33 and counting

As I wrap up the first day of my 33rd year on earth, I'm thankful that:

1. Not many people think I look 33. As much as I'd like to take credit for it (I do try not to get too stressed out and get plenty of rest) but I'm sure genetics play a role in that.

2. I had a lot of medical savings account money left, so I went and got a physical exam and did the full workup. Doctor couldn't find anything wrong with me.

3. I have a great set of friends and family. In many ways, my "family" has grown to the point where I kinda know what it feels like to have a bunch of extended family in town. Between my sister's in laws and family and my dad's young friends, my family went from 4 to about 20.

I'm hoping that on my 34th birthday, I'll have a lot of great stuff to talk about!

Packer season ticket update - 2010

Here it is...

Data updates - dating and Packers

About 2 years ago I brainstormed all of the women I've asked out or have dated. Here's an update since that time:

• Total number - 25 (was 23)
• Who ended it - Me: 6 (was 5). Ambiguous: 3 Her: 16 (was 15)
• People with these number of dates - 0: 8 (7 rejections, 1 out of town) (was 7) 1: 5 2: 5 3: 1 4: 1 5+: 5 (was 4)
• How we met- Friend of a friend: 8 (was 7), Wedding: 5, Orchestra: 3, Work, Softball, Class (one of the classes was ballroom dance): 2 each, Online: 1, Science Fair (it was a teacher, not a student): 1, random social event: 1 (was 0)
• Number taller than me: 2
• People with the same name: 2 each of Emilys, Amys, Erins, and Jennys
• Asians: 5 (was 3)  Non-Asians: 20. 5/25, or 20% (up from 15%)

Only 5 more before I hit the magic number of 30!

Oh, I also got my Packer season ticket update. I'll hafta post that later...

My cousin on a Taiwan version of American Idol

Here's a clip of my cousin on a Taiwanese singing show (kinda like American Idol).



I'm especially proud to have musical talent in the family. It was after a trip to Taiwan where I met up with my cousins last time that it hit me as to why I'm so "both brained" (i.e. a creative side AND an logical side). My dad's side of the family, who are mostly in the US, are engineers, scientists, etc. So it never really sunk in that it was my MOM's side of the family that was responsible for my creative side. It's after that I really decided I need to find a calling in life that allowed me to use both; what a great combination!

Waiting for Godot (gas re-lighter person)

So it's been a few weeks since I've last blogged... I'm waiting for the gas person to come by to re-light my gas because apparently they did some service on it and had to turn it off. They said they'd be here in an hour about an hour and 10 minutes ago. Reminds me of a time when this happened and the guy showed up at 1 AM. Never once called to let me know they were running late (I had called them at 8 PM, and a few times after that). I always wondered why they couldn't get a better idea of when they would show up,  or at least give you a call if they were running late.

The house has been on the market for almost two months now. I've had a few showings, but no offers yet. Story of my life. :) I think in a couple weeks, after I've pared down my stuff even more and gotten me ready to move, I might start bugging my realtor...

My neighbor did have a rummage sale this weekend, so I added a few of my things to it. Ended up making $47. Still have a 27 inch tube TV for sale for $60.

Can't wait for our annual Stupidfest vacation with my high school/college buddies. Heading to New Orleans next week!

Ug still not here. C'mon I want to get some sleep...

Sunday Night Bloginage (with holiday tomorrow!)

Weekends are great. I miss the sabbatical days...

Got to see Meghan on Friday, I forget she reads the blog... Tom actually gets his updates through Meghan through this blog or Facebook.

The house has been on the market for a couple weeks now. Had someone come through yesterday, and the good news is they didn't seem to have any issues with the house. They just decided not to move to Mason. It's hard keeping the house showable at all times. Not only do I make my bed now, I put decorative pillows on it. I also hide my trash cans and clothes hampers. It's probably a good lesson in discipline for me, but it is a stretching exercise.

I'm starting to get pumped about moving. I've narrowed down my apartment search to two places: Hyde Park and downtown. I love how the place downtown has the river right next to it and a park, and it's walkable to Newport. But the place in Hyde Park is also walkable to a lot of stuff and has a lot of restaurants around it. It also hedges an assignment in the northern suburbs... downtown would add 10-15 minutes to my commute. At least now I have a default! Now we'll see just how bad this housing market is.

I really need a rummage sale. Only issue is I've never done one before, and I don't think I have enough stuff (i.e. baby clothes) to make one go. Instead, I've got some older TVs, small furniture, printer, type stuff. Maybe I'll see when my neighbors are doing one next and leverage some scale...

Hope everyone is having a great holiday weekend... one more day to go!

It's all starting to hit me

I listed my house on Monday of this week... so it's officially on the market! My first showing is tomorrow afternoon. It's quite a milestone after all this work.

Today I toured 3 apartment complexes... and it touched off a wave of anxiety on my part. The first one was a little older than I expected and not what I envisioned. The second was OK. The third one was a good location, but again not as nice as I had envisioned. I suddenly started thinking "oh my god what have I done." I'm giving up all this space... what if I don't find anything as nice as my house? What if work moves me somewhere close to here and I choose a place closer to downtown? Will I wish that everything just goes back to status quo? It's comfortable here! Maybe I screwed up and owning a house isn't that bad?

I re-read a chapter in a book I'm reading called Get Out of Your Own Way entitled Backing Down Because You Don't Feel Ready. In each chapter, it provides a little nugget, or a takeaway. This chapter's takeaway was "Just because you're nervous doesn't mean you're not ready." It's normal to have anxiety and be a little nervous when making a change. It's nice to read those words again, but I'm still a little anxious and hopefully I'll be able to fall asleep soon...

House update

The house is now officially all fixed up and cleaned. Only thing left is to do some staging... which will be tough since my furniture consists of second hand couches, coffee tables, a folding table, dressers and drawers from my childhood, and cheap office furniture from Staples. Oh and of course a futon I slept on in college.

The hardest thing to do now will be to keep the house showable. It really goes against what I'm used to doing... that is let things pile up, then take care of it all in one shot. Maybe it'll be a good thing for me to learn.

Some interesting things I found:

• Cable bill from 2001 (my cable was $23 a month back in the apartments)
• My rejection letters from college... including two from P&G (and of course one acceptance letter from P&G)
• My acceptance letter to the University of Wisconsin, University of Illinois, and Cal Tech (I have absolutely ZERO regrets going to Madison)
• A bunch of postcards from my friends I had kept, including stuff from college. Many are at least still Facebook friends.

Also, my beloved Brewers chair is now in the basement. But don't worry, where ever I end up, it'll be back in a prominent place!

Figuring myself out: Why I have a messy room

This latest insight was so interesting that I had to blog about it... It came out of a book called The Birth Order Book. I'm a first born, so I skipped to the chapter about firstborns. It talked about how first borns tend to be perfectionists because the only role model in their lives was their parents. So they would strive to be just like them, which is pretty hard for a 2 year old.

Sounds interesting... but I'm not a perfectionist by any means! I keep my desk as messy as the cubicle police will allow at work, my house has taken a TON of effort to clean up to the point of being presentable, and I have trouble completing tasks once I get it started. But the book then had an interesting insight... "Slobs and poor students are usually discouraged perfectionists who have given up trying because it hurts too much to fail." I wouldn't call myself a poor student, but I can definitely see why I don't like cleaning. It's because when I was growing up, cleaning was a process that didn't have a ending. I would clean my room, and my dad would always find one more thing that needed to be cleaned better. I'd proclaim myself done, and he'd come by and point out 2-3 more things that needed to be done (he also was a first born... perfectionist label fits him pretty well!).

So I guess I gave up trying for perfection. I think in general, this is the root cause of a lot of my unwillingness to clean, organize, or plan. Or at least complete it. I'm subconsciously thinking that I'll be criticized, and avoiding criticism is more important than doing the task.

Of course, I should be grown up and mature enough to not have that bother me. A lot of this is inside my head. But how does one get over this? I'm looking for another book...

Updates

Project sell the house is coming along... tomorrow they finish painting the house. Wednesday the handyman is coming over to fix some random stuff, and the flooring people are going to replace the carpeting and flooring. I'm hoping to get the house listed next week.

Some places I've looked at living next are Blue Ash, Kenwood, Hyde Park, Oakley, and Downtown. Blue Ash was leading before, but now I think Downtown has taken the lead. Ideally somewhere with a nice view. My only concern is where does one get groceries when living downtown?

Figuring myself out

So over the last few months, I've gone through a lot. A normal relationship can do that for you, much less one with a lot of variables in it. I've had the counsel of many friends and my sister to help me along. I've also learned a lot about myself and what I need in my life.

One thing that's been really bothering me is why I can't seem to realize my full potential in my work. On the one hand, I want to get myself out there and go for stuff. But then I get demotivated, scared, and unsure of myself. I'm a full believer that you need to go out and try things to learn, and to learn from failure. So I shouldn't be afraid of failure!

I've been reading up on psychology and self-help books. Somewhere I read one thought as to why people have problems finishing things... it's because they grew up with critical authority figures. To avoid the hurt of criticism, they just never finish the job. I can definitely relate to that. There's really no rationale for me to feel that way, I have very supportive friends and family. And I should be mature and confident enough to know that any criticism I do get I can ignore (for the bad or unactionable criticism) or accept and work on (for the constructive criticism). But I guess the human brain doesn't work logically!

 My hop chemist dad definitely had his influence on me on this. He was your typical Asian parent. When getting a 98%, he would ask why I missed the 2%. (Although I think back on it, he only did it because he thought it was right to do. I don't think he really believed in it himself.) He pushed math and science hard, almost to the point of obsession. There's a quote that I read somewhere, where a parent was telling his kid about what he could be when he grew up: "You can be a doctor, an engineer, or a failure." There was definitely that kind of feeling.

But my dad's saving grace was that he was a softie at heart. He would do all those hard core things, but deep down I don't think he really believed in it. He was doing it because that's what his dad taught him, and that's what the culture was. He's also been much more open minded in the last few years, willing to listen to all this new age stuff my sister and I have been feeding him. Because of that, we are still very close. 

So I'd like to figure myself out more, for the purposes of removing my psychological barriers to get myself to the point of fulfilling my potential. I've done the thought exercise a lot of imagining me 50 years from now looking back to when I was 32... would I be happy with myself or regretful that I didn't take advantage of my youth and freedom? Right now, I'd say no.

The first thing I'd like to do is to understand why the Chinese culture is the way it is. Why push math and science so hard? Why so critical? Why focus on preventing things from going wrong? I did a quick Google search, and one thing that came up was the beliefs of Confucianism. The scholar was put on a pedestal. So my quest might start there...

Where I've been - 1/3 life crisis

It's been a while since I've blogged... but it's good to know I haven't been ex-communicated from Karen's blog roll yet. It's been quite a last few months of self-discovery, of which is still in progress. I'm in the process of doing some housecleaning, both literally and figuratively.

I've decided to sell my house. It's a terrible economic time to do it, but I've told people, this isn't a financial decision, it's a life decision. I blogged back in October of 2008 that I just didn't have any passion towards owning my house. I moved in when I was like 24 years old. Well, on Saturday, I will sign on with a realtor (who ironically I bought the house from back in 2001) to put my house on the market... only 2 years later. Many people ask where I'm going... I'm definitely going back to renting. A nice complex sounds really nice, where I could have a swimming pool and workout facilities. I'd love a place where I can walk to stuff like small restaurants and places that have wifi. Other than that, I'm pretty open.

I also recently broke up with Priscila. It's really hard and gut wrenching because of all the history we had. And without getting into gory detail, the issues that caused the breakup weren't anything she was doing on purpose. But alas, it wasn't something that I could live with. It's been tough getting used to the single life after over a year with her. Although it hurts now, it was probably the right decision.

Anyways, there's my life... I can probably sum up my life right now as throwing the dice again and seeing what comes up.

Rent vs. Buy: One person's actual data

Recently, after doing my taxes and figuring out how much of a tax benefit I get for my mortgage, I thought to myself, "I wonder if owning a house really does pay out the way everyone says?" So I proceeded to tally up every expense and benefit owning a house had compared to if were to have rented a place at the same monthly payment. I've lived in my place for over 8 years. I figured it would be a great real life, raw hard core data example to share with people.

In a nutshell, after brainstorming everything I could possibly think of, it came out remarkably even. In other words, if I had rented a place for the same monthly payment I was making, I would have come up no worse for wear. In fact, I didn't even include any time costs, like mowing the lawn, weeding the yard, etc. Here's a breakdown of the costs I came up with:

The equity and appreciation that we hear so much about is offset by realtor and repair costs. What's this I keep hearing about "throwing your money away" when you're renting because you're not building equity? Well, too bad when you sell it you need a realtor. And when the roof needs fixing or the runoff water needs to be re-routed to the front because it's flooding the back, that comes out of your pocket too. Not that I have any personal experience of that.

Here are the assumptions I used to come up with the costs:

Years in house	8
Purchase Price	170000
Down payment investment	2.00%	Assumed rate of return if you had invested the down payment
Sold Price	184086	My own guess based off comps
Appreciation %	1.00%	Based off the sold price
Down payment	30000	20% of purchase price

Here's a breakdown of all the costs that went into the graph, and some more detail:

HOA fee	-150	per year	I live in a house, so this fee isn't too bad
Closing costs	-3000	one time
Insurance	-400	per year
Maintenance/Utilties	-38	per month	Garbage, water, and sewer
Down payment opportunity cost	-600	one time	Earnings if I had invested the down payment
Tax benefit	1050	per year	After the standard deduction, and 25% tax braket
Repairs	-9400	one time	See chart below
Realtor costs	-11045	one time	6% of sold cost
Appreciation	14085	one time	Based off my own estimate of comps
Equity built up	150	per month	Average over the 8 years

And here are all my repair costs, in gory detail:

Siding and wall damage from storm (deductible only, insurance covered all)	$1,000
New roof (plus deductible minus insurance)	$3,000
Roof boots (3X)	$300
Reroute runoff and drainage	$1,100
Landscaping	$1,200
New carpeting	$2,000
New drywall from fixed leaks	$800
Total Repairs	$9,400

These repair costs are even before anything a home inspector might come up with when I sell the house. Plus I need to re-seed my yard, it's looking a little sickly. And the back fence needs painting. Again, I didn't count the money I paid my neighbor kid to mow my lawn, or the hundreds of dollars of mulch, or fertilizer, or the tree I had to cut down that died... I better stop and continue this analysis before I lose everyone.

So what happened to all the great benefits that my parents and everyone else told me owning a house had? I tried to figure out what went wrong. The answer, as you might expect, is the housing market. I had a 1% appreciation per year over 8 years. I did a little sensitivity analysis... if I had gotten a 3% appreciation per year, I would've been $30,000 ahead! Whoa. OK, so let's say it was -1% (where it was in a lot of markets I bet). And the answer is... -$25,000. I think that's what everyone calls "underwater."

So this whole idea of owning a house as an asset boils down to how well the housing market does. And it's a huge swing. This is what economists call leverage... you borrow money to invest in something. So owning a house is an investment. It's owning a very risky investment. Would you put down $30,000 and buy shares of any stock? How about borrowing $170,000 on that $30,000 and buying up that stock? So why would you do the same on a house?

Here's raw data. Buying a house is a very risky investment. All the equity built up and the tax benefits gets sucked up in realtor fees and repairs.

Yes, it's the American dream. I plan on selling this house, but I will probably buy another one in the future. It's great to own your home so you aren't at the mercy of a landlord or a lease. But go into it knowing it's very risky, and be able to mitigate that risk by having a LOT of money in reserve. Buy a house because you want to live in a house, not because it's an investment. And make sure you can truly afford everything that comes along with it (see above).

My top 5 events of 2009

Continued from a previous post...

5. Winston's wedding - I had the honor of being the best man at Winston's wedding in the Bay Area... congrats to Winston and Shanying!
4. Birthday dinner with families - My 32nd birthday was pretty special, as my parents and Priscila's extended family (mom and dad, who were visiting from Brazil, sister, brother-in-law, nephew from Milwaukee, and brother, sister-in-law, and other nephew visiting from Florida) met at the best Chinese restaurant in Milwaukee. The families got along like they'd been friends for life.
3. Sabbatical road trip - Subject of another entire blog! A 2-week road trip to the east coast, following the Brewers to Pittsburgh and Washington DC (where they lost a lot of games and fell out of the pennant race). I ended up going through Baltimore, Philadelphia, Atlantic City, and New York City before coming home.
2. Three month leave of absence - From August through November, I took a leave of absence from work. It was a great experience (see #3) and really left me refreshed and rested!

And of course, the #1 thing that happened to me in 2009 was meeting Priscila. She's gorgeous, charming, spunky, and definitely the best thing that happened to me. She's of Chinese decent, but born and raised in Brazil... so she's also very diverse and interesting! I'm looking forward to many more "top 10" events in the future with her.

2009 - Top 10 List

As tradition, I like to do a top 10 list of happenings in the past year. Things really started kicking off in 2007, where I graduated with my MBA after 6 years and got my first promotion. In 2008, I saw my sister get married in St. Thomas and Milwaukee and also took a wonderful trip to Hawaii. I somehow had to keep up with it in 2009, and I would hafta say I definitely have! So here it goes, the top 10 happenings of 2009:

10. MacBook Pro - I finally took the plunge and went to back to an Apple computer, my first since the Apple IIe I got in first grade!
9. SF visit - In February I flew out to the Bay area to visit Winston and his fiance at the time. They took me to Berkeley and SF Chinatown. Lotsa eating!
8. Stock Market - With the economy tanking in 2008, I made a point to learn from previous downturns and put money into the market. The batch of stocks I picked returned over 60% in 2009!
7. New Years trip to Orlando - I spent the final seconds of 2009 at EPCOT center in Disney World with someone special (see #1). We almost didn't make it as 12 hours is a long time to spend at EPCOT...
6. Stupidfest, eh? - Our annual former roommates trip in 2009 was to Toronto and Buffalo. Great buffalo wings at Anchor bar, and Toronto had great food too.

Stay tuned, top 5 coming up!

Blogger and Twitter and Facebook, oh my

I had lunch with Tom this week and he reminded me that I had not posted to my personal blog in a long time... He was, of course, absolutely right. Part of the reason was I had tried to branch off and start separate blogs of topics that were more focused... including Forever Cheesehead (about Wisconsin sports), Wok this Way (about Asian American life), and Dale's Sabbatical (about my sabbatical). I always struggle about how much personal info to put in these blogs... whether I want this to be a blog for my friends and family, or if I wanted the general public to read it. It's really nice to have one for friends and family because I can go back and see what's been up. But it'd be nice to have a public blog to see if what I'm saying rings true with the rest of the world, and to do the marketing work necessary to see if it can spread. 

Then of course there's Twitter and Facebook. And of course you can link every combination of Twitter, Facebook, and blogs. For the people who use Blogger, I feel like it's really hard to upload pictures. I don't have it quite figured out yet, but I think I may have a personal blog and a separate public blog. I've been checking out Wordpress, and it has a feature where you can have different settings for your blogs. You can even set some of your postings personal and require a password. But until I figure that out, I guess I'll just post here!

If anyone has any advice, please feel free to chime in!