Sunday, April 20, 2008

Percent of Asking Price Received

I have good news, I'm about two chapters away from finishing the book (out of what will inevitably be 20). Then there is editing and some revising and tweaking and tucking. Regardless, and I mean this sincerely, arrogance and hubris aside, it is some damn fine writing.

Allow me to whet your appetite with a excerpt;

"It was one of those moments where you start to wonder if life isn’t real and God is just toying with you. That this is nothing but a big, elaborate video game and you’re the one on the big screen. That it was already as bad of a situation as it could get and it was statistically impossible to get any worse. Therefore if it did, it must have been divine intervention on God’s part, yielding not only proof God existed, but that he was a sick and twisted sadist/bastard."

I don't know if I'm going with "sadist" or "bastard." Any preferences?

In any case, the final two chapters are obviously conclusionary in nature, however, they're also quite data intensive and so I've happened upon some great charts, but this one in particular showing what the average person in the Twin Cities area is receiving as a % of their asking price for their homes;



Which means, if banks are in repossession of these fine assets they're going to be getting a lot less than what they lent out on it.

13 comments:

  1. Shouldn't it be "sadist"?

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  2. I think you mean "sadist", not masochist.

    Sadist = gets off on hurting others.

    Masochist = gets off on hurting self.

    Unless you're trying to make some commentary about the imaginary spaghetti monster being "all things" and thus hurting anything else is hurting himself.

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  3. Anonymous9:42 PM

    Did you mean the choices to be sadist/bastard? In the contect, that makes more sense to me.

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  4. Sorry, my bad. A lot of the book was written at 2AM.

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  5. Also, I hate that graph. Look at the scale -- it's a 10% decline. Assuming they did 80% LTV, they're not even underwater, but even at 90 or 95%, it's not like the world has ended.

    The situation is bad, but lying with statistics and graphs to overstate the case isn't needed.

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  6. Also, the chart may be worse than it seems, since presumably sellers today will have lowered their expectations somewhat already

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  7. It's actually worse than the chart shows, since presumably today's sellers will have lowered their expectations already.

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  8. Anonymous9:56 AM

    sadist.

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  9. Anonymous11:21 AM

    Generally I consider it bad policy to be rude to the Supreme Being, what with him being SUPREME and all. Going out of one's way to insult the guy that invented the photon (not discovered, but INVENTED... there is a difference) and any all that believe in him, is generally not a wise policy in my book.

    Also your reference that "things could not get any worse" has been proven by history to be a false statement. Things can ALWAYS get worse... the residents of Saigon and Phnom Penn learned that in 1975. The residents of Germany learned that in 1933 and then re-learned it during the allied bombing of 1943-45, and then the folks in the Eastern Zone of Germany got another 45 year long refresher course in the subject. The crew of the USS Indianapolis learned it in 1945, as did the residents of Petrograd in 1917 and the residents of Lenningrad during the siege thereof.

    If history teaches us anything it is that ANYBODY who says "Well it can't get any worse" is WRONG.

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  10. Anonymous12:22 PM

    And people say you have anger problems?

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  11. Anonymous8:04 PM

    I must really be a sadist on steroids!

    I looked at the chart and thought "90% of list? it's that good? I would have thought it would be worse than that."

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  12. I would have gone with "one sick son of a bitch," but that only works aesthetically.

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  13. Anonymous7:56 PM

    To Cappy: You're already heading in that Hunter Thompson sorta direction with that paragraph, so do the readers a favor and stick with bastard. Sadist is too smart, and I don't you're writing this SINGULARLY to inform people, we wanna be entertained to when we fork over 25 (20 CAD) for this book.

    Ryan, my friend, its an 10% drop which for a 300000 dollar home is like losing 30 grand aka a sweet Caddy. Who knows how many sweet Caddys are now lost by banks foreclosing on property. Well, more accurately, how many banks imagined they had a massive fleet of Cadillacs.

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