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Ok, since we're venting. I've been doing this for a while now and it just makes me feel good. :) Picture a two-lane road that is being merged into a single lane after a traffic light. There are those little merge arrows painted on the road before and after the traffic light. While stopped...

We didn't actually go to a tea plantation but took a local bus to the Periyar National Park (near Munnar) in Kerala. One of the sights I will never forget was going up the hill slowly, smelling wild jasmine through the open windows and going through a beautiful tea plantation. This was almost a...

I'm at 37 (and am also 37 years old!) DW is probably about 5 countries behind. Our 4-yr son hit 10 countries last fall if you include the US. None of these are airport stopovers.

Fuego, they told me that I wouldn't need an appraisal (LTV about 40% including a 50K untapped PenFed HELOC which didn't require an appraisal). My GFE does have it listed, but there is also a origination credit for all the various charges. My total settlement fee is $300 and the appraisal is...

I think this is the reason to only go with Penfed for a 5/5 HELOC and not for their standard HELOC. Their standard HELOC looks like it has a 1.5% min payment (P+I) and their 5/5 HELOC has 2% min payment. Their standard HELOC rates can be matched or beaten, so it's not worth the 1.5% min...

Interesting. That logo looks very similar to a popular restaurant we have in SoCal: Wahoo's Fish Taco Pretty good food, sorta a mix between Mexican-Hawaiian-Asian. Man, no wonder REWahoo was able to RE. All these royalty checks! It's like having a working wife! :)

I bungee jumped in Queenstown, NZ back in the late 90s. I was on a trip with my college buddies, it was the second to last night of our trip to NZ, so felt the need to have a finale! It was such a rush and I'm glad I did it. Especially since one of the buddies chickened out at the last min...

I'm a big fan of TrueCrypt. You can use it to encrypt some or all of your hard drive or USB drive locally and if you want to store stuff in the cloud, just make a virtual encrypted drive and put your stuff on there before uploading it to the cloud. Any would be snoopers can't read the data...

Actually, I believe it's "Media Access Control". MAC addresses can be easily spoofed, but it does provide one extra layer of security since the would-be attacker would have to know what MAC address to imitate (the address of your laptop) before gaining access to your network.

Just got back from 12 days in Spain. Wonderful, wonderful time. Now to get over the jet lag...

Well, she's back to normal now since she had a good day at work! :) She's a wonderful teacher that makes a positive difference in her student's lives. She'll probably end up sharing a contract by the time she's 40-45.

DW knows I've read this forum and she's pretty much on board with our semi ER plans. She has always said that she'd like to continue her job (teacher) till she's at least 50 which is about 15 years away. She had a bit of frustrating day at work and wanted to veg a bit so started started...

Excellent topic. We don't have a specific semi-RE date, but we are fairly close to FI. I would say over the last year that I've caught myself grinning ear-to-ear several times. I just feel so fortunate and humbled to be in this position.

I don't dislike Fidelity, but this doesn't speak very highly of them.

I'm trying, I'm trying! But every time I point out CA's lower cost of living and more business friendly climate, Texans seems to counter with their beautiful mountains, beaches and lakes! :)

As Brewer said, the PenFed 5/5 ARM actually has a 2% cap, so the most it can go up is 2% every 5 years and up to a maximum of 5% over the life (30 years) of the loan. Considering they are often very low cost and have attractive rates, they can pretty good deals.

We use about 300-400 kwh/month regardless of summer or winter. Rarely use the A/C or heat and our bill is almost always around $35-$50/month. There are 3 of us in a smallish tract house in SoCal with decent insulation but poor weatherstripping and single-pane windows. Heating is with natural...

Sorry for your and your Dad's loss Sue.

PenFed's 5/5 ARM went down to 3.375 and they now have a new product called the 3/5 ARM. It's rate is 3.0%. We just finished signing the docs for our 3.25%/10 yr loan tonight and I was logging into PenFed to turn off my automatic payments on my old loan when I saw these new rates!

I completely agree. Our neighborhood has a training facility where Olympic swimmers (and several gold medalists) often train. There is highly recommended and successful guy who teaches kids there and also at neighborhood pools. Anyways, the non-negotiable criteria he has for training a...

I don't think Qaddafi's is in any position to be issuing fatwas anyways. If anything, your hilarious parody would probably earn you an honorary position with the transitional government! Hmm, let's see, you'll need an Arabic name... How about TromboneAl Al-Ameriki or TromboneAl Al-California?

We are in SoCal, so not a cheap area. We pay about $750/month for 4 days a week (7 hours) preschool. My parents watch him one day a week. The reason it's so "cheap" is because it's almost a non-profit school since it's a tied to a synagogue. We aren't Jewish, but we appreciate that he gets...

We just started the loan paperwork through our credit union for the same rate with no costs. I think that's a pretty good rate. I shopped around and wasn't able to beat that rate anywhere. A few places (such as CashCallMortgage.com) had the same rate but I rather deal with my CU. Our LTV...

Thanks for the help everyone. I'll definitely check out the warranty and samclem, I found an Alside distributor within 20 min of our house so we'll definitely check them out.

Hello, We are getting ready to add on to our house and are exploring the dizzying array of windows and doors. We've pretty much decided on a fiberglass exterior door and sidelights. We also have to decide on about 10 windows and a large sliding french door. All of these are new-construction...