Earn What You Spend

I live in NYC.  I am accordingly obsessed with real estate.  But what I compulsively obsess over is not the newest development, nor the most recent astronomical price at some starchitect’s building. Rather, it’s a simple question: am I better of buying or renting? 
Felix has an interesting article about it this morning - with lower interest rates and falling housing prices, the [...]

Yesterday I wrote about my new appreciation for being underwater on your mortgage.  Mark Cuban, a wildly successful entrepreneur, was thinking along the same lines and wrote this excellent post.  He makes a number of points, but first tackles the difference between the “Buy and Hold” strategy for stocks versus your home:
I think “Buy and Hold” [...]

Underwater mortgages are easy to understand: they occur when a homeowner owes more on their house than what they could get if they sold the house.  That is, the outstanding mortgage is greater than their home value. 
But they are very interesting and consequential phenomenon, especially considering a large number of those who are underwater on their houses put [...]

The blame game is well underway for the current financial crisis, and it will only get worse.  Who is to blame?  Well, that all depends on who you are, and what you have to gain from pushing the burden off to someone else. 
A common culprit is ‘greed,’ though I find this implausible.  If someone can point [...]