The value of realtors

Matt Haughey writes that he bought a house this year without the help of a realtor and feels confident that he could also sell a house without a realtor:

We sold our first house and bought a new one this year and in the process learned that we really could do without a realtor, just as the authors described. We staged our old house ourselves, and pushed our realtor to get us on the weekly home tour. I took photos for our listing and helped write it, keeping in mind the lessons from the book and removed every empty phrase like “fabulous” and “wonderful” and replaced them with descriptive terms like “open” and “large”. We did all of our new home shopping online and by canvassing the city and calling builders with works in progress. We found and bought our new house without any realtors involved at all. It was surprisingly easy — whenever I was wondering what we were supposed to do at a stage in the financing/offer/escrow process, I could just punch up google and get all the info I needed. Google searches lead me to offer letter templates, legal ramifications for each document we signed, and how to find the best financing. While I like my realtor and consider her a personal friend, if we ever sell our new home, we’ll do it ourselves and save a few grand next time around.

If Matt feels comfortable handling a real estate transaction himself, good for him, but I think that finding a buyer for your home-for-sale and/or finding a home for you to buy are the least important tasks that a realtor does (or should do). Monitoring the legal aspects of the transactions is the most important role. I would feel very uncomfortable not having an experienced expert monitoring the process and advising me in the legal transactions.
When we sold and bought houses three years ago, we ended up finding the new house ourselves–which is pretty easy these days with everything online. But we needed to close on both houses on the same day, so we were super sensitive to a delay in either deal. Our realtor was in constant contact with the seller’s and buyer’s realtors for each deal, both title companies, and our mortgage lender to make sure everything went smoothly. He knew exactly what should be happening with each transaction at every point and he was hard-assed when necessary with the other parties to make sure they did their tasks competently and in a timely fashion. His diligence and expertise were well worth the fees we paid him (since we used him for both transactions, he waived one of our fees to him, which reduced our total realtor costs a bit).

Doing web page layout with CSS

You know, I fully embrace the principle of doing HTML layout via CSS vs. the old fashion table layouts, but the browser implementations of CSS still differ so much that it’s been a huge pain every time I’ve tried to implement more than rudimentary CSS layouts. As you have surely noticed if you visit here regularly, I recently converted this blog to one the newer MovableType templates, and then have been tweaking it to my liking. But the stylesheet for this template is over 1000 lines long, and every time I’ve tweaked it, I’ve encountered different behavior in Mozilla and Internet Explorer. Frustrating.

F*ck Christmas

This is awesome (if a little vulgar for my tastes). An excerpt:

Can we back up just a couple steps here? At what point did a basic understanding of the separation of church and state become a f*cking war on religion? And how did we get to the point where you can call an organization set up to defend our civil liberties “Terrorists” on national television and no one fires your *ss? Enough. F*ck all of you lying little sh*theads who wish the world was out to get you so you could play the poor oppressed victims. Wake up *ssholes — you’re the cowboys, not the f*cking Indians.

(Sorry about the censorship; I don’t really want my blog to get blacklisted by nanny programs)

Pet names

So far, our new dog Penny is known in our household by these alternate appellations: Pen-Pen, Wenny the Poo, the Tootsie Roll factory, Chi-Hua-Hua (pronounce each vowel), Terriwawa, Puppy Doodle.

A taste of his own medicine

A law professor has evaluated the federal tax code on the basis of Judeo-Christian ethics, and found it immoral. The abstract of the paper:

This article severely criticizes the Bush Administration’s tax policies under the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics. I first document that Judeo-Christian ethics is the most relevant moral analysis for tax policy because almost eighty percent of Americans and well over ninety percent of the Congress, including President Bush, claim to adhere to the Christian or Jewish faiths. I also show that evaluating federal tax policy under Judeo-Christian principles not only passes constitutional muster but is also appropriate under the norms of a democracy. I then provide a complete theological framework that can be applied to any tax policy structure. Using sources that include leading Evangelical and other Protestant scholars, Papal Encyclicals and Jewish scholars, I prove that tax policy structures meeting the moral principles of Judeo-Christian ethics must raise adequate revenues that not only cover the needs of the minimum state but also ensure that all citizens have a reasonable opportunity to reach their potential. Among other things, reasonable opportunity requires adequate education, healthcare, job training and housing. Using these theological sources, I also establish that flat and consumption tax regimes which shift a large part of the burden to the middle classes are immoral. Consequently, Judeo-Christian based tax policy requires the tax burden to be allocated under a moderately progressive regime. I discuss the difficulties of defining that precisely and also conclude that confiscatory tax policy approaching a socialistic framework is also immoral. I then apply this Judeo-Christian ethical analysis to the first term Bush Administration’s tax cuts and find those policies to be morally problematic. Using a wealth of sources, I then establish that the moral values driving the Bush Administration’s tax policy decisions reflect objectivist ethics, a form of atheism that exalts individual property rights over all other moral considerations. Given the overwhelming adherence to Christianity and Judaism, I conclude that President Bush, many members of Congress and many Americans are not meeting the moral obligations of their faiths, and, I argue that tax policy must start reflecting genuine Judeo-Christian values if the country is to survive in the long run.

Oopsie.

My wife is an iPod convert, too!

Katie really likes to listen to music when she drives, especially when she’s alone in the car. Last summer, we got her a new(er) van, but it doesn’t have a CD player like our old one. Katie has been asking ever since if we could get a CD player installed. I told her that it’s obsolete technology: she should just get an iPod that she can use in the car and elsewhere.
But, because she didn’t really understand why an iPod was better, we haven’t done anything about music in the car for her. Well, about three weeks ago, my brother-in-law bought me an iPod Nano, and this morning, Katie took it with her to work for the first time. As soon as she got to her office, Katie called me and said: “I want to marry your iPod!” I asked her if she now understood what I’d been telling her for months, and she agreed that she did indeed. I’d better start figuring out how to get her an iPod; she was threatening to kill me so she could inherit mine.

If we could do church

Gordon Atkinson recently posted to his blog If We Could Do Church, in which he tries to imagine what a Christian community would look like if it were free of most of the institutional baggage of contemporary churches.
(The comments to Gordon’s post are also interesting: Gordon clarifies some of his thoughts and several commenters refer to existing Christian communities that exemplify many of the characteristics that Gordon imagines.)
I’m always ambivalent about the church as institution, but I’ve been feeling more negative about it than usual lately, so Gordon’s post hit a nerve. I’m willing to admit that there’s always going to be some administrative overhead in maintaining any group of humans (even in Gordon’s conception of a church community), but I think it’s a constant struggle to weigh the amount of time, money and effort we put into the institution itself vs. the amount of those resources that are absolutely necessary for the group to use the remaining resources to help others. Many churches, it seems, get more caught up in maintaining the institution itself than I think they should.
I think the key difference comes down to size. Gordon says that his conceptualized congregation would be small enogh “to meet comfortably in a living room.” The larger the group of people, the more organization overhead you incur.
Another possible solution to this dilemma may lie in our Methodist circuit rider roots. In thoe circuit rider days, Methodist churches were small groups of individuals who managed themselves, and a circuit rider pastor only showed up from time to time to provide a minimal amount of professional guidance.

The obligatory weather post

They say that the weather in Texas changes quickly. (Of course, I’ve heard the same declaration about other places I’ve lived). That’s certainly not true in the summer, which is predictably hot and sticky. But this time of year, we do live up to that claim. Yesterday, it was in the mid 80s and very humid. We got a cold front through during the night, so it’s in the 40s with a brisk north wind this morning. Today’s high will in the low 50s. Fun.

The first LEON

A couple of years ago, we bought four Christmas stocking hooks that sit on the mantel. Each has a big brass letter on it, and they’re intended to spell NOEL. But we decided that’s too boring. We now have a new Christmas tradition: each year, a different member of the family spells something else. Last year we celebrated the first LEON. This year, Hannah spelled LONE.