<p>I don’t want to get into too many details. The deal may have changed a little today. It is going to change as more info comes in. We have 120 days of due diligence. If the deal changes, I reevaluate. </p>
<p>There might be a different deal that fits what I want better. Don’t know yet. Might do nothing. I usually do when it comes to deals like this. :)</p>
<p>Jym626, my daughter wants to buy a place. Somewhere between SF and San Mateo. I was hoping for Marin, but Marin doesn 't make sense.</p>
<p>My daughter would prefer to buy but if nothing shows up, she will rent. She is going to leave SF. The rents are too high.</p>
<p>I selfishly wanted her to consider buying a place in SF. One of the problems is, there is a lottery system for public schools. Students are not guaranteed a spot in their neighborhood schools.</p>
<p>I grew up in the sunset district. It is relatively affordable. I like the sunset district. The area brings up memories. My wife did not grow up in the sunset didtrict. She hates it. :)</p>
<p>Another friend 's kid who lives in SF was just notified. Rent is increasing from $2600 to $4200. </p>
<p>Whoa. That’s why DS is glad he is in an older, ergo rent controlled place</p>
<p>Yeah… :)</p>
<p>I am going to help my daughter by a house. I want to keep her around here!</p>
<p>That’s great, dstark. Using our assets for things like that is what we want the assets for to begin with, after alll right?</p>
<p>While you’re at it, dstark, wanna help mine too? 
He’ll stick around there…</p>
<p>On that note, my youngest son mentioned that he’d definitely live in Seattle if we bought him a house. On the water.</p>
<p>I’m not sure if he was kidding or not…but unfortunately we don’t have a spare couple million laying around.</p>
<p>^^ You CAN borrow from dstark… :)</p>
<p>Yeah…I agree hayden. </p>
<p>I am not putting up a couple of million. I had to check my post to see if I wrote something I didn’t mean to write. :)</p>
<p>I am not buying the whole place. There are cheaper places than $2 million. I am helping with the down payment. </p>
<p>It is a bribe. My daughter knows it is a bribe. My wife and I told her the help is only for the SF bay area. You go somewhere else…you get nothing.</p>
<p>My daughter is ok with this. :)</p>
<p>Nothing wrong with bribes, I always found that method more pleasant than threats.</p>
<p>The most effective bribes we have ever relied on are the tickets dispensed by those machines at a local arcade. After my preschool age kid had learned we could use the tickets to trade for (generally useless) prizes, he was obsessed with getting the tickets (but not obsessed with playing the games.) We used the tickets to bribe him to practice on piano for some time.</p>
<p>Since it cost us more time and money to get those tickets (he was not interested in playing the games himself), we tried to bribe him with real money because we could also buy those prizes with the money. But he did not want the money; he wanted the tickets. We found we could buy the paper tickets cheaply from somewhere but he did not want OUR tickets. He only wanted the tickets from THAT arcade.</p>
<p>Later we learned that those ticket games are like casinos for the minor. We stopped going. Luckily, he does not grow up and becomes a gambler.</p>
<p>These days, he would scold his mother (or more likely because he thinks it is unwise to play the lottery because of its unfavorable odds) if he caught her buying the lottery. It is somewhat strange that it is only my wife but not me who will occasionally buy the lottery. She said if she won, our son would be able to pay off his student loans immediately - a clever excuse but I do not say anything because she does not buy it often.</p>
<p>But at one time my wife became very good at playing the claw machine there. Whenever we saw a claw machine somewhere (at some restaurant or even at a Walmart at one time), we could not resist playing at a claw machine if we had the time. One of the stuff animal we got became one of his favorites and he still kept it today.</p>
<p>Mcat2, your post is a great post on child psychology.</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>
<p>My wife spent so much time with our child while he was growing up. So there must be something funny to tell. I asked my wife if she remembers those “arcade ticket” bribing trick. She said she did. She said that while the kid was at a preschool, she rushed to that little arcade (in a mall) and played one specific game which could possibly disperse the most tickets as a not-so-young woman. After having got many tickets, she left with the tickets without trading in the tickets for any prize. The worker at the arcade looked at her suspiciously and likely thought she was an idiot. Women of that age would rarely go to that place alone and played only one kind of game.</p>
<p>It was funny that once our child was convinced that the tickets are good for trading the prize, he would rather keep the tickets he had earned rather than traded them in. He was happy that he always owned a lot of tickets.</p>
<p>I live in New Jersey where property taxes are obscene. I pay close to $30,000 for a house worth $900k-$1 million. </p>
<p>The town where our beach house just went through a reassessment. I am working with the town assessor to get it down. The company that did the assessment did not contact us for an interior inspection as they were supposed to, so we suddenly have a jacuzzi and a new kitchen! We learned the hard way with our first NJ house is that you need to understand what the assessment is based on a get the assessor to explain every code in the property record card. Out first house had some completely wrong figures, so we overpaid at least $10,000 total over 5 years and were only able to go back 2 years to collect the stake. </p>
<p>The one thing to remember is that assessment in many places is a zero sum game. If everyone is overassessed by 10%, the tax rate will be lower. </p>
<p>That’s a good story. I like that he would rather keep the tickets than trade them in…</p>
<p>Your son is good with money, isn’t he?</p>
<p>We never need to worry about him spending OUR money unwisely. I said OUR money because he has not had earning any real money by himself yet (still at a school, in a program which practically does not allow any student to work.) He has accumulated a quite significant amount of student loans! Borrowed a phrase from one of my colleagues to comfort myself: It (his loans) is an investment for his future.</p>
<p>Back to the real estate topic: In the back of my mind, we wish we could manage to keep the house (in another state, now a rental property) where we raise our child. This would happen only when our son will be able/willing to go back to our (old) city/state in, say, 3-4 years. The probability that this will happen is almost zero. But we could have a dream, right?(The tenants actually expressed the interests to buy that house from us but we said no, at least not now.)</p>
<p>mcat-
you do know that you can buy rolls of those arcade tickets at Party City and office supply stores, yes??</p>
<p><a href=“http://www.partycity.com/search.do?query=double+roll+tickets”>http://www.partycity.com/search.do?query=double+roll+tickets</a> </p>
<p><a href=“http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/1364743/OfficeMax-Ticket-Rolls-Double-Red/”>http://www.officedepot.com/a/products/1364743/OfficeMax-Ticket-Rolls-Double-Red/</a></p>
<p>Here ya go </p>
<p>It sounds like what mcat’s kid wanted was tickets he himself had won at the games. They were the symbol of his skill (or luck), not a means to acquire prizes.</p>
<p>My younger daughter used to respond well to those sticker charts – but she never cared about getting to go buy the toy or whatever thing we were offering once she got X many stickers. She just loved seeing the chart with a sticker there for every day. And she got really upset when she had a day without a sticker, because she could never go back in time and earn that missing sticker. It ruined the whole chart as far as she was concerned.</p>
<p>Anyway, @dstark, has your daughter looked outside of SF? I live on the peninsula and prices are more reasonable in some towns here (not all of them of course).</p>