Don't Quit Your Day Job…

Here’s an interesting move on the part of Bank of America… account holders who use their debit card at any time during a month will be expected to pony up $5.00 at the end. The fee doesn’t apply if you use your debit card at ATMs, just when you use it to make purchases. It’s just the latest of the big banks to make waves with debit card fees – and, with the fee scheduled to roll out to Bank of America account holders next year, it’s the largest of the debit card fee programs. Wells Fargo and JP Morgan Chase are also toying with the idea to tack on monthly debit card fees.

The San Francisco Bay Area, generally agreed to include the nine California counties of Alameda, Contra Costa, Marin, Napa, San Francisco, San Mateo, Santa Clara, Solano and Sonoma, is one of the wealthiest regions in the United States. From its powerhouse engineering and business schools to the Venture Capital firms in Menlo Park and Palo Alto; from the financial buildings in San Francisco to the tech firms in Silicon Valley, the region has an immense capacity for generating wealth (and a history of massive booms and devastating busts).

There is a part of the Bay Area, which I’ll call the Inner Bay (although I know it is sometimes called the “Real Bay Area”) which has an especially concentrated amount of wealth. That wealth is reflected in home prices which are among the top in the nation. In the Inner Bay, consisting of Alameda, San Francisco, San Mateo and Santa Clara County, it’s not unheard of for houses around 1,000 square feet to sell for close to a million dollars (or more, in places like Atherton, Saratoga, Los Altos and Palo Alto).

Don’t Quit Your Day Job… is now on Twitter, check us out by clicking this link or the slick icon in the subscribe section. Special thanks to Bret at Hope to Prosper for being our first follower! For the record, the first user DQYDJ followed is Nelson at Financial Uproar. Congratulations, or whatever superlative normally goes with Twitter accomplishments. To the rest of our readers, there is still time to grab one of the other milestone spots like 1,000th reader – or 10th…

Here at DQYDJ we’ve rambled on recently about the affordability of homes, and even tried to convince you that when mortgage interest rates are low it’s not necessarily a good time to purchase a house. We’ve tried to make the point that affordability in Real Estate seems conditioned on affording payments instead of the actual purchase price of a home. That said, we left our readers hanging by not graphing that affordability with changing interest rates.

For a deeper background, please visit “Rooting for Price Increases and Low Interest Rates” for a description of the DQYDJ Median Home Affordability Index, and “Home Price Affordability Calculator” to play with the affordability numbers yourself.

In our last article, we promised you a calculator so you can copy our methodology and calculate ‘affordable’ houses by determining what an acceptable monthly payment would be. In our current article, we deliver! Thanks to Ironman at Political Calculations for the calculator creation script, it was very useful once again!

I’ve mentioned it in previous posts, but I’ll say it here again: I purchased a house this year, against the advice of many (and to the delight of a select few). One of the things you will note if you undertake your own house hunt (or you’ll recall if you’ve ever purchased a house) is the massive information disparity which exists between the house-hunter (or seller) and Realtor(s). Even though, with few exceptions, real estate purchases are the largest purchases most of us will make in our lives, transparency is non-existent and bad advice abounds. For starters, and the purpose of this article, I’d like you to consider two statements: “it’s a good thing when home prices rise” and “It’s a good time to buy now, interest rates are low”. Let’s consider those, shall we?

Weeks and links for the week – including an editor’s pick.

As educational inflation makes college more and more expensive, there is a curious slide in the SAT scores colleges use as one of the factors in determining who will get admitted into a new class. For years, SAT scores (standing for the Scholastic Assessment Test) and ACT scores (standing for American College Testing) have been the final hurdles for High School seniors (and practice for HS juniors) who are looking to go on to college. As a standardized test used by colleges and universities to compare students to each other across a new class, SAT scores are also useful to compare students in various years. SAT scores, which had a clear positive trajectory from 1995 until 2005, started sliding until today. 2011′s average score of 1011 is only one point above the 1995 average of 1010.

Here’s an interesting link, this time brought to you by an Economist piece which asks, “Who are the world’s biggest employers?”. Luckily, they answer. The top spot went to our own United States Department of Defense, with a whopping 3.2 million people on the payroll.

What, am I crazy? Peyton Manning of the Indianapolis Colts is probably a doubtful start for the rest of the 2011 season, and perhaps has made his last start of his Colts career (The Colts would owe Manning $28 million if they exercised his contract for another year at the end of 2011 – crazy to think about). He is also due to make at a minimum $23.4 million this year – $20 million as a signing bonus for his new contract and $3.4 million in guaranteed salary. Luckily I left myself an out – the problem with painting every sports contract with the “overpaid” brush is there is an army of athletes who will never touch the salaries which make us do a double take. As Frédéric Bastiat wrote in his essay What is Seen and What is Not Seen, “Let us accustom ourselves, then, not to judge things solely by what is seen, but rather by what is not seen.”This article requires a special shout-out to Nelson Smith at Financial Uproar who planted the seed – sorry I waited until the third week of NCAA football to write this!