Since I’m always working on one website or another, trying out new ideas, this is something that interests me very much – coding the 17th website is just not that exciting. One of her recommendations was Squarespace.

I’m simply blown away. It’s a very easy point & click way to build web sites (including blogs, discussion areas, photo galleries, what-have-you) that really doesn’t require any code. It comes complete with pre-built traffic measuring tools, log viewing, etc – and pretty, too.

And in case you really need your own custom tweaks, you have full access to the CSS, and limited places where you can even inject additional HTML.

Since I’m currently tinkering around with re-building my wife’s jewelry web site, I gave it about two minutes, just playing around – here‘s what I got so far.

It’s impressive enough that I’ll spend some serious effort on this over the coming days. (Add to that the fact that they’re fairly affordable – $8 a month is certainly in line with other hosting solutions, and they do all the software patching for you )

Oh, and if you’re – like me – paranoid about your data, they have full XML export facilities. And blogs can be exported in Moveable Type format, which pretty much every other blog software can import.

I do like the fact that it allows you to take a lot of factors into account – tax rate, inflation, appreciation, rent increase, return on investment, you name it. It also allows you to interactively modify the settings – move a slider and see how it affects you.

What I didn’t like is the fact that the underlying methodology and formulas are only explained vaguely. Especially at rather extreme values, it returns unintuitive results. I can explain the results to myself if I assume a certain methodology, but I’d feel much better if I knew the underlying formulas.

Anyways – it’s yet another tool in the real estate buying toolbox.

There are plenty of factors to take into account – inflation, investment earnings, mortgage rates, HOA dues, and tons more. Sitting down and doing math sounds rather unappealing and dry. Instead I looked for tools to help me make that decision.

That’s when I ran across HotPads. They have a very handy heatmap to give you a quick overview whether it makes sense to rent or buy, depending on the area. Here is the Los Angeles area map.

At a glance, I’m now able to find out in what areas it’s (in general) a better idea to buy than to rent. It’s only a rough guideline – you can always find a hidden gem – but it helps to focus the search. (And it helped me pinpoint an area I hadn’t even looked at before)

The next question is, given my current rent and a mortgage of a certain amount, which one makes more financial sense, and how do things change over time?. Thankfully, HotPads supplies me with a buy vs. rent calculator , too.

The way it looks in the sample case, I’ll have more net worth within two years, but I’ll have higher monthly payments for the next seven years. Time to find a better mortgage rate…

The “natural” schedule for a budget is a month – many of the major expenses you pay are on a monthly basis. Yet my paycheck arrives on a bi-weekly basis (i.e. every 14 days), and Petra has an even more irregular income. That’s no basis for planning.

So we sat down and figured out a few things. First steps, what’s the minimum income we’re guaranteed to make in any given period. For me, that’s two paychecks. For Petra, we picked the worst month in the last year and went a bit below that. That’s our ‘base salary’.

Next, we set up our ING account¹. There is a ‘Salary’ account that receives my paychecks, plus Petra’s monthly contribution from her account. From there, we have an automatic fund transfer every 1st and every 15th – into an account aptly named ‘PayForIt’. As a result, each month we have the same amount of money available.

We also save some money – a paycheck every two weeks translates into 26 a year, and only 24 of them go to the pay account. In other words, two full pay checks a year sit in a savings account – I’m automatically saving money without doing anything. Any ‘extra’ money that Petra makes above the assumed minimum also gets squirreled away.

This has the side benefit that we have to learn to live with slightly less money than we actually make – never a bad skill to have.

If you implement this yourself, be aware that the transition period to this scheme can be a bit awkward. Often, a lot of items are due on the 1st, so you’ll end up having to pay them in the month before. If you don’t plan for that, you will encounter moments where your PayForIt account is underfunded – and you definitely want to avoid that.

In the meantime, I’ll keep a log of this journey. And the first step of any journey is getting to know the terrain. Although I’ve been here for almost four years, most of L.A.’s neighborhoods are still fairly unknown to me. Thankfully, there’s plenty of information online – I started with a neighborhood map of L.A. and a pricing heatmap of L.A.

This gives me at least a good starting point – anything that’s too far away from my work and too pricey will not get checked regularly. From there, it is easy to use a site like Zillow or Redfin to get a more detailed view of what’s available at what cost.

Of course, there are plenty of open questions left:

• What are those neighborhoods like?
• How much house can I afford? What are the hidden costs?
• What about foreclosures?
• Condo or House?

And many more – so expect to see more on this topic in the near future.

No, not “to” the mines – My work is actually a fairly relaxed place.

Instead, Petra and I spent the weekend in the mountains at Pala, screening for Gems. There’s exactly one working mine left in Pala, and the guys who run it (Purely as a hobby!) have open screening sessions. I.e. you can sift through all the debris from their digging and blasting. Unfortunately, that means the really cool stuff is already gone – but still, we had a great time and found some interesting crystals.

And I took some time off to take a couple of pictures

The downside? Boy, am I sore today. Better than a workout…

Instance #1, in the elevator, woman on cell phone: “Can I get you Paris Hilton’s phone number? I think I can!”. Because here, you need to announce to the entire elevator if you know people.

Instance #2, an extremely strange ad on a lamp post:

Yes, I know this is a campaign for Pink Taco, but it’s still something you’d only see on the West Coast.

More laters….

And there are few nicer ways to spend a sunny spring afternoon than being outside, having butterflies all around. One of the benefits of living in L.A. is that you can pretty much fulfill every wish you have without ever leaving town. In this case, that means a trip to the Pavillion of Wings at the Natural History Museum.

It was a fantastic experience – see my photo gallery if you like butterflies. But even if you don’t like butterflies, the NHM is a must-see if you live in Los Angeles. The exhibitions are well done, and it’s one of the few museums that don’t talk down to their visitors. Expect more reports from there – we were so impressed that we became members.

The answer here is, we don’t lack public transportation. We lack decent public transportation. I love taking the bus, I take it whenever I can – but it still drives me nuts. Why?

• Schedules

  To say the schedule is unreliable is the understatement of the year. There is no real schedule. There is some approximation of one on the web sites, but even that only lists times for particular stations. Take the bus inbetween? Take a guess. And plan for some wait time – plus/minus 10 minutes aberrations are the norm.

• Drivers

  Many of the drivers drive like they’re crazy – either their gas/break is in dire need of maintenance, or they didn’t get proper training. Or maybe they mistake themselves for a reincarnation of Mario Andretti… To be fair, there are many excellent drivers, too. Once you become familiar with their schedules, you can arrange your bus trips around that – being catapulted about a bus is not my idea of fun. But as somebody just trying the bus for the first time, you will inevitably be riding with one of the nutcases. Probably some law of nature…

• Metro/BlueBus split

  So we have two bus companies servicing the same area, with slightly different prices. There are some rules when you can or can’t transfer between lines, but I couldn’t tell what they are. The pricing model of the two lines is different. They don’t accept payment from the other line – if you have a Blue Bus card and need to take a Metro bus, you better hope you’ve got quarters on you.

• Bus Stop organization

  Partially, this is an outflow of the split mentioned above, and partly this is just strange. At my home adress, I have three bus stations within 300 yards. First one: Blue Bus #2, and bus #20 – which I guess is part of Metro. It has different pricing, and it’s orange, so it can’t be Blue Bus. Right? (See what I mean about the confusion?) 100 yards further a stop for the Metro Express 720. Another 200 yards, and there’s another stop for #2/#20. Why do we need three different bus stops? Combined with the schedule being what it is, I have to divine which line is going to arrive next to pick the right station. Or, alternatively, stay at the second station and break into a mad dash to station three if I was wrong.

And the list continues. Public transportation in L.A. is certainly good – for a city in the U.S. Compare with Europe, and you’ll cry. A common suggestion is that we just need to educate people, and demand will kick in. That’s simply not enough – all the education in the world doesn’t fix the problems mentioned above. We need to fix public transportation – just repeating the mantra “It’s not so bad” won’t increase usage a bit.

And we can’t just make small fixes. To get people to switch between different experiences, there needs to be a significant gap between both experiences. Public Transportation can’t only be as good as a car ride, it needs to be a good chunk better.

Educating about the environment will only help a bit. Most people don’t think about long term impact when they make everyday decisions like “car or bus?”. So we need to give them a short term effect that they see right away – i.e. “Riding the bus is much more pleasant than parking on the 405″. That’s not entirely there right now.

Tags: Environment, Los Angeles, bus, Public Transportation