art, science, computers & philosophy

We took this email to heart since 51% of our mortgage payment goes to pay property taxes and the value of our house has dropped 20% while the taxes based on the county tax appraiser have gone up 12%.

Here is the email:

Your House As Seen By:

Yourself…

Your Buyer…

Your Lender…

Your Appraiser…

Your County’s Tax Assessor…

Thanks Cate!

Evident Technologies maker of EviDot quantum dots for Science research now makes Holiday lights using Quantum Dot enhanced LEDs that are 90% energy efficient. Go green this Holiday season with LED lights that will save you $$ on your ever expanding electric bill.

We were driving on a very long straight stretch of road, across the very flat land of Illinois, surrounded by lots of corn fields as far as the eye can see, in our car family (Honda Element) when the radio news mentioned the government may help out the ailing automobile industry. This started a conversation. We asked each other to name all the American car companies, and then list what cars they make. Now we are your average family making well below the $250K that the politicians were all talking about in the run up to the election this year. We make a slightly more than the average income for our town of $35K a year. Our car is 4 years old and finally paid off, and we have a second car that is eight years old and paid off as well. We think of ourselves as an average family, and fairly in tune with popular culture. So back to the question. What American car and American car makers exist? We made a rule that we had to answer the question in one mile driving at 70mph. We then asked the question again about foreign cars. The results are in the tables below. We checked the car prices when we got home on Edmunds.com.

American car makers we could remember and the cars we thought they made:

Foreign Cars we could remember:

Cars we know we could never afford but know the makers name anyway:

When we checked Edmunds.com later we found that we missed quite a few car makers. There are 48 makes being sold in the United States and 13 are US brands cars. We added the prices for the base car if we knew its name. Sorry Dodge, we could not think of any vehicle made by you. The names of cars we wrote down were the first ones that came to our head that is why Camaro beat out Corvette for Chevy. The makes in the tables are in the order that we remembered first, so Ford is still number one in our memory as a car company Jeep is last. Sorry Buick, Cadilac, GMC, Lincon, Pontiac, and Saturn we forgot you even existed until we got home and looked you up on the net. Actually not true about Cadilac, we remembered their cars can “turn you on”,  we don’t know which ones they are, but apparently that is what they do. As for foreign cars, we knew Jaguar made something, we just had no idea what kind. While thinking about Jaguar we remembered Dodge made the Neon, which I don’t think they sell any more and then the Viper which is insanely expensive, but we still don’t know what Jaguar makes as of this writing. The last table is the exotic cars list, you know the ones you dream of owning. We remembered Bugatti as own company, because of a U-tube video. We were pretty clueless about what they make these days except for the Boxster which beat out the 911 because one passed us on the highway while we were making our list.

Now for economics, if you own a house you should not have a payment on your house that is more than what one person in your family makes in a week. That is our philosophy and we stick to it. So if you don’t buy a car outright then you should still have 10% down and the monthly payment shoud be one quarter of what you pay for your house. If you do it like that, and you make $50k a year, or about $800 a week, then a car payment should not be more than $200 a month. Based on the lists above, none of the new cars we listed are affordable to someone who makes 50K a year, since a $15K car cost $296 a month at 7.23% interest and 10% down for 60 months. Even with 20% down the car is too expensive. I think the car companies in America made the same mistake as the banks and pushed the limits too far above what people can really afford and relied on badly made car loans to help make a profit. If we are going to use tax payer money to bail out auto companies then, at least, bail out the ones that we can remember. Sorry Cadilac, you may turn us on, but then the endorphins kick in and we forgot who you are.