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Cake day: July 4th, 2024

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  • Every instance I’ve seen with actual details has been improper use of real property tax exemptions. In many states you get a discounted tax rate by declaring your home as your primary residence. If you own several properties you only get the discount on one, which is supposed be the one you live at the most (ie primary residence).

    The “fraud” part comes in play if you claim multiple properties as your primary. It’s harder to do that if the properties are in the same state, but it’s easy if they’re in different states since states don’t talk with one another. It’s so easy that it’s often accidental.

    We’re talking a few grand a year in tax savings. It’s ripping off your state by under paying and people in these positions should know better so it’s harder to give them sympathy, but elevating what may be an accident to a supposed major scandal is a silly headline making exercise.

    And why is this happening? Retribution, of course: first person I recall being attacked in the manner recently was MTG.













  • It’s worth trying to see if you can get eyeballs on the room immediately above that location. If you have multiple floors windows are usually placed in parallel, one floor above the other. So it may be not a plumbing issue, but a window above could have a leak from the exterior that’s traveling downwards. Or the roof. I’ve seen leaks presenting evidence 20+ feet from the source before. They can take really unexpected routes through a building.


  • The Federal Reserve, which manages interbank money transfers in the US, last year approved a service that creates near instant transfers for pennies.

    We have three official ways: wires (same day; acceptable for lawful purposes ie real estate; costly at $20+ each), ACH (takes days; fractions of a penny; used for bulk transfers that are planned in advance or are not time sensitive ie checks and payroll; what venmo etc actually do in the background, behind the facade of their app), and now FedNow.

    FedNow is more like bank transfers used in other countries where silly stuff like venmo isn’t needed. Problem is every bank needs to spend the time and expense to implement it. That is going to take ages, and with venmo-like services being well established there isn’t a lot of demand driving adoption. And probably why anyone reading this never heard about it.