6 ms·

The idea here of how you furnish a place in the US doesn't match my personal experience. He does mention Craigslist in passing, but simultaneously dismisses it,

The idea here of how you furnish a place in the US doesn't match my personal experience. He does mention Craigslist in passing, but simultaneously dismisses it, but I think that's a bit trite. We bought a ton of fixtures, furniture, and even construction materials from Craigslist, St. Vinnies, and our local Habitat for Humanities and saved a pile of cash. We didn't deal with the whole big-box experience. Furniture is similarly dealt with. Even before Craigslist, there were old fashioned classified adverts and garage sales which weren't as convenient as a single giant market, but gave us options. From the sounds of it, our luck with Craigslist/ second hand sources was just about as good as his was in Ecuador with one out of our many purchases being a bit of a disappointment. Also, this paragraph bothered me: > Here, the process always involves a drive to a big-box store (few of these are convenient via transit, especially if you need to make multiple stops), a credit check, some paperwork to commit to a multi-month payment plan, a scheduled delivery a week or two out, and often some hassle with the delivery company requiring a phone call in which I sit on hold. I don't pay for anything other than my car/ house on monthly payments and nobody should. This article is more a criticism of the US culture of debt rather than looking at what options we genuinely have. We've always had the option to pay in cash and not deal with the financing, it's just a bit less convenient. Likewise, if you are willing to deal with second hand goods, we have the option to get second hand goods, you just have to search a bit harder to find them. Really, the big difference between experiences is the expectation in the US that you will have your own transportation, and that is the real story here in my eyes. In Ecuador public Transportation and casual truck rental works. In the US, it's quite a bit tougher to exist without a reliable car or truck. I also don't understand why he dismisses CL, yard sales, and recycling stores out of hand because they are right up his "Inefficient, but Smart" alley.

ebg13 6y ago
> I don't pay for anything other than my car/ house on monthly payments and nobody should You should if there's no additional cost for doing so, because that's a free loan. The same quantity of money a few months down the road will be worth a little less than it is today, so you should give it to them then instead of now when you can do slightly more with it. If you can get either 1X and 2Y now or 1X now and 1Y later, you'd be foolish to do the latter. And if you're thinking "but prices go down, not up", you're both wrong on average and also probably thinking about the exact category of goods (tech gear) that tends to offer interest-free financing.
- AnimalMuppet 6y ago
  Only if 1) you are certain you have the means of repayment, and 2) the time to fill out the application is free.
- tosers4 6y ago
  depends on how good you are with your finances. You can easily get too much debt if you are not careful doing those kind of things. Most people just check that the debt payments fit in their budget, but they forget their budget might shrink. US families are drown into debt, in fact most families live paycheck to paycheck, so i wouldn't give that advice of using debt event without interest. I would only give such advice to people I already know that can take care of themselves financially. (As in know how to actually manage money, not about being rich or poor) And there is another benefit of paying in the act: its off your mind, one less thing to worry about. Might not be the most efficient but is the the one that makes you worry less.
- danans 6y ago
  > You should if there's no additional cost for doing so, because that's a free loan. On the small time scales that interest free financing works, you're probably better off using a rewards based credit card and getting 2% back on purchases rather than handle the overhead of tracking eventual payoff date on various expensive on household items, or risk missing those and paying very high interest and penalties. A credit card payed off at the end of the month is after all a short term interest free loan. After all, if you kept $1K in your investments by borrowing interest free for 1 year for a TV purchase, how much are you realistically going to make in the best of conditions on that $1K? 4%? So $40. Not worth the overhead of managing it IMO, to say nothing of the credit damage that comes from excessive borrowing.
- seem_2211 6y ago
  I mean it's "smart" and "efficient" but it's also fragile. The simplest way to manage your finances is to avoid debt wherever possible (especially consumer debt). Very hard to go into bankruptcy when you don't owe anyone anything! The "smartest" way to manage your finances is to use credit cards that give you points and pay you back via a few hundred dollars worth of free flights a year. But there's a bunch of opportunity costs associated with pursuing that route, and a level of diligence that frankly most people do not have. The best thing about debt is that it lets you move really really quickly - if you don't have $2k for that furniture set, you can just finance things and pay it off over 2 years. But that's the worst thing about debt as well - you now have a monthly obligation that's going to be a line item expense for the next 24 months. If you'd spent 12 months saving up for that furniture set and paid cash, the day you buy the goods is the day your financial obligations start and end. I am not opposed to debt entirely, and think it can be a great strategic lever (I used a credit card to finance my initial move to America which has done wonders for my income and my career, far exceeding the interest costs that I paid). However I think for most consumer purposes it's less of a help and more of a hindrance. Take the new 84 month car loans. That's 7 years! That's a long time to assume that your life will have no material changes, or that nothing will go wrong.
jimhefferon 6y ago
> We've always had the option to pay in cash and not deal with the financing, it's just a bit less convenient. Yes, true. But from watching what happens at those stores, it seems to me that most people do debt. Perhaps they don't have to, but they do.
jeffbee 6y ago
Having a dishwasher and clothes washer and dryer can mean the difference between having time to work and not. Labor-saving devices bought on loan make perfect sense to me. From my perspective it's funny that you give yourself permission to buy a car on credit since to a car-free person that's nuts, but to a person who needs a car to access their place of work it's obviously sensible.
- titanomachy 6y ago
  The argument is definitely there for a laundry machine, but a lot of people buy sofas and TVs on monthly payment plans as well. I agree that going into debt to buy a new car is nuts. Some places are terrible to live car-free though, and not everyone is willing or able to relocate.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Having a dishwasher and clothes washer and dryer can mean the difference between having time to work and not. Labor-saving devices bought on loan make perfect sense to me. From my perspective it's funny that you give yourself permission to buy a car on credit since to a car-free person that's nuts, but to a person who needs a car to access their place of work it's obviously sensible. If buying on credit or going without were the only choices, I'd agree with you in a heart-beat. But they aren't. You can get a decent, running washer/ dryer on craigslist for about $150 each. Dishwashers are even less. Buying new and financing is going to cost someone $40-60/ month for 2+ years which is a pretty big burden for someone who is struggling. > From my perspective it's funny that you give yourself permission to buy a car I'd love to be car free, it's a great choice if you are urban, but we've lived semi-rural for quite a while. Also, since I almost always keep cars for well past the end of the loan (or in some cases bought used for cash) I usually don't have a car payment.
treis 6y ago
>In Ecuador public Transportation and casual truck rental works. In the US, it's quite a bit tougher to exist without a reliable car or truck. We have that. It's called Uber pool/Lyft Line. I argue with people on my city's reddit about this. Ad hoc point to point transit is the future but they want to spend billions on rail that won't be operational for decades.
- alanbernstein 6y ago
  I'm curious about your arguments for how Uber/Lyft is preferable to rail. I don't presume to know the right answer to this question, but it seems unlikely that Uber/Lyft will continue to exist in their current form indefinitely. Rail, on the other hand, appears to be a proven solution in many large cities.
  - treis 6y ago
    > I'm curious about your arguments for how Uber/Lyft is preferable to rail. There's just not the density to support rail at a level to make the system fast an reliable. To make it work you need trains every ~10 minutes or so and enough coverage where people only have one transfer. Otherwise, your commute time becomes too variable based on your luck missing the connection and it becomes too long on average because of transfers. The infrastructure to create that coverage is extremely expensive and only makes sense if you can keep the trains mostly full. It's also sometimes flat out impossible because if you add stops to increase coverage you get slower travel times due to increased stoppage and loading time. In short, to make a rail system work you need ~100 people going from point A to point B at any given time. For an Uber/Lyft style system to work you only need ~10.
    - magicalhippo 6y ago
      When I was in Tunisia a while back I experienced the low-tech variant of Uber/Lyft. We wanted to visit another city, and ended up in a kinda bus depot except it was filled with cars. One lane per destination. We paid, got in the first car in "our" lane, and when the car was full the driver headed off. It was cheap (in local terms) and flexible. Waiting time was reasonable, and the driver stopped when people wanted off. Meanwhile back here in Norway they're talking about expanding the railroads around the capital. The projected cost is just insane, and I'm 100% confident the estimates are not at all realistic due to difficult terrain, and politicians not being sure about exact placement of certain track segments yet. Should it go through town, or on the outside?
projektfu 6y ago
Most US cities have or at least used to have the same scenario of a few furniture stores in the same district where you can browse several selections. I remember Schenectady having several stores in one spot each dedicated to lighting (and exhaust fans and doorbells, because of NuTone's business). The big box thing is, in my opinion, relatively recent, and I felt like it started with Home Depot. That was the cause of the closing of the independent hardware stores in Schenectady, such as the venerable Wallace Armer. In other places they attribute it to Walmart's but that came late to the Northeast. Now, small stores tend to carry boutique items and everything costs a lot more than the big box stores. On the one hand we have a very efficient furniture-making-selling system in the big boxes, that produces stuff that can be set up once but usually does not survive a move well. On the other we have expensive, one-of-a-kind type crafts that are able to become heirlooms but are out of the price range for most people who just want a coffee table or a couch.
- ogre_codes 6y ago
  > Most US cities have or at least used to have the same scenario of a few furniture stores in the same district where you can browse several selections. I remember Schenectady having several stores in one spot each dedicated to lighting (and exhaust fans and doorbells, because of NuTone's business). The impression I got from this article is that most of the stuff he bought was second hand. There are a lot of decent ways to buy second hand goods in every city I've lived in.
maxsilver 6y ago
Yeah, his "Inefficient, but Smart" argument doesn't seem smart, it seems painstakingly luck-based. In the US, we used to call this "knowing a guy" or "fallen off a truck" purchasing. It's highly inefficient, super unpredictable (in both cost, delivery time, quality, etc), and is highly inequitable. (What if you don't know a guy? What if your guy doesn't like you?). Your Craigslist description is a perfect example of this from the buyers side too -- sometimes you find a great deal, but sometimes the seller is crazy and threatens you with physical violence, or raises the prices after you already agreed and arranged to pick it up, or sometimes they sell you something with bedbugs in it. This style of purchasing "works" if you are a wealthy expat with tons of time to play with (as a StrongTowns blogger living in Ecuador would be). But it sure doesn't seem "Smart" in any way.

ebg13 6y ago

> I don't pay for anything other than my car/ house on monthly payments and nobody should You should if there's no additional cost for doing so, because that's a free loan. The same quantity of money a few months down the road will be worth a little less than it is today, so you should give it to them then instead of now when you can do slightly more with it. If you can get either 1X and 2Y now or 1X now and 1Y later, you'd be foolish to do the latter. And if you're thinking "but prices go down, not up", you're both wrong on average and also probably thinking about the exact category of goods (tech gear) that tends to offer interest-free financing.

AnimalMuppet 6y ago
Only if 1) you are certain you have the means of repayment, and 2) the time to fill out the application is free.
tosers4 6y ago
depends on how good you are with your finances. You can easily get too much debt if you are not careful doing those kind of things. Most people just check that the debt payments fit in their budget, but they forget their budget might shrink. US families are drown into debt, in fact most families live paycheck to paycheck, so i wouldn't give that advice of using debt event without interest. I would only give such advice to people I already know that can take care of themselves financially. (As in know how to actually manage money, not about being rich or poor) And there is another benefit of paying in the act: its off your mind, one less thing to worry about. Might not be the most efficient but is the the one that makes you worry less.
danans 6y ago
> You should if there's no additional cost for doing so, because that's a free loan. On the small time scales that interest free financing works, you're probably better off using a rewards based credit card and getting 2% back on purchases rather than handle the overhead of tracking eventual payoff date on various expensive on household items, or risk missing those and paying very high interest and penalties. A credit card payed off at the end of the month is after all a short term interest free loan. After all, if you kept $1K in your investments by borrowing interest free for 1 year for a TV purchase, how much are you realistically going to make in the best of conditions on that $1K? 4%? So $40. Not worth the overhead of managing it IMO, to say nothing of the credit damage that comes from excessive borrowing.
seem_2211 6y ago
I mean it's "smart" and "efficient" but it's also fragile. The simplest way to manage your finances is to avoid debt wherever possible (especially consumer debt). Very hard to go into bankruptcy when you don't owe anyone anything! The "smartest" way to manage your finances is to use credit cards that give you points and pay you back via a few hundred dollars worth of free flights a year. But there's a bunch of opportunity costs associated with pursuing that route, and a level of diligence that frankly most people do not have. The best thing about debt is that it lets you move really really quickly - if you don't have $2k for that furniture set, you can just finance things and pay it off over 2 years. But that's the worst thing about debt as well - you now have a monthly obligation that's going to be a line item expense for the next 24 months. If you'd spent 12 months saving up for that furniture set and paid cash, the day you buy the goods is the day your financial obligations start and end. I am not opposed to debt entirely, and think it can be a great strategic lever (I used a credit card to finance my initial move to America which has done wonders for my income and my career, far exceeding the interest costs that I paid). However I think for most consumer purposes it's less of a help and more of a hindrance. Take the new 84 month car loans. That's 7 years! That's a long time to assume that your life will have no material changes, or that nothing will go wrong.

jimhefferon 6y ago

> We've always had the option to pay in cash and not deal with the financing, it's just a bit less convenient. Yes, true. But from watching what happens at those stores, it seems to me that most people do debt. Perhaps they don't have to, but they do.

jeffbee 6y ago

Having a dishwasher and clothes washer and dryer can mean the difference between having time to work and not. Labor-saving devices bought on loan make perfect sense to me. From my perspective it's funny that you give yourself permission to buy a car on credit since to a car-free person that's nuts, but to a person who needs a car to access their place of work it's obviously sensible.

titanomachy 6y ago
The argument is definitely there for a laundry machine, but a lot of people buy sofas and TVs on monthly payment plans as well. I agree that going into debt to buy a new car is nuts. Some places are terrible to live car-free though, and not everyone is willing or able to relocate.
ogre_codes 6y ago
> Having a dishwasher and clothes washer and dryer can mean the difference between having time to work and not. Labor-saving devices bought on loan make perfect sense to me. From my perspective it's funny that you give yourself permission to buy a car on credit since to a car-free person that's nuts, but to a person who needs a car to access their place of work it's obviously sensible. If buying on credit or going without were the only choices, I'd agree with you in a heart-beat. But they aren't. You can get a decent, running washer/ dryer on craigslist for about $150 each. Dishwashers are even less. Buying new and financing is going to cost someone $40-60/ month for 2+ years which is a pretty big burden for someone who is struggling. > From my perspective it's funny that you give yourself permission to buy a car I'd love to be car free, it's a great choice if you are urban, but we've lived semi-rural for quite a while. Also, since I almost always keep cars for well past the end of the loan (or in some cases bought used for cash) I usually don't have a car payment.

treis 6y ago

>In Ecuador public Transportation and casual truck rental works. In the US, it's quite a bit tougher to exist without a reliable car or truck. We have that. It's called Uber pool/Lyft Line. I argue with people on my city's reddit about this. Ad hoc point to point transit is the future but they want to spend billions on rail that won't be operational for decades.

alanbernstein 6y ago
I'm curious about your arguments for how Uber/Lyft is preferable to rail. I don't presume to know the right answer to this question, but it seems unlikely that Uber/Lyft will continue to exist in their current form indefinitely. Rail, on the other hand, appears to be a proven solution in many large cities.
- treis 6y ago
  > I'm curious about your arguments for how Uber/Lyft is preferable to rail. There's just not the density to support rail at a level to make the system fast an reliable. To make it work you need trains every ~10 minutes or so and enough coverage where people only have one transfer. Otherwise, your commute time becomes too variable based on your luck missing the connection and it becomes too long on average because of transfers. The infrastructure to create that coverage is extremely expensive and only makes sense if you can keep the trains mostly full. It's also sometimes flat out impossible because if you add stops to increase coverage you get slower travel times due to increased stoppage and loading time. In short, to make a rail system work you need ~100 people going from point A to point B at any given time. For an Uber/Lyft style system to work you only need ~10.
  - magicalhippo 6y ago
    When I was in Tunisia a while back I experienced the low-tech variant of Uber/Lyft. We wanted to visit another city, and ended up in a kinda bus depot except it was filled with cars. One lane per destination. We paid, got in the first car in "our" lane, and when the car was full the driver headed off. It was cheap (in local terms) and flexible. Waiting time was reasonable, and the driver stopped when people wanted off. Meanwhile back here in Norway they're talking about expanding the railroads around the capital. The projected cost is just insane, and I'm 100% confident the estimates are not at all realistic due to difficult terrain, and politicians not being sure about exact placement of certain track segments yet. Should it go through town, or on the outside?

projektfu 6y ago

Most US cities have or at least used to have the same scenario of a few furniture stores in the same district where you can browse several selections. I remember Schenectady having several stores in one spot each dedicated to lighting (and exhaust fans and doorbells, because of NuTone's business). The big box thing is, in my opinion, relatively recent, and I felt like it started with Home Depot. That was the cause of the closing of the independent hardware stores in Schenectady, such as the venerable Wallace Armer. In other places they attribute it to Walmart's but that came late to the Northeast. Now, small stores tend to carry boutique items and everything costs a lot more than the big box stores. On the one hand we have a very efficient furniture-making-selling system in the big boxes, that produces stuff that can be set up once but usually does not survive a move well. On the other we have expensive, one-of-a-kind type crafts that are able to become heirlooms but are out of the price range for most people who just want a coffee table or a couch.

ogre_codes 6y ago
> Most US cities have or at least used to have the same scenario of a few furniture stores in the same district where you can browse several selections. I remember Schenectady having several stores in one spot each dedicated to lighting (and exhaust fans and doorbells, because of NuTone's business). The impression I got from this article is that most of the stuff he bought was second hand. There are a lot of decent ways to buy second hand goods in every city I've lived in.

maxsilver 6y ago

Yeah, his "Inefficient, but Smart" argument doesn't seem smart, it seems painstakingly luck-based. In the US, we used to call this "knowing a guy" or "fallen off a truck" purchasing. It's highly inefficient, super unpredictable (in both cost, delivery time, quality, etc), and is highly inequitable. (What if you don't know a guy? What if your guy doesn't like you?). Your Craigslist description is a perfect example of this from the buyers side too -- sometimes you find a great deal, but sometimes the seller is crazy and threatens you with physical violence, or raises the prices after you already agreed and arranged to pick it up, or sometimes they sell you something with bedbugs in it. This style of purchasing "works" if you are a wealthy expat with tons of time to play with (as a StrongTowns blogger living in Ecuador would be). But it sure doesn't seem "Smart" in any way.