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> And you can always add supplemental later. Great point. Investments are made based on expected returns on investment, and we're free to postpone them until

• hedora 4y ago
  > Spending money hoping to bank on the occurrence of unexpected outcomes simply can't be justified. I would have agreed a decade ago, but in the one year our house has been standing, it has endured two 100 year events (a heat wave and a rain/windstorm). We overpaid about $1000 to go one size up on the (variable) heat pump / AC and $10-20k to oversize + harden the solar / battery. It has been worth every penny at this point; the solar kept the fridge, freezer and AC happy in > 100F heat during a power outage. That's $500-1000 of food just for the one event, and outages are increasing in frequency. (Air conditioning was mostly unheard of in this area 20 years ago, since it didn't get hot enough to ever run it.) My big concern is that we're already eating into the engineeeing tolerances for the wind rating on the house itself. I do agree that you should consider what can be upgraded later, and put money towards things that are hard to change (insulation, wind ratings, etc.)
  • genewitch 4y ago
    the "it doesn't get hot enough to need air conditioning" argument was used to build out tons of apartment complexes in the pacific northwest, say, around Tacoma and Seattle. I lived in Tacoma in the mid-2000s for a summer and it was miserable. And everyone i spoke to about it said "yeah, that's the joke."