Heh. Some buyer just blind messaged me about buying part of my baseball card collection. I basically told him "Sink my well, put in my driveway, and put up a shop on my property." I figure that's about $25K. He'll see about $50K if everything auctions for market value, which it won't. But if he wants to take the risk, God bless him. Truth be told, I really do need to dump some of my investment grade shit before the bottom drops out of the market. No one under the age of 40 cares about old baseball cards. Everything I have is worth more then what I bought it for, so it's time to let most of it go before I lose my ass.
Has anyone read Masters of Doom? Its about the founding of id Software and its influence. I am about to start it.
Well, it looks like me and my family will mostly dodge the bullet again. And Lake Charles/Cameron parish are going to get drilled again. The majority of the habitable homes down there have blue tarps covering their already-damaged roof. This is going to be a Mike Tyson uppercut to the jaw after a devastating gut-punch. I'm not sure how many more of these that area can take.
You mirrored my reaction perfectly. I had read there were ''lots'' of tarps up from the last storm. My sisters all live on different parts of the gulf coast and the one nearest this storm sent me that link in our group text. The visual is shocking. If their shit wasn't damaged before, it sure will be now...
I can't even imagine what those folks are feeling right now. All I need is one more major event to affect my home and I'm outta this state. I have several coworkers in Lafayette and the surrounding areas that are feeling pretty uneasy. My area is showing possible wind gusts of 50-60 mph. It's going to be an interesting next 48 hours.
That was actually one facet of our decision to leave the gulf coast. There were other things considered of course, but the idea of dealing with the distress, instability, inconvenience, and financial burden of big storm after big storm made us shy away from getting tied down and purchasing a house anywhere near all that.
In all my 48 years, I have lived within 45 minutes of where I am now. I grew up only 12 minutes from here. I have very few relatives that live outside of this state. I love hunting, fishing, and my LSU Tigers and where I live I'm less than 2 hours from all of those. So this is most definitely home. But I won't go through rebuilding this house again. I'm going to choose a new location with a much more agreeable climate. I'm ready to trade the 3-4 months out of the year I won't go outside because of the heat for 2-3 months of it being too cold. The insufferable heat & humidity combo + the biting/stinging insects are enough to drive you nuts. I won't even go into the politics and quality of life in this state. If something happens, I'm headed north after I figure out which new set of natural disasters I AM comfortable with. I'm thinking Eastern Tennessee, N. Carolina, Virginia, Kentucky area.
TN is beautiful. We talked about that general region as a possibility too but he got a job offer in Oregon so here we are. The biggest selling point of the south was the low cost of living, lower taxes. But stuff really isn't that cheap anymore and I like the things higher taxes support, like well funded public education. All my siblings and I were sent to private schools. There were $ix of u$. Kinda negates the low taxes thing... Also my dad hates the cold so the ''mild winters'' thing was a point always driven in. But hey, actually, if you have reasonable clothes and equipment, cold and snow is tolerable and enjoyable in a lot of ways. I had the advantage of marrying someone not from the deep south, so the grim and plodding acceptance of the heat, humidity, and bugs wasn't there. We also lived in Hawaii for a time, so moving around a little as young adults and not having kids to tie us down allowed us to move to a whole new region relatively easily. We may move again for various reasons but the weather is great here and natural disasters are few and far between. Life is way more enjoyable and predictable.
I know it maybe rude or ignorant, but i have never understood people who keep rebuilding there house in the same hurricane zone.
How do you sell a house destroyed by a hurricane? On the front end it is uninhabitable with a low value. After rebuilding you are financially sunk in it and less likely to sell it because the area is flood prone or whatever and values are diminished. Plus all the reasons people don't want to move anyway....family/support, jobs, familiarly. Rebuilding is the path of least resistance. Except how the storms are going to be bigger and more numerous. Lots of people are going to be getting fucked up worse than usual. Then they'll be too poor to move.
Um....the county/parish, state or federal government will buy you out. Fema has a pretty simple and well funded program to move folks. The issue isn't the house, its the home so to speak. Jobs, extended families, communities. Also, it seems obvious now, but there are thousands of miles of coastline that haven't had an impact in decades. Most folks buy insurance, prepare accordingly and roll the dice. Up until recently, those dice were kind of friendly. I wish it was legal to mark up properties that were struck by floods/hurricanes so that developers don't capitalize on folks saying fuck it, then flipping the houses. The places fucked up by Ike and Harvey are going for $250k right now....with not a single mitigation in place and the new buyers are often clueless...
This... all of this ^ Even more of this ^ And one more thing: Pride. "This is my HOME. My family has lived here for generations. We'll rebuild, just like they did." Which is some bullshit I just can't get behind. Hell, my name appears in a history book of New Roads (Pointe Coupee Parish) and I lived there for 3 years. But the idea of rebuilding this house, or any other, after flooding or wind/water damage after doing it just 4 years ago is not something I'm going to entertain. The street I live on is a mix of some brand new homes built up on a giant pad of dirt several feet high or elevated on stilts, rebuilt homes that were gutted and flipped, and several that are yet to be demolished that really need to be. If something happens to this house, I will maybe, MAYBE gut it (should be a lot easier this time around) and then sell it. I have contents and structural insurance so I'll take that and whatever the gutted house sells for and GTFO of dodge.
My grandparents lived on the intracoastal way for 40 years in South Florida. I think that entire time they had a fence blow over. However, this last trip to Florida, we stopped by a restaurant that's right on the water and during high tide, their parking lot had about six inches of water in it. From there we went to the Boynton Inlet and they had the same issue. The inlet was redone in 2011 and I'm guessing they didn't redo it to have the parking lot flood everyday at high tide. One thing to hear about climate change, another too see if affect places you remember from your childhood.