Joel Weber

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• July 23, 2007, on Early Retirement: Where to Live?:

  One major factor in the renting vs buying tradeoff is how much and how long you're going to use something. If the thing can spend most of its time being used by others, renting may be more convenient. If you're going to spend a month a year at a vacation home, owning the whole vacation home (ignoring the possibility of owning a timeshare) may be more expensive than renting because you have to absorb the costs for the 11 months that you aren't there. Of course, you could find renters for the other 11 months (unless it's a property that's only attractive during part of the year, in which case you can probably still find renters for some of the time), but then you have to deal with those renters and still have to deal with keeping the place maintained. And for a vacation home, renting also means that if you discover you don't like the place, not coming back next year becomes easier. Owning a primary home would give me some stability I'd really kind of like that I don't really ha...

• July 24, 2007, on Voice Over IP telephone service:

  If you're going to have an ILEC landline at the cheapest price anyway, and your main interest in VOIP is reducing the price of long distance, you might also consider something like RNK Telecom's prepaid calling card, which has local access numbers throughout Massachusetts. That may end up getting you rates that are just as good without the tech support hassles of VOIP. Especially if you go for the second cheapest plan that gives you a limited free local calling area. While you may have 384kb/s or more on your cable modem in both directions, and you may only need about 64kb/s in both directions, one of the features of IP is that it lets many connections be multiplexed on the same link, and in general the equipment that's out there isn't necessarily set up to make sure that your VOIP calls get their 64kb/s no matter what. I've certainly found myself having to kill a bittorrent client on one occasion to get adequate VOIP quality (although the VOIP was buried in an IPsec VPN which my ...