A simple calculator for how much home you can afford

ByJohn Brown

It’s March. Spring is here in most places. And this is when the house hunting season starts to get rolling. I used to moonlight as a realtor. I started from nothing, ran my own little gig, and did very well. Then I got a book contract, and there was no way I could do three jobs. But I learned a lot.

One of the things I learned is that home buyers very frequently have a very hard time staying within their budget.

They set a number, start looking in their price range, then peek at the homes in a higher price range, and of course those homes look better. Why wouldn’t they? They’re more expensive! And, geez, they have such nice faucets and cool counters and a shower with five heads so you can wash your body from every imaginable angle, and suddenly many of my buyers would refuse to see cheaper homes. Because they just had to have the ultrawash shower.

Or a dent in a wall that’s officially called an alcove.

Or a super deluxe gas heater fireplace that runs on banana peelings and saves gerbils.

Or whatever.

It’s called house craze. It’s a temporary thing. It passes as soon as you get in the house and start making the payments.

And then you wake up and realize you have a hot tub and you hate hot tubs! What in the world were you thinking?!

Well, you had house craze.

The unfortunate side effect of buying too much house is that the mortgage eats up so much of the take-home pay that it makes everything else exceedingly tight. Or impossible.

You don’t have room to pay off debts. Don’t have room to invest much, or at all. Don’t have room to have fun vacations. Don’t have room for anything except the fricken-ricken, blankity-blank, #$%!* house!

This condition is called being house poor.

So house craze leads to being house poor.

Which leads to second jobs and stress and often more debt. You may also end up in a roadside ditch. The situation below occurs with more than just with cable companies.

The lender will tell you that you can lend up to 36% of your take-home pay!

Your eyes go wide, and you being to think that maybe you can afford two ultrawash showers. But just slow down and think for a second–the lender is the one SELLING you the loan.

Right…

Don’t listen to the lenders.

Listen to common sense.

My advice is the same as Dave Ramsey’s:

  1. Don’t buy a house until you’re out of debt and have saved enough to pay 10% of the purchase price of the house.
  2. When you’re at that point, get a 15-year, fixed-rate mortgage with a monthly payment that’s no more than 25% of your take-home pay.

So that’s my advice. You’re free to do with it what you wish. Just know that being house poor sucks.

And all that to introduce the calculator which will tell you exactly how much home you can afford. It takes 10 seconds to fill in.

Here it is: How much home can I afford?

Download it and be happy.

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    Indie Thoughts: When an author should self-publish and how that might change

    ByJohn Brown

    From publishing consultant Mike Shatzkin:

    For a number of reasons, the belief here is that most of the time for most authors who can get a deal with an established and competent house, their best choice is to take it.

    Sounds reasonable, but then we get to the money quotes.

    The strength of the traditional publishers and the traditional deals is directly related to the amount of the market that is served by inventory in stores. When that proportion was “nearly all”, the power allocation was “nearly all” to the traditional publishers.

    ***

    Self-publishing and new-style digital-first publishing can grow more to the extent that the book-in-store share of the market shrinks more. But while that’s happening, the big publishers are also adding to their capabilities: building their databases and understanding of individual consumers (something that all the big houses are doing and which the upstarts seem not to believe is happening, or at least not happening effectively), distributing and marketing with increasing effectiveness in offshore markets, and controlling more and more of the global delivery in all languages of the books in which they invest.

    It will compound the pressure on the alternative players if Amazon continues to grow its global market share for ebooks. The bigger the percentage of the market that can be reached by self-publishers with one stop at Amazon, the less interest they’ll have in picking up smaller chunks of the market with additional deals and the more powerful will be any incentives Amazon cares to offer for making the title exclusive to them.

    Link to the rest at The Shatzkin Files, and thanks to Passive Guy for the original link.

    Shatzkin’s discussion of the amount of the market served by inventory in stores is right on. But his “best choice” conclusion doesn’t follow.

    Why?

    Because the question for each author has to be which stores will I be in, what kind of floor space will I have, and how long will I be there? And in many cases the answers to those questions do not compete well with indie options.

    For example, a lot of in-store sales come from the drug store, grocery store, airport, Walmart, Costco type venues. But it’s rare than an author getting an average deal will see the light of day in those places. Those are reserved for bigger sellers. And not very many of those. So unless you’re getting a big deal, you can’t count that floor space.

    Poof. Tens of thousands of venues are now no longer part of the equation.

    So you are now left with whatever number of stores the publisher can get you into at Barnes&Noble (a max of 675 stores), Books-a-Million (max of 200 stores), Hastings (max of 149 stores), non-chain stores,  etc. I think the total number of book stores in the USA is around 10,000 or so. But publishers won’t get you into all of them. Some don’t carry your type of book: they’re used books stores, or kids book stores, or Christian book stores. And even if it’s a store like Barnes&Noble, you probably won’t get into all their stores. So how many stores will you actually be in?

    Next, you have to wonder where you’ll appear in the stores you do get into. Will you be face-out somewhere prominent? Or will you have two copies spine-out in the back? If you’re spine-out, that’s just reduced the value of the floor space publishers offer you yet again.

    Finally, how long will you be there? If you sell your two copies in a store, are you done at that store? Will your books be there longer than 12 weeks? Will they be there even 8 weeks?

    James Patterson can sell millions of books because he has multiple copies in tens of thousands of stores with great display. And he’s usually there for more than just a handful of weeks. If you have two books spine-out in each of 500 stores for eight weeks, how well are you going to do?

    Here’s some math on author revenue and units sold. Is selling 1,000 books with the royalties and contract terms offered really worth it? What about 4,000 books? 7,000? Are you going to be in enough stores with a decent placement to get those numbers?

    If you’re going to be in thousands and thousands of stores with good placement, and the terms of the contract are reasonable, then, good golly, working with a publisher looks great. But if you’ve got a book that’s good enough to make an editor somewhere want to buy rights to it and the publisher is offering to put you spine-out in a little over a thousand stores with all sorts of contract crap, then Shatzkin’s “best choice” is really a poor one. In those situations my money is on going indie.

    EDIT: It seems there are about 12,700 book stores in the USA. But that includes big-box stores, which I think are the Walmarts and Costcos.

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    I need your insight!

    ByJohn Brown

    R-moviesLast year I posted about a service I’m working on to get ratings on books for sex, violence, and language. I posted similar thought about YA books in “Since When Did Young Adult Become The Cure For Cancer?“.

    I’m back.

    I did lots of customer discovery last August in an effort to see if book ratings is a problem worth solving, i.e., are there lots of avid readers who would love content ratings and sign up? All my interviews were very positive, but I didn’t finish validating our ideas because I had to stop to get books out and because we discovered some things that made us change some of our assumptions. I started up again a few weeks ago, this time with a team.

    To continue the project, we need to interview 20-40 avid cleaner romance readers. Folks who probably read just such a book last month.

    Why?

    The biggest problem startups like this have is assuming they know what the customer values, being wrong, and building something nobody wants. So before we build anything, we need to first understand exactly what readers are doing today to solve this problem and where (and if) they are struggling. If we can validate the need, I think a lot of folks will be very happy having popular clean reads delivered to their email every week.

    If you know someone who fits the bill, please send this post to them. They can shoot me an email by clicking the contact link in the menu bar.

    If you fit the bill, please contact me.

    It would be incredibly helpful to me to hear about how you approach this and ask you a few questions. It won’t take more than 20 minutes, and there’s no need to prepare in advance.

    Hope you had a great 4th!

     

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  • Presenting at the League’s Summer Symposium

    ByJohn Brown

    I’ll be presenting this Saturday, June 8, at the league’s summer writer symposium at USU. Here’s the description of my presentation.

    Make ‘Em Beg For More!
    How do you keep your readers begging for one more page? The answer is probably not what you think. Come to this session to learn the surprising secret—along with plenty of examples and how-tos. When you’re done, you’ll know exactly what you need to do to write stories that are devilishly hard for readers to put down.

    Check out the schedule below. Looks like there will be some great presentations. If you attend, please come and say hello.

    https://www.leagueofutahwriters.com/summersymposium

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  • The MacFarlane (Tor), Correia, Hines Cage Match: Put It In The C Story

    ByJohn Brown

    Larry Correia is a big-booted barbarian who likes to fight in a cage. And a lot of us love to watch big-booted barbarians go at it.

    We like demanding matches. We like a little blood and good sportsmanship (of course, sportsmanship in the cage is different than in other venues). And we respect both sides for showing up and giving it their best.

    This last week Larry Correia battled with Alex Dally MacFarlane (and Tor, the silent partner, who thought her new column would be a great idea and has given her their big platform to talk) and Jim Hines. If you didn’t watch the match, here are the links.

    I’ve enjoyed reading the give and take in this fight. For me, the barbarians seem to have landed more blows (and done so with many more funny and memorable one-liners.) But that doesn’t mean Alex Dally MacFarlane shouldn’t crusade.

    And I mean crusade, as in battle.

    Underneath it all MacFarlane wants to change something. She wants to change hearts and minds. A lot of us want to change hearts and minds about various things. A lot of us will show up and risk getting bloody for such things in a variety of settings. Heck, Correia the Barbarian was even willing to spend two years of his barbarian life trying to change hearts and minds in a setting where big boots are not allowed (poor Correia, more sad puppies).

    But here’s the deal.

    If you want to win someone like me, you’re going to do it not by scolding or brow beating me or by mandating something and then trying to back it up with sticks.

    You’re going to do it by writing something so delightul that I cannot but help listen to you.

    You’re not going to tell me what I can’t write.

    You’re not going to tell me what I must write.

    You’re going to model writing that makes me want to write that thing.

    You’re going to be like Tolkien and spawn five decades of writers who want to do nothing more than imagine worlds filled with strange races and wonderous settings and weird talking tree men who have lost their wives.

    You’re going to invite like-minded folks to join you in creating wonders. Or in just having a good old time.  And not worry about other writers inviting folks to their creations, which might be totally different from yours.

    And those wonders and good times are the things that will work the magic.

    Miguel Sabido is a master of entertainment with message. Here’s a great piece in The New Yorker introducing him, his work, and methods. Notice what made his stuff so effective. The new ways of thinking he wanted to offer were never found in the A story. They were never found in the B story.

    Why?

    Because the number one thing the story had to do was suck people in (entertain).

    And so the new thing to consider was in the C story.

    MacFarlane, put it in the C story. And build a Middle-earth. Or a ring world. Or at least some vampires that sparkle.

    In the meantime, I’ve got a barbarian book on the shelf that looks like a mighty good time. I think I’m going to give it a read.

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