Good Advice You Were Glad To Ignore

[JustGeorge]

In 2018, we bought our first home.

It was quite an ordeal, being previous to this, we never had any credit and had to muster some up. Credit cards seemed absurd. Why would I buy stuff I couldn't pay for? Apparently, it was the way of the world, and I wasn't going to be approved for more debt if I didn't go into debt first...

After a year of that nonsense, and some other fun scenarios, we were finally approved for a home loan at a reasonable interest rate. A new credit union in the area was trying to get itself up and running, and we benefited from that. Wonderful! We were approved for an $80,000 home loan.

My uncles decided to meet us at one of their houses shortly after, to show us all these 'wonderful' homes, most of which looked the proper size to house my big toe, not necessarily a growing family(there were two kids then, but the third was on his way, though there were still ten cats). Most were a bit over the 80k we'd been allotted, as well.

Drink in hand, it was explained to me that you always buy the most expensive you can afford, and in the best neighborhood. Don't worry about the house. Not enough bedrooms? You can move. Not enough windows(I've found windows vital to my mental health)? You can add more(forget that windows aint cheap). Just get rid of your stuff and squeeze into one of these boxes for a few years. Yeah, you'll not afford anything but beans and potatoes for dinner, but it'll be worth it when you can flip it after awhile.

I told them I wasn't going to do that, and furthermore, I was going to shoot under budget. "No! You never do that! You might not bring in much income now, but that always changes!" I told them I didn't believe it, and they chalked it up to the ignorance of their blue haired niece. I figured best play things cautiously.

We bought a large house in a decent neighborhood at $56,000. The only reason it was priced as such in the neighborhood it was in was because the previous owners had obviously gotten as drunk as they could and attempted to remodel... cosmetically, it was a piece of work. But, it had an abundance of space, and was perfect for our needs. We'd had to find a different realtor to show it to us; the original wouldn't show us something so far below our loan approval rate, and kept trying to distract us with his picks. More of that 'buy more than you can handle now, in hopes you can handle it later' attitude.

The only thing that stays the same is that the world just keeps changing. As Covid took over the world, and the economy is crashing because of that, I am damned glad I ignored my uncles and the realtor. I still have my reasonable monthly payment. One uncle was right, my husband does make more now, but now the price of everything has skyrocketed, so it doesn't help much. Some nights, we have beans and potatoes. Scary to think what we'd be eating if we'd originally gone the 'beans and potatoes' route.

In this case, I'm glad I stuck to my gut and ignored what was common 'good advice'.

How about you? What good advice are you glad to have ignored?

 

[Jedster]

@JustGeorge

When I was 6 years old, I had extreme stomach cramps. My mother took me to the doctor who said she should take me home, put me to bed with a hot water bottle on my stomach.
On a strong feeling, she took me straight to the hospital where they found I had an appendix about to burst(it was removed successfully).

I am glad ,my mother didn't take the doctor's advice.

 

[ChristineM]

How about you? What good advice are you glad to have ignored?

Similar.

When starting up the business all banks were falling over themselves to loan to startups. Accountant advised grab what you can and pay it back as you earn it. Rent a decent studio and hire the best artists you can find. You'll be doing good in 10 years.

So what happens if our new idea falls flat, after all CG was non existent then so...

Ignored.

We borrowed some cash from both our parents, set up in a spare room of an electronics distributers warehouse, with 3 desks, 4 computers with 33k modems and hired a couple of hungry students.

A year later we needed to hire more hungry students and move to bigger premises, still a dump in an converted cotton mill but at least we weren't sharing desks. And the computers were networked.

Within 5 years we were internationally recognised with 18 employees (including the original hungry students) and doing work for multinationals, media conglomerates and governments and investing in a super computer (second hand but hardly used)

Best advice we've ever ignored.

 

[amorphous_constellation]

yeah and the interest rate, I thought, was going up to 6 percent or something, which is probably making mortgages very tight.

 

[JustGeorge]

@JustGeorge

When I was 6 years old, I had extreme stomach cramps. My mother took me to the doctor who said she should take me home, put me to bed with a hot water bottle on my stomach.
On a strong feeling, she took me straight to the hospital where they found I had an appendix about to burst(it was removed successfully).

I am glad ,my mother didn't take the doctor's advice.

That's really scary. Sometimes I wonder where these physicians get their licenses from...

I had trouble with my middle son. He'd gotten a big bump, and I thought it might be staph. Well, how dare a patient suggest they know what's going on... all the doctors(there were 4 before the last one) refused to swab it, and said just wait and see what it does. One gave him MRSA meds(because I had had MRSA once before), but wouldn't swab to find out for sure. It didn't help, of course(because it wasn't MRSA).

I walked into an urgent care crying after one encounter, and showed the doc in there the problem. He said "that does look like it might be staph. Let me swab that for you." It was. He gave him the proper meds. It healed.

This all happened over a 6 month period...

yeah and the interest rate, I thought, was going up to 6 percent or something, which is probably making mortgages very tight.

I think right now housing markets are bad...

 

[exchemist]

In 2018, we bought our first home.

It was quite an ordeal, being previous to this, we never had any credit and had to muster some up. Credit cards seemed absurd. Why would I buy stuff I couldn't pay for? Apparently, it was the way of the world, and I wasn't going to be approved for more debt if I didn't go into debt first...

After a year of that nonsense, and some other fun scenarios, we were finally approved for a home loan at a reasonable interest rate. A new credit union in the area was trying to get itself up and running, and we benefited from that. Wonderful! We were approved for an $80,000 home loan.

My uncles decided to meet us at one of their houses shortly after, to show us all these 'wonderful' homes, most of which looked the proper size to house my big toe, not necessarily a growing family(there were two kids then, but the third was on his way, though there were still ten cats). Most were a bit over the 80k we'd been allotted, as well.

Drink in hand, it was explained to me that you always buy the most expensive you can afford, and in the best neighborhood. Don't worry about the house. Not enough bedrooms? You can move. Not enough windows(I've found windows vital to my mental health)? You can add more(forget that windows aint cheap). Just get rid of your stuff and squeeze into one of these boxes for a few years. Yeah, you'll not afford anything but beans and potatoes for dinner, but it'll be worth it when you can flip it after awhile.

I told them I wasn't going to do that, and furthermore, I was going to shoot under budget. "No! You never do that! You might not bring in much income now, but that always changes!" I told them I didn't believe it, and they chalked it up to the ignorance of their blue haired niece. I figured best play things cautiously.

We bought a large house in a decent neighborhood at $56,000. The only reason it was priced as such in the neighborhood it was in was because the previous owners had obviously gotten as drunk as they could and attempted to remodel... cosmetically, it was a piece of work. But, it had an abundance of space, and was perfect for our needs. We'd had to find a different realtor to show it to us; the original wouldn't show us something so far below our loan approval rate, and kept trying to distract us with his picks. More of that 'buy more than you can handle now, in hopes you can handle it later' attitude.

The only thing that stays the same is that the world just keeps changing. As Covid took over the world, and the economy is crashing because of that, I am damned glad I ignored my uncles and the realtor. I still have my reasonable monthly payment. One uncle was right, my husband does make more now, but now the price of everything has skyrocketed, so it doesn't help much. Some nights, we have beans and potatoes. Scary to think what we'd be eating if we'd originally gone the 'beans and potatoes' route.

In this case, I'm glad I stuck to my gut and ignored what was common 'good advice'.

How about you? What good advice are you glad to have ignored?

A couple of career-related ones. The first was the Careers Advice people at Oxford who in the mid 70s, when I graduated, were advising science graduates to consider chartered accountancy as a career, because numeracy was a requirement and though it paid poorly at the start, things got a lot better later on - and you learned a lot about how business works through auditing companies. I thought that would kill me with boredom so I joined a firm of patent agents instead. That paid equally poorly but it was quite interesting (the inventions at least, the law less so) and bought me time to gain confidence in the world of work before I left to join Shell - where I did OK.

The second was at Shell in the early 2000s, when a move from products to services was all the rage. (There was even a dreadful little book called "Who Moved My Cheese" which was a sort of facile parable about the need to change your business when market conditions change, or die.) I was strongly advised to make the move into the hip and trendy new services group. But I didn't trust it and thought I would try to tough it out as an old-fashioned, product-centred technocrat. Within 3 years, all the bright, earnest, dynamic colleagues who had moved to services were out of a job....while I soldiered on.

If there's a moral in this, I suppose it is not to follow the trend unless you are really comfortable that it makes sense for you.

 

[JustGeorge]

A couple of career-related ones. The first was the Careers Advice people at Oxford who in the mid 70s, when I graduated, were advising science graduates to consider chartered accountancy as a career, because numeracy was a requirement and though it paid poorly at the start, things got a lot better later on - and you learned a lot about how business works through auditing companies. I thought that would kill me with boredom so I joined a firm of patent agents instead. That paid equally poorly but it was quite interesting (the inventions at least, the law less so) and bought me time to gain confidence in the world of work before I left to join Shell - where I did OK.

The second was at Shell in the early 2000s, when a move from products to services was all the rage. (There was even a dreadful little book called "Who Moved My Cheese" which was a sort of facile parable about the need to change your business when market conditions change, or die.) I was strongly advised to make the move into the hip and trendy new services group. But I didn't trust it and thought I would try to tough it out as an old-fashioned, product-centred technocrat. Within 3 years, all the bright, earnest, dynamic colleagues who had moved to services were out of a job....while I soldiered on.

If there's a moral in this, I suppose it is not to follow the trend unless you are really comfortable that it makes sense for you.

I remember hearing about that book...

 

[Subduction Zone]

When I had a furniture store a sales rep showed me a line of furniture that he was representing. It was lower priced than my most expensive brand and a bit more expensive than my cheapest. This was at a time when the economy was bad, but I was impressed with both the combination of quality, cost, and design of the product. I had bought the store from my father and he still "worked" there. If he had nothing to do he would come in and help quite often. Or at least pass the time of day. I never told him about the new brand. When it came I set up a bedroom suite of it and waited until the next time he came in. When I broke the news to him he instantly started a rant about the economy being bad and that it was a bad time to invest in a new brand. I just showed it to him and the sale price. He asked my if could sell it at that price and still make a good markup. My response was "Every day". That ended the argument.

Years later he went so far as to admit that it was the best business decision that I made since I sold a ton of it.

 

[exchemist]

I remember hearing about that book...

Haha. In fact, while you were writing your reply, I was on line looking it up. Amusingly, it seems I am far from the only one to have loathed and despised "Who Moved My Cheese". See this from Wiki:

"In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of "structural reorganization", or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. This has been characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America as an attempt by organizational management to make employees quickly and unconditionally assimilate management ideals, even if they may prove detrimental to them professionally. Ehrenreich called the book "the classic of downsizing propaganda" and summarizes its message as "the dangerous human tendencies to 'overanalyze' and complain must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one."[6]

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams said that patronizing parables are one of the top 10 things he receives complaints about by email.[7] Adams' retort to the message in the parable is that it is a "patronizing message for the proletariat to acquiesce".[8]

I vividly recall giving my low opinion of this miserable book to a couple of managers, who then complacently informed me that senior management had just ordered 200 copies of it for distribution throughout the division, so I might be well advised to keep my opinion to myself! I did not, of course , but it left its mark on me. My opinion of the management of the division never really recovered. Looking back, I think that was the start of my calculated programme of doing my job as well as possible but progressively antagonising the management, which reached its conclusion in 2011 when, to my satisfaction, it bore fruit in the form of redundancy with a golden f*** off, 3 years before normal retirement date.

 

[JustGeorge]

Haha. In fact, while you were writing your reply, I was on line looking it up. Amusingly, it seems I am far from the only one to have loathed and despised "Who Moved My Cheese". See this from Wiki:

"In the corporate environment, management has been known to distribute this book to employees during times of "structural reorganization", or during cost-cutting measures, in an attempt to portray unfavorable or unfair changes in an optimistic or opportunistic way. This has been characterized by Barbara Ehrenreich in her book Bright-sided: How the Relentless Promotion of Positive Thinking Has Undermined America as an attempt by organizational management to make employees quickly and unconditionally assimilate management ideals, even if they may prove detrimental to them professionally. Ehrenreich called the book "the classic of downsizing propaganda" and summarizes its message as "the dangerous human tendencies to 'overanalyze' and complain must be overcome for a more rodentlike approach to life. When you lose a job, just shut up and scamper along to the next one."[6]

Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams said that patronizing parables are one of the top 10 things he receives complaints about by email.[7] Adams' retort to the message in the parable is that it is a "patronizing message for the proletariat to acquiesce".[8]

I vividly recall giving my low opinion of this miserable book to a couple of managers, who then complacently informed me that senior management had just ordered 200 copies of it for distribution throughout the division, so I might be well advised to keep my opinion to myself! I did not, of course , but it left its mark on me. My opinion of the management of the division never really recovered. Looking back, I think that was the start of my calculated programme of doing my job as well as possible but progressively antagonising the management, which reached its conclusion in 2011 when, to my satisfaction, it bore fruit in the form of redundancy with a golden f*** off, 3 years before normal retirement date.

I remember management reading it where I was working at the time; they didn't pass it down to us staff, though. Staff were seen as temporary. Very seldom was anyone fired, but they hired people for whom the job was simply something to do while they were in school. 6 months to a year was average, though anyone who stayed on for more than two years faced burnout. Most left at that point.

Good for you for not keeping your opinion to yourself!

 

[Stonetree]

In 2018, we bought our first home.

It was quite an ordeal, being previous to this, we never had any credit and had to muster some up. Credit cards seemed absurd. Why would I buy stuff I couldn't pay for? Apparently, it was the way of the world, and I wasn't going to be approved for more debt if I didn't go into debt first...

After a year of that nonsense, and some other fun scenarios, we were finally approved for a home loan at a reasonable interest rate. A new credit union in the area was trying to get itself up and running, and we benefited from that. Wonderful! We were approved for an $80,000 home loan.

My uncles decided to meet us at one of their houses shortly after, to show us all these 'wonderful' homes, most of which looked the proper size to house my big toe, not necessarily a growing family(there were two kids then, but the third was on his way, though there were still ten cats). Most were a bit over the 80k we'd been allotted, as well.

Drink in hand, it was explained to me that you always buy the most expensive you can afford, and in the best neighborhood. Don't worry about the house. Not enough bedrooms? You can move. Not enough windows(I've found windows vital to my mental health)? You can add more(forget that windows aint cheap). Just get rid of your stuff and squeeze into one of these boxes for a few years. Yeah, you'll not afford anything but beans and potatoes for dinner, but it'll be worth it when you can flip it after awhile.

I told them I wasn't going to do that, and furthermore, I was going to shoot under budget. "No! You never do that! You might not bring in much income now, but that always changes!" I told them I didn't believe it, and they chalked it up to the ignorance of their blue haired niece. I figured best play things cautiously.

We bought a large house in a decent neighborhood at $56,000. The only reason it was priced as such in the neighborhood it was in was because the previous owners had obviously gotten as drunk as they could and attempted to remodel... cosmetically, it was a piece of work. But, it had an abundance of space, and was perfect for our needs. We'd had to find a different realtor to show it to us; the original wouldn't show us something so far below our loan approval rate, and kept trying to distract us with his picks. More of that 'buy more than you can handle now, in hopes you can handle it later' attitude.

The only thing that stays the same is that the world just keeps changing. As Covid took over the world, and the economy is crashing because of that, I am damned glad I ignored my uncles and the realtor. I still have my reasonable monthly payment. One uncle was right, my husband does make more now, but now the price of everything has skyrocketed, so it doesn't help much. Some nights, we have beans and potatoes. Scary to think what we'd be eating if we'd originally gone the 'beans and potatoes' route.

In this case, I'm glad I stuck to my gut and ignored what was common 'good advice'.

How about you? What good advice are you glad to have ignored?

In 1990, I, we bought a house. The previous owner used
a real estate broker. The broker received 6 % of the sale price for his commission. Of course, the buyer actually pays that commission as it is included in the sale price. The property was in a nice neighborhood and was easy to resell. I did not use a realtor when I sold the house,ten years later. I just hired a lawyer for $750 to monitor the sale. I could then sell for less and still manage a profit since the buyer didn't have to pay a realtor commission which would have been approximately $5000. It has to be a seller's market ,however.