Hi, Mortgage Fans!
Interesting story about the song The Devil Went Down to Georgia. I’ve only been in one fistfight my entire life; it was in the hallway between classes when I was in the 6th grade. The kid with a locker next to mine was the only person shorter than me in our class; thus – it was easy to pick on him. The entire semester I kept telling him that the devil was actually better than Jonny in that song and should’ve won. I honestly believed that, but this kid came from a really, really religious family and didn’t want to hear anything positive about the devil. Throughout the school year, he continued to warn me to shut up, and I continued to badger him with my opinion about that song. A few weeks before school let out, he blew his fuse and shoved me into a locker, and that turned into a short-lived fistfight that he clearly won. Fast forward five years: In my junior year in high school, we were assigned to write a thousand-word research paper citing at least three sources. For a mediocre student, I knew I had to go to something I was really knowledgeable about. The title of my paper was: “The Devil Won!” and the paper was about how The Devil actually beat Jonny in the song The Devil Went Down to Georgia even though that’s not the way it went down. My sources were the girl who rode the bus with me (she played violin), the kid who ended up beating me up (we were friends by then), and a letter from Charlie Daniel’s manager who said he agreed with me. The paper should’ve been titled “How I Barely Worked on This Paper” because it was done with less than 10 minutes of research, but hey – I got a C+, and sometimes it’s not the amount of time researching but the actual quality of the research. The teacher who graded my paper told me, “It was the most convincing pile of crap” anyone had ever turned into him. Anyway, here I am 30+ years later, researching where interest rates will go next – more about that below…
Research Quote of the Day: “Research is to see what everybody else has seen and to think what nobody else has thought.” – Albert Szent-Gyorgyi
This Week in Economic History: On this date in 1978, Take This Job and Shove It, a song by Johnny Paycheck, went to # 1 on the Billboard charts. (*I was alive in the 70s – the GREATEST decade of rock music, although there were some really, really bad songs.)
Possible Game Show Answer: The national animal of Scotland is the unicorn.
Wuss’up This Week: Every day, reports about our economy are released into the wild, and these reports can sway interest rates in either direction. Today we’ve got Retail Sales (expected down -1.0%), Jobless Claims tomorrow and Existing Home Sales (expected 3.96 million) on Friday. If these reports are good for the economy, we will see rates tick up, and vice-versa if the numbers disappoint.
Interest Rate Update: Today, we find a conforming 30yr fixed rate (*that’s for any loan at $726k or less) in the low-to-mid-6s, and jumbo 30yr fixed (*over $726k) closer to 7%. As usual, rates will vary based on the type of home, equity in the home, weird stairs in the home, and your credit score.
Don’t Forget to Remember: For any purchase or refinance loan that closes with me, I will waive the appraisal fee! Grab yourself a cup of instant karma and pass my info to any friends, family, coworkers, or people who like Freud Intensifies memes that can use this gift!
Research Quote of the Day 2: “Research is what I’m doing when I don’t know what I’m doing.” – Wernher von Braun
Timeout for Trivia: Congrats to those who guessed Julia Roberts last week.
Want to be entered into a drawing to win Judgemental Maps? Simply email me the answer to this week’s Who Am I? question.
Good luck: “My song reached # 1 in the UK on this day in 2005 – many years after my death! it became the lowest-selling number-one song in UK history, but that doesn’t bother me because I’ve had some other number # 1s that stayed on the charts much longer. Before we talk about music, did you catch my movie last year? It starred a guy who almost went to the moon; he played my manager whose real-life nickname could be followed by ‘Sanders’ or ‘of corn’. My music has been on many movie soundtracks – including this blog’s writer’s favorite Nicolas Cage movie from the early 90s. An anagram for my name is ‘sleepy livers’, and yeah, my drinking may have put my liver to sleep, but it was drugs that put my entire body to sleep forever.”
