How much does noise affect real estate prices? Ever wonder how much better a house would be if it wasn't […]

I recently purchased my first house here in the Bay Area, and I did it in a decidedly non-traditional way.  For a few years I had been reading about a smaller real estate company known as Redfin which operated in a more hands-off way than a normal real estate firm.  Redfin leverages technology and a slick user interface to help its users (most of which will not use Redfin to buy a home, but the search feature is that good) find homes on their own.  Once a house is purchased, Redfin actually refunds some of the brokerage commission.  In most places, 3% of the purchase prices goes to the seller's agent, 3% to the buyers, and 1.5%, 50% of Redfin's commission, goes back to the end user.  So... what's the catch?

Serious Thinkers™ in all corners of the web return to some common themes, even when those themes are currently out of the public spotlight. Recently, those Serious Thinkers™ have been reading between the lines on topics which the public has moved on from - the effect of the minimum wage on unemployment, and even more to the point, the effect of the minimum wage on specific segments of the population. And why shouldn't they? The current official unemployment rate is 9.2%, but the official unemployment rate among those with a Bachelor's Degree or higher is a relatively healthy 4.4%.

In 2006, Former President George Bush signed a well intentioned law which allowed companies to automatically enroll employees in the company retirement program - and to automatically choose the investment in which they were enrolled. The Pension Protection Act of 2006 authorized companies to automatically enroll new participants and enroll them in three types of funds - lifecycle funds, balanced funds, and managed accounts - while absolving the companies of any financial liability for losses in the funds. As expected, the law has effectively increased the rate of participation in company 401(k) accounts.