A couple of weeks back, we here at DQYDJ tried to get some Bay Area street cred with our screed on how Bay Area house prices make more sense than one might think (please read that article if you are genuinely interested in our model). After being informed by the readers on the Bay Area home site Burbed that our definition of the Inner Bay Area (the 'Real Bay Area') was too large, we're back for another pass. Thanks to Burbed's super-intelligent head editor Madhaus and a huge amount of comments we're back with two calculators we're titling "The Burbed and DQYDJ Real Bay Area Calculators!". Since all Bay Areans hope for 7.2% annual home value returns (check it - doubling every ten years!), we hope everyone will enjoy this little demonstration of the absurd amounts of wealth that the place we call home generates.

One of the things we like to do here at Don't Quit Your Day Job is to reveal interesting things hiding in plain sight. One of those things: subtracting the Daily Treasury Real Yield rate from the Daily Treasury Yield rate gives you a good idea of the market's expectations of inflation. Even though media prognosticators won't agree on whether we're in for a deflationary era, hyperinflation, or a whole lot of nothing, you can get a reasonable prediction from market data. Our explanation is below, along with the limitations of this method.

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary." - Steve Jobs 1955 - 2011

Writers on personal finance blogs and websites are, on the whole, a frugal bunch. The reasons we started our respective sites are varied - influence, to chronicle paying off our debts, the spread uncommon knowledge, altruism, or merely to build a stage to have our financial opinions heard. Our readers are a much more diverse bunch. While most all people have to deal with their own finances, our readers come to us with their finances in various stages of disarray. While us writers, as a whole, have our finances in order (or at least on the right track), some of our articles tend to preach to the converted. I feel there is an overabundance of frugality articles in our corner of the internet - so I ask, "Is Frugality Overrated?".

Here at DQYDJ we've rambled on recently about the affordability of homes, and even tried to convince you that when mortgage interest rates are low it's not necessarily a good time to purchase a house. We've tried to make the point that affordability in Real Estate seems conditioned on affording payments instead of the actual purchase price of a home. That said, we left our readers hanging by not graphing that affordability with changing interest rates.

For a deeper background, please visit "Rooting for Price Increases and Low Interest Rates" for a description of the DQYDJ Median Home Affordability Index, and "Home Price Affordability Calculator" to play with the affordability numbers yourself.

I've mentioned it in previous posts, but I'll say it here again: I purchased a house this year, against the advice of many (and to the delight of a select few). One of the things you will note if you undertake your own house hunt (or you'll recall if you've ever purchased a house) is the massive information disparity which exists between the house-hunter (or seller) and Realtor(s). Even though, with few exceptions, real estate purchases are the largest purchases most of us will make in our lives, transparency is non-existent and bad advice abounds. For starters, and the purpose of this article, I'd like you to consider two statements: "it's a good thing when home prices rise" and "It's a good time to buy now, interest rates are low". Let's consider those, shall we?

Here's an interesting link, this time brought to you by an Economist piece which asks, "Who are the world's biggest employers?". Luckily, they answer. The top spot went to our own United States Department of Defense, with a whopping 3.2 million people on the payroll.

We recently covered a lot of the fallout from Standard and Poor's recent downgrade of the debt of the United States. The United States has 50 states which also issue their own debt, and get their own credit rating from the credit ratings firms. Luckily (this time) the legwork has been done, and I'm able to just link you to the primary source, the Tax Foundation! So view on to see the credit ratings of the states.

Here at DQYDJ, we retrieved Standard & Poor's AAA 'Domestic Ratings' for sovereign debt on the morning of 8/11/2011.  Here's  the list of 'AAA' rated sovereign debt issuers you have already seen at our site: Australia, Austria, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Guernsey, Hong Kong, Isle of Man, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Singapore, Sweden, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom.  We told you the other day that the only thing that really matters is the yield - the price at which a sovereign can issue debt.  Let's dig into that further!

It's been two full market days since S&P cut the debt rating of the United States one notch from AAA to AA+... and for one day at least, it was looking like S&P had the stock market by the nose.  Two days later we can finally take a look back at what happened since we've had two trading days, a rest in between, a Federal Reserve statement, and a speech from the President.  To wit: the S&P 500 Index closed at 1199.38 on Friday, 1119.46 on Monday and 1172.53 on Tuesday.