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Ask Slashdot: Shortcuts To a High Tech House
First time accepted submitter phaedrus9779 writes "I'm a recently married man about to take on the next big adventure: home ownership! I came across a great house in a great community but I need a little bit extra: a high tech house. The problem: money, I'm on a budget. I'd love to have home theaters, super high tech weather stations and iPads seamlessly installed in all the walls — but this just isn't possible. So my question to the Slashdot community is: how can I build a high tech house that will be the envy of my friends, provide lots of useful gadgets, and not break the bank? Also, as always, the cooler the better!"
Pay off at least part of the house before you add frivolous crap to it to impress your friends. I have always been more envious of people with a paid-off (or at least non-defaulted) mortgage than I have of those who have 5-year-old technology pointlessly glued to the walls. You get to choose which of those you have in 2017.
I don't think that you understand American culture very well. This isn't about the house or the gadgets or the technology. This is about the American male having a higher debt load than his friends and relatives. That's what really matters in America. The bigger your debt, the more American you are.
When an American says he "owns" a house, the house is secondary. It's the $400,000, 60-year mortgage that's important. His neighbor maybe only has a $350,000, 40-year mortgage on his house, so his neighbor is clearly the inferior being.
Then there are the American's car loans. Many American couples own three or four SUVs or trucks, because that way they can possess more vehicle loans, each for a greater amount. You don't want to be the only American on the block with one or two cars! That'll clearly show that you're scum.
Credit card debt is also a very important indicator of how American somebody is. If you've only got one credit card, you're probably just trash. You're worse than trash if you haven't been paying at least some interest on the balance for a few years. Real Americans will have maxed out at least four or five credit cards, while working hard on maxing out the sixth, seventh and eighth that they possess. Buying the overhyped Apple useless-gadget-of-the-hour is a great way to achieve this goal.
I hope you have a better understanding of American culture now, and the utmost importance of debt. No American household is complete without owing huge amounts of money to some faceless corporation, especially when there's no hope that they could ever repay it during their lifetimes.
Make sure whatever you do, it's wife-friendly (unless your wife is an uber-geek).
If your wife is typical, when she wants to watch TV she wants to press "ON" on a remote, then select the channel that's running Glee. She doesn't want to boot a Linux box, mount a fileshare and browse a bunch of torrents. Similarly, if the house is cold she wants to bump up the thermostat, not telnet into the furnace from a PC that doesn't have a case that lives in the garage.