My blog is primarily about finances, architecture, and programming. But sometimes I want to share something important that we must know to improve ourselves. For example, the accessories that make you look charming.
I collected my 3 recent questions to ChatGPT.

I am a 20-year-old male. I have to find 2 scents. One for work – business and business casual style, and the second for a date. What can you recommend?

For a work scent, you might want to consider something that is sophisticated and subtle. A classic, woody fragrance with notes of sandalwood, cedar, or amber would be a good choice. These types of scents are subtle enough to wear to the office, but still have enough character to make an impression. Some examples of woody fragrances that would be suitable for work include Dolce & Gabbana’s “The One for Men,” Guerlain’s “Terre d’Hermes,” and Yves Saint Laurent’s “L’Homme.”

For a date scent, you might want to choose something that is a bit more bold and romantic. A floral or spicy scent would be a good choice. Floral scents can be soft and feminine, or they can be more bold and exotic. Some examples of floral fragrances that could be suitable for a date include Marc Jacobs’ “Daisy,” Dior’s “J’adore,” and Gucci’s “Bloom.” Spicy scents can also be very romantic, with notes of cinnamon, cloves, and other warm spices. Some examples of spicy fragrances that could be good for a date include Dolce & Gabbana’s “Light Blue,” Yves Saint Laurent’s “La Nuit de L’Homme,” and Burberry’s “The Beat.”

How to tie a tie

The Four-in-Hand Knot: This is a simple, classic knot that is easy to learn and suitable for most occasions. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gVYkE1DHnJ4
The Half Windsor Knot: This knot is slightly more formal and works well with medium to wide ties. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x1LbKfOv6TE
The Full Windsor Knot: This knot is more formal and works well with wide ties. It is a bit more complicated to tie, but it creates a large, symmetrical knot. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7TZKX9y-RVQ
The Pratt Knot: This knot is similar to the Four-in-Hand, but it creates a neater, more symmetrical knot. It is suitable for most occasions and works well with medium to wide ties. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2sV14T4T-8s

How to wear a scarf

The Basic Loop: This is a simple, classic way to wear a scarf that works well with most types of scarves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dO-cKZ6UJwE
The Parisian Knot: This knot is a bit more stylish and works well with long, thin scarves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSfZlDV7Kj4
The Ascot Knot: This knot is suitable for more formal occasions and works well with thicker, more luxurious scarves. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MQ-JgvB_Mxw
The Shawl Drape: This is a simple way to wear a large, rectangular shawl-style scarf. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNp-bV7jK0Q

Rules:

The suit is only dark blue or dark gray. Black is allowed only at evening events with the black-tie dress code, as well as at funerals and weddings.
The jacket is single-breasted, with two or three buttons. Length — up to the middle of the palm of a freely hanging hand. The fabric is solid, dense, without iridescence (chameleon effect), and gloss.
Trousers of a classic cut, with arrows. The length is up to the middle of the heel with one front fold above the shoe.
The shirt is white, plain, opaque (not transparent), and without pockets. Cuffs with one or two buttons are acceptable, but French cuffs are preferable, with medium-sized cufflinks of laconic shapes. The cuff should peek out from under the jacket by 1-1.5 cm.
The tie without glossy gloss, plain, muted colors (dark red, dark blue, dark gray, graphite). Small geometric patterns or contrasting stripes are acceptable. The tie should not be too wide, and its knot should not be too large. The length should reach the middle of the belt.
The belt is only made of smooth matte leather with a classic laconic buckle. The color of the belt matches the color of the shoes.
Shoes — oxfords or derbies made of smooth matte black leather. Brown shoes are only allowed in the heat. The sole is thin, the heel is 3-5 cm.
Socks up to the middle of the calf, are selected in the color of shoes or trousers. White or multicolored socks are not allowed.

These are generally accepted rules. But some politicians deviate from the rules and add their own corporate identity: Trump wears a bright red tie and printed socks; Putin most likely has higher heels. Macron sometimes wears a turtleneck under the jacket. Canadian leader Trudo wears socks with ducks and star wars. Some civilizations are also wearing traditional costumes, e. g., the Saudi Arabian prince wears a thawb (or dishdasha).

The suits are meaningful. For example, Marcon wears a turtleneck under the jacket if he expects changes from the politician’s decision. The clumsy oversized non-ironed costume can mean that person does not care about the public – Trump is one of them. Obama, at the conference against terrorists, wore a beige suit, that seemed too informal in a context of a speech on such a serious issue. A light suid is only used at weddings and on the beach.

Brands:
Putin wears Brioni and Kiton (4000-8000€). Macron wears a local brand, Jonas et Cie, for just 380€. Biden wore Ralph Lauren at the inauguration. Hart Schaffner Marx and Hickey Freeman produce suits for presidents for 3000-5000€. So, the price of the suit may be any: 400€, 3000€, 8000€ and higher.

Source: RBC.ru

After the mobilization at the end of October, housing luxury prices dropped 40%. Prices stabilized at the 15% discount compared to August 2022. Why did it happen and what to expect in the future?

Theory

The housing market can’t be shorted. It is an advantage over the stock market. That means you can’t borrow a house, sell a house and buy it back when the price for this house falls. The problem is that all houses are unique, and the lender expects to get back the same house. The person to whom you sold a house will not sell you a house cheaper than you borrowed it.

The lender may give a set of houses that he will accept from a borrower. Usually, such houses are better than borrowed ones. Such practice is not popular due to the complexity and does not affect the housing market the same way as stocks shorted by institutions for trillions of dollars affect the stock market.

Low liquidity of housing. Stocks are sold fast with a low spread between ask and bid prices. This is because all stocks of a company are the same, information is open, and the stock price is affordable. Also, buying stocks requires a low commission, and the contract is created automatically (in reality it is not so easy and you don’t own shares when buying stocks through a broker, but it is a long irrelevant story).

Buying a house is a long process of finding the right prices by analyzing hundreds of parameters, negotiating, and signing documents with help of a realtor and a lawyer.

To sell a house immediately, seller agrees to sell a house for the bid price, and to buy it, the buyer pays the ask price without negotiations. The spread may be huge, moreover, if too many people sell a house, sellers give huge discounts.

What happened when mobilization started

300k people were drafted in one week. After the announcement of the mobilization, people had three days to leave the country not to be drafted. Plane ticket prices raised from an average of 300$ to 5000$. The last tickets were sold for 15000$ in the economy class. (at that time I was also leaving the country, but I am an EU resident and I paid nearly 500$ to get to Austria by carpooling, plane and bus).

People were scared to get back to Russia. Leavers sold everything they had. They sold houses in one day in exchange for foreign cash. Sellers gave a 40% discount, which was incredible – a luxury house for a price of an economy-class house. Tip: in crisis keep cash to make the best deals.

When all leavers left, the housing prices went up, because there is no need to sell the house fast anymore. That is why the prices bounced. Moreover, the demand for housing dropped, because those who needed a house already bought it, or took a mortgage if it was applicable. Some people who wanted to buy housing may be decided to keep the money in foreign currency to be ready to flee. That is one of the reasons, why the US dollar costs 67 rubbles in cash and only 57 rubles on market (because it is not possible to withdraw money from a bank account, except for SWIFT).

Why prices will continue dropping

There are two reasons for that: Mortgage restrictions and uncertainty. Since the start of the mobilization, the banks stopped giving mortgages to males, except for programmers, who have a right to a 2% mortgage by law. Programmers can’t be drafted by the law.

Due to the risk, that a person will be drafted and won’t be able to pay for a mortgage, banks are not ready to provide the mortgage.

Also, the credits and mortgages, that were taken before the militarisation on the 21st of September, will be automatically discarded if a person dies. That means, the family will keep a house without liabilities, and banks will get huge losses. As for now, the government will not support banks with money and will not compensate for losses. Small banks are f*cked (benefit for big banks).

Eventually, mortgage rates will increase, fewer people would like to take mortgages, and the demand for houses will also fall.

Signal to fall now

40% of newly built houses is not sold. It is bad for construction companies – they should pay off the credits asap, but if there are not enough customers, the manager has 2 variants – sell now cheap and close the credit or keep a small debt, or wait till the best times and pay a lot for a debt. Sometimes firms wait too long and become bankrupt. The banks notice such a situation and increase the credit rates for companies.

The companies stop building new housing if the credit rates are high and the demand is low. Some companies freeze construction. It helps to meet supply and demand, and stabilize prices. If there is no risk of losing the attractiveness of a neighborhood or a city itself, it is the best time to buy housing. However, in times of events like a war, the risk is uncountable and the price may fall even higher.

If the mortgage rate is high, more people would prefer renting apartments instead of buying a house. That drives rent prices up. The problem is that due to the high inflation, the price of a house also rises.

The price for housing also rises when the mortgage rate is low. Then it is much easier to take 30-year long mortgage and get your own housing instead of paying expensive rent and getting nothing at the end of the rent term. Then more people will buy a house with a mortgage. With higher demand comes higher price. So the price for housing rises.

Freddie Mac, 30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgage Average in the United States [MORTGAGE30US], retrieved from FRED, Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis; https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/MORTGAGE30US, September 13, 2022.

Don’t Quit Your Day Job... dot com

In some countries, government incentivises taking a mortgage. Military servants usually get lower mortgage rates. In UK if a person above 18 buys his first house for less than 500k$, he pays only half of a house price. In Netherlands, government insures mortgages, meaning, if a person is insolvent to pay for a mortgage, government will buy a house from a bank, and return money from mortgage payments to a person. The government will also give a discounted rent for a person (I will check this information, I can be mistaken). Therefore the prices for a condo in Amsterdam tripled (if i don’t mistaken). All of these incentives drive prices for housing up.

Real estate market has a huge problem – it is hard for prices to fall. Not only because of scarcity of land, higher price for materials and labor costs. There are no market mechanisms to make prices fall. In the stock market, it is possible to short stocks – sell the stock that you don’t own, and buy it back when price falls, making the profit in the difference. Short selling works with stocks, because the stocks of one company are identical, their value is always the same.

It is not possible to find 2 exactly the same houses, even Soviet flats have different views, neighbors, and house condition. Therefore, short is not really possible.

To lower the housing price, either the place should loose the attractiveness or the new technologies should make housing cheaper. That what happens in the US market. New housing for the mid-class household became simplier and smaller than before. Remember the housing in Manhattan and Brooklyn of 20th century – the red brick houses with fire stairways on the façade. Compare their quality and design with new housing: the cheap coloured ventilated panels with studio apartments.

How 9/11 affected housing prices

The example of attractiveness loss was on 9/11. Based on the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, most of the employees who worked nearby moved to other parts of New York City or New Jersey. The rent prices for an office in Manhattan dropped from 52.5$ to 50.75$ per square foot. By November 2001, 57 million square feet near Trade Center were traded on market just for 41.81$ (Pearson, Macroeconomics, page 54). but that happened with offices. What about the households?

More people started to buy one-family houses near New York. The prices went up 10-15% comparing with previous year. Even thought, the average price of one-family house in the US has fallen.

Mortgage crisis

After looking at the graph, we see that there was only one fall of housing in the Mortgage crisis of 2008-2009. The crisis basically happened, because banks gave too much mortgages to people, who had a huge risk to become insolvent.

Thousands of people couldn’t pay off the debts. Their houses were put for a sale. The supply of houses was so high, that the prices went down. Construction companies stopped building houses, just because there were not too much people who could afford houses and not so much banks would give mortgages. For construction companies it is very bad – they should sell nearly 70% of housing as fast as possible to pay off the debts. Therefore, a lot of companies became bankrupt and ceased the construction of objects.

Such situation lasts till the supply is covered by demand. Meaning that prices fall to a fair price. When it is happened, the construction continues.

I love buying premium products. I buy everything I need and I afford any hobbies I want. But I don’t become poor after purchasing all of this stuff. And most of the time I only pay 20-30% of the item’s price. How can I afford to buy an iPhone for 300€? How do I get money after buying an expensive camera? Let’s learn about depreciation.

When you buy stuff, look at 3 things: a lifetime of a product, It is hard to break, for how much will I be able to sell this stuff in the future?

Buy 1-year-old stuff

I don’t buy new iPhones, Macbooks, cameras, or bikes (i hope soon I will add cars here). Instead, I buy 1-year-old items. For example, I bought iPhone 11 pro 256 GB just for 600€, while the 12th was priced at 1200€. This iPhone was in perfect condition and was just 6 months old. I keep it already for 2 years and I can sell it for 450€ (Sep 2022). However, I broke Face-Id while swimming and now I have to give a discount and sell it for 300€. The total cost of an iPhone usage was 300€, or 150€ per year or 12.5€ per month.

Some people sell their 1-year-old phones to buy new ones. They sell it for 50%-70% of the price. That means, that to have a new iPhone each year, a person should pay a difference of 600€ between the initial price and selling price, or 50€ per month. But if you wanna have the previous model and keep it for 2 years, the monthly payment is just 12.5€. It is 4 times cheaper to have the previous model. If you keep the old model for a longer time, maybe you can even pay 10€ per month. To clarify, it does not mean that you pay someone € each month, it just shows how much value the phone loses every month.

Depreciation is the value, that an item loses each month or year. It is also treated as the real cost of usage of a good. In theory, you should take the price of a good when you bought it and the selling price after the expected time of usage. Then you subtract these prices and divide them by the number of years or months that you plan to use that stuff. For an iPhone 14, it will be (1200-600)/3 = 200€ per year if we assume that we use a 1200€ iPhone for 3 years and sell it for 600€.

Depreciation can be counted linearly, or more complicated. For easiness, assume that in the first year the item loses the same cost as in the next 2 years combined.

Used items are Inflation-free. That means if the price for new models goes up, the used items will cost the same as before. It is just a rule. For example, in Russia, there is huge inflation in cars. The previous models of a car cost 100k€ 1 year ago, the new model cost 300k€ due to the import restrictions. We could imagine, that if these cars still have the same engine and interior, the price for the one-year-old car should also rise dramatically. However, it is not the case. For example, the used Audi Q7 of 2020 with 50k km costs 70k€, while the new one of 2022 costs 250k€. The only difference between them is the small adjustment in the exterior and interior.

Different countries have different prices. For example, I bought a used camera, Sony a7 II for just 570€. When I came to Russia, it appeared that I can sell it for 1.2k€. So, I can sell it here and get a 600€ profit. It is known as Arbitrage. It is when you profit from the difference in prices without risk.

Buy high quality

Don’t buy low quality. Such items are easy to break, and their lifetime is short. You will not be able to sell it, so you just throw it in the rubbish bin after some time. Keep in mind that cheap low quality items are sometimes made with the child force and in poor worker conditions. And by buying and throwing the bad quality items in the rubbish bin, you are polluting nature.

High-quality items last long, show prestige and are beautiful and comfortable.

Also buy new

Not every item can be bought or used. Don’t buy used headphones, parachutes, or stuff you know nothing about. For example, I want to buy a bike for 2.8k€. It is expensive. I could probably find the one-year-old bike, but I don’t know how to check the bike for quality, or I don’t want to change the details. In such situations, I can either hire a professional or ask a friend for help. Or just buy a new one. The bike, for example, has a lifetime of 7 years on average, and then the depreciation will be 2800/7 = 400€. Of course, a bike can be sold even for 1000€ in 7 years, because we can change details and make repairments each year, but let’s assume that we do nothing. So, the cost of a bike will be 33€ per month. It is not too much for high quality.

What about fashion

Fashion is complicated. The fashion houses know that people want to be trendy, and the style changes each half a year. I don’t know if it is a good idea to buy used clothes, but it is a good idea to buy expensive classical outfits. For men it is easy – just buy suits for 2k€ each and use them for a decade. Buy good shirts, t-shirts, and 8 pairs of shoes for different events. The men’s classics change too slowly. There are also trendy casual outfits that should be changed more often.

For women, it does not work. Fashion for women is much more important. It is a way to show her status and prove to herself that she is the most beautiful. However, some brands like Burberry don’t change their fashion style too often. Gucci can also be worn for a quite long time. I recommend not buying the brand stuff, but quality stuff. Don’t be a crank and don’t buy an item with huge brand logos. Instead, buy something attractive. You will never find a brand on a 5k€ dress and suit.

When buying new clothes, remember how can you combine them with other clothes or whether you already have enough outfits for some occasions. Maybe you just need to buy high-quality t-shirts instead of 20 t-shirts with cheap prints. I have an excel file, where I put all the wardrobe items in my Austrian house. It appeared that I have items, that costs 6000€ in total. But I have only a few things that cost more than 100€. I understood that I have too many cheap clothes up to 25€. And the thing is that I wear such clothes for 1 or 2 years. The expensive items, however, I wear for a much longer time. I also found out that I have 5 suits, and 4 of them cost less than 200€ each.

I hope, after reading this article, you will buy quality stuff for lower prices and will afford anything you want.