u/Critical-Load-1452

yo so i got this row home in fishtown, been in my family for like 30 years, my aunt lived there forever but she passed last year and now its mine i guess not really a flex tbh

the place is a mess like not just old but like falling apart, roof leaks in two spots, basement floods when it rains hard, the electric is still knob and tube which is scary af, and theres a weird smell i cant get rid of no matter what i try

i dont have money to fix all this stuff, like at all, i work a normal job and live paycheck to paycheck basically, contractors came by and gave me quotes, 15k for roof, 10k for electric, who knows for the basement, like where am i supposed to get that kinda cash

i tried listing it with a realtor but she said nobody will buy it in this condition unless i drop the price crazy low like below 100k which seems insane cuz its in fishtown you know? houses around me sell for 300-400 but those are all flipped and pretty

so now im stuck, i pay taxes and insurance on this place every month and its just sitting there empty, cant rent it cuz its not safe, cant sell it cuz nobody wants a project, i thought about just walking away but my aunt wanted me to have it so i feel guilty

but im nervous cuz i hear horror stories too, like lowball offers and hidden fees

has anyone here sold a philly row home in bad shape to a cash buyer? how much lower was the offer than what you hoped for? did they really cover everything like they say? and do i need a lawyer or is it straight forward

i just wanna be done with this but i also dont wanna get screwed you know? any advice from locals who been through it would help a lot

The banks knocked me back again last week for a small loan to buy some new equipment. My business is still fairly new so my revenue isn’t where they want it to be. Super annoying because I know I can make it work if I just get a bit of capital behind me.

I’m curious, for those of you who’ve been rejected by the bank, what did you end up doing? Did you go through a broker, try a non-bank lender, or something else?

A friend recently used Ezy Pzy Finance when the banks said no to him and he said they were pretty easy to deal with. Has anyone else had experience with them or other options that actually came through?

god the disconnect between silicon valley and actual engineering is just wild right now. keep seeing these startup pitches where they want to replace a perfectly tuned PID or MPC with some massive transformer model because it "learns better"

like... do you guys even know what a lyapunov function is? you cant just pipe a hallucinating probability distribution into a physical actuator and hope it doesnt tear the machine apart.

it's honestly exhausting. Im tired of having to explain to management why we cant just "chatgpt" our process control.

Although I was watching some clips from that recent panel on deterministic AI and it seems like the serious hardware guys (think ASML was there) are finally pushing back against the hype. the idea of energy-based models treating states as actual mathematical constraints to be satisfied, rather than just statistically guessing the next token, feels a lot closer to how we actually formulate optimal control problems anyway

but idk. until the rest of the software world realizes you need strict mathematical guarantees before turning a high-torque motor, I guess ill just keep arguing with PMs about why bounded stability actually matters.

curious what people think about education nowadays, like school, college, degrees, etc, it used to feel like the main path to a stable life but now there are so many other options like online skills, trades, self learning, i’m wondering if traditional education still gives the same value or if things have changed a lot, what’s your experience with it?

I’ve been thinking about going into teaching, but I keep hearing how demanding it is — workload, classroom management, burnout, etc.

At the same time, people also say it’s really meaningful and rewarding.

For teachers here — what’s the reality like day to day? Would you choose it again?

I feel like small habits make a bigger difference over time than big one-time decisions.

what’s something simple you started doing that had a noticeable impact on your finances?