Four years ago, I was downsizing and building a home while I still had a hefty mortgage on my first home. I couldn’t secure the loan on my own until the other house was sold.
I applied for the mortgage with my girlfriend. I had a down payment of $125,000 and paid the monthly mortgage, along with real-estate taxes. She pays for the utilities.
Needless to say, things are not working out, and I would like her to move out. She wants half of the home’s value, as her name is on the mortgage.
Is she entitled to half the value? Can I refinance without her knowing? I think I snookered myself. Please help.
Homeowner
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‘Needless to say, things are not working out, and I would like her to move out.’ MarketWatch illustration
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Click the link belowfor the article (Quentin’s reply):
Going back to the office soon? As a speech trainer, one common source of anxiety I’ve been hearing from people is the social interaction they’ll once again have to make with colleagues.
But like any other form of public speaking — yes, elevator banter counts — small talk skills have nothing to do with your personality, and everything to do with learning to empathize with your audience.
If you want your skill and comfort levels to soar, avoid these seven conversational pitfalls:
Now that the World Health Organization has officially recognized the symptoms of ‘workplace burnout’, it’s clear that the mental health effects of too much work are a global concern. While it may feel tempting to walk away from work altogether, scientists warn that not working is also linked to mental health issues. As a paper published in Social Science & Medicine, there’s an “effective dose” of work we should be doing each week to reap the rewards — and it’s not that much.
“Indeed eight hours a week would be enough for the average worker.”
As part of the University of Cambridge’s “Employment Dosage” project, study co-authors Brendan Burchell Ph.D., and Daiga Kamerāde, Ph.D., spent a lot of time thinking about how to optimize work schedules to improve mental health. In this study, they wanted to answer one question: is there an ideal number of hours we should work per week to keep ourselves feeling emotionally fulfilled?
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Photo by Chonlachai Panprommas / EyeEm / Getty Images.
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Imagine you’re on a boat heading offshore and the engine fails. Suddenly, you’re floating aimlessly out at sea with no ability to reach your destination. This is what languishing feels like.
Sociologist Corey Keyes first used the term languishing to describe “the absence of feeling good about your life,” and Adam Grant raised its profile in a recent New York Times column. Languishing is the state between flourishing and burnout. When you’re flourishing, you feel fulfilled, energetic, and eager to take on challenges at work. When you’re burned out, you feel exhausted, overwhelmed, and drained. When you’re languishing, you feel a lack of meaning and a desire to “fit in” emotionally.
Earlier this month, a technology entrepreneur named Chris Herd posted a thread on Twitter. “I spoke to 10 x Billion $ companies who canceled return to the office due to the delta variant,” he began. “A few predictions on what else is going to happen.” His first salvo was titled “Office Death,” and claimed that “by the time people can return to the office a lot of companies will no longer have space to return to.” His next prediction was about “City Flight.” He stated that workers would continue to flee cities and would quit if their employers forced them back into urban offices. The thread continued with sixteen more tweets.
In 2018, Herd, who is thirty-one, started a financial technology company based in northern Scotland. He soon realized the difficulty of attracting talent to his location and organized his business to operate without a physical headquarters. Impressed by the benefits of his office-free operation, Herd pivoted into a new company, First base, which supports a remote-work infrastructure. In 2019, he began tweeting strident objections to office work, with loud claims about the superiority of alternatives. When the pandemic hit, the audience interested in these discussions exploded in size. In early 2020, Herd posted a long thread of predictions about remote work’s rise during the next decade, and it hit a nerve in a way that his earlier tweets had not. His follower count grew from about a thousand to over forty-five thousand, and his threads became must-reads for anyone who closely followed these topics. Many commentators have been discussing the need for a more flexible approach to when and where work happens in a post-pandemic world. Herd, it turns out, is proposing something altogether more radical.
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Illustration by Ben Denzer; Source photograph by Paul Denzer
Film and Writing Festival for Comedy. Showcasing best of comedy short films at the FEEDBACK Film Festival. Plus, showcasing best of comedy novels, short stories, poems, screenplays (TV, short, feature) at the festival performed by professional actors.