David Moskowitz's Page

I often find myself applying the Principle of Sunk Cost to many financial problems I encounter.

The Principle, sometimes paraphrased as “don’t chase good money after bad”, holds that certain financial costs cannot be recovered once they are incurred and therefore should not affect future actions or decisions.

A common example (Wikipedia) is that of purchasing a movie ticket and realizing shortly into the movie that it is quite unwatchable. I… Continue

I was watching Fox news Sunday night while eating dinner. Around 7:30 PM, my attention was suddenly jostled away from my frozen dinner (dieting…), by an advert for the upcoming Huckabee (as in Mike Huckabee, former presidential candidate) which will feature a segment on house swapping. While I did watch the Simpsons during the 8PM hour, I recorded Huckabee and watched it later on (since I hadn’t been approached for the show, which usually means expect some onlinehousetrading swappers).

The segm… Continue

Nice front page piece (at least online) in the Christian Science Monitor.

A bit short for the amount of research I know went into the story, but at least they tracked down Jerry and Sherry again.

Also, we finally have a statistic regarding how many swaps are taking place:

"But such deals are gaining momentum. Some 8,000 swaps take place every month, estimates Danielle Babb, a real estate analyst and dean of business at Andrew Jackson University in Birmingham, Ala. "

Sounds a bit optim… Continue

It seems like every time I turn on my computer this month, I receive notice of some other new feature on house swapping. And many of these are high profile pieces (ex. Time, CBS Evening News, MSBNBC.com). Is the growth of swapping finally going exponential?

While Domuswap has not been the main feature of any of these recent articles, I can watch the additional traffic that these, nevertheless, generate. The statistics seem to imply that the growth is still linear, and tends to slow down after t… Continue

We’ve come a long way in the two or so years since the emerging of swapping on the internet. Through extensive media coverage, I must think a larger percentage of the population, or at least home owners and sellers with their eyes open for such stories, are aware of swapping. However, the results haven’t proved as promising. Sure, there are a few anecdotes of swaps that have taken place. These more often than not, took place on Craigslist, with several on Domuswap and Onlinehousetrading. I am no… Continue