Allow me to offer a guest post from fellow daygamer and wing Bodi on a topic I’ve never heard discussed in the manosphere…..

Have you ever been in a crowded bar, a social place, full of noise and crammed with men and women all there with the express purpose of meeting each other yet observed a pair of girls, perhaps sitting at a small table, intensely locked in conversation with each other in their own little bubble. Perhaps you even opened them and were told briskly “they are not there to meet men”.

No dick

Have you ever known a girl, in her late twenties and single, who starts to get more into her career. Perhaps she starts ‘working all hours’. She may get a dog and/or even move out of the city into a small town. ‘It’s the only place I can afford the mortgage!’ she’ll say. She’ll get into baking.

No dick here either

Perhaps you knew a girl who didn’t go to bars and didn’t get into her career, but she had a very close group of female friends and they did everything together, organizing character building activities each weekend and staying in close contact over social media. Most of them were single. They all went to Ascot and got tipsy on Champagne.

Or maybe you were out walking one day and noticed a girl wandering on her own through the park, dressed a little alternatively and taking endless same-ey photographs with a huge SLR camera. Maybe you even thought it was a perfect daygame set and opened her, to be shocked at how disinterested, flat and drained she seemed.

Congratulations, you have encountered a phenomena increasingly common in the feminist women’s desperate attempts to ruin their own lives: the Celibacy Club. The common Celibacy Club is where a group of women (we’ll address the Solo variant later) form an intense dynamic the essence of which is to ensure the ongoing celibacy of each member. They trade their own likelihood of success in acquiring a mate for ensuring the other member’s celibacy. On a very simple level you’ve seen this behaviour before with generic nightgame cockblocking where girls will prevent friends from getting theirs if they’ve not had their own, or will even just cockblock out of spite for the sake of it. A Celibacy Club is a level beyond this, it’s less ephemeral and the natural urge to cockblock metastatizes into an all encompassing subtle mechanism of group social control where member accepts celibacy as a fair price for ensuring their rival’s celibacy too.

Celibacy Clubs are dysfunctional herds. Think of ‘The Claw’ in Toy Story.

A metaphor, yesterday

A bunch of tiny aliens live in one of those grabber machines. They are all identical. They are weirdly culty and wait in anticipation until The Claw drops one day and picks one of them, carrying them up and away to a better place. The lucky alien, The Chosen, will beam blissfuly as he is lifted up and say “Farewell friends, I am off to a better place” as his comrades all coo in rapture at the spiritual event.

Pre-date

This is a woman’s life: they bumble along together in little groups, like herds of zebras, waiting for the lucky day that a lion stalks alongside and pulls one of them away into his own life and reality. The problem with Celibacy Clubs is they derail this prime directive: a Celibacy Club would be the crabs-in-a-barrel phenomena whereby The Claw drops so all the other little aliens jealousy hold down anyone lucky enough to get clawed, thus preventing them being spirited away. The end result: nobody gets Clawed.

How would you recognize a Celibacy Club in action? Here are some tell-tale signs:

• Lack of dick. Lots of talk; not much dick. Most members (lol) are single and continue to be so.
• Subtle attempts to prevent each other from putting themselves in any situation where men could approach them. In a social place the intenso-bubble will form. The group will generally waste enormous amounts of time attempting to schedule activities, then all constantly reschedule and flake on each other. The end result: spending time at home with a box-set.
• High levels of social control: lots of contact through social media
• Subtle attempts to joint lower their SMV: group piggery in restaurants, excessive alcohol consumption, gradually lowering standards of dress and deportment, encouraging other members to pig out or not diet
• Group shaming of members trying to break away
• Outright cockblocking

 Let’s look at some examples of such clubs, all real examples that I have encountered:

• Amanda, age 38 and feeling it. Gradually increases her working hours to help her ignore the fact her flat is cold and empty. Meets mid 40’s agressive, loud, wealthy career saleswoman. They ‘really hit if off’ and then every other weekend is a trip away involving lots of champagne and huge dinners. The older woman ‘really supports her’ and often perks her up by telling her ‘no man is good enough for her anyway’.
• Kate, age 30 and single. Every Friday night it’s drinks after work with a couple of the girls from work. It usually begins in the office with a bottle of wine and vague jokes about ‘getting chatted up’, but ends up in the corner of a pub in an intenso-huddle over a table and more wine, with orbiting males quickly repelled by the group force-field.
• Michelle, age 25, moves to London and doesn’t know anybody. She joins a Swing dancing club ‘to socialize’ and even admits she’d like to meet men. The other girls there are very friendly and she swaps numbers, gradually getting to know them. Pretty soon they are helping each other pick appropriate fashions, travelling to dances together and forming an intenso-bubble of femininity at the crucial socialization times before and after the dance classes. She never quite meets a man. None of them do.
• Clare, 28, moves to London and doesn’t know anybody. She joins a choir and sings and plays violin. She thinks it works but doesn’t understand the implications when all her new friends are 35 year old, thick set and terribly posh home-counties girls, living off daddies money in their own little apartments in good areas of London. She starts socializing, but it’s all dinner parties and drinks in nice, quiet restaurants in the suburbs. Weekends fill with choir practice and coffees in pleasant cafes by the park. In other words: a total absence of dick.

Why are Celibacy Clubs so initially tempting? Because of two things: firstly, the immediate throat-slitting joy of enforcing celibacy on other members. Second because it facilitates avoidance, and girls love avoidance. Girls all want to feel like they have unlimited time and unlimited options. It’s hard to believe this if you sit in your flat every Friday night on your own watching ER on DVD and crying into a bottle of wine and a cheescake. Fill your life with noise and the signal gets harder to pick up, and let’s not forget what we all learned when little: the thing that makes misfortune easier to deal with is having others have to deal with it as well. Remember, men’s self-help is self-development, women’s self-help is is self-acceptance.

After the initial two-pronged ego gratification of joining a Celibacy Club membership rapidly becomes quite stifling. Despite all the intenso-bonding a girl’s hindbrain will be screaming at her that her vagina remains continually unfilled. It starts to feel wrong and the gnawing sensation of avoidance becomes harder and harder to ignore. A Celibacy Club is a prison, a prison whose walls are held up by women’s adherence to The Female Groupthink and their intrinsic fear of non-conformance.

Smiling in hell

Eventually a girl in a Celibacy Club will begin to realize she ensuring her friends celibacy is not enough, and will try to break out of the club herself. She will try to pull away and sneak off and acquire herself a man, well aware that should she be caught by the Borg-mind she is part of she will endure their wrath. At the simplest level you have the classic scenario of a girl “losing her friends in a club”. Believe me my friends, if you’re ever in a club and you run across a girl who has ‘lost her friends’, STRIKE! Beyond this you get intermediate measures such as giving up or radically changing hobbies, increasing workload or time spent with families to avoid certain hobbies or obligations and at the highest level you quite often see girls make radical life changes: like changing career, going back to University or moving city or country. It’s not easy though…and mull over this if you want a glimpse into horror: the reason girls go the toilet together in clubs is not to gossip, but so they don’t want to leave each other alone for even one single minute.

 In the next part: Solo Celibacy Clubs and why you should smash them

Imagine if those x-ray glasses advertisements in the back of 1970s Marvel comics had been real. Imagine it was possible to don a pair of glasses that let you see through all the bullshit and see the world as it really is.

For back when women still had modesty

I had zero calibration as a child until well into my adult life. I’d run around doing my own thing, imposing my reality onto the world and then show total obliviousness to the responses of others. I never learned to read the subtle cues in peoples behaviour that betray what they really think. Perhaps I was an unusually blundering idiot but I think men generally are an oblivious bunch. We live in the world of direct obvious overt communication.

Two years into the Game I still marvelled at Jambone’s ability to just know where a girl was at and whether she was up for it. To me it seemed he had a superpower but really he’d just taught himself calibration by fucking 150 girls since he started university. When you go through enough sets from beginning to end you get calibrated. When I asked him to deconstruct and list the signals he was reading he couldn’t really do it. It was too internalised.

So one thing I’m doing with my book is deconstruction. I’m breaking everything down into tiny micro steps. Ultimately Game follows a simple mini-loop:

Provoke feedback -> Use girl’s response to place her -> Make an informed next move

When you read her IOIs you are doing this. When you compliance test her you are doing this. The further you can deconstruct the steps and the more precisely you can sort the signal from the noise, the faster and more reliably you can move the girl forwards. That’s the nuts and bolts of calibration but the end goal is to internalise it and make it intuitive.

As you get calibrated you see the world differently. It permeates your world view and can’t be unseen.

You see a chode on a first date. Immediately you classify him on the socio-sexual hierarchy and you calculate relative SMVs with the girl. You know where the girl is and what she’s looking for. You can future project the next ten years of their lives with actuarial certainty. You see people on the bus and you can see their inner game issues written into their face, their posture and their clothing. You start to see men as women see them, seperating them into “gets laid” and “doesn’t get laid” buckets.

It’s weird. There’s an unbelievable amount of information transmitted if only you know what signal to detect and how to process it. The Red Pill does the same thing. You start to see what the office environment really is. You can almost see dollar signs being transferred from the middle-aged professionals across to the welfare housing a few streets across the office. You can see the cage office chodes build around themselves.

People talk about red pill bitterness, that emotional reaction to realising everyone’s lied to you every year of your life to pick your pockets and frustrate your ambitions. Perhaps we should also talk about red pill disengagement, that Cassandra Complex of seeing things as they really are but being powerless to change them. Watching the lemmings marching to the cliff and wondering why they can’t see they are marching into the abyss.

I love John Carpenter movies. Watching They Live as a teenager really got me thinking “what would it be like to have a pair of glasses like that?” Well, twenty years later after swallowing the red pull, learning game and the fundamentals of economics I get it. The world is so simple and it amazes me the elusive obvious is so well hidden from so many.

My new book is a textbook. Every page offers specific actionable advice for what to say and do while interacting with a woman you’re trying to seduce. To adequately convey this advice I need to bring my poor reader up to speed on key concepts and mindsets so I’ve been writing little “box out” sections as tangents to the body of the text. During my chapter on “daygame is dirty” I go into detail about the female’s dualist sexual strategy:

• R-selection: Acquire high-quality DNA
• K-selection: Acquire long-term provision and protection.

This reminded me of the first time I ever heard PUAs reference what we now call the socio-sexual hierarchy. Tyler Durden wrote a celebrated post on the Bristol Lair called The Secret Society back when PUAs didn’t really have the vocabulary to parse the concepts but they knew they’d discovered something real. I’ve used this as a jumping off point for this particular box out. So to whet my reader’s appetites here’s an extract from Daygame Mastery……..*

This idate is looking promising

Most men are, in carnival terms, rubes. They are easy marks. They have been brought up in a deeply fem-centric world and all of its delusions. They go to work, earn money, pay taxes, buy products, watch TV and have sex with a tiny number of homely women. Dysfunctional as this sounds it’s exactly what the grand meta-narrative of the feminine imperative wants. It’s a feature not a bug. It’s no conspiracy. Most people have bought into the ideology implicitly and women can’t even articulate why they want it this way, much less design and administer such a conspiracy.

What matters is the result: Most men don’t get it.

Most men don’t realise that sex is everywhere. That innocent-looking girl in a woolly jumper sitting in Starbucks reading Proust? Last week she was picked up in Hyde Park by a player who fucked her three hours later in the disabled toilet at Charing Cross Hotel. That Iranian girl with the head scarf and wide blue eyes? Once a month her father pays for her shopping trip to Harrods and she sneaks away to spend the night with a player who picked her up outside Knightsbridge underground station.

There is a world of sex going on underneath our noses. 99% of men have never participated in it and many don’t even believe it exists. While waiting in the queue at Whole Foods they see the customer in front making small talk with the cashier as she bags his items. Oblivious, the man saw but he didn’t observe. A keener eye would recognise that “small talk” was a flirty indirect-direct ping that raised a smile, followed up by some sparkling eye contact. The player was screening the cashier, giving her a come-on to gauge her interest. Sometimes a cashier gives her number and gets fucked in a hotel room three days later. Then she goes back to work with nobody the wiser.

All women have “indiscretions”. These are her R-selected moments. It’s just that she’s not having them with the K-selected man so he doesn’t even know they happen. There are precious few R-selected men in the world so they act as aggregators. Twenty women may each have only one indiscretion but they all happen with the same man. This is why when you become an Advanced Player you stories become literally unbelievable to the average man. He’s literally never seen that world. He was never allowed into the Secret Society.

According to the UK Office Of National Statistics, 20% of all females living in the UK are aged between 15 and 30 years old. According to me, approximately 20% of them are a six or better in hotness. Depending who you believe women of that generation will have between 10 and 20 lifetime sexual partners on average. So let’s run some simple maths (it’s a crude sketch, social statisticians beware!):

• 4% of women in the UK are bangable (20% of 20%).
• Each of these women will average 1 new notch per year during their bangable window.

Let’s assume half her notches are within stable LTRs with K-selected men while the other half are R-selected “indiscretions”, thus each girl has one Player Notch every two years. This means for one player to score 20 notches per year he is aggregating 40 girl-years of indiscretions. He’s stealing the lunch money of 39 other men. Not only that but we are only looking at the top 20% of the girls. Which leads us to quite a startling conclusion about R-selected men:

The hot girl population of the UK can only support a maximum of 0.1% of men being players before female notch-counts rise exponentially.

There’s a reason the society is kept a secret.

* Smarter readers will have observed I’ve given away one of the few extracts of my book which uses ideas that are already public domain. It’s not just the society that remains a secret!

Something just occured to me when reading Bodi’s recent post on workplace woes. He discusses the baiting tactics of office gammas and deltas and one particular tactic sprang to mind. Now bear in mind I write this from intellectual curiosity in the games people play rather than as a severe warning of a likely risk. I almost never encounter this tactic, mainly because I never let myself get drawn into the killzone of it. Unless someone can point me to psychology literature beating me to the punch I’m going to coin the term: The Bear Bait. It’s a way weak aggressive people can sway the crowd / bureaucratic institutions to dispose of a stronger opponent or to control the frame by the threat of such force. The tactic as explained from the position of the gamma / feminist aggressor:

A white man at an HR diversity seminar

Step One: Establish office reputation as harmless, helpful, normal person

Gammas are often excessively helpful to other staff when it’s measurable and recordable (e.g. an email answer to a problem posed) while resentful and value-taking in mood (e.g. talking down to you as they do it). Understand their behaviour is based on denying their low SMV by constructing an elaborate delusional reality in which the world is stupid and they are better than everybody else. Thus they are stubborn and aggressive (a frame-push) but also fragile and terrified. As Ricky Raw correctly observes they don’t feel guilt, just toxic shame. So you’ll find gammas frequently glad-handing the office and conspicuously engaging in impression management.

Step Two: Identify victim

Gammas are always looking for a recipient of their frame-push because they need to position themselves above everyone. Busybody women are always looking for an outlet for the screams of their barren wombs. If you have little involvement with these people they’ll leave you alone but if you find yourself sitting next to them or in regular team meetings you can expect trouble. Most office workers are spineless pushovers so their frame-push encounters no resistance but if you hold your frame expect them to make a project of you. This is why its best not to provide unnecessary ammunition from your personal life – don’t talk about Game, don’t offer political opinions and don’t flaunt how much better your life is than theirs – these are all digs into their toxic shame that will make them more resentful and more motivated to attack you because your very existence is an existential threat to their delusional reality.

Trouble brewing

Step Three: Engage victim in casual chat with other people in earshot

The aggressor will start chumming-up with you by making innocuous small-talk that gradually veers away from what is directly relevant to the job. Most of the time nothing comes of it except a mild pump for information to use against you later but every now and then the planets will align for them – you fall into a conversation and there’s lots of people who can overhear. Now this is when the trigger is pulled and it suddenly becomes a bait-and-switch from friendly chat to deliberate malicious attack. Precisely the reason it works is it lulls the victim into the killzone by exploiting their friendliness and goodwill.

Step Four: Utter socially-conventional (but completely untrue or nonsensical) platitude that forces victim into hard choice to either concede the frame (a) or argue a position that constitutes thoughtcrime (b)

The aggressor will accept either of two outcomes. Either you accept the frame-push, dicktuck, and can then be bled dry for fuel to power their delusional reality (that they are above you) or you resist and they try to destroy your life. Being passive-aggressive they are seeking to recruit external forces as their cat’s paw namely laws, social convention and HR departments. At a minimum they want co-workers to label you an outcast (“He’s a bit weird, that guy. A racist/sexist/bigot”) so they can use you as a foil for their own moral superiority when discussing you at the watercooler. The lottery jackpot is if they can twist something you say into an HR-actionable offence that has witnesses. Remember their reality can’t tolerate your existence outside of their frame so they will be ruthless and vindictive about it. So, examples (I lay it on thick, in practice they’ll be quite nuanced and subtle):

Him: Did you see that slavery case in the news? Three women were held for thirty years by some man. It’s horrific.

You: Yes.

Him: Don’t you think it’s awful that in this day and age we still have slavery and sex-trafficking in the UK? Men are still able to get away with it (this is the frame-push)

You (a): Yes, it’s terrible (concede frame)

You (b): Well, we don’t. These cases are extremely rare and are almost exclusively confined to immigrant populations from third-world countries. It’s not a “UK” problem (thoughtcrime)

Step Five (a): Continue to push victim by heaping more platitudes on them until receiving concession

Once they sense your willingless to submit they’ll demand total supplication because the further they beat you down the more superior they feel. Expect a long rant to consolidate their frame delivered with a watchful eye waiting for the slightest flicker in your eyes that allows them to bait you with a “don’t you think so?”. So for example:

Him: Yes, it’s terrible. There are still so many things wrong with this country from the legacy of colonialism. I think these women are very brave. The police should do more. I think those victims were ignored for so long because they are Malaysian and Irish. It’s just like the Lawrence Report said – the police are institutionally racist…. blah blah….

They know full-well they are goading you. That’s their pleasure – prodding a declawed bear with a pointed stick from safe distance.

Step Five (b): Feign incomprehension to draw out verboten opinion, making sure everyone in earshot hears and begins to pay attention.

The slightest crack in their reality causes them existential pain so if you push back at all they will try to destroy you. When you initially express crimethink they may leave you a bit more rope to hang yourself by nodding and making listening noises before suddenly raising their voice to paraphrase your opinion to the audience. Watch here for a deliberate attempt to squeeze your opinion under any thoughtcrime label e.g. racist, sexist, homophobic, right-wing, bigoted, reactionary, old-fashioned etc. Once the label is there the specifics of your opinion cease to matter and instead the “fact” of your “racist outburst” becomes part of the historical record.

Step Six: Immediately make it personal in a way that leaves victim false dilemma of either conceding frame (a) or making what can be twisted into a personal attack (b)

The next step is usually to either dredge up an identity politics card or to hypothetically create one. So for example:

Him: Angelina Jolie is such a good actress and a very morally-inspiring women. She’s really hot too.

You: Not my type.

Him: Why not? She’s one of the most beautiful women in the world, always winning prizes for it. Of course you’d want to date her.

You: She’s old, unpleasant and raising a bunch of other men’s children. I’m not interested.

He now has multiple lines of attack to pursure your verboten opinions and to make it personal. Such as:

• What have you got against mature women? They don’t reach their sexual peak until forty you know. My girlfriend is 35 and in her prime. Are you saying she’s worthless?
• What have you got against single mothers? She’s a role model for struggling women everywhere. My sister/friend/neighbour is a single mother. Would you discriminate against her because she has a child?
• You only date silly young girls? Are you a paedophile or something?

Of course if you’re being attacked by a woman she’ll immediately find something about herself to personalise it along the lines of “you don’t like X. I am X, so you think I’m a bad person?” be it body fat, age, bastard kids, divorce, paper-shuffling pointless career, worthless degrees…… she’ll find a way to position herself as the subject of your “hate”.

Note how the stakes are raised. He/She is betting the farm that you will either (i) back down from your position because continuing your case can only result in a personal insult in an environment that punishes personal insults or (ii) say something that can be reframed as a personal insult precisely to trigger that punishment by her cat’s paws.

Step Seven: Condescending and self-congratulatory gloating (a) or immediately playing the defenceless victim (b)

So if you back down they’ll preen themselves now they are positioned above you or seek to record the “personal attack” as a “fact” which can now be actioned against you. Either way they’ve won.

Victorious

Perhaps your first response is to think “no way are people that self-consciously manipulative” and if so, you’d be wrong. People are very devious. Just watch how naturally a pair of drunken bar thugs will execute a pincer movement on a victim with velociraptor-like telepathy. This stuff is hard-wired. The more oestrogen in a person’s system (i.e. women and gammas) the more likely they are to revert to this passive-aggressive aggressor-victim manipulation.

This tactic is writ large across the whole of society especially by race hustlers, feminists and the other Professionally Aggrieved and Offense Takers By Proxy. It’s utterly wicked because they know full well that the overwhelming social power is on their side yet they go out picking fights, little different to the packs of Pakistanis who go on the roam in Shadwell for solo white victims. The obvious question is how do I defend myself?

1. Don’t get set-up. The whole tactic is based on lulling a man into the killzone so learn to recognise the set-up. These gammas and women will throw out lots of little micro-tests to ping for your opinions. They’ll drop incidental comments expressing GoodThink then monitor if you enthusiastically agree or go silent – if its the latter they’ll mark your card for later. When you social acuity is tight you’ll spot these pings easily, as you’ll also spot the suppressed gamma rage / man-hate in their eyes and set of their jaw. I don’t rise to the comments and if they keep pushing I just tell them I don’t discuss that kind of thing at work.

2. Don’t take the bait. This should be obvious but when you feel the trigger being pulled, don’t do what they expect you to do. Don’t get involved. Make sure everyone can hear them needling you and trying to drag something out of you while you keep your opinions to yourself. If they are really insistent just call them out: “Just say what you mean” or “What are you trying to get me to say?”

3. Pull the Reardon Gambit. Assuming you got caught off guard and have now expressed CrimeThink in front of an audience, you are in damage control mode. Your best defence is to explictly and overtly describe the tactic back to the crowd by either being uninvolved: “It’s obvious what you’ve done. You pushed me into expressing an opinion publically precisely so you can take offense at it. I only told you because you asked. Stop playing these weird games and let me just get on with my job. I came here to work, not to play politics. You’re transparent” or if you’re sharp you can reframe them as the aggressor: “I don’t think this is appropriate for a professional environment. I’m trying to do my job and I think it’s unfair to single me out and try to publically shame me for privately-held opinions. People can see your game.”

Whatever happens just know this person had it in for you from the moment they marked your card. If you must play this game it’s best to just chip away at their frame daily with tiny getures and comments that position you above or outside their frame but never reach the threshold of being actionable against you. It’s a bitch move but if they started it it’s fun to keep shaking their reality for lulz.

“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen [pounds] nineteen [shillings] and six [pence], result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” Charles Dickens, David Copperfield.

The essence of a bachelor’s life is that he maintains control of his time and his freedom to maneouver. This is how you feel in control of your life and avoid the sense of being harried, put-upon and trapped. We are quite aware that getting married-up (the old “ball & chain”) and having children are the two major ways in which a man can surrender his time and freedom to maneouver. If that’s what you want in life, by all means go for it. This post is written for bachelors who have chosen to remain free of such entanglements for the foreseeable future. The two key principles are:

1. Get a secure high top-line income, preferably scaleable
2. Get a low fixed cost base. Convert fixed costs to variable costs.

This is talk from business financial planning so I ought to unpack it a little for non-bankers, beginning with considering a man who has it all wrong per Dickens. Imagine a caricatured cubicle-jockey who works full-time 48 weeks a year on a permanent-employee contract. He owns a suburban three-bedroomed house and both he and his wife have a lease car each, perhaps a couple of years old. They have a sky sports / entertainment subscription, 24-month 4G mobile phone contracts for both adults and both children. The mortgage has ten years paid and fifteen years remaining plus there are a few unsecured loans to cover big ticket expenses like the recent kitchen remodelling. What is the risk profile of this man’s finances?

• Income is not scaleable – He is already working at his full capacity of 48 weeks a year of full-time working weeks.
• Income is all from one source, his salaried employment.
• Expenses are all high, fixed amounts with long duration. There is significant debt which is subject to (probably) floating interest rates.

What this means is the man has a very narrow margin of error. When expenses rise he had few options to absorb the change – does he try to get overtime at work or does he trade-off another expense? If his income drops (his hours are cut, he is fired) he has a huge monthly payment to meet and no means to do so. Not only that but by having equity in his home he has alot to lose in a home repossession. The man has no time and no freedom to maneouver. This is why bachelors should be very wary of owning a home. The things you own end up owning you.

One thing investment managers quickly adopt is the idea of asset classes. Everything is an investment and allocating funds to one asset class (e.g. equity) means less funds for another asset class (e.g. bonds). This is simple opportunity cost. Investment managers will take a strategic view on the likely performance of different asset classes and make their bets accordingly. You should be doing the same.

Property is not an emotion. It’s not a symbol of success. It’s not a part of your identity as a man. It’s just an asset class. Depending on your life situation and the economy it’s wise to be either long or short property. Usually it’s better to be short (i.e. renting not buying), here’s why.

Freedom

Buying a house locks you into one place and a high monthly fixed expense. For no reason other than that it is usually smart for the bachelor to avoid buying a house. When you tell your boss you have a mortgage you are telling him “I can’t walk away from this job so please fuck me over with limitless demands, pressure and shitty projects. I’ll take it all while wearing a shit-eating grin because I know I don’t have the option to walk away”.

A man with a huge income-expense margin can accumulate a large pile of fuck-you money in his savings account. He can take time off work. A man on a six-month rental apartment can very easily trade down to a cheaper place if money is tight, trade up when he’s flush or just go move to another country/city to follow a good job opportunity. As Robert De Niro advises in Heat: “Don’t let yourself get attached to anything you are not willing to walk out on in 30 seconds flat if you feel the heat around the corner…. Now, if you’re on me and you gotta move when I move, how do you expect to keep a… a marriage?”

On the lam

Taxation

The golden rule of taxation is that the burden falls heaviest on those least able to avoid it. The poor don’t pay tax because they have little income to tax and little to lose by refusing to work. The rich don’t pay tax because they can restructure their affairs to minimise it. Tax falls disproportionately upon the middle class for three simple reasons:

1. They earn high enough incomes to make their life significantly more comfortable from working than not working.
2. They have assets (housing, savings, pensions) that can be plundered and are too large to comfortably walk away from.
3. They own property. It is fixed in one location and cannot be moved offshore. Nor can they.

Buying a house positions yourself squarely into the cross-hairs of a thieving government whether overtly (property taxes, stamp duty, rates) or covertly (you are locked into place for all the personal taxes)

Asset bubbles

Property is just an asset class. Nobody buys a house outright in cash. Under periods of stable banking families will typically provide a 20% cash deposit and borrow the remaining 80% which any investment manager will tell you is 4x leverage. You have £4 of debt for every £1 of equity but still control (carry risk and rewards of) 100% of the investment. Let’s consider a contrived example to clarify the maths:

Your capital: £20k. Your mortagage: £80k. Your house price £100k.

Scenario 1: House prices rise 10%. Your house is worth £110k. You now have £30k in equity (the debt didn’t increase) This is £10k profit on an investment of £20k = 50% return.

Scenario 2: House prices fall 10%. Your house is worth £90k. You now have £10k in equity. This is £10k loss on an investment of £20k = 50% loss.

The key characteristic of leverage is it magnifies the impact of asset price movements. A change of just 10% in house prices creates a 50% change in your wealth. We are so used to hearing risk-takers extoll the virtues of leverage in rising markets that we can forget leverage also works on the way down. As many a leveraged hedge fund found out to their cost. The main point for the bachelor to process is this:

Buying a house is a highly leveraged bet on the direction of the housing market.

You are not reducing risk by buying a house. You are increasing it. This is before taking into account another factor: housing is a depreciating asset. Houses fall apart and become delapidated without regular maintenance and repairs. This truth is hidden in fast-rising markets because the net amount of house price rise minus maintenance costs will be positive. Thus accepting that buying a house is an investment decision, and in particular a speculative investment decision, we must understand how a house is valued. If your natural thought is “look in the estate agent’s window for similar houses” you are a moron. There are three ways to price a house over the long term – all are ways to determine if the housing market in a given area is over- or under-valued at the time you are considering purchase.

1. Median house price to median salary ratio

It’s an obvious truism that if the average person cannot afford the average home then house prices are going to drop. You can find long-term historical data (for example Case-Schiller) that gives a clear pattern for any region. Generally speaking in the US house prices will cost 3 times the salary of whoever lives in it. Pull up the graphs. Any time prices deviate there is a bubble or crash and eventual reversion to the mean. It’s simple (effective) supply and (effective) demand. What can’t happen won’t and therefore when median house prices outstrip the median earner’s capacity to pay they don’t pay. There’ll be a period of market breakdown as delusional sellers refuse to drop prices (the first sign of a house price crash is sharply reduced transaction volume – buyers and sellers can’t agree a price) but then as the 3Ds come into effect (divorce, death, reDundancy) the forced sales pull the market down.

Find this for your region

2. Median salary to median mortage payment ratio

People have a comfort zone for how much of their monthly income they are willing to allocate to housing. Long term statistics show that to be about 33% of take-home pay. The rest goes on food, entertainment, clothes, car whatever. Banks consider this ratio in making loans because as the % rises the borrower’s wiggle room to deal with external shocks reduces as does their willingness to meet payments in times of duress. When you read stories of young couples paying 60% of take-home pay to meet mortgage payments then its a sure sign the market is overpriced and headed down.

3. Bank optimism

There are long-accepted rules in the banking industry and long-accepted ratios in determining loans. Put simply your banker assesses you on the three Cs

• Collateral – How much of a deposit or how valuable is the asset the loan is secured on. This is why they require a cash deposit. If you pay 20% deposit then the house value can drop 20% before the bank takes a loss. Your skin in the game is 20% and thus you are far less likely to walk away from your loan. Reduce that to 5% and the game has changed.
• Cover – How many times over can your take home pay cover your mortgage payment? If that number is low you will struggle when interest rates rise or your income takes a knock. You are fragile.
• Credit – What is your historical creditworthiness? Do you have a history of repaying your debts or welching on them?

House prices are determined by the availability of credit because it’s the size of the mortgage the bank will give you that determines your effective demand to bid on a house. Thus when lending standards are lax (i.e. banks are optimistic) borrowers can get larger loans and thus bid up prices. When banks are aggressively marketing loans with 5% deposits or ALT-A interest-only repayment schedules, or the central bank is forcing down interest rates it is all pointing in one direction: houses are overpriced. Lax lending leads to high rates of bad debts and an inevitable banking contraction. Lending standards over-correct to the strict side and suddenly borrowers can no longer bid so high. House prices drop.

This is what a banking crisis looks like

There are many additional factors that impact house prices that I won’t go into. For example consider how these sociological changes affect prices:

– Expansion of public sector jobs in a particular region: Wages rise in that region leading to increased ability to bid-up house prices. When government contracts and fires those workers prices come back down.

– Mass immigration: Large numbers of wealth-destroying third world immigrants flood a country. For their housing demand to become “effective demand” (backed by the ability to pay) they must receive government housing benefit. This can only be funded by taxation (national debt is merely deferred taxation) which means the increase in effective demand by the colonists is offset by the decreased effective demand of the wealth-creators (when taxes rise, median salaries and interest cover falls – see above ratios).

– Debasement of the currency: Prolonged periods of quantitative easing artificially suppress interest rates which has the effect of (i) reducing monthly payments for borrowers on floating rates (ii) destroying yield on investments for savers. It’s a direct transfer of wealth from savers to borrowers. Effective demand is transfered from one group to another but not increased overall. When currency is debased house prices have the illusion of increasing because they are measured in a unit that loses it’s real-world value. For example in the UK the pound was devalued 25% in 2008-09 but house prices remained flat. The economic effect is house prices dropped 25%.

These are complex factors but I raise them to solidify the key point: Property is just an asset class and it’s a leveraged investment. It’s not an emotional decision or a rite of passage to becoming an adult. For most bachelors most of the time buying a house is suicide. It takes away your time and freedom to maneouvre. It will also very likely lose you money if you buy now.

* Anyone retarded enough to say “rent is just throwing your money away” will be sent to the spam queue.