Starting with my first Franklin Planner in 1995, I have been engaged in a seemingly endless quest to develop the perfect productivity and organizational system. The Franklin system was truly spectacular. I was working in Silicon Valley at the time, and taking the introductory class from a real FP trainer was required after you got hired. It didn’t take long to see why. The class was two full days long, and it laid out a simple…
Now is the Right Time to Invest in Real Estate
Why is it the right time to Invest in Real Estate? This is Canada this is January 15th and the Bank of Canada just dropped their bank rates by 0.25% and its now sitting at .75%. What that means is that banks themselves could follow suit and adjust their own lending rates some are saying they are not going to do anything. Regardless, you have interest of less than 1%. Right now if you have…
Smart Investment Money Goes for Real Estate
I found a great article by Denis Kleinfeld on the Moneynews.com website that talked about real estate as an investment vehicle and I wanted to pass it along. Here’s the piece: I know that many people are unhappy with the way their money managers have been handling their investment portfolio. This becomes readily apparent to me every time I sit in one of those meetings between the client and their investment advisers. The meeting pattern…
The Landlord Suicide Squeeze
The suicide squeeze is one of the most exciting plays in baseball. It happens when there’s a runner on third who takes off toward home when the pitcher starts his motion, expecting the batter to make some sort of contact with the ball and put it in play, thus scoring a run. Except for trying to steal home outright it’s also the riskiest play in baseball. I was with a couple of buddies this afternoon…
Stock Market is Now DOWN for the Year. What’s in YOUR Wallet?
It has been a pretty good ride, hasn’t it? I mean, since the dark days of the “great recession†when the DOW bottomed out at 6443.27 on March 6, 2009, the market has gone pretty much straight up. Remember those guys in the office that spent all day with a browser window open to their E-Trade accounts so they could “trade†their mutual funds? They were all over the place before the DOW tanked. They…
Beware of Professional Tenants!
I have to say that one of my biggest fears about being a rental property owner is running into a “Professional Tenant”. A “Professional Tenant†is a someone who knows the rental laws cold, knows the system, and therefore knows how to work the system†by taking advantage of pieces of the law to live rent free. Sometimes indefinitely. They can cost you several months of rent and thousands of dollars in legal fees before…