I bought another house last week. On my lunch break. An hour and 20 minutes out and back. Yes – I’d like the Chicken Fillet with extra tomatoes and a large diet Pepsi. Make that to go. Oh – and throw in a 3 bedroom bungalow with appliances and a finished basement too. I got home that evening and told my wife. She said “Cool!” Did I hit the jackpot with her or what? I remember…
I HATE Foreclosures
Pretty strong I know. But I do. I hate ’em. Now don’t get me wrong, I LOVE the real estate business. I LOVE looking at houses. I LOVE buying houses. And I LOVE renting houses. I just HATE foreclosure. I must confess that I’ve become spoiled. I realized that in spades this weekend. You see, since about August I have shifted my focus to looking at regular listings. No foreclosures. No HUD homes. None of…
After All the Volatility And All The Promise – All You Get Is A Measly 6.4%
12,463 13,264 Recognize those numbers? I know that some of you do. And those do should be fatally disappointed with them. Why? Because they represent the opening and closing Dow Jones Industrial Average numbers for 2007. 2007 opened at 12,463 2007 closed at 13,264 A whopping 801 point increase for the year. An increase of 6.4%. For the entire year. (But don’t feel so bad – the S&P 500 posted an increase of only 3.5%…
Are You a “Half Empty” or “Half Full” Type of Person?
A friend of mine emailed me last week with an article that forecast more bad news. And he, I think tongue in cheek, suggested that I must be doing cartwheels because the bad news for the housing market was great news to me. That got me thinking again about the power of perspective. You see, a great many of the historically grand fortunes in this country were made by people going against the grain. Buying when…
The Myth of “Win-Win”
I’m sure that you have seen the news reports out of Ohio during the last week. First one, then a second Federal Judge dismissed foreclosure proceedings because the lenders “failed to prove that they owned the properties they were trying to seizeâ€. That’s a complicated way of saying that the paperwork is screwed up. (If you’ve ever worked at a big company, you know that this is the rule not the exception.) More importantly though,…
Can You Afford to Lose Any MORE Ground?
This is the performance of your retirement account while you have been investing in the stock market over the last six months. Look familiar?  Take a closer look at the chart – over the last six months the market has been down – despite those huge peaks that you see. That means a negative ROI – and the fact that you probably lost money – and lost ground. Is this going to impact when you can…