All Forum Posts by: JD Martin

 Right on the money. A good number of people I know think he is a despicable human being, but were unwilling to tolerate some of the craziness coming from the far left any more, including open borders, "pronouns", pregnant men, and other piles of nonsense. There's no sense of self awareness. Most people I know don't want to see decent working people trucked off to another country but they also don't want to see criminal enterprise around trafficking people. I think it's a good example of what happens when too many crazy ideologies start taking hold. Some of that stuff was just a good PR blitz but there was plenty of real stuff to latch onto.

 🤣🤣 I love it, those days feel like another lifetime really. Yes, you are right about the child labor laws imagine these days if people saw a 9 year old swinging a box cutter and carrying bundles of magazines almost as heavy as he was! I didn't get the benefit of hanging around guys who knew anything, the press guys were all blue collar stiffs that were going paycheck to paycheck and my father was making sales calls while I was in school so it was pretty rare I got to see those. One thing I did learn was how to talk to all different kinds of people from bums on the street to corporate presidents and everyone in between, which I think helped me later down the road as someone who was always kind of considered as relatable. Like you said RE is a people business and if you are uncomfortable with people you probably aren't going far.

 Jay I still have one of those books hanging around. The low interest rate in the book starts at 8% and goes up to 24%. Just to show how old the book is! 

My father used to run one of those Real Estate guides. My mother did the typesetting and he did most of the sales calls to the broker offices. We'd get them printed monthly and once a month would go to Newark to pick up truckloads of bundles of new books, which I then delivered to grocery stores, pharmacies, etc as my father pulled up in front of the stores. At 9 years old I could carry in 2 bundles, slice them open with a box cutter, pack the display stand, and collect the old previous month books in about 1-2 minutes maximum. We'd spend about 2 weeks delivering all the bundles and I was the "free" labor until I finally negotiated 10 cents a bundle from my old man. 

 You are entitled to receive a house back just as whole as you delivered it. A cheapo Walmart junk lock is not the same as a Kwikset (which is honestly not that good a lock anymore), and multiple keys is not the same as one key. So you are justified in either putting in new locks or having them rekeyed. She should have reported if/when the dishwasher went bad - what's wrong with it? Cleaning it comes out of the deposit. 

The main thing I see: don't assume that just because you think it's "popular" right now that you will see this kind of action going forward. You could have just caught the right breeze, or the low rates might have given you a spurt. The area might just be extra popular at this time. You have no way of knowing what your booking rate is going to look like going forward. When I bought my STR, a couple of months after I closed I was killing it with bookings. They were so good I was exceeding my own projections. Last year was back to earth; a glut of available properties drove the rates down for everyone and a drop in visitors also increased vacancies. I use the property myself, but if I couldn't afford to keep the place vacant all year long I'd have been in trouble.

My thoughts, in no real coherent order:

1. Most all of Trump's "policies" will eventually be demonstrated to be foolish nonsense. The people carrying out all of this chaos are boot-licking lackeys largely unqualified to run a fruit stand much less a government agency. 

2. That doesn't mean that addressing the underlying issues is unwarranted. Immigration surely needs to be fixed. Trade policies have been a train wreck for a lot of workers in the US and has also led to a lot of intellectual theft.

3. All of the "waste" that people are complaining about is someone's job. Economics is really nothing more complicated than the availability and velocity of money. Thinking that we can put the kabash on a lot of consumer spending (via layoffs, higher product spending through tariffs, etc) without any negative short-term economic effects is fairy-tale thinking.

4. The stack of problems faced at the federal level were created over many years, by both parties in conjunction with oligarchical interests and greedy individuals who wanted more cheap crap for less money. There's no short-term solution to any of this.

5. Like all empires the US will fall and be superceded by something else. I believe we're in the heady days watching it come apart and it is inevitable whether we like it or not. Roman citizens had no idea how bad things actually were until the city was being sacked by the Huns and Vandals. 

6. The level of federal debt we are accumulating is totally unsustainable and should scare the crap out of anyone younger than 40-50. Spending 15% of revenue on interest alone in a low-rate environment is horror-show stuff. 

7. Part of "our" (US) collective problem is that we spend a lot of our money on foolishness that has no long-term return. Building a bridge that improves commerce or drilling a new well to increase energy production is a positive ROI; lots of things we do in government AND in private enterprise is equivalent to the old "hookers and blow" line.

8. Interest rates are going to be forced to be reduced for several reasons, not least of which the housing market is essentially seizing up and it (with ancillary businesses) is a larger part of our GDP than many years ago when we had a significant manufacturing base, and the US needs housing to be active and healthy. Beyond that, the national debt is so atrocious that the federal government needs a low-rate environment to stay anywhere near above water; we can't afford to be issuing treasury notes at 3%, much less 5%. We need zero rates just to keep the national government from imploding.

9. A lot of economics is junk science. It depends heavily on past returns, which as we all know from our prospectii, "past performance is no guarantee of future returns". It also depends heavily on humans acting in predictable, rational ways, the complete antithesis of the human animal. I wouldn't put any faith in 100 economists agreeing on anything. Whether you think Trump's actions are great or they suck, we will only know the effect in the rear view mirror and anyone claiming otherwise (including Trump and his minions) is full of crap. All of us as investors know this inherently; we make investments based on our best information and guesses on how the vehicles we choose will pan out. If we have a lot of experience, or are lucky, we are usually right more than we are wrong (otherwise, we're probably broke) but we're not always right and we sometimes pick losers, or fail to pick the better winners. 

10. This may sound cold and uncaring, but so be it - the only thing I actually care about is whether or not the rent is in my bank account when it's supposed to be there. I can't control any of the rest of it, regardless of my feelings, so it's generally pointless to expend much time or energy on worrying about things outside of my sphere. I hate it for all the people that will be losing their jobs because of a jackass hatchet job, and I hate the chaos that is going to result, but we also kind of asked for it. We allowed ne'er do well politicians to sell a lot of the country down the river by convincing us that we were just going to serve each other appletinis and let the Chinese make all our stuff, and we'd all be the better for it. Under the guise of "free trade" we let the Chinese blackmail our corporations into doing business there if they gave up their intellectual properties. We all decided we'd rather buy cheaper junk overseas stuff than more expensive US made items for many years until there weren't any US made items to buy, just so we could each have 10 more widgets each. 

Regardless of what happens with this administration there are always opportunities everywhere, if you just keep your eyes open. Sometimes the opportunities are rental houses and private lending. Sometimes the opportunities are bug-out packs and water filtration devices and bullets. Americans might be nice people but we (collectively) are lazy and soft. We haven't known "hardship" in 75 years and have had the comfort of oceans insulating us from the troubles most of the rest of the world confronts regularly. I served in the US Navy and our poorest people in the US live better than 75% of the rest of the world; the most menial slobs here today live better than kings lived 100 years ago. People are "mad" about egg prices and not being able to just schlep down the street to get some manufacturing job they think they're entitled to because daddy and grandaddy worked it, but they don't mind walking around with $1500 Apple phones and having $750 car payments. A couple of weeks ago one of the doo-gooder organizations around here had a food drive and cars were lined up for 7 or 8 hours, miles down the street. I drove along the road going the opposite way and 90% of the cars in the line were way nicer and more expensive than my old econobox Kia. They're either liars in needing the food, or have their priorities so screwed up they need to wait in 8 hour lines in $50k cars for a $100 box of food. 

I get the whole appeal of the Trump approach - burn the whole thing to the ground and regenerate the forest. Unfortunately the group of them in charge of doing it are a bunch of clowns, shysters and con-men. I have no idea how it will play out, but I feel reasonably confident that I can keep enough wealth to keep me and mine going until I'm dead and as Kenny Rogers said "the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep". 

Just based on the info you provided I would take the loss and move on. You really have too many things working against you on this particular property. Money is not your only resource, so is time and energy. From what you posted this is going to take a decent amount of all to make an already unprofitable property just a little less unprofitable. That's not really a winning strategy. 

Remember what Kenny Rogers told you - you got to know when to fold em, know when to walk away. 

 Hahaha that is a great story! Besides, Lorrie Morgan was no Patty Loveless or even Pam Tillis :P  And I liked her husband better anyway; frankly, if he hadn't died I don't think anyone would even know who Lorrie Morgan is. 

 The states that I know require you to try to mitigate your damages if a tenant breaks a lease early. That means that unless your state allows you to just keep their money you have to try to re-rent the house. We have an early termination setup that we use to avoid these kinds of issues. They pay a fee and go on their merry way. Easy and clean for everyone.