All Forum Posts by: Jim K.

@Marcus Auerbach

Well, the basic are pretty simple. I left Greece in 2007, just before the bottom fell out of the Greek economy, came to the USA and married a Russian/Ukrainian immigrant in 2012. Steady investing from 2012-2022 and the Russian invasion of Ukraine.

We've seen crazy things from two of the greatest internal economic and political failures in the history of Europe. Thank God, we've been insulated from them because we live in the States, but that doesn't mean that they haven't happened to our closest friends, our families, to people we know and respect.

For us, it's impossible to overstate the security implications of seeking financial independence. I'm sure you've read my posts against the idea of investing in cryptocurrency and thinking that when the time comes to crush Bitcoin, governments will play fair. My wife and I have a privileged perspective on what governments in turmoil will do, one that includes technocratic appointed governments, capital controls, selective forced military service, and refugee crises.

We feel the same way about giving our money away. If you actually care about anything and you think a government is going to realistically do something useful about it, you'll be wrong at least eight times out of ten. In my case, it's the English-language education of the children of Greece. We plan on donating everything we own to a professional organization that I was once a board member of, one dedicated to improving English-language educational outcomes in Greece. A few million dollars in the right place, structured the right way, will go a long way to upping professional teaching standards in the ranks of Greek English-language instructors.

We are in this so that generations will benefit from what we do. There are only so many times you can turn your head away from children just like you were without the privileges of your birth being completely screwed over, being stamped defective, second-class citizens of Europe, before you realize that making this better is a useful thing to do with your life.

Riding an ebike to do many of my rounds is not being fake humble, although it would appease my heightened instincts for self-preservation. I believe it aligns with my values, and that makes me happy. Spending money on a hot car to impress my neighbors in a place like where I live and operate (just south of Pittsburgh in the Homestead area) is frankly laughable, if you know anything about Homestead, PA. I actually live in a duplex built for an heiress and remodeled by yours truly: I really can't complain about the accommodations. We have no children and my wife is now retired and also working in our business.

Don't get me wrong, I'm as vain as the next guy. But after the things I've seen, I know spending more money on fun stuff for myself will never make me happier. I grew up in poverty and then decided to become a humanities grad student: money was never important of and by itself for me. On the other hand, my brother studied computer science and has consistently used whatever money he's made to buy hotter cars and live in larger houses. Good for him, I understand why. But for me, I need two vacations a year and that's about the only thing we spend any significant amount of our money on outside our business.

I kind of suck at counting cash, too, come to think of it.

I got into it to be able to give a lot of money away. Hopefully one of these days I'll tell my story on the Money Podcast. When I was young, I thought had the luxury of picking my own battles and fighting them in my own way. I know now that some battles find you and you just can't live with yourself if you don't fight them.

I long ago came to terms with the fact that I, unlike most people, didn't get into real estate to be able to afford things. I am also a pretty good handyman like you, which I didn't have to mention back in the days when this website had a DIY forum. All the same, I don't routinely carry enough tools in toolbags big enough in th SUv we use for rounds to solve every problem I have the tools to solve. Usually, my tool job boxes and cases are at whatever local project house we're renovating, and I get my tools together for maintenance jobs there. The first time I go look at a reported maintenance problem, I'm not usually carrying more than a backpack worth of tools and equipment, which I can take with me on the ebike.

When a tenant thinks you own multiple houses, you're pretty much OK. It's when they know you own multiple apartment buildings, I've found, that they start to have stranger and stranger opinions. Especially multiple affordable-housing apartment buildings.

 That's a big part of operating in Pittsburgh, too. I've avoided most of it but not all. The really big difference comes when you start buying and operating multifamily with commercial loans. Your tenant who lives in the same duplex as you so simply will never look at you the same as the tenant who lives in your multifamily.

If I wanted a small scooter I'd get one. The bike appeals to me in a way a scooter does not.

 Food for thought, JD. Thank you.

One of the things I learned early in this business is that the best thing to seen as by tenants is as a capable yet non-threatening entity. I actually learned it from my experiences as a tenant myself, in college and grad-school rental housing. There nothing more annoying than a landlord who doesn't follow the well-known "covenant of quiet enjoyment," which means that under normal circumstances a landlord should always give a tenant 24 hours of notice before he shows up and bangs on the door. Add to that a landlord who shows up driving a flashy car and dressed to the nines, and you have a clear starter recipe for rental nonpayment problems and a bag of concrete flushed down the toilet as a parting gift by an evicted tenant. The disrespectful, uncaring, arrogant, and contemptuous landlord always gets his in the end, one way or another.

So early on in my rental property business, I formulated "Jim's Law," and I have lived by it successfully since. If you are anywhere that your tenants could possibly see you out and about, you must never out-dress, out-drive, or out-crib them. Living in a very modest home compared to your net worth is more important in some places than others, I suppose, but I live within four or five miles of almost all my tenants and my county's website clearly gives the location of where their tax and sewer bills are sent, so unless I invest in a post office box and an LLC, I shouldn't live in a McMansion with a lawyer foyer, a garage mahal, and a turret.

If you want to wear nice shoes, designer clothing, or lots of jewelry, go on vacation in another country. Rent a hot car at their airport. Tell everyone you own four times more rentals than you do and they're eight times more profitable than they actually are. Hell, everyone else is doing it.

But my question to the community today has to do with e-bikes and bicycles. I've found myself absolutely intrigued by the idea of getting around this town on an ebike. Has anyone ever tried this and had it backfire on them?

@Scott Trench, the former CEO of this website, tells an amazing story of riding his bike to work and being accosted by a Ford F-150 driver who automatically assumes Trench is poor because he's on a bike. Has anyone else had things like this happen to them, especially as a landlord/property manager working with tenants? I'd love to hear your stories.

Oh, it's time, Scotty. Hate to see you go, glad to know you're riding off into the sunset. You certainly helped change my life. And I still want to do the Money Podcast eventually and try to explain the connections between radical political instability and personal financial independence, from the perspective of having a family caught in the Greek debt crisis.

Andy, some times you just can't win. Some people are just prone to self-destructive cycles, and they just can't find a way. It's six more months, and that's all she wrote. At least this isn't COVID, when so many of us were forced to house tenant-parasites for so many months.