All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

You might have to get the city to create a new address for the garage apartment.

I worked for a company that moved to new quarters. The new quarters were a series of strip-mall properties (998 Main Street, 996 Main Street, and so forth), but the landlord called them 1000 Main Street in the paperwork because the walls between them were removed to make room for our company. The USPS wouldn't deliver mail until the city created the address 1000 Main Street, which took a city council vote.

I lived in a city where splitting a property into multiple addresses required an environmental impact report (more traffic, more parking, more occupancy, zoning issues, and so forth). City government got involved in the details.

Do you have a faculty adviser? (I did when I went to school.)

Tell you adviser you're interested in exploring real estate (keep it vague at first) and ask for advice. Interview for information, not for a job or for financing. One thing will lead to another eventually.

@Nathan G.

Does an insurance company ever deny a renter coverage? If so, it might be an additional screening tool. On the other hand, if the insurance company rubber stamps all applications (once the premium is paid), then renters insurance doesn't provide any additional insight about the renter's character.

Homeowners insurance can be denied (or made prohibitively expensive) if the homeowner files too many claims or fails to fix certain issues (mostly safety related).

My landlord requires renters insurance on a take it or leave it basis. Either I supplied a copy of the policy (emailed by the insurance company) or my lease didn't get renewed.

@Cameron Riley

I'm the type of person who avoids conflict. When someone does something like this to me when I'm looking for a job, they've told me by their actions rather than their words I don't want to work at their company. If I'm already working at a company and I sense something isn't quite right, I start getting ready to vote with my feet by updating my resume and getting my prospect list of potential employers ready. When a company wants to get rid of someone, they "keep book" and since no one is perfect, there is always something they can find to justify their actions.

When I had a problem with a noisy neighbor after I first moved in to my present apartment, I tried to fix it by talking to the neighbor (on the recommendation of the rental office). The neighbor told me since he wasn't trying to upset me with his loud stereo at midnight, it wasn't his problem if I got upset by it. It took me a year to "keep book" on this guy and I also gave myself a Plan B deadline by which the problem had to be resolved or I would move. I ended up staying and the landlord didn't renew his lease (they needed independent third-party verification of the problem).

The lifelong lesson I learned is to have Plan B and Plan C backups to every Plan A, especially when it comes to putting food on the table and having a roof over my head. I started out life less jaded, but reality is reality. Perhaps my mistake was not applying to work at Apple when it was still a young company (Young Steve Jobs on how to hire, manage, and lead people), but even Steve Jobs had to leave Apple and wander in the desert for many years before returning to bring the company back from the brink of bankruptcy in the late 1990s. His techniques were controversial. People either loved him for being a genius or hated him for being a jerk.

My task now is to blaze my own trail rather than piggybacking on someone else's vision and hard work. 

Google "suicide cleanup service" because property owners and managers have to deal with this harsh reality of human nature sometimes.

Back in the 1970s, I was a volunteer at a crisis intervention hotline (non-professional with a few hours of training by the real professionals). Most people who called where going through a temporary rough patch in their life (divorce, breakup, layoff, death of a loved one, and so forth) and simply needed an anonymous, non-judgmental ear on the other end of the phone to talk to ("active listening"). But sometimes more was needed and we had a pre-approved list of referral services we could provide to a caller (phone numbers and street addresses in those days). The Suicide Prevention Center was easy to find in the phone book because its listing came right after Suicide Cleanup Service.

I eventually stopped doing this volunteer work because of burnout. It felt good helping people at first (and it made me realize I wasn't the only "crazy person" out there), but after a while, the callers would change while the topics didn't. It seemed like I was trying to push a string up a hill and getting nowhere. I finally decided I was better able to serve the community by getting out of the way and letting others more qualified than myself answer the phones.

What I learned as an active listener, however, has helped me in other areas of life. Sometimes it's better just to listen and let others do the talking. My realtor is good at this. She quietly listened to me when I wanted to buy my house and again when I wanted to sell my house. She asked intelligent follow-on questions, which told me she was actively listening to me and trying to understand my house buy-sell needs so she could meet them (which she did).

Porch cams are inexpensive and installed throughout the neighborhood where I lived in San Jose, California. One video was posted on Nextdoor of a middle-aged woman walking with a baby stroller mid-day in a safe neighborhood. She walked down someone's walkway and was recorded removing mail from the house's mailbox and putting it in the baby stroller.

People behave differently when they know they are being watched. Years ago, people were misbehaving on the Santa Clara County Transit buses. Cameras were installed above the driver to monitor the passenger section (this was before they were so readily available on Amazon). According to the San Jose Mercury News, the misbehavior dropped significantly.

If you decide to install cameras, consider registering them with Crime Reports. It saves the local police the time and hassle of getting a search warrant to review your camera recordings (you've given them permission to do so ahead of time). Many participating agencies provide promotional material such as window stickers and signs you can display.

Security cameras don't completely prevent crime. Local news stories show videos of store robberies and then ask the pubic to provide tips. What I don't know is how to calculate how many robberies were deterred because the would-be robber didn't want to risk getting caught. I wonder if insurance companies offer a discount when the property has cameras?

The easiest way to find out if you can be preapproved for a loan is to call the bank and ask. The joke for entrepreneurs is if you don't know how to get turned down for a loan by a bank, you probably shouldn't consider going into business for yourself.

For a full-time engineering job, you will likely be on salary and classified as "exempt" for purposes of determining whether you are eligible for overtime ("nonexempt" workers have to paid overtime, while "exempt" workers do not). You will be paid for 40 hours of work a week whether you actually work 20 hours or 60 hours a week. In slow economic times when the economy is soft, your employer might have only 20 hours of work a week for you to do, while the opposite is true during boom economic times.

What's the catch? From my experience as an exempt employee, 20-hour work weeks do not exist. When times are that slow, two people get laid off and a third employee gets to work 60 hours a week (for 40 hours a week of salary). In the aftermath of The Great Recession, for example, several engineers at the company where I was contracting were joking they were working only half time because they only worked 12 hours a day for 6 or 7 days a week (and getting paid for 40 hours a week, perfectly legal in terms of the labor laws). The engineers put up with it because jobs in Silicon Valley were hard to get after The Great Recession. I know many of these engineers are retired now (F.I.R.E.) because the pressures were intense.

If you expect to make good money by working full time in a professional job, you can. If you plan on using your spare time to get into real estate, you can. You just have to hustle. Live below your means and start building your cash reserves (and pay down or off any debts, such as student loans). You want to establish a good (high) credit score. The Mr. Money Mustache site has some wonderful suggestions for how you can F.I.R.E. and do other things with your life besides working long hours for The Man. 

I should have provided more context and provided a takeaway.

The theme of this thread is how to say NO gracefully to avoid hurting the applicant's feelings and avoid any negative PR if the rejected applicant goes viral with the story or decides to sue claiming discrimination. Saying "the vacancy had been filled" has been suggested (because it's neutral) rather than providing a specific reason (credit score, background check, whatever).

My post was an attempt to point out job applicants face similar politically-correct rejections. But if the job continues to be advertised (or the rental continues to be advertised), someone is going to notice. Career columns back in the day suggested to do what I did in that situation to call attention to the practice. "The vacancy has been filled" or "another applicant has accepted the job" is a neutral way to get around anti-discrimination laws.

Age discrimination is an issue in Corporate America. At one networking event, a 40-something told of a job interview where after a round of interviews with the hiring department, the young HR trainee told him they couldn't hire him because he was too old. The senior HR trainer who was outside the room, but listening in on the conversation, immediately stormed in to say the company doesn't discriminate on age. Instead, she said they couldn't hire him because "he wasn't a good fit." I can understand from group dynamics the importance of having a good fit among the team members. At the same time, this need for a "good fit" can be used to mask discrimination because the reason will likely hold up in court.

No matter what the laws are on the books, American Ingenuity has ways of getting around many of them ("loopholes").

My takeaway: Accumulating enough income-producing assets makes F.I.R.E. possible. All of the "silly crap" that occurs in life makes F.I.R.E. necessary.

It used to irk me back in the day when I got a letter a couple of days after a job interview with a prospective employer saying the job had been filled by another applicant, and the job ad continued to run in the newspaper. One time, I sent polite followup letters to both the hiring manager who interviewed me and HR department (which didn't) thanking them for the interview. I mentioned in my letter the rejection letter I had received ("I notice you hired another applicant") and the fact the job ad continued to appear in the newspaper. Soon afterwards, the job ad continued, but the name of the hiring manager named in the ad had changed. I don't know if that hiring manager was with the company anymore, but the company at least had made a personnel change.