All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

I just renewed my lease. I chose the maximum length made available to me (13 months) instead of renewing what I'm doing now (12 months). The lower rent savings for me was $1 a month. I chose this longer term because I have one more month of certainty in my cashflow spreadsheet. If I had done nothing, my current lease would have become MTM at $200 a month more. At some point over the next two or three years, I'll buy a house and move out. By renewing as I did, I kicked the can down the road for another year or so. The landlord (which is a corporate entity with thousands of doors in several states) gets a tenant it likes for another 13 months. When I decide to move, I can buy back my lease for 2 months worth of rent. Relative to the $200 a month extra for MTM, leasing long term means 10 months or so is the breakeven point. If I plan to stay longer than 10 months, it's cheaper for me to sign the longer lease and buy it back if my plans change.

FYI -- I agree no action can be taken for another year because the current lease has to run its course. But for me, I like to play "what if" games with my cashflow spreadsheet for both my household and investing budgets. I must make sure I don't count my chickens before they hatch, but I have no problem running the potential numbers under scenarios of how many of my chickens might hatch. I stress-test my budgets this way so I can take precautionary measures ahead of time.

A competitor is charging more money for his product than you are charging for your product. Are you underpricing your product? Or is your competitor overpricing his product? Are there other rentals in the area to serve as a yardstick? For example, calculating the average or median rent of several rentals similar to yours might provide good guidance for the rent you could charge at renewal. As a judgement call, you can always charge less than your calculated number if you choose to do so because finding a replacement tenant can be costly.

All of the above. I played the Cashflow game around 50 times over a 4-year period back in the 2000s (mostly Cashflow 101, but some Cashflow 202) and learned a lot. While the game is good, it's even better when you use it in conjunction with the resources on BiggerPockets and other places ("always get a second opinion").

A real estate investor in the area held monthly Cashflow parties at her home once a month. Today, some real estate Meetups use the game as a way for real estate professionals to network with those interested in real estate investing. Depending on your mood at game time, you can play the game aggressively (take bigger deals earlier than you should) or conservatively (stay with smaller deals longer than you should) to contrast your various outcomes using play money rather than real money.

Once I know what I'm doing, I prefer online. But when I do something for the first time, I usually need hand-holding to answer the silly kinds of questions newbies have and get me through the details. What I don't like about phone trees is determining which category my question falls in. I call only when I can't find the answer online. Instead of trying to figure out whether I need to press 2 or 3, for example, I just wait for an operator to come on the line.

When I was doing my door-to-door training (the Cutco knife division of WearEver Aluminum in those days), the sales manager told us if he didn't speak to the car sales person for at least 2 hours, he knew he paid too much. I went to the store to buy a vacuum cleaner back then and I felt cheated when the sales person didn't try to sell me on one particular model over another (nor did she ask me qualifying questions about why I needed a vacuum cleaner). Instead, she pointed to a wall with half a dozen models on display and asked me which one I wanted to buy.

I hate to haggle or make trade-off decisions about which model and options I want (I usually default to the lowest price when faced with a decision to make). The reason I bought a Saturn many years ago is the no-haggle guarantee. Here's the price, take it or leave it. Henry Ford was on to something when he said you could have any color you wanted as long as it was black.

I love it when my landlord says the rent is due on the first of the month and late fees kick in on the fifth of the month (no exceptions for weekends or holidays). I have a stake I can drive in the ground for planning the rest of my life around. I never have a conflict with my rent payment. If I happened to be short on cash (which I'm not anymore), it's my other expenses that would have the conflict.

I agree news isn't news anymore (but profits are still profits when "media companies" make money). I yearn for the day when Walter Cronkite gave the news because I knew it was credible. Today, the "news" often comes from content farms staffed by AI robots. I'm amazed cars and real estate can even be sold online. In the old days, you needed people who knew how to close a sale to make a sale (my failed attempt at door-to-door selling). We live in a new world order now. 

The beauty of buying a home in the SF Bay Area historically is if you eventually sell it and move to an area with a lower cost of living, the "dead equity" in your SF Bay Area home becomes liquid equity you can use for other purposes.

Past performance is no guarantee of future results. There are several significant earthquake faults in the SF Bay Area and the slippage of any one of them could put a damper on home price appreciation there for a period of time. Half a century ago, Detroit was the place to be when Motown ruled the world of automobiles. Then the world changed. But Detroit might still be the place to go today if you want to buy real estate at rock-bottom prices.

According to the book Investing the Templeton Way, people who bought farmland on the courthouse steps at the depth of The Great Depression for the 50 cents of back taxes the farmer couldn't afford to pay made out well in the decades after The Great Depression. They had to be patient, however, because it literally took decades for the wheels of progress to reach the land they owned.

The takeaway is cash is king when you have it and the people who need it don't have it. You can buy quality assets from motivated sellers at rock-bottom prices.

I'm starting to believe media companies (content providers) are a recession-proof industry. It doesn't matter if the news is true or false. What matters is the advertising dollars follow the eyeballs no matter where they go. Fortunately, I own shares of Microsoft (the parent company of MSN), which is a Dividend Achiever.

The media was saying the same thing about the Boomers in the 1970s as they are saying about the Millennials today. The generation of pot-smoking hippies would never afford a house, much less anything else. By the 1980s, some Boomers had morphed into Yuppies (Young Urban Professional: a young person with a well-paid job and a fashionable lifestyle) and became the target of Madison Avenue. Today, some Millennials are apparently morphing into Muppies.

Whether the news is real or fake, however, it never changes. The issues the nonconformist Steve Jobs discussed on Nightline in 1981 are still with us today more or less. What has changed is we now have online forums such as BiggerPockets where people interested in a topic (wealth-building with real estate) can exchange ideas. The world is speeding up and change is happening at a faster rate.

California Home Prices Are Soaring. Here’s Why

Dream big. Aspirational goals are what drive us forward (read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill). But keep your feet on the ground and move towards your goals one step at a time. For example, while you are building your practice, take advantage of everything BiggerPockets has to offer. Open a high-yield savings account (currently paying a 2% rate of interest) and set aside an amount (even if it's only a token amount) of money into your "Real Estate Empire" account. If you feel the urge to invest in stocks, set up an imaginary portfolio on Yahoo Finance and watch it. Your learning will start when you realize how much money you didn't lose because you only used imaginary money.

When I was growing up, I was going to be the next Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. It didn't work out that way, but I did manage to make it through engineering school (I was the first in my family to go to college and had to be my own role model). I have many aspirational investing goals as a retiree. I opened several accounts and funded them with placeholder money until I can get up to speed and intensify my efforts with larger amounts of money. For example, I'm interested in crowdfunding and am toe-dipping cautiously into this domain. Whether I win or lose on what I've done so far will not move the needle on my net worth. But I'm learning about this new domain made possible by the JOBS Act of 2012.