All Forum Posts by: Account Closed

Check out Disclosure Quest.  It's not a perfect solution, but it's the best one I've found so far.  Their related site is Crowdfund Insider which tries to cover the news and trends.

Regardless of your chronological age, one strategy to consider is being perceived as the dumbest person in the room so others will ignore you. One of my neighbors said his CEO visited the local office recently for a networking dinner with a dozen employees. The CEO said almost nothing the entire evening. When my neighbor asked him about it, the CEO said he learned more by listening while others did the talking.

Experienced-based maturity rather than chronological age might be the better metric. Napoleon Hill (Think and Grow Rich) said every adversity, every failure, every heartache carries with it the seed of an equal or greater benefit. Those who've been there and done that are in a good position to assess others when quietly developing their A, B, and C candidate lists of who to consider doing business with in the future.

My lease says I have to give a 60-day notice to move out ("buy back my lease") or non-renew (a non-renewal automatically turns into MTM at $200 more per month). The lease also says my landlord has to give me a 60-day notice if it wants me to move out after the lease ends and doesn't want me there on a MTM.

• HOT MARKET (corner-case scenario #1): I give a 60-day notice, pay all the money I own (2 months rent), turn in the keys, and move out the same day. The next day, the landlord finds another tenant who moves in and starts paying rent. The landlord collects double the rent for two months.
• COLD MARKET (corner-case scenario #2): Same as #1, except the landlord takes many months to find a replacement tenant. The landlord doesn't collect rent for those many months except for the two months it collected rent from me.

This is a risk management issue on everyone's part. I'll be moving out sometime in the next couple of years after I figure out where I want buy a home here and I put the two months of move-out expense in a savings account already. This money is the cost of doing business in a capitalist economy. I have no idea what the landlord is doing with regards to potential future vacancies, but someone on its staff gets paid to figure it out.

Ask a New Yorker how to get to Carnegie Hall and the answer is practice, practice, practice.

Ask a BiggerPockets member how to build wealth and the answer is execute, execute, execute.

The same mindset existed back in the late 1960s when it was known as the hippie movement among my youthful generation. "Peace and free love" turned out to be not so peaceful and free when the real world finally took over and people needed jobs to support themselves.

When someone has health or religious reasons for being unable to eat the type of food served at a restaurant, tell management you want to pay for a meal and explain why they don't have to go to the expense of preparing it for you.

I've never tried this myself, but I'm told you can cut your toilet paper expenses in half simply by using both sides. 😜

I've learned the best way to learn how to invest is when I had no money to invest. That way, I couldn't make the stupid rookie mistakes rookies tend to make. To earn while I learn, the return on paying down debt is the interest rate on the debt. To paper-trade stocks, for example, set up an imaginary portfolio on Yahoo Finance and watch it.

To get in the right mindset, consider putting a small portion of these extra funds into a linked savings account (you can get a 2% rate of interest currently in a high-yield savings account). Then when you're out of debt in a couple of years, you'll have a placeholder balance in place as a launch point for your investing program. You'll also have the real estate insight you've picked up from two years of following BiggerPockets and local networking.

While it's true a seasoned investor would know how to generate passive income using good debt to pay off bad debt, rookies usually don't have this kind of know-how when starting out. Getting into debt (good or bad) is easy, while getting out of debt (especially bad debt) is hard. Good debt can quickly become bad debt when mistakes are made.

When my new landlord took over last year, my existing lease was honored.  My lease comes up for renewal soon and they want me to stay.  My rent increase is less than 1% if I let them know right away.  Otherwise, it might go up if I dawdle.

I don't know if this is frugal or practical, but I use the small cardboard boxes with my packets of instant oatmeal as trash receptacles and plastic cereal bags as their liners. I put this stuff in the plastic bags I use for my fruits to create the trash bag I put in the dumpster. My budget loves me, the environment loves me, and the landlord's maintenance staff gets a good chuckle out of it whenever they see me do this.

I bring my own grocery bags to the store. In California, stores where I lived had to charge a per-bag fee when I didn't bring my own bags (Florida outlawed this practice). I use the back of junk mail letters and paper receipts as scratch paper. I get e-receipts and e-statements whenever possible to cut down on tree harvesting. Trees are better used to recycle my carbon dioxide exhales back into oxygen.

I'm not a West coast tree-hugging liberal. I'm a rural Upstate New York "Agro American" who learned conservation from my parents and from the 4-H Club when I was growing up. Why pay for new stuff when I can easily repurpose existing stuff I'm going to throw out anyway?

As far as eating at a fancy restaurant, I don't anymore. But when I've done so in the past, I choose items from the menu. I realize the establishment has to make money to stay in business. I don't use a doggie bag either. If it's on my plate, I eat it while I'm there. I learned how to do this when I went off to college and had to pay for my meals with my own money. Food garnishes (lettuce, tomatoes, whatever) can be converted into great salads.