But there are some big moves coming into the city (medical mart / convention center, aquarium by a private investor, guy from iron chef just opened up a shop) and the house is a few houses down from the house on the movie "A Christmas Story".

The fact is that too many small business owners are really doing nothing more than creating jobs for themselves; they are not creating anything of true economic value.By that I mean let's say someone invests $400,000 in a donut shop and their target return is 10% on their capital.

Do you always want to work for a big shop or do you want to own the shop?

.$3000 should be plenty...if you get bids for more than that shop around...

I'll add a couple of examples I found helpful, the first chapter is called The Broken Window. when a rock is thrown through a window, some people go on and on how this is wonderful, this creates work for someone to fix the window, but in reality, if the window hadn't been broken the owner of the shop would have bought a new suit instead, and created work for a tailor, and had both a new suit and a window, not just a window. but no one ever saw the suit because it never came into existence because the owner of the shop had to use his limited resources to buy a window. but everyone can see the window and the job "created" by it so they are fooled into thinking a job was created and a window was brought into existence and that this was productive.the second chapter, creating jobs for the sake of job creation is really just moving jobs around, and usually the market not the government can best decide what people actually want and need.

In order to fully take advantage of this, shop around.

We're in escrow on a nice one built in 1997 in a great rental neighborhood (jobs, shopping, commuting, ethnically diverse) in Indianapolis

Your local hardware shop should be able to do it.

Basically, back in the day, the self esteem of the individual borrower determined the deal they got, since the MLO could just tack a pre-payment penalty, make it an ARM, bump the rate, etc, and get paid more for every little "feature" they shoved in (so if the 'true' rate bump for your 680 FICO was 0.25%, they'd bump it 0.75% and get paid more for the 0.5% difference... in this world loan shopping obviously made a huge difference).

Most experienced mid to large size shops have a fairly large geographical footprint which gives diversification opportunities to their clients.