There’s always something to howl about.

Month: December 2013 (page 1 of 1)

Want to be a better, more-perfect version of yourself? Master something difficult this year.

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You weren’t just cheated of an education when you were young, you were cheated out of the full awareness of your own humanity.Mait Jüriado / Foter.com / CC BY-NC-SA

I always love to read about the outrageously nefarious bad guys who are doing all the things we hate. Doesn’t matter who “we” are, since the bad guys afflicting every “we” are always blindingly brilliant, amazingly competent masterminds of evil.

I guess it’s useful to exaggerate your opposition, but here’s the thing:

Everyone I remember from school was a fuck-up.

Start with a good solid two-thirds compliant drones, dutifully going through whatever motions seemed to be required. Maybe half of the rest were glib and lazy. Even the straight-A apple-polishers were just phoning it in, doing the minimum necessary to get the grade from the glib-and-lazy grown-up teaching the class.

Am I misrepresenting the world of education? Is there anything you can think of that you did in school that you’re truly proud of now. Away from athletics or the school play, was there anything in your academic life that you gave everything you had? Was there anyone else who did that?

Was there any class that you took — ever — where you had to bust ass every day or risk get hopelessly lost? And when you got to that class, was that the end of your forward progress in that discipline?

The kids from the hard side of the quad — the maths, the sciences — know what I’m talking about. The kids from the soft side of the quad — the arts, the social sciences — may be recalling a graceless exit from the maths and sciences.

But the truth is that virtually all of us were denied the kind of education that was a matter of expected routine for our grandparents. Partly this is our fault: Too often we were grade-greedy glib-and-lazy fuck-ups. But mostly it was the fault of our teachers — and their teachers.

Were they outrageously nefarious bad guys, hell-bent on depriving us of a decent education? Were they blindingly brilliant, amazingly competent masterminds of evil, conspiring to enslave us in a state of Read more

How Are YOU Getting Real Estate Leads?

Let’s get back to it.

We’re all sitting around today, plotting and planning our strategies for 2014…

Writing down goals. Looking over our numbers, canceling the crap that aint working and signing up for stuff that might…

For me, (ever since I read MREA back in 2004) the modus o has always been “If I get a shitload of traffic, and generate a shitload of leads, and set them all up for some kind of semi-automated follow up, I’ll make more money.”

Guessing a lot of the folks reading this agree, though some of us have bigger “balls” then others and are willing to spend a lot more on lead gen then we do on food…

Right now my favorite way to generate leads is with dirty little Facebook ads that drive traffic to dirty little squeeze pages like this.

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How are you doing it?

(I’ll show you more about mine if you show me yours…)

Most Creative Loans We Funded in 2013

1- We funded a $900,000 Orange County purchase with just 6.5% down payment and no mortgage insurance

2- We funded an Orange County condo, with a VA loan, and got both the Master Association and Condo Association VA approved in 30 days

3- We funded a $600,000 San Diego County purchase, with just 5% down payment and a seller-carry back second mortgage and a conventional first mortgage.

4- We funded a 7-unit San Diego apartment property, $820,000 purchase price with just 10% down and a 20% seller-carry back second mortgage.

5- We funded an “underwater” property with loan values at 135% of the appraised value in Los Angeles County.