There’s always something to howl about.

Month: December 2009 (page 3 of 5)

One Turtle Dove

The Glass Ceiling

I remember the moment I decided to stop wearing a suit and tie in public—forever. It was a couple days before Christmas and I dropped by the K-Mart to pick up a punch bowl for the office party.  I was looming  in Housewares when an elderly woman approached me with a fistful of coupons.  Alvin and the Chipmunks were singing that insidious song through the sound system.

“I want to file a complaint.”  She said.

“I don’t work here.”  Me.

“You’re not the manager?”  She asked,  insistent.

“No. I’m not the manager.”  I replied, perhaps a little snippy.

She glared up at me like…well…like I was lying.  More than anything, I hate being implicated in an aspersion when I’m innocent. I’d rather receive three french hens every day for a year from someone I don’t truly love than be deemed a liar (unless of course, I actually am, in which case, I will simply deny until totally boxed in).

“This is an Italian suit,  lady. You need to find someone with a name tag,”  I continued, perhaps a little prideful.

“That lady over there said to ask  you. That you were a manager.” She pressed.

We turned our attention to a  squat woman in a burka, a rare sight in Richmond, Virginia in those days.

“That lady over there doesn’t speak English.”  Me, perhaps a little too loud.

“I speak better English than you,” the lady yelled back across the aisle.  “I speak five languages. How many you speak?”

Oh yeah.  One of  those days.  A blue light siren began twirling above my head and something inaudible was announced over the speakers, interrupting  the chipmunk falsetto drone. I froze as a wave of shoppers began scurrying  in our direction; something about cutlery.

“You don’t have this Foot Soaker in stock.”  The elderly lady shoved a coupon under my nose as the herd surrounded us.

“I know I don’t, ma’am…Because…. I. Don’t. Work.  Here.”  Me.

“She deserves a rain check,”  Burka lady. “It’s false advertising if you don’t. Bait and switch.”

“Yes. Bait and switch,”  Elderly lady.

Bait and Switch!”  Somebody yelled from the mob. “Bait and Switch….

About that time an employee approached me and ask Read more

VA Condominium Complex Approvals: Navigating the Maze of Paperwork

We helped to secure a lot of VA condominium complex approvals in 2009.    The VA Regional Home Loan Center-Phoenix is one of the best government agencies with whom I’ve had the pleasure to work.  The folks working there are professional and committed.  It helps that they know that we do our homework prior to submission for a condominium complex approval.

Sometimes, the system breaks down. My goal today is to explain how better to manage the process, for all parties involved.

The key component to the VA condominium complex approval is the Attorney’s Opinion Letter.  Essentially, the VA relies on the expertise of an independent attorney to evaluate the condominium documents and offer an opinion as to whether or not those documents comply with the VA regulations.  An attorney opinion letter is NOT a requirement for the submission package but attempting this without one is not recommended.  While it adds another layer of cost to the approval process, the result is a greatly reduced examination time at the VA.

The document checklist is available in Chapter 16 of the VA Lender’s Handbook.  Specifically, the table of required documents is available on page 16A.03.    I suggest that the loan originator AND both real estate agents AND the escrow officer review this table as soon as an agreement of sale is executed.  At first glance, the list appears to be ominous (lots of dead trees).  Upon more careful scrutiny, it is plain to see that only 5-6 documents are required; the other 20 or so are only required IF AVAILABLE.  The VA condominium complex requirements then are almost identical to what would be required for an FHA or conventional loan.

Still, the required documents are the required documents.  Failure to provide those documents can result in lengthy delays.  The reason is not because of the process, it is because of “trust”.  The VA trusts the attorney to properly vet those documents, the attorney trusts the lender to properly organize those documents, and the lender trusts the escrow officer and title officer to properly provide those documents in an expeditious manner.

Simply put, if you show that “you Read more

Next year we’re going to splurge — maybe — starting with the twenty-first thousand dollars for the month

Here’s my favorite Christmas card this year:

I helped Stephen and Suzanne Kranick buy that house in the weeks before Thanksgiving. I think it’s cool that they love it so much that they made it the star of their holiday card.

I put two houses into escrow today. I’ve done that before, but Cathleen and I are both packing transactions into January at a nice pace. I’m still holding out hopes for one more all-cash deal in December, but the calendar is turning on me day-by-day.

But here’s the thing: The pace we’re on right now puts us at $20,000 gross commission income a month for 2010. I’m sure that sounds like a lot of money to anyone who is not in the real estate business, but it ain’t. But our marketing costs are where they’ve always been — very low — so we’re right on the cusp of proving the claim I’ve been making here for coming on four years: It is possible to do this job without spending fifty cents on the dollar for client acquisition and without feeding a vast cadre of useless eaters.

It’s plausible to me that we could be at $40,000 a month by the third quarter, and from there it’s not a huge jump to seven figures, GCI, per annum.

But: Meanwhile: We are cheap bastards. We never hesitate to spend whatever it takes on mission critical tools, and that will always be the case. But we have been very tight on every discretionary expenditure for a long, long time. And as much as business has sucked over the past four years, it is being tight that has gotten us through the worst of it. A lot of Realtors didn’t make it, as we all know.

So: Cathy just had her birthday, and from me she got a 2 gigabyte memory upgrade for her iMac. So romantic…

But, even so, we can foresee that we are going to have a little money for luxuries in the coming year, and the question plaguing me has been how to manage that kind of spending without going crazy on the upside, as it were.

Here’s Read more

Looking for reasons to be cheerful this Christmas? Thanks to the free market, everything is better than it was when you were a kid

From Reason.TV:

It’s worth thinking about as statists strive to destroy innovation in medicine (via Obamacare) and industry and transportation (via environmentalism). If it gratifies you to weep about how bad things are, compare the America of your youth to the police states of Communist Europe in that same epoch. Whatever complaints you might have with liberty, things could be — and will be — a lot worse when you have unleashed the leviathan state on every aspect of your life.

Christmas and Natasha – only in America

2009 has changed me. It has been a year of struggle, victory, and in the end… of complete thankfulness for all of the good things that I have in life. Living in America is one of those good things. Living with a family that loves me unconditionally is another. One of the lessons that I learned from this last year was to redouble my efforts to pay it forward and to give back.

I received an email last Sunday night from my friend Nancy Schafer that her efforts to host a child from an orphanage in the Ukraine had paid off and that 11 year old Natasha would be flying here on the 16th of December for an 18 day stay and hopefully to find an adoptive home here in the USA.

My mind raced back to my own family and then directly back to Greg’s Ramblin Gamblin Willy story about Anastasia. I am not a guy that likes Latin much and this to date was my favorite post that Greg has written. If you have not read it yet, please do. If you have, it is worth another read.

“Do your worst. I will not kneel.” has become a mantra that has stayed with me. And now when I thought of an 11 year old flying over 24 hours straight with no parents to meet an unknown person (as great and kind as I know Nancy is, she is an unknown to Natasha) I knew that I must try to help out in my own small way to make her stay here more enjoyable and hopefully help raise enough awareness so that she might enjoy the blessings that I have:

Living with a family that loves her.
Living in a free country.
Being free from the restraints of a caste system so that her dreams can in fact become a reality.

For those who may not think that America is truly the land of opportunity, I would simply contend that we build fences to keep people out while others build those same fences to keep people in. People are dying to get INTO our ‘hood. We Read more

Retirement Ain’t For Everyone

Just because you’ve found yourself in a position to quit your day job, and sail into the sunset, should you?

If we assume you’re financially set and your Purposeful Plan has found the cool end of the rainbow, what will you do? So many of us use artificial rest stops in our lives as an excuse to do one thing or another.

My dad sat down one weekend and set a business goal for himself with a 10 year time period for its accomplishment. Big problem. He was one of those guys born with only one gear — overdrive. For nearly five straight years he worked with less than a total (not counting a few sick days here and there) of 30 days off.

He was definitely a thinker, but once he believed he’d figured something out, either lead the way, follow, or get mowed down, ‘cuz he was gonna get to Point B. His motto was given to him by his sixth grade teacher when he pointed his finger at 11 year old Dad and said, “Don’t make excuses Brown, make good!” And he did. I’ve given this a lot of thought, and at least for Dad the problem was simple.

He never seemed to ask himself about life after achieving a goal. Like so many investors who read books and buy videos to learn how to buy investment property, he never asked a crucial question, much less come up with the answer.

Then what?

Just like buying real estate investments — anyone can buy something. Is it the right something? If so, and it rises in value — then what? Uh oh. Planning for retirement begs the ‘then what?’ question like a puppy happily wagging his tail who won’t go away. Figure out what your ‘then what?’ is and you’ll be way ahead of the game.

There was the story he told me about having some drinks after work one evening with some friends. They got to talking about business, as they all owned their own real estate firms. Before he knew what was happening, the conversation had veered sharply into Read more

Manufacturing Inflation (How Art Laffer Got It Wrong)

If you’ve wondered where that inflation was, you might start seeing signs of it today.  Economic data released today are a great example of why inflation is a monetary consequence and not an economic one:

New York metro manufacturing activity slowed WAY less than expected:

Factories in the New York region unexpectedly expanded at the slowest pace in five months in December, indicating manufacturing may provide less of a thrust for the economy in coming months.

Wholesale prices jumped WAY more than expected:

The 1.8 percent increase in prices paid to factories, farmers and other producers was more than twice as large as anticipated and followed a 0.3 percent gain in October, according to Labor Department data released today in Washington. Excluding food and fuel, so-called core prices also exceeded the median estimate of economists surveyed by Bloomberg News.

Industrial production rose a tad, mostly from exports which may be a consequence of a weaker dollar :

Manufacturers are benefiting from rising demand overseas as the global economy recovers from the worst slump since World War II. A 12 percent drop in the value of the dollar from a four- year high on March 3 against its major trading partners is making American goods more competitive. Exports have risen for six consecutive months since reaching a three-year low in April.

What’s this all mean? It could very well mean that all this cheap money is starting to work its way into the economy…from the producers’ side.  If those producers can’t pass along the higher prices to the consumer, because of a paradigm shift in consumer demand, we’re going to see a lot more business failures.  That could lead to higher unemployment.

OR…it could mean something much worse; it could mean the feared currency collapse is underway.

Art Laffer once suggested that America’s “great export is our monetary policy” (VIDEO).  Since that utterance to Peter Schiff,   Laffer’s written a book admonishing the Government for the very strategy he endorsed.   Laffer’s lost credibility aside, it is instructional to note that we, as a Nation, have become overly reliant on foreign capital.  It looks like that party could be over.  If Read more

The Rates Aren’t The Only Thing That Matters….. (My thoughts on how to create healing in the housing market)

A couple of thoughts about this article from the New York Times:

  • It’s true.   Anecdotally, I’d have to say that depending on the day, anywhere from 30-50% of the people who I discuss refinancing with are either not able to do it because their income has fallen or because property values have dropped.  Now wait, you’re probably thinking, “I thought that the government was allowing people to refinance even if their mortgage was over 100% of the value of their property.    They are, but there are a couple of caveats to that:
  • The loan has to be with either Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and a substantial portion of the market isn’t with either one of those.   If you want to find out whether your loan is with either one of them, check Fannie Mae Loans or check Freddie Mac Loans to find out.
  • If you have a second mortgage/home equity line of credit on your house and the combined balance of the two loans exceeds 105% of the value of your home (but is less than 125%) then you can still refinance, but the pricing adjustments that Fannie and Freddie charge are so extensive that unless your interest rate is over 6%, it’s probably not worth refinancing.
  • If you are like a LOT of people in today’s economy, your credit score isn’t quite as high as it used to be.   It might be because you’ve had struggles to make some payments on time, it might be because you’ve had some of the credit lines cut on some of your credit cards (thereby lowering your credit scores because you’ve got too much of your available credit tied up), it might be a variety of reasons.   But the end result is the same.   In order to get the best possible rate, you need to have either:
  • A 5% equity position in your house and no second mortgage or
  • A first mortgage of no more than 80% of the Read more

Into the belly of the beast…

So I’ve been building a criminal practice… I’ve now reached the point that I’m bringing in enough clients to make that self-sustaining in terms of paying the bills and generating some income. Criminal practice is fun, but limited in terms of compensation.

My intention has always been to add at least one, maybe two areas of practice onto that. I’ve been considering some kind of debt/bankruptcy law or equine law (or both). Of course, I don’t want to spread myself too thin. There’s a lot to learn in each area. Equine law is uncharted. There are a few practitioners, but none doing it the way I’d like it to be done. I’d need to invent a whole business model myself, test it, then innovate. In addition to that, I’d need to get acquainted with areas of the law for which there are few, if any, mentors. There’d be a lot of self-learning.

Debt/bankruptcy law is pretty well charted, although I have my own innovations I’d like to introduce, particularly on the business and marketing end. The good thing is that while I’d be able to innovate in certain respects, I wouldn’t have to develop a business model out of whole cloth. And there are tried and true litigation methods, and “Continuing Legal Education” classes that teach you those methods.

So I’m in a bit of a quandry. I’m leaning toward the debt/bankruptcy practice because it is proven and because I can anticipate returns in the first half of 2010. These returns are not insignificant. Equine law may be a time and money suck for a while before either failing or being a huge winner. The upside on equine law could be huge, much bigger than bankruptcy/debt law.

Here’s one additional consideration: If you’re a pessimist about this economy, you should expect bankruptcy and debt law to be a thriving area for years and years to come.

Any thoughts?

The twelve days of iPhone apps: Turning your phone into a real estate agent’s pocket powerhouse

All right: So: Let’s start in the middle.

First, we have four cell phones among the two of us. We have the two spares in case we need to put a phone in the pocket of a subcontractor. We keep a close eye on the folks who work with us, but we don’t ever want for our people to be without a lifeline.

Even so, the phones we actually use are the iPhones. It seems plausible to me that I may add a Droid and a Pre in 2010, both of them to keep any eye on what else can be done. But the iPhone app universe is exploding like the universe of time, space, mass and energy, and it seems reasonable to me that that the iPhone will be driving cell phone/pocket computer/etc. innovation for the foreseeable future.

Just in recent days, the appworld has added live video streaming and real-time credit card processing, and my thinking is that there are a lot of as yet undisclosed tricks in the iPhone developers’ APIs. In other words, I suspect that Apple has been holding back on the iPhone’s feature set to kill competitive features as they’re aborning, nipping every supposed incipient iPhone-killer in the bud.

I realized last night that I want for my laptop (a MacBook Pro) and my desktop computer (an iMac) to be the same one computer. Does that make sense? I want for those two computers to be cloned and continuously-syncing instances of the same one database of files. And I want for my iPhone to be a moon of that doubled planetary system.

This is singularity thinking: One way that human beings could leap to the next level of our evolution is by moving into computing hardware. The philosophy of all this is brain-breaking: Hardware geeks insist that the human mind must be a finite-state machine, while everyone with an introspective consciousness acts reflexively upon a seemingly undoubted belief in free will.

That’s a problem we’ll have to deal with on the way to the singularity. Meanwhile, a software instance of “you” could be cloned to live on as many hardware devices Read more