Real Estate Listing Print Ad:
Will have some results to report on this next week, but I’m thinking a half page ad with 8-12 of these babies lined up in a row could add some excitement to an agent’s Sunday morning?
Month: April 2010 (page 2 of 2)
The following began as a comment to a great post put up by Greg Swann recently, in which he excerpted a terrific article from Mark Steyn on income taxes and suckers:
…by 2004, 20% of U.S. households were getting about 75% of their income from the federal government… how receptive would they be to a pitch for lower taxes, which they don’t pay, or lower government spending, of which they are such fortunate beneficiaries? How receptive would another fifth of households, who get about 40% of their income from federal programs, be to such a pitch?
I believe My Styne is talking about the “tipping point” here, something I’ve also been talking about since before the election in 2008. Once enough people are dependent on the government, we reach a tipping point from which there is no purposeful return; only failure and rebirth. This is not news.
What’s interesting (at least to me) is the actual equation marking this tipping point. Obviously if more than 50% of the populace received 100% of their income (or benefits) from the government, we’d be over the tipping point. Not much of a stretch there, but not much of a definition either. I suggest the tipping point is well below the “50% get 100%” threshold.
So what is the level? This strikes me as a very important number – and concept – to know. Where is the line if it’s not “50% getting 100%:”? For argument’s sake, let’s say we have a voting block that will endorse politicians and policies which benefit themselves. Is receiving 75% of their income from entitlements enough to effect that vote? 60%? 45%? I suggest that the block crumbles at 20%, but is monolithic at 75%, so the answer lies somewhere in between. A 30% loss of income would be pretty bad for most people, but may not be bad enough that they would forsake their principles and beliefs. At 40% though… I think we’re dialing in the range.
On top of this, we should take into account the actual voting numbers of the population. How is the tipping point affected if Read more
Well, I couldn’t help myself. I bought the iPad – the to-be-shipped-in-late-April, 3G & WiFi, 64 gig model.
I see significant work applications – for instance, keeping all client files available for court, creating eBooks of NC criminal code so I don’t need to lug around books, and, I hope, doing document signing on the fly.
I have not used DocuSign yet since, until now, I’ve been doing criminal law which doesn’t have a lot of documents that need to be signed, and, what’s more, they usually are signed in court.
But I’m starting to do bankruptcy and civil litigation work related to debt defense, and for that I think I’ll either subscribe to DocuSign or some similar service. DocuSign claims their service works with the iPad, although they haven’t created an App for that. As Greg mentioned, they need to Get On That.
I’ll post a review once I get the iPad in late April or early May.
UPDATE: I’ve been searching for a good list of productivity apps for professionals. I stumbled across this article in Forbes Woman which I found pretty irritating. Why? Second app listed is “Big Oven,” an app to help people find recipes so if you “[e]ver find yourself roaming grocery store aisles with little or no clue what to make for dinner.” Are you kidding me? Is this the second most important app for working professionals? No: it’s just obnoxious sexism.
As if it happened yesterday, I remember having just began seriously bodybuilding with a (understatement) stern trainer, a world champ who had no patience for anything less than all-out effort. One day my partner and I were following the workout he’d given us, when our trainer, Gene, walked up without preamble. “This is a man’s gym. If you girls are gonna keep playin’ around, get outa here!” What? Huh?
From that day forward, my workout partner and I never gave less than 100% again, at least if Gene was in the same hemisphere. He was that scary, and we were, well, 16. Gene wouldn’t let us fail. Our goal was to end up competing — which we did about 30 months later. In that time we became the more or less adopted sons of nearly the entire gym population. Our growth musta been fun to watch. What I thought would take a few months though, took over two years to accomplish. The goal was met though, as we both competed, and credibly so.
One might think I’d of learned my lesson about goals through that experience.
Much is made of setting and achieving goals. Dad was a crazy-ass goal setter. The guy had the ability to set a goal, become Stephen King obsessed, yet without anyone knowing about it. Try that sometime. One day after his third Jack on the rocks at the Club, his friends got him to share with them the 10 year goal he’d set for his real estate company over five years earlier. They were dumbfounded, and proceeded to ‘let him down gently’ by explaining how he’d maybe been a mite too optimistic.
It wasn’t ’till almost a year later that he told them he’d already accomplished that 10 year goal a few months before the first conversation. He’d done what they told him was impossible to accomplish in a decade, in just over half the time.
Setting goals and achieving them are entirely different things, an understatement of which I’m sure you’re painfully aware. We’ve all learned that one the hard way, right? I sure did.
I’m putting Read more
Shrug, Atlas, shrug. Mark Steyn from Investors’ Business Daily:
In less than a quarter-millennium, the American Revolution will have evolved from “No taxation without representation” to representation without taxation. We have bigger government, bigger bureaucracy, bigger spending, bigger deficits, bigger debt, and yet an ever smaller proportion of citizens paying for it. The top 5% of taxpayers contribute 60% of revenue. The top 10% provide 75%. Another two-fifths make up the rest. And half are exempt.
This isn’t redistribution — a “leveling” to address the “mal-distribution” of income, as Sen. Max Baucus, (D-Kleptocristan) put it the other day. It isn’t even “spreading the wealth around,” as then Sen. Barack Obama put it in an unfortunate off-the-prompter moment during the 2008 campaign.
Rather, it’s an assault on the moral legitimacy of the system. If you accept the principle of a tax on income, it might seem reasonable to exclude the very poor from having to contribute to it. But in no meaningful sense can half the country be considered “poor.” The U.S. income tax is becoming the 21st century equivalent of the “jizya” — the punitive tax levied by Muslim states on their non-Muslim citizens: In return for funding the Islamic imperium, the infidels were permitted to carry on practicing their faith.
Likewise, under the American jizya, in return for funding Big Government, nonbelievers are permitted to carry on practicing their faith in capitalism, small business, economic activity and the other primitive belief systems to which they cling so touchingly.
In the Islamic world, the infidel tax base eventually wised up. You can see it literally in the landscape in rural parts of the Balkans: Christian tradesmen got fed up paying the jizya and moved out of the towns up into remote hills far from the shakedown crowd.
In less mountainous terrain where it’s harder to lie low, non-Muslims found it easier to convert. That’s partly what drove Islamic expansion. Once Araby was all-Muslim, it was necessary to move on to the Levant, and to Persia, and to Central Asia and North Africa and India and Europe — in search of new infidels to mug.
Don’t worry, I’m not Read more
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
I’m going to say something very unpopular… again:
We gotta get the Government out of the mortgage business.
That’s not going to happen anytime soon but we, as responsible free market advocates of our respective industries, must never stop saying “I told you so” when the whole thing implodes again. After repeated admonitions, they’ll start listening. When they start listening, we’ll experience a brutal but swift decline followed by a healthy and sustainable restoration of private mortgage banking.
Everyone is worried about Wall Street securitizing the paper. The prevailing thought is that without a government guarantee, no clear-thinking investment banker will ever take a risk on the American homeowner again. I know how to solve that problem;
Make ’em an offer they can’t refuse.
If a housing capital drought reduces housing prices to a stoopid low level, those investment bankers will be back. Investment bankers have the memory of a four-year old. We have to remove the current arbitrage game they’re playing so that they can get back into the business of doing what they should be doing; analyzing and pricing risk.
Right now, your mouth is probably shaped like an “O”. You’re most likely thinking “mortgage rates will skyrocket to 10% and NOBODY will buy a house! ” Your conclusion would be wrong and I’ll prove it to you:
Today, a $300,000 30-year, fixed-rate loan, at 5% requires a monthly principal and interest payment of $1610. If mortgage rates skyrocketed to 10%, the loan amount, for the same payment, would drop to $183,500.
That’s an offer Wall Street can’t refuse.
PS: If I’m sounding like a broken record, it’s because I’m going to keep saying” I told you”, as my battle cry, until they start listening. For those of you who believe in “spreading the wealth around”, believe me when I tell you that price deflation redistributes wealth to its proper stewards.
South Park is the abstract and brief chronicle of our age. FaceBook gets it good and hard, but the episode is a tech pastiche. Watch it on-line here.
The flowers are not really all that special. It’s the light that makes them seem so magical…
by Brian Brady
Commercial Real Estate Finance Expert
Structured Debt and Equity
Licensed Real Estate Broker in AL, CA, and FL
The current Adminsitration has its target on one more component of the capitalist model; free labor. From today’s Wall Street Journal:
You might therefore expect a federal effort to encourage employers to give unskilled youngsters a chance. You would be wrong. The feds have instead decided to launch a campaign to crack down on unpaid internships that regulators claim violate minimum-wage laws.
“If you’re a for-profit employer or you want to pursue an internship with a for-profit employer, there aren’t going to be many circumstances where you can have an internship and not be paid and still be in compliance with the law,” the Labor Department’s Nancy J. Leppink tells the New York Times.
Did you hear that? You might not be allowed to employ a willing student, who wants to learn a trade, without paying him minimum wage.
Consider these two summer job options:
1- Working in the Goldman Sachs mail room for minimum wage. That job certainly gets a young person in the door but the opportunity to learn, network, and accept greater responsibilities are practically nil.
2- Interning on a trading desk, for PIMCO, for no compensation. While that young person won’t make a dime, she has the chance to work alongside fixed income legend Bill Gross. She’ll speak to fund managers all over the country, meet people who might hire her after graduation, and accept challenges few people her age would ever see.
Anyone should be able to see that the latter is the equivalent of a free MBA while the former is an invitation to a labor union. Chris Gardner knew the value of an internship. He worked for free, when he needed fast cash to support his son. He willingly traded his labor for future opportunity-that’s an investment.
Read what Greg Swann wrote about the value of free, in the early days of Bloodhound Blog:
How much future is there in a job that millions of very smart people are willing to do for free? Maybe not the same work, but so close that any differences become academic.
Greg was talking about the disintermediation of the Read more
Cathleen and I have been on a love jag, lately, and I cannot begin to tell you how beneficial it’s been. A very simple idea: We added spending time alone together every day as a part of our goal-getting regimen. This turns out to have been an inspired idea, although I did not foresee that going in.
At some point I may write about this experience in detail, because there is a lot to be learned from it. As an example, consider this: If you want to end the day married, start the day married. No relationship can endure if you’re not doing anything to maintain it.
Teri and I have been talking about the same sorts of issues privately. Here’s a clip from email I wrote to her:
My wife is most beautiful when she’s all the way in love with me. Her features are very fine in the ground state — striking, as an old family friend would have it. But when those features are lit from within by her passions, then she is many orders of magnitude more enthralling. But it’s my job to earn that response from her — and I wish I could insist that I’ve earned that response every day. But there is no better incentive to staying on the path to Splendor than to marry someone you have to live up to.
We are a spiteful race. We wound all our treasures and treasure all our wounds. The SplendorQuest begins when you learn to think the other way — to focus on the world as you want it and not as you don’t want it. I wrote the essay shown below six years ago, and I wish I could say I’ve always lived up to it — all the way, every day. But I’m living up to it now better than I ever have before, and I can’t think of any reason why I should not be able to get better at loving my wife every day from now on.
What does this have to do with real estate? I hope you figure that out before a judge orders Read more
Jay Seville of JustNewListings.com in the Northern Virginia suburbs of Washington, D.C. sent along this photo of the customs signs he is building for his team.
Lo-tech don’t mean no-tech: Sign calls sell homes. If you’re doing custom signs, let me know. I’m delighted to show off the hard work of hard-working dogs.