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Category: Group Therapy (page 57 of 81)

December 31, 2009

You know what? Despite everything: Happy New Year!

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I wrote this last night in a comment to a post:

The United States is being run as a kleptocracy, but instead of plundering the treasury and the accumulated wealth of the nation in behalf of a small criminal conspiracy, we rob from a rapidly-diminishing productive sector in behalf of a vast and ever-burgeoning population of moochers — at all strata of society.

You can’t flip on the television without running across a cipher for your own grandmother proudly announcing how some politically-connected vendor has taught her how to rape the taxpayers — which is to say you and your kids, her own great-grandchildren — in her own behalf. This will be the real triumph of Obamacare — to turn every last resident of this once-proud nation into sniveling beggars, each one trying to snap up more benefits than his neighbor.

We don’t have to eat each others’ flesh to be cannibals, and it seems plausible to me that we will not be suffered to live a life of freedom and independence, in the very near future. The entitlement mentality is such a shameful thing that the people who use it as a means of enslaving each other will not suffer the contradiction of an objective renunciation of their creed. In any case, once you’ve eaten a meal taken by theft, you’re not as apt to make noises about law and order, property rights, all that sanctimonious nonsense. Who am I do judge, once I’ve drunk my neighbor’s blood?

That’s dour, but I’m afraid it’s much too exact. Yes, I know that things are always worse than they seem, that the doppler effect of the noise that is the news makes the onrushing crisis sound more ominous even as receding events seem to race away harmlessly. But I fear we are at a tipping point, a place where the grasshoppers so far outnumber the ants that there really is no hope, going forward, for a life based on self-reliance, on philosophical egoism, political individualism and economic free enterprise. The United States has resolved to resolve the contradiction of chattel slavery by making slaves of Read more

December 31, 2009

Stop The Presses! BawldGuy Agrees With Arianna Huffington?!

by

Real Estate Investments Broker

Author website

Live long enough and you’ll pretty much see and hear everything. I’ve seen a pitcher strike out five — count ’em — five batters in one inning, standing right behind the catcher. I’ve seen a so-called conservative president actually increase the requested spending of a bill authored by Ted Kennedy. Hell, I’ve even seen, be still my heart, the Chargers in the Super Bowl and the Padres in two World Series.

I wonder what odds Las Vegas would lay on me agreeing with the Huffington Post that today is New Year’s Eve? Let’s just say she and I could save each other a buncha time on election days by not voting, since we cancel each other’s vote every time out on virtually every issue/office.

But then it happened. Huffington coauthored a post with Rob Johnson on the topic of what we, as regular folk, can do about the abusive conduct of most of the To Big To Fail banks. It’s both simple and brilliant. They even provide a pithy video and a link to a list of local banks in your community.

The idea? Let’s all take our money outa those thug-like banks and move it to local institutions. The money will still be equally insured. Imagine the message it’ll send to not only the TBTF’s but to Pennsylvania Avenue and Capitol HIll who, so far, have been the poster folks for clueless in D.C.

Anywho, thought it was worth sharing.

Happy New Year!!

December 31, 2009

And there’s a hand my trusty friend ! And give us a hand o’ thine ! And we’ll take a right good-will draught, for auld lang syne.

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

2009 beat me up.

Oh sure, I’ve been beat up in other years, but this is different because I’m not able to look back and say, “Well, thank god that’s over,” and move on, because it’s not over. The body blows that 2009 delivered are coming along with us into 2010 and we will be dealing with them indefinitely, which isn’t what the New Year is supposed to look like, is it?

When I sit down to make resolutions and plans, something I love to do, I now have to factor in time for unknowns, time for emergency trips to hospitals, time for staying put and just… waiting. But really, how do you factor in unknowns? How do you schedule trips to the ER on your calendar? How do you plan for the unplanned-but-inevitable?

I’m not sure, truth be told, but I think it has to do with using your time wisely, something I can do, but typically don’t. It has to do with flexibility, something I do fairly easily, and it has to do with focus. Um, huh? Focus? What’s that? I twitter, remember? I’m an awesome friend to ask a question of because I’m the person who will drop everything and help you find an answer, because what can be more fun (key word) than finding new fun things to do, because who knows what new fun things will come from that discovery, leading to more new fun things… and well, it’s much more fun than it sounds.

Don’t judge. I have strengths and I have weaknesses just like you, I simply need to learn to work with them under the 2009 rules. I can do this.

I’m going to have to become more mobile. Mobility is flexibility is productivity for 2010. But bigger than that for me, and I suspect I’m not alone, is using time wisely. It’s not a hard thing to do, but for me, it can be difficult to master. Using time wisely in an unstable environment means I get to always ask myself the big question: What is the best use of my time right now?

And here’s the thing: Read more

December 30, 2009

Unchained Melodies: A sublime mash-up of William Shatner’s cover version of Common People

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

I have time to write software today for the first time in a while — which is well because we need it. While I was working, Radio Paradise (commercial-free semi-hip music for middle-aged white people) played William Shatner’s cover of Pulp’s Common People, and it made me so nuts I had to go out and find a clip.

Glad I did, because this mash-up is just perfect. I grew up in a grimy industrial town in downstate Illinois, way over on the wrong side of the tracks. I was lucky to have school teachers who were old enough to have pre-dated the unionization of compulsory illiteracy — but that just means I know how to tell you to go have safe sex with yourself in all the best dead languages. If you’ve never bought a steak without weighing the cost, this song is for you.

December 30, 2009

Why are people in New York and Connecticut unhappy, while the folks in Louisiana and Tennessee are more satisfied with their lives? The obvious answer is the true one: Taxes and spending.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

More from The Wall Street Journal: People in high-tax states are less satisfied with their lives than those in low-tax states.

Who knew?

That’s not a fair question. Everyone who can do math already knew this. But what’s interesting is that it points the way forward for all states, especially the ones currently losing their high-earning tax-slaves to less onerous tax-plantations: Cut taxes. Cut spending. Get rid of your kleptocratic union laws.

Or: In the words of John Galt, “Get the hell out of my way!”

The study suggests that quality of life heavily influences happiness. This may seem obvious, but until this study, social scientists have struggled to develop a model that supports this hypothesis. Now we know that people who say they’re satisfied with their lives aren’t just delusional or overly optimistic, and people who say they’re unsatisfied aren’t just pessimists. People have legitimate reasons to be happy or unhappy.

And well, high taxes seem to be a big reason — ostensibly an even bigger reason than weather given that California is one of the unhappiest states and inclement Louisiana is the happiest. Further, considering how much New York’s crime rate has dropped and schools have improved in the last decade, taxes seem to overwhelm even these two critical factors in the happiness equation. According to the Tax Foundation 2008 analysis, three of the top five unhappiest states—New York, Connecticut and New Jersey—have the highest state-local tax burdens. On the other hand, four of the top five happiest states—Louisiana, Florida, Tennessee and Arizona—are among the states with the lowest state-local tax burdens. True, correlation doesn’t prove causation, and high taxes alone don’t always make people miserable, but there’s something going on here.

In states with high property, income, and sales taxes like New York, people have less money to spend on other things that make them happy. They have less money to spend on vacations, hobbies, home improvements, eating out and child care. Another problem may be that people receive a low return on their tax dollars. The study’s authors note that people are least happy in states that impose high taxes but don’t provide Read more

December 30, 2009

Making New Year’s resolutions is easy. It’s keeping them that’s hard. How people are getting year ’round results from their year-end goals.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From The Wall Street Journal comes more than resolutions. More, even, than sheer resolve. A set of specific tactics and techniques to fulfill your New Year’s resolutions enduringly.

It is no secret that the odds against keeping a New Year’s resolution are steep. Only about 19% of people who make them actually stick to their vows for two years, according to research led by John Norcross, a psychology professor at the University of Scranton in Pennsylvania.

But those discouraging statistics mask an important truth: The simple act of making a New Year’s resolution sharply improves your chances of accomplishing a positive change—by a factor of 10. Among those people who make resolutions in a typical year, 46% keep them for at least six months. That compares with only 4% of a comparable group of people who wanted to make specific changes and thought about doing so, but stopped short of making an actual resolution, says a 2002 study of 282 people, led by Dr. Norcross and published in the Journal of Clinical Psychology.

My resolution is to read the whole thing.

December 29, 2009

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas

by

Mortgage Officer

Author website

and all through the country, people were paying more attention to Christmas than they were to the government and to the financial mess that is making our country struggle.

So what did the Treasury do?   They did two things:

  • They expanded the nationalization of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac from $200 Billion each (that’s $200,000,000,000) to an unlimited amount of funding.   In other words, the US Treasury just handed their checkbook to Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.
  • They did it on the day when no one was watching and they did it 9 days before it would have required congressional approval.

How nice and how timely.

Nothing to see here, move along, move along……

Tom Vanderwell

Heard on the Street: Fannie and Freddie – WSJ.com

That was a nice holiday gift to taxpayers.

As expected, the Treasury on Christmas Eve increased the amount of money it can plow into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac to keep them solvent. Before, the U.S. had pledged up to $200 billion to each. Now, over the next three years, the Treasury can spend as much as is needed to prevent their net worth going negative. Such a change would have required congressional consent after Dec. 31. Given that each U.S. household had effectively committed $3,800 to both firms, the Treasury should have waited till the New Year so the people’s representatives could have had their say.

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December 27, 2009

What’s wrong with California? Nothing anyone left in the state has the fortitude to fix. What’s the Golden State’s future? Ask Detroit.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From a lengthy diagnosis of everything that is wrong with California from The Claremont Institute:

Three of California’s last four governors, and six of its last nine, have been Republicans. The politicians who secured those victories immediately found it necessary to cooperate with a dominant opposition party; California is, in every other respect, a state that has been becoming more Democratic for as long as its oldest residents have been eligible to vote. California has not given its electoral votes to a Republican presidential candidate since 1988, or been represented in the U.S. Senate by a Republican since 1992. Of the 53 Californians in the U.S. House of Representatives, 34 are Democrats. In the past half-century, each of the two chambers of the state legislature has seen a Republican majority—once. The GOP’s state senate majority endured for two years, the one in the lower house for less than a single year.

The evidence is incontestable: the liberal strategy of waiting for the public’s anger to subside is far sounder than the conservative strategy of hoping it will gather strength. The liberal calculation rests on a shrewd assessment, not only of human psychology but also of modern mobility. California is not yet East Germany, which means that one of the ways Californians who are mad as hell can decide not to take it any more is by moving away. The Census Bureau shows that California, the state that used to be a magnet, has experienced negative "net domestic migration" since 1990. Between 1990 and 2007 some 3.4 million more Americans moved from California to one of the other 49 states than moved to California from another state.

States don’t conduct exit interviews, so there’s no way to tell how many ex-Californians left paradise because the taxes were too high, the public services too shoddy, and the unions too overbearing. Whatever the tally, one problem for conservatism in California is that the conservative critique of the state’s governance argues as strongly for flight as it does for fight. It is possible to advocate a national policy agenda by invoking patriotism, but "state-riotism" is a far weaker Read more

December 23, 2009

From the Files of Captain Obvious: Five Fundamental Real Estate Business Truths

by

Rust Belt Realtor

Author website

I. am. not. BawldGuy. And I don’t play one on this, or any other blog. Okay, now we’ve got that (not-so) deep dark secret out into the open… If you are approaching BawldGuy status, God Bless You, and keep on truckin’ and you go girl! You can move along, because this is for those of us who are working on real estate at the ground floor level.

I’ve been given the gift of time in 2009 and looking back and looking ahead, I see some obvious truths about the real estate business. Some of these are based on mistakes I’ve made, but as long as we learn from them, I’m okay with sharing.

Truth #5: I like twitter. I don’t like facebook. But who cares? Without a goal–driven plan to use either for a very specific reason, then I’m wasting time on both, and I’ve wasted time so you don’t have to. Use them to chat, or use them to market, or use them to sell, but understand the difference and if you are going to use them for business, have a plan and follow the plan. Don’t get sidetracked, and do stay focused. If you are a lender or a vendor then you might want to network with real estate agents, but if you are an agent, then stop talking water cooler and find people who can tell you to go to hell.

Truth #4: You don’t need social media to do a great job in real estate. You don’t need to  blog, or twitter. You don’t need to go to conferences. You can. You might learn a nugget or two, but it’s entirely unnecessary to your success, and it just as likely will be a huge waste of your time and energy.

Truth #3: To be successful in real estate, you need to meet as many people as possible. Lucky us, people are everywhere, and we can find them through any means- the method is really unimportant to getting to close. What’s Read more

December 22, 2009

Looking for the beacon of progress for American cities? Forget Portland. Forget Houston. The road we’re on leads to Detroit.

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

From PJTV.com, a bone-chilling exposition of how the entitlement mentality killed one of the great American cities:

There but for the grace of god? Not quite. Detroit is just the leading edge of a wave of entitlement thinking that is engulfing what was once the beacon of human liberty for the whole world.

We scorn philosophy at our peril. For more than a century and a half, Americans have been asking profoundly important philosophical questions — and giving the wrong answers.

“What do the rights of the individual matter when people are starving?”

“How can you worry about private property rights when people are homeless?”

“Health care is a collective responsibility. Why should you be free to escape it even if you can pay your own way?”

“How dare you claim a right to personal autonomy when your personal autonomy is destroying the planet!?!”

Don’t bother to ask yourself what America will look like when the concept of individual rights has finally been eradicated from our philosophy. We already know the answer to that question. It will look like Detroit.

December 18, 2009

Unchained melodies: Real Estate’s 50 Most Inconsequential Online

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Apparently I have been voted onto the Inman “News” list of Real Estate’s 50 Most Inconsequential Online. I have no direct evidence of this, just a bunch of tweeted twaddle that Tom Johnson turned me onto last night. Needless to say, I don’t plan to spend $80 to feed my already quite corpulent vanity.

This is my third or fourth year on the receiving end of this evolving “honor,” and, with some exceptions, Inman’s list is comprised of a company I am less and less comfortable keeping. BloodhoundBlog has always been about the consumer for me, and about practitioners who know how to put the consumer first. Alas, the RE.net by now just looks like more of the same — more sleazoids looking for ways to sucker broke-ass agents into paying three bucks a pop for rotten eggs. Deadwood was a fun TV show, but I don’t want my name soiled by the real estate equivalents of Al Swearengen.

I do want to take a moment to apologize to Brad Inman, though. I have offered up what I thought was sound business advice to the man — coated, to be sure, in what might seem to be a bitter pill. But I had assumed that Inman was a grown-up, and, as a demi-billionaire, presumably capable of dealing with a certain amount of acerbic wit. It turns out though — as certain lyrical twitterbirds have pointed out to me — that Brad Inman is in fact an infantile encephalic retarded paraplegic with a harelip — and thus my jibes aimed at him were not sporting. This, at least, is the only conclusion one can draw from the plaintive tweeted bleatings about my criticisms of Big Bad Brad that have emerged from other names on Inman’s list of Real Estate’s 50 Most Inconsequential Online.

Which is, just by itself, a good reason to say to hell with the whole magilla.

Meanwhile I can think of only one tune so perfectly suited to the occasion, Big in Japan by Tom Waits:

If you want to do right by your clients, you have no need to lean on me as Read more

December 17, 2009

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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

December 17, 2009

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

by

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

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.

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Welcome to BloodhoundBlog, the national real estate industry marketing and technology weblog written by, for and about real estate professionals. Better yet, welcome to the wired world of real estate. We are busily inventing Real Estate 2.0 – technology, marketing, service and salesmanship. Like all Bloodhounds, we are smart, frisky and fiercely independent. We've built a spot on the earth – beloved over all – where each one of us can be who we are, no matter who that might be. We are committed to an idea of excellence that will flush the bums, the con-men and the crybabies out of the real estate industry. If you yearn to have your failures excused, your moral lapses absolved or your boo-boos kissed, seek elsewhere. But if you are sick to death of mediocrity – welcome home. Read all about us, subscribe to our feed and steel yourself for the hunt. We work hard, we play hard, we learn everything we can – and we bow to no one.

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