[Doofrat]

Great video. The bubble primer on video. Guy really put alot of work together into a concise package. I’d really recommend people take a look. I noticed on his graph showing risky loans that SD was an outlier (is that right?) on the chart.

[Doofrat]

On possible problem with getting them down to two cards is that the credit card companies will just up their limit to compensate. I went to only one card (my wife has another) and within two years, they upped my limit to $30,000 and send me those blank credit checks every two weeks.
If your parents don’t have the willpower to not spend on credit, then a fresh start will only be a fresh round of credit and they will be down $25,000 in their 401k.
I’ve seen this happen with friends whose parents bailed them out of credit card debt. In no time, they were back in big debt.
I’m not saying your parents are like that, but you should consider whether they are or not.
Perhaps they should talk to a financial planner, the administrator of this site is a financial planner and can be reached at [email protected].
I referred somebody to him and was very very impressed with the results!

[Doofrat]

I think alot of people believe that this downturn is only a seasonal adjustment and have either given up psychologically on selling until spring, or actually pulled their listing until Spring. I think it’ll be interesting to see what the general feeling is towards the beginning of summer, or mid summer if the market hasn’t picked up by then and everybody who pulled their listing has put it back on the market.
I’m holding off on any guess until then.

[Doofrat]

My old neighbor moved recently and when he was applying for a loan, he specifically stated that he wanted a fixed loan. Well the broker agreed, then tried to get him to sign paperwork for a variable. He caught it, but it gives you an idea of how much pressure they try to sell these junk loans with. Anybody know how much more commission these loans get?

[Doofrat]

I was under the assumption that the time after school and on the weekends (besides time for homework) were times for unstructured learining?!?

Forget college, these kids are probably going to have a problem with that whole structured environment they have at most work places.

[Doofrat]

So David Pressly uses a poll of homeowners that “clearly debunks” the speculation of the demise of the housing market. Nice. He can’t supply some research showing increasing demand projected into the future based on some sound data, he uses a phone poll of Susie Smith, part time cake baker and PTA member’s opinion of where the market is heading to debunk these media reports.

I think David Pressly should fire his financial advisor and just conduct phone polls of which stock people think is going to go up.

I wonder what percentage of dot.com stockholders thought their stock would continue to increase in value before the crash? (probably 100% because if they thought it’d decrease in value, they’d have sold, wouldn’t they?)

[Doofrat]

Snippet from Warren talking about the housing bubble in May of 2005.

Buffett: “I recently sold a house in Laguna for $3.5 million. It was on about 2,000 square feet of land, maybe a twentieth of an acre, and the house might cost about $500,000 if you wanted to replace it. So the land sold for something like $60 million an acre.”

http://money.cnn.com/2005/05/01/news/fortune500/buffett_talks/

[Doofrat]

Thanks for the clarification. I figured I must have been missing something.

So the primary lender is covered because the secondary payed the 20% of the primary off. In essence, instead of getting insurance, they are paying a higher rate to a secondary lender who is almost acting like an insurer.

[Doofrat]

One of my wife’s co-workers lives in one of these communities (could even be 4s) and they got a box with Halloween decorations to put up and were told to encourage their neighbors to put their box of decorations up as well. Probably same thing happened there, everybody putting up the same box of decorations.

[Doofrat]

How about the just trying to get out at breakeven sales where the listing price – 6%(commission) = previous sale price?

[Doofrat]

Don’t rent an apartment, rent a house from an owner.

http://sandiego.craigslist.org/apa/

You can get a nice place for that price.

[Doofrat]

Here’s tonight’s FTH:

Bought for $325,000 956 square feet, $80,000 in renovations. railroad track through the back yard (just kidding, the back yard’s too small for a railroad track, it’s just past the fence 🙂 )

Guy’s a waiter, forgot what wife did.

Trying to sell for $479,000, just fell out of escrow, 137 days on market now.

$479,000 – $405,000 = $74,000. Take out the commissions of maybe 4% – 5% of maybe $20,000, gives $50,000 profit.

So far they have spent over $12,000 in carrying costs, so now they are down to $38,000 profit – all the other little costs they forgot about.

I’d call this a failure, but you don’t see that on TV:

http://www.ziprealty.com/buy_a_home/logged_in/search/home_detail.jsp?listing_num=C614053&page=18&property_type=SFR&mls=mls_so_cal&cKey=vvk92b47&source=MRMLS

[Doofrat]

Cabinboy,

I thought you were serious about the 6 month comparison, reading it now, I can hear the sarcasm being clicked on prior to the statement.

You bring up some good points about the four principals, and people that don’t have the attitude as well as the knowledge of these (at least the first three) might be successful for a period of time, but get wacked later.

Personally, I like reading the posts from everybody because you have nothing to lose, and you might learn something, but like you pointed out, you have to take everything with a grain of salt and not rely on a blog poster for investment advice.

[Doofrat]

I think Kev374 summed it up:

“It’s better to absorb knowledge from all sources and then make your own judgement.”

Cabinboy, if your argument is correct, Rich should just take down the forum since everybody here either has all four skills you describe and doesn’t need anybody else’s analysis, or they don’t have these skills and will blindly follow somebody’s advice here and get in trouble and end up on the street.

“Six months of returns” Where does that fit in after talking about the limitations of fundamental analysis?!?
First you say that fundamental analysis loses it’s value over short time periods (which I agree with wholeheartedly), but then you want to compare 6 month returns?!?

I think that the forums are a valuable source of ideas, no matter who they come from. If people want to go 100% gold, that’s their business and I may not agree with them, but I certaintly want to hear their argument about why they are doing it, I might learn something.

I don’t think people here are reading posts and then opening a new window and logging into E-Trade to dump what Powayseller talked about last week and buy what jg talked about today. Give us more credit than that.

[Doofrat]

No, I think flippers will be broke. Besides, weren’t flippers were paying lots of capital gains and boosting property tax rolls?

They didn’t go after traders after the dot.com bust.

I don’t know who they’ll go after, but if they do, it’ll probably be somebody with money.

[Author]

Posts