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EconProf
ParticipantActually, BG, I think his location was in the Bay Area.
Reading his blog, he seems to be peeved at people nit-picking his lifestyle and choices, and challenging his ideas. But he certainly does not advocate this for everyone. He simply claims that we could all do with a lot less status-seeking consumption if we chose to. And I like how he rips advertisers for shaping our values and habits.
The fact is that capitalism has delivered vastly higher living standards for everyone–rich and poor–in the past two generations. A growth rate of GNP per capita of 3% per year means a doubling in 24 years, and 3% was about our average from the 50’s through 2005. In the 1950’s, houses were far smaller, two-car garages were rare, houses had one black-and-white TV, (but not till the mid-fifties), and cars were clunkers that lasted about 100k miles. This is why he suggests if you want to know what you have to change in your life to live on $7000 per year today, ask your grandparents what they did in the 1950’s and 1940’s.ParticipantUCGal, that is a good blog site too, especially where it challenges us to rethink everything. I once had high hopes that this deep recession we are now (barely) coming out of would force a lot more introspection and spending retrenchment than we are witnessing. Looking at the way people spend, it seems shoppers are about as intoxicated with consumerism as ever.
ParticipantOne last item: Why do you have to pay them 3 month fees to fire them?
It appears they may have breached the contract by not performing. Reread the contract and see if you have an out by virtue of non-compliance on their part.ParticipantYou’ve posted a lot of good advice, that apparently you learned the hard way.
I’d question your advice against using a management company that has its own in-house maintenance, however. So many repairs are minor and can be handled by a good fix-it guy, that it may (stress on MAY) be cheaper than calling in a contractor/repair company every time.
Also, as to pricing of the rental, I believe in setting a realistic price based on comps that YOU do, perhaps with their help, and then going ahead with a full force advertising blitz. Craigslist is especially useful, if you use strategic pictures, carefully chosen bullet points to describe it, etc. Then rerun the ad every few days since many craigslist users look only at the last few days’ entries.
Then, if it doesn’t rent in a really short time period, and you or your company has had inquiries and lookers, then your price is simply too high.
The market is trying to tell you something. Listen to the market and adjust quickly. Too high a rent and a long vacancy period are a common mistake, and more costly to you in the long run.ParticipantThere are three tax raises on the November ballot, so we will all get a chance to have our say about California’s fiscal future. The one pushed by Governor Jerry Brown would raise the top income tax rate to 13.2 percent, which would make it the highest in the nation. Another part of his initiative would raise our sales taxes, which are already the highest in the nation.
Meantime, with 12 percent of the nation’s population, we have one-third of the welfare recipients.
CA has the second-highest unemployment rate in the nation, and our businesses and middle-class taxpayers are heading for the exits, and moving especially to low tax, business-friendly Texas, AZ, and Nevada.
All these and additional facts cited in the article are not new–the authors merely collected and assembled data already out there. But finally the public is getting informed, no thanks to the lame CA big city newspapers, who have largely cheered on the trends of recent years. It’s going to be an interesting election season in CA.ParticipantThat this commentator and local “financial commentator” is still around is a reminder that we need to hold purported experts to their record. Piggington does that, but it is a small slice of the population. Journalists especially need to dig deeper into those they interview and quote so the public would get a fairer picture.
ParticipantI drove a Prius for about a year and really liked it, except for the tail-gating drivers of monster pickup trucks.
Two observations: The Prius may have the most uncomfortable seats ever. I resolved the newer Prius would be my next car until it came out and I sat in it–a deal-killer for us tall guys.
Second, the feasibility of the Prius gets better the higher gasoline prices go. Studies of the “payback period” for paying extra for a Prius are obsolete if they are relying on last year’s gasoline prices.ParticipantGlad you like Santaluz Early Retirement–it is a community that grows on you. It is also a rigidly-enforced dark sky community, enforced by those pesky CC&Rs. So take a midnight walk out in the moonlight and you will see the sky as nowhere else in San Diego. BTW, your private message did not come through to me.
ParticipantThere are maybe 70 “casitas” of this type in Santaluz, and while this is the biggest of the three casita models, it is perhaps the worst located of all. It is hemmed in by a street on two sides and close-in other units on the other two sides. NO view or feeling of openness like virtually all the other casitas. People buy these for the ambience, one-story privacy, and view, and this unit is lacking.
Considering this, it seems neither too high nor too low in price.ParticipantGood, leased farmland in the midwest will earn you only around 2 – 3% per year. That’s comparing the annual rent to today’s value. It is not a place to be if you need cash flow.
However, that same farmland has about doubled in value in the last five years. The value of the land depends upon crop price trends and expectations of future crop prices. Corn has about doubled in the past 3 – 4 years. Land prices may be in bubble territory right now. OTOH, the bubble may get bigger–depends upon world crop prices.ParticipantThis would be an interesting approach, and has several advantages from an efficiency standpoint.
First, the homeowner would likely stay put and keep making payments in the hope that house prices are likely bottoming out this year, and the expense of moving is a huge waste he could now avoid. There are a lot of inherently wasteful things that occur when a foreclosure happens and all parties lose–lenders, forclosed homeowners, neighborhood degradation, to name a few.
Second, house values would more likely stabilize as fewer foreclosures would hit the market. Result–more consumer spending as ALL homeowners have a better personal balance sheet. The economy recovers faster, tax revenues increase, etc., etc.
Much as I hate to see bad behavior rewarded–the moral hazard objection–this is worth considering, providing its only a one-time deal (ah, there’s the rub!)Participant[quote=stockstradr]Gold on front page of NYT (and same story in other news media) is why I dumped all my gold several months ago.
I’ll risk later ridicule and make three predictions:
1) Gold will hit $800/ounce before it hits $2000/ounce.
2) When that happens – probably within 12 months – then I’ll back up my truck and load up portfolio with gold.
3) Within five years we see $3,000/ounce.
We are still in a strongly deflationary recession with deflation about to enter nasty second leg down. I say you do not want to hold gold in near term.[/quote]
stocktradr, if I remember correctly, you have a pretty good track record with the markets, so I’d like to hear why you think we are in a deflationary environment. By most accounts, our economy is now expanding at around a 3% rate, employment recovering slowly but surely, and housing will find its bottom this year. Doesn’t this predict inflation instead of deflation? What do you see hitting us that would be deflationary?ParticipantExactly right Allan. Keynes actually proposed, at the onset of the Great Depression, that the government run a deficit only when needed to stimulate the economy, and then to run a surplus during prosperity to “pay it back”. Deficits during good times and bad over the course of business cycles was not in his playbook. Today’s big government advocates like Krugman use Keynes as intellectual justification to push permanent increases in government. If Keynes were alive today he would not approve.
ParticipantThe housing bubble inflated people’s personal balance sheet from about 2001 to 2006, and they extracted that growth in equity via HELOC’s and increased their overall spending. From a micro standpoint, they increased their wealth. From society’s standpoint, the total housing stock stayed (about) the same, so in a macro sense the nation was no better off.
The last half-decade has seen everything reversed, in which personal balance sheets have been devastated by the decline in housing values, while liabilities have stayed about the same. This is why the Great Recession has proved so intractable–consumer spending is not only no longer hyped by rising housing values, but is hurt by the evaporation of housing equity.
Krugman, a fervent Keynesian, has demanded more fiscal and monetary stimulus to make up for the lack of consumption. He has claimed that the only problem with the stimulus so far is that it has been too small. Notably, he is big government guy, so instead of the stimulus coming in the form of tax cuts, he has pushed new programs, agencies, and government workers, all of which become entrenched and impossible to remove when (and if) recovery comes. -
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