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flyer
ParticipantWe’ve dropped some serious cash on items of the auto and aviation variety that may not have made any sense to others, but, since we could afford them, they made sense to us.
Even though buying the Tahoe may or may not make sense to others, it sounds like you and your family would really enjoy it, and, as long as it’s not a stretch financially, why not?
ParticipantOf course, there are many other categories each of us can add, and there will be variations on the theme–some of us will be here a shorter time–others longer.
I just thought it was very interesting to see how most of the categories are universal.Seeing life categorized in terms of how just about everyone on the planet spends their years, makes it clear that no one is here forever. Imo, it’s just more of an impetus to really live the life you want to live–now.
ParticipantPersonally, we’ve cut the “working” category in less than half, so that frees up more TBD years, should we be so lucky to make it to 78.
ParticipantTrump definitely seems to have gone over the edge this time–even for him. I do, however, relate to his preference for marrying intelligent, beautiful women.
Participant[quote=joec]In the UT today:
http://www.sandiegouniontribune.com/news/2015/jul/11/china-golf-juniors-junior-world/More CV homes being bought up for Chinese golfer kids![/quote]
Read that also, joec.
Back when we were growing up in LJ and playing in in all of the golf and tennis tournaments as kids, even then, there were quite a few kids from various countries competing, and our kids saw this as well during their years of competition.
As we all know, CA has what most of the world wants, so it will be interesting to see what affect this particular trend has on our local economy going forward.
ParticipantBG, I understand everything you’re saying, and I’m sure things will work out fine for you whether you decide to stay, or move to another location. From what you’ve posted here, it sounds like you’re in a position to make whatever choices you wish when the time comes.
My point was that, for those who are waiting for another “crash,” perhaps there will be another downturn, perhaps not, but, as you said, I seriously doubt that coastal CA (or within 10 miles or so of the coast) will EVER return to “bargain” pricing.
We’ve known quite a few people who wanted to come back after leaving San Diego, and were unable to replace what they had, not to mention the fact that many of the kids who have been raised here, cannot afford to buy here after they are out of the “nest.”
Wherever each of us decides to live–life is short–so enjoy it while you can!
ParticipantHaving been born and raised in LJ, we’ve seen all of the CA real estate cycles over the years, as BG mentioned.
Most of us who plan to stay and live this incredible lifestyle really don’t care if it’s different this time or not–but for those who do–only time will tell.
ParticipantThe Telegraph 7/9
“While all Western eyes remain firmly focused on Greece, a potentially much more significant financial crisis is developing on the other side of world. In some quarters, it’s already being called China’s 1929 – the year of the most infamous stock market crash in history and the start of the economic catastrophe of the Great Depression.
In any normal summer, a 30pc fall in the Chinese stock market – a loss of value roughly equivalent to the UK’s entire economic output last year – after an ascent which had seen share prices more than double within the space of a year would have been front page news across the globe.
The dramatic series of government interventions to stem the panic – hitherto unsuccessful, it should be added – would similarly have been up there at the top of the news agenda. Yet the pantomime of the Greek debt talks, together with the tragi-comedy of will they, won’t they leave the euro, has relegated the story to little more than a footnote – even though 940 companies, more than a third, have now suspended trading on China’s two main indices.
America in 1929 and China today – are at roughly similar stages of economic development.
The parallels with 1929 are, on the face of it, uncanny. After more than a decade of frantic growth, extraordinary wealth creation and excess, both economies – America in 1929 and China today – are at roughly similar stages of economic development.Both these booms, moreover, are in part explained by extremely rapid credit growth. Indeed, China’s credit boom dwarfs that of even the “roaring Twenties”. Borrowed money, or margin investing, played a major role in both these outbreaks of speculative excess.
True, the Chinese stock market bubble is only a one-year wonder, whereas the build-up to the Wall Street Crash of 1929 was more sustained. Even so, the comparison still holds. As noted by JK Galbraith in his classic account, The Great Crash 1929, even as late as 1927 it was possible to argue that American stocks represented fair value.
It was only in the final year that the “escape into make-believe” happened in earnest, when the stock market rose by nearly 50pc. This applies to the Shanghai Composite, too. Stripping out the lowly-rated banking sector, valuations for just about everything else have rocketed, making those that ruled on Wall Street in the run-up to October 24, 1929, look relatively modest.
Nor do the similarities end there. As in 1920s America, China’s stock market boom has ridden in tandem with an equally speculative real estate bubble.
The macro-economic backdrop is also surprisingly similar. Then, as now in China, rural workers had emigrated to the cities in vast numbers in the hope of finding a more prosperous life in fast-growing industrial sectors. In 1920s America, virtually all these sectors – from steel to automobiles and the new technologies of radio and consumer durables – grew like Topsy, inspiring households to invest in them and chase the apparently bountiful profits they were generating.
A similar explosion in industrial activity has taken place in China, only more so. China has packed more development into a few short decades than any country in recorded history before, creating a worldwide glut in industrial capacity that even global demand, let alone domestic Chinese demand, is struggling to accommodate.
Already, there are warning signs of a slowdown, similar to those that front-ran the 1929 crash – depressed commodity prices and a virtual hiatus in global trade growth. The Chinese economy is like one of those cartoon characters who manages to keep running long after leaving the edge of the cliff, only belatedly to look down and plunge into the abyss.
Naturally, there are many dissimilarities too, not least that China is still essentially a planned and centrally-controlled economy which has so far managed to defy the usual rules of economics. The consensus is that this time will be no different, that even if the stock market does continue to crash, the impact will be no worse than 2007-08, when the Shanghai Composite fell by two-thirds.
Yet after a massive fiscal and monetary stimulus, the wider economy barely lost a beat. Have no fear, the Chinese authorities have it all under control. Believe it if you will.
I don’t buy it. Indeed, I can see very little evidence for China’s technocratic elite having things under control. The firebreaks that China put in place over the weekend to mitigate the panic are, in practice, not much different from those applied during the Great Crash of 1929, only this time it’s public rather than private money that promises to quell the fire.
They failed spectacularly in 1929. This time around, they’ve thrown the kitchen sink at the problem, but so far it has produced only a mild, and wholly unconvincing, rebound. The fire still smoulders, threatening to break out anew.
China cannot forever, Greenspan-like, keep answering each successive bubble by creating another.
First it was gold, then housing, and when cooling measures threatened an all-out bust in the property and construction markets, the taps were turned on afresh, producing a further flood of money into the stock market.The authorities were happy to tolerate the bull market at first, hoping it might encourage a switch from debt to equity financing, but there seems little chance of that now. The stock market boom has only succeeded in adding to the debt.
Whether any of this turns into a calamitous economic meltdown obviously depends on the rest of the response. Policymakers have learned a thing or two since 1929; we now know that the real damage in financial crises is done not by the crash itself, but by a collapsing banking sector. Stock markets are only a signal of credit contraction to come. Even so, I doubt China has as much of a handle on its banks, and more particularly its shadow banking sector, as it pretends.
One further thought on these parallels. Now that the export-led model of economic of growth seems to have reached its natural end, at least for China, president Xi Jinping pins his hopes on internal consumer demand to drive growth, and he’s vowed to continue with the free-market reforms of predecessors to help achieve this.
Unfortunately, it’s proving a difficult transition. Part of the problem with free markets is that by definition they cannot be controlled. Busts are as much part of their DNA as the wealth-enhancing properties of their booms. As China is about to discover, bad downturns come with the territory.”
Should be fascinating to see if, when and how this plays out.
ParticipantWith economic unrest so prevalent around the world, the following excerpts from an article a friend sent me presents an interesting perspective on CA. . .
“California is the home to more super rich than anywhere else in the country – and it also exhibits the highest poverty rate in the nation, when cost of living is taken into account. Income disparities in the state of California are among the highest in the nation, outpacing such places as Georgia and Mississippi in terms of the Gini coefficient, a standard measure of inequality.
Some degree of income inequality is to be expected – people have different talents, skills and predilections, and markets will reward these in different ways. But there are serious consequences when things tip too far in one direction, as seems to be the case for California.
For most of the 20th Century, California had its share of rich and poor, but they were the outliers on either side of a broad middle class. The California Dream was the American Dream with a destination. While people no longer came to California to strike gold and stumble into riches, they did come to build a stable life for themselves and their families: a promising education, a good job, a home, a car. From around the country and around the world, migrants came seeking employment in our factories, and homes in our cities and suburbs. Stable, middle class jobs – and generally rising incomes – were the norm.
Beginning in the 1980s, the rich began to pull away from the rest. Between 1979 and 2012, California’s Top One Percent nearly doubled their incomes, increasing by 189.5 percent, while incomes for the other 99 percent actually fell by 6.3 percent.
The widening gap has many causes. As California, through Silicon Valley, led the world into the digital age, productivity rose to unprecedented levels. But virtually all of the economic benefits went to those at the top, partly because of the spectacular wealth created by the tech sector. In just the last 10 years, California tech companies added at least 23 billionaires to the list of richest Americans – Twitter alone boasted of creating 1,600 millionaires overnight when it went public 15 months ago. The state now has 111 billionaires; if we were a separate country, that would put us behind only the U.S. and China, and tie us with Russia.
Despite America’s reputation as a land of opportunity, intergenerational earnings elasticity (a measure of how likely you are to be stuck in the income group in which you were raised) is higher in the U.S. than in Canada, France, Germany and the Scandinavian countries, and just a bit better than in the United Kingdom or Italy.
And place matters in an even larger sense, with broad swaths of coastal California – including the Bay Area, part of Los Angeles and the Central Coast, and Orange County and San Diego – generally doing much better than those in inland California. This spatial separation by income also occurs in our daily lives: In 1970, for example, 65 percent of Americans lived in middle class neighborhoods, while only 15 percent lived in very rich or very poor neighborhoods. By 2009, only 42 percent lived in middle-class neighborhoods and 33 percent lived in neighborhoods at one of the extremes. California may indeed continue to be a land of opportunity–for the select few.”
June 24, 2015 at 4:55 PM in reply to: OT: Creative way to spend $1100 in a FSA health savings account #787495ParticipantLike the podiatrist idea, based upon what you’ve mentioned about your feet.
Although we can go anywhere, we’ve found Scripps to be great for just about everything we need, so you might want to consider one of their podiatrists.
ParticipantAgree many people who live in TV love it, others wish they could live somewhere else. I’ve heard both sides from many people.
Since we kind of live out in the country, yet near the beach in rsf, we plan to stay. We’re definitely beach lovers, along with everything else we do, so our location just makes sense for us and for our families. We do have a place in HI, and also enjoy spending time there, as well as other spots. It’s all about personal choices, and no one-size-fits-all.
June 23, 2015 at 3:43 PM in reply to: Career Advice wrto an Environment Undergoing Change of Ownership #787447Participant[quote=flu][quote=flyer]The main thing about all of this is that it sounds like you’re really going to enjoy the experience, as well as the financial rewards.
In my book, that’s the only way to live–enjoy![/quote]
I try not to get too excited about every new thing. The reason being is I’ve been around enough to realize that the grass is greener when you aren’t there. I’m sure every place has their issues. I would have been perfectly happy if I could stay where I am at. But then I also realize, I was getting too comfortable and tolerating things too much. So we’ll see. That said, I’m not ready to retire both financially and because I think I want to try to milk as many years more as I can doing what I do before people really don’t want me anymore.
In the meantime, I still need to build my real estate empire so when that day does come that I can’t work anymore, plan B is already alive and in auto-pilot.
I need to teach my kid to start investing much earlier in real estate. Starting at 30ies is just way too late if you are starting from nothing. One property per year netting $1000/month x10 is just unrealistic. More like one property per two years, maybe three if prices stay the way they are at. So to acquire about 10 properties, one probably needs closer 15-20 years..So kid should probably start when they are in their mid-twenties[/quote]
Agree building the real estate portfolio is a great idea for you and your family. It’s worked out great for my grandparents, parents, as well as for us and our kids, whom I sure will also pass it on.
June 23, 2015 at 5:12 AM in reply to: Career Advice wrto an Environment Undergoing Change of Ownership #787431ParticipantThe main thing about all of this is that it sounds like you’re really going to enjoy the experience, as well as the financial rewards.
In my book, that’s the only way to live–enjoy!
June 23, 2015 at 5:07 AM in reply to: Career Advice wrto an Environment Undergoing Change of Ownership #787429ParticipantYes, cvmom, although not mainstream, it’s definitely a very good movie. Although the author has had some royalty issues of late, we’ve heard he’s doing well.
My wife has been involved in developing her share of blockbuster movies, but she most enjoys searching the world for hidden gems like this one, and has met some extremely interesting people along the way.
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