[Hatfield]

I think you can accomplish a lot of what you’re looking for with an Everbank foreign currency CD. They are a US-based bank that offers CDs that are indexed in single foreign currencies, and also “baskets” of currencies.

For example, their Indian Rupee CD is paying 6.5%

The deposits themselves are FDIC insured, but not against currency fluctuations. But this seems better than actually sending your money abroad, you’ll get proper income reporting, you can get your money back in a hurry if you need to, and so on.

I don’t currently hold any of these CDs but did quite well on the Euro CD during the big dollar slide about 10 years ago.

https://www.everbank.com/currencies/rates

[Hatfield]

The tax sale is held once a year at the convention center. It’s coming up – March 19. I had always been curious about these and I finally went several years ago and here’s what I learned.

* Dan McAllister himself runs/MCs the auction, and he’s a pretty funny guy actually.

* The vast majority of “properties” for sale are timeshares, which I think probably speaks volumes about timeshares.

* Many of the properties magically get redeemed a day or two before the auction, which means the list you see on the website isn’t really very representative of what actually gets sold at auction.

* At the auction they print out a book listing the properties with aerial photos and parcel maps. Costs something like $100 to buy the book and register to bid (which I did not do).

* As noted above, all encumbrances on the property transfer to the new owner. My guess is that if the current owner isn’t current on his property taxes, he probably isn’t current on a lot of other things either, so if you buy a property at auction it seems likely you’re also getting stuck a bunch of liens too. I don’t know whether the assessor would know about private notes or mechanic’s liens, so you’d want to research that as well.

* It seems like there’s a lot of smart money at these things. By smart money, i mean bidders who have run title searches the day before the auction and know the properties pretty thoroughly. The sense that I got is that you’re going up against sharks, and unless you’re a shark too you’re likely to get eaten.

* There’s also some amount of stupid money at these things. Once I realized that I was not the smart money and therefore this was not a game I wanted to play, I watched for awhile and then went back out into the lobby and chatted up some of the tax assessor clerks (who by then didn’t have much to do). They confirmed my suspicions about really, really needing to do your homework before bidding. One clerk chimed in and told me about a property in Julian that pops up every few years. On paper it looks great. The property looks fairly sizable but it turns out that it’s only large enough to put in a well, or a septic system, but not both. So there’s no way to get permits to build on it. She said that every few years somebody buys it thinking that they’re finally going to build their dream cabin up in Julian, only to discover that they can’t get permits for anything. It’s of no value to any of the neighbors because they know that nobody can build on it, so it goes delinquent and shows back up at auction.

* As for properties getting redeemed right before the sale, what’s happening is that some investor will track down the property owner and say “look, you’re about to lose this property and wind up with nothing. Let’s work out a deal so that at least you can walk away from this thing with something in your pocket.” That actually seems like a better strategy than buying the thing at auction, but it takes pretty big balls to approach somebody like that.

If you go, please report your findings! Would love to hear other perspectives on this process.

[Hatfield]

The WebSense relocation “package” was a 20% pay cut and zero moving assistance. It remains how many people from SD will actually go. The knuckleheads at Vista Equity apparently have the attitude that engineers are all interchangeable. And I’m hearing some pretty disturbing things from my friends in the OmniTRACS division which Vista recently bought from qcom.

[Hatfield]

And really no props to Amex are necessary. They are responsible for any losses over $50 due to fraud, not you, and you’re not even responsible for the first $50 if you lose the card and report its loss before any charges go through. That’s true for credit cards, but not so true of debit cards. There are some protections for debit cards but they are not as strong and don’t favor the consumer as much.

For this reason I only carry a credit card and absolutely refuse to use any kind of debit card. A couple times the credit union or the bank has sent me a debit/ATM card and I’ll have tell them no thank you, send me an old fashioned ATM-only card or I’m taking my business elsewhere.

[Hatfield]

I wouldn’t be so much worried about the zombie apocalypse. I’d be much, much more worried about the hangers-on and long-lost “friends” and “relatives” popping out of the woodwork once your name and likeness were splashed across the press. Only a couple states allow you to win anonymously, but apparently in California there is a way to set up some sort of trust inside a corporation that allows you to collect anonymously. Maybe make it a Nevada corporation, because ownership and officers are not a matter of public record. I’d want to keep that new Gulfstream a secret.

[Hatfield]

I’m more of a straightforward guy. I would get up really early, go out to the paper and slip in some photos of the perp walking up to the paper and leaving with it, with a note that says “I know it’s you, you know it’s you, can we stop this now?” Then leave the paper out for him to steal. When he sees the note I bet that will be the last time he steals your WSJ.

[Hatfield]

I think your best bet is going to trade it in on something. You’re not going to get close to blue book, but they’re probably not going to look at it either and make deductions for repairs needed. They’ll probably just wholesale it back out anyway. When I traded in the MINI they didn’t even take a look at it.

[Hatfield]

The brakes are expensive on a BMW because the rotors are consumed as well as the pads. So you need pads and rotors all around, hence the high cost. My MINI was that way too, and when one of the front brake calipers stuck – for the second time – taking the rotor with it, BMW refused to cover it under warranty. This was with 20k miles on it. That car was such a godawful POS that I couldn’t bring myself to sell it to a private party. I didn’t want the buyer phoning me up 3 weeks later when the next thing to break finally broke. I traded it in on a new 911 which I’ve been very happy with.

[Hatfield]

When the lease expires, I offer my tenants the option of signing a new lease or reverting to month-to-month. Some tenants like the perceived security of a lease, other prefer the flexibility of going month to month. If they’re good tenants it makes no difference to me, and they seem to appreciate being given the opportunity to choose what option they want to take.

BTW, the law in California changed a few years ago: if the tenants have lived in the property for a year or longer, you must give them 60 days notice. It used to be 30 regardless of the length of the tenancy.

[Hatfield]

Prius Chat is a great resource for Prius questions.

http://priuschat.com/threads/smart-key-replacement.82922/

I had Mossy Toyota replace and reprogram one of my smart key fobs about a year and a half ago. Total cost was $273. I could have dorked around with an eBay key fob but it just didn’t seem worth it to me.

The smart key feature is never something that i would have ordered, but I have to say I really love it. Walk up to the car, the dome lights come on, you touch the handle and the door unlocks, you get in and drive away, all without ever pulling the keys out of your pocket.

[Hatfield]

Nice to hear from you flu, I miss your posts.

Nice choice of cars there. My 996 is only the base model. 🙂 Actually, I’m not sure why anyone would want a Turbo 996 *and* whatever 996 the upper one is (Carrera S? GT-3?) Just for variety’s sake I would have gone with an old Targa or a 914/6 or something. I guess you’d have to give it the lower bunk since the old ones tend to wet the bed.

To answer your question, the race car(s) in question are nothing fancy. Quite the opposite: 24 Hours of Lemons cars, the sort of thing that, if left in the driveway, tends to bring out the neighbors with torches and pitchforks.

I’m headed out of town for a few days so I’ll give that broker a call next week and let you know what I learn.

[Hatfield]

Thanks for the replies, everyone, I’ll give Jack a call next week.

SK, I’m looking primarily for a place to store an RV, trailers, desert toys, race cars, etc, and set up some metalworking and welding equipment. I own two residential rental properties already, so for this I’m mostly thinking of it as a place to park some capital, get use of the space, and hopefully make a few bucks when I sell it in 10 or 15 years.

I did poke around on Loopnet and it seems like most of the properties are in O’Side or Otay, and many of those are commercial condos. Dunno how the commercial condo world works but my gut feeling is that I’d rather go fee simple if I can find such a place. It seems like there’s loads of appropriately funky properties along Main St. in National City but those sorts of properties do not show up in loopnet.

I’m reasonably familiar with how things work in the residential RE world but I have no clue how the commercial side works, which is why I wanted to talk to someone who specializes in this stuff, first to see if I can even do this, and secondly to hopefully find a suitable property.

[Hatfield]

We’re in OB and have Cox Preferred. Using the dslreports speed test server in LA I’m seeing 5.3 Mbps down and 2.3 up, with 43 mSec latency.

We’ve had very few reliability issues, and we even had service for 6 hours into that big power outage a few years ago. (Nerd that I am, I powered the router, switch, and wireless adapter off an inverter connected to a deep cycle battery.)

My main beef is the cost ($54.99/mo before taxes). One of the perennial items on my to-do list is to get our home number ported to a throwaway phone, wait 30 days, and then port it to Google voice so I can drop the landline and use an Obi box. We’ve already dropped cable. Once that’s done everything would be over IP and I’d theoretically be able to bounce back and forth between Cocks and AT&T every year and pay the prevailing teaser rate.

[Hatfield]

If you’re not willing to fire your agent after the mishandling of the first house, you should at least ask for reimbursement of your out-of-pocket expenses arising from that fiasco, to be taken from their commission on the second house.

[Hatfield]

[quote=spdrun]Note that this is NOT an article from The Onion.[/quote]

The Washington Times is almost as authoritative a source.

[Author]

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