Stopping Junk Mail and Annoying phone calls

One of the best ideas I ever came across on the Internet was the location of web sites to stop junk mail, get on the No Call List and Opt out of Credit card offers. This has literally saved me hundreds of hours per year that I can focus on making money or just relaxing. Taking action is really simple and takes no more then a few minutes for each registry, but great in reducing wasted time. Most highly recommended.

Finding Money for your investment rental property purchases

The banks, despite receiving billions from the Fed continue to hold onto their money and not lend to investors. This requires some creative real estate investing ideas to circumvent the problems. Here are a few ideas for real estate investors:

• Seller financing


• subject to financing


• rent to own investing


• 401k loans


• hard money loans
• family loans
• peer to peer lending

Hope some of these financing ideas stir your creative juices.

Investment Property Capital Gains

Need to figure capital gains taxes for your investment property? Use this page on investment property capital gains to get an idea of how much to pay the IRS if you sell your rental property

Fire! Why every renter and landlord need insurance

The first rental property that I purchased during my second attempt at being a landlord had a fire last week. The tenants had just moved in 5 days previously and had a fire in the fireplace. They went to sleep at 1:30 and the smoke alarms woke their kids at 4am. Luckily the previous tenants had moved and I had replaced the smoke alarms (the previous tenants had disabled them). The smoke detectors saved the lives of these tenants.

Unfortunately for the tenants they did not have renters insurance. However, I did have landlords insurance policy which covers loss of rental income. My policy also has a clause which requires the insurance company to cover any upgrades required to meet building codes. This is a lifesaver since my locality requires that any time a building permit is issued upgrades to older homes are required.

Buying a House for Investment

How do you go about buying a house for rental property investment? Basically, it is the same process for buying a house that you might live in. However, you must know local rental incomes for houses and it is best to buy what many call a "starter" home. This makes it easy to use rent to own investing to ensure that you receive the highest rental income possible.

50 Tips for Investing in Rental property

I've compiled a list of over 50 tips for investing in rental property here. Many have links to more detailed explanation of what to do.

Will the banks ever lend again?

During the early part of the last decade banks seemed to have unlimited money available to lend. Credit card offers poured into my mailbox, "no doc" loans for buying property were common. 100% financing for investment property was easy to obtain.

No more - during the past 18 months all of my HELOC's have been cut to zero. Funny, in my location (western NY) property values never sky-rocketed as they did in other parts of the country. And while other housing markets are seeing a big burst of the bubble, my market has continued to climb in value. Despite this, the automated valuing programs that banks use to assess property value seem to use a "one size fits all" approach.

I had several unsecured lines of credit available to me that have also been cut. In fact, every time I make a payment, the credit limit is cut some more. Despite my debt load dropping 10% during the past year and never being late for a single payment, my credit score is dropping like a rock as my balance increases relative to my total credit available.

What to do? Actually, I am reducing paying off debt and increasing the amount I send to my emergency cash reserves. It seems like not what Dave Ramsey would advocate, but if something major happens I can no longer count on borrowing from a bank.

Even Peer to Peer Lending sources like LendingClub have become more selective.

Despite what our government officials tell us, the money lenders tell us not to expect much of an economic recovery for a long time to come.

Circular Firing Squad that is the EU

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5D0VhS8qXT0&feature=player_embedded

Real Estate Rent to Own Working Great

A couple of years ago I tried my hand at flipping real estate. However, after months of being unable to sell my flips in 2007 (in hind sight just before the big real estate crash), I started using lease-options to keep the property occupied.

Now after over 2 years my rent to own strategy has been remarkably successful. I detail all of the methods I use to this strategy here at rent to own homes secrets.

I haven't had a stretch of more then a week when any of my properties is unrented.

Obama's unconstitutional theft

An apt quote to think about on one of the worst weeks of US history from Thomas Jefferson

"To take from one because it is thought that his own industry and that of his fathers has acquired too much, in order to spare others, who, or whose fathers have not excercised equal industry and skill, is to violate arbitrarily the first principal of association -- 'the guarantee to everyone of a free excercise of his industry and the fruits thereof'"

Supporting GOOH

My disgust with the political class has never been higher. Career politicians succumb to the corrupt influences of big government and continue to look out for their own self-interest rather then the interests of the constituents that they represent.

As such, I've joined a movement to replace all 435 members of Congress with new bodies. Tim Cox has started a group called Get Out of Our House which aims to replace incumbents with new bodies.

People worry that we shouldn't get rid of the "good ones". But even Washington had the sense to step down after two terms.

The process for selecting citizen candidates is a good one. I urge all readers to click on the link and join the fight.

The Government Bully

With the Senate approval of a health care bill we come one step further to having the arrogant elitists in Washington jam something down our throats that the large majority of American citizens do not want. In NY neither my Congressman nor Senators have been even willing to listen to the concerns of their constituents in an open forum, believing that they know what is best for us.

There are major Constitutional difficulties with these bills

• forcing private insurance companies to provide services at costs that do not allow them to profit
• The creation of "death panels" which cannot be abolished without 67% of future Representatives voting to do this (this is the rationing board that will be established when the inevitable shortages occur)
  
• forcing taxpayers to fund abortion *which takes away our right to "life")
• preventing firms from going around the system for people that would like to get other services
• forcing citizens to buy something that they may not want or need

In all my life I have never seen such a perversion of the political process. In American history only the attempt by the Democrats to open slavery to Kansas and Nebraska is as extreme. That ultimately ended very badly with the Civil War.

The Truth about Global Warming Scandal Comes out

A hacker has extracted hundreds of emails that show the enormous cover-up and dishonest science that global warming extremists have used to deceive the world. Link here

• The emails suggest the authors co-operated covertly to ensure that only papers favorable to CO₂-forced AGW were published, and that editors and journals publishing contrary papers were punished. They also attempted to “discipline” scientists and journalists who published skeptical information.

• The emails suggest that the authors manipulated and “massaged” the data to strengthen the case in favor of unprecedented CO₂-forced AGW, and to suppress their own data if it called AGW into question.

• The emails suggest that the authors co-operated (perhaps the word is “conspired”) to prevent data from being made available to other researchers through either data archiving requests or through the Freedom of Information Acts of both the U.S. and the UK.

It's been my contention for as long as I have blogged here that this whole AGW stuff was complete nonsense. Now it appears that the perpetrators of this fraud were not brain-washed but only liars.

Al Gore - the most dishonest politician in America's history - may he face criminal prosecution!

Is this the smoking code?

Data without manipulation

For those curious about what "hide the decline" means

some historical perspective

Gold, the US$ and a Train Wreck

The price of g0ld has recently spiked over $1100 an ounce after sitting under $1000 for several months. Meanwhile the value of the US dollar has continued it's slide downwards. The Fed recently stated that they will continue with their easy money policy until unemployment starts to pick up. With unemployment likely to keep moving up, it means that the Fed will continue to flood the world with dollars.

What does this mean? Is this 1978 when gold will increase in price by a factor of 5 in 18 months and inflation soared to our highest levels? One can't but help to think that history is set for a repeat. If other commodities follow the price of gold, a second economic collapse might be in the offing.

The Fed is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can't lower interest rates anymore. If they do the right thing (like Volcker - raise interest rates), it will hurt the current politicians as unemployment rises. If they do nothing, another massive bubble will blow up and create a train wreck bigger then we saw last year.

Goldman Sachs and the price of oil

The more I read about Goldman Sach, the more I see them as an evil company - the type of company that gives capitalism a bad name. Heres a story about how GS and some of the oil companies are manipulating oil futures markets

GS is making these "round trip" trades without actual oil ever exchanging hands. GS will sell an oil contract to BP and BP will sell the same contract back to GS. The price goes up, other traders see the high volume of trades and jump in, driving the price even higher.

Right now the world demand for oil is very low. Oil tankers are sitting full with no place to pump their cargo, yet the price still keeps going up.

The point of the futures markets was for companies to hedge against future prices increases or drops. Now an unregulated ICE outside the US has become a dark pool where insiders can drive up the price of oil to pad their outrageous bonuses.

Will the government investigate this? I doubt it. Paulson was from GS as well as Geithner. Sometimes, I feel like a crazy conspiracy theorist.

Wall Streets War on investors

Whenever I get excited about stocks I read something like this and get discouraged again. High frequency "flash trading" and "dark pools" - no wonder capitalists get a bad name.

Hope to make money in stocks?

Last week I attended a GetMotivated seminar. I was hoping to see some of the great speakers I had heard years ago while in Amway - Zig Ziglar and Robert Schuller. However, both are quite along in their years and were really unable to speak very well. Zig has suffered a brain injury and just sat on stage while we watched a video of some old speeches. The most memorable speech was given by an Indian immigrant (whose name I don't recall).



I did listen to a speaker called Phil Town who was making a stock based sales pitch and ended up signing up for a 2 day seminar. This is an organization connected to Wealth Magazine. Apparently this company is owned by TD Ameritrade. The web site is at Investools.com.



I've not really done well in my stock market investing career and been somewhat ambivalent about investing in stocks Vs real estate. However, I left the seminar with a renewed interest in stock investing. While the main purpose of the seminar was to sell really expensive education courses ($5000 to $25000), it did provide some insight into key ideas that I have been missing in stock market investing. Previously, I had dismissed technical analysis, but the speaker convinced me that the market indeed gives lots of signals about what it may do in the future.



So, I'm going to use the tools for the next 9 months and see if they can at least prevent me from taking a beating during the next market crash.

Best Real Estate Advice

Some have written and asked why I rarely write about real estate now. The reason is that there is not much to write about. All of my properties are always full and I get above market rental income. How I did it is detailed in Rent to Own.

So what have I been doing? Building a website with all of my real estate information in one place. It's something that I had wanted to do for a long time. I have always thought that the $2000 courses that real estate guru's teach is way overpriced and wanted to share that information free.

So for the best free real estate advice website go to Investing in Rental Property.

How did I create that website? Visit SBI and find out for yourself. It was fun and relatively easy to do it.

Some also ask why I write on political stuff. The answer is simple - there is no bigger danger to the efforts any entrepreneur may face then government intervention. The success of people in the US is based on property rights. Any thing that the government does to undermine property rights erases the work that I do. Whether it is imposes massive tax increase based on the hysteria of global warming or the attempt to create a single payer government run health care system. It all undermines my work - putting a gun to my head and stealing my money.

You're a right wing nut job if....

• you believe creating trillions of dollars in new debt will not save us from going bankrupt
• you think that the free market would provide better health care than the government run options
• you think that punishing US energy consumers with higher prices is a bad idea given that India and China won't reduce carbon output
• you don't think that Bush was Hitler II
• you think it is wrong to screw bond investors at GM and Chrysler while rewarding the Unions
• you don't believe Obama is "almost a god"

Obama and Cloward Priven - Crisis to Communism

I recently became aware of something called the Cloward Priven Strategy that explains most of what has been going on in politics. The basic idea is to create a crisis and force change on the Country. I always wondered how Democrats could impose so many crazy ideas on the nation that seemed so contrary to logic. Now I know. They aren't dumb - just evil.

Things like Global Warming, the banking crisis and voter registration fraud are intential attempts to disrupt the existing system and "spread the wealth around" as our great Messiah Obama has declared.

The global warming hoax which I have written about extensively has no basis in science. It's intention is to foist this Cap and Tax scheme on us to undermine industry and destroy the economy.

The $787 billion stimulus is not intended to make jobs, it's intended to prolong the crisis so that the leftests can take over more and more of the economy.

The Community Reinvestment Act which led to the banking crisis was a plan to destabilize the nations monetary system.

ACORN's voter registrations efforts has the goal of overwhelming the democratic process and make it illegitimate. In the end we will beg for a dictator to save us since we can't trust elections.

Saul Alinsky wrote:

"Make the enemy live up to their (sic) own book of rules," Alinsky wrote in
his 1989 book Rules for Radicals. When pressed to honor every word of
every law and statute, every Judeo-Christian moral tenet, and every implicit
promise of the liberal social contract, human agencies inevitably fall short. The system's failure to "live up" to its rule book can then be used to discredit it altogether, and to replace the capitalist "rule book" with a socialist
one."

Alinsky advocated the politics of personal destruction which took down Bork, tried to take down Clarence Thomas and now Sarah Palin.

Will the electorate wake up in 2010?