As previously mentioned, this blog used to be worth just under $7,000. Now I found that its value has doubled in the past 6 months to just over $14,000.
My blog is worth $14,113.50.
How much is your blog worth?
Of course, changing the code, makes it worth even more!
My blog is worth $1,400,113.50.
How much do you want your blog to be worth?
I’m selling a property I bought in Salt Lake City. It was the first property I bought there and I made a few mistakes on it. Not only didn’t it have front landscaping, it had rubble in the front yard and subsequently had 3 foot weeds growing there.
Also had a run of bad luck with tenants. They kept moving out!
Finally I got bored and one of the cousins of my ex-tenants got his friend to put an offer on the house. I think the house is worth $260,000 less $9k for landscaping or $251k. He put an offer for $242.5k which is more than I’d fetch if I would have listed it with a broker so I took it. Considering I bought it for $210k, that a nice 32.5k profit less around 3-4k in vancancies, or roughly around 28k. Plus I get my 10% downpayment back.
Its a good time to be getting a check for around 50k!!! I have several oil deals I want to invest it in.
Now my problem is whether I want to do a 1031 exchange on this property. If I do, I don’t pay tax on the proceeds, but I also tie up my 21k downpayment for a long time.
In a 1031 exchange you DO NOT get to pull your downpayment out of the deal. Plus I may not be able to invest in the oil deals – it has to go into real estate deals, which most of the oil deals will not [although oil deal sometimes can qualify as real estate deals and be eligible for 1031 exchanges. The downside is they’re more expensive to get into and that eliminates any advantage of not paying taxes].
Since I have several properties at this point, I have roughly 45k in depreciation losses. Since my maximum passive loss is capped at 25k, I have 20 to offset against passive profits or the 28k I’ll be making off this deal! That way I get my 21k back and I pay taxes on the remaing 8k, or roughly $1,200! I can live with that. Plus I’m still carrying over 15-20k of losses from the stock market crash of 2000! So I probably won’t end up paying any tax on the profit.
And the sweet thing is the investor actually took over the lease-option agreement of the previous tenant and is paying rent until the loan closes! Of course I charged him a $2k assignment fee which helps mitigate my vacancies.
After todays unsurprisingly poor performance by Vonage, the next IPO is MasterCard.
Unlike Vonage, MasterCard is pretty profitable, and with a market cap of about $5 Billion [about twice that of Vonage] actually seems like a pretty good deal. Also unlike Vonage, they’re trying hard to make money [upto the point of gouging both card holders and retail shops]. Incidentally Vonage did claim that they weren’t to serious about making money, they only wanted to focus on building their client base.
One dark spot is the $1 Billion payout with WalMart over the next 10 years and the potential for lawsuits regarding high transaction costs, fees and interest rates.
But if you’re carrying high balances on your credit cards, this is probably a great way to hedge your bets!
Since people aren’t buying a lot of GM’s gas guzzlers, GM’s marketing team has hit on a novel way to entice customers in California and Florida to buy certain vehicles by July 5th.
One caveat is that customers must also agree to enroll in the OnStar vehicle diagnostic service, which is free for the first year but after that will cost $16.95 a month. Each month for one year, GM will give drivers a credit on a prepaid card based on their estimated fuel usage. Fuel usage will be calculated by the miles they drive, as recorded by OnStar, and the vehicle’s fuel economy rating.
In California, eligible vehicles are the Chevrolet Tahoe and Suburban sport utility vehicles and Impala and Monte Carlo sedans; the GMC Yukon and Yukon XL SUVs; the Hummer H2 and H3 SUVs; the Cadillac SRX SUV; and the Pontiac Grand Prix and Buick LaCrosse sedans. In Florida, eligible vehicles are the Impala, Monte Carlo, Grand Prix and LaCrosse.
It works out to a saving of about $100/month if you drive 1000 miles/month. So its basically a $1200 incentive. BIG DEAL!
Yahoo news reports Sales of new homes up 4.9 percent in April.
While that makes a nice sounding title, the rest of the article is slightly incomplete. The links for Yahoo news usually disappear so I’m not posting the link to the article. Instead here’s a summary of the interesting parts. You’ll see its slightly less optimistic.
The Commerce Department reported Wednesday that sales of new single-family homes increased by 4.9 percent last month to a seasonally adjusted annual rate of 1.198 million units, the highest rate since last December.
Economists, who had been forecasting a sales decline in April, said the increase had been skewed by the fact that the government lowered sales activity significantly in prior months.
Also, they noted that the number of unsold homes remaining on the market at the end of April rose to the highest level on record, an overhang that they predicted would depress prices going forward.
The median price of a new home sold in April was $238,500, up just 0.9 percent from a year ago, far below the double-digit price gains sellers were enjoying last year at the peak of the housing boom.
“Housing is holding up better than we had thought given how much mortgage rates have gone up, but we still expect it to weaken as the year goes forward,” said David Wyss, chief economist at Standard & Poor’s in New York.
Wyss said he expected home sales would drop by 10 percent this year and that construction of new homes and apartments would be down by about 8 percent.
According to this article Buffalo should be in the top 50 places to live.
Buffalo goes head-to-head with most of the Top 50 and comes out ahead.
Sperling can’t speak for Kiplinger’s, which chose the Top 50. But he said Buffalo is a contender just for its low-cost housing and quality of life.
“People are working hard to bring [Buffalo] back,” Sperling said by phone from Oregon. “Look at the downtown development you’re doing.”
Add Great Lakes boating, fishing and swimming; skiing an hour from downtown; two pro sports teams and low-crime, school-rich suburbs, and we’re knocking on the Top 50 door.
Within a two-hour drive lie Toronto, Niagara Falls, Niagara-on-the-Lake and the Chautauqua Institution. What besides cornfields is within two hours of No. 10 Iowa City?. And I’ll take our blizzards over No. 1 Nashville’s tornadoes any day.
Granted, we get killed on projected job growth (none) and high taxes. But on balance, Buffalo stands higher than most.
Hmm…last time I looked at Buffalo it had a negative job & population growth for the past 20 years and also the average salary had been dropping for the past 10 years too. The property tax was also very high. I think it was around 5-6%. When investing you always follow job and population growth, so I was wondering if this data had changed and whether I should reconsider investing there. Rather than dig up my old sources and go through the data again, I thought I’d rather ask the author of the article, Don Esmonde.
It was very nice of him to reply.
Lots of government-related, and many associated with academic institutions (SUNY at Buffalo, a handful of 4-year colleges, etc)…Also a number of manufacturing (GM, Ford) jobs…As the saying goes, this is a nice place to live — if you’re got a decent job…
Sadly this isn’t a post about how to get out of paying parking tickets. This is about why you should pay your parking tickets. Ask Yahoo has a pretty good postgiving some pretty good reasons. Not only does the fine increase after about 3 weeks, eventually you’ll get a boot, towed and then impounded.
And how do you get out of a parking ticket? Well you’ve have to ask my wife. She’s gotten out of several parking and moving violations.
Jeffery Stain of SavingAdvice.com was able to quit his job of teaching and selling antiques on ebay through his blogging endevors. He’s started about 20 different sites, all related to personal finance such as Debt Reduction 101 and Financial Baby Steps. He was able to monetize his sites through the use of Google Adsense, where web publishers earn chump change every time someone clicks on a link. When enough people click on an ad, its pays the bills!
Through cleverly linking several related sites and providing fresh content everyday, Jeffery has managed to make enough money to pay the bills. He’s not rich yet, but he’s able to quit his job which is quite an accomplishment. Wish him all the best and don’t forget to visit his site!
Related Posts:
Why I’m looking for a job and why Adsense rules!
I just received No B.S. Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs
As you can see, their covers are pretty identical so I ended up with the wrong book[incidentally I didn’t realize this until I had read about 30 pages! This was definitely not what I looked at in the bookstore.] Anyway I decided to read it since I had started it. I didn’t learn anything new until about page 143. Dan called it Behavorial Congruence.
Basically you act according to your goals. If your goal is to lose 25 pounds, eating icecream and stocking the cupboards with cookies is not congruent to your goals! If you want to get rich, sitting on your couch and watching TV is incongruent, hanging out with poor people who whine and complain all day is incongruent while copying what rich people do is congruent. A very simple and obvious yet commonly overlooked idea.
Another good point he brought up was focusing on actions rather than results. You don’t focus on getting a contract signed today, but rather on making 100 phone calls and persevering until you get your work done. Making the 100 phone calls increases your likelyhood of getting a paying customer to sign a contract with you. By focusing on what you can influence, rather than what you cannot, you make it easier to succeed!
These 2 points were worth the price of the book, even if I had to wade through 143 pages to get there!
I made the Carnival of Personal Development too this week!
Why is personal development important? Because you need to alter your thinking in order to get rich!