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The (new) Eclectic Dragonfly.

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NEVER FORGET

Photo by Sister72

Who in their right mind would think this is a good idea?

CNN is reporting that the President’s jobs plan may create as many as 1 million jobs.  They go on to add that ‘economists gave generally positive reviews’ to the President’s plan.

Um, FYI, the President gave a speech.  He hasn’t actually given us the plan.  The actual plan hasn’t even been written yet!

OK.  Now let’s look at the numbers.

1,000,000 Jobs created

$447,000,000,000.00 Estimated cost of Obama’s “plan”
    (that $447 billion dollars!)

That’s $447,000.00 per job!

If you take that cost for each job and broke it down for one year’s paycheck for one person that’s:

$447,000.00 cost per job

divided by 52 weeks in a year

divided by 40 hours in a week

That pay rate would be $214.90 an hour!

Unless it’s the economist that’s getting paid that call it $215 an hour, how can they possibly consider this a good investment?  The President doesn’t care.  He’s spending our money on this lame brained idea, not his own!  And he’ll be out of office before the bill comes due.

Should Congress pass a cockamamie scheme like this?  With those numbers?  Where the ROI is only a million jobs?  And probably the vast majority of them will be bureaucrats overseeing the new Centralized Federal Workers Administration?  Lord help us! 

Well, I suppose the - still to be proposed - Federal Works Planning Kommittee vill need verkers…

“Und if you don’t like verre ve assigned you to verk you vill be reassigned instead to a kamp to be reeducated!”

America was nice while it lasted.

Please take a number…

Two weeks ago I made an appointment to meet with someone from the mortgage department at my bank.  That appointment was this morning. 

I got all dressed up.  Trousers and polo by Botany 500, my best going to the office shoes, watch by Michelle* on a tooled leather strap made by yours truly.  I don’t get that spiffed up on the weekend for just anybody…

[* It’s very real but I got it for next to nothing at the flea market.  It’s so nice when the venders don’t know what they have! ;-) ]

I arrived about ten minutes early and fully prepared.  I had my pay stubs.  I had my bank statements.  I had two years worth of tax returns. I had documentation regarding my pension and 401(k).  All laid out nice and neat in a ring binder.

I also had five (5) copies of my personal Income Statement and Balance Sheet.  The first one shows things as they stand today (admittedly not very pretty…), the next three show the three steps I’ve laid out that will solve my cashflow problems once and for all, and the final result – a wonderfully clean and productive Income Statement and Balance Sheet that, once I achieve it, will give me the freedom to invest as I see fit for my future.

She didn’t look and any of it.

She just fired up the banks web-based mortgage application form and filled it in for me as if I didn’t know how to type.  I could have done that myself two weeks ago at home on my own computer in my skivvies had I chosen to do so.  The “person from the mortgage department” we were meeting with turned out to be nothing more than an order taker!

(muffled by the speaker)

“Would you like fries with that? – Please drive up…”

This was a total waste of time!  Both my time in the meeting this morning and of the two weeks we waited for this morning to arrive!  I need to talk one-on-one with a real decision maker, not waste my time with low level data entry clerks!  How do I get past these underlings and reach the real mortgage people?  I may not be independently wealthy now – but very soon after I get to that fifth spreadsheet I expect to be someone my bankers will know on a first name basis!

I’m sooo confused!

So, if then candidate Obama had as he stated been to fifty-seven states and he had at the time one left to go to, but they wouldn’t let him go to Alaska or Hawaii – how does North Dakota not qualifying to be a state mess up the math?

For extra credit factor in the fact that two ‘states’ are actually not states but commonwealths…

Now that it’s come to light that North Dakota is not now nor has it never been a state, what happens to all that federal money that has been spent there low these many years?  And what about all the federal taxes paid by North Dakotans over those same many years?

Oh what a tangled web we weave…

I suspect the .gov of the territory will try to quietly “fix the problem” and sweep it under the rug.  All the while hopping that nobody notices.

H/T to SayUncle for bringing this to our attention.  Go forth and read the comments.  Many a good point are made there in.

Why get into Real Estate?

“… Real Estate or other entrepreneurial investments” might be more accurate.  But that makes for a lousy headline.  ;-)

Anyway, my answer to that is simple.  The old industrial age model no longer works. 

That was:

• Go to school* so you can
• Get a good education so you can
• Get a good job
• With a good company
• With good benefits
• And a retirement plan
• And you’ll be set for life

* By school they really mean collage.  For most people and most careers these days a high school education simply won’t cut it.

I had friends who retired from Polaroid many years ago.  They retired with a full pension and benefits and should have been set for life.  Then Polaroid filed Chapter 11.  As part of their reorganization they convinced the bankruptcy judge to ‘relieve them of the burden’ of their obligations to their retirees.  In an effort to save the corporation the judge threw all of the ‘no longer productive employees’ under the bus, as it were, and cut off all of their pensions and health insurance.  That saved the corporation a bundle!  And hosed all of the people who made Polaroid what it once was.  Not the Board of Directors, mind you.  All of the rank and file.

This is but one example of many and it was quite a few years ago now.  But it is still going on to this very day.  In some cases the corporations skip all the fuss and bother with filing bankruptcy and just cut the bennies themselves.  CNN has an article on their Money page on that very subject, as a matter of fact.

Early retirement a scary health care option

You simply cannot rely on the old model of retiring from the company you’ve worked for for thirty years, plus what Mum calls Social Obscurity, to guarantee a secure retirement.  And don’t expect your 401(k) to be there for you either.  Robert Kiyosaki has a whole book on thesubject.

You need to take responsibility for your own financial future.  You personally as an individual. 

Don’t expect the government to save you.  They can’t even save themselves!  Just take a look at the latest budget crisis spawned by our ‘leadership’ in Washington.  I don’t even need to post a link here because no matter how many years down the road you may be reading this there will be some financial crisis in the news that has as its origins foolishness emanating from Capital Hill.

Don’t expect some NGO to save your bacon either.  I’m not casting aspersions there.  It’s just that an NGO’s resources are invariably much more limited than the government with its ability to print currency on a whim.

You may get lucky and get help from somewhere.  But you can’t count on it.  That is why YOU have to take the initiative and take care of yourself for yourself.

The safety briefing given by the flight crew always states “If the oxygen masks are deployed PUT ON YOUR OWN MASK FIRST!”  You cannot help others if you pass out.

Likewise, you have to take care of your own financial well being, especially if you want to help others.

Bringing this back around to the headline: Investing in real estate that produces a solid passive income, such as the 14-unit apartment complex I am working on purchasing, is a time tested and proven method of generating a reliable income without trading time for cash as in an industrial age job.  It also has the benefit of providing that income even after you retire from your job in the corporate world.

Some would say that now is a lousy time to get into real estate.  “The bubble’s burst and property values are in the tank.  Why on Earth would you want to get into that mess?”  I would reply that now it the best time to get into real estate that will ever occur in our lifetime!  Everything’s on sale!  There are bargains everywhere you look! 

Buying to “flip” in a rapidly appreciating market is only one way to make money in real estate and IMHO it’s far from the most reliable.  Frankly, it’s a form of gambling.  You are buying something in the hope that someone else will pay you more than you paid.  That model will simply not work in most markets at this point in the cycle.

On the other hand, buying a rental property that will pay you more than the cost of owning it over however many years you choose to own it is a sound investment.  That passive income may not be the big flashy bundle of cash the flipper may have made a few years ago, but it will continue to come in.  Month after month.  Year after year.  And if managed property it can continue to do so for your kids and their kids and barring some great calamity for many generations into the future.

Now about that calamity, that’s what insurance is for.

Right now is the very best time we will ever see to get into real estate.  That is why I am working so hard, even staying up late to get the paperwork done, to get this first deal under my belt.  As I said in my one pager: once I have completed a couple of deals of this type my next destination is “To Infinity and Beyond!”  (Thank you Buzz Lightyear for that quote!)

If you’ve read Robert or Dolf or Loral or the other Robert or any of a dozen others this will all sound familiar to you.  If you haven’t I’d suggest you get on down to your local library or book seller and get your hands on a few of these books.  Reading them will open your eyes to a whole new world of opportunity!

One Pager

One of the things that one of my favorite authors, Robert Shemin, recommends is to write up a personal business plan.  His is all of one page long.  He calls it his One Pager.  I’m openly swiping that phrase for mine, though the title on the page is The Master Plan.

I had been thinking about this for quite some time and finally sat down and wrote it out in detail.  Actually I was working on it at lunch yesterday much as I am writing this today.  It was up on my screen when my boss comes along, plunks himself down in my guest chair and asks “Whatcha got going?”  I told him about the actual work I was working on and that I’d switch back to that after lunch.  I don’t know how good a look he got, but my one pager was almost finished…

Anyway, I included that in the fax I mentioned in my last post to try to give the lender a sense that I have a defined plan that includes a time-line for getting myself out of the mess that becomes apparent when you examine my financial statement.

I hope it helps!

In any event, I now have the plan.  I know what my next steps need to be and what to do after that.  I just need a little OPM (that’s Other People’s Money) to get me started along the path.