I may break this into two posts. We'll see how long I ramble.
First off, I'm getting old. My entire childhood, I was underweight. At about 5'10" as a young adult, I struggled to maintain 135. By my 30s, I settled in around low 160s. My scale has little markers you can set. I've got one at the lowest I weighed since buying the scale (that may have actually went down when I was loading trucks for UPS in my 40s. I forget). One is the most I ever weighed. That definitely went up a year or two ago. And one is around my target weight of 163. I'm happy with 165. 155 is my superhero top-shape weight.
These days I'm pretty well pegged at 174. And I really can't say I'm 5'10" anymore. Just over 5'9" is more accurate. (Apparently Harrison Ford was 6'1" for "Star Wars" and these days he's more like 5'10".) I'm doing plenty of cardio, walking The Dog but I really should be adding some strength training. Of course it all may be futile. I'm around the age Arnold was for the movie "Eraser." He looks good in it, but I think it's the first movie he doesn't take his shirt off in. And it's all been downhill for him since then. He's still in good shape for a guy his age, but there aren't going to be any gay guys clamoring him for him to take his shirt off these days.
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Finally supposed to be closing on the next house Monday afternoon. Real estate investing is hard for someone with empathy and compassion. Oh, you can convince yourself you're helping someone out of a financial jam, but part of me always feels a little like a vulture, preying on someone's misfortune.
I think I mentioned that this house, the woman is selling it because she's in poor health and she's been getting behind on the mortgage since her husband died. In fact, she can't move out until she gets the money from the close. There are ways to do that and I think we've done them as well as possible. The title analysis took awhile. Then they needed the amount that would go to the mortgage company. Once they got that, they realized there was a discrepency in the title that would require the woman's 3 kids to sign off on the deal. That's supposed to have finally happened and I've got my cashier's check ready for Monday.
But here's the kicker: In the breakdown of where the money goes, she's only going to wind up getting a little over $7,000 from a $125,000 deal. $109K goes to the mortgage company. Heck, between the realtors will be splitting almost as much money on the deal as she's pocketing. And if I read things right, the mortgage is actually around $11K more than they paid for the house.
Once upon a time I had a classically trained art teacher. He always maintained that there was no reason for us to suffer through the stuff he learned but even at a young age I disagreed: You have to know the rules in order to have the option of breaking the rules. If you don't know how to do something, you can't decide if it is important to your work. That's the way I feel about real estate investing too. You have to know the rules to know when to break them. Anyone who tells you the basics of real estate investing tells you how important leverage is. You get loans to buy your houses. Then you use the profits to get more loans to buy more houses. Stack up a house of cards. Now this isn't a bad idea if you're just starting out. What 25 year old has $125K to drop on a house? But I've invested in stocks literally since I was born and lived very frugally. I've also made some pretty good real estate deals that paid off quite nicely. End result is that I owned 3 houses free-and-clear. So instead of collecting $1,000 rent and then paying $650 to the bank (plus some for the insurance company, some for the tax man, etc), I keep that $650 (can't do anything about insurance, expenses, or taxes) for myself. So The Plan is to pay this bastard off as quickly as I can. Live frugally for another 10 years or so so I can live comfortably (well, by my standards) for the rest of the time. At that point (barring the Apocalypse, in which case money will be the least of my worries) my money should have reached critical mass where it will continue to make more money faster than I spend it. (And that isn't even factoring in Social Security.) That's right. I still need to write a screed on Social Security.