Category Archives: Money

The tale of the McDouble, and lessons from it.

Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Investment, Marketing, Money, , , , , ,

In this age of all the hype about a down economy many people are looking to save money.  One thing that millions have done is turn to dollar menus at fast food restaurants.  I have noticed that chains with good menus are busy and still quite popular, and presumably profitable.  I have also noticed that some chains just don’t seem to be catching up, such as Arby’s, A&W and Long John Silvers.  I often drive by many of these and the parking lot is usually empty, and when I go inside the whole place is empty.  It seems that some companies are watching the trends, they share this data with all the franchise owners and make changes to their system to make it more profitable, others simply sit there and do nothing, watching their empty store.

McDonalds has always provided good value, they are good at making customers think they are getting a great deal and that is because they usually are, as long as you stick to the value menu.  The only burger left on the value menu was the Double Cheeseburger, a fairly good burger and a great value.  In December of 2008 they replaced it with the McDouble.  It is the exact same thing but with one less piece of cheese.  They say it will save them 6 cents each, and I have eaten a few of these already, they still taste just as good and now have less fat.  Of course this was done mostly to save McDonalds money, but the lesson that should be learned is that businesses have pressures that make it hard to stay profitable in this economy, while at the same time they need to offer better deals to keep the customers coming.  Some get it, and have started to change, and others are simply empty and on the road to failure.

It is hard for most small business owners to understand that by charging lower prices they can make more money per day, simply by doing more transactions.  I went to the mall this weekend and there were a few stores going out of business, they even had 50% off sales on most everything.  But even at this price they were STILL more expensive than the local Walmart, it is obvious why they went out of business.  Too many store owners in the US have really gotten away from providing value for their customers.  During my travels in Asia I have noticed that most companies have a very small markup.  I even have talked to many owners that felt that a 10-20% is fair and ethical, and more is not.

In the US for the last few decades it has been all about getting as much as you can, charging all that the market will bear.  But this mentality is not going to work any longer, too many people now are suddenly taking the time to watch their dollars.  The companies that have ran their business on this model and have grown with borrowed money to take all they can have seen their sales dry up, and their bills come due, with out being able to borrow they are going out of business.  Yesterday during my trip to the mall I visited Dillards.  Dillards had a huge sale, all watches were 50% off, Jewelry was the same, and most every section of the store was the same.  The store was packed, it took 15 minutes just to talk to someone to look at a watch, and people were buying all over the store.  Some of the employees were worried because it felt like the store was going out of business, the check out lady said she was there for many years and has never seen this before.  But for me I know that stores like this are still making money at these prices, and it is much better to sell the stuff and make something than to keep it in inventory.  An hour later I walked into Macy’s.  They have a larger store, and almost nothing was on sale, and because of that there were almost no customers in the entire store.  The employees were just sitting there.  Macy’s is a big and old company, maybe they just have deeper pockets, but more likely they just don’t get it yet.  They both are public companies and both are down over 60% in the last year, lets look a year from now to see who does better.  Dillards will be able to report higher sales.  They took a large hit in their stock price with they announced their October and November sales numbers going down 10% from 2007.

On a side note the company report from dillards says this…

During the four weeks ended November 29, 2008, sales were significantly above the average company trend in the men’s apparel and accessories and shoe categories and significantly below trend in the juniors’ and children’s apparel and home and furniture categories.

I have been told before that when the job market gets tough people tend to dress much nicer, they need nicer clothes to go to that interview or to simply look better on their current job so that they won’t be fired.  People are willing to skimp in other areas.  I just find it great when you find hard data like this to confirm everything you have been taught.

Thanks for reading, I would really like to hear from you about what you think, please leave a comment.

One Simple Change that will rock your world.

Bootstrap, Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Inspiration, Investment, MLM, Money, real estate, The World, , , , , ,

I am sure that you have noticed that the media, and what people talk about has really become a bummer recently.  I mean all that I hear is doom and gloom.  It is a fact that the economy is slowing down and things ARE going to be much different in many different areas in the future.  Two main areas will be the availability of credit and the profit margins that companies have.   Many companies simply are too inefficient to stay afloat in this time.  Many companies will close and make all their employees go home, others will cut costs by eliminating employees, both of these factors will result in much higher unemployment.    Bills will go unpaid, people will be evicted, and the masses will feel generally negative.

So what can you do about all of this, for yourself and for your business?  Well the truth is that you must change the way you think about all of this.  Here is the real situation, there has been a shift happening for a while in the way business is done, the way money is made.  Knowledge is the key, creating a better system to do something and then implementing that system is the road to wealth in America now.  It has been so for a long time but the majority still can not see it.  In a time of change, like the one we are going through, there is unprecedented opportunity everywhere.  The larger the crisis the larger the opportunity.  And we are in a huge crisis, it is most likely that the opportunity will never be larger in your lifetime to make serious money, have serious success or to change the world.

So here is the basic change that you need to make.  Every time you hear someone say “Challenge” or “Crisis” or “Recession” or any of the other negative things you hear every day, constantly think “OPPORTUNITY”. Think about how the change has displaced old players and has make openings for you and your business to move forward.  When you hear about how someone can’t get a new car because of the credit mess, think about how money can be made keeping their old car looking like new.  When people talk about going out of business or they are clearing out their inventory to make payroll think about what a good deal you can get, and how you can buy more than you need and then mark it up to others once the sale is over.  (I do this on Laptops, buy at the clearance sales, and sell after the sale is over, or online to those that don’t know about it.)  When a company goes out of business you can look at the strong companies in the same industry and you have just found a good investment.  Best Buy is going to do great in 2009 when Circuit City is gone, that was the thorn in their side and it is gone.  And what about all those people who are out of work?  Well MLM sign-ups are at record levels, everyone is looking for an opportunity to own their own business, and people are putting much more effort into building those business.  Because of this so many new MLM companies have popped up, but many of them are not very good, please read about what makes a good MLM here.  When you see the real estate market just think about the fact that in the long run housing always goes up, and many cities have already started to show signs of recovery.  You can easily find houses that are great deals, get a tenant in there, and have much larger positive cash flow than has been possible for over two decades.  I know people buying houses with 20% down for under $120k and having payments less than $600 a month, then they rent it out for $1,200 a month.  Rental prices have not seen the drop that ownership has had.

So in every area that I can think of there is huge opportunity for the person and company that can see what if going to happen, figure out the correct change to make and implement that change quickly.  During this time you will need to break some ties with your old cash cow that has been paying your bills for the last few years, and focus on what is going to make you money in the future.  Many people will never be able to do this.  I know a very rich and successful guy who has not changed the way he has done business in years, his company has recently had to move out of two of their buildings, fire half the people and make some other huge changes, but they did not change the core of their business, and their business focuses on Luxury Construction supplies in Arizona, and I fear that this is not a market that will come back before this company is out of business.

So look for the opportunity in every crisis, embrace change and reap the rewards.

A change is coming.

blogs, Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, how to, Inspiration, Money

For a while now I have not been blogging very, much.  The main reason for this was my leg injury which really limited the amount of time that I could sit at my computer.  I used the laptop but the letter O was missing until I just got a new keyboard for it.  This made my time on the computer much more limited and work took the highest priority.

I now know that another main reason for that was because of the feeling I had that my blog was restricting me.  Basically i started this as a business blog, but recently my thoughts have not been too much about business, it still all comes from a business perspective.  I feel that I have a lot of good things to say that people are interested in.  I am often wrong, and I also often come up with new ideas, and follow them to see where they go. I also felt that often other people did a much better job than I ever could do and they covered the topic I want to talk about better than I ever would so I then decide not to post on that topic, I will change that and just point out their brilliance, and tell my readers to read their articles.

I have noticed that the blogs entries that I liked they most, and the ones that were the most popular are the ones where I tried to explain or simplify a complex topic.  By far my blog entry on “How to buy a laptop” is the number one entry, followed by “How to Buy a Computer Monitor” and “The Mortgage Crisis in Plain English“.   So I have decided that I will post many more entries where I simply take a complex subject, analyze it, and put my opinion.  In some areas I am an expert but in most I am not, but one thing will stay true, I will try to focus on every topic from the perspective of an Entrepreneur.

So from this day forward I will strive to post on this blog much more often.  My leg is feeling better now, and I also now have the keyboard so I can post from the laptop also.  This will make it much easier.  With the new topic I feel that I will have much more to say, in fact I have a huge backlog of topics I want to write about.

The Auto Bailout…….my idea

Business, Government, Money, Politics, , , , ,

Well they have been talking for a while about trying to save the auto industry.  The problem is that people just stopped buying cars for obvious reasons, no money/no credit/focus on more important things.

The car companies are very far in debt, this is from loosing money for decades, mostly due to high legacy cost.  This means that they are paying billions each year to pay for health insurance and give money to people who no longer even work for the company.  They also pay more for the ones that work there.  All of this make is very hard for them to compete

Basically it all came down to the Unions, and they know that if they wait they will not need to give up nearly as much.  The car companies will be more desperate and they will have more friends in Washington come January.

So what is my idea.  Well the problem is not enough sales, so lets just fix that problem.   Give people “down-payment” assistance from the government.  Say $4,000 if you, your company or your local government buys a new car from the big three by the end of March or so.   And also get the government to buy cars, lots of them.  They could use them for police work, give them to cities that need them and give them to charities that need them.   If you put $4 billion, into the first plan that would move 1 million vehicles, resulting in about 30 billion of sales for the industry, reducing inventory and solving their main problem.  If the government purchased another $10 billion in vehicles, of course only from the big three, and divided up by 2007 market share, it would basically solve their crisis for the time being.  There would not be any messy loan that would not be repaid, and the government would solve this problem while getting something of value out of it.

The next step to help cut costs is to have the government make labor come to the table and renegotiate terms so that they are more like Toyota, Nissan or Honda, so that our big three can compete.  If we could to that and cut these costs we could save this thing.

Tell me what you think…please comment.

The SOLUTION to the mortgage mess!

Business, concepts, Government, Money, Politics, real estate, , , , , ,

The other day I was watching the nightly local news like I usually do and they said that the city I work in was just given over 6.5 million dollars from the Federal Government that is earmarked to help stop foreclosure in the city.  This is a city of 400,000 and is in Arizona, the state with the third most foreclosures.  I figure the city of Glendale has had a bit under 1000 foreclosures this year.   (Yes we were the city that hosted the Super Bowl this year, if you were wondering.)  The thing that made this meeting pop out to the local media was the fact that the city council had NO idea what to do with the money so they were asking the General public to think of ideas and to go to the council meeting on Nov 25 to present their ideas.

For me this was a challenge.  I have been thinking about this for a long time, now there is a forum where I can actually be heard.  Very cool.  So I have been thinking about it for a week or so now, I will write down in this blog all of my ideas.
econdev_slideshow7

The federal government has mostly been focusing on the banks and helping them by buying bad loans or doing other things that really have not worked much so far.  For all this effort they have spent billions and the rate of foreclosure is still going up.  Some banks have stopped putting many clients info foreclosure simply because they can not afford the write downs.  The best hope of stopping it is really focusing on the people who are going into foreclosure.

Foreclosure happens for two main reasons.  The first reason is that a house is too far upside down, and the owner simply makes a business decision and walks away, willing to let the bank take the loss because then he does not have to. Many of the houses that fit into this reason are owned by investors who simply are making a business decision that is hurting all of us. There is little we can do in these cases, for these people it is simply a numbers game.  The best thing we can do is find a way to help this person sell this house through a short sale.  The best buyer may be the tenant that is currently living in the house.  As a city we could help these tenants with their down payment and get the bank to lower the amount of the loan enough so that their new payment will be the same or lower than what they have been paying in rent.

The second main reason for foreclosure is because the payments are more than the home owner can afford, this is either because the payments went up or the income went down.  There has been a lot of focus on loans that have “Adjusted” and spiked to a much higher payment amount, but only about half of foreclosures are this type.  In many cases the home owner has had a change in income from a business failure or job loss and can not afford the payments at this time.  Remember it only takes 90 days of missed payments to be put into foreclosure but it takes much longer to replace a job or a business.

So what is the solution?  It is in everyone’s best interest to avoid the foreclosure process and banks are very willing to work with customers that ask for help.  The best way to help people is to help them take action and to give them the tools to help themselves out of the situation.  I would propose that some of the money would be set aside to create an office where people can come to and help writing a hardship letter to their lender, this office would also give advise.  There would also be a city website where this information could be accessed.  This office could also hold seminars for the public and market these events.  All of this should cost well less than $250k per year to run.  Once a hardship letter is written most banks will apply 3 months of payments to the account and simply move them to the end of the term.  Also many banks are also willing to lower interest rates, reduce payment amounts and even reduce the total outstanding balance.  By writing these letters alone it could stop as much as 50% of the foreclosure in the city.

But then we need to go a step farther, I would propose that once the hardship letter is submitted that the city would help would help these people get a loan.  Most of these home owners are good hard working people and they will find a way out of their situation soon by either starting a new business, getting a job, or solving their problem another way.  By the time people pay late on their house they usually have already paid late on everything else and in our current system that means they can not get a loan to save their house.  Miss a few credit card payments, or a car payment, then get a bit behind on your mortgage the only loan you can get it either a short term payday loan or a credit card for $500 at 24% interest, and both of these help little to stop foreclosure.  The loan that these people need would be a line of credit that is easy to qualify for, has good terms and is long term so that they don’t need to worry much about it until after they have fixed their problems.  In most cases a loan in the amount of 10-15k would be enough to ensure that that household would not go into foreclosure.

Of course the City is not in the business of giving loans to its citizens.  But financial institutions are not willing to give loans to these people who need them the most because of lack of credit or income.  The solution is a guarantee by the city to pay these loans.  I think that the best idea would be to select one financial institution, that already has at least two offices in our city.  I would also go a step further and look for a locally owned institution.  It should also be a credit union because these non-profits give back to the community more than out of state banks do.  You then deposit $5,000,000 of the funds into a CD at the financial institution and make that the guarantee for the loans.  With long term, loans that are fairly easy to pay back the defaults could be quite low, well under 20%, and the financial institution could loan out 15 or even 25 million dollars and still not loose a penny on these loans because the first losses will be taken from the $5,000,000.  The financial institution also stands to gain because they will only have to pay 1-2% interest on the $5,000,000 but will receive 9% interest on the loans.  This interest will allow them to pay for the marketing and administration of the program while making a fair profit.  You should select the financial institution based upon the criteria above but mostly on how much they are willing to lend out to Glendale citizens once this $5 million security is in place. Most any financial institution would be willing to write 20 million or more in loans based on a government guarantee of covering the first 5 million in losses.

econdev_slideshow51
So who should qualify for a loan? If we give out loans to the wrong people it will not be as effective.  Well the plan is to stop foreclosure in Glendale so they first would need to be a homeowner of a house located in Glendale.  Next they should actually live in the house, investors should simply do a short sell and give the house to the tenants.  Next they should be people who are at risk of default, people who are at least 60 days past due on their mortgage.  They also should be people who can not afford their payments, people with payments more than 40% of their household income.  Right now there are probably less than 2000 home owners in the city who meet all of these requirements, and if they all received loans for $10,000 it would total only $20 million.  There should be no check of credit history or income sources.  A credit check could be done but only used to establish that they are using a valid SSN and that they live in Glendale.

So what should the rules regarding this loan be? We should create a system that helps people stay in their house so this is what I suggest.  The loan can only be used for making mortgage payments, homeowners insurance payments, property tax payments, and to cover electrical bills and city service bills.  When the loan is originated the homeowner would provide a list of these companies.  Money can only be withdrawn by going to the financial institution and getting a cashiers check directly payable the company, or by using the financial institutions bill pay service.  The loan would be a line of credit with a set limit.  People could choose to pay down the loan at any time and even pay it off.   For the first 3 months there would be no payments required.  After that and for the first 3 years a payment of only 2% (Or $25, whatever is more) would be required.  After that the customer must pay 4% (Or $50 whatever is more) each month until it is paid off.  The homeowner would only be able to withdrawal for the first 2 years under this program.  Using this system all loans that are paid on time will be paid off in under 8 years from the date withdraws stop.  These loans would also have a clause that if the house is sold or refinanced some time in the future these loans would be paid off in full from that sale.  If a payment is made late there will only be a late payment fee equal to 10% of the missed payment amount or $10 whatever is more.  The customer would then have to make up this payment by paying extra on the next two months.  In the case of the first mortgage still going into foreclosure in the future this loan would be paid by the security (The $5,000,000).  If there are any clients who are more than 90 days past due then the minimum payments for these accounts will be paid for by the security until the homeowner starts paying again or until the loan is paid off.   The security would still retain the right to collect funds from any future refinance or sale of the property.  An added benefit for the homeowner would be the reporting of this larger loan on their credit reports, for most of them this could be the largest non mortgage they have and if they pay on time could give them a needed boost.

With such a system it will be easy for the financial institution to manage, easy for the client to get a remedy to their problem and it would be the best use of the governments money to help as many people as possible avoid foreclosure.  After 10 years the program will be over and there is a very good chance that the city will still have much of the $5 million left, allowing other programs to be done at that time.  This system will help between 1,500 and 2,500 household, a number higher than the amount of foreclosures in the past year, putting a stop to most avoidable foreclosures.  This is a total win win situation, the city win, the home owners win and even the financial institutions win with lower foreclosure rates and for our partner institution new customers and income from the loans.  We also must act fast because every day the situation is getting worse and our fix should not be kept on hold.

econdev_slideshow41

Is it ok to steal?

Business, Computers, concepts, Government, Investment, Money, Politics, The World, , , , ,

I own a computer store.  It is fairly small and not so profitable recently.  In fact as our products have turned into a commodity it is very hard to make money any longer.  But there are other places that sell computers, CostCo, Dell, Best Buy. These companies are big, they make tons of money and are very rich.  They have tons of extra inventory just sitting there on their shelves.  Now if I went out and decided to take some of that inventory from their store and put it on my shelves, it would help my employees keep their jobs, it would help my store make more money this month and it would be totally illegal and immoral.  It is there stuff, I have no right to it.

But this is exactly what our government does but on a much grander scale.  In fact if you are the big store, and you don’t them steal from you Joe Biden calls you unPatriotic.  Yea if you are one of the people who will benifit from this plan I can see how you may support the Obama/Biden plan of taking more from the people who really make this economy work and giving it to the people who are middle class, or even those who choose not to work.

If you have any ethics you must see that this is simply another form of theft, the problem is that we have lived with it for about 63 years and people have become so used to it that they have become dependant on it.  If you make more than 120k per you, or maybe even less you should expect your taxes to quickly go up.  Obama says 250k in many speaches, 200k during his infomercial, and biden said 150k a few times last week, but now other written items from they say 120k.  Once he takes office, if he wins, I think it will quick drop to 100k or 75k.

On a side note Bush made some tempoary tax cuts that were fairly large and they expire in 2010.  When Obama says that he will not raise taxes to the middle and lower class he simply means that he will not add any new taxes BUT he is fully intending for the Bush tax cuts to be allowed to expire, in effect raising taxes, but HE did not do it….it has long been set in motion.   This slick concept is not caught by most people.

Social Security is the worst kind of theft.  It is a huge program that simply will NOT keep working much longer.  Basically you have a shrinking group of hard working young people who are mostly working pay check to pay check hardly getting by.  Then you have a growning group of older people who have had 40 years of high income earning, they mostly own a house and they have on average 10 times the assests of the first group.  Who should give who money.   Well, you guessed it, our government has it backwards, the hard working poorer working people give their money to the retired people who sit around and lead a life of leasure for the most part.  The worst part is that they feel entitled to this life because that is what they have been told for decades, it is illogical and is the main cause to our problems but there is little that can be done to fix it.

The Silver Lining

Business, Money, , ,

Now that people are cashing out of everything in this market, many people are buying gold, it has kept its value very well, but the volitility of it has been crazy, many days it can be up or down 5% with ease.  But during this time I have noticed that silver has fell like crazy.  It was $19.70 when gold was $950.  But silver has gone down to $11 when gold was $900.  That is over a 40% drop for silver.

In the past I have made a good deal of money on silver, I bought a lot for under 6 during 1996-1998.  I sold the last of it when silver hit $19.50 at the start of this year, but I have never seen a change this large this fast in silver.  Look at this chart to the right.  This may be a great time to buy silver.  Of course if you plan to buy silver, nothing is better for me than silver bars or coins.  Most coin places sell these for 20 cents above the quotes price, and will buy them for 20 cents below the current price.  This is how they make their money, but you get the item itself, and it is better than hoping the bank you buy the paper from does not fail, or you have a problem getting it done.  Also you can give them as gifts, and sell them to friends and such and pay no transaction fees. Also it is easy to save, when I was in college I would buy two ounces every time I sold a computer, after a few years I had a few hundred ounces.

New Nigerian Scam method.

Business, Money, The World, , ,

I thought I have seen or heard of all the nigerian scams.  To protect myself I always use PayPal or else I deal in person with the customer.  Basically PayPal is a good company for running transactions because they are really focused on security, it is fairly hard to scam someone on paypal.  But today I posted something on craigslist, I specifically stated that I will only ship my item to people who pay with PayPal.  Craigslist is a huge target for bad people and almost all checks are fraud.

So a few minutes after I posted the item I got emails from two people who were interested.  They were both from free accounts.  (Red Flag)   Both were eager to buy at the full price with out asking for anything (Bigger Red Flag)  Next they wanted it shipped to Africa (100% Fraud massive red flag).   But I wanted to see how they would scam paypal.  Paypal is very secure.  So I told them to send me the money.  This is how stupid they are, they just spoffed some emails from paypal.  They took the normal one and made it seem that it came from paypal but when I logged in there was no money in my account.   The email really came from  paypalverifyingagent@mail2consultant.com but they made the name say service@paypal.com the real address paypal sends from.   They did a decent job of spoofing the email, it looked just like a real one if you did not look at the header.    But then to try to ease any subspisions they sent a second email saying this.

This e-mail is sent to you as a confirmation of payment made to your PayPal account.We have rigorously examined the payment for Your Laptop by PayPal Member(monica0002) and the amount to be credited to your account by  PayPal is $800.00 USD 

       This transaction is in order and legal.This fund will be credited to your paypal account once the shipment tracking number is sent to our verifying team



      We encourage you to ship the item immediately (due to Paypal's policy) as your payment has been confirmed by us.Security is of critical importance to us at PayPal. 


      We use proprietary technology and constantly innovate to help ensure your transactions are safe. In addition,  PayPal has over 20,000 staffs worldwide dedicated to keeping  PayPal
accounts safe, and stopping online criminals. And we work with Internet
Service Providers (ISPs) worldwide to shut off fraudulent websites as
soon as possible.

PayPal‘s Fraud Investigation Team is highly experienced in fraud prevention. Several members of the team were former law enforcement officials with extensive experience in fighting online fraud. PayPal‘s fraud investigation team focuses on: Identifying and preventing fraud before it occurs, Detecting fraud in process Mitigating loss, if fraud does occur, Delivering information to law enforcement around the world to help stop those committing online fraud.

I sent a message saying that I had not received the money when I checked my account. Of course cause it is totally fake.  Four minutes later they sent another that was almost the same, but this time it said that my account would only be credited once they confirmed the tracking number with UPS (A total lie, PayPal never does this.) After 10 minutes I receive 5 more emails from the buyer who really wanted me to contact them ASAP (I guess their time at the Nigerian Cyber Cafe was almost up.)

I also receive another fake paypal message that is much more desperate




Dear  Jason Dragon (dragon@capitalactive.com),
                        This is to notify you regarding Payment made by "Monica0002" to your  account. The payment has been successfully made but on escrow due to security reasons we have to receive the shipment tracking number before your account will be credited.
                        This a new measure we are taking in order to protect both  sellers and buyers against fraudulent activities. Immediately the Item has been ship, send the shipment tracking number to PayPal Customer Service Department: paypalverifyingagent@mail2consultant.com composeto=shippment_proof@consultant.com&composecc=&subject=&body=" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">and immediately the shipment tracking number is CONFIRMED. Your account will be credited immeditely.

PayPal, and Craigslist company Copyright 1999-2008 PayPal. All rights reserved.
PayPal (Europe)  is authorised and regulated by the Financial Services Authority in the United state as an electronic money institution.

PayPal FSA Register Number: 226056

I simply sent an email back saying I don’t ship to scammers.  I wonder if that FSA number means anything?  I also noted how they misspelled, and why would a PayPal message mention Craigslist?   All odd.

Of course the reason that they do this is because it DOES WORK on some people who are too naive.  I am sure they have received tons of free stuff.  I bet at least one person who reads this blog has shipped an item out.  If this is you, or if you even were sent this scam I would love to see a comment from you.

The Mortgage Crisis in Plain English

blogs, Business, concepts, Entrepreneurship, Government, Investment, Money, Politics, real estate, The World, Uncategorized, , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Hello, my name is Jason Dragon.  You may be a long time reader of my blog, or like many people you may have found this simply by doing a search, if that is the case then welcome.  I plan for this blog entry to be one of the largest in scope of any entry that I have every done.  We are going to talk about the current Mortgage Crisis.  I will talk about it in 4 areas.

  1. The Boom
  2. The Bust
  3. The Current Situation
  4. The Way Forward

If you are wondering, I do have a degree in Business and I spent a lot of time studying economics. For a short time I even sold mortgages.  I will try to keep the text as simple as I can, I want you to not get bored and to read the entire things. Some of this will be my educated opinion, but most is simply fact.

The Boom

At the start of 2000 there was a bust in the stock market, millions of people pulled out a total of billions of dollars.  When 9/11 came they did so even more.  All of these people needed a place to put the money and the new trend was to put it into Real Estate, housing prices started to rise.  By 2003 and 2004 many real estate gurus arrived on the scene, showing common people how to make money in real estate.  It was a great time.  Prices were going up each month.

To add to this information, for the first time, was easy to get and compile.  It was easy to find a good deal on a house online, you could even find out the estimated value of your house or any other by going to sites like Zillow.  It was also easy to get a loan.  Because home values were expected to keep going up you could get a house for $150,000 and get 100% funding because by the time you get close to closing it was already worth $175,000.

The housing market was a great investment, it is one of the only investments that you can get almost total leverage in. Figure this, you buy a house for $150,000.  You only put $10,000 as your down payment, you get a tenant in the house and they pay for all the expenses giving you a zero cash flow but no expenses.  Now you sit, wait a year in this market and the price of the house goes up by 10%, BUT your return was not 10%, because the price goes up on the whole value of the home, not just your down payment.  You now have $25,000 equity in the house, a return of 150%.  This is the reason that investors flocked to houses, huge returns.

For many people, the more passive kind who usually invest in bonds and such this was way too risky for them, so they decided they would simply buy mortgage backed securities.  100’s of billions of dollars flew into these.  What these were was baskets of mortgages, and you could buy shares in this basket just like a stock, they had sold and predictable returns.  If you were used to getting 2% on your money in a CD or government bond, now you could get 5% on your money by buying one of these.  It was great for pension funds and foreign banks to sock away money because it had a higher yield and was still considered very safe.

The reason it was considered so safe was because of the very low default rate in mortgages caused by a booming housing market. Most people would simply sell their house for a nice profit before they went into foreclosure.  The investment banks reduced the risk even more by bunching 1000’s of mortgages together.  They would then break them up into different levels.  If there were any defaults the investors at the lowest level would be wiped out first, and the investors at the highest levels would still receive their full returns even if 20% of the mortgages defaulted.  It was a great system.  The investment banks bought up over a 100’s of billions of dollars worth of mortgages using this process, and they charges a hefty fee for all of it, making them some of the most profitable companies in the world.

For almost 70 years there was been a set of two companies, founded by the US government to facilitate the flow and resell of mortgages, these are Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae.  Basically these were huge companies that would buy mortgages from banks.  If a bank could not resell the mortgages they would need to get deposits to cover all the mortgages that they wrote and that would be nearly imposable.  About 92% of all mortgages are resold.  Freddie and Fanny purchased over half of them.  They would buy them from the bank, the price was set by the value of the house, Credit of the home owner, zip code of the house and a few other factors.

This created a great system for the banks.  They would sit there and advertise that they can get you a great deal on a mortgage, they would help you with all the paperwork, they would send your information to underwriting, where they would basically see what was needed to make your loan sell for the highest price to Freddie/Fanny.  They had some rules such as the first mortgage could only be 80% of the value of the house, or else the homeowner would need to buy PMI (Private Mortgage Insurance).  The bank would then take your entire mortgage packet and find out how much they could get.  On a $200,000 loan at 6% there is someone making $12,000 in interest every year.   The buyer of the mortgage would pay a premium for the loan, but they wanted to make sure they would get their money back.  So what the banks did was to get the home owner to sign a pre-payment penalty clause.  Basically this was a clause saying that the bank would get 2 years worth of interest from the customer, that the customer would still have to pay 2 years of interest even if they sold or refinance the house before 2 years was up.  So on that $200,000 mortgage at 6% interest the holder of the mortgage was guaranteed $24,000 in interest payments.  Because this $200,000 mortgage was really worth $224,000 for the first 2 years they would offer to buy it for $215,000 from the bank.  The bank where you got your mortgage made $15,000, paying some of that out as a commission to your mortgage broker.  They also usually would agree to service the loan, meaning they would send out statements and collect the money on behalf of those who owned the mortgage.  If a loan had a longer pre-payment penalty the bank would get more money, if they sold it for a higher interest rate they would also get more money.  The more income they could show for the client the more they would sell the loan for.  The interest of the bank and mortgage broker was to get as much from the client as they could so that the resell value would be as high as possible.  A few banks even started to lie about some of the details to drive up the price.

Mortgages were sold almost instantly.  This allowed banks to generate mortgages as fast as they could.  It was a great deal, get someone to come in and fill out some paperwork, show that paperwork to the mortgage buyer, get the buyer to agree to fund the deal and then you close on the whole deal and walk away with huge profits.  Do this a few times a day and a little office with a handful of people can make millions per year.  And that is exactly what happened. The banks had every incentive to get you into a mortgage, and they would do whatever was needed to do so.  It was easy to get a loan, even if you had no money to put into the deal, they simply would do a 20% second mortgages, or even if you really had no income, you could just do a stated income loan.  People were buying houses who could not pay for them.  Their main plan to pay as little as they could each month, and refinance when that 2 years was up and they would have a ton of money due to the value of the house going up.  It was a great system that worked for millions of people.

All of this easy money was causing housing prices to sky rocket.   I live in Phoenix Arizona and between 2003 and 2006 prices for most of the city doubled, people were bidding against each other in attempts to get houses, simply because the house was a good investment.

Where was this money coming from?  Well as I said much of it came from people who got out of the stock market, and needed a new place to keep their money, a large chunk came from foreign companies.  Remember we are buying at least 700 billion dollars more of stuff each year than we export.  So many nations, China, India, Saudi Arabia have billions of dollars that they need to invest somewhere.  They want us to keep buying to they make it easy for Americans to buy things on credit, then we buy more and they sell more.  It is a great spiral that put America in huge debt while at the same time sending millions of jobs all over the world.  The is the greatest transfer of wealth in the history of the world, but more on this in another blog.

The Bust

In mid to late 2006 the prices started to get very high, and there were signs of problems.  Some of these no money down investors who bought on stated income loans started to not pay their mortgages and the prices were not going up fast enough to still leave the buyer of the loan with a profit.  The buyers of these loans started to change their guidelines on who they would give money to, they started to make it harder.  This was a sign to many investors to start to sell, and the number of houses for sale started to go up.

Some of the hottest housing markets were Southern Ca, Phoenix Az, Vegas Nv , Atlanta Ga, and Miami, Fl.  These markets saw some of the largest gains, they were all nice warm places to live and people have been moving here for decades.  But they also had something else in common, they were all major places where Illegal immigrants would flock.  In late 2006 and early 2007 there was a huge national debate about Illegal Immigration,  and many of those here illegally owned houses but decided to simply leave, they dumped their houses, many others just borrowed as much as they could and walked away.  And the prices in these markets started to fall.

Once prices started to fall it changed all the numbers for the banks and the buyers of the mortgages.  If you get that same loan for $200,000 the buyers have more risk now, they don’t have a security of the house itself because the value will likely be less than $200,000 if the customer defaults.  So they said that they would only take the best and most qualified borrowers.  No more stated income loans, no more loans to people with sub-prime credit.  Suddenly most Americans could not qualify to buy a house.   All of these people were pushed out of the market, demand for houses plummeted, and when demand goes down price is soon to follow.

To make matters worse some of the Sub-Prime loans started to default.  Many were from investors who were upside down on the loan, they borrowed in a corporate name so there was no ill effects to them to simply walk away and give the house to the bank.  So thousands of them did just that, it was smart for them to do so.  The people who used the system the most were mostly the smartest and best at it, and when things started to go down they were the first to get out.

Most of these banks only put a 1-3% budget in for losses and some are getting much higher losses than that.  These foreclosed houses had to be sold so the banks simply dumped them on the market.  But banks are not in the business of selling houses, and they do a very poor job of selling houses.  They are risk adverse so they only want buyers who they feel will actually close the deal.  For the most part they sell the house as-is.  They do nothing to make the house look good and nothing to try to sell it.  For most buyers, buying a REO (Real Estate Owned)(Bank Owned) house is not appealing.  People with good credit who can buy a nice house want that house to be ready, and come with a warranty.  So these houses sat on the market for a while and the only choice for the banks was to keep slashing prices.  This was the main cause for housing prices to plummet.  This caused even more people to realize that they are upside down on their house and more of them simply walked away.  From the middle of 2007 until now this process has been happening, and it keeps getting worse.

These banks then saw their stock start to melt down.  Imagine a company that has 250 billion in mortgages but they owe 200 billion in debt on those mortgages, lets call them Mega Bank.  It was great for them in the boom time, they borrow money at 3% and loan it out at 7%, making 4% on 200 billion dollars, or 8 billion per year.  They had every inventive to do this as much as they could.  This company would have a value of 50 billion dollars or so in book value, the stock market almost always prices your stock well above book value so the Market Cap (The total value of all stock of the company) may be 100 billion or so.  With earnings of 10 billion or so it would be at a Price to Earnings ratio of 10, something that wall street loves to buy.   This company would be a star.  Now what happens if there is a ton of risk in the mortgages that the company owns, the company figures out that 5% of their loans are defaulting, but for one loan that is a total loss it wipes out the profits from 10 other loans.  So their accountants do figure out on average how much are all of the loans that they company owns worth.  If that number is lower than what they currently value the loans at they restate the value of these loans and do a write down of these impaired assets.  If you have 250 billion of loans on the books your accountants may feel that they are only worth 200 billion.  50 billions dollars, on paper, just disappeared.  Some companies bought insurance for such a thing to happen, the largest company that sold such insurance was AIG, they have as much as 300 billion dollars of insurance losses out there that may be paid.   So if you are Mega Bank the value of your company just went down by 50 billion dollars, but in reality all the rest of your assets you owe so your stock crashes, your market cap is no longer 100 billion but maybe more like 10 billion, or even 1 billion.  Investors on the stock market don’t know what to do, all they know is that they can’t value your stock.

The Current Situation

At the start of 2008 there were 5 major investment banks in the US, and three banks acting as mortgage clearing houses.  These were the banks that were selling mortgages to investors.  The investment banks took most of their profits by keeping some of the most high risk and high profit mortgages for themselves.   4 of the 5 investment banks saw huge losses, and all three mortgage clearing houses saw major losses.  1 of them went out of business, Indy Mac, they simply took so many losses that they could not pay depositors any longer.  Freddie Mac and Fanny Mae lost almost all of their stock value and had to be propped up by the government to stay alive.

Of the 5 investment banks Bear Sterns was the first to fall, they went from a 100 billion dollar company one week to being bought out by JP Morgan Chase for only 1.1billion the next.  The next to fall was Lehman Brothers.  They lost billions in sub-prime mortgages.  Their book value was negative.  They has a lot of really good assets though and tried to sell to a bank in Korea, but it did not work and in September of 2008 their stock went almost to zero.  They declared bankruptcy On Sept 13th, and are being sold in pieces to different companies, stock holders will probably get nothing.  On the same day the third Investment, Merrill Lynch was purchased by Bank of America for $50 billion.  Bank of America stock fell 15% that day because investors thought that they had over paid.   That only left two Investment banks,  Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.  On September 22nd 2008 these two bank, under new government requirements converted to traditional banks.

None of this was helped by the hedge funds, these are basically large pools of money that often bet that something will fail.  These hedge funds helped drive the price down of many of the companies I wrote about today.  But many hedge funds also lost money on the mess.

The government has decided that for the most part they are going to bail out many of these companies, they are also considering a new govenment agency that will, for a short while, buy up this bad debt for pennies of the dollar, allowing the banks to write off these losses and move on.

During this whole time it has gotten harder and harder to get a loan, basically unless you put 30% down, have perfect credit and tons of income you are not getting a loan.  The government put in a program to help some home buyers which helped out a bit.

Even with all of this going on our economy is still fairly sound.  Employment levels have only gone down a bit, and many other parts of our economy are still stable.

The Way Forward

I have always been a free market guy, I think that the system works best when there is freedom to be successful and freedom to fail.  The government is really taking the failure and greed of these companies and helping them out.  They are doing this to save the normal people and the economy as a whole and to fix our broken mortgage system.  The government, and our President have seen how large this problem is and that they only way to fix it is a huge government bail out, and I AGREE with them.  The bail out will put stability into the system, it will prop up all the banks, and it will resolve the credit crisis allowing money to start flowing again.  They are looking at up to 1.5 TRILLION dollars in loans, and buy outs.

I think that we need to do this, if we don’t our economy is sunk, but this is NOT a progam that I think will cost the taxpayer any money, in fact I think it will make our government the highest profits that we have ever made.  Think of it this way, they are not just giving money away, they are going to be buying mortgages at the low of the market, the current talk is to buy them for 50-60 cents on the dollar.  If they do that they will set a low in the market, these mortgages are still backed by the actual real estate and the economy will turn around.  So one of three things will happen to each of these mortgages.  They will either get forclosed on and the government will sell off the house, most houses are still valued at over 60% of the value of the mortgage so they will still make a bit of money.  Option two is that later on they may sell back the mortgage for a profit, maybe 70-80 cents on the dollar.  The last thing that will happen to some of these loans is that the home owner may sell or refinance the house, and the government will get 100% of the value of the house, basically doubling their money.  I think that if the government does this that they will make at least a 20% profit on the money.  They are talking about buying 700 billion in mortgages, making them about $150 billion.

For AIG they are giving them a 2 year loan for $75 billion.  In the termns of the loan the government gets a 11.25% return each year AND they get stock options where they can buy 80% of the company at a very low price.  The company was worth over $200 billion last year.  If it goes back up to even 100 billion the government will make almost 80 billion from their stock options, and still make about $17 billion from the interest on the loan.  This bail out could make the government almost 100 billion dollars.  The owners of AIG see how much they will loose if the Government loans them the money so they are still looking for other lenders to help them out.

Almost everything that they are doing is set up in such a way, this whole bail out system as a whole, will probably cost out government nothing and make us at least half a TRILLION dollars in the next 2-3 years.  This could wipe out our deficit and radically change our government balance sheet.   It is not enought to totally wipe out our deficit but it will reduce it a lot.  If the economy really picks up so will taxes and the government has a good chance of being in the positive.  Of course this positive change will not happen until 2009 and if a democrat wins as president will probably say that it was them that made this change and that they are the reason that the government is suddenly so profitable, but we know the truth.

On a side note the President does very little to effect the economy.  Most of what is done is done by congress or the treasury department.  Also anything that the president does do takes 2-3 years before it really goes into effect.  Such as the losses in 2000 were not caused by Bush, he just took office.  All I know is that I would never vote for someone who thinks that raising taxes in a time like this is a good idea.

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Time is more important than money.

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Today I read a blog that very clearly states the delegation thing I was talking about the other day.  Sure you could do everything yourself to save a bit of money in the short run but in the long run that type of thinking will cost you your potential.  This is what AJC said on the 7million7years blog today.

Trading time for money is exactly the wrong way of looking at it: time is a finite resource; money is an infinite resource, why trade the finite one for the infinite one?

In other words, they keep printing money, but nobody is giving away more time.

So, every time that I can find an opportunity to ‘buy’ time with my money that’s exactly what I will do.

It’s why I give my shirts to the drycleaners; my mowing to the landscapers; and my property management to the experts. It’s why I outsource practically everything to do with my investments, too – except picking the investments themselves, or managing any issues to do with risk.

If I didn’t outsource my property management, I would eventually stop buying real-estate because every property that I bought would add to my workload, and who wants to do anything that makes you have to work harder?

So, I may lower my return on each property somewhat, but I reinvest the ’saved time’ into purchasing more investments … the whole shebang is much greater than the parts.

If you want to be a successful business own the employee mindset and the frugal mindset will hold you back.  It has for me, I see it now that this was one of my biggest mistakes, that is why I talk about it so much.