19 October 2007 No Comment Print This Post  Email This Post

This has been a long week for me. What’s new? I missed on a great piece of real estate today. About a month ago I saw a nice home in Sugar Land, TX. for sale. If you follow this site you’ll know I’m moving to Texas next year when I wrote about leaving San Francisco to build wealth. It was a good looking property, listed at $155,000. The beauty of this is that it was a banked owned property, a foreclosed home valued at about $175,000. At $155K I just kind of sat on it since it wasn’t a screaming deal and my condo has not yet sold, and my money was tied up. About a week ago the bank reduced the asking price by a whopping $25,000, bringing the price to $129K. I jumped on it and had my agent go and snap interior pics and give me a full report. He got back to me yesterday, and it turns out the entire ceiling had to be replaced due to water damage, same with the carpets. I figured this was no problem because I would change the carpets anyway. This was a steal, and just when I was about to make an offer we find out that the property was sold on the 17th.

I guess we’ll keep looking. Although foreclosures are not as common in that particular city, I’m sure we can get some deals. So that was my week. Here are some great content from other sites I frequent:

Learning to love the not-so-big house. I think a big house is beautiful and luxurious, but its definitely not great for your wallet. JD at Get Rich Slowly brings up some good points to consider when contemplating a large home.

Protecting your ass(ets) should you end up in court. JLP at All Financial Matters gives a few pointers on how to protect your ass if you get into legal trouble. Asset protection is a whole other discussion for another day, but its a necessity nowadays.

Ten ways to blow a sale.  I love reading Ben Stein’s material, and heres an example of a useful article from his Yahoo! Finance column. No matter what you think, we are all salespeople. If you’re business minded and an investor, you are selling more than you know it. Ben has some great tips on how to make sure you sell correctly.

Five reasons why having a child is not as expensive as you might think. This is a great read by Trent at The Simple Dollar. I like the part about changing your spending priorities and I completely agree. If you have kids, you’ll rethink that expensive vacation or that over priced jacket. I think we’re all creative enough to adjust our budgets accordingly should kids come in the picture.