Ryan McFarland

With the rates for mortgages dropping drastically, i wonder if it is a good time to consider dabbling in flipping homes. The sub-prime mortgage “crisis” must be putting homes onto the market at a decent discount from their appraised value. Kevin and i have been talking about this. Let’s say you can get a house for $100,000 less than its $300,000 appraisal. You pay $200,000 for the house and then take a loan out against the equity. That’s usually at about 80%. So you have $80,000 to work with. In one year about $30,000 would have to go toward the loan payments, insurance and taxes. You then have $50,000 to put toward improvements. If you do landscaping, paint, and minor improvements yourself you can easily give a major makeover for $30,000. In one year it would be simple to work away at projects on evenings and weekends. Sell the house for the appraised value and you’ve made $20,000 in a year. There are too many variables to make something like this a sure-fire deal though. Capital gains taxes are one thing to consider. The downturn in the housing market could very well stick around making selling the property more difficult.

I’d love to use Commercial Mortgages to take an old building in an urban area and turn it around.  I think it would be a neat reality and HGTV type show… take an old building and renovate it so the bottom floor is retail space, the second floor is office space for a deserving non-profit and the higher floors are apartments.  At the end of the project the building is turned over to the non-profit.  Then they have a nice base for operations along with rental income to continue providing services.  The show could follow a few such projects as the builders work with the non-profit to make the building suit their needs.

I was thinking that it would be great if my email client would pop up a dialog window if i tried to send an email without an attachment when that message had the word “attachment” or “attached.”  I’m usually pretty good about making sure i attach whatever i intend to but on a few occasions i have forgotten.  It turns out i’m not the first to have the idea.  In fact, someone else even patented it in 2001.  I’ll have to assume that the only reason that all the email programs that i have used are lacking this because the patent holder is rejecting offers to use the service while just waiting until all email users are driven near insanity by emailing people back with the “I don’t see an attachment” message.  Read the patent of 6970908.

For something considered “so 2004″ not long ago, the internet is exploding with web logs.  They really have developed away from angst writing by geeks and toward niche-specific communities.  Technorati is the authoritative source on blogs and blog links.  They have been tracking sites since March of 2003 which just happens to be when i started using blogging software to update my site.  At that time there were 250,000 blogs that they tracked.  Here’s a little graph with a few points that i added for relevance.

Cena, Karna, and i were blogging before Technorati had tracked 10 million blogs.  There are other web logs that i read that would fit on here but the three of us are the oldest that i follow that have not lost archives. Hooray for early adopters!
[graph source]

Taking a few months off of our home improvements has given us a little more time to think through our plans for the property. All of our ideas piled together would equal pretty significant Homeowner Loans. One of the first things we need is a workshop or shed for me to move my tools and projects into. We had planned on constructing a shed behind the house — actually rebuilding the rotten one that had been there. Two winters with thousand pound piles of snow falling onto the site of the planned shed has changed my mind.

Now the idea is to make the carport a garage with a workshop in the back. We can use the whole thing for a workshop with just the addition of some insulation, windows, a door and a garage door. Then we’ll build a post and beam structure detached from the house as a carport. In the summer we can just park in the driveway and use it as a covered patio. In the winter if we want to we can park one vehicle in the garage — i even have a heater for the space.

That will open up the current workshop/boiler room for our planned office and downstairs bathroom.

By this coming winter we should have the garage enclosed and the carport built. That will give us the dark winter months to do the interior work we have been putting off. Since we recently refinanced the house a home equity loan wouldn’t give us much to work with. We’ll just have to pay for the projects as we go along.

I hope you had a nice birthday dad.  Sorry i didn’t call… I had a meeting with my new boss all afternoon.  We went through the parks and facilities and i tried to show him a bit about the department.  We ran into three different people in the first hour that said something to him about the quality of work that i have done for the city.  Since an elected official or few seem to be pointing out my failings it was really nice to have him almost bombarded by comments to the contrary.  I’m not worried about having him as a new boss.  He’s been managing cities for 34 years so he’s been doing something right.  As long as he is fair then i’m sure i’ll be happy.  He’s a few years older than you… in fact he called you a “youngster.”  I hope you had a great day!  Love you dad.

Here is some information from a sale i had on Amazon.  The book was “Living a Life That Is Blessed - Devotional Studies From the Life of Abraham” and the initial purchase was made on January 23rd.

Buyer @ 2/20 8:13 PM: “I have not received this order on time and would like to cancel it. Please do so and do not ship this book to me. Thanks”

Me @ 2/20 8:32 PM “I’m sorry Pam.  I shipped the book out immediately after you ordered it.  Please give it a few more days and when it arrives feel free to inspect the postmark. Thank you”

Me @ 2/20 8:36 PM “I just looked and you’re right - that has been a long time.  You ordered it on the 23rd.  If you wouldn’t mind just giving it a few more days I will refund your money (although I will still be out the merchandise with no way to recover it) if it does not arrive.  Would you be willing to wait another week?  Thank you.”

Pam @ 2/21 4:53 AM “Sorry but I do not want this order at this late date.”

Pam @ 2/21 11:17 AM “Ok-the book came and I will keep it. Thanks.”

I’m almost certain that 90% of the time a buyer has emailed me about a book not arriving that it arrives the very next day.  I wonder what she would have done if i had returned Pam’s money in the 5 hours between her insisting she wanted a refund and when she emailed me to say she had received it.  Since it is a Christian book it is nice to think that “living a life that is blessed” might include paying for things you receive.  Apparently a blessed life does not include compassion.  Then again, perhaps the compassion will come after reading the book.

With the feds reducing the interest rate and the economic downturn in the headlines for some this might be a good time to refinance their homes. We just went through that. Mortgages are an awfully complex part of finances. In my estimation we would not benefit from refinancing at this point. We could get a lower interest rate but the fees that are stuck on the bill the bank gives you are pretty steep. The thousands that we would have to pay might be worth the expense if we foresaw staying in the house for the next 25 or 30 years. But we anticipate paying off the loan entirely in 10 more years. A percentage point drop makes even less sense knowing we won’t be paying as much in interest anyway. If anyone has a variable rate mortgage this would definitely be the time to refinance and lock in the low rates.

After our trip to Cambodia and Vietnam we really started to consider buying property overseas. Land prices are much less expensive in developing countries and it is fairly easy to predict how population growth and urban expansion will push property values up. Other than Mexico i had never really thought about considering land purchase outside of the United States. There was a fantastic resort property that Mike, Ailis, Karna and i rode by on our afternoon of scooter rentals in Na Trang. Hmmm…

A waiter at a restaurant.  People are so demanding when they order food.  If a cook messes up an order the customer blames the person that put the plate in front of them.  Not that orders are never entered incorrectly.  Sure that happens.  But since i rarely send my food back i know that i would not handle others being belligerent about a simple error that can be fixed.  Worse still, relying on tips for income when a mistake that is out of your hands could cost you money just seems to put you in a financial bind.

Anything in sales. I’m just not pushy enough to convince someone to buy something no amount of Sales Training can change my non-confrontational nature. I’d be the laziest salesman ever. If it was a commission based job i would starve. I have never had a job that handling cash was a major component of the job either. I’m the worst person for my staff to ask to help figure out where an error in the till is.

A truck driver.  As much as i like road trips it really would stink to have to get from point A to point B in a set amount of time. I like the freedom of serendipity when traveling.  I guess i don’t have much serendipity while at work now so perhaps that isn’t a good enough reason.  How about the way that i sometimes have fallen asleep at the wheel?  Fortunately i’ve never wrecked because of it.  The drivers of tractor trailers must be under so much pressure to put many miles in a day that they either must have superhuman endurance or they must be prone to using stimulants to help them get through the days (and nights).  I don’t even like coffee!

Every now and then i receive a mailing from Domain Registry of America (they are such a shady company i will not link to their site).  The top right of the sheet they mail out says “Domain Name Expiration Notice” and the bottom is a tear-off portion with a spot to fill in your credit card number and check off how long you want your domain name renewed.  Because domain name owners have their mailing address listed openly, anyone can search records and see where to mail you things.  DRoA takes advantage of that and bulk mails out notices like these that look like a renewal bill.  They do say in the text “When you switch today…” but they also have “Failure to renew your domain…” as well as telling you the date that your registration expires.  They actually are not very good at making sure that the expiration date is correct.  I received one for a domain that is good for another 6 years.  Their rates are horribly high.  They charge $30 for a one year registration.  There is no reason to pay more than $10 per year - considerably less if you register for more than one year.  Unfortunately, DRoA does not include an envelope with pre-paid postage.  If they did i would probably glue the envelope to a box full of gravel and mail it back to them.  They just prey on organizations that have a person that pays bills that arrive and that does not have a connection to the tech-end of the operations.  SEAtrails was duped by them years ago.

Cena and i have watched quite a few TV series for not having television service of any sort. We watch them on DVD. Among many other shows we’ve followed Nip/Tuck (from Tummy Tuck). I’m not a fan of most of the operating scenes in the show but they always do a nice job of having the strangest cases come in. Between television programs like Nip/Tuck and many celebrities openness regarding their cosmetic surgery it really isn’t a surprise that nearly half of the British population would consider cosmetic surgery.

I can understand some people’s desire to have a surgery done for purely self improvement reasons. I had to live with a giant nose and huge ears as a kid. And children are the cruelest beings on the planet at certain ages. But much more understandable are the reconstructive surgeries that make people whole again. Whether it is burn victims, cancer survivors, or accident victims there is a definite need for people with the skill to recreate the bodies that people had before their misfortunes.

I vividly remember one instance. In 1992 my first duty as Northeast Region Chief of the Order of the Arrow was to give a speech at the lodge banquet of a group in Delaware. I stayed with the lodge chief and his family. During the dinner the evening before the banquet the lodge chief left the table and his mother turned to me and asked if i had noticed anything about his face. I said i had not and she told me that it had recently been entirely reconstructed after a horrible car accident. Naturally i tried to see any signs of scarring after that but his face seemed to have healed wonderfully.