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Some of those spectacular aerial video excerpts look like they were made from a drone-based video camera with a practiced operator. I think there’s an impressive lesson there for publicizing properties.

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There are a couple of other issues worth asking about. You mentioned that the owner was trying to sell the mobile home park. What size is it? How much acreage, how many mobile home lots does it have, both developed (ready to rent) and undeveloped (maybe need plumbing, power, concrete, etc)? Or are the three mobile homes you mentioned for sale the sum total, and cover the only lots in this park?

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There are quite a few investors looking for sizeable mobile home parks, but if this is just a little bitty patch on a back road with no room for expansion, then perhaps doing HBS flips on those three MHs might be some good experience for you.

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Mike, this is a very enlightening PDF about your question and how age-restricted housing works in Massachusetts.

http://www.capecodcommission.org/resources/affordablehousing/AgeRestrictHousingMA2005.pdf

How representative that discussion is for other states, I can’t say. But it appears to highlight at least some of the major aspects of your question.

–Dee

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And the legal war against Airbnb is not limited to just New York State….

http://time.com/money/4541529/airbnb-legal-challenges/

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(Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer, and have no ambitions to ever play one on TV.)

To give you a new set of eyes to view options, think of them as a unique asset class.

Options are potentially a fascinating store of value, and even more so if they are structured to be renewable, the longer the better.

They are relatively anonymous, compared with a property title.

They are highly portable, even globally, for any of you expat wannabees.

They are not, to the best of my knowledge, an item of seizure interest by TSA, unlike precious metals. You don?t have to go through the drill that a successful Ukrainian escapee accomplished when he crossed the border out of the old Soviet Union. He had his platinum stash drawn into wire, of the same diameter as wire clothing hangers. He then bent that wire into clothes hangers, onto which he loaded all the clothes he could to cross into the free world. The border guards never had a clue. No need to be that crafty with options.

They are highly saleable.

They incur no reporting requirement from the IRS or FATCA (although anything can change).

They do have some burdens. They require more energy, initiative and knowledge to create, maybe some renewal funding, and potentially have some hurdles to enforce, depending on the legal atmosphere in the applicable country.

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Jackie, you wrote:

“…I would not touch a rehab project with a ten foot pole now! ”

Here’s a classic example of a high-dollar house in Baltimore being rehabbed with the “hope” of flipping:

http://www.cnbc.com/2016/10/13/a-1-million-bet-the-anatomy-of-a-high-end-house-flip.html

Can you smell the aroma of risk in the air? With the housing bubble economy hanging by a pre-election manipulated thread, and coastal city housing markets usually becoming the leading indicators of falling-away demand, how many checkmarks on a risk aversion warning list for this house deal can you spot?

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I’m also thinking that since your friend with the military disability can only be around a fraction of the time, that’s probably a very short term solution. In the larger cities (and I have no idea where you are or what you’re close to), there are readily available companies that act as intermediaries for house sitters. Such sitters are already vetted, bring along their own minimal furnishings, pay a greatly reduced (from market) rent because they understand that a house could be sold quickly, so they are fully prepared to move out on short notice. (My brother and his family once acted as house sitters while his house in a previous city sat on the market for a couple of years. He kept the bulk of his home furnishings in a storage warehouse during that time.)

I grew up in deep rural America where even though it was heavily Christian, the long timers well understood that once it became known locally that a house had gone vacant, it WOULD be broken into, burglarized, and stripped. I of course have zero knowledge of your local circumstances.

But your attorney’s “advice” would even seem to preclude using a house sitter — which seems like he prefers for you to commit property suicide. Just more reasons why I think you need some far better legal advice, a lighting timer with some randomly changing settings (for when your friend can’t stick around), etc, etc.

–Dee

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Regarding your attorney’s “underwhelming” explanation, I would be very unhappy about his unwillingness (or inability?) to explain to you those reasons. Either would shake my confidence in his ability to be useful to you. Would those undisclosed reasons reveal any conflict of interest between what’s in your best interest versus his billing plan to be a part of your mediation process? I don’t know, but his secrecy seems very disappointing.

I realize you have an all-too-short time fuse before you leave town for a month. I’m thinking that when your schedule permits, some comparison shopping for an attorney might be in order. My gut feel says there’s something really wrong, even though I don’t have but a fraction of the facts that you know about.

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Y’all might find some advice I found recently about fending off burglars, lightning fast and very much on the cheap, to be noteworthy. The advice came from an interview with a convicted burglar. The theory is that burglars prefer to avoid a dog confrontation at all costs, and especially a big dog. So the recommendation was to place an only partly filled doggie dish with dog food beside the back door. Not a little bitty chihuahua-sized dish, but something a Doberman might appreciate.

Seems like a near instant solution, while one is contemplating all the electronic solutions, with their technical and pricing tradeoffs. That might even be handy for people without all the pressure that Greg is facing.

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Greg, I’m also thinking that the idea I described was just a rough skeleton. Here on CFD, we certainly have no idea whether you live in a community property state, or a separate property state, and what, if any, rules and case law your state might have about property decisions “in contemplation” of a divorce. I know that in federal bankruptcy cases, there are such rules in advance of filing for BK, eg., which if ignored, can give the federal BK judge grounds to undo some carefully laid plans in progress.

I’m thinking that to put some flesh on the bones of that skeleton so it can be made to dance for you, you probably need some expert legal advice on family law in your state on what you have in mind, and that might well include some conversations about master leasing if your divorce attorney is (likely) not familiar with that subject. He might even need to confer with a legal expert in that area who David Tilney might recommend. I’m just guessing here.

Again, good luck in navigating some of the toughest decision making that anyone could ever face.

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Greg, you might give some thought to what kind of arrangement might help keep your ex-to-be from turning your tenant’s life into a living hell. I know you’re familiar with David Tilney’s master leasing concepts. (You and I met in Dallas some years ago at David’s event.) I’m wondering if there might be a place for a provision in a master leasing arrangement for your house that restricts all inspections of the property, control over the utilities, etc and contact with the tenants to a master leasing individual of your choice, so that neither you nor “anyone else on the house title” could terrorize the tenants. Clearly, such a provision would work best if your chosen master leasing person was someone you had complete confidence in.

You might also consider running your challenge by David. He might have, or know people who have, some special insight into such matters.

Good luck in finding the best possible solution. This is probably one of the most unique challenges we’ve seen on CFD in many years.

–Dee

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With a “little fixup,” it could be perfect for some free ranging chickens after they’ve tired of their daily adventures. [grin]

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Mike, I claim zero expertise in the “subtle marketing” area you referenced. I only know some of the basics about why a few of my ancestors made the leap to cross the Atlantic to come here in the first place. The most recent ones learned in January of 1874 that they were about to lose their exemption (in the Ukraine) from the Russian army draft, and would lose the right to run their own schools in their German language. That was enough that a third of their community had picked up, and landed in this country via four ships by that fall. One of the descendants of those who didn’t leave wrote a letter to my Kansas hometown newspaper in 1933 describing how Stalin had confiscated that year’s crops (that forced starvation of millions, called the Holodomor), how people were dying in the streets from starvation, and how he pulled up a cowskin rug to boil pieces of the leather so that each day there might a little something to eat.

So am I extremely grateful that my ancestors picked up and boogied out of Dodge when they did? You betcha.

Now that’s about as extreme a case as it could get. But people tend to learn better from the grossly extreme, though far less frequent, examples. My people were strongly motivated to get away from where they were. They didn’t even make a decision until after they arrived in New York City as to what state to head for. One of my great grandmother and grandfather pairs settled in South Dakota, but after a few years of prairie fires, terrible floods, and blizzards, picked up and moved south a few hundred miles. (There were no Jackie Relocation Tours in 1874.)

The 2/3 of that community in the Ukraine who remained suffered through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, the fighting that continued through the early 1920s, the Stalin-ordered starvation of the early 1930s, and the German invasion during WWII, where they were trusted by neither side. Many were deported to Siberia. Those families were not motivated to move when they still had the chance. And that’s a big issue. If somebody is determined not to move, the destination doesn’t seem to matter much. If they’re REALLY motivated to move, many different destinations are possibilities.

A few years back, I borrowed a look (via interlibrary loan) at a tremendous book by Dr Thomas Sowell titled Migrations and Cultures (1996, still on Amazon for full ISBN and description) in which he described the experiences of several large cultures in world history who had made major migrations to places all over the world. My own interest at that time was in the Germanic groups, and how they fared once into Canada, the US, Central and Latin America.

If you want a really spooky list of issue motivators, this August 2nd article by Mike Adams has that:

http://www.naturalnews.com/054857_rigged_elections_fake_media_fairy_tales.html

OK, while I’d have to confess to being pretty good at “finding things,” I can’t claim any special expertise in choosing what’s important to other people’s choices or what motivates them down deep. That’s everybody’s own challenge in their “pursuit of happiness.”

I was not a world history major. Perhaps as a result, I’ve been more fascinated by the occasional discovery here and there from long ago that somehow seems relevant to today. That includes stories of groups of people who felt threatened by whatever or whoever, and whether they picked up and got out of Dodge, or whether they dug in and determined to stick it out, come hell or high water. A few years back, there was a botched TV series about the Jewish group that holed up on a mountaintop retreat that King Herod had built. The Jews called it Masada, meaning fortress(which the show couldn’t be bothered to explain). There was only one difficult way in and out, a great water supply and years of food supplies. The Romans surrounded Masada, and spent a couple of years literally building a huge long dirt ramp so they call haul in their huge siege machines. They wanted to leave no examples of any cultures resisting the Roman system. So near the end, as the siege machines were closing in, the Jews agreed to commit mass suicide, rather than live under Roman slavery. The TV show concealed the fact that the Jews deliberately left plenty of their food stores untouched — to leave a message for the world that they had not been starved out, but refused to live as slaves.

The amazingly contrasting PBS TV episode recently was about Machu Picchu in Peru, that the Inca leadership had spent perhaps a hundred years building along the top of a mountain ridge in the 1500s. They had built enough stonework to house around a thousand people, with plenty of farm and garden land on one side opposite the housing, and a mountain spring water supply from a half mile away sufficient to provide up to 15 gallons per person per day, and a sewer system to separately carry away all wastes. Again, there was only one very narrow and easy to defend way through a tunnel into their mountain fortress. They could have held out for years. Yet at some point, with knowledge of the Spanish invasion and its overwhelming numbers, they completed abandoned Machu Picchu even after all that century of work, and “got out of Dodge.” I’m sure that many many of their descendants are still living in Peru today.

It’s not difficult to make a case for cultivating portable skills, assets, funds, language abilities, and mindsets. There are lots of stories especially from Jewish history where they were forbidden to engage in many of the “fixed asset” businesses, and so they learned many more portable professions whether in medicine, finance, the sciences, etc. Today the emergence of the internet has exploded the number and variety of such ways to make a living.

It’s also easy to understand the several reasons why people choose to “dig in” and stay put, whether from age, or local familial loyalties, or lack of assets, or whatever. People are complex.

Enough of my rambling. Mike, I wish you the best in whatever direction you pursue.

–Dee

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Mike, here’s a strategy. Find out from Jackie what the minimum size business is that you can establish in Panama — so that you can deduct the cost of that trip.

Now I’ll sit back to let the experts pick holes in that approach. [grin]

–Dee

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I sincerely hope that this idiocy by the Seattle city government does not spread to any other cities or states, but my crystal ball is as cloudy as anyone else’s. Unfortunately, bureaucracies at any level of government have a perverse incentive to build their empires — the more missions, the more employees, rules and budget it takes to chase those missions, and more employees means a far bigger paycheck for their upper echelons of management, and opportunities to benefit unaccountably under the table from whatever constituencies those missions recruit and cultivate. It seems often to not matter how ludicrous, perverse or downright evil such missions might be. The urge for bureaucracies to metastacize seems almost universal.

I’ve not seen this discussed yet in David Tilney’s master leasing email group. If they are lucky, perhaps the Seattle example won’t spread. If not, probably the only individual landlord’s choice would be to sell out, and move one’s assets and operations elsewhere, just as Jackie described. The risk of property destruction by tenants with zero incentive to take care of the property seems like inviting an arsonist with no hope of insurance.

–Dee

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If this article is to be believed,

http://www.optimalauctions.com/getting-to-know-dutch-auctions.jsp

the MLS process of listing a house at an artificially high price to see if it gets any foolish buyer nibbles, and then at some unpredictable interval, haggling with the seller for permission to drop the price some previously unguessable increment, appears to have been adopted as the most botched implementation possible of an early 1600s auction system developed in Holland in response to the weird growth and marketability pattern of rare Tulip bulbs. That article covers that rather amazing history nicely.

What came to be known as the Dutch auction started by setting the price of a Tulip bulb lot way high, but with all interested buyers knowing that the price would come down by a known amount (in gilders, eg., or by some percent) in a known and very short time. If no buyer raised his hand, that process would rinse and repeat, with everyone present knowing exactly the timing of, and the price drop amount, to come. At some point, one buyer would yell or raise his hand (the article doesn?t say which), and that Dutch auctioned lot sale was done. The auctioneer could immediately move to the next lot. Fast, efficient, simple.

The MLS listing system today took that now-ancient Dutch auction process, and botched it in nearly every way possible, including giving the most inexperienced or laziest agents every opportunity to omit or do the publicity badly. They dragged it out over six months, or worse. They made sure that nobody could know when or if the price would drop, if ever. They chose to make the amount of each price drop a mystery to the buying population by haggling over each price drop. The MLS listing system pours cold water in so many ways over buyers? sense of urgency.

Perhaps that little bit of history will help you appreciate what a work of genius the classic auction process, implemented by slight variation via the HBS method, really is.

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A good friend of mine this morning sent me a quote from Vince Lombardi:

“If you are not fired with enthusiasm,
you will be fired with enthusiasm.”

— Vince Lombardi,
coach

That seems to me to apply — even if you have to be the person doing your own firing, because of a pursuit that you ultimately discover your heart is simply not in. So Steve Harvey’s emphasis on passion is not misplaced, even though it’s part of a larger picture.

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Steve Harvey is an upbeat guy whose heart is almost always in the right place. He would be very hard to dislike. And his focus on the use of passion for what you do is a ?big deal.? If you don?t have the passion for something, the odds are that if you don?t develop that passion for something you take on, that pursuit will wear out its welcome in your psyche and you?ll tire of putting in the hours and effort needed for real success. But I think there?s more to the puzzle.

Some people have the passion for whatever, but don?t have, or can?t develop, the skill set needed to implement in that field. An example might be someone trying out a ?people business? who turns people off repeatedly, who comes across as untrustworthy even if s/he is totally honest, who can?t read people, etc, etc.

Some have, or can develop, that skill set, but don?t have, and will never develop the matching passion. An example might be a Wall Street broker who discovers the business requires that s/he be regularly dishonest with clients.

Others might have both, but a combination of unfavorable or really treacherous market conditions (a lack of demand, or overwhelming competition, or high risk conditions that turn even little blunders into financial catastrophes [a very good reason to explore with Jackie?s low risk strategies]) can turn that first big ?Jump? of Steve?s into a horrible tragedy. I?ve mentioned this story before about a lady whose family mortgaged their entire section of Arizona land to fund the construction of a Las Vegas high-rise — just before the last highly predictable Federal Reserve engineered financial crash, in which they lost everything when the bank foreclosed on the doomed project. She bought into the ?gotta be an action taker? siren song, having no understanding of the business cycle history and pitfalls.

My point is that while Steve is absolutely correct about the need for passion in your pursuit, he doesn?t mention that sometimes passion can be developed after exploring a new pursuit. Also he doesn?t connect it to your existing, or possibly developable skill set, nor to however receptive the market conditions are to your particular pursuit.

I remember the days when the ?What Color is Your Parachute?? book focused on your passion, but without much attention on skill set or market conditions. Eventually some of the better career counselors figured out that all three really matter. To give Steve proper credit, his enthusiasm for the passion issue is a great place to begin your exploration of any pursuit.

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About legal methods to get assets out of the US without any reporting requirement

Porter Stansberry?s 2015 book titled ?America 2020: The Survival Blueprint? has four very interesting pages (pp.47-50) on three ways to get assets out of the US in ways that do not, as of yet, require reporting to that government.

The first method is to open a foreign bank account in an amount under $10,000. If you take measures to make sure it won?t grow to $10,000 or more, it will remain without any requirement to report it to the US. A suggestion was also made to make sure that account is a ?holding account? — meaning that you can keep that account in whatever currency you choose.

It also mentions that such rules are per person. In other words, a couple with four children could open six such accounts, keeping the total under $59,000, for example, which would provide a very interesting way to get assets out of the US and available for foreign operations. There are some suggestions on choosing a cooperative bank on page 48.

The second method, from page 49, is to buy some offshore real estate. And while it?s not generating any income, it is simply unreportable.

While that page seconds the usefulness of the internationalliving.com website, it recommends LiveAndInvestOverseas.com as well.

The third method is holding precious metals offshore (whether gold, silver, palladium, etc) along with some methods of how to go about that. While it?s rather widely known that much privately held gold was confiscated at a less-than-market rate in 1933 by the FDR administration, it?s not as widely known that was followed by a silver confiscation under the same administration. And after stiffing American citizens of their uncounterfeitable precious metals, the warfare/welfare spending of the Vietnam era generated sufficient gold outflows to foreign nations to cause Nixon in 1971 to renege on gold-backed financial instruments to all foreign nations, oh, so politely called ?closing the gold window.? So the willingness of the US government in the 20th century to stiff both citizens and foreign governments is well established. This is a government with no qualms about denying its own veterans with severe medical needs VA care for decades. It also has no qualms about cooking the books on actual inflation so that inflation-indexed promises such as Social Security check amounts can be crippled.

Just within this last week, Peter Schiff announced that his precious metals company was being acquired by BitGold (in Canada). Here is their press release:

http://ir.bitgold.com/investors/press-releases/press-release-details/2016/Goldmoney-Announces-Acquisition-of-Schiff-Gold-Inc-and-formation-of-Joint-Venture-with-Renowned-Gold-Investor-Peter-Schiff/default.aspx

That may provide an interesting way to exercise the third method from the Stansberry book.

Since the book was released in 2015, it should be fair game for interlibrary loan requests. While it is available on Amazon, print editions start at $55, and there are no Kindle editions.

–Dee

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Thank you, mactrustee. I had not heard of the “highest and best use” theory being ripped off by tax looters. In Texas, it can occasionally be used by property owners about to lose their property to eminent domain (however unjustly to local developers in cahoots with local government, such as for sports stadiums) to demand compensation based on that “highest and best use” that the developers intend to put the property to.

In some states, I think it may still be possible to get a single family house (currently being property tax gouged by out-of-state money sloshing in to jack up local comps) converted to a designation of commercial use (since the owner(s) don’t live there and use the house strictly for rental income. In the states where commercial tax valuations are based strictly on the income that a property generates, that commercial designation could potentially result in enormous tax savings. But clearly in a state like Florida addicted to “highest and best use” tax looting, that redesignation to commercial status probably wouldn’t help.

Here are a couple of superb quotes from the great French writer and free market economist Frederic Bastiat (1801-1850):

“It is impossible to introduce into society a greater change and a greater evil than this: the conversion of the law into an instrument of plunder.”

“But how is this legal plunder to be identified? Quite simply. See if the law takes from some persons what belongs to them, and gives it to other persons to whom it does not belong. See if the law benefits one citizen at the expense of another by doing what the citizen himself cannot do without committing a crime.”

–Dee

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