Tag Archives: real estate

Condos

I have a growing number of good friends that are real estate agents.  I appreciate the service they provide because it takes a lot to detail what each client wants and find the appropriate match.

That being said, I am dumbfounded by the concept of condos.  You would have to be a marketing genius in order to convince me to basically buy an apartment.  This is how I see it; You get all the benefits of owning a house except for the fact that you don’t own a house.

I can’t play drums or have my music loud and I swear that the 300 lb man living upstairs walks on his heals.  Sometimes the hallway smells and this drives me crazy, but hey it’s mine all mine.

I am well aware that my views may change when I am 105 years old.


9 things you may not know…

1.  The word mortgage comes from the French word “mort” which means “dead” and “gage” from Old English, which means pledge.  Dead pledge.  From what I understand, when you take a mortgage on a property you are buying a lien position on the dead allodial title holder to the land.  Allodial is derived from a term that means ’Alloted by God’.

2.  Real estate comes from French/English origins circa 1666 meaning ‘belonging to the Royals.  From what I understand, the Crown has a lien against the property and this is why property tax can be legally extracted.  Allodial title meant that the land was God-given and no one could lay claim against the allodial title holder until death.  See #1

3.  Paper money was originally receipts for gold or silver deposits.  It used to read “pay bearer upon demand” and you could cash it in for its silver of gold equivalent.  Hence the term “worth its weight in gold” and where the english sterling pound derives its name from.

4.  Since 1933 money reads “legal tender” and is printed from the governments pledging the future labor of the people to the Bank for International Settlements in exchange for “credit” deposited into the treasury.

5.  The “credit” is actually debt and 100% of income tax goes toward interest payments to the holders of the pledge through the International Monetary Fund and Bank for International Settlements.  The Crown of England, The U.N. and The Vatican hold interests in these pledges as well.

6.  When you sign a ‘loan’ document you are creating a security that the bank can trade on the securities market.  They literally enter the number amount of the security into a computer and you go to work to pay back something that was created out of thin air by your signature.  The bank did not loan you a thing but get to keep, trade and profit from the asset/security that you created.

7.  We currently use what is called ‘fiat’ currency which means ‘by order or decree’.  We literally order it into existence by our word or signature.

8.  The Federal Reserve Bank that issues the U.S. currency is privately owned by European, British and Saudi banking families.  Before the signing of the bank act in 1913, the people could simply authorize their government to issue credit in order to facilitate the needs of both government and people.

9.  Every material ‘thing’ or service has already been bought and paid for by the labor of people.  Money was originally a barter tool to make the exchange amongst the people easy.  Once income tax was “temporarily” instated as a war measure, the people could no longer afford to buy back the fruits of their labor.  From here, they had to turn to banks for ‘loans’.


Idea #2

I met with Cheryl Crowe.  She’s the head of socially responsible investments for Canadian Credit Unions and NOT the rock star.  Here is the idea that I met with her about:

We start an equity fund that invests in entire distressed areas of a city.  The distressed properties would be demolished and rebuilt or retrofitted into modernized homes AS POWER SOURCES rather than power consumers.   Basically, these areas of the cities would become alternative power grids to compete or supplement the current energy supply.  Like batteries.

What happens to existing tenants?  Fire them out of a canon for all I care.  This idea is about making improvements, not pandering to the weakest link.  If you get offended by this, then I’m just kidding.   

The new tenants would become part of an education program that teaches them how the technology works and how it is maintained.  The would move in on a lease agreement at fixed rates.  The fund could control the rate of return on investment by setting the lease rates to a specific percentage. 

On another note:  I found out through a friend at Manitoba Hydro that they had a practice of purchasing energy from people who use solar panels or generate private energy at $0.50 per unit and selling it back through the Hydro grid at $0.10 per unit.  He suspected that it was because they didn’t want the competition.  Go figure. 

Regardless of the complications that would inevitably arise from manifesting this idea, I personally feel that builders could be taking the “homes as power sources” idea a little more serious.  Cheryl loved the idea but didn’t know how to go about making it happen.  Apparently investment advisors at banks only sell products and don’t necessarily know how to create them. 

This is an idea that came to me when I asked my self what I would invest in.  There are some really forward thinking equity funds in the states.  Here in Canada we are stuck with “ethical” funds that invest in the five major banks and oil companies.  I apparently have a different definition of “ethical”.


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