Another Christmas Money Making Venture

Last year, Tickle Me Elmo was the hot Christmas gift and Kenric did what many others did to capitalize on the craze - buy a bunch and resell them. This year, the hot gift seems to be the Nintendo Wii, at least so far in the holiday shopping season.Working for a video game maker gives me something of a unique insight into the world of video games, but I didn't need any inside information to know that no store can keep these things in stock. I just...

Phoenix Housing Prices

Things are slowing getting back to normal here. After being gone for a week and coming back and having to rebuild my computer after it crashed, I'm slowly starting to gain control over the items that piled up while I was away. One of the things I am catching up on today is my blog reading.Last week, Kenric posted about the housing price drop in Phoenix. One thing he said was "If you have cashflow or breakeven you can survive this. That’s why cashflow...

Louisiana Conference Call

Phew.. I just got off a 1.5 hour conference call with the other mortgage holders on the Louisiana mortgage that is going to foreclosure a week from today. We basically went over the various options we have open to us and how we want to instruct our attorney to bid at the auction. The opening bid at the auction starts at an amount equal to the foreclosure auction costs, which is less than $2,000. We will instruct our attorney to bid the price up to...

Going On Vacation

I'm heading off to Kansas today for the Thanksgiving holiday, so there won't be any posts for a while. My PC also crashed and I'm having an extremely difficult time re-installing Windows, so even when I get back, it might be a while before I can post again..Two quick notes:Goldman Sachs today announced that mortgage lenders may need to scale back lending by up to $2 trillion dollars which could lead to a "substantial recession."In response to the...

Another Louisisana Update

The foreclosure process on the Louisiana properties continues to move forward. The property will go to the Sheriff's sale on December 5. I fully expect Joe to file for bankruptcy on December 4, thus stopping the sale. Joe wants to speak with the minority holders of the mortgage note, but no one wants to talk to him and, to my knowledge, no one has. He's turned over some financials, but just his records - nothing official like a K1 or anything that...

Good News On The ID Theft

We've got some good news on the identity theft issue. My wife got a call two days ago from the police department saying they caught a woman trying to pass a bad check with her name on it. Not only was the woman arrested, but she was singing. No kidding. The police actually said "she's singing" and naming all the people involved in the scam. I thought police only talked like that on TV!Anyway, I guess there were several people involved and they are...