Change of plans on this last project.. About $5k down the drain but at least I can recoup maybe $10k from selling the now-complete kit.

You’re probably wondering why the change of heart?

1. Plan before you build — broke this one. Would have never even started had I known what the city requires in permitting (a lot).
2. Hire the right help. Licensed contractor helps, they at least have to lookout for their license. I didn’t follow this one either, and while it’s totally my bad, I still feel like I got taken for a ride a little. Nothing against the other fella. Talk about a flashback to the eCommerce business a few years back with the “partnership” deal (shudder).
3. Preliminary Land Partition pretty much done, onto Final Plat stage then to figure out how I am going to extract the equity out of the 2 lots.
4. Ran into extra snags. When the city sewer connection was pulled up in 1994, a (from what I was told shady) sewer company abandoned but did no decommission the septic tanks. The city has no record of decommissioning, so the burden of proof falls on me. This is also a requirement for the land partition, so no way avoiding it now. I did some digging.
   • Tried calling, and even going over to the old plumbers place of business (he was “unavailable”). Highly doubt he would have records from 17 years ago anyways.
   • Pulled a chain of title on this property back to 1980’s and tracked the owners down in Santa Cruz, California and spoke to an older lady. She said yes they did own that property. The husband was always “at work” every time I called, now they are dodging my calls. I also got their email, with no response. Maybe they are on vacation at this time of the year? I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt and think it could be a coincidence and I’m just calling at a bad time. But at this point it is what it is.
5. I realized I was drifting away from my goal. While a temp shop would have been super for what it was intended for, I knew it was time to cut my losses before I sank more time and cash into it. So I’m pulling out.

So at this point, I just need to sell the shop kit. Then take care of the septic tank issue and continue the Land Partition and piling up cash money.

What are my approchaes to the septic tank challenge?

1. Called a Realtor of mine, he mentioned he was going to talk to some Title Companies and do some digging. Apparently Title Companies have record research departments and can be resourceful at times.
2. Got a tank “locator” out here, but they apparently just use a video camera to “scope” the location. But with the old pipes missing, that was a no-go. That was $95 (discounted since he didn’t really help).
3. Called my Land Use gal, she may know a few folks that can find it.

It looks like it’s inevitable that I will just have to completely tare up a chunk of my yard. Should be fun!

I am having fun learning this silly stuff though. Should be a piece of cake someday. By the way… some city workers are total dicks. Some actually try to go out of their way to help.

Until next time. Cheers.

Been doing site clearing for most of the week for a Steelmaster workshop. Costing a small fortune to rent equipment and labor, but it’s got to get done.

“the mole” going to town on the lot

Taking vids and pics of progress. Will explain some of the process later..

Long story short, for the meantime until I write a real explanation, my server ate 3 blog posts. Turns out the VMware disk instance crashed and everything was happily hanging out in the RAM (memory), that is until I rebooted it. Yikes!

Google cashes saved the day, recreated the posts, and will take a look what else it ate when I have time. Broke all the cardinal rules: hosted myself (this time I paid for a years worth of real hosting), didn’t backup DB as often (now I’ll backup daily). Was a target for disaster, good thing the migration to the paid hosting was not too difficult.

This is a mini-placeholder meanwhile — I’ll drop more detail shortly.

Mas­sive Outflows

As some of you that know me, I have always been 401k/mutual fund averse. Which pretty much means I’ve com­pletely avoided it, and didn’t even have one. In the past, we’ve gone in and out of the mar­ket. But mostly because of the calamity in the last few years, we have been on the sidelines.

Things have changed. We have a “com­fort­able plan” some­what in place now, but we were miss­ing the “safe plan”.

I’m still com­pletely dis­gusted with the 401k/mutual fund indus­try. Just take a look here, here, here, here, and here. And if those aren’t enough, just search for “mutual fund out­flow” — there is a heck of a lot of it out there right now.

Shame­lessly stolen from Google images — can’t find author

But why?

First I’ll con­tem­plate on why there is so much money pour­ing out. Here are some of my rea­sons, most of these are obvi­ous to many people.

• Unem­ploy­ment is crush­ing this econ­omy. What do you think a indi­vid­ual who has to pay his rent will do with­out any cash left to his name, but a chubby retire­ment fund he can tap? Do you hon­estly think they will rea­son with them­selves whether they should leave the nest egg or pay the penal­ties? I don’t think so.
• Con­fi­dence isn’t down, it’s non-existent. I sus­pect many peo­ple have cut down or elim­i­nated con­tri­bu­tions after see­ing their funds slashed in half over the past cou­ple of years.
• I think the pub­lic may pos­si­bly be start­ing to see the fal­lacy of this Employee Retire­ment Income Secu­rity Act (ERISA) of 1974. Just like the 16th Amend­ment which made taxes legal in 1913, but wasn’t preva­lent until 1943. It seems it takes about 30 years to see the con­se­quences of a big deci­sion. If that is the case, what will our off­spring see in 2040? Will the con­se­quences of our spend­thrift gov­ern­ment be obvi­ous then? What pro­por­tion of bailouts will we see then?

There is prob­a­bly a mil­lion rea­sons out there why there is such a huge shake up. Here is a quote from Zero Hedge on this post:

Over­all, sell­ing by S&P500 insid­ers was 8,279.5x times greater than buy­ing (per Bloomberg). There were 5 insider buys for a total of $150,673, and 117 sales for a total of $1,247,500,249. There is no point to even dis­cuss what this data point indicates.

I don’t know about you, but when you have more peo­ple sell­ing than buy­ing, it’s pretty obvi­ous where this is heading.

Am I crazy?

Maybe.

My rea­son­ing behind why Kim and I are enrolling in our employ­ers 401k:

• Buy low sell high. That might not apply to this mar­ket con­di­tion yet, but this car­di­nal rule is con­stantly bro­ken by unin­formed investors. Just like we started buy­ing real estate last year as the fire was engulf­ing the indus­try, and every­one was run­ning from the flames — we were run­ning into the flames. This has served us well.
• We have an exit. Hard to believe with a retire­ment plan that you need an exit. Yes, I totally believe you do. The say­ing “invest long term, and park your money” is not invest­ment advice, it’s a sales pitch. A big prank pulled by the finan­cial indus­try on the Amer­i­can peo­ple. Our long term plan once we no longer have to be employed is to roll over the 401k into a Roth IRA, prefer­ably self-directed so we can have much more con­trol. Which will also get hooked up to our cor­po­ra­tions, so that we can uti­lize pre-taxed busi­ness income to max out our contributions.
• Free money — kind of. We are doing the bare min­i­mum to max­i­mize the match­ing. Our employer matches 2.5% for our 5%, which gives us a con­tri­bu­tion of 7.5%. The only prob­lem is some of that will get wiped out when we con­vert to Roth since we have to pay taxes when we con­vert. Oh well, it could be worse.

Our Con­tri­bu­tion Breakdown

Our break­down as far as con­tri­bu­tion is as follows:

• 30% Large Cap
• 30% Mid-Cap
• 30% Small Cap
• 10% Income (bonds)

We will see how this works out.

Fore­sight

I think there might be a pretty good cor­rec­tion before we see an improve­ment. There is also a big loom­ing prob­lem if the baby boomers — whom, I sus­pect, will behave sim­i­larly with the mas­sive out­flows. They won’t sys­tem­at­i­cally tap their required dis­tri­b­u­tions, they will sim­ply kill the golden goose. Peo­ple just don’t behave ratio­nally when it comes to money. Emo­tion trumps logic. I don’t care what any­one says, this will most likely happen.

There has also been a lit­tle con­cern over ETF’s (exchange traded funds) on my part. The logic behind ETF is that the more peo­ple buy, the more the fund buys. Gold being a good exam­ple right now, ETF’s are on fire. The more peo­ple buy the paper asset, the more the fund has to buy the phys­i­cal assets to back the paper assets. Guess what hap­pens when folks bid up gold, and the fund has to find the phys­i­cal asset to back those inflows? The funds bid up the prices. It’s vicious cycle. Can we say gold bub­ble looming?

Now what?

We are prob­a­bly going to open a Roth IRA on the side, regard­less if we have these 401k’s. Our goal is to put away at least 50% of our monthly income into retire­ment, sav­ings, and invest­ments. It should be very much doable real soon. I will con­tinue to shy away from the paper mar­ket aside from what I men­tioned above, prob­a­bly well into this decade. We shall see.

It’s been a while since we talked Craigslist. As I’ve men­tioned before, we are on the fore­front of knock­ing down lifestyle infla­tion and con­vert­ing the pro­ceeds to lifestyle cre­ation (or design as it’s most com­monly known).

Over the past year, we man­aged to purge a quite a bit of junk. It may seem to some that sell­ing a bunch of crap on the inter­webs is a lot of has­sle — it really is. My expe­ri­ence has been that I also put off “the doing” it until I give myself no choice. The purges have came in phases I sup­pose, so what seemed like a big task was done by tak­ing lit­tle bites here and there. You know that say­ing “how do you eat an elephant?”

• Phase 1: Pick the crap that sits and gath­ers dust, that still has value. You prob­a­bly know what I’m talk­ing about, that shiny toy you splurged on, only to replace that excite­ment with some­thing else — or maybe over time you for­got that you even bought it. For me this has been odd elec­tron­ics and gad­gets that I picked up over the years. Yeah, cat­a­log that crap, sell it. I’ll tell you right here, you wont miss it much if at all, and the cash you make off those mis­takes is just that icing. My main con­cern was it was tak­ing up space in my life, and it no longer had a place there. Now you wont have you worry about ever mov­ing it out of the way to get to some­thing else, or dust­ing it.
• Phase 2: This one is a lit­tle more dif­fi­cult. You prob­a­bly use this doo­dad a lit­tle more often, and are very fond of it. Your bud­dies come over and mar­vel over that wall of com­puter screens, TV’s (or pro­jec­tors in my case), stereos, what­ever it is. Deep inside you know that doo­dad exists to suck up your pre­cious time, but you love it any­ways. Cat­a­log that crap, sell it. You may miss it a lit­tle at first, but a week or two from now, you will prob­a­bly find that your new found free time, the spare cash you made from it, and more room in your liv­ing space is a whole lot more ful­fill­ing. If you have to stack your crap because you have no room, that’s a clue to take action.
• Phase 3: We’re still work­ing our way up to this one. It con­sists of the crap that is quite use­ful but not so much if you want to be mobile. This one is not for every­one. Some exam­ples of our own would be stuff like air com­pres­sors, tools, fur­ni­ture, kitchen stuffs, and appli­ances. If you are a home­owner, you know that some stuff you can’t get by with­out. There are really a few ways you can approach this one. Some folks might want to sell most of it but store some in stor­age, at least if you plan on uproot­ing your life (I did men­tion this one wasn’t for every­one). Our plan is to work our way up to lighten the load, so that we still have a lit­tle bit of crap we can store should we choose to come back and re-establish in Port­land, Ore­gon. Where are we going? Not a clue, but we rec­og­nize that this is a one of those steps we have to take if we want to have the option of being mobile in the near future.

As you can prob­a­bly tell, it’s not an easy task to lighten lifestyle infla­tion — espe­cially if you have stayed put and the clut­ter has slowly over­whelmed and taken over. One thing I can assure you is that if gets eas­ier, as long as you start some­where and per­sist. It seems as if the more you de-clutter, the bet­ter you get at it. Another side ben­e­fit is that I have become a whole lot more respon­si­ble with dodg­ing impul­sive buy­ing. Once you have had to get rid of crap (maybe even kick­ing and scream­ing some­times), you start to know the value behind not bring­ing that garbage to your home in the first place.

Some of the crap we have sold recently have included (in no par­tic­u­lar order):

• BenQ 7800PE  pro­jec­tor — Pur­chased for ~$800 (and gone through 2 bulbs at ~$250 a pop) — Sold for $300
• Zebra label printer — Pur­chased for ~$150 — Sold for $80
• Onkyo 5.1 sound sys­tem — Pur­chased for ~$300 — Sold for $120
• Ibanez Elec­tric gui­tar — Pur­chased for ~$350 — Sold for $60 (I know, ridicu­lous, didn’t even learn to play)
• Asus EEE (7″) — Pur­chased for ~$250 — Sold for $51
• Nin­tendo Wii (with mod­chip) — Pur­chased new for $300 plus $50 for chip (when they were scarce off Craigslist) — Sold for $122
• Dell 30″ mon­i­tor — Pur­chased for ~$1100 — Sold for $600
• Cus­tom gam­ing rig (I built this for Kim — Com­po­nents cost ~$2000 — Sold for $600 for a quick sale

We’re look­ing at about $5300 worth of crap, and recouped only $1933. Ouch!!!

Clearly, Phase 2 is still not done. We still have some ways to go, includ­ing (for exam­ple) sell­ing my PC/Monitor, Kim’s D60 Nikon, and quite a bit of other crap. We also have to main­tain a bal­ance for a lit­tle while because we have a lot of work to do on this house, so that means a lot of tools will need to stick around, the fur­ni­ture etc. But rest assured, that stuff will totally get whacked as soon as we are able to uproot. That is the objec­tive at least.

We have more crap to sell in the pipeline and I’m pretty sure I’ll write more about that.

Updates on the rentals

We finally closed on our 3rd rental (this ones in Mem­phis too). This was the lay­out of the transaction:

• Earnest: $2,000
• First clos­ing: $11,063.48 ($8,000 down pay­ment + $3,1063.48 clos­ing) — assumed hard money $86k (to dodge the points) & took a 2nd note from seller $19k (invest­ment firm in Memphis)
• Sec­ond clos­ing (refi — conv 30yr): $4,573.98
• Total invest­ment: $17,637.46

Our posi­tion:

• Paid: $115,000
• Appraised: $145,000
• Debt: $108,850 (rolled some clos­ing costs in after appraisal came in favorably)

Cash flow:

• Rented for: $1,350
• Debt carry (PITI): $892.99
• Man­age­ment (8%): $108
• Gross cash flow (no vacancy or repairs fac­tored): $349.01

With the gross cash flow, we are look­ing at ~23% cash-on-cash return. With repairs, vacancy, depre­ci­a­tion etc. — we are prob­a­bly around 15–20%. I don’t like to throw solid fig­ures out, because there are way too many vari­ables, and I’m still a noob. We will talk more num­bers down the line when I have some con­crete fig­ures. But regard­less, that’s a nifty return. We aren’t even con­sid­er­ing the fact that in 2007 this prop­erty sold for $200k, so there is also the poten­tial of an equity upswing that I can take advan­tage of later down the road. I guess the funny part for me is that the pre­vi­ous prop­er­ties took more cash, even though they were lesser value. This goes to show that the total cost of an asset doesn’t mean jack, it’s all about how much you need to bring to the table to take con­trol of it.

Anger­ball

Which brings me to my next point. After I talked to The Ren Men, I have to admit, I was dev­as­tated to learn that they don’t bring any cash to the table (they’re doing it the right way). Instinc­tively I knew this; I’ve read this in books, I’ve read this in var­i­ous blogs, I’ve heard this in audio books, and yet — I still brought money to the table. This isn’t nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing, my prop­er­ties are still giv­ing me a excel­lent return com­pared to them paper assets. I’m totally stoked with the cur­rent results. And yet, I know it’s time to move on to big­ger deals that involve…infinite returns.

It’s clear to me it’s time to grad­u­ate to more sweeter deals. This means it’s time to rework our approach to invest­ing. At this moment, we are rebuild­ing reserves. We are sharp­en­ing our tools. The next one will (it must) take as min­i­mal amount of cash as pos­si­ble. It’s go time baby!

Stay tuned…I think we’re on to some­thing here.

As of a cou­ple weeks ago — about this time…I had no idea I was gonna do this, or what I would get myself into. Fast for­ward to today, and I got this killer inter­view all ready for your tasty con­sump­tion. Granted, every skill that took to pull this off is so new­bish, but I fig­ured I gotta start somewhere.

These guys have mas­tered the art of pas­sive income and con­tinue to push their bound­aries. Don’t for­get to check Grant and Alan out on their show at http://renmenshow.com!!

The ques­tions I had lined up didn’t exactly go as planned, mostly because it was so dynamic and things over­lapped, but I think it worked out just peachy. Next time I need to cut it a bit shorter, I real­ized that even with a hand­ful of ques­tions the time can fly. Let’s just say I think I could have done better.

So, this is what I orig­i­nally had in mind:

1. Why did you guys decide to become entre­pre­neurs and investors, was there a defin­ing moment that was the dri­ving factor?
2. How do you feel about the con­cept of work­ing for free? What does that mean to you?
3. How have your plan­ning skills and tools evolved over the years, from year 1 to today.
4. Do you believe in the power of man­i­fes­ta­tion? What are some your recent exam­ples of what you believe to be just that?
5. How did you learn to keep reserves, what is your rule of thumb?
6. When did you start to fig­ure out how to replace your­selves with systems?
7. Are you, and if so, how do you main­tain your Real Estate Pro­fes­sional status?
8. Do you main­tain war­ranties on your properties?
9. At what point did you real­ize you had to hire peo­ple to help run the rental busi­ness, and what did you do?
10. What were your yearly mile­stones? How many units were you able to buy year 1, 2, and 3?
11. Gonna throw in a extra here, what ques­tion would have been best to ask?

Need­less to say, these guys are pretty awesome…

If you got a chance to kick it with the Ren Men, what would you be talk­ing about?

Oh yeah, I got some more stuff cookin’ over here, can’t wait to share that with everyone!

Yesterday was my first call to do some maintenance on the 1998 Ranger (6 cyl). So far it has been running just fine — but yesterday morning it decided not to. We took it for a spin to the bank and immediately noticed something was wrong — the truck was gutless, sputtered, and shook a little. It was pretty obvious to me that we were down 1 cylinder, at least we still had 5 more.

We carried on the day as usual, but I swapped cars with Kim before work. I took the 1998 Ranger, and left 15 minutes earlier-than-usual to work. On the way there, I pulled into Autozone and got the ODB2 code pulled for free. That told me that my check engine light was triggered by code P0304 which I learned means Cyl 4 Miss-fire. So I picked up a set of plugs and wires and proceeded to go to work (W2 job,  not on the ranger).

This morning I pulled the set of tools out and yanked cyl 4 spark plug out. Then it started raining (go figure, Portland weather), so I put the new plug in cyl 4 and started it up. That fixed the gutlessness, so the code should be gone soon. I think the wires look pretty good, so I’ll just replace the rest of the plugs and return the plug wire set. It was $25, and I’m pinching pennies!

Dirty Plug #4

Which leads me to the reason why I’m pinching pennies. We have another possible property in the works. Yes, a couple months after we bought our primary residence — we’re looking at another rental. We will see if it works out.

Kitchen Crazy

Check out this clean kitchen!

We have recently installed a kitchen in the house that we purchased and have moved into. During the process, we had to live without a kitchen for twelve days. That is a eternity, during which time you cannot prep food, wash dishes, or any serious cooking.

One thing we did right was purchase the appliances before we moved in, which gave us a ice box and a range to cook on. Aside from that — there were no cabinets, counter tops, or sink for that matter. Everything really came together though when the cabinets came in. After this happened, the counter top materials were ordered, and the sink we had already purchased from Craigslist before the cabinets came in.

Quick rough cost thus far:

• $2,550 — (11) Custom cabinets from local cabinet shop in Beech, installed with crown and plywood counters etc
• $2,300 — Appliance set from Craigslist
• $170 — Laminate material (Wilsonart Aeon, Crystalline Shell)
• $160 — Garbage Disposal (the quieter ones with the plastic encasement, it really makes a difference!)
• $100 — Kohler iron-cast sink w/faucet from Craigslist
• $100 — Plumbing stuffs
• $100 Frame a wall in (a few studs, couple sheets of sheet rock)
• $35 — Contact cement for laminate
• $25 — Counter top finish wood edge — asked the cabinet shop to make them for me in Beech with same finish — we ordered them after the install was done
• $15 — Caulk & chip brushes

Grand total so far: $5,550

Some things to consider at this point as far as more costs would be to finish the back-splash, and adding some electrical sockets to a separate fuse. We are not sure as far as what back-splash we will be doing, but it will most likely be some type of tile. I’m guessing maybe $1,000 to $1,500 at most, so we will find out.

In this one the counters have not been installed yet

Ready to stick the laminate on, the contact cement is on — so we use a wiped down extension cord to line up the counters to prevent it from sticking on wrong, then pulled the cord out after we lined it up (the cement is ridiculously strong)

Thanks to my friends who showed up with the help and expertise.

Land partitioning

On another front, we had a meeting today with the land expert on the partitioning process. We have the preliminary site plan from the surveyors. Next we need a tree arborist report, storm water test (which I think I will be doing to save on fees), and a private road drawing. Then we submit for what the city calls a Phase 1 process for land partitioning. The meeting lasted 2 hours, and it was a steep learning curve. But me and Kim really enjoyed discussing the process with a professional.

I’ll have to write more about this later when we get moving on the process, should be an adventure.

From time to time I fire up the electronic version of Robert Kiyosaki’s — Rich Dad Cashflow 202 game.

I remember when I first played around, on Cashflow 101 even, it was a challenge to get out of the rat race. At times it took a long time; and at other times you go broke, sometimes more often than not.

Well, I decided to fire it up recently and change the rules a bit. Getting out of the race became a lot less challenging and very predictable. So I decided to change up the rules a bit.

New rules: Stay in the Rat Race to build up passive income to a million a month.

The key I have found is to continue building up passive cash flow, but in a way where your net passive income equals your expenses, in a 1:1 ratio. If you go over the edge and the green bar fills up, you get kicked out of the Rat Race. The way you get around that is continue pulling out bank loans from time to time to bump up the expenses. Keep in mind if you pull out too much of a loan and kill a big chunk of your passive income, it’s more difficult to build up cash reserves at a faster pace to buy more property. So there is a happy medium.

What I have found is that once you get above 20k/mo and make the first million on cash reserves the second million in cash reserves and 100k/mo comes at you fast (takes me about 30 minutes, also depending if I go bankrupt, which I did once in this screenshot).

Some stuff I do to make it go quicker:

• Once you hit 750k and up in cash reserves, it no longer worth the time to buy anything smaller than 8 units, don’t even waste your time looking at the card.
• I wait for a market card to unload the small fry to clean up my sheets (it gets loooooong).
• Avoid the Capital Gains card, I don’t even bother (takes up time to look at charts and to see if you made a profit, with real estate you know what you’re buying upfront).
• Once the reserves hit in the millions (especially 5 million and up), I simply buy blocks of shares in a Pro Partnership card (the one for 50k a share for $1,000 a month). Basically, when I get the partnership card I pull out a bank loan to bring up my expenses, then I buy blocks of 100 shares for 5 million, which equals 100k/mo in passive income. Normally I pull out 900k loan right before I buy the block (cause it wont let me pull out 1 mil) this lowers my net cash flow by 90k in order to load up on the new 100k cash flow. Remember, I don’t want to get kicked out of the Rat Race.

Once you are able to start buying big blocks, your reserves just rocket to the moon when you bring in a cash flow per month that could kill a horse. At that point you can’t buy property fast enough, but I do buy 25 and 50 unit, and just watch the money pile up and keep an eye out for the partnership or bond cards, it’s just easier to buy big chunks at a time, and it’s less lines you have to move around.

Once you have 500k a month in net passive income, my reserves just went through the roof.

I stopped playing last night at this point, it just got hard to move the mouse fast enough to keep up, that and I started to nod off:

• 1.2 mil in gross passive
• 3.5 mil in bank loans
• 500k/mo net passive
• 40 mil in cash reserves

PS: Hey Robert, if you read this one, make a Cashflow 303!!

This month has been a whirlwind of activity. The latest push to progress is putting the kitchen in on the property we are moving to. The custom cabinetry was ordered but we were lacking appliances, so we set out to club a deal over the head and bring it home. We have always had great success with craigslist.com, and over time have found some tricks that tend to give us better results. I wanted to share what has worked for me, and what I have learned.

Craigslist Street Sense

From my past experience, every type of deal takes a different approach. Here are some guidelines I typically follow:

• For every $1000 we go up in price, we typically spend 2–3 days extra looking, this allows you to learn what is available on the market, and what a good price is.
• Post a Wanted ad (even if the ad sucks), this outsources your ability to look for deals and allows your ad to filter and attract potential sellers while you’re snoozing or doing your own thing.
• Act fast, good deals come and go, some deals fly off the shelf. I sold the white 240sx for $1000 in a couple hours from posting — actually, the kid bid himself up to $1100 because I had another buyer with a trade at the same time looking at the car for sale, but that’s another funny story.

That’s basically it, really simple.

So for example when I was looking for a ride to replace my white 240SX (that I sold also on Craigslist about 2 months ago), I spent a couple weeks really looking for a replacement ride. For this appliance set, we were looking for about a week. It’s rare that I find things just pop out, deals come at all different times, and you are not able to filter everything or always get to it first — there are others out there.

The reason we take more time when it comes to bigger heaps of money is that the research time is built in. We find this gives us time to learn the market niche and research what a good deal is, and what isn’t. This way when you pull the trigger, you probably copped a good deal. There are diminishing returns though, the longer you look, the more chance of analysis paralysis setting in. This happened to me during the car replacement search, so I took a break and only checked Craigslist once a day or so, just to keep the deals in the peripheral vision, but not enough to get engrossed and confused.

Making it work for you

Posting a Wanted ad is really underutilized, and it is key to cast out as many hooks as possible. When you post a Wanted ad, what you’re really doing is casting out a lure, then leaving, and hoping someone who is researching their market to post their goods for sale, will see your wanted ad. You can see how powerful this is. People coming to you with hopefully your criteria, to sell their goods. It’s like autopilot, except that you have to keep in mind that some people don’t research and just post, and some wont care to reply to your ad, so there is a big pool of people out there that the Wanted ad isn’t effective for. This is why you still need to check the deals manually.

There are 6 things that I keep in mind when I make an ad:

1. Utilize Character Map in the title, and try to use all the allotted character space. If you’re running Windows: Start -> Run, type “charmap” and hit enter; if you run something else you probably have an alternative. Don’t overdo it, eyesores get flagged.
2. Put your criteria in as much detail as you can, and make sure it is formatted well, I like to use lists and breaks to give a decent layout. You can read up on what other stuff you can use on Craigslist help. http://www.craigslist.org/about/help/html_in_craigslist_postings/details
3. Tell them what to do if they think they are a match, you will find that most people don’t follow these directions, but it’s nice when they do.
4. Write the post naturally, in a non-sales-like way so people don’t think you are a for-profit trying to make a buck. This typically leaves out a lot of keywords that people might be searching for, so you want to compensate and add these words at the bottom. Even I left out some because there is such wide range of brands out there that I would not be able to remember off the top of my head, but some is better than none.
5. Use a hit counter, people like to see if this is a hot ticket item, and I’m sure you would like to know how many eye balls have seen the page. You can find others but the one I found a while ago was http://not.a.ladydeals.com/HitCounter/. I always use a counter with any post.
6. Find a generic pic if you don’t have one, this let’s the sellers know what you have in mind, it also makes it so your post goes through the filter if someone has “has images” checked on Craigslist.

So basically, the layout in raw form is:

<h3>I am looking for a used modern kitchen appliance set for a good price. If you are remodeling and want to put in shiny new appliances, sell me your old ones.

My criteria:
<ul>
<li>36″ side by side fridge with water/ice</li>
<li>30″ range/stove (prefer gas or glasstop)</li>
<li>30″ over-the-oven microwave with fan exhaust</li>
<li>24″ dishwasher</li>
<li>Standard slide in appliances.</li>
<li>Prefer stainless or black (or white perhaps), everything — all in 1 finish, please</li>
<li>Same-brand set a plus</li>
<li>Nothing older than 5 years</li>
</ul>
Interested? Send me an email with the following: Pics, Asking price, Model Numbers of each appliance.

Keep it reasonable, not interested in any sets over $2000.

Thanks for looking!

Keywords: Fridgidare, LG, Kenmore, Whirlpool, Amana, Maytag</h3>

<img src="http://not.a.ladydeals.com/HitCounter/counter.php" alt="" />

On it

Oh yeah, I’ll keep this one short. Make sure you have the cash (I ignore people that contact me when I’m selling who have no money, the “can you wait a week so I get paid” crap hardly works), and make sure you jump on a deal if you see one. If you spent a week or two looking, you already know in your gut it’s good. That’s just been the case for me.

The goods

This is a Maytag stainless steel set that we picked up.

Includes:

• 36″ wide, french door, counter depth fridge
• 30″ over-the-range microwave with vent
• 24″ quiet dishwasher
• 30″ glass-top double-oven range

This was spotted right after work, around 1AM, the post was posted around 8pm — about 5 hours before I emailed the seller. I offered $2,000, and Kim emailed with a different combo of $2,300 for everything or $2,000 for everything but the dishwasher. Long story short, this was a “we got foreclosed and took our appliances and need money for rent” kind of deal. The kicker in it for me is that the house this is going into (the kitchen I’m putting in) was foreclosed on, so that makes this really another distressed deal that is common in this kind of economy. The seller emailed back with a counteroffer of $2,300 on a first come first serve basis and I said I would pick it up the next morning.….which I did just that.

Freshly unloaded

Plugged in and cleaned (inside the fridge, pardon the hand prints from manhandling it when I installed the water line)

Here we have the Ranger (yes #2, don’t ask) I picked up last month. It’s a 2001 2wd 4-banger with about 135k miles. Paid $3,600 cash, about fair value but I made sure we got one in good shape as always. Drives nice compared to my beater 240SX that I got rid of. Overall I think it fits me. The irony though is that the Green 1995 S14 240SX was replaced with a Green Ranger (the 1998), and the White 1990 S13 240SX was replaced with a White Ranger (this 2001). Must be some kind of synchronicity or something, either way — boggles my mind a little.

Here she is in all her glory…

Oh yeah, off subject, but in the midst of all the moving and the general craziness — we found time to kicks it. Don’t forget to mix in a little fun.

Get in my belly!