Click on the links below for recent real estate articles in the media.
Selling your home - 10 tips
GTA Condo Market - Has it peaked?
Spring Housing Market - Is this the last big one?
Duct cleaning - Is it worth it?
TREB reports resale homes holding their own
10 ways to avoid buying the wrong house
Tuesday, 22 March 2011
Wednesday, 2 March 2011
Who's minding the mint?
Here’s an interesting article that I just read, not specifically real-estate related, but if you're investing in real estate (or anything, for that matter), then this advice could apply to you too.
It amazes me that some people can be stupid or naive enough to think that there's such a thing as a risk-free investment. Even hiding your money in your mattress is an investment of sorts. And the risk of that investment is that if your mattress goes up in smoke....
Real estate has its own risks as well. Just different. But remember that house prices don't only go upwards.
As I go through life, I learn more and more to ask myself if something passes "the smell test".
Does it smell fishy?
First warning that an "investment opportunity" fails the test is when someone in that article says
“there was no possibility of him losing his money.”
that should make you scratch your head.
There’s really NO place you can invest your money that doesn’t have risk. It’s that the risk comes in varying degrees.
Can you lose your money if you invest in Canada Savings Bonds?
Yes! But the risk is very little because the government would have to collapse for something like that to happen.
Second warning – if you invest “off the beaten path”, I.e. with non-mainstream financial investors, you have to know your risk is going up – especially if it’s not even their primary job [laffin!!]
I mean in this article, these people were just plain greedy and their greed blinded them to sensibilities and normal suspicions. For example: How can some part-timer be having all this success when even the pros don’t have his success record? And if he’s so successful, how come he’s not doing it as a full-time job? And thirdly, if he is *so* successful, why does he even have/need a job????
I’m laughing at the investors in this article who are trying to blame the OSC for their own greed and stupidity. They're basically asking to be protected from themselves.
The author of a newsletter that I subscribe to says that no one can ever beat the market on a regular basis, like this clown, or like Bernie Madoff claimed to have done. Being able to do so, would imply that at some point you’re garnering more and more wealth and eventually ALL of it. And since no one has ever garnered all the wealth of the world and own all the stocks, or even just to a dominant position, you know it can’t happen.
I chuckled at this article because it refers to dentists getting swindled because it’s widely rumoured that dentists and doctors, more than any other professions, are the ones most often swindled.
And an interesting analogy to this article would be to ask you, if I told you that my friend does dentistry “on the side” – would you trust them enough to go yourself? Probably not. Yet these clowns invested HUGE amounts of savings with someone who still has a day job! How twisted is that? You trust your savings with someone who doesn't even do this investing as their REAL job????
It’s really important that you start putting some money away at an early age to make it work for you. But it’s even more important that you think twice about where you put it and never all in one basket.
BTW, I just bought this guy’s books after hearing him interviewed on local morning radio
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)