This N' That on Making Money

 I put in an offer today on a bank owned, new three bedroom, one bath, small house in the country, on a dirt road. List price was $43,000 I offered $30,000 we will see what happens. I offered to buy in an as is condition, with 10% down, with them financing it at a 5.5% interest rate, on a twenty year amortization, with a five year balloon. I attached a $1,000 earnest money check to show them I was serious. We will see how bad the bank wants it off their books. There are deals all over the country you just have to keep looking and keep making offers. Sooner or later you will nail one.

We have been working on a re-make-over of our patiostore.com web site and it is now launched for customers to use. It has bugs in it that will get worked out as we go along. The goal was to make the site more user friendly and give it a more up-to-date look that will meet with the expectations of the customer. Web sites have to do a re-make ever three years to keep up. Now we will work on better cross selling and better category grouping to make the web site more search-able. Sales where up before the new site look was launched and this should help even more.

The remodeling work on the five unit rental property we closed on in January is going slow. I am not pushing it because we are paying cash as we go along to keep the equity as high as possible. That equity will be needed later this year to do another deal. You can read more on this a little further down this page. The post are newest first so keep reading older post until you find it.

I just finished my taxes and decided to put $4,000 into a traditional IRA. I would owe the IRS $1,164 more if I did no IRA, and only $64 if I did the $4,000 traditional IRA. The bank is only paying 2.5% on a two year CD but the $1,100 in less takes paid is a 25% bonus. I am older so a Roth IRA's (which are the best gift our government ever gave us) is not a good deal for me. If I was 50 years old or less I would have paid the taxes and used a Roth IRA. Roth's work best when you have time on your side.

If a man age 28 puts $2,000 in a Roth IRA every year until he is 40 years old, he will have approximately $1,000,000 tax free at age 65. I assume a good growth mutual fund is used as the investment vehicle. Historically the stock market has returned 12% over the long haul.

Tell us what you are doing to make money! If you own a business I would love to get your P&L statement to add on here (names changed of course) to help others in the same business. Having a P&L to look at when writing a business plan is immensely helpful. So if you have a P&L on a business you will share, fax or email it to attention Jim. Fax 210-829-1482 I will change the name and address before posting it.

God gave you twenty four hours today, what are you doing with your's?

Interesting stats.

47% of the people in the US pay no income tax. Of the people who pay income taxes. the average amount paid is 5% to 8% of income. My effective tax rate for 2009 was 8.47% of income. The wealthiest people pay most of the income taxes.

The average millionaire is self made, first generation. They typically own a business, or have a business profession such as CPA, doctor, lawyer etc. Average time to reach the million dollar net worth club is 17 years. Average work week is 60 hours. Small businesses create most of the jobs in the US. Most small businesses never reach a million dollars a year in sales. Over 50% of wealth comes from real estate. The wealthiest small business people own the real estate they operate their businesses out of.

The new health care bill will be like Medicare a large under funded government liability. Medicaid a (state level program) is medical welfare. If everyone is insured, what happens to the insurance for medical we pay that is included in our car insurance, in our homeowners policies, in our property taxes for the county hospital, in our liability policies, in our workers comp policies, etc. What you want to bet they all keep the money.

Jobs program dreams: If the government wants to create jobs and stimulate the economy, they only need give small business people a seven year $50,000 loan for each job created up to 10 jobs. Make the loans SBA direct loans, keep it simple and do it fast and you will have jobs in months rather then years.

Pick businesses who have been in business three or more years, let the assets of the business secure the loan, and I bet you would have a 70% pay back, and interest will cover most of the losses. If any congress men wants to talk about this call me.