Catching up this week.

March 26,

We had our association HOA board meeting last night. It’s been very quiet around the place. We’ve had no major repairs to make since we replaced the damaged rafter holding up the front porch roofs. We have a substantial amount in our bank accounts! The increase in fees is helping us by us putting the increase away to take care of property insurance, which is what it was intended to do. For the foreseeable future, we’ll have a positive cash flow. We have some HOA dues delinquencies but not too many. Here hoping we don’t have any really big unexpected things come up like we did the whole new water line thing about two years ago. :0 We made major broken line repairs over and over and then finally had to redo the fresh water lines, those old pipes just wouldn’t hold together anymore.

Our units are generally worth about $50,000-55,000 these days. That’s just about the 50% decline in prices for the Phoenix area during the last two-three years. A couple of units have sold in the past two years. Our property managers said they’re beginning to see some properties move a little more than they did 6 months ago. They’re hopeful it will get better and one of our board members said we have to wait another couple of years for things to get better. He’s hopeful too, that things will increase in value. I think he’d like to get out of being a landlord himself here although he is a good landlord and good for us to have on the board.

I didn’t mention anything about the further deterioration of housing and any other market. We didn’t have time for those kinds of discussions and needed to get a lot of business done in our time allotted. One member had worked 12 days in a row and looked really kind of tired. He works for an airline, counter agent. Our property managers are good but they work regular hours and attend some board meetings during the week so they were ready to go home and forget work.

March 22,

Interesting, to say the least, point from Jim Puplava at www.financialsense.com this past Saturday, March 20, 2010. He has a weekly show that is available to listening on the website in a variety of formats. The topics and guests for each hour are listed at the website. I don’t listen to everything every week, but this past week I listened to the MP3 version of Hour 2 on the topic: “Turning Point: Change Ahead for Markets and Economy.” This part of the program was about 1 hour and 15 minutes. About 35-40 minutes into the program at the end of this Turning Point Segment Puplava says and I paraphrase I’m not direct quoting. As matter of fact I think he’s quoting a guest from the hour 1 of this date.

Everybody known a major financial crisis bigger than we’ve ever seen before is coming. What nobody knows, what nobody is smart enough to know, whether it’s 3 months, 6 months, 1 year or 2 years. Big money is preparing for this because everyone knows it is coming.
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Cheers,