As the United States returns to a normalized interest rate environment, things are going to get interesting. A few of my personal thoughts on the situation in which we, as a country, now find ourselves.
Buried thousands of pages within its newly-enacted buget, the State of Ohio just quietly created a new Ohio Homeownership Savings Account program that allows individuals and married couples in the Buckeye State to take a tax deduction in exchange for saving for the purchase of a house. I think this could be the start of something interesting, especially if it takes off across other states and/or the Federal government.
One of the most famous value investors of the past 100 years was a man named Christopher H. Browne. His father started a small firm, Tweedy, Browne & Company, that was Benjamin Graham’s stockbroker. It was through Tweedy Browne that Warren Buffett bought his personal shares of Berkshire Hathaway, taking control of the textile mill he would…
I’ve been browsing real estate all day for a project that needs my attention. I ended up wandering from community to community, and at one point, clicking on random states. I somehow came across what has to be the ugliest piece of property I’ve ever seen in my life but now I can’t look away. I’m fascinated.
Here is a great question about first home buying and what to expect … Dear Joshua, I’ve learned a lot over the years reading your content, and I value your in-depth research and nuts-and-bolts discussions on a lot of the subjects you talk about. With that, I have some questions about home ownership. My wife…
To understand home foreclosures, you need to understand how bank mortgages are structured. Once you do, it will be easier to see how I view the problem of dealing with losing a home because you will see there is no “bank”, there is only a conduit through which depositors – waitresses, business owners, factory workers,…
A family member of mine was looking at houses and I started thinking about Charlie Munger when he said it is important to keep a lot of the “silly needs” out of your life. (This particular family member is doing a great job managing his budget, but in general, it made me wonder about society…
If you wanted to be as rich as Mr. Monopoly, how much would it take? How high would your annual income be? Your net worth? Those are the question that I pondered sitting at my desk this morning. Out of pure curiosity, I began to adjust the values of the Monopoly property rents for inflation, using the last full-year CPI figures (2009), knowing that the game was originally released in 1935.
