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As I mentioned a few posts back I read a book called “How to invest in Condominiums” by Andris Virsnieks. I did not finish this book entirely, but this is mainly because the book did not fully captivate my attention. Mind you that I read this book because I have been very interested in investing in real estate in one form or another for quite some time.

According to the title of the book, it covers such topics like:

• Select the right condo
• Make the real estate market work for you
• Attain positive cash flow
• Reduce your tax basis through depreciation
• Live rent-free and retire early

Judging by the cover it seemed like an interesting read. After getting a ways into the book it seemed to cover the same stuff over and over again. I guess that since I had been thinking about investing in real estate for so long I had already thought about many of the strategies that Virsnieks covers in the book.

The basic investment plan suggested by Virsnieks essentially goes a bit like this. First you must select a brand new condo. A remodel or apartment conversion just will not do. He does not believe in buying an older unit to upgrade into a more valuable one. Not only must the condo be new, but it also must have high demand for the units. If there is not high demand for them, then it may be harder to sell them later. The other main point that the author reiterates throughout the book is the value of hiring a property management company to take care of all the dirty work for you. Virsnieks claims that the management company typically takes about 9% of the rent for their services, but it is well worth not dealing with all of the hassles. He says that by purchasing a new condo and hiring a property manager, then you will only have to spend about 40 minutes a month on your investment. That 40 minutes will be spend going over the property management statement and depositing the check in the bank.

Virsnieks makes the whole process sound quite easy in the book, and indeed it should be. There are a few problems that I have with how the book is set up though. The majority of his purchases were made back in the 1970s, so it is somewhat hard to wrap my head around the purchase of a $23,950 condo in Seattle that rents for $265/month. These days a cheap livable condo in Seattle goes for about $175,000 or more. He also makes mention of mortgage payments in the 13%+ range, which is unheard of these days. If you applied everything on a strict percentage basis, it would all probably match up about the same, although in Seattle I believe that condo prices have increased more than rents have.

Personal Finance, Real Estate, Reviews condo, invest, landlord, real estate, rent, tenant

I normally don’t use this blog to rant about a company, but AT&T wireless especially pissed me off today. For the past few months my girlfriend of about 2 1/2 years have been thinking about switching her phone over from her dad’s family plan to a family plan with me. It just seemed to make sense for us, especially since I don’t go through a ton of minutes and she was sharing hers with three other people on her old one. So just last week we went into AT&T to get everything moved over.

It seemed like a pretty painless process. All in all it took about five minutes. They checked all of our IDs and got our numbers and then transferred her number over to my plan and set us up with a new minutes plan. It all sounds good until I took a look at my bill this morning.

Apparently AT&T charges what they refer to as a “Transfer of Service Responsibility Fee” which costs $18.00! $18.00 to move a number on a computer from one account to another. No credit or background checks needed to be done, just a straight transfer! It seems like they should be encouraging you to sign up with the family plan since you will most likely keep your service there longer. Instead they just penalize you! Rediculous! I wonder if they charged her dad as well?

One more thing that made me pretty upset was that they got rid of almost all of my rollover minutes. Over the past 12 months I had accumulated over 3,000 rollover minutes. When I switched over to the family plan they took away all of those minutes except for 700. What happened to keep the minutes that you pay for?

The account summaries that are posted along with this article are taken from my actual bill, so I am not making this stuff up. I’d be curious to hear if anyone else has had similar experiences with AT&T and whether or not this is standard practice on the other wireless carriers.

Personal Finance, Random, Reviews at&t, family plan, rant, rollover