Some
have compared the excitement of watching a baseball game to watching paint dry
(and to others, that’s a tad offensive to paint), but the Chicago Cubs and the
Cleveland Indians certainly gave it their all and took it not only to the last
of seven games for the World Series to be decided but into extra innings. It seemed to be a fitting dramatic build up
for the Cubs to end their 108-year drought of winning a World Series –
the Curse of the Billy Goat has been broken.
Oddly
enough, a high school kid from Mission Viejo, CA, wrote this as his senior
quote beneath his photograph in his 1993
year book: “Chicago Cubs. 2016 World
Champions. You heard it here
first.” I’m not making that up. The kid’s name is Michael Lee –
Google it. Media outlets have since
interviewed Mr. Lee –
now a grown man –
and he claims he had a dream about this when he was a young kid, and it’s
always stayed vivid in his mind. I’m
sure, like you, that there wasn’t even a trace of trying to be a smart aleck
because we all know how serious high school students take the writing of their
senior quotes. If I remember correctly,
mine included the words “blah blah blah.”
I’m
sure when the young Mr. Lee’s classmates cracked open their yearbooks to write
messages of “have a great summer” and “don’t ever change”, they read his quote,
laughed uproariously (because the Cubs of the ‘90s were no great shakes), and
focused on more important things like whose party they were going to crash that
weekend. To that same end, I’m confident
Mr. Bircham
the shop teacher didn’t say to himself, “The world should keep an eye on
Michael Lee. He’s got something there
about the Cubs.”
While
I honestly find the whole “prediction” fun –
it’s great fodder for an article like this –
there are some things that are happening today that would have seemed just as
outrageous not very many years prior.
For example, three
years
ago, Amsterdam’s mayor asked a roomful of pension fund managers if they’d be
willing to invest in the regeneration of his city’s notorious red light
district. Two lonely hands went up. The two funds whose managers raised their
hands, as a result of taking the mayor up on his offer, are seeing an annual
rate of return between 10 and 15 percent.
The other funds stuck with “normal” investments like government bonds,
which are yielding about . . . zero
percent. Another investment firm
representing the British Medical Association decided to look farther afield for
growth opportunities and purchased 52 bingo parlors –
they’re offering a net yield of 8.4% currently.
Single-family
residences are the “regular” or “vanilla” home purchases these days –
to the conventional way of thinking, such a home is the first property one
acquires before doing anything else in the real estate world. But a case can certainly be made –
not as a wild prediction but one that can be proved with numbers –
to step outside the “norm” and make your first purchase a duplex or a fourplex. With it as your primary residence, you can
get a lot of great products with much lower down-payment requirements, and you
can get the other tenants to pay your mortgage.
Plus, you only need to live there for a year –
then you can move on and purchase that dream house while you keep the original
property as a great investment. People
may laugh a bit like you just told them a joke when you tell them that this is
your plan –
they might fail to see into the future like you can. Just smile and think of all that passive
income.
And
speaking of strange jokes: If you had
told me two or three years ago that my two major choices for President of the
United States came down to Donald and Hillary, a case possibly could have been
made for voting for the Billy Goat. With
that said, be a solid citizen and vote this Tuesday!
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