Real estate agents and home buyers alike are feeling the squeeze from the lack of homes on the market.  Don’t despair!  For both real estate agents and home buyers, there’s a great untapped source for finding deals before they ever hit the market: your lender.  If any of you are a bit confused by what I mean when I say “your” lender, I mean . . .  w ell, us.   How do we do this, you ask?  Two words: equity watch.  For the real estate agent who helped their client buy a home, say, seven years ago, we let them know when their client has reached a certain level of equity in their home and prompt the agent to give their client a call with the good news.  It’s a good excuse for them to call, catch up, deliver the great news, and see if their client is ready to sell their home and either upgrade or downsize, depending on their station in life.  Statistics have shown that almost 70% of people sellin...

With my friend’s permission, I’m including an excerpt from a humor column he wrote a few years back.  I have a point, I promise, and I’ll make it below.   All  told, I believe there are at least 764 shades of the color blue that are completely indistinguishable to my eyes, but my wife has the innate ability to differentiate each and every one.   Stranger  still, when I tell her that Cerulean and Celestial look identical to me, she’ll say things like, “Oh, come on.   The  Cerulean has way more red in it, and the Celestial tends to be more yellow. ”   How can “blue” be red or yellow?   Aren’t  we talking about the three primary colors, the basic building blocks of all other colors? I would like to say that this truly shouldn’t matter to me, but I just spent my afternoon painting an entire wall Blue #429 – it has a name, I’m sure, but I dare not mention it for fear that one of you out there will ...

More than a couple of years ago, I witnessed something that makes me laugh and cringe at the same time.  Having lunch at a local restaurant, I spied a real estate agent and a loan originator having what I would characterize as a “first date”. I couldn’t help but overhear little snippets of their conversation, and as far as I could tell, things were going relatively well . . . at least until the agent asked the LO this question: “So, do you like to sit at open houses with agents?”  I immediately looked to the LO’s face awaiting the response.  I didn’t need to hear another single word coming out of the LO’s mouth because his face said everything:  you would have thought the agent had asked him if he enjoyed bobbing for apples in a pool of acid judging by the look on his face.  While his face was communicating complete revulsion, his lips said, “Yes, of course.”  And that’s when I looked over at the agent’s face to see, ...

Some time ago, in a science class I was required to take, I learned something that I actually remembered.   Here in the United States, manufacturers of food and other consumer products are required to list the ingredients in the order of their quantity in said substance, largest to smallest – and that’s the reason that when you look at the ingredient list of a lot of products you see “water” listed first.   And on those items that enter the health-and-wellness category like shampoo, you’ll see another listing on that back label that reads “Active Ingredient”.   In essence, even if the item is, say, 90% water, the active ingredient is the thing that makes the product do what it says it does.   For example, the active ingredient in Head & Shoulders shampoo is Pyrithione Zinc, and its job is to control and eliminate dandruff.   Here’s another way to look at it: if H&S had ALL the other ingredients EXCEPT Pyrithione Zinc, it would probably clean your...

Full disclosure: that’s as salty as the language is going to get in this week’s edition, I promise.   Further, I apologize if I shocke d you with that title, but I believe you’ll see my reasoning in just a moment.   Social media is ubiquitous.   (That’s a fancy word meaning “found everywhere”, and I chose to use it instead of “found everywhere” because it sounds cool – try using it at your next cocktail party to impress your friends.)   Whether we’re at work, school, place of worship, coffee shop, etc., we’re touched by some avenue of social media.   It’s sort of made us a “transparent” society, and there are many good things about that.   However, that transparency often leads to oversharing and the insistence that being rude should be accepted because someone’s “just being honest.”   Let me be honest here: that’s hooey!   (I told you I wouldn’t get salty.) Fire up Instagram or Facebook, and you’ll see people posting, for exampl...