The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) reported that the federal budget deficit for fiscal year 2016 was a whopping $588 billion, up from $439 billion in FY2015. The CBO projects the deficit to rise to almost $600 billion in FY2017. That is bad enough. Yet the Treasury Department quietly reported that the national debt exploded by…
DetailsThe below article was written by Richard A. Epstein, contributing writer of Defining Issues, a Hoover Institution Journal. Please send a copy of this article to every elected official you know…please. Everyone agrees the most attractive areas in California suffer from a housing crisis that calls for drastic action. The difficult question is deciding what…
DetailsIf you’ve missed some of the prior articles, basic guidelines on successful investing are in my book “Stairway to Wealth” available at LuLu.com. Continued from Part 14: The items above are just examples. Some of the clauses may be inappropriate for a home remodeling contract. There could be – probably would be – other provisions…
DetailsShould you be self managing your property or should you be paying a management company to deal with your property? It’s a question that comes up quite often around here and there really is no one answer that fits everyone.
For this edition of the Q&A column, we are presenting a summary of the various rent control measures that were on local ballots November 8. The summary is an overview of the most relevant aspects of each measure, and is followed by a link to a website where the complete measure can be reviewed for…
DetailsThe passage of Prop. 64 (Marijuana Legalization Initiative) on the California ballot on November 8th is not a “carte blanche” (total permission) for the use of marijuana wherever and whenever people desire and decide to use it. Rather, the result is the de-criminalization of marijuana use accompanied by a complex series of regulations which will…
DetailsIf taxpayers focus on the results of the recent election, there may not seem to be much to celebrate. While the rest of America took a big step toward fiscal sanity, the same cannot be said of California. At the state level, all three taxes, one on marijuana users, one on smokers and another on…
Details“The biggest mistake many investors make is to ignore the numbers generated by their properties.” Financial Statements Let’s start with financial statements, or lack of them. Many real estate investors only track the results of their real estate investments at tax time. Instead investors should be reviewing their results by reading their financials on a…
DetailsThere is no dispute that the Millennials make up the largest segment of our population. They number around 80 million young adults who were all born between 1978 and 1995. They represent about 25% of the entire population.
Regulations adopted in 2014—the so-called “Airbnb Law”—formally legalizing short-term rentals under 30 days for the first time, are not achieving the desired compliance goals. According to the city’s Office of Short-Term Rentals, 2,207 hosting applications have been received, but only 1,717 have been approved. That’s a small percentage of the estimated 7,000 to 10,000 hosts…
Details