Archive for the ‘Finance’ Category

Politics, Virginia Mountain Homes and Home Equity Loans

Friday, November 6th, 2009

We have a guest from Virginia who is all into politics and the healthcare debate. He was complaining about a Sesame Street episode that contains a disparaging reference to PoxTV, which sounds a lot like Fox TV. He says it’s not just coincidental that a Federally-funded TV program comes out against his favorite network. Maybe not, I don’t know.

When he wasn’t complaining about politics, he was bragging about the new house he bought in the mountains of Virginia. He said he found his Virginia mountain home on the web, and the price was low. And of course, he got the $8000 home buyer’s credit, and a low mortgage interest rate. He says his monthly mortgage and insurance payments are much lower than his previous house, and he works from home on the internet.

In fact, he plans to get a home equity loan HELOC and use the money to buy more land adjoining his acreage. He wants to buy the land soon, because he thinks that prices and interest rates will soon go up. He thinks that investment property in the mountains will be the new hot market, and he plans to have as much as possible.

He’s probably right, but most of us here are still investing our excess funds in a couple of lottery tickets each week.

Advertise the Naugas Inn?

Thursday, April 16th, 2009

It’s no secret that the decline in tourism has put a crimp in the hotel / resort industry. (To say that we at the Naugas Inn are part of an “industry” is quite a stretch, but we’ll go with it.)

I was interested to run across a blog posting of how other businesses are dealing with the economic situation, and in some cases thriving rather than surviving.

I wonder about Story 8 on that page, teaching people how to set up their own travel agencies. Maybe we need to market the Naugas to travel agents.

I think I’ll go for a walk in the woods and think it over.

Our Motivated Guest

Thursday, December 4th, 2008

We had a guest at the Naugas who was all excited about a motivational seminar he had attended a few days earlier. He said it was very…motivational.

He said that the speakers included Suzy Orman, Gen. Colin Powell, Mayor Rudy Giuliani, Robert Schuller and Zig Ziglar.

He mentioned that General Powell is a comedian (who would have known!) and that Ziglar is now ailing due to a fall at his home.

The thing that surprised this guest was that so many people bought the ‘how and when to use covered calls to beat the stock market’ package that was for sale by Phil Towne. All the experts say that you can’t time the market, but he said that (literally) thousands of people lined up to pay $100 each for the covered-calls course (plus $600/year subscription to a necessary additional service, plus potential upsells).

He said that there was also a presentation about how to protect your assets against lawsuits, but that he already knew all that stuff from the Asset-Protection-Trust.us website.

Anyway, our guest paid less than $10 to go to the motivational seminar and said it was well worth it.