One year ago today: March 5, 2024, sleep without rest.
Five years ago today: March 5, 2020, they wobble.
Nine years ago today: March 5, 2016, $10,000 too much.
Random years ago today: March 5, 2004, Martha is cooked.
Up before dawn and reviewing the changes to lofty.ai. It was stunning to hear an on-line outfit openly admit the scrambled and screwed-up shit stew they call a “wallet” was a massive barrier. People (such as myself) avoided that can of worms from day one. It reminds me of the days when computer game-addicts were called “whiz kids” because the parents had no grasp of what was going on. The cute term for morons raised around the needless complexity of wallets is themselves “crypto-native”. So imagine my surprise that lofty.ai (hereinafter “Lofty”) took dead aim on this problem without any need to thank me for my input since the middle of last year.
I engaged in roughly 20 conversations with Lofty’s bot and staff, who barraged my e-mail with advertising, that the brick wall was this wallet situation. I repeatedly told them I was interested, but no interested in having to figure out how the insane wallet crap worked Yes, I like the concept and would like to invest a lot of money (compared to their average client) but I don’t care to get my foot stuck in some on-line quicksand. (I have other reservations such as their muddled payout method, but am willing to learn how they’ve screwed that up as well.)
This puts Lofty back into focus—I have done nothing yet except review the changes. What sold me was the founder described his own experiences which match what you may have read in this blog. We both disliked the massive workload of finding the right place to invest. I estimate I spent at least $5,600 looking for this cabin. Trips, inspections, wasted searches, gasoline, and useless agents, but worst was the arthritic system itself. It was more luck I found the cabin after years of appointments and disappointments. Even JZ gave up on helping me by 2015. Please read today’s addendum for what I’ve been doing with this.
No plans for this morning except getting supplies. The radio says if Europe has 30,000 troops to send to the Ukraine, they don’t need the 20,000 America troops stationed there to protect them. Nothing about the speech last evening. When a federal judge ordered the reinstatement of cancelled government credit cards, Musk set their spending limits at $1.
Trivia. More people are killed accidentally by .22LR cartridges than all other calibers combined. This stems from people who underestimate it’s power. The LR stands for long range, it remains lethal up to one mile. Except for maybe 30 shells or cartridges, this is the only bullet I’ve fired in my life. Any marksmanship for me was this bullet.
Ad for women’s blue jeans.
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See this box? I didn’t build it and probably wouldn’t. It’s at the craft store with a $18 price tag. How that I am familiar with the process, I see why they have to sell this fairly useless box at such a price. While downtown, I priced out several articles, including a faux leather finish for the interior of a fancier box, should I ever build one. It was a nice way to spend an hour inside as the storm clouds gathered. It’s getting rare but I did see a lady with a pair of legs that are my favorite.
The electric will be different, as in more like $300. I was in the leather department looking for a stitcher when I found something I’ve been trying to find it the electronics stores. It’s a 100W soldering iron. I find soldering stations cumbersome and wanted something easy to store. The unit I saw was for decorating leather, but the $30 price tag scared me away for now. I had been looking for a branding iron of some kind, no luck.
Groceries also showed a drop to less than I was spending two years ago. And prices have really surged. A partial explanation is those who know me would have noted I have a lot of leftovers these days. It’s from a switch away from even what little processed or prepared food I used to eat. Another telltale sign is I have cash to eat at cafes when the kitchen floor is lifted up. By mid afternoon, it was too soggy to crawl under the building, as most of the initial work is near the perimeter where it gets messy in no time. Maybe we’ll tackle some small repairs just because we can.
We got some crazy news, the Supreme Court has ruled that any of the judges, mostly Democrats, can overrule Trump’s freezing of foreign aid. Most of us did no know they had more authority than the President. Then again, it is Trump’s fault for not firing them all, good idea or not, in the first 48 hours. No judges are better than corrupt judges.
Now nobody panic, the reports smack of Democrat propaganda, as in “we got Trump now”. They just finished announcing he was cutting off Social Security by stopping payments to anybody more than 112 years old. He just made a mockery of their behavior at the meeting last night.
Apparently Congress can defund the program by not allocating the money. But that would take a miracle for them to operate that fast. The Deep State will have all the checks issued within the day and the money will be gone.
I was able to get the rest of the lumber and blocks out of the truck and sort of in position near the parts of the floor. That tangle of wiring means I can’t just slide the beams into place, but if I more the wires first, I’ll be working in the dark with no coffee. The dark, I could probably handle. My plan is now to compromise by moving what wiring as can be saved along the joists instead of underneath them. Still, I will need another fifty feet of wiring no matter what. I know I’ve got a small roll somewhere that has been missing for over a year.
How’s our Depression-era family doing in the audiobook? Dreary, as usual. The family is crumbling after Rafe abandoned Elsinore. It must be around 1935, as I recall old people talking about how they thought the drought was over due to Spring rains. But Spring in Texas is in March, plenty of time for the prairie sun to bake everything back to dust. Like many families, my parents were raised on a farm, but were never farmers. By the time the Depression was over, most farm labor had been replaced by machinery. This picture was apparently near Childress, an hour’s drive from where I was born. The farms that failed were those that paid for everything on credit. I wonder how many of the farms that stayed small and lived within their means are still around today.
Warning, this book is one of compounded misery, rarely a happy moment. I see it has five-star ratings. The characters are real enough to keep me interested over what would otherwise be a sob-story. That’s because to me, poverty is pretty much the same any time and place. Complete lack of money, opportunity, and infrastructure is routine no matter who causes it. I can identify more with the kids, growing up without any experience or adventure in the middle of nowhere. And today, people on welfare have no clue what poverty is.
While this story is a classic and the audiobook production is about as good as it gets, you realize by around half-way there is no happy ending. There are types of damage that can never be undone and one of the worst is a wasted youth. I have to finish it now just to find out which of the bad options these people choose. But don’t expect a tear for the people who had to get in a truck and go to California for work. They had a truck, and gasoline, nomsayn?
ADDENDUM
I’m hardly the first person who wished I could get together with a small dedicated group and invest in rental real estate. The barrier is how the establishment has turned that plan into a full-time headache. There were options, like investing in a management company, but you lose control of your money. You were really investing in management, not real estate. They pooled their properties and you cannot cherry-pick. And you need a lot of money before they’ll even look at you.
That left you with the option to “become a janitor or hire one”. There were also tax barriers and zero protections against bad operators. You don’t know bad until you’ve dealt with Florida. So along comes Lofty, saying they can take care of the properties, which they have an incentive to do since you can pull your investment (in theory) of any that don’t follow the rules or don’t produce. You are investing in a share of the rent on individual properties, isolated from the day-to-day. Great, you want my dollar, you keep your nose clean.
However, full stop at this juncture to re-assess. I’ve followed Lofty and doubt one person in thousands properly follows or manages their account. I doubt Lofty investors even understand much of the process, since any relevant data has to be extracted from what the company crows about. Lofty is no different than other on-line outfits whose offerings are talking points geared to the user who thinks he’s savvy but is really a Starbucks-slurping scruff.
Another difference with Lofty is you own part of the real estate, not part of the management company. I’m not entirely clear on how they accomplish this, but gather this from the nature of the tax documents they provide annually. You get a 1099 from the property, the rental income is taxed as regular (nominal) income; any sales are capital gains or losses. That’s what I seek, not some partnership that saddles you with “experts” who it turns out fantasize they are investors because they bought the house they live in. Such people will always act in their own best interests rather than the group. Since finding the right group is an eternal misery, it is wiser to avoid direct partnerships if you can.
This, if you are wondering, is what attracts me about fractional investing and it goes way back. My philosophy has always been to seek those opportunities that reflect my investment strengths, which would include
a) tolerance for risk and lossA reflection of this is Caltier, who now thinks we are wealthy and accredited. (It’s past the stage where any offering we get from Caltier, the first thing I do is check if it is for accredited only.) But I say again, Caltier is only a reflection. I do not directly own any property in Caltier and I’m still waiting for last month’s disbursement instead of going in there and taking it like a real owner would. It is that above list of elements that I was really looking for.
b) 100% ownership/equity
c) support infrastructure
Which brings us back to Lofty. I took a close look at what they call staking. This is where you buy tokens which represent fractional ownership, and these tokens are far more liquid than the property. This introduces a separation which gives advantages to those with Item B in the list. I would own any tokens outright and not beholden to anyone, especially anyone who has bank or rent payments always due. I detect a secondary market I have always liked—the tokens themselves.
So standby to see how I deal with this new situation. I early concluded Lofty must have developed software to keep track of who owns what, evidenced by their low $50 buy-in. This caught my attention, but not for the reason most people would think. It does not answer an age-old question I’ve been asked so many times: where can the small investor put up $50? There really isn’t any place and Lofty is not the answer. (The world knows people who only have $50 to invest are often full of inane ideas and spook easy.)
That’s where Item C comes into place. I have software that tracks thousands of small items, such as vacuum tubes. But not with a view to inventory (theirs), but a view to profit (mine). Aha, I may now have some place to invest $50 and those who lack infrastructure do not. Sure, you can borrow a token from me.
The ruler is a piece of junk because you cannot build anything much without measuring inside dimensions. And if you look close the ruler markings do not being at the leftmost edge.
