Either online, in the mail, or direct phone call, almost everyone has at some point seen an ad for timeshares. They usually look like great deals on free or very cheap vacations. The fine print specifies one must attend a sales session. Most of us are aware of timeshares but have heard bits and nuggets [...]

In the blogosphere there are tons of link roundups out there.  But there’s only one that irregularly and is handpicked by me.  Enjoy the best of the web from the last couple of months: Doctors die differently: This was perhaps one of the most thought-provoking articles I’ve read in the last year.  A significant portion [...]

As of this writing we are converging on the 6th year of this housing mess, and for almost 6 years we’ve heard people from the head of the Federal Reserve to real estate experts to Jim Cramer say we’ve reached the bottom of the housing market. For too long self-interested parties have made claims the [...]

You can find a poll to support just about anything. And recent polls support that idea. Another recent poll is showing people are very interested in changing the income tax deduction on mortgage interest and about a quarter of people are okay with eliminating it altogether. Back before the days of the mortgage crisis I [...]

Have you ever worked with a set of data for an extended period of time only to find out the data was wrong?  I have.  Sometimes when working in a spreadsheet I wouldn’t select the columns correctly and only sort part of the spreadsheet.  This leads to the data being all screwed up.  It could [...]

Even though Occupy Wall Street has lost some of its muster, the message has been loud and clear, people are pissed off.  The easiest target has been Wall Street, and it will likely remain that way for some time.  They certainly deserve a lot of the blame, blame they’ve been getting since 2007.  Over the [...]

Even with housing prices falling and so much damage to the real estate market, the homebuilders continue to push on. New neighborhoods continue to slowly pop up and shoppers are still considering new homes. With so many delinquent mortgages and empty houses and desperate sellers, why are people still buying new homes? Are builders making [...]

If you haven’t seen the ads before, the National Association of Realtors has been advertising that every two home purchases creates a job.  At first I thought I could agree with that.  So I started digging to see if there was maybe an article to be written that says Realtors aren’t doing enough to help [...]