I can’t help noticing that according to the S&P Dow Jones chart from Investopedia, when you are looking at investing and foreign tariffs, real estate has much less foreign exposure than other types of investment, such as information technology and materials. So perhaps it will be a stable investment into the future.

REI Capital Resources is a loan originator for select investor single-family residential, multi-family residential, vacation rental and commercial projects. Our goal is to provide fast closing loans to fund your investment projects, so you don’t lose a great deal. This includes bridge loans for the acquisition of property.

Give me a call or send an e-mail for assistance funding your project.

Patrick St.Cin
512-213-2271
Patrick@REICapital.cash

According to Investopedia, The Market Sum, by Caleb Silver, the value of the stocks for both Walmart and Amazon, the two giant retailers ended up 9% higher this year.

• Walmart fiscal 2019 Revenue: $514 billion
• Amazon 2018 total Revenue: $233 billion
• Walmart fiscal 2019 operating cash flow: $27.8 billion
• Amazon 2018 net income: $10 billion

So, the nines seem to have it. I know that I spend quite a bit of money at Walmart and Amazon. Add in my mortgage and the local grocery store and that is where most of my money goes. I believe that this news is no surprise.

However, I was surprised to know that there is no definitive explanation for the phrase, “dressed to the nines” according to Endangered Phrases by Steven D. Price. He says it means wearing fashionably elegant clothing, but history fails to tell us exactly where that term comes from. Among the explanations that have been advanced, “the nine worthies of the ancient world, the British Army 99^th Foot Regiment’s smart uniform, the nine buttons on the gloves owned by a medieval woman, and the nine muses.

Price reminds us that nine has a special significance in the English language even if we don’t know why. There is “cloud nine” and “the whole nine yards.”

The “whole nine yards” might come from the amount of cloth it takes to make a suit of clothes or the amount of cloth it takes to make the sails of a three-masted ship (3 yards for each sail) (The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms by Christine Ammer). Personally, I think it has something to do with football, soccer, or golf; nevertheless, it means “everything that is relevant.” And, “cloud nine” refers to a state of complete happiness. (Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, 2015)

I did say we should learn new things in 2019. I did think it would be something more than idioms that include the number nine, but I’d say that Walmart and Amazon both would agree that nine is a good number in this year 2019.

Walmart and Amazon are talking in the billions of dollars, but I am down here on earth with you and happy with lesser amounts. Although investing in real estate projects is a whole different beast than selling retail goods, it still offers rewards that include profit for your risk and your effort, and best of all, it may launch you into new directions, careers, and interests.As a private lender, you would expect a much more secure and short-term investment experience than you can get investing in the stock market or in retail sales. Your investment in the form of a loan to a borrower interested in remodeling and reselling real estate would be secured by the real estate, and the project would be completed and resold in a few months or a year. Let me know if I can be of help to you this month. I can be reached at

Patrick@InvestorsLendingSource.com

512-213-2271

Austin, Texas

References:

Ammer, Christine, The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms.

Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. 2015 Farlex, Inc,

Silver, Caleb, 2019. Investopedia, The Market Sum https://link.investopedia.com/join/53o/00-fwd-marketsum

Price, Steven D. 2015. Endangered Phrases

Photo Credit: Lai Fong (Lai Fong of Calcutta, fl. 1870-1910) Attributed to [Public domain]

Photo by Bryan Schneider on Pexels.com

So much of what we do seems to be about the numbers, and that is the careful approach to money and real estate investing. Research, data, and knowing are key. Once we have enough numbers, coordinates, impressions, population flows, and price points, we can let the algorithms take over and decide for us if it is safe to jump, to invest. But where is the mystery in that? Where is the romance? In the book The Business Romantic, by Tim Leberecht, we read the staggering statistic that in the time it takes us to read one chapter in his book, “the human race will produce the same amount of data that currently exists in the U.S. Library of Congress. Big Data indeed.” Awk!

Too Much Measuring

Lebrerecht points out that in business, the mantra often is “You can’t manage what you can’t measure.” I’ve seen this in business. Managers trying to track performance data on every employee and somehow relate it to success. In our personal lives, the fashionable apps available to us also quantify our every heartbeat and the fate of every calorie, spitting out information about everything we eat and how it relates to our best-every performance. As we age, the mobile heart EKGs and breathing machines tell us if we are okay despite how we feel, or if it is time to call 911. Human agency it seems is being pressed out by the numbers.

And so it is in many of our decisions in this business we are in of borrowing, lending, buying, renting, and selling. Over and over I say, do the numbers, do your research, know what you are getting into. We want to know the numbers. We want to quantify all the potential risks and rewards. And, that is the sensible thing to do.

The Adventure

But there is another way to do business, the romantic way as Lebrercht points out in his book. It is the unpredictable way, the way of the gut. It is looking at business as the greatest adventure of the human experience. It is giving all we have and not counting the return. It is the leap of faith, our celebration of the unknown and the unexplainable. (I can just feel the office quake as all those business productivity managers falling out of their rolling desk chairs.)

So, I ask, what if we fall in love with a house? What if we want to embrace a neighborhood, a town. What if we are passionate about fixing this little house up so it is beautiful, each door knob polished to perfection, each mop board stained precisely? If that is the way we are feeling about our business, we are business romantics. It is taking the small and making it big.

In Love

When we are in love with our work, we do it for the sake of doing it. We see our work as bigger than ourselves as something with purpose. We don’t even notice our paychecks. We might not get along with everyone or be completely streamlined, but we are successful. We are improving neighborhoods, building communities, turning the sow’s ear into the silk purse.

My advice on this winter Friday in January is to forget the efficiency and give old romance a try. Seek out the mystery, the romance in property. Where a person lives is so important to them. It is our job to bring property to life, to engage in the business of buying and selling to create places where humans thrive and to thrive ourselves as we bring a dream to life.

That is it! Look at your work for what it is—creating places for humans to live! This is a high calling indeed.

I would love to give you a hand in whatever you endeavor to do.

Follow this link for a quick application form: http://investorslendingsource.com/pre-qualification-program

Or, please call or e-mail.

Pat St. Cin

Patrick@InvestorsLendingSource.com

512-213-2271

Austin, Texas

References

Jacqueminot Roses, painting by Martin Johnson Heade [Public domain] via Wikimedia commons.

Leberecht, T. 2015. The Business Romantic. New York, NY: HarperCollins.