Let’s be realistic, shall we?
It’s the original roof, three original bathrooms that look like $60k-80k to fix, original furnace (no A/C), only half of the windows were replaced, no solar, no pool, no spa, no backyard improvements at all – the skimpy old BBQ is a negative and there are more weeds than grass in the yard. The house was built in 1990 so it was designed in the 80s, which means it has a big living room/smaller family room which makes for an odd fit for a 6-br house. Doing our $75k in showing improvements only gets buyers interested – an attractive list price and gentle coddling are needed to get this one closed.
Everything wrong with this property can be fixed with money!
You don’t have to be a genius to gain wisdom: often time teaches us the wisdom no textbook can. Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger are both in their 90’s and as sharp and curious as any 30-year-old I know……their (long) lifetime of experience seeing things really closely and broadly is wisdom for all of us to know. I thought some of their quotes from their weekend retreat in Omaha were worth re-broadcasting:
“What gives you opportunities is other people doing dumb things.”
“The situation in banking is what it always was. Fear is contagious. Sometimes the fear is justified, sometimes it isn’t.”
“In 58 years I’d say there has been a great increase in the number of people doing dumb things.”
“Bankers should be more like engineers…avoiding trouble instead of trying to get rich.”
“One of the inane things that’s taught in modern university education is that a vast diversification is absolutely mandatory in investing in common stocks … That is an insane idea. It’s not that easy to have a vast plethora of good opportunities that are easily identified. And if you’ve only got three, I’d rather be in my best ideas instead of my worst.”
“The world is overwhelmingly short-term focused. I’d love to be born today and go out with not too much money and hopefully turn it into a lot of money.”
“I don’t understand the APPLE i-phone at all, but I do understand consumer behavior. … We’re learning all the time, from all of our businesses. … We don’t get smarter over time, we … get a little wiser, though, following it over time.”
“You should write your obituary and then try to figure out how to live up to it. That’s something you get wiser on as you go along. … You just want to make sure you don’t make any mistakes that take you out of the game or come close to taking you out of your game. You should never have a night when you’re worried about investing, assuming you have any money to invest at all. … Spend a little bit less than you earn, and you can spend a little bit more than you earn. … Then you’ve got debt, and chances are you’ll never get out of debt. I’ll make an exception in terms of a mortgage on your house.”
> “Bankers should be more like engineers…avoiding trouble instead of trying to get rich.”
My old aviation company has an enviable safety/performance record because we engineers also flew what we designed and built.