Jason Hartman: Welcome to the Creating Wealth show. This episode number is 276 and this is your host Jason Hartman and today we are going to talk about an Expo that I am speaking at on September 8, that’s the Silicon Valley real estate Expo or investor Expo. And so we are going to have a little quick interview on that, but for the intro section today I invited Steve Bach to talk with us and talk about a couple of things in the news and current events. Steve how are you?
Steve: Doing great and feeling wonky, Jason.
Jason Hartman: Well, yes intellectual takeout is definitely wonky. So good stuff. I tell you I have said to various girlfriends I have had over the years, I have always said I’m really a very nerdy guy who happens to dress fairly well. I’ve never owned a pocket protector or had those glasses with a little tape around the middle of them, but.
Steve: It’s all about the disguise.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, that’s right, that’s right. But hey the first thing I thought I would have us talk about today is the middle class and you know I have long talked about it on the show, Steve, but it is really my mission to save the middle class. That’s a big part of why what I do. When I sold my last company in 2005 I could have just retired or at least retired for a while just you know retirement is subjective term. It depends on how you want to live right, but I have never been one to be very interested in retirement, I love to work, I love what I do because I feel it’s really a mission and one of those big missions is to save the dwindling middle-class. You know many years ago I read Lou Dobbs book War on the Middle Class and I would highly recommend that book for our listeners and I think we invited Lou on the show a while back. We got to see if we can get him on. He is not on the air as much as he used to be and I like his commentary. But they talk about the 2000s being the last decade for the middle class and that whole last decade concept comes from the discussions of Japan and Japan, they used to say Japan has had a last decade now. It’s almost 2 last decades for Japan and I think the major part of Japan’s problem is the demographic problem, one that we do not fortunately have in the US. We don’t even have anywhere close to that problem, our demographics in the US are pretty phenomenal in many ways, at least in terms of age. Maybe not education and so forth, but in terms of age we have got demographics that should be powering the US to a grand state of economic prosperity but what are your thoughts on this?
Steve: Well we were saying that the 2000s were last decade for the middle class. I’m looking at the story we are referring to and there is a quote, that really sums it up, it’s from a garage owner in New Jersey. This guy says I find that I am running in place at best and in some areas I’m probably slowly falling behind. And it’s kind of depressing to see that we see that the median income is down significantly. What would make that even more scary though I don’t know if that’s adjusted for inflation, because that’s what’s just obliterating the middle class.
Jason Hartman: It sure is. And you know it is interesting that they don’t say that. I was going to bring up that very same point because in this news article by Rob Quinn, it talks about how the middle class itself is defined as households with income from 39,000 to $118,000 and it says it is shrinking and the study found that it’s falling from 61% of the population in 1971 to only 51% today. But here is where it gets so murky and it’s so hard to understand this. Number one is because of inflation number two is because of how inflation is calculated and we all know that’s you know a whole scam in and of itself that you talked about before. Number three part is technology and that’s part of the inflation calculation when we talk about hedonics and so forth, one of the ways they misrepresent inflation, but when I had that interview, many episodes ago I think it was late last year actually with Bill Wattle who did that great piece talking about the poor and how the poor today are so much richer than they have ever been in history, poor people nowadays have air conditioning, television sets, DVD players, brand-new Michael Jordan sneakers, iPhones all kinds of cool stuff. But that’s the benefit of technology.
So again this stuff does get murky and it gets hard to tell and I think the place to really look to understand what is happening to the standard of living is, is things that aren’t very technological. So one thing that’s not very technological is the size of your home, but I have talked about the misleading nature of that before because homes have gotten larger, certainly since post World War II baby boom, homes have gotten much larger in terms of average and in terms of median numbers. But you know Steve the interesting part is while the homes have gotten larger, the lots have gotten a lot smaller and the density has become much, much more compact. So we’re leaving on top of each other very literally in many cases nowadays. But if we are not, we are living in small what they call cluster home subdivision, where you just don’t have as much land as you used to and land is not very impacted by technology at all, is it.
Steve: No, no not at all. And that’s the pinch, you know technology has a tendency to get cheaper over time. But some of these other things like commodities, they are getting more and more expensive. I have a family of four, a wife and two kids and I am not kidding you, what I could buy hundred dollars worth of groceries a year ago, now that’s costing me a 130. And that’s where we are seeing this pinch happening continually and that’s where it is squeezing the middle class. The article goes on to talk about how the upper portion, some of them are actually doing better. They are moving into the wealthy class, but most of them, they are just getting whittled down. They are having to cut this, they are having to cut that and it’s just getting smaller and smaller and tighter and tighter on these people every single day.
Jason Hartman: Yeah no question it is. And you know one of the things about food that’s kind of interesting. Number one you need to look at the drought scenario going on in many parts of the country. So that is impacting food prices and that’s not directly related to inflation. So it is fair to kind of adjust mentally for that. But the other thing you have to adjust mentally for which nobody is doing except me so far as I know, is food quality. You know with mass production and farming, and genetically modified food and with Monsanto and all of that evils in many ways, I think they do a lot of evil. But you know they do some good too on balance and if you want to hear more about Monsanto by the way, I talk a lot about them on my holistic survival show which is of course on iTunes and you can go to holisticsurvival.com and oh I just got a mention one more thing. You know me Steve, I am the king of going on a tangent and you know Obama. We just had the Republican National Convention and soon the Democrats are going to make, but you know Obama has tried to portray himself as a champion of the little guy and you know on the show I think the first, first lady actually to do a small garden you know which is symbolic of course it’s almost meaningless, but it is a symbol. At a White House right to do this little garden vegetable garden, what’s interesting about it is Obama is so in bed with big corporate America, it’s sickening because what is it, his head of agriculture is the former CEO of Monsanto, you know I don’t know how much more fascist you could be than the Obama administration except for George Bush, right in front of him you know same kind of deal. But Obama is even worse, so but the thing is George Bush never claimed to be portrayed as a champion of the little guy. Obama has, so you know it’s kind of the difference there. But yeah so the quality of food has gone down and you look at these like soaring cancer rates and many people think it’s the pesticides, it’s the genetic engineering and you know a lot of the stuff nobody really knows for sure and you know it may take decades to really know. So it’s not just that you don’t just pay for things. I guess my point is this. You don’t just pay for things in dollar cost you also pay for them in other ways. You pay for them with your health, you pay for them with quality of food. Certainly having small localized farms with much less economy of scale that makes food prices higher. And if we had the same food scenario today that we had for example back in the 1960s when it wasn’t so corporatized and not every farm was you know run by a big giant corporation and there wasn’t nearly as much genetic engineering in our crops and they didn’t have the hybrid seeds and they didn’t have the pesticide stuff like they do nowadays, if you did that kind of food production and you had to buy it that way today, food prices would be an enormously expensive. So my point is I’m just trying to say that inflation has been hidden largely in food. Everybody complains about food being more expensive, but it would be far, far, far expensive if we were getting the same food we got decades ago. Do you think about that ever, I mean does anybody think about it that way?
Steve: You know I haven’t thought about it that way. I think that you know you have these big corporations that are driving most of the food production with the middle class, who is the biggest demographic shrinking however. That’s going to be decreased profits and so these businesses, they make up for it, whether they are big evil corporations or not, when a business feels a pinch, it adjusts. That’s what they do and that’s what a lot of times the government doesn’t realize. They just think they can just mandate everything to them. So they decrease the quality, the decrease the quantity even. I was listening to a radio talk show the other day and it was hilarious, the host took a call from a 12-year-old boy who was upset that the potato chips that he buys don’t have as many potato chips. And the radio show host said well, you are tracking this. And this little boy was saying, yeah ever since Obama took office, there are less potato chips in my bag and the host actually had a bag of them brought in and he counted it, you are right. This bag is almost all air. So they are cutting back on the quantity as well, altering the packaging, changing it, cutting costs however they can because this pinch is being felt throughout the whole economy.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, now it’s an amazing difference you know, inflation is being hidden all sorts of different ways and on that food topic here, but it really applies to many commodities, not just food. If you go to Argentina for example. Well Argentina is very well known for the high quality of its beef and you know I have been to Argentina. I have been to two places, [Indiscernible 0:11:53] and Buenos Aires and by the way I looked at real estate in Buenos Aires and I talked about that on a prior episode. But there you don’t have as much of a corporate bureaucracy producing food is like we do in the States. And so you are not, you may pay more for the food, but at least inflation isn’t hidden in it the way it is today. So there is a lot you pay for it in a lot of ways other than just for dollars and that bag of chips is of course deceiving even a 12-year-old can tell, it’s amazing. Let’s move on because we got to cover a couple of things here. And securitized rentals. Now, the whole global ranking system the real estate market the whole system of this investment banks and brokerage houses during the last huge financial crisis from which we are still suffering pretty seriously, these Wall Street antics and crookery. But one of the big parts of it is that when they started securitizing mortgages, it became an issue of hot potato where basically banks could make loans and instead of being that sort of quaint old-fashioned savings and loans and I will just make it hearken back to the movie probably everybody has seen. It’s a wonderful life with Jimmy Stewart, great movie by the way. If you are ever feeling bad about your life was that movie, it will make you understand the value you have in the world and the impact you have, everybody does. And where bankers really one time cared if the borrower had the ability to repay the loans because it mattered because they would actually lose real money, but then when they started securitizing mortgages which means they sold off, they bundled thousands and maybe millions of mortgages in these huge pools and they sold that pool of mortgages to another party and these were traded all around the world at basically lightning speed and nobody really knew what they were buying. Sometimes the same mortgage was represented as being in 30 different polls and it was really only one mortgage, so it was like, it was like fiat money, it was a big Ponzi scheme. And so we obviously had a lot of problems with that and leave it to the folks on the Wall Street, they never run out of ideas, these financial engineers. Now what do they want to do Steve. They want to securitize rental streams.
Steve: That’s right, that’s right. If you live in the western US or the south-eastern US you are really seeing that increasingly in auctions and through different purchasing methods private equity firms and hedge funds are buying houses, I think they are overpaying severely but they are bundling these up into rentals and I got called to a meeting in Orange County a few months ago that his company was saying look, this is what we want to do, we want to accumulate as many rentals as we can and we are going to convert this pool of rentals into a real estate investment trust, that would be securitizing the rentals. And so than they can chop these things up and sell them over and over again and heaven forbid like they did a few years ago sell the same thing five or 10 times, right. I once heard that securitizing mortgages was kind of like watching somebody bet on a horse race and somebody was betting on what that person would do, who is watching, who is betting on that person. And it just got so convoluted.
Jason Hartman: Well you know by the way let me just mention. I did a show with Zach, our provider in St. Robert, Missouri and a lot of you have invested with him and had some very good experiences I have myself. And you know we talked about the concept of derivatives and you know if you look up the word derivatives in Wikipedia for example another wonky thing I love, I use Wikipedia constantly and you look up derivatives I mean it’s like it’s hard to get your head around what it really is. So my incredibly overly simplistic definition that I came up with this it’s the thing about the thing. It’s not the thing, it’s the thing about the thing. And sometimes that the thing about the thing about the thing about the thing about the thing about the thing removed two dozen times. So you know it’s like that horse race betting you were just mentioning, that was a good metaphor for it.
Steve: Yeah and in the scenario, the problem we have is identical to what we had with the mortgage-backed securities. These guys would issue these mortgages and then they would sell them and then they are out. That due diligence didn’t have to be that great impact we saw how behind the curve Moody’s was on rating these things in the first place and this would be almost impossible to rate these things for the agencies I mean imagine the diversity of these renters and these neighborhoods. And then additionally you have got the problem that okay private equity in these guys, they are going to probably flood these things with renters that are not great because once they sell off the asset to the real estate investment trust or the securitized vehicles, that is the article says that’s tantamount to full cash out. And whether those tenants are still there and paying rent after the fact they don’t care. They are getting their cash out.
Jason Hartman: It’s just another way to do sub-prime loans and instead of being a loan, it’s a rental income stream. So they can put low quality renters in properties, people that can afford it just the same people they put into loans. Okay is the same thing. They can sell off the pool of rental income streams to a bunch of suckers on Wall Street and this is why follow my commandment number three, be a direct investor, be in control of what you invest in, whether it be income property, my very favorite or hard money or private lending and then you are in control. You’re not relying on some institutional criminal basically to decide what your financial future is going to be like. So you know it will just be like the sub-prime thing they will just put crummy tenants and people who can’t afford just to cook the books and make it look like they have got a tenant, but who knows if the tenant will actually pay, right.
Steve: Right, right and there is one scenario where this could possibly turn out better than the whole mortgage-backed security mess. In the scenario these rating agency and everybody, they are proceeding with a lot of caution because they have recognized all these variables and they don’t really have a track record, they are being very careful. But what we don’t have here is the government coming in and ensuring or guaranteeing these rental income streams and that’s in many cases what we had in the mortgage backed securities mess. So hopefully I can’t say whether it will happen. I mean Wall Street has a tendency to make these things a lot more convoluted then they need to be. Hopefully when these people risk their capital and these REITs go to purchase these things, they are going to say hey look. There is no safety net for us. There is no bailout, there is no guarantee by Fannie Mae or whatever here, we got to use our head. We have to really take a look at real organic risk here and make an intelligent decision because nobody is going to catch us.
Jason Hartman: Yeah maybe. Now that may be good, it may be bad, that could really go either way those, Steve.
Steve: It’s a big maybe.
Jason Hartman: You know it’s a big maybe. Maybe there will be more careful and responsible because they won’t have the sort of too big to fail thing behind them hopefully or they might just make it worse because there is nobody there to catch them. The taxpayer won’t be there to catch them which you know I applaud that for sure but at least the last time around I mean if you can pick any good point of how poorly the crisis was handed, they created a bunch of fake money to do these bailouts. So I don’t know, without the bailout certainly it would have been initially worse I think overall bailouts made things much worse in the long run. But who in America lately has ever thought about the long run.
Steve: Yeah, yeah, right exactly. The politicians they don’t want to cause any short-term economic pain no matter what the cost. You know elections are two, four and six years cycles and that’s how these decisions are made.
Jason Hartman: You got that right, but — we really wanted to bring this up because we saw an article in Naked Capitalism and that’s nakedcapitalism.com and it talks about the new real estate train wreck coming, securitized rentals. It says no matter how bad things get it turns out they can always get worse. Wall Street is about to foist a new “innovation” on investors that even ratings agencies won’t be able to touch. Geeky, reckless or just plain lazy mortgage originators, servicers and trustees took out what is actually not an unreasonable idea, that mortgage securitization and it turned them into a loss bomb. It’s just unbelievable that we just never stop innovating and every time you hear about Wall Street inability, well hold on to your wallet. That’s you know — that’s what’s definitely was going to happen. But hey Steve I want to talk on a future show about a whole bunch of things but definitely this investor led recovery and the fact that the homeownership rate, I mean this is super exciting. The homeownership rate is the lowest it’s been in almost 50 years, what are phenomenal, phenomenal time for us as investors. I mean wow, could you ask for a better perfect story?
Steve: Yeah and it is definitely an investor driven recovery. Even those price points for properties where it makes the most sense because you can start spending too much in certain markets on jumbo properties where the price you pay starts outrunning the rent you get by far. There is a sweet spot there and those properties are being picked up like crazy, but many of them by these guys that we were just talking about and there are driving massive, massive amounts of sales. The part of it that gives me some hesitancy though is much of this is in what I call the rubber band areas where they have high volatility. And you know you wonder if it’s more of what we were just talking about earlier to though with so much of this going back and forth you know what are these homes really worth? I don’t think we know yet, but we do know that from a cash flow perspective and rental demand they make a lot of sense today more so than they have in many, many years.
Jason Hartman: Oh yeah and the demographics and all of the factors lining up to create this perfect storm are phenomenal and that’s why you know smart investors are coming out and they are buying properties like crazy. It just makes sense. But hey Steve thanks for joining me. We got to run and we will talk about some of that stuff next time, but everybody stay tuned we will have Geraldine talking about some thoughts on the investment market here. We will be back with that in just a moment.
Introduction: Jason provides an extremely unique service. Deal evaluator, are you interested in a property outside of our network, need a second opinion, no problem. Let our experts evaluate the deal. Find out more about it at jasonhartman.com.
Jason Hartman: Hey it’s my pleasure to welcome a great lady, a real estate investor and entrepreneur to the show and this is Geraldine Berry. She heads up a big real estate investor group in the Silicon Valley area and she is got a great Expo coming up and I am speaking at the Expo. So I just wanted to get take on the market from Geraldine, how are you Geraldine.
Geraldine: I’m great. Thank you for having me.
Jason Hartman: Good, good. Now you fall into another category that I did not mention introducing you and that is you have such an excellent accent, I just love it.
Geraldine: Thank you.
Jason Hartman: You have a lot of wealthy tech entrepreneurs up in your area obviously and Silicon Valley San Jose area and they are coming out and they are buying a lot of real estate now, aren’t they?
Geraldine: Yes they are and I think when you live in an area like the Silicon Valley and we have been in operation, this is our 11 year now, what you decipher is that things go up and down and so people are beginning to see the reality is that real estate is at an all-time low in pricing and it’s the great opportunity and so they are beginning to participate at a high-level.
Jason Hartman: Yeah it really is you know foreign investors are gobbling up American real estate. They just can’t get enough of it, they make up almost 10% of our market in the last year. It’s just amazing how they are rushing into to buy income properties here, but oddly not all Americans are getting that message. You know may be when you live in the environment, you don’t always really see it. Many do, but some still don’t. With the tech entrepreneurs up in Silicon Valley, your own local market there is really moving, isn’t it?
Geraldine: It is and you can see some companies like Facebook despite people talking about the debacle with the –
Jason Hartman: The IPO.
Geraldine: Yes exactly, but it’s been a great boom to our area. Google and Apple, they are all located right here in our backyard. So inventory is just extraordinarily low levels. So there is very little inventory. So what that means is that there is multiple bids on houses all the time here and now. And rents are escalating pretty rapidly and so that means jobs are coming back and you know the market is heating up and I don’t think we will ever have a big slot of inventory in the Silicon Valley, Bay Area market, it’s just not — I don’t believe the banks would ever let that happen.
Jason Hartman: Well you know I don’t know if it really could happen, I mean even if your prices went down there, they are so high already it’s unbelievable. What do you get up there? You better little two bedroom one bath house for 900,000, right?
Geraldine: I know and actually just you know in terms of my story in 2005, we had heard from speakers coming to our organization about the market and the financial crisis that was on the horizon, so we exited the market and particularly outlying areas like Stockton and how they would be impacted and I would heavily invested in there and so we sold and then I sold my primary residence and I rented for several years here and then I bought back a year and a half ago which like in retrospect was the perfect time, Jason, but that was kind of accidental, but we were keeping an eye on it and I feel that you don’t have to get in at the very bosom or out at the very top. There is no need to be greedy. If you can get in and around that area you are doing just fine.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, you know Geraldine, I always, I always found that it was a good philosophy in business always leave a little bit of money on the table for the next guy because when you don’t, things just generally don’t work out too well.
Geraldine: Exactly, exactly and I think that you know we want other people, we want to get this thing going and I think if you are too greedy, it does come back to bite you and we even had people who had commercial buildings who wouldn’t negotiate with that client when they got into a blind when the economy turned here. And then they ended up having an empty building and losing the building. So there are times to really kind of negotiate and help people and make things mutually beneficial. And I think when you do that and you come from a good place, things really do work out.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, well I couldn’t more, just it reminds me the late great Stephen Covey who passed away recently, author of so many great books including Seven Habits Of Highly Effective People. You know one of his things was, it’s either win-win or no deal because it’s not win-win, people find a way to make the deal fall apart. That’s the philosophy you just have to live by, so. And I know you come from a good place there because you know you have just got a very successful organization and you are really quite an entrepreneur which I want to talk about in a moment, but give us your outlook on the national real estate market and investor sentiment. You talk to a lot of investors, you have got a huge group. What are they saying?
Geraldine: Well I talk to a lot of people and people are interested now in participation because they see the writing on the wall. There is no inventory locally or very little and there is a lot of competition. You know you’re having hedge funds come into our markets and they are buying for the long-term hold and so they are not concerned with the margin that they get on these houses. So they are beating out local investors. So that’s a interesting tidbit I think but we just wonder long-term how that will play out if these big hedge fund managers that have never been involved in real estate to this degree before, buying multiple houses.
Geraldine: Geraldine, I’m so glad you brought that up because you know you want my prediction on that. I think yours is probably the same, but of course we all remember the famous Warren Buffett quote from a few months ago where he said, I would buy a couple of million houses if I could figure out how to manage them, right. And you know what I always say over investors, they’re probably sick of me, saying this. I say that, the good and the bad of the income property business is that it is a highly fragmented market and as such you are in a place where you need to as an individual or a small investor and well small investors are listening to this, we are not hedge funds, embrace the fragmentation. It’s very frustrating in a way because not every property manager you deal with does things the same way, you can’t commoditize this business very easily and that’s what keeps the big institutional investors out. So my prediction on all these hedge funds and institutional people coming into, buy up income properties in droves is that, they will try it. They will be in this market for a couple of years and they will slowly start to exit later as the experience the frustration of that fragmentation which leaves that opportunity for you and I, doesn’t it.
Geraldine: Exactly and what we like to talk about frequently as Jerry said, real estate investing is a business. You have got to look at it, you have got to look at the underlying numbers, does this make sense. Who have I in that area that can work that piece for me and I see this as an investor, both in California and out of state. If you know a market you can quickly ascertain if that property makes sense to you and you can make a decision. Hedge funds can’t move that quickly. They have the money, but can they make an educated decision and then do they have the people in place to take care of the business on a day-to-day basis, which can be a grueling training, which is why you are seeing a lot of people now saying hey, I might possibly invest. I might be that — I might be a first trustee investor in a house as opposed to owning the house, but the money is secure. So there is different based to approach this, but in Silicon Valley, I think a lot of the professionals that I talk to and that I interact with and a lot of people that attend our organization or high-level professionals in the Valley. So that’s how we get an opportunity to really kind of see both sides of the coin, but what they are seeing is you know that companies are not that loyal. So create a portfolio, small any size in real estate may be simple as acquiring a house a year for the next five years, is a great strategy and a great way to go, because that way you can secure your future and your retirement. So you can put it on a 15 year loan, 30 year loan, whatever works with your time horizon, get it paid off and then you will have these rents coming in to you at retirement time.
Jason Hartman: That is the perfect plan B. You know this is your social security folks. It is the security, the only real security in the world is the activity of planning and acting to create your own security, not depending on anybody else. Wall Street, the government, it doesn’t work. You know we have got to create our own security.
Geraldine: We have to and we have to band together with the people that are on the same page with us and associate with people who are like-minded in that regard. So we can execute and learn from one another. And that’s what I do best is I get people together who are really pushing their lives forward. You know I am up at 5:15 every morning, Jason. I’m not loitering around in bed, waiting for 8 o’clock to get up. I have a lot of work done by 8 am. That’s because I have a vision for my life and I am executing on that vision everyday.
Jason Hartman: Well you know you are quite an entrepreneur. I mean you have — you have been working since you were 10 years old. I shared that with you, I started very young too. You know I was always looking for ways to make money, whether it was selling patches to other kids school, making money and then having you know multiple paper routes and working in mom’s businesses and then you know starting my own business. So it’s a great history, when you, just Geraldine I mean look at, entrepreneurs make something out of nothing. Where there was a vacuum before, the entrepreneur goes in and creates something that wasn’t there, that did not exist out of a bunch of random parts and desperate parts. And as real estate investors, that’s what we are saying everybody should do. The real estate entrepreneur. We have an executive with one of the major tech firms in Silicon Valley, I won’t mention the name, but this individual is – their plan and they are executing on it pretty quick is to purchase about 80 properties through our network. And then come to what they call financial independence day, where they leave their company and just have their real estate and their income properties support the same high, high lifestyle that they had with that big technology company in Silicon Valley. So you know it really is a great thing.
Geraldine: Jason, in fact I have some entrepreneurs, some professionals from the Valley that have done just that. They have left their job and now there are people I interview. You know when they talk about how they did it, why they did it, the security that they had in their job and how they waited till it was the right time. We don’t suggest that you find out about real estate as a potential way to make a lot of money because it’s not that easy. Don’t give up your job. Take your time, form a strategy, form a plan, begin to execute. There is a lot of hours in the day even if you work, you can do this on the side.
Jason Hartman: Yeah, it really comes with, what you are talking about of the very modest plan of maybe buying one income property per year for five years or you know maybe you are buying, one per month for five years you know and then you have got 60 properties or five. Whatever that number is, that’s all individual for everybody listening. But it reminds me of Harvey Mackay’s book. He’s got these great book titles and I had him on the show several episodes ago, but one of his books is called Dig Your Well Before You Are Thirsty. And isn’t that a great way to look at real estate investing.
Geraldine: It sure is, it sure is and in terms of just planning and strategy, I mean I grew up in a family in the south of Ireland, I was one of eight kids. I’m not saying that I worked since I was 10. I did I was made to contribute to the household in terms of working and we had, my mom had an antique store that I had to take care of and she left me completely responsible for that sometimes that, 10,11,12 years of age.
Jason Hartman: That’s great training.
Geraldine: It was great training and you know, then I came to America and I had probably $500 in my pocket and you know the American Dream is alive and well. That’s all I want to say. Even in an economy that we had a few major things go wrong in terms of our economy and we have things we need to fix, but America is still the place I want to be. Because there’s so many things that you can do to be successful here.
Jason Hartman: What year did you come here from Ireland?
Geraldine: In 87.
Jason Hartman: So in 87, yeah. That just gives the listeners some perspective on that and you know that is so true I mean many people talk and write about now the decline of America and I agree that America is declining in many ways. So you are not going to hear some Pollyanna view. But the question is Geraldine, compared to what, compared to where. I mean where is it better than in America even now. You know I have got a friend who lives in China. I talk about frequently on the show and he loves to bash America and say China is better. And I’m like, are you kidding me. Compared to what?
Geraldine: With their one child policy? I interviewed an economist about China and you know the fact that there is a whole generation of men that have no women for them, that is going to be a big issue for the Chinese. Because of the one child policy, just that single thing.
Jason Hartman: Within 20 years, China has a huge unsolvable demographic problem, in two decades. They are going to hit the demographic wall just like Japan did and Japan, you know they used to call it the lost decade. Now Japan is almost at two lost decades in their economy. So these countries, if they don’t have some degree of immigration hopefully it’s legal, that’s another subject. And if they don’t have a birth rate those countries die, they wither away. Look at Europe, look at Japan and China, it’s right around the corner for them. And you cannot change demographics or destiny. America is still a vibrant, colorful, flavorful place where people still come and still put their money.
Geraldine: Exactly and especially if you live in an area that you know, you live in Phoenix I mean there is a hub of activity going on there. Inventory is slow their now and the economy is beginning to really thrive again. And I think you know we have to look at that. I was in London, I was speaking at the company in June and the British, my perspective from that is that, there was a lot of finger pointing about the banks and it was still going on and on. That’s not constructive. How are we going to get past this? That’s what I would be looking at and then I go back to Ireland and the entrepreneurial spirit is really coming alive there in terms of what do we do, people are pushing through these and the Irish have more debt per capita than you know most of the countries in Europe because they secured the dozens of banks. So there is — there is a lot of issues that people have and we have our own here in America, but we certainly are a big country and we are a force to be contended with. And we will thrive, I do believe.
Jason Hartman: Geraldine, that’s a great message for investors and I couldn’t agree more. You just got to position yourself right. Many, many people will be devastated in the coming years because they didn’t position themselves right for the inflation that many including myself think is coming and the changes that are going to happen. I mean the game has changed. All we’ve got to do is adopt the strategy that works for the current environment and we will all prosper because of it. Now you have got an Expo coming up. I am one of your speakers at the Expo. Tell the listeners a little bit about it if you would.
Geraldine: Well [Indiscernible 0:39:24] is known for its content rich meetings and events. You do not do sales purchase and so this event we have more than a dozen workshops speakers that are at the top of their game. We will have a panel from the financial field and these are all heavy hitters in the banking industry. They are going to share with us what they see as opportunities and how we can participate and Jason you’re presenting on the 10 Commandments of investing and there are rules for investing and you’re going to share those with our attendees. We have somebody talking about apartments, we have people talking about property management, we have Bruce Norris who is a California market trending expert, but his views are applicable wherever you are. He’s been somebody who’s been a friend of the [Indiscernible 0:40:14] for probably 8 to 10 years and so we are looking forward to a very full program in terms of content and then we will have the Expo floor and there will be opportunities to explore what’s available in terms of buying real estate and so we are very excited about this at the Convention Centre in Santa Clara and its registrations –
Jason Hartman: Dates and prices, yeah.
Geraldine: Okay the registration is exposiliconvalley.com, realestateexposiliconvalley.com and its $79. It’s all day Saturday, September 8th.
Jason Hartman: Fantastic. Well Geraldine, thank you so much for joining us today. And I am looking forward to contributing to your Expo and helping you make it a big success.
Geraldine: Thank you very much indeed, Jason.
(Top image: Cory M. Grenier)
The Jason Hartman Team
Transcribed by: Renee’
