- The days where you can get hard money on decent terms if you had good credit and a stable job history.
- Any hopes to get hard money on ridiculous high rates and fees if you had bad credit.
- Joys of sitting on the Internet and applying, applying and applying and getting, the 50 business credit cards and unsecured credit lines as long you had a pulse, an LLC and a FICO over 680.
- All activity on the Internet from California investors discussing the gold mine of East Side Detroit foreclosures and how it was going to make them millionaires in the next 12 months.
- Mainstream magazine covers from Fortune, Forbes, Money and Smart Money talking about the need of adding real estate (read: condos in FL, NV, AZ) to your portfolio).
- Buyers with bad credit on the edge who cannot get qualified anymore even with decent jobs.
- Buyers who cannot document their income. Self employed plumbers, waitresses and strippers just dropped out of the buyer's pool overnight.
- The idea that worked for 50 years in Michigan - that as long as you worked for a company that makes cars - you have job security for life since as long as there are people, they will need cars.
- The stability of owning an engineering degree in Michigan and the benefits, salary and job security that came with it.
- The idea that you can own a retail business of any kind near a automobile manufacturing plant and do O.K. for the rest of your life. This does breaks my heart, because they are collateral damage in a fight they did not started.
I can fill another ten pages with this.
Change, whether you like it or not, happens.
To us (getting old is a drag); to our personal relationships (wife does not think as highly of me as she used to 10 years ago); families (kids grow up); jobs (they used to be stable back in the days) and it also applies to things you know and do in your business and real estate investing in Michigan.
To say most jobs are worth half of what they were 15 years ago is not an exaggeration. Scary part is to sit and think what your job is going to be worth 15 years from today?
So here is one big question for you: What skills, things, stuff, strategies, knowledge, brain waves you currently own and comfortable with right now that are going to be lost in the fire in the next 12 months?
Even a bigger and more uncomfortable question: what are you going to do about it? What it the plan, resources, people you are lining up as we race toward the end of 2009 who and what are going to replace the things and skills that will be lost in the fire?
Where is the big opportunity that you might be missing out?
