Ian Royle

Building our house

admin — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 06:11:37 +0000

I’m a little less than a month into building our house. On the 25th of August will be our foundation inspection. A month to the day that I started. I broke ground with on the foundation on the 25th of July. Today, I was finishing up the final touches. I installed the sump pit, a 24 inch diameter 30 inch deep liner, undermined the footing to install the 4 inch PVC for the sump. Would have been more correct to have installed before I poured concrete but mistakes happen the first time you try. So I’ll be packing hydrolic cement in around the pipe to secure it. As well finished installing the weeping tile on the undisturbed clay around the footing. I’m most happy about how the foundation turned out. I put a lot of extra time into doing my footing before stacking my ICF’s and that made all the difference, the extra effort in the early stages made it so much easier to install the ICF’s. They were a breeze. Dampproofing with the soprema was also very easy and completed yesterday. Tomorrow I will get the 3/4 inch washed rock on top of the weeping tile with the bobcat and tie in my T to the sump pit, and tighten down the last few bolts on the sill plates.

Tracy and Dexter Are At Grampa and Grammas

admin — Mon, 23 Mar 2009 23:08:21 +0000

I am going to miss my little man and his mom for a couple days. They have headed out to grampa Larry and gramma Nicoles place for a few days. Gramma is going to watch Dexter while Tracy does the taxes. So many taxes to do. At least business year end is done. Well, things are looking up. Lots of calls on the rental properties. Lots of interest in the places which means they are priced right and maybe a little low. I’d rather be a little low on the rents and full though than vacant for even a month. Tracy and I don’t always agree on that one but the way I see it if you have a place that you could rent next month for twelve-hundred but you could rent it this month for eleven well what is the difference. One month vacant is a lot of money. Tracy has a point that the overall monthly cashflow of the properties has to be higher to qualify for more loans but right now I’m not interested in adding to our portfolio. I sorta don’t like this prison we have built for ourselves. Right now I’m just going to do things the hard way and work until I get some of this burden off of me. Things are good though. Right now we are saving, a little over three thousand a month. Monthly budgets are so awesome. I wished we’d done this years ago. Tracy and I buy groceries once a month, track all expenditures using our air miles mastercard and have gotten a really great handle on our debt/income ratio. I recommend this to everyone. Anyway, I’m tired and working nights tonight so have a good sleep all, Miss you Dex and Tracy.

Your loving Husband and Dad Ian. Can’t wait to see you both Wednsday. Have fun at baby salsa. And I’ll write again tomorrow.

Miraculous Healing!

admin — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 18:48:50 +0000

It has been a while since I began this experiment and it is time to resume it. But with a new theme. This is just going to be my random thoughts. Maybe about what I like maybe what I don’t. So I will recap these months away over the next few days. The family and I went on a cruise this past February. We went to Florida and took a cruise with Norwegian Cruise Lines on the Norwegian Sky. The trip to Florida went pretty well. Our flights lined up perfectly and we didn’t get lost anywhere. The car we rented was a Toyota Sienna and was awesome. When I can, I would like to buy one for my family. We went to the Keys where my wife and I had honeymooned six years ago and retraced some of our steps. The Hungry Pelican is now just The Pelican and has added a whole bunch of units so some of it’s old charm is gone. No more polopas to lounge in. But the really big thing was we attended a Spanish service at the church my wife and I attended on our honeymoon. The church is called The Lighthouse on the Rock in Key Largo. We don’t speak Spanish but the people invited us to stay for the St. Valentines service and a special sermon by Pastor Enrique Alfonso. They offered to translate the service and so we decided to stay. At eh end of the sermon Pastor Enrique invited anyone who needed prayer to come forward. My mother-in-law, Marty Misner went up. Marty suffered from fibromialgia and was in constant pain all the time. Constant and debilitating the pain was always present. It sapped her of her strength and energy and sucked the joy out of much of life. So she went forward and the congregation prayed. She began to shake. I usually am unmoved by these things. Often people “perform” during these things. But my mother-in-law, is the opposite of a performer. She isn’t even that good at social conventions let alone performing as to a script where the preacher prays and the sinner shakes, quakes and falls down as happens at many of the travelling “Christian” circuses. The ones that travel about the country, renting space from credulous congregations, taking out radio adverts, and then having lines of people prayed on. If they don’t play according to scrip, then they WILL shove you down. No this was different, it was a small church of believers. Not travellers, moving on when no one gives them money anymore. This was their home. and this was their reputation. My mother in law WAS being touched by God, moving among these believers. She said afterward she felt a powerful tingling in her body, she felt power coming in. And she has been better since. She had abundant energy on the cruise and since the prayer has went off her multitude of medications she took daily to control the pain. She has been pain free since and we praise God and the power of Jesus Christ for this. May he continue to bless the congregation in Key Largo and the people of Florida. Amen

Going Bankrupt

admin — Fri, 06 Feb 2009 01:30:30 +0000

Not that I want to…but it could very well happen. Very little money is coming into Alberta anymore, and the construction industry is winding down. Few jobs will be left for the workers here anymore, and those that are left will likely be filled by the cheaper foreign workers who are here now. Little hope for the indigineous population who must pay the mortgages and bills we recieve. That means I will likely be out of a job soon. Very soon. Half a year soon at best. I haven’t figured out what I will do yet. I’m not even sure I care. Do I wait tables? Sell coffee? Go back to school? Head to Afghanistan on a Class C? Not sure yet. I know that this fiasco I am in though is my own fault. Too often I let other people make decisions for me. I like to say I am the accidental carpenter. I wanted to start a bicycle company after returning from my time in Taiwan. Instead my dad found me a job busting my hump in the sun pouring concrete for ten bucks an hour instead of pursuing my dream of owning my own business. I need to be definate about what I want. I need to know who I am. I finished Napoleon Hills book Think and Grow Rich and can see all the mistakes I made. Right now the best thing I took from the book is that life offers nothing worth the price of worry. So I will not worry. Six years ago I had nothing. If everything goes wrong, well I’ll still have nothing. I’m only really worried about providing for my son and my wife. I don’t like these days. I don’t like when you sleep to escape and wake up to the nightmare.

My response to all the happy bust bloggers out there

admin — Sat, 20 Dec 2008 13:51:40 +0000

Heh, heh,heh, this is the best blog in the world. Buncha smug, pretentious, self-righteous, whiners all swallowing their own bathwater. I’ve read your drivel for years, busy bashing everyone on the RE wagon, cause you missed it. Then busy cheering as the wagon burned. All deluded naked little emperors, you chalked up your not being part of the great real estate crash as a result of your own superior intellect and not the fact that you were stupid and oblivious and unprepared when RE started up and once it got going you just couldn’t catch up. And then huffing and puffing you crested a hill to see it all going down in flames and cheered cause like a bunch of vultures you figured you were about to feast on the carcasses of “investors” and scoop up their houses dimes on the dollar and then you’d be the smart ones! Oooops, what caused the fire on the RE bandwagon? Same thing that’s causing the world to burn now. I heard people on this blog saying they were going to buy when the prices went down! And now that the prices are down, the jobs are gone…can’t qualify for NINJA mortgages now, those are extinct. Oh sure there are a few unionized government workers out there that will ride this out, but that ain’t exactly a white knight, I’ll talk about them a little later. Why would they buy an extra house to rent when there are no tenants cause nobody’s got any jobs to offer them. Which pretty much precludes YOU guys as well from buying them to rent or own when the banks won’t lend money on “SHOEBOXES” anymore. Safe as bricks, ha ha ha. Well maybe you can take some of your RRSP’s and buy a worthless house now! How many of you losers are looking at destroyed RRSPs and stock market portfolios now. Probably not many, most of you are hand to mouth anyway…so pick up the RE that is so devalued now…doesn’t matter anyway, who wants a house in Alberta, there won’t be any jobs anyway to pay the taxes at any price! Maybe you can move to Ontario where you can build cars no one wants and no one can afford! Maybe the government will have a make work project where they pay people to build cars and then transport them to another facility where they crush them and recycle the parts and then ship the materials for reprocessing in an endless cycle. Or maybe you can go to BC and be ushers at the Olympics, shuffling small crowds about since no one will be able to afford to come and stay in BC being as the whole world is becoming jobless. Or maybe you could move to NL those near-sighted retards seem to be crowing about their wonderful future as they see their first surplus ever, while they choose to ignore the looming reality of ten dollar barrels of oil. And that precludes any reality where that retard Dion’s Green Shaft could ever become fruitful. As the economy dries up so too do the streams of money that propped up the environmental pundits. Those swindlers like Suzuki and Gore are gone now too. Haven’t heard anything from either one now for months maybe even a year. Can’t build the future of a green world without investing money in tech and right now there isn’t any money. So bye bye green economy. You all don’t seem so smug and cheerful anymore. Whats the matter? Little belt tightening this Christmas? Workplace insecurities, like maybe your job might be next now that oil prices have plummeted below Alberta shut in prices. Your post are filled with a feeling that’s palpable. It’s fear, as you all realize that you aren’t insulated or smart. That the loss of those upgraders projects in Alberta and falling oil prices is just as connected to the demise of the big three as the RE bubble. That you, just as much as anyone else is going to be affected. Your own bosses are going to be out of business because the tool push crews that used to drill your Alberta oil wells and dig up your oil sands have no money to buy your services and products. And the people building cars in Ontario are going to be out of work, defaulting on loans, not driving anymore, not buying anything but groceries and water and heat if they can. And government deficits of the eighties lead to debts that couldn’t be paid by the nineties as private businesses mostly ceased to exist. With no one to tax anymore even the crudest government hacks realized that the swelling bureaucracy couldn’t last by eating itself. I’m too young to know what government over-spending was called in the eighties but I think it was deficit, we use the word stimulus now, but that will be followed by a new buzzword in the future that will capture the meaning of the extensive loss of government jobs to come as the weight of the mounting debt, deficit, I mean stimulus begins to reap results similar to the late eighties and nineties. In the decade of grunge it was called downsizing, and I knew a lot of downsized government employees. Hell my dad was one. So to those of you young enough to recover from this and see the next big bust, the RE boom was just the beginning, your job is next, have a little humility the next time you think about posting your smug comments on a blog, to those of you in a government career read Mike (authentic) December 19, 2008 9:08 AM and hear the clear word “downsizing” as you remember or research the nineties. And to those of you who are about to retire after having complained and cheering the RE boom and bust…too bad for you. Life goes on.

The Sky Is Not Falling

admin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 02:17:59 +0000

A lot of people have recently lost heavily in the stock market and real estate market. The nice part ablut it is…it isn’t real money. The really important thing is your month to month income. If monthly your income stays the same you can maintain the lifesyle you are in. One problem I see with investing in the black box of mutual fund sales is that most people have no idea how much they would need to “earn” from their investments to maintain the lifestyle they want. Funds sales people bandy about terms like rule of seventy two and come up with obscure numbers like you would need six-hundred thousand to retire. Problem is, these numbers don’t account for unknowns like how high will rising taxes be when you retire, how much will staples cost, what will energy costs for heating be, what will inflation rates really be, will new technology alter the need. The truth is, no one knows how much you will need to retire because:

A: No one know what future costs will be.

B: No one knows how much money you will have in your mutual fund account after having several hundred or thousand people pool their money for a fund to mutually benefit the money manager.

C: No one know what kind of annuity you will receive once you convert your RRSP to a RIF.

D: No one knows what taxes will be taken from you by the government.

My advice. Start a budget now, start investing in things that give you monthly income today and build that. Don’t go in for pie in the sky money managers and fund sales people pitches…ask them for details on their retirement and see if it doen’t include YOUR money.

Currency swept up in commodities crash

admin — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 02:23:06 +0000

Currency swept up in commodities crash

This is a story all full of bad news. This is a story with no good news at all. Except for my wife and me and our son. David Wolfe comments, “That means belts are going to have to be tightened - governments, companies, consumers. The whole whack.” Well for us there is no more belt tightening to do. Our budget is worked out and I just changed jobs resulting in a rise of after-tax income of nin-hundred dollars. Hopefully, through these times I will keep working with a two-thousand nine-hundered dollar surplus and we will be able to take advantage of the discounts of this time.

.25 % Rate cut is a good thing

admin — Wed, 22 Oct 2008 02:00:16 +0000

These are peculiar times. The TSX fall to 2004 levels because oil fell to 2006-07 levels. Wierd huh. The rate cut is half of what analysts expected and stocks fall. Half the economic stimulus expected translates into a reversal of the rally of the last two days. So had analysts gotten the half point they expected stocks would have gone up? Really this is a really dumb thing to involve oneself. Trying to predict which stocks are going up and which are going down. And it’s funny too that I have never met a speculator in the stock market. They all day trade, but they are all long term. It’s never them that need a bailout, always someone else. So why is a .25% cut in the overnight lending rate better than a 0.5% cut? Because the analysts were wrong and the result was a deflationary effect on stocks. It pushed them down a little further and prevented buyers from becoming exhuberant for the day on a nothing announcement and prevented the derivative markets short sellers taking advantage. Having more sellers show up in the market place means more people are collecting cash to pay off debt (hopefully) and a little bit more of the cost of the past many years is paid back. By the way, I think short selling should be illegal myself. Where else in society can you “borrow” someones property without asking, sell it and then replace it before they know it is gone and not be charged with theft. I have heard that there is a way to prevent this but I don’t know how yet. Even plus or minus less than one hundred.

Wealth Is a Long Term Strategy

admin — Tue, 21 Oct 2008 00:26:03 +0000

It was peculiar at work last night. I have taken a job working night-shift in construction. I prefer nights, no public, no tourists-the people who come and tour the facility they are building, paying to have built, or bureaucrats when it’s a government job, and no bosses for the most part. The job is great and I am glad for it, I’m sure it will get me and my family through this recession. But it was peculiar because of who I am working with. The others, with the exception of the bosses are a curious bunch of odd-balls. In particular a short, old little Frenchman from northern Quebec who told me in a single sentence, “I can build things for so cheap, so much cheaper than anyone else, but I need the money to do it.” And, “If I win the lottory then I will not tell you and I will move to an island to live.” It was the certainty in his voice that winning the lottery was something that wasn’t a distant possiblity but something as real as recieving a demand for payment in the mail from the utility companies. He was a man without a plan, well other than lottery tickets to a one off payday and we all know money comes easy it goes fast. But long term wealth, the type I believe is attainable needs to be approached with the idea of your assets providing enough money periodically to provide funds necessary for your lifestyle in the same period. With that in mind I want to talk about my “One House a Year Strategy for 25 Years”. The idea is that if you buy one house a year for twenty-five years and then sell those houses off for the next 25 years you will be completely fine. Provided the following;

The mortgages are 25 years long.

No further leveraging is required.

The costs are covered, mostly, by the rents.

Then sold at almost any cost the house is a gain.

I’ll talk more about it later.

Having a Plan Makes All the Difference

admin — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 01:28:50 +0000

These recessionary times we are experiencing are unlikely to have a tremendous effect on the younger generations. Those being gen x and below. Since we aren’t planning to retire in the next few years what we have is a great opportunity for bargain hunting. By picking up the stocks and investments that have been discarded from portfolios to pay for losses incured in high risk mortgage investments the preperation is made to be able to cover the debt incurred to own them free and clear quickly, since in most cases now these assets are changing hands far below their value. The more quickly an asset is free and clear the sooner it begins to take care of it’s owner. Even the older generations who are not heavily leveraged should be digging around amongs the offerings in this world wide stock market rummage sale. These times don’t last forever and they don’t last long. And unlike a labour day sale where yesterday’s style choices are blown out to make room for the next fad, good assets like stocks and real estate never go out of style. I hope that you recognise this is not a catastrophe. It is the creative destruction that takes place before you rebuild. Take hope, take control of your budget, find a place to make changes to save money, open up an online trading account and start hunting for good strong companies and buy them. It’s a simple plan. But it is a plan. Most people let events happen to them and without having an idea of what they will do, they haven’t got a chance to make alterations that will take them to a goal. Having any plan means that you have an idea where you are going and how to get there. That also means that you are able to take action when things happen to thwart your plan…since you actually have a plan to be thwarted. But without a plan, this time of opportunity will pass you by.