I live in San Francisco, where I can’t go a day without hearing how unaffordable it is to live here. Let me share three immediate solutions to a housing affordability crisis.

The media loves to excoriate the tech companies for pricing out poorer residents who’ve been here for decades. Ironically, the majority of techies themselves can’t afford to rent a $3,500 one bedroom apartment or buy a $1.7M median property by age 30 because they are relatively underpaid!

It is VERY bad form to buy a property with long term tenants, boot them out through an Ellis Act eviction, remodel, and then flip the property for a profit. It’s also terrible to buy a property with the intention of replacing long term tenants with yourself. Folks, please buy a place that does not displace existing tenants! It’s cruel to make people move out of homes when they’ve lived there for decades. There are plenty of other properties sitting underutilized or vacant to choose from.

Perhaps you also live in one of the many crowded cities in the world where rent and real estate prices have made living unbearably expensive. Your teachers, artists, writers/bloggers, musicians, and public servants are getting pushed out. Traffic has become unbearable. And your neighborhood is getting homogenized, much like it is at work. Let me offer three immediate solutions to the housing affordability crisis.

Life isn’t fair, but the savvy learn how to take advantage of unfair situations. For example, I came up with a master plan to buy another property due to IPO delays.

A lot of things in life are out of our control. So it’s important to turn lemons into lemonade. Stock market corrections remind us how meaningless money is if not enjoyed. We could constantly worry about the stock market and feel miserable about how much money we’re losing. Or we can invest smarter, focus on the long game, and make better use of our money.

I’ve most of my investable assets in various index fund ETFs, and six figures invested in actively managed portfolios to hunt for home runs. So far, I’ve only found one home run in Netflix over the past several years. And ironically, the joy I get spending $10 a month for Netflix’s streaming service FAR OUTWEIGHS the joy I’m feeling from making tens of thousands of dollars in Netflix returns!

In this post I wrote in 2018, I reflect and share how I planned on taking advantage of an unfair situation to potentially improve my financial well-being. Afterward, I’d like everybody to think about what type of messed up situations are happening in your area that can be exploited as well! 

Are you thinking of buying a vacation property to live a better life? I’ve owned a vacation property since 2007 and let me say I should have just rented instead. This post will discuss all the reasons why you should not buy a vacation property.

I understand why people want to own a vacation property. The secret to never feeling homesick while on vacation is to simply buy a property in each of your favorite vacation destinations. So clever right?

Well, that was what I thought until I blew my finances up buying a Lake Tahoe condo a couple years before the financial meltdown in 2008 – 2010. At one point, the property was down about 50%. Until this day, the vacation property’s value has not fully recovered.

Ever since I was a kid, I’ve been a dreamer. Most dreams never came true, but it didn’t stop me from fantasizing what could be. After I discovered San Francisco in 1995 when I went with a childhood friend to visit UC Berkeley, I knew I had to go West at some point. Life felt so much better than in Virginia.

Soon after relocating from New York to San Francisco in 2001, I discovered Lake Tahoe and told myself, if I could spend six months in San Francisco, two months back home in Honolulu, two months in Lake Tahoe, and two months traveling internationally, how sweet that would be!