From hliu at mindspring.com Thu May 27 14:11:45 1999
My lack of "knowledge of both leverage and the details of
American financing" has put me among the top percentage of the
high net worth individuals in America. Risk management and
investment is what I do for a living. I make decisions daily
involving over US$1 billion of investments globally (which
makes me small time among the big guys); and have been doing it
for over 10 years, and I started out in real estate.
Well, don't give up that day job just yet to advise Greg on which mortgage to get :)
The point is: keeping a long term mortgage on one's residence,
a non income producing asset, is the dumbest "investment"
choice to make voluntarily.
Except when it pays off? The 5 year ROI on my condo is about 32% annualized, just about beating most of the mutual funds out there who never touch real estate. Where do you get these kinds of proclaimations?
Here's the best free advice you'll get today: when someone says "never" or "dumbest" ... bet against him!
Hocking one's house to speculate in Amazon.com is not
invvesting - it is gambling.
Money is fungible last I checked, so if you have a mortgage at all and you buy Amazon.com instead of just taking all available cash and stuffing it into your single real estate holding, you're gambling?
And oh geeze, didn't we already have the argument (that I won) about this fiction called "investing" ...? Investing doesn't exist. Maybe you missed this, Mr. Billion Bucks, but there are only two kinds of market participants: specs and hedgers. Get over it.
/jordan