• investing with anxiety
    Real Estate

    Investing with Anxiety

    I have lived with anxiety for much of my life. As a teenager, I had crippling social anxiety. I was bullied as a child and I felt that any social interaction could lead to my being victimized again. When you’re bullied at seemingly random times and after random actions, you start to look for patterns. When you don’t find a pattern, you develop the anxiety that at any given point, something terrible will happen to you. That’s a scary way to live your life and a very unpleasant one. It leads to avoidance and fear of many situations which are involved in having a simple quality of life. My social…

  • Finances

    “Did you just spend $100,000 on an education to get a $40,000 a year job?”

    So this meme/ad is currently making the rounds. The idea is that a college education is a terrible investment. That we’ll justify spending absurd amounts of money on college even if we know that the promised land of high-paying entry-level jobs is gone. The Value of an Education The ad revolves around a simple assumption. We should be able to measure the value of an education, specifically a college education by measuring what we put into it financially and then measuring what we pulled out of it financially. It should add up in dollars and cents. Not just that. We should be able to measure dollars to dollars, inputs versus starting…

  • Real Estate

    Selling Our Condo

    We buy and sell lots of properties. We do so much volume selling our own properties that as a real estate agent, I often rank in the top 10% of agents worldwide (that says more about the industry than it does about me). And that’s without representing anyone but our own family! Most of these home sales are unemotional on our part. We do the work. We get paid and we pay our taxes. We move on to the next project. Today, we closed up on a different type of transaction. As part of our plan to hit the road, we sold our primary residence…a condo in Northern Virginia. The…

  • Destinations

    Presley’s Outing

    Presley’s Outing has been our favorite RV Park that we have stayed as so far. From the moment you call Mr. Presley to make your reservation, you know you are coming somewhere special. The property is a family legacy and it is run as such. We were guided into our site and Mr. Presley even disconnected and moved our Tow Dolly for us. Our site was beautiful with full views of the beach and river. He had kayaks available for use and he didn’t mind that our dog “Bart” ran amok. This was the first place where we began to understand “Southern Hospitality.” Within minutes of arrival, we were invited…

  • construction
    Real Estate

    Hiring Contractors Correctly

    This is a task that we have perhaps failed at more often than we have succeeded. In this blog post, I’ll go through the mistakes we’ve made, how they’ve cost us, and our processes moving forward. Most people would rather go to the Dentist than hire a contractor to repair their home. These common mistakes are the most usual culprit when it comes to a contract that is stressful and costly. 1. Defining the Scope of Work When we were starting out, our scope of work was simple. It basically didn’t exist. Our contract would say things like “install new cabinets” or “replace windows.” There was no mention of which…