The Successful Landlord Blog

So, during the run-up to the supposed housing bubble, the local property taxing authorities have been totally taking advantage of rising property prices by jacking up the assessed property values and thereby collecting more money. Somewhat evil, but hey, it’s the government we’re talking about.

Actually what’s even more evil is that the county governments are threatening to raise the millage rate (thereby increasing the percentage of tax they collect) if the Florida state legislature passes a law forcing them to reduce property taxes due to screaming homeowners (see below), but I digress. Read the rest of this entry »

So, this post is entirely unrelated to being a landlord but interesting (I think) nonetheless.

Today, I ran upon a silly time-waster of a story on Digg.com entitled “The Top Ten Things I’ve Learned From My Patients.” Obviously written by a medical doctor. In the comments section below the post, some malcontent posted a comment about “top 10/5/25″ type-articles making it to the front page of Digg.com yada, yada, yada. Read the rest of this entry »

Something occurred to me the other day. We (the American consumer) are totally expected to be lazy and undisciplined. I mean, really, there are even business models built on that expectation and fact.

Have you ever seen financing deals directed at consumers and/or homeowners that sport advertising tag lines like “12 months, same as cash financing?” I have bought many items with this kind of financing and never paid a penny in interest. These items range from smaller items like my iPod ($500 with three months, same as cash financing) to larger items like my new air conditioning system ($8,000 with 12 months, same as cash financing.)

Read the rest of this entry »

So, today I ran across an interesting article on Digg.com about how in one Chinese city the government will be installing some 20,000 cameras on the streets linked by a computer system programmed to recognize faces of “police suspects” and all supplied by a US company, no less. From the article:

Data on the chip will include not just the citizen’s name and address but also work history, educational background, religion, ethnicity, police record, medical insurance status and landlord’s phone number. Read the rest of this entry »