As the end of the year approaches, many of us are thinking about ways to mitigate our tax liability for 2023. Unfortunately, this year there is not a whole lot in terms of options. The IRS has clamped down on syndicated conservation easements and anything resembling it. If you are being talked into something like […]

A lot has happened over the past year in real estate. It goes to show how quickly things can change. Unless you have been living in a cave, you know that interest rates went way up really quickly. When that happens, housing typically goes down in value significantly. Oddly enough, in much of the country, […]

When I moved to Montecito a few years ago, I was amazed at how many people didn’t seem to work. To be clear, we don’t have a homeless problem out here. We just have a lot of people who own businesses. And it’s not quite true that they don’t work. They just don’t have regular […]

It’s NFL season and I’m still glued to the TV despite my team’s rough start and the fact that we lost our starting quarterback for the year. In case you don’t know, my team is the Minnesota Vikings and our starting quarterback was Kirk Cousins who just went down with a brutal Achilles tendon tear. […]

The world of real estate is kind of a cult. Members of this cult tend to think that pretty much anything outside of real estate is just a waste of money. I used to subscribe to this religion. And, for the most part, I still kind of do. My portfolio is largely real estate and […]

No one getting married thinks that they will ever get divorced. I can tell you that from personal experience. Yet over half of American marriages end up in divorce. I was lucky in that I had an amicable break-up. Most of the divorces I’ve seen in the past few years have been ugly. I have two friends finally get […]