Real estate tips

Given how low the traffic is for this blog, I might as well turn this into an online notebook.  I can use Google Docs, or I can just put it here.  Blogger is fairly dead, and especially without any SEO.  However, what's nice about a blog is that it can be in the form of a diary.

Things to do:

A lot of YouTube channels refer to Biggepockets.
https://www.biggerpockets.com

The thing about living in a HCOL area is that the houses are very pricey.  It is almost impossible to find any properties that are cash flow positive.  So for me, it has turned into a waiting game, waiting for the market to dip.

Why do I want to invest in real estate?  For the kids really.  By the time they grow up, it is going to be super expensive.  So I want to invest now, and time advantage of the slow appreciation over time.  Before the kids can actually buy for themselves when they reach the age of majority.

Maybe the mistake is not to look for something in a HCOL area, but look in other areas where cashflow is positive.  Not as much appreciation in value, but why not?

Watching a disaster in real estate

There is something very hypnotizing about watching disasters.  This is why people watch disaster movies right?

In the Canadian market, it has been very hard to lose money over the last decade unless one buys in at the wrong time.  Today, I learned that there were a couple of twitter accounts dedicated to listing Vancouver properties that sold way below its acquisition value.

https://twitter.com/johnny_33

https://twitter.com/mortimer_1

The second one is an interesting read.  I knew that Vancouver prices were inflated.  Toronto prices are inflated.  But I had no idea that there were so many Vancouver properties that are really bungalows that sell for $2 million.

Eiffel style chairs for the kitchen

These chairs are pretty popular on Amazon.  I had a few IKEA Tobias chairs that cracked after maybe 5 years of use.  I'm not into wooden chairs so I need something more modern for my kitchen.  With the kids, I can't have fabric chairs that get extremely dirty.  I've replaced 3 of the Tobias chairs already.  They all crack in the middle so it must be a design defect.  Instead of pouring more money into Tobias, I figure I'd get something different.

For like $30 a chair, this seems to be a no-brainer.  The price of 6 chairs is the cost of 2 Tobias chairs.  So even if these break or crack or get destroyed by the kids in 5 years, it doesn't really matter.

You can buy chairs on Amazon:
https://amzn.to/35Al1s6

IKEA and We are unable to confirm stock levels or estimate your delivery to complete your order at this time.

TLDR; If you can't check out at IKEA because the website cannot confirm stock levels or estimate delivery time, just check out as a guest and/or use the Microsoft Edge browser.

Every time IKEA has a sale, I try to use their website naturally to score some good deals.  But every time I do this, it never works.  IKEA must have a fairly robust back-end given that they move billions of dollars of merchandise a year. 

Once again, they are having their $19 flat shipping in Canada.  Once again, checking out did not work.  I got the dreaded "We are unable to confirm stock levels or estimate your delivery to complete your order at this time" error message.  What is really bad about this is that the message just flashes temporarily in red, and seemingly disappears.  Being a web developer, I know that likely that it is just some stylesheet that is making it hidden.  So by looking at the HTML code, voila, the error message is still there.

However, this time, I refused to give up.  I read on Facebook comments that you can try checking out as a Guest and use the Microsoft Edge browser.  And surprisingly, it worked!  It doesn't seem like I lost much since I created an account right after, and in the account section of IKEA, it doesn't look like it stores the history of previous orders. 

Wow.  IKEA's website seems like it was built from the 1990's.  The url still has /webapp/ within it... so maybe some 1990's technology that uses WebSphere or one of the popular e-commerce servers from way back when.