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All Forum Posts by: Hal Cranmer

Hal Cranmer has started 59 posts and replied 142 times.

Post: Techie from St. Paul, MN

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

Jim,
Welcome. I live in Lakeville. Good to see another Minnesotan. I have a bunch of duplexes in Minneapolis. What kind of real estate are you interested in?

Hal

Post: Tax sale lists

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

I'm kind of new at this tax sale stuff. However, I went down to my county office a couple of days ago and found a list of everyone in the county who is delinquent in their taxes. I was thinking of going through the list (it's pretty big) and find absentee owners or owners that owe large tax amounts and send them letters, or maybe send them a PA?

Has anyone done this? Have they had any success? What kind of correspondence do you send them? Thanks.

Post: The corporate bailouts have become a complete political disaster

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

Terry,

I went to this website and was a bit disappointed. They are asking the government to increase regulation in the form of stricter anti-trust rules. Any decent economist will show you that anti-trust is a sham and that the only true monopolies are created and sustained through government force. The problem does not lie with the banks - it lies with the government.

If you want to find a group that is really heading in the direction of free markets and a return to sanity, you might want to check out this grass roots movement:

http://www.campaignforliberty.com/index.php

Post: Is the Rental Market Slowing Down?

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

I have a place that I am trying to rent out before June 1. I have had it on the market for a little over a week (I know it's a short time), but usually I get a lot of calls and emails of interested people right away. This time I have hardly received any. Last time I rented this place it rented in 24 hours. I post an ad on Craigslist almost every day and have 'For Rent' signs outside the house.

My question is, are people seeing the rental market start to decrease/slow down? Are rents going down? The rent I'm charging is not going up at all and it is cheaper than a lot of other ads on Craigslist for similar properties. The property is in Northeast Minneapolis very close to the U. of Minnesota. I also wonder if it's just a slow time of year because a lot of students are not looking to move until the summer?

The weird thing is that I bought another duplex in the same area in December and had it rented before I closed on the place. What gives?

Post: Mobile Home Investing in Minnesota

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

Hi Everyone,

I bought Lonnie's materials and started looking into buying and selling MH's here in MN. However, the first park owner I talked to told me that you have to be a dealer to buy and sell mobile homes. Sure enough - I looked it up in the statutes and it looks like he is right.

However, he did say you could work with a dealer and finance them. So I got in touch with a dealer who told me she thought I needed a finance license, but did not know how I obtain one. Does anyone have an idea how I do this?

The dealer license has ridiculous requirements ( you have to work for a dealer for 2 years and you have to put up a $20K bond as well have $1M in insurance etc.) but it sounds like the finance license is a lot less?

Thanks.

Post: Economic Outlook

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

Matty,

You are absolutely right - the Fed is the agency nobody wants to talk about but has caused the most damage. Ben Bernanke is doing everything wrong and we will all pay for it. Politicians love the Fed because they don't have the guts to really raise taxes on us in order to pay off their spending. So they tax us through inflation and nobody notices.

I went to a Campaign for Liberty group meeting last night. They are really organized and are training libertarians to run for local offices - it made me feel like there is a glimmer of hope.

Right now it's just really hard to watch the country go down the tubes!

Hal

Post: Top 10 Porkiest Projects in the Stimulus Bill

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

Thought everyone might like these guys:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S4hrnbhIHDY&eurl=http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/&feature=player_embedded

They are going around presenting invoices for the stimulus bill to American people to show them what Obama is doing to our debt.

Post: Now here's a speech.

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

Could I offer an alternative to show what a conservative used to be (also from CPAC)?:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X_aZn6wqAdQ&eurl=http://www.lewrockwell.com/blog/&feature=player_embedded

I used to like Rush, but then when he has rants like this (transcript from his website) I realize that he loves big government too:

So, let 'em [the Democrats] go ahead with these tactics. We can't stop them anyway. We lost the election. But they're going to lose down the road. They will not control government forever, and when our turn comes, we are going to turn the power of government against the left. We are going to investigate them. We are going to hold public hearings. We are going to humiliate them. We're going to nationalize their unions. We're going to fund our groups for a change.
If they can give ACORN $4.1 billion then we can start paying our groups with federal money. We're going to do exactly to them what they have done to us. We're going to build and use the big government that they have built and turn it right against them. We are gonna turn the power of government against the left, and against Democrats in ways they cannot imagine. They will not know what hit them. They are using the law. They are using government to advance a cause that is un-American. . . . We are going to use the power that left is centralizing in the federal government to punish them, to break 'em up, and to make them pay for this. It's time for tit-for-tat. Nice guy playing by the rules when they don't, is over. It's time they got a taste of their own medicine, and it's going to happen, folks, because they're not going to hold power forever. The left -- you people, you Democrats -- you are creating a monster that you will not be able to control forever [just as, I interject, George W. Bush did, which now the Democrats are exploiting]. You will ultimately regret what you are doing just like the media will ultimately regret its sacrifice of reason, its abandonment of its primary purpose. The day is coming when the media will actually investigate a Democrat and find some problems and nobody's going to believe them because they've lost all credibility. . . . We are taking names. We are taking names now. We are monitoring who on the left is going to deserve payback, and it's going to be hell. This much I promise you. This is just getting out of hand.
We're gonna come after the left's favorite corporations. We're going to come after your favorite political constituents. We're going to come after your favorite media outlets. You want to try the Fairness Doctrine? Fine. We'll impose it on network television. We'll impose it on newspapers. You want to try censorship? Fine! We will censor you when we get the control of the government back. We will reapportion districts using the Census to help conservatives. We're going to turn the power of government against the Democrats and the left and weaken and you break you into little pieces. Because, my friends, the day has passed when we can become passive and be passive about what they are doing. We will use the political and the legal system as they have and are, and we will use it to promote our party and to diminish theirs. We will use the power of government and legal system to promote our movement and our agenda, just as they are.
If they are going to bastardize the American system, if they are going to make this government large and powerful and intrusive, someday they're going to lose it. But they're going to lose it after having amassed all this power. We will control it, and we're going to turn it right back against them. We will build a massive army of patriots to counter ACORN. We will defund ACORN. We'll defund the labor unions, and we will fund our own people to go out and zap ACORN. And we will do everything we can to enhance anti-union employment. We will make sure that when companies lose money, that the people that get canned are union people. We're going to use the power of government just like the left is using the power of government. We're going to use the justice department.

We're going to go after big unions with the justice department. We're going to find all of the criminal activity. We are going to find all the lack of ethics. We are going to find every bit of corruption we can, and we're gonna sic the attorney general and the justice department and the US attorneys on you people just as you have been doing to the people of the right and the Republican Party for 50 years. And then we're going to find George Soros and other concentrations of left-wing power and wealth. And we're going to focus our attention on him, so that the American people will finally learn just who the hell paid for the bastardization of the United States, just who the hell paid for the destruction of the American way of life.
. . . We're going to become activists. We'll take back our government.
It's going to be a bigger, more powerful, stronger government -- and we're going to turn it against the left in ways they could have never imagine.

Post: How do you prepare for the coming future?

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

Alfred,

I would give you my username and password, but I get nasty email messages when I did that in the past and my friend and I logged on to the site at the same time. They would cancel my usage for 24 hours. Other than that the site is very user friendly. For $14.95 a month it's at least worth a try for a month or so?

The guy writes based on the theories of Austrian economics. If you want to read more of what is coming (and what to do about it-somewhat), there is a free site called http://www.mises.org.

They've been writing about the coming catastrophe since 2002.

Post: How do you prepare for the coming future?

Hal CranmerPosted
  • Real Estate Investor
  • Lakeville, MN
  • Posts 153
  • Votes 17

I'm not sure about the rules on recommending a website, but this one has been great at predicting what to do in these times:

http://www.garynorth.com

He recommended gold back in 2001 (when it was $250/oz), shorting the stock market in Nov 2007, and now buying real estate.

He charges $14.95/month for a subscription but he has saved/made me much more than that. I don't get any kind of commission for endorsing it - I just think it's a great site for how to deal with this economy.