Government

There is an article coming out of Oregon Public Broadcasting that is complaining about a company that has been evicting people from rental housing, even with the nationwide eviction moratorium.

The article follows Leonardo Cruz, who they claim is being evicted from his apartment because he has a “service dog” and uses this as a springboard to launch into an attack of a management company called “Income Property Management, (IPM)” which is a for profit company that, along with other companies, manages various rental property for “Home Forward,” which is a nonprofit owner of low income housing in the Portland area.

Some of the rental properties are managed by Home Forward themselves, while others are managed by various contractors. Home Forward manages 2400 units itself, with half of the remaining units being managed by IPM. Why doesn’t Home Forward simply manage the properties themselves? The answer lies further down in the article:

“the nonprofit invests in its staff — a $20 minimum wage, pensions, comprehensive benefits” besides trying to “work with tenants and try to avoid evictions.” So why is this preventing Home Forward from managing their own properties?

The subject of the article, Leonardo Cruz, was admittedly at least six months behind on his lease. Letting people stay in your rental property without paying, while at the same time paying your employees high wages and lavish benefits is how you go out of business- nonprofit or not.

The national eviction moratorium says you can’t evict people for nonpayment. So the management company, with a tenant who hasn’t paid rent for more than half of a year, finds another reason to evict.

Demanding that companies provide people with free products while paying lavish salaries and benefits is a sure way to insolvency. Socialists never understand this economic reality, and this is why socialism has failed every single time it has been tried.

On my post about hyperinflation from yesterday, my advice was to move finances into assets like precious metals or real estate. An anonymous commenter had this to say:

I think precious metals are a fools errand. First, when the crisis strikes you will be making your target – meaning that you are going to risk your life for a thing. Second, it is not worth much for day-to-day transaction. I am aware of several who accumulate gold bars and coins. You cannot simply shave off parts of the bar for doughnut, and you are almost invariable going to get a lot less for the coins than it is worth.

I decided that this would be a good time to share my thoughts on this. My wife and I do have SOME savings in physical metals. Metals are not bought as a way to carry out day to day transactions. They are a hedge against inflation, and not meant to be used as currency to purchase things in some sort of a ‘Mad Max: SHTF’ scenario. Honestly, ammo and food would be worth far more in such a case.

No, I am talking about storing your wealth in a medium that will preserve your life savings during the high interest/high inflation economic troubles that will surely follow the idiotic policies that are being put in place by our new communist overlords.

I personally think that more than a few ounces of PMs are a bad idea. There is a loss buying in (a one ounce gold coin costs 5% over melt value), there is a loss selling (another 5 to 10%), and the coin is a nonperforming asset- meaning that it doesn’t make money for you, other than being an inflation hedge.

Real estate is different. If you own real estate, it can make money as rental property, as well as the fact that it gains value at a higher than inflation rate.

My wife and I discussed our options yesterday and have decided to close all of our accounts (other than IRAs and 401k accounts) and use the money to buy more real estate.

In an inflationary economy, you are better owing money than having money. A fixed rate loan for real estate is denominated in pre-inflation dollars, but paid with inflated dollars. If the loan is a fixed rate loan, the Fed increasing rates won’t affect your loan.

There are other pitfalls to owning real estate, but there are ways to reduce those risks. That is an entirely different and more complicated conversation.

AOC and 51 of her cohorts are pushing for the $2,000 checks to be a monthly event. Doing this will cost an astounding $10 trillion a year. This would be on top of the already massive $4 trillion Federal budget.

The amount of US dollars in existence is currently about $19 trillion. This would increase that amount by 50%. Having an additional $10 trillion in the system, most of which would be inserted directly into circulation like some kind of ghetto lottery, would be devastating to the dollar.

With the added stressors of rising petroleum prices and the increased minimum wage that is likely to pass within the next few weeks, we are likely to see a LARGE increase in prices across the entire economy. That will quickly be followed by the Fed moving to increase interest rates in an attempt to cool the economy. All of this adds up to bad, bad news for the US economy.

The policies that have already been put in place are bad enough, but increasing the US money supply by 50% means a straight up financial disaster. Even if the monthly checks don’t happen, there is some bad stuff coming down the road.

My wife and I discussed the situation this morning. The best defense at this point is to put your money in any vehicle that will insulate you from a falling US dollar. Stocks and bonds are a no go. In fact, this leaves only hard assets that have intrinsic value. In our minds that means precious metals or real estate.

I would suggest that anyone who is reading this take steps to secure your finances from the inflation that will happen.