My Wealth Journey

Novastar (NFI) reported earnings after closing yesterday and BOOM! The stock dropped over 30% and has dropped over 50% within the past few weeks. Novastar is a subprime mortgage company that is facing the fact that a lot of the loans they approved will not be paid back. First New Century, now Novastar, so who is next? HSBC got hit a while ago but not as bad as these two companies.

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Even though the markets were closed today, XM and Sirius announced a merger that a lot of people have been expecting. Some people don’t know if the FCC will approve it but I think they will make the necessary change in the law allowing this because of other competitions such as HD radio. I don’t know how much Sirius’ stock will jump because of this but XM’s stock looks like it may jump at least 3 or 4 bucks when the market opens tomorrow. I had some Jan 08 $5  calls for Sirius that I’m hoping will  go up.

http://biz.yahoo.com/ap/070219/xm_radio_sirius.html?.v=11

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I fall in the category of those who are waiting to buy a home for me to live in (I do own out of state rental properties) because I think the price levels are insane and cannot be substainable. Just searching through ziprealty’s listings this morning shows some properties have dropped over $80k in a 3 month period and yet there are still no buyers. I have a feeling a lot of homeowners are reducing their prices too slowly or not reducing the prices and simply just relisting on the MLS will get burned within the next year.

I recall a few days ago coming to a listing that had a price reduction of 10K every week for the past 2 months. I kid you not. That is 80k drop in 2 months. Now I bet if they did this all at once instead of trying to get as much as they want (not as much as they can), the home would have been sold already. I’m guessing this homeowner was some flipper who bought the home as an investment and is trying to minimze how much he has lost.

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There is nothing like waking up in the morning and seeing your affiliate marketing earnings doing well the previous day. I use a few affiliate networks so I don’t leave all my eggs in a single basket. When I first started, thats actually what I did. I figured, if I’m making X amount, I’m going to stick to it and didn’t think about diversfying too much. One day, Google’s SERPs jumped and pushed some of the sites from page 1 to nowhere and my earnings were cut in thirds. I’m still trying to recover from that and have since created different sites in different niches. I get more happy when the earnings are more evenly distributed across my sites rather than all from one site even if it means a little bit less revenue.

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What is going on with Yahoo stock? It has been jumping like crazy the past week since they launched the update to their advertising. I sold a little bit of my holdings in Yahoo after it jumped to 29 or 30 to diversify a bit. The stock is actually more expensive than Google’s (GOOG) stock based on their P/E.

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I have a rental home in Saratoga Springs, Utah. For those not familiar with the area, it is a new booming town next to Utah Lake. I was there in the fall of 2005 even though the city was rather small, I could see a ton of homes being built there and the growth potential. I picked up a single family home preconstruction home there with the plan of holding it 3-5 years as I believe the market still has quite a bit of ways to go. I’m hoping for 5% appreciation or more over the next few years.

Anyway, I was able to rent out the home after I closed on it and now that tenant is expecting to move out at the end of this month. I’ve started posting ads on a few online classifieds and have gotten a few people interested but no applications yet. One person is suppose to call the current tenants to setup a time to check out the home so I’ll cross my fingers on that.

I originally filled this home by placing an ad in the local newspaper and am very fortunate that I haven’t had to use a property management company because these tenants are some of the best I’ve ever had! All my other homes, I do use property management.

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Welcome everyone! This is actually my first blog. Yes, I know I’m a few years late to the game but it is never too late. I’m not new to the Internet or writing online. I started a content site way back in 1998 and have maintained it on a regular basis till the dot-com bust. The site is still up and brings in a few bucks here and there from the ads but I have since moved on to focus more on affiliate marketing in my quest to make enough to be able to quit my day job. This blog will just be a place where I write about my various experiences in my wealth journey to exit the 9-5 job and be able to have a combination of passive income and my own company bringing in the money.

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