from  ”Promises, Promises”  by Naked Eyes

When you promise somebody that you will do something, is it to get them off your back or are you committed?

When the boss asks you to stop texting in the office and you promise not to anymore, is breaking that promise different than promising your son you will be at his football game and then not making it?

Does intent change the penalty when one breaks a promise?  If you make a promise with no commitment or intent to keep it, is the guilt less than when you make a vow and do not keep it?

How many people do you know that seem to not be committed to what their marriage vows promised?  If a person does not honor an oath made to their soon to be wife, family and friends, should you trust them to keep an exchange of promises in a business contract?  Or is an oath given in a ceremony a step higher on the commitment scale?  If so, what does it mean if one does not honor an oath?

When somebody tries to convince me that they have a steel curtain between their business and personal behaviors, I find that this is really a way to say “please do not look at my behavior in this situation as reflective of how I am as a husband or father.”  Why is it necessary to say this?

I think it is because if you can’t be trusted to keep your promises, the truth is that this behavior knows no boundaries.  Likewise, I have found that a person of honor,  does not need to advise us to judge their public persona separately from the way they act privately.

Hard to be trustworthy part of the time.  Do you agree?

Last week my curiosity reached a new level.  I received the following mass circulated email in my inbox:

URGENT FACEBOOK

Facebook launched Facebook Places yesterday. Anyone can find out where you are when you are logged in. It gives the actual address & map location of where you are as you use Facebook.  TO UNDO:go to “Account”, “Account Settings”, “Notifications”, then scroll down to “Places” and uncheck the 2 boxes. Make sure to SAVE changes. For your safety please do this immediately!!!!!!

So, knowing just a little on this topic I realized there was a lot of drama being passed off in this message.  First, I realized that this has to be a mobile phone with GPS application.  Bib Brother has not, to the best of my knowledge, started registering different IP address locations or wireless signals utilized in home networking.  So, like all of these location platforms, Facebook Places is a mobile application and not every cell phone is it going to apply.

So, next to my Facebook account.  The instructions above are correct.  When followed, there are two boxes to uncheck under “Places”

Tags Me At A Place

Comments On My Visits to Places

OK..so now I see what the concern and fear are about.  This permission appears to say that Facebook is going to automatically track me wherever I go!  No way I want that! 

No way that is what is happening!  Bad choice of words I would say…

Remember, location services allow the user to “check-in” to places.  They don’t provide ongoing satellite tracking to your every move.  Facebook’s permissions language would freak out any parent who is following up on the mass sent email.

I do start to dig deeper into Facebook Places and start to find some things I am not comfortable with.  First, I read somewhere that this new feature will allow your friends to check you into places.   I don’t like the sounds of that at all.  Lets say I am out with some people and in order to be out with some people I had to make up a little white lie to somebody else.  Just sayin’…never really happens.  But lets say that one of my friends decides to tag me at this place and now my other Facebook friends see where I am or was, and I am busted.  I think if I am playing this places game, I want to control everything tagged about my locations.

To change this feature is not so obvious.  In fact it is frustrating what you have to do to find the option. In your Account Settings  Choose Your Privacy Settings and in small print find the link to Customize Settings.  On this page scroll to “Things Others Share” and find Friends can check me in to places.  I was pleased to see this permission has not been defaulted to any choice.  You should make sure on your account also.  I have disabled this feature until I can figure out if there is any benefit.

There is also a feature called “People Here Now”.   This one allows you to be visible to friends and strangers checked in nearby.  It is enabled in your default privacy settings under “Things I Share”.   I am going to leave it enabled for now as it is something I control.  Here is how this looks when using the feature.

My biggest concern is that once you create a place that is checked in it becomes part of Facebook’s public directory of places.  How many teens, using Facebook primarily through their cell phones, will check in from their bedroom and create a listing for their home?  This is the one that bothers me and I will be monitoring this closely to make sure one of my tech wise kids do not forget privacy issues like broadcasting our address all over the Internet.  If you’re curious if a listing has been created for your home or other private place, launch touch.facebook.com on a GPS-enabled smart phone. Under Places, you’ll be able to see a listing of nearby Facebook locations.

To their credit Facebook has created an entire FAQ on this new Feature.  It is in the Help Center.  I doubt most teens will take the time to read it.  There is a lot of information there.  I am going to keep playing with this feature and will let you know if I can figure out how to use it for commerce beyond the obvious mentioned.  Let me know what you discover also.

Let me show you how easy it is to make this list applicable to anybody who has something to sell.

Reducing sales office hours

How about reducing any hours you are open or available for business?  We are more and more part of a 24/7 world and people want to shop and purchase when they want to.  What can you do in your business to make it possible to buy from you more hours each week?

Assuming they know what buyers want

Major purchase manufacturers like home builders and car makers  are real villains for telling us what we want.  Ever try to buy a car off the lot that had just the basics?  Not 200 different ways to listen to the radio or 30 different diagnostic messages on the dash?  I know houses and cars have design issues that makes it more expensive to go outside the box and have a custom one built.  I don’t hear much about focus groups lately but now seems like the time to listen to what your customers want and ask some hard questions along the way.  Oh..and REALLY listen!

Neglecting their websites

Have you ever worked with a web site designer and asked him if he has ever sold anything?  You should.  Or before hiring see if your designer gets that the majority of commerce buyers are annoyed by lengthy flash intro pages, and that fancy looking people filling up the pages of your site are not going to jump off the page and sell anything.  You have to take a website designer and lead them..not vice versa.

Forgoing sales training

I am guilty of this also.  We are all busy and we hired John because he could sell more appliances than anybody else at BigBox Electronics.  Except, John’s retail store sales experience is going to be totally different than what is needed going into a prospect’s home to sell them landscaping.  Mentoring and reference materials are needed.  Make your new salesperson read everything you have available about your product and procedures, and then mentor and show them how it is done.  It is hard, and it takes time, but the payoff in these hard times is worth it.

Skipping spec homes

How about just not having inventory in the store?  Or not being available for two weeks to demonstrate the benefits of your management services?  Spec homes are inventory ready to be bought now.  They also often leverage into an order because the spec home provides proof of concept but maybe not exactly what the customer desires.  What is your spec home?  How can you make sure you offer a “spec home”?

Five mistakes….five ways to get better!

Shit My Kids Ruined

claiming to be “the strongest visual birth control on the market today” this site will provide you with memories of those moments that remind or set your body to fear (depending on the age of your children).  There is also a companion site

Shit My Pets Ruined

I actually have several submittals to both.

So that my young adult kids do not think this is just a site about 3 year olds, take a look at the teen driver pulling into a garage and not finding the brake pedal.  Actually, I have a friend whose wife also did this (not picking on women here…just telling the story!).

The site even has a mission statement:

Comic relief, Commiseration, & Birth Control.

I think we can all use the humor in big doses.  Commiseration feels much better also.  Birth Control?  Despite the way these things make you feel when they occur there will likely be moments in raising kids that far exceed the frustration these events command.  

Occasionally kids give you memories that are so priceless, it will make you glad you suffered through all of these Kodak moments.

Occasionally.

Here is a nice story about how sometimes what we do not know we have stored in our attic might just someday save our hind ends! (hint to wife..take note there is a reason for me to save the things I have stocked away-besides just avoiding trips to the store late at night to finish a school project!).

I hope in this economy this works out for this family.  Notice they have not actually auctioned off the comic but I am assuming they stopped packing?

Under the program, homeowners who qualify can have their mortgage payments cut to 31% of their monthly income by extending their loan term to 40 years or slashing their interest rate to as low as 2% for five years. Participants must make three monthly payments during a trial period before they receive a permanent modification.

As much as we all wish this news to be true, as it would surely lead us back to housing stability as we quickly modify home loans and fix the housing crisis…it just is not accurate.  We return to the central point of many of my posts.  Numbers can be presented in many ways and statistics can be used to make many different, and often conflicting points. 

In what I will propose is a lack of research in our media or understanding of this economic situation, combined with just the right words utilized through the Treasury Department, renewed optimism now exists that loan modifications may be a very successful part of our economic recovery.  Oh, I hate being the person to throw cold water on this whole idea but here goes.

•  According to research from Barclays Capital, in a July 21 intra-day commentary on residential credit, Barclays analysts Sandeep Bordia and Jasraj Vaidya write that while they believe overall redefaults from HAMP will be better than those from prior modifications, “we find that the data as reported…are misleading and fail to capture the full magnitude of redefaults from these modifications.”   The federal report showed that almost 6% of permanent modifications were 60+ days delinquent at the six-month mark, while fewer than 2% of permanent modifications were 90+ days delinquent. A caveat, as pointed out by Bordia and Vaidya, can be located in a footnote in the report, which states, “a HAMP permanent modification is canceled for nonpayment if it is more than 90 days delinquent.” The analysts interpret the footnote to mean that 90+ day delinquent loans are removed from the percentage of delinquent numbers reported. “Removing 90+ [day delinquent] permanent mods from the delinquency calculation and basing the calculation only on successful modifications makes the redefault rates look too low,” Bordia and Vaidya write. The analysts additionally say that their base case expectation of approximately a 60% lifetime redefault rate on HAMP modifications is still adequate. 
• The number of homeowners leaving the program exceeded those who received new loan modifications for the second straight month. More than 91,000 homeowners cancelled their government loan modifications in June, while just 38,728 received new modifications, according to data released Tuesday.
• Almost 530,000 of the nearly 1.3 million government modifications have been cancelled since the program began last March. Dropouts climbed as homeowners missed payments on their modified loans or failed to turn in required paperwork.

I for one look forward to the day we see stabilization in housing.  The debate continues as to what is the best way to accomplish stability.  Nothing is going to stop the train that is long ago out of the station that is pursuing every possible action to keep homeowners in their homes.  It serves the government to send out this type of news to work on the optimism factor that is very much in a deficit today.As I look across my own neighborhood, not knowing what the circumstances some of my neighbors carry, but seeing their inability to maintain their homes to community standards, I am again reminded that just because a method is offered to reduce a mortgage payment, the likelihood that suddenly a homeowner can pay for replacing windows, maintaining landscaping, and trimming overgrown tree branches hanging over their homes, is only solved through an orderly sale and relief of their debt through liquidation, or prosperity.  The prosperity thing seems to not be a likely option as most states are now seeing an actual increase in unemployment rates and many people have left the job market entirely. 

What do modifications really provide in the big picture and why do so many press organizations trumpet success when there are hard questions that really need to be asked about those results?

For years we have struggled with short sales and I feel that experience gave me some insight others may not.  For a long time, I have been skeptical that short sales will be a big part of the housing solution.  Primarily because there are so many stakeholders in the game that have to agree, it is basically selling a home by committee..and a large committee at that.  

Earlier this year the federal HAFA program began and with it I believe we have the most significant step in creating a process to assist people who need to sell with a short sale.  Unfortunately, simply identifying who NEEDS to use a short sale for a sale of their home is not as easily done as said.  HAFA goes a long way toward placing some boundaries on identifying these parties.  The primary one is the owner must have tried first for a government loan modification and failed to qualify.  While this parameter had to be built in, many homeowners are barking because they simply DO NOT want to stay in their home and DO NOT want a modification.  Yet..they are underwater on their mortgage and few think they should be required to use any of their own cash in order to settle on their debt.  There are also many innocent people who HAFA can assist because they do not have any resources so they are not going to qualify for the HAMP modification, clearing their path to a HAFA short sale. 

It is the group of people that have the resources to settle some part of their unpaid mortgage balance that are now seeking creative ways to complete a short sale.  Besides the attempts to hide assets, a new game is playing itself out where the short sale is orchestrated by several parties, outside the lender’s awareness.  Simply, sales are being created that are not arms length.  For the players in this scene, the banks are eventually finding out and prosecuting.  The most comon scheme is known as “Home Flopping”.    Federal agents say these schemes are on the rise. 

“Home Flopping” involves the listing agent for a home convincing a bank to complete a short sale for an amount the listing agent recognizes will allow a second sale to a third party for an increased amount.  In other words, the increased amount is what the bank should have accepted and received in the short sale.  The parties to the transaction (Seller, Realtor, Buyer #1, and the Broker Price Opinion agent) all split the profits.  The FBI is prosecuting one of these right now where the Realtors have pled guilty of convincing Regions Bank to accept a short sale of $102,375 and two month later selling the property for $132,500.  Profits were likely distributed to all parties.

The biggest challenge for short sales?  Greed!  All the parties to the transaction, and I can think of about eight possible ones, all have their motivations and the committee rarely can totally agree.  Throw in a few of the parties who have additional profit schemes in mind and you can see why I remain skeptical about the success of short sales ever really being a large part of the solution to the housing crisis.

The best solution-a revived economy.  Next to that, modification or a controlled Deed In Liew of Foreclosure.  Modifications allow people to stay in their home with a new payment plan, orwith a Deed In Lieu they may leave their home  and the bank avoids the laws that cause homes to deteriorate sitting vacant for months to years awaiting foreclosure.  Two simple solutions that take the greed factor out of the equation.   Time will tell..but this is a message I have been putting out there for two years now and so far, little has happened to prove me wrong.

Earlier this year, women became the majority of the workforce for the first time in U.S. history. Most managers are now women too. And for every two men who get a college degree this year, three women will do the same. For years, women’s progress has been cast as a struggle for equality. But what if equality isn’t the end point? What if modern, postindustrial society is simply better suited to women? A report on the unprecedented role reversal now under way— and its vast cultural consequences.

I am looking around my neighborhood and see numerous men who have been out of work for a year or more.  Their wives are the bread winners and they are home taking care of the family and house.   For one thing this recession has created an environment where the higher priced middle age men were the ones let go.  In the meantime, I am a witness to the business advantages being offered company’s owned by anybody other than a male (and while this is not a post about race, all the disclosures I am exposed to also ask my race so I think it must be acceptable to add the classification “white” to the group affected).  So, in addition to the societal advantages this article so aptly exposes, there is also an orchestrated direction in our society to move women (and other groups) in front of  (white) men in the food chain. The two factors combined explain why so many men may be permanently out of the work force as we once knew it.

Regarding the societal changes-some outtakes from this article that are relevant.

“Men seem ‘fixed in cultural aspic.’ With each passing day, they lag further behind.” Numerous college women assume they’ll be primary bread winner; guys “are the new ball and chain.”

“As thinking and communicating have come to eclipse physical strength and stamina as the keys to economic success, those societies that take advantage of the talents of all their adults, not just half of them, have pulled away from the rest.”

“The evidence is all around you [e.g.] in the wreckage of the Great Recession, in which three-quarters of the eight million jobs lost were lost by men. The worst-hit industries were overwhelmingly male and deeply identified with macho: construction, manufacturing, high finance.”

“Of the 15 job categories projected to grow the most in the next decade in the U.S., all but two are occupied primarily by women.”

“Women hold 51.4% of managerial and professional jobs—up from 26.1% in 1980. … In 1970, women contributed 2 to 6 percent of the family income. Now the typical working wife brings home 42.2%—and four in 10 mothers are the primary breadwinners in their family.”

“What’s clear is that schools, like the economy, now value the self-control, focus and verbal aptitude that seem to come more easily to young girls.”

If you have raised boys and girls, this last point brings all of this home in a different light than just blaming cost-cutting and diversification efforts.  The information age we now live in favors the skill sets of women.  It is part of their genetics..better communicators, better understanding of a problem, more focused.   If you are raising a boy today, it may be the greatest gift you can give to allow them to absorb the skill sets that involve the characteristics that are those of great communicators,organizers, and disciplinarians.   Boys have been raised, and continue to be raised, to excel on the playing field and in stiff competition.  We, as the American society, reward our boys for success on the football field, and tend to overlook failure in Composition classes.  Girls, this is reversed.  Where is your child’s future?

If this article is correct, for the first time boy’s are now arriving in the future at a disadvantage.  I see evidence of this change everywhere.  Better consider the affect of your priorities on your son’s.  Very few of them are ever going to play a sport after high school, and fewer yet will ever receive a dime for their athleticism.

This article is a wake up call.   Not much you can do if you are a middle aged (white) guy like me, but you sure can recognize what the world will look like for your children.

The take away:

With the options available to sub prime borrowers in the last boom period, I doubt that not being able to borrow (insured by Fannie Mae) in order to buy another home, is going to have much affect on so-called “strategic defaulters”.

I think the target for the default judgement announcement is the investors who so loosely utilized funds to buy properties and never spent a dime because they figured they could flip the property.  This is not a stab at investors in our free-market system…just also asking them to take the responsible steps of honoring their obligations. 

The carrot of  encouraging borrowers to work with their lender to resolve their problem has appeal.  I hope that this effort will be more geared to short sales than modifications.  I fear to much emphasis on modifications in order to help a homeowner keep a home they can’t afford and still can’t afford after the modifciation.

Orderly liquidations of these homes should be the goal.  Why did it take so long for Fannie to say “no mas” to the strategic defaulters?  Where is Freddie Mac on this topic?  How about all of the direct lenders?