Move Smartly: The Podcast

If you ask a random group of people whether real estate is a good investment, you’ll find that the majority will say: “Yes, real estate is a good investment.” Setting aside the question of when real estate is a good investment -- and when it might not be -- is the more important question of why so many people simply assume it is. This automatic belief puts down our guard and results in very lazy and bad decisions about real estate.

One of the things I often hear working in real estate is that "renting is a waste of money", most often from real estate agents and parents trying to get their kids to buy a house. To really hammer the point home, they usually follow this up by saying "Why would you want to pay down your landlord's mortgage when you could be paying down your mortgage?" It sounds so logical that you feel like an idiot for even thinking about renting. But how true are these statements? Is renting always a waste of

To paraphrase the Nobel prize winning economist Robert Shiller: Bubbles are situations in which just hearing stories of friends and family benefitting from home prices going up, attracts more people to buy through a combination of envy and gambler’s excitement. To measure this, Shiller and his long time collaborator Karl Case sent out surveys to buyers and sellers in a number of US cities and identified a number of red flag responses that are indicative of a housing bubble.   What are some of these

Many buyers turn to their parents for advice before buying a home for a number of reasons. First, many of them have bought a house before even if it’s been a long time , so we believe they can offer valuable insights based on their own personal experiences. Second, we have an underlying trust that our parents are looking after our best interests. So what could go wrong?

Finances cause a lot of stress in relationships and one of the main reasons for this stress is that we rarely have open and honest conversations about money with our life partners. And this is particularly true when it comes to our real estate expenses.

Financial stress is among the top reasons couples get divorced.  And for most people, housing costs are their single biggest expense. Does this suggest that the home we buy today may be the first step towards financial stress in our relationships tomorrow?  I think it does. So why does this happen?

In this first episode I'll discuss what listeners can expect from the Mindful Broker podcast.