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Lost Home Equity Leaves Thirty-somethings Vulnerable | Chappaqua NY Real Estate

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Contrary to popular belief, loss of equity in their homes since 2007 has hurt adults in their late thirties more than their Baby Boomer parents, contributing to fears that they will not have enough income and assets for their retirement, according to a new Pew Research survey released today.

Americans today are more worried about their retirement finances than they were at the end of the recession in 2009, especially younger and middle-aged adults rather than among those closer to retirement age-a major shift in the pattern that had prevailed at the end of the recession.

About four-in-ten adults (38 percent) say they are “not too” or “not at all” confident that they will have enough income and assets for their retirement, up from 25 percent in a Pew Research survey conducted in late February and March of 2009. Among adults between the ages of 36 and 40, 53 percent say they are either “not too” or “not at all” confident that their income and assets will last through retirement. In contrast, only about a third (34 percent) of those ages 60 to 64 express similar concerns, as do a somewhat smaller share (27 percent) of those 18 to 22 years old.

Fears over retirement are driven by a companion Pew Research analysis of data collected by the Federal Reserve Board in its Survey of Consumer Finances. For most Americans, equity in their homes represents most of their wealth and the collapse of housing values in the middle of the past decade sent personal wealth into a nose dive for most homeowners, regardless of age.

Overall, the Consumer Finances survey found that median home equity-the fair market value of a home less the amount of the outstanding mortgage and other liens-fell by about a third (32 percent) from 2007 to 2010. And U.S. Census data released in June found that most of the decline in median wealth between 2005 and 2010 can be attributed to sinking home values.

Median home equity-so-called housing wealth-declined the most for homeowners ages 35 to 44. Between 2007 and 2010, the equity of homeowners in this age group was cut in half (52 percent). In contrast, housing wealth fell by 30 percent among those 55 to 64 and by 20 percent among adults 65 and older.

Adults 35 to 44 years old have a much greater share of their wealth represented by their home equity because they have not yet had the time to accumulate financial wealth. Moreover, these younger adults have had less time to build equity, so the market collapse cut into a greater share of a smaller base than for longtime homeowners. Finally, this age group benefitted less than older adults from the rise in stock market values since many sold their holdings when stocks fell in 2009.

The S&P 500 Index peaked at 1,576 in October 2007 but then fell to a modern low of 667 in March 2009. Since then, the stock market began a steady rise, closing at 1,258 on the last day of December 2010. It now stands at about 1,450, nearly back to its earlier peak.

During this decade of wild market swings, ownership of stocks and retirement accounts, such as 401(k) and thrift accounts, fell among most age groups. But the declines were greatest among those ages 35 to 44. The proportion of adults in this age group who directly held stocks declined by nine percentage points from 2001 to 2010, with half of this drop occurring before 2007. In contrast, the share of adults 65 and older who directly held stocks declined only 3 percentage points from 2001 to 2010, from 21 percent to 18 percent.

The proportion of 35- to 44-year-olds who held stocks indirectly through retirement accounts also disproportionately fell by 9 percentage points, about double the decline among those younger than 35 or between 45 and 54 years old (4 percentage points for both groups). As a consequence, those in the 35 to 44 age group have benefited less from the rapid increase in stock prices since 2009 because they were less likely than their older counterparts to own stock and retirement accounts.

via realestateeconomywatch.com

Get over your real estate trauma | Chappaqua Realtor

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Editor’s note: This is the first of a two-part series.

Every day, more and more Americans click into a decidedly post-recession state of mind. Whether or not they’re still unemployed or upside-down, ever-increasing numbers of us have grown tired of being down and depressed and decided to do whatever it takes to get back on our feet and back into the flow of life — it’s so short, after all.

Fortunately, the real estate market seems to be flowing in that same direction: Millions of Americans have seen their underwater mortgages dry out this year, due to nothing more than increased buyer demand, which, in turn, increased home values. But millions more still owe more than their homes are worth — and many more than that are still dealing with the financial and emotional trauma of struggling to make the mortgage payment, tussling with their banks over loan modification requests, a past foreclosure or short sale, or even recession-created fears around buying a home, or selling and locking in losses.

Here’s the deal: The more you fear or focus on this trauma, the more it becomes a major influence on your decisions and your life. So, how can you extinguish it altogether? Here are some strategies:

1. Focus on what you are for, not on what you are against. We often create what we fear, largely out of our panic and paralysis around the topic. So, if you constantly worry about losing your home, being upside-down and whether your home’s value will ever recover, you are simply more likely to get and stay in these situations. Anxiety will cause you to spend more than you should, or to perform poorly at work, snowballing into high credit card bills or an interruption in income.

It’s a small mindset tweak, but a powerful one, to focus instead on what you want to have happen — or, as “Three Simple Steps” author Trevor Blake puts it, what you are for.

If you are for being debt-free, you might be inspired to start a small business and be your own bailout. If you are for getting out from underwater, you might decide to aggressively pursue the loan modification options, or to rent out an extra room on Airbnb to fund extra payments to reduce your mortgage principal.

I’m not saying these are the things you have to do to create the situations you want — I’m simply suggesting what I know from personal experience, which is that if you focus on what you are for, then you are much more likely to see that happen than when all of your time, energy and emotion is fixated on the things you hope don’t happen.

2. Metabolize the trauma. I believe that everything we do — every endeavor we make, every decision, no matter how painful or joyous the outcome — is a success. We are either successful at what we were trying to accomplish, or the experience is a successful education. But when we have painful experiences, it’s difficult to get free from the pain and move on until we can appreciate the successful education that the experience holds.

In order to let go of the trauma you might still have from things that happened around your mortgage or your home, you might find it helpful to work with the image Dr. Henry Cloud creates in his book “Necessary Endings”: the image of metabolizing the experience.

When we eat food, we metabolize it, holding onto the elements that are nourishing and beneficial and eliminating the rest. You can do the same thing with experiences like losing a home to foreclosure or short sale, or being upside-down on your mortgage: Take some quiet time to be real with yourself and identify what learnings you can cull from all the decisions and events that led to your real estate trauma.

Once you do that, you can almost have a ceremony of sorts where you simply declare to yourself that you’ve got what you needed from the experience, and you’re ready to let the rest go. It might sound new age-y, but even the most wizened business execs and hardened military strategists will tell you that learning and letting go of past failures and disappointments so you can fight the next battle are essential ingredients of resilience, and that resilience is a prerequisite for long-term success.

Next week, I’ll provide you with three more strategies for letting go of your real estate baggage.

via inman.com

Agents: Do not be afraid to set yourself on fire | Chappaqua NY Real Estate

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“Success isn’t a result of spontaneous combustion. You have to set yourself on fire.”

That’s a quote by Arnold H. Glasow I came across years ago that always stayed with me.

I speak with agents almost every day. Selling real estate is a tough business.

Between navigating the shifting expectations from buyers and sellers, building your brand presence online and trying to keep up with all the shiny new tech and social media tools in our space, pushing yourself to innovate your business and experiment with your marketing strategies can be daunting.

That’s why HomeFinder.com set out to find some of the most creative agents across the country who blaze their own trails and find success using digital marketing across YouTube, Instagram, Blogging, Facebook and Single Property Websites. For these agents, success meant actual sales, marketing credibility and lasting client relationships.

We put their stories together in this free E-book, Five Agent Success Stories – Close More Business Using Digital Marketing.

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Five Agent Success Stories – Close More Business Using Digital Marketing

In each story, you’ll learn:

  • How that agent uses that specific marketing channel or tactic in his/her business
  • Detailed success stories that led to a sale
  • Advice to get started or recharge your past or current efforts

Here’s a sneak peek and a few excerpts from one of our fire-starters – Kendyl Young.

Kendyl is an agent with Teles Properties in Glendale, CA. She has produced videos for her business for three years and has more than 146 videos on her YouTube channel for her listings and neighborhoods.

Kendyl constantly gets into situations in which she knocks on someone’s door or
sees someone out at a restaurant and they recognize her from her videos. One such instance happened at a pizza place, where a fellow patron instantly recognized her.

This man watched her market report videos and said he’d always wanted to meet her because of them. He thought she was very smart and would always forward her videos to his
friends who were interested in real estate.

By using YouTube like this, Kendyl made invaluable inroads to this potential client’s insular community without ever having met him or any of his friends.

“It’s made me realize my videos have far more reach than I would have thought,” she said.

A few of Kendyl’s YouTube tips:

  • Resist the temptation to turn on your smartphone and shoot whatever comes to mind and post.
  • Watch as many real estate videos as you can. Note what you like and what you don’t.
  • If you are not willing to learn how to make good videos yourself, find a professional. Everything you put out there is a reflection of the quality of your business.
  • Good sound is more important than good visual.

Kendyl’s story continues in this E-book, along with four others.

Take a cue from these agents who have already tried and succeeded. Learn, borrow, adapt.

And don’t forget to keep those matches handy.

via next.inman.com

The Social Media is Not Only For You “Marketers” | Chappaqua NY Real Estate

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The Social Media is Not Only For You “Marketers”

Social-media-marketingWith most companies nowadays running social media marketing campaigns, it’s safe to say that the majority of them aren’t running them up to their full potential. That’s because in many companies and offices, the only people actually using social media for anything at all is the marketing team. This is because of a common misconception that has to do with the speed with which social media marketing came upon the world and its unfortunate name. While it is indeed marketing, leaving it to the sole use of the marketing team is a huge waste of potential resources.

So who should be using it? Everyone.Involving and integrating the whole company into a multi-faceted social media blitz will not only increase profits, but it will open new doors to thinking outside of the box that could give your company the edge when it comes to competitiveness in your industry. So, instead of leaving it to the marketing team to come to you with a plan for integration across the boards, take the initiative and push cross-functional social media marketing upon your company.

Why Does Everyone Have To Be Involved?

Since social media has dug in firmly and is here to stay, every department in the company should be looking at how they can use it to make the whole entity run better. Ideally, this will involve representatives from each department meeting up for social media brainstorming sessions, but here are a few suggestions to help get the ball rolling.

The Sales Team sales-team

Perhaps the biggest untapped resource of social media marketing is the sales leads which are out there. You have at your disposal a targeted marketing list: either people who already like your service or product or people who like your competition’s. Go after them! In your monitoring tool, implement a smart keyword search and get new leads.

Customer Service

customer-serviceEvery B2C has a customer service department that is typically only using traditional methods to make themselves available to customers. In the future, social media outlets will be used, so start to plan ahead (or even implement them now) and you’re sure to stay at the forefront of the competition. Be certain you have a strategy, good management tools for social media and a clear plan and then see how social media can help build trust amongst your fans and followers.

Marketing and Communication Departments Marketing-Communications-Team

Because traditional media is actually quickly becoming outdated media, it’s important that the marketing and communications departments stay on top of the latest trends, but also not forget what works. Campaigns shouldn’t always solely be aimed at social media; at times there should be some integration with standard media methods. Regardless, finding the mix of the perfect combination is what it’s all about.

Social media has one huge advantage in that you can instantly get feedback on the campaigns from the target audiences (i.e. likes, shares, comments, edge rankings, etc.). Applying this to your current and future campaigns helps you build a more responsive and non-plastic approach to monitoring and adjusting your sales and reputation. Be sure you’re using keyword searches and monitoring tools to do so.

Public Relations

PR-TeamThe PR team should be closely monitoring this same feedback as well, but taking it a step further, scouring blogs, newsletters and other forms of lesser known social media to stay on top of public opinion. Having an extra set of ears to the ground will help the marketing team and vice versa, as both teams work hand in hand to create the exact public image and branding your company needs to succeed.

Purchasing Departments

If you’re in one of the larger companies that have purchasing departments, they can use research tools available online to monitor and assess the companies they will be making acquisitions from. Tracking their sales and other stats through social media is simple, fast and efficient.

Essentially, the possibilities are endless with each department and how they can use social media to boost their productivity. Consider getting the best and brightest together for some brain storming and expand upon some of the things we’ve touched on here

via blog.socialmaximizer.com

The Time-Honored Art of Splitting Wood | Chappaqua NY Realtor

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Chopping stovewood to size by hand may, at first glance, appear to be a ponderous, imprecise activity that requires little more than pure brute force. Nothing could be further from the truth, however. There is, instead, a distinct art to splitting wood. The skilled woodsman or -woman who works with — rather than against — the rounds he or she is handling can split up a lot more fuel in a given time than can some muscle-bound ox who tries to club the wood pile to smithereens. In fact, a great many experienced splitters (both chore-laden homesteaders and briefcase-laden urbanites) have honed their skills to such a point that they look upon billet-busting as one of life’s more enjoyable tasks.

Make removing ice from a windshield easier with an onion, keep a candle in the car for emergencAnd even if you’ve never split a stick, you can become an accomplished woodcracker yourself. To do so, you’ll need a few commonly available tools, the how-to basics I’ll share in this article, some rounds of ripe-for-the-opening wood — and practice.

The Tools

The instruments most often used for working up wood by hand are the single-blade splitting axe, a pair of three- to five-pound steel wedges, a middle-sized sledgehammer, and an eight-pound splitting maul. [EDITOR’S NOTE: Several manufacturers have devised variations on the standard hand tools — we’ve sized up a number of woodcracking aids in The Great Wood-Splitting Contest II]

However, it isn’t necessary to have all of these tools to begin work. I recommend starting out with a pair of wedges and that workhorse of the log-busting trade, the splitting maul (or “go-devil”). The blade of the latter implement can crack open many a billet, while the tool’s back end can be used for driving wedges. (By the way, never use the butt of an axe for pounding — its thin head may crack!)

The Technique

Probably the single most important wood-splitting rule is this: Always place your to-be-broken rounds on a short chopping block. Such a base will provide solid resistance to the blows, increasing your stroke’s penetration and guaranteeing that when your maul breaks through the billet, the tool’s blade will land in wood instead of slamming into dulling earth or stones.

Once you’ve set your piece of tree up on its chopping block, stand back with your arms extended and feet planted squarely apart. (And, for safety’s sake, be sure to wear boots and sturdy long pants!) Then line up the go-devil over its intended target, wind ‘er up and swing!

Now some folks go for pinpoint accuracy by lifting their mauls straight up overhead, while others feel they gain more power by swinging the implements back around their shoulders. And one person will let his or her top gripping hand slide up toward the splitter’s head on the upswing, but another will keep both hands clenched together in a grip similar to that used by a golfer. You’ll have to experiment until you decide just which technique is best for you.

via motherearthnews.com