John T. Reed’s news blog

Mr. Reed, congratulations on deciding to write a new book, especially one that challenges your previously-held beliefs. I would recommend that you name your book Movin’ On Up. However, I take issue with your newfound book's premise, namely for the following reasons: 1. Transaction costs: Loan fees, RE broker commissions, and closing costs. That would be at least a 7% loss every time one sells and buys. That’s an aggregate 35% loss over one’s lifetime if there are 5 transactions, using your every 7 years for 40 years strategy.  1.a. This can be ameliorated by using a lower-commission brokerage such as Redfin, becoming an RE salesman/broker yourself (which might be worthwhile if this...

Copyright by John T. ReedI welcome intellectually-honest debate. It is one of my favorite ways to test my theories and learn.  That is the way we were trained at Harvard Business School where all lessons are taught by the case method and my wife and I got our MBA's. When Harvard Business School was founded in 1908, it was modeled after Harvard Law School, which also uses the case method of instruction.. https://www.johntreed.com/collections/how-to-spot-dishonest-arguments-and-keep-your-own-thinking-straight In college, I was on the debate team during my freshman year. Retired general and unsuccessful presidential candidate Wesley Clark was on that debate team as well. He was my “Table...

Copyright by John T. ReedI welcome intellectually-honest debate. It is one of my favorite ways to test my theories and learn.  That is the way we were trained at Harvard Business School where all lessons are taught by the case method and my wife and I got our MBA's. When Harvard Business School was founded in 1908, it was modeled after Harvard Law School, which also uses the case method of instruction. In college, I was on the debate team during my freshman year. Retired general and unsuccessful presidential candidate Wesley Clark was on that debate team as well. He...

In the course of writing my principal residence book I made a discovery that I did not realize before.   The path I took was to buy apartment buildings as fast as I could starting when I was 22. The path I SHOULD have taken was to buy only principal residences one at a time and devoted the down payment money and time I devoted to dealing with rentals to my principal residence instead. The principal residence would have take infinitely less of my time. I would have been sued about real estate not at all. I would have avoided a...

Interesting column by Andy Kessler in the WSJ on 6/1/20. I will just riff on the same subject. Covid 19 has been what I call an unethical experiment. By that I mean that you would never shut down the nation to see what would happen. But for various reasons, the experiment has been launched and is ongoing. Need structural change in education One of the structural changes that may result is extreme change in the eduction establishment from Head Start to K-12 to college. Extreme change that will make education more cost effective and that will greatly reduce the pay,...