All of my robocalls are people offering to buy my debt and give me a better interest rate.
Basically, you can either find a bank or broker that’s willing to do a jumbo mortgage, or you can go private. It’s a little easier to get jumbo now than it was some years ago, but a lot of banks won’t talk to you about them.
Nothing I’ve looked at in the last decade here would fit into a regular mortgage. A mid-sized 2BR in our neighborhood would be ~800k minimum. More likely ~1.2MM.
Even better, a lot of places are more than even a jumbo mortgage. Those condos are almost always paid for in cash. The cash itself either comes from personal wealth or private lending one step removed.
I’ve heard a lot of mentions over the years of private lending, is this moreso “my rich relatives” or “someone who people know that is particularly interested in lending money for these properties because they know how to manage it and make money if I go belly up on the deal” type of deals?
Obviously the former can happen but I’m wondering more if people mostly mean something like the latter.
It means you get money from a person or group of people who are most likely real estate investors. You’re going to have to pay them back according to terms that do not have the same kinds of restrictions that mortgages have.
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From all the news I’ve seen, I could have sworn most of the cash came from money laundering and foreign crime.
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Throw in a bit of tax evasion while you’re at it.
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Yep. It’s pretty common to use property and cars in tax evasion schemes. Business owners here will regularly register their personal vehicles as business vehicles to claim a percentage of their petrol and registration against tax, for example.
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Of course, the issue can be more subtle than that. If you legitimately use your vehicle, personal or otherwise, for business purposes, you can legitimately deduct some of its expenses as a business expense. I wouldn’t consider that evasion, per se, so long as the amount you’re deducting is the amount you actually spent on business-related expenses. For example, if you’re a traveling salesman, it’s entirely reasonable to claim your petrol/gas expenses during your business trips as business expenses.
I’m mostly talking about more egregious stuff, like claiming the “business trip” you’re taking with your secretary that you’re having an affair with as a business expense on your taxes… or other more “creative” ways of hiding money.
Of course! But a lot of people just claim the max possible regardless of usage. And it was just the first example that came to mind, albeit a minor one - it’s also not uncommon to do things like buying a ton of stuff in EOFY sales, claiming them at full MSRP as a business expense against tax, and then reselling them, or just buying them as personal items and claiming them. Buying properties as “Business properties”, then renting them out. There’s a lot of tax schemes out there that aren’t even strictly illegal, just super shifty.
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Ah, I see what you mean… Yeah. Fudging the numbers to your benefit of things that, on the surface, appear to be legitimate is definitely something I have a huge issue with. And it’s something I strained to be careful with (but I like to think of myself as a pretty honest individual) back when I was still married and my then wife ran her business out of our house. We could legally expense a percentage of some household expenses (utilities, maintenance, etc.) as business expenses, but we worked with our accountant to make sure we were as legit as possible… and even then, we were trying to be extra safe due to the high risk of audit.
People don’t even bother answering the phone anymore.
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Hey kids, you want to shutdown the system? Infest it with bots.
#2020TwitterPlague
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it blows my mind that with this extent of egarbage I still get physical spam mail
I only answer the phone for people I have in my contact list and not even all of them.
Yesterday I got a call from an actual person who was returning a call from my phone number. Of course their number had the same first six digits as mine. As for why you’d call back the number that robocalled you I have no idea.
You can just spoof a phone number; does callerID even matter anymore?
Since I no longer live in the mid-Hudson-valley, I just auto-block any phone number from that entire area code.
Reply All is an excellent podcast. If you’re in this forum, you should listen to it.
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We just have to start by making the default for all phones be that incoming calls automatically go to voicemail if they aren’t on a whitelist (your personal contact list). How many people do you actually know? It will be pretty hard for a robocaller to guess/know a whitelisted number to spoof for each individual person they are trying to spam.
Not even. It’s how many people do I actually know who would call my phone number instead of using a modern means of communication?
That would just mean a ton of voicemails I’d never bother listening to to see if any are legit. It would be functionally equivalent to blocking said calls entirely.
Exactly anyone over about say 60.
Also anyone who works for a large bank, even ops guys from large banks seem to landline all day.