June Musings
(note, this was written a few days ago, never finished, and sort of rambling)
The immigration crackdown is fascinating. I use the word fascinating, which one could object to, since it neither relays rage or whole-hearted approval, the two most common responses these days to anything political.
The raids hit close to home the other day with an ICE action in Honesdale, a town neighboring ours. I wonder how and why they chose a little pizzeria in the middle of nowhere to police. The organizational effort being applied to these actions is impressive, or maybe not - take 20 heavily armed masked para-military in war machines and go surround a pizzeria located on a small main street.
On the job fronts, I haven’t heard from any of my subcontractors any noise about raids, men not showing up, etc… and I haven’t heard any news about any of this in the mid-Hudson Valley. I do see on my social media a lot of ‘raids’ and irate community members, but when your feed starts to flood on a topic, that’s when you need to be most aware of the nature of social media - that they feed you what interests you, and the correlation between your perception of what’s going on (based on the frequent feed stories) and what is really going on can quickly diverge.
I’m not surprised the local cops and the state police are helping out - these guys love to get the juices flowing with some over-the-top policing - more fun than pulling over teenagers coasting through a stop sign.
If Trump wouldn’t be his own worst enemy, he could be riding his successful border shutdown program to elite presidential status - it’s impressive and shows how easily a serious-minded person on the subject can achieve results. I get how we are sending a message - if you aren’t here legally, don’t come - that makes sense. That there is a potential cost to coming here illegally, and it’s not a fun price to pay. On the other hand, the individual cases of families being separated, of people who have lived here a long time being deported to who knows where, that’s hard to feel some empathy for. But wishy washy policy makes for wishy washy results.
On the other hand, the alternative reality is these people do a lot of work in this country, so like tariffs, there is going to be a lag before the true cost of the effort is known. I don’t know enough about the tariffs to understand if what we are doing is long overdue and fair, but I do know it sure seems hard not to believe it’s going to raise costs a lot (and add uncertainty and delay into a lot of planning). But on the immigration front, I really don’t know how you replace hundreds of thousands of hard-working, reasonably paid people - less workers, higher rates of pay, higher cost to produce, higher cost to consumer.
I’m sure you all have seen the story of the mid-50’s guy in Nambia on a safari who went outside his tent to take a squirt and got eaten by a lion. Not cool. I’m sure it doesn’t happen much, but still - it’s like a shark attack, doesn’t have to happen a lot in order for it to resonate on a deep level, far outpacing the likelihood of it happening.
We are building 3 homes right now - 2 in Sullivan County and one in New Paltz. I have zero spec homes under construction. This is the lowest risk positioning my company has ever seen. It’s a natural denouement of sorts, an unplanned slowdown, that seems necessary and overdue in retrospect. A slowdown caused by me being tired of the hamster wheel of buy, build, sell, rinse, repeat: of not having the qualified staff to get it done: of land being expensive and hard to find, though I am seeing a slowdown in the liquidity of land, which should naturally bring down the price a bit.
It’s the last day of school in PA, perhaps the earliest ever release from school year. Not sure why, but it is. It’s a sunny perfect warm day after weeks if not months of shitty weather, so that’s fun. Lucas has around 25 kids over - I said ‘how many people are coming over?’ and he said ‘not many’ but then in the next utterance said, ‘hey, you mind ordering 6 large pizzas?’ Reminds me of how clueless I was when my front lobe was undeveloped.
My pickleball court construction is sitting there as a large concrete pad, curing, and waiting on the court painter who of course is behind like everyone cause of all the rain in May. Saturdays have been a mess in general - it’s been months since we had a nice, seasonally appropriate weather environment on a Saturday. At least it’s not 50 degrees anymore. After a long cold winter, the long cold wet ‘spring’ was dispiriting. I think the JV baseball team had 2 rainouts for every game played.
High school graduation is today, and then Sunday if today’s weather looks iffy. They like to do it outside so have to be flexible with the scheduling.
I’ve been exercising regularly now that the weather has changed, walking and biking and lifting lightly. What’s been good is I’ve avoided any injuries which kept occurring because I’m used to continuing to push my limits and gain strength, leading to over-done-it syndrome and some lagging injury, but now I’m more careful to grow any strength training very slowly and aim as much for maintenance as to quick strength building. For 55, I’m doing pretty good - it’s getting close to the age where it really starts to show who’s been taking care of themselves and had an eye towards fitness and health, and those who don’t. At 55+, you can really look worn out, overweight, and over-aged and there is a definite divergence of men at this age as to how they look, act and feel. You can’t discount genetics in this whole scheme of things, but that’s only best leveraged with an accompanying scheme of eye on the ball healthy eating and living.
I put away the bottle of beer and booze almost two years ago now after a lifetime of low-simmering daily beer or drink, and some serious binging. I think it had on-the-margins ‘too much’ over the years, but not really, in the whole scheme of things. A lot of it was just out of habit, - order that instead of this out of habit - so a lot of the drinking was just being mindful and intentional, sort of like how you should behave with money - anything done without thought or awareness can overtime work against you. I think I commented a few times how I felt pretty cheated when the pounds didn’t just fall off after cutting out all those empty calories but it turns out substituting cookies and tastycakes for a beer is a one step forward one step back type of dance.
I handed out 10 $1250 scholarships the other day to 10 Delaware Valley High School seniors the other night, for a financial literacy seminar and scholarship I developed through a small non-profit I fund and run. Stay out of debt, don’t buy shit you can’t afford, have a budget and watch out for student loans. I reviewed 21 applications and got a lot of insight into high school kids these days. By any measure, I’m generous: with my time, insights, money and attention. I think any real generous person never really feels that way, because by positioning yourself as a giver, you always get a lot more requests than you can possible grant.
Been Cold and Rainy in the NorthEast
It’s not going to come as much of a surprise to those in the Northeast about my first topic of conversation - it’s been cold, and it’s been wet. 50’s, windy, and a lot of rain. Memorial Day was punctuated by a circling cold front that dropped showers throughout the day. Today, Monday, it appears that maybe we’ve turned the corner into seasonality.
I can tell it’s been raining not so much by an interruption in construction activities, but in my leisure - no community bike rides in 2 weeks (typically Mountain Bike Mondays and Road Ride Thursdays), no pickleball, hard to sneak a walk in, my pool can’t get above 60 degrees, my garden is wilting and yawning for the sun, sweaters still lay about the house, the house heat keeps kicking on.
I’ve said it a few times this weekend, and I don’t know if it’s a sign of getting older, but I keep finding myself repeating - “Glad I’m not camping this weekend”. I get why I’m thinking it: lots of camping on the weekends up here on the Delaware River Valley, and it’s been chilly, and wet, so less than optimal for an activity that can counterintuitively raise the stress levels rather than reach a state of ‘nature calm’ - let’s just take everyone out of their element, give them poor wifi, substandard shelter, damp clothes, and a lot of new skills to learn and have a great weekend. I don’t know why I’m thinking about camping, and the near miss of not camping this weekend, since I don’t really camp. Maybe I’ve camped 20 times in my 40 years of camping age range.
My new project on my property, the pickleball court, is on the home stretch (not to mix sports analogies). Garden is planted, pool is up and running, yard is dethatched and green, garage cleaned out, and the big landscaped bed weeded.
Found this 1972 classic while organizing my garage.
I’ve ruminated before, I don’t think on these pages, but before in my mind, about the unfairness of the tax system when it comes to single earners rather than married filing jointly. Sure, when both adults are working, and the household income is higher because of it, sure, that makes sense to offer a higher level income for certain tax rates and breaks. But there’s lots of situations in modern family life where a single earner has a family, has all the expenses of a household, and the tax code treats them as if life is cheaper as a single, which is hardly the case. In fact, in many situations, spreading the costs of running a household over 1 person is more expensive than for more than one. There are economies of scale to everything from dinner prep to laundry to heating the house.
For instance, I own a home, raise a kid, have 2 cars, a pet, and everything else that one needs to run a household including utilities, insurance, house maintenance, etc..., there’s only one income, I’m not married, and I’m taxed like somehow my life is cheaper to operate than a married couple. Seems to me there should be a caveat in there somewhere - like if only one person works in a married arrangement, why should they get dual income credits? Currently a married household gets a ceiling of $500k for joint filers and a single person $250k. That $250k difference results in $80k more taxes withheld for the single person household.
And similarly for single earners, if they have kids, or own a house, or some other real expense criteria, you should get the lower tax rates (or more accurately, higher income level ceilings). It should be less about your marriage status, and more about your life obligations - like does your mortgage, real estate taxes, child/support and alimony, and perhaps a few other inputs add up to a certain percentage, and if so, you get a higher ceiling. I already see a few flaws in my plan, but the tax code is complicated so I’m sure they could figure it out. Also seems unfair that high costs states and areas get the same federal ceilings as low cost states, since it’s hardly unfair to argue that $200k in Kansas is a lot different than $200k in Boston. Seems unfair that single-earner households - arguably operating on less stable footings than a dual income family since any inability of the single earner immediately threatens the whole structure -seems unfair at the assumption that running a life as a single person is 50% cheaper than as a married couple. Though who knows - maybe when the idea was introduced, it was thought to be a motivator to get married?
Our house we are building in Parksville.
The SALT tax debate at the federal level has been interesting to watch, as Mid-Atlantic states, particularly NJ, NY, CT and MA, dig in to restore a higher deductibility of state and local taxes from federal tax obligations. With real estate tax bills easily reaching $20k or a lot more in many places, the limit of $10,000 passed in 2017 was a real and true financial blow to many families. Sure, many could afford it, but many affluent families live far beyond their means, so a new $10k, 20k, $50k tax can be a big deal. $45k in real estate taxes deducted off your fed return - here’s the math - $45k deduction, 37% tax bracket - was a real $20k tax savings, but at $10k cap, is now a $4k tax savings. A $16k out of pocket swing. Chump change to some, a real hit to others as that amount is 2 car payments, 50% of room and board, the cost of raising a kid for a year. So anyways, they are holding up the big beautiful spending bill because of this issue, and I’m really not surprised - it was a big deal when it was passed, and it’s a big deal now.
New long overdue railing heading down to the pool -
Turns out for ‘pass-thru entity’ people - those with C corps, S corps, LLC’s etc - the law in 2017 introduced a lot of changes, but when push came to shove, there were new loopholes -intentional or not no one really knows - that resulted in my tax bill (nearing 40-45% for the majority of my income) more or less the same - calculated a lot different with credits and debits being pulled from new places, but in the end, about the same owed. The same can’t be said for W2 workers, or those without the flexibility of business deductions - the W2 workers, as always the case, have nowhere to hide from tax code changes.
It’s been raining but we keep cooking along, with 4 homes under construction and moving at a quick pace. Being less busy, and being highly skilled at my job, I’ve found my tangible effectiveness notching upwards - I mean, I’m always pretty effective, but when you are drinking through the fire hose of productivity challenges cause you are building a dozen houses at a time, the effectiveness gets watered down if only because there are more problems to solve, your time to solve them remains the same, so your effort and attention per problem is reduced. Allowing time to zero in and dedicate the time to each, leveraging a lot of knowledge and experience, makes most problem fixes a lot more certain.
A few examples of sticky situations that only good and effective strategy and communications can counter - Alps Airbnb host trying to charge us $2k for a cracked picture window, local electric company asking me to come 2 miles for electric service rather than tapping the transformer 200 yards away, a few employment related matters were resolved in my favor, a successful appeal of the assessment levels of my homes in Fremont NY saving my families up there a bunch of money on their annual taxes (as well as preserving their resale levels since every dollar in annual real estate taxes is a blow to the ultimate value of a home), - there were a bunch more but I can’t think of them. I think one thing that is happening for sure is I’m just walking away, or quickly resolving, tasks and situations that may have principle at stake, but not business advantage. Letting some of that go can save a lot of mental resources and have the time there just really is no point to chasing the principle - to prove what, to whom, exactly?
I handed out (10) $1250 scholarships for Delaware Valley High School seniors for a scholarship I titled EZ Money - A financial literacy seminar. They had to apply, they had to write an essay and they had to attend a 2 hour seminar I led, which I used up most of my time talking about debt, and how to avoid it. And next Wednesday I present the funds at scholarship night. We had 21 applicants for 10 slots, which the scholarship coordinator at the school thought was pretty awesome especially since of all the strings attached to the award. To me, it speaks to the thirst for real financial guidance that people just don't have access to.
Resales, and the French
It’s a rare Catskill Farms resale property that doesn’t sell quickly, and for full price. The most recent example is a house we designed and built outside Narrowsburg NY overlooking the Delaware River. This modern Ranch, one that I dreamed up to mirror the shape of the bend in the Delaware River it overlooks, is one of the most unique homes in SuCo, if not the Hudson Valley. And priced at $1.5m, with a new studio/garage; a fairer price could not be had for this.
The only reason it is selling for $1.5m instead of $2.9m is because of the affordability of our builds, the vertical integration of our efforts, the efficiency of our program. I think they have less than a million invested in this property, which is just an absurdity on the face of it.
One reason we always live to fight another day is because we are always offering value, which we can do because I know my business and the markets about as well as someone can know these things, learned through lots of effort, lots of study, lots of curiosity and lots of sometimes costly experimentation.
Over and over and over for decades we have built homes, sold homes, had those homes resold, and repeated to the benefit of a wide range of Sullivan County businesses. Needle-moving impacts. Our aggregate macro and micro economic impacts are gigantic and game-changing, not just for the people who reside in the homes, but for the communities in which these homes exist.
I was thinking about the French, and our recent trip to the Alps, and I was remembering the 3 different run-ins I had with some French men - 1, in the cafeteria on top of one of the ski mountains where I was getting some cheese and bread and olives and waiting in line to pay, and someone’s shouting about something but because I don’t speak french I’m not paying much mind but then I realize it’s directed at me and it’s because my plate needs to be weighed to be priced right. Now I was definitely in the inadvertent wrong - frankly never occurred to me - but the cost of a mozzarella stick I’m not sure rose to the level his voice inferred.
The 2nd was on the slopes, when a guy in front of me - and we weren’t going fast, sort of cut me off at low speeds - at the edge of a run, where I was out of horizontal space, and our skis tangle just minorly and I believe he might have quickly fallen and popped right back up, and come up fighting and yelling and pushed me to the ground. I was in the Alps, and I was a bit shocked, so I didn’t have much of a reaction even to the push, but he certainly thought it was the end of the world.
And 3rd, at our ski slope condo, a large picture window had a crack in it, when we arrived, which you just assume everyone knows about, but I guess he didn’t and tried to blame us for it to the tune of nearly $2000. One, it sucks to be blamed for something you didn’t do - it happens all the time in construction where someone you can’t identify did something, and you can either go around blaming everyone, or just eat the cost and preserve the team. This was especially obnoxious because just by accident I snapped a time stamped photo at 5:34pm of the mountain views and that picture happened to capture the crack coincidentally. We had only checked in at 5:15pm - so I get the guy can suspect us since he clearly missed the defect (or more likely, the cleaning company didn’t report it, or actually did it), but with that tight window - we arrive, literally immediately crack the window, and take a picture to prove it was already there - but with that tight window, any self-respecting host has to admit that’s a pretty tight timeline for us to be working under, like the unlikely 3 shots from Oswald’s rifle. Anyway, AirBnb rejected his demand for money after an investigation.
United was responsible for a delayed bag, which forced my wingman Eli to buy head to toe ski gear on the slopes of a famous resort, which I can’t imagine there is a more expensive way to buy ski gear. $1800 of ski jackets, pants, long john, etc…., which United reimbursed with a pretty straight-forward process. I guess maybe first class passengers get better treatment, but even still it was amazingly efficient, communicative and in the end, took full responsibility.
So, I was facing literally $3500 of extra charges, but needled my way through them at no cost.
I’m sort of winning on all these types of fronts these days, with lots of bandwidth to evaluate problems, deploy actions or communications, and swagger towards successful resolution. You can’t do that when you got too much on your plate and don’t have the mature support around you. It’s frankly just too much to ask of even a veteran business-owner. I think it’s a measure of the successful recalibration I’m seeking, that sweet spot of busy - enough to be profitable, not too much to be harried and chained to the stress.
Monday, the little Ranch sells, in Narrowsburg, and that finishes off a 3 house project on Wood Oak Drive. I bought those lots when they came on the market, and my only demand was that I get all 3, even if I have to pay a little more to make it happen, because few people care more about the impact on neighbors than I do, especially if they are my home, but generally also. I've seen so many poorly planned homes that negatively impact, sometimes to a big degree, the peace and value of a neighboring property. Many times, just some consideration, knowledge and spending a little money would have prevented the whole drama.
PanAmerican road trip being planned.
Alps, veni vidi vici
Well, The Alps came and went. We arrived with a gamble that the end of season - literally, the end - would provide sufficient snow cover for a worthwhile ski getaway for me, my 27 yr old nephew and his 30 yr old brother. From our 4th floor, 3 bedroom ‘penthouse’ a few kilometers up hill from Meribel Center, we could survey the mostly snowless trails in the Meribel Valley.
The Three Valleys (Tre Valles) is the largest ski area in the world, combining 3 resorts/mountains, into one, navigable by crossing the peaks from one to another - Courchevel, Meribel, and Val Thorens. With parts of Val Thorens sitting at over 3000 kilometers, even late in the season the mountain provides plenty of skiable surface. From what I read, this April was at 62% of normal snow cover, so while it was still skiable, it was certainly the end of the season with many trails and lifts closed (still plenty open) and a lot of stores and restaurants shut for the season.
The temperatures were into the 40 and 50’s. I learned a trick about converting Celsius - take the celsius number, double it, and add 30 and that’s approximately the Fahrenheit temp. Problem is that doesn’t work for negative numbers right - like -2 Celsius is what? How do you double -2? I’d have to ask my son, though turns out he’s not in competition for any math awards so it’s hard to see how asking him would help.
The 3 Valleys, just about exactly 2 hours outside of Geneva on the French side, was clear the season was ending. Without significant snow fall for a month, the wind down, close out efforts of the stores that remained open were phoning it in at best. The working transients that serve in the Alps in the winter and migrate to the Riveria in the Summer was on the minds of many.
Then came, pretty much without warning, the largest storm of the year, dropping 3’-6’ of snow throughout the Alps, transforming spring back to winter, and even the large groundhog like marmots seemed like wtf after they burrowed their way up and out of the snow cover. There was this group of three that hung out in the sun under a lift for the longest while, trying to get their game plan in place.
This is the type of storm that closed down ski resorts, with an end of season lack of staff, lack of supplies, lack of energy. I guess it was a world-wide story first for the snow and then for the 5 of 5 avalanche risk that closed the resorts the first day post storm, and had the high peaks and valley to valley crossing closed the 2nd day. In other parts of the Alps, like Zermet, they are still digging out and I’m not sure any skiing was had since there was widespread electrical outages, road closures and even bridge collapses. But in our isolated valley we were skiing the day after in bright blue skies, warm temps and soft snow. It just snowed and snowed and snowed. And then there was a quick window of perfect skiing before the long sunny days turned the new snow into rapidly thinning sticky mush.
I ended up getting a high altitude high alcohol good beer buzz for the first time since April 2023 at an apres ski slope side party that I skied into after an exhilarating day on the slopes. The sun was too warm, the vibe too good, the beer too strong. End of season moment. Tip - it’s hard to ski when intoxicated. Luckily I didn’t have far to go, and luckily when intoxicated, you don’t care too much about how long it takes or the trouble getting there.
This season the skiing took me to Killington VT, Steamboat Springs CO and the 3 Valleys in the France. That’s about double what I typically do in a year, and with the runs being so long in France, the total skied must easily exceed my yearly average, and I think the results were starting to show in my abilities. One nice thing about skiing is that you build from year to year, like riding a bike or something similar, not like golf where any pause results in immediate regression. I guess otherwise skiing really wouldn’t be a thing for most people since they don’t go a whole lot - a few times a year.
Well, that wraps up a lot of travel over the last 6 months, starting with Costa Rica in November, St Petes over New Years, Killington, Steamboat and now France. And France last June, and Costa Rica last April. And the Vanderbilt Mansion in Asheville NC last Christmas. Dozen trips to NYC, one to Martha’s Vineyard, and that’s without really even thinking about it too hard.
Back on the home front, the new team crushed it and we are calibrated exactly right in talent and workload to have a terrific year from a few different vantages. I’m hoping the availability of land starts to straighten out because while it was a good thing to force me to personally slow it down, I do need access to land to keep the ship moving, even at slower speeds. I feel like I’m on the tip of the bow, looking out over the ocean, trying to spot the wave to ride or avoid.
I spent some time on the free of business operational details and it got me thinking about what a crazy trip the last 5 years has been, and that I sailed through quite the storm, and anyone along for the ride - employee, client, family - benefited from my efforts, sometimes in the most extreme and personal fashion. That’s the joy of small business - you can make an impact on lives, and with building shelter in particular, you really can make a long and lasting impact. My homes will be here a lot longer than I will be.
I watched the Bob Dylan movie on the way to France and Hangover 1 on the way home.
My nephew and I binged White Lotus, Season 3 on our off days, and that was fun. I definitely had a crush on Mook until I realized how famous and hot she is and totally out of my league (for now).
