Costa Rica, 2025
Lana Del Raye’s Turn the Light On has been a favorite song of my mine for nearly a year - long enough that you start to fear the shine is rubbing off the pronounced affect each listen provokes; the song slides by a little quicker, a little more unnoticed; subtle at first and then obvious. Always a sad turn of the cards.
I’m reading All the Pretty Horses, having just finished a book I really enjoyed that I can't recall at the moment. Audiobooking a Michael Lewis book on the crash of 1929, as he and many others try to establish, or at least warn against, the parallels and similarities of the boom we are experiencing now with those of studied history. For while the past doesn’t always repeat itself, there are similarities many times. Artificial intelligence is big and life changing for sure, but so were railroads, airplanes, telephones, radios, cars, televisions, indoor plumbing, the computer, internet/broadband, cell phones and hundreds of other examples - most if not all of the abovebeforementioned were viewed as so society-changing with a potential consumer market so large as to accommodate any level of investment or speculation.
Turns out history teaches us a simple fact - that two opposed things can be true at the exact same time - that the consumer market was large enough to accommodate generations of growth in the respective industries, and at the very time produce cycles of creative destruction, a pruning of the winners, a liquidation of the losers, retrenching and then growing again.
The retrenchment is painful because the bull markets and go go times last longer than they should and investors get greedy, abandon diversification, chase gains, and sometimes borrow to amplify gains. Even conservative investors can capitulate to the FOMO and reduce their strategic diversification and chase the hefty gains everyone else seems to be booking.
New barn house in SuCo in private lake community, for sale.
4000+ 4/5 bedroom barn house for sale in Kerhonkson on 30 acres.
Installed a modular pool in Narrowsburg from our company Catskill Modular Pools.
Then bam, the music stops, the musical chairs are quickly filled, the Titanic lifeboats are loaded up in a frenzied and inefficient fashion, and panic sets in then you really have a circus as people who know they’ve pushed the limits of their risk tolerance sell into the down market, accelerating it, and then it feeds into self in a vicious cycle.
That’s when it’s good to have cash on hand.
The stories that will be written about this crash and correction when it happens have been heavily foreshadowed - the big ETF’s which were supposed be a model of diversification became very top heavy with the big tech stocks to boost returns; that the market gains for the last few years were easily seen as deriving from only a few of the many stocks in the market with the rest of the market lackluster or worse.
The thing that will suck is that a lot of the people that will be hurt by a 3-5 year correction are the boomers who kept their 401k’s a little too aggressively for a little too long and now living off a sizable nest egg reduced by gyrations of the market.
Thanksgiving family gathering.
I really don’t know why I care, I just find it interesting. I can write intelligently about the market psychology like I have above because I can self-examine my own inclinations and have done enough reading about it, past and present, to put it into context. But big picture stock market risk, my over-all portfolio, even if the whole thing was disproportionately and overweighted in Technology, still leaves 60% in other things, mostly real estate.
Broadly diversified, mostly pretty liquid real estate. Some homes, some rentals, some land, some income producing, some spec homes, in multiple states, multiple markets, 15-25 real estate investments with a lot of disconnectedness among them, so there would be little contagion in a downturn. And the relationships to keep the whole thing steered well. An income coming in from business, rents and mortgages held.
I’m becoming pretty bullet-proof, which for someone who hung out on a shaky tree branch for the better part of 2 decades, that’s an interesting feeling, and even after it sort of became clear that’s where I was heading, it takes the brain a few more years to overcome the dopamine and stress that feeds the appetite of the day, and then at some point each individual who did spend decades gambling gets to decide individually if they would like to wean themselves off that mainline fix, or live in that zone of perpetual stress and anxiety that can fill lots of hours in a day in a productive and consequential fashion.
But for me, individually, I’m not looking for a ‘performative retirement’ or 3rd Chapter - I’m looking to be able to sit still, both body and mind, and let life and its ups and down pass through me as a river flows. Any activity can be approached with a need to instill it with an edge, or a rounded smooth pure vida playbook.
Speaking of Pura Vida, I’m on my way to Costa Rica, Guanacaste Region, with my wingman Eli, Lucas and two of his friends. This is my 3rd or 4th trip down and I already wish I planned more time for it.
New Ranch house in Narrowsburg NY, for sale.
It’s funny this life I’m living with these leisure expenses - as someone who has watched business and personal expenses closely for a long time, for a real reason of survival - a nag of scarcity tags every dollar I spend, every day. The feeling may linger, may pass quickly, may be hardly notable, or may be pronounced, but it’s there. I’m not the guy who doesn’t feel the sting of spending, even if I stopped really noticing how much things cost awhile ago - on a personal front, business-wise I spend intelligently and never look back at amounts that dwarf anything I'm doing personally. That’s a transition too - from scarcity spending mindset to enjoying the freedom of responsible spend-thriftiness. You hear a lot about that from retirement / financial advisors- how a life time of savings makes the twenty years of spending without income in retirement a tough mental pivot. I can see that.
Mi casa en Milford.
The amount of strategic thought, and then execution/implementation my Catskill Farms teams has undertaken over the last 3 months has been extreme, and spread out across the new talent I have both in the office and in the field. From scouting land, to making deals on that land, to the contracts and due diligence (surveys, septics, etc…), to house/land pairing, to building permits to foundations and frames and land clearing and driveways - across 3 or 4 counties. Feels good to be killing it again, at this level, with this type of precision - both client-based and construction- based. You can have all the hard-earned experience you want, but you can't even begin to leverage that well without a good team with talent and potential and attitude.
And potential is important to me because no matter how good you are at Catskill Farms, I got something new for you to learn when you begin to understand your current tasks at hand. No one literally has ever left my employ with real progress in their skill set and marketplace attractiveness.
One night in this tree house not far from playa del coco.
Stopped by to help a client Bill test out his fireplace since he was having a big dinner party and it never been fired up before - they live mostly in Southern CA. It was a masonry fireplace from top to bottom, as opposed to an 'insert'. Old school process and craftsmanship. Thing drafted and burned amazing.
Economic Trampoline
Things just feel like they are coming to an economic head - the tariffs have had time to work their way through the economy, meaning suppliers of product are becoming cognizant of the impact on their costs and are starting to pass them along; markets are bubbly and skittish with retail investors with FOMO on returns hanging onto sector heavy portfolios with brash but, at least historically speaking, not sustainable returns; immigration raids slicing construction unemployment to very low levels (increased costs); college-grads facing 8-10% unemployment; student loans; unaffordable yet still increasing health care costs; inflation; everyday costs like home insurance and car insurance escalating upwards of 25%; house sales slowing; loan defaults rising; a media beating drum of a ‘market bubble’ in AI and tech.
This scenario is taking shape as Catskill Farms gets set to enter the ring for another round of high-stakes Catskills housing speculation, which typically takes av1.5 years to 2 years wash and rinse cycle to buy, design, build and sell cycle. Just bought, or will shortly buy, 3 pieces in narrowsburg, 1 piece in Yulan, 2 pieces in Kerhonkson, 1 piece in Long Eddy/Fremont. Hedging that speculation is several ‘pay as you go’ house construction project - 1 in Catskill, 1 in Kerhonkson, 1 in Bearsville and 2 we are finishing up in New Paltz and Fremont.
We have a half-dozen+ rentals over 3 states with high quality tenants and diverse locales, mortgages I hold from past sales and a few homes that are complete and ready to sell.
So, I’m the Captain, on the bridge, looking for the icebergs I know are out there but with a destination in mind, a puzzle to solve, a Rubics Cube to spin. With a great team that makes it, if not fun, wholly engaging. And it’s not a computer screen - it’s out in the woods, with real people, with real trucks and dogs, fighting, clawing, arguing, and producing something that will be there for a very long time.
I’m in Houston Texas with three teenagers to see the Texans play the Broncos. My friend who runs Fox Sports got us field passes and great seats. We gained an hour by heading West, and it was the ‘set your clocks’ back weekend, so here I am at 4am, feeling like it’s 6. Bunch of people keep coming into the lobby looking for the Starbucks to open since their coffee clock is out of sync with the time change. 7am creeps closer, but slower The 2 hour gain won’t leave much room for the kids to argue about not getting enough sleep since 2 hours were built into their schedule. They Ubered into downtown Houston and last I saw of them on my kid-tracker was entry into a huge arcade, with a flat entrance fee rather than a pay as you go model.
I’ve been in Houston for literally 12 hours, and the mix of people down here is extreme. People from all over, working away. Raj, our Uber driver, from Pakistan, been here 11 years, lives with his cardiologist uncle. Feels poor, vibrant, private equity and immigrant labor, gas drilling, hill-less, flat, rich. The airport is 40 minutes from the Stadium - it’s sprawling. Seems like traffic would be horrible at the wrong times of the day.
I played a lot of baseball in my life, but I don’t watch a lot but I did watch the Dodgers/Bluejays since I kept hearing about absurdly compelling games and late inning heroics. This game did not disappoint - wow, the BlueJays were literally just a few outs in the 9th inning away from ending what Fox Sports cruelly called “Canada Dry” as it surveyed the lack of sports championships across all leagues over the last 30 years. And then some 2-bit 2nd basemen reached low for a sinker and swatted it over the fence to tie the game. The whole game was thrilling and went to 11 innings when another Dodger homer won it for them.
I feel like I’ve been part of a series of thrilling sports games recently - 2 high school football games and now this one. The one this past Friday in Pittston PA the final score was 7-6 after a 4 quarter battle in the trenches and (4) 4th and 1 stops in the Red Zone. Pittston is one of those old Scranton mill towns, with a grass field and a multi-decade sagging economy.
I mentioned a few posts ago that if you don’t mind losing you can actually win a lot. Trump a great example of that - for every win he is experiencing he has a half dozen losses, or as Dylan says the ‘loser now will be later to win’. Many times there are losses that lead up to the win, or sometimes what appears to be a loss just pivots through some sort of macro or micro incident to a win.
I used to lose a lot of small battles that never added up to much but were super frustrating - small claims court cases, unemployment cases, workers comps audits, HOA election drama, and many others - I even got a positive court decision in an HOA case were I represented myself (pro se) against a real attorney. But recently I’ve been tapping the top ring on a whole bunch of typical losers, bringing home one small win after another. It’s possible I’ve cleared my plate of so much interesting distractions like that big wrestling legal matchup a few years ago that I’m able to laser focus on the flood of problems that come my way in a more adjusted focused fashion. If this light-touch steering of the vessel continues to be effective, it should be a fun 24 months. Although calling it light touch is probably hard for anyone to grasp who actually sees the daily effort and intervention.
I always love when a foreign news source picks up a local story - like a new real estate destination. The BBC just did a big story on the Eric Canal. I love these stories because the writer and publication doesn’t assume a lot of information or background knowledge of the reader, so they take their time giving historic context, be in social or economic. Just brought together all the parts and pieces of my Eric Canal education journey over the last year into a readable and full form.
https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20240715-the-erie-canal-the-manmade-waterway-that-transformed-the-us
My cell phone voice texting continues to gaslight me - taking my most common text partners and purposely mis-spelling their names - Lysa, Erik, Jon. And this isn’t just a mis-spelling, Iphone tapping on the go - this is someone’s name so if you don’t fix it the recepient will text back with a question on why you are mis-spelling their name so you have to decide to take the tedious time to fix it now, or fix it later. And if this is AI of the future, where a phone can’t figure out the spelling of a name you have spelled 1500 times before, we certainly are in an AI bubble. Though I do like my chatgpt, and it has cut into my use of Google search, and you can how behomoths (Xerox, IBM, Blackberry, Kodak) once ubiquitious fade away.
Just sitting around waiting for my compound interest to do its work.
Autumn Updates
For us long-suffering entrepreneur types, our day to day productivity is typically off the charts. I’m not saying this to brag or boast, but as an observation. As I find myself procrastinating a few things here and there due to some low-simmering depression over the emotionally wrought things in my life currently, the self-critical ‘procrastination’ made me reflect on what my days are really like compared to most people, with top to bottom obligations of some sort and it’s been going on for decades.
I’m helping my son with his grammar last week for a test, and we were studying compound adjectives, and when a hyphen should be used. I’m a big English language geek so I was all in on the request for help, so see above - ‘self-critical’ and ‘emotionally wrought’ - similar but not. Both occurred before the noun they are describing so should get a hyphen, but then, like many times in the English language there is an exception, and in this case the exception is the rule doesn’t apply if one of the adjectives ends in ‘ly’, which it does in this case, hence ‘emotionally wrought’ is sans hyphen. Either of these compounds would not get a hyphen if they come after the noun, mind you, and and ‘self’ and ‘free’ always gets one, before or after a noun - self-expression, free-love, etc… Interesting stuff.
The Milford Boro bell tolls at 5am on a Sunday morning - I can hear it ever so faintly in the quiet morning. It rings hourly, 24/7/365. It does not toll to the count of the hour of the day I don’t believe - just a gong or two at each passing hour of each passing day.
To circle back to the commencing paragraph, to us busy self-employed people, tasks and to-do lists are endless, complex, and typically urgent. You typically build up a muscle to tackle them as they announce themselves, since there is another soon arriving at the station, so not a lot of space to kick the can down the road without it all piling up on you. Which makes some self-observing procrastination stand out like a mutt in a pure-breed dog show- but I think compared to a lot of lives lived, pushing off a task is par for the course, be it a chore, a repair, a will, or self-improvement initiative.
Long and meandering electric line dug up a steep embankment.
I mention it because I’m definitely procrastinating a few things more than I would like - sure I’m working a lot, learning spanish, reading a book a month, working a lot, writing a blog, keeping up my social media, showing up for my son and dog alike and dozens of similar efforts, but I’m not exercising like I’d like to be, not getting my walks and hikes in, haven’t been to my detached residential gym in a few weeks - and for someone who is aware of tasks undone, it just stands out as a symptom of something going on.
But life is chapters and not all chapters of a book can radiate with the bright sunrays of happy endings. I’m just glad I have some money in the bank, because to navigate all the stuff thrown my way recently while being taxed and uncertain financially, might actually be a bridge too far.
I can never see a survey ribbon without some sort of feeling of FOMA of what someone got that I didn't.
I mention a slight case of the blues up top not for concern, sympathy or intervention, but just as some simple self-awareness. It’s very much anti-culture to ride your ups and downs with anything other than a smile and stiff upper lip, but it’s unnecessary. Like is said in therapy and psychological circles, it’s ok not to be ok. The faking it is what gets people into trouble. I also mention it because in my life, career and journey, feeling good, bad or something in between has never been a reason for task deference or avoidance. Shit needs to get done, regardless of what is going on, and it typically needs to be done pretty well, pretty quick, and pretty comprehensively. The ability to compartmentalize and motor on is a critical skill of anyone achieving anything in any professional arena because life will be throwing some distracting stuff your way, and frankly, you need to buck up, stay dialed in, and keep the thing rolling.
That all being said, that all being true without a doubt, that over the years, there has been nothing that has derailed my focus and concentration on the Catskill Farms thing, day in day out. However, that’s not to say that I did it that well, did it with unnecessary brute force and toe-stomping/crushing. Some people with less on the line might be able to even-keel through some of the issue, but for those of us who path is actually defined by identifying, evaluating, addressing and solving real problems in real time, I think most of us could confess to approaches that while may be effective, leave some real collateral damage in its wake.
For me, I’m universally, in all areas I work and play, considered a bit of bi-polar wildman asshole. A fair description. But I’ve also built and have sustained a business that has no local peers. So could it have been done differently? Maybe, but we will never know because no one has succeeded in doing it differently - all we have are once and done johnnies who maybe wanted to be a Catskill Farms-like player, got a house or two or three built and then we never hear from them again as they slink off with dashed dreams, a harrowing few years of effort with little to show for it, and diminished bank account balances. Catskill Farms has over 300 homes dotting the country-side, carpenters with $200k in a 401k, hundreds of people and businesses nursing off our economic development tit, be it towns and their tax revenue, employees with their stability, subcontractors with their quality client, and clients and their families enjoying the fruits of our seriousness.
A lot of the criticism directed towards me is wholly fair but it’s also wholly out of context, like ants judging an elephant. What we do, on a daily basis, year after year, is attack and achieve large-scale goals with gigantic consequences in both success and failure. There is nothing we do that doesn’t have an important impact on someone.
Not sure what my point is other than when you lead from the front, when you never shy from being the point of the spear, when you are always aware of the most pressing problem to solve and personally select that one as your task of the day, that is best done not as a dull, rounded tip, but a sharpened, focused edge of concentration. Construction is a big-boy sport - and it takes a big boy mind-set to meet your goals.
I look out and around survey the battlefield, and I understand better than most that it’s not the superficial headlines or instagram partnerships or false-start collaborations that sustain us, but the real, deep, raw-hide tough relationships that have ridden this bull ride with us for decades -subs, banks, lawyers, surveyors, engineers, employees, - relationships built and sustained by trial by fire, and here’s the real kicker - built and sustained by continuing to get hard shit done day after day for years - paying bills, forging ahead, navigating real problems. There is not a person I work with -from the banker to the client to the vendor- who doesn’t believe I will find a way to solve the problem that prevents me from living up to my word. It’s atypical.
These micro-finance options for consumption are everywhere. I can’t buy anything without some option to ‘split the payment in 4’, like Karma, Affirm, Afterpay, Paypal, and now I think even Venmo the last time I paid someone using that app. It’s scary stuff - I’ve never clicked the button, so I don’t know what the application and approval process looks like, but given the financial illiteracy of most of America, I can see a lot of people getting into a lot of problems with easy micro finance like this. Grocery bills, holidays, travel, gas, back-to-school.
Ever since the death of my friend John, and the devastation he left in his wake with the lack of an estate plan, I’ve been on a mission of sorts to make sure men in my orbit have addressed their estates in a pro-active way. Maybe it’s a will, maybe it’s a trust, maybe it’s life insurance. I’ve now coached close to a dozen colleagues into a roadmap to take care of the details that can leave your legacy of good intact when you pass instead of turning people’s lives upside down taking care of the shit you never had time to. And since I run into and around with a lot of people, the long-term impact of making this a priority for me and my colleagues should be large over time. There is just really no excuse for it, especially some of these small business people, who have small businesses that could be complex to unwind, difficult to sustain, immediately in need of continued cash flow. No quicker way to diminish your life’s work than to leave it in the hands of people unfamiliar with its operations upon your passing. Wills, trusts, and life insurance. It’s not that complicated.
The 6am bell tolls. My good friend and once-upon-time college roommate Justen has a small business named Devotion to Writing, where he systematically, through courses and trips, encourages people to make a habit of writing. I often, in fact it seems always, use the comfort of writing as a recuperative tool in solving riddles of a personal and professional matter.
Business-wise, we are busy. Busier than we have been in years. That actually isn’t quite true - I’ve been busy for the last few years, but it’s been a lot of nonsense of team-rebuilding - a tedious task, an unredeeming task as it went sideways and backwards. But now we are busy in a way I enjoy, and to be honest, deserve. I’m not one to feel ‘deserved’ or ‘entitled’ - I work for what I get - but in this situation, I feel I put in the work, maybe for longer than I should’ve needed to - to get my operations team back in order, so to be firing on all cylinders alongside a full cadre of talented men each day, that feels deserved.
It appears I just booked $5m of building business, plus have at least 5 spec homes planned across 2 counties, plus we have a fully finished house that will be for sale as soon as we get electric to it, and two homes ¾ finished to complete. That gets us through 2026 profitably without a problem - just show up and execute. Considering just 3 months ago, I had slowed my business down to its slowest pace maybe ever because I had just failed so miserably to rebuild my office team after 2 years of effort, this is a pretty grand achievement.
I always like to step outside myself and look at my actions as a manager, in order to disassociate and learn from my efforts - and the big takeaway here is to be careful fixing problems with band-aids and duct-tape and coverup makeup, because the rot you introduce is real and can just prolong the inevitable shakeup. The real problem with my business, and keeping it staffed, is we don’t mess around. I expect a lot, everyday. The consequences of mis-steps are visible and transparent. I expect people to improve, regardless of their current talents - even the great can get greater.
Just bought 5 pieces of land in SuCo for just under $500k, just bought 2 pieces of land in Ulster for just under $200k, have a 4000 sq ft home on 30 acres being built in Kerhonkson, client-based homes going on in North Branch, Catskill, Kerhonkson, Saugerties and Bearsville. There are many things important when you start to move this fast, but primary among them is your attorney, and your finance guy - that’s the oil that keeps the motor humming safely.
Almost two hours of writing. Guess I was feeling peculiar.
Financial Thoughts
The funny thing about grief related to death is it appears you have several rings of fire - you have those with first ring relationships, the partners, children, parents. Then you have the 2nd ring which may not be that impacted by the death directly, but are directly impacted by the concern for those that were impacted directly, which can be as challenging as the primary ring/impact, since you aren’t the one in charge of the journey. The other trick is to remember how long this trip is for those left behind - months barely touch the wound.
I spent my Saturday, at age 55, 2.5 decades into this Catskill Farms project, running around a broad swath of the Catskills helping families envision their upstate future. Milford to Catskill to Woodstock to Mt Tremper to Milford. Right now, it looks as if I’ve booked work through 2026, and when you have that done, then you get to gauge the extent of the peripheral risk you want to take - it’s not ‘house money’ but the risk ratio is much diminished.
We also have time on our side these days - there is a very low risk related to ‘timing’ - if things take a little longer to sell, it’s not killing us, though it does look like I’ll be engaged in a little borrowing to complete these homes for the first time in a few years. I have one house, Ranch 73, that has been sitting complete for nearly 7 months as I wait for electric to the site (which seems to be gaining traction now) - just sitting there, empty, finished, fully funded, nearly 4/5ths of a million dollars. That’s a lot of money to have tied up, but then again it’s sort of nice to have that diversified investment as the frothy stock market is worrisome to anyone with a brain.
Speaking of the stock market, I have what I thought was a conservative allocation into a dividend bearing etf labeled SCHD - it buys and allocates across non-technology sectors with a long history of principal appreciation and strong dividends payouts - a somewhat defensive position since it shies away from the concentrated gains of the Fabulous Seven (meta, amazon, apple, nvidia, microsoft, alphabet, Tesla) - 7 stocks that have led to a 34% concentration of these holdings in the the S&P 500 - 7 stocks make up 34% of an index that is made up of 500 stocks. It’s not the way it’s supposed to be, but the manager of these funds have no choice but to juice their returns with these holdings.
So the SCHD was intended to be defensive and a counter to the concentration mania, but it wasn’t supposed to be a real dog, returning just 2% in a market where the simple S&P returned 15%. It’s the type of return that pushes even conservatively-minded investors to take more risk. The S&P has returned 250% over the last 10 years.
Though, on the other hand, it’s this type of illogic where a broadly diversified portfolio returns nothing is a red flag of tulip mania mentality in the market in general. It’s when conservative investors capitulate and start chasing frothy returns. Just by the nature of my real estate activities, I’m pretty diversified; I’d hate have 90% of my wealth tied up in the stock market, as money managers can’t sit on the sidelines but know they are playing a dangerous game of Russian Roulette, when a lot of people won’t find chairs once the music stops. According to one graph I just reviewed, the other 494 stocks in the S&P 500 returned -2% with earnings down -8% since 2021. Frightening, when you now add in tariffs.
The micro finance hacks I keep seeing are more and more cra-cra - finance your vacation, finance your airbnb, finance your winter gear shopping cart, finance your holidays, finance your gifts - spread the purchase out over 4 easy micro-financed payments. I’ve never done it so I don’t really know the penalties for missing a payment or failing to pay, but I’m sure it’s onerous. One of the concerns is these type of finance arrangements don’t show up in the overall reporting of credit usage by Americans, so the indebtedness of the typical American may be understated- but I wonder how delinquencies get addressed - can you report a bad debt to the credit agencies if you have reported the debt in when it was originated? Probably.
The Chime advertisement I just watched is probably one of the stupidest things I’ve seen in awhile. It’s asking ‘why should i have to wait for my paycheck until the money hits my account on friday?” “Why shouldn’t I have it now?” Umm, it’s called a payroll cycle and if you can’t wait on a payroll cycle, you probably aren’t doing a great job with your money, since now that you’ve accelerated your payday a day or two, that little hack is gone - it’s not like you can accelerate it further - it’s now baked in just like it was, now it’s a Tuesday instead of a Thursday, and I would guess you are paying for the privilege.
With all the stupidity in America and its money, it’s becoming abundantly clear that to stand out, you only have to do a few simple things right - show up, stay off your phone, stay out of debt and have a reasonable attitude. The bar to success has never been lower.
