Home Loans Made Between Jan. 1, '03 & Dec. 31, '07

There have been so many laws passed recently that it's getting pretty confusing. Something happened to us the other day though, that brought a recent California law into focus.

A young couple asked to see one of our rentals saying that they only had a week to move. There was a notice on the door giving them seven days to move out because the lender was foreclosing. The landlord / owner had dropped out of sight and would not return their phone calls pleading for help.

So not only do they have to move right away but they likely will not get their deposit back. These tenants had no idea the owner was not making his mortgage payments and that the house was sliding into default.

The Perata/Bass Mortgage Relief Bill went into effect on 8 July this year here in CA and is meant exactly for this type of situation so if you are a landlord (or a tenant), here are four major provisions of the bill (it applies only to loans made in the title above and all provisions went into effect on 8 Sept.):

1. lenders must contact owners IN ADVANCE to explore options to avoid foreclosure

2. tenants will get a notice once the notice of sale has been posted on a property

3. tenants now have 60 days rather than 30 before eviction

4. locals (our HOA?) can levy fines of up to $1,000 on the lender if they don't maintain a vacated property that has been foreclosed upon by fixing things within 30 days. That might include damage by trespassers or squatters for example.

If you are a tenant or a landlord you can take steps now to comply with this law.

Saving Water

Our general manager Jamie Lea recently urged us all to conserve water because our sewer ponds had reached their designed capacity. Evidently things are in the works to expand or improve them but until that happens we all need to run less water down the drain and I'd like to hear more ideas of how to do that from readers.

Here's one I saw recently to get the ball rolling:

When running the tub or shower to get warm water, put a plastic bucket under the stream and collect the water until it is hot enough for your use. The saved water can be used on plants, for your pets, or for an endless list of other things.

We've heard that tubs use more water than showers so if you try this in a tub you probably will collect more than I did when I tried this in the shower. We have one of those limiter shower heads that restricts the flow to 1.5 gpm so I maybe got a gallon before it turned hot.

And of course the head is high up on the shower wall so much was missed but if everybody did that in our county that's what, 45,000 gallons a day?

Anyway, I'd like to hear from you. There are plenty of easy, practical things each of us can do to conserve water.

Editor

The Problems with Joe

By now most of us have learned that he's not really a licensed plumber, that his real name isn't Joe, and that he hasn't paid some of his state income taxes; this latter being a little bit embarassing given that he was accusing Obama of raising his taxes.

The accusation itself is a little shakey, too; he evidently wanted to buy a plumbing business that apparently would cost more than the $250,000 tax "floor" that Obama is proposing and somehow is confused that he would be paying taxes on that purchase. But as we all painfully know, income tax is based on just that __ income. And net income at that, meaning what you take in less your expenses in the case of a business.

To buy a business for say, $500,000 and take home after all the overhead costs $500,000 in the same year is an investor's dream and even if Joe had borrowed to do this, he'd be able to pay off a vast majority of the loan in the first year. Darned few people can ever hope to do something that fantastical. T. Boone Pickens or Warren Buffet maybe but not the average Joe.

A lunch room conversation brought up a more bothersome speculation, though: was Joe "planted" by McCain's team to embarass Obama and score votes for McCain? Given some of the just plain ugly tactics seen lately by regional GOP campaign teams (in San Bernadino County Obama was pictured on a $10 food stamp holding a bucket of fried chicken, a rack of barbequed ribs, and a watermelon), I wonder if the suspicion that some wild-hair Republican in Joe's GOP area may have influenced Joe to do this.

Stay tuned.

Writers & Articles Wanted

I have been filling in this slow time in real estate with substitute teaching (many stories there!) and am unable to meet my original goal of one story a day. Thus I wonder if any of you readers would be interested in contributing short articles to this blog . . . humor, local activities, human interest, animals, etc. The last stat counter report showed 114 pageloads so you know what you like to read. Just email the material and I'll take it from there.

Bruce Batchelder, Editor

Remember Cold Fusion? Well . . .

This is Dr. Randell Mills, the CEO of BlackLight Power in Cranbury, NJ. Mina Kimes on CNNMoney.com this morning reports that this entrepreneur with $60 million in venture funding says he's found an endless source of cheap energy. Trouble is, it violates the laws of quantum physics.

Here is some of what she reported:

Such skepticism doesn't daunt Dr. Randell Mills, a Harvard-trained physician and founder of BlackLight, who recently claimed that he has created a working fuel cell using the world's most pervasive element: the hydrogen found in water.

"This is no longer an academic argument," Mills, 50, insists. "It's proven technology, and we're going to commercialize it as quickly as possible."

For the first time in his company's 19 years of persistent trial and error, Mills says he has a market-ready product: a fuel cell that produces a chemical reaction to alter hydrogen atoms. The fuel cell releases heat that turns water into steam, which drives electric turbines.

The working models in his lab generate 50 kilowatts of electricity - enough to power six or seven houses. But these, Mills says, can be scaled to drive a large, electric power plant. The inventor claims this electricity will cost less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour, which compares to a national average of 8.9 cents.

While his business has been working on the "BlackLight Process" since its inception almost two decades ago, Mills developed the patented cocktail that enables the reaction - a solid fuel made of hydrogen and a sodium hydride catalyst - only a year ago. (He recently posted instructions on the company's Web site, blacklightpower.com). Now that the device is ready for commercialization, he says, BlackLight is negotiating with several utilities and architecture and engineering firms, but he won't disclose any partners' names until the deals are finalized.

(Editor): I'm hardly the one to ask about physics ___ particle,quantum, or basic. But the idea that he is beyond the conceptual stage and now at the point of going commercial with this caught my eye. Note that he hopes to have one or more systems in place by Fall 2009. I think it is particularly significant that he plans these fuel cells for power generating plants, the ones that burn coal and contribute so much to our pollution and warming climate problem. Will coal states or coal interests in Congress block this? Stay tuned.