By Steve Wightman. 9 November 2023
The first time I flew a small airplane was in a Cessna Bird Dog tandem 2-seater. It was anything but a dog. It flew like an eagle. It climbed at 1500 FPM and could land on a football field. Pure fun. Years later I flew a Piper Cub on floats with a friend. It was the 1970s. The waters were pure, shorefront homes rare and never a shortage of flying friends.
Now homes aplenty line lake shores everywhere. Waters hide handfuls of invasive species, residents complain of noise, communities impose restrictions, and friends have lost interest or moved on. So, where’s the joy?
The best bets today are wild rivers and lakes. Maine and Florida have both and communities who are friendly to seaplanes. The receptions here are mostly warm and enthusiastic. People want to learn more about seaplanes and their pilots. This is especially true with lakefront lodging. Managements love to photograph seaplanes gracing their lodges. Who knows? Pilots could find their photos on a magazine cover!
Make new friends. Find joy in Maine woods and waters. If for no other reason, go there because Maine is incredibly scenic.
By Steve Wightman, Certified Financial Planner™
2017, like today, was a very tight real estate market in the western suburbs of Boston. Bedford was no exception. For years, my wife and I had been outbid many times while pursuing our dream home. It was gut wrenching each time. In the Fall we came upon a three-bedroom standalone condominium that met most of our needs. The owners seemed noticeably confident they would get a high asking price. Based on our past buying excursions, we knew that our offer could be easily rejected for another. Borrowing from my experiences as a financial advisor, I created an option agreement to sell our old home to competing developers and pay for the new. The agreement gave us the opportunity to live in our old home rent-free until closing on the new one.
Win-win: How did we land a new home with such high competition? “Cash is king.” It works! It put us way in front of our competitors. Then we dropped a sweet bomb “no pre-buy inspections. We were satisfied that the disclosures were accurate. The sellers never got a sweeter offer. They jumped to say “Yes.” It was a win-win tactical move; the Sellers got a cash offer over asking. Furthermore, the sellers had no risk of losing mortgage funding, and there would be no inspections that could pull the rug out from under this sweetened deal. We the Buyers, landed our dream home that met all our needs for the present and long into our futures. Furthermore, home prices in this community were inflating in double digits. We locked the purchase price. Another win is that within a year or two we concluded the value of our new home would significantly exceed what we had paid for it.
Win-lose: What about a conventual approach? Think about it; had we joined the crowd depending on a mortgage and demanding a pre-purchase inspection would we have stood out like a big green flag to the sellers? I think not. More likely, it would have triggered a bidding war where an inflated price became ridiculous. That is a win-lose approach doomed to fail for buyers.
Lose-lose. I have seen many cases where both sides become unreasonable and even polarized. Sound familiar? An example happened to me when a potential buyer discovered a lien that had remained attached to the deed after the mortgage had long ago been paid off and released it. The mortgage company had not removed it due to an oversite. This led to a high bidding potential buyer dropping out of the bidding process due to dwindling trust based on a false claim.
The moral of the story is that both buyers and sellers need to listen to one another, work together, and craft the best sale plan for mutual success. Remember, it is not about who is right or wrong. It is about winning. Never hold a position that is unsupported in fact. The price of that could be your lifelong dream slipping through your fingers. That is a huge price to pay for “being right”.