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cheap land Archives - Page 7 of 7 - Frontier Properties USA

Sticking it to the Long Distance “Man”

By: Mark Podolsky | February 23, 2011

I know this blog is supposed to be about land, but I wanted to share with you my favorite way to stick it to the “Man” and get free long distance calling and avoid paying high cell phone service fees.

I don’t know about you, but I hate my cell service. Don’t get me wrong I love my iPhone, but AT&T is horrible. Well, there are all these cool ways now to make free calls via the internet. Since I have a hard time using my cellphone in my office I make free calls now directly from my computer using my gmail account. It’s easy and works pretty great most of the time. Some times it cuts out, but you just hang up dial again and 9 out of 10 times it works. All for free! If you sign up for Google Voice you can even accept incoming calls from your computer. I bought a Logitech USB headset since I’m on it all day, but if you just use it once in a while you don’t really need the headset.

There are a bunch of apps for free cell phone use via WiFi and the most popular is Skype. You need a smart phone like an iPhone or Google phone, but most people have them now. It just bypasses the cell towers when you are in a WiFi area and routes the call via the Internet and it sounds really nice. If you call someone whom also has Skype the Skype to Skype calls sound amazing. You can make 3G calls as well when you aren’t in a WiFi hotspot, but the quality really starts to suffer.

If you ever have to make an International call there is a new service called freephone2phone.com that will make you listen to a quick advertisement, but then will route your call for a free 10 minute call to most International numbers. It’s pretty amazing and the quality is great.

I think if you’re paying for basic telephone service and have a high cell phone bill each month it’s worth looking into these new technologies to save a few bucks. Then you can

take that $$$ acquire a piece of land! See a win-win for all of us.

My partner and I are on a mad buying spree right now so let me know if you are in the market for property.

Cool Alternative Housing Ideas

By: Mark Podolsky | February 23, 2011

I’ve almost finished with a book written in the late eighties titled “Your Money Or Your Life” about basically only buying things that fulfill us, and how to get to that point in life where you’re working because you want to not because you have to. It’s kind of like therapy for money.  Anyways, I was thinking if I didn’t have my house and a mortgage what cool things I could do and all the money I’d save.  So since I’m a land owner and there isn’t anything stopping me trying these cool housing alternatives I should try it right?

So this post is going to be about non-traditional ways of living on your land.  Sure you can put an RV out there or a camper maybe even a manufactured home, but those things have been done and won’t impress the neighbors (although your views sure will).

So here are a few cool ideas I had for living off the land.

Have you ever heard of a yurt?  Well there is such a thing and you can learn more about it here– Yurt Information. Basically, a Yurt is a circular domed dwelling that is portable and self-supporting; originally used by nomadic Mongol and Turkic people of central Asia but now used as inexpensive alternative or temporary housing.  Cool, inexpensive and self sustaining.  Like the Prius of housing… Well, maybe not that mainstream, but you get where I’m going with this…

Another cool idea: A really tiny house.  Have you seen this guy — Tiny House Guy. He manufactures really small functional homes. They are tiny, but really cool looking and somehow functional.  I’m trying to de-clutter my own home and it would be so much easier if every time I tried to buy something I could just simply think, “Hey, I’d love that. But it won’t fit in my tiny house!”  I’d save so much money a year living like this I could afford another Tiny House just for my stuff! Oh yeah, that defeats the purpose… Plus, he’ll even teach you how to build your own at a workshop. Very cool right?

How about this idea- A rammed Earth Home.  What is it? It’s walls made from earth that is smashed into forms. It has an interesting history: Rammed earth has a long history around the world and was popular in the United States before railroads made the transportation of lumber and other building materials commonplace.  In recent years, the material has been seeing a resurgence as an eco-friendly option for home building.  It doesn’t get much more natural than building a home right out of the ground around it!

Cool website:

smartypig.com— If you need a new computer, or should really start saving for your wedding or anything else, try SmartyPig. It’s a legit online savings account, but it’s focused on motivating you to save for your big purchase or event. SmartyPig’s accounts are FDIC-insured and offer a fairly competitive 1.75 percent APY (at the moment), but they’re set up a bit differently than your standard account. You make an initial deposit of at least $25, then choose which accounts to draw from on a regular basis. You can then share your savings goals through Facebook, Twitter, or a group email, and those people who have long, long since told you to get a new car can contribute. In other words, it might just stave off nice but useless birthday gifts in favor of real progress. When it comes time to draw out your money, SmartyPig also offers cash bonuses if you go through Amazon, Travelocity, or its other purchase partners. If nothing else, SmartyPig isn’t in the same online bucket as your banking, so it’s a semi-hidden space to stash away money a little at a time.

Have any land questions? Contact me. Seriously. Don’t be shy.

Blading A Road

By: Mark Podolsky | February 22, 2011

We have been busy with some more acquisitions and are planning to acquire more property as the market improves.

A recent land investor of mine has a back hoe and large machinery
for blading roads. If you want a road bladed let me know and I
will provide you his contact information. Depending on the location and
topography the road should be reasonably priced and will obviously increase the value of your property and the subdivision as a whole. Of course, you have to blade in the road from the 30′ easement area of the subdivision so everyone has legal access. He also has an engineering friend that provides solar power panels as well. Very nice guy and also named Mark!

I found an interesting land article about which is the better
investment: Land or Stocks. Click this link to read it:
http://www.landthink.com/opinions/stocks-vs-land-which-is-the-better-investment/

I’m sure even if you don’t read the article you know instinctively
that rural land outperforms the stock market. However, I thought
the article was well done and informative.

I have recently made some quick less than a minute
YouTube videos of the land in Pershing and Humboldt
County’s. Check them out here:

Let me know what you think. I need some more investors! Let me
know if you have friends or family that also want to invest in rural land.
Of course, if they are like me, they are watching every penny, but now is an excellent time to invest before the market heats up again and it’s all gone.

Useful sites:

So I emailed a friend of a friend the other day a potentially
awkward question about his business and he never responded. As a result, I’m left in the dark. Was he offended by my email? Did he even open the email? Did it go to his “junk” mail, etc. However, if used this site –www.whoreadme.com I would have had my answer. This site tracks your email and alerts you when the recipient has read it. Maybe I will re-send it to him and track it….

Another great site I found was www.myfax.com/free which allows you
to send faxes for free in the U.S. and 40 other countries. I pay a
monthly service for an efax account and I may be dropping it soon.

For people who drive their cars regularly, change in the price of
gas can be very costly for their budget. Considering the volatility of gas prices, imagine if you could hedge against future gas price increases. This site Petrofix.com lets you do just that. It lets you lock in a fixed price for a
gas, so when the price goes up in the future, you won’t incur any additional costs. This service works well, if you are certain that gas prices will increase in the future. If prices go down, you will benefit from lower prices but will still have to pay the fee for each booked gallon over the period of your plan ( around $0.28 – 0.40 per gallon depending on the lock-in period)). This hedging strategy worked great for years for Southwest Airlines until the recent drop in oil
prices dropped their stock price like a hammer!

Before I write the Check

By: Mark Podolsky | February 22, 2011

When I look to buy land an an investment it has to meet this simple criteria before I even think of picking up a checkbook…

1. It has access. Legal. Ingress and egress. If you can’t get there or you can’t find it either is anyone else. If it has rough access and it’s a great price. Fine. If it has a main road close to it and you just have to blade a road it fine (given you can get easements). If not, then pass.

2. Does it have something compelling about the property. Are there mountain views? Is there water nearby? Is it in the path of development? Did a new employer move to town and the local housing market is bubbling up? Is it in a part of the Country people typically love like the Southwest or California? I’m not interested in Minnesota property. Too damn cold. What unique attributes does the property have? If there aren’t any then I pass.

3. Are there any potential environmental issues? I always check this site before I make any acquisition–http://www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/index.htm. If there is anything close then of course it’s a pass.

It’s really that simple. Access and something compelling about the property provided there are no environmental issues. Then it all comes down to pricing and negotiating. That’s where the “magic” happens.

Cool and useful website:

If you’d love to cut or eliminate your cable bill but still want to get the major networks’ live feeds, consider Ivi.tv, an online-only alternative to retrieving over-the-air stations with an antenna or via ClearQAM over the cable network.

ivi.tv works by retrieving publicly available television signals over-the-air in several large markets, including Seattle, Los Angeles, New York, and Chicago and then rebroadcasting them over the internet using their own custom software.

It is very cool (and useful!) to be able to pull in stations across the country in reasonable resolution. However the service does have some drawbacks. The first is the quality: it is not quite running at full framerate and the skipping of frames was noticeable for me even on a 25mbit connection. The second problem is that the network

stations are all suing ivi.tv for copyright infringement. ivi.tv for their part is rebutting them claiming that FCC must-carry rules state that they, as a cable network, must be able to retransmit any content that the networks offer for free via broadcast. It’s a hot topic within the telecommunications industry, and it’ll be interesting to see how things pan out.

Ivi.tv has basic subscriptions available for $4.99 a month with some upgrades that include $.99/month for the ability to DVR shows. For now, I’ve found that ivi.tv works and it is a great alternative if you want to watch live content from network stations that are not available anywhere else in streaming format on the network.

Then again, if all you want is access to you local over-the-air HD networks, you can buy or make your own DTV antenna.

Why I Started Investing in Land

By: Mark Podolsky | February 21, 2011

About ten years ago I was working in a lucrative, but soul sucking career as an investment banker doing mergers and acquisitions for private companies with a little boutique firm in Phoenix. I was miserable, but I had a conversation with one of our clients that changed my life….

This was a guy that was a “deal guy” that spent half of his life on airplanes and the other half analyzing companies to see if they could buy them really cheaply build them up a bit and then sell them and make themselves obscene amounts of money. Well, he was a bright nebisshy guy and had just made on his last deal tens of millions of dollars. I was talking to him about another deal and asked rather charmingly so where are you putting all of your new found millions? I thought he was going to say something esoteric like 60% bonds, 30% stocks and 10% commodities… Instead he simply said, “Land.” I said, “Huh? Why land? For crying out loud you have made yourself richer than rich analyzing and buying companies? What’s up with land?!!!?” He said in a Zen master tone, “In all of my years investing I’ve never heard of anyone losing money investing in land…”

So I closed a big merger deal, paid my taxes took the rest of the money and told my wife I’m going to invest in land. She was skeptical and already thinks I’m crazy, and says” Mark, please don’t lose all of our money… Just put in a CD or a mutual fund… Please…” I said, “The best investor I know told me he was buying land and I should buy land.” So she says, “Did he tell you how to do it?” I said, “That’s the fun part. It doesn’t matter, if I can’t sell it, the worst case scenario is WE OWN LAND!!!”

She bought my enthusiasm and I went to New Mexico with a buddy of mine, researched some nice dirt in a gorgeous rural area and bought as much as we could afford. Well, that first deal I went and marketed the land on the internet, made some money, bought more land, made some more money and a year and a half later told my boss to shove it and started buying and selling land full time. Well, times are tougher now, and my Wife still asks me when I’m going to get a real job, but I absolutely love the chase and thrill of buying raw dirt. It’s like a high for me. And if I make a mistake and buy something no one else thinks is as great as I think it is I always remind my Wife, “Don’t worry we own land.”

Cool website I found:

http://www.bundle.com/— My Wife and I argue a lot about money and she’s always reminding me how lucky I am that I’m married to her and not her crazy shopaholic friend so and so. Well, now I have some data to strengthen my argument as bundle is a web service focused on letting you compare your spending habits with other people in the country based on your location, age and household composition.  Don’t worry, I”ll still lose the argument…

Double dip recession on the way?

By: Mark Podolsky | February 16, 2011

I have had several in depth conversations with other real estate experts whom believe based on the Government deficit, current policies and our economic foundation of being a Country that “doesn’t make anything” anymore we are headed for a double dip recession in real estate.  If and when this happens, people flock to safety.  

Traditionally, there have been two safety routes for long term investors to hedge inflation and avoid stock market volatility. Buying gold and land.  Generally speaking, I continue to think that land will be a better investment than stocks, bonds and commodities in the future. Land values will rise because of population growth if nothing else. As a finite resource, more people should mean continued demand and appreciating prices, even if the middle-class shrinks some as the consequence of structural changes in the economy.

I  am always acquiring new properties.  If you are interested in learning more about these properties let me know as I only have a handful of lots and have not started marketing these yet online.

Useful websites I have found:

Check out luggage luggagelimits.com.  If you plan on traveling any time soon you will find this site useful. Different airlines have different luggage policies. Frequent travelers know the inconvenience it can cause when one has got extra luggage and the airline either refuses to accommodate it or charges exorbitant fees for carrying it. LuggageLimits is a useful website that can help you avoid such situations. Select the airline, departure and arrival airports, and get the corresponding luggage weight limit.  No registration required which I love!

Check out http://www.crossfit.com.  If your New Year’s Resolution this year was to get fit then this is the site for you.  Crossfit is an online training program which includes exercises and workouts that help in improving the overall physical fitness of a person. Their main website, which goes by the same name, contains detailed information about the program and the exercises included in it. There are demo videos, articles, Crossfit games and even a section for kids. There’s also a Workout of the Day (WOD) posted on the website everyday. The Crossfit training program has been implemented across various institutions around the world which includes police academies and military organizations. The program isn’t intended for beginners. Therefore, if you are a newbie, you should go slow on it.

Want to save some money?  Check out http://www.couponcraze.com/ CouponCraze, as the name suggests, is a site where you can find thousands of coupons and discounts for a wide variety of products and services. The homepage features categories like Today’s Deals, Expiring Soon, Bargain Finder etc on the top, which lets you prioritize your coupon search right from the start. Then you have a long list of coupon categories on the left and tools & popular merchants on the right. The categories range from clothing, electronics, sports and even for occasions like Christmas. When you click on “Redeem Coupon” for a listing, it automatically copies the code and takes you to the merchant site where you need to paste it while checking out. Overall, a nice site for saving money on online shopping.

Water Violators

By: Mark Podolsky | February 16, 2011

I saw this site today and thought it was very interesting.  Check out projects.nytimes.com/toxic-waters/polluters.  This site show all the water violations for a city or area.  I think this would be very helpful in the due diligence process in the future when evaluating land.  Of course, I check out all the property we acquire and thankfully the water is still pure.   The importance of water can’t be understated.  If water is not potable or too expensive to obtain via well then the property is just not worth the trouble at any price.  However, with technology I do believe we will soon see areas that were unable to get clean water get it as I addressed in my last update.

Cool sites I have discovered:

There are so many websites on the Internet on any topic, which makes it quite hard to find the most relevant and useful site for a specific purpose on your own. Spring is an online service that makes it easy to find the most useful and consulted sites in any category and ranks them based on their actual popularity among users. Simply enter a keyword i.e. “finance” or “movies” into a search box and press “Go”. You will get a list of relevant websites (4 on each page) along with their image thumbnails. Hover with your mouse over a thumbnail to read website’s short description and see categories it belongs to. Websites are ranked according to their online usage statistics.   Check out www.springo.com

The other site I recommend is for people whom like magazines, but don’t want to pay for them so they read them online.  Check out www.magme.com.

Don’t forget to drop me a line about the site and if you are into Twitter you can follow me http://twitter.com/Landguru.  Right now I’m not tweeting hardly at all, but I’m planning on getting more into it.

Off the grid so to speak

By: Mark Podolsky | February 10, 2011

Since most of the property we offer is off the grid so to speak we always want to provide you with information on solar energy and alternative sources of energy and living. I found this site– http://www.off-grid.net/ that I think is helpful and inspiring.

Basically, everyone owns land for their own personal reasons, but I have found that 70% of my customers are what I consider “legacy investors”.  That, is they are investing in the property as their legacy for future generations to enjoy, or profit from.  They aren’t looking to build right away, improve the property or even use it recreationally.  They just know they acquired it at the right price and one day their children will be thankful that their parent or parents invested in land so long ago for them as their legacy. In fact, we are starting a new Facebook campaign in the coming weeks with the title “What will your legacy be?” Hopefully, it will strike a chord, and people will be amazed at the quality of land they can invest in right now at amazing terms with us.

Cool website:

www.listenmusic.fm– This is a cool website which lets you listen to free music without having to sign online.  I hope you like it.

Market Analysis from investor’s perspective

By: Mark Podolsky | February 10, 2011

I want to open with a bit of market analysis from the land investor’s perspective.  Those with cash are going to be seeing lots of opportunities come their way.  Whether in real estate, land, the stock market or other commodities (like oil), prices are in most cases at 2004 levels. We have all seen this before and those whom slowly buy up assets always do well in the long run in times of uncertainty.   Now is the time to worry about the things we can control.

I am discussing (or arguing) with my wife every week how we can cut our expenses.  Here is a great article by David Pogue the Technology guy writer for the New York Times on how to lower your cable and phone bill–

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/08/technology/personaltech/08pogue.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=business

I am re-negotiating with everyone.  From my banker, to my auto company, to insurance, to our weekly babysitter everyone’s costs and fees are getting re-examined and shopped.  If you haven’t re-financed your home mortgage yet, now is the time to seriously look at the potential savings.  Check out www.bankrate.com for average rates.

From a land perspective, I am looking at creative and inexpensive ways to improve my land and position myself for higher prices in the future.  I believe in the next few years alternative power, especially wind power for our Nevada property is going to be an incredible selling point down the road.  Here is a link for information on WindPower-

http://www.otherpower.com/otherpower_wind.shtml.

Also, I have been getting some questions about well drilling. Check out http://www.welldrilling.com/Search-Drillers.htm for more information. Adding a well or a windmill will definitely increase the value of your land.

Cool Sites:

Another free movie site:  www.watch-movies.net

If you like to do slide shows check out www.animoto.com.  

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