Have all of you seen this? It was making the rounds on facebook this week and I thought it was hysterical! Here’s the thing…it’s completely true! Everything’s amazing right here on the Peninsula too…and it sure seems that nobody’s happy. Anyway…I’m crazy about this clip and Lewis CK (the comic here) and had to share it. Have fun!

Well, here’s an office that I can clearly remember not wanting to go to! Now it seems rather innocent. The question this week is…where exactly is this office? If you’re the first to answer correctly you’ll win a $30.00 gift card to Lucky’s at Edgewater Place…or wherever you may be for that matter. All the rules of the road are available to view on the left hand margin as well as on the bar above. All correct answers along with the winner will be published on Monday morning. Any and all silly jokes, the funnier the better, along with semi obnoxious banter and all wrong answers will be published immediately. Have a great weekend…go buy a house would you!

Foster City sure seems quiet to me lately, downright asleep actually. Not a whole heck of alot is going on around here when it comes to single family home sales…that’s for sure. Right now there are 31 active single family homes in town and I have NO doubt that the inventory level is just the beginning. It’ll be really interesting to see if we reach 50 listings at any given time this year. If that happens the pressure on prices will certainly become significant. I actually don’t ever remember a time when there were 50 single family homes actively for sale in Foster City. 8 houses were listed in February and 8 in January. Of those 16 houses, 1 sold. Currently there’s 3 pending sales in town and each of those sold in different months. Typically more houses are listed later in the spring too, I actually have several coming up myself, so I think it’s a safe bet that we’re going to be in for a whole bunch of new listings arriving on the Foster City scene.

What’s really fascinating is the fact that January came out of the gate well! Lot’s of folks were out there looking again…and then seemed to all go back to the sidelines just after the Inauguration. Here’s a couple of bellwether places that will be interesting to watch just to see how long it will take them to sell.

342 Menhaden listed by Christy Long of Re/Max Today for $950,000. Nice house and in great shape. This floorplan did pretty well last year. It’ll be interesting to see what happens here!

1412 Melbourne listed by Donna Marie Baldwin of Coldwell Banker for $917,888. Great location and a nice house that’s well priced (it seems?) Certainly one to keep an eye on.

In January, 3 houses sold and have closed escrow to date. One went $259,000 under it’s orginal list price, one went $190,000 under asking and the third went $49,000 under asking. Wow! The first one comes from a home originally priced over $1,300,000…a category that I feel is really soft and where values are particularly vulnerable. In other words…if you’re a buyer you should experience a great opportunity to negotiate if you have the courage to jump in the water in the near future. Go ahead…take the plunge!

What’s really interesting to me about this photo is that it precisely symbolizes the future of the FC real estate market. Right now it’s pretty safe for this guy to snooze in that spot…but at some point a pilot could get in that plane, start the engine and provide this character with a somewhat rude surprise! One day the market will start up again too…and I have no doubt surprising alot of buyers…who will still be sound asleep.

According to all the signs at least, the Home of Foster City’s Little League is none other than Sea Cloud Park . Arriving on the scene about 2 seconds after I posted the picture was Suresh Narayanan. Great job! Suresh wins the $30.00 gift card to Jack’s Prime Burgers in San Mateo. Also coming in with the correct answer was Erika, Priya, Jodi, Rowena, Alex, Eugene Berman, Archana (not sure why Wordpress’ time is off?) Harish, Ryan, Francis, AR, Bill and Wei Li. Congratulations to you all! I hope to see you again this coming Friday…and/or we’ll run into each other one of these days at Jack’s Prime!

Sailing on into the weekend we have, for plenty of you I’m sure, a fairly easy one! The question? Where exactly is the “Home of Foster City Little League”? Yes, it’s safe to say we’re talking about baseball. (I say that because I seriously doubt whether my wife Lesley knows that!) . This week I’m going to go slightly out of bounds again and give the winner a $30.00 gift card to Jack’s Prime burgers in San Mateo. Every time I seem to open my facebook page lately I see somebody touting their lunch there…and I’m crazy about this little burger joint too, so I thought I’d pass it along via the contest. All the rules of the road are available to view on the left hand margin and on the bar above. All correct answers will not be posted until Monday morning. All semi obnoxious banter, silly and kind of silly jokes and all wrong answers will be published immediately. Have a great weekend and even if you don’t win, go check out Jack’s!

Continued from yesterday…

Two weeks to the day of cancelling his policy, he felt a lump in his neck…….cancer.  He began undergoing extensive radiation and chemotherapy, with a very dismal prognosis.  He also became ineligible for any type of life insurance.  He and his wife were looking at a future well beyond their worst nightmares.  Their children will lose their father; this woman will lose her husband.  As devastating as this is in and of itself, there is no money to handle this type of situation.  I know many people who may not believe in life insurance, will say the wife can just sell their house and get a job.  Really?  Just sell your house?  Really, just get a job?  What happens in the meantime?  What if the house doesn’t sell and during this time you have to use equity?  What if you cannot get an equity line due to the decrease in your home value?  What if you have an equity line, but your lender has frozen it due to the market?  Really, she can just get a job?  She hasn’t worked outside of the home in 5 + years!  Where can she just get a job that will pay enough to pay the mortgage on the home that won’t sell? 

Let me tell you what actually happened to this family.  Sadly, the husband did indeed die.  The family did have some savings, but not enough to go past a couple of months, about the same time some of the medical bills started to roll in.  The wife did start to look for a job, but the reality is, with a full time job comes the issue of child care expenses.  The type of jobs she was qualified for, would not earn her enough to pay for childcare.  She was able to sell the house, along with so many wonderful memories, and of course at a loss.  She had to move back to her parent’s home, in another state, so they could help her get back on her feet.  You can imagine, this just added to an already traumatic situation for her little ones.  This was all over $45 a month…..

This woman has now become an advocate for Life insurance.  She wrote an incredibly moving and poignant letter to their agent thanking him for trying so hard to convince her husband not to cancel his policy.  I can tell you, this agent (my good friend) feels maybe he could have tried one more time to change his client’s mind; he also, will never get over this.  I forgot to mention, the wife did not know her husband had cancelled the policy until she called her agent to advise him of her husband’s death.  So what am I saying to you?

Yes, we may all have to cut back in some area of our lives to compensate for a salary reduction, or a lay-off, or unforeseen car repairs that have to take priority right now, but don’t make a decision regarding your life, a decision that will impact your family forever.  Remember, you will be dead, so you may not see the aftermath and destruction of your decision, but those that live, will deal with it forever.  Talk to your agent, there are always options.  This man could have reduced his coverage temporarily.  He could have increased the deductibles on his cars and home temporarily to off-set that $45.00.  Your families needs do not change when you are no longer in the equation, they just become greater because you are no longer there………

“Making smart decisions that will not affect your family and their well-being in difficult times”

If you read the newspaper or turn on the television at all these days, it is impossible to escape the reports about the difficulties many people are facing today.  As an insurance professional, I have had countless customers coming into my office to cancel their homeowner policies due to foreclosures, short sales, etc.  This is not only gut wrenching for our customers delivering their sad news, but very difficult for myself and my staff.  These are policies we wrote and excitement we shared, when our customers purchased their 1^st home. 

I know many people are having difficulty making ends meet each month, heck, each day, and I further realize people are looking for ways to cut back and save some money.  We are all feeling it in some area.  There is definitely a trickle down effect that transcends all industries and work places.  You may think of cancelling a certain service that seems like more of a “luxury” right now to save a few dollars, but what does it do to that small business owner who now has lost a customer?  He now may have to let a worker go, who now becomes unemployed and so on and so forth…..it is an inevitable situation, but there are some areas where we just should not take risks when trying to save money.

I have been taking at least a few calls a day with people wanting to “temporarily” cancel their life insurance.  I want to give you some perspective into a different type of “trickle down” theory that is not only very real, but one I have seen first hand just a month ago.

An agent friend of mine in another state had a customer who decided he just could not afford to pay his $45 premium for his life insurance right now.  The agent tried to talk him out of cancelling the policy and perhaps finding other areas to cut back, i.e. making coffee at home or brown bagging it to lunch, etc.  The customer was insistent, assuring the agent as soon as things were better financially, he would buy another policy. The policy was cancelled.  This was a $750,000 policy, purchased over 5 years ago.  The customer had 2 young children and a stay at home wife who has been out of the work force for 5 plus years.  The intent of the policy at the time of purchase, was to provide his wife enough money to handle their mortgage payments, continue to save some money for their kids education, and of course all other miscellaneous bills while maintaining some semblance of their normal life.  It was also meant to buy his wife some time to find a job (I won’t even open the can of worms about realistically trying to find a job in today’s climate, especially when one has been out of the work arena for a long time).

Continued tomorrow….

It’s a bird sculpture, no fountain actually, in Leo Ryan Park. This weeks winner was Dana Ferri who get’s the $30.00 gift card to Plaza Gourmet Deli. Also arriving on the scene with the correct answer was the ineligible Steve Toler, Bill Hastings, Archana, Erika,Rowena and Jeff Chu. Good job you guys! I thought this one was a little on the hard side…what do I know! We’ll be back on Friday to do it all over again too. See you soon.

My Aunt Marta died a few weeks ago, today there’s a memorial service for her in Foster City. I guess my family correctly figured Valentines Day would be perfect to honor her…she certainly was everybody’s Valentine. Marta was 92, and in every other instance that I can remember, when somebody passes at an age like that I would think “How wonderful that she lived such a long life”. In Marta’s case I’m going to miss her enormously. She was, quite simply, an amazing woman. She and my Uncle Harry bought their house on Flying Fish Street over 40 years ago and always seemed to be this town’s biggest fans. The picture up there is from her back yard. Growing up in Colorado all we ever seemed to hear were stories of this little paradise of a town they lived in and what it meant to them.

Marta was quite a character. She was the type of woman who didn’t have the time or inclination to mince words. You knew where you stood with her…and where she stood on just about every significant issue that came down the pike in our world. When I was 2 I was supposed to be taking a nap in her guest room when I discovered her pillow was filled with feathers. Somehow I managed to wrestle all of the feathers out and it looked like it was snowing in the room when she came in and busted me. She always seemed to tell that story every time I was around after that…including last year! Like I was 32 when it happened! I, of course, have no recollection of it at all…just the recollection of her telling the story!

When I was 21 and in college I spent the summer in Europe and for a few days I spent some time in her ancestral home town of Ljubljana, Slovenia (then Yugoslavia). Marta told me to make sure and look up her relatives, the Lubich’s, when I was there. Well, when I got there I did just that…and discovered that there were 3 or 4 pages of Lubich’s in the Ljubljana phone directory! I told her I could have yelled out the name Lubich in the town square and have had several people come up to me as a result! How was I supposed to know which ones were her relatives? She said they all were! “Why didn’t you yell like that?!”

She was the best cook I’ve ever known! Her Thanksgiving dinners were amazing! Her mashed potatoes were somehow different (I never could figure out how or why). Everything she cooked was like eating it for the first time. If you ever managed to get a plate of her cookies at the Holiday’s you truly were rewarded! Nobody made cookies like Marta.

Here’s one big lesson from Marta that I hope not to forget. For almost all of her 92 years she was as sharp as a tack mentally. She was a voracious reader and almost every afternoon she played a dice game where she added a score with a pencil and paper. She consciously did things to stay sharp. In fact, I always felt like she was sharper than I was! She represented a value system that seems to me to be disappearing. She was an incredibly smart and savy stay at home Mom and family was her job. She was an astonishing success. When you left her presence you always felt like you mattered. Maybe the saddest thing about losing Marta to me is the fact that for as long as I remember she was the hub of the family wheel. All family activity seemed to be centered around her house. It just won’t be the same going forward. I won’t be surprised if I lose touch with some relatives. Lesley, my wife, say’s it’s like a big library that’s burned down losing Marta.

God speed Marta, I love you.