The Energy of Revenge

I want to talk about the energy of Revenge.

There’s an energy to it.  If that energy is directed improperly it can cause havoc in life – it can hurt people, it can create karmic debts, and even cause an infinite loop – two “enemies” can be endlessly tied to each other in a downward spiral that consumes their life, their time, their energy and their happiness.

You already know all of this. But you haven’t heard anybody talk about the proper use of the energy of Revenge.  It’s not something to ignore and block and suppress; it’s something to respect, and to use. You need to know how to handle the energy of Revenge.

Real Life Example

Let’s say I feel upset about losing the fourplex rental property in 2010 that my wife and I purchased in 2005 at the height of the real-estate bubble in the United States.  We paid $80,000 down payment for this property (purchase price $400,000).  In 2010 we had to short-sell it. We not only lost the property and the $80K downpayment but our credit rating was damaged for two years.  The final blow was having to pay an extra one thousand dollars from our own pocket, right at the end of the short sale because our “management company” managed to not hold the renter’s deposits for us like they promised they would. It was very frustrating.

OK. Let’s say I’m really mad about this, and rightly so.  So, I feel the energy of revenge. I think, “boy, I want to hurt that buyer who acted nasty towards me in an email when we were closing,” and I think, “I want to sue that management company for stealing the deposit money from me,” or, “I want to sue the real estate agent who sold me the property originally.” I can think of plenty of things to get upset about.  And what’s the alternative to those, I’m going to do nothing? I’m going to ignore what I’m thinking, to cancel and ignore my feelings? Squelch it and suppress it? Deep down inside of me? That can’t be good.

I can do EFT or TAT to null out the painful-aspect of those memories over time, so when I think about our old fourplex I don’t feel a shooting pain in my chest. But maybe that’s not the right thing to do either, if it takes away my motivation to make a comeback from this? Should I remain the victim, or is there a way I can triumph after all? I feel an energy to do something; I don’t want to lose that energy; but I also don’t want to be in pain, and I don’t want to just ignore everything and let it go.

This Ain’t Your Father’s Revenge

What I’m saying is, there’s a different kind of revenge you can take which is not harmful. In fact, it’s constructive.

I waited to see what would happen, I kept experiencing the experience to the end. When we settled all the tax consequences of the short sale, we ended up getting $20,000 back from the IRS the next year because it was such a gigantic write-off of lost money for us.  Wait, what?  You have to stop and think about that – that doesn’t fit into the “everyone’s evil, I’m a complete victim” scenario my brain was trying to convince me of. I suddenly have an extra $20K cash? That’s a lot of money. I didn’t expect that.

When you take that into consideration, there’s a new aspect here that my wife and I get to experience.  Because housing prices fell so dramatically, it’s a far better time to invest in rental property now than ever before.  We decided to take that money and make a down-payment on a new property with it.  Because we’ve learned a lot since the early days of our investing experience.

I studied what I did wrong with the earlier property, with the view that “if we ever do this again, at least I’ll know what NOT to do!”  I learned how to tell if an investment property will “cashflow” for me or not, something I didn’t know when we purchased that fourplex. I can calculate the Return on Investment (ROI) which helps me know how many years before my entire investment is paid back. Once it’s paid back, who cares if the value of the property goes up or down anymore?  I can tell when I’ll have gotten all my money back out – I will still own the property, and it will still be generating money for us! Sure, I’m buying a slightly smaller property now, but not by much, since prices fell so sharply.  And, since I can make it cashflow, it will be a MUCH better experience than the fourplex. I will make money every month – that monthly check feels good – rather than just breaking even each month with the old fourplex; that was a constant frustration for 5 long years.

My Revenge

So my revenge is this: I am taking the remains of losing the fourplex (the $20,000 refund from taxes) to buy an investment property, and in the first year I plan to make way more money than all 5 years of owning that fourplex. Because of that, I don’t care that it’s a single family home, a smaller property; I’m doing way better than before.  It will take years, but I’ll be able to get back that $80,000 and more.  Especially if I save up that money and don’t spend it, I can make a downpayment on another property, and rent it out, and make even more every month.

I lost money with that fourplex, but I learned a whole lot.  And the world changed around me to make it more worthwhile to do it again, not less. I also learned what it’s like throughout the entire Short Sale process (by living through it!) – so that’s no longer a fear of mine. It’s just a thing I can do now if I have to, based on the law of the land. It’s a process like any other, and when it’s over it’s over. There’s nothing to fear anymore. I know all this because I have first-hand experience, now. Not everyone can say the same. All this experience makes me smarter and more fearless than before.

My new property will cashflow about $350 every month while rented out.  I’m getting a 15 year loan, so 15 years from now (I’ll still be around then!) the mortgage magically goes away and I will be making about $850/month every month it’s rented out.

This is my revenge.

In my mind, I say:

“I’ll show you… I’ll invest right this time, because I learned how.  And make way more money than the old way ever could have!”

Psychological Obstacle

But of course, there’s still the emotional component that hurts me, a psychological blockage against getting a new property, against cooperating with a bank, with a realtor, with the seller, the property inspector, etc.  But that’s something I know how to fix with EFT and TAT.  With a few days of work, a few minutes each day, I can clear the blockages preventing me from success at this endeavor.  I can use the energy of Revenge to drive me to clean the problems – I can’t help thinking:

“You can’t make me feel bad! I refuse to! You can’t stop me that way! I will be perfectly OK with property investing, and the proof will be when the money is coming in.”

With hard work I can make it work, just like every other kind of success I’ve had in my life, in so many areas I’ve already experienced.  Why is it always harder than I think it should be when I begin?

The actions I’m taking now, my revenge from that bad investment, is a form of Justice.  It’s Freedom and Righteousness combined. To be able to say, “not only am I not in a bad way, I’m better off now than ever.”  The old property felt like a weight around my neck. The new property makes me excited to be purchasing, and will give me a tinge of happiness every month I see a rent check arrive. Maybe this property will be useful to me the rest of my life, and be a nice inheritance for our children when we pass away some day. Not only that, but it’s useful to whoever rents it from me.  I’m a kind and thoughtful landlord.  No ridiculous demands, no spying, just what you’d want from a landlord. So I’m providing a high-quality rental property. If I didn’t do this, whoever else owned the property might not be as reasonable and good as I am. Strong but fair.

So, any time I’m struggling with the details and paperwork of this property purchase, I remind myself: This property replaces the fourplex. And all those people that sold me the fourplex, inspected it, told me I was doing the right thing when they likely knew trouble was coming economically (or maybe they didn’t know, who cares) – it shows them I can succeed better than ever before without their help.  So there.

I’ll show you guys, all you fourplex experts! You Losers! I’m a better investor than you are. I’m not tricking anybody, I’m not taking anti-depression medication that flattens my joy like you are, you unnamed person in this investment property business.

So. You can benefit from the energy of revenge. Revenge has energy. Don’t ignore energy! The energy can drive you to do the right thing next time, to the best of your ability.  You can make it to a higher spiral – you’re standing in the same place, but armed with far better knowledge and experience than ever before.  It looks vaguely like before, except one thing: you totally know what you’re doing.  You own this moment.

I’m telling you: Success is the best revenge.

Reward the Good

There needs to be a commonly accepted reward system for the Good Work that people in our society do on a regular basis.  Doing good needs to be encouraged today – to help people to do the right things around them, to really help people when they need help, despite all the reasons to not help.  Helping other people shouldn’t be a secret – it needs to be loudly recognized and encouraged!  If only there was some kind of reward system – that would encourage the largest majority of people to start doing good, and really feel good about the service they do for the people around them.

There’s a difference between the average person and Mother Teresa. Mother Teresa did her work because she was self-driven, something inside her drove her to do her work.  She did not get paid for it.  Because of that work, so many people – the poorest of the poor – had better health and a better life, and they go to see that there is somebody in the world who loves them after all.  And we, in the richer countries and cities, could see Mother Teresa helping the poor, and were inspired by it; at least, it makes me feel good to think about it.  The affect and benefit of this one woman to humanity and society was tremendous.  But then we go back to our regular lives, our regular jobs, and we don’t get 1 foot closer to helping Humanity the way she did.  At all.

So I ask you, how can we encourage this kind of behavior?  How can we do more to help other people ourselves, in a way that’s compatible with modern life today – without disrupting our whole life?  There is no huge benefit to an individual to help other people today.  Many people feel it in their hearts; but very few act on it.  Those who act on it know it’s not “cool”, today, so they don’t talk about it much.  So it’s not encouraged to others like it should be.

There’s no reward system in our modern society to encourage this kind of thing.  It’s a kind of catch-22, really, in our society today – if it’s not cool, people hide it, so nobody knows about it, so it stays hidden, and stays not-cool, not the thing-to-do, not the way-to-live, today.

Well I have a solution:

Build a Points based Rewards system

You are rewarded points for good deeds you do, the amount of points depending on the benefit that good deed had on other people, or nature.  Picked up a piece of trash and threw it in a trash can?  That’s 1 point.  Spent 30 minutes helping someone whose car is stuck on the side of the road get it going again?  You just scored at least 30 points.  If there was a passenger, you helped 2 people not 1, so that’s double points.  Is a whole room full of children going to receive their lesson today, because their teacher is back on the road because of you?  Add 60 points then; maybe more.  It all depends on how much good was accomplished by the work you just performed.

Someone can write an app for smart-phones that lets you track your points easily.  It could record the GPS location where you were, it can take pictures of your work, and let you write words about what you did.  Maybe there will be categories, so the points calculation is easy to do (done for you).  You could then see how much Good you did this week, compared to last week or last month; sort of like how the various exercise apps work today.

The app should have a social element – your friends can see the good work you just did, and you can see what they’re up to as well!  How encouraging will it feel to go out and do something awesome for someone, and your friends compliment you for it?  It will drive them to do something awesome for someone else, wherever they are, and whatever skills they have available to them.

Did you just pick up 3 bag-fulls of trash alongside the road, or around your neighborhood?  It took 25 minutes of your time, but the place looks beautiful now.  Take a picture (before and after), enter your Good Deed into your phone, post the pics, and grab the points!

The next generation of the app could allow groups with names – you and your friends can work together, pool your points and compete against other groups.  Who raised the most service-points this month?  Maybe you get more points for being part of a group, for performing a service activity in a group.  Maybe interface with FourSquare to “check in” to a service event with your friends.  Auto-tweet about how many points you gained each week/month.

There needs to be a web-based app as well, so if you don’t have a smart phone you can still enter your points.  Or, maybe you want to type a lot of text for the description, or enter a whole bunch of entries you wrote down on paper over the last week – helps to have a PC/Mac with a full keyboard to do that.  What features should the web site have that’s not on the cell phone app?  Bigger screen makes it easier to review your service history / friends list / groups list.

Recycling – extra points if you recycle the plastic / glass / aluminum,  or not?  You can get cash for the aluminum if you want it.  Maybe a registry to help you find people near you who collect aluminum, you can drop it off at their house?  If you’re not going to get the money for it, might as well be someone who uses the same Social Good app that you do.

Bottom Line

If you never do good service for others, you are missing out on a certain type of joy.  It’s a special feeling when you do good work without expecting anything in return.  How can you know that if you’ve never tried it? And if you start posting your service items and points, your friends are gonna want to try it too. You just made it cool.

You don’t have to put your whole life on hold and move to Zimbabwe, just to do good in this world.  You can do a whole lot wherever you are today, with the schedule you have today, with a little creative thinking you’ll find it. I know this about myself – I can’t fix cars; I won’t be that guy.  But some people are like that.  I’m the guy picking up trash for no reason by the side of the road as you zoom by wondering what the hell THAT guy is up to?

With a point system like this, with a huge number of people lifting their heads and looking around for something good to do wherever they find themselves, only then will we improve our society in ways that are not possible today – in the greatest ways you can’t even imagine.

Why not?

Q & A

Question: if I got extra points for the kids that teacher taught later that day, because I fixed the car, shouldn’t I get some points also for the extra IQ for each student? For the higher scores they got on their exams this year? Shouldn’t I get a couple points for that 1 kid who was going to fail school, but because of the teacher being there 1 extra day, the kid got just enough points to pass, graduate, and get a job they couldn’t have otherwise gotten, as their first job?  And shouldn’t I get a few points because their lives be a little better, over the next 50 years, I mean a little tiny bit (times 30 students), because of me?  Maybe one of them was able to get married because of that difference (rather than living alone the rest of their life); and their children grew up to be amazing and powerful and helpful? Maybe even the leader of the country? Shouldn’t I technically get points for that somehow? Even as fractional points, that would add up to something big, wouldn’t it? Maybe a LOT of points?  Maybe close to infinity?

Answer:  Now you’re beginning to understand.

Big Data Analysis

Someone should write an easy to use app, like a spreadsheet, but for handling Big Data.

Big Data is a popular area of discussion on the Internet today – it’s all about managing gigantic data stores of lots and lots of data, usually many millions of rows of data points, with various attributes to those data points including the day and time that the points were taken, but usually also dozens of other data values along with it.

Tools We Have Today

Think about spreadsheet apps like Microsoft Excel or Open Office’s Calc, or the spreadsheet in Google’s Documents – think about how good they are for data manipulation at a fundamental level.  They present a 2-dimensional grid of cells, and each cell holds a single data point.  Or, a cell can hold words; or it can have a formula, which can calculate using a formulaic language, resulting in a newly-derived data point that appears in that cell.  That cell therefore has two views:  the data value result of the formula, and the formula itself.  How can 1 cell display itself 2 different ways?  The original inventors of this idea figured it out:  by default display the data value, since that’s what you’re basically working with – data.  If you single-click the cell, the formula appears on a “formula line” near the top of the app.  And, if you double-click the cell, you’re able to edit the formula – it appears temporarily right there in the cell, for you to edit.  If it’s too large to fit in the cell’s space, it temporarily makes a larger rectangle so you have enough room to edit.  Once done editing, it recalculates the formula, and draws the data value quickly in place again.  And, it recalculates any formulas that were dependent on that cell for one of their values – and recalculates anything dependent on THAT cell too, and THAT cell, and THAT cell… and so on.  Spreadsheets are very powerful and useful for many purposes because of this capability.

Big Data …Sheet

But Big Data is different – very often you are working with entire data sets, not individual values.  Or some summarized data – if you have daily data points, maybe you want to look at the data as a whole week of data points averaged down to a single value; so the resolution is weekly data.  Maybe you need summing, not averaging.  Or maybe you need Bezier smoothed curve data, derived from this data.

What would a Big Data Sheet look like?

Maybe each column in a Big Data Sheet represents an extraction of 1 column from a whole 2-D set of data.

Maybe you have functions that, instead of calculating on a single data value, perform operations on a whole data set at a time, transforming it into a new set of data.  Like Moving Average, or EMA (Exponential Moving Average).

The data set element would need to have meta-data about itself, such as whether the data has been de-exponentialized for graphing purposes, or not.  Either the X or Y axis, or both, could be exponential.  Or logarithmic.

Data sets can be more than 2-D though, they can be 3-D or 4-D or really any dimension.  So another thing you’d need would be a way to extract 2-D slices from that data.

If the axes of a data set (or a slice of a data set) had meta-data about what the data type is, then you could match them up with a completely separate data set, on that common axis.  Maybe the common axis is Time – that’s a popular one for a lot of data sets.  If you have a data set of CPU load from server A over the past year, and a similar data set from server B, you might want to do calculations and comparisons between the two, and derive useful knowledge from them.  The two data sets may not start and end at exactly the same times; you could choose to extract just the data where the timestamps overlap – that should be a Function in this system. Maybe there’s also a function that reduces that data even more to “whole days” worth of data – discarding the first day and/or last day, if they are not complete days worth of data (midnight to midnight).  The two sets of data might result in 3 “columns” of data in this application (time, cpu load A, cpu load B).

And, of course, you need to be able to graph all these data sets, derived sets, slices, merges, etc.

Can’t Excel Already Do That?

It just occured to me that 75% of what I’m talking about can already be done today with Excel.  There’s just a few places that it falls short. Working with data sets so large they won’t fit into a computer’s memory is one of them.  It also doesn’t know how to take a 2-D slice of a 5-D data set, and remember where the slice came from and how it was taken, so you can re-slice different ways, and with different ranges, while doing “what-if” scenarios.  Those slices would need to be cached somehow, for future calculation speed.  Like if you summarize 5-million rows of every-second data from years and years into a new data set that’s a sub-set of the date range and has been averaged into daily data points, that’s a much smaller set.  The math for that only needs to be done once, and stored under a new name that the user gives it.  But it must point back to the original data set where it came from, with indications on how it was derived.  Now, if the original data set changes, the derived data must be recalculated – it changed too.

Maybe the right thing is for existing spreadsheet application authors to add a few Big Data features to their apps to handle these things.

Parallel Processing

Calculations on Big Data sets (and slices, and merges of sets) are inherently parallelizable, much of the time.  So it would be great if this new Big Data Sheet application could farm out the calculations across many servers that the user has pre-configured; or, maybe they can rent a CPU farm that’s a centrally located set of compute servers that the application creator, or others, have set up.

The science of Map/Reduce for data sets is growing, and is a powerful way to perform many operations in parallel on really large data sets.  That could be the technology behind a front-end of high-level operations that can be performed on Big Data sets, or slices of sets.

Database Storage

We might need to invent a new kind of database server storage system for gigantic N-dimensional data sets, so that we can extract slices from them in any direction/dimension we want, as quickly as is reasonably possible.  You can assume it might take more than one database server to store such a large set of data in this flexible manner, so the servers might all need to work together, when queries arrive from clients retrieving data from the gigantic data set.

How do we store the data so slices can be taken from any direction, of any amount?

How do we create redundancy, so any one server going down doesn’t take the whole database with it?

How do we backup such a data set, to keep it in off-site storage?

It’s fun to ponder these things.  I know there are good answers to all of them.

It would be fun to see how the world explores this topic more over time.

Where is All the Money?

If you haven’t seen this yet, you need to.

Click the giant poster on this web page, zoom in to read it:

xkcd: Money

(start in upper-left corner)

Backing Up Your Important Data

What is your plan for backing up the most important computer data in your life?

To answer that, you have to be able to first answer:  What is the most important data in your life that could be lost?

For me, the answer is:
1. Gmail Contacts (the most important people in my life – their emails and phone numbers and addresses)

2. Delicious Bookmarks (my most important bookmarked web pages, across all browsers)

3. Dropbox (I have a lot of files I don’t want to lose in there, some of which I share with other people)

4. Everything on my main computer at home, which has the share drive with all our family pictures on it and all my financial records and other important stuff.

5. Gmail Filters

6. Gmail Messages, Folders

7. Nozbe (project management software)

Backing Things up

Here are the procedures I follow for backing these things up. Remember, a Backup is simply a copy you make to another location, so that if the original location is completely destroyed somehow, you have “your copy” that you can refer to – or put back in place, when the main area is repaired.  When everyone else is yelling and freaking out and blogging and twittering and law-suits are flying, you’re calmly waiting for everything to settle down so you can put your files back in place and resume your work as normal.  [NEXT LEVEL: You're surfing on top of the waves] [PRINCIPLE: shit breaks in the Physical world, get used to it]

1. Backing up Google Contacts

login to Gmail, click Contacts

“More Actions” -> “Export…”

All Contacts.  Google CSV format.

Save As… to your desktop.

drag the file to your backups folder. It may be in c:\backups if you want, or somewhere else (on Windows)

2. Backup Delicious Bookmarks

browse to delicious.com

login to your account

click “Settings” (upper right corner)

click “Export/Backup Bookmarks”

include “my tags” and “notes”

click EXPORT button

Save As… to your desktop

drag that file to your backups area.

3. Backup Dropbox

right-mouse-button drag your Dropbox folder to your backups area

when the menu appears, choose “Copy”.

4. Everything on my main computer

I paid for Carbonite automated backup.

As I change files, add, delete, modify things, Carbonite works in the background to make sure there’s a copy of everything from my computer onto their remote servers.  Very easy to see when each thing was backed up, what has not yet been backed up, restore lost files, etc.  Definitely worth it if you have a Windows PC.

I also occasionally drag my most important folders from my PC onto an external hard drive, I have a 1.5TB drive on my main PC for this purpose.  I do that every couple months, just to make sure I have my own copy of all my own files, separate from the computer that could die and take them all with it.

5. Gmail Filters

login to Gmail

click the Gear icon -> Mail Settings -> Filters

scroll to bottom

click “ALL”

click “Export”

Save As… (to your desktop)

drag file to your backups area

6. Gmail messages, folders

If you’ve never done this before, download and install Mozilla Thunderbird

If you’ve never done this before, set it up to POP or IMAP  to remotely fetch your email files

Run Thunderbird, so it remotely fetches your email

can take a long time, if you have a lot of email

7. Nozbe (project management software)

go to the main web site (www.nozbe.com)

log in

click the Gear icon (upper right)

Backup your data

Backup your data

save to desktop

drag the file nozbe_export* to your backups area

Scheduled Timing of Backups

I do this copying of files once a month or so.  You may choose to do it sooner, or later than that.

I definitely recommend making sure YOU have a copy of your important stuff, so even if the world around you crumbles, you can get your own stuff back if you need to.

There are ways of backing up all your stuff on Facebook, but I don’t bother to do that;  I consider facebook and twitter to be transient, not permanent.  Twitter is definitely transient – go back and see if you can find your old tweets from 1 year ago!  They’re gone already.  I hope you didn’t say anything important.

ASU Mascot Harms Students

Arizona State University, I call on you to change your mascot.  It’s time to throw away the “Sun Devils” moniker, and choose something better.  Let me explain why.

My daughter is getting ready to go to college in the fall, so we’re touring the local universities here in Arizona, to ask questions and learn all about the campus.  The spring semester is going on right now, so we had a chance to experience campus life for a few hours with all the students and professors and staff walking, biking, generally doing their thing.  Our tour of the University of Arizona down in Tucson three weeks ago went very well – the tour went smoothly, the campus was nice, the students all looked like they enjoyed being there.  Today we toured ASU’s main campus in Tempe, and it didn’t go nearly as well.

The physical aspects of the tour were nice, overall.  The two students who guided us around the campus were friendly and helpful enough, and we got to see all the kinds of things I’ve always wanted to learn about at this campus: libraries, public eateries, major buildings that the students take classes in, and a tour of a typical dorm room.  On the surface everything was normal.  But everywhere we went I could feel a huge weight, a cloud-of-doom feeling, which wasn’t present at the UofA.

I could sense the following thoughts tied to the oppressive feeling:

• They told me I’m a Sun Devil.  I don’t want to be a Devil!
• Am I really a Devil? I thought I was a good person!
• I want to be a good person, not a Devil.
• I’m supposed to yell “Go Devils!” But I don’t want to encourage Devils.
• If I succeed or help others to succeed, am I helping Devils succeed?
• I am secretly a good person; I hate having to temporarily be a Devil until I can get out of this place. This place is fucked up.

The symbol of a Devil is a well-known symbol in the United States of America.  The Devil is clearly the greatest foe of goodness and righteousness in Christianity, which is by far the biggest religion in this country (more than 78% of people are Christians, according to a recent survey by the Pew Forum on Religion and Public Life).  This negative symbol is known to everyone in the USA, not just Christians.  It represents the most extreme form of evil, unstoppable badness, even to many non-Christian people.  This symbol is dangerous in the psyche of nearly everyone in this country.

So now, let’s think: if you are a Devil, and you succeed in your work, what are you doing?  What kinds of conflicts does that create inside of you?  If you sabotage your own success in order to block the Devils, what are you doing to your life?  Why are you paying money to be a Devil?  What are you even doing here?

The Cloud Causes Conflict

Of course each student knows they are not an actual Devil! That’s obvious. They look in the mirror every morning and clearly see that they are a human being.  That’s why there is a conflict within them.  They see and know they are one thing, human, but everyone around them tells them they are something else – a Devil.  These two opposites create a powerful conflict within them that they must fight every day while studying, talking to other Devils (I mean students), eating, sitting in class, throwing a party, etc.

Have you ever had people around you believe something wrong about you, believe you did something bad that you didn’t actually do, and start treating you that way?  Do you remember how that felt?  You didn’t do it – you know that clearly, in your mind.  So why do you feel uncomfortable?  Why do you keep thinking about it, why does it bother you?  You kind of want to believe them now, even though your mind says “no! I didn’t do it.”  Come on, don’t you want to believe what all your friends and family are thinking?  That’s the kind of conflict I’m talking about.  And if that thought about you is that you are the most evil symbol in our society, how much stronger does that stand against you; how much more energy do you have to expend to fight it?

If ASU Changed their Mascot

If ASU changed its mascot to something more psychologically neutral, current students would feel a kind of relief in their life without knowing why.  Future students would be relieved without even knowing it.  Future students would get better grades easier, have more fun, adding to a greater success for ASU as a university.  Especially in difficult economic times when so many businesses are failing, anything a smart business can do to create greater success in their future can help keep them afloat until our society reaches the next economic upswing.

Are there entire groups of religious people who won’t even attend ASU because of their mascot?  I bet there are.  That’s a whole demographic of students and income ASU could have access to, if they simply spent a finite amount of money one year to change their mascot to something else.

Before I visited ASU in person, I thought the Sun Devils was just a silly thing.  You can have whatever mascot you want at a University, they chose “Sun Devils”, I don’t even know what that is, but OK.  Who cares; it’s not a big deal.  But after I visited, I realized the powerful invisible impact of that choice, and I realized it needs to be changed.

Thought forms are very powerful.  Thousands of people thinking the same thought forms every day for 4-5 years in a small space (1-2 square miles), eventually replaced by a fresh set of people thinking the same thought forms once again, creates a cloud of interconnectedness of those forms.  If the forms are positive and uplifting, the people in that place will experience extra positive energy and happiness.  But if those forms are negative and conflicting, that cloud drains energy and happiness from all those standing in its influence.

ASU, stop torturing your students in a way they aren’t even aware of!  Address your failure head-on, and make it right.  I call on you to do this now.  Just get it done, it won’t cost a lot to do, and everyone will thank you in the long run.  Stop the bleeding of a certain kind of good will from your organization.  Stop the unusual disadvantage you’ve placed against all of your students.  You can do this, I have faith in you.

If Arizona State University changes their mascot to something less harmful, I believe they will be around for a very a long time.

What I Expect

I expect more from you, world. More and better science, to improve life for Humanity all over the globe.

To do that, you must stop shooting and attacking and bombing each other.

To do that, you must disconnect yourself from your real enemies – hatred and self-centeredness. Your real enemy lies within.

• Realize that everybody has the same rights as you.
• Use the “as-if” method to stop your automatic biases, to see how to treat other people.

The “as-if” method is simple: any time you have an interaction with another person, anyone, anywhere – you imagine that you are them for a moment. When you hear words coming out of their mouth, you imagine what they’ve been through that would cause them to say such a thing, and you imagine you have been thru the same thing, just like them.  Don’t worry, you can’t lose yourself doing this, just as you don’t lose yourself watching a science-fiction or drama movie, or reading a book.  With practice you’ll reach a point where you totally understand what the other person is saying and why; why they’re acting the way they are.  You’ll realize that sometimes when two people are arguing, actually, they’re both correct.

You can only make the best decisions and take the right actions when you really understand the viewpoint of everyone involved. The “as-if” method can help you reach this level of understanding.  And then your decision, your action, will be fair to all – you may even find solutions that satisfies everyone’s need, even opposing viewpoints.  You’ll find that elusive third-angle, that new approach nobody thought of, which solves everyone’s needs and everyone can move on to the next level of living.

People aren’t your enemies anymore.  You live in a world with nothing but brothers and sisters.  Nobody’s totally evil and wrong, but you might believe that, based on what other people have told you; because of their inability to see things in grey-scale the way you’re learning to do.  They don’t know how to use the “as-if” method like you do. The best thing you can do is go and see for yourself – go to the source, listen, watch, and learn.  You can make the best decision when you have the purest information.  In this world of Information Exchange, where anyone can talk with anyone else all over the world, it should not be hard to go direct to the source – you can ask the questions you want, and get the information you need.

Hatred and its bedfellows (malice, slander, treason, revenge) are a kind of sticky glue that sticks to you if you let it.

Don’t let them, anymore.

You can put away your old toys now that you’ve outgrown them, and explore new and better toys.

World, for you to achieve what I expect of you, you need to honestly see your current limitations and work to overcome them.  Watch out for your superior attitude. Don’t jump to conclusions. Don’t see everything in Black and White – everything in the world is really gray-scale; part wrong, part right; part good, part bad.

I want to see real results of real scientific discoveries and breakthroughs in all parts of the world now, and I want all people to respect this and benefit from it.  I want to see Wikipedia’s Portal:Current_events page have real discoveries and breakthroughs in every avenue of modern science and medicine and life, every week.

The next step is up to you. I’m depending on you. I love you. You can do it!

My Thoughts on Real Estate Investing

My goal right now is to learn how to make money in this world, to become free of the Rat Race, under the current rules of how money and wealth works. I’ve already learned I’m pretty bad at a lot of the ways people make money, many of the ways don’t feel right to me. Real Estate investing seems to be fairly most compatible with my values and goals. It works for me. Someday the rules of how money works in our world will change dramatically – when that happens, I will learn how to do it all over again. Because money is a potentially unlimited kind of energy in our world, which can be used to do great things. It’s a man-made energy. It has man-made limitations and side-effects, compared to real energy like electricity or magnetism or light or love or will-power. But it can still do great things.

The Rat Race

Anybody working a job, taking a paycheck, and living off that money is in the Rat Race.

You’re out of the Rat Race when you’ve invested enough that the cash flow from those investments (Passive Income) is all you need to live!
You no longer have to work for your money because your money is working for you with the investments.

Yes it takes a lot of money. But not quite as much as you think. And, making money is easier the better you get at it. I’ll explain that in a bit.

Getting Out of the Rat Race

You’re out of the Rat Race when your Passive Income meets or exceeds your total expenses (cost of living). How much money do you need to live each month? That’s a specific number. Record all your expenses for 1 month and figure it out. Take into consideration any annual expenses or quarterly expenses you have, too; divide annuals by 12, divide quarterly’s by 3 to get the amount per month you generally have to come up with, so you can pay all your bills, year round. Yes, surprise expenses come up too; you should set aside a reasonable amount for those as well. What total did you come up with?

Now imagine that you have enough Real Estate that all of the rents you collect, combined, exceeds that number. Well, there are expenses with Real Estate too, like property taxes, HOA fees, advertising to get new renters, paying utility costs between renters, loss of income when you don’t have a renter; etc. That might sound scary, but really it’s a small cost in my experience. As long as you buy a property in such a way that the rents you’re receiving are more than all the expenses combined (including the mortgage, if there is one), then you’re cashflowing that property – you’re getting free money every month for simply owning that property. Very little work on your part (near zero) once you have a steady renter.

Let’s say a single property can cashflow $250 per month for you – that’s your money free and clear, after all the property’s expenses are paid for. Now, you already calculated what your personal living expenses are. How many $250′s go into your personal expenses total? That’s how many of those properties you need to own to be completely out of the Rat Race!

Suppose you can get by on $4000 per month (total personal expenses). Well, $4000 / $250 = 16, so you’d need to purchase 16 of those properties. Man, if you only had 16 of them, all that cash flow would pay all of your living expenses – no need to work! Or, you could continue working, and have LOTS of extra money for truly awesome vacations, or you can actually spend your time helping the world in the best way you know how, which you never could do before! You’re not trapped by the Rat Race – not locked into a career path or job you hate but keep going to day after day because it seems to work for you; and because you need the money. You don’t need the money now!

But I know it seems a long way – from where you are today until that future point where you own 16 properties. There are many questions. Will a bank even give me 16 mortgages to buy 16 properties? (answer: they’ll loan up to the first 10; by then you’ll know 3 or more alternate methods of financing those last 6). Is this even legal? (yes; I know more than one person in the Phoenix area who own over 100 properties themselves). The thing is, just focus on acquiring that first property.

More Money Each Month Makes it Easier to Invest

Here’s an interesting thing to think about – once you own your first cash flowing property, you have that extra amount of money every month coming in. That will help you save up money for the next property! Just getting that first one is the hardest. Now think about when you have 1 property, and it seems to be working, $250 extra cash in your pocket month after month. All right. Then you get a second one. And it seems to work, month after month too, $500 in your pocket now each month (in the above example). Hmm this gets interesting! With $500 cashflow above and beyond what you make at your job, you can put it aside for investing, in addition to whatever else you can save from your paycheck, if anything. I know it’s hard. But now you have an emergency source of income if you need it upon occasion; and, if you can just save up again, you can buy a third property. More cashflow! And so on.

Of course obstacles come up – you’re hosting Thanksgiving at your house, have to buy a lot of supplies and food, then Christmas arrives and you have to buy presents and decorations. November-December is the hardest time for my family in terms of saving money. But don’t let it get you down; some months are easier than others.

Getting Started

Getting started in Real Estate investing, there’s so many unknowns, you have to trust many people who might be strange to you (real estate agent, property inspector, contractor for repairs, etc.) But like everything else, as you get to know these people over time and see how they help you, that obstacle will go away. Then there’s the psychological side of the problem! We are not trained in the public school system (or most colleges and universities) about investing. It doesn’t feel right or normal to receive money for something you own.

Psychology of Investing

I want to talk about the psychological side of investing, because it’s extremely important. If your mindset is not right, you will sabotage yourself and not be a successful investor.
I don’t know what it is, but most people have emotional resistance to buying “extra properties” that they are not going to live in. Or about handling large sums of money. Or they’re overly suspicious of the people in the industry when they don’t have to be. There are many mistaken ways we think about things related to investing. We’ve watched so many movies that show horrible stereotypes of the money-grubbing evil rich man; Hollywood has done a great disservice with this. Example: Other People’s Money from 1991. Movies like this cause people to be unable to imagine themselves as being Good and Rich at the same time. Do you really think additional money will change your psyche all that much? It won’t. You’ll always be you. Besides, when you have more money, you can still choose to live the same way you always do – you just have more money to donate to a soup kitchen, women’s shelter or school; or do good work with around the neighborhood, your city, state, the church, your country, or elsewhere in the world.

If you find yourself facing irrational fears or anger about property investing as you learn about it, or if you catch yourself sabotaging your hard work in some way, you can help yourself get out of that rut with exercises you can do yourself. I recommend trying either EFT (Emotional Freedom Technique) or TAT (Tapas Acupuncture Technique).  There is a lot of emotion around money for a lot of people.  These exercises can help you escape past emotional-damage, even if it was given to you by your parents or others in your life. The instructions on both sites cost you nothing, it’s a free download. And both of them really work, for a lot of things, not just money issues.   Why not try them?

Consequences of Losing Your Job

Think about Real Estate investing this way:
When you own NO properties, all of your income comes from the job you work at. If you quit or get fired, you just lost 100% of your income. Period.

But, if you have 2 properties each bringing in $250/month, that’s $500/month you get every month even if you lose your job. That’s kind of a nice thing to think about! 4 properties would be $1000/month. A little elbow room to find that next job, a little cushion.

Not all properties cash flow $250/month. I’m just giving an example. If you buy wrong, it might break even ($0/month); or even cost you money every month. You have to do your math, add up all the expenses and incomes, to know whether it is going to work for you or not, before you buy it. But I also know people with single family rental homes cashflowing $300, $500, or even $700/month that they acquired at a good price.

What’s a Good Deal? Measure by ROI

The way you evaluate a good property investment is to look at the ROI (Return on Investment). In other words, how much money are you getting back each year, in comparison to the amount of money you spent buying the place? Because think about it: If you had to spend $100,000 to get a property that cash flows $500, is that better or worse than buying 5 properties ($20,000 each) that cashflow $200 each? $200 x 5 = $1000 a month, so obviously the 5 smaller properties is a better deal.

ROI is the percentage of your initial investment that you get back every year in cashflow.
You can calculate it like this:

ROI = (cashflow per month) x 12 / (investment initial cost) x 100%

In the above example, $100,000 property that pays $500/month has an ROI of 6%
(500 x 12 / 100000) x 100%

Each of the $20,000 properties paying $200/month have an ROI of 12%
(200 x 5 x 12 / 100000) x 100%

So, even though $200 sounds like less than $500, the ROI is better, so you might as well buy the better ROI property!

Another way of looking at it is: how many years before you got back ALL THE MONEY YOU INVESTED?

Yes that’s right, there is a number of years after which you’ve received ALL your original money back. You still own the property, you’re still making money from it every month; it still has most of its value left. You just paid yourself back the whole investment! Now that is a deal!

A 6% ROI property has paid for itself in 17 years. (100 / 6, then round up)
A 12% ROI property has paid for itself in 9 years! (100 / 12, then round up)

Can you believe that? You can have a chunk of money that you do something with (buy property), such that it pays you nearly every month for 8 years, until it’s all paid back to you. And when you’re done, you still own a valuable property and the cash flow is still coming in. Then, at the 16-year point it’s re-paid for itself again. And again at the 24 year point. And 32 year point. And so on.

The money can keep coming in until the day you die, even if you live to be 132 years old. And, when that happens, your children can inherit the property and continue receiving cash flow from it, for ever and ever. As long as they don’t sell the property

(And they can inherit it tax-free if you set up a Trust before you passed on; but that’s a topic for another day.)

ROI is very much like APR (annual percentage rate). Except APR is what you pay your credit card company for your rotating credit. It’s good for them. What APR do your credit cards have, 10%? 12%? 19%? Very likely.

Now, you also have a bank account, and it probably earns you interest too. That’s passive income – cash flow! You did nothing but leave money in your bank account, and the bank thankfully pays you some returns on it, month after month.

But how much are you earning that way? Right now my bank’s interest rate on savings and money market accounts is 0.1% per year. How much money do I have to deposit with my bank to make the interest they pay cover that $5000 per month expenses in the example above? Let’s do the math:

(deposit amount) * (0.001 / 12) = (monthly interest)

(monthly interest) / (0.001 / 12) = (deposit amount)

5000 / .000083333 = $60,000,000

You’d have to invest SIXTY MILLION DOLLARS in order to cover your expenses!
That’s totally unreasonable. Bad ROI. That’s never going to work.

You can do similar math for other financial instruments like CDs (Certificates of Deposit) and other things.  The “totally safe” investments like that don’t look good.

So, as you might imagine, it’s not worth dealing with properties that are going to net you only a few percentage points of cash flow per month. I shoot for 5% to 10% as a conservative ROI. Once you have a few properties of this type, you can choose whether to invest in more risky properties that can net you 20% or even 30% ROI.

Sometimes You Get an Amazing Deal

And there’s always stories. A friend of mine lives in a condo which was recently bought by an investor for the amazing low price of $17,000. The investor spent a little money on paint and kitchen items like a new oven, stove, microwave, etc. Let’s say he spent $22,000 total. Well my friend is living there, so he knows what the rent is: $750/month. I will assume there’s no mortgage, and taxes are around $70/month, HOA fee probably around $80/month, I’m just guessing now; I bet the investor is cashflowing at least $500/month on the place! The ROI on that is 27% – he gets it all back every 4 years!

Learning More

If you aren’t familiar with Real Estate, all the terms and concepts; what order to do things in; how to calculate whether a property is worth buy ing or not; well, there’s a lot to learn I know. But, there is a finite amount of stuff to learn – you can learn it, and then you’re done. And, this knowledge by and large hasn’t changed in 100 years. If you learn it today, the basic ideas will work the rest of your life. It’s not like computer technology that’s changing dramatically every 5 years. And you can teach the concepts to your kids.

How can you learn more about property investing? There’s many ways:
1. go to a realestate investing group in your town – there’s probably more than one. Search for them on the Meetup web site.
2. buy and read books on the topic. Learn to think right with Rich Dad, Poor Dad and Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant to get motivated.
3. buy the board game “Cashflow” from Rich Dad, and play it: Rich Dad Cashflow 101 board game (with CD’s)

The Cashflow game sets your brain up to think properly about investing. Play it with your kids – I was surprised how quickly my 17 year old daughter picked it up when we first got it 2 years ago. She makes it out of the Rat Race faster than I do more times that not!

Investing in Real Estate is a friendly sport. Investors aren’t battling against each other – they encourage each other and work together many times to be successful. If I help you, I didn’t subtract anything from myself. I can still invest my money regardless of what you’re doing. Cooperation – it’s the way business ought to be! That’s another thing I like about Real Estate investing.

Other Advantages

There are many other advantages to owning Real Estate investments which I haven’t mentioned yet. You get a tax break for all the interest you pay on mortgages – with a lot of properties, you might pay very little income tax. You have an emergency resource you can sell if you ever need a large influx of cash. When inflation rises, you can raise your rents when everybody else is raising the rents on their properties. And, if property values ever start going back up, you can make money on selling the place someday, too.

You Were Born At A Disadvantage

Look – you’ve been trained since birth to be OK with carrying heavy DEBT – a mortgage on your house, car loans, school loans. Credit cards. Why weren’t you also trained about the symmetric opposite: ASSETS? Debts cost you money every month. Assets make you money every month. Why didn’t anyone encourage you to learn about Assets? This should make you mad.

The deck has been stacked against you. What are you going to do about it? It’s time to learn about assets, about investments, which you can do in your spare time. Learn what the “rich people” were taught from birth. You can learn how to harness debt to acquire assets that make you money. You can learn this yourself, and the proof of your success will be the cash flow coming to your wallet month after month. Then it won’t matter that you never learned it when you were young. And, you can fix the future – teach your children now, while it’s easy for them to learn it. And thus you’ve improved the world.

————-

ADDENDUM – Investing With an IRA

A lot of my money is locked up in my IRA, which loses money most of the time if I just leave it with a money manager. All aspects of the stock market are way too risky for the past few years, and the next few years, to be investing money reserved for retirement. It’s just wrong. Don’t do it.

There is a way to invest IRA money in nearly any kind of investment, by moving it to a different kind of manager. I moved mine to Vantage Retirement Plans (formerly Entrust Arizona). They’re a popular one here in Arizona when you want to invest your IRA funds in Real Estate. Basically, that company holds the funds in trust for you, to be distributed at your retirement – and they will “invest” it in anything you tell them to. What you do is create an LLC that you are the manager of, they are the member – and you ask them to “invest” it all in the LLC. This is a completely legal way that gives you the ability to control your retirement funds, to invest any way you want, without having to get approvals constantly from the management company. There are numerous stipulations, you can’t spend the money on your self or your family members; and other rules. It has to be investments that don’t benefit you or your family in any way. For example, if you buy a rental house, you can’t move into it, neither can your family members.

It’s complex to set up the accounts and LLCs, but I trudged through it. The income on realestate in an IRA is all tax free – because you aren’t taxed in a Traditional IRA until you withdraw the funds at retirement. To withdraw funds with this system, I would have to (1) have funds to withdraw (i.e. cash; maybe sell a property if I have to), (2) pay the funds through the management company (Vantage/Entrust or whoever you use); (3) they take some percentage as their fee (often 2%). In addition to all the regular IRA requirements (you must be 59.5 years old or older; a limited amount each year can be withdrawn; after a certain age you’re forced to withdraw a certain amount or lose it; etc). Luckily I don’t have to worry about all that for many years to come. My job right now is to make the money grow through investing in Real Estate.

I’m just now realizing that IRA’s and 401K’s are really sucky investment vehicles. All the good parts of investing have been stripped out of these entities, in the name of “conservative investing” – “to protect you, the inexperienced investor”. Really, all it does is pay large interest, fees, and dividends to the stockmarket participants who know more than you do. You have very little control in your IRA, and even less control in your 401K to make enough money for you to actually retire on. The IRA I built up for 11 years at my previous company, staying invested for 6 more years after that, currently has less than 1.5 years worth of income at my current rate – there’s no way I can retire on that. It’s a travesty.

You need a way to set up your retirement money to make a consistent, reliable income for you, at a good interest rate, every single year between now and when you retire. But it’s such a pain in the butt to have to work with money in an IRA, I almost think it’s easier to pull it out, take the tax hit on it now, and do the investing directly as personal funds from now on. The accounting and bookkeeping would surely be easier in my life if I did that. I currently am not planning on doing that, but I seriously considered it.

 

One For All

Democrats vs Republicans
Team vs Team
Criminals vs Police
My Religion vs Your Religion
Employee vs Customer
Workers vs Management
Kids vs Adults
Parents vs Teachers
Rich vs Poor

We’ve been trained to think “us vs them” in our society, and it’s time to stop. It doesn’t work because it’s wrong.

“Us vs Them” creates a ridiculous amount of waste in our society. The amount of money collected and spent by Democrats to fight against Republicans, and vice-versa, is staggering. And it’s needless. Everyone knows that you want the right person in the right position; it doesn’t make sense to stick to a party line any longer, one way or another. When the system is failing, you need fresh thinking, you need anyone who can dig out from a mess, and you need everyone to support them. If the two choices are A vs B, then neither A nor B will work. You need a creative new idea, perpendicular to A and B, called C. Someone needs to think of C, and implement it. And we need to support them when that happens.

We now have a 2-party political system in the USA where if any one of the two parties begins to succeed, the other works even harder to tear down the first and ruin their progress. That’s so disgraceful to humanity. It’s so disrespectful to the Principles of the United States of America. It hurts my heart, and then I have to turn off the TV and hide from it all. And I don’t think I’m the only one.

But politics isn’t the only place where Us vs Them is destroying power, wasting energy, wasting money, food, our time, and other resources.

If people really wanted to solve problems in order to live a happier and more fulfilling life, they would find ways of actually listening to other people with joy in their heart, eager to hear what the other person’s fertile brain has thought up recently. They would admit a series of ideas is interesting and new and different, when it is – regardless of whether they agree with it or not. These people would love each other so much they would want to be like each other, admiring their mannerisms of oration, the way their mind works, how their heart influences their thinking… and they’d try to be the same way.

I have seen musicians who mutually admired each other, and learned things from each other – the end result is wonderful: the highest quality of music for all to hear.

There is limited money, limited energy that the human race has to work with right now. Each of us has limited time on this Earth. It’s unacceptable to waste any of it. If there is a better way than the current norm for spending those hours, that money, that energy, well… it needs to be studied, understood, and followed from now on, by everyone in the world.

Learn how to cooperate, to arbitrate, to work out differences by seeing the other person’s point of view. This would solve so many problems in our lives, and provide a far happier life for all around us including ourselves.

I think about the homeowner who fights their HOA about changes to their home. That’s so ridiculous – those people would kick themselves if they could see it from a distant eye, a balanced view. The HOA is themselves. If you don’t get this yet, sit in on a few HOA meetings. Ask the board members where they live and how much they get paid to be there. Do you know the answer? If not, go and ask. You will be startled.

I want to see people laughing and talking and agreeing and disagreeing and sharing and appreciating each other. If there’s a disagreement, well, what the heck; this time let the other person win. Let them try their idea, if that’s the consensus. If it doesn’t work out, they learned something – we can try your way now. Maybe next time they will cave in to your idea, to your surprise (it would be nice once in a while, wouldn’t it.) So you get your chance to implement your idea. If it doesn’t work, then you will have learned something – we can try their way now.

This is the difference between chaos and order. Chaos is opposites pulling against each other, canceling each other out – reducing results. Order is cooperative effort which compounds results. Spending energy to progress, rather than spending energy to hold back. Adding two numbers together, rather than subtracting one from the other.

I’m beginning to think this is the real meaning behind the Tower of Babel. It wasn’t so much that humanity started speaking a thousand different languages (after all, the Internet is slowly fixing that). No, the problem is that humanity started insisting on their own way or the highway, for a thousand different opinions, with or without evidence; with or without experience. Everyone’s an expert, everyone has an opinion, and everyone gets pissed off if you don’t listen to them and do exactly what they want. This shit has to stop. The stopping can begin with me, and you.

Next Steps

1. Right now, go and look up your HOA’s web site. I dare you. Find when the next open meeting is; call and make sure they’re still meeting at the same time & day & place. Then, attend the meeting and start asking questions.

2. You’re a parent? So why can’t you see the child’s point of view anymore? You were one not so long ago! Sometimes the child is right in what they’re attempting, if you keep your eyes open and put aside your homegrown prejudices.

3. The next time you’re in a disagreement with someone, stop yourself and see if you can fully understand their point of view – particularly, why they are saying what they are saying. What’s their motivation. You don’t have to agree with them. But you should be able to argue their viewpoint at least as well as they can. If you can’t, yet, keep practicing. There’s no emotion required in understanding a viewpoint. Except, possibly, compassion, once you realize the origins of why they are arguing the opposite point from you.

4. The next time someone suggests the next path of action and you point out all the obstacles of their idea, if they’re still insisting, then back down. Say “OK, we’ll try it your way.” Because their way could work. Maybe you can now discuss the few pitfalls you predicted, and together come up with some good ways to deal with them – so they aren’t even a problem. Remember, the other person (who’s so positive about their own idea!) is in the perfect mental position to solve problems with their idea. You are not, because it’s not your idea; you’re mind is somewhat against it. You can think up the problems (and they cannot); they can think up the solutions when you cannot.

That’s the cooperation that leads to success.

And when it works, you can say “we did it together!” and you will be really happy.

And when it fails, you can say “let’s find the solutions together!” and that work will be energizing for you.

I’ve seen it. I’ve done it. I highly recommend it.

Cutting the Cord to Cable TV

A lot of people have been asking me all the details of how I set up TV in our house to reduce my cable bill to $0 a month, so I decided to explain it all right here.

I was paying $97 a month for DirecTV, and wasn’t happy with what I was getting. Then they raised the price to $102 a month. Only 1 of our 3 TVs received the HD signals, even though all 3 TVs are high-definition TVs. And only 1 could actually record shows and pause live tv (DVR/PVR). I really wanted that feature on all 3 TVs, but that would have been even more expensive. And, once each TV has a recorder on it, I couldn’t record something upstairs and watch it downstairs – each TV would have its own separate recordings; I’d be forced to watch it wherever I recorded it. That’s not what I wanted. The DVR they provide for recording shows has 2 cable inputs, and can record 2 channels at one time – or, record on one channel while watching TV on another channel. That’s neat, but only works for a single TV. If you wanted all 3 TVs to access 1 DVR, so you can share recorded shows, that won’t work with only 2 inputs.

Motivation

My wife and I only watch TV about 1 hour a day or so, mostly just these things:

• Dancing With The Stars
• Daily Show
• White Collar
• Simpsons
• Cash Cab

And, we never watch them live – I can’t stand watching advertisements, I always fast forward through them. I am already aware of the products and services available in our society, and I will search them out when I need them. Product information should be pull, not push; I don’t want it pushed onto me, I will search the Internet for it when I want it.

My children (17 and 19) watch cartoons and some misc shows on TV; they don’t seem to be really picky about the shows they watch. Besides, more than half the time they are watching thingson their Internet connected computers, like Anime and other things.

My Requirements

I want to have 3 TVs receive HD content, have some kind of digital TV Guide directly on the TV, be able to pause live TV shows, and record shows now and in the future for later viewing. I want a show recorded on one TV to be available on all the other TVs. I want every TV to be tunable to different channels from every other, while simultaneously recording 1 or more things at the same time. And, I want to pay $0 per month – that’s NO dollars per month – for such a service.

I’m OK with buying extra equipment up front, because that’s initial cost only; not a monthly fee. As long as I don’t buy it on rotating-credit (because then your credit card is your never-ending monthly fee).

I’m not OK with how slow channel-changing and scrolling is on the stupid cable company’s DVR devices. They all suck, in my opinion, it’s an insult to my psyche to be forced to use them. You press the channel +/- button, and cobwebs form on your remote control before the channel actually changes. There’s no excuse for outdated technology. There’s CERTAINLY no excuse for paying $102 every month for outdated technology.

My Setup

I already have high-speed Internet, 20Mbps DSL thru Qwest (the local telephone provider), which I’m paying about $20/month for, for 24 months, which is quite a deal. I’m bundling a home phone line with that (adds about $35/month which seems excessive). We still need the home phone line as our “default” phone number when signing up for things (I never answer the line). The kids use the home phone sometimes to talk to local friends for hours on end. And, we still need FAX machine ability, believe it or not, in this day and age; you have to have an analog phone line to do that. Maybe some day we can get rid of the analog line, but not yet.

I already have a nice new high-end Windows 7 Pro PC mini-tower with a nice big hard drive. It has dual Intel Xeon 2.4GHz processors (64 bit) and 4GB RAM. Windows 7 Pro comes with Microsoft Media Center software built-in.

I added a dual TV tuner card to the box (PCIX slot), and plan to add 1 more of those cards. You need 1 tuner for every channel you want to simultaneously tune to and/or record. Two dual-tuner cards would let me tune in 4 separate channels at the same time.

I bought an external digital TV antenna and mounted it on the roof, pointing in the direction of South Mountain – that’s where all the TV and radio antennas are in my area. This enabled me to get 25 channels including ABC, NBC, CBS, FOX, both HD and SD, and a whole bunch of lesser channels including a lot of spanish-speaking ones and some praise-the-lord type channels. It took a lot of fiddling to get the right position and angle, luckily I had a friend helping me. Media Center has useful features built-in that scan for channels, so you can see how many you’re getting with different antenna positions/locations.

Now here’s the tricky part. I wanted this antenna to do two things: I want the antenna signal going to every TV in the house, directly. And, I want it going into my PC’s TV tuner cards. How can I do both at the same time? With a signal splitter. But when you split the signal, it weakens the signal; the weakest channels may not come in anymore after doing that. So I also bought a digital-coax-amplifier device.

Another factor to consider is, the longer coax-runs you have, the weaker the signal gets. Especially if it’s going through a lot of connectors (each connector removes a little signal-strength too). I knew I wanted the antenna to go down to my house’s central Cable Box, because that box feeds out to every TV in the house. I won’t have to run new coax to every TV in the house this way.

The coax runs go like this:

• antenna into my upstairs office (where the media center PC is)
• that antenna line goes into a 2-way splitter, one output of which goes straight into the PC (for best signal strength).
• the other output goes into the digital coax signal amplifier.
• the amplifier output goes back outside, and down to the cable box that’s luckily on the same side of the house (on the first floor).
• I added a 4-way splitter in the cable box, so every TV could be hooked up that way. Don’t ask how the previous cable provider fed cable to every TV without a splitter; I believe the dish antenna had splitting capability built-in.

This arrangement seemed to work the best. The signal’s a little weaker at each TV than it is at the Media Center, but you get a pure HD signal to every TV on all the best channels. And, if you want to record live TV and play it back, you can use the XBOX media center next to the TV to do that. If you can’t receive a channel on the direct coax line, I tell my family, try it on the media extender; it works then.

My current setup only has the XBOX on 1 TV. Because you have to run ethernet wire to the XBOX, from your home’s central Internet connection. I have an 8-port Gigabit Ethernet switch, perfect for splitting out physical ethernet connections to each Xbox device next to each TV. But for now, that’s just 1 wire going to 1 TV. Once I add the second tuner card (for a total of 4 tuners), I’ll be ready to run cat6 Ethernet wiring to the other two rooms. I have a plan on how to do that – go thru the attic for one of them, and around the side of the house for the other. I might run some 1/2″ wiring pipe with waterproof joints (Home Depot electrical section) around the side of the house to protect the wiring and make it meet code. Or I may just tack up the wire and paint over it with a coat or two of house-paint for sun-protection. The sun gets so hot and dry in Phoenix Arizona in the summer time. If I run pipe, I will paint that with house-paint so my wife won’t complain that it looks bad.

The TV receiver card also came with a media center remote, which looks like a normal TV remote that you point at the XBOX to control all the media center features. That way you don’t have to use a 2-handed XBOX controller to change channels, record/pause, etc. It feels a lot more natural this way.

I also bought a Boxee box and a Roku box, to play with them. I like the Boxee box better than Roku. The boxee has the coolest remote – it’s radio, not infra-red, so you don’t have to “point it” at the device. Just works better. I can play Netflix movies on my HD TV this way – I will probably buy one for every TV in the house, just because of this. Not to mention being able to view all the TED talk videos, and a ton of podcasts that are really awesome to listen to / view. These devices encourage you to play Vudu movies which are some of the latest movies but cost $3-$4 per viewing; no, I don’t want to pay Blockbuster prices per movie inside my home. I prefer Netflix. I pay $17 a month for Netflix, and get access to everything that way – as much streaming movies as I can handle, as well as 1 disc physically mailed to me via USPS, so I can access their entire catalog that way. I’m a bit of a movie buff, and I want to make sure I can always get to old/obscure movies when I want to.

I have been paying for Netflix for many years now, and use it a lot. I would have Netflix whether I have TV or not; that’s why I don’t count the monthly cost of Netflix as part of the cost of this TV system. I don’t think of Netflix as TV but as Movies. Although they are getting more and more past seasons of TV shows all the time.

Of the TV shows I listed at the beginning of this article, I can now watch all of them except one on my new setup.

• Dancing With The Stars – ABC over-air; auto-record every show with Media Center/Extender.
• Daily Show – Boxee box has it as a “show”; or a laptop can play the latest episodes on their web site.
• White Collar – plays on USA channel only; that’s a cable-only channel. Can’t see this with my new setup (darn). I believe when the new episodes start in January 2012 we can watch them on the web site, but possibly not; we’ll see. Some shows play “last week’s episode” only, which would be OK with me – I don’t mind being 1 week behind.
• Simpsons – reruns playing continuously round the clock on many over-air channels.
• Cash Cab – reruns playing continuously round the clock on one over-air channels.

Notes

I searched the whole Internet for media extender devices that are Microsoft compatible. A year ago or two there used to be a lot of them. Now, they’ve almost all been removed from the market! I finally discovered that Microsoft’s own XBOX gaming system has Media Extender built in, and it’s cost is only $150-300 at this point, which is why the stand-alone media extenders left the market. They were around that price range too, and had no gaming capabilities like the XBOX has. I settled on the XBOX 4G product because it was $100 cheaper (no hard drive). It works fine for being a Media Extender. I think if I used it for a lot of gaming, I’d probably want the more expensive one with the hard drive.

Why not use Wifi to each Xbox, you ask? Because you need REALLY fast data connection speeds for streaming HD video. Times 3, because there are 3 TV’s I’m trying to operate in this way all at once. Even 802.11N isn’t fast enough to do this. Or, if it is, that would then slow down the 4 laptops we have that connect already to the hub via wifi – a sacrifice I’m not OK with.

Did you just say “802.11N should be fast enough because all that streaming TV is using up Internet bandwidth anyway; your 20Mbps DSL Internet connection is your bottleneck”? That’s not quite right. Most of the TV viewing we do is playing pre-recorded TV – so it’s streaming off the media player, going through an XBOX going to the TV. Times 3. That doesn’t have to access the Internet at all – it’s only using our local house intranet. If one thing is beating up only the local network, and the other thing is using local network PLUS Internet-bottleneck, then separating the two speeds up the whole process. I can ram 100Mbps thru an ethernet wire or 1Gbps if the device can handle it. My PC can certainly handle it, as can my Gbps switch. Without touching the 20Mbps Internet connection. A lot of the “pre-recording” is being done when nobody is home; or everyone’s asleep.

The Experience

I can experience TV the same was as normal – lean back with a remote control, interface with a very glossy, nice-looking screen with pleasant sound-effects to browse recorded shows, TV listings, play/pause, rew/ff, etc. I am controlling a Media Extender (XBOX), which is talking over the ethernet wire to my Media Center PC where all the recording and channel-tuning is really taking place. And, that Media Center PC is still available for use as a PC when I need to get to the Internet.

To access the Boxee box or Roku box, I used to use my TV’s “input” button to switch inputs. But now I did one better – because the XBOX and Boxee and Roku all use HDMI cables to connect to the TV, I bought a cheap 4-port HDMI Switch for $20 which auto-senses when a new signal comes on line, and switches the output (TV) to look at that channel! Now I don’t have to do anything – turn on Boxee, and the TV displays Boxee. Turn that off and turn on XBOX, TV switches over to XBOX. Really nice. Less confusing for my wife and family. The HDMI switch came with a mini remote control (yuk, yet another remote control!) – but because of this auto-switching, I never have to use it.

Is this setup right for you?

You’ll have to ask yourself some questions.

• Do I really watch all the cable-only channels, HBO, etc.? Can I do without those?
• Are the shows I watch on cable already available over the air, or from some Internet-based provider, like Netflix or Hulu or in other ways?
• Would a 1 week delay in viewing be acceptable to me, for shows that are made available on their web site 1 week late?
• Over 2 year period of time how much money will I save? Because there’s a few hundred dollars of equipment and setup for a system like this; maybe as much as $1200 for 3 TVs with everything. What’s your monthly cost today? Multiply that by 24.
• Won’t you still be watching TV 3 years from now? 5? 10? Maybe you should multiply by 96 instead (8 years worth X 12 months). Now how much would you save?

My guess is, if you have Internet access in your home today, you’ll probably want Internet access for the rest of your life. And, the “next speed level up” from your current Internet connection is probably no more than $20-$30 a month. Far less than cable TV costs with HD DVR for 3 TVs. Probably worth it.

You can ease into this slowly if you want. Start searching the Internet for how to legally stream TV shows you like watching. Many of them are available for free on that show’s web site. Look into Netflix and Hulu and Vudu – where you will pay a little per month, or a little per movie.

Credits

A big Thank You to my friend Derek who loaned me his coax crimp-tool, connectors, and giant spool of wire so I could build all the wiring I needed at my house for free. Thanks also go to Steve and Brian who talked me through the specifics of how all this could work before I ever attempted it. Thanks, guys!

Links to Products

Here are some of the products I bought on Amazon for my setup. These, or equivalent devices, should work fine for you. These are affiliate links, so I get a small payment if you purchase from these links. Feel free to use them or not, your choice.

• Xbox 360 Console 4G
• The Boxee Box by D-Link HD Streaming Media Player
• Roku 2 XD Streaming Player 1080p
• Motorola Signal Booster 484095-001-00 Bi-Directional RF
• Terk HD-TVS Slim-Profile Outdoor HDTV Antenna
• HDMI 5×1 5 Port Switch/Switcher with IR Remote Support 3D
• RiteAV – Cat5e Network Ethernet Cable – Blue – 150 ft.