I’m no financial guru, so please take what you are about to read with a pinch of salt. This is not meant to be taken as expert advice. Just an honest opinion of what I would do in these turbulent economic times if I could still afford to keep my house.
I would not sell it. Why?
First of all I’d be selling in a depressed market, that means I would be selling it at a fraction of its real value. Secondly, because of this saying:
Bad money drives out good money
Bad money in this case would be the declining value of cash because governments all over the place are printing money (and in the process creating humongous deficits) in order to:
When that starts to happen increasingly, investment funds stop flowing into paper assets/ exotic financial instruments and run to the safety of tangible assets like gold, other precious metals, oil, and -yes – real estate, all collectively known as commodities (good money).
Because demand will have returned to commodities, their prices will shoot up as further pandemonium ensues.
It seems that in the panic we have all forgotten about past horror stories of hyperinflation. What I’m seeing now with rescue packages worries me because those are the very actions that can lead to hyperinflation. Yet we all seem to be merrily oblivious of the monster that might befall us.
Most of us alive today have never experienced hyperinflation (except Zimbabweans) and that painful experience may be just around the corner.
I don’t buy the story about inflation going down “because the economy is slowing down”. That’s talk of inflation from a completely different dimension. These are the reasons I think your house may pick up value sooner than you think.
If you had spare cash, now would be a good time to pump it into real estate. Property is cheaper and it will always be a good store of value.
If this does not happen you can rightly dismiss me as a bumbling quack who should stick to computer code. but I have the gut feeling that we are headed in that direction. Don’t get me wrong, the good times will be back, infallible human ingenuity will again find new ways to create great sums of money out of thin air. This will not happen before the crucifixion passes through.
One day it might be written in history books that the biggest economic blunder made in the 21st century was to not let financial institutions fail and let the markets correct themselves.
Without meaning to toot my own horn, I correctly predicted over a year ago that the overheated Chinese stock market would collapse and cause mayhem. This was largely overshadowed by the crisis that began in the US.
All the while, others were saying such a thing was impossible. Perhaps that’s because they honestly did not see it coming. So let’s not be too hard on our gurus. It’s important to be careful about whom to take advice from. This blog post by Dave Duarte backs me up on that front.
Let’s remember that it’s not nice to fool with mother nature.
A while back I stumbled upon this article by the team at radiiate.co.za. It speaks about the benefits and potential pitfalls of using agile development methods in general.
I was preoccupied with a lot of things at the time so the message did not really sink through that a lot of time and effort could be swallowed up by this approach, and that it is probably best left to internal or personal projects only.
The article mentions also Agile can be employed on client work if there is a clear understanding of the time and costs involved in journeying from point A to a hazy point B.
I could not agree more, especially after spending the past week on designing this blog (WordPress) and getting new ideas as I went along. I shuddered at the thought of having a client behave the way I did and yet being on a fixed budget.
Someone would have definitely got burned and I wonder, since Agile is the buzzword right now (especially in the Rails community), how this wildcard of a project scope is accounted for.
I don’t know too many clients who would be willing to hand you a blank development cheque, not least in these times of economic turmoil. What do you think?
Who would have thought that a government institution would be an early adopter of Flex and AIR?
Certainly not many people, and I am one of those pleasantly surprised by the news that the South African Revenue Service (SARS) had done just that!
It’s not everyday that you find the public sector out-pacing the private sector in new technology adoption (well, Flex has been around for a good number of years, so it’s not really that new).
I first learned of SARS’s foray into the Adobe Rich Internet Application (RIA) space when I registered for e-filing on www.sarsefiling.co.za . The e-filing website could use some improvement and I’m confident that it will come in time. Just like private sector banks, SARS has truly grasped the internet’s value proposition and I find that I highly commendable.
In an effort to foster more efficient tax controls, SARS developed two distributed desktop applications for tax practitioners and employers. A third package for individual taxpayers is in the works. The brand name for the suite of applications is equally catchy – e@syFile.
Their efforts went so far as having the e@syFile suite as finalist in both the North American and European Adobe Max awards at the end of 2008! Now that’s what I call palpable success.
To SARS I say:
Thank you and well done!
You have paved the way for adoption of the most exciting technology to come around in ages and I hope the private sector and other government organisations learn from your successes.
I wonder how many other SA organisations are seriously using Flex and AIR in their enterprise application environments. Does anyone know?
I know that there is a heavy-hitter of a stock analysis flex/php/mysql solution doing its thing in Nigeria. It was built for Customs Street Advisors, Lagos by the wizards at Saven Technologies.
While on the subject of tax, here's an interesting fact: According to legend, the term "Peeping Tom" was coined from a tax-related matter. It is said that Lady Godiva rode naked through Coventry in order to persuade her husband not to tax the townspeople so heavily; the only person to look at her as she rode by was a man named Tom and Peeping Tom has become a synonym for voyeur. (circa 1040-1080)