Ed Icionsub

On the Yahoo front page this morning is a link to the headline stories about which cities are expected to be be trouble spots over the next 12 months.

Local Market Monitor, a Cary, N.C.-based real estate research firm, surveyed 315 U. S. cities and has forecast the Atlantic City metro to experience the largest drop in home value this year – and possibly well into next year.

The top five cities they predict will see the worst decline in property values include:

5. Bellingham, WA

4. Glen Falls, NY

3. Portland/Beaverton/Vancouver OR/WA

2. Provo, UT

1. Atlantic City, NJ

Came across an interesting blog today by Bert Martinez. If you are not familiar with Martinez, he is a professional motivational speaker and sale trainer. He is also the host of a live radio show on CNN650.com.

I like the blog topics he has on his site. They make sense for business in today’s world.

Here is a quote from the Bert Martinez site that I like:

“Your greatest obstacle to success is yourself, it’s fear of failure.”

~Bert Martinez

Next month we will be spending a weekend in one of my favorite family-friendly resorts: Myrtle Beach. We have been going for years and always have a wonderful time. I was searching for resorts for golf in Myrtle Beach and have it all planned out.

Although the rest of the family wants to go for the beach and the ocean, I am going to enjoy 3 days of golf on the best courses in South Carolina. I found golf packages in Myrtle Beach that save me money and are strategically located near the beach as well as the best golf courses.

My boss told me about a web site that he likes to use to arrange for tee times: http://www.ttimesonly.com/ so that is the next step in planning my mini-vacation in Myrtle Beach. After I set up my gold games, then I will let the family plan around the times I’ll be golfing and we’ll all have plenty of time to enjoy ourselves.

Call me crazy, but it sure seems to be getting very hard to work with real money these days. The financial institutions want the money and they want the rest of us to carry around plastic cards so they can limit how much real money we really have. Thank goodness there are still some places like the payday advance businesses that make real cash available when you need it.

My step daughter just got a new job and had her first payday on Friday. It was only for 2 days of work, but it was a big first step for her. They gave her a check drawn on a bank that is out of state, as the company’s headquarters is in Atlanta.Well, folks, I challenge you to find a way to get that check cashed into real money if you do not have a checking account at a bank or credit union.

What I found is that a cash advance store will cash paychecks for a small fee. Every place else that we tried, such as the big discount department store chain, the local grocer, and even my bank will not cash her check or they want an outrageous fee for processing it. I don’t see why it should cost someone up to 20 percent of the check amount as a fee to convert a paycheck into cash money. I thought we had usery laws against this kind of price gouging!

I used to think that a cash advance business was only to help people borrow money against their next paycheck. But they do a lot more than that. They will cash pay checks, tax refund checks and even take a debit card to give you cash money.

My post about stress on the 25th has garnered the most spam comments of any one post that I’ve ever written. I guess the word stress is one if the top search words for spammers to zero in on making spam comments. So by writing this post I will probably get even more of the little buggers. That is why I’m writing this – it is a little experiment that I have decided to undertake. I want to see if this one attracts the same scumbags as the first post, or if it gets even more attention from spammers than the first.