First Update Of 2012

Wow.. I can’t believe I haven’t updated this blog since December! Truth be told, there isn’t much happening. My three outstanding hard money loans continue to pay on time. I haven’t received an update on the Houston apartment since last time, so there isn’t a whole lot to tell there. I’m assuming performance of that still sucks or we would have heard something. I did make a decision to go a bit further into hard money lending. I’ve got some money in a UTMA account for my daughter that has been languishing in the stock market for the past 5 years. I finally got fed up with seeing it sit there doing nothing and have liquidated the stocks and will be switching those funds to HMLs as soon as the trades settle and my brokerage can get me a check. I have noticed in the paperwork I get for some of my existing loans (trust deeds and recorded docs and such), other people I lend with have done the same thing.
In somewhat-related news, my self-directed IRA is getting up there in value. I think in the next couple of months, I’ll split that investment into two loans just to provide a bit of diversity. It’s not diversity in the stock market sense of the word, as both loans will be in the real estate sector and the same geographic area (probably), but the loans will be on two different properties, possibly with two different borrowers. I need a couple more months of interest payments before doing this though, in order to satisfy the minimum balance requirement for my bank account before I withdraw the funds.
The market seems to be picking up in the California Bay area. My partner says for the first time in a long time, he has more requests for loans than money to fund them.