Spoken Gently's Blog: All Categories

Whether a young couple starting out, a retiring couple looking for a place to settle down, a starving college student looking to survive, or just anyone looking to save some money, Tri-Cities Washington is the place to live! The Tri-Cities has recently been ranked number 1 out of 350 communities in the Pacific Northwest by the ACCRA Cost of Living Index as the least expensive place to live. The Tri-Cities was given an index rating of 88.9 during the third quarter; down from 89.9 in the second quarter. The low cost of groceries and housing is partly to thank for the low cost of living in the Tri-Cities. Communities ranking the closest to the Tri-Cities are Spokane with an index rating of 93.5; Portland at 95.1; and Boise with a rating of 96.0

Tri Cities…

I'm excited for Colleen (and us) as she passed the Washington State Broker's Exam last week. This opens up all sorts of doors for us, one of which going out on our own. Kinda scary, but we've always been self-employed so we've traveled this road before. After being married to Colleen for 23 years, I still continue to be impressed by her (and love her all the more). Given the responsibilities of 5 children (er, the 6th being me, but we won't go there!), all at home, she finds the time to have a successful real estate career and make time for the many, many hours required to study for the brokers exam. Congratulations Colleen!

We're just starting on the social marketing thing. Yeah, kinda late to the party, however, you can read/follow more about… Read Full Post

Has anyone seen this? ActiveRain now allows a member to post to an outside blog with a unique url. I helped Colleen set up her own blog using her name. Coleen Lane (yup, her blog is the best ever, so says the unbiased husband!). When we went looking for a domain for her, naturally we started with her name. I was incredulous to find that colleenlane.com was not taken, especially since a search in Google renders 2,240,000 results. Fortunately, her name (and our site) is on the top of that list!

ActiveRain Outside Blog Pro: Allows an url to mature and it's free (except for the cost of the domain name)!

ActiveRain Outside Blog Con: There are duplicate content issues that will need to be resolved. So far, anything we have posted on our ActiveRain blog is…

The Washington Post recently reported that the emotional and financial strain of the housing market has become so rough, it’s on par with divorce, and even death. TODAY’s Barbara Corcoran and psychologist Jeff Gardere explains how to lessen the burden and turn your house into a source of revenue:

Well, we've decided to put our West Pasco water front home up for sale.  We are spending way too much time commuting back and forth from North Richland getting our 5 children to school and other activities.  North Richland here we come and we're leaving behind a Columbia river home with many upgrades.   Our 3500 sq ft home's starting price is $659,000.  Pictures of our home and river views can be seen here, and when clicked, a larger image opens in a new window:

That's almost 2 decades ago! Can it get any worse? I'm afraid it will. Today's MSNBC headline news:

"Construction of new homes plunged by a bigger-than-expected amount in September, as builders slashed production to the slowest pace since early 1991, when the country was in a deep recession. Friday’s housing report was yet another piece of evidence that the nation is struggling with a weak economy that, if the financial crisis is not solved, could dive into a sustained downturn. President Bush on Friday said in a speech that the credit markets — where many companies find funding for their operations — will take a while to thaw, but that Americans should be confident that it will."

The Tri Cities Washington economy is still strong, but I wonder how…

We started in Squidoo a few years ago mainly to add to our inbound linking portfolio. We are pushing 225 lenses now, not only in real estate related lenses, but lenses on many other topics. Our children have gotten involved and created some of their own! We have always donated all our Squidoo earnings to one charity or another. Given our dire economic times in most American communities, I thought I would post our recent earnings. Perhaps some could use the extra income to get through the winter months, or to contribute to their favorite charity:

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The above earnings are from Squidoo's matching of Google's adsense.…

CNN reports today that "An outraged sheriff in Illinois who refuses to evict "innocent" renters from foreclosed homes criticized mortgage companies Thursday and said the law should protect victims of the mortgage meltdown. Cook County, Illinois, Sheriff Thomas J. Dart says too many renters are being evicted for landlords' problems, and he is suspending foreclosure evictions in Cook County, which includes the city of Chicago. The county had been on track to reach a record number of evictions, many because of mortgage foreclosures."

This is truly sad.  Until now, I thought of the mortgage debacle as a shared responsibility between folks buying homes they should not have been buying, and lenders lending money they should not have been lending.  At first…