Another Friday came and went rather quickly due to the number of appointments I had today. Luckily I was able to keep them all within their expected time frames, as well as assisting several un-scheduled drop-ins.
My first appointment today was with a retiree who is thinking of selling his home and moving closer to his immediate family. I’ve heard many similar reasons from seniors over the years, and have given pretty much the same advice to nearly all of them. Aside from what I told him about selling, we ended up in conversation about the continued influx to our City of seniors from outside our State’s borders.
I’m still wondering why most of our native seniors haven’t realized how many more senior transplants we’ve recently welcomed from far and wide. Just this week I closed on a home which was purchased by senior couple from a Southern State, and likely next week, I may have one, possibly two homes sold to people coming from out West.
Their reasons for moving here are nearly all the same which include, no more fast-paced freeway driving, reduced costs of living, close proximities to health care, and above all, being de-stressed after getting out from under all their personal debt which is usually due to having sold their homes for much higher prices than what they ended up purchasing here in North Iowa. In comparison to most metro areas, our monthly costs of gas, electric, water, sewer, and garbage are noticeably less, even in spite of our higher winter heating bills. But we must remember, people who’re living in Florida, Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, and parts of California, are paying exceptionally high electric bills during their long summers due to having to keep their air conditioners running for months on end.
I finished our conversation by saying, “It’s high time we as a community stop fretting about what direction we should be headed, and focus more on making Mason City a “preferred” retirement community which will attract all the more tax paying citizens. We could even get some clever sayings going like, “Move to Mason City where there’ll be a deck chair reserved for you on own Golden Pond.”
Once again, while showing several of my scheduled homes today, we couldn’t help but notice the filth contained within. I can’t even imagine what must go on in the minds of sellers who offer up their homes for sale in such conditions. As far as I’m concerned there’s no excuse for it other than blind laziness. On the flip-side, the home I closed on last week, was so clean you could’ve eaten off the basement floor.
After hearing something today, I couldn’t help but bristle all the more regarding Amazon’s tactics of driving more business in their direction. I head earlier, and it was then later confirmed, that one of our City’s churches is encouraging their congregants to sign up for “AmazonSmile” and follow a specified link, so that if they purchase something online from Amazon, that church will receive a half of 1 percent of the cost of their purchases as a rebate.
Now how much farther reaching, and low stooping is Amazon going to get? What I said to the person telling me this was, “Instead of buying something they really don’t need, why don’t those church members dig a little deeper into their pockets every Sunday, and remind themselves that they’ve freely given with no strings attached.”
The real art of giving, is when there’s absolutely NO physical, monetary, mental, familial, or even religious strings attached. Have you noticed? I left out “spiritual”, because the only string that should be attached to giving freely is helping along our own very personal spiritual growth and development.
Of course any church that promotes such gimmicks, is just creating more future jobs lost brick and mortar stores. I guess the religious don’t think forward enough to where if their members don’t have jobs, they can’t tithe, and possibly even worse, they’ll have to sell their homes and move out of North Iowa, and you know what that means, there’ll be all the more vacant brick and mortar churches blighting communities all over our Country.
Today is the day Holtz Realty’s upgraded website was released to the cyber world so to provide a version that’s all the more client, customer, and user friendly. I’m hoping you’ll like this year’s upgrade. We must continue to evolve along with the technologies of today because all the more buyers and sellers look to the internet first, and by the way, this is a special year for Holtz Realty. I’m not sure what I’m going to do in celebration, because Holtz Realty will be celebrating this year its 75th year anniversary of doing business and North Iowa. Now that’s a very long time compared to most other companies. I truly hope you must believe we are doing something right.
Tonight’s one-liner is: If you live simply, there’s nothing to worry about.
