Individual Economics in the Age of COVID-19

I’m grunching, haven’t read any other replies. I’ll get that book on Kindle so I can read it on my phone/laptop. This is probably either going to be conducted on the phone or by email, do you think that’s good or bad? If it needs to be in person I could ask someone to meet me outside the property management office one day.

A dedicated thread on living accommodations might be very nice if we can restrain ourselves from arguing about the concept of property.

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Email option is the best imo. That way you can have ample time to look at everything at your pace and more importantly think about what you want to say before you say it.

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I hate email for exactly these reasons I just realized. I do not want the other person to have time to carefully compose their responses and think about what they should do. I want to keep them off balance reacting to me through the whole thing.

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And for you (the one with the most experience in these situations) that probably makes sense.

For me (who doesn’t and would likely be negotiating against someone with more experience), I definitely want time to think and be able to craft a carefully thought out plan.

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Oh yeah I get that. I’m just finding that interesting and now I’m on to the ramifications of that. Tells you a lot about how you’re being perceived by the other person. I think a huge part of this is just understanding that tempo matters and knowing when to try to hurry up or when to shut everything down and go slow… and knowing that this is a knob you can turn.

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New thread title is confusing similar to the other thread title and kind of defeats the purpose imo.

Hmm, how about now? Personal finance in Sundry Chitchat and stocks in the news category.

I gave private PM response to Cuse recommending email before I saw these replies. And your thinking is exactly why I recommended. He will be across the table from folks who negotiate for a living. We want to claw out every advantage for our side. But I am in violent agreement with your thinking, most folks don’t really think through flow/pace/deadlines etc. It’s the classic, “what’s your budget for this purchase?” “when do you need to make a decision?”

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lol no that’s much worse. Now we have 2 nearly identical topics with nearly identical names in the same category.

I think generally people want to discuss, a) their own personal investments, and b) the economy as a whole. Topics titles and categorization should reflect that as much as possible.

Redacted for privacy.

By the way, it’s worth adding that I probably overpaid the first time. I had been looking for apartments for a while, they wouldn’t budge on the price and we were excited about the location, so we took it at the listed price. At the time I didn’t know how many vacancies they had. So, anyway, even my current price was probably too high then, let alone now.

Burn it all down and start from scratch.

One thread in Politics - The Economy

One thread in Chitchat - Personal Finance

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The challenge with this split is how to classify stock discussion, which is a high volume topic. Like, nobody who’s interested in the economy gives a shit about whether I think Berkshire Hathaway is a good buy right now. But if we have stock discussion in personal finance, it’s going to drown out topics like this negotiating one, mortgage refinancing questions, FSA accounts, etc. That’s already happening and what I’m hoping to avoid.

Clearly I have done more harm than good.

As a general comment and I welcome feedback, one first negotiation principle: Never get emotional if you can avoid it. Regarding the unreasonable offer of 38% over par, it’s an anchor, a specific tactic to create emotion and lower your ability to be rational and use logic. So I know folks are like f-that offer and of course I agree! The offer is designed to smoke you out, but don’t get upset, it’s a game. And I know its not a game, but the closer you can get to treating any negotiation like a fun and interesting game, the better off you will be. It’s analagous to tilt in poker. Don’t chase 7-2o cuz the drooler across the table just dragged a big pot and you haven’t seen a playable hand in 2 hours.

Not directed at Cuse, intended as general guidance.

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I agree with this. I think we need a separate thread for this and for stocks, and if we want another one about the Economy we can do that, too. There’s a lot of overlap, but I think combining any two of them will do a disservice to the people who get the most value out of those topics.

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Just for kicks, I checked some of the ledgers for our retail tenants. It’s about what I figured, the more successful restaurants before all this are still paying, but the less well off and retail definitely are not. That was about the same story before Covid though. Extremely large national drugstore and pharmacy definitely still paying as well as most tenants in general. Overall fairly surprised.

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We’re all guilty now, I think.

iirc, the main reason some of the personal finance stuff got pushed out is because discussions about exploiting the pandemic for personal gain was rubbing some people the wrong way, justifiably so I think. The unmet demand is from people who want to discuss the economy without hearing about the market gambools of upper middle class people who clearly aren’t at risk of any real hardship.

This is probably the best advice ITT. If you do nothing else, learn how to mirror.

ETA: Mirroring is covered extensively in the book as is the “accusation audit”. Combined with asking open ended questions, these three tactics give you 80% of what you need to negotiate very effectively. And really, most of the remaining 20% is just practicing these techniques until you can do them cold.

What are open-ended questions going to get me from a landlord that’s a property management company? I feel like what they need is my money, what they want is more of it, and what would make them happy is as much of it as they can possibly squeeze out of me.

I guess maybe like they might not want to go lower because of a risk of non-payment so the trade off might be a bigger deposit or paying a couple months up front? Something like that?