Alright, What Gives? (trying to sell a boat)

[YoungPerformance]

As others have said, the biggest problem I have seen is the financing on a boat that is 10 years old. They are not giving 20 year notes on used boats, like they are/were on new boats. Most people are lucky to get 48-60 months on a 10 year old boat. That puts the note out of reach for most, so they need a big downstroke. Most do not want to get off of their reserve cash for fear of what the economy will do. A lot of people will take on a note, but do not want to unload all of their reserve cash. A guy can go buy a new boat for rock bottom prices and get at least twice the term on repayment. I'm not saying it is smart to take a 20 yr note on a boat, but that is what guys are doing. They are only looking at the monthy payment. It doesn't seem to matter that they will be upside down for ever.
Eddie

[fund razor]

I was surprised that, during the September/October credit crisis I was able to get a 10 year term on my 20 year old Apache at a rate within a point of my mortgage rate.

While I didn't need to take the ten years, I decided to for cash flow convenience while I am putting new power in. I don't think that I will be too far upside down, even after a considerable repower expense.

But, I have to admit that one of the reasons I bought an Apache was for the large resale audience. One of the reasons that I chose new custom power was also to preserve the value and desirability of the boat, just in case.

[VtSteve]

I'd have to agree with Professor Webinar that all indicators are far more stable than in January or February. What we have now is an economy that is off life support, but remains on watch.

As for the boat? Great looking boat. If it's in great shape and surveys well, it seems like a fair price based on NADA Retail. But from what I've seen this year, NADA remains worthless for used boats.

[DollaBill]

A very strong opinion, but most likely incorrect. I just finished recording a 70 minute webinar which will be available soon that points to all the indicators getting stronger. Since I am licensed, i cannot promote it on a national website without being registered in every state. but if anyone wants to PM me, and if I am registered in your state, i will provide the link.

People, we are in extraordinary times. But the actions being taken are precisely what the economy needs. Fears of inflation are certainly warranted. but we will be fortunate to have an inflation problem. Hyper-inflation can be dealt with. But rapid dis-inflation or deflation are economic killers. that is what we are combating now.

Bernanke is the foremost expert on how we got into a Great Depression and how to avoid it. he is running the playbook exactly as it should be. Think of it this way, when the system is working, we can argue the strengths of different ideologies andpolitical persuasions. However, when the system is broken, we have to stop the bickering and look at what can fix the problem. Doingnothing, or letting the "weak" fail, is EXACTLY what put us into the GReat Depression. Now we do have FDIC on bank and such, but we can avoid the horrors of a drawn out depression.

There is plenty of money to be made. People who are waiting for a recovery in a traditional sense will be left out in the cold. those who are examining the developments and making their moves will benefit handsomely.

I can't comment as to Bernake playing the book perfectly, but I can say and have maitained since summer of '07, this isn't anywhere NEAR over and we aren't near a bottom. TB is dead on with the commercial RE market and unsecured credit. It's going to blow up hard.

We may reach a bottom in Jan-May of 2010, but then we have a 5 year climb to normalization and we won't see good times like we did ever again ion our lifetime

[sellsman11]

The sky is falling!!!

[fund razor]

The sky is falling!!!

I had a dream last night that the sky was falling, and it was coming down in pieces and I was trying to keep it off of my boat and car.

[HPOffshore]

I can't comment as to Bernake playing the book perfectly, but I can say and have maitained since summer of '07, this isn't anywhere NEAR over and we aren't near a bottom. TB is dead on with the commercial RE market and unsecured credit. It's going to blow up hard.

We may reach a bottom in Jan-May of 2010, but then we have a 5 year climb to normalization and we won't see good times like we did ever again ion our lifetime

TB & DB are more right-than-wrong...there's definitely more fun(sarcasm)to come. There is going to be another wave of foreclosures due to continuing spiral of property values. Don't know nearly as much about the un-secured credit market, but it sounds like the current administation is very worried about it, judging from the legislative actions of late.

[CRT]

Here is a suggestion if you want to sell. It worked for me. Ebay is a cheap way to get your product advertised. It probably won't be sold on Ebay, but you will get lots of exposure if you post the ad correctly. It can be relisted cheap. Also, suprisingly, not everyone who wants a boat searches the internet. 9 solid buyers of mine came from Boattrader Magazine that you pickup in gas stations. Especially in the LOTO area. Just 2 cents. take or leave

[LaughingCat]

TB & DB are more right-than-wrong...there's definitely more fun(sarcasm)to come. There is going to be another wave of foreclosures due to continuing spiral of property values. Don't know nearly as much about the un-secured credit market, but it sounds like the current administation is very worried about it, judging from the legislative actions of late.

I agree, there are more shoes to drop. But the ones who will miss theboat are those who are hoping to get back into a leveraged-flipping situation. Real estate is not going to rise significantly for a long time. It will rest on its core values, stable slow growth with income production.

But for people who are thinking outside that box and looking at other asset class and such, the future holds great potential.

The economic recovery will sneak up on us and not be a magnified bubble. So people will not notice it. Think about it, in the last 2 months, the market has risen over 30%, but people are still talking about how bad things will get. History shows, the market begins it's rise well before the recession is over.

I received several PMs and will respond shortly. Thanks guys.

[jhenrie]

Rick , I'm keeping mine !!!!

[Lomax]

www.powerboatlistings.com is where i listed my twin small block 29 and it sold for alllllllll the money to a buyer from Finland. Its a very desirable boat over there due to the small blocks...price it at $39,999. i had a crazy amount of buyers from out of this country replying to my ad and damn near had a bidding war going on....good luck

[phragle]

if someone is in a position to buy a somewhat expensive toy (relatively) they are going to lowball you because the only thing the see inthere mind is that you need the money. your in mich, so the world thinks your an unemployed autoworker dumping toys trying to eat and avoid foreclosure. the people in the market your aiming for (size/age/price) arent high rollers, so they see todays market and they are no longer looking for a good deal, they are loooking to rape the desperate.

[smittyseng]

Here is a suggestion if you want to sell. It worked for me. Ebay is a cheap way to get your product advertised. It probably won't be sold on Ebay, but you will get lots of exposure if you post the ad correctly. It can be relisted cheap. Also, suprisingly, not everyone who wants a boat searches the internet. 9 solid buyers of mine came from Boattrader Magazine that you pickup in gas stations. Especially in the LOTO area. Just 2 cents. take or leave

This is a good idea and let me add to this,I know several people who have sold boats/exspensive items using E-bay. No,someone didn't bid on their item enough to meet the reserve price and win it but what they did do is see it on their, then CALLED the seller and ended up making deals. Run a E-bay ad,make your buy it now and your reserve realistic (and they should be the same really),take the most flattering and detailed pics you possibly can and the very most important thing: list a good phone number where they will reach you directly 24 hours a day,preferably one with caller id. If you get a out of state call or one that doesn't look familar while your sale is running or afterward and you miss it,call them back and say you missed their call and you were just curious what they needed as some people will only call once and just won't leave a message either. Like I said,I have know guys that ran ads then afterward someone called them and wanted to really negotiate/test drive boat resulting in a sale,Smitty

[Top Banana]

My Boat question turned into advanced economics #101 class.

My apologies to somewhat hijacking your thread. You have some excellent answers here and your boat looks to be priced right and is in great shape.....good luck with your sale.

Laughing Cat.......believe me I am on your side and wish that everything will turn around and get much better.......but I have a few questions that bother me.

Recently, the government implemented a "Stress test" for banks. Basically they are making sure that the banks have enough capital to be sound while suffering the losses they have incurred. For the banks that don't pass the test, they are being asked to put in more capital or raise more capital.

Bank of America was found to be the weakest of the banks and it was determined that they needed another $34 billion, approx to be safe. They sold assests, like their shares in the Bank of China and sold stock and will raise more by converting some preffered stock to common stock.

Whew, everything will be fine now right?

Well maybe, except for Mr Joe Smith who lives around the block from each one of us. Mr Smith has been a wonderful citizen to date, had a steady job, paid his bills on time, raised a family and contributed back to his community. Mr Smith, through no fault of his own got laid off last fall. Pick any scenario, his company no longer exists. He really truly believes in his heart, that he will get another job soon and continues to look, but nothing yet.

Yesterday the Federal Reserve said unemployment could get much worse like 9.6 % rather than 8.8%

Now the corner strip mall that Mr Jones and his family have been going to for years has a number of small businesses in it. Since Mr Jones lost the job, he and his family don't go as often anymore and have begun to notice that some of the stores have gone out of business and ....For Lease.... signs, are in the windows.

Even though Mr Jones doesn't have that income anymore, he really believes that he is just a day or so away from his next job, so he continues to put some necessities on his credit cards, so he can make his mortgage payment from his available cash.

When the commercial real estate market..Strip malls...and other types, begin to fail, the banks are looking at another round of foreclosures in much bigger amounts than the housing market was. Here comes that nice government man again to ask for more capital to absorb these losses.....more sale of assets and more stock and ...Whew, we did it again.

Nice job, but here comes that pesky old credit card market. Many Mr Jones' have now realized that the new job isn't coming and they have no way to pay the credit cards off, so they have to default....sorry. Yes we know, here comes the government man again and maybe some banks can even do the capital infusion a third time, but many won't make it.

Meanwhile back at the ranch....normal businesses have been trying to borrow money to keep their business alive and their banks are telling them....Yes, you have been a great customer but the government is making us keep higher levels of core capital to pass this stress test, so sorry, no money for you.

The great stock market crash happened in 1929. In 1928, the country was in a recession and the housing market was struggling. The government...yep them again, chose to raise the discount rate to the banks from 3.5% to 6%. They effectively cut the available money supply.....sound familiar..no money to borrow. The legislators at the same time were passing a protectionist tariff. No money, no chance of import export trade to help. The market reacted and in three days in October 1929, the market collapsed.

In 1932 Roosevelt replaced Hoover as President and began a massive Goverment Stimulus plans...sound familiar? The National Industrial Recovery Act in 1933, forced 2 million businesses under government control, with a huge federal bureauracy that set everything from production to pricing. Sound a little like the GM and Chrysler scenario to you?

Experts agreed later that if the government stayed out of the problem, the depression would have been over 7 years earleir. Roosevelt never saw less than 14% unemployment during his 8 years, despite all the stimulus money and programs he threw at it.


So here we are at 2009.....this is either going your way and get better or the other way and get worse.....what is worse? Only time will tell.....we both can't be right....and believe me I am really rooting for your side to win.

Now, I'll shut up and we will just have to wait and see what happens.

PS Please send me your web article, I'd love to read it.

[Excalibur Racing]

I thought the crash of 1929 had alot to do with people borrowing money to put in the stock market, when it went down they had loans, no money banks forclosed etc. Then people caused a run on the banks took out their money the banks failed etc, sound familar? Guy's and Gals I hope you have planted your victory garden just in case! I have and just got an AR-10 .300 Express to protect it.

[LaughingCat]

Both the !930's and this downturn are very complex and can not adequately be compared and contrasted thru a chatboard. However, just some basic differences:

FDIC In the 30's, there was no FDIC coverage. As banks began to fail, the government simply got out of the way. Assumption was, let the weak ones fail, the strong ones will be fine. Bank failures spread like a rapid cancer as people worried every bank was bad. The whole system crashed.

They raised taxes back then, increased interest rates and basically cut off monetary flow into the system. So an economy stiffled by consumer decline was amplified by government ineptitude. It took years before they even figured out that the Crash of 1929 was caused by a group of speculators, I believe one was named JP Morgan and another named Rockefeller, decided they could short everything, on a monster scale. The fear of a sell-off would get everyone selling. they covered at the bottom. Years later, those players we brought in to write the SEC Acts of 31 and 34. who better than the people who caused it. kind of like getting gotti to write a truly effective anti-mafia legislation once he's pocketed everything he could dream of and would not face prosecution.

Funny thing is, legislation written back then included Glas-Steagle Act and Naked short Selling rule. Both were repealed in the last 10 years. In addition, the uptick rule. Right now, the market has been overly compressed down by excessive short selling which cannot hold it down forever.

The govt has four engines at their disposal. And fortunately, Bernanke is the formost expert on how we got into the Great Depression and how to avoid it. He's playing the book by the rules. He's flooding the economy with cash to avoid deflation or deression. Taxes have been cut, as seen on our employees paychecks starting in April, they've pushed stimulus packages and rates are near 0. Exactly the opposite of what ushered in the GD. So there is the chance we can go into GD 2.0, but let's be realistic. Americans aren't sitting around wondering wha tis going on. They have every medium possible telling them what is or is not happening in every crack of the world in real time.

On top of all that, Americans have NO interest in accepting that the great Capitalism experiment of the last few centuries failed and we can all crawl into luxury fridgerator boxes and begin cooking old tennis shoes under a crumbling highway overpass. Instead, they will accept whatever work they can get. Bridging the gap betweenwhen the recession started and when we emerge is a series of events, news periods and economic incidences that appear dramatic and almost horrifying. But the saying goes, it is always darkest before the dawn. People are going to have hardships and it is very easy to project forward based on current trajectory. but a turn ALWAYS comes.

Governmnet has taken all four engines and put them at full throttle. It will take and we will recover. We will be fortunate to have an inflation problem. That will seem like a simply lean/rich adjustment compared to a deflation/depression hardship on our 'racecar.'

I am still waiting for my compliance department's permission to post my website so everyone can hear my March conference call, future confernece calls and the Shifting from Defense to Offense presentation I just recorded. And please note, i am not soliciting anyone to go out and do anything with their money. Detailed planning always comes before I recommend anything.

[VtSteve]

Naked short selling rules have not been repealed to the best of my knowledge. A shoddy regulation, SHO, was put into effect in 2005. The SEC had been barraged by complaints from smaller companies that Naked Short Sellers were destroying the stocks, but they did nothing mostly. During the worst of the banking moments last year, they not only enforced some of the naked short rules, they banned shorting on many financial stocks. IMO, the uptick rules should have stayed.

I don';t believe the market has compressed too low. When ten years of financial profits are wiped out, chit happens. Some may just be overvalued still, due to a myriad of fake accounting tweaks performed.

The Great Depression was different for many reasons. Following the market crash, you had a severe cutback in consumer spending. A major and severe drought devastated the midsection of the country in 1930. You had low interest rates and available credit, but very alarmed and cautious consumers.

It's a very interesting discussion that explains many of the financial and central banking features we have now. Pointing only to government interference is pretty simplistic. England's Gold Standard return would be far more interesting.

[DollaBill]

I would call the current "pull-back" in consumer spending the most intense since the depression. People ARE scared and are not spending anything. I don't care what the govt is telling CNBC.

[JupiterSunsation]

The sky is falling!!!

Don't you need to get back to dusting off your inventory.......

[JupiterSunsation]

i would call the current "pull-back" in consumer spending the most intense since the depression. People are scared and are not spending anything. I don't care what the govt is telling cnbc.

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