Month: April 2011

Avenue Commercial Castleridge LP Investment Corp. Annual General Meeting Notes

Today I attended the Avenue Commercial Castleridge LP Investment Corp. Annual General Meeting and finally learned about the status of our troubled Concrete Equities investment. There’s some bad news, and some good news. Overall though, it was net-positive: the bottom line is that there’s some debt to deal with (the vultures want their pound of flesh), but we have full ownership of our property, are cash-flow positive, and things are looking up in terms of us eventually getting back on track for the cash disbursements we all signed up for. I took as many notes as I could; here they are in point form:

  • Presented by Steven Butt, General Partner, Avenue Commercial
  • Very positive on this particular building
  • They were given millions of pages of documents by Ernst & Young; hard drives. Five months of work to process, several hundreds of thousands of pages scanned
  • They’re not going to go back and look at all the documents – they’re moving forward
  • We now have financial statements (hooray!)
  • T-5013 tax forms are available
  • Castleridge: 8.25 acres of property, 74,000 square feet of leasable space
  • Building constructed in 19991 and in good condition, but the overall property needs some work. Suffers from a few years of neglect
  • Nov 2007 we paid 24.2 million for the Castleridge location. Concrete took $3.2 million as their fee.
  • The June 2008 appraisal was $18.5 million; the June 2010 appraisal $18.2 million
  • Loss in value of $5.7 million. Why? Large promotion fee, receivership costs, spike in retail vacancy, 30% vacancy
  • Exit of CCAA after 1.5 years in July 21st, 2010

Continue reading Avenue Commercial Castleridge LP Investment Corp. Annual General Meeting Notes

Avenue Commercial Schedules Annual General Meeting

If you’re an investor in any of the five ill-fated Concrete Equities properties in Calgary, now being run by Avenue Commercial, there’s an important meeting coming up on April 29th. It’s being held at the Highland Park Community Association Hall (3716 – 2nd Street NW). The schedule is as follows:

  • MEG LP Investment Corp: 9:00am  to   9:45am
  • Millrise Deer Valley LP Investment Corp: 10:30am to  11:15am
  • Castleridge LP Investment Corp: 12:00pm to  12:45pm
  • Lavalin LP Investment Corp: 2:00pm  to  2:45pm
  • CE Place Investment Corp: 3:30pm  to  4:15pm

You’re required to bring photo ID with you for registration – which starts 30 minutes prior to each meeting, and closes 10 minutes after the meeting starts – and only registered owners will be permitted into the building. I’ve emailed them to ask if husband/wife combos are permitted; the investment is in my wife’s name, but I’m the one who handles the investments in our family – so far no response from them, but I’d be surprised if they said not to this. No audio or video recording devices are permitted.

The email I received with this information alludes to some good news, so I’m tentatively hopeful that the investment we have in Castleridge will get back on track and earning us money like it was always supposed to.

Working with a Resume Professional is Sometimes the Best Choice

As someone who spends a good part of his day writing – blog posts, reviews, editorials, email, etc. – I pride myself on my ability to put words down in a cohesive, effective manner. So you’d think that when it came time to update my resume, it would be an easy task. Not so much. I don’t know if it was the fact that I’ve never been overly comfortable writing about myself, or if it’s that the idea of putting together a resume from scratch was extremely daunting. I hadn’t updated my resume in seven years, so when I looked at it and saw how outdated it was, I wasn’t sure where to start. I toyed with in for more than two months before accepting the fact that I needed help getting it done. Yes, there was a strong case of denial at work – and while I was initially reluctant to spend money on having someone help me write my resume, I finally accepted that it was the best approach.

I did a quick Google search for “resume writing” and saw an ad by Resume Lifesaver, a.k.a. Sarah Wright, and clicked on it. I found Sarah’s costs to be reasonable, her response time consistent, and she was an absolute pleasure to deal with – especially since I was an uncooperative client, often taking weeks to respond to her at the beginning. She also took the time to have a phone call with me to learn about what I wanted my resume to communicate. There’s something I find profoundly unpleasant about working on my resume, and she was patient with me while I slowly convinced myself to finally tackle this project.

If you’re looking for someone to help you write a new resume from scratch, update an old resume, or re-work your current resume for a new job, I can recommend Sarah Wright and Resume Lifesaver without reservation.

And here’s a tip: once you get your new resume, update it a couple of times a year with significant accomplishments and career milestones. Don’t worry about it getting a bit long – you can trim out the unnecessary stuff when it comes time to share it. You’d be surprised at how easily you forget some of this stuff if you don’t write it down!

9 Things The Rich Don’t Want You To Know About Taxes

“John Paulson, the most successful hedge-fund manager of all, bet against the mortgage market one year and then bet with Glenn Beck in the gold market the next. Paulson made himself $9 billion in fees in just two years. His current tax bill on that $9 billion? Zero. Congress lets hedge-fund managers earn all they can now and pay their taxes years from now. In 2007, Congress debated whether hedge-fund managers should pay the top tax rate that applies to wages, bonuses and other compensation for their labors, which is 35 percent. That tax rate starts at about $300,000 of taxable income—not even pocket change to Paulson, but almost 12 years of gross pay to the median-wage worker.”

This is a stunning, eye-opening article about taxes in the USA. Reading it made my head swoon – there’s so much corruption, deception, and outright lying going on when it comes to the issue of taxes, it makes you wonder how much longer this can continue. I’d classify myself as “anti-unnecessary tax” – I have no problem paying taxes every year because I know that my taxes go toward funding the things that make the lives of my family better: healthcare, defence, roads, police, fire-fighters, etc. I don’t embrace extra taxes, however; the GST we have in Canada (currently at 5%) irks me because it’s a tax everyone has to pay, regardless of income level, and when you combine it with the taxes we already pay on fuel, property, etc. it adds up. Paying taxes are part of what it means to live in a society where services are provided though, and seeing people – very wealthy people – manage to get away with paying nothing is infuriating.

Simultaneously Impressive and Chilling: North Korean Military March

Make sure you go full screen and 720p HD – excellent camera work (shot with Canon DSLRs)! This is a “re-mix” of this original footage.

The Triumph of Coal Marketing: Putting Things in Perspective

Is that a shocking graphic or what? If you can’t quite make out the word on the far left, it’s “Nuclear”. This chart compares the number of deaths generating nuclear, oil, and coal-based power on a per-watt basis. Seth Goodin shared this and I found it quite profound. I’ve been a proponent of nuclear power for a few years now, and this chart only further drives home the truth. Coal, and oil, are destructive, messy, finite energy sources and we need to move toward nuclear power to generate our electricity. Yes, the problems with the nuclear power plants in Japan are scary, but the hard reality is that even when incredible disasters occur like the 8.9 earthquake and the resulting tsunami, modern nuclear power plants are still fairly safe. There were some lessons that were learned in Japan – such as placing the back-up power generators underground, along with their fuel supply – that will help ensure nuclear power is safer for everyone in the future.