Sellin' the "Crib" for a new career

The caricature to the left is of the Salwens; Mr. and daughter Kevin and Hannah. It appears on page 23 of the March 15, 2010 of the New Yorker. The Salwens for those who have not heard are, now (at least for this week), writers with a successful book, and wanderlusts on a successful book tour bringing in the dough. Their book, The Power of Half details their story and subsequent "journey" spiritual journey, that is (oh brother!), not the book tour pay per speech journery tour that brought them to New York recently from their backwater hovel in Atlanta (actually it was an $800,000 home with an elevator, YES an elevator but why haggle).

Your see, the Selwens have this precocious (some would say obnoxious)daughter (that would be Hannah), now 15 or so, who, in 2006 as the family stopped at a red light, saw two men: a homeless rummy to the left and a rich folkster in a Mercedes to the right. She posited that if the guy to the right in the German car did not have such a good car (read that as not all the money he had), the rummy to the left would be able to have a meal (read that as government hand-out).

Ahhh, says the moron father...yes, but but but, and the kid says NO BUTS WE NEED TO GIVE IT ALL AWAY so that the rummies of the world can get to Burger King STAT! The father should have cut it off right there telling the kid she has no business suggesting the dispersal of HIS hard earned samoleons. Ditto, the father should have cut it off right there by telling the brat that, perhaps, the guy to the left (rummy) should ask the guy to the right for a job, and that what the kid is proposing is communism -- from each accrding to his abilites to each according to his needs. But Karl Marx NEVER did put together a best seller on that score (and it appears the Salwens have; see Barnes and Noble), but that is getting ahead of our opus.

To make that long story short, the Salwens SOLD their home for $800k, elevator and all, and gave half dough away to some seed eaters in Ghana (what ever happened to that Atlanta rummy right around the corner from them?).

And now, they are on the book tour.

We posit a few points here:

At first I was pondering saying what a true moron the guy is, but hey, the guy's got quite a financial head on his shoulders. Wealth is all fluid -- Look at it this way...he sells the ranch for a good a good bowl of rice, puts on the sneakers and runs for the hills. That's one way around the housing crisis.

But even better, he invests HALF of what he sells by dumping it off to some cuckholds out of the country (out of the country because inside the U.S.A. we could actually see how useless it is to give money to porch-sitters). I say "invests", because he writes the book about the experience and now he's rolling in the dough from Amazon, B&N, and all other sorts of cash registers, doing the tours, doing voice books and becoming a celebrity of the benificent type, just like that little girl who wrote a letter to Gorbachev in the 1980's (by the way, that kid died when she was about 13, I believe, in a private plane crash on way to a publicity event).

There is a moral to this story:

There are many folks who've come forward with interesting ways to sell a home and maximize profits in these hard times -- staging, loan take backs, point buy downs, rent-to-owns, who knows?..., but this guy wins the contest.

He sold his house for a best selling book writing career.

Bravo