0522 2013 FARJHO is the answer to Rep Loretta Sanchez’s question to Fed Chairman Bernanke today.

In Bernanke’s testimony today, Representative Loretta Sanchez asked about how middle class families who had lost their homes in the downturn have been unable to regain home ownership in the current housing price run-up made happen by the new hedge fund land lords.

Immediately following that, Senator Mike Lee asked Bernanake about the potential danger in repeating the previous credit bubble by the current loose monetary policy and easy credit again pop up the housing sector.

I am glad to see that the politicians will finally start realizing the problems with the Fed’s monetary policy and the Administration’s housing policies. I think they both may want to read my recent previous blog posts below to find the answers to their questions and assume a leader role to take the necessary actions with FARJHO to correct these serious middle class home ownership problems in a timely manner. It would be nice if only they could start watching the short introductory video about FARJHO to begin with. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UV0hUjAGUZg

Anybody who knows them, please feel free to forward this post to them. Thanks.

Filed under: Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Federal Government, Housing, InvestorsAlly, PeoplesAlly, Co-prosper, Ex-middle class, FARJHO, Fed's bubble blowing, Housing, PeoplesAlly, Propertyless, Rep Loretta Sanchez, Senator Mike Lee

0403 2013 Let ex-middle class propertyless Americans co-prosper with the property investors through FARJHO

I watched David Stockman’s recently comments on TV about the phony money economy and the great recovery of the 1% created by the Fed’s money printing. I can’t agree with his thoughts more.

As I also said in many of my blog posts before, if the Bernanke-led Fed loves blowing bubbles so much, why did they (including Ben himself) even bother to rush to pop the previous bubbles back in 2004 to 2007 to create the financial crisis to begin with? It could have been managed in a soft landing without those bold moves to raise interest rates back then. Innovations in economic methods and tools could have made a major difference if only they were willing to learn a few new things.

Equity sharing concept has been around for quite some time. All that was needed is a better mousetrap in new business methods to implement that old simple concept. If they had applied themselves to conduct more innovative research and thinking they could have come to some solutions similar to the FARJHO structure invention themselves. Since that is not the case, it has made the FARJHO method much more difficult to be adopted since it was not invented there.

Now that they have created the havoc in 2008 that has made many parts of the Western world’s economy upside down ever since. The prescription they have given to our dilapidated Main Street economy was nothing more than to go back to blow yet more bubbles all over again on Wall Street, and with the might of a nuclear arsenal to re-inflate a phony economy in a way that would make Greenspan’s previous loose monetary policy looks like blowing a small bubble gum.

The net result of this whipsawing interest rates induced flip-flop instability of ours and the global economy they have created from popping and re-inflating the bubbles is the quantum shift of our nation’s property wealth from the 99% to the 1%. Ex-middle class Americans lost their homes when the Fed blindly popped the bubbles without any rescue plan for the aftermath. Now with the extreme low interest rates to re-inflate the economy that only the well-connected institutions and the wealthy individuals left from the aftermath could benefit from, properties were snapped up by these elite property investors left, right and center. Whatever happened to the government’s lofty goal when they setup the GSEs to help American citizens to realize their American dreams of a home ownership?

We plan to launch the FARJHO services under our non-profit organization PeoplesAlly Foundation as well so that low income working families could also enjoy the new benefits of FARJHO. Hopefully we could do our share to help restore the ex-middle class Americans back to be property owners again. Please help support our membership drive crowdfunding campaign at http://igg.me/at/PeoplesAlly/x/2666771 .

There would also be many opportunities for institutional investors to work with us in this mission. They could either partner with us to set up many co-branded series of FARJHO Funds in different geographical area as seed funds to show case to free market investors the enhanced economic benefits or they could simply set up their own funds to co-invest in the FARJHO programs that we help the low-income homeowners with. The Fund does not have to be non-profit itself. The Fund will simply selectively invest in the non-profit Foundation’s FARJHO projects on a pure free market basis.

It is indeed an opportunity to do well while doing good for these participating free market investors. In this way, it also helps us keep our efforts on a pure free market basis as well, which is central to our belief that capitalistic methods could be more efficiently and effectively used to achieve social goals.

 

Filed under: Crowdfunding, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Federal Government, Housing, InvestorsAlly, Mortgage, PeoplesAlly, Co-prosper, Ex-middle class, FARJHO, Fed's bubble blowing, Housing, PeoplesAlly, Propertyless

0315 2013 PeoplesAlly Foundation’s crowdfunding project on Indiegogo

Please help support PeoplesAlly Foundation’s crowdfunding project on Indiegogo. Contributions are tax deductible.
http://igg.me/at/PeoplesAlly/x/2666771

PeoplesAlly Foundation is a 501(c)(3) not-for-profit organization headquartered in Southern California that focuses on providing portable housing affordability to low income working families and helping regular middle class home seeking Americans to own homes without the use of debt.

Its main service is an innovative creation of a new home co-ownership structure called FARJHO (Flexible And Reversible Joint Home Ownership). PeoplesAlly Foundation helps educate the public and promote the awareness of the availability of alternative free market choices for consumers to own homes without incurring debt.

Through its affiliation with the online home equity crowdfunding portal site http://farjho.com as well as the offline FARJHO Funds, it aims to ultimately conduct FARJHO matching services in conjunction with the efforts of the state and local housing agencies. A dedicated website http://wehomeowners.org will be set up to serve as the portal for the foundation’s members.

Filed under: Crowdfunding, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Federal Government, Housing, PeoplesAlly, Crowdfunding, FARJHO, Indiegogo, PeoplesAlly

Crowdfunding of Home Equity at FARJHO.com – How crowdfunding could help solve our country’s housing finance problems

This blog post first appeared in Huffington Post on 8/7/2012. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ralph-liu/how-crowdfunding-could-he_b_1752633.html

Ever since the JOBS Act was signed into laws by President Obama on April 5th this year, the enthusiasm on crowdfunding has mushroomed in just about every corner of America. Many people with some technical Internet knowledge would rush in to start a crowdfunding portal to help American create more jobs through helping entrepreneurs raise equity financing. Many more are anxiously waiting to utilize the new found channel to raise money for their own business start-ups from regular investors over the Internet.

At InvestorsAlly’s FARJHO.com, we have coincidentally also been trying to provide the matching services between aspiring home owners and prospective joint property investors to co-own homes through a new innovation home ownership structure called FARJHO (Flexible And Reversible Joint Home Ownership) over the Internet within the past few years.

The concept of connecting consumers directly via Internet used be to called a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) method of matching individual consumers with similar desire to consummate a transaction of a common interest, be it a dating service or a financial transaction. Going back a little bit further to the 90’s, this matching of retail consumers directly through the power of the Internet used be more popularly categorized simply as the Consumer-to-Consumer (C2C) e-commerce. So crowdfunding appears to be nothing more than another jargon as the latest variation in the evolution spectrum of the Consumer Internet service, although technically speaking it is more a Business-to-Consumer (B2C) e-commerce since the relationship seems to migrate from a one-to-one to a one-to-many relationship. The new break-through to suddenly let out the pent-up interests in crowdfunding is really on the regulatory side. Kudos to those visionary law-makers!

As for the coincidental parallel innovation on the housing finance side, FARJHO is a new way to implement the old property equity sharing concept that has been around for more than 30 years, although primarily more popular in the UK. Those older equity sharing methods did have many growing pains and never made it to the mass consumer market. Inventions in social sciences would provide new economic values just as technology inventions do. The distinguishing features of FARJHO as a new business method to implement the equity sharing concept are three-fold:

First, FARJHO allows renter/home occupier and joint property investors to own only one home at a time in order to maintain the sanctity and the freedom of the single family residence ownership. This is in sharp contrast to many community oriented equity sharing methods of Co-ops, Land Trusts, Kibbutz or hippy-ish Commune types of older equity sharing methods.

Second, as a brand new concept, FARJHO introduces and allows only member level debt financing to eliminate the foreclosure possibility which exists with the conventional property level debt financing that are commonly used by a Shared Equity Mortgage (SEM), a Shared Appreciation Mortgage (SAM), a Shared Ownership Mortgage (SOM) or any other existing equity sharing schemes to date. In all those older business methods, the home occupiers could still get foreclosed whenever they lose their monthly income capability. The concept of FARJHO is to move people from a Pool-Borrow-Buy (PBB) method to a Borrow-Pool-Buy (BPB) method in joint home ownership.

Third, FARJHO provides a natural built-in buffer to conventional renting to avoid potential eviction when the tenants temporarily lose their monthly income capability. The equity stake of the renter/co-owner of the FARJHO structure could act as an optional voluntary collateral against missed monthly rent payments and therefore provides property investors with enhanced investment security through less credit risks and at the same time provides the tenants/co-owners with more home occupying stability during the rainy days in their working lives.

Although we at InvestorsAlly have received overwhelming positive response and a very strong market demand from home owners under our various educational test marketing programs conducted in Southern California within the past two years, due to the prior securities laws related regulatory concerns, we have not been able to officially market the FARJHO service freely in a massive scale. Now with the new crowdfunding provisions of the recently passed and signed JOBS Act to be enacted by the SEC by the end of the year, we have accordingly been preparing to position and may finally be able to launch our FARJHO.com as a dedicated crowdfunding portal site as the authoritative marketplace for crowdfunding of home equity, one home at a time, through the new home ownership structure of FARJHO. This will be a giant step towards realizing a stock market for home equities.

The reason why this new regulatory crowdfunding business opportunity development could be made possible to be applied to housing finance is that the proprietary new home ownership structure of FARJHO that we have coincidentally been working on for the past few years basically corporatizes each home in America one home at a time. Since each home will be treated as a business venture via a simple LLC legal structure under FARJHO, the new crowdfunding regulatory provisions could therefore be conveniently applied to housing finance for the first time. The reason why we have adopted the LLC legal structure is that using LLC to hold real estate properties is a tried and true method in commercial properties for many decades already, even though they have been used with an opposite purpose to FARJHO as far as leveraging is concerned.

The portal site will provide free membership to homeowners around the world similar to how Facebook does for individuals with all the social networking capabilities but our homeowner members will have a specific hope of selling their homes, buying another new home in whole or in part, investing a small part of a few other member’s home equities as an investment portfolio or simply obtaining occasional short term financing through selling fractional shared equity of their own homes through the new FARJHO home ownership structure.

There could be many more other free market based new consumer choices made available to solve our country’s current housing finance problems by this new FARJHO service to free people up from the current dominant mortgaged home ownership that often results in foreclosures and hence has created many financial problems and social instability to our economic societies. Furthermore, it may lay the proper free market foundation for further future benefits to grow upon with even more innovations that we could not even foresee at this moment.

For example, the use of property equity sharing as a temporary non-debt based financing alternative for small businesses to obtain funding to created jobs, the use of property equity sharing or cash flow sharing concepts and methods for the governments as a new third alternative economic policy management tool (vs the existing fiscal and monetary policies) to provide stimulus or to slow down an overheated economy, … etc. (more detailed policy tool examples are available in Chapter 6 of the SwapRent application paper at https://www.box.com/s/feae725ede7042c53412 )

FARJHO.com aspires to become the first entrepreneurial venture to bring new housing related economic benefits via crowdfunding to the American consumers under strictly free market principles by harnessing the power of social innovations, Internet technology advancements and the timely regulatory foresights.

A copy of the original FARJHO creation white paper could be downloaded through this following link. https://www.box.com/s/cc0de069ab5c3fd3007e

Filed under: Cash Flow Sharing, Crowdfunding, Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Housing, InvestorsAlly, Mortgage, PeoplesAlly, SwapRent, Cash Flow Sharing, Crowdfunding, Crowdfunding of home equity, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, FARJHO.com, Housing finance, InvestorsAlly, PeoplesAlly, shared appreciation, shared equity

0707 2011 FARJHO combined with Section 8 rent assistance – Section 8’ed FARJHO!

Recently I attended an excellent seminar put together by the Orange County Housing Authority explaining how Section 8 rent payment assistance program works in Orange County. We have been on the lookout for developing more FARJHO and SwapRent based housing affordability programs for PeoplesAlly Foundation so that the new economic benefits could extend to low income working families. It seems that there potentially could be a great match.

One of the very convenient ways for Joint Property Investors (JPIs) to make lower risk investment through FARJHO LLC structures is to pair up with the Section 8 recipients in each state as the AHOs (Aspiring Home Owners). Since these potential partial home owners are most likely low income working families therefore these services are handled and provided through PeoplesAlly Foundation instead of InvestorsAlly, Inc.

The goal of both PeoplesAlly Foundation (PA) and InvestorsAlly, Inc. (IA) is to provide free market based solutions to housing affordability, joblessness and unemployment of our capitalist society so that capitalism could stay intact, irrespective what may happen next to the middle class American people in the unfolding economic crises. None of the solutions provided through either PA or IA would be dependent on tax payer’s money. Free market based solutions are absolutely a must to save our country’s economic future.

The reason why it may provide synergy when linking up with the Section 8 rental assistance program is that FARJHO could make the assistance money for the working poor already committed by the Congress to work much more efficiently. Here is how.

Section 8 rental assistance payment recipients could already choose where they want to live. It has become a tenant oriented assistance program since 1998 rather than building specific as in the past or as in many other affordable housing projects which are often plagued by many problems. So what if some of these recipients have worked hard and earned some savings or inherited some small sum of money? Let’s say it is $50,000. It is not large enough to buy a home here in Southern California and they can not use it as a down payment to borrow a mortgage to buy a home with a 100% ownership since they have very low income to service the debt.

Why not let them own a piece of the property that they rent through the FARJHO structure? It would be a win-win for the Section 8 rent assistance recipients and the landlords. By having a part of the ownership, they would treasure and love the homes that they rent from the Section 8 approved building landlords. They would get to have a percentage of future appreciation value of the property that they own and they would take care of the properties as though it is their own. Most importantly, it would develop a self prestige that they may have become a proud home owner (although partial) and be a more useful and stable member of the local neighborhoods that they reside in. That could be one of the best features of capitalism at work made possible by the new FARJHO structures. Landlords would for sure no longer have as many problems with the tenants as they once did!

Furthermore, since the Section 8 recipients could choose where they want to live, they no longer have to reside in multi-family housing complexes. It is a perfect chance for some of them to choose a dream house to buy through FARJHO from the pools of HUD REOs or even the Fannie Mae Homepath REOs so that they could help our governments clear those massive unsold REO inventories.

Isn’t this a perfect way to help the working poor in America realize their American dreams without using any more of the tax payer’s money or using any form of those dangerous mortgages and/or securitizations?

We look forward to starting to work with some of the housing authorities in many cities, counties and states in the near future to make Section 8’ed FARJHO a reality soon.

Filed under: Economic Viewpoints, Equity Sharing, FARJHO, Housing, InvestorsAlly, PeoplesAlly, SwapRent, Affordable housing, FARJHO, housing affordability, Housing authorities, HUD, Local governments, OCHA, PeoplesAlly, PeoplesAlly Foundation, Rent assistance, Section 8