Ohio Life Estate Deed: Fill & Download for Free

That is a loaded question that will entice many different answers. I will be up front and say that I have a dog in this fight. But before you blow me off, consider my background.I have 45 years in the industry, 15 as a full-time realtor and 25 as a full-time appraiser. I served (briefly) on the Board of Directors of my local Board of Realtors. I've been around and survived the real estate wars...sometimes barely. I simply tell you all this so you know I've lived it.The biggest mistake I made in my career was not investing in the very industry in which I made my living. I started out doing that, in partnership with two friends, a painting contractor and a plumbing contractor, and we owned 12 doors by the time we were 30. Nice start. But back then, in small-town rural Ohio, being an investor usually meant owning duplexes or triplexes, and my role was being the landlord. I hated it. So, being young and dumb I said I'd never do that again. I liquidated and never did it again. Not smart and my biggest regret.I went through my career as a lone ranger, and happily so. I had a good career for the most part without a lot of stress, but the last 10 years or so were a bitch. I saw the ill-conceived lending policies, I wouldn't play ball with the lenders and I lost tons of business. I survived, but barely. It wasn't fun. I retired and moved to Florida 8 years ago, thinking I could invest down here because of my "experience". WRONG!! Apples and oranges to say the least. From small town white-bread middle America to urban, multi-cultural south Florida...talk about culture shock! I didn't know what I was going to do. I spent a bunch of money with Armando Montelongo. Good info but I went home after 3 days, woke up a couple days later and said "what now". I was lost, even with my experience. That business model (I had done sever others like it several years earlier) just doesn't work for most people. Most people have good intentions starting out but just can't do it on their own. Human nature I think.Now, to the meat of my story. I went to an investors luncheon one day. Came out and saw a car with a sign on it that said Real Estate Investor Seeking Trainee. I thought it was worth a call. Was it ever. It saved my ass. It was a different concept in real estate. I'm not saying it's for everyone, I'm not saying it works for everyone. But I am saying I've seen multiple kids begin acquiring real estate before they hit 20 and I've seen some become able to retire by 30. As for me, I came down here 8 years ago having sold my house in Ohio and having nothing else. No real estate at all. I now have partial ownership of 95 single-family houses, notes and mortgages, I've done a rehab, a couple flips, I've done several small private loans and I've earned some significant money through commissions by promoting this company.What I'm saying here is that real estate is the greatest wealth-building industry in the world. Many people would like to do it but are scared to...scared of making a mistake and losing money and not having a clue where to begin. This model that I found creates local communities of investors who learn together, work together, partner together, party some and mix work with play. That's called support, and its this support system that makes this model different from anything else out there. It takes most of the fear away. We're in a new Era. The traditional college education doesn't work for many people the way it used to. It is still educating to the Industrial Age, creating employees.Those days are numbered, as are the days of many brick-and-mortar businesses. We will have 30% unemployment one of these days. Jobs are disappearing and underpaid. Automation, technology, the net, robotics, now Artificial Intelligence are taking jobs away at a rapid pace. What will my grandkids do to make a living? Real estate, that's what! There are three necessities in life...water, food and shelter. We're in the shelter business.New models are needed. I'm convinced that this is the business and education model of the future. Online, available 24/7, taught by people who actually make their living doing what they teach, live classes available, MP3 and workbooks online and, with most packages the education, updates and all new classes are included for as long as the company exists. It is the best concept in real estate that I've seen in my long career. It really wasn't feasible 10 years or so ago because the technology wasn't available then. It is now. I have a degree in education and my wife was a 35 year classroom teacher, so I know good education when I see it. And this is about far more than fix-n-flip. It's about how to set up and structure a business, how to find the money to do deals, how money works, how to pay off installment debt in 1/3 of the time without increasing your payments, tax liens and deeds, buying notes and mortgages, how to find and buy apartment complexes, find people to manage them, how to manage those managers, commercial real estate and much more. This works. Everyone needs to have someone teach them things. Very few go it alone. Don't be fooled to think you can. You probably can't. You probably need help. Support. The "Guru's" don't offer that. I would counsel you to find something that does. Something in real estate.

Well, no not really. Not one with official pay stubs that the IRS could tax or anything.One of the interesting questions I like to pose to faithful Latterday Saints is this: “How did Joseph Smith earn a living?” Most will stare back at you blankly, answering that he was either farmer or a store-keeper, but few seem to have ever thought about the issue before. None will admit that he basically earned his coin off of the Church itself or off of ancillary business ventures that directly targeted the pocketbooks of his followers. Very few like to follow along Smith’s actual employment history as you might on a C.V., but let’s take a crack at it, shall we?We all know that Joseph’s first “job”, apart from family chores, was as a professional “treasure hunter”. He was not very good at this job, as he found no treasure, but who can blame him because there was no treasure to be found.While Smith owned farms, especially in his later years, and occasionally worked on them, his disability (one leg was shorter than the other) meant that he really couldn’t spend much time at the hard physicality of farm work. He was much more interested bookish or indoor concerns. Again, who can blame him? Would you rather spend 15 hours a day limping behind a plow or 15 hours a day staring into a hat and translating an unseen golden book. One gets you pretty sweaty and achy, the other gives you eye strain. When you read Smith various journals you quickly see that he spent an enormous number of man-hours “studying” or “translating” and very few threshing wheat. Who paid for this life of a professional student/translator? Joseph sure as heck didn’t get Pell grants.As Mr. Kimmons points out, while the Book of Mormon was originally published as a sort of money earning venture, Smith & Harris, et. al. quickly found out that publishing can be a decidedly “non-profit” endeavor. Nobody became J.K. Rowling off of the proceeds of a volume that Mark Twain labelled “chloroform in print” and E.B. Grandin never signed up to run off a second edition.What interest Smith had in “working the land” came from the point of view of a real estate developer. In the Kirtland, Jackson County, Far West and Nauvoo eras, Smith and the other high Church leaders all bought or leveraged large tracts of undeveloped land, which they then pitched to the dispersed Saints as their latest gathering place. The Saints flocked to each new Zion and their early-arriving leaders then flipped the land at a profit.On a personal note, I have a number of letters from my frugal Yankee ancestors commenting about how overpriced they thought these LDS land deals were. Their sticker shock caused them to delay selling their lucrative NY dairy farms and postpone their part of the gathering of Israel. When they did finally move, they decided to buy in the next county over where the gentile prices were more attractive.If the Saints had ever managed to stay in one of these new Zions for more than just a couple of years, they might have actually made a bit of coin, but they kept getting themselves kicked out, progressively losing everything, time and again. Remember, Smith ran through 4 successive “gathering place” land developments in under 14 years. Real Estate development needs time to percolate in order to accrue value because you are essentially buying nothing and convincing customers that it will someday become something.The land records of Nauvoo, for example, are replete with instances of Smith selling lots to incoming Saints that he owned or controlled as “Trustee-in-Trust” of the Church, but in most cases he sold the land for promissory notes that were never collected. The diary of William Clayton, who was Joseph’s recorder for these deeds, contains details of the many deals, including an ad placed in the paper exhorting new-arriving Saints to buy from Joseph, and not from competing sellers around town. It also remarks upon the rare instance when someone actually made a partial payment with CASH instead of IOU’s. In theory, Smith would have collected beaucoup downstream bucks if these buyers eventually made payments on their notes. In reality, he (or the Church) got almost nothing that was fungible.Mr. Kimmons mentions Smith’s brief Kirtland forays into storekeeping, at which he failed at dismally. He does not mention his dip into banking, with the notorious Kirtland Anti-bank Safety Society. Latterday Saints often skip over Smith’s career as a banker and they don’t like to talk about this KASS because Joseph quickly lost all the money his LDS investors put into this under-capitalized and possibly fraudulent institution. Did he embezzle? I don’t think so. Personally, I cut Joseph some slack in this instance because he was not doing anything differently with the KASS than every other frontier Rothschild was trying to do in an era of shady and unregulated banking. Everybody lost their shirts in the financial Panic of 1837, not just the Mormons in Kirtland.Nevertheless, the failure of the KASS was the reason Joseph got run out of Ohio, not because any gentile mobs chased him out. His own bankrupted congregants were the ones chasing him this time. Never fear, he quickly bounced back with more Speculative land deals in Missouri.As for whether Joseph “got rich” or made a living out of the Church in latter stages of his life, it’s difficult to say. He never became Vanderbilt rich, but he was certainly the richest man in Nauvoo at his death. Countless faithful Saints had already turned over everything they had to the black financial hole of Church and were impoverished in the process. (See the history of the Huntington family for one). By the end of his life, Smith seems to have lost interest in land flips as he “sold” many of his lots in the Galland tract for mere promissory notes from his impoverished followers. Either that or there was only so much squeezing the LDS Golden Goose could tolerate and by the 1840’s it was all out of eggs after Ohio and Missouri.One of Joseph’s main occupations in the Nauvoo era was as a hotelier/saloon keeper/sideshow barker. Again today’s Saints don’t much like to talk about this because they don’t like to admit that the man who gave them the Word of Wisdom sold alcohol from his home and employed his gun-slinging best friend Porter Rockwell as his bartender while he entertained room & board tourists by displaying his Egyptian mummies in his frontier B&B.Well, get over it. Most of the “drinks” sold in such a tavern were of the “mild” variety (meaning weak homemade beer) that were permitted by verse 17 of his WoW and the mummies were cool to look at.At the end of his life, Smith’s finances and the Church’s finances were so hopelessly co-mingled that upon his death no one could really tell who owned what. Emma, his widow, and the new leader of the bulk of the Church, Brigham Young, famously fought over who was supposed to get what. Deprived of a husband and a source of income, Emma held on to as much as she could. She kept the Chandler mummies and the Book of Abraham papyri, two items that you would think were bought for the Church, with Church funds. She kept her home and what Illinois land she could, but eventually sold it or lost it all.It turned out that without a Prophet there was no profit in Nauvoo.

It doesn’t need to be renamed, but a de facto renaming to Franklin is a great idea.From what I can tell, the main pushback on the name Columbus centers around Christopher Columbus’ reputation. Columbus initiated a pattern of genocide of Indigenous peoples in the Americas, something admitted by even Samuel Eliot Morison, who could be considered one of Columbus’ most sympathetic biographers. Naming a city after a person unquestionably carries a connotation of celebrating that person and their deeds. It is understandable that people find problems with celebrating a person who initiated a policy that led to “complete genocide”. It is also understandable that people may weigh the deeds of genocide heavier than any positive value Columbus’ reputation of discovery and pioneering may have.Another reason people don’t like the name Columbus is that it’s not very unique. However, Columbus doesn’t even make it within the top 34 of place name usage in the US. Names like Franklin, Clinton, and even Dayton far outnumber Columbus in terms of city or town names. That being said, there might be a certain pride that the people of Columbus have for their city, such that they want the name of their city to be as unique as Seattle (only one in the US), Pittsburgh (2 cities in the US), or Atlanta (4 cities in the US).But, onto a concrete answer. I don’t think Columbus should be renamed de jure. Just thinking about all the signs that would have to be changed is enough for me to know it’s not worth taxpayers’ money (let alone the logistics of changing URLs, post office names, etc). However, I think a de facto, “soft” renaming could be a great idea. And my proposal for that de facto name would be Franklin. Not only does this allow for people to call their city’s name without invoking the name of a genocidal man, but it also is a more clear and accurate way of describing the actual area of what people mean when they say Columbus. The borders of Franklin county roughly align with the borders of Columbus and its suburbs.When someone lives in Gahanna, Dublin, Northland, or Grove City, they’ll usually say they’re from Columbus. That’s inaccurate, because the city of Columbus doesn’t include the city of Dublin, Gahanna, etc. We’ve literally outgrown the name Columbus. Okay, that isn’t true - there are 1.3 million people in Franklin county and 900,000 of those people do live within Columbus proper. But when it comes to the Columbus metro area (which extends beyond Franklin county), which is considered to be 2 million people, we actually have a majority of people who don’t actually live in the actual Columbus boundaries.Calling Columbus by the name of its county is the best compromise to save taxpayers’ money and discontinue the celebration of a man who has a reputation of committing genocide. While renaming the city to match what Indigenous peoples called this land could be considered retributive justice, the money that would be taxed from those who want justice for Indigenous peoples could be better spent on more effective causes. And I think this solution is quite elegant — we’ve had the name Franklin even before Ohio became a state.*Addressing counterpoints:Some may point out that Benjamin Franklin was a slave owner, but he did end up becoming a staunch abolitionist by the time he died. Though I know the cancel culture zealots may not be satisfied with this, I will also note that he required his children to free their slaves in order to receive his inheritance.Some may also point out that Franklin is an even more redundant name than Columbus, with 31 cities named Franklin across the country. However, there are no Franklins even close to the population size of Columbus, giving it the chance to take over the cultural real estate available for the name in national discourse.And just for the fun of it, I want to address the people who have fallen in love with the idea of renaming the city “Flavortown”. Guy Fieri, who coined the phrase “welcome to Flavortown”, was born in Columbus. Also, despite being in the midwest, Columbus has a solid reputation for hosting restaurants serving cuisines from all around the world. But, as likable as Guy Fieri and this name is, it really doesn’t offer anything to those with practical concerns about the name, from both a taxpayer and Indigenous perspective.*https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Franklinton_(Columbus,_Ohio)Sources:Morison, Samuel Eliot (1942). Admiral of the Ocean Sea: A Life of Christopher Columbus. Boston: Little, Brown and Company. ISBN 978-1-4067-5027-0. OCLC 559825317.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_U.S._place_names