I am sure someone out there has either invested in or lives in a condominium.  Essentially, a condominium is a building or complex of apartments and/or houses.  One of the responsibilities when living in a condominium is the payment of monthly fees.  These go to a condo board which is to administer the condominium and the associated land on behalf of the owners

There are many ethical condo boards out there but all it takes is one where the owners are being taken advantage of.  This may result in huge special assessments which go directly into the boards personal bank accounts.  If you try to retain legal counsel to investigate or even call the police, they could say to come back when you have some evidence for them to investigate.  Instead of having to go through a long and emotionally exhausting process which could take have a large financial and emotional toll, I would like to propose an alternate method of stopping condo board theft.

Contact your national taxation authority and have all the people you suspect of embezzling funds from the condo board audited. An investigation of their personal bank accounts for the past 3 years should suffice.  If any condo board funds are being stolen, it could very well be found in a simple tax audit.  I can virtually guarantee that if someone is stealing, they have never even thought of the tax consequences of their actions. No lawyer (but perhaps a priest, rabbi or imam) is capable of stopping a tax audit because the law is clearly written so that government can look at anyone’s records. The tax authorities could then go to the police with evidence in hand and have the criminals charged for fraud if theft is occurring.

All of this would occur for the price of a stamp and envelope and no lawyer would ever have to be paid.

At some point in your life, you may be asked to keep certain employment or business practices confidential.  This information may have the potential to ruin business relationships and you never know who knows whom.  Some people do not take this matter seriously and I wish to give an example of how the potential of their ignorance can have potentially devastating effects.

In 2009, I worked as an oil and gas accountant with Oklahoma based Semgroup. This was an excellent company with great employees, management and outstanding work environment!  Our offices were in a Calgary office Tower.  The owner of this tower is involved with North American energy infrastructure and has thousands of employees.  There was also a brokerage firm in the same building as ours but I have forgotten their name.

Every day, all of the Semgroup employees would hear non public information regarding the inner business practices of the company. This was done simply by all of the employees taking the elevators and listening to numerous conversations. Their employees felt their company was the only one in the building.  They simply could not be more wrong.

It was quite routine for their employees to speak very loudly when others boarded the elevator and discussed what was going on with a now famous pipeline. This was long before the media started giving it serious attention. If everyone at Semgroup got together, we could have easily pieced together their internal operations which they wanted to keep confidential.

One day, someone from the brokerage firm in the building saw me push the elevator for the 20^th floor and said “Semgroup; is there anything not public that I should know about?” He did not know that I was also trained as a stockbroker and was well aware of the consequences of passing on insider information of a company. My response to him was to read the newspapers as all the information he needed was there.

At that point, I was very lucky and grateful to all my fellow Semgroup employees who knew and understood the importance of keeping information confidential.  Their ethics and practices have always been an inspiration to me!

For the past few years, the entire world has been made aware of the situation in Europe regarding their ongoing fiscal problems.  There is talk about the potential breakup of the Euro-zone, bailouts, IMF intervention and much more.

To me, the whole situation can be summed up simply and very clearly. If a person, corporation or entire country spends more than it makes for a short period of time it must address that issue. Nations can postpone a default moreso than corporations and individuals but the end is the same. Greece spends more than it earns and for that reason, there is huge turmoil being heard worldwide.

For someone who owns a property, two five or more, the lesson here is that you should always buy positive cash flow properties that put money in your pocket and don’t take them out.  If Greece had more money coming in than going out, this would not have become a problem.  If you are considering buying a property in the hopes of equity appreciation while losing money on a monthly basis, consider the lessons from the Euro zone as an example of what can happen.