The Residential Real Estate Crash Index Message Board

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Strategies & Market Trends : The Residential Real Estate Crash Index

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To: shades who wrote (36862)	8/4/2005 10:28:37 AM
From: Moominoid	Read Replies (2) of 306849

Diversification across countries. Trying to forecast what will happen next is too. And being rich to start with helps a lot. My grandmother's family lost their copper mines in Russia in the revolution there. Nothing they could do about it. In the end their firm (once the biggest non-ferrous metal producer in Europe I am told founded in 1820) was eventually expropriated by the Nazis. It survived being a communist firm too and is now still there: ilsenburger-grobblech.de I went to Halberstadt in 1998 and saw the house my great grandmother built there. It served as an orphanage. Now been demolished. We are still trying to extract our share of the compensation money. East German state didn't claim to be responsible for any Nazi actions. So only post reunification could anything be done. In Halberstadt there is a plaque in the ground in the middle of one square where it says the Jews were lined up and taken to Auschwitz on a particular day. My father's relatives were long gone though to Belgium and the Netherlands. My fathers uncle seems to have escaped after the war started. Bribes I guess. He supposedly was good at losing what was left in the futures markets :) But my father grew up in Frankfurt and Köln (born 1916, remembered the 1923 hyperinflation, 1929 stock market crash etc. though he was a child these events had a big impact). In 1935, his stepfather (also in metals business - his own father in antiques/art business) started the move to England. By 1937 it was complete. They seemed to live fine there and got a lot of stuff out of Germany. My Dad could only get a student visa to Belgium where he was going to study engineering. He failed the entrance exam and by March 1939 was in Britain. In the Fall the British arrested him and put him in an internment camp. Eventually got out of there went through the bombing of London working in factory. We grew up very much lower middle class but with a savings ethos etc. and very risk averse (but he bought stocks etc.). Very low allocation to property :) Eventually he inherited after court battles some antiques and art which were the trading stock of his father's antique business that was just started before his father died in 1921. They turned out to be worth a lot of money (though it wouldn't go far in bubblezone US housing markets). The final big sale took place when he was 80! He kept all most of the money in cash pretty much till he died in 2002. Well that's just a few details. The main thing is to get out alive. Portable knowledge is good. Property is hard to move. Thinking ahead is good. Geographic diversification and contacts are good. My mother's family probably were effectively driven out of Ireland. English ancestors probably more willingly emigrated to Australia. But that is a whole other story. My grandfather was born in a gold rush town. Don't know if they were looking for gold there. They were very much working class.

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