Year: 2018

Terry Brezsny Ballantyne
- Terry Brezsny Ballantyne

Unprepared

Since I started writing and speaking about our American way of handling aging and death, a lot has changed. Just 9 years ago, no one thought much about preparing for the most important transition of all, the passing from this world into whatever the next one holds. Despite the fact that we ALL experience the cessation of our life here in the corporeal, so many of us are fearful or shy about talking about it. Fear of being deemed morbid or macabre, having a death...
Terry Brezsny Ballantyne
- Terry Brezsny Ballantyne

Unquenchable Light

Over and over I hear that no one feels old when  they report they are living a meaningful life.  And meaningful as defined by the goals and values they want to achieve. Whether they are staying physically active, donating time to community, mentoring grandkids,  working in the garden or learning a new cooking style, the older folks that have a goal and are tethered to meaningful people in their lives report "I am not old!"  Whether they are 50 or 90, these qualities of engagement...
Tom Brezsny
- Tom Brezsny

7 Keys to Staging Success

  You know you are supposed to de-clutter, take down personal pictures, and ditch the doll collection.  But staging goes much deeper than that. Good staging creates an ethos, a magnetic sense of wanting to stay in the room. We subscribe to the Wabi-Sabi school of staging and there is a good reason for it. Wabi Sabi is the aesthetic that is sometimes described as one of beauty that is "imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete", and somehow more human.   I spend a lot of my leisure...
Tom Brezsny
- Tom Brezsny

What's 2019 Look Like?

What Does 2019 Look Like? Well, I am not an oracle but here's my opinion. In Santa Cruz County, there just aren’t enough homes listed for sale to meet the demand from buyers.  Our county, the second smallest in the state, transitions only about 180-250 homes a month.  Yet we have pre retirees buying now for later use, Millenials forming households, refugees from Silicon Valley seeking a more serene lifestyle here in Santa Cruz and overheated Central Valley folks seeking the coastal breezes. This is...
Terry Brezsny Ballantyne
- Terry Brezsny Ballantyne

Millenial Update

Millennial demand for housing will keep climbing. After a decade of decline the homeownership rate finally ticked up in 2017. By the third quarter, 63.9% of households were occupied by owners--up from a low of 62.9% in the second quarter of 2016. McLaughlin says 2017 will be remembered as “the year the bleeding stopped and the healing started.” As Millennials age this trend is expected to continue. The generation of adults born after 1980 were slow to enter the housing market, but as a growing share of...
Terry Brezsny Ballantyne
- Terry Brezsny Ballantyne

Why Poor Pricing Choice Will Kill Your Sale

How To Price Your Home For Success In a market that has created the impression that every home sells, it's easy for sellers to fall victim to the fear of leaving money on the table.  And some, who have not sold a home in a while, they still believe in  the old "wiggle room" theory of home sales which went out the window in 1999. Today if your home is overpriced by even 10%, it will sit.  For some reason, new to the business real...
Tom Brezsny
- Tom Brezsny

Welcome to Good Times

  This week feels like a homecoming for me.  Let me count the ways. It’s been thirty years since a column of mine last appeared in the Good Times.  In the 80s, I was the restaurant reviewer for the paper, a job that’s surely in much better hands these days. I think my last story panned Schlotzsky’s, a deli chain from Texas that tried to make a go of it in the historic Leonard Building on Cooper Street. Being completely unsuited to Santa Cruz, it...
Tom Brezsny
- Tom Brezsny

Doldrums of Summer

  It’s that time again. The Dog Days of Summer. Or as some call them: the horse latitudes. That’s an old sailing term for the doldrums, a place where the wind dies down and the sails go slack. And even though I start off each year, knowing we’ll eventually arrive at this point, it’s always a surprise when we actually get here.  As ready as I think I am,  I’m never really ready to ratchet down from the torrid pace of the previous few months....
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