If you own a four-plex, and in ten years it goes from $300,000 to $1,100,000 ...
Your yearly cashflows might be -$5,000 or +$10,000 year to year, but that has little to do with "losing money."
(You can go pull $100,000 profit early, in any given year, via a mortgage or line of credit that will be nuked on sale of the four-plex/franchise, and MLB teams in fact do this constantly.)
But all of the sportswriters refer to that trivial yearly cashflow as the "profit/loss," and the owners encourage it.
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The Seattle owners are doing fantastically well, and when they nix a minor $5M expense in July, the sportswriters will write about their 2011 cashflow.
If I refused to paint the walls in my $1.1M four-plex, because my 2011 cashflow would go from +2,000 to -2,000, would that be okay? (And don't forget I just pulled $100K in cash via my line of credit, and it doesn't show on my taxes as positive cashflow. I cashflowed $98k this year, but I get to tell you that I "lost" $2,000.)
Considering the public financing of their stadium, the whole situation is an outrage.
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I guess there's no such thing as a sportswriter who owns a rental. Lucky for the owners.
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