Ornoth

Every so often, curiosity impels me to check out my former homes on Google Streetview, to see how much they’ve changed over time. Usually it’s nothing dramatic, but today’s exception left me stunned, shocked, and incredibly grateful.

Back in 2001, I bought my first – and to date only – property, a condo unit on the second floor of the historic former Hotel Vendome, located in Boston’s trendy Back Bay.

By far its most dramatic feature – and the reason I selected it after viewing seventy others – was a sweeping view of the neighborhood. The living room’s south-facing bay windows not only offered tons of delightful sunshine, but overlooked an empty lot that had served as a parking lot since 1958. It was the only unit I’d seen that had such a wide-open vista.

That panorama included many of Boston’s notable buildings: the Hancock tower, the Prudential tower, the New Old South Church with its distinctive Italianate campanile, 500 Boylston, 222 Berkeley, the Boston Art Club and the 1884 headquarters of the Massachusetts Bicycle Club (both now part of the Snowden School). I could watch shoppers walking along trendy Newbury Street, catch glimpses of Boston Marathon participants as they finished in Copley Square, or admire the colorful DuBarry trompe d’oeil mural that decorated the exterior of one of the buildings facing the parking lot.

It was truly a fabulous view, and I enjoyed it virtually every single day for the fifteen years that I lived there. Here’s what it looked like around the time I moved in (as always, click through for a larger version):

Of course, there were also days when it looked a little more like this:

It was no secret to me how great a blessing it was that no one had built anything on that lot. In fact, it was kind of a mystery why it never happened. Although I never heard rumor of any plans, it was something I always feared. But nothing ever materialized, and I moved out and sold the unit in February 2016.

So you can imagine my shock when I happened to check my old place out on StreetView. Here’s the closest equivalent to what you would see out my bay windows as of September 2022:

Yeah. Wow.

The lot was purchased in 2019 by L3 Capital in Chicago, who filed a project review in 2020 with the Boston Planning and Development Agency for a five-story, 43,000 square foot building containing retail and office space. A building permit was issued a year later, and construction appears to have moved along rapidly.

So that accounts for my “stunned and shocked” reaction.

As for “gratitude”, that comes from having enjoyed that unsurpassed view for fifteen wonderful years, and for the blind luck of having sold when I did, just four years before this development project came to light, on land that had been a parking lot for the previous sixty years!

My Back Bay condo was a truly amazing place to live, and that panoramic view was a huge, irreplaceable part of it. But that treasured view is one that I truly can never again experience.

Huh. Last week Lenovo announced a worldwide recall of 205,000 laptop batteries manufactured by Sanyo because they could overheat.

When I bought my StinkPad, I got two extended-life battys. One overheated and fried within a few months of purchase, and the other I’ve used sparingly since then.

Now they’re both (allegedly) being replaced. Score one for the home team!

Oh, and I should also mention that the state posted their annual abandoned property list, and my name appears to be on their for something that’s value in excess of $100. I dunno what, but we’ll have to find out…

And all this on top of a $3500 income tax refund. Yow! WTF, over?

So whenever the topic of stock options comes up, I have this dilemma. When people learn that I sold my stock near the peak of Sapient's stock value, the usual response is "Boy, that sure was smart. I wish I'd been that smart."

Now, I'm torn about how to respond. Yeah, it was smart. Not that wisdom is the only factor that applied, and not that I can just say to my peers that their financial ruin is a very regrettable result of their lack of foresight. So instead, I usually say that a lot of it was luck, in that I was looking for a house at the time, and sold my stock in order to put as much down as possible.

But not wanting to brag about my wisdom is really just a social phenomenon, which I can put aside in this relatively private journal. Sure, there was a lot of good fortune involved in getting hired at Sapient before its IPO, but I made a number of decisions involved in managing and protecting that good fortune that demonstrated wisdom, foresight, and yes, intelligence. In order to support this conclusion that I'm so averse to admitting even to myself, I'd like to take a look at those decisions.

First, I had a strategy to my accumulation of Sapient stock. I exercised my stock gradually, doing my best to specifically minimize my AMT burden. I also held my stock as long as I could, so that I would avoid increased taxes on short-term gains. And I consulted an accounting firm in order to get the best advice I could on managing my growing assets and minimizing taxes.

Second, I made the decision to sell. Looking at my net worth as the millenium approached, I realized that 98 percent of my fortune was tied up in Sapient stock. No matter how well your company might be doing, that's just stupid. Although my stock had appreciated to an astonishing degree, it was still an unrealized gain that was entirely at risk, and a very high risk at that. I made the decision to sell and put my assets into a condo about a year before I actually sold my stock. At that time, I predicted that the speculative Internet bubble would undergo a whiplash negative counterreaction, as just about anything which becomes such a major trend inevitably does. I sold my stock in the autumn of 2000, a couple months before Sapient's competitors all began dropping like flies. I'm surprised that I looked at places for a whole year before I sold my stock; why my peers completely ignored the all-too-obvious warning signs just amazes me.

And finally, I didn't waver from the thinking behind my decision. A number of people pointed out home financing alternatives that might have been attractive in other circumstances. For example, I surprised many people by offering a down payment of more than two-thirds of the purchase price of my unit, when I could have put nothing down and kept my stock (and also paid a lot more in mortgage interest). Similarly, I was offered a stock-backed mortgage, where my stock would have served as collateral for my loan, and I would have been able to retain ownership of my stock. Either of those options would have had tragic consequences, and I didn't avail myself of them becuase they violated my primary reason for buying a house: cashing out of my risky Sapient holdings.

So although there definitely was some luck involved in my joining Sapient and in the tactical timing of my sale, I think I should be able to gracefully acknowledge that I demonstrated wisdom, foresight, and intelligence in how I managed my financial assets. The fact that I'm so well off now isn't just the result of dumb luck, when the majority of my peers have watched their fortunes be destroyed, and in some cases owe fortunes that they don't have to the IRS.

I don't want to overgeneralize, but I think too many of my peers are whiny, priviledged kids who have never had to learn financial discipline, responsibility, and independence. If you want to avoid a hand-to-mouth existence, have a retirement, and live well, you need to respect your money and where it comes from, and learn how to protect it. That's the wisdom that I have which produced, for me, such a better outcome than my peers.

Of course, that doesn't mean I'm going to lord it over them when the topic comes up; I'll still be careful to avoid any implication that my friends' financial woes are the result of their own shortsightedness. But I needed to write this journal to clarify to myself exactly what degree of conscious control I had over the outcome, and by implication, whether I really was being smarter than most of my friends or not.