No BS Financial Freedom .com » The Real Estate Market

I’m Back For Financial Freedom

gabrielg — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 20:06:45 +0000

Well I know it’s been a while since I have written to you. I’ve been keeping myself rather busy with many hours onthe job, exercise, study, a touch of social activites, and not as many wealth building actions as I would like.

I’m still at my sales job where I have been selling advertising to about 120 different industries. It’s a fun job that pays well and I love the people I work with. It is also rewarding in non social and monetary ways because I love selling; however it is still a job. It is still an employee role that I play. It is still a part of the “rat race” that kiosaki refers to.

In reference to my financial freedom, I have still been adding money to my savings and financial freedom account on a daily basis. My cash reserves are growing, but have yet to produce even 1 dollar of passive or portfolio income.

I have been sporadiclly looking at potential real estate deals and making offers. Many of the properties are REO (real estate owned) by the bank. In our current market I have found that alot if these foreclosed properties wil recieve numerous offers and alot of he strongest competition comes from first time home buyers who are willing to offer more than a cash investor at wholesale prices.

I need to implement a new strategy for aquiring real estate and bargain prices. I know that the current condition of the market is an excelent time to invest and something that many sophisticated Investors have been waiting a long time for.

I have a mind to put together a marketing campaign and focus on specific targets to attract motivated sellers to call me with the properties that they need to sell. Already, I have created a rough outline of a marketing plan for the next few months, but the first step is to come up with a catchy name and memorable logo that I can brand the market with.

U.S. foreclosures hit record level in February

gabrielg — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 16:42:03 +0000

By Simon Kennedy

Last update: 6:11 a.m. EDT March 11, 2009

LONDON (MarketWatch) — The number of completed U.S. foreclosures in February was 121,756, the highest monthly total since the crisis began, according to data from Foreclosures.com. The figure was a 67% increase from the 72,694 reported in January and was also well above the previous monthly high of 104,243 set last September. The number of pre-foreclosure filings also set a new monthly record, rising 24% to 207,703 in February from 166,860 in January.

The 11 Forgotten Laws

Peter Schiff predicts Imminent Doom – Fear And Loathing In America

gabrielg — Fri, 16 Jan 2009 17:29:45 +0000

Multi-Family Investing Meeting

gabrielg — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 06:04:00 +0000

Here are some of the basic ideas that I picked up around the Multi-Family RE Investor Meeting:

Be patient.
Be persistent, persist & learn from failure.
Don’t ever give up, continue to make offers.
Rehab A & B Type properties to the max.
Mindset is key, one of the biggest ingredients to success.
Create systems for yourself & your business & stick to them.
Network with people who have the experience.
Don’t listen to people who are negative, pessimistic, or have less experience than you.

There seemed to be a consensus around the table stating that if you are going to do anything in multi-family real estate, do 50 units or above for a number of reasons.

To begin with, apparently, the underwriting process is much smoother with bigger deals. The smaller deals (4-49 units) look too much like residential to commercial lenders, and they look too much like commercial to residential lenders. Apparently the “bigger money” (above 5-10 million dollars) is easier to get, and it is much looser.

Also, on another note, it’s going to be essentially as easy to hire a great property manager on a 36 unit building as it would to hire one one a 1000 unit property. It is better to overpay a great property manager, than to underpay a bad one.

“If I had eight hours to chop down a tree, I’d spend six sharpening my axe.” -Abraham Lincoln

Work on your business, not in it. Meaning spend more times working on the systems and hiring the people who will implement them, than doing the actual work yourself (i.e. hire a competent RE CPA instead of trying to do all the bills and taxes on your own). It’s too easy to get sucked into the day to day details of the operation, so learn how to delegate properly (property management, bookkeeping, etc).

“Business and investing are team sports.”- Robert Kiyosaki

Since Real Estate Investing is a team sport, surround yourself with the best people in their respective areas…Realtors, engineers, attorneys, tax advisers, lenders, etc… The goal is to be the “dumbest guy” on your team. If you are the smartest guy on your investment team, than something is wrong.

Books that were recommended during this meeting:

The Worth of a Dollar

gabrielg — Sun, 04 Jan 2009 07:41:00 +0000

If the Federal Reserve continues to just print more money out of thin air, what does that do to the value of the dollar?

Apparently that continues to lower the amount of resources you can purchase with every dollar you have in your pocket. The more that is printed, the less clout it
has in the financial world.

It cannot go on forever, and eventually it is scheduled to repeat itself. Throughout history, when a government went off of the gold or silver standard, the ones who have survived financially were the ones who held onto the precious metals.

I have about $5,395.00 saved up in my Financial Freedom Account which I have made a habit of adding to each day. The only purpose for the money in this account is to generate more money. I have been considering investing a portion of this in my Real Estate Investment Mentor, ultimately working together it should uncover a real estate deal that will more than pay for the cost.

Another thing I have been considering is to put it all into silver and gold, and just continue to build up those reserves until the market crashes. Although, I intend on growing the gold and silver reserves, I would like to do it with a separate account.

This money that is in my FFA right now can be used to do actual deals right now, not to mention all of the priceless education that comes about through more experiences.

I was studying a crash course on the patterns that economic bubbles tend to follow. It showed various market bubbles through history in line graphs, and laid them on top of each other. If the real estate bubble follows the same pattern, it appears that the real bottom of the real estate market should be somewhere around 2015.