Financial Freedom One House At A Time
So, you’ve been telling everyone that you buy houses, and you’ve finally found someone who needs to sell their property quickly. After you inspect the house, you realize it needs work. But there could be a good profit if you fix it up and sell it. You get the seller to the kitchen table and structure the deal of the century. The seller accepts, and you close the deal….
I was having lunch with a good friend and investor named Emmett, recently. We talked about the current market and strategies we’re implementing, and we discussed what we see our other investor friends doing. One of those friends hasn’t done many deals lately because she got her start when the market was at the bottom. Now that the market is moving so much, she is afraid it will…
I had two recent experiences that were the epitome of poor customer service. One was at a recent closing where the real estate professionals were bantering back and forth so loudly that the attorney and the buyer (the actual customer who is paying everyone’s salary at the table) couldn’t hear each other. The second was at a big box store where I had a less-than-enjoyable time picking up some…
The phrase, “One size fits all,” is something that should never be applied to your contracts. It’s very important that your documents fit the individual deal you’re working on. If you get on the internet and get a generic contract, it may have verbiage in it that’s not compatible with the laws in your state. You don’t want that. Each time you write a contract, the situation…
The other day, Ashley and I were shopping for appliances for a flip. Normally it’s not a big deal. We use the same stove, dishwasher and vent hood on almost every house. But this time, it was after Black Friday, and everything was on sale. We pointed out some different appliances we liked to the salesperson. But on each one, they tried to up-sell us. And each up-sell added…
On a recent workday, I walked out of the door of a house we’d purchased the previous week and got into my truck. To quote Peg from the PBS show my kids watch, “Peg + Cat,” “I’m free-e-king out!” When I arrived at the house, we found it was still completely full – as in, the seller hadn’t moved yet. You see, they’d had until the day…
This morning I watched a video presentation by world-renowned motivator and educator Brian Tracy. He spoke of a study performed by the Harvard Business Review that included interviews of Fortune 500 CEOs. One of the questions asked was, “What was your biggest failure and how did you react to it?” This question stumped the CEOs. They would often look perplexed and ask what the interviewer meant by…
Ashley and I just got back from the “What Box” seminar on creative deal structuring presented by Bill Cook and Pete Fortunato. It was great, but I’m not going to lie – by the time we got through with class, my brain was numb. On the car ride home, we talked about the “aha” moments we’d had. One of the things I learned was there’s a difference between…
Here’s my current situation: I’m in Fort Walton Beach Florida. As the waves roll in, their sound makes a constant yet subtle roar that I’m sure was designed by The All Mighty to soothe the soul. The bleached white sand gently tapers down into clear, light blue water that mixes with varying shades of green as you move deeper into the Gulf of Mexico — I now understand why…
I was recently invited to a mastermind meeting that had some pretty advanced investors in the room, one of whom was in the habit of buying tax liens – these are liens counties put against properties when homeowners don’t pay their property taxes. Counties do this so they can sell the liens at auction and recoup the funds they didn’t collect from the homeowner. This is called a tax…