The latest fodder in the “no money down” witchhunt is Casey Serin, a 24-year-old investor in Sacramento, California that’s now $2 million in debt after leveraging himself to the hilt with techniques from Russ Whitney and Carleton Sheets. To the personal finance blogosphere, he is a classic example of what can happen when you buy […]

Browsing real estate over the Internet is a wonderful thing, but nothing compares to driving around neighborhoods and paying close attention to what’s happening. It’s called “farming.” You take note of:

When houses go up for sale, what they’re asking for, and how quickly they sell
When houses go up for rent, what they are asking for, […]

Flat rate listings are taking the Realty world by storm. For a few hundred bucks (or nothing at all), you can put your house on the Multiple Listing Service (MLS) and popular sites like realtor.com. Usually, this means you’ll save 3-6% of the sales price, a tidy figure for sure.
There’s only one problem. Your house […]

You can make money as a part-time investor. There’s no doubt about it. Only, you’ll never make as much money as a professional investor.
You see, the professional makes investing his career. Through hours and hours of experience, he becomes a master of the trade, often gaining and losing it all several times over.
But he never […]

If you’re a subscriber of the various personal-finance blogs out there, you’ve undoubtedly heard about Prosper.com. It’s a distributed lending network where everyday people loan money to other everyday people. I love the concept, but I’m also feeling left out.
Currently, Prosper.com has a lending limit of $25,000 — a gigantic sum for your average borrower, […]

How much money are your houses really costing you?
Most investors stop budgeting after adding up the downpayment and carrying costs, forgetting to include taxes, maintenance, improvements, and commissions when selling the home. If you add it all up, they’re not making nearly as much as they think they are.
Over at Consumerism Commentary, Flexo breaks down […]

As a real estate investor, it was tough for me to write this post. We take pride in how much money we can borrow, and the thought of paying down a mortgage is almost painful, unless we’re selling the property.
But it has its advantages.
In my last post, we covered three reasons why paying down your […]

It’s tax refund time. You’ve got a few thousand dollars coming back from the IRS, and you’ve got to decide what to do with it. Do you pay down your mortgage or use the money for a downpayment on a new house?
This is the question that JD over at the Get Rich Slowly blog asks […]

We’ve been going over some pretty philosophical material in the Real Estate Investing 101 series, so I thought we’d take a break for a quick negotiation tip.
I can’t tell you how many negotiations come down to a few percent difference between what the seller wants and the most a buyer will pay. You come across […]

Risk.
We’re all familiar with it, we all fear it, but only some of us know how to deal with it. One of the largest differences between experienced and inexperienced investors is in how they think about risk. To the beginner, it’s a monster that could pop up at any moment and take your money, and […]