Nest Investors

The home in the past few years has been your biggest investment right? Wrong! We’ve all read about realesate or have saw something of another either on the news or the local papers and now see how this logic can be such a backfire. Home foreclosures are now happening in a nieghbothood near you, literally. However there are always two sides to every story or two view points rather. One is that you purchased a home in a highly inflated area and got the bad end of the deal before it was too late to get out. Two you made a purchase on a home and git a great deal and saved a couple of thousands dollars on the purchase price. Obviously, in some cases with the second person, you came out on top by not purchasing in over your head and possibly avioded what others got themselves into by living over their means and essentially buying homes with negative equity homes.

With all of that being said, at this point I am not detering anyone from owning a home. I am actually trying to look at this somewhat optimitically. For instance, if you don’t plan on moving from your local area for the next three to five years it would actually be a good time to purchase that first fixer-upper home. With interest rates being at a all time low and banks in dire need unload homes that have flooded the market, homes have drop in some areas almost fifty percent. On the other hand, banks have also gotten extremly tight with lending due to this very concern. However, this is still a buyers’ market and a great time to negotiate getting a great deal for a home. For more tips on this please read.

Recently spoke with a few friends and this is just a list of some creative ways and things to find homes with great potientials! Some of this you may already know this, but it won’t hurt to remind you.

1. Place a newspaper ad (major daily)

2. Place an ad in Pennysaver, Thrifty Nickel, Greensheet, etc.

3. Bandit signs

4. Drive neighborhoods looking for vacant houses and FSBO’s

5. Call FSBO ads

6. Search MLS for junker properties

7. Search MLS for expired listings

8. Contact landlords who are evicting a tenant

9. Contact landlords with properties for rent

10. Pre-foreclosures

11. Foreclosure auctions

12. REO’s

13. HUD & VA houses

14. Tax sales

15. Estate sales

16. Properties with outstanding building code violations

17. Properties with outstanding health code violations

18. Condemned properties

19. Fire damaged properties

20. Out of area owners

21. Network with professionals, i.e. attorney, CPA, REALTOR.

22. Network with service people, i.e. letter carrier, pool service person, lawn service person, newspaper delivery person, carpet cleaning people, plumbers, etc.

 23. Bird dogs

 24. Wholesalers

25. Magnetic car sign

26. Distribute business cards EVERYWHERE

27. Career attire (Polo shirt with embroidered “I Buy Houses” logo)

28. Fliers

29. Door hangers

30.   Probates

In my area (Houston), some of the big players also do #31. billboards, #32. radio spots, #33 TV spots, and #34. full-page ads in the yellow pages. Hope this helps. Best of success!

Here is another room that we were working on in this house. It took me three days to do this by myself, not so fun, but I enjoyed the end results.

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 This is a picture of the floor of one of the houses that I was working on this past summer. It took a lot of work! In this room we decided to put down carpet.

 ** WELL FOR THOSE OF YOU THAT ARE RICH THIS ARTICLE IS FOR YOU!! **

       Well not exactly, I figured I would start of by saying that to get your attention. Well this is it, there are a few things looking on the up and up although times are still a bit hard financially. Rates are dropping like crazy and homes are selling for dirt cheap. Read this recent ARTICLE I found on the front page of Yahoo. I also got to be honest. I paid $10k for this house, that’s right $10k! However, there is a story behind every picture and a picture behind every story. As I go along and show pictures of the house, check out the comments.

Current news! Legislatures have recently passed a law that will try and protect the consumers from dishonest credit card companies. If you’ve ever applied for a credit card you’ve seen the fine print, which I myself can honestly say I didn’t do in the past. The Office of Thrift Supervision and the National Credit Union Administration approved the regulation that would not only make sense of the small print and ambiguous terminology used, but consumers would not get doubled charged for amounts carried over from previous months. In the mean time credit card companies still can charge pretty much whatever they please, and I find it ironic that companies like Chase have actually explain that one of their reasons  for the rate hack is due to “hard economic times,” which was also reported on CNN news, as if we hadn’t know this!

Happy New Years!

It’s a New Year, and we know what comes with the New Years right? The New Year resolutions! Even if you think the New Years resolution is a bunch of baloney, let’s just say you had one in mind. So for hypothetical reasons we would like to ask those readers a question; What would you change financial about your current situation in 2009?

Hello my loyal readers, it’s been a minute since I’ve had time to post something new so I apologize. I’ve been so consumed with the resent changes that have taken place with the unsteady job market, housing slump and recently pursuing of the “good life.” Since I’ve made the last post I’ve witnessed four close friends of mine that have all lost jobs at “Fortune 500” companies within weeks of one another. What does working for a Fortune company mean anyway? That’s another topic within itself.

 This blog is about the question: “What now?” Three of the four friends all own homes and from what they’ve told me, unlike what’s suggested they don’t have six months of savings prior to the short notice of their job loss. In July Congress passed a law that would require mortgage brokers to take classes on ethics, all I have to say is wow! How helpful do we really thing this will be and what good is this law for those of use that have already been affected by these unethical brokers? How will this affect those people that we know and love? On the surface I don’t know because a lot of the damage has already been done.

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You are probably wondering what the heck this number means at this point, but I can promise you by the time that you finish reading the second paragraph you will probably have a better understanding of where this is heading. As usual, I was reading another article about home ownership and financing. After reading some shocking information I decided to do some research of my own, only to be more shocked.

When I purchased my first home, I was right out of college and had student loans of more then $30,000 and about $3,000 total in savings, which if you do the math my Net/Debt Ratio was horrible. On another note, when I walked into a loan office they made me feel like “a million bucks,” so they said. One month later and $3,000 less for closing cost, with no money down, I had a “new” pre-foreclosed condominium. Just like that I went from rags to riches and now owed twice as much debt.

Back then, I maintained an average of 619 credit score over the three major credit bureaus. At the tender age of 25, I figured that the credit score was all I needed in life to get me where I was going. In today’s market that would probably get you about 15% down payment at minimum, which I don’t know how I would have ever accomplished this during that period of my life. Seems like the economy has really taken a turn for the worst and I see something like this being a problem with a lot of middle income families.

In a recently written article in Money magazine, it was said that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, will soon be requiring a 740 score for buyers to avoid the healthy interest rate or down payments. This rate increase would affect over 33million Americans whose scores fall below 680. The National Association of Realtors has stated that most Americans that look to get a home with zero percent down payments in the near future would have to maintain at least 621 or better score to even be considered.

With the credit crunch and banks reluctant to lend out money to consumers and small business, we have to figure out ways to overcome the shortfalls of how the economy has affected us all. Some suggest that we, as Americans, either have to learn how to save more money to afford a larger down payment to prevent possible foreclosure, or wait for the banks to loosen leading. The chances of the second part happening may be something none of us want to hold our breaths on, so it’s probably a good idea for all of us to start working on the saving part.

I don’t know about a lot of other people but I am pretty pissed! I am a Middle Tennessean, Nashville to be exact, and living with the aftermath of Hurricane Ike. I have never, again NEVER, been this directly affected by what has transcended in such a short time period. It pretty much seems like Armageddon. This is it, a few days after the hurricane I left the city for a vacation.