Newbie Looking for guidance to get started

General Real Estate Investing
1

Hello, I am soon to be 65 and accepted early retirement not by choice but by necessity. I have been lurking at real estate investing for some time. I must confess I am near broke - the Great Recession killed me. That said I have some questions and welcome any advice and in particular answers to the following questions:

  1. Is it better to form an LLC or Corp for asset protection and borrowing from banks?
  2. Given my lack of resources, I plan to wholesale properties to get off the ground. I imagine I still need a little bit of seed money. Can anyone suggest how much seed money I should have to avoid surprises in my early transactions?

Any and all responses greatly appreciated.
Thank you in advance for your help.

2

Answers:

  1. Neither. How you hold title has no bearing on lending, except for the credit rating of the borrower.

You don’t need an LLC or Corp until you’ve got a quarter million dollars to lose. Until then, that’s what insurance is for.

LLC’s are what people screw with, when they can’t get off the dime, and actually do real estate.

  1. At sixty-five, you’ve got to have the aggression and fearlessness of a 20-year old.

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Issue:
You haven’t told us what you want to accomplish through real estate.

3

Thanks for your response.
You indicated that I failed to disclose what I wanted to accomplish by investing in Real Estate. Here are my goals:

  1. Achieve assets that were taken from me during the past 10 years. (I’m not stupid, I did have an IRA before then.)
  2. Purchase a reasonably nice home.

I also would appreciate any other readers who might respond. No-one (guru or otherwise) seems to want to tell me what kind of money I need to have on hand for wholesaling properties. I know it is supposed to be done with little or no cash or credit, but I would like to be prepared for contingencies.

Thanks
Vicky S

4

Real quick:
You need five thousand dollars.

Your goals are too vague and imprecise.

Settle on a dollar amount you intend to make and then set a date to make it. Then create a painful consequence for yourself, if you don’t accomplish your objective.

You won’t hear that from anyone else. I can tell you from personal experience, that until you have a clear idea of what you want to do, set a deadline to do it, and then create a painful consequence if you fail, you will likely screw around with all sorts of analysis, second-guessing, listening to people who don’t have your best interests at heart, are disgruntled, negative and will drag you down to their level of disbelief.

Meantime, start doing the business, until you close on a deal. Analyze the costs to find, close and flip your first deal, and then scale up using the knowledge you’ve acquired from actually doing your first deal.

Until you find, close and flip your first deal, you won’t have any idea how much money you need, or how to avoid hiccups. After that, you can begin to know what’s necessary to do in order to achieve your goal (and/or adjust the trajectory).

Get your five grand together. Go buy a book on wholesaling. Start wholesaling.

BTW, you’re at the age where failure is not only an option, but the faster you fail, the faster you’ll gain the experience necessary to succeed the way you need, in order to achieve your objectives.

This is more or less a spiritual commitment to your goals that I’m describing.