I am interested in getting into real estate investing. I am looking for anyone with experience or advice. I do not have any money, bad credit and I am a stay at home mom. Any information would be appreciated.
Thanks,
Stacey
s3000girl,
The VERY first step is easy and relatively cheap.
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Read as many books as you can. But I can recommend a few. " The Millionare Real Estate Investor", by Gary Keller. Also, the “Rich Dad Poor Dad” series are chep too. This forum is free.
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You NEED NEED NEED to repair your credit. That will take time and paying your debts. No easy way around it.
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Are your kids in school full time? Is there a way you can generate an income. If you can’t get out and work, perhaps you can start a home business. You WILL need money to get out of your current position and to begin investing.
If spend the time doing these 3 steps, you’ll be in a better position to start. But not until then. Good luck!
Thank you for your input. I have no debt. I recently quit my $50,000 a year job because my youngest son was recently diagnosed with autism.
Again, thank you.
I’m sorry to hear about your son. Your priorities are obviously different than many other parents. I know very little autism but I’ve heard its the kind of condition where the child ends up teaching and inspiring the parents about overcoming life’s obstacles. I wish you the best.
As far RE investing goes. You have an advantage where you have no debt. But to repair your credit, you need to open a credit card and charge small amounts and pay them off each month. It’s about establishing new credit. Reading those books I suggested will cost you about $100. Each book is under $25. The time and money spent on education beore jumping in is nothing compared to the thousands of dollars that you pay for a bad deal. Keep plugging away. You’ll get there. Good luck. :biggrin
Have you looked into tax liens and tax deeds? You can get in sometimes for a few hundred dollars. In a traditional transaction it could take 3 years to get a return. But there are folks that are contacting the home owners before it goes to auction, offering them a few hundred dollars, getting the property for that. Then turning around and selling it to a wholesaler for $5,000 or more. The transaction is done with the money in your pocket in about 6 weeks. There are people out there that are telling their secrets.
Hi s3000 girl,
Phlemboy’s advice is bang on. At least start educating yourself. Things will start coming together just by having a greater awareness of what all of this “investing stuff” means.
Just one idea to keep your costs down…check out the local library. Last year, I went looking for a book on some other topic and saw a whole bunch of the investing books I had purchased over the years on the library shelves! It never occured to me to look there.
My library has DVD’s as well…and some of them instructional in nature (for example, they had one with Susie Orman on finances of some sort). Free.
I hope that helps. Just FYI, I started with no job and no money and a big WHY…I have done a ton of real estate investing starting from that point. You can too if you decide that’s what you want.
Take care,
Stacy K.
Hi Stacy, I am sorry to hear about your son. I hope he becomes all he can be.
I assume you want to get into real estate to make money, to recover some of the income you gave up when you quit your job.
With your lack of resources, experience, real estate knowledge, cash, credit and possibly time, I don’t think investing in real estate at this point is going to give you the money you are lookng for, at least not in a reasonable time period, especially now when the real estate market is in a nose dive. You also have the banking industry doing a complete 180 and making it harder than anytime in the last 20 years to get financing.
I know this is heretical advice, on a real estate forum, but I have been a real estate investor for 25 years. I started with nothing too, so I have an understanding of what you face.
I don’t know if you have read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki. It is a great book on becoming financially independent and probably read by most of the people on this board. In the last few years of the real estate hysteria, when everyone thought they were a real estate investor, many people have overlooked what Robert really said about real estate investing. He did not say go out and buy real estate if you need to make money, he said make money then buy real estate.
What I advise clients in your situation to do is to start or buy a home based business, maybe it could be in some area that is connected to your recent career. You did not mention it, but if you are married and your spouse is a part of your business, we can show him how to get an immediate increase of $500-$1,000/mo more in take home pay from his current job, based on the tax breaks accruing to you as a home based business owner.
Get your business going so that it produces some cash flow that will enable you to buy real estate when you are ready. At the same time, start your real estate education. Real Estate education is the most valuable resource you can have, even more valuable than cash! I would advise you to focus almost exclusively on how to find motivated sellers! That is the most valuable skill a real estate investor can have and if they do not have that skill, they will probably not be successfull.
Once you have learned how to find truly motivated sellers, you can tie up their properties and sell them to other investors, for a nice fee. This would be great, low risk, high reward way to break into the industry.
I wish you the best of luck!
Bill Young
S3000girl,
It's a little tough to give specific advice without knowing what kind of resources ( time, money, etc..) you have to work with. Although it's getting increasingly difficult for people with bad credit and no money to invest in RE ( for good reason), there's still opportunities that can come your way. I think when you get your RE education foundation, you'll be able to find an area that suits you. Also by that time, you should have your credit repaired enough to begin. I would guess about 2 yrs. to repair credit. Perhaps even less. Why not join your local REI assoc. or Landlord assoc. and start asking questions? Basically I'm saying that you should keep asking questions and learning. You'll never know what's possible until you try. Just don't put results before effort. Good luck.
Stacey,
I can’t emphasize enough that if you are truly serious about wanting to get started it may be longer hours than your $50,000 job. A lot of time will have to be sacrificed if you really want to make this work. Seek out others who are successful and follow them. I did this, putting in tremendous amount of hours wanting to learn and made a lot of sacrifices along the way, but the payoff is AMAZING!!
Good luck!
join your local reia