All Forum Posts by: Richard Warren

This has happened before. For those old enough to remember, people were up in arms because the Japanese were buying up everything in the 1980s. The Yen had risen so high vs. the dollar that everything looked cheap to them. They were jumping in and buying anything without regard to the merits of the deal. The last straw for many people was when they purchased Rockefeller Center for $1.4 billion. Fast forward to the 1990s, the Yen had plummeted and the Japanese investors were abandoning their US holdings and suffering huge losses. Those who don’t learn from history……

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Think about it: lenders are so skittish about making loans to anyone. Do you really think that they’ll give someone a loan with little or no documentation?

Congratulations Frank, you hit the 1,000 post mark! I think Josh gives you a brand new convertible now!

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HELOC = Home Equity Line Of Credit

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What you should do at this point is keep your eye on the deal. There are any number of reasons for the deal to fall through. If it does you can step back in. In the meantime keep looking for other possibilities.

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April figures for pending home sales rose to the highest level in six months. This was not expected and shows that lower prices are resulting in increased buying activity.

Article: http://biz.yahoo.com/rb/080609/usa_economy_housing.html

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You may wish to pick up a copy of The Total Money Makeover by Dave Ramsey. It includes a lot of great advice and includes a program called a debt snowball, which is similar to what allcash talks about.

http://www.amazon.com/Total-Money-Makeover-Financial-Fitness/dp/0785289089/ref=pd_bbs_sr_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1212990604&sr=8-1

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Better to be discouraged than to get burned. You need to be creative. Perhaps you can line up private financing or bring in a money partner. I’m not saying that you CAN’T get permanent financing, just that it isn’t as easy as mortgage brokers would like you to think. That’s why a backup plan is so important.

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While the do have REO bus tours here in Las Vegas, I was on one that was a little different. It was a bus tour through one of the more exclusive gated communities in the area that took place in summer 2007. My wife and I went because we were interested in seeing the area and I was also looking for opportunities to network.

The tour consisted of both resales and new homes. The community surrounds one of the better private golf course country clubs and homes sell from about $950k to over $6 million. These homes were absolutely spectacular. At one point of the tour you visited the sales office for the developer where they had set up an area where food was served. They hired caterers and put on a decent barbecue lunch. This illustrated the state of the market last summer. They had about 25% of the turnout that they expected. I was talking to one of the managers of the event and they were in the process of arranging to donate the leftover food to a local homeless shelter. At least some good came of it.

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This is a perfect example of why you need to do your homework on ANY investment.

A couple of possibilities:

1) He IS a totally honest and trustworthy person – that does not make him a good business person. He may have had the best of intentions but did not really know how to create a good business deal.

2) He could be an outright crook. There are countless examples of people using a position of trust and authority to swindle people.

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle. Always do your homework before parting with your cash!

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