This topic is near and dear to my heart. When I started my RE career, I heard about the necessity of finding private lenders. In fact, I even found two. But then I stopped. For four years I PROCRASTINATED. I didn't get it!!! For four years I continued to go to banks and jump through their hoops. I also had used hard money lenders but found them VERY expensive.

It wasn't until I quit my J.O.B. and found that banks wouldn't loan me money that I realized that I needed to bring private lenders into my life quickly.

When I took that step, everything changed for the better.

What are some of the advantages of using private money for your real estate investments? Well, if you haven't decided whether or not to use private money, I decided to lay it on the line here for everyone to see.


• You can get money fast & you can buy at a discount
• No credit check & doesn't show up on your credit report
• Unlimited funds
• Control because you set the rules
• Help your friends, family & associate. Meet a great group of people
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Note: laws and regulations regarding the advertising, registering, and formalization of private loans vary enormously state-to-state. Generally, these rules apply to the borrower rather than the lender, but even lenders should be aware of what the laws in your state say about these transactions. Of course, this article is not intended as legal, accounting, or other professional advice. Always consult with your legal, accounting, or other professional before making any investment.  Further, nothing in this article should be construed as an offering or solicitation of a security.

Private lending is a strategy in which even moderate-income investors can easily get involved.

There are plenty of real estate entrepreneurs and rehabbers who want to borrow your money; if you let it be known you have as little as $20,000 to lend in most markets, someone will be right there ready to put that cash to work.

If all goes as it’s supposed to, it’s a truly hand-off investment; you just sit back and collect checks.

But the big fallacy of private lending is that YOU, as the private lender, don’t need to know very much to assure that the deal goes well. After all, it’s up to
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Just this morning, I was having yet another conversation with a fellow educator about the frustration we have with students who have the brains, education, and resources to make deals—but who, month after month, do everything BUT make deals.

We discussed people who spend big bucks on courses, set up their LLCs, draft land trusts, buy marketing/accounting/management software, attend local REIA meetings religiously, have a color-coded filing system, get their real estate license, start a buyer’s list, concoct every conceivable question about every conceivable scenario in a deal…

…in fact, do everything that it takes to be a successful real estate entrepreneur except make offers.

Many of these people are successful in their other endeavors; many have good jobs, nice houses, great kids, you name it. But they can never seem to get to the point of actually buying a property, no matter what we tell them or how much time passes.

What many of you seem to be waiting for is that NEXT bootcamp or the NEXT investor meeting or the NEXT meeting with their coach.

And what you’re hoping for is
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This topic is near and dear to my heart. When I started my RE career, I heard about the necessity of finding private lenders. In fact, I even found two. But then I stopped. For four years I PROCRASTINATED. I didn't get it!!! For four years I continued to go to banks and jump through their hoops. I also had used hard money lenders but found them VERY expensive.

It wasn't until I quit my J.O.B. and found that banks wouldn't loan me money that I realized that I needed to bring private lenders into my life quickly.

When I took that step, everything changed for the better.

What are some of the advantages of using private money for your real estate investments? Well, if you haven't decided whether or not to use private money, I decided to lay it on the line here for everyone to see.

• You can get money fast & you can buy at a discount.
• No credit check & doesn't show up on your credit report.
• Unlimited funds
• Control because you set the rules.
• Help your friends, family & associate. Meet a great group of people. Read More...

          I think that for almost everyone, there are 2 sets of priorities in life: the things you HAVE to do (go to work, clean the house, pet the dog, pet the husband, etc) and the things you don’t have to do, but which bring much greater long-term rewards (flip enough deals to quit the job, buy a house, train the dog, train the husband).

          The first set of goals is relatively easy to accomplish, if only because day-today life doesn’t proceed very well without them. The second set is more difficult, because, in all honesty, your life won’t change much if you don’t flip a house this week. That particular lack of change should, of course, be viewed as a BAD thing, but if everything else is going OK (you haven’t lost your job or been faced with a giant medical bill or something), it’s not a bad enough thing to spur you into action next week.

          In an already-full life (which I think most of us would agree that we have), it’s often difficult to find the time to do something that will eventually lead us to a better life; it’s so much easier to tick off the “must dos” and put off the “wanna dos” until tomorrow.

The Must Dos in Your Life vs. the Wanna Dos

          For example, th
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Myths about Land Trusts

By: Mr. Land Trust^®, Randy Hughes 

I write and teach a lot about the many benefits to using a Land Trust to hold title to real estate investments. There is a lot of misinformation in the marketplace about Land Trusts and a lot of bad advice given regarding these title holding trusts. After using these trusts for more than 40 years, I have found that the myths outnumber the facts. In this article I will dispel some of the myths that I hear over and over.

MYTH: Only bare land can be put into a Land Trust

TRUTH: Any real estate (or real estate related asset) can be titled in a Land Trust

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          In my business of rehabbing and reselling house, it’s impossible to make any money without the right contractors: those who get the job done on time, on budget, and right.

          Novice retailers usually don’t have such people at their fingertips, so how can you build a team of good contractors? The answer is by following all eight of the critical prescreening steps below.

Lease Options and Subject Tos, aka “Getting the Deed” are two very popular ways to purchase real estate with little or no money down. Acquiring investment real estate can be handled with many different approaches, but these two techniques can be implemented with little or no money down in most incidences.

A lease option is a technique which involves gaining ‘control’ of a property, but not owning it.  It is the right to possess a property now and purchase that property at some future date with terms you define when you buy it.

A “Subject To” is getting the deed to a property without getting a mortgage for the home.  Instead, the seller signs over the deed to his home ‘subject to’ the existing mortgage. The buyer in this case makes the mortgage payments on the old loan but does not need to get a mortgage themselves to acquire this home.

Both of these techniques usually require little or no money down.  In both of these techniques it is possible for the buyer to get money from the seller or the purchaser (or both!) in the beginning of the transaction.  These techniques, when used properly, will provide for huge profits.  They ar
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 When it comes to acquiring properties, rehabbers have different potential avenues to pursue for good deals: buy direct from property owners, purchase from a wholesaler (who is flipping the contract to you via assignment or a double close), buy at auctions, etc.

 When a wholesaler flips a real estate contract, he is transferring the rights of a purchase agreement to another buyer (you). The process involves finding a property for sale, signing a contract for the real estate, then flipping that contract to a new buyer to make a profit.

 Rehabbers looking for good real estate leads, i.e. identifying motivated sellers who are prepared to sell  their property below current fair market value, can be very expensive. High qualify leads can cost hundreds of dollars each. Unless you have a highly sophisticated lead-gathering system in place, you can spend large amounts of money and wind up with bad or no results. So, one big advantage of buying from wholesalers is that they do all the legwork finding deals, for which you pay them a fee. That way the rehabber can concentrate on what he does best: rehabbing (repairs, painting, cleaning up).

 A. Dealing with Wholesalers

Suppose you find
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For decades, I’ve heard Pete Fortunato going on and on about his “financial friends” and “allies” and how important they’ve been to his enormous success in the real estate business.

As a relatively new investor, my limiting thought was, “Great, Pete, you’re a million years old [he was probably 45 at the time] and you’ve been doing this forever, and you have rich friends who’ve ALSO been doing this forever, who know that you’re super-experienced and able to perform.

Also, you’ve helped them with YOUR money or deals, so they help you with yours.

What in the world has this got to do with me? I don’t have the track record or the relationships with people with money that you have, nor the money to help THEM with THEIR deals, so move on and tell me how to buy houses with no money!”

Because I Just. Didn’t. Get it.

I thought that a “financial friend” was something like an actual friend or family member, who might, I don’t know, give you a loan at 0% interest just to help you get your first deal—a sort of angel with a checkbook who’d do whatever it took to get you the money you needed.

Or that it was a person in a mental rolodex of people who had money—like private lenders, or hard money lenders—who could be ‘convinced’ to give it to you IF you qualified and IF yo
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