Cash for Investment?

[Account Closed]

So my wife & I are obsessed with becoming investors. Everyone we have networked with says we must have skin in the game to do any kind of joint ventures/learn from them or even join a team, which we would love to do, however we basically gave our life savings to a family member to deal with a health battle. The hard money lenders say we must have about 10k in the bank to qualify for a loan which we no longer have. Been told to wholesale, but nobody wants to show us how. We keep hitting dead ends but at the end of the day, we know if we had 15-20k in the bank, we could get moving in right direction. Don’t know any private investors. So, question is...what creative ways are out there to be able to get that money in the bank? Business loan? We cant qualify for anymore credit. We just don’t want to wait a year or two to save all that money back again. Ideas? Thanks in advance!

[Jim K.]

@Account Closed:

"Why would you assume I don’t do those things to learn myself...we have and we do."

Which was it?

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"We just don’t want to wait a year or two to save all that money back again."

It's the obvious top of the market in more than half the country. This is not the time to be chomping at the bit to acquire real estate as a beginner -- you're not going to be finding good deals on the MLS like you could circa 2010-2011.

The current newbie rage is to put out a million illegal bandit signs that read "We Buy Houses" or send out a million sleazy direct mailings that read "I wanna buy your house for CA$H!" Those barely worked to begin with. Every month the market goes on as is, they're becoming less and less productive.

All the wise things that a person new to the real estate business should be doing to establish off-market deal pipelines really do take TIME to develop. And you need to make decisions about what kind of investors you want to be even before that. But here you are, certain that all you really need is some quick capital and you're off to the races! You said it yourself:

"we know if we had 15-20k in the bank, we could get moving in right direction"

Just how do you know that?

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What comes to mind for me reading your posts is the Classical Greek expression << οὐδέ γρῦ >>, which means something like "without a voice." The ancients used it to talk about the linguistic sophistication of barbarians who came to their lands, eager to live or work or trade with them, and yet were so ignorant of the Greek language that it wasn't that they didn't understand a single word, they didn't know a single syllable of the language.  They grunted and pointed and expected that was enough.

My advice is to pay your learning dues, Lance. Most people getting into this business end up losing money. Now, there IS such a thing as "analysis paralysis," or fearing to pull the trigger although you have all the useful information on a property. Sometimes it's better to jump in, lose money, and come out having learned something new. But that's not what's happening here. You want to take a high dive into a shark tank with your feet in concrete shoes and a bleeding beef roast strapped to your back.

What's stopping you from getting on Amazon.com and buying a dozen books on wholesaling? What's stopping you from going to property auctions in your area to meet wholesalers in action? Have you attended any of the real-estate meet-up events in your area? Have you bought a single lunch or cup of coffee for someone who's already making money in real estate? You've posted twice on Bigger Pockets and in your second post, you've yelled at a guy with a profile that quietly mentions that HE'S BEEN LANDLORDING SINCE NINETEEN NINETY-FIVE. Uh-huh. Twenty-three years of skin in the game, and you just lost him completely as a possible source of information.

At least think about what I'm saying, OK? I know how frustrating it is to be in your shoes. What you want to do is change your life, and you see other people doing it here, and you're saying to yourself, why not me?

There's a popular thread right now stating that the OP went from zero to fifteen properties in a year. And half the BP community is writing out their congratulations to her.

Start doing searches here and see how many long threads you find written by OPs who proudly state, "I LOST IT ALL IN REAL ESTATE! NOT ONLY DO I NOT HAVE A POT TO PEE IN NOW, I HAVE NOTHING TO PEE WITH!"

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Let me tell you a story about my parents: it's late and I have diarrhea of the fingers tonight. In the 1970s, they were doing well in Athens, Greece. My dad owned and ran a small local textile factory making shirts that he sold to business contacts in Germany. Well, this guy came along one day and said that he was selling plots of land near Loutraki.

Loutraki is a small resort town about fifty miles out of Athens. The area is famous for mineral springs: a lot of the bottled spring water sold throughout the country comes from there.

Loutraki is built next to the sea in the shadow of the base of a mountain. The guy who came to see my father was selling plots of land a bit up the mountain. Since the water supply of the town could never go up there with the frankly primitive water infrastructure of the time, the land was worthless for housing, although it commanded fantastic sunset views of the Gulf of Corinth.

But the guy claimed that he had found a natural artesian spring on the land, and that's the land what he was selling. This was believable -- spring water's what the area is famous for. My mom and dad went on a trip with him, saw the spring bubbling out of the ground, and immediately bought the land he was selling. No analysis paralysis there! It was the deal of a lifetime for a confident, capable, successful businessman like my dad.

The next week, they went back, and there was no spring. The guy who sold them the land had disappeared. My parents went into town and talked to people, and it turns out that the longtime owner of the land had sold a parcel just a few months ago to this pair of characters who were known for running this same spring scam throughout the area. This is how it worked: the "land agent" had a buddy on the scene who set up a big bladder full of water a bit further up the mountain, ran a hose through the brush down the mountain, and buried the last fifteen feet. Seeing the land agent and the marks coming on the scene, the guy hiding in the brush would turn a valve, and instant spring!

And so my parents were the not-so-proud owners of two plots of land fifty miles away from their homes that couldn't be used for anything other than grazing livestock.

In the house that I grew up in, the name "Loutraki" was never mentioned. I didn't even know there was a town named Loutraki in Greece until I was maybe 16. My dad never invested again in real estate, never even bought a primary residence where he lived. I only heard about the land deal grudgingly from my mother right after my father died. I think my older brother still doesn't know about it to this day.

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Think about my father when you think about how badly you need 20 grand and how unimportant acquiring the knowledge to make successful real estate investments is. I know I do.