Lifestlyes Unlimited Good Or Con?

[Jerry Jaco]

Hello All. I was basically, looking for a trustworthy/reputable School and or online classes to learn from. I have been listening too "LifeStyles Unlimited" 1490-New York and the radio personality makes good business sense, in most cases with real estate. Has anyone attended the $700 class(s) or online and did the program actually help buying a home/multifamily succeeded thru their program? Or is the info all smoke and mirrors to get you money? Or can I get started on my own, from knowing what already know, but need a helping start...

thanks Jerry

[Geode Pratt]

Hopefully I can provide a little better answer than the one above.

As a Lifestyles FFP member, which was $500 for 3 years when I joined, (and for single family only) I have been to several meetings, the 2-day seminar, spoken to the "mentors", etc. 

First of all, Lifestyles is a TEXAS company. They started in Houston and have offices in Dallas, Austin, and San Antonio. They may have opened offices in other cities as well. In my opinion, if you are looking to buy and hold (rentals), either single family or multifamily, and are a new investor, and in Texas, their minimum membership is well worth the money. The general lessons they teach, documentation available, and overall approach are, I believe, solid fundamentals for long term cash flow. No preaching of get rich quick here. With that said, I have no clue about their knowledge of markets outside of Texas. They seem to have quieted down a lot here in Dallas lately. I really thought they retracted to focus on Houston again, but maybe they are making a national push now.

They do have a few membership options, some of which supposedly include bus tours, spoon feeding of deals, and multifamily mentoring. I have no experience with these programs, as they were out of my price range.

For someone who has never done any investing, and wants to buy and hold, I think their cheap program is probably worth the $500 or $700. Once you've taken that step out and own 2 or 3 properties, downloaded the forms you need, watched the videos, etc., you have probably outgrown them or at least that membership. At that point, maybe upgrading is worth considering.

If it wasn't for Lifestyles Unlimited, I don't know if I would have ever bought my first rental property, much less the 2 that followed it, so for me it was well worth it.

As far as the single family mentors go, I was less than impressed. Yes, they will answer a few questions here and there (sometimes taking up to a week to respond), but in my experience the answers were very generic. When I decided I wanted to start flipping, they refused to discuss it unless I upgraded to a $6000 membership. Since then, I have pretty much written them off. They have revamped their membership levels recently and seems they are offering MUCH less for the FFP program than they did before. I noticed a lot of the training videos I had access to a year ago are no longer on the website. I'm guessing that's now in the $6000 package.

Again, this is all simply my experience from the single family side of things. I had no interest in going into multifamily, so if that's your thing, your experience may be different. 

I noticed you are in New York, so if that's where you want to invest, I would suggest you talk to them and make sure they actually have members/mentors in your area who know that market and interview those people. Because, when Del and Steve start talking about a bread and butter deal of buying a $100k house for $60k, that may not be the least bit relevant in your market.

Hope this helps. As with anything, they key is going out and doing it. No amount of education is worthwhile if you don't get off the couch.

Good luck!