Desperate Buyers Only

Sorry for the long silence.  Real Estate investing has taken the back burner the last two monthes to clients, a product roll out, and two weeks of vaction which were mostly spent hoping my dog didn't lose her left eye.

She didn't, but she is now blind in the eye. 

But onto something slightly more relevant. There is a group of products, in marketing, that are "DBO" or Desperate Buyers Only.  Before you get too deep into the assumption that all DBO products unethically prey on people in bad situations, fire ant killer is a DBO product, as are almost every book ever written on house breaking a dog.

People with fire ants and dogs that make messes in the house are desperate buyers.  They're willing to pay whatever it takes, with very little selling, to get rid of their problem.  When those kind of DBO products work as advertised then everybody wins.  Buyer gets their problem taken care of seller gets paid. Everyone is happy.

But there is another class of DBO products that really do prey on people who can't afford them.  And they tend to be the more expensive products.  A lot of loan modification programs and any number of real estate guru's fall into this catagory.  I'm not trying to say they don't work.  I have no personal experience with any of them so I really can't say.  Since 90% of businesses fail it doesn't prove it to me that the programs aren't useful that only a very few of the students enjoy success.

Still I have a hard time wrestling with the morallity of offering products like this for sale. Marketing a program, that people can't really afford anyway, to people who are unlikely to have the resources to make it succeed rubs me wrong  All the posts I see here, and on Internet Marketing forums (another refuge of the desperate dreamer) by posters that need $10,000 dollars in the next two days to aoid loosing their house really rip me up inside.

I'd love to help them, but I'm not aware of anything legal they can do to make that money in the time frame they need. And I certainly don't have $10,000 I can afford to give away.

So I got to thinking, what can I, and we as a community do to try and reach out and try to help these people.  I don't have an answer, but if you do I'd love to hear it.