I have now become more firm with that philosophy due in part to your example and in part to my recent bad experiences with our local agents here.

Well, maybe if you believe in the "You broke it, you buy it" philosophy. it might have been a good choice.

Simply buying land hoping it will go up without a market analysis and understanding the opportunity costs of holding is not a good strategy. 2) Again it depends on your philosophy and strategy.

All really not bad philosophies to learn and adhere to.

1) Grossreal: if I look at my core values, I do not see any fraud at all, even in case of me straight out giving money straight back to Yeow who owns the place and negotiated the seller.The whole bank philosophy of "we're willing to take a loss, as long as THAT guy doesn't make a gain" is horrible.

They represent different philosophies that so far none of them proven to be the ultimate way of life in their purest form.

for example, how many loans exist today that don't have a due-on-sale clauses, and there is still all sorts of info on the www assuming that these loans are still abundant and a viable way of doing business.that said, some promoters aren't comfortable selling, and an effective way i've found to still do business without hard pitches is to help others by giving gifts (in the philosophy of seth godin), and that gift can be the gift of knowledge. if someone ends up doing business with me, that's great, but i don't expect them to and i don't create that expectation on them.

I will point to this as proof that the Tea Party has brought an improvement to Washington, getting folks who requested 1 Billion dollars of earmark bans in the past to give up that method of working in Washington and to get on board with the philosophy of ending earmarks.3.

They read the books, go to the REIA meetings, post on the forums, etc -- all the stuff that leads up to the part where failure is possible, but not actually taking that risky step.Now, those people who I've known to succeed (in real estate or any major endeavor, for that matter) are those who were taught a different philosophy growing up -- they were taught, "Failure is just one step on the road to success.

The question is besides the buy and hold philosophy of cash flowing properties, what are the other strategies we could use to get ~20% annual return.