Being that we all feel swindled by the borrower, I doubt any one of this group is actually out to screw the others over.

You are 19, and there are some people who will try to take advantage of you (take your money), so be careful and only partner with someone you trust.At 19 partnering might be hard, you are young, and inexperienced, hard but not impossible.Maybe you can earn and learn with sweat equity working with a partner who knows the ropes, doing remods, roofing, painting, cabnet installs, as well as learning the financial end of things...Don't work for free, your labor is valuable and Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, get a percent of the property ownership for your efforts.And beware of those who will swindle you based on your age and inexperience--every smiling face is not your friend.Good Luck!

Thank youI've been there, my first rental and tenant crushed me... swindled me into an illegal section 8 deal and played me like a fiddle.  

Rather than committing a 'large line of credit' to actually make the purchase and hope to come out the other end with a profit, executing an option contract with the seller instead on a distressed property could be done with 10% or less of the capital commitment, plus provide the investor with breathing room to determine if they can actually make the deal work out.This used to be called 'speculating'; now it all seems to be lumped under the general category of 'wholesaling' and considered to be the equivalent of swindling... 

Or maybe it was a little old lady swindled by an unscrupulous wholesaler.

It makes sense that you are now looking into a mentor, you will have a pretty good idea what to look for in a mentor, someone who is legit and is not trying to swindle you. 

Sure they say, as soon as I prove I'm not the tenant trying to swindle them.

A lot of people skimmed this and only thought that you were tight on cash and are trying to swindle it out of newbies.

I don't want to get stuck with a HML and our project taking 4 months to finish because I can't trust people or get swindled :| I wonder if that was kind of a Kansas thing though because just having been born and raised there people don't often take a whole lot of pride in their work.

"It sounds as though" you have a dog in this fight to swindle children out of their future earnings with student loans to transfer money from their pockets to yours in some way -- "I'm sorry to hear that".Colleges teach ZERO of use in the real world.There are other Swindles designed to take money from people and not provide value that are highlighted on this website from time to time too.