Or, you might just want to give her a gift card for a nice meal.

We only have one car with a payment, no kids, and scant credit card debt (very minimal compared to income)...yet no one wants to lend us money.

Borrowing from car loans to credit cards and everything else will become more expensive until time goes by and you rebuild your credit history.To me your thinking is once this expensive house I have is gone from the short sale then might debt to income will not be so bad.

The good news is there is multiple ways to market at variable costs.Networking (technically free) but you want to have business cards to hand out (vista print 250 for $10 plus shipping).Is there a local REIA that is accessible by bus?

Many times the neighbors know what happened.Just tell them you are looking to buy houses in the area so that you can clean them up, and get them occupied, and you saw this one looks vacant, and could use some TLC.Most of the time, they will not give you the persons contact info, but if you give them your card, they may reach out to the owner.2) Send a letter/postcard to the house, using a first class stamp and mark "Return Service Requested" under your return address.

I have a consolidation loan with a $9,000 balance, a car lease, and two credit cards.

The perfect icebreaker, heheh.They asked me to fill out a form so the broker could contact me, I handed over a business card instead (not property related occupation).

A word of advice:Leave all of your Charge cards and your checkbook(s) at home!

Give the tenant a $20 gas card and call it a day.

I'm thinking the first things to do are probably network at REI to build my cash buyers list, get business cards to hand out and investigate setting up an LLC.