There is no magic formula.

Living deal to deal off of your money is a good formula for failure in real estate.

just remember, there are FICO scores, and then everything else is a "FAKO", its fine to monitor your scores to look for trends in your score with a FAKO, but there is no way to determine FICO from FAKO scores.Generally if a FAKO is going up, the FICO probable is,,but not always because the formula to come up with the scores is differentIt seems like I'm always having my FICO's pulled for a refinance, and I watch FAKO's from all 3 bureaus,,,and believe me, there is no relationship to FICO and FAKOs

i have a buyer that looked at my property and used a formula of land value minus demolition.

The other a serial entrepreneur who ran the largest wine concern in the US and took it public.One owned everything in cash period and had no debt the serial entrepreneur had all sorts of deals going and believed in debt and financing but that I am sure because of his background running public companies.In our business we borrowed from banks ( credit facilities) to loan to those that needed MHL's and we made the spread which as you know is pretty nice, but even those facilities required us to have 20% of our own capital in each loan.So the capital structure of each HML I made was our strip of capital ( cash) at 20% banks at 80% but with the bank never being more than 56% of appraised value. if the loans were higher LTV we needed more cash.So at the end of the day I think it depends on what your doing how big you are and of course your deal flow..As I move forward loaning money I require CASH into each deal I do with very few exceptions.So combination of cash and OPM seems to be the right formula..

But having said that, I still think going to the property records office and looking it up for yourself and networking with other investors, contractors and bird dogs is the best and most proven way to be successful in real estate and its FREE.I've seen a lot of seminars come and go all saying they have a magic bullet or secret formula that will automatically throw money at you, all you have to do is click a button on your computer.I haven't found that magic bullet yet.What I have found is 90 percent of the people who buy these courses and programs never do anything with it and another 5% folds at the first or second "no" from a seller.I believe being successful in real estate takes two things persistence and patience.Persistence to keep picking up the phone and patience to know you may talk to 50 people before you get a yes but it'll come.

They are not that hard to do if you follow the right formula but again dont think this is a way to do "free" real estate.

You can work numerous formulas but I typically want my payment to be 40-50% of my rent rate max. 

It can be a big help in qualifying for mortgages since they can be counted on as reserves after a penalty is factored into the formula. 

So I guess that's why it came to a surprise to us that the Richdad formula put us into the box with everyone else!