Comet Settlement Real Estate

During my years of foreclosure investing I’ve identified four key principles that have led to my success. This article describes those principles–do you have them?

1. You need to make a commitment to succeed. Real estate investing is simple, but it is not easy. Many, many long hours–punching in numbers, looking at houses, evaluating deals, talking to people, constructing deals, seeing where your profits will come from–are going to have to be spent in order to become proficient at buying and selling real estate.

You need to have a plan and execute your plan to succeed. Remember, those who fail to plan are planning to fail. The investors I know around the country who are wildly successful have overcome challenges, stuck with it when times were tough, never gave up, and had a true belief in themselves that they would succeed and that failure was not an option.

2. You need capital or a way to raise capital. You can buy real estate with little or nothing down, as many people have indicated over the years. However, the person that has capital at the ready is the person that is able to pull the trigger quickly and potentially reap very large rewards. So you need to have money for your real estate transactions in some way, shape, or form.

You might think that your resources are extremely limited. Through perseverance, ingenuity, creativity and enthusiasm, though, you can find all the capital you need through what is known as “private funding”. Private funding is the use of individual investors’ money to fund your deals. These individuals are far less critical than banks when it comes to funding deals. Private investors look for a lower loan to value ratio than lending institutions do. Of course, it’s easier to find willing private investors when you have a solid track record of success in real estate. But there are proven ways to find private investors as a beginner, too.

3. You need to leverage your resources. Real estate creates wonderful leverage for the investor, allowing them to parlay their investment into bigger and better real estate transactions each and every time, through shrewd research and prudent investing.

4. You need to take massive action. This means doing whatever it takes to make tons of offers and create massive activity that drives your investing business forward. If you do not create massive amounts of action in the first six months to get your property funnel filled with deals, you more than likely are going to lose your initial start-up money.

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Paul Wells has been investing in foreclosures full-time for more than 5 years. For more foreclosure investing secrets like the one in this article, subscribe to Paul’s Free Foreclosure Investing course here: http://www.FreeForeclosureInvesting.com.

One of the ways to get money to buy foreclosures is from private investors. This article discusses why private investors are so important to your foreclosure investing business.

A traditional way to get money for your foreclosure investments is through a hard-money lender. The hard-money lender will generally charge a percentage of the amount borrowed, or what is known as points. Three points would be three percent of the transaction. For example, if you borrowed $100,000, at 3 points, that would be $3000.

Many hard-money lenders charge interest-only on their loans, meaning they get their principal back in full and the way they make their money is on the interest. In a short term proposition this is not a bad scenario because at the beginning of any amortization schedule, the majority of the money paid out of the monthly payment goes to the lending institution. However, I have seen hard money lenders charge as much as 15 points on smaller deals to be able to fund the deal.

As I continued on with my business, and I started doing more and more deals, it become apparent that my number one need was going to be private money but without the points. So I had to put myself in the place of somebody loaning money.

Put yourself in their place. If you wanted to loan money what would you want to know about the person you’re loaning money to? Obviously, the number one criteria for someone loaning money is, how sure am I going to be that I am going to get my money back, or even a portion of my money back?

One of the most common problems with young investors is that they have no money to invest or their credit is too shaky to finance things themselves. Most banks seem to want more documentation than any person on earth can provide. The challenge in creative real estate is deals need to be done fast. Banks are notorious for not doing things at a speedy pace, but a molasses pace.

One of the exciting things about being a creative investor is that you can take ideas the average person would never have and build them into great dynasties of real estate wealth. Yes, I said great dynasties. It is potentially possible, if you have the ability to network your way through the private investment community, to add a tremendous amount of zeros to your bank account balance.

One of the true challenges for a young real estate investor is going out and finding a good deal but then not having the particular money in place at the time to pull the trigger. The power of private money can be the answer to your creative real estate financing problems and can help take you to the next level.

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Paul Wells has been investing in foreclosures full-time for more than 5 years. To ask Paul a question, go to his Foreclosure Investing blog here: http://www.AskPaulWells.com

So why should you invest in foreclosures? In the long-term, it’s for lifestyle and financial freedom.

I do not define success in terms of winning or losing, but rather by whether I am challenging myself to be the best that I can be. One of the reasons I left my 9-5 corporate job, besides getting laid off, was because I wanted MY OWN lifestyle. I wanted to create my own lifestyle for me, my family, and my friends. I wanted to become a champion, the best at what I did. I believe that anything I set my mind to, I would be successful at that endeavor.

However, my biggest problem in working for a company where I was not the boss, the president, or the owner, was that I could not set my own schedule. I would not be able to go skiing when I wanted, play golf, or travel when I wanted. I was a terrible employee because I wanted to do things when I wanted to do them. And today I don’t want to be accountable to anybody, except myself and my family, and the people that are counting on me to create real estate transactions.

Don’t get me wrong. I was pleasant at my jobs, and I showed up, and I produced revenue. But the reason that I think I was a terrible employee was that I only wanted to work just 2 to 3 weeks a year. To me, a JOB means Just Over Broke and my time was not my own time, it was my boss’ time.

When I first started in the real estate investing business I had to ask my wife to give me a chance to make this work. I had a severance package, so I had three months to move forward. When we cashed the first check of $8,000, I took $4,000 and took my wife to Paris, a place she always dreamed of going. That helped tremendously in my pursuit of this business.

Now that I have established my business I take off one week for every six weeks of work. This gives me five to eight weeks of vacation per year depending on how my deals are going. I use this time to connect with my family, vacation, work on other projects, and just go out and enjoy life because isn’t that what it’s all about? If you’re working so hard that you’re not enjoying life then you need, in my opinion, to rethink your priorities.

My 15-yr-old son Nick and I go to hockey games, football games and other things that a 15-year-old and his dad can do together. My 6 year old daughter Chloe and I go skiing in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado where we live and we do it 10-15 times a year. We go camping, take motor home trips, fly to Maui to go to the beach and much more. This is truly a life that I am designing.

My belief is we should constantly have to better ourselves, to acquire new skills, to refuse to be bogged down with the feeling of failure, inadequacy, or that L word–loser. In my opinion, the losers of the world are those that never try. I would rather work with somebody who has tried 10 different businesses and failed than somebody who has worked 30 years successfully for one company and achieved moderate success.

When are you finally a financial success? Only you can answer that question for yourself and your family but to me the answer is when you can totally financially support yourself without having to show up for work. When you can do whatever you want, whenever you want, with whomever you want, anywhere you want, anytime you want to do it, as much as you want to do it, then you have reached financial success. That is the time that passive income is really working for you and your dreams are becoming a reality.

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Paul Wells has been investing in foreclosures full-time for more than 5 years. For more foreclosure investing secrets like the one in this article, subscribe to Paul’s Free Foreclosure Investing course here: http://www.FreeForeclosureInvesting.com

Foreclosure under a mortgage requires a court ordered sale conducted by the sheriff or other court-appointed official. Foreclosure process is called judicial foreclosure. In the event of default, the mortgage accelerates the due date of the dead to the present and notifies the defaulted debtor to pay off the entire outstanding balance at once. If the debtor fails to do so, the mortgage initiates a lawsuit, called a foreclosure action, in the county where the land is located. The purpose of his legal proceedings to a charge toward the county sheriff to seize and sell the property. The judge’s order is called an order of execution. Acting under the order authentication, the sheriff notifies the public of the place and date of the sale. This requires posting notices and the property and the courthouse and ran an advertisement of the sale in a newspaper.

1. Redemption. At any time up until the sheriff’s sale, the debtor may save the property by paying the mortgage note is due. This up right to save or redeem the property before the sale is called the equitable right of redemption. The debtor might also be obligated to pay delinquent interest, court costs, attorneys fees, and sheriff’s fees in order to redeem the property.

2. Sheriff’s sale. The sheriff’s sale is a public auction normally held at the courthouse door, and anyone can bid on the property. The property is sold to the highest bidder and the proceeds are used to pay for the costs of the sale and to pay off the mortgage.

If the property does not make enough money in the sale to pay off the mortgage, the debtor may be able to obtain a deficiency judgment against the debtor for the remaining debt. To obtain a deficiency judgment, the creditor must apply to the court within three months of the judicial sale.

In some states, such as California, deficiency judgments are prohibited if the mortgage secured a loan to purchase 1-4 unit personal residence occupied by the owner.

Post-sale redemption.

After the sale, the debtor has an opportunity to save or redeem the property. The debtor can do this by paying the purchaser the amount paid for the property plus acute interest from the time of the sale. This right to redeem the property on the sheriff’s sale is called statutory right of redemption.

Dependent on the court congestion and the availability of the surety for foreclosures, and judicial mortgage foreclosure may take anything from several months to several years from the time of the default until a sheriff’s deed is delivered to the purchaser, which finally divests from the debtor of title.

Martin Lukac, represents http://www.RateEmpire.com, a finance web-company specializing in real estate/mortgage market. We specialize in daily updates, rate predictions, mortgage rates and more. Find low home loan mortgage interest rates from hundreds of mortgage companies! Visit http://www.RateEmpire.com today