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I wanted to take some time to give an idea of how I'm learning to think. I believe I mentioned real estate in my video. I'm currently working on a real estate project that I acquired at tax foreclosure, and I'm researching a few leads for future projects. One of them has been interesting enough so far to write about. Changing Mindset: From Wages -----> Power A friend of mine in eastern Washington has been looking out for properties to flip. The Washington RE market is INSANE right now (fastest growth in the country), and finding inventory for projects is tough. You can't just go to a real estate agent and say, "Find me a flip." The foreclosure auctions aren't even a good place to go now; there is so much competition that the bidders are counting on the market rising to make their profit. That's speculating as far as I'm concerned and I stay away from it. He told me he had been watching this place and it looked pretty abandoned, even though the house looked in good condition. It's on 40 acres. I know how to look up registered owners of properties in the public records, so I found the owner of this property friend found, sloppily scrawled "Hi, my wife and I want to buy your house at <location>. Contact me at <number>." on it and sent it in the mail. I had a call within a couple days. It was the daughter of the deceased owner. She explained to me that her father had passed away 5 years before, and the property was in foreclosure and behind on its taxes. She was frustrated because she knew that, had she planned differently, she could have saved it (maybe by selling off part of the acreage). There was still over $300,000 owed on the bank note, and it was 5 years in arrears. She told me she would do whatever she could to help me purchase it, because she didn't want to see it go to foreclosure. The house was valued under that and needed some work, so there wasn't an option to take it to a real estate agent and sell it on the market. It's important to be personable in these situations. People don't like it when you start drooling over dollar signs when hearing their misfortune. "Assuming I'm able to purchase this property, is there anything you would like to be seen done with it, if it's possible for me to do?" She began to cry. She told me that she just wanted to see it used. Her grandfather had owned the place, which probably means it was his homestead, and she had grown up there with her father. Her grandfather had an orchard on the 4 acres that was irrigated, and her father grew alfalfa there. I realized she was living in the middle of a 1930's Steinbeck novel: the bank was taking the family farm. I told her I had a lot of research to do and I would get back to her. Now this is my job: get creative. On face value, this place is a flop. It's in an extremely depressed area of the state. People can rarely afford houses past the $150k range, property sales move very slowly, and owning acreage often means you just own a bunch of sagebrush. After buying off the note, fixing it up, paying taxes, holding costs, and closing costs, I could be $400k into it, and because the market is so slow, I wouldn't have much of a chance to take advantage of the extra acreage, and would just have to value it for the house. A quick market analysis tells me that the house would be worth $280k finished if I'm lucky. Further, I would need to come up with at least $300k just to pay off the note, let alone other expenses. Even if that's a cheap house by Seattle standards (We've got like a $750k median right now. It's retarded), that's still a chunk of change. It isn't impossible--finding money is easy if you have the right investment--but people want to know their return on investment. How much do I earn based on what I had to invest? So what to do with the place? Let the bank have it? Or the county because of the back taxes? During the phone call I got permission from the owner to check out the property. I sent my friend out there and he said that the house is in pretty good condition. Needs some work, but nothing serious. It's 2400 sq. ft. and split into two levels, both levels having a bathroom and a kitchen. If one were thinking rentals, it could be split into two 3 bed 1 bath 1200 sq. ft. rentals. In this depressed area, 2/1 800 sq ft houses are normal. Additionally, he checked out the 1200 sq. ft. mobile home that's on the property. The owner mentioned this one, too. It needs even more work than the house, but it's still in recoverable condition. Okay, so now I'm thinking 3 rentals. Additionally, my friend pointed out that it's fairly common to lease farm land. It's possible that those 4 acres of irrigated land could be leased out as well. Alright, so instead of thinking of this property as a flip, what about something for an investor to buy and hold? Depressed areas are depressed for home sales, but they're BOOMING for renting. It makes sense--if no one can afford to buy their own house, that means everyone is renting. I called a local RE agent to chat with her about it and she confirmed my suspicion: renting is BIG there right now. She told me a 1200 sq. ft. 3 bedroom rental can go from anywhere to $1000 to $1200 a month. Okay, let's be conservative and take that $1000/mo number. Three of those would put us at $3000/mo. I don't know yet what the market rate for a lease on those acres would be (got my friend over there working on it), but for the sake of argument let's say it's another $1000. That puts us at $4000/mo cashflow. So what would the rate of return on this be? Again, let's say it costs $400k to acquire, repair, pay for taxes, pay for holding, and pay for closing costs to an end buyer. The return on investment for a cash buyer would be ($4000 x 12 / $400,000) = 12%. That's actually pretty damn good. Better than the stock market can provide. But can I do better? Let's see if we can get even more creative. The owner filled out a Authorization to Release Information form to the mortgage company so I could get information on the mortgage. It's a whopping $128,000 in arrears, and the full amount is $313k, with about a $1600/mo payment. Turns out it's 80 months behind, not just five years. Whatever the case, $128k is less than $313k. I could use some OPM. Other People's Money. If that $128k were paid up, the mortgage could continue as usual and the foreclosure would be canceled. There is a thing in the real estate investing world called a "subject to purchase". A buyer purchases a home subject to the existing financing. To put it in layman's terms: the seller would keep the mortgage in her name, but deed me the property on the agreement that I would continue to pay her mortgage*. What this means is if I were to come up with $128k instead of $313k, I could get the mortgage up to date to stop the foreclosure, and get the property in my name without qualifying for financing. BOOM. Round that up to $200k for repairs, and how do the numbers come out? We have a $1600/mo payment to make now, with probably another $200 from taxes and insurance, so $4000 - $1800 = $2200/mo cashflow. ($2200 x 12 / $200,000) = 13.2% return on investment. Getting better. *Yes, if I quit paying the mortgage, her credit would get trashed. Why should she trust me? Well, what else is she going to do? She's losing it, anyway. But wait. Where do I make money out of this? I don't have $400k or $200k to invest. I'm still a young kid that needs to earn the money in order to do that. Normally this would fall under the category of a wholesale deal, but I'm thinking more of an option. An Option to Purchase Real Estate Agreement is a weird animal. Essentially, with that agreement, the owner would sell me the exclusive right to purchase the property within a certain amount of time, such that I could cloud the title of the property and no one could buy it out from under me. This can be for any price we agree to, even if it's $1. I could include in this option any other rights I want--including the right to fix the property. What this means is I could fix the property without having to spend the money to acquire it first (assuming it could be fixed before it's foreclosed on). Acquisition is generally the biggest cost to a project, and doing this would DRASTICALLY change costs for me. It's no joke that it costs money to use money. Interest payments are huge. If I set up the numbers properly and do my research and agreements right to make it look good for an investor who wants to buy it, I can purchase an option from this owner for a negligible amount of money ($100 or less), and instead of exercising the option and purchasing the property myself, I can sell the option to the property and let someone else deal with exercising it. Depending on how much room is in the deal, I could sell the option for $5k, $10k, even $25k. This is from only having time and the small amount of money I paid for the option in the first place. The end investor gets maybe a 12% return on his investment, I get almost an infinite return on mine. My buddy will be even happier--he'll get 50% just for finding the lead. But the REAL question is: how many deals like this would I have to do before I can use my saved money to purchase my own rentals and get 12% returns? Heck, I could buy them from some new kid learning the ropes like me now. I wanted to post that to give everyone an idea here of how there are different ways to think about earning money. From my family and my public education, I learned that I earn a certain amount of money for a certain amount of time worked. I always had two problems with this. One, the instant I stopped working, I stopped earning money. Second, the progression is linear. When I started learning about how I could make deals to run my own business, I realized that my creativity could help define my income potential. Find a problem, and solve it in a way that provides value to people, and make sure that you get paid for it. I don't know if this deal is going to work out (I still have some research to do and numbers to run), but the learning experience is invaluable. The more I learn, and the more comfortable I get doing it, the more my income potential grows. I wanted to post this here to give FDR members an idea of the freedom of earning money, because I see many people focused on employment and wages. There's nothing wrong with employment and wages, but real freedom, independence, and power in your life comes when you control your own time, and you can only control your own time if you control your own income. Hope the story was enjoyable!

I've read a few good books on this topic -- most recently by Robert Kiyosaki -- do you have any recommendations of your own? (Maybe in a new thread?)

By this argument, welfare recipients and women shouldn't have the right to vote because they lead society down a path to leftism, which is bad and kills people etc. Or something. That's the argument Peter Thiel actually made, as a libertarian in a piece published by Cato: https://www.cato-unbound.org/2009/04/13/peter-thiel/education-libertarian