Nothing Down for the 2000s: Dynamic New Wealth Strategies in Real Estate

Real estate is both the""simplest, easiest, safest, shortest route to financial freedom"" and an invigorating self-help regimen, insists this latest edition of the bestselling financial primer. Real-estate guru Allen's system has two tenets: 1) buy residential rental properties from desperate""don't-wanter"" sellers, and 2) pay""nothing down,"" using""Other People's Money."" After a broad but incomplete introduction to conducting and valuing real-estate transactions, he gets down to the nitty-gritty. Tenet 1 requires searching classified ads, hunting for For Sale signs, rummaging through foreclosure, bankruptcy and divorce records and otherwise beating the bushes for motivated sellers, then wangling the price down further. Tenet 2 requires a labyrinth of""creative"" financing schemes involving various combinations of partnerships, options, floating bank loans, life-insurance policies, unsecured notes, second and third mortgages on multiple properties and other""paper formulas."" Allen sells this program, with much motivational hectoring, as an opportunity for self-actualization. He insists that the only barriers to success are fear and lack of imagination, provides readers with worksheets to help them set concrete goals and discover their purpose in life, and suggests a visualization methodology called Neurobics to get them fantasizing about the wealth that will be theirs in the real-estate business (after an initial""starvation period""). Despite himself, Allen portrays real estate not as a safe and simple road to riches but as an all-consuming life project, full of endless trolling for leads, hardball negotiations, murky wheeling and dealing and sudden scrambles to meet financing deadlines and loan payments. Personality types who thrive on such a highly leveraged career of risk-taking and sharp practice will love this book. Others may balk at the total reconstruction of character and lifestyle Allen's book appears to demand.