Wealth Building Strategies: Ways to Purchase Real Estate Without Getting a Loan

My main wealth building strategy has been investing in tax liens. Now I love investing in tax liens for lots of reasons. You can watch a short video about Why Invest in Tax Lien Certificates on my web site at TaxLienLady.com. But I’ve always wanted to be a real estate investor. Regardless of what you may have seen on a late night infomercial, tax lien investing is a great wealth building strategy but it’s not a good way to purchase real estate. In my experience a tax lien on a good piece of property will almost always redeem. That means that you don’t get to foreclose on the property. What you do get is a great interest rate on your money.

The problem with investing in real estate as a wealth building strategy for me has been that usually you need a lot of money, so I’ve been researching ways to purchase real estate without having to put down a lot of money. After all, I’m used to investing small amounts of money at a time – in tax liens.

We finally did purchase our first investment property. We bought it at a real estate auction and got a great price. But what a rude awakening when we went to get the financing! Things have really changed in the past few months when it comes to getting a loan. Sure there are still some great programs out there for first time home buyers and even for people who are not first time buyers, but are purchasing a home to live in. The problem is that banks do not really want to lend to investors.

Fortunately my husband and I have a really good mortgage broker and a good credit scores, but we still had to put 20% down in order to secure a mortgage on this property. Last time we applied for a loan on an investment property (on a house that we ultimately decided not to purchase), we only had to put 10% down and we were able to lock into an interest rate 1% lower than what we were able to get now. And that was only about four months ago.

Because we intend to purchase more than one investment property, we realize that we’ll have to find another way to buy properties other than getting a conventional mortgage. Now I’ve been to various real estate trainings for different methods of purchasing real estate. I’ve taken trainings from different experts on short sales, subject to deals, foreclosures, etc. But I haven’t actually purchased a deal using any of these methods. Most of them, except for purchasing property “subject to,” require that you have some cash, which I won’t have after we close on this property. So my focus now is to purchase investment property without using my own cash and without bringing in other investors.

Even though I have taken courses on how to purchase property “subject to” the current mortgage, the method that I learned did not really work in my state so I abandoned this method before I even tried it. Then I heard a tele-training with Wendy Patton on lease options and subject to deals on REIBlueprints.com. I wanted to listen to the training because we intended to sell the property that we’re purchasing using a lease option, and I thought that was what this training was about. But it was actually about how to purchase properties using lease options and subject to deals without having to put any money down.

Wendy was awesome! I just had to have her training course that consisted of 4 separate real estate investing courses: Buying with Lease Options, Selling on Lease Options, Working with Realtors, and Taking the Deed Subject To. Wendy offered these 4 courses and personal coaching with her for under $1000. I jumped at the opportunity to purchase this because I had spent more than twice at much for just one of those courses from other real estate gurus. The good news is that if you act now you can still listen to Wendy’s free tele-training with REIBlueprints.com, and get in on this special offer, but hurry because I don’t know how long this offer will last.