Back in the late 1980s I had the entrepreneurial itch.
After seeing the same late-night infomercial over and over again I finally summoned up the courage and did it. I shelled out hundreds of dollars that I really couldn’t afford to part with to acquire my very own copy of Carleton Sheets’ “No Down Payment” course, complete with audio cassettes, worksheets, and tons of information on how to purchase real estate creatively with little to no money down.
If you’ve been around long enough, you’ll recall that mortgage interest rates peaked in October of 1981 at 18.63% and finished the decade at around 10%. The 1980s were an incredibly expensive time to buy a home. Yet interest in home buying didn’t wane. People just came up with more creative ways to acquire real estate.
At the age of 19 with barely a penny to my name, I purchased my first piece of investment property – 12 duplex apartments in the downtown area of the city – using what I had learned from Sheets’ course and others. I worked a full-time job and, like many young folks, was leveraged to the hilt, maxed out with credit cards, auto loans, and all sorts of consumer debt. I spent every waking moment outside of work making this venture a success, doing as much of the painting and handywork as I could myself, collecting rent, fixing things that broke, and being good a landlord.
That single adventure taught me a valuable lesson:
Obsession beats talent, every day of the week.
I had never done anything like this before. I wasn’t a skilled handyman, didn’t have any prior experience in real estate, and didn’t even own a home myself (I was renting an apartment). I succeeded because I was passionate about what was in front of me, and I was determined to make it work in spite of incredible odds against me.
In the decades that have followed I’ve consumed tons of information about buying and selling homes, managing rental properties, and business and finance in general. I’ve purchased millions of dollars’ worth of real estate using just about every creative twist and turn imaginable, using everything from simple 30-year mortgages to very complex LLCs and operating agreements.
And let’s be perfectly clear: I’ve made TONS of mistakes along the way as well, learning valuable lessons from each and every one.
My goal is to leverage my experience to provide a highly condensed version of the very best strategies you can use to excel in your endeavors so that you don't have to reinvent the wheel spending decades learning from mistakes I've already made.
Cliff Williams
Founder of The Expert Network