Ask Del Now!
“Day after day after day this lady would complain about this other lady next-door neighbor’s laundry.
And then one day she got up and she and her husband were sitting there and she said, “Honey, look. The lady’s finally got clean laundry.”
She goes, “I wonder what happened.”
And the husband said, “Honey, suffice it to say that I got up this morning very early and I cleaned our window.””
Negativity
Today, folks, what I would like to talk about is something a little different. It’s about negativity and how people who have an agenda—how they see the world creates division and the agenda for that which they are trying to stress to themselves and to everybody else.
It also goes a little bit along with that concept that, “If I can’t do it, then maybe I can teach it or teach that it shouldn’t be done.” And, “If I can’t teach it, then maybe I should legislate it so nobody else can do it or teach it” type of a concept.
What I’m talking about, there’s article here today—I can’t even believe this—it says, “Are distressed homes worth it?” This came out by MSN in their real estate department. And it says, “Short sales and foreclosures seem like great bargains, but hassles and hidden costs may make these unconventional purchases more trouble than they’re worth.”
Foreclosures
Man, now think of that. That’s an entire indictment on whether or not you should be out there buying foreclosures. Now, based on what? Based on what negative point of view when people are making thousands and thousands of dollars of profit—sometimes tens and sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars of profit on one deal or on multiple deals? Why the indictment? Why even the negative point of view?
So they go on it says here—I’ll read this to you ‘cause I’ve got to show you their facts. “Home buyers are finding that the battered real estate market offers just as many opportunities for headaches as for bargains.”
And it goes on and says, “Seth and his wife Crystal, both 25, recently bought a bank-owned two-bedroom town house for $110,000 when similar homes in the same area development were selling for as much as 131. But exactly one day before the scheduled July closing, the Grotzkes—or whatever their names were—learn that there was a second unpaid mortgage. Because of this foul up the couple was forced to live in Grotzke’s boss’s basement for more than a month. They finally closed in August.”
Problems
Now, folks, let’s just think about how stupid that is as a set-up point to bring up. What they’re saying is if you are completely ignorant, if you’re a complete idiot, if you’ve got no professional help helping you at all and you are blindly going into buying one of these houses, you may run into problems.
But the problems that these people ran into are basically based on their stupidity and/or ignorance. For example why would anybody buy a two-bedroom town house and pay 110,000 bucks? That’s ridiculous, absolutely ridiculous—that’s like a hundred dollars a square foot. It’s insane. That’s not a special. To buy something at 110 that normally would cost 130, that’s not even a 20 percent discount. That’s not a deal. That’s not even worth doing.
But then you go on and say that okay, before they bought it they didn’t even bother to get title insurance? Nobody, nobody, no real estate agent worth their salt, no investment consultant worth their salt would let anybody buy a house without getting title insurance. If there were title insurance the second mortgage would have been found.
3 Months
Second of all, the mortgage company who foreclosed on the property has given that second mortgage the right to buy them out and they didn’t. So the second mortgage is wiped out. So it’s really not even a matter — anything more than having the title company clarify that issue and get them to remove the lien. And obviously that’s what happened because it had gone ahead and closed.
But how do you end up living in your boss’s basement for three months? You don’t have an apartment? You don’t have a place you’re living now? What did you do? I mean, yeah, you think you’re going to close.
I remember when I owned a home in Sugarland, and I sold it and bought another one over here. My contract allowed me 30 days to move into my new home and a holdover provision if I needed to. The buyer of my new home wanted to move in right away because he is a young dumb kid and had given notice to his apartment complex and didn’t want to hold over ‘cause it would cost him more money to hold over.
Buyer Beware
But I made sure that I had 30 days to move, and I made sure that I had a holdover clause and I had title insurance. So because I wasn’t an idiot, none of those problems occurred to me.
But now to go back and create an indictment on all of real estate investing because of this problem, because of this example—this is the lead example in their article—only goes to show you that most of the people in this world, the press included and probably even more so than anybody else, are completely negative — completely negative to the world because of their paradigm, because the way they see the world. “It’s not fair. It’s not safe. It’s dangerous out there. Buyer beware.” Well, yeah, buyer beware; buyer don’t be an idiot.
Let me tell you a story. There was a young couple that moved into their new home. Every morning they would sit at the breakfast table and look out through the window to the next-door neighbor who would be putting her laundry out there on the line.
Dirty Laundry
And every day the wife would make a comment to the husband like, “I don’t get it. She’s washing her laundry and putting it out there to dry, but it’s still dirty. I don’t know if she doesn’t understand you’ve got to use laundry detergent. I don’t know if she doesn’t understand what it is that she’s doing, but she’s doing something wrong and it’s dirty.”
And day after day after day this lady would complain about this other lady next-door neighbor’s laundry. And then one day she got up and she and her husband were sitting there and she said, “Honey, look. The lady’s finally got clean laundry.” She goes, “I wonder what happened.” And the husband said, “Honey, suffice it to say that I got up this morning very early and I cleaned our window.”
