One of the first real estate investing books that I ever bought when I got serious about real estate investing. Now that I’m looking at getting back into that industry to take advantage of the real estate market these days, I decided to revisit this book and some of the idea in it.
This books takes a “get rich slow” view of real estate investing. It is one of the better step-by-step real estate investing books out there. The focus of the book is buying rental properties for cash flow, and the authors, Mike Summey and Roger Dawson, show you how to find motivated sellers, determine the investment value of a property based on it’s Net Operating Income (aka, cash flow), manage your properties, and more.
Because the book is aimed at readers with full time jobs and family obligations, the authors walk you through how to do everything in small bites. For example, to learn about your local market, the book shows you how to meet with real estate agents and obtain and analyze market research data so that you can find particular home types and neighborhoods to invest in, and do it all over the course of several weekends.
All in all, The Weekend Millionaire’s Secrets to Investing in Real Estate is an excellent introduction to anybody just getting started in real estate investing, and it does give you a good portion of the “book learning” you need in order to start working on your first real estate deal. You can purchase the book at most major book retailers, and online via Amazon
For the things that the book is lacking, such as contracts, property inspection forms, and more in-depth, specialized information, the Real Estate Investor Wiki is worth looking at for filling in the gaps.
Until next time,
Jassen Bowman
Back in January when I was getting serious about making the trip to Australia, I started looking for ways to keep the costs down. I made some notes about things to look further into, which I never really did. I was cleaning up some old emails and found an email to myself with the following notes in it, so I just thought I’d share. I do specifically remember one of the biggest things I found, which goes right in line with something I’ve been saying for years: Never pay a fee to get free travel — such programs are usually just scams or ripoffs.
Here are the notes:
Check with cruise lines for free cruises in exchange for offering services to other passengers that you do already, such as teaching aerobics, organizing ballroom dancing, doing catering, or, for me in particular, preparing tax returns or hosting marketing seminars
Carry packages and documents – Check out courier.org or call them at 308-632-3273 – clearinghouse for courier services
FreeTravelCenter.com
Participate in archaelogical digs — these often require tons of labor, and they are under- or un-funded digs, so usually need volunteers – PassPortInTime.com
They had some travel savings stuff at the time — CoolSavings.com
Happy New Year to everybody!
Sincerely,
Jassen Bowman
I just completed migrating from the b2evolution 3.x blogging platform to WordPress 2.9. In fact, this is my first post under the new WordPress platform.
I’ve spent time over the past several days consolidating all my b2evolution blogs (dozens of them) down into one site. It was a difficult decision process to consolidate to one domain, and I did so gradually. I will now forward the old domains to specific categories on this blog.
Once I had all the posts and categories cleaned up on b2evolution, I had to figure out how to migrate it all. There are no easy ways to do this. There are instructions out there for exporting b2e data using a Movable Type skin, then importing that into WordPress. However, these methods don’t work with b2evolution 3.x.
After unsuccessfully trying the skins method, I went to wordpress, and used their instructions, actually, including their database import script, located at http://codex.wordpress.org/Importing_Content
Here’s how I did this:
1). Remove domain as a parked domain, added back to my hosting account as as add-on domain.
2). Upload WordPress 2.9 files and configure it, using the database name, login, and password of my b2evolution database. Yes, install the WordPress tables into the b2evolution database.
3). Run the WordPress installer script.
4). Run the WordPress migration script for b2evolution. It worked with b2e 3.x!
5). All my b2e pages imported as posts, so I manually recreated the 2 pages and deleted their post copies.
6). Deleted all my old b2e users.
All my categories (10 of them) and posts (160 of them) look to have imported correctly. The only downside was that the post dates all say today.
I also need to look at my .htaccess files to try and preserve old inbound links. It’s almost 1am, but I’m going to tackle that right now anyway. 
Merry Christmas, everybody!
Sincerely,
Jassen Bowman
Let’s take a hypothetical situation. Let’s say you owe the IRS a small bank vault of back taxes. Let’s also say that your own bank vault happens to be empty, and next the IRS is coming to seize your cardboard box from the alley you sleep in. You need help, and you need it fast.
When it comes down to choosing who is going to represent you in front of the IRS, you have some decisions to make. A big one is what kind of representation you’re looking for. For all intents and purposes, your choices are a CPA, an enrolled agent, or an attorney. In other words, your choices are a number cruncher, a tax expert, or, well, ya know, one of those folks that’s the butt of the best jokes ever written. :p
So, back to our scenario. When your fighting back against the IRS, pick the guy you want on your side:
The CPA:
The Lawyer:
The Enrolled Agent:
Granted, these are just stereotypes, and we all know how accurate stereotypes are…but still….I’m just sayin!
This is a follow up to my previous post concerning keyword research and niche selection. In that post, I discussed how to do keyword research and find market opportunities on the Internet. It is well known that once you have selected a niche, built a web site, optimized it for the search engines, and added some content, that you cannot just sit back and relax. The importance of keeping live, fresh, and up to date content on your site on an ongoing basis is talked about ad nauseum in various Internet marketing circles. I wanted to provide a real life case study about this situation.
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