A large number of Investing Architect readers get here after googling "how to buy investment properties with no money" every week. Once arrived, they read extensive articles about our Blueprint real estate investing strategy in which long term real estate investors employ their hard saved capital to build a solid stream of retirement income using quality real estate investments. At first glance, the two are thoroughly incompatible - on the one hand, there are aspiring investors who seem to want … [Read more...]

A couple of years ago, an American friend of mine went on vacation to Italy with the family and he tried authentic Neapolitan-style pizza for the first time. He was speechless! The pizza amounted to a unique culinary experience and had nothing whatever to do with its gooey American counterpart he had taken out thousands of times. "How is it possible - he asked the shopkeeper - that something made the same way from the same ingredients, can be so deliciously different?" The shopkeeper's answer … [Read more...]

When I started Investing Architect a couple of years ago, I wrote a controversial post called Why Equity doesn't matter that caused quite a stir. It was inevitable. A conservative, prudent, "low and slow" real estate investing guy (by his own admission) was advising his readers that built in equity was irrelevant. How could this be, considering what happened to real estate markets in 2008 with millions underwater on their mortgages? Wouldn't it be more conservative and prudent to only purchase … [Read more...]

One of the first things people tell you about investing is that you must diversify. And by people, i mean your Uncle Ralf, who took a finance class once. Then comes the proverbial "Don't put all your eggs in one basket" accompanied by the mandatory wag of the index finger. After you put some thought into it you realize that Ralph might be on to something here. It's commonsense - when you put all your money in one thing, if that thing goes bust so do you. So spread your money around and while … [Read more...]

Based on conversations after the fact, many of our clients revealed that they had been reading Investing Architect for months (and in one case, over a year) before they decided to contact us to craft and execute their real estate investing Blueprint. This surprised me a little at first. But after giving it some thought it all started to make a lot of sense. Before you take the step to contact someone like me, you have to come to two important conclusions. First, you have to decide that … [Read more...]