Have you ever seen one of those pay loan stores? The basic idea is that someone can get a short-term loan by borrowing money against their next paycheck or next number of paychecks.

This can be a life saver for someone who is about to loose something very important to them because they don’t have money for the car payment or their rent.

The downside for the person borrowing the money is the amount of interest and fees they end up paying to the finance company. If you calculate the interest paid, it far exceeds any type of usury limits. I’m not really sure how they get around usury laws, but that’s not the issue in this blog post.

In other words, if you are the one taking out that payday loan, you’ve got to be very motivated for this type of arrangement to make sense to you. Some call this taking advantage of people, but I don’t agree with that. The individual who’s in that situation needs to be the one to decide whether or not that’s a good deal for them at the time they are making the decision.
Successful real estate investors know how to put together creative offers that solve all sorts of problems for those involved. Again, someone looking from the outside at one of these offers might say the investor is taking advantage of the seller. I’ve gotten that before from a relative of the seller.

However, when it comes down to it, that relative isn’t going to do anything to solve the seller’s problem. They aren’t going to buy the property, and they don’t know anyone else who’s going to buy it either. They just end up being a temporary roadblock at best, or a permanent deal killer at worst.

One of my favorite creative offers are no interest, no money down offers. He’s a video where I explain one of these types of offers:

This philosophy of creative problem solving goes way beyond buy properties. It extends to the customers you sell these properties to. For example, I offer most of the houses I have on rent-to-own terms. If I’ve got a prospect who really loves one of my houses, I can usually find a way to sell them the property regardless of their situation as long as they have one the key ingredients to work with (See my last blog post about recipes for success).

It extends to the contractors and handymen I use to work on my properties.

It extends to the lenders who finance my business.

What it all comes down to is finding out what the other party needs. If you can find out how to get them what they need while at the same time getting what you need, you’ll be very successful as a real estate investor.

Add a comment below if you’d like.