Clark Howard's Living Large in Lean Times: 250+ Ways to Buy Smarter, Spend Smarter, and Save Money by Clark Howard & Mark Meltzer

Author:Clark Howard & Mark Meltzer
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: Self-Help
ISBN: 1583334335
Publisher: Avery
Published: 2011-08-02T00:00:00+00:00

Being a landlord is not easy, but I am proud of our rental homes. The rental income is slowly helping us replenish our depleted savings and allowing us to pay down the HELOC. Before recently having to evict a tenant, we enjoyed an occupancy rate of 37 out of 38 possible rental months.

The best part? The fact that we bought the homes from some of the “giant monster mega-banks” for an average of about 10 cents on the dollar from what they sold for in the peak of the market!

Mike M., GA

Never buy property without looking at it

Over the years, con artists got notoriously rich by selling people Florida swampland. This rip-off was especially popular in the 1960s and 1970s when future retirees bought property that was basically worthless because it was all wet. It became such a well-known scam that it didn’t work anymore—until the mid-2000s when what was old became new again and the con artists came back to prey on another generation.

Sometimes people are all too quick to buy a dream and will suspend disbelief to buy land without seeing it. One of the new equivalents of swampland in Florida has been desert land in Utah. The New York Times reported that Box Elder County, Utah, intended to file charges against cons who had sold parcels of land over the phone and Internet to three thousand people in the United States, Europe, and Australia.

The land was supposedly adjacent to a metropolitan city. But when people would go to Utah to see their new homestead, they’d find that no such city even existed. Worse still, the land they’d purchased could not be developed because to do so would violate local and state zoning laws.

This new twist on the old rip-off scheme of land speculation started when cons took advantage of a Utah land rush and bought up property that was parched and desolate. Then they illegally subdivided the land and sold five-acre spreads.

The New York Times article was cute in a way. They sent a reporter to find one of these “conveniently located” parcels in Lucin, Utah. The reporter got to the location—some 150 miles away from the nearest big city—and found an area where the only inhabitants were a snake, a beetle, and large ants!

I have two simple rules to follow when buying land. First, never buy property without seeing it. Second, make sure the land has water rights or it’s going to be useless to you. This second caveat is especially important if you’re buying in one of the mountain states, like Utah.

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