Customer Reviews

Building Wealth One House at a Time: Making it Big on Little Deals

5 star:		(18)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a fascinating book, with plenty of good advice for investing in rental properties and learning to live off the income produced by your investments. Schaub talks about finding deals, negotiating for better terms, using agents, managing your properties, and protecting your key assets. The paragraphs below briefly discuss three of his key points.

Schaub's chapter on learning how to work yourself out of your day job hit home with me. Isn't this a goal we all share? Schaub's plan is easy to understand, but not necessarily easy to follow. In my action plans, I first wanted to be able to pay my electric bill with income that had spun off my investments. After reaching that goal, I wanted to pay my phone bill, car insurance, etc. I kept working to build investment income sufficient to pay my bills. Eventually, I reached a point where my investment income has almost equaled my work income. I'm using the bulk of my work income to make investments. Schaub suggests using your investment income to replace your need to work. I suggest you keep working, and use you work income to make bigger investments.

Schaub's entire thesis rests on the concept of buying quality properties that you manage and control, and striving to pay them off within a ten-year period. When you approach retirement, theoretically you will have the income of these properties flowing into your bank account. This is a great idea, and certainly doable; however, maintenance, tax, and insurance expenses will never go away. So don't forget that maintenance alone may eat up to 40% of your gross income. Insurance and taxes will eat another 10-20%.

Schaub talks about owning property out of town, and this is important info for all investors. Your main concern is control. I learned my lesson the hard way here. I owned a home free and clear in a different state. However, my property manager seen to it that every month I had a significant maintenance costs, such as $325 for removal of used stove. $459 for removal of tree roots from pipes under house. Month after month I put up with these outrageous costs, that I would have handled for pennies if the home was within a hour's drive of my home.

Schaub suggests you Focus on making small deals that you can understand and control. For example, a small investor can earn sufficient returns from several single-family homes in good neighborhoods, without having to negotiate for malls and apartment complexes, or get over your head in partnerships and complex land development deals.

You may also want to read "Think and Grow Rich" by Napoleon Hill and "The 17 Principles of Creating Wealth" by Phillip Collinsworth.

I like this book. The author offers advice and strategies that I believe I can make work for me in the real world. There was nothing that I read in the book that I would feel strange or wrong about doing. In fact, I'm looking into making an offer using his methods.

The only conflict for me was that John recommends investing in your own area. He doesn't seem fond of investing out of town. I live in Southern California, and unless you are make large cash down payments, it's nearly impossible to be cash flow positive for a very long time. I'm going to adapt the information in the book and continue to invest out of town.

I'm definitely adding this to my investment book library. It's a keeper.

John Schaub has been a house investor, author, and speaker for over thirty years. He presents a senario of buying a house, renting it out for enough to cover its cost and maintenance, paying it off over a ten year or so period, building an investment portfolio of properties that will then provide for a good retirement income.

As with a lot of things, the devil is in the details. And most of the book covers things like finding the right house, negeotiating the price, a quick look at accounting, borrowing and everything else connected with the real estate marketplace.

The book is dead on. There are an awful lot of people who have made a lot of money this way. There are two or three he doesn't mention. One is buying houses at auction when they have been foreclosed, something you should investigate in your community, particularily if you live in a one commodity area that is subject to boom and bust. Another point is that most of the people I know who have build themselves this kind of business do a lot of their own maintenance. You can pay for things like cleaning and painting, but it's expensive.

Investing in rental houses is a business. Like any business it's subject to working hard, making the right decisions, and having just a bit of luck. If the earthquake finds your house ....

Having invested in single family houses for 30 years and attended many of John Schaub's seminars I didn't find much new in this book.

But for someone just getting started it is full of great information. It doesn't just cover how to negotiate and buy real estate. More importantly it explains WHY you should invest in real estate.

John Schaub is one of only a small handful of real estate instructors and authors who have actually done, and are still doing, what they teach and write about.

Once you finish reading the book you should take John's excellent "Making it Big on Little Deals" class.

Enjoy the book.

John Schaub has written an excellent book on the qualitative aspects of real estate investing. It doesn't deal much with the important mathematical aspects of estimating your projected return on investment. Instead, it deals with what types of real estate investments provide the best return with the least amount of work, what type of investing strategy to use, and how to find good deals. He advocates a long-term buy-and-hold approach instead of short-term flipping. John Schaub's approach to real estate is very similar to Warren Buffett's approach to stocks: buy low and hold for a long time.

It seems that most real estate investing books are get-rich-quick schemes aimed at the ignorant, gullible, and desperate. This is one of the few good books. I highly recommend this book, but it should not be the only book you read before beginning investing. A good companion book would be Investing in Real Estate by Andrew McLean and Gary Eldred.

By the way, the review by John Matlock "Gunny" is fake. If you read lots of Amazon.com reviews, you'll see him around a lot. Check his review history. He reviews more books than any human could possibly read, and he only writes 5 star reviews, so he is probably a reviewer paid by the publisher.

I really enjoyed this book. It was informative had great examples. Most of all though, for a guy that's got analysis
paralysis it's giving me the confidence to go out and take some
action. After you read Schaubs book you'll feel like you can really do it.
This is the best book I've read so far on the subject and I highly recommend it.

I was hoping for a text with more than the very basic, very repeated information in most books of this subject. If it's your first book on real estate investing, it will be great. If you're seeking more advanced subject matter, look elsewhere.

This book is a solid foundation for a beginner. I've read about 6 or 7 real estate books, and I would put this one probably at #3. The book is definitely concise - maybe a little too concise... and that's one of the reasons I see it as a book that introduces a concept, but stops there.

I have been interested in investing in real estate for a few years now. At 23, I am a first-time homebuyer. I only own one house, and I am already familiar with every concept he introduces in this book. On the positive side, he discusses those concepts with a down-to-earth mentality and routinely translates to layman's terms, although, again, he oversimplifies and leaves out the details of how to put some ideas into action.

Broad conceptual overview. Realistic. Concise. Easy read. Not a waste of money unless you're already a successful real estate investor.

The key to investing wisely in real estate is buying good houses in good neighborhoods - but there's more to it than that: buy at wholesale prices, properly fund an investment, and learn how to gain tenants who will increase a property's investment value in Building Wealth One House At A Time, a practical guide by real estate expert John Schaub, an investing expert whose program is taught through seminars and home-study courses. Plenty of similar-sounding investment guides promise wealth; this is one of the few to provide the step-by-step program on just how.

I bought this book about a year ago, after having purchased my first home. Since then, I have purchased a second home, and discovered what it means to be a landlord. This book inspired me to become a landlord, and has helped me through the process, tremendously.

Well thought out, well organized, totally accessible to the novice (and helpful to those who already have a few properties, as I am told by my more experienced friends for whom I purchased this book), Building Wealth One House at a Time discusses manageable steps that we must take in realizing personal wealth through the real estate market.

This is not a get-rich-quick scheme. This is a formula meant to target the focused individual, who may or may not have much money up front- in fact, John Schaub discusses his own experience of creating personal wealth from very meager beginnings. Schaub discusses the idea of acquiring one house a year, and renting each one out to high-quality tenants. He also does touch on the idea of buying and selling shorter term, in order to gain initial capital, but the mainstay of this book focuses on acquiring and maintaining assets (single residential homes), for the long term.

I have pored over this book many times, in all aspects of my own real estate experience. It is essential for the novice real estate investor, and offers great tools that even a more experienced investor can use. It's small, but powerful!