Customer Reviews

The Weekend Millionaire's Secrets to Investing in Real Estate: How to Become Wealthy in Your Spare Time

5 star:		(40)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(7)

 

 

I never really understood why people get so excited about real estate investing until I read this book. Now I finally got it. The tax shelter, the leverage potential and the long term benefits all make sense now. Best of all I liked the 8 weekends where they tell you exactly what to do to get started. This has to be the best $15 I've ever spent.

As other reviewers have noted, the essence of this book is:

1. Buy a property very cheaply.

2. Rent it out so that you make a profit.

3. Repeat Steps 1 and 2 above over and over.

4. Live a charmed life and wait for the paychecks to keep arriving in the mail each month.

Reality problems:

1. Finding foreclosures is difficult in this real estate market since any foreclosures that are not total disasters will be snapped up super fast.

2. Finding families on the verge of bankruptcy has to be as miserable a career as ambulance chasing. The authors try their best to sugar coat the fact that they are urging you to benefit from other peoples' misery. But no amount of sugar coating can cover up the fact that their advice is the same as ambulance chasers.

3. Asking real estate brokers to take their fee in a mortgage-like payment will usually get you laughed at right out of the brokers' offices. They often see suckers trying to use this program. Word to the wise: they don't fall for it (unless they have a lack of brain cells) because they want their money front and center, not bits and pieces of it for the next 10 or so years.

4. Finding something "cheap" in most of the major cosmopolitan areas is nearly impossible these days. If something is cheap in a hot market, that means either that the neighbors are members of a drug cartel or that there is a nuclear waste facility under the property. Unless you're buying sheds in the middle of the boondocks, nothing is cheap these days.

5. What about taxes, insurance, renovations, bad tenants, natural/man-made disasters and their effects on your property? Well, the authors pay some lip service to these concerns, but otherwise they don't worry too much about it.

The only thing of real value is the explanation of calculating ROI and some charts that you on your own can make into Excel spreadsheets. It also teaches you some accounting and home buying basics. Of course, you can get the exact same basics for free on many different websites.

Save yourself the cost of this book. Buying it just makes the authors even more fabulously wealthy and encourages them to write more books for unsuspecting audiences.

I have been investing for over 21 years and started with Nothing Down by Robert Allen. My first two deals were 'nothing down'.

Over the years I have done a lot of deals and different things work in different situations.

The Weekend Millionaire is one of the best books for an investor who wants to learn how to invest for long term income. It is not a get rich quick book. The book assumes you have a day job, you pay your bills and have a life other then real estate.

I was impressed that they take you from finding a property to inspecting it to coming up with the offer price and then what to do if the seller says 'yes' or 'no'.

The book does not cover all styles on RE investing. No book could and this one clearly does not even try to cover everything. The advice given is very practical and will help the reader create real wealth if the reader implements what they learn.

One generic comment. All the books, tapes, seminars and similar are worth what you pay or are completely worthless depending on if you apply the information. You can make a lot of money with real estate. You can also spend a lot of time and money getting ready and never have any success. You really need to get out there and pound the pavement. This book will be a great guide if you want to apply what you learn.

John

Easily the best real estate investing book I've read. This is a no-nonsense, very practical look at how to buy single-family homes and rent them out. It's a page-turner, it doesn't get lost in the details yet is descriptive enough for people to get started. The authors' philosophy is to generate an income stream through renting your properties, and then use the properties as leverage for buying subsequent properties. They basically advocate NEVER selling them unless they're not profitable.

As other reviewers have pointed out, the sections on negotiating are excellent and should not be taken lightly. The techniques they describe were eye-opening, I was shocked at how they might be used, or used against me! To many, the section on negotating may even be more useful than the rest of the book.

To further motivate you to get started, the book includes 8 chapters at the end, each representing one week, that describe exactly what to do in your first 8 weeks of getting started. Very well written, i've already recommended this book to several others.

The authors correctly convince you that the terms of the deal are often as important, or more important, than the selling price. This is because you can still get a good return on investment (ROI) even if you pay more than the asking price. Then, to me, the only weakness in this book relates to financing homes in very expensive markets. The authors advocate only buying houses within a 10-mile radius of where you live. Sure, if you have so-so credit and little money, you can probably scrape up financing for homes in the $50000-$100000 range. But what if you're like me, in the San Francisco Bay Area, where 1300 sq foot homes in decent neighborhoods can go for $300-400k? This is a VERY high barrier for entry. This becomes laughable when the authors describe an example where they bought a 12000 sq foot manufacturing facility for $200k, and the challenges they faced with making this facility profitable when rented. I'm not sure that any amount of creative financing will be able to help some people in markets like this.

I've read dozens of books on real estate investing and to be honest, I've found most of them either over my head or just plain unbelievable. When I heard Mike Summey talking about the book on the Real Estate and You show on WYCA-FM, I had to check it out. Finally, I've found a book that explains real estate investing in simple language and breaks it down into such doable tasks that I can't wait to get started. I loved the stories that illustrate how to apply the techniques the authors teach. Not only do they tell you what to do and how to do it, but they go the extra mile and use real life stories to show you how to achieve successful win/win negotiations that benefit everyone. If you don't buy another real estate book, buy this one. It's a keeper! You may also want to check out the website listed in the book. It's www.weekendmillionaire.com and it's a great resource for real estate investors.

Many people are stuck in a 8-5 JOB and want to start a busines but don't have the capital or time to do it. The author is honest and up front that you can become a millionaire through your own real estate investing business but it won't happen overnight. He takes you step by step on how you can get started with out a lot of risk, working on weekends and with very little money to get started.

What the author shares in this book works as he has successfully used the same material he teaches in the book to build his own real estate investing business. I first became acquainted with the author Mike Summey when I purchased the "Wealth And Empowerment Training" course from Carleton Sheets Training Institute. Mike did a lecture on one of the video's as he is one of Carleton's most successful students. During the lecture he showed slides of his properties and he explains in detail how he built his Real Estate Investing Empire. If you are serious about becoming financially independent buy the book!

This book is three things. First it gives you the basic idea on how to invest in real estate and steps to doing it. Second it teaches you negotiation techniques and third, it is a great self motivating book. The second and third things about the book is great expecially the negotiation techniques, but the first thing is lacking. It does a great job of explaining how to make money from investing in real estates and even gives you steps to doing it but the steps lack detail that someone who is 20 with no experience in owning a home needs. Other then that I do recommend it because it is very easy to read and gives you an insight on real estate investing. I also recommend that you get "Investing in Real Estate" by Andrew McLean and Gary W. Eldred, PhD. You should read the Weekend Millionaire's Secrets first and then read Investing in Real Estate second. It gives you more detail into all the things that the first book talks about.

Anyone who is serious about investing in real estate should add this book to their library. It's simple and to the point about focusing on the actual part of real estate investing that makes sense: Making money! Not a gimmick! I read the book twice and there were a few references to "gimmick gurus" but they seemed less like endorsements and more like recommendations. When I started this book 2 weeks ago I had no experience or property. After reading the book twice and slowly applying what I have learned throughout I made 8 offers, and closed on a property that is in a developing section of the city. Of all the books I have read in real estate, this book is the one that convinced me that I can succeed in Real Estate, and motivated me to actually start investing.

I bought this book largely on the recommendations here at Amazon.com. It was worth the money.

This is a fairly good book. If you want to get into real estate investing but are unsure how to start, as I do, this book will be useful to you.

The book is broken into three main sections. Section 1 discusses real estate investing in general. It gives plenty of real life examples of properties the authors have purchased, how the deals were financed, etc. Section 2 is Roger Dawson's tips for negotiating. Dawson covers these in his other books and tapes, but they're worth repeating here. Section 3 is the week-by-week guide to getting started. It is like homework for the reader.

The book seems to emphasize seller-financing quite a bit. Now, I've never invested in properties before, but how often can you find sellers willing to carry some sort of financing? I'm not sure. But the book isn't relying on 100% seller financing - more like 20% or whatever the bank won't carry as a mortgage.

The book also contains a fairly decent description on how to calculate the "wholesale value" of a property. So instead of starting from the retail price (what the seller is asking), you start from how much you can rent the place for and determine price from there. The terms of the financing have a huge impact on price, according to this book. So you can often give the seller 100% of their asking price, as long as you can get favorable a interest rate.

Very interesting. I'm actually going to read this book one more time.

As a professional investor, broker and appraiser of real estate with 35 years experience, I would laugh at sections of this book were it not that some readers will put their money where Dawson's mouth is. Errors abound. One small error is Dawson confuses interest rate with mortgage constant. If one is not prepared to feed one's investment, the difference is between making a profit (mortgage constant) and going broke (interest rate).

Many of Dawson's statements make it difficult to believe he has ever actually purchased and owned real estate for investment. I can guarantee he has not done so on the West coast, at least not in the manner described or with the tactics he promulgates.

Run, don't walk, away from this book.