Product Description
Any idiot can sell real estate, I said. Soon I learned no one gets rich selling other people's real estate--you gotta have your own. Three years later, having taken 33 real estate seminars all over the US, I owned 77 rental houses, 12 duplexes and built a trailer park near Tallahassee, FL.
The book goes into great detail on the importance of having good credit--and how to build one if your's is damaged. Writing as though one is sitting with me at those seminars, I describe the nuances, the shocking facts of how easy it is to become independently wealthy just by sacrificing a few years of very intensely stressful days and nights. The most amazing part to me--I didn't really start till I was 62 and facing a bleek future with no pension, no savings!
About the Author
As a highschool kid in downeast Maine, I raised chickens in below zero weather, had an egg route, built a sawmill and cashed in selling lumber when the famous summer resort, Bar Harbor, burnt to the ground in 1947. My brother, an NBC vice-president, chided me that my "talent" was wasted in Maine so I came to New York City and climbed the ladder in the advertising industry beginning with a lowly job on the NY World-Telegram & Sun. Ad agencies pay good money for copy writers and I was soon writing copy for P&G's CAMAY soap. The war came so I joined the Marines. They saw my p.r.experience and had me establish five Marine Corps base newspapers! I tell people that I was assigned to an "LMD"--a large mahogany desk, and that I worked in a "Brick foxhole" in Washington, DC, that I arose to the rank of PFC--personal friend of the captain.
After the war I attained the pinnacle of a print-space-ad-salesman--working for Hearst's American Weekly--but TV was cutting into print budgets so I switched to selling TV time for NBC. As sales manager for their Today and Tonight shows I set sales records still not bested but ennui set in. Who needs to be a middle man for tax collectors. Between my incredibly high rent on 5th Avenue, NY and Fed taxes, I was just standing still while the Russians got the abomb secrets from the Rosenbergs. Air raid drills in the Big Apple was just too much for me to take. With my 3rd wife, Ellen, I rebuilt an 1898 sailboat and decided to follow Joshua Slocum's famous route around the world. But, again, meeting this entrepreneur in Grand Bahama, hearing how he talked the British government into giving him a 30-year income tax and duty-free contract--that did it. I had to find a "dirt-poor" British island and duplicate this golden opportunity.
Having been there and done that, I decided to write about what I had done--but after getting scores of rejections (and lots of no replies) from the big publishing houses--hell, anyone can become a publisher! In 1997, at age 82, I founded "Cardinal Books" inspired by the pair of cardinals that visit my birdfeed station in my backyard as I take my morning swim in my pool. Of course I am 'bareass' as my place is entirely surrounded by walls, fences, shrubs, trees--and a guard at the gate! In an atmosphere like this, who can't create graceful prose?
