I am excited to feature a guest writer to JustAskBenWhy. Douglas Dowell is an accomplished real estate guy, a fellow writer on BiggerPockets.com, and an all around nice guy! *Consult legal counsel before acting. You’ve got the basics of real estate investing down. You know how to spot a great deal. Now what? Real estate […]

Conceptually, this is one of questions on the minds of a lot of beginners. If you are indeed a newbie in this sport, you must be wondering why people would ever sell for 60 cents on the dollar, and at times for less. I know I struggled with this. It was truly difficult for me […]

Suppose that you own 10 buildings in your portfolio and you have 10 mortgages of $80,000 each for a total mortgage debt of $800,000.  Further, suppose your portfolio generates a total of $3,000/month of cash flow.  If you decide that it’s time to start paying off your mortgages by reinvesting $2,000/month of your cash flow, […]

This sounds like an oxymoron, doesn’t it? Typically we think of being stuck due to being at a dead end with a lack of options. But, in fact too many options can and does often cause confusion and a sort of intellectual paralysis for new real estate investors. Earlier today I had a conversation with […]

Investing is about numbers, and when measuring return on investment (ROI), most of us focus on the math. However, not all math was created equal – some things are less apparent than other. Allow me to illustrate: I purchased a 10-unit apartment building in February of 2013. Without getting into too many specifics, let me […]

Unfortunately for us, so many people today rely on television as their guiding light, their beacon of truth – so to speak.  If it looks easy on TV, well then it must be easy.  Relative to real estate investing, this couldn’t be any more so with regard to a technique we refer to as Flipping.  […]

On Friday, October 12, 2012, CNBC aired a segment entitled: College Costs – the Next Fiscal Cliff?, in which the hosts interviewed Derek Thomson of the Atlantic on the issue of the rising college tuition costs. MSNBC’s The Morning Joe Show aired a similar segment entitled Time’s Focus on Higher Education from their latest issue, in which Time […]

What I have learned through experience, and what I teach, is that purchase price is only one of many negotiable terms which establish the validity of the investment and the magnitude of the investment returns in real estate. What is a real estate deal? It is a meeting of the minds – an agreement which […]

Question – when going into battle, would you rather have one soldier on your side or a thousand? Hopefully you didn’t answer one. Income streams are your soldiers in the battle against the cost of living. Wouldn’t it be better to have several, so that if one soldier goes down, the others will keep your […]

I do not have television in my house which helps with being able to get away from the news cycle, but not entirely. Every time I log onto the internet or turn the radio on in my car I am privy to the clichés of current politics, and one thing is for sure – people […]

On August 2, 2012 a tweet from Money Magazine came across my tweeter page @JustAskBen which read as follows: 1.3%: Annualized real return on real estate, 2000 to 2012. I feel compelled to elaborate on this tweet since while Money’s assessment is likely statistically true in terms of an inflation-adjusted growth in equity over the […]

In a recent editorial entitled “Higher Education Bubble Will Pop,”  George Will examines higher education relative to the concepts of value vs. quality, and makes the point that the two no longer co-exist within higher education.  Truly, most students pay the money for a piece of paper, not so much the knowledge that comes with […]

According to Wikipedia, “entitlement” refers to a notion or belief that one (or oneself) is deserving of some particular reward or benefit. In a previous blog, I shared my observation that an entitlement mentality for the “bling-bling” life style has taken over the entire USA, so it seems.  Entitlement drives people to living outside of […]

Many of life’s failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up… ~Thomas Edison   Hope Yen, of the Associated Press, reports in an article entitled A Higher Degree of Uncertainty that 1 in 2 recent college graduates is either unemployed or underemployed.  More specifically, about 1.5 […]