This Blog is being written after my 40 anniversary of my departure from the U.S. Air Force after 20 years as an enlisted man. I thoroughly enjoyed my Air Force career and have no regrets, but it was pretty low-paid work. My vaunted retirement pension that I started collecting at age 37 was $249.51 per month.
I fumbled around for three years in corporate America than failed into real estate. I got a salesman’s license and spent a couple years as an Apprentice learning about houses, then I opened my own Brokerage office and discovered how to Option houses rather than to list them for sale.
Without the need to qualify for a loan, borrow money, or wait for closings, in the real estate recession of the mid 1970s I was able to buy Options on houses by the hundreds and sell them within days for just a few hundred dollars profit. My wife and I worked over 90 hours a week to exploit the opportunity the housing recession had created.
When I found a house that I wanted to hold as a long term rental, I leased them with an Option. My Lease terms were geared more toward creating a cash-flow spread, and I traded off a higher strike price on the Options to obtain this. Thus, I never had to worry about negative cashflow and could concentrate on buying even more Options on houses that I could sell swiftly.
One day, to my surprise, a little over five years from when I listed my first house as a salesman, I found that my rentals were producing enough income each month to enable me to quit working. I was 45 years old. I took off in my motor home and started living my dream of being financially independent.
At that place and in that time, there was a lot less competition but there were a lot fewer houses for sale and the prices were microscopic. Today, a person has to work harder, but the rewards are much greater. There’s really no reason that a person ccouldn’t do the same thing I did within the next five years if he or she is willing to work as hard as my wife and I did for as many hours a week as we did.
For those who are a little less obsessed with making money, it could take a lot fewer hours a week, but a few years longer to reach that point, but it’s still doable; in fact, people are doing it today.
So if you want all the good things in life and the freedom to enjoy them, look at today’s slumping housing market as one of the greatest opportunities you are apt to find within the next few years, and start optioning houses and either selling or renting them.
