Lease Option Investing - How I got Started

When I first started in real estate I didn’t know anything about lease option investing. My first house was a three-bedroom bungalow in a suburb of Detroit. My principal, interest, taxes and insurance (PITI) was $438. I rented two bedrooms to two girls for $250 each. I had cash flow and I was living free! My $62 cash flow per month paid my credit card payment. I was 21 years old and I thought this was pretty cool! So I decided to do it again. I did it three more times that first year. I had no money or assets, but I did have good credit. I was making all of my down payments with credit cards. This is NOT how I recommend doing little or no money down investing.

At the start of my real estate investing career; I was $20,000 in debt with student loans. In my mind, the worst thing that could have happened was that I would go bankrupt. However, I had good credit and was able to make my down payments on homes with credit cards. It wasn’t long before I had a credit line of over $250,000 - and too many credit cards. Using credit cards should be the last resort for any kind of investing, including lease option investing. Remember, credit cards are not how I recommend doing little or no money down investing. I never missed any payments, even though it was an administrative nightmare. The problem is that they set me many years back in my wealth development.

When I started investing, I didn’t know about lease options and I thought what I did was a no money down investing deal and something very creative. I didn’t know of any gurus at the time who focused on buying on lease options, so I developed my own tools and systems to buy homes with little or no money down. It was a case study of learning the hard way.