Too Good To Be True?

[tropicsgoddess]

That company is asking for an upfront fee of $8000??? Those are some major red flags for a scam. Let your guy know that you do support him and that you do have your reservations about this venture he wants to get into. I don't know why anybody would want to be in the real estate biz or anything close to it (mortgages, etc.) when the market is so shitty right now.

[Jester]

He claims that this company who ran the seminar, whoever they are, are going to help do everything for him - get him the money to start out, find properties for him to buy, etc. He said their fee for all of this is $8,000.

So, let's see. Little to no work? Check. They'll do just about everything for him? Check. They'll help him find everything he needs to succeed, without him really having any knowledge about this field? Check.

So far, it is only potentially a scam. Now, do they want a large amount of money up front for "fees" and "training"? Lesse, eight grand....yeah, I would say that is a huge fucking check!

Legally this is probably not a scam. Realistically, this is absolutely a scam, and the one certainty I see here is that your boyfriend is going to lose his eight grand and probably never see a return on it. I mean, anyone who wants to make a lot of money without doing any work and having other people do it for them is by definition very lazy, and the fact is one does not make large amounts of money by being lazy, unless they inherit it.

These people are preying on people's hopes, dreams, and utter laziness, and the fact is, for the company it is a win-win situation. If the "investor" actually does all the work and makes money and succeeds, the company wins by looking good. If the "investor" is lazy, as most of them will doubtlessly be, the company can say they did not succeed because they didn't do what was necessary to make money. The company wins by pinning the fault on the "investor."

You may notice I put the word investor in quotes. I do this because a true investor has some realistic chance of making a return profit on his initial investment. This is NOT the case here. Your boy toy is getting taken for an eight thousand dollar ride.

Remember, if it seems too good to be true, it almost certainly IS too good to be true.

Getting into real estate NOW?

No offense, but has he read the news? Looked at the stock market, noticed all the yelling and flailing and panicking over the real estate market crash?!!!!

Actually, if one is buying for investment and/or future sale, this is the perfect time to get into real estate. It is totally a buyer's market (Nurse Betty got her new house for a steal last fall), and if I were the type to buy property, right now I would be buying as much as I could. Could the market dip more? Sure it could. But at some point it will bottom out, it will stabilize, and it will recover. And in general, real estate only appreciates in a stable economy. Yeah, I know it's not a stable economy now, but these things are cyclical, and at some point int he future, the economy will stabilize.

That being said, that doesn't make this whole thing any less of a scam.