FDIC and Former IndymacBank Guys Slap Together a Deal to Transfer Wealth from Homeowners to OneWest Bank

IndymacBank was seized by the FDIC in July of 2008. OneWest Bank acquired their assets (at a discount, obviously) in March of 2009.

Now the FDIC is covering 80% to 95% of losses due to short sale or foreclosure. OneWest Bank just can’t lose on this deal.

Now tell me if this doesn’t make your blood boil! And it gets worse!

Click below to watch the entire video.

U.S. Economy To Be Hit By Second Wave of Mortgage Defaults

Just like we’ve seen in the past with prime and option-arm loans going into default, we’ll see a new tidal wave of subprime and ALT-A loans.

This also means that FHA is changing the rules for purchases, making it harder to buy homes, and possibly making the problem even worse in the short-term.

Over the next few years, home prices could drop even more, making homes even cheaper to purchase. This upside-down home economy is causing more people to walk away from mortgages for those going into default.

When does this tumbling snowball hit the bottom of the mountain? Soon I hope!

As with all scary news, take this with a grain of salt. The sky is not falling. Life must go on – fear and trembling is to warn us of oncoming danger, not possess us. We’ll all be okay – really! :)

For all of us investors out there, let’s do what we do best – take action on these economic changes and fix the problems while making a handsome profit!

Here’s a link to the article:
http://beforeitsnews.com/story/16576/U.S._Economy_To_Be_Hit_By_Second_Wave_of_Mortgage_Defaults.html

The Commercial Real Estate Dilemma

Over $1.4 trillion in commercial real estate debt is expected to come due over the next three years. Many of these notes will be difficult if not impossible to refinance.

Lenders are already taking HUGE hits on these commercial foreclosures just to get them off their books and create liquidity to continue lending.

This is an AWESOME opportunity for real estate investors today. Commercial short sales is the next big thing in real estate. Paydays are big, and much easier to get than residential short sales.

Here’s a link to the article:
http://money.cnn.com/2010/02/04/news/companies/banks_commercial_real_estate/index.htm

HUD Temporarily Removes 90 Day Seasoning (anti-Flipping) Requirements for FHA

Great news for Buyers, Sellers, Brokers, Lenders, and Real Estate Investors!

Today HUD has announced that it will temporarily remove its 90-day anti-Flipping rule and will allow FHA buyers to finance properties that have been recently purchased. This should any sales including REOs, short-sales, foreclosures, rehabs, etc.

This new rule will take effect on February 1, 2010 and will continue for one year or until further notice.

This will open up a whole new window of opportunity for everyone involved in real estate! I can’t wait to see what it brings to us for 2010.

Here’s a link to the article:
http://portal.hud.gov/portal/page/portal/HUD/press/press_releases_media_advisories/2010/HUDNo.10-011

My First Online Income Experiences

Back when I first got online in 1995, I had a friend from Sioux Falls, SD who I met online in the IRC channels on Undernet. We had remained friends for many years and worked on projects together, and even met in real life a few times since we weren’t too far of a drive away from each other.

During my first year of college, he found a way to make money online using pay per click banners. I had heard of this before, but I had never done it in the past. I made a small income online doing this with Kory.

In the spring of 1998, I was pretty busy with school, but I decided to make a web site similar to a Mad Libs™ story. You know, where someone asks you questions like: “Give me the name of a person.. Give me a noun.. Give me a verb.. Give me an adverb.. Give me a color.. Give me a number between 2 and 1000, etc.”

The person who asks you these questions is filling in the blanks in a story as they ask them. After all of the questions are answered, the person reads back the story to you and the end result is a funny story.

So what I did was create a story for the upcoming holiday, St. Patrick’s Day. Because it had a holiday theme, it was MUCH more popular.

All I did was create a simple one page web site on a Lycos free web site owned by Tripod.com. When you came to the page, you were immediately met with a javascript popup with nine questions in a row similar to the ones I gave above. After all of the questions were answered, a very funny story was written to the web browser. It worked very well!

I also used the same psychology those forwarded emails had in them. At the end of the story it read something like this:

“You may not have gotten your wish, but you may still have a chance with (person you admire); (he/she) is the true love of your life you’ve been hoping for! (person you admire) will ask you out in # days or less, but you must show or tell 10 or more people about this website within the next few minutes. The more people you show it to, the sooner (person you admire) will ask you out. If you don’t, you will have bad luck for # years!”

I started sending the link out from a lab computer to a bunch of friends two weeks before St. Patrick’s Day. By the next morning, I sat in the same computer lab and noticed a piece of paper with my web site link on it! haha.. no joke! Then someone sat down and checked her email and loaded the web site of mine!

Pretty silly, huh? It worked! Within two weeks I had over 5 MILLION hits!

I had some banners put on the page, and Lycos was paying out $1.00 per thousand impressions. Unfortunately, they didn’t come up with this payment program until halfway through my campaign.

The COOL part was that a guy from Lycos actually CALLED MY HOUSE back home! He kept leaving messages and actually talked to my mother and asked her to congratulate me on the success and that I should build more sites! LOL

I ended up getting a check for $2,300 or something from Lycos, and a few hundred dollars from the other banner clicks. I think they were paying $.10 or $.15 per click. One of the affiliates was a scam and didn’t pay me much at all. This seemed to be the norm back in those days so I got burnt out and didn’t do it again for a few years.

The following year, the web site wasn’t so cool and the novelty wore out, but I did learn a lot about building traffic and affiliate programs.

The following summer I also was getting people to sign up for an affiliate program online using bots on IRC to message people about it. I was getting a 10% cut of their $.20 per click. Within weeks I realized I was getting scammed AGAIN because they were paying me only a fraction of what I had earned, and lost out on THOUSANDS of dollars in commissions. It was a Canadian company and I didn’t really have much luck coming after them since I was in the USA.

Now it’s too bad I didn’t know what I know now. If I had an opt-in page for jokes, I’d have had a MASSIVE list of maybe a million subscribers. I could have offered a free joke of the week or something if they just put in their name and email.

That could have helped sell the funny t-shirts I wanted to make for my college t-shirt company. *SLAP* Oh well!

There are plenty of other opportunities coming my way, every day! :)

Computers – When Did I Get Hooked?

When I was 14 or so, our family got our first computer in 1993.  Everything changed for me.  I found a new form of entertainment!  I went from a Nintendo junkie to a computer junkie!

Okay, I admit it; I still played my video games, but I spent more time on the computer going forward.  I was so hooked!  I even learned how to upgrade the computer myself – hard drive, memory, floppy drives, etc. As quickly as technology evolved, I was upgrading.  Back then, computers were advancing VERY quickly – so most of my money was well spent there. ;)

I first got online in 1995.  I believe it was CompuServe, and then AOL, paying for a second phone line since my mother didn’t like me being on the phone all the time, and also $.10/minute because the dialup server was long distance!  Soon, local Internet access was available.  But it was still a few towns away from us, so I still was paying long distance.  I was paying over $100 a month for dialup.  Good thing I had a job!

Back then you got a certain number of minutes for a monthly fee, and then it was like $.25/minute after that.  It was kind of like cell phones today.  I remember I had a cell phone back then, too (ugly big bag phone for the car only).  But I only used that for emergencies.

I was an addict – learning all I could about computers online; I also discovered Internet Relay Chat.  I met up with people all around the world in chat rooms on computers and programming.  This is how I learned it all so quickly!

I built my first Web site within my first year online, and also hosted my own virtual server back in 1997.  It had all the bells and whistles, UNIX, Apache, and some form of SQL if I remember correctly.

I even had a shell account and had the ability to add user accounts and run my own scripts and applications.  I also compiled my own IRC server linked to another network (I think it was called Gamma Network).

I also gave away free hosting to some of my friends online.  This was when being on the Web was EXPENSIVE and difficult!  And if you knew how to get online and have a Web presence, you were super cool!

Back then, getting traffic was SUPER easy!  Any beginner could get hundreds or thousands of hits a day with a little bit of work using some dirty little tricks (like keyword stuffing, etc.).

I never did figure out how to take credit cards online – back then, you had to be a rocket scientist to do so.  I just never bothered because it was so difficult, and I had other interesting things to do.  Eventually I found another way to monetize that traffic.  It’s called: Affiliate Marketing

Stay tuned for my next post about how I generated my first income online! :)

Update on the Mail Marketing – Let The Leads Prequalify Themselves

What I’ve discovered is that I need to filter my leads automatically using my voice mail.

One thing I can do is mention that I’m not looking to buy at retail prices, and that not many other people are because of the state of our real estate market.  I could probably let people know that I do have a good real estate agent I can refer them to if they’re interested, and to mention that on their message to me.

If I do this, it will do two things:

1. It will reduce the number of messages I receive. My prospects will automatically disqualify themselves.

2. There will be less response, and less leads to refer out to real estate agents.

On my next mailing to sellers, I will definitely change my message on my voicemail.  I don’t think that my message on my postcard needs to change much.  It’s pulling VERY well, and I’m STILL getting calls today!

Until next time,

Ryan Thompson