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    101 Ways to Buy a House: If Your Goal Is to Catch a Cheetah, You Don’T Practice by Jogging
    101 Ways to Buy a House: If Your Goal Is to Catch a Cheetah, You Don’T Practice by Jogging
    101 Ways to Buy a House: If Your Goal Is to Catch a Cheetah, You Don’T Practice by Jogging
    Ebook144 pages2 hours

    101 Ways to Buy a House: If Your Goal Is to Catch a Cheetah, You Don’T Practice by Jogging

    By James C. Clinkscales

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    About this ebook

    It doesnt matter how many times youve bought a home; its a purchase that you must research if you want to avoid trouble.

    Author James C. Clinkscales, a licensed broker and real estate investing veteran, explains 101 ways to buy a home in this witty and straightforward guidebook. His approach makes learning about options easy and fun for buyers and others involved in the process, such as real estate agents and lawyers.

    Discover the positives and negatives associated with different types of mortgages, learn how to avoid mistakes during the buying process, and steer clear of problems that the author encountered earlier in his career. Information on Federal Housing Administration programs and the history of real estate financing makes this guide even more valuable.

    Its not necessary to be a mathematician to become an expert on real estate finance. Get the tools you need to own a bigger piece of the American Dream with 101 Ways to Buy a House.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisheriUniverse
    Release dateMar 7, 2012
    ISBN9781469758237
    101 Ways to Buy a House: If Your Goal Is to Catch a Cheetah, You Don’T Practice by Jogging
    Author

    James C. Clinkscales

    JAMES C. CLINKSCALES graduated from Auburn University. He is a licensed broker who taught many years at the American Institute of Real Estate and Kennesaw State University. He formerly taught at Darlington Prep School in Rome, Georgia, and was the headmaster of Joseph T. Walker Schools in Marietta, Georgia. He owns the American Institute of Real Estate and US Realty, and he lives in Marietta.

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      Book preview

      101 Ways to Buy a House - James C. Clinkscales

      Contents

      Dedication

      Introduction

      by James C. Clinkscales

      Dedication

      I dedicate this book to God and his Glory. He has kept me and my family safe and healthy all these years. Our kids love each other, and the cousins love and play with each other—with the birth of our first great- granddaughter, Harper, there are now twenty- two of us and we are so fortunate. For some reason, He wanted me to do this book. It’s not that I needed to chase any more Cheetahs, we have ours, but, somewhere out there, someone needs a Cheetah in his life and God wants him/you to catch one or two. May you succeed! Also, this book is dedicated to my wife, Pilar. She lived with me through all these experiences, putting up with me and loving me. She is the artist who did the Cheetahs. She is a nationally known wildlife artist. I didn’t teach her anything. I went to Spain on an exchange scholarship (University of Madrid) and found her. She taught me how to say Sí. I have been saying it ever since. Next year, January 28, we will have been roommates for fifty-two (52!) years! (2012)

      Also, this book could not have been possible without my thousands of students, to whom this book is also dedicated. So perchance you are why He wanted me to write this book. When I got into real estate there was no training. May this little book give you some training. My training was a poem: Welcome, James. Here’s your desk. There’s the phone. Go git ‘em, boy. You’re on your own. Whatever your profession in life, as you travel toward point Z, there are some Cheetahs running around. Go git ‘em! You’re not on your own!

      Introduction

      by James C. Clinkscales

      During the past thirty-three years, I have sold and bought real estate and taught real estate courses, including appraisal classes, to thousands of students and now I wish to take the mystique out of the whole process of real estate finance for the entrepreneur, the purchaser, the seller, the student. There is nothing more simple than the structuring of the financial part of house-buying. The easy part is finding, and allowing someone to okay a purchase agreement/sign the contract. Once upon a time, when your grandparents, uncles and aunts wanted to purchase a house, farm, place, they either paid cash, or they went to the bank and took out a loan called a straight note, or straight loan, which meant that for five years, they would pay interest only and then, when the note became due, they paid off the entire loan and the last interest amount. Straight Note was the only game in town. There were no other ways to finance. Amortization didn’t exist. Yes, refinancing did exist. If a fellow couldn’t pay off the entire amount, he could usually go the refinance route. FHA, VA, Conventional Financing as we now know it, FNMA (Fannie Mae) didn’t exist. Housing wasn’t so expensive, as it is now. There was very little government intrusion into people’s affairs, no big utility bills, people bought a load of coal or firewood for their heating and cooking, there were no large car payments, etc. to worry about, most moms made their own clothes and most of the clothes for the kids. You got a new pair of shoes each fall to wear to school and to church, and went barefooted during the spring and summers. I mentioned church. Most people back then, went to church, the main social event of each community. They prayed for rain to make the crops, to be able to pay the mortgage. There were no televisions, few movie theatres. For diversion, I remember that people sang. Yes, you would go visit a neighbor and both families ended up singing around the pump organ or piano before you left for home. Well, back to real estate finance history.. It just so happened in the late twenties and early thirties (nineteen hundreds) that the weather changed to become a huge dry spell—probably the cows and livestock, horses, etc., were causing global warming! Crops failed. Dust blew from Texas to Georgia and back. They called it the dust bowl effect. At about this same time, the stock market crashed, sending the already weak economy into a great depression. People couldn’t make good on their note payments, neither interest nor principal. The foreclosures began. Why didn’t people just refinance? Because, banks didn’t have any money, either. Hard times! Words like hobo, vagabond, came into being. Soup kitchens, soup lines. Boxcars were full of men looking for work, any sort of work, to be able to take care of their families. I remember (we were now into the second world war.) hobos coming to our back door, begging for a meal (Dad was a Baptist preacher). We later learned that it was the practice of hobos to mark the preachers’ homes in each town, where a meal would be likely. Mom would fix them a plate, usually consisting of pot liquor and corn bread, maybe some greens, in fine, they got the same thing we ate. You don’t know what pot liquor is? It’s the juice you get from cooking turnip greens! I always sat with them on the back steps and watched them eat. They were fascinating to me. Then another one would show up, smelling just like the last one. We seemed to always have plenty. If we asked for a second helping, sometimes, Mom would say you’ve had plenty." Earlier, when my mom and dad were in college in Birmingham, Alabama, (the Howard College, now Samford University), they told of always having three meals a day: Oatmeal, Cornmeal, and Skip-a-meal! Back to Finance.

      Something had to be done to put people back into housing. A fellow named J.P. Morgan had already bailed out the entire US government with his own private funds. Can you imagine that happening today? What did they do? Why, they invented FHA (Federal Housing Authority). The name that finally stuck and along with it, amortiziation. Amortization is derived from a Latin word meaning to kill-off little by little. Don’t try that with a dog. To bob a dog’s tail, one must cup off the entire tail at once. To amortize would eventually kill the dog! Also, FHA doesn’t mean Future Homemakers of America, which is what I thought when my Realtor asked me how I wanted to go, FHA, VA, or Conventional, meaning, of course, how I wanted to pay for the house, now that we had located it. I could not see how the only FHA that I knew about, (Future Homemakers of America—teaching little girls how to cook, had anything to do with our buying a house. My wife could already cook circles around anybody. VA? Some sort of a disease? I wanted nothing to do with that one! You see, the general public hasn’t always been aware of the terms that we in the industry take for granted. I opted for Conventional, thinking myself a rather conventional fellow, or course, when it was finally explained to me that I couldn’t afford Conventional, we finally went FHA. My agent should have determined how we were going before ever putting us into his car. All professionals do that now. FHA is given credit for amortization, which I will explain later, for putting America back into affordable housing, establishing a national building code, and thus improving the quality of dwellings in America.

      This book is for anyone and everyone who wants to own the American Dream, home ownership. I have tried to keep it simple enough so that the uninformed can use it and become successful and pick up enough knowledge along the way to be very informed. There are technical parts of the book that are also kept simple. It has always been my style, inside and outside the classroom, to be funny. I like funny. I like it more than not funny. I have found that if my lectures are funny, the class enjoys the material; they leave the classroom at the end of my lecture not realizing that they have been lectured to. They thought they had been entertained. If I am having fun, then they are having fun and are learning, my whole intent in the first place. There are many other books on real estate finance that, frankly, even other real estate instructors don’t even enjoy. So, over the years, I have found that real estate can be made as simple as it really is and can be enjoyable for the student. I will therefore try to make this unfunny material as fun as possible as we journey through the store with the student. Oops! I used the word student twice! Well, we are all students in the sense that we learn something new, so if I call you students along the way, it’s from habit, having taught real estate students for over thirty years.

      One doesn’t have to be a mathematician to enjoy real estate finance. You would think that trigonometry, geometry, algebra, and calculus would be useful in a finance setting. Wrong! Forget that. Real estate finance is 4th grade arithmetic. Anyway, this isn’t a book on real estate finance, but on a bunch of ways to buy a house and how to chase and catch cheetahs! You don’t need to be a genius to go to the store. This book just gets you in and out of the store with your purchase. You decide which purchase without pressure from any salesperson. You’ll have more knowledge, ammo, than they regarding your purchase when you read this book.

      Just to show you how anyone, non-mathematical, can successfully even teach real estate finance, take me for example. I never liked math. You could say I hated it. I took algebra in high school and learned that it was nothing more than memorizing formulas. I have always been good at memorization. I loved Spanish, French, German and now Arabic. I happened to grow up knowing English, Southern and Ebonics. But at Auburn University (During my first three years the school was known as API—Alabama Polytechnic Institute—Auburn),I was required to take algebra and Trigonometry. I took algebra early because I thought it was easy and I made an A. Trig, I put off till my senior year. I even complained to my faculty advisor. He said that I had to take it. I don’t recall his body language at the time, but he probably touched his nose when he told me that after graduation, I would use Trig every day of my life. I teach a course called The Body Language of Selling Real Estate. We know that if a person touches one’s nose while talking, he is LYING. Well to make a point, I recently got out my HP_12C calculator, the only one to use if you are a real estate professional, and put in my graduation date, then that date at the time. Of the thousands of days since then, guess how many of those days I have used Trig? Four times and all on crossword puzzles! To finish this story….in my first Trig class, the teacher, General Crawford, asked the class of 48," How many of you

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