On Sun, 23 Mar 2008 15:34:53 -0400, "Ed Huntress"
wrote:
snip
I knew some guys when I was in my 20s who became millionaires in pretty
short order borrowing that way. It was VERY good borrowing for them.

First, you'd use your VA or an FHA 221-D2 mortgage (no longer available) to
buy a house for peanuts. Then you'd live in it. In six months, you'd be a
prime borrower in the eyes of the mortgage companies, and you'd use the 5%
or 10% you'd otherwise have used on your *own* house to buy one or two more
on MGIC low-down mortgages, and rent them out. In a year you'd qualify for
an investor-grade conventional loan and buy an apartment building for very
little down. You could even put a lien on one of the houses you bought to
use for the down payment on the apartments, because the longer term trends
were always (or almost always) up.
snip
==========
And some one always wins the lottery....

This does not make it a good investment technique in the
aggregate.

You only hear about the few lottery winners, never the millions
of losers...

FWIW -- the only consistent money makers are the people running
the lottery, and they ain't using their own money.


Unka' George [George McDuffee]
-------------------------------------------
He that will not apply new remedies,
must expect new evils:
for Time is the greatest innovator: and
if Time, of course, alter things to the worse,
and wisdom and counsel shall not alter them to the better,
what shall be the end?

Francis Bacon (1561-1626), English philosopher, essayist, statesman.
Essays, "Of Innovations" (1597-1625).