Deals Gone Bad #1: Too Many Deals, Not Enough Cash Flow with Mark Dolfini » Episode 929

Someone once told me that “Smart people learn from their own mistakes and wise people learn from the mistakes of others”. If you’re following what you think is a smart strategy and you find yourself spread too thin, then it’s time to look for someone who’s wise and has already risen from the ashes of a monumental real estate crash-and-burn.

You might know Mark Dolfini from Landlord Coach, but you may not realize that at one point he was $100,000 in credit card debt and just steps away from bankruptcy. Beginning in the late nineties, Mark was able to start investing in using the best strategy ever: OPM, or other people’s money. But just because you can purchase a property and cash flow a little, that doesn’t mean that it’s a good deal.

Mark is open about some of his biggest mistakes, including how he didn’t give himself enough room for expenses and what being over-leveraged on time looks like. Today, he’s a lot more careful about how he figures out CapEx on his properties, and he walks me through some of the factors that he ignored when he first began investing.

I hope you’ll love this series and learn from these tales of caution. If you’d like to see my notes of all of the different ways you can have a bad deal, text the work BAD to 313131, and you’ll be able to access my mind map for this series.

And don’t worry, I’ll keep adding to this interactive mind map as I interview people, so keep checking back on it as I add new ways people can wreck a deal and almost blow up their real estate career.

What’s Inside:

—How Mark figures out the future expenditures for his properties.

—Why it took years for banks to extend mortgages to Mark again.

—What being over-leveraged on both time and money looks like.