A highly detailed investment manual with personal touches and useful examples.
Real estate investor and podcaster Washington shares his own methods and experiences in a guide to locating and financing real estate deals.
What’s the biggest challenge facing most real estate investors when they start out? For the author, the answer to that question is clear: “finding deals and funding them.” To help budding investors, he organizes this how-to with an eye toward each of these goals, dedicating a large section to overcoming roadblocks along the way. Washington, who co-hosts the On the Market investment podcast, writes that he started out in real estate investing with only $1,000 in his savings account, bad credit, and a goal “to earn enough money to truly build the life I wanted for my wife and our future children.” He attributes his success, in large part, to a change of thinking—one based on an active decision to achieve his desires: “With the right mindset, I knew I could make it happen.” Self-help style motivational strategies, such the importance of confidently introducing oneself to others as an active investor, are interwoven with practical, informative approaches to finding off-market deals. The author includes numerous checklists, definitions, and breakdowns of pros and cons for each strategy he presents. The second section, dedicated to specific financials, is even more information-rich, covering tax incentives, conventional mortgages, and less well-known forms of credit one may leverage, such debt service coverage ratio loans, and much more. The level of detail that Washington provides on each subject is impressive; interested entrepreneurs starting from zero will find helpful lists of definitions, deal examples, and even basic scripts for cold-calling potential sellers. Some of the motivational writings can feel a bit clichéd, including the “Three Ps of investing” (persistence, patience, perseverance). However, the book also offers plenty of practical, sound advice, such as a section on how to best communicate with sellers, complete with conversation starters. By breaking everything down into step-by-step processes, Washington does make it feel like anyone could easily follow in his footsteps—and adopt his positive outlook.
A highly detailed investment manual with personal touches and useful examples.Pub Date: June 11, 2024
ISBN: 9781960178145
Page Count: 220
Publisher: BiggerPockets
Review Posted Online: May 29, 2024
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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