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Bob Diamond’s Secret Strategy

UWS 1 Bob | Overage Business

Foreclosures rates are rising due to high inflation and a recession.

Those foreclosures are opportunity for you to make a lot of money helping victims of foreclosure get a refund of some of the money collected at the foreclosure auction!

There are millions of dollars out there right now and the clock is ticking on the deadline to collect those monies. Most people never get their refund because they dont know about the money, and your business will be letting them know about the money and helping them get it for a percentage.

This is a terrific opportunity for you to get in on the ground floor as the foreclosures rise and to make a lot of money.

Join Julie Houston as she talks to attorney and world-class foreclosure expert Bob Diamond about this opportunity. Learn how you can capitalize on the increasing number of foreclosures and get in early on this amazing opportunity.

Watch the episode here

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Bob Diamond’s Secret Strategy

It’s Julie Houston, the host of Underground Wealth Secrets. On behalf of Bob and Ed Diamond, I’m excited that we have Bob here for our first interview. I want to welcome you, Bob. Welcome to the show. We are excited to get started, dive in, and talk about some real reality that’s happening in our market and real estate market. I know you have several decades of experience that you have been through, and maybe that could be something we could start with.

I have been to this show before. I know how it goes and how it ends. There are lots of good news. The news, as we all know, specializes in bad news. That’s the only news that they specialize in. What they don’t ever show you is the opportunities and the good things that are going on. This is a world with opportunities. If the news looked at an apple tree and you had 2 rotten apples and 15 great ones, they would do an explosive video on the two rotten apples. They would ignore the thirteen delicious ones.

I say, “Let’s be different. Let’s talk about the delicious apples. Have a nice apple meal and find the opportunity.” There is danger. I’m going to show you where the rotten apples are in life. There are some apples that were good and have turned rotten but there’s opportunity. I don’t know if you ever noticed this, Julie. Did you ever read things about how during the Great Depression, people like Rockefeller all made their fortunes?

Yes.

It’s the same with this guy named Warren Buffett that you might have heard of. That’s where he becomes active. One of the problems with everybody is we are all herd animals. We all run with the herd because we feel safer but that’s not always safer. Sometimes the herd is running off a cliff, and that’s why people get hurt because they will stay in the herd at the wrong time or be in the wrong herd. Now is a time when you need to shift because the ground is shifting. The economy has changed. It’s shifting.

What we are here to talk about is what are the opportunities? What is reality, first of all, because we got to identify reality? Now that we know reality, how do we react to this in a way that’s going to work for me, my family, and the things that people I care about. That’s what we are here to talk about. Let’s have a dose of the truth and opportunity.

I know that you are heavily involved in the overage business. You run an overage business and also educate on it. What do you feel now in your business? What are the benefits of that business in this economy and market?

It’s perfect. What’s going on? For anybody who doesn’t know, the overage business is where we help people that have lost their property, usually their house, to foreclosure and get their money back from that foreclosure. You might say, “How do they get money back? The government or the mortgage company sells your house.”

The thing is, when the house sells for more than the debt like more than the Tax Bill or more than the mortgage balance, that extra money is available for the former owners to claim but there’s a catch. You have to apply for the money to claim it. It’s like an IRS refund. If you don’t fill in your tax form and turn it in, they don’t give you a refund. If you do turn it in, there’s no problem. They send you the money.

The news only specializes in bad news. They don't ever show you the opportunities that are going on. Click To Tweet

This is a classic underground wealth secret that is very much under the radar, and people don’t know about it but it’s amazing. This business is exploding. I don’t think we talked about this, Julie, before. I was looking at a list. We need this new list because I was helping one of our students get a list. I pulled a list and looked at it. I’ve never seen many six-figure over-dues in my life like one after the other. What’s going on is that housing prices have gone through the roof. Let’s talk first about housing values. Interest rates are shooting up, which helps us.

House values, if you looked several years ago, houses are worth a little over $200,000 on average. Now, houses are worth a little more than $400,000 on average. They’ve gone up so much in value. That creates a lot of equity. When a house gets sold at a foreclosure auction, mortgage foreclosure or tax foreclosure auction, there’s a boatload of equity in it, which means that the overage or extra money left over is a lot of money. That’s why six-figure overdue are getting pretty common.

Our business has become much more profitable. The people we teach the business to are making much more money. Everybody is having a big old party over here. Unfortunately, I don’t like to dance in the graves of anybody but this is the truth, and we are here for the truth. The truth is that more people are going to lose their houses to foreclosure. People are going to be losing their jobs. People are going to be having a tough time. For the people that are already on the margin, that $6 a gallon gas is going to kick them over the cliff, unfortunately.

We are there to help them. What we do is help those people who lose their house to foreclosure and get their money back. The amount of money that we are seeing is much larger. The number of foreclosures is much higher and going up. This is an example of one that is countercyclical. When the economy does badly, we do better. There’s more business to be had. In that example, you want to be in the right business at the right time. You mentioned interest rates. Let me address that. Interest rates have almost tripled from the beginning of 2022 for mortgages.

They have, I watched it every day, and I’m blown away.

The question is, “What does that mean?” It means that the real estate market for resales and new home sales is going to slow down dramatically. The reason I say that is that people buy on payment. I’ve got X number of dollars as a down payment. I saved up $25,000. I could do that for a down payment. A mortgage broker will tell you, “You can spend X percent of your income on the mortgage.” Maybe it’s 33% or whatever they are using at that moment. When interest rates go up, the amount of money that you can borrow for a given payment is less and a lot less. That means that people are going to be buying less expensive houses or not buying now. Less people are going to qualify for mortgages.

I was talking to a friend of mine who’s with a big title company. He told me that they do a lot of refinances. He said that in 2021, there were twenty million people that qualified for refinancing based on interest rates and income. He said, “Now, it’s 400,000 instead of millions. It’s 20 million to 400,000. They are expecting a huge slowdown in their business.” If you are in the house flipping business, don’t buy anything now. It’s not the time to buy.

I personally am in the house flipping business, and I’m not buying anything. I’m waiting on the market. I will review them. I’m not even looking now, to be honest.

That’s smart, Julie, because you want to do the right thing at the right time. It’s like, you want to sell dinner on trays at dinner time, not at breakfast. It’s not breakfast time, don’t be selling houses. The thing is, you say, “Bob, I’m in the house flipping business. What do I do?” You need to change because when the economy and the world outside change, you need to change. If it’s raining outside, you must bring an umbrella and a raincoat. The weather will clear up. I promise that. You want to do the right thing at the right time. Now, getting into debt and buying expensive inventory in the form of houses is not the thing to do. It will be. The opportunity is going to come up again.

UWS 1 Bob | Overage Business
Overage Business: When a house sells for more than the debt, then that extra money is available for the former owners to claim. But there’s a catch: you have to apply for the money in order to claim it.

Now, take those entrepreneurial skills that you have, redeploy them into a new thing, and you can rock it. The key is to change what you are doing because the world has changed. If it’s a heavy rainstorm, you need to change your clothes and activity. If you do that, you will do great. If you continue doing the same thing, you will be in trouble.

Here’s an example of things you might do, Julie, to give you a thing. If you could buy a house where you could get permanent financing on a fixed rate, it would rent and be positive cashflow. That’s cool. Go do that. You are locking in your payment, and tenants are going to continue to be out there and, with less people able to buy, the more tenants.

I have two rental homes. I’m finishing the second one. Those are the only two I bought prior. I was like, “We are going to rent them out now because people are looking for affordable rent,” especially in our area, getting out of the city and closer to the country neutrally located. We have been having a lot of success with rentals.

The thing you want to do is count on your rental to pay its own way. This is not a time where you are like, “I’m going to buy it and hold it for several years, and it will go up in value.” It may be flat for a while. It may even decline in value, and that’s okay. Let’s say you had a rental house. That’s positive cashflow. You are not paying $300 each and every month reliably. Do you care if it goes down in value a little bit?

I don’t.

It doesn’t matter. You are long-term gain, and your time will come around because everything is cyclical. The real estate market is certainly cyclical. Everybody that’s reading this knows. If you are around in 2007 or ‘08, it was a tough real estate disaster for a lot of people. It came back for the people that got into the game in 2009, ‘10, and ‘11. They looked like geniuses by 2015. It’s a matter of doing the right thing at the right time.

My belief is that the overage business or something like it is the thing to do. The reason I say that is because, in my business, we don’t have to borrow any money. We don’t have to put a lot of cash out. Essentially, we are helping people get their money back for a portion of what we recover. You don’t have to put out money. You are not hiring contractors and handling those bills. You are not depending on mortgage rates. I’m not depending on anything other than I do my job and get paid well.

That business is good for now. Here are the features that I would look for in any business you are looking at. First of all, low entry cost. Don’t be borrowing money or putting a ton of money into anything now. Low entry cost and low operating cost. I would like to see something where you don’t have to hire a bunch of staff and get an office. This is not the time to do that.

In a time of uncertainty, you don’t want to keep light on your feet and without a lot of cash out there. Most service businesses would fit in this category to make it simple. If you said, “I’m going to start a lawn cutting business.” You can cut lawns, get a couple of lawn mowers, go off and cut lawns and you could make money and be fairly safe. I don’t think that’s a great use of your time but you could do that.

The sad truth is that more people are going to lose their houses to foreclosure today. Click To Tweet

That business where it’s more of a service business. Dog walking, lawn cutting, pool cleaning, anything that’s service where you are not investing in a lot of inventory and not borrowing money is great because then, with your efforts, you will be great. The overage business is like that. It’s a service business, meaning the service of finding money that is owed to people, alerting them to it, and going and getting the money for a percentage.

What I love about the overage business that you touched on is that you are legitimately helping people and changing people’s lives while earning an income, which is not common these days in a business to get into, especially at a lower-end cost to start. The impact that you are putting on people’s lives surpasses even that.

Our average deal now is over $50,000, which we are recovering for people. We start to fee typically $20,000 for doing that. We are getting someone $30,000 they didn’t know about. They had no idea even existed. In a short time, a matter of typically three months or so, we get them a check for $30,000. These are people that have lost a house at foreclosure. It’s like rain on a plant that’s wilting. That plant bruises right up because it makes a big difference for people.

That’s life-changing for probably half of America or more. Extra $30,000, that’s huge. Especially coming from losing your home, who knows the backstory that they had? What I love in the value aspect of the business is that you are genuinely helping people.

It is a helping business, and that’s the best part. The feeling of you are making money is great. We all want to make money but this business has a feel-good aspect to it because we are helping people that are abandoned. Nobody wants to do anything with them. They owe everybody in the world money. They lose their house. They are trying to find a place to live. All of a sudden, we come around like Santa Clause and give them $30,000. It’s a life changer, especially at that moment. If you are a person that wants a business where you can truly feel like you are helping people, and you truly are, in any metric you want to measure, you are truly helping people. This is the business. It’s great.

The opportunity seems like this is the window of opportunity to get into this business.

It’s the right time. Everything has the right timing. When things change, it’s important that you change what you do to adapt to the times. You don’t want to be a buggy whip maker when all of a sudden, they are producing cars, and you are making buggy whips. It’s not the thing to do. You want to shift. It’s always something that occupies people’s minds. It’s a big decision.

I would encourage you to look at this and as well as whatever you look at to shift into. Think about the low cost of entry and low cost to operate. What else is interesting, Julie, and I know you are related to this. With most businesses, you have to spend a lot of money on advertising, maybe Google Ads or Facebook, thousands of dollars a month to generate leads, which you hope to pan out. In this business, you don’t have to spend anything to get leads. I did a search. That list I was talking about where I was helping one of my students.

I’m blown away at the amount of the overages because I’ve never seen them that high myself.

UWS 1 Bob | Overage Business
Overage Business: The overage business is the thing to do right now. You don’t have to borrow any money or put a lot of cash out. You just help people get their money back for a portion of what you recover.

This is one list from one county, with $6 million on that list. I would’ve expected to see about $2 million on that list if I had looked several months ago. Now it’s $6 million. If you think about the total potential profit from that list, not that you are going to capture everyone but the potential there is about 40% of it. That’s $2.4 million.

If you could capture 1% of that opportunity, it’s $60,000 in your pocket. It’s time to do this. I love the business. I love the feel-good aspect. We’ve helped people that are homeless. I don’t know if you remember the lady who was one of our students. She’s 90 years old, living in the Walmart parking lot. Did you ever hear that story?

I believe so. The one that was homeless and ended up in a shelter.

No, that’s Carrie.

I haven’t heard the Walmart story.

There was a lady who was in her 90s. We get this picture from a student. The lady was holding a check-up with a smile on her face. It was interesting because our students generally are not in their 90s. I’m curious about this thing. I looked at the story along with the email. This poor lady was living in a trailer park. She broke the rules, to be fair. She let a gentleman that was down on his lock crash on her couch, and that was against the rules. They used that as a way to kick her out. They took her at a little technical violation. She let the guy stay over. She felt sorry for him. He didn’t have anywhere to go.

She ends up getting kicked out of her trailer park and ends up living in her truck. The picture was of her and her truck in the Walmart parking lot. She had no way of getting back into housing. She had Social Security. Her finances were balanced but she didn’t have the money for the down payment, the security deposit, and all those things. She was stuck living in her truck, and nobody in their 90s should be living in a Walmart parking lot. Nothing against Walmart in their parking lots.

Our student got her $25,000, and God bless her heart. Our student decided to waive her fee, which sometimes you do in the right circumstance. She waived the fee. This formerly homeless widow in her 90s had $25,000 in cash to get her back into housing, get her house because she needed some furniture all too. She lost everything, her kids and clothes. I should see if I can dig up that picture somewhere and send it over to you. Maybe you can stick it in this because I know you are going to do a recording list.

To me, that’s the touching part of this business. To be able to teach students who do things like that because a lot of people ask me, “Why do you teach this business to people? It’s lucrative. Why do you do it?” Here’s the deal. There are 3007 counties in America. For a million mortgage foreclosures a year and equivalent tax foreclosures, at least that many. There’s no way that any one person with a business can even scratch the surface of the opportunities that are out there.

If you're in the house flipping business, don't buy anything right now. It's not the time to buy. Click To Tweet

One side of it’s an opportunity. As a businessman, I’m like, “This is cool. This is an opportunity.” On the other side are these people that desperately need help. You are talking like a homeless widow person. That is a human being that desperately needs help. There is a deadline to claim this money. If you miss the deadline, the government keeps the money. I decided that as a strategic thing, I’m like, “We are going to have our own overages business because I love doing the business.” It’s important if you are teaching something that you do the business. It’s unacceptable to me to teach what I did several years ago. We do it actively.

I thought, “I will do a teaching business also.” To be fair, we charge for education. We make money on that also. With that being said, I feel good when one of our students does something like that, finds a homeless widow in a Walmart parking lot, gets her $025,000, and that homeless widow is now back in housing again.

I’ve never seen a business like that. It doesn’t get better than that. Especially having the characteristics to care about people that much, that is where it’s at. A lot of people are missing the boat on that in their business.

It’s hard. I used to do the fix and flip business, and you do help. You help keep a community better or fix up a usually rundown house. You make the community good but you got to buy them cheap. That’s the other side. You must buy it at 30% off the market or maybe at 40%. That’s a big discount for the seller to take. If they have their $200,000 house, you need to buy it for $100,000, taking into account repairs and things.

It’s a big discount for them to take. That’s where it gets hard to say, “I feel great. I’m helping people.” You get some poor guys in foreclosure and are going to lose their house next week. They are in a position where they need to dump the house. If you are twisting when you are saying, “I’m helping them avoid foreclosure.” You are, they did put themselves in that position but it’s still not exactly a feel-good business that way.

To be honest, most of the investing I do is owner finance. It’s helping people get into a home that may not have the best credit history, background or whatever the situation is. We do vet everyone, and we have a vetting process but there are people that aren’t comfortable using the bank. For us, we feel like we are helping families get into a home. They can own a home instead of renting a home. We base it off the rent in the market in the area. It’s affordable for them to purchase this home.

I love that plan. Even going into the market, we are going into that’s something you should still keep working on. You have to be careful in your buys because if we do run into a falling market, meaning falling values, it can be hard to resell. You could still keep doing that. That’s a cool strategy for now.

The two reasons I’m doing the rentals are we are going to hold them for now. Do them as rentals and decide what we want to do with them once the market goes through whatever the market is going to go through. We all know the market is about to do something or change. It has been constantly changing regularly.

We are seeing a big shock.

UWS 1 Bob | Overage Business
Overage Business: Live a life where you don’t need to worry about the day-to-day. You want to be in control of your destiny. Have a business that’s making money independent of whatever the executives want to do.

It cost me over $100 to fill my car up. It used to cost me $55 max, and it was $110 to fill up my truck.

Once it costs $100 below, that’s significant. It was like $60 to $68.

I can’t even get fresh chicken breasts where I live.

When I went into my entrepreneurial journey, which I started when I was young, I started in my twenties. My whole dream was to live my life so I didn’t need to worry about the day-to-day. I didn’t need to worry about finances. That’s where I’ve gotten to in life. I observe high gas prices. I’m like, “That’s expensive to fill the car.” It doesn’t impact me. It’s not like I don’t have to make a different choice like eating pasta instead of steak. I can do either.

I would say for anybody out there is this can do that for you. One of the smartest things you can do is to have a business that’s making money independent of whatever HR and executives in your company want to do. Take the people that are working at the title company. I don’t want to use their name because I didn’t ask for that permission.

They are expecting their business to drop dramatically. They said, “Addressable market of refinances.” Instead of twenty million people that could refinance, given current interest rates and all that. Now it’s 400,000. They are assuming that their market’s going to drop at 90%, which means that they are going to drop their staff that takes care of refinances by probably 90%. It’s breathtaking.

It’s mind-blowing.

If you think 9 out of 10 people aren’t going to be there. They are in that refinance department. Citibank announced 1,000, either layoffs or reassignments within their mortgage. Jamie Dimon, the CEO, said, “We are preparing for what we think is coming. A thousand people are going.” That’s going to be the story for a lot of people. Not to get in the weeds on that but what I would translate for everybody reading is that you want to be in control of your own destiny.

This is a time to be in control of your own destiny, and the way to do that is to have a business that works in the market conditions and thrives in the market conditions. That way, you are not subject to what some CEO wants to do or some cost-cutting measure because you got a life to live. You get a family to support and bills to pay. You want your own reliable business where you can be the captain of your own ship. You control your finances. Somebody else doesn’t.

When things change, you have to adapt to the times. Click To Tweet

The way to do that is to get a business going that’s reliable, strong and fits the times. That is the thing to do. That’s why I’m such a proponent of everybody should be working on something on their own. Don’t depend on the government or some corporation that doesn’t care about you. You depend on yourself. If you do that, you will get through this. You will feel proud and strong. Your finances will be good. I hope that you get to where I’ve gotten to, where money isn’t your concern about living life like gas goes up to $6 again. I notice and see it but it doesn’t impact me. I would encourage you to think about that, and if that’s something you would like, jump on and get your own business going.

That was some great feedback, Bob. I appreciate all the feedback and everything that we reviewed. Did you have any final things you wanted to mention or advice that you would share?

I would say, “Don’t be paralyzed with fear.” It’s easy now to get paralyzed with fear. The reason I say that is when you look at the news, whether you go online, watch TV or whatever you do, they specialize in bad news. That’s what they do. Even young journalists in college are taught to get the bad news. They say, “If it bleeds, it leads.” William Randolph Hearst was the one who said that, I believe.

Try not to take that as the gospel truth for your life. Your life is your life. If the overall economy is tanking because the Federal Reserve made the wrong moves or you blame whatever government in power, that’s all fine. There is always opportunity in every market. Every time and every place, there is opportunity. You have to move. You can’t wait like a squirrel in the middle of the road for the recession to roll you over because rollers are big old steam rollers. It’s going to squash you if you don’t move.

What you want to do is not get paralyzed with fear but get into action because getting into action gives you confidence. It opens up the doorway to success, and you have to do something. I’m telling you, the thing to do is work at a business that is right for the time, that doesn’t take a big investment, and you can roll up your sleeves, start doing some work, and have success. Overages and one of those businesses, there are other things you could do. Overage is the one I know because it is what I’m doing but don’t be a squirrel in the middle of the road because you will get run over, and there’s no need to be a squirrel in the middle of the road. There are lots of opportunities out there.

Thank you so much, Bob. Thank you again for sharing all of that and being on this show. Bob Diamond with UndergroundWealthSecrets.net. I’m excited that we got to share this and share this with everybody. Don’t forget to check out our upcoming episode soon.

Thanks, Julie. You are doing a great job. It’s interesting talking to you, and I’m glad you are doing what you’re doing because you need to show people what they can do to thrive. Not just to survive but to thrive in this world. Good work.

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