In your investing career how many times have you thought
to yourself, “I’d like to have an attorney look at this but I don’t want to
spend the money?,” or “I think this is the law, but it would be nice if I
could ask an attorney to find out for sure?”
As real estate investors it would be nice if we could have
an attorney at our disposal whenever we needed one. One that could help with
contract questions, tenant disputes, contractor issues, asset protection,
and so on. In reality, we would need many attorneys to cover all of these
different areas.
Here is another question for you: How many times have you
known you should have an attorney look at something
but didn’t want to incur the expense so you just risked it? If you are lucky
it didn’t come back to bite you, if you were unlucky you ended up paying the
cost many times over and you have vowed to NEVER get into that position
again.
The expression “An ounce of prevention is worth a
pound of cure” definitely applies when it comes to legal protection.
Beginning investors especially are vulnerable, due to both lack of funds and
lack of experience in avoiding pitfalls.
If you have been smart enough to make use of an attorney
have you cringed at the size of the bill you received? $50 to get one quick
question answered?
Fortunately there is an excellent solution for us, it’s
called Pre-Paid Legal. For a small monthly fee - with no contract
required - we can get access to a battery of attorneys. How small
is the monthly fee? Right around $25 bucks a month!
How can you use this as an investor?
For starters, you can make unlimited phone calls to
have your legal questions answered and receive legal advice. How useful is
that? Think about how many different ways you can use that when you are
buying or selling investment deals, or even for your personal life. For
example, let’s say a tenant calls you and says their apartment was broken
into and wants you to fix the front door. Tenants speak in code, and more
often than not, when a tenant says their apartment was broken into it really
means they locked their keys inside and didn’t want to pay the fee for you
letting them back in so instead they kicked in their door and claimed
someone broke in.
A quick call to Pre-Paid Legal and the attorney may advise
you to have the tenant file a police report and have you insist on seeing
the police report before the door can be repaired or have the door fixed at
their expense if they fail to provide the police report. Tenants know that
filing a false report is a crime so they’ll probably think twice about
following through.
Pre-Paid Legal can also write letters on your behalf. When
people or businesses receive a letter from an attorney on your behalf they
know that you have an attorney at your disposal and will not be easily
pushed around. This can be very useful when dealing with unscrupulous
contractors, for example. I have had my share of great contractors but I’ve
also had to deal with some who try to take shameless advantage. If you have
a contractor who consistently doesn’t show up at the job site to get their
work done this costs you a lot of money in delays. A quick letter from your
attorney will probably be all of the prompting that contractor needs to
start showing up and getting the job done.
Or what about if the contractor underbids the job and then
tries to bill you extra for their mistake? Most people end up paying this,
pretty much knowing they are being taken advantage of but not knowing what
they can do about it. A letter to the contractor from your attorney will let
that contractor know they aren’t going to be able to take advantage of you.
If a contractor tries to bill you just an extra $600 for a job that would
pay for your Pre-Paid Legal costs for 2 years!
Here is something that most people don’t know. When you
buy a house the purchase agreement you sign is in no way a standard
document. Purchase agreements aren’t written out by each state and then
required to be used in each transaction. It doesn’t work that way. Every
real estate company has their own purchase agreement, any private
transaction outside a real estate company will have a unique purchase
agreement. Once you sign that purchase agreement you are bound to it. How
would you like to be the buyer of a house where you have to pay the seller’s
unpaid property taxes for the last five years because it was written into
the purchase agreement?
Too many of us don’t want to spend the money to have an
attorney review a contract. We just risk it instead. Pre-Paid Legal will
review an UNLIMITED number of personal documents for you, up to 10 pages
each. Plus they will review one business document once a year at no extra
charge. Talk about peace of mind!
Those are some of the common uses we as investors have for
Pre-Paid Legal. Those types of things are integral to our business and we
would use them on a regular basis. Pre-Paid Legal offers a whole lot more
benefits than that for our small monthly fee. I won’t go into them all but
here are two critical ones. If you or your spouse is named as a defendant or
respondent in a civil or criminal action you receive 75 hours of paid
attorney time, and it increases by another 75 hours for each year you renew,
up to a total of 335 hours of pre-trial and trial time. That enough for
almost every trail except O.J. Simpson’s! God forbid that this should ever
come to pass, but what a wonderful safeguard to have.
The other critical service Pre-Paid Legal offers that I
wanted to mention is that if you are ever audited by the IRS, which seems to
happen more to us investors than the average person, you receive 50 hours of
paid attorney time. Facing the IRS without the support of an attorney just
isn’t something you want to do.
Do you have your will done? No? You are not alone; 80% of
our country does not have a written will. Pre-Paid Legal will do your will
at no charge and your spouse’s, or significant other’s (if living together),
for an additional $20. Stop putting it off. You need to get your will done.
It is free now so there are no excuses.
If you are a seasoned investor, I have probably already
mentioned at least one thing that has happened to you where you would have
benefited from an attorney’s assistance (hopefully not too much more than
one thing!) If you are a beginning investor, I can pretty much guarantee to
you that at some point in your investing career you are going to NEED an
attorney. There will be plenty of times when it will be to your benefit to
make use of an attorney, but there will be at least one occasion in your
investing career where you will NEED an attorney.
As real estate investors, when we buy and sell houses, we
often make use of Realtors™ and mortgage brokers on our transactions. Each
time we do, they get paid for their work, usually a percentage of the cost,
which amounts to thousands of dollars. If you could retain a Realtor™ and a
mortgage broker for $25 bucks a month to take care of you wouldn’t you jump
at the chance? Here’s the thing, attorneys charge MORE than Realtors™ or
mortgage brokers! I recommend Pre-Paid Legal to every investor I know
because it’s such a great deal and I make use of it myself.
To sign up for Pre-Paid Legal or to find out more please visit:
www.pplontheweb.com or call Michael
at (248) 227-3943.
© 2007 by Wendy Patton
Wendy Patton is widely
recognized as one of the most inspiring speakers on "Little or
No Money Down" real estate investing. Her real estate savvy and
great depth of experience and knowledge has helped her in
orchestrating the most complete and easy to follow, Lease/Option
Program in circulation.
Home Study Courses by
Wendy Patton
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