As I’ve explained before plenty of times, I do quite a bit of work in my area (central Ohio) for large and mid sized banks. Most of what I do is called ‘recon’ for banks , I go out and take pictures of properties they have in their lending portfolios and tell them how much it’s worth. In addition to that, I go out and valuate homes for PMI reduction purposes, and homes that are in foreclosure ( BPOs ) to tell the bank if the home is in good/bad condition and the market value they’ll get by selling it as a foreclosure.

Outside of working with banks, I’ve worked on every level regarding distressed property sales, from the owner who can’t afford a mortgage anymore (I’ve walked them through a short sale), to the other side of the coin , working with on a eviction , and repossession of a property. I find the whole process very interesting, and have heard just about every story possible out there regarding foreclosures, in fact a while ago I ran one of the largest foreclosure blogs out there.

One of the most interesting things that I deal with is the end stages of foreclosure, after the bank wins the property back at auction, it sets a series of events in motion that I get to deal with. In the state of Ohio , normally the homeowner has 30 days to vacate the property from the time of the sheriff’s sale, and after that time, the bank will take physical possession of the property.

Now, as simple as this seems, it’s a very complex process on the bank’s end, usually involving a multitude of lawyers, real estate agents and some times law enforcement officers. What interests me is the sheer number of people who either don’t realize they’re loosing their home , or continue to believe they will not lose their home after not making payments for months or even years. See, I’ve seen situations where the homeowner hasn’t made payments on their home for well over a year, the bank files for foreclosure, sells the property at a sheriff’s sale , then the local sheriff shows up one day to evict them. By evict them , I really mean escort them off the premise of what used to be their home.

Most law enforcement officers I’ve delt with are quite nice about everything, however there have been instances where the homeowner has literally a hour to vacate the home. I’ve been in properties shortly after the eviction where food was still sitting on the stove (obviously the burners were off) as well as bowls of cereal on the dining room table (with food even). It gives me quite a eerie feeling when I enter a home like that to take pictures. I almost feel like I’m in the setting of a zombie movie, one of those type where the guy walks around the city and no one is there ,every home being vacant and frozen in time.

In these situations, I find it quite interesting to see what the ‘Average’ person takes with them , the things they feel are worth the most to them. The reason I’m also posting this is that these people are effectively in emergency situations and make some serious mistakes in the things they don’t take with them.

#1 – Cash
In general, in the homes I’ve been in have been devoid of all cash. This isn’t to say they take all currency with them, as almost every single home I visit has quite a great deal of loose change all over the house. It seems to me that alot of people don’t know where they keep money, or just keep it on them. I’ve been in one or two homes where the owner had saved an amount of change in a jar or box and just left it (maybe $20-$30).

#2 – TVs
The absolute second thing I don’t see in homes are decent TVs. It was a tough choice picking between this and cash, every single home that I’ve been in that has a nice TV has been removed. Granted, they could be stolen from the home after the bank/sheriff locks the home out, however they’re almost always gone if they’re nice. I’ve run into a few homes that have older TVs or rear projection TVs that are still there, but they’re quite obviously worthless. One thing I’ve noticed is that they will usually leave the HDTV’s stand there. It’s a bit interesting because the cost of many of those stands are quite high.

#3 – Guns
I have YET to see a home where anyone has left any sort of firearm in it, from what I can tell these have a HUGE value to people (which to me should be obvious). The only reason this isn’t #1 is because it’s hard for me to estimate how many of the homes I work with have firearms in them. I know in general in my area, roughly 50% of the homes have firearms, but I’ve never seen one left in a house. I’ve seen a few gun cases, and even a small unlocked gun safe (which by itself was worth $100-$200). I know for myself personally, firearms would be the first thing I’d take if I had to leave in a emergency.

#4 – Computers
Most of the homes I’ve done work in have obviously had computers in them at one time, most of the time I can find work areas with computer manuals but not computers. Interestingly enough, I’ve been in some homes where the homeowner was in such a rush , they just pulled off all the cables from the case and took the case with them. I’ve seen a few LCD monitors (easily $75 or so) left , and a TON of old-style tube monitors.

#5 – Primary vehicles
It should be pretty obvious that most people have a decent vehicle, and normally they use it to haul off all of their junk. Interestingly enough , one time I saw a rather nice one-axel trailer that someone left behind with tags. I really can’t imagine why someone would leave something like that but they did.

Now , those are the top 5 things I’ve noticed people seem to value when they have to leave the house, I think most of use would say ‘Yeah , I guess those are important’. However to me is the glaring issue with what people chose to leave behind in their homes. These are not in order of commonality , however they’re in the order of what I would consider important if I had to leave my home and didn’t know where I’d be going to.

#1 Financial documents
I don’t want to get into the gory details due to people that like to steal identities, but there is not a single personal document that I’ve not run into inside a foreclosed home. Check books , atm cards , some credit cards, birth certificates, social security statements and everything like that. In addition to this, I see ALOT of homes where family portraits , pictures and letters are left as well. Obviously these aren’t absolutely vital or carry the risk of ID theft, but it bothers me a bit that people generally don’t care about pictures.

#2 – Secondary vehicles
Most people seem to not value vehicles, even if they’re in decent shape but have some sort of issue that keeps them from running. The best car I’ve seen at a foreclosure was a late 90s dodge intrepid. I know that’s not the bee’s knees but it has to be worth something even if was without engine (I didn’t check). I also ran into a pretty decent looking mid 80s camaro at a house too. Another property I was dealing with had about a 2000 F150 truck , it had sat there for over 2 years, I was told that ’something’ didn’t work in it, but have no clue.

#3 – Food
This is one of the top things people leave at homes , sadly I run into alot of homes that have perishables that are left in the fridge/counter that are far beyond spoiled when i get to the house. I’m pretty sure they leave it there on purpose for the bank and people like me , however I find more non-perishables in houses left lying around. I’ve found pantries with a good month’s worth of food. I know that if I didn’t know where I was going , food would be one of my top priorities.

#4 – Porn
I don’t know what it is with foreclosures and porn , but the majority of homes I visit have quite a collection of porn mags in them. By quite a collection I mean one house I was in had 4 stacks of magazines that were about 3ft tall each. I’d leave them there too I guess if I had to leave, but I find it interesting.

#5 – Tools
Every type of tool , of every quality you can imagine I’ve seen left at homes. In one instance (the house that had the f150) the homeowner had left about $2,000 worth of tools at the home. In this situation I actually knew the homeowner through a 3rd party, I asked him why he left things like cordless drills, a large table saw , batteries at the home, he said ‘he had borrowed them off a friend and didn’t care about them anymore’. I guess that’s a lesson in being careful who you lend tools to. The tools lasted about 6 months in the abandoned home as I had to check the property every month or two. They were eventually stolen from the property, which shouldn’t surprise you at all.

As time goes on, I’ll add to this list, I will also share some pictures of what I’ve seen in homes before (some of it will shock you).

Please feel free to re-post this article or modify , just provide a link back to this blog.

ABSREO is another one of those REO ‘brokerages’ who says they will send you a ton of listings once you pay their fee to be featured.

Next time a company emails you , do what I do to check credibility……..Find out how many listings they handle in your area. In my case, they have a whole 5 listings in the state of Ohio , that’s right , 5 listings. More than likely they have a few dozen to maybe a hundred agents fighting and paying money for those 5 listings. So , long story short, if you want a 5% chance of getting a listing (they have a whole 35 properties in Florida and California) by all means go for them. However if you’re careful like me ,don’t spend the money, it’s just a waste of your hard earned cash.

I’ve been doing quite a bit of work for the large banks I work for (Chase, HSBC, BOA/Countrywide/FNMA/FreddieMac).

Anyways, one of the things I wanted to do was to pull a report on Central ohio home sales over the past month (Starting on July 1st) through the 30th , then starting again on August the 1st. From the MLS data I pulled , there has been a 26.6% drop month-over-month compared to 2009 in July, and a 15.5% drop so far in August. This leads me to believe that the housing market is pretty soft, even with interest rates being as low as they are (I’ve seen 3.5% 7-1 arms from our wells fargo affiliate bank).

I’m personally worried a bit as to what will happen with higher interest rates and a low demand market. Obviously I have a bad feeling about where we’re headed, but we’ll have to see where things go.

I’m also debating on whether or not I should do a webshow based on real estate. How many of you would like to see a show on the gory inner workings of real estate investment?

The project I’ve been working this entire year on has finally started to have SOME success, although not as much as I’d like.

I’ve been going into several avenue as of recently concerning other ventures. My adsense income is pretty stable now, not too bad for only have a small handful of sites with adsense installed. I’ve also been getting into physical product CPS sales which has worked out great! I’ve managed to snag a few long-term customers that keep re-ordering the same product which is awesome, considering my markup is well over 100%, hopefully I can expand that niche into a full blown e-store. I’m realizing that there’s lots of traffic out there for everything, you just have to get creative to do it.

Another interesting note is that I’ve been told a few times now that my facebook posts on doing gaming ruined the niche…….I guess there are lots of lemmings that are only interested in copy & paste campaigns, maybe I should monetize that?

As for my new greatest project, the one that’s taken most of the year – It’s going better, if we can scale it it should do a few thousand a day in net income which would be great, it’s just hard waiting.

In this post I’ll be talking about the inner workings of kaching kaching, in the mean time to put a long story short – No it’s not a scam , but it sucks none the less. It’s just a ploy to get some referal income and unless you REALLY know how to market, it’s not worth your time.

Work from home typing jobs have been around for ever , starting in the early 50s even as ‘home memographers’ as featured in older magazines (Most large magazines had ad space devoted to these ads).

Now that we’re age of the internet , companies that place ads trying to entice people to buy into their program that supposedly teaches you how to make money at home by just typing on your computer.

This type of business opportunity is much harder, and much more complex to deal with than a simple scam, as there are so many types of these programs out there. For instance , medical data transcription is a very legitimate ‘typing job’ that people do , it requires several months of education to do. This is very different from a offer that teaches you how to create a money making blog , which then is different from creative copywriting.

Simply mindless typing into a computer just doesn’t exist , however there are tons of opportunities out there for someone to do smaller odd jobs online for a little bit of money. If you sign up to our newsletter (featured at the bottom of this page) you’ll get a free list of dozens of ways to make money from home, all for free.

One such program we talk at lengths about is Amazon’s Mechanical Turk which allows people to take small , odd jobs from various companies and individuals. These tasks can be as simple as following someone on Facebook, or as complex as developing a written sales campaign. Compensation can range anywhere from a nickle, all the way up to tens of thousands of dollars.

So , these are two examples of jobs that you can do from your own home that only involve typing.

There are many others , too numerous to list , however here’s a short list we compiled.

• Data Entry
• Medical Transcription
• Menial Task
• Blogging
• Copy Writing
• Blog Copy Writing
• Social network connecting
• Per-Task computer work (links , blog posting ,ect)
• Product reviews
• Article writing

typing from home picture

These various types of typing jobs cover quite a wide array , as well as make up a huge skill set , ranging from nothing to a degree in English , or sales.

One major thing to consider is the cost of the program. My dad signed on to a medical data transcription school , the total cost was around $1,500 or so. Once he had his ‘license’ from them and had completed all the required education , it then took time to find doctors/hospitals to partner with. In this case ,it was a great choice , as depending on his typing speed, his income would start out at $8 per hour , and as he got quicker and better at typing the data, he increased his income to around $18 per hour.

On the flip side , there are many programs out there that offer ‘home courses’ for home typing jobs, one we reviewed in a earlier post had a price tag of $9595.00 which is a astronomical number. In the case of this specific program , most of the information in the so called course could be found online for free, and only about a hour worth of searching.

Be sure to be careful ,and check for reviews from other people that are doing the same thing. Be sure to join our newsletter that includes a free ebook ‘How to make $10 in 10 minutes for nothing’ a great book to get you started in the world of work from home typing jobs. The book is free, and we don’t sell your email address to anyone.

I found one guy’s review and decided I’d try one of the ones he suggested.

I’ve already tried PIWIK before, it’s great, however it’s self hosted on each site, which in my case means every day logging in to each site , and checking stats. Sure , i could find a tool to do that , but it’s too much work. Piwik’s interface is THE BEST of all i’ve seen.

Getclicky is also great, however if you have more than 1 site, they charge you. I had a deal worked out with them , that allowed me to have up to 100 sites for only $20/mo with a max of 15k PVs a month , as they’re really concerned about a high number of page views.

Enter woopra – a analytic tool that met all my criteria and went even farther. Woopra has a desktop tool that allows me to log into a dashboard to view stats (a big plus). It also lets me throw on a ton of sites, with a max of 30k page views per month which is more than fine with me. The interface is good, better than clicky but not as nice as piwik. So far I’m quite impressed , they charge per site in terms of fees ($5/site on the minimum package) but I guess it’d be worth it, as it brings you up to 100k page views per month.

Not too shabby at all Check out woopra.com for their service.

To start off, I can’t say these are outright scams , but in most cases clever marketing ploys.

Most work at home assembly schemes amount to 2 different instances.

1 . Advertizers who make craft making products who are trying to get people interested in buying their products.

2. Work from home ploys with nearly no benefit.

Obviously,  the first of these two types of assemble products at home systems is the one you go for , so I will be talking more at length about it.

Most of the time, these ads are placed by equipment manufacturers , not companies looking to outsource labor to home workers. Companies that make things like welding , mills , lathes, and even simple things like DIY crafts.  These types of ads can some times be misleading , in the fact that once you purchase the device , machines or equipment to “assemble products at home” you then have to sell them yourself.

Obviously in a system like this , one could easily make their own products and sell them without aid at a local flea market , or online at a place like ebay or etsy. Both of these places allow anyone to sell home made products, etsy is the better of the two for selling home-built products.  I would advise you a word of caution – Don’t spend any money on equipment unless you’re willing to loose it. It’s far too easy to spend hundreds, if not thousands of dollars on equipment not yet make a dime back. Craftster is also a good resource for DIY products as well , and it’s 100% free.
The second type of advertiser is much more of a scam. They offer to put you in ‘contact’ with companies that offer home assembly products, and inform you that they have their own product sales channel , or that the company will just buy the products off of you (or pay you a fee per product you make). The issue with this is that there are VERY few companies who need hand-made products, and even then, they’re swamped with people wanting to work for them. I had even run into once instance where someone  had paid upwards of $2,000 for a system like this, and made absolutely nothing off of it. I would be much more wary of these types of scams, as they can take nearly everything from you.

Some tips to consider when looking to make products at home are :

• Find out whether the company is giving you FREE instructions or if you have to pay for them. If you have to pay for the instructions, it’s likely a outright scam , don’t give it any of your time. If they explain it to you without a purchase or up front fee, then you have to consider if you’re willing to deal with selling the actual product.
• Talk to others who are involved in the same product assemblage system , ask the company for  a reference or two, if they’re legit they won’t bat an eye at the thought.
• Do as much research as you can about the actual company involved in the product assemblage , the BBB is a great resource for that.

Always be careful and vigilant when looking at work-at-home products. We offer you your own free guide to you by signing up to our email newsletter. We even send you a booklet of how you can make $10 in under 10 minutes without any cost involved whatsoever.

Growing up , I remember reading a article in Popular Science magazine about a “Job Offer” ad in the classifieds, offering that anyone for a minimal fee could work from home stuffing envelopes, and make good money doing it.

So, I sent away for the “Free” information on stuffing envelopes at home, and received a letter back with “information on how to start”. I promptly threw the letter in the trash after reading they wanted $29.95 for information on how to get started. I was pretty upset that the supposedly free information seemed like a scam , and never went back to look at it for many years.

Recently though, I’ve had many people ask me about whether you can really work from home stuffing envelopes. So , I set out a small journey on finding what the deal with this gimmick was, and whether you really could make money doing it , or if it was utter BS.

Since I’ve been involved in various programs, systems and methods of making money at home, and home job sourcing , I have plenty of contacts to find out the real deal on stuff like this, so I contacted my network of friends.

What I heard from one person was what I heard from all of them concerning envelope stuffing – It’s a scam , don’t spend your money.

While I’m not one to ever think that something is a outright scam , I decided I would go further into things and see really what was going on.

In short, you pay a person $29.95 to send you a packet of information on how to get “paid stuffing envelopes”. This involves you taking out ads in the newspaper, placing more ads on ‘get paid to stuff envelopes’. You then go on and ask people to send you a further $29.95 to get information on how they can do it themselves. This in itself is a pretty straightforward “pyramid scheme”. I have also found others who were asking for much less in return , maybe a quarter , or only a dollar.

So , in the end , I can’t say it’s a scam , but you’ve need to ask yourself whether you’re one to purposely convince other people that they can work from home by stuffing envelopes and then to give you some of their money as well.

I’m sorry to disappoint anyone, I know if I could make $20 a hour from home doing something this simple, I’d be the first to sign up , but it’s just not that easy.

So , do you want to REALLY learn how you can make money from home, with no investment what soever? Just join my mailing list, and I’ll show you how to turn 10 minutes into $10 , without spending anything other than your time.