07 Oct Raise Your Credit Card Limit and Buy
Raise Your Credit Card Limit
By
George N. Skidis, Jr.
Raise your Credit Card limit is one of the traps to beware of when attending a real estate “Guru” seminar. Do you enjoy going to real estate investment seminars? Most of us do. Yes, even experienced real estate investors get a thrill out of learning a new lesson or finding a new twist on how things are done.
Watch your step when the out of town Real Estate Gurus come to your city for “This Weekend Only events. One of the things I have seen at a couple of these seminars recently is the “raise your credit card limits” technique. This is your “Homework Assignment” given by the course leader. All of the students are asked to go home and call every one of their credit card companies. Your goal is to get your purchasing limits raised and your interest rates lowered.
To complete the homework assignment the course leader provides each student with a script of what to say and maybe even a chart to track their success. Talk about using positive affirmation to hook your students. They now see the speaker as an expert in credit solutions and repair as well as real estate. Of course this sales technique only works for the students who succeed in raising their credit limits. The ones who don’t may not be able to buy the course anyway.
Often these same gurus will be the very guys telling you to buy flips and other properties with your credit card. Although this technique can and will work, it can be extremely dangerous financially. Missing one payment can raise your interest level up to the state maximum usury rate.
How would you like to pay 29.99% interest on a $30,000.00 credit card balance? Your payments would be $1,433.66 per month for 30 months, but only if you could afford to make them. That’s $12,994.80 in interest payments. I made those calculations using a simple amortization calculator. The calculator did not include any allowance for possible late fees or allow for calendar variations in the repayment plan. The guru may be empathetic, they may be a great salesman, but you are the only one who should know how to handle your credit. Not the real estate Guru. Credit Cards are dangerous.
The big problem is that the speaker is getting the student all excited about increasing their credit limit and having all that buying power. Guess what their first opportunity to buy something will be? Did you figure it out? It will be the seminar Guru’s overpriced program for real estate investors.
Raising your credit card limit must send a subconscious buying signal to the brain. People line up and throw their plastic down in wave after wave of buying frenzy. I have been to a lot of seminars. It happens over and over again.
Summary
The surprising thing is what some of these “courses” cost. The most expensive “free seminar” I ever attended was a three day sales pitch with some occasional training thrown in to keep it believable. The last three hours of day two were nothing but a sales pitch. They trotted out the big guns and went for broke selling personal mentoring, bus tours, a multi course catalog and paid trips to foreign lands. Can you believe that the Manufacturers Suggested List Price (MSRP) on the deal was over $96,000.00 when all was said and done? But for those who couldn’t stretch their “personal growth” that far a smaller less valuable package was available. In fact, there were several smaller less valuable packages available, going all the way down to $1,995.00 for the cheapest package. But the speaker didn’t recommend that one.
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