Financial Freedom with Real Estate Investing: The Blueprint To Quitting Your Job With Real Estate – Even Without Experience Or Cash by Michael Blank is both a ‘how to’ and a bracing bit of financial self-help. 

Michael Blank, according to his bio and the book’s introduction, is an ex programmer, would-be restauranteur and a seasoned investor who’s lived both near catastrophic failure and phenomenal success. He sets out a strong case that for those looking to retire from their jobs and live on passive income from their property, multi-family apartment blocks provide the most time and cost-efficient solution, relative to flipping single-family homes.

Blank then both guides and cheerleads the potential novice property investor through his three-stage process: 1. raising the funds for that all-important first deal, without relying on personal savings, 2: How to interact with brokers as a serious buyer and build the right team of advisors or coaches, 3. Rapid analysis of potential deals and making offers in 10 minutes. Though the latter may seem implausible, it offers a systematic way of deciding whether an offer is worth making and is illustrated with a clear set of examples.

He also discusses in detail the potential pitfalls: again here borrowing from other self-help texts. The essential messages include not allowing perfectionism to lead to paralysis, looking outside of one’s local area for the best apartment deals. Playing Devil’s advocate, Blank also reviews cases in which single-family homes might be the better option and how to make flipping houses contribute to the dream of achieving a viable passive income.

Written in a straightforward, conversational style that assumes no prior property investment experience, Blank borrows from other texts in the financial ‘self-help’ genre, most notably the extreme budgeting of Rich Dad, Poor Dad, by Robert Kiyosaki and Sharon Lechter, in his use of real-life case studies interwoven with statistics and mathematical models, lest anyone break out into a cold sweat at the thought of serious number-crunching. He also references this book directly, as a means to entering the correct mindset for investing with a view to living on passive rental income.

Blank’s text also contains plenty of links to his own webpage and worksheets. These include aids to decision making, in preparing a marketing packing to present to potential co-investors and tools for analysis, the book contains information and motivation, without engaging in hard selling of his other books or his coaching endeavors to the reader.

In all, Financial Freedom with Real Estate Investing: The Blueprint To Quitting Your Job With Real Estate – Even Without Experience Or Cash proves a useful, informative and practical addition to any potential property investor’s reference library.     

Summary by Casey Ryan Richards