1. Suze Orman vs. Warren Buffett:
Whose Real Estate Advice Should
You Follow?

2. You know Suze Orman –
she delivers hardcore
financial gut checks to
everyday Americans on a
regular basis. In her latest
book, The Money Class, she
also recently delivered a pretty
striking declaration: that the American Dream -
which, for many, includes home ownership and
upward economic mobility - is as dead as a
doornail. To back this up, she points to huge
numbers of jobless and what she sees as the near
impossibility of getting credit these days.

3. 1. Ditch your "dream home" for a practical pad.
When it comes to homes and mortgages, bigger is
not always better. What is
better is to buy a home that
makes sense for your family's
future and its finances. In
Buffettt's own words, "a house
can be a nightmare if the buyer’s
eyes are bigger than his wallet and
if a lender . . . facilitates his fantasy."
Instead of buying dream homes,
Buffett went on, the goal should be
to buy a home you can afford.

4. 2. When you buy, plan to hold.
Warren Buffett is worth $50 billion,
and he still lives in the home he
bought 52 years ago - for $31,500.
Many Americans got caught in the
housing crash when they took on
mortgages they could only sustain
for a short period of time, then
weren't able to refinance as expected. Buffett's stock
investing advice has long been to avoid making
investments you can't hold for at least 10 years.
Likewise, buying a home should be done with a long-term
plan to avoid catastrophe when home values fluctuate in
the short term.

5. 3. Mortgages should have fixed, affordable payments.
In his shareholder letter, Buffett
points out that a housing company
he holds has done vastly better than
other real estate and mortgage
industry players and attributes their
success to the fact that "our approach
was simply to get a meaningful down-
payment and gear fixed monthly payments to a sensible
percentage of income." Buffett believes these two
mortgage musts are the key to avoiding
foreclosure, opining that "[i]f home buyers throughout
the country had behaved like our buyers, America would
not have had the crisis that it did. . .. This policy kept [the
company] solvent and also kept buyers in their homes."

6. Who do you think is right? Suze or Warren?

7. Randy Bett
Investment Realtor/Author/Investor
Real Estate Professionals Inc.
Better Group Real Estate
202-5403 Crowchild Trail NW
Calgary, AB T3B 4Z1
Phone:403-774-7464 Ext:1
Fax:403-208-0082
Toll Free fax:888-711-6801

8. Randy Bett
www.BetterGroupRealEstate.ca