Shawn Forgaard

Shawn Forgaard, House Investor
You wanna know something... I don't think he'll come away from this "wiser". Hey, Shawn, you just pissed away $800K in stock options, what are you going to do next?

Repeat after me: the average person should not invest in real estate.


2008-05-11: California man losing nine homes in mortgage mess
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - A California man who has defaulted on nine homes and expects banks to foreclose on all of them, forcing him into bankruptcy, says he now considers it a mistake to have invested in the real estate market.

Shawn Forgaard, a 37-year-old software company project manager, bought one home for his family to live in and nine more as investments. He stands to lose all the investment houses in the mortgage meltdown but says he has come away wiser from the experience.

"Everyone stumbles. I'm not going to hide or run or live in denial, or with regrets," Forgaard told Reuters in an interview. "On the surface it looks like total devastation but it's just the opposite. I'm confident our lives will be much, much richer as a result."

Forgaard bought a house in Santa Cruz, about 60 miles (100 km) south of San Francisco, in 2000. Four years later, using $800,000 in stock options, he began snapping up investment properties, putting 10 percent to 40 percent down on negative amortization loans -- in which payments do not cover the interest so that a borrower's balance grows over time.

Experts say speculators like Forgaard, who count on real estate values to keep rising to pay off their debt, play a risky game and doubly so when they use neg-am loans.

"You are essentially betting the house on the strength of the housing market and if you're that leveraged in debt and the market goes down, you're going to lose your shirt," said Austin King, director of the community organizer ACORN's Financial Justice Center.

"To do it eight or nine times over is eight or nine times as foolish as just doing it once," he said.