JUST SAY ‘NO’
Reading this could save you thousands of pounds and let you sleep at night.
I was emailed by – I’ll call him John – the other day. Twenty years ago he and
his wife were sold a timeshare – an easy way to own a nice property in the sun
for one week of the year. The real purpose of timeshare though was to tie you in
for life to management and service charges which will grow and drain away your
money. John and Mary, struggling to meet the payments, have been trying to sell
it. Without a high-pressure, misleading sales pitch no-one will buy.
John wrote to me asking if he should take up an offer of an ‘armchair investment
opportunity’ buying a ‘luxury resort property’ in – wait for it – the Dominican
Republic. If he did then the cost of disposing of the timeshare would be taken
off his hands.
So John was seriously asking if he should invest in a property market he had not
researched, in a country he had never been to, with a language he could not
speak, and a legal system which he knew nothing about. ‘No’ I replied.
John was contacted because when he tried to sell his timeshare he immediately
went on to – let’s be kind – a ‘warm list’. That list was sold to other crooks
trying to part him from his money on the promise of relieving him of the problem
of the first con.
You might think that once someone has been conned out of some money they would
be more cautious when they are approached by another crook trying to get more.
Wrong. The criminal mind knows very well that the best list to start calling is
a list of those who have been fooled already. They use a more direct term – a
suckers’ list. Because once you have been fooled the crooks know that (a) you
can be, and (b) you may well be tempted by a scheme to recover or make back some
or all of the money you have already lost.
Once you have been conned out of money in a land investment you are more likely
to be open to the idea of making back some of the money you hoped to make by
investing in fine wine, or carbon trading, or sustainable forests, or cheap
American shares, or housing developments in – well almost any country in the
world.
So if someone calls you out of the blue, offering an ‘investment opportunity’ in
something you do not understand or in a foreign country and with the promise of
major returns please, please, please say ‘no’.
It could save you not just thousands of pounds but years of anxiety and
sleepless nights.
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