Business Reviews

Archive for the ‘Investing’ Category

The People’s Program at thepeoplesprogram.com is an illegal cash gifting program. If you’re researching them or involved in it, this is probably not what you want to hear, but I’ll prove it to you during this review.

The main page in warm and fuzzy, they go on in every way about how it’s not a business, nobody makes or earns money, and lots of pictures of families with kids. It’s not until you enter the password and see the rest that they Read the rest of this entry »

He claims it's worth a billion pounds. You can stop laughing now...

Neil Lasher makes a book he gives away free on how to buy someone’s business to profit from it. It’s got a lot of information, and some affiliate links at the end for his amazon.com account. They’re pretty good picks for books on the subject so I’m not alarmed they’re the typical affiliate stuff. These are good choices to learn the business.
The thing I take issue with is Read the rest of this entry »

UFirst United First Financial is one of the programs out there claiming to let you pay off a mortgage in half to a third the time without costing anymore or higher payments.

The way it works is this: You put all your cash into the mortgage, and use a home equity line of credit to pay bills from the checkbook or credit card linked to that account. The theory is that having your available cash on the mortgage balance reduces interest, which is true. However, they don’t seem to address that home equity accounts often have a lot of fees when you use them, also they will charge interest (and usually a lot higher than your main mortgage) for money you barrow from it to pay bills. Also if you don’t have a HELOC there’s fees to get one, as well as credit requirements.

How doing this, especially for people living paycheck to paycheck and don’t have enough money in savings to really make a difference is going to help is beyond me. You see, if your money in the bank is earning 5 percent anyway, and the interest on your home loan is tax deductible, the difference could be just a few basis points here by the time you take the tax break into account.

Now, I’ve never used this system, but if the math added up, why wouldn’t this be a premier mortgage product? Armies of real estate agents would be lining up to help them sell houses, the financial institutions would be ablaze writing these kind of mortgages (yes they get less interest if it works, but they get a lot more business). Can you imagine those Ditech.com style ads saying you can get a loan product that you’ll be able to pay off in half the time?

Why are they and TJ Marr with his living free and clear programs the only two places I could find, and why aren’t they on MSNBC,  Bloomberg, or Oprah? I can’t even find a single post from a person who is using it. If you are going to try something like this, I would take it to a mortgage broker and buy them lunch if you have to in order to get a reality check.

Also, what happens if you’re home equity line of credit gets frozen if your house goes down in value? It sounds too good to be true to me, and if it does live up to their claims, the financial world would be on fire over it, but they are not.

I have to say that after several hours of researching the Living Free and Clear system by TJ Marr, I couldn’t find a single person who has used it on any message board or newsgroup.

The only posts praising it to the skies were affiliates selling it. A couple of people in the loan business said they were curious but cautious, and one person ordered it, then couldn’t get a refund.

The claim TJ Marr makes is that you can pay off a mortgage in about 1/3 the time it would normally take by putting all cash into the loan balance, and then paying bill from a home equity line of credit.

Now, they don’t tell all the details, since they want you to buy the system, but you have to ask a couple of questions here. First off, if this method works, why isn’t it widespread knowledge? He claims you don’t have to spend any more money each month, and making interest work for you instead of against you this way lets a person pay down their balance much quicker.

I’m no financial expert, but the math here just doesn’t add up. Home equity loans charge interest, and often plenty of fees for accessing the account. Also, if your cash is in the mortgage, then your not paying interest on it, but that interest is tax deductible, and if it’s normally in a checking account getting five percent anyway, I don’t see where the savings comes from. The real danger is if your house goes down in value and they freeze the HELOC like Countrywide did last summer to over 100,000 people in a month, then you can be in deep trouble.
The only person I saw on all the message boards who ordered it, bought it for $99, then they charged him an additional $900, and he claims to have returned it three weeks later and they wouldn’t give him a refund. Also, they claim a 30 day refund policy, and a 12 month refund policy if you can prove that mathematically it doesn’t work.

After studying and researching these claims, along with their charge you $99 then another $900 later policy, this just doesn’t add up. This is the only person in the world who knows how to pay a mortgage in 1/3 the time it takes, with no additional money?

I’m sorry but I just won’t be going for this one. It’s been available for a couple of years and if it worked as advertised. it would be on Oprah, it would have sent shock waves throughout the country with homeowners.

The only people praising TJ Marr’s Living Free and Clear course are the affiliates who want you to buy it. I do wish I could have found a single person on the entire Internet who’s used it and been successful, but I haven’t.

Gurubusters.com is a copycat review site run by Gary Jezorski (many posters doubt “Dani Mendez” exists because if you opt in to their form, Gary is who you’ll be getting solicitations from. There is no mention of her anywhere on the Internet at all, it’s likely clipart and a fictitious name.

There are many unhappy posts about this place. One said she got a data entry solicitation, another woman lost $4,000 when the DXGold type company Mininvestment went out of business (Mininvestment.com just goes to a portal, they are long gone).

The site hides all information behind a proxy, yet claims to “expose” gurus and so on. They of course are just a thinly veiled promotional site for Gary Jezorski’s site at currencyexchangeprofits.com which sells an e-currency trading program with sales hype that borders on the hysterical.

Now, there’s nothing wrong with a commercial site, except that he represents himself as a “guru buster” when there’s a clear conflict of interest that he’s not mentioning. If a person runs a commerical site, fine, but don’t represent yourself as a moral authority and without disclosing it, use it to promote only your products. Also, if you submit a review, it says in the terms of service you give them explicit permission to edit the reviews however they see fit, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in the posts there.

I have to make mention of currencyexchangeprofits.com which, if you get on their list, you’ll be sent a sales letter for the $299 course on e-currency trading (e-currency isn’t real money, it’s Internet money which isn’t backed by a bank any other security).

First off, this site has as much predatory sales copy as I’ve ever seen, anywhere. It claims there’s no risk (and do you’re homework, there’s plenty of risk) and you don’t even have to understand it to make guaranteed profits with 30 minutes a day.

Let me tell you, if that was the case he would hire an army of temps to do this instead of selling the information. This sales copy is playing on pure greed, I’ve seen it before and even a novice could spot it. When you hear things like “Go on a trip, send your kids to the best schools, buy a new sports car, or have all the free time you want” you know you’re about to get screwed.

Even the numbers make no sense, first it’s $299 for the course to learn it, then a $4,000 fee to get into trading (as quoted by a woman who did it with minivestment before they vanished and took her money with them). Even then he uses $200 as an example investment, at 1 percent daily return, which is $66.88 in 30 days. If 1 percent was actually attainable, don’t you think every hedge fund manager would be into this and you’d have heard about it on the financial channels? I need to take a deep breath and use bullet points for a moment, please excuse me.

- No investment is guaranteed to make money.
- No trading of anything is risk free.
- This isn’t real money, it’s e-currency and is not backed by any bank.
- If 365 percent annual returns were possible, you would have heard about it.

Hypocrisy really gets me upset, and to use gurubusters.com to claim to keep people from getting screwed, hide all information, then send people headlong into imaginary money investing with predatory sales copy and all the promises is unbelievable.