Advice: Buy MORE Gold/Silver or hedge with Real Estate?

Your choice is, of course, your own, but one thing that always occurs to me is that PMs are maintenance free.  Having lived in student apts back in the day and later owning rental property, I can say without equivocation that I hate being responsible for apt maintenance, particularly when the renters don't care as much for your property as you do.  If you don't mind calls in the middle of the night, or repair jobs on weekends when you would rather be doing something else, then go for it.  I know a lot of people who have made a lot of money with the kind of rentals you suggest.  I'm not one of them, and that's just fine with me.

Doug

I like to beat dead horses, what I'm driving at here is 54% employment these kids are going to get smart fast and not take on debt.  Living in dad's basement with debt is worse than living in mom's basement without debt.

How much difficulty are borrowers having paying back their debts? Of the 37 million borrowers who have outstanding student loan balances as of third-quarter 2011, 14.4 percent, or about 5.4 million borrowers, have at least one past due student loan account.~Source

Tommy,  

Have you looked at how landlords have fared in other countries (Germany, Argentina, Zimbabwe, etc.) when experiencing a currency crisis?   I am currently reading the book When Money Dies  to try to understand what people experienced during the Weimar Republic's fiat disaster.  It is my impression that at some point landlords won't be able get paid what they want for rent... increasing unemployment and rising prices make me wary to be a landlord.  I know renters that have recently agreed to "stay another year" as a renter if the landlord dropped the price for them, which he did.

If you do go into this business, in addition to what others have offered, brush up on the eviction laws in your area, how much notice to give a tenant if they are deliquent on the rent, court costs to file, police costs for actual evictions, etc.  Cost to repair damage left behing by the evicted tenants.  My family had many rentals as a business and had some crazy stories about this.  It didn't happen often, but it did happen!

Also, how is the market in your area... are housing prices stable, rising, or falling?  What about rents?  How have rentals costs been over the past few years?   Is rental demand increasing or decreasing? 

Would some arable land be another option for real estate investing? A small lot that wouldn't cause you to be debt ridden... to hold, farm, or sell later? Or starting a CSA (Community Supported Agriculture) on some productive property?

I wish all the best in whatever you choose!

Boy, that's a tough one. There are some tremendous opportunities to buy short sales and then sell them back to the previous owners who are on the verge of jingle mail. .Many of these poor souls are ready to swim away from houses that aren`t just under water, but scraping the sludge at the bottom.

Say they paid 250,000 for a house in 2005 with a minimum down payment and it's only worth 80,000 today.. The bank isn`t going to renegotiate the principal with them. Bank will deal with you and your partners if you have cash. You buy it for 80.000 and sell it back to the owners for 120,000, at 10%. Everybody`s happy, but you need cash!

Taking on debt in hopes that renters will magically appear in great numbers, is optimistic, but more likely you are going to see schemes like I`ve outlined above take the piss out of the rental market. Being a landlord is hell in the residential market.