Casey Serin - it is all over, his last house is in foreclosure.

The Casey Serin real estate saga is over. The last of his eight houses has been foreclosed. He is now officially out of the real estate business. However, Casey seems to attract problems like honey gathers flies. According to his most recent blog post, he has three recent addditions:

• His auto insurance was canceled due to non-payment.
• He owes 2 months of rent and utilities.
• He had his car trashed by some thieves, who took his car stereo.

Casey intends to take a well earned break from real estate and blogging. However, he remains the eternal optimist. As he puts it “there are many good opportunities on the horizon, including a possible job, but nothing is certain right now”.

Indeed, “nothing is certain”. This is why we all need to be careful when taking on debt. It took Casey just a few short months to accumulate a lifetime of debt. He will be dealing with consequences of the housing bubble for many years to come.

Here is a youtube clip where casey explains how he got into such a financial mess. The ethical aspect of Casey's behavior is already fully discussed on this website. All I want to say is that Casey has little understanding of net worth, interest rates or risk assessment. For Casey, money is a matter of cash flow; money comes in and money goes out. There is one particularly interesting moment in this video clip. Casey has just explained how he has made $30,000 on a quick flip. Someone asks him about taxes. Judging from Casey's reply, it is fairly obvious that he hasn't thought about it.

So, Casey has come and gone, and we don't need to think about him or his sorry plight anymore. Nevertheless, Casey does leave us with at least one disturbing question. How many other Casey-real-estate-investors are there out there, making the same dumb mistakes that he did? Let us hope that Casey was a one-off.