Why I took
the back road
Like a lot of people, I spent years looking for a way to build real passive income — something that could eventually replace a paycheck and fund the kind of retirement I actually wanted. I tried crypto. The volatility and risk never sat right with me — it felt more like gambling than investing. I invest in the stock market, and I still do — but something about it always felt abstract. Numbers on a screen, disconnected from anything real.
"I wanted something tangible. Something I could drive past. Something where I understood exactly how the money worked."
Real estate always made sense to me on that level. But conventional real estate investing — buy, rehab, rent, deal with tenants, deal with repairs — felt like a second job, not passive income. Then I came across the Contract for Deed strategy, and something clicked.
The idea is simple. Buy undervalued homes in the right markets. Sell them to buyers who want to own but can't access traditional financing. Collect monthly payments like a bank. The buyer handles the property — taxes, insurance, maintenance, repairs. Every leaky faucet, every broken furnace, every midnight emergency call goes to them, not us. We act like a bank. Banks don't fix toilets.
What makes this strategy genuinely different is the long game it plays. You build the portfolio using private capital over five years, pay your lenders back with interest, and then collect cash flow free and clear for the remaining 25 years of the contract. Most investors want returns tomorrow. This strategy is built for people who are willing to think further ahead.
I'm a CFO with nearly 20 years in accounting and finance. I look at numbers for a living. This strategy makes sense on paper and it makes sense in practice — I have two active performing deals proving it right now, and I'm just getting started.