We started out with $16,000. Thankfully Julie was a saver. When she graduated from University and started working as a sales rep she continued to live like a student. And, she put every extra penny she had into paying down her student loan. When that was paid off, she proceeded to save the extra money. Her plan was to go back to school for her MBA so she wanted to have as much cash in the bank as possible to pay for school.

When we met, I had a property with my Mom that we'd purchased years before, but didn't have much else. After years and years of being a student, I wanted to enjoy the money I was making. I drove a nice new financed Volkswagen and enjoyed my nights out in Victoria. I didn't spend money excessively, but I was carrying credit card debt and didn't have savings. Julie shared her visions of "retirement at 35" with me, and I got excited.

It didn't happen overnight, but it only took a few months to change my situation. I quickly paid off my credit card debt, and started putting a few hundread dollars away each month in savings. And, we started shopping for our first investment property.

Our first investment was a lot easier to do thanks to Julie's school savings. But, you don't need money to buy your first property.

I will get into the details in a bit, but as far as we're concerned, there are only 3 ways you should consider coming up with a down payment on a property, but the good news is that only one of them requires that you have money saved:

1. Your own savings (cash out stocks, GIC's, and even retirement savings in some cases)

2. Equity in your home

3. A partner with cash.

Here's the hard reality that you won't like to hear though. Finding a partner will be next to impossible if your own finances are ugly. If you have no experience investing in real estate, you are deep in debt and you are trying to get rich on my money, what exactly is in it for me, as your potential partner? It just sounds risky to me.

But, if you come to me and say "Dave, I have found this property that I think is a great investment. I don't have any money because when I graduated from University two years ago, I had $30,000 in student loans. I only have $5,000 left to pay off, but I really want to get started real estate investing and I think this deal will be great," I will be more interested in working with you.

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