Scoring a Second Home Hits the Mainstream

For some reason I get quoted by writers in Men’s Health once or twice a year, in a random article about travel that’s squeezed in between a dozen on how to have six-pack abs and score more dates. (The latter usually includes such bullet-point sage wisdom as “Listen to what the woman is telling you instead of staring at her boobs in between checking your text messages.” OK, that’s not an actual quote, but it’s the general idea.) In the current issue there’s a one-page article called “Score a Second Home” and it would be a refreshingly good one even if it didn’t plug Make Your Travel Dollars Worth a Fortune so nicely.

I can’t endure the menshealth.com website for more than 30 seconds, but from what I could tell the article is not on line yet. The print mag is on every newsstand out there though, so flip to page 84 of the August “Special Lose Your Gut Issue.” There’s an oddball assortment of five places with bargain real estate in Honduras, the Dominican Republic, Belize, Bulgaria, and Saskatchewan in Canada. There are some actual prices for a few plots of land and rundowns on the attractions of each place under “Why Buy Here?” Here’s the lowdown: they’re all probably a better deal than where you live now.
There’s a section at the bottom on time-shares vs. fractionals, but here’s all you need to know: the second one is an iffy investment and the former one is not an investment at all. Buy something that’s all yours and pay a caretaker to look after it while you’re not there.