New here - introducing myself

Hello everyone!

Karen here. I just found out about Dean and his courses last week. I've watched the Rock Bottom Blueprint marketing videos, all of this week's live event videos and spent HOURS on YouTube catching up on the videos there. And I'm in August 2009 on Dean's video blog.

(I'm a video junkie, by the way. I just LOVE videos! If anything's taught on video and it's free, I've probably watched it. LOL)

AND I just got my Profit From Real Estate book today!

I've never done any RE deals in the past, other than my husband and I buying our own house almost 7 yrs ago, but I was working with an investor maybe 10 years ago while he was studying another real estate "guru."

I've wanted to invest in real estate for the last almost 20 years, and in our current situation, it pretty much seems like a necessity more than anything else.

52 yrs old; lost my job about six years ago due to a medical disability only two months after we made settlement on our house. I've been working from home online ever since trying to make something - anything work, to help pay the bills.

I have to say, from the first Rock Bottom Blueprint video, Dean just blows me away. Inspiring and I wish I had his energy! And the genuinely REAL people that are making this work are a tremendous inspiration.

I'm anxious to get started because of our current financial situation, which could be worse, but certainly is still too stressful.

Also, I told my husband I would LOVE to be able to invest in the Rock Bottom Blueprint. By the time I got to the last video I was hovering over "Add To Cart" knowing right well I had NO way of paying for it. So I bought the book instead.

While we're reading the book and getting all the right things in place so we're prepared, I have a question that maybe someone can point us in the right direction. (And if this is not the right place to ask, point me in the right direction, please. )

We bought our house six years ago this past March. We paid $150K for it, 100% financing, and at that time it appraised at almost $275K.

Today it's appraised at about $200K. The mortgage is current, but because our credit in the crapper due to unemployment, disability (we're both on permanent disability) and the economy, we can't get refinanced.

So I was wondering, are there ANY lenders today that would do a refinance to help us pull some cash out of our house even though we have crappy credit and no money for fees or closing? Or is that pretty much a pipe dream? We're not talking all of the equity; just maybe $20K or $25K, so half, if even that.

I feel like we have this asset but we've just not found a way to tap into it because in order to get some of our money out of this house, we have to already HAVE money. But if we had money, we wouldn't want to try to take out any equity.

So that's my rather lengthy introduction and my refinance question. Most of the articles and videos I've gone through so far discuss how to assign houses and buy houses to help other people avoid foreclosures.

Fortunately, we're nowhere near a foreclosure and we absolutely do not want to sell our own house, but we could really, really use some of the equity out of it to get us through and relieve some stress while we read more of the book and get something moving on making some deals; like a cushion just in case it takes us longer than 30 days to do one successfully.

Thanks a bunch!