Archive for July, 2012
How to Add an Extra $1 Million to Your Retirement Plan
If you would like to add an extra $1 Million to your retirement plan, start today. Buy one investment property: a house, a duplex, a 4-plex, etc. Just start. Start with one. Next year add another one. Add another one on year three.
If you’re crazy like me, keep adding.
(I acquired 92 units because I have the greatest ever handymen, and I didn’t want them to find a new client. I wanted to keep them busy. They just kept renovating themselves out of a job as we added each new property…until we had/have almost no service requests. True story. My Mom finally asked me, “How many units are enough?” I told her I never thought of it like that, I was just trying to keep Allen and Andy busy!)
The more units you acquire, the easier it gets. You develop an “economy of scale” and your great helpers (handymen, landscapers, janitorial crew, bookkeeper, etc.) start to run like a watch. I know you don’t believe me about this, yet. But eventually you will. (You can always hire the management out if you don’t find the game as exciting as I do.)
Interest rates are at an all time low. Get out there, take a risk and add just one unit to your assets this year. Then rinse and repeat next year.
Read the full CNN Money article here.
Happy investing, and happy retirement!
“U.S. Housing is the Next Gold”
Dr. Steve Sjuggerud says that real assets are better than gold now. As real estate investors, we already know that. But now the cat is out of the bag! Read his blog post to get the scoop.
More Good News for Landlords
This great new info-graphic from our friends at The KCM Blog shows visually that landlords are getting special again.
100% of markets tracked saw an increase in rents this quarter.
As landlords, we go through periods where we don’t feel very special (the recent recessionary years come to mind).
And then we have periods when we feel very special…when rents are rising and units fill fast (and banks lend us money)!
I signed leases with highest-ever rents on 6 different properties in the past month – both homes and apartments.
There were feeding-frenzies with multiple applicants on each of those properties. The feeding-frenzies repeated even though I made pretty big rent increases on all the homes and apartments that turned over.
Several times I had to take the ads down within 24-48 hours of posting to get the phone to quit ringing.
I figured the rents must be too low.
Each time the feeding-frenzie happened, I re-researched the market and raised the rents again.
This is a great problem 🙂