Author: Justin Weinger

How To Make Money Off Small Town Home Investments

The objective of investments is to have a place to park some of your money, minimize your exposure, and make more money over time. In order to succeed at investing, you need to understand that it is part risk and part lucky planning. Risk is always associated with investing and is often the first significant barrier people have in deciding whether to get involved with investments or not.

But with proper research and planning, you can minimize the potential for catastrophic losses before you even invest a dime. People are often fearful of investing because they don’t understand the foundations and risks that can affect investment opportunities in the first place. One of the things people do is inflate their understanding of investments which leads to added risk, take on too many investments, which leads to added exposure, or act out of fear due to momentary market fluctuations.

So what is a person to do? First, you can hire a financial expert to help guide you. Then, you can take on risks by investing without really understanding the values and fluctuations of the market, or you can look for more long-term, more secure investment opportunities such as investing in real estate. No doubt, one of the safer, long-term strategies for investment is to buy real estate.

Types Of Income Opportunities In Real Estate

In order to make money in real estate, there are three primary ways.

  • Purchase to Sell: With a purchase to sell, you’re buying the property to sell whether you invest money for renovations or sell as-is. The benefit of purchasing a home to sell is that you can make some decent cash, especially in a seller’s market. The downside is that you can take a significant capital gains tax by doing so.
  • Purchase and Hold: With a buy and hold strategy, purchasers have a few different options. One is to buy the home, live in it, and sell it much later in time as you pay down the mortgage and increase equity. The second option is to buy the property with the intent to make rental income over time. The risk here is if you have any layovers between renters, something significant happens that causes loss of revenue, or you can’t charge enough rent to cover your mortgage.
  • Real Estate Investment Trusts: With a Real Estate Investment Trust, or REIT, you join forces with several other investors to purchase Real Estate. The bonus of this strategy is you can buy more Real Estate than you might as an individual and lower your risk along the way. The negative is that you only own a small share of the investment rather than entirely making your profits smaller.

As an individual looking to make money off small townhome investments, a good strategy may be the buy and hold method but with a tiny change. For example, instead of buying a single-detached home and renting it out, consider buying condos or apartments and renting those out instead.

The benefits of buying a condo or apartment versus a home are that the costs are typically lower. In addition, you have the Homeowners Association that will take on some of the day-to-day maintenance of the property outside the condo. As an entry to rental ownership, these may be an excellent first step to consider.

However, if buying to hold and rent out your property is the goal, then finding a centrally located place is ideal. Other considerations are that it has an excellent rental occupancy rate, access to major industries, and is affordable enough that you can charge more in rents than your mortgage are all factors to look for in your search.

For detached, single-family homes, you can look to the suburbs of major metropolitan areas that offer some of the keys we discussed earlier. For example, houses for sale in Moreno Valley provide you with an area of population growth outside of a central metropolitan area (Los Angeles) and stable occupancy rates.

By considering purchasing a rental property in a suburb surrounded by a large population density, such as Moreno Valley, you’re going to have increased demand for rental units while having lower inventory available, further driving the rental market upward and making you more income over time.

How to Track Money When You’re a Busy Family

When all your family members are busy managing their own lives, it can be hard to keep track of the money coming in and going out. This can create a lot of stress for you as the head of the household.

Here are some of the best ways to manage your family’s budget, as well tips on how to stay out of debt:

Step 1: Get Organized With A Budget Planner

With a budget planner, it’s easy to keep track of your spending and set goals for the future. You can use an app, a spreadsheet, or even a notebook to create a budget. Budget planners can help with financial security. Whether you are looking for ways to lower your monthly expenses or saving up for that big purchase, a budget planner will help you stay on track. Initially, your budget will not be accurate because of many variable expenses, but after a few months, your ability to predict expenses based on averaging your costs will improve.

Some tips for saving money with a budget planner include:

* Saving on groceries by using coupons and store sales.

* Selling used clothes, books, and toys online and then using the proceeds to buy other items.

* Planning out your meals beforehand, so you only buy what you need when going to the supermarket.

Step 2: Designate a Money Manager in the Family

Money management is vital for all members of the family. One way to make it easier to manage all everyday household expenses is to have a family budget managed by one of the parents. This “money manager” will then collect money from the earning members of the family and spend it on household expenses.

Step 3: Automate Your Savings and Investing

Amassing savings is not always the easiest thing to do, but it will force you to think twice about everything you buy, especially if you tend to use credit cards to spend more than you earn. Automation can be used to make saving money easier.  You can use an app that will automatically put away a set amount of money each month. The app will take care of all the complicated calculations for you.

Step 4: Make Better Decisions For Your Finances

To make better decisions for your finances, it is crucial to be aware of the pros and cons of each financial decision. There are many ways to do this, but one way would be to start with the most expensive option and work your way down until you find something that is most sensible. This method considers not only what you want in a specific financial decision but also how much money you have and what decisions will be the most beneficial in the future.

Step 5: Check Your Credit Score Regularly To Keep It In Good Condition.

It’s easy to keep an eye on your credit score. There are many ways to do this, such as with an app or by logging onto the website for your credit card company. To ensure that you have a good credit score, make sure that you always pay off your credit card balance, avoid maxing out the card, and make sure that you do not spend more than 20% of the limit on any one card.

Summary

Although it might seem a little awkward in the beginning to use a budget planner, designate a family money manager, and automate savings and investments, you will soon get into the habit of doing it.

These three habits will then push you to start making better financial decisions based on the consequences you will experience in the future and become more vigilant about your credit score.

Discover How Developing Good Habits Will Build Wealth

There are two basic types of personal finance habits – wealth building and poor spending—more than likely, you already know which type of person that you are. You’re either the one making financial decisions that brings you closer to building wealth or all of your decisions keep you from building wealth.

By understanding which one you are will allow you the ability to improve.

But first, it’s important that you understand financial freedom doesn’t necessarily mean wealth. If you’re like most people, you want to have financial freedom, but they lack the necessary habits to obtain this. Being financially free means that you have control over your finances rather than your finances controlling you. This results in less stress, better spending habits, increased savings potentials, better credit score, and proven financial decisions that lead to more money in your retirement, college funds, and savings account.

One of the most challenging aspects of wealth-building is developing the necessary habits to save, properly invest, and build good credit. You need to have discipline and consistency so that you don’t make unnecessary purchases that you cannot afford to pull from savings, making it impossible to save and creating debt. Thankfully, you can begin implementing some things that allow you to set up and forget about when it comes to saving and growing your retirement fund.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to determine good financial advice from lousy advice making it nearly impossible to know if what you’re doing or not doing is right or wrong when it comes to financial freedom. Here are some of the best financial habits to build your net worth. You should begin adapting to these simple-to-follow methods today as they will help you to manage your money better, build wealth, and create financial freedom.

Begin Setting Financial Goals
Financial goals are a necessary step to the process. Choosing your goal can be as simple as building an emergency fund, saving for a downpayment on the house, or building a 5 million dollar retirement fund. Having an exact number that you want to save makes achieving this goal much more manageable. Regardless of what you choose, you’ll want to do a few important things, and that is to define your goal with a timeline and be realistic clearly. Once you have this figured out, you should create short-term goals that will keep you on track and motivated.

Create Your Budget And Live By It
Learning to budget and live by that budget is one of the most important habits you can adopt. And the sooner you do, the better off your life will be because it will help you make better financial decisions, obtain and crush every financial goal and build wealth that you would never be able to achieve otherwise.

There’s power in budgeting and if you want to increase your net worth, then getting strict with a budget is the number one way to obtain it. It’s essential that you create a budget, track your expenses and constantly stay focused on your financial goals.

Creating your budget begins with how much money you have coming in, tracking your spending, and setting goals.

Save For The Things That You Want
This is a must and the one that is often neglected the most. By saving for the things, you want to purchase; you’ll avoid debt and reduce financial stress. Far too many people buy using a credit card and make purchases on a whim. This type of spending habit will undoubtedly lead to financial problems somewhere down the line.

While building credit is essential and can quickly be done with a credit builder card,  it doesn’t mean that you should make purchases that you don’t have the money to pay for. If there is something that you want to purchase, a new suit, watch, or anything else, it’s essential that you begin saving money without taking away from financial goals that you have already set in place.

Following these simple things will keep you out of debt, and aid in building wealth that will be beneficial for now and for your retirement. Becoming financially free isn’t something that happens on its own; it’s something that you need to make happen.