Real Estate

Let me ask you a question: how long does it take you to pick out your clothes in the morning?

I bet it takes longer than most people will spend doing the math on their next real estate investments.  I just don’t get it. People think the best deals are done on “intuition” and just buy something because itfeels right.  

Ugh. Please people! 

I’ve said it before numerous times: If you don’t have the right math going into a deal, you’ll never get the right profit coming out of it. (Tweet This!)  That deal you thought was incredible will turn out to be a thorn in your side for years to come and you’ll join the ranks of the millions who have “tried” real estate only to fail.

This is why I harp so often on getting a firm understanding of the math when buying an investment property.

I don’t care if you are buying your first or 100th property –  you need to understand and do the math.

That is my ultimate goal with this post: to help you learn to analyze a real estate deal so you can make the best investment possible.

Below I’m going to walk you through the math I use to analyze a rental property, step by step. Please, if there is one post this year you read carefully and don’t skim: let it be this post!

(Oh yeah – hey you! To accompany this blog post, I created a free PDF poster you can download right now and print out. It’s called “The 10 Biggest Mistakes Investors Make When Analyzing Rental Properties” and will help you avoid the mistakes that so many investors make when analyzing deals. Don’t buy a bad deal! Avoid these 10 mistakes and get a great investment property! To get the PDF, just click the link below:)

The Ultimate Guide to Analyzing Rental Properties – read at BiggerPockets

P.S. looking for hard money loans in California? Be sure to check out my friends over at northcoastfinancialinc.com. They have very competitive rates, can fund within a week and specialize in fix and flip loans and other hard money loans.

Sometimes I do stupid things.

I can’t blame it on anyone else… it’s just me. Sometimes I’m just an idiot.

• I say the wrong thing at the wrong time and look foolish.
• I buy something awesome and expensive… and never use it (cough… my iPad.)
• I forget to call my family on their birthday.

Dumb, I know.

However, most of these things are fairly mild compared to the idiotic things I’ve done as a real estate investor. The following list may seem like I’m poking fun at others but, in reality, this is a reflection on the idiotic things I’ve done in my investing career.

But I want better for you.

I don’t want you to look like an idiot. I want you to succeed and live the life you’ve always dreamed, so allow me to share with you my best tips for investing in real estate without looking like an idiot.

10 Rules for Investing in Real Estate Without Looking Like an Idiot

1.) Do Your Homework

One of the best ways to look like an idiot when investing in real estate is to jump in before you know what you are doing. You saw it on TV, you read it in a blog post, and suddenly you think you are the next Donald Trump and… well, you end up looking like Rosanne Singing the National Anthem.

It’s not pretty.

(click to continue reading on BiggerPockets)

P.S. looking for hard money loans in California? Be sure to check out my friends over at northcoastfinancialinc.com. They have very competitive rates, can fund within a week and specialize in fix and flip loans and other hard money loans.

When I was a kid, Duck Tales was one of my favorite TV shows.

Each day after school I’d watch the adventures of Huey, Dewey, and Louie as they fought off the Beagle Boys who wanted good ‘ol Scrooge McDuck’s hard earned money. They always managed the thwart the efforts of the villains and save Scrooge’s money and, as a reward to himself, Scrooge McDuck and the three nephews would take a swim in his vault of money. Yes, you remember. They would jump of the diving board head first into mountains of gold coins. As a kid, nothing seemed more exciting than that.

So how did Scrooge get so much money? To use Scrooge’s own words, by being “smarter than the smarties, and tougher than the toughies.”

In other words, scrooge was good at business. He was smarter than the rest.

Yes, this is only a cartoon, but I think there is a valuable lesson to be learned here. If you want to succeed and swim in your own river of cash, you need to be smarter than the rest. I believe the best way to do this is through a solid grasp on the numbers.

Math is not most people’s favorite subject in school, but it might be the most important for a real estate investor. Understanding how your business makes money is imperative in helping it make more. Therefore, today I want to focus on one of the most important aspects of real estate math: Cash Flow.

In layman’s terms, cash flow is the amount of income left in your business after all the bills have been paid; this amount is often expressed as a monthly dollar amount. In the real estate rental business, cash flow is the income lefts after paying out expenses such as the mortgage, taxes, insurance, vacancies, repairs, capital expenditures, utilities, and any other expenses that affect the property.

How to Calculate Cash Flow

(Click to read on BiggerPockets…)

P.S. looking for hard money loans in California? Be sure to check out my friends over at northcoastfinancialinc.com. They have very competitive rates, can fund within a week and specialize in fix and flip loans and other hard money loans.

I was cruising around the BiggerPockets Forums today and I stumbled upon a thread started by Karen M. titled “Tell Me What You Hate About Landlording.”

I thought it was a fascinating discussion – to see what some people consider the worst or best parts about Landlording. After all, we landlords tend to get into this “real estate investing is awesome!” mentality (bloggers, like me, are most guilty of that!) and love to talk about the good stuff… and often times the hard stuff gets ignored because no one likes a complainer.
Well… I’m going to do some complaining!

It’s my hope that this post can serve dual purposes:

a.) Help others get a realistic vision of what landlording may look like and
b.) Hopefully generate some incredible discussion in the comments.

Let me preface this article with this:  I already know about 20 people are going to put a comment below that says “this is why I use property management.” I agree – many of these problems (not all, but some of them) would not affect me if I had a property management. However, any honest real estate investor who uses property management could easily come up with a list of their own of 12 things they hate about investing in real estate. Arguing property management vs. self management is a topic for another day. The fact is: I am a landlord.

Finally, if you are reading this, I would LOVE if you do me a favor and comment at the bottom of this post, offering me (and everyone else reading) some advice to help overcome some of these issues.  Also, let me know what you hate the most about Landlording. I look forward to seeing what you have to say!

Without further suspense, I give you: 10 things that I absolutely HATE about landlording.

1.) Never Truly Taking a Break

(click to continue reading on BiggerPockets)

P.S. looking for hard money loans in California? Be sure to check out my friends over at northcoastfinancialinc.com. They have very competitive rates, can fund within a week and specialize in fix and flip loans and other hard money loans.

They started investing in real estate 30 years ago… with so much hope for their future.

A rental house here, a duplex there… and soon they had a rental portfolio anyone would be proud of. They actively managed their properties and worked to make sure they were operating at peak efficiency.  Several years ago both the husband and wife retired from their day jobs and eased into retirement – funded by their rental income and social security.

This year they are filing bankruptcy and losing a majority of their properties to foreclosure.

This is not some made-up example… this is the story of one of my best friend’s parents, and they are not alone.  In fact, 95% of the properties I’ve purchased have been foreclosures purchased from landlords who have failed and lost their properties in a foreclosure. Most of them, I would guess, will never again get into real estate investing.  They worked hard for years to build a financial future for themselves, only to see it come tragically crashing down around them – dashing any hopes for lasting wealth creation.

This begs the question: why? 

If real estate is as good of an investment as we all (on BiggerPockets) make it out to be… why do so many real estate investors fail?

Perhaps more importantly: how do I avoid this possibility in my own life?

This is the question that has been swimming around my mind for some time now. Each week on theBiggerPockets Podcast I ask our guest “what is it that sets apart successful investors from those who fail?”  I’m intrigued by this idea and scared that I may end up the same way. After all, as Mark Cuban famously said “everyone is a genius in a bull market.”  Is that what real estate is? Do some people simply get lucky, and others not so? What are some of the trends that lead to this failure… and what are some trends that can minimize this risk?

(Click to read on BiggerPockets…)

P.S. looking for hard money loans in California? Be sure to check out my friends over at northcoastfinancialinc.com. They have very competitive rates, can fund within a week and specialize in fix and flip loans and other hard money loans.