Crowd Source Your Down Payment

I’ve tried to write this post so many times that my head hurts.  I’m just going to keep it really simple this time.  If you’re not buying a house using a bank mortgage, you can “Crowd Source” all or part of your down payment.  That means that you sign up on a site like Prosper.com or…
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Tuition

2014 didn’t cause me to rethink why I invest in real estate but it did give me a healthy wake-up call regarding risk and leverage.  Higher leverage is the way to achieve higher returns on any producing investment but with it comes higher risk.  It was a year of dealing with a tenant going through…
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Real Estate: Building a System vs. Buying a Job

Why do you buy or desire to buy rental properties?  If you have never asked yourself this question, please take a minute to do so now.  Why?  Well because the answer to this question should determine how you go about the process of acquiring properties and building your business. As I see it there are…
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Cash Flow vs. Net Income

If you have more than one single rental property, I would recommend starting to treat your rentals as a business.  Get a separate checking account, register an LLC, and learn double-entry bookkeeping.  I use Quickbooks Online for my accounting and Quickbooks actually makes it easy to do double-entry bookkeeping without you even realizing it (except for…
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Targeting Cash Flow in Rental Properties

Real estate investing is all about cash flow.  Cash flow.  Cash flow.  You’ve heard it so many times that it almost becomes annoying.  Even people that have never even considered buying a rental property will ask you if your properties cash flow (yes, it’s a noun and a verb).  Now, while I go against the…
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