Entries Tagged as 'investing'

Financial Freedom | John’s Burning Question

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Hi Nicola

Here’s my burning question…..I am a man. 50 years old. Anyway, I would like to ask for your advice regarding my route to the wealth highway.

My financial position is thus. Home owner with no mortgage. Our home is worth around £155,000 in today’s market. My wife owns a 1 bedroom house with her sister a 50/50 share mortgage  around £70,000 and valued at say £90,000. The property is let and only just pays for itself.

My wife and I both work with approx take home pay per month of £2250. I require around £100 a week to live on and my wife requires all of her income to live, so I can save around £750 per month.

I have a credit card of around £2000, savings of £3000 and my wife has a loan of £3000. I hate my job and would love to be free of it.

My interest is web design and am becoming quite good. Hopefully this is where I can shine but I need more free time for this to happen. I am knackered at the end of the day.

I realise that my wife and I are in a good position regarding our own home and we could maybe do something with the equity, I don’t know.

What would you do, Nicola?

Hi there John…congratulations on being our first “Ask Nicola” burning questioner! And what a lovely one to start with……the quick answer is that you are financially free already, you just don’t know it!

I’m going to mainly deal with your own situation here as your wife and you seem to keep your finances quite seperate…is that right?  Do come back to me if you wanted a response bases on your joint finances….

You say that you would like to do more web design, and with some good marketing online, and networking locally, and I know that you could make a very good living at this.  Local business people are AT LAST waking up to the power of the web in generating leads for their business, and how efficient and cheap that can be compared with the traditional methods, like advertising.  They are happy to pay £500 - £1000 for a blog type site (great for SEO), and around £2000 - £3000 for a blog type site, with ecommerce / mailiing list capabilities.

You could educate yourself about internet marketing, including traffic generation, social networking and web 2.0, as well as web design (our about to be relaunched Internet Marketing Home Study System will soon be available via our very affordable Silver membership) and then you would REALLY be in demand.  I would envisage that, within a year, you would be outsourcing most of the work!

However, the issue seems to be time and energy, as your day job takes both.  Have you considered taking some of the equity in your house, and investing it in your new business, using it to

a) pay yourself a salary of £500 a month (£100 per week x 52 divided by 12)

b) pay for some teaching to bring your internet marketing / seo skills up to scratch - Silver would cover that

c) pay for a year’s worth of mentoring - our Money Gym Gold programme would be ideal for this and I would suggest you have a look at our coaches, and see which one you think would best be able to hold your hand through the year, to set up and build your business.

I would think pulling out £20,000 would not only cover the expenses as above, but also pay the payments on the money you would be borrowing so your outgoings would not go up at all.  If you apply before you hand your notice in, you should have no trouble getting a mortgage of 12% loan to value.

Your other alternative - if you don’t want to use your equity, is to use your £750 a month savings, to build a “Freedom Fund” to cover your first year in business, and in Money Gym Silver membership, we give you a blueprint on how to do that, step by step.

HOWEVER, if I were you, I would be pulling out all the equity available, and as well as investing in my new business, as above, I would be buying as many one bedroom buy to let flats (existing housing stock NOT new builds) as humanly possible.

This would ensure that you never had to work again, if you didn’t want to!  You could keep leveraging the growth in your property portfolio, again and again, tax free, to grow your portfolio further and to live off.

Again, this is something our experienced property investing Money Gym coaches could hold your hand through, via the Money Gym Gold programme as they are all very sound on this topic!!

Now, you know what you can do (and what I would do) the only question is “what’s going to stop you doing it?”

Keep in touch John and let me know how you get on?

Warm regards

Nicola


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Ask Nicola

This is the page where you can ask us your most burning Wealth Creation questions - about any of the Lanes of The Wealth Highway.

  • Property
  • Internet
  • Business
  • The Stockmarket

We particularly welcome questions from women, and want to assure you that there are NO stupid questions - we all had to start somewhere with learning about making money and clever investing.

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Burning question about wealth creation?

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Beat Credit Crunch - Sell Your Home!

Bet you never thought you would hear that advice about beating the credit crunch from us eh?

I was moodling around Google Trends today, looking at the interesting key words and phrases thrown up around the phrase “credit crunch” and I came across something - by a “So-Called EXPERT” - that absolutely incensed me. Have a read below and then carry on to hear my thoughts on the subject……!!

(This article is was featured on the Money Week website and was taken from “Merryn Somerset Webb’s free weekly personal finance email, Money Sense)

Merryn says: We’ve heard that 41% of people paid for some part of Christmas on their credit cards; that more people than ever before will go bankrupt this year; that repossessions are likely to keep rising all year; that mortgage rates are going to keep going up even as base rates fall; and that the average person only has enough cash to last 12 short days should they leave their jobs.

Hot on the heels of this has come a plethora of articles telling us what to do about it. Anyone who doesn’t know how to consolidate their loans, find an interest free credit card, cut their utility payments, create a budget spreadsheet (you can download one here) and get a cheaper mortgage by now clearly hasn’t been listening to the personal finance experts properly or spending enough time on the Moneyweek website.

But reading – and writing - all these money makeover articles this month (see also: How to give yourself a money makeover), I’ve been beginning to wonder if for many people the best way to survive the credit crunch and free up a lot of cash in a hurry might be to stop bothering with financial micro managing, dump their mortgages altogether and rent somewhere to live instead.

Why it makes sense to rent, not buy.

Selling to rent (STR as it is now known) has made some financial sense for some years now in cash flow terms – i.e. rents have been generally cheaper than mortgage payments on most properties. But now that the chances of making a capital gain on owning a house (the only reason to have bought over the last 3 years) look pretty low, it seems to make more sense than ever.

READ MORE HERE >>> (If you can bear to…..)

Right then, deep breaths all round!

Any Money Gym client will be spinning on their mouses (mice? meece?) right along with me because we all know something that the majority of the population does not seem to know….or believe……or worse……they seem to forget in times of TEMPORARY crisis like these….

Property doubles in value every 7-10 years in the UK on average, and it’s quicker in the South East. Even taking dips in growth (because that is what this is, a dip in growth).

The GOVERNMENT for heaven’s sake, have recently upgraded their estimates of ANNUAL GROWTH of property in the UK, for the next ten years, from 5.5% per annum to 8.5% per annum. And that’s the whole of the UK. The South-East historically has risen at around 14% over the last 50-60 years.

So, when your average family home is worth around £240,000, and the family who lives in it is set to make another £240,000 over the next ten years, without having to work for it, or even pay tax on it……..

HOW CAN IT POSSIBLY MAKE SENSE TO SELL IT?

How else could they make that money? That’s £24,000 a year…..more than many people make per annum in their JOBS.

Sorry, I’m shouting I know, but I’m bloody furious!! If I had my way, old Merryn would be taken outside and shot at dawn. With a paintball gun obviously, but publically and with dayglo paint balls that HURT a bit. While wearing a sign that says “STUPID ALERT: DON’t BELIEVE A WORD I SAY”

Even if this fictitious family have to borrow some money to keep up the mortgage payments or GOD FORBID, GET A SECOND OR THIRD JOB to keep up with their payments, surely that’s got to be worth doing?

My business partner Judith Morgan gave up two properties in London in the early 90’s because it was that, or let her business go down the tubes. She subsequently sold the business for well over six figures, but now she says she should have kept the properties, and DONE EVERYTHING in her power to do so, because they would be worth MILLIONS to her now. And have taken a lot less work!!

Read Judith’s story here - and she’s an accountant, so she knows.

Unlike Merryn somerset Webb, MoneyWeek editor who doesn’t know, to the point of being dangerous.

Her biography reads thusly:

Merryn was a senior scholar at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where she gained a first class degree in History & Economics. She then became a Daiwa scholar and spent a year studying Japanese at London University. In 1992 Merryn moved to Japan to continue her Japanese studies and to produce business programmes for NHK, Japan’s public TV station. In 1993 she became an institutional broker for SBC Warburg, where she stayed for 5 years. Returning to the UK in 1998, Merryn became a financial writer for The Week. Two years later, in 2000, MoneyWeek was launched and Merryn took the job of editor.

She writes a FREE weekly personal finance email called Money Sense and has recently published a book on personal finance for women, Love is Not Enough: The Smart Woman’s Guide to Making (and Keeping) Money (HarperPress, 2007).

Note: Nowhere does it say she’s a professional property investor. Oooooh, were those all JOBS she has had? Methinks they are. High paid jobs, but jobs nonetheless.

Money Gym’ers……….avoid this woman like the plague! In her articles credits she lists one article called “Your house is not your pension” - I have read it and I tell you now, you should not.

In the third paragraph, she says “But if your house isn’t your pension, what is? Personally, I think it is a nice savings account backed up by a SIPP (Self Invested Personal Pension) into which you put a variety of low cost exchange traded funds which you then hold for 20 years”.

Hahahahahhahahahahahahh - the sound of hysterical yet still FURIOUS laughter echoes round Money Gym Towers, startling the seagulls and the children of the beach. All very well if you have excess income over expenditure and you have 20 years till you want to retire. Which most people - most women - don’t!

God almighty, comment by clicking the link below, will you Money Gym’ers?

Let me know I’m not alone in my fight to save the ordinary people - particularly women - of the UK from being trapped in their “Just Over Broke’s” and total financial poverty in old age?


bookmark Beat Credit Crunch - Sell Your Home!

£1k For A Piece Of Caribbean Paradise?

Judith £1k For A Piece Of Caribbean Paradise?Judith Morgan says: “Only £1,000 down for your own freehold little bit of Paradise in the Caribbean? Can this really be true? Or is it simply “Too Good To Be True”?

I have always wanted a life in the sun, so when one of our own ex-clients on the 2007 Money Gym Gold Express programme contacted me earlier in the year, I couldn’t wait to hear about the opportunity she presented.

At the time, I had challenges of my own – I was right in the middle of moving house in the same week as Janet Swift took me to a 3-day Alan Forrest Smith event and then I hurtled up to Manchester to find out all about Cartel, about which more later.

And to be honest with you, and I don’t think Victoria would mind my sharing this with you, when she brought it around to me, she hadn’t got her own head round the offering yet and so I simply didn’t understand it either and with all that busyness on my hands, I just parked it – a bit further down the To Do List! But I do remember calling Nicola and saying we must tell our clients about this. Nicola said “no, not now, let’s wait until someone we know and trust has invested their own money in it first” or word to that effect.

But Money Gym clients are not fools and so Victoria hedged her bets and she also showed it to Marcus de Maria AND Maria Davies. These days, Maria writes a regular column for “A Place in the Sun” magazine and so if Victoria could get past Maria’s defences, that would be a great result.

As Maria tells the story, Victoria badgered and badgered and badgered until Maria caved in and looked at the details and followed up on the opportunity in a way which I simply had not had time for.

And what did she discover? Maria discovered something so good she invested herself and she has now given up most, if not all, of her other speaking engagements just to present for this company. She is concentrating on them pretty much full-time and for the same reasons, it doesn’t just look too good to be true – it is true! And we want our clients to get a piece of that action!

With Maria’s “heads up” we have now all discovered something which, as I say, many will think too good to be true and indeed that may prove to be thei greatest marketing challenge!

So, what do they offer then, and how can you get your own freehold bit of Paradise in the Caribbean for only £1,000 down?

caribbeanhouse £1k For A Piece Of Caribbean Paradise?This company is a UK based developer, owned and run by one family, most of whom work in the business. Their Head Office is in Essex and I have been down there twice, once on my own to learn from a BBC geologist and oceanographer all about why their developments are no more likely to be hit by a hurricane than the south coast of England (!) and once with a carload of lovely Money Gym ladies.

We went to find out more, we went to grill the sales guy whose name, appropriately, is Sunny. We grilled the poor boy (and ticked him off about the state of the Ladies Loo to boot) for way more than two hours and he had the answers to all of our questions, literally at his fingertips. Sunny, rather worryingly (but affectionately I feel) now calls me “Trouble”.

Since then I have been once more to hang out in Essex. I have been to their Directors’ Box at the glamorous all-new Wembley Stadium where I met Katharine. Katharine is a Cambridge graduate who has worked for this company since she was 23; she’s now 26 and she is, quite frankly, the most brilliant presenter I have ever heard in all my years in the Money Gym.

There’s no fluff, she embodies the word succinct, thank heavens and she’s intelligent, intelligent, intelligent and posh (her hobby, nay passion, is Polo). And Katharine has created a lot of the business excellence which this company now display. Again, when answering questions, she quite easily and quickly put her hands on the answer to everything. Katharine is my new best friend in the Wonderful World of Wealth Creation.

God knows how or where the CEO recruited Katharine (she was head-hunted apparently) but he’s no fool. Together they are a brilliant business combination to my mind.

Sunny’s Mum works for the company. Katharine’s brother is her PA. It truly is a family business. Does that make it a better business? Not necessarily, but apart from Cartel, I haven’t found a business with greater or more infectious energy for a very long time. Victoria even took her singing sister into this company to work too.

So, let’s cut to the chase. Who are they and what’s in it for you?

A little piece of Paradise as I already said on terms which are literally too good to be true…..
[Read more →]


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House Prices - Latest!

Nicola says: I dont’ really need to comment do I?  Should I email to friend’s bf or just not bother? LOL

28/07/08

Picture%20071 House Prices - Latest!

The National Housing Federation have forecast that house prices in England & Wales will rise by 25% by 2013.

The federation states that while there will be a slight reduction in 2008 of 4.4% and a smaller reduction of 2.1% that house prices will quickly recover and will be rising by 9% in 2012 and 2013.

It states that one of the reasons for the growth bounce-back is that there is a great demand for housing and this demand has not diminished but in fact will grow. The demand will be partly prompted by the cutback of new houses on the market as house builders mothball and delay projects during the current housing uncertainty. People are also living longer and the high rate of divorce continues to prompt demand for even more housing as couples split up and need two homes instead of one.

The Federation predicts that the cost of an average home in England by 2013 will be £274,700.

Therefore investors need to consider 2008 as the window of opportunity to buy property as cheaply as possible. There are still a large number of motivated sellers but as soon as the market starts to recover then these sellers will be more tempted to wait or increase their prices. It is probably that the current buyer’s market will only last for another 12 months so investors should consider buying now rather than paying higher prices in future years.

http://talkbuy2let.woofti.co.uk/news/


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4 Deadly Myths About Property

peterstanley 4 Deadly Myths About Property

Peter Stanley, ex Business Bank Manager, professional property investor, author and great friend of The Money Gym, has written a great report that puts some perspective on the property market which by all media reports is “crashing and burning” at the moment (July 2008). We had a long chat after I read it, and he has given me permission to share it with you.

Peter says: “Regular readers will know how much I dislike media reports on the property market, as they’re often based on a single piece of data, or an opinion that’s passed off as fact, when most articles closely resemble works of fiction.

You only need to watch the evening news to realise that good news is in short supply, not because good things don’t happen, but because bad news sells. Sad but true. If you don’t believe me, next time you’re listening to the news, make a note of every good story - you won’t need a big piece of paper !

So, for anyone who’d like to know what’s really happening out there, here’s the most common myths;

Houses aren’t selling / people aren’t buying

Whilst there was a lull for a couple of months, houses are selling again.

That isn’t an opinion, but fact.

As you can imagine, I get to speak to a lot of estate agents and watch a lot of houses, waiting for the sellers expectations to reach mine and I’m seeing more and more houses bought between those times.

In fact, I was surprised recently (and not much surprises me these days) when I overheard a conversation between two estate agents about their sales figures. One of them had sold seven houses in ten days, which would be a good result in any market - perhaps someone should tell the Daily Mail & The Express.

It gets better though, as seven sales was for one of the estate agents in the office, not the whole office, so even if the rest of the staff had only sold another three houses, that’s a house sale a day !

No-one can get a mortgage

Whilst mortgages are harder to get than they were, there are still mortgages to be had.

If you haven’t got a deposit, or have a poor credit record, then you’re likely to struggle, but this is a knee jerk reaction to the Banks’ over eager lending policy of recent years.

I recently went to see a house where the owner was about to get repossessed, to talk about a deal……

[Read more →]


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Property Boom Kills Entrepreneurship

Over at The Business In General Blog there is an interesting article about property booms stifling business start ups.

“The negative relationship between property investment and entrepreneurship is not immediately obvious. However, the recent property booms in Ireland and the U.K. (amongst others) helps to demonstrate this relationship. In recent years, both countries have experienced phenomenal growth in house prices. That is, until everything came grinding to a halt at the end of last year. [1]

The net effect of this boom has been one where the incentive to become truly entrepreneurial was significantly reduced – why try and create a new product or service if there was a guaranteed high return from property development? Similarly, from an investment point of view, why consider any other investment opportunity if there was a perceived guaranteed high return from property development?

In Ireland, the short-term results of the boom were a huge increase in people ‘getting into property’ and in the U.K. every second TV show on Channel 4 seemed to focus on property, e.g. Location Location Location, Property Ladder, A Place in the Sun and Grand Designs. Now all manner of problems are coming home to roost as the market collapses and the scale of consumer debt is becoming obvious. [2]

The Irish Government was happy to continue to fuel the boom, rezoning land for development, and cosying up to property developers [3], given how the huge property related taxes were contributing to their coffers. As David McWilliams, a leading Irish economist points out, a national focus on property is damaging as a ‘country which experiences a property boom turns in on itself. The reason for this is very simple, property cannot be traded. Bricks and mortar are tied to the land and the land is fixed and can’t be exported. Therefore, the discipline of international competition is lost.’

I would go further than this, it also destroys enterprise – there have been countless examples of successful businesses in Ireland shutting down because there is a greater return to be had from selling the property for redevelopment than continuing the business as a going concern. [4]

As someone passionate about entrepreneurship however, I take the view that every cloud has a silver lining, and that the property collapse could prove to be an excellent stimulus for entrepreneurship.

As Michael O’Leary, M.D of low cost European airline Ryanair recently claimed, “I love recessions,” he says. “Recessions are much more fun. Good times are a pain in the bum. Good times, any idiot can make money. In recessions, the good get up off their backsides and start doing the kind of sensible things that they should do all of the time. It’s good for business”. [5]

Now that ‘property development’ is no longer a safe bet, and the Irish and U.K Governments realise that the boom is over, it is likely that entrepreneurship, in its purist form, should take off once again. Those who stretched themselves with high mortgages will face stark options: sell up at a loss, or try to make ends meet. For some, second jobbing will be their only option and this will also help to fuel the passions of entrepreneurship in people. It is also hoped that the respective Governments will play their role, after all their taxation policies and planning policies have helped to fuel the boom in the first place.

Alan Gleeson
Palo Alto Software


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Credit Repair With Rent2Own

For people who have a bad credit the rent to own home facility provides solace in the fact that they can repair their bad credit while in the process of buying the house. The rent to own home policy is a good one and helps the buyers purchase a house by renting it first.

Some people choose the option of a rent to own home in order to check out the neighborhood, before committing to the property. But there are other cash strapped people with bad credit for whom the rent to own home is the only way to buy their dream homes, because of the fact that they are unable to get home loans because of their bad credit.

There are a huge number of home owners who have found the home of their choice by the process of rent to own. Leasing the house before practically owning it is fast becoming the preferred choice of transaction among most people.

Suppose you have a bad credit history, then it is really hard to get finance from the banks to buy a house, under such a scenario the only option left is to go through the process of rent to own. In the process of rent to own contrary to the outright sales the buyer does not need to make a huge down payment at first, in fact the down payments are very small indeed. This makes it easier on the pocket for the first time investors as well, and the other fact that bout fifty percent of the rent paid by the prospective buyer is accredited to the rent credit account lowers the price of the house substantially.

People who have bad credit can always choose a leasing option where they have a longer option period , making it easier for them to repair their credit while being in the process of buying the house.

Courtesy :  Century 21 /HT Brown Realty

The good news is that Rent To Own (Rent2Own) is becoming more common in the UK, with a network of property investors who offer properties under this scheme growing all the time. 

Rick Otton, who pioneered the system in the USA and then Australia, mentored David Lee in the UK, and having got the process right over the last three years, David and Rick are now rolling out a tuition programme which is very exciting, and just right for the current market conditions.  First time buyers and novice property investors are struggling to get mortgages, and the Rent To Own / House For A Pound techniques are allowing investors to turn negative cashflow properties into positive cashflow, and allowing first time buyers and aspiring property investors with no deposit and no credit rating to find out how to buy a property (or several) for next to nothing.  This is not “no money down” but damn close to it!

The Money Gym sees this as a perfect complement to long term investing, and so we will be presenting the concept at our next Property workshop on 14th June.  Find out more here http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/mgpresents/property2.htm


bookmark Credit Repair With Rent2Own

Property: Top 3 Ways?

When I first started the Money Gym, and wrote the “Financial Intelligence 101″ tips, that grew into The Money Gym ebook, one of the most popular sections was the Property Investing Section.  Everyone wanted to know about investing in, and making money from property.

In the early days, when we used to host the Money Gym workshops at The Acacia, my much loved boutique hotel and my latest venture into property investing, we used to cover “The Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” and we used to simply tell people about them, they used to go off and investigate the one they liked the sound of, then we would coach them from there.

However, one day, a couple of guys came along who blew most of our “Top 10″ out of the water. 

Out of “Top 10 Ways To Make Money In Property” only three of them remain.  Which ones?  Aha, you will have to wait for the next few days to find out that!

After we heard about how these guys invested in property, we simply couldn’t, in all good conscience, just tell folks how they COULD invest in property, but we felt we then had to share how we felt people SHOULD invest in property.

Now this went right against all accepted coaching law and wisdom, I can tell you!

But hey ho!  Wealth coaching has always been different - a mix of training, mentoring and coaching, rather than pure coaching itself.

At The Money Gym, we aim to save you time, money, and stop you making expensive mistakes.

Mistakes like I made with buying that hotel in the first place.  If these two guys, my mates Greg and Andy, had been around in 2003, there is NO WAY they would have let me buy it.  They would have stopped me making THAT half million pound mistake.

Side note:  You will see in this week’s ezine, I talk about the difference between “failure” and a “mistake” and it’s an important distinction to make if you are an entrepreneur.  Essentially, a failure is something that can bury you but you can learn from your mistakes.

That hotel was a mistake - some would definately see it as a failure - but I choose now to see it as a mistake.  A very large one true….. 

One that taught me a VERY LARGE LESSON!  In fact, SEVERAL very large lessons.

I will never forget the moment in the garden of The Acacia, when Greg or Andy uttered the immortal words that made me realise that buying it had been a mistake and told me why.

1.  This hotel will never make you the amount of profit that would make all the work you put into it, worth it.
2.  You have a lot of your own money in this business and you will struggle to ever get it out.
3.  When you have had enough and you do want to sell it, nobody will buy it, unless you find someone as daft as you were, to buy it in the first place.

Hmmmmm…..

They like straight talking, those two.  And that is one of the things I most value about Greg & Andy. So many people won’t tell you what you need to hear.  Nobody around me in those days did, that’s for sure.  Hence the mistakes.

So, five years on, here we are, still making mistakes but not so many, and certainly not failing, and together with Steve and Judith, two more straight talkers, they are still two of my closest friends and mentors.  Whenever I want some advice about business and life, I go straight to Greg, and to Andy for property market / business marketing / creative / internet input.

So you can imagine how thrilled I am that Greg still comes to London, to present for The Money Gym on property investing.

I can’t imagine how much longer he will do that, as we are pretty much the only presenting he does outside their own Open Days.

He’s coming to the Southwark Rose on 14th June and really, you should be there. 

* If you have questions about the current property market, you should be there.

* If you have questions about your business proposition, you should be there.

* If you just want to see a down to earth, authentic, funny, FANTASTIC speaker, you should be there.

* If you want to recharge your wealth creation batteries, and hang out with some like minded people, you should be there.

That’s five “shoulds” in five lines, I’m about to get struck off the Eurocoach List!

Book your place here - still some Early Birds left as I’m late promoting this due to half term.

http://www.TheMoneyGym.com/MGPresents/property2.htm

See you there!

Nicola

p.s.  Greg always sells out fast so get your space booked now.


bookmark Property: Top 3 Ways?

Playing Property Snakes & Ladders

The rather interesting headline in todays Worthing Property Weekly was…”A Return To A More Steady Market”

Damn, damn, damn!  We all wanted another year of doom and gloom about house prices - never have there been so many empty houses with motivated sellers and prices being slashed.

property_colour Playing Property Snakes & LaddersThe article goes on to say “The property market is correcting itself rather than heading for a spectacular crash, according to the National Association of Estate Agents.  It based it’s claims on information contained in the latest report by the Royal Institute of Chartered Surveyors…….The house price falls are modest and the picture is still patchy with some areas of the country finding it tougher than others….credit crunch affected confidence….underlying factors that support property market remain:  low unemployment, historically low interest rates and a pent up demand for houses.”

As I say, Damn, Damn, Damn!  I was rather hoping for those 15-30% drops my friends (non-property investing) boyfriend is confidently predicting and I told you about last week.  On her usual entertaining note, Judith has written about her personal rather up and down property investing story here.

“My history with property investing is somewhat checkered to say the least. In 1979 my Dad lent me £500 towards buying my first home which cost £9,000 and on which Ken Livingstone, then Leader of the GLC, gave me a 100% mortgage. I sold the flat in 1983 for £21,000 and bought a house costing £43,000. I sold that in a sealed bid in 1987 for about £85,000 and bought a house for £125,000 and then rented it out in 1990 as an HMO (house of multiple occupancy) even before we knew what such a thing was, and bought a flat to live in costing another £125,000. So at that point I owned two properties worth a quarter of a million, following nothing better than instinct, naivete and native cunning.

And then interest rates went to 18% and I struggled manfully with the cashflow of my business in difficult market conditions and to pay both mortgages for about three years until I finally caved in and in 1992 both my homes were re-possessed and I found myself in debt to the tune of about £300,000 and facing bankruptcy. Snakes and Ladders. Back to Zero. Er, make that £300k below zero.

So, if I suffered so badly in the last “crash”, how are things different now?  Why am I buying, buying, buying and more to the point, how am I doing it?”

(Nicola’s note:  Our next Money Gym Presents day is on Property, and not only will the best thing since vienetta Ice Cream be presenting there - Greg Ballard - but Judith and myself will be sharing the “Top Five All Time Ways To Make Money From Property” - find out more here.) 

Judith says:  One of those ways is something we only came across this year, but has blown us - and many of our Money Gym clients - away.  Dave & Rick’s Cashflow Investor plan means you don’t acquire more assets - or “slumbering giants” as I call them - and don’t get me wrong… you do need some slumbering giants.

But what if you have no equity to leverage, no inheritance to invest, no savings deposits and no good credit rating? How are YOU going to make large lumps of cash in the property lane of the Wealth Highway?

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