With so much economic instability around the world, it is important for everyone to have multiple sources of income now… and especially when you retire. You cannot count in Social Security or a Pension. You can count on income from free and clear rental properties and that’s why we teach you many different ways to acquire real estate without using bank financing. Real estate can provide income so you can quit that job you hate now. And it can provide income to support your lifestyle when you retire ( perhaps early).
For years we’ve been kicking around the same statistics about failure and success: For 100 persons aged 25 today, at age 65 in 40 years 36 will have died, 5 will still be working, 4 will be independent, but not well off, 54 will be dependent upon charity, family or the tax payer just to stay alive, and ONLY 1 WILL BE A WINNER – rich enough to be completely independent.
Why do these differences exist? It’s probably more a matter of attitude than anything else. Most people aim too low. They expect too little of themselves and they measure their progress against the average person in their community. They don’t realize until too late that the average person that they’re using as a role model will most likely be one of the ones who’ll exist solely because of charity in one form or the other when their earning years are passed.
Another form of destructive attitude is in the concept of NOW rather than LATER. It’s a mind set in which people act as if the present were going to go on forever. Over and over I’ve heard people in their mid 50s say that they were going to have to start getting serious about saving something for retirement. They aren’t even aware of the tens of thousands of dollars they’ve frittered away along with energetic years which could have been spent insuring their financial well being during retirement years. Too late, they’ll wind up like 95% of the population living lives of quiet desperation because they failed to consider their own futures.
Probably the fatal error that even knowledgeable people make is in failing to realize that they must continually strive to convert their time, energy and talent into increasing net worth and assets just to keep from falling behind. Think about this for a moment. Take away government retirement checks and you’ll discover that the average 18 year old in the United States earns more than the average 65 year old. Somehow, that 65 year old hasn’t learned to convert the 47 year advantage in experience he possesses into more income. It’s as if he hadn’t learned anything of value throughout his whole life.
So here’s the challenge.
(A) Expect to win, plan to win, act to win.
(B) Be willing to sacrifice a part of each day in order to have a better tomorrow.
(C) Always be on the lookout to find ways to increase your efficiency at increasing your earning power and that of your investments. Just as this booklet will hopefully give you better tools with which to achieve your goals, recognize that the investment you make in your own knowledge will probably produce the highest return over the years.
There’s one more key to winning:
Learn ways to expand your productive time through the use of other people, computers, building upon past experiences of yourself and others, maintaining a high energy level and good healthy habits, reading, listening to tapes, attending seminars, trading off low skill jobs which you can’t do well, and concentrating on high paid work that will maximize your return on invested effort.
Try to double and triple up on things you do to get higher yielding returns. For example, a person who cuts down a tree (a) clears his land for crops, (b) gets healthy exercise, (c) converts a tree to either fuel or building materials, (d) warms himself up. In short he does one job and derives multiple benefits – increasing his yield.
You need to start thinking about doing the same thing with your investments. To achieve this, you’ll need to acquire knowledge over a broad range of subject matter.
For example, rather than merely brokering a transaction for a fee which represented a small percentage of the value of his efforts, an entrepreneur might Option a tract of land for a future building site or tract development and pay for his Option by agreeing to do all the zoning, financial feasibility and marketability studies, permits application, etc.
In the event he didn’t close the Option, the owner would get all the documentation to use for any subsequent sale. The owner might accept this offer because of his inability to imagine possible uses or unwillingness to undergo all the hassle involved in doing the work and getting approvals.
From your standpoint, you’d have to do all of these things anyhow – and by doubling up your benefits, you’d be controlling the property without any cash at all. If it didn’t prove feasible, you’d have lost only what you would have lost anyway. On the other hand, once you’ve gotten the results of your study, you could at that point probably market your Option and paperwork package for a profit. Certainly, changing of zoning alone would increase the property value for a tidy profit. But why stop here?
Why not go the extra step and co-venture a subdivision tract with a builder and share the profits. You might offer to exchange completed single family houses to the Optionor in a tax free exchange for the land, then offer the land to the builder in exchange for an equal share in the profits of the subdivision which you could take in completed free and clear houses.
Your percentage of profits would seem cheap to the builder who would typically finance out at least 100% of the construction costs. His permanent financing and sales will net him a nice profit. You could take some of your houses and give them to the former owner upon completion to free the land and complete the exchange, and with a little care, (and until legislation prohibiting it is made law) you might even pull off a tax-free transaction under IRC SEC 1031.
As you can see, the value of knowing WHAT to do, WHEN to do it, HOW to do it to maximize profits and how to assess the potential for profit are all based upon things you, the entrepreneur, knew that the other’s did not. That’s how your knowledge directly created your profits. The value of this project would far exceed that which even a skilled professional broker might earn in several years. In this way, you’ll have increased the present value of your own skills and your net worth. It can be presumed that free and clear new houses would be able to earn an attractive income whether from rents or from systematic liquidation sales.
Get the WINNING FOR FINANCIAL FREEDOM book to learn Jack Miller’s 109 financial maxims which I’ve personally found to be extremely valuable to me in building my own financial foundation for investment and for life in general. They’re rules of the road for those who would aspire to financial success.
