Investing Tips Information

Most people use investments to create enough wealth to retire comfortably, so although writing about retirement plans is not directly related with investing, it is indirectly related.  Many people retire too early, while others retire too late. I hope that you find this article helpful for your retirement plans.  

Three Critical Decisions about Your Retirement Wise retirement planning is not all numbers.  There is a huge emotional component to it, reflecting the fact that retiring involves one of life’s most profound periods of change.  No one really knows in advance how he or she will weather the process.  That is why some people enter a period of prolonged depression, convinced that once a career ends, useful living stops, too.

For others, the transition is so easy that anyone observing them might think such individuals were born to retire.  At any rate, three crucial decisions that many pre-retirees must make vividly display the mix of financial and emotional elements. They are:

1. Knowing when you should retire.

2. Sizing up an early-out offer from your employer.

3. Deciding between taking a lump-sum pension and an annuity.

Recent studies indicate that about 25% of retirees are unhappy, primarily because they had not been ready to retire.  For some, the decision had not been theirs to make.  But in general, at the end of a long career most people think they are headed for freedom and do not stop to consider whether the free time they’ll have will lie heavy on them or be the prolonged vacation they envision.

Retirement planners say that six months or so after quitting work, reality sets in.  To make sure that retirement is a welcome reality, weigh carefully the decision to call it quits.  Look for the two prime signals that you are ready to retire: (1) You find it harder and harder to keep your mind on your work; and (2) You view retirement not as a passive vacation, but as an active adventure.

Be honest with yourself and admit just how rigid you might be in your life as it is at present.  The more averse you are to change, the more you will have to work on making the transition bearable. If your employer provides retirement planning seminars, take advantage of them.  They are apt to address emotional as well as financial issues. If such seminars are not available, seek them elsewhere, perhaps through community groups.

If you are planning to retire, then I recommend looking at this retirement suggestion.

1 Comment »

Why should you bother investing at all when your neighborhood bank is a nice, safe place to put your money?  The answer: inflation and taxes.  If your savings, after taxes, doesn’t grow faster than the cost of living, its purchasing power will steadily erode.  Put another way, if you don’t find a way to put your money to work for you effectively, you’ll never be able to reach the financial goals you cherish.  In short, after you take care of your emergency savings fund, you need to become an investor.  The following example, which doesn’t even account for the take of taxes, will show you why:

Had your grandmother stashed $90 under her mattress 50 years ago, (the price of a decent-quality, three-piece bedroom set in 1945) that money today would buy little more than a set of sheets.  If she had invested that $90 in a bank savings account that kept even with inflation, she could still afford that roomful of furniture.  But if she had put her 90 bucks in the stock market, it would have grown to more than $25,000 today: enough not only for that bedroom set, but for a down payment on a second home to put it in.

If that story doesn’t impress you, here’s a scarier one: Investing wisely can mean the difference between retiring to a cushy house on the 18th green or retiring to a state-run oldsters’ home.  Saving, while extremely important, is essentially just putting money away for safekeeping.  Investing, by contrast, is using your money to produce more money. 

Are you thinking that you need a lot of money to invest?  You don’t.  Many equity mutual funds, which pool money from small investors and use it to buy stocks, accept initial investments as low as $500 or even $250.  More than 140 fund families let you in with $100 or less.  Most funds also let you invest as little as $50 or $100 a month.  You can also see what it’s like to be a stock investor by purchasing a single share of a company for, say, $30. 

If you haven’t invested a dime in your life, you’re not alone.  Millions and millions of people around the world don’t own any stocks or mutual funds.  Some of them have just decided that they don’t know enough to invest intelligently.  Others think that investing is too scary and worry about the possibility that they’ll lose money.  Still others think that investing in stocks and mutual funds is no different from playing the craps tables.  The truth is, it isn’t hard to learn how to invest, putting money into stocks or stock funds isn’t scary, and by investing defensively, you can protect yourself from losing money.  As for the craps analogy, it’s flat wrong.  Winning at dice means having good luck.  Winning as an investor means using your brains.

No Comments »

A mutual fund is a collection of investment money pooled from lots of people to be invested for a specific objective.  When you invest in a mutual fund, you buy shares and become a shareholder of the fund.  A fund manager and his or her team of assistants figure out in which specific securities (for example, stocks, bonds, or money market funds) they should invest the shareholders’ money so that they can accomplish the objectives of the fund and keep you (and your fellow shareholders) as a happy customer.  Because good mutual funds take most of the hassle and cost out of figuring out which securities to invest in, they are among the best investment vehicles ever created:

1. Mutual funds allow you to diversify your investments, that is, invest in many different industries and companies instead of in just one or two.  By spreading the risk over a number of different securities representing many different industries and companies, mutual funds lessen your portfolio’s volatility and the chances of a large loss.

2. Mutual funds enable you to give your money to the best money managers in the world, some of the same folks who manage money for the already rich and famous.

3. Mutual funds are the ultimate couch potato Investment!  However, unlike staying home and watching the TV or playing Nintendo, investing in mutual funds can pay you big rewards.

4. You can use mutual funds to invest in specialized areas, such as currency funds, futures funds and offshore markets (such as China, India and Russia). Many people would not have a clue as to what to invest in within these areas, but great returns can be made with the better managers.

While mutual funds can be good, there are many out there that give very low returns.  In some cases, the managers do not have that much incentive to perform well, so the fund has low returns. Banks try to get you into some of their managed funds, but their main concern is getting the fees from you while they invest offshore with your money and make greater returns. I would stay clear of managed funds through banks. You need to do some research into the fund that you are interested in before you take the plunge.  How has that fund performed in the past and what is the fee structure?  Is there an incentive for the managers to make the fund perform? Also, some of  the better mutual funds require a substantial amount of finances before you qualify to participate in them.

I personally have invested in mutual funds through  Landau Securities.  I found that they were a great source to invest in mutual funds because they provided the means to invest in funds that were run by the best managers in the world. Most of these managers operate in tax havens, but I shall talk about this in more details in another post. They also had life bond options, which allowed members to participate in a variety of high quality funds without having to qualify for the large entry fees.

2 Comments »

How to Find Attractive Commercial Real Estate for Sale Using the Internet

As a new Professional Commercial Real Estate Property Scout, one of the first things people learn is how to find promising properties which could be attractive investments.  There are several different approaches, but today let’s just discuss one of the most popular.

How to Find Promising Properties Using the Internet

One of the best, quickest and easiest ways is to find commercial real estate for sale is using the power of the Internet. The reason most professional Property Scouts love this approach is they can do anytime, it’s low cost, and best of all, they can search for properties around the country without leaving the comforts of home.

What’s great is commercial real estate agents and brokers are starting to become very computer savvy and beginning to list their properties they have under contract online.  Usually they upload pictures, descriptions, characteristics data and other relevant information into massive real estate listing databases.

Right now, there are millions of properties online.  Most are segregated into the following categoies:

1. Multi-Family (Condominiums and Apartment Complexes)

2. Office Complexes

3. Retail Properties

4. Mobile Home and RV Parks

5. Mixed Use Buildings and Warehouses

6. Raw Land That Can Be Developed

The key to finding properties is knowing where to look.  And by far the easiest place and most success-certain place to look is commercial real estate listing database websites. While there are hundreds, if not thousands of these websites on the Internet, one of the most popular is one called http://loopnet.com.  Another popular one is called http://www.costar.com/.

These websites are probably the biggest, containing literally millions of properties to search through.  They have free services and they also have premium services.  Most property Scouts who are serious sign-up for the premium services.

Why?

Because one of the services you get is to be able to specific the criteria you are looking for and then as new properties are uploaded that meet that criteria, the website will alert you via email.  This especially attractive especially when you are very discriminating and have a particular profile of the type and attributes of the property you want.

You can get very detailed in your profiles also. For instance, it’s easy to search for raw land in a particular geographic area with specific qualities, with specific owner attributes, and special financing terms.  The Property Scouts of Maverick Real Estate Investments, Inc. are trained in detail in which properties yield the most profit and which are not so attractive.

The key is to have a crystal clear profile of the type of property you want.  The more general you are the more properties will “pop up”, but one doesn’t have the time to search through hundreds or thousands of properties one by one. You want to be discriminating. You want to think quality instead of quantity.

Once you know and understand your property profile, and once you have learned to navigational basics inside a specific website, then you can start to fully exploit all it’s features and functionality.  For instance, it pays dividends to learn how to use advanced search functions, like using descriptive keywords to find the properties you want. Let’s say you may want look for properties in the path of progress.  One of the most certain indicators of this is having a Walmart in the area.  So you could search for “Wal-Mart” in the notes associated with a properties being searched.  Usually a smart broker will be thoughtful enough to put that in the description or notes regarding a property for sale.

Some website have lots of functions and other have rather minimal functions.  Usually, if a Property Scout values their time, they’ll take the time to learn a specific listing website and ALL it’s functions and stick with it.  In other words, they try to become an expert within a certain website, so that they can be efficient and not let potential opportunity slip through their fingers.

The bottomline is searching the Internet for promising commercial properties is kind of like using Internet search engines.  One doesn’t have time to search through millions of them.  You want to find the ones that are most relevant to what you are searching for. The same thing applies to finding promising commercial real estate on the Internet.

To find out more about Commercial Real Estate investing, Maverick Real Estate Investments, Inc., or the Property Scout profession, visit: Commercial Real Estate Investing

1 Comment »

Investing Tips Info is mainly concerned with financial investments. So from our point of view, if you invest in something then you put your money into the likes of equities (shares), property, bonds and/or fixed interest schemes with a view of making a profit.

Many people want to have financial freedom, but they do not want to work at it. They go to work to earn some hard earned cash, spend some money on bills and leisure and then complain that there is not any money left to invest.  If you are one of these people, then hopefully future posts within Investing Tips Info can help you get out of this annoying rut.

You have to set a structured plan in order to create successful investments.  There are many nitty-gritty details that need to be looked at down the track, but the first thing that you must do is to create detailed and realistic goals. If you cannot visualize what you want, then there will be no real purpose for you to invest.

Once you have written down your goals, you need to set a comprehensive budget. In my opinion, budgeting is the most important part of investing and financial freedom. If you spend more than you earn, then you will never get ahead. In your budget you will need to “pay yourself first”. If you read any decent book about making money, they will all say that you need to allocate at least 10 percent of your income into investments before allocating funds to bills and leisure.

It is important to compound your money made from investments. Your investment portfolio will grow exponentially if you just reinvest your profits.

One of the first books that I read about investing was “The Richest Man in Babylon” and it described much of what I have said in a somewhat amusing manner. I highly recommend that you get yourself a copy of that book too before you begin investmenting.

1 Comment »