Resolutions You Shouldn’t Make for 2007
- WEALTHY: Laying the groundwork for real estate investing (Justin Ford)
- HEALTHY: Okay! Okay! I’ll do it! (Michael Masterson)
- WISE: Mark Caine on planning
ALSO IN THIS ISSUE:
- Goal-reaching help from ETR (Suzanne Richardson)
- Libraries … who needs ‘em? (David Cross)
- Add "ebullition" to your vocabulary
The Early to Rise 2006 End-of-Year Blowout Sale
What are your resolutions for 2007?
To increase your salary by $15,000? To finally start your own profitable online side-business? To locate an incredible real estate deal?
Whatever your dreams, hopes and aspirations may be… ETR is here to help!
As 2006 comes to a close, we’ve compiled a dozen of our best success programs into a year-end blowout sale with our lowest prices ever… so there’s no better time for you to start making your dreams come true in 2007 than right now.
This offer ends when the New Year begins, so don’t put it off and risk paying more a few days from now. Act today and you’ll get the best deal we’ve ever offered, guaranteed.
Stop by our ETR 2006 End-of-Year Blowout Sale now.
- MaryEllen Tribby
"Meticulous planning will enable everything a man does to appear spontaneous."
Mark Caine
Kicking Off the New Year With ETR: Resolutions You Shouldn’t Make for 2007
By Justin Ford
Every year, Michael Masterson encourages ETR readers to use the first two weeks of January to lay out their goals for the next 12 months. This year, I’m hoping at least some of your goals will have something to do with investing in real estate. One may be to buy a certain number of properties. Another might be to add at least $1 million of cash-flow rentals to your portfolio. Yet another could be to do your first commercial deal and end the year with at least 10,000 square feet of fully leased commercial space.
Investment goals like these can be helpful. They can motivate you, nudge you to the next level of competence, and spur you to come up with a workable plan to achieve them. They can also act as a yardstick against which you measure your progress as the year goes on.
But whatever new benchmarks you’re setting, don’t make your new target numbers into a resolution.
Instead, always let the quality of your deals take precedence over the quantity.
I have my own target numbers for 2007. I consider them ambitious, and I’ve started to make progress on them. Yet I would rather not add a single dollar’s worth of new properties to my portfolio … or one square foot of commercial space … than buy rashly for the sake of hitting a target number.
Here are just a few examples of what can happen if you forget this lesson …
I met a former investor a few years ago who bought something like a dozen properties his first year as an investor. It turned out he had a "mentor" who sold him his own properties and financed them at inflated rates. The newbie was thrilled to own all this real estate, until he finally realized he couldn’t make the properties cash flow and that, even if he sold them, he wouldn’t get what he owed … much less what he had paid.
By that time, the "mentor" had sold the loans, pocketed his profits, and disappeared, leaving the overleveraged beginner to go bankrupt.
You see similar things happening in the stock market. Why did investors pay ridiculous prices for all those money-losing dot-coms back in the ’90s? Because they were focusing on short-term targets. A stock had gone from $10 to $20 … and some "analyst" was predicting it would go to $50 or $100 before the year was out.
Never mind that the quality wasn’t there. That there weren’t enough earnings to justify the price. That it wasn’t a business that comfortably covered its expenses, could profitably compete, or was prepared to withstand a downturn in its market.
Investors nonetheless poured into the stock, craving huge profits in a short time. And all the while, the guys who started the company kept it afloat long enough to legally sell their inflated shares and walk away with millions before the stock collapsed.
Now, don’t get me wrong. You can absolutely make a lot of money in real estate in a short time. I’ve done it, and so have quite a few other investors I know.
But the way to do it consistently and with the greatest margin of safety is NOT to focus on short-term targets. It’s to focus on value over the long term. In other words:
- Buy cash flow (properties that pay for themselves).
- Buy at or below market value on a dollar-per-square-foot basis.
- In bubble markets, only buy deeply discounted properties (special situations such as pre-foreclosures, bank-owned properties, etc.).
- In value markets, make sure you have growth (rising jobs and employment) working for you as well.
- Concentrate on areas that are improving and experiencing rising demand.
- Plan for rain. That is, have ample cash reserves or access to cash through a credit line or private lenders. (Hint: If you don’t have cash yourself, make sure your private lender or equity partner puts up enough cash in the beginning to adequately capitalize the deal, including reserves.)
I’ll go into detail on each one of these points in future ETR articles. But for now, go ahead and lay out your real estate investment goals for 2007. Then lay out a plan to meet those goals.
But resolve to always buy value … first and foremost.
That way, you’ll be a successful investor not only in 2007, but in 2017, in 2027, and for as long as you care to invest.
[Ed. Note: Justin Ford is the creator of Main Street Millionaire, ETR’s real estate investment program.]
Jump On Now and Make 300%… Before Wall Street Discovers the Stealth Market in Uranium
Thirty years ago, the biggest energy giants walked away from millions of acres of land with proven uranium reserves… land that wasn’t worth exploiting when prices hit rock bottom. But one company grabbed the best of that land for as little as $1 an acre.
Now, with the price of uranium skyrocketing, the value of those reserves has increased more than 1,300%… yet you can still purchase this company’s stock for pennies on the dollar.
But you’ve got to jump on this now before Wall Street discovers the stealth bull market in uranium. Once they do, this stock is going to POP. Get the full story here.
Dear Michael Masterson: "Cigars … You Don’t Need Them."
"I am 77 years old. Many years ago, I had one sister eight years my senior, a second eight years my junior. When Lorillard (a giant tobacco company) first wrote (truthfully) about a mouse growing tumors on his back from nicotine, I wrote my sisters, warning them. I had quit smoking years before. They laughed at me.
"To my sorrow, not long afterward, each died a painful and horrible death from nicotine.
"Cigars are as sure to kill as ‘coffin nails’ (cigarettes). You don’t need them. With your astonishing success, a lovely wife, and dynamic sons, you must think of them if you are indifferent to your own fate."
Mary Gribble
San Marino, CA
Based on Mary’s sage advice, I’ll be cutting back on my cigar smoking as part of my Health goal for 2007.
- Michael Masterson
ETR Insider Report: Uncomplicate Your Life
By Suzanne Richardson
I’ve got a suggestion to help you get started on the path to achieving all your wealth-building, health-building, and personal goals. And, along the way, you’ll become better organized and more "on top" of the events in your daily life - which will make reaching those goals a smoother process.
You see, I’m always on the lookout for better ways to organize my schedule. And there are lots of options out there. Maybe too many! After looking through a few planners, I got a little dizzy. And overwhelmed. All I wanted was something simple - because for me, simple is simply better.
I mentioned my quest for more organization to Charlie Byrne. "I have just the thing," he told me. "And it’s not complicated at all."
He told me about ETR’s 2007 Daily Planner, one easily accessible place to keep track of your appointments, work projects, and progress toward your important goals.
This Daily Planner does not just make life simpler and more organized, it also helps you work through ETR’s goal-setting program.
So if you’re looking for a good way to organize your life - and help you keep the New Year’s resolutions you’re working on this week - you might want to give the ETR Daily Planner a try.
It’s Good to Know: Libraries Online
By David Cross
My sister was mortified. "Twenty years since you visited a public library?!" Shocked as she was, I am guilty. It probably has been that long.
I read constantly … but I just don’t visit libraries. You see, my childhood library was a lifeless brick and concrete affair from the 1930s that smelled musty and was populated by disapproving librarians in half-moon glasses. Oh, and there was that reading room incident with the starting pistol when I was 10.
But in the recent two decades that I’ve been avoiding libraries, it turns out that big changes have been made.
Upon investigation, I discovered that my local library is new and shiny and has introduced online searching and book reservations - both of which are helpful tools for anyone who’s looking for a specific, hard-to-find, book. But I just learned about a much niftier library feature that helps turn otherwise dead time into enjoyable recreation time.
Because I am a "member in good standing" with the library (meaning, I have a library card), I can search and download from a huge selection of audio books via its online system. So I can drop one of over 850 borrowed books on my MP3 player and listen to it in the car … on the airplane … while I’m gardening … or lounging on the couch.
I’m currently listening to "Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!" - a warm, quirky, and oft-amusing series of anecdotes about Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman, which the library’s online review described as "engagingly eccentric." And I can listen to it on my computer or MP3 player as often as I want for 10 days.
I can also burn some books to CD and transfer them - from computer to MP3 player and back again - a specific number of times during the lending period.
Does your library network offer a similar set of cool features? It may. And if it does, it’s a great way to enjoy new books or old classics for free.
Check it out.
[Ed. Note: David Cross is Senior Internet Consultant for Agora Publishing in Baltimore. Learn more of David Cross’s strategies for marketing your online business by checking out ETR’s Internet Marketing DVD Library.]
How Much Money Can YOU Make By Copying This "Mistake"?
How did Vicki Smith accidentally ‘hotwire’ the Internet and turn it into the goose that laid the golden egg?
Well, imagine a huge fortress with steep, heavily defended walls and a great big, drawbridge to get through. Inside that fortress is the huge pile of wealth there is to be made on the Internet. Now imagine trying to scale those walls with no equipment and never having done anything like it before. That is what many people try to do…
But what did Vicki do? By mistake, she got ‘lost’ and wandered around the back of that fortress and found a ‘hidden’ door which lead straight in. A solid gold door which opened up a gateway to riches…
It’s an opportunity which really does work, that anyone can follow and put into practice quickly in just an hour of your spare time from home.
Read about Vicki’s good fortune…
- Patrick Coffey
Word to the Wise: Ebullition
"Ebullition" (eb-uh-LISH-un) - from the Latin for "to bubble up" - is an unrestrained expression of emotion.
Example (as used by William Makepeace Thackeray in Vanity Fair): "… having the fear of her schoolmistress greatly before her eyes, Miss Sedley did not venture, in her presence, to give way to any ebullitions of private grief."
Michael Masterson
Copyright ETR, LLC, 2007