Technorati Tags: Apartment Investing, Dave Lindahl, Flip your house, investing, investors, multi family, Real Estate, Real estate investing, syndication

The Senate and House voted in favor of extending the first-time homebuyer tax credit. As you know, the legislation extends, through April 30, an $8,000 first-time homebuyer tax credit and creates a new $6,500 credit for homebuyers who have been in their current residence for the last five years or more.

The Senate unanimously voted Wednesday night (98-0). The House just passed the bill this afternoon (Thursday, November 5th) (403-12).

President Obama is expected to sign the legislation tomorrow, Friday, November 6.

Technorati Tags: Apartment Investing, Asset Protection, banker, Dave Lindahl, Fed fund rate, Flip your house, investing, multi family, Real Estate, Real estate investing, Renovate Properties, tax credit

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Success is often gauged by one’s income. That’s just the way of the world, regardless of how much you agree with it, and it is important to understand that there are several forms of income. Most traditional careers or means of earning a living focus on one particular income stream, that being the type where you trade time or effort for compensation.
Look at a traditional job. You spend a certain amount of time and effort and you get a paycheck as a result. If you don’t work, you don’t get paid. Employers (at least some, anyway) work to help their employees create a better tomorrow through building of retirement accounts. These represent a sort of asset that is cashed in later in life to replace a previous income source.
Assets are a second from of income that we should all pursue. Whether it’s the selling of items of value, retirement accounts that build over time, stocks that pay dividends, or appreciating commodities like real estate, assets all represent an income source. The catch is that many assets need to be sold or liquidated in order to produce income, thus relieving you of the asset in the process.
Okay, so we’ve seen that traditional and asset based income each have their ups and downs. What about other income sources? What options exist? As a successful real estate investor and a successful entrepreneur, I’m a huge proponent and example of how monthly residual income can truly change your life. Ready to hear more?
Real estate is one of those great investment vehicles that truly offers you the entire gamut of income opportunities. It can pay you now, it can pay you later, and it can pay you residually or monthly. Few investments can claim to do that and, for this reason alone, real estate is a winner.
With respect to real estate, I want to talk a little about what I like to call the philosophy of monthly income. I refer to it this way because a commitment to generating and maintaining monthly income from real estate is indeed a philosophy and likely one that differs from the way things have always been for you.
Ask yourself what income sources you’ve relied upon in the past. For most of you, the answer will be traditional income of some sort or another. Whether it’s income from a job or quick cash income from real estate, this is what most people are used to and, for this reason, it is easy to sit in a comfort zone with this type of income.
What I’d like for you to do is consider a slight change of philosophy, or a paradigm shift if you will. What’s the best kind of income? I think it is the kind that you don’t have to work for and that comes in, whether you’re doing anything or not. That is what monthly residual income is and is what it can be for you when you invest in the right sorts of things, such as apartments.

Technorati Tags: Apartment issues, Dave Lindahl, Flip your house, investing, Real estate investing

Lots of people interested in house flipping (the fun term for buying and quick-selling real estate) have older tape programs and books sitting around teaching about deals in which a real estate investor purchased a home and sold it within a month, or two months to someone else – and made a ton of cash.

Great stories of buying a house for $15,000 and selling it in a month to a buyer for $45,000, or more, pocketing over $30,000.

Those are great stories, and lots of fun. They’re even fantastic motivational tools, great to listen to when you want to get yourself back on track in your real estate investing plan.

House flipping in a month really was a fantastic deal. You could find a property that was in need of repair, (or even just a little paint), fix it up, and have cash in your pocket in a matter of weeks – even before your bill was due to the lumber yard! Real estate flipping was like money in the bank!

But times have changed. Flipping houses by buying low and selling high in a few weeks isn’t really your best move anymore. There are now stiff prepayment penalties on most mortgages, and the capital gains on a short-term investment are twice that of a long-term investment. (You’ll pay 30% on short-term gains, and 15% on long-term gains).

Old style house flipping has gone the way of the dodo, right?

Nope – there’s no need to worry. Flipping houses still happens all the time, in all sorts of markets and all sorts of time frames.

Here are a couple of scenarios in which house flipping is still a great way to start if you’re just beginning real estate investing, or as a way to generate cash – to use for your investing, or even for a nice vacation!

The first way to still successfully get into flipping houses is to control the property, but never actually own it. By finding the property and a buyer, and getting in the middle, you can effectively flip it in a short period of time. This is called a simultaneous close, and details are outside the scope of this article, but this technique can be done with single family homes, apartment buildings… all sorts of real estate transactions.

Another way to get into flipping real estate is to hold for a little longer period of time – more than 12 months. So, for just 13 months, you own a property, with good tenants, good cashflow and in a good market, and when that magic month happens, the 13th month, you can sell to another person, and put money in your pocket.

Now, what if that other person is your tenant, and they’ve been living in the house right along? You’ve presold the house! That’s right, you’ve purchase the property, put the tenants in the property, collected rents (with a positive cashflow), and you have an agreement that the tenants will refinance the property during the magic month – the 13th month – so that your capital gains are less, and you put more money in your pocket!

Plus, for the trouble of babysitting and letting the tenants live in the home for over a year (which some tenants need to fix their credit or to save money for a downpayment), they buy the home from you for more than you paid.

Technorati Tags: Flip your house, Renovate Properties