Investing Guide for the Group of Irregular Income
Are you one of them, Group of irregular income? I understand that most freelancers and also small business owners will be the “members” of this group. To be honest, I’m also one of them. Being a small business owner, my income is mostly depending on my business and I can tell you that a business is different with a steady income job, the income is different each month. This is one of the challenges that you might encounter if you want to start your business.
In this article, I would like to share with you the investing guide for the group of irregular income. Although the main target of this article is on the group of irregular income, but I think this guide is also work for any one especially those with tight budget over their steady income.
Preparation before investing Your Money – Budget Your Money
Yes I agree that budget your money is quite boring and annoying. However, from the group of irregular income, we have no choice but have to make a plan to use our money. Planning is important to an investor and budget can help you build a system to control your expenses. There are a few points that you must pay attention on budgeting your money, especially you are from the group of irregular income.
For the first 3 months, set a budget and get the average figure for your income and expenses and also categorize your expenses. The main purpose is to know your habit on spending money.
Use the information you collected for the first 3 months and predict your expenses ahead and then set a budget that included an investing account. This account will be the place where you save a certain amount of money for investing.
Then building up an emergency fund at least 4-6 months. The main purpose is to secure your life just in case anything happens in future.
If needed, try to re-allocate your money in the budget again every 1-2 weeks. This is one of the important steps for budgeting over irregular income. This will ensure your money is enough for the next pay day by reviewing your budget from time to time.
Before this, I wrote a few articles that are about budgeting which might help you:
Saving Tips that make your budget works
Learn and Start Investing : Start Small with simple baby steps
I prefer to get started small in everything. This will be much easier for my mind and get motivated to take action. I usually become procrastinate and stress if I want to start something very big and complicated. Eventually nothing is done by me. So I prefer baby steps especially invest using my irregular income.
Learn “how to invest” frugally – Investing is a skill that we must learn. We cannot just jump into the market and invest our money. This sound like gambling and not investing, isn’t it? So I always try to learn and gain information before taking any actions. Since I have a budget, the money for me to take any investing courses, buying any reports or books are quite tight. So I usually read books and reports for free from local library and also local book stores. If you can take good care on their books, you are welcome to spend time reading in book stores.
Always invest with small capital – Yes, sometime I come across some of the investment that can bring more profits in a shorter time. However, those investments usually need a lot of money to invest. For me, I usually let them go and look for those small capital investments. I think stocks, forex and also mutual funds are a good start for. This is because with a small amount of money, you can start investing and gain experience.
Dare to loss “small” – So far I never heard or see any investors that do not loss any money along their life in investment. Everybody will lose money in investment. The key here is how you learn from the losses and then make more profit next time to cover it. So “Exit strategy” is playing an important role here. To minimize my losses, I always have an exit strategy. Since my income is limit and so is my investment capital, I must learn how to control the losses from investment and protect my capital.
Diversify your investment – There are always some argument between putting all your eggs in one nest or diversify them. To me both of them have their pros and cons. However, for irregular income group, I will recommend diversify. The reasons to do that are:
1. Diversify means diversify the investment risks
2. Diversify means diversify your investment capital and hence reduce the impact of losses into your capital.
Because our capital is limited, we must learn how to manage the risks of investment and also protect our capital from being burnt out by the market.
Conclusion
No matter what kind of job, income or business you have, you must learn how to manage your money, how to invest them and plan your future financially. Yes I agree that, sometime, there are a lot of negative voices coming out from my head telling me that “I can’t invest because of my irregular income” or “There is nothing you can do with this kind of irregular income”. This kind of negative voices and mindset don’t block me at all because I have a goal, a goal to achieve financial freedom by age of 30. I know I must do something to achieve my goal and have better future. So I still continue to learn how to prepare my irregular income, get myself ready and invest. You might also have the same condition that I have. But don’t give up! There is something you can do on your personal finance and future, even your retirement. This only depend whether you believe it or not. IF you believe, nothing can block you!
Good Luck!
Harrison Loke
Review on Blog Profits Blueprint – How to Make a Living with Part Time Business
Do you ever ask yourself these questions before?
“How can I start a blog that make me money?”
“I have a blog but how come I can’t generate income more than $100?”
“I want to know how those bloggers do something different that make them so much of money from their blogs?”
“How can I run a part time business that brings me full time income?”
…….
Do you ever ask yourself the above questions before? Or do you curious how to make money from a blog? If you do, then please spend a few minutes to read this article. This is because in the next few paragraph, I’m going to share with you my honest comments, reviews and opinions over a blogging ebook, Blog Profits Blueprint.
PS: I’m not selling this ebook and I’m not the author too. However I just help the author, Yaro Starak, to pass this FREE ebook to you. Although it is free, but the information inside is worth thousands dollar. I said this because the information inside really inspires me to make this blog better which I believe will make me thousands of dollar in future.
What is Blog Profits Blueprint? Nothing but Just a FREE Ebook that worth thousands dollar.
Blog Profit Blueprint is an ebook written by my favorite entrepreneur blogger, Yaro Starak. Yes this is another FREE ebook on the internet. But FREE does not equals to cheap quality. However to me, this ebook is valuable because of the information inside. Iin the Next few paragraphs, I will show and prove to you why this free ebook is so different from other free ebooks that you can get from the Internet.
Yaro Starak is one of the online entrepreneurs that I always give the highest honor to. If you read his blog before, you will understand what I’m saying. He is doing a great job by sharing some of the tips, experience and know-how over his blog with all of us. One of the theories that he mentioned before which I 100% agree and support is how to make a blog become a business instead of self-employed. From here I know Yaro is having some similar mindset with me where both of us are looking for freedom and time, however, at the same time, we are trying to do anything that make us money with little of time.
If you ever blog before, you will know that blogging is not a true business model. You have to spend time to write contents, handle comments and market your blog. Sometime this really makes me feel that I’m self-employed instead of running a business. You might hear some of the advices from blogging gurus that “You must update at least 1 post per day for your blog”, then you really treat a blog is a job. However, Yaro is different. He is promoting the theories “Running a Part-time business to Earn a Full Time income” for blogging. Wow! This is rock, don’t you think so? Now, this information is shared over his free ebook, Blog Profit Blueprint.
What actually inside the Blog Profit Blueprint?
Now let me share with you what is inside the Blog Profit Blueprint Ebook that make me keep saying it is good for you.
Actually Blog Profit Blueprint is a report where Yaro shares the details and steps how he make $6000 and more monthly just from blogging. This is 55 pages book that will share all the basics that blogger must know such as how to choose a topic, how to write, how to bring traffic and how to make money. All the theories are easy to understand.
Without further ado, let me show the table of contents and some of the highlights from the book that I think is a “Must Read” for you.
- How To Make Money Blogging
- How I Discovered Blogging
- Blogging as a Business, Not a Job
- What’s Next?
- Who Is Yaro Starak?
- What Is A Blog And Why Are They So Popular?
- How Blogs Make Money
- Two Key Ingredients For Attracting Attention
- Why Do You Blog?
- How To Choose Your Blog Topic – Passions Vs. Profits
- Let’s Talk Tactics
- Content + Marketing = Traffic
- What Is A Pillar?
- How Do You Create A Pillar?
- How To Market Your Blog
- Time vs. Reward
- Most People Are Lazy
- Communication Channels
- The Power of Leverage
- Compound Effects
- Think Big Picture, Work Little Picture
- Traffic Tactics
- Peer Relationships
- Network Effects
- Start With Your Peers
- Bigger and Better Content Pillars
- It’s Time To Make Money
- Can Blogs Be A Stable Income Source?
- The Holy Grail of Blog Monetization - Recursive Affiliate Income
- The Next Best Option – Direct Advertisers
- The Problem with Google AdSense
- Other Monetization Options
- My Top Blog Monetization Methods
- Turn Your Blog Into A Business
- Why Most Bloggers Fail
- Do You Have Enough Information To Succeed?
- Congratulations! – Now Get To Work
- Advice For Beginners, The Lost And Confused
- Private Mentoring For Serious Bloggers
- Affiliate Opportunity
- Thank You For Your Attention
PS: Those titles in “bold” are “Must Read” For you.
Personally I already opened this free ebook in my notebook and read through it more than 5 times because I’m serious in making money from blogging and I know the content inside can really help me to do so. This is why I spend so much time reading this book. But of course, after reading, I must take action and apply the know-how from the book so I can get the results.
There is 1 statement from Yaro inside the book that, Blogging is just like running a business. You write your content and providing value to your reader. However, just like other business, you must learn how to market your blog. I agree with Yaro that marketing for your blog is important and this is the only way we can bring visitors to our good content and transform them to our repeat readers. So I spend 10x more time in reading those sections that touch the topic of marketing, such as Content + Marketing = Traffic, How To Market Your Blog, Communication Channels in the book.
As you can see from the list, according to Yaro, without congruency between strategy and tactics, no amount of good advice, tips, techniques, case studies or even the holy grail of blogging wisdom – “write good content” – will make you success. Now don’t you think that Yaro’s theories are so different? Maybe you should grab a copy of the ebook to read it. Don’t Trust me! Read and feel it yourself.
Grab a Free Copy of Blog Profit Blueprint Here
PS: You do have to give your email address to get the book, but don’t worry, I already give mine to Yaro and so far I don’t receive any spam mail from him. Instead, I’m getting some updates, know-how from him directly to the email. So don’t worry, you loss nothing.
Grab a Free Copy of Blog Profit Blueprint Here
Enjoy the Book!
Harrison
How to Buy a Profitable Rental Property and Get Passive Income
This article can be the part 2 for my previous article, The Reasons why Getting Started in Real Estate with Buying Rental Property which is talking about the reasons and also the benefits to get started your real estate journey with Rental Property. You can click on the link and read through the article first if you do not know what are the benefits of rental property. If you are ready, let us move on with this article: How to Buy a Profitable Rental Property and Get Passive Income.
Now I hope you have made your decision that you are going to involve in rental property and want to make some passive income for your pocket. Actually real estate is really a good way to invest your money where you can leverage on it for capital gain, tax deduction and also passive income. However, there are a lot of rental properties available in the market for you to choose from. Sometime you will easily get confused or we should call this Information overflow where you have too much to choose and too much of information have to be handled.
So in order to help you, I wrote this article which I will share some of the tips and guides that I learned which will help you to buy a rental property that make you money. In a nutshell, this is also a buying guide for rental property.
Without any further ado, here are the tips:
Understand Yourself Financially
- Get your finances in order. Before you invest any money, please make sure your finances are in order and under control. Here is the checklist for your finance:
- If you plan to taking out a mortgage, your credit report has to be good and does not contain any bad records. This will also help you have a higher chances to be approved and get a mortgage at a favorable interest rate. With a lower interest rate, your ROI (return of investment) can be increased too.
- Always double confirm whether you can afford the installment payment of your property if anything happen such as late rental payment from tenants or cannot rent out your property where you have to pay the entire installment yourself at that time.
- Make sure all your debt is under control. Maybe you can start a budget to make sure you can handle both your expenses, debt and mortgage payment.
- Always prepare an emergency fund that can afford your expenses for 3-6 months just in case anything happen in future.
I have 2 articles that might help you to make better decision here:
Things that you must consider before ordering a house
Budget to Financial Freedom – Prepare for the Known, the unknown and dreams
How to Choose Your Rental Property
- Choose a good location. In real estate, location is everything. People tend to care about the location when choosing their houses. Here are some of the example what people consider:
- Area with good Neighborhood and low criminal cases
- Surrounded with industrial or commerce zone which will provide job and business opportunities.
- Easy Reach of a good shopping center or local shops
- Good transportation infrastructure such as motorway, bus or train links
- Will pay attention on schools or university for those who are having children.
If you buy a property in a good location, you can easily rent your property out because the demands are there. One of the good examples is buying a rental property around universities or colleges. The market demands, tenants, are there and also the chances that you are going to rent your property out are really high. In some cases, you can also charge more on rental too.
- Look at the property. I heard from an experienced real estate investor that the ratio to find a good property is 1:100. That is mean he has to see 100 properties to find a good deal. As an investor, all you care is making money. So you must pay attention on the property itself to determine its investment value. In general, a good rental property should:
- Less than Twenty years old. This will reduce the chances you pay for the maintenance problems.
- Have good security system
- Have nice inner decoration
- Have fitted kitchen, private bathroom, etc
- Parking place
- If you rent out with furniture, make sure the furniture, curtains and carpets are in good condition and clean
- Clean and neat
DO Your Investment Homework
- Calculating the number. Investment is a math related activities where you must calculate the expense, income and cash flow from the investment. Before you buy a rental property, make sure you collect all the expenses associated with the property and deduct it from your rental income. Make sure the result is positive. There is always a good advice from real estate investors that “You are making money while you buy and not sellâ€. I believe on this.
- Do not overpay your investment property. In real estate, all you have to do is just have a little right over a rental property. Maybe you get a mortgage at minimum expenses, and then make money from the difference between your expenses and rental income. So do not overpay your property, use the extra money to get another property if you have. If not you will end up losing money or hardly make a dime from your investment.
- Find the right broker. If you are first time investor in real estate, maybe getting a broker is correct for you. A reputable real estate broker can make a lot of difference in your investment. They are experienced, familiar with the market and also have the contact list on their hands which may help you rent your property out easily. Of course, they may charge on their expertise but if your investment can afford it, I think this is quite ok to get someone to help you.
- Understand the real estate market. Well, this is the hard part of the homework where you must learn about your market. I can tell you that different area, district has difference on its market trend. So you must learn about this. In this matter, a broker may able to help you. But if no broker is helping you, then you must learn it by yourself and here are the tips:
- Low prices in the housing market can mean that the amount of rent is also low.
- Generally, high housing costs cam mean that you will be able to find more renters.
- Some people recommend that when buying rental property, look for those which have rent prices that below current market rents. Will allow you to raise the rent in future
- Make sure your targeted area is having a good rental history. You must check and see the average how long tenants are staying and their payment records.
- Understand your tenants. Whether they can afford a new house in the same area or are they prefer to rent rather than buy? By knowing this, you can understand that whether there are demands on your rental property.
Conclusion
I hope after reading this, you will have a clear picture on how to choose a rental property that will generate passive income to you and help you achieve financial freedom. Please feel free to comment on this article if you have any ideas, tips or experience to share with us.
Good Luck,
Harrison
