The 8 Easy Steps to Get Started in Real Estate
Do you want to invest in real estate? However you have a problem - you don’t know how to get started? Then you must read this article - The 8 ways you can take to get started in real estate easily. All the steps I’m going to tell you here will help you to build a firmly base for you Real Estate Empire. The best thing is every steps are so easy that you can start taking action right away.
To build wealth in real estate, you don’t have to wait until you get cash or credit. Instead, you can start right now by taking some simple action to come up the money. Beside that you must also set a plan to train you up with the relevant know-how and information that will help you in real estate investment. All you have to do is take action today! This is the main point of this article – showing you the simple action that you can take today!
Ok, without further ado, here are the steps in general:
- Cut your Spending and increase your savings.
- Shape up Your Credit.
- Start a part time business.
- Closely read the real estate news
- Go out and look at the properties
- Join a real estate investment club
- Read books and attend seminars that about real estate
- Set goal and commit to buy a property as soon as possible
Cut Your Spending and Increase Your Savings
Every financial success is start from a very basic step – Manage your money. It is not about how much money you make that bring you to financial free. It is all about how you manage your money. So the first most simple step that I will recommend you is cultivate a new habit to spend your money wisely. Just make plan to cut down your expenses and increase your savings. This savings will be your modal to invest in real estate. You will be thankful that you have this habit today after 10 years. This is why saving is important to achieve financial freedom.
Shape Up Your Credit
Your credit or FICO score will directly affect your investment strategy and profits in real estate. This is because your credit will determine whether you can get a loan and the interest rate which is very important in your real estate investment. I wrote an article called Improve Your FICO score to achieve financial freedom faster. Inside there, I mentioned about how important is your FICO score, how it is being calculated and some of the steps that you can take to increase it. So I recommend you to read my article and follow the steps I provided to shape up your credit.
Start a Part Time Business
One of the main reason I write this article is I want you to stop thinking and take action if you want to invest in real estate. If you think that you don’t have the enough money to invest, then you can start a part time business to generate it. I recommend my 2 articles that talk about 20 Ideas to start a part time business and also reason to start a part time business. Of course, my first choice and favorite part time business is blogging. So stop thinking now, and do something that will generate excessive cash for your real estate investment.
Closely Read the Real Estate News
If you can follow the news of real estate news closely, you will get a good feel for the relative market trend. Besides that I also recommend you to read about the real estate classifieds and ads. Just open up a newspaper and you will find a lot of relevant information. I want you to do this because this is a best way for you to learn about the property price and rental level for certain areas. You will absorb the marketing tactics from others which is important for you to sell/rent your property out in future.
Go out and look at the properties
All of us know that practical experience is as important as theory. The best way to gain practical experience is calling your local real estate agent and go out to look at the properties. At this stage, you don’t really have to buy the property. You can also drive through and explore the property deals in some neighborhoods and communities. If you see any “sale” and “rent” sign board, you can call the owners and ask for the rate. This will let you feel the trends in property selling prices, apartment vacancy rates, and rent concessions on the market.
Join a real estate investment club
Your local real estate investment club will be a great resource for you to start your journey. There you can meet different kind of investors, from beginner to advanced investors. There are a few advantages you can get from real estate investment club. First, you can meet other investors and collect valuable contacts. All the contacts are targeted in real estate market! Second you can partner with others to find deal and invest. You can leverage on partnership to make money. Third, you can learn a lot of practical and theoretical know-how from others. Each member might exchange their own experience and this will save you a lot of time to do research yourself.
Read Books and Attend Seminars
Books and seminars are another great resources for you to learn something all the time. Now you can set a budget and a goal to read at least 1 real estate book per month. If you can afford, attend some great seminars as well. A seminar also is a great place for you to build relationship with other real estate investors. So set aside some spare time daily and read information about real estate. I can guarantee that you will improve a lot within 1 years of reading.
Set goal and commit to buy a property as soon as possible
Finally, the most basic step is setting a goal. Without a goal, you will not have any motivation to move on. Without a goal, you will go no way! So set a goal today. Maybe you set a goal to buy 1 rental apartment within 2 years of time. Or maybe you set a goal that you will have at least $10,000 of cash on hands after 1 year for real estate investment. All you have to do is set a goal and focus on it.
Conclusion
I have to say this again, you don’t have to wait until you have cash and credit to get started in real estate. There are a lot of simple steps that you can take today as you stepping stones in your real estate journey. So keep everything simple and take 1 simple step daily. After a long time, you will have a more establish financial and basic to jump start your real estate investment.
This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Invest Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by investing your money. You can read other relevant articles over here.
A review on Starting a Drop Shipping Business, Part 3
This is part 3 of the series on Starting a Drop Shipping Business. You can read the previous article of this Series below:
- Part 1 : What is drop shipping and the advantages of drop shipping.
- Part 2 : The Disadvantages of drop shipping business and should you start it?
After discussing both advantages and disadvantages of drop shipping business, I think you should have a clear mind that whether this business is suitable for you.
Just like other kind of business, if you want to start a drop shipping business, then you must learn the proper way to start it. You must have a strategy that will maximize the advantages and minimize the disadvantages and risks. This is what this article about.
Below are some of the tips that I will give you if you want to start a drop shipping business:
The Basic Steps to get started in Drop Shipping Business
- Find a good drop shipper. Just like what I said in part 2, in most of the time, you will have to depend on drop shipper to handle your after sales service such as shipping and returns. So finding a good drop shipper is a must and definitely is the most important part for this business. This is why I will recommend you spend more time on this research before you start a drop shipping business. Don’t worry, I will cover more information on this in next part, part 4 of this series.
- Market Research. When you have a few reputable drop shippers on your list, then you can start researching the market. This is one of the hard parts for business owner. First you must find a niche market that is not too niche until lack of demands. Demands are very important in business. However, at the same time you must look at the competition of a targeted market because high demands always come with high competition. So your job is trying your best to find the win-win situation. Of course, you can start with some products and test the market. You will gain more experience and eventually able to look for a niche market later. In general, you must look for:
- A niche market with targeted buyers
- There are plenty of demands and ready buyers in the market
- Less Competition in the market
- Products Selection. Now it is time for you to select a few products to sell based on your selected niche market. Please remember to sell only a few products and make sure it is really target on the niche market’s demands. From my experience in running my own business, this will help you to be more focus in marketing efforts and advertising costs. At this moment, you are the one who handle the business. So it will be easy for you if you select a few products to sell.
- Be Prepared to handle backorders and returns. Yes, you can let your drop shipper to handle this for you. However, I encourage you to put some attention on this and if possible build a system to handle this. Try your best to make the process more convenience for your customers and make sure the whole process can run smoothly. If possible, try to collect your customers’ contact emails and numbers for further follow-up and relationship building.
- Treat this like a real business. Please remember, this is your business. So please be honest with your customers and please DON’T SPAM! I saw a lot of business owner try to bring traffic to their web pages and stores by spamming. I can say that their business will not last longer as they are putting their business image on risks. We are trying to build a long term business, aren’t we? So be careful to decide every steps you take in business.
Above are 5 tips that I can give you to get started in drop shipping business. Some of the steps might take you a long time to get done but don’t worry, take your time. This is not a race. As long as you get every done properly, then you drop shipping business will have a good foundation and it will be easy to success.
In next part, as I promised just now, I will talk about how to select a good drop shipper and some of the questions that you must pay attention. You can subscribe to my RSS feeds or bookmark this site by pressing CTRL + D for next updates.
This is an article that I wrote and put in the “How to Make More Money” which is about achieve financial freedom by making more money. You can read other relevant articles over here.
5 Ways to Get Motivation and Achieve Your Goals
In this article I will share 5 ways that I always use to motivate myself and help me to achieve anything that I targeted at. If you have a goal and currently suffer from lack of motivation, then you must read this article.
Do you have a goal? I wish you have. I also have a goal. A goal to achieve financial freedom at the age of 30 and I try my best to do everything that might bring me there.
So far, my conclusion for this goal is it is not easy to achieve financial freedom. However, this does not mean that it is unachievable. Each goal has its “price” and you have to pay it in order to achieve it. You have to work hard and do certain thing correctly to achieve what you want. Every goal is like this.
Sometime you might feel that you are frustrated and lack of motivation to continue due to some failure or unexpected results. However, if you want to success, you have to keep going and never give up! So motivation is very important in the process to achieve your goal.
The 5 Ways to get Motivation!
- Imagine the future.
- Reprogram your words.
- Ask yourself questions.
- Research More About Your Goals.
- Expose your goal to public.
Imagine the future. I have a habit. Every night, after I lay down on my bed, I will imagine the life after I achieve my goal. I will keep imagine until I fall asleep. By imagine the future, you can make your mind to feel the “benefits” of achieving the goal and reminding you about what you want in future. I found that I can gain more confidence, motivation, excitement and eventually make me believe that I will achieve my goal in future. This make me have more power to move forward.
Reprogram your words. Our words and the way we talk can reflect the way we think and believe. So you must reprogram your words and make your mind and believe system accept your goal. For example, before this I always say “I can’t do this”. My mentor heard about this and reminds me to change my words to “How can I do this successfully”. Now I always set some short term goal for myself which is beyond my ability. So I will keep thinking and saying “How can I make it succeed?” and most of the time I will come out some plan and strategy. At least my mind will not give up and keep researching and learning to make it a success. So start from today, you must pay attention on your words and replace those negative, unsupportive one with those that will motivate you to move forward.
Ask yourself questions. From time to time you must ask yourself a few good questions. A good question is something that will motivate you, remind you and push you to move forward and achieve whatever you want to. Here are some of the questions that I always ask myself:
- Am I really want to give up?
- Will I regret if I give up now?
- Does giving up really solve the problem?
- What I really want? / What is my goal?
Yes, I will ask myself these questions whenever I want to give up. So far I already beat the mind of giving up for 5 times using these questions. Human is emotional and most of the time we tend to concentrate on negative thinking when something bad happens. So with this question, it will remind you about your goals, your future and hence try to boost your confidence up and move forward. So start from today, please list down at least 5 questions that you will ask yourself when you want to give up. You can add more if you want to.
Research More about Your Goals. My goal is achieve financial freedom and I always research on this topic. I found that I will be motivated every time I read the stories about how people achieve financial freedom, what is the life after financial free, the way to achieve financial freedom and so on from researching. I think there are 2 reasons why I will feel like this.
- First, I will better understand my goal and the benefits that it gives me if I achieve it. It is quite exciting to know that the life after financial free.
- Second , throughout the research, I can understand more on “how to” achieve financial freedom. From here, I will gain more confidence and believe that I can achieve my goal one day!
Expose Your Goal to others. Don’t be shy and shame, just tell your goal to your friends and family. There is nothing to shame on your goal, right? So just share it and mention it loudly with others! 2 reasons to do this:
- The power of promise. If you share you goal with others, you are actually make a promise to others and of course yourself!
- Let someone to keep track and remind you. Once others know your goal, they might ask you from time to time about your progress towards your goal. If you don’t want to be shame, then you must show some progress to them.
But you must be careful on this. You must share your goal carefully with others and choose those that you think will support you and not just teasing you because of your goal. I have experience on this while I shared my goal with some of my friends. They just said my goal is unbelievable and I am dreaming. But I don’t care, they won’t change my mind because I found another group of people who trust me and encourage me to achieve my goal.
Conclusion
Above is 5 ways that I always use to motivate myself. My strategy is very easy, first, I gain more confidence about my goal by imagine the future and research on my goal. After that I set my mind accordingly to accept my goal by reprogram my words. Then I stop myself from giving up using the tactics of asking questions. Of course, last but not least, I leverage on my friends and family by sharing my goal with them. I want them to help me keeping track my goals.
Motivation is very important to make us take action towards our goals. So we must think a certain way to motivate ourselves at the time we set our goal.
Do you have any other ways to make yourself motivated? It will be great if you share it with us here.
