Successful investing is smart investing. Investment is all about making the right choices, so that not only are you able to satisfy your immediate needs and requirements, but are also able to ensure the same for the medium and long term future. Just as no two individuals can be exactly the same, the financial needs and investment patterns vary from person to person. However one can follow certain definite markers to ensure that the path taken is the right one.

Understand Your Needs: Investment goals come with different time frames and different objectives. One may invest for a short term goal like buying a car or even a holiday abroad. On the other hand, one could consider a long term investment plan to cater for the period when one has retired from work. How much one is able to commit to investment is dependent entirely upon one’s risk taking ability.

When it comes to risk taking there is some truth in the adage that greater the risk, more the reward. That does not however mean that one should be reckless. Everyone possesses a risk threshold that they will not consider crossing. Factors like the level of a person’s income, one’s net worth, one’s ability to understand the investment scenario and the objectives behind investing drive how and how much a person invests.

Early Bird Catches The Worm: The younger that one embarks on one’s investment journey, the better are the gains. The compound interest that you will make as a young man would fetch quite impressive gains by the time you started getting along in years. For instance if one started investing $93 every two weeks starting age 25 one would reach an amount of $500,000 when one hits sixty.

This is a painless and easy way of building up a fine retirement fund. At age 25 if you are not married; you would hardly have any major expenses to worry about, and could afford to put away some money. As the years go by your responsibilities and expenses will increase, but so will your income, and you will not feel the pinch of the regular installment you committed to paying when you were so much younger.

Invest Regularly: This definitely makes a lot of sense for most people considering that it is far easier to invest small sums regularly than investing a large sum at one go. Firstly one might not be able to afford the latter and secondly one does need money for things other than investment, which will get tied up in large investments. Also it gets you used to the idea of setting aside a certain sum of money regularly. Monthly and quarterly investment options, where a certain fixed sum gets debited from one’s account regularly is a fine approach to take.

Spread your investment: That you don’t put all your eggs in one basket, applies to investment more than it applies anywhere else. Taking care to spread one’s investments over a diverse range of options will both reduce your exposure to risks and optimize your long term returns. You will be better inured against downturns in any specific sectors. So even if a part of your investments takes a temporary hit, there will be the other part still working well for you.

Track your investments: Your investments come out of your hard earned money, and you should therefore track them with a hawk’s eye. An annual appraisal, either with the help of a finance industry professional or on one’s own is very much in order to see that one’s investment objectives remain on track. There is nothing that stops you from recasting your goals in light of the changes one goes through in life over a period of time. These may be on account of personal milestones like marriage, children’s education, impending retirements or even the prevailing market situation. The idea is to guard one’s money zealously and make every penny count.

Make the right kind of investment: One needs to make different kinds of investments for the short term and the long term. Short term investments need to be less risk averse and easily encashable. The latter type of investment on the other hand need be of the late maturing growth oriented type.

It is extremely important to find a good property manager. Even then you should keep track of everything that is being done with your property. Remember this is a business…your business. If you aren’t careful, you’ll see your investment become a liability.

Although what a property manager charges is important, even more important is what you get. On average we pay 8% a month on collected rents. You may find someone that will charge you only 5%, saving you money, and in return they may destroy your business. To date, we have not found a good property manager that only charges 5%. Saving money isn’t as important as hiring the right property manager that will properly take care of your investment.

Your goal is to:
• Decrease expenses – utilities, repairs, etc.
• Avoid tenant turnover.
• Raise rents to keep up with current market rent rates.

Property managers are not your business partners. They work for you! They can make recommendations but that’s it. Consult them as a resource but you must make the final decisions.

It’s very important that you explain to them how you want things done. Then you must pay close attention to be sure they are doing what you’ve asked.

Every time a property manager says you need to repair something you should ask why. We were told once that the kitchen light was broken. Before sending the handyman to repair it, I asked them to first ask the tenant to check the light bulb. Believe it or not, simply changing the light bulb fixed the problem. You want your property managers to only send repair personal when absolutely necessary.

Anytime a repair is made on your property, be sure to get a copy of the invoice from the property manager. Look at the invoice to verify that your properties address is on it. If you have any questions about the repair, the contact information will be on the invoice allowing you to call the repairman. Unfortunately there are dishonest property managers. They will charge you for things don’t exist so that they can make some extra money. Keep track of everything and verify it all.

The repair people can be your eyes. Be sure the property manager has them pay attention to how the property looks and report back.

You want tenants, but only good tenants. Be sure the management company is only bringing in qualified tenants that will pay the rent and take care of the property. Always approve the tenant yourself. Don’t trust it to someone else. Have the property manager discuss the potential tenant with you. Talk about their credit score, if employment was verified, how much money the tenant makes, the back ground check, etc.

You will get bad tenants, it’s part of the business, but you will lower the number of bad tenants that you get by doing proper due diligence on them before allowing them in your property.

Be Sure That Your Property Manager Is Strict! No excuses should be accepted as to why the tenant hasn’t paid rent. The bottom line is they should pay rent or move out. Otherwise the property manger must evict them immediately.

We own a 4-plex in Arkansas. One tenant was late one month. Then two tenants were late. I was busy at the time so I let it go. Then three tenants were late. At this point, busy or not, I needed to call my property manager to see what was going on. She said, “well they’re all having trouble paying the rent….but they called me to say they’d be late!” I told her I don’t care if they call to say they’re going to be late. If they are late you must start the eviction process. That sounds harsh but over the years we’ve learned we have to be. Tenants will take advantage of you if you let them. I told the property manager to send all four units a letter stating that if they were ever late they would be evicted. No excuses. The next month every unit paid on time and they have ever since.

Most tenants understand that the most important thing is to keep a roof over their heads. However, if you let them make another expense the priority, they will. They’ll pay that expense first and hopefully pay you when they can if there is money left.

The other thing we’ve learned over the years is that by allowing the tenant’s to pay the rent late each month you are actually hurting them. If you let them get behind and pay late one month, then usually it will be harder for them to pay on time the next month. What happens many times is they’ll pay later and later each month and eventually get so far behind that they can’t catch up. At that point you have no choice but to evict them, and in my opinion it’s your fault because you set them up to fail. The rule of thumb is they must pay the rent on time, or at least by the 3-5 day grace period. If not, then your property manager needs to understand that they must start the eviction process. When tenants see that you are serious, they’ll usually pay on time.

Be sure that your property managers understand that they are not ever to give the tenant your name or contact information. Make this very clear!

We like to always add fire extinguishers in each home or unit we own. Just be sure that you know how long the extinguishers should last and replace them as needed. There may be legal ramifications in your state when adding fire extinguishers so be sure to discuss this with an attorney that practices real estate law in the state the property is located. You should also run this buy your insurance carrier.

Most tenants will forget about changing the smoke detector batteries and replacing heating and AC filters so it’s a good idea for you and the property manager to keep track and have them regularly changed. Whoever replaces everything should also inspect the property while they are there to verify that the tenants are taking good care of your property.

It can be very helpful for you to use a property manager to manage your properties, however, you must oversee them. Don’t make the mistake of not paying attention to what is happening to your investment.

One of the keys to succeeding in information product creation is to break the process up into discrete steps. This frequently isn’t an instinctive reaction for the typical information marketer. Especially on the internet where small sized learning products are the norm.

However, it is extremely important to your ultimate success. In fact, I would go so far as to say that if you don’t do this you probably won’t succeed… even when you are starting out let alone as you move forward.

Your product creation system should do this for you if only to help you to understand the overall task.

But why?

In this article, I’m going to ignore chunking and focus on the practical aspects. That’s not to say that chunking isn’t important. It is. It’s important to understanding and to learning the process. But while you can use the same chunks as you move forward, long term your focus needs to be on the operation of the system not the understanding of it. Unless of course you are constantly training new people!

So why is chunking important to long term use of the product creation process? (Yes, I know systems design uses a different term for this process but I’m not teaching you systems design. So I’m going to use the word learning content designers use.)

The first reason that having individual discrete tasks is important is one of schedule estimation. Frequently it is very difficult to estimate how long the total task of creating a product will take. After all, the size and type of the products matters as does the number of products in your product funnel. And those are just the most obvious elements. However, estimating a discrete task is often much easier. The total can then be estimated as the total of the discrete tasks.

Secondly, scheduling a large task can be problematic. However, by segmenting the task into a number of discrete tasks, you gain a much greater flexibility in scheduling. Not only that but as your business begins to add people you are able to schedule multiple people to the product creation.

Finally, segmenting a large task into smaller discrete tasks allows you to have much better control over the product creation. This affects two different areas — status and quality.

By segmenting your process into discrete tasks you are able to schedule and record the progress at much more detailed level. As a result you are more in control of the status of the product creation. You know what everyone is doing. When they should complete it. And how much it should cost. You also know exactly what has been done.

You also improve your overall quality. Instead of waiting until everything is done you can check quality as you go. This allows you to immediate react to low quality products without absorbing their costs. This means that you have less rework and your rework costs less. And if the product is not going to meet its quality requirement you will know about it in time to stop the development, change the requirement or fix the product.