The Accidental Real Estate Investor

Oftentimes, we discover the best things in life by chance. Like the time my wife made me try a new restaurant (I’m the guy who doesn’t like to try new foods) and now I eat lunch there everyday. How about when your father (or mother) insisted that you get a job and work weekends in high school, and you discover that you love working. (Hey… it can happen, plenty of us love to work!) Or, maybe it’s when you finally discovered that the home you purchased to live in has become one of the greatest investments you ever made.

Alright, the first two weren’t discovered by chance as much as by compulsion… wives and fathers can be formidable forces in forging our life habits… but the last discovery really was stumbled upon. We buy a home to live in, only to figure out somewhere along the way what a great thing owning a home is.

Now, I won’t be discussing paying yourself versus paying a landlord… you still need to make payments to someone if you are borrowing money. Nor, will I discuss the tax benefits of owning a property versus renting. However, I will discuss how owning a home can be an amazing investment and why you might consider buying just one more piece of real estate.

First, you will eventually own your home without a mortgage. The amazing thing about 30 year loans is that they are actually paid off in 30 years! So, if you get a 30 year loan and make 30 years of payments without refinancing, guess what? You own the house outright. Assuming the house did not go up in value at all and it was a $200,000 house you’d have increased your net worth by $200,000 just by paying your loan each month. However, that’s not even the biggest benefit of home ownership.

The biggest benefit is that real estate tends to go up in value over long periods of time. Of course, house prices rise and fall, but inflation tends to make housing prices go up over time. So, what would a $200,000 house be worth in 30 years? Well, if values were going up at about 7.2 percent per year (it makes the math easy to use that number), then your property doubles in value every 10 years. So, over 30 years, it would have doubled three times.

So, a $200,000 house doubles once to $400,000. It doubles twice to $800,000 and doubles a third time to $1.6 million dollars.

Remember, you own it without a mortgage at that point too. You can sell it to fund your retirement account at that point. Alternatively, simply refinance it to have the advantage of its increased value while still living in it.

So, now that you know that you’ve been an accidental real estate investor by owning your own home, perhaps you might want to double your wealth by buying just one additional investment property. Triple it by buying two other properties. What would an extra $5 million mean to you and your family?

Until my next post,

James

P.S. Sign up as a Real Estate Investor Bronze Member and get immediate access to over 100 amazing real estate investor courses that will walk you through the steps of how to select the best properties to make offers on, how to negotiate the best deals and how to manage the properties you do buy. Plus we have on-going training and consulting free to our Real Estate Investor Bronze Members. Sign up now.

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