Alex Anderson's blog

Many Americans aren’t going to have enough money to retire. That is just a un happy reality of these times. Instead of resisting this reality (and the unfairness of it all) the best action someone who hopes to have a healthy retirement can do is simply make sure that they are not the average US Citizen. We must take actions to make sure that they will have enough income to enjoy their life and be able to pay their bills, including their increasing medical bills.

One of the best method to get around being one of those people who end up bagging groceries in their so-called retirement, based on the opinion of Rich Dad, Poor Dad author Robert Kiyosaki, is to buy investment property.

Buying MN investment property is an excellent method for people to prepare for retirement because it provides something called “passive income”. After someone has done the preliminary work, passive income keeps coming in without a lot of effort. A typical worker gets compensated only for the time he works in a day. A real estate investor, after creating his/her system, makes money for keeping it running. And keeping it running, if she been very clever about it, involves paying his/her employees to manage the properties for them.

The best thing about making passive income (such as from investments) is, the more time the real estate investor keeps them, the more money they should make for him/her, with less and less effort on the real estate investor's part. It's the nearest thing to the “Holy Grail” of the realm of money.  read more »

Robert Kiyosaki's Rich Dad books attempt to advise the potential real estate investor that there is nothing magical about investing, and that you and I can learn to accomplish it. Though he created the series, by introducing the idea in “Rich Dad, Poor Dad,” that wealth is influenced by an individual’s financial philosophy, he is not the only author working on those books. He presents the reader to the possibility of mentors, or specialists, that distribute their expertise with regard to MN investment property with the real estate investor. One of his advisers is Ken McElroy. Robert Kiyosaki values Ken McElroy's expertise so much, that he asked Ken to help write his books.

In “The ABC's of Real Estate Investing,” McElroy explains the complete necessity of hiring specialists to assist you with real estate projects. There are countless reasons to employ experts to help, but the 2 most notable ones are time and knowledge. Those 2 reasons feed off of each.

For example, though the real estate investor must have a fundamental knowledge of construction, law, financing, accounting, the market, etc., there is no way she will ever be able to become an expert in ALL of those professions. He absolutely must become an expert in the real estate markets that interest him. This alone will take up most of his time and energy.

Therefore, if he tries to purchase a property using this basic knowledge of construction, for example, he will probably make wiser decisions than the typical citizen who is trying a similar thing. However, there’s a big chance that he will miss seeing something that an expert architect would see right away. Having that expert with him on your initial inspection is as vital as an fledgling adventurer bringing a tour guide with him on a walk through the jungle.  read more »

As a Minnesota Realtor AND an Investor I've seen a lot of people do a lot of different things to make money with real estate. Some buy property to fix it up, then "flip" it (and hopefully make a profit) and others (like me) practice the "Buy and Hold" method of purchasing investment property, holding onto it, and renting it out as my tenants pay down the mortgage for me.

Of my 4 properties total, I have 2 single family homes here in Minnesota that I manage myself. Just this last month, the lease was up on one of my properties and I needed to find new tenants to rent it again. So I did everything that I cover in my Minnesota Investment Property Guide and sure enough, I've got new tenants to cover the mortgage for me again for at least a whole 'nother year!

This didn't just happen though, I honestly had to run across town SEVERAL times to show the place and juggle the logistics of running the ads (as covered in my guide), taking the phone calls, running across town to meet with prospective renters (several of which were no-shows), and making sure I had the cash to pay back the last tenant's deposit. In other words, it was WORK!

As I was feeling a little flustered and stressed having to do this, I took a few minutes to calculate what the long term benefits will be for having done this with just the 4 properties that I know own. In addition to the well needed tax breaks I get each and every year NOW, in 25 years or so (when the mortgages on my properties are paid off by the tenants) I will STILL get the tax benefits in addition to a tasty $72,000 in passive income that will come in EVERY year till I die!  read more »

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When you begin the great adventure of reading tons of real estate investing books (because, let's face it—it's pretty interesting stuff if you're a newbie) you will get to a point in which you scratch your head. “That sounds great,” you might say. “But how do I, Joe Doe, with three-point-four-two kids and a job delivering pizza, start messing with investment property?”  read more »