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Are you a renter looking to transition to the role of a landlord? Do you think you have what it takes to keep up with rent collection, home inspections, and tenant complaints? This step-by-step guide to buying your first-income property can help you better navigate the task of being a property owner.

Is Rental Property the Right Investment for You?

Although owning rental properties is one of the most stable forms of investment, it isn’t for everyone, or at least not right away. Thus, it would be best if you didn’t dive into the industry simply because everyone else is doing it. Real estate is a capital-intensive venture you should only embark on based on your state of mind, finances, and risk aversion.

Real estate is right for you if:

• You’re ready to be a landlord
• You don’t mind investing long-term
• You value stability

Real estate isn’t right for you if:

• You want to get rich quick
• You need liquidity
• You’re not ready to deal with tenants

5 Steps to Buying Your First Rental Property

1. Do Your Research

Research is essential for any business owner to thrive. You must be ready to do your homework and find out what you need to succeed as a property owner, especially if you’re buying your first one. While there are some things you’ll have to learn on the job, going in with an idea can help you navigate hurdles better. You should compile a list of questions to research on the internet or ask experienced real estate professionals. For example, would you like to invest in a single-family unit or a condo? How does that rental property perform in your chosen location? Also, it would help to decide whether you’ll manage the property yourself or hire a qualified property manager to handle your rental investment property.

2. Get Your Finances in Order

As we highlighted earlier, real estate is a capital-intensive venture, so you must prepare aptly. If you have personal debt, you might want to consider paying those off first. Too much debt can make getting a loan with reasonable rates harder. Besides, it might be hard for you to keep up with monthly mortgage payments. At this stage, you should start evaluating your financing options. A bank loan might not be the best solution for everyone. If you’re a good negotiator, you may consider seller financing. Of course, you can pay cash upfront if you have enough to spare.

3. Find the Right Property

Your first rental property can make or sink your portfolio. Hence, you must find the right one. The key word during your search is location. Prime location often translates to higher income for the property owners. Thus, it would be best if you were looking for things that attract renters. As a tenant, what informed your decision of where to live? Was it close to your office, good schools, and the city? Remember that people are willing to pay more for neighborhoods with an excellent walkability score. Gyms, laundromats, supermarkets, and bus terminals can contribute to your walkability score. The more errands people can complete on foot from your rental, the better.

4. Estimate Your Expenses

Before committing to any rental property, you should estimate your expenses. One of first-time property owners’ most common mistakes is underestimating their rental costs and undercharging tenants. You need to take a holistic approach when calculating your operating costs. Most landlords will account for repairs, utilities, staff salaries, loan mortgage, and property taxes. However, it’s easy to ignore travel expenses, employee gifts, and HOA fees. With these expenses in mind, you can create an accurate budget and ensure your cash flow remains positive. Also, it can help you take advantage of tax deductions.

5. Know Your Landlord’s Duties

As a tenant, you might think your landlord has it easy. After all, they only remind you when it’s time to pay rent and come around occasionally to make repairs. However, being a landlord is an active job and managing a rental property requires a lot of attention. Besides the apparent roles of collecting rent and making repairs, you need to schedule maintenance and pay utilities. When your units are vacant, you have to put out ads, screen tenants, and sign a valid lease. Also, you need to be aware of state laws regarding habitability, security deposits, and much more. With so many responsibilities, you should consider leaning on the help of other real estate experts.

Conclusion

That’s our step-by-step guide to buying your first income property. Moving from tenant to landlord is a big transition, and we hope this article clarifies what you need to do. However, before taking these five steps, you should consider if real estate is right for you. Remember that your first rental property will set the pace for the rest of your business. Thus, it would help to rely on an expert property manager when you need it.

Financial planning has always been a tough job to take on, especially when you are entirely new to Finances’ Industry. Another bitter truth is that despite going to every successful school or college, you will come across very few schools that help us learn Finances and Financial journey in a better half.

Assume your Financial journey as a plane, which lacks the flight path and the flight routes, will you be able to land it?

Planning the Finances and managing the Investments has never been an easy job. You need to know your long-term and short-term financial goals, along with keeping a keen eye on whether you should invest in this.

A Happy Financial journey has the following benefits:

➔ Better Credit Score.

➔ Better relationship with family members.

➔ More positivity around.

➔ Manageable stress levels.

We all might have gone through several ups and downs in terms of Money, and it will not be surprising to say that Money can give someone the biggest surprises. Investing Money or saving on your expenses are such ideas that can help you get a Financially stable future, but you also need a Risk-proof plan for investing in the right direction and platform.

Let’s talk about Starting your first financial journey without any error-prone area.

➔ List down your expenses and Income, also develop a detailed Spending plan for the same.

➔ Identify your asset and the Liabilities.
➔ Goal Setting

➔ Create a Saving Plan.

➔ Make a routine plan and check them annually.

➔ 1. Know your cash flow.

Briefly note all your expenses you did in the past year and the expenses you did in the last four months. After the list is prepared, you can just view them side by side and compare them in order to see your spending pattern. This will give you your exact spending pattern as well as helps to prepare a budget every month, for which you can prepare a monthly budget. If you spend more than your budget principal, then you will end with a bad credit score, credit card debt, and unwanted credit card debt.

➔ 2. Know your strong and weak points

After you know your spending limits, you now need to make a box with two sides, a left and a right side. The left side will have all the items of value, and on the right side, you need to enter those names or items for which you have, for example, mortgages, loans, car loans, etc. After listing all the things in both the parts of the list, now subtract both the sides and now you have your Net Income.

➔ 3. Goal Setting

Set 3 goals you would like to achieve in the coming times like in the coming three years you would like to buy a car, and then after five years, you would like to buy a home so you will have to save some each month to come up to that price of the house in 5 years. Short-term goals and long-term goals can be set for x years, where x is the number of years which depends upon your Income every month.

➔ 4. Savings is your best friend.

The key is not to always start big, instead of creating small and saving every month is the right way to achieve financial freedom. Do not just overdo it. Instead, take it slow because if you are overdoing it, eventually, you will take it as a hard way to save pennies, and you will end giving up.
With time, you will get more comfortable and eventually get your savings to grow. If you like to spend on items lavishly, then the correct way is to put all savings in an account you don’t have access to.

➔ 5. Keep your actions under the monitor and watch over your savings.

Keep your finances under direct monitoring. The more attention you will pay to your savings and expenses, the more control you will have over the cash outflow and inflow. Finances are much like your body physique. The more watch you keep on it, the better physique you will get. There are numerous tools available online that can help you achieve a lot of the above in rather a straightforward method. You can set reminders as to when your payment will come so that you can deposit it in your savings.

If someone lacks the value of “Assets and Liabilities” for whatsoever reason, having basic knowledge about primary education and finances is all that is needed.

Important takeaways:

● Each step above depends on the previous stage for specific reasons. You cannot jump to step 5 and then recursively move backward. To do proper investing, budgeting, and savings, you should be prepared for what these terms are related to.

● Money journeys can never be some easy points of life. These are primarily curved graphs because of the Investment market not staying stable enough. Your career opportunity will shift from one curve to another curve, including your family situation, to evolve as well.

● Never be your own boss until you are an expert in the field and aware of every steep point. Always get the suggestions of some Certified Financial Planner.

Conclusion

Money matters are not easy enough; they are always a jumbled up set of sentences with most of the investment plans. You just need to know what hold of the stacking cash you will need to fund your Financial Freedom at your retirement. As someone says,’ Money is the root of all evil,’ I think this is an incomplete statement. The correct statement should be,” Money can be the root of all evil if you do not manage it properly with time, taking care of the investments and savings.”

Ankita Kaushal is working as a blogger for Veronica Karas. Veronica Karas is a Certified Financial Planner in NY. She helps with Complex financial issues like stock options, estate planning, tax & financial planning and more. Get in touch with her now for any assistance regarding Financial planning.

People, for their nature, are in a constant quest for finding ways for making money or profiting from their capital. Due to the recent events though, this attitude has begun to be predominant for those restricted at home, and that’s how online stock trading began its unstoppable rise.

Between the many broker firms you can find online, there are some which may be considered more trustworthy than others. Traders tend to make a difference between regulated brokers and non-regulated ones, and for a good reason: brokerage services which are not regulated by a regulator lead often to scams and money-losses.

That’s why today our focus will be addressed towards one of the most famous regulated brokers available online: eToro.

In this eToro review we’ll discuss main features related to the eToro trading platform, regulation, fees and everything you need to know before start trading with it.

eToro: Why It’s Safe

Born in 2007 as “Retail FX” in Tel Aviv, this brokering service has now reached and surpassed $800 million in value and it’s used by +10 millions people across the world.

This achievement has been reached for many reasons, and one of these is surely being a very well-regulated broker. In fact, eToro has a presence worldwide with many offices across the world and different entities for different regions, and each one of those are regulated from local and internationally recognized top-tier regulators such as CySEC, ASIC, FCA and FinCEN.

Additionally, this broker offers high protection standards for its client’s funds. We’re speaking in regards to two measures enacted by eToro: negative balance protection and segregated accounts.

While negative balance protection consists in an automatic block of the trader’s balance before it goes in red, segregated accounts are an extra-precautionary measure useful in the unlikely case of the broker’s bankruptcy. With segregated accounts, traders’ money cannot be touched by liquidators or anyone else outside of the one who made the deposit, because they’re the only one allowed to access the bank account.

eToro: Why It’s Famous

eToro has become an international phenomena for plenty of reasons, but one of the strongest has always been related to that revolutionary idea called Social Trading.

This brokerage service has implemented autonomously a proprietary trading platform which has integrated many features inspired by main social media. Once you’ve opened eToro, you’ll find that assets are treated like Facebook’s posts or tweets, with other traders discussing and arguing on the last news regarding it.

Furthermore, what really made eToro’s fortune has been the most iconic feature of all: the Copy Trading.

This innovative feature made it possible, even to the less experienced trader, to copy other traders and their portfolio in an automated way. In fact, once enabled this feature opens any position opened in the selected portfolio, and so it will be for any future position.

Those targeted by this feature are usually a part of what we’d call “Influcencers” if we were on a social platform, but here they are called Top Investors. These kinds of traders are a sort of peculiar asset and you can invest in them depending on their risk level and your profit aims.

If you are a new trader though, we strongly suggest you to pick a Top investor with a low risk ratio.

eToro: Before You Start

If you want to start trading by opening an account with eToro, you can do it by doing a minimum deposit of only $50 if you’re a US resident. If you don’t want to commit and invest money straight away, this is not the only way to start.

As a matter of fact, eToro allows you to open a free demo account. By using this form of trading, you’ll be able to practice how much you want, without fearing making mistakes that will lead you to lose money.

Although many people think saving and investing are very similar to one another, there are some key differences.

By being aware of those differences you may change your mind when deciding which action to take.

We listed some pros and cons of both saving and investing to help you to weigh which is the better solution for you.

Similarities and differences between saving and investing

The thing that connects the two is that they are both strategies to accumulate money! Saving or investing both imply putting your money aside for potential future needs.

They can both protect you from debt. However, if you find yourself in that situation, be active in the process and claim Payment protection insurance if needed.

The difference between the two is the type of assets used in the account.

Another one is that if you want to be able to use the cash quickly, save (but it can also be done for some long-term future plans).

If you don’t want to play it safe and your desire is achieving a higher return – invest!

Where to go?

Savers – go to a bank or a credit union and open a saving account. When opening a saving account, look for the APY (highest annual percentage yield) to maximize your earnings.

Investors – open an account with an independent broker, which includes mutual funds, bonds, stocks and exchange-traded funds. Also, keep in mind when investing that you should invest only the money you won’t be needing any time soon.

You should keep your funds in the investment for at least 3 to 5 years minimum.

Are there some risks?

While investing, you should always think twice before doing something. Saving is safe with the minimum amount of risk – it is very easy to do and the chance of losing money is equal to zero.
You are always familiar upfront with how much you will earn in your balance.

On the other hand, investing is always unpredictable and you have to be aware of the risk of potentially losing everything, but also of earning a lot more!

When talking about risk, the thing that needs to be mentioned is the price of saving and investing. Saving is not expensive, since opening an account is free.

But, you have to keep in mind some unpredictable factors such as inflation. Saving doesn’t protect you from it, while investing potentially can save you (if you think in a long-term period).

How should I decide whether I should save or invest?

This decision should be based on your wishes and needs.

If you’re looking for earning money and taking risks that can possibly have very good or very bad consequences, you should invest.

If you are thinking about putting some money aside just in case you might need it someday and you want to be able to use your money whenever you need it, you should save.

This decision is not always easy. Thinking it thoroughly, make the best decision for yourself. It can be a lot easier than you think – contact Optimal Solicitors in Manchester, they know what to do!

It is a well known and most asked question that what other services do Accountants provide to the business organizations rather than just simple bookkeeping process. The fact is that reputed accounting firms provide a number of other accounting-related services rather than just conventional financial transaction Record-Keeping services. Well known accounting firms provide the services of the financial strategies implementation within a business organization which can generate a huge amount of revenue for a firm or a business organization.

Accounting firms and small business accountants are really beneficial in finding out which strategies to implement in an organization and which ones to avoid in order to optimize the profitability of the business in the long run. As it is the job of the Accountants to manage all the financial transactions and the records of a business organization, that is why they are more valuable near about the revenue charts of a business. This is the reason why Accountants can guide the business management better about the financial strategy implementation within an organization.

In this article, we are going to discuss what services Accountants provide to small businesses.

So, keep on reading to find out more information below about small business Accountants and accounting firms.

1. Taxation:

The small business Accountants provide the services of taxation to the business organizations. The taxation for a business might seem simple at first but it actually is not that simple and straightforward. The reason behind this is that new tax codes come and the rules keep fluctuating. The small business Accountants are aware of the changing tax codes and they know what is next. Accountants know how these tax returns changes are going to affect your business organization.

2. Debt Coping Strategies:

The reduction of death and its optimization is one of the key procedures towards the profitability and revenue generation of a business organization in the long run. It is the job of the small business Accountants to manage the credit card management of a company and assist them in this regard. Accountants have all the valuable knowledge about the market and they can assist you in the implementation of a financial model that is going to be the most profitable for your business.

3. Payroll Management:

Accountants also assist the small businesses in payroll management of their company. Accountants are able to guide the management of the company better whether they can afford new employees at the moment or not depending upon their financial revenue of the company. So the job of an accountant is not just traditional bookkeeping but it is much more than that. Accountants can also determine whether you can provide your employees with certain benefits in a certain situation currently or not.

4. Business Growth:

The most important service that Accountants provide to small businesses is the plan for their business growth in the long run. It is a crucial step towards success because this is how Accountants can add value to a business.

Conclusion:

The job description of Accountants for small business organizations is not just traditional bookkeeping.