When you want to start a home based business, there are certain things you must consider first. It is not just like any other business started and operated in the normal and likely way. This kind of business is always unique in some areas compared to the normally formed businesses. One of the interesting features of home based businesses is that it is certainly done from home. There is no need for an office in the business center’s or anywhere else as expected with other businesses. There are regulations on how these businesses should clearly be started. Starting a home based business and managing it successfully may perhaps be the question everyone wants answered to.Before you start a home based business, outline your priorities, talents, skills and considerations of what you want to do. If for instance you want to start an online consultancy firm, access you capabilities, your competence, your talents and whether this is an opportunity ready for the market niche. Are you really ready to work from home? Weigh the probable advantages against the disadvantages of working at home. Once you set a decision, make sure you preview and review your options with the help of a specialist or expert. This is important in helping you analyze the benefits of venturing into a particular business. Professional home based businesses should find needs and expectations of customers and actually satisfy them.Start an internet business by transforming your ideas into realities. Many people are ready and eager to launch or start their businesses than run them. In many instances, their joy comes when they launch new products or services in the market, but they constantly fail to make these products known to customers. After setting your ideas and starting the business, it is important to work on it and improve every possible aspect of the business. A lot of research is generally needed for home based businesses to succeed.Start a home based business from a deeper understanding of what the risks are. If it is not worth the investment, energy and the expected profits, then an alternative can definitely be sought. It is important to carry out research before you start any type of business from home. Some businesses require nothing much while others must always reflect on the expected value of the investment or other inputs into the business. Depending on the type of the home based business, your personal attributes must contribute to the business’ success.
Why Investing in Real Estate Made Me a Millionaire and Investing in Stocks Didn’t
Martin, our money man and main investing partner, emailed us last night and said simply “I’ve pretty much lost it all”. We’d been shopping for a commercial property to buy to diversify our investments. Martin was once again partner with us on the deal we found, assuming he was comfortable with the numbers.
At least he was planning to before the markets crashed and Martin lost his six figure down payment! Now, sitting on pennies (o.k., not quite, but definitely not enough to make a down payment on a million dollar industrial property), Martin is probably really wondering what so many other people do, “Is real estate a much better investment than stocks?”
My answer is always a resounding “It depends” or “Diversification is best”… but if you change the question and ask me where my money is invested, 90% of my money and my net worth resides in real estate (even excluding my current home).
And yes, I am young – I’m in my early thirties! I am also a millionaire and it’s all thanks to real estate. It’s not to say that stocks won’t make you rich, Warren Buffet is one extreme example of the wealth that can be created through stocks, but I like real estate because:
You Can Kick It! Real estate is tangible. You can drive by a property and tell your friends or family that it is your property. You can also check up on how it’s doing. That is not as easy if you just own shares in a company. There’s nothing to show your friends and family, and most company’s won’t let you sit in on their meetings to see how they are doing!
Leverage: If you have $16,000 to invest (which is what I started with 7 years ago), you can buy $16,000 worth of stocks and bonds. But, if you buy real estate, you can buy a property worth $160,000 (which is exactly what I did). While some stock investors are able to buy on margin (when you only put down a portion of what the stock is worth), this is a sophisticated and high risk move that only experienced stock investors typically make. If your stocks go up in value by 5%, you’ve made $800. But if your property goes up by 5% you’ve made $8,000! This is on the same $16,000 investment. This doesn’t even take into account the other ways you can make money from real estate….which leads me to my third reason I love real estate.
There are three ways to make money from real estate: Appreciation, which we discussed above, rental income, and other people’s money (your renters) paying the mortgage down. Even if your property is decreasing in value, you are still getting paid rent and that rent is paying down the mortgage, and the surplus after expenses are paid is hitting your pocket!
Control: As a shareholder of a company, you have no control over your investment. And, you never really know what’s happening behind closed doors. I don’t need to start naming the corporate disasters of the last decade like Nortel, Enron and WorldCom for you to really understand what I am saying! But with real estate you do have control! If electrical bills are too high you can change the light bulbs to more efficient ones, seal the windows, and take other measures to reduce the costs. If you are losing money, you will know it very quickly! And you will be able to take measures to improve this situation. With shares, what can you do if your shares in Nike drop 15%? You can sell more or you can buy more… that’s it.
Creative ways to make money. A simple stock investor has two ways to make money from stocks… appreciation in their value and dividends. I owned stock with dividends once. The $30 cheque once per year was incredibly rewarding. Because you have control over your property, and there are three different ways to make money from the property, there are plenty of creative techniques to try to make more money from your asset. Some people rent out the garage separate from the house. In the right location, you could sell advertising space or just get price reductions on work done in exchange for some advertising (ever asked a painter what kind of discount you can get on their work if you put up one of their signs on your lawn??), you can add vending machines or laundry facilities, you can change the density of the property (add more units… more units means more rent), or you can change the usage of the property to sell it to someone who can make better use of it (if you are in a commercial area, an office developer might want to pay big bucks for a properly zoned property to develop on). There are dozens of ways to turn a simple house into a money making machine with creativity. The same can’t be said for stocks.
Access to the Equity without selling the asset. In the example of the $16,000 I used to buy my first investment property, I was holding most of that money in mutual funds and GIC’s. When I cashed out, I had to pay tax on the gains! So, while I actually had just under $20,000, after the government took their share, I only had $16,000. With real estate, when you need a chunk of cash, you can refinance a property or take out a secured line of credit against the equity you’ve built up in the property. This means that you get to continue making money from the rental income on that property AND someone else continues to pay down you mortgage AND if property values are appreciating, you will continue to have an appreciating asset AND you get the money you need – without taxes to pay too!
And speaking of taxes… real estate has a lot of tax advantages. Taxes vary by province and state so I won’t get into all of the different advantages… but suffice to say that there are plenty of opportunities to write off expenses against your income, write off the interest on your mortgages, and reduce capital gains taxes.
With so many reasons to love real estate, I haven’t been able to go back to the markets. It’s not to say you should do that too! Real estate isn’t a very liquid investment, and once you own it you still have work to do (unlike stocks). It’s a personal choice, but I know Martin, our money man, is wishing he’d never put his money in the hands of his trusted stock broker. Even in our absolute worst real estate investment we broke even…and in less then 2 months he lost 40% of his money…and worse for him is he lost a significant portion of the down payment he was going to use to buy the commercial property. Maybe some of the stocks will come back, but he’s afraid that a lot of his money is lost forever.
Plan To Succeed With Information Product Creation: Why You Need To Split Your Process Up
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.