Live Simple and Be Fulfilled
Alternative Income
Investing In Private Equity Funds For Real Estate
241 month ago
As with all investment articles on this site, I’ll just warn that I’m not an investment professional, and this should not be taken as advice.
In my recent monthly status I mentioned that I’ve begun a new experiment in my ever growing portfolio of alternative investments. Before I go into the details, let me explain how I got here.
Several months ago, I began a partnership with a local real estate investor who was seeking money to purchase a distressed house. I invest the money, she does the work, we split the profits. An distressed house is now a livable one, and a family gets a beautiful new home right next to the elementary school. Everybody wins.
I like this idea, but there are reasons why I may not want to increase my More >
Avoiding Income Taxes With Self-Directed IRAs
101 month ago
I’ve spoken a lot about income diversification, using various investment strategies to create the income. One of the things that bugs be about these types of income, however, is that I had to do a lot of it with taxable money. And since I’m still working a full time job, in a high marginal tax bracket, this money was getting taxed at a rate that was really eating into my effective profits. I knew I could shelter basic dividend income inside my IRA, but what about real estate investments and other income generating investments?
Then I learned about Self-Directed IRAs (SDIRA). An SDIRA allows anyone with an IRA to get greater asset diversification by allowing for investments other than traditional stocks and bonds, including but not More >
Lending Club Investment Update – October 2011
144 months ago
I’ve now been investing with Lending Club for almost 4 months. Around that time, I wrote about my Lending Club investment strategy. Basically, I used historical analytic data to filter out loans that I believe will return a significantly higher return than the average.
When I began investing in Lending Club, I decided I would invest $10,000 to see what kind of returns I can get. If, after 1-2 years I find my returns to be sufficient, I’ll increase my holdings to $20,000. I doubt I’ll go beyond $20,000 in Lending Club, but I’m not completely ruling it out. It’ll depend on my returns, as well as what other opportunities for investment that I find.
My stretch goal is to achieve a 15% CAGR, although I consider anything over 12% a big More >
Getting Started In Real Estate Investment – Financing A Flip
304 months ago
About 3 months ago I decided I wanted to get involved with Real Estate Investing (REI), so I got a book from the library and started reading. It turns out the RE world is a highly complex world! Always up for a challenge, I was hooked.
Next I joined BiggerPockets.com, and joined the forums. Experts there are quick to answer your questions with fancy jargon and confusing acronyms. After a few weeks I decided that I didn’t have the time to be a landlord or to do all the work of rehabbing and flipping a home. Hmmm, I was stumped. How could I make money, learn new skills, and not invest too much time in this fascinating world of REI?
Before giving up, I decided to send out a few emails to a few random but active RE investors in Colorado More >
My Android App Creation Strategy
154 months ago
This past month wrote an Android game for my 3-year old son. Soon after, I decided to see if I could make a few bucks. My expectations were small, thinking if I made even $0.50 per day that would be a cool $15/month of passive income in my pocket. If that happened, the I could write just 1 new app per week, which would result in $750/month after a year. I would have been very happy with that.
Well, I’m happy to report that this experiment has been a big success, and relative to my expectations it’s been a phenomenal success. After just 20 days, I’m averaging $15/day and possibly rising. I say “possibly” because there is not enough historical data to support an accurate trend, and the standard deviation in daily earnings is too high to More >
Android App Survey
205 months ago
As many of you have seen, I’ve recently gone offline to pursue a new income with Android phone apps. It’s turned out surprisingly successful from a ROT (return on time) perspective.
My plan with this blog was not to become instructional, especially in areas I don’t consider myself an expert (app development included). But I also received quite a few requests offline to describe the process of what I’ve done, and how I’ve made money recently. So I’m opening up a survey to see if people want to learn. If so, I’ll write a 3-4 part series that I think would get a novice to making some sort of income with android phone apps (not iPhone because I haven’t done it).
If there is no interest, I’m OK with that. This way I can focus on new apps More >
Lending Club Investment Strategy
316 months ago
About 2 months ago, I decided to begin investing at LendingClub.com, a peer-to-peer lending platform. Peer to peer lending is a method where investors like you and me can provide micro loans (as small as $25) that get pooled together for someone that needs the loan. These people pay interest rates ranging from 6% with good credit to 20% or more with more questionable credit. LendingClub.com charges a small fee of 1% for the service of pulling it all together, as well as for their significant filtering of loan candidates. In fact, Lending Club claims to filter out ~90% of loan applications.
I invested an initial $5000, but soon after decided to raise that investment to $10,000. Only the $5000 is active in loans right now, the rest is More >
Experiments In Real Estate
47 months ago
Once I achieve an extremely early retirement at 35, I will consider my self a professional investor (capitalist). Because I take this very seriously, I want to learn as much as possible about actively investing in different sectors, including real estate. And so yesterday I made my first move into real estate by purchasing a home.
Actually, my first move was 2 weeks ago when I sought out a successful landlord in my area and asked her to be my mentor. In addition to teaching me a lot, we’ve agreed to go into partnership on some homes. She is cash strapped and actively working many deals. I, on the other hand, have lots of cash but no time to seek out the best deals. We’ve got along well, so we agreed to do business together.
The house More >
My Lending Club Experiment
27 months ago
Since my plan is to become a full-time investor (early retiree, capitalist, lazy bum, or whatever you choose to call it) I am constantly searching for new methods to stretch my capital as much as possible. For the past 10 years, I’ve kept 90% of my money in stocks – both individual and mutual funds. I’ve kept the remaining 10% in cash. That strategy has had reasonable results, although not stellar given the overall growth of the market since 2000.
Recently I’ve been investigating 4 new investment strategies:
- Bonds
- Real Estate
- High-Yield Dividend Stocks
- Peer-to-Peer Lending
Today I’m taking the plunge into peer-to-peer lending, by investing $5000 into a diversified lending portfolio at LendingClub.com. I will get into the details of More >
