Friday, 8 November 2013

An Alternative To Traditional Stock Market Investment - Real Estate Investing

By Frank Miller


Many people question why you would get involved in a high yield investment program, but really, the answer is simple. Extraordinary profit. While it's true that most high yield investment programs are high risk, they also provide the opportunity to make a large amount of money in a relatively short period of time. High yield investment programs are not for the weary or the timid as it's very high risk investing, but those who do take part are usually not sorry for the experience. High yield investment programs, or HYIP is something that many investors simply steer clear of because they have heard horror stories or had a bad investment experience and don't want to risk losing their hard earned cash. But, being involved in an HYIP doesn't have to be a bad thing, and for most people, the results are well worth the risk that is involved in this type of investing.

Now let's take a look at the mechanics of buying property. Here it can be seen that investing in real estate is quite different from most other traditional investments such as stocks. With real estate you can often borrow up to around 80 percent of the value of a property, sometimes even the full value and beyond under special circumstances. Thus a more modest investment of say 20 percent of the value can be used to buy and control the full value of the larger investment. Naturally, if the value of your investment increases, I.e. property prices rise, then the value of your real estate investment also increases. If so, then you are into profit, including that on the money you originally borrowed. Naturally, there will be costs associated with real estate investing (such as legal fees and property maintenance, taxes, etc), but these are usually small in comparison with the potential gains.

Borrowing in order to invest in real estate makes real estate a type of leveraged investment. But if you know anything about leverage, you will realize that leveraged investments can also go against you. What, for example, if the property you purchased for $300,000 decreased in value to $240,000? Even though the value only dropped by 20 percent, you actually lose 100 percent of the original $60,000 investment. And if you have a mortgage on this property making up its full purchase price, you will actually need to pay money to the mortgage provider in order to cover the costs of selling the property. That's in addition to the loss of the whole of your initial investment. So, as you see, investing in real estate is something to be taken very seriously and should not be done with money which you might need for other things in the near future. Investment in property is more secure as a long-term investment. In the above example, if you could have held onto the property and not sold it, the loss would purely have been 'on paper'. In all likelihood, over time the value of the property, unless grossly overpriced when you originally bought it, will rise and you will likely not only recover the full value of the initial investment, but also possibly make a nice profit when you do come to sell.

Like all types of investing, HYIP is not for everyone. Many investors believe that opportunities to get involved with an HYIP are just like deciding to throw your money away. Because of e-currencies, many people receive emails for various HYIP programs and consider them nothing more than spam from scammers who want to steal their money. In certain cases this may be true, in other cases an HYIP is a legitimate way to make a good return on even the smallest investment. It's all about choosing the right HYIP and knowing when to pull out if things start to get a bit shaky.

A further benefit of investing in property is that you might be able to purchase cheaply a run-down or 'distressed' property and fix it up or develop it further. Properties like this can still be found if you look around carefully. Naturally, investing in this type of real estate can still produce large gains. This is something you certainly can't do with traditional stock market investments. However, returning to the initial question about whether real estate investing is still a viable option when current prices seem to be nearing their peak: yes, it can still be so, but you might need to be more creative and prepare to be in for the long haul. Property 'flipping' methods that worked extremely successfully yesterday, might not work at all well tomorrow.

Without the existence of investment-linked products, one may disagree with the phrase and may not "buy term and invest the difference" but instead to take up a traditional participating life insurance product that provides life protection with an element for investment. The premium may be higher but it leads to wealth creation for the future.




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