Financial Freedom For Doctors

10 Tips for investing in property - en route to financial fr*eedom!

In thinking how to blog for the financial freedom for doctors site today, I thought an introduction to property investment may strike a chord. Don't forget that you always have the option of investing passively through Progressive Property...(Please excuse the aggressive marketing - it works for lesser mortals but not for us analysis paralysis freaks, but believe me, the product is worth it...)

Anyway, here are some tasters...

1. Don't read the papers!

You know how honest and truthful the  media is in portraying GPs and the NHS! Why believe their assessment of the property market?

Newspapers are in one business - the business of selling papers. Television media are there to increase viewing figures. If there was no bad news, papers wouldn't sell and folks wouldn't bother to watch the news so often - I know that I was glued to the television after the events of 9/11 and during the foot and mouth crisis! Don't believe everything they tell you! There are other ways to perform your due diligence!

2. Take one step.

You can procrastinate all you like - meanwhile, other peoples' property will have appreciated in value! Professionals like us are particularly subject to "analysis paralysis" - we have been taught to analyse every scrap of evidence that we can get our hands on. It has been drummed into us. To take any step without doing so goes against the grain - it feels wrong, and risky. But analysis paralysis doesn't make you rich...and risk aversion won't make you into a millionaire (don't forget, you're nearly there - in dollars a million is only £700,000 - how much is YOUR house worth?)

3. Get to know an area well.

If you are thinking of buying into property (unless you plan to do so passively...) - get to know your chosen area really, really well. Jog, cycle or walk the dog in the area every day. Get to know one square mile infinitely. Know which properties came up for sale and how much they make. Know how much local rental is. Spot the planners applications. Notice any scaffolding. Know it well so that you spot before anyone else when something is below market value (BMV) as this is the fundamental step to making money from property.

4. Talk to letting agents.

Go into the letting agents in your chosen area. Ask them the question - "If I were to offer you a property that you could let out right now, what would it be?" Find out what is letting locally. Find out market rents, and any local trends. Get them on your side, part of your network, quickly.

5. Establish a network.

Get to know property investors, mortgage brokers, estate agents, letting agents locally. Establish a wealth network. Networking is how you get (and give) good deals.  Enjoy talking to them!

6. Look out for BMV (below market value) deals.

Some people who may be looking to sell at below market values include:

Banks after repossession
Householders before repossession
Families after bereavement
The elderly when they are planning to go into care or warden controlled accommodation
Couples going through relationship breakups.

If you can offer people a quick sale with no housing ladder, you will be doing them a service. Help them (and yourself) out.

7. Rid yourself of negative beliefs around money.

This was a tricky one for me! I grew up with the traditional Christian ethos that money is bad and we don't want to be rich. Working my way through the 101 financial tips and Nicola Cairncross's book has helped me no end. All the while that you feel that you don't deserve to have money (and in my experience we females are more prone to this than the guys) you will do something, usually subconsciously, to prevent you from doing so.  I will be focussing on this in a future blog post!

8. Put the rent up every year.

Be business-like about this. If you aren't pro-active on this count, you will be losing money. Put it up by a small amount, enough to keep you in business, and you won't go far wrong. Sure, there is a problem if rents all around you are actually falling, and you need to keep an eye on the market, but don't forget how much it costs nowadays to move house!

9. Respond promptly to queries.

If you have made an effort to trace BMV deals, you must follow up every lead. Work to establish yourself as a reliable individual, who the agencies can rely on. As a landlord, respond to information about problems - or ensure that your agent, if you use one, does so. Work to keep your tenants - they are important to you.

10. If you are doing up your own buy to let property, don't do it up to your own standards.

Don't choose that luxury and very expensive bathroom that you have always wanted - you need reliable but inexpensive fixtures and fittings in your B2L property. Don't forget that few tenants look after property as well as if they owned it, and you may well be replacing it more frequently than you would in your own home.

I hope that this is a useful taster for all you budding property investors -  food for thought for starters!

KR
Alison

Investing in the States!

Well, I've taken the plunge!

Having invested in UK property, with my first buy to let just completed and being done up to boost the rental and re-mortgage value, I have turned my mind to the exciting opportunities abroad.

I was present when Ayshe Kadir gave a group of 20 moneygym members a talk on Investing in Property in the United States. It was mind-blowing.  In fact, as we all agreed afterwards, a "no-brainer".

Investing in America offers several advantages at present.

While property prices have gone down in the UK, those in America are ahead of us due to the sub-prime foreclosures. Although they may not be completely at the bottom of the cycle (who knows?) they are likely to be nearer to it than in the UK.

Ayshe kindly explained all about the events leading up to the current credit crunch in the US.  Basically house buyers were offered a very low (unrealistic) introductory mortgage rate, to be hiked up to market rates after 2-3 years, but were assessed for mortgage repayments at the lower rate. Consequently many of them are now unable to keep up repayments. Thi does sound familiar, doesn't it?

This is leading to multiple houses being repossessed ("foreclosure" in the States). In fact, it is estimated that 1 in 20 US homes are being repossessed.

Opportunities abound in the US for buying property at record low prices.

There are three particularly good ways to make money out of property in the US at present. These are:

Tax Liens
Tax Deeds
Pre-Foreclosure

Tax-liens occur if a householder is "delinquent" - in arrears with his/ her property tax (council tax, if you like). If they do not pay the due amount by the 1st May, the court places a lien (legal charge) against the property, disabling your ability to refinance or sell it. At the time of going to court there is a penalty attached, which varies according to the state concerned.  The tax lien certificates are sold to investors. The lien holder (investor) then takes the interest on the tax and the investment, giving a ROI of 8-80% depending on which state you are in.  The redemption period (the time span for the property owner to pay the tax) can be up to 3 years, so it is not a quick turn around investment. Most property owners pay up at some time in that 3 years.

If you have some money to invest in the medium term, this is a reliable focus as it it guaranteed by the state.

In some states Tax deeds exist rather than tax liens. In these, the county will sell the house if the property owner does not keep up with taxes. The quirk here is - the property is sold for the value of the tax owed, not that of the property - here you can buy houses worth $200,000 for $10,000.

Pre-foreclosure purchases occur "on the court-room steps" or in the weeks leading up to a court hearing. Property owners would far rather get a good price for their houses than  they will get in court. It is possible to help people out here by buying during this time.

The way to make money in property, whether at home or abroad, is to buy "below market value". This may mean buying poor-looking houses & doing them up, or finding "motivated sellers". With pre-foreclosure deals we have access to 90 motivated sellers per day in one state alone!

Of course, there is far more to investing in the states than this, and in all cases due diligence is needed.

So I've signed up with Ayshe, and we wait to see what evolves - at the moment it is forms to fill in, companies to create, & notaries to meet up with...

Enjoy life - I am !

Alison

Financial Freedom for Doctors can help you to work out how soon you can be financially free, enabling you to work part time, take better holidays or plan for an earlier retirement. Find financial freedom through property investment, the stock market and the internet.

Property Woman of the Year Awards

Last weekend's Mail on Sunday had a summary of the finalists of the Property Woman of the Year Awards for the first year that it has been run. It was amazing how negative the journalist reporting the piece was - it would appear that he hadn't cottoned on to the fact that these women were making a success of property, like so many others.

I wonder when I'll be on the shortlist!

Here is a summary concocted by my friend and property/ business coach, Judith Morgan...

NORTH – Helen Currie – Profit £359,000

Helen, aged 43, former police inspector, left job due to depression – has 8 properties worth £1.065m compared to purchase price of £706k.

SOUTH EAST – Hasmita Reardon – from homeless immigrant to 75 properties – Profit £2.9 million

Owns 75 houses and flats in Sittingbourne, Kent.   Over the last 10 years, Hasmita, aged 44, has housed the homeless and single mothers whom nobody else wants.   Her husband wasn’t keen but her portfolio is now worth £8.4m at a cost of £5.5m – last week she bought 5 properties.   Husband Steve has now given up his day job laying driveways.   (Judith: You don’t say!)

LONDON – Sylvana Young – “I bought 650 flats in a month – turnover £50m

Last October, Sylvana bought all 644 apartments in two of Europe’s biggest residential towers now being built in Canary Wharf in London’s Docklands.   Sylvana, aged 36, now personally owns 20 flats and houses in London worth £8m.   Her personal portfolio has generated profits of £3m and she has bought 1700 flats for clients. 

SOUTH WEST – Fiona Macaskill – Profit £3.4m

Operates in a small niche, providing the very best accommodation to students in the Fishponds area of Bristol.   Buys three or four houses a year, and likes to fully refurbish Victorian terrace houses and convent them from 3-bed family homes to six-bed student houses with 4 en suites.   Fiona has amassed a portfolio of 35 houses worth a total of just under £8m compared to a purchase price of £4.6m.   AFTER ALL HER MORTGAGES ARE PAID, SHE IS LEFT WITH A MONTHLY INCOME OF £15,000.   

MIDLANDS – Sue Wordsworth – Profit £162,000

Sue, 47, has no ambition to give up her day jobs as a military aerospace engineer and regards property investment as a hobby.     Loves it when her potential tenants come to view her properties and say “wow, this is lovely” (Judith – me too, I LOVE that).   Five properties worth £395k compared to purchase price of £233k.

WALES – Sandra Cook – Profit £30,000

Sandra, 50 bought her first property last June from a friend who was having trouble selling his one-bedroom flat.   She now owns three within 300 yards of her own home in Cwmbran, Gwent.   Sandra specialises in accommodation for divorced and single people locally and says “as soon as there is enough equity in my properties, I will re-mortgage and buy more”.   One of the properties is a rent-back, i.e the person who sold it to Sandra rents it back from her.

YORKSHIRE – Teresa Galley – Profit £454k

As a young single mother working in London in 2001, Teresa could only afford to buy a run-down flat in Ilford, Essex, and do it up herself.   “Money was tight and I learnt how to tile a bathroom from a B & Q fact sheet” says Teresa, 44.   She doubled her money and bought a house in Leytonstone. She realised she had a knack for this and decided in 2004 to re-mortgage the house and get into BTL in her native Doncaster. She bought 4 tenanted flats and a house she converted into five flats. She paid £124.5k for it and spent £42k on it and it was then valued at £325k. Teresa gave up her job in 2006 to set up a property company. Today she owns 15 houses and flats which cost her £816k and are now worth £1.27m.

SCOTLAND – Jacqueline Welsh – Profit £750k

“I wanted buy-to-lets, my husband didn’t. We split.”   Jacqueline aged 45, started this in 2001. Today she owns 18 properties which cost her £1.5m but have risen in value by £750k. She now manages her own property portfolio and runs a letting agency with more than 100 houses and flats on its books.   “When my husband left I thought I’d never be able to retire, but now I plan to stop work at 50”.   (Judith: Oh look, she got a second business out of it too!)

Inspirational food for thought, eh?

My first buy to let completed last week.....Onwards & upwards!

Alison

Financial Freedom for Doctors can help you to work out how soon you can be financially free, enabling you to work part time, take better holidays or plan for an earlier retirement. Find financial freedom through property investment, the stock market and the internet.

Rich Dad Poor Dad's Cashflow 101

Hi!

Cashflow 101 was a game of Monopoly type created by Robert Kiyosaki of Rich Dad Poor Dad fame. It is absolutely brilliant, and helps us to learn by playing - fun, and enters our brains at a deeper level. 

I am planning to set up games in Sussex for my Financial Freedom for Doctors group. The game is not cheap, costs £100 plus some for importation tax, better on Ebay. Traditionally you buy it, then charge people £5 per game to play with you. UP to 6 can play.

It teaches you about investing in real estate, the stock market, and about the fun of joint venturing for mutual gain (eg going halves on a property); it also demonstrates that it is much more difficult for a high earning professional like me to get out of the rat race than for a low paid person eg receptionist, as by the time we start learning this stuff we docs have already started increasing our overheads by buying "doodads" (non investments) like better cars, holidays, and private school fees. The game tends to take 4 hrs to play....

Robert Kiyosaki also does a childrens version, but my cashflow mentor reckons that most kids would be able to play this with you...

see http://www.richdad.com/

I love it!

Alison

Logos

Hi there!

I just thought I would make a recommendation for logos. There are some great people out there who can help with this.

For my membership website, which is an information site and forum for animal therapists and pet owners to encourage them to integrate complementary and sciantific medicine to get the best of both worlds, I had a vision of a horse's, a dog's and a cat's head, a green leaf, the colours purple and gree, the site name www.TheNaturallyHealthyPet.com, & the tag line Natural Therapies for Animals. I just didn't know how to put this together.

I posted the job on Elance ( http://www.elance.com/home?rid=15HRQ) - they have quite simple instructions, it is easy to do, although it is best to peruse a few of other people's jobs first to get an idea of how they are phrased. I also looked at some peoples logos on the site, to get an idea of what logos are created. Didn't spend too much time on that though.  I had several offers (& over time have learnt that it is best to post a job on Elance on a Monday if you can, you get more replies than if you post on a Sunday...) & looked at the profiles and portfolios of all applicants, comparing costs, quality and feel.

The company I chose was Some Advertising, based in Romania, and you will see from the logo that Florin Pavel, the creative director  (florinoctavianpavel@yahoo.com) has masterminded a brilliant interpretation of my dream.

Similarly, when I created www.FinancialFreedomForDoctors.com I had the vision of Gold and purple, a stethoscope and some representation of money. I would have liked to have an interpretation of a house (property) and a share graph (Stockmarket) as well, but concluded that this would be too busy for a logo (although I still feel that these icons would be a good addition to the right side of the banner on the site). I felt that the gold writing could look like gold bars...I then emailed Florin and again he came up with the goods - they have really interpreted the info well.

Each logo cost just $99 or £50, I was given a choice of 5 for each one, and could have had unlimited revisions until I was satisfied.

Then I Emailed a friend who specialises in search engine optimisation (as it happens), who I know creates the most fantastic email signatures. In turn he created an email signature for each of my companies, with the limited company address and number for the limited company (as set out in the rules). My usual Email signature has the naturally healthy pet logo & info on all my previous sites.

I have then organised business cards for each of these two sites - and voila! Branding is created.

Experts tell me that my two beautiful brands (of which I am extremely proud) are strong and stick in the mind....

They also help me to focus on my aims. Great!

Here's to freedom!

Alison

Blogging and article submission

The aim of Blogging!

Blog as often as you want. Aim your blog at search engine optimisation, not necessarily at your reader - it is more for SEO than for readers. You need to accept that people may not read your blog, yet it will still be useful for increasing traffic to your site.

The more often you blog, the better your page rank will be. Daily would be brilliant but few of us manage this. I now have 4 blogs - holistic doctor on line, financial freedom for doctors (& yes, I did copy most of my website article into that, as it had turned into some rather useful information!), vane cottage (about the countryside around our holiday cottage), and the naturally healthy pet.

You can use free articles from the internet for your blog postings, as long as it is full of your keywords (words that a potential client would search on with Google). I write articles for my pet website, then some months later edit them as free articles for submission. I use submit your article

There are plenty of other websites for article submission, and you should look on plenty if you are hunting. The advantage of this one for submitting is that it in turn submits to 1000s of other (free) article submission sites. This costs money but is cheaper than my time for submitting my article to a similar number.  If you google my name Alison Grimston you will find pages of my articles!

Ideally my blog posts would be all my own words, but as you can imagine time is short. I set up Google alerts to let me know when interesting things are published that are relevant to my  keywords, as these sometimes stimulate thought & lead to blog writing. Sometimes I copy the info into the blog with a brief comment.

Gosh, I am beginning to see the enormity of what I have learnt with the moneygym over the last year!

Now to monetise that knowledge!

KR

Alison x

Different types of website

Hi There, soon to be financially free doctors!

If you are thinking of creating a blog or website, perhaps you will find the following information useful.

I thought I would add some information on the approaches I have taken to website design.

I first set up a blog in Feb 2007 with www.Typepad.com.  The advantage of this blogging software is its ease of use. It can easily be converted into a blogsite or simple blog, and once you have become used to the structure there is much you can do. My blogsite has now had 4500 people look at it (not necessarily independent users, probably includes people who look each week, but helps you keep blogging anyway). It is on www.holisticdoctor.com . You will notice that the URL showing at the top of the page is not the above, but a sub - version of typepad - http://holisticdoctor.typepad.com/holistic_doctor_on_line/ .

More & more internet marketeers are now switching to wordpress, as with wordpress it faciliates that ability to have the URL showing at the top, "www.yoursite/blog" - this is felt to be even better for SEO (search engine optimisation) but I will leave that for now. It is apparently more difficult to use for non techi people (a friend with a big site has just switched over to it) so I am staying with Typepad for now.

To focus back on this post:

1. My first site (I am excluding the very old site www.alisongrimston.co.uk) is a blog - as above, done myself, with some later tweaking by an excellent Typepad specialist, Claire Raikes (http://www.businessblogangel.com/)

2. My second site is a standard website. I did not have the time to learn to use frontpage (which I note is now obsolete, has stopped having new versions produced by Microsoft). I farmed the job out to Elance (www.Elance.com) (see my post under Logos to see how to do this) and a company in Canada took it up (although I suspect work was done in India, due to certain small spelling & grammer misunderstandings). The site www.VaneCottage.co.uk is very much how I wanted it, with a site type that I decided on after looking at other websites. This was created in July-August 2007. However, the pictures did not originally cycle through properly, so I had to get theses sorted, and found that my web tech person in the UK did not feel comfortable with adjusting this site as it was not set up in the way he would have done. I have later had further tweaks done my my outstanding web tech person in Canada (she is more expensive than I would have found through Elance but she knows exactly how to do what I want quickly).

3. My next site is a membership site. My Internet mentor, Nicola Cairncross, (The Moneygym club) feels that membership sites are the way forward in internet marketing. She has examined various options for software for membership sites, and feels that Subhub cannot be bettered. My idea for www.TheNaturallyHealthyPet.com seemed to lend itself to a membership site, so I created this through subhub, again from my own vision. This is a much more expensive way to create a website - but you must admit it looks wonderful! It is easy to upload the articles to, the blog is automatically updated, and there is a shopping cart that takes paymetns through paypal automatically as part of the site. The subscriptions can be collecteed in £, $ or euros. I have created it with 3 types of membership, basic (which is free), pet owner and therapist. There is a forum as part of the software. In order to create a community, I decided to make the first 100 members free (currently at 87). It is easy to look at the stats for this site - I am having approx 50 unique visitors per day, 600 per month. Trouble is, I haven't yet created the Ebook that should make it pay...... But it is easy to add downloads, which people can pay for or you can link to from other pages. Downside is cost - £2500 or so for setting up & first year's maintenance.

Hence my need to join this fantastic course and community!

4. My next site is www.financialfreedomfordoctors.com - This is a blog site (ie a blog made up to look like a website). I made it on typepad again as I know I can edit this whenever I wish, and I am frustrated by the process ofaltering my vane cottage site - in fact I never alter this, although I update the blog regularly. Regularly altering site contents (as with my monthly articles on thenaturallyhealthypet.com) is important in SEO (how well your site is picked up by Google). Although I would have been able to create this site myself, I have learned that things happen much more quickly in life if we delegate - levering other peoples' time and experience, as Robert Kiyosaki (Rich Dad Poor Dad (an inspirational book)) would say.

So this is my current baby. I think you might agree it looks less professional than the subhub site, but only cost £800 to get someone else to create (would have been cheaper in Elance but I don't think they would have integrated the Autoresponders correctly). I am able to edit it completely myself. The content needs improving +++, and I will be posting on this when time allows (but I have taken 2 weeks to get on & do this).

Now to create E-products & make them all pay!!!!! Also I am aware that videos & podcasts are the next big thing....

KR (& more later),

Alison

Dr Alison Grimston