Property Investing: It’s Not Passive Income
Apr 28th, 2009 | By Les Sheppard | Category: Featured ArticlesWelcome back! Have you made sure you never miss a new property? Subscribe to updates with your best email address in the sidebar to the right.You see everything new at least 48 hours before the crowd!
Property investing has given my wife and I a great deal of freedom to do what we want with our lives. Whether we decide to sit around in the garden, go walking, or focus on our internet business, we are making money from our properties. Many would say we’re earning passive income, but we don’t.
The problem with pursuing “passive income” is that you’re telling yourself you don’t have to do any work to make that money. Keith Cunningham, author of “Keys to the Vault” says, “The label becomes the experience. Using the word passive for anything means that you are going to do the least to get the most.” Trying to build wealth through passive income is like trying to get six-pack abs without working out. It isn’t going to happen.
When you buy a property, hire a property manager, and then do nothing more than deposit the rent money into your bank account, you’re setting yourself up for trouble. I would hate for you to have bad things happen early in your property investing career because you have been in pursuit of passive income. We worked hard to find the properties, bought them, and would never “passively” let things fall apart!
We review all the bills and talk to our letting agents on a regular basis, and mostly manage the lettings ourselves. And we both carefully track and monitor the money that gets spent on each building.
Listen, I’m not saying you have to treat property investing as a full-time job. It really doesn’t require a lot of time and attention. It takes us less than five hours a month to actively measure, monitor, and adjust to maximize our profits and minimize our struggles.
And since we don’t consider our properties to be a passive income stream, we’ve been sleeping better… and making more money!
Tell us about your own experiences… Feel free to leave a comment!
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