2205 FBF:The Masters Weekend - A Biannual Gathering of Income Property Real Estate Investing Experts

Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy. This show is produced by the Hartman Media Company. For more information and links to all our great podcasts, visit hartmanmedia.com Please note disclaimers at end of show. Welcome to Creating wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven't thought of before and a new slant on investing fresh new approaches to America's best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He's been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors. Welcome listeners around the world to the Creating Wealth Show. This is Jason Hartman, your host and this is episode number 151. Thanks for joining me today. Wanted to give you kind of an overview of the Masters Weekend today where we will give you a bunch of clips from some of our different speakers that we've had at past Masters weekends just so you can learn some of the content in this you'll get a few small tips on credit restoration and enhancement, 1031 exchange principles, investing in real estate with your IRA asset protection, some take on monetary policy and inflation organizing your business. Just a bunch of little snippets here. We do have a full fledged product that we will be releasing very shortly as well which will be a full length version unabridged of the Masters Weekend that you can buy as an audio download. And also we would really really like you to join us for the Masters Weekend. This one is going to be particularly special this time because we are going to dedicate one day to marketing, home business, micropreneurship and being a lifestyle entrepreneur as we like to say, so that you can have a side business, a passive income from it or semi passive income. And another day of course will be devoted as usual to developing and creating wealth throughout through real estate investment by investing in income properties. So that's what you'll hear about mostly on this sampler. And remember the next Masters weekend, it only happens twice a year, is March 6th and 7th here in Southern California So we hope you can join us for that. If you purchase a property anytime after you hear this from us and before the Masters Weekend, you can get a free ticket for you and a friend. So that's got a very high value to it. Take advantage of it. Call any of our investment counselors for details at 714-820-4200. And I know that loads of people have been ordering our white paper best $25 you'll ever spend, which is our predictions for 2010 with a full ROI build, in other words, where we build the ROI. So you're not just looking at a prediction on appreciation or depreciation of any one of the 35 markets around the country we've profiled, but you're looking at a full build of ROI based on the multi dimensional nature of a real estate or income property investment. So take advantage of that. You can register for Masters Weekend, the Creating wealth boot camp. Get a copy of the white paper. You can get all of this and much more@jason hartman.com and there's a lot of free resources there as well, so take advantage of those. Hey, by the way, got a lot of nice comments on last show number 150 with Dr. Dennis Whateley. So I'm glad you liked that. And we've got a whole bunch more great shows coming up for you. We've just really, really spent a lot of time on developing great content for you. So I appreciate the nice feedback, appreciate the testimonials, itunes and so forth. And we'll keep it coming and make sure that we continue to provide valuable information on financial freedom. By the way, if you don't have a copy of the Financial Freedom Report, make sure you get a subscription to that. It's just such a great product. Most of those newsletters are like 16 to 20 pages long. They include about 20 different articles on financial freedom. And again, that's an annual subscription of $197. So very, very cost effective and you'll get that. So take advantage of it. It' jasonhartman.com, go there to learn more. And also in this show, after the Masters Weekend Sampler, I will include one of the articles from the newsletter that you haven't heard before on this podcast. So here's the Masters Weekend Sampler and then we'll have a good article for you as well, an educational article. Let's listen in. This is Jason Hartman and I want to welcome you to the Masters Weekend, a gathering of experts. This is one of the most successful events that we do in and it's a rare event, we only do it twice a year where we gather experts from all fields of expertise from all different locations around the country and I just wanted to share some snippets from a few of them here on this sort of Masters Weekend sampler. And by the way, this is not a big promotion, this is content. So you're going to hear some pretty good content here too. Have you ever really wanted to know the inside scoop on analyzing investments? Whether you should make that go or no go decision when looking at a property, we will talk about the power of analysis. Have you ever really wanted to know how your credit score works? And of course it's important, but what parts of are more important than others? There's a lot of misinformation about this and we at the Masters Weekend discuss a lot about credit restoration and credit enhancement. Have you ever really been curious about tax strategies of high level CPAs and investors use? Have you ever wanted to get a CPA who charges $385 an hour in the room to answer all of your questions pertaining to just real estate and home business opportunities? Have you ever been interested in 1031 exchanges? You may have heard that word but not really understand in depth what it is or how it works. Do you know that you can exchange not only real estate but all sorts of other things on the 1031 tax deferred exchange laws? Do you know that you can go ahead and defer, defer, defer and basically never pay tax until it's in your estate and then have that tax or that tax liability step up to market value so the government never gets paid? Pretty cool deal. Have you ever been interested in asset protection? Have you ever been sued? Have you ever been concerned about the government coming after you about some kind of fine or attacking your assets? That happens to a lot more people than you think, folks. I've read a lot of stories about that. Have you been concerned about legal liability? People get sued and they're not prepared. It's very important that you set things up in advance and protect yourself with proper legal structures. Have you ever thought about investing in mobile home parks or self storage facilities? These are some of the best ROI opportunities in the real estate world along with multifamily and single family, but they include some very special things that you have to be aware of. Have you ever been interested in investing in real estate with your IRA or 401k? Boy, there's some great opportunities there, especially with the new law changes in 2010. Have you ever been interested in really getting your properties organized so that your real estate portfolio is managed efficiently, like it's a whole little business unto itself? Well, we will talk about that at the Masters Weekend. Welcome to this week's edition of Flashback Friday. Your opportunity to get some good review by listening to episodes from the past that Jason has hand picked to help you today in the present and propel you into the future. Enjoy. How about talking to local market specialists? Have you wanted to get all these people that we talk about on the show in one room, in one place so you can talk to property managers, local market specialists, all kinds of different experts that fly out from all around the country to help you with all of these various disciplines when it comes to investing. How about organizing your real estate business? Well, I do a whole session on organizational tips. How about a client panel with real world stories? We call this Tales from the Edge. They're not all good, they're not all positive, but they're all real. And you'll hear from real people about the challenges they faced and how they overcame them. How about the best practices in the mortgage side of the business? Have you ever wanted to make sure that you can qualify for more loans, that you can structure mortgages properly, that you use mortgages as an asset rather than as a liability when investing? There's a lot to this. How about the last part, fighting the three major demons of investing and the three major demons of your financial life. Well, we've got it all at the Masters Weekend, a gathering of experts. Let's listen in to a little sampler here as to what it's all about. You'll hear from many of the different speakers. Here we go. If people are experiencing hardship, the sort of first level of understanding, and I've had people ask this question, is, look, if everybody's broke, how will they rent my house? Well. Well, it's just a matter of where they are on the economic ladder. So if you were to talk with your tenants. I only have one property, a local property in Irvine that I manage myself, but all of my other properties, I have managers all around the country and I own properties in 11 states and 17 cities. And so I don't talk with my tenants. But if I did, and if I were to in the next few years, I bet I would hear something like this. The tenant would say something like, I used to live in such a nice big house. I used to have a 3,500 square foot house and now I'm renting from you a 1600 square foot house. The Point is, there's always a renter. It's just what was their former life. They're moving down, their lifestyle is being diminished. And I think for tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people, probably their lifestyle will be diminished. One of the things we've got to practice to make sure that doesn't happen to us is financial self defense. Financial self defense from government, from central banks, and from Wall street, because those are the three biggest threats to our financial security. In my opinion, the power of analysis an investment is when we as taxpayers or individuals decide to take our excess funds and put it into some type of a vehicle that hopefully is going to give us a return. Now, a lot of us have been looking at our 401ks, which you keep hearing the word is 201ks, which is rapidly going into a 101k. Okay, so but we're investing in maybe in a 401k or something to that effect. We invest in real estate and such. But the bottom line, when we talk about investments, we're talking about the fact that we're taking surplus funds and we're wanting them to grow. That's simply what a defined investment is. When you're analyzing a property, there's two ways of analyzing the before tax cash flow and then what is my real estate taxable income? What is my real estate taxable income? So when we're looking at it, we're looking at it from two perspectives. Because what you have to understand about investment properties, for those of you that may be new to investments, is that you do not get taxed on the before tax cash flow. You are going to be taxed on the net operating income until you we dip. And we're going to talk about that in a second. If I have a cap rate, say of 10% and say the property is 200,000 and my NOI is 20,000, that'd be a 10% cap rate. How to make a cap rate make sense is if you stopped and thought that If I leave $200,000 in the bank and at the end of the year the bank gave me $20,000 worth of interest, my return would be 10%. Okay, so that's one way of looking at cap rates to see whether it makes sense. Now the one thing I'd like to tell you, when you're looking at multiplier, the lower the multiplier, the better for the buyer of the property. When you're looking at cap rate, the higher the cap rate, the better for the buyer of the property. Credit enhancement and Restoration. So obviously the credit score is extremely important because you have to look at this in the long term. A lot of people just want instant gratification. I want it right now. But if you're an investor, like all of you are, you have to look at the long term effects of a credit score and why it's so important. Past due notices destroy scores. Every time you're past due, forget about it. That's. It's a big, huge chunk. It's usually 50 to 60 points hit on your credit score every time that you're late. Missed payments is another big one. And the amount of the missed payments, the higher the missed payment, the higher the impact on your score. The lower the missed payment, the lower it is on your score. Your second factor, revolving debt ratio, 30% of your score is based upon your credit cards. How do you use your credit cards? So one of the factors, and I talked about this on Jason's show, is you want to share the debt amongst many cards. Jason called it credit socialism. It may sound a little bit funny, but it is to an extent true. The reason why you want to do that, if you have two or three credit cards, for example, right? And your available amount of debt is $100,000, and you ride it. Let's say that two of your cards are at zero balance, but yet you maxed out on one card. It makes you look like you're maxing out all of your debt. So what you want to do is you want to spread it along those three cards so it doesn't make it look like you're just maxing yourself out on one individual credit card. Get added as an authorized user. What does that mean? It basically means if I'm Danny and I have sue, and sue has never had any credit in her life. Because by the way, having no credit is as bad as having bad credit. Okay? That's why it's important to start somewhere. If sue says, you know, Danny, I don't have any credit, but she is my sister, okay? And sue comes to me and says, danny, you know what? I want to establish my credit, what's the best way to do it? Well, sue can join me as an authorized user. What does that mean? It means that she's on my account. Her number is being reported to the bureaus. So she's basically on my account and she's utilizing my good behavior to show up on her credit report. So that's actually helping sue gain some credit. Tax secrets of wealthy Real estate investors. Okay, just a real basic tax law overview. Tax returns are based on tax law. A lot of people just don't think about that. They think, well, I just put the numbers in TurboTax and I get a tax return. But it's based on tax law. Tax law is created by Congress and written into the Internal Revenue Code. Then the IRS says we're going to make it more simple. Simple. And we're going to take these two volumes of the Internal Revenue Code and they turn it into six. I don't know how that's more simple, but that's how they work. And I like this little quote from George Bush stated that there are more than a million words in the Internal Revenue Code. Well, there's a lot more than that, but so we have the Internal Revenue Code. The wealthy individuals hire top CPAs and attorneys so that they can take advantage of tax law or tax loopholes. And we're going to go over a couple of those real estate loopholes today. Alright, Real estate benefits. Just a recap. One which has nothing to do with taxation is ability to create passive income. That's why people typically want to invest in real estate, create passive income. How much money can I make? Cash flow positive each month. Ability to have renters pay your mortgage. Ability to reduce income tax. I'm going to focus on that today. That's why I have it in red. Ability to defer investment gain. There's a lady in here that just came up to me and introduced herself and said that she does 1031 exchanges. Has anyone done a 1031 exchange? Okay, a couple. All right, so a 1031 exchange allows you to swap one property for another one. And assuming that you have a gain in there, you don't have to recognize it. So as a recap, real estate professionals have the ability to convert passive loss and non passive losses, the power of exchange and deferring taxes. Under present law, you can sell and exchange, sell and exchange over and over again. Going up in value, diversifying, buying multiple investment properties all over the country. You can do this over and over and over again. And under present law, if you pass away, your heirs receive the property at the step up in basis or its fair market value as of the date of your death. And if your heirs sell that property at that value at your date of death, they don't have to pay any of the tax that you've deferred over all these years of investing. Okay? It's a huge benefit every time you sell investment property. And all of you in this room appears to me have investment property. I'm very pleased to see so many of you own already invested property, but when you sell it. On page 30 is an example of a property where you have a choice. Once you sell it, you can sell it and pay the tax or you can do a 1031 tax deferred exchange. And this is a good example of how you calculate that. We have a website, you can go on that website, put your own information, put your own depreciation, put any of your capital improvements, put the variables on that that particular sheet into our spreadsheet and it will calculate exactly what your taxable event will be. Taxpayers intend to hold the property for investment is really the key. You must have a paper trail showing that you've held the property for investment on schedule E of your tax return because everything is tracked through your tax return. So make sure that you get it on your tax return. It does not have to actually have income. However, you could have raw land and you could have expenses but no income. That would still be considered investment property. And again, foreign real property is not like kind to us real property asset protection secrets. However, if you do have a good asset protection in place, plan in place, you will discourage people from suing you just because they think they can get to your money. Because when they do their asset search there, it shows you with your millions of dollars or hundreds of thousands of dollars of assets. If we do it right, they're going to do an asset search on you and they're not going to see much. Unfortunately, it's also not going to make your life any simpler, but it's not going to make it overly complex as well. A lot of it really depends on the type of asset protection you need. Think of it this way. You've got your assets in the middle and I like to think of it as a trilogy. You've got risk management, which is one circle one barrier around your assets. That's the common sense stuff. Don't drive 120 miles an hour on the freeway, obey the laws, etc. You also have insurance. Insurance is something that we have to have or should have depending on where your exposure is. If you have your own business, then you're going to have a lot more insurance than if you're just a non business person and you're just running personal risk. You would have your normal, maybe an umbrella Polish policy or something to that effect. Here's the problem with the international entities. After 9 11, anytime money's going in and out of the country, there's a lot more scrutiny to things. As long as you're not using it to evade taxes, you'll be okay. You can do these international entities, but it also limits what you can do. So if you have an international entity that's then coming into the US and buying something, well, you're not going to be able to do an S corp. You know, you're not going to have the tax pass through it. It complicates things. And so maybe you do a trust mobile home parks and self storage facilities. But this is what's going to set you free. This is what is just a huge juggernaut because for every home that we have coming into our park that the spaces, the space is free. We're not getting any rent whatsoever on that, on that space. Currently we bring mobile home in that space. All of a sudden, you know, say we have $200 lot rent. We start getting $200 a month, a lot rent for that space where we got nothing before it was just dusty old dirt. If you annualize, that's 2,400 and you do put a 10 cap, that's 2, that's 200 or I'm sorry, that's $24,000 a month or 25, $4,000 equity we have in that home. If we bring in 10 homes in one year, which is not a whole lot of homes, we usually bring in about 20 to 30 and some, even 40 in some of our parks. But if we bring in 10, that's a quarter million dollars that we just went up in our equity. That's also, you know, with it is that's $24,000 of income that we didn't have today. A $10 monthly lot rent increase adds $1,200 to your bottom line. What happens with mobile home parks is it's very difficult, at least up until about a year ago, for people to move their mobile home into your mobile home park because it costs roughly between $3,000 to $6,000 to move a mobile home, whether it's a single one or double wide. So what would happen is you buy a mobile home park at 50% occupancy, you need to bring that mobile home in because nobody else is going to bring it unless you do. So we were buying a lot of mobile homes from the banks and we were moving them in. We're setting them up and then we're renting them on a lease option program with the tenant. A client panel where you'll hear real stories from real clients. And it's not all good. Some hardships and how they've been overcome. Mike had called Me and said, hey, we got this model home. I need an answer in two hours. So I had to make this decision. We bought a model home. The builder rented the model home back from us. So the good thing about that was the rent was like $350 more than what you would usually rent and they paid the property taxes. So we bought that from Mike and then we're going to see Mike at the end of the month. We're going to fly down, see Mike, he's going to pick us up at the airport, give us the two bit tour of Austin again, stay at his house, take us back to the airport the next day. So you need to build a relationship with your realtor or management company wherever you go to. Good story was I have the model home because that brought in a bunch of income, certainly in terms of the overall buying experience and a group that's focused on education more than just selling properties. Platinum was the best buying experience. We started. My wife and I started buying in 2000 and like Jason said, we bought through Platinum, other real estate networks and some totally on our own. So that was the easiest in terms of the buying experience. Yeah, I did a little bit of research and I knew the areas I wanted to buy and I went to a couple of investment groups. This is the only one that actually agreed with where I wanted to invest in. So Texas was the first place I wanted. I bought in Round Rock. It took me three weeks to get it rented out. Very happy with it. The tenant was there for about 15 months. They ended up leaving, just took off. We ended up renting it within three weeks as well. So actually the first time was three days and then it was three weeks afterwards. And actually again, those properties I did see, I saw three of my Texas properties, all very great communities. One of my friends that's actually a property manager in Dallas, went with me to a Dallas property and she just said, heads up that this was just great construction, great community. And so where I've really felt very grateful and confident is that generally speaking, everything that I've purchased into has done very well. And so I went to your website, listened to all your podcasts, send in a letter. I think I came here that week, before I even went to one of your seminars. I sat at his desk and I took home three properties. You took them home? I only bought two. Well, I took home the format. I ended up buying two. That right at the very beginning. So anyway, what I wanted to talk about was the fourth one on there, the maintenance and the maintenance and monitoring. My Husband and I were new to this. We had never owned rental property. We had owned homes. We had our first house and we waited for the equity to build and then we went and got the house we really wanted. But we never were property managers or landlords. And so in the seminar that we had attended, one of the things that stuck in our head was even though you guys are scouting out this property for us and that you pre screen these property managers, you still have to do your own homework and you still have to be responsible ultimately for your property. One is in Pflugerville in Texas. That's the Austin area. That was the first one I got through platinum. That's great. It was a new build, $170,000 and it's needed no maintenance at all. The tenants been in since day one took three weeks to get a tenant firstly, and that's just on a year to year basis for lease. I got the property rented within three or four weeks after the rehab. I've never been there. I probably am a little delusional when I look at it. I write a check for 510 with my taxes and everything and I get that check for, you know, around $900. So it seems good to me. But so far it's been a good experience. We have an offer in for another one and I would recommend everybody listen to all the podcasts because there's just free information. I've been had rental properties before which I sold and had to pay capital gain. So there's a lot of free information to learn and you know, you don't charge for that, which I think great service. So I've enjoyed the experience. It's a little, it is a little scary because everybody says why aren't you gonna go there and look at it? I go, I gotta trust somebody. And actually the house I bought in California was more work than this one. I just wrote a few checks and made a few phone calls and didn't really have to. It was less work investing in real estate with your ira. So how it works is you really want to think about your IRA as being in an umbrella. So if you can forget give my drawing and pretend that looks like an umbrella. Normally if you have an account at one of those custodians that I was just mentioning, you can invest in things like CDs, right. What else? Stocks. Exactly. Mutual funds, bonds, things like that. So with a true self directed ira, whether that's with interest or another truly self directed custodian, you can expand that. We would never tell you not to invest in this list because we want you to be truly diversified. But you can invest in other things like real estate. So that could be a condo, a single family home, a fourplex, could be foreclosures, it can be raw land, can be tax liens, LLCs. You can invest in anything except for a life insurance or a collectible. And we'll talk a little bit more about what a collectible is in a few minutes. So along this lines with the ira, if you have a, or a SEP or a simple ira, so anything except a Roth, all of your funds are going into your IRA on a pre tax basis, right? All the funds are going in on a pre tax basis. And along those same lines, all of your profit and gains, such as rental income, if it's a piece of real estate, is going back into the ira. So this is all the profit and the gains going into the ira. My organizational tips, in addition to that, you do need Quicken or QuickBooks. Probably have two files, have a two filing system. And you know, I just developed this with my operations manager. First you have your acquisition file. This is legal size. Then you have an operations file, it's letter size. But in here you have a system. And here you have a description of the house, sales brochure, plot plans, photos. Of course, you have your photos electronically, of course, as well. Purchase, contract and your final HUD one statement. Your HUD one statement is your closing statement, insurance information, copy of your home warranty, your first loan package. Okay, so that's for your loan when you use it to purchase the property. The purchase money, loan appraisal report, second loan package, if you have a second. And here you have your mortgage loan disclosure statement. And then here, you know, we just provide like a little glossary of terms. We have this file system. Here's a couple cautionary things. This doesn't happen as much since the credit meltdown. But loans used to just get transferred, transferred, transferred all around. Now none of the banks trust each other. Why should they? They're all a bunch of crooks, okay? None of these Wall street firms. So you don't see the loan transfers happening quite so much anymore. But remember when a couple years ago you'd get a loan with one firm and then it'd be transferred again and then it'd be transferred again and then transferred again. And you know, it's like every three months you're making your payments to a new entity. I mean that was a hassle and it was easy to miss a payment or get confused. Okay, that's not such a problem anymore. One good thing about the credit meltdown, okay? In fact, it's so disorganized right now, they might just forget you owe the money entirely, okay? It's amazing. Flood insurance and land surveys. So sometimes they'll reclassify a property and say it's in a flood zone or it's not. And that's not too common, but it's just something to be caution of fighting the two major demons of investment, the demon of risk and the demon of inflation. And this is kind of where I get into what I call the post responsibility era. Now I didn't want to put this in because and Jason said, well no, Doug, you need to include something about all these bailouts, okay? Cuz you could take, take as much risk as you want now and someone's gonna bail you out. And I'm like, that just feels wrong to me because to me I've always thought that if you take risks and you're an idiot, then if you, you know, too much risks, you lose all your money. If you tell people, well, we're gonna bail you out, we're gonna bail out people who act like idiots, all you're gonna get is more idiocy, which is true, but if the government's bailing people out, if they're throwing hundred dollar bills in front of your feet, you'd be kind of dumb to not pick it up. And, and so in the post responsibility era, there are opportunities where even if you have taken risks that have turned out badly, there are chances to not be totally wiped out. Am I saying you should depend on that? No. Am I saying you should be aware of it? Absolutely. I'm just going to go through really, really simple illustration of what causes inflation. Prices, first of all are an equilibrium between the amount of money in circulation in the economy, the amount of goods and services that are produced, and if the amount of money increases and the goods and services stay the same, the prices have to go up. If you just kind of think about it as two bubbles, right? You know, one bubble is your money and another bubble is your goods and services. If the goods and services go down and the money stays the same, prices have to decrease. If the money goes up and the goods and services stay the same, the prices have to increase. Now you'll always have things trading off commodities go up and down. And if we spend more money for say soybeans or oil, that means there's less to spend on something else. And then when there's that lower demand, then the prices will Adjust downward. But the only thing that can drive all the prices up at once or all the prices down at once is the supply of money. Property analysis, market analysis and property tracking. So real estate is a numbers game and to be successful you really do have to understand the numbers. And our goal is to make this as easy as as possible. So we've combined eight tools into one package where you can research the different areas Jason showed the appreciation map earlier. You can purchase a property by shopping around for the properties through Jason's website. Track the income and expenses on the property, do online tax preparation, online loan applications. We have an online document storage system so you can keep an off site back of all of your important documents as PDF files. And then we have calendars, contacts and a correspondence log and a bunch of other miscellaneous little utilities. So those are the basic three steps. And now we can look at the report. You can look at maps, satellite photos and you can upload your own picture of the property or get it from the real estate agent. Most of the ones on Jason's website have the picture there, so when you add it to your portfolio it will automatically show up. And then finally you can look at a brief summary report which does the apples to apples summary comparison between the different properties. So let's say I was thinking about buying these three properties. I could just click on this brief summary and it shows me the basic numbers right on the same page. So I'd look at these and I'd say okay, that one's minus 3% cash on cash, 82% ROI. This one's minus 55% and 53. Okay, that one's out. And then this one's minus 1% and 44. Okay, so based on these three, I'd eliminate these two and I'd say that's the best deal. So it really takes the guesswork out of finding out which property is truly the best deal. Best practices in Management. Alright, owner 101 things you should do, things that we expect of you. You should pay your own mortgage. Be actively involved, involved in your property. People One, you have to, you have to kind of say you are to get the tax benefits for being an active owner. So pay your own mortgage. Don't rely on your mortgage, your property manager to pay your mortgage. Don't give the control of your property to someone else no matter what, even a good guy like myself. Your property manager needs to have plans for you. You have to know what those plans are if you want to know what they are. You need to know how your property manager is securing your information because it needs to be secure. You don't want that information floating around. I always notify my owners of their tenant qualifications. I let the owner be involved in that process. It's your property. Why in the world would you let anyone just carte blanche move anyone they want to into your property? How would you do that? Some property managers don't give you that option. Their management contract specifically says I have the right to move anyone into your property that I deem fit. And if that's the way they do business, that's the way they do business. But you shouldn't have to do that if you don't want to. Don't be afraid to ask questions. And that's the key. If you don't understand something on your statement, if you have a problem with something that happened on your property, the yard wasn't being mowed and you got an HOA violation sent to you. Ask questions, be involved. Don't be afraid to put your property manager under the fire. Do not feel rushed to take a bad tenant. You're sitting here, you've had the eight month vacancy and it hurts. And you get a tenant that is not so great. But you want to take that chance because you could really use the mortgage being paid. If you take a bad tenant, it could work out for you. However, if you take a bad tenant, you could end up in a worse situation than you are now. You'll learn about mortgage planning. Let me ask you this. If I asked you to make a list of assets on a sheet of paper, I can use this drawing board here. The typical financial statement advisor is going to be working with some of your assets, typically your stocks, your bonds and your mutual funds. That make sense. However, if I asked you guys to make a list of all your assets and real estate was on that list, wouldn't that real estate be your single biggest asset in your list of assets? Wouldn't it be? Absolutely. Right. And on the liability side, if you have a mortgage or mortgage as, wouldn't that be your single biggest liability? We hope so. Right? If it's not your single biggest liability, we got bigger problems. Right. So in addition to that, this mortgage, if you have a mortgage, is also likely to be your single biggest monthly expense. So the typical financial advisor again is only dealing with part of your assets, your stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Yet your single biggest asset, your single biggest liability and your single biggest money monthly expense. And I wish our guy from Merrill lynch, is that where he's from? There used to be the expatriate David yeah, I wish he was still here because he'd agree with me. Single biggest asset, single biggest liability, single biggest monthly expense. And unfortunately, the traditional financial services industry gives lip service at best to helping you manage these very significant numbers. As a financial advisor, a lot of times people come to me and say, randy, what can you really do to help me manage my mortgage mortgages, manage my debt, manage the equity and the real estate market profiles of several markets from around the country. Alright, so the Atlanta, we call it the perfect storm. Again, we didn't research where we started investing. It's just where we lived. And so we started just investing in real estate there. And so we would like to say that we researched and made great decisions because we like the economy and what's going on there. It just happened that way. But there's a lot of documentation, have it all folders which will be back there from CNN.com to Forbes to the Fortune 500 publications of why Atlanta is an incredible market in terms of owning an investment property. First of all, affordable homes, the affordability of houses and quality houses in Atlanta compared to what's obviously going on in other places, especially here, it's just, it's not comparable. The value and the type of nice property that you can get for the low dollar amount is unmatched. The large rental market, huge growth of transplants, business transplants that come into the city. Atlanta doesn't have Hollywood, it doesn't have the ocean. What else are the draws here? In n out Burger we don't have the stuff that draws people that want to live there. Why people come to Atlanta, Corporate business climates. The growth is consistent and steady. Corporate, the job diversity. The economic growth in Atlanta is huge and it has been for a while. The growth charts are consistent and they're continual. The young professional population is huge. The educational economic atmosphere in downtown Atlanta area, which you can see here, there are 13 universities and so four of them are on six city blocks right next to each other. Then you got Georgia State, you got Georgia Tech, you got Emory, there's 13 universities. So the young professionals that come out, obviously that are going to be renters initially, the transplants that have to go there and rent houses, the rental market and not even including the main factor of course, which is people that can't get loans right now. It is an incredible place to own a rental property right now. And that's what the Masters weekend is all about. It is one of the best educational events out there. It only happens twice a year, so be sure to go to jasonhartman.com and get your ticket. Remember, the tickets are for two people so you can bring your spouse, you can bring a friend, a co worker, family member, whatever. It's just great education and we want you to be there on March 6th and 7th. Go to jasonartman.com for the early bird price of $697, which expires on February 10th. So it is important you act quickly because the price will increase after that. Now here's a little article from one of our newsletters entitled we are out of Money now and I don't mean to scare you, you this is actually very positive for people following my strategy because what it means is that if you get in on long term fixed rate debt, and I know it may have been hard to see this over the past year and a half or so during the financial crisis, but lift your head up above the storm and there's a whole different kind of storm coming at us. A much, much bigger storm that will impoverish tens of millions if not hundreds of millions of Americans. And there's only 307 million Americans there. So I'd say 200 million people will be seriously hurt by this. But those in the know, those following my strategy will actually benefit from this storm. So here's a couple of thoughts on it in this little recent article from our newsletter. And tune in on the next Creating wealth show after you hear this, because we've got some great shows coming up. Here's the article. We are out of Money now from the jasonhartman.com blog. We don't mean to scare you. Well, okay, actually we do. But those words we are out of money now were spoken by President Obama at a recent press conference. Ouch. Does that mean that the US Economy is a car with a bone dry gasoline tank still rolling slightly from 233 years of inertia? Maybe a better analogy might be that the economy is a car with a bone dry gasoline tank still rolling slightly from 233 years of inertia heading off a cliff. Well, what can we as law abiding citizens expect when our government continues to bankrupt itself and devalue our currency? Seriously, the federal government is a Ponzi scheme that makes Bernie Madoff look like a piker. Here's a glimpse into the future after the dollar collapses. 1. An explosion in prices as Americans scramble to buy basic necessities 2. Sparse grocery shelves and long gas lines. 3. Failed businesses and a breakdown in commerce as long term transactions vanish due to worthless currency. 4. Rampant crime and unemployment. 5 Disappearing government services Sound like fun? Well, what can you do to protect your wealth? The simple answer is to own income producing property. It's the only investment liable to have any value when the fiat currency collapses and the time to act is now. There may still be time before the greenback dies as the major player on the global currency market, but there may be less time than you think. Wall street is already coming apart at the seams from greed and incompetence. Make it a point to explore history's best bet when it comes to investing. Platinum Properties Investor Network offers free educational services for any investor interested in weathering the coming storm. Check us out at www.jasonhartman.com. Copyright the Hartman Media Company for publication, rights and interviews, please email mediajasonhartman.com this show offers very general information concerning real estate for investment purposes. Opinions of guests are their own. Jason Hartman is acting as president of Platinum Properties Investor Network exclusively. Nothing contained herein should be considered personalized personal, financial, investment, legal or tax advice. Every investor's strategy and goals are unique. You should consult with a licensed real estate broker or agent or other licensed investment, tax and or legal advisor before relying on any information contained herein. Information is not guaranteed. Please call 714-820-4200 and visit www.jasonhartman.com for additional disclaimers, disclosures and questions.