Passive Income From Real Estate

Real estate investing is one of the most common ways that people become wealthy.

You can buy real estate such as houses, apartment buildings, office space, retail space, etc. and rent it out. You can also make money from the appreciation, assuming that real estate prices rise while you own the property.

When renting a property, it’s nice if you can create a positive cashflow, meaning that your monthly rents provide enough to cover your mortgages, upkeep, property taxes, and other expenses and still leave you with some profit. Note that as you pay down the mortgages (which is essentially being done by your tenants), you will gradually own more equity in the property. You can then borrow against this equity to fund more investments, or you can sell it and cash out.

Real estate investment has some tax advantages too. One role of government is to help ensure access to housing for its citizens, and so tax laws encourage real estate development and investing.

While real estate investing can be done in ways that require a lot of cash, with some creativity you can do deals that don’t require tying up a lot of money — and still generate passive income for yourself. In this capacity you can also act as a real estate dealmaker, putting deals together that other people will execute. For instance, you could assemble a proposal for a new shopping center, help get key tenants interested, and then sell the deal to a real estate developer in exchange for a cut of the revenue. This is way beyond my current expertise, but I’ve heard of people making good money doing these kinds of deals.

Many businesses and organizations hold a great deal of wealth in the form of real estate. For example, McDonald’s not only makes money from selling dead cows; they also own many valuable street corners around the world. The Catholic Church is also a major land owner.

As your investments increase in value and your equity increases, you can borrow against your equity to buy more property, thereby increasing your holdings over time. Of course there’s a risk of overextending yourself. Many real estate investors have gone bust when their over-leveraged investments sank in value, and they ended up owing more than their properties were worth while also dealing with tenants who could no longer pay the rent.

I can’t share much about real estate investing since I’ve never been into it. I’ve read several books on the subject out of curiosity, but providing housing and office/retail space to tenants just doesn’t excite me. I think this would be a decent way to generate passive income for someone who is patient, can be disciplined enough to stick to a long-term plan, and who knows a lot about property and is good at assessing what a property is worth.

If this type of investment interests you, please don’t let my personal preferences dissuade you from investigating it fully. Libraries have plenty of books on how to invest profitably in real estate, and I’m sure there are plenty of websites and forums where you can find good advice from experienced investors.

Even though it’s not my cup of tea, I wanted to mention real estate investing as part of the passive income series since it’s a common path that people use to generate passive income and long-term wealth.

Steve Recommends
Here are my recommendations for products and services I've reviewed that can improve your results. This is a short list since it only includes my top picks.

Getting Rich with Ebooks - Earn passive income from ebooks
Site Build It! - Start your own money-making website
Lefkoe Method - Permanently eliminate a limiting belief in 20 minutes
Paraliminals - Condition your mind for positive thinking and success
The Journal - Record your life lessons in a secure private journal
PhotoReading - Read books 3 times faster
Life on Purpose - Discover your life purpose

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Step Out Of The Comfort Zone

Enrich your life when you step out of the comfort zone. Tackling a new skill or taking an adventure that scares you a little helps you grow and makes you happier.

Most of us have a desire to be comfortable and play it safe. Trying something new can seem scary and not worth the effort. However, full enjoyment and fulfillment comes in those moments we step out of the comfort zone.

Think back to the most meaningful, amazing moments of your life. When you examine them you will find that they had you stepping out of your comfort zone. Trying something new and unfamiliar brings extra excitement and emotion to the event. These highs leave us with a greater sense of accomplishment and fulfillment that simply doing the same thing every day.

Stepping out of your comfort zone doesn’t have to be a death-defying adventure. It could be something as simple as traveling to a new place. One example is taking a photography challenge where you have to photograph 100 strangers, getting their name and a little bit about each one of them. For those of us who are not gregarious extroverts this is a huge step out of the comfort zone.

Often, the things that are scariest bring the greatest rewards.  That being said, it may be easier to start with things that are closer to your comfort zone. As you gain a bit more confidence in yourself branch out into greater leaps.

Some ideas for getting out of your comfort zone are listed below. The size of the steps may be the same or different for you. These are just to give you an idea of in how to stretch yourself.

Call a friend or relative you’ve lost contact with.Sign up for a blog challenge that stretches you.Speak in front of a group about a subject you are passionate about.Learn a new skill.Get up in the middle of the night to see a meteor show or hike to an amazing spot.Volunteer. If you’ve never worked with your hands volunteer with Habitat for Humanity and start to learn about building while helping others.Travel on your own for vacation.Take a class in something you don’t think you have any talent for.Take a whitewater rafting trip.Write a book.Learn how to swim, if this is a skill you don’t have it can seem very daunting.Attend an event where you don’t know anyone. Don’t just be a wallflower either, talk to at least 5 people.Be the first to say, I love you.Quit your full-time, safe, job to start your dream job.Fly in a very small plane piloted by a crazy friend.Hike the grand canyon.Visit a country where few of the residents speak english.Backcountry camping in Yellowstone, with the bears.Call up experts in your industry and ask for an interview or endorsement.

When you try new things and stretch your limits you will find they aren’t where you thought they were. You are capable of so much more than you ever believed.

What is the next step out of the comfort zone you will take? Share your plans with us in the comments below.

(Photo credit: Beyond Normal via Shutterstock)

 Do you want to learn some small optimization tweaks that make a big difference? If so, download my free 45 minute training here: Optimize Your Life   Lori Thayer is passionate about optimization. Optimize life and business when you connect with others, enrich, and simplify. Small changes make a big difference. These tweaks help you save time and enjoy life more. You can follow her on these sites: blog,  Facebook, Twitter and Google Plus.

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Forget grades. Let’s have fun with math: Shimon Schocken at TEDGlobal 2012

Shimon Schocken is a professor and founding dean of the Efi Arazi School of Computer Science at IDC Herzliya in Tel Aviv. He starts out with some of his life story, introducing us to his grandfather, Salman Schocken, who dropped out of school aged 14 to help feed the family. He went on to found “a glittering empire of department stores,” every store building a “jewel of Bauhaus architecture.” Salman was the ultimate self-learner, a man who surrounded himself with an entourage of young, unknown scholars to enable their writing and learn from them. (The fact that said entourage included the likes of Franz Kafka likely didn’t hurt.)

In the late 1930s, Salman fled Germany, leaving everything behind and spending the rest of his life in a relentless pursuit of art and culture, ending his life as a scion of society. “Such is the power of self-study,” says Schocken, who goes on to introduce the next generation of Schockens, his parents, Gidon and Dvora. Likewise, neither went to university, but both were obsessed with reading and his house was stacked with thousands of books. “I remember my father telling us that when everyone in the neighborhood had a TV set, only then we will buy an FM radio.” He’s half-joking, if that.

His upbringing perhaps explains Schocken’s own obsession with self-study. Now he moves to tell us a story about a computer science course he developed with colleague Noam Nisan, because 12 years ago, they were frustrated by the same phenomenon: “students were losing the forest for the trees. It was impossible to connect with the soul of the machine.”

So what did they do? They developed a way to have students build a complete computer system from the ground up. You know. Obviously.

So Schocken and Nisan started with the “nand,” a simple logic gate with four input/output states. From here, students work through projects to build a series of objects, growing in complexity from the chipset to the hardware platform to the assembler to the virtual machine to the operating system to the compiler. By the end, students were playing games that they wrote themselves, on machinery they built. A triumph!

“Noam and I worked five years to facilitate this ascent and enable students to build it in one semester,” says Shocken. The trick, he adds, was to decompose computer construction into standalone modules that could be built and tested in isolation. Not only that, but all said building blocks were freely available on the web. “We laid out everything on the web and invited the world to take whatever they needed and do whatever they wanted with it. Then something fascinating happened. The world came–and in short order, they were building our machine.”

He gives examples. Pramode C.E. put together a group of self-learners in India. Parag Shah unbundled projects into even smaller projects in Mumbai. Many other different people have used the machine to execute very different ideas in very different ways. “For quite a few people, taking this Nand2Tetris pilgrimage has been a life-changing experience,” says Schocken, citing one student who describes himself as “profoundly changed” by his studies.

Here’s the important point. None of these students care a fig about grades. “They’re doing it for one motivation only: they had a passion to learn.” And with that Schocken takes on the thorny topic of grading. “I’m sick of it,” he says. “We’re obsessed with grades because we’re obsessed with data. But grading takes away from fun of failing.” It means that we don’t tolerate mistakes. “We collect B+’s and A-’s and aggregate them into a number that sums up who you are and stamp it on your forehead.” It’s degrading, he says. Let’s talk about “upgrading” instead.

Now Schocken gives an onstage demonstration, showing a mobile app he developed to encourage children to play with math rather than worry about grades. He shows how it’s possible to have a fun, hands-on experience when calculating the area of shapes such as rectangles, parallelograms and triangles. It’s super cool. And imagine! The audience likes this very much.

So what’s next for Schocken and co.? First up, they’re deconstructing the K12 curriculum into a portfolio of apps similar to the one that he just demonstrated. They’ve developed an authoring tool to enable any teacher or parent to develop their own versions of activities, even without programming ability. And finally, they’re building an adaptable ecosystem to match different learners with different activities based on learning styles.

But what all this boils down to, he concludes, is that this isn’t really a matter of math. “In the end it’s all about people.” he says, before quoting some graffiti he once saw on the street in Tel Aviv. It said: “High tech, schmigh tech! The most important thing to be is a mensch.” Laughter, and applause.

Photos: James Duncan Davidson

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Are You Still Broadcasting Doubt?

As you read through this passive income series, suppose you start seriously thinking about creating your own passive income streams. You talk about some ideas with your friends and family, and you get a negative reaction. Perhaps they suggest that passive income is beyond your reach and that you should just settle for a job like any “normal” person would.

It’s possible these people are trying to keep you from having a failure experience, but quite often there’s also some fear in the mix. What if you actually succeed? If the people around you don’t have strong self-esteem, your potential success can seem threatening to them. They may expect you to fail the first time, but if you stick with it and keep going, it may worry them that the odds of success will begin to shift in your favor.

People will often try to get you to change when they sense doubt in you. When they sense certainty, they usually won’t bother. So if you’re getting these kinds of reactions, the most common culprit is that you’re broadcasting self-doubt so loudly that other people can’t help but respond to it.

Being uncertain isn’t a problem, but be aware that it opens the door to being influenced. This can expose you to new ideas and suggestions, but it’s hard to take action when you’re in this phase because others’ influences are usually not congruent with your own desires. If you stay in this uncertain phase too long, you may end up more confused and paralyzed.

When you wish to move forward with action, or if you’re done spinning your wheels with doubt, then commit yourself to forward action in a particular direction. This will reduce distracting influences. If you wallow in uncertainty and keep seeking others’ counsel, you’ll never get anything done.

Sometimes you can find certainty through exploration, but most of the time you have to create it by choice. You never know how different decisions will turn out in advance. Just pick something and go forward anyway, like a child deciding which ride to go on first at Disneyland. You don’t know if it will be the best choice, but you act like it will be the best anyway.

I often enjoy showing people around the Las Vegas Strip when they come to town. Sometimes I tell them that I’m going to show them the most amazing sight in all of Las Vegas, one they’ll never be able to forget. I say this with over-the-top enthusiasm. I take them to the Bellagio Hotel, and as we turn a certain corner, I point it out to them and gasp, “Isn’t this the most incredibly thing you’ve ever seen?” Then I show them a fountain of liquid chocolate. It’s a cool thing to see if you’ve never seen it before, but it doesn’t really live up to the hype I projected. Nevertheless, that silly enthusiasm can make the experience more fun for everyone, and it makes the experience more memorable.

You don’t have to be so over-the-top in your enthusiasm for what you’re doing, but if you’re going to move forward in creating passive income, then create the certainty that you’re on the right path, especially when you share your thoughts with others. It makes the experience more fun, and it encourages others to play back at you with their own silly enthusiasm instead of trying to get you to change their mind. It also helps to diminish potential fear or jealousy from others.

Whenever I create a new stream of passive income, I never know how it will turn out. Sometimes the results meet my expectations. Sometimes the results are better than I expected. Sometimes the results are dismal. When I’m taking action, I focus on moving forward without worrying so much about the result. I don’t allow myself to be riddled with doubt and hesitation along the way since that would only lead to paralysis; it would also invite derailing influences into my life.

When other people are doubtful and hesitant, are you usually able to pick up on that? Can you tell when others are committed and when they’re not?

People can sense the same in you, whether you realize it or not.

I’ve noticed that when I’m unsure about something I’m writing about, it opens the doors to a flood of feedback from people who want to influence me one way or the other. It also invites a lot of criticism. However, when I create more certainty in my writing, I hardly receive any feedback like that. People don’t try to influence immovable objects to change.

When I first began writing about polyamory and open relationships a few years ago, I received tons of feedback about it, ranging from deeply critical to hugely supportive. I was still getting comfortable with the idea, so I still had a lot of uncertainty about it, and I’m sure that came through in my writing. It was good to invite this kind of feedback initially since it helped me think carefully about it before proceeding. But when I decided that this was the right path for me, I stopped creating and projecting doubt and uncertainty, and consequently, people stopped trying to influence my choices in this area.

If you feel that other people are trying to get you to change, and if this is becoming annoying, take a conscious look at the doubt you’re projecting. People are responding to what you’re broadcasting.

Many people have to deal with critical and unsupportive friends and relatives. If that’s been a problem for you, then stop giving others the impression that you’re uncertain and ready to waffle if they exert enough influence. You’ll only bait them into trying to change your mind.

Put your attention on moving forward with action. If that’s your focus, then when someone tries to influence you to stop or slow down, they won’t get very far. You may choose to respond with something like, “Oh… I’m sorry… did you mistake me for someone who’s uncertain about this? Please don’t try to slow me down. I’m not interested in debating whether or not this is a good idea; I’m past that phase. I’d prefer to have your support going forward, but if you don’t feel you can offer that, I understand. Just do the best you can to accept that this is important to me, even if you don’t agree with it yet. If I later change my mind about this, it will be my choice to do so. But for now I’m motivated to move forward on this. Wish me luck!”

If someone tries to come over the top by brushing this off, get up and leave immediately. Don’t waste your time arguing. Have enough self-respect to know that this kind of discussion is beneath you. You have every right to make your own choices. Some people can’t take a hint, and you have to be assertive with them to make that clear. Sometimes it takes several confrontations before people finally see that continuing to ride you is pointless. This is especially true with relatives. It may take a few blow-offs before they can change the way they relate to you.

There’s a flip side to this as well… one that many people overlook. When you project uncertainty about your decisions, you not only invite criticism and derailing influences on one side, but you also repel potentially supportive influences on the other side.

If you act like you’re unsure about creating passive income, then potential business partners will avoid you like the plague. Who wants to work with someone who’s unsure of themselves? Who wants to risk dealing with the business-virgin?

Yes, you will build confidence through experience. But you can also create confidence by committing yourself. Either you’re going to create streams of passive income, or you’re not. Which will it be? It’s not enough to declare that you’re going to do it. If you’re going to adopt a passive income lifestyle and not rely on jobs and the government to support you for the rest of your life, then start acting like it too. This includes not getting into arguments with people who either don’t understand it or won’t be supportive.

I remember what it was like to be just starting out on this path. My friends thought I was a bit of a slacker for not wanting a job. People would send me job applications or tell me of job openings. But when they figured out I was committed — and especially when I started making real money doing this — they all backed off. At the same time, I began attracting dozens of new entrepreneurial friends into my life, people who were much better matches for where I was at the time. With these new friends there were no pointless arguments about whether this independent path was a wise choice; that was just a given, so obvious as to be unworthy of discussion. Instead we focused on sharing ideas and supporting each others’ projects.

I really do think that fear and jealousy play a part in other people’s reactions. I mentioned open relationships in this article because the reactions to exploring open relationships mirror the reactions to earning passive income. Both paths involve breaking ranks with socially conditioned behaviors and embracing greater levels of abundance.

If you’re still arguing and debating with people about whether or not the passive income path is a good idea, you haven’t tipped yet. Those who get it know that such arguments are beneath them. When you finally see that these derailing influences are popping up in your life as a result of your own doubts and fears, I think it will help you see that in order to succeed — and especially to gain the social support you desire — you must eventually dump this limited thinking and leave it behind.

You may be wondering why I’m spending so much time on the mindset of passive income, trying to help you grasp it from different perspectives with article after article. That’s because the mindset is at least 80% of the value here. Once you really understand the passive income mindset, it’s all downhill from there. The action steps are easy to figure out for anyone who’s committed. You can learn by trial and error, buy courses and programs and books to help you, or research ideas on the Internet. There’s no need to even wait for me to finish the series.

Some people are already building new web businesses as a result of this series, and I suspect they’ll be generating income before the series is over. They’re taking action because they get it. Further delay is pointless. They can continue to follow this series and use it to supplement what they’re learning from direct experience.

If you haven’t taken any real action yet to create your first passive income stream, what’s your excuse? Remember that “I Don’t Know How” Is Not a Valid Excuse. Other excuses for inaction are just as feeble. If you have time to read this, you have time to work on your first stream. Instead of wasting your energy on doubt and hesitation, you can make real progress by diverting that energy into forward action.

Steve Recommends
Here are my recommendations for products and services I've reviewed that can improve your results. This is a short list since it only includes my top picks.

Getting Rich with Ebooks - Earn passive income from ebooks
Site Build It! - Start your own money-making website
Lefkoe Method - Permanently eliminate a limiting belief in 20 minutes
Paraliminals - Condition your mind for positive thinking and success
The Journal - Record your life lessons in a secure private journal
PhotoReading - Read books 3 times faster
Life on Purpose - Discover your life purpose

If you've found Steve's work helpful, please donate to show your support.
Follow Steve on Twitter  -  Add Steve on Google+  -  Get Steve's Free newsletter

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The Yogic Way of Forming New Habits and Breaking Old Ones

Some want to change certain habits in them, break the pattern and find new ground. They try to follow discipline, adopt everything they can to stay motivated including writing journals, meditation, reading self-help books and so forth, and yet they seem to make little progress, if any. They keep going back to square one before they give up eventually. Why are habits so hard to break? Or, why is it difficult to form new habits? They are serious, sincere, committed, yet they are unable to live the life they can or they so want to.

Your consciousness, your life is an aggregate of proclivities and psychic imprints that have been traveling with you over lifetimes. They make you who you are. It is for this reason that even identical twins can have different preferences, they may think and  behave differently. Everything you do and experience in life leaves an imprint on your consciousness, on your mind. These imprints form your habits. The best way to break old habits or form new ones is to wipe these imprints and create new ones. Let me share a little story with you:

There was a guy called Bo. A high level executive, in his mid-forties, working for a large organization. Bo had a happy family with a loving wife and two kids. However, he was often battered by episodes of shooting pain in his right knee and wild mood swings. He was physically fit, all medical reports were fine. Nothing could explain his knee-ache. As for the mood swings, they happened even when he was on a vacation, when there was no stress of work. To make matters worse, he experienced it more in a public setting. When in such state, Bo often said things that hurt his wife and damaged their relationship. He would later apologize but the impact of apology almost vanished, for, the pattern of verbal bashing and subsequent apologizing seemed intertwined and constant.

They tried many things without success. One lucky day, they came across a genuine healer. He advised them to recall and narrate the major incidents of his life, especially those where he experienced grief and pain, physical or mental. A few hours later, they had figured out the cause of his sudden appearance of physical pain and mood swings. It turned out that Bo was bullied in school. One particular time, a bully gave him a nasty blow on his right knee with a baseball bat. The blow did not break his knee but he cried out loud in excruciating pain. His wailing and howling immediately got the attention of many and he was promptly given medical aid. The bully was expelled from the school and no one ever pestered him thereafter.

However, that experience had found a permanent home in Bo’s mind. Whenever he passed through the markets, if he saw a baseball bat or even any memorabilia linked to that sport, he experienced pain in the knee. It all happened in the subconscious mind; he was unaware. Shouting became his coping mechanism. His mood swings were triggered at the sighting of anything linked to baseball, especially the bat.

Habits are spontaneous responses. They spring from your memory. Yoga sutras state that memory is the unmodified collection of words and experiences. If you work on erasing those imprints, you can get rid of any habit. There are two simple ways you can adopt to erase your psychic imprints, there’s a yogic method and there’s an intellectual one. You can read up on both methods here.

When you are angry, negative, pessimistic, paranoid, it means you are hurt somewhere deep within you. It means that untoward experiences of the past have not been forgotten yet, that, you still haven’t forgiven yourself or the other person, that, you are still not healed. They are merely the symptoms of a wounded consciousness. You can heal yourself. Such healing will give you a clean slate.

Not everything that happens to you is your fault. Allow yourself to be yourself. Heal yourself so you may be the person you wish to be, living the life of your dreams.

(Photo credit: Road on the Sky via Shutterstock)

Om Swami is a mystic living in the Himalayan foothills and writes frequently on his blog. If you like this post, you can show your love by subscribing to Om Swami's blog.

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A procession of dementia

The June issue of the neuroscience journal Brain has an amazing cover showing “increasingly bizarre and menacing caricatures by an artist with frontotemporal lobar degeneration during the course of his illness”.

The caption reads:

From left, the first picture drawn many years before his illness; the middle pair in the first 2 years of dementia; and that on the right at least 3 years into the illness. Background: Gouache entitled ‘Unravelling Boléro’, showing de novo transmodal creativity comprising auditory to visual transformation, by a patient with primary progressive aphasia…

Link to Brain cover (via @tiempoasm)

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How to Make Your Resume Stand Out From the Crowd

Do you know what happens to most of the resumes you send to the recruiters? They end up in the pile in the dustbin. That’s why you are not getting the interview calls you expect. How can you stop that from happening — and how can you make your resume stand out as well as increase the chances of getting interview calls?

If you can make your resume interesting and help it to stand out in the crowd, you are more likely to accomplish your goals of getting more interview calls. Most of the resumes are boring because they follow similar format and styles. Is there any way to spice up a boring resume and make it look more attractive to the recruiters? How can you make your resume stand out in a pile of resumes?

If you want to be unique, then you will need to take some risks.

The next time you are applying for a job, you need to — first and foremost — do this: Focus On The Job Title of the Job You’re Applying For.

You can do that by adding some descriptive words to your job title. Make it interesting — make it stand out. Recruiters often only look at your resume for just a few seconds. So you have only a few seconds to make a positive impression — and you can do that with your resume title. Your resume title can get that necessary first glance and create an important interest for recruiters.

Here’s an example  that will help you understand this idea better…

Instead of writing “Content Writer” why not write “Content Writer for XYZ Corporation,” if the XYZ corporation is a well-known name. You can also write “Content Writer with 5 Years Experience,” or “Content Writer with Marketing Background,” or “Content Writer with HTML Skills.” They may just be a few words — but they are the words that can get the attention of the recruiters. Adding those words in your resume title can do the trick for you.

Here are some other examples:

Instead of “Internet Marketer” as your resume title, why not have “Internet Marketer with AdWords Certification.”Instead of “Marketing Manager” as your resume title, why not have “Marketing Manager with Online Marketing Experience.”

This looks like a very small trick…but it works. It works because it helps the recruiters see something that they are not finding with the other hundreds of candidates. It shows you as unique, different, and proactive — and recruiters love those traits. Show that you are really interested in the opening and recruiters will look to call you for an interview.

It helps if you write about your experience and expertise without the recruiters having to read the whole resume. It saves the recruiters’ time, making the screening faster. And everybody loves to work less and get things done faster….right?

So, the next time you are sending your resume in for any job, customize it for the job and search. Find and use attention-grabbing and important words in the resume title. Try it a few times and you will see the difference. The recruiters will also notice the difference, improving and increasing the chances of getting you that elusive job interview.

(Photo credit: My Resume via Shutterstock)

Bikash Kalita is a Content Manager for the technology blog Take A Plunge. He also manages Nirvana Sutra, the complete Content Management Agency. He is a netpreneur and helps people to write, create and publish eBooks.

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