I’m a landlord.
Not because I want to be…
Not because I thought there was a fortune to be made…
And certainly not because I like fixing things all of the time…
It’s because I bought my old house at the height of the sub-prime meltdown. It was a seemingly affordable property for my wife and I when we were in our 20s. We were thrilled to find a Baltimore row-home in the neighborhood we wanted for an amount of money we could afford.
Once we went to get the loan, however, we were shocked and thrilled to realize that not only could we afford it, but the loan officer told us we didn’t even have put any money down! We could have purchased a $250,000 home for literally nothing.
What a steal!
Now, knowing better, we did put a chunk of money down to lower the payments, but we certainly got into real estate at the tail end of the single biggest bubble I’ve ever seen — or ever hope to see — in my lifetime.
Long story short, between the time I bought my house and today, I’ve had two kids. They will need to go to school and I wasn’t about to send them to the shambolic Baltimore City school system. Nor was I going to fork over the insane amount of money it takes to put two kids through private school in the city…
So we did what countless millions of young parents have done in the past… packed up and moved out to the country…
The problem is, we put our house up for sale at the same time we put a down payment on a beautiful old farm house in a great school district. We weren’t worried about selling our city house, because we naively believed our real estate agent, who said “You’ll sell this house in a week.”
A week turned into weeks, which turned into months. All of a sudden, we were staring down the double-barreled reality of two mortgages.
So, I did what I needed to do: I rented the city house and became a landlord for the very first time.
The long and the short of it is, being a landlord sucks. In fact, almost every real estate investment kind of sucks…
Renting requires a full-time commitment to your tenets: vetting renters, fixing pipes, repairing windows and most of all, dealing with late payments from fickle renters.
The other popular real estate investment is “buying and flipping houses.” This can be incredibly lucrative, but also incredibly dangerous. Not only do you have to have a ton of startup capital — which most mom and pop investors simply do not have — but there are also dozens of unforeseen costs.
I have a friend who buys undervalued homes at auction — practically sight-unseen. He gets the homes amazingly cheap. But in the past year alone, he’s had to replace an entire roof on one home, completely gut and replace the plumbing in another, and had to abandon one home entirely because it wasn’t structurally sound.
While he still may get out ahead in the long run, repairs like this can tie up a ton of capital for long periods of time — time he could have been reaping gains from more solid and pain-free investments like the one I’m about to share with you today.
The thing most people who tell you the real money is in rental properties and flipping houses leave out is that these money-making schemes don’t typically take into account the blood, sweat, and tears it requires to make these investments profitable in the first place. They can completely consume your life.
That’s why I’m taking a different approach in staking my claim in the next real estate boom — one that will dwarf the golden years of the sub-prime bubble, yet is as solid and sturdy a bet as you can make for the next 20 to 30 years. It doesn’t involve outrageous and almost criminal financial trickery like mortgage-backed securities, collateralized debt obligations, or credit-default swaps. In other words, you won’t have to collapse the entire economy in order to make a ton of cash on this investment.
And it requires practically no startup capital. With as little as $20, you can essentially become a landlord in this huge boom, without any of the hassle of actually owning, managing, or selling properties.
You just have to sit back and collect rent checks. Let me explain…
While there were billions of dollars made selling McMansions to gullible Americans with no-money down “liars loans”, the next boom is rooted firmly in reality. That’s because this next real estate boom will be driven by people in total control of their money.
These are people who can actually afford the real estate they’re paying for and — unlike the hordes of families living way beyond their means to afford that “dream home” — this group really won’t have much of a choice…
You see, America’s purse strings are controlled by a rapidly aging population.
70% of the disposable income in this country is in their hands. They drive at least $7.1 trillion in annual economic activity. I’m talking 46% of the entire U.S. economy.
By 2032, this economic growth is expected to surpass $13.5 trillion.
They own 63% of all financial assets.
And guess what?
They’ve got trillions of dollars in savings, retirement funds, pensions, stocks and bonds, home equity, and so on. I’m talking about Baby Boomers — the most financially flush demographic group in the country, and maybe in all of our history.
As they begin downsizing, they’re pumping a nice chunk of that money into a blazing-hot real estate niche. It will end up as a trillion-dollar real estate market most investors haven’t even considered. I, on the other hand, have given it a lot of consideration.
Through my research, I have identified three key stocks that will play this demographic trend like a fiddle.
- Are uniquely positioned to keep climbing for decades into the future
- Are recession-resistant and resilient against market shocks and tremors
- Yield obscene dividend payouts, giving you a safe, stable source of residual retirement income and equity you can count on
Essentially, you can become a landlord for millions of wealthy people and reap risk-free, double-digit returns without lifting a finger.
