While surfing onlne, I came across this blog post: Real Estate as an asset class. Basically this guy wants to be able to live off his dividends at some point and his blog is devoted to that. He's wondering how real estate fits in. He invests in REITS...
See more 
While surfing onlne, I came across this blog post: Real Estate as an asset class. Basically this guy wants to be able to live off his dividends at some point and his blog is devoted to that. He's wondering how real estate fits in. He invests in REITS but isn't too sure about actual investing in Real Estate. Well here's the skinny on investing in Real Estate for cashflow. 1. You definitely want to buy in an area thats reasonably priced. How do you define reasonable? As a rule of thumb, the monthly rents are 1% or higher of the purchase price. for example, if you're buying a $90,000 house and the rent is $900 per month or more, thats a reasonable price. 2. You want to make sure that after paying for property management, utilities, taxes, insurance and maintenance the rent still covers the mortgage. You may need to learn how to do this. I strongly recommend reading What every Investor Needs to Know About Cashflow. 3. Make sure you figure out the return on investment, or as I like to call... See less 
Highlights:
As a rule of thumb, the monthly rents are 1% or higher of the purchase price. for example, if you're buying a $90,000 house and the rent is $900 per month or more, thats a reasonable price. 2.
.value, '<a href="http://www.kaboodle.com/minh/Money-Matters.html"><img alt="" src="http://cn1.kaboodle.com/hi/img/2/0/0/2b/1/AAAAAjkWmjEAAAAAACsWQA.png" width="100px" /></a>','http://www.kaboodle.com/minh/Money-Matters.html','1');)
