Considering Buying a Denver Condominium?

By Michael Canon

Many people think that finding a Denver condominium is difficult. There are plenty of great options out there, and many of them don't cost much more than an apartment would. A condominium gives you the freedom to live like you won the place without have to worry about mowing the grass or trimming the trees. Although it is usually older people who choose to live in condos, they are a great living option for others as well.

Condominiums, or condos for short, have been steadily decreasing in cost over the past few years. A smart buyer knows that this is the best time to buy a Denver condominium. Most of the people that enjoy condos don't need a lot of room and like the extra amenities. They are just like apartments, but the only difference is that you are able to own a condo. Condominiums also tend to be more luxurious and a bit bigger then apartments, but that isn't always the case.

A Denver condominium can be found in just about any part of town. The best place to start your search is in the local newspaper. Usually you will be able to find a specific column just for listings in your area. You can also search online for listings or talk to a local real estate agent. Buying a condo is a big decision, but they are very cost efficient compared to other properties. A good place will offer you privileges to the public recreation facilities including swimming pools and fitness rooms.

The average price of a Denver condominium has been settling at about $170,000 dollars. This means you will be paying between $800 and $1,500 dollars every month. Larger and more luxurious condos will cost you more. The best time to consider buying a condo is when the market is down like it is. Later on if you choose to sell you condo to someone else it will probably be worth more.

Basically there are three different Denver condominium styles. The first type is for wealthier people looking for very expensive living areas. They have access to many features that can't be found in other types of condos. There are also vacation condos. Vacation condos are usually found near the edges of the city within the mountain views and outdoor activities. The last type of condo is a budget friendly loft, and these are great for students and singles. These are less expensive and may be located closer to downtown.

Proper research ahead of time will help you find the perfect Denver condominium. You can go through hundreds of different listings before you find a condo that you like. The easiest way to get an idea of what living in a condo would be like is to take a tour of it. These are easily set up and will help enormously with your decision. - 23229

About the Author:

Michael Canon is a top Denver realtor with the Canon Colorado Team who have been frequently quoted by the Denver Media as real estate experts. Michael will help you find that perfect Denver condominium or loft that you're looking for. Get in touch today by visiting Denver Condominium or Downtown Denver Lofts!

Investing in Real Estate with No Money - Part One

By Dave Peniuk

There's a hard truth out there about getting rich and it's this; if you're already living as if you are rich, then you will never become rich. That means if your credit cards have a huge balance and you're drowning in debt, real estate investing is not going to rescue you.

I know... those guys on late night television introduced you to people who got out of debt and quit their jobs just 60 days after taking their real estate investing course. Let me tell you first hand that if those testimonials on t.v. are real, those people are the exception, not the rule.

You can, and we believe you WILL, create massive amounts of wealth through real estate investing. Set your goals, find properties that meet those goals with plenty of good research and then hold onto them for at least five years...preferably longer. It works... look at the richest people in your city. Of those that are self-made, I bet at least 25% of them did it through real estate. We always go through the richest people in Canada and Power List for Vancouver, and this number holds up.

The trick is to learn what you're doing, and then accelerate your investments after you have built a base of knowledge and equity. It's not the only way to make millions in real estate...but it's the way that requires less money, has the least amount of risk, and induces the least amount of panic attacks.

We started out with $16,000. Thankfully my wife Julie was a saver. When she graduated from University and started working as a sales rep, she continued to live like a student. And, she put every extra penny she had into paying down her student loan. When that was paid off, she proceeded to save any extra money that she had. Her plan was to go back to school for her MBA so she wanted to have as much cash in the bank as possible to pay for school.

When I first met Julie, we had very different lifestyles. I was enjoying the money I was currently making. I went out a lot, drove a brand-new Volkswagen with financing, and had some credit card debt. I also had a piece of property that I owned with my mom. But when I met Julie she talked about retiring at 35. She spoke of it so clearly and had such a good plan, that I knew it could happen if I worked at it too.

It took a lot of work on my part to pay off my credit card debt, but I did it. I then started to save a few hundred dollars every month. But the reward was worth the work, and we started to shop for our first investment property.

Thankfully, we had Julie's savings to help us with our first purchase, but if you don't have enough in savings, don't worry. There are ways to buy property without money.

You may have heard of 'no money down' programs, and though they certainly exist and they can work, they're also very risky. Usually this is too much risk for an average person to handle, and why would you want to handle it anyway? Especially when there are three much less riskier ways to get into real estate investing:

1. Your own savings (cash out stocks, GICs, and even retirement savings in some cases)

2. Your home's equity

3. A partner with cash.

Here's the hard reality that you won't like to hear though. Finding a partner will be next to impossible if your own finances are ugly. If you have no experience investing in real estate, you are deep in debt and you are trying to get rich on my money, what exactly is in it for me, as your potential partner? It just sounds risky to me.

However, if you're in 'good debt' (like the kind that comes from student loans that you have been diligently paying down) and if you've done your research on real estate investing, then a partner starts to think differently about your debt. After all, you know how to control your money, so you won't waste his/her money. The potential partner feels that you can be trusted and that any risk to investing with you is slight.

See what I am saying? This person has no money, but they have the right mindset about money. They are in debt for a good reason AND have been diligent about debt repayment.

Before you can buy a single piece of property, you have to be able to control your own finances. This gives you control of your destiny. Living beneath your means is the only way to do that. If you're unsure about what you make versus what you spend, try this: for the next six months, keep track of every penny you spend. Once it's there in black and white you'll be able to see how you're living and where you can make changes.

I can imagine what you might be thinking - "but, Dave, I always spend a lot during the holiday season", or "we've been planning the trip to Europe for two years"! Don't fret- if you've saved up for those things, you deserve to do them. But, if you are going to end up going into debt for those things, you may have just discovered that you are a SPENDER, not a SAVER. If that is the case, you may not be ready to start growing your wealth and becoming a rich real estate investor. - 23229

About the Author:

Learn How to Retire with Real Estate with Dave's free Real Estate Investing Starter Tips Guide. Learn how to find money for real estate deals, create financial freedom, extra revenue and massive wealth with tips like: How to find quality investment properties, finding and keeping great tenants, and easy ways to make more money with real estate.

What Are the Seven Habits of Highly Effective Real Estate Investors?

By Julie Broad

Remember that book by Stephen Covey that was printed in 1989, Seven Habits of Highly Effective People? In it's day it was a best seller, and even now it's still great advice. I found my old copy on my shelf the other day and I started to wonder... what would the seven habits of a successful real estate investor be?

After some thought, I realized that a successful real estate investor is not a special breed; I personally believe that anyone could become one if they really wanted to. However, they would need to practice these seven habits:

Habit One: Know Your Goals

The first thing that most of the real estate investors that I know start out with is a goal. One of the investors I know in Toronto sold his home and bought two lots side by side on which he built a townhouse complex that had 8 units. Successfully completing that project gave him the start he needed, and now he has a company that sells and builds hundreds of homes every year. As with anything in life, goals that you set can be simple but may lead to big things; whereas larger goals may have to be broken down into simpler shorter term goals.

Habit Two: Make Your Money when you Buy

It's very risky to pay over market value for a property in the hopes that the rent will go up, the area will improve, and/or the property's value will increase. The simple formula for long term success in real estate is to buy a desirable property below market value, in an area with a lot of potential for future growth.

Habit Three: Hire Help

Unless you want to buy yourself a job when you buy a property, hire a property manager. Unless you are an accountant, hire one to help you with taxes and bookkeeping for your properties. And, in most cases, we also recommend you hire a real estate agent. Just take some time to find one that will work with you to achieve your goals.

Habit Four: Use Just the Right Amount of Leverage

Every single money-making real estate investor that I have met has made money in real estate, in a big part, due to the ability to use leverage. Even the richest people will eventually run out of cash if they keep buying property. Leverage allows you to use a small portion of your own money to buy a property. The less money you put in, the higher your potential return on investment. In really simple terms, if you put in $10,000 on a $100,000 property and earn $5,000 in a year, your return on investment is 50%. If you had paid cash for that $100,000 property your return would still only be 5% ($5,000). Too much leverage equates to too much risk though, so find a balance. If you buy a $100,000 property and only put in $2,000 of your own money and the market value of that property drops to $90,000 you now owe more on that property than it's worth.

Habit Five: Find Good Partners

I love the success stories where someone with nothing but big dreams and a lot of initiative ties up one or more properties with contracts. They had little to no money, so while they had the properties under contract, they went out and found people who did. If you aren't starting out with a big bucket of cash, it's tough to make millions in real estate if you aren't willing to partner with others. Your partner might be a family member, a friend, a colleague, a company or even someone you haven't met yet. We are millionaires from our real estate investing thanks to a couple of great partners that contributed equity to our investments along the way. We would likely only half of what we own now without them.

Habit Six: Be Persistent

When starting out in real estate (or even when you're established) you're going to hear the word "no" a lot, so make sure you don't stray from your goals. Some of the people you could hear "no" from are as follows:

- Potential partners that do not want to partner with you on a deal,

- The banks - we've had issues getting financing for almost every property deal we've been involved with,

- Family - sometimes we try the bank of parents and we almost always get rejected but we still try because the interest rates are so favourable,

- Insurance companies - if you don't live in the same province as the property you are trying to insure, most insurance companies don't want to do business with you. We have approached and been turned down by numerous insurance companies that won't insure our Ontario properties because we live in British Columbia,

- Property Managers - sometimes the Property Management company you want to hire isn't interested in managing your property.

A true real estate investor will keep going even if they keep hearing "no". This is what separates the successful investors from the ones who just give up.

Habit Seven: Research - Always be learning

- The best investors are the ones that ask a lot of questions, keep their eyes open for new opportunities and do a lot of research. Many get right into the details of a city. They go to the municipal offices and pull the official plan. They get zoning details and applications. They talk to the city councilors about plans, they attend city council meetings and know everything that is happening in an area.

Not every good investor I know possesses every one of these habits. And I know there are habits that many good investors have that I haven't covered. But as I thought about the most effective and successful investors that I have met or read about, I realized that almost all of them did possess each of the above habits. And, that anyone could really do what they did if they set out to establish these habits and practices in their real estate investing. - 23229

About the Author:

Learn How to Retire a wealthy real estate investor with Julie's free Real Estate Investing Starter Tips Guide. Learn how to create financial freedom, positive cashflow and massive wealth with tips like: How to find quality rental properties, finding and keeping great tenants, and easy ways to make rental property recordkeeping simple and more profitable.

A Forex Tutorial On How The Forex Market Works

By Bart Icles

Learning the basics of the foreign exchange market is part of any forex tutorial. And part of learning the basics is learning more about how the foreign exchange market works. We may all know that a certain type of forex market exists in any place wherein one currency is traded for another. You can say that the foreign exchange or currency market works as an international market for different kinds of currencies. Through forex trading, investors from different parts of the globe are able to exchange currencies.

Practically, the forex market works through the exchange of currencies. This currency exchange makes the forex market unique because investors are able to buy and sell money all in the same time. Currency trades are done in pairs wherein one currency is paired with another. Some of the most common currency pairs include USD/CHF or the US dollar and Swiss franc, EUR/JPY or the euro and Japanese yen, and CAD/USD or the Canadian dollar and US dollar. Presently, the forex market is the largest trading market in the world, where in more than one trillion trades are done each day. Turnover rates in the foreign exchange market are almost thirty times larger than the total volume of equity or stock trades in the United States.

In spite of its large volume and popularity, the public remains to be relatively unfamiliar with the foreign exchange market. The currency market was made open to the public only in 1998, when large inter-bank units were broken down into smaller pieces and offered to the public.

Before 1998, the foreign exchange market was only meant for big players like banks, large currency dealers, and multinational corporations. These days, the currency market is no longer limited to large-sized businesses that have strong financial backgrounds - even individual traders are allowed to participate in foreign currency trades. Nevertheless, large international banks still remain to be the major traders in the foreign exchange market. These large banks are said to be in control of almost 70% of the trades in the forex market.

If you are looking into joining the unpredictable yet rewarding world of currency trading, it would help a lot to spend time in learning the ins and outs of forex trading. You can start with a simple forex tutorial on market basics so you can have an idea of how the market works. The amount of time you spend on learning more about the currency market and the quality of forex education you receive can pretty much determine your future success or failure in the forex world. - 23229

About the Author:

A forex is a powerful tool in your forex education. Forex trading takes dedication but is well worth it. Once you learn how to trade and do so successfully your life will change dramatically.

S&P Futures Explained (Part III)

By Ahmad Hassam

The E-mini S&P futures contract trade almost 24 hours per day with a 30 minute maintenance break in trading from 4:30 to 5:00 PM daily. The monthly identifiers for the E-mini S&P futures contracts are H for March, M for June, U for September and Z for December.

The margin requirements for E-minis are much less than the normal contract. The day trading margin is less than the margin to hold an overnight position in S&P 500 E-mini Futures contract. If you are a new E-mini trader you be careful as traders are expected to pay for the difference between the margins for the entry and exit points. In case you lose at the end of the day you are likely to pay in a big way.

All futures contracts are settled daily (assigned a final value price). Based on this settlement price, the values of all positions are marked to the market each day after the official close. Your account is then either debited or credited based on how well your positions fared in that days trading session. In other words, as long as your positions remain open, cash will either come into your account or leave your account based on the change in the settlement price from day to day.

It is this mechanism that brings integrity to the marketplace. As losses are not allowed to accumulate without some response being required, this system gives futures trading a rock-solid reputation for creditworthiness.

Leverage: The effect of price changes is magnified because futures markets are highly leveraged. You typically pay the price in full with stocks (i.e., without leverage) or on margin (50 percent leverage). Leverage can produce large profits in relation to the amount of your initial margin if you speculate in futures and the market moves in your favor. However, you also could lose your initial margin if the market moves against your position.

For example, assume that youve decided to put $10,000 into a futures account. You buy one E-mini S&P 500 index futures contract when the index is trading at 1000. Your initial margin requirement for that one contract is $3,500.

Because the value of the futures contract is $50 times the index, each one-point change in the index represents a $50 gain or loss. If the index increases 5 percent, to 1050 from 1000, you could realize a profit of $2,500= (50 points) ($50). Conversely, a 50-point decline would produce a $2,500 loss. The $2,500 increase represents a 25 percent return on your initial investment of $10,000 or a 71 percent return on your initial margin deposit of $3,500.

An increase or decrease of only 5 percent in the index could result in a substantial gain or loss in your account in either case. Thats the power of leverage. Similarly a decline would eat up 25% of your original $10,000. It is 71% of your initial margin.

Leverage can be a beautiful thing. When everythings going your way, it makes your money work harder and produces more in a shorter period of time than if you paid for everything in full, up front. Indeed, leverage is the key, distinctive aspect of futures trading as compared with stock trading.

But there is a dark side to leverage, too. For example, assume you use $5,000 in your account to buy an E-mini S&P 500 contract worth $50,000. Instead of going up, however, prices fall by 10 percent and the contracts value drops to $45,000. Your $5,000 is completely gone. Unless you get out of the position with an offsetting sale when your maintenance margin level is violated, youll be obligated to put up even more money if the market keeps moving against you. Leverage is the one ingredient that can produce either horror stories or happy endings. To get the happy ending, it is extremely important that you fully understand the power of leverage and how to manage it well. - 23229

About the Author:

Mr. Ahmad Hassam is a Harvard University Graduate. He is interested in day trading futures and currencies. Trade Dow Futures and S&P Futures!