I purchased my first house in 2007 a few years after I started working — it was the cheapest house in a good neighborhood and all that I could afford at the time. When I moved for work a couple of years later, we decided to keep it and rent it out in case we ever moved back to that city. We did the same with the next house on a subsequent. That was my accidental start as a landlord.

It worked so well that we started saving and buying more houses as investment properties.

We now own a portfolio…

Like most people, when I started my adult life, I had no concept of what it took to be financially secure. I assumed that having a good job and socking away money in my 401k was all I needed to be safe. I planned to keep my head down and work hard to ensure that I was valuable to my company and hope for the best.

Then the layoffs came.

What a stressful time. To not know if you will have a job, a salary or medical insurance for your family is tough.

I was fortunate enough to stay employed…

One of the oldest arguments around is about the merits of owning assets (investing) versus trading assets (speculating). This dichotomy is found in real estate (owning rentals vs. flipping houses), the stock market (buy and hold vs. trading), crypto (HODL vs. trading), and likely everywhere else where humans try to make money.

I’ll be upfront that I’m an investor that aims to own assets for cash flow and long-term appreciation (both real estate and equities). I’ve tried to trade options and a few other speculative strategies, but I’ve almost always lost money on them.

I’ve been MUCH more successful when…

Predicting the future is notoriously difficult, and it is best to admit as such. I avoided doing anything in the stock market other than buying low-cost index funds for a long time because I thought you had to know which stocks would advance. Since I had no confidence in my ability to pick stocks that would appreciate faster than the market, I kept to my S&P 500 fund and got my guaranteed average returns.

It was during the lockdown last year that I started reading about value investing and have developed conservative valuation strategies that do not rely on forecasting.

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There continues to be a lot of discussion in finance and investing circles about something called “passive income.” With a name like that, is it any wonder that many people start to dream about laying on a beach, sipping pina coladas, and checking on their ever-growing bank account that requires zero effort to double every year? But what is passive income, how passive is it really, and how can you generate it?

The truth is there is nothing that is 100% passive, and the term has been abused by internet marketers looking to sell courses and books for their own…

As we kick off the start of a new month, I wanted to share the most popular articles from May in case you may have missed one. If you are interested in learning more about how wealth is built through real estate, going against the crowd, or by generating cash flow, read on.

Most new real estate investors focus only on the potential appreciation of a property, and some even make the mistake of buying a property with negative cash flow because they believe the appreciation will save them. …

Before the locked last year, my focus for stock investing was low-cost index funds. I knew the market wasn’t always efficient, but I wasn’t sure how to take advantage of it when it wasn’t.

During the crash, I was prepared to buy with cash on the side. The problem was that the S&P 500 never got back down to what I thought was a reasonable level, then it quickly took off again. After that, I decided I needed to learn how to evaluate individual stocks.

If the market as a whole could stay overpriced, maybe I could find some stocks…

I bought my first house in 2007. It was an old townhouse, the cheapest house in a good neighborhood, and the only thing I could afford at the time. We lived in it for two years before moving away for work.

Instead of selling it, we decided we wanted to keep it in case we moved back to that city. So we hired a property manager and rented it out. We made money and got to keep the house, which increased in value.

We quickly learned to love real estate as a great way to build wealth.

That was the…