The biggest downside of building a nest egg for retirement is TIME. It takes time to save and invest and accumulate money. Usually DECADES of time.
There is a way to get around this. Instead of accumulating money, accumulate mostly-passive income streams.
Golden gooses.
Once your monthly passive income exceeds your monthly bills, you’re done with jobs and work schedules forever.
Few people ever realize they are just one good property away from early retirement.
Learning how to do this is self-education, so you can learn around your existing job.
The right property can be purchased with borrowed money, so you can start right now.
The right property will support a manager to run it, so it’s mostly passive.
The right property will generate enough income to pay a large mortgage, all operating expenses, a manager, and enough to pay all your monthly personal bills plus more.
The right property gives you immediate financial and time freedom.
For me, the “right property” was mobile home parks.
With mobile home parks, I only rent the land so there are no dwelling repairs. Mobile homes are expensive to move so tenant turnover is extremely low. By buying an entire park, I buy dozens of rent streams at once, at the lowest possible cost-per-rent-stream. With income properties, the more rents coming in, the less risk from non-payers, vacancies and unexpected expenses.
Mobile home parks easily trump single family homes and apartments. Homes and apartments feature dwelling repairs, constant tenant turnover and extremely high cost-per-unit. It’s difficult to buy enough homes and apartments to gain the financial and time benefits you get from mobile home parks.
I “retired” in 2009 after selling an active business and using the proceeds to buy a second mobile home park. Then I added a third park. Each park had a manager who dealt with 90% of all tenant and operational issues. I chose to write the checks and deposit the rents. I did 95% of my “managing the manager” by phone and email.
I've since sold the parks & fully retired. I earned 90% passive income five different ways.
Income. After depositing rents and paying the parks’ operational bills, mortgage, and manager, I kept the rest as my monthly income.
Equity. Each month, when my tenants paid their rent, I used some of that money to make the mortgage payments, which lowered my balance, building equity.
Appreciation. Due to the magic math of mobile home park values in the marketplace, each one dollar I increased profit added 10 to 14 dollars to the value of my parks.
Depreciation. Thanks to real estate owners writing the tax laws, I could legally depreciate a large portion of the property value each year. This amount is usually so large that my ample spendable income was reduced on paper so much that my taxable income was so low there was no tax due.
Inflation hedge. I borrowed mortgages at 5%. REAL inflation was nearly 10% then (ShadowStats.com). This pushed half my inflation exposure to my lender. I easily overcame the other 5% through annual rent increases, property appreciation and equity gains.
Best of all, I controlled the assets. I could touch them. I could see them. I could increase rents and decrease expenses. I could change the managers. I could change the tenants. I could sell a property or buy a new one.
As long as I owned golden geese, my retirement funding would never run out. This is the difference between living off a nest egg or living off a perpetual income stream.
I went bankrupt at age 39. I didn’t learn about income properties until age 40. I had zero savings. I self-studied people who achieved what I wanted. I bought my first mobile home park at age 44 with just $1,000 down. I was financially free by age 48. I bought my second park at age 52 and early-retired. The past 12 years have been wonderful. Every day is Saturday.
So yes, parks are lucrative monetarily. But to me, their biggest benefit is TIME. I’m free of jobs and work schedules forever. I only wish I’d learned about mobile home parks earlier. I could’ve saved years of employment and retired at age 25 instead of 52.
Time is far more valuable than money. Income properties are the only thing I’ve discovered that lets us buy an early retirement right NOW.
Mike Johnson made the journey from jobs to freelance writer to entrepreneur to passive income and early retirement. Now he teaches others how to skip right to passive income and early retirement at WorldsBestWriter.com .
Once I learned how to BUY passive income, I stopped chasing the bucks and the bucks started chasing me!