In fact, Monopoly became the best-selling privately patented board game in history.

You want to win, right?

The more expensive a property is, the more valuable it is.

Do you want to own the Boardwalk or Baltic Ave.?

The post The Truth About Monopoly appeared first on Cardone Capital.

This is a continuation of the “Fight for $15” campaign that’s been attempting to get minimum wage up to $15 in America.

People have made protests in cities around the nation in recent years looking to change minimum wages to $15.

 If you do the math, working 52 weeks at $15 an hour is just $31,200 annually.

The problem is, that is still not enough money!

What most people aren’t realizing is that raising the minimum wage is not a solution to their problem.

The federal minimum wage is $7.25 an hour and there are currently 29 states with a minimum wage higher than that.

Several cities have already put, or are in the process of legislation that will increase their minimum wage to $15 over the next few years, including San Francisco, Seattle, Washington DC, and Los Angeles. On July 1 of this year, San Francisco became the first official place to reach $15 an hour.

Arizona, Colorado, and Maine will also incrementally increase their minimum wages to $12 an hour by 2020.

The reality is that the first thing you get when you raise minimum wage is more people on minimum wage.

If you want a whole country on minimum wage just raise it to $20.

Why don’t we go to $30? What does it matter?

Prices will skyrocket. That hamburger you eat, that milkshake you get at Wendy’s, your dry cleaning — all those things will get much more expensive when you raise the price of the hourly person.

The truth is minimum wage is not a solution to anybody’s problem.

The only solution to a person’s problem is their own productivity, their creativity, and their ability to separate themselves in the marketplace and be great so that nobody would want to pay them minimum wage.

No government, no congress, no senate, and no president can help you if you’re on minimum wage.

Even at $15 you need more money.

I know how tough it is for people on minimum wage. I worked at McDonalds, and I didn’t deliver. I wasn’t worth the $7 they paid me — or I guess it was $3 back then. I wasn’t great so they fired me and replaced me with someone else willing to work for $3 who would do a better job.

That’s why you have to get great. Get great at the job you have. If you can’t get great at a job you hate, you’ll never get great at a job you love.

Whether you are a fast-food restaurant worker, child-care worker, a driver, a shipper, or a cashier, your minimum wage job is not the problem. Raising things to $15 an hour will result in lost jobs, reduced hours and business closures.

Instead of focusing on what others must give you, set your mind on what you can give others. Minimum wage is not the solution — whether it’s $15 or even $20 an hour — the solution to your financial problems is to get great, learn new skills, and became more valuable in the marketplace!

If you want more than the hourly wage you get paid, invest in coming to 10X Growth Conference 3, the world’s largest business conference.

I’ll see you there!

The post Amazon Raises Wages – But Don’t Shoot for $15 an Hour! appeared first on Cardone Capital.

1) Do It Yourself 

2) REIT (Real Estate Investment Trust) 

3) Partnership 

Today I’m going to talk about Doing it yourself…

DO IT YOURSELF

Buying apartments on your own is for a much smaller number of people than you would think. Many people will attempt to buy a small apartment building, a duplex, triplex or fourplex. These are all mistakes. Small unit buildings and “plexes” will not have enough units to protect you against vacancy fluctuations, produce enough cash flow to cover issues or appreciate in value enough to be able to reinvest or compound your investment.

The mistakes you will make in real estate are not as obvious as you might think, and most all of them are made because people go it alone. However, the biggest mistake of all, is to never buy income producing real estate in the first place.

This is what you will need to do if you are going it alone:

1) Find a deal 

2) Negotiate the terms 

3) Set up an LLC 

4) Get a loan 

5) Close the deal 

6) Find tenants

7) Turn units 

8) Manage the property 

9) Rehab the property 

10) Provide reports to the bank 

11) Take phone calls from existing and prospective tenants 

12) Fix the property

Of all things on that list, the hardest part of investing in apartments isn’t the tenants, the termites, and the toilets, it’s in finding the right deal. Finding the deal (on-market or off-market) is the most difficult part of buying apartments. Sometimes just getting the seller or broker to take you seriously is difficult.

I remember when I told my Mom I was going to start buying apartments and she said to me, “People are going to be calling you at all times of the night.” I thought to myself, “No one is calling me; I am buying deals big enough whereby the property can afford a management team.” 

On most of our properties, the tenants don’t know the names of our investors as the property is under an LLC ownership, not our personal names. When a tenant calls for assistance, he or she gets a well-paid manager who is trained on how to resolve the tenant’s issues.

No one calls me or the investors, because the property produces enough income to pay a great manager to deliver a great experience.

Finding deals would seem to be the easiest part when buying apartments, but in reality, finding the deal is the most difficult task of all. Remember this rule: if the deal is easy to get, it probably isn’t any good. And the more interest in the deal, the more value it will have to the next set of buyers.

I have bought deals before just because of the amount of interest, knowing I could sell it the next day if I wanted to. I recently bought a 500-unit deal for Cardone Capital and within two months of closing I was offered an $11 million profit.

You want there to be competition on every deal you buy. I will even tell you this, having to pay more to get a deal is a good sign of the value of the deal. The old adage, “Buy low and sell high” sounds good, but it will not be your best strategy with apartments. Warren Buffet says, “Far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than buy a fair company at a wonderful price.” 

For more information on the three ways to invest in apartments pick up my book, “How To Create Wealth Investing In Real Estate”.

Our offerings under Regulation D Rule 506(c) are available to accredited investors only.

The post Three Ways To Invest In Apartments: Part One appeared first on Cardone Capital.

There are 3 simple steps you need to remember to build an empire. First, you need to get money, then you need to keep it, then you need to invest it. Get, keep, invest—3 simple steps. Most people don’t know how to get the money, many can’t keep it, and very few know how to multiply it.

#1 GET MONEY

Look at income possibilities not how to cut expenses. I am not trying to get smaller, I am trying to expand. Think expansion and acquisition. How do I get in front of more people, help more people, collaborate with the right people and ultimately grow? When it comes down to it, you will need skills to get money. If you don’t learn how to sell, you won’t ever get enough money to invest much of anything. The problem with many people is that they are just punching a time clock at a job. You have to ask, “Who’s got my money?”.

#2 KEEP MONEY

Many people have a problem with keeping any of the money they get. If you make 6K and spend 6K, what good is that? You’re broke. You want to be in a place where you can first get more money so you can be able to save some of it. If you are only making 50K a year, don’t worry about keeping the money because you’re broke. You need to first learn to get money. Invest in yourself and get skills so you can at least get over the 100K mark and then start to save.

#3 INVEST MONEY

For those few individuals that can get money and are able to keep a good portion of it, then and only then should you think about multiplying it. If you don’t have 100K saved, you aren’t ready to invest. Keep getting more money and keeping it until you have 6 digits in the bank. I personally invest in real estate—not stocks. How you invest is up to you but you better know what you are doing with your hard-earned dough.

Don’t be in denial—we live on an economic planet. Each day you must deal with money. Finances and economics are the main topics of everyone’s adult life—whether you accept it or not—your life revolves around money. When you go to the store, the gas station, have to pay the rent, go online, when your kids need clothes, or when you open the refrigerator and discover you are out of bread, milk, and fruit…you need money.

If you don’t know how to get money, you will never have an empire. If you can’t keep it, your family will never be wealthy. If you don’t invest, your little pile of savings will soon be gone. Get money, keep it, and invest it — it’s really that simple — but if it were easy wouldn’t everyone do it?

GC, Cardone Capital.

The post Empire Building Made Easy appeared first on Cardone Capital.

Do you think you should own a home or rent? Unless you have twenty million in the bank laying around you have no business buying a house.

Most people think the only way to save money is to buy a house. They have been misinformed and misguided by media, society and even their parents in thinking home ownership is a way to ensure their retirement and that when they’ve grown old that they’ll be financially secure. In most cases, buying a home means you will be paying it off for thirty years. Then to get that money out of it, you would have to sell it. What then? Where will you live?  You won’t be ahead.

A home is not an investment because it doesn’t pay you every month.  In fact, you have to pay for your home every month. Property taxes, easements, insurance, upkeep – plus the mortgage payment itself. That’s why a house is not an asset, it’s a liability. An investment is not a good deal if you are paying in and no cash flow is coming out.  Your equity is tied up and you don’t have access to it.

So, what are the other reasons for renting instead of owning a home? When you rent, you can leave and move when you want. You have flexibility in mobility. With today’s economy and job market it’s not a bad thing to be mobile. And why settle down? Invest the money in yourself or your business. Your money needs to work for you, not the other way around.

If you want a great opportunity to create income for yourself, realize that America is becoming a nation of renters. Apartments offer high cash yield, build equity, give tax advantages and let you use leverage. A $400,000 purchase can be bought with twenty-five percent of the price, allowing you to leverage $100,000 to control four times the value in physical property. Stocks or gold can’t produce that type of result.

A house, much like a 401K savings plan, has been fed to you as part of the American dream and making it. Really, it’s a middle-class myth perpetuated by outdated thinking, politicians and mass media. The middle class is dying. It cannot be sustained anymore by the money being earned by that class of people. Buying a house may have worked for previous generations but old ways of doing things aren’t viable today. We are not in the 1950’s, things have changed and people need to adjust their thinking about finances and creating financial security.

Instead of investing in a house right away, invest in yourself. Becoming better at your job, improving your skill set, networking – all those investments will pay off and improve your financial situation by giving you opportunities to earn more income. Becoming better will never fail you.

Whether you have a house or not is irrelevant to how well you are or, will be, financially. So many people are concentrated on savings but their real problem is they just don’t make enough money. Concentrate on increasing your income so you can save to make a real investment.

Only after you have enough income should you start to think about investing. Buying a home to live in is not going to pay you. Whether it be multifamily real estate or something else, a true investment will not cost you money. A home needs to be fed, it won’t feed you.

If you start investing in yourself, focus on growing your income and putting that growing income into an investment that will pay you, then you will be living like the rich do, not like the middle class.

Most Americans have been made to believe the myth that getting rich is almost impossible or not important. If you look at the world you will see that the only group of people that are safe are the rich. The rich didn’t get rich “buying a house”.

The wealthy will be able to survive inflation, housing busts, tight credit, high unemployment rates and whatever else is thrown at them. They have investments that pay them.

Don’t get caught in the idea that a house is your ticket to wealth. Home ownership has been fed to this country as a way to financial prosperity. It may have been true in the past, but today it’s all a myth.

The post Rent Versus Owning appeared first on Cardone Capital.