What is Your Strategy?<\/h2>\n
Once you have your goals established, the next thing is determining which of the hundreds of strategies<\/a> you could utilize to achieve your goals. \u00a0Some strategies are more active, such as wholesaling and flipping. \u00a0Others are more passive (but still require work) such as buy-and-hold or tax lien investing. \u00a0Narrow down the strategy or strategies that will contribute towards achieving your goal.<\/p>\n Sometimes this step can come before your strategy, sometimes it can come after. \u00a0In my case, my goal was to generate monthly income to cover my expenses to allow me the freedom to make decisions without having to worry as much about the financial impact. \u00a0My strategy to do this was to purchase buy and hold properties. \u00a0So my next step was to find a location that would fit my strategy.<\/p>\n One of the first things that I did was to lay out my criteria for a location. \u00a0These included things like:<\/p>\n After I had my basic criteria, I grabbed a map and created a circle of my target area. \u00a0 \u00a0I then took towns (Zip Codes) within the circle and plugged them into City Data<\/a> to get information and population trends for the zip code. \u00a0Any that did not have steady\/increasing populations got removed from the list.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n I then created a spreadsheet for each Zip Code. \u00a0I followed rental ads (either in the newspaper or online, whereever landlords advertised properties for rent). \u00a0At the end of the month I analyzed the data and asked the following questions:<\/p>\n Once I had this information, I then began looking at properties for sale. \u00a0I used a spreadsheet to quickly evaluate these properties<\/a>. \u00a0At this point I was not looking to purchase a property, but instead looking at the ratio of house prices compared to rent. \u00a0Some of you may be familiar with the 2% rule. \u00a0I’m not going to debate the rule in this post, but what I was looking at is basically what is the ratio of purchase prices in the area to rents in the area. \u00a0By looking at multiple properties in an area and using this ratio, I was effectively able to “score” each Zip Code.<\/p>\nWhat is Your Location?<\/h2>\n
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![\"Rochester-NY-Radius\"](\"http:\/\/entreprenewlyweds.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/rochester-target-radius.png\" "\\"\\"")
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