The ultimate goal of income investing is to generate passive monthly income while keeping the majority of your time available to enjoy the wealth you create. In other words generating monthly cash flow that does not demand all of your time. For example you could buy real estate and contract the management out to a Property Management Company to handle finding tenants, collecting the rent, perform minor maintenance, and depositing rents directly into your bank account. This will allow you to keep the majority of your time free while generating a monthly income.

Another, method of generating monthly cash flow is to buy stocks that pay monthly dividends. The monthly dividends would be deposited each month into your bank account. By combining these and many other monthly income generating techniques which require minimal or none of your own time will allow you the freedom to do what you really want.

[Submitted by estinc]

In 1934, Benjamin Graham and David Dodd wrote in their classic "Security Analysis," "The prime purpose of a business corporation is to pay dividends to its owners." It was common thinking that the possibility of stock price increases was speculative, so the main reason to own stocks was to partake in a steady flow of dividends.

But 66 years later, at the end of the 18-year bull market of 1982 to 2000, many investors had almost no interest in dividends. The incredible rise in share prices during that long bull run dwarfed dividends' contribution to total returns. Nobody would seriously say that the prime purpose of owning shares was to get dividends.

As we all know, that bull turned into a bubble, and the bubble burst over the three years from 2000 to 2002. When the dam gave way, it ruined the retirement plans of thousands of people, and it sobered up many investors.

Since 2002, there has been a rekindling in appreciation for dividends and dividend-paying stocks. Investors realize that a dividend stock portfolio can lower risk, grow principal, and steadily increase income over time.

With good dividend-paying stocks, you can actually have both growth and income. Dividends are stocks' secret weapon. Studies show that dividends have accounted for nearly half--or more--of the total return of the stock market over very long terms.

That may surprise you, considering how little publicity dividends get. There is no widely reported dividend index that receives the attention bestowed every day on the Dow, the S&P 500, and the NASDAQ indexes.


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Real estate is not just about buying or selling a house. It is about educating consumers so they can make the best possible decision, according to Baldus Real Estate, Inc. which is teaming up with the College of Southern Maryland to provide existing agents with more educational opportunities, starting with a Maryland Ethics and Agency: Law and Responsibilities class April 23.
“Existing agents need to renew their licenses every two years and continuing education is big component of the process,” said Sharon E. Martlock, an associate broker and the director of training for Baldus Institute of Real Estate.

“CSM is excited about partnering with Baldus Real Estate, Inc. to provide real estate training. Through the Corporate Center’s continuing education offerings, businesses like Baldus Real Estate, Inc. can collaborate to bring training locally to meet the needs of their business and clients,” said Linda Schleip of the Corporate Center.

“Reputation and service are the two qualities that define a great real estate agent. In order to provide the best customer service, an agent has to know and understand the standards of practice such as what are the ethics involved in working with other agents, clients and lenders; what are the disclosure laws; what is illegal flipping and what are the signs of predatory lending? We need to be educated if we are going to give our clients appropriate counsel,” said Martlock, who pursued real estate 25 years ago after being dissatisfied with the answers provided by people who were supposed to be assisting her in her house purchase. “I realized I could do it and I could do it better,” she said.

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Think about owning a diversified portfolio of stocks that pays you to invest, in the form of dividends. Do you own a credit card? Well then you probably understand how fast interest expense can add up, becoming a financial nightmare. The opposite is true with dividend investing and how fast your dividend income can add up. Even better, when dividend paying companies you own increase their dividend payouts, your income increases! There are many questions to ask when investing in dividend paying stocks some of which are:

How long has the company paid dividends ? (Check the dividend yield and history)

There are amazing dividend paying companies such as Colgate Palmolive (NY:CL) (yield 2.0%) that have paid dividends every year since 1895 or Proctor & Gamble (NY:PG) (yield 1.9%) since 1891. These tremendous dividend histories confirm the companies' commitment to paying dividends. Normally dividend histories of 5 to 10 years plus are considered good.

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Warren Buffett is the most successful investor of our time, perhaps of any time. He is famous for his pithy quotes, which often appear in his annual letter to shareholders.

Taken together, his quotes pretty well sum up his investment philosophy and approach. Here are his best sound bites of all time on being a sensible investor.

1. Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1.

2. Investing is laying out money now to get more money back in the future.

3. Never invest in a business you cannot understand.

4. I don't look to jump over 7-foot bars: I look around for 1-foot bars that I can step over.

5. I put heavy weight on certainty. It's not risky to buy securities at a fraction of what they're worth.

6. If a business does well, the stock eventually follows.

7. It's far better to buy a wonderful company at a fair price than a fair company at a wonderful price.

8. Time is the friend of the wonderful company, the enemy of the mediocre.

9. For some reason people take their cues from price action rather than from values. Price is what you pay. Value is what you get.

10. In the short run, the market is a voting machine. In the long run, it's a weighing machine.

11. The most common cause of low prices is pessimism. We want to do business in such an environment, not because we like pessimism, but because we like the prices it produces. It's optimism that is the enemy of the rational buyer. None of this means, however, that a business or stock is an intelligent purchase simply because it is unpopular; a contrarian approach is just as foolish as a follow-the-crowd strategy. What's required is thinking rather than polling.


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Are you finally ready to start finding great real estate deals that you can wholesale for a fast profit? Well, let's get a big picture overview of some of the various ways that you can find deals as a real estate investor or real estate wholesaler, and in future articles I will break each one down in detail.

Before I get started, I want to point out that there are dozens, if not hundreds, of variations on these methods for finding deals. You may talk to another investor who is doing something similar (mailing a different list of people, using a different flyer method, and so on). So, to spare you the monotony of endless variations, I will try to discuss some of the more common and/or more effective methods I know of for finding real estate deals from years of personal experience and the experience of the hundreds of wholesalers who I work with.

How Investors Find Deals

According to a survey of investors in Gary Keller's book, "The Millionaire Real Estate Investor," 32% of their deals came from networking, 28% came from real estate agents and the MLS, 10% from driving and walking neighborhoods, 9% from newspapers, 7% from foreclosure listings, 4% from For Sale By Owner (FSBO), 3% from Internet and Database research, 2% from targeted marketing and 5% from other sources. So, there are many ways to find wholesale deals, we will be focusing on locating motivated sellers.

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Dividends are transfers of cash by the corporation to its owners—portions of a company’s profits paid out to the company’s shareholders.

Every company has to decide what to do with its earnings. It can plow them all back into the company to fund growth; make acquisitions; or undertake special projects. Or, it can siphon off some and return them as dividends to shareholders.

Reasonable minds can differ as to which is better, dividend-payers or non-payers. Those who think that a dividend-paying company is usually a better company cite factors like these:

--The company must be financially solid; otherwise the Board of Directors would not pay out the money.

--Cash flow must be plentiful. The dividend probably reflects management’s confidence in the stability and growth of future earnings, quite possibly based on information that is not publicly available.

--A company that pays dividends will probably invest the earnings it does retain more carefully. The dividend program imposes discipline upon management, which makes better decisions about what to do with the remaining money.

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If everything you knew about money was wrong, wouldn't you want to find out today? Most of what our parents and grandparents taught us about money, investing, mortgages, and financial security is wrong. They taught us to go to school get a job, work for the same company for thirty years, collect a pension, make a big down payment, pay off the house as soon as possible and the list goes on. The truth is that the rules of money have changed. While this advice worked 30 years ago, it does not work today.

97% of Americans are currently retiring with incomes below poverty levels. It is time to stop functioning on outdated financial information. Only 5% of US homeowners will ever pay off their homes. You have a 95% chance of failure when it comes to paying off your home. That is why you need to manage your home and your mortgage differently if you ever want to become financially independent.

Lets take for example two different people who each buy a $200,000 home. Each Earns $70,000 a year and has $40,000 in savings. Person 1 believes in the traditional way of paying off the mortgage as soon as possible. He is very committed to this so he gets a 15 year mortgage at 6.38% APR and puts all $40,000 of his savings down as a 20% down payment, leaving him zero dollars to invest. He has a monthly payment of $1,383. He has a tax rate of 32% so his net after tax cost per month is $1,227. He is so committed to the fallacy of paying down the mortgage that he sends the mortgage company an extra $100 a month in order to reduce the principle faster.


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In today's world of day-trading, mega-corporations, and high powered investment firms, it's easy to get discouraged when looking at your retirement plans. You can get lost in the notion of being a small fish in a very large ocean of investment options. It's at this precise point that it becomes crucial for you to adjust your paradigm, or way of thinking, in order to meet the challenges you're presented with head on. Think of this mental re-conditioning as a way to trim your sails in the face of today's financial storms.

To begin with, in order to be truly successful, or in other words to emulate the behaviors of truly successful people, there are a few key principles you must understand and apply to your daily practices.

The first and most important of these principles is that your life is and will be EXACTLY what you make of it. It sounds over-simplified, I know, but hear me out. The world functions down to the smallest atom on certain unchangeable natural laws. What goes up must come down, objects in motion tend to stay in motion, and so forth. But the most profound of these laws is that of cause and effect, a principle which simply states that a process must be initiated in order to carry itself out to completion. A similar concept which springs forth from cause and effect, and the core of what we're talking about here, is called the law of attraction, or manifestation, or any other name it has been called by. It is simply the force which carries an idea from its initial intent to its final result. What this means to you and I is that whatever intent or attitude we place into being has the full potential to be made manifest, like a message sent out to the universal order that will, in fact be answered in one manner or another. So getting back to the simple, what we think is what we will become, simply because we have started its creation by thinking of it.

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