Consumer: personal finances help

If you're buying a place for income, you need to understand the numbers in a deal. If you don't understand income and how income affects investment property value, then you shouldn't be investing in real estate. Savvy investors hire a team of professionals (realtor, lawyer, accountant, 1031 company, mortgage lender, inspector, and so on) to assist them in creating a proper valuation for a property. If you want to invest, you should build your team and get them to interact with each other. That's how they'll help you make smarter decisions.

For example, if you're buying a warehouse or a retail strip center, you probably aren't an expert in commercial building construction. You won't know if an interior wall is failing or if it's likely the roof will leak. You're far better off hiring a commercial property inspector to walk you through the property and help you figure out what it will take to keep it maintained and in good working order. If you buy the property and later decided to sell it and buy a different investment property, you'll need a top accountant and 1031 exchange specialist to help you complete the transaction and meet Internal Revenue Service rules.

It's really hard to do it on your own and be profitable. It's one of the biggest mistakes early investors make. At the very least, find an experienced agent who represents other investors to help you identify property and get yourself a great real estate attorney who can help draw up documents that will protect you and your other assets.

The trend in residential real estate is to build smaller, more energy-efficient houses that are cheaper to own and maintain. All of the McMansions built in the 1980s and 1990s could become white elephants that see their value erode, even as the larger market recovers.

Do you have any advice for those looking to remodel? What types of upgrades are prudent?
The remodeling industry was hit extremely hard last year, and while more people are planning to fix up their homes this year, the problem is one of financing. You either have to save up enough money to fix your house or you have to charge it on your credit card. You can no longer take out a home equity loan, use the proceeds to fix up your house, and then refinance the balance into a new mortgage. Home equity lines of credit are hard to come by these days because the federal government wants lenders to keep a percentage of every HELOC on their own books. As a result, they're few and far between.

This isn't the time to make big, flashy improvements to your home. The economy is still extremely fragile, and we may be heading for a double-dip recession. If you can live with your grungy carpet for another year, you should do it.

When it comes to fixing up your house, you want to spend as carefully as possible. Figure out what amenities are standard in your neighborhood, and then build to that level--not a penny more. If you have to sell for some reason, you don't want to take a bath financially.

What's your advice to people who are thinking it may be time to consider buying a second/vacation home? Key pointers?
I do think that now is a great time to buy. I've just blogged on the three reasons why people buy vacation homes: as a place to create family memories, as an eventual place to retire and rent out until retirement hits, and for pure investment reasons. Decide which kind of vacation home buyer you are and then reverse-engineer the process to figure out what kind of vacation home you should be buying. If you can't afford the cash down payment or have a lot of excess cash to keep the place running and in great shape, don't buy a vacation home. It's easy to think you're getting a great deal because of the purchase price, only to find yourself snowed under by management costs, cleaning expenses, and resort fees. If you're going to rent your vacation home, here are nine things you should know.

How about sellers--any advice for them? Is it a good time to trade up to a larger or better home if you can swing it?
Can you sell your home right now? Can you get enough cash out of your primary residence to be able to trade up to a larger home? What most buyers forget is that a larger home means larger utility bills, maintenance costs, and upgrading costs, as well as higher taxes and insurance premiums. There's more to maintain, cool, and decorate. Can you afford all that?

Right now, those homeowners who can sell their property, whatever size and wherever they live, control the market. The problem is that many of those sellers are so freaked out that they don't really want to buy anything right now. So, they're thinking about renting or are moving in with family or friends. We're seeing the housing market continue to shrink at the moment, but it won't always be that way.

Property values might not rebound until 2020--or later, depending on where you live. You can't make a decision about selling based on when you think the housing market will rebound. That's like saying, "Should I sell my stock today or wait for the company to rebound?" We don't know when that will happen, if ever.

If you want to sell, and have a compelling reason to move, you should figure out an exit strategy. If homes are selling in your area, then you should try to sell your house. If homes aren't selling, and you're 40% underwater with your mortgage, you'll have to either do a short sale, a deed-in-lieu of foreclosure, or a strategic default.

In 2006, recent Harvard grad Alexa von Tobel was headed for a job at Morgan Stanley. But though she would soon be managing the bank’s investments, she realized she didn’t know the first thing about her own finances. Most financial guides seemed to be written for middle-aged readers with millions in assets, rather than recent college grads. "I was reading every book I could find, but none of them spoke to me," she says. So she came up with the idea for LearnVest, an online personal-finance resource for young women like her, and ended up writing an 80-page business plan.

After two years at Morgan Stanley, von Tobel entered Harvard Business School in 2008. But upon winning a business plan competition held by Astia, a non-profit that supports women entrepreneurs, she took a five-year leave of absence and invested $75,000 of her Wall Street earnings to start LearnVest in November. She quickly enlisted advisors, including Betsy Morgan, the former CEO of the Huffington Post, and Catherine Levene, the former COO of DailyCandy, to help develop the site’s content and technology. In January 2009, she secured $1.1 million in seed funding from executives at Goldman Sachs.

LearnVest’s site launched a year later and has since signed up more than 100,000 members. It offers online budgeting calculators, video chats with certified financial planners on the company’s staff, and free e-mail tutorials on topics such as opening an IRA. The company earns revenue from advertising and by referring its users to companies such as TD Ameritrade. In April, after just four weeks of fundraising, von Tobel closed a $4.5 million investment round led by Accel Partners, which has also invested in Facebook and Etsy. (Incidentally, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lived in the same dorm as von Tobel at Harvard.)

Von Tobel likens LearnVest to an online version of The Suze Orman Show, but with the goal of reinforcing positive finance habits early on. “Suze Orman helps 45-year-old women get out of debt,” she says. “Why not reach 20-year-olds to keep them from getting into debt?”

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