You might be surprised to see people leaving their day jobs and earn tremendous amount of money from their newly established online home based business. Those skeptical ones think that those who make such a huge profit depend on sheer luck. Since you’re influenced by such assumption, you won’t have the initiative to leave the “comfort zone” and succumbing to the dissatisfaction of your working environment, in a ruthless rat-race.In fact, those who have made thousands of dollars from their own business don’t solely depend on sheer luck – they have made it because they are capable to find the right making-money online opportunity!How they actually find the right business opportunity? Follow these tips below:Tip #1: Identify your passion – Hearing your own “inner-voice”In the beginning, you have to be truthful to yourself and ask yourself – What is my passion? What am I capable of? For instance, if your main interest is selling your own product – probably setting an online store suits you most. If you prefer earning commission from sales of affiliate products – then, you should build affiliate marketing business. If you like sharing interesting information to internet users – thus, it’s appropriate to set up a web publishing business.In short, focus on your strengths – not on improving your weaknesses.Tip #2: Finding a “mentor”At this point, it’s not having a real “mentor”, it’s actually searching for experienced people who have are willing to share their experiences, as well as comprehensive methods that help them to develop a profitable home based business. The best place is to follow such personal journal-like post threads in internet business forums – personally, I would recommend WarriorForum.com. You can ask related questions or send personal messages to them when they are ‘offline’.Don’t be tempted by some internet marketers’ approach who is offering “Making-Money Online Fast” products – because building a successful internet business does not happen overnight, it requires the 4-key approach which is Learn, Test, Evaluate, and Improve.Tip #3: Learn, Test, Evaluate, and Improve – the 4-key approach of starting a profitable businessMany successful entrepreneurs have something in common – the 4-key approach of building a money-making business. Here’s the elaboration of this 4-key approach:Start with “Learn” – most important that you get related resources from internet forums, or from your competitors. Don’t be afraid to ask questions to experienced internet forum users, and try to figure out ways to outsmart your competitors of your niche. Extract any important information from them and organize them into proper places. Make sure this information comes handy when you need them.Then, “Test” – based on the information that you obtained, start applying those opportunities that tested by experienced home based business owners. Many newbies failed to initiate their new businesses because they were too hesitate to test any possible opportunities that work. Basically, a business can only become successful one if you’ve found the right opportunity.Next is “Evaluate” – Not all opportunities work all the time and sometimes the results can be devastating. Therefore, it’s important to evaluate your progress, and develop any possible solutions – it’s like doing a math test, you need to figure out any possible ways to solve a problem, it can be a long or a short one – as long as it can fix the problem for good.Lastly, “Improve” – it means finding solutions that can improve your online home business opportunities work. It requires hard work, persistent and faith – these values are essential of making your business work on the long term basis.If you’re able to find your own online home based opportunities – work it out and strive for success!
Property Management, Investment Property Tax Deductions, and Strategies for Real Estate Pros
The cost of hiring a property management company to handle investment properties is significantly less than most property owners believe. Investment property owners who manage their own property with the idea that property management costs are too much might be mistaken as to the actual real costs. Additionally, a large percentage of property owners do not take advantage of all of the tax strategies available to them. For example, if a property owner manages their investment portfolio out of their home office there may be some business related items they are not expensing. Interest in all forms including mortgage interest, equity lines of credit interest, and any business loan interest are all expenses which are typically deductible. Losses like casualties, disasters, and thefts are expenses which properly accounted for are deductible. The most overlooked deduction is depreciation on investment properties, and for real estate professionals as defined by IRC 179, an investment property owner can supercharge their depreciation deductions. To maximize one’s return on investment each property owner should educate themselves about tax strategies, and thoroughly evaluate their entire tax planning roadmap with a tax attorney or competent certified public accountant.
Combined Tax Bracket Percentage Determines the True Cost of an Expense in Your Investment Property Business
First of all a property owner must fully understand this basic concept. If their annual income from all of their activities placed them into the combined, federal, state, and local tax bracket of 50%, then their ordinary and necessary business expenses are in actuality fifty cents ($.50) for every one dollar ($1.00) spent. It’s simple to think about it this way: If a one dollar ($1.00) is spent on advertising then that one dollar ($1.00) is legally expensed. If a person is in the 50% combined tax bracket then they have actually only spent fifty cents ($.50). This is because the one dollar ($1.00) they spent actually reduces their taxable income by one dollar, thus, reducing their tax liability by fifty cents ($.50). So each ordinary and necessary expense is truly only 50% of the actual cost.
Now that you have your mind around that concept if a property manager is charging you $200/month to manage their single-family residence rental property the actual (end of year) cost to the owner is only $100/month because the property management fees are an ordinary and necessary business expense and fully deductible. Now consider that 50% reduction in your perceived cost and maybe property management doesn’t seem so expensive anymore. Add to that the impact on your time, energy, effort you spend managing that property. Add to that the gasoline expense necessary to drive by that property once or twice a month. Finally, add to that the comfort of knowing a professional property manager could in fact be taking care of your property and you wouldn’t have to have all of these expenses, time, energy and effort and maybe, just maybe, you would reconsider using a property manager going forward because you now realize that they really aren’t that expensive for the services they provide.
Home Office Deductions are Tricky, but can be Legitimate
If a home office is used 100% for ordinary and necessary business reasons then there is no reason a person shouldn’t be taking advantage of expensing the home office square footage, the equipment, the materials, the supplies and any utilities paid to help operate the office. The problem lies when the home office is used for personal reasons because it is difficult to prove what percentage of the home office is actually an ordinary and necessary business expense. There are many Internal Revenue decisions on this vary issue, and each one shows the difficulty in achieving the correct balance between business and personal expense, and more importantly, being able to prove it in an audit. If you are considering running your property management business out of your home office be careful. Although there are a lot of legitimate expenses which are clearly available to you, there are several that are not.
Interest Expense is Sometime Overlooked
When you are evaluating your interest expenses do not forget to expense any interest from your home equity line of credit as this can be easily overlooked. Also, if you have a small business loan that interest is deductible as well.
Disaster, Theft Losses are Deductible
In the event that a loss occurred during your business cycle those expenses are deductible provided you had a good record of the items that were lost. There would almost always be an offset as well for any insurance reimbursements, but the point here is that losses must be fully evaluated while you are preparing your tax strategies.
Depreciation and the Real Estate Professional Internal Revenue Code
When planned correctly the “non-cash” expense of depreciating one’s rental property can be the difference in paying taxes or realizing the benefit of a tax-loss. Most residential investment properties are depreciated over 27.5 year period. Commercial property is depreciated over 39 years. However, if a person were to be classified as a “Real Estate Professional” pursuant to Internal Revenue Code 179, then the benefits of owning investment property become much greater. Without going into great detail a real estate professional’s own personal property portfolio is treated differently than a typical investor. If this is enticing enough one should investigate the benefits of this little known exception in the IRC and real estate industry.
Contact a Competent Tax Attorney or Certified Public Account to Review All of Your Current Tax Strategies and any Planning Going Forward with Your Investment Properties
The information contained in this article is by no means tax advice, but merely some ideas to contemplate the next time you consider your tax situation. Every person who owns a rental property business should consider tax planning and tax strategies with a competent professional specializing in tax. There are numerous legal ways to take full advantage of tax laws and your professional status within the property management context, however these decisions need to be considered carefully with a tax professional.
Effective Marketing Strategies in Product Creation
Marketing includes matters such as pricing and packaging of the product and creation of demand by advertising and sales campaigns. There are other options, of course, like product creation, resale rights marketing, joint ventures and the likes, but they are merely secondary to the above.
If you take the freelance route, it is important to ensure that all rights to profit from the final product, or any materials produced in its making, remain yours. Bookkeeping, physical product creation or delivery of goods can be done better with specialized help. Determining the purpose of the product is vital in niche product creation.
Implementation of Methodology – The choice of implementation of Six Sigma methodology depends on whether development is required on existing processes (DMAIC) or on new process/product design creation (DMADV). Determining what you really want to sell, something that you can be relaxed selling is the first step at the creation of a niche product. With the technological advancements in the hosting industry, from automated control panels and scripts that simplify creation of accounts; to complete turnkey solutions, there is no excessive need to worry about spending time on the actual product sold to the customer.
For instance, you should be prepared to either perform yourself or to subcontract the completion of the following tasks:- Product idea research (are there any existing products or patents already existing for this idea)- Product specification document training (what it will do, how it will look, how will it be powered, and how the user will interface with it)- Marketing study (what it will be named, who would buy this, how much would they pay, how will we get customers to purchase the product)- Schematic or electronic circuit design process- Creation of a bill of material or BOM and an approved vendor’s list or AVL for each component in the design, preferably with multiple sources identified, with a BOM and AVL for each assembly level in the product- Printed circuit board layout design process (single sided board, double sided board, or multilayer board; size of the PCB; board material)- Mechanical packaging design with user interfaces (displays, buttons, switches, key. This removes all product creation costs from your budget as a marketer.
No other database of affiliate programs offers such a possibility for profit on either the affiliate side or the product creation site. Your chosen niche should allow for the creation of more than one product or service.
There are several marketing strategies that are necessary in the creation of a successful e-commerce web site – Email marketing (broadcasting) of prospects/customers – Effective use of auto responders (generate automatic email messages) – Online Newsletter – Online Form / Survey to capture your prospect’s email address – Electronic Product Delivery (if you sold a digital product) – Advertisement (Ad) Tracking – Back End Sales – Affiliate program etc.