Leverage to Lift Your Profits

Today I’m going to continue talking about making those huge returns that I touched on last week. Remember, with only a $30k salary and saving just 10% for only 5 years, you can bring in as much as $21 million dollars by age 70! How is it done?  It’s done by using two different types of leverage.

No. 1: Financial leverage. This is Other People’s Money (OPM) as in mortgage loans, personal loans, signature loans, loans from family or friends, or even through having family and friends as partners.

No. 2: Labor Leverage. This is Other People’s Efforts (OPE). You bring on other people, including employees, part time contract labor, day laborers, contractors and the like, to do the fix up work that will create added value in an asset.

Basically what these two types of leverage can do for you is help lift something that is bigger than you can take on yourself. To paraphrase what Archimedes said, give me a long enough lever and a place to stand and I could by myself lift the earth.

Using these two levers is exactly how it is very possible to receive a return of 15% or 20% or even more, turning a meager income of $30,000 into $21 million! The math is pretty simple. As I said in my July 25th blog, if you go out and buy a $500,000 dirt bag type property, one that needs some fixing up, and do this with a $100,000 down payment (a down payment that itself may be borrowed) and then go out and use some OPE and improve the value by $50,000, that gives you a 50% return on your money,

But of course it will have cost you something to fix it up. Let’s say it cost $30,000 in material and labor to fix it up. That puts you at a 20% return. Now keep doing that on additional properties and you’re looking at a cool 21 million by the time you hit 70 years old. Let me emphasis that you can only do this if you control your own money and do the work or have others do the heavy physical work.

Anytime someone comes along and offers you a 20% or 30% return on your money without you doing a thing, grab your wallet and check book and run away as fast as you can.  These very high returns are possible but, for the most part, only with your efforts or the efforts of other people that you control.

Think of it this way … if you are making 30% or more on most every deal you do, why would you go tell others about it? Wouldn’t you just borrow more money at 5% or 6% and take home the difference? You certainly wouldn’t give someone else a big fat return of 20% or 30% in passive income for not doing a thing to help.

I’m not saying these returns are easy and take no effort and there are other details such as income tax that will eat into that profit (although there is a way–see the IRS 1031 section of the tax code to help delay some taxes) so these numbers aren’t exact. But what I am saying is that it doesn’t take as much savings capital as most people think.  In fact it takes relatively little savings to reach some very big financial levels.

By the way, I’ve had more than a few deals that have topped the 100% return level. Compound that for a few years and your eyes will pop out! That’s the potential. Now, doesn’t that get you motivated?