When it comes to finance, I started off my career investing in stocks, following the portfolios of some of the best stock investors of all time. Investors such as Warren Buffet, Charlie Munger, and Peter Lynch. I put everything i had in my savings into stocks. Every check I made, I put 50%- 75% of that into my investment account. After a year of buying tech stocks, retail stocks, and bank stocks, my portfolio grew about 12%. In total, I was able to save about $10k… The big idea was, if I save about $50k into one or a couple different stocks, I could potentially make $500 a month off of dividend income. But here’s some of pros and cons of making that decision.
Pros and Cons of Investing $50k in Real Estate for Dividend Income
| Pros | Cons |
1. Stocks are Extremely Liquid. Meaning you are able to sell you stocks immediately if you were in a sticky situation. However, in my opinion the best investor is a buy and hold investor. | 1. Most dividends do not come monthly, them come quarterly. Which means every 4 months you’ll get to your dividend payout. |
| 2. If the price of your stock goes up you earn money. So if you invested $50K and the stock price goes up 6% than you make $3k totaling $53K. However, if it goes down you lose 6% or more. | 2. To save up $50k, think about how much time that would take. A couple of years, realistically speaking. By that time you could’ve made a number of different investment. |
3. You can reinvest your dividends to earn you more money. This method is called compounding, where you’re money is doubling over the years. | 3. You may lose money big time, if the stock market goes down. Look back at the 2008 crash, everyone lost money, houses, and jobs. |
Referring back to this chart, there are companies that will continue to appreciate in price. But what will go up, may go down (click the link for examples). There are also companies that do pay monthly dividends. But if you were put $50k into one or two different stocks, how do we know how stable that stock is? Do you want to put your money at risk? If you’re a low risk investor, that would be the smartest decision. So I thought to myself what if I bought a condominium, and rented it out after a year of living in it? How much would I have to spend out of pocket to buy it?
To answer that question. Using the purchase price of $100k, the down payment and closing costs would come out to $9k. Let’s fast forward a year from after i bought my property.. The time has come for me to move on, and now i want to rent my unit out. I could potentially make $500 monthly, i would just have to rent out the unit for 30%-50% more than the actual cost of my mortgage payments but that is doable if you bought the property at a good price. On top of the monthly cash flow, you can ask for first months rent or last months rent. During the 2008 recession, one of the most stable investments were rental properties. The best part about real estate is that its in constant demand. Somebody’s always looking for a place to rent, just do your due diligence when you do choose your tenant. The most important part about investment properties is the guaranteed monthly rent check. While other investments such as commercial properties during a recession might be a lot more risky, a rental property still brings in a steady flow of passive income.
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