So, what is short-term investing for you? Are you saving up a bunch of money to buy your first rental property? Are you saving up a bundle of money to do another investment? Short-term is relative. What’s short-term to you? Some of you it’s 90 days. Some of you it’s nine months. Some of you it’s two years.
Average investments in the alternatives that I teach, are usually three to five years. That’s kind of a nice, sweet spot for investors. But that’s considered more midterm, that’s not short-term. Short-term, really I can’t define that for you.
Why do you want it? Because why do you want your cash just sitting around? Why do you just want your cash sitting doing nothing, when you could be making some interest on it.
Again, debt is the cost of money. So, if you’re the bank, and you could lend your money out to somebody, in a first position secured first position, and you could make 10, 15, 20%, as a hard money lender. You know, first, do you have enough money to do that? How short-term can the project sustain getting the money back to you?
There are a lot of real estate projects that can be short-term, but they also carry some risk. The supply chain is off. The cost of goods is off. Their ability to flip that project to get your cash back is off. There’s a lot of variables in the market that, unless you have a really good project manager, there’s some inherent risk in that.
So, what do the traditionalists say? If you go look this up on the Internet, what do they say the top seven short-term investments are? They’re not what I do, but here they are: High yield savings accounts. Just put in a savings account. The thing I would say, and I’m just going to give some counter to each of these, there are some savings accounts, most of them are international, that do pay 5, 6, 7, percent. But a high-yield savings account is usually under 1%.
Short-term corporate bond funds. You kind of got to become an expert in bonds. Money market accounts, again, what are you going to make? Less than 1%. Cash managed accounts, short-term U.S. government bond funds, no penalties, CDs, treasuries, and money market mutual funds.
So, that’s what the market’s going to say. You’re going to be out, you’re going to look, and then you’re going to come here and you’re going to say, “Loral, how can you say such different things?”
Because my number one goal is to make you a millionaire. I’m the Millionaire Maker. So, what do wealthy people do in short-term investing? Number one, we use the software called iFlip.
It’s a company that was formed out of our community, run by one of our community members. It’s a free app. It’s a software that allows you to put your money into smart folios, and it is high liquidity. You can put it in, forty-eight hours later, you can get it out. There’s no fees. You just pay for the software and the money moves in and out of the market. What I love about it is that it takes you out of the market when the market gets really volatile. So, I use iFlip in many of my companies and instances for just having extra cash.
Now, I mentioned earlier you could be the bank. So, you could do some notes. The challenge with those is the project duration. I’ve had people be the bank and lend out money, and hard money loans for buying inventory, buying merchandise. What if that merchandise and inventory don’t move fast enough, can they get paid back fast enough? So, there’s some risk inherent to putting your money into other projects.
A third one, if you’re willing to put your little toe in the water, and you know how to manage it, but I would get some experts around you, you could put your money into cryptocurrency, through a Coinbase or a Coinbase Pro. Invest in some stock and block ones, like Ethereum or Bitcoin. You’ve got the risk of going up or down. As long as you manage it really, really closely, I’ve known people to do really well. I’ve seen people make 100% overnight. There’s no guarantee on any of this.
If you want safe, safe, safe, I would lean towards high yield, the savings accounts, the money market accounts. There are banks who allow international accounts that literally do 5, 6, 7, percent, and there’s high liquidity.
What makes a good short-term investment? What are some of the criteria? Number one is liquidity, that’s what short term’s about. Especially if you are putting some money together because you want to go get 20, 30, 40, 50 thousand dollars, whatever you’re working on putting together, to go buy your first real estate project.
What I would do is put it in an iFlip, I would let it make money over there, then I would I’d bring it back out to do my project. So, liquidity means you can move money. If you need money immediately, just keep it in cash. Usually, you can withdraw in about 24 to 48 hours.
What else makes a short-term investment good? You can say stability. So, you do need to look at, can the investment that you’re doing bring that money back to you. Is it stable, and then you got to look at the manager. Who’s running? Who are you going to send that money to, and what are they going to do with it? And do they have the experience and capacity and the track record of bringing that money back to investors?
The last one is low transaction fees. If you have short-term money, you do not want to spend a lot of money in transaction fees. So, believe it or not, what you’re going to be shocked about the stock market and your broker is a taking a lot.
So, even on those bonds and mutual funds, and the things that are suggested on the Internet, you have no idea the power of the hidden fees in those. So, even though they’re liquid, the hidden fee transaction is astonishing. So, be careful out there.
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