Have you taken a look at your investment portfolio lately? If you have, and it's filled with the normal stock and bond investments, you may have noticed that there has been a lot of damage to those investments in the past year or so. With the credit crunch and the market crash, most investments are half, or less, of what they should be.
This is when you should consider what you should be doing to hedge those other investments. This is where REITs come in.
REITs are Real Estate Investment Trusts. These are funds where you fund a real estate management company. There are a variety of REITs out there. Some offer a way to back real estate developers who are taking on new ventures in construction. Others are meant to fund management of residential real estate such as apartment complexes, condominiums or even neighborhoods. Still others use the funds put into the REIT to operate commercial real estate interests.
I think Louis J. Glickman said it best when he said, "The best investment on earth is earth.” Real estate is always a wise investment. No matter what happens the land will always be there. Sure it may waiver in value from time to time, but in the long run, it will always be around, unlike businesses that can close their doors and take your investments down with them.
With this said, adding a REIT or two to your portfolio it would offer you a little more diversity and security in your investments.
You never know what the stock market will do. Just in the past few decades we have seen a number of sweeping changes in the market that completely broke some investors. Think of how many people you know who went bust during the Doc.com era.
Often the problem for them was they were too focused on the flavor of the month. They were putting everything they had into the new Dot.coms hoping to continue to ride the boom and make great profits. While they did see some great profits, those did not last forever. For those who kept putting everything they had into the doc.com market, they felt the agony of defeat in a major way when the market fell, many losing everything they had.
While there is nothing wrong with trying to jump in on an up and coming thing and make a great profit, it comes down to the old 'all your eggs in one basket' cliché. You don't want to have everything hedging on one investment. Instead have a diverse portfolio so if there is a drop in one area, you have other investments hedged against it.
In this case, even when there is a drop in the stock market and mutual funds, real estate usually will hold pretty strong through the down times, keeping you from feeling that all of your investments have been swept away.
When you're ready to take a step towards diversity, make sure to do it right. Going to a website like ReitBuyer.com will help you do just that. They will not only give you the research and information you need to buy wisely, but they are also real estate brokers for these investments and can help you seal the deal.
Tuesday, March 10, 2009
Stock Dow Jones Mot Be a Sound Investment But REITs Are Solid
Don't Believe Media Real Estate Hype
If you have been considering REIT investing, you may have found yourself debating whether this is the way to go with the current economic situation being what it is in the United States. It seems every time you turn around that there are any number of negative real estate articles in the newspaper on the TV and even on all of the Internet news sites. It may have you second-guessing your thoughts about investing.
Frankly, things are not always as bad as the media makes them sound. Part of the job of the media is making things sound more dramatic so you will listen to their coverage of the stories. And if you look back at many of the 'sure disasters' they have claimed, most were quite the overstatement. Take the Y2K bug for example. Many media reports were advising people to stock food, water and money since no computers were going to work after Y2K and therefore our whole society would collapse. It never happened. Sure, there were a few minor glitches, but most were fixed in no time and life continued on in the year 2000 with little more than a hiccup.
When you consider this, you should consider what else they are blowing out of proportion.
Many are blaming the media for being the cause behind much of the financial problems that the country is believed to be having, from the stock market to the real estate industry, not because the problems are that large, but because they are making them that large.
So, how do you know what's safe to invest in. Well for one, you never really know what is a safe investment. After all that is why there is risk to investing. But you can be more confident in real estate than many other options. The reason for this is that real estate is not going to completely disappear. Think about it. Even if the price fluctuates, a real estate investment fund will still hold substantial value, even in the worst of economic times. It's not like the land is just going to shrivel up and disappear. No, unlike companies that can close their doors and take all their shareholders funds down the tube with them, real estate will always have value, even in the worst of times.
If investing in real estate is new for you, you're not alone. There are plenty of people who are just making their way into the real estate market and need a little advice to make sure they are making the right trading decisions. This is where REITBuyer.com comes in to help. REITBuyer.com is a full service REIT broker that not only can help you manage your portfolio and online trading, but is also chock full of research and educational tools as well as charts, tables and programs that can help you learn about the REITs you are interested in and make sure you go into this in the right state of mind.
There always has to be a first time for everything. In this case, take a page from the book of Donald Trump, "Every day, you'll have opportunities to take chances and to work outside your safety net. Sure, it's a lot easier to stay in your comfort zone. In my case, business suits and real estate. But sometimes you have to take risks. When the risks pay off, that's when you reap the biggest rewards."
If you have been considering REIT investing, you may have found yourself debating whether this is the way to go with the current economic situation being what it is in the United States. It seems every time you turn around that there are any number of negative real estate articles in the newspaper on the TV and even on all of the Internet news sites. It may have you second-guessing your thoughts about investing.
Frankly, things are not always as bad as the media makes them sound. Part of the job of the media is making things sound more dramatic so you will listen to their coverage of the stories. And if you look back at many of the 'sure disasters' they have claimed, most were quite the overstatement. Take the Y2K bug for example. Many media reports were advising people to stock food, water and money since no computers were going to work after Y2K and therefore our whole society would collapse. It never happened. Sure, there were a few minor glitches, but most were fixed in no time and life continued on in the year 2000 with little more than a hiccup.
When you consider this, you should consider what else they are blowing out of proportion.
Many are blaming the media for being the cause behind much of the financial problems that the country is believed to be having, from the stock market to the real estate industry, not because the problems are that large, but because they are making them that large.
So, how do you know what's safe to invest in. Well for one, you never really know what is a safe investment. After all that is why there is risk to investing. But you can be more confident in real estate than many other options. The reason for this is that real estate is not going to completely disappear. Think about it. Even if the price fluctuates, a real estate investment fund will still hold substantial value, even in the worst of economic times. It's not like the land is just going to shrivel up and disappear. No, unlike companies that can close their doors and take all their shareholders funds down the tube with them, real estate will always have value, even in the worst of times.
If investing in real estate is new for you, you're not alone. There are plenty of people who are just making their way into the real estate market and need a little advice to make sure they are making the right trading decisions. This is where REITBuyer.com comes in to help. REITBuyer.com is a full service REIT broker that not only can help you manage your portfolio and online trading, but is also chock full of research and educational tools as well as charts, tables and programs that can help you learn about the REITs you are interested in and make sure you go into this in the right state of mind.
There always has to be a first time for everything. In this case, take a page from the book of Donald Trump, "Every day, you'll have opportunities to take chances and to work outside your safety net. Sure, it's a lot easier to stay in your comfort zone. In my case, business suits and real estate. But sometimes you have to take risks. When the risks pay off, that's when you reap the biggest rewards."
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