Your Home – Your Best Investment

In 2009 I founded invesdoor.com and the tag line was: “The door to your home…your best investment.” For most American families their home is their best investment. For some, it may not be the biggest but it definitely is the best for a number of good reasons.

In this issue I will touch on some of the basic reasons home ownership is your best investment. This will also affirm why the business of facilitating real estate sales (if the Broker is savvy enough) will be with us for a long time.

The following is a list of only some of the reasons your money is best placed with your personal residence:

1 Leverage

2 Appreciation

3 Sweat Equity

4 Tax Advantages

5 Choices

Let’s begin with leverage. In most cases, paper investments of all kinds require 100% of the amount invested up front. Not so with real estate. When speaking about your prime residence it gets even better. Lenders traditionally offer a plethora of attractive programs that make home ownership doable for millions of Americans.

We all like to be appreciated, but the appreciation we are talking about here is what happens to the value of your property in time. In the long term, real estate historically goes up. It’s a matter of supply-and-demand. As one Investor put it, “they aren’t making any more of it.” As time goes on, land in any size parcel will become scarcer. This creates demand.

As an old General Contractor, sweat equity gets me pretty excited. This means that you can discreetly increase your home’s value by improving it in some way. The advantage is that you get to enjoy that improvement as long as you live there.

Notice I said discreetly. It takes a trained eye to come up with a plan for improving any property. Otherwise you could easily over-improve for your locale.

The tax advantages are many and the rules are always changing. Suffice it to say, federal tax laws are structured to favor home ownership. Maybe it’s because a good percentage of voters are homeowners.

The variety of choices that your home investment grants you will make building your personal wealth much more likely. You need to have a place to live. Why pay rent when you can pay towards your own home mortgage…and write most of it off your taxes? That’s why we say: “the door to your home…your best investment.”

Since 2009 people coast to coast have paid me thousands of dollars for my real estate investing advice. At the end of the day, this is the best investment tip you’re gonna get.

C.J. Lauria is a Real Estate Investor since 1988. He is also a Realtor, Author, Speaker, Educator and Director of Invesdoor® Real Estate in El Dorado Hills, CA.

Article was first published in Mountain Democrat