Where to invest my money

Investing is a mix of an effective lifestyle choice vs time in life. In theory .. its purist capitalism at its best. If you want your money to work harder quicker .. then you have to gear your investment schemes to suit this. Small timeframes to do your deals and minimum timeframes to create maximum profit. However as always .. smaller timeframes for profit usually come with greater risk components.

You have to gear your investment strategy to what you feel you can cope with. The first thing i would suggest is deal with numbers you can approach. Most people in reality cant cope with numbers beyond a certain amount. I know personally i get a bit headstrung with figures over 20k. Its beyond my ability to visualise and cope with. Even though i juggle amounts up to twenty times that a year.

You have to work out what choices are the onces you feel ok with. Even go to the extent of mapping out LIKELY returns on your property based on existing figures. It will give you a better insight on what you are doing .. where you are going. An investment strategy SHOULD be a continuous remapping of existing assets and reassessments of their utility value in that scheme.

The best three examples of that i can give you are from my fathers investment patterns. He has had a block of units .. and every time he needed to sell it was for a decent reason.

The first time he sold the property was getting old and was developing rotting windowsils. For the suburb it was in .. it was a great deal for a developer to revamp. At the time it would have cost my father too much to renovate. So he sold it into a good market.  AND REINVESTED. (Held 28yrs)

The second time the road he had the property on became a main road instead of a side street in the suburb. That meant peak hour traffic outside the door and no parking for visitors. The property had become unattractive. (Held 15 yrs)

The third property was bought cheap .. became a cash cow (returns of 14% sound good to you?). And yet there was a time when the property was no longer able to meet the needs of fussier and better paying tenancies .. it had poor parking solutions on the property. So DESPITE the fact it was a cash cow .. it was sold off as individual units. (Held 12 yrs)

The point is .. each of these properties worked over time .. and did their part to act as an investment. There was a time when the income / maintainence / useful asset  equation failed in each of these cases .. and it was time to sell.

The other point i should approach is to judge your oncoming market. You arent going to be a fortune teller .. but with a reasonable  ear to the agents in the area and the ability to judge for yourself the existing suburb conditions .. you should be looking for markets which are changing for the better and are on the way up. Learn what an improving suburb looks like. Thats where you'll find your best value deals.

Make an investment choice that will be easy for you to live with. Make an investment choice that challenges you .. and improves your knowledge of an investment base. The second time around .. this knowledge will make investing in that areas MUCH easier and your ability to pick winners will be much improved.