Janet Schlarbaum and Mark Schlarbaum Business Tips

Submitted by: Janet Schlarbaum

Author: Ryan Bowman

Looking to invest in real estate but concerned about the possibility of losing your shirt if the deal falls through? A safer, more efficient option may be investing in REIT mutual funds.

Simply put, a REIT mutual fund is a company that buys, develops, manages, and sells real estate assets, thereby avoiding you the hassle and complication of doing it yourself. Also, with a REIT mutual fund investment, you can invest in many different types of real estate, in many different places, at the same time.

Investing in REIT mutual funds has its advantages and disadvantages. One of the main advantages is the liquidity of REIT mutual funds. Liquidity, which is the ease of converting an asset into actual cash income, is a great perk of REIT mutual funds because they are easily bought, sold, and traded on major exchange markets. So if you wake up one day and decide, “I’ve had it with REIT mutual funds,” you can sell is pretty quickly through a broker or an internet e-market.

Also REIT mutual funds qualify as pass-through entities, which are companies who are able to distribute their income cash flows to investors without taxation at the corporate level. And because REIT mutual funds are pass-through entities, whose main function is to pass profits to investors, most of their business activity is generally restricted to the collection of rental income, making them pretty safe investments.

A brief history of REIT mutual funds

REIT, or Real Estate Investment Trust, (pronounced “reet”) mutual funds date back to the 1880s when investors could avoid double taxation because trusts were not taxed at the corporate level if the income was distributed to beneficiaries.

However, in the 1930s tax laws were passed which reinstated double taxation for REIT mutual funds, decreasing the popularity of this type of investment until the 1960’s when Eisenhower signed the 1960 real estate investment trust tax provision which reestablished the special tax considerations.

REIT mutual funds were good to go again! Since then, REIT mutual funds have increased in popularity throughout the 1980’s, with other reforms and barriers removed throughout the years. This trend of REIT mutual funds reform continued to increase the interest in and value of REIT mutual fund investment.

Today there are over 193 publicly traded REIT mutual funds operating in the United States, with assets totaling over $500 billion! Approximately two-thirds of these REIT mutual funds are currently traded on national stock exchanges.

Who can I trust to tell me more about REIT mutual funds?

A very important thing to remember is, while REIT mutual funds are thought of my many as a real estate investment endeavor; they are actually a form of publicly traded securities.

Legally, your licensed Realtor or broker is not qualified or even allowed to give you any investment advice or direction concerning REIT mutual funds. So don’t be offended if they say they can’t help you!

Author: Luke Perry

Asset management is a form of investment management. The term asset management is sometimes used to refer to the management of all investments, including assets, or it may be used to refer to assets that don’t fall under the more standard categories of investment management, fund management or portfolio management.

Asset management is one facet of the vast global investment management industry. Large financial institutions manage billions of dollars in assets for businesses and individuals all over the world.

Many insiders feel that independent firms are more successful and more dynamic in investment management than are large banks and insurance companies.

Asset management helps to protect and grow investments. The assets under management may be a large company’s pension fund, or an individual’s retirement savings. Institutions that manage assets have great weight in the financial markets because of the amount of funds under their control. The decisions these companies make as to how to invest and move around the money they control can affect the overall rise and fall of financial markets.

Pension funds accounted for more than $15 trillion of funds that were under asset management in 2004. In comparison, more than $30 trillion of private wealth was in investments in 2004, about one third of which was being managed by investment management firms. Asset managers in the United States account for almost half of all funds under management globally.

Understanding asset management is a complicated topic. If you have large investments, you want to make sure your assets are properly managed. Various financial advisors can provide information about the best fund managers, the institutions with the best track records, and in general the type of management that may be right for you or your business.

Author: Shaun Parker

At 39 years of age I came into an unexpected inheritance. Not having experienced disposable income before I wanted to invest it wisely. I want to be able to enjoy this myself without jeopardising any inheritance that I could pass on to my own children. However, as soon as the news of my good fortune was out, advice came flooding in.

Put it in the bank, buy stocks and shares, set up a business as well as the sillier ones of putting it under the mattress! I took some time out to think about it and also to think about what i wanted to do with it.

I wanted an investment that I could see dividends from now rather than waiting for retirement. I decided, along with 50% of the UK’s homeowners, to invest in property instead of pensions. Property investment seemed like a good idea but with the security of banks looking rather precarious, mortgage rates rising again and the property market being unstable, I was unsure where to turn. Some research was in order.

I considered overseas investment properties. Rental rates were good. I could rent out a beach front apartment in the Caribbean and treat myself to regular diving holidays with the added benefit of income from renting out for the rest of the year. Or a property near the Black Sea. A beautiful up and coming holiday destination but people are still nervous because of the regions history.

I could keep back some of my inheritance and invest in a condo hotel in the US. This involved buying a room or a suite within a hotel and paying the hotel management to rent it out for me when I wasn’t using it.

If I wanted to stay nearer home I could buy land in the UK but with planning permission and councils being notoriously difficult was there the possiblity that I may just end up with a stretch of the next motorway running through my land, or worse still, losing it to compulsory purchase?

Not so keen on these last two ideas. I wanted to see, in bricks and mortar, what I was getting.

Being a rather distrusting person, I decided not to invest in an overseas property although I was reassured it was safe. Various locations in the UK come and go when it comes to investment trends. Except one. London - the financial capital of the world. It made sense.

City highfliers are in line for Christmas bonuses this year set to top 9 pounds billion. Thats a 15% increase on last year. Salaries of city workers are now, on average, 90,000 pounds with the rest of the country on 25,000. pounds Plenty of disposable income there!

Apparently, flats overlooking the Thames are now going for half a million and property values have risen at a rate of 20% this year in comparison with 8% for the rest of the country.

So, thats where I’m going for property investment. A nice little flat, overlooking the Thames, let to a City worker who’s main home is in the country.