I just finished going over my real estate finances for the year so far. I decided to track my real returns as opposed to my paper returns. In other words, I don’t care about the depreciation benefits that real estate gives me or any of those things. Simply put: I’m curious to know my net profit on a monthly, quarterly, and yearly based. I won’t work backwards to see what it was in the past because that’s of no relevance to me now. However, I want to keep a closer eye on things from this point forward, especially since I’m in the works to try and get some of my expenses down.
I made an individual spreadsheet for each property, and a spreadsheet for all the properties combined. This new spreadsheet should also help me keep better track of things come tax time. I’m filing my taxes myself this year because after looking through all my past filings, I haven’t been too pleased with my accountants. I constantly feel like they leave money on the table, or mess things up in a way that comes back to haunt me later. For example, my lender found an error in my taxes in 2022 when I was trying to purchase my 3rd property and that slowed me up quite a bit a bit. I don’t want to spend 900 dollars on an accountant that’s not doing that good of a job anyway.
So after completing this spreadsheet, here is what I have learned from my real estate transactions 2 months into the year.
My total profit margin is 5% on all my real estate.
My problem property cost me about 471 dollars to maintain every month. This is the main reason why my profit margin is so low. Luckily, the income from my first property covers this, and still leaves me a few dollars left over. Now that my stepfather has decided he wants to take profits from our joint property that we have rented out, I’m considering adding those extra dollars to my personal real estate account.
I’ve also been thinking about All my income streams.
- My main job that pays all my everyday expenses
- Real estate, which once used to give me a nice chunk of change now only gives me between 100 and 250 across all properties every month.
- Amazon influencer; does about 500 so it’s not a big source of income. I think this program is on the decline but I’ll ride it as far as I can.
- My side hustle: this includes selling on Etsy and flipping items on eBay; this one still has me in the hole about 1500. I’ll make a profit on this soon, but I don’t think it’ll be sustainable because some of the items I bought are not of value. I’m not giving up on it yet, but it’s going to be tough to turn my idea into a large consistent profit. After this month, I should be in the positive between 500 and 1000 dollars for 2 months of work.
These are essentially my 4 income streams. I’d like to start working on a dividend investment account, but for my goal I’m thinking that throwing all the profits from everything that’s not my job into growth stocks is the best avenue to achieve a million dollar Net worth.
Now that I have a child on the way, things are going to get more costly. I’ve pretty much eliminated all eating out, unless my baby mother ask for something. But when I’m alone, I try and swipe that card as little as possible.
For the month of march I plan on working on the house setting up a better working environment for me that can also accommodate the baby. I’m also going to see if I can get a new insurance for the property that’s eating up my profits, a new tenant, and a new lease that’s going to up the rent to offset some of the expenses of increasing insurance and tax costs.
I should also have a good idea about my side hustle and how fruitful it’ll be. Meanwhile, I’ll be trying to renegotiate my pay at my job and seeing which path I will take in my mortuary career. Things are moving slow to start this year off, but they’re moving nonetheless.