Cost.

The obvious advantage of taking a term life insurance policy over a whole life insurance policy is the cost. Often a term life insurance policy will cost you hundreds of dollars a year but a similar whole life insurance policy can cost as much as thousands. In fact, there are some term life insurance policies that will cover you to the value of $100,000 over a ten year term that cost less than ten dollars a month. Obviously, similar factors are taking into consideration when applying for term life insurance as they are when applying for whole life insurance; factors such as health, family history, lifestyle and age.

Flexibility.

Term life insurance offers you a greater level of flexibility over it’s whole life insurance counterpart. For less money you are able to take out short 10, 20 or 30 year plans and you are able to determine the exact level of cover that this offers. You may have a 4-year-old son and a partner who has opted to stay at home and look after him. Right now he is dependant on your earning money to feed, clothe and care for him but in twenty years he will have finished school, finished college and hopefully got himself a job. This means he is no longer your dependant and you may not need to make financial allowances for him in your life insurance. Alternatively, your mortgage may expire in ten years. You won’t need to pay to cover your mortgage once it has been fully paid up.

Investment.

A term life insurance policy costs you hundreds, even thousands, of dollars a year less than a whole life insurance policy. This means that you can invest your money yourself instead of relying on the insurance company to do so. Insurers are typically very conservative when investing your money, so by taking a term life insurance policy you are able to be a little less strict over the type of investment you choose affording you a greater potential to make more money.

Your Audience: Whether you are marketing on the Internet, using direct-mail, or creating display ads, marketing to the right audience is crucial. Even the best marketing piece or sales presentation is worthless if it’s presented to people who are not interested!

Do your research. Who is your target audience? What do they read? What are their fears? What are their desires? These are just some of the questions you should ask, and once you have the answer you are on your way to uncovering a hungry market.

Benefits: Although it’s important to know your products thoroughly, it’s equally as important to know the benefits of each feature. Agents are so focused on how an annuity works that they often lose sight of the benefits. It’s what drives your prospect to respond to your offer or sign the application.

A good exercise is to squeeze out as many benefits you can for each feature of your annuity, and write them down. This will not only help you in your annuity lead generation efforts, but it will help you sell more annuities as well.

Do you really want to market a product?: One thing is for certain, if you’re marketing a financial product like an annuity, you can expect small response rates. The reason for this is that your potential prospects have been hit with advertisement after advertisement on the advantages of owning products like annuities. As a result, your prospect is more likely to throw your marketing in the trash, or simply click delete.

An alternative to marketing annuities on the front end is to create what is called a “lead generator”. A lead generator comes in many forms, but the most common is an information product. In this case it would be a booklet, report, or something similar. Do not mistake this for a brochure. A lead generator, written properly, works more like a sophisticated sales letter.

Instead of advertising an annuity, you would advertise your lead generator. The key is to use the lead generator as a tool to capture your prospects contact information, and as a result, you build an extremely valuable list that most agents and financial advisors would crawl over broken glass to own.

Systemize: Whether you decide to market an annuity on the front end or use a lead generator, it’s important to systematize your marketing system. Studies show that it can take up to 17 contacts to make a sale. In other words, for every lead you generate, you should have a sequence of follow-ups ready to go.

Test: Another important area you should consider is testing small. Once you decide upon your market and how you want to generate leads, test a small ad or test a small number of names on a well selected list. If your response rates do not provide you with a decent return on investment, you haven’t wasted a lot of money.

Secondly, you can find out where you went wrong in your marketing system and fix it. Once you have a profitable annuity lead generation system put together, you can roll it out on a bigger scale.

A successful annuity lead generation program has the best chance of success when you target the right audience, uncover the benefits of your product, choose the right approach, follow-up regularly, and test small (to get the kinks out).

Up to one third of major credit card issuers now include a “universal default clause” in their credit card terms. The UDC allows the credit card company to raise the interest rate on the account if the cardholder pays his or her bills late. This can apply even if the credit card bill is paid on time! It is important to find out if your credit card terms include a UDC, as your interest rate could be affected by whether or not you pay your telephone bill on time. This is just one of many ways that credit card companies are increasing their profits, but it isn’t one that they’re willing to advertise. When a letter comes in the mail from your credit card company that says “change in your credit card terms” or something like it, make sure that you read it. Failure to do so could raise the interest rate on your credit card substantially.

Another “fine print” issue that has been turning up recently is the prepayment penalty that is now being attached to up to half of all mortgages and home equity loans. The volatile nature of interest rates in the lending market has inspired many homeowners to repeatedly refinance their homes in the last few years. Lenders often hold a mortgage for only a few months before the borrower finds a lower rate and refinances, paying off the original loan. In order to “protect” the profits from lending the money, up to half of all lenders are now requiring a substantial penalty if the loan is paid off prior to a specified date. These fees can amount to several thousand dollars on a primary mortgage and several hundred dollars on a home equity loan. Most borrowers would not be pleased to go through the process of refinancing their home, only to find out at closing that they owed a penalty of five thousand dollars. Instead, be sure to read the fine print in your mortgage or home equity loan documents before you sign them.

As the lending and credit markets become more and more competitive, lenders are doing more and more to increase their profits. They are not necessarily doing so in obvious ways, however, so it is always in your best interests to read any document carefully before you sign. Your failure to do so could cost you quite a bit of money.

Why do you need such a low price to make it work? This is quite simple. A common guideline among investors is that you must make at least $10,000 to make it worthwhile. Remember you’re an investor and not a handyman. Rehab projects last typically 4-6 months, sometimes even longer. You don’t want to end up making minimum wage as a handyman after the project is done. Quite frankly this is not uncommon for first time investors.

Real estate investment is all about numbers. If the numbers are right you must make every mistake in the book to turn your project into a financial disaster. That’s why you must buy the property as cheap as possible. Selling the property is your least problem. First you have to put together a budget. Here’s a little example.

Property A is located in a decent neighborhood with average home resale values of $150,000. That’s what our property will appraise after the repairs are done. We also take out a hard money loan with 4 points and 12% (interest only) for 100% of the purchase price. We calculate that the property will sell for $150,000 in 6 months. There are about $10,000 in repairs you have to take care of.

Property A

Purchase Price $100,000

Purchase Closing Cost $8,000 (fees + 4 points)

Holding Cost $6,000 (6 months of interest)

Repair Cost $10,000

Insurance, Utilities $2,000 (you need a vacant property insurance which is more expensive)

Selling Closing Cost $13,000 (6% realtor fee of $150,000 + closing cost)

Total $139,000

Selling Price $150,000

Expenses -$139,000

Total Profit $11,000

This is just a very simple example, but I hope you get the picture. Keeping track of the numbers is essential in real estate investment. In the example above just imagine what happens if you spend more money for the repairs or you have to sell the property for less money. Even worst if you can’t sell the property within 6 months and after 9 months you sell it for less money. Not only did you loose on the selling price you had 3 months of interest piling up as well.

When you’re investing in rehab properties you have to have an exit strategy. My exit strategy is, to rent the house and refinance the hard money loan if I can’t sell the property after 6 months for the price I’m asking for. This will cover my monthly expenses and I have more time to sell the property when the market is better. Actually converting a rehab property into a rental can be a very profitable choice of real estate investment. Friends of mine are doing quite well with this strategy.

Bottom-line; crunch the numbers, make a budget, keep track of your expenses and have an exit strategy. Having this in place you’re good to go.