A Woman’s Guide To Real Estate And Travel Hacks
Our November Portland Women Investors meetup was an information-packed and riveting presentation from one of our very own members, telling her story from living abroad with an aversion to real estate to returning to Maine, to buying her first condo, and growing her portfolio from there - all in just a few short years! She also threw in a ton of nuggets about how she uses credit card points to travel for free (without taking on unnecessary credit card debt)! I really don’t think I can do her presentation justice in a simple recap, but I will try to sum up my key takeaways. If you want to learn more, reach out and I will connect you two so you can learn from the master herself!!!
Tips & Tricks for Building A Portfolio:
Find a partner you trust. Our presenter spoke about how she had worked with a few different realtors, but never quite felt the right fit. Finally, once her and I partnered up, she felt like she had a great relationship, with great communication and, most importantly, honesty. I felt like I could give her honest feedback (at times it was run away from this building as fast as you can!) and I could also challenge her to look at the overall picture and make sure fear wasn’t getting in the way of a great opportunity (because, of course, growing a portfolio comes with a lot of fear!).
Leverage your assets. Our presenter shared how she was able to leverage HELOCs (both on personal and investment properties) to increase her buying power and ultimately scale her portfolio quickly.
Find a property manager you can trust! Big shoutout to Lindsay Crosby at Method Property Management - give her a call if you are looking for someone in Greater Portland (I second this recommendation, Lindsay is amazing!).
Tips & Tricks for Maximizing Credit Card Points:
Her preferred card is Chase Ink (NOT the premier but all the others). The key here is the sign on bonus since you can get so many points for signing up. This allowed her to take multiple trips recently almost completely free.
Chase Ink also allows you to transfer points, which gives you more flexibility and better options to use your points to the max.
You can have multiple business cards and open multiple cards and still get the sign up bonuses.
Credit pulls do not show up on credit scores (as evidenced by her amazing credit score!).
Benefits of a business credit card in real estate is that there is so much we are already paying for, we might as well get the points to go with it!
Use this referral link (and share yours!) to help each other out!
Consider setting up bi-weekly payments - it can be easy to go overboard and get into expensive debt. Make sure you have a plan to pay consistently.