People are always out on the lookout for how to make money…from my experience you need to start in your daily life. I’ve never been an advocate of buying expensive lunches or that cup of coffee for $5. Brilliant business plan BTW. I’m also not cheap, I spend money when I feel I’m getting a good value on something or celebrating a particular occasion, I think it’s smart living.

One of the biggest achievements I’ve accomplished to date was buying my first condo. I was 24 and after losing quite a bit of money on the stock market I finally decided to put my money into good use and buy my first home. The first step was getting an agent, they make sure you get out there and actually start looking J. I found a great condo that was on the market for 1 day.. a penthouse suite with an amazing unobstructed view of the lake. It’s small but the price was right. I purchased the condo for 189,000, that was over three years ago.

The condo market here in Toronto has been red hot, which is great but I wasn’t looking at flipping, I’m in it for the long run. See there is a few ways to look at a mortgage payment and I look at it this way… I used to spend $700 on rent plus utilities, when I got my new place it was going to cost me $1400 with maintenance. The way I see it is, I’m paying myself about $300 a month that’s the principal amount. So my cost goes down to $1100. Now I also got a bunch of great amenities and the luxury of living in a penthouse suite, not bad. So there is a little bit of a difference but not much, easily I adjusted to the new hike in my living expenses. See the brilliant thing about this is, just a few months ago I got an estimate on the value of my property and it’s valued at around 250,000. That’s about a 33% jump in my equity in just over 3 years, divide that into 3 years invested and each year I’ve made a potential additional income of $20,000. Now that’s what I call a sweet deal.

Anyway I’ve moved out of my place about a year and a half ago to move in with my girlfriend and we purchased a new place just a few months ago. It’s on Yonge St. right in the middle of downtown with an amazing view facing east on the 33^rd floor. My other place I rented out and it’s currently covering itself… meanwhile my equity keeps going out.

Want to know another big tip? Here it is… compared to New York and Vancouver, Toronto’s housing prices are currently considered BARGAIN prices!!!! Toronto is exploding, there is 100,000 new people moving into Toronto each year, and it’s the biggest city in Canada. The potential for prices to keep going has never been stronger.

I’m hoping that we’ll be able to buy a new place once every 3-4 years and keep going. I like to think at it this way… every time you buy a new place it’s like you’re getting a new partime job. Think about it… you invest 20-30k to buy a new place… rent it out and within two years you get all of your investment back and your equity goes up. You keep doing this over and over and as long as you plan thing properly there is no reason that by the time you’re hitting 40, you don’t own 4-5 properties. It’s that simple, again when trying to make money look at where you’re spending it first.