If you own your own home-based business, you might not have ever thought about home based business legal advice before. Well, it is just as important for someone working out of their home for themselves to protect and grow their business equally to that of someone who has an office and is doing something more in the public eye. If you own a business of any kind, you are more than likely offering a product or a service to someone, somewhere, and what that means is that someone can sue you if they so choose to. Getting legal advice is a great way to manage and deal with all these things, unless you have an extensive legal background.One of the most important things that will be important to home based business legal advice is to get a proper business set up completed, including a business plan, business financing, and protection in the form of business structuring. These are elements that are often neglected by those who are opening a business from home. Small business startup needs more help than many might think. Your idea might be fantastic and might blow others out of the water, but if you can not protect your business and yourself, you could be headed for dangerous water.When you own a home based business, you might not be thinking about taxes either. Sure, you may have thought of the tax benefits of owning a business, but how about paying taxes? You need to get home based business legal advice on how to get registered in your area for a tax identification number, local and state tax payments, and find out if you need any permits or licenses to do what you are doing, where you are doing it. These are all important factors to small business legal advice that you can have for a very affordable price if you choose to use a prepaid legal business plan.A new small business has a lot of things to get in order. Small business legal advice is necessary and can be very affordable. Protect and grow your home business by planning ahead and having a legal service ready, willing, and able to help you get things set up properly and also who can be there in the event that a fraudulent or even a legitimate lawsuit is filed against you for whatever reason. Using legal assistance is a great way to get a lot of necessary services and help.

Deciding to start a home based business used to be as easy as ABC: you simply picked a business, bought a PC and quit the day job. Before you knew it, you were up and running, on the road to success. But these days things are tougher. The expansion of internet home based business opportunities, financial upheaval and people stampeding for extra income means that the game plan has moved up a notch or ten. For success, will any old equipment do?The competition on the home based business front means that you have to make your choice and make it well. The choice isn’t simply about the actual business either. For instance, in your budget to buy a business/franchise, training and all start-up fees, what will be left for your office equipment? Or will any old equipment do?For a start, before choosing your home business computer equipment, think about the following: Will you be office based, working on the computer and manning the phone or are you going to be mobile? If you are meeting customers and clients, is it essential to have a portable database/information along? Is a portfolio or catalogue sufficient, or do you need information that only a laptop can provide?If you plan to be mobile and anticipate flying frequently, Will it be convenient to haul your laptop along with your luggage and hand baggage, or will a pc tablet, iPad or notebook be more convenient? If size and weight is a big factor and you choose one of these for their leisure capabilities as well, can you accomplish your workload on it? For example, if you write a lot of reports or articles, take into account that netbooks have a much smaller keyboard than laptops, and iPad and tablets don’t have one at all.If your home based business will keep you office bound and you only have an old pc, can you function as well as if you had the latest gizmo? You will probably manage until you are able to upgrade to faster and easier equipment. If you have already ditched the old pc in favour of a laptop and have it languishing somewhere, do you know that you can connect the monitor to your laptop to provide dual screen activity? If you want further information, check out my article for step by step instructions – it’s very easy to set up and very useful.Your home based business success may be affected by your old equipment if it is slow and temperamental, but a bigger factor may be your marketing. I believe that every business is a winner provided you have the right tools to help you succeed. That would things like mentoring and training. After all, having a great business and latest technology won’t get you as far as you need to be if you aren’t properly equipped with the right marketing skills. So, make yourself a coffee, pull up a chair and click on the following link now. In your home based business success, will any old equipment do? You decide.

I have a confession to make… you see; when I first started out in real estate investing I didn’t do everything on my own. I had a little secret that most people do not understand. In fact, most people make this mistake over and over again and never even realize how much this same mistake is costing them.

Let me explain, most beginner and intermediate real estate investors do all the work themselves. This includes finding tenants, credit checks, signing leases, maintenance, tenant relationship, rent collection, evictions, accounting, routine inspections and all of the other 100′s of things a property owner must do to keep their real estate investments profitable. Seems like a lot doesn’t it? That’s because it is!

If you are an experience real estate investor you quickly learn that the tenant stuff is a lot of work and not very profitable. The real money in this business is finding new profitable deals and arranging good financing not collecting rent and doing maintenance.

So the secret that most new real estate investors do not know is hiring a professional property manager and letting them handle the 100′s of tenant issues will free your time to focus on new deals and financing. By hiring a professional property manager to oversee your properties you can rest assure that all of the tenant activities will be attended to and your property and tenant will be managed in a way that protects your property and keeps it value as high as possible. I was able to learn this early on it saved me from making many costly mistakes.

By hiring a professional property manager I was able to see how they marketed for new tenants, how they collected rent and occasional went to court, how they did the accounting and financial record keeping, and how they managed difficult tenants. All of these issues I could have learned by making own mistakes several times and then learned how to do it right by “trial and error”. But this is costly way to learn. It is far better for the new real estate investor to hire a professional property manager and learn from how they handle these issues.

You may want to eventually manage your own properties but in the early years you should hire a property manager and learn how they do things first. Then after you have seen how it is done you can self manage with a sense experience.

I will also say that tenants are very good at sensing when someone is inexperienced at property management and I assure you they will take advantage of that inexperience to your determent. Tenant will test you to see if you will give them some breaks or if you do not know the local landlord laws. This is also why a professional property manager can help you establish some experience and the ability to stand up to tough tenants.

Your goal as a real estate investor is to create long-lasting PASSIVE income for yourself. Passive income means that you should be earning income from your investments with little to no effort on your behalf. Managing your own properties is not passive income.

Stop wasting your efforts and let a professional property manager oversee your property investments and focus your time on finding new properties and your real estate investment business.

What worked prior to 1995 for investors, no longer works in our “New Age of Investment Bubbles” we as investors find ourselves in these days.

If you as an investor manage your own employer-sponsored 401(k), Roth/401(k), 403(b), or other retirement account, or leverage a Buy-and-Hold strategy to build long-term wealth, or choose to hire a financial advisor/professional to manage your money… your investments are not protected from the massive loss of wealth that will occur when the next and all future bubbles bursts.

In this article, I’ll focus on:

Why a Buy-and-Hold strategy is dead in today’s “New Age” of investing.
Why protecting your wealth must be your #1 priority.
The “New Age of Investment Bubbles”

1995 ushered in a whole new era of investing that the vast majority of today’s investors have yet to recognize and adapt to. Investors have been mislead into believing that what worked in the years prior to 1995, is still relevant in this “New Age” of short-term irrational speculation, or gambling, or chasing what’s “hot.”

This “New Age” is built on investment bubbles that burst wiping out trillions of dollars of investor wealth and making it impossible for investors to ever realize their lifetime wealth potential.

If you’re not familiar with the S&P 500 index, the most widely held and measured stock index over time, I recommend you check out the link below to get a quick visual representation and historical perspective. I’m confident you too will agree that 1995 was a year something dramatically changed and altered the landscape of investing.

Please don’t be mislead or fooled by a financial advisor, your parents, or friends that what has worked in the past, will work in this “New Age of Investment Bubbles.” It certainly didn’t stop the massive loss of investor wealth during the Tech and Housing bubbles when those bubbles burst, and there’s no reason to think this “New Age” is going to change anytime soon as it has enriched and built massive amounts of wealth for Wall Street, investment banks, the financial services industry and all those working in them… just not for we the “average investor.”

Why Buy-&-Hold Is DEAD!

Buy-and-Hold is… no was… a great long-term strategy prior to 1995 when markets were rational, as it was easy to manage, it removed all emotions from investing, and had a proven track record of success over many decades. This strategy however, is no longer relevant or prudent in today’s “New Age” and a little math and the S&P 500 are all that are needed to prove why Buy-and-Hold is dead!

As a Buy-and-Hold investor, you’re taught that to build long-term wealth you only need to stay invested in the markets 100% of the time so you capture all the upside potential during extended Bull Markets, while weathering the downside of Bear Markets. Let’s see how this strategy has worked in this “New Age.”

If you started with $100,000 invested in the S&P 500 at the beginning of the Tech Bubble on January 1, 1995 and stayed invested 100% of the time, your investment would have gained 115% during its Bull Market and weathered a loss of 50.8% during its Bear Market. At the end of the Tech Bubble, your initial $ 100,000 investment would have grown to $105,780, nothing to write home about after 7 years.

The Housing Bubble immediately followed and its Bull Market gained 105%, or just barely enough to recover the 50.8% loss. When the Housing Bubble burst however, the loss was 56.8% and thus your initial $ 100,000 investment as a Buy-and-Hold investor, would now be worth $ 93,679 after 14 years for an annual rate of return of -0.46%.

This is the exact reason why so many Baby-boomers are having to consider delaying retirement, supplementing their retirement income with a second job, or even worse, taking greater risk with their investments in a futile attempt to earn greater return in this “New Age.”

Consider the Current Bubble we’re in. As of February 28, 2014, the S&P 500 had gained 175% during our current Bull Market, increasing the value of your $ 93,679, to $ 257,617 for an annual rate of return of 5.06% since 1995. But don’t forget, all bubbles burst and today’s Current Bubble is no exception. Assuming our Current Bubble will follow the trend of the Tech and Housing Bubbles, it’s not hard to fathom a 50% loss. Based on such a loss, your initial $ 100,000 investment will be worth $ 128,808 after approximately 21 years, and that $28,808 gain in wealth would equate to an annual rate of return of 1.21% in this “New Age of Investment Bubbles.”

No investor will ever build long-term wealth at that rate of return!

RIP Buy-and Hold… or till we meet again!

What’s An Investor To Do In This “New Age” To Build Wealth?

Investors must recognize the biggest challenge and most important factor to building long-term wealth in this “New Age,” is in how to protect the value of their investments from the massive loss of wealth when bubbles burst. Protecting wealth must be an investor’s #1 priority if they ever want to build long-term wealth.

Protecting wealth today requires a unique approach that minimizes these massive and devastating losses of wealth when bubbles burst. To do such, investors must simply learn when it’s prudent to get out of the market when a major market meltdown is occurring by moving their investment(s) to the safety of cash or a cash-equivalent position. This is not difficult to achieve but it cannot be accomplished with any degree of success by guessing when to get out of the market, counting on your emotions to tell you when you’ve lost enough money and it’s time to get out, or by listening to friends and/or co-workers.

The only way an investor can successfully protect their wealth in today’s “New Age of Investment Bubbles” is by integrating a simple, yet highly disciplined strategy that leverages pre-determined entry and exit triggers or indicators.

Pre-determined entry and exit triggers work like this. Once a bubble burst, a pre-determined exit trigger would tell an investor shortly after the meltdown has begun to sell their investment(s) and move their money to cash or a cash equivalent investment, and once the meltdown is over and the markets have begun to recover, a pre-determined entry trigger would tell the investor it’s safe and prudent to buy back into their investments so they capture the upside potential of the new Bull Market so they can build wealth.

Academic studies prove a strategy of this type removes the guesswork, emotions, and noise for investors in trying to time the markets, reduces overall portfolio risk and volatility, protects wealth from the massive market meltdowns when bubbles burst, and ultimately, provides the added benefit of improved annual rates of return.

How does a strategy using pre-determined triggers compare against a Buy-and-Hold investor in today’s “New Age?”

Let’s assume a worst case scenario that after a bubble burst, a pre-determined exit trigger gets an investor out of the markets after a loss of 25%, and gets an investor back in after the markets have gone back up at least 25%. In essence, our entry trigger lags a market recovery and misses out on the first 25% of gains during a Bull Market, but our exit trigger minimizes the overall market losses when a bubble burst or during Bear Markets.

After the Tech Bubble, an investor integrating a pre-determined trigger strategy would have seen their wealth grow to $ 142,500 versus the $ 105,780 for the Buy-and-Hold investor. After the Housing Bubble, the investor using triggers saw their wealth grow to $ 192,375 versus $ 93, 679 for the Buy-and-Hold investor, and after the Current Bubble bursts, $ 360,702 versus $ 128,808. The $360,702 amount of wealth for the investor using triggers would have realized an annual rate of return of 6.30%, versus 1.21% for a Buy-and-Hold investor.

To see the detailed comparison of a Buy-and-Hold investor versus an investor using pre-determined triggers, please check out the link below.

What’s important for investors to understand in the examples above are not the absolute numbers, but the power of using pre-determined triggers with their investments to build and protect wealth in this “New Age of Investment Bubbles.”