The short answer is yes, now, for the long answer. You can definitely invest in real estate if you have a full time day job; in fact there are many ways that your day job can benefit your real estate investment.
How a Day Job Can Help You Invest
The most obvious reason why it can be a good idea to have a day job is that you can still pay your bills. You won’t need to rely on putting food on the table from real estate because your job pays for your day to day expenses. There is a reason why it’s called real estate INVESTMENT, it’s because you should look at it as a way to build wealth and financial security for your FUTURE.
It is also so much easier to obtain a traditional bank loan if you have a day job. The thing that most of these real estate investment gurus don’t tell you is that a bank wants to see that you have a steady reliable way to pay them back for the loan you take out with them. It is extremely difficult to prove that you can pay back a loan for a property investment if you don’t have a day job. This is why there are “private money lenders” that will lend you money for you to purchase investment property, but usually charge much more than a traditional bank. It’s a risk for the bank. Having a day job can be a great tool to obtain bank loans on investment property, build up an income, and then quit your job.
Not only should you be able to pay your bills, but with a day job, you should have more money to invest in property. While working a traditional job, you can save up extra money for a down payment on your first property. Once you have a couple properties, it is easy to pull money out of a previous deal to help finance the cost of the next deal, but until then, you need some cash to get started. A day job can give you the money you need.
One of the main benefits of having a day job is that you can afford to hire out much of the work needed on a property. By doing this, you will be able to get things done correctly and in a much faster manner than if you were to do it yourself. When we first started we did basically all of the work by ourselves. While we learned a lot, it was a manner of necessity, because we were broke college kids. Having a day job can provide you with the money you need to gain traction faster.
A Day Job Can Hinder You
We are extremely knowledgeable in fixing issues that come up on our property. Brad taught himself how to do plumbing by installing it by himself in one of our properties. We are also experts at restoring hardwood floors, as we have done this on at least a dozen places. While a day job can give you the money to hire out jobs, you will probably never be skilled at repairing damaged property. You simply don’t have the time to learn all of that, which can be a drawback. By not knowing what a job needs to be completed correctly, there are more opportunities for you to underestimate to cost of what it would take. There is also a possibility of your hired workers not performing a job correctly and you not finding out until it seriously costs you.
With a day job, you won’t be able to be actively monitoring your hired workers to see that they stay on task. This can cost you money and sometimes projects will have to be redone several times. You will have less ability to manage the project as a whole, and this can create issues. For example, you may not have been able to explain to the contractor what you would like done when it needed to be performed and the contractor might have to do his best guess on what you would want. There can often be a disconnect between what he thinks you want and what you would actually like done.
Having a traditional day job can be a great way to start to invest in real estate slowly on the side. A day job can provide you with financial stability so you can get a bank loan and not be stressed trying to pay your monthly expenses. While it can be difficult to manage contractors while you are working, you will be able to get work completed faster and better than if you did the work on your own. Ultimately, it’s a tradeoff between putting in more time and sweat equity into a project or putting in more money.