Wealth Tool Box
Project:
Tools to Make More & Lose Less
- Airbnb (make money from your house)
- Allocate Smartly (lose less in the stock market)
- Rakuten (cashback for all your online purchases)
- Turo (make money from your car)
Airbnb
When we were having some trouble finding a roommate to fill an extra room in our house recently, I created a hosting account on Airbnb one night. I hadn’t even finished my profile and I went to bed. The next morning, I woke up with a reservation and had to rush to buy art, furniture, bedding, and toiletries for our guests. After just 2 weeks, I had broken even and was profitable. I made over $1,000 in the first 3 weeks after opening the account.
Allocate Smartly
If you are a stock market person, I highly recommend you check out Allocate Smartly. They are all about risk mitigation, which is what you’ll need if you want to have a chance of growing your wealth in the market. Losing money due to high volatility is the main reason that most people don’t even manage to beat inflation investing in the Wall Street Casino. These guys can help you prevent that.
Rakuten
Buy stuff online much? Rakuten is a no-brainer. Install the Rakuten plug-in in your web browser, and you’ll immediately start racking up cashback from your online purchases. Then they send you checks. It’s that simple. Free money in the mail with no effort. With the above link, you’ll get $10.
Turo
Using Turo you can rent out your car similar to using Airbnb to rent your house. Just like with Airbnb, you have secured the underlying asset, now you can make it produce for you! This app can help turn your car that is normally a monthly expense into an income-producing asset. The average car is parked 95% of the time, just costing you money and taking up space. Let Turo help you flip the script in your favor.
Tools to Save Time
- Fancy Hands (US-based virtual assistants)
- Shipt (shopping delivery)
Fancy Hands
FancyHands.com is a virtual assistant service online. I signed up for Fancy Hands and it’s been awesome to hand off some of my work. When I was buying an investment property in Memphis, I had Fancy Hands assistants find me the top three building inspectors in town by scouring Google and Yelp reviews, Then I just called those three and made my choice. You could have them
- Search for things online
- sift through emails
- make reservations
- do data entry, or even
- wait on hold for you
The assistants are all U.S.-based and speak perfect English. As a bonus, click the above link and you’ll get 50% off of your first month.
Shipt
Shipt is awesome! I use Shipt to order groceries when I don’t want to spend time searching for items and waiting in line at the store, or in traffic on the way there. In my area, Shipt will deliver within just 2 hours from
- Target
- QFC
- Fred Meyer
- Safeway
- PetCo
- Office Depot & OfficeMax
- Smart Foodservice
- CVS Pharmacy
I have run some tests, and this doesn’t end up being any more expensive than going shopping myself. I just save tons of time, at pretty much no cost. Especially when you factor in the fact that I don’t make any impulse purchases when I use Shipt. With this link, you’ll get $50 off.
Tools to Stay Organized
- Dropbox (go paperless or store all your files)
- Evernote (organize files, notes, and projects)
- FileThis (auto-download all bills to one organized folder)
- LastPass (never forget a password again)
- Personal Capital (a single dashboard for all your money)
- Prism (bill notifications and payments)
- Stessa (whole real estate rental portfolio in one place)
- Todoist (best to-do list app)
- TurboTenant (find and screen tenants for free)
DropBox
I use Dropbox every day to organize my work files related to business and real estate. A couple of years ago I decided to go paperless. I scanned all my most important documents into Dropbox, and now I can access them on any device or online in seconds. This has made my last few mortgages way easier than they used to be because I have all the relevant info at my fingertips and ready to email. I also use Dropbox for collaborating with others, because you can share any file, even to people without a Dropbox account. I also like knowing that if something happens to my hard drive, I’ll be able to restore files from the cloud. If something happens to the cloud, I’ve still got my files on my phone and computer.
Evernote
Evernote has also been an invaluable tool in my paperless lifestyle. I take notes and store files here in a project-based or theme-based way. Evernote has advanced search functions with text recognition even for handwritten notes, and you can add tags to organize files and notes in Evernote based on project or theme instead of by folder. For example, one file could be relevant in more than one project and you can tag it as such to access it easily. The Web Clipper plug-in also lets me quickly save articles and web pages to Evernote. I can edit PDFs in the app, and each Evernote note has its own URL to share with others.
FileThis
This service automatically downloads and organizes all of your monthly bills and bank statements in a folder either on your computer or in the cloud (or have it be both at once by setting your FileThis folder to be located in a Dropbox folder). It’s great to be able to find these documents so easily, all organized in my FileThis folder when I need an account number, or when applying for a loan.
LastPass
LastPass has been a lifesaver for me! I now store all of my website credentials with LastPass. I never have struggled to remember my credentials because it auto-fills my username and password for any site I visit when I’m logged in to LastPass. It saves a ton of time and effort. In addition to passwords, I can also securely store files, credit card and bank info, and secret notes. Another cool feature of LastPass is that I can share a login link with somebody, like my assistant, and they can access a site to complete a task for me without ever seeing the username or password. Best of all, it’s free!
Personal Capital
Personal Capital is my primary financial dashboard. I link all my bank accounts, loans, mortgages, credit cards, investment properties, and even Paypal and Venmo. I can monitor all my money in one place with Personal Capital, so it helps keep things simple. There are tabs to keep track of property values, loan balances, monthly cash flow, net worth, budgets, stock market losses, and much more. It’s pretty simple to navigate around the site, too. Join Personal Capital using the above link & we’ll both get an Amazon gift card.
Prism
Prism solves one problem: keeping track of all of your bills and paying them easily from a single hub. The app is beautiful and simple. See your bills and pay directly from Prism for free.
Stessa
Stessa changed my life. As my real estate portfolio grew, I began to have trouble keeping track of all the books myself. I was searching for a bookkeeper for my rental properties, and they all wanted to charge around $200 per month per property! Stessa is free software that acts as a single dashboard for all of your rental real estate. It makes bookkeeping easy because it links with your bank accounts, mortgages, and credit cards to import all transactions automatically. At the end of the year, you can easily print a report for your tax person. Stessa also produces colorful graphs so you can see your investment performance, and it gives you a place to store all documents like lease agreements, inspection reports, closing docs, appraisals, insurance policies, etc.
Todoist
This app is arguably the best to-do list app out there. It has many ways to categorize tasks with tags and filters. There is even a way to be notified of relevant tasks when your phone senses that you have just arrived at a location, or are just leaving. I have reminders that I set up to remind me of things that happen once a month, once a year, or even less often. For example, all my subscription services that need to be paid once a year at random dates are in there, as well as oil changes and tire rotation, and daily tasks. Each day, I get reminders in Todoist, so I don’t need to remember everything.
TurboTenant
Turbotenant is a quick, free way to enter your rental property info and get it pushed out and published to a ton of different sites to advertise that a place is available for rent. Then they have a way for a prospective tenant to submit an application and pay for a background and credit check. It couldn’t be simpler. I used Turbotenant recently to fill a vacancy and the whole process is smooth, sophisticated, and free for landlords!
Top Books to Increase Your Financial IQ
- Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us
- Antifragile: Things that gain from disorder
- Give And Take: Why helping others drives our success
- Rich Dad Poor Dad: What the rich teach their kids about money – that the poor and middle class do not
- The Richest Man In Babylon: The success secrets of the ancients
- LEAP: Lifetime Economic Acceleration Process
- The Power of Zero: How to get to the 0% tax bracket and transform your retirement
- Becoming Your Own Banker: Unlock the infinite banking concept
- Profit First: Transform your business from a cash-eating monster to a money-making machine
- Organize Tomorrow Today: 8 ways to retrain your mind to optimize performance at work and in life
- The Go-Giver: A little story about a powerful business idea
1. Drive
2. Antifragile
Antifragile is a book that helps understand the benefits of becoming not only resistant to the unexpected, but actually setting yourself up to benefit from it.
