A person was telling me the other day that he phoned his local Internet provider as he was interested in getting wireless access capabilities with his Internet service. As many of you may know all that is required for this is maybe a cheap $30 wireless router that you can buy at most stores. The company did have solutions apparently where in this case it was an additional $5 a month to rent a modem with wireless features in it.

Kind of a crazy markup when you think about it and how much more expensive it is to rent an item to do the job as to outright buying the necessary equipment yourself. It’s usually more expensive to rent the items directly through the supplier in this case too as I would say there are just a ton of people who don’t want to take the time to research the solutions that make more sense financially and simply want it to work right away. Therefore, there’s no reason for the company not to make a huge amount of profit out of it.

You’d think that once you buy the latest electronic items that the previous models would be obsolete as nobody would want to use or need them anymore. Recently I saw an advertisement for a person who was looking for a camcorder that was able to take mini-dv tapes as they needed to transfer all of these old footages to a digital format and did not have one available. They were willing to pay about $20 just to use the camcorder quickly too. Strange as it is, I still have my old camcorder that accepts mini-dv tapes even though you’d think I would have sold it a long time ago.

Out of curiosity I just did some random searches to see how many people there were out there that were in a similar situation and mindset like the above. Sure enough, there seems to be a lot and in most cases these people’s old items have ceased to work and they don’t want to pay high professional fees to digitize the video. That made me think if someone could literally just spend a few minutes per week to find people to rent out their old equipment to where they can make a very decent side income with.

I was told about this apartment of sort where one of the rooms in the building was being sold for a very good price. From the sale price alone it seemed like it was half of what you would expect to pay for something similar. Therefore, even if you didn’t plan to occupy and live in the space yourself it sounded like a great investment. I was then told the drawback was you were not allowed to rent this space out to anyone even though you own it. To me, the vale of that space just dropped like a rock after hearing that.

I can understand if the building area has certain restrictions such as you are not allowed to say play loud music after a certain hour, but being able to rent out your property in these situations is a big purchasing factor I’d say if you were looking at it more from an investment point of view. Other than that, I guess the main appeal is that it definitely makes more sense than renting a place each month if you yourself have yet to own your own living space.

Many times when you ask people what they would do with say a million dollars a common answer would be that they would put the money in a savings account and then live off the interest that they would gain every month. Just recently a person was telling me that he planned to do just this with his retirement funds except with a little twist.

By the looks of it he will probably have about half a million dollars in pure money which he thinks is a decent enough funds to work with. The twist? To get this money he is going to sell things like his house and essentially live by renting a place. Therefore, the hope is that the monthly expenses for this will equal to how much he will earn without doing anything.

I personally don’t think it’s as straight forward as most people think it is. Unless you have some kind of specialized savings account, which definitely are available here at least, you have to think of factors such as you are going to get taxed if you truly get that much money every month. I used to think living off interest would be the ideal thing to do, but just living through life it seems like there are so many opportunities to try where when it comes to an income I would rather have something that I had to actively be involved with.

I treat interest money as a nice monthly present, so to speak, as opposed to relying on it. Very much like those rewards you get from using your credit cards.

Well this was an interesting scenario I heard from a real person. When it comes to money I think we all want to make decisions that yield the best return on investment. At the same time, it needs to meet our lifestyle demands too. So imagine this scenario. Throughout the years you have developed a decent savings and pretty much have everything set accommodation wise such as your own house. You are now retired at say 60 years old and living on a small fixed monthly income.

Now for whatever reason you lost your house and have say $250,000 left in the savings. So, you need to find a new home. The problem is that you can’t buy a house for $250,000 and so you need to go for something smaller such as a Condo. The issue is everything costs at least $200,000 which means you will have $50,000 left. Assuming you don’t work to generate an income and just rely mostly on your small monthly income, you will last about 3 to 5 years if you are still in a “retirement” mode. You want to live by yourself too and so sharing accommodations is out of the question.

Now the other option is to not own any property but rather just rent a place at like $800 to $1200 a month. So theoretically, if you insist in being in a retirement mode still this can bring you a long ways further if you are not expecting to be around for like another 20+ years.

However, the person mentioned that idea was out of the question as it was stupid to pay that much for rent and not own the property. In a situation like that would you still personally be so dead set on an investment kind of mentality?

For me personally, if I had to choose between these two only I would probably go with the renting route. Although, realistically for myself if I was given a choice I would go with a hybrid route where you would have to semi come out of retirement and do something to generate a decent cash flow again.