Who would've thought it was there the whole time? One of the most important lessons in living a successful life was right under our nose the whole time. If you were like me and lost every game of Monopoly you've ever played, you probably didn't take away too many lessons from it. The only lesson I learned was to never play it again. I'm here to tell you your days of losing this game are over and this secret will work on the board game and off.
I'm going to cut straight to it. The key to win Monopoly is to buy every property you land on. You need to stockpile as many properties as you can, as quickly as you can. This is pretty much a sure fire way to win. Many people wait for the biggest properties to buy, others drive around the board a few times before they buy something, or have their favorite properties they hold out for. There are many strategies, but I have put this to the test many times and I haven't lost a game since. When I buy every single property I land on, the first time I land on them, I quickly grow a portfolio that is unstoppable. The longer you have the property, the more money you get in total (people land on your properties sometimes the first go around the board). Not every property you land on will be extremely lucrative. Some will be duds, but you can use them in negotiation and sell them to other players to get some quick cash. You can shell all this money out in the beginning because you don't have much money going out i.e. you aren't landing on expensive properties yet. You can be riskier when people haven't built up properties with super high tolls yet. This sounds like it is a short term play, but this is actually a long patient play. How does this relate to real life? How does this make me successful in real life? Let me explain.
Many of the richest people on earth amassed their riches through real estate, most from buying their properties early in their life. Imagine if you bought a house when you were 20 years old and rented it out. Let's say the house was $200,000 (It's much easier than you think, this could be done with as little as$0 - $6,000 out of pocket). You would get a 30 year mortgage on the property, your mortgage would be around $1,200 per month with all taxes and insurance included. Let's also say you could rent this house for $1,400. These are all conservative numbers. With inflation around 3% per year. Your house would be worth roughly $380,000 after your mortgage was paid off 30 years later. This isn't accounting for the $72,000 in cash flow you would receive over the last 30 years your house was rented out. $200 per month for 30 years. So after this 30 year period you would have an asset worth $380,000 in cash and you really didn't do much at all besides pay $6,000 for the thing.
Imagine you bought 1 per year. Imagine if you just had five of these, you bought one per year from ages 20-25. you would have $1.9 million dollars in assets (five houses worth $380,000 each) and you would've received $360,000 in cash flow in those previous 30 years. You would be 55 by the time they were all paid off since you bought your last one at 25. You could retire a multi-millionaire 10 years before society tells you that you should at age 65. Before you get too excited I'm going to explain the other side of the coin.
Yes you have five houses worth almost $2 million. But what if you didn't sell them and take the cash? After all, you have five houses mortgage free now. Let's say you decided to keep renting them out now that your mortgage is paid off and you don't have those bills. Inflation applies to rent as well, rents historically have raised about 3% each year bringing your $1,400 rent to $2,660 after year 30. Five houses renting for $2,660 each would bring you $13,300 per month in cash flow, or $159,600 per year. Does this get you excited? Imagine if you didn't stop at five houses, you did 10 or 20 or even 50! This is how real long lasting wealth is created. This is what Monopoly teaches you, buy up as much property as you can as early as possible and those properties will keep you fed for the entire game. To learn more about real estate and how you can do this for yourself in real life I suggest you read this book. It lines out the exact steps needed to take to create passive income through real estate without being a millionaire to start with. I hope after this article you've learned how to take down your friends in Monopoly, and take down the world in real life. Now, throw the board game away and get to work!
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