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      Top Destinations:

      Whether you’re looking for fun and sun, a peaceful retirement, or the chance to earn some extra income, you’ve got a real world of opportunity open to you… In short, we’ve done our best to narrow down your best options, but only you can decide the right country for you.

      • Spain
      • Portugal
      • Panama
      • Belize
      • Colombia
      • Cyprus
      • Mexico
      • France
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      • Browse All Countries

      Best For:

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    • Budgets

      How Much Will It Cost You To Live Overseas?

      The only honest answer is, we have no idea. And neither does anyone else. The only one who can answer that question is you. Here’s the most important thing to understand about budgeting your new life overseas…

      Super Cheap

      • Chitré, Panama
      • Santa Marta, Colombia
      • Phuket, Thailand
      • Dumaguete, The Philippines

      Cheap

      • Medellin, Colombia
      • Boquete, Panama
      • Kyrenia, Cyprus
      • Hua Hin, Thailand
      • The Algarve, Portugal

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      Home Real Estate

      How You Make Your Fortune In Real Estate

      by Lief Simon
      Jun 19, 2024
      in Real Estate
      0 0
      Eiffel tower between Parisian tenement old street alley and buildings

      AdobeStock/FreeProd

      I didn’t start my investment career overseas. My investing journey began at home.

      I bought my first investment property in the United States.

      It was 1995, and I bought a three-flat building in Chicago. I was renting an apartment in another three-flat, and the owners told us they were selling the building. Until that moment, I hadn’t been thinking about buying a house, let alone a multi-unit building.

      But I liked the apartment where we were living, so I began looking into whether it would be possible for me to buy the building. I started to educate myself, running numbers, speaking with mortgage lenders, checking the prices of other buildings, and trying to understand the market.

      While the negotiations didn’t work out for the building where we’d been living (that really was a great apartment… designed by Frank Lloyd Wright), the seed had been planted.

      I found another building that met all my parameters…

      Friends and family all thought it was a bad idea to buy. Too risky.

      Why was someone as young as I was at the time—in my 20s—just starting out, thinking about making such a big property purchase?

      With the help of a $5,000 loan from my first wife’s parents, I put a down payment on that three-apartment building.

      It turned out to be one of the best investments I ever made.

      I sold the building less than three years later for a leveraged return of 3,000%, turning my $5,000 down payment into $150,000 in profit after closing costs and commissions. I’d sold it for almost double what I’d paid.

      I’d run the numbers and knew that building was a great prospect. There was some risk—for example, if the property lay vacant and we couldn’t get renters. But for me, it was worth taking the risk because of the potential upside…

      It worked out.

      With that willingness to take that risk early in life, I was able to achieve my ambition to become a millionaire by age 35, and my net worth has grown and grown since.

      I’ve applied the same principles from that first investment to my investments since then.

      I study the market… I run the numbers… and if the numbers stack up, I buy.

      By looking overseas, I’ve been able to find opportunities to grow my wealth that I never would have found back home…

      With that “nut” from my Chicago investment, I was able to purchase (along with Kathleen) a property in Ireland… which, thanks to Ireland’s strong property market, we were also able to eventually sell for more than three times our investment.

      My next real estate investment was in Spain. I bought a pre-construction apartment on the beach.

      Again, I was looking for an opportunity where the numbers stacked up…

      I spent 10 days traveling the entire southern coast of Spain looking at real estate and speaking with a dozen developers and agents.

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      By the time I got to Estepona on the south end of the Costa del Sol, I had seen a lot of properties—most of them crap.

      The developer I met in Estepona had released a new beachfront project the day before I’d arrived. His group didn’t even have their sales office set up at the property yet. They were working out of their main admin office down the road.

      We visited the site, I looked at the plans and prices, and I was ready to invest.

      This was the best opportunity I’d seen on the entire trip… and because it was pre-construction, the initial capital outlay for the deposit wasn’t much.

      I called my wife, Kathleen. She’s a fairly conservative investor. Her first reaction was to tell me I was crazy to be thinking about investing in Spain… in a pre-construction project. What did we know about buying pre-construction real estate in Spain?

      While a 10-day trip couldn’t be called an all-encompassing education in Spanish real estate, it was enough, as I explained to Kathleen, for me to know a good deal when I saw one.

      She begrudgingly agreed to buy a unit because I was there and she wasn’t. She had to trust my instincts.

      And, in the end, she sure was glad she did.

      That purchase falls into the top 10 of my more than 60 real estate investments over the years. The developer sold the apartment for me before it was completed. The returns were almost 100% profit over the less than two years that I held the property.

      Other great deals I’ve invested in over the years include…

      • 80% profits in just eight months in Romania. Thanks to my legwork and my contacts on the ground, I spotted a market in Eastern Europe that was set to rise—before most anyone else was looking. Before I could begin the renovations I planned, a buyer came to me… cash in hand… and I almost doubled my money…
      • 20% net yields and 100% appreciation in Panama. This home-run purchase at one of the best addresses in downtown Panama City has provided double-digit cash flow as both a short-term and a long-term rental. Today, it is worth more than twice what I paid for it and serves as Kathleen and my personal pied-à-terre as we come and go for business and pleasure from the Hub of the Americas…
      • 50% appreciation in less than a year and a half from a coastal pre-construction buy in Cyprus. This recent investment is on track to bring me a greater return than my pre-construction win in Spain…

      This, essentially, is how you make your fortune in real estate… how I made my fortune.

      My personal research and my trusted contacts have helped me see more overseas real estate returns like that over the years…

      As I wrote in my previous book, “Buying Real Estate Overseas For Cash Flow (And A Better Life),”

      “How do you get rich investing in real estate overseas? You make one purchase in a market generating decent yields. Rent it, setting aside the excess cash flow each month, until the property’s value has appreciated to a level where it makes sense to sell. Roll over the accumulated rental income and the capital gain into a next property in a next market.

      “Do this until you’re accumulating enough excess cash flow that you can afford to buy a next investment without selling one you already own.

      “Continue in this way, on and on, until, in time, you’re a bona fide global property baron earning enough cash flow to fund a life of travel and the retirement of your dreams.”

      This is the lifestyle of the New American Pioneer…

      Stay diversified,

      Lief Simon signature

      Lief Simon

      Editor, Simon Letter

      Tags: 'Diversification Offshore''Global Property Investing''real estate overseas'Cowboy Millionaire Book
      Share83Tweet52
      Lief Simon

      Lief Simon

      Lief Simon has lived and worked in 7 countries on 5 continents and traveled to more than 75 countries. His real estate investment career began with a $5,000 down payment on a three-flat building in Chicago. Less than three years later, Lief sold the building for a leveraged return of 3,000%—$150,000 in profit after closing costs and commissions.

      From there, he turned his attention overseas and has bought property in 24 countries including France, Croatia, Portugal, Ireland, Belize, Spain, Argentina, Cyprus, Romania, and beyond. Thanks to his decades-long career as a global property investor, Lief has built a multi-million-dollar portfolio that includes rental properties, significant land holdings, and 7 personal residences.

      Lief has established residency in 3 countries and acquired a second passport from Ireland.

      In 2008 Lief and wife Kathleen Peddicord made the most important investment of their lives—a 215-acre oceanside finca, known as Los Islotes. There, on Panama’s largely undiscovered Veraguas coast, they’ve installed underground electricity, water, and internet and built a forever family home that sits at the heart of their ultimate vision: a gold standard private residential community for those in search of a true safe haven escape.

      Lief’s latest book, “Cowboy Millionaire—The New American Pioneer,” collects all the wisdom he has learned in three decades of living and investing outside America.

      He offers advice on international diversification in his twice-weekly Offshore Living Letter and monthly Simon Letter dispatches. For real estate investment opportunities, check out his monthly Global Property Advisor service.

      If you’d like to meet Lief in person, join him for one of our upcoming in-country conferences. You’ll find further details here.

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      • Boquete, Panama
      • Kyrenia, Cyprus
      • Hua Hin, Thailand
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