Our 'Transformation Tuesday' for this week is a large 4 bedroom, 3.5 bath home in Memphis, TN. With this large, 50+ year old home, we had a lot of repairs to do, including filling in a pool, tree removal, and refinishing the original hard wood floors. Check out these before and after pictures as we see how this updated 2-story home turns from overgrown to neat and charming.

When we think about real estate investment, and more importantly, success in real estate investment, we have to think about who we are serving as investors and management teams. That comes down to our renters.

When you consider your finances, what do you think about? Do you feel a sense of excitement, or does it provoke anxiety? Do you focus on savings, or scaling your wealth? Your mindset about money can say a lot about your potential for success.

This week we have another Memphis/Mississippi area 'Turnkey Transformation' for you! In addition to Memphis, Dallas, Houston, Little Rock, St. Louis and Oklahoma City, there are plenty of smaller, nearby markets that Memphis Invest has been able to enter in these sprawling cities. Mississippi provides plenty of opportunity for investors and residents to get the 'perks' of being near Memphis but still being in the outer suburbs of the metro area.

In real estate investment, scaling your portfolio is absolutely essential to your long-term investment success. We don't ride bikes with training wheels forever and we don't stay in the shallow end of the pool.

When we consider real estate investment, the important factors aren’t always home prices, interest rates, and realty data. While these things can provide insights, we can find a more rounded, telling picture when we look at the overall condition of a market. When we do a deep analysis of a market to determine whether or not it is worth bringing turnkey investment opportunities to our investors, for example, we look at a great many economic factors in our prospective markets.

We're in Houston for this week's Turnkey Transformation, where we have a 50-year-old home that gets quite the extreme makeover! You'll see a new roof, garage, floors, paint, fixtures and plenty of updates! Make sure you look at all our before and after pictures, there's a lot to see in this transformation!

As much concern as there seems to be about the state of the housing market at the end of the year and going into 2019, there is a more specific conversation to be had about the U.S. rental market. For buy-and-hold and turnkey real estate investors, this is perhaps the more pertinent discussion to be had.

The U.S. housing market is in a slump. 2019 is bringing with it a flurry of predictions and speculations, many of which have to do with the shifting environment. Are we due for a bubble burst? Unlikely. The conditions in which the housing market crashed in 2009 are wildly different than the conditions we're currently experiencing.

Who doesn't want to retire early?

Most of us feel like early retirement is out of reach, but that just simply isn't the case. It is only beyond reach if we allow it to be. With the right financial strategy, preparing for early retirement doesn't have to be difficult or intimidating.