Buying a home is a huge financial decision, and a common mistake is focusing solely on the cost of the house rather than how you can best invest in your future success. While a real estate agent is an obvious lean-to during your decision making process, Ryan Stafford of PS Platinum believes the best agents are the people who know when to collaborate with outside resources. For this reason, Stafford teams up with the experts at 20/20 Financial to help you make informed choices about your new home as well as your financial future.
When working together, a real estate agent and a financial planner can walk you through some of the more difficult decisions when it comes to buying or selling a house:
- When should I sell?
- When should I buy?
- What are my long-term goals?
- How will these decisions impact my family or business?
- How much of my capital should be invested in real estate?
- How stable is my investment?
The Value of a Personalized Team
Real estate and investment go hand-in-hand; your decisions in one area can directly impact the other. When your realtor and your financial planner are working together as a team, you can begin to build a network of trusted advisors who are dedicated to realizing your goals. Once you consider real estate as yet another piece of your investment portfolio, the value of this group effort is clear.
How to Protect Your Assets
Stafford’s approach with 20/20 Financial is to facilitate constant collaboration with his client throughout the entire process of buying or selling a house. By collectively helping you clearly define your unique needs, goals, and expectations, Stafford can help support you in building a solid foundation for your future by:
- Understanding how you choose to allocate your assets: liquid cash, savings, life insurance, real estate, and external investments
- Identifying properties and opportunities that support your financial road map
Is My Primary Residence an Investment?
Real estate and investing become more intermingled when we look at a primary residence.
Stafford believes a property can be more than just the rock of your financial foundation; it can be the place you call home for the next twenty years; or it can represent an investment and a project you hope to turn around and sell for a profit.
While the approach will differ for each family depending on their unique needs, discussing the impact of both perspectives is extremely important to the homeowner. On one hand, we all want to have an established residence that is the rock of our overall lifestyle. No matter what happens, that home is there is protect and care for your family. On the other hand, a primary residence is often the largest investment a family will make, and likely one of the safest.
By bringing your real estate agent and financial planner together, you can define your goals and build your investment portfolio accordingly. More importantly however, you can rest easy knowing you have an expert team on your side, with a clear understanding of how to protect your most important asset and future goals.
Jumpstart the Real Estate and Financial Planning Collaboration
Want to learn more about the overlap between real estate investment and financial planning? Understand how your primary residence impacts the short and long-term goals of your future? Contact Stafford for more information and to jumpstart the process.
Or, watch the video Stafford and the 20/20 Financial team created to help their clients understand the collaboration and how it can benefit you as a home buyer or seller. You can find the first article in their series together here: