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What Will Your Retirement Look Like?
Planning for retirement raises many questions. Have you considered how much it will cost, and how you’ll generate the income you’ll need to pay for it? For many, these questions can feel overwhelming, but answering them is a crucial step forward for a comfortable future.
Start by understanding your goals, estimating your expenses and identifying potential income streams. The Definitive Guide to Retirement Income can help you navigate these essential questions. If you have $1,000,000 or more saved for retirement, download your free guide today to learn how to build a clear and effective retirement income plan. Discover ways to align your portfolio with your long-term goals, so you can reach the future you deserve.
An Overlooked, Yet Important Factor in Rental Property Due Diligence
Roger’s Rules are drawn from 2,000+ transactions and lessons learned at the Church of the Painful Truth. I’m the Associate Pastor, a position earned by having made nearly every mistake available to an investor. I write these because I hope to never see you there.
There is a river of money flowing through the rental property business.
It moves from tenants to landlords, from buyers to sellers, from borrowers to lenders. It’s been flowing for centuries and will keep flowing long after we’re gone. Your job—our job—isn’t to invent the river. It’s simply to step into it—with buckets.
Which means the first question isn’t cap rate.
It isn’t cash flow.
It isn’t even price.
The first question is whether there’s any water where you’re standing.
Some markets have made it their civic mission to divert that river away from landlords. Tenant-friendly eviction rules. Rent control ordinances. Local judges who treat state law as a friendly suggestion rather than binding instruction.
These aren’t abstract policy debates. They are direct taxes on your time, your money, and your sanity—collected when you’re already under stress, by people who will never factor your interests into the equation.
Here’s how it plays out in real life.
You have a non-paying tenant. The statute is clear. You follow the process. You show up in court with your documentation clean and complete. And a local magistrate—who in some jurisdictions is not required to be a lawyer, or even particularly familiar with the law, only popular enough to win an election—decides to “cut the tenant a break.”
Maybe it’s a technicality.
Maybe it’s compassion.
Maybe it’s just Tuesday.
Now you have a choice. Accept the ruling and keep bleeding. Or appeal—spending more money, more time, and more months of rent you’ll never collect. Either way, you lose.
The river didn’t disappear.
You just wandered into a drainage ditch and mistook it for a channel.
Here’s the rule: you don’t have to stand there.
There are plenty of landlord-friendly markets where the law means what it says, courts apply it consistently, and the process—while never pleasant—works the way it was designed to work. Getting to those markets isn’t harder than buying into the hostile ones. It just requires asking the right questions before you close instead of after.
The best intelligence costs nothing.
Show up at a local real estate investor meeting and ask. Experienced landlords will tell you exactly which counties, which courthouses, and sometimes which judges to avoid. This information is hyper-local, current, and vastly more reliable than any state-level summary you’ll find online.
The same logic applies to rent control. If a municipality has decided to cap rents, that decision was made without you and will be enforced without your consent. Other municipalities made no such choice. Go there instead.
I am not suggesting you change the world.
The politicians who created these conditions are not coming to your rescue. Your losses are, at best, an acceptable rounding error in their math.
The river is long.
Find the stretch with water in it.
Step in.
Let it flow.
You can’t take a riverboat cruise in a drainage ditch.
Will Your Retirement Income Last?
A successful retirement can depend on having a clear plan. Fisher Investments’ The Definitive Guide to Retirement Income can help you calculate your future costs and structure your portfolio to meet your needs. Get the insights you need to help build a durable income strategy for the long term.
The best HR advice comes from those in the trenches. That’s what this is: real-world HR insights delivered in a newsletter from Hebba Youssef, a Chief People Officer who’s been there. Practical, real strategies with a dash of humor. Because HR shouldn’t be thankless—and you shouldn’t be alone in it.
