Despite all the best intentions, few people achieve their lofty goals. In fact, some studies suggest that fewer than 30 percent of New Year’s resolutions are kept! Most goal setting experts believe this is due to ignorance concerning how to set goals properly. So what can you do to minimize your chances of failure and maximize your chances of success to achieve your resolutions for 2010?

Before you have to deal with tenants, you must first purchase rental property. The first, and most important thing you need to do when getting involved in rental real estate is to buy right. If you don’t buy right, then you may be doomed to failure no matter how good a landlord you might be.

In order to sell properties, sellers are making concessions, such as lowering the asking price, providing home warranties, paying the buyer's closing costs, and offering seller financing. In this buyer's market, investors need to develop a clear exit strategy before they buy a property. To sell a property quickly, they need to sell it at a large discount, meaning that they must buy at an even bigger discount.

Intrinsic Value:

Intrinsic value or IV can be defined as the amount an option is in-the-money. The deeper in-the-money the option, the more IV it possesses. For a call option, the formula to calculate IV is: stock price minus strike price. For a put option, the formula is: strike price minus stock price. Let’s practice calculating IV on stock XYZ, currently trading at $50. Suppose the 45 calls are trading at $7.50. To calculate how much IV is in this call option, we would plug the stock price (50) and strike price (45) into the aforementioned formula: 50-45= 5. Thus the 45 strike call has $5 of intrinsic value. This should be quite intuitive as the option is indeed $5 in-the-money. Now let’s look at a put option by calculating the amount of IV in the 60-strike put, currently trading at $11.75. Once again just plug the stock price (50) and the strike price (60) into the put IV formula: 60-50 =10. There is $10 of intrinsic value in the 60 put because it is $10 in-the-money.

The overhead of running an eBay business is extremely low. Since eBay is a wildly popular site, you will not need to do too much to market yourself, at least not in the way of traditional advertising. Customers are already drawn to the site; therefore, you can just focus on catching their eye once they stumble across your listings. Additionally, with all the tools available to eBay sellers, you will likely be able to effectively run a profitable business without needing to hire employees, at least in the early stages.

In reality; however, creative financing simply means finding an alternate way to solve a financing problem. When faced with a challenge in financing a property, choose the easiest path to the finish line. The goal is to get the deal completed and make some money, not to impress yourself and your fellow investors by using complex techniques.

I knew a Realtor who was putting two to three properties under contract a week, yet had fewer than one closing per month. This was because he expected the deals to close themselves. He finally realized that a signed contract does not guarantee that a deal will close. Once he began to understand the amount of work involved in taking a contract from signature to closing, his income skyrocketed.

The inexpensiveness of the options may be alluring inexperienced traders into thinking they are cheap, thus an obvious buy. The reality is just because an option is inexpensive, it doesn’t mean it’s cheap.

For example, on April 26, BAC was trading around $9.40 and the May 12.50 calls were trading at $.37. There’s no doubt that $.37 for an option is inexpensive, but is it cheap? Well, let's look at the facts. We have a mere three weeks to expiration and BAC would have to rise to $12.87 just for you to breakeven (assuming you hold to expiration). That’s a 37 percent move in a very short period of time. This suggests that the 12.50 calls are trading at a very high-implied volatility, as an option trading for $.37 that far out-of-the-money with three weeks left would have to be. Under a lower-volatility scenario, those 12.50 calls may only be trading around $.05. So the bottom line is you can’t look at an options price to determine if it’s cheap. You have to take into account its strike price, time to expiration, and current levels of implied volatility. Oftentimes when implied volatility is pumped up too high, inexpensive out-of-the-money options can rise to unjustifiably high prices.

It goes without saying that a good real estate education is vital to one’s success. Successful real estate investors know the basics, and are continually getting additional education and learning new skills and tactics. In the past, one had to learn the basics from another investor or from the school of hard knocks. In today’s world, there are numerous educational and coaching programs that can teach you the basics of real estate investing in record time. Take advantage of all the education you can get. Novice investors are prone to making costly mistakes that those who have received proper preparation are easily able to avoid. You can save yourself a lot of time and money by learning from the mistakes that others have made in the past.

There have been a multitude of definitions for entrepreneurship. Wikipedia.org describes entrepreneurship as:

The Making Home Affordable Program is really two separate programs: the Home Affordable Refinance Program (HARF) and the Home Affordable Modification Program (HAMP). HARF is set up to give four to five million homeowners with loans owned or guaranteed by Fanny Mae or Freddy Mac an opportunity to refinance into more affordable and long-term stable loans.