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6 Ways Wealthy People Make Money With Debt

It’s essentially robbing your future self of money. A debt-free man is wealthy.

By Alin BoicuPublished 2 years ago 9 min read
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A Chinese proverb states that the man who is free of illness is happy.

On a fundamental level.

Since borrowing money, this is true debt, as most people are aware, and it causes financial difficulties.

However, we now live in a world where debt is virtually everywhere and a major part of our economy. Debt is used by everyone.

The difference is that some will benefit from it while others will abuse it. For many, the concept that debt can be beneficial is difficult to grasp because most of us are only familiar with one type of debt, which many people refer to as bad debt.

In order to understand the positive side of debt, these are debts that come out of your pocket with a high interest rate, such as credit card debts, car loans, and student loans, that will take years or even decades to pay off.

1. Commercial Debt

Most people see debt as a way to buy something they can’t afford to pay cash for, such as a car or a house, and they’ll spend years or decades paying it off to finally own what they bought. For wealthy people, debt is simply a tool that allows them to build something they can’t do on their own or help them accomplish things faster. For the wealthy, debt simply means more resources to grow and accomplish more.

If they don’t have the funds to buy them right now or prefer to save their money for other reasons, for example, Steve Jobs used debt to make his first big sale for Apple.

He was able to sell 50 Apple 1 computers to the Bytes Shop, a local computer store, but there was a problem.

He lacked the necessary components.

He needed to build those computers, but he didn’t have the funds to do so.

So he went to a computer parts company and asked if he could buy the parts on credit so he could build the computers despite his lack of credibility.

He had to show the store’s purchase order in order to get those parts on credit, which he did and completed the order, giving Apple their first $25,000 in the 1970s, which in today’s money would be around 115,000. Of course, if debt is used incorrectly, the amount would be around 115,000.

It may have a negative impact on our financial situation.

Many wealthy people spend time and resources learning about debt and how to use it. The second way many wealthy people use debt to make money is by adding leverage to their portfolios.

Most investors put their hard-earned money into an investment portfolio in order to grow it over time.

2. Use of leverage

Some people use leverage, which is when they use debt in their investment portfolios to increase their profits.

Let’s say our friend Tom is able to invest $100,000 in an investment portfolio that yields a ten percent annual return.

This means Tom will make a $10,000 profit on his friend’s investment.

Jerry also invests $100,000 in the same portfolio, but his account has a 35-percentage-point leverage.

This means he has a total of 135 000 in his portfolio, with 100 000 in his own money and 35 000 in debt, yielding a 10% market return. Jerry makes $13,500 instead of $10,000, bringing his return on investment to 13.5 percent instead of the standard 10%. This method, while able to produce higher returns, also carries higher risks.

Let’s say the market goes down 10% instead of up 10%. Tom will lose $10,000, but jerry will lose over $13,000 because jerry’s portfolio is technically larger than Tom’s. Although leverage is widely used by sophisticated investors and hedge funds to increase long-term profits, there are other ways investors use debt to make money even when markets are down.

3.Shorting

Investors can use a strategy known as shorting, in which institutions or individual investors do not borrow money.

Instead, let’s say you want to borrow stock from a brokerage firm because you think company x will go down in value.

As a result, he takes out a one-hundred-dollar loan on their stock. He now owes a hundred dollars for one share of company x, which this investor immediately turns around and sells for one hundred dollars on the open market.

He now has $100 in his pocket, which is fortunate for him.

His predictions turned out to be correct. After a major scandal involving mice in their kitchen, company x’s stock dropped 85 percent in a matter of days.

This means that shares are now worth $15.

So, out of the one hundred dollars, our investor takes fifteen dollars.

He takes the money he made from selling the stock in the first place and buys it back at a huge discount.

He pays the broker back for the stock he owes him and keeps the 85 dollars as profit, minus a small interest charge for borrowing the stock.

Many investors and institutions, such as hedge funds, profit from a falling market in this way.

This method is now extremely dangerous.

When you invest $100 in the stock market, the most you can lose is $100 if the company you invested in goes bankrupt, but when you short a stock, your losses can theoretically be infinite because there is no limit on how high a stock can go. For example, in the recent Gamestop debacle, a hedge fund heavily shorted the stock because it appeared the company was going bankrupt, but retail investors didn’t take that into consideration.

Kindly and purchased so much stock that the price of the stock skyrocketed. Within a year, the stock had risen over eleven thousand percent from its low point, causing hedge funds to lose over thirteen billion dollars.

4. Commercial real estate

There are other, more traditional ways for people to make money; for example, real estate is one of the most common ways that the average person uses debt to build wealth. Real estate allows an investor to purchase a property even if they do not have the funds to do so. This allows the investor to own a property and use it as a cash-flowing asset by borrowing funds.

They can take advantage of a larger asset.

They can have others pay their debts, build equity, and generate positive cash flow for them.

Those savvy investors can now use a few additional strategies to increase their wealth.

Assume we pay $300,000 for this property.

This property isn’t the nicest, but it’s in a great location and the local market is booming, so we put down forty thousand dollars as a down payment and finance two hundred and sixty.

So we decide to spend an extra $10,000 to fix it up and make it look nice because it’s in a great location and the market is rising, we decide to have our property reassessed and it’s now worth $360,000. With this new figure, we can go to our bank and refinance the property, add this additional $60,000 to our property’s equity, or cash it out, essentially borrowing from our own assets to invest in anot

5. Make Money Available For Investing

When interest rates are low, it is sometimes preferable to finance items we want to buy.

If you’re going to buy a car for $50,000 and can borrow the money at a 2% interest rate, it might be more cost effective to finance the car rather than pay cash.

If you invest $50,000 in the stock market, you will earn a ten percent annual return. You will receive a higher return on your investments than you will pay in interest.

For example, if you take out a five-year loan for your car with a 2% interest rate, you’ll end up paying $52,583 in total, including interest.

However, if you had invested those fifty thousand dollars in the stock market over those five years, it would have grown to eighty thousand five hundred and twenty five dollars, a profit of nearly twenty-eight thousand dollars made with debt.

6. Tax evasion

One of the most common ways wealthy people use debt now is to avoid paying taxes. When it comes to avoiding taxes, the wealthy are quite astute.

When you invest for retirement, you usually let your assets grow in value.

And once you have enough money to retire, you gradually sell your assets or use the cash flow from your assets to fund your lifestyle. However, this means that you will have to pay taxes on this money if you buy stocks or real estate properties and then sell them when you retire.

Let’s say you put in a lot of effort and now have a real estate portfolio worth $30 million.

You’re ready to kick back, retire, and enjoy the fruits of your labour.

So you sell a property for a 10 million dollar profit to fund your retirement. The sale of this property will result in a 2.3 million dollar capital gains tax to the federal government, plus an additional 1.3 million dollars in state taxes because you live in California.

This means you’ll owe $3,754,365 in capital gains tax.

So your ten-million-dollar profit has grown to six-million-dollar profit. As an investor, nearly 40% of your profits were lost to taxes. That doesn’t sound like a great plan.

So, rather than selling the property, you decide to borrow the $10 million and use your $30 million real estate portfolio as collateral, because debt is not income.

It is not subject to taxation.

As a result, you won’t have to pay capital gains tax on your millions.

You must now repay the money that you borrowed.

This is when wealthy people take advantage of a tax loophole known as the step-up basis to completely avoid paying taxes.

Normally, when you buy an asset that increases in value, you must pay capital gains tax on the profits you make, but when you use a step-up basis and pass your assets to your children, the asset’s starting value is adjusted to the current market value. For example, if you bought a property for $100,000 and it is now worth $400,000, you had a $300,000 gain and would have to pay taxes on that gain if you sold it, but when you use a step-up basis and pass your

They did not make any money.

To avoid paying taxes, you use your money to buy an asset, then borrow against that asset to finance your lifestyle, and at the time of your death, you pass down your assets to your children using the step-up basis, after which they can sell the assets with no tax consequences to pay off the debt. The benefit of this strategy, aside from avoiding taxes, is that because you did not sell your assets to pay for your lifestyle, the assets will appreciate in value.

So, rather than selling your assets, you end up with more money by borrowing. As you can see, debt isn’t always bad if used correctly; however, if used incorrectly, it can be detrimental to our finances. Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad’s Guide to Becoming Rich is an interesting book that touches on debt management and leverage.

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Alin Boicu

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