Lili Invests Blog

What's up everybody? My name is Lili Thompson and welcome to the Lili Invests website. This is where I'm documenting my real estate investing journey alongside my Lili Invests Youtube channel.

One of my biggest goals in life is to support myself and my family financially through my own businesses and through passive income. That's why I started educating myself and investing in real estate.

There are a bunch of real estate “gurus” out there, but that’s not me. I started out as just a normal 24 year old sharing my journey with you guys.

My first videos on this channel were about the end of my basketball career due to a torn ACL and the global panini in March 2020.

My whole life I'd been an athlete and with that taken away from me, I felt kind of lost. I even thought about switching sports and trying to go pro in golf until the stay-at-home orders took effect.

And I found myself spending more and more time at home feeling like the world...

What's up guys? My name is Lili and I've been posting consistently to my Lili Invests YouTube channel for over 2 years. Now my channel has 185,000 subscribers, 267 videos, and almost 7 million views!

My channel is all about my journey to financial freedom through real estate investing.

Today I wanna talk about the mindset behind starting a YouTube channel because as my journey has shown, if you're able to step outside of your comfort zone, there is a big opportunity for starting a YouTube channel and it could quite possibly change your life.

Not only is YouTube the second biggest search engine on the planet, but video content is very quickly becoming the number one way people get their education, connection, and entertainment. Think about if you need to learn how to change a tire, you're probably gonna go watch a video about it rather than reading an instruction manual.

Same thing often goes for a lot of things that we're doing in our day-to-day life: people rather watch...

Today I'm...

Have you tried to estimate rehab costs with no experience before? It's not easy right? Here on this blog I help real estate investing beginners learn to invest in real estate.

This post shows how to estimate rehab costs. Running the numbers and estimating rehab can be one of the toughest parts of doing wholesale or BRRRR real estate. 

So I’m looking at a property that is in pretty distressed condition, and I want to show you guys how I run the numbers. As we walk through, I'm going to show you how I use my new rehab calculator to estimate the rehab as I go through.

Now, this is for those of you that aren't contractors and who may not have a bunch of construction experience, but still want to be confident when you're running your numbers. 

And then I'm also going to tell you how I can teach you to run comps so that way you'll have the two most important numbers.

You'll have confidence in your rehab estimate as well as your ARV. So I'm gonna show you how I use the...

Unless you live under a rock, you know that the housing market is going insane and good deals are getting harder and harder to find. So why is it that we spend our hard-earned money driving for dollars or skip tracing properties, and then we don't even keep track of the leads we actually make contact with?

Or when we finally do get up the nerve to cold call, we talk to someone who's interested and wants us to call them back in a few days, but then we lose their contact info in a mess of sticky notes and random papers?

You know what I'm talking about. The cost of a disorganized business is higher than you think, and I don't know for sure but I can guess that throwing away money isn't part of your business plan.

If it keeps happening, you're gonna run out of cash sooner rather than later. I realized that I was in this exact situation a few weeks ago.

In today's post, I want to show you guys what I did to change it and stop the bleeding. This is my first time cold calling homeowners...

I'm sharing an opinion that is probably a little controversial in the real estate investing world, and it has to do with some recent government tax changes, real estate investing changes, all that good stuff. I've seen a lot of real estate and investing YouTubers here talking about this change, and I kind of disagree with most of them.

But what we're going to do today is, we're going to watch Graham Stephan's latest video talking about this change, and i'll share my thoughts as he kind of is explaining how everything is working.

Graham: So a few days ago, I made a video discussing my thoughts on the new personal tax increases along with an analysis of how that would affect the stock market.

However, I purposely left out one crucial point which has the power to completely change the landscape of real estate investing and home ownership, because honestly it deserves its own video. 

And that brings us to today.

In the middle of one of the most heated housing markets of all time,...

This is not your typical business advice.

Everyone tells you to write a business plan, start an LLC, design a logo, throw it on some merch, talk about it on Instagram, and put your head down and grind because money doesn't grow on trees.

They're wrong, money does in fact grow on trees. There are five types of money trees, and today I'm going to show you how to plant seeds and start growing one of your own. In fact, to prove to you how much I believe in this strategy, I'm starting a brand new business in the same way.

I documented my very first real estate deals on this channel. I'm going to be documenting that business and all of the failures and all the successes starting with this post.

Today's post takes us from zero to five hundred dollars, and if you follow along with this series it might just take you from day one of your business to Financial Freedom.

If you're really about it, let's go! I recently read a book called “The Millionaire Fastlane,” and it got...

If you're like me, you'd probably really enjoy a scenario where you're sitting back watching TV and you get a notification on your phone that you just had a deposit to your bank account for some work that you did months ago.

That's passive income, and it sounds like a dream right? 

Well, there are a lot of videos here on YouTube telling you all types of scammy unrealistic things to do to get a little bit of extra money.

But today, I'm gonna put y'all on some free game and tell you exactly what has put over a thousand dollars into my bank account passively. And it only took a little bit of upfront work that I did in one weekend.

It's something that I know anyone can do.

So when I first started researching how to make passive income online, I came across a lot of scammy stuff, unrealistic stuff, and things that were very time consuming. 

Maybe you've run across similar things, surveys that you can take, or videos that you can watch but they only end up paying out a couple of...

The Zillow vs. Redfin debate is kind of like the Apple vs. Android debate.

One is much much more popular but they kind of cut corners and it's kind of all about that name recognition. Whereas the other one actually might have some really good features that you're missing out on.

When you just go with the big name, the split between the two isn't that exact, but let's go ahead and dive into it.  

One of the tools that I use a lot is Redfin, and a lot of people ask me why don't you use Zillow, or can you use Zillow, and yes for most things you could do either or on Zillow.

But today I just want to break down the difference between the two, and what I like more for different parts of the investing and wholesaling process. I think that these are two really good free alternatives to PropStream.

Now PropStream is definitely going to take you to another level, but PropStream is $97 a month, so I recommend that you get started using Redfin or Zillow. 

And if you want to try...