Loan is disadvantaged to Cash but Limited !

In an earlier article, a myth was broken where it says "getting loan will Decrease your liquidating options" so if you have the cash to buy the whole thing, you should go ahead and buy it and NOT getting a loan. Because once you get a loan, you will end up disposing your item Slower and get back Less worth - which is the opposite of liquidation.

That message has disturbed a lot of old friends who have been using loan successfully in their property investment. They have been borrowing loan in their investment for more than 10-20 years and almost always successful getting back a bigger return as a result of the loans. If loan is not a good thing or not liquidating, what has happened in the past 10-20 years, they just got lucky ?

Loan or any form of effective borrowing,

is a leverage tool.

Lets take a look at the same example used in last article; You have the option to buy an property for $100,000 and you could also get a loan where the interest is 5% for the next 10 years. Below spreadsheets show a few calculations;

The left most column in bold under "sell direct" mean if you bought with cash earlier and sell now, you would have get back this much money after the appreciation or depreciation.

The right most column in bold under "sell with loan" mean if you got the loan in the beginning, then this is what you get back in net after deducting the remaining capital.

The most important column in this article is the 2nd column from the left under "no loan - loan". It shows the difference of buying with cash vs buying with loan. If it is a positive number, it means buying with cash has an advantage earning or saving against buying with loan.

Below show 2 cases where the property could have appreciate or depreciate 10% a year ...

Case 1 : Item "appreciate" 10% a year

Case 2 : Item "depreciate" 10% a year

If you focus on the numbers in 2nd columns, they stay the same. It doesn't matter if your item increase or decrease in value, the differences between buy with cash and buy with loan are the same.

If your item appreciate, buying with loan will earn $5,000 less.

If your item depreciate, buying with loan will less $5,000 more.

It may still seems like a disadvantage to some readers up to here. But it actually is limiting the strategical cost of a transaction. No matter how the market goes, the person who got a loan will only lose $5,000 comparing to those who bought with cash earlier. In order words, the strategical cost of getting a loan is $5,000 for the 1st year.

You may also observe that this strategical cost is decreasing over the years. 2nd year the difference is less than $10,000 ( $5,000 x 2 ) and 3rd year is even less than $15,000 etc.

Limiting strategy cost no matter how the market goes is a very powerful situation in investment.