Australian Property Investor Rick Otton

Sometimes with human nature, when you engage in a process or something in life that’s too simple, the brain will go, ‘Well, it’s too simple. It can’t be that way’.

Sydney, Australia (PRWEB) May 23, 2013

In a new Creative Real Estate iTunes podcast, property investment strategist and author of ‘How to Buy a House for a Dollar’, Rick Otton, has revealed how it’s possible for aspiring investors to ‘live the dream’ even without real estate investment experience or financial capital.

In a detailed interview with one of his students, James Campbell Bruce, Mr Otton said anyone with persistence and gritty determination could get the gist of his out-of-the-box strategies.

“Sometimes with human nature, when you engage in a process or something in life that’s too simple, the brain will go, ‘Well, it’s too simple. It can’t be that way’,” Mr Otton said.

Mr Otton is renowned in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand for his unusual property investing methods.

For more than a decade, the property mastermind has been sharing his knowledge gained from personal experience, from transacting rent-to-buy situations and coaching people on how to invest in property with no deposit, to earning positive cash flow from day one.

A success story

Podcast caller, James Campbell Bruce, said he had managed to leave his Sydney-based full-time teaching job to run a property investment business within 13 months of committing to Mr Otton’s creative real estate investment strategies.

He said that at the time, he and his wife had hit a wall as property investors because banks would no longer provide finance to grow their portfolio.

“My goal was to try and live off passive income and I thought there had to be another way. I was lucky to see Rick at an event. As I went through the course, I learned a lot of and we were able to sell a property eight days after we finished boot camp. It was a good decision,” Mr Bruce said.

He said while his new property business typically negotiated win-win deals for a diverse range of scenarios such as negative equity and instalment contracts, it was important to be adaptable

Article source: http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10762876.htm

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Article source: http://bdaily.co.uk/creative/23-05-2013/little-known-secrets-of-web-design-london-company/

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Rick Otton Property Investment Strategies Accelerates Powerful Life Changes for Investors

PRWEB.COM Newswire

Sydney, Australia (PRWEB) May 23, 2013

In a new Creative Real Estate iTunes podcast, property investment strategist and author of ‘How to Buy a House for a Dollar’, Rick Otton, has revealed how it’s possible for aspiring investors to ‘live the dream’ even without real estate investment experience or financial capital.

In a detailed interview with one of his students, James Campbell Bruce, Mr Otton said anyone with persistence and gritty determination could get the gist of his out-of-the-box strategies.

“Sometimes with human nature, when you engage in a process or something in life that’s too simple, the brain will go, ‘Well, it’s too simple. It can’t be that way’,” Mr Otton said.

Mr Otton is renowned in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand for his unusual property investing methods.

For more than a decade, the property mastermind has been sharing his knowledge gained from personal experience, from transacting rent-to-buy situations and coaching people on how to invest in property with no deposit, to earning positive cash flow from day one.

A success story

Podcast caller, James Campbell Bruce, said he had managed to leave his Sydney-based full-time teaching job to run a property investment business within 13 months of committing to Mr Otton’s creative real estate investment strategies.

He said that at the time, he and his wife had hit a wall as property investors because banks would no longer provide finance to grow their portfolio.

“My goal was to try and live off passive income and I thought there had to be another way. I was lucky to see Rick at an event. As I went through the course, I learned a lot of and we were able to sell a property eight days after we finished boot camp. It was a good decision,” Mr Bruce said.

He said while his new property business typically negotiated win-win deals for a diverse range of scenarios such as negative equity and instalment contracts, it was important to be adaptable to each situation.

“It’s a case of getting in front of a buyer or seller and working out what they need, then working out which strategy is going to fit that need,” he said.

“Try and get rid of that mindset that everything has to be perfect from the start, like I did. You’ve just got to keep practising and learning.”

To hear this, and other free podcasts from Rick Otton visit CreativeRealEstate.com.au. Phone enquiries in Australia can be made on 1300 888 450.

About Rick Otton

Rick Otton has spent decades making money by snapping up inexpensive real estate and putting it to work building wealth, and teaching others to do the same.

He is the founder and CEO of We Buy Houses, which operates in the US, UK, Australia and New Zealand, and through

Article source: http://www.digitaljournal.com/pr/1263529

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Fidelis Screening Solutions is a leading provider in the background check and drug screening industry, and has just launched a new version of RentPrep, a popular landlord tenant screening solution.

The latest version includes a number of updates such as responsive design for mobile users and improved search features. These should all make their landlord brand the easiest to use in the competitive tenant screening market.

Stephen White, CEO of Fidelis Screening Solutions says “We are a young, forward-thinking company that actually woke up one day and realized we were missing the boat. In a sea of industry competitors, nobody is focusing their attention to what really matters; the landlord’s user experience. Our team built this new version from the ground up with the only goal of making RentPrep brand better than anything on the market today for tenant screening.”

Notable features in the new version include a responsive client area that enables reports to be ordered from any device, including smart phones and tablets. There is an improved home screen that is intuitively easy to navigate, and it’s now possible to search by the applicant’s name. The billing page allows invoices and receipts to be printed for orders, and everyone can now manage their credit cards online for a faster checkout. It’s also possible to add sub accounts, and this feature is ideal for anyone with multiple users or property management companies and enables everyone to access the same account with their own login credentials.

RentPrep 1.1 is scheduled to be released in June and will include even more features such as an affiliate section and live chat. The affiliate link allows clients to earn passive income for doing nothing more than giving out a link. Live chat will allow real-time support for ordering and navigating the site. The new version will also include a new support section that allows users to get answers on anything from FCRA questions to interpreting reports.

Rent Prep is a unique service in that it offers a blend of technology combined with FCRA Screener Intelligence providing the most accurate and relevant background checks available to property management companies and landlords.

Article source: http://realtybiznews.com/fidelis-screening-solutions-announces-launch-of-rentprep-v1-0/98721086/

Apple CEO says his company is a patriotic American company and complies with the law – and the spirit of the law – on tax

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/21/apple-ceo-tax-avoidance-senate-live

Today, Apple executives will testify before Congress about the details of their expansive tax-minimization system. 

Major tech companies exploit differences between taxation policies in different nations in order to pay as few taxes as possible. 

Apple isn’t the only one. In fact their competitor Microsoft has a massive system by which to avoid taxation, detailed in another Senate report from last September. 

American companies keep sixty percent of their cash overseas and untaxed, some $1.7 trillion, according to a U.S. Senate HSGAC Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations released in September 2012. 

That report used Microsoft as a case study for the leaps and bounds that U.S. corporations go through to minimize their tax exposure, and illustrate the current flaws with the international corporate tax regime.

The Senate investigation found that Microsoft reduced its 2011 federal tax bill by a whopping $2.43 billion — or 44 percent — by using a wide, international network of controlled foreign corporations and the exploitation of various loopholes in the U.S. corporate tax code. 

According to Microsoft, the company paid $3.11 billion in federal taxes in 2011. 

According to the full Senate report, Microsoft Corp does 85 percent of its research and development in the United States. Of its 94,000 employees, 36,000 are in product RD. The company had reported income of $23.2 billion, but with a federal tax liability of $3.11 billion only paid an effective federal tax rate of 13.4 percent. That’s much lower than the top statutory rate of 35 percent for corporations.

The way the group accomplished this is through a wide variety of foreign groups in tax havens like Ireland, Puerto Rico and Singapore, and by exploiting a recently updated tax loophole.

In fairness to Microsoft, they’re doing what nearly every other major technology company does. A Microsoft representative commented on the fiduciary responsibility to shareholders to maximize value.

The company accomplished this by selling the intellectual property rights for its retail businesses to different controlled companies in tax havens. 

The report found that Microsoft has three main revenue sources resulting from its intellectual property. The first is retail software which is comprised of the sale of products to consumers, retailers, and enterprise licenses to governments and businesses. The second is web products like Microsoft Bing and Xbox Live. The third is licensing to computer manufacturers who pre-install Microsoft on the products they sell.  

In the 1990s, Microsoft established three regional retail operating centers in Ireland, Puerto Rico and Singapore. These offices regionally oversee the first revenue stream, retail sales. The Ireland office oversees all retail operations in Europe, the Middle East, and Africa. Singapore oversees all operations in Asia, and Puerto Rico oversees all operations in North America. 

These three retail operation centers — plus Microsoft U.S. — all buy in to RD cost sharing pool, which in turn gives them the right to sell Microsoft products in their respective zones. Each sector pays a percentage of the $9.1 billion Research Development budget equivalent to their percentage of retail sales.

The Ireland office pays approximately

Article source: http://www.businessinsider.com/apple-microsoft-avoids-taxes-loopholes-irs-2013-1

Apple CEO says his company is a patriotic American company and complies with the law – and the spirit of the law – on tax

Article source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2013/may/21/apple-ceo-tax-avoidance-senate-live

Apple CEO Tim Cook went to Washington Tuesday, prepared to fire back after a Senate panel reported that the company famed for its iPhone and iPads was infamous for corporate tax avoidance.

Cook, Apple CFO Peter Oppenheimer and Phillip Bullock, the company’s head of tax operations, were scheduled to be the star witnesses testifying in a public hearing showdown with the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.

Along with defending Apple’s tax strategies, Cook is expected to propose a simplification of corporate tax laws that would encourage U.S. firms to bring foreign earnings back home for job creation and economic investment.

The expected testimony was to respond to the Senate panel’s scathing Monday report that said Apple avoided tens of billions of dollars in U.S. taxes on its income and profits by shifting the funds through a global web of offshore entities — including three that had no tax residency in any nation.

The three entities were run by some of Apple’s top executives but were located, on paper, in Ireland, though they in some cases had no employees. One reported $30 billion in net income for 2009-2012, yet filed no corporate tax return and paid no income taxes to any government during those years, according to the report.

Another affiliate received $74 billion in sales income over four years, but paid taxes “on only a tiny fraction of that income,” the report said.

Apple also transferred economic rights for some of its intellectual property to its offshore affiliates in low-tax jurisdictions, saving tens of billions of dollars in levies, the Senate panel concluded in its latest look at corporate tax avoidance tactics.

The company then went a step further by using U.S. tax loopholes to avoid federal taxes on $44 billion in otherwise taxable offshore income from the intellectual property rights during the last four years, the report said.

“Apple wasn’t satisfied with shifting its profits to a low-tax off-shore tax haven, Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the subcommittee chairman, said Monday evening. “Apple successfully sought the holy grail of tax avoidance. It has created offshore entities holding tens of billions of dollars while claiming to be tax resident nowhere.”

Arizona Sen. John McCain, the panel’s ranking Republican, said Apple “should not be shifting its profits overseas to avoid the payment of U.S. tax, purposefully depriving the American people of revenue.”

In written testimony filed with the subcommittee on Monday, Apple said “in accordance with U.S. law,” the firm “pays U.S. corporate income taxes on the profits earned from its sales in the U.S. and on the investment income of its controlled foreign corporations.”

Insisting it doesn’t use “tax gimmicks,” Apple said it does not move intellectual property to

Article source: http://www.usatoday.com/story/money/business/2013/05/21/apple-tax-hearing/2344351/

Fidelis Screening Solutions is a leading provider in the background check and drug screening industry, and has just launched a new version of RentPrep, a popular landlord tenant screening solution.

The latest version includes a number of updates such as responsive design for mobile users and improved search features. These should all make their landlord brand the easiest to use in the competitive tenant screening market.

Stephen White, CEO of Fidelis Screening Solutions says “We are a young, forward-thinking company that actually woke up one day and realized we were missing the boat. In a sea of industry competitors, nobody is focusing their attention to what really matters; the landlord’s user experience. Our team built this new version from the ground up with the only goal of making RentPrep brand better than anything on the market today for tenant screening.”

Notable features in the new version include a responsive client area that enables reports to be ordered from any device, including smart phones and tablets. There is an improved home screen that is intuitively easy to navigate, and it’s now possible to search by the applicant’s name. The billing page allows invoices and receipts to be printed for orders, and everyone can now manage their credit cards online for a faster checkout. It’s also possible to add sub accounts, and this feature is ideal for anyone with multiple users or property management companies and enables everyone to access the same account with their own login credentials.

RentPrep 1.1 is scheduled to be released in June and will include even more features such as an affiliate section and live chat. The affiliate link allows clients to earn passive income for doing nothing more than giving out a link. Live chat will allow real-time support for ordering and navigating the site. The new version will also include a new support section that allows users to get answers on anything from FCRA questions to interpreting reports.

Rent Prep is a unique service in that it offers a blend of technology combined with FCRA Screener Intelligence providing the most accurate and relevant background checks available to property management companies and landlords.

Article source: http://realtybiznews.com/fidelis-screening-solutions-announces-launch-of-rentprep-v1-0/98721086/