Hi, this is Kyle and Kenny from In A Day Development. We’ve been cash flow investors, primarily focusing on rental real estate and notes, for about four years, so you could call us newbies. However, we’ve had our fingers on the pulse of technology since we could operate a keyboard. We’ve both been avid programmers since childhood, and we’ve been programming professionally for over three decades if you put both of us together.
We frequently attend investor events, and we’re always approached with questions regarding technology, web sites, software, the Internet, mobile apps, and other related topics. Though we don’t (yet) have the long decades of experience through which our teachers and mentors have developed their skills, knowledge, and expertise, we have tried hard to leverage technology in our investing.
The most frequent question we’re asked is ‘iPhone® or Android®?’ and the answer is ‘You can get great devices from either one’. If you’re thinking of getting a tablet (which we recommend), we’d recommend sticking with the one that most closely matches your phone – if you’ve got an Android phone, look into Android tablets. If the iPhone is your thing, then the iPad® is for you. Why? If you stick with the same platform, you won’t have to buy all of your apps again – as long as you use the same username, the apps you’ve purchased from the Apple® App Store or Google® Play can be installed on as many devices as you want. Also, the ways you use your Android tablet will make more sense to you if you’re used to your Android phone, and if you’re good at working your iPhone, then the learning curve when picking up the iPad is very shallow.
That said, we were early adopters of iPads, having had iPhones for several years and having written apps for both iPhones and iPads for more than three years. We both have iPads and we use their awesome capabilities in our daily lives to enhance our investing. A computer is only as good as the software installed on it, though, and here are some of our favorite apps:
Sign-My-Pad and DocuSign Ink let you read and sign documents, like real estate offers, without wrestling with printers, scanners or fax machines. Aside from the simple economy of not spending money on paper and ink, we can turn our offers around much faster and get contracts signed wherever we are – the 3G/4G Internet access allows us to send, receive and do business anywhere. Even better, you can avoid hand cramps by saving signatures and initials within the app. DocuSign Ink is free, and it has available in-app purchases which unlock additional signatures for a nominal fee. Sign My Pad is $3.99 with additional signature slots available for purchase. There’s a ‘Pro’ version available for $19.99, as well.
10bii Financial Calculator is a fantastic financial calculator, inspired by the Hewlett-Packard® 10bII. This might seem like a plug for our own product, but the fact that we rely upon this app for analyzing our own deals means that we have a serious incentive to make it the very best it can be. From saved TVM (Time Value of Money) transactions to PDF amortization schedules, to a simplified uneven cash flow investing interface, to the app drawing cash flow diagrams, to the Easy Modes which work like ‘wizards’ for common calculations, we use this app every day… and so do a lot of other investors. The 10bii Financial Calculator costs $5.99.
Redfin®, Realtor.com®, Zillow® and other similar apps give us information about properties that are active, pending, or closed, and let us research our target farms and specific properties. These apps tend to be free.
Gmail is a free app from Google that lets you access your Gmail inbox, including your labels and archived mail. The built-in Mail app will let you send and receive email via Gmail as well, but the specialized Gmail app provides some extra features. It can alert you when new emails have arrived in your inbox, and it has a ton of very nice features. If you’re not a Gmail user, this app won’t do you much good, but you owe it to yourself to try it out, as it’s an excellent mail system with some fantastically innovative features.
Dropbox, Google Drive, and SugarSync are free apps that allow you to store files in the cloud so they can be accessed from anywhere. You can drop a file into your Dropbox on your desktop computer and it is available on your mobile device instantly. You can allow others access to the files to make collaboration easier or you can keep them private –, it’s up to you. In fact, we wrote this article on Google Drive so we could collaborate easily and then just share it with The Norris Group rather than sending a word processing document via email. Being ‘somewhere else’ when our files are ‘at home’ is a real pain, and so is only being able to find an old version of a document that you know you’ve done more work on these apps and their corresponding web sites (which let you upload your files from your computer, or create them right on the site in the case of Google Drive) are a key part of our technology-based investing strategy.
Google is our preferred search engine, and the free Google app for iPad is a great front-end to Google’s indispensable service. If you have a question, Google probably has the answer.
There are so many more awesome apps out there, and we’re working on more iPad apps to enhance our own investing efforts. If you think you could get at least some benefit from a tablet computer, we’d recommend getting one. On the other hand if you’ve already got one and you know of a killer app that we’ve missed, please drop us a line at TheTeam [at] InADayDevelopment.com and let us know about it.
Happy investing!
Kyle Humfeld and Kenny Wyland,
In A Day Development
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