A fruit vendor in the Ubud market Jack Kurtz/Zuma Press. How did you find Bali? and What do you do all day? are the two most common questions asked of us. I am a retired lawyer from California; my husband is a vintner (plus many other things). We are both 68 years old, and most people cant wrap their minds around the change we made moving to Bali, Indonesia, seven years ago. As we approached retirement age, we kept a watchful eye for those places that were exotic, less expensive (we lived in California for 35 years) and comfortable for Americans. A top priority was warmth. We both grew up in Connecticut, and I spent four winters in Buffalo, N.Y., so we were done with cold and snow. We visited all the warm climates we could find on the globe. It was by chance that a client/friend asked me to visit her in Ubud, Bali. When I returned, I said to my husband, This may be it.

If you dont know where are you going, you ill end up someplace else– Yogi Berra In the previous edition, we have seen that # ONE in smart investment is managing greed. We learned how to manage greed in analyzing an opportunity, so that we can avoid emotional buying. We now know how to set our limit. In this edition, we will learn how to set our investment goal, so you can confident go ahead and end up where you want to be. Being in property business for many years, I have experienced that most property investors don’t know what they do, because they have no clear concept. Those people will say my purpose of the purchase is investment, but they are often not sure what investment really means for them. Whether the property will be re-sold, or if they should build, if they like to rent out, or subdivide and sell those smaller blocks.

In a gentle way, you can shake the world. - Mahatma Gandhi. 
I heard on occasions a question by my friends and clients from outside Ubud who want to buy a property in Ubud: Is it true, the local people can be annoying there ?. Well, Iam not a Balinese, nor am I coming from Ubud, therefore they feel free to ask me such question. I also heard a few less enchanting stories from foreigners living in Ubud, like: my local neighbor is a nightmare for me or they just want my money and similar ones. What happened actually? Who is wrong? Is the local community here sometimes really horrible? Or could it be the new comers behave inappropriately and are upsetting their neighbors, therefore have provoked a negative reaction? 
In my daily work, Iam dealing with my Balinese team from Ubud, with vendors and many of the local community. I found that all of my Balinese colleagues have a great personality.

Foreign tourist arrivals spiked 14.3 percent for the period of January to March 2014 compared to the same period in 2013 with a total of 831,625 tourists entering Bali. Travellers come mostly through Ngurah Rai Airport. Only 15,155 people arrived through sea ports aboard cruise ships, said Panusunan Siregar, the Head of Balis Central Statistics Agency (CSA). According to the CSA, for the year 2013 foreign tourist arrivals amounted to 3.27 million, this figure clearly exceeded the local governments target of 2.8 million. For the period between January and March this year, Australian arrivals topped all other nations with a total of 207,475, nearly 25% of the total number of arrivals. This itself was a 15.67 percent rise in the number of Australian foreign arrivals from the same period last year. Chinese arrivals increased by 50%

In the last edition we have discussed how we could become rich or get richer by buying and selling property, and the importance of selecting a property agent who can make your investment easy to handle and profitable. At the end of the last edition we also said that apart from the four levels of property investors as discussed, there is actually one more at whom we did not look yet. This is the pure investor, retiring young and rich without the need to sell his property, even getting a positive cash flow every month for living expenses and being able to buy more properties. Interesting, right? Now how does that work? In investing, there are two types of profit that can be earned by the investor, - capital gains and cash flow. Capital gain is the difference between positive sales minus purchase cost and expenses including taxes.