Free Real Estate Tracker Printable

Hello everybody! I’m writing to you from the Time of Corona, Scary Stock Market, and Fears of a Recession.

Some of you are in isolation and may have a lot more free time lately. Others are taking care of your children much more than normal and probably feeling pretty appreciative of teachers right now. Some of you may be like me, continuing to work full time at my squadron while also dealing with All Of This.

What a year the last few weeks have been, eh?

I know that people are worried and unsure about what the future holds. I know that worry can lead people to make bad decisions.

I’m not here to tell you what to do. But I do want to do what I can to reduce the doom and gloom.

So for that, I introduce to you a new printable Real Estate Tracker. Something that will help put a positive spin on the financial things, even if it feels like everything else around you is in a tailspin. Because folks, tracking your net worth right now might not feel like the most positive thing in the world. I know, trust me. But if you can stop doing that for a bit and reframe how you are looking at things, you will see it’s not all bad.

I mean, it’s plenty bad. You just don’t need to add to it. covid-19 is doing plenty of that on its own.

On with the post!

The Military Dollar Real Estate Tracker

What’s special about this tracker? Well…

• It can be used to track multiple things
• It shows what you own (which only goes up unless you sell) vs what your net worth is (which may be experiencing some wild fluctuations right now!)
• And it involves coloring. Think that sounds juvenile? Wait until you are on day 17 of lockdown

I’m trying to get this out quickly, so I’m not going to write an essay on why this tracker is awesome. None of us needs that right now, amiright? Instead I’m just going to explain how to use it.

Some things that apply to the tracker regardless of use:

On the left side of the tracker is a way to track your progress by date and amount. The date part is obvious. Each time you update the tracker, you’ll write in the date you did it. The amount section will vary based on what you are using the tracker to track. I’ll discuss that more below when I discuss each use.

The “foundation” of the house is a large blank area where you can fill in what exactly you are tracking. I wanted to make it easy for people to document that in case they are using multiple trackers for different things.

The tracker relies on you coloring in bricks to visually show how you are adding to your real estate portfolio. The more bricks you color in, the more you have.

The doors, windows, roof? Personally I think you should just color those in right away to get started. But another idea would be to use them for major things. Like maybe one brick equals paying off $2000 on your mortgage, but you fill in one of those large elements as a bonus every time you make a lump sum payment of $5000 or more. I’ll leave that up to you.

The Real Estate Tracker has 126 full bricks

I counted 126 bricks on this house. That’s because I’m not counting any brick that is less than half the normal brick size. See how the brick layout means you have some “bricks” that are 1/2 the normal size or even smaller? And how some are just small fractions of a full size brick? I didn’t want to count those because I thought it’d be confusing…is a 1/4 “brick” worth the same amount? If not, how much is it worth? I decided to just count the bricks where most or all of the brick is showing to keep it simple.

Want more bricks?

I left the smaller bricks uncolored in case you decide you want to use them. Maybe you want to count higher than 126. Maybe you want small bricks to represent something else. I left it up to you.

Personally, I recommend not counting the small bricks and instead filling them in right away. Think of it like the “FREE” space on a  bingo card (thanks for the idea, Josh!). Filling in those “free spaces” at the beginning gives you some immediate motivation when looking at the tracker. And, let’s face it, investing in real estate in the first place is an important first step. I say, give yourself credit for that first step by filling in the small bricks.

Now on to how to use the tracker. But first, click on the tracker or this link to download it and print it for your own use. No cost, no email address required. It’s free for your use. I hope it helps you remember that scary news doesn’t take away everything you’ve worked hard to achieve.

Use #1: Track Mortgage Paydown

This is the use that will apply to the most amount of people. It’s also the one that requires the most work to fill out (not much, I promise!) so it’ll take a bit longer to explain.

Those of you who’ve been following me since the beginning may remember the post where I showed how I track my mortgage paydown. I still love that method, but it’s pretty labor intensive to “build” a house that actually matches your house’s footprint. This Real Estate Tracker is a lot simpler and can be used by a wide variety of people.

For this one, I recommend the “Amount” section represent the remaining balance on your mortgage.  You will have to do a little math here. Basically, the “Amount” section should show an ever decreasing balance. But you want to fill in an increasing number of bricks, right?

What you will do is subtract the remaining mortgage balance from either the purchase price of the house or the mortgage amount (your choice). You do not want to use the current value of the home, because that constantly varies and doesn’t achieve the goal of this tracker. So either pick the purchase price or the mortgage amount and use that consistently. In this example, I’m going to use the purchase price for a fictional house that has a $265,000 mortgage on a 0% down loan (no other costs are rolled into the mortgage).

Instructions for filling in the real estate tracker for mortgage paydown

Start by dividing the starting amount by 126 to get the per-brick amount. If you want to use the smaller bricks, count out the ones you plan to use and use that number.

$265,000 divided by 126 = $2103.18 (slightly rounded up)

That amount goes into the “One brick =” section.

Then, each time you check your mortgage balance you would fill in the “Date    Amount” section with the current data. Self explanatory.

Here’s the real math: Take the remaining balance and subtract it from the original amount (mortgage or purchase price, whichever you are using).

$265,000 minus $166,028 = $98,972

Divide that amount by the amount each brick is worth.

$98,972 divided by $2103.18 = 47.06

That’s how many bricks should be filled in. That’s the total, not the new bricks to fill in (unless you are doing this for the first time) so I recommend tracking it next to the amount if you don’t want to count anew each time. You will color in the difference between the last time you updated the tracker and the current time. So if on 11 January 2017 you had paid off 23 bricks worth of the mortgage and on 14 April 2017 you’d paid off 24 bricks worth, you’d color in one additional brick (24-23 = 1).

In case you are wondering, in my example here the owner receives a bonus every mid-January and puts a large chunk towards the house. That’s why almost $100,000 was paid off in less than 6 years. Results not normal; your results may vary.

Use #2: Track REIT Shares

Another way to use the Real Estate Tracker is to track how many shares you own in a Real Estate Investment Trust, or REIT. If you plan to have less than 126 shares over time, you could just do 1 share per brick. If you think you will own more than that, you could make each brick worth multiple shares. In the example below, one brick is colored in for every 10 shares owned of a fictional REIT.

The amount section shows how many shares this person has. My fictional investor is buying 10 new shares every month, plus using dividend reinvestment to add an additional fraction of shares. That means every month they buy a new brick’s worth of shares, plus add a little more from the reinvestment.

Easy, right? And unless you sell some of your REIT shares, you’d never lose a brick. You’d only be gaining.

Use #3: Track Real Estate Investment Properties

This one is as easy as it comes. For those of you that are building real estate empires and have (or want to have) a whole bunch of properties, you could use this tracker to visualize how many doors you own.

Buy a single family home? Color in a brick. Buy a quad? Congrats, you get to fill in four bricks at once. Buy an apartment building or a mobile home community? Well, you’re probably too busy to be filling in coloring sheets, but hey if not have at it!

What’s Ahead

Within a week I plan to put out another printable tracker that will help you look the same way at your stock and bond investments. If there’s another type of tracker you’d like to see, please let me know!