@Nat Chan I never understood why contractors would ask for a large deposit to start a project, here in California your limited to what can be asked up front generally up to $1000 or 10%, which ever is less.I never give deposit, most contractors that we deal with have a clear and well define scope of work, attached with a detail schedule of values (Especially for large projects that run a couple of months) and a construction schedule complete with milestones.

This is a true rags to riches story that we can associate with at BP and have proof that it's doable.We look forward to hearing about your future milestone achievement as you happily work towards your 4,000th posting.

But Rich Somers just made a short video on Instagram today and made some good points about this graph.

This 10 year historical graph of the USD vs the CAD shows a clear trend that the USD is gaining value over the CAD now:http://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?

Congrats on the milestone!

Consider the value of preferred payouts for milestones or risk points.Entity?

Not a lot of economic graphs blah, blah but I do keep a general feel for the economy and its short and long term direction.

@Jon Homes what I do is either manually or by copy and pasting it add up a given years cash flow and equity growth (combination of your appriciation figure and pay down) from the previous year, and divide THAT by my ORIGINAL equity or 'cash needed' figure to come up with that years returns.Not sure if you noticed but in the report, if you go to the graph at the bottom and hoover over the 'dots' on the graph lines if will give you figures for EVERY year instead of just the ones that show up above.Dan Dietz

Mostly, after the first small down payment, subsequent payments are based on milestones of task completions. 

Make sure you have written out in a contract all of the work you expect to be done (this cannot be to specific in my opinion) and the payments schedule/work milestones timeline agreed upon upfront to avoid any confusion down the line.