Let me start with up until about two months ago, I’ve never really thought about Real Estate Investing. Last year I had a friend at my previous workplace tell me about two books he read: “The 4-Hour Work Week” and “Rich Dad Poor Dad”. He told me he was excited to get into investing. I was listening to him tell me about how he was looking into purchasing a house or an apartment. He was explaining to me how you can buy a property, rent it, and make money off of that house. I remember thinking it was a pretty awesome concept and idea. I’ve seen all those things online about “passive income”. At this point in my life I was thinking I could implement passive income via a website that generated traffic. But this novel idea of creating a website never came to me.
Well, fast forward a couple months later and I purchased those same two books and my coworker then now has two properties (SFH) purchased. I started reading The 4-Hour Work Week and I’ll be honest, it took me a bit to get through it. Sitting here writing this post now, I know I’ll have to go through that book again to absorb more. Fast forward another couple months, I left my company and started with a new company. But I finally started reading Rich Dad Poor Dad and that’s when it happened. A little gear in my head started turning. A lot of people online love and hate the book. I’ve seen both sides of the argument. My stance is: if you ignore some of the weird information like insider trading and the such and just use it to broaden your mind on money, you’ll benefit from it. He kept drilling in the idea that your money should be working for you. You should not be the one working for money, it should be working for you. Half way through the book it clicked. Robert (the author) kept talking about investing, which I had no concept about. I never had investing courses during my college or compulsory education. I wasn’t taught how to properly utilize my money to make more money. Looking back on it now, our school systems need more education revolving around money: investing, saving, taxes, the worth of a dollar. It seems you need to learn these lessons either through your friends/family or the hard way of failing and hopefully learning from it. Once I got towards the end of the Rich Dad Poor Dad book, when Robert mentioned a list of items he uses for investing, two struck my interest: Real Estate Investing and stocks. I have a friend who messes with the stock market and I don’t know much about it, similar to real estate investing.
I chose to read more about real estate financing. Next I bought another book named “Building Wealth One House at a Time”. This one really got the wheels turning in my head. He started laying out numbers and I’m a numbers guy. I love math and I love money. So once this all started making sense… I was honestly getting excited. I finished the book in under a week and bought even more books. I’ll speak to those more in another post once I finish those. I also started looking online for other resources and people to talk with. I found biggerpockets.com and that’s helped me speak with a couple contacts, as well as I found a meetup.com group for real estate investing local to Kansas City. I joined the group, joined their Wednesday night call, and they spoke about interesting topics as well as about a mentor looking to help new people with real estate investing. I honestly saw it as a way to just sell yourself out and make money. I say that because I saw other people online were asking for a couple or more thousands of dollars to mentor you, but this gentleman was only asking for $500. So I took the plunge and it was honestly quite worth it. The amount of notes and knowledge he drops on all of our calls can be overwhelming. My now mentor gets on calls with me and the other team members in this group every two hours.
I started reading the Rich Dad book around October 1st, which means I’ve been at this for about seven weeks. In those seven weeks, I’ve read two books (working on my third now), joined biggerpockets, meetup, and found a mentor. My goal is to have my first real estate investment deal in 6 months – by April 24th 2021. That gives me another 5 more months. All in all, at this point, I feel I’ve made great strides in my knowledge and actually applying my knowledge. I’m confident I’ll complete my first deal by my goal. But I’ll keep at it and document the progress as I go here on my blog.
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Thanks for reading, be nice to people, and have a great day.