Investor Cardinal Rule: SHOW UP!

Last night I went to my local REIA meeting as I do every month. This night they had a particularly big turn out for the particularly energetic national speaker. I saw people last night that I haven’t seen at meetings in a while and also met investors that I’ve never met before. Which led me to wonder, why in the world do I not see these people every month???????

When I started out I took the advice of all the books and Gurus that tell you “Join your local investor club, it’s a great resource for education and networking.” Um, yeah, duh… I joined 5 of them and still go to the big 3’s meetings nearly every month as well as some others where I can fit them in. I average attending four real estate investor meetings a month, which is pretty much one a week. And up until recently, I did this while working a full time job, working my real estate business and having family commitments including two kids, so I don’t want to hear that people don’t have the time to go to meetings. I even ended up running one of those meetings as president, which was an even greater time commitment.

So do people just not care enough to make the time and commitment to attend??? One person told me that the meetings are sometimes dull so he didn’t bother to go or even be a member any more. I seem to remember a lot of high school and college being quite dull, but I went anyway and ended up learning a thing or two, or at least making some friends to hang out with later. And that’s really what its all about for me. Sure, not every meeting is going to be relevant to what I’m doing and not every meeting will have as engaging of a speaker as last night’s did, some may be downright dull, but I‘ve got news for you: YOU STILL NEED TO GO!!!

Unless you found a magic crystal ball in your Grandma’s attic, you do not know what tidbit of information you might pick up that will help your business, or what new contact you might make that will turn things around or open you up to new deals. I actually met Robert Cass with Local Real Estate Deals Media at a previous REIA meeting and that has gotten me started on an entirely new and WAY more exciting path than I ever would have seen. Where would I be now if I had decided I was too tired or too busy to go to that meeting? A very different place that I wouldn’t like nearly as much and doesn’t have nearly as much potential, I’m sure. What other opportunities are out there that I won’t know about if I’m not in the right place at the right time?

Networking is huge, especially in real estate circles. Just look at the success of online networking sites and the enormous numbers of real estate related people on them. Real Estate investing is really more about people than about properties, and some of those important people are your fellow investors. Sure, plenty of investors are very successful without being members of groups, or maybe they were members back when they started out and just don’t think its worth their time anymore now that they are successful (and to those I ask why they feel they don’t need to give back some of the knowledge and experience to others that are now starting out just like they were). But don’t they ever wonder how much MORE successful they would be if they increased their network and did so regularly?

Find your local REIA or other investor group, join, go to meetings. Go to more than one if you can. Maybe its not even a fellow investor you meet, maybe its just a guy that does windows, or someone that has private money to lend, or the publisher of a national investor magazine. How do you know who it will be or how they can help you? The point is you have to obey one of the cardinal rules of successful business people: SHOW UP. And I mean literally!

When opportunity comes knocking...

This past Friday I found myself suddenly jobless. YIKES!!!! Granted, this is something I’ve been working towards anyway and was even planning on, but I don’t think you can ever be completely prepared for it until the reality strikes. So far it hasn’t completely “sunk in” that I have no set schedule to abide by, no boss looking over my shoulder to make sure my work is getting done, and most importantly, no pay check to count on every two weeks. I KNOW all of these things are what I longed for and are now the facts of my life, but I just can’t wrap my head around the full significance of them yet!

So what does it feel like exiting the normal work force, some of you may wonder…

Truthfully, it feels like a lead brick is resting in the bottom of my stomach 24/7! I’ve prepared, I have a Plan A and a Plan B, and even some ideas for other plans should those two fail, but planning alone can not ease the feeling in my gut. Oddly, this is almost the same experience I had when I was pregnant with my first child (and even my second, come to think of it). Not to loose my male audience, but its true! There are the same amounts of fear, excitement, dread, hope, and “what was I thinking???” moments as after we’d decided to bring a life into this world with no actual experience in doing so. We read books, attended classes, talked and listed to other people who had been there before us, and gathered advice from professionals until we had some level of confidence of our foundation and were ready for the leap of faith. Sound familiar?

I admit I have a parachute of sorts, I have some things going “on the side” of my real estate investing which will enable me to ease into my self-sufficient “jobless” status. Honestly, my real estate investing is no where near ready to support me on its own, but the Catch-22 of time and attention to real estate versus time and commitment to my job has been a major obstacle in being more successful in investing. I can get all the education and mentoring I need, but it does me no good without the time to implement the strategies. Now that the cycle is broken, I am excited to throw much more of my effort into real estate and see my success grow accordingly.

Just like when I was pregnant (sorry guys!), I know that I CAN DO THIS and do it well, and that the fear and doubt are minor in comparison to the rush of empowerment and excitement.

I am embracing this opportunity to strike out on my own and live my life as I wish to live it. I know the road ahead will be a difficult struggle, but it is one I believe I will vastly prefer over wasting 8 hours of every day to help someone ELSE live the life they wish to live. If I fail there will always be other jobs to turn back to, and if I must go back then I will do so without regret, but how else will I ever truly know the kind of success I might have if I never bother to try? The opportunity knocked and I gladly answered the door, ready and willing to follow it no matter what the path. Thank goodness I was ready for it when it did!!!

So tomorrow starts the first day of the rest of my life. I can’t wait to meet it, even if I do carry some extra weight for the moment. What’s a little lead in my stomach compared to the limitless opportunities that I’m about to be a part of? Sounds like I got the better end of that bargain, now if I can just find some cash flowing multi-family properties where the stakes are the same!!!

What Now????

I have a question: What is the one thing you will end up taking away from this economic crisis we find ourselves in?

There’s a never ending stream of news articles about how we got here, who’s to blame, finger pointing, predictions about the length, depth, and duration of this, the worst recession since the Great Depression. I’ll leave the analysis of those statistics to the professionals and hope they come up with something that makes an ounce of sense. I for one am not holding my breath that they will be successful, though. One statistic I do believe is that history repeats itself. We’ve been here before and we will be here again. I’m young enough to not remember any of the previous major downturns of our economy, so this slump has been an eye opening experience for me. It has raised some important questions in my formerly peacefully complacent mind.

I grew up thinking that EVERYONE went to school and then got a job. End of story. Sure, I knew that there were a few people out there who had started businesses or inherited a fortune or maybe chose to be a stay-at-home mom, but for me I knew that it was “hi-ho, hi-ho, its off to work I go.” Both my parents worked throughout the majority of my life. They didn’t always like their jobs, but they were excellent role models of how to be responsible for your family and keep a steady job.

Many parents were like mine, going to work to bring home their paycheck and live decent lives. But what has happened to these hard working average people? They have been rewarded with layoffs, pay cuts, benefit cuts, and entire businesses going belly up. I know so many people who have found themselves suddenly jobless, no income or assets to their name and no prospect of finding a new job, especially not one that they actually want. Now that we are in this mess, I can’t help but wonder why in the world so many people worked so hard to put all their financial eggs in one basket? Now their baskets are bumped and eggs broken, and some have been completely overturned so that all the holder now has is a gooey mess on the floor.

Well, the fact that so many people were never taught and never thought about any other way is for a completely different post…

What I want to know is: What are you going to do now?

If you are reading this you are probably already in real estate investing, just starting to get into it, or maybe just thinking about this kind of business. If so then good for you! But what else are you working on? Just because you’ve realized that being a normal employee isn’t the way to go doesn’t mean you should just switch all you precious eggs to a new basket!!!! The name of the game now, for those of you who are still wondering, is diversification. We need to all be looking for multiple forms and streams of income. Real estate has incredible opportunities and statistically will always perform over the long term, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t have other things working for you to secure your way of life.

I’m working on just that plan myself. In addition to getting into real estate investing a little while back, I have been actively researching other avenues that will enhance my lifestyle and lead to finally becoming truly financially independent. I am very, very close. NOW is the best time we’ll ever have to take a step back, honestly assess our lives, and decide where we want to go from here. The media may be telling us how terrible things are in our economy, but I only see how many opportunities are suddenly available. Didn’t I read somewhere that more millionaires were made out of the Great Depression than any other period of time before or since? That’s exactly what I’m taking away from this whole debacle, that it’s a gift for us all to start again more intelligently and prosperously (see my earlier post on failure!).

Make a plan to split those eggs up and put them in many baskets. Start a business, join a network marketing/direct sales company, go back to school to learn something new, check out stocks and options (the market will go up again, ever hear buy low sell high?), write a book, invent something, DO ANYTHING other than what we were all doing before. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results. Keep your job or look for a new job if you must, who doesn’t want some security in their weekly income? But DO NOT under ANY circumstances be complacent with your job’s sole income again. Have a plan B, C, D and E already working for you on the side so that you never need to worry yourself sick at night wondering: What now?????

Top 5 Reasons to Like Failing

Its curious how the human mind works. Whenever I learn something new, it seems that I can usually gain more knowledge from the "Ooops, don't do that!" moments than the ones where I easily succeed the first time. If I'm learning a new computer program and click the right combination of buttons the first time, more often than not I can’t exactly replicate it a second time without re-reading the directions. But, if I clicked on the wrong button for something along the way, it’s a sure thing that the mistake raises a red flag in my memory the next time so that I do NOT click on that again!


Strange as it may sound, I am actually eager to fail just for this reason. Many new investors I meet circle forever in a "just looking" cycle. They look and look at properties, waiting for the legendary fool-proof house where they can't go wrong to show itself. It goes without saying that they are currently still looking. (Hint if you're one of them - look in the same place where the unicorn and the goose that laid the golden egg went to hide from the world) Since I know that I'm not going to be able to avoid failure forever and that statistically most new RE investor’s first few deals don't go as planned, I'd much rather just get it all over with than orbit uselessly in space searching for a myth. Why stall for time when I can just get the learning process started and move on towards becoming more successful? So here are my top five reasons that I actually LIKE failure in the real estate world:

1. You can be sure you won’t make THAT mistake again!


2. You’ll have great laughable stories for your networking meetings… you know, after time has healed the wound a little and you can talk about it without tearing up…


3. Failures thin the pack, the ones who aren’t passionate enough tend to just quit, leaving more meat for the rest of us


4. Newbies think you are a wise and seasoned investor when you dispense your experienced and from-the-heart advice.


5. You'll have that much more drive and determination to do better the next time

Don’t get me wrong, I don’t plan to fail, and there are certainly some things, like parenting, that you can bet I would NOT like to think I failed at. I’m actually an optimist and always have super high expectations that I will succeed in everything I do. However, in regards to real estate and many, MANY other adventures in your life, you really must be mentally prepared for failure to happen. I don’t think there’s any experienced investor in my real estate network or even any of the Guru’s that could honestly say they’ve never made a mistake on a property. You can bet they learned a lot from those mistakes, though, and never made them again!


I’m big on quotes, and I love this one: “Failure is the opportunity to begin again more intelligently.” (Henry Ford) There’s tons of them out there similar, choose which ever you like best. There’s also the story of how Edison failed over 10,000 times before finally perfecting the light bulb. While still working on his invention he asked by a reporter if he felt like a failure. His response: "Young man, why would I feel like a failure? And why would I ever give up? I now know definitively over 9,000 ways that an electric light bulb will not work. Success is almost in my grasp." It only took 1,000 more attempts to learn what NOT to do. The point is that if you want to be successful, you need to embrace failure for what it is - a learning opportunity.


Embracing the possibility of failure is still no excuse for not doing everything in your power to set yourself up for success. After all, the goal is to make money, NOT to fail (which usually costs money). Do all your due diligence, ask advice, get educated, be cautious for goodness sakes, over and under estimate everything where appropriate, but KNOW you can NOT KNOW everything and you’ll probably mess something up at some point. Your attitude about that failure is one of the biggest determining factors in how successful you will be in any of your life endeavors, especially real estate. Come on over to my way of thinking and get ready for some of the best educational opportunities of your life.



Happy investing!

Super-Size My Pond, Please.

Not too long ago I was working slowly and diligently toward becoming a medium-to-large size fish in the decent sized pond of my city, Richmond VA. I frequented all the local real estate investor groups regularly and was known by a good number of local investors, as well as a few in other parts of the state. Sure, I had big dreams of knowing and becoming known by investors all over the country, having a huge network of people to draw on for experience and out-of-town investing, but I figured I had a long LONG L-O-N-G way to go before that would ever happen. I just had to keep slowly building and adding to my network through meetings and seminars, and eventually I’d get there.

Such was my thinking, until I was hit by the tidal swell of social networking. A few months ago a colleague suggested I put the local investor group that I head up onto two well known social networking sites to keep our members better connected. Formerly I had always been of the “pish-posh” school of thought on such sites, thinking they were just for teenagers and the socially desperate. But I’m not one to turn my nose up at other people’s suggestions without some thought and a good test, so I joined both social sites personally to check them out. Of course, I connected to the obligatory family members and old high school boyfriends, but I was amazed and blown away by the number of real estate investors suddenly available to me across the country with almost no effort on my part to find them. And what’s more, they WANTED to connect to me!

Before I knew it, I was “friends” with educated and seasoned investors in Florida, Illinois, California, Georgia, Arizona, New Jersey and so many more locations that I would have NEVER known investors in had it not been for these sites. My pond had gotten a lot bigger, super-sized with a few clicks of my mouse, but that only meant I had more room to grow into an even bigger fish. Even better, the groups, blogs, forums, and fan clubs have provided a treasure trove (sunken of course, lets keep up the nautical references) of information and contacts that are potentially endless. I can and have asked these people for advice, opinions, bounced ideas off of them, found an investor radio show in Kansas, and even just chatted about our different markets. Needless to say, I’ve become a BIG fan of social networking and did, indeed, put my investor club on several of them.

Here’s a few words of wisdom I’ve gained in my short social networking career:

#1. Find one (or two) you’re comfortable with. Some sites are very simple and user-friendly, even require minimal interaction. Some are geared towards professionals, some towards more casual friendships. Still others may seem simple, but have such a vast array of codes and nuances that it may easily overload a new user. Know yourself, your commitment level, your desired results, and ask around or do some research to figure out where you might start.

#2. PARTICIPATE! There’s nothing worse to most avid social networkers than those who sign up but only log on once every blue moon, or maybe even only once. Trust me when I say that it may seem silly or dull or slow at first, but the more you participate the more you will be “seen” on these sites and the more people will want to be a part of your newly expanding network. Plus, if you don’t use it you’ll never realize the benefits it can have for your business like finding or listing properties.

#3. Don’t get overloaded! If you end up liking it and start joining more and more sites, it could easily become a full time job just to keep up with everything (because you are an active participant, right?). I know a few busy investors who actually had to hire others to log onto their social networking sites and post/interact. Most of us think this is a little cost prohibitive, so don’t take on more than you can reasonably handle with your schedule.

Of course, I still attend every local investor meeting I can fit into my schedule (nothing can beat face time), but I’ve expanded on my idea and information base exponentially, more than my local groups could ever offer. I may not yet have an incredible network of real estate connections across the country, but thanks to this crazy idea someone had to allow people to personally connect over the internet, I’m now on the fast track to achieve one of my goals. I’ll never doubt the teenagers again… well, at least for good networking strategies.

Til next time, happy investing!!!

To blog or not to blog, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler to suffer the thoughts of mine own mind without exposure, or to take up the pen and unleash those thoughts, and by that stroke open mineself to the world?

For me it wasn't much of a decision. I already narrate my life in my head as I'm living it and talk WAY too much about my own situations, good or bad, to anyone who makes the mistake of asking, so it's no big step to write all those thoughts and soliloquies down for the world to see. My only hesitation is that everybody who thinks they are anybody, especially in the real estate investing world, already has a blog. Isn't the blog market over saturated already? Do we really need another person throwing more junk into cyberspace that no one reads? Well, maybe not, but my ultimate decision was "too bad!" and here I am. The internet pretty much has unlimited space anyway, right????

Let me start out by saying how incredibly excited I am to be a part of Local Real Estate Deals as we begin our quest to link real estate investors across the nation together on a huge variety of media platforms. Local investing topics in a national format, who'd of thunk? Trust me when I tell you that LRED will soon be an industry leading company and household name to investors everywhere in the USA, and maybe even beyond!

So what will I be offering to my faithful readers here on LRED's blog profile? Probably nothing Earth shattering, sorry to disappoint! A little humor, a little insight, hopefully a little education, and, if I'm really lucky, maybe a little scattering of brilliance every now and then. I will happily post the good alongside the bad and the downright ugly, freely sharing my experiences with real estate investing, personal development, my road to wealth creation (road still under construction!), and the goings-on at Local Real Estate Deals. If you're looking for all the answers, keep looking (and let me know when you find them!). In the mean time, subscribe to this blog and give me some feedback as we go. The only thing I like better than hearing my own self talk is hearing the ideas, experiences and feedback of others in response!!!

Oh, and don't worry, I'll keep the Shakespeare references to a minimum, I promise! ;-)