Are Real Estate Investors Crazy?

Hey guys, welcome back to the show. Today, I want to answer a question that a listener recently sent in. If you don’t know, you can actually ask us questions, and I’m going to start to address more and more of those on the show. Go to flipnerd.com/ask. The question is, “I’m having a hard time convincing my family that I should focus on real estate investing instead of my job. So am I crazy? What do I tell my family?” In essence, that was the question, and that’s what we’re going to talk about on today’s show.
Welcome to “Real Estate Investing Secrets.” We are all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live better and more fulfilling lives. But most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else and chase their dreams. How can we use real estate investing as a vehicle to achieve financial freedom? My life is dedicated to answering your real estate investing questions, and helping you build an investing business that allows you to change your life and the world around you, and to enable you to turn your dreams of financial freedom into a reality. My name is Mike Hambright from flipnerd.com. And your questions get answered here on the “Real Estate Investing Secrets” show.
Hey guys, Mike Hambright here with flipnerd.com, “Real Estate Investing Secrets” show. Hey, I wanted to talk to you about . . . So what we started doing earlier this year was, and we haven’t really marketed it that much, was telling people, “Hey, ask a question. You can go to flipnerd.com/ask. And we have a form there where you can fill out a question and ask us a question and I’ll address it on the show. And that’s what I’m going to do today.
So one of the questions I had was from John in Missouri. No, it was not John Martinez, I don’t think, maybe it was. That was asking about, basically he said, “Hey, I’ve done some deals, I focus on real estate investing, but I still have a job. My family thinks I’m crazy for focusing on real estate and leaving my job. What do I tell them?” And the truth is, is that that’s my story, too. In fact, I started on real estate investing and I had actually lost my job.
And so I could have gone back to a cozy corporate environment. But if you know my story, I got fired from one job that I loved that was totally unexpected, from a multibillion-dollar company that eventually went away and tens of thousands of people lost their job. And then I went to another company that was flying high and then they filed for bankruptcy. So I was kind of forced into that situation to do something new, and I just made the decision to bet on me.
And so we deal with this all the time. I’m a real estate coach as a lot of you guys know, and I’m around a lot of successful real estate investors. And are we crazy? Probably. A lot of us are gluttons for punishment. A lot of us make a lot more money than we did in corporate America, but we’re still not happy. Because as entrepreneurs, we tend to continue to move the goal line. But are we crazy? Well, are we crazy to bet on ourselves? That’s really the question.
So I’ll talk about that a little bit. Again, a lot of you guys know that I’m a corporate refugee. If you’re in a job that you hate, the question is, is are you crazy for staying there, right? It feels secure. But I can tell you from somebody that’s lost their job a couple times and knows a lot of people that have lost their job, it feels like you’re safe. But are you really safe if somebody is kind of at the switches of your life, if somebody else could wake up one day and say I’m done with this, or I’m done with that person, or we’re going to lay off this unit, or we’re going to stop selling that product?
Wherever you work, you know, your job is at the mercy of somebody else’s decision. Now, the truth is, is when you’re self-employed, you’re also at the mercy of a lot of things. You have to provide good value. You have to work hard. Usually, we work harder for ourselves than somebody else, at least in the beginning. But that is the question. Am I crazy? Are we crazy? And so I would tell you, John, that you’re going to have a hard time convincing your family that you’re not crazy.
What happened in my instance, is everybody thought we were crazy. We had a one-year-old son. My wife had left her job to have our son. And together, we made a very good income in corporate America, but just were completely unhappy. In fact, my wife was miserable because she had to travel a lot. So it depends on your situation. But the truth is, is eventually, if you start doing well, your family and your friends will say, “Can you help me do that, too?” right?
At the end of the day, I think we all want some level of freedom. We all want a high level of freedom, right, but not everybody is willing to work hard enough for that. So I can tell you that I just got back, and I don’t say this to brag, because truthfully, we were gone for too long. We were gone for over a month. My wife and I went to the UK for a couple of weeks and had a little vacation. And I had some other trips. Some of it was meeting my Investor Fuel family up in Chicago, and then I went to speak at Harvard Club of Boston, in Boston, which was really cool.
But I was able to leave home for a month, which is way too long for me, but I had the flexibility to do that. My business didn’t stop, nothing stopped. The truth is, after the first couple of years I was in business, I found that my business actually does better when I’m gone, because I’m not here to cause problems and come up with new ideas and stuff that distracts my team.
But at the end of the day, here’s what I’ll tell you. From somebody that has a lot of education and spent their whole life to kind of prepare to work for somebody else, when I look back now, I’m never going back. I might get some FlipNerd t-shirts made that say, “Unemployable,” because I’m unemployable. One, I would never go work for somebody else in a traditional role. Two, truthfully, they can’t afford me. Nobody can afford me.
Today, you can’t see it down below, but I’m wearing shorts and sneakers today. I can do whatever I want. I’m about to go have lunch with my wife. I dropped my son off at camp this morning. I have a ton of flexibility that I never could have had by working for somebody else. Now, I’ve earned that, too, we worked very hard for a long time to build that. And if you have a family that is not full of entrepreneurs that only sees at the surface level, like, “Oh, this company is hiring, you should go work for them,” or, “It sounds like you have a good job, why don’t you stay there?” you’re going to probably get guilted often into staying in that job.
And the truth is, is that your family members want you to be safe, like the brain tries to keep you safe, which is why a lot of people stay in a job they’re unhappy with because it’s deemed as safe. And I can tell you from experience, it might feel safe, but someday, it won’t be, or it might not be, you never know. But the truth is, if you have those things in your heart and your gut that are driving you to do your own thing, and you know there’s a better way, then you will regret not taking that on.
So let me kind of follow that up with saying, you know, it’s not that you only have one chance, I don’t know your situation, or for any of you listening that are in the same boat, it’s not that you only have one bullet in the chamber and that’s it. For some of you, it might be, but the truth is, is prepare to make failures along the way, and don’t let that force you to go back. Because that is what happens to most investors.
I’m going to say right now that most real estate investors, those that try to get started, fail, like 90%+. Now, let me break that into two categories. One is a bucket of people. The smaller bucket is those that actually do a deal and fail. And that’s because they did not have the right training, they didn’t know what they were doing. And they failed big enough to where they lost money and we’re out of the game. But they did not follow a proven system. They were not tied to a coach or mentor that knew what they were doing. They just said, “I’ll figure it out.”
And it was they made some mistakes where they lost money. It could be didn’t evaluate the property right, didn’t evaluate the repairs, paid too much for it. Those are the most common situations. The second, a much, much larger group fails before they ever actually even do a single deal. A single deal. And this is why, they fail in the mind. They defeat themselves before they get started. They try some things, maybe throw a little bit of money at advertising, maybe drive for dollars, and they start talking to a couple of friend and family members.
They just don’t take a big enough bet on themselves to where the first stumbling block hits, and they just say, “I’m out. It doesn’t work for me.” Or they start to convince themselves that, “Well, the markets change and this isn’t a good time to get started.” Or they find some way, usually it’s human nature to blame everybody other than yourself. “It’s the market. It’s my market. There’s too much competition.”
I actually talked to somebody today that I’ve known for a long time, and he immediately went to, “Well, Opendoor is in my market, and maybe this isn’t even a good place to invest anymore,” and the guy’s never done one deal. I’m just like, “That’s crazy talk,” right? So we can defeat ourselves very easily. And I’ve seen it quite a bit. I have been coaching for 10 years, and I see a lot of people defeat themselves. So your mind is very important.
And that’s why, honestly, it’s good to be a part of a good coaching program or around a lot of people that will support you. Because it’s human nature for your friends and family to say, “I told you so. See, I told you so. Oh, you’ve been trying this for two months, you need to just stay at your job, or you need to go back to your boss and see if you can get your job back.” And the truth is, is people want you to be safe, the mind wants you to be safe, and safe means probably doing something that you don’t want to do, right?
And you have to be willing to bet on yourself. So are we crazy? I started this off by saying, are we crazy as real estate investors, entrepreneurs, or are they the crazy ones? And I would argue that they are the crazy ones. I have this thing that I’ve been spending a lot of time. My birthday is actually this week. And I often use like milestones, like birthdays, Thanksgiving. We just had 4th of July, obviously, to think about what I’m grateful for and what I want more of.
And it’s common. You guys all probably get this during your birthday, “Oh, what do you want? What do you want? What do you need?” Well, the truth is, is I don’t need anything. And I’m at a point in my life where anything I want, for the most part, I just buy it, or I just go do it. And I’m not saying that to brag, I don’t . . . You know, we have a nice house, and nice cars, and things, and we do a lot of travel, but I’m not for flaunting, you know, a lot of those things. It’s just that I’m in a point in my life where I’m relatively simple.
Some of you that know me might disagree with that. But I’m able to do what I want. And if you want more of that in your life, then you have to bet on yourself. You will not find that situation in the real world by working for somebody else and only pursuing their dreams. It doesn’t mean that you can’t work for somebody else and be building your own things on the side. I have some people that work for me and they also have real estate investing businesses and they do things as well.
But it does mean that if you’re 100% committed to somebody else’s dreams, you probably will never reach your own. So hope you got some value from that. By the way, if you have not subscribed yet to our show, FlipNerd, “Real Estate Investing Secrets,” we’ve been doing the show for five-and-a-half years, millions and millions of downloads and views on YouTube, and iTunes, Stitcher Radio, we’d love it if you go out and subscribe and give us a positive review. I’d love that.
If you got some value out of this, if you are crazy, if your family thought you were crazy, for those of you that are watching on Facebook, just comment down below, and share your crazy story, or those who thought you were crazy, or any lessons that you’ve learned along the way about how to get over the hump. So I hope you got some value out of this. I appreciate you guys. We’ll see on the next show.
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