Real Estate Investing Ain’t All Wine and Roses
Posted on July 15, 2011 by
Want to see me go off like a bottle rocket? Just let ONE of those real estate investing infomercials pop up on the TV. You know the ones: fancy cars, expensive mansions, beach scenes in Hawaii…with the TV “investor” claiming: All this can be yours if you’ll just buy my super-secret system. Oh, just shoot me dead!!!
Folks, those poop-filled infomercials aren’t real. What is real? Let me take you through a typical day of real estate investing.
Monday, July 4: I was at my desk by 4:30 a.m. and spent several hours reading a real page-turner – the 2011 U.S. Master Tax Guide. Why? The biggest expense Americans face is taxes – the government loves to steal what you make! One of the best ways to drastically reduce your taxes is to own rental property. We’re continually trying to learn new ways to structure our deals in a way that allows us to keep more of what we earn.
Around 7 a.m., Kim and I loaded the truck. Truck? You probably thought all successful real estate investors dive a brand-new Mercedes. Not so, Kemosabe! We have a 1998 Dodge diesel dually 4×4 with 300,000 miles. It has rust, dents and dings – and best of all, it’s paid for!
We spent our day working on several properties we were about to put on the market, looking at six houses scheduled to be sold at the next day’s foreclosure auction and inspecting three of our rental properties.
So you’re thinking: “But Bill, it’s the Fourth of July – why don’t you and Kim take the day off?” No way, Kemosabe. To us, it was NOT the Fourth of July. It was INDEPENDENCE DAY!!! We were celebrating the day by working for ourselves, which would guarantee our independence.
By noon, we had cleaned one of our rentals, making it ready for the new resident who was about to move in, made repairs to a mobile home we had just bought in the Evergreen Mobile Home Park, and inspected three of our rental properties.
After lunch, Kim and I laid a new vinyl floor in another home we had just acquired. Our partner on the deal is our good friend and fellow investor, Mike Tarpey. The day before, Mike had worked his tail off mowing and line trimming!
On our way home, Kim and I stopped by our six target properties scheduled to be sold at the next day’s foreclosure auction.
Once home, we put away our tools, wrote up rental property inspection reports and put together our top bids for July’s foreclosure auction.
As day turned to night, and the fireworks started going off, Kim and I were already in bed. We smiled at each other knowing that we had spent the day busting our rears doing what was needed to guarantee our independence!
Folks, this is what real-world real estate investing is like. Why toil this hard? Because, the end goal is to get Mailbox Money. In other words, having your capital (rental property) work for YOU instead of YOU working for your capital!
Bill & Kim Cook are a husband and wife real estate investing team. They live in Adairsville, Georgia and have been investing in real estate since 1995. They specialize in buying single-family homes, mobile homes and mobile home parks. They also run North Georgia REIA and teach folks how to successfully invest in real estate.
