But Why Real Estate??

When I was a young kid I came to a strange realization that my grandparents were about 55 and I had never seen them work. They traveled all the time, played golf multiple times a week and payed for their house and cars with cash. They had 6 kids who were all married and had around 20 grandkids. Every Christmas and every birthday we all got $50 each. I remember doing the math one holiday season and came up with an unfathomable amount of money to my kid brain, yet they didn’t run out of money.

I went to my mom and asked, “How do Grandma and Grandpa get all this money if they never work?” And she quickly explained “They live off the interest of their savings.” I don’t know if she just didn’t want to take the time to explain to me where the money really came from or if she had never given it much thought herself. 🤔 But I had $100 (aka a LOT of money to a kid) in a savings account and I made right around $.20 of interest each year, and nobody was living off that, let alone shelling out $50 for 30+ Christmas gifts and $50 for 30+ birthdays plus anniversaries and graduations and weddings.

I had to know the truth; so I asked my Dad. He said years ago my grandparents bought a property with 3 buildings. One building housed their rental equipment business, the building next door was a taco shop and behind it was a house. They retired from their rental equipment business before I was born and since then have lived off the rent from the buildings. Every first of the month the owner of the taco shop, the owner of the rental business and the family that lived in the house would pay them rent, and they would live off of all that money and do essentially nothing, and the property had paid for itself many many times over.

My grandparents later told me they had also owned an apartment building and some other investments throughout the years, but the real key to being able to retire, and retire early, is to live below your means, save the rest and invest it in real estate. If they could do it, we could too.

So in 2013 my husband and I began learning as much as we could about all things real estate. We started taking steps to develop our real estate investment company and in 2015 we did our first real estate deal. It was a long distance flip in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was almost exactly what not to do, but that is a whole other story. The rest is history.