14 years of school, and not a single day was to cover any of this stuff. now i have to do my own research and my own schooling to understand all of these concepts. what a waste of time to go to school.
Well I don’t agree with that unless you went through the 5th grade for 6 years. You learned how to read didn’t ya? I can safely say that at 51 I learn something new almost every day. Herbster
Knowledge is power my friend. I am with Herbster on this one. I love to learn.
School isn’t necessarily about the specific subjects that you study…learning is a life-long thing - you should never stop learning. School, espcially college, should teach you how to think, how to reason, how to research, how to apply common-sense to given circumstances.
Hopefully, somewhere along the line, you’ve learned some life-skills - like getting along with others, leadership, how to balance a checkbook, how to save, making sound/timely decisions, not procrastinating, how to type, how to analyze issues, how to problem-solve, etc.
Keith
yea but it would of been nice if they told us how to flip houses
To Keith’s list above, I’ll add punctuation. You seem to have missed that class.
The day you quit learning is the day you quit growing. The last thing you want is to become proficient in flipping only, and then have that market fall out from under you. Real estate is cyclic. What works now, might not work next year. School teaches you to learn how to learn.
“Christ! Seven years of college, down the drain!” - Bluto
Yeah…but …then “everyone would know how to do it” It would be a totally different environment and probably even harder to make money in real estate investing than it is now. There would be a LOT more competition.
Society always tells people to get an education and a good job and a retirement plan
not to invest in real estate
Most people think “What if I can’t rent it out…or get bad tenants?”
Fear scares people out of investing in real estate and many other things.
Many people are happy putting their money in a savings or Bank CD at around 2% (nowadays) rather than taking the “risk” of investing.
Investors turn what others consider a “risk” into an opportunity.
I agree they won’t teach you how to flip a house at the majority of traditional colleges , but I don’t it is totally useless. I think it is important to have a well rounded education.
Just keep on learning about real estate and you should view it as a positive thing that it isn’t taught in school.
I does agres wit ya sayin how schools be stupid ans stuf. I jus sits bak ans collex the cheks from mys main man obama. Word
OK, THAT was funny…
Keith
Guess what buddy? Nothing is guaranteed. Alot of investors, even the experienced, can lose it all. Lots of bankruptcies happening right now. You need education to fall back on if you screw something up, and you also need education so you won’t be an idiot. There is more to life that you need to understand than just flipping houses. And for many people (brace yourself), investing in real estate is not the greatest thing since sliced bread. It takes work, patience, determination, INTELLIGENCE, and involves alot of risk.
I encourage you to continue learning about as many things as possible. Because if you think school is useless, you have alot to learn…
Well it just depends on how you see the big picture. To me it seems like you tell me to go to school because investing may not work for me and i might need something to fall back on, to me that seems like what your saying.
but for me its, investing is what i want to do, i plan on studying it and i plan on doing it even if i fail once ill learn from my mistake and ill keep going until i am successful at it. Only reason i am in College really is because my parents want me to go, as a Junior at a good college im not learning anything about what i really want to do , which is Investing.
While you see investing as a risky thing, i see it as long as I have the right Knowledge in an investment i control how risky it will be.
So while i see investing as a glass of water half full,
You sadly see the glass half empty and persue something to FALL back on.
I was at a career day at a local high school and I was thinking the same thing. People go to college and complain that they can’t get a job or they end up working at Mc Donalds with a degree in music or communications. I believe that when you go to college you should only go if it is going to make you somebody you can’t be without going to college. When you finish college and you are what you studied you should go if not you should get a job. For example if you get a degree in engineering you are now an engineer. If you get a degree in accounting you are an accountant. If you get a degree in English you are not an englisher or a degree in commincations you are not a communicator. That is the difference and you are paid accordingly. We still hire engineers out of college (even in this economy) and we are paying them $62k/year. I think that is pretty good and worth going to college.
And thats a good point, If you go to college to study accounting for 4 years putting alot of money in it, id assume your going to be an accountent.
That was what i was trying to say. college teaches you how to be what your studying to be. so in my case if i wanted to be a full time real estate invester, college wont get me this. Yes it might teach me how to do my research properly or how to write a good paper, but it wont teach me to be an investor, and that is why i say go to college to study in something you want to be. But if you want to be an investor college might not teach what you want to know.
One thing to bear in mind is the goal. What we are trying to do is be rich. Now the question that I always ask is are all millionaires rich and are all rich people millionaires. I say no. Most of my neighbors are millionaires but none of them are rich. They have assets (mostly their personnel equity in their residences and 401k) but those assets don’t have any cash flow so they are not rich. They have to wake up every morning and go to their jobs at Exxon, Chevron, BP or Hewlett Packard to afford their lifestyles. My wife’s grandmother is rich because she has enough passive income to afford her chosen lifestyle. That is the difference between working and investing. Being an engineer or an accountant is a job. Being an investor is not a job. Being an investor is all about developing passive streams of income. Once those passive streams of income are enough to pay all your expenses then you are rich. You don’t need a million dollars of net worth to get to that point. You may only need 10 cash flowing houses with mortgages.
Investing is never taught in school because school is run by teachers that everybody knows are underpaid. If you want to know how to be rich you need to learn from rich people. If teachers taught a how to get rich course it would be like learning how to loose weight from a fat guy…oh that is Dr Phil.
That being said what I did was took the money made from my job I got using my degree in engineering to develop a lifestyle that I wanted. I got the 5,000 sqft house with 3 car garage and a nice pool, lake house with boat and all that comes with that. Determined what that lifestyle that I built costs to maintain and then started to build my passive income to cover those costs. Once you have enough real estate to cover all the costs then you cut the job away and you wake up in the morning and instead of running to work to pay for your lifestyle you wake up and live that lifestyle.
You don’t make money for money’s sake. If you make money for money’s sake you are a miser. You make money for a purpose. And the purpose is lifestyle. Remember it is not about the money it is about the lifestyle.
Doesn’t your college have a business/finance degree? It might not teach you real estate investing specifically but it will teach you many aspects of making money with money.
My degree is in just that, Business with a concentration in Finance. But I am a software developer by trade. Now that I’m investing in RE too, I’m recalling things I learned that apply.
Plus college could be the most fun you’ll ever have. Don’t be in such a hurry to work, because you’ll be doing it for a long time.
p.s. Another major that you can use directly with REI is economics. Real estate cycles are all about economics.
You may not have REI 101 available at your local college, but if you can’t get a good paying job to start out, it’s gonna take an awful lot of burger flipping to come up with the down payment for that quad you want to purchase. You can want to be an investor all day long and say you’re more motivated than anyone else in the world, but if you don’t have any money coming in you’re going to have a really hard time building your portfolio. College will help you develop skills in your chosen field and give you tools to become a professional at that trade. If your job pays well enough, you’ll have extra money to put into REI. In the mean time, you can still educate yourself about investing.
See justin, heres the thing , You dont need any money to start real estate investing!!! :biggrin
And thats the thing i was talking about when i said that knowledge can minimize risk.
Check out Wholesaling and or Sandwitch Lease Option, justin, you might find something interesting.
You really do need cash to start investing in real estate. You see in order to sell real estate investing courses you sell to the largest market of hungry people. That is people without cash or credit. What happens is that until you get cash or credit there are things that you do to get cash and credit. Wholesaling, owner finance etc. These are like when you get accepted to a college and they put you in remedial math or a reading class. You are taking the classes at a college but they are not college courses and don’t add to your degree plan. This is remedial work you need until you get to the college courses. You can do that remedial work in real estate by using these techniques or you can get a job and use that job to accumulate cash and develop credit.
The best thing about college (depending on your major) you can earn a lot of money in a job that will allow you flexibility and doesn’t demand long hours so that you can actually start investing in real estate.
Well, then, let’s see it. Instead of hearing about how much school (or whatever) sucks, start posting about how you’re (in your case) flipping houses to be rich. Walk the walk.
Jeremy, we can all tell you’re very excited about being the next big millionaire from real estate investing. I’m sure you’re already imagining yourself sitting on the beach with a margarita and driving around in your Ferrari picking up the ladies…
Your whole point in this post is that school is useless because they don’t teach you how to flip houses. Nothing more. Many of us are saying that is generally an ignorant statement made by someone with lots of excitement but really no experience. You’re talking to investors that have made money and are continuing to make money in real estate and THEY are telling you that you’re being short sighted. I can promise you that getting your degree is something you won’t regret. More people fail at real estate investing than succeed, so anything to get you ahead will help. Besides that, you’ll find that, once you pass the age of 19, there is more to life than money.
With that said, I would build some credibility by doing a deal (or two) before you push this subject any further, b/c you could ruin your reputation by offending people that know alot more than you.