Best Practical - real /actionable information whre did you find ?

[Kumar Tummalapalli]

Hello All 

Summary of my qn , if you don't have much time :

what was the best source of information you found when you were starting in real estate investing ? It could be a book , a course , a mentor ( doesn't matter whether they charge $100/hr or $200/hr ).

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Details :

why do I ask this qn :

90% of what I see in you tube / podcasts and even some paid courses , they are full of B.S . YOu buy a course worth 100$ and then the guru is just trying to sell you his $2000 course , his book - without providing any valuable/real actionable information . It basically has general BS such as you can quit your 9 to 5 Job , you will become zillioniare by next month , you need to analyze deals carefully and so on . You don't need to pay a guru to tell you that you have to analyse the deals carefully . There is nothing in the course which says "how" to analyse the deals carefully , what practices do you follow to make sure that the ARV is calculated rightly . The answer doesn't have to be the worlds most innovative strategy , but it can be a simple thing which works well . example below

For ex : I tried to buy and sell cars ( not to become rich or make money but just to step outside of my comfort zone ) . I always worried if I would pay too much money and then i might not be able to sell the car for a profit . I did one simple thing to valuate - went kelly blue book and with the condition as poor - i found the value , I always paid less than that and every time i sold the car for a quick profit $1000 - $2000 profit . So even though this is a very simple strategy , it worked and I only knew that from experience .

Another webinar I saw - says "10 awesome secrets for real estate investing " and then you know what the ten are - first one is wholesaling , second one is flipping houses...ha ha , I think you got the idea what the remaining are. 

In this day and world too much information is teh problem . Information which is useless , information which is biased and one sided , information to make people excited and buy courses . 

I have faced similar problems in other areas , for ex , I wanted to find a nutritionist/doctor who can help with tweaking my food and suggest supplements to resolve my insomnia and some mild depression i was experiencing around 7 yrs ago . I spoke with 10 nutrionists , about 4 psychiatrist , read around 15 books ( not fully ) - finally found one book , one nutritionist and one course which are great . 

So the summary is - I know that there is good information , good mentors , good courses out there - But unfortunately they are buried under " become a zillionaire by rei " courses, they are not advertising on youtube/facebook .

Important : I now know that there will be some proxies of gurus who will post that a specific guru is the worlds greatest . I request if you are just promoting a guru , please don't do that , I can easily spot by listening to one webinar or consulting with them for half an hour - that they only make flashy videos and are useless

If for some reason , you don't want to post here publicly , PM Me , but posting here would help others as well :-)

Thanks for your patience

[Jerry W.]

@Kumar Tummalapalli, welcome to BP.  I was already a property owner before I found BP.  That being said there a lot of things I needed to know as I had never read a book on renting, I just had trial and error.  After finding BP I literally read through the education section ( I think it was called Learning back then).  It took me about 2 months of heavy reading and listening to POD casts to consume most of it.  I am talking 5 to 6 hours of reading on every night and much more on weekends.  All of that content was free.  It was a lot like cramming for finals. All that reading helped put the pieces together for me in a logical way.  While I have bought and read several books since then, that really gave me the basis for most of what I do now, and helped me understand the books I later read.  I only joined the Pro section of BP after I made my first deal and figured it was my way of paying BP back for all I had received.  Don't get me wrong, there is value in being a Pro member, but I already had received the value before I upgraded.  Listen to all of the POD casts and then read all the BP blogs, then read the most popular books in some of the lists.  That was the best information I ever received on real estate investing.