Career Insight

[Ian Lockwood]

BP Community, I'm hoping you guys can provide some insight into my situation. I'll start first with my long term goals. 

Long term: I would like to make full-time income from residential properties I own and rent. Start with small properties and over time acquire more and/or trade up for larger multi-unit properties. I currently have zero properties - brand new to this. Please don't ask me what "full-time income" means because that changes over a lifetime. I'm currently married with no kids, but that will change. I don't need to be stupid rich, but I would like to be financially comfortable with the freedom to live my life on my terms. Nothing crazy. 

With that being said, for the past 8 years I have been training college athletes, helping them to become faster, stronger, etc. The hours were awful and the pay was awful. Most jobs hover around $30-45k per year while working 60-70 hours a week. I enjoyed aspects of it but there was zero life/work balance. 

With my long term goals in mind, I believe becoming a real estate agent is the best approach to learning the ropes of the real estate world. However I do not have an interest in being a real estate agent for decades. I simply see it as a way to gain knowledge and lessen the learning curve for real estate investing. I'm hoping it could also help me make decent money (i.e., more then $30k) to help save for down payments on invest properties.

Leading a life with balance (not working all the time) is important to me though and my biggest fear is walking into a job with the same hours that I had before. I've been told that residential real estate has very bad hours (evenings, weekends, etc) and can be a grind to make a decent living. 

Conversely I've heard differing thoughts on commercial real estate. I've heard that it's a better life/work balance because the hours are more predictable and weekends aren't often required. However I've also read that commercial real estate is a huge grind and "only the strong survive / dog eats dog" type of stuff. All the info online about commercial real estate makes it seem far worse then residential, yet I've had the owner of a very successful private real estate brokerage tell me that commercial is a much better life then residential. 

With my long-term goals in mind, I would greatly appreciate any insight people could offer. I realize it's a bit vague (I'm new to this, remember), but anything is helpful. 

[Daniel DiGiacomo]

The first thing that comes to mind for me is spend time learning who to wholesale properties, build income and cash reserves and start your buy and hold career using your profitable wholesaling venture to fund the whole thing.