Are You “Building a Portfolio” of investments or just “Doing Deals”?

[Don Konipol]

When I started investing in real estate in 1976, I had no thoughts about how any property I purchased ”fit” into my investment plans….probably because my plans were not well defined.  My long term goal was “get rich”, and my strategy for any investment was “make money”, LOL.  Through the years I began to think more strategically, and slowly but surely a ideal portfolio began to take shape in my mind that I was able to use to guide me in both acquiring assets and disposing of assets that didn’t fit the portfolio.

Seems to me that when Capital is limited, and your main asset is the long term time horizon available to youth, any time spent thinking about  “your portfolio” is probably wasted; to accelerate wealth accumulation you have to decide the degree of risk you want to accept and accumulate assets, or more to the point “do deals” that give you the greatest return for that level of risk.  
Toward the middle on to the end of a long investing career, hopefully you will have significant assets unencumbered by debt, or at least with lots of equity.  At this point you would probably want to play more defensively, less risk, accepting moderately smaller gains, and perhaps switching to more passive investments.  At least this is how my  46 year real estate investing career has gone. 

I’m interested in knowing what you think, and what your experience has been with this.  Where are you at now - concentrating on THE DEAL or on building a PORTFOLIO?   Or perhaps both?  Or for you is it something g totally different?