Just getting started in the NW suburbs of Chicago

[Jim Santopadre]

Hi everyone,

My name is Jim and I’m just dipping my toe in to real estate investing here in the northwest suburbs of Chicago.I was an electrician for 15+ years, a small business owner (a restaurant/bar), and spent a couple years doing the construction and repairs on houses for a real estate investor on the houses he was flipping.I was involved in a rental property that my ex-girlfriend owned (one I completely remodeled for her) and have watched as my father has profited off of a successful rental property and have always wondered why he doesn’t have more.I’m ready to move to the other side of these projects and become the investor instead of just doing all the physical work.

I just spent the weekend attending the Rich Dad Education Three day Real Estate seminar, which left me with mixed feelings.I am a big fan of Kiyosaki and have read just about everything he has written.I fully believe that we in the middle class are not taught what we need to know about money and it really affects our financial wellbeing.I don’t regret spending $495 on the weekend seminar (I brought my brother with me which helped me feel better about spending the money) although I believe they misrepresented themselves a bit. In the two hour teaser seminar they claimed that I would learn the methods to make money in real estate, which they did, even though the information was somewhat broad.However, I think if the trainer would have spent less time yelling at us about how dumb we are and how much smarter he was, I might have gotten more out of the weekend.That is not to say that I didn’t learn anything, I actually learned a great deal, others around me did not share in that opinion.The bottom line is that after the three day seminar I think I could stumble my way through some of the real estate vehicles they covered but I would make a lot of mistakes.

My first and biggest complaint was the trainer, he was a terrible speaker.My girlfriend is a professional speaker/educator for a medical device company and I am a semi-professional magician/comedian, so I know a thing or two about public speaking.He was late both starting and finishing every day; he was also late for every single break and lunch.And although our trainer was passionate about the material, he was not supportive and had absolutely no apathy for his audience.The concepts they were teaching, often times go against deeply ingrained ideas some of us have held for 25+ years or more and would stir up deep emotions.Whenever a question was asked for more information, he would yell “you don’t need to know the details!”.I’m sure everyone can imagine just how feels when a trainer tells you that you don’t need to know the details after he just told you to buy a house using your credit card, not a warm and fuzzy feeling.

I can honestly say that the three day seminar did help me understand that there are many options in real estate that I didn’t know about and still don’t know enough about.But it very much whet my appetite to learn as much as I can about real estate investing and more importantly get started actually investing.