How to Start Investing

I see it on the bigger pockets forums all the time, people start a post asking things like “how do I start?” or people come up and ask me, “what real estate book should I read?” I think those people are already missing the point and selling themselves short. They’re hoping somebody will reply to them with the quick secret to immense wealth and success, but this is obviously never going to happen. You must take responsibility for your own education, because just like anything else in life, nobody will ever care as much about your future as yourself. I for one think it is insane to depend on anybody else for my financial security.

Everybody should build their own base of understanding of investing, especially when it comes to real estate. This needs to be done on your own, reading and listening, learning terms and concepts, so you can begin to understand what the pros are talking about. You need to learn how to calculate rates of return, how financing works, how real estate transactions work, and so on. There’s a ton you won’t know. Lose yourself down a few rabbit holes, google an ROI equation, watch a youtube video on excel spreadsheet calculations, read an article on how a real estate transaction went way south, listen to a podcast of a success story. You need to be familiar enough with the investment vehicle that you can clearly and confidently talk to someone about what you want to do before you start going up to any successful people asking them what you should do. Successful investors rarely have time to drop everything and spoon-feed a newbie from day 1, regardless of how much they love helping people. Honestly, even if the pros had time to hold a newbie’s hand, it’s not really helping the newbie, because I believe everyone needs to accept responsibility for their own education. Taking responsibility for your own education not only provides you with your own wisdom and expertise, it provides you with the confidence that you can learn the next steps, and the game plan for how to accomplish any future learning that you will inevitably need as you begin your investing career. Would anyone ever invest with someone who had to ask someone else how to do everything? Or would people rather invest with someone who is confident that they could learn and figure out how to tackle any challenge?

I am completely confident that I can learn any new niche, or continue to learn and build expertise in areas that I’m already knowledgeable, because I have already taught myself so much. I’m not saying that I’m a genius, or that I did everything completely by myself, I’m saying that I read the many articles that much smarter and more successful people have written, I’ve listened to the podcasts by those same people, and I’m confident that I could find out how to learn about anything. It’s never as daunting as it seems to learn a new subject, but it’s always a lot deeper and more complex than you thought. You simply must take responsibility for your own education. Go after it at your own pace until you legitimately know the subject. Once you know the subject, you’ll understand what value you could provide to a pro that you would like to learn from, and you’ll know “how to get started” or “what books to read.” That’s the type of person that the pros want to teach! They want to help the people who have demonstrated that they have done the homework, because otherwise they will feel they are wasting their time. Why should a successful investor spend any amount of time teaching you something when you haven’t even tried to teach yourself yet?

Bottom line is, your success is the most important thing to only one person on the planet, and that’s you. But the good news is, with the internet, smartphones, and investing communities like BiggerPockets, you have endless resources just moments away. Take the time, do the homework, exhaust your own learning ability, and then you can ask the pros a question. Most likely, your specific question to successful investors won’t be one that’s asked a hundred times a day, and therefore much more likely to be effectively answered.