The Norwegian Investor - Background

Always been interested in Real Estate? I wasn't. Not at all. Not since summer of 2014, roughly one year before writing this post. But so much can happen in one year, and for me things certainly did. The year has been all about learning at an exponential rate. It's hard to point to the exact moment when things clicked for me, but seeing that not only one, but two of my friends did well in real estate... well, that was certainly a huge motivator and an inspiration for me to see that maybe I could do it too.

I asked one of them and he pointed me to some books I should take a look at. I have been fond of reading informative books for a long time and it didn't take me more than a few minutes to buy several of the books he recommended. Some of the books I had read before, like The 4-Hour Workweek, Rich Dad Poor Dad and The E myth revisited. So I re-read those while I waited for the other books to arrive. I usually go all-in when I'm excited about something, so its not unusual for me to read a book per day.

The books I ordered then were:

• How to invest in real estate with little or no money down - Robert Irwin

• Real estate investing for dummies

• The ABCs of Real Estate Investing - Ken McElroy

• Think and Grow rich - Napoleon Hill

The funny thing about learning is that usually the more you learn, the more you become aware of all the things you don't know, so I bought a dozen or so more books right after, and have ordered several more again recently. Since I discovered the BiggerPockets podcast, Amazon.com have surely increased their revenue by quite a bit, and I wish to give a shout-out to Joshua Dorkin and Brandon Turner for being such a big part of my progress and education. As of May 2016, I have listened to all podcasts created and found value in almost all of them.

Although I really love to learn and to read, I didn't want to be stuck in learning mode. And thanks to my incredible wife which I am so grateful to I was able to get clear on a number of things such as timeline, financing and purpose.

Once I saw she was on board with the investor plans, and a possible timeline became more clear, we set our minds to acquiring our first income property by summer 2015, a goal that we ultimately reached, but not all things did go according to plan...

More in the next post.