Mom Knew Best All Along: Funded College Through REI in 80's

8 years ago, my husband and I spent lots of time adjusting our financial goals from exclusively wage-working until retirement to investing in buy and hold real estate. We felt it was a hugely fresh take on how to live our lives. Surprise! Not new. Mom already did a version of it in the 80's.

In a Bigger Pockets podcast, Jay Hinrichs a real estate investor with 40 years experience, said there is nothing new in real estate: https://www.biggerpockets.com/renewsblog/bp-podcas.... If you look back through the decades, you find people were using the same investment strategies we use today. That truism parallels my experience in our family's financial planning.

While sharing our brave new financial strategy with my mom, she gently pointed out that she put my brother and me through college with the profits of 2 real estate investments she made in the late 80's. Wait, what! Mom already did what I am doing now. Why didn't I leave her home 30 years ago with this plan for investment? Why didn't I repeat my mom's strategy earlier?

In our next phone call, instead of talking with mom about the grand-kids, I asked her questions about her process and motivation back in the 70's and 80's causing her to invest in RE. Here is the story.

First of all, mom is no slouch. She was born during WWII, lost her Dad at age 16, graduated from Michigan State, worked as a librarian, married and then divorced her high-school sweetheart after putting him through law school. As a single mom, she put herself through law school while raising 2 grade-school children. Her specialty was Estate Law, that is helpful.

Mom's take on money is that it should be made quietly and not talked about much. I apologize to mom in advance for posting this so publicly.

Motivation to invest in real estate came from her need to fund our college tuition. She states she would have never bought investment properties if she did not have children. Children created a financial need beyond what her job could cover. Her job funded her retirement and our monthly budget but, how to fund college?

You can see from her short bio, mom knew how to plow through to her goals. The goal of getting us through college without debt weighed on her. She did not trust that Dad would be contributing to this effort, so she developed a plan she had control over. Like many heads of households, mom realized the limitations of working more to generate more income. Luckily, as an estate lawyer, she saw the tax benefit of passive income. Two of her attorney friends were investing in Buffalo, New York. She ran some numbers and launched her plan.

Mom started shopping with an eye for properties that would cash flow from the start and mature for sale when my brother and I needed college funds. Two properties she found met that goal. They were within driving distance of our home. Financing was available: she had the money for the down. 

I believe she saved the down money by driving uniquely strange cars: a purple AMC Gremlin and then a Green Mercury Comet. Neither of our cars looked as good as in these photos. Both could accommodate a canoe with tie downs through the windows on family trips. I loved these cars. But, I digress.

For those of us interested in teaching our children the benefit of real estate investing, pay attention now. This is where I missed the lesson. My take away from mom's real estate investing was: it meant mowing.

Yes, this writer went through college and incurred no debt through the efforts of my forward thinking mother but, my prominent memory is REI created unpaid work. Mom managed the properties herself. Upon purchase of each investment, mom laid carpet, grouted tile and painted the units herself. She also remembers hiring contractors to help with a porch roof and appliance work. My brother and I mowed and went with her to the properties for drive-bys and clean-outs. Mom was very good at realizing the value of delayed gratification. My brother and I were not.

Let's be honest, a single working mom is limited on time, so a teen (me) who appears to hear static when presented information about financial planning may miss out. Either mom did not include us in the financial education portion of her plan or I did not understand the value of listening. She did her books after my brother and I went to bed, we mowed.

Philosophically, mom is a champion of active work as the way to stay out of trouble. We were to go to college and then to jobs. Investment real estate in her portfolio was not to be repeated for continued wealth generation. She was an estate lawyer, I wonder if she just wasn't impressed with the trust children of her clients.

So, what will I do that will be new? It will not be some breakthrough REI strategy as I previously thought, but rather a family focus on financial education for my kids. How we talk about money to our children will be part of the plan. Our kids will need to be financially nimble. Going forward, I resolve to involve my kids not only in my drive-bys and some paid mowing, but also the books.

We are going to Bali, Indonesia next month to visit my Dad (another story) and I will be sure to show my kids how this travel is funded through our real estate. Our jobs are funding our monthly budgets and some retirement. REI is heavily funding our fun and the larger part of our retirement.

To all the REI moms out there:

• Teach your kids the value of work and RE investing. They go together well.
• Encourage them to start early.
• Structure your REI in a way that generates enough time to teach your children about your business concept.
• Budget for a property manager. For goodness sake!
• Network with families doing investments.
• Create your own women's real estate investment network.
• Pay your kids for the work they do on the family investments. Their frontal lobes are not yet fully developed to understand the consequence of money over time.
• Encourage your children to invest as a means to finance their dreams in career and lifestyle.
• Encourage your kids to teach their friends about investing.
• Encourage your kids to believe that increasing passive income to acheive life goals is admirable, not money grabbing.