All Forum Posts by: Hannah Reichert

 I didn’t read everyone else’s response. I only read your post and the last part is what stuck out. You mentioned talking to your friends and family about your future plans and “feeling Like a deflating balloon”.. 

Why in the world do you need to talk to your friends and family about your future plans? When I started investing almost 20 years ago now I didn’t need to talk game to my friends and family.  Know what you want to do and do it is my advice. :-)

@Hannah Reichert,

First,  some might disagree with me.. but stop talking to your family/friends about your interest in real estate.    What do you gain?    Unless they are active investors, they'll likely just deflate/warn you of all the bad stuff.   Lets be real, they don't likely have the guts to do it themselves.. so why waste your time/energy telling them?    Talk to LOCAL REAL ESTATE GROUPS!   Meetup is great!   Investors who get real estate are different than normal friends, find investor friends!   Find people with common goals that you can bounce ideas off, those will be your biggest cheerleaders!     Find people who are doing what you want to do, and offer to help them!  Surrounding yourself with the right people is crucial IMO.   

Keep your regular friends, but don't bore them with your real estate talk..  and don't bore you real estate friends with your family talk! Sweet and simple!

Second, why do you care what others think?   Do you want real wealth, or do you want perceived (keeping up with the jones)aka  fake wealth?    Stop comparing yourself, it's not a race.    There will ALWAYS be people richer/poorer.

If you chose to be an investor, just know.. things will go wrong, things will go badly, it will be expensive, it will be stressful,  it's hard work!  You will be sacrificing time/money/energy.    

Let me tell you one thing is don't beat yourself up and be sure not to compare yourself to others. We all have our forks in the roads and lessons we learn at different times. You can do real estate investing, your very smart with a lot of potential. Put the work in and get started in the right direction. Your husband will be there to support you and you are house hacking which can send you so far ahead in the right direction. With house hacking you can eliminate a mortgage and save serious money to use for other stuff. I am doing this as well and believe it is the best way to get started. Best of luck to you guys and keep on trucking. 

Hannah, OK, so, here are some other things I'll say, and while it's free advice, it wasn't free to me.

1. I think you're investing too much of your time in thinking of yourself as "a real estate investor." What you may be chasing is a mirage, a picture in your head, of someone who's Successful with a capital S at this. All kinds of people in all walks of life do this. I think that imagining yourself as "a real estate investor" is much less useful than thinking of this in terms of one transaction at a time.

2. Why are you doing this? If you answer ultimately ends up me-based, you'd have to be psychotic to succeed, an absolute narcissist. If your reason ultimately lies with other people and all these doubts and concerns are secondary to your desire to do this for your child, for your family, for the loved ones in your care, things get a lot less problematic.

3. All this worrying about yourself, your shame and self-doubt, your worries that you're not good enough...the world is filled, bursting at the seams with a-holes who will tell you these things about you, again and again. You don't have to help them out. Don't allow yourself to believe that you are simply destined to fail and that's that. NOBODY KNOWS, least of all, you. God doesn't just hate you. When you find yourself falling into that common mental trap, go visit a children's cancer hospital. If in truth God is hateful, he's got much more awful, wasteful, hurtful works of hate to focus on than beating you down.

And one more quote:

“The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.”

-- Ernest Hemingway

@Hannah Reichert

Hannah,

Investing is about the long game. Measuring yourself against friends and family will not be of benefit to you. A required part of increased responsibility positions at work is longevity and there are few doubts in my mind that military spouses are probably often underutilized by their employers due to this.

There is always someone more and always someone less intelligent, hard working, lucky, successful and any other adjective you want to compare yourself to others on. If talking to family (assuming this is extended family/friends and not your nuclear family) is what is shaking your confidence, then I would not continue to engage in that behavior. Not meaning to overly simplify your situation, but there are members in our family that don't get it, or are worried about it, or have a different approach and we use so we just don't bring it up in those situations. It sounds like you should start concentrating on the upcoming house hack and not on other people's positions in life. If you have a master's degree you can learn enough, if you manage budgets you can do enough math to analyze a deal. Now go find the outlier and buy it.

@Hannah Reichert I recommend finding a different group of people to network with, you can attend local meet ups and reach out to other investors on BP. Spending the majority of your time with others who don't have the same vision as you can be very discouraging. That's why it's important to develop relationships with like minded individuals that motivate you to continue working towards your goals.