failure, real estate, investing, startup

FAILURE (and how to learn from it)

The greatest learning tool you’ll ever have: Failure.

One of my biggest setbacks happened very early on in my investing career. I was on my second property. The first one didn’t go so hot, so I was anxious to make some money on this second deal. I bought a house for $50,000 and I planned on putting $50,000 into it. The goal was to sell it for $180,000. I was doing all the work myself. I was investing my money, my time, my energy, all day all night. However, this game is tough – I failed pretty bad. my 2 month timeline turned into an 8 month timeline. My $100,000 all in budget turned into $140,000 by the time I was out. On top of that, on top of the pressure from my family, my wife, the people who loaned me money saying “Joe, are you going to get out alive?”, I had the market crash and the bottom fell out. That was bad. I couldn’t sell the property. I didn’t know what to do. What I ended up doing was renting the property, making money every single month, and it taught me a great lesson: rental properties are awesome.

For the last 10 years, I’ve been making $400-500 a month on this property. We’re selling it this year and I will clear $80,000-100,000 on the property (see this beauty Here). I paid down the mortgage, the market appreciated, and things have gone right.

You’re going to have a ton of setbacks along the way in your journey in real estate investing. I’ve had pipes freeze in the middle of the night the day before a house goes on the market and the entire house floods. I’ve had contractors totally mess up the construction losing 10’s of thousands of dollars AND I have to go back and fix all the problems. I’ve had financing fall out at the very last minute where I lose a very profitable deal. Stuff happens,but that’s business. These things teach you lessons and you learn more from your mistakes than you can ever learn from your successes. keep plugging away and never let failure stop you.

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