Yesterday, I went to my first real estate investor meeting here in Birmingham. I’ve been a member of GaREIA and this was no GaREIA. It was more of a sales presentation that went through one person’s no-risk, no money down system for making a fortune in real estate. He says he’s been a millionaire twice in his life doing real estate. He even told us how his wife died of melanoma and how much it cost ($600,000). This is why health insurance is so important. Health care costs a lot!

His strategy was basically to do wrap mortgages on mortgages that are over 15 years old. Take over the payments, make money on the spread and lease option the property. I’ve heard this strategy before and I wasn’t too impressed. He was nice enough to sell a package for $99, but I wasn’t too interested. I’ve read a lot of books that do the same thing. Derek has a friend in Florence that’s lost his ass in wraps. Vacancies can really kill you with that strategy.

He said stuff about how people will try to stop you in this business. That really resonated with me, because people have been trying to keep me from doing this. My parents, my girlfriend for a time, and some of my other friends. I think there is comfort in uniformity. People see you doing something different and they want things to stay the same, they don’t want you to change things in your life, because things might either change in their lives or it may show how they’ve missed out on an opportunity. We all hate to think of times where we’ve taken the wrong path at the fork in the road. If we all go on the same path, then no one can find out where the other path led to. Then they can’t tell us that we missed out on the oasis that other path led to.

I’m reminded of a story I heard somewhere of how crabs in a crate only need two inches of box height above the level of crabs. Theoretically, the crabs could climb out, but the crabs hold onto each other, keeping them from crawling out. I guess this is why change is so hard sometimes, the people next to us are holding us back from getting out of the crate. They don’t do it out of spite of jealousy, most of the time it’s out of love and concern. In order for us to really exceed the mean, we have to be ready to see what’s outside of the crate.