Why Real Estate?

Why get involved in Real Estate?

I'll tell you my reasons.

Ever since I met my spouse, he has talked about early retirement and financial freedom. Freedom 45. Time. Time and financial means to visit family, travel the world, and endorse humanitarian and charity programs. Not that he had a plan figured out (that involved me, anyways), but that has always been the goal. That is still our goal.

So we set about trying to figure out how to get there. He once told me that if he never got married and remained living a 'university student lifestyle' with roomates at a rental house of $300/mo/per person, he could have saved up enough cash by age 35 to retire and live off the interest. He even has a spreadsheet detailing the numbers. But we got married, and I guess that sort of ruined that plan. :D  I've looked into countless work-from-home opportunities to try to find a side job that would get us ahead, and keep us ahead while I become a stay-at-home mom with our future kids.  We actually consented to meet with people from a few different network marketing companies, thinking that might be my side-job. He has researched endless investment potentials, including stocks, bonds, ETF's, REITs, investments with dividends or not, etc etc. We dabbled in some mutual funds, some ETFs, but never quite felt like we were going anywhere fast. Turtle speed would have been faster.

When we went to our first Real Estate evening seminar, the idea just made a lot of sense. The speaker was talking about better returns than any other investments we had researched thus far. He explained how Real Estate can be recession-proof (another post, stay tuned :). He talked about systemizing the process so that owning real estate could be done on the side, we didn't have to quit our jobs to be successful at it. He talked about early retirement and living off Real Estate income. He talked about passive, or residual, income. It all seemed to fit. And all these reasons have yet to be proved wrong for me, a real estate baby though I may be. Real Estate just makes sense! It may take a few years to build up our capital enough to have income from rental properties paying our bills, but to us that is a few years well worth the effort. So in we dove!