#1 Mistake Made By Real Estate Investors

Posted @ 10:42 pm - Filed under Real Estate Investing, Purposeful Planning, Retirement, Investment Lessons, BawldGuy Axiom

Ever watch the old TV show M*A*S*H? One of my favorite scenes illustrates tonight’s point well.

Colonel Potter was pleading with Hawkeye and BJ to go easy on Major Frank Burns, the camp pain in the butt. “Please, be helpful to Frank when you can, OK? There are a few things he doesn’t know.” Where upon Hawkeye replied, “But Colonel, it’s so damn hard to keep up with everything Frank doesn’t know.” And there ya go. So many of Frank’s problems came his way as a direct result of not knowing the questions, much less the answers.

Exactly.

BawldGuy Axiom: We’ve all had tough questions for which answers were difficult to find. The answers that you’ll never find though, are to the questions you never knew to ask. The consequences can be severe.

What with lending becoming more and more of a convoluted maze, and comparing one market to another, finding answers to questions you already know to ask, just isn’t enough. Divin’ in head first without the one answer you really needed can be incredibly irritating at best, and traumatic at worst. Either way, why do folks insist they’ve done their ‘research’ and found the answers they needed?

Real estate investing in today’s atmosphere ain’t for sissies or those who love playin’ ‘let’s pretend’. It’s serious business. Wonder how much the seller of an income property cares about how much the buyer doesn’t know?

Let’s use flying. Do ya buy a ticket on an airline, or do you rent a jet and jump into the cockpit? (Can’t wait for the first comment by a pilot on that one.)

BawldGuy Takeaway: Do what you do best, and leave the flying to the guy in the cockpit wearin’ the uniform. The idea is to get from Point A to Point B.

When it comes to your retirement, knowing the answers is only the beginning. It’s finding the guy who knows the answers to the questions you didn’t know to ask that makes a huge difference. That difference multiplied over the next 10-30 years can sometimes be measured in orders of magnitude.

Can your retirement income survive not knowing those answers? The #1 mistake made daily by real estate investors isn’t the absence of answers. It’s the answers to the questions they didn’t know to ask.

Let’s talk about some of those pesky questions. Contact me today, and we’ll figure out a Purposeful Plan leaving no question unanswered. Now that’s livin’ in a world Frank never knew existed.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, August 13th, 2008 at 10:42 pm and is filed under Real Estate Investing, Purposeful Planning, Retirement, Investment Lessons, BawldGuy Axiom. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.