Ok, Boomer
I really think it is the tiny things in life that get us through the worst of times. Like an over-the-pants hand job in 9th grade after being bullied for being a virgin, or ripping a Marlboro red as you commute home in your 2012 Kia Sorento after a hard day's work. Today I was lucky enough to have one of these little moments when I really needed it. The world works in mysterious ways and I will always wonder what motivated this 70-year-old man to walk from his front porch and approach me as I walked home from a local coffee shop. He shared with me how he is writing a novel about a Native American who is seeking the remains of his brother lost in Vietnam so that he can pass to the afterlife. He told me he regretted spending his life as an attorney and wished he could have pursued creative writing his whole life. I thought that was really inspiring as we stood in the shadow of his corner lot rowhome that Zillow has valued at 2.2 million with a measly 6 beds and 6 bathrooms. As I crossed the street and entered the 650 sqft apartment that I pay $2,600 a month for the right to dwell and kill mice in I thought, "wow, fuck that dude."
As some time has passed I still feel that way. This is a microcosm of why I want to make this blog. Boomers don't realize what they have got and love to spit in our mouths while they pretend to bestow this great advice on us. Like my guy, you'd be living across the hall had you pursued that dream. Regret is fun to have when you can afford it. Here's the thing, nothing stopped this guy from becoming a writer at 22 or 32 or any other age except for his desire to have nice shit. I think Boomers have it tough in some sense because they grew up in the post-WW2 boom whereas to their parents who had survived a shitty 20 years prior it was fun to own things and pursue the American dream. But Boomers went too far, they buy one house just to get a bigger one down the road and then a bigger one just to one day complain that it's too big and too full of shit to maintain. They have a two-car garage with a pair of BMWs financed at 2% and complain about my beater parked on the street that was financed at 7%. Like chill daddy. Life is beating me down enough.
I have seen some people my age enter this rat race to own bigger and better things and I get it, nice shit is cool and different strokes for different folks, but it's so easy to become a slave to our possessions. I've had nice things and I've had almost nothing and life wasn't really better one way or another. I am sorry that this has read like a manifest for eating the rich up until this point but I swear there is a lesson or at least an ending coming. This is where the lesson of Rich Dad Poor Dad comes in. Like most books, there is about 2-3 hundred pages of filler when there is really only a paragraph of real shit in it so I will give the 30000-foot view before hitting the main point.
Robert grew up in Hawaii and his dad was a very smart man and worked in the state's Department of Education. He would buy new cars and bigger houses as his family needed. One day he got fired and it ruined him financially. All he had done was acquire liabilities and not assets. I'm going to break this down for those of you who attended a state school in a second. His Rish dad, who was actually his best friend's dad built businesses and invested in real estate things he called assets. Assets are things you buy with cash or debt to generate income. If it doesn't pay you or pay for itself it's a liability. This really clicked for me. Maybe leveling up in life isn't about finding a way to get a bigger mortgage or a newer car, maybe its about getting stuff that will let me pursue your version of that old man's creative writing dream instead of being a lawyer?
When Covid came my wife and I panic purchased a nice little mid-century home in the diamond of the midwest, Omaha, NE. My wife had lots of notes and wanted it to be cute and have rooms and stuff. I just wanted it to cash flow if we moved out to make it a rental. If I couldn't afford to buy a bigger better one when the time came without selling this one then I probably couldn't really afford a new one. We lived there a few years to avoid committing mortgage fraud, then moved back to DC and made it a rental. Today it pays me a little money and covers its own mortgage.
I know this can't apply to every home purchase anyone has made but by considering this and understanding this concept you can commoditize housing and own the libs...I mean you can force yourself to save money on an asset that will hopefully appreciate and offset the lack of social security we will receive when we hit the ever-raising retirement age. I hope to get a few more of these and provide nice places for people to live before they can buy their own homes. This is sort of like creating my own 401k I have to contribute a fixed amount. I believe the true value of small real estate investing is the system savings element that is often overlooked. It's easy to not fund a Roth IRA or to knock a few points off your 401k contribution at work, but now every month my tenants are saving for me.
Robert's book is a good read, but mostly because he shits on his dad most of the time, and who doesn't have daddy issues they'd like to blast to the world am I right? But The idea of making money work for you is huge. Whether it's investing in stocks, real estate, or floating a brick for a guy who sells weed in Gary, Indiana that you met on Discord. Reframing the idea of money as a commodity you trade for things into tool to get more of it was a big thing for me.
As some time has passed I still feel that way. This is a microcosm of why I want to make this blog. Boomers don't realize what they have got and love to spit in our mouths while they pretend to bestow this great advice on us. Like my guy, you'd be living across the hall had you pursued that dream. Regret is fun to have when you can afford it. Here's the thing, nothing stopped this guy from becoming a writer at 22 or 32 or any other age except for his desire to have nice shit. I think Boomers have it tough in some sense because they grew up in the post-WW2 boom whereas to their parents who had survived a shitty 20 years prior it was fun to own things and pursue the American dream. But Boomers went too far, they buy one house just to get a bigger one down the road and then a bigger one just to one day complain that it's too big and too full of shit to maintain. They have a two-car garage with a pair of BMWs financed at 2% and complain about my beater parked on the street that was financed at 7%. Like chill daddy. Life is beating me down enough.
I have seen some people my age enter this rat race to own bigger and better things and I get it, nice shit is cool and different strokes for different folks, but it's so easy to become a slave to our possessions. I've had nice things and I've had almost nothing and life wasn't really better one way or another. I am sorry that this has read like a manifest for eating the rich up until this point but I swear there is a lesson or at least an ending coming. This is where the lesson of Rich Dad Poor Dad comes in. Like most books, there is about 2-3 hundred pages of filler when there is really only a paragraph of real shit in it so I will give the 30000-foot view before hitting the main point.
Robert grew up in Hawaii and his dad was a very smart man and worked in the state's Department of Education. He would buy new cars and bigger houses as his family needed. One day he got fired and it ruined him financially. All he had done was acquire liabilities and not assets. I'm going to break this down for those of you who attended a state school in a second. His Rish dad, who was actually his best friend's dad built businesses and invested in real estate things he called assets. Assets are things you buy with cash or debt to generate income. If it doesn't pay you or pay for itself it's a liability. This really clicked for me. Maybe leveling up in life isn't about finding a way to get a bigger mortgage or a newer car, maybe its about getting stuff that will let me pursue your version of that old man's creative writing dream instead of being a lawyer?
When Covid came my wife and I panic purchased a nice little mid-century home in the diamond of the midwest, Omaha, NE. My wife had lots of notes and wanted it to be cute and have rooms and stuff. I just wanted it to cash flow if we moved out to make it a rental. If I couldn't afford to buy a bigger better one when the time came without selling this one then I probably couldn't really afford a new one. We lived there a few years to avoid committing mortgage fraud, then moved back to DC and made it a rental. Today it pays me a little money and covers its own mortgage.
I know this can't apply to every home purchase anyone has made but by considering this and understanding this concept you can commoditize housing and own the libs...I mean you can force yourself to save money on an asset that will hopefully appreciate and offset the lack of social security we will receive when we hit the ever-raising retirement age. I hope to get a few more of these and provide nice places for people to live before they can buy their own homes. This is sort of like creating my own 401k I have to contribute a fixed amount. I believe the true value of small real estate investing is the system savings element that is often overlooked. It's easy to not fund a Roth IRA or to knock a few points off your 401k contribution at work, but now every month my tenants are saving for me.
Robert's book is a good read, but mostly because he shits on his dad most of the time, and who doesn't have daddy issues they'd like to blast to the world am I right? But The idea of making money work for you is huge. Whether it's investing in stocks, real estate, or floating a brick for a guy who sells weed in Gary, Indiana that you met on Discord. Reframing the idea of money as a commodity you trade for things into tool to get more of it was a big thing for me.
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