Real Estate Investor Education - Learning From Your MistakesBy: Curt Cloyd – Director

Personal Wealth Academy, LLC

I just read a really cool short blog post that I wanted to share with you because I feel it will help you immensely in becoming successful at investing in real estate.

It's a true real estate investor education piece that's all about learning from your mistakes and using them to grow your real estate business. You can read the entire article for yourself, just click here.

The author, Cliff Redding, does a great job of making it clear that EVERYONE makes mistakes in this business. I couldn't agree with him more on that point. If you are expecting to jump into real estate investing and be flawless, you really have another thing coming.

No amount of real estate investor education can possibly prepare you for all the things that can (and will) go wrong when you start actually doing deals.

Cliff lays out a simple four step process to using your mistakes to actually grow your business.Here they are:

1) Identify the mistake.

2) Take responsibility for the mistake.

3) Let it go.

4) Use what you learned.

This is exactly the formula that I believe real estate investors should be using. With each step in this process, Cliff gives a brief description or example of each step.

That's actually the point of this article that I start to diverge from with my opinions, so from this point forward, I want to enhance this real estate investor education piece with my comments and insights.

Let's start with step #1 of identifying the mistake. Cliff points out that in this business, mistakes frequently result in losing money. He also talks about how these mistakes are often things that cannot be specifically pin pointed.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume that you don't have a whole lot, if any room to make mistakes that cost you money! Especially ones that you aren't even aware that you are making during or after the fact.

That right there is a surefire recipe for failure my friends. And this is exactly why I tell the vast majority of my clients that they are risking too much in trying to become a real estate investor -if they are doing it because they NEED the money.

Usually people in this position aren't able to recover from a money losing mistake and they end up financially destitute. These are ALL the horror stories you hear from people who say real estate investing don't work.

To be a successful real estate investor, you MUST be a successful business owner first. That's why I recommend to all my clients to create a cash flowing business with low overhead BEFORE beginning to invest in property.

Then you can use cash flow from that business to fund your investments and if you make a money losing mistake, you can recover from it because your entire livelihood wasn't dependent upon the deal being a huge profit producer.

In terms of step #2, taking responsibility, I want to add this.

There's far too many people these days that aren't willing to own up to their mistakes. That's a trait of losers. Losers blame others for their problems and they will never be more than mediocre in their lives.

Winners take responsibility and own up for their mistakes. They ask for forgiveness and receive it along with respect from their peers. Then they can go on to step #3, which is letting it go.

Those that can't take responsibility never really move on. The mistake will usually fester in the back of their mind and prevent them from taking future actions that are required for success.

People that don't take responsibility for their mistakes can never achieve the ultimate real estate investor education course - using what they learned to improve their business.

Just think about it, if you aren't willing to admit that you made a mistake, how on Earth are you ever going to learn from that mistake and use those valuable lessons to better yourself?

It's been said that Thomas Edison had over 1000 versions of the light bulb before he got it right... all of those failed versions being mistakes. If wasn't able to learn from those mistakes, he wouldn't have figured out how to do it right and we would all probably still be using candles in our homes.

The thing I want to wrap up with on this article has to go back to a part of step number 1 above -not even knowing a mistake was being made.

This is crucial because many things are subtle in the real estate investing business. Cliff assumes that everyone has to go through the process of learning by making mistakes on their own.

While that is certainly one way to accomplish learning, there's another form of learning that I consider to be much more effective - learning from people who have already made the mistakes!

That's the pinnacle of real estate investor education because you can short cut the learning curve and avoid the overwhelming majority of mistakes that will sink most people in this business.

At Personal Wealth Academy, we've developed and refined a three step real estate coachingprocess that we take all of our clients through in order to achieve success in real estate.

First, we help them establish a cash flowing business with low overhead within 30 days.

Second, we help them leverage their cash flow into properties that provide equity and spread.

Third, we help them get compound interest and return using high return vehicles that have extremely low risk.

All of these things are done through real estate.

But the thing you have to understand is that working with us is NOT right for everyone. In fact, we are extremely selective and only take on a very small group of clients at any given point in time.

You can find out if you qualify to work with us by completing the short real estate investor success quiz that we've developed. It's completely free and only takes about a minute. Just enter your email in the box on the right and you'll be able to take the quiz immediately.