How I Lost $2,000 and Learned the Lesson of a Lifetime

This blog is not just about sunshine and roses! Sometimes, it’s about a lesson learned.

You will not invest in real estate and make thousands of dollars tomorrow! Well, you might, but then you might as well consider yourself the equivalent of winning the lottery. One thing that I am a HUGE believer in is paying it forward and allowing others to learn from your mistakes. No need for the next newbie to make the same mistake. Let them make a different stupid mistake because they learned from yours.

Did you know that our first house was almost a COMPLETE disaster? I had to go on TWO house hunting trips because the first one failed miserably ($2,000 lost was the cost of the first housing hunting trip). Even we who have done this four more times didn’t have an amazing first experience.

I still remember buying our first home almost three years ago to the day. I was a newly minted MBA, my husband a newly minted winged aviator. We had survived the first year of marriage, flight school, and graduate school. We felt nothing could stop us. We finally felt ready to take the next step: our own house. We were on fire until we began the home buying process. Oh my gosh, was that a painful experience! I remember sending my husband to Navy Federal to talk to the mortgage council because I couldn’t get time off of work.

He came home more confused than he started, and at the end of our discussion I felt less knowledgeable about business than my first day of undergraduate school. I then spent 60 minutes of time I didn’t have at work getting everything straightened out. Honestly none of that was education over our “choices” but just completing paperwork. I remember driving to San Antonio Airport from Kingsville, TX on my way to house hunting in Virginia Beach by myself because my husband couldn’t take time off work. Instead of happily looking at houses, I was arguing with the mortgage broker who was five states away, in some nameless office from a bank full of bureaucracy.

Then I get to Virginia Beach and our real estate agent ditches us because her clients who drove in from the mountains of Virginia for a special trip have priority. Remember, I  just flew over a thousand miles away from Texas to Virginia! Then the house failed inspection in EVERY way possible, after the realtor told us it was a great house needing a”little” work. She was brand new and all about building clients but not keeping them. The inspector pulled me aside about 30 minutes into the home inspection and says, “This house is a disaster. Don’t buy it”. To top it off, the agent was completely unavailable to show us any more houses!

Guess what? We survived! I came back for another house hunting trip on Sept 11, 2010. We found a great agent on the second attempt, whom I love, cherish, and is a great friend who has subsequently helped lots of our friends buy houses. He then hooked me up with a great broker, who answered phone calls, and had an office I could walk in to. The broker hooked us up with a great rate and got us approved for the amount we needed. The rest is history.

It couldn’t have been too bad, because we have done this process four more times since. Yes, our lesson learned.

The point of this story is that the first time you do anything it is rough. Think of all the kids who scrape their knees learning to ride a bicycle, or broken arms from skiing, or any other time you fell off the horse and had to jump back up!

The goal of this website is to provide you the leg up that I never had, hopefully making you a more powerful consumer. However, you may still fail and have to try again. Remember, it isn’t going to be perfect! But you can look back and say, “lesson learned.” You’ll need longevity and the ability to get back up, dust yourself off, find a new “answer,” and proceed!