Christian Osgood argues most landlords are self-made, not inherited-wealth types. He started at $11.50 an hour screen-printing, moved through sales, and built a real estate portfolio from nothing. He questions whether successful investors should give their kids a head start, or if that betrays the merit-based American Dream.
Chapters
He's a landlord with rich parents. Most owners of real estate don't have rich parents. They either made it and their kids have no interest in inheriting the portfolio, so the empire crumbles in a generation, or it's someone with a chip on their shoulder, maybe someone who even immigrated from another country to make it in America. A lot of the people I interview on Multifamily Strategy, these are business owners and real estate owners who, yeah, they started with nothing. Myself, I started as a screen printer making $11.50 an hour. It wasn't even screen printing shirts. It was cleaning the screens with chemicals. I went from there to a job that made a mighty $40,000 $100,000 a year that I worked for 2 years before I started climbing a sales job, saving and saving, saving. I started with $0 in my pocket and here's where we ended up. So, uh, wasn't true for me, isn't true for most people. Though worth asking the question, if you make it in your generation, do you want to pass something on to your kids? And is there anything wrong with them starting with a head start when you make it? Food for thought.