#202 3 Foundational Books for Real Estate Investing Beginners

Hey, everyone. This week we're going to talk about how to get the foundational education just to get you started on your real estate investing career. I know the world of real estate investment can be really confusing for many of you that are just starting. I remember being there a short while ago. There's so much information out there. In fact, I don't even think it's a problem of having information is knowing what to use to help you out. So this week I'm going to talk about three books that I use that have significantly helped me on my journey. So if you want to find out about those and how I can help you, so start. Build or grow your real estate investing career and your portfolio. Stay tuned. Welcome to the Passive Income MD Podcast, where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe. Now, let's get on with the show. Hey everyone. Hope you're having a great week. I don't want to start this week with a downer, but there have been several reminders this week of how precious life is and how important it is to take advantage of every moment that we have with our loved ones, with our family members, trying to create, you know, amazing experiences in our lives and not wait for things to come because you might not even have a chance in the future. So take advantage of today. It's probably cliche in a lot of ways, but at least for me, this week has been a reminder to take advantage of what I have now. Now I know it can be a balance. I know it can be challenging, especially us in the. In the field of medicine. We've grown up, really delaying gratification. We've given up our 20s. We educated ourselves, gave up a lot of trips, gave up income, gave nights and weekends for a future situation where we could really support our families, help people, be in attending, be patients. We gave all that up with the hope that in the future we'd have the ideal life, helping patients, being an attending, having income for ourselves, being able to take care of our families, go on great trips. And it's happened for many of you. But there's still many of you that are thinking, what's next? How do I continue to level up? How do I continue to shape what I have? Or I'm ready to take it to the next level. Or maybe you're a couple years into being an attending like I was and realized that medicine wasn't quite what you thought it'd be. Maybe it's not going to Create the security for you that you thought would be there for you at the end. So now you're looking at your entire career for the next 30 or 40 years. Is this life going to give you what you delayed all that gratification for? My hope is that it will for all of you. But one thing I've learned is that the best way to handle this situation is to create your own security. And you want to do that so that you can live the life in medicine that you want and the life outside of medicine that you want. I think all of us know that our lives are not all about work. If anything, the Pandemic taught us is that life is precious and all of these things are important to create a really fulfilled life. So again, for me, when my eyes were open to all of this, kind of felt like I was escaping the matrix or whatever you call it, I started to see things differently. I was trying to figure out, how do I create that other income while I still practice, so I could still do the things that I love to do in medicine? And my income was still okay at that point, and it was doing well. But how could I hedge against uncertainty in the future? And what I found in that time was that real estate investing was one of the best ways for people to be able to do that. There were other physicians that were doing it. They were surgeons, they were intensivists, and they were figuring out ways to not only travel with their family, be successful with investments, and then of course, have their practice and their life in medicine that they wanted. So I decided that I wanted to dive into real estate. The problem is that many of us don't know where to start or it feels intimidating. I mean, it's kind of crazy. We have more information at our fingertips today than we've ever had in history. We have all the knowledge in the world pretty much up to this time right there sitting there in the palm of our hands. We can Google just about anything or there's a YouTube video to show you how to do it, but yet with all that information, it still feels extremely intimidating. And many of us don't know how to start. So I'll just try to make it easy for you. Obviously we have our podcasts, our blogs, and our Facebook group, but I'm going to tell people, if you're not sure where to start, just start in some good old fashioned books. Books are tried and true way to learn anything that hasn't changed. Whether they become now digitized, they're on your iPad or Kindle, whatever that Is to me, books and the way they're curated for a specific purpose, they're the most high yield type of information out there at the best cost. So many of you probably know the books I'm going to talk about. I'm going to share how I came upon these books and then what they did for me. The first one's granddaddy of them all. Probably all of you have read this or if you haven't, you should get this book. It's called Rich Dad, Poor dad by Robert Kiyosaki. It is promoted. It has the number one personal finance book of all time, I guess, if that's what they're saying. But I will tell you, when I talk to real estate investor, as a real estate investor and I ask them, what was the book that started it all for you? I would say 90% of them say and point to this book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Now, it's not a how to book. So when people read this, they expect the how to. It's more of like a motivational story that really talks about the notion of unlinking time for money. It talks about two people that were significant in his life. Whether they're real or whether they were fictional, that's disputed. But either way, think of it like a fable. One father figure in his life, which was actually his own father, had a good job, a good W2 income, well respected, well paid for the most part, and he kept that throughout his entire life. On the other hand, he had his rich dad, which was another father figure in his life that decided to go a different route, where the goal was to create passive income, to create scalable, leverageable or leveraged money or income, to unlink time for money. And he talked about the way they think about life, the way their lives went, and ultimately how they have control over their freedom and their time. It helps you think about the hamster wheel of life and whether you're on it and how to escape that. The first time that I actually got exposed to this book was back in residency. I read a few pages here and there, but I didn't really get to it. And the reason why is that I still had this idea in my mind that medicine was going to do it for me. My whole goal was to become an attending. I'd be set, life would be good and I wouldn't need anything else. It was only when I got screwed for hours at my work and my job and was given what I felt was an unfair, unjust allotment of shifts, even though I was a partner, given more nights and weekends than other people that I had to make a shift and a change. And all of a sudden this book became relevant for me. I read it once, then I read it a second time right through because I wanted to make sure I understood the basic concepts. And it's a quick read. You can read this in a simple weekend or even in a day or two. And it put me on a different path, a path that I'm still on today. And I would never even consider going back to what I had before. He's got some great follow up books including the Cashflow Quadrant. You should definitely check that out. But if you haven't read Rich Dad, Poor dad, you need to put that on your checklist. In fact, it might be the best $8 that you spend in personal finance. Go out, check out this book and read it this weekend. The second book that I read it was called the ABCs of Real Estate Investing. It's by someone named Ken McElroy. By the way, Ken has come and participated in our pimdcon, the Physician Real Estate and Entrepreneurship Conference. For two years now he's come out and he's been a speaker both live and on virtual for us, a great wealth of information. Owns thousands and thousands of units of properties all over the country, owns property management. He does, he's quite successful. And what he did in this book was he created a really comprehensive primer, I'd say a book for early investors to understand the language of real estate, to get the basic terms down, to understand not only the basic theoretics or the theoretical knowledge, but also the simple math behind understanding whether an investment is going to do well for you or not, whether it's going to create cash flow, which is the ultimate goal. For me, a lot of this is about doing it yourself, is about how to find, evaluate deals, finance deals, manage properties, mitigate risk. And I think it's important to learn a lot of that. Even if you're not planning on doing yourself, you're too busy. You want to invest in a syndication or invest in someone else's deals, you're going to want to know how to do at least the very basics on your own. So you can know that they're doing a good job or you want to know the good questions to ask. You want to understand the language, the vocab. And there's some great examples that are pulled into this book from successful investors. For all of us in medicine, in your specialty, in your field, there's always that book, the early book that you read in either med school or when you first start your rotations that talks about the basics of that specialty or field. It's not going to have everything in it, not going to have all the complex stuff, but it'll get you going. It's the primer. He also has an add on book called the Advanced Guide to Real Estate Investing. Now this book has stuck with me all these years because it taught me that it's possible for us to do this, at least for me. I thought that I didn't have the background, I didn't have the education in real estate investing, but reading this book, I realized it's not that complicated. As an anesthesiologist trying to understand all the physiology, all the pharmacology that is complex, there's so much there in real estate investing. It's a simple, repeatable process with, you know, math that my third year old could do at this point. But again, just because it's simple doesn't mean it's easy that you can understand the basic concepts. You just have to know how to apply those and find the right situation. And that led me to the third book, which is the book on rental property investing by Brandon Turner. Brandon Turner, I used to listen to his podcast early. He's one of the early founders or personalities of this platform called BiggerPockets. He's not really part of that anymore, but it's something that I use to start me on my investing journey. But this is another comprehensive guide to building wealth and achieving financial freedom through rental property investments. It laid out the map for me pretty well. It talks about why many real estate investors fail, how you can make sure you don't. Again, it shows you how to find some of the best deals even in competitive markets. Gives you a lot of those actionable ideas for rental properties and the financing. And then of course talks a little bit about taxes, about how to keep a lot of the wealth that you have by deferring and eliminating taxes. I know that's important to a lot of you, if not all of you listening to this. This is for the beginner investor and has some advanced topics in there and it's something that I've had to refer back to again and again. Now these are three books that gave me the foundational education and the information to get going. It didn't tell me everything and when I read it, I didn't understand all of the concepts, but it just gave me to take the first step. And I think that's what we're all looking for. We're Looking for the education, the community, the mindset, the help so that we can take our very first step. Because once you start, there's momentum that's created. Once you invest, you'll start to learn more, things will become real, then you'll go back and educate yourself more. You'll get into better deals, you'll get into bigger deals, you get into different opportunities. And all of that starts by just taking simple action. You can't just sit there and read books and expect your life to change. However, if you don't even get started there, nothing else will happen. So if you've been sitting on the fence, you've been listening to this podcast for a while, you still feel like you don't have the foundational knowledge. Start with these three books, get it done, read it over the next week or two, and then come back here and let's talk about how to get you started in investing, how to take that first step, get over that first hurdle and start you down your journey. Especially in today's market where I feel like there are opportunities for many of you that have read these books and want to take the next step in terms of learning the due diligence for these passive real estate investments like syndications funds. I definitely want to invite you to sign up for our wait list for our Passive Real Estate Academy. It's coming soon. We're going to be opening doors. We only do this like once or twice. Every single year is where in four weeks we get you to the place of confidence in investing in deals, knowing why you're investing, why you're not investing in other deals. And we surround yourself with a community of people doing this together, learning together, growing together, and you have this community for life. If you're interested that sounds appealing to you at all, go to passiverealestateacademy.com you'll learn all about it there. Now I've shared some of my favorite books. What are the books that have got you started? I'd love to hear. Let us know. Go to the show Notes, go to our Facebook group, our communities and let us know what are some of the real estate books that have really made a huge difference in your life now? Thanks everyone. Have an amazing week. Pat yourself on the back. It was probably a hard week that you left behind, but you made it through and you're going to do amazing things this week. Let us know how we can continue to support you. Take care and have a great day. Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app. You're listening to us at. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. Learn more at our website, passive incomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.