Real Estate Investing Can Make You Rich

By: Alex Anderson

If you are going to get rich, you may have to give up everything you ever learned in school and from your parents and start from scratch. Now that's not a definite by any means. You may not have to start over. If someone along the line taught you, for instance that it doesn't actually take money to make money, then you may already be on the right track.

That's right. Robert Kiyosaki, author of the Rich Dad book series, said it exactly like this: "It doesn't take money to make money. I often hear people say it takes money to make money. I disagree. We had no money when we started and we were also in debt. It also doesn't take a formal education."

He then mentioned Bill Gates as someone who never completed a college education. Which would you rather have, a collection of doctorates or Bill Gates' money?

What it does take, Kiyosaki says, is determination and a willingness to learn quickly. But you also have to know what to do with your talents and, most importantly, to know which part of the Cash Flow Quadrant to generate your income from.

The Cash Flow Quadrant is an icon taught to him by his best friend's father, a man to whom he refers in his books as his "rich dad." It is an illustration of what his rich dad called the four different types of people in relation to money: Employees, the Self-employed, Businesspeople and Investors. Each quadrant comes with its own outlook on the world. The outlook of those in the B and I quadrants are the ones that help make them rich.

When Kiyosaki says you need to be willing to learn quickly, he doesn't mean go back to school to improve your job skills. He means you should learn about investing, preferably investing in real estate. The rich dad on whom he based his books was a real estate investor. You can get rich investing in real estate because everything else depends on it. At the beginning of his book Cash Flow Quadrant, he pointed out how so many of Hawaii's businesses were sitting atop real estate that his rich dad owned.

But he doesn't just mean you have to learn the nuts and bolts of investing. You do have to learn about those things, at least to the point that you are able to intelligently choose a professional to help you with your investments. But more importantly than that, you have to learn how to think like an investor, and possibly a bit like a business person too.

That is a far cry from thinking like a Self-employed person. According to Kiyosaki, a self-employed person is someone who owns a job, not a business. You don't own a true business, he said, unless you can leave it for a year and return to find it still making money for you. Businesspeople, he said, know better than to try to do everything themselves. In order to save time and money, they hire people to do the things they can't do or don't have time to do. That's why hiring a qualified real estate professional to guide you in your decisions can be a good investment in and of itself.

However you decide to do it, learning the nuts and bolts of real estate investing yourself or by hiring a qualified person to advise you, it is definitely time for you to move to the I quadrant-that is, if being rich is something you'd like to consider.

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