Yes We Spent $5,000 on an Old Box of Real Estate Tapes

Is it just us or has anyone else spent thousands of dollars to "learn how to get rich in real estate?"

We've both been to multiple real estate boot camps that have cost us tens of thousands of dollars.

That was more than 15 years ago (are we getting old?) but those seminars/classes/pitches have been etched into our memories forever.

We've never regretted spending all of that money on those courses ... I'm not sure we actually learned what we thought we would but each one of them had some sort of lesson or golden nugget of information that would serve us well over the years.

Looking back, I'm not sure we would have spent as much as we did on them ... but overall, we don't regret it.

Aside: Two of my favourites were a $2,500 Lease/Option course I took my wife to as a wedding anniversary present.  LOL!  Can you believe I'm still married after that?  What a great woman!  And the second was $8,000 I spent on a "mentor" who I discovered knew much less than I did.  I already owned rental property at the time and he took me on a tour of McMaster Student rentals and proceeded to explain how the market was completely saturated and everyone had vacancies in the area.  What he didn't realize was that Nick and I owned a rental on the street that we were touring and we had rented it out at capacity each year without fail. That particular experience was not money well spent!

If it's not obvious to you yet we're pure information junkies and we'll pay to get it.

When I went into sales I paid $2,500 for sales "coaching" outside of the training that the company I was working for was providing.

And at that time $2,500 was a LOT of money to me (it still is a lot of money, but relatively speaking, back then, it was a huge amount to me).

But one of the most hilarious (or sad) things I've spent money on was a box of tapes ... yes, old-school cassette tapes ... for $5,000.

Robert G. Allen the real estate guru guy sent out some marketing letters promoting his real estate advice.

I was recently married, just bought our first home, just had my first child but somehow managed to scrape together the $5,000 required to buy these things.

A few weeks after I ordered, a big box of tapes landed on our doorstep.

And to listen to these things I had to buy a "boom box" from Zellers because my 4-door, standard, Honda Civic didn't have a tape player (by then CD players were standard).

I then drove to work and home each day for weeks listening to how to buy homes with no money down and how to wholesale properties and more fun stuff.

I quickly learned that the real estate information contained on those tapes wasn't very useful to me.

It was U.S. focused and some of the strategies were out of sync with Canada.

But amazingly, I did benefit greatly from that investment.

Some of the tapes were on negotiation and public speaking.

The negotiation tips have served me amazingly well over the years.

And I remember studying those public speaking tapes over and over again.

In fact, when I was at Oracle Corporation, I was asked to speak in front of the 300 person sales force in Mississauga, Ontario about hitting your sales quota and going to the annual "President's Club" reward vacation.

And I nailed it.

I was nervous but I nailed it.  And it was in large part to the things I learned from the tapes inside that $5,000 box.

That experience gave me the confidence I needed to improve my own sales results, negotiate stronger, and perhaps more importantly, it really helped strengthen my own positive self-image.

And I think we can all agree that how you "feel" about yourself day-to-day often dictates the quality of your life and the results you achieve.

I often reflect back on those tapes and recall how much I learned from them.

So although 80% of the tapes weren't useful to me ... the ones I least expected, about negotiation and public speaking, were worth their weight in gold to me.

I'm sure I've earned back multiple times that initial $5,000 because of the lessons on those tapes.

A few years ago I threw them all out but kept the negotiation and public speaking ones.

Recently Nick and I figured out that we've spent over $300,000 on different marketing seminars, mastermind groups, travel to them, etc.  ...  so our investment in information continues.

I have a personal dream to build a massive, old-school, non-digital, library in my house - with collections of all these different programs and books we've studied over the years.

Strange right?

I don't want a bigger house for a bigger rec room or TV area ... I want a huge library!  LOL.

Anyway, why are we sharing this?

Because over the years we've taken a lot of heat from friends about the money we've spent on this stuff.

But years later it's paying off and the payoffs seem to be accelerating.

Over the past years, during our month long summer adventures in Croatia, we've taken multiple "mini-vacations" within a vacation to Paris, London, Rome, Barcelona and multi-day Croatian island trips where we've chartered our own boat with a captain to cruise us around.

We're not sure that would be possible without all the investments we've made in ourselves over the years.

So if you're someone searching, reading, investing and learning, and taking some heat for it ... realize you are not alone ... you are a part of a group of people looking for the "slight edge," the "little advantage" that will make all the difference in your life.

We're all in this together!

In fact, we've noticed that all high achievers invest in themselves.

They spend time studying the history of their niche.

They're constantly searching and learning.

But today if you find yourself buying a $5,000 box of tapes that's just plain crazy ...

... get the CD, or better yet, the MP3 version 🙂

Until next time ... Your Life! Your Terms!