Last weekend, Jason and his team hosted a fantastic virtual event with many incredibly intelligent and ambitious people attending from all over the United States. It was an absolute blast to take a deep dive into the many topics surrounding wealth creation with Jason, his team members Sara and Lisa and local market specialists. A big thank you to all who attended for your great questions, comments and participation in the event!
Buyer’s Remorse
Something that came up at the virtual event in light of the current high home prices across many markets (and Jason has often talked about this on his show), was buyer’s remorse. When you are in the trenches evaluating a deal, it almost always looks and feels expensive. Every investor gets a touch of buyer’s remorse; it’s human nature to question ourselves after the fact and wonder if we made the right decision. And that questioning usually leads us to thinking we paid too much! As the author of Jason’s favorite poem “The Reluctant Investor’s Lament,” said way back in 1977: “everything is so over priced.”
Well, having been a real estate investor for most of his life (decades now), you can believe Jason when he says: it always feels that way. That’s just the way it is. However, every deal is a great deal when you look in the rear view mirror and time heals all wounds. This expression applies not only to life experiences and relationships, but also to real estate. Time gives us perspective. You can compare it to looking at a painting close up; at that distance, you can only see small brushstrokes. But when you back up, you gain perspective and context on the entire canvas and its content. This is absolutely true with real estate deals. At first, it’s very easy to feel that you paid too much. However, when you let some time go by and gain a little perspective, you see that it was a great deal in the rear view mirror. As long as you aren’t buying in a place like Detroit, of course… The deal must make sense the day you buy it naturally.
Inspired Investing
Sometimes you’ll hear a song and even though it might be something you listened to a lot in the past, you hear it again and it just hits you like a brick! That happened to Jason recently while driving as Whitney Houston’s “One Moment in Time” came on. It’s such a great song and full of inspiration that is absolutely applicable to our thinking about investing, life motivation in general and about taking a chance when it is presented to us. The late great Earl Nightingale used to say: luck is what happens when preparedness meets opportunity. And that’s so true in life, because opportunities come into everyone’s life and for those that are unprepared, the opportunity makes them look foolish; just think of a lottery winner who ends up broke a year later. Let’s apply this to real estate investing. What if an opportunity comes into our life or we find a deal, but then we think “oh it’s too expensive, the market will crash, there’s a bubble, etc.,” and we lose the deal. Had we invested sustainably with Jason’s techniques and followed his “Ten Commandments of Successful Investing,” all we had to do was wait – history has proven this asset class over and over and over again.
So consider again the lyrics to this Whitney Houston song, which was written for the 1988 Summer Olympics in Seoul, South Korea and apply this to yourself as a real estate investor:
“I want one moment in time,
When I’m more than I thought I could be,
When all of my dreams are a heartbeat away
And the answers are all up to me.”
It’s common for us to always be looking for the answers outside of ourselves, but Jason reminds you that you need only look inside. Don’t be like the reluctant investor looking in the rear view mirror and seeing nothing. All the answers are up to you!
Ashley & The Jason Hartman Team
