@Julie Hill
For me, my own math issues go right back to family. You may have noticed that people who make, in one way or another, their living out of something tend to be excessively proud of that thing. They form part of their identity, sometimes a very large part, around it. Your electrician will quote you chapter and verse of the national code because he's so proud of his mastery. Your doctor will speak to you using Greek terms as he's supposedly trying to communicate with you. For engineers and coders (who like to call themselves software engineers), oh, they love da math talk.
My brother is a coder. He was the kind of person who, growing up, would only play you in games where he was reasonably certain he would win all the time. For instance, I was two years younger than him, and as soon as I could beat him in chess, he stopped wanting to play. As soon as I grew an inch taller than him, any sort of wrestling was off-limits. I'll bet you know types like this, or are sadly related to them, like me.
In school, my brother was ahead of me, and good at math, and I found that meant that any sort of math achievement on my part would be carefully belittled by him. Did good on a quiz? "That's just stupid kid's stuff." A test? "Maybe next year you'll start doing real math." As my father was a mechanical engineer, my brother's math skills were much ballyhooed in my family. I seemed to have got the message very quickly that my math skills would never be appreciated in my family.
My brother's BS degree is in, predictably Computer Science/Mathematics. I instead studied English Language and Literature. At the end of my BA, faced with the reality that I had no money and the only way to move ahead in the field was to get a PhD in it, I had to take a test called the Graduate Record Examination, which is a lot like the SAT. There's a math section on it, and I studied for it, and for the first time, really, I made my peace with all the crap I went through in high school math. I became really good at quickly adding things up and calculating percentages in my head when I realized that hocus-pocus talk around those things was one of the main ways people get swindled in society. Once I could relate it closely to something I was interested in (how people are controlled and manipulated by the societies they live in), and not the mean little spite on my brother's face when he saw me doing well in math, it was a lot more interesting for me.
I ended up scoring well enough on the GRE math section to get a combined score that took me where I wanted to go. I think I took most of the math monkey off my back.
These days my brother is drowned in debt and working like an animal in the corporate world to pay off his upside-down mortgage on his McMansion and whatever he's still paying on his Tesla, while I am building up my little handyman C-class rental empire slowly and methodically, having realized the market for college literature professors is mighty tight these days and getting worse.
It's really amazing how much sibling rivalry stops bothering you when you have enough money and a quality vision for the future to laugh off the many stupidities of the past.
Julie, math guys are just as silly as the rest of us. They think they're super-special mentally, all the horsepower upstairs in the world -- but they're not and it's laughably obvious at times. Math is their thing, that's it. Some of them are more aware, most are not. That's how it goes. They always want you to have the impression that THEY KNOW THINGS, especially in real estate investing. They talk about BIG DATA and abstruse metrics. But very often, they know squat about houses, residential construction in their area, the history of construction, all kinds of things related the fact that it's called REAL estate for a reason. They ignore how intensively local most forms of real estate investing are until it bites them in the butt, and then they lie to themselves and pass off their over-reliance on numbers and metrics instead of people and relationships as just bad luck.
Math guys will buy a total piece of crap that's guaranteed to lose them money because they have more faith in their spreadsheets than a priest in Christ, they can't even see that the place is falling down. They rely on agents, contractors, inspectors, and lawyers to "do their jobs" when they don't have the foggiest notion of what those jobs entail (nor do they have any real respect for those jobs). Math guys will haughtily inform you that the physical stress they feel at work in their offices and the painful paper cuts they get from handling printouts are JUST THE SAME as a day spent in the trades and the much larger physical risks tradesmen run.
So Julie, you stick to what you need to learn, you keep working at it until you understand it, and you'll soon be laughing as much as I do at some of the math-based lunacies of real estate investing you'll find here on Bigger Pockets.