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What It Takes to Be a Big-Time Investor

Ali Boone
3 min read
What It Takes to Be a Big-Time Investor

You want to be a for real, no joke investor. Like Kiyosaki, or Trump, or Gates, or who knows who. You don’t want to just be set for retirement. You want to make the most money in passive income you can so you are financially free and can do whatever you want.

What do you need in order to make that happen?

Requirements of Any Big-Time Investor

1.       Don’t Be Location-Specific. I’m sorry, but no one can tell me that the big boys all only buy investment properties locally and landlord their own properties. They just don’t do it. Where do they buy? Wherever the best deals are! Where the best deals are is always changing, and will always be changing. Some markets may be pretty consistent in always having good deals, and some markets may be pretty consistent in always having bad deals, but there is no market that will always have the best deals. Plus, an amazing deal may pop up  totally under the radar in some random area at any given time for little rhyme or reason. Maybe even in an area that typically always has bad deals. The big-time investor jumps on whatever the best deals are, no matter where those might be. No big-time investor only buys locally. They also don’t work on their own properties.

2.       Outsource All Work. Did I mention big-time investors don’t work on their own properties? No way. They only oversee the teams who do all the work. Big-time investors live off passive income. There is nothing passive about lifting a hammer during a rehab or taking repair calls from tenants. Those things are work. Work = not passive = not what big-time investors do. As Robert Kiyosaki says, “I don’t work for my money.” Meaning, he is not hands-on. His job as the big-time investor is to ensure proper teams are in place who will handle all the work associated with a property and then he just has to ‘manage the manager’ after that. And at his level, I’d imagine his job is to ‘manage the manager who manages the managers’. Then his other major task is to figure out how to creatively finance the deals so that it puts the highest returns possible back in his and his investors’ pockets.

3.       Leverage as Much as Possible. Another famous debate. Do you pay all cash for a property or do you leverage? Well, what do the big boys do? I’ll give you a hint- they don’t pay all cash for anything! They leverage as much as possible. They know that using other people’s money is the smartest way to maximize returns on any investment deal. They are also smart enough to know that investing all cash into something is insanely risky because they could potentially lose all of that money. So they look for money from other sources than their own pocketbooks.

4.       Know How to Find Money. I had an investor one time tell me that his full-time job, as a flipper, was finding money. It wasn’t flipping the houses, it was finding money. Every single deal required him to find more money. Why? Because he was slick enough not to use his own money for both risk and return reasons. At the point you consider time, effort, risk, and returns it is very obvious that you should always be using someone else’s money. Once you master how to find other people’s money, you can master real estate investing (assuming you know what to do with the money once you find it). If you can’t master finding other people’s money, or you insist on not leveraging for fear of, well not sure what the fear with leveraging even is, you will never become a big-time investor.

What kind of investor are you? One who insists on only buying locally so you can do all the work yourself and manage the headaches, all while risking every penny of your own money? Or one who knows the real definition of passive income?

Photo Credit: f_mafra

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.