Lucky and stupid

[pieman]

From another website...
"There's a thread on this forum with over 1400 posts (fav SS thread) slagging off at how stupid property investors are. I guess they must be stupid and lucky"

So as a PI do you feel that you are stupid and lucky?

As my properties roar up and i look at a conservative capital gain this year of 750k, i don’t particularly feel lucky or in fact stupid. What people don’t realise that at some stage, if you are any good at this you have to put your b@lls on the line. Like in 2000, I had borrowings 25X my income and just worked my *** off to pay the shortfall with lots of weekend work.
Am i lucky, that now after holding onto some of that portfolio i am now worth close to net 3m? I don’t feel lucky, I feel like at times it was hard work and that occasionally i really wondered weather it was worthwhile.

So you people that are starting off, dont expect and easy ride but a hard slog imho.

What about you other experienced PI's, are you lucky and stupid?

pieman

 

[Rob Williams]

Yeah, I'm lucky and stupid, too.
I've had enormous CG over the past 2 years, much of which has manifested in the past year.
I've cut my expenses to the bone to make up the shortfall on my loans, against the advice of well meaning friends and family, not to mention the negative feedback from the positive cash flow proponents (I haveno problem with that strategy, I just choose a different path to the same peak).
A few people tell me that I "got lucky". Lucky is what I would have got if I played Keno at the casino and won a big chunk of cash.
Maybe it's easier for people with no vision or motivation to make themselves feel better by saying it's just "luck".
I agree, Pieman, it may not be an easy ride, but when you see the power of time and compounding first hand and you reap the huge rewards, it's an awesome and empowering feeling.
So, anyone looking to get started ... what are you waiting for. Like Rixter says, you don't have to get it right, just get going!

 

[Player]

I'm lucky and stupid

..............What about you other experienced PI's, are you lucky and stupid?

pieman

Absolutely.

With regards the latter, I started without knowing much at all in my early twenties. Whilst I didn't know what I didn't know........I took action, repeatedly and, let tincture of time do its work. Many of my peers called me stupid .......I didn't listen to them.

With regards the former, I (and like yourself and many others here no doubt), am very lucky as over time I accumulated knowledge and applied it further, hence creating my own LUCK

Labour Under Correct Knowledge.

 

[our obsession]

Appearances to the mind are of four kinds.

Things either are what they appear to be; or they neither are, nor appear to be; or they are, and do not appear to be; or they are not, and yet appear to be.
Rightly to aim in all these cases is the wise man's task.

Borrowed from Epictetus.

 

[HiEquity]

Pieman

Congratulations on your achievement!

As to myself, I feel lucky but not stupid.

Lucky in that our properties have grown faster and further than our expectations at the time we purchased them.

Not stupid in that we knew this type of growth was possible and the only way to capitalise on it was to have an exposure. The likelihood of growth appeared significantly higher than loss at the time and we were fortunately correct.

However, if we had bought the right properties at the time and maximised our exposure, our financial position would be many multiples of what it is now so while we may not be stupid we will definitely follow a different path going forward. This learning experience is worth an awful lot of money though. I would say this process makes us "unsophisticated" investors.

If we were stupid, we wouldn't have done anything and we would still have the knowledge base we had years ago. If we were stupid we would have sat back and studied the theory of investing ad infinitum from the safe sidelines before doing anything while watching opportunities fly by. IMO there is no substitute for the learnings to be had from having large chunks of skin in the game so you learn not just about the market but also your own responses and can optimise both.

Stupid people don't start this learning process for themselves and so always look around for others to provide advice and blame instead. There is no substitute for improving your own real world investing judgement through jumping in the deep end IMO. Choosing such a path is not a stupid thing to do... even if you do end up losing a bit of skin in the process!

 

[steveadl]

If being smart prevents you taking an opportunity due to all the reasons it couldn't work, then I'd be happy to be called stupid.

Stupid and rich will do me just fine. Beats smart and poor any day.

Luck is a term used by a person in reference to others willing to take action they weren't confident to take themselves.

 

[rugrat]

Let's hope I'm lucky. I need little luck to ensure I still have servicaility mid next year when my IP settles, which with interest rates rising, may be out of my control - So I'll take all the luck I can get.

 

[battler]

I've always been considered stupid, and if it hadn't been for my bad luck, I wouldn't have had any luck at all.

 

[Shaneelastic]

Im a member of that other forum, and I can say that there are alot of members that post in that section who actually believe that they can make more money from trading shares than any other activity.

They choose this over sometimes even getting a real job - yes some are good at it but a majority aren't.

Also alot of the members over there are doing finance degrees, and again believe that they can beat the market.

These people who im talking about are the worst possible clients to have why? – because they think they know everything. They just don’t realize that you can purchase a property with basically little down and negatively gear it.

 

[AlmostBob]

The more
Edit
Kathryn
goes against expert opinion the stupider we are, the larger the margin
The harder we work, the luckier we get

expert
ex, - has been
spurt, - drip under pressure

experts know absolutely everything about a subject with no relevance to the current problem
experts, failed to predict or preapre for the prior downturn

 

[willfong]

If this crowd is called lucky and stupid the other mob must be unlucky and still stupid. I know which one I'll rather be in.

 

[blaster]

Ahhh , that title just had to make me look.

Sounds like it's coming from the shares corner to me !

I'm aiming to become at least 1/2 as stupid as some of the people around here myself . A 3 or 4 million portfolio will do me very nicely thanks very much.


Cheers

 

[joanmc]

I guess I must be both too then

Actually nothing p*sses me off more than having people say how "lucky" I am!
"lucky" my a**!
is it lucky to spen day after day scraping paint? Going without to service loans, etc etc. for YEARS! and now that I can sit back and have holidays I am "lucky"

bite me!

 

[BayView]

From another website...
"There's a thread on this forum with over 1400 posts (fav SS thread) slagging off at how stupid property investors are. I guess they must be stupid and lucky"

So as a PI do you feel that you are stupid and lucky?

As my properties roar up and i look at a conservative capital gain this year of 750k, i don’t particularly feel lucky or in fact stupid. What people don’t realise that at some stage, if you are any good at this you have to put your b@lls on the line. Like in 2000, I had borrowings 25X my income and just worked my *** off to pay the shortfall with lots of weekend work.
Am i lucky, that now after holding onto some of that portfolio i am now worth close to net 3m? I don’t feel lucky, I feel like at times it was hard work and that occasionally i really wondered weather it was worthwhile.

So you people that are starting off, dont expect and easy ride but a hard slog imho.

What about you other experienced PI's, are you lucky and stupid?

pieman

Yeah; I'm lucky that I got onto this caper when I did, but stupid that I didn't do it way earlier.

Actually, I'm not lucky, so I make my own luck, and I'm not stupid, but not a rocket scientist by any stretch.

Because I know I lack smarts, and am not lucky (never gamble these days and always have been terrible at it) I've chosen to do lots of work and research to make sure the investments are winners.

At the end of the day it's still a guess, but it's more of a damned good educated guess.

 

[RumpledElf]

We're amazingly lucky. We were ignoring the house we bought for about a year (there's the "stupid"), noone else bought it in all that time, and then we managed to get a lo-doc for it about 5 minutes before they started clamping down on lo-docs. The property market here is now on an incredible uptick and we've either tripled or quadrupled the value of the house in the last year, depending on how you calculate it (we're subdividing so it is now effectively two properties). We had absolutely no plans to buy property at the time because we couldn't afford a bloody thing and were pretty much demoralised that we were going to be stuck in my old house indefinitely. Now we've gone from 'stuck' to being able to build a new house cash within the next year, give or take some highly irritating wriggling to avoid needing a loan.

Lets hope this 'luck' holds out because I'm currently looking for a tenant who'll actually pay rent on the other house that didn't want to be sold.

Oh and I bought one of those timber venetians at Ikea (which is 200km away so kind of hard to just take it back) yesterday on a whim thinking "yup, that looks about the right size" and figuring $25 wasn't too much to throw away if it was the wrong size. And whaddayaknow? It is pretty close to a perfect fit Lucky!