Second time’s the charm?

Here I am back in the land of blogs. Can I keep this one going for more than a couple of years? We shall see.

About four years ago, I had a personal blog that I kept up before I had kids & real estate. I started it mostly to get back into writing and somehow the pressure of having readership, even a small one, served to motivate me to blog on a regular basis. Besides, I had the time. Back in those days, I was, what one would call, footloose and fancy-free. No diapers to change, no loan papers to sign, no tenants to screen, no roofs to replace. Sigh. I do believe those were the good, old days of my adult life. How quickly things can change!

In a matter of two years, I was eye-ball deep in real estate investing and child-rearing. As the months went on, the kiddie side of life got a bit easier, but the real estate market was (still is, I believe) progressively deteriorating. My days were filled with dealing with tenants, plumbers, realtors, investors and bankers – not very exciting fodder for a blog, particularly when things aren’t going as well as you’d hoped they would. Some day, a lot of these experiences will be amusing to recount, but at the time, I was not in the mood to be funny. I was tired. Tired and disillusioned.

Every time I sat down to blog, all I could think of was how those real estate “gurus”, the ones who flog their “secrets of real estate riches revealed” books, tapes and bootcamps on tv or at various real estate “conferences” (think: live infomercial!), needed to be taken out back, en masse, and shot. Them and their promises of instant riches!! Who were they trying to kid, right? Everyone knows there’s no such thing as “overnight success”!! Ahem.

Okay, so I didn’t get into real estate thinking I was going to get rich overnight, but the market had been sizzling for a while and lots of people were raking in amazing profits. Heck! There were a million and one ways to make money in real estate: flipping, renting, rehabbing, short sales, pre-construction, etc., etc., etc. I’d met people who were successful RE investors. Just regular folks like you and me, making a killing. Yeah, those were the days.

Too bad I didn’t get on that band wagon way sooner. Fact is, I was much too late to the party. The best alcohol had been consumed, the hors d’oeuvers eaten, the cookies demolished and all that was left were some pretty, little crumbs and a few cheap wine coolers. But I was hungry and thirsty, doggone it and I wanted a taste of the action for myself. Visions of financial prosperity – nay, financial freedom – occupied my mind. I wanted to be free to write, take pictures, and hang out with my husband and child…in a tropical location if at all possible. One day, when a friend of mine, down in Florida, recounted his successes to me, I made a decision to go for it. I was going to be a bona fide real estate investor. Cool!!

After attending a few conferences, reading a bunch of books and joining a few very active REI forums, I felt myself ready to take the leap into active investing. I can do this! I said to myself. How hard can this be? Hardy-har-har.

I learned the hard way.

And now, though my real estate days are not precisely behind me, I have made my peace with the “industry” and with my own naivete. And I am oh so much wiser now. I might even go so far as to call myself a “seasoned” investor. All that seasoning came at a price however, but not the cost you’re probably thinking about. It’s too soon to say whether financially, my investing adventures have cost us or made us a few or a lot of bucks. And if in the end, we do end up losing money, still the “other” cost will have been greater.

Dealing with money all the time, thinking about it; estimating, calculating, negotiating, counting, crunching, worrying and then dealing with people who were ultimately only interested in their own good fortune – though many of them were genuinely nice folks – it made me a “hard” person. And I wasn’t a softie to start with! Oh, I resisted, believe me, but when the resistance began costing ME money, I knew that I either had to learn to be like “them” or I had to get out. Unfortunately, “getting out” was not an option. I found myself so busy with all things RE, that I no longer had time for the things I truly enjoyed – reading, writing, taking pictures. Things were not going the way that I had envisioned.

In spite of the general hectic nature of my life, Hubs and I, decided to go for #2 offspring. (I wasn’t getting any younger, after all!) After having my second baby, priorities had to shift. I don’t know what it is about having kids, but unless you are really fighting it, personal growth occurs at an almost exponential rates. Why, I asked myself, am I wasting time on the shallow promise of riches and the supposed “free time” that they would bring to do the things I love, when I can do those things now and not have to sell my soul to get there? And so, here I am. Some 25 odd years since I took my very first photograph using my dad’s Zenit and some 17 years after taking photography classes, mixing chemicals in the darkroom and writing essays about Weston and Karsh and some 6 years since my first digital camera and most recently, some 1000s of images of my kids later, I have finally allowed photography the place in my life that it deserves. That it needs. That I need.

What will come of it? I do not know. It’s hard to predict where life will take me. What I do know is that I am finally occupying my days with something I’m truly passionate about. Something that brings me joy and satisfaction. I hope that this joy and fulfillment will spill over from my life into the life of others and that in some small way, I can help make the world a better, kinder, softer kind of place.

By the way, here are my kids!

Natasha – 2 and half

Anastasia – 6 months