You don't have to be smart, or even a stable genius, to make money in real estate, you just have to be staked. That is given money to start. As in Monopoly. We started each game with a player given $500 or $1500. I forgot. I'm old.
That's how one begins in real life as well. I know this for a fact.
My father was not a wealthy man. He was working class. And grew up in the post Depression era. His mother saved string. His father took whatever money was saved, including the enormous string fortune, and blew it all at the racetrack.
Nevertheless, my father made something of himself. Not for nothing, but he did that after he spent a year in an Army prison for smoking the reefer in 1947.
My father was not your everyday Bronx-born CPA.
When I moved out to California and started making a life for myself, he suggested I get some real estate. Are you kidding? I said. I was barely making ends meet writing shitty copy for help wanted ads in recruitment advertising. That's when he fronted me $30,000 to buy a tiny condominium in the not-so-desirable southern areas of Culver City. Minutes away from the also Not-So-Fabulous Forum.
It was 800 square feet and had 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, a dining room (more of a nook), a tiny living room, and a kitchen the size of a powder room. You could fit two people in the kitchen but then there wouldn't be any room for a pot roast or a chicken.
I dutifully paid him back the money because I didn't want that nut hanging over my head. Years later and in a stroke of good fortune the California real estate market obliged me with a huge profit on the condo.
I sold it for nearly 3 times what I paid for it.
I took that profit and bought out my uncle and his modest home in Palm Springs. It was a way for me to avoid capital gains tax. And for him to have some cash in his pocket for his golden yet-cranky years.
With the miniscule rent he was paying me I was also able to bail out my sister-in-law who had gotten underwater on her townhome. I still rent it to her. At under-market rates, but I'm glad to be in a position to help her out.
Not to mention my house, originally purchased during Culver City's frumpy years. With Google, Apple, and Amazon now situated here, it ain't that frumpy anymore -- $$$.
The point is, real estate been very, very good to me. So to assume that Donald Trump is some kind of business wunderkind is to conflate his success with some kind of plan.
Or even a concept of a plan.
Any idiot, including me, can make money in real estate. As the saying goes, "Land, they're not making any more of it."
Just something to keep in mind, I was fronted $30K in 1988.
Ex President Grandpa Ramblemouth was given $400,000,000 by his tax cheating, Ku Klux Klan loving father. And yet he still finds the need to pimp sneakers, bibles, trading cards and shabby books.
OK, maybe the last one doesn't help make my case. I've also got books to sell.
Feel free to pick one up here...
My other point is...Fuck Donald Trump.
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