Regarding my message on Tuesday about “Why a College Degree Keeps You Miserably Broke”…
RESPONSE:
“I disagree with your title or your further statements. The college degree, when chosen correctly, provides more financial stability and consistency than flipping houses. But then again … you aren’t selling college degrees!” — Dorothy
TOM:
I’m certainly not selling college degrees.
Don’t need to.
Plenty of other people do that.
Especially given how big and price inflated the entire Education Industrial Complex has become the past 30 years.
Once upon a time I thought a degree was worthwhile. I even went and got me one. At $24,000 per year back in the 1990s (it’s more than twice as much now), that piece of paper cost me $96,000.
Which is why it was bothersome in the years afterwards that not one employer ever pulled a transcript or even bothered to make that degree a requirement of the job.
Admittedly, my degree was in History & Political Science, so it’s not like I was designing bridges or doing heart surgeries.
But that magical value never materialized.
And neither did the job security for me or even for millions of other people with even more advanced degrees.
There simply are not any guarantees with a “safe & secure” job anymore (perhaps government jobs are still an exception…).
Is constantly worrying about losing your job real security?
Who does stay in a job for 50 years these days?
Do any companies actually last that long anymore?
(Do they even make gold watches to give out at retirement anymore?)
Things changed.
The world changed.
And what was once promised and promoted as the ultimate lunch ticket ceased to be so.
That was tough news for me.
Continues to be tough news for others.
And hasn’t been accepted by still a huge majority of people yet.
But that’s okay.
It’s not a crime to disagree with me.
(At least not yet…)
The real estate house flipping skills, method, and techniques I now teach — things like marketing and negotiation — are totally transferable. They are the life-blood of all businesses. Learning them improves all parts of life.
And no one can take these skills away from you once you learn them.
They stay with you and improve everything you do.
Dollars per hour wise, flipping has the “stability and consistency” of a full-time job beat hands down. 40 hours per week is 2080 hours per year.
That’s an enormous amount of time.
Divide out what you make per year to figure out what you make per hour. Then factor in the opportunity cost of what you could have been doing with that time as life passes by (more family time anyone?)
My dollars-per-hour is at the top of the scale no matter what degree or profession it’s compared against.
Maybe not everyone’s priority, but it’s mine.
Is it stable to flip houses?
I do indeed need to put the effort in to make it happen. If I stop, then it stops. It isn’t an automatic thing at all.
But people always need houses (food, clothing, and SHELTER being the basic necessities of life). And houses are always getting run-down, out-of-date, and in need of repair. And especially because people always get into trouble and need to sell, or die and their heirs need to sell, or get divorced and need to sell, or get sick of their tenants and toilets and need to sell, and on, and on, and on, and on…
So I feel “secure” in knowing the business is there as long as I care to go after it.
Yes indeed, and make no mistake about it, I’m am selling something.
I’m always very open about that.
Here’re the links:
Rapid Cash Generator Kit
Rapid Cash Generator Implementation Bootcamp
Tom Zeeb
Traction Real Estate Mentors