The Money Mustache Community
Learning, Sharing, and Teaching => Real Estate and Landlording => Topic started by: nereo on December 04, 2018, 12:33:26 PM
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Oy.
My workplace has weekly seminars designed to help people with everything from retirement planning to wellness planning. Some of them are incredibly useful. This week's seminar focused on "First Time Home-buying". Oh boy...
Within the first 2 minutes it became apparent that this was very much an infomercial led by a real-estate agent. I wish I had thought ahead to make up Real-estate jargon bingo cards. her opening powerpoint slide had the phrases "forced savings account", "best investment you'll ever make" and "the path to a secure retirement" in bold bullet points. It went downhill from there.
Without any real prompting, she casually mentioned she was also a Dave Ramsey Certified Seminar Leader (didn't know there was such a thing) and then told us about her retirement strategy, which was entirely landlord based. Fair enough, until she added "... I don't understand IRAs and you can't trust the stock market". Um... come again? Don't forget, "land value never goes down" (tell that to the people in Paradise, CA)
While I agree that being a land-lord can be a great wealth-building strategy for some, she spent quite a time trying to convince us not to participate in our company sponsored 403(b) plan - where we have a 100% match - and instead use that to buy properties. Weird thing was, she even admitted to not liking or being a very good landlord, and outsourcing that to a property management company. She used 'questionable math' to make her point, like how paying $1k/rent for 5 years was equal to buying 1/3 of an $180k home, ignoring things like interest, taxes, insurance and upkeep that the owner is responsible for.
The topic of new-build vs buying a home was also a no-go with questionable math. She claimed new-build constructions would "end in divorce... just kidding! but not really!" then said a newbuild would cost "over $300/sqft" whereas buying an existing home was "$150-220, depending on quality". Those numbers seem horribly skewed to me based on my experience, and don't seem to reflect the 'all-in' costs of home purchasing.
Weird thing was, she was brought in to give us information on the home-buying process. This isn't her area and she even said we should find someone local (i.e. not her) who we were comfortable dealing with. Seems like someone who had drank too much of her own kool-aid.
Anyone experienced anything similar?
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Did you at least get out of work for a bit?
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Did you at least get out of work for a bit?
It's voluntary and during lunch hour.
We did get tasty Gingerbread cookies, though!