This was kind of a funny conversation where I was talking to a real estate who mentioned that some of the houses that he sells have some kind of tree or plant that grows fruits and vegetables and he uses that as nudge to enhance the value of buying the house.

Guess it makes sense in many ways yet at the same time I’m not quite sure why it is kind of humorous at the same time. I always thought having fruit trees or say a mini garden would be a good way to save money too general. Imagine having a collaboration of some sort where all your neighbors each grow something different.

You can pretty much just mix and match and save each other a lot of money. My neighbors actually do that where everyone pretty much encourage others to say take a plum or apple from the tree if they want one. Not sure if people would really consider that as a reason to boost a property value though.

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I was told of an interesting scenario today where a person originally invested in a condo a few years back and just recently decided to sell it. Turns out, he was able to get almost one million dollars for it. As a result, he then decided to use that money to buy a house worth over one million dollars as it was almost like free money.

The person telling me the story thought that was kind of crazy as she believed if you were that fortunate to sell it for that price you should just find something decent for say $600,000 and then use the rest of the money for other purposes.

I guess a lot of people do this for smaller items as well. For example, let’s say you bought a piece of electronic equipment and for some reason it broke. The company then gave you back the original cost of the item and then some to compensate you for your time. Most people would be inclined to then use all that money to then buy something superior to what they had before as oppose to wanting to save the extra money and get something of an equal value like before.

While in many ways it is simply a preference, I think it is kind of a bad habit that you have to teach yourself not to do. I know for myself I usually perceive free money or ones gained from investments as funds designated to help you earn more money as this is essentially your pool of funds to help further flex your financial stability. Therefore, to me it is almost invisible in regards to spending it as a regular fund.

Like in the case of the condo scenario what I would have done would be say if I originally invested $600,000 then for the house my consideration to buy it would be that $600,000 plus factoring my existing stream of income and savings. The other $400,000 I would try to think of what else I could do with it such as maybe trying to find another good deal on a condo to hopefully repeat the cycle. I personally think it is better then just spending it all.

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There is an interesting story that popped up around here about a 26 year old real estate agent named Robert Zoost who markets himself as a more high-end realtor while being portrayed as a “Million Dollar Man” so to speak. Even on his site there is a line stating “Marketing Properties from $1,000,000.00 - $50,000,000.00”.

Initially to a lot of people from the outside, including the media, painted him as a real estate superstar. Interestingly enough, his past has been slowly popping up due to various events, including lawsuits against him, and it is not a pretty one at all from a financial point of view it seems. There were occasions where he received advanced commission checks, well into the five figure ranges, while being hounded to repay various financial debts to multiple parties.

There were two instances that caught my attention where one of his former girlfriend apparently leased a cell phone for him which he was suppose to pay her back for. On top of that, he drove a luxury Mercedes Benz, to help his image I’m guessing, and the car happened to have been purchased and owned by a different girlfriend mainly due to his request (Based on what I read).

That just made me think of the parasitic style type of lifestyle that a lot of people indulge in at the expense of others. Isn’t that usually the case where people who constantly feel the need to flaunt about their vast riches are not all that they appear to be? I actually have experience lending a person a lot of money and resources as well. While getting your money back can be a real pain, it sure taught me a lot about the personality patterns and actions of people like that to avoid them.

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One prominent topic that I heard during that conference was a debate on whether it is better to invest in stocks or real estate if your goal is to generate wealth for the long term. The main point for real estate was that it is more stable than stocks when it comes economic circumstances. For stocks it seems like the argument was that it is more obtainable for the average person to do.

I personally never tried real estate yet as it seems like something you would want to educate yourself about before trying it. There just seems to be so many details and regulations that you need to understand before doing any kind transaction. It’s definitely something I will want to try one day for the income journey section.

I don’t see why you wouldn’t want to try both if your good at it though as like some say it’s about diversifying.

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I attended the Learning Annex event with an open mind and as you all know one of my main goals was to document my experience. It was held at the Vancouver and exhibition convention centre and to my knowledge there were about 4000 to 5000 attendees. Of course, I’m sure most people attended with the assumption that they would get to see Donald Trump live as well as getting a free copy of his book “Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life”.

They sent a mass e-mail to all the registrants beforehand on how the first fifty people in line would get $100. Apparently the first person there was lining up as early as 2:30am. That alone kind of gave me a picture beforehand on what the overall event would be like.

The live speakers there consisted of Bob Kittell, Dr. Albert Lowry, Don Burnham, Lee Brower, Raymond Aaron and Chris Johnson. The topics ranged from making money with stocks, real estate, utilizing government grants and general motivational speeches. With the exception of Lee Brower’s keynote, for the most part the other sessions felt like an incredibly long infomercial using typical techniques to get people to buy tools and seminar packages on the spot.

Here is an example with the first session which was pitching a seminar for a product called Investools that is suppose to help people in deciding when to sell or buy stocks. At first the speaker teaches people about some very basic information about the industry in general which of course is very enlightening if you don’t already have too much knowledge of it. They then proceed to inform how lucrative it can be to get involved while showing all these testimonials from people who have been successful with it.

With that planted in people’s mind, they then show you how expensive the program would normally be apparently while using a return on investment way of thinking to further justify the price. Afterwards, they tell you how they are offering this exclusive promotion for that day only where they have decided to give it at a special discounted price and that there are limited quantities. With Investools for example, it went from $4,297 to $999 (Which was a pretty consistent final price range for most of the other products).

This would cause a frenzy of people to get up from their seats to purchase the product right away for a fear of loss. It then felt like an auction house of some sort as the person would ask people to bring out their credit cards while continuously counting down how many have been sold. I captured a quick video of it here:

There was one technique that was used by a lot of the speakers which I thought was a bit devious personally. A lot of times the speaker would use the promise of giving people something expensive or luxurious for free on the spot to play with the crowd’s emotion to get them to chant and cheer. Then at the very end they casually slip in on how you have to buy their product to qualify in getting it for free. A great example was with Raymond Aaron’s session as he made a lot of people believe that he was going to give everyone in the room a free cruise ship vacation if people show enough enthusiasm. Here is a sample of that:

Aside from the speakers, most of the other happenings revolved around giving away money and prizes such as raffles and holding a quick dance contest. There were some activities that involved people having to network and meet others. I personally thought it would have been better if there were more events like that. I did get to meet some new contacts which was nice. People were getting weary overall it seemed with the conference and the event organizers would constantly mention how Donald Trump will be there.

At around 7pm or so one of the event organizer mentions how it was time for everyone to welcome Donald Trump. The lady was presenting it as if he was going to walk in the room. A lot of people were simply looking around the room and then to a lot of people’s surprise it was simply a recording from one of his past appearances at an Annex event in New York. There were a lot of moans and sarcasm from the crowd over it initially and it almost felt like the lady was shocked over the reaction. Lucky there was no anarchy of any sort. A lot of people simply left in disappointment without even watching the recorded speech.

For the Trump speech in general, myself and a lot of others thought it was kind of humorous when you could clearly see that the video was shortened from the original length it seemed as there would often be these noticeable video transition effects. Here is some of the video for those who are interested:

In the end, I did get a free copy of the book as advertised. It was disappointing overall I thought personally and I really didn’t like how some of the speakers seemed to try to belittle the status of the attendees as a way to imply that buying their products will help change all that. Some example are how there was a generalization at times that all the people in the room had horrible credit scores and that they could help them fix that or that everyone in there were poor financially with a disappointing lifestyle. I don’t know about everyone else, but I would have preferred if it was more of a positive approach in wanting to genuinely help others. I did get to meet friendly and successful people too and so all was not lost.

I thought the best session was Lee Brower’s keynote as he seemed genuine in wanting to help/inspire people without a hidden agenda to sell a product of some sort. There was a funny blooper at the end as he wanted to give away this package of Pringles to the crowd and the lid flipped opened.

If there was an actual fee to attend the event though I could easily see how a lot of people would have been outraged over it. I think most people were disappointed overall based on the comments I heard. I personally walked away with what I intended to do which was to attend mainly for experience.

In my opinion, I think the important thing to realize before attending these types of events is that if you want to change something in your life it always starts with you changing yourself first. That way you’ll prevent yourself from buying all these things emotionally in hopes that it will be a quick fix answer in life whether it’d be personally or financially.

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