It’s great to have big goals but if they’re too big, too unrealistic, and too far away, they may prevent you from taking action NOW.

As the old saying goes, “you can’t eat an elephant in one bite”. Well, the same goes for beginner real estate investors: you (generally) can’t buy 10 properties in one purchase. While it’s great to have big goals, it’s important to break down those goals to realistic, “digestable” bite-sized pieces that will allow you to take action NOW.

A beginner investor should start out with realistic goals. Of course, I would never discourage someone from thinking big, but those big goals often have a tendency to prevent us from ever starting. When we say things like “I want to own 50 doors one day” the big picture seems so daunting, so far away, that it can be quite discouraging to think of how far you have to go to achieve your goal.

I can’t count the number of times I’ve heard investors tell me about their tenth property before they’ve ever bought their first, and, admittedly, I was guilty of this when I started out my real estate investment career. I have people ask me if they should set up a corporation to buy their first property because once they own 10 it will help limit liability. Or, someone said to me the other day “I want to buy bigger multi-family properties because once I hit a certain number, banks will stop lending to me” (this was all before he even owned ONE property to begin with).

To reiterate, I am NOT discouraging from having big goals, but I am encouraging you to break those big goals down into digestible, actionable goals NOW. Take your 10 property goal and break it down into “I will buy my first rental property in the next 3-6 months”. Then, after that, you can step up to “I will buy 2 more properties in the next 12 months”, etc. The beauty of real estate is its compounding and its leverage. One property building equity and cash-flowing is great because you can soon tap into that equity to buy another. Then you have 2 properties building you equity that you can tap into and so on.
Think big, but start small. Think big, but break it down into actionable, realistic goals that you can achieve NOW.