Don't Predict - Prepare!

In the course of one week, I’ve seen articles and emails predicting the bottom of the real estate market, the beginning of the end and a turn-around and solid increase in the market. And each one of the articles has statistics to back up their widely divergent claims.

How can this be possible? Predicting the future has never been easy. Someone is bound to be right and someone else is bound to be wrong, but you won’t know what the true answer is until the facts are all in and someone gets to do the “I told you so” dance.

I remember other times in my life when people have staked everything on widely divergent points of view. For example, I’m old enough to remember the cold war. When I was in 3rd grade, I walked to school each day by a neighbor’s house who was busy building a bomb shelter. I don’t think he worked, because his only task, day in and day out, was hauling out dirt, then putting up concrete walls and finally building a store of food and water. “You’ll be sorry!” he used to say to others in the neighborhood.

I remember hearing of people who had companies that make a great living building bomb shelters.

Well, thank goodness my neighbor never needed his bomb shelter. His prediction was wrong. He spent a lot of time and money on something he didn’t need.

If he had been right, the rest of us would have been in a lot of trouble.

But through it all, there was one guy who prospered. That’s because he didn’t predict - he prepared. He saw an opportunity and seized it. That’s the guy who had the contracting business building bomb shelters. And, for that matter, the construction supply company who sold shovels, wheelbarrows and concrete prospered too.

Is real estate going to go in value? Is it going to go down further? Let me ask another question - does it matter? If you could buy a property today that gave you great cash flow, and cash flow was what you wanted, does it matter? Or maybe you decide the real estate market is too volatile these days (a decision my husband and I have made) and want to move into virtual real estate.

Whatever you choose for your course of action, there is one way to make more money with more security. Prepare. Don’t waste emotional energy trying to predict. Chances are you’re going to be wrong anyway. Prepare. Chart a course with a Plan “A”, Plan “B” - maybe all the way up to Plan “J” or so. Prepare. That’s the secret to success in volatile markets.