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Is It Possible To Become A Real Estate Mogul If You Start With No Money?

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Here’s the thing.

I went from being worth nothing—divorced, broken-hearted, dead broke and living off my little brother’s charity in 2014—to being worth a quarter million dollars in only two years. Beyond that, I follow a strategy that allows me double my income year-to-year. Let me introduce myself: My name is Gualter Amarelo, real estate agent, property manager, real estate investor, and now, your real estate mentor.

Not long ago, I was driving around my hometown with my buddy Bruno. I forget exactly what he’d asked me, but it led us into one of my favorite topics: real estate. During our discussion, Bruno asked me some really important questions and I realized that if I wanted to add value to the lives of people all around the world, same thing I’ve dreamed of doing since I was little, I needed to make this information available to everybody, not only the people in my hometown.

Throughout this Series of posts, I’m going to address some of the significant questions Bruno brought up that day.

Every Master Was Once A Disaster

I guess my life story is about how you can come from nothing and still achieve success. I’d always wanted to be successful and have an impact on the lives of everybody I came into contact with—just about everyone wants this. So when I was younger, my brother and some friends and I started a band with me on the bass.

Our original band didn’t work out, so most of us moved on to trying covers, but we didn’t have a passion for that and soon the bands had died. It was during my band days that I’d met my wife. The event of our encounter took place when I was working at Walmart. She was dating one of the managers at the time, and I remember telling my brother about this attractive new girl that worked in the layaway department.

It took about eight years of friendship and support as she went through a breakup and then another; but in the end, we’d both fallen madly in love with one another and on September 10, 2011, we got married, surrounded by family and friends in the backyard of my very first house, which we’d bought together a few years earlier, by my father, a man whom I love and adore more than any words could ever describe.

Back To My Car Ride With Bruno.

It was a beautiful spring day, the sun was shining and there was a cool breeze that whispered life and opportunity as we drove by City Hall with its nearly two dozen flags from various countries blowing in the wind, commemorating the melting pot that was our city of Fall River, MA.

I had picked him up because his BMW had gotten a flat tire and I’d offered to fill it for him – he was shocked that I knew how to do that. I’ll never forget that moment as we passed by Dunny’s Saloon, one of my favorite bars in Fall River, and Bruno turned to me, and that’s where this all started.

“So, I have to ask: Your parents were rich, right?”

I want to be very clear about this because I get asked it a lot and it’s important for people to know that you don’t need to have rich parents to be successful. By no means was my family even remotely close to being rich. They had always been hard workers, yes. In fact, they’re still working very hard. They’ve always had enough to get by, but by no means was my family rich at all. We were lower-middle class by the time my parents divorced and my brother and I moved into our own place together.

To give you a little insight into my childhood and home life, my father wasn’t born in this country. He was born on the island of São Miguel in the Azores and my grandparents came to America in search of better income when my father was only six years old. They worked in the city’s factories. They were mill workers. My grandfather drove forklifts at Quaker Fabric and my grandmother sewed for the same company.

My father, who had two kids by the time he was twenty-five, was twenty-one when he married an eighteen-year-old woman—who would be my mother. They married young and had no college education. They didn’t even have the means to pursue a college education if they’d wanted to. They went to high-school, sure, but my mother dropped out of that. That’s right, I have an immigrant and a high-school dropout for parents. They were very smart in a lot of ways, particularly with parenting, but formal education wasn’t something they had. They weren’t taught how to pursue wealth, and so they never passed along the knowledge to me.

“Oh, wow. So, were they involved in real estate, then?”

Nope. They weren’t involved in real estate either. The only history my family has with real estate is that my Portuguese grandparents who spoke heavily broken English in the long run, after years and years of saving up money, bought a four-family home in the city of Fall River—I was raised there. My parents never owned a house when I was growing up.

My father had wanted to buy a home, and I found out recently that my mother had considered getting into real estate, but she never took the test to get her license and that dream died along with my parents’ marriage. For the entire time I was building an empire, the only piece of property my family owned was my grandparents’ multifamily building.

So, there you go again—no—without doubt, they weren’t rich, and they had very little exposure to real estate.

As I mentioned, I did grow up in my grandparents’ four-family home, so that was I picture I forever had in my head. Like, my grandfather was my landlord – I knew that. I knew that landlords seemed to have money, but I didn’t indeed grasp what that meant nor why until I was much older. I had a simple knowledge that my grandfather was a landlord and I wasn’t allowed to do certain things in the house, like jump around or play tag with my brother, or make too much noise, because we had neighbors upstairs and my grandmother downstairs worked overnights.

However, I do remember a lot of my friends didn’t have those rules, but it was a part of my life. I was a kid. I didn’t really worry about it. It was a mere situation that existed and I didn’t try to question it. Follow the rules, and everything is great.

The Ponderings Of A Young Real Estate Mogul

One thing I did question, though, was why my father always had to work. My mom used to call him a workaholic. She would stay home with us; meanwhile, my father always had two or three jobs. He was busting his butt and I remember there always being a lot of tension in the house about money because it was always scarce. It always seemed it was disappearing. There wasn’t enough. We had food budgets and there was never anything extra to get me and my brother toys or even Fruit Roll-ups once in a while. It was always no-name-brand cereal or oatmeal.

There was only ever enough money to get by, never anything extra to save or plan for the future. Growing up, my little brother and I always just assumed that’s how life was. Even our friends’ parents had their own homes and were always working extra jobs and barely scraping by with enough to live a life well below luxury. We didn’t know anything different. We knew that we had to go to school and we had to get good grades and one day we’d get a good job. I remember thinking, “Okay, my dad makes $40,000 a year, so that’s what I want to make. If I make that, I’ll be all set. If I make that, I’ll be doing really good, just like my dad.”

Strange Rules That Created An Obsession With Money As A Teenager

My mother had put a lot of things in my head, like I wasn’t allowed to start dating until I had $30,000 in the bank. She set me up with these weird rules: I couldn’t date somebody until I was ready to marry them, and I couldn’t marry them until I was ready to buy a house. I believed that a house was purchased with a 20% down-payment, which meant I had to have $30,000 in the bank. This was the math I’d had in my head ever since I was fifteen. Those were the sorts of thoughts in my head.

Here I was, fifteen years old, and my parents have never owned a house. They had gotten married without even plans of owning a house. When I asked about that, she told me I should buy one because that was the mistake they had made.

I Remember Making A Decision Then Never To Make The Same Mistakes As My Parents.

Another key benefit is that my father used to always tell me that real estate was the key to getting rich. “The rich get richer and the poor stay poor, and the rich own real estate.” He’d always said that. He always told me, “You need to work hard, work hard, work hard, save your money, and then invest it.” My father was a very smart man. So why did he never end up getting rich? Why don’t I come from wealth when my father was so smart?

The funny thing is that they both knew, they both gave me the seeds, they both told me to invest, but my father never invested and my mother never invested. To this day, despite my success, they’ve still never invested, though my father recently got his real estate license and I couldn’t be more proud of him taking that first step to financial freedom. As of February 2018, my father joined my team of real estate agents and we’re going to start working together doing some flips and doing some of the kinds of work that I do already.

But it’s interesting, you know. To think that I didn’t come from real estate. Nor did I come from any kind of money whatsoever. But I did come from a strong work ethic and a promise to not make the mistakes of my parents. That, I consider, was one of the beginning pieces that set me up to succeed in life.

Over the next few posts I will continue to reveal some of the critical experiences in my early life that formed my view of the world and why I continue to building my real estate empire and likely what has lead to my new found love of Silver, Crypto, business and the Stock Market as ways to diversify my wealth and income streams.

These posts are being pulled directly from my first book, Broke To A Quarter-Million which can be found at Amazon and Audible! Get your copy and let me know what you think!

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