A Rat and His Chance

Yet another reason I am thankful for the people around me is education. Let me brief you on the Bentleys.

My junior year in high school, a mate of my mother’s received an unrefusable job offer in Albany, New York. This presented a terrible dilemma for her and for me because on the one hand, if I went with them, I would be starting my senior year in a place entirely alien to me, and I would have been giving up three years worth of work in the Band program, which was to yield a considerable position for me my senior year. On the other hand, if I were to stay in Atlanta, well, the problem there is obvious. I was seventeen years old.

But, due to circumstances that were, well, “extenuating” at best, my mother allowed me to stay in Atlanta and finish my school career here. I lived with my best friend, who is a Bentley. My installment there was a more permanent arrangement of a situation that had already come to be. Before I moved in the house I was their “adopted son” and they were my “Mom and Dad of sorts.”

So that year, in February, my mother left for Albany and I moved in with my best friend. The Bentleys have and always will be a surrogate family to me.

That’s why, when Mr. Bentley gets excited about something for his family, I’m never left out of the circle. He is a real estate investor, and recently he has been working at it pretty hard. The result has been that he wants to pass on the benefits of learning those things to us, and so the past few months for me have really taken a turn.

I didn’t go to college because I didn’t graduate high school on time. I started working and quickly found out how much working (even if you’re doing something you love to do) really bites. I felt that a career, 40 or more hours a week, not enough money in most cases, two days a week off and one or two full weeks a year, was not the way life was supposed to be. But like everyone else who is too caught up with the here and now to work at it long term, I just swallowed my feelings and rose every morning at five or six o’clock to go help someone else get rich…the rat race.

That all changed when I read a book called “Rich Dad, Poor Dad” by Robert Kyosaki. That was step one. The author, a retired entreprenuer and investor himself, writes about how money can work for us instead of vice versa; how a job is a temporary solution to a long term problem; how we should work for education and not for money. He describes the beginning in the rat race and, if so, the uprising out of it and on to the fast track.

Step two was to study real estate investing and ways to acquire properties using none of your own money. If having your own money work for you is good, having other people’s money do the work is great! If a man worked at this type of thing consistently enough and aggressively enough for five or ten years, he could retire from his job and wages, and have investment returns paying his bills…and more. Does ten years sound like too long to wait? Try retiring after 40 or more years on a fixed income and government cheese.

Step three may be nothing. I don’t know yet, but for now I’m interested in studying my way to freedom. Freedom from dependence on a job with poor wages, freedom from someone else’s time requirements, freedom to educate myself, to live and spend time with my family. If I want to have a job for love of the subject matter (I want to be a band director.), then so be it. The money won’t matter because by then I will have a foundation of income in which I’ve made my money work for me.

Don’t be a rat. I strongly suggest reading this book.

So this is the beginning of my education. Who says education has to be from college? If it makes me money, I don’t care where it comes from!

For my spiritual future I have to thank my birth parents. But for my financial future I have to thank the Bentleys.