Oh, the Highs and Lows!

There is a previous post related to this one! Social Anxiety, Phone Calls, and Real Estate Investing

I did manage to go through with looking at the building! However, the night before I felt very depressed and defeated. My brain told me I was silly for calling about it, that I didn’t have the money, that there was no way they’d take a kid like me seriously (I’m 27, and in situations like these I feel like I’m 14!),  they’d judge me for bringing my parents, and that somehow they’d be condescending and just know that I was never going to buy it. My attitude made me want to call the real estate agent back and call the whole thing off! Needless to say, it was a rough 24 hours before I even got to the showing!

Thankfully, the real estate agent was wonderful and very helpful, and the owner was a 60+ year old, skinny biker who just oozed the hippy vibe. Loved them both! To be honest, my first impression of someone in a trade will often effect my anxiety later down the line, so had I gotten a very pushy and unpleasant real estate agent this time, my anxiety would have been 10x as bad the next time I tried to contact one. So my good experience is definitely helpful to future me!

The building itself was overwhelming! The size of it, folks! It was three levels, plus a basement, and I believe the real estate agent said a little over 30,000 square feet! The things I could do with it! I’ve actually began working on floor plans and ideas, and will share those once I have them where I want them (perfectionism).  My significant other does have a friend who has done a lot of contracting in his life, and he’s agreed to walk through it with us sometime next week to see if he can give a ballpark figure of how much money you’d have to have to fix the place up. There is a lot of water damage in one part of the building, the roof at one time collapsed in and fell through the 3rd floor, onto the second, and then proceeded to leak water to the first. There was a new roof put on it around 12 years ago, so that stopped the decay, but there’s already a lot of damage done in that section!

Now, why am I continuing along with this anxiety inducing lunacy if I have no intention of actually buying the place? It’s a learning experience! I have been given the numbers for different places in town that help with grants and such for historic old buildings, and I need to call city counsel with what I’d plan to do with the building to see if they’d approve it. If I go through this process now then when I do it seriously it will be less stressful. Right now I have the knowledge that I can back out at any time it gets to stressful, and know that it’s not likely the building is going to sell tomorrow.

I’m glad I went, but it’s definitely caused me a lot of anxiety this week, and made me moody and I’ve hit at least one rather extreme depressed spell. I almost went home from work sick yesterday because I could barely function. Thankfully, work picked up in a way that had me running all over the office, and the physical movement helped tremendously!

I have a lot of things I want to write about, so I may have to break my Mon, Wed, Fri rule and put up a post or two over the weekend. We’ll see! Hope you all have an amazing Friday!

 

Social Anxiety, Phone Calls, and Real Estate Investing

Tuesday was a good day. I made a phone call asking about a property on the street I live on that is for sale. The property is an old building, originally housing our cities first JCPenney. It’s basically been vacant since 1977. They want $19,900 for it.

Let me start out with the fact that I absolutely hate phone calls. I would rather go directly to a person and talk to them then call them. I text my friends, only my immediate family gets the pleasure of talking to me on the phone. If it wasn’t because my job required me to support users over the phone, I wouldn’t do it. You can imagine it was a special kind of hell the first year at this job, dealing with phone calls trying to answer peoples questions about issues on the spot. I’m not sure how I survived without getting terrible stomach ulcers from stress.

Anyway, I called the real estate agent the first time and got her voicemail, which was a little bit of a relief. I like hearing people’s voices before I talk to them directly over the phone. My brain tells me I can tell by the sound of their voice how friendly they are and how mean or condescending they will  be to me when I actually do talk to them. I left a voicemail about the property and waited, with an upset stomach, for a call back.

Now let me tell you about the abusive relationship that my stomach is stuck in with my SA. Whenever I deal with social anxiety, I end up feeling very queasy. Sometimes, this keeps me from going anywhere or doing anything until the anxiety inducing event has either passed me by or I suck it up and do whatever it is. I swear, I don’t need any fiber in my diet, social anxiety is enough! So, after my first phone call, I had to hit the toilet. Then I managed to miss the call back, so I then had to use the bathroom a second time before calling her back again. Needless to say, my stomach was in bad shape the rest of the evening.

Now, to be honest, I didn’t have to make this phone call. I made myself make it. Why? Because I wanted to and knew I would regret not doing it. You see, I’ve been really interested in investing money in real estate for a while now as well as starting a business. I have no desire to buy myself a house yet, I’m very happy renting, so why not put that money to good use? While I don’t actually intend on buying this specific property (it’s quite a mess from what I can tell peeping through the windows into it), I need to start somewhere in getting comfortable with doing these sorts of crazy things that I want to do. So, this afternoon I have an appointment to view the property with the real estate agent and the owner.

My parents will also be going with me.

Baby steps.

*stomach gurgle*