Ep 135: Myles Wakeham: How Anyone can Make Money in Real Estate

Have you always wanted to get into real estate investing, but just don't know how or where to start? Well, today, I have a fellow soldier of freedom and living the life you want, Myles Wakem. Myles and I have been investing in real estate for decades and have learned many lessons during that time. Today, we share with you some of those lessons and how anyone can get started in real estate investing and be successful if they exercise patience and realize it is not a get-rich-quick scheme.

As always, we dip into numerous other subjects relating to the economy, government abuse of power, and how taxation is actually theft.

About Myles in his own words: I was born and raised in Adelaide, Australia. Adelaide was a wonderful place. Clean, great community, great weather, great food. I mean the idyllic location. My parents were not wealthy, but nor were they poor. My father worked all of his life for the same company. My mother was a stay-at-home parent. My parents owned their own home and paid it off. They struggled financially but were able to put me through private school. I was an only child – I guess I didn’t have to share their focus with another, so I got lucky.

I had always been interested in technology from a young age. I was such an avid learner that I would go to great extremes to seek out things and get involved in clubs, community groups, etc. I rode my bike everywhere – even for hours to the city’s center to spend my Sunday afternoons in the public library. Soaking up every bit of knowledge I could get. Strange things that people often didn’t pay attention to. But I did.

One day I got exposed to CB Radios. This was in the 1970s. I became obsessed (as I often did with things). I learned about electronics, physics, communications, etc. This led me towards computers, and eventually, I bought one of the first personal computers – in 1978, the TRS-80 Model 1 computer. I learned everything about programming that computer, and it became everything to me. As the computer industry evolved, so did I. I started a software company and became one of the few experts in software development in Adelaide – getting gigs to write software for government departments, big corporations, etc., and I was still not even 20 years old. My passion for technology was matched with a business passion, which started well before I discovered technology. I guess business was in my DNA.

In 1989, I moved to the United States, settling in Los Angeles. I realized that the ability to migrate from one place to another was a life-changing experience. It taught me to embrace everything I found within my grasp, learning about business in the USA, I got involved in the music industry, and I was able to leverage my computer programming experience to land work in some early startups – one of which became Amgen, the world’s largest biotechnology corporation. Although I spent much of the next 30 years living in the USA, I never lost touch with my home of Australia, and in the late 1990s moved back there for many years before returning to the USA. In 2002 I moved to Scottsdale, Arizona, and I’ve lived here since.

I am a self-made business owner. I don’t have a job. I do have clients and I do work on software projects and data centers, etc. today. It is because this is what I love to do. It isn’t because this is my career. I’ve never embraced that concept. I think if you are blessed to find your calling early in life and you can turn that into an income earner, you will embrace that far more than a defined “career” that people have to convince themselves that they love to do. I got lucky in that regard. But it was more that at a young age I was passionate to learn things. I still am. I just can’t learn them in a classroom, or a lecture hall, or books. I have to go out and see things with my own eyes and touch things with my own hands. It is just the way I operate.