So no. Luck has not been involved. This has made me a millionaire
@Slowhandluke. How’s your theory working out for you?
This is not my theory. Experts who deal in risk; it's their theory. I however, do agree with them.
While I'm not poor, I'm not a millionaire. I currently work a steady job (while I could put in more hours and get more $$$ - and easily be a millionaire, I'm not that type of person). I got burned doing a startup earlier in my career. After getting burned, I started to do more research on the topic of risk. Only within the past couple years, have I started to understand it more -- at least my version of it
"Risk" is a big topic, and theories are ever changing
Feel free to think whatever you want. Lottery winners think that their "strategy" of picking numbers helped them to be a millionaire. You cannot convince them otherwise. There are millions of people who leverage their money in order to hopefully gain high wealth. Some succeed and some fail... actually, most fail.
you obviously had to leverage and gamble; there were doubts to the outcome because you stated that what you did was not for the "faint of heart" (or something to that effect) implying great risk. I'm glad it worked out well for you. However, where are the people who has the same IQ as you, the same drive, and decision making abilities, but through random luck choose a different area to invest, and lost their shirt? That is survivorship bias.
Your plan was to buy rentals that cashed flow. You predicted it to continue to cash flow for a long enough time to make money. That was your gamble. I'm sure at one point in time, you were extremely leveraged and you were at the mercy of the markets. If the rental market went down, you would have ben SOL, but it didn't so you reaped a nice reward.
I guess my main point is one can be successful because of luck while thinking it's because of their skill in predicting the future OR one can be flexible enough that long-term planning doesn't matter as much. you roll with the punches. I think you do roll with the punch's, but you put too much stock on having a good idea -- "buying rentals that cashflow at the very beginning". That idea means very little if a black swan event happens. Look at all the commercial real estate now. I'm sure a lot of the owners were saying "buy commercial real estate that cashflows from the very beginning.. it's never going to go down.. companies will always need space for their employees, etc." --- BAM, blackswan..... I'm sure a lot of them are in the poor house now.