Real Estate, Baby!

I attended a meeting for Veritas Financial Group for the Real Estate Track last week that made me once again, ponder about class and money. There were ten of us in the room and we were introducing ourselves and talking about the type of experience we had with real estate. I was the last one to go and got to hear about everyone’s experience in that area first. Of the ten people in the room, nine of them had experience with real estate because their family is either in the business or owns some property. This scared me and I was afraid to say that my only experience in real estate was when we touched over it very briefly in the introductory track for the program, Financial Universe, but what else could I say, right?

As the first kid in the house to go to college, my parents expect for me to be the first one in the family to buy her own house. We were never able to buy our own house because my parents never made that much money from the jobs they held. My dad was a chef in a restaurant, now he’s retired, and my mom was a seamstress at basically a sweatshop. Because of their limited ability to speak English, they were never able to get better paying jobs. My mom actually even got underpaid for all the time that she spent sewing clothes together. Friends from home who had parents also with a limited ability to speak English had the same exact experience. Their parents either worked in restaurants or worked in other places that only spoke Chinese. Owning property was sort of a far reach for some of us. Anyways, that meeting sure made me extremely self aware and class conscious. At a school that seems to be all about networking, it just felt weird to admit that I don't have that type of familial connections.