The path of the Millionaire Real Estate Investor is a progression through four stages. First, you must learn to Think a Million (think like a Millionaire Real Estate Investor) before you make your first move. How you think matters. Whether this strikes you a cliché or as a timeless truth, the bigger you think, the more you can accomplish. What you hold in your mind is what shows up in your life. Learning to think like a Millionaire Real Estate Investor will give you the greatest chance of becoming one.

The next step is Buy a Million, in which you’ll get a thorough understanding of the best models for investing in real estate and, more fundamentally, an understanding of money: the ways it is made and the ways it can be lost. The goal is to equip you with the working models you need to purchase investment properties with a market value of a million dollars or more. Believe or not, this is not the huge leap you might imagine, and many investors reach that mark long before they ever expected they would. Buy a Million is about the fundamentals of acquiring properties, holding them, and in some cases selling them. Buy a Million applies the power of Criteria, Terms, and Network to launch your career in investing.

After you Buy a Million, you’ll set your sights on having an equity poison of a million dollars or more in your properties. We call this stage Own a Million. This is when you will realize that the investing you have done has blossomed into a bona fide business. With that transformation come a set of issues specific to that level of ownership. Acquiring properties through credit potentially becomes more difficult, cash becomes a commodity, and managing your investments could require help from several quarters. This stage involves dealing with and often balancing cash flow with asset or equity buildup. It may involve selling, trading up, or exchanging. It certainly involves understanding the surprisingly simple realities of tax and owner entity issues. The good news is that by understanding these issues from the beginning you can plan for them. That is what the models are intended to help you. By beginning with the right models, proven ones that can handle the big issues, you’ll never have to stop and scratch your head or, worse, start over and reinvent what you do.

The last stage of growth for a Millionaire Real Estate Investor is Receive a Million. Think of it as the summit, a place where only the best have gone. Receive a Million is when you are in a position to receive an annual income of a million dollars from your investments. Pivotal to this stage is that your investment business be designed so that you can choose to get out of the day-to-day work and enjoy the benefits of what you’ve created.

Exactly when you decide to move into “receive mode” is up to you. Obviously, you don’t have to wait until you are receiving a million dollars a year. You can accept the cash flow you’ve built and step out of the business sooner. Or you can wait and receive more down the line.