The Donald vs. Tony Robbins

Spent all yesterday morning and this afternoon at the so called Wealth Expo at the LA Convention Center. It was an event coordinated by The Learning Annex and has been fairly heavily advertised for over a month now with headline keynote speakers including Donald Trump, Robert Kiyosaki and Tony Robbins. Tickets to attend the event including the keynote events were $125 retail or $49 to just the exhibit hall and the non-keynote speakers of which there were several dozen. The turnout was much larger than I had certainly anticipated with the count being over 40,000 over the two days. The vast majority of the breakout sessions were real estate related including topics such as investing in commercial real estate, eBay real estate, tax liens and countless other topics. The exhibit hall had maybe 100 booths on everything from investing in rental homes in Texas and Arizona to financing and investment groups.

One thing that struck me was how mix the audience seemed. I'd say that over 70% of the people looked like average Joes that I can't imagine are already investors of some kind. It's kind of scary when that many people who have no business being in real estate investing think that it's so easy. It screams real estate bubble although I don't believe we're in a bubble that's about to pop like the dot com bubble of a few years ago. On the other hand, I'm sure many of the people were very wealthy, experienced investors as well.

Of course all of the session speakers were selling some kind of educational material or other seminar. The speaker before Donald Trump was selling his program on commercial investing for $1500 and there were probably over 200 people that snapped it up including some younger people where I'm sure that $1500 might have been a month's salary. We almost bought the material ourselves but I guess I tend to be cautious about stuff like that. I especially didn't like how he presented the price like a typical infomercial (the value of this program is $13k, but WAIT, order now and you get this and that and it's only $1500). If he hadn't so blatantly promoted it like that to appeal to emotional impulse buyers, I think we would have bought it.

Tony Robbins session was at 8:30 on Saturday morning but there were at least a couple thousand people on hand. I'd never attended one of his events before and he was certainly an incredibly dynamic speaker. Halfway through his two hour session, he was drenched in sweat from all of the energetic jumping around. I have to say that his message and style are very effective and I'd consider spending a couple of thousand to attend one of his seminars.

We came back this afternoon for Trump's session. It's been well publicized that he got paid $1,000,000 for his 1 hour session but he actually ended up speaking for closer to 2 hours because the audience of thousands clung to his every word. He offered anecdotal stories about The Apprentice and his ups and downs in real estate. At the end, he opened it up to Q&A and quite a few people used the opportunity to shamelessly self promote their services which wasn't met well from the audience. One practically begged for a chance to be chosen as a contestant on the next Apprentice season. Several previous contestants were actually there promoting a new Trump magazine at a booth. I shamelessly got a picture with Stacie J. (Crazy 8 Ball one) and Jennifer (comment about the Jewish ladies one) who were both contestants last season.

All in all, it was a well spent $175 for the two tickets just to attend the two sessions by Tony Robbins and Trump. It's not everyday that you have the opportunity to get a dose of wit and wisdom from two such incredible people.

Total spent yesterday:
$175 donation to KOCE (public access TV station) which gave us two full access tickets to the Wealth Expo
$10 parking near LA Convention Center (5 hours later they were charging $20)
$13 light lunch at LA Convention Center
$57 clothing at Marshalls
$38 dinner for two at Alcatraz at The Block (saved $10 with Entertainment Card)
$118 pair of casual Cole Haan shoes and leather wallet
$23 late nite munchies and impulse buys at the supermarket

Total spent today:
$80 additional lumber for gate and fence
$52 supermarket
$10 parking near LA Convention Center
$83 dinner for 2 at Lasher's in Long Beach (saved $20 with Entertainment Card)