RealEstateIQ ad: I kept the house

My husband left after 24 years. I kept the house. Barely. I know how that sounds. I'm 52, I'd been saying "one day I'll get my license" for 15 years, and one day turned out to be the day I couldn't make the mortgage on one paycheck. Hear me out. He kept the retirement account, that was the deal, and it felt fair until about three months later when I sat at the kitchen table with the bills and figured out there was no version where I kept the house on a dental office salary. So I signed up for the course. I work full time at the front desk and my daughter and the baby moved in with me in October, so there was no "study time." There was 10pm at the kitchen table after the baby went down and that was it. So I did what I did in school. Notes. PAGES of notes. I basically rewrote the book by hand because that's how I passed everything in 1991. 180 hours of course and three spiral notebooks to show for it. I felt ok going into the test. I did not feel ok coming out. I missed most of the math and almost all of the Texas portion. I sat in my car in the parking lot for a long time and I did not tell anybody for three days. I could not fail at one more thing that year. Here's what I figured out later. I KNEW the material. I could have told you what a proration is. But the test doesn't ask you what it is, it gives you numbers and four answers and 90 seconds, and everything I knew was buried in a notebook somewhere. I learned it the way you learn something to write it down, not the way you learn something to answer a question about it. If that makes sense. Two things happened. My daughter found the score report on the counter (I left it there, I think on purpose) and instead of saying sorry she said "ok so when's the retake." That's all she said. I cried like a baby. And a lady in the Facebook group for my course, about my age, said she passed on her second try with flashcards. Like 140 cards and a PDF for Texas specifically. I ordered them from my phone in bed and honestly forgot about it until the box showed up. They're real cards. Question on the front, answer on the back, one thing per card. 41 math problems with the steps written out. A Texas PDF I printed at work and put on the fridge next to the daycare calendar lol. What changed wasn't my brain. It was that somebody had already gone through the 600 pages and pulled out what's actually on the test, so I stopped trying to learn all of it. And I stopped needing an hour of quiet. Cards in my purse with a rubber band. I did them while the baby ate breakfast, at my desk between patients, in the Kroger parking lot. Every card I missed went in a pile. Every night the pile got smaller. When it was empty I knew I was ready. The math clicked because I could finally see the steps instead of just panicking at the numbers. And the Texas stuff, the part that sank me, took maybe a week. April. I finished with 20 minutes left and made myself go back and check every math problem even though I wanted OUT of there. Passed. I called my daughter from the parking lot and she cried, and then she put the baby on the phone, who did not care lol. I closed my first deal in June. That check covered the mortgage for three months. I still have the house. So if you're in it right now, 45 or 52 or 60, a baby in the house, one paycheck, a notebook full of stuff that won't stick: you're not slow. I wasn't slow. I was learning it the wrong way for a test. The cards are RealEstateIQ. 142 cards, 41 math problems, the Texas PDF (they have every state). I don't recommend things, but I would not have passed without them. Not in April and maybe not ever. They're in my desk drawer with the rubber band still on them. https://reiqeducation.com/pages/exam-flashcards