I sat down to complete a task this evening that I have been putting off for sometime. Paying my bills. Every month I wait until they pile up and then I have to spend an hour or so knocking them down. It's depressing and usually puts me in a bad mood. The catch though is that 99% of the time we have money to cover all the bills. I postpone this task so frequently that you would think we're in the hole. By no means are we living high on the hog, but for our 2 person middle class family were doing relatively fine.
We eat where we choose. Usually out, because of our crisscrossed schedules. She's working and I'm at home or I'm working and she's sleeping. It's an excuse I know, but the fact remains that we eat what we choose.
We both have vehicles a step or two above a beater. An Accord and an Xterra aren't anything to complain about. Man I need new brakes.
I've always been a saver, but I have learned that life isn't forever and you cannot take anything with you. My wife has graciously imparted this knowledge on me. It has helped me to learn to enjoy what we have instead of focusing on what we don't.
I think that's an important statement.
I read a post on Flippinghomes.com today describing a father's day he spent chaperoning his daughter's field trip. He put aside his real estate desires and dreams for the day and lived in the moment with his daughter. I struggle putting my real estate ambitions and financial goals on the back burner when I take a me or us day. I can do it, however I feel guilty like I could have spent the day being more productive. The hell with that. I'm going to focus on letting go. I need a mental picture to help me remember. It'll be me on a Caribbean beach on a lounge chair looking out to the ocean, past my sand covered feed....like the Corona beer commercials.
Why put of what I can do now?
Pay the bills as they come in and let go when I need to.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
Saturday, October 20, 2007
A week of Vacation & Work
So I just returned from a week of vacation. I forced myself to "forget" all things related to real estate for my 7 days of bliss. I read a great book that I would recommend and encourage all to put on your to-do list. The 4-Hour Workweek by Timothy Ferriss. Wow! Solid material. Tim delivers idea after idea to lessen your workload. I know I'll be referring back to this book many times as our journey continues. I hope we're building our business responsibly now, so that we can experience the type of life Steve Cook (flippinghomes.com) speaks so passionately about. I also continued to read "Think and Grow Rich", by Napoleon Hill. This book is like a college textbook and I've been reading it for some time now. The 4HWW book was a quicker read, partly since it was written in today's grammar, versus Hill's book which was published in 1960.
While I was gone, Tim (of the brother status) was hard at work. He told me he listened to the first day of the boot camp cds and continues to be blown away and continually motivated. He finished our goal of listing all the properties in our small (1000 properties) farm area. We did it on the cheap by creating a spreadsheet and cutting & pasting from Maryland's Tax Property website SDAT (http://sdatcert3.resiusa.org/rp_rewrite/). We now have a complete list of all the properties in our farm area. We have also driven the area and given each property a rating on a 1-10 scale. Vacants get a 0. Our plan is to then do a letter mailing to those properties with a rating of 5 or below and any properties that listed as non-principal residences. Hopefully it should be simple using mail merge techniques.
We've got our letter fine tuned after submitting to the Flippinghomes.com website. We'll mail to each property 7 times and hope for some responses. Additionally, he attended our/his first RE investment club meeting. I'll let him write about his experience, but a quick preview......lots of hype, little material.
In preparation for our mailing campaign, we are also making it our goal to listen to the Saturday workshop session put on by JP of flippinghomes.com a few months ago. It was the session with Bill Guerra on The Art of Prescreening Motivated Sellers 101. It was one of the solid deals put out by the fh.com website and included 3 or 4 hours of interview/audio and Bill's ebook, "How to talk with Sellers". Tim and I are meeting Monday night and we're gonna be discussing what we learned and do some practice calls.
Tomorrow and Monday I'll be reading & studying in between painting my butt off. I've got my upstairs project underway and I promised my wife it will be done before the year ends in an even number. 72 days to go. I shall get this project done. We've been living in the downstairs of our 1400 square foot home since March. Man I'm slow. Granted I completely rehabbed our upstairs, but it's been one heck of a project. I look forward to using proceeds of RE investing to rehab our downstairs. I'm done with hammers and nails for a while...hopefully.
So that's what we've done since my last post.
What have you done to come closer to your Real Estate Dreams?
Ed
While I was gone, Tim (of the brother status) was hard at work. He told me he listened to the first day of the boot camp cds and continues to be blown away and continually motivated. He finished our goal of listing all the properties in our small (1000 properties) farm area. We did it on the cheap by creating a spreadsheet and cutting & pasting from Maryland's Tax Property website SDAT (http://sdatcert3.resiusa.org/rp_rewrite/). We now have a complete list of all the properties in our farm area. We have also driven the area and given each property a rating on a 1-10 scale. Vacants get a 0. Our plan is to then do a letter mailing to those properties with a rating of 5 or below and any properties that listed as non-principal residences. Hopefully it should be simple using mail merge techniques.
We've got our letter fine tuned after submitting to the Flippinghomes.com website. We'll mail to each property 7 times and hope for some responses. Additionally, he attended our/his first RE investment club meeting. I'll let him write about his experience, but a quick preview......lots of hype, little material.
In preparation for our mailing campaign, we are also making it our goal to listen to the Saturday workshop session put on by JP of flippinghomes.com a few months ago. It was the session with Bill Guerra on The Art of Prescreening Motivated Sellers 101. It was one of the solid deals put out by the fh.com website and included 3 or 4 hours of interview/audio and Bill's ebook, "How to talk with Sellers". Tim and I are meeting Monday night and we're gonna be discussing what we learned and do some practice calls.
Tomorrow and Monday I'll be reading & studying in between painting my butt off. I've got my upstairs project underway and I promised my wife it will be done before the year ends in an even number. 72 days to go. I shall get this project done. We've been living in the downstairs of our 1400 square foot home since March. Man I'm slow. Granted I completely rehabbed our upstairs, but it's been one heck of a project. I look forward to using proceeds of RE investing to rehab our downstairs. I'm done with hammers and nails for a while...hopefully.
So that's what we've done since my last post.
What have you done to come closer to your Real Estate Dreams?
Ed
Monday, October 8, 2007
Onward & Upward
I realized today that writing in the past tense is a much more difficult thing than I had anticipated. In recognition of this, my posts will focus more on what is currently taking place in our Real Estate Freedom.
Once I have some spare cash lying around maybe I'll hire a writer to compose my biography. Not that my head has swelled like a watermelon and I think I'm New York Times Bestseller material, but I would like to preserve what I have contributed to my family history.
Where am I? About April of 2007, I attended a FlippingHomes.com boot camp. What an experience. I walked in there with my hand firmly gripping my wallet. It wasn't until about day 3 that I had actually allowed myself to relax. I was soaking in so much info I was floored. The teacher, Steve Cook, turned out to be exactly what I hoped for. I had been hooked to his website like a worm on a hook for the previous year.
Now I got to experience 5 straight days with the founder and creator of this amazing site. Honesty, trustworthy, helpful, friendly, reverent....he was a living, breathing Boy Scout. Being an Eagle Scout myself, I was impressed. I had completely lucked out in choosing and deciding upon a great educational beginning for my Real Estate career. I'll go into more of my experience in a future post.
Since my boot camp has been over for over 5 months...What's been accomplished? It was said that Steve's boot camp's have a much higher rate of success than any other camp. I will definitely be adding to that percentage. My attending of the camp was in the middle of my transition to a new position at work. Have I mentioned that I love my job? I know I'm in the minority, but I have a fun and exciting job that doesn't require much from me when I leave and come home. So in dealing with my new position, I made a decision to postpone my real estate journey. I also had a full remodel of my upstairs in progress. New floors, doors, paint, walk in closet, vanity room, and a complete remodel of the bathroom. No small undertaking. What the hell was I thinking? I have a habit of biting off big bites. I once drove myself to the hospital because I had a bolus aka huge chunk of chicken stuck in my throat. I could breathe, but it was stuck like when you have to drink some fluid to push down bread if you eat it too fast. No amount of drinking would dislodge it. What a mess.
So September 2007, I decided it had been postponed long enough. In the meantime, my little brother, Tim had gained an equal interest. I purposely only gave him direction to find his own path, but we both ended up choosing Real Estate. We are equal partners. 50/50. We've been great friends since childhood and I know the strain this could put on our relationship. We've had many chats on our partnership and a future post will talk about our decision to work together.
Starting in Real Estate is a lot like starting a small business. We meet weekly and both have goals that we each set individually and collectively. Today I signed a contract for a UPS mail box service. $128.00 for six months. The advantage is a street address versus a PO BOX from the ol' USPS. We've set up a Gmail account. It gives us both access to contracts, educational material we collect, spreadsheets, emails, goal lists, and much more. It's working great we can both sign on from home or work and it's fun seeing completed goal that we've each done while the other is busy working at their respective 9-5 jobs. We've also chosen a small farm area. In all it should have about 1000-1500 homes. It's a solid 3-5 on Steve's neighborhood scale. Our immediate goal is to utilize the state property database to compile our own direct mail list. We've essentially compiled every property in this zip code. Then 'driving for dollars', we are giving each house a numerical rating 0 is vacant and 10 is a gem. We'll market to the 5's and below. Sending a letter to them once a month for 7 months. This is our first step. Concurrently, we are moving towards MLS offers.
We've ordered business cards and Tim is going to attend our/his first investment club meeting on Oct 20th. My 9-5 requires I work that day. I'll definitely be attending the next one. We're holding off on the LLC formation til our first deal or so. No need to waste time on that now. We've got a business plan in the works, but it's currently on the back burner. We talk almost everyday, but at least every other. We meet once a week. Our NUMBER ONE GOAL is to close a deal by 01-31-2008. 4 months. We've got lots of work to get done.
We will succeed. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. No excuses. We aren't trying, we're doing.
Once I have some spare cash lying around maybe I'll hire a writer to compose my biography. Not that my head has swelled like a watermelon and I think I'm New York Times Bestseller material, but I would like to preserve what I have contributed to my family history.
Where am I? About April of 2007, I attended a FlippingHomes.com boot camp. What an experience. I walked in there with my hand firmly gripping my wallet. It wasn't until about day 3 that I had actually allowed myself to relax. I was soaking in so much info I was floored. The teacher, Steve Cook, turned out to be exactly what I hoped for. I had been hooked to his website like a worm on a hook for the previous year.
Now I got to experience 5 straight days with the founder and creator of this amazing site. Honesty, trustworthy, helpful, friendly, reverent....he was a living, breathing Boy Scout. Being an Eagle Scout myself, I was impressed. I had completely lucked out in choosing and deciding upon a great educational beginning for my Real Estate career. I'll go into more of my experience in a future post.
Since my boot camp has been over for over 5 months...What's been accomplished? It was said that Steve's boot camp's have a much higher rate of success than any other camp. I will definitely be adding to that percentage. My attending of the camp was in the middle of my transition to a new position at work. Have I mentioned that I love my job? I know I'm in the minority, but I have a fun and exciting job that doesn't require much from me when I leave and come home. So in dealing with my new position, I made a decision to postpone my real estate journey. I also had a full remodel of my upstairs in progress. New floors, doors, paint, walk in closet, vanity room, and a complete remodel of the bathroom. No small undertaking. What the hell was I thinking? I have a habit of biting off big bites. I once drove myself to the hospital because I had a bolus aka huge chunk of chicken stuck in my throat. I could breathe, but it was stuck like when you have to drink some fluid to push down bread if you eat it too fast. No amount of drinking would dislodge it. What a mess.
So September 2007, I decided it had been postponed long enough. In the meantime, my little brother, Tim had gained an equal interest. I purposely only gave him direction to find his own path, but we both ended up choosing Real Estate. We are equal partners. 50/50. We've been great friends since childhood and I know the strain this could put on our relationship. We've had many chats on our partnership and a future post will talk about our decision to work together.
Starting in Real Estate is a lot like starting a small business. We meet weekly and both have goals that we each set individually and collectively. Today I signed a contract for a UPS mail box service. $128.00 for six months. The advantage is a street address versus a PO BOX from the ol' USPS. We've set up a Gmail account. It gives us both access to contracts, educational material we collect, spreadsheets, emails, goal lists, and much more. It's working great we can both sign on from home or work and it's fun seeing completed goal that we've each done while the other is busy working at their respective 9-5 jobs. We've also chosen a small farm area. In all it should have about 1000-1500 homes. It's a solid 3-5 on Steve's neighborhood scale. Our immediate goal is to utilize the state property database to compile our own direct mail list. We've essentially compiled every property in this zip code. Then 'driving for dollars', we are giving each house a numerical rating 0 is vacant and 10 is a gem. We'll market to the 5's and below. Sending a letter to them once a month for 7 months. This is our first step. Concurrently, we are moving towards MLS offers.
We've ordered business cards and Tim is going to attend our/his first investment club meeting on Oct 20th. My 9-5 requires I work that day. I'll definitely be attending the next one. We're holding off on the LLC formation til our first deal or so. No need to waste time on that now. We've got a business plan in the works, but it's currently on the back burner. We talk almost everyday, but at least every other. We meet once a week. Our NUMBER ONE GOAL is to close a deal by 01-31-2008. 4 months. We've got lots of work to get done.
We will succeed. Period. No ifs, ands, or buts. No excuses. We aren't trying, we're doing.
Tuesday, October 2, 2007
A Lil' Background
Why does someone choose real estate investing? For me it's both a passion and a creative outlet. I love taking something old and making it new. My dad has always been a builder. He build a huge two story addition to our home. Sheds, dog houses, and bunkbeds were also built. He's an electrician by trade and a jack of all the others. Around 2003-04, I was bit hard by the real estate bug. More like a real estate alligator. I've been hooked ever since. I read about 5 books on investing when my interest first began. The one book that cleaned the dirt and grime from my eyes however was "Rich Dad, Poor Dad". Man I wish someone had given me this book when I was 10. It was such an alternative way of thinking. I was raised to work hard and you will be recognized and rewarded. I've always praised myself for my strong work ethic. My whole family is this way. My mom moves 100 miles a minute when she's working, it's draining at times. But, my parents have given me my work ethic. I thank them for raising me to be a good servant and for teaching me the value of what's important in life. If I can emulate a quarter of what they have created I will be a lucky and successful man. I believe I am making them proud with the path I am currently on. I have a good career, a strong marriage, and a balanced life.
In reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, my eyes were opened. I've learned to evaluate my life worth, not my net worth. I know I cannot take money or material things with me when I die. I can leave behind a legacy and memories to those I interacted with. Real Estate Investing is my vehicle to help me in what I seek. My current jay-oh-bee has a finite number of dollars I can earn yearly. If I want more money it's there by way of overtime. For that I'm very fortunate. However, when evalutating my life worth, overtime only gets in the way. It's a liability, not an asset. I chose Real Estate Investing because I'm passionate towards it. It is a great fit for who I am. I don't need to change my personality or retrain myself to be successful. I need to focus and perservere and I know it will happen. My life worth will fill the mountains of the earth. I will succeed.
In reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad, my eyes were opened. I've learned to evaluate my life worth, not my net worth. I know I cannot take money or material things with me when I die. I can leave behind a legacy and memories to those I interacted with. Real Estate Investing is my vehicle to help me in what I seek. My current jay-oh-bee has a finite number of dollars I can earn yearly. If I want more money it's there by way of overtime. For that I'm very fortunate. However, when evalutating my life worth, overtime only gets in the way. It's a liability, not an asset. I chose Real Estate Investing because I'm passionate towards it. It is a great fit for who I am. I don't need to change my personality or retrain myself to be successful. I need to focus and perservere and I know it will happen. My life worth will fill the mountains of the earth. I will succeed.
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