176: I’m Starting Over! Join Me!

Listen / Watch

Show Notes

Starting Over Real Estate Investing

I’m starting over real estate investing!!! And this time, I’m inviting you to join me on the adventure.

Seriously!  This is a chance for you to get a REAL look at what it’s like for a successful real estate investor that is… well… a bit rusty to navigate a market that has changed.

Everything has to be relearned.   This is a perfect opportunity to learn what works and doesn’t together.

But I take comfort in knowing the basics always remain the same.

For example, buying as low as possible is how you safely make money in this business.  That will never change.

Why I am I doing this?  What exactly will I be sharing?  How can you help?  Read on.

What Happened

I’ve not been directly involved in my house flipping/wholesaling business for several years now due to a switch to focus on the software for real estate investors I’d been developing.

I got started flipping houses in 2003, weathered the storm created by the crash around 2008, and built a team to scale the business in 2016.

Over the years I’ve generated thousands of motivated sellers leads and flipped and wholesaled over 600 houses.

With a team in place, my focus had transitioned to full time development of LeadPropeller real estate investor websites and FlipPilot lead/deal management software.

I recently had coffee with my real estate investing mentor.  A question he asked me caused a wave of enthusiasm to rise up from within me.

He asked, “Are you going to get back into real estate investing?”

I hadn’t even considered it!  But, when he asked the question, I immediately felt the answer rise up from within…not from my head, but from my heart.

YES!!! Absolutely.  I do want to get back into the game!

This was a no-brainer.  I love this business and the long-term wealth it can create.  This was fully realized as we separated assets during the divorce.   Turns out real estate has a tendency to increase in value over time.  Who would have thunk it?

I’ve also matured quite a bit as a result of recent major life changes.

I did a deep dive within myself over the last year and a half considering what success really looks like and enjoying life in the process.  

Once I learned to be honest with myself, I realized that my life had become stale long ago.  I spent my time hiding from the fact that I wasn’t happy and didn’t know what the hell to do about it.  I was asleep at the wheel of my life.  I needed to WAKE THE FUCK UP!

As I took steps to wake up, which I fully intend to share over time through the sharing of this new journey back into real estate investing, I realized how much I had been operating from fear.  I realized how I’d built walls around myself to protect myself.  I became so narrow minded I couldn’t enjoy life because I was so busy trying to make sure everything didn’t fall apart.  Weird how that works.

I bring this up because this big wake up helped me realize how fear was keeping me from enjoying life.   Every day is an opportunity to experience something new and enjoy it, no matter what it is.  I think this is crucial for all of us.

We can set and achieve goals until we are blue in the face, but those quick shots of accomplishment cannot compare to what is possible if we figure out how to make each day fun.

Enjoy life! 

Are you not where you want to be?

Join the club.  I’m still not where I want to be and will likely never be…so I’ve decided to work at changing to become open to whatever happens each day.  It might not go the way we want, but we can experience it fully and find joy in it.

I feel this is what separates those that achieve and are miserable and those that achieve and are alive and living life.

All of this to say that I will be sharing the good, bad, and ugly as I get back into real estate investing.  I’ll be sharing the inner and the outer.  What’s happening in the business and what is happening in me as I work to build financial freedom and at the same time grapple with the inevitable fear and enjoy the process.

Hero’s Journey

It’s truly like any great movie.  Most great movies follow the Hero’s Journey.  The Hero’s Journey consists of a hero that goes on adventure, ends up in crisis and being challenged.  Overcoming the challenge makes the hero a success but the real reward is in the transformation the hero must go through to make it through.

You might be reading this thinking that you will be following along on my hero’s journey and watching me transform, but that’s not what I intend.

It’s much bigger than that!

I want YOU to be the hero. 

This is YOUR Hero’s Journey.  I’m giving you a mission and hope you accept the challenge.

The mission is to make a true go at real estate investing to achieve financial freedom, but more importantly to transform yourself in the process.

To join me in discovering more about who we truly are as individuals and finding joy within each and every day.

To find joy in the day to day rather than waiting for the end goal to be achieved.

To finding out what that means for each of us as your idea of success should be your own.  You might want a big flipping company doing over a 100 deals a year.  You might be completely happy with the lifestyle that only doing 5 deals in a year provides.

Here’s what I’m doing…

Flipping Junkie’s New Direction

Rather than random posts about different topics within real estate investing, house flipping, wholesaling, etc., FlippingJunkie is taking a new direction.

The blog and podcast will now be the platform with which I document what I’m doing to build financial freedom AND enjoy life along the way.

I’m not going to tell you what you should or shouldn’t do.  Only you can do that for yourself.  I’m not you and you are not me.  I am not a guru.  I don’t know all the answers.  This journey is discover the answers for myself.  The hope is that you can use it as inspiration to find your answers.

You might have been reading this and thinking, “But, you’ve already done this!”

Sort of.

Flipping Houses Exposed

If you’ve been a follower of the blog or podcast for any length of time, you might know about Flipping Houses Exposed: 34 Weeks In The Life of a Successful House Flipper. 

This book actually started as a series of blog posts on this blog.  Back then I was ramping up my business after having taken 3 months off to get my private pilot’s license.

Here’s what I documented that time around:

• The marketing I was doing every single week
• Every single motivated seller lead that came in including
  • The source of the lead
  • Why the seller wanted to sell (the motivation)
  • How much they were asking
  • How much I determined it would be worth fixed up
  • Whether I determined a deal was possible and why
  • What offer I made
• The rehab process and cost for deals bought
• Before/After pictures of the house flips
• Final numbers for deals

Looking back, the best part of doing these blog posts was the feedback I was getting.  First, it held me accountable to plan what I was going to do and then execute…every…single…week.   It was a lot of work but the second part of the feedback is what truly made it all worthwhile.

So many people contacted me to tell me how the blog posts were showing them that it was entirely possible for them to do the same.  They saw there was nothing special about what I was doing.  It helped them to remove the excuses they were using to keep them in their comfort zone.

I cherish the friendships that began from those series of blog posts.

Even though I felt I covered everything possible in those posts, I had left something out.  Something extremely important.  Something that had I shared it, many, many more people that stayed on the sidelines might not have.

I’m not leaving that out this time.

What I’m Doing Different This Time

This time, I’m will be sharing what I’m dealing with inside myself as I embark on this adventure.  What’s likely to be there…in fact what is already there… FEAR.

Yes, even experienced investors have fear.  It’s what we are doing with that fear that makes a difference.  I want to talk about this aspect of the business.  Of course, it will be relative to who I am and my experiences. But the hope is to allow you to realize we are in the same boat.   It’s not just me that sometimes has intense anxiety and a driving fear that if I stop for one moment everything will collapse around me.

My good friend, Don Costa, and I were talking about what struggles many new investors have in this business.  He mentioned something profound.  He said that most of the struggles mentioned are surface level problems like “I don’t have the money”, “My market is too competitive”, “I don’t know what marketing to do”, “I don’t know what to say to sellers” are really just covering up the core issue, FEAR.

While these can be valid problems, they’re more likely just an excuse to stay in our comfort zone.  Those problems can be overcome, but the FEAR should be talked about examined and accepted (NOT REJECTED).  Then we can move forward!

So, along with the documenting of how I’m approaching my re-entry into the business of real estate investing, I want to share what I’m doing to overcome fear and obstacles.  I want to share how I want to use this opportunity to grow as a human being.

What this means literally is sharing some of the things I’ve found over the last year and a half to greatly reduce my anxiety and help me feel like a real, wide-awake, alive person.  I’m a work in progress…but I’m making progress.  I want to share that.

If that’s your sort of thing, I get it.  But, if you feel like this approach to this blog and podcast is something you are excited about, please let me know in the comments!

Let’s Go!

Within the next week I’ll be posting specifics on my game plane.  The plan consists of an achievable goal, why the goal is what it is and the reverse engineering I did to work my way down to what I need to do right now.

I’ll be sharing:

• TheWHY for the goal I set
• The financial goal I set
• The number of deals I need to reach that goal
• The number of leads I need to get those deals
• The marketing I’m doing to generate those leads

In additional, I’ll be sharing the tools I’m using to manage the business.  THIS IS HUGE!! Because as I look back at what I accomplished during the 34 weeks documenting my business, I realized that I only did 11 deals from the 495 leads that I generated.  THAT SUCKS!

That’s only 1 deal out of every 45 leads!!!

I’ve learned a lot since then and I’m excited to show you what I learned to help at one point getting to where my team was contracting 1 out of every 5 leads!

With that same ratio, we might have turned those same 495 leads into 99 deals! Yeah, I know….

I’m rusty so that’s not likely right away.  But the knowledge and tools I will be using will help me to get much closer to that better lead to deal ratio.

This is going to be fun!!

 

 

Recommended Books

Flipping Houses Exposed: 34 Weeks In The Life of a Successful House Flipper

Flipping Houses Exposed: 34 Weeks In The Life of a Successful House Flipper

Flipping Houses Exposed: 34 Weeks In The Life of a Successful House Flipper

Free PDF version of Flipping Houses Exposed: 34 Weeks In The Life of a Successful House Flipper.

links

FlippingJunkie Facebook Page

FlippingJunkie Facebook Group

YouTube channel

Please Rate and Review

This is my simple request: If you enjoy the podcast and look forward to hearing a lot more episodes, I would be very grateful, happy, beholden and otherwise indebted to you to rate and review the podcast on iTunes.

It’s your choice and I do not want you to feel at all obligated. But I’d love it if you would subscribe and leave a rating and review.

Ratings and reviews allow the podcast to be seen by more people, which will help me achieve my goal of helping as many others as we can to get started in the house flipping business and change their lives.

Click here to rate and review our podcast! :)

Not sure how to leave a rating and review? Click here to view the instructions (it only takes 2 minutes)

How to Subscribe to the Podcast

There will be a brand new episode every single week, so be sure to subscribe and receive each episode as it’s released.

Subscribe on iTunes  Subscribe on Stitcher