First, I work full time as a police officer, and will at least until I’m vested, which will occur at my 10-year mark (October 2009). I work over 40 hours a week - well, 41.25 hours per week, not counting any overtime on calls that I might get. When I started investing in real estate, I worked part-time jobs on my days off. I worked at a bank, at a school, and at numerous other part-time “gigs”. (You’ll find that most police officers have part-time jobs to supplement their income.) My wife and I had made the decision that once we had kids, Tracy would stay home to raise them. We now have two wonderful boys and we stood by our decisions, although at first we were pretty financially strapped and had very little free time.
Since we began investing in real estate, I no longer have to work any extra jobs at the Police Department to make ends meet. Of course, real estate has taken the place of those extra jobs, but investing pays a lot better, which is why I began doing this. Investing in real estate is coming close to providing me with enough cash flow to decide if, when, and how much I want to work (it’s pretty hard for me to consider my investing real work) and to spend time with my family.
Enough of my background. Let’s move on. I’ll tell you how I accomplished it, and I’ll give you some tips on how you can do the same.
What I love about real estate is that you can fit your work into little bits of time - if you do it correctly! Now, if you decide to start off with a huge rehab job with no education or experience, it will end up biting you in the end. That’s absolutely the last project I would advise you to start, both in terms of risk and time.
EDUCATE YOURSELF
First, you’re definitely going to need to get some education. While I love investing and have tons of courses and training material, the biggest mistake I could make would be to think that I know all there is to know about investing. I suggest you make it a point to enjoy learning, because it will pay you massive dividends.
Now, most cops listen to the radio when they are driving around on patrol. Instead of that, I turned a disadvantage into a huge advantage and put all of my courses on my iPod and spent eight hours a day listening to information that would grow my mindset. Although I don’t imagine that most of you have eight hours a day to listen to educational stuff - and I’ll be honest, there were some days when the last thing I could listen to was something about real estate - I would recommend that, whenever you’re driving around, you listen to something that will help to educate you or propel you toward your goals as opposed to music day in and day out. This is a huge key to success!
If you have limited time, you have to make it a point to make the most of the time that you do have. Even if you’re only driving to work for 10 to 20 minutes a day, you also have 10 to 20 minute to drive back, so you have 20 to 40 minutes a day to educate yourself. If you have errands that you have to run, that could grow your listening time even more.
Let’s add it up: 20 minutes x 5 days (a typical work week) = 100 minutes x 50 weeks = 5000 minutes, or over 83 hours per year! If your travel time is longer than that, you’ve just bumped it up even more! Little bits of time add up immensely! Think about moments when you are wasting your time and find a way to use them to bring you closer to where you want to be. Do you have any books in the bathroom? Why not?
FIND THE TIME
Your next step is to leverage your time. I don’t know your exact situation, so I’ll just imagine that you’re starting from scratch like I did, with little cash and very little time. You may be a step or two ahead, and if so, then you can adjust accordingly.
I would highly recommend that you make a time chart and account for every minute of every day for a week. Just make a diary of what you do during every half hour. Now, if you’re an average person, you probably waste enough time watching TV, surfing the Internet, reading newspapers, or reading e-mail - time that could make you millions in real estate investing, if you could only apply it correctly.
EVERYTHING YOU DO IS EITHER MOVING YOU TOWARD YOUR GOAL OR AWAY FROM IT.
PERIOD.
So, take a week and journal exactly where your time is going. You will be amazed at how much time you’re wasting. I know I was! Once you do this, you’ll have an idea of where your time is being wasted. It might not be much, but it’s something. Your job is to find that time, and schedule it for developing your real estate investing business. It doesn’t matter if it’s reading a book, going to lunch with an investor, going to a local REIA meeting, making offers, or whatever. You just have to start where you are, and plan time to do it. And then….JUST DO IT! Pick a set amount of time that you want to use for your freedom, and make it part of your schedule.
Once you have an idea of how much time you’re wasting, you have to figure out how you can begin investing with your limited time. The quickest and easiest way that I have found to invest with the least risk, effort, and time is by wholesaling, or flipping houses.
Now, I’m not talking about the type of “Flip This House” kind of flipping that you see on TV where they do a complete rehab. That’s the last thing I’d point you toward. I’m talking about finding a deal, locking that deal up, and passing it along to someone that’s looking for a deal! That was what gave me the belief that I could do this thing, and on my first deal, I made $5,000 (about six weeks of my policeman’s salary at the time) with about eight hours of work. I did it all wrong, and I spent way too much time on that one - no joke! But I did learn from my mistakes.
Instead of showing homes, now I stick a lockbox on the property, take calls, and give people the code. That’s a huge time-saver for me. If you have very little time and can’t answer calls because you have a job, then you have to adapt and overcome that limitation any way that you can!
Here are some other time-savers that I have implemented.
Instead of taking calls about each property personally, set up an outgoing voice mail message and use it as an advertisement. If they are interested in more info, have them leave a message to call you back. Now, that’s not necessarily the best thing to do, but it is something, and what I have found is that doing something is always better than doing nothing! If you make a continuous effort in the bits and pieces of time you have, and do it on a consistent basis, then you will eventually be rewarded.
Once you have done a couple of deals, you will want to reinvest that cash into making you more productive. That could be hiring someone to put up bandit signs for you, hiring someone to take the calls for you, implementing a website with a back-office management side to help you leverage your time, or whatever else boosts your productivity.
Your end goal, if you’re anything like me, is to establish a business that will provide you with cash flow every single month, whether you are at home or on a beach somewhere, sipping mixed drinks. The key to getting to that point is implementing a system.
CASH FLOW
Personally, while I like to suggest wholesaling to help people get started, I am of the opinion that you’re only as good as your next deal. It can bring some great cash, and it’s a great way to get your feet wet when learning this business, but once the deals stop, the cash stops as well.
In my case, I’m focusing on getting
