Just finished reading a book called the “Lifeonaire” by Steve Cook and Shaun McCloskey. I highly recommend reading it even if some of you don’t agree with all that is presented in the book. I know I didn’t agree with all, but I did understand the basic concepts they were getting across.
Often times, when you get into real estate investing, and you find that you love the work and the returns, you will find yourself struggling with balancing family and social life against work life. Unfortunately, JJ and I struggle often with finding a balance with social/family life to work because we are together enjoying the work of rehabbing and investing to the point of forgetting to do other things besides real estate and rentals. We thought we would find many other friends in the same line of work, only to discover there are very few people who truly enjoy working homes as much as we do and then still dream and talk about even when we are not there on the home site. So, it does become an extremely lonely and isolated profession.
Yet, there are many who want to be wealth real estate investors but defer to their family and social life more than putting in some time to make an investment happen (the opposite of a work-a-holic). Although JJ and I understand family comes first, we often find that people orbit around their family life to the point of not getting anything done instead of trying to get their family members involved in certain areas. For example, the wife could be doing the bookkeeping or finding the next best property or collecting rent and making deposits. The kids could be involved by seeing you work and understanding how the money process works (learning job and life skills to home maintenance). If your kid is too young to be helping, at least they could help pass out flyers for your properties that are available in your neighborhood or at the local park/YMCA bulletin boards. These are ideas to help balance your work/social life. We highly recommend getting family members or friends with similar aspirations to team up with you and share the load to get there faster.
However, the main theme of “Lifeonaire” was to simply your life. We let things get too complicated to the point where work will ‘own us’ along with our ‘possessions’ if we let it. There were 4 steps. 1) Develop your life goal and plan (your vision) to get there. 2) Making ends meet for your vision (you trade time for money) and is often where most of America gets stuck in the hamster wheel. 3) Simplify your life so that you can create more time for your self and family. 4) Building your pipeline. Take the excess cash from stage three and invest into free and clear income-producing assets.
It is mainly common sense and does go against the American way of life. But this formula may not work for everyone because it takes so long for some of us.
Crissy
