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Planning for 2015

The only way to achieve anything is by setting goals. You can start with long-term goals like building a real estate portfolio worth $1,000,000, or creating $5,000 a month from passive real estate income. These long-term goals then need to be broken down by years, months, weeks, and days. There is no way we’ll reach our long-term goals if we don’t work towards them every day.

With that, the end of the year is a great time to look at existing long-term goals or make new ones. It’s also a great time to define the things you want to achieve in the upcoming year to help you reach those long-term goals. Here’s a look at my goals for 2015:

Finance goals:

  • Save at least $45,000 – In order to accomplish this goal, I need to save $3,750 each month. Not a small amount, but in order to achieve financial freedom within the next decade, my wife and I are willing to live a frugal life (spend on things that are important to us and save everywhere else). The $3,750 each month will be divided into two: savings and investing. We’ll be saving for a few goals such as traveling and buying a house to live in. The money we save for investing will be divided into our IRA’s and to down payments on new real estate investments.
  • Purchase 3 additional properties – Now that we have two properties, we’re hungry for more and want to build our passive income by purchasing additional properties. Our goal for 2015 is to buy three additional properties. At an average of $25,000 per down payment, we’re looking to invest around $75,000 (before closing costs).
  • Grow my net worth to $150,000 (it’s currently at $100,000) – Assuming we can save $45,000 in 2015, that should help bring our net worth to around $150,000 (of course, if our IRAs and properties appreciate, that will help as well).

Personal goal:

  • Start a family – This is a big one, and kind of scary. This is definitely the main goal for the year.

Passive REI blog goal:

  • Write one post per week – I don’t have lots of plans for this blog… pretty much what I mentioned in the About page; keep myself accountable and share my journey with others. One post a week seems like a good amount and of course during interesting times like new projects or while closing I’ll blog more often. But for now once a week is my goal.

So these are my goals for 2015. In order to keep myself accountable, I’ll touch on these goals in my monthly income reports every quarter and at the end of the year.

 

Performance Meters

Introducing the Passive REI performance meters!

Every month, as part of my income reports, I’ll grade the following parameters:

  • Cash flow – will be graded based on the potential versus actual cash flow.
  • Passiveness – graded based on the amount of time spent on my income properties-green means very little time spent, red means too much time spent. This won’t include efforts on acquiring new properties, as those are not passive but rather very active (it’s important to learn everything I can about the property, neighborhood, turnkey provider, etc.).

The idea is to compare between different months, and visuals are always easier to consume than text.

My August and September meters came out the same:

 

Cash flow
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Passiveness

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Start with Why

I didn’t have an easy time starting out in real estate investing. In fact, my first two deals didn’t even go through. After those two deals failed, I had to decide how to continue and if to continue at all. I could have taken my savings and purchased bonds, or stocks, or real estate trusts. These, too, would classify as passive investing but they probably wouldn’t give me the returns that investing in real estate could provide.

After the two deals failed, I had to take a break for a few days… No reading about real estate, no replying to offers from whole sellers or turnkey providers. During those few days, I took time to think about why I was doing what I was doing. Why was I spending so many hours after work learning about real estate? Why was I researching different markets? Why was I talking to real estate agents, mortgage brokers, real estate investors, turnkey providers, and others?

So here’s what I came up with, here’s my “why:” I want to escape the rat race. I want to stop trading my time for money at a 9-5 job. I want to create passive cash flow to pay for my day-to-day life and take advantage of things like appreciation and amortization to build long-term wealth.

My goal is to own my time. All of it. Today I spend between 8-10 hours a day at work. I don’t have much choice since my employer provides me with a monthly income in exchange for those 8-10 hours each day. I want to stop that. Or at least have the option to stop that. I want to be able to spend more time with my family, and more time doing the things I enjoy. I believe that is true wealth. I believe that a wealthy person is someone who has full control of their time.

So that’s my “why.” Building that, getting to the point where I own my time, and having the financial freedom to do so. What’s yours?.