Join us in our drive to financial freedom

Welcome back.  First off, I would like to thank everyone for all the kind thoughts on our drive for $60,000 in 60 days.  We’re going to continue our drive towards financial freedom, and with that we plan to update this blog about 1-2 times per week.  We will continue to provide information on what we’re doing and insights into the things we have learned or are learning about real estate investing.  We encourage everyone to provide feedback and really make this a great community of real estate investors.

So, for today, we’re going to talk about a habit we have gotten into that helps tremendously to keep us focused on our real estate investing business.  Each Sunday night Kelly and I sit down for a few minutes and we brainstorm about what we need to do for the upcoming week.  We normally start by reviewing what we accomplished the previous week and then talk about what we need to complete for the next week to stay on track.  Through this process we are able to set our goals for the week, or “mini-goals” as we call them.  These mini-goals are the things that we really need to accomplish for the week to keep the ball moving forward.  For example, last week our mini-goals were:

• Get the utilities turned on at the West Bloomfield Property
• Setup appointments & meet with contractors
• Obtain pre-approval for funding on the West Bloomfield Property
• Set a closing date for the Pontiac Property

Once we determine the goals for the week, we then break down each of the goals into simple tasks that will help us accomplish these goals.  For instance, we broke the mini-goals into the following tasks:

•  Call electric company – Todd
• Call gas company – Todd
• Go to West Bloomfield Township water department – Kelly
• Get recommendations for contractors – Todd
• Set appointments with contractors – Todd
• Set appointment with home inspector – Kelly
• Send credibility kit to hard money lenders – Todd
• Phone conference / meet with hard money lenders – Todd
• Meet with Pontiac property hard money lender – Kelly

To manage these mini-goals and keep them at center stage, we write them down on a big dry-erase board in our kitchen.  This board really helps keep Kelly and I organized and on the same page because we can update it throughout the week with things we have completed, or add additional things that come up throughout the week. 

With this list of mini-goals and tasks, we were able to systematically accomplish each of our goals last week.  All it took was to focus on the tasks at hand, and we were easily able to complete these goals.  I cannot tell you how much this has really helped in keeping us on track in our real estate investing.  It is something that is really simple, but it just takes a little discipline to do on a consistent basis.  We are happy to report that we accomplished all of our mini-goals last week, and this week our dry-erase board looks like this:

We are already on track to Close on Lydia, get contractor bids and obtain more properties like Lydia…maybe we’ll have to add more goals for this week…we’ll let you know what happens