Hard decisions during COVID-19
COVID-19 has, as I’m sure is true for many, thrown some curveballs into our plans to say the least.
My wife was studying for her RE license and got her test in the nick of time (think minutes difference between being allowed to test and having her test cancelled). Unfortunately for her the market for those services has contracted significantly given that she has no experience in that field. She has since left a retail job of 20 years for another retail job, albeit PT.
I currently have a good paying FT job but during the course of selling the one rental we had to pay off the wife’s 401k loans we were convinced by the listing broker that it was a good idea to start a Handyman business. Despite his encouragement for me to quit my job and jump into the Handyman business FT right out of the gate we elected to start it as a side business. After only 2 months and very little spent on advertising it appears that we may be on the verge of outgrowing our britches and being forced to a decision sooner than we had hoped.
I should mention that we have known this listing agent for 10 years and his advice has always been right on the money. He has offered some assistance with SEO although it might be worth paying someone just to get some of it done faster. In addition, he has offered to plug us into a FB networking group he runs that is exclusive to RE agents and has roughly 6,000 members within an hour of us so I doubt we would lack for work.
The benchmark to replace my income is $350/day, 5 days a week. At $420/day, 5 days a week I can replace both of our incomes completely. While it has been up and down to this point we are now 3 weeks out on work at 2-3 days/week and starting to accelerate. I believe if we go FT, bump our advertising to $10/day, and get the plug from the RE listing broker we would be swamped.
At what point would you go FT if it was you? Can you recommend an inexpensive CRM software to help us with long-term growth and customer retention? Anything else in particular you would recommend we consider as we prepare for this slightly scary, exciting decision in our lives? The only big negative I can think of at this time is on the investing side where we want to grow simultaneously but will be losing almost 100% of W-2 income when we pull the trigger so lending options will be limited for at least 2 years.