Shock, Anger, Denial, Depression, and Acceptance…

These are the 5 stages people go through during a traumatic event.

About 2 years ago, I had my traumatic event when a family member’s health took a serious turn for the worse. I spent 30 days in the hospital and rehabilitation center helping them along and making sure all went as well as possible.

In the end, my family member required 24 hour care. My options were limited to either have them stay in a care facility or figure out how to financially pay for a similar service at work, which would be much more expensive. I essentially had to come up with about $3000/month within the next 3 years to keep them at home.

I’m very old school (I guess) in that matter. I know my parents would want to finish their lives in the house we all grew up in. I also realize that I am who I am because of them.

In the middle of all this, I somehow struck up a conversation with a co-worker who began to describe to me how he had accumulated 10 single family properties in the Las Vegas area within the last 3 years. He lives in California, but decided to invest in Vegas because of the much lower entry costs. He has his reasons, or his “why”, which lead him to his course. Instead of bombarding him with questions, I decided to educate myself a bit first on what he was discussing.

That’s where a found Bigger Pockets online. It literally opened up my path to resolving my matter. Here, I discovered how cash flow properties could get me to my goal… how wholesaling and flipping could augment that goal. I was also able to find my now-partner who pretty much took me under his wings and helped me accumulate my current portfolio.

My strategy was simple..

Each unit, or door, acquired in my buying area provides me with $150/unit/month after all expenses. If I acquired 20 units, that’s $3500 per month in total. My goal of $3000 is then more than achieved.

At this point, I have 17 units acquired. I’m in the process of rehabbing a portion, refinancing a portion, and collecting rents from those already completely processed. In all, I’m well within schedule of meeting my 3 year deadline of $3000/month. I’ve also created teams to help build wholesaling and flipping opportunities as well, to create capital support to help sustain cash flow growth.

The moral of the story: What’s your WHY? Ask your at least 3 times why you are doing something. It’ll get you to the root cause of your action. Without a solid root cause, its very hard to stay motivated and drive through all the learning, obstacles, and fears. Your why is what will drive you to extraordinary limits. My why is what wakes me up at 5:30AM before I go work, use my lunch breaks to create more opportunities, go to REAs after a full day work to network, and build a team to not only help my cause, but to help others. What you give comes back tenfold without asking...

God bless and enjoy your Sunday!

Rafael