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The 6 Things I’m Working for This Year (Beyond Money for Money’s Sake)

Nathan Brooks
4 min read
The 6 Things I’m Working for This Year (Beyond Money for Money’s Sake)

This past week I attended one of the local real estate investor meetings to meet new people, spend time with our property manager and introduce her to people I knew there, and maybe find a few new clients for property management or turnkey solutions. But I didn’t expect to get my brain and week rocked by the speaker.

It was someone from the Lifeonaire series, and I honestly figured it would be a lot of rah-rah-rah crap — with stories of how he made a whole bunch of money in three days, not using any of his money, and how he now travels to Bora Bora every weekend to his fourth home. That’s all totally cool with me if you have that fourth home, and I love the beach, but I was hoping there would be SOME advice I could use.

The talk was about two hours. I sat there, enamored for every second of it.

Well, other than the drunk guy who decided to come pester everyone in the row behind and in front of me. After a few minutes (luckily, at the beginning of the talk), he finally walked back out after using his arsenal of cuss words and smoking his e-cig, blowing the smoke into the back of my head. His antics were short-lived, and he finally got on back out of there. But I digress.

Seriously, the talk was awesome.

He shared his life experiences and stories of the businesses he had built. His struggles, successes, and utter failures. A lot of his story was really striking for me, mainly because of how similar parts of our life, especially how he had built (a much larger) company and lost basically everything in the downturn of the economy.

private-money-lender

Everything he said hit home with me. I quit my “job” and went into real estate full-time to be able to enjoy more time with my family, do more traveling, enjoy dinners out, and have play dates with my children.

It wasn’t to buy more stuff, spend more money that I haven’t made yet, or let the lifestyle creep happen as I made more money.

I hate to tell you, but I had begun to fall into all of those things. I’d spend a little more on traveling, a little more on eating out, a little more on a car wash membership. Or the cell phone bill. Whatever item or cost, it’s so easy to spend more. And want more.

From the talk, I walked away with more clarity than I’d had in a while. I wanted to get back to the basics of my business, my money, and my time.

Focus Only on the Most Important Things

Our company has started 2016 with a bang, growing our clients from all over the country for property management and acquisition. When things are going well and there is a lot to do, it’s easy to work 100 hours a week. But that isn’t healthy.

Related: The 3 Major Reasons I Invest in Real Estate (Other Than Money)

Instead, empower your team and mentor your shining stars who can grow into doing other things that you have done. Teach others skills that are your strengths, but also bring on people who help cover and fill gaps where your skills are lacking or where you don’t enjoy doing something.

If your earning goal is $100k a year, you better be doing $100k a year worth of work.

If your earning goal is $1M a year, you better be doing $1M a year worth of work.

There are many different ways to spend family time, personal time with hobbies, quiet reflection time, fun time, and work time. Know what each of them is about and commit that when you are working, you do work. When you are enjoying play time at the park with the kids, enjoy play time.

Man, I am not always good at that.

family

Passive Income, Passive Income, Passive Income

When I think about the most comfortable people in the real estate business, they have many income streams, and they make passive income from various sources like rentals, property management, or owning a business that generates reviews without them needing to be there to crank the wheel to produce the income.

As I was sitting in that talk, I was reminded of how little you honestly need to live pretty well, if you have low overhead costs and little or no debt. It’s so easy to dream about the big giant house and the fast cars (which I do love both) — but when I am honest with myself, I am 100 percent confident I would choose an awesome life — working with less stress, making passive income — with less stuff, a nice but reasonable house and nice enough car.

Don’t Do it for the Money

This is a hard one. Anyone can earn money for money’s sake. There are lots of rich people out there. Lots of them. Whatever “rich” means. Maybe they own a house. Or owns two houses. Or have X money in the bank.

Whatever.

But as you have a fresh start with a new year, what are you working FOR?

Related: 4 Spectacular Ways Passive Income Can Change How You Live Your Life

It’s my hope to be working for a few things.

  1. I want to support my family with good decisions, creating wealth, making money, and having fun doing it with others I enjoy being around.
  2. I want to live under my means financially.
  3. I want to grow our passive income.
  4. I want to grow our wealth through real estate and other business.
  5. I want to spend more time with my family, whether it is teaching them music lessons, playing at the park, or dreaming of a trip to Florida.
  6. I want to grow and empower my team to also do the same — not work crazy hours, live under their means, and understand the power of the business they are working in and what it could do for their lives.

So, here’s to doing just that. Growing business. Growing time. Shrinking debt. Enjoying family time — and work time. And handling the good stress.

And drinking good wine. 🙂

What are YOU working on this year? What is pushing you toward your goal this year?

Share what inspires you to work on your real estate business each and every day in the comments section below!

Note By BiggerPockets: These are opinions written by the author and do not necessarily represent the opinions of BiggerPockets.