All Over the Place!

I’m sure you can tell from the few blog posts I’ve written, I’m still not sure what I want to be when I grow up!

You’ve seen posts from me about surveying, writing, and building a cash flow business. So you might be thinking to yourself, “This guy has the attention span of a gnat!”, or “This guy better pick something and get to work!”.

You are correct. Although, I feel like my problem has always been that I’m a bit too much like Charlie Brown. I used to read a lot of Peanuts cartoons by Charles Schultz and I always identified deeply with Charlie Brown. A super-nice guy, but a little flaky and a little wishy-washy. As the old song goes, “He’s a clown, that Charlie Brown…” (“Charlie Brown” by the Coasters – look it up if you’ve never heard it!).

I’ve been reading books lately that give all sorts of great advice, but there was one thing that stuck in my head recently: “Find someone who’s doing what you want to be doing and go learn from them.” I can’t find the book I read that in and I definitely can’t take credit for something so smart and simple.

A friend of mine from high school is currently building himself a living through investing in rental properties and real estate. I called him up, invited him for drinks, and then attacked him with 20,000 questions. Maybe I should have warned him what was coming, but I found out pretty quickly that he was more that willing to talk about what he’s been working at the past few years. He also gave me a ton of great advice and resources to look at. Here’s a few of the nuggets I’ve got so far:

• Look into courses and information from Real Estate Investment Network (REIN) Canada (reincanada.com): a great resource for learning about real estate investing in Canada.
• There are many ways to get into real estate investing, but understand the numbers – “it’s all about the numbers” (I’ll maybe elaborate on this a bit more later).
• The worst thing you can do is to do nothing – my friend said he read that in the literature somewhere. It’s not something he came up with, but it’s something that stuck with him.
• Take some time, think about what it is you really want, what you want your future to look like, what you want your business to look like, and why you’re getting into real estate investing. Then write it down, make a plan, and start working.

In my last post (Our New Journey…..) I mentioned my wife and I were going to talk to a Mortgage Broker and find out if we can afford a new property. Our real estate agent recommended a very professional broker here in Regina – Denise Allin. She has been amazing to work with so far! And I can’t say enough about our Real Estate Agent – Jennica George (Regina – RE/MAX)! After talking to my friend I realized that we were getting ahead of ourselves a bit and needed to first come up with a plan.

Over the weekend we (my wife and I) will be spending some time thinking, talking, and writing about our plans and goals for the future. We have an idea in our minds about where we want to be in 10 years (retired!), but we need to be in agreement about how we’re going to get there and what we think our retirement looks like. After all, I don’t want to imagine what retirement looks like without my wife and I hope she feels the same way! I guess I’ll find out this weekend….