When to Quit Your Day Job (CFFL 555)
When to Quit Your Day Job (CFFL 555)
Transcript:
Jack Butala: Jack and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hi!
Jack Butala: Welcome to the show today. In this episode, Jill and I talk about when to quick your day job.
Jill DeWit: Oo, I hope it’s soon.
Jack Butala: Jill, do you want to quit your job?
Jill DeWit: No, no, I’m just saying.
Jack Butala: My god, this is why Jill created this topic, cause I think she’s gonna resign on this show.
Jill DeWit: I’m ready. Yeah, I am. For me, it’s today.
Jack Butala: Before we take Jill’s resignation, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the LandInvestors.com online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Brian asks, “I’m running into a problem where I have people who want to buy a property, but just don’t feel comfortable sending me a cashier’s check for $9,000 without some assurance that I’m not going to just walk off with their money. We could go with a third party to act as an intermediary, I guess, but then there are additional fees. Anyone here have any schemes to put …”
Jack Butala: Schemes?
Jill DeWit: Schemes. We’ll say “ideas to put such buyers at ease. I have wording in the purchase agreement that states if the buyer doesn’t receive the recorded title by X day, the transaction is null and the seller will issue a full refund. But that still doesn’t prove to them that I’m not a crook.”
Jack Butala: This is a great question.
Jill DeWit: All right.
Jack Butala: It’s a common issue, even for us, with all the experience that we’ve had. And here’s the solution. It’s called Escrow Perfect. It’s one of the solutions and companies that Jill and I will provide, are providing, and our doors will be open, the website will be open, I don’t know, about 60 days. About 60 days. So quite simply, think of it as title/escrow but without all the title insurance and without all the expense. It’s gonna cost a few hundred dollars to the get whole deal done.
What you need, and this is why people used to use lawyers and now they use title companies or escrow companies to close deals. So it’s an unrelated third party and it removes that necessity of trust and it gives you some type of recourse if something goes south.
Great question, Brian.
Jill DeWit: What about today? What does Brian do today?
Jack Butala: You know, it depends on his geography. What would you do, Jill? I mean, we’ve faced this. I don’t know if we’ve faced it this month, but we’ve faced it.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, I mean I guess I would go back to the buyers and honestly, this is one of the times I would turn things on them. What would make you feel better? Number one. Maybe they say, well, if it’s just not a cashier’s check, or if it’s this way, or something like that. Or maybe the whole thing is, too, really, the answer is doing an escrow. And you know what? Here’s what I would say.
Here’s the deal. I understand that we could open escrow. I’ll split the fees with you. I mean, that I think is a total fair thing. Cause I’m willing to be when he’s selling something for $9,000, he could probably …
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: There’s enough room in the deal that we could probably afford to split it with them, cause that would make them more happy to do the transaction. I don’t have this as much. Because once you get going, you build up your business and you have customers and you’re out there and they can go and do their homework. And they can see you and your company, and Google you, and make sure you’re a legitimate person and all that good stuff. Then that does make a difference.
I’ve also had people, too, Brian, that point out their association with us. And I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that, too. You could use us. Say, look, I’m with this bigger entity, not entity, but …
Jack Butala: Sure. Investors group.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. That these are the people I work alongside with, whatever. And you can say, check them out, if that doesn’t make you feel good. And then, at the very end of the day, if they’re still not comfortable, then I’m not comfortable. You know what I mean?
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: There’s times where if they have too many hoops, I’m like, all right, what’s wrong with you? And that makes me not comfortable. Like, hmm, were you not really going to send me a cashier’s check anyway? Were you trying to get me to send you the deed first? Was there something shady going on with the buyer. Because let’s be honest, that could happen.
Jack Butala: I mean, admittedly, there’s some trust that’s required in these transactions. So chances are, if you’ve followed our program, you bought the property with a cashier’s check and a notary, so you can say that’s how you bought it. And offer to pay a notary to do the same thing.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: Or you can give them a choice of notaries. What Jill’s really saying is, get on the phone with them, and establish their trust. That’s really why this is not a problem with us. Because if when we do have these problems, Jill herself, not our staff, it gets to her desk. And so she’ll call them and say, look, we’ve done this 15,000 times or whatever. I don’t know, Jill, what would you say?
Jill DeWit: Uh huh. I mean just like that, yeah. You know, I want you to be comfortable. Ask me any questions. Stuff like that. Okay, where are you guys? What do you guys do? I don’t know, whatever they want to ask. Trust is really, trust is a feeling. Trust is not something on paper. You know, I was just thinking about that car that I bought that made you go sideways, Jack.
Jack Butala: Oh my gosh.
Jill DeWit: So this has been awhile since I shared this story. So I bought this car and the woman and I upon first meeting totally trusted each other. We were all cool. She happened to be from California also. And so pretty much what happened was, I think I … I don’t even think I gave … I may have given her $1,000, or I may have even paid for the car. I don’t remember. And I drove off with her car. And I didn’t have the title yet, because there was a title thing. And Jack was like, oh my God.
Jack Butala: There was a title thing.
Jill DeWit: Jack was so nervous.
Jack Butala: That’s what she calls it.
Jill DeWit: I hand her money and I took the car. He’s like, you know, she could try and call and say it was stolen.
Jack Butala: There’s nine things, no, 90 things.
Jill DeWit: So Jack was irate. But I was like, no, but so what, I have a piece of paper that she signed. “Great, that makes me feel better.” And I’m like no, we’re all cool. And it was a good, I don’t know, six weeks until the …
Jack Butala: She’d just paid the car off.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: And she was waiting for the bank, which was way out of state, to return the lien-free title.
Jill DeWit: Right. So she could officially sell it to me. And it was so darn funny. Because I was like, nah, we’re good.
Jack Butala: What could go wrong?
Jill DeWit: Jack’s like, oh my God, there’s insurances, users, all these things. Oh my God. But you know what? It was a trust thing.
Jack Butala: And you know what happened in the end? Jill was 100% right.
Jill DeWit: It worked out.
Jack Butala: It worked out great. The car’s great. Everything was … it was a picture-perfect deal. And Jill got really what she wanted, which was to drive the car for nothing. Put the top down, with her hair in the wind, because she has a feeling.
Jill DeWit: So. Silly you. But trust is something you have or you don’t have.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: And you know what? If they don’t have it, that’s fine. Do your best and then sometimes that’s all you can do.
Jack Butala: I wonder why this question doesn’t come up more often? I guess people just want to get out of the deal or into the deal or whatever.
Jill DeWit: I don’t know.
Jack Butala: It doesn’t happen that much for us either. In fact, I can’t remember the last time. Maybe I just don’t know.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, you don’t know. Just kidding.
Jack Butala: If you have a question or you want to be on the show, reach out to either one of us on LandInvestors.com. Today’s topic, it’s Jill’s topic. When to quit your day job. This is the meat of the show.
Jill DeWit: Do it now. Just rip of the BandAid. Do it now. I’m totally kidding. Could you imagine?
Jack Butala: No. People are quitting their jobs right now.
Jill DeWit: Sweetheart, babe. Here’s the drive home in the car. Sweetheart, I listened to a very powerful podcast today.
Jack Butala: Oh no, no.
Jill DeWit: And here’s the result. I quit my job. Cause we’re doing this.
Jack Butala: Please don’t do that.
Jill DeWit: No, don’t do that. Cause wouldn’t that be awful?
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: But Jack and Jill said I should rip off the BandAid.
Jack Butala: No, no. Don’t even. Somebody’s gonna take this out of context.
Jill DeWit: I know. I’m totally kidding.
Okay, so I’m gonna fast-forward, and then I’m gonna give you a little background. When do you quit your day job? I’ll give you the answer right now. When you’re staring at yourself in the mirror going, I should of done this six months ago.
Jack Butala: Or a year ago, in my case.
Jill DeWit: Or two years ago, or something. When you’re going, man, I hung onto this way too long. I’ve got 18 fallback plans and I’ve got our whole family, we’ve been covering our health insurance for a year and a half now.
Jack Butala: Exactly, Jill. My gosh, we agree.
Jill DeWit: And I don’t worry about the mortgage, because that was taken, that’s all paid off now.
Jack Butala: That’s right.
Jill DeWit: You know, when you are having those conversations with yourself, that’s when it’s okay to breathe and take the step. But it needs to be, you need to be so far down the path that it’s just ridiculous. That you’ve been basically having a double income for a long, long, long, long time. Because your investment job, your new job, you know what I mean, as an investor, has been paying the bills for a long, long, long time.
So your day job has just been kind of a security blanket. Right, Jack?
Jack Butala: You know what pushed me over the edge? I did a calculation in a spreadsheet and I said, this job is costing me X amount of money a month.
Jill DeWit: That’s good.
Jack Butala: I’m making so much more money over here, if I actually did it full time, and I could reasonably increase how much I make by let’s say, this is very conservative, by 20%. It ended up being like 400% at the time.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: But if I just increase how much I’m earning by 20% a month, that justifies how much money I’m making at this silly job.
Jill DeWit: That’s true.
Jack Butala: It’s hard, though. You know, we’re taught right from the beginning, when we go to school, I could swear it’s a conspiracy. We send our kids to school. They have these classes. They have a teacher up there that’s their boss.
Jill DeWit: Which, poor Dad, here it comes.
Jack Butala: You know, and they, oh really?
Jill DeWit: Yeah, that’s where you’re going.
Jack Butala: I haven’t read this book. I swear it’s conspiracy. So we set these kids up. They go to school. They have a teacher/boss, they eat lunch at the same time, they have to behave, there’s rules and there’s consequences. It’s just like a job. So naturally, you get out of school, you don’t have any money, so you go get a job, basically go back to school, in a school environment. And you get, in a really insignificant way, rewarded. I hope none of our employees are listening to this.
Jill DeWit: It doesn’t apply to them. Oh my gosh. This is for everyone else, not our staff.
Jack Butala: We’re gonna walk in today and it’s just going to be empty in there.
Jill DeWit: It’s going to be chaos.
Jack Butala: There’s going to be sticky notes that say, you guys are right. Thanks!
Jill DeWit: I’m doing this on my own time. Oh, no, no, no. That’s so funny.
Jack Butala: You know what? The fact is this: when you quit your day job, it’s up to you. I quit mine like two months late. And I literally had, what Jill described, absolutely no debt, in any way, and five or six hundred thousand dollars in my checking account. So, am I saying you should wait that long? No, but that’s my take on it was, that’s what worked for me. I just didn’t, I didn’t have a land academy, by the way. Or land investors. I was like, sending letters out and doing …
Jill DeWit: It was only you. It was you dependent of you.
Jack Butala: Going to tax sales and stuff. I’m like, how long can this last?
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: Well, I can make X amount of money last for a really long time. And I did, so it worked out for me.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Jack Butala: I’ll tell you. I’ve started and closed several businesses. That’s a different topic. But fortunately, this was not one of those, so …
Jill DeWit: You came to me. Do you remember that? You came to me, because I was literally, this was so funny. I’ve said this before. I had one desk facing one direction, and one desk facing the other direction. Cause the day job I had at the time was working remote a lot. So I would be working from my home office. And I would be working, working, working. I’d flip around because the phone would ring. And I’d flip around and do some land stuff, and I’d flip back around and go back to that. And I’d flip back around because there was a land thing, and I’d flip back around. It was tiring.
And then there was times that I was working with the quote unquote “day job,” and I was missing calls for the land job. And that, for me, was a little bit of a revelation. I was like, shoot, I’m losing money right money because I’m not available to answer this phone.
Jack Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: This is bad.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: And then you joined in too, because you saw the effort I was able to put in for the day job. And I couldn’t quite mirror that effort, at least not on call like this, with the other job. So you realized, whoa, if we took that out of the equation and you just did this, wow!
Jack Butala: So last week I brought up, I’m going to bring it up again. I’m actually writing a book. I’m wrapping it up, actually. Called, I don’t know what the title’s going to be, but what it’s really about is a young man’s guide to making good professional career decisions. Stuff that I wish someone would have told me a long time ago. Like, don’t get married too early, don’t have kids too early. Work out the financial piece. Go to school where it’s appropriate.
And it’s kind of a take off of the ideal scenario that Mark Cuban talks about all the time. Like, if you’re a young man, do not buy a house or a car or get married or have children. What you need to do, and this is right on topic with when to quit your day job. Rent a room somewhere with a bunch of other guys who are just as sloppy as you are, for a couple hundred bucks a month. And don’t even start the job process. I mean, hopefully, get a couple years …
Here’s my advice. Get a couple of years of professional experience in whatever, for me it was accounting. Whatever you’re into. To put something on a resume in case, as a fallback. And then you can actually learn, too, whether you actually love working in an office environment like that or whether you can’t stand it. For me, it was the latter. And apparently for Mark Cuban, too.
What he did was rented a room for $200 a month and he did exactly what he wanted to do, which was develop software. And built an empire really quickly. Because he just didn’t want to do it anybody else’s way. So if you’re the kind of person that’s listening to this and that’s you, figure out how to undo whatever you’ve done to yourself that you have to undo financially. And it’s harder to do than that one sentence I just said. But free yourself up so that, if you don’t have any expenses, you don’t need a job.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: That’s really the truth.
Jill DeWit: That’s a lot of it. Yeah, that’s a good point.
Jack Butala: You don’t need a car. If you need a car where you live, move to someplace where you don’t. And on and on and on.
Jill DeWit: Especially when you’re starting out.
Jack Butala: Have those real conversations with yourself. Yeah, especially, Jill.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, when you’re starting out and you’re young, you can do that stuff.
Jack Butala: What you don’t want to do is add expenses. And the two most expensive things on the planet are marriage and children.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: And that’s what my whole book’s about. Actually, I don’t need to finish it now, because I’ve just said it.
Jill DeWit: Are you sure? Jack, that’s awful. You can’t say that!
Jack Butala: I know it’s awful. Hey, I’m here to say the awful truth.
Jill DeWit: Ugh.
Jack Butala: I’m serious.
Jill DeWit: Well, then it applies for women, too then. By the way, you know what?
Jack Butala: Hold on a second.
Jill DeWit: All right. I need to stand up for the woman here.
Jack Butala: It’s not gender thing.
Jill DeWit: That’s what I wanted to point out.
Jack Butala: So.
Jill DeWit: You point out that the men hold all the cards. No, it’s for us, too.
Jack Butala: Two weeks ago, I’m not sure when the show aired, but I talked just like I’m saying here. And you know how many emails I got? From men saying, man, if I’d have done what you guys just talked about …
Jill DeWit: I know. I’m getting divorced and I sold the kids. I’m just kidding.
Jack Butala: I’m saying that to myself.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: I look back on it now and I can say this stuff. But it ended okay for me, so it’s easier to write it.
Jill DeWit: Well, back up. Let me back up, Jack. Let’s talk about the people right now today. There’s everybody in our situation right now. So this is great for all the young people, all the two of them, that are under 25 …
Jack Butala: .. that listen to this show.
Jill DeWit: It’s good for both of the guys who are under 25 that listen to this show.
Jack Butala: Let’s say you’re 50.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Jack Butala: Let’s say you’re a 50 year old guy.
Jill DeWit: Yep.
Jack Butala: Do the same thing.
Jill DeWit: No, you can’t!
Jack Butala: Get rid of all that stuff.
Jill DeWit: Okay, you can’t get rid of the boys, you can’t get rid of the wife and the kids. Or the spouse and the kids.
Jack Butala: Okay, if you say so.
Jill DeWit: Jack.
Jack Butala: The kids eventually turn 18.
Jill DeWit: I know that.
Jack Butala: That solves itself.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Jack Butala: That’s what this book is about.
Jill DeWit: Jack! Gahhh…
Jack Butala: I’m a gentleman on this show, Jill, so I’m not gonna, and we end with you. Theoretically, I try to be.
Jill DeWit: Theoretically.
Jack Butala: This book is not politically correct and it’s not gentlemanly. And it’s not sexist or anything else like that.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: There’s a female version of it.
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: I thought you were going to write the female version of it.
Jill DeWit: I am writing the female version. Thank you very much, you thought.
Jack Butala: The female version should be something like this, as far as I know, but that’s why I’m not gonna write it. Jill is.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: See the male version. That’s how the female version should go.
Jill DeWit: Don’t fall in love.
Jack Butala: That’s right.
Jill DeWit: That’s where women go sideways.
Jack Butala: I could not agree more.
Jill DeWit: They fall in love and then all their plans change.
Jack Butala: Did you ever see the movies where the guy really likes a girl, and he says, we should do this. And sweetheart, you’re the love of my life and I’m gonna sweep you off your feet and we’re gonna travel around the world, and it’s not founded in anything. And she’s like, look, I don’t really have time for this right now.
Jill DeWit: That’s the way to do it.
Jack Butala: Be that girl.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. That’s the way to do it. I’ll see you when you get back.
Jack Butala: I’ll see you in 10 years.
Jill DeWit: I’ve got my own plans.
Jack Butala: After I’ve the vice president of whatever.
Jill DeWit: Yeah, let’s meet up in 10 years. I like that. You are 100% correct. Thank you.
Jack Butala: Join us on our next episode, where we discuss how to buy back-tax property.
Jill DeWit: And we answer Erin’s question about, this is good: should there be a stipulation against marijuana?
Jack Butala: What?
Jill DeWit: I know.
Jack Butala: That’s hilarious. I can’t wait to answer that.
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Jack Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: So what is the marijuana questions?
Jack Butala: I don’t know. It comes up a lot.
Jill DeWit: It does. Well, now that it’s legal in a lot of states, people are talking about properties. The other day on one of our calls, one of our members was talking about …
Jack Butala: It’s a cash crop. You need land to grow it.
Jill DeWit: … like advertising property that’s actually zoned for that use.
Jack Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: And what a market that could be. I’m like, that is really wild. And you piped in too. You talked about, hey, go ahead and get the certificate for it and attach that with the property, because that differentiates. That’s one way to differentiate your property, you know. And I’m sure there’s a market for that. It’s pretty cool.
Jack Butala: We talked about it in our last … if you go on YouTube, we have a Thursday call, Hey Listener. If you on YouTube, we have a Thursday call, every Thursday, and we post it on YouTube Thursday night.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Jack Butala: For whatever reason, this topic came up in one of our member, Luke, had a real good solution about how to sell property and get involved in it. It’s actually pretty cool.
Jill DeWit: Mm-hmm (affirmative). It’s awesome.
Jack Butala: Information and inspiration to buy under-valued property.
Jill DeWit: Hey, you like our show? Please subscribe and write us on iTunes or wherever you are listening.
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