Stuff Your Father Never Told You (LA 978)
Stuff Your Father Never Told You (LA 978)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit: Hi.
Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from sunny southern California.
Steven Butala: Today Jill and talk about the topic, stuff your father never told you.
Jill DeWit: I can’t wait to hear what you have to say.
Steven Butala: This is kind of a show that I put together that is directly pertaining to real estate. But specifically for younger people and older people too. I talked about this a couple of years ago on the show, and we had a live event, and many many people came up to me and said, man I can’t wait to read this book that you’re writing about this topic because, anyway, I’ll talk about it in a second. But it’s so important to really plan your life out. That’s really what this is about. Instead of just letting stuff happen to you. Like planning a real estate deal out. Like you want to know what’s going to happen. You want to remove most of the variables, or all of the variables that you can. Plan that there’s going to be a few variables you can’t control. And just make sure you get it done. I’m not sure a lot of people plan that out. I planned out the professional part of my life, not so much the social.
Jill DeWit: It worked out I think.
Steven Butala: It worked out well. Before we get into it though, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on a LandInvestors.com online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Joe asks, I’ve got a group of properties under contract with a seller, which includes a commercial property. The purchase price is more than I have in my acquisition funds right now. But I don’t want this deal to go to waste. So I’m looking for a funding partner for the deal. I retried Land Academy deal funding, got it, but they said it didn’t meet their criteria. I’m not a member, so LandTank is not an option for me. Purchase price is $20,000 and there’s a similar commercial parcel currently listed for $250,000. Did anybody-
Steven Butala: And that’s where the question ends. And the reason that I included this in there is because there are multiple people, new land investors that are, here’s my email address, here’s my phone number, this is what we love to do. So and then, all things that happen in Land Academy, it all works out for the members and the people. And then we never hear.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: It’s just gone. They have successfully flown out of the nest and we don’t know.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. So here’s the deal. Land Academy deal funding, I do review deals for members and non-members. And so there’s something about this deal, it may have been something, just like an access issue, usually the things I don’t accept are, there’s some access issue or a flooding issue or it’s got too many, too high days on market issue, or some other-
Steven Butala: Those are federal criteria.
Jill DeWit: Or not enough skin in the game to, sometimes I’m like okay, by the time we invest in this and you and I split it, it doesn’t really make sense. So it’s usually things like that for us. That’s part of my criteria. And then-
Steven Butala: Biggest one is access. And the second biggest one is not enough money.
Jill DeWit: Not enough money.
Steven Butala: So by us saying, you know what, this doesn’t work for us. Well what we’re saying is, it’s probably a pretty good deal.
Jill DeWit: It might be a good deal.
Steven Butala: It just not, it doesn’t work for us.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Or even the days on market. I’m really here to doing it fast. So if it’s going to take you ninety days or six months to sell, I don’t really want to tie up my money that long. So maybe it’s something like that. If it’s a glaring issue, I’ll let you know too. Because then sometimes if it’s availability thing, we all need to take a step back and look at it, because of that. So I’ll let you know. So then this next phase is, for members, we create a website called LandTank. So that would be my next thing is, do you want to become a member, that’s the best way. And just throw it on LandTank and again, someone else, it might be their criteria.
Jill DeWit: Maybe there’s somebody who wants, says I’ve got all these hunters in my back pocket. They could care less about access, they’d love this area. I’ll do the deal with you. Kind of think if they’re in it, and they’re doing more properties, they’re members and they’re doing a lot. So and that would be our thing. So I think that’s interesting that they put it in their online community. And I’m glad that you told me that somebody, and a lot of people had reached out and said let’s talk. That’s cool.
Jill DeWit: There’s a lot of money in our community. Because yeah, like you just said, doesn’t meet my criteria, doesn’t mean doesn’t meet somebody else’s criteria.
Steven Butala: There’s no office building that I would purchase, or even be a shareholder in.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: But that doesn’t mean people aren’t buying and selling office buildings and making tons of money every single day.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: Just because that’s, I’m not into it. So it’s the same thing with land. So along today’s topics though, one of my line items for stuff your father never told you, is to not give up. So whoever you are, with this deal, I know you’re not a member, because you said that. Don’t give up. If you believe in the deal, that’s what matters. If you truly believe this is a great deal and here’s why, your excitement about it is contagious. Or your complacency or how you present it, well, let’s just see if they do it. I don’t know, I got to go work today.
Jill DeWit: It’s true.
Steven Butala: That’s how everybody’s going to see the deal.
Jill DeWit: That’s true.
Steven Butala: So I don’t know exactly what happened with us, because we go through a lot of deals, but I’m sure was nothing like that. I’m sure it was exactly what Jill said.
Jill DeWit: There was something.
Steven Butala: Yeah. They sabi. Stuff your father never told you. This is the meat of the show. There’s an order about how you should pursue being successful in life. First of all, you want to sit down and if you’re this kind of person sitting around saying I really do want to be successful, when you’re young it’s usually because I want a fast car, and as you get older those things become less important. But nobody, I don’t care who you are, wants to go to work somewhere for the rest of your life. Very few people do I should say.
Steven Butala: And who doesn’t want financial freedom? And I don’t mean tons and tons of money in the bank and gold chains. I mean just like I get to choose what I do tomorrow morning when I wake up. So if that’s one of your goals is just to have the freedom in your life, this is what I’m talking about. So if you can picture, all developers, real estate developers know, I’m sorry, IT developer knows, what a Gantt chart is. And if you can picture bars, it a horizontal bars of activity, and then place your dates, like you have a 100 year life, right. It’s finite, it shouldn’t be wasted. For the first 18 or 23 years of life, you go through an education process. At the very end of that, the last two years of that, you should start working for free somewhere to learn what you went to school for. And that starts the next phase of your life.
Steven Butala: So now you’re working for free. Eventually you honestly seriously need some dough to live on. And so what should you do then? You should create a living environment and a learning environment for that matter that’s incredibly efficient, and very cheap and sustainable, so that you always have more money coming in than is going out. I haven’t talked about children or women yet at all, or men.
Jill DeWit: Will you?
Steven Butala: I will just in a minute.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: So now you’re traveling along at 26-ish. You have a little bit of, three four five years of work experience under your belt. And you’re still living in squalor. In fact to be real literal about it, you should probably find a house or an apartment somewhere where you can, your whole living expenses are like $300 a month or some number like that. And it’s a freaking disaster, like you would never let your mother in there, or anybody you care about. But it’s just a place to crash when you’re not working. Bill Gates said there’s no reason that someone in their twenties should ever take a vacation at all, and I agree with that. So you should be at some point, thinking about getting during that part of your life, a good job, one that pays pretty well, and a professional environment. You’ve got all your formal education done, and now you have some experience. Whether it’s getting promoted within the environment that you’re working or it’s finding maybe a client that you’ve been servicing, and go work with them. But it should be a substantial pay increase to make it worth your while.
Steven Butala: As that’s happening, you’re moving through your twenties, and you should have an idea at that point in your life about what you want to do. Whether it’s real estate, whether it’s being a medical doctor, all this stuff fits into all of this. Whether it’s being a plumber who then eventually owns a plumbing company, who eventually takes a public and on and on and on. There’s a million different paths you can take. None of them are wrong. Some of them pay better. Some of them don’t. I’m a big fan of scalable stuff. It’s real hard to scale a plumbing company. Or scale being a medical doctor. It’s really easy to scale being a novelist or a programmer. You write a program once, you sell it a million times. You write a book once, you sell it a million times. Very scalable.
Steven Butala: If you’re a plumber, there’s eight hours in a day and that’s it. You can only bill it out. If you’re a doctor, there’s eight hours in a day you can bill out for and that’s it. Very different billing rates, but not scalable at all. If you own a McDonald’s franchise, you can buy another one, and then you buy ten more. That’s repeatable, not really scalable. That’s a different chapter. So you’re moving along in twenties. You want to start thinking about what’s going to happen socially in your life, because you got all the hard stuff done. Now I want you to imagine being 28 and doing what I just said, with four children and a wife.
Jill DeWit: Not going to happen.
Steven Butala: It’s not going to happen.
Jill DeWit: Not going to happen. No. You wouldn’t be at this point. You couldn’t have got there with all that. There’s just no way. You couldn’t live like that. You couldn’t sacrifice like that. You’d be scrambling to make more money to pay the bills to pay for the wife and four kids.
Steven Butala: Right. So I mean, you can make it possible, but you’re totally in a minority of the people who’ve accomplished this. Because you can’t live in squalor. You can’t have children live in squalor.
Jill DeWit: You can’t. But no matter what, I think it would hold you back and slow you down. So your goal at thirty might become your goal at thirty-five because of this delay because, I hate to call it a delay-
Steven Butala: It’s a huge delay.
Jill DeWit: But expenses and what’s involved in that. So yeah.
Steven Butala: And not to mention, just the stuff that’s on your mind. If all you’re doing is going to work and trying to work on your career and yourself-
Jill DeWit: Your focus.
Steven Butala: You can’t maintain-
Jill DeWit: Good boy. Good boy.
Steven Butala: A positive response. That’s a Freudian slip. Imagine a possum.
Jill DeWit: You’re thinking of your boy at home. You can’t be thinking about like you have a boy who’s sick. Your mind would be on that. Like you just said, so-
Steven Butala: Relationships, social relationships are a lot of work, I don’t care what anyone says. Children are times ten that amount of work, and once you start having multiple children, forget it. There’s just, is it rewarding? That’s up to you. Some people say yes, some people say no. Sometimes relationships, social relationships are the most rewarding thing in the world. Sometimes they end up in tragic fiery balls of disaster. That all depends, we don’t know.
Steven Butala: But let’s just take care of the stuff in the beginning of your life that we know about and that you can control. And then if you do decide to have a relationship with somebody, have it for a lot of years before you have children. So now you’re 32, 35. You probably own your own house, or you’re paying a reasonable mortgage somewhere. You’ve got a pretty stable job and if something happens to that job, you have three fall back plans to get another type of job, and some money saved up, and maybe you’re dating somebody that you actually like. Or maybe you’ve been through twelve people that you sort of thought you liked, and you’re on your thirteenth one and maybe this is that one, I don’t know. That’s where you want to be when you’re about 35.
Jill DeWit: Right.
Steven Butala: At 35, the window starts to close for having children. That’s just the way biology works. And it’s true for-
Jill DeWit: For women.
Steven Butala: No. I disagree, this is true for men and women.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: Do you want to be a 55 year old guy having children, and you can’t really even play with them because you’re so tired and just mentally, it’s not even physically. You’re just mentally kind of done with, you just have a very different mindset from a man’s perspective, trust me.
Jill DeWit: I don’t know how men feel, because I see men doing that, so I didn’t know how you felt.
Steven Butala: I think men, most men that I know that are older that married or gets together with younger women and they have children is because the woman wants to do it and the man kind of says, you know, I’m happy to do it. I’m kind of loaded financially, and I’ll be dead when all these people are whatever. So that’s their problem, not mine.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: I mean it. People ask these questions, I’m going to answer them.
Jill DeWit: No, I know.
Steven Butala: That’s what this book is all about. It’s all about stuff your father never told you.
Jill DeWit: I didn’t know.
Steven Butala: Your dad never told you this stuff because (a) he’s just trying to be nice about it and/or (b) he doesn’t care himself.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: And that’s just the truth of it.
Jill DeWit: I got it.
Steven Butala: So now you’re 40 and you have two kids and you’re happily married, or whatever. However that manifests itself in today’s world. If you haven’t decided by the time you’re 40 that exactly what you want to do in life and really built on it, and built something that now, let’s say you want to be a convenience store owner, and you’ve got four convenience stores and a good staff by the time you’re 40, let me tell you something. You’ve made it. Because if this stuff doesn’t happen to you by the time you’re 40, and this is for boys and men only, it becomes exponentially more difficult to do it in your 40’s because of where your head is. Because this insane entrepreneurial fiery lust to make money and start companies and stuff, you typically don’t develop that after 40. And now there’s all kinds of examples, Colonel Sanders, and the guy that started the 99 cents store. All kinds of examples proving me wrong. But those are not the norm. They’re the offshoot, right end of the bell curve situation.
Steven Butala: In your 40’s is when you institutionalize your empire. You take those four convenience stores, and you turn them into 24 maybe, and then you start putting them into regions, and honing in on which products work and on and on and on and on, putting good computers and hire yourself somebody or multiple teams of people that are smarter and younger than you to figure out things that you don’t want to work on. In my case, I just can’t stand working on IT. So I have all of that outsourced, almost all of it. I’ve done it myself. No one wants to be around me when we talk about IT, trust me.
Steven Butala: In your 50’s, now your kids are getting a little bit older and hopefully you’re still married to the same person. If you’re not, that’s okay. Stuff happens. You move on. In your 50’s, you want to take this thing to the moon, or maybe even start to diversify. If you’ve got a convenience store, little mini-empire, maybe already you’re selling some of your own products in there. You’ve been to China a couple of times to figure out which ones work in your store best, or who can reduce your costs, and on and on and on. And by the time you’re 55, you really want to have accomplished your financial goals when it comes to how am I going to sell this thing and when. Are my kids going to take it over? Or don’t they care? They usually don’t care. From personal experience, they just don’t care, for some reason. Or am I going to run this thing until I’m 80. No. Don’t do that. You just want to have a plan. And then, implement that plan, and then enjoy yourself.
Steven Butala: In your 60’s it should all be about managing some type of portfolio from a coffee table. And so I can take this further and further. In your 70’s and 80’s is a lot more of just your 60’s, or maybe let’s say you find some crazy, I know a lot of guys for some reason who I know have really settled into like buying a few houses and cleaning them up, maybe renting them out, getting to know the tenants, have coffee with them and stuff, and just kind of building another separate balance sheet that way, because it’s fun.
Steven Butala: In our case, we’re certainly not in our 60’s at all, but in our case, we went through all of that, a version of that, and chose to start Land Academy, and now House Academy. And it’s taken on a life of it’s own, as our way to give back. So none of this stuff my father ever told me. Not one of these sentences in this whole spiel that I just gave and chances are your father either. I mean, I don’t know. Your father was a lot more-
Jill DeWit: I’m not a guy. So I got different speeches.
Steven Butala: This isn’t just for guys.
Jill DeWit: Yeah I know, but girls get different speeches or no speech too.
Steven Butala: So you know, I’m not plugging anything here. What I’m really saying is, have a plan. And plan for the fact within the plan that stuff’s going to change. What you do not want to do, what you do not want to do, is materially move these things around. Like what happens when you’re young, especially with men, you got a checklist. Every guy that I’ve ever talked to has sort of a plan in their head or a checklist. Even if it’s like, I want to be the assistant manager and then I want to be the manager of wherever I work. To do that, it’s never going to happen if you have, if you, well okay, here’s my list. I want to be the assistant manager, then the manager. I’d like to eventually get married. And I’d love to have one kid. And it’d be great if a Ferrari happened during that time. Some list like that. It’s just as simple as that.
Steven Butala: And then you sit there and you look at that list on a piece of paper, and you say, well the easiest thing on this list is for me to get married. In fact it’s easier for me than being an assistant manager. Chet got married yesterday. Well the second easiest thing now is to have a baby. She wants to have a baby anyway. Check. And now you can say goodbye to the Ferrari, and the manager situation, and all of it. So it’s not your fault. It’s just that you didn’t have a plan or nobody like me told you this stuff. It’s the stuff your father never told you. I wonder how many people clicked their radio off?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know.
Steven Butala: Like all of our stuff, several people, there’s people who turn it off forever and there’s some people who just email me saying, that’s the greatest stuff I ever heard, so seriously, what are you-
Jill DeWit: I love it. I have nothing to say. I’m just sitting here listening, absorbing. And I know this stuff. This is stuff we talk about all the time.
Steven Butala: Right.
Jill DeWit: I know that. So but it’s important to say and you’re right. Stuff that didn’t get said and I wish it had.
Steven Butala: There’s got to be a female version of this. I hope there is, is there?
Jill DeWit: There is, but I don’t have twenty minutes to go into it. I don’t want the show to be that long.
Steven Butala: Jill, you’re a saint.
Jill DeWit: Thank you. I know.
Steven Butala: Well, you’ve done it again. You spent another 20 minutes or so, listening to the Land Academy show, even though it had nothing to do with land. Join us next time for an episode called, the division of responsibilities in a partnership and why it’s so good.
Jill DeWit: And we answer your questions, plus on our online community LandInvestors.com it is free.
Steven Butala: You are not alone in your real estate ambition. I guess I had some stuff to say, like in my soul.
Jill DeWit: I didn’t even really need to really be here for this one. Wherever you’re listening or whatever you’re watching, please subscribe and rate us there. We are Steve and Jill.
Steven Butala: We are Steve and Jill. Information-
Jill DeWit: And inspiration-
Steven Butala: To buy undervalued property.
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