Personal Career Advice from Steven and Jill (LA 1437)

Transcript:

Steven Butala:
Steve and Jill here.

Jill DeWit:
Howdy.

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 awesome western southern Arizona, not western as in western southern, I mean kind of western cowyboyish around here.

Steven Butala:
Yeah. I think it’s central Arizona, don’t you?

Jill DeWit:
I don’t know. I would say southern, I don’t know. Because I can drive to the border in a couple of hours, so that’s why I feel like it’s southern. So I don’t know.

Steven Butala:
Today, Jill and I talk about your personal career advice from both Jill and I.

Jill DeWit:
Now I took this a little bit career and because I heard personal, so I put career and like a life advice. I came up with three-

Steven Butala:
That’s how I feel too.

Jill DeWit:
Okay, good. Because it always does tie together.

Steven Butala:
Professional career advice would be something like …

Jill DeWit:
Get a recruiter.

Steven Butala:
Don’t wear high tops.

Jill DeWit:
Don’t wear high tops?

Steven Butala:
Yeah, it’s work.

Jill DeWit:
Would you ever? Do you own? Have you ever owned?

Steven Butala:
Yeah, I’m sure I did.

Jill DeWit:
Really?

Steven Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
I never did.

Steven Butala:
Not like the ones that the kids wear now.

Jill DeWit:
Okay. The kids.

Steven Butala:
Not the $500 ones, I’ll tell you that.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Butala:
Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community, it’s free.

Jill DeWit:
And by the way, if you are a Land Academy member, check us out. You can reach us on Discord to.

Jill DeWit:
Kevin wrote, “Hello, land investors. My name is Kevin, I live in New Jersey, about 20 minutes outside of New York City. I currently own two single family homes and properties. Here it’s expensive, but can be found if you look hard enough. We purchased our investment property for $160,000, put $40,000 into rehab and did a cash out refinance at $200,000. Our tenants pay $2,100 a month, which gives us, excuse me, cashflow of about $250 a month and the house is valued at $350,000.”

Steven Butala:
That’s a good start.

Jill DeWit:
This is great, “Our personal property costs $260,000 and it’s valued at $325,000 currently, although we’re in the process of fixing it up to force value. Taxes in this area are killer, with it being over $6,000 on each of the properties.” I’m sure that’s a year.

Steven Butala:
New Jersey has the worst taxes, highest tax rate in the country.

Jill DeWit:
Worse than California?

Steven Butala:
Yeah, by far.

Jill DeWit:
Got it. Okay. “We want to continue to buy and hold properties, but it requires a good amount of cash on homes in this area. We’re not quite at the point of feeling comfortable investing in buy and hold properties out of state. After hearing about the podcast through a book and listening to Steve and Jill, I believe buying and selling land will give us a cash infusion we need to further our long-term goals.” This is great.

Steven Butala:
Boy, whoever you guys are, you’re smart.

Jill DeWit:
“Right now, my biggest question is to figure out where do we begin with my mailers. The U.S. Is a large place, lol.” That’s true.

Steven Butala:
All right. So you’re smart and you understand real estate. That’s the good news, Here’s the bad news. We’re going to have to undo a little bit of this. I hope you don’t deal with the real estate agents. I almost want to say Kevin, that you might want to take a look at a, we have another product that Jill and I never talk about called House Academy. If you go to house academy.com and take a look around there, it’s going to really sing to you. These properties that you can successfully clearly renovate, you need to be finding them cheaper. So imagine this $160,000 hot property, you bought it for 80,000 and put 40 in that cap rate at $2,100 a month is fantastic. So you’re on the right track, Jill and I are not rent people. Although we do have a bunch of properties that we do rent out successfully, that’s not our main focus, but-

Jill DeWit:
Kind of on accident.

Steven Butala:
Yeah, well they’re all, like most of them, all of them are former primary residences.

Jill DeWit:
It’s like [crosstalk 00:03:57] we move on or just don’t, like “I don’t want to sell it. Do you want to sell it? No.” And it can’t just sit there. So there we go. On accident, we’re landlords.

Steven Butala:
So you’re right on the right tracks. As far as buying and selling land, I was just going to say this before that, because the question is at the end of this whole thing, and it’s like, “How do we do this?” And so my big point here is don’t stop what you’re doing because it’s working, but it’s real hard to have positive cash flow on a property that you rehabbed and put all this love into and you spent $160,000 on and cashed out, and God knows how many hours you put in, to get $250 a month. That’s where Jill and I look at each other and say, “This is not right.”

Jill DeWit:
So here’s the thing. So you did a cash out refinance, so it’s valued at $350. So it sounds like, so you could sell it for, for $350 payback the $200 and have $150. Am I reading that right? And imagine what you could do with that now.

Steven Butala:
See? Jill’s automatically thinking about selling these properties.

Jill DeWit:
Yep.

Steven Butala:
She immediately gravitates toward that.

Jill DeWit:
I do.

Steven Butala:
And I could kiss you on the lips for that. That’s how it is here.

Jill DeWit:
I’ll take it out at $6,000 a year or two, by the way. Because nobody likes writing that check.

Steven Butala:
Jill we were made for each other.

Jill DeWit:
So I like that. And then you put that into something else, maybe like land.

Steven Butala:
Like land. So let me explain this. This is one of the first, because you’re … this is one of the first blogs that I wrote many, many years ago, it was called the 24 Month Millionaire, which people still talk about. And I don’t talk about it too much anymore because it’s very salesy, which I hate. You take $4,000, you buy property, you sell it for $8,000. You’ve got to make sure that the property’s great. You take that $8,000, wherever you got that $4,000 go put it back. Maybe it’s your savings account, maybe it’s your mother-in-law. You’ve got $4,000 of pure profit now and you do it again. Now you have eight and you double it to 16, 32 and it’s not going to take long. If you’re selling one property a month to get $2 million of equity. So think about that and not think about your $250 a month. That’s where Jill’s getting at because we lived that the other way. We live the, what are the numbers really without thinking that on the deal that you just closed?

Jill DeWit:
Bought for 20 sold for 80.

Steven Butala:
So if she did, and she does way more than this, but if you did one of those a month, $60,000, you would put in the bank profit $600,000, more than that $700,000. $720,000. So if you made $700,000 in 2021, would you put it into, would you take some of it and buy houses and clean them up and sell them? And learned an offer $2,000 to make $250 a month, or would you just say, “Maybe I should just stick to this land thing?”

Jill DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). That’s the whole point.

Steven Butala:
Today’s topic, Personal Career Advice from Steven and Jill. This is why you’re listening.

Jill DeWit:
We kind of just [gave 00:07:13] something.

Steven Butala:
That’s what I think. And we didn’t disagree, which is helpful for everyone.

Jill DeWit:
I wrote stuff down, do you want me to go first?

Steven Butala:
Sure, that would be great.

Jill DeWit:
Okay. So I took this thing, I wrote it down and I said, “Okay, personal career advice. And I changed the question to me which is, “What would I have done differently?” That’s what I did.

Steven Butala:
Oh. That’s a very interesting take on this.

Jill DeWit:
So I put number one, I would have used my W2 job, and I’m literally reading this down. I wrote this down, I’m not kidding. I would have used my W2 job as a paycheck to start my own fill in the blank. Maybe I didn’t know back then, but I would have worked out something and not make my W2 job a 17-year temporary job.

Jill DeWit:
I felt like I had a 17 year temp job. Isn’t that awful.

Steven Butala:
It’s like renting for 17 years, then you decide to buy.

Jill DeWit:
What the heck was I thinking? So how would I use that? It’s just a place to start, have a paycheck, pay the bills, like we talk with people that are young, I don’t care what is it you want to do, start something of your own. And I wish I would have done that instead of just hanging out and gone. “Oh, this is good.” No, it’s not. I live for vacations and live for a measly percent raise like, “Oh yay.” And then in this world, by the way, you’re maxed out. Like, “Oh, I met max pay.” And you brag about that. Who brags about max pay? That was not cool.

Steven Butala:
I’m going to buy you dimes later.

Jill DeWit:
Thank you. That was painful. Number two, I would have waited for family and kids until my ex whatever fill in the blank, I decided on my own was cash flowing. And what I’ve learned now too, is that your niche finds you, not necessarily you finding your niche, and so no matter what, if I would have just gone off and started something, I know it would have developed into something else and then something else and then something else and something else. But it would have learned how to start a business, hire, fire, build a team, all the things that I needed, websites, all of that good stuff.

Jill DeWit:
And then my number three career advice, this is very different. I would have bought more property back then. Like imagine I grew up in Orange County, in Southern California. Where would I be now? If I would have been dumping my money into silly little, in the ’80s and ’90s, into who knows what property or land or anything? Even though we just told what’s his face at this point, but imagine-

Steven Butala:
What’s his face?

Jill DeWit:
Sorry, Kevin. Sorry, Kevin. Even though we just told Kevin sell it and move on, but man, if I was young and knew nothing, but I knew enough to scrape together a couple whatever and buy my first house and rent it out to all my friends and then keep it like we do. It’s paid for now and then I keep, paid for is the key here, keep it and move on, where would I be now with all of that? What’s yours? Those are my three.

Steven Butala:
Here’s my question. Why do we continuously, generation after generation destroy ourselves and make these terrible decisions?

Jill DeWit:
I think because we’re taught that. I think it’s like, well at least for me growing up. I grew up where my parents had jobs, nobody was independent. Nobody had their own business. And that was because their parents did it and my grandpa worked for a refrigeration company in Michigan.

Steven Butala:
What is this obsession with getting married, buying a house and having kids? Usually in that order.

Jill DeWit:
Isn’t that silly?

Steven Butala:
What is this-

Jill DeWit:
You grow up thinking that’s what we’re supposed to do.

Steven Butala:
Worldwide as a species. Why do we do this? And then six months afterward or two years later when there’s diapers everywhere and the mortgage is 30 days late.

Jill DeWit:
You’re yelling at each other.

Steven Butala:
Because you got laid off. And I’m not the first person to say this. So I don’t understand what this obsession is. I don’t.

Jill DeWit:
I don’t know, years. Can you give me some tips? What do you think?

Steven Butala:
Yes.

Jill DeWit:
Okay.

Steven Butala:
And by the way, Jill and I are, are actively writing what we call “Crap Your Parents Never Told You”. It probably won’t be launched under that, I don’t know what it’s going to be. It’ll at least to be a book, probably a free one. But yeah. I mean I had a, this is truth. This is truth time. I had a six month marriage, that was a mistake. Didn’t cost anything and didn’t cost anybody anything, except I think her father paid for the wedding, but I don’t care about that. And there was no hard feelings, everybody shook hands and that was it. And then I spent a tremendous amount of time and energy becoming, rising through the ranks in public accounting on the consulting side and hated every second of it. But I knew it.

Steven Butala:
I knew that that was something I had to do. It was with a name brand company, KPMG. And I knew that if I got through that and could get a good recommendation letter from the guy that I was working with above me, I could get a job anywhere and I did. I went into investment banking and all kinds of stuff. If you care about me at all and you shouldn’t, you can check it all out on LinkedIn. So my advice is to not get married. This is male and female, exactly the same. Get as much education as you possibly can without incurring hundreds and hundreds of thousands dollars of debt. I don’t care what anyone tells you, you can go to college and put yourself through college. Even it’s buying, selling land. Our 17-year-old is buying and selling land right now.

Steven Butala:
And I’m not saying that’s the only way. I just think that if you get a good job at Home Depot and you don’t spend a ton of money, live in a house with five other people where you’re spending $200 or $300 a month total, you can put yourself through college or at least dramatically reduced. We’re sheep. Everybody just follows the [inaudible 00:13:16]. “Oh, you got to go get school loans.” No, you don’t. Don’t go get school loans. Figure it out. Maybe delay going to school for six or eight months, work two shifts a day, somewhere that you can get the highest dollar. You should put yourself aside, that’s my advice. You are not important. How comfortable you are or the type of chair that you sit in or the television that you have or the car that you drive or the makeup you wear or the shoes that you have is silly.

Jill DeWit:
When you’re young.

Steven Butala:
I think it’s always silly, but in general, I differ on this a little bit. I don’t think those are the rewards that you get in life. Those creature comfort, personal, that personal stuff, especially when you’re young. Forget about all of that. And it’s very, very hard to listen to somebody like me or watch somebody like Jill and I, when you’ve got television and the internet and all these idiots out there telling you that you need to have a Ferrari by the time you’re 28.

Jill DeWit:
That’s dumb. Hopefully you never have one.

Steven Butala:
Put all that stuff aside, get a great education, delay having a very serious relationship with somebody for as long as you can. If that happens, that’s okay. Hopefully there’s somebody like Jill, that is on the same mindset where … what is so funny?

Jill DeWit:
I think you’re awesome. But Uncle Steve said, no relationships. I try to imagine all that when I wake up.

Steven Butala:
Whatever you do, and I’m serious about this, do not have children. However, that ends up happening for you. And so you’re, I don’t know, at least 35. Jill might, I don’t know- [crosstalk 00:14:54].

Jill DeWit:
I’m okay, with that one.

Steven Butala:
Okay, good.

Jill DeWit:
I’m good with that one.

Steven Butala:
I was going to say 40, but Jill has issues with 40.

Jill DeWit:
No, no, no, yeah, that’s not safe. 30s are good.

Steven Butala:
And if let’s say, I don’t know, your career didn’t work out or you’re on your third career or whatever, then don’t do it at all. Don’t have, it’s very easy to probably 50, 60% of our friends, maybe more don’t have children and they’re happy as hell. And very affluent and active and vocal about it. So you have to do this stuff in order or It’s going to be a huge mess.

Jill DeWit:
Whatever’s right for you.

Steven Butala:
No, I disagree.

Jill DeWit:
I mean whether you want to have kids or don’t have kids. There’s no right or wrong way at that. Some people want kids.

Steven Butala:
I think that-

Jill DeWit:
You wanted kids.

Steven Butala:
Yeah, I did. I also had a bank balance in my mind that I followed a plan. Have a plan. Like you can’t succeed at Land Academy unless you have a calendar in front of you and you’re following a daily plan and you’re learning this on the first week and we have a 10-week course that we’re about to launch that keeps you right on track. So why would you go about your life not having that?

Jill DeWit:
Right.

Steven Butala:
That’s my point.

Jill DeWit:
I agree. That’s so, you’re right. So many people don’t do that, they just go with the flow. Well, I guess everybody else is going to college, I guess I should do that and I can’t afford it. So I’m going to take out the loans like everybody else does. Oh, I guess I should do this now and get that job and do this whatever, I like that.

Steven Butala:
A long time ago, I asked Jill this question and I’ll never forget her answer. I said, “What is it with, girls just want to get married so bad.” Like around early twenties, mid twenties. And this is her answer without hesitating, this was never crossed my mind. She said, “Well, all our friends on Facebook are getting married.”

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, that’s what’s going on.

Steven Butala:
That’s it?

Jill DeWit:
I think it’s peer pressure.

Steven Butala:
I’m like “What?”

Jill DeWit:
Yeah, there’s a lot of girls that are young and they’re like, “If I don’t get married, what’s it going to say about me?”

Steven Butala:
And it was Facebook back then. Now it’s like …

Jill DeWit:
It wasn’t my age, I didn’t have Facebook then, but-

Steven Butala:
Snapchat or whatever the kids use now. So I say Facebook and I know I’m dating myself, but-

Jill DeWit:
Okay. Just thank you for not saying, oh shoot. I can’t think of it right now but the one before Facebook, it doesn’t matter. It’s funny.

Steven Butala:
Here’s some other advice because I know we’re running over. Wherever the money is, go there. Recently I’ve had experiences with people who say, “This is the town that I’m living in.” And that’s it. When you’re young and you’re unattached, if it’s in Key Largo is where you’re going to make $150,000 salary, or if it’s in South Dakota fracking, then go do that. And while you’re making all that money, spend $300 living in some awful place with other idiot guys that you can’t stand. Because it’s not about you at that point, it’s about building blocks. And if you do all this stuff before you’re 30, you’re going to be done financially and you’re going to be happy, and on your way to living the rest of your life. I see so many people make all these terrible mistakes between the ages of 17 and like 28. I can go on and on.

Jill DeWit:
I know you can, do you want me to stop here or do you want to keep it going? I can’t decide. I just kind of took a back seat because this turned into like a little bit of a lecturer rant, I’m like, “Okay.”

Steven Butala:
But this whole 18 year, oh, is it bad?

Jill DeWit:
No, no, no, it’s not bad.

Steven Butala:
It’s this 18 year thing is just an awful job.

Jill DeWit:
What do you do? Oh, like a job thing?

Steven Butala:
Yeah.

Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Well, stuff happens. I’m sure you are not alone. I’m sure there’s people here listening that are going, “Yep, did that.”

Steven Butala:
You just got caught up at the tail end of that gender.

Jill DeWit:
Did that.

Steven Butala:
It’s a terrible gender bias.

Jill DeWit:
I know. You know what’s great though? Now we’re here saving people. We saved our kids. Our kids have come to us and said, “I don’t want to do this kind of career, that kind of career.” I said, “Great. That’s awesome.” Some of our kids want kids, someone could say, “I don’t want kids.” I said “Great, because I’m not in a rush to be a grandparent anyway. Don’t hurry up on my account. That’s fine with me.” Nothing’s wrong. And I know just when we were young, it was just not looked upon. And I’m sure for our parents, it was even worse. Our parents, you better. Like if you should be a stay at home mom because moms didn’t work and I remember my mom, it was kind of weird even then that she worked. But because my parents were always trying, they were trying new things and that was really good. So happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us right here on the Land Academy Show.

Steven Butala:
Tomorrow, the episode on the Land Academy Show is called, “Jill’s recent successful 11th hour land upsell. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.”

Jill DeWit:
That did go long. How funny is that? I didn’t realize what a [inaudible 00:19:39] when we were talking about that. But I think it’s really good, I know it was.

Steven Butala:
There’s three listeners left at the end.

Jill DeWit:
Well, there is that. If you’re interested in learning more about us or what we do check out landacademy.com and houseacademy.com. We provide the education, tools and support. You need to be flipping property like the pros.

Both:
We are Steve and Jill.

Steven Butala:
Information-

Jill DeWit:
… and inspiration …

Steven Butala:
… to buy undervalued property.

—————————————-

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