Jack Thursday – Work Life Money Balance (LA 1602)
Jack Thursday – Work Life Money Balance (LA 1602)
Transcript:
Steven J Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill K DeWit:
Hi.
Steven J Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill K DeWit:
And I’m Jill DeWit, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.
Steven J Butala:
Today’s Jack Thursday, and I’m going to talk about work, life and money balance.
Jill K DeWit:
That is so celebrate your life of you.
Steven J Butala:
Is it?
Jill K DeWit:
Yes. I noticed you have one of my [Deepak 00:00:27] books on your bookshelf.
Steven J Butala:
I’m sure that was collected from you.
Jill K DeWit:
That makes me happy. Yes, it is. And if you look inside, it might be signed because I think it was Metahuman. That’s right.
Steven J Butala:
Actually, that’s a recent one.
Jill K DeWit:
I went to the, yeah, I went to the … It was in Manhattan Beach. I went to the, no, it was [inaudible 00:00:47]. I don’t remember what it was, but a bunch of us went to hear him speak at a high school campus. And it was, yeah, it was [inaudible 00:00:55]. It was really cool. And I got the book there and got to see him. It was neat.
Steven J Butala:
Did you meet him?
Jill K DeWit:
Well not, I mean, didn’t like shake his hand, but I mean, I guess.
Steven J Butala:
I’m a big Deepak fan. I think a lot of that, well, over the years it changes genes. Sometimes it’s new age. Sometimes it’s self-help. But I think he’s the real deal.
Jill K DeWit:
Oh, yeah. He’s awesome.
Steven J Butala:
I think there’s three or four people in that space that are really worth listening to and write well and are very smart.
Jill K DeWit:
He’s awesome. Someday I’m going to go to one of his retreats. I’ve been thinking about it. So, yeah.
Steven J 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. And don’t forget to subscribe on the Land Academy YouTube channel and comment on the shows that you like.
Jill K DeWit:
Ty wrote, “Does anyone use the last sold dollar amount or praised dollar amount versus offer when scrubbing, when available, of course.” I just did an analysis on my last mailer and found some as crazy as 3%. These, of course, were anomalies, but I found that more than 20% of my offers were below the 10% range of offer to last sold. Sending an offer for $20,000 on a property that lasts over $500,000, no matter how long ago, minus 2009, seems a bit ridiculous and something I should just scrub or adjust. Thoughts?”
Steven J Butala:
This is a very, very intelligent question. Here’s what happens. You download it, you do everything that you’re supposed to do according to the education and you download a dataset and you’re staring at this dataset, you manipulate it and you’re getting ready to price. You go away far over to the right of the data set and you see how much this person on this one line item paid for the property and when they paid. So if they bought a property for $30,000 in 1995, and you go back over to the left where your pricing column and you price everything out, and they paid $30,000, plus all this appreciation of how many years, and you’re actually offering them $8,000, you start to question yourself. This is a very, very intelligent question.
Jill K DeWit:
This is true.
Steven J Butala:
Does it matter? Should you look at that? Should you do a mailer based on what people have, not just casting a wide net, but based on and offer that person a little bit more than what they paid and just see. Absolutely not. I’ve done this and I’ve tried it. We had a person in our most recent career path that built a company based on individually pricing very expensive properties. And at the end of career path, he messaged me and said, “I realize now we’ve been doing this wrong.”
Steven J Butala:
You can’t, you can try this, but what you’re doing by using this methodology is removing the possibility of hitting a home run. We were obsessed with pricing in this group, probably too much. If you ask Jill, we’re too obsessed with pricing. What you’re trying to do is find a person, not a property. You’re trying to find a person that’s in the right circumstance in their life where they just don’t care. They just want the old car out of their garage, come and get it. And there is a material consistent percentage of people that own land and they’re just done with it.
Jill K DeWit:
Sometimes we’re those people.
Steven J Butala:
We’ve done that, personally.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. Like I have a property right now that, you know what, because here’s what happened. Let me paint this picture, because it’s a perfect example. I got a guy a couple years ago, well, a year or so ago, in deal funding. I funded the deal. It was brand new. I trusted him. I didn’t look at it. He overpaid. Flat out overpaid. He knows he overpaid for the property. And so we can’t sell and make a profit.
Jill K DeWit:
So it’s been in my, and he’s like, he threw me the keys, like, “Sorry, Jill. I kind of goofed.” I’m like, “Yeah, you kind of did.” So it’s mine, because I paid for it kind of thing. He’s like, “I’m out. I tried to sell it. Can’t do it. I’m out.” So anyway, it’s sitting there and I just got an offer and I guess somebody else has sent me a written offer. I’m like, you know what? It’s close enough that I’m like, “I’ll take it. I don’t really care.” So I sent it to my team, like “See if this person’s for real. And if they’re willing to net me out that money, I’ll take the hit and they can have it.”
Steven J Butala:
Nice.
Jill K DeWit:
So, that’s the point. So, that happens. You think that everywhere on the planet property automatically appreciates. It doesn’t sometimes. Sometimes it doesn’t appreciate. Things just don’t pan out like they thought they were going to. The Amazon building that everybody was counting on coming in didn’t do it or whatever was going to happen, that bill didn’t pass. So this stuff didn’t get built. This didn’t happen. The hospital’s not there. Whatever it is. And then like I said, sometimes too, we change. I’m like, eh. You know?
Steven J Butala:
What’s this, the technical term, what I call this, is cost plus pricing. Never do that. Never, ever do that. And I have a case study of someone who spent hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars in our last group who realized after how we taught all the career path, that it’s not the right way to do it.
Jill K DeWit:
You can get lost in this, spending hours trying to come up with a little something that you’re thinking everybody’s missing. And now you’ve wasted how much of your time. Just get it out there.
Steven J Butala:
Just get a bunch of offers out there at 20% or 30%, ballpark.
Jill K DeWit:
Doesn’t matter how you got there.
Steven J Butala:
Yeah. Price it correctly, 20%, 30% of what the retail pricing is. Using our methodology, you’re going to do a bunch of deals.
Jill K DeWit:
Well, things go up and down, when you really look at them. I don’t know you’ve ever studied those. You go to Zillow or any of the realtor or Redfin, they’ll show you and you scroll down into the pricing on the property, like for a house and they’ll show you, here it was up and here at one down. So you can really, I’m not, we’re not making it. It doesn’t always just go up. Things change.
Steven J Butala:
Especially if you’re not in California.
Jill K DeWit:
Hello. Look at Seattle right now. Our kids are experiencing wonderful reduced rent in phenomenal areas because everybody left. Rents are down. So, things change. Just because that’s what it was doesn’t mean it’s …
Steven J Butala:
People choose to buy or sell real estate, the vast majority of the time, the vast, vast majority of the time, because of a life change. They don’t do it to make money like we do. We do it. Buy and sell real estate all day long to make money.
Jill K DeWit:
Right.
Steven J Butala:
That’s not what regular people do.
Jill K DeWit:
It’s true.
Steven J Butala:
And I say, we, I mean the whole community, the Land Academy type community.
Steven J Butala:
Today is Jack Thursday and I’m going to talk about work, life, money, balance. This is why you’re listening.
Jill K DeWit:
Okay. I’m going to get comfortable here because I love this topic and I can’t wait to hear your take on this whole thing.
Steven J Butala:
Up until very recently, if not up until today, I’ve actually failed at this. And so here’s my thoughts on this.
Jill K DeWit:
Up until today.
Steven J Butala:
Every time you see this on the title of a book or a title of some article or blog, it’s work life balance. Well, for me, it’s never been work-life balance. It’s been work, life, money balance. When I was younger, I got the greatest job at the time that I could ever get. I bought and sold long-term care facilities on a full commission basis, nationally, as a commercial real estate agent. And I sold several properties to a group that was planning on going public. I didn’t know that at the time, in Arizona. So they flew me out from Detroit. I met with the CEO. He was actually the former CEO of the healthcare system in Arizona. And he spun off the assets from that healthcare system that nobody wants … Hospital entities, healthcare systems, don’t want care facilities. They hate them. I don’t know why. They’re very profitable. They just don’t like them. I don’t think that they think they’re cool. They think hospitals are cool and nursing homes suck. I don’t know why. I don’t think they suck. They’re very profitable or they can be.
Steven J Butala:
I sold this group some buildings. They flew me out here. I got the job as a VP of Acquisitions. I got paid a great amount of money, a salary plus a pretty serious backend fee for everything I bought. I was completely and entirely single at the time. I had absolutely no debt and my rent was $315 for a brand new apartment that just was built like two blocks from my office. My work life balance was amazing. I worked eight to 10 hours a day, probably six days a week, finding facilities that we could buy. We’re chock-full full of money, all over the country, and I was doing something at a very young age that I knew exactly how to do using tact and everything. Everybody that was older than me and the entire company was mesmerized at how I could send out faxes and offers and they would come back and we would buy facilities without brokers or anything like that.
Steven J Butala:
I really added some value to the company and I had a blast. I mean, when the Flintstones whistle blew, I went and had a blast with a lot of people that I worked with, made a lot of lifelong friends that I still have now. Work-life balance was beautiful and the money was coming in. I was spending a lot because I was an idiot kid like everybody does, but I was still separating it and doing things basically right.
Steven J Butala:
Then things change. And this is what throws your work, life, money balance to the wind. It throws it off. And it happens pretty quickly. You get in a relationship, in an interpersonal relationship, whatever you want to call that.
Jill K DeWit:
It wasn’t me. I just want to say.
Steven J Butala:
It was decades before Jill.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. It wasn’t me.
Steven J Butala:
And then, so now you’ve got to deal with somebody else’s opinion or whatever else. Then stuff changes at work. It always does. Those beginning two years of that company were amazing, but now we’re a publicly traded company. We successfully went public on the NASDAQ. So we had to do all this other additional reporting for stuff that we were doing anyway, and nobody cared.
Steven J Butala:
So my work life balance got thrown off the track. I was working a lot more. I was less effective. My hands were half tied about how I was performing at work for a lot of different reasons.
Jill K DeWit:
How you’re performing at home.
Steven J Butala:
Yeah. And then I had this thing, the chirp in the back of my head about what’s going on and why I’m never there. And so you got to, when these things happen, you got really step back in. You have to take back control over what’s happening. And it’s a lot harder to undo these things than it is to do them.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s true.
Steven J Butala:
Then you throw in the last part of this. I’ve only been talking about work life. Then you have to start throwing in money because when people part ways, there’s compensation in some cases that has to happen. And so you need to plan, none of which anyone plans for, or you get a call, you get laid off. I actually got laid off at the end of this, at the end of that deal. And it worked out to be the best thing that ever happened.
Steven J Butala:
My point is, you just got to be aware of it. You have to really manage because if you let this stuff happen to you without managing it, you’re going to get driven into the ground, driven to your knees and kept there. So when you need to undo work, you got to undo it. When you need to undo some stuff in your life or redo some stuff in your life, you got to do it.
Steven J Butala:
But here’s the thing. And here’s what you have the most control over. Money. Stock it away. In those earlier days, the heyday when it was a blast, I would take about $1,000, maybe $1,200 of after tax W2 money, and I would put it into an account and pay my stuff, pay my bills, rent and everything else. It was a very small amount of money and I would put all the other money away and nobody knew about it.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s smart. That’s good.
Steven J Butala:
And I’ve been doing that and so when Jill and I met, we were both coming off of all kinds of life experience about work, life, money.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s putting it lightly. That’s good.
Steven J Butala:
And so, to this day, here’s the truth time. To this day, Jill and I do not have a personal bank account together.
Jill K DeWit:
Correct.
Steven J Butala:
She manages her own money. She goes and does whatever she wants. We never talk about it. And I do the same thing. And if we spend more than $500 out of a money account, a business account that we own together, we check with each other and that’s been going on for a really long time and it’s worked out great. I hope you think it’s worked out great.
Jill K DeWit:
Long time. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Totally.
Steven J Butala:
So you have to really micromanage this stuff. Recently, the last three, since we started Land Academy and since 2015, we both work too much. Jill’s going to talk about that tomorrow. She has a way of dealing with it and it’s kind of humorous. So I think our money balance is perfect. I love our money balance. Do you?
Jill K DeWit:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Steven J Butala:
Our life balance is pretty good. We just work way too much and we’re working on stuff that doesn’t make us any money.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. We’re getting there. We’ll help you.
Steven J Butala:
So my point is not to complain or this is not a rant. It’s just please manage, take a look at this, put it as an item in your calendar once a week. If you’re younger, once a week.
Jill K DeWit:
That’s a great idea.
Steven J Butala:
And if you’re considering taking a relationship to the next step, ask yourself, what’s going to happen with your work, life, money balance?
Jill K DeWit:
It’s true. You know what’s so funny. We have Microsoft, all the Microsoft products and there’s a thing on there. I can’t remember what it’s called. But I get, a couple of times a week, I get little updates on my phone telling me how much time I spent in meetings.
Steven J Butala:
Yeah, I get that too.
Jill K DeWit:
Isn’t that great? And how much free time I had.
Steven J Butala:
With teams.
Jill K DeWit:
And how many and who I communicate with the most, how much my email time is. And I actually look at it.
Steven J Butala:
I do too, Jill. We haven’t talked about this.
Jill K DeWit:
I do. And I look at it. That is funny. And I look at it, I go, Ooh, this is bad. Sometimes I’m like, oh, no wonder I’m worn out. It even tells me you had 80% of your week as meetings and crap. And I’m like, it should say and crap. But I’m like, it’s that funny.
Steven J Butala:
Hey, I’m up for it. Bill Gates said, I don’t know where he said, when you’re in your 20s, you should never take a vacation. And I completely agree with that. All those, in your 20s, you’re building everything for the rest of your life. And you have the most energy. In my 20s, there were multiple times, many, many times where I just didn’t go to sleep. I would go out to have a blast and just go to work. Splash some water on my face.
Jill K DeWit:
I may or may not have done that. I could do, I remember it being that age, I could do an all-nighter easy and go to work at the whole next day. But then if I tried to do it a second day, that was whoa.
Steven J Butala:
Yeah. You can’t do that.
Jill K DeWit:
I tried that.
Steven J Butala:
Yeah.
Jill K DeWit:
That was a disaster.
Steven J Butala:
I had an office building where I intentionally put an apartment above it and I’d just stay there.
Jill K DeWit:
I think I may have seen that place.
Steven J Butala:
Yes. You have.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven J Butala:
Inside and out.
Jill K DeWit:
Yikes. Happy you can join us today. Five days a week, you can find this here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven J Butala:
Tomorrow is Jill Friday and the title is what she does in her office all day. What the hell is she doing in there?
Jill K DeWit:
I know. This is good.
Steven J Butala:
You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill K DeWit:
Yeah. This came about because the other day you’re like, you were getting mad at me. You’re like, “What are you doing? You’re working too hard.” And I’m like, “You actually think I’m working in there all day? Let me tell you what really goes on.” And I’m like, “You know what? I’m actually not going to tell you. I’m going to share it for everybody.”
Steven J Butala:
Yeah. It became a show. That’s one of Jill’s ways to shut me down. Save it for the show.
Jill K DeWit:
Exactly. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find our content valuable and we do appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please check out our YouTube channel and hit the subscribe button.
Steven J Butala:
We are Steve and Jill.
Steven J Butala:
Information …
Jill K DeWit:
And inspiration …
Steven J Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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