Jack Thursday – Breaking My Own Rules Equals Personal Growth (LA 1651)
Jack Thursday – Breaking My Own Rules Equals Personal Growth (LA 1651)
Transcript:
Steven Jack Butala:
Steve and Jill here.
Jill DeWit:
Good day.
Steven Jack Butala:
Welcome to the Land Academy Show, entertaining land investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit:
And I’m Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from the Valley of the Sun.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today is Jack Thursday, and I’m going to talk about how I break my own rules constantly, but it actually equals personal growth.
Jill DeWit:
It’s okay when you do it. It’s not okay when I break your rules.
Steven Jack Butala:
You know how when you’re watching, yeah. If anybody’s going to break my rules, it’s me.
Jill DeWit:
That’s right. That’s the only one.
Steven Jack Butala:
The same thing happens if I try to break your rules.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Number three and I know that. Don’t do that to dad.
Steven Jack Butala:
You know how you, absolutely. You fast forward through whatever you’re watching on Netflix, or Amazon, or Hulu, no matter how short it is-
Jill DeWit:
Like people do to this show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. I wonder if they listen to it at times four.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
Then they can detect when we say land.
Jill DeWit:
And then tune in.
Steven Jack Butala:
Like, not yet.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
This is all being fast-forwarded through.
Jill DeWit:
Exactly.
Steven Jack Butala:
Here’s the trigger, if you’re fast forwarding. Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by [crosstalk 00:01:09].
Jill DeWit:
Oh, that’s a trigger? Oh, got it. Slow down now. Oh, my gosh. All right.
Steven Jack Butala:
I had somebody email me two years ago and they said, “Look, I know what you’re trying to do here, and the only real value to any of this is the question that you answer. So, can you please edit all that down, and the whole show can just be-”
Jill DeWit:
The question.
Steven Jack Butala:
“100 questions in a row, and save me a lot of time?” And I said, “Sure, absolutely. I’m happy to do that. I’ll let you know on Thursday.”
Jill DeWit:
That was not visible on iTunes, so we could still keep our rating.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s free. And don’t forget to subscribe on the Land Academy YouTube channel, and comment on the shows you like. People say, people want stuff free. Did you ever notice since the internet kicked in, because we’re old enough to know a time before the internet-
Jill DeWit:
Uh-oh.
Steven Jack Butala:
Where nobody expected stuff for free?
Jill DeWit:
True.
Steven Jack Butala:
Everybody expects everything to just be free.
Jill DeWit:
I know. You’re not wrong. Charlie wrote, “Does my bookkeeper need knowledge of the land business to be a good fit for us? I’m just looking for something that’s cost effective for my relatively small number of transactions. I talked to Anderson Business Advisors, but I don’t think my one to two properties per month warrants $170 minimum per month in bookkeeping. Maybe I’m wrong.” Such a great question.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s a great question, Charlie.
Jill DeWit:
Especially, end of year here.
Steven Jack Butala:
Actually, you’re 100% right on everything you said. I actually have some experience in this. Here’s what you want to do. And this is a whole module in Land Academy 3.0, which is coming out in January, about your business, setting up your business correctly. I realized that we never really-
Jill DeWit:
Talked about it.
Steven Jack Butala:
In the formal education.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
This is what I want you to do. I want you to make sure you have another bank account that’s separate, and I want you to put some money in there from your personal bank account. Let’s say $30,000, $40,000, or whatever number you’re comfortable with. And all the revenue and expenses that you incur in your business, I don’t care if it’s building a website, or getting a phone number, or all the other things that are necessary to send a mailer out, need to come out of there. And then when you have some revenue, when you sell some property, it goes back in there. So, what you’re doing is separating your entire, your personal life from your business life. If you do that and you have access to both accounts on the internet, you do not need a bookkeeper at all. So, bookkeeping really scrambles certain people.
Jill DeWit:
Bookkeeping and accounting, or bookkeeping being versus your tax accountant, are different.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
Can be different.
Steven Jack Butala:
Bookkeeping-
Jill DeWit:
Is different.
Steven Jack Butala:
And your tax person-
Jill DeWit:
Can be the same-
Steven Jack Butala:
Bookkeeping is a completely different talent, and most people [crosstalk 00:03:54].
Jill DeWit:
But you don’t need that. Yeah. Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
And so, but so to answer your question, no, that’s how you bookkeep. And honestly, that’s how we do it. Even at our level, and I’m talking tens of millions of dollars a year, it’s all in, it’s set up in separate bank accounts, the revenue and the expense.
Jill DeWit:
Well, you know what too?
Steven Jack Butala:
We don’t have a bookkeeper, is my point.
Jill DeWit:
Charlie, back in the day, let me tell you, Charlie. I do not have an accounting degree. I am not a bookkeeper, but I can do math. So, back in the day, all of our terms properties and things that we had going, I did it. I was keeping track of it. We never had a formal bookkeeper. I would keep track of the payments coming in, and I just queued up for you.
Steven Jack Butala:
Right.
Jill DeWit:
For the real time, the end of the year, the accounting for taxes, I just had to have it presentable.
Steven Jack Butala:
Right. So, that brings us to taxes. So, now we’ve taken care of bookkeeping for 99.9% of us. Even the people in Career Path, that’s how they do it. And those people, some of them are making more than we are. And the new people in Career Path are learning from them, so this is good. Your tax person, and I said this in Discord, nine out of 10 tax people will not understand your business and make mistakes. And so, you really, and a lot of people said the same thing, including our moderators.
Steven Jack Butala:
You’re going to have to go, you have to really talk to somebody who understands buying and selling real estate, not a tax person for a real estate agent.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, gosh.
Steven Jack Butala:
That’s completely different.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s closer to manufacturing, than anything, so it has to be specialized. And no, I don’t think you should go to Anderson. Anderson’s huge. Arthur Anderson was a massive, it still is a massive company. So, it’s too big for that. You need a local person. Please go into Discord again and say, “I’m in the fill-in-the-blank area, and I need a good tax accountant.” This gets me thinking, because Jill and I have been talking about this for years, to get a couple of accountants that understand this, and make them the Land Academy accountants. Because the accountant we have does an amazing job for us.
Jill DeWit:
And he won’t do it. He’s tapped out. He’s like, “No, I’m good.”
Steven Jack Butala:
He’s got little kids. And I said, “Hey, do you want to be, how’d you like 300 or 400 more customers that do the exact same thing with me?” And his answer was, “No. My kids are little. I have enough clients.”
Jill DeWit:
Yep.
Steven Jack Butala:
“I want to spend time with them.”
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
How do you say, what do you say to that?
Jill DeWit:
I get it.
Steven Jack Butala:
You just say, “Yep.”
Jill DeWit:
I get it.
Steven Jack Butala:
“Congratulations. I wish I was you.” Wish I could be satisfied with my own level of revenue.
Jill DeWit:
Oh, my gosh.
Steven Jack Butala:
She shakes her head.
Jill DeWit:
I love it.
Steven Jack Butala:
Today’s Jack Thursday, breaking my own rules equals personal growth. This is why you’re listening. Well, I’ll start with the very first, start with the question, how I answered one of, the question just a few seconds ago. There was a point in our career, Jill and I, when we restarted together, because the business really changed in 2010 because of the recession, the real estate-driven recession, where we both looked at each other and said, “You know what? How about,” because we had a paid-for house, and all our utilities are real low, and our general expenses are very, very, very low, about as low as they’re probably ever going to get. If we could just make-
Jill DeWit:
Oh, yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
She and I, this is a conversation we had. If we could just make $5,000 more a month.
Jill DeWit:
We’d be rich.
Steven Jack Butala:
I mean $5,000 above what our fixed costs are, which are two or three grand at that time, that’s, we’re good.
Jill DeWit:
Yep. We can take all the trips we want to take, do everything we want to do.
Steven Jack Butala:
So, that was our business model.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
Well it’s not that-
Jill DeWit:
But then we called it, remember cash over land, [inaudible 00:07:31] we call it $10,000 a month for life.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
We said, let’s make it, we’ll make it 10, because that’s easily attainable. And people love 10.
Steven Jack Butala:
And we were very easily making 10 then.
Jill DeWit:
It’s like, yeah, because then you’re making six figures a year, but he was like, “Ooh, this is great.” And then, go ahead, dear.
Steven Jack Butala:
And so, I never, Jill knows this. I don’t, this is confession. It just keeps going up. My target just keeps moving up. It’s beyond a million dollars a month now, which is so ridiculous, it’s silly. I hope you’re watching this on YouTube, Jill’s reactions. And so, look, all this stuff constantly changes. I’m constantly eating my words and changing my rules. Is that personal growth or is that mental illness? I think it’s personal growth. What do you think it is? You’re just as guilty about some of this stuff.
Jill DeWit:
So, here’s the thing.
Steven Jack Butala:
How many Cartier watches do you need, by the way?
Jill DeWit:
You asked me a long time ago when I was the happiest, which I’m still happy. I’m just, my thing was a couple years ago, the level we were at, I was like, “This is it. I’m done.”
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah, me too.
Jill DeWit:
“This is it.” And it’s half of where we are. And then, oh, so everything to me is gravy. That’s how I see it. So, am I driven to do more? Yeah, I am, because that’s in our nature. That’s nature. That’s not nurture.
Steven Jack Butala:
This whole week is full of rule breaking.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
There was, not too long ago, I said, “Never, ever use a real estate agent. Only do this.”
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
And now we found out that when you find a really good real estate agent-
Jill DeWit:
You can do more.
Steven Jack Butala:
When you find a really good woman, the sky’s the limit. You can do some amazing stuff.
Jill DeWit:
Yes. Especially with the women over an agent. Exactly.
Steven Jack Butala:
So, that’s a rule that I broke.
Jill DeWit:
I’m trying to think other ways that you have-
Steven Jack Butala:
I’ll give, I have a few.
Jill DeWit:
Okay.
Steven Jack Butala:
I built a business, not so much with Jill, but the one before it, buying property, access-less property. And I had a whole bank of customers in Arizona, who, for whatever reason, really wanted cheap, huge acreage property that had no access. They didn’t want it to have access. There’s a lot of reasons why you wouldn’t want access to a property and you don’t want to be found. They all centered around that. And so, we couldn’t keep it on the shelf. Every single property I purchased, they would buy. And I got to, after about 20 of these deals with a certain group of people, I found out they would just pretty much pay anything. They saw that as a massive premium, as a great attribute, and they found ways to get to it. They would tell me, they’d take pictures and stuff and show me. One group was, you know how they have these Jeeps that climb rocks?
Jill DeWit:
The geo, oh, the Moab.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah.
Jill DeWit:
The Moab people. Yeah.
Steven Jack Butala:
So, it was just this massive challenge. They weren’t suffering from funds, so I’d buy a 40 acre property that had no access at all for $4,000 or $5,000, and sell it to them for $20,000, and they couldn’t write the check fast enough.
Jill DeWit:
They love it. Take all their friends out there, do bonfires. Who knows what else?
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Who knows what?
Jill DeWit:
Exactly.
Steven Jack Butala:
And that’s the whole point. They’re never going to be found.
Jill DeWit:
So, don’t be afraid. If you have this one takeaway from today and from us, don’t be afraid to eat your own words.
Steven Jack Butala:
It’s going to change.
Jill DeWit:
It’s going to change.
Steven Jack Butala:
If it doesn’t change, then you are going to, it’s going to die. It’ll die on the vine.
Jill DeWit:
Every time you say, “Not my kid,” it will be your kid. Every time you say, “I’m not going to do that. I will never do that,” yeah, you might.
Steven Jack Butala:
We started Land Academy without any data. It was data that we use, and rapidly found out that people need data, and they want access to data. They don’t to get it themselves.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
Or they’re not interested in getting, it’s too much work.
Jill DeWit:
Right.
Steven Jack Butala:
So, we provided that. It was Real Quest. Well, Real Quest is completely obsolete now. We only use Data Tree and that’s all being covered in Land Academy 3.0. So, that, I’m eating my words on that.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. There’s lots of things.
Steven Jack Butala:
Never buy a property with any structure on it. Well, probably 30% of the properties that we buy now have mobile homes on them, or cabins, or sheds, or something.
Jill DeWit:
I only want rural vacant land. I don’t want anything commercial or-
Steven Jack Butala:
Industrial.
Jill DeWit:
Yeah. Think there’s lots of things that we’re doing different. It’s okay. We’re here to be your support.
Steven Jack Butala:
Change is good.
Jill DeWit:
It’s like a meeting.
Steven Jack Butala:
Yeah. Support group.
Jill DeWit:
Yes.
Steven Jack Butala:
An I’m uncomfortable with change support group.
Jill DeWit:
There we are. That’s us. Happy you could join us today. Five days a week, you can find us here on the Land Academy Show.
Steven Jack Butala:
Tomorrow is Jill Friday, and she’s going to talk about identifying with, versus emulating rich people. You are not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit:
I was wondering how you were going to title that topic, based on the chat we had in our morning bathroom meeting.
Steven Jack Butala:
Do you want to hang around-
Jill DeWit:
Sitting on a bench.
Steven Jack Butala:
Do you want to hang around with somebody who’s rich, or do you want to be rich? That’s what the show should be called.
Jill DeWit:
So, identifying with, versus emulating. I love it. Thank you for tuning in. We hope you find our content valuable and we really do appreciate your support. If you haven’t already, please check out our YouTube channel and hit the subscribe button.
Jill DeWit:
We’re Steven and Jill.
Steven Jack Butala:
We’re Steven and Jill. Information.
Jill DeWit:
And inspiration.
Steven Jack Butala:
To buy undervalued property.
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