A beginner’s struggle Recently I was asked about the main struggles that Ashley and I faced when we began our investing journey. These struggles really boiled down to two things. The first was where to get money for deals. You see, Ashley and I were broke kids with a mountain of student loan debt and no verifiable income when we started out. This meant that we weren’t good…
FOCUS like a lion Ashley and I just got back from a mastermind meeting in Dallas, Texas. It was made up of real estate investors from all over the U.S. who are seeking to build better businesses by developing their systems and processes. Ya’ll, it was phenomenal! Each investor gaves a 15-minute presentation where they told a little about themselves and their company. Next, they told the…
How we did our first deal When Ashley and I realized we needed to make our living as real estate investors, it was 2009. We were freshly married, just out of college and didn’t have two nickels to rub together. To put it bluntly, we were completely broke. On top of not being able to find jobs that fit with our bachelor’s degrees, we had a mound of…
I’ve been blessed to have a great friend — but an even better mentor — by the name of Bill Cook. He’s the man who taught me most of what I know when it comes to property management, creative deal structuring and running a real estate investing business. And to this day, he challenges me to be better. You may be asking how Ashley and I earned the…
Oh B-1 can no beat. That title was supposed to sound like the Star Wars character Obi-Wan Kenobi. Yeah I know it’s a stretch, but bear with me. The reason I chose that title is because B-1 is the lot number of a Lonnie Deal we have down in Acworth. And I want to tell you about it because, to reference Star Wars again, “the force is strong…
Gary Keller, founder of Keller Williams Realty, wrote a fantastic book called “The One Thing.” In it, he challenges some modern ideas about multitasking, its effectiveness and its impact on the successfulness of your career. His basic conclusion is that multitasking is a farce. He sights a study performed on college students to determine their effectiveness while multitasking. What the researchers found was that the people who…
Today is a bittersweet day. We had a Lonnie Deal payoff for the very first time in over six years. It’s bitter because we just lost the $275 income stream this deal was paying us and now we have to go out and replace that money. It’s sweet because I just got a text from my good friend named Mike Hicks. Mike’s a smart investor up in the Rossville…
One of my greatest real estate mentors, Bill Cook, recently asked me to critique the bio he was putting on his new website. You see Bill is a very private guy. So when he asked me to help with writing something personal like that, you’d better believe I stopped what I was doing and gave it my full attention. As I was reading through Bill’s bio, it really…
I was talking to one of my best friends, Houston Long, recently about something that had been going on at his office. Not only is Houston a top notch investor, but he’s also a fantastic agent at Maximum One Realty. At his office, they had a new hire that was going full throttle. By that I mean they were showing houses from early in the morning to late into the…
The other day I was reading a forum discussing myths in real estate investing. One of the contributors said the phrase “it doesn’t take money to make money” is the biggest myth in real estate investing today. I disagreed with the contributor from the standpoint of personal experience; Ashley and I had no money when we started. We were broke kids, straight out of college, with a ton…