Living a Wealthy Life

I have started outsourcing my life, and it is only costing me $1.33/hour to do so.

I am very into real estate investing. My goal is to invest in positive cashflow real estate in a variety of towns around Australia. However, do you know how many towns their are in Australia???? There are thousands of rural towns in Australia.

So how do you know which ones to invest in and which ones to avoid. Firstly you look at population. I avoid towns with less than 8,000 people in them. But how do I know which towns are big and which towns are small? Do you know the population size of Blaxland, NSW of the top of your head? I sure don’t.

You can easily find the population of these towns but it takes A LOT of time consuming research. My solution was to outsource.

I have been re-reading the 4 hour work week and I have been loving it. Tim Ferris is becoming less of a douchebag and more of a genius the more I read his book and watch him online. I have so far gotten a few major things out of the book, one of which is the importance of outsourcing.

I found a website www.oDesk.com where you can post your jobs and people bid on the hourly rate they will accept for that job, or you can post a task and they will bid on the price for accomplishing that task. For me I create a simply job, my title was “Simple Web Research and Data Entry – Maximum Pay $1.20/hour”. Within 20 minutes I had about 15 applications, with the cheapest being $1/hour and the most expensive being $1.33/hour. I hired someone within the hour (from the Philippines) and gave him the details of my incredibly long and boring research project. I gave him a 72 hour deadline and told him to stop after 8 hours of work so we can reassess.

So far he has been able to complete 238 town profiles in 8 hours. Not as much as I expected, but still fairly decent. If I was to pay someone in Australia the base rate of $20/hour then for my 8 hours of Philippino work (which cost me $10.64) I could hire an Australian for half an hour. I don’t know about you, but completing 238 suburb profiles in half an hour for anyone would be impossible.

All in all it is looking like it will cost me around $100 to complete the suburb profiles of EVERY town in Australia. Now that is something I could easily do myself, but it would likely take me a week to a month to complete. For the small cost of $100 I can regain a week to a month of my life and I can spend that time doing more productive work tasks (like finding and sourcing real estate deals) or I can spend that time with my wife (and soon my daughter).

The only downfall of outsourcing that I have experienced so far is the language barrier. Simple instructions are not so easy for people to understand when they don’t speak your language. It took a few back and forth emails in order to get my man on track, which took about 30 minutes of my time. Also posting the job and assessing applicants took a chunk of my time also (another 30 minutes). So for small jobs like buying movie tickets, it might take you 15 minutes of back and forth emails to accomplish something you could have done yourself in 5 minutes.

But for bigger jobs it is AWESOME! Spend an hour of my life simply sending emails and not having to think about it, in order to get a HUGE task achieved for around $100. By spending 1 hour and $100 I have saved so much time and I don’t hate my life (which would have been the case if I did this research project by myself).

Better yet, once this is completed I can then take all this research and create a product to sell to other people like me who want to know the populations of towns and the price points of property and rental returns. If I am smart I can get my $100 back (and more) by then selling the research onto someone else. Once this is completed I might even pay to have someone research property price points at the bottom end of the market and enter that data for me. I am also thinking about outsourcing my personal book keeping (ie. Checking statements and then punching numbers into an excel spreadsheet)

But this excel sheet will be great because I can instantly sort it in population size and I can then immediately eliminate hundreds of towns because of their population size. This gives me the tools I need to do further research and to find deals that I might be able to purchase.

All in all outsourcing is awesome and I would recommend it to anyone who has a long menial task they need to get done.

I am glad that everytime I come to the emergency ward it’s not me that needs emergency help. I do always want to be a person who people can call in the middle of the night and I will come to your aid. It is always great to have people you can count on, so if I can ever be that person for someone else I try to be.

Below is my mate Nath, who scratches his eye will a floor tile, and my uber pregnant wifey.

Today I am getting back into internet marketing. In the last few weeks I have completely stopped internet marketing to focus on property. There is so much more money to be made easier in property than internet marketing and I can see now how property can provide me with financial freedom a lot quicker than internet marketing ever could.

Although I do have a problem. Property doesn’t take up a lot of my time. Doing property deals is an elongated process and takes minutes of your time spread throughout each day and each week. But then you have the dilemma of what you do with the time in between. I could do nothing, but that isn’t exactly me, I always love to have my head full of something.

So after much consideration I have decided to start getting back into internet marketing. Property will still be my focus, and will be my focus until I am financially free, but I realise that internet marketing will be good for me also. Firstly it will generate income which will increase my borrowing power, secondly it will give me something to do, but most importantly it will give me an outlet for which to teach.

I have come a long way in the last 6 months when it comes to understanding wealth and actually being in a position where I am moving forward into wealth. I am currently still in negotiations on my first property deal and I am looking to do my second deal within the next month.

It will be very different teaching wealth from a place of wealth (or really moving towards) than just from a student’s perspective. In the past I have always been the student of wealth, someone who knows a lot but not someone that had a lot of money. In fact I worked just enough to scrape by so that I could spend my time studying wealth. This meant I had great knowledge but no money.

I do believe that knowledge brings with it finance. The size of your bank account will increase to fit in with the size of you as a person. If you are rich on the inside, you will naturally gather and grow money to reflect who you are on the inside. If you are poor on the inside, even if you win lotto, your money will naturally shrink to fit who you are. So I am so glad that I focused on increasing my capacity instead of working harder for money.

I haven’t really planned out exactly what I am going to do when it comes to internet marketing. This blog exists as my own outlet for my life, so it won’t be part of my investment plan. I am not trying to make money from this blog. Although I have a few other things in mind.

I have grown a large subscriber base over the last few years (about 1,500 subscribers) but making money from my subscribers has always seem to elude me. So to combat this I plan to create my own course to market to my subscribers. It will be a course to teach people about the financial basics that I have been learning for the last 6 months. The financial basics that have allowed me to purchase my first property and start generating passive income.

I also want to continue to market and grow my list. I have around 1,500 subscribers. Ultimately I want to have 60,000+ subscribers and to get them I will be writing articles and submitting them to article directories.

I also want to eventually create a “How to make money with Aweber” course. I free course that I would market and get people to sign up for. The course would be free and I would only make money through affiliate sales of the Aweber service.

Basically I am trying to keep my brain occupied and have a little bit of fun in between doing each property deal.

Doing what I do (which even I don’t really know what I do) your situation changes all the time. One minute you are investing one way, the next minute it changes and then a day later it changes again.

Usually this happens because of a set back, because of a way that I planned to invest fell through. This has happened to me multiple times and it happened again just the other day.

Something I noticed today was that my recovery rate, and the speed at which I can formulate a new strategy, has quickened. Instead of being set back a week to find a new strategy it now takes me about a day. Instead of having emotional breakdowns I simply feel a bit flat for a few hours.

This shows me that I am growing. My brain is getting quicker and smarter and more creative. It makes me less scared and more excited. Every time I fail I find a better way of doing things and that makes me more and more confident that I will achieve my goal.

Financial freedom in 5 years is starting to sound too easy for me…well not easy but too passive. I am an agressive investor, I want to achieve the maximum the best way I know how. So now I am hoping to cut 5 years down to 2.5 years, giving me 2 years remaining for financial freedom.

I have learned this week the full extent that there is no such thing as job security. I have heard about it, read about it but now I am experiencing it.

My chemist, where I work part time, is cutting shifts…mine included. I lost 6 hours work, as far as I am aware, and that doesn’t sound like much but it is a fair chunk when you only work 14 hours a week.

When people’s shifts get cut the owner benefits. It makes me want to be an owner, not a worker.

You know that saying that says “we are the author of our own destinies”? I want to be someone that lives that creed. I see why so many people search for job security though, it is stressful not knowing how you are going to pay next weeks rent…but I think being the author of our own destiny is more important than job security.

Will I get a new job to pay the rent…yes probably…but am I settling for less than what I want? No.

I have a plan set out, and that is in motion, to achieve financial freedom in the next 2 years. Yes, it sped up. Originally my plan was 5 years, but some changes have happened and opportunities are there for it to be done in 2 years instead of 5.

I admire the entrepreneurs of the world, because they authored their own destiny. I want to do the same.

I had a meeting with a mortgage broker yesterday to apply for a loan for a property I KNOW we can afford and I KNOW that the banks will give us approval for. I was excited to meet Bob the Broker because he sounded really nice on the phone. Our appointment was at 2:30pm but by 2:45 there was no sign of him and he hadn’t even called to say he was running late. So I called him, and he only just remembered who I was. He even said to me “I almost forgot about you completely”.

Turns out he wasn’t coming to the meeting and he pretty much blew me off. Through this experience I have come to realise that I don’t fit the bill when it comes to mortgage brokers. I believe a mortgage broker’s target customer is someone with a large wage and a large deposit who simply wants to buy their family home. Not a 21 year old on a part time sales assistant wage wanting to find any possible way that what I want to do can be done.

I originally went with a mortgage broker because I had heard so many advantages of using them. You pay them nothing, they do all the work and find the best loan for you…that is if you fit the bill. Now don’t hear me wrong, I am not hating on mortgage brokers. My days of hating on people are over (thanks Casey), but I am just saying you have to be a certain type of person to use a mortgage broker (well from my experience you do). I am sure there are mortgage brokers who are different but it is hard to find someone who will bend over backwards to find you a loan because they believe in your future potential and the money you can make them if they do develop a good relationship with you.

So after a few bad experiences with mortgage brokers I have discovered that I don’t fit their bill, so I am looking for loans myself. I am going to approach banks and lenders myself and try to find someone who will trust in me and my deal enough to offer me financing. I think mortgage brokers would be awesome, as long as they think like you. The problem is it is hard enough finding one person who thinks like me, let alone one person who is a mortgage broker who thinks like me.

It is interesting to watch my wife’s face when I get turned down again and again and again. I imagine it to look like a parent who doesn’t know if their child is going to throw a tantram or just calm down. She doesn’t know if I am emotionally shattered, or if I am ok. Generally it is a bit of both. I am starting to develop a thick skin to people telling me no. I still get my hopes up and hope for the best (when sometimes maybe I shouldn’t) but when I am let down generally I can deal with it quite well, I just keep moving forward.

It is an interesting journey trying to work out how to succeed when you don’t quite fit the bill. Most of what I want to achieve is different from the way everyone else does it. But that is what makes my life so exciting. I love that I have to fight to succeed, I love that I have to push every boundary of what people believe because I know I can achieve what I want. It makes life hard, but it makes life exciting and ultimately no one wants a boring life.

I have just started reading one of my Rich Dad Advisor books “How To Create A Winning Business Plan” and it an extremely challenging book.

I know that I want to be financially free in 5 years. I also know that I want to achieve this through investing in positive cashflow property. I even know my first few property deals and the return I can expect on them but I really don’t know much beyond that.

I don’t have a complete business plan to map out how I am going to get from where I am now to where I want to be in 5 years.

I think the main reason I lack a business plan is because I lack experience. Part of my ‘plan’ is to continue to learn better ways to invest in property. So I don’t know now the things I will know in 3 years time, so how can I write that down in my business plan?

Thinking about a business plan has been great because it has helped me define

My Exit Strategy - For each property deal I need to have an exit strategy before I purchase it. I hadn’t really thought about my exit strategy before, so it is helpful to start thinking about that now

How To Pay Back Capital – People investing their capital with me will obviously want to know what return on their investment they are going to get. But just as importantly they want to know when they are going to get their capital back. So I have really had to put my head down and work that out. Can I achieve that through rental income, or do I need to wait until the property goes up and refinance. How am I going to get their capital back

Worst Case Scenario – I have already gone through a few of these, but when investing by yourself you REALLY have to know the worst case scenario and whether or not you can afford it.

Scaling – Scaling is simply repeating what you did on a bigger scale. Instead of doing just one property do two, or do a unit block. In order to scale you need to have skill and capital behind you. My business plan is making me think about how I can scale my property investing effectively

So there you have it. Today what I did to move towards wealth was think about my business plan for property and I started to work out in even more detail exactly what I hope to achieve and how I plan to achieve it.

I have so many people that I just want to prove wrong. People that say

• “The only way to get rich is to get a job”
• “I need a payrise”
• “I can’t afford to invest”
• “Investing is risky”
• “You can’t become financially free by the time you are 26″
• “You can’t invest without any money that is too risky”
• “Why would anyone want to invest with you”
• “I can’t afford to have kids”
• “You need to put your head down and get a job”
• “What are you doing with your life”

There are so many people that just make me ANGRY with the things that they say. Because I know deep down in my heart that what they are saying is full of crap and completely untrue.

But today I realised that I won’t be able to prove people wrong.

Take a look at Steve McKnight. He is the Aussie guy that wrote 0-130 properties in 3.5 years. He kicked ass and proved to everyone that it can be done, but still he doesn’t have the glory of saying “In your face bitches”. He has critics smearing his name and his method all the time, saying he is a fraud and his method doesn’t work EVEN though he proved them all wrong.

I have realised that people do in fact live in different realities. As Christians we like to believe that everything is black and white, that there is right and wrong, possible and impossible. But more and more I am starting to see that many things are relative.

Like people who say “I need a job because I have bills to pay and I have to pay my mortgage”. That statement is true for them because they believe it. Because they believe it their mind won’t stretch to find other money making opportunities. It is real because they believe it is.

So even when I prove people wrong they will never understand because they live in a different reality to me. I can get rich without a job, but they will still believe deep down that you need a job to make money and they will fail to see there is another way EVEN WHEN IT IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEIR FACE.

It is a little annoying because most of the people that fight me live in a different reality to me, so I won’t be able to say “I told you so.”

But knowing this is releasing. If you are doing something just to rub it in someone’s face then you probably shouldn’t be doing it. So it has allowed me to drop that whole aspect and just go after it for me and my family and the people that support me in what I am doing, but aren’t able to do it themselves yet. So it is good to finally get that bad motive out of my system.

Today was an awesome day for my mind. You know when you have those moments and it is like instantly your mind expands and you can see the possibilities? Well today was one of those days for me.

Today I was thinking about a property deal I am looking at doing and also thinking about my next deal and how I can best move towards my goal of becoming financially free in just 5 years (I have about 4 and a half left). Then God started challenging my mind and he was saying “Come on Ryan think bigger, stop thinking about little deals, start thinking about ways you can make a LOT more money from each deal”. So I did. I started thinking about buying blocks of units (There is a block of 10 units I want to buy that could net $150/week in the first year and even over $800+ per week in the future). I started thinking about buying a block of ten units, or buying land and building a block of ten units. Then it just hit me!

I realised that I am just one property deal away from being completely financially free. Just one freaking deal. Not 100 deals, not 50 deals, not even 10 deals just one deal away from financial freedom.

I am looking at a property at the moment that will net me about $20/week (or $1,000) in the first year, and in the 7th year it will net me about $80/week (or $4,000/year). Now that is not nearly enough money to live off. $1,000 doesn’t even pay one month’s rent for us. So this one deal won’t make me financially free.

But if you could purchase an apartment complex with 100 apartments and you could earn $20/week per apartment that is a huge $2,000/week or around $100,000 per year. In just one deal you went from having little or no passive income, to becoming financially free. BOOM!

The most awesome thing about this as well is that you don’t need any money to do it. I have been reading some of the Rich Dad’s advisor series books (thanks to my mums who hooked me up for Chrissy) and 2 of them are on real estate investing from a guy called Ken McElroy, and he is a dooze dude. He does exactly what I want to do. He goes out and buys apartment blocks that have 150+ units in each of them. He has a line of investors wanting to invest with him (because he is so good). His investors put down about $1 million and the bank will lend them something like $8 million to buy this property and Ken takes a 10% share in all positive cashflow and all capital gains. Because he is so good each deal can net him $20,000/month in passive income and he can increase the value of the property $2-5 million and pocket 10% of that increase.

I did a little online borrowing capacity calculator today and me and the missus can borrow about $140,000. Woh, step back…haha it is definately not a lot. But that is ok, because I don’t plan on relying on my borrowing power. One of the best things about apartments is that they don’t take your personal income into account, they only take the income of the property into account. So even if you work part time at a Chemist like me you can borrow $9 million if the property and your experience supports it.

So the other day when me and Timay went to the “mortgage broker” who told me the 100 reasons (that I already knew) why I couldn’t achieve what I wanted to achieve (one of the major reasons being my income) I knew that he was talking from a different reality to me. His method relies on borrowing power, my investment method doesn’t.

Granted, I don’t really have the experience needed to convince someone to joint venture with me in a multi-million dollar property deal, but soon I will. This property I want to do is the first step towards it. Anyone not wanting to invest with me now is possibly missing out on lucrative future deals (suckers). I have no doubt in my mind of how successful I will be.

“One Look, One Look, I’ll Show You One Look” – Derek Zoolander

I feel like Derek right now. “One Deal, One Deal, I’ll Show You One Deal”. One deal to financial freedom. How easy is that.

And that idea grew my brain by like 10 goodness levels today.

I work in a newsagency part time and part of my job (well most of my job) is selling lotto tickets. Last night was an OzLotto $30 Million Jackpot and I had loads of people buying tickets hoping to win it big.

It is one of my life goals to become a billionaire. I plan on doing this through investing in multi-family unit complexes. Both purchasing them and creating them. Now when your goal is to become a billionaire it really puts $30 Million into perspective.

I have always said that I don’t want to win the lotto. Whenever I pray to God the thing I ask for is wisdom, not money. Proverbs 16:16 says “How much better to get wisdom than gold, to choose understanding rather than silver” or in my translation “How much better is it to get wisdom instead of inheriting easy wealth, to choose understanding over tonights winning lotto numbers”.

I am struggling to invest because I don’t have the capital I need to buy a property. I could get a job to raise the capital, but who ever became a billionaire by simply getting a job…if you can name one person I would really like to know. Instead I am trying to raise capital by convincing other people to invest with me. If I can’t convince someone to invest $7,000 with me on a low risk positive cashflow property, how can I be expected to raise the millions in capital I will need to my apartment complexes in the future?

If I won $30 million it would stop me learning what I need to earn in order to become a billionaire. I might be rich, but I want to choose wisdom and understand over easy wealth. Then, if I lose all my money I can get it back even quicker.

Plus I want the story of going from nothing to making it big time…and I don’t plan on doing it the easy way.