Your Freedom Goal

Hey. What’s up, freedom fighters? Welcome back for another episode. Today, I want to talk about to you about freedom and your freedom number. Now, I’m recording this while on a two-week trip to Ireland, Scotland, and England. I’m actually in Scotland as we speak right now. I was actually hoping to record this outside. It’s really beautiful out there, but it’s a little windy. But today, I want to talk to you about your freedom numbers and what that means for you.
Welcome to “Real Estate Investing Secrets.” We’re all looking for freedom and the opportunity to live better, more fulfilling lives. But most of us were trained our entire lives to work for someone else to chase their dreams. How can we use real estate investing as a vehicle to achieve financial freedom? My life is dedicated to answering your real estate investing questions and helping you build an investing business that allows you to change your life and the world around you, and to enable you to turn your dreams of financial freedom into a reality.
My name is Mike Hambright from flipnerd.com, and your questions get answered here on the “Real Estate Investing Secrets” show.
Okay, guys. So today, we’re going to talk about freedom. Now, I told you that I’m in Scotland right now. I have never recorded . . . I haven’t really, until recently, recorded very many shows outside of my office. If you haven’t noticed, we’re coming up on 500 episodes here quickly and everything has been very kind of sterile, like, in the lab, if you will, but which is really just my desk. And so I aimed to kind of . . . I do a lot of travel. I go to a lot of events. I host a lot of events and I aspire to start bringing more and more shows to you from kind of in the field or out and about, which is perfect for me to share some of my thoughts with you because truthfully, that’s where I live. This is my life and I’m out doing things that I enjoy, and just want to kind of share those with you as well.
So right now, I’m in Scotland. I’m talking a little bit quietly. So, I apologize for that. I’m actually inside of a bed and breakfast that we’re staying at on the Isle of Skye, which, if you map it, Isle of Skye in Scotland is, like, literally, the middle of nowhere. I mean, the GPS shut off like 45 minutes outside and we’re just kind of driving blind to try to find this place.
But, you know, one of the things that I do, if you’ve been following me, for all you know, I travel a lot and it’s one of the things that is important to us, to go out and experience things. Part of that came from growing up and doing almost no travel. We had a beach trip that we went to see my grandparents once in a while when I was growing up. But other than that, we very rarely left my kind of small hometown and didn’t really get to experience a lot of the world. I want my son to experience those things. And he’s actually not with us on this trip. But I want my son to experience lots of things. He’s done way more at 11 years old than I did all the way up until 20 or after college, for sure. By the time he was five or six, he was . . . by the time he was probably three, he was better traveled than I was up until after college for me.
But what I want to talk to you about today is your freedom number, your freedom goals, okay? What’s the recipe for your freedom? So, let’s talk about that.
I think one of the things that happens while I’m here sharing this with you, and if you’re just getting started in real estate investing, I feel that what happens a lot is people have some big goal. Like, they’re unhappy where they’re at. Maybe they’re in a job they don’t make nearly enough money and they’re unhappy there. And they have this goal that’s so lofty, which is awesome. You should set big goals. But when they realize they can’t get to that extreme goal, they quit. They stop.
Now, truthfully, a lot of people, most people that try to get started in real estate investing, I’m going to use the word fail. What I’m really trying to say here is they quit. And they often quit before they even get started. And a lot of times, it’s because lack of confidence that you could hit some lofty goal. That’s good to have, by the way, but if it discourages you and forces you to want to stop before you even get started, then that is not good, right?
So one of the things that we do in our coaching program is we teach people about goals. What are you trying to accomplish? And one of the mistakes that a lot of people make upfront is they set that goal too big. They’re too ambitious. And while a lot of people will tell you it’s okay to be ambitious and you should have these kind of big, hairy, audacious goals, these BHAG goals that are way out there. Nothing wrong with that, but don’t let it discourage you.
So, your goals really need to be steppingstones, right? So, your first goal is really to do your first deal, right? And your next goal, somewhere along the line there, should be replacing your income because once you’ve replaced your income . . . once you’ve done your first deal, honestly, your confidence shoots to the roof. You haven’t done your first deal yet. And if you haven’t replaced your income yet, but you’re getting close, like, stay on path. Because what happens is after you achieve . . . after you’ve offset your income, if you’re still at your job or even if you’ve left your job, once you’ve replaced your income from what you had before, you have this massive amount of confidence that it’s not about survival mode anymore.
So I’m on this awesome trip. We’re gone for two weeks. In fact, we’re gone from home for almost five weeks and that is because I have this two-week trip with my wife to Ireland, Scotland, and London. And in the next show, one of the next shows, I’m going to record one in London as well and share some thoughts with you there, is that . . . those weren’t my goals. When I first started, when I left Corporate America or was forced out of Corporate America basically, my goals were not to be able to go travel the world. My goals were to survive. I needed to feed my family. I needed to replace my income or replace our incomes because my wife had left to have my son who was working with me in the business. So that was our first goal, was to get up to the point to where we don’t have to worry about paying the bills anymore, right?
So this game is often like a stairstep approach. You’re going to have to hustle hard. I hate a lot of the kind of badge of honor that a lot of real estate investors have or the industry has about kind of the Gary Vee approach, like, working your face off. But the truth is, is until you get up over the first goal or two, until you replace your income, you need to work your face off or you need to do whatever it takes.
Let me kind of preface that by saying “If you want it bad enough,” right? A lot of people in this business that I’ve seen failed because they don’t want it bad enough. They’re not willing to do the work. So they’re dreaming. They went to a weekend seminar. They maybe even paid for some training, right? And they think that that is what’s going to be the fuel to get them to their goal.
Well, the truth is, is that’s just the education. That’s just the knowledge. It’s a little bit of the blueprint to help you get there, but you can’t get there without hard work. And then, folks might come home and plop down, tired after a long day of working for somebody else, by the way, and click the TV on, or start searching . . . surfing social media and spend all this time on there. Until you get your business off the ground, you might have two jobs, right? And it’s not ideal, but neither is not fulfilling your dreams.
So, I want you, whatever freedom is for you, I want you get out a piece of paper, maybe have a journal or somewhere where you write your notes at, your thoughts, your goals, and think of your dreams and your goals, and kind of your freedom path as a stairstep approach. The first step is to do your first deal, right? And maybe there’s a couple of other steps after that. But a step not far from there is to replace your income, which is to consistently do deals. And then from there, you can dream as big as you want. But get there first.
Now, what happens is, and I couldn’t . . . there’s some wisdom here that’s coming out that I didn’t have early on. So, I hope that you can learn from my path and my journey, is that I didn’t have the knowledge that I have now. I didn’t . . . when I defined my goals back then, we actually did a very good job defining our goals early on, which is what helped us get here, which is why I want that for you. We have the foresight to know how important that was to learn, like, “Okay, I need to do a house. I need to consistently do two houses a month.” And then, to back into an execution plan to get there because a goal without kind of a plan for execution is pretty much worthless, right?
But I didn’t have the wisdom back then to know that I could get to here, where I’m traveling and doing lots of things, and able to spend a lot of time helping other people. I was just in survival mode and that’s fine. If you don’t get past that for now, that’s fine. Get there and then worry about it. Like, that would be a good problem to have, right? But just define those first couple freedom goals, freedom numbers for you, and then chart the path there.
So, we’re not going to talk about it in this episode. Maybe I’ll talk about it in the next one. But we’re going to talk about the path to hitting those goals, right? And you kind of know what they are already. Let me help you. You guys have heard me talk about this for years, is the way you operate this business, is you generate leads from motivated sellers and you don’t know early on — and different parts of the country are a little different — what your conversion rates are going to be but it’s not untypical to have to talk to about 30 motivated sellers to buy one deal, to get one deal under contract whether you assign it, wholesale it, rehab it, whatever you want to do.
Now, what that means is if your goal is to consistently buy one house a month, do one deal a month, then you need to consistently generate 30 leads from motivated sellers a month, right? So, I’m trying to help you chart this path to whatever freedom is for you to where you say, “I need to do my first deal,” which I would tell you to do that. You need to generate 30 motivated seller leads, right? And what happens over time, you get better at your craft of talking to sellers, helping solve their problems. And so, maybe your conversion goes to 1 in 20, right? But let’s just kind of say you’re going to be at 1 in 30 when you get started. If you don’t feel like you’re comfortable talking to people or you’re terrible at sales or negotiating, maybe it’s 1 in 40, right? Just let’s estimate based on who you are and what you feel is in your heart, feel what you’re capable of, make estimates appropriately based on that.
But then it’s, “I probably want to do a deal a month. I need to generate 30 motivated seller leads a month. I want to do two deals a month. I need to generate 60 motivated seller leads,” right? And there’s kind of a fine line there as to what is a motivated seller versus, you know, just people calling, maybe wanting to list their house or retail sellers. They’re different people, right?
But anyway, back to your freedom number. Whatever you want to accomplish in life, you can. You just have to start and get out of the gate. If you’re stuck in Corporate America right now or if you’ve been talking about getting into this game for a long time, then I would advocate to you that you have not laid out what your goals are and you have not charted a path there, an execution plan to focus on this every single day to get it done.
You deserve that, right? You deserve to . . . you don’t have to come explore the world, like, my wife and I love to do, our family loves to do. It could be that you want to spend more time with your family. You want to donate more to your church, money or time. It could be that you want to sponsor a little league team in your hometown. It could be that you just need the money to help your aging parents or family members. They could be anything. Your goals don’t have to be driving fancy cars or living in awesome houses, or taking great vacations. It could be something totally different or it could be all of the above, right? But it all starts with getting you down the path of what your goals are. You have to define those goals. So, go ahead and if you would, define those goals.
And the next episode that I’ll record, so it’ll probably come out in the next week or two, is going to be a little more direction to help you chart a path to get there. We do this in our coaching program. It’s at flipnerd.com/coaching if you’re interested in learning more, talking to us about how we might be able to help you achieve your goals. But until then, keep on fighting for freedom and I’ll see you on the next episode.
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