Transcript:
Welcome to the Tax Sale Podcast, where tax sale investing is made easy.
I’m Casey Denman, a tax sale veteran, the author of the tax sale playbook, founder of the tax sale academy, the leading tax sale expert and trainer and your host right here on the tax sale podcast.
Thanks for joining me on today’s podcast. This podcast is provided completely free to help teach you about tax sale investing and is made possible through The Tax Sale Academy. If you’re looking to learn about tax defaulted real estate, in a comprehensive, step by step basis then head to TaxSaleAacdemy.com and click on join. Again, taxsaleacademy.com and click join.
Today is December 30th; it’s the end of the year and we’ll soon embark on another year. In fact, it’s the end of a decade and we’ll be embarking on another decade in mere hours. It’s a time to sit back and really think about your future. It’s the time of the year to really start making plans.
Whether you listen to this podcast on the day it comes out or in the future sometime, perhaps even the middle of the year following its’ release, it’s important to understand that you can make plans for your future at anytime. We often use the end of the calendar year as an excuse for new starts or new goals, but you can and should frequently plan for your future.
When it comes to tax sale investing, there are a variety of plans that you can and should make. I’m a firm believer that you must be very aware of your business, how you’re currently operating it and how you’ll proceed into the future. The problem that many investors and business owners get stuck in is the mundane, day to day tasks that keep them chugging along at the same pace. This approach never allows you to pickup speed, which we can also refer to as increasing revenue or profit. You must consciously look at your business and ask yourself where and how you can improve it.
Let’s look at a brief version of the process I use to plan for my tax sale business. This process is very simple and can be applied to virtually all aspects of life, although we’re be approaching it from the tax sale investor’s standpoint, of course.
The first step is to ask yourself Where Am I? A plan for the future can’t be properly established without first determining where you currently are. If I want to get on the PGA tour as a professional golfer but I’ve never golfed before, then I suddenly have a much clearer picture about the future. It’s time to have an honest conversation with yourself.
Look back over the last week, month and year. Look at your screw-ups, see what happened, how did you mess up so badly? And I’m not just talking about lost money, but maybe the margin wasn’t quite as good you thought it’d be or whatever. What are the weaknesses that always see to linger? What always seems to get in the way? What are the common issues?
Positive thinking is great, but it’s time to call a spade a spade. With this step there is no purpose whatsoever to express artificial confidence. This is not the time to fake it to make it. If you’ve made lousy investments in the last year, it’s time to face that head on and admit it to yourself.
It’s time for reflection. If you’re just starting out, be honest with yourself. Do you REALLY understand everything that’s going on in this business? Are you confident enough that in the event of life and death you would make the correct decision? Would you invest single dime that your grandma has left into a property? Sure, those are pretty extreme questions. I get it. But what I want to illustrate is that NOW is the time to be brutally honest with yourself. Every year I ask myself these same questions . . . how did I screw up? How could I have been better? And the answers usually don’t make me jump for joy. It’s not fun reflecting and being hard on yourself.
Now, on that same note what did you do right? What was the major successes you had this year? Maybe it was a financial success with a property, maybe you stepped outside your comfort zone and bid on a property, or attended your first auction, maybe you completed the tax sale academy, maybe your sole success in this business is that you just discovered it. Give yourself real, honest credit now and take note of what you did correctly.
When you have the good and bad from the last 12 months established you should have a much better idea of where you truly are. Maybe you’ve started, but it’s become apparent you need more knowledge, more training, more effort, more time, more capital, whatever. Maybe you just nailed it last year and you made more money than you ever thought possible. Whatever the situation, paint yourself a very clear and vivid picture of where you truly are, right now, in this moment and time.
So that’s step one, determine where you are.
Step two . . . where do you want to go? Specifically where you do want to go in the short term. And when I say short term, I’m talking 6 or 12 months. Many people are so short sighted they want business success in days or weeks. But be real here, be honest. The success you desire will likely take years. So as you trend towards that success you desire, what does the ideal next six months or a year even look like? Take a realistic, but optimistic picture of the six and month month periods.
If you’re just getting started, your focus should be on obtaining the necessary knowledge and preparing yourself correctly. So in this regard, your goal should be to learn everything you can about tax sale investing, traing yourself, research, go to auctions, find a mentor and then be ready to pull the trigger when the right opportunity hits.
If you’ve already started but aren’t seeing the success you desire, your goal will perhaps be to get more of the good investments you’ve already made or at least locate good investments between now and 6 months. And if you’re doing well, say you’re coming off your best year ever, your goal should be to figure out a way to really scale this, ramp it up and grow it exponentially.
So, step one, determine where you are, step two, determine where you want to go short term, and now step three . . .
Determine how you’ll get there. So, we have the starting points and ending points established. Step there is to determine how to connect those dots. How will you go from where you are to where you want to be. This is the part of the process where you must detail every step that you should take in as much detail as possible. It’s important to determine the precise steps to get there. We’ll discuss this more momentarily, but it’s time to give yourself a plan that you can easily follow. Notice I said easily follow – while it likely won’t be easy to execute, it should be easy to follow. As humans, we are creatures of habit and when we think we should be doing something that doesn’t fit within our typical habits we come to resist it. So, develop the new habit of following your plan every single day.
The best way to develop this plan is to make a bullet point list of 8-10 things that you should do to get you from where you are to where you want to go. Then break those down to another 5-6 sub bullet points that you can implement over time. When you have this make sure they’re in proper chronological order, of course, but when you have this you have now detailed the path to take you where you want to go.
Ideally, you’d break it down into 26 different steps for a 6 month plan and then another 26 for the second 6 months of your plan – one step each week of course. If you want to take it a step farther, go right ahead – you can break it down to the hour for all I care. This act will allow you to plan out your schedule to get you in the right direction. Sure, things come up and you might hae to modify your plan on the fly and that’s ok – but the important part here is to have a plan that is easily followed.
For example, if you’re just starting out – maybe you set aside one hour each day to learn for the firs month through something like the tax sale academy. Then the next month you start exploring different areas and locating tax sale list lists. Then you start researching those lists and reviewing previous auction results. Then you go to some auctions. Then you get ready to take advantage of the next opportunity. Then you buy your first property when the times rights.
Whatever your specific plan is, now that we have that plan schedule it. Take those bullet points and mark then on a schedule. I do it the old school way – I’ll google calendar, print 12 months out, then handwrite in what I need to do every single week from that bullet point list. I want to so obvious what I’m supposed to do that I can’t screw it up or can’t get busy and overlook it. I want zero friction when it comes to knowing what I should be doing. We use this same principle in our 30 day challenge in the academy – once you sign up for the challenge we tell you every single day what you should be doing. The results in my life and in teh academy area tremendous.
Yes, this will take time. But, remember, the goal is that you simply look at your calendar today and figure out what exactly you should be doing.
So, there you have it. That’s how you develop your tax sale plan. Start with where you are right now – a real, true, honest assessment. Then figure out where you want to go – a realistic, but optimistic goal for 6 and 12 months. From there, create a written, easy to follow plan to connect the points.
Thanks so much for joining me on today’s episode. Inside The Tax Sale Academy we go creative funding methods, we discuss how to make your money go as far as possible, we teach you so you don’t waste money or time. Our entire academy is designed around help you profit from this incredible business. If you’re interested in signing up, you can get started by going to TaxSaleAcademy.com and clicking on Join. Again, that’s TaxSaleAcademy.com and click on join.
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Have a wonderful day. Take care, bye bye.