Another Great Month of Real Estate - January 2025
With a blink of an eye, the first month of 2025 is in the rearview mirror. January is the start of a 12-month race and I like to spend it focusing and planning, aka Planuary. With this post, I’m going to run through some of my 2025 goals and how I use January as a springboard to a productive year.
Goal Setting
To kick off Planuary, I virtually attended Brandon Turner’s 2-day Goal Setting Webinar. It was a great way to set aside time and actually write down my 2025 goals. In the webinar, we identified 3-4 goals for the year and broke those goals into quarterly milestones. Marcus gifted me with an Intention Journal to further help me break those goals into weekly steps.
My 2024 goals are:
Financial: Reach $100,000 in cash and stocks by Dec 31st. My ultimate goal is to be a real estate developer and this chunk of change will be the foundation for my first new construction apartment building.
Educational: Learn three new skills - options trading, land underwriting, sales, and home building (as you can see, I can’t count). Being a life long learner is important to me and these four skills help support my other goals.
Environment: Fall in love with three rooms in my house (my bedroom, my office, and my living room/dining room). Creating an environment that I love will make me happy and proud to invite friends over!
Physical: Compete in a rowing regatta. I spend a lot of time in the gym but I want to transition into more outdoor activities.
Recurring Tasks
My recurring tasks are previous goals that have become common place. They aren’t goals because I don’t have a well defined end state but these tasks set me up for success in other areas.
Attend two networking event per month. All I can say is that things happen when you leave the house!
Balance our books at the end of the month. This “simple” task makes year-end financials much much easier and more accurate.
Workout 5-6 days/week. I wake up at 6:15 and workout every weekday. It sets the tone for the day and no matter how bad the day goes, I can at least say to myself that I worked out.
10/10/10 Nightly Routine. This nightly routine is a gamechanger! 10/10/10 is 10 minutes cleaning, 10 minutes of hygiene (brushing my teeth, moisturizing my face, etc.) and 10 minutes stretching. It helps me wind down for bed, when I wake up the house is clean, and I no longer wake up tight.
Bookkeeping and Year End Compliance
The end of the year brings the beginning our tax preparation. In January, I focus on our investor backed companies so that we can get tax documents to said investors ASAP. Then in February, I’ll shift to our personal companies and taxes.
The beginning of the year also brings a wave of annual reports and business license renewals.
Is it fun? No.
Is it necessary? I have no idea.
Q4 Investor Update
Last but not least, we publish our Q4 Investor Update. Overall, our properties finished the year strong but maintenance is still killing us across the board. I think it’s a mix of property managers not getting competing bids due to lack of contractor responses, and the rising costs of goods and labor due to inflation.
