Most likely, when you start out in a new business, particularly in real estate investing, you discover it’s fun, exciting, and profitable. You may become addicted to it. When you run your own business, you start working 60-hour weeks, even 80-hour weeks. And all of a sudden, you’re working all the time.
Your personal life, your family life, and your spiritual life could begin to suffer.
The whole reason you started your business was to achieve financial freedom. But soon you’ll find yourself, like I did, working all the time. Perhaps you will then qualify as a workaholic and join my new group-real estate anonymous.
The following ideas will help you set up a system right now so you won’t overdo it.
Set office hours.You’ll add to your enjoyment if you set office hours. You’ll find that you focus better and accomplish more when you have a finite amount of time to work. If you gave yourself seven days a week to work, you’d probably spread out whatever work had to be accomplished over those seven days. Whether you’re a part-time or full-time investor, set your office hours and keep them.
Every business has multiple components, especially running your own real estate investing. Find out what you like to do, what you’re good at, then do those things yourself and hire others to do the things you don’t like.
Could you learn to change the brakes on your car? Change your oil? Even cut your own hair? You probably could figure out how to do these things, but you don’t because you don’t want to. It’s stressful, it’s a headache, you’re not that good at it, and others are better equipped to do it than you, so you don’t mind paying these specialists.
Be careful when you get into real estate investing; you may try to do everything. The thought of doing all those jobs holds a lot of real estate investors back. Whatever tasks cause you headaches, simply hire other people to do them.