Monthly Archive

Just found this phenomenal collection of tools for freelancers. Check them out here.

Looks like there is a MeetUp dedicated to The 4 Hour Work Week. You can find it here; I am also adding it to my blogroll…

Ok….sort of off-topic here, but I am very much a do-it-yourself kind of guy, and I’m always on the lookout for sites that tell you how to do stuff. So imagine my sheer joy in finding this site.

Talk about an early Christmas present…

This is for all of you nomadic web designers; it’s a great resource, aptly called forwebdesigners.com. You can find it here.

Sorry, putting on my real estate investor hat on for this post…

So…this is how my day went…

9:00 a.m. Met with the Appraiser at the house I am buying… Nice guy - put up with me pointing out absolutley everything nice about the house (Nice House = Nice Appraisal = more money to pay for the rehab).

12:00 p.m. Met with Contractor #1… Nice guy - put up with me pointing out absolutely everything bad about the house (Actually, he’s bidding for my work…he has to be nice).

2:00 p.m. Met with the Inspector… Nice guy - HE pointed out everything nice about the house…and a few bad things, but nothing major thank God. He actually told me I had a good deal - Big Relief, I can go back to sleeping nights.

5:00 p.m.  Met with Contractor #2… Nice guy - he too put up with me pointing out absolutely everything bad about the house; he too is bidding for my work.

The final wild card is the septic system, but the neighbor recalled that it was repaired recently (or at least she remembers the smell!).

I was joking about the not sleeping nights. I did my homework in advance, which I guess is today’s moral.

When I first met with the owner I walked the house. Then, the next time I met with the owner, I walked the house. Finally, I arranged some time to REALLY walk the house, while talking with the owner about the house.

Regardless of what you do for a living, surprises tend to be expensive.

I have been catching up on my blog reading lately and saw this over at 43 Folders. The post is about Don Miguel Ruiz’s book “The Four Agreements”. Basically the Four Agreements are as follows:

1) Be impeccable with your word.

2) Don’t take anything personally.

3) Don’t make assumptions.

4) Do your best.

Yeah…the words “Common Sense” spring to mind, but I look at my dealings with other people and find that I may occasionally skip one or two of them (usually #2 or #3, but honestly, never #1).

Lea Woodward over at the Location Independent Blog has come out with this pretty extensive list of blogs that deal with Location Independent Professionals.

First of all, those of you joining me from Lea Woodward’s “Location Independent Blog” welcome! I hope you find this a good resource; fell free to browse past entries…

So…the bank has accepted my counter offer for the short sale. They are getting some money back for the house without initiating foreclosure, they are forgiving the loan, so the owner is relieved, and I am getting a nice house in a decent neighborhood - win-win-win.

The downside is that it is putting a damper on my plans for starting a virtual business. All my energy is now focused on due diligence and lining up a team to get the house in good condition to rent (this in addition to working my full time job!) My original exit strategy was to flip it, but that was before the sub-prime mess. As I mentioned earlier, there is still the possibility of getting a management team to handle the rental, but it is not worth it for just one house; I will need to get a few more rentals for this to be feasible.

Still, I am actively looking for ways to outsource as much as possible.

The longterm goal is to build multiple streams of income to get me out of my job and free up my time; this is just one step toward that goal.

Bear with me, this is probably going to be a long entry…

Back when I first decided to get into real estate investing, I read a book by Robert Allen called “The Challenge”. Basically it’s about him taking a group of ordinary people and teaching them how to buy investment property in the period of one month (kind of a “Buy a man a fish, he eats for a day; teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime” sort of thing)…

Anyhow, in the book, he mentioned the story of “The Blue Vase”. It is about a young man who is given a seemingly simple task, purchase a specific blue vase at a certain store, but in fact, he faced seemingly insurmountable obstacles at every turn; yet he persisted. (You can view a movie of the story here; it’s a little campy and runs about 20-30 minutes, but it gets the point across). The thing is, for me the story “stuck”. It was the one major thing I really got from the book, and I always remembered it.

Flash forward to April of this year.

A friend of a friend had twelve houses going into foreclosure. He bought them in a package from another investor (there were nineteen houses altogether, he managed to get rid of seven). Three of the houses were just too far away for me to be interested, which left nine houses. So I plotted the locations on my map book (yeah, I know there’s a thing called GPS; what can I say, I’m an Analog guy in a Digital world…but I digress…)

Starting from the house furthest away, worked my way back home, looking at each of the houses.

Here is where the serendipity part comes in…

In trying to find the last house I got lost; I turned up the wrong road. I followed it a bit and realized I made a mistake and decided to turn around and head back the way I came. So I found a spot where I could turn my car around - right in front of an abandoned house.

For a real estate investor, an ugly, abandoned house can be a potential goldmine. Something else pretty cool, next to the house was a very large undeveloped lot. I got out and took a look at the house from the street. I could not find a house number so I went to the house next to it and wrote that number down.

I finally found my way to the last house, but all the while, I was thinking about the abandoned house. The other houses I looked at did not fit my investment criteria, but the abandoned house showed promise. So I went home and began my search for the owner.

The really cool thing about the county in which I live is that pretty much all of the records are online, and free to access. I went to the county property tax database and looked up what I thought was the house address. I got a name, Fran (names and addresses changed to protect the innocent). I looked up her name online, found her, and called her. I asked her if she owned the house at 123 Oak Street. She said there is no house at 123 Oak Street, just a vacant undeveloped lot which she owned.

Turns out I was one lot off on the address; the abandoned house was at 124 Oak Street. Something else she admitted to me, even though the property at 124 Oak Street was not in her name, she owned it as well. I asked her if she was interested in selling either the house or the lot and she flatly said no. I gave her my number and told her to please call me if she changed her mind, and she told me she doubted that would happen, that she’s trying to acquire the property around the house…click…

This really got me interested. I looked at the plats (the county maps that show the lots in a particular section of a county) and saw that what I thought was two lots, was really three lots. And in fact, there were three vacant lots behind these three lots! So, looking at the land from street level where I had parked, I saw a vacant lot to the far left (122 Oak), another vacant lot in the middle (123 Oak), and a lot with an abandoned house on the far right (124 Oak). And then, behind these three lots were the three other undeveloped lots.

After digging a little deeper, I saw that not only did she own 123 & 124 Oak, she also owned the lot behind 122 Oak. I then went to look for the owner of 122 Oak, and here is where things got a little strange. The address of the owner was care of the County Tax Assessor…hmmm… The owner was a guy named Hank. I called the county tax assessor and they were a little perplexed about this as well. They put me on to someone else who told me that the taxes on the property were unpaid since 2000. Most likely, Hank was dead. Why the property didn’t go through probate, I don’t know, but there it was. I asked how much was owed in back taxes, she told me: $580! Now I was REALLY interested. I looked up the Social Security Death Index and saw there were two Hanks with the same last name that lived in the same town. Both died a while ago. So I was back to square one.

I decided to look up the deed for the property using Hank’s name and something funny happened. I didn’t see the deed for 122 Oak, but there was a deed for 121 Oak (which had a nice house on it). There were three people on the deed, a woman named Mary (same last name as Hank) a woman named Eve (different last name) and a guy named Hank Jr. (with the same last name). It turns out, Hank’s family owned two plots of land, one that his wife and kids owned, that was later sold, and the vacant lot that Hank Sr. owned. The two Hanks in the Social Security Death Index were Hank Sr. and Hank Jr. So that left Mary and Eve. I assumed that Mary was Hank’s wife, and that Eve was his married daughter (explaining the different last name).

At this point I did another search on the Social Security Death Index for Mary and Eve. I got a hit on Mary - she died in 2005, but no hit on Eve. I tried both her maiden and married names - nothing. This meant she could be alive. So I went through every resource I could to find Eve. I was able to find old addresses and phone numbers, but nothing current. Back to square one again.

I was beginning to lose hope, when I stopped and re-thought the problem.

Mary died pretty recently, maybe the local paper had her obituary. I went online to the AJC (Atlanta Journal Constitution - our newspaper) and looked in their “Stacks” section (this is their Archives). I knew the exact date of death, so I looked a few days after and sure enough I saw a brief entry with just the mention of her name. To get the full entry cost me $3.

I paid, got the full obituary, and saw the words that even today bring tears of joy to my eyes…“survived by daughter Eve” followed by a new last name…(turns out her husband died and she re-married).

I did a lookup of the new name and sure enough, there was an Eve of that name living relatively near to the vacant lot. I called her, introduced myself verified that Hank and Mary were her parents, and asked her if she knew that her father owned a vacant lot. She said no, she didn’t. I then explained to her about the lot and how I found her. I asked her if she would be interested in selling the lot, she said yes.

We closed in late June.

I then called Fran (remember her?) I told her I was the new owner of the vacant lot next to her property, and if she was interested, I would be willing to sell her my land (at a nice profit of course). She told me she was not ready to do anything yet. I gave her my contact info (again) and told her to call me if she’s interested.

I haven’t heard from Fran; I will probably call her this month and see if her situation has changed. I may even offer to buy her lots if she’s wiling to let them go. In any case, I am the proud owner of a .25 acre lot in a nice area of town that I can either develop, or sell, and I got it at a really good price.

The point of this particular tale is this, never give up. Never.

A lot of times, we run into an obstacle - real or imagined - that causes us to quit. I am convinced that there is always at least one solution to every problem we encounter in life. It may not be pretty, it usually is not easy, but it’s there if you are willing to look for it. If you are stuck, stop for a bit, sleep on it. Our minds are amazing at solving problems, if we just take the time to use them.

End of Sermon… :o)

If you get a chance, hop on over to Lifejotter.org. The site has been redesigned and looks really good (the content rocks too!).

Lifehack.org (which is yet another excellent lifestyle design site) has a good article on 6 Rules to Work Less and Get More Accomplished. You can find it here. Some of the rules should be really familiar to readers of 4HWW.

On Friday, October 12th, I looked at Google Trends and picked the second highest entry, Nicole Jaracz (Drew Carey’s fiance), and created a blog entry with her name in the header and body, along with tagging the entry with her name. (The first entry was a much loved college football player who died with his girlfriend in a car accident…no way I was going to use that with a clear conscience).

Here are the results:

Oct 12 - 5 Views to my blog, 1 of which was to the Nicole Jaracz entry.

Oct 13 - 13 Views to my Blog, 0 to that entry.

Oct 14 - 13 Views, 4 to the Nicole Jaracz entry

Here’s where it gets interesting…

Oct 15 - 126 Views, 116 specifically for Nicole

Oct 16 - 87 Views, 82 ” “

Oct 17 - 37 Views, 29 ” “

Oct 18 - 9 Views, 4 ” “

Oct 19 - 9 View, 6 ” “

This was for a period of one week.

Now, I totally understand that this is not a great method to draw in readers. I’m sure a lot of people took one look at my site and realized it had very little to do with Nicole Jaracz, so they left. I did not get much traffic to my other entries. I am also sure that most BAD internet marketers don’t care; they probably figure that, if you have a good enough hook, you may catch some of the readers. Any traffic is good traffic. Which is why the tag the heck out of their sites with everything in the world.

But as you see by the numbers, they drop off pretty quickly.

There is something to learn from all this… First, if you have really good content, and it does match something hot on Google Trends, putting the entry in your header, body, and tag can jump start your exposer. Something else pretty interesting, I still get, on average, anywhere from 3 to 5 readers still landing on that entry daily. Talk about Long Tail…

I am trying to figure out how to put this information to good use, but it was something fun to try.

Every quarter, publicly held companies are required to issue a report showing their progress for the past 3 months. This report is called a 10-Q.

Just over three months ago (last quarter), I finished reading The Four Hour Work Week, and I decided to work the principles into my life. The purpose was to create a virtual company, where I would subcontract the work to freelancers (or become a freelancer myself), with the eventual goal that I can run this company from pretty much anywhere in the world I choose to live.

Here now is my personal 10-Q…

The plan was to use multiple streams of income from the Internet, and possibly Real Estate investing (which sort of is counterintuitive because you need to be around to manage your properties, but I’ll get to that in a minute) to finance my endeavor.

Internet

I ramped up my education in Internet Marketing by taking the Thirty Day Challenge in August. My first attempt at applying the principles from the challenge ended with two outcomes; the first outcome - not desirable - was that I didn’t get any sales from my affiliate link on my blog. The second outcome - desirable - was that I placed on the first page of Google when searching for my keyword phrase. Yes it was at #10, and yes it was only for a couple of days before dropping off, but in my defense, I did not apply all the principles I learned and didn’t put a whole lot of effort into it. Seeing it on Google did boost my hopes that it was possible to make it happen, and motivated me to take more action. Like everything else in life, you get out of it what you put into it.

I got sidetracked a little with my “day job”, but I am on track to make another attempt at a successful Affiliate Marketing project. This time I’m all in.

The second Internet project I am working on is some sort of Information Product, like an eBook or Video. This is still in the early stages, but I have a couple of ideas I will explore, and document in later blog entries. I think this holds a lot of promise, because it doesn’t take a lot to produce, and if marketed right, it could produce a nice stream of income, with a minimum of maintenance.

Finally, something that I have not mentioned at all in this blog. Using an old PC I had lying around, I built an Ubuntu (Linux) server. Along with Linux, it had Apache - a web server, MySQL - a database application, and PHP5 which is used to create Web based applications (collectively called LAMP). I am getting up to speed on web page design and creation. This falls in line with my freelance aspirations. All you need is a laptop and an internet connection, and you can run a business.

Real Estate

As I mentioned in my last blog entry, I have a pending deal on the table. If the bank accepts my counteroffer, and there are no surprises in the inspection, I’ll have a nice house in a decent neighborhood. I originally intended to rehab and flip it, but in the current environment, I may either wholesale it to another investor, or change my strategy and rent or lease purchase it. Yes, if I rent it, in the short term, it will mean that I have to be around to manage it. Not something I can easily do from a beach in Nice…or the Italian Riviera…Still, in this market, I am thinking I can pick up one or two more houses, and if the numbers are good, I can hire a team to handle the property management. This, I can run remotely.

Plus there is no rule that I can’t do a little of everything, Internet Marketing, Web Design & Creation, and Real Estate investing.

The overall goal is to quit my day job to free up my time to do the things I want to do with it.

So…that’s the current state of Project Nomad, Inc. :o)

This first Quarter was primarily goal setting, education, exploration, and some action. The outlook for the second quarter is to take more action to move me closer to my goal of independence.