It’s Time to Start Thinking About Your Financial Goals and Needs for the New Year

I’m very excited about the New Year and all of the possibilities I believe real estate investors will have the opportunity to take advantage of in 2015. Every New Year I sit down and write out my goals and needs for the coming year on my yellow pad. Once I have my goals written down for the year I then write a contract with myself setting forth what I promise myself and my family I will do this year to achieve my goals. For years I used to do a New Year’s resolution and I found that by the third week of the New Year my resolutions were already forgotten and I was just going through my days as I had always done in the past, sometime productive, sometimes not productive.

I don’t know about you, but when I give my word to someone in my mind I have just made a contract with that person. When I give my word, I will do whatever I can possibly do to keep my word to the other person. I want the other person to feel confident whatever I tell them they can believe in. I feel the same way about signing a contract. As with giving my word to someone, signing a contract to me is a very significant obligation I don’t take lightly whether to someone else or to myself. I started writing a contract with myself 20 plus years ago as what I promise myself I will do in the coming year. Some year’s life got in the way and I wasn’t able to fulfill my promises to myself even though I tried my best. Other year’s just because of the fact that I had the contract I could review every couple of months kept me on track to achieve what I had planned to do that year.

I have suggested doing this to many of my students as a way to keep them on course of achieving what they need to do to make their real estate business, as well as their personal lives grow and prosper. One of my students has started a support company for the Oracle Company. She has also spent the past two years in Africa doing humanitarian work in Kenya, and in her spare time she is writing a book about how her life has been changed because she wrote a contract with herself every year, reviewed it periodically and then completed her goals as close to her projections as she could. Her focus has benefited her financially so she can now live the life of her dreams without worry about money.

May I suggest each of you doing this simple task of writing a contract and signing it to yourself setting forth what your goals and plans are you want to achieve in 2015? If you will do this whether life gets in the way or if it doesn’t this is a wonderful way to keep yourself on track to be able to take advantage of the real estate opportunities I am seeing everywhere I look.

This can be a bumper year for you if you look for different opportunities and focus on your plan to capture more profits from the good deals you find every day. Keep an open mind and think about what I have written about in past articles. If you remember I wrote about every property you will ever look at will fall into one of four categories. If you have a qualified buyer’s list for each of these different types of properties you can easily profit from each. Those categories are:

1. Houses upside down financially: either REO property or properties in some stage of the foreclosure process, or completely underwater financially.
2. Houses you don’t want: ugly houses, war zone properties, any property you wouldn’t personally want to OWN.
3. Houses you can fix and sell retail: Pretty houses where people want to live and would be proud to own.
4. Houses you can keep as long term income rental properties: good houses in good areas where people won’t mind living.

If you will look for the opportunities in the areas where you look for houses in 2015 it can be a bumper year for you. Do yourself a favor, try writing yourself a contract that lays out what you plan to do this new year, review it periodically, do your best to stay the course and see how much difference this simple idea can add to your bottom line. For more real estate investing strategies and ideas go to www.LarryHarbolt.com.

I hope you have a Happy and Prosperous New Year. Happy New Year!

Larry