The Four Hour Work Week
It sounds a bit too incredible to believe, but this is the actual title of a book I am currently reading. The author, Tim Ferriss, has some incredible stories about how he and other members of the “New Rich” have created such automated, systemized and outsourced companies that he has gone from 80 hour work weeks to four hour work weeks.
Life is too short for us to put in all this time at work and it is causing many people to miss out on prime opportunities for trips, adventures and unique events to add to their life experiences. Our lives are ruled by our work and we have to start looking at it from the reverse angle, where we can rule our work.
Years ago when Karen and I were working so hard on building up our company KatSid Housez, and while I was still holding a full time job, a four hour work week was unrealistic. There are too many tasks that only we could do, or were more cost effective if we completed them. The problem was we missed much of the point.
All the extra work we did when we started actually cost us money. We could have brought contractors in and had renovations completed in days or weeks. It may have cost more than our “free” labour that was put in on evenings and weekends, but it would have also reduced our time line by several months, saved us additional mortgage and holding costs and allowed us to rotate our money faster into the next project.
As we continue to evolve, we bring more and more contractors in to do the work, freeing up our time. This really became more apparent to us over the last two months. Between Christmas and the first week of February, we have taken almost five full weeks off and a couple of very relaxed weeks. We had almost three full weeks off around Christmas we didn’t start any major projects in January as we went to the Caribbean for a week in late January and then lost a week to colds and flues in the family.
Miraculously the company is still thriving, we are still moving forward, and we are more energized than ever. Imagine if we apply more techniques to streamline our work week, outsource even more tasks and automate many of our procedures. Working a couple days a week may not be that far off.
I’ve lived the 80 hour work weeks, and I can absolutely tell you I loved the last couple of months significantly more. Sure, it’s good to keep busy, but I had more fun coloring Valentine’s Day cards with my daughters the other night, and playing Wii bowling with the family a few nights earlier and it wasn’t even to hard kayaking in the Caribbean in January. So I think I am going to spend some more time focusing on making this the norm, not the exception.
Here is a little quote that brings it all into focus, at least for me;
By working faithfully eight hours a day, you may eventually get to be a boss and work twelve hours a day. – Robert Frost, American Poet
Real Estate Investing 1,2,3
As we are well into the second month of 2008, I have been running into more people interested in talking to me about Real Estate Investments. Some have seen what we have done over the last five years, and others have been referrals from various contacts of ours.
The predominant theme being they want to start buying property and flipping it for profit just like on TV. It’s at this point I have to remind them that TV doesn’t always imitate life. Reselling properties for a profit can be a prime example.
Flipping houses for profit is never as easy as it looks on TV, and is significantly harder to do in Canada than in the US where most of the TV shows originate. With the extremely loose qualifications required for sub-prime mortgages in the US it allowed novice investors to purchase homes with very little money down and quite often with lower payments?
In Canada, until recently, you needed to put 25% of the purchase price down just to buy a property. With an average price around $450,000, you need $112,500 to buy the property and you still haven’t done any renovations. If you are looking at a lower priced property, this number will drop, but the numbers are still significant.
Costs in Canada are also appreciably higher here than across the border. Windows in the Southern US are not going to require the same insulation factors as our chilly Canadian winters require. This drives up prices. Labour costs are also substantially higher adding to the total renovation costs.
In fact, the high cost of labour is what leads many new investors to do a majority of the work themselves. We originally were victims of this mindset as well with our initial flip properties. It made sense at the time to save the $20 an hour for a painter or $60 an hour for a plumber and do the work ourselves. After all, our labour costs were zero per hour. All those savings became pure profit, didn’t they?
If we cut back to a 60 hour work week renovating a property, we were saving almost $5,000 in a month by not paying someone else. It seemed brilliant at the time, until we realized we were missing out on everything else in our life. We had no time for friends, our family, or any relaxation. The exact opposite of why we originally started doing this.
Additionally, since it took us quite often twice as long to do some of the work due to incorrect tools, lack of experience and the learning curve, it would cost us more in holding the property than we initially saved. Hindsight makes it so much clearer to us now.
I mentioned several articles back about people targeting Albertan’s for seminars on making money in Real Estate, both locally and in the US. Make sure you really do your research on these people presenting and organizing the events. I hope some of the above information opens your eyes, while money can be made in Real Estate, there is much more to it than an hour long television show can tell you about.
In Closing
Everything always happens at once it seems. With vacations, cold and flu season and getting back on track January ended up being mostly a write off for us. Now that we are three quarters through February, we are starting to see a bit of the light again after playing catch up for the first few weeks.
Between our accounting year ends, what seems like nonstop meetings with people interested in Real Estate investments and meetings with companies who are looking for housing for their staff it has been a real roller coaster of activity. If you have ever had any questions about what we do, or are interested in more information please contact us. Also, don’t hesitate to ask questions via comments at the bottom of the Newsletters or on the blog pages.
We believe we have some wonderful opportunities for people and are hoping to make 2008 as great a year for others as it will be for us. The Newsletter can be a great source of information for not just people interested in Real Estate, but anyone who may be affected by the economy, so if you know of others who would like to receive this please have them visit our site and register to receive their own copy.
Regards,
Bill and Karen Biko
KatSid Housez Inc.
info@housez.ca
403-870-4663
