Episode 65: The Number One Mistake Investors Make When Getting Started

Welcome to the On Purpose Investor podcast show number 65, the number one mistake investors make when getting started. Welcome to the On Purpose Investor podcast. My name is Eric Vogel. I'm a real estate investor mastermind, coach, husband to an amazing woman and often my co-host, tiffany, and father to two incredible boys. I'm on a mission to help you become a real estate investor and not only achieve seven figure success, like my wife and I did, but to do so with intention, direction and clarity. If you want to transform your financial and personal goals, become the version of yourself you've always wanted and reach your dream life ASAP, then you're in the right place. Thank you for deciding to hit that play button today. Now let's begin what's going on, everybody, and welcome back to the On Purpose Investor podcast. I'm your host, eric, with my amazing, lovely, beautiful wife and co-host, tiffany, with the eye roll today. There we go. So today we're diving into the number one mistake investors make when getting started. You know many people new to real estate think the first step to getting started is to find that rental property. Obviously, you can't become an investor until you have a property right. While this seems very logical, they are missing a key ingredient for lasting success. That ingredient I'm talking about is a clearly defined roadmap for the next three to five years of your life.

You may ask what the heck does that have to do with real estate? But it's the difference between achieving your dream life and achieving the wrong goals. So many investors brag about doing 100 flips a year or buying five houses a month, and while it can be exciting and flashy, most of us just need 10 to 20 homes to replace our income. Then the challenging part hits what would you do with your time if you didn't have to work your full-time job? Sure, laying on the beach and playing golf sounds great, but you'd be surprised how quickly you can get tired of that.

Oh, gosh, would you spend more time with your family? You know, travel the world, work on hobbies or a passion project. You know, knowing what you're working towards will give you the fuel you need to keep going when things are tough, and it will ensure you that you're buying the right type of houses and the right number of properties so you can live that dream life. Today, we're going to dive in and talk about the roadmap and how we used it to build our dream life.

Absolutely. I mean honestly, we didn't have the roadmap initially. We knew how much we needed to replace an income and we knew roughly how many properties it would take to get there, but we didn't have, like, what are we going to do with our time? I mean, we knew we wanted to have kids but like y'all- and then what?

Staying?

home with kids is not for me. We did build our roadmap. Later on, I thought I wanted to be home with the kids more, so we had to redo our whole thing after I realized stay at home moms like y'all, I don't know how you do it, it's not for me, but I don't know what the right word is. I'm proud that so many women can do it, because it is a hard job.

Yeah, I've been doing stay at home, dad, and so, yeah, kudos to you. Stay at home, moms and dads and dads out there. It is a tough, tough road. It's so draining on like the emotional side, because two year old negotiating with a toddler. I feel like you need to read Chris Voss's book Never Split the Difference, which is a very good tactical book on negotiating with you know, sellers or buyers or whatever, or two years. I really feel like it's so practical with two year olds it's like do you want the red juice or the apple juice? I want both. Yeah, no, that's gross, I want the whole bag.

No, you can't have a whole bag of M&Ms, because you will go crazy.

Yeah, so you know, using the roadmap. What is the roadmap?

Yeah, it's a vision for your life. So it's three to five years is kind of the target and the idea is you sit down and you think about like, what is your ideal day, what is your ideal week, month, and really just sit there and journal on it to start and just figure out where do you want to be.

So I want to go a little bit backwards and evolve on the what is the roadmap? So it's that detailed list of what does your day look like.

Not just a list. It's like you can make it like a vivid vision type thing where it's Brandon Turner did a newspaper article for Open Door. You can make it into something very creative if you want. Ours was just pretty bland because I'm not super creative when it comes to that.

We bought a dry erase board and just started writing on the dry erase board just the things that we wanted to have, right.

I mean it's you know it's a Tuesday morning. I wake up and I have a cup of coffee while I meditate or read the newspaper. I don't know, people don't read the newspaper anymore. I don't think some people do, okay.

I know if Cole Skinner is listening to this podcast right now. I'm sorry, cole. He is probably reading the Wall Street Journal.

It's like if you were describing a movie of your life, writing that out. What are you doing? What do you feel? How do you spend your time? Yeah, when you don't have to go to a job every day now why?

why is it so important? You know, that's what. Why is having something written out like that so important?

There's so many reasons it's important. I mean one I Like had a little bit of like an existential crisis this year, of like what makes me happy, and that's where the top 10 comes into play, but also when the top 10 is the top 10 things that make you happy. But having the roadmap helped me kind of like redirect and it's just. It's almost like a journal entry to myself of what my future looks like in an ideal world, right, and it kind of gives you a North Star to point to go ahead into your as myth example that you love to use.

Maybe people don't know what an as myth is. As myth is a term that I learned in the military, where it is essentially a target. Yeah, now the as myth. Target is defined as a degree, so the 360 degrees on a compass and your as myth is the Trajectory that you're shooting. So if you're standing in the woods and you can see a tower in the distance, you see a mountain on one side. Well, you look at your map and you orient yourself and say, oh, I'm, I'm at this point in the map and you say I want to go to this point on the map and I can see my targets out there and I want to go to this point. So I'm going to hold my compass and I'm going to shoot my as myth, which is essentially pointing your compass at that direction and Reading it on the compass, and it'll say like 262 degrees, and then you have to take into account if there is a Change on the map, a plus or minus one, two, three degrees. Then you do that and then you calculate how many steps it is to get there and then you take your paces and you, okay, constantly look down, you keep checking your compass and make sure you're on the path with your as myth and your paces, and that you get to the spot you're going to the idea is there's a point on the horizon that you can see in the distance and you are saying that is the point I am working towards, because you have the map and the compass is telling you that's where you need to go and at times you're going to go into places of your route that you can't see that point anymore. But you have your compass and you have your as myth and you know which direction you should be heading right and you might have to go through a really muddy bog or you might get chased by wild boars, like I did once, but you still have your as myth right and the idea to apply this to real estate.

If you have your roadmap, you know where you're going and what you're trying to accomplish and, when stuff gets hard, work all hours of the night to get a property ready for rent and then you sit down and you're like we're gonna make $100 a month like this sucks. Having that bigger vision and roadmap in place helps you stay focused. Right so, like you were saying, if you wind up taking a slight detour, you know how to get right back on track. Right, and I think there's so much in real estate of Like a hustle, and I call them vanity metrics like how many flips are you doing a year, how many doors do you have? And if that doesn't help you reach your dream life, then what's the point? Right, you don't need tons and tons of rentals to have a great life.

Yeah, I mean, we mentioned it before you most people only need 10 to 20 homes, right, and that's single family homes.

Yeah, absolutely, and that would create a beautiful life for the majority of us. I mean it has for us. Yeah, so Having a clear plan Gets you there. I mean, we have a lot of friends who got started in real estate and they'll do a deal here and there every few years, but they're not working towards an active goal. And we were able to find freedom so much faster because we knew we needed this number of properties to get to our number, yeah. And then we assessed oh crap, like being at home is not in my roadmap now. So we've reworked it and we've changed our whole life around what we want our roadmap to look like.

Yeah, the roadmap is meant to guide you and At a certain point in your journey, you may realize Wait, I need to shift a little bit. I need to reorient myself on the map and make sure that that is actually the destination I wanted to go to. Now it's going to power you through the hard times and Help you make decisions. You know, I like to say and I heard you say it and we've heard other people say it you know, if you can't say heck yes to something presenting itself you an opportunity, an opportunity, it's a heck no right. If you can't say heck yes, then it's a heck no absolutely, and that roadmap will help guide you toward making that decision easier and faster.

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I know there were times that we had opportunities and we went to the roadmap and read it and we're like this does not get us closer to those goals, right, I think the majority of people in America and can't speak to other countries, but a lot of the people we interact with don't have goals or a plan for their life. They put some money aside for retirement or save up for a big purchase, but that's about the extent of financial planning for their life and we get caught in the monotony. I think of going to work, coming home, taking care of kids, watching Netflix and just we're tired. So we don't have that clear plan. But when you have the plan, it gives you motivation to sit there and analyze deals when you'd rather go to bed or to do the hard stuff. Because you know this is getting me closer to this dream life of mine. Yeah.

I like to see that the roadmap is just a very elaborate definition and detailed version of your why. Yeah, a lot of people understand and have heard and know that you have to have the why figured out. Why do you want 20,000 dollars a month in cash flow? Because, yeah, it sounds cool, it sounds nice, but why do you really want it? What is it going to provide to you and your family, or just you, that is gonna make it worthwhile, or is it truly gonna bring you fulfillment and wholeness? So the roadmap is like you got your why figured out. Now how are you getting there? In dream life university that we did last year, and Secure Legacy Code, which is coming up this fall, we do a lot of work on the why and I give a lot of practical exercises on how to achieve the ultimate why. Usually, the why is about five to 10 layers deeper than what you think. It is Absolutely, and usually there's many facets of why, but the roadmap really helps to bring that why to fruition.

Yeah, it's. In a way, part of the manifestation process is having a vision board and seeing that dream life and really envisioning what your dream life looks like, and one of the things I've done a ton of work with this year is creating vision boards and things like that, and it fits right in with the roadmap. So I mean you can create your roadmap and then go into Canva or whatever your software of choices and pick some images that fit with that roadmap vision. It's incredible. I mean we've had a conversation about some things we want in our life and we're seeing them come to fruition now in a way that it does not make sense. But focusing on what we want and why we want it and leaving it up to God to make it happen has worked really well for us, so we're gonna keep doing that.

That's right. We go with our intuition and we have a lot of trust that things are happening for a reason. If you try to force things into reality that is not in alignment with where you are meant to be heading, either you're going to achieve it and it's gonna suck, or you won't ever achieve it and you'll be disappointed. And so there is a lot of work in all of this, of understanding what it truly is you want, so that the universe, your God, whatever your higher belief is, can work Right if you don't know where you're going, you might wind up going and pursuing things that don't align with your ideal life.

And then you look up and you're working more than you did before you left, whatever your regular job was to get into real estate. You're working more. You're not making a lot of money because you're just using money to solve problems. We have a friend who realized if he did less deals he would make more money. So if he works less he can make more. Like, how beautiful is that that now he's not working as much? Right, and he gets more time with his kids and to do things that he wants to do. But you have to have a clear vision of where you wanna be to make sure that you're on that path to get there. That's right.

You know, when you were saying, all that I was like is that Yogi Berra sitting next to me. If you've listened to our podcast, you know that that's one of my favorite quotes.

Yeah, you've used it a lot.

It's one of my favorite ones, but I always have to include the. Is that my picnic basket? Yeah, don't confuse Yogi Berra with Yogi Berra, all right, so we talked about what is the roadmap and why you need a roadmap. The biggest you know question many people will ask is well, how do I create it? Yeah, and it's really up to you.

For us. We like to get out of our house and go to a different setting. Our first one we did at a campsite that we love.

In North Carolina. Yeah.

And Otto was four or five months sitting there. He was five months because it was my birthday trip. Yeah, he was sitting in his little bumbo. I'm so sweet.

And Tiffany constantly looked at me and said don't let him eat those rocks. Yeah, and then he was eating those rocks, yeah. Anyways, we removed ourselves from everyday life, yeah. So there were no real interruptions and we got to a point where we could. You know, relaxation and separation are the two main goals when getting into writing your roadmap or creating your roadmap.

Yeah, if you're married, working on this with your spouse to make sure that you're on the same page, maybe you outline some points for yourself and have your spouse outline some points, but coming together and making sure that you're building a roadmap for your family. Yeah, and they're like in ours. We had sections for us as individuals within it, but our business had a section. Yeah, our personal, like our family life was a section, and then we had personal sections within it.

And so the way Tiffany and I built our roadmap was on PowerPoint. You know, we just went in PowerPoint and created slides and said 2019, here's the business goals. 2019, here's the family goals.

So that wasn't the roadmap. The roadmap was a Word document that we had.

Oh, that's right. I'm sorry yeah.

And then we took the roadmap and chunked it into goals for each business and each court. Well, we had annual, monthly, quarterly, all that good stuff. So we broke it down and once a month we would sit down and review the goal and we would read through the roadmap and then go through our goals and see are we on track to hit, you know, this month's goal, this quarter's goal, and so on.

And I would highly encourage you, if you're going to go, do this, which I encourage everyone to but my encouragement to you is don't edit what you've written. Create a new one so you can go back and see how things have shifted. I love that you have different pages on the spreadsheet that show kind of our property tracker. Absolutely, and this year we had one property, this year we added four properties, that year we added seven properties.

I do a new spreadsheet of our property tracker and our goal sheet each year, so it is really sweet to see. I wanted you to put a vapor barrier in our old house. For like a year. It finally happened. It did.

Right before we sold it Right and then we sold it, so it wasn't an issue.

But we had goals for us as individuals, for the family, like things we wanted around the house done. And we just kept it in this tracker, so we knew Are we reaching them. Yeah.

Yeah, a lot of people say you know, if you don't write a goal down, it's not going to happen.

Well, there's statistics I want to say it's Harvard, don't quote me on that but where they looked at what people achieved if they had no goals, if they had goals that they just verbally said, and then if they had written goals, and the people with written goals were way more likely to reach them than even the ones that had the goal but didn't write it down.

So the way I do my goals is through a vision board, and every January I take my last image board, my last vision board, and see you know, has has have things shifted. Am I still aspiring to have that that big RV? Yeah, am I still aspiring to have this, you know, youtube channel or or whatnot, whatever was on my vision board, right? And I love going back and looking at my vision board and seeing, oh I, oh, my gosh, I had nine images up here, yeah, and I've achieved seven of them, right. It's really fun. And now I get to evolve that vision board and take it to the next level.

Yeah, I want to come back to that in a minute, but as you're creating a roadmap, don't worry about how you're going to accomplish it. Yeah, it's very important, just dream and a lot of times it's easier to just jot down some things and then make it into more of a creative document. I know we had some like health goals on ours that we have not achieved but we'll get there. But we just dreamed of like. What in my wildest dreams would I like to have.

Yeah.

And sometimes it's easier to start with 10 years and bring it back down to three.

Yeah.

Because we think we can do a whole lot in 10 years. But if you take that 10 year goal and put it in three years, you'd be surprised what you can achieve.

Right. So a lot of people think, like, in 10 years they can create a portfolio of 500 houses, but don't think that they can achieve 10 houses in one year, right, right. So, like Bill Gates has a great quote that says most people overestimate what they can do in one year and underestimate what they can do in 10 years. Yeah, so I said my example backwards. Well, it's like if you plan for a year.

you think you're going to get a lot done, but you don't get quite as much. But in 10 years like 10 years is a long time that's a very long time so if you go into this with an approach of what do I want my life to look like in 10 years, and then you make it your three year plan, you would be surprised how much you can get done. Yeah, maybe you don't get 500, but if you get 300, wouldn't that be pretty dang good?

Oh my gosh, that'd be amazing if that was your goal, right, and if that goal aligned with where your roadmap truly wanted you to be.

I mean, for us our goal, I think, was 20. When we first got started it was we started doing some rent by the room so we were able to get there faster with fewer homes because we had the higher cash flow Right. But we roughly 20 was our goal. We've gotten up to 14. We set a goal of having that before our son was born and we realized we're not going to get to 20. But there's this thing we heard about called Padsflit, so we can rent our home by the room. So that got us to our goal. So we knew our son was coming. Like I was pregnant, we knew some time around.

And we had to make it happen.

But we changed our strategy a little bit to make it happen. That's right, and if we had made that a 10 year goal, we would have hit it in 10 years, but it wasn't what we wanted. So think about what your ideal situation is and maybe cut the time down and you'd be surprised you. You will find a way to make it happen if you, if there is enough pressure.

Absolutely. If you've listened to that Padsflit episode and you're interested in Padsflit, I'm going to have a link in the show notes to set up a call with our home girl Blake over at Padsflit and you can set up a call just to get some information.

That was episode 61. So not too long ago that we put that out there. Yeah.

But I'll make sure that link is in the show notes so that if you want to set up a call with her and just learn about what, if can you do it in your market Right? Will it explode your cash flow? Will it work? Yeah, that link will be in the show notes.

Yeah, so finally how to use the roadmap.

Yeah.

So I absolutely love this. I think Brandon Turner told us the idea, but we go in and we highlight our roadmap as we review it. Yeah, and if we have a compost something, we make it green. Yeah, if we're working on it, we make it yellow. And if we're behind the target, we make it red. Yeah, and it's really cool over time, to see that roadmap turn green.

Yeah.

And then, once you get to that point, then you're like, oh shoot, we need to work on the next roadmap.

And if something you know over the course of three years just stays red, it may be something that you want to reevaluate and say does it truly align with where I want my life to be? Because there's a reason you're not giving it energy, right? So just be honest with yourself.

And I mean, changing your roadmap is not a bad thing, Not at all. We changed ours, felt like every six months. Yeah, because what we realized, what we wanted, shifted, or we changed some small things in the business that this was no longer relevant, or there are so many weird things that, like side ventures, we put on there. We had our handyman business on there for a while and then we sold that so that you know, fell off and we've added things and changed it. But it's using it as that, as myth, as that landmark of where you're headed. If you're driving a Marietta Georgia and you say go buy the big chicken, people know what that means. You have a landmark that you know where you're heading to that big chicken. If you don't know what it is, google Marietta Georgia, kfc, it's a big chicken.

It's interesting. Its mouth opens up and down and it's pretty great. I love it.

So using your roadmap as your compass, as your North Star to reaching your dream life is the best way to do it, and we know a lot of investors who are way more experienced than us and have been in the business a lot longer. But they wind up getting caught in those vanity metrics of doing so many flips or just knowing what your dream life looks like.

They get hooked on the deal and it's an addiction and it really can be oh.

I've been getting the itch and there's other things I want to do, but there is a high that comes with getting a good deal and we all get a little scratchy.

I love scheduling closings at the attorney's office, not only because of the funness of closing and the excitement of a new deal, but also we love our attorney and we love hanging out with her. The biggest strategy in the roadmap is that when you get to the point where you've reached these overarching goals, that you know what you're going to be doing, so that you don't get there and you just keep working and you keep chasing deals and you can't sit back and enjoy your family, enjoy your life, enjoy the culture of wherever you are. A lot of people work for the sake of working. They stay busy for the sake of saying busy.

It could be such little things. I love reading and I stopped reading because we have kids and you're not going to sit there and read a book while there's a two-year-old running around the house. But I can build my work day around setting time aside to read and that's something that doesn't cost a whole lot of Kindle books $10. But it takes time and if I'm not intentional, I won't do it. So it helps you create that intentionality and we created on-purpose investor. So people live with that intentionality and every day they're doing something to help them reach their goals or to live out their dream life, if they've already achieved that. And I am excited for what's to come for on-purpose investor because of the help that we're going to be able to provide for people and help them reach that awesome dream life that they never thought was possible.

Absolutely. And if I can read a book called Rhinoceros Success and envision myself as this rhino running through the jungles and I don't just eat grass on the ground like cows do I'm a rhino and I'm going to chase my goals and I'm going to charge them and manifest them and make them reality. When I read that book, I wrote on piece of paper on a sticky note, put it on the fridge and said I'm going to own two houses by the end of this year and I felt like how the heck am I going to do that? How am I going to do that? I just didn't think it was possible and we ended up having two houses and I just didn't know. But if someone like Eric Vogel can set a goal that big and it seemed huge and achieve it and get out of my comfort zone to make it a reality by writing it down, you can too. Now that book Rhinoceros Success. Scott Alexander wrote that book. It's a great pick me up. It's a great book to give you motivation.

Absolutely. And I want to say too we have a friend who just closed on one of his first run all and he has a goal for two this year and he's like it's such a small goal, it's a huge goal.

It's huge.

And it might seem like just one house and just a couple hundred dollars a month, but it is a leap towards something greater, like the first mission to the moon. Yeah, the moon's not that big of a deal now, but back then it was huge because no one had done it.

That's if we've actually okay, stop.

So, your first deal no one in your life like you, you know, have not done this before. So it is a huge feat to make it to the moon to get those first deal or two. And then you realize, okay, I know how to do this, now I can go to Mars. Yeah, it might seem like nothing, but it is huge because it is setting the foundation for you to take on more deals. You'll start building momentum and growing faster the snow ball is powerful. It is, and we didn't really Understand it until it happened for us and we're like oh, it makes sense.

Like the majority of people in America, their biggest thing they'll ever do is buy their, their home. And you are trying to take it to the next level Absolutely not just buying your home, but buying homes for other people to live in. Right, and that is something that you may have in your Immediate community that they cannot rationalize, they cannot picture that, they cannot understand how you are accepting such a big risk and how you can afford to do it, and there's a lot and so you know you may be lacking that community of when are you gonna get people To to experience this with? you will hear the on-purpose investor. That's that's what we're here for. Yeah, we're here to be that community for you and to you. So if you want to be a part of a community like that, go to investor connect on Facebook. We do have an online group on there where we talk about our goals each week, we talk about where we're headed and we just we're there to keep each other picked up, absolutely.

All right. Well, I think we've talked about the roadmap, what it is, why you need it, how do you create it and then how to use it. So just check it every so often, make sure you're on the right path, that you don't wind up way off course.

Yeah, that's right. All right, Thank y'all for hanging out with us today on the on-purpose investor podcast. We're on a mission to create a hyper intentional life for you so that when you're at the end stage of your life, you're on top of the building you want to be on and you're happy and proud of who's around you and what you're doing. All right, we'll see you next week. Thanks, we Are immensely grateful for you joining us today. If you haven't already done so, we invite you to subscribe to our show. We understand that many of you tune in regularly, but perhaps haven't had the chance to hit that subscribe button yet. Don't worry, it's effortless, takes about three seconds to follow or subscribe on your platforms like Spotify, apple Podcasts or wherever you're enjoying the show. Your support is invaluable to us and has played a crucial role in the tremendous Growth of our podcast. We sincerely appreciate your assistance in any way, shape or form. Together, we can launch this podcast to even greater heights.