Jammed Etcetera

Time for work-at-home entrepreneurs is their single most valuable asset. Nothing can replace time…valuable, precious time!

No matter how rich or poor you are, no matter how many things are on your ‘to-do’ list, you still just get the regulation twenty-four hours each day. Sometimes I could use another twenty-four but that isn’t going to happen. I’ll bet that you could use more hours in your work day, as well.

The thing about those twenty-four allotted hours per day is that we can’t spend all of them working. We have to sleep some of them. We have to take time to eat and there is the occasional shower, too. ?

Our families and our friends require some of our time. Relationships must be nurtured. So…we can allow ourselves just so many work hours each day. Since our working time is limited that means that we must make the very most of the hours that we work. We can’t waste time on unimportant details or on tasks that others can do.

When you shave a few minutes here and a few minutes there, you will make more efficient use of your allotted work hours. Here are a few suggestions and in the interest of saving your time (and mine), I’ll keep this brief and to the point.

• Email account efficiency: We all have various email accounts. We use one account for this and another account for that. Checking each and every email account more than once a day can be a time consuming task that you very easily make less time consuming by having all of the email that comes to all of your various email account to come into one gmail account. One email account takes a lot less time than several and you can still maintain all of your various email addresses.

Additionally, you don’t need to spend a lot of time reading and answering emails that are not going to add to your bottom line.

Email comes in several varieties. There are emails that are business related, emails that are important but not business related and emails that are simply frivolous and time wasting. If an email has been forwarded several times, don’t waste your time.

If an email is addressed to a great many people, don’t waste any time on it either. Email can consume a lot of time. You need to filter the important from the irrelevant and only spend time on those emails that are related to your business.

• Set up time tables to help you prioritize your work day: A scheduled work day is an efficient work day. You will get a lot more done in a lot less time if you know in advance and can see at a glance what task is next on your list. I like visual aids. A time table is a visual aid. It can help you allot your time efficiently and productively!

• Focus on result producing activities: When you make your work day schedule, you need to be certain that the tasks that you schedule are the ones that will in fact make your business grow and thrive. Don’t waste your time, effort and energy on tasks that can be done by others.

Take time to investigate outsourcing. You can add hours to your day each and every day when you outsource the mundane business tasks to others.

You can outsource such tasks as bookkeeping and accounting, article/E-book writing and submission, travel and event planning and ad writing. Others can do these tasks better and more efficiently than you can and your time is better spent on growing your business, making those contacts and closing those deals!

• Shave time off of counter-productive activities: Like I said, your friends and families do required some of your time but you can also waste a whole ton of time on such unproductive activities as watching TV.

You will be really surprised at how much of your day that you waste if you keep a record of your time expenditures over the course of several days’ time.

Now don’t misunderstand me. We all need down time. We all must relax our minds as well as our bodies. We can’t be all business all the time but we can limit our unproductive or counterproductive activities.

Time is precious and time is limited. We need to make the very best use of every minute of every day that we possibly can.

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Back in the days of the wild, Wild West, when easterners traveled across this vast country looking for opportunity in the newly opened territories, they were often referred to as a ‘tenderfoot’.

This wasn’t a complimentary term but it was a rather apt one. The easterners wore ‘city’ shoes that weren’t designed to withstand the rigors of the western terrain. Their hats didn’t have wide brims to protect them from the sun and their clothing wasn’t made of tough material like denim.

These new westerners didn’t know how to take care of themselves and because they didn’t know where and what the dangers were they didn’t have any idea how to avoid them. If you are just beginning to consider the idea of investing in real estate you are a tenderfoot and you do need some instruction to avoid losing your shirt…and probably your pants, hat and boots, as well.

First you will need to determine what your strategy will be in real estate investing. Do you want to buy a property, fix it up and sell it quickly or do you want to buy a property, hold it and wait for the market to increase? Do you want to deal with renters? All of these questions are ones that you need to answer before you invest in any piece of real estate.

You will need to learn how to investigate the value of properties yourself. It isn’t fair to use the time of a real estate agent and have them show you property after property while you try to look for a good real estate investment.

There are several online sites that are helpful in determining the real value of real estate. DO NOT rely on tax values. They are not reliable and they are not accurate either. You can find a real estate agent that you can work with and you can find recommendations for such agents online.

After you have learned how to determine property values yourself and have chosen a real estate agent that you can work with, the next thing that you need is a good broker that you can also work with. Ask your real estate agent for the names of three mortgage brokers.

Then you will need to find out what interest rates and closing costs each one charges. (Check out your local bank or credit union as well). Take copies of your three credit reports and choose a sample property for each broker to run hard numbers on.

Now you are ready to actually make your first investment. You want to choose the lowest price house in the best possible neighborhood to put a contract on.

Let’s say the cheapest two-bedroom house in the best neighborhood in Fort Wayne costs $100,000 and the next cheapest, comparable home is listed for $140,000. If you buy the home that is priced at $100,000, you can raise your price to $130,000 the next day and make a dandy little profit.

Now let’s talk about closing the deal. First show the seller your pre-qualification letter from your lender. Then get the required inspections for termites and get your appraisal. Once you have all of your ‘ducks in a row’ so to speak, it takes about 30 days to make the final close.

A note here about any renovations or repairs that you might want to make to the property: Before you close, you might want to think about a Purchase and Renovate loan. A Purchase and Renovate loan wraps the cost of construction up in the loan so you don’t have many out-of-pocket expenses. This may require an estimate from a general contractor and plans from an architect as well.

Okay, now let’s go back to the first thing that you needed to do and that was to determine your strategy. Now is the time for you to execute that strategy that you have used to invest in this real estate. If you bought it with the strategy of flipping it when the market went up then you just simply wait.

If you bought it with the strategy of renovating and then selling then it is time to start your renovations. On the other hand, if you bought it with the strategy of renting it, it is time to start looking for tenants.

You see, the point of having a strategy for profiting from the purchase of any piece of real estate must be your first decision because everything that comes after that is dependent upon it.

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