How goes your balancing act with life, work, investing and charity?
Last week for us was definitely pushed our limits to the edge. My wife and I are parents to a three and five year old, Cherry is in her final stretch for tax season doing Accounting to over 100 local real estate investors, our charity for which Cherry is VP Finance and I am President had one of our three major events this past weekend fulfilling the wish lists of 32 of Hamilton’s poorest families.
Thank you to all our donors and volunteers. If you see my post on Instagram you’ll see Batman and Thor, God of Thunder were in attendance to spread some cheer.
On top of all of that, we closed on our newest investment property on Thursday and it’s one of the worst closings I’ve ever seen mostly our own fault and the general difficulty of the lending market and lots of learning lessons.
The biggest lesson here is to start your financing process earlier than we did. Most of you are on the ball as you have your financing in order before conditions are lifted. We did not have a financing condition so we let that deadline slip a bit too far. I do however want to thank Butler Mortgages, specifically Dave and Michelle as they bore the brunt of our challenges but got it done.
Also I’d like to thank Crystal at CAP Law for getting our deal closed and doing an excellent job coordinating with the sellers’ lawyers.
Real estate investing can be all things: easy, challenging, fun, challenging, rewarding, challenging yet worth it.
Tonight is game seven of my hockey team the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Boston and my favourite team, the Toronto Raptors game 5 of their playoff series. But guess what I’ll be doing? I’ll be in Hamilton with a wet/dry shop vacuum to get the water out of the basement at our newest property.
This is one of the realities of investing, the best deals are often houses with challenges, this one the basement is known to leak but it’s a very easy fix by rerouting the downspout away from the foundation. I’ve already done it but now I need to get the rain water out of the basement to prevent mould growth in our unfinished basement. I’ve always wanted to own a shop vacuum anyways and I’ll be home in time to watch the remain two thirds of the game.
If you don’t like doing any work on your properties that’s totally ok. I was just way to slow in booking my handyman to do this job and again, I’ve always wanted a shop vacuum :)
Speaking of investing being challenging and worth it, that brings us to this week’s guest Evelyn Lamarsh, our client since she was 26 years old when we met in 2011. Fast forward to today she is one of those few investors with 10 properties and living in financial peace.
Evelyn and husband Mike are living the dream. Evelyn has her dream job, Mike retired from his job in his early 30’s, they have two young children they get to spend lots of time with and they just bought a 30 foot boat to spend family time on and entertain friends and family. A boat paid for by their investments.
Financial peace and living the dream are indeed possible with some early hustle as explained by our client and more importantly friend, Evelyn Lamarsh.