Behind the Beard | December 30, 2021
Something I'm Reading:
I’m currently reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig and its really good! It’s an older book but I have heard great things about it and am really enjoying it. I’m about a quarter of the way through it.
Something I Teach:
Let’s talk about resolutions. A study was done at Dominican University several years ago on goal setting and strategies for achieving goals. The study broke participants out into multiple groups: one group just thought about their goals, another group wrote down the goals and an action step for each one, the third group shared their goals with a friend, and the last group also sent a weekly progress report to their friend.
The study found that only 43% of participants who thought about their goals completed them. However, 62% of people that shared their goals with a friend completed them and 76% of those that sent their friend a weekly progress report completed their goal (the full study is linked here if you want all the details).
So - if you’re serious about your 2022 goals, do more than write them down in a journal. Set up systems to support your goals. Find accountability. Join (or start) a mastermind and take daily action to hit them!
Something I Photographed:
Each week I share a photo I snapped in the previous week. Sometimes serious. Sometimes random and funny. Maybe a selfie once in a while. Just because.
Playing dress up with the kids…
Something I'm Excited About:
It’s been a massive week at Open Door Capital with two closings! We closed on Cheval Apartments in Houston, TX which is a $70MM, 387-unit apartment complex we took down with our friends at Disrupt Equity. This deal has a prime location close to Houston hot spots with a local household income of $150k+ and a projected 290K+ local jobs to be added over the next 5 years! And we also just closed on our biggest mobile home park acquisition yet - two mobile home parks totaling 400+ units in the Springfield and Joplin, MO MSAs!
ODC is ending the year with a bang and we aren’t slowing down in 2022 😉 So be sure to join our email list at odcfund.com/email so you get notified about our next investment opportunities.
Something I Can Answer:
Each week, I'll be answering one question from someone on my BehindTheBeard textletter! Want your question answered? Submit it by simply replying to this text!
Question: “What is your biggest piece of advice to someone pursuing FIRE (financial independence)?”
My number one tip is to avoid income creep. This is the phenomenon that as your income rises, your expenses increase to match your income. For example, buying a bigger and better house as you earn more. Or maybe you used to drive an Oldsmobile in college. Then you bought a Honda and now you’re looking at a Mercedes.
The number one rule of financial independence is to give yourself a budget and stick to it no matter how much your income increases. The second piece to that is make your income rise! Find a way to get scalable income. This could be entrepreneurship or sales or something where you have a way to affect your income by putting in more effort and more intelligence. The key is to maximize income while keeping expenses the same - it’s really that simple!
Your Friend,
P.S. Have a question you want answered by me? Reply to this text with your question - I pick one to answer each week in Behind the Beard and do my best to reply to others directly via text.