Real Estate Rookie: 90 Days to Your First Investment by Ashley Kehr

Chapter 1
GOAL SETTING
Why Set Goals?
The very first step in your whole real estate plan is to make a goal. It’s
difficult to arrive at a destination when you don’t know what that
destination is. How will you know if you’ve reached your version of
success if you don’t first define it?
Some of you might be wondering why you can’t just try your best and
see what happens. The answer is, of course you could. But I’m guessing
you didn’t pick up this book to become a real estate investor of mediocre
proportions. Even if you don’t have mogul-sized dreams, you likely want to
succeed, and do so as efficiently as possible. Without a goal, that probably
won’t happen.
The world is full of distractions. Once you open your eyes to the
entrepreneurial opportunities available to you, chances are pretty good that
you’ll see many ideas that look appealing. These new opportunities fall into
one of two categories: distractions or room for growth. It will be important
to learn how to differentiate between the two and pick out only the best
options (for you).
Shiny-object syndrome is real! I have it. I know it can be fun to
daydream and wonder “what if.” But chasing after each and every bright
idea can slow you down. In order to efficiently and effectively reach your
desired destination, you need to have a focal point to keep you on track and
moving forward. Navigating through all of the choices life throws at you
can be hard. Who wouldn’t want to open a coffee shop, pimp out an RV and
travel cross-country as a full-time vlogger, or finally launch that start-up
business with your best friend? All of those things sound like a blast! And
they have oh so much potential for profit. Why not do all of them?
(That was a rhetorical question—I’m going to tell you why not.)
It can be easy to fall away from your first intentions. But if you have a
specific goal, you can lay out a plan that keeps you on the path to success.
Setting Your First Goal
Tarl Yarber, an investor out of Seattle, once said to me, “You wouldn’t hire
a contractor that had a dream of building your home. You would hire one
who had a plan.” The ideal builder would have drawings, a skilled team of
laborers, and a system to implement the completion of your project. This is
how you should design your goals.
Your goal (your dream) needs to have a plan in place. You need to ask
yourself, “What are the action steps that will get me from where I am to
where I want to be?”
Start with a goal and reverse-engineer it. Work backward. Let’s say that
within five years, you want to earn $5,000 in cash flow a month.
How many units does that require? If you can net $200 a month from a
property in your market, you would need to obtain twenty-five properties
(or units) to reach your goal. Essentially, you’d need to purchase five
properties every year, for five years.
From there, we can break it down to monthly, weekly, and daily action
items. These items could range from calling lenders to getting preapproved
for a loan to reaching out to three private lenders a week to analyzing one
deal a day. As we go through the book, you will fine-tune these action
items, but for now, a good place to start is to think of one task you can do
monthly, one task you can do weekly, and one task you can do daily.
For example, once a month, you could analyze a new market or
neighborhood. Once a week, you could submit an offer, and once a day,
analyze a deal. It sounds good in theory, but to make it happen, you will
want to assign yourself action items to complete and track these items.
Write things down. Set deadlines and lay out specific instructions. The
more detailed you are in your plan, the easier it will be to implement it.
This book is subtitled “90 Days to Your First Deal.” Some of you
will be able to accomplish the goals in that amount of time, but

Real Estate Rookie: 90 Days to Your First Investment by Ashley Kehr