Sixty-nine. Counting from the day this episode comes out, Friday, October twenty-third, that's how many days are left in this year.

Welcome back to the Cashflow Diary podcast. I'm J. Massey.

Maybe you said this would be the year. The year you got ahead of the bills. The year you stopped checking your balance before you swiped your card at the grocery store. The year you started something of your own.

And here we are at the end of October. For a lot of us, January you and October you are living the same month.

Today I want to talk about why that happens, using one idea from my old courses that I still teach. You can decide, or you can default. Either way, a decision gets made. Then, if you run rentals or you're thinking about it, we'll look at what deciding looks like inside that business. And I'll give you something to do with the next sixty-nine days.

Back in twenty thirteen, in our Cashflow Foundation course, I said something I still believe.

We don't like making decisions. That's why we procrastinate. And so what we end up doing is we let time make our decisions. That's the funny thing about time. It'll make decisions for you when you fail to take control of it.

Think about what that looks like in real life. You don't decide to stay in the job you dread. You decide to think about it after the holidays. You don't decide to keep living one paycheck at a time. You just never decide anything else, and the calendar keeps turning pages.

In another training I put it this way. Sometimes we don't make a choice, which by itself is a choice, and therefore we experience things by default.

Your phone has default settings. So does your money. The day the paycheck lands, the day the rent leaves, the amount that comes in and the amount that goes out. If you never touch the settings, they stay right where they were. And next October looks a lot like this one.

So why do we wait? I teach a picture for this.

Draw a line for where you are right now. That's your reality. Draw another line above it for what you want. The space between those two lines is pain.

When the lines are close together, there's a little pain, and a little pain doesn't move anybody. It's like a small headache. You think, eh, it's not that bad. You drink some water, you go to bed, and you hope it's gone in the morning. You didn't change anything.

Then usually one of two things happens.

The first one, nobody picks. The bottom drops out. You get laid off. Or you hear bad economic news, you open your statement, and your four oh one k became a two oh one k. Your reality drops, the gap gets big, and all of a sudden you're very motivated.

The second one, you get to choose. You move the top line. You get honest about what you want, and you make it bigger and clearer than a vague someday. Now the gap is big enough to move you, and you didn't need a layoff to get there.

So you've got a choice. You can wait for your reality to decline. Or you can purposely increase your dream. One of those costs a lot more than the other.

Here's an exercise from that same course. Get a sheet of paper. Write these questions in the first person, with the word I, and and be truthful with yourself.

What would I lose if I don't do this?

If I don't reach this, how will I feel about myself?

What will my family lose?

That last one hits hard for a lot of people. In that course I talked about how common this is. Not only do people have their own dreams to worry about, but their parents are getting older, and they have to take care of their parents too. It all lands at the same time, and what they're earning doesn't cover the whole gap.

Jim Rohn had a line I quoted in that course. Don't wish it were easier. Wish you were better.

The answers on that sheet of paper are your reasons. Keep the paper. You'll want it on the days you don't feel like it.

Now, a lot of people say the hardest part is getting started. I think the hardest part is staying started.

You can get started in a weekend. You go to a seminar, you get all excited, great, you're started. The question is, come Monday, are you still started?

When you work a job, there's accountability built in. If you're not there at eight, somebody notices at eight oh one. When you build something of your own, the alarm still goes off at eight. But nobody calls at eight oh one to ask where you are. Your dreams are going to call, but they call in a quieter way, and you have to learn to hear them.

So I teach people to change what counts as a work day. A work day gets measured by the result you produce. In one lesson I said, if you add five new contacts to your database, and you do it at ten p.m. at night, that could be when you work that day.

And you don't have to be perfect. In an eight-hour workday, as long as you get five hours right, you're good. Pick the result. The day is done when the result is done.

So what does that look like in a rental business?

For me, the second stream came from rentals. Mostly as an operator, through rental arbitrage. That means leasing a property with the owner's permission and renting it out furnished.

A rental is a business. It takes work up front, it takes money, and it can lose money. It's one way to build a stream, and it isn't the only way. This is education, not financial advice.

Defaults show up in this business too. People wait to find the perfect property before they've learned how to run the numbers. They wait to call a property owner until they feel ready. They wait to follow up because the owner said, maybe next month. Every one of those is a choice made by default.

So use the result-based work day. Early on, the results that move a rental business are numbers and conversations. Run the numbers on one property. Have one conversation with a property owner, or with someone who already does this. Follow up with one person who said maybe.

And keep the timeframe honest. I've told people for years, there's no such thing as unrealistic goals, just unrealistic timeframes. One result a day for sixty-nine days is sixty-nine results. That's numbers on a stack of properties and a handful of real conversations. By January, you'll know whether this business fits you.

Okay, here's your homework. It takes about ten minutes, and you can do it tonight.

First, write down one thing you want to be different by December thirty-first. Make it specific enough that you could check it off.

Second, write the next step. Just the next one.

I made this point in a training on procrastination. You need the next step, because that's what a GPS does. It gives you the next turn. Make that turn, and it gives you the one after that. You can leave your driveway without seeing the whole route.

Third, pick your daily result. The one thing that makes a day count. Five contacts. The numbers on one property. One follow-up.

And then start. I've asked the same question in my courses since twenty thirteen. When do you want to earn more money? The answer is now o'clock. When do you want to be free of debt? Now o'clock. It's the only time you and I really have.

Sixty-nine days. You can let time make that decision for you, or you can make it yourself.

In that old course I said, at the end of the year, you want to look back and see that your goal list is more of a checklist. One result a day is how January you and October you stop living the same month.

If you'd like a second set of eyes on your situation, your numbers, and whether a rental business fits your next step... that's exactly what our complimentary one-on-one diagnostic call is for. Go to cashflowdiary.com/diagnostic. And we'll look at it together.

Okay, that's it for today. Write the one thing, write the next step, and pick your daily result. I'll see you on the next one.

I'm J. Massey. And this has been the Cashflow Diary podcast.

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Quick note... this episode was voiced with my licensed AI voice, built from my own recordings.