Most people have a cost mindset where they’re always looking at the cost of things and they often say to themselves things like, “I can’t afford to do that.” That is not a very positive affirmation to use, and it comes from a place of scarcity.
Time is one of your most precious resources, we all only have a certain amount of time. We don’t know how much that is and once it’s gone, it’s gone. You can’t get it back. Whereas money is a different resource. You might have a limited amount of money right now, but in the future, you can always make a lot more money, particularly if you are successfully investing in property.
The problem is most people just don’t value their time and because they don’t value their time, that holds them because of this cost mindset instead of a value mindset.
My Personal Experience
At first, most people start investing in property and they manage their properties. I certainly did this when I started investing, and I did it for several reasons. I didn’t want to pay a letting agent 10% to manage properties when I thought I could do it myself, I thought I could probably do a better job than most letting agents, and I thought it’d be good to get to meet my tenants. I could tell you that third reason, the novelty soon wears off, but the main reason was I didn’t want to pay someone else to do it, something that I could do myself. Now that works to a certain extent, you can certainly manage a few properties, very much part-time. I was working at Cadbury’s as a full-time, first graduate, then a senior manager. I had my part-time business, running student nightclub events. I didn’t have a lot of spare time, but I had enough to manage my properties.
Why I Stopped Managing My Properties
As I bought more and more properties, I noticed I was spending more and more time managing and less and less time buying. And you make the money when you are buying properties, not managing them. I took the step to bring someone else in some letting agents to manage my properties for me. And although I took a dip in income, it cost me some money. It also gave me back a huge amount of my time, and that’s an important distinction. I probably got that distinction when I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki. I want you to listen very carefully to this when you understand this saying, it’s very, very powerful.
“Poor people will spend their time to save money.”
This is a poor mindset, whereas people with a rich mindset will spend money to save time because they recognize that time is such a precious resource, and you can always earn more money in the future when you start a business. Investing in property is a business, if you start a business as a solopreneur, it’s just you and you must do everything in that business, but the key is to understand when you should outsource things. Now in our property business, we outsource a lot of things. We outsource our accountancy, our legal, our lettings management, our maintenance, our refurbishment. I even outsource someone to walk around and check all our properties once a month. you might think, why do you need to do that? Well, it’s not a cost. It’s an investment because we need to know that our properties are being looked after. By getting someone else to do it, I save myself time, but I also make sure that it’s done consistently across all our properties.
So the key here is when you’re thinking about your property investing, when you’re thinking about your life, think about how you can spend money to save time and also to think about how you can outsource tasks so you can focus on what you’re good at, what you enjoy doing and what makes you money. Because if you can do that, that’s when you’ll accelerate your property journey. I hope you found that useful, and if you did, please do share it with other people.
Remember, if you have a cost mindset, it can slow your growth, but if you have a value mindset, there’s no limit to what you can achieve.
