Age is No Barrier for House Investment (020)
Age is No Barrier for House Investment (020)
Transcript:
Steven Butala: Steve and Jill.
Jill DeWit: Happy Day.
Steven Butala: Welcome to the House Academy Show, entertaining real estate investment talk. I’m Steven Jack Butala.
Jill DeWit: And I’m Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sunny southern California.
Steven Butala: Today, Jill and I talk about how age is no barrier for house investing. Man, Isn’t that true?
Jill DeWit: You know what’s funny to me is I’m sure there’s people out there that think that it’s true, but it’s natural, but bums me out.
Steven Butala: What do you think they think? I’m too old?
Jill DeWit: Yeah.
Steven Butala: I’m too young.
Jill DeWit: Yep. I’m too young. No one’s going to take me seriously. I’m too old. No one’s going to take me seriously. Seriously.
Steven Butala: I don’t know. I don’t know. I wouldn’t stop me from doing anything.
Jill DeWit: Well, we’re going to talk about that.
Steven Butala: Before we get into it, let’s take a question posted by one of our members on the houseacademy.com online community. It’s free.
Jill DeWit: Mark asked, how much is The House Academy program and how long does it take to learn all this?
Steven Butala: Go ahead, Jill. I don’t know how much this stuff is.
Jill DeWit: I actually don’t know either.
Jill DeWit: Fuck. I will say this. We often have specials on things going on, so you can find them on the houseacademy.com website. How about this? Zip on over to houseacademy.com, go to join and you’ll find a whole menu item and it’s right there. And that’s one thing that I love about us and I know all of our community loves about us, that it’s right there. It’s no hidden. You’ll never find on a website of ours that if you have to go click here, schedule a call, and then on the phone call we might share with you how much it costs. And I hate that.
Steven Butala: Yeah, that’s just …
Jill DeWit: Isn’t that awful?
Steven Butala: That’s games and smoke and mirrors and silliness.
Jill DeWit: It’s silly. It’s right there.
Steven Butala: Just to get you on the phone to talk to a salesperson. We don’t play those games like that for anybody.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: It’s silly. It’s ridiculous. Disrespectful
Jill DeWit: And we don’t have any upgrade-y, “Oh, but for this, you got this.” And then, “Oh, but if you want that, you got to pay for this.”
Steven Butala: We have one product. We have one product for one price and a monthly access fee to the data that you need and some of the other tools.
Jill DeWit: Sheet male and all that.
Steven Butala: Yeah, the data in the mail that you need that you … Stuff you need to do that send offers out anyway. You’re going to pay for it anyway. And it’s twice as-
Jill DeWit: Cheaper through us.
Steven Butala: … way cheaper for us than anywhere. Jill and I have spent hours, hours and hours and hours, on all the companies that we have, making sure that we are the cheapest and the best in the industry. And if we’re not, we cancel it. Here’s an example. We used to have a company called Title Mind where we essentially outsourced while we became an escrow company.
Jill DeWit: In-house.
Steven Butala: Yeah, exactly.
Jill DeWit: In-house. Yeah.
Steven Butala: And we couldn’t do it better and cheaper than First American Title, so we stopped doing that. The other projects that we have at any of our websites, you can see the DeWit family companies down there. They’re all fantastic or you don’t see it there. You don’t know. Or we pull it down and we make it better and then we put it back up.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. And how long does it take? I’ve heard several of our members and usually they recommend, and I like this concept, to go through the whole program first. Just blow through it once. One sitting. And that will take you, The House Academy, 10, 12 hours roughly to get through the whole content. Then, watching your head then sleep on a little bit, go back through it. Then go segment by segment by segment. Things will start to really kick in a little bit more and you’ll figure out what areas come easy to you like, “Oh, I understand that. No problem.” And then all these areas you need to work on are like, “All right, I need to watch this one three times.” That’s, that’s the best way. So if you planned, I’d say, really two weeks, so your head more hurt. If you give yourself two weeks to get through the content twice, and I’m assuming you have a full-time job and a family and other things going on, I think that’s a really good timeline.
Steven Butala: And you should schedule it all out for yourself. That’s what I recommend in the program. So if you’re going to learn all this because you’ve got vacant Sundays of time, then schedule it out that way.
Jill DeWit: Yeah. Four hours every Sunday until it’s done kind of thing.
Steven Butala: Learning all of this, everything, you have to be incredibly organized or it’s just going to become an afterthought and you have to schedule everything out. Just like everything. That’s just how it is. I love that part of this. I love scheduling everything out and getting it all done.
Jill DeWit: I know you do.
Steven Butala: Today’s topic, age is no barrier for house investing. This is why you’re listening.
Jill DeWit: Okay. Let’s not ignore that comment by the way because it’s so funny how different we are. And it ties into some of this here too. It’ll tie into my last part of this topic. You are a scheduling fiend and I’d like to just have an idea of what I’m doing and then I move it around and it depending on the day that goes. And sometimes I wake up, maybe I’m a plan doing something that involves a big outdoor event and it’s raining. Come on. Maybe it’s a hike. This doesn’t happen very often, but-
Steven Butala: It’s raining.
Jill DeWit: … it’s raining. I’m going to reschedule it. Maybe the night before I might reschedule what I’m doing the next day because of how much fun I’m having the night before that happens. So, I like to leave a little bit of wiggle room in there. For you, it’s a lot of wiggle room. I find it funny. But no matter what, we can find a way to work together.
Steven Butala: We get a lot of stuff done because of scheduling. Amazing amount of work done. We own I don’t know how many companies now, how many lines of revenue, how many deals we do. And a lot of it’s because we have a great staff. And that didn’t happen on accident either. But I’ll tell ya, it’s a lot of, it’s just an immense amount of scheduling and over-scheduling. And then not communicating too much about it and just showing up for whatever’s in the schedule.
Jill DeWit: Well, not only that, but the talent.
Steven Butala: Well, that taps into age, so I don’t know. I think that it’s real hard to be in your 50s or 60s and not know a lot about something. Am I stepping on your toes here?
Jill DeWit: No, no, this is good.
Steven Butala: You’ve been doing something for 50 years, so hopefully you’ve better have become a master at it.
Jill DeWit: Right. And it’s legal.
Steven Butala: Where did that come from?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Steven Butala: Where does illegal come from?
Jill DeWit: I don’t know. I don’t know.
Steven Butala: You mean maybe you’re just really good at being a hooker?
Jill DeWit: No.
Steven Butala: Is that what you’re getting at?
Jill DeWit: Maybe they’re behind bars. I don’t know. You’re doing something for 50 years. I don’t know. All right, can I jump in?
Steven Butala: Yeah.
Jill DeWit: Okay.
Steven Butala: Yeah, for sure.
Jill DeWit: Age is no example in this industry and doing house transactions is kind of the topic. So we have examples, like we alluded to earlier, we have guys doing this in their twenties, couples in their twenties and then we have couples that are, gosh-
Steven Butala: Way retired.
Jill DeWit: … way retired. This is their got into it because what usually happens, I found a lot of them, they got into to find their retirement dream home and they realize, “Hey. By the way, that got us a retirement dream home at a great price. What if we do a couple of these on the side and help pay for our retirement dream home.” And they just back into it that way.
Steven Butala: This a fantastic retirement work day, average work day. I think this is great. This is what I plan on doing on my own retirement.
Jill DeWit: Exactly. Especially for those individuals, those of you that are retired, sitting on a chunk of cash and are looking for a way better way to place your money than whatever little interest or getting in a variety of other ways, so that’s a beautiful thing. So that’s my number one example. I have examples, young and old.
Jill DeWit: Also, I was thinking age doesn’t matter because talent exists regardless. There are people we all know that are just born with data and spreadsheets and numbers. Remember that show Numbers? You’d see all the numbers come together and just fit for him. Some people see it no problem. Some people were like, “Oh, that makes my head hurt.” Yeah. They can’t look at a spreadsheet with too many numbers that can’t look at pages with too many words, so there’s different talents.
Jill DeWit: Also experience. So whether you’re young or old, your talents are your talents, period. Also for a lot of us older … Hate to use the word older, but let’s just say more than 30 or you know what I mean?
Steven Butala: Just say it.
Jill DeWit: All right. For a lot of us that have some experience in other careers before doing this. Your life experience, you already know, it brings so much value to anything that you do. You know how to read people, you’ve been through ups and downs, you’ve seen businesses start and fail and thrive and all kinds of things. So there’s so much value that you bring based on that.
Jill DeWit: And then my final thing about age doesn’t matter. Wherever you are, whatever you are missing, if you really want to kill it, you will sit down, put it down on paper and find that partner. And that’s, I think, the best way because there’s some things you can learn and teach yourself and there’s things that you just can’t. As much as you want to, you’re not going to be that good and you have to face that fact. And the best thing you can do is do like I did and find a partner who has the same goals that you want also, but they fill in that missing piece.
Steven Butala: So I am quite often a victim of age discrimination and it’s actually a pretty humorous thing for me to go through. I smile every time it happens. I was born in 1966 and all through my toddlerhood and grade school years, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were creating the computer industry as we know it. So right about the time I go to seventh grade, they’ve got computer classes which I take and develop and develop and develop. Fast forward to college and post-college where the vast majority of the people in the workforce don’t have a computer on their desk yet, but I do. So I’m that very, very, very first generation of people my age who understand computers. And then, of course, the internet comes and cell phones and not necessarily in that order and the whole thing as in here … Again, fast forward to where we are today.
Steven Butala: I very much embraced this stuff and not everybody my age does. Not everybody took to it. And in fact, if you’re two to three years older than I am, we have a lot of friends that are two or three or four years older than I am. They missed that window and they don’t understand except for like what they have to do at work on a computer, don’t understand it. So, young people constantly locked me into, “Well, let me help you with that.” They just don’t think that I understand how to use a computer when in fact, I was programming when they were long before they were born. So it cracks me up every single time. I usually take it out of their hand and say, “Let me show you exactly what the back end of this thing looks like.”
Steven Butala: So if you’re older and you’re struggling with computers long before you buy into anything like selling houses or buying houses or anything, you gotta learn how to use a computer. And you’ve got to learn how to put somebody in your life, like Jill said, that does know how to use the computer. And so all this age experience that you have, you guys can both win. We have a lot of people that come to our live event that are sitting together, two guys, one in their thirties and one in their one who’s 65 and working great together and smashing it out of the park. So, age doesn’t matter and there’s nothing that, from this relationship/partnership standpoint, in my opinion, that can’t be overcome.
Jill DeWit: I could not add anything more to that. That was beautiful.
Steven Butala: It’s true.
Jill DeWit: Thank you.
Steven Butala: Hey, we know your time’s valuable. Thanks for spending some of it with us today. Join us next time for another interesting episode.
Jill DeWit: And we answer your questions posted on our online community at houseacademy.com. It is free.
Steven Butala: You were not alone in your real estate ambition.
Jill DeWit: I was mesmerized at what you were saying.
Steven Butala: Why?
Jill DeWit: Well I just cause your way of explaining it is a little bit different and it was great and I like how you brought in, that which is true, that’s the value of doing … We haven’t done any live events for House Academy yet. I don’t even have any scheduled, but I know it’s coming. We waited a long time for Land Academy before people were beating down the door saying, “You got to have a live event. We got to do this. We need to know we’re not alone out here,” so I’m waiting. I want to get our membership up a little bit and I will do a House Academy live event, so sit tight. But it is such a great way to make a connection and get a partnership. And if anything, maybe meet your money guy face to face.
Steven Butala: Yeah, exactly.
Jill DeWit: Or a money guy face to face. Maybe it’s us. So, a lot of value there. Thank you for saying it.
Steven Butala: Let’s just be honest. I didn’t finish saying it. This is all technology- driven 20 years ago. If you’re listening or watching this and you’re my age or older, you know how hard it was to sell a house before the internet. The MLS was in a phone book sized book, and you’d look through your books and they’re three weeks old, eight weeks old. And then you know how long it took, before email, how to mail something or FedEx your documents and stuff before DocuSign, so that’s not a deterrent. That’s experience. And so you should be able to really say, “Well, wait a minute. We used to use to take two months to do this. Now we can do it in two minutes. All right, well let’s just kick it up a few notches,” because the concepts never change.
Jill DeWit: Exactly.
Steven Butala: I’m going on too much.
Jill DeWit: Great. Thank you. Wherever you’re watching, wherever you are listening, please subscribe and rate us there.
Steve and Jill: We are Steve and Jill. Information-
Jill DeWit: and inspiration …
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