Endgame

My brother Rex called me up a couple of weeks ago to talk business. Nothing specific, but he seems to be interested in doing business with me in the future. I have no qualms about doing business with him, but it did make me think about my future in this business. Let's say that I succeed at this real estate business (and it looks as if I will) and start making six figures a year with millions in assets. What do I do then?

Firstly, I'll make this statement: my illness will come back. It could be next year, five years, or even ten years from now, but it will be back. Full remission means nothing to me, and statistics prove that it will most likely come back in some form at some point. When it does return, I'm not fighting it. I fought it before because I was scared of dying and not accomplishing what I set out to do. Now that I have survived it, I have an extremely different view of life. Nothing about dying scares me, except for dying a failure. I won't go into the philosophy or my thoughts on it, only that I won't fight it and it will eventually kill me.

With that said, I plan to stop working jobs by the end of 2012. By the end of 2013 I'm hoping to be making at least 8k a month off real estate alone. By 2014 I should be preparing my exit strategy for getting the fuck out of Smalltown. I will most likely hire a secretary who will handle my affairs in Smalltown. She (and she MUST be a she) will be doing everything that I'm doing now: renting out apartments, coordinating workers and work orders, collecting rent from the PO Box, filing paperwork, and so on. I'll pay her a decent salary a month, although I don't know if I'm going to do it on the books. I'll train her, set up an office in one of my properties, and let her get to work. I'll stop by and check in at some point each month once it's all up and running, just to make sure it's being run well. The secretary will be screened heavily, as she will be the most important person at that point.

I will also reserve a unit in one of my properties for a handyman. He will live rent free and provide repair services on my properties. I've seen Sha try to do this many times and fail miserably at it. The handyman always ends up half-assing the job then complain that he's doing work for nothing, so I'll have to figure out how to create a better system. The handyman has to feel as if he's getting paid even though he'll statistically be cheap labor. I have time to figure that whole thing out so I'm not worried about that.

Once everything is set up I'll definitely have alot of free time on my hands. I'm sure I'll buy more properties, make more money, and employ more people, but by that time I should be making enough to hire a supervisor to take care of all that. My business model is designed in a way that I will merely be the "eye in the sky" while everyone does the work that I'm doing now. I will, of course, leave a large margin for error. The more people that get involved, the more things that can go wrong.

Maybe I'll do nothing. I'm not a traveler so I won't be traveling much. Maybe a trip here and there, but nothing big. Maybe I'll do nothing. Maybe I'll wake up in the morning, eat Lucky Charms, watch some cartoons, play some video games, then go back to sleep. I'll wake up in the afternoon, eat lunch, play some video games, then go back to sleep. I'll wake up in the evening, eat dinner, play some video games, have sex, then sleep. Sounds like a plan to me.

Seriously, I don't know what I'm going to do when 2014 ends. The only thing I know for sure is that I will never work for anyone again. My brother has always been smarter and more creative than me, so I'm pretty sure he'll have good ideas. My only requirement for his ideas is that they don't include me learning or doing much. Something tells me that, whatever my endgame is for this business, it shouldn't be anything that puts me back to working "the grind". Life is far too short.