Charles upgrading the kitchen of the first house we flipped

I have identified and put in writing a number of goals for the rest of my life.  One of the goals that I  identified is to flip one house a year.  We flipped our first in 2011.  Since then, we have looked at many houses and put several offers in, yet haven’t secured another house to flip.

It could get discouraging and it would be easy to give up, but remembering the specific goal… to flip one house a year… keeps me going.  Through this process, we are learning a lot as well.  We are learning how to make decisions faster, how to more quickly estimate the costs for the upgrades on the homes we look at, and much more.  So even though we haven’t yet obtained another house to flip, we are learning things that will make us better at this.

Benefits to Writing Down Goals

• Goals help you to remember what’s important to you.  Working towards your goals assures that you define your life, and not letting circumstances define your life for you.
•  Specific, concrete and measurable goals are motivating:  For example, knowing it’s already April and we haven’t yet obtained a house for 2012 motivates me to keep intentionally working at this.
• Goals help you to accomplish more than you would without them.  We may find out that flipping a house/ year isn’t an attainable goal.  On the other hand, we will probably end up flipping more houses with that goal in place than if we hadn’t ever set a goal at all. You’ve heard the saying: “Shoot for the moon!  You may not make it but at least you will have reached the stars!”  So true.
• You learn things about yourself and /or acquire new skill sets as you work towards your goals:  As someone with a very high value on being a lifelong learner, this is a pretty big deal to me.

Flipping our first house enabled a trip to Europe with the family!

The reason for the goal of flipping one house a year?  It’s because I have another goal in mind! And that is to travel!  I have a list of countries that I want to visit in my lifetime, and since money doesn’t grow on trees…

Today we put in another offer on a house and now we wait and see.  In the meantime, I have other goals to work on.