Episode 52: Faith In The Small

Hi, I’m Michelle Bosch, real estate investor, mom, wife, and host of the “InFLOW” podcast. And I’m passionate about helping women invest in land and apartments. Join me each and every week for real estate investing strategies and interviews with thought leaders that will leave you inspired and ready to step into flow for inflows of cash, inflows of ease and inflows of grace in your life. Now, here on YouTube are the video versions of my podcasts and in order for you to get my latest information, please go ahead and subscribe. And now, let’s go.

Welcome to the “InFLOW” podcast. I’m your host, Michelle Bosch. I’m excited to come to you guys today and talk about a topic that is dear to my heart and that is to have faith in the small. And the inspiration for, I think this episode today is I just came back from a two-day event called Book to Brand event. I am in the process of writing a book and I am learning from one of the best out there and you know, decided to invest in myself, bank on myself. Go out there, New York City, travel, you know, hotel, make accommodations, logistic arrangements, everything, organized my life so that I could be at that two-day event, which just happened right now, Monday and Tuesday.

And one of the things that really struck me was an exercise that they had us do when…I think on day one and there was a prompt and it was a brand expert, that wanted to kind of give us a feeling for how creativity can kind of like find you and meet you if you’re willing to take baby steps of, you know, 10-minute chunks of dedicated time to writing you know, this book. And so, she gave us a prompt that said, “I remembered a moment when…” And the prompt was like, I remember this moment when something happened and she wanted us to go to that moment in our mind, in our heart, in our physical body and basically, based on that prompt, start writing whatever first came to mind. You know, no judgment, no overanalyzing, just basically following our intuition, our whispers, you know, that we all hear in our hearts and start writing.

And I remember started writing you know, I started writing about an experience that I had when we went ahead and decided we’re going to be involved in real estate. We are going to try and flip our first house and I remember us, you know, putting a house under contract that we had found here in the Garfield District here oft Phoenix, a historic district. And it was a copely junker, the house needed, you know, roof repairs, foundation repairs, a new kitchen, new flooring, new bathrooms. I mean, pretty much new everything. We didn’t know anything about anything regarding finding contractors, estimating repairs for those. But we kind of like did the best we could. We at least, you know, took some action and decided that you know, we were gonna put this under contract worst comes to worst, we could back out of that contract. You know, we made sure that there was a stipulation on our contract you know, that said that. And in any case, in the residential, you know, world you have, you know, a due diligence period where you of course, you don’t waive that contingency of the due diligence. You don’t waive, you know, financial contingency or at least I would advise you not to waive those because it proved really, really important for us.

So, I’m writing about this experience and you know, we put the newspaper ad, you know, I think it was like a handyman special, you know, we sell cash, assets, call me and my phone number. And we started getting calls and nobody wanted to buy that house that we had under contract. It was a small three-bedroom, I think, one-bedroom house. And it was like I said, it was a total junker. And I remember me thinking after we decided, okay, we’re going to get out of this deal. We’re not gonna pursue this. Nobody wants it. Nobody wants, there’s no one there that we can wholesale this to. We probably made a mistake on after repaired value and estimating, you know, what a wholesaler would want to purchase it, you know, from us for. And not enough, you know, leaving not enough, probably nit in the deal for the next person over or for the person that ultimately was going to do the rehab. So many things that we probably did wrong, but there was no one that wanted it, period. That’s the end of the story.

And we decided, okay, houses or at least this one house is not the way that we’re going to do any money on real estate. And we started…we stumbled into land and I know you guys have heard me a lot about, you know, our beginnings in the land space, but I don’t know that I’ve shared the story of this one junker and in just the stress of like, “Oh my gosh, we don’t have any credit. How are we going to get a loan for this?” And you know, “If we decide to go through with this on our own, how are we going to do the repairs? We don’t know anyone that can help us. We don’t have, you know, a rehabbing crew.” And so on and so forth. And going through all of that uncertainty and fear and then finding, you know, another asset class and also having uncertainty and fear, but more than anything, what I felt back then because I wasn’t new to real estate back home, you know, my father, an accomplished lawyer had made an investment in real estate that after he passed away, really took care of my mother and I financially.

And so, I wasn’t new to real estate. I knew the power of real estate and that was like I said, a commercial property. You know, Jack, we both had jobs, we both had MBAs. And then starting to look at the asset class of land for us seemed small, seemed like, oh my gosh, you know, we’ve done all of this and yet, look, we are not able to pull this off on a house. We’re going to have to, you know, look for an asset class that is much, much simpler. That doesn’t have all of these moving pieces and we’ll try to start there. But, what that story reminded me of was that back then we, in spite of thinking that that was a small way to start because we were both professionals and by all accounts successful, you know, but still living paycheck to paycheck. We had to have, with great credentials, with great education, we had to have faith in the small. We had to make a decision, you know, we had two choices. Wait, and waiting in my world is always a wrong decision. You know, you cannot adjust, you cannot pivot, you cannot find your way if you are stuck in paralysis analysis and not moving. If you’re in action, if you’re moving, you can gauge, okay, you know, whatever vehicle I’m on is not taking me in the right direction that I want to be. And so, we were in motion and we knew, you know, when we came across that first junker that we couldn’t wholesale, that that was a wrong place. And now we were in the land space and we were looking at buying our first piece of land and, you know, having that in the back of my mind thinking, you know, this is small, you know, this is small, but at the same time have an incredible faith in the small. And so, like I said, we had those two choices.

We could have faith in the small, or we could wait, and waiting is a trap. So, we just decided to have faith in the small, start co-creating, you know, what we could see the success, the financial success that I could see in my mind that I had visualized and imagined in my mind. And that’s another thing, I think it’s a little bit of a segway here that I wanna mention and it, perhpas this is too woo-woo but there’s two places. You know, when everyone talks about creating financial wealth and financial success, there’s two places that that success is being created. And the first place of that success is being created is in heaven or it’s in your imagination. You know, that’s the first place or the first dimension, let’s put it, it’s a spiritual dimension where it’s being created. And the second dimension where it’s being created, of course, it’s reality. It’s the physical space. You know, it’s the material space that we see. So, I know that, you know, I’m going on a tangent there, but yeah, that’s so important to understand that there’s two dimensions where you need to create, you know, that financial success.

So, I guess it’s not so much of a tangent because it totally relates to what I’m saying right now, which is to have faith in the small, to have faith in the things that you cannot see right now all through the end, but that are in hindsight, you know, you’ll be able to connect the dots and say, “Wow. This decision here, this commitment here,” you know, to take action, even though it was a baby step. It might have been investing in yourself. It might have been considering an opportunity. It might have been willing to discover, willing to listen to your heart, listen to your curiosity and explore a new opportunity, a new pathway, one that may not be well-traveled, you know, because everyone talks about, for example, house flipping.

That’s how we started, you know, and that’s how we ended up with that first junker that we couldn’t wholesale. Because when everyone thinks about real estate, the least thing that they think about is land, and it’s houses. That’s why we naturally did not start with, you know, with land. We started trying to flip you know, junker that didn’t work out. And so, now in 18 years, I’m sorry, later, you know, I can now in hindsight, connect the dots and start seeing how that faith in the small, in the small little…what I considered little deal, you know, that very first deal in land really turned into now a career of over 4,000 flips. Us being the premier experts when it comes to land investing. Us being, you know, one of the largest land investment companies in the country. Us moving up, you know, to holding a single-family home and now large apartment building portfolio of real estate assets that are paying for our lives, that are paying for, you know, our expenses, our day to day expenses and so on and so forth.

And so, it all comes from us having faith in the small, you know and having faith in that first kind of like, you know, spiritual dimension where we could see it and then us willing to, because of that faith and us seeing it, taking small baby actions, baby steps whether it was investing in ourselves, backing on ourselves. You know, following our intuition, going to that first tax lien, tax deed auction.thing, tax deed option, sending out letters, you know, for the very first time to vacant landowners, that old property taxes to then later discover that holy moly, it’s not just the people that are old, you know, that are owing delinquent taxes on land.

The ones that are interested in selling their land, that people that do not have any back taxes also want to sell their land. That nobody has approached them. That I am dealing in a complete blue ocean, you know, as blue as my shirt., ocen with no competition, with no one else, you know, really operating and working in the space. And it all started with, you know, having faith in the small.

So, I just wanted to, you know, jump on here and just spend a few minutes, talk to you guys about that and what things are you right now waiting on for things to be the right way, for, you know, the time to be the right one, for the promotion to be there or for having more time? You know, because if you think about it, any time we’re about to grow and do something scary, we always make these excuses and have these objections of time, money you know, “I don’t have enough money to do this or I don’t have enough time to do this or I’m too busy or I’m too much.” You know, I felt too much like, “Oh my gosh, I have a degree. I have an MBA.” You know, “I have this very professional career.” You know, if you’re a doctor, a lawyer, you know.

I just wanna remind you, my father was a very accomplished lawyer and it wasn’t his profession that kept us afloat, you know, financially for my mother and I. It was his small tiny action of having faith in himself, selling some land in the rural parts of the country, buying a commercial property in the city and you know, that financial decision, that small tweak in, you know, or wrinkle in the activities that he was doing on a daily basis back then, you know, was monumental. Ended up being monumental and affording us and me specially opportunities that I would have never guessed, you know, that I would have had if we would’ve relied on the salary of my mother as an elementary teacher back home.

And so, have faith in the small. Take action. If you want to join us, we are actually teaching a land profit lab starting February 3rd inside our Facebook group, the Land Profit Generator Group, you can go to lpglab.com. L-P-G Lab, and it’s going to be also on the show notes here and join us. We’re going to be teaching you everything that has to do with land flipping. We’re going to be giving you basically a crash course that is not just about us giving education but actually having you, setting you in motion, having you take baby steps each and every of those five days that you’re going to be with us to get you closer to your goal of your first, you know, investment, successful investment in real estate.

We’re all looking for that spread, for that profit between what we buy and what we sell it. And in land, it is so simple, so easy. And it doesn’t mean it doesn’t require hard work. You know, there is work to everything. Jack and I, let me tell you, we are both going to be of the same opinion that there are no shortcuts in life. That only hard work, you know, will pay off in the end, because that’s all we know. And so, it’s not that it doesn’t require the work, but compared to everything out there in real estate, this is relatively simple, relatively easy.

So, join us. Again, that is lpglab.com. I am excited to have you there and co-host that lab and until the next episode of “InFLOW,” you guys have a wonderful rest of your day. Thank you.

I hope this episode left you feeling inspired and ready to get inflows of cash, inflows of light, and the inflows of faith in your life. I welcome your reviews on iTunes. Please leave me a review and help me create an amazing community of women inflow.

Thank you as always for sharing your voice by going to michellebosch.com and joining the conversation about the show. And while you’re there, grab a copy of my “10 Commandments to Living a Life Inflow.” You can also follow me on Facebook at Michelle Bosch, and on Instagram at Michelle Bosch Official. Thank you very much and until the next one.