Hello everyone and Welcome to another episode of Selling Greenville what I like to call your favorite real estate podcast here in the greater Greenville area I'm your host as always Stan McCune realtor here in Greenville County South Carolina and I am happy to let you know in case you didn't know that all of my contact information is in the show and if you need a realtor if you want to talk to a realtor if you have any real estate needs at all let me know I would be glad to help you I'd be glad to at least talk about it you'll find that I'm not a very pushy person if you don't want me to to talk to you I won't talk to you I'm not going to be blowing up your phone and sending you text messages asking for referrals every few minutes that is not the type of person that I am but I would love to talk to you if you have any real estate needs and if you like this podcast at all and I hope you do please make sure that you are subscribed to it make sure you don't miss future episodes which will 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estate and especially when it comes to flipping houses that's where people really get into all these different formulas and different numbers and everything has to be exact but one thing that usually gets left by the wayside when people are assessing real estate is they don't consider the value of time and we've heard of course the very very famous phrase time is money there's a reason why that phrase is famous it's because there are so many layers to it there are so many aspects in which time is money and because that's true we know that it's true on multiple multiple aspects of the phrase times as money is true it's kind of nearsighted to be crunching numbers on real estate transaction and not to factor in the time element of it now of course some people will factor in time from the standpoint of holding real estate of course we know that that that is an important thing how long you hold your real estate means your holding costs are higher the costs of capital that it takes to to have that piece of of property the aspects of you're paying more for insurance you're paying more for taxes blah blah blah I'm not talking about that okay people factor that in all the time I'm talking about your time personally the value of your time as a person and as it relates to real estate transactions real estate Investments that you're doing your time is worth money it and it has value and that should be accounted for and this is something that's a really big deal to me when I'm assessing a real estate deal for instance that I'm looking at acquiring and as probably anyone that listens to this knows I do some real estate investing on the side it's not a by any stretch a full-time gig it's something I relegate to the side I actually really don't I don't enjoy a lot of aspects of of real estate investing and so I tried to keep it on the back burner as much as possible but it just doesn't make sense for me to operate in the space and not to use the knowledge that I have to benefit myself and so when I have a deal that my clients pass up on that makes sense for me I will take advantage of that deal now when it comes to time here is here's kind of the way I'm going to to phrase this if time is currency okay if time is money if time is currency then I want you to think about it in this way you're spending a lot of it from a pretending that it's currency you're spend spending a lot of it doing the things that you hate and let's say that you spend 5 hours a week doing the things that you hate you're spending it it may only be 5 hours a week but in reality it is much much more than that in the long run in terms of how you feel in terms of how it impacts your life if you're doing something that you love from a from a time is money currency standpoint you're not spending anything you're doing something you're you love you're you're essentially using time and getting back exactly what you want exactly proportional value for the time that you're spending so so you can say there the other way to say that is that you're not spending anything and if you're just doing something you're okay with to me I I see that as you're simply working you know what's a job a job is something I'm okay with a job is something I don't love it's something I don't hate it's just something I have to do that and I'm talking in in you know just broad I'm painting a broad picture here that's essentially a job at that point you're doing something that you're you're just okay with you don't love it you don't hate it and that is kind of that will kind of help you to start thinking in terms of okay how where am I going with this how am I how am I approaching this so I think that there are kind of four main factors that I think of and and you might think of more if you do please let me know I'd be I'd really love to to hear what you guys think about this I think of four main factors when it comes to time that assesses that kind of determines the value of the time a and that allows us to then give it to assign value to it okay there's the enjoyment factor which we just kind of I just kind of introduced you to the enjoyment Factor how much do you enjoy what you're doing you're spending time doing something do you really enjoy it okay enjoyment Factor there is the stress factor how much stress does it bring to your life does it cause you to lose sleep does it cause you to to have emotional issues you got to go to your therapist you got to take anti-depressants I don't know what type of stress does it bring you so that's the stress factor there is the third one the negative lifestyle factor is what I'm calling it I had a hard time naming this one but we'll just call it the negative lifestyle factor and that is when it's taking you away from things that you want to do right so let's say that you would really like to watch the Super Bowl but man I you've got to be over there at the house flip that you're working on you know rewiring that house or you're getting phone calls during the Super Bowl from your contractor saying hey we got a problem here so there is a negative lifestyle Factor and then fourthly there is a missed opportunities Factor so as you're doing this project over here how many other opportunities are you missing out on and and let me clarify one very important thing here I'm not talking about missing opportunities because you don't have enough money because that's what happens right that for a lot of us we might be tapped out financially whether we're actually tapped out or whether we're just at our comfort level Max we don't have any more money to allocate towards real estate and so opportunities come up and it's like ah I got to pass up on that that's not what I'm talking about we're talking strictly from a Time standpoint so because you're so busy doing this other thing that now you're not able to Avail yourself to other opportunities that are out there you have the money let's just assume for the sake of argument you have the money you just don't have the time and so there are missed opportunities that we have to account for so these are four factors that we need to assess in order to determine what is happening with our time how much value is are we surrendering how much currency how much time currency are we spending in real estate and and of course you can apply this to other things Beyond real estate but I'm thinking about this mostly of course from a real estate perspective and of course through the lens of Greenville so here's the way I'm thinking about this I think we need to judge these four categories put them on a scale I've actually got a spreadsheet in front of me and I've got these these four categories on the left enjoyment Factor stress factor negative lifestyle Factor and Miss opportunities Factor I've got those on the left column and then I've got three more columns to the right one column is love SL low and I'll explain this in a second the other one is it's work slm mediand the other one is hate SL High and then I've got zeros in the love SL low column T in the its work slm medium column and 20s in the hate SL High column all right so here's how this works basically for things that are positive for you so if if you really enjoy what you're doing let's say that you're flipping a house and you just love it it energizes you it brings you so much enjoyment you look forward to it every aspect of it it is just brings you life brings you vitality in essence you're not spending time currency yeah you're spending time but it's not you're you're you're spending your time doing something that you love so that's a good use of your time for the sake of of what we're talking about here we're going to say that you have spent zero time dollars because you're getting for your time something that you love so that is in the love/ low column you love it it a Z okay the lower the number the better that indicates how much you've spent quote unquote you haven't spent anything let's say that you on the enjoyment Factor you're like you know what it's it's okay it's it's just kind of like a second job for me all right at that point we're putting a 10 that is and and I'll explain how these values get assigned how it works later but it's a 10 and then if you hate it all right and you're just like I hate every aspect of this I do it for other reasons I do it for the money but I absolutely hate it from the time I purchased the house until the time I've sold it every step along the way I hate it's a 20 so the lower the better and the higher the worse from zero the scale is basically from 0 to 20 now we've got the stress factor let's say it brings you you say it doesn't bring me any stress your stress is low that would be a zero and of course if you're if you're doing this at home if you're pulling out a spreadsheet and you're creating this yourself I don't necessarily think it it has to be 0o 10 and 20 I mean put it on a scale maybe it's really like a five it's not no stress but it's also not like work level stress so you say it's somewhere in between that it's a five it's a five okay great put it as a five it's work level stress that's a 10 it's like super duper stressed causing you to lose sleep that's a 20 negative lifestyle factor it's taking you away from from things that you want to do let's say that it's not and and that can be from for a variety of reasons maybe you have outsourced everything to the point that you actually don't need to be there at all you're hardly even involved you barely even know what's going on now that that's rare it's it's rare that you would be completely unplugged from it but let's just say for the sake of argument that that's the case that would be if it's not taking you away from anything that you want to do that would be a zero if it's taking you away from from things to the extent that work does again comparing it to to just having a normal 8 to five job that would be a 10 and if it's like controlling your life like you're over there all day all night for like a long period of time that would be a 20 all right it would be high high on that negative lifestyle Factor scale and then the missed opportunities Factor and this one's a little bit harder to assess you you've just got to be honest with yourself are you still availing yourself to opportunities are you still looking are you still spending the time to to go look at properties for instance or to be networking to try to to make those connections with people that can help you in that way doing things to try to to get more financing to try to to try to raise more Capital all these things if what you're doing real estate wise is not taking away at all from that it's not causing you to miss any opportunities and that would be a zero if it's again work level type of of U of or medilevel is taking you away it's taking you away from you know it's maybe giving you 50% capacity let's just call it that it's giving you 50% capacity from what you would normally have if you didn't have a single project going on that would be a 10 on this scale and then if it's basically you're just hunkered down you can't even think about any other opportunities out there then it's a 20 on this scale now here's how this works the scale essentially think of it kind of like a work week if you go through these four things and and here's what you can do you can try to extrapolate let's just say a house flip for instance you can try to extrapolate roughly speaking what the value would be for all of these in a house flip but you might even break it down even further to the different parts of the house flip the acquiring of the property the doing the work itself then the marketing the property to sell and you could find a bunch of other SE subcategories in there you could look at how you spend your time on all of those things to value your time and to value how your time is being spent in those different Pursuits that way you can approach it from that standpoint but you can also just take the whole thing and just try to figure it out as you know one big enchilada so to speak so let's say that you plug in all these different numbers you say enjoyment Factor I don't really enjoy it it's kind of like work to me that's a 10 okay stress you know it brings me a little bit of stress that's a five all right now we're up to 15 negative lifestyle yeah it takes away a little bit from from my lifestyle not a whole lot it it's not the equivalent of working a a you know a full-time job that's another five now we're at 20 missed opportunities well maybe you're you're really having to to hunker down you can't really focus on more than one thing at a time we're going to call that we'll call that a a 15 okay because you can't really you you will start to get stressed out if you have other opportunities that you're having to look at so that's the 35 the scale is the way the scale works at least the way I've designed it is that 40 is straight there in the middle and this makes common sense if you're at a 40 that means in essence that your your time is being spent kind of like just a second job and so at 35 it's a little bit less than that okay it's a little bit more enjoyable than just working a second job if you get over 40 now you're talking about something that's you're spending more time currency than you are at a job you're spending too much time currency if it's over a 40 and so you can apply this to different projects as well you look at a project and you say you know what this project I am going going to spend a lot of time here this is going to be me spending 40 hours a week here it's going to be stressful it's going to take me away from things it's going to cause me to miss out on opportunities you need to assign a value to that now let me say this okay I'm not saying that just because something is and maybe I I made it sound this way before and I apologize if I did just because something is over a 40 on this scale doesn't mean it's a bad opportunity you just have to understand that at that point you're spending a lot of money in terms of time currency okay over a 40 you're spending a lot of money now maybe you're getting back so much money on your investment that it just makes sense you know just like working overtime at work it just makes sense to get that time and a half or whatever the case may be I personally I don't want to get over 40 I want it to be lower than that and I would actually take lower margin types of projects in terms of house flips and whatnot in order to keep that number below 40 but we just need to be honest about the time that we're spending and so you can look at a project and and determine that and to determine factor in it's not just about the money okay if it were just about the money then this would be a whole lot simpler but you have to find a way to assess your time as well and this is one way that I think we can do that and and maybe you don't want to plug in a spreadsheet like I've done just think about how much you enjoy it how much stress it brings to your life how much it's going to cause you to miss out on things you want to do and how much it's going to cause you to miss out on other opportunities and you can kind of do that math in your head to some extent now a lot of people if they really really just love house flipping or whatever type of real estate project that they're doing they might be willing to surrender some of these other things and maybe for you you can Tinker with the scale and maybe give more weight to one thing than another this is just how I've done it and this is just to give you an example to start you thinking about this concept of valuing your time not just being focused on all these different rules for how much money you make in a real estate transaction but to actually give value to the time being spent as well because there is value to that and that needs to be accounted for now in part two this was part one of of this time value type of concept in part two I have an actual formula that I'm going to give to you guys and that's going to be next week we'll talk through an actual formula that I use that I develop that I think is going to be helpful helpful in a way for us to determine whether whether our time is being used in a good way the value of it how to how to think through it and again this is all subjective because at the end of the day you may be willing to make time sacrifices for money sacrifices and there are different times where that can make sense but I want us to to Think Through real estate more holistically it's not just about money it is also about our lifestyles I hope that was helpful for you guys just reminder my contact information is all in the show notes please rate review subscribe download all those things for this podcast I appreciate you guys I hope to hear from you soon and I hope you stay safe [Music]