There are two wolves in you. One is fear, the other is focus. Which wins?

The one you feed.

I believe the time to feed focus is long overdue. Specifically focusing on something other than fear. Something actually healthy for once. I understand people's concern with what has been going on and I don't want to underplay COVID's risks to certain segments of the populous but at this point it is time for a reset.

These past two years have been a good environment to be putting our heads down and building, like we have been doing. We have been immeasurably lucky with our timing. Imagining our lives trying to travel during the COVID-era within a world operating under tyrannical conditions, with closed borders and forced lockdowns becoming the norm, would've been far from enjoyable. We travel for freedom and the past two years have been anything but that. Couple everything above with us barely scraping by and being "starving" YouTubers sounds like an involuntary struggle perpetuated by scarcity. No thanks. We'd much rather our struggles be voluntary while sacrificing short-term pain for long-term abundance. That is our lives now with building a rental property portfolio to get back to sailing full-time again.

Our living quarters for 2019-2021

We have multiplied our freedom tickets by over 5x since we left YouTube by way of voluntary discomfort, hard work and luck. We got lucky due to our timing with buying our first property in early 2019, prior to the recent real estate boom, and lucky again with locking in our refinance in the summer of 2021 with interest rates at their all-time lows. Our first property, the one we have called home for 3 years now, we purchased for $205,000 through a combination of cash savings (mostly from our boat sale) and a literal boatload of short-term debt. We lived in the property for near the entirety of the full-gut renovation. It was challenging but not as uncomfortable as living on a boat on land while renovating it.

Fast forward to today. After spending $175,000 on the rehab of our 1st property over the course of 2.5 years, we were appraised at $600,000 allowing us to cash-out every dollar we spent on the home and a nice chunk of cash on top. All of this was tax-free and at a 30-year rate of 2.5%. We then took the extra cash we made from our 1st DIY BRRRR property (Buy, renovate, rent, refinance, repeat) and bought a 1920s fixer-upper log cabin in the mountains. Our plan is to do the same thing again but this time around at much smaller $ figures with less short-term debt. The reason for wanting to size down is due to 2 factors.

The first being conviction. Buying in late 2018/ early 2019, it was easy to formulate an investment thesis surrounding an eventual supply squeeze happening in the future as we haven't been building enough homes for a decade. Couple this with demographics showing Millennials coming into prime buying age and you have the market we are currently dealing with and likely to deal with for the coming years. Demand is far out weighing supply. The second factor being trying to scale our real estate business. We are under contract to buy a 3rd property, in close proximity to our first. This is all terrifying to us trying to buy multiple fixer-uppers for cash but we know this beats the hell out of the fear resulting from analysis paralysis and scarcity. We've been there. That was us in 2017 doing YouTube full-time, building no wealth and surviving. Back then we were feeding fear. Now we’re feeding focus by buying property for 70 cents on the dollar and force appreciating our properties through extensive DIY renovations.

Hard for housing prices to go down when we can’t meet demand.

Being rational throughout this whole Clusterfuck-19 has served us well. With the gift from nature that is omicron providing long overdue herd immunity and, on an individual basis, vaccines helping protect those who need it against serious illness and hospitalization, there is no reason we can't get on with our lives again. The question that takes up way too much rent in my head everyday is why haven't we gone back to normal yet? I don't have these answers because I'm not interested in trusting the "science" nor am I interested in engaging in most conspiracy. Although some conspiracy tastes a lot like truth nowadays.

I take issue with the current state of things because I want the average person to be able to pursue freedom. I know having daily fear shoved down our throats from our institutions results in the same world of scarcity as having your money lose 10% of its value each year. Inflation & COVID are massive freedom reducers. These two force you to feed fear and forget all about focus.

How hard have they made it for us focus on anything other than dodging COVID the past 2 years? With daily death counts thrown in our faces on every screen in our lives, how could this all not negatively effect us?

I think the past decade has painted the most convincing picture of what the most cherished commodity of the modern day is - attention. Think about the media playbook for 2020 until now. We went from WW3 with Iran to Covid to BLM back to Covid and now to Ukraine. Eventually we have to ween our corrupt media/social media off of our constant attention.

In a world heavily overdosed on fear, it pays to be the focused one. It’s long overdue to flip the script. It’s been two years. It’s time to flatten the fear.