In the realm of achieving Financial Independence (FI), it does not necessarily equate to you being a bum and sit on the couch all day long doing nothing. As a matter of fact, the truth is no matter how you achieved FI, you will still need to be managing something. It can be managing your real estate portfolio, managing your property managers, managing your flipping business, or anything in between. In order for you to not transforming your FI into another W2 job that ties you down, it is important that you figure out a way to run your real estate business from anywhere in the world.

Technology

The world is a connected world nowadays, so barring the fact that you are camping out at the Amazon forest with 0 satellite reception, you can practically travel to and live in any civilized place and run your business remotely using technology. It starts with the very basic things of hardware, which includes a mobile smart phone, a laptop, or a tablet. To make it effective, you will also need to pair your hardware with the adequate internet service, whether it is a high speed data plan (LTE or 5Ge) or a high speed internet at your hospitality (WiFi, Ethernet).

With those 2 elements in place, you can get online, communicate with parties, carry out your orders, and check on status. You can get on your Property Management website to monitor your portfolio, get on your banking website or mobile app to conduct financial transactions, email / text / video conference / call anyone, and even do due diligence based on your specific criteria.

Virtual Assistant

VA is a great way in the FI community to help offload tasks so you can gain back time in return. So how do you decide what and how much to offload to VA? We at DoorInvestor tend to run through this exercise before arriving to a decision:

What we do is, we will document our day at 2 levels: Time-Table & Process. An example of Time-Table can be something like:

• 9 am – Check and respond to emails
• 10:30 am – Call financial partners to raise money
• 1:30 pm – Conduct due diligence on deal
• 4 pm – Write deal package

Next, an example of Process can be something like:

• Check and Respond Email – I will open up the email client, read through each email in its entirety and then mark the ones that require my input. After I read all the emails, I go back to the marked ones and reply them.
• Call financial partners – I go through my contact list and make a phone call on my mobile device to chat with them about family, recent happenings, and about upcoming deals
• Conduct due diligence – I go this Website 1 to search for comps, Website 2 to search for demographics, Website 3 to submit a request for skip-tracing… etc
• Write deal package – I open up the deal package template in Microsoft Word, and I replace the address with <this>, and replace the price with <this>, and I fill in <this> content based on the results from my due diligence above

What comes out of this exercise, is you get a visual on which tasks you can (and should) outsource to a VA, and which you should keep to yourself. In this example, it is quite obvious that you can outsource Task 1, 3, and 4 to a VA, while you can keep the relationship building Task 2 to yourself.

Once you identify which tasks to outsource, the next step is to provide the VA your Process document, so the VA can just follow the script to mimic what you do. Let the VA update your Process document if he or she finds certain steps missing. The importance of having this document is that you can actually scale and be redundant down the road. Say if later on you need to hire another VA, or the current one quits and you need to find a replacement, having an up-to-date Process document will save you so much time to re-training.

It Can Be Done

As you can see, it is not rocket science to put together the proper documentation and products in place to enable you to work from anywhere in the world.