What's your Mission, Vision and Values?

Question

What are you working towards?

During my 5 years in real estate I've flipped 8 houses and acquired 7 rentals while working overseas.  In my account, it's been a good run.  The problem is I've had trouble figuring out my vision for where I'm headed.  It's not that I've got shiny object syndrome, on the contrary, I have found my groove with flips and rentals.  But I'm not sure how big I want to grow and I wonder if having a mission or a goal would help me.

This all came from me seriously considering paying off 6 of my 7 houses which would take my cash flow from around 15,000 a year currently to about 50,000.  I know that conventional wisdom (and 99.9% of BPers) love the value of leverage and might call me crazy but I just keep wondering about the value that reducing my debt would bring.

Additionally, imagine this.  Right now I have a net worth of around 350,000.  If I pay these off in 5 years, that number should be closer to to 800,000...Sure, I could leverage and hope to get more properties, but on the flip side, I might be able to position myself to be close to early retirement by generating this large amount of yearly income.

I have tried to look up stories online of people blogging about WHY they paid off multiple investment properties off early and sharing their experience, but all I come across are models and opinions (mostly against it).  I'd love to hear from somebody who has taken this route.

Have any of you paid your properties off with a long-term strategy, goals, mission, etc?  Thanks!

Shawn Melis · Answer

I just heard the vivid vision podcast Brandon Turner did based on Cameron Herald's book vivid vision, I would start there. If you don't know what you want 3 years from now, or 30 years from now, its hard to come up with a strategy for how to get there. Either way, keep sharing your journey.

Alexander Felice · Answer

What are you going to do with the new freedom during retirement? That's the much harder problem to solve in my experience. Focus on that and it should provide some clarity on how to adjust your investing strategy.

as for the money, rates are super low and inflation is set to rise, so it's probably not an efficient use of capital to pay things off but that may not matter depending on your goals, it's good to consider though.

I think about paying my debts off but it's so consistently working it's way down I see very little benefit to throw money at it.