A day in the life of a note investor

[Geoffrey Pierce]

Greetings, forum. I'm peeking over the fence to see what all the fuss is about. One aspect I'm reading about is how notes are hard work, entail lots of phone calls, and feels like an being an administrative assistant, but it's unclear in what perspective that's painted. Are you talking tedium hard, or "Sell, Mortimer! Sell!" precarious hard, or calculus hard, or no life outside notes hard, or ...?

Books, tapes and seminars won't cover the actual day to day lifestyle, so I thought I'd ask for your experience as part of the whole picture. 

Thank you.

[Adam Adams]

My opinion is that it is all up to you and how involved you want to be. When we were in commercial apartments, we learned to manage the managers. I don't deal with borrowers, I deal with loss mitigation firms, servicers, attorneys and property managers. And I don't call them every day. They know what their job is, so I check in on the status every once in a while. Sometimes I only check in once a month. That gives me time for the hot issues that do come up now and then.

The opposite side of that spectrum are investors that treat their vendors like employees and they are calling every day. That will keep you busy and it won't earn you many gold stars from the vendors either. In fact, if you turn out to be a burden, they'll fire you.

We've got over 60 active notes. And when I say we, the wife is the other part of that pronoun, but I do all the work. I don't put in a full 40 hour week. But I'm also very organized with my systems and I'm a manager of managers.