Reflecting on 2015 Goals

Happy New Years!

A time for reflection and goal setting.

I am thinking about not setting goals for 2016. This year will bring tremendous change, with us empty nesting, huge changes at my “real” job, and possibly a move. I’m thinking it might be wise to just roll with it rather than stressing myself out more. But, the year I tried to relinquish my to do list was an exercise in frustration; I am very driven, very goal oriented, not very go with the flow. So we’ll see.

Another reason to potentially not set big goals for this year is that I didn’t accomplish many of my 2015 goals. And yet, it feels like a successful year.

My focus word for 2015 was CATHARSIS. As in, releasing, relieving tension, and purging. I identified a handful of specific real estate/landlording goals:

• Read 8-12 real estate or related books and post book reports on BiggerPockets. Fail, I only got five books read.
• Meet Marcia Maynard, another BP contributor, who I admire greatly. She lives about an hour away. Fail, I didn’t even make initial contact. I really really want to make this happen though.
• Attend a Settle area BP meet-up and maintain my presence on BiggerPockets. Fail. But I almost attended one in Seattle and one in Portland. It’s really hard to coordinate my work and home schedules without more advanced notice.
• Declutter life, including getting rental files purged, archived, and maybe even a step closer to being on the cloud. I didn’t explore electronic storage, and the files need their annual scrubbing, but I did set up a system to deal with the paper files.
• Get rental earnings up and stress down, including:
  
  • Investigate turning some units over to a property manager. Yes, did this! This was a huge success. Giving up control was hard, but loving the results.
  • Spend money on improving properties instead of just getting them move in ready over and over. We had a lot fewer move-outs this year, so less money spent on turnovers. But, maintenance costs still feel high. December costs were quite high with a storm and a rat infestation, but it feels like this will still be a great rental earnings year, which should allow us to spend more on true upgrades.
  • Attract and retain better tenants, to increase returns and reduce time landlording. Did I mention less turnover?!? Our last three tenant placings have been great choices. And our property manager is adding value (higher rents) and reducing our time and stress.

So on a scorecard these results may not be very good, but it feels like the ones that came together made a really big difference, so I can’t beat myself up too much for what didn’t get done.