Ep 184: How to Have Your Best Year Ever!

Inflation as it's being tamed is going to allow the government to unleash some of these other other stimulatory things that are out there. Welcome to the Next Level Income show where it's our goal to take your income, your investments and your life to the next level. I'm your host, Chris Larson. If you haven't yet, get a copy of our book for free at our website, nextlevelincome.com. that's www.nextlevelincome.com. just click on the book link and I'll even send you a copy if you put your address in. Happy New Year and welcome to 2024. Today I'm going to talk about two things on the show. I'm going to talk about some of my predictions in the latter half of the show about what I think we're going to see this year in 2024. And I'm also going to outline how to have your best year ever this year. So I hope you've had a fantastic 2023. I hope you've seen fantastic results in all areas of your life. And if you have not done this before, I'm going to give you a game plan, a map, a process that you can follow to have your best year ever. And I would also encourage you to check out our new coaching program. We're starting our live eight week coaching program this month. And if you email Coach next level income.com Again, coach@nextlevelincome.com and just say send me some more information on your coaching program. We will send you a special pre launch code where you'll save fifteen hundred dollars. So if you use the code, prelaunch all caps, you'll save fifteen hundred dollars that coaching program and you'll get to go through the coaching process with a cohort. You meet a lot of great people that are doing awesome deals in the real estate space. You'll work directly with myself and Matt Foer who heads that program up as well. So check it out. Email coachnextlevelincome.com to get more information. So what is my process every year that I go through to have my best year ever, to really continue to make process, to make progress both on a personal level as well as a business level. There's a few steps that I follow. The first is building your three year vision. And I like three years. A lot of people have a five year plan, you know, one year plan. I think the challenge with that is in one year you overestimate what, what can be done in five Years. You can literally remake your entire life in seven years. We literally recreate every cell in our body. So I really think that three years is kind of like this Goldilocks time period where you can make a tremendous amount of progress but you also give yourself a ramp up period. And what I would recommend is you go remove yourself from your house, from your typical day to day life. I like to do this when I'm on vacation or away from my kids. Maybe spend some time with your spouse or your significant other and go through this. And there's some different questions you can ask yourself. And I outlined this in a blog which is in the show notes and you can click on that link and go through it. And I kind of go through some of these questions that you can ask yourself. Stuff like what does your health look like? What is your ideal schedule? What do you do every day? What is your career? What is your business? How has this changed over the past few years? What is your net worth? How much do you make every year? Who do you spend time with? Where do you live? Where do you travel? Are there any fun things that you want? Do you want a new car? You want to put all these things down? And what I do, I put them into four main, main categories. The first is health. And for those that have been longtime listeners of the show, you know that I value health above all else. And the reason is without your health really doesn't matter how much money you have. A lot of things in your life just kind of fall into the background when your health is, is ailing. That's why we have my personal Dr. Doug Lucas on. Dr. Doug Lucas you can check out, he's been on three times the podcast here. You can check out some of his tips if you go back and search through out the show episodes. Number two is financial and you want to put what is your net worth? How much money do you make? What type of investments do you have? How much active and passive income do you have? These are the things that you want to outline in your financial category. And by the way, with these categories you want to speak in the present tense. I like to write this as a story, a one page story. And it literally should make your hair on your arms stand up. It should give you goosebumps as you go through this process and you read this. It's super. It should be super exciting. It should get you charged up every time you read your vision. And the reason is you want to use this as motivation on a weekly basis to go through this process. The third Category is social. I like to talk about where's my family in this process, how is my relationship with my wife, who do I spend time with from perspective of friends in a social environment. If you're not married, this could be, you know, what your social sphere looks like. If you're like me, you're married, you have two younger children. A lot of this may revolve, revolve around your family and how you prioritize those things. And then the last category is going to be what I like to call personal enrichment. And personal enrichment can take on a lot of different forms. This can be education. This could also be things like we built, we built a new house a few years back and you know, that was a big focus for about three years as we planned and ultimately built the home that we now live in. And my family's going to spend about 10 years in as our, as our children grow up, they go through middle, middle and high school before they ultimately leave. So it depends on your situation. But you want to have, have those things and you really want to think about all of these things from the present tense. And, and you can ask yourself a simple question. Last year was amazing because what is it? Think about that. Like close your eyes and really think about what would make your life truly amazing. What are some of my examples? Um, I talk about like my weight. I want to be 175 pounds under 10% body fat. I want to do three strength workouts a week. I want to ride my bike at least two times a week. I want to get up at 5am every day and meditate. You know, these should be easy to understand things. And those last three things that I mentioned, strength workouts, riding my bike, wake up at five o'. Clock. These are the next step. So once you have your three year vision outline, your three year vision outlined, you want to break this down into easily digestible action items to help you achieve your goal. So you have kind of your headline goals that you have out there outlined in your vision and then you have your process goals. And I like to do a three year vision that I revisit twice a year. I do it as the new year kicks over and I do it mid year as well. Happens. My birthday's in June, so I like to do it at the new year as well as on my birthday. And then I review my process goals each quarter and I list out what I'm going to do. And those are those that I just mentioned. If I'm going to maintain 175 pounds at single digit body fat. I want to do three strength workouts a week. I want to ride my bike two to three times a week. I want to get up at 5 o' clock every day. It means I get in bed on time. That means I maintain muscle mass. That means I maintain my cardiovascular fitness. And then each week you can review these and you can program your week. You can actually schedule your week around these goals. And that's the last piece of this. So if you think about it, you have your three year vision, you have your yearly or quarterly goals and, and then you break those down on a weekly basis. To help you do this, I'm going to offer you a special gift. I will send you a copy of my coaches Craig Valentine book to help you go through this called the Perfect Day formula. And you can either click the link in the blog that's that's in this in the show notes here or you can say please send me a copy of Craig's book and send that to coachlevelincome.com again coachlevelincome.com we'll send you copy of the book as well as information on our new coaching program. So hopefully this has given you some ideas and a process that you too can Follow to make 2024 your best year ever. Now everybody wants to know what is going to happen in 2024 from a financial perspective. Frankly, I do not know. But I do like to think about it. I like to follow the financial markets. I like to read a lot of economists and I like to try to figure out where we are in a macroeconomic cycle. And over the years I've come to believe in what is the 18 and a half year real estate cycle. And I've kind of stress tested this over the years. And if you listen to episode 100 of the podcast, which is almost 100 episodes ago, I outline this 18.6 year to be exact real estate cycle and how it works. And to paraphrase the 18 and a half year real estate cycle, it works upon credit creation. Ray Dalio talks about this as well. And if you think about it, as banks lend money and provide credit that injects money into the financial system, the Federal Reserve does the same thing. So as banks have more money coming into their system, they can create credit. This is the same thing that lowering interest rates does in a lot of different ways. It allows the ability for more credit to be created because if interest rates are lower, it's easier to cover that debt service. That means you have more money that you can cover with payments and that helps bolster asset prices, which is why the risk free rate has such a correlation with asset prices. Today's show is sponsored by Money Insights and their Investment options Optimizer Strategy. In my book, I share how I use the same strategy starting over a decade ago to invest my money in two places at one time. This strategy has been used by the wealthiest for generations for estate planning, minimizing taxes, preserving wealth and increasing stability for their investments. Now you can do the same thing. In addition, you can build a plan to build an emergency fund, pay for college, fund a business plan for retirement, and ultimately optimize your total financial picture. To find out more information, check us out at the banking link atnext level income.com so what do I think is going to happen in 2024? Well, let's take a step back and let's view it through the lens of this 18.6 year real estate cycle. The 18 and a half year real estate cycle is characterized by two seven year periods of expansion with a mid cycle slowdown in between these two seven year periods. So we had seven years up from 2012 into 2019, I'm sorry, into 2020, right through the end of 2019. And that mid cycle slowdown, no surprise, was during COVID this time. If you go back 18 and a half years, that mid cycle slowdown was during 9, 11. And it may see kind of, it may seem kind of uncanny, but you can go back through history and see these periods of crisis where this mid cycle slowdown, these periods of crisis during these economic downturns are characterized by kind of that crisis that is occurring in the world at that time. So I think it's very interesting to look at that and it'd be interesting to see if we fast forward 18 and a half, 18.6 years, what's going to happen again. But after this mid cycle slowdown, it's very important to understand that there's another seven year period of expansion, specifically in real estate. So what does that mean? That means that right now we're about halfway through that second seven year period of expansion. And this is actually typically the strongest period of an expansion during that entire first 14 year period. Now I'm not again, I can't predict the future, but historically what we are seeing is that these next few years are typically the strongest period when it comes to the real estate markets. Now why would that be? We've, we've actually seen in 2023 and I was on a panel about a year ago and I was one of the Only people that said, hey, I think we're actually going to see a fairly buoyant market in 2023, a strong market in 2023, both on the stock market side as well as the real estate side, despite increased interest rates. And the reason was that credit expansion. The other reason is there was six trillion dollars. Six trillion with a t dollars of savings and capital on the sidelines. So when people say, hey, I'm going to wait for that next great deal, you're competing against 6 trillion other dollars for that deal. And that tends to bolster financial markets. So what can we expect this year? I believe that with falling rates, we're going to see that, that sustained buoyancy in the real estate market. I think we're going to see some of the gridlock that we've had over the past year, year and a half start to free up and some of these transactions occur. And yeah, there's going to be some distress in the markets as people that have overextended themselves with certain investments are going to have to potentially get rid or refinance those investments. But I think those things are going to work themselves out of the system and a lot of that capital that's been on the sidelines is going to come back to work. The other thing that we tend to see in years like this year, and this year is going to be characterized by presidential election, you see government stimulus. Now why do we see government stimulus? We see government stimulus because the party in power wants to have a positive economic record to reflect upon going into the election. Now, how is the government going to stimulate again? I can't predict the future, but some ways that I believe will, what will happen are interest rates. I think we'll see the Fed lower interest rates in 2024, which they've already kind of mentioned that they may do, but that would, that would help free up some of this capital that's on the sidelines, infrastructure spending. So when the government injects money through infrastructure, we have a trillion dollar infrastructure bill that's working its way through the system right now. That helps inject a lot of capital and create jobs and create money and stimulus in the economy. We're going to see these student loan debts that are, that are being forgiven, that's going to inject money into the system. And there may be some other ways as well that we see the government try to stimulate the economy because they want to make sure that they have a strong economy, which is typically the number one thing that voters push towards. We've seen inflation be tamed. I know for the past couple years I said that we're going to see inflation kind of persist because of all of that liquidity that's in the market. So I don't think we're going to see necessary deflation in 2024. But I think some of that inflation as it's being tamed is going to allow the government to unleash some of these other, other stimulatory things that are out there. So what do you do? What do you do during these periods? I think it's, it's smart to continue to pay down debt, maintain appropriate levels of debt. So most of our properties have between 50 and 70% loan to value outstanding on them. So we're trying to maintain responsible levels of debt. If rates drop, you can refinance your properties, you can increase your cash flow. And I'm a real big fan, as I've talked about, of assets that have a, an operating component to help juice that cash flow. So over the next several years, I think high quality properties that are cash flow positive are going to outperform. That means like class A apartments. On the other end of the spectrum, I think mobile home parks are going to do well because there's nothing more affordable that's out there. So we're very active right now in the mobile home park space. You can get more information about our new mobile home park fund, which is very unique, under the Invest link on our website. So click on the Invest link and you can schedule a call with our team to learn more about that. Also, as rates increase, you can essentially become the bank, which is why we have a debt fund. So, you know, we lend money to those that are looking to rehab homes and provide more housing out there to help solve this housing affordability crisis. And this is a good time to either be invested in banks or actually become a bank yourself. You can learn more about that debt fund in the Invest portion ourselves and then last but not least on that, that kind of end of the spectrum, car washes, we've been very active in the car wash space as well, which also has another operating portion to the real estate to bolster those cash flows coming from that. So I think that high quality real estate as well as operating real estate are going to perform at this point in the cycle. And look, if you want to sit on cash, I don't think that's, that's a bad choice either because you know, at some point here in the next five years, I think we are going to see a pullback. We're going to see opportunities in the market. We certainly don't want to forego the great opportunities that we see here in the next two or three years as we're going to see a great strong real estate cycle, in my opinion. But you know, it may be a good time to take some money off the table if you have a lot of equity and properties and maybe put that into a high yield account. Treasuries we love cash high cash value life insurance as well. You can learn more under our Banking section with that. And if you're looking for some help to put all this together, I mentioned this at the top of the show today. You can check out our coaching program. We still have our course online. If you click under the Resources link you can click our course. You can get a great deal on that by using the code Next level all caps N E X T L E V EE L all caps and you get a great deal on that course. Or email Coach atnext level income.com to learn more about our live coaching program. And hopefully all of these things that we've discussed today in the show can help you have your best 2024, your best year ever in all aspects of your life. Hey Chris, here again. I hope you found this episode valuable. Now I have one more thing to give to you. We have a page for my coaching clients where you can get a free copy of my book as well as much more from previous guests on the show. Just check out nextlevelincome. Com coaching to get a free copy of my book, audiobook and much more. I'll send you a copy of my book and cover all the shipping costs as a thank you for listening to the podcast. Also, please like share and take just 90 seconds to give us a rating on Apple Podcasts.