What was the highlight of May you ask? Getting my testicles removed.
Haha!
For a long time now I’ve known that I did not want kids. I don’t like children and I don’t like the idea of giving up my life to raise another shithead like me.
Luckily, I found a woman who was all for the idea of no kids and fully supported me getting a vasectomy done. Before anyone gets confused, I am fully aware that I did not have my testicles removed, only sections of the vas deferens.
Rachael personally loves children, but she doesn’t like the idea of raising them or pushing them out herself. She’s a teacher and gets her fill of kids there, we don’t need them at our home. I could fully see myself helping, housing, and mentoring someone who was eager and needed a hand but not from birth.
If that person, or persons, comes along and I feel the desire, then great. If not, then I get to fully focus on my wife and my puppies, along with all the other opportunities that come our way.
If you’re curious about how the procedure went and the grueling aftermath, don’t be scared to reach out!
The Business
Whether we consider this part leisure or business doesn’t really matter since it’s a little of both. My wife and I took a trip out to Chicago to go pick up a truck we had to repo. Turns out the truck’s engine was shot so we weren’t able to drive it back.
Bad news, right?
Not really, it gave us a great opportunity to go check out our properties for the first time and meet some of the people that we talk on the phone with all the time. We met our new contractor, who was a lot younger than I expected but super respectful and a very hard worker. He’s made some serious progress with the new house and it looks like it’s on the way to being done in about two more weeks.
So far, our payment plan has had no hiccups and is keeping him on his toes to make sure he gets everything done quickly.
We also met our agent, Keith Hatzfeld, and his wife. They are amazing and I highly recommend him to anyone looking to purchase investments out in that area.
The other property that dragged out is done! We have already started marketing it and should be getting some tenants in soon. Our original property there has already passed inspections and the new tenant will be moving in shortly.
We are also closing on another property on Tuesday the 8th! It’s a complete gut and I’m super excited to get to work on this type of project. I’ll make sure to post some before and after pictures/videos of them as well.
On the dealership side, we didn’t quite make the numbers we would have liked. It does help that the previous months we were ahead so it somewhat levels it out, but I like keeping that lead and never giving it up.
Sure enough, traffic has started slowing down a bit. Nothing super alarming but enough to make us buckle down and adopt our second-half-of-the-year approach.
We also found a new lender that has been great, even with prices being as ridiculous as they have been. If you’re wondering if the prices have come down, the answer is no. They’ve kept going up.
Like usual, we’ve kept the bulk of our paper, but we decided to push out some numbers considering how easy and how well this new lender is paying. Usually we have to fight to take a ‘loss’ from our acceptable number when going through lenders but with them they have made it smooth and have paid out more than acceptable.
The first few days have started out slower than I would like so we are shifting our focus with the sales team to bringing people in as well as providing more and better content since there is more time available to them.
The Leisure
We took a trip to Chicago! You already knew that…
Let’s start with books. I only made it through one book this past month. Pre-suasion by Robert Cialdini. Fascinating book, especially for someone who is in any type of sales role, direct or indirect.
I’m disappointed in how long it’s taken us to get through The Last Astronaut, especially because of how absorbed I am by the story. I’m in no way blaming my wife for not finishing it faster, but the blame is definitely on her. Now if you go and tell her I said that, I’ll deny it.
At the moment, since there are no other books on my list, I am listening to a lot of podcasts. One of these days I’ll find one to get through for this month.
I’m still playing Apex but not as much as I was. I’m not bored of the game, I think it’s plenty enjoyable with all the new content they’ve added, I’ve just been writing more and planning things out for the company since next month is when we are supposed to ‘step away from it.
I haven’t even watched much of anything this month! We just barely started the UK version of Utopia. I thoroughly enjoyed the US version and was very bummed to hear it had been canceled.
A show I recommend for this month: Billions
A movie I recommend for this month: Cargo
The Puppies
Clemmy is adorable. We recently took her on her first walk outdoors and she did surprisingly well with a leash. I would personally prefer to train them to be off-leash but Rach doesn’t like the idea too much. She’s scared of cars hitting them or other dogs attacking them.
We’ve been holding her on our walks since she first joined us. Now that she’s grown more, she wants to jump down and be with her sister so it’s not as easy.
I’m having to be way more protective of my Noves since she’s so gentle and Clem is the younger sister that doesn’t have a limit. Clementine bites the shit out of Nova when they play. She even tries to bulldoze through Nova as Nova eats to steal the food and Nova is too passive to do anything. Clearly, I have to defend my middle child.
Spartacus is being Spartacus. What more can we say about him?
I started their social media pages for everyone to be able to follow them. It starts out with Nova as she was a puppy and will continue on through Clem joining us until it catches up to the present day and moving forward.
You can follow them at:
Instagram: @benekepups
Facebook: benekepups
Twitter: @benekepups
I’ll get them a YouTube page once I have their videos edited.
My Writing
Some progress on my writing: I have started writing the next story in the Wastelands series. It will be posted after Butter finishes uploading. It’ll follow someone that was briefly introduced in the previous story as well as allow some previous characters to make an appearance, even if it might be their last.
Some time in the future when I step away from the day-to-day at Westland, I will be looking for an editor that can help guide me through a solid edit of all my stories.
If you know anyone that you might recommend, please reach out!
Thanks for reading! I’ll see you next month.