I just paid my real estate tax on the 43 acres of land in AZ I purchased when I was in college about 10 years ago.
It was memorial weekend, I drove 4 hours from my house in Phoenix(was there for an internship) to the east side of AZ, the guy told me he had a parcel he thought would be perfect for me, I stood on top of it, looked around and told him, “I will take it.” It cost me around $16,000 and I financed it with 11% interest. $1000 down.
Then I used the money from Sallie Mae to pay for grad school a few years later to pay this property off. Since the interest rate was less than 11% and I could defer the payment because I was in school.
Ok, that wasn’t even the craziest thing I spent money on….
When I was in grad school, I went to a stock trading seminar, dropped $32,000 on stock trading classes. After I bought those, I never spent 1 hour going through the material.
One month after purchasing the stock classes, I started my USANA business. And what happened next is for another day…
I never stressed about the debt, I always had a much bigger picture in my head on the way I wanted to live my life.
It is Monday morning, so many people are going to be riding subways, sitting in traffic, and going to a job they hate. Thinking about the weekend and how fun it was and dreading the fact it is a Monday.
In the next 30 minutes, I will be picking up a baby that will need a diaper change. I will be playing with poop, not really but you get the picture.
This is fantastic because when I bought that property or spent the $32K on something I never used, this is the exact reason I did all of those crazy things.
It was to live a life very few people get to live, it was be at home with the family, it was to build a business which will pay me whether I work or not, it was to have the ability to create something greater than myself, it was to put my ego in check, it was to hangout with friends in the middle of the day, it was to allow my wife to sleep while I take care of our daughter, it was to surround myself with people I actually want to hangout with, and even though it has been by far the most challenging thing I have done to this point…
it was for all of the poop!
What is your crazy money story?
Mike Watts is an entrepreneur, speaker, husband, and father.
Before becoming an all around badass by radically reinventing his own life, he used to work for Phillip Morris. Today, he shows business owners how to expand their choices, do less and create the financial lives they want.
