Now that we have an understanding of residual income and how it can help you exponentially grow your business, I’d like to share a couple of stories of mine that will give you a better understanding of how it applies to real life. The Shutdown I’m not sure if you remember all the way back to January of 2019, but during that time I had a client that was scheduled to close on the 17th of January. Everything was ready, and we were “clear to close” But, there was one little problem, my client was a government employee. Now, it’s not that I don’t like government employees, but his employer plays a big role in this story. If you remember what was happening during this time, you will know that the government was shut down and had furloughed a number of employees. This was a big deal for a couple of reasons. One, he was no longer technically employed. Two there was no one to answer the phone when the bank called to verify his employment. If you can’t verify employment it is a little tough to get a loan approved. Well as you’d probably suspect, we couldn’t close until they could verify his employment, setting us up for an unknown closing date. Normally this would have had me worried, wondering what I was going to do, “I need this to close”. But the fact that I had been building a residual income that was built into my real estate business I was able to rest easy. The income that I had earned from the production of the agents that I had partnered with, from across the U.S. and Canada, was more than enough to cover my mortgage payment for the month. This allowed me to relax and remove the stress of a delayed closing. My Son’s October 29th 2019 I dropped my son off at school by walking him to the gate and watching him run to the playground. It was just like any other day until he turned around, holding a single finger up as to say, “1 second dad, I have to tell you something”. He ran over to me and said, “I can’t go in daddy”, with tears rolling down his face. I didn’t realize what this was eventually going to become, and quite honestly, I wasn’t ready for it. From that day on he only made it to 3 full days of school until we got shut down completely because of COVID -19. It turned out that he was experiencing anxiety at quite a high level. This required me to sit with him at the school office for hours at a time or sometimes bring him home while I tried to work. I'm sure you can imagine how difficult this was to put in a full day of work. And as you probably guessed, as the hours I was able to spend working went down, my own production went down with it. I mean, when you are working no more than 2 hours at a clip, it’s a little tough to get in a groove. This went on for 4-½ months. But you guessed it, by leveraging my business to create an additional revenue stream, my mortgage was covered, regardless of the amount of homes I sold each month.
