I heard this line the first time from Nick Karadza at the Rock Star Inner Circle member event.
I’ve always been depositing my rent cheques late.
Life is busy with two kids. Operating a growing business requires a lot of attention. Sometimes, depositing rent cheques become the lowest priority of my life.
With the improvement of technology, now I can actually sit at home, take a photo of the cheque, and make the deposits.
This might have saved me a trip to go to the bank every month, but it didn’t really save much time given that we have student rentals, which have 6 to 7 tenants from each house.
To buy myself some time, I’ve decided to delegate the cheques deposit function to our local bank.
I was so excited about this service being offered.
August 1 came, I checked my bank balance. Nothing got deposited. Oh well, it was the Civic Holiday, so the banks don’t work that day.
August 2 came, nothing deposited.
August 3 came, I finally contacted the branch I dropped the cheques off at and started the investigation.
Today is August 16. The cheques are still not deposited! The bank still couldn’t give me an answer or letter indicating that they lost the cheques and the next steps to compensating my tenants.
We gave them a total of 90 cheques, post-dated till end of school year 2017. 🙁
My mom’s house is currently in between tenants in Toronto. We purchased it in 2003 and the house is due for a facelift.
Many of my blog followers know that my mom lives in Hong Kong. I am the designated property manager for the house.
In the middle of the reno, we noticed that the water tank was leaking unexpectedly. 🙁 We had to replace it.
During one of my inspections, I noticed someone dug up the dirt around the gas meter. It was completely shut off.
When Reliance came out to replace our hot water tank, they confirmed that it was capped and sealed off by the gas company due to non-payment.
I called the gas company and they couldn’t find any cancellation order issued from their end. Somehow someone went out there cut out the gas supply and sealed it off properly.
Yes, Enbridge Gas will come out to fix the problem, free of charge. The cost is just the time we would incur to fix the problem.
AND of course, to top this off, we had two court dates set for two tenants. One is for non-payment of rent and another one is for termination of lease due to major renovations we plan to carry out within the property.
AND one of the properties has a leaky toilet and we received a hydro bill for over a thousand dollars.
AND the city of St Catharines issued an invoice for $450 for non-compliance by law to upkeep our lawn. The tenants are the ones responsible to cut and tend the lawn and they didn’t do it within the timeline given.
It’s a rough month for these properties.
No success can be achieved without long-term commitment. No success can be achieved without failure.
No one says they’re easy. But I’m thankful that we are knowledgeable and experienced enough to deal with these problems.
I recently had a consultation with a couple who wanted to minimize their tax and debt burden. They are maxed out on their home equity line of credit and they are trying to find ways to lower their tax.
We all think that we paid way too much tax in Canada.
Not this time though.
I considered them as the top 1% income earner in Canada combined. Unfortunately, the 6 figure salary that they each make is still not enough to support their life styles.
The problem isn’t the tax system. The problem is their spending habits.
The problem is that they don’t have a goal in their mind and make life decisions to achieve that goal.
One of our goals is to achieve financial freedom. This involved making choices such as driving a more practical car than a flashy BMW.
This also involved not having a bike that would cost $500 a month to maintain and not having a pool that would cost $6K in maintenance annually and $50K to install.
This also involved sitting in a coffee shop writing my blog post while waiting for my hot water tank to install and the gas technician to reconnect our service.
Many investors ask how we started investing and own the number of properties that we own at this age.
Tony Robbins says “life happens for us, not to us”. Take responsibility and deal with you sh@t and you too can succeed!
Until next time, happy Canadian Real Estate Investing and I will continue to deal with my problems!
Cherry Chan, CPA, CA
Your Real Estate Accountant
Charlie Xia
Great post!
Like this one so much!
Mandy Branham
Well written and so truthful Cherry!
People want pleasure without pain. They want success without failure.
But the balance in life is from realizing you need both sides – the good and the bad. The more prosperity you want, the more headaches you must deal with.