Inspirational Video

I came across this video today and I although the message is simple, it's incredibly important.

I learned in the Marines that you can do so much more than you think you can. This is true regarding life in general. The limitations you believe exist are put there by you. You're the only one holding yourself back.
When I got out of the Marines to become a full time real estate investor, it didn't just all come together so easily. The first few months were very slow and I had several sleepless nights wondering if I could really do this or if I was just wasting my time and what little money I had saved up.
Fortunately I had friends that kept me going when I was considering just giving up on it and getting a normal job and living a normal life.
Thankfully, I did stick with it and my life has never been same.
I encourage you to watch this video and always stick with it!

Moving to San Diego

Well I haven't updated this in a while and it's about time.

I closed up shop in NY and drove out to Tucson, AZ to hang out for a month, work on the website business and really think about and get clear about the next step in my life.

So on a weekend trip to San Diego after a couple beers with a good friend/mentor of mine, the idea hit me.
So after a couple weeks of researching it to ensure it was feasible, I flew back to NY, cleaned out my apartment, sold some stuff and packed what I could in a few bags and flew back to Tucson.

I'll be packing up everything in Tucson and heading to San Diego, Monday or Tuesday, probably Monday.

I'm going to be setting up a real estate investment company there that specializes in negotiating with lenders who have large portfolios of non-performing loans due to people in foreclosure mostly. I'll be working with lenders to get discounts on their collateral and thereby getting the property cheap enough to resell and make a profit.
To make it better and more effective though, I'm going to build a team of motivated people to work with me to blast out offers on a large scale and see what comes back. It's a pure numbers game at this point.
Investing in Watertown was pretty easy and it's time to work up and see if I can hang in the big leagues and it doesn't get much bigger than San Diego. I'm feeling pretty optimistic about it.

So that's the latest. I'll try to post here more in the future.

Davao: Death Squads, Tans and Birth Clinics

Davao City:

So I took a few days off from my trip to go visit my sister, Laura, in the Philippines. My sister is volunteering at a maternity clinic in Davao City serving as a midwive to the pregnant women that can't afford proper medical attention. It's part of a program she is enrolled in.

Basically she delivers babies.

As I said, she lives in Davao City which is apparently well known for the infamous death squads that were put in place by the mayor who was elected three years ago. The intersting part is that they are not out to kill opposing parties or revolutionist (although that's a good possibility that occurs as well) but drug dealers and otherwise criminals so it's kind of like a "boondock saints" put in place by the government.

Well I was here, one girl mentioned she was out and seen a large crowd outside of the mall and after asking what was going on, she was told the DDS (Davao Death Squad) had killed a well known drug dealer.

So she booked an awesome little trip for me while I was here. She booked me a room at the BS inn... still wondering if there was alterior motives behind that. It was like a motel 6 but only about $9/night. My hostels in Europe were cheaper!

I met Laura's friends, seen where she worked and had thanksgiving dinner with all of her co-workers.

Then we went and played 3 hours of badminton at the local gym. I was wrecked by the time we were done. These people are crazy good at this "sport?"

We got everywhere by these "tricey's" which is a motorcylce with little cab on it as show below or just a motorcyle.

The cool thing about Davao was the lack of tourists. I seen only a handful of white people which was cool because of the attention we recieved everywhere we went. People stopped and starred, school kids yelled and waived...it was crazy....but cool.

I took a short video from the motorcycle ride that gives a tast of it:

So the first day, we went to the market and I tried cocunut juice just poured from the coocunt...FYI, it tastes horrible!!

Then we took a trip to the island of Samal to check out the beaches and the falls. We took the motorcyles and there was 2 of us + the driver on each bike..so people on a two person bike.

The hills were not exactly smooth asphalt either so the ride was a trip in itself.

We made it to the beach where we swam, ate lunch and I was conned into trying coconut juice straight out of the coconut and it was still horrible!!

We then jumped back on the bikes and headed to the falls. Pretty awesome and fun to say the least.

And here are a couple of the guys we paid to drive us around all day:

After that me and my sister headed to Paradise Island which is a local resort which is pretty cheap and still really well done. It was very high standard but by Philippino standards, not U.S. standards.

Here's the accomodations

We had dinner and played some ping pong and I crashed early. We woke up at around 7:00, had breakfast. My pineapple juice was litterally an actual pineapple that the turned the inside to juice and served as a pinapple..check it out:

Then we went snorkeling and took a nap on the beach, I managed not to get burned. The interesting thing about Philippinos is that they thing white people are beautiful and try to avoid tanning to get darker and actually have "skin whitening" soap and body wash.
In America, it's the tanner the better so it was nice to have a few days where I was the desired colored vs the red haired, freckled guy.
It just goes to show you the grass is always greener.
Here's Laura playing with some kids.

and some pictures of us with the underwater camera:

I think that's about it for this leg of the journey. I'm heading back to Bangkok to catch up with Bill and his buddy for the rest of the trip.

Davao

First day in Thailand

Well the flight wasn't bad at all. The whole 20+ hours went by pretty quickly due to sleeping, audiobooks, real books and music - the occasional video helpes as well. The views were prett nice over Northern Canada and Alaska.

I barely made my connecting flight from Chicago to Tokyo and as I expected, my luggage failed to make it. Not that big of a deal but since I'm leaving tonight to go see my sister Laura it's making it tough to get my luggage before I see her and I had a whole bag with stuff just for her so she'll be a bit bummed if she doesn't get it.

So I got to my hotel at about 1:30 A.M., got a sim card for my phone and checked my email before going to my room.

I slept until 7:00 and jumped into the shower only to change into my same clothes I've worn for the last 30 hours or so.

I only had the morning before I had to check out of my hotel so I grabbed a guy with his "taxi" and we took off. He let me drive...

ya right! There's now way I could have survived the way they drive here.

I had him take me to the canal where I could catch a boat ride to get the overall picture of Bangkok.

It was a trip to say the least! Here are some pics from the ride:

After that, I went to the Grand Palace. The main tourist attraction in Bangkok and for good reason - the place was incredible! Pics are taking forever to upload and I'm hungry so I'll post them later.

Then I went and checked out a few other temples and attractions. Talked with some young school kids in english to help them learn it better. There teachers were there and loved it. Cute kids for about 45 seconds, then it was to much so I moved on....

I went and checked out a suit shop with some really nice stuff for a fraction of the price you would pay in the U.S. (Slave labor does amazing things for prices). So Picked up a couple suits and shirts that they are mailing back to the U.S. for me...hopefully they make it there....

Now I'm at the hotel writing this since I have little to do until my flight tonight. I'm going to go check out some shops once I'm done writing this.

All in all, it's good! The weather is great, things are going smoothly - minus the luggage deal of course but I'm sure it will work out!

Well I'm heading to the Phillippines tonight to see my sister for a few days.

SCPW is complete!!!

What a crazy ride! Persistence does pay off and I'm happy to announce that www.SuperCheapPropertyWebsites.com is completed and is ready for business.


I was planning on doing a large direct mail campaign to start things off but I'm going to wait until I get back from Thailand to ensure everything runs smoothly. The direct mail campaign should set the benchmark for the potential of the site so I'm excited to get that underway.

Only 10 days until Thailand!!

HUGE leap for SCPW + TV interview

What a relief! Building this website, www.SuperCheapPropertyWebsites.com has had it's ups and downs. It's seriously been like a roller coaster ride. At one point, everything is great and you're very close only to shortly realize that there are significant errors which are going to take time to resolve.
Well over the last couple days, my team in Chicago has made massive progress in getting this website to completion. I won't bore you with the details but we're incredibly close to launching now.
My guys are working on "tiding up" the site and doing intensive testing to ensure a smooth launch.

I'm hoping to start the marketing on November 5th, next Monday. This will give me time to review and analyze the results before I jump over to Thailand and the Philippines for a couple weeks.
It's kind of funny because my one buddy (http://snowbank23.blogspot.com/) who's a professional poker player just mentioned how he almost wished the Thailand trip would be delayed since he's thinking he'll have a great month playing poker...I think he thinks that solely because he got killed in October! J/K bill.
Well I almost feel the same way because I really need to be here to test and analyze different marketing campaigns. It's going to work out fine though because I can set stuff to run automatically and then I'll have lots of data to analyze when I return.

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TV Interview!!!!

This is pretty AWESOME! Part of marketing is trying to get as much free PR you can get - TV shows, Radio interviews, Articles in magazines, etc...

Well my Awesome G/F who's a reporter (and Princeton grad..but not smarter than a 5th grader) hooked me up with her friend to do a TV interview with. So next week, I'll be getting some free PR in the form of a TV interview.
Although it's a local channel, it's still positive because other journalist and reporters will catch wind of it and hopefully be interested and contact me for a story.

So yeah, pretty awesome!