As promised, here is my 2015 retrospective. Turns out doing a retrospective on an entire year takes a long time… I’m not sure why I was surprised by that, seeing as retros over a week can easily take an hour.

January —> May

I started off the year continuing working under contract for MFCU. I had been working on that project since it’s inception, about 8 months prior. Because of some turnover on the team, I ended up being more or less the senior guy on the project. I thought that was kindof funny because the app was a phonegap application (HTML, CSS, and Javascript) and I only had about 9 months of experience with phonegap, HTML, and Javascript. I learned it specifically for this project… I was doing ok, but there was a lot of shooting in the dark happening… especially when it came to best practices and system architecture with Javascript. Luckily, DZ was put on the team a couple months before the new year. Not to sound like an asshole… but it was refreshing to have someone on the team that could actually match and exceed my skill level. I hadn’t really had that since I stopped working with Ben, my long time friend. I could be wrong, but I think DZ kindof thought the same thing. Needless to say, after months of working on the same team, we ended up becoming pretty good friends.

Over the winter, working on MFCU wasn’t bad… There were certainly frustrations, but we were working on some moderately complex problems that were fun to solve… So long as the company politics stayed out of the way. By spring though, it became pretty uninspiring. The users of the application we were building (financial service reps - FSRs) were clearly not that interested or impressed with what we were doing. Higher management and the FSRs seemed to be on different pages when it came to what they thought would be useful in the application. This resulted in an overly complicated app that no one wanted to use. That was very frustrating and depressing. There was a real need for proper product development, and we were denied the opportunity to fill that need. During the summer it just became worse… being told to work on things that we knew were going to be useless was thoroughly demotivating. On top of that, the problems we were solving became more frivolous and tedious. I started becoming restless and craving challenge.

June —> August

I think that feeling of restlessness fed into a few different things. On the more minor side, I got a new car, a Mazda 6, 6 speed manual. I had never driven a manual car before, so that challenge was fun. Within a few weeks though, it became second nature and I felt like I needed to be outside my comfort zone again. Around the same time, in June, my mom invited me to go to a real estate seminar put on by Armando Montelongo companies. I had always been interested in that subject, but never really explored it. So I said sure, why not. It did happen to be during my normal work hours, but I was pretty sick of working on MFCU anyway so I decided to go anyway (I remember it was a particularly slow day at the office…). Something new and exciting to learn about, yay.

That event became a major pivot point. After that seminar, we signed up for a 3-day workshop. After that, we signed up for “the bus tour” along with classes on asset protection and cash flow. It turned out to be a good thing that MFCU was becoming very boring and monotonous because over these few months I ended up being very busy with other stuff. By the time June came around we had to kick into hard core wedding planning mode. We had a wedding coming up August 22nd and most of the planning was still not done. This was due to a combination of factors, one of the major ones being that our first wedding planner was a total lemon. We had a little less than 4 months (may included) to nail down a guest list, send out all the invitations, secure the food, secure the bartenders and alcohol, figure out what we were doing about the tent and all the furniture (it was an outdoor wedding) and probably at least 5 other things that I’ll omit for the sake of brevity. On top of that we had 3 Armando training events to attend. We had the cash flow event at the end of June, just outside of San Antonio. We had the bus tour the weekend of July 12th (my birthday) in Riverside California. Then, the asset protection event on August 7th in San Antonio. The combination of the wedding, and these events ended up making me miss quite a bit of work, either actual days out of the office or time spent on the phone trying to pull everything together for the wedding. Thank you again DZ for picking up that slack, my head might have exploded otherwise…

All that hard work certainly payed off on August 22nd. That was, without a doubt, one of the best days of my life. Everything turned out perfectly. The weather cooperated (thank god…), the food was spectacular, as were the drinks, and the decorations looked amazing. There is only two things I would do differently if I could go back and do it again. First, I would have gotten another chorizo taco before the truck left. Second, I would have started planning earlier. Photo credit to McFly Photo + Design. They did an absolutely amazing job photographing our wedding.

Afterwards, we went down to the Greektown Casino for the night. We left for our honeymoon the next morning. We drove up to Glen Arbor MI and spent the week on the beach and thought about absolutely nothing. No wedding planning, no work, just relaxing. Of course, because the weather was so perfect the day of the wedding, it did not cooperate at all the week after. It was mostly cold and windy… but we made the best of it and brought our cooler of beers and our books out to the beach anyway.

September —> December

During the time I was away on my honeymoon, MFCU decided, for the second time, to end their engagement with RIIS. I kind of knew this was coming, so I wasn’t totally shocked when I came back and was told we couldn’t bill MFCU anymore. It did, however, put me in a bit of a predicament. Having just finished the wedding, and payed for a portion of the real estate training, it was not exactly a good time not to have an income stream… Luckily, with a lot of help from my mom along with the rest of my savings, I was able to hold out until money started coming back from the real estate business. So, in the end it turned out to be a good thing that MFCU ended when it did because it enabled me to focus all of my attention on real estate investing. For the remaining 4 months of the year, I spent every moment I could on real estate investing. We were able to buy our first property about a month in, right at the end of September. We ended up with 2 more in October and another 2 in November making 5 by the end of the year.

Other Notes From 2015

I think it was mid way through the year… by DZ’s recommendation, I started listening to Tim Ferriss’s podcasts. Holy crap, that was life changing. I have made it through maybe 50 of them now, and each one seems to be more fascinating than the last, if you are into habits and strategies of highly successful people anyway. Without listening to those podcasts, I most certainly would not be writing this post. I wouldn’t be meditating, I wouldn’t know about the benifits of fasting and ketosis, and I probably wouldn’t have signed up for the Pan Florida Challenge, I could keep going, but you probably get the point. Life Changing. I know I have mentioned The Tim Ferris Show in previous posts, but again, if you haven’t checked them out, go now, you will not regret it.

Toward the end of the year I got a gym membership and started going a couple times a week. As I have already mentioned, I signed up for the Pan Florida Challenge, so I had to start going to the gym to start training for that.

I finally made practicing Spanish a habit. I would like to be fluent in a bunch of different languages… I always thought being a polyglot would be super cool.

I started meditating a lot more. I didn’t really make it a habit… but I did find that did wonders for stress levels. I had a relatively high level of stress leading up to the wedding…

Final Thoughts

2015 was a tremendous year for growth in almost every area of my life. If last year, someone had told me where I would be a year from then, I don’t think I would have believed them. I can just imagine, getting a call while sitting at my desk, programming, and when I pick up the person on the other line says “In one years time, you will own 3 more businesses, 8 more houses, and be in control of over 3 million dollars in assets.” I would have laughed and hung up. But here I am. Just to be sure I don’t mislead anyone, It was not easy… there was an insane amount of hard work, a ton of uncertainty, and a lot of stress. Growth happens outside your comfort zone and that is exactly where I put myself for a majority of this year, and while it is, by definition, uncomfortable, I plan on doing the same thing this year.