Next year we’re going to splurge — maybe — starting with the twenty-first thousand dollars for the month

by Greg Swann

Suburban Phoenix Real Estate Broker

Author website

Here’s my favorite Christmas card this year:

I helped Stephen and Suzanne Kranick buy that house in the weeks before Thanksgiving. I think it’s cool that they love it so much that they made it the star of their holiday card.

I put two houses into escrow today. I’ve done that before, but Cathleen and I are both packing transactions into January at a nice pace. I’m still holding out hopes for one more all-cash deal in December, but the calendar is turning on me day-by-day.

But here’s the thing: The pace we’re on right now puts us at $20,000 gross commission income a month for 2010. I’m sure that sounds like a lot of money to anyone who is not in the real estate business, but it ain’t. But our marketing costs are where they’ve always been — very low — so we’re right on the cusp of proving the claim I’ve been making here for coming on four years: It is possible to do this job without spending fifty cents on the dollar for client acquisition and without feeding a vast cadre of useless eaters.

It’s plausible to me that we could be at $40,000 a month by the third quarter, and from there it’s not a huge jump to seven figures, GCI, per annum.

But: Meanwhile: We are cheap bastards. We never hesitate to spend whatever it takes on mission critical tools, and that will always be the case. But we have been very tight on every discretionary expenditure for a long, long time. And as much as business has sucked over the past four years, it is being tight that has gotten us through the worst of it. A lot of Realtors didn’t make it, as we all know.

So: Cathy just had her birthday, and from me she got a 2 gigabyte memory upgrade for her iMac. So romantic…

But, even so, we can foresee that we are going to have a little money for luxuries in the coming year, and the question plaguing me has been how to manage that kind of spending without going crazy on the upside, as it were.

Here’s a strategy I came up with today: Any discretionary spending in 2010 has to come from the twenty-first thousand dollars for that month. In other words, we have to rack up $20,000 in GCI for the month before we scrape off the first dollar for expendable expenditures. That might seem to be more than peculiarly penurious, but I’m a long way from being convinced that we’re all the way done with poverty. If we have money to throw around next year, I want to throw it into rental properties — starting with one each for the abuelitas.

And back down here on earth: I wrote and transmitted a contract while I was composing this post. I have always believed that hard work pays off, but, even when it doesn’t, I have always believed in hard work. Here’s to a great 2010 for hard-working dogs everywhere!