Flipping America 463, Asset Protection and Estate Planning
If you listen to Flipping America and act on what you learn, you are going to end up with assets. Cash, properties both real and personal, and possibly a lot of it. Funny thing about our litigious culture here in America - poor people never get sued. But if you are rich, you can count on it. Yes, even if you are a good person and treat people well, someone will try to find a way to unjustly take what is yours.
Once a lawsuit is filed, you have lost. You might not lose the case, but you will have lost time, effort and not a small amount of money to attorneys in your defense. In some cases it is cheaper to settle the case and pay money even though you have done nothing wrong. The best way to win a lawsuit is to never get sued and the way to insure that is to own nothing.
Bob Bluhm is an attorney who can help make you immune to frivolous money-grab lawsuits. I like his approach and his style and I think you will too.
Mindset Moment:You’ve heard it said that “perception is reality.” No it isn’t. Reality is reality. The more precise statement is “perception is YOUR reality.” That’s not even completely accurate though if you are mature enough to accept that your perception of the reality might be colored by your perceptual sieve.
What is a perceptual sieve and what the heck does this have to do with real estate? Great questions but keep in mind that although everything is NOT directly connected to real estate everything IS connected to your life and your business - and for many of you, that connects to real estate. What I’m about to share with you will affect your practice of real estate. But if you own a different type of business, it will affect that in a similar way.
A perceptual sieve is like a screen or a filter. It’s a combination of your experiences, your lifelong messaging, either internally or from others, comparisons with similar situations in your experience and other events that give you a unique way of looking at the world. Events that fit your prior notions can become a sort of confirmation bias that will create a self-perpetuating loop - either positive or negative -- depending on where you started.
The 1997 movie “The Devils Own” feature Brad Pitt playing an Irish terrorist who comes to New York to broker an arms deal. In a unique twist of fate he ends up as a houseguest for a New York City cop of Irish descent, played by Harrison Ford. One of the famous lines from the movie is this one from Pitt, “The story doesn’t have a happy ending. It’s not an American story. It’s an Irish story.”
It’s entirely possible that two different people with different perspectives and perceptual filters may witness the same set of events or circumstances and come away with very different interpretations. This is due to their perceptual sieve. Once you recognize you have this filter, you can consider that when you are replaying the inner video of the things that happened. How could others have seen or interpreted this differently? At this point maturity and some humility begin to enter the frame.
In any conversation there are actually three conversations. What was said, what I think was said, and what you think was said. Which one is most accurate? But which one is most likely to affect your actions or reactions to that conversation?
When you look at a situation in your business, the tendency is to simply react. I recommend that in many cases, if time allows, take time to reflect before reacting. I would bet you that if you give it 24 hours before doing anything, your take on the entire event will be different. And your response will almost certainly be better than it would have been as a quick reaction. It certainly won’t be worse.
You can’t take a full 24 hours to think about everything. But most of the time you won’t need to. Because if you are pursuing your life thoughtfully, you might have already thought about what you do or how you would respond in most situations. This comes from pre-meditated anticipation, which is a topic for another day.
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