I associate the first 5 years of my real estate career with pain.

Lots of pain. I sunk everything I had financially and mentally into making my business work because that was the sole source of our household income.

I took on debt to open up a brokerage, depleted our savings to keep it afloat during the crash, and racked up even more debt to double down on trying to grow the business, finally reaching a breaking point not long after my daughters were born.

I was working insane hours and felt like I was failing at work and at home.

The harder I worked, the more it seemed I was sinking lower into quick sand.

I felt trapped.

My dream was to become wildly successful (financially), so that I could travel all over the world with my daughters and be the Dad I had always dreamed of being.

I would tell myself, if we could just get X dollars in the bank account, we would be safe to go on a grand trip.

Do you have something that you want so bad but is seems to always be out of reach? But just like the end of a rainbow, it keeps moving away from you the harder you try to reach it.

My “breaking point” fortunately turned into my “turning point”, when I decided to risk everything and go on a grand trip anyway, even without the financial safety net I thought I needed.

And something crazy happened.

My business didn’t blow up. I found a way to fund the trip by renting out my house as a vacation rental while we were away.

I did end up working almost every day of my trip. But my office was under a palm tree in the tropics. I loved it. I spent tons of great family time with my wife and daughters and every day felt like an adventure.

I found I could get through my work quickly when I didn’t have the distractions of the office or home.

My remote office also allowed me to see my business more clearly and I was able to implement changes that helped it grow and become more of the business I had always hoped it would be.

I discovered that I didn’t need to reach some financial goal to travel the world with my family, we just needed to be creative to find ways to do it.

For the past 7 years, I’ve been traveling overseas with my family for 1-3 months every year.

I still work while I travel. It’s not a traditional vacation. It’s a remote work assignment with my family, packed with adventures and mis-adventures as we discover new parts of the world.

We still travel on a low budget, by doing house swaps with people all over the world who want to come to Boise. We even exchange cars, so when we get to the destination we don’t have lodging or car rental expenses most of the time. We buy our tickets with travel miles earned from the real estate business. Sometimes we spend less on our trip than we would in the course of normal life at home.

The point is we find a way to make it happen every year. Because traveling with our kids is the goal, not making enough money so we can travel with our kids every year.

Our next adventure is to Scotland and Ireland. We leave this week. We’ve decided as a family to create a YouTube channel to film our trips, so others can follow along on our mis-adventures, and believe me, we have a lot of them.

To prepare and practice for filming our trip we’ve done a couple pre-trip videos, and posted them on our new YouTube Channel called, What Would Turners Do?

Here they are. This is a glimpse into our world.

Episode 1 – Count Down To Ireland and Scotland

Episode 2 – Camping in McCall

We’d love it if you would subscribe to our channel (My kids are actively participating in the Pre and Post Production and I don’t want them to get discouraged, so if you could take a quick minute to subscribe to the channel that would AWESOME!). You’ll see the subscribe button under the video in youtube.

Back to the point of this letter.

Do you ever find yourself saying,
“Once we have more money, we are going to ______”?

I challenge you to re-engineer that question. Take “making more money” out of the equation. If you were able to get rid of that arbitrary number, ask yourself…

What Would YOU Do?

Find a way to do the things you love to do without waiting for a financial pot of gold to manifest. Use your clever mind to think outside the box.

Be creative to achieve your LIFE goals.

Don’t wait for tomorrow.

Cheers to being creative in life,

Mike Turner

Co-Founder: Impact Club Boise
Host: Idaho Speakeasy
Collaborator: Value Drive Approach
Founder: Front Street Brokers
Author: Agent Entrepreneurs
Voice: 208-340-8399