Fliperati

As I’ve vaguely touched on before, I won’t have much time to work on my newly acquired property until July.  That’s because my current Wall Street job barely allows me enough time to eat and sleep at my Manhattan apartment and it would be almost impossible to do any real work on a property in New Jersey except on weekends and holidays.  Fortunately, my last day of investment banking is June 30th and I will have all the free-time in the world to work on the house once I’ve cleaned out my desk and left the office for the last time.

However, simultaneously abandoning a lucrative banking career and taking on a mortgage and a major renovation project is not nearly as radical a transition as it may appear.  I’ve been planning to leave my current job for about a year now because I’m weary of the Wall Street lifestyle, so that move is only loosely correlated with this first project.  I have a solid network of contacts in my current industry and I’m confident I would be able to get a new finance job with relative ease if I should need to, although I hope it doesn’t come to that.  If do decide to rejoin the regular workforce in the near future, I would like to get a more relaxed position in public service or research where I could still pursue real estate investing and other activities in my free time.  Also, I feel good about the purchase price of my first property and I think it would be difficult to lose money on this project, assuming the market doesn’t crash catastrophically and that my renovation costs don’t spiral out of control.

This could all be terribly naïve, but the wheels are already in motion and time will tell how good my assumptions and planning really are.