How and How Not to Review a Land Acquisition Deal (LA 1462)

How and How Not to Review a Land Acquisition Deal (LA 1462) Transcript: Steven Butala: Steve and Jill here. Jill Dewitt: Hello. Steven Butala: Welcome to the Land Academy Show entertaining land, investment talk. I'm Steven Jack Butala. Jill Dewitt: Oh, and I'm Jill... Steven Butala: What's going on? Jill Dewitt: I don't know. For some reason I was waiting, I was ready for what I was going to say after that I forgot about my name. I was focusing on what word do I want to use today? So I'm going to say, and I'm Jill Dewitt, broadcasting from sizzling, Scottsdale, Arizona. Steven Butala: It's perfect weather right now though. Jill Dewitt: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Steven Butala: Before we get into it, let's take a question posted by one of our members on the landinvestors.com online community. It's free. Jill Dewitt: Isn't it funny when you live in some of these places, by the way, where the forecast doesn't change? I'm sure it's like that for some people in the winter, in some locations, like, "Well, and today's another cold one." Steven Butala: I moved to Arizona in 1994. And I can tell you very accurately that all the perceptions that people from Michigan have about Arizona and specifically Phoenix are completely incorrect. It's only old people live there, it's too hot all year round, you can't really, it's just so hot. None of those things are true at all. Jill Dewitt: That's cool. Steven Butala: And there are 10 other ones, but some of them are really derogatory, so I'm not going to... I'll stop right there. Jill Dewitt: Okay. Cool. All right. I'm not sure how to say this name [Sitoboh 00:01:18] wrote. Thank you both for providing insightful answers and guidance on last evening's accountability group call. Following up now on one of the topics discussed, accounting as a land investor. Within that topic, you Steve had spoken about the importance of setting up separate bank accounts and to never co-mingling funds. Would welcoming the opportunity to continue discussion here and potentially receive further guidance on handling bank and funds and bank accounts in the land business, tracking expenses and related areas of accounting within reason since this could be an entire course that you believe are important to an entry to mid-level land investor. That's a lot. Steven Butala: This is posted on Discord and what ended up I answered it. And I'm going to answer the question here, but more importantly, what ended up happening is that we have a member who lives in Salt Lake City, who's a CPA and has his family practice in California, so he quote-unquote escaped California a lot of years ago, more than 10 years ago. Good for him. We just did too. And this became a massive topic. And now this guy, I'd plug his name if I could remember it, is taking on new clients and customers and setting up bank accounts and helping people in our group. This is my point about Discord. It just became this topic. Then it turned into, "Hey, you got to read this book." And then we all... Did you see it? Jill Dewitt: No no. Steven Butala: Then we all piped in like, "No, you got to read this book and you got to read this book." So my Amazon cart's full of books, that members are saying, you need to read and you need to think about it this way. Jill Dewitt: That's really cool. Steven Butala: Here's what you do. Wherever your personal bank account is right now, go on there and open another account. It takes seconds. In most cases, I know for Bank of America it just take seconds. Jill Dewitt: Like a sub-account kind of thing? Steven Butala: Yeah separate account. And go fund it put some amount of money in from the other account. Whenever Jill and I start new companies, I always put $10,000 in there. I don't know why. Sometimes it takes a lot more, sometimes it takes a lot less. And then every single expense you incur, get checks, order checks and a debit card, and it doesn't have to be in an LLC yet. What's important is it's separate.