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Opportunities don’t just show up in your doorstep unless you make a way for it to do so. Here to teach strategies and solutions on finding money for your real estate investments is Chris Naugle, the Founder of The Money School. He explains why you need to reimagine the way you look at and understand how money works in real estate. Chris emphasizes the importance of setting up a strategy for achieving your goals before entering the industry as well as having a multi exit strategy in place for security. He goes into the details of how you can secure money by not asking for it, instead by solving people’s problems.
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Listen to the podcast here
Solutions To Finding Money, Where To Go & How To Ask with Chris Naugle
I’m excited to welcome to our show, Chris Naugle. Chris is an entrepreneur with high-level experience as a financial advisor, managing over $30 million in assets. Using his expert knowledge and finance, he has successfully bought, renovated and sold hundreds of properties with his work being featured on HGTV. Chris, how are you? Welcome to the show.
I’m doing great. I’m excited to be here.
I’m excited too. I can’t wait to hear about all of this private money stuff. It’s going to be fun. Why don’t you start by telling us your story?
The story starts when I was a kid, I grew up in a lower-middle-class family. My dad was an alcoholic. My mom and dad got divorced and mom had to raise me. It was that story you hear all the time, but that story is not the norm for everybody. I realize that, but that’s how I grew up. I was that kid who always wanted more. I’ll never forget I always was willing to go out there and do what everybody else was unwilling to do. By 2004, that landed me to be a pro snowboarder. I don’t know if any of your readers have ever been to Buffalo, but most people avoid this place like the plague, but it’s not exactly the iconic place where you breed pro snowboarders. We have hills, not mountains. In 2004, I’d accomplished that goal. All I wanted was to be a pro snowboarder. At that point, I also had co-founded a chain of skateboard and snowboard shops called Phatman Boardshop.
I started them when I was seventeen years old. I started it as a clothing line in mom’s basement, which is a whole other part of the story. My mom, who never had anything, as crazy as this sounds, she put her house up on the line. It was the only asset she had in the world. She put her house on the lines for a crazy punk seventeen-year-old skateboard-snowboard kid to chase his dream. That’s how Phatman Boardshop was founded. By 2004, even though I had become a pro snowboarder, even though I had this chain of four skateboard and snowboard shops. Everything in my life seemed like a fairytale, but I still wanted more. I’ll never forget, at that point in time, I was infatuated with the movie Wall Street. Do you remember the original Michael Douglas Wall Street movie? I remember that movie and I’ll never forget it. When I saw that movie, the first thing I thought is, “I want that.” The only thing I could think of is to get that I need to be a stockbroker.
I need to be a financial advisor, which is where that all began because, in 2004, I started diving in and studying and doing everything it took. I became a financial advisor right around that time. As an advisor, I excelled fast. I got all my licenses, got every single certification you could possibly get. If there was a cert, I went out there and I got it. It was because of that, I rose to be one of the top advisors in the firm I was at. That continued on. I was an advisor for a long time. By 2006, I’d been seeing some of these flip shows on TV. We’d be at the shop working and we’d have HGTV on or A&E. We’d see these flips. In a TV show, you see a flip getting done in 22 minutes. It’s entertaining. I said, “I can do that.” I had some money from being an advisor and I decided to start flipping houses.
My first one was in 2006. It was a complete disaster. It’s the only word I can call it, but I got my feet wet. I did that all the way up until 2008. By 2008, this is the pinnacle. I was crushing it. I was literally crushing it as an advisor. I had flipped a couple of houses. I was a pro snowboarder at the peak of my career. By that point in time, I got my retail stores. Everything was humming along with that and I then got my next big idea. This is one of those grandiose ideas because I’ve always been a big thinker. That idea was I was sick of paying rent to my landlord. He kept raising my rent.
Two buildings down, this dilapidated paint store came up for sale. I saw the sign and I’m like, “That could be my new home for my stores.” What I would do is I would convert it to a three-unit strip mall. I’d have the tenants pay for my rent because why should I pay rent when my tenants would pay it for me? That was my big idea. I dove in. I borrowed money from a hard money lender. I call them knuckles in my stories. This was in 2008. It’s perfect timing. I didn’t even see this coming as an advisor, which is a whole other story.
Finding Money Solutions: You don’t need a ton of new things. You only need one thing. One thing that will catapult you faster, smarter and more efficiently.
In 2008, the small thing called the Great Recession hit me like a Mack Truck. It brought me to my knees. It got so bad during that period of time that I was one payment away from being completely bankrupt. I literally didn’t know how I was going to make it to the next day. What happened is my girlfriend, she’s now my wife, Lorissa. She moved into my house and I had to come home one night. This is when everything was crashing all around me. When you think your life is going one way, all of a sudden, these things happen and then you’re going the complete opposite direction.
I came home and I looked Lorissa in the eye and I said, “Sweetie, I need your help. I need your help paying the mortgage and the utilities. Honey, you’re not going to like this. I have to rent that bedroom out to this guy named Pete. I know you don’t know him, but I can’t make it. This is what I need.” At this point, I threw it out there. I had no one else to ask. I thought, “This is a 50/50 shot,” because she could say, “I’m going to let myself out and good luck, buddy.” She liked me because she ended up marrying me and making it through that period of time with me. Those are exactly what we did. We rented out two bedrooms in my little house that I had back then. That’s how I made it through.
By 2009, Warren Buffett, who was my all-time hero, says three things. I repeat these all the time, “Buy low, sell high and don’t lose money.” In 2009, I understood one of those three things. I understood buy low. I also understood real estate was cheap because that’s what the whole recession was about. That’s what brought me to my knees. I was right in the middle of it. If everything’s low, let’s start buying. That’s what I did. From 2009 to 2014, that’s all I did. I bought dilapidated apartments one at a time. I borrowed money personally for each one of these. I wasn’t using commercial loans. I didn’t know how money works. I thought I knew how money worked because I was an advisor and I knew exactly what I was taught in all the teachings, classes and certifications. I learned exactly what everybody else knows about money, the traditional way of thinking about money.
By 2014, I got up to have 36 units. I was back to making good money in the advisory firm because the markets have rebounded. By that point, I had sold off my stores in 2010. Phatman was sold and I’ve even sold off my strip mall. Right at this point in time, I realized I was in trouble all over again. You would think everything was going well but what I didn’t realize is when you borrow money in your personal name, the banks look at you and they say you don’t fit in their little square box eventually. I got up to 36 units, which were six properties. I brought one more to the bank and the bank said, “You don’t qualify because you don’t fit in a little box called the debt to income ratio.”
I said, “I can’t buy this new six-unit, but I’ve got all my other ones.” They said, “All those lines of credits that we gave you, we have to freeze all those, Mr. Naugle. You can’t use those anymore.” I had a bunch of properties unfinished. At that point, I’d gone from having money back in 2008. I was crushing it to almost losing it all. I had made it back and here I was again, now I was losing it all again. It was getting so bad that I was living paycheck to paycheck trying to make ends meet with all these properties and all my obligations.
I and Lorissa had bought our dream house and that was a big expenditure. It got so bad again that we had to sell off all 36 units, which who cares, they’re investment properties. I had to sell that dream house. That’s when I started thinking about quitting. I was like Rocky Balboa with the towel ready to throw it in. I got in the mail a postcard and this is where everything started changing. It changed because of what I call a magic postcard. This postcard was nothing special. You’ve gotten them. I bet you your readers have gotten them. It said, “Come to this three-day seminar to learn how to flip houses.” When I tell people that, they’re always like, “You’re crazy. What is wrong with you?”
What was wrong with me is that at this point I was humbled by my failures that I had nothing to lose. By going to the seminar, I got a free iPod Shuffle. That’s exactly why I went. I didn’t have anything to lose. I had an iPod Shuffle to gain. Off I went. On day one, there was nothing special but by day two, everything changed. It wasn’t because I learned a whole bunch of new stuff. It was because I learned one new thing. That one new thing was that breakthrough for me. It’s the same with many of your readers and the people you’re around, we don’t need a ton of new things. We need one thing. One thing that will catapult us faster, smarter and more efficiently. That one new thing for me was I learned that with the successful real estate investors and there were two of them. Mike and Greg were their names. What they were doing and how they were using money in real estate was the complete opposite of everything I’d ever been taught in my entire life about money and about how to use money in real estate.
At that point, I realized that they don’t teach this stuff. This is the knowledge you need to seek out and you need to dive in and chase because it’s never going to come to you. No one’s ever going to teach it to you because they’ve got nothing to gain for teaching you. When I learned that, I started questioning everything. Everything I’d ever learned started being questioned. Do you know sometimes in life, when you got hard times, you blame everything else? I blamed the lack of money. I blamed the economy. I blamed everything I could possibly blame. I was in the blame game. At that point, I realized it wasn’t about the money. It wasn’t about the economy. It was about the misinformation that I’ve been given my whole life because these two guys, what they were doing was working and they were killing it and it was everything that I’d never been taught.
That’s the moment when I decided to get off what I call the financial hamster wheel and that’s when I learned how all this work. How I learned all this is I swiped my credit card for $27,000. I told you where I was in 2014. I was broke. I was barely making it. Here I did swipe my credit card. My wife killed me when I came home and told her, “I bought us this thing. Do you know that thing that you didn’t want to go to? I swiped my credit card for $27,000 because what we need is what these guys can teach us.” That’s what changed it all. When I swiped it, I wanted to throw up in my mouth. I did. One of those ones that you got to re-swallow. It was so overwhelming that I was broke and here I was going $27,000 in debt without a hope in hell in ever paying that money back. That’s where the TV show comes in.
I want to point out some things, Chris. Your story is amazing and it highlights some of these things that people go through or are afraid of going through. What is the biggest reason people don’t get started in real estate? It’s fear. Their fear that they don’t know enough, that they’re going to fail, that they’re going to go bankrupt, that they’re going to end up homeless. There are a lot of things that go on through our mind that are not necessarily rational but are definitely there. What’s interesting is when someone comes on this show and they lived the nightmare. You were one paycheck away or one payment away from being homeless. You had to sell your dream home. You were crushing it and then you lost everything and then you’re crushing it and then you lost everything. This is the thing that I want the ladies to know. Success is there for the taking, but failure is a part of success. We learn through that failure. Failure is scary. Chris can tell you. I’m looking at his face and he gets choked up when he’s talking about this. It was hard. It sucked. He had to talk to the woman he loved and humble up and ask for help. He had to sell their dream home.
That almost cost us our relationship.
Things happen that sometimes we’re afraid, what if they leave? I know I’ve had this with David. What if he leaves me? I’ve made this huge mistake. I said this many times and I want to say this again. Don’t give up on yourself. Real estate is the single most consistent, proven way of building wealth in the United States. It’s safe in general as long as you do it the right way. We know real estate works, but if you get in it and you make some bad decisions, it’s not going to kill you. It will make you stronger. In the end, if you stick with it and you don’t give up on yourself, you will see success. Even if we see failure, even if we see economic crashes, no matter what we’re seeing out there, what’s going on in our own mind is going to determine how successful we are. Fortunately, we have control over our own minds. That’s an important thing. Chris, I love your story of this roller coaster ride because this is the thing that many women fear.
I would never advise people to do that. It’s painful. Jump in feet first without any mentor, without any knowledge, don’t do that. If you do your research and get started, you get a mentor who can help you sidestep a lot of those mistakes and you can see success. I wanted to point that out, Chris, because as people are reading this, we’re all emotionally involved. “I can’t believe he went through that.” I wanted to point out that this is what we fear. This is our worst case. Now, Chris is here talking about his successes. Thank you for that, Chris.
You’re right with everything you said. You could even take and go back into my story and pull up the rest of the fear. The fear of being a pro snowboarder and what that was like, showing up places, and having to hit a jump that you thought was bigger than anything you’ve ever hit. That fear that engulfs you and that was part of life as a pro snowboarder. The fear of when my mom put her house on the line. Even though that was an exciting time, as a seventeen-year-old turning eighteen, my mom’s house was on my shoulders. If I failed, I’d lost my mom’s house. My whole life has been facing fear. Don’t think for a second it’s ever been easy. That whole roller coaster ride you heard there, there are many things in there where I literally want to quit.
I wanted to quit every time, but the only way to truly fail is to quit. I wasn’t willing to accept that even when things got bad in ‘14. Me and Lorissa, she was my fiancée then. We split when that house got sold. Things got hard and I didn’t know if that would ever come back. I had to take a month and go to Thailand to clear this head because I didn’t know how to get through to the next day. It all came back together because I never gave up. She never gave up on me either. When we came back and we went to this training that we spent all this money for.
At first, she was mad at me. She couldn’t believe I did what I did, but then when she saw it and she met Greg and Mike and she met all the other mentors that we were being coached by, she realized that this is what we needed. She realized that this is the stuff we were never, ever shown. I’m going to get right into the show because many people want to know how does one go about getting an HGTV show? How do you get that? That’s the likeliness of getting struck by lightning. A lot of people are misinformed on how you get a show. A lot of people think that they see you on Instagram or Facebook and they call you up and say, “We’d love to have you on HGTV.” No. Here’s how it started for us.
We were in a convention at this real estate training with our mentors and Tarek and Christina got up on the stage. They did a little dog and pony talk and it was great. My wife and I looked at each other and do you know what I said to her? I said, “Sweetie, if we’re ever going to get on that stage, we’ve got to have our own show.” Instead of going out and trying to find somebody to produce the show, I went back and I hired my friend, Kyle. He started going to one of the flips we were doing. He started filming us. I got this crazy idea as a snowboarder that we should do a show that mimics Jackass and Flip or Flop and bring it together. That’s where the first rendition of the show came up, which was Flip Out. How it started is we started filming and we were having so much fun.
Finding Money Solutions: If you’re getting into real estate, you should have a system and a strategy.
It brought me and Lorissa closer. We brought one of my ex-pro snowboarders in, his name was Blair. That whole experience, that bonding experience of working toward this pie in the sky thing, which was scary. It’s like, “This may never happen,” but the thought that if you work toward it and you keep that idea strong in your mind, it can happen. It did happen. We sent that video out to all the networks and we got turned down by every one of them the first time. The producer that took us on dropped us because they couldn’t get it placed. We should have quit there. We’re like, “No, we got something.” We went to the next producer.
That producer took my little crazy pie in the sky idea and he made it into their little box. He said, “This is what HGTV is looking for. You guys are this close. We need to squish it together.” We filmed it a whole other flip. That flip is the one that got us on HGTV. It didn’t happen overnight. You’ve got to understand, in 2014 is when we started that dream of getting a show on HGTV. We didn’t air until 2018. Think about that. Sometimes your dreams are not going to happen overnight. There is no easy button in life. It is a marathon. If you want something so bad that you can taste it and so bad that you will never stop, you’ll get it. As Napoleon Hill says, “If you dream it and you believe it, you can achieve it.” That’s exactly what got us the show. Never giving up.
Our show aired in ‘18, HGTVs Risky Builders. You can look it up. It was a wild and exciting time, but that same thing, when the show aired and we aired six times, we didn’t move on to the next season. You think you got it. Your ratings are there. You’re the number two show out of green light and you think you got it and all of a sudden, one thing happens. That one thing that happened for us was discovered about HGTV when our show was airing and they decided to freeze all my shows. That door that we thought was going to open that was going to pave the way for the rest of our life slammed in our face.
Another thing that Chris said that I want to highlight. His dream took four years. We are conditioned to have a short-term vision and immediate gratification mentality is common now. There are many people out there promising us, “You can make $1 million in two years. You have to work ten hours a week for the next eighteen months.” The truth is that I’m not going to say bad things about anybody that’s making promises because I don’t know. What I do know is an assured way of success is to have a long-term vision, especially in real estate. Chris did flips. That’s more of a short-term thing. I have done a couple of flips. It’s not my favorite thing to do because the pressure is high, but you want to have a long-term vision. First of all, if you’re flipping, have deep pockets enough that you can recover from any mistakes. With flipping, you have to be right on target.
We are at 257 flips to date and it would be 258 soon. I can assure you, you better hope you’ve got a good plan for how cashflow is happening.
In the beginning, mistakes happen and that costs money and time. You need to make sure that you’ve got the backing to do that if you want to do flips. Regardless of whatever you’re doing, whether it’s flipping or wholesaling or buy and hold, which is what I do, have a long-term vision. Real estate is not a get rich quick scam or idea. It is a long-term business. Even though his TV show, we’re talking about that and it took four years or whatever, understand that real estate is that way too. You want to stick with the dream long-term because that’s how it’s going to pay off.
The other thing too that you said in there that I want to clarify that it’s vitally important is if you’re getting into real estate, I don’t care if you’re going to wholesale. I don’t care if you’re going to flip. I don’t care if you’re going to do BRRRRs and buy and holds, you should have a system and a strategy. My system and strategy are simple. Each and every single property I have goes through, I call it four, but we’ll focus on a three-step strategy. Number one, every deal we get, first, we try to assign that deal because the quick dollar is always the best dollar. Number two, if we can assign it, we don’t freak out. We don’t worry because you know what we figured out, we figured out how money works.
That’s what I’ve written a book about. It’s what I teach and talk about, money and how money works. We take the deal down. What we do is we look at, can we wholesale this deal? Can we do a quick sale without doing much work or any work at all? If we can’t, if we flip the deal, that’s strategy number 2.5, as I like to call it, because if we can’t pull it out, then we’ll look at flipping it. If we flip or we’re looking at that strategy, we have to be able to make 20% profit. If we’re not going to make a 20% profit, it moves on to step number three or strategy three, which is a BRRRR. What we’re going to do is renovate it like a flip. We’re going to basically get it ready.
We’re going to rent it. We’re going to take it to the bank and refinance it. We’re going to keep it as a long-term rental because once you own the asset and you control the asset, it’s now providing cashflow. It’s appreciating. What we’ve even been doing is taking a lot of our rentals, packaging them together in nice rental portfolios and selling them off to areas like California, Toronto, New York City, where they can’t touch rate of return like what we’re getting here. That’s what we’ve been doing. Because we have that system, we never have to worry about cashflow. There’s always a secondary strategy. That goes right into what you were saying. There’s not one or the other that’s better, just make sure you have multiple exit strategies in your strategy.
Thank you for saying that, Chris. That is my big thing on how I have avoided my own disasters in my life in real estate is always having several exit strategies. Every business partner I go into business with, they have to understand that I’m not married to one particular exit strategy. I have my preference, but if that one doesn’t work, we are going to number two. In other words, if we’re trying to sell a flip or a construction project and the market has plummeted and we can’t sell it, I’m not going to chase the market down. I’m not going to do that. We are going to rent it. Understanding that you have many options with exiting a project is important. You don’t want to get married to a particular idea and you don’t want to get so bullheaded about it that you will make mistakes like chasing the market down. Instead of chasing the market down, chase rents up. You can do the opposite and succeed. Chris, nobody else talks about the multiple exit strategies. Thank you so much for that.
We did 257 flips and you might look at that and be like, “Wow.” We made a lot of mistakes in the early years. All we did was flip. I can tell you, there were times where I couldn’t even buy groceries because I had so much money out there, I didn’t have cashflow. We started getting smart. What we started doing is getting a rental and that rental cashflow, we’d roll it in. We created a spreadsheet. We had X amount of cashflow coming in and we wanted that cashflow to support the carry cost on the flips. It didn’t happen overnight, but we started figuring out, “If we can build a rental portfolio that cashflows, we can use that cashflow to determine how many flips we can do at one time because the cashflow carries the cost of the flip business.”
You make the big profits on the flips, but sometimes you’ve got to wait for that. We started saying, “If the house doesn’t sell and we don’t make 20%, no big deal. Let’s rent it and move it into the rental portfolio. If it didn’t sell now, it might sell next year or maybe down the line, we’ll keep cashflowing. We figured this out through mistakes. All these ladies that are trying to get into this business, if you take this knowledge and you apply this in your business, you will not go through these roller coasters that I had to. You won’t have to look fear in the face like I had too many times and say, “How am I going to get to the next thing?” You’ve learned from someone else’s mistakes. Although failure is a necessary part of success, you can minimize the number of failures by learning from other people’s failures and then applying what not to do in your practice.
It is why a mentor is so important. Could you tell us a little bit about how you started financing things? I know you started using private money rather than the banks. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?
It all came when I learned that the people that were crushing it in the business, I always thought it was because they had millions of dollars of their own money. I learned that they didn’t. They mimicked what the banks did. They used other people’s money. What the biggest thing I started doing, and I was good at this because I was an advisor, is I started going out and finding all these people that I thought had money. Whether it was in an IRA, hidden equity in their home or money that they had set aside in investments that maybe they weren’t comfortable with the risks. I found all of these different sources of money and the biggest source of money I found, to be honest, and this is going to blow you away, permanent life insurance. Do you know how much money is sitting in permanent whole life and universal life policies? These people don’t even know that they can access their cash value. I started going to these people and I started solving their problems. This is a massive takeaway.
One thing I got super good at is never asking for money. I never went to somebody and asked them for money. I went to somebody that I knew had money. I said I’ve learned what their problem was. Sometimes their problem was they didn’t like making their car payment. What I would do is teach them and I would say to them, “What if I could show you how to have your house pay for your car?” You see their problems, their car payment. The thing I know is they’ve got equity in their house. Instead of their house being a liability, I taught them how to turn their liabilities into assets by taking and using that hidden equity that was sitting in their house. That interest that I paid them on a monthly basis, the mailbox money, that paid for their car payment. I started learning that people’s problems weren’t wanting to become a multimillionaire.
Their problem was they wanted to take one more family vacation. Maybe they wanted to take their whole family to Disney World on them and pay for the little thing. To someone, that’s a major problem in their life. To us, do you know how easy it is for a real estate investor to solve that person’s problem? Show them how to take their IRA, their 401(k) money, their hidden equity, either money sitting into the life insurance and how to then take that income from those vehicles that are not doing anything for them in terms of an income. Show how that income will make them have that vacation. The number one thing to raising private money is not asking for money. It’s not knowing a bunch of people with money. It’s going out there and finding the people that you liked, the people that trust you, and teach them how to solve their problems. Their problems are stinking easy to solve.
For you, it was easy because you were a financial advisor. You had access to this information. The layman, for instance, me, I would never have that information.
Finding Money Solutions: Make sure you have multiple exit strategies in your strategy.
You do. How many people do you know that have employer-sponsored retirement plans, 401(k)s, 403 (b)s, 457s? Every person that’s working in a regular W-2 job probably is putting money into a retirement plan. They’ve been taught to do that their whole life. They’ve got this money sitting in their retirement plans, but do you know what their mindset tells them? “I can’t use that money. I would have to pay tax and penalties to take that money out.” That’s what they think. They don’t know that they can take a loan from that 401(k). When they take a loan from that 401(k), you being the borrower or the real estate investor, can pay that loan back for them and put some extra money in their pocket. If their loan costs them 5% and that interest that they’re paying on the loan goes back into their account, but that’s a cost to them. Why don’t you pay them 10%? They’re making a spread of 5% on that money. Everybody’s got one of these things.
A lot of people have old 401(k)s move into IRAs. Show them how to take those IRAs and move them to a self-directed IRA. You don’t even need to be the expert to say, “I know a person that could basically help you do this.” Everybody wants to think that I’m different because I was an advisor. Maybe it was a little easier because I knew how to identify these things, but everybody knows somebody that has money. Most people will tell you that they don’t have any money because they don’t know how money works. If you get a little bit of knowledge on how money works and you learn how to position your opportunity, which is your real estate deal, your opportunity, you can be positioned to solve their problem. All of a sudden, you start figuring out that the people that you don’t think having money are the biggest ones you can help and the biggest ones that can give you money for your deals. It’s a misconception of where the money lies and how people can use that money.
I don’t know if this happens for you, but someone starts talking about something and then something grabs your attention and you don’t hear anything else. This happened to me while you were talking, Chris. I was going to backtrack a little bit. You talked about they’ve got their 401(k). You can take a loan. You get 5% and then you, Chris, are going to pay them 10%. Ladies, the only reason I am focusing on this is to give you an idea of the paradigm shift that Chris can create for you. There’s one example. Based on what he said, there are probably many opportunities based on what you’ve got, but here’s the paradigm shift that happened for me. You take out a loan from your 401(k) at 5%. I don’t know if you caught this, but do you know that 5% is getting paid back to you? You’re paying interest back to yourself. You’re making 5% and he’s giving you 10%. A lot of people would look at this and say, “I’m getting a loan at 5% and I’m getting paid 10%. This is arbitrage. I’m only making 5%.” How much are they making?
It’s more than 5% because you are paying them 10% and the 5% they’re paying back to their 401(k) is their money. They’re paying themselves back with interest. What they’re doing is the same thing the bank does. You are literally mimicking what the bank does every single day because you learned one new thing that you can change. Everything I teach people is only changing one thing in your life. That is it. It’s applying basic banking principles, the simplest things that are on for hundreds of years to your everyday life. It will change your life. It will completely transform your life if you learn that one new thing.
There are many of those new things that we can learn. Once we focus on one and we start to utilize that, we create a plan like you’re talking about. Now, we have a business.
It’s about the home equity line of credit. It doesn’t cost anyone anything to get a home equity line of credit. Most banks will dish things out and they don’t even charge for the appraisal. It costs nothing to use or to get a home equity line of credit if you’re not using that money. You now got this home equity line and that home equity line taps into the equity in your house. People get excited about having equity in their house, but why? What is your equity in your house doing to change your life? Nothing. Do you know what your equity in your house is doing? I want you to visualize this.
Picture that you come home from work and on your couch is your money sitting there and your money is holding the soda from your fridge. The Lay’s potato chips from your cupboard and there are crumbs and everything all around your couch and your money is sitting there watching TV. Kick back. You worked a hard day and your money looks at you and says, “Did you have a hard day at work?” That’s what your money is doing every day. It’s sitting on your couch being lazy while you’re off hustling because you’ve been taught to go out there and work hard, work long, and you’ll get ahead. Your money needs to work hard. The best thing about your money is you can be a slave driver. You can make your money work hard and it will never ask for a break. It will never ask for a vacation. It will never even get mad at you, but you have to teach it and send it to work.
Your money is sitting there being lazy. Teach your money on how to go to work. Remember my mom. I told that example where she put her house on the line. After she did that, we learned something. After I paid off that store’s loan, what we started doing is mom had this line of credit. We started using mom’s line of credit to buy real estate. My mom’s line of credit was 5%. I would pay my mom usually 8% to 10% on the loan. I’d take a loan and I would pay mom back. That amount that I paid my mom above and beyond her payment to her home equity line of credit was enough to pay for a car. That’s where I came up with that whole idea of having your house pay for your car. That’s what people want. People want their car payment paid for by their house. They just don’t know how. The answer is so simple. Every one of you reading this has the answer to their problem. That answer is in the form of a real estate opportunity. Don’t ask for money, solve problems.
I’ve got one million things that I feel like I could add and we’re already out of time. We’re going to have EXTRA after this and we’ll do a deeper dive on some of this stuff. If you’re subscribed to EXTRA, you’re going to get a lot more. If you’re not subscribed to EXTRA, do it because you’re going to want a lot more. We’re going to talk about more of this stuff then. Before we close out this portion of the show, Chris, could you tell people how they can get in touch with you?
The best way to get in touch with me is my website. It’s ChrisNaugle.com. They can go on there and that’s the best way. They can also check me out. A lot of people love social media. I am all over Instagram. It’s @TheChrisNaugle and Chris Naugle on Facebook. You can’t not find me. I answer every single direct message individually.
I knew that you wanted to give my readers a free gift, which is the eBook of your bestselling book, The Private Money Guide: Real Estate Edition. He’s going to be giving you that free eBook. Chris also wanted to make another generous offer. Could you talk a little bit about the membership offer you wanted to make to my audience?
I do because we’re talking about money and a lot of times, I can teach people where all the money is and they still don’t want to look for it. What I’ve created is a community of lenders and borrowers. Picture eharmony, the dating site. I’ve created that for lenders and borrowers. It’s a community that you can come into where all the lenders in there communicate with all the borrowers and the borrowers can submit their deals through a standard operating procedure. We do all the work for you. You fill in the blanks and your deal goes on. Literally, you can have all the lenders looking at your deal and they will do that. It’s called The Money School community. What I wanted to do is basically make a special offer and give it to everybody in your community at a very reduced price over what we normally charge. You can test it out. It’s a monthly subscription. You can try it. If it didn’t work, you stopped the subscription, no big deal, but it has literally provided funding for I don’t even know how many at this point. I don’t keep track of all the deals, but that’s what I wanted to do.
The URL is ChrisNaugle.Teachable.com. You’re going to look at the membership. It will show you the regular price, but then when you get an opportunity to put in the coupon code 50OFF and you’ll get $50 off of the monthly membership. It’s month to month. You can try it for one month at this reduced rate and continue at that rate if it seems to be something that is going to work for you. That’s generous and it’s an ongoing gift. It’s not like $50 off the first month. It’s an ongoing monthly gift. That was generous. Thank you, Chris.
You’re welcome.
Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?
I’m always ready.
Give us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.
The Private Money Guide: Real Estate Edition: Solutions To Finding Money. Where To Go & How To Ask
The super tip to getting started is easy. It’s get started and find one person that is doing what you want to do and latch onto them and learn from them. That would be my super tip to getting started. Stop trying to think you need to know everything and take that leaping start.
What is one strategy on being successful in real estate investing?
One strategy on being successful in real estate investing is to come up with a strategy before you get started. Lay out or map out where you want to be and come up with the plan to get there. If you want to have five properties, come up with that plan of how many offers do you have to make versus how many houses you have to get. Write the plan down. Don’t dive in without a plan. Do the plan first.
What would you say is one daily strategy or daily practice that you use that contributes to your personal success?
Every morning, the first thing I do when I wake up is I get down on my knees and I thank God for what I have.
Chris, this has been amazing. Thank you for everything you’ve offered in this portion of the show.
You’re welcome. It’s been an honor.
Thank you for joining, Chris and I. We are going to be talking about more of this stuff in EXTRA. The question that I am going to be asking Chris is, how do you build wealth through debts and expenses? How do you come out ahead? That’s juicy. We’ll probably be doing a deeper dive on the private money piece also. If you’re not subscribed to EXTRA but would like to be, I know this sounds a little bit confusing, but here’s the thing. You go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. You get the first seven days for free so you can test it out. You sign up for the subscription. After that, it’s a monthly subscription that’s super cheap. It’s $5 a month and you can get your EXTRA episodes.
If you are on Apple Podcasts, you’ll be able to see it on Apple Podcasts. If you’re on Podbean or anything else, you’ll be able to see it on the device that you’re using. You don’t have to have another subscription to any other device or apps. I want to explain that. I know that was a little bit long-winded, but I get many questions on how do you do this. It’s RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com and then it’s self-explanatory from there. Thank you for joining Chris and me on this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time and until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams so get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. We’ll see you next time.
Important Links
About Chris Naugle
Chris Naugle has dedicated his life to being America’s #1 Money Mentor. His success includes managing over 30 million dollars in assets in the financial services and advisory industry and tens of millions in real estate business, with over 200 transactions and an HGTV pilot show since 2014.
In 20 years, Chris has built and owned 16 companies, with his businesses being featured in Forbes, ABC and House Hunters. He is currently the co-founder and CEO of FlipOut Academy™, founder of The Money School™, and Money Mentor for The Money Multiplier.
As an innovator and visionary in wealth-building and real estate, he empowers entrepreneurs, business owners, and real estate investors with the knowledge of how money works. Innovating what it takes to break the chains of financial slavery, Chris is driven to deliver the financial knowledge that fuels lasting freedom. To date, he has spoken to and taught over ten thousand Americans.
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Moneeka Sawyer is often described as one of the most blissful people you will ever meet. She has been investing in Real Estate for over 20 years, so has been through all the different cycles of the market. Still, she has turned $10,000 into over $5,000,000, working only 5-10 hours per MONTH with very little stress.
While building her multi-million dollar business, she has traveled to over 55 countries, dances every single day, supports causes that are important to her, and spends lots of time with her husband of over 20 years.
She is the international best-selling author of the multiple award-winning books “Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment” and “Real Estate Investing for Women: Expert Conversations to Increase Wealth and Happiness the Blissful Way.”
Moneeka has been featured on stages including Carnegie Hall and Nasdaq, radio, podcasts such as Achieve Your Goals with Hal Elrod, and TV stations including ABC, CBS, FOX, and the CW, impacting over 150 million people.
Moneeka Sawyer
Monick Halm is the founder of Real Estate Investor Goddesses. She is an educator and advocate for women to create real wealth through real estate. She is herself a real estate investor, syndicator, and developer with over 14 years of real estate investing experience in multi-family, mobile home parks, RV parks, flipping, commercial, vacation rentals, syndication, and ground-up development. Together with her husband Peter Halm, and her investors, she owns over 1300 rental units across 6 states.
Brett is a capital gains tax deferral expert, Investment Real Estate Expert, Multifamily Broker, and the Founder of Capital Gains Tax Solutions – a company helping people to defer capital gains tax on the sale of their highly appreciated assets, eliminate the need for a 1031 exchange, and free up their time so they can create & preserve more wealth.
