The Gratitude Game – Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving! There are a lot of things to be grateful for, especially on a podcast about investing and money. Don’t forget to be grateful for the things it can get you. Treat your parents to an expensive dinner or fly someplace with your friends. These can be expensive but just say yes. If your heart says yes, then follow it. Join Moneeka Sawyer as she talks about what she’s grateful for this year and for the future.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
The Gratitude Game – Happy Thanksgiving!
Happy Thanksgiving. I hope you’re having a wonderful holiday already and spending time with people you love or doing things that you love or both. I wanted to do an EXTRA show because I am feeling a lot of gratitude. I wanted to share that with you and maybe help you to experience a little bit more bliss through this holiday season.
There are a couple of things that I’m feeling a lot of gratitude for. First of all, for this show. I feel a huge amount of gratitude that anybody wants to read, that I’ve got something to say that people find valuable and that you ladies are there for me. You let me know what you need, you’re loving stuff and I’m changing your lives. I feel like I finally found my calling. This is the thing that I’m supposed to be doing. I don’t know why it took me until I was 48 or 49 to figure this out. Why did it take so long?
I’m so grateful that I did figure it out. I am living the dream. It’s fulfilling. I’m changing lives and helping people create bliss, which is my heart work. Also, I’m helping them to create wealth, which will help all of us to live more blissful lives. I want to say thank you to you for being a part of my life and for supporting me. I want to hear from you. Please remember that. Part of what makes my work worth it is hearing from you or hearing what you need.
That doesn’t seem like something a lot of women like to do. We don’t often like to ask questions or for help but I would love it if you do that. I want to hear more. What is it that you need? What questions do you have? How can I serve you more? That makes it more fulfilling and gratifying for me. Thank you for being a part of my life.
It’s not really the money that you want. It’s the ability to say yes to the people you love.
I want to tell you a little bit of a story and I hope this doesn’t come across as a brag. It’s more of making a point. A girlfriend of mine started traveling the country in her RV years ago when she retired. We see each other 2 or 3 times a year. I met her in Belize when I bought my Belize property and in Hawaii. We meet in different places. That’s with our significant others.
She and I have a girls’ retreat for 2, 3 or 4 days every single year. It’s her and me. In 2020, we didn’t get to do either of those things because of COVID. This 2021, when we were doing our weekend away, we decided to splurge. What’s was interesting about this is we haven’t spent money in two years. She texts me and says, “Moneeka, do you want to go to The Ritz?” We usually go to a spa. You know those prices are like they’re not cheap but we’ll spend somewhere between $300 and $500 a night and then we split it.
The Ritz is $1,100 a night. She wanted to do the whole package. What I was so grateful for was that it didn’t even occur to me to say no. I didn’t even think, “That’s so much money.” I didn’t think about any of those things. We’re only going for two nights and we’re splitting the cost. Years ago, I thought I couldn’t do and afford that. My financial situation is better. That’s true. I’m grateful for that. I’m not minimizing that. The thing that I’m most grateful for is that I didn’t have to think about it. How did my life get to that point where I can be a yes when my heart says yes?
There are a lot of people who are richer than me and they can say yes to a lot more things but I’m so grateful for the fact that I wanted to spend this time with my girlfriend, just us girls and connecting. She desperately wanted to do something because she’s never done this before. She doesn’t have anybody else in her life that she could do that. She’s like, “You’re the only person I could even ask and I didn’t expect you to say yes.” I was able to say yes to her. I’m so grateful that I can do that.
The next thing that happened was I went to Mexico with my parents to take care of them. My dad and mom are old. They’re not very mobile but they’ve traveled their entire lives. They don’t want to stop. It’s a quality-of-life issue for them. I want to be able to support them in that. I was able to take time off of work. They were not able to pay for vacation this 2021. Usually, they pay each year but it’s because they have a timeshare. It’s a long story. They weren’t able to get us a condo, so we had to pay. It was not cheap because they’re staying at an all-inclusive resort so that they can travel but not travel or not deal with all the other stuff. We were able to be a yes for that too.
What I’m trying to say is there’s a lot of focus on this show about money and investing. What I want to focus on is gratitude for what those things can get us because it’s not the money that we want. It’s the ability to say yes to the people we love, give to our aging parents, children, spouses, take care of ourselves, be able to be yes to our friends when they need us or want to play in a way that they can’t play normally.
Thanksgiving Gratitude: Be grateful for when you’re buying something expensive and you don’t even have to think why you’re buying it. Get your life to a point where you can just say yes when your heart says yes.
What is it that money gets us? I’m beyond grateful for what it’s able to do for me. In addition, how many donations were able to do this 2021? I did so much more this 2021 than I’ve done in the past. I’ve got that foundation that I don’t worry about this stuff. I can do things in a little bit of a bigger way, be a bigger yes, connect more deeply with my heart because I’m not worried about the budget and donate more when I feel more like I want to do that. I’m so grateful for what my real estate business has provided me in the way of opportunities to follow my heart. I’ve been sitting with that.
Please forgive me if that sounds like a brag. I hope you understand that’s not what the point is here. As I was in Mexico with my parents, I was going to do this there but I decided not to because I didn’t want to get all dressed up. I wanted to focus on my vacation. As I was sitting there on the balcony, looking out at the ocean, I was filled with this incredible feeling of gratitude. That feeling of gratitude is what makes life so worth it.
What’s also cool about feeling that gratitude in that way is I’ve got that to take it with me. When I came back to work, things were on fire. There were technical issues that happened with the show. Some things went wrong. I had to deal with all this stuff. Suddenly, I was hit with stress but because that emotion of gratitude was deep and anchored in me, I could plug into it again and feel that I could bring it back up. I feel grateful for that.
That feeling of gratitude is what makes life so worth it.
I want you to think about this. What is it that we want to create and do in 2022 and beyond? Is it possible to feel gratitude for what we have but also gratitude for what we’re about to create? We can have gratitude for what we have and for what we are about to create. For Thanksgiving, there are a few things that I invite you to do. Maybe it’s not on Thanksgiving Day but if you can do it, as soon as possible. Sit down and be in true gratitude for something in your life. It could be anything, big, small, something that happened now or your whole life. Be able to get deeper into that feeling of gratitude.
When I’m in that feeling of deep gratitude, I touch my heart. In that way, it anchors it. You go into this deep feeling of gratitude. I tell myself this story. I envision what’s going on as much as I can give myself in the way of feeling all the senses, the thoughts, being able to see me in those places, feel, taste, hear or smell that engages that feeling of gratitude. Not just, “I’m so grateful for,” which is great but dropping into your body.
This takes a little bit of time. It’s a little bit more involved than writing, “I’m grateful for this.” Create a story around what that gratitude is and feel it in your heart. When you’re deep in it, maybe touch your heart, fingers together and shoulder, anchor that feeling. Remember to let go of that anchor before that feeling of gratitude tends to disappear because it comes in waves. You feel a huge amount of gratitude, touch and then you start to see it’s fading away. Let go of that anchor because you want that anchor to be the gratitude anchor.
Thanksgiving Gratitude: There’s a lot of focus on this show about money and investing. But what you should really focus on in on the gratitude of what those things can get you.
What I want you to do is think a little bit about what you want to create. 2022 is right around the corner. What is it that you want to create in 2022? You can think of something big or small. I’m not asking you to put together these big goals but there’s a little bit of a gap between where you are and where you want to be. Just because you’re grateful for what we’ve got doesn’t mean we don’t have more. That’s part of what living life is all about. What’s the next step? What’s the next evolution? What’s the next cool thing for us?
You want to think about what it is that. It could be something very small or big, like I want to buy my first piece of property, invest in my first syndication or start a new real estate wholesaling business, whatever it is that you want to do. It could be those things. If it’s those things, you want to pick one step. You don’t want to go for the big gusto thing. You want to pick a step that you can achieve. Maybe, it’s doing research, calling a realtor or whatever that first step is. There’s a gap.
Think about what that goal is or what that future thing that you’re going to create is. Touch your heart and deliver that feeling of gratitude to that new goal as if it’s already happened. You’re going to think of that next step, goal or the other side of that gap, what you’re trying to achieve and then touch your anchor of gratitude. You’re going to feel intense gratitude for this thing already having happened. When you do that, you’re pulling yourself forward towards that next piece that makes part of your life that is going to fill you up and you’re going there with gratitude.
My invitation for Thanksgiving is to fill today and tomorrow with so much gratitude that you can’t help but be blissful. I hope that you loved that and it was helpful. I hope you’re having a wonderful Thanksgiving. I will look forward to talking to you soon. Always remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I love you, ladies. Happy Thanksgiving.
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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.
Syndication Series #4: Senior Living As An Real Estate Investment With Eng Taing
What real estate investments have growth opportunities nowadays? Eng Taing, born in a refugee camp in Thailand, where his family escaped the Khmer Rouge from Cambodia, immigrated to America. Despite not having much, he found a way to thrive for success. Blessed with being good at math, Eng understood data patterns in the real estate market. Now, he is focusing most of his time and money on senior living investments. So how did he end up investing in senior living? Find out by tuning in and learning more about this asset!
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Syndication Series #4: Senior Living As An Real Estate Investment With Eng Taing
Real Estate Investing For Women
Welcome to the Syndication Series where you are going to learn all about what syndication is, and how you can utilize it to build cashflow and grow your wealth. It’s an exciting strategy and I’m looking forward to sharing all of our guests with you. Let’s get to the show.
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I am so excited to welcome to the show, Eng Taing. He is the CEO and Founder of Touzi Capital, and a highly experienced real estate investor with $100 million of assets under management. Eng works hard to help people reach their full potential. He is an economist by training from the Wharton School of Business. He also has experience leading data science and analytics at Apple, Capital One and AT&T. He applies that experience when identifying and underwriting investment opportunities in markets. Eng has presented at companies like Apple, Facebook and Amazon, where he teaches employees how to minimize their tax burden and keep and invest more of their earnings so they can achieve financial freedom.
Touzi Capital is a real estate investment company focused on investing in Kansas City that believes that your money should work for you. It has been investing in commercial real estate for many years, and trusts that this is one of the best ways to predictably build wealth through passive income. Touzi Capital focuses on high cashflow investments and providing passive income to investors by acquiring and optimizing multifamily, industrial and senior living assets. In doing this, they want to make real estate investing accessible for the everyday investor through technology and a data-driven platform along with their dedicated team that puts you first. Eng, welcome to the show.
What a mouthful. I don’t even know who wrote that.
Talk to us a little bit about your real estate journey. You went to Wharton Business School and then you moved into real estate. Tell me how that worked out for you.
I would love to take a little step back to my formative years to highlight why I got into real estate and why it’s important for me. I was born in a refugee camp in Thailand. My parents are Cambodians and we escape the Khmer Rouge. There were lots of interesting stories of hiding in jungles and hiding from laws, out of hiding and keeping some pretty terrible stuff. It’s more of my parents’ story. I did grow up in LA and I grew up very poor. I grew up not having much, but I got very lucky to have been growing up in America. I have been fortunate enough to be good at Math and have a family that put a roof over my head, to not see what I didn’t have, and to have enough hunger to drive me to my biggest why.
Hopefully, a lot of your audience has a big why to help them provide security and financial freedom in whatever form that means to their family. That’s been my biggest driver. When I started to get good at Math, I gravitated towards investment banking because that’s the thing people did in my age group. Everybody said, “Let’s go do investment banking. This makes a bunch of money, be a stock trader,” or whatever it is. I did all that. I’m pretty good at Math and at understanding data patterns.
Having a predictable monthly income will make you feel relaxed.
What I found about myself is I did not like the volatility, the up and down, the movement and checking the market. I went through the financial crisis. I helped cause the financial crisis. I’m sorry. When you book $4 billion losses in subprime assets, that’s probably not a great idea. Seeing that side of things and seeing the value of these houses go down, that’s how I first got into my first real estate investments at the young age of 23.
I’m lucky enough to have the capital to deploy at the time. I remember it very clearly. It was a $125,000 investment to a $30,000 purchase price of investment to get $1,000 a month in net monthly income. I liked that feeling of having a monthly predictable income. Obviously, I’m hiding a few things like what I had to do with painting the house, remodeling, getting tenants, and tenant issues. In general, when you come from so little and have just a little bit of security, it gets you a lot of confidence. My story isn’t a story of getting into real estate and just doing real estate. My story is of someone who has always tried to do a lot of things. I had a side passion for real estate and now it’s the main passion of my full-time job or my business.
It’s always been a side hustle. For me and probably some of your audience, you work your 9:00 to 5:00 and you buy real estate. For me, having that passive income help me make better decisions. I was able to go to the Peace Corps when everyone went to MBA. I met my wife in the Peace Corps. I was able to take bolder career decisions of asking for more, of not having a fear-based life of financial insecurity and saying, “I can’t go for this job or make this counteroffer.”
That helped because I was buying real estate every year, and having that little base of support grow and grow. I knew that I didn’t need to have much to survive. Having that, on top of everything else I was doing, gave me more freedom of choice and urgency. It’s a long story of how all these formative things helped me get into real estate, as well as why I’m doing more real estate and why I love preaching to the choir about real estate and subsidiary tax advantage. I’ve heard a lot of people who invest in real estate and not pay taxes. I love talking about that as well.
I went out to lunch with my mother-in-law and I told her, “I’m not sure what’s going on with me but I am getting teary-eyed with everything that’s happening around me.” It’s not everything, but things touched me so deeply. I’m not sure what’s going on with that. Just hearing your story about being a refugee and running to Thailand first, and then escaping to the United States, it’s a very similar story of my parents who had to flee from Pakistan during the separation because they were Hindu. Basically, they only had their clothes on their back and they ran across the border. They had these big houses in Pakistan and India. They had 15 or 18 people living in one dirt-floor shack.
I know the story. I never had to live it. They came to the United States and then had me. When I hear these stories, you realize how insanely lucky we are here in the United States. What I wish is that people understood that luck and it did not deter them from their drive. How old were you when you moved to LA?
Three years old.
Senior Living: The growth of this aging population will need more care, such as better communities and better facilities to take care of them.
You probably don’t remember too much of that struggle. As little people, we still get the subconscious impact of that. Your parents brought you here and they had this drive. They wanted to create safety for you and you got to see that, then that helped you to build that drive. Sometimes, those of us that come from immigrant families have this huge advantage of understanding what it could be like if we were not here and we didn’t have this opportunity. That touched me so much and I wanted to say thank you so much for sharing that story.
You’re welcome. That was my purpose. I love to share my story. My story is my parent’s story. My story is a lot of people’s stories, of not just immigrants who are refugees but of people who don’t have much. I fundamentally believe that it’s a lot of mindsets. It’s having that mindset to be grateful for what you have and what you can have for your health and for all the stuff. I know my son grew up very spoiled. I’m trying to figure it out. I don’t know how to not spoil him. I want him to have fun too. I want to buy him all the toys, but I have pictures of me in his age chasing chickens in the camp. It’s a different journey.
You are right that mindset is everything. You got a mindset from your parents, and you’ve inherited and developed your own mindset. That mindset will then hopefully, will impact your children and the world around you. Everything that we do is done through the filters of our own eyes that are affected by our own minds. If you come from a filter of gratitude, everything that you see will be of gratitude, and living that life helps our children to understand it and see it.
Even with all that they went through, my parents were so grateful to be here. They were so grateful for their children and for their opportunities. That’s a big reason why I’m so grateful for everything too. I totally understand what you’re saying. That mindset piece is huge. I’m sure no matter how spoiled your little one is, he will get that from you too. He might be chasing chickens but he might be doing it in the park.
That’s what rich people in San Francisco didn’t know. They just buy a chicken coop. It’s a sign of affluence that I got chickens and fresh grown eggs.
It’s come full circle. It’s not just an immigrant mindset. I thank you for emphasizing that. There are a lot of people that come from a place where they are not very privileged, or they had very little, or they were in bad circumstances. Through the change of their mindset, drive, and being able to have a vision of what might be possible, they are able to overcome that and create a life of freedom and choice. I released my TEDx Talk, which is called Who Is The Boss Of You? It’s all about economic freedom to give you a choice. We’re on the same wavelength on that. Let’s talk about real estate specifically. Talk to me about your favorite investment class or asset class.
I’ve gravitated towards senior living as a great asset class. For those who don’t know, senior living has many varieties to it. You have nursing homes, independent living, adults 55-plus assisted living. I was fairly in the middle of assisted living where folks, elders, and our residents are the greatest generation and they’ve contributed so much to this country. They are 85-plus. I love to invest in places where you have strong fundamentals or an asset class with strong fundamentals. That means there will be a lot more old people in the future. That’s just the demographic shift that is a known quantity in America, the silver tsunami. The growth of this aging population will need more care, better communities and better facilities to take care of them.
Having just a little bit of security gets you a lot of confidence when you come from so little.
Why I love this asset class, and I’ll compare this to multifamily because I do have both, is it’s both business as well as real estate. It has many great intangible changes. You are renting. You have to have depreciation. You have leverage and all these things that real estate gives you. You also have a business that essentially, for us, is an all-inclusive resort where our rents are typically five times the amount that you would pay for a comparable apartment building. You have a $500 revenue, but you have three times the costs. That comes from making sure that you have three meals a day and all this stuff. It’s just by creating community. I love thinking about creating community and how we can give our seniors the best community as these are the retirement years. These are the years that they would stay probably for their entire lives.
What I like to compare it to multifamily is that typically three years is the average length of stay. Once you get somebody in, they’re staying for a while. Because we do private pay, not Medicaid or Medicare, we know exactly that they can afford these things three-ish years. Overall, they are income resistant. In a pandemic, you can lose your job or income and be unemployed. Our tenants are recession resilient as I would like to call it.
They have an income. They have the money ready. They put that out from the funds. They’re using this for the last remaining years of making sure they’re in a great place. I’ve gotten deep into senior living. The reason why I got into senior living is because I love cashflow. I invest with cashflow and I’ve been investing in California until it didn’t make sense. I’m a nimble and flexible person. I don’t want to just be, “This is what I’m doing. I will only do that. I’m never going to do anything else.”
While you will learn expertise in that thing, if the market shifts, if California gets more expensive, which it has because it gets more regulated and may control, which it has, and if multi-family becomes more expensive, which it has, then I can’t get the same kind of cashflow that I’m used to, and I’m spoiled. I like to surround myself with double-digit cashflow. I’ll invest in this as well. I will chase after good asset classes that there’s a good moat around. When I started, I bought something to invest in, I didn’t have any guidance on how to buy real estate. They didn’t have sites back then. I figured out what to buy and do the math myself. I was pretty good at Math. I can figure it out.
If more people can do what you’re doing, that means the return is not as good. It’s more competitive. What you want to do is get to more uncompetitive areas where you can create a moat of competitive advantage. Senior living has a huge moat. No one is going to go figure it out like, “I want to invest in senior living nowadays.” Hopefully after this show, maybe some of your audience will. It’s definitely a great moat. There are lots of people in the space, but not as many as they should be. There are lots of communities that are thriving even during COVID.
When I think about what I want to continue to do from investing overall is I love cashflow. I say cashflow risk appreciation, even though all my assets have appreciated. This is what happens to assets, especially when the government prints a lot of money. I liked cashflow because I can get that money now and then compound it or invest it in many different things. When you invest for appreciation, you’re like planting a tree, then it becomes a big tree, but then that’s very risky to only have one tree. When you’re investing for cashflow, I like to think of you are planting the tree and you got a forest. You can invest all the cash from it in many different things. Having double-digit cashflow, meaning if you put $100,000, you get $1,000 a month, gives you the freedom to do a lot of different things.
Senior Living: Figure out complicated things. Others won’t do it. So, it’s time to try it out.
That’s what gives you a lot of buffers because if you’re just investing for appreciation, I don’t want to say negative, but others have investments that can do both. That’s the money that you got to put into it every month. If you lose your job, you might not have that cashflow from that property to cover that debt. Cashflow investing for me is always a big buffer of safety. I’m always thinking of how conservative, how safe it can be, and how much money this investment can make so that it pays for itself and for all my other debts.
For senior living, I love the way that you talked about that. I talked a little bit about California as an appreciation market. Usually, you’re going to have negative cashflow, which now everybody is like, “Don’t do that.” It’s a bad word. When you have an appreciation market, you’re usually not going to have any cashflow. Sometimes you’ll break even, or if you hold for a while, maybe. There are different ways of investing in it. It is good to consider what are your goals and to pick a strategy accordingly. I love that you’re so clear on exactly what you want.
Talk to me a little bit about senior living homes. I’ve looked a little bit into it. I’m very curious about it. I’ve got a lot of elderly family members that have been in homes. I hear a lot about insurance issues, not insurance like medical insurance but insurance as in insuring the home. It is its own big thing that none of the other asset classes have. Have you found that to be a particularly big challenge? What do you think about that?
I think of it as an added cost that is baked into the revenue. Your NOI and op expenses are baked into it. It has three times the cost. You had licenses that you have to get. Oftentimes, a medical license but when you open anything you get a license of that nature. We’re building single-story communities where you typically have 80 to 90 people in the community.
We have many different layers of liability protection both from having insurance, which can be costly but it’s baked into the cost, to also a management company, which we either own or a third party. We would have the liability of all the HR because it’s a people business. It’s having people and taking care of people. You want that to live off your investment. You have three entities when you are investing in senior living versus when you have multifamily. You might just invest in your own name. You may have insurance. You could do an LLC but being in California, it’s $18,000 a year.
It is a little bit more complicated but once you get to know that business, you know how to handle those things.
I love complicated things. I love to figure it out and then maybe someone else will do it because it’s complicated. They might want to do it and there will be more for me. That’s great.
Senior living is a queried asset class.
There are two other questions I wanted to ask you. First of all, I do want to talk about opportunity zones and how they fit into this. I know that we’re going to talk more about that in EXTRA. We will get there. The other question is, do you invest in homes and take other people’s money to invest in them? For instance, if I wanted to invest in senior living but didn’t want to have to learn all that stuff, can I do it through you?
That’s exactly what we do. Thanks for bringing that up because I will say all these complicated things. One of the things you could do is at least know that at Touzi Capital, I’m here to provide you with an option to invest with us and participate in the same cashflow that I’ve been talking about and the same stuff without having to sign a loan, without having to get the insurance or having any liability because you’re not even on any of the paperwork and the corp liability business. We take care of everything. All the headaches of hiring people and all that stuff, we’re taking care of. We’re doing this at scale so that when you’re doing anything ten times, you get better at it. It’s something that I appreciate myself. We love to have anyone potentially because you’re investing and growing with us.
Thank you for that. Ladies, as you know, we will be asking him how to get in touch with him. That’s one of those things you might want to talk to him about. If you have an interest in senior living homes instead of learning the whole game, you can have a piece of your investment portfolio with him and make income passively. That’s a possibility too. Talk to me a little bit about opportunity zones. We’re going to do the deep dive in EXTRA about this, but give us a little high level because I know that several of your properties are in opportunity zones. Is that true?
Yeah. We’re developing two properties. One is Jacksonville. We’re breaking ground. I will be flying over for the ribbon-cutting ceremony. I love opportunity zones and what it represents, which is a new law that was passed during the Trump Tax Cuts. If you know the letter of the law or the tax code, you can reduce your taxable income, which means you can keep more of your earnings. If you work hard for your money, keep more of your money. Use all the things that the rich people and investor class use all day. This is a great opportunity because we have a lot of folks who have a lot of stocks. I come from Apple and they make a lot of money from stocks.
When you sell stocks, you have to pay capital gains. In fact, when you sell almost any asset, you have to pay capital gains. That capital gain is tax and for opportunity zones, it’s the first class of investment that you can essentially say, “I’m not going to pay that. Not now. I’ll pay that later.” Put that money into an opportunity zone. If you owed $100,000 of taxes on capital gains, don’t pay that. Pay that later. We defer taxes all the time. That’s a great strategy. That’s all real estate. That’s what people are most interested in. When you do 401(k), you want to defer taxes in the future. You defer taxes for six years, not too long, then you reduce it by 10%, and then you hold it for ten years. It’s quite a while for any real estate investment. All future capital gains get eliminated.
Compared to a non-opportunity investment, and I do have both, if given the same number of returns, let’s say, 12% each annual return, the opportunity zone will give you 50% more money at the end because you would have free money going in and free money going out. It’s like a Roth and 401(k). I can go into the details on that too but basically, don’t pay taxes if you can. There are ways to do that. Even if you’re a W-2 employee and working hard, there are many ways. If you’re investing in money, investing in opportunity zones, investing in places that the government is saying, “Invest in this place. You would get a great tax benefit.” These places sometimes are great places to build senior living communities.
You totally piqued my interest. I would like to do a deep dive on that in EXTRA, where you can talk a little bit more about how that actually works because you go to high-level as I asked. I want to know more about that and exactly how that works. Ladies, we’ll be talking about that in EXTRA. Definitely stay tuned for that. Before we go to our three rapid-fire questions, tell everybody how they can reach you.
Senior Living: Just get started. You will fail. You will learn. It’s all the same. It’s going to be a great journey.
They can reach me at our website TouziCapital.com and email me at [email protected]. I am always happy to talk about taxes, real estate investing, and financial freedom. It’s all the things I’m passionate about. I have YouTube videos and TikTok. I got viral and it’s a million views. What we love about this space compared to everything else I’ve been doing is I’ve done a lot of talking to people and seeing people on their journeys. I’ve learned so much by talking to people. If you’re trying to do anything, networking and relationship building is key to success.
Definitely, get in touch with him. He’s very generously offering some of his time, which not very many people do. Be respectful and kind. If you’re interested in this topic, give him a call or send an email. Eng, are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?
Yes.
Give us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.
I hate saying it depends, but what I always say is get started. Just do it. A lot of people always think. I think too much. I think all the time. Getting started is going to be the best way to learn. If you’re short of money, find somebody who has money. If you are short of time, find somebody who has time. Those two things, time and money, will allow you to get into real state. There are so many technologies nowadays. You can use Redfin, Zillow or all these great applications that I didn’t have when I started. That will help you to get into it. Just get started. You will fail. You will learn. It’s all the same, and it’s going to be a great journey.
Tell us one strategy for being successful in real estate.
The big strategy that I’ve come to is to value your time. If you value your time, then you can create processes or decisions that are going to keep you down in the weeds or quagmire of figuring out how to evict somebody or do this or that. While you have to do that in the beginning, if you’re trying to be successful, that means you will try and do this a lot. You’re not just going to try this once. If you get lucky, you’ll try this ten times. Think about what you would want to do 5 to 10 times over and figure out how to scale. That’s why for me, it’s always been about going up, scaling, and knowing that a multimillion-dollar loan is easier than a $100,000 loan. I just need the income for it. I just need to have the experience. Scaling and thinking about how to do things multiple times is always a great strategy to be successful.
You work hard for your money. Keep more money.
Scaling and systems conserve your time. What is one daily practice that contributes to your personal success?
I do fasting. I’m an intimate faster. That’s a little bit of me back in time and not eating breakfast. I used to eat a lot when I was working at a corporate job. I loved having lunches but what I found is there are some great health benefits of fasting for me, not for everybody. For me, it’s giving me a little focus during the day to have a black cup of coffee, and then get into my routine. That has helped me focus on the task at hand every day.
This has been fabulous so far. Thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show.
Thanks for having me.
Ladies, we got more. We’re going to be talking about opportunity zones and how they can save you in taxes, capital gains and all that cool stuff. I’m super excited about that. Stay tuned for EXTRA if you are subscribed. If you are not but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get the first seven days for free. You can download this one and whatever ones you want to read and check it out. For those of you that are leaving us now, thank you for joining Eng and me for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.
Important Links
- Touzi Capital
- Who Is The Boss Of You? – TED Talk
- [email protected]
- YouTube – Touzi Capital
- RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com
About Eng Taing
Eng is an experienced private fund manager with $100M assets under management. He has 12 years of private market and real estate investing experience and has focused on cash flow investing to create significant passive income. Eng is an economist by training, from the Wharton School of Business. He also has experience leading data science and analytics at Apple, Capital One and AT&T. He applies that experience when identifying and underwriting investment opportunities and markets.
Eng is the classic immigrant story that can only happen in America. He was born in refugee camp in Thailand, where his family escaped the Khmer Rogue from Cambodia. Having grown up in Los Angeles, he pursued economics by day trading and playing Poker to pay for his tuition while attending the University of Pennsylvania. There he trained as an economist and afterwards went into Investment banking. Later he would leave the financial world to join the Peace Corps, volunteering in the Republic of Georgia–a year after the Russian invasion. There he met his wife–Jennie, who was also volunteering abroad. They now have one son, with another on the way.
Eng has presented at companies like Apple, Facebook, & Amazon where he teaches employees how to minimize their tax burden and keep and investing more of their earnings so that they can achieve financial freedom.
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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.
Syndication Series #3: Fundamentals Of Investing To Achieve Financial Independence With Chris Larsen
Real estate is the best path towards achieving financial independence. Becoming financially independent means having the choice to do what you want with your time. In this episode, Moneeka Sawyer sits down for some great insights into real estate with investor, author and entrepreneur, Chris Larsen of Next Level Income. We hear Chris narrate what got him into real estate, starting from single family to commercial real estate. Chris also shares his investing strategy and how Infinite Banking works, and how to leverage your insurance policy for cashflow. Drop by and listen in as Chris and Moneeka share valuable information for investors to use.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Syndication Series #3: Fundamentals Of Investing To Achieve Financial Independence With Chris Larsen
Real Estate Investing For Women
In this episode, I am so excited to welcome to the show, Chris Larsen. He is the Founder and Managing Partner of Next-Level Income. Chris has been investing and managing real estate for several years. While still a college student, he bought his first rental property at the age of 21. I love people that get into this industry young.
From there, he expanded into development, private lending, buying distressed debt, as well as commercial offices and ultimately syndicating multifamily properties. He began syndicating deals in 2016 and has been actively involved in over $225 million of real estate acquisitions. He is passionate about helping investors become financially independent. Chris, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me. I’m excited to be here.
I’ve been looking forward to this show and you’ve been so patient with me with all the rescheduling. Thank you. I’m glad we’re finally here. Chris, give us a high level of your story. I know it’s very exciting.
First off, I love that you bring up to get started early. Now it’s early, whenever you can do it. I was 21 when I was in college. My passion at the time was racing bicycles. I went to Virginia Tech for Biomechanical Engineering. I did pretty well in school and I was told like, “You should be an engineer like your grandfather.” All I want to do is race bicycles.
Cycling is like a real engineer sport because it’s all about numbers and power to weight ratios. At that time, drug which I wasn’t into. That was the end of my story in a lot of ways because I didn’t want to do that. Along the way, at that same time, when I was at this turning point, trying to decide what to do as I was looking towards a professional career, my best friend, roommate and training partner passed away. He had a massive brain hemorrhage between my freshmen and sophomore year in college.
I poured another year into the sport and then I realized even after I was winning more and more races, that I wasn’t happy. Even though my team went professional, I didn’t. I stepped away from the sport, went back to school. As a junior in college, I thought like, “What the heck am I going to do with my life? I don’t want to be an engineer. I was going to go race and then figure out what I wanted to do.” While I was racing and even when I was young, the first thing I remember and probably if you’re reading, you think the same thing. You hop on your bike and you have this tremendous sense of freedom. That’s what I wanted.
I wanted the freedom to live life on my own terms to respect not only the life I was giving them but also the life of the friend that I lost. I turned towards investing. I was introduced to it by the same gentleman, Clint Provenza, who introduced me to cycling. My father passed away at five and he was a real mentor to me. I started looking into investing. I was day trading, and one of those nights/mornings that 3:00 AM, when I was laying there in bed, thinking about what I should do with my trades. I thought like, “Do I want to be doing this twenty years from now?” The answer was no.
I looked at other investments. I read over 250 books on money, investing and settled on real estate because you could control it. I bought my first property at 21. I built and managed a portfolio of single-family rentals for fifteen years but ultimately transitioned into commercial real estate. That’s what we focus on. I try to enlighten people and share my mistakes, so they can take the fast track to get towards financial independence, which took me a couple of years.
It’s so interesting. I have a very similar story in that. I wanted to be a dancer and that was my thing. I came to investing for a similar reason. I wanted a life of choice. I think that freedom of choice is our true wealth. That’s what I wanted and real estate allowed that. It did take me several years before I could say I could retire, my husband and I, but I couldn’t do with the lifestyle that I wanted in California. We would have had to move, so we continued to grow our portfolio, but it was the same thing. After several years, we are doing everything now that we’re doing because of the choice and we want to do that. There’s nothing more liberating than that.
At some point, income is important, but it’s the freedom to choose that brings happiness.
I think studies show. I teach a financial literacy course here. It’s high school students coming out of underprivileged homes. Most of them are living below the poverty line. We had a conversation about, at some point, income is important, but it’s the freedom to choose. I cited the study that shows the janitors that have freedom in their day-to-day choices are happier than the CEOs that are making 10,000 times now what they are, but they’re not happy because they don’t have freedom.
My TED Talk is about this and there’s a lot of research about there’s a threshold where money does buy happiness to a certain threshold. The original number they came up with within 2010 was $75,000, but a study was done in January 2021 that said it was $100,000. It’s gone up because of inflation. Whatever that number is, it’s $100,000 now.
Up until then, the number of dollars that you bring into your household does relate directly to the level of happiness in the household or the level of satisfaction. After that, now we have freedom and excess income. We are taken care of and now we can focus on joy, bliss. I’m so glad we’re on the same wavelength around that. Tell me about this concept of infinite banking.
Next-Level Income was born of this desire to curate information around financial literacy and education. As I built it out, we have three main areas. We talk about how to make, keep and grow your money. Those are the three steps. I have coaching clients and that’s what we work through like, “How can you maximize how much money you’re making? How can you keep more money?”
Financial Independence: Freedom of choice is our true wealth. Real estate allows that.
Thank you so much. Talk to me about your perspective on multifamily. This is a hot topic with my ladies.
I call multifamily real estate the holy grail of investing. If you look at my book, it says How to Make, Keep, and Grow Your Money Using the ‘Holy Grail of Real Estate’ to Achieve Financial Independence. I’ll send you a copy for free if you go to the website. I’m so high on multifamily. I was the person that managed my portfolio for fifteen years.
I was the person that got the phone call on my honeymoon in Costa Rica and paid $40 and collect call fees to deal with a problem tenant. I was the guy that stayed in too long and didn’t get a great return on my properties. I was also the guy that was fortunate enough to run into somebody that introduced me to this space. I started to investigate multifamily real estate and I’m a demographics guy. I spent eighteen years in the medical device industry. That’s how I made the money to invest. I got into a medical device.
I moved and lived in Asheville, North Carolina, because we have great demographic trends. When I started to investigate multifamily being an engineer, day-to-day guy and analytical, I found that multifamily was supported by these terrific demographics by what we now call the Millennials. They rented and guess who’s supporting multifamily now? It’s their parents, the Baby Boomers. They’re selling their homes and renting and now Gen Z is renting as well. We’ve turned into this nation that we like to own the American dream, but also flexibility.
I jumped into multifamily because of the demographics and the analytics. My MBA is in Portfolio Managementhat I found is something that Ray Dalio calls The Holy Grail of Investing, which allows you to increase the Sharpe ratio. The Sharpe ratio increases the returns of your portfolio and decreases the risk. It’s like a boat that goes faster and it has less bumps when you’re on it. I thought, “What is better than that?” Ray Dalio calls that The Holy Grail of Investing. I call multifamily the Holy Grail of Real Estate because it allows you to increase the returns in your portfolio and allows you to decrease the risk.
I know that in EXTRA, we’re going to talk a lot more about multifamily. We’re going to go deeper to the pros and cons of multifamily and then he’s going to do some number breakdowns for us. These are things that I get asked about a lot. It’s not my strong suit. My husband and I have not been involved yet in multifamily. The commercial evaluation of the numbers is not his strong suit, so he hasn’t had to do it yet. This will be fun. EXTRA will be talking a lot about that stuff, but why don’t you give us a high level on why you like multifamily? What’s so exciting about it?
There are a few things. If you’re reading and you’re like, “I love real estate, but I don’t want to be the person that has to go in and fix toilets, find new tenants, screen people and do showings and all that.” I get that because I’ve done it. The big thing is if you invest in multifamily with an experienced operator, it’s 100% passive. You can invest, be a direct owner, get the income, the depreciation and the depreciation of great tax benefits, especially if you’re a high-income earner, but you don’t have to deal with it all yourself. That’s fantastic. It’s scalable.
You could buy a 100 unit multifamily building for $10 million. You could buy a $1 billion multifamily portfolio. Whether you’re investing in your first deal or you’ve been investing for twenty years and you’re looking to place $1 million or $10 million of capital, you can use the same strategy. It’s very scalable. There’s something that I like even more, it’s the control. You might’ve heard me talk about laying in bed at 3:00 AM feeling like things were out of control with my money. I like real estate because you can control it.
We’re acquiring a property in Greenville, South Carolina and we live in Asheville, which is about an hour away. We were down in South Carolina for my son’s 9/11 lacrosse game. I took him to the property and we drove around. It was built in 1997. It’s a little beat up. The stairs needed to be replaced. They need new paint. We can control all of those things. If you own a business, apartments are valued like a business. They’re valued by net operating income. If you live in your home or you have a rental home and it’s 1,000 square feet, and it sells for $300 a square foot, it’s worth $300,000. It’s easy math.
Financial Independence: Next Level Income was born of this desire to curate information around financial literacy and education.
The bank figures that out because they say, “The home on your right is worth $305 a square foot, on your left is worth $295 a square foot.” Yours is about $300 a square foot. You don’t control that. The market goes up and down. If we go and buy an apartment building for $10 million and it has $1 million of net operating income, that’s probably not a great metric. Call it a $20 million apartment building with $1 million in net operating income.
We increase the net operating income 50% from $1 million with a $20 million to $1.5 million new valuation. You’re probably thinking to yourself when your cap rate is $30 million. We control that when we’re able to move the rents by the renovations, operations, being more efficient, bringing better management and those sorts of things. Again, it’s passive and scalable, but most importantly, it’s controllable.
I’m sure some of you are like me going, “Wow,” but we will break this down so you can go through this again and we’ll break down more of that in EXTRA so we can take it a little bit slower. I feel like you already covered this. What are the important metrics? What exactly should we be looking at?
I’ll dive a little deeper again. We can unpack this a lot more in the EXTRA section. I started as an investor in these deals. I was called a limited partner before I syndicated these deals and became a general partner. If you’re a limited partner and you say, “I’m interested in this.” You need to look at three different things. You need to look at geography. Are you investing in an area of the country that people want to move to? I wrote a whole blog post about this. I talked about how you can identify these. It’s very easy to see with reports from companies like United Van Lines. You can go on our blog at the beginning of 2021 and read the post I put on there.
You want to be in large cities where people are moving, that is growing faster than the national average. Where are these cities? A lot of these are from the Southeast. I moved to North Carolina for the demographics, the Carolinas, Florida, Georgia, Texas, Phoenix, Colorado and Boise, Idaho seems to be a big one here. Why are people moving here? They’re moving out of California to places like Colorado, Texas and Idaho.
They’re moving to the Southeast from places like California, LA, New England and New York. The places that are cold and don’t have a great quality of life. Taxes are going up. I have a coaching client. He told me and he’s like, “We’re looking at South Carolina to move. Taxes are going up. We don’t want to live here anymore.” Number two, the operator. Are you working with an operator? This is somebody that’s going, finding and buying the property. That’s going to bring you in alongside them and then they’re going to operate it. They’re going to increase that net operating income.
Have they done it before? Have you done it in the geography that you’re invested in? What is their experience there? You want to ask him some tough questions about what’s their strategy. You look at the metrics in the deal. That’s pretty complex. We looked at over two dozen different metrics on the deals that we’re in, and there are a lot of different variables that come into play. Again, if you’ve ever invested in a business, if you’re a business owner or professional, you can read a financial statement.
That’s the thing. If you call me and say, “I’m interested in this deal.” As an owner of this property, you’re entitled to all the same information that you would be entitled to if you own a single-family home. You can go through those and you can call the operator and say, “Walk me through this. What am I seeing here and there?” Don’t be afraid to ask those questions and understand the numbers, strategy and why an operator is going into the market.
Talk to me a little bit about ROI. Different operators do this differently. Tell us a little bit about how you structure your deals for your investors.
What we do is called syndication. Syndication is very simple, it is someone, an operator going out and bringing in investors alongside them to invest. What’s important is how that syndication is structured. What we do is we do what’s called a preferred return. If you look at deals, say 6% to 8%, what does that mean? That means investors get the first 6%to 8% of the returns coming from that property. Investors are preferred in front of anybody else. They’re going to be subordinate to the lender.
The other thing that’s nice about these properties is it’s called non-recourse debt. I work with a lot of doctors after spending several years in the medical device profession. They don’t want more risk, more debt and a bank to come after them for something. They have patients that are out for them if something bad happens. That’s a nice thing about these properties as well.
After taxes, the next biggest expense that a lot of people don’t think about is financing.
After the lender, the investors get that preferred return. There’s an equity split. That split is a large part that goes to investors and then the partners that organize these deals get the minority position in there, but that’s the incentive. You want to work with the group, in my opinion. How we do it is we give the investors the first big portion of the returns, about a half of the returns upfront. The other half comes from that split on the backside and then we as partners get a piece of that split.
We’re incentivized to maximize the profit of that property on the backend. You asked a question there and I’ll address this. There are a couple of different ways to look at this. You can look at a total return. You’re going to get a 10% return comprised of half cash and half appreciation on a property. There’s also an equity multiple. You’re going to double your money over a certain period of time, it’s another way to look at it. There’s also what’s called the IRR, the Internal Rate of Return.
We can dive deeper into the EXTRA portion of the show or you can go ahead and check out my book, which goes deeper into this as well. You can always read on a site like Investopedia, which dives deeper too. It depends on what type of investor you are. Maybe cash or the total return is important to you. It all depends on what type of investor you are.
Do you pay investors immediately? When they first invest money, are they guaranteed a certain return each year while the project is happening? How do you structure that for your people?
One little red flag is we never say guaranteed because these are investments that have a risk associated with them. If you ever hear me say guaranteed, you should either slap me on the face with a stick and a paper towel or something in my mouth too. We have a couple of different types of investments. We have investments that we pay investors a fixed return based upon the performance of the property. Our group pays out monthly. We like to pay out monthly. There are groups that payout quarterly. It’s not necessarily better or worse, but personally, I like to get money in my account every month.
You then get some stuff on the backend depending on how the project goes.
In multifamily syndication, you’re going to get regular cashflow monthly, quarterly or annually. When the property sells, think about it like a rental property. You’re getting rent. If you’re renting it out for $1,000 a month and your expenses are $900, you might get $100 a month. When you sell it, if you bought a property for $100,000 and you sell it for $150,000, you get that $50,000 profit on the backend. It’s very similar to that.
Do you guys do the whole refinance structure piece too or do you go for the sale?
When we model out the returns on a property which is called the pro forma, we don’t assume we’re going to refinance the property. If you’ve ever owned a rental property or you have a property of your own, what’s nice is if you have a HELOC, a Home Equity Line Of Credit and you pull money out of your home or an investment property, you don’t pay taxes on that when you pull that money out.
You might pay taxes when you sell it, but you don’t pay taxes when you pull it out. It’s very similar to what we do. A lot of times, we look to do that if the property is performing. We don’t tell investors that’s part of the plan because we want to be a little bit more conservative than that but that is a very optimal way to pull an investor capital out in a tax-efficient manner.
While we dove pretty deep into all of that stuff and I know we’re going to get even deeper, so definitely stay tuned for EXTRA. We’ll be talking more about the fundamentals of multifamily investing and the numbers around that and also the why or why not to do it.
Before we move into our three rapid fire questions, I want to let you ladies know how you can get in touch with Chris because he’s amazing, isn’t he? He’s got two awesome offers for you today. First of all, he’s going to give you his book for free and he and I are holding a webinar together so that you can meet him live and ask as many questions as you’d like.
Learn how you can invest like the rich to create true freedom for yourself by getting a free copy of his book nextlevelincome.com/bliss, where he’ll send you a copy of his book for free.
Also join Chris and me for a free webinar designed just for you to get informed and ask questions about how Chris does syndication and how he can help you to save the date. December 2nd, at 4:00 PM Pacific time. Go to blissfulinvestor.com/syndicationwebinar. That’s blissfulinvestor.com/syndicationwebinar.
Financial Independence: Syndication is very simple. It’s an operator going out and bringing in investors alongside them to invest.
I didn’t tell you this, Chris, but we have three rapid-fire questions. Are you ready?
I love it. I’m ready. I told you I’m wide open here, so let’s do it.
Tell us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.
The best tip I can think of is to find somebody that has gone down the path you want to go down and either ask them for advice or hire them to help be a mentor.
What would you say is a strategy to be successful in real estate investing?
I think success, in general, is habits. Whether you want to be successful in real estate, successful in life, losing weight or whatever it may be, you need to focus on your daily habits. If you want to be successful in real estate, that may be in as far as syndications or passive investments or reviewing a deal every day or every week. If you are going out and buying your own properties, that may be contacting brokers, making phone calls and getting options out there that are coming in towards you on a regular basis.
What would you say is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?
I’ve learned a lot over the past years. I bought my older son The Five Minute Journal for Kids. It is basically a gratitude practice. I know you’re big on this. I think happiness comes before success. You have to get in that right mindset, the abundance mindset, which is what you share. You know that success and that money will come to you and there’s always a deal out there. You don’t have to worry and fight over these things. Share, help other people and other people will help you get in the right mindset. That’s what I try to do every day.
This has been an amazing show. Thank you so much for all you’ve already contributed, Chris. This has been great.
It’s my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me.
Before we close out the show, I want to head off any confusion we might have about upcoming webinars. So in order to make this series the most valuable possible for you, I have arranged to have two webinars during the next couple of weeks.
The first one is going to be with Dr. Sam, who you heard from a couple of weeks ago. He is an investor just like you ladies. And he has figured out how to evaluate syndication opportunities that come across because he gets a lot of them. And if you’re interested in them and you put your name out there, you will start to get a lot of them. You’ll learn how he evaluates them so he can figure out which projects are the best for him regarding his risk tolerance, his capital availability, and what kinds of projects he’s actually interested in, like location and that sort of thing.
Dr. Sam has developed a tool he’s now sharing. So we’re going to do a webinar with him and you can talk to him about what it’s like to be an investor in syndications and what to expect. And then also he’s going to go through his tool specifically and show you how he’s evaluating different projects. So I’m really excited about this because you actually get to have a conversation LIVE with another investor who’s actually doing investing in syndication projects. So in order to sign up for that webinar, go to blissfulinvestor.com/Samwebinar. So that’s for Dr. Sam, right? So blissfulinvestor.com/Samwebinar. And that webinar is going to be held this week on Thursday, November 18th at 5:00 PM Pacific time. So again, that’s Thursday, November 18 at 5pm pacific time. Go to blissfulinvestor.com/Samwebinar.
The second webinar we’re doing for the syndication series is with Chris, who we just heard from in this episode. As you know, he’s an operator. So he’s going to be able to answer questions about how syndications actually work, how they’re put together and all the details of what you can expect from an operator. So that’s really exciting because you can ask as many questions as you want from an actual operator LIVE. So that’ll give you more confidence what you need to know with regards to how syndications are run. So I’m super excited about this one too. And this one is on Thursday, December 2nd, at 4:00 PM Pacific time. So that’s Thursday, December 2nd at 4:00 PM Pacific time. And to sign up for this one, go to blissfulinvestor.com/syndicationwebinar. So that’s blissfulinvestor.com/syndicationwebinar.
So to give you a really quick recap, Dr. Sam, who is an investor and is going to be sharing his evaluation tool, we’ll be holding a webinar this week on Thursday, November 18th at 5:00 PM Pacific time . Go to blissfulinvestor.com/Samwebinar.
And then Chris Larson will be holding a webinar as an operator on Thursday, December 2nd, at 4:00 PM Pacific time, just go to blissfulinvestor.com/syndicationwebinar.
I think you’re going to love both webinars because you’ll get two completely different perspectives. So don’t miss them sign up now.
Stay tuned for EXTRA. We’re going to be talking more about the fundamentals of multifamily. If you are not subscribed but would like to be, please go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. You get the first seven days for free. Check it out, download as much as you can and you can stay if it’s for you. Thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. We appreciate you. I look forward to seeing you and until then remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires.
Important Links
- blissfulinvestor.com/Samwebinar
- blissfulinvestor.com/syndicationwebinar
- Becoming Your Own Banker
- Next-Level Income
- TED Talk – Who is the Boss of You?
- Ray Dalio
- Where Should You Move? 5 Ways To Take Advantage Of “Geographic Arbitrage.”
- United Van Lines
- The Five Minute Journal for Kids
- RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com
About Chris Larsen
Christopher Larsen is the founder and Managing Partner of Next-Level Income. Since “retiring” after 18 years in the medical device industry he dedicates his time to helping others become financially independent through education and investment opportunities. Chris has been investing in and managing real estate for over 20 years. While completing his degree in Biomechanical Engineering and M.B.A. in Finance at Virginia Tech, he bought his first single-family rental at age 21. Chris expanded into development, private-lending, buying distressed debt as well as commercial office, and ultimately syndicating multifamily properties. He began syndicating deals in 2016 and has been actively involved in over $400M of real estate acquisitions. In addition to real estate, Chris has invested in equities, oil & gas, and small business lending, as well as being active in Venture South, one of the nation’s Top 10 Angel Investing groups. Chris lives with his wife and two boys (and Viszla, Lucy!) in Asheville, NC where he loves spending time with them in the outdoors and enjoying the food and culture that the region has to offer.
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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.
Syndication Series #2: Build Strong Passive Income with Monick Halm
Love to create passive income streams through real estate investing but don’t know where to start? On today’s show, returning guest Monick Halm does a presentation about real estate syndications and how to passively invest in real estate and earn double-digit returns. Monick is a real estate investor, syndicator, and developer with over 15 years of real estate investing experience in multi-family, industrial, mobile home parks, RV parks, flipping, and vacation rentals. She is also a bestselling author and host of the Real Estate Investor Goddesses Podcast. Tune in to find out how to get high returns with relatively lower risk. Plus, discover how you can avoid having to deal with the three T’s – tenants, toilets, and termites!
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Syndication Series #2: Build Strong Passive Income with Monick Halm
Real Estate Investing For Women
Welcome to the Syndication Series where you’re going to learn what syndication is and how you can utilize it to build cashflow and grow your wealth. It’s an exciting strategy and I’m looking forward to sharing all of our guests with you. Now let’s get to the show.
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Welcome to the show. We are going to do things a little bit differently. I am bringing back to the show, Monick Halm. We’ve had Monick on the show before and I had an interesting conversation with one of you guys. The question was, “I have money in my retirement program. I cannot afford to lose it but I want to have high returns.” You’re 65 and you want to retire soon. You can’t afford to lose the money but you want to get high returns with very low risk and you want to be very hands-off.
That was a tall order and I have no idea how to answer you but I do have resources. Monick is the resource that I actually reached out to because I know that she talks about ways to invest with high returns, low risk and hands-off. I wanted her to share her expertise with you. Also, it was very funny because I got that one question and then the same week, I got a very similar question for somebody else. It’s so funny how things come in groupings. This is the topic that people want to hear about.
I’m excited to present this to you. I’m going to have her introduce herself. I know you ladies have met her before because she’s been on the show. I’ve also asked her to do a full presentation because I want to make sure that I’m not interrupting and she captures everything that’s important for you to hear. It’s going to be a little different than normal. She’s doing a presentation. I will interrupt with some questions.
The other thing is she is actually doing a slideshow. If you’re a visual person and you want to see the slides, you can go to YouTube and look up Moneeka Sawyer or Real Estate Investing for Women and then you’ll be able to find this video. You can also go to Roku with Real Estate Investing 4 Women. You can look us up there. I’m going to turn it over to Monick. Monick, welcome back to the show.
Thanks for having me back to talk about one of my favorite things. I love to invest in real estate. I found it a little bit by accident, which I’ll talk about that. I’m going to share my slides. I’ll try to be as descriptive as I can for those who are reading. I’m going to be talking about real estate syndication, how to passively invest in real estate, earn double-digit returns and not have to deal with the three T’s. The three T’s are Tenants, Toilets and Termites. This is a way of possibly investing in real estate that is a pretty high return and lower risk.
Nothing is risk-free. I want to start by saying that. It can’t guarantee you returns. If anybody says that they will guarantee you a return then run in the opposite direction and we will guarantee it. This is a relatively lower-risk investment and I will share why. Before we get going, I’m going to briefly introduce myself and why I talk about this. I am a Real Estate Investor and I’m a Syndicator. Basically, syndication is crowdfunding real estate.
I bring groups of investors together to purchase real estate. I’ve been in real estate for many years. I have a little over 1,300 rental doors in seven states, raised over $35 million with my partners since 2016, with a real estate portfolio worth over $220 million. I’ve written the book, The Real Estate Investor Goddess Handbook and Wealth for Women: Conversations with the Team That Creates the Dream. My newest book is Investing in Real Estate from $1 to $1 Million, which is available as a digital download for free on my website, REIGoddesses.com.
I also have a show Real Estate Investor Goddesses. I’m a Real Estate Investment Mentor, Educator and Coach. That’s me in a nutshell and a little bit of my background for why I’m talking about this. First, let me briefly describe what is real estate syndication. In the simplest terms, syndication is a structure or relationship between multiple investors pool money together to fund a project, real estate or otherwise.
Investing in real estate syndication is essentially investing in a real estate enterprise as a passive investor, alongside multiple other investors. In English, it’s basically we bring together a group of investors that will passively invest. We’ll talk a little bit more about what all of those different roles are in a second.
First is syndication something for you? Maybe you can relate. If your real estate vision is big but you’re not sure if your bank account balance is big enough to fund it then you might be interested in syndication. If you have some money set aside but you’d like to be able to leverage it, spread the risk and you don’t want all your eggs in one basket then syndication might be a good fit for you. If your life is full and you’re not sure if you will have the time or other resources necessary to invest successfully then syndication could be a fit for you.
If you fit any of those things, I totally understand because that’s where I was. I want to share my story, which you may relate to. As with Moneeka, I’m a first-generation American. My parents are from Haiti. I have super supportive parents who were always like, “You can be anything you want as long as you’re a doctor, lawyer, professor, engineer.” I wasn’t into Math and Sciences so I went to law school. I ended up at Columbia Law and I was on a partnership track.
Success is doing what you love with who you love when you want to do it.
I have a picture of me walking. I’m in Japan, walking to our firm there. I was working for big international law firms, partnership track, six-figure income. I checked all the happy immigrant parent boxes. I’ve done everything right but I was miserable. At one point, I found myself in the emergency room. I remember that Tuesday morning and when the doctor told me that my appendix had ruptured, I’d have to spend several days in the hospital. I ended up spending nine days in the hospital. He said I’d have at least 30 days afterward to recover. My first thought when he said that was, “Thank God. I don’t have to go to work for at least 30 days.”
I had this incredible sense of relief. It didn’t hit me until that second how unhappy and miserable I was. I had taken it for granted that I was meant to be that unhappy but it took that moment to give me clarity about that is not normal. That is not good. That’s not okay. I had done exactly what I was told. I had followed the path exactly. I was that miserable and that unhappy. I knew I had to find a different way. They don’t know what causes appendicitis but I was sure it was stress from my job. That job was literally killing me. I had to find a different path.
That was not an easy thing to do because I did the path that I was told would lead to success. I did the path that my parents believed would lead to success. They didn’t know better. They taught me what they knew. I fell into real estate completely by accident. The only thing they’d ever taught me was to buy my own home. That was what they knew about real estate. Moneeka, you were lucky because your parents knew about real estate investing. You were born into it. I was not. My parents just knew to get a job, trade your time for money and then buy a house that you live in but it gives you no money.
At least, they said buy a house. I don’t know how many people whose parents didn’t even know that much.
At least I had that.
You had so much. It sounds like your parents adored you and wanted the best for you.
They did and they’re great parents. I love my parents. They definitely did the best they knew to do. They were very supportive.
I wanted to highlight something that you said, which I think is valuable. Ladies, this is something to think about. We’re talking about real estate but one of the things that Monick found in that hospital and I know I’ve been here too is how do we define success? She did everything right. I did the same thing. I did everything right. Our parents told us what success was going to look like and how we were going to get there because that’s the best that they could do. That’s what they knew.
The way that they define success is different than how we define success. We have had to create a new life based on our vision of success. That’s an important key for you ladies to keep in mind. How are you defining success? I love what Monick was talking about, “This might be for you, if.” If that is you, how are you defining success and what are the next steps? I wanted to highlight that success looks different for everybody.
For me, success is doing what you love. Being able to do what you love with who you love when you want to do it. That is success. After having spent lots of time doing things that were killing my soul, that was what it felt like being a lawyer and it literally was killing my body too. After having spent that much time being miserable, now I have the freedom to do work that I love and I’m passionate about and I have a passive income stream so I don’t have to work if I don’t want to.
I get to make a difference and spend time and vacation and do all of those things that I want to do when we’re allowed to leave the country and our homes. I have freedom. That’s success. I didn’t start there. I got there by a series of happy accidents. I was sharing that when I went to go buy my home. This was in 2005, towards the top of the last bubble. I live in Los Angeles, a very expensive market.
You understand being an expensive market. Those of you out there in the much cheaper markets probably cannot conceive of the prices that we have to pay. Even back in 2005, a starter home in a semi-decent neighborhood was upwards of $600,000, $700,000. I had a low six-figure income so that was challenging for me but a friend of mine that was in a similar boat suggested that we buy a duplex together. He would live on one side. I’d live on the other side.
The original plan was to get a property with two equal sides but we ended up finding this old craftsman that had a larger downstairs unit, a two-bedroom unit upstairs. It had a converted garage in the back which was a one-bedroom. We ended up each taking a bedroom in the bigger unit, renting out our upstairs, renting out our back house, even renting out our basement. I started the house hack before I knew that was the thing. I went, “This is awesome.” We’re paying our mortgage and I got tax benefits. This is great.
Passive Income: If you don’t want all your eggs in one basket, syndication might be a good fit for you.
My husband had a duplex. We got a single-family rental together. We started to flip houses when houses were on sale. By 2015, houses were not on sale. It was getting frustrating. Flipping houses is a short-term job. It’s like a short-term contract. You do it, fix it up, sell it and hopefully at a profit and then you have to start over.
I wanted something more passive. I started to look for a fourplex, which at the time was the largest thing I could think of. In LA, you cannot find anything that cashflows. It was pretty much impossible because it was going to cost a fortune and there was no money coming back from that. I ended up being introduced to this man that would become my mentor, Robert Helms, who is the host of The Real Estate Guys Radio Podcast.
He’s done hundreds of millions, maybe even over $1 billion worth of transactions at this point. We had a mutual friend. When I was telling our mutual friend, Kyle, how frustrated I was, he said, “My friend Robert Helms is going to be in LA tomorrow. You should come and meet him.” I met him and he’s the one that changed everything. It’s one ten-minute conversation and why I’m here talking to you. This is exciting.
He was super nice. He asked me what I was doing. I told him about the flipping and how that was getting challenging and looking for the fourplex in LA that that would not make cashflow. He said, “LA is a tough market. I always say live where you want to live, invest where the numbers make sense.” That makes total sense after you hear it. I always thought you had to invest where you could drive to your property, touch it, self-manage it. It never crossed my mind that I could invest outside of where I lived. Literally, that opened up the world to me.
The other thing he said was, “You can buy that fourplex by yourself but you’re limited to your own capital and credit. Alternatively, you could bring a group of investors together and you’d get 100, 200 units.” He started telling me about the benefits of that. My brain exploded right there. I was like, “What? That’s a thing? You can do that?” I got chills, “I want to do that.” That was very exciting to me to find out. I went home and told my husband that night. It’s like, “There’s a thing called syndication. We need to learn how to do that.”
The Real Estate Guys, Robert Helms and his partner, Russell Gray, were teaching a seminar on it in January of 2016. We went to that seminar and signed up with their program. We met Brad Sumrok. He was our apartment syndication mentor. We signed up with him. We went to tons of different events throughout that year and since to learn how to do that. I probably invested over $60,000 in education but it paid off.
We ended up syndicating and getting into a 109-unit mobile home park in North Carolina. We did 318 units in Dallas, 514 units in Atlanta, a 50, 51-unit townhome community and then 77-unit apartment community in Albuquerque, all in that first year. Over 1,000 units in that first year through syndication through bringing investors together. Two of those deals were passive.
Monick, you take things slowly, don’t you? You said only two of those were passive?
The mobile home park and the two in Albuquerque that we syndicated, we’re actively investing. We still passively invest in things, as well as actively invest in their benefits to both, which we’ll talk about in a minute. Other than the mobile home park, all of those things have been sold. We have new ones, a little over 1,300 in different asset classes, different states. It’s allowed us to diversify. It’s allowed us to scale, grow and a quantum leap in ways that I had never imagined possible. That’s why I’m very passionate about it.
I have a picture in a slide. It’s me but I’m actually wearing a tiara and I’m surrounded by a bunch of men. It was at a mastermind that I was in. First of all, 90% of our investors were men. I had been working with women but it came as this divine download to bring women into this game and especially invite them into syndication. I created Real Estate Investor Goddesses to bring women into this game.
My mission of helping 1 million women create financial freedom through real estate investing came as this divine download but not the how of it. I’m still figuring out the how. We’re ways from that but the what of it has come. It’s been great. The word’s been going out. As with you, Moneeka, I’m passionate about getting more women into this lucrative game of wealth-building. One of the ways that are great for women is with syndication because a lot of us are busy.
We have jobs, we have to homeschool, we have parents and kids to take care of and all of this stuff. This is a way of being able to get into real estate that is passive, that doesn’t take time past the vetting or some of you might be interested in being on the other side of it too, where you get to bring groups of investors together. You can benefit a lot by being on the active side, which is the side I mostly play on. Either way, there are a lot of benefits. Why would you want to do that?
First, it allows you to buy more than what you could afford by yourself. As a passive investor, you get to leverage OPM, other people’s money. It’s not just your money. It’s the money of all the other investors and often a bank too. We usually get financing as well as all of these investors that come in. You’re able to leverage OPM to get something much bigger than what you could afford by yourself.
Invest where the numbers make sense.
You also get to leverage OPT, other people’s time because somebody else is going off and finding the deal and putting it together and bringing all the investors together. You have to vet the deal and then send in your funds and wait for it to come back with friends. It allows you to spread the risk. It’s not all on you. The risk is spread. Also, as a passive investor, you have very little to no liability. You spread the wealth.
As a syndicator, I get to create an opportunity for many people to benefit. As a passive investor, you get all the benefits of being a real estate investor, like the tax benefits and otherwise, without the work. With a real estate syndication, there are a lot of benefits. It gives you the benefits of passive cashflow. You get a share of the monthly cashflow and equity that’s at the end when we sell. You get federal tax benefits. A lot of people don’t realize that. You have the assumption that the more you make, the more you pay in taxes. That’s what we’re told.
Higher-income, more taxes, except when it comes to real estate investing because of the way it’s structured. With the tax code, you often end up paying less. A lot of people will get into real estate, especially when they have very successful businesses. A good stabby CPA will say, “You should start investing in real estate because you’re paying too much in taxes.” Even though you’re making money with your real estate because of the way real estate is, it looks like a loss for tax purposes. You’ll pay less.
I have a very good friend. He’s a successful businessman. He found himself one year owing $500,000 to the IRS. He had always assumed the more you make, the more you pay in taxes. He had multimillion-dollar businesses and he found out about real estate. He bought an apartment building in Memphis. The apartment building is making money.
It was making six figures a year of income but it brought his tax bill from $500,000 to $0. He’s making more money. Not only did he make money but he saved on the money that did not have to go to Uncle Sam. It’s not what you make. It’s what you get to keep. In real estate investing, even as passive investors, you get to keep more.
I’ve said on this show many times that no matter how someone becomes rich, the rich always invest in real estate. That’s where they make the majority of their money. They make a huge amount of money in real estate. They also save a lot of money in real estate, which they can then grow again in other ways whether it’s in their business or real estate.
Monick has given you a cool breakdown of why the rich invest in real estate. What’s cool about real estate is that you don’t have to be rich. This is available to everybody, especially here in the United States. This is the most amazing country that way because this is not true elsewhere. The government actually supports everybody from a single mom all the way to the richest person on the planet in investing in real estate. We’re supported to do that. It helps us to grow true wealth and it helps to lower our tax bill. There are many good reasons to invest in real estate.
The government wants you to invest in real estate. That’s why they give these incentives in the tax code. It’s to get more people to invest in real estate. There’s a book called The Color of Law. It started in the 1940s after World War II. They thought that if people owned real estate, they would not be communists. It was a way of helping stop communism. Whatever the reason, it’s a good thing if you’re a real estate investor. It helps you out.
People who have a lot of money shift from being about income to being about wealth preservation. Real estate helps you preserve wealth, not just because it appreciates and some of these other benefits but because of the enormous tax benefits. That will help you save money off of your real estate income and it helps you pay less on more of your income, not all. I’m not a CPA but it helps you. Check with your CPA.
It is very beneficial, tax-wise. As I was talking about before, you can leverage OPM, other people’s money and other people’s time. When you’re in syndication, you’re able to do much bigger properties and their economies of scale and leverage in that way. Retirement savings came up because people are saying, “I have this money in my retirement account. I’d like to be able to find investments that make sense and that are lucrative, relatively safe and with self-directed retirement accounts.”
Not the account that your work’s going to put you in normally, which gives you a very limited menu of things that you can invest in, like some mutual funds and bonds. If you can self-direct your money then you can put it into real estate and get better returns. Also, with real estate, you get appreciation over time. Properties tend to go up in value but you can also force appreciation by doing targeted rehab, which is what we do with syndication.
We have a business plan. When we buy a property, we plan to add value to that property and appreciate the value. It’s worth more after a certain amount of years. We’ll sell and be able to recapture that. Even on paper, as the value of the building grows so does your net worth. It allows you to leave a legacy, which for many of us is one of the main reasons why we want to do this. Real estate since time immemorial, has been the main way that people have built, preserved and passed down wealth. It still remains the same way. That’s one of the best ways to build and leave a legacy.
It’s the feel-good business. That’s a win-win. I only invest in ways in which I can leave a property in a community better than we found it. In our syndications, that’s the focus and it feels good. It’s a wealth-building opportunity for everyone touched by our deals. That’s why I love it. Those are the benefits. Think about what are the benefits for you. What’s your why behind real estate investing or syndication? Depending on what are the why’s that are more important to you, there are certain deals that will give you more of those benefits or less so tap into your why behind them.
Passive Income: Don’t try to do a syndication without a qualified securities attorney. They make sure you know what you’re doing when you take on other people’s money.
What types of properties can be syndicated? Basically, anything can be syndicated. You can syndicate debt. Sometimes, it’ll be a fixed return. It’s a debt or a loan that we’re syndicating. You can syndicate equity, ownership stake in the property, raw land or single-family residential properties. I put an asterisk on the slide because syndications are generally for larger commercial projects. There’s a lot of expensive legal work that has to be done. I’ll talk a little bit more about the legal ramifications of this. It’s not something that I would recommend you go out and ask a bunch of people to give you money for a deal.
They’re governed under the Securities and Exchange Commission. It can be pricey to put one of these together. The numbers have to be justified. The deal has to be large enough to justify the legal costs of putting together a syndication. You won’t find a single-family residential property that is syndicated, unless it’s going to be used for something like a residential assisted living facility, a facility that where people are paying upwards of $4,000 a bed to be there and it’s a very high cashflowing business. Those get syndicated. Otherwise, it’s like a house to flip. Normally, you won’t see that but they could be if somebody wanted to do that. Multi-family apartment complexes, that’s very common, office space, retail, industrial, you name it, can be syndicated.
Who’s involved in the syndication? You’re going to hear the terms syndicator, sponsor, active investor and general partner. Those are all used interchangeably. That is to describe the individual or company or team that’s finding, acquiring and managing the real estate. They should have a history of real estate experience and the ability to underwrite and do due diligence on the properties. They’re the active investors. They’re the ones doing the work.
There are joint venture equity partners. Sometimes that’s my role in deals, where we have a group of investors and we’re not on the operation side or bringing in funds for the investment. We’re connecting our investors to operators that were part of the sponsorship team. With a JV or equity partner, it might help with financing. They’re reporting communications, tax documentation, that sort of thing.
Last but not least, there are passive investors sometimes called limited partners. Those are individuals who will invest in the syndication. They own a percentage of the real estate as a result. If it’s an equity deal or they’ll have a percentage, they’ll be part of the loan. If it’s debt, they’ll get all the benefits of property ownership, not involved with acquiring the property, arranging financing or doing any of the day-to-day management. They cannot be.
Think of it more like if you’re buying stock in Apple. You own a piece of Apple. If they do dividends then you would get your dividends. Otherwise, you have that ownership stake but you’re not going to call the company and say, “I want you to change this feature on the iPhone.” Our passive investors can call us and tell us what they’d like to change but if there is someone who’s managing it, gets to decide when to sell, what to do and who’s the team then that’s on the active investor side.
I’m going to share a fairly typical example of a 100-unit apartment building. This is one that we did. I’m going to round out the numbers to make this easier to understand. This is not a guarantee of results. This is not atypical for syndication. It’s fairly typical in terms of returns. This deal was a $5 million purchase price. The rehab budget was $500,000. We’re buying an apartment building, fixing up the units, getting them nicer so we could raise the rents to market rates because this property was underperforming.
There was a loan. We got a loan, 75%, $4.125 million so the interest rate was 5% at the time. It’s lower now. We had a downpayment of $1.375 million, closing costs of $200,000 and cash reserves of $75,000. We were raising $1.65 million. We rounded up 33 investors at $50,000 each. I won’t go through all of the various numbers. I’ll highlight the end result. After the total cash flow, the whole profit was $51,575 after five years. Basically, it more or less doubled the money of the investor after five years. Part of that was in cashflow, a little over $23,500 in cashflows. Sales proceeds were close to $78,000. That was the profit.
That’s not bad for something that is passive. That is not atypical for these types of syndications. On the active investor side, that also invests $50,000 in the same deals as an active investor, you get a share of the cashflow, the acquisition fee, there’s also asset management fee and you get a share of the equity for putting together the deal and then there are fees for managing it. In this case, an active investor who also put in $50,000 had the same profit that all the other equity investors did, $51,575. There’s a 3% acquisition fee of $49,500, 1.5% asset management fee, $60,257, 15% deal sponsor equity share of $116,700. The total sponsorship return was $287,032 on a $50,000 and sweat equity.
There’s a lot of sweat equity in that but that’s the return. If there was a team doing that, all the acquisition fee, asset management and deal sponsor equity would be split amongst the team members. You can get three times or more of the returns by being on the active side and doing the deal. It can be very profitable either way. Does this sound like something you might like to try?
It’s one of the nice things about it as a passive investor. You can learn but you have to vet the deal and then wait for it to come back with friends. For those of you who are interested in being on the active side, I have a warning slide here. Do not try to do a syndication without a qualified securities attorney. You could win yourself a very hefty penalty, an orange jumpsuit and some jail time. I want free housing but not that way.
They make sure you know what you were doing when you take on other people’s money. You can’t usually advertise an opportunity. It’s very regulated in terms of who can invest with you and how. It’s going to be people with whom you have a substantial pre-existing relationship and they have to be sophisticated enough to understand the deal or you’re only dealing with accredited investors. For those of you who don’t know what an accredited investor is some people think it’s like, “I’m not accredited. I haven’t taken the test. I don’t have the certificate.” There’s no certificate and test. You qualify either through your income or through your net worth.
If you have an income as an individual of $200,000 or as a married couple of $300,000 per year, you’ve had it for at least two years with a reasonable expectation that you will in the subsequent year, you are an accredited investor. If you have a net worth of $1 million or more, not including your primary residence then you are an accredited investor. Congratulations. You are part of the 8% of the population who are. Most people do not fall under that but if you do, you’re an accredited investor. That will allow you to take advantage of more of these opportunities.
Invest in ways in which you can leave a property in a community better than you found it.
Some of them are for accredited investors only some are for both but you do have to have a pre-existing relationship with the person bringing the deal. If you are trying to syndicate then you need to understand when you can take credit, when and how you can take people. If somebody is talking about this on Facebook, be wary unless it’s accredited investors only and they could do that.
You can’t take anyone’s money, even if they want to invest it with you. I’ve had certain deals where we had to have that pre-existing relationship. Suddenly they come and I’ve met them after I already have the deal. They’re like, “I wanted to put money into it.” I was like, “I wish I could take your money but I can’t. There’s a next one. We’re going to get to know each other. Next time, you could, if you feel like it but I can’t now.”
If you want to find out more about these passive investing strategies, we have an Investor Club at Real Estate Investor Goddesses. I created this club because I wanted to get more women to know about these types of opportunities. The Investor Club doesn’t cost anything to be part of and you’re not obligated to do anything but it allows us to get into that pre-existing relationship. You then get access.
A lot of people are like, “How do you find out about this? How do you get access?” We have to get into a relationship with a syndicator. I deliberately set out to get more women into this game because when I started, 90% of our investors were men. I’m happy to say 90%-plus of our investors are women. I would love to be able to get more women into this because they’re great investors. I’ve done better on my passive investments than I ever could have done in investing in LA or these expensive markets where I was doing all the work. They can be lucrative.
Let me talk a little bit about the risk for a minute because there are risks. Here’s where the biggest risks are and how to mitigate the risk. They can be great opportunities. It’s important that you invest with the right people. The team is everything with real estate. There are three things to look at in order of importance. First is the team. Next is the market. Next is the property and the plan. It’s in that order of importance.
Your team is very important. You want a team that has a good track record. You want a team that’s trustworthy. A good track record does not necessarily mean they’ve never lost money. Robert Helms, my mentor, would say that he would not invest with anyone who had not lost money before. He wanted to invest with somebody who had lost money and stayed in the game. He wanted to know what happened when it went bad? How did they deal with it? Are they still playing in the game?
Things happen like in 2008. It was very bad for a lot of people. There might be some deals that people bought that are not quite as right a year ago that might not be doing well right now and how are they handling it? How are they going to get through it? That tells a lot about somebody. It’s not necessarily that they’ve never had a miss. That’s not a bad thing. You want to know that they’ve been able to handle it. They have a long track record. They know what they’re doing, trustworthy, following the rules and they’re doing it right. The team is important.
The market, where are they investing? You start to look at their business plan. What is the property they’re looking at and some of the assumptions they’re making? I like to under-promise then over-deliver. Not everyone has that. How are they underwriting? Those are the things. You’re going to want to be able to vet the people who will get the deals and make sure it makes sense for you.
If it does then you raise her hand, say, “I’m in,” and you invest and wait for your money to come back with friends. That’s how you do it. We tend to buy properties that are already cashflowing. A lot of these deals, they’re already stabilized and they’ll plan to increase cashflow. When things tend to go bad, you may not meet the mark that you wanted to but it’s unlikely to lose your money. They’re great in investments.
Do most of your projects take five years?
Five years is a fairly typical hold plan period. For the past few years, we were getting out more quickly because of the way the market was going. We’re paying more money for the same amount of income. It became a very good time to be a seller. I like to be a seller when it’s a sellers’ market and a buyer when it’s a buyers’ market. We started to sell because we could hit our returns more quickly. It’s better if I could get somebody a 100% return in 2.5 years versus 5 years. We were selling more quickly when it made sense.
Looking at where the market is going, it might be closer to our five-year period or it might not make sense to sell in five years. We may hold on for a year or two. As the sponsors, we’re going to do what’s best for our investors and we’ll sell when it makes the most sense. If it doesn’t make sense to sell, if we’re going to sell down or at a loss then we hold off because we’re always cashflowing. That 5-year plan might become a 7-year plan depending on what’s happening in the economy or sometimes it’s a 2 or 3-year plan if that makes sense.
Is there a particular class that you invest in?
Most of our investments are in class B multi-family and we’re also doing a lot of industrial. In fact, we’re doing more industrial as there’s a lot of uncertainty in the rental market because more and more people are losing jobs and not able to work. That’s harder. Industrial is one asset class that has been the least affected by what’s going on. One of the things that we’re doing a lot of is the types of deals called sale-leasebacks.
Passive Income: Three things to look at in order of importance – the team, the market, and the plan.
Basically, it’s a company that has a facility. We did a frozen pie company, baby food company and we have a couple of others but they’re essential businesses. Their businesses are doing super well in this crazy economy. These facilities that they had built and they wanted to get equity out of them. They couldn’t refinance to get the equity that they needed so they’re selling it but then they lease it right back as our tenants with these triple net leases.
For those of you who don’t know, what’s great about the triple net lease is they tend to be very long. These are twenty-year leases that we have with our sellers/new tenants. They pay a triple net lease. Not only do they pay rent, but they also pay property taxes, insurance and all of the maintenance. They basically take care of all of the expenses with the exception of any debt service. We have loans on the properties and they’re not going to pay for that but all other expenses, they cover. There are no surprises.
We have built-in rent increases in the leases as well year over year. You know what the income’s going to be and what the expenses are going to be. The plan is we sell them to institutional buyers after 3 to 5 years. It’s very similar returns to multi-family, cash returns in the 8% to 10% range with cumulative annualized returns in the high teens, low twenties. We like them and they feel a lot more safe and stable, especially in this type of climate. We’ve been doing these.
How do you find those?
We have partners that have been doing this for many years. They’re one of the very few people who do this. It’s a very niche segment of the market, which is great. I don’t like going where a lot of the herds go. I try to look away from where the herds go and into places that are a little more open pastures. These companies will contact our partners. The big part of the due diligence on these is due diligence on the company to make sure that it’s a company that’s going to last a long time.
The good thing about these long triple net leases is you have a tenant and they’re super easy. They almost know property management. There is very little to do but when you do lose a tenant, it can take a while, some months sometimes a year or more, to find a replacement. The important thing is to have a very steady tenant that’s not going to go anywhere. We do a lot of due diligence on those tenants. We make sure that the seller/tenants, the company is very solid and then we do the deal.
How big is a deal like this usually? How many investors are you looking for? How often do you do this?
They will vary. We’ve done syndications where we’ve raised as little as $500,000 and as high as $8 million. I think that was our largest raise so far. It’ll depend on the raise. A fairly typical minimum investment is $50,000. We’ve had somewhere it was a $100,000 minimum and we’ve had a couple where it was a $25,000 minimum.
How many of these do you do per year? How often can someone get into this?
Our goal has been to do two a quarter but because of COVID, we’re about to do our fourth one. We have at least one a quarter.
That was amazing. So much information but really good stuff. Thank you, Monick. I think that was super helpful. If you had one tip to give my ladies about investing in syndication, what would you say?
I would say, if you want to do this then you need to get on the list of people who do syndications. Connect with people. We have our women’s intuition. Tap into that, as well as your learning. Find people, get to know them, who you can like and trust and that can do a good job with syndication. If you’re passively investing, the only way you’re going to get access is to get into interrelationships with people who have these types of deals.
This is part of the conversation I have when people apply to get into the Investor Club. We can hop on the phone. I get clarity on their why. Why do they want to do this? Depending on their why, different investments will be a better fit for them or not. It’s important to tap into your why. It’s important to know what your resources are, what you can invest, where your funds are and have that clarity about where your money is and when you need it.
Passive Income: If you’re passively investing, the only way you’re going to get access is to get into interrelationships with people who have these types of deals.
If it’s money that you’re going to need in 1 year or 2 years or if you’re 65 and you want your money in two years, a deal where your money is going to be locked up for five years is probably not the best fit for you. If you’re going to need it that quickly and you’re okay with the cashflow or something then that’s fine. It could be 5 years but it could be 7, depending on what’s going on. It could be less but it could be more. You need to get a sense of when you’re going to need the principal back and make sure that it all makes sense for you. We would have that conversation on our call too so I could get clarity and make sure that you’re getting into deals that make sense for you.
Why don’t you tell everybody how to get in touch with you?
To join the Investor Club and get into a one-on-one passive investing strategy session with me, ladies, go to REIGoddesses.com. Gents, go to VIP-Assets.com. Both will get you in the same place. When you go there, you will understand. REIGoddesses.com is speaking to women. It’s a lot of pink.
That is so helpful, Monick. Thank you for coming back to the show and sharing all this information with us. It’s valuable as always.
It was my pleasure. Thank you much for having me.
Ladies, thank you for joining Monick and me for this conversation. I hope it was helpful. I know we did a little bit of a different format but I hope you got a lot of great information. Contact Monick if this is a strategy that you’re interested in. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon.
Important Links
- Monick Halm
- show – Previous episode with Monick Halm
- Moneeka Sawyer – YouTube
- Real Estate Investing 4 Women – Roku
- The Real Estate Investor Goddess Handbook
- Wealth for Women: Conversations with the Team That Creates the Dream
- Real Estate Investor Goddesses Podcast
- Robert Helms
- The Real Estate Guys Radio Podcast
- The Color of Law
- Investor Club
- VIP-Assets.com
About Monick Halm
Monick is the founder of Real Estate Investor Goddesses. Her mission is to assist one million women to achieve financial freedom through real estate. She is a real estate investor, syndicator, and developer with over 15 years of real estate investing experience in multi-family, industrial, mobile home parks, RV parks, flipping, and vacation rentals. Together with her husband Peter Halm, and her investors, she owns over 1300 rental units across 10 states.
She is the #1 bestselling author of The Real Estate Investor Goddess Handbook and Wealth for Women: Conversations with the Team That Creates the Dream, and host of the Real Estate Investor Goddesses Podcast. She is also a Real Estate Strategy Mentor, a Huffington Post contributing author, keynote speaker, recovered attorney, certified interior designer, Feng Shui expert, avid world traveler, wife, and mother of three amazing kids.
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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.
Syndication Series #1: How To Evaluate A Syndication Deal With Dr. Sam Giordano
Everything starts with learning. You can excel really great in one thing if you are determined to know how it works. In real estate, it’s the same case. You have to strive for your goals. Moneeka Sawyer sits down for a conversation with Dr. Sam Giordano on evaluating syndication deals. Where should you be investing? How do you find the right process that works for you? How do you evaluate a syndication opportunity? Dr. Giordano answers these questions and more! Plus, he offers a spreadsheet that could just be the one to help you up your syndication game. So listen to this episode and enjoy the process of learning and growing.
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Watch the episode here
Listen to the podcast here
Syndication Series #1: How To Evaluate A Syndication Deal With Dr. Sam Giordano
Real Estate Investing For Women
I am so excited because we are going to do something a little bit different. One of the things that I’ve been thinking is that as we’ve gone through the years of this show, every single time I do a show, we record something new. There’s a new idea, a new strategy or a new opportunity, and I love that. It’s very exciting to me. I know many of you love that too. What concerns me a little bit is that I feel like I might be confusing you.
Instead of giving you an opportunity to go deep and to learn strategies so that you can make a decision whether that strategy is right for you or not, I just keep presenting new opportunities, which is confusing for me hearing them like I think, “That’s a good idea,” and I know that if I wasn’t already well implanted into some strategies that I’m already using, it could be confusing for me.
In order to support you, ladies, to actually start taking action and grow your portfolio and become super-wealthy and blissful, I’ve decided that I’m going to start doing some different series. Each series is going to be focused on a strategy that I’ve heard a lot about from you. You’ve asked many questions and you want more information. I’ve brought on several guests onto the show already about that topic because of your interest in it.
What I’m going to do is create some of the series that will be a deep dive into that particular topic. Sometimes, it’s hard to go back and re-listen to episodes that are hard to find on iTunes and a lot of the podcasting formats, and even on my website. There might be so many that you don’t know what to listen to.
What I’m going to do is go back and compile the best episodes into a series. If there are any missing parts or holes, then I’ll record a new episode or two to fill those holes. Either it’ll be a new person, maybe I’ll do something, but my strategy is it won’t always be a series and it won’t always be replays. This is to support you as we move forward from here to help you to start taking action and feel like you’re getting what you need to create success.
I’m not just here talking about real estate. I’m here to help you build the blissful life that you dream about. That’s my goal and that’s why I’m creating this series. I’m now starting the first series and I’m excited about it. We are going to be having some reruns and that may irritate some of you. If you don’t like this series idea, please email me and let me know. If you love this series idea, please email me and let me know because I’m here to serve you. I want to make sure you’re taken care of and that I’m providing what you want. I’ve got all my great ideas, but they don’t mean anything if you don’t love them. This is the time for you to tell me what you need so that I can be of service to you.
Here is the first series that we’re doing. Welcome to the Syndication Series. We’ve had many people on this show talking about syndication. Some of you are still a little bit confused about what syndication means. What it means is someone has a big project and they need to get money for that project. What they do is they go out there and find investors to invest in their project. That’s called syndication.
If it’s actual syndication that is legal, they have to file with the SEC. There are some definite legal things that they have to do, but the basic idea is they’re taking money to help invest in a project, either to buy the property, build the property or refurb the property. That is what that very complicated-sounding word is. Syndication means people are collecting money from lots of different individuals to fund a project.
In this series, we’re going to be talking to several syndicators. I’m also going to be starting this series with an education piece about how to evaluate projects. This is so exciting because it’s new in the market. I feel extremely excited that I met this person. It’s as if the universe sent him to us, so I can’t wait to share him with you. He’s going to be talking about how to evaluate syndication projects. We’ll start the series with that, and then we’ll move in so you can get to know some of the syndicators that I want you to hear more from. Maybe they’ve already been on the show and we’re doing a replay, or I’m re-recording something. We’ll see how it goes. I want to make sure that as we go, I’m providing the best value.
Welcome to the Syndication Series. I am excited to welcome to the show, Dr. Samuel Giordano. He is a practicing gastroenterologist, author, real estate investor, and Cofounder of PassiveAdvantage.com, a website designed to help physicians and other high-income professionals with passive real estate syndication deals. He and his partner, Terry Kipp, have designed tools specifically geared towards passive and limited partner investors to help objectify and bring to light the risk points of various real estate syndication deals before choosing to invest.
The tool also has built-in functionality for tracking investment performance versus proforma, as well as a separate tool for tracking your progress on the path to financial independence. He has been investing in passive syndication deals as a limited partner since 2017 and initially developed this tool for himself. Now, he is focused on helping other physicians and investors and bringing it to the masses. His ultimate goal for himself and others is financial freedom, and to be able to live a life of your choosing on your own terms. How are you, Sam?
It’s great to see you. Thank you so much for having me.
Did I do okay with your specialty?
You did outstanding. Perfect.
My mom’s a physician. I have a level of integrity around this. I want to be able to say it right.
It must be in the genes.
I am excited to have you on the show. I want to tell you a little bit about how I met Sam. I was on another show. Do you remember whose show it was? I want to mention it because it was so good.
It may have been Taylor Loht, The Passive Wealth Principles.
I was on that show and then Sam called me because I offered an opportunity for people to talk like I do with you ladies and see what happens if you call me. He set up an appointment and we started chatting about syndications. He’s like, “I want to figure out my next step. I’m not sure what I’m doing,” and he was so humble. I got on the phone with him and he is miles ahead of me in the syndication world. This is such an interesting thing that I want you to know. Many people can be successful. I’m successful in what I do and Sam’s successful in what he does.
Many are interested in the passive growth opportunities of syndication, but sometimes, it's hard to kind of figure it out. Share on XYou’ve heard many amazing people on this show that are successful, but we’re successful at what we do and there are other people that are so much more successful at what they do. This is one of those amazing synergistic things where he was like, “I wanted to find out about what you’re doing,” and I’m like, “I want to find out what you’re doing.” Once we started talking, I realized what a value he could be for you so I asked him to be on the show. This is his very first ever. Is that true?
It’s one of my first ones, so forgive me if I make any rookie mistakes.
We love rookie mistakes. We like the true, authentic deal. This is going to be fun. I’m excited for him to talk to you about this tool because many of you are interested in the passive growth opportunities of syndication. We’ve had several people on the show talk about syndication, but sometimes it’s hard to figure it out. Where should you be investing? What projects, what people, how do you find a facilitator? Is it called a facilitator?
Yeah. There’s a liaison. There are certain liaisons that put you in touch with syndicators. There are a lot of questions.
I’ll get all that information. When Sam presented this tool, I thought, “This would make it so much easier even for me,” so I wanted to share him with you. That is why Sam is on the show.
Thank you for having me. It’s my pleasure.
Tell us a little bit about your story. How did you get into this? I know you’re a doctor. Tell me a little bit about what happened.
Evaluating Syndication Deals: If somebody is not performing adequately, then you can obviously not recommend them any longer.
I appreciate you giving me the opportunity. It’s great to talk with you again. I’m born and bred in New Jersey. I came from humble beginnings. My father only graduated 8th grade, and my mom only graduated 10th grade. I was the first person in my family to go to college. After college, I went on to work in the pharmaceutical industry research for a few years, and then not feeling fulfilled, I decided to go to medical school. I met my wife in between medical school and residency. She’s a California girl. I somehow convinced her to stay in New Jersey, although I fight that fight every day.
I finished my fellowship as a gastroenterologist back in 2012. I was doing all the traditional things you think about from a personal finance standpoint. I was maxing out my retirement accounts, paying off my student loans, investing in my children’s 529, all the classic personal finance things that are preached to us. Eventually, as loans got paid off, I was able to invest in post-tax accounts. There came a time where I wanted to look into more alternative investments.
That was around 2017, the same time when the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act was enacted. We lost the ability to deduct state and local income tax. In high taxes states like New Jersey and California, that can be a big hit on your taxes. Synergistically at that time, I started looking into alternative investments, and then I also started looking for ways to diversify some of my taxable income. That brought me into the real estate realm a little bit.
Why did you choose syndications?
Initially, I had dabbled in thinking about owning my own rental properties, single-family rentals, and looking into possible turnkey opportunities in most cases, out of state since New Jersey doesn’t have the best real estate investment opportunities for those types of things. I started to hear horror stories about people who bought these turnkey properties and that the property managers that were managing them out of state weren’t always truthful. It started to steer me off a little bit.
I talked to a few friends that had done some of these real estate syndication deals to where they invest in the deal passively. You give them a certain amount of money and you have fractional ownership in the deal. After you do the upfront vetting and due diligence of that deal to decide whether you want to invest, once you make the commitment financially, then you start receiving distributions either monthly or quarterly, depending on the structure of that deal. You don’t have to do anything anymore.
The great thing is you get a lot of the tax benefits, which is some of the stuff that I was looking into, where at least it doesn’t increase your taxable income. In some cases, you can use that depreciation from those deals to offset some of your other passive income or active income in somebody who’s a real estate professional.
Once I saw these deals and I saw that it was more hands-off because I still have my day job as a physician and I’m not looking to give that up. This looked like the perfect fit in terms of what I wanted to accomplish. It was like opening Pandora’s box when I learned about it, and then it just set off this year-long education process of learning more.
You talked a little bit about turnkey. We are probably going to be doing a series on turnkey also because it’s a strategy that I love. What is interesting is you’re talking about all these horror stories of the scam artists out there that create a dodgy products. The properties aren’t right and the management company that they put in isn’t right. There’s a lot out there that doesn’t work, but there is also a lot out there that does work. One of the values that I provide in this show is vetting and getting to know these different people and operators. My ladies go and invest with them and I hear feedback.
We’re able to put together a network of operators in the turnkey area that my ladies can invest in. The syndication area is not that much different. It’s interesting that you said they were opposites because in the syndication area also, there are a lot of scam artists and operators. There are people that are taking people’s money. In anything in real estate, if the market goes down, you lose money. Not to scare you off, it’s significantly more secure than other investments but it is an investment. There are a lot of operators, even in the syndication world, that are scamming people, unfortunately.
I wish that wasn’t the case but you’re right.
The big difference with the syndicators is that they have to file with the SEC. These guys are being tracked by the government. There are ways to find out about their reputation. If they start to scam people, they’ll be shut down. There’s a little bit more security as far as finding operators this way, but it still doesn’t mean that they’re perfect. If they say you have a ROR of 34%, and then they give you 9%, at least you didn’t lose money. It’s very important to find syndicators that have a good reputation, which is why I’m doing this series because I personally have invested with several people.
Interestingly, Sam has invested with some of the same people, and I’ve developed relationships with some of these syndicators. That’s why we’re doing this series. We want to educate you on how to evaluate projects so that as we go through talking about syndication, you can look at each one of those operators.
If you like what you hear, you like what kinds of projects they’re in, you can get information from them, and then when they start sending you projects or opportunities, then you can go through those opportunities with this tool that Sam’s going to be talking about. There is meaning to my madness. There’s a reason I’m doing it this way. I wanted to point out that it is true that out there in every industry, whether it’s education, real estate, turnkey, REITS, syndication, whatever it is, there are risks. The operator is going to be the key. Wouldn’t you say?
Start looking at alternative investments and ways to diversify some of your taxable income. Share on XI do. The service that you provide to your readers is huge because you have a go-between where if somebody is not performing adequately, then you can not recommend them any longer. That’s a cost to them so they then would have to treat your readers and the people that you referred to them well. As far as if you don’t have those associations available to you, the only way that you can combat that uncertainty or to differentiate which syndicators are good and which are not is through your own education.
The first year that I started to learn about these syndications was in 2016 or 2017 because of the fact that some of these syndications require a pretty significant upfront financial commitment, I’ve made a promise to myself to spend an entire year just to educate myself. That was in the form of podcasts like your own, reading as many books as I could get my hands on, looking at different real estate forums. Anywhere I could get the information in regards to the real estate syndications, I was taking that all in.
As I was going through that year-long timeframe, I used a note sheet to take notes on some key points, or if I heard something interesting on a podcast, I’d put it on that note sheet. Eventually, that note sheet morphed into an Excel sheet where it had parameters that I was looking for in these syndicators. That first year, in addition to the education, if I heard of a syndicator or there was a recommendation of a syndicator through a friend, I would reach out to them, try to have a discussion, and see if it was a fit. What you tend to do if it’s a fit is to get on their investor list.
At that point is when you start receiving these deals through what they call an investment summary or a pitch deck. When you first see those, it’s overwhelming. Some of them are 40 or 50 pages and you don’t know what you’re looking at but over time, when you combine some of the education components into what metrics you need to look at and after looking at some of those investment summaries multiple times, you start to pretty quickly pick out what the metrics are that you’re looking for and what’s in the investment summary.
Over that year, I formed this sheet and it’s what I still use now. It’s gone through many iterations but it gives me the confidence that there’s not one clear risk point or red flag in the deal. If there is, then I’m aware of it and I can then decide if I want to invest in that deal, or I want to move on and invest in another deal. Getting back to the question, the one way to combat that uncertainty and not knowing whether someone you’re dealing with is scrupulous or truthful is to educate yourself as best as you can. The whole process of forming the sheet is to try to truncate or shorten that education process that I had to do so that people can more quickly be pointed out to certain areas that they need to look at.
That’s the education process that you went through. What is it that you actually go through when you are evaluating a syndication opportunity? We’re going to do an awesome deep dive in EXTRA. Give us a high level and then we can go much deeper. We’re going to have more time in EXTRA to do that.
When you look at a deal, the three main components would be the sponsor, the market and the deal, and in that order. Meaning that the sponsor is clearly the most important component of the evaluation, but that’s the trickiest because there are a few objective things that we look at, but it’s not as many clear quantitative objective parameters that you can look at when you’re evaluating the sponsor.
A big thing is when you do have that phone conversation with them, what’s the feel you get? Do they seem like nice people that you’d want to go have a beer with or hang out with? Do you feel like as soon as you get off the phone, you’re like, “I don’t want to talk to that person again?” You got to trust your gut. Even though that’s not quantitative, that’s one of the more important things that you can have when you’re evaluating these sponsors.
The market looks at parameters where people are generally moving like the Sun Belt area, Southeastern Florida, Atlanta, Texas, Arizona, and moving out of states like our state, New Jersey, California, New York, and moving to places where the weather is good and taxes are better. Most of the investments I look at have what they call population migration into those areas. You look at job growth and education in those areas. You look at the average salary in the particular community that the apartment is going into.
Evaluating Syndication Deals: One way to combat that uncertainty and not knowing whether someone you’re dealing with is scrupulous or truthful is to educate yourself as best as you can.
The third part is the deal itself. You can get granular in the deal metrics because those get quantitative, but the three main breakdowns of the deal itself would be property metrics, the debt structure, which is extremely important what kind of debt is on the deal. That’s one of the higher risk points of the deal, and then the rent growth projections. That’s a high-level overview of the main things that you look at in a deal.
As the limited partner investor, one of the best things you can do is think about what your end game is like what you’re doing this for, and where you see yourself in whatever time horizon you set out if it’s 5, 10, 15 years. I did that early on and that has made all the difference because then I can see where the goalpost is and how close I am to getting it. If you don’t know where that goalpost is, it makes it a little harder to see what you need to do to get there.
That was one of the very first things that we talked about, you and I in our first conversation. This is one of those things that I bring up for everybody. You need to know where you’re headed. There are a few things that we need to know, where am I headed, why and what my resources are. That sounds easy but it’s so much deeper than that. Once you know those things, picking a strategy, whether it’s syndication or anything else, becomes easier. Setting the goals and the path of that strategy is so much easier.
You want to pick a strategy that is aligned with who you are, all of it. I was talking to somebody about what your resources are and his wife wasn’t on board, but she’s one of his resources. If she’s not on board, that’s going to be a hard journey for you. Your relationships are a part of your resources, personal, as well as network. I go off on these tangents but I love what you were talking about.
My wife wasn’t on board initially either. It took her a little bit of time. I started to show her the numbers, she started to learn a bit more, and now she’s more involved. It takes some time to take a little transition.
Maybe we can talk in EXTRA too about how you helped her to make that transition because I’m getting a lot of those questions lately. Having a goalpost to know where you’re going is going to make a huge difference for you. The cold bolt is your first goalpost. Once you get to that goalpost, there will be another. Don’t worry about limiting or whatever it is. That goalpost will eventually change once you reach it too.
The biggest thing with these investments and when it’s something new like there’s some complicated variable to it where it’s not super intuitive to understand, I found that the hardest part is taking that first step. At least for me and I’m sure it is for others. Sometimes I feel like education conquers the fear, whether it’s a miss or in other things, when you feel like you’re fully prepared and you’ve done all you can, then it brings you closer to taking that first step.
Knowing the things to look for and having a tool as we have discussed helps take the first step. Once that happens, then it becomes easier. The next thing you know, three years later, I’ve done over ten syndication deals. I can still remember my first deal a couple of years ago. It’s amazing how quickly it can happen.
I also believe that education helps to mitigate fear, but there is such a thing as analysis paralysis. Don’t overeducate. There is a point where you have to actually take that step. Talk to us a little bit about how you took those first steps to invest in your first deal.
Believe it or not, the criteria I look for now are different from the criteria that I used on that first deal. That’s the nature of the economy as your education evolves. That first deal, I was primarily focused 80% on the sponsor because even though I had done all the research and my analysis on what to look for in deals, I wasn’t sure that I wasn’t missing anything. That’s that same thing, paralysis by analysis. I was at the point where I was like, “Do I know enough? Do I not know enough?” The way for me to mitigate that is to put even more of a weight on that sponsor.
The sponsor I invested in that first deal, my interactions with them and their organization, I’m like, “These guys are first-class. They seem like they’re doing things the right way. I have confidence in what they’re doing. I’m going to take a leap and go with them,” and I did. Thankfully, it worked out. They had what’s called a fund structure, where it involves multiple investments in one vehicle. Nowadays, I look for more of the single asset deals as opposed to the fund deals, just because some of the times with the fund deals, it’s a little harder.
There are nuances between the funds and the single asset deals, but the single asset deals allow me, now that I’m more comfortable with the vetting, to actually vet more of the deal. Whereas when it’s a fund, they may not have even bought the properties before you’ve invested, so you are 100% looking at the sponsor. At that point, I was comfortable to work with. Whereas now, since I’m more comfortable in what I’m looking at, I’m more interested in the single syndication deals, but that’s what allowed me to take that first leap. I had the most confidence in the sponsor. That’s where I was comfortable with at that point.
What is it that’s changed? You said that you don’t look at the same things. Back then, it was all about the sponsor. Tell me a little bit more about now.
The sponsor is still the most important. At the stage I’m at now, my overall goal was to try within 10 to 12 years to get to a point where I could create enough income to cover my expenses. I had an idea of how much I would have to invest in these real estate syndication deals looking at average or conservative returns to where I would get there in 10 to 12 years. In order to do that, a portion of me is focused on what’s called the velocity of money. I’m looking for deals that may not have a ten-year hold time to where it’s taken time to get my money back.
Some of these syndications require a pretty significant upfront financial commitment. Share on XI’m looking for deals where they may have a five-year hold time. Hold time is just the amount of time that the deal is projected before they sell the property and do any business plan or value add to sell it. I’m looking for deals that may say that it’s a five-year hold but in reality, they’re looking to fix it up and sell it in three or refinance it in three. You then get all your money back during those refinances, then I can deploy it in other deals.
Back then, I was more focused on security, whereas now, I’m more focused on trying to not take extra risks. Just do deals where there’s more of a chance to get in and get out in a quicker time period, so then I can redeploy it because then you could capitalize those gains quicker and then that 10 or 12-year horizon, I could potentially achieve in 7 to 8 years if things work outright. One of the things is that the deals I look for have a shorter hold time. I’m less interested in the fund structure at this point.
Ten, twelve years from now, I may then switch back and want the security, and not want to have to continue to redeploy deals. The markets I’ve looked at have changed a little bit in that period of time. As well as the economic exchange, rent control states, and different things like that affect what you can do in terms of increasing the rents after you do renovations on some of these investments. All those things have changed, believe it or not, in the short years since I started investing. It’s a constant thing you have to keep up with a little bit.
Most of my ladies know what syndication is. I’ve mentioned this a couple of times. What we’re talking about is an operator who has a big project who is looking for money. He’s registered with the SEC, and you have an opportunity to invest in that project. That’s the real simple way of saying it. However, Sam just mentioned a bunch of little things that I don’t think we’ve mentioned on this show. I’d like to break it down just a little bit.
What happens is when you find an operator, you’ll get a project, and then you evaluate that project. You then have an opportunity to either be a preferred investor. Sometimes, they have two different levels of investors and sometimes they don’t. They’ve got preferred and standard. The preferred is usually the people that get in first and they get a higher rate of return that’s paid to them. They’re basically borrowing money from you to start this project. You might get 10% if you’re preferred and 8% if you’re not preferred. Those are just examples.
What happens is the syndicator takes all that money. They either buy the property and start the refurb, or they already have the property and it’s just being used for refurb. They’ll tell you what it’s for. They’ll do a forced value add. A forced value add is they’re fixing it up. They’re doing a remodel. Their goal is to be able to raise rents because when you get a loan on a property like a multiunit, your loan is based on the income of the property. It’s not based on your personal finances but it’s based on the income of the property.
The property is getting a certain amount of income. They refurb it with your money, and then they raise rents. They’ll clear everybody out and put in a bunch of new people. Most of the time, they’ll do it piecemeal. As people leave, they’ll put in people at higher rents. As leases come due, they’ll raise the rents. There are a couple of things that they can do. They can sell the property and do it again or now they’ve got cashflow and they want to keep it.
Evaluating Syndication Deals: There’s a liberating feeling when you have the ability to cover some of your expenses and not have to worry about what’s going on in your job life.
Often what they’ll do is they’ll refinance it. They’ll take some cash out, and that cash out is now paid to all of the investors. This is tax-free income because it’s out of a refinance, so you get this income. A few years down the line, they might sell the property. At that point, you get a portion of the equity in that sale. Before that, you’re getting a portion of the rent every single month.
Not every syndicator will pay on every one of those pieces. Not every syndicator has the same plan or way that they run a project or pay their people. In general, those are the different opportunities. There are a few more opportunities but that’s a base level of what you can get. You’ll hear things like ROR. People will say, “I got a rate of return of 34%.” What does that mean over five years?
What happened was, they got 10% every year. During the refinance, they got another percentage, then they got all this rent, and then at the end, they got another percentage. Some of it’s taxable and some of it’s not. That’s when you hear the ROR. They’re taking all of those ways of being paid and they’re adding that into, “Over five years, this is what it averaged out to.” That’s when you hear that term. That’s what you’re looking at. Did I miss anything, Sam?
No, I think that’s great. You’ve explains it perfectly. With these multifamilies that are more than four units, the value, instead of it being a single-family home where the values are based on comps, or if somebody wants the house down the street and sold it for X amount, so my house is worth X amount. The multifamily, when it’s four units or more based on that net operating income, if it’s a 200-unit property and you increase the rent in each of those units $100 a month, that all of a sudden kicks up the value of that property a significant amount.
The difference between what they paid and what it’s now worth is based on the operating income, they could get some of that cash back, sell it and get some. The nice thing about multifamily units is that there are clear numbers based on what you can collect and what the value is. It’s not like, “I’ll pay you $600,000 for your house.”
When they can increase those rents, then it’s clear data as to what the value of that property is, and then they can use the benefit. It can benefit the investors and the syndicators. Even though it doesn’t seem like $100 a month rent is a lot in increase, when you add in all the months and you add in all the units, it becomes a pretty significant amount of money. You explained it perfectly.
Thank you for that additional input. You’re not doing this on smaller properties. You’re doing this on larger ones. I’ve done a few syndications. I’ve done one in a 252-unit property, I did one in a 550-unit property, I did one in a storage development ground up, and I did another one in a mobile home park that was being refurbed. That’s how I’ve invested in a lot of different areas that I know nothing about, but I want to get in on the action or on the opportunities there. It’s a way for me to go to an expert. Just like we’re talking to a doctor, you wouldn’t do what he does at home. You’re going to go to him. I believe in going to the pros.
If someone’s doing this and doing it well, I want to invest with that person. A lot of these things, I want the advantages that those markets give us without having to learn about them myself. I’m so busy myself. I don’t have the bandwidth to learn all that stuff, so it’s given me an opportunity to invest in places that I can’t learn enough about, but I can learn about the operator. I don’t want to be responsible for myself for a multi-million dollar project, in something that I don’t know, so it’s better to have a team.
That’s one of the examples that you used in relation to the unit size. One of the criteria we have in the sheet is we look for properties that are at least 100 units or more. There are a couple of reasons for that. One is that you can have economies of scale. You can afford to hire an onsite property manager as opposed to if you have a 40-unit or 50-unit. In addition, at the time of sale, if you want to sell to an institutional buyer or private equity, they generally don’t want to look at complexes or apartment complexes that are less than 100 units, so it just gives you more opportunities. One of the criteria we look at in the sheet in terms of the deal-specific criteria, is it 100 units or more? Is it 150 or more? They get assigned scores based on that. That’s good that you said that because that does affect the growth opportunity and the risk profile of the deal. That’s a good example.
Thank you. Talk to us about the kind of people that should be investing in syndications. Who is this for?
It depends at what level you want to get into it. There are crowdfunding websites like CrowdStreet, RealCrowd, and Yieldstreet. A lot of what they do is they aggregate earlier syndicators that have a hard time getting investors, and they then have deal minimums that are smaller. If you go to those main sites, you can see some of the deals that have smaller minimum investments. It’s not always the case but sometimes the deals, they’re newer syndicators so there may be a slightly higher risk profile to some of those deals versus what they call private placements.
In private placement deals, there are two criteria. One looks specifically at accredited investors where you have to meet certain financial criteria in terms of your net worth and your income, and then there are some that don’t require you to be an accredited investor. In some of those deals, the minimums could be as much as $10,000, $20,000. In some cases, even $50,000. The way I look at it is people who have some disposable income and they want to get into real estate but they don’t necessarily want to earn things on their own. That’s one category of people.
The second category of people are those who start with active investing or active rental. They may start with a few single-family, then they have maybe a quadplex or an eight-unit, but they want to get out of the active involvement. There are some syndications that take what’s called a 1031, where they could take that portfolio of eight units investment and then transfer it into these limited partner syndication deals. You see people that either haven’t invested a while or were a little more mature in their career, or have a little more disposable income that gets right in, and go around that active stage.
There are some who start in the active stage that eventually work up to having more units and having more disposable income and cashflow from those units, and then get in syndications that way. One of the barriers to entry in these private placements is that some of the minimum investment sometimes can be a little higher. Once you meet that criteria, syndications are good for everybody.
When you look at a deal, the three main components would be the sponsor, the market, and the deal, and in that order. Share on XEveryone should have a key component of real estate in their portfolio. You can do it through REIT investing and equities investing. If you’ve seen the market back in March of 2020, when the market goes down, the REITs go down. There’s not a lot of diversity in that case, but in times like now where the market’s very high and inflation is a concern, you’d want to hold onto the hard assets. Real estate is a great investment. That’s why we’re seeing things become more and more competitive. It’s a long-winded way to say it. It’s right for most people, the syndication investing. It’s just a matter of where you’re coming from and what angle you want to take.
My understanding is that for most of the syndications that I’ve looked at, the minimum I’ve ever seen is $25,000 but usually, each unit is about $100,000. Did you say that you can get in for less? Talk to me a little bit more about that.
In the crowdfunding platforms like the CrowdStreet and those kinds of platforms that have similar investments to syndications, some of those minimums may be as little as $1,000, $2,000, $3,000, anywhere in that lower range. You don’t have as much control over the vetting process of the syndicator because that’s done by that particular website.
In some cases, not always, it’s newer syndicators. A lot of the more mature syndicators don’t always go through those websites if they can raise the capital on their own. Whereas if a newer indicator doesn’t have a track record and is looking for some help from aggregating some of these investors on these websites, then the cost of that is the websites may take a fee, but they also decrease the investment minimum.
Those are the examples where you would be able to get in at a lower minimum. In the private placements like some of the stuff that we’re talking about, you’re right. Most of those are in the $25,000, $10,000, $50,000. Believe it or not, if you ask syndicators, even if the minimum is $50,000, especially if it’s your first investment and you say, “I like what you have to offer. I’m comfortable with you but with my first investment, can I maybe go half of that? After that, we’ll go to the minimum.” If the minimum’s $50,000 and you offer $25,000, most syndicators, especially if it’s your first investment, won’t say no to you.
You just have to ask. Sometimes it can be a little weird to ask, but it’s a lot of money, so you want to be comfortable with that, and they realize that too. If it works out, then going forward, you can then stick to the minimum. There is a little bit of a negotiation within reason that you can negotiate that minimum down a little bit to make yourself more comfortable.
We are running out of time but I want you to talk a little bit about how to use syndications to achieve financial freedom.
The way I look at it is you often see two different mindsets. Some people are either entirely based on investing in the stock market and going that route, especially if you’re not aware of syndication investing. Some people that have had their eyes opened to real estate are completely taking all their money out of their 401(k) and outside the stock market. You find people that are strongly on either side. I find myself right in the middle. I still do my traditional pretax retirement accounts. I am an employee as a physician so I max out those.
If you take syndication out of it and you think about the classic personal finance education, people use a 4% rule in that. The first thing you do is calculate your annual expenses, for example, $100,000 a year. If you want to have an idea of how much of a nest egg you need to save in order to retire, you would then times that by 25, which gives you a 4% withdrawal rate of your money. Let’s say your annual expenses is $100,000, then you would have to save $2.5 million in order to cover that $100,000. That may take a decent amount of time. That’s based on the 4% withdrawal rate.
When you add in syndication investing, where a lot of these investments are somewhere in the 8% to 10% cash on cash, if you’re doubling or in some cases even tripling the return, then that may be a twenty-year time horizon. If you just invested in the stock market, that can be truncated down to somewhere in the 8 to 10-year range, if assuming typical investment returns using syndications.
I wanted to invest somewhere in the $50,000 to $100,000 a year into syndications. Over a ten-year period of time, taking all the returns from those deals and then reinvesting it back into new deals, that would give me somewhere in that $1.2 million to $1.5 million range. If you then take 10% annually from using that cashflow as a rough estimate, even 8%, if my expenses were $120,000 a year, that’s what I wanted to cover. That’s how I came at that number
The beauty is that that would cover my entire expenses without taking into consideration any of my stock market investing. I realized that seems like a lot of money and not everyone can do that, but further along in my career, I wanted to invest. That’s what I allowed myself to allocate to that and what I wanted to achieve in the period of time that I had. That’s the way that I looked at it. I wanted to invest a set amount, assuming a specific return and to cover my expenses within a ten-year period.
That was a good breakdown. How he set his goals, how he decided to achieve them, and set his timeframe on when he wanted to achieve that. He set his goalpost and then set a path to get there. It’s a good example of that. Some of what Sam is doing is helping other people to achieve goals in a very similar way, so he’s created this spreadsheet which is I’m having him on the show. It’s more than a spreadsheet, this tool that helps people to evaluate syndications. Could you tell us a little bit about the spreadsheet specifically?
It started as what I created for myself back in that 2017 timeframe. As I was going through creating the spreadsheet, I started to speak with other real estate investors and other people in the space that are doing similar limited partner investing like myself. They’re like, “Can I get a copy of that? I would pay you for it.” At the time, I’m using it for myself and I don’t feel comfortable giving it to somebody else. I shared it with many friends in the beginning to take that first step and I’m like, “This can break that barrier to entry and break that fear hurdle that people have to get them to take that first step.”
We created a spreadsheet. There are three components to it. One looks at the deal itself to where you are analyzing the deal, going through more specifics in relation to the sponsor, the market and the deal. The other components are a deal tracker, which looks at when you have made the investments. It allows you to track the investments based on the distributions that you’re getting from it versus what they said they were going to pay you, and gives you a side-by-side comparison for all the investments you have. The third component is tracking your path to financial independence. For some of the numbers we just talked about, you could plug in your own numbers.
If the annual amount you can do is not $100,000 but $50,000, then it shows you how long it would take you to reach your desired expenses that people can plug in there. We try to make it like a one-stop-shop for people who are interested in passive investing. For most of the tools, you would need to both vet the deal and monitor your progress, both on the path to financial independence and then the deal performance so that people would take that step.
For some people, that can change your life, having the liberating ability to cover a lot of your expenses with your investments. You may choose to continue to work every day just like you do. I love my job. I’m not looking to quit, but there’s a liberating feeling when you have the ability to cover some of your expenses and not have to worry about what’s going on in your job life.
Someone asked me, “Why are you looking at retiring in two years? Are you unhappy, or is David unhappy?” We’re not, but our priorities are changing, our parents are more elderly, there are things that we want to be able to do, and it’s nice to be able to say, “I don’t have to worry about money so much that I have to be so committed to any particular job.” If Dave and I wanted to take six months around the world and his company said, “You can’t do that.” He can say, “That’s okay.” He comes back and finds another position but he’s not freaked out about, “How are we going to pay the bills?” You’re living in choice rather than in need. It’s a different way to live life.
It changes your whole mentality. I’m not quite at the point yet, but even just getting the passive income that I get in now, then I’m like, “I only need to bring in X amount for my job if I did want to change things.” It goes to, “I want to work,” from where it was, “I have to work.” You feel more control. In this COVID environment where people are getting more stress at jobs and physician burnout, many more people are looking into these things because of that reason. They want flexibility. If there are environmental changes, if there are job changes that they still can feel like they can cover the bills and it’s not as if you’re worried about that. That’s part of the reason we did this. It’s to try to get more people to that place because it’s a different place to be versus the typical.
Evaluating Syndication Deals: Take care of yourself. There’s something that happens when you realize that you’re on a path to a better life.
The other thing is that it’s not that you have to get there to feel that liberation and the comfort. When I started investing in real estate, I was making very little. I was putting away $100 a month type of thing, but the thing is that once you start taking that action, you suddenly feel like, “I’m going to be able to take care of myself.” There’s something that happens when you realize that you’re on a path to a better life and that you’re going to be able to take care of yourself. You’ve figured this piece out. You can figure stuff out. You don’t have to be at the goal to feel that feeling of liberation. It’s getting on that path that opens you up.
There’s something about seeing the checks come in the account that I use for syndications and I’m not doing anything. Even as a physician, if I stop choosing to go to work, I’m not going to get paid. My income as a physician or as anyone who does labor that requires themselves requires me to go to work to do that. I don’t make money while I sleep as a physician, whereas with this kind of investment, it’s unlimited in terms of it doesn’t have any limit to my time.
I only have the same amount of hours in a week that you have and everyone else has, whereas, with this kind of investment, the limit is basically for your financial means to do it. From there, it makes money without you having to do anything, which is a different place to be. It’s the classic passive income as opposed to the active income of your day job.
Here’s the cool news. He’s offering this to the public for the very first time. You get this price and he’s going to quote, but just understand that the price will go up, so if you’re reading this 1 or 5 years from now, the price is going to be a little bit different. They want to know how much it is for this tool.
What we have offered is I wrote a free eBook that goes over in more detail. It’s in a book format and an 80-page eBook on How to Passively Invest and Vet a Real Estate Deals. That’s free and there’s no price. You can just download that at PassiveAdvantage.com. There, you can also find the tool that we’re talking about that goes through all of the different metrics to look at, to track the deals you have invested in, as well as your path to financial independence tracker.
You can purchase the tool. The price of the tool is $199 but we’re giving your audience a 10% coupon discount. At purchase, you put in the words BLISS10, and that will give you 10% off. It’s the least we can do. Hopefully, you guys find the value of it and it’ll help with your education or help to see what’s important when looking at these deals, as well as see where you are on the path to financial independence.
Ladies, I do have a special web URL for you to go get the product or the tool and then put in the coupon code. That URL is BlissfulInvestor.com/syndicationws. When you go in there and you select the product, then you can put in the BLISS10. That’s how you get your 10% discount. This pricing is already incredible, but it’s nice to get an extra discount, so go check that out. The other thing that I’m super excited about is Sam has agreed to do a webinar for us where he actually goes through the worksheet. For those of you that want it, you know how to get it.
To me, it seems like a little bit of a no–brainer. If you’re interested in syndication, this is a no-brainer price so go do it. I don’t want you to stall, but if you want to know more or you’re more interested now in syndication and you want to know what the numbers look like, Sam and I are going to be doing a webinar together. He’s going to do a breakdown of a deal.
That is going to be on Thursday, November 18th, 2021, at 5:00 PM Pacific time and 8:00 PM, Eastern time. If you want to sign up for that, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/samwebinar. Definitely come. You get to ask questions. He’s going to go through a presentation and he’ll answer as many questions as we got time for. Please put that on your calendars and you’ll get some reminders too. Do you have anything else that you wanted to share with us before we sign off?
I think we’ve covered a lot. I truly appreciate you taking the time. It’s been a pleasure talking to you. It always is. I feel like we have a lot of synergy in terms of what we look for and what we’re looking for in terms of what we use real estate for. I want to bring it to more people to get to where we are, to make their first investment, and I’m hoping that this tool allows people to do that. I’m happy to answer any additional questions that they may have and happy to answer more questions at the webinars as well.
Thank you so much. This has been such a good show. Thank you for all you’ve offered in this portion of the show.
It’s my pleasure. Anytime.
Ladies, stay tuned. We’ve got more in EXTRA. We’re going to be talking about going through a whole deal. We’re going to do a run-through on a deal. I’m going to talk to Sam a little bit about that transition that happened for his wife and how they made that happen because I know this is a big topic for you, ladies. I am going to also ask him about the 1031 DST. He threw that in just a tiny little bit, and it’s a topic I’m interested in. I’m going to ask him about that in EXTRA.
If you are interested in those topics, stay tuned. If you are interested but are not subscribed yet, just go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get the first seven days for free, so you could get this one for free and as much as you can listen to in the first seven days, then you can stay subscribed if you’d like. For those of you that are leaving Sam and me, thank you so much for joining us. Have a great day and always remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon.
Important Links
- PassiveAdvantage.com
- tool – Deal Analyzer
- BlissfulInvestor.com/syndicationws
- BlissfulInvestor.com/samwebinar
- RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com
About Dr. Sam Giordano
Dr. Giordano has been a practicing physician at an academic medical center for ten plus years and has had consecutive designations as a “Top Doctor” in his geographic region. He has also published multiple manuscripts in peer reviewed journals. He has an avid interest in personal finance and financial education, and has formed a personal finance teaching curriculum for residents and fellows at his hospital. He is also an assistant professor at the associated medical school for his hospital. He began exploring real estate investing in 2017 and has now invested in multiple passive syndication deals during that time as a limited partner. He realized there was an unmet need and formed his own tool to better and more efficiently vet passive real estate syndication deals. He has personally experienced the benefit of passive real estate investments as a busy professional, but also realized how few of his colleagues were aware they exist. He is now committed to changing that, and feels a passion and calling to bring an exposure to passive real estate investments to more professionals to ultimately diversify from the stock market and forge their own path to financial freedom.
He is a proud husband and father of three children, and during his spare time enjoys hiking, exercising and traveling to explore our beautiful world.
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.