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Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business To Over $1 Million In Profits In 12 Months With Mike Simmons – Real Estate For Women

 

We might think that growing our profits is going to take a lot of time, but that isn’t always the case. Sometimes, what you need is to do a bit of level jumping, and today’s guest is just the right person to teach you how. Moneeka Sawyer is joined in this episode by real estate investor and author Mike Simmons in a great discussion on jumping to the next level. Mike shares his story of getting into the real estate space, and the challenges he faced along the way. Mike also shares his insights on success in the business and the things he learned as an investor.  

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Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business To Over $1 Million In Profits In 12 Months With Mike Simmons – Real Estate For Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Mike Simmons. He is a real estate investor, podcaster and speaker who shared the stage with Gary Vaynerchuk at his Agent 2021 Conference. He is a Co-Owner of the wholesaling company, Return On Investments, Producer and Host of the popular podcast, Just Start Real Estate, which I was just on and a partner in 7 Figure Flipping, one of the nation’s largest real estate mastermind groups. He owns sixteen rental properties and has wholesaled and flipped over 80 properties in 2020. He wrote the book titled Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months, which tells the story of his success as a real estate investor.  

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Mike, welcome to the show. 

Thanks for having me. You’re awesome. I can say that because I had an hour–long conversation with you. Thank you for having me. 

You’re welcome. My pleasure. Ladies, we did this fun thing. We’re doing an episode swap. We did it in one big chunk. I don’t always do it this way. It is fun to get to have a long in–depth conversation with you. This has been amazing so far. I’m excited about what you’re going to share. 

There are a lot of people who do real estate, work full time, and love their job. They don't want to leave. Share on X

I appreciate it. I’m more excited to do this. I get the benefit of knowing you’re super cool and fun, even before we get started.  

Mike, give us a high–level, two–minute version of your story of how you got started in real estate. 

My story is relatable, which makes it normal. I worked from 9:00 to 5:00. I was in corporate. I went and got my degree much after high school. Ten years after I graduated, I went back and got my degree. The reason is right out of high school, I got a job working for UPS. It was a union. In my family, we were all Midwestern union–minded. My parents, all they wanted for me was to get into a job that had a good strong union. They thought that was it. That was the end game. Once I did that, I thought, “I didn’t love high school so why would I go to college.” I am in a union. This is what my parents said I’m supposed to do. I start working for UPS. Long story short, it wrecked my back at a young age. I couldn’t get out of bed without going to the chiropractor 3 to 4 times a week. I was on the road to being a cripple in my twenties. I was smart enough to look around and go, ” I can’t do this for the rest of my life. Something has got to change.”  

I went into the automotive industry. I’m from Michigan. Everyone goes into the automotive industry. I did that. There was good pay, good benefits. I liked it. It was fun. I was lured away from school there too. We went through this recession. This real downturn and the automotive industry took a hit. People were getting laid off like crazy. I had to be honest with myself. The one thing I learned in growing up with a dad who’s a Marine is how to be very self–critical. I am not someone who has a hard time understanding their faults. When I looked around at this time in my life, I said, “There are so many layoffs happening. I don’t have a college degree. I have some experience. Honestly, if I were a company and hiring and some HR, I wouldn’t hire me. Why would I hire me? There are more qualified people. People with degrees and more experienced. I am very expendable right now.”  

That scared me. I went back to college. I don’t use what I got in college anymore but I went back to college. What college did for me was it expanded my mind a little bit. It made me think about the possibilities. I started thinking about things that I never thought about before like retirement, investing and saving. Up to that point, I’m paycheck–to–paycheck like a lot of people. It’s stupid but that’s what I did. I started looking into the stock market and day trading. We talked about that a bit on my podcast. I did that for a while but I hated it. I didn’t like the stock market. It was boring to me. I needed something more exciting. I came across real estate. I decided this is what I want to do. I love this. I’m interested in it. It’s definitely a vehicle to get me where I want to go. I did the worst possible thing that you could ever do when you make a decision in your life that you want to do something was I got paralysis analysis. I started overthinking it.  

I started reading books, taking courses and going to seminars. I was educating myself to the point that I was overwhelmed with information and I didn’t know what to do. I felt like I don’t know enough about anything. It’s sad to say the reason I called my podcast Just Start Real Estate is because I realized the biggest problem people have with success is they don’t even get started. I decided in 2003 that I wanted to be a real estate investor. I didn’t buy my first house until 2008. I spent five years paralyzed with fear. Paralyze thinking, “What are people going to say if I screw this up? What will my parents say? What will my wife say? Will I lose money? Will I look dumb?” All these crazy thoughts that people have legitimately. I was frozen with that for five years before I got started. The first house I bought, flipped, and made money was like being stuck underwater until you almost are ready to pass out and then being thrust above water. I took this deep breath of air. For the first time, I felt like I was doing what I meant to do and that was to create my own destiny. That was how it started. 

 

That’s quite a visual. I felt that viscerally. It is interesting. We talked about this on your podcast, too, that entrepreneurial mindset. Being in corporate, for me, was being held underwater. It was suffocating, dying and miserable. I worked for great companies. I had a great job and great bosses. There was nothing wrong. It just wasn’t right for me. When I was able to get out there, it was taking that big gasp of air and feeling, “Finally, I get to be me.” 

If you’re not an entrepreneur, it can be a scary, terrifying thing. That’s how you know that you might not be cut out for that. For the people who go, “I feel like I’m alive for the first time,” that’s where you’re supposed to be. That’s how I felt. 

What’s interesting is that there’s a place for real estate investing in all of that whether you’re a corporate, executive, single mom, single dad or entrepreneur. In all of those places, that’s the beauty of real estate. There’s room for an investor strategy. Wouldn’t you agree? 

100%. I know a lot of people that do real estate, work full time and love their job. They don’t want to leave. It’s something that helps them supplement and get them to where they want to go faster. For some people, it’s what they want to do. They don’t want to be in corporate. I was like you. I was miserable. I wasn’t the best employee because I was difficult. I always had an opinion of how things should be done. I was not necessarily beloved by all of my managers and things because I was difficult for them. I constantly had a way about how I wanted to do things. It was good to understand where I belong. I always tell folks, “In growing up my world, there was this gravitational pole. The gravitational pole was toward the security of air, unions, working hard and saving your money. That was it.” To become an entrepreneur, was like escaping gravity. It took a lot of energy. It took me twenty years. I skipped over it. I was working for someone else for twenty years before I got started in real estate. It took me that long to break out of the expectational grips that my parents had. It was no fault of theirs. They loved me. They were one of the best. That’s what they knew. That’s what they thought was the best thing for me so it took a while. 

You talk a lot about creating a business that can operate without you. That’s real estate. That’s the dream. You go from a solopreneur to this business. As I say, I work 5 to 10 hours a month. I work very little on this. I call it my multimillion–dollar side hustle. That’s what we want. A business that we don’t have to trade time for money with. Talk a little bit more about that. 

The worst thing you can do is go off from working eight hours a day for someone else to work sixteen hours a day for yourself. That’s not the goal. For me, what that looked like? I won’t lie. I think I’m a slow learner because it took me about 5 or 6 years to dial in and understand what it took to run a business. Up until then, I was running what I like to lovingly call a lemonade stand. The lemonade stand was making a lot of money. It was being run the same way a five-year-old runs a lemonade stand. I ‘m taking money in one hand and handing it in another. I don’t know what’s what and it’s just crazy. Going from a solopreneur to someone who is running a business, I didn’t know what I didn’t know. I bounced around. I stayed local. Everyone I talked to was friends, family and a couple of people REIAs who weren’t doing anything interesting in their business. My mind wasn’t able to grow much because, like a goldfish, I was in a very small bowl. That was the entire real estate world to me. These few folks I talked to.  

It wasn’t until I was put in a much bigger bowl that I was like, “There is room to grow here. There are people doing some cool things that I’m not doing.” Specifically, the number one thing that got me out of that little bowl and allowed me to have access to people who were doing things that I wanted to do but I didn’t know how to get, there was no bridge for me to get to where they are. They were in another location with no way of getting there. To create that bridge, I needed to surround myself with people who were where I am at that time and got there. That was a mastermind. If it isn’t a mastermind then at least a mentor who has your best interests at heart which sometimes can be tricky or a coach or somebody. You need to put yourself in an environment with a person or ideally people who are beyond where you are in business and can help you bridge the gap between what you know and what they know that got them to where they are.  

I met a guy named Andy. A very close friend of mine. I went on vacation with him. At the time when I met him, I was running about $200,000 a year gross profits. I don’t want to get CPA here because I’m not. He was doing about $2 million at the time. I was, “You have the business that I want. You have employees. You have people work for you. You have nothing but free time. You’re not doing much most of the time and you’re running this business. How did you get there?” He said, “It took me four years to get from where I am.” I sat down with him over the course of time. He laid out some of the things that move the needle for him to get them to where he was, not just the things that work but the things he tried that intuitively make sense and I would have tried. That didn’t work so well and why it didn’t work. He showed me this field, the path he took and he pointed out the landmines.  

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If you’re running through a field with landmines, you have them all clearly marked and there’s a path where you go. It may take you four years to get across that field with no information. I said, “Why can’t I do what you did in four years? Organically, you figured out. Why can’t I do that in one year? Can I?” He said, “Sure. There’s no reason why you can’t.” That’s the groundwork for my book. How did I do it in one year? That’s what I lay out. I took all of his plans. I compressed everything he did slowly and methodically into a year and I executed it. Now, what’s the difference between me and somebody else? Nothing, except when I go to you, Moneeka and say, “You are successful. I want to emulate what you did because I think what you did was smart. I’m interested. Can you please tell me what you did?” You say, “Sure. Here’s exactly what I did.” What I don’t do in that situation is question you and say, “That doesn’t work in my mind. You had an advantage.” None of that. I just did it. I didn’t question it.  

That’s part of being raised by a Marine. Guess what you don’t do when a marine tells you what to do when you’re eleven? You don’t question them. You do it right. That served me well in that instance because I just said, “This guy knows what he’s talking about. I believe it. He’s telling me. Why would I question them?” I didn’t. I executed and went from being a $200,000 gross profit business to over $1 million in gross profit within twelve months. I did that within a year. All I did was follow a blueprint that was put out before me. 

There are some things I want to highlight there. First of all, when you decide to follow or take instructions for somebody, make sure a couple of things. Make sure you want to be in their shoes. There’s a couple of things to remember there. First of all, don’t take advice from someone who is not where you want to be. I used to always say don’t take investing advice from someone who’s broke. Don’t take real estate advice from someone who’s afraid of real estate. You want to be in their shoes. Also, the core mission of their business should be similar to yours.  

For instance, for me, money is great but freedom is more important so freedom of choice and time. When I go to talk to somebody, I want instructions from someone who has freedom of time and freedom of choice, as you did. You went to somebody that has this multimillion-dollar business of revenue each year. They have all this free time. You didn’t go to somebody who has a multimillion-dollar business but working sixteen hours a day. They’re out there. They’re a million. They’re a dime, a dozen. When you’re choosing that person to follow, make sure there’s someone you want to be in their shoes and their life, not jealously, none of that stuff. You’re not aspiring to be them but you’re looking at their life and you want a similar life for yourself. Then follow instructions because they know things that you don’t know. You will make mistakes along the way and they will have the answers for you. After that, you can adjust it once you get good at their system. You can make it your own system. Don’t do that initially. Yes, you’re smart but you’re following somebody for a reason. They’re smarter than you in this way. 

The crazy thing is, being smart is not necessarily a prerequisite for being successful. There’s a lot of smart people that fail. Find a successful formula and follow it. As you said, find the recipe that works. Make it the way they tell you to make it. If it tastes great, great. If you want to adjust it afterward, fine but you have the formula. You know how to do it. I totally agree with you. To your point, somebody who you admire. Someone who you look at and say, “They are in a position that I would like to be in, freedom of time, freedom, money, all that stuff” He fits that bill. He’s still a mentor of mine. He’s still somebody who I look up to and has my best interests at heart. He’s a great guy who I think a lot of. 

You do a full breakdown of what you did in your book, correct? 

Yes. Here’s the thing. One of the things that I’ve learned over the years that I’ve been in business is most people think it’s the software or specific technique that you employ. It’s not. It’s a little bit less sexy than that. It’s a little bit more of belief systems, structure and things like that. For me, going from what I was bouncing around, as a wholesaler flipper, a deal or two a month going to 10 to 15 deals a month, the difference was a couple of things. Number one, I had to learn that every time I bought a house, it should not be a brand new adventure where I change all of my systems and processes. As a flipper, I was walking through the aisles of Home Depot and Lowe’s picking out countertops. It’s, “I’ve already done 30 flips. Why am I coming up with a brand new pallet every single time?” That’s illogical and inefficient. It’s why my bandwidth was only allowing me to do so much.  

 

I learned to systemize and create processes that were easily trainable and downloadable so that people could take those processes. Go with them and I didn’t have to be the person doing all the thinking all the time. I learned to create systems and processes that were repeatable that could have efficiencies and economies of scale. That was number one. The second thing was, I learned to track numbers. I was running a lemonade stand. If you ask most five–year–olds how much money they made that day, they hand you a bunch of money. That’s how I was running my business. I learned that I have to track things. I need to track my KPIs.  

I have a couple of different sets of KPIs that I use, key performance indicators. Some of them are what I call my island numbers. My island numbers are if I were stranded on an island or vacationing on an island and somebody gave me this handful of numbers. I would reasonably know the health of my company based on this handful of numbers. It’s not all telling. I wouldn’t know if I’m succeeding or failing by looking at these numbers. That’s important. Certain departments have more granular numbers. At the end of the day, if you don’t understand what money is going out and what money is working when it comes to marketing, real estate investors may be using 2, 3, 4, 5 different marketing channels. They know they’re getting deals and making money but they don’t know which marketing channels are working. Should some of them be turned off? Should some of them be turned up because they’re very profitable and the other one is not profitable? You don’t know because they all blend together and not paying attention. Watching my numbers, knowing my numbers and when it comes to KPIs, we’ll get deeper into this during the EXTRA but as a high–level thing. I think that there are two separate categories when it comes to metrics or KPIs.  

There are performance, result–based, result–oriented numbers, and activity numbers. We’ll break that down a little bit more. Sometimes, tracking the activity can be as or more important than tracking the actual results. We’ll get into that deeper. I did that. The third thing that I learned and dialed in was the hiring part of it. It’s virtually impossible to run a company at scale without people if you value your time. You can do it on your own but even Superman can’t be in two places at once. He can get to a place and be very fast or Wonder Woman but you can’t get there at the same time. I learned that hiring people effectively and hiring the right people cannot only make me more money but also free up my time. Some people think if I hire people, I don’t make as much. No. You hire the right people, you make a lot more and you get your time back.  

I learned that. In the beginning, I hired so poorly. There are a lot of nuances to it that we can get in deeper to but some of it was I was hiring people based on their resume alone. I wasn’t giving any thought to culture fit. Do they have the same values as me and my company? We had to go through some pretty crazy amount of people in that first couple of years because I was hiring with only one thought in mind. I talked about this on my podcast. When you get into business and all you care about is money, it’s going to be tough. I would rather hire great people and train them to be good at their job than hire someone who appears to be good at the job on paper and maybe not the greatest personality fit or value fit with my company. That was huge for me. 

Our conversations are so robust and so exciting to me. They just slip away from us.  

I’m surprised it’s been this long. I love talking about this stuff. 

What I want to do is let the ladies know that in EXTRA, we’re going to talk about business partnerships. I have a business partner. I know how valuable that can be. It’s also something that we haven’t talked about in the show. He also brought up some good points on what those actions are. We talked about results versus activity results. We’re going to talk a little bit about that. We’re also going to talk about hiring and scaling a team. This is a place where I, Moneeka, fall down almost 100% of the time. I have some good people that are working for me now. It’s been years of me and I would rather my ladies don’t have to go through what I’ve been through. I’m no expert. I think it would be fun. If we got the time in EXTRA, we’ll try to cover that too. Those are my objectives for EXTRA. Ladies, stay tuned. That is going to be so juicy. I’m excited about it. Before we end this show, Mike, could you tell my ladies where they can reach you? 

Thank you for that. If you want to find out more about me and what I’m up to, you can always go to MikeSimmons.com. That always has the latest and greatest stuff that I’m working on or what I’m involved in. Also, we referenced a few times. You guys should definitely go and check out Moneeka on my show, Just Start Real Estate. We have fun conversations like this. We don’t always just ask the hardcore real estate stuff. We talk a little bit about life and things. Go, check that out. I’d love to have you. 

Are you ready for our three rapid–fire questions? 

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I’m so ready. Let’s do this. 

Mike, give us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate. 

I would say find someone local, hopefully, that has blazed some of that path for you and just ask for advice. There’s nothing better than having someone who’s been there and show you how to get there. That’s what people don’t do enough to ask for help when they need it. 

What is one strategy for being successful in real estate investing? 

This is not necessarily a positive look at it but I always think back to corporate and the thought of that scares me enough to make me get out of bed in the morning. It’s a little bit of motivating me a little more than pleasure sometimes but I never want to go back to that. That’s what I do. 

What is one daily practice you do that you would say contributes to your personal success? 

One of my superpowers is I’m very good at compartmentalizing. What I do is when I’m working, I’m working. I’m full–in and full–on. Everyone knows, don’t knock on the door. Don’t come in. Don’t bother me. When I’m not working, I am 1,000% into my family, kids and wife. I’m very good about not checking messages. I’m focused on her. I’m focused on them. I put up high and very thick walls between the things that are important between work and family. When I’m doing one, I’m not doing both. 

That’s a hard thing to do. 

When you’re talking to your spouse, boyfriend, girlfriend or someone, one of the biggest turnoff moves in the world is to look at your phone and read a message while they’re talking. It’s so rude. You’re holding your phone. You’re running a business. It could be important. It’s hard to not look but, what does it tell the person that you’re across from whether it’s your kids, your husband? What does it tell them when they’re talking, you look down, and your reading? It’s the rudest thing in the world. I try to be careful about that. 

Mike, this has been such a good conversation. I can’t wait for the next part. Thank you for what you’ve offered so far. 

Thank you for having me. It’s been fun. I cannot believe how fast times go. 

I know it’s fun. Ladies, stay tuned for EXTRA. We’re going to talk about the actions that you can take to build your business, hiring a team and building a partnership. All of those things that EXTRA. We got a lot of stuff we’re going to cover so stay tuned. If you’re already subscribed to EXTRA, you can stay tuned and if you’re not but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get seven days for free. You can check it out. If it’s not for you, you don’t need to stay. For those of you that are leaving us now, thank you so much for joining Mike and I 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

• Mike Simmons
  
• Return On Investments
  
• Just Start Real Estate
  
• 7 Figure Flipping
  
• Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in Profits in 12 Months
  
• Moneeka Sawyer – past episode of Just Start Real Estate Podcast
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com 

 

About Mike Simmons

As the owner of a successful real estate investing company, lending company, and also a partner in one of the country’s largest real estate mentorship/mastermind companies, I specialize in helping entrepreneurs create systems, processes, and automations that allow them to work on their business and not be a slave to it.

I am also the producer and host of my own online show, Just Start Real Estate, and have conducted over 350 interviews with entrepreneurs who run 6, 7, and 8 figure businesses. Additionally, I have a new book that is now available on Amazon: Level Jumping: How I Grew My Business to Over $1 Million in 12 Months.

 

 

 

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Real Estate Investing As A Way Of Taking Control Of Your Wealth With Victoria Lowell – Real Estate Women

 

When a couple is looking for a house, it is not the man who has the final word. It’s the woman. Women know what to look for in houses, which would mean that they have the potential to invest in real estate. Maybe they just need to be introduced to it or to learn about it. After all, women are naturally good at handling money. Join your host, Moneeka Sawyer, and her guest, Victoria Lowell. Victoria is a financial coach and the founder of Empowered Worth, an educational platform for women to control their own financial future. In this conversation, they talk about empowering women in real estate, taking us through retirement planning, maxing out the ESPP, real estate debt, cheap money, and more. It is time to remind women of the power they hold when taking control of their wealth. Follow along as Victoria shows you through real estate investing. 

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Real Estate Investing As A Way Of Taking Control Of Your Wealth With Victoria Lowell – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing for Women 

I am excited to welcome to the show Vicky Lowell. Vicky is a financial advocate and coach, international best–selling author and the Founder of Empowered Worth, a financial education platform that empowers women to become active participants in their financial future and wellbeing. She is also the author of the international bestseller Empower Your Worth: A Woman’s Guide to Increase Self Worth and Net Worth. Her expertise in this field has led to her hosting a college planning seminar at the University of Miami in 2021 with several speaking opportunities planned both locally and nationally. Welcome to the show, Vicky. How are you? 

I’m excited to be here to talk about women, finances and real estate investing because that is part of it. We have to diversify. That is a great way to do it. I am super excited to be here. 

Women are naturally, by default, better predisposed to be successful in real estate. Share on X

As soon as you applied to be on the show, I was, “Yes. This is the woman I got to talk to.” I’m glad you are here. Vicky, could you give us a high–level version of your story? Tell us how you got to where you are. 

I’m going to do like Sophia used to say, just the facts. I was the quintessential stay-at-home mom, living in Greenwich, Connecticut, has been in finance, two kids, nice car, great house. 2008 came, the market crashed. I found myself turning to my husband, my college sweetheart, we are still married, saying, “What is a mortgage?” He’s like, “Our mortgage payment?” I have no idea what the mortgage payment is. I have no idea what the car payment is. I have no idea what it would cost to run this household if you were to lose your job or drop dead tomorrow. I got to college but my college degree has been hung up on the wall. I have forgotten about it. It was my a–ha moment. I said, “I’m going to figure this out. I’m going to get back into the workforce. I don’t like being a stay-at-home mom that much.” I was doing what was expected of me as a Cuban. I changed the narrative. That is what I did. 

I went back to school for a little while. My husband came with an opportunity to work for him. He is a financial advisor. I started off as the marketing girl because that was my background. I ended up loving the women I was working with. I became a financial advisor. In 2019, I decided to start Empowered Worth. I decided that I was tired of women being in need. That was the empowerment for women. They weren’t connecting with their finances and I needed to be part of the solution. I couldn’t do that as a financial advisor. I didn’t want to have my desire to help tied to needing to get those assets under management and have people feel icky about it. It felt like a conflict of interest to me. I started an educational platform. It’s on–demand courses and coaching that women can get so that they can feel empowered and they can empower their worth. That’s why I wrote my book. 2018 was an epiphany. I set my first child off to college and I gave birth to Empowered Worth. 

It’s interesting that you came from a financial planning background. We are talking about all the standard financial planning products. You moved out of that. We are talking about real estate as a part of diversification. Talk to me about your relationship with real estate. 

I have a mother who frankly helped establish my family’s net worth by doing real estate investing. She didn’t realize that is what she was doing. She would drive around. She would get the pickup line. She would be 30 minutes early. She would drive around the neighborhood, look at houses and would buy them. She would fix them and flip them. She made herself a nice portfolio of real estate. That is something that I saw growing up. As I became a financial advisor, a financial planner and did all those educational parts, I realized diversification is key. When we talk about real estate diversification, a lot of times people think, “I’ll invest in a REIT or I will do something like that. That is on the market.” Those are great ways of doing it but for women, we are tactile. We would like to see what we are investing in. That is why real estate investing is crucial. I love to do it. I know what is selling in my area. I know what works. I know what I can get out of it. Why not have that be part of your investment strategy? It does make sense. The land is right there. You own it. No one can take that away from you. That is something that resonates with the female investor. 

How do you invest? What is your strategy? 

My strategy is diversification. I like to buy and hold things for a long time. When it comes to real estate, I have purchased something a little bit further up from where I am in Miami. It’s a great price, markets shooting up here. I know it’s going to rent well. I’m very intrigued with the Airbnb, VRBO market. I have had the opportunity to speak to some people on the board of VRBO. They are seeing huge growth. This is a great little niche to get into. That is what I did. I said, “Let me get into that.” I have never done that. I shy away usually from property management. I saw my mom have four stories. This is the time that it makes sense. People are going to look at traveling in a very different way post–COVID. 

A lot of people are doing VRBO and Airbnb has been a rough year. People are, “All that income is gone.” That is interesting that you are looking at that. There is probably an entry–level opportunity again. Is that what you are thinking? 

Yes. I have been able to take advantage of some of the people who were in it, who couldn’t ride the wave of the travel stoppage in the United States. In certain areas, I have seen people talking about it in ski communities. I have seen people talking about it in Orlando where you have Disney World. Not everybody wants to stay at a hotel especially if hotels aren’t giving you those extra little amenities. You can stay in a home. You know who has been in there. It’s usually sanitized well. You feel safer and you get a little bit more for your dollar. That is where I’m seeing. It’s a great way to start, buying an area for me that I know is going to go up. Being able to VRBO or Airbnb allows me to defray that cost and be able to hold it so I can be there as it grows. 

How would it look to scale that? I have done Airbnb, too. I had one room in my house. I was in more of a corporate environment. We were walking distance to Google, walking distance to Box, driving distance to Facebook. We were right there. People would come for more corporate stuff. I have never had to scale that. Could you talk to me a little bit about what that might look like? I know that you are starting but do you have a plan? 

It depends on location with any real estate. I happen to have a friend who went from being a teacher to being a full–time Airbnb, VRBO person. She now runs a property management company. She will literally grab other people’s and manage it while they put it on Airbnb. It’s very scalable. It all depends on where you are doing it and if the demand is there. For those houses, it makes sense to get 2 or 3 houses to start off with especially now, interest rates are at an all–time low. Get an arm that will allow you to have a low–interest rate. You are doing that. The biggest issue I have with scaling it is who is going to manage the property for you. 

That’s where before you do anything. That is what I did. I researched property management companies because I was not going to manage this. I don’t have enough time. I have got a husband, children and a business. I found a great property management company. That is key and making sure to talk to people who are doing it, talk to other Airbnbers or VRBOs, whatever it may be. Talk to them and see who they are using and get that referral. That word-of-mouth referral is crucial. 

 

We are on a complete tangent from what we expect that we were going to talk about but this is fascinating to me. The other thing is these management companies. What do they normally charge to manage a VRBO or an Airbnb? 

I have seen everything from 8% to 10% of what you are charging daily. It all depends on the level of what services you are going to provide for your Airbnb or VRBO guest. If you are doing a very full Millennial. They’re going to have a basket. They are going to have pretzels and stuff. You’re going to be doing that. You could be filling the refrigerator for them. All of that will add on. That is going to cost you if you are providing that type of service. You should probably get that back with what you are charging. That all depends. I have also learned everything from what a good property management company because they are going to be the ones that are going to list it on Airbnb for you. They want to see in your rental. They are going to want to see, are there stainless steel appliances? What does that kitchen look like? What does the furniture look like? Are you a standard? Are you a premiere? Are you platinum? All that type of stuff goes into it but it’s a lot of fun. I don’t have fun picking stocks the way I have had doing this. 

Thank you so much for going on that tangent with me. That was fun. Your whole thing is about empowering women financially. Talk to me a little bit about how that works and what that means to you. 

What it means to me is changing that horrible narrative that women have had for years, that we have to get married and have our husbands manage our finances or that we can’t grasp high–level finances. Women are great at the day to day. Women are great at budgeting, statistically. Every bank on Wall Street has a report on this. You can Google it. Merrill, UBS, anyone you want to look at. Google women, they have done a report. Look at those statistics. They are the same. It’s shocking. 80% of those women are great at budgeting. They can tell you what the kids spend on orthodontia. They can tell you what’s being spent on groceries. They can tell you all that stuff but ask them a high–level personal finance question. Ask them, “What is your retirement plan? Where are your IRAs? What is your 401(k)? What are they invested in?” They can’t answer that. That is the narrative that I want to work to change. When you ask women, “Why aren’t you engaging?” “I don’t feel confident.” 

That’s where Empowered Worth was born, to give women confidence. I want you to know that we are there for you. We are your coaches. We are the women who have your back in the financial world. You can feel comfortable coming to the financial table, talking to a financial advisor or getting your feet wet in what whatever type of financial investing, be it real estate, markets, equities, bonds, whatever it is. I want to give women that confidence because that’s where it all starts from. That’s self–worth and confidence leads to an increase in your network. It all ties in. 

You are of the opinion that women gravitate more to real estate than to the markets. Could you talk to me a little bit about that? 

Time and time again, when I was a financial advisor, I would call in and I’d say, “Why aren’t you coming to the meetings? Why aren’t you doing this?” She’s like, “I am involved. I have been doing some stuff.” What are you doing? “I have been buying houses and flipping them.” A lot of women were into the whole flipping market thing that we saw in 2008. They may have shied away a little bit but they are usually the ones because they know what other women are looking for. Consumer spending decision, the women decide what house to buy. Rarely does a couple come in and the man says, “It’s this house.” She is going to say that. 

As a woman, when you are the one prepping, staging that house, doing the remodeling of the house, you are literally your market. It’s very easy. You also know the neighborhoods because those are your neighborhoods or it was your past neighborhood. You are buying something where you grew up, where your parents sell it. You understand that in a much more tactile way than the obscure investors buying something. That is where that power is and why they gravitate to it because they are selling to themselves. 

I have been saying on this show all the time that we are naturally by default better predisposed to be successful in real estate. I have also heard this statistic that the multi–million, multi–trillion–dollar real estate industry, still in investors, there is only about 40% of the investors that are women. What that tells me is, we are more likely to gravitate to real estate. We are still only 40% of the market. We are a tiny little percent of what the people that invest in the markets. Would you say that is true? 

I would think so. It goes back to confidence. What is holding them back? It might be access to funds. It’s whether or not you feel comfortable pitching to your husband. Let’s say you are the stay-at-home mom like I was. I don’t know if I would have felt comfortable back in 2008 telling my husband, “Can I have $60,000 for a down payment? I saw a great property and I’m going to flip it.” I don’t think I would have done that. A lot of women may not even know a lot about lending structures and how to get those sources of income. They are a little bit hesitant. 

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Once you get past that and you buy your first home, it’s a learning curve. Once you get there, you will do it and do it again. It’s like a drug. The women I know who are doing this are literally addicted. They are buying by the owner, which is incredible. A lot of them are buying by the owner or they are getting their realty licenses because they want to take that middleman out and keep that commission. It’s amazing. You can do that. That is the great thing about real estate. You can be a stay-at-home mom, have a job and it can be your side hustle or it becomes your main hustle. You can do that. 

Talk to me about retirement planning for women. 

Retirement planning for women is something that is an uncomfortable conversation and we need to have it. Women are incredibly underfunded for retirement, for a multitude of reasons. First and foremost, being the pay gap that we suffer in this country. Women are making less. We step out of the workforce. That is the very well–known mommy penalty. We don’t necessarily accrue the funds that we need to have by the time that we reach retirement. It’s scary, unless you have a partner who’s thinking, “What happens when my counterpart retires? Do I have enough money saved in my 401(k) or IRA to cover both of us?” You may be incredibly underfunded. In addition to that, Social Security is not going to get you there. Everybody understands that now. We need to embrace that. It’s not going to be enough even to add on to that 401(k) and IRA. We need to have that conversation. 

Last, the divorce rate. For those over the age of 50 are double what they are for everyone else. What happens when you get divorced at 50? You lose 50% of those retirement assets. Walk out the door because it’s the divorce. You’re going to get 50%. You don’t have the years of working to replenish that type of retirement savings. I’m always telling women, you are probably going to come into the workforce. That is the nature of the game. We have children. We caretake for spouses, children, our parents. You may not have that work trajectory in the workforce, increase and maximize your retirement savings when you are working. Give the max. If your company matches, give as much as you can. It is better to spend the money from your paycheck on retirement accounts than to go out and buy that purse that you are not going to have in ten years. You can’t eat the purse when you are in your 50s. Let’s be honest here. 

Talk to me about filling that gap on the mommy penalty. What do you do to make sure you are maxing out the matching of the 401(k)? I like to talk about making sure you are maxing out your ESPP, which is the Employee Stock Purchase Plan. Those are some of the things that we do. What are the things that you talk about? 

Those are great. Those are definitely ones that people need to think about. If you are in a situation where you are a stay-at-home mom, sit down with your spouse. If it’s feasible for you and your budget, talk about a spousal IRA. As an individual, if your husband is doing a 401(k), your partner is doing a 401(k), I get that there are benefits. There is matching. There is corporate stuff but you can still get a spousal IRA. We definitely have that conversation. It’s something you should think about. I’m all about the side hustle. Even though you are not working doesn’t mean you can’t be working. Think about it, there are 1,000 things. 

With COVID, a lot of women have turned to their side hustles to add money. I know a lot of friends who are making jewelry and doing well. Does it surprisingly sell the same as the day–to–day work that they had before? No, but it’s putting food on the table. Think about that side hustle and stash that money away for your retirement. Do not take a vacation with it. Do not spend that money on a gift for your husband. That money is there to provide for you. In that side hustle, I include real estate investing. Save a little bit. My mom got her first amount of money that she used to buy her property by all the money she skipped off the groceries. She is probably going to kill me that I said it. I had a dear friend once who told me my husband never looked at the grocery bill. I’m knocking out $50 a week off the grocery bill. She bought a great property with it. That is a great way of doing it. Think about ways that you can skip and get some stuff there. Put it in a retirement account. 

This is how things went for me. My husband is a software programmer. He has his normal job. We have made a decision that he would pay for this day and I would pay for the next day. I was planning for the future. He was paying for our lifestyle. We still have the 401(k)s. Everybody knows that the 401(k), those programs are still not going to retire you. We were very aware and we embraced early on that Social Security was probably not ever going to be around by the time we retired. I wanted to do the whole real estate thing. I grew up in that. I trusted it but my husband, not so much. The way that we did that whole conversation was we owned a piece of property. He knew that you should buy a piece of property. We worked those numbers. Why pay rent? Why make somebody else rich? We did that and then as an appreciated, I negotiated with him that any money that we get in real estate, I want to keep it in real estate and have it continue to work in real estate. 

As equity grew, I took out an equity line. He is very conservative. He was like, “Real estate money needs to make money in real estate.” We took out up to 80%. I take that equity and I invested in more real estate. That is how we built our portfolio. What’s interesting about that is it required little for me. You have to live in our house, which we were doing. We had to let it appreciate. I had to pay attention enough to know when I could pull money out and buy something else. It was a slow process. It was my side hustle. I will say that is what is going to retire us in the end. It happened in fifteen years for us that we live in an appreciation market in California. Everybody doesn’t have that same experience. Sometimes you have to be a little bit more aggressive in there. For us, it was the side hustle that required no hustle. There was nothing. I did this natural thing. The whole argument about real estate money, staying in real estate, won him over and has provided the retirement venue for us. 

That’s true. I go back to this. Women need education into what the lending options are. Let me get the equity line. Let me do that. You can write off your taxes. There is so much stuff that you can do. There are sources of money out there. You need to figure out how to structure that debt. People hear debt and they start sweating bullets. I’m, “No. There is bad debt. That is your credit card on Chanel bag you can’t eat. There is good debt and that is real estate debt.” I’m not worried about real estate debt because you own the land. You have this. If it makes sense, if you are doing it right, structure correctly, you are going to see a growth in your net worth. 

 

The other thing about real estate debt versus consumer debt, which is credit card debt, cars. Real estate debt is leverage. If you think about it, you put 20% down and get 100% access to any money that the property makes. If you put 20% down and the house goes up, it appreciates by $20,000, you get a $100,000 home. You put $20,000 down. The house appreciates by $20,000, you made 100% on your money. Who took most of the risk? It was the bank. You got very little risk for huge potential. The bank is asking for a little interest rate. When it was at 17%, relatively speaking, that was a small interest rate in comparison to consumer debt. It’s cheaper money. You get to write it off. There is a bunch of benefits that the government gives you. People are like, “I don’t want to be in debt.” 

If you have to pay cash for a house, you don’t want to be in debt, you are using cash. You are not utilizing leverage. If you make $20,000 on that house, you’ve made 20%, not 100%. You’re not using all of the benefits of what real estate can do for you. This is what you are talking about with the higher–level conversation. Most of us understand debt, no debt, cash and loan. What we don’t understand is that there are ways to leverage so that debt is good debt. I will be the very first to say we do not pay for anything on credit cards. It is simply a budgeting tool for us. We paid every single month. I never pay for a car with a loan. I don’t lease cars. There is this whole argument of the opportunity cost of where I could invest it. I don’t do consumer debt. I just don’t do it. That is one of our rules. I am completely leveraged on all of my real estate because it’s cheap money. It makes me a ton of money. Buying a car does not make me money. 

I love that you said this. I say this all the time. When I was a financial advisor, people come in and be like, “I’m going to pay that house off.” I get that. There is a lot of books that say you pay the house off. We are going to take the money that is growing in this account that we have that you are invested in. We are going to pay off this debt that costs you this much. Why? You are losing all that growth by getting rid of this debt that does not cost you what your returns are costing you. You need to understand the numbers behind it and sit down. That is what I live to do, to explain it to people because they get scared. They hear all this noise and it becomes like that Peanuts show then they tune it out. There are a lot of ways to invest especially in real estate like you are saying and have it be a moneymaker for you. 

I would love to have that conversation about cheap money on this show. We haven’t done this. My husband and I have talked about it all the time. He keeps saying you need to have this conversation on your show. Let’s talk about this. What do we mean by cheap money? What do you explain it? I will jump in because I know you know how to do this. 

What we are saying by cheap money is I look at the opportunity cost. What is borrowing that money going to cost me? The example I was giving. Let’s say you have a great stock portfolio and it is growing at 10%. I’m going to use easy numbers here. You have the opportunity to put 20% down and get a mortgage on a property of X, map 2%. It makes sense for you to do that because the cost of borrowing that money is less than you paying the house off full and holding out the full amount of the house. You are taking that growth of money that you would have had. That’s what people should understand. You are losing the growth opportunity by putting it and paying it off. 

What you are doing is you are paying 8% to pay off 2%. What you want to do is it the other way around. You want to pay 2%, get the 8%. This is the thing that I want you to know. Let’s get clear on this. Let’s say you pay taxes on that. It’s not long–term or short–term. Let’s take it to you earning 6% or 5%. Your mortgage is at 2% or 3%? Do you want to take the 5% that you’re earning and pay that money so that you can pay off 2%? That’s like saying, “I’m going to take $100 that my dad gave me to pay off $20.” Why would I do that? If my dad gives me $100, I’m going to pay something off. It’s going to be a lateral. Once I spend that $100 on that, $50 is gone. Why did you do that? You wouldn’t do that. 

If you truly understood it, you would never do that. The same is true for people who say, “I’m going to borrow the money and I’m going to take the money out of my 401(k).” Why? You are going to pay penalty and taxes. Do you have to do all this to pay for this whole? No, you have enough of the down payment. Do that. Get the mortgage. Leave the retirement account alone and pay the mortgage off. There are some great mortgage options out there. I haven’t looked at them when new numbers come out. This is something that I have heard a lot are talking about, the fifteen–year arm. A lot of people aren’t holding their homes for fifteen years. Look at your age, if you are in your twenties, you are not going to be living in the house for fifteen years. Most people don’t live in the house. Why would you get back an interest–only fifteen–year arm and let your money work for you? I wish more people would have that conversation. I wish the mortgage lenders would explain it better. I wish that there was more financial planning and it was taught how money works for you. 

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That is one of the questions that I get most frequently especially here in California. People are investing. “I got a $1.5 million rental property. I’ve got $1 million loan. How am I ever going to pay that off?” You are never going to pay that off. It’s not cheap money. That is not something you should be paying off. What you want to figure out is how are you going to cashflow that? Paying off, when you are talking about mortgages unless when you are doing end-of-life planning, you want to have no mortgage. You want to be able to live at your least expensive. It makes sense. It shouldn’t even be part of the conversation because it’s a write–off. It’s something that is helping you to grow appreciation. It’s getting you cashflow. It’s cheap money. 

I do agree with that. Once you are hitting that retirement age, once you are 65, 66, 67, that is the time to talk about paying off your primary home. We don’t have those secondary. Make sure you have everything in the LLC and title the way it should be for asset protection. If you are doing all of that then definitely don’t pay off those mortgages on those rental properties. There is no reason to. 

Thank you for having that conversation with me. I can’t have that on my own. It needs to be a little bit of back and forth. 

It’s my pleasure. I hope everybody understood what Moneeka said. You are going to be ecstatic once you do because you are going to make money. 

We are going to get into our three rapid–fire questions. Before we do that, I want to let you know ladies, we are going to be talking in EXTRA about how COVID affected women financially and what are the repercussions and consequences are going to be for several years after that. We are going to have a conversation about that. It is a gift and another tough conversation that a lot of us are looking at. I love that Vicky is willing to have the tough conversations to help us grow, empower us, build what we need to build. We are going to have that conversation in EXTRA. Before we move on towards the end of the show, Vicky, could you tell everybody how they can get in touch with you? 

The best way to get in touch with me is to visit my website, www.EmpoweredWorth.com. Everything is there for you. You have a great blog that comes up once a month. Join our free membership. It gives you great basic personal financial education on demand. You can do it at your leisure and some great other little things that we add in there monthly for you. 

You have got a free membership. You said that you were going to offer my ladies a fifteen–minute session with you. 

Yes. I have it on there. I call it the Fifteen Free Intro Coaching Session. If you have any questions, you get to pick my brain for fifteen minutes. You would be surprised how much we can get done in that time. I would love to hear from you, ladies. If you have any questions, if you want me to explain the money to you, I will do that. I will run you through it. I will put it on the whiteboard. We can do the math. 

That is at EmpoweredWorth.com. Are you ready for our three rapid–fire questions? 

Yes, I am. Let’s go. 

Vicky, tell us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate. 

Know your area, location. I personally believe in invest in the areas that you know either because you grew up there or you live there. 

What is one strategy for being successful in real estate investing? 

I say this to everybody. I say this when it comes to finances. Don’t be emotional. Be financial. Don’t take it personally. I know people put their blood, sweat and tears into these houses and making them perfect. If someone walks in or a realtor walks in and goes, “You made a mistake.” Don’t listen to them. Trust your gut. 

Vicky, what would you say is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success? 

I love yoga. I have taken up yoga in 2020. It was something that got me through a lot. It has helped me. The best thing about yoga is the silence, meditation and being able to center me because there is a lot of noise in our lives. We need to connect with ourselves in a very spiritual, meaningful way. It’s not financial. It’s yoga. 

A lot of people say that. They say yoga, meditation. That is fairly common. It’s good to realize that, ladies. In order to be successful in real estate or in our businesses or as moms or as anything, we need to take care of ourselves. We need some downtime where we are all about us. That is important. This has been amazing, Vicky. Thank you so much for what you have offered in this portion of the show. 

Thank you for having me and for giving me this opportunity to connect with your readers to talk about how important real estate investing is. It’s where a lot of us get our start when we start investing before we even jump into the stock market. It is an important part of every portfolio. 

Thank you for that. Ladies, we got more. We are going to be talking about the financial consequences to women from COVID and what are those long–term repercussions going to be? We are going to be talking about that in EXTRA. If you are subscribed, stay tuned. If you are not but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You get seven days for free. Check it out and stick with it if you love it. The other thing is you can connect with me and find out everything that I’m doing at BlissfulInvestor.com. There is a free report there. There is the show. That is my website. Ladies, if you love this show, help out all the ladies in your life and tell them about it. 

This is the most meaningful thing that I do and the reason I do it is because of the emails and reviews that I get. I’m talking out into the ether. I don’t know who is reading. When I get responses back about, “Moneeka, you started my investing life. I’m so excited. Moneeka, you changed my life because I finally bought a property after thinking about it for a few years.” When I get these letters back, it fills me up. We are making a change in the way women see the world. If you want to support other women that you love, tell them all about the show and have them read the blog post. Hopefully, you will be a letter to me soon too. Go to BlissfulInvestor.com and tell all of your lady friends about the show. If you are leaving now, thank you so much for joining us. You know how much I appreciate you. Always remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there. Take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I will see you soon. 

 

Important Links

• Empower Your Worth: A Woman’s Guide to Increase Self Worth and Net Worth
  
• www.EmpoweredWorth.com
  
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com
  
• BlissfulInvestor.com 

 

About Victoria Lowell

Born and raised in Florida, Vicky has always been passionate about entrepreneurial pursuits. In 2012, she started her career in finance at UBS Financial Services. By 2017, she transitioned into a financial advisor.

Vicky has always been an active member of the community and worked for various entities nationwide. From open and honest conversations within these communities, she discovered the need for women to learn financial planning.

This passion then drove her to enhance her career and advance her education in the immediate and long-term financial implications of divorce as a Certified Divorce Financial Analyst^®(CDFA^®). She recently was also certified as a College Financial Counselor.^®

In late 2018, she left UBS Financial Services to follow her passion and founded EMPOWERED WORTH. Recently, she became an international bestselling author. Her book Empower your Worth, both English and Spanish versions, reaching the Bestseller’s List in various categories and countries. In 2020, Empower Your Worth became a finalist in the Canadian Book Club Awards.

 

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How To Up Your Social Media Game To Grow Your Business With Lyndsay Phillips – Real Estate Women

 

There’s no denying that social media is here to stay, and billions of people are now active on socials, which is why businesses are stepping up their social media game. The growing number of people using Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and other social platforms is why business owners invest in content marketing. Moneeka Sawyer is joined by Lyndsay Phillips, a content marketing expert and the Founder and Owner of Smooth Sailing Business Growth, to share how a business can attract and convert customers faster through social media. Lyndsay shares how she got into content marketing and talks about the importance of having an avatar, the difference between using a post, a story, or a live, and how to utilize those. She also explains how socials can be used to build better relationships.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Up Your Social Media Game To Grow Your Business With Lyndsay Phillips – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am excited to welcome to the show Lyndsay Phillips, Founder and Owner of Smooth Sailing Business Growth and Real Estate Investors Marketing. Lyndsay is the go-to content marketing expert who helps clients attract and convert customers faster. Lyndsay is featured on MSN, NBC, Fox, published in Home Service MAX Magazine, and has guested on a ton of podcasts including JLD’s Entrepreneurs On Fire, which I have been on also and Joe Fairless’s Best Ever Show.

She’s a serial podcaster with shows like Smooth Business Growth Podcast and now co-hosts the REI Marketing show. Speaking at events such as Dream Business Academy, Podfest and Service Business Edge. She has shared the stage with Mike Michalowicz and Jay Abraham. She’s working with successful real estate investors. She’s increased her product audience, extended their reach and built their authority status through content marketing.

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Lyndsay, how are you?

I’m glad to see your beautiful face again.

Welcome back to the show. Could you tell us a little bit about your story and how you’ve got involved in this? I know that you help real estate investors, too. There aren’t a lot of content marketers that help investors. Tell me a little bit about how you’ve got into that.

Social Media Game: It’s great to create blogs, podcasts, videos, and information on your website, but if you’re not talking about the right topics, the right places, or their language, you’re not going to attract anybody.

I started as a VA and then niche down into content marketing. I found that it was working well for my clients. I love the creativity and the psychology behind attracting, building relationships and converting. I was working with a friend of mine, Aaron, who’s a real estate investor copywriter. He introduced me to some investors that were struggling with their marketing. I started doing work for them and helping them out. It grew. I have been on podcasts. I’m establishing a name for myself and realize that there aren’t a lot of services out there, whether it’s online marketing, digital content or whatever that are geared towards real estate investors because it is a unique industry and there are much to understand. I love it.

Talk to us about why it’s important to have an avatar? I want to give a little perspective on ladies on why we are asking this question. If you are not in marketing, one of the things that we do in marketing is pick an avatar of our ideal client, listener, tenant or home seller. There are a lot of different avatars. An avatar simply means the person that would be perfect to do business with. For me, you ladies know that when I buy a house, the very first thing that I’m thinking about is my tenant avatar. That tenant avatar is my business partner. This is the person that I want to do business with.

I picked the tenant avatar, which is executives and then I started to look for houses that the avatar would like to live in. I find the house, and then I go and advertise to that avatar. First of all, the property attracts them but also my understanding of who they are attracts them and what their needs are. An executive, for instance, does not want a landlord that’s breathing down their throat. They do not want a landlord that defers all maintenance and telling them what to do. They are executives. They are used to being the boss, not be bossed around. I understand who they are. For them to do business with me is easy. I provide a house that they will love.

Avatar is a marketing term that we use and it sounds a little bit like markety. It sounds a little bit voodooey but it’s relevant in everything that we do. Ladies, if you are single and you are looking for a guy, you should have an avatar of that man or whatever it is. VA or whoever it is that you are trying to attract, whatever the customer looks like, you want to have an avatar. Talk to me a little bit more about your perspective on that.

Customers don’t want nonsense. They want to get to the point and get things done so they can move on with their busy lives. Click To Tweet

It’s great to create blogs, podcasts, videos, lead magnets and information on your website but if you are not talking about the right topics, the right places or their language, then you are not going to attract anybody. As you said, you are attracting executives. If you were attracting elderly people, they don’t probably watch videos, listen to podcasts or wouldn’t necessarily be on Instagram, let’s say. What appeals to them, their lifestyle, pain points and what they want in life is different. When you are thinking about what content, there are many options out there. It can be overwhelming. We are talking about Clubhouse and that’s like, “Another thing.”

There are many options and it can be like, “What do I do? Where do I do it? What am I going to talk about?” The first thing that you need to do is think about who you are attracting? Ask questions. Think about the three best deals that you have put together or your three best tenants. Think about it like, “Why did they come to you? What were their concerns? What kind of questions did they ask? Where did they find you? Where do they hang out? What do they even do in a day? What are they like as an executive?” They don’t want nonsense. They want to get to the point and get it done so they can move on with their busy lives. Where like seniors, they were a little slower, they take their time and there are more thought processes. The whole way of digesting information, accessing it and making that decision is different. It will affect everything that you do.

Also, how you do business with them. With executives, they were excited to get a text from me. With an older and elderly person, she wants me to come by, say hello, hang out with her for an hour and have tea because that’s how they have always done business. We’ve got all these great new tools but that doesn’t excite them. There are a lot of different kinds of people. I have some people that are all in the construction industry, which is great right now with COVID-19. The conversation is different with them. The way that I meet with them, they want me to have a relationship with their kids so that I understand the way the family works for them and those things. The way that each of us does business is a little different but we can be included in a grouping and the way that we show up in the world.

When you think about the marketing, you can’t look at it from your perspective like, “I want to rent out my property, I want to sell this multifamily home, I want a deal and I need a partner.” They are not going to give a crap about what you want. You should think about what they want like losing sleepovers or what kind of decisions they are making. That’s what you need to base all of your decisions on. If you are worried about like, “Should I be on Clubhouse? Should I be on Instagram?” Just think, “Are they?”

I remember one of my clients was like, “We’ve got to be on Snapchat. It’s the new greatest thing.” I’m like, “Your peeps don’t even know what Snapchat is.” Why waste your time, effort and money putting marketing in that avenue when you can’t even survey people and find out. They were on YouTube and watching videos all the time. He spent more time and effort doing videos, which by the way, is good because it helps you connect with someone faster because they are looking in your eyes and they can see your personality if you are like them. You get to read for people.

You can build relationships faster by podcasting and by doing videos because you are going to cut to the chase and front of the line much faster. You need to think about where they are hanging out. Do they listen to podcasts? Do they watch videos? Do they love to read? Like my one client, his peeps don’t read. We don’t do a lot of blogs because they don’t care, they don’t have time and they couldn’t care less. For me, like entrepreneurs, I love blogs, picking out tips and stuff like that. I do a lot of blogs. You need to think about, “Where are you going to hang out? What kind of content are you going to put out?” That’s going to help you drive what topics you are going to talk about and what kind of language you are going to use. All those things will help you drive and create that content marketing that is going to attract much faster.

I had a place that came empty during COVID-19. This is an interesting thing, ladies, to think about is when you are reading this, you are out there looking at things on YouTube or you are in these communities, which I encourage you to network, find out what that avatar is going to look like. I found out that a lot of my peers are finding their new tenants through the Facebook Marketplace. I will be the first to admit that I am not doing the whole Facebook thing since the pandemic started.

Social Media Game: You can build relationships faster by podcasting and doing videos because you’re going to cut to the chase and in front of the line much faster.

There has been a lot of negativity. Part of my defense for my immune system is to make sure that there’s little negativity comes in as possible because we do have to pay attention to what’s going on and it’s scary. In my spare time, I want to feed myself yummy stuff. It was not showing up on Facebook and the news. It was not showing up in those places and also in other places. The point is, even though I was not on Facebook, I heard this thing that everybody is getting their stuff on the Facebook Marketplace. I looked at the avatar of the Facebook Marketplace and I didn’t have an idea of who was there because I hadn’t been there. What was fascinating about this thing is I go to Realtor.com, Zillow and Craigslist. Those are the places that I normally advertise and of course, I did those things and then I threw an ad up on the Facebook Marketplace. The response on the Facebook Marketplace was 10 to 1 on the other ones.

I would get one on Zillow, one on Craigslist, zero on Realtor.com and then I would get twenty on Facebook. The quality of the ones on Facebook was not necessarily good but within three days, I have three applications from the Facebook Marketplace. It’s true that as the times are changing, people are also changing. Where I may not have thought that an executive and an executive’s wife are on the Facebook Marketplace, that’s not true. What I’m trying to say is that finding out who your avatar now is great and that person is going to evolve the same way that you are evolving. You have to be aware that an avatar is a person. It is a person, it is not a stick figure, people, and technology changes and all of that stuff too.

That’s a great point. Even being connected with people like you, me or Facebook groups, ask questions. Don’t be afraid to ask questions. You don’t have to know everything like, “Where’s everyone getting the most action on this?” Feel free to test. If you were like, “I don’t know, I’m on the fence.” You can test something for a while. If it works, great, you are going to run with it. If it doesn’t, good to know. It’s okay to test. It’s not like you are spending $1 million and you are jumping in. If it fails, that’s okay, too.

That’s a little bit about the avatar. Now, what do you post?

Everyone gets stumped like, “What do I write every day?” That’s why many people are not consistent with their society because they have no idea what to write. For me, I love recycling, reusing and leveraging a piece of content. If you have a podcast episode, a blog or a video because you can just transcribe the video, you are going to share that and share more than once. Also, you can splinter little bits and pieces out of it. I call these snackable bites. Let’s say, for instance, you have a blog. It’s like the five limiting beliefs of real estate investors or whatever it may be. There are five points right there so you can take one piece and make a social media post and pretty meme, quote or graphic. Just stands alone and doesn’t link anywhere that’s shareable. You can ask questions like, “What do you think about this? Do you prefer this or this? Are you this kind of person? Do you find that this holds you back?” People love to state their opinion and people want to share more about themselves. You want engagement. You want interaction. That’s one of the easiest. Ask a wacko question.

You have taken your blog, you have splintered it and take out little snackable bites. You can also do a video on that topic. People aren’t going to remember, “Didn’t she do a blog on that topic that she’s talking about?” This is like extra content and then you can even share other people’s content. You are a wealth of information, Moneeka, and other sources, BiggerPockets or whoever. Whatever articles that you find or tidbits of information, it is okay to share. To me, you are not lowering your authority by doing so. You are serving your audience, you are showing that you are learning more, reading what’s trending, what’s going on, you are showing that you care, you want them to be informed and it’s super easy to do. You don’t even have to think about it.

Many people don’t do this but the last point I want to share is to share what’s going on in your life. You did an ad in the marketplace that you weren’t sure and you were like, “Look at the results I’ve got.” You can share that, “I have my doubts. I gave it a try. Here’s what my results were.” Share what’s going on in your daily life. It’s okay if it doesn’t work. You can be vulnerable. That’s fine. People want to know what’s working for you, how you are doing your thing, how you are rocking it, what’s going on behind the scenes and they want to know your personality. They want to know about you. If that doesn’t fill up your week with social, I don’t know what will.

You can plan it. You can say, “I don’t like doing videos so maybe I will just do that once a week. I will write a blog once a week. I will break it up.” We have little bites episodes. You can do that in one minute or you can do it in Stories or whatever. You can plan that out like, “This day, I’m going to ask a question. This day, I’m going to do this right.” You don’t have to think through it every single day, every single week. You can let that go.

It gets old fast does. For us, we do it for our clients as well but even for me and whoever. It’s like a batch task. The first week of a given month, maybe you dedicate that to creating content, your podcast, your blog and your video. The following week, you can take little bits out, splinter and make some pretty graphics. The next week, you pre-schedule it, then you’ve got a week off, and then you do it all over again. As long as you are in a routine and you have a system. If you have a system, you can farm some of it off to a team member, VA or content marketer. It just does itself.

Sometimes, it’s geographic-specific and sometimes, for me, it’s national or international. My reach is quite large for my show but when I’m renting a home, it’s more specific. How do you decide what to post for each of those to extend your reach for that if we want to be geographic specific or we want to be broader and more widespread?

You are right, some investors work in a specific geographic location or other entrepreneurs too. They were more bricks and mortar or what have you. It’s important to be an integral part of your community like liking the Better Business Bureau or the downtown core Chamber of Commerce. I don’t know what you have in the States compared to Canada but those associations and charities, finding out what is even going on in the news in your area and the current events of like, “It’s a Peach Festival next weekend.” It shows that you are a part and a leader in the community, which is huge.

Following all of those, liking, commenting and sharing those posts, DM them and ask them what’s going on, the more you communicate and network within your community and you are sharing what’s going on, people will see that and it will be reciprocal. The other great tip is if you are mentioning someone and tagging them if you are talking about commercial buildings or what’s going on, you can tag them, and then same with hashtags. Hashtag your city or your region. A lot of times people will search houses in Detroit or whatever that may be. That helps target and get you in front of that audience as well.

Why would you use a story instead of a post? What’s the difference? I’m always posting and I don’t even know what stories are. That’s true on Instagram as well as on Facebook. How do you use them?

Everyone is getting off on that kick. Stories, when you open up it’s easier to see it in your mobile app than it is on desktop. You will see right at the top almost like a slider of these long posts, normally Instagram or square posts. They will only be up for a day. They are up and they go, however, you can save them to your Highlights on Instagram to store them and people can go in there, keep them and look at them. It’s where everyone goes automatically. It’s right at the top and it’s eye-catching. You are going to grab their attention first with the Stories than you are in the News Feed.

We all know Facebook, its algorithms, the News Feed and they pick and choose for you. I don’t know too much about the algorithms when it comes to Stories and that, but I do know from my own experience that I’m more apt to see something throughout the Stories. They are cute, some of them have moving images and they are like little clips. If you do a bunch of Stories in a day, they stockpile. It almost reads like a little movie because they show a whole bunch of them together. You can see someone’s day in action if they are on there a lot and doing a bunch of Stories but you are going to grab people’s attention quicker. It’s more work.

When it comes to social, if you think about how you can help people and create a conversation, you will naturally make that next step. Click To Tweet

I wonder, “With all of this stuff, how am I going to get my work done? How do I do all this without completely consuming my life?”

That’s where systems are so key. I use Canva. Say you are creating images for social, you can just resize it to Instagram Stories and then you can add layers on top, tweak it and stuff like that. They do have a lot of fancy templates and you can go full-on all out. The app itself like Instagram on your phone, it’s quicker to do it on the fly that way. As long as you have a system or you are in a routine like, “Every morning, I’m going to take one of my pictures, do my little thing, and then fire it off on Instagram.” You can also connect Instagram to Facebook so that whatever story you put on Instagram automatically goes to Facebook Stories. There are a little few automation tricks that will at least save you a bit of time.

There are Stories and then there are Lives. Talk to me a little bit about the difference between those and how to utilize those.

Lives are like a video but it’s not prerecorded. You pick up the phone, hit the little Go Live button and you are instantly talking or you are showing up on video. The great thing about lives, especially on Facebook, is it notifies anyone that you are following to say, “Lyndsay is Live.” You can grab their attention versus if you upload a video directly to Facebook, they are not going to get that notification. The beauty of a live is that you can communicate with people in live time. If they are commenting, they like heart and a little heart goes up and you are like, “Joanna, how’s it going?” You can respond, and then it will stay up after that. If people aren’t on Facebook right then in there, they are still going to consume it. It’s still evergreen. You can also use an app called Repurpose.io, any live that you do, it can automatically strip the audio for a podcast, format it for IGTV, and flip it over to YouTube so you can feed your YouTube channel. There are automation tools so that you can take a Live Facebook, use it and leverage it in different ways. That way, you can save a ton of time.

With live, it still pops up like, “Moneeka is Live right now,” but the Story stays up for a whole day. Is that true?

It’s 24 hours.

How do you use social to build better relationships? I know that we are going to talk a lot more deeply about this in EXTRA but give us a high level of what we should be considering around that.

To me, I’m like, “You want to showcase your expertise in social media through the content that you are sharing. You want to show that you are professional, that you are branded, that you’ve got that credibility and you want to talk about stuff that’s going to attract the right prospects.” It’s great to attract but then if nothing happens after that, it’s all a moot point. If you think of it as a way to connect with people, have conversations, show your personality and care, then you are good.

That’s why I like some of those posts that you do. They are like engagement questions. You are asking them. Think of it like how can I make it a two-way thing versus me pushing info on pushing promo out. When someone comments, comment back. You can even DM them and take the conversation off there and like, “How is it going?” You can ask them more questions. It even strengthens that relationship even further. “I’ve got a great resource that maybe was helpful, I know someone that knows how to do that. Let me connect you with that person.” Think about how you can help them and create a conversation. If those two things are always in the back of your mind when it comes to social, then you will naturally make that next step. Does that help?

It does help. I know this is a much larger topic than what you can say in one little paragraph. That’s why ladies, I asked Lyndsay to go into more depth about what that will look like and how to structure that. We are going to be talking about that on EXTRA. That’s going to be an EXTRA. Before we close this part of the show, Lyndsay, could you tell people how they can get in touch with you?

They can go to SmoothBusinessGrowth.com and if they go to SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/moneeka, they can get free content.

We’ve got a couple of cool gifts. We’ve got free content for two weeks if you go to SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/moneeka. The second gift is at SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/bliss. Could you tell us about that one?

It’s our done for your services. We have monthly where we have content that you can take, go and post it. We have more high-end services where we will brand it, customize it and schedule it for you so that you don’t have to worry about it at all.

When you go to that link, do you get one month for free or do you get a discount? How does that work?

The prices are right there but with the Moneeka, you do get two weeks of free content like blogs, emails, video scripts and images.

Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?

Go for it.

Tell us one super tip for getting started in real estate investing.

To me, even if you are scared, do it anyway. I built my business on that premise. It’s like I was petrified by doing podcasts, videos and speaking on stage, and I’m like, “I’m just going to do it anyway.” It may not be perfect at first but you take that next step by taking action, it automatically propels your business forward.

What would you say is one strategy to be successful as a real estate investor?

I would say being consistent. If you are a podcaster, keep doing your podcast every week. If you are blogging, do your blog every week, if you are doing live videos, be consistent with those. You have to be in front of people’s faces and be in contact with them constantly. People are like, “You are everywhere and you are doing all these things.” It naturally builds your authority and reaches you as well. You can’t take six months off. You have to be consistent.

You can take six months off, you just have to plan for it.

You have your team do all this stuff.

That’s right. As for me, I’m often recorded four months out so at least I can take two months off anytime that I wanted. As we were talking about, when you are setting up your systems, you can plan this stuff out.

Social Media Game: The beauty of a live is that you can communicate with people in live time and respond to them, and it will stay up after that.

Absolutely.

What would you say is one daily practice that you do that contributes to your personal success?

I would love to say it’s meditation or yoga but it’s not.

A lot of people say that on this show.

It’s not gratitude. I’m a no-nonsense kind of girl. It is my calendar and my project management tool. If I don’t go to that every morning, figure out what my priorities are and what my to-do list is, I would be lost and I would be chaotic, not efficient, not productive and I would never get anything done.

What is the software you use?

I use Teamwork but Basecamp is great and there’s Podio. There are so many. Some of them are a little bit over the top but as long as it keeps you organized, especially if you’ve got team members in there, and then recurring tasks that you don’t have to think about it, your tasks will pop up and say, “I’ve got to work on that this week.” No one wants to drop a ball.

Thank you so much for everything you have offered on this portion of the show. I’m excited about what we are talking about on EXTRA. Ladies, if you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. We are going to be doing a deep dive on building strong relationships using social media and content marketing. If you are not subscribed to EXTRA but would like to be, just go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com and you can sign up there.

The first seven days are for free so check it out. If you love it, you love it and if you don’t, you don’t. You don’t have to stay. It is totally up to you. For those of you that are joining or leaving us, thank you. If you are leaving us now, it has been great hanging out with you. Thank you for being here and you know how much I appreciate you. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams, so get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I will see you soon, bye.

Important Links

• Smooth Sailing Business Growth
• Entrepreneurs On Fire – Past Episode with Lyndsay Phillips
• Best Ever Show –  Past Episode with Lyndsay Phillips
• Smooth Business Growth Podcast
• REI Marketing
• Realtor.com
• Canva
• Repurpose.io
• SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/moneeka
• SmoothBusinessGrowth.com/bliss
• Teamwork
• Basecamp
• Podio
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

About Lyndsay Phillips

I’m Lyndsay Phillips, CEO and Captain of Smooth Sailing Business Growth, your content marketing strategic partner, is a serial entrepreneur and also proud owner of Smooth Business Podcasting & also Real Estate Investors Marketing.

I’ve been featured on MSN, NBC, Fox and published in Home Service Max Magazine and has guested on a TON of podcasts including John Lee Dumas’s Entrepreneurs On Fire and Joe Fairless’ Best Podcast Ever. I’ve been a podcast host for years on Smooth Business Growth Podcast and have spoken at events such as Dream Business Academy, Podfest, and Service Business Edge (sharing the stage with Mike Michalowicz and Jay Abraham).

Through Smooth Business Podcasting we are a full service agency that launches podcasts, produces, promotes and leverages to help businesses like you gain more leads, increase visibility, boost authority and grow.

But yes, we are also a full service Content Marketing Agency so having us as a strategic partner gives you a FULL team at your fingertips. We plan, publish, optimize and promote your content through the web, social media and email so that you can have more leads, more clients with less stress and more freedom. Through my amazing team, we partner with entrepreneurs, coaches, authors, and speakers, who are seeking fast-paced business growth but have finally come to the realization that they can’t do it alone, do it all and do it well.

And for Real Estate Investors looking to build relationships, build their authority and grow, we offer FREE resources like our Real Estate Investor’s Marketing Group on Facebook, the REI Marketing Show and our done for you services for content and podcasting.

Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!

• Here’s How »

Join the Real Estate Investing for Women Community today:

• https://blissfulinvestor.com/
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To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

To see this program in video:

Search on Roku for Real Estate Investing 4 Women or go to this link: https://blissfulinvestor.com/biroku

On YouTube go to Real Estate Investing for Women

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How To Invest In Real Estate Across Borders With Lauren Cohen – Real Estate Women

 

If you want to invest in real estate across borders, you need to be actively involved in running the business. Moneeka Sawyer’s guest today is Lauren Cohen, an international lawyer, realtor, and foreign investor expert. In this episode, Lauren explains that you need to make a substantial investment in a non-marginal business. Join in the conversation to discover more of Lauren’s top tips for investing across borders. If you want to use real estate as a tool for immigration, you can’t miss out on this episode. Tune in! 

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

How To Invest In Real Estate Across Borders With Lauren Cohen – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am excited to welcome Lauren Cohen to the show. She is a Serial Entrepreneur, an International Lawyer, Realtor and Foreign Investor Expert. She is originally from Toronto and now in South Florida. Lauren is also a bestselling author and sought-after speaker. She launched her podcast, Investing Across Borders, in late 2020. Lauren and her turnkey team believe in overcoming obstacles and navigating global expansion for business owners and real estate investors while providing access to unique passive income solutions. Lauren’s overriding goal is to help clients navigate the path to invest, live, work and play across borders. Lauren’s superpower rests in paving a path to immigration visas through real estate investments. Ladies, I’m sure you can tell why Lauren is on the show. Lauren, welcome to the show. 

Thank you, Moneeka. It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you for making the time for me. 

It’s my pleasure. Ladies, I want to let you know that Lauren was booked for this show. We booked earlier in 2021. Since then, several of you ladies have heard her on other shows and gave me good reviews. I’m going into this interview with, “We’ve got somebody amazing on the show.” I’m super excited about that. I also want to tell you one other thing about Lauren. You guys know I’m all about systems. Systems equal bliss. I had all this system set up for my intake and scheduling. Lauren and I did it a little backward. We got the system. 

I went online to put together the whole, “I want to be able to introduce her.” I put together a little script and I noticed that nothing was in the intake form. It was 8:00 or 9:00 PM here at California time so it was late in Lauren’s time. I don’t start work until 10:00, so I’m like, “We have nothing.” There was a lot. I emailed her and I sent her something on LinkedIn. She happened to be online. Lauren did this thing. Anybody else that I would have talked to would have been like, “Can we reschedule?” I’m scheduling four months out. You ladies know that I pre-record. Lauren’s like, “Okay.” She got it all to me in ten minutes. 

It’s a problem that I have. I’m over-responsive. I need to go to the twelve-step program for responsiveness. 

The thing that I want to point out and one of the reasons that I’m excited to tell you a story, I know that it’s not sounding relevant. The way that we do anything is the way that we do everything. My focus is on bliss, pleasure, joy and relaxation. As a lawyer, it’s important that you are responsive. How many of us are freaked out about something? The things that we are dealing with lawyers are usually things we don’t know anything about. You want somebody who’s responsive, kind and generous. Lauren is all of those things. Thank you for making my process more blissful even though tech failed us. 

When I received it, I’m like, “How did that possibly happen? That can’t happen. There’s no way I’m going to miss this because I know how long it took us to get here. I’m going to get this done quick.” Believe it or not, I’m studying for the mortgage exam because I don’t have enough licenses. I decided I need something else. The reason is that I have so many clients in need of mortgage opportunities. We are in the middle of studying and I get this, “I have to go and deal with this right now.” My boyfriend is like, “What’s going on?” I’m like, “Let me be.” My son’s like, “Mommy.” I’m like, “I’m going.” I got it done. Thank you. 

If there is one thing that I do pride myself on, it’s exactly that. It’s not that I don’t get into panic mode because I was in a little bit of panic mode, but it’s not the end of the world. It’s not like somebody’s sick, but I get it done. That’s what 2021 is all about. I joined a mastermind called Get It Done in ‘21. The truth is it’s about that. In 2020, we had many challenges, obstacles and interferences in our lives. What is going on? Not that there’s no uncertainty now, but you have to focus on what you are grateful for every day and come out of each day thinking, “How can I impact people in a better way?” 

One of the things that 2020 taught us is to be able to roll with the flow. It taught us about flexibility, resilience, caring about the things that are important to us, and focusing on those things because there are so little we felt we had control over. Those are the things we do have control over. How are we responding? Who are we caring about? How are we showing up? 

I was thinking of the same words as you were saying them. It’s true. How you show up for one thing is how you show up for everything. 

I honor you for your kindness to me. 

Thank you for acknowledging that. I had spoken with a gentleman before from Canada. He said to me, “I am impressed with you. You’re this and this. We Canadians love you.” I said, “I am Canadian.” He’s like, “I love you even more now.” 

Lauren, could you tell us the high-level, two-minute version of your story? Let everybody get to know you a little bit and where you came from. 

My story is a little unique. I don’t share it all the time, but I started sharing it more because your story is what dictates or drives you. I am originally from Canada. I moved here a long time ago. I have not been home in several months, but I’m not bitter, maybe a little bit bitter. I have not seen my mom, brother, nephews, niece, sister-in-law or anybody in several months. I came here with a dream. I was married at the time. I moved back to Canada and I came here again. It’s been an interesting ride. 

In 2006, I got married. My then-husband was deported on the way back from our honeymoon. We went to Thailand on our honeymoon. I wasn’t in the immigration space to the extent I am now, that’s for sure. I didn’t realize that he was inadmissible. I didn’t realize that these things he had in his background and his history would stop him from being admissible. I was in the process of getting my green card. I had a lawyer who now is my partner. I had a lawyer that was doing everything. I never contemplated this problem. He was in the process of getting his visa. 

We get married and we go on our honeymoon. We should not have left the country or maybe we should have because everything happens for a reason. We came back. They took him from me at Chicago O’Hare Airport. They expeditiously removed him. They put him in immigration jail and they deported him. Here I am with all this stuff from our honeymoon in Thailand. I’m like, “What am I going to do now?” 

It goes to show you that you have to turn adversity into prosperity and you have to find the silver lining, which is the name of my nonprofit and the name of my book, Finding Your Silver Lining in the Business Immigration Process. There is always a silver lining. The silver lining of that was it was never meant to be that marriage. It pushed me into the immigration space. I knew that I had a calling to do something greater for people from all over the world migrating to the US and Canada because I’m licensed in both countries. I need more licenses. 

You are an education junkie. I can relate to that. 

I don’t like going to school, but I like learning, reading and getting licenses. Having a mortgage license and being a realtor is complimentary. That’s what happened. He was barred from entry to the US and I said, “I have to find a different path.” That’s what started me on my journey. My number one goal is to help people to invest, live, work and play across borders so that they can be anywhere in the world. 

This all started with an idea in Israel that I had that people should not be stuck to where they live but should be able to be completely mobile. My home is in Florida. My heart is in Israel, but my family is in Canada. I usually can go anywhere and do business. That is what I created for myself and what I wanted to create for others and give them the path to come and immigrate to the US especially through real estate investing. Many people want to invest in real estate in the US and here is the whole other benefit of doing that. 

When you help people with real estate stuff, you help them whether they are American citizens looking to invest internationally or if they are international citizens from somewhere else wanting to invest in the United States. Is that true?  

Yes. 

Turn adversity into prosperity. Find the silver lining in everything. Share on X

The other thing that you help people with is if they are international, they are somewhere else, and they want to come to the United States, they can do that through investing. Can you tell me a little bit about that piece, helping them get citizenship, to emigrate or whatever that looks like? 

It’s extraordinarily complex and I’ll tell you why. Real estate investing, as a rule, is passive. Real estate investing to immigrate has to be active because to qualify for a visa, you need to be actively involved in running a business. The terminology is you have to make a substantial investment in a non-marginal business. I have created the ten steps to immigrate through real estate. It’s a step-by-step guide to take people from, “I want to invest in real estate in the US. How do I do it?” The first eight steps are for anybody that’s investing and the last two are for people that want to immigrate through that path. 

I’ve been working with real estate investors for a decade and working with them to get their visas, but only over COVID, I connected all of these dots together to say, “There is a path. It’s not going to be your single-family home, a couple of units, of condos or flipping. That’s not going to work.” If you add flipping to the BRRRR method, holding properties, Airbnb, commercial, self-storage, mobile homes, you create a strategy that can potentially pave the path to immigrate. 

I have a lot of international readers, but I don’t have a lot of people that talk about that stuff. I wonder if maybe we consider doing another show specifically about that for my international readers. I’m in 45 different countries. I want to tell you a cute story. Ladies, you haven’t heard this. Lauren, I hope you don’t mind that I tell you this, but this is funny. I went on a cruise to speak. I was talking about Choose Bliss on a cruise and we went to the Greek Islands, but we stopped in Spain. The first stop was in Barcelona. 

My husband and I are sitting at a cafe. We are talking, laughing. All of a sudden, I hear my voice walk by. David and I both look over and some guy is walking around with their iPhone listening to my podcast. I was like, “Oh my god.” We got off the cruise at Mykonos or something. We are sitting in a little cafe having some lunch and someone’s walking by with a phone. They are looking at the phone. They look up and they look over towards me in passing. All of a sudden, their eyes get wide. They look at their phone. They looked at me. They’re like, “Are you Moneeka Sawyer?” It’s in Greece. It was so much fun. It was twice in that one trip. We haven’t done a trip since then because of COVID. It’s exciting to see the impact that I’m making internationally. There is an audience on this show for you, Lauren. Maybe we can talk about that another time. 

That’s what my webinar series is. You should come to my webinars. It’s how to immigrate through real estate. We walk through the whole process and I’d love to have you there. The thing is not everybody wants to immigrate. Who can blame them right now? There is a lot of upheaval in this country. COVID has not been managed so well. That doesn’t mean that they don’t want to invest. 

We have had other people. Francois Braine-Bonnaire came on. He also came on talking about how to get people into turnkey properties here so they can take advantage of the American real estate market even if they don’t want to live here. There are all different levels of people that want to immigrate, people that don’t, people that want something hands-off, and people that want a good write-off reason to come to the United States. There are all different kinds of reasons that international people would want to invest here. 

The other thing that I want to focus on is about us Americans because this is a question that I haven’t covered at all. I have covered it once because I invested in Belize myself so that show aired about my process on that. We haven’t had anybody talk about Americans investing internationally. Let’s focus on that. Talk about some of the top tips for investing across borders. 

The top tips are going to be the same no matter if you are coming into America or going out of America. At the end of the day, you need proper cross-border tax guidance. I don’t care who you are, where you live, how small your portfolio is, how little you have to invest, you need somebody to guide you on cross-border tax. If you do not have an expert that understands both countries and has some knowledge or understanding, is there a tax treaty with the US or is there not? How is your investment going to get treated in the US? For US taxpayers, we have to be cognizant and concerned about our investments overseas. 

Let’s talk about Canada. It’s the easiest one. Lots of American investors have invested in Canada or do invest in Canada or now want to invest in Canada because suddenly it’s become that much more appealing. Maybe not Toronto because Toronto is a completely out-of-control market but other places. My business partner is in Calgary. We have lots of investors that are investing there because many of the properties are upside down. There is an opportunity to go in and find what is the equivalent of subject–tos in Canada or opportunities to wholesale properties. 

If you don’t get that cross-border guidance and you end up making $100,000, do you want to give 50% or 70% of that to the IRS or whoever the revenue agency is or the tax authority? I don’t think so. I have a prospect. He has been talking to me since we started talking. He came to a summit that I did with my Calgary partner. I call them Empowered Women in Real Estate. You need to speak at that. We do allow men. He came to this and he set up a call with me after. He said, “I paid $100,000 to the Canada Revenue Agency.” I said, “Why? How did that happen?” He’s like, “Because I didn’t talk to a lawyer first.” 

The number one thing that I’m going to tell anybody who is reading is don’t be afraid to talk to the lawyer and the accountant because fear is going to end up costing you so much more than you would pay to get the proper guidance in place. It so happens that I’m working with one of your members that I met through another podcast who’s investing in Spain. I have a client who’s developing properties in Honduras. I have clients that are investing in the UK, Canada, which’s an easy one for me and in Italy. 

My real estate license is with a company that is in ten countries and soon to be over twenty. It’s an international exposure and approach. Not everybody can even contemplate what that looks like. That’s super important. When you are looking at investing across borders, use and abuse your professional team. Don’t try to do it haphazardly and say, “I’m going to buy a property in the Dominican or something.” I hope that answers your question. 

 

There is a good point here that you made and I want to emphasize it. Don’t trip over dollars to save dimes. You want to make sure that you are paying a little bit upfront to save you a lot on the back end. It feels sometimes that there is all this upfront stuff. If you buy and sell something and you save yourself $100,000 or 50% in taxes, you only pay 20% or whatever. I don’t know what the numbers are like. I know that those deltas can be significant and you want to make sure that you minimize those taxes as much as you possibly can. The only person that is going to know how to help you is going to be a pro like Lauren. Is it easier to invest in the US or consider investing outside of the US? 

It depends on what your goals are. Investing in the US in real estate is not a super heavily regulated industry. There are rules and opportunities. Each state has a different approach, opportunities and markets. For most, the US market is the biggest opportunity that presents the most volume, potential listings, properties and upside. Coming into the US is easier than going outside of the US. 

We invested in Belize because we are prepping for retirement. What are some good reasons to invest outside of the US if you are an American citizen? 

There could be tax advantages. It can be a tax haven. It can be an opportunity to move your money outside of the US legally and be able to have that nest egg built in a foreign country. You never know what’s going to happen here as we have seen in the past. That gives you an opportunity to have somewhere else to go. It’s all about a strategy and a lot of people forget that important part. If you don’t have a strategy, whether you are investing in the US or outside the US, you are going to fail. It’s like with everything we do. If you don’t have systems, you are going to fail. If you don’t have a strategy, you are going to fail. You have to create a strategy and work with a professional team to implement that strategy. 

Talk to me about building that strategy. What are some of the first steps to building that international strategy? 

We are going to first look at what you are doing in real estate, see where you want to invest, and how you want to invest? Do you want to have joint venture partners? Are you using your own money? Are you using other people’s money? What corporate structure do you have in the US? Do you have contacts and connections in that subject country, that new country? How does that all look? How was your professional team going to stack up? What types of properties do you want? What are your goals with those properties? 

Protect your assets as you're expanding your business. Share on X

Do you want a property that you can go to a part of the time and Airbnb the rest of the time? How does that look? Bringing in those tax advisers, figuring out how you’re doing asset protection as well, looking at asset protection solutions and opportunities. You have to protect your assets as you’re expanding your business no matter if it’s in real estate or anything. Those are some of the steps that we would go through in analyzing how to make this all happen and execute it. 

What is the number one risk in not setting up that structure before you start? 

It’s twofold. The first is that you could be shut down legally. You could be precluded from visiting your properties or investments because you didn’t put the structure in place and you could be stopped at the border, whichever border that might be. The other thing is this huge potential tax consequence of not setting up your structure properly from the get-go, which could shut you down anyway because of numbers. 

In extra, we are going to talk about 1031 exchanges and doing that over borders. I’m excited about that. Could you tell us a little bit about what we’re going to talk about? 

I’m assuming that your audience knows what 1031 is. 

Yes, they have heard about it. 

I don’t have to explain what 1031 is. 1031 is awesome because it allows investors and property owners to transfer property no matter where they are from. What we forget is, this is especially true for Canadians, the exchange will be disregarded for tax purposes oftentimes when they go back to their home country. They may be legally allowed to do it here in the US, no matter where they are from. The impact could be negative when they go back to their home country if they take the money out of the US. 

We are going to be talking a little bit more about the intricacies around that. I’m excited about that extra because we have never talked about this stuff. Before we move into our three rapid-fire questions, could you tell everybody how they can reach you?  

I am easy to reach. Please find me on LinkedIn. I will tell you that you need to find me with my Canadian presence because that’s super important. There’s a little confusion about that. On Facebook, it’s LaurenESQ. Everything is LaurenESQ. I’m launching my podcast website, it’s LaurenESQ.com. That’s my brand. I’ve been using that email address forever and a day. That’s the best way to find me on Facebook. On Instagram it’s @Lauren_Cohen_ESQ. On Twitter, it’s @eCouncilInc, which is the name of my company. I’m on Clubhouse. You can find me on that new crazy thing. I hear that Elon Musk shut the platform down because you’re only allowed 5,000 people and he had 5,000 people in the first room he set up. I can understand that. I would be interested too but I was asleep. 

You can always email me directly. On top of the free gift, I also am offering a free consultation to anybody that would like to talk about US investment, cross-border investing, expanding out of the US, and bringing your business into the US. It’s bit.ly/lacexplore. Moneeka makes easy URLs. I would be happy to set up a call, please reference that you met me here. I will be happy to set up that time with you. 

You have a free gift for the ladies. Tell us a little bit about that. The link for this one is BlissfulInvestor.com/laurenesq. 

When you said that, I was like, “LaurenESQ, that works for me.” 

I love that because I know that most of our links to reach our guests start with BlissfulInvestor.com. 

You are good at branding. It’s excellent. I am taking a few lessons from you. I already adopted one of your lessons on signing up for the podcast, so I hope it’s okay. 

Tell us about your free gift. 

I’m probably going to have to renew this free gift because many people have downloaded it. It’s popular. It’s called Eight Steps to Successful Real Estate Investment Across Borders. It’s the guide that will help you and it’s free for all of your readers. It’s a $47 value. It’s going to help you to think about the different elements that we have talked about here and a little bit more. 

When you go on there, BlissfulInvestor.com/laurenesq, you will see that it’s $47. You get a special code for my ladies so you get it for free. It is our REI4FREE. Thank you so much for that. I know that there are going to be a lot of people interested in that. 

It’s a pleasure to serve you, guys. I love working with real estate investors. It took me a while to find my calling. One thing I will tell any of you that haven’t figured all of it out yet, don’t worry. You will figure it out. 

Thank you so much for that. Are you ready for three rapid-fire questions? 

I’m ready. 

Lauren, tell us a super tip on getting started investing in real estate. 

Get a coach, that’s a super tip. Don’t do it alone. Whatever you do, work with a coach or somebody that has done that or somebody that can guide you. You don’t want to invest haphazardly and you need a strategy. 

What is one strategy for being successful in investing in real estate? 

Staying focused and staying in your lane. My four favorite words are, “Stay in your lane.” Don’t try to play realtor, lawyer or accountant. Get people on your team that can do those things because that’s how you’re going to make money in real estate. They are going to guide you, help you do due diligence, analyze the price perspective investments, deal analysis, for example. 

What is one daily practice, Lauren, that you would say contributes to your success? 

 

I work out. I have the COVID–20. There is no question. I cannot survive without some type of workout every single day, whether it’s a power walk, a workout, watching kickboxing or working out on my ski machine upstairs or something. You have to get your endorphins going because we are all stuck at home. I’m lucky that I’m in Florida. We are not all that lucky. 

Lauren, thank you so much for everything you have shared. 

It’s my pleasure. 

Ladies, we have more coming in extra. We’re going to be talking about 1031 exchanges across borders, so stay tuned for that if you’re already subscribed. If you’re not subscribed but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com and you get the first seven days for free. You can check this out as much as you like for the first seven days, and you can decide one way or the other if you love it or not. For those of you who are leaving us now, thank you so much for joining Lauren and me in this portion of the show. 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 will see you soon. 

 

Important links

• Lauren Cohen 
• Francois Braine-Bonnaire – Past Episode 
• LaurenESQ – Facebook 
• LaurenESQ.com 
• @Lauren_Cohen_ESQ – Instagram 
• @eCouncilInc – Twitter 
• Bit.ly/lacexplore 
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com 
• Choose Bliss 

 

About Lauren Cohen

Lauren A. Cohen, international speaker, #1 bestselling author and immigration and business strategist, is an attorney licensed in both the U.S. (TN) and Canada (ON). As an active AILA (American Immigration Lawyers Association) member, Lauren boasts a stellar track record of success. She was also recently recognized as one of 2017’s “Super Lawyers” by Attorney-at-Law Magazine.

Although her role at e-Council does not involve practicing law, Lauren has first-hand knowledge of the visa process, having herself immigrated from Canada, and later becoming an American citizen in 2012. The overriding goal in all of her business endeavors is to help her clients achieve their version of the American Dream. Developing sound strategies designed to sustain long-term growth is a cornerstone of the e-Council Inc. brand.

After spending several years working as corporate counsel in various industries while delving into the field of immigration law, Lauren decided to combine her legal knowledge and business acumen. The result is e-Council Inc., a company offering concierge turnkey business immigration services ranging from professional Business Plans to comprehensive project coordination for all types of business visas, with a special focus on EB-5 solutions for direct investment and regional center cases. Lauren and her team help businesses raise capital, assist franchises seeking additional franchisees particularly in the form of foreign investors, and work with foreign investors seeking access to the U.S. markets.

 

• Here’s How »

• https://blissfulinvestor.com/

• LinkedIn

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram

______________________________________To listen to the EXTRA portion of this show go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

 

To see this program in video:

Search on Roku for Real Estate Investing 4 Women or go to this link: https://blissfulinvestor.com/biroku

On YouTube go to Real Estate Investing for Women

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Mother’s Day Edition – The Impact Of Family On My Business And Success With Reed Goossens – Real Estate Women

 

Many see investing as a male dominating world but for Moneeka Sawyer, a real estate investor and author of Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment, it is an industry where real estate women like her can be influential as well. She joins Reed Goossens as she shares how her experience recovering from an accident and her family have a great impact on her business’ success throughout the years. Moneeka also wants to use this opportunity to empower women in the industry and show the world what they got.

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Listen to the podcast here

 

Mother’s Day Edition – The Impact Of Family On My Business And Success With Reed Goossens – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

Ladies, I hope you had an amazing Mother’s Day weekend. I was trying to think of what I could do to honor Mother’s Day because I feel like it’s a very special holiday. I always want to honor our moms who supported us to become the women that we are now. I was on Reed Goossens‘ show and he did the most amazing interview, where he brought out so much about my family that hasn’t been shared. Since I think of moms as the core of the family, I thought of featuring a show about family, what it means to me and how it has impacted my life. Hopefully, it’s inspirational and helpful to you also. Enjoy the show.

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I have the pleasure of speaking with Moneeka Sawyer. She is a lifestyle-focused real estate investor with an emphasis on helping more women succeed in the real estate industry. Moneeka has been investing for many years and she has truly created a life-by-design business, where she only spends between 5 to 10 hours a week working on her business and helping inspire other people to be more successful in real estate. She’s also the bestselling author of the book, Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment, which was honored at the very prestigious Women of Impact Quill Award. I’m pumped and excited to have her on the show to share her incredible experience and her insight and knowledge. Moneeka, welcome to the show. How are you doing?

I’m doing great. Thank you so much for having me, Reed. I have to say one correction that’s worth mentioning. It’s 5 to 10 hours a month.

I must have skim-read that part.

That’s what people assume and that’s why I like to point it out. It’s amazing what’s possible. We can do 5 to 10 hours a week. We could also do 5 to 10 hours a month. It’s what’s good for you.

Tell us about more of your upbringing and how you value a dollar through your childhood. That’s an important step to start with to craft the story around what you created.

My story begins with my parents. My parents were immigrants. They came to the country with $200 in their pocket and a dream of building a life that was amazing for their children. They had heard that the golden ticket to wealth in the United States was to invest in real estate. When they got here, they immediately started saving their nickels and dimes. My mom is an MD, but she couldn’t work as a doctor here. She would sew the curtains for her house or the pillows for her sofa so she could save all those nickels and dimes but still have this beautiful home that she would expect for herself as a doctor, and then I was born. Their hearts were filled with love, joy and excitement for this new child. They’ve invested in their very first real estate investment project. It was land. They stayed focused on that their whole life and fast forward many years, they paid for my college education through real estate.

I grew up watching that whole thing. It was a topic of conversation. This is an interesting thing that happens in Indian families. Not all Indian families, but many. We do have a very open conversation about money. I got to hear about the stresses that my parents were going through, whether my mom needed to go through residency again to be able to practice here or my dad being discriminated against at work. They came here in 1967 and we lived in Ohio. It was a very white community. People were still very kind and they still had great jobs, but there were also people who were not kind who discriminated against them. I heard all of this stuff.

Bliss is a deep sense of joy, contentment, and that confidence that no matter what happens in life, you can handle it. Click To Tweet

One of the things that impressed upon me was that it was important to me to be able to make money myself and not be dependent on anybody else, which is an interesting dichotomy because Indian women wanted me to have an arranged marriage. A man was supposed to be able to take care of me, but then on the other side, I needed to be fully independent. Talk about mixed messages. What was interesting is my mom and dad would not let me work. I was a girl. I needed to study. I needed to go to college. I needed to get married, but I also needed to be a professional so I could support my husband to make a lot of money.

As I was growing up, I wasn’t allowed to work. I wanted to. I would read Entrepreneur Magazine. I don’t know if anybody remembers the old Entrepreneur Magazine where they had all these binders of businesses that you could start. You can pay $99 and you would get this business startup pack for anything, a wedding planner or a banker. There are all these things. I would buy them. I was so hungry, but I wasn’t allowed to work. I wasn’t allowed to go out there. My very first job was at Jack in the Box when I was seventeen and I bagged. I felt like I was dating because that was another thing I was not allowed to do. I was going to have an arranged marriage. I would sneak out so I could go work. It was so naughty. I had developed an appreciation for money. Dad had started to talk to me about real estate when I was very young. I got my very first allowance, which was very little. Even in those days, he taught me about budgeting. I opened a checking account and started writing checks. I was very fortunate that way. He taught me a lot about the practicality of money and the role that it plays in our life.

Thank you for being vulnerable and honest. That’s probably the most intriguing dollar story I’ve heard. I get so many people on the show like, “I have mowed lawns.” I was like, “Don’t say mowed lawns. Say something better.” You’ve had the opposite of having to try and fit in as a kid and probably see your other friends out working at McDonald’s or wherever it is. They had money to buy dresses and go out on the weekends and be teenagers. You had the other traditional side of your upbringing and your heritage, which is important. Not to pull you that, but it’s what your values that your parents wanted to instill in you. It’s very humorous that your parents were like, “You got to make money and land on your own two feet, but you can’t. We want to give you an arranged marriage.” What were the conversations around the dinner table when you wanted to break away from being that first-generation American and break away from the norms that probably your parents were brought up with back in India?

It was hard. I’ll preface this by saying, I am absolutely crazy about my parents. They’re the two most beautiful people on the planet. I am so fortunate to have had them guiding me through my journey in life, but growing up was hard. It was hard in our environment because I’m not white and we grew up in very white areas because of my parents’ jobs. Out in the world, it was tough for me. At home, that was my sanctuary and my parents were so scared. They used to watch General Hospital. They saw all the drama on television. Because they hadn’t grown up in this country, they were scared that horrible things were going to happen to their girls.

Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment

They held on so tight and were so protective. Very young, I became very secretive. I would have to sneak out to go do my job. I sneaked out for everything. I didn’t talk to them about anything because I was afraid that they would be so afraid, then they would hold me up in the tower of safety in our home and I couldn’t do anything. I couldn’t go out with friends. I couldn’t work. I was in all honors classes and my honors classes started at 7:00 in the morning. My mom and dad were afraid to let me go to honors classes because “Who goes to school at 7:00 in the morning?” I did. I wanted to get into a good university. You can see this misunderstanding of what life is like.

Indians do this too and a lot of cultures do this, yelling and screaming on top of our lungs, “I love you, but you are so wrong.” I don’t think it was dysfunctional. It was truly authentic and honest because we got to the bottom of stuff and there was never a dearth of love for us. No matter how angry we got, we were a unit and we loved each other like crazy. We always had that as children growing up. Even now, I never felt that there is a moment that there is no unconditional love in my life and that’s because of them.

I will also reflect back to you that I came from a very similar family, not necessarily traditional. We live in Australia. It was Aussies being Aussies. It’s that whole unconditional love and bringing in. I even remember bringing my wife and she came from a broken family, and how intense it can be sometimes. She felt outside like, “I didn’t have this growing up. You’re very lucky, not many people have this.” I was very similar to you that there was that unconditional love. Everything that they thought came from a position of love and they said, “I want to protect the girls and they can’t do this, that or the other,” but it probably made you very cheeky in terms of going out and escaping, and having to do things on your own ways to feel like you had a life.

I’m very independent, but it was also interesting. I went to UC Berkeley and I had a lot of my other Indian girlfriends who had had a similar experience. They went to UC Berkeley and we were all like, “We get to hang out at school.” What was funny was that I went out there and I was like, “I’m here to learn. I wanted to start a business my entire life. I’m going to go to business school.” For UC Berkeley, you have to re-apply for business school. I was like, head down, “I’m going to make this happen. My life is my life. I’m in control. I don’t have to sneak around to work or study.” I was so excited. All my friends got into drugs and alcohol and not in a bad way. They were all still smart. It’s just college kids being college kids, but they were all into the party. All my old childhood friendships fell apart because my version of freedom was creating the life of my dreams and their version of freedom was trying everything possible under the sun. It’s a very different perspective. I’m tenacious. I can be crazy, but it was all very focused on, “There is a life that I want and I’m going to go get it.”

Many people do it and myself included. When that freedom does come when you go to university, you do tend to rip the lid off. That’s not necessarily a bad thing because you then test your boundaries and you test where you need to pull your socks up, “You have stuff up. You’ve partied too hard over here. Now, you need to pull your socks up because you’re grades are failing.” I can sympathize with your friends but also with you in terms of having that freedom and understanding, “There’s so much more control of my life.” Even when I went to high school with the deputy principal’s son, I was very goody two shoes and not doing anything when I was a teenager.

When going to university, I started like, “Girls and alcohol. Holy crap,” but then realizing like I’m still very studious and my grades were suffering. You had to make that choice in life. That’s interesting when you were at university back to the story of the girlfriends from Ohio, going to UC Berkeley and then having different perspectives. You do eventually drifted away because of different priorities in life. That’s okay. That’s the point of going to university. The point of figuring yourself out is for all these things to happen. I love that story.

It’s funny because sometimes I think I robbed myself of all that fun. I was so focused on what I wanted and I didn’t slow down and notice that there was fun out there. I could go party. I could have it all. It didn’t have to be mutually exclusive. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve relaxed quite a lot. I’m not quite that focusing crazy.

Don’t wish away those moments that you’re going to miss so much when they’re gone. Don’t wish away your life. Enjoy every single moment. Click To Tweet

It’s a good segue into the bliss. What is bliss? Part of what I’m hearing from you at a young age is what you thought you had to do in order to be successful. A lot of entrepreneurs that I interview on the show do get the blinkers on and are just crazy. They take certain priorities that are business over health, life or love, and things start to whine. They realize that they don’t have a life. The purpose of all that we do, whether it be at university or in creating something from nothing in businesses. It is to enjoy the journey because it’s not ultimately the mountain top we scale, but it’s you only live one life. Enjoy it now. We have this social media anxiety. We always got to be comparing ourselves and “I always got to have something more to do.” It’s such an interesting bliss that I want to talk about with you because I know you’ve got a lot to give on that piece.

We only get to the mountain top for a little while and then we look around and we got to go back down. If you don’t enjoy the journey, then all you get is that ten minutes on the mountain and then you’re climbing another mountain. Bliss is a deep sense of joy, contentment, and that confidence that no matter what happens in life, you can handle it. It’s about emotional mastery and emotional resilience. That’s how I’m defining bliss. My journey or my passion is to help real estate investors, women, business owners, people in general, to let you enjoy that journey. Let me tell you a story. Your story is perfect, but I’m going to tell you another one.

I was in Iceland and we wanted to go see a glacier. It was a two-and-a-half-hour drive. We decided to do it. We were driving along and there are two ways that we can approach this. We can drive as fast as possible and make the two-and-a-half-hour drive two hours, or we can drive below the speed limit. We’re on vacation. Everybody is like, “Really?” We’re driving and looking around and enjoying the scenery, the terrain and the way that it changes. Here, it’s plants and waterfalls. Here, it’s lava. We’re getting out, taking pictures and stopping for lunch. The experience of going to that glacier was completely different by doing it that way. We had this beautiful journey that ended up taking us three hours. We got to the glacier. We hung out there for two hours. It was gorgeous and worth the journey. We drove back and enjoyed the drive back too. We went to dinner. Our next goal was to find a hotel and go to dinner.

That’s a good metaphor for life. Are you looking around? Are you having good meals? Is it okay that you take longer so that you can enjoy that journey? When you get to that goal, as fantastic as it is, being at that goal only lasts for a little while and then there’s another journey to another goal. Do you want to live your life jumping to ten minutes of bliss or do you want to enjoy the entire journey so you can enjoy all of it? That’s what I want people to get is whether it’s in real estate, whether it’s with your families, people are like, “I can’t wait until my kids go to kindergarten.” Don’t wish away those moments that you’re going to miss so much when they’re gone. Don’t wish away your life. Enjoy every single moment of it.

Have there been any losses in your life to understand that mindset shift? You do slow down because you clearly are the person who is hungry, who wants to hustle, who wants to prove to their parents that they can go up, do it and stand on their own two feet. Has anything happened in your life? You can say no, getting older and all that stuff. I know personally, I lost my mom. I’ve got a story for you that I wish I was at the life I live now before so I can spend more time with her. I live in America. She’s in Australia and I got home three days before she passed. I did a whole episode on priorities versus goals and how that we can sometimes shift them. Was there anything that shifted along your journey in the way that made you realize, “This is not a sprint. Let’s take the long journey. Let’s do lunch. Let’s enjoy the scenic route?”

Real Estate Women: Find ways to make the hustle livable so that you don’t burn out. You don’t want to get to the other side and be completely burnt out.

I have been very fortunate I have not experienced loss yet. We all do and I know that it’s coming. As I mentioned before, I’m madly in love with my parents. I want lots of time with them and with my sisters and nephew. We’re very family-oriented. That’s been ingrained in me, but the hustle didn’t stop. It transformed. When I was in a horrible car accident, I lost my legs. I was a professional dancer. That was the one thing I was allowed to do. Since I was five years old, I was dancing. I had a world reputation. I danced all over the world. When I was 21, I was in a horrible car accident that was not my fault. Someone hit me and my hips got dislocated, my back got thrown out and I became a cripple for a couple of years. I should have been into a chair but that’s another story.

I went through a huge depression during that time because everything about my life suddenly shifted. I just had gotten out of college. My new job disappeared. My fiancé left me because I wasn’t the same person anymore. I was a dancer dancing six hours a day. Now, I had no exercise. The chemistry in your body changes so fast. I gained so much weight, which aggravated a lot of the problems. I went through this horrible time. Fortunately, somehow I ended up getting married. My husband is a dream guy, but even marriage didn’t fix it, even having the money and taking care of. This is one of the things that we do as people. When things go wrong, we think, “If I have the love of my life, everything will be better. They’ll take care of it. They’ll save me,” whether it’s a man or a woman. I had that mentality from my upbringing. I got married to this beautiful man, but he didn’t fix it. He couldn’t. Nobody can fix your life. Only you can fix your life.

I remember I had a moment when I had gone through a huge depression. The pain wasn’t going away physically. My legs still weren’t working quite right. It had been 5 or 6 years. My marriage wasn’t fixing all the problems. I remember one day, I was lying in bed. I had been in bed for a week. I had been depressed. I had been sleeping. I heard my mom’s voice in my head. She said, “Moneeka, get out of bed and go get some air. You’ll feel better.” I had the covers over my head. I pushed them off of my head and swung my legs around to get out of bed to go for a walk. As I tried to stand on my legs, I fell to the ground because they were so weak, they couldn’t hold me. At that moment, I thought, “I can’t do this anymore.” I prayed and said to God, “Either have mercy on me and bring me home or teach me how to live.”

A girlfriend called about an hour later, who I hadn’t heard from for years. She turned me on to a coach and this coach taught me how to live. The very first thing that he talked to me about and I do this in all of my coursework is, “What are your values? Design your life not based on anybody’s expectations, not even your own because your own have often been given to you, but create a life based on those values and what’s important to you.” What was important to me was my relationships. No matter how much I wanted to hustle, how important a business was to me, my highest value was my relationships. That was what slowed me down and made me realize, “I can’t spend 80 hours a week. I have the capacity, but I can’t do it because my life feels bad.”

What do you say to those people who are in the hustle right now? They are trying to make ends meet. They are putting one foot in front of the other. They are in the grind right now. For you and I, we’ve both been in that grind. We’ve both been in that 80, 90, 100 hours a week. For me, personally, working a W2 job, trying to get out and become financially free in these situations, and all sort of stuff. What do you say to those people who are in that right now? How do you give confidence that it’s going to be okay?

The very first thing that I will talk to them about is, “What are their values? Why are they doing that hustle? What are the values that you’re trying to satisfy? What’s the goal that you’re trying to get to?” Find ways to make that hustle livable because, for some of us, it’s necessary. It was necessary for me. It was necessary for you. Find ways to make that livable so that you don’t burn out. You don’t want to get to the other side either and be completely burnt out. Set milestones for yourself. You’re hustling. You’re working an 80-hour week. When does that stop for you? Is it a year? When are you going to re-evaluate? The other thing is you may be hustling. You may not be hustling towards your goal. Things may not be working.

For me, if you’re in the hustle and you’re working that hard, every six months, re-evaluate, “Is this hustle going to get me where I want to go?” That way, you can pivot or refocus if you need to. Keep going. You want to keep re-evaluating and then get to that place where it doesn’t become a habit because hustling is adrenaline-filled. It can be exciting on many levels. It can become a habit and a distraction to what you want in your life. Those are the sorts of things I would tell them.

It’s so important to keep a level mindset in terms of running your own race because so many people compare themselves to other people. Back to your analogy of going up in Iceland, going up to that glacier, taking the long journey and it’s your journey. That’s okay that it’s your journey. It comes a lot from being self-aware. You have to take care of yourself mentally to allow yourself the mental freedom to not compare yourself constantly to other people because that is what we were. We’re always in this constant struggle of like, “So-and-so is doing this and I’m in my job. I haven’t broken free. I haven’t got financially free.”

No one else can fix your life. Only you can. Click To Tweet

It’s okay that you’re in that position. Give yourself some permission to allow yourself to be okay in that situation. It will change and know it will change over time. I think people forget that because they’re only looking at the 4×4 inches box. They’re not looking at the big picture. Sometimes you do have to take that time to make sure that you’re checking in, recalibrating if need be, and understanding that this needs to be sustainable growth in a hustle, not necessarily a burning out type of growth.

My youngest sister had a little boy. He’s the dream of everybody in the family. He’s adorable. His mom said something about his eye was a little bit off. They got it fixed or whatever. My other sister said, “Everybody should realize that he’s perfect the way he is as long as we don’t compare to other people.” It’s true. That was so profound. We’re all in our perfect place and we are perfect as long as we don’t succumb to comparing ourselves to others. Our life is ours. You may not feel like everything is going perfect, but trust that you are perfectly where you are and that you will get to where you want to go. It doesn’t matter what anybody else is doing.

I’m going to stuff up the quote, but I don’t know who the author was. It talks about LA is three hours behind New York, yet it’s three hours in front of Hawaii. It’s not that Hawaii is late or LA or New York is early. It’s their own time. You’re not late. You’re not early. You’re just on time because you’re running your own race. It compares the time in the world and it’s so true. You’re not late. You’re not early. You’re on time and it’s your time. It’s your journey and that’s okay. Tell me more about what you do in terms of how you’re giving back to the wider community. I bet you’ve got a great book that has got an incredible award. You’ve got your show going on and you’ve also got your real estate investment business. Talk about those three facets of what makes you tick now in the world.

I have a real estate show called Real Estate Investing for Women, where we focus on mindset, heartset, emotional mastery, money smarts and real estate strategy. It’s a very holistic approach to creating a blissful real estate business and creating wealth that way. That’s my big focus. I invest in executive properties. If anybody ever wanted to know what that is, come listen to my show. I have very streamlined strategies on how to keep everything blissful. I have that going on. One of the big bliss things for me is I give back to the community in teaching right through my show. I also am very involved in a school for the poor in India. That’s where a lot of my money goes. This is one of the things that we think about like, “Why are we building wealth? What does it allow us to do?” For me, it gives me the time freedom and financial freedom to do things in the bigger world. I can run my show. I can help children in India. I can spend more time with my family and my nephew or my friends. Those are the sorts of things that I’m doing.

My real estate investing business could retire me now. I have the time freedom that I have always wanted. The show is my big thing. I do have a couple of other books. If you look up Moneeka Sawyer on Amazon, you’ll find several books under my name. I released another one called Real Estate Investing for Women and I have a fun one that’s called Your Amazing Itty Bitty Blissful Real Estate Investing Book. It’s 40 pages. That’s also available on Amazon. Those were my three big things. I built my real estate business in about 25 years. I put together a report of how did I do that so that I could retire. I started with $10,000 and now I can retire. I’ve put together that report. That’s available to your audience for free if they would like it at BlissfulInvestor.com.

You’ve got a whole brand in and around educating women. Why is there a lack of women in the real estate space? I was even looking back at my shows. I’ve only had maybe less than a dozen women over 220 episodes.

It’s interesting because real estate agents, there are a ton of women, but as far as being investors, I don’t know. Maybe we haven’t been educated right. I’m not sure what’s going on there. It’s so frustrating to me, which is why I am focused on women. The other thing that’s very interesting is that we see investing as a male world and it can be intimidating. What women don’t realize is that we are brought up in America. We are brought up in a male-dominant world. We are forced to learn how to succeed in that environment. We learn the skills. We learn the way to think. We learn all of those male-dominant ways of doing business.

We also inherently by default have the feminine ways of doing business. We’re intuitive. We can see the bigger picture. We can multitask. Men can multitask too. It’s just done differently. I just want to clarify that. We bring different skills to the world and the business world. As women, we have the benefit of having male skills as well as female skills, but we don’t value our female skills. If you marry those two together, we are amazing investors. We have an understanding that most men don’t have access to unless they plug into the other side. We’re amazing investors and I want to support that.

I have a hard time finding women speakers for my show for that same reason. It’s time for us to step into the leadership of our own lives and create the financial freedom that we can have and deserve. Everybody deserves that. I don’t know either because I was brought up in a household where I was taught all about money. I feel very fortunate. I didn’t realize how many women are like, “I don’t get it. I don’t know how to pursue that.” A lot of education is by men with the language that feels uncomfortable.

I think of this historically where the man is going out to be the breadwinner and the female is at home taking care of the kids and, “Don’t you worry yourself with the finances. I’ve got it sorted.” That’s completely shifting and hopefully, it continues to shift. You’re trying to put a megaphone up to the issue and enticing more people into the world of real estate, particularly female, a popular part of the population. It’s important because it’s empowering. The more people can be empowered to learn about something, particularly the female part of the population has not had the opportunities because of the way we’ve been brought up for many years. To want to take that stand and say, “I want to learn about something. I want to learn about this financial freedom. I want to learn about creating financial wealth for myself and my family because that’s the whole point, to give me time freedom to spend with my kids, to spend with my family, to grow as a human being.” You talked about feminine energy and that is important. We all have it in ourselves. It’s just an ability to tap into it in certain ways. You’re doing an incredible job of giving a megaphone.

The school that I support in India is a coed school. Because here’s the thing with empowering women. If a woman is fighting and screaming, “Pay attention. Respect me,” people are going to hear, but people don’t learn by words. We need the support of our entire community and that means our men. If men are not going to support the empowerment of women, it’s going to be a huge, long journey. As the men come on board, now we all are lifted up together. Every single one of you who is willing to be a voice as an ally of women’s empowerment, we need you and appreciate you. Your voice is important too.

Real Estate Women: We’re all in our perfect place and we are perfect as long as we don’t succumb to comparing ourselves to others. Our life is ours.

There are some weird statistics out there in the S&P 500. There are only less than fifteen women who are CEOs, yet more than 25 of those CEOs are called David. It takes all boats to rise. Everyone needs to be pulling in the right direction, not just the female community saying, “We want to do this.” It’s about also the other side of the coin, the male community saying yes and acknowledging and telling that community, “We’re seeing and hearing you. You have a place at the table and you should always have a place at the table.”

We all value that. Men are greatly improved and evolved by recognizing that also. Like I said, my husband is an incredible, beautiful human being and so much of that is he values me. He’s not just an incredible, beautiful human being to me, he’s also respected everywhere because he has a good understanding of what respect looks like for everybody.

I have one question before we dive into the top five investing tips. What are your plans for 2020 and beyond, both business and personally?

I’ve got a summit coming up, my very first summit. It’s online virtually. I was originally going to have it live in person and then I felt very limited by that. I want to be able to reach as many people as possible so making it virtual allowed me to do that. I’ve got that going on. I’m probably going to release a book because that’s what I do. I love being an author. Look me up as Moneeka Sawyer on Amazon to see what happens there. Everything in life is a surprise. I love the new surprises that I’m inspired to do. Honestly, I want to invest in one more property. My goal is to be able to retire in Silicon Valley. Right now, I could retire. I would have to move. I want to be able to retire here so my husband can continue to be supported in working because he loves being a software programmer and this is where the work is. I’m going to be buying a couple of more properties, probably changing my strategy from an equity strategy to a cashflow strategy. Those are some of the things that I’m learning about, growing in and excited about.

At the end of every show, we like to dive into the top five investing tips. What is the daily habit that you practice to keep you on track towards your goals?

I have a good morning routine and anytime I miss it, I feel out of sorts. It’s super simple. I can go through it in a couple of minutes. I wake up and my alarm goes off and I push snooze. Everybody says, “Don’t push snooze.” I always push snooze and that time between my two snoozes is when I do my gratitude practice. I have a very specific way that I do that. Anyways, I do my gratitude practice, get out of bed, get dressed and feed the dog. My husband and I go for a beautiful walk together with the dog and have some coffee together. We make some eye contact before we split between for our days. I come home and I do some mindset tools. It depends on what I’m into. On that day, maybe I read, watch a video on YouTube or recite something. I do some positive affirmation and then I sit down at my desk at 10:00. I get my exercise, meditation, affirmations and gratitude. I get it all.

It’s so important to keep that morning ritual sacred for yourself because it helps you start the day and get involved into the next 8, 9 or 10 hours, however long you work for. Who is the most influential person in your career to date?

It’s my dad.

In your business, there would have to be an influential tool. When I say tool, it could be software or it could be a physical tool like a phone or a person. What is the most influential tool in your business on a day-to-day basis?

Books.

Books you’re reading or you’re writing?

Real Estate Women: You may not feel like everything is going perfect, but trust that you are perfectly where you are and that you will get to where you want to go.

I would say I’m reading. I’m always reading something. That’s not necessarily part of my morning routine, but at lunchtime, I can’t help it. I love to read. At some point during the day, I will read something that moves me forward to what it is that I’m doing tomorrow and what I’m doing in my business. I would say my Kindle, specifically.

In one sentence, what has been the biggest failure in your career to date and what did you learn from that failure?

I bought this place that I live in, my dream home. I bought it in 2008 and within six months, it lost 50% of its value. I lost $500,000 in six months. What I learned is it’s so important to stay blissful because my whole life would have blown up. If I didn’t have the skills that I had, I would never be where I am now, but instead, I engaged my bliss strategies, held onto the property and kept my head. It turned around and turned into a good thing. The truth is stay blissful, manage your emotions, be resilient and have mastery. Be very intentional about how you’re living you’re life. When things go wrong, be intentional about how you solve those issues.

Moneeka, where can people reach you to continue the conversation if they want to be in your sphere and want to learn more about what you do?

Moneeka Sawyer is where you find me everywhere, @MoneekaSawyer on Facebook and Instagram. You can go to BlissfulInvestor.com to find out about my books, my programs and my podcast is called Real Estate Investing for Women. You can find that anywhere podcasts are.

I want to thank you for jumping on the show. I want to reflect on the things that I took away from the show. I think the number one thing that I took away from the show is that no one can fix your life, only you can. That’s so important in this world of, we want to blame other people for the situation we’re in and not taking control and not owning up to your shit and turning it around. Blaming your parents, your upbringing, your husband or the dog. We all get into that mindset, but it’s also making sure that you’re self-aware enough to take yourself out of it. Have your morning rituals that are going to keep you grounded and make sure you are in a blissful state to not be so reactive in the situation, and understand more what the long-term game is. Did I leave anything out?

No, that was beautiful. Thank you for that summary.

Thank you so much for jumping on the show. Enjoy the rest of your week and we’ll catch up very soon.

Thank you.

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There you have it. It’s another cracking episode and jam-packed with some incredible advice from Moneeka Sawyer. Please make sure you check out all her stuff. She’s all over Facebook. She’s all over Instagram. She’s all over the Google webs in terms of making all her books on Amazon. Make sure you head over to BlissfulInvestor.com or check out her show, Real Estate Investing for Women on any way you podcast. I want to thank you all for taking some time out of your day to tune in to continue to grow your financial IQ because that’s what we’re all about here on this show. We’ll do it all again next episode. Be bold, be brave and remember, go give life a crack.

Important Links

• Reed Goossens
• Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment
• Real Estate Investing for Women
• Your Amazing Itty Bitty Blissful Real Estate Investing Book
• BlissfulInvestor.com
• @MoneekaSawyer – Facebook
• Instagram – Moneeka Sawyer

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