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Build & Protect Your Wealth Through Apartment Investing With Ronnie Shalev

 

Being a doctor can be exhausting, especially when you have to work 12 hours and your family relies on you financially doesn’t help in helping to reclaim your life. This episode is dedicated to everyone who wants to reclaim their life and remain financially stable. Today, Ronnie Shalev, a board-certified ER physician turned real estate investor, shares her career shift and how you can build and protect your wealth through apartment investing. Ronnie’s mission to help people with their financial wellness led her to provide some more insights on why investing in apartments is more relevant than other asset classes. Choosing the right market is part of risk mitigation, which Moneeka and Ronnie dive deep into. So if you want to free yourself from the job holding you down, tune in to this episode now! Learn how you can live a life on your terms!

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Build & Protect Your Wealth Through Apartment Investing With Ronnie Shalev

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Dr. Ronnie Shalev. She is a board-certified emergency physician turned real estate investor. She was a practicing ER doc for sixteen years, but her job sucked the life out of her, leaving her drained, burnt out, and unable to enjoy her family and kids. She wanted to reclaim her life but didn’t know where to start.

She was making great money. Her family was relying on her financially, so she was trapped by the golden handcuffs. That’s when she started exploring the world of real estate investing and found a way to make recurring income without having to be physically at the hospital or with her patients. After some time, the income she earned from her real estate investments gave her the freedom to quit her grueling emergency medicine job and transition to a medical device company. Ronnie’s mission is to share her knowledge with other women who are feeling trapped and want to free themselves from their jobs and live life on their terms. Welcome to the show, Ronnie. It’s so nice to have you here.

Thank you so much for having me.

I know we were talking a little bit about this in the green room, but it’s interesting to me how many doctors have come onto the show talking about either how they are evaluating syndications, or they are actual syndicators. What’s fascinating to me is my mom is also an MD. I know what kind of income you guys make. Especially as an ER doc, that’s some crazy difficult stuff, and they pay you well for that.

It’s fascinating to me to see how syndications and being a syndicator can replace that kind of income. It’s such an inspiration. This is something to think about. We wonder, “Can I replace my income?” Think about the six-figure incomes that are being replaced with real estate. It’s awesome. Thank you so much for coming to share your story on the show.

I’m so excited to share my story. I know that a lot of people can relate to wanting to design their own life.

I’m one of those people, too. That’s what bliss means to me. It is a choice. It is not being a slave to the expectations of the world around us, whether it’s our job, our families, or whatever it is. We want to be able to live life on our own terms. It’s awesome. I read your bio, but why syndication? Why did you take this particular route?

I was not ever planning on being a syndicator. Ever since I was a little girl, I have wanted to be an ER doctor. I wanted to help people. I wanted to help people with their health and their life in their times of need. I remember a shift where I was alone. I was the only doctor in the entire ER. There was no scribe, no mid-level, no physician assistant, nothing. It was around 10:00 PM, and I was treating two stroke patients at the same time. I also had an asthmatic who was having severe trouble breathing. I had someone having a heart attack. The waiting room was full. There wasn’t an empty chair. You could see the pain and frustration on everyone’s faces, the patients and the families.

On top of it, there were several ambulances lined up waiting to get checked in. I looked at the clock to see, “When is my relief coming?” It was eight more hours. The stress was unbearable. I couldn’t breathe. I was responsible for all of these people. The administrators had cut all of the physician hours and assistance hours, leaving only one doctor responsible for everyone who walked into the ER or was already there. I’m faced with this situation. What did I do? I put my head down, and I did it. I took care of everyone at the expense of my own health. I didn’t eat, drink, or pee during that shift.

For eight hours?

Twelve. I came home, and I was so exhausted. I collapsed on the bed. I went to sleep in my scrubs, which is unheard of because you feel disgusting after the hospital. I slept the rest of the day. My husband and my family didn’t understand why I was so tired. They didn’t understand that I’d taken care of over 50 patients that night with extreme stress and liability. It’s hard to fathom. How could they?

I started to think about what else I was supposed to do. I was like, “What else is there? I’m a high-paid hourly worker, and I’m tied to my job. I have to keep it.” I was told by my administrators with no medical education how to practice medicine and how quickly to see the patients. They made sure to tell me that I was dispensable and could be fired if they didn’t like my numbers. I started to think, “Why did I love this job in the first place? Something has to change.” That’s when I started looking at other options and what else was there. I was like, “How can I free myself from this job?” That’s where I found real estate.

It was about that time that a friend told me that he was passively investing in real estate. I didn’t understand what that meant. He was like, “I own a piece of 100 7-Elevens, and I receive a check every quarter. I get passive income.” I’m like, “Passive income? What is that? That’s weird.” For years, I had been working per hour. My time was not passive at all. My money was never passive. I thought to myself, “This sounds weird. This sounds fishy. Is it a pyramid scheme? Is he lying to me? It sounds like it’s too good to be true. Maybe you could lose your money. I don’t know.” I was very paranoid.

I started thinking and remembering what was going on in the hospital and with those administrators. I was so frustrated about trading my health and my well-being for money. I decided, “Why not? Let’s give it a shot. It’s not like real estate goes to zero. It’s almost impossible for that. There are hard assets. There’s land.”

My husband and I decided to dip our toe in and do a small investment first. It worked. We started getting checks every quarter. I said, “This is interesting. Does it work again? Let’s do it again.” We did it again. We started seeing results. That’s where we started investing. We’ve been part of over 26 deals. We’re always looking for new ones. We did a reassessment and said, “I could leave medicine. I can go to something that’s way less stressful with this passive income that we’ve generated.” It took many years.

How many?

It took eight years. That’s the thing. This is not a get-rich-quick scheme or something like that. This is a long-term strategy where you know what the outcome is. It’s predictable. After I was able to do that, I still see all of my physician friends and colleagues as miserable. I’m telling them, “This is what I did.” They’re like, “How did you do it? Did you win the lottery?” I’m like, “I didn’t win the lottery. This is the actual strategy that I did.”

Apartment investing is a long-term strategy where you know what the outcome is. Share on X

They still have fear. They were like, “I don’t have time to learn it. I don’t have time to study it.” I said, “That’s perfect. I’ll do it for you. I’ll do that. You can leverage my expertise. You can leverage my time. You can leverage other people’s money through the banks.” I went and studied how to do it actively myself. My husband and I took a mentorship program and learned how to do it. We started our own company, where we are syndicating apartments specifically and bringing along other professionals.

Do you ever miss the helping people aspect of medicine?

I help people all the time. What I didn’t know when I was looking at being a physician as a career at that time, I thought, “This is how you help people.” Now I have a better perspective that you don’t have to help people with their health. You can help them with their financial wellness. I’m still helping, which is huge. On top of it, I’m also able to still use my medical knowledge. I work at a medical device company. It’s not because I have to work there. It’s because I want to work there. We’re helping thousands of patients every single day. I get to use my medical knowledge. I get to use my investing knowledge. I get to help so many people on a grander scale. I’m still feeling that drive to help people. That’s that feeling.

You don't have to help people with your health. You can help them with their financial wellness. Share on X

It’s so interesting because I don’t have to work either. I’m like you in your situation. I’m, by nature, a coach. My mom was a psychiatrist. She and I are so similar. My heart is to help. I found a very similar thing when I was coaching. I was trading time for money. I gave up on so many other things that were important to me. It’s certainly not comparable to you, but there’s that feeling inside me of wanting to help.

As I’m trying to redesign my life, retire, and have more time for my husband, my family, my nephew, and my parents as they’re aging, I’ve got the financial wherewithal to not have to do anything. My way of helping is by doing this show because this way, my ladies are elevated by my guests and whatever little knowledge I can offer. It’s an opportunity for me to give back so that I have that peace inside of me fulfilled. The biggest things in people’s lives that we need an abundance of are our health, our wealth, and love. It is our relationships. It is the three biggest things, and you’re handling two of them. That’s unbelievable. That’s awesome.

I love that you’re helping so many women and bringing on powerful people to motivate. How does someone know that they can do it without hearing that other people have done it, too?

That’s right. Thank you for sharing your knowledge with my ladies. Talk to me a little bit about why you chose apartments.

We passively invested in a lot of different asset classes. We’ve done self-storage, retail centers, mixed-use buildings, industrial warehouses, and assisted living. There’s a lot that I’ve done, but I like apartments the best because they make sense to me. I feel like housing is a basic need. Everyone needs a place to live. If they’re shopping online on Amazon, they’re at home. They’re not going into the office. They’re working remotely. They’re doing it from their homes.

With the interest rates going up and the supply shortage, people can’t afford a house. They can’t afford a down payment. There’s a whole population of renters that have to be renters. There’s also a whole population of people that want to be renters. There are the Millennials that don’t want to be tied down. They don’t want to be having these roof leaks, plumbing, and all kinds of deferred maintenance on their home. They don’t want that. There are seniors. These are people that are trying to buckle down and live on fixed incomes. They don’t want surprise expenses with their homes.

That’s a good point.

They’re downsizing. They move out, so they become renters. There are all these people going to rent, and there are not enough places. That’s why rents are going up crazy all over the place. I’m going into apartments, but I’m not just going into any apartment. We focus on recession-resistant assets. We’re looking at Class B and Class C properties. The reason I’m looking at that is that what happens when you’re in a recession? It is what people might say we’re in. You’re living in a Class A building, which is a high-rise. There’s a bellman or a doorman. It has all of it.

Maybe you have a pay cut, or you get furloughed, or you’re let go. Why do they move? They move into Class B. It is the same thing. The people living in Class B move to Class C. I’m right in that demographic that whether we’re in an economic downturn or not, people are looking to live there. I’m taking those communities, and I’m making them better. I’m doing value add. We’re putting in dog parks and solar panels. We’re including internet in our packages. We’re doing a lot of nice things for the residents, making it a community where it’s a nice place to live. What we’re doing is we’re adding value. We’re making the residents a great place to live, and then the investors make money. It’s a win-win.

Tell me about how you pick your markets. I know you’re doing Class B and C, but how do you pick the markets you want to go into?

I’m focusing on the Sunbelt states because I want people to be moving to where my apartments are. I’m looking for landlord-friendly states. I want to be able to evict if I need to. I don’t want a tenant that has lived there for two years and doesn’t pay rent. I’m looking for landlord-friendly states. I’m looking for growing markets. These are sub-markets where people are moving into. Why are they moving? There are jobs. I’m looking for where there’s job growth.

I don’t look for only one employer or one type of employer. The last thing you want is to have this robust factory, and then the factory closes, and everybody loses their job and moves out of your apartment. I’m looking for markets where there are multiple diverse employers in energy, entertainment, device, biotech, or whatever it is. There’s a lot of variety. If one goes out of business, they’re not all going to go out of business.

You can’t completely reduce risk, but you can start thinking and pre-planning if you have a safety plan. I’m looking for recession-resistant assets. I’m looking for places where you can evict tenants that aren’t paying. The goal is to bring income. We want to make sure that people are moving there. We want to make sure that there are different types of employers. There’s a lot of thought into the market selection.

 

In EXTRA, we’re going to be talking about how to mitigate risk. My belief, and correct me if I’m wrong, is part of the mitigation of risk is how you choose a market. Is that true?

Absolutely.

We’ll do a deeper dive on that, so we get a little bit more conversation around that in EXTRA. I’m super excited about that. You talked about passive investors versus active investors. Give me your perspective on it because, as a doctor, it’s going to look very different than it does for the rest of us. Go ahead and define for me what you were looking for as far as a passive investor versus an active investor.

Personally, I love passive investing. It is the ultimate way to explode your wealth. The biggest reason because of that is because of leverage. You are leveraging other people’s expertise. I’m not going as a passive investor to go and fly into every city, drive around, see what the best areas are, and then do research on which companies are moving there, who’s moving their headquarters, and what’s happening in the city design planning. Someone’s doing that for you. You’re not spending your time doing it.

You’re also leveraging other people’s relationships. You’re not having to forge relationships with brokers and tour properties and show them that you’re serious. You’re also not having to sign on for any loans. When you’re a passive investor, you’re not having to find the financing, the debt, and all that stuff and meet all these bankers and mortgage brokers. You don’t have to do all of that. You also don’t have to be finding the deals and analyzing them. You’re leveraging other people’s expertise. You’re leveraging other people’s time.

You have a life. You’re a busy professional. You have a family. You want extra income, but you don’t want to be tied to a new hobby where you’re like, “I wasn’t planning on being a landlord,” where tenants are calling you about termites and how there’s a leak or a fire. Passive investors don’t have to deal with any of that.

Active investors, on the other hand, are the people that want to do work. They’re the ones that are finding the properties. They’re the ones that are doing the market analysis. They’re like, “Is this a good market? Is this a good property? Does this make financial sense? What is the business plan? Is this a buy-and-hold? Are we holding it for a long period of time and waiting for it to go up, or are we renovating it? Are we raising rents? What are we doing?” You’re the one that creates the plan. You’re in charge of it. You’re also in charge of executing that plan. It is making sure that the contractors are coming, that the property managers are renting out the units, and that there’s marketing to the property.

You’re doing a lot of that stuff, and then at the end, you’re the one that does the exit plan. You either refinance it or sell it. Active people are doing active work. It depends on what you want as a person. How do you want to design your life? That’s what I love about real estate. Anything you do in real estate, you’re going to do well. Is it active? Is it passive? Is it commercial? Is it residential? There are so many things that you can do, and you’re going to do them well. As long as you have the right team and the right education about it, anyone can do it.

 

It’s available to anybody. That’s what I love about real estate. That’s not true in other parts of the world, but here in the United States, we are so lucky. The government even helps you do it and rewards you for doing it. They want people to own their houses. They want people to feel committed to their communities. They want that, so they encourage us to do that.

It’s interesting because when we look at passive versus active, there’s a whole spectrum of passive versus active. The ultimate passive is investing, for instance, in REITs or syndications. I’d love for you to address that. It is all the way to fully actively being the syndicator doing all of those other things. Personally, I have an active model, but I only 5 five to 10 hours a month. It’s active, but I consider it passive. For me, that’s what I consider passive, but you’re right. It’s not fully passive.

I’m my own acquisition person. I have the exit strategy. I’m calling the tenants for rent raises. I’m doing all of those things. It doesn’t take me a lot of time, so it seems much more passive than a 40-hour-a-week job or a 60-hour-a-week job, which is what I had before. It’s still very passive. It’s more active than what you’re talking about. Could you tell me a little bit about your perspective on REITs versus syndication?

A REIT is very similar to a stock. You are buying shares of a company that is owning and managing properties. You’re not owning the real estate itself. A positive with a REIT is that your money’s not locked into a property. You can buy it. The stock, you can sell it. It’s like the stock market. You’re liquid. You can go in, and you can go out.

What I don’t like about REITs is that you don’t own the real estate. You’re investing in a company. If the company is spread thin or something happens in the company, those shares do go down. It’s not a for sure thing, not that anything is for sure. Real estate is getting the depreciation from the real estate. If you are owning part of a company, you’re not getting the depreciation. In syndication, you are an actual owner of the property. You get a depreciation. You get the tax benefits without having the headaches of home ownership.

 

Thank you for that. That was awesome. I love what you’re sharing. I’m so inspired by your story and what you’ve been able to do. Could you tell us how people can get in touch with you?

I have an email account. If someone wants to email me, it’s [email protected]. You can email me. I’m happy to hop on a call and talk to you about what you want, how you want your life to look, how active you want to be, or how passive you want to be. Picture a day when you go to work because you want to go to work, not because you have to go to work. Picture a day when your spouse tells you, “You seem healthier. I love the freedom that we have now in our life.” Picture a day you can travel if you want to travel, relax if you want to relax, or serve others if you want to serve others. That’s what real estate investing can do for you. That’s what it did for me. That’s why I’m so passionate about real estate and helping other people. Email me. I’ll be happy to connect.

I love that. Tell us a little bit about your free gift.

I offer a free masterclass about passive real estate investing, what it is, what are the different asset classes you can invest in, and the difference between active and passive. It is a lot more in-depth than we’re talking about here. We’ll talk about what syndication is and what returns we are looking for. You can find it at Invest.ShalwinProperties.com.

That is perfect. Thank you for that. That will be a great way for people to get started and get to know passive investing a little bit more. Thank you. We are going to be doing EXTRA, which is going to be about how to mitigate risk. We’re going to be doing a little more of a deep dive also on finding markets. We’re going to do that after our three rapid-fire questions. Are you ready for three rapid-fire questions?

I’m ready.

Give us one strategy for getting started investing in real estate.

The best way to start is to find out the different ways that you can start and figure out how you want to start. Do you want to be doing it all? Do you want to start passive and then be active later? Do you want to start active and maybe be passive later? Do you want to do both? The first step is to sit down and think about what you want to do and then do it. That’s my big thing. Taking action is so important.

I agree with you on that. What is one strategy for being successful as a real estate investor?

It’s important to listen to podcasts. This is an easy thing. Try to educate yourself by hearing people talk about stories about how they did it. Once you hear how they did it so many times, you start thinking, “I can do it, too. It doesn’t sound so hard.” Listening to other people’s successes and how they did it is important in being successful yourself because success leaves clues.

Listening to other people's successes and how they did it is very important in being successful yourself because success leaves clues. Share on X

It’s a personal self-brainwashing, isn’t it? It is building that confidence. It all starts in mind.

I believe that strongly.

Tell us one daily practice you do that contributes to your personal success.

We’re going to do mindset. I work on my mindset every single day. Stress is wired into me, whether I’m in the ER or doing real estate. My mind is always thinking. In calming my mind down, one of the big things that I do is meditate. I also practice something called reframing, where if you’re thinking one thing, you release, pause, and start thinking like, “Is this thought serving me? Is this helping me to think this way? How am I going to get where I want to be?” It’s certainly not going to be thinking this way. You got to start thinking the other way. Trying to manipulate how I’m thinking and trying to always reframe is a big thing that has always helped me.

Reframing is such an interesting thing because people are like, “You’re making it up if you’re reframing.” The thing is that you made it up in the first place. Any situation that’s happening could be happening to ten different people, and they would have ten different reactions. The situation is not the problem. It’s a story that we make up about it that creates our response. If you’re going to make up the story anyways, you might as well make up a story that’s more serving to your business, your joy, and your life.

There’s something in our minds that we have something called automatic negative thoughts. That is back in the caveman days when we were trying to protect ourselves. We’re like, “Someone’s coming,” and it could be a tiger or whatever it is. That is a preservation thing. Our mind does that. We have to stop. We don’t have to listen to every single thing our mind tells us. That’s something that is important for people to understand. You need to recognize when you’re starting to spin in a spiral of negative thoughts that might not be true.

True is an interesting word. There are some basic truths like don’t kill people. That’s probably a basic truth. In general, in our lives, truth is very subjective. What you’re perceiving is not necessarily true. I love that. Thank you so much for all that you’ve offered in this portion of the show. This has been wonderful, Ronnie.

Thank you so much for having me. I love talking to you.

We get to talk more in EXTRA. Stay tuned. We’re going to be talking about mitigating risk in syndications and picking markets. I’m super excited about that conversation. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, stay tuned. If you’re not but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. For those of you that are leaving Ronnie and me, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. You know how much I love having you here. I look forward to seeing you next episode. Until then, remember, goals without action are just dreams, so get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next episode.

 

 Important Links

• Dr. Ronnie Shalev
• [email protected]
• Invest.ShalwinProperties.com
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

About Dr. Ronnie Shalev

When I was an ER doctor, my high pressure job sucked the life out of me. I was left weary, burned out, and unable to enjoy my family, my kids, and my day-to-day life. Since I made great money, I felt hopelessly stuck in these “golden handcuffs”, and saw no end in sight.

Now I help others create PASSIVE INCOME so that they have the FREEDOM to do what they want with their time and not be held captive by their jobs.

SHALWIN PROPERTIES partners with investors who want access to real estate deals so they can get the benefits of real estate without the headaches of being a landlord.

Whether you want to diversify your assets, earn passive income, hedge against inflation, or maximize the tax benefits that come with real estate investing, Shalwin Properties helps you every step of the way.

 

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

Learn how to create a consistent income stream by only working 5 hours a month the Blissful Investor Way.

Grab my FREE guide at http://www.BlissfulInvestor.com

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Passive Investing: The Key To Achieving The 5 Freedoms In Life With Whitney Elkins-Hutten

 

Passive investing is one way to the five freedoms in life: freedom of income, choice, independence, location, and impact. When you get into passive real estate investing, you need to be sure of what you want, why you need it, and what you need to do to get it. Once you know those answers, you will be free financially and personally. Join Moneeka Sawyer as she talks with the Director of Investor Education at PassiveInvesting.com, Whitney Elkins-Hutten. Listen in as they discuss how you can achieve true financial independence in real estate. Learn why financial freedom isn’t the only freedom you need in life. Find out how to time block your calendar to make the most out of your time. Plus, discover how to get into real estate syndications. Tune in for more!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Passive Investing: The Key To Achieving The 5 Freedoms In Life With Whitney Elkins-Hutten

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Whitney Elkins-Hutten. She is the Director of Investor Education at PassiveInvesting.com and a partner in $700 million in real estate, including over 6,300 plus residential units and more than 1,400 plus storage units across 8 states. She experienced flipping over $4 million in residential real estate. That’s an awful lot of real estate, Whitney. Welcome to the show.

Thank you.

Whitney is one of these patient beautiful people we’ve had to reschedule several times. I super appreciate that you are even here. Thank you so much for that.

My pleasure. I’ve had to reschedule myself.

Whitney, could you give us the high-end version of your story? Why are you in real estate? How did you start? Give us the short and dirty version.

I started in real estate investing in 2002 by accident. I started as an accidental landlord. I bought a house with a significant other. About a month later, the relationship fell apart and the house and everything were in my name. I was terrified. I was like, “What am I going to do?” I was young and didn’t have a family at the time so I stuffed the house full of roommates.

The house also needed a huge rehab. There were psychedelic flowers painted all over the walls from the 1960s that had never been taken down. Poor layout, you name it. A green sheet was covering beautiful hardwood floors. My roommates didn’t mind living in a construction zone. As a matter of fact, I paid them a lot for beer, pizza and sushi.

We turned that house around in about eleven months. When I sold it was probably my number one investing mistake because I didn’t realize the power of real estate at that particular time. I had read Rich Dad Poor Dad and got it all wrong so I had to go back to school. What I did realize when I sold that property is I made more in eleven months than I did in my day job working 60, 70 and 80 hours a week in public health and traveling all the time.

I hadn’t been paying for my housing at all because my roommates had supported the majority of the bills with rent. I was like, “How many more times can I do this?” That term is called live-in flipping. I did a few more projects by myself and then my husband eventually joined me. Not all projects went extremely well. Maybe some people here have heard of the story where the bus fell into the roof of one of my properties. Yes, that did happen. Most people are like, “How does the bus fall on the roof?” On a mountainside, it will happen there.

Fast forward to ten years, I found myself not able to leave my day job. I didn’t have any more financial independence than I had started with. I had buckets of equity but I couldn’t pay my day-to-day bills consistently with that type of income. It dawned on me. A friend of mine mentioned to me one day, “Why don’t you keep those properties and put a renter in them with that land?” I scaled to about 30 properties. About a year and a half, single-family properties in-state and out-of-state.

Another problem is that I was able to step away from my day job to be at home with my family and our young daughter but my husband couldn’t because we couldn’t pick up properties fast enough. We hit another ceiling of achievement and had to learn how to scale through the larger multifamily property. We did it both actively and passively.

I quickly learned that I’m more geared toward the passive side of investing. That brings me to where I’m at. I’m still a partner in all that real estate that you named. However, one of my favorite investment vehicles is how to get into passive real estate like multifamily, self-storage, car washes, hotels and even real estate debt.

That’s what’s been able to afford my husband and me to have the five freedoms in life, freedom of income, freedom of choice, freedom of location independence and freedom of impact. That’s what I get to do here every single day at PassiveInvesting.com. As the Director of Investor Education, I help people realize those same goals for themselves. It’s a journey I took.

 

It’s so interesting that you did read Rich Dad Poor Dad. That’s the book that seems to start a lot of people on investing. You’re still like, “I’ll get rid of this one.” I have to tell you that I made a similar mistake. I hadn’t read Rich Dad Poor Dad at the time because it wasn’t out. That’s how old I am. I sold my first piece of real estate too. Years later, I was like, “What was I thinking?” We bought it for $200,000. It is now worth $1.75 million. That’s the way things go.

It was the second book for me and Cashflow Quadrant. I know Robert Kiyosaki goes over the cashflow quadrant in Rich Dad Poor Dad. I wasn’t in the space to absorb what he was trying to say there. I knew I had landed on something with real estate. I still had this thought that I have to put in all the work. That’s the only way that I can be rewarded. I have to provide all the value.

That’s not necessarily the case. It was more about how can you shift your income from trading time for money into either building your business or learning how to invest in other people’s businesses. It was about ten years after that when I hit the first inflection point. When we decided to start holding onto some of these properties that we were flipping, I read that book. It was a slap in the head.

Tons of bricks came crashing down because how many flips had I done before then that we hadn’t held onto? I’m like, “That would’ve been amazing if I could have kept them all.” We were buying with a low down payment. We had low-interest rates. We were able to use 203(k) loans for construction because we were living on the property. We were using the 121 exclusion, which is the 1031 exchange for real estate investors to keep our capital gains tax-free. How powerful would that have been if I was able to keep all of those?

I love this conversation, Whitney, as we’re starting together because I would like this to land with people. Much of the time, people that are reading this show understand real estate and what leverage is to a degree. It is hard to switch from the mindset of trading time for money to having your money work for you passively.

You work on the front end but then you let it work for you after, in a way, like hiring an employee that you don’t have to manage. There are a lot of people that have W-2 jobs that have a hard time making that switch. It’s interesting that you mentioned that even as a flipper, you were in real estate and still had trouble making that mental switch.

I have a lot of properties where I have tenants in them. They’re mostly passive. We know that as a landlord, if you’re managing your property, it’s mostly passive, not completely passive. I make a lot of rent and appreciation on those properties by doing very little work. Relatively, the trading time for money is very low. My ROI is huge for the time that I spend.

I am trying to move to fully passive. It’s even hard for me to go there because once you’re used to being in a way of doing things, it’s hard to go to that next level. I wanted to say that so that the ladies that are reading can see that if you’re having trouble fathoming this and taking that next step, understand that all of us, from the people at the very beginning to the people that have reached great heights in real estate, do have trouble making paradigm shifts when we’re going to the next level. Sometimes we need to hear, “It’s okay. You’re not alone. We all do this,” but it is necessary to make that paradigm shift to get there.

You talk about paradigm shifts but for me, it was my identity. The initial shift of being able to step into real estate and allow it to work for me. Shifting my active income from my public health job into being a real estate professional. I spent how many years in school and training, studying for board exams and all of that. I know that if I want to have true financial independence, I have to let that side of me go. It’s not that I will never do public health ever again. It’s just that I’m not a public health professional, I’m an active real estate investor. I have a lot of controlled property that I own and I use property management.

If you really want to have true financial independence in real estate, you have to shift your identity solely to real estate. Share on X

As I started unwinding some of that portfolio and shifting it into truly passive investments, passive with your time and income, that was another identity shift. Those core 30 single-family properties, my babies, I had trouble letting those go because I was like, “I’m a single-family investor.” That’s what I do. I knew if I needed to go to the next level, that part of me, I needed to shift my identity yet again to be a real estate investor. You get to create more impact in the world too whenever you do that. For me, it’s those 30 single-family properties. At one point in time, we were up to 52 between Indianapolis and Kansas City.

If you think about it from how I was paying my real estate taxes, I’m only impacting 2 areas and 52 households. Now, I’m across eight states and multiple cities in those areas. The taxes that I pay in those areas and the thousands of families that we’re able to impact, it’s a greater impact that I’m able to create. It is like Marie Kondo. You got to give that old you a little hug and then step into the new you to realize that full potential.

It is interesting because we’re evolving beings and we have so much potential to evolve as human beings but then also financially in our impact on the world and those sorts of things. You’re right. Every single time we step into that new identity, it’s a complete transformation. What also can happen to a lot of people is this Imposter syndrome. “I don’t belong here. I got all those degrees. That’s where I belong. I’ve been doing this for 40 years. This is where I belong.”

The thing is that nobody defines where you belong except you. I have often said, even about Imposter syndrome, that if you’re not failing it, you’re not going big enough. You’re not pushing yourself to that next level. When you push yourself to that next level is where you start to feel that doubt but you’ll get there. You did it the first time too.

To become the identity that you are now, you pushed. You did this education and all these hard things to become that person. Ladies, I wanted you to know this. Maybe it’s time for that identity shift so that you can go to that next level. You have 5 different kinds of goals that you look at in life and 5 areas of financial freedom. Talk to me a little bit about your perspective on goals, not financial freedom but five kinds of freedoms.

These aren’t concepts that I’ve created. These are things as a student of history. My dad was a History major and I rebelled against every museum he ever took me to. It wasn’t until he took me to Custer’s Last Stand in Montana that I was like, “I need to get this. I need to start studying the past.” Studying these great people so we can learn.

The reason is not that we will never make mistakes ever again, but so we can collapse time and get through those obstacles and mistakes faster. I know that was a little bit of a tangent but stick with me here. When I started hating those first levels of achievement, even with that first house, I’m like, “The first house went swimmingly. In the second house, I did everything wrong. What was happening?”

I essentially repeated the same thing but here I barely broke. My neighbor tenant who was living in a bus fell into the roof of the property the day after it sold. He’s pulling a shotgun on the police. I’m like, “What? I went off the rails somewhere.” It was because I hadn’t taken to heart the lessons that I could have been learning. I don’t have to learn them all myself. I can learn from other people.

Long story short, it was like, “Success leaves clues.” That’s one of the quotes that I love by Tony Robbins. Who can I learn from and start piling all these different pieces together? When I heard about the five freedoms in life, I was like, “That’s it.” When people said I’m pursuing financial freedom or financial independence, I’m like, “That’s one but there’s something else there for me to pursue.”

It can’t all be about money. I landed on choice in time but there’s still something else there for me to pursue. When I heard about the freedom of location and independence but more importantly, the freedom to create an impact, I was like, “That’s it. That is what I’m after.” Every time that you talk with an investor or a client and you start to uncover what they’re trying to achieve in life, it’s going to boil down to one or multiple of those freedoms.

That’s step one. What do you want? Which of these freedoms are you truly going to go after? Step two isn’t about re-engineering the math behind how to hit that freedom. This is where a lot of people sell themselves short. They’re like, “If I want to have financial freedom, time freedom and be a location independent, I need 20 houses to go hit $10,000 a month.”

That’s not the question you should be asking yourself. You need to understand how you want to feel when you hit whatever X goal is, financial independence or freedom of choice. You’ll always move the goalpost on the number of houses and the amount of income that you want to create. That’s how people go through life unfulfilled if they continue to move the goalpost. We all do it.

 

Whenever they can define how they want to feel, that’s when they understand what enough and fulfillment is. You can always do more. There’s always room to do more but you have to understand for yourself, “How do you want to feel whenever you do attain your goal?” Understanding, “What do you want? Why do you want it?”

We can start re-engineering, “What kind of mindsets and skills do you need to acquire? Whom do you need to have in your world? Does it have to be you that does things or can you hire it out and shorten your path even further?” Those are the three centering questions that I challenge anybody when they’re working through their goals.

As we decide on a goal or land on a goal, for this conversation, we need to decide on strategies that are going to help us to get there. How do you recommend people do that?

That would be in that third question. Who do I need to become to achieve the goal? Do I need to let go of an identity? Do I need to shift my mindset? What do I need to embody to be a real estate investor that’s bringing in $10,000 a month? I have to probably break those initial identities around being an employee who’s told what to do.

I’ve got to switch to an entrepreneurial mindset. Thinking through what are those mindset changes that somebody needs to make. This process can take a couple of hours in the afternoon to think through. Once I’ve made these mindset changes, I’m going to pretend that I am this entrepreneur that’s bringing in $10,000 a month. What kind of skills does that person need to have? They probably need to have some financial skills, goal-setting skills, team-building skills, relationship-building skills and negotiation skills.

In some way, processes around tracking progress and continually checking in with themselves. Not once a year, not every six months, not quarterly. Weekly or daily. Whom do you need to have in your world to make this happen? When we’re first starting, we’re probably the ones that are wearing all these hats as the operator of our business. I encourage people to think future state in 1 year or 5 years. Elevate yourself to CEO quickly, which means you shouldn’t be the one posting on social media or sending out networking emails. You might have to do that at the very beginning but quickly let go of that and start bringing people into your role to help you out with these things.

Think about how you’re using your time. I take people through a wonderful exercise on time management. It’s helping them color code their time and putting dollar amounts to the activities they’re doing in their day. The shift in thought can be overnight and very impactful when you realize that you’re doing a lot of things that are robbing you of money, as opposed to giving you wealth, not only financial wealth but personal wealth, health wealth and stuff like that.

You could be doing things that are actually robbing you of money as opposed to giving you financial and personal wealth. Share on X

I’m super curious about the color coding your time blocking to see where you’re losing your time.

I would encourage the people who are reading to go and look at your calendar. Write everything down. Maybe you’re doing this retrospectively. It’s like doing a food diary. Nobody wants to write down, “I had a Snickers bar or I drank a Coca-Cola,” especially if they’re trying to lose weight. Do that. Write everything down.

How much time do you spend on social media, watching TV or doing all these things that you may not need to do to be successful? Once you have it all written down, this is about getting real with yourself. You’re going to go through anything that you’re getting paid $0 an hour to do and color code it brown. This might be mowing the lawn, washing dishes or doing laundry. I’m not going to beat up TV, social media or anything like that.

The next thing to do is to go through and do any of those administrative tasks that you have to get done. They are related to your business but there’s no exchange for money. Maybe it keeps the lights on. You would pay somebody $10, $15 or $20 an hour to do. Color code those in light green. There are going to be those activities whenever you step it up. They’re going to be networking events or meetings that only you can do but if you train the right person to do it, they can do it. Maybe those type of activities yields you $100 to $1,000 an hour. Color code those in the brightest green you possibly can.

You’re going to go through any of those activities that only you can do that you love doing and you’ll do $2,000 or more an hour. Color code those gold. If your goal is to spend more time with family or your health, those things are priceless as well. Color code those things gold. The first time somebody does this, they’re going to realize that their calendar looks like a pile of poop. It’s a lot of browns. We’ve given the context of where you’re spending your time.

What do we do? We try to reduce, eliminate or outsource as much as we can the brown things. Cut what you can. Get it all gone. It’s hard like going on a diet. Those things tend to creep back in. Automate whatever you can and then outsource. Do you have to be the one to mow the lawn? Do you have to be the one to do the laundry? We’re outsourcing to our daughter some of these things so she can provide value to our household. I love gardening. I know I don’t need to be shutting down the garden for the winter. I have somebody coming tomorrow who’s spending all day gardening. I get to tinker around with my little herbs.

The light green things are going to be the first virtual assistant that you’re going to hire. They’re going to take on all of those low-level tasks for not that much. Maybe you pay them $10 or $15 an hour. They’re going to get it done so much faster than you can because that is their primary job. As you start scaling your real estate business, you’re going to start bringing in more people or partners to help share the load on those bright green tasks.

What that does is it’s going to open up more time for you to bring in those yellow tasks, those conferences that you should be going to network, the deal-finding activities that you need to be doing to scale your portfolio, spending time on your health, your family and relationships with others. We’re starting to open up time. When people say, “I don’t have time,” it’s a clue that tells me that they haven’t done this inventory to understand how they’re spending their time.

 

On the other side of that, when you free up a lot of your time and you say, “I don’t have time,” it’s more about examining, “Is that because this is something you don’t want to be doing?” You can take it on both sides of that. In the front end, you clear up a lot of that time if you’re still feeling like, “I don’t have time.” You do have time now for the things that are important to you. Are those other things not important to you?

Also, if they’re not in alignment with the goal. I sit down with my family once a quarter and do what we call a dream session. What are the things that we want to learn and experience and how do we want to give back? Those are the three key areas for happiness. There are so many things that I want to learn like language and playing chess.

I have 50 things written in those categories but I don’t have time to do it all. You continue still to have to make choices. The things that you still can’t make time to get, does it align with your goals? How bad do you want it? We’re centered back on those three questions. “What do you want? Why do you want it?” Sometimes you have to purge. Every year, I purge a lot of the activities that I thought would be cool to do. I’m like, “They’re not. I don’t want this.”

Thank you for that. That was super awesome. I’m going to try that. I love the visuals of the colors. Talk to me about real estate syndications, syndicators, operators, markets and all of that stuff.

I have a whole process. I have boot camps. People can reach out to me. It’s this little ten-minute primer. It’ll work for them because it is truly a process. The first thing to understand is syndication means group investing. A lot of people initially are like, “I don’t understand what syndication is. It sounds like the mafia.” It’s not. Syndicate comes from the Latin word “As a group.” As a group, how can we take down a larger asset?

Syndication means group investing, it's not anything mafia-related. Share on X

We split that group further down into limited partners and general partners. General partners are the ones that are going to be the day-to-day operators who run the business. They’re going to be sourcing the deal, underwriting the deal, acquiring the deal, raising capital and figuring out credit and lending. They’ve got all the brokers and lenders. They can get other investor capital pulled together. That’s their core business.

The limited partner’s job is to do three things. Vet the operator, market and deal. That’s it. Once they write that check, essentially, they still have other jobs because they’re in a partnership. They still need to read the communication, ask questions and be responsive to any needs that the general partner has of them. Largely, their day-to-day operation role is non-existent. They’re done.

This is a great way for somebody who’s a high net-worth individual and somebody ready to transition from having their controlled portfolio. They’re ready to fire Home Depot and their property manager and get their time back. This is a great avenue. It can even be a compliment to somebody’s portfolio. Maybe somebody loves doing this specific niche part of controlled real estate.

They want to have exposure to multifamily, self-storage, car washes and hotels but they can’t. They shouldn’t and they can’t go learn it all and be the expert in everything. They can invest with experts. That’s what syndication is. The first question in this process is, “Do you love real estate?” If you can’t check that box, this isn’t for you. “Do you believe in real estate?” That’s a better question. A lot of people here do believe in real estate already. We can check that box.

The next question is, “What are your goals?” Do you need cashflow, tax benefits, equity or diversification? I have a whole eBook that walks people through this exact process. You need to understand your risk. Do you want a class-A asset? No CapEx, no maintenance. Do you want more value to add or plus assets where there’s maybe a little bit of CapEx and deferred maintenance to work on but you get maybe a deeper discount on the property?

Are you swinging for the fences and you want a development deal or a heavy-value add opportunistic deal? There are different reward profiles and risk profiles for all of these different types of assets. You have to understand what fits best for you and your portfolio. That’s all the groundwork. You have to do that groundwork first and it doesn’t have to take long. I walk people through a process that takes them an hour to get all these questions figured out for themselves.

It is then the time to go look for operators. We’re looking for high-quality operators. One of my favorite ways to find operators is by going to conferences or meetups. You can do a simple Google search if you would like but you got to get good at discerning great marketing versus a great operator. Always get on the phone with the operator before you ever write a check. One of the number one investing mistakes I see limited partners do is that they love the operator. They’ve heard about them through a friend but they don’t get on the phone with them themselves to fully understand if this is the right person for them to be in partnership with.

 

We’re trying to figure out, “Are they genuine, authentic and transparent? Do they have a background in real estate? What is their track record? What exits have they currently produced for their limited partners? What are their biggest challenges have been?” We went through the COVID pandemic. We’re butted right up against heavy inflation and a recession. We’ve had all sorts of weather-related issues in the past couple of years.

There has to be some challenge that’s cropped up. I’m not looking for an operator that has had zero challenges. I’m probably more attuned to invest with an operator that has had challenges and overcame up well versus somebody who’s never had a challenge. What you’re doing when you go into passive investing goes back to that identity shift.

You’re no longer the day-to-day operator on a deal. You’re investing. According to Robert Kiyosaki’s Cashflow Quadrant, you’re getting into that self-employment category and shifting into that investor category where true financial freedom and time freedom are found. You have to get good at vetting operators. The other mistake I see limited partners make is that they get starry-eyed by returns on deals. I can put any number down on these papers guys.

I can show it to you but the operator is the one that has to deliver so you’re investing in people primarily with this type of strategy. Whereas before, you were the strategy and the person. Essentially, this was leveling up, becoming the CEO and back-filling with a Director of Operations or a CO to help build and scale your investment business. There’s a wealth of questions that you can ask an operator here. That gives you a high-level little primer on that but then you want to understand what markets they’re in. I encourage people when they’re moving into passive investments to be in markets where a lot of investing cards are stacked in their favor.

When you're getting into passive investments, make sure you are in markets where a lot of investing cards are stacked in your favor. Share on X

I like metropolitan service areas, maybe in the primary area or the secondary area or 35 to 40 miles from the city center. There’s a lot of infrastructures there. There is going to be a lot of money put into these areas. Certain areas are scaling there. They’re becoming a tertiary market and they’re scaling to a secondary market. You can find those areas to be on the path of progress but we’re looking for areas where the population, income growing and jobs are growing and diversified. Crimes and poverty is coming down.

We’re also looking for areas that have good landlord-tenant laws, especially if you’re going into multifamily. Certainly, good tax laws because taxes are one of your number one expenses on any real estate asset. If we can be in those pro-business areas, that’s even probably a feather in a cap for an investment. There are tons of other questions there and resources that I can share with people on how to suss out good markets and then we get down to the deal. A lot of people are like, “Show me the returns and the money.” That’s not where we should start.

 

We need to double-check that deal. Does it match our goals? Where do we want to be invested? How do we want to be invested? Equity, tax benefits, diversification, is it in the markets that we want to be in? We can start getting into the business fundamentals of the deal. Does it have the risk profile that we want to have or be exposed to? Does it have the time horizon that we want to be exposed to? Does it have a distribution schedule that works best for our finances monthly, quarterly or annually?

We can start getting into the return profiles on the asset. There’s a wealth of other things that people need to do to complete actual true due diligence when they look at a deal. Those are some high-level screening-type questions to help somebody get jumpstarted into passive investing. When they look at an initial deal, to understand in a few minutes whether that deal will work for them.

Is all of that covered in the book that you’re going to be giving my ladies?

Yes, and more.

Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about that book? Ladies, Whitney has been super generous. She’s giving you a digital copy of her book.

It’s called The Passive Investor Playbook. It’s the ultimate guide for hands-off investing. It’s a free eBook. You can go to PassiveInvestingWithWhitney.com. It’s a subpage on the PassiveInvesting.com website. Be sure to go to PassiveInvestingWithWhitney.com because that’s the only place where you can get this eBook. Once you read it, I also put together a short checklist for people, that way they can have that short checklist and do a quick screening on a deal in the future once they learn these general principles. There is an opportunity to schedule time with me and we can talk about all things real estate. I love it.

I love that. Thank you so much for your generosity in sharing that. This has been good. We went a little bit off-topic of what we were originally planning on talking about but I feel, Whitney, you’ve offered such valuable information to my ladies. I super appreciate that.

It’s my pleasure.

Ladies, one of the things I asked Whitney to talk to us about in EXTRA is car wash deals. This is something that nobody has talked about on this show and I’m super intrigued about it. We’re going to talk about investing in car washes and what that looks like. Stay tuned for EXTRA to know more about that. Before we go into EXTRA, let’s do our three rapid-fire questions. Tell us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

The super tip is going back to understanding the three questions. “What do you want? Why do you want it? Whom do you need to become to get it?” When you answer that third question, it’s mindset, skills and networks. That’s what you’re digging into. It’s not a one-and-done deal. Continue to ask those questions. If you’re just getting into real estate, do it once a quarter. Once you get solid in your plan, do it every six months. Eventually, you do that as an annual ritual.

Before you get started in real estate investing, you need to know what you want, why you want it, and who you need to become to get it. Share on X

1) It’s going to take you time to land on what you truly want. 2) Your wants are going to change as you move those goalposts down. Those are the three centering questions. My family does that still once a quarter to double-check that we’re flying the right path. If you’re flying from LA to New York, the majority of the planes are always off-course. If you can continue to do small course corrections, you’re going to eventually get to your destination.

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

Understanding very quickly that it’s a who, not how game. That can be from delegating, offloading, automating and also relationship-building. You don’t need to do this in a vacuum alone. With many of the people that I work with, that is a hard challenge. We’re brought up as employees to do your work. Even in school, do your work, stay at your desk and don’t look at the other person. That’s not how real estate goes. The quicker that you can understand that it’s a community, it’s a team and the majority of the people are working together to get deals done, you’re going to scale fast.

Thank you for saying it exactly that way. I love that. What is one thing that you do daily that you would say contributes to your success?

For me, it’s putting my oxygen mask on first. I get out of bed. I have a kid, a dog and a husband. The first couple hours of my day are all focused on me and getting my top priorities done. My priority is my health and my relationships. Also, what is the first goal that I need to do and tackle getting those things done? I sound like the Army commercial like, “We get more done by 10:00 AM than most people do in a day.” That’s pretty much what I do but it’s putting my oxygen mask on first, eating, getting those things done and moving those chess pieces early on in the day.

By 10:00 AM, if my day gets derailed, I’ve already won it. My day on Monday got derailed when we had to take my daughter into the emergency room. She’s fine. I had already been up for a couple of hours and I was like, “Here we go. We’re doing this.” It didn’t set me that far back because I had already moved a lot of those chess pieces pretty early in the day.

That is great advice. Thank you for everything you’ve offered on this show, Whitney.

It’s my pleasure.

We’ve got more. We’re going to be talking about car washes. I’m so excited. If you are subscribed to EXTRA, please stay tuned. If you’re not but would like to, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com and you can subscribe there. For those of you that are leaving Whitney and me, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. I super appreciate you and 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

• PassiveInvesting.com
• Rich Dad Poor Dad
• Cashflow Quadrant
• PassiveInvestingWithWhitney.com
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

About Whitney Elkins-Hutten

The beginning of my real estate career went better than most—my first ever rental in 2002 was a huge success. It was on my second deal that I almost lost it all.

Those two experiences shaped my real estate journey into what it is today. Knowing there had to be a right way and that success always leaves clues, I studied the greatest real estate juggernauts and was able to replicate the personal finance and wealth creation strategies that they used to create financial freedom.

 

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

Learn how to create a consistent income stream by only working 5 hours a month the Blissful Investor Way.

Grab my FREE guide at http://www.BlissfulInvestor.com

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Excel At Short Term Rental Advertising With Mike Denman – Real Estate For Women

 

Investing in short-term rental advertising could be a game-changer for your real estate business. In this episode, Moneeka Sawyer sits with Mike Denman, CEO of Better Than Awesome, to discuss the exponential benefits of using social media ads to reach more people and get more bookings for your business. Mike shares his start in real estate and short-term rentals, sharing how he gained massive ROI by investing just a few short dollars in an advertisement. Throughout the years, Mike has observed the evolution of how ads can and should be used in social media. Listen to hear about tips and tricks on setting up a system that leaves you stress-free and income-rich. Stay tuned!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Excel At Short Term Rental Advertising With Mike Denman – Real Estate For Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am excited to welcome to the show, Mike Denman. Mike is an award-winning filmmaker based out of Colorado who has worked in marketing and advertising for video games since 2011 and real estate since 2015. He has been at the forefront of technological advancements in connecting people to content through the internet via apps like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube, and too many others to mention.

He launched STRAdvertising.com in 2022 to help educate real estate investors on the power of advertising. Adapting his real estate advertising tactics to encourage higher amounts of web traffic to short-term rental listings was possible due to his years of iterating on the process. He has been a real estate investor for a couple of years. Mike, how are you?

I’m good. Thank you for having me, Moneeka. I am very honored to be here on your show.

I’m happy to have you. Ladies, you’ve met Mike before. I played a panel that I did with Mike and Laura Powers. That’s how I met Mike. You’ve already read his great advice on real estate investing, and through that conversation, I realized he had so much more to offer you. I wanted to have them on the show. Mike, thank you for joining us again. This is going to be awesome.

I’m very excited. Honestly, after meeting a lot of these other real estate investors, I’m like, “There’s a lot of people out there. They almost know all the things and need a little bit of help and guidance to be able to see some of that success,” especially with a lot of the short-term rental investors that I work with directly. That’s where I’m buying most of the actual level of information flows that are not there. I’m like, “This has got to be something that we help people with.” I’m happy to help people learn how to do that stuff. It’s going to compete with the big boys.

You said it in the panel before but remind my audience, why did you choose short-term rentals?

This is completely not even me choosing it in the first place. My partner, Patricia, she’s an incredible real estate investor. When we first started doing real estate investing, we were renting out a room in our house and even Airbnb-ed our master bedroom to see what that would do. We were even able to get two different people to rent from us at the same time. We are sleeping in kids’ rooms with all those Schell Games moving around.

When Patricia and I started investing in property, we were doing long-term rentals. Here in Colorado, the market was challenging for rents. In 2021, we were assessing what our cashflow was. We were getting $400 a month, maybe getting out of the long-term rentals, charging thousands of dollars in rent even for these places. We are like, “Let’s make an assessment.” I did a bunch of spreadsheets mapped over many years. I was like, “If we sell it, what could we do with equity? Do we buy a bunch of long-term rentals?”

Patricia ended up reading Avery Carl’s book, Short-Term Rental, Long-Term Wealth. She was like, “I’ve got to do these short-term rental things, and this is a whole new way of approaching it,” and I was like, “That sounds great.” I didn’t even think too much about it after that. I was like, “Cool.” We started doing the whole real estate selling and getting the properties done. Through the appreciation game, we had like $250,000 to work with. We were able to 1031 exchange into some short-term rentals.

As Patricia was going through and finding different properties, she found this beach property that was in Texas in Crystal Beach that was put onto the market. Someone had looked at it. Our real estate agent is like, “You guys should check this out.” It was a gorgeous place. It was $925,000 and was on the beach. We are like, “This is crazy amounts of money.” Our own house that we live in is not even that much money. It’s valued at $660,000, but we bought it for $420,000. It was a different time. The appreciation in Colorado has been nice, so it’s been helpful.

For the short-term rental selection process, Patricia did AirDNA to see how well the prospective comparable properties are going to do in terms of how much revenue they bring in through Airbnb through Vrbo. We found this Crystal Beach property. We were like, “This is great.” We ended up getting another property that The Real Estate Robinsons or Tony Robinson was sharing on his Instagram. They had flipped a house in Joshua Tree. Patricia’s like, “Sold,” and then we ended up going and buying that house that they listed and flipped.

We bought the Real Estate Robinson’s second flip in Joshua Tree, and there was a whole bunch of stuff that we wanted to change in that. We wanted to put it in a second bathroom. We ended up launching the first short-term rental in its first place in February of 2022. The Joshua Tree one, which we soft launched in June because we had people working on it. We didn’t want to have that whole thing going.

The reason I stepped in is the whole short-term rental itself was after the first three initial short-term rental bookings, which Airbnb is like, “Twenty percent off and you can get these things,” and more people come to it. They dump about 3,000 to 5,000 people onto your listing when you first launch an Airbnb, so there’s a large exorbitant amount of people that see your listing.

 

The potential statistical value of that large amount of people is that someone is going to book those three bookings. That’s usually the statistic I use with advertising. Out of everyone I show it to, about 10% end up clicking on my links, and out of that 10%, maybe 1% to 2% of those booked save it or they will share it with their family, which I don’t even know about until after they’ve already booked. They are like, “We shared this with our family,” and then they tell me about it. There are all these anecdotal pieces of it.

Patricia came to me and was like, “We need to have bookings. We have these mortgages. What are we going to do?” I was like, “Isn’t this whole new short-term rental thing? I don’t know.” I didn’t know too much about the short-term rental ecosystems or how those even worked on the platforms like Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com. I was like, “I will run some ads. It will be fine.” She’s like, “Don’t tell me you are going to run ads. This is stressful. Aren’t you taking this seriously?” I’m like, “It’s cool. I will run ads. I will spend $100 and take ten days. Let’s see if it’s viability.” I then started getting bookings. I spent $2.43 at one point, and I got a $6,000 booking.

That ROI is pretty good.

That’s pretty cool. Another time, I started running the ads, spent $4 and some change and got a $3,000 booking. I was like, “I do feel that this viability.” Some of them the ads show me that people are not interested in some of the photos I’ve used, and then I can see which photos I need to put up as the front photos. I also use ads as a market research tool for which headlines or titles work to get people to click. I try spreading that information back onto my Airbnb. It’s a cyclical piece of the puzzle. I ended up having this inform this, and then I tested it out here. I throw a bunch of things out to test it. Me, getting into the short-term rental game was because we needed to get more bookings. I was like, “I could do that.”

I have been doing real estate marketing and advertising for a while but I’ve never done short-term rentals. I started talking to other short-term rental people and was like, “People are having a hard time with bookings.” I know exactly how stressful it is not to be able to feel confident that you are going to be able to pay that several thousand dollars mortgage.” If I don’t have money coming in to pay for it, I have to pay it off my own pocket. I don’t think that I want to have that going. I put the effort into dialing in and focusing on how to help short-term rental people get those bookings.

I have been helping people. I’ve gotten over a few dozen different campaigns I have been able to run for folks getting bookings. I do a lot of other assessments of where the people are coming from so they can find where their clientele’s coming from. Through ads, you can shape and create the ways in which people are introduced to your own system. What you offer is different from other people but when you look at it on the Airbnb system where there are all these familiarities, and some of them are super similar.

Through ads you can shape and create the ways in which people are introduced to your system. Share on X

For example, people who invested in the Smokey Mountains in Tennessee. Some of those cabins look very similar. There’s not a lot of differentiation. When people are scrolling through Airbnb and looking at all this stuff, the hard part is they get analysis paralysis like, “I don’t know which one is better. They all look roughly the same. There are A-frames and all these other cabins.”

What the advertising does is it takes people from other platforms and then it puts them into your listing because they are not even seeing other listings. That’s one thing that is helpful because I’m able to charge more money per night on my listing, so I run ads. Over the summer, the highest was $379 more a night than comparable listings in my area. I’m like, “If I’m bringing people to this and those few out of 10% like my place and the 1% or 2% book, I’m getting my rates. If people don’t book with me and are looking around in that local area, then they are booking with my neighbors.” I have an indirect benefit to the area that I’m advertising to because the person to who I showed the ad to didn’t meet my criteria. They still are looking now for a vacation when they hadn’t even thought about vacation beforehand.

It all started with this whole need, and then it ended up being something. I was like, “This is a viable thing.” That’s when I started the business. I was like, “This is going to be something that I can have, and I help.” It’s not even my main thing but now I’m starting to do it more and more. I feel like it’s more fun and exciting because I like helping people, especially helping them make money. That the blissful side of things is when you have those systems in place, and they are working and doing what they are supposed to do so that way, you are not stressed out. Watching Patricia go through some of the stressful moments and I’m all casual, “No worries.”

 

That probably drove her crazy.

I felt bad. I was like, “I’m not trying to be all like hunky dory about it. I will run the ad. It’s what I do.”

It’s funny that you talk about putting in the systems to make it less stressful. I’ve said on this show before that systems are the key to bliss because when you have a system done or processes, you know that things are going to be handled. You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can hand it off to a VA if you so choose or to somebody else to help you. You also have a pretty good idea of what your results are going to be like. Certainly, you have to revisit the systems and results like things that are constantly changing and expanding but I have said many times that it’s a system and process that creates the bliss because it reduces your stress exponentially.

It does. When we feel the stress of paying our own mortgages sometimes, and even though we work and have jobs, we have the money, and it goes in, that’s the system. The job is the system to then facilitate the housing. All these things are already built into our own ecosystems. On the investing side, it is how you make investing work for you. You listen to the experts and take a lot of information in but those systems are all in the same thing.

You build out your Airbnb, Vrbo, and Booking.com. You then have an OwnerREz that connects to those that create one calendar so that way everyone is not double-booking a calendar piece. Having a double-book weekend is expensive, and it can take away your Superhost status if you end up canceling things. There are challenges that you want to avoid. Those systems create the ease of operating that way so you can do far less and enjoy life more. You then can see, “I’m getting far more than I would through my stocks.” It’s different.

Real estate is the number one way to increase wealth in America. If you want to increase it and succeed, you got to do something. I always think back to the Pareto Principle, the 80/20 Rule. Eighty percent of businesses fail in the first two years. These investment properties, when you look at them, they are little mini businesses. If you don’t treat them like a business, you are not going to see their success of it. It’s going to be stressful, and you are going to be one of that 80% that fail. The statistic I saw from BiggerPockets was that over 60% of Airbnb owners sell their Airbnbs within the first year of doing business or something like that.

That’s an interesting statistic.

Patricia will say this all the time, “It’s not for everybody,” and I can account for that. It is a job, and it is being hospitable. If you are not good with people and hire someone that is good with people. You have to have that system or whatever your faults are and ailments in terms of dealing with the hospitality side of things as we go to town on towels. We have more towels than reasonably possible in our short-term rentals. We’ve gotten many people who are like, “I want to leave a ten-star review because of the number of towels you guys had.

At this moment, we are like, “When we go into this short-term rental stuff, how do we want our vacations to appear, and how blissful would it be if this was available for other people?” That’s why we stock that many towels. With hair and all those things, sometimes you need multiple towels to do stuff. If you’ve got kids, you get all these wranglings. There’s a whole bunch of stuff. You can’t have like one towel to use. You must think about how you want to be perceived, especially as a business owner and a hospitality provider.

What makes your property special? That’s all marketing. I used to run Airbnb too out of one of my bedrooms. We used to rent a couple of bedrooms. That was one of the things that we did. People loved the towels. We always had fun towels. I had Polka Dots or Paisleys, and they were plush. People love the towels. It was the weirdest thing. I was like, “What is this?” They are like, “Where did you get these?” It’s so funny. You said you do Airbnb and Vrbo, and what was the calendaring system that you used?

It’s called OwnerRez.com. It’s Owner Reservation. That is our main connecting piece. It does the automation between the different short-term rental platforms. For pricing, calendar, availability, images, text, and all of those elements, you can change on those individual platforms but it takes time and effort. You can even pay OwnerRez for $500 or something like that, and they set all the stuff up for you.

There are emails that come out of their automated emails when you have a lease agreement you need to be signed and all these different things. There are cool features in that. If you pay a little bit more monthly, there’s a direct booking site, so you don’t have to pay half a separate website built out there. For direct booking sites, it’s a formidable experience doing it.

You are literally becoming the hotel. That’s all the liability and scariness of that. There are things that you have to pay attention to for direct booking, which is why I’m like, “I send most of my traffic to Airbnb now.” When I send traffic to Airbnb, I’m inorganically increasing the traffic flow to that listing view page. By increasing the views of that, I’m telling Airbnb’s search algorithm, “This is a popular property.”

It will put it on the top.

It raises in rank and makes you successful in terms of both organic searches as well as your ad searches. That way, the ads are influencing the ability of Airbnb to see you as a viable property. Since Airbnb changed things in the summer of 2022, it’s crucial to have some ways in which you can stand out on the Airbnb platform. What Airbnb wants now is unique places with very strange experiences. They want to promote all those things more so than the run-of-the-mill places that are perfectly reasonable to vacation in. Each of the systems is a different ecosystem. There’s a whole different Oprah episode that we can go into those things.

Airbnb changed things in the summer of 2022, and it's really crucial to have some sort of way in which you can stand out on the Airbnb platform. Share on X

I don’t think that the Vrbo clientele leaves reviews quickly enough, so I don’t even push my Vrbo. Although, we get 30% of our bookings from Vrbo for the Crystal Beach property. I don’t get any of those bookings from my Joshua Tree property. There’s a difference in the type of person who’s using those things. Airbnb is almost like Kleenex in terms of brand recognition for the short-term rental game itself.

As investors, when we are going through it, we want to be in all of them. Whatever one you are on, you are going to have an opportunity for people to find you. In the Venn Diagram of the internet, there are all these people that go to certain sites or all of them. That’s a way in which you can stand out by standing up for all of them.

I want to start digging into the actual advertising piece. First of all, thank you for the algorithm update because I was not aware of that. As with everything else, whether it’s Amazon, Google, Facebook or whatever, everybody is updating their algorithms, and they have a definite slant on how things are going. I wasn’t aware of that update. Thank you so much for that.

It was a massive one. They call it the summer release. It was detrimental. I couldn’t even find my property listed on Airbnb after that. For their beachfront or ocean view category, they didn’t show my property at all. There are all these other things about those systems not working to their full effect of what they should do when they make those changes. Doing ads is what I have been succeeding at. I don’t even need to worry about being on that platform as much. The location is now findable but in those moments, it’s a little freaky when my name just dropped off.

I’ve had that happen too. I was a Superhost, and my property was always in the top three, and then suddenly, it disappeared. I was like, “What happened here?” It was interesting. Anyway, so let’s talk about advertising since that’s your genius. Talk to us about creating a digital presence to compete effectively. You’ve talked a little bit about it already on a high level but give us a little bit more on what to do.

I published a little book, and it’s very tiny and thin. It’s only 37 pages. I made a quick little guide on how to excel at short-term rental advertising. When you think about the digital presence and what people succeed at like “Where are people hanging out online?” We have a few different areas where people are online. Meta has Facebook and Instagram, and some other different websites that are all in that circle and sphere.

 

You have other ones like Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok. TikTok is a great landscape because many people are on TikTok now. It’s excessive amounts of people. I have a friend doing syndication stuff as well. He’s going to start doing content on TikTok, teaching people about how to do syndications, where you all pull money in, and you can buy a property together. There are a lot of different avenues with that. They are also being used for NFTs, the Non-Fungible Tokens. Those are other areas that I have been helping people with as well. Not just with the advertising.

For the ad systems, you can operate on ecosystems like Meta, which is what I like to use for a lot of the short-term rental or real estate investing stuff, in general. With Meta Ads, I can literally create an advertisement that has an image or video. I usually choose up to 10 images or videos for 1 ad campaign. I then have five different pieces of text. I like using people’s reviews.

Whenever someone stays at your property, if you have a short-term rental or an investment property that is like commercial property or something else, you have some statement of actual patron or a customer of that and they are like, “I love this. This is amazing. I love staying here.” People trust what other people are saying more than what we are telling them as the actual owners. It’s not necessarily like, “Come visit my thing. It’s the best,” but it’s like, “See what people are saying about this,” and then you make your decision based on that. That helps people make those eccentric.

People trust what other people are saying more than what we're telling them as the actual owners. Share on X

You run ads with a bunch of different combinations of text and little calls to action and create those little moments to use that digital presence to then tell people about it. Oftentimes people will say, “You have to be active on social media and all these things.” I’m like, “I don’t have a lot of time, and I’m not very active on some things.” I know the viability of being active on a social media platform like Facebook if I have a business page. If I post a bunch of things there every single day, I can’t even promise I would get much action or activity out of any of those posts.

People are oftentimes like, “I don’t see the viability of it,” but if you run ads, your posts are getting to people instead of them having to find it through all the different things. Facebook from 2018 is when they made the change. The first thing you see is events in groups. The things your friends are doing, the groups that you are in, and people are talking about stuff that you care about. You then see your friends’ stuff, and then below, all the way at the bottom, you see business pages.

Those business pages, that’s the viable thing that used to be what worked and tell people about stuff. I now post a few things on there and treat it like a digital billboard. Ultimately, I have enough information and photos on that Facebook Meta page where people then say, “This is what this is.” If it’s a short-term rental, they see where it is, the photos of it, some of the things to do in the area, and also the link to go book.

I use ads to tell people about the booking page. I literally don’t point them to the Facebook page. I tell them about the link. They see the Facebook page in the ad so that they can click on it. This is funny because I use a lot of different KPIs or Key Performance Indicators to see whether or not these ads are working. From the Facebook side of it, it’s the number of clicks I have on the ad is one thing but then the number of shares, interactions, responses, reactions, loves, hearts, all those little things, engagement with people talking about it, commenting, telling their friends, and tagging them in it. There’s all this activity that happens, and it’s lovely.

When people save the posts, I’m like, “This is golden,” because someone saved it. They might not be a client of mine now but they are probably going to book at some point. If they are aware of it and since they clicked on my ad, I can target the people who’ve clicked on my ads. I can say, “Remember the ad you clicked on. You should totally take a vacation. You deserve it. You are amazing.”

When you have those moments, these ads are doing all the posts for you. You could set up an ad campaign. All the different combinations of modular like texts, images, video, and all those things Facebook’s algorithm will put together for you. It will find the most performing, the most clickable, the most liked, the most effective, and a combination of all those things. With that, you can see a lot of cool data. You can start seeing, “What are people interested in?”

 

When I was starting with my Crystal Beach place, I was like, “This is a luxury place. It’s got vaulted ceilings. It’s great. This is better than anything I’ve ever lived in myself.” When I started using luxury or things I would normally do for luxury real estate, people weren’t clicking on it. When I used family-friendly or fun for the whole family, people clicked on those things in droves. I was like, “I see who my clients are.” They are people who have kids and families that are bringing people together. Ultimately, those little friendship circles are also a part of that too so it’s not families.

Those are popular keywords that I then put into my listing titles. That way, I’m like, “This triggers more people to click on this. If I update my listing, it’s going to then match what my ad said.” The ads inform what I put onto my listing itself, and the top photos go to the forefront of those listings. On my Instagram page we don’t have much activity in terms of us posting on some of our Instagram pages.

Our Joshua Tree property, that LA, San Diego, and Las Vegas crowd who usually rents in Joshua Tree use Instagram more. That’s something that we organically post on Instagram for those ecosystems to work a little bit more. I don’t see the viability of it quite yet but it’s nice to have some of those things working out.

Those markets for the Joshua Tree property like Instagram. How did you figure that out as opposed to Facebook?

When Facebook runs any of the ads, it’s going to send them out to Instagram and Facebook. It has all of those arranged. With Instagram, I saw the clicks were far less. I spent money straight up on Instagram $100, to see the viability of it. Out of that $100 spent, I didn’t get any results in terms of bookings. That made me feel that it wasn’t necessarily a viable source for new bookings from those ads. That’s something that might change. There’s an ebb and flow to things.

I’ve even started doing ads on Pinterest, and I can talk about that a little later but there are ways in which you can reach the audience that you are trying to reach. There are mechanisms that they are paying attention to online. You even mentioned TikTok. There are a lot of people on TikTok but I’m not necessarily sure how many people are going to be booking vacation rentals or even doing real estate investing. It’s the demographic of who is booking. When they are clicking on your ads, those things all come into factor.

The demographic who is actually booking and when they're clicking on your ads, those things all really come into factor. Share on X

I put a lot of effort into Facebook for a while, the beginning parts of my business. It’s not for real estate but more for real estate investing for women and bringing women together and the community. What’s interesting is that the level of effort that it took to try to get things moving was so massive. It’s not my expertise, and it became such a chore for me. It was not fun. I was spending too much time there, as you said. We are all busy.

You put in time and energy, and you want to see some results if you are going to continue. I found that with Facebook, I was not getting the results that were helping my ladies. On Instagram, I spent a lot of time on Instagram but I don’t post a lot anymore because, for a huge amount of time, I wasn’t getting any following or whatever. I’m a little bit of a social media fail, which I’m okay with. I decided it’s okay to be a social media fail. It’s interesting to me that you are talking so much about ads, and you don’t have to be active on social media and still, doing the ads is effective.

You are not a failure on this stuff. All of the efforts that you put in, even though you don’t see the value, still have some value to someone out there. When those people find you and go back through your past posts, they are like, “I get a sense of this,” as more of a rapport with you because you do that stuff. That heavy lifting up front is viable.

For ads, you can set this up. Facebook figures it out. It’s probably going to deliver over 3,500 different ads. When you think about the thousands of advertisements that are going out there and people being shown based on their interests and demographic area, sometimes I will target one city or different cities. I rarely target the whole United States.

I will go in and find specific areas where there are certain investors, people looking for certain properties or different things of that nature. I will find where the guests are based on a large blanket area and set the ads. I then see where the clicks are coming from as specific cities. I drill in and only advertise to those cities. I try to make it that way.

I’m learning stuff with the ads. Even with Facebook itself, if you have some posts that have bigger interests or video posts, there are some things you can test out on social media without running them as ads. I like to run them as ads to test them out before I put them on social media. You can do both but it informs me of the other.

One of the best things now is that the videos are portrait-size. Those videos are more converting for Facebook’s own statistical analysis of how people are interacting with content. I usually talk to Facebook’s ad support team a couple of times a week. This summer, they have been promoting Reels. The most effective ads now are the fifteen-second ads that go between Reels. They are fifteen-second ads like a video, portrait size with your phone and film it is saying what you do and where you are at. Even if you are an investor trying to get other investors to pull money for a syndicate, there are different mechanisms that you can do to tell people about what you are doing.

That’s the number one thing about real estate stuff. No matter what real estate thing you are doing, you talk about it. If you talk about it, you don’t know who else might be interested in it, who else might be doing something in that or who else might be interested in investing money with you that you can use their money to do things with.

 

There are all these different options that are viable ways of making money that you don’t even have to be doing all the hard work. For those people who are doing that syndication thing, there are beautiful opportunities. For the people doing short-term rental stuff, there are amazing opportunities for people to be reminded of taking vacations. You are like, “I provide this luxury experience for people who have vacations.” There are all these people doing amazing things with their own properties. They have galactic game rooms, the Patrick Swayze room down in the Palm Springs area. He’s with STR Nation.

There are all these different companies that are building themselves out by designing the different experiences of what makes a cool vacation. Now that we are all thinking about it, we spent some pandemic times not going anywhere and going to some of these places, and the viability of some of the short-term rentals went up during that pandemic because a lot of hotels closed but now hotels have been doing smear campaigns. They are like anti-Airbnb and other short-term rentals. They are like, “They are spooky, and you have to take out the garbage yourself and all these things.” They will say the worst-case scenarios.

I’ve seen some people who have minimum night stays that have not seen much results from advertising. If your property is not viable for whatever variable the person needs to have like calendar availability, location or the number of beds you have. I can’t guarantee that there will be bookings with any of the ads I do but we can try and find out. Also, the added benefit of not having to run your own social media makes it easier, and you have something running.

In advertising, I spend $10 a day for each of my properties. It’s $300 a month for a property. If I run people’s ads, I usually charge them 1-to-1 based on what that is usually of the ad spent. For the most part, I’ve spent $700 a month on advertising. I’m like, “I got X amount of money in bookings by telling more people about it.” It’s a justifiable cost for me. When I think about the time I save by not having to post a bunch to get people to even pay attention to it, I had all that time to spend with my three-year-old daughter, which is far more important for me to ensure that I’m paying attention to her than worrying about posting on my Instagram and Facebook pages.

You said something that I want to go back to. It’s the vertical video. Are people posting them in their Reels and lives or are they posting them in their groups? How are they doing that?

When they post them live, it goes onto stories. That’s a viable solution for those. When they post them, even as a story on Facebook or Instagram, it does different things. You can take the same video and post it to Facebook Stories, Instagram Stories, TikTok, and YouTube. There are all these different places you can put that same video. That same video could act as a trend rolling. I like YouTube for a lot of this stuff as well.

I don’t know the viability of what people are booking for on YouTube but if you are looking for other real estate people or doing investing, there is a lot of information on YouTube. They are making YouTube Shorts, which are essentially the same thing as the Stories on Facebook or Instagram. Snapchat is where that all originated from but that’s not a viable ecosystem for this. This is good for video games.

TikTok is where everyone is now. Even if, as investors, they are like, “I’m going to try that out.” TikTok has an advertising opportunity. You create an ad account, pay them per view, and you have to submit a whole video. It’s usually a pretty simple process but I have been doing ads for so long online. It’s not easy for a lot of people. Even setting up Facebook ads takes some effort to get some things going because it is a tricky regulated system. Sometimes you have to submit your business information to be verified. That way, you can advertise. Facebook is getting touchy about things, especially if it’s around any political season about ad accounts in general and what you are advertising. It’s crucial.

Is a Story the same as a Reel?

No, but it goes in the same spot. A Reel is a minute or longer video that lives in the Stories environment. Story environments like Facebook Stories and even Instagram separated out Reels into their own section now. It’s still being put into the regular post areas. Everything with these platforms changes. It always adapts to new things. If someone has a cool new product idea, they are like, “Let’s do that everywhere.”

There was a whole Clubhouse thing that came out while we were all at home during the pandemic. Everyone is talking and having voice chats. All of the platforms started having that thing as well. The hot thing now is Reels. If it’s a minute-long version of a video that’s shot in that 9X16 format, that is all that you need to do. If you are not doing those Reels, you can post a little bit.

If you don’t want to post those Reels and have it done through ads, you make the ad that’s a 9X16 video and then submit it up to be included as a Reel, and then all of those will show up. This leaves you not having to worry about doing it and not doing a lot of them. You can have one doing most of the work for you. It takes a lot of that stress of having to create a lot of content.

My partner, Patricia, was getting stressed. She’s like, “I have to make content and all this stuff.” I was like, “It’s okay. Make 1 or 2 that you like, maybe even 5.” I’m a big fan of testing. I like to spaghetti test everything. If I’m going to throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, then I’m going to see, “The 2 or 3 things worked well, and I’m going to keep doing those things.”

If you iterate on the process and make it even better each time, I can’t guarantee that it will always be the same thing that works well. After people work with me, I’ve got at least a good idea that I can flip a switch on, and then all of a sudden, they have ads running and a bunch of traffic going to their listing. If the listing has things on it that make people want to book it, then great but if they have anything on it barely, they have low information, low images, and bad images, we can find out pretty quickly if that’s a viable listing.

Throw a bunch of stuff at a wall, then see the two or three things that worked really well and keep doing those things. If you iterate on the process and make it so that it's even better each time. Share on X

I’ve worked with a couple of guys over the course of running ads. They determined that it was the property they needed to sell. They were able to find out quickly instead of having months and months of mortgage costs and ultimately draining some of the reserves. They can find out, “This is not a viable product,” or maybe they need to do a different type of investing. Maybe it’s long-term or midterm.

I love the midterm investing stuff, especially because of the traveling nurse mentality. There are many resources that those people have that we, as investors, provide. I know several investors that only invest within 500 feet to 1,000 feet away from hospital access. They have patients as well as nurses who do traveling nurse stuff and stay for more than 30 to whatever timeframe. It’s usually pretty decent money for that thing. It’s not some of the short-term rental money but you can get three times the actual cost of the mortgage and rent.

As an investor, you must figure out, “Which one of these areas you want to do it in.” I’m still a big fan of long-term rentals. We have 4 doors in Iowa, and they are 2 duplexes. Patricia went out to Iowa to close on one of the properties. I had a buddy who moved out there. She’s like, “You got to invest in Dubuque, Iowa.” We are like, “Dubuque, Iowa. That’s weird.”

We have two of these like little duplexes that rent $1,500 a month without having to do much. That’s just cashflow. When we started our journey, we had $400 a month cashflow. We are like, “This is tricky.” We are able to get a second job’s income on a monthly basis coming through moving some of that money to long-term rental. That ecosystem is a little bit different, and I don’t do advertising too much for that. We only do ads when we are placing people in there, which is 9 to 12 months at the time. It’s not too crazy.

It could go on forever. We didn’t get to do our three rapid-fire questions or anything. I always have to make that judgment call on myself about, “Do we move this along or do we go with the flow?” In your case, what I’m finding is there’s so much knowledge in your head, and you speak in this stream of consciousness, so we get all these jewels that came out. Those were off-topic but amazing. Thank you for that. Ladies, I hope that that was okay with you. Every time I would like to say, “Let’s get to this next question,” then he would say something, and I was like, “What?” and I would lean in. I hope you ladies had that same experience.

Before we sign off, we are going to talk about Pinterest. Mike has had a lot of experience as he’s talked with Facebook, YouTube, and Instagram but he started working on Pinterest. I wanted him to share with you that experience because we’ve never had anybody talk about that on this show. We are going to be doing that in EXTRA. Stay tuned for that. Mike, could you tell the ladies how they can reach you?

You can reach me at STRAdvertising.com. I’m pretty active on Facebook. I have a Facebook group, Short Term Rental Marketing Advice (Powered by BTA) Better Than Awesome is my main umbrella company. I’m happy to provide help. I have a lot of free resources. In fact, I normally charge for this but I’m going to give your audience a copy of my eBook on how to excel in short-term rental advertising. It’s a quick and dirty little walkthrough on how to do this with my processes, how to iterate on things, and a lot of my methodology. I talk about my own experience of getting into real estate stuff but it’s very short. It’s 37 pages, and there are lots of pictures.

Essentially, it’s a quick, easy start guide to get you into it. I have a little extra bonus in there. It’s a digital presence quick start guide that tells people, “Once you are over quick and dirty. This is the platforms you should get onto. This is how the ad is set up. This is a demographic you want to look at,” but I will be able to send that to everyone that has an eBook offer. We will make sure we have a link for you guys.

That’s STRAdvertising.com/moneeka. Thank you so much for giving my ladies that book. I know it’s out there, and it’s normally $9.99. It’s so sweet that you are giving it to my ladies. Thank you for that, Mike.

You are incredible, and I love what you are doing here. My mom raised me right. I’m trying to be a good ally. One of the most deserving populaces to be able to have better information and compete at the higher levels, as I said earlier, even the big boys club, that nomenclature is totally inappropriate. Let’s make that into something where it’s the big players club where it is something that people don’t have an association of gender with it. It’s very important that, as a cis White man, I use whatever privilege I can to impart some benefit to people who are not in the weird privileged state that I am by societal inheritance.

I don’t do much to earn some of the things that people inherently give me as I walk into the room but what I do have and gained from that I can impart with some pretty solid wisdom that’s actionable and can help make money. I genuinely feel pretty confident. Everyone that I’ve worked with teaches how to do this or even uses the book to do it. They are all very pleased with how short and concise it is, and it’s not a bunch of BS.

Thirty-seven pages are awesome. I wrote a 37-page book also. You have to get good at making your point. It’s hard but it’s good for the reader.

I started making TV commercials as one of my first video jobs. That highly complex thing into a short-distilled conversation piece is what I’ve specialized in.

Thank you so much for all that you’ve offered at this portion of the show. I can’t wait to talk in EXTRA about Pinterest.

Thank you so much for having me again. I appreciate everyone. If you guys have questions, feel free to reach out. My group has a lot of great people, and I have been helping with as well. They all have a good insight into their own stuff. I like information sharing, so let’s get everyone in there. I have been banned from other groups on Facebook for sharing free information. There’s a thing out there, and people are not interested in what I’m doing because it’s working and competing with what they have. That’s unfortunate but everyone deserves to compete at some of those higher levels without having too much.

Thank you. Ladies, stay tuned. We’ve got more. We are going to be talking about Pinterest in EXTRA, so if you are subscribed, stay tuned. If you are not but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com, and you can subscribe there. For those of you that are leaving us now, thank you so much for spending this time with Mike and I. 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 will see you soon.

 

Important Links

• Mike Denman
• STRAdvertising.com
• Short-Term Rental, Long-Term Wealth
• Booking.com
• OwnerREz
• Short Term Rental Marketing Advice (Powered by BTA)
• STRAdvertising.com/moneeka
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

Get Dr. Shaler’s free EBook: “How to Spot a Hijackal”  at https://www.forrelationshiphelp.com/help-handling-hijackals-spot-signup/

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

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Learn how to create a consistent income stream by only working 5 hours a month the Blissful Investor Way.

Grab my FREE guide at http://www.BlissfulInvestor.com

 

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Self-Directed IRA: How To Keep Your Retirement Funds Secure And Invest In Anything You Want With Kaaren Hall

 

Self-directed IRAs have grown in popularity over recent years. They offer more flexibility, including the ability to use your IRA funds to invest in things other than stocks and bonds. However, they are not as common as 401Ks, and there’s yet a lot to understand about them. That’s why in this episode, Kaaren Hall shares her expertise in self-directed IRAs and how women like her can thrive in real estate investment. Kaaren is a Self-Directed IRA Expert and CEO at uDirect IRA Services and OCREIA. Tune in now and learn how to start self-directed IRAs!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Self-Directed IRA: How To Keep Your Retirement Funds Secure And Invest In Anything You Want With Kaaren Hall

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am excited to welcome back to the show for the third time, Kaaren Hall. For those of you who have not checked out her shows before, let me give you a reminder of her bio. This is what we have. Despite being in the midst of a recession and mortgage market collapse, Kaaren Hall founded and made a resounding success of uDirect IRA Services. She discovered a strategic way to put her twenty-plus years in mortgage banking, real estate, and property management to use.

The solution was an untapped market for both her skills and for investors, which is self-directed IRAs. Through uDirect IRA, she has guided tens of thousands of Americans through the process of diversifying their investments using self-directed IRAs with $1 billion plus under management. Learn more about Kaaren and its thriving company at UDirectIRA.com. Kaaren, you are very distracting.

I’m so sorry. You have to have fun because it’s serious business. We like to keep it light.

How are you?

I’m doing super well. I saw you. That was lovely. All is well.

Kaaren is incredibly generous with her time in her business as well as in her personal life. She has been putting together these boss lady retreats. For some of us ladies that don’t have the time to do stuff, she puts it all together. We show up and have this luxurious time with all these powerful women. We don’t talk business. We are not there to talk shop. We hang out and get to know each other’s hearts. It has been so much fun to hang out with Kaaren and some of the other ladies that were there. She also invited me to this formal event where I got to dress up in a beautiful gown. Who gets to do that? It was so much Fun.

How many gowns do you have? People don’t do gowns but it was so much fun.

There was so much eye can be there with all the men in tuxedos. It was so good. We had a great time. That was not too long ago. It’s so nice to connect with you again.

I’m happy we can be talking because the IRAs have always been a hot thing. There is some stuff on the griddle, if you will, coming up. It’s a good time to talk about it.

Why don’t you start with that? That’s a great lead-in.

When you read my bio, and you talked about an untapped market in 2009, it was an untapped market. Many people had no idea what a self-directed IRA was. These things were created. The IRA, in general, was created in 1975. It has been around for so long. It’s tried and true. In 2009, all of a sudden, it was recession time. There was money. You can’t get a loan from a bank, especially for real estate investing, because it was such a tough time. That’s when I opened uDirect. People discovered the self-directed IRA as they know it. That’s when they discovered it because they could tap into other people’s IRAs to raise money for their deals.

I want to interject one thing here that I’ve done. Every single time you talk about this, I want to put it in here, too. A lot of people say, “I’ve got a self-directed IRA,” because they’ve got it with Fidelity, Vanguard or whatever. “They let me direct as much as I want.” They let you direct on certain vehicles, usually mutual funds. They will let you do some REITs if you are interested in real estate. They will mostly stock.

They are stock market-type vehicles. They won’t let you invest, for instance, in real estate. What Kaaren is talking about is a true self-directed IRA because you can invest in other things that are not stock-based. That’s the big differentiating factor between a true self-directed IRA and a, “I’ve got a self-directed IRA in my 401(k).”

It is self-directed. IRAs are IRAs. An IRA is like a bucket that holds assets. What makes it self-directed is the asset you choose. When you talk to your financial advisor, they are licensed. You know this. You are licensed. If you are licensed to sell market-correlated assets, that’s it. You can advise on that but you can’t advise outside of the stock market. We are all about the alternative asset. What makes it self-directed is that you are choosing the asset. We are not telling you what to invest in. We don’t offer anything for sale. It’s truly self-directed.

 

Back to the recession, it was great to see and witness the grassroots level of capital raise. There was a huge need for capital and projects. There were so many houses that needed to be rehabbed and fixed. One of the solutions was IRAs. IRAs were a grassroots person-to-person way to rebuild our economy. In retirement accounts altogether, there is nearly $40 trillion in retirement. That’s an enormous amount.

Let’s put that money to work, making everything better. My IRA loans your business some money. Your business pays my IRA back the loan. My IRA purchases a house. The renters pay the rent to my IRA. There are private placements and precious metals. There are so many different kinds of assets. That’s when it came to the forefront of most people’s minds.

Self-directing has been around for a long time. As you and I were chatting about off-camera, not a lot has changed in the years since I have been in the industry. A few things have. A couple of Case Laws have passed, drawing lines because the IRS doesn’t always make things clear. With the IRs, it’s always, “It depends.” We’ve received, in many years, a skosh of clarity from them but hardly any. It’s largely unchanged.

We are looking at a couple of possible changes again on that griddle of IRAs. One of them, and this has got bipartisan support called the Secure Act 2.0. The biggest thing that we will see coming out of this Secure Act 2.0 is an increase in the RMDA or Required Minimum Distribution Age. Why do you care? It’s not a big deal. This is why you care. If you were at a level where you needed to take money out of your IRA, that’s fine.

 

If you were at a level where, “I’m doing good. I want to leave my money in my retirement account, so it could continue to grow because I don’t need it now,” it was 70 and a half, and then Secure Act 2.0 passed, and it became 72. It’s going to go to 75. Your money can keep continuing to grow all those years before you are required to take it out. Isn’t that great?

Yeah. This is the key. We get a little bit confused about it but people don’t realize that in IRAs, there is a required age. If you are 70 and still working, you don’t need all that money. You are still required to take out a portion at 72. I have known many people who are like, “I don’t want to take it out yet. I’m not ready. I want it to keep growing.” Yay on them at 72 that they are like, “I’m still going strong,” but the government didn’t give them any option. It sounds like there’s a possibility of a new option, which I love. That means you can take it out younger than 70. Is it 59? What is the lowest?

59 and a half is when you can take it out without penalty.

That’s a good start if you want to.

The required minimum distribution is you have to. That brings up another good point about the Secure Act 2.0. If you forget your RMD and don’t take it, the penalty is 50% of what that RMD would have been. It’s so big. It’s bad. What the 2.0 is looking to do, and it’s in writing. We will see how it comes out. Secure Act 2.0 would lessen that penalty to probably 25%. That’s what they are talking about. I know RMDs are probably far off for a lot of people but this is important, maybe for your parents or your other family members that have to take this money out. It’s good to know that things are going to become more lenient in that regard. I’m happy about that.

When you are deciding where to put your savings money or you are investing money away, those are things that you are going to consider. If I want full liquidity and full control, I may not want to put it in an IRA of any sort. IRAs have limits on how much you can put in and all of that stuff too. As you are making your financial plan for your future, some of it you are planning for retirement, for cashflow, for now, for vacations, and for life happening. Which portion do you continue to put into your IRA, and how do you decide to utilize that? How much are you going to prioritize? The more flexibility we have on that, the more likely we are to prioritize that as a possibility. Wouldn’t you agree?

Completely. What you said brought up a point. You are using that money. When you are investing using an IRA, why do you do it? Why would you use an IRA? It’s because of its tax-protected status. If it’s like a SEP, a traditional IRA or a 401(k), chances are it is tax-deferred. You are not paying tax until you take the money out. If it’s a Roth, it’s tax-free, assuming you need two qualifying conditions like being 59 and a half and having a Roth for five years.

It’s the tax treatment. That’s the reason you use an IRA to invest. You are not going to pay the tax in a typical IRA, the traditional or SEP IRA, for example, until you take the money out. You can make a huge killing. Maybe you bought a building, and 1 year or 10 years later, you sell it. Maybe you made $100,000. We don’t need $100,000. You need $10,000. You want to take up $10,000, so you don’t have to pay tax on that whole cashflow experience. It’s the amount that you need. You pay the tax as you direct per diem.

When you are putting your financial plan together, it gives you more control. For me, I’m all about choice. I want control over my money. That’s what it’s all about for me. Choice in my money gives me a choice in life.

Plus, when you contribute, unless you make too much and hit a certain amount, you can also perhaps take a tax deduction for your contribution. This 2022 or coming up in 2023, the contribution limits went up because we see inflation. We saw the biggest increase. If you have a solo 401(k) in 2022, the cap is either 25% of your income or $61,000, the lesser of. In 2022, the contribution limit was a lesser of 25% of your income or $61,000. You can make that 2022 contribution all the way until your tax filing deadline. There’s an end to that but you can do that and make a prior year contribution.

For 2023, here’s where the contribution limits had a very surprising increase. It went up $5,000, which is very unusual in this arena. It’s 25% of your income or $66,000, the lesser of. If you have a solo 401(k), that is a huge advantage to you to be able to contribute $5,000 more and, hopefully, most likely get a tax break on that.

I know a lot of people reading do not remember what a solo 401(k) is. Could you define that really quickly?

Sure. We know what a 401(k) is at work. It’s a savings plan. Unlike an IRA, this is a 401(k). It’s a different animal. It’s the same purpose but a different animal. An IRA is one thing like a SEP, which is a Simplified Employee Pension. An IRA is one thing but the solo 401(k) is two things. It’s an employer portion and an employee portion. It’s two buckets.

If you are self-employed with no full-time employees in any of the companies that you own, then you can have a solo 401(k). You qualify for it, and you can contribute more. It has two buckets. Those are the employer and the employee bucket or we call it the plan and the participant. In the participant portion, which is the smaller portion, that can be all Roth. That’s one of the great things about the solo 401(k).

Another great thing about a solo 401(k), if you qualify for it, is that you can take out a plan loan. You can borrow from your solo 401(k) for your personal use. That is maybe to buy a personal home, take a vacation, pay for college or whatever. You must pay your 401(k) back over a five-year period, either monthly or quarterly, at a market rate. It’s like a little investment. The loan turns out to be an investment for your plan. You can have that for personal use. It’s huge. You can’t do that in an IRA.

There are other benefits. If you have an IRA and want to invest in real estate, that’s great. Many people do. If you have a solo 401(k) and invest in real estate, that’s also great. If one of these accounts wants to take a loan, it’s a solo 401(k) that is not subject to the UDFI tax for an acquisition loan. We all love the power of leverage. In our personal lives, leverage is yay. In an IRA or 401(k), typically, the proceeds that the account earns because of leverage are subject to this UDFI tax. If it’s for acquisition, then this solo 401(k) has an exemption. That’s another great thing about the solo 401(k).

Tell me about that tax.

We will break off solo 401(k) for a second because it’s a great account if you are self-employed and have no full-time employees. It’s the bomb. There are two times an IRA can be taxed. We use IRAs, 401(k)s, and all these plans to save on tax. It’s not income tax. It’s UDFI and UBIT tax. That is what it is. If you want to jot something down for our readers, it’s IRS.Gov Publication 598. You can go deep there on Pub 598.

We will use simple numbers. Your IRA purchases a house, and it’s $100,000. That’s great. In your IRA, you only had $70,000 to put in, so you borrowed $30,000. Thirty percent of that acquisition cost is leveraged. Your renters pay the $1,000 rent on that $100,000 house. 30% of that $1,000 was earned because of leverage. That 30% that was earned due to leverage is subject to the UDFI tax or Unrelated Debt Financed Income Tax.

We are talking about your IRA owning a house and a renter. Here’s another situation where the UDFI tax comes into play and catches people by surprise. That’s private equity. If your IRA loans money to a private equity capital razor, that’s different. If your IRA has an equity position and ownership position in private equity and that asset sponsor is taking leverage in the deal, then part of the money your IRA earns is because of the leverage the asset sponsor took. You are going to owe UDFI, and you might not know it. That’s one of the things when you do your due diligence on a private placement. Always read it. Always have your attorney review it. Take a look and see whether this asset sponsor is taking on cap or taking on leverage.

 

It’s not the end of the world when you file a 990-T, which is the tax form. You get to take a deduction, so maybe there will be no tax at all. You still have to file. Maybe it’s a wash, and it’s not a big deal but you want to know. That’s because if you need to file the 990-T and you don’t, the IRS will come knocking eventually and say, “Why didn’t you file a 990-T?” They are going to know because the asset sponsor is going to issue a K-1 to you. They share that K-1 with the IRS, and the IRS knows, “Red light here. This is what we should expect. We should expect a 990-T because there was income earned because of leverage.” A lot of people don’t know that.

That was an awful lot of good information. It blew up my brain. Can I ask some questions?

Please do.

We have a lot of boss ladies that do syndication. Let’s say, for instance, we invest with one of our ladies. For many of them, their minimum is $50,000. My audience, you know what we are talking about. Let’s say you put $50,000 in a syndication deal, and it’s got a five-year span. Your preferred rate is 7%. Your IRR is supposed to be whatever it is. We get our K-1 every year. Let’s get specific. How does that work? I know you explained it to me but let’s break it down a little bit more, so I can understand what you said. Is that okay? I know you are not a tax consultant. I’m clear about that. What you said was interesting, and I’m afraid I missed something because I’m in that situation.

Some of our friends, I invested with them too but I’ve invested as a note investor like a lender. I don’t have to worry about these taxes because my IRA doesn’t have an equity position. My IRA is the lender. It’s different.

You are not a preferred partner. You are just carrying a note.

That’s correct. I like to think I’m preferred.

There’s something. Your preferred rate is 7%, 9% or 10%, and then they are going to refinance and give you back your capital and then some. You get part of the rent every month, and then eventually, they are going to sell, and you are going to get some of that equity. You then have a gain because you’ve taken depreciation. There’s all this good stuff.

That’s the beauty of making money right there.

That was pretty cool. When you say that you are just carrying a note, is that not the same as what I said?

It is similar but I don’t have an equity state. I’m a lender, not an equity owner.

That’s also interesting. As an equity owner, for instance, like what I’ve got going on, how does that translate? Do you know?

If your IRA is an equity owner and your IRA earns money because of leverage, then it kicks in this UDFI tax. It’s a tax on unrelated income tax. It is related to investing. I don’t quite get that definition because you are investing but that’s what it’s called. It’s the IRS. Go figure. The thing about it is that if your IRA earns capital due to leverage. It’s not money that you contributed. It’s not money you saved. You are not earning a certain percentage of that return because of your savings. You earn that return because of the leverage that the asset sponsor took out. It’s subject to tax. You would talk to your tax advisor, show them the K-1, and have them file a 990-T.

 

That’s only if it’s invested with an IRA.

With a retirement account. That’s correct. I’m all in the bubble of retirement accounts. That’s all I speak on. It is inside the bubble.

That’s interesting. I didn’t know all that. That’s cool.

It’s a good thing to look for because so many people are caught unaware.

What were some of the other things you were headed towards?

It’s hard to remember but we talked about the Secure Act, what’s happening with RMDs, and the possible changes. When you and I were at this event, we heard economists speaking about what’s on the horizon. Nobody has a crystal ball but it certainly could lead to perhaps lower-priced real estate again. We might see that again. If we do, that might be a good time to acquire real estate again. Buy low, sell high, I don’t think that’s giving investment advice. Everybody knows that. We may have an uptake in people investing in brick and mortar and sticks and bricks real estate again, having tenants, and going through that. Why don’t I talk a little bit about what it’s like to own real estate in an IRA?

Please, that’s what I was going to ask. Tell us how that works.

Do you know how we buy a stock where we go online? That’s what I do anyway. I click and I’m like, “I want this many shares,” and it’s there. There’s no problem. The first is buying a house. Let’s say that’s what we are doing here. You got to go through escrow. You got to do all that title. You can’t get away from that part. Your IRA comes in with the money.

If you need leverage, we talked about the non-recourse loan that your IRA would take to borrow money. We are there. We are at the closing table. The offer has been made in the name of the IRA, either you have leverage or you don’t. Maybe you’ve got two partners buying it together concurrently and are ready to close. That’s great. You then close on real estate.

I want to clarify. Let’s say, for instance, we are talking $50,000 again. You are buying a $200,000 piece of property. You put in the $50,000 from your account but that controls much more. Your 25% controls four times as much in the asset. That’s the way real estate leverage works. There’s a special kind of loan that can be given to an IRA that’s not given to the rest of us. That’s what she was referring to when she said non-recourse loan. Those are the loans that you can get if you’ve only got a certain amount of the value of the property to invest.

It threw me off but that’s true. You’ve got this property, and you are buying it. We could go off on so many rabbit holes but I’m going to stick with it. Your IRA, let’s say, owns 100%. You didn’t use leverage. It bought the building straight out with your savings, whatever building it is. What do you do with it? There are things called prohibited transactions. One of the things is that you cannot offer what’s called “over-contribution of sweat equity.” You don’t want to offer an over-contribution of sweat equity because it’s prohibited.

You’ve got this property in your IRA but what you can’t do is hammer the nails. You can’t do the work yourself because it’s called an over-contribution of sweat equity. It’s a prohibited transaction, which is something you want to avoid. That’s why we always talk to people. We give a free consultation so we can talk to you and say, “Tell us about your deal. We will help you learn how to avoid prohibited transactions, so you are not going to do that.” What you can do is you can still hire third-party vendors. You can select the property, close on it, and do all that without it being sweat equity. You can vet the renters in the property and hire third parties to do the work without it being considered sweat equity.

You are allowed to property-manage. What you cannot do is take any fee from your IRA for anything, including property management for an IRA on property. That’s great because your IRA is there. You’ve got tenants. You’ve done your homework. You’ve got a cashflow going. You can use that cashflow to build your retirement. All expenses must be paid for by the IRA, and all proceeds must go back to the IRA that owns that asset. That’s how that works.

For instance, let’s say you put in all the money from your IRA, and suddenly, you’ve got some maintenance things. A fridge goes out. The sprinkler system breaks. Something happens. All the money from the rent has been going into that IRA, so you’ve got this extra money that you can utilize for these other things that you have to do. It comes up with real estate.

That’s why we ask our account holders to leave a 10% pad in their account because you don’t know what you are going to need. There are the closing costs, the rehab, the property tax or that new refrigerator that you need for your rental. It has to be a rental property. You can’t have any personal use of it. All those expenses have to be paid for by the IRA. You need to leave a pad. Let’s talk about what happens if you don’t have enough money.

Let’s talk about that because that’s what everybody is thinking.

There are a few things you can do. You can write a check and contribute to your account. That’s probably everyone’s first go-to. Your contribution depends upon your age, your income, and your account type. You can then write a check and contribute. Maybe you already made your contribution, so what can you do then? Maybe you’ve got another IRA someplace. You will liquidate that to cash, send the cash over to the self-directed IRA, and make it up.

You could take on a debt partner. That’s somebody to give you a non-recourse loan to your IRA account so that you could then come up with the money to do what you needed to do if you had to. If all else fails, you would need to sell the asset. If you didn’t have enough to cover the expenses, you would need to sell the asset because you can’t pay for those things personally.

When someone gives you a non-recourse loan to make up the difference, are there certain percentage restrictions? Does it have to be another IRA that’s making that loan? Tell me a little bit about what that other loan might do because that’s interesting. I’ve never heard that before. How can you utilize that?

If anybody would like a copy of my list of non-recourse lenders, and it’s not the people I necessarily endorse because it’s as a courtesy but if you want that list, I would be very happy to send it to you. You can reach me at [email protected]. That is my email address. You could also go to UDirectIRA.com. There you go. I will send you the list. It could be an individual. It could be a bank. I don’t know if a bank would make a loan if you are in a hard place but it doesn’t have to be IRA money. It could be somebody else’s personal money.

What it can’t be is a disallowed person. It’s not going to be a lineal ascendant or descendant. That is parents, grandparents, you and your spouse, children, and grandchildren. They are not going to be making this loan. It’s also not going to be a 50/50 business partner. They are disallowed or any fiduciary like your real estate agent or your CPA. That’s somebody who has a fiduciary duty to your calendar and this asset. They would be barred from doing that. You could have a third party make a non-recourse loan to your IRA.

That’s interesting because that gets us out of trouble in a situation like that.

It might be the final straw. That would be my last go-to but it’s available. We are in real estate. We bought the property. It’s the whole lifespan. Let’s talk about the timing of the lifespan of something like this because that’s something people always wonder, “How long will it take?” We know how long real estate takes. Let’s put it there. Real estate is an imperfect world. It’s always, “I’m sorry, but.” It can also have a glorious outcome. In some way, there is going to be a train wreck at some point along the way because it’s a house.

Real estate is an imperfect world. It can have a glorious outcome, but it can also be a train wreck at some point along the way. Share on X

It happens. I don’t like to call it a train wreck. There are challenges and tears.

Challenges and opportunities, that’s what it’s. It’s to say that you are going to have a pitfall, so you want to know what to expect. First, you open an account. That’s the first thing. How long does it take? It may be a day. You fill out a form, give us a setup fee and your ID, and there you go. You’ve got an account. It takes one day max.

The second step is putting money in that account or funding it so you can make a contribution. You can do a rollover from a previous employer plan like you are moving the money from that previous employer’s 401(k), 457(b) or 403(b). That takes about two weeks if it’s a previous employer plan. You transfer an IRA-to-IRA transfer, which usually is much faster than a rollover. It usually takes a week tops.

When it’s open and funded, then you invest. You select the asset that you want to invest in. It could be precious metals, private equity or a loan. There are many different things. You give us what we call the supporting documentation, which is a general way of saying the contract. There’s some agreement, even if it’s an invoice to pay a vendor or it’s the actual note and deed of trust for a secured loan.

Whatever the documentation is for that asset, give that to us along with a simple, quick form like who you are, what you want to do, how much, and all that. We then review it. It goes through a review process. We say 3 to 5 business days to make that happen but oftentimes, it happens a lot faster. The majority of the time, it happens a lot faster. Sometimes more but mostly a lot faster than that.

You open the account. It might take two weeks to fund it. While we are waiting for that money to come in, we are reviewing your documents and getting everything all queued up so that you are ready to pull the trigger when the money comes in. We will send a check or a wire, and you’ve self-direct. That’s how that works.

That’s true for real estate, too. I’ve heard that to buy real estate. You have to open up an LLC in the name of the IRA.

That’s an excellent topic. I’ve got a lot to say about that. That’s called the IRA-owned LLC. You probably heard it called the checkbook IRA. It’s not what it is. People get the misconception that when they open a self-directed account that a checking account comes with it. That is a misconception. That is not how it works. You have a retirement account that’s self-directed. You open it, fund it, then you have a third party create a special-purpose LLC. You are not going to do this yourself.

People get the misconception that when they open a self-directed account, a checking account comes with it. Share on X

People will say, “I have a 401(k). We will put it in there.” You can’t use the LLC that you created yourself because you own it. Your IRA cannot purchase an asset you own. It has to be a third party that creates this special purpose LLC. The IRA is open and has money in it. The IRA buys 100% of the initial units of that special purpose LLC. The money goes from the IRA into the LLC’s checking account. Your IRA is like the umbrella, and your LLC sits under the umbrella. The IRA owns the LLC. That’s how you can have checkbook control of your IRA funds. It can be handy in some situations, especially when you are investing in tax liens that are transaction-intensive.

When you are buying properties at an auction where you have to have the money, there are some useful purposes. You don’t have to have an LLC to purchase real estate. You will hear some attorneys say, “It gives you great asset protection. It does this and that.” That all may be true. I’m not a lawyer and can’t give legal advice but people will do it for that reason too and to separate out their assets. There are a lot of reasons to do that.

I live in the State of California. Every single LLC gets taxed $800 every single year. That continues. It’s not like it’s exempt from that because it’s owned by an IRA.

It’s for the privileged. Nobody else has that high tax as an annual fee. That’s another good point. If you think, “I don’t like this $800 in California. I’m going to open a Delaware LLC for my IRA,” you still have to register it in California. You would still pay in Delaware and California.

I found that out the hard way.

Sometimes, it’s worth it to people that do that. A lot of people do that to protect their assets. That’s a great conversation to have with your asset protection attorney.

One of the questions or comments that I get from my ladies is, “I don’t understand it.” When people are confused, they don’t move. They get stuck. Some of this stuff helps us to mitigate that feeling of not knowing. What would you say to people that are hesitating? For instance, my husband is like, “I’m going to keep it all in the 401(k). I understand it. I’m good.” He’s got some rollover money. We were talking about self-directing it. He’s like, “I want to do it this way.” There are a lot of people out there that are like that. They don’t understand it. They are afraid to move everything over or roll it all over. What would you say to those people?

I would say that you probably want to have a return on your investment. You want your money to grow. You take a look and say, “How can I make my money grow?” Let’s say you decide you are going to invest in it. You were like, “Maybe I will throw it out to a private equity like a Reg D offering.” Whether you do it personally or in an IRA, you can still make the same return. If you do it in an IRA, then that return is either tax-free or tax-deferred. That’s one reason to use a self-directed IRA.

Let’s assume you’ve got those two buckets of money, which are personal money and retirement money. If you only have retirement money, you have a different question to ask yourself, “I want to invest in these assets that I know best.” In this case, we are using an example of private equity. You are like, “I know private equity better than the stock market. Do I want to invest in market-correlated assets, or do I want to invest in alternative assets?” We are assuming that those are the assets that you understand and have your head wrapped around.

That’s a different question. Is it the stock market or alternative assets? Are you going to invest personally, with your IRA or with your retirement account? These are questions you need to ask yourself. Where are you going to get the best bang for the buck tax-wise? Sometimes, in real estate, you get the most bang for the buck buying it personally because there are so many write-offs to buying real estate personally. That could be the case but you don’t know if you don’t pencil it out. Meet with your CPA and get some financial advice.

There are some people that would say this, “I don’t want to put my retirement stuff in anything that would be a high risk that I could lose money because that’s my retirement money. I don’t want to risk it with that.” I would love to hear your feedback on this. If you think that there’s a high probability of losing money, it’s probably not a good thing to put in your IRA. It may also not be a good thing to be investing in personally unless it’s your play money or only a certain percentage.

If you are having that conversation with yourself, you might reconsider. I’m super conservative, so if I’m having that conversation with myself, I’m not going to invest it in anything. If I feel like I can invest in it, then it’s something I could do in my IRA. The stock market is not a guarantee, either. People lose money in the stock market every day of the week, unfortunately. It’s not because it’s in the stock market that it’s something that people understand or it’s something where you have quick liquidity. Making decisions with the push of a button doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s protecting your money.

You have to make wise choices about investing, to begin with, and then it’s what vehicle you are going to use, what your tax situation is, and whether your tax benefits are going one way or the other. You want to pencil it out with pros and cons. You can simplify your decision-making process that way.

You have to make wise choices about investing, to begin with. Pencil out the pros and cons; you can simplify your decision-making process that way. Share on X

Kareen, that was so amazing. Thank you much for all that you’ve offered so far in the show. That was awesome.

Thank you. It’s a privilege to be able to share this information so that people can grow their retirement. That’s what we want.

You are so amazing. We all love you. How can people reach you?

The best way is UDirectIra.com, our website. You can click and schedule a consultation. You can read our free report that’s out there to learn about some different asset classes. There is a lot of information there. You can also email us at [email protected]. We will give you a free consultation. We will say, “Tell us about your deal. What are you looking to do?” We will discuss that with you, and then you can make your decisions if that’s the right thing for you.

You also offered earlier that if you go to [email protected], you will give us a list of non-recourse lenders. You could ask for that, too. Thank you for that. I’m excited. We are going to talk at EXTRA about how to do your due diligence on investments that you want to do in your self-directed IRA. Stay tuned for that in EXTRA.

If you are already subscribed, you are going to get it right after this. If you are not and would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com, and then you can get all that information on doing your due diligence. It’s a little bit different from the way that Kaaren talks about it because she’s talking about it as far as putting it in a self-directed IRA. I’m excited about that conversation.

For those of you that are leaving us, thank you so much for spending this time with Kaaren and me. You know how much I appreciate you. 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 will talk to you soon. Bye.

 

Important Links

• UDirectIRA.com
• IRS.Gov
• [email protected]
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

 

Get Dr. Shaler’s free EBook: “How to Spot a Hijackal”  at https://www.forrelationshiphelp.com/help-handling-hijackals-spot-signup/

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

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How To Generate Passive Income Without Quitting Your W-2 Job With David Vernich

 

Generating passive income does not only mean earning money without playing an active role in your investment. This will also allow you to keep your W-2 job, giving you multiple income sources. To discuss how to do this the right way, Moneeka Sawyer sits down with David Vernich. He shares how he got proper mentorship to get into real estate, borrowed money from a banker, and started renovating homes and building family rental properties, all while continuing with his regular day job. David also discusses their partnership program, where he helps other aspiring real estate investors emulate the same strategy he did when he began.

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Watch the episode here

 

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How To Generate Passive Income Without Quitting Your W-2 Job With David Vernich

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome the show, David Vernich. As a banker for many years, David has loaned money to all kinds of businesses, but one stands head and shoulders above all the rest to generate passive income through real estate investing. Several years ago, David sought a mentor to teach him how to invest in real estate and found the perfect husband and wife team to show him the ropes.

After doing one single-family flip and coming to the realization that finding and fixing up houses was not something he enjoyed, David pivoted to a team approach. Using his financing expertise, he became the guy to firm the purchases and renovation for starter homes to build passive income for the whole team and share in the many benefits of owning 1 to 4-family rental properties. Welcome to the show.

Thank you. That’s several years condensed down into a paragraph.

I love that. You did a great job. Many times, I get these bios that are a whole page long, so thank you for that. You started as a banker, and I can relate to that, as I was a business loan officer. You moved into real estate investing. Give me a little bit more clarity. As a business loan officer, I never did business loans for real estate. Talk to me a little bit about how that transition happened for you.

I didn’t get into banking because I wanted to be a banker. I got into banking for two reasons. 1) My wife worked for a bank and didn’t like working at the bank and thought I would fit in. 2) I hated my current job. If you hate your job, you’re open to other opportunities. If your wife says, “This might be a good job for you,” you listen to her. That’s how I backdoored my way into banking.

I thought, “I want to own and operate my own business one day.” I would think being a banker is probably a good position to be in. It will introduce you to all these small business owners and get to talk to them and know them as friends. They’ll tell you the good, the bad, and the ugly, and they did. That’s why I stayed a banker. It looked like it was going to be extremely difficult to do what they did, and they were always frustrated with making payroll and having multiple employees and government regulations. I thought, “I’ll stay being a banker.”

That was fine until I hit the age of 45. At that time, I was still married to the same wife, but she wasn’t working at the time. We had four sons at home. I was making about $80,000 a year when I was 45 back in 2007. I always looked at it as a football analogy. Everybody knows about halftime. Halftime is half the game is over, and people make halftime adjustments. Are you ahead? Are you behind? What are you going to do for the next half? Twenty years into your career, when you start at 25, you get to 45, and you’re going to retire hopefully at 65. You want to take a look at where you are or what your score is.

Review your life once you get to the halftime of your career. If you started working at 20 years old, look at where you at when you reach 45 and make halftime adjustments. Share on X

I pulled up all my numbers as a banker, filled everything out, and realized, “I’m behind. In fact, I’m so far behind. If I don’t do something different, then I’m going to have to live in a van down by the river like Chris Farley did on Saturday Night Live and eat government-subsidized cheese.” I wasn’t going to be that bad because I was saving. I saved every year from the very first job I had at age 22. I started my 401(k).

I never stopped saving, but the pile of money accumulated over the years was nowhere near enough to generate anything close to maintaining my standard of living, so I knew I had to make a change. That’s what motivated me more than anything else to find something that would fill the gap. When I looked at my loan portfolio, the only people I would trade places with were the people to that I had lent money in the past that were real estate investors.

That’s how you got turned onto real estate.

I avoided real estate for so long because my problem is I don’t have two thumbs as far as being able to do any work whatsoever. If you gave me a hammer, I might not even know what end to use. Assuming I figure out which to end to use, the end result is going to be a total disaster, and I’m not kidding. I’m terrible at anything about fixing. In fact, I joke with my wife my favorite tool in the tool belt is the checkbook because I’d rather pay somebody to do it than do it myself.

I am so with you. My husband is fairly handy. A lot of the little stuff he’ll do, but I am all about the pen and checkbook. That’s my favorite tool. My favorite tool is the pen. I write a note, and I write a check.

Pay the professionals. They do it once, and then you get to enjoy whatever you want to do with your time.

Talk to me about what happened next. What are the results? You started with zero.

I started less than zero because typically, one of the biggest holdbacks for people into real estate is, “I don’t have the money to buy a house. I need to have 20% or 25% down. I’m afraid of debt, so I want to have 100% down,” so they look at their checking accounts, “A house costs $100,000. I don’t have $100,000,” close the checkbook and done, but I was a banker. I said to myself, “I don’t have $100,000,” and that was my goal. I wanted to buy a house and fix it up for $100,000. Remember, this is 2007, so this is several years ago.

In which market?

It’s Nashville, Tennessee. I looked at my checkbook, and I didn’t have $100,000, but I did have a W-2 job as a banker, so I made $80,000 a year. I had clean credit. I had a good credit score and my secret weapon. I knew the easiest bankers in the city. I know which ones had the lending authority of $100,000 for newbies that liked me that would trust that I would pay it back.

I called this individual and said, “I’d like to borrow $100,000 unsecured.” He said, “What are you using the money for?” I said, “I’m going to buy a house, fix it up, and put a renter in there or sell it.” He said, “You’re working at another bank now, right?” I said, “Yes.” “How much do you make?” I told him, and he said, “Check box one. You got a job with an income. Check box two, I got good credit,” and then number three, “If you don’t sell the house, I’m going to have to take it as collateral and put a mortgage on it.” I said, “No problem.” He said, “Come on up, I’ll give you $100,000.”

That was how I got into real estate. I borrowed the entire amount from another banker. I had that in my back pocket because I wanted that first. The next thing I had to do was find somebody who would show me how to do this. Step one was to have the money or know where you’re going to get the money. Step two was who’s going to show you how to do something you’ve never done before.

I started thinking about people I’d let money to from other banks because I’d been through, at this point in my career, seven bank mergers that had been bought out. I’d leave at a bank, go to another bank, and start fresh with another bank. Some banks like real estate loans, and some don’t. I would lose track of some of these folks, but I remember them. I helped a lot of them get started.

I called this one individual and said, “Let’s go to lunch. I want to ask you a question.” When I took him to lunch, I said, “Can you teach me how to flip a house?” He looked at me and said, “No,” and I was like, “What?” I would’ve bet money because I helped this guy get started. He goes, “No. I get up at 3:00 AM, and I’m in my pajamas. I can’t show people to do this, but you don’t need me. You need these people because these people have a formal class, and they used to be one of your customers too, Dave, so wake up and smell the coffee.”

I’m like, “Lunch number two,” I went to lunch number two, and they said, “Yes. We will teach you how to flip a house.” What we do is we have a class in a house. It was a husband and wife. “We’ve been doing this for several years. We have 144 houses. We have a full-time property manager on staff and a full-time repair and maintenance guy on staff. You come into our house. We’ll take six Saturdays and go through all the lessons, and then your final exam is to do your project house, which we’ll help you with, but you’re responsible for coming up with all the money because that’s what real estate’s about.”

I said, “Sign me up.” I went to the house for six classes in a row. I had the money lined up. We fixed the house up before we even finished it. Somebody said, “I’d like to rent this house.” Quick story, that person moved in and has been the same tenant ever since in that house for several years and not one turn. After we finished, I said to them, “Time out. I’ve done everything you said. The whole time I was doing it, I was biting my tongue because I either wouldn’t, couldn’t, or didn’t want to do 95% of what you were teaching me, but I did it. I didn’t complain.” They said, “Why in the world would you do this? Why would you spend this money and all this time if you’re not going to do what we taught you?”

I said, “I needed to know what value I brought to the chain because if I can’t bring value, I can’t be a part of real estate investing.” What they said was, “How do you want to work this?” I said, “Here’s what I propose. I don’t want to ever flip another house. I never want to find another house. I don’t want to manage the house.” “What do you want to do?” I said, “No, I will bring you unlimited amounts of capital, so you don’t have to put any money in the house. You just do all the work because you guys are pros. You’ve got a system already. I want to plug it into your system. What I bring is unlimited capital.”

They looked at me and said, “We see you’re driving a Toyota Corolla, Dave. You’re not rich.” I said, “You’re right. I’m not. I borrowed $100,000 for this first house. However, I know people who are doctors, dentists, and business owners who have plenty of money but no time or desire to learn how to do what you do. They don’t even have the time to take the class with you that I took. If I bring these people in, you do the work, and I get a piece of each property, we can build a very successful team. We can do way more houses as a team than we can do individually.” That’s what we’ve been doing for all these years.

That is an awesome story.

It wasn’t something I planned from the beginning, but I had to figure out that if I didn’t bring value to this equation, I couldn’t do real estate. I knew I didn’t want to do the hard parts, which I couldn’t do, but I did know there were people out there that were very good at it. If I could take something off their plate that they didn’t want to do, like talk to bankers or investors and gather their money which was a walk in the park for me, then I could say, “As long as you can perform and get base hits on every house that we don’t lose money, I can find you unlimited amounts of money.”

Have they?

They have. Now, with all the partnerships I’ve been involved with doing the same thing for several years, we have 119 properties.

This same team is the one that does the actual legwork for it. Is that true?

They were my original team. They’re still partners with me on the majority of my houses in Nashville, but as you probably have heard in the news, Nashville is a hot real estate market. The numbers stopped working for new purchases. My first purchase in Nashville was $70,000 for a 3-bedroom, 2-bath house, 1,400 square feet. That house is now worth $325,000. It doesn’t work in Nashville, so I had to find another group of people to do the same thing in another city.

I moved 42 miles Northwest of Nashville to Clarksville, Tennessee, which is home to the 101st Airborne Army Post. I did it with an investor lady up there who was extremely good at it. I did the exact same pitch to them. I did it with another group that I found in Memphis, Tennessee. I then branched into Little Rock, Arkansas. Essentially, I can find teams in different cities that are good at what they do, and then I bring the capital as I did in Nashville originally. These are cashflowing markets.

How are you picking the markets?

Basically, the numbers have to work. One of the things I feel strongly about is that I have two mandates with what I’m doing. It has to be profitable, or I won’t continue. That’s a given, but there are two major prices that are brewing that will never be fixed in our lifetime. The first one is the retirement income crisis. The issue with the retirement income crisis is people like myself, when I looked at my 401(k) statement at age 45, are not able to save enough money through a middle-class job to replace their current standard of living.

I’m not talking about having their lifestyles rich and famous and lighting cigars with $100 bills on their yacht. I’m talking about I want to maintain the same living standards that I have now. I read a report that over 50% of Americans are retiring are around $40,000 a year in income, and most of that is from social security. They’re having to scrape and cut expenses.

 

The second thing that we all probably are familiar with is there’s an affordable housing crisis. Builders cannot build anything that even approaches “affordable” housing for most individuals. When I say affordable, there is no such thing as affordable housing if you don’t have an income. You have to have a base of income, and that’s why I named my book Middle Class to Millionaire, but even the middle class is feeling squeezed in housing now.

What we tend to focus on is finding 20 or 30-year-old houses that you wouldn’t want to move into because they’re not that good-looking, but putting the money in them to fix them so that they are livable and rentable, but because we’re buying an older house and fixing it up, we’re not tied to new construction costs. We are now trying to build a brand-new starter home in Nashville with a lot already paid for because we owned it. It’s probably going to cost $225,000 for a starter home, and if you add the lot, that’s $325,000. That’s the bare bones and nothing fancy starter home. That’s where we are in this country for a lot of the people.

You’re picking markets where you can go in and the numbers have to make sense. You can get older homes that you feel you can fix up and still make a profit. What kind of returns are you looking for cashflow-wise?

Cashflow-wise, it’s roughly $200 to $250 per month after all expenses. That’s why I say this, these aren’t home runs, and you’re not going to retire in one. When I originally got started, I thought to myself, “This was my plan before I had the plan that I have now.” Let’s say I can hold my nose, stumble through this, and have ten houses. I’m going to get one house a year for ten years. I’m going to put a twenty-year loan on the first house. When I turn 65, that house is going to be paid for every year after that.

If all my houses are paid for, and I am bringing in $1,000 after all expenses, taxes, insurance, repairs, and maintenance. That’s $120,000 in retirement income. That was my original goal when I decided I hated this as much as I thought I would. I need to find mentors. The original deal I had with my mentors, who did all the work, was I was going to get 25% of each house. That meant for me to do the same amount of houses, I had to do four for every one, but instead of me doing the whole house hating it, having blood, sweat, and tears, mostly tears in every single house, they would call me and say, “Dave, we found a house. We need $80,000 to buy it. We need $20,000 to fix it up. Go get the money.”

 

I then would make a few phone calls and a few emails, and minutes later, I’d have the money. I was done. I was like, “I’m going to get paid on this house for as long as we own it, and I’m going to get my portion of the cashflow for years, and it only took me fifteen minutes.” That’s why I decided I could keep my day job. I don’t have to quit it. All these things started happening, and I saw the money coming in and thought to myself, “This is cool.” Everybody needs to hear about this.

You took my breath away. That was amazing. There were two things you needed to do. You need to find the money and a mentor. Those were the first two things that I also did. Initially, my mentor was my dad, but I had that in the can. I had to find the money. Those were my first two things. I knew I needed those. What were the other obstacles that you faced getting started?

A big one I’ve alluded to multiple times is how inept I was. I always thought you had to be able to do everything. It was good to do a whole house once by myself because I knew for a fact I didn’t want to do property management. I don’t want to fix the house up. I would have to work with contractors anyway, and they would know I don’t know what I’m talking about. They would probably rip me off six ways.

In the back of my head, I thought, “Surely, I can find these houses.” This was in 2007. There were foreclosures everywhere. I was shocked and dumbfounded at how difficult it was to find a house. In fact, I had to cheat after a while because I would go out on my lunch hour or one-hour break from the bank, and I would be driving for dollars looking for houses. These were houses that had clearly been marked as foreclosures.

It wasn’t like I had to uncover any secrets or anything. I’d write down the name of the sign, call the real estate agent, and say, “I drove by this house, and I want to buy it.” They would ask me a few questions, and eventually, they’d figure out I was an investor. They knew it wasn’t retail. That turned a lot of them off. A couple of them would say, “I’ve already sold that house to a buddy of mine who’s an investor, so you can’t have that one.” I’m like, “Why do you still have your sign-up?” He said, “Looking for people like you to add to my database,” and I’m like, “That’s wasting my time.”

A few times, I’d get a real estate agent, and they would say, “That house you’re trying to buy in the market it’s in is worth $100,000, but it needs about $20,000 worth of work, so we’ll sell it to you for $80,000.” While doing my six classes, I knew that I should be able to buy that house for $60,000 and then put $20,000 in it, and then I could sell it for $100,000 if I wanted to flip it. The agent told me, “You can’t do that.” I’m like, “Yes, we can,” and then I got hung up on.

I was like, “This is hard. I can’t even find a house.” You got to kiss a lot of frogs to find one that works. Finally, the light bulb came into my dense little head, and I said, “I’m going to call my mentor,” and I said, “Winter’s coming, and I want a house. I’ve got the money lined up. This is frustrating. You’ve been doing this for several years, I bet every day your phone rings, and someone’s offering you a house because they know you’re a known commodity that can put cash on the barrel head. Would you please do me a favor and help me get the first one? By the way, take me to other students that were doing the same thing I was.”

The first one was tearing wiring out of the drywall. My eyes were big because I couldn’t even find the wire in the drywall to pull it out. The second house that went to someone was on the roof with a sledgehammer and was taking down a demoing of the chimney. I looked at them, thinking to myself, “There’s no way I wanted to be this heavy of a lift of my first one.” I was happy to break even to say I did one. I told them, “I’ve got a scale from 1 to 10 on how hard a house is, and my scale is the low-end under one. It would be a vacuum cleaner and a paintbrush. On a ten, they would be a sledgehammer and a bulldozer.”

On my first house, “Please find me a two.” That’s the highest I want to go. I told them, “We can break even on it, but I don’t want to do a heavy lift.” The next day she called me and said, “Dave, we found your house. That’s a two,” and it was. I’m like, “I’m terrible at finding a house, fixing them up, and managing them.” That pretty much left me with the money guy.

There are some things I want to highlight there that are valuable. There’s a thing that I do that drives my husband crazy, and that is that I’m constantly asking. It’s not that I’m asking questions like how this work and how that work. I’m asking for an exception. What that looks like is we’ll go to a café, stand in a long line, order our lunch and our coffee, but we forget something. We go, and we sit down. Usually, that something is something simple. We forgot our waters. The way that the café might work is that you have to stand in line again because it has to get in line. They’ve got their systems, and you don’t want to interfere with the systems. I understand systems, and I want to be respectful.

However, if there’s a 20-minute line and I’ve got a 30-minute lunch, and we’ve already waited in line, I don’t want to do that. I’ll go to the back or the side and say, “I’m very sorry. I did not ask for our water while we were in line. Would you consider giving me some water?” Invariably, the answer is yes. If you’re at Starbucks, they’ll always be like, “You should stand in line, but we’ll do it for you.” You get a little gruff, but I’m not afraid to ask. There are times when it’s not for a cup of water but for other things. They’ll say, “You need to stay on the line like everybody else.” They’ll say no. That philosophy of asking in spite of the fact that you might get a no is a superpower.

David demonstrated this perfectly. These teachers have lots of students. They’re teaching a particular system, and he was like, “No, that’s not going to work for me. Let me ask some questions. Could you do this?” Not only, “Could you do this,” but, “Could you do it this way?” He went so much deeper. What happens is so many of us are even afraid to ask.

I’ll have tenants come through my houses, and they’ll say, “I don’t have good credit. If I apply, are you going to say yes?” What I’ll say to them is, “I can’t say yes unless you apply.” Nobody can say yes to you unless you ask the question. You’d be surprised how many people will if you do. What I love is how David is, “No, this is not going to work. This is what will work. I’ve got mentors. Let me ask the question.” Many of us are too shy to do that.

To give another example in daily life, the other day, we stood in line, and I forgot to order a coffee. These people at this café know me a lot. This is the other thing. They know me and know that I will ask. They still love me. You’re afraid if I ask the questions, they’re not going to like me anymore. They think I’m imposing, it feels bad, they’re going to judge me, or whatever. They love me there. I go up, and I’m like, “I don’t want to stand in line again. I forgot my husband’s coffee. Would you mind giving it to me now, and he’ll pay later?” “Of course.” It’s just asking questions.

These are menial things that I’m talking about in my daily life. David did that on a bigger scale with his mentors and with his real estate. I want you to see and start practicing this. Start practicing asking for what you want. Do it kindly, gently, and respectfully. In everything you do, start building that asking for what I need muscle. Get it to a point like you are with David where he needs to make this business work. He knew he was behind, but he wasn’t afraid to ask questions.

You can build the asking-the-question muscle in your life to then when you find a mentor and find a situation where you need to ask a question, then you are willing to ask it. I’ve been asking financing questions like crazy now because I’m trying to hold onto a piece of property that I would rather not sell. I’m getting no all over the place. I’m still asking because I’m not afraid to ask. There’s a way to do this, and if there’s not, it’s not going to be a nightmare. I’ll sell the property. I would rather not, but I keep asking questions.

Even though my loan, the situation, and the property are difficult, I never get a, “I won’t look into this.” I get a, “Sure, Moneeka. Let’s take a look,” because I ask respectfully, and people like working with me. There are times that they benefit from my ask in this particular case. Your team and mentors have benefited from your ask. The cafe benefits from my ask because I keep coming back and bringing everybody with me. They get a ton of business out of me. Let them benefit from your ask, but don’t be afraid to ask. David, your story is so perfect for that lesson. I hope it’s okay that I took the time to share that. Do you agree with me?

Yes, definitely. That’s what holds a lot of people back because they’re so timid and thinking that was an option, they would’ve told me. Believe me, everyone’s busy doing what they’re doing, and they’re so focused on what they’re doing. They don’t have time to stop and consider that there’s another way sometimes. I have 4 sons, and 3 of them would take whatever I said as, “That’s what dad said. I’m not going to move,” but my third son would always negotiate. The other boys would look at him, “That’s not fair,” and I’m like, “Sure, it’s fair. You have the same opportunity as he did. He just took it.”

People are sometimes so busy doing their work that they don't even have time to stop and consider a better way to do things. Share on X

It’s true for me and my sisters too. I will ask, and the youngest one will go with whatever they are told, like you said. If there were a different option, they would tell me the other option. The problem is there are 100 options. They’re not going to go through all of those. You think of the option you’re interested in and ask if it’s available.

Essentially, if he threw an option that I didn’t like, I would say no to that too, but occasionally he would come up with something that I was like, “I didn’t think about that. Let me think about that.” He would get something that he was wanting. Anybody can do this, but having it done to you versus you being the person asking is a different strategy.

I love that. Talk to me about investing in 2022. Can we still do this and still make passive income?

Yes, you can, but you always have to keep your eye on the numbers. There was a recent article in your Apple Newsfeed that said there are four markets in the country that still have affordable housing based on the population. That’s Detroit, Michigan, Memphis, Tennessee, Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.

There are always markets that have affordable housing based on the numbers like, “This is the average person’s income. This is the average rent.” Do the math and see if it’s affordable. You have to reverse engineer and say, “Can I make this work by buying a house for X, adding this to the renovations? This is my maximum number,” and run the numbers on the debt and say, “It cashflows $200 a month.” I can do stuff all day long until those numbers change. When the numbers change, which they do eventually, then you find another market that’s affordable.

 

Don’t get married to a market. That’s another thing too.

Yes. I started in Nashville, and the numbers do not work in Nashville at all.

You started in Nashville because you live in Nashville. Is that true?

Also, because the numbers worked. If the numbers didn’t work, I’d give up. Luckily, sometimes I didn’t even know the questions to ask until I had the experience to know what to ask. When I first started, even though we bought our first house for $70,000, that was a house that literally nobody wanted. That makes you nervous, saying, “Other experienced people don’t want this house. Should I be buying it as a rookie?” but the numbers worked.

When the numbers work, you have to say, “If there’s a renter out there that will pay what the market rent is and I can run this at this cost, and if the numbers work when I put a loan on it where I’m going to make $200 a month.” You’re not going to retire with that, but that first house will get you started on the path to retirement.

What is it that you know now that you wish you had known when you started?

The mindset issues keep people from doing things that they want to try. The fear of failure, the fear that this won’t work for me, and the fear of being scammed, everybody has those same fears. No matter who you talk to, relatives or friends, “I’m thinking about doing X,” there’s always somebody that can pull a bad story out and say, “Don’t do that because I knew a person and they did it once, and they’re living in a van down by the river now.”

Having been through banking and doing commercial loans, I’ve seen people in every type of business succeed, but I’ve also seen people try to do the same type of business and fail. Typically, it’s not the system. It’s whether you are cut out to work in that system. I was a small business administration loan officer, so I’d get every single person that hated their job that woke up on Monday and say, “I’m going to go see the bank and tell them about my dream, and I want them to give me a loan for it.” I would try to talk people out of it and say, “Your business is a half-baked idea.”

A lot of people would say, “I want to start a restaurant,” and my first question was, “Have you ever worked in a restaurant? You are literally cooking and cleaning all day long. It’s hard work. I would rather go try it before I bought it and put my house on a mortgage to make sure it was something I wanted to do.” These mindset issues are real to us individually, but if things are done correctly and if people have been there before you can show that instead of going down that path which has a cliff that you got to climb, walk over here, and there are steps, it makes a huge difference.

I love that. I’m all about the mindset piece. That’s right up my alley too. The biggest asset that we have is real estate between our ears. If we grow that into a good valuable asset that supports our life, everything else is so much easier.

I told you at the beginning that I avoided real estate because of all the things I knew I couldn’t do or wouldn’t do. I kept coming back to the one thing that motivated me more than anything else, which is this is working for people. Housing is such a basic need. Everybody is spending money on housing. It’s not like you’ve got to introduce this new concept of, “Come out of the woods. Let’s live in this nice heated box.” That’s nothing you have to do to convince people they need a house. You have to provide affordable, comfortable, and safe housing. If you do that, there are plenty of people that will pay for you to live there.

This conversation has been amazing. Thank you, David.

Thanks for having me.

I want to let you ladies know we do have more coming up for EXTRA. David’s going to share with us the four Fs for success in real estate. He’s got a little system he wants to share with us, so stay tuned for that. David, can you tell everybody how they can reach you? Also, you’ve got a special gift for everyone.

There are two basic ways to reach me, and it’s not through Instagram because I take no pictures, and it’s not through Facebook because I only post once a year. My obligatory, “Here’s my family and what they look like at the beach,” that’s the only post I do with those two. One that I am active in and one that I’m targeting the book towards are W-2 employees and self-employed people, and most of those people professionally would be on the LinkedIn website.

If they can connect with me through LinkedIn, my name is David Vernich. I’m in Nashville, Tennessee. As far as I know, I’m the only David Vernich in America. It should not be that hard to find. The second way is I do have a website called MoneyScoreboard.com. It doesn’t make sense unless you read the book, but there is a little money scoreboard that can be filled out to show you how far away you are from being able to retire.

Tell us about the book.

The name of the book is Middle Class to Millionaire: Making the Leap to the Next Level. It is trying to get the knowledge I’ve obtained for several years into the general public. For anybody that likes Seinfeld, I call it the Festivus for the Rest of Us because most real estate shows tend to focus on, “Do it all yourself A to Z. Be the superwoman or superman. Go find them. Go lift bales of hay. Go chop trees down. Draw all this stuff,” and then the rest of us who are W-2 employees are like, “I don’t want to do that in my free time.” There’s way more of us than there are of them out there, the superstars.

The normal middle-class people, if we can band together and do things like teamwork and each take a small piece of the deal but essentially band together, then not only do we minimize our downside risk, but we greatly increase the probability of success. That’s what I’m trying to get across in the book. Real estate investing can be, when added to your retirement account, something that will supercharge the amount of money that you’ll be able to receive, not only in retirement but way before retirement. I don’t want to wait until I’m old and crippled to start pulling money from my retirement. I want to enjoy life now when I’m still young. This is a way to do it.

The book is called Middle Class to Millionaire. David has very generously offered for my community to give you a digital copy for free so you can get to know the way that he works and has done this. If you want to do that, go to BlissfulInvestor.com/MiddleClass. You may be middle class now, but you can become a millionaire too. David, you shared with me one of your goals. Could you share that with my audience, so they know where you’re coming from?

I never looked to be a best-selling author. I just wanted to get this information out there, but I was pushed by several groups and friends to come up with a hard and fast goal on what I wanted to accomplish by releasing this information. I feel like I can help a lot of people to fill the hole of the retirement income because that’s a big crisis coming down the pipe for people that are getting up in age like myself as well as an affordable housing crisis. This fixes two major problems for a lot of people.

However, I’m only one person. I don’t have a big staff of people. In order for me to help as many people as I can, I’ve got to limit what I can do. I feel like I can help 100 individual investors obtain at least ten houses, and we do that in a partnership program. I’m holding their hand along the way. They have to qualify and bring value to the process, but I help them see the value they bring. Frankly, some people won’t have the necessary ingredients to do it, but most people would be surprised that they’re already ready to make this next step.

David is looking for partners that he can help to build their wealth together. I love that. Thank you so much for sharing that, David.

I’m glad to help.

Are you ready for our three rapid-fire questions?

Hit me. Let’s go.

Give us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

They’re already doing it by reading this episode. To me, there are a lot of shows out there that can teach you, and you’ve got a great one, Moneeka. Talking to somebody like yourself is a free and easy way to do it on your schedule and time and to hear real-life stories, not fake stories, not scams, but real-life people doing it every day. That, to me, gives you the belief system that this can be something that you, too, can do, which will take you to the next level.

I love that. Thank you. What is one strategy for being successful as a real estate investor?

You alluded to it earlier, and that is asking questions. A lot of people keep everything to themselves. They might read or hear something but then don’t say anything. You’d be amazed if your radar is on. In any social engagement whatsoever, how often can you probably insert something having to do with finances, retirement, or real estate investing? You got to be listening for the clues. When I’m in a group setting, and somebody has not said something that triggered, I can talk to them about real estate.

If you turn your radar on or get into social engagements, you'll be amazed at what you can do with your finances, retirement, and real estate investing. Share on X

A lot of what you’re saying is asking it in your own mind. When you’re listening, that’s how you know if you’re asking those questions.

Plus, a lot of people in the back of their minds are trying to figure it out too. If you can be somebody that can provide one piece of the puzzle that they were looking for by offering something that you learn from a podcast or a book, that opens the door to some great conversations and maybe even some partnerships.

What is one thing that you do every day that contributes to success?

I eat my own cooking. My goal is as I continue to grow my portfolio of real estate, I’m always looking for my next purchase. For example, I try to do one thing every day that moves the needle in real estate. My last partner and I have known since I was nine years old. We’re 50/50 partners, and as 50/50 partners, we bought two houses on the same street in Little Rock, Arkansas. We used cash to buy them, which was our own cash, but we didn’t want to keep it tied up there.

We had to go to another bank and finally had the loan closing to pull out 80% of the cash we had invested in those houses. Here we are at the restaurant, and we have a check for $134,172.40, which was the refinance from one, and a check for $115,229.40. I said to him, “Would you have ever believed when you first met me, when we were nine years old, that we’d be sitting at a restaurant at this age swapping six-figure checks?” He said, “No.” He then got his brand-new convertible Corvette car and drove off. He looks way more successful than I am because I drove away with my Toyota CHR with 200,000 miles on it. However, I was so happy for him because a lot of the money he made was because of our partnership.

I love that. Success looks different to everybody.

He asked me if I wanted to get in the driver’s seat, and I said, “I don’t think I could get back out. It’s so low to the ground, so thanks.”

That doesn’t look like success to you.

Trying to crawl out of a car in the parking lot would be very embarrassing. I’m like, “I know how far my knees could go. I’m good. I’ll stand and look at you. I’ll admire your car from a standing position.”

That’s a funny story. David, this has been a great show. Thank you for all you’ve shared.

My pleasure. I do appreciate you having me on here. I hope this helps your audience knock out some of those limiting beliefs that they might have in their mind that they can’t do this because I know they can.

I know they can, too, and your book will help. Ladies, remember to go to BlissfulInvestor.com/MiddleClass and get that book. We’ve got more in EXTRA. We’re going to be talking about the four Fs for success in real estate, according to David Vernich, so stay tuned for that if you’re already a subscriber. If you’re not, please go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com, and you can subscribe there. If you’re leaving, David and I now, thank you so much for joining us. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then, remember, goals without action are dreams. Get out there, take action, and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you next episode.

 

Important Links

• David Vernich
• Middle Class to Millionaire
• David Vernich – LinkedIn
• BlissfulInvestor.com/MiddleClass
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

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