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REI Expert Panel Discussion: What You Need To Know About Real Estate Investing

 

Have you always wanted to get into real estate investing but didn’t know where to start? Then this episode is for you. Today, Laura Powers hosts a real estate investing panel with some amazing experts, Henry Washington, Mike Denman, Patricia Berman, and Moneeka Sawyer. Having their fair share of success in real estate investing, the panelists break down barriers to entry in real estate investing. They make it simple and inspire people to know that no matter where you are, it is possible to get started with real estate investing. Enjoy!

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REI Expert Panel Discussion: What You Need To Know About Real Estate Investing

Real Estate Investing for Women

I was on a real estate panel with some cool people and the conversation was fantastic. I wanted to share that with you. That’s what this episode is. I hope you enjoy it.

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I’m so excited. I’m hosting this Intro to Real Estate Investing Panel with some amazing experts. I’m so excited to have all of our participants and experts here. A little bit about myself. My name is Laura. I’m a psychic medium. I do a lot of different things. I describe myself as a creative entrepreneur. As I started to make more money, I felt the need to learn more about money, how to invest property and how to be smart with money because I didn’t have that growing up in my family. It’s been something that I had to undertake on my own independently. If you don’t know how to handle your money and you get more, you will not accumulate more money, which is the desired goal for up for most people.

Even though I would not describe myself as a real estate investment expert, I’m a novice but I do know all these amazing people that are better at it than I am and that is farther along in their journey. In talking with all of these individuals, I realized they had so much amazing knowledge to share. In particular, focusing on new investors. There are lots of great tips and tools.

It can be somewhat intimidating to start investing in real estate when you’re a beginner, so part of my goal for this panel is to try to break it down, make it simple and inspire people to know that no matter where you are, it is possible to get started in real estate investing. That’s a little bit about me and why I wanted to host this panel. We’re going to introduce the experts one by one and then we’ll dive into some questions and answers.

First, I want to introduce Henry Washington. He’s an author, entrepreneur and real estate investor with more than 70 rental units and dozens of house flips under his belt. He built his rental portfolio in three and a half years. That’s so amazing. I was talking with Henry in my podcast and I said, “This is the length of a Bachelor’s degree if you think of the amount of time in your future for a degree.” That’s what he has done and has these incredible shifts. Henry is the newest co-host of The BiggerPockets Podcast and cast member of the BiggerPockets show On the Market. Thanks so much for being a guest, Henry.

I’m so happy to be here.

Is there anything you’d like to say before we introduce the other guests?

I’m happy to be here. This is super cool what you’re doing. I’m very passionate about real estate investing as a vehicle to build wealth. I love how you’ve mentioned that if you don’t learn how to handle your money, your money will handle you. Everybody wealthy owns the property. Even if you don’t use real estate to build your wealth, most people then put their wealth into real estate to grow it. I love that you’re trying to educate people on how to not only make money but how to continue to have that money grow. Kudos to you.

 

Thank you. That’s a huge goal of mine and with inflation being 9%, it’s more important now than ever. We met at this real estate investing track. I was struck by Henry’s story and how he didn’t have a lot of money saved up. I wanted to give people that background and that’s how we connected. It was inspiring to me because I want everyone to know that you can get involved in real estate even if you perceive that you don’t have capital. There’s always a way. I’m so pleased to have you.

Let’s go to Mike Denman. He is an award-winning filmmaker based out of Denver. He’s worked in marketing advertising for video games since 2011 and real estate since 2015. He’s been at the forefront of technological advancement and connecting people to content through internet apps like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, YouTube and many others.

He’s adapting his real estate advertising tactics to encourage higher amounts of traffic to short-term rental listings as possible due to his years of iterating the process. He’s been a real estate investor for years. We met through the film industry. I have learned that there are a lot of people that are in film and TV that use real estate investing to build a platform, which is amazing. Mike, go ahead.

Real estate is powerful. When we met, your podcast was first starting and you were seeing where all the trajectory went. You realized real estate was a thing that you wanted to get into. I, separately with Patricia, ended up going through the real estate investing side because she was like, “I want to get more into real estate.” It’s a natural progression but from two different angles.

Mike, I would love to hear if there’s anything else you’d like to share.

A fun thing about how we met is we met at the Women in Film & Media Colorado division. It was a female-led organization that still allowed male members. I was part of their marketing committee for a year or something like that. That’s when I met you and ultimately, all the trajectories that we’ve gone. It’s interesting because of your trajectory when we met, your podcasts blew up and all of these little pieces of the puzzle.

Having the real estate aspect be something that you found is like, “I’m going to put money into money-making things.” This is a surefire approach because everyone knows that you can increase your wealth with real estate. It makes sense that a lot of filmmakers and other people are like, “I have all these things but I don’t have a traditional 401(k).” Real estate becomes a cool add-on to it. It’s all super fun stuff.

I don’t think everyone knows. If you were in creative work, that’s often not as reliable as a regular paycheck because you tend to do a lot of freelancing or any other kind of freelancing work where you don’t have a regular paycheck, then something like this that can build wealth and have income that’s not tied to a paycheck is valuable as well. One of the stats I heard is that the average millionaire has eight or more sources of income. It’s also great for diversifying, even if real estate isn’t your main thing, what a powerful thing to be able to have at least one of your pockets of income.

Our next guest is Patricia Berman. She’s been a real estate investor since 2014. Patricia’s real estate journey began in 2014 with purchasing a primary residence and selling it two years later with a nice appreciation, repeating that process while holding the previous primary residences and running them out as long-term rentals. After a long stint investing solely in the Colorado market, she expanded to Iowa, Texas and California.

In 2022, Patricia took her love for hosting and service and dove into short-term rentals. She is successfully doling out hospitality by managing her two vacation properties with her partner, Mike Denman. Patricia is writing a book on leverage and she hopes to help other people find the courage they need to jump into real estate on their terms. Thanks for joining us, Patricia.

There are many ways to dip your toes into real estate, be successful, and get that stream of income happening for you, no matter what you do, no matter what your strengths are. Share on X

Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here and talk about real estate. I’ve spent a lot of time listening to BiggerPockets and realizing that there’s a style of real estate for everybody. There are so many ways that you can dip your toes into real estate, be successful and get that stream of income happening for you no matter what you do and what your strengths are.

I found what I love. We are invested in some long-term rentals but short-term rentals have souped up our portfolio. It’s not for everybody but I love it. The important message is to find what you love in real estate and do it on your terms. That’s what we’re doing. I want people out there to know that you can do this and it’s important to build wealth.

Another reason I wanted to host this panel specifically is that there are so many different ways to approach real estate. The more I got into it, the more I realized that you could flip, hold for long-term and do long-term rentals. You can do short-term rentals.

Also, house hack.

There are so many different ways like multifamily. It opens that door for people to see the different ways. In your case, you’re doing many of these different models. You’re not doing just one but based on your personality, one or more approaches might work for you. If you think it’s about flipping or short-term rentals to open your idea about the different ways that you can approach this, then find a real estate investing pattern and a method that works for you.

It doesn’t have to be one thing or another.

I’m going to introduce Moneeka Sawyer. She is the host of a talk-related podcast, Real Estate Investing For Women. Her expertise and joyous laugh have been featured all over the world in over 50 podcasts, on stages, on radio and TV stations, including ABC, CBS, Fox and The CW. Her multimillion-dollar real estate empire is only one example of her ability to strategize, organize and implement big business plans.

She is the bestselling author of the book, Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment, which has built a multimillion-dollar business through real estate. Moneeka teaches others how to create a blissful and abundant lifestyle. She has traveled to over 55 countries and loves to teach others. I’d love to start with a question to the panelists. If you were starting from square one, what do you recommend? You’re like, “I’ve never invested in real estate. Where do I start? What do I do? What do I learn?”

It depends on age but house hacking is one of the best ways to start a real estate portfolio, especially in this market when you’re looking at something where interest rates are rising and there’s a little bit of uncertainty in the market. Use what you have. When you purchase as a primary residence, you’re going to have access to lower interest rates and reduce your overhead by either renting out extra rooms in your house. If you don’t want to share a space with other people, you can get up to a four-unit property and rent out the other units.

 

I am a big fan of house hacking. We even did it as a family where we had one extra room and rented it out to women who were single moms and stuff like that. We’ve vetted super well and it worked out well for us. We made a lot of lifelong friends that way. That’s one of the best ways to get started. There are many but that’s my go-to.

There are so many ways to go about it. One of the things that’s interesting to me is even when it’s a tough market for buying and selling as a whole, it’s still a good rental market. Keep that in mind that even if it’s harder to buy something, you might be able even more easily to rent it because people that would be buying aren’t buying. Either Mike or Henry, I would love to hear your responses too.

My response is the same as Patricia’s because that’s the trajectory we are going on. What do you think, Henry?

Getting started is super intimidating to people and it’s, even more, intimidating given the economic environment. People are concerned, “Am I buying at the top of the market? Am I paying more for the money for higher interest rates? Is there going to be a crash?” This war overseas is pushing prices of commodities up. People are like, “Is this the right time?” The answer is it’s always the right time. It’s a matter of what and how you buy.

When I’m talking to people about getting started with real estate investing, the majority of it is about your mindset around real estate investing. We’ve all mentioned it multiple times already in the short time we’ve been on the show. There are so many different ways to invest. A lot of those ways to invest are going to be more beneficial for one person versus another based on their financial situation.

To be able to tell you this is the best method for you is not easy to do without knowing what your financial situation is or what your super strengths are. What people should focus on is first making a decision, deciding you’re going to buy a property, even though you don’t know how or you don’t have the down payment. Maybe you think you don’t have the credit or you can’t find the property to buy. All these factors are going to come into play that we will tell ourselves is a reason we can’t do something.

Take all that off the table and say, “I am going to buy a property in the next 3, 6 or 12 months,” whatever that is for you. You have to make that decision in your mind and heart. Once you are solid on that decision, you’ll figure out a way. The show will reveal itself to you. Here are Laura, Patricia and Mike. You’ll know something that somebody says about a path that maybe makes sense for you. Patricia talked about house hacking. Maybe somebody who’s made the decision to start investing in real estate didn’t know about house hacking but now they know.

They’re going to go do some research and maybe that’s how they get in the game. When you’re starting, it’s more about deciding. “No matter what, I’m going to figure out how to do this and do it.” I promise, once you’ve truly made that decision and you keep immersing yourself in real estate investing culture, information and knowledge and surrounding yourself with people who are successful real estate investors, you will figure out a way to do it.

There’s a way to do it with no money, with some money, with other people’s money and when you buy deals on the market or off the market like house hacking. There are short-term and long-term rentals. One of these strategies will make sense for you. You only have to make a decision that you’re going to continue to educate and surround yourself with people who are doing it. Until that path reveals itself, you got to go down that path. That’s what I tell people who are getting started.

When you keep immersing yourself in real estate, investing culture, information, knowledge, and surrounding yourself with people who are successful real estate investors, you will figure out a way to do it. Share on X

Forgive me. I’m having a lot of problems too. The universe is saying something and I’m not sure what that is. I heard what Henry was saying and one of the things that I say on my show is goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life of your dreams. What everybody here is stating is first, Henry says you have to make a decision. Everything in our lives starts with a decision and a choice to follow that decision. Once you make that decision, action has to follow because otherwise, it’s only words in your head.

I loved what Henry was saying. I’m so sorry that I missed what Mike and Patricia said. It’s important that we make a goal and make a choice to take action towards that goal. That’s how we create the wealth and the blissful life that we want. I do want to go back and make a couple of comments about what Laura said. She said that most rich people have eight sources of income. Don’t misunderstand that by thinking that it was eight sources of income that you work. It’s not.

Most of those sources of income are passive and the things that rich people work at are the things that they’re passionate about. They’ll have one thing maybe that they are passionate about and they pour their heart into but these passive sources of income are what create the wealth. Henry also said that most wealthy people own real estate. That’s true. They may not have made their money there but that’s where they put their money later, which is what Laura is doing.

She’s modeling that for us, which is beautiful. You have to understand that 8 sources of income do not mean you need 8 jobs. Passive income is the key and real estate is the most stable way to get that passive income. The other thing that I want to say is there are 1 million ways to make $1 million in real estate. Choose one. As Patricia says, there are so many.

The action doesn’t need to look like you went out now and purchased a property. Listen to podcasts like your podcast, the BiggerPockets Podcast and to all of these successful people who have done it in different ways. When you hear one that makes you excited like, “That sounds great.” That’s what I did. Even after I had become a real estate investor, I listened to one with Zeona McIntyre and Avery Carl. I was like, “I’m going to get into short-term rentals.” You have to listen to your gut and heart but start consuming that information because that’s the only way.

That’s the only way that you’re ever going to learn what the opportunities are out there.

Maybe for some other people, it’s not listening to the podcast. Maybe it’s going to Meetups because those are another way.

Networking is a big deal. Thank you so much for mentioning that.

Our community of investors is so huge, welcoming and helpful that it’s like, “Get in where you fit in.”

 

You have to understand that because someone else is successful does not mean that you have to do it their way. I love what Henry was talking about. He built all of this passive income in three and a half years. I retired myself in fifteen years because that’s the goal that I had and the choices that I made from my lifestyle. I traveled to 60 countries during that time. I have all these other things that I love to do.

Although I wanted passive income to retire, it didn’t need to happen in three and a half years. I had the time. As you’re looking at what is going to fit for you, understand that Moneeka or Patricia and Mike, Henry’s way or whatever Laura’s way turns out to be, I’m excited to hear, whatever our ways are, it’s opportunities for you to learn but it’s not necessarily going to reach your goals in your way. The way to stay blissful is to make sure that you understand yourself and create a strategy that supports your joy, as well as your wealth. You can have both. I hope that was what you were looking for, Laura.

The next question that I have is, what is your first real estate investing story? What got you into real estate? How did you get started? Let’s start with you, Henry, because one of the reasons to host this panel was to hear your story at Podfest.

I got started a few years ago out of desperation and panic. I had a panic attack because I was freaking out that my wife was going to figure out that I sucked at money and dollars and wasn’t going to be able to afford to provide her with the life that she deserved. I came to that conclusion because we got married fairly quickly. I met my wife and then we got married 365 days later. That was a quick physical transition but as far as mentally and financially, those things didn’t move as quickly as we did. It’s when we decided that we wanted to get married.

I had a wake-up call when we tried to buy a house together. We did all the things. I felt that I did all the things that society tells you to do. I got good grades. I went to school. I got a good degree and a job. I was doing software development and data analytics for Walmart. I was making a great income. We got married and went to buy a house. I’m like, “This is great. I make twice as much as she does. We’ll be able to afford this great house.”

The bank pretty much called me one day and said, “If you want your wife to be able to buy a house, you can’t be on the loan.” My credit was so bad. I made money but I didn’t have any money. There was $1,000 in my savings account. To a bank, I wasn’t bringing anything to the table other than the fact that I had a W-2. That was a big blow to my ego and to me as a person who wanted to provide for my new wife. I got punched in the gut as far as my ability to be able to do that. I had another wake-up call when we were having a conversation one night.

My wife bought that house and allowed me to live with her. Once we moved in, we did the other thing that married couples do, which is talk about your future, kids, dream houses, vacations and things. That’s supposed to be a fun conversation and it wasn’t. For me, I was terrified because I was like, “It’s a dream house but we barely got in this house. I don’t know how to dream house is going to go.” I knew I couldn’t afford it.

It was a starter home. It was a nice home but it was small. After that conversation, we went to bed and I woke up at 3:00 in the morning sweating and panicking because I knew she deserved things that I had no idea how to afford. I had $1,000 in my savings account. I had bad credit, so I did what anybody would do. I started googling, “How can I make some extra money?” That brought me to discovering terms like passive income.

I was like, “How can I make extra money without doing anything?” I started googling how to make passive income and that led me to articles on BiggerPockets and YouTube videos around people who invest in real estate. That was the first time I heard that real estate investing was something that normal people did. Up until that point, I assumed that super-rich people in big companies and things owned real estate and that’s the way it worked. It was an eye-opening moment for me to see that normal people with jobs, kids and families are owning property and they do it all the time across the country. It was mind-blowing to me.

Everything in our lives starts with a decision and a choice to follow that decision. Once you make that decision, action has to follow because otherwise, it's just words in your head. Share on X

I ended up watching this TED Talk from this kid who was 27 years old and had 27 properties. The whole goal of the talk was he was financially free and he used rental properties to get there. I was like, “If this kid figured out how to buy twenty houses and be financially free, I could do it.” I went like, “I’ll do that.” With my bad credit and $1,000 in my savings account and being denied the loan for the house that I was living in at the time, I decided at 3:00 in the morning that I was going to buy real estate. That’s what I did. I woke up my wife and said, “We’re going to be real estate investors.” She was like, “Let’s do it.”

I didn’t know how to do it but I had made a decision. When you decide something, the suffix of the word decide is cide, like suicide. It means to kill off. There’s no other option but to do it when you make a decision. Once I did that, I was like, “I’ll go find people who do it and hang around them a lot until I figured out how to do it.” That’s when I discovered REIA meetings and real estate Meetups. If there was a meeting in my area, I got in the room every single week or month consistently. I wanted to learn and surround myself with people who were doing it so I could learn how to do it.

Between that, I was telling people that I was a real estate investor with only $1,000 and bad credit. I’m a believer that the universe gives you what you put out. If you don’t put out there that it’s what you are and that’s what you want, why is anybody else going to believe you? Why are the things that you’re looking for going to find you? They have no reason to. I was like, “I’ll tell people I’m an investor. Hopefully, that brings me the thing that I want.” That’s 100% how I found my first deal.

Somebody who heard that I was a real estate investor was a friend of mine. He was like, “I heard you’re buying property. I got to sell this house in 30 days. Can you buy it?” I was like, “I can buy it.” I had no clue how to buy it. I ended up putting that property under contract and found out how to do that because I googled how to buy a house without a real estate agent. It said, “Put it under contract.” I googled, “What’s a real estate contract?” I downloaded one, changed the names and we signed it. That’s a terrible idea and people shouldn’t do it but I did it. I was like, “I’m going to figure this out.”

I had to buy it and take it to a bank. The bank said they’d give me money as long as I had 15% of the down payment. They said, “Do you have it?” I was like, “For sure, I have it.” I didn’t have that either. I had to go to my group. That was the power of networking. You mentioned that networking is so powerful and I 100% agree. People don’t leverage networking enough. Everybody goes to 1 meeting or 2 and they network but that’s not networking. That’s only going to 1 meeting or 2.

Networking is consistently showing up and being around everyone who’s doing the things that you’re doing. It’s not only going to 1 meeting or 2. It’s committing to being consistently in those circles because the more consistent you are in those circles, the more people see you as an expert, the more the universe is going to send the right people in deals and things your way. I was so consistently in this group that I had this network of friends.

This investor group is so helpful. They want to see you succeed. People want to help you out. You hear wholesalers say, “Somebody is going to steal your deal.” It’s not like that in real estate. It’s more, so somebody is going to help you make money on your deal. Everybody’s so helpful. I went to my network and I was like, “I got this house. It’s a great deal. I don’t know how to buy it. How are you buying it?”

They talked me through how to go find the money. Somebody said he could leverage a 401(k) to buy it. I was like, “I will have to go find a 401(k).” My wife had the 401(k). I went to her and I was like, “Remember that time I said we’re going to buy a property? We need to borrow $20,000 from your 401(k) to buy this house.” She said, “Let’s do it.” We bought the house. The bank called after we bought it and said, “That house had a bunch of equity. We’ll give you a line of credit on the equity so you can go buy more deals.”

I went from a panic attack to owning a house 90 days later and the bank calling me and saying, “Here’s $20,000 to go do it again.” That is mind-blowing when you’re panicking about money 90 days before that. That’s my intro to real estate investing and what changed my life. Once I bought that first one and I saw how powerful it was, I said, “I’m going to buy as many as I can as fast as I can.” That’s how we got into it.

 

It was such an inspiring story. That was a big motivation for me to host this particular panel. I love this because so much of this is about faith. It’s about making a decision that something’s going to happen, even if there is the perceived idea that you don’t have the resources or you don’t know how. Also, get in the room. Connect to the people that are doing it. Learn from them and get connected with a supportive network. I’d love to ask that same question to Moneeka. Can you share your intro story to how you got into real estate investing and what happened to you?

My intro story to real estate happened before I was born. It started with my parents. They had an arranged marriage in India, came to this country with $200 in their pocket and didn’t know each other very well. Suddenly, they’re starting a new life because things were bad in India. They wanted a better life for themselves and their family. One of the things my dad had heard was that the golden ticket to wealth in the United States was to buy real estate. They’re thinking about this. They want to buy a primary residence.

My mom’s a doctor and my dad’s an engineer. My mom is saving all of her nickels and dimes that she makes. She’s sewing little cushions for her sofa that she made. She’s making curtains. Imagine this doctor doing all these things and saving every nickel and dime so that they can buy real estate because that’s the dream. I was born 2 years later as their 1st child. Filled with that feeling of love, joy and hope for this new baby, they finally bought their first home. They bought their primary residence and then also an investment property soon after that.

They bought their primary residence when I was born. Three years later, they started their investing journey. It’s been my whole life. Fast forward fifteen years, they were able to pay for my college education and my wedding with real estate. They did the same for both of my sisters. My whole life, I had seen what real estate could do. I’d also seen my dad’s stress with tenants not paying rent, dealing with the different mortgages and juggling all the different phone calls from their tenants, the toilets and the termites. We hear about this stuff and this is what scares people away from it. I saw that.

I have to tell you, I had dug my heels in. I was like, “I do not want that life.” One of these things that I learned about real estate was it’s a long game. You want to be in there for a long time. If I was going to do a long game, I was not going to do something that was going to be miserable. I was clear on that. I decided, “No, thank you.” I graduated from college during a recession. I couldn’t find a job. I had a great degree from UC Berkeley.

I remember one day sitting with my dad and I’m like, “How am I going to do the adulting thing? What’s going to happen to me?” My dad said something to me that night that changed everything. He said, “Do you know, Moneeka? Everybody has stress, fear and money problems. Do you want poor people’s money problems or do you want rich people’s money problems?” My first thought was, “Do rich people have money problems?” They do but they are better problems.

My whole mindset changed. It was like, “I want this.” I got a low-paying job. I took whatever I could get. I swallowed my pride with a UC Berkeley degree. I did what my mom did. I started saving nickels and dimes so that I could buy my first piece of real estate. In the meantime, I fell in love. My sweet husband and I decided we wanted real estate. For our wedding, we asked everybody no gifts. We wanted a down payment for the house. Everybody gave us money.

We put together $10,000 and then went for an FHA loan. We’ve tried that but it didn’t work for us. We put down 5% on a $200,000 property. We were broke but we had this house. This is how we got it. In those days, we called house hacking getting a roommate. We got a roommate and that’s how we afforded our first house. We lived with this roommate for a few years. We got an equity line on the home once it had appreciated and then did it again. We rented this out.

That’s how we got started and the rest is history. My very first rental home was a nightmare. It was like my dad’s because that’s what I had learned. That’s what had been modeled for me. We sold that first property. My husband’s like, “You are so going to regret this,” and he was not wrong. We got rid of that property because I was like, “I can’t stand this headache,” but then with the next one, I realized what real estate could do for us.

Just because someone else is successful does not mean you have to do it their way. Share on X

Henry, thank you for that decision idea. I made another decision that this was going to be the thing that I did but it was going to be happy for me. I was going to create my model. I was going to streamline my processes. I was going to create something that I could live with for the rest of my life, which is what I did. That’s how I began. For the first 4, 5 and 6 years, I would buy a primary residence because they’re the easiest to get into. They require the lowest down payment. The loans are easy to qualify for. You have to pay rent, so you might as well pay yourself.

I buy another primary residence and then rent that out. That’s how I got started until, eventually, I had enough equity in my homes that I could go shopping. It was like a monopoly. “I can go buy ten,” but it took a little time to get there and I had given myself the time. I wanted to do this in a way that felt good to me. That was my journey.

It’s important to focus on doing whatever you need to and get it going. It may not feel easy in the beginning. When you’re starting something new, there’s a certain amount of resistance you have to work through. That’s one hard part. The other thing is making decisions that may be in the short-term don’t feel the best but in the long-term are going to be beneficial. You have this pocket of money and put it into the house, so you don’t have that money anymore. That can feel not so great. You’re like, “I don’t have that $10,000,” or whatever it is that you put into a house or, “I’m getting a roommate.”

In the long-term, that’s going to be a good decision. Not to get too caught up in whatever’s happening at the moment. If it fits into your long-term vision for yourself, know that it can be worthwhile. It was on another podcast interview where you talked about how when the recession hit, the housing crashed. You made the tough decision to move out of your house and rent it so that you could keep it. That was not easy but in the long-term, it was a great decision for you.

There’s no clear path to wealth. One of my coaches said to me, “The person with the most flexibility wins.” The word pivot was used during the pandemic a lot. If you’re able to dance with what’s happening out there in the world and your life, you’re going to be able to create more of that wealth more easily. Many people that were in my situation lost everything. I lost several million dollars in six months in 2008 in 2009 but I made some different decisions than other people. I didn’t freak out, get scared or think the market was ever going to come back.

I decided, “This sucks. What am I going to do?” What I was going to do was hold my properties and figure out how to make it work. All of us have choices in every moment. Our knowledge, as Henry, Patricia, Mike and everybody’s talking about is to get educated. As you’re in those environments hearing the conversations and you’ve got that education, it makes it a lot easier to do that dance, pivot and change your strategy based on what’s going on. You’ve got a wealth of information that’ll help you to build your financial wealth.

That story made me want to give your mom a big hug. To come over here with $250 and she started saving her nickels to help buy that property, I want to hug that lady.

My parents are amazing. I’m so blessed.

Another thing to stress is it seems to me there is likely to be another recession here with inflation being so high. We’ll see how long and serious this goes but it still can be a good time for you. That doesn’t mean that it’s not a time to be in real estate or you’re going to lose everything. You have to be aware and make smart decisions based on what’s happening.

 

With that determination and will, you can still make it work even in this perceived challenging time. Most millionaires are made and billionaires too, often in times of economic downturn. What is challenging in some ways is a bigger opportunity in different ways. Much of this is about reframing as well.

Real estate is the best recession-resistant vehicle to invest in because rents go up as inflation goes up. There are other factors too. That’s oversimplifying it but real estate is the vehicle that can help us to weather that inflation storm, depending on how you invest.

We were talking before about how everybody needs a place to live. Maybe eventually it’ll be fully in VR and that won’t even be the case but at least for the perceived future, people need a place to live. People will always need that, whereas other things are negotiable. You need food and a place to live.

Real estate is a finite resource. A lot of people don’t realize that, especially in areas where growth has already happened and there are restrictions on open space and building. Considering the idea that it’s a finite resource, you got to get yours.

Where people can work from remotely anywhere, it’s opened up a lot more different real estate markets that people hadn’t necessarily considered living in before because they’re like, “It’s not accessible to my job.” These rural markets have amazing and affordable properties. Even when we went out to Iowa and we started doing our long-terms in Iowa, it was this scary first out-of-state thing. It was freaky but it works out because different areas have different regional economics. Ultimately, you can invest with lower amounts of money but still bring in some cashflow.

We cashflow beautifully on properties that we purchased for $125,000 each. People need places to live. They need nice, beautiful spaces. To build on what Henry and Moneeka said, it’s important in real estate. You want to sit with yourself and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are. What do you want to do? What energizes you? The best way to be successful is to be authentically yourself. I try to tell people this all the time. Be authentically yourself. It’s a struggle for us. Every day, I’m wondering, “Maybe I should do this but that doesn’t suit me.” I’m trying to always center back on being authentically ourselves. When you are, you have more potential to get further.

I’ll comment on the whole flexibility thing. If you’re ultimately not a real estate investor and you think about being flexible, it’s that uncomfortability of having a roommate or those things where you wouldn’t necessarily normally do it. If you move out of your house for a little while, which we’ve all done, you move out of your primary into another primary, you get that primary going, the house is where you make a home at that moment and it’s a thing you’d build on, you get a little bit uncomfortable for some periods. You have to be okay with some of those levels of comfort. It’s like, “You can go a couple of years without having a walk-in closet that you love.” If you have a place that you are like, “This is going to be great to rent out,” spend a year there and then move on to the next property.

Wealth is built outside of your comfort zone.

One of the things I tell my tenants is, “You’re paying my mortgage. She can sit there paying your own.” I tell my tenants to leave me. I’m telling everybody, “Leave your landlord,” because you’re going to pay somebody’s mortgage. When the recession got tough, my husband lost his job and stuff like that, when we moved out of our dream home, where we built our whole life together. We finally bought our dream home and then we needed to rent it out.

The more consistent you're in networking, the more people see you as an expert, and the more the universe will send the right people and deals and things you're away. Share on X

He finally got a job and we moved into a dump. When I walked in there, it smelled like dog pee. Everything inside has been spray-painted gray. It was horrible. I walked in there and broke down crying but it was all we could afford and they will not pay rent. We had to buy it because that’s one of my policies. Don’t pay somebody else’s mortgage. Whatever we could do is what we did and it worked out beautifully in the end. That flexibility thing is so important. It can be your superpower to build that flexibility muscle.

This is good in life, not just real estate investing, if you can see the whole picture. We’re getting close to the end of the hour. Patricia and Mike, briefly, if you could share a brief version of your first real estate investment and then we’ll wrap up.

I’m originally from New York. I grew up in Brooklyn. This is a very rent culture city. Unless your parents had generational wealth and had a home that they owned already, you typically rented and don’t buy because it seems so daunting and scary. I moved out to Colorado in 2011. I purchased my first home ever in the beginning of 2012 for $305,000. Two years later, we sold it for $400,000. Even to purchase that house, I took a loan against my 401(k) to make that happen. I love paying myself back.

Henry said I didn’t know how I was going to fund the down payment. I thought I would take money out of the disbursement but I was researching and found out you can take a loan against your 401(k). You pay yourself back with interest and I was all about that life. I also learned that it doesn’t hit your debt-to-income ratio. That’s a small tidbit for people out there.

I was bit by the bug. I bought another place in 2014 for $245,000. I sold it 2 years later for $320,000. I was like, “I am getting into real estate.” I made that decision because this was working out. Why wouldn’t you get into real estate? This is crazy. The Colorado market had risen quite a bit and it continues to appreciate year over year for crazy numbers. That’s where it was.

I started by renting out a room. We then moved out and bought another place and rented that place out. We moved out of that one and rented that place out. That’s how we built our real estate portfolio and gained access to home equity lines of credit. That’s how our journey began. In 2021, we sold one of our most appreciating properties.

We jumped into the short-term rental market with a lot of appreciation that we had gained on one of the houses that we owned in Golden. Here we are and we’re doing well. We own two short-term rental properties plus our long-term. We plan on continuing this journey of purchasing long-term and maybe purchasing another luxury short-term rental.

I do advertising mostly for video games and real estate as well because I like it. When she started doing short-term rentals and came to me saying, “I’m not getting any bookings,” I was like, “It’s okay. I’ll run some ads.” She’s like, “Don’t tell me it’s okay.”

“What are you talking about? Do you know what the mortgage is?”

 

I’m like, “That’s all good.” I’ve been running advertising on Facebook, Instagram and different things like that for so long, especially for real estate. I was like, “This is going to be easy.” I started running ads for short-term rentals and it got easy. We were able to bring in massive amounts of people and increased our Law of Averages to get bookings.

I have this lever I can turn on and off and she feels like, “We’re getting views and bookings. I feel like it’s normal.” I’m like, “It’s cool.” I’ve been able to take that, create a system, help out a bunch of other short-term rental hosts and develop even advertising methodologies for them to follow us that way so they can find success on their own. I’ve pivoted my business a little bit to focus more on that in 2022.

I wrote a book, How to Excel at Short Term Rental: Advertising. I have a whole bunch of things happening in the real estate investing side of things, shifted and pivoted more of my day job focus and then I’m like, “I have more fun and a little bit more exciting times. I get to talk to all these cool real estate investors.” Instead of making the videos for real estate investors who are 20-year-old kids who learned how to wholesale at 18 and have 30 properties, which is amazing.

I was like, “I don’t know how to do that.” To Henry’s point, I was like, “You have to surround yourself with these people.” Ultimately, when you start talking to other investors and we find the different flavors of real estate, there are all these things that you can end up benefiting from by providing services for it.

I’m glad that you brought up short-term rentals because that’s a viable option. It’s a very different business model but I was talking with a friend here in Las Vegas who has three short-term rentals that bring in about $1 million a year. It can be real income. You have to know the rules and everything. In certain places, it’s allowed and not allowed. Do whatever you need to do to make sure that it’s legal but it can be a viable path to income.

There’s been a huge influx of investors who were rushing to short-term rentals but that’s where Mike comes in because if you’re treating it like a business, you should be advertising it. The more people who see your property is casting a wider net of people who are likely to book your property without waiting on the platform to get you invested.

There’s going to be a lot of cross-pollination within the panel itself. I’m excited for all of you to connect. I was like, “I can’t wait for you all to meet each other.” For anyone who’s reading, I love these panels. You and everyone can already see how amazing all of these individuals are. They have so much knowledge in different areas and backgrounds, which I love.

If you want to further your connection and learn more about real estate, I’m hosting an 11th-Month Real Estate Magical Mastermind. I’m calling it magical because I know that it will be. All these fabulous panelists are experts in the class. I’d love to have you. You can find out more about that on PowersHour.biz. You can look under the classes.

Feel free to reach out if you have any questions about it. It’s at [email protected] to contact me. I want to thank all of you so much for your time. I’m excited to see what happens, hear more about your journeys and learn more. Even though I’m posting this real estate class, I’m learning from all of you and I’m so grateful. Everyone’s going to learn from you as well. Any final closing thoughts that you have that you want to give out to people as we wrap up? I’ll start with Moneeka.

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I already gave you my closing. Goals without action are just dreams, so take action. I do have one other thing that I want to mention that is very relevant because we’re not all real estate investors. Remember that bliss is your birthright, so choose bliss every single day.

Henry, how about you?

I gave some mindset at the top of the show to talk about how to get started. I’ll give some tactical at the bottom of the show. Actual tactical things you can do to get started investing in real estate. You have to put the blinders on because it’s so flexible. There are so many ways to get started. It’s going to be overwhelming. There are so many options for you. Find the lowest common denominator among all the options and that is typically always going to be a good deal. It doesn’t matter how you’re going to monetize a property.

If you’re going to flip it, rent it, short-term rental, long-term rental, wholesale or wholetail it, all of these strategies require you to buy something at a discount that’s a good enough deal so that when you add value to it by fixing it up, putting tenants in it or furnishing it and renting it out, you can turn a profit. If the lowest common denominator is finding a good deal, then that’s where your focus should be. Don’t worry about all the other stuff like who’s going to finance it, who’s going to work on it, who’s the contractor going to be, who’s the title company or who’s the real estate agent. None of those things matter until you find a deal.

Find a deal. Figure out what a good deal looks like in the market. If you’re looking to buy real estate, you can do that simply by networking and asking people what they’re buying. Figure out how you’re going to find those good deals. You can google, “How do I find under-market value real estate deals?” You’ll get a ton of options. It’s direct mail, cold calls, on the market or off the market. There are all these strategies.

Pick the one that you think you can implement the easiest that you can apply the right amount of money and time to. Do it relentlessly consistently until you get a deal. Once you get a deal, you’ll be so motivated to go figure all that other stuff out that I’ve mentioned before because you’ll have that thing in your hand that you so worked hard for. People will line up to give you those resources because you’ve brought them something of substance. Take everything off the table, put your blinders on, figure out what a good deal looks like and be relentlessly consistent about finding one until you do.

Patricia and Mike, any closing thoughts for the two of you?

Be authentically yourself. Sit with yourself for a little while and figure out what your strengths and weaknesses are. What do you like to do as it relates to real estate? What do you think you want to do? What are you willing to try? Take action on those things. Learn more about how you can get involved. If you try something and you don’t like it, you don’t have to stick with it. There are so many different ways to get involved. Most importantly, start educating yourself about the different ways or what it is you want to do.

In the corporate world, Patricia, we call that a SWOT Analysis. You sit down and do your strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. You write them all down. That is your point of attack.

 

Also, make the decision. “I’m going to get involved in real estate.” That’s what you got to do. Don’t lose yourself in it.

One thing I’ll leave off with is even after you’ve dove into something, it’s okay to spaghetti test. Everything is a test. It’s not anything you have to commit to. I try a bunch of things at once. I see what sticks, resonates and reflects the value that we have. The reality of investing in the short-term and long-term where we hadn’t done that in 2022 is a freaky thing. Be like, “I know systems that work and the ways in which we can increase some of the viability of it.”

As you go into something, there are always ways that you can increase its effectiveness of it. You can get more investors to even add to it. It syndicates. There are all these things that you can do with other people’s money, like seller financing options. Finding those off-market deals and getting people to even be involved and you renting from the person who owns it. You are paying them their actual fee instead of a bank and you take over the actual deed later on. There is all this different stuff that takes conversation and trying it out. Explore and be unafraid to try new things.

Everyone, thanks for participating. I appreciate your time and energy. I’m excited about the mastermind.

Thank you for having us.

If you’d like more information about me, you can go to my website, PowersHour.biz. You can find me on Twitter @ThatLauraPowers, Instagram @LauraPowers44 and also on Facebook. Thanks for reading.

 

 Important Links

• On the Market
• Women in Film & Media Colorado
• Real Estate Investing For Women
• Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment
• How to Excel at Short Term Rental: Advertising
• PowersHour.biz
• [email protected]
• @ThatLauraPowers – Twitter
• @LauraPowers44 – Instagram
• Facebook – Powers Hour

 

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

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Get In The Real Estate Game With Kenny Simpson And Krystle Moore – Real Estate For Women

 

The real estate industry presents various opportunities where you could grow your wealth. There are many ways to succeed in real estate, but you must get started. Listen to your host Moneeka Sawyer as she talks with Kenny Simpson and Krystle Moore about tips on how you can get in the real estate game today. It’s not yet too late. It’s time to get your action plan together. In this episode, Kenny and Krystle share the importance of constantly growing and not making decisions based on fear to achieve your goals and attain financial freedom. They discuss the benefits of owning multifamily properties and what kind of investments will help you beat inflation. Tune in to learn how to be in control of your financial future.

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

Get In The Real Estate Game With Kenny Simpson And Krystle Moore – Real Estate For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show, Krystle and Kenny. Krystle Moore is the Founder of Pacific Shore Capital, San Diego’s leading expert in commercial financing and real estate investing. She began her career at the age of nineteen. With over eighteen years of experience, Krystle has funded over $1 billion in loans, helping over 1,000 clients with their commercial and multifamily financing needs. Between managing over 1,000 units, rehabbing, and designing countless properties, she is committed to sharing her immense knowledge and industry expertise with our clients.

Kenny Simpson, Head of The Simpson Team, is San Diego’s premier residential financier and real estate investor. He has worked with over 1,000 clients on 1 to 4-unit financing, helping them shift their mindset, and have confidence about qualifying for a loan, whether for a primary residence or investment properties. He is a Co-host of San Diego’s most popular real estate podcast, Get in the Cashflow Game with K&K. Kenny has over seventeen years in the business, including his own investment and management experience, having managed over 1,000 units, helping rehab, and design countless properties. Welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having us.

I’m excited to have you on the show because I want my ladies to know this. It’s important to have mentors in the industry that have been here through the cycles. You guys went through the 2008 and 2009 crash. Many people that are in real estate now got in the last 10 to 12 years. They got in at the bottom when things were easy to get into. They didn’t have to ride that wave. That wave was a rough one. I love that you guys have been in the industry long enough to know that things can go bad and what to do when that happens. Congratulations on your success around that. I’m so excited to be having you chat with my ladies about financing.

I’m excited too. I’m passionate about women being involved in their financial future. I was honored to be able to be on the show.

Thank you so much for that. What’s important for us to all understand is that as women, we need to be in control of our financial future. We’re not taught that as younger women. We have to figure that out ourselves. Our allies, the men in our lives, are an important part of that success. Kenny, I super appreciate your support of our ladies. My husband is the same way. My husband is not as involved in my business though. He is a good support staff. This is big. Could you talk a little bit high level about how you got into the industry and what your story is?

I got started when I was nineteen. I was taking some community college classes. Quite frankly, my family couldn’t afford to pay for college or anything like that. It was all on me. As a young 19-year-old, I thought, “Why am I paying to go to school? I should get paid to do this.” I needed to pay my bills. My mom worked as a rep at Washington Mutual at the time. I was begging her to give me an in, call somebody, and let them interview me. That’s all I’m asking for. Don’t give me a handout, but give me an opportunity. When she felt I wouldn’t embarrass her, she finally gave me a couple of recommendations.

I interviewed and did residential for about four months, but I always wanted to do commercial. I did what they tell you to do, “Tell everybody. Tell your friends. Tell your family. Eventually, someone is going to give you a shot.” I met my first client at the gym. I was super into fitness at the time. I winged it from the beginning. I had no idea what I was doing. He knew that anyways. That’s how I got my first deal. From there, it was a good time. We were on the upswing on 2003. His partners referred me to their partners and his partners’ partners. It was a snowball effect from there.

Why were you so interested in commercial rather than residential?

 

I thought to myself, “I’m not as the emotional touchy-feely first-time home buyer. I wanted to work with business people.” On the commercial real estate side, even when you’re getting a real estate commercial loan, it’s a business loan. We assume that you’re a sophisticated business person. That’s why we don’t have RESPA and all these other crazy things that came as a result of the 2008 financial crash. I liked working with more sophisticated investors, generating wealth for people, and figuring out how to get more cashflow. That’s what lights me up. That’s why I went in that direction.

Kenny, how did you get started?

It’s a bit similar. I was in college, paying for my own way too. I had a lot of friends. In 2002 and 2003, they started making a lot of money around me in real estate and I’m sitting there going to college day after day. I woke up one day and I said, “I’m over this.” I want to go to work and make money. I always wanted to be in real estate, not sure which aspect. A friend reached out and said, “Do you want to come and join my team?”

I started off in the business as a loan processor which is good. It gave me a lot of well-rounded skills and I learned the background. Quickly, we ended up starting a branch, and then several years later, I’m here as a mortgage broker and enjoying what I do. I dove in and figured out residential was the way. I knew I didn’t want to sell real estate. I didn’t know I wanted to do financing, but now that I’m into it, I enjoy it.

I was a mortgage broker for years and it was so much fun like the puzzle of a loan package. Whether it’s commercial or residential, it’s like a puzzle. Putting the whole thing together, getting exactly the right product for the right person and the right property. There are so many moving parts. I love that you started as a processor because so much of the time, the processors don’t understand what mortgage people go through on the front end.

We’re trying to put together a puzzle. They’re trying to get it to underwriting. They’re the middleman. They are a key part of our success. Many of them don’t understand what it takes on both of those sides, the front end and the real back end. That’s amazing that you did that. What an asset for you because you understand them then.

The business has come a long way with technology. Lenders have tried to figure out how to make the process as easy as possible. As we’ve gotten further away from 2008 and 2009, Fannie, Freddie and a lot of the banks have eased up on some stuff and got a little bit more realistic. The pendulum swung way too far then way too far the other way. We’re getting some normalcy. It’s helpful because getting a loan sometimes cannot be fun. As we all know, it’s paperwork and it’s a stressful time when you’re buying a house. We try to make it easy as possible.

You wanted to talk about multifamily properties which is a topic that my audience is interested in. Let’s start by talking about why. Why did you get started in multifamily to supplement your income and how does that work?

The thing is we’re all taught in school to get our education, go out and get a good job. That may have worked a long time ago, but if you’re living in a major metro like us in San Diego, it’s not cheap to be here. Having a W-2 job your whole life is not going to work out well for you when it comes time to retire, even if you contribute the max to your 401(k) and things like this. We backed in to see what lifestyle we wanted to have.

A lot of real estate investors don't pay taxes. They provide housing and in exchange for getting a lot of tax benefits. Share on X

I had the benefit of seeing that since I was nineteen. I got to see tax returns. I worked with a lot of real estate investors that own multifamily. It seems like they didn’t have to work. They were always on vacation. Their idea of work was driving by the properties or having lunch with brokers. It seems so fun for me. I’m like, “I love to fill my days doing this.” I started realizing the cashflow that they were getting because it doesn’t look like that on tax returns.

That’s the benefit of being a real estate investor. A lot of real estate investors don’t pay taxes. They provide housing. In exchange for that, they get a lot of tax benefits. I find that multifamily is the absolute safest investment vehicle that has the most tax benefits. That is why I truly believe in owning multifamily properties.

I would like to add something interesting that shines a light on my own life. That’s similar to what you said, Krystle. First of all, Krystle, congratulations on starting at nineteen, both of you guys. The younger we started, the more opportunities we have to create huge amounts of wealth and a huge legacy.

Those of you ladies reading that are 19, 18 or 20, you need to get started. Even later in life, there are so many opportunities. I always say there are a million ways to make $1 million in real estate, but the sooner you get started, the easier it is. Congratulations on you guys. To anybody who’s reading that’s young, get started. It’s important. The thing that I wanted to comment on is my husband and I bought another property, a primary residence. I was dismayed at what we can afford.

There were a couple of things that I noticed that I want to highlight to my ladies. Because of the write-offs, the depreciation, and all of that stuff, in real estate, it looks like you’re making no income. Plus, you get to do a ton more write-offs. For me, I’m showing huge losses. That means we pay fewer taxes. What that also means is that because of me, we can’t qualify for loans. My husband does all the loans.

This is how we’ve distributed it. What’s also interesting about this is when we were young, our first house was $200,000. Our next house, five years later, was $700,000. Our next house was $750,000. What’s interesting is that even now, all we qualify for is $750,000 to $800,000. Why? My husband is a superstar at work. He gets nice raises, 3% to 6% raises each year. Think about that. Have property values gone up faster than 3% to 6%?

What do we qualify for? It’s still about the same number of dollars because he has only been going up 3% to 6%. We can do a little bit more if we dig into the numbers. There is stuff because of losses and stuff like that shows up on the tax returns. That’s not about me. Everybody who’s reading this, take that in. It has been 25 years that he and I have been together buying real estate. We still qualify for the same property value now almost that we did twenty years ago.

If you are going to rely simply on your W-2 income, are you going to be able to grow your wealth? We have to buy in bad neighborhoods to qualify for our loans. We didn’t have to use to do that. You hope that in life, you’re improving your lot. You’re improving the neighborhood. You’re improving the house size. Why are we not able to do that?

There are a lot more conversations around that. I don’t want to say that that’s the end of the story. It was an interesting thing for me to notice. How is this even possible? We have been in the business for 25 years. We made some adjustments. We did some different things, stop writing off things, stop taking losses or do some other things that we can do. If you’re just relying on your W-2 to plan your future, that’s what you’re in store for. It does not keep up with inflation. It does not keep up with house prices. The cost of living is going up. Your income will not keep up. It’s important to find ways to supplement that income. Does that make sense?

 

That is such a good point. We’ve always been commissioned-based. We’ve never had that idea. Even thinking about a W-2 job, that’s what we’re trained to do. That’s the safety that we run to and the safety is not winning in this environment.

In any environment, it’s never one. If you look at W-2 versus housing prices, over time, we’re not able to keep up. People have to move to cheaper areas to afford the homes that they like or you need to be a dual income. You’ve got to do something other than being a W-2 employee to keep up with housing prices. There are some interesting things there.

First, that’s your cost of living. The other thing that tells us is real estate is a good investment. It is increasing significantly faster than inflation and our incomes. It’s not true in every single market. If you do your homework and you pick the right markets, that is true. Ladies, I’ve never said this on the show. It’s important to understand where you’re headed if you’re not going to invest in real estate and you’re not going to create those other streams of income and cashflow.

I have a good example for your story on that because you do bring up a valid point. I do residential financing. Krystle is different. A lot of her clients might not even have a job. They might be real estate investors. Mine typically have a job and they’re just getting started or some. I happen to do her clients, but I have a client that worked at Qualcomm for 25 years. He did the retirement. He did the stock thing but never bought real estate or bought a house, and the crash came.

He said, “I’m going to go in and buy real estate. This is it. This is my time.” I remember meeting him. We probably ran into him 5 or 6 years after the crash. He bought all this real estate. He went crazy and worked crazy hours. I remember sitting down for lunch. He goes, “It’s crazy. I worked 25 years as a W-2 employee for Qualcomm.”

He did well and saved for retirement. He’s a conservative guy. He’s like, “I built more wealth in five years from real estate and cashflow than I have ever done with this job over 25 years.” He realized and said, “I should have started younger.” To prove your point, this is why you start younger and as soon as possible. What you can do at 5 years, 10 years or 20 years is unbelievable.

I am so grateful that for some reason, I figured that out also when I was in my early twenties. There’s a huge amount of my audience that is not in their early twenties. They’re in their 40s and 50s. There are many different ways for you to make money in real estate. If you’re not getting started early, it’s not the end of the world. It’s not the end of the game, but it is easier and takes less effort to build that wealth if you start younger. There’s a compounding, inflation, appreciation, and all of those things that aid intuitively and naturally so you don’t have to think about it.

Getting started is the most important part. It doesn’t matter how old you are. We have clients who got started later in life. We have a huge investor we know here now who didn’t get started until he was 35. He was a musician playing in bars. He borrowed $3,500 from his broker to buy his first property. He owns over 6,000 units now. He’s in his late 60s. From 35 to let’s call it 65, he owns 6,000 units, 100% by himself in San Diego, the most expensive market in the country. There are stories for every person. It’s not like if you didn’t get started in your twenties, it’s over for you. Get started at any point in time and you will exponentially improve your life going forward.

I’ve talked about this on the show all the time. Before you pick a strategy, you have to figure out who you are and where you’re at. What is your risk tolerance? What are the things that you’re trying to achieve? Part of that has to do with the timeframe that you have to achieve your goals. How much time do you want to spend each week and each day, but also how much time do you have? That’s one of the components to think about when you’re picking your real estate strategy. You’re not out of time, but more time gives you more opportunities. Kenny, what do you look for in an investment property?

Start younger in real estate and start as soon as possible, because what you can do at five years or 20 years is unbelievable. Share on X

We have this conversation a lot because we do get referred to a lot of first-time home buyers and also first-time investment property buyers. I have the same conversation. I said, “Why are you buying a house or an investment property?” I then said, “You need to answer that question.” I tell people that a husband and wife should be on the same page. If you don’t have a husband or a wife, then you don’t have to be on the same page with anybody. It’s your own money.

That’s the question. Sit down and say, “Why?” The other questions are, “What are the goals? What are you looking to do? What is the plan?” Some people are like, “In five years, I want to make $5,000 a month in income.” When you come up with the why, the plan and the goals, then we back into, “What kind of property do you want to buy? Are you going to buy a single-family? Are you going to buy a four-unit? Are you going to buy a five-plus?”

We always push, if you can, to buy the most units as possible because that’s what we push to. At the end of the day, if it’s your first deal, you might not understand it. If it’s your third deal, you’re like, “I should try to buy as many units as possible.” When you’re looking for your first real estate investment property, when you answer all those questions, it gets easier. If you’re getting pre-qualified with somebody like me, we back into it, “How much money do you have? Is it just you or are you bringing in other partners?”

We then back into, “This is what you can afford. This is what the gross rents need to be. This is how we can get you a loan.” Krystle could be a little bit different because the property has to qualify. When people say, “What are you looking at in your investment property?” I’m more like, “What’s your why? What’s your game plan? What can you afford?” From there, then we go, “Where are the areas we might want to look at?”

For example, here in San Diego, you might not want to go buy an investment property. We have to drive 45 minutes away every time you have to go somewhere. Maybe you’re going to look for something closer. My idea for your first property is if you can buy close to you or near you, it’s easier. Especially if you’re buying it, rehabbing it, and managing it, you want to be close by. What I’m looking for is probably not the first question I ask. It’s more backing in and getting all those questions answered and all the pre-qualification. I feel it makes it so much easier to identify what you want.

That’s exactly how I operate and used to work also with my clients. I love that. Krystle, how about your perspective on that?

It’s similar to Kenny. A lot of times when I’m working with new investors or even people who own a couple of 2 to 4-unit investment properties, and now they want to take the next step, it’s great that Kenny and I worked together because people don’t know when they’re making that crossover to apartments that the property has to qualify. They come to me and they say, “I have X amount down. I can get 75% LTV, right?” Technically, yes, but the property has to support the cashflow.

This is why having your criteria, your goals, and understanding exactly what you’re looking for is so important. You can go buy a 2 to 4-unit property and put 25% down and cashflow negative. If you don’t do your homework upfront and you don’t understand how to run cashflow, and you don’t have criteria, you could be in a property that doesn’t even cashflow. On apartments, we won’t let you do that. It’s difficult to fail. At the same time, you might have to come in with a lot more money down than what you anticipated.

The first step for me is talking to someone in getting qualified. It’s not just a broker. A good broker is going to want you to be in contact with a lender as it is, but you want to take a handful of deals to your lender and say, “What do I qualify for on these deals?” You can start understanding all of the different terms that we use in multifamily. It’s much different.

 

Every building that you look at is a business. I’m underwriting the business. That business needs to cashflow. Based on that, I can tell you what loan I can give you. For most of us, if you don’t have a loan, you don’t have a deal. We usually start there. Pre-qualifying for multifamily is a much easier process than it is for residential. It’s a different way of looking at it if you’re used to residential.

I want to highlight quickly and summarize for my ladies. I’ve said this before on the show, but I want to say it again. The big difference between lending in residential and in commercial is in residential, you qualify. In commercial, the property qualifies. There are completely different ways of analyzing whether you’re qualifying or not.

Keep that in mind when you’re looking at switching over. Maybe you’ve got 1 to 4 units. You’ve been doing residential. If you’re going to switch over to multifamily, understand that the big key to remember is it’s not about you. It’s about the property, which can be amazing if you don’t have the income or the credit. There are a lot of things that we need in residential that we don’t need necessarily in commercial. That’s true, correct?

That is correct. In your example of you guys buying a house and the fact that you only qualify for about the same as you did over the last twenty years or whatever, that doesn’t necessarily hold true in multifamily. I have plenty of real estate investors who cannot get a home loan but can go get a $5 million apartment loan.

Isn’t that amazing?

I like to say we use common sense.

It’s also interesting how we define common sense, but it’s a business loan, so you don’t have to qualify. Your business has to qualify. I love that. Let’s talk too about how to maximize your ROI.

One of the things that are so important when you’re buying a property is when you’re looking at properties, for example, some people might say LoopNet is the worst place to find apartment buildings. I’ve heard that so many times. I found some of my best deals on LoopNet. Why is that? I can look at a building and see the income potential that other people didn’t see. I get it and I get deals because of that.

When you’re looking at properties to invest in, you want to look at other ways that you can increase the ROI. The beauty of multifamily too is that the higher your NOI, your net operating income, the higher the value of your property. We value properties based on the cap rate. If you can increase the NOI, and multiply that by the cap rate, then you’ve already got an exponentially higher value.

It is advisable in high inflationary environments that you should be running to real estate. Share on X

I look at other things. When I walk into a building, I not only look at, “Does this building have RUBS, utility billing? If the landlord is paying all utilities or some utilities, can I come in and charge the tenants for their utilities to offset that cost?” A lot of buildings are doing that nowadays. “Is there storage? Is there parking? Are there other ways that I can increase?” In California, we have ADUs, which not every state may have. You can add an Accessory Dwelling Unit. “Is there a potential for me to add some ADUs or granny flats on the property? If I make small improvements to the property, can I increase the rent? Does that make sense?”

Also, I take a look at expenses. “How can I cut expenses?” Sometimes I go in and energy costs are astronomical. They haven’t converted to LED. The trash bill might be high. You can go renegotiate. There are a couple of different trash providers. You can negotiate the price down. There are so many ways to increase your NOI on a property. You have to be a forensic investigator when you go in and look at a property to see how you can maximize its potential.

Ladies, as you’re reading this, there are a lot of terms thrown out there that can be a little intimidating. Understand that that’s why you need a pro. When you’re looking at your financing and starting this journey, talk to somebody like Krystle. She’ll explain all those numbers and the way that the lending works around this so that you can understand it. Once you’ve talked to a pro, now you know what to go out and look for.

One thing that has been helpful for us in our business and also with other clients is when you’re looking at somebody to work with, it would be helpful that that person is also a real estate investor because they understand. They’re looking at the property as if they owned it. They know things that someone who has never invested in real estate would never know because they’ve never been there.

It’s helpful when you’re looking for somebody to work with that you go to somebody like that because we can be more of an advisor. I’m not just going to come and throw out loan options for you. I’m going to say, “What if we can do this? Maybe we can increase rents during escrow to push loan dollars. Maybe I can get this insurance quote down.” I’m doing everything I can to maximize your loan or get you the loan that you want. That’s the person you want on your team.

That’s going to be true, whether you’re buying a single-family, multifamily or commercials like offices, retail, or whatever. Anybody that you have on your team should be investors themselves. If they’re not walking the walk, they don’t understand your pain points. They also don’t understand the opportunities. That’s a good point. Kenny, do you want to add anything?

Some of the obvious things for ROI is you go into a dilapidated unit. You go put your cabinets, flooring, countertops, and all that. That’s a way to generate higher rent. That’s going to increase the value of the property. The other thing here in California that is huge is jet parking. I know that sounds weird. You have a garage. You have access to storage. We try to put laundry-in units, instead of a laundry room because people pay $100 to $150 more for a garage and $150 more for a laundry-in unit. We’ll also put AC and wall AC units in because people will pay more money.

As you get further along in the journey. We had the privilege of managing a lot of units. We learned a lot. We tested it. We would say, “Let’s remodel this unit. Do all this fancy stuff. What did we get? Why do we keep this one plain Jane over here?” We realized you’re getting a lot more money. It was worth it long-term. When you sell the building, some of these are going to pay you a premium.

When you’re doing ROI, what are you doing for the short-term for the rent game, but also what is a potential buyer if you are going to sell that property and exchange up for something bigger? Are they going to pay you a premium? We’ve found that there are a lot of buyers, especially here in California, who might be in a different part of their life and age.

 

They’re like, “We own this property. It’s got a lot of issues. We don’t want to deal with it. We have it free and clear. We want to sell it.” When you want to buy something that has market rents, is completely rehabbed and completely done, we will pay a premium for that. There are many reasons why you would increase the NOI and fix up the building, not just for the cashflow, but it could be if you’re going to sell in exchange for the building.

We refinance too. That’s another key.

This is an intuitive thing, ladies, to think about. When you walk into a house, if you look at it and go, “It needs air conditioning. This fridge is old. This doesn’t look nice. It was livable,” and then you walk into a comparable property that’s got air conditioning, it looks nice, and it’s a home for you and your family, would you pay a little bit more? It may not be dollar-to-dollar, but there’s this intuitive sense of, “I would much rather live here?” This is how I run my business too.

I want to make sure that people walk into the house and have a sigh of relief, “I could live here. This is so nice. This is so much nicer than these other places. I can do laundry inside. I can park my cars without getting sap all over them. I don’t have to pile the kids into the car and run to the car wash every week.” There are these intuitive feelings that we have in our gut when we’re moving into a home. Taking care of those pieces may not necessarily be a direct relation dollar-for-dollar, but you will notice it’s so much easier to rent, sell or maintain if you’re doing those things.

Not to mention retention too. That’s one of the things that we found. When you put laundry and/or AC unit, people stay longer. That reduces your turnover costs and vacancy. That’s our goal. We want you to get cozy and stay there.

Most of my tenants stay between 10 to 12 years for exactly that reason. They love the property. They don’t want to have to move to someplace else that’s not as cozy. I’m proud of my tenants. They usually buy something. Once they’ve lived in a happy home, they’ll usually buy something, which I love. It encourages them. They understand what it feels like to live in a place that feels like home.

Let’s talk about inflation. Everybody is talking about this. There’s a lot of fear around this. I can understand the fear, but we have had inflation before and real estate investors still have done well. It’s something to be aware of. It’s something to consider, and it’s something that you can use to your benefit. It’s not a time to sit on the sidelines and go, “It’s inflation. We’re not going to touch real estate.” I would like to get both of your guys’ perspectives on that, both in residential and commercial.

Frankly, I would advise in high inflationary environments that you should be running to real estate. Most of us want to feel the safety that we have all this cash in the bank. The truth of the matter is that the higher the inflation, the less your dollar is worth. You’re losing money by keeping money in the bank. That’s not to say that you shouldn’t be able to pay for your expenses for 6 to 12 months, whether it’s in your business or your personal life. You need to be able to cover your costs for a period of time.

In terms of the fear of inflation, I get that. The best thing to do in a market like this is to understand that there are things that you can’t control. While you need to be aware of them, you should not make decisions based on fear. You need to make decisions based on getting the knowledge, understanding where you’re at, and that you can’t change it, but you can have some control in your personal life about growing your wealth, making smart financial decisions, and changing some habits. It’s more like, “Let’s get an action plan together,” rather than, “Let’s be scared and be paralyzed.” This is the problem. Most people freeze because they’re scared. That’s the worst thing you could do in an environment like this. The most successful people take action.

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How about you, Kenny? What do you think?

For residential, because people are buying their homes, their costs and bills have gone up. If you bought a home, the rate is high. We’re in the camp that rates will come back down in the future. In 2020 and 2021, we saw all-time crazy low rates. We saw inventory at all-time lows. We saw buyer demand crazy. That resulted in crazy inflation in real estate. People overpaying all this stuff. We come to 2022, demand is going down. Supply is coming up. Some are selling for different reasons. Now, the buyers are going, “What should I do here?”

I tell everybody, “We have already seen price reductions. Some things are coming down and cooling off.” People are sitting here and listening. You hear this over and over. This is the story we’re having. “Should I buy now? Should I wait?” There’s probably a window from now until when the Fed says, “We’re going to do QE again.” That is quantitative easing. It means they’re going to put money back into the system. Now they’re taking it out at a rapid rate.

If you look at the ocean, it’s a low tide. They’re pulling money out. The water is draining out and they’re going to flood the system back. When that happens, interest rates will drop. Demand will go up. People feel more confident, but that’s also when everybody decides, “I’m going to get off the fence and buy.” Between now and whenever QE is, if we knew, we would write a book. This is what it is. We wouldn’t be here. This is the time to buy.

I would encourage people to look at inflation. It is now to your advantage. If you know rates are high and you think, “I’ve done my homework,” there are plenty of YouTube videos, podcasts and stuff to study, that interest rates go up and they’re going to lower the interest rates. Even if I lock in at a high-interest rate, I get a deal on a house. Let’s pick a house. A $500,000 house in 2021 was selling for $550,000.

The $500,000 house listed now is getting an offer at maybe $500,000 but they’re asking for a $15,000 lender credit. That is a huge difference between what was happening now and yesterday. If you’re seeing that, you are getting a discounted house. If you have a higher rate, it might not feel good, but if you can be in the camper, you’re refinancing in a year. You’re getting a lower rate and you’re not in the camp where everybody else is. You now have to buy. You’re amongst all these people and this whole wave of people that are going to come in.

I think now is the time to do it. Inflation is fearful for most because they don’t understand it. Putting your money in the bank is when they’re paying you 2% and inflation is 8.5%. We know it is more than that. You’re getting crushed. You might see a dip in real estate for now because of inflation and the rates are being manipulated up. In the long-term, you’re going to wish you look back. This is an opportunity to buy.

I loved your analogy of the ocean and the tides because that is how real estate is. There are low tide and high tide, and seller’s markets and buyer’s markets. It has been that way since the beginning of time. To understand that what’s happening is not permanent. You’re not married to the system. The system is going to change and you get to pivot and adjust based on what’s possible.

Even though interest rates are high, rents are raising higher. Interest rates are going up. They have gone up to 2% in the last few months. That’s too high. Anyways, they have gone up quite a lot. What have rents got up? Rents have gone up 30%. Even if you buy a place and you’re paying more, you’re getting significantly more in rent.

 

Inflation is playing on your side. You can be afraid of interest rates. You’re also losing a huge amount of money in the appreciation. The market is cooling down. We might see some corrections. Over time, if you guys can see me on YouTube, the real estate market is market specific. This is not true everywhere. In general, you have a correction and then it goes about higher. Over time, the general curve of real estate goes up.

In 2008 and 2009, we saw some people weird. It was a complete crash. Still many markets are significantly higher than they were before that crash. If you’re looking at real estate as a long game, what rates are doing is going to influence inflation, inflation influences rents, which influences your cashflow. Over time, appreciation is steady growth. There are different strategies in different markets, but I can’t say, “Don’t invest in real estate.” You have a good opportunity to benefit from inflation by investing. Would you guys agree?

Yes. Not to mention that you talked about buyer’s markets and seller’s markets. It shifted to a buyer’s market. You don’t have to go out and put an offer on a property, non-contingent, money-hard, day one anymore. You can ask for your proper due diligence timelines. You can get your financing contingency and your appraisal contingency because it’s not a seller’s market anymore.

It’s a much safer time, especially if you’re new to investing, to get that time to do your due diligence. Whereas before, it was this extreme pressure situation. You’re competing with all of these people. Nothing makes any sense. You just want to win. Now you get a lot more time to do your due diligence and research and make sure that you’re making the right decision when you’re making offers.

That’s a good point because it’s so much less stressful. You’re not scrambling constantly. Also, your taxes are based on your purchase price. In 2021, if you bought something for $550,000, as long as you own that property, you are going to have increases every single year based on a property value that started at $550,000.

If you buy it and it’s at $500,000, even if you’re paying a higher interest rate, you’re paying less in taxes. It could balance it out. You get exemptions on your tax returns too. It’s all a numbers game. Instead of running away in fear, take a look at the way that the numbers are working out. You may be pleasantly at what the opportunities are. If you take a look, you will be pleasantly surprised by what’s going on.

This is the thing. I’ve seen this so many times, even with clients who were experienced real estate investors. Every time they close a property, they go, “I don’t know. I don’t think it was a good deal. I think I overpaid.” Of course, you feel that way. You just paid the market price for the property that you bought. Let’s talk in three years and tell me how you feel. With property management, I did budgeting all the time for our clients. Every year I would have this budget and then, at the end of the year, I would look at it and calculate what their actual returns were on their properties.

In year one, they would be like, “That’s all right.” Year two, “Okay, fine. It’s a little better.” Year three, they’re like, “This is great. I made a good decision.” Everything feels expensive on day one because you are paying the market price. Sometimes you’re going to get a home run, but you can’t count on a home run every time. If you pay a market rate for a deal, and 3 or 5 years from now, you will look back and be happy that you did.

Even in the financial crash of 2008, our apartment values didn’t go down for us at least. There were some pains in a lot of parts of the country, higher vacancy, management companies going bust, mismanaging properties, and things like that. You’re going to have to watch those things. If you can hold on and responsibly manage your real estate, you’re going to win in the end.

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I feel like I could talk to you forever. We’re getting to where we don’t have time. I want to make sure that we complete the show and then we’ll talk some more in EXTRA. In EXTRA, ladies, we are going to talk about hacks to get your first deal. We’ve got two people. We’ve got commercial and residential. Both of them are going to weigh in on that. I’m super excited to be talking about that in EXTRA. Before we move towards the end of the show, could you tell us a little bit about how people can get in touch with you? You got a free offering for my ladies which I’m excited about.

We are almost done with a course on how to buy multifamily properties. It’s called the Real Estate Hustle Course. We’re going to offer the first ten people who DM us to Get In The Cashflow Game. That’s on Instagram, @GetInTheCashflowGame. We’ll offer the first ten people free beta access to the program. It will be a subscription-based program. People who will come into it are going to pay a monthly fee. We’ll give your first ten readers free access for a year.

That is so generous. DM is a direct message, ladies. It’s a DM on Instagram and it’s Get In The Cashflow Game. We’ve got so many ladies. I did a poll. I was like, “What social media are you on?” They’re all like, “I’m not on social media.” That’s what that means. Thank you so much. That was a generous offer. I love that. Are you guys ready for our three rapid-fire questions? I’m going to ask each of you separately.

Let’s go.

Who wants to go first?

I’ll go first. Krystle asked me to go first.

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

One super tip in getting started is listening to podcasts like this. We live in a day and age where you can go on YouTube, Apple or anywhere and find so much great content. It’s unbelievable. That is where you should start. Swallow and absorb as much content as you can.

What is one strategy for being successful as a real estate investor?

 

Stick to your discipline. Know your numbers and what you want to buy. Don’t start wavering on that and making bad decisions. Stick with what you set out to do. Don’t start doing crazy things and getting out of your comfort zone just to do a deal because they can come back to bite you in the butt.

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

I am an early riser. I get up probably between 3:30 and 4:00 AM. I’m not saying I recommend that, but I would tell anybody is whenever you get up, maybe you get up an hour extra and take that time. I call it “Me Time.” If you have two kids or if you’re a mom, tell your husband, “You’re going to watch him,” but go spend an hour on making yourself better, whether that’s learning about real estate, meditating, or going for a walk. That hour extra added up over one year over 20 to 30 years, I guarantee you, will change your life.

Thank you for that, Kenny. Krystle, are you ready?

Those are some good answers. Let’s see if I can come up with something original. I promise you it won’t be telling people to get up at 3:30 or 4:30.

That was painful to listen to.

I’m tired just thinking about it.

It’s true. Each of us is different. We’re all built differently. When you’re picking your strategies or how to run your life, be aware of who you are. That works for Kenny. It wouldn’t work for me, but it works for Kenny. If it works for you, that’s awesome. No judgment at all. Krystle, tell us one super tip on getting started investing in real estate.

The super tip is to get started. First, you want to know your criteria because you’re not going to go anywhere without knowing your criteria and your goals. Once you identify that, you get off the sidelines and get in the game because you’re going to keep analyzing over and over. If you don’t get started, you’ll keep analyzing and never do anything. Know your criteria and your goals and just move.

Investing in yourself is one of the best decisions that you can make. Share on X

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

My strategy for being successful is that I’m constantly growing and learning. I not only have listened to podcasts, YouTube, and things. If you have the benefit of investing in yourself, that is one of the best investments that you can make. I had a hard time with that over the years. I would invest in real estate any day, but then investing in myself for marketing or courses seemed silly, which now I know that’s silly. I have a mentor. I am in coaching groups. Kenny is part of mastermind groups. We are investing in ourselves, growing our knowledge, and being better every day. That is how we’re able to be more successful every day.

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

For me, I keep up with the news. It goes along with all of the podcasts and things. I don’t turn on the news in the morning, but I look at things on my phone. I listen to people that I respect in the industry, whether it’s economists or real estate investors. These are people I’m always trying to stay up-to-date with the newest strategies. Who are the newest lenders? Maybe there are newer types of loans available. Maybe there are other things I can do to improve my portfolio.

For example, we’re looking at doing solar and common areas to increase cashflow. It’s all these little things that I’m looking at to do to better my investing, but also me as a person. I focus on that. I don’t listen to the noise of the media, but I do look at people that I know and respect and people who are where I want to be. I look at what they’re doing.

I love all of it, but that last point of looking at people who are where you want to be. Don’t listen to the people who are not. It’s important to stay focused on the people that are where you want to be. They’re going to help you to get there faster. This show has been amazing and I’m so excited about what we’re going to be doing in EXTRA. Thank you so much for what you’ve contributed so far.

Thanks so much. This has been so fun.

Ladies, we’re going to be talking in EXTRA about hacks on how to get your first deal. If you’re subscribed to EXTRA, please stay tuned. There’s more. If you’re not, but would like to be, go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. You get the first seven days for free. Check that out. For those of you that are leaving us, thank you so much for joining Kenny, Krystle, and me for this portion of the show. You know how much I 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.

 

Important Links

• https://www.Instagram.com/GetInTheCashflowGame/
• Pacific Shore Capital
• The Simpson Team
• Get in the Cashflow Game with K&K
• YouTube – Moneeka Sawyer
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

About Kenny Simpson and Krystle Moore

Kenny Simpson is San Diego’s premiere Residential Financier and Real Estate Investor. He’s worked with thousands of clients on 1-4-unit financing, helping them shift their mindset and have confidence about qualifying for a loan whether for a primary residence or for investment properties. He leads the Simpson team and is the host of San Diego’s most popular Real Estate Podcast, Get in the Cashflow Game with K&K. Kenny has over 15 years in the business, including his own investment and management experience having managed over 1000 units, and rehabbing and designing countless properties as well.

Krystle Moore is the founder of Pacific Shore Capital and San Diego’s leading expert in Commercial
Financing and Real Estate Investing. She actually began her career at age 19 and now, with over 16 years of experience, Krystle has funded over one billion dollars, helping over 1000 clients with their commercial and multifamily financing needs. Between managing over 1000 units, rehabbing and designing countless properties, she is committed to
sharing her immense knowledge and industry expertise with her clients. Krystle’s expertise has been featured in SD Voyager and the San Diego Business Journal and she spoke on investing in Real Estate for the “MAX NOI” event. She shares insights and strategies as the host of San Diego’s most popular Real Estate Podcast, Get in the Cashflow Game with K&K as well as her Pacific Shore Capital YouTube Channel.

 

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

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The Magic of Leverage With Wendy Papasan – Real Estate Women

 

When do you discover your purpose in life? In this episode, Wendy Papasan shares how you can leverage living the best life you possibly can. Wendy enjoys teaching and guiding young adults to figure out what they want to do in life, which empowers and inspires them to become big thinking leaders in the future. Listen as she provides examples of carefully grasping the things you are good at so you can reach your goals and grow!

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Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

 

The Magic of Leverage With Wendy Papasan – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome Wendy Papasan back to the show. She leads the top real estate team in Austin, Texas. Prior to getting into real estate, she was a stay-at-home mom making no income. For over a decade, the Papasan Properties Group at Keller Williams has helped more than 1,600 families totaling more than $600 million in home sales.

In addition to a real estate business, she is a Cofounder and chairman of the board for Her Best Life. I can’t wait to hear more about this. It’s a million-dollar startup that helps women build big businesses and even bigger lives, which she’s done for herself. She’s also a co-host of the award-winning podcast Empire Building.

As an activist active real estate investor for many years, she’s passionate about helping others understand how money works and how to build wealth. A community activist and philanthropist, she is active on the board of KW Kids Can, a nonprofit that helps young adults think bigger and find their mission. She and her husband have helped raise more than $1 million for children with cancer. I hope you can see why Wendy and I are so alike. We have so many of the same values.

In her spare time, Wendy enjoys trail running, spending time with her family and international travel, and so do I. She is married to New York Times bestselling author and Keller Williams Vice President of Strategic Content, Jay Papasan. You guys know that I love talking about the book, The ONE Thing, and that is what Jay Papasan co-authored. They are the proud parents of two children and a dog named Taco. I love our conversations. We were sitting in the green room just chatting away and I can’t wait for Wendy to share with you ladies all this cool stuff she’s got going on.

Thanks for having me back.

It’s a pleasure. It’s nice to see you again. I love that you are the woman that likes to talk about leverage. Leverage is the magic to life. The two things that you talk a lot about are leveraging time and money. When I talk about money and time, both we never have enough of but money, we can always get back and make more time we cannot. Time is the ultimate commodity as the thing that once it’s gone, it’s gone.

It’s also a great equalizer. That’s the thing that everybody has the same amount of every single day. We all have 24 hours in a day and how we use it.

That’s what you are good at, is how do we use it? Let’s start by talking about leveraging time and then we’ll move into leveraging money. Does that sound fun?

That sounds great.

Talk to me a little bit about how you see leveraging time and what does that look like for you and your business?

The gift that I got when I started my real estate business was my kids were 3 and 5. I had been a stay-at-home mom for five years. I wanted to continue having a relationship with my kids. I leveraged myself right away, which was I got some help on the contract to close side pretty much from my first deal. That taste of leverage helped a lot.

For me, I was very committed to picking up my kids. I worked part-time my first couple of years in real estate. I was picking up my kids at noon and that compressed the schedule. It made me appreciate this idea of leverage because a lot of people, when they start out, they have too much time in real estate. They don’t know what to do all day long. It forced me to focus on the things that matter most and that’s the key to leveraging your time. It’s understanding what your priorities are. A lot of people wander around and they don’t understand what their priorities are.

 

The key to leveraging your time is understanding what your priorities are.

 

Talk to me a little bit about that. How do you define those priorities and how do you create the leverage required to live by those priorities?

I’m pretty clear about my mission and my mission is to empower and inspire big thinking leaders to create lives of abundance. What my mission does for me is it’s a filter for the choices that I make with my time. A lot of people don’t understand or know why they are on this planet. I strongly believe that everybody’s here for a reason. If you don’t know it, then it’s your job to go out and figure out what it is.

Let me give you an example. If that’s my mission and somebody says to me, “Can you teach a class to young adults on helping them figure out what they want to do with their life?” that’s an easy yes for me because my mission is to empower and inspire big thinking leaders to create lives of abundance.

If somebody says to me, “Will you be on the board for Austin Pets Alive!?” a local animal shelter, that sounds like fun. I do love my dog and I do love animals. However, it’s not in alignment with my mission. For those of us that have a tendency to say yes too much, raise your hand. It’s all of us because we want to do it all and have it all. It’s a nice filter because every yes is literally a no to everything else.

What I love that you talked about that there is that, it would be fun, there are a million fun things that each of us can do. What would it be like if we said yes to the things that were fun, but that were also aligned with our mission? The filter of it would be fun can certainly be there, but it has to be also aligned with a couple of other things in your life. For me, it’s all about core values. I talk about it more in that perspective. Talk to me a little bit about how you came up with that mission statement that defines the yes or the no.

I have an easy framework and it’s an exercise that we usually do over the course of an hour. I’m going to have to give you guys the short version of it. Take a piece of paper and draw a line down the middle of it. On the left-hand side, you want to write down all of the things you are passionate about. Moneeka would write travel, real estate investing, helping women, all these different things, and other things you are interested in. Baking. Maybe you are a baker. I don’t know. On the right-hand side, you write down the things you are good at.

For instance, you would write down communicating, podcasting, talking to people, getting the best out of people, whatever it is, these things that you are good at, and then you make what I would call a through statement. For instance, Gary Keller’s mission statement is to help people live the best life possible through teaching, coaching and writing. It’s an easy framework. That’s his number one passion.

You want to go back to those lists and narrow it down to your top three. You are not going to have seventeen different things. That makes no sense. You are not focused at all. It’s your passions on one side, what you are good at on the other, and then you make a through statement. Moneeka’s mission in life is to help women live their best lives through podcasting or whatever it is. I don’t want to put words in your mouth.

I see how you got through with that. It is to have women live their best lives through real estate and to do it blissfully.

I created your mission statement and it’s one sentence.

This is the other thing. I have worked with coaches before and they are like, “You got to put together a mission statement that will make you cry every single time or get teared up with passion every time you read it.” We would put together this paragraph and we worked on it for months. We came up with this thing and yes, every time I read it, I got tingles. I knew this was it, but when I’m trying to make decisions on where I’m going to spend my time, I’m not reading that. I know that it’s one sentence that captures the essence of everything that I stand for.

I would say take that mission statement, tape it up on the wall in your office and understand that you are not married to your mission statement. You are dating it. We are all dating our mission statements. I’m sure your mission in life has changed and evolved as you’ve grown as a person. As you are looking at it every day, you are thinking, “I’m going to tweak this. I’m going to do that. I’m going to change that.” You look up one day and it sticks.

 

 

Even if it sticks now, in a year, you may have to evolve it again. I love that clarity on that. You have your mission statement and you basically leverage your time based on if this is going to forward my mission or if this is aligned with my mission. I’m a yes, and if it doesn’t, I’m a no. Is that true?

Yeah. For a lot of the extracurricular stuff. For those of you that are reading, if you are working out a job, you are not necessarily going to be aligning all of your work. I would encourage everyone to be at a job that aligns at least with their values or their mission statement, but it’s also important to understand that the way you become more successful in this world is you run towards the things that you are good at and you leave everything else behind, which is what leverage is.

An easy way to do that is to think about what I would call your not-to-do list. Take a piece of paper, tape it to your desk, take a Sharpie and write, “My not-to-do list,” on top of it. This is for every single person reading. Every time you’ve got that feeling of, “I don’t want to do that,” or you put something off, you put it off again, you put it off for the third time, that then goes on the to-do list. When your to-do list is full, you got your piece of paper. When that’s full all the way down to the bottom, then you’ve got a job description for somebody else.

Hopefully, that person wakes up every day and they are thinking about their mission and what they love to do. It’s what’s on your not-to-do list. You can then continue to fire yourself from the things that you are not good at and your role gets smaller and smaller. In some ways, your life gets bigger and bigger, but your role gets smaller and smaller and you get better and better at it, and that’s what success looks like, doing a deep dive into the things that you are good at.

Honestly, women, a lot of times, are good at all things. We are too capable. We are good at this and that, and we keep all that stuff because we are pretty good at it. What ends up happening then is you never become an expert on anything, and that is how you will get paid the most from your work. It’s when you become very good at it. Nobody who’s good at everything ever got paid a large sum of money. That’s not how it works.

I’d like to give a little perspective on that because I know people that run businesses. This is in tech. It’s a little bit different than real estate. Even in real estate, they are in tech, they are a consultant and they run the whole show. They are a one-man shop making $1 million a year, but they run the whole shop, which means they are working fourteen hours a day. The relationship with their children is not as good as they would like it to be. They are up at night thinking about all the things that they need to do, so they are not getting rest. They are getting heavy and unhealthy. They have got all these other things. They are able to do everything and they make a lot of money.

There are two things that I’m trying to say here. There’s a huge sacrifice that we make in life to do everything. You are not leveraging your time that way. You are basically trading time for dollars. I have had this conversation. If I’m doing all of those things, so I’m working fourteen hours a day and I make $1 million a year, I’m making this much per hour.

First, it’s, “I make this much as a consultant.” No. Divide it around everything, and this is what you are making per hour. They are like, “I’m making $2,000 an hour.” That’s pretty good. What if you paid someone $500 an hour to do those jobs? You now have a better relationship with your kids, you are able to work out, you are not working as hard. You might take it up to $2 million a year because you are not so tired. Your brain is more fresh and you focus on the things you have expertise in and growing that expertise.

You are also not going to burn out and you are not going to look up after your kids have left the house and be filled with regret.

We can be successful doing it all. Some of us are that good.

I think you can have it all. I just don’t think you can do it all.

What I’m saying is to take a look at that because there are a lot of different ways to look at the cost of trying to do it all yourself. It’s not monetary either.

 

Move away from scarcity to an abundance mentality.

 

Even those people that are doing it all, I still believe that they got help. They might have help at home. They’ve got a housekeeper. They are probably leveraging some part of their life.

They have to, otherwise, they’d be on the road and never taking a shower. It’s more a matter of like focusing on what it is in your business. I love the way you talked about the not-to-do list. I’m going to use that. That’s so good. We have talked a lot about leveraging time. Do you feel like you got anything else you want to give us before we move to leveraging money?

I do. I think that for a lot of women, especially, leverage starts at home. No matter where you are, you get to leverage the things at home that you don’t want to do. My friend Via always says, “Kids don’t remember who made the dinner. They remember that you all sat down together as a family and had dinner together.”

Especially for women, if you think about it, we are only 50 years removed from our mom’s generation, who couldn’t even have their own checking account. It’s a very short time. There are a lot of feelings that we have as women. We are sexist about ourselves. It’s impossible to be a woman in America and not be sexist, even if you are a woman, because you have beliefs about what women should do. That’s part of where the guilt comes from. We feel like we should do everything that these moms did in the ‘50s and then also be a professional working mom and it’s impossible to do without burning out. You got to do your not-to-do list at home first.

I want the ladies to sit with for a minute because that is not something we talk about. You’ve heard from me. I have a wash and fold to do my laundry. It costs me $125 every time I do it. I go every two weeks. They hang up all my husband’s shirts. They put together all my socks, do all my laundry, and do my red separately because I wear a lot of red. They know how to work for me. It’s $125. That’s 10 to 15 loads of laundry. How much time would I have spent washing, drying, and hanging it?

Folding and putting away. You probably still have to put it away.

We still have to put it away unless you’ve got an organizer. I’ve got that too, but the putting away is a fraction of the time of doing all of those other pieces. What do you get to do with that time? You don’t have to work. This is the other thing. You don’t have to work with that time that can turn into leisure time because you do serve breaks.

You could get a hobby. What’s a hobby?

Leisure time or time to cuddle with your dog or your little person or go to a soccer game. Whatever it is, it doesn’t have to turn into work time. Just because you are leveraging your personal time, it does not mean that it has to turn into work time. It has to turn into your type. Whatever you choose to use it for. I do the wash and fold thing.

The other thing, my husband, when we got married, he promised me, “Moneeka, you will never scrub a toilet as long as you live with me,” and we were dead broke. We made nothing in those early days. We still had a maid because that was a high priority for us. During COVID, when the maid wouldn’t come, I put in this little pill into the tank and the toilet was staying awesome. My husband did the toilet. He promised me I would never scrub it. I thought a lot about it. It was a year and a half later when he finally admitted it.

Moneeka is like, “Haven’t you guys tried these things? They work amazingly. My toilet was never clearer. I don’t even know why I got a housekeeper.”

My husband is like, “No.” It’s one of those things. Even when things have been rough for us, I don’t always have a wash and fold, but I always have a house cleaner. I hate to say that we have rights and we deserve them. Those aren’t words that I like to use it often, but ladies, we should take care of ourselves.

 

 

You also can put other people to work. It’s weird. In America, we feel like we have to do everything ourselves. If you go to other countries, it’s an obligation as you are building wealth to put other people to work. It’s super weird what we do here. We feel like we have to do everything ourselves and I can tell you firsthand, you can have a big impact on people. My housekeeper’s from Ecuador. She owns three investment properties in Ecuador because she’s been my housekeeper for many years. I’m always talking about this stuff, so she ended up buying three investment properties herself. You can have a big impact on the people in your world as well.

You are making jobs. That’s for sure. You are helping the economy, all of those things. I totally love that. Thank you for bringing that point up. It’s so important. Let’s move to leveraging money. Talk to me about what it means to you and some of your strategies around that.

I grew up in a small farming community in Northern Minnesota. I would say it was lower middle-class. A lot of my extended family was farmers. The idea of real estate investing, owning your own business, anything like that was very weird and nobody leveraged anything. My great-grandmother worked on a farm her whole life. She ran the family farm for many years. She shoveled her own walk until she was 97.

This is in Northern Minnesota, where it snows eight months out of the year. The mentality was that you do everything yourself. I can remember when I joined Keller Williams, I was a real estate investor first, and then I became a realtor. I started to understand this idea of moving away from scarcity to an abundance mentality.

I realized that money is flowing freely through the universe. I believe that. I know there are some people reading that are struggling and you may not understand that, but it is true. There are lots of money out there. The trick is to understand that there’s always enough money, and the amazing thing about real estate investing is you get to leverage money to create more wealth.

Unlike any other investment, you get to buy something at a fraction of the cost and complete strangers pay your mortgage off for you. You tell people, for instance, from Russia. You say, “You can buy a property for 20% of what it’s worth.” They look at you like, “What? My family had to save forever to pay for 100% of the property.”

Foreigners come here and they are like, “Why doesn’t everybody own ten properties?” I’m like, “I don’t know. Tell me why.” It’s crazy. The idea of leveraging your money, imagine purchasing Tesla stock and calling up eTrade and saying, “I want to buy 100 shares, but I can only afford 20.” eTrade is going to be like, “No. You can’t do that.” You get to do that in your business, too, because you get to leverage money in order to make more money.” That’s leveraging money.

I’d like to emphasize. We talk about leverage a lot on this show. It is my favorite topic but let’s go into it one more time. Leverage is simply you taking a small amount of money to control a large asset and to get the benefits from the asset. I hear a lot from people, “I don’t want to be a slave to the bank.”

You can choose. You can be a slave to whoever owns the majority share of your asset or you can be a slave to your landlord. One will kick you out and the other will not when their life changes. Who are we a slave to? That feels a little bit negative. I don’t mean to make it sound like you are always a slave, but when people use that leverage, I’m saying that.

It’s more like choosing your hard. I tell people. People are like, “It’s hard to buy investment properties and being a landlord.” It’s not, but it can be hard, but it’s also hard if you wake up and you are 85 and you don’t have any assets or any income. That’s hard too.

You wake up one day and your landlord says, “I’m selling this property. You need to be out in 30 days.” That’s hard. I love that. Choosing your hard, and also choosing our easy. These things are hard, but understand that on the flip side of that, there’s an awful lot of easy. There’s an awful lot that it gives us. When we talk about leverage, don’t be afraid to do 20% down and then someone else is paying for the rest of it because now you are taking 20% of the risk. They are taking 80% of the risk. You get 100% of the benefits. You get 100% of the hard, you get 100% of the easy, and you get 100% of the growth, and that’s how you create your life.

Here’s another way to think about it. I tell my real estate clients who have young children, “Would you like to pay for college $0.20 on the dollar?” They are like, “Wait, what?” “Your son is three. You are going to buy an investment property. You are going to put 20% down. You are going to put it on a fifteen-year note and in fifteen years when your kid is eighteen, complete strangers will have paid the 80% off. You’ll have an asset free and clear and you can sell it. Your kid can go to college or take an equity line. Never sell a good asset. That’s what Warren Buffett says.

 

The amazing thing about real estate investing is you get to leverage money to create more wealth.

 

Keep it and get an equity line that’s cheap and let it keep growing for you.

It’s for refinance.

I have never heard it that way before. I love that. Anything else you’d like to say about leveraging money?

I think we are good.

One of the things that I love about Wendy is how concise she is. She knows her life and she knows how to say what she wants to say.

Leverage done.

You ladies know that we are going to do EXTRA right after this. I asked Wendy what she wanted to talk about, and she got asked to speak at Inman. She’s going to be talking about self-care, mental health and that sort of thing. It’s important that we take a look at when we are talking about leveraging time. Sometimes we don’t remember that the single most important asset that we have is our own health, and our mental health is a big piece of our health in so many ways. This mental health thing, there’s a little bit of a stigma sometimes with those words, but it’s so important.

Especially now after COVID, we are lonely. We have spent a lot of time alone. We spent a lot of time hearing about other people’s pain, even if we have got our own pain. Sometimes we feel guilty that we are not as in much pain as other people, so we don’t ask for help. We don’t admit that we need help. We don’t admit that we need to take care of ourselves.

There is a lot going on for us, especially as women, because we care so much about the people around us. We forget that the single most important asset is our own health. I asked Wendy to share with us what she’s going to be talking about at Inman and so she’s going to be talking about that at EXTRA. Do you want to add anything else before we move on?

I would say that if you don’t take time for your wellness, you will have to take time for your illness.

We’ll be talking about that EXTRA, and then I know that you have a special gift. She’s offering this for us. I’m so excited. She’s like, “I just got in touch with my ladies so we can do these for her team.” Tell us about the gifts from my ladies.

I have a new startup that I have been working on for a couple of years now. It’s called Her Best Life. It aligns perfectly with you and everything that’s in your heart. It was started because we wanted to amplify the lives and voices of women in business. I believe that it can be leadership lonely. It can be hard to run your own business and to be at a party maybe with other moms in your neighborhood and not be able to have a connection because they are talking about, “It’s so hard to go to Target.” Maybe you are talking about that too and run this $5 million business I have got over here.

 

 

We started this business with the idea that it can be leadership lonely for women, and it’s called Her Best Life. You can go to HerBestLife.com. We have several memberships and one that we are launching is our Net Worth Club. For those of you that don’t know what net worth is, it is the number that you should be focusing on in your personal life.

It’s like your personal P&L, your personal Profit and Loss statement. A lot of times, we focus only on the income, the top-line revenue, but we don’t focus on the profit, which is the sum of all of our assets. Net worth is everything you own, all your assets minus all your debt. We are launching a club where we track our net worth, but we track it together. We meet once a month. We take turns sharing information that’s of value.

Sometimes we talk about cryptocurrency and having the right insurance for your business. Sometimes we talk about real estate investing. It’s all the things. It’s $25 a month. It’s a low price because this is my passion and I want everyone to be able to get in there and do this because I believe that this one habit of tracking your net worth is how my husband and I have built a lot of our wealth.

You can go to NetWorthClub.com and type in the code BLISS and you guys can get three months free. It’s a $75 value. If you are not into it, you can jump out. This is something only for you guys. It’s something we invented before we started. I was reading my email from Moneeka’s team and it said, “If you have something to offer.” I was like, “I do have something to offer.” I hope you guys can join us.

It’s three months free, and then if you love it and you stay, it’s only $25 a month. It was so cute because I was asking Wendy, “What’s the price afterward?” She was like, “There’s no obligation afterward. If you don’t love it, you don’t stay.” It’s interesting because I hear this all the time. It’s because I asked this question, “What is one daily practice that you do?” People will talk about their daily practice.

Every once in a while, someone in the green room will say, “Do you know what my monthly practice is?” That has led to all my success and it’s tracking their net worth. It’s not tracking their profit and loss. It’s not tracking what they did right or wrong. Although, they do those things. Successful people do those things, but the thing they feel has built their wealth the fastest is being aware of their net worth.

It’s true for us and it’s a practice that we have practiced for many years. It’s crazy. It’s old.

No. You’re not old. We’re the same age.

You have fantastic skin. There you go.

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

I’m ready.

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

 

If you don’t take time for your wellness, you will have to take time for your illness.

 

This is a little self-serving, but I honestly believe it’s true. I had someone who was on the operations side of my team. She had her real estate license and she hemmed and hawed about getting into real estate. I said, “You need to sit down with so-and-so,” who is the best industrial realtor on my team. This person on my operations team had been looking at into buying an investment property for eighteen months.

She sat down with the investor realtor on my team and, within six weeks, was under contract. My tip is to get in touch with a realtor who does investing, if you are a realtor yourself. Even if you are a realtor yourself and you don’t do investing, hire someone because they will give you the confidence you need to pull the trigger. It’ll be the best money ever spent.

Focus on getting a realtor who does investments. Not deals with investors, but as an investor themselves is the very best. What’s one strategy for being successful in real estate investing?

This is not a tactical strategy, but being it for the long haul. This office that I’m in, I bought this house before I was a realtor in 2006. I bought it off Craigslist. It’s darling. When I bought it, I didn’t even know what I was doing. It’s two bedrooms. It’s 670 square feet. It’s tiny and on a busy street. One of the bedrooms doesn’t even have a closet. I would never tell one of my clients to buy it and I bought it for $135,000. I added on 750 square feet. I moved my office in here and I have probably made a couple of $100,000 on it by owning it for many years. Whatever decision you make in real estate, ten years in the future looks pretty good, even if it’s a poor decision.

It is a strategy because I like to tell people that mindset is a strategy. How you manage your mind, the way that you look at your life and your business is a strategy. It’s the most foundational strategy. It’s where everything begins. Being in for the long haul. You and I are so aligned. It’s so true. Ladies, she’s got a live event. Contact her. Find out what that’s all about.

We are sold out, but we are going to get you a ticket.

Her Best Life is on October 26 to 28, 2022, in Scottsdale, just so you know what’s going on. Tell us one daily practice you do that contributes to your personal success.

This goes back to our conversation about wellness. The thing that contributes to my success the most is getting up. I’m up at 5:00 and I’m working out with a trainer in my gym at 5:30. I do that three times a week. I have been doing that for many years. I do it with my husband. Several years ago, it was a very expensive proposition for us to do that. Honestly, it’s still pricey, but that habit allows me to do everything else. I’m up early. I get a lot of things done. By noon, I have packed more into my day than most people do in a week. It gives me the energy to do what I need to do every day.

Thank you so much for everything you’ve offered on this portion of the show. It’s amazing.

My pleasure.

I can’t wait to talk in EXTRA about self-care, mental health and us ladies, how we can prioritize ourselves so that we are able to do all the things in life we want to do. We’ll talk about that in EXTRA. If you are not subscribed to EXTRA, please go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com. You can subscribe there. You get seven days for free. Check it out.

If you are subscribed, stay tuned. We have got more. For those of you who are leaving Wendy and I now, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. I hope you found it as amazing as I did. I look forward to talking to you next time and 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

• Wendy Papasan – Past episode
• Papasan Properties Group
• Her Best Life
• Empire Building
• The ONE Thing
• NetWorthClub.com
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenExtra.com

 

About Wendy Papasan

Wendy leads real estate teams in Austin and Houston, Texas, as well as Minneapolis/St. Paul, Minnesota. After just 10 years in the business, she has sold more than 1000 homes totaling more than $325 Million. In addition to her real estate business, Wendy owns multiple income-producing properties, and is a partner in a Memphis real estate office.

She is a sought-after real estate speaker coach aligned with MAPS, who consults with agents across the country. She is particularly passionate about seeing women succeed in business and helping everyone grow their wealth. A community activist and philanthropist, Wendy is chairman of the board of KW Kids Can, a non-profit that helps young adults think bigger.

Last year she raised $150,000 for Heroes for Children, a Texas nonprofit that helps children with cancer. She also helped raise $30,000 for Community First Village, a master planned community that provides affordable, permanent housing and community for the chronically homeless in Central Texas. She is married to New York Times best-selling author and Keller William’s Vice President, Jay Papasan, and they are the proud parents of Gus and Veronica and a dog named Taco.

 

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

To see this program in video:

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

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The Role Sabotage Plays In Our Money Relationship With Jennifer Love – Real Estate Women

 

There is so much more to our relationship with wealth than the things it can afford us. It also goes deeper into our mental and emotional state and wellbeing. While working hard to earn, we can’t help but sabotage ourselves by being sucked into overwhelm and anxiety. It is time to develop a healthier relationship with money as Moneeka Sawyer sits down with Money Therapist, Wealth Philosopher, and CEO of the Living Wealthy Institute, Jennifer Love. In this episode, they discuss the different money personalities that can help inform us about how we are with money, the nature of money, and how we can learn to start living wealthy by making financial decisions that are in alignment with who we are. Join them as they take us further down into developing a healthy relationship with wealth and do what we can with it in the world.

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The Role Sabotage Plays In Our Money Relationship With Jennifer Love – Real Estate Women

Real Estate Investing For Women

I am so excited to welcome to the show Jennifer Love. She’s a Money Therapist, Wealth Philosopher, an ally of nature, advocate for emotions, top 5% internationally-acclaimed business advisor and dark chocolate enthusiast. She’s an award-winning five times career entrepreneurial with many years under her comfy Keds. She retired her high heels years ago. She is a thought leader with a heart that matches her name. Her degrees, Training and Research in Human and Organizational Behavior Psychology are the foundation of her clinical work.

She’s the visionary CEO of the Living Wealthy Institute helping rural leaders develop a healthy relationship with wealth free from overwhelm and anxiety by following a regenerative money equation for a holistic and nourishing experience. Leaders who know how to raise, manage, grow and contribute money can live soulful wealthy lives to become allies for future generations to come. She believes anything is possible while remaining grounded in science, real business practices and hard financial analytics. A former client once said about Jennifer, “With Jennifer, the only possible outcome is success.” Jennifer, welcome to the show.

Thanks.

Why don’t you jump in and give us a bit of your story?

It doesn't matter how much money we have. It's not about the money. It's about what's going on inside of us. Share on X

I’ll take us back to the three-year old me. The three-year-old me was standing in a dark hallway in my parents’ home in Oklahoma City, Oklahoma. My brother is taking a nap in the other room. I’m hearing my parents fighting. I can hear my father punching holes in the walls. Before I knew it, my father is walking down the hallway past me and out the door. I turned and look at my mom. She’s sitting on the bed and she’s crying. I go to her. I crawl up on the bed. I see the cut up credit cards sitting next to her. She looks to me. She’s crying and she says, “We don’t have any money. Your dad’s leaving and he’s not coming back.” My father was an entrepreneur. We lived quite rich up to that point.

That was the day that we went from being rich to being in poverty for a while. I lived in an ant house. We call it the rat house. What was the impression that was made on me that day was watching my mother become financially disempowered and not ever recovering from that fully. That made a big imprint in my life. There were a few other imprints that were made that day too. If it’s okay, I’ll go ahead and share how those imprints were made, what I did with them and how they ended up sabotaging me in the long run. We all have our own stories and money narratives. This is part of the work that I’m doing to help leaders unpack this for themselves.

My story coming through that day was one, I’m not good enough because I’m not good enough for dad to stay. I’m going to save the day. I’m going to make it all okay for mom somehow and rescue her. That ended up turning into overcompensating through achievement. In high school, I was the gal who was getting great grades. I was on the flag team. I walked our high school down the Rose Parade. I was front and center doing that. I won an art competition. Universal Studios won the competition. This goes on and on, going all the way through Missionettes, which is the girl scout version all the way through. My list goes on and on.

By the time that I was 29 years old, I had already started three companies. One of my clients asked me to come over and take over as CEO for a short period of time. It’s a mortgage bank. This was what brought me from San Diego at that time to New York City. There were 100 people in that company. By the time I was 30, I was running a mortgage bank with over 100 people. It’s pretty impressive we might say. In my early 30s, I was the CEO of an award-winning wholesale chocolate company doing millions and all that great stuff. The problem was that, in theory, this all sounds great on paper. By the time that I was in my early 30s, while I had all the accolades, I had all the credentials, I was emotionally bankrupt. I had sabotaged my own ability to feel like I could live wealthy in my life.

 

During this time, I was also bulimic. I was bulimic for a few years. Behind the scenes, I’m a hot mess. In front of the scenes, I looked like I got it all together. I was miserable and suffering inside. I was making it all about the money. What the story that was running me was I got to save the day. I got to make it all okay. I got to prove that I’m enough. I prove that I’m enough. That was driving me. These are the kinds of stories that are driving us a lot. What did I do about all that? Clearly, I’ve been doing work for a long time to move through all of this for myself.

I’m the gal who moved from my twenties drinking two pots of coffee a day and not sleeping two nights a week to having a 2 to 4-hour morning ritual and routine. It’s a big shift in my life. What I learned through doing my own inner work and reclaiming my living wealthy power, I found out that I matter. I am enough. I care deeply. I have a lot of tenacity. I’m incredible at building things. I have great capacity for wealth. I began to unpack all that for myself to understand that what I needed was to become my own best friend, to find compassion for myself, to accept myself exactly as I was with what was happening underneath the covers, which was all this unprocessed emotionality.

It is interesting because someone who was very wealthy but couldn’t live like they were wealthy. People must think, “That’s easy for you to say. I like to get there.” There’s a whole range. You call it money personalities. There’s a whole range of money personalities from wealthy, not able to live wealthy, poor and trying to get wealthy. Could you talk a little bit about these money personalities and how that shows up for different people?

Before I do, to bullet what you’ve said, underline and bold it as well, you’re right. There’s an interesting distinction that a lot of people hold because a person has money that somehow their life is easier. I’m here to say, I work with those who are struggling financially to the millionaires, billionaires and everything in between. What I find is that we can all be prisoners inside of ourself. It doesn’t matter how much money we have. It’s not about the money. It’s about what’s going on inside of us. That affects how much money we have. Going to the person, the money personalities, there’s the avoider, which is the most common especially amongst women leaders and women entrepreneurs I find.

Often, emotions in this world are not given a space. Share on X

We’re avoiding money. Even those who might have a lot of money in the bank, they’re still avoiding. Maybe they’re emotional avoiders but they’re still avoiding money in some way. I’ve worked with those who’ve made $10 million and lost it twice. That’s its own form of avoidance and how they’re being in relationship with those in their life, their relationship with money, how that’s even happening and how that’s playing out in their life. We’re all avoiding. The avoidance isn’t necessarily just, “I’m not looking at spreadsheets. I’m not managing my finances.” It comes in these increasingly nuanced ways and becomes very sophisticated overtime. It’s the money avoider.

The second one is the one where we’re trying to keep up with the Joneses. This is where it’s never ever enough. There’s the cautioner. The cautioner we can think of the Ebenezer Scrooge. Ebenezer Scrooge is curmudgeon-y. He’s got lots of money. His finances are in order but they’re a prisoner inside themselves as well. They’re not happy. They’re not living wealthy. They’ll sacrifice themselves for $1. These are some of the money personalities. There are more. There’s a rebel as well who’s like, “I’m going to do whatever I want, whenever I want, however I want.”

I’m beginning to over time with some of the research I’ve been doing with my clinical work to identify a few more. We’ll see how those begin to express themselves over time. It’s been interesting to have my research and the research that I’ve been doing on these many personalities confirmed by some of the other financial psychologists out there and what they’re seeing as well. We can see that some of how we express ourselves as primarily through one of these forms usually or there might be a secondary. There’s a personality type test and many personality tests that we can take. If someone’s interested in doing that, they can certainly head over to our website. I’d be happy to walk them through it.

There was something interesting in your bio where you talked about being an emotions advocate. I know that a lot of these imprints happen through an emotional response, an emotional reaction or something that was emotional in our life with you watching your dad walk out and see your mom crying. There’s a whole image that happens that imprints in our mind. It creates an entire emotional response. For me, I wrote a book called Choose Bliss. Bliss is about allowing ourselves to have all of those emotions but not living in the emotions except the ones that serve you.

All of them are clues whether you’re in ecstasy or despair. All of those are clues about what’s going on in your life. Where you want to live is in that place where I call bliss, which is this deep sense of joy and contentment. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have all the other stuff and we don’t have challenges but we have to honor the emotions. Bring ourselves back to an emotional home that serves our life and helps us to feel joy. That’s my perspective on emotions. I’d love to hear yours since you talk about being an emotional advocate, which most people will not even talk about. I’d love to hear your take on that.

We’re living in a world where emotions are often especially the intense emotions. Even what we would classify as positive emotions is often poo-pooed. “Don’t get too excited. Don’t celebrate too much.” It can be too muchness. Often emotions in this world are not given a space. My story is a perfect example of how repressed emotion begins to express itself. I see and I hold that there are all these different aspects of ourselves. I call it the four worlds of humanity. Nothing new about what I’m about to say, spiritual, mental, emotional and physical aspects of ourselves. What is interesting is we are not listening to our emotions. Let’s say anger, for example. I’m angry that my father left but I’m not processing it because I’m pretending like I’m fine. It’s the “I’m fine” syndrome.

When we shove that emotion down and we don’t deal with it, it’s going to begin to express itself out in other ways. That might begin to express itself out in thought, which it did for me. “I’m somehow not good enough. I need to go prove that I’m good enough.” That was a thought process that I was having because I wasn’t dealing with what was happening for me emotionally with that imprint in my life and that experience. It started also showing up behaviorally. I became bulimic, its form of trying to sooth myself. I’m trying to move and process something out of me that I can’t seem to deal with. It’s expressing itself in another form. If I had continued with that, that could have brought all kinds of other things, stress, anxiety. It creates all kinds of things in our life, our hearts, cancer. We know this has been proven over time in science and research.

 

It also shows up spiritually over time. I call it the scar tissue that begins to build up when we’re not dealing. We’re not handling the repression in our life or the ways that we’re operating in our life that are not what we desire, that are not wholesome. In the spiritual aspect, what that might look like is I’m feeling very disconnected from my purpose. I don’t even feel like I belong. I don’t have a sense of belonging. What are my passions? What am I passionate about my creativity? I’m not even connected to it. I’m not even been doing any of it. Emotions have a lot to do with everything coming back to this. When we repress anger, sadness, despair, fear or whatever other emotion we can insert, it’s coming out in some way, shape or form. It just looks different.

Much like you, I see emotions as our friends. I’m like, “Come on, anger. Sit down right next to me. Let’s have a talk. What’s going on?” We hear a lot about emotional intelligence but we don’t necessarily know what that means. I see that emotions are packed. They’re like nutrient dense soil that’s super-packed with information about what’s going on. I call it our North Star. It doesn’t mean it’s right or wrong. There’s a very big distinction between our truth in the moment and right or wrong, good or bad. We’re not going to be dualistic about this. It’s, “What’s happening to me? I’m angry. No wonder my chest feels tight.”

What are the thoughts that are happening? I’m feeling upset that my father walked out the door. At three years old, I’m not doing this practice but I’m walking you through the example. “I’m angry about the situation. What do I need?” We can begin to understand what our needs are in that moment. What are our unmet needs? I believe that we’re walking around in a world with a whole bunch of people that have a whole lot of unmet needs. They are making all kinds of financial, world and business decisions that are based in fear, anger and sadness. They don’t even know it.

We’ve talked a little bit about the nature of us. Let’s move to the nature of money since we’re talking about being wealthy. Talk to me a little bit about your perspective on that. Tell us a simple truth about the nature of money.

I believe that the simple truth about the nature of money is that it’s our natural state of being. I think we’re born naturally wealthy. Why I bring nature into the dialogue and conversation is because I believe that nature is one of our greatest teachers. We’ve lost connection with one of our greatest teachers and gifts in life. That’s Mother Nature herself. I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago, I was in Tulum, Mexico. It’s a great spot. I learned that the soil there is primarily made of limestone so it’s super hard soil. Most of the ecosystem has a hard time rooting down, especially in times of drought. Below this limestone and soil are these cenotes. Cenotes are caves that are filled with water.

Most of the ecosystem above the cenotes can’t root down to access in a time of drought, except that there are some trees that are strong and big enough to be able to break through that limestone, go down into the cenote and bring the water up into itself. Here’s a cool part. This is where it gets interesting to me. It begins to share the water with the ecosystem around it through the microbiome, fungi and bacteria in the dirt in the soil. It communicates with the other ecosystem around it so that it can support the system around it being incredibly generous with what it has to support what is suffering and what’s having a hard time.

We're walking around in a world with a whole bunch of people that have a whole lot of unmet needs. Share on X

Does it have to do that? No. Why does it do that? It’s because a more flourishing ecosystem creates a better environment for the trees. All that microbiome and the fungi, when it goes on the tree it’s supporting it. It’s helping it. It’s feeding it in its own certain way. The tree knows inherently that if all of the ecosystem is taken care of, that not only is it better for everyone, it’s better for me too. Nature has all these incredible, simple principles that I believe we can look out in relationship with wealth, money, how to behave, to learn from and reconnect with. To me, coming back to the question, I believe that our natural state is much like nature. It’s naturally being wealthy.

I believe that the biggest joy of being wealthy is what we can do with it in the world. It’s not who can we give to. I believe that people also do not value what they’ve been given. I don’t know if you disagree with me on this but there has to be some level of deserving your own respect and wealth. It was handed to you. You may go into that whole thing about, “I don’t deserve it. I’m very entitled.” There’s weird stuff that happens when things are given. However, I do donate. There’s a lot of stuff. There’s no need to talk about all that. The point that I’m trying to make is our ability as wealthy people to make the world a better place through the work that we do is the biggest joy of being wealthy and is the most fulfilling piece of it. I love that you talk about it that way because that was a perfect example of how that shows up. It’s not as obvious in our human community of how that works.

What you described that being generous, being in relationship with our wealth, that’s how it can be. It’s not for everyone who has wealth. It’s not but it can be. Much about that state, which is what I call living wealthy, that natural state of beingness, feeling free, feeling full where it’s regenerative rather than just like, “I want to suck it all up and store it over here for myself.” That is not a natural principle. Money is meant to flow. Money is simply energy. In fact, money only becomes what we make it. Money, I believe, is that quietness in space, that nothingness. Money is what we make it mean, what we make it be through our energy.

This is how I see it here. If we clear ourselves of what is blocking us, clogging us, the traumas, the stories, the emotional pain, it’s so much easier for everything to flow in and out. I had a vision several years ago. It’s a cool vision. I drew myself. It was on a New Year’s Eve evening, intention setting, party. I loved it. I had this vision of myself. I was standing out in nature with the trees and the birds. My face was tilted up to the sun. The sun was beaming down on me. My arms were open wide. I’m standing there feeling totally free and open. The sun was pouring these beautiful rays, different colors, red, orange, yellow and white into my heart.

I was standing there not needing to do anything just receiving it. Out of my stomach was a magnification, 10 to 100 times bigger light coming out of my stomach feeding the world. I was being filled. I didn’t need to do anything because it was coming right through me. It was like I was a prison for more being shared. That is how I hold myself in my life. The only way that we can live into that fully, that kind of an experience where it’s like receive and share, however sharing means for you based on your values, I hope. That’s what’s possible but if we clear it.

You have created something that you call the living wealthy model. They know that we’re going to do a deep dive on this, which I’m excited in EXTRA. Could you give us a high level what that means?

The first phase of the living wealthy model is getting awareness. This isn’t a new concept out there in the world. Getting awareness of what is identifying what’s happening inside of you. That’s what we’ve been talking about in this conversation in a certain way. It’s getting clear on what are the emotions that I’m having, what thoughts are those creating, what’s happening for me behaviorally and how’s that showing up in my purpose in life. We can’t get around it. I work with a lot of folks who have done a certain amount of personal or spiritual development. They come and meet with me. It’s like a whole other level.

I had a client at the end of 2020. She’s like, “Jennifer, I feel like I was the marble and you were Michelangelo. You created the Dave.” I said, ” Let’s make sure that we’re clear here. I handed you the pick. You were Michelangelo creating your own David.” That’s what the experience is. It’s like taking away all of the things that don’t belong there. Once we have an awareness of what is there, that creates understanding, it creates another level of understanding about what’s going on inside of us, how it got started, why. We get to this construction zone, I call it. In this construction zone is a constructive choice.

We can either beat the hell out of ourselves. The three-headed drama lama, I call it, comes out. The bully comes out. My expression of the bully is the Hulk. We all have it. Is the bully coming out? Is the victim coming out? Is the hero coming out? What is that looking like? It’s this inner critic that we all have in here. Do we understand what happened by the unpacking, getting the awareness, identifying what’s there and going, “No wonder?” In which leads us down the path into compassion for ourselves. When we can access that compassion, we can get to this place where we can move into acceptance, acceptance of what is. We can move into forgiveness, whether that’s of self or of other. With that, we can then begin to excavate.

This is where I have a lot of fun with clients. I take their hand and I’m like, “Come on. Let’s go inside. Let’s take a look. Do you see all that shit over there? Let’s clean it up. I’m getting the dump truck. We’re backing it in. Get the shovels. Load it up. Let’s get this out.” What’s left is all this beautiful gold inside of them. It’s like, “How do we clean this all up? How do we get that gold inside of you to shine so bright?” We enter then into the phase that requires discipline. It’s integration. I call it the practice field. This is where I do a lot of practices, all kinds of practices of clients. We often think that, “I got the information. I’m clear on what is happening inside of me. I’m good.” I’m like, “Did you decide that you got the awareness, you’re going to go climb Mount Everest? You went. You got the backpack, some of the equipment and you’re going to go up to the summit. Is that how it goes? No.”

 

We don’t expect ourselves to do that in a physical aspect. Somehow when it comes to our mental and our emotional aspect, we seem to have a lot less patience. We got to enter that integration practice field for quite a while so that the full alchemy of remapping that whole humanness can happen. Once we do and we’re fully committed to that process, then we enter embodiment. That’s where we become liberated where possibility, choice and freedom like I was describing that flow. Freedom is possible where we are open and live wealthy. That’s the wealthy living model.

We’re going to do a little deeper dive in EXTRA. What does that look like?

I’m going to share some contemplation questions to get the ladies here started on the first phase of awareness by helping them unpack and identify what’s there.

Ladies, that’s going to be cool. Let’s stay in tune for that. Jennifer, could you tell everybody how they can reach you?

It’s easy. Head over to JenniferLove.com or you can find me on Instagram @TheJenniferLove.

I know that you had a free wealth assessment. That’s at JenniferLove.com.

That’s right. Free wealth assessment gives you a lot of great insight into what’s going on for you with your wealth and living wealthy.

Thank you for that. Are you ready for our three rapid fire questions?

Yes, ma’am.

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

My tip here is to leverage your network. A lot of what I see, whether it’s investing in real estate or investing in your business doesn’t matter. People think that they don’t have the network that can support them in doing the funding. I call bullshit. I wrote a Huffington Post article several years ago. There are 600 people that want to fund you and those 600 people are in your own life. There was a New York Times article several years before that showed how the average person, the average American at least, knows 600 people in their life who would be willing to support them in some way, shape or form. Not necessarily direct money but be able to connect them with other. I’ve done a lot of fundraising over the years with my own companies and with other people. I’ve helped to raise over $100 million. I know a little bit about asking people for money. Whether that comes to real estate deals or anything else in your life, you can leverage your network. There’s one tip here. Sit down. Make a list of the 600 people you know and ask.

What is one strategy to be successful in real estate investing?

First of all, investing yourself greatly. Making decisions when you’ve got all that stuff inside of you is not going to go so well in long-term. Believe me, I know. The second suggestion I have here is especially for the newbies or those who are still figuring it out. Put on your science lab hat and make it the experiment. It doesn’t have to be perfect upfront. It’s not like you’re going to get all the great returns right away. Make it an experimentation process and go in like a scientist. My grandfather was one of the first scientists in the United States to work on penicillin. If he hadn’t put on his science hat, where would we be?

The same rings are true for anything in our life, including being successful in real estate. Start by being realistic. Invest in real estate based on your values. That might mean doing it a little different. Maybe one of your values is sustainability. You’re all about investing in revitalization. You can still make great money investing in real estate based on your values. Make sure that when you’re making these financial kinds of decisions that you’re doing it in alignment with who you are. That’s part of living wealthy.

Running our businesses through our values, through the filter of our values makes it much more meaningful too. What would you say is one daily practice that contributes to your personal success?

I started out there with the morning routine and ritual. That is huge for me. I’ll share what that looks like. For me, that’s breath. That is contemplation. I spend time in the mornings contemplating. It’s where all the magic for me. I’m a 4:00 to 6:00 AM wake up time. Contemplation, meditation, visualization, all of the things but also pandiculation. Pandiculation is a form of stretching. It’s like what the animals do. It’s not stretching out as far as we can go range of motion. It’s resistance against so that we create the tension to get rid of the tenseness in our body. Pandiculation is a very powerful way that I open my body up. I open my heart up. I open my mind up. I turned myself on. I have a connection practice where I connect with myself and the planet. That’s my morning ritual.

Money is meant to flow. Money is simply energy. In fact, money only becomes what we make it. Share on X

Thank you for that. This has been amazing. Thank you so much for what you’ve shared on this portion of the show.

You’re welcome.

I can’t wait to talk in EXTRA more about the living wealthy model. Ladies, thank you for joining Jennifer and I for this portion of the show. Stay tuned for EXTRA. We’re going to be talking more and doing a deep dive on how to get started in that living wealthy model, which is what we’re all here about to live wealthy, blissful lives. I’m excited about that. If you are subscribed, stay tuned. If you’re not but would like to be, to go to RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com. You get seven days for free. You can download a ton of great content and then stay or not, whatever you prefer. For those of you that are leaving Jennifer and I, thank you so much for joining us for this portion of the show. I look forward to seeing you next time. Until then remember, goals without action are just dreams. Get out there, take action and create the life your heart deeply desires. I’ll see you soon. Bye.

 

 Important Links

• Jennifer Love
• Living Wealthy Institute
• Choose Bliss
• @TheJenniferLove – Instagram
• Article – Top 600 People Who Want To Help Fund Your Business
• RealEstateInvestingForWomenEXTRA.com

 

About Jennifer Love

• Here’s How »

• https://blissfulinvestor.com/

• LinkedIn

• Twitter
• Facebook
• Instagram

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