1148: 2,000 Books & Time Value of Money with Jason Franciosa

I first started reading the rich dad books and that led me to looking at different motivational speakers. And I stumbled on Jason's podcast about seven years ago and then from then I was hooked. And after listening to him and I really got sold on his philosophy on how he looks at the market and real estate in general. And I wanted to jump in seven years ago, but I decided to open up a few businesses that went pretty well, but you know, I live in New York, so a lot of expenses over there, so those went not as according to plan. So now I saved my money up again and I'm here.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show with Jason Hartman. You're about to learn a new slant on investing, some exciting techniques and fresh new approaches to the world's most historically proven asset class that will enable you to create more wealth and freedom than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who's actually been there and done it. He's a successful investor, lender, developer and entrepreneur who's owned properties in 11 states, had hundreds of tenants, and been involved in thousands of real estate transactions. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to your financial Independence Day. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to episode 1148. 1148. This is Jason Hartman. Thank you so much for joining me today. We have a guest coming up, but first we've got my friend Manny Vea. He is the host of the 2000 Books podcast and YouTube channel. He is a voracious reader, as am I nowadays. I think I'm more of a listener than a reader, but I used to be a better reader. You know what they say, all the readers are leaders. And what I say, all the earners are learners. So lifelong education is where it's at. Manny, welcome. How you doing?

Good, man. Thanks for having me. I love books. I used to be an engineer. I gave that all up to get into this side of life, to be a bookworm.

Well, I got to tell our listeners the very funny story of how we met. Okay, so you can chime in on this, but I'll tee it up. So last year we were both at a conference in San Diego. And you live in San Diego. We were at Andrew Werner's. He was holding a little small private whiskey party. I think it was in his hotel suite there in San Diego at I believe the Marriott or the, the Hyatt. We were both at the party and we were Just talking, grabbing, you know, some hors d'. Oeuvres. And I said, you know, what do you do? And. And he said, oh, I host a podcast. And. And I pulled out my phone and I was literally listening to your podcast on the way to that little party, and I showed you that your podcast was right on my screen of my. That was a very, very.

That's right. But there was more to it, Jason. Actually, what happened was initially when I asked you and you said, oh, I have this real estate show. And I'm like, which real estate show? And you're like, at that point, I didn't really know your full name, so I only know your name, Jason. And you told me, oh, it's the Jason Hartman Real Estate. I'm like, no way. I. Dude, I used to literally, I remember getting started on your podcast, as in getting started on thinking about investing in real estate from your podcast. So that was like, what? No way. That's you. And I, like, I couldn't make the connection between the podcast pictures and you at the time. But as soon as you said that, I'm like, dude, I'm such a fan of you. And then you started asking me, oh, okay, so what do you do? And then when you started asking and we found out that I have the book summary podcast, you're like, what's the name? It's 2,000 books. You're like, no way, man. I'm listening to this. So it was like, you know, we're mutual. Mutual fans, mutual admiration society here.

It was like, what a coincidence. The biggest coincidence was that I was literally listening podcast on the way to that party. And now Andrew Werner is a host of the Mixergy podcast. And so he had a little. A little party. And so that was great. That was just so. I mean, what are the chances, right? What are the chances?

I was taking a picture with you listening or with your podcast on the phone. So I still have that picture.

You gotta send that to me. That's just such a funny picture. Yeah, that's great. I love learning. I love reading. I used to own about 4000 books. I actually, I didn't count them exactly, but I. I sort of counted the what's on one shelf and multiplied and, you know, and I started getting rid of them over the years. And I used to say, you know, if you're not going to give me an electronic book format or if your book isn't available in electronic form, I'm not going to buy it and I'll never read it because I just can't handle moving any more books, you know, and packing them and unpacking them again. But books are incredible. Obviously, they change lives. Your podcast is really handy because it's allows people to compress time and do more. So when we were talking, I asked you if you would come and speak at our upcoming Meet the Masters event, and you said yes.

Yay.

And. And so you will be speaking at our upcoming Meet the Masters, and I'm really looking forward to it. Now, you kind of curated some of your. Your book summaries for our attendees, right?

Yeah. So, as you know, like, I've been. I've been reading a ton. I mean, I've read a ton. You've read a ton, Jason. So it's so much fun. We're going to get the opportunity to talk about some of the best, some of the greatest books ever written on becoming successful in life. And a lot of people who are ambitious, people who are driven, they always gravitate towards books like that. But in my reading of over 1500 books at this time. And you've read over 4000 books, or even more than that.

No, no, no, I didn't say I actually read the 4,000 books. I said I owned them.

Okay, well, you've probably read a.

Just owning them. Doesn't that make you smarter? No, it doesn't actually, but it probably does. But I have read a lot, definitely.

Yeah, you have. So what we're going to do on that talk is curate, like, talk to the listeners maybe, of our top five greatest books of all time. When it comes to how to become more successful in life, how to take your success to the next level, it's really for the ambitious people.

Can't wait for this presentation. I'm super excited about it because we're going to curate. Well, really. But I'll help you. Some of the classic books, but also a couple of modern books kind of compare and contrast their philosophies and, you know, maybe talk about where these philosophies overlap. I know you picked two classics to talk to our listeners about, and I read both of these when I was 17 years old, and they changed my life. They just totally changed my life. Can't wait to dive in and talk about that. But, Manny, you're also going to talk about how to read books more effectively, right? Yeah. Tell us about that.

So the two questions I get all the time. So, remember, I used to be an engineer. I actually left my engineering career to start this business over three and a half years ago. And every time I talk to people about What I do, which is I'm a professional book reader. I read, I learned from books, and I summarize those books for the audience. The two questions I get are, what are the greatest books that I should read? And the second question is, how do you read so much? Because I read seven books a week, so I literally like. Either I'm reading that or listening to that, or I'm consuming it in some format, either physical, Kindle, or audible. So people always ask me, how do you actually condense all that knowledge in your brain, and how do you learn fast from these books? Because it's one thing to speed read, it's another thing to actually learn from that. And that's something I'm really excited to share with your audience. As to how to read a book for maximum learning, I cannot wait to.

Hear that part of your presentation. Because, you know, I've taken speed reading classes, and it just never took. I just can't. I don't know, maybe I'm just not. I just don't have the knack for it or something. But that is a great skill in the information age when we've got so much coming at us and everybody. I'm sure everybody listening just feels like they're drowning. Right. You know, you just can't keep up. You want to keep up. You want to learn everything. I don't know. At least for me, it's. I think it's kind of a compulsion. It's like an oc, OCD almost. I just want to learn everything. I'm so curious.

You and I are the same. We're kindred spirits here.

Yeah, but, but. But that's not all good, right? You know, you can always feel you. At least I'll speak for myself. You know, I always feel like I'm behind, like I'm overwhelmed. I. I sort of beat myself up about it. So it's not all good. It's good to be curious, for sure, but maybe it goes overboard. Maybe there's a book for that, right?

Well, yeah. I mean, there's the difference between, like, reading a lot, but then also reading, but learning from them. And that's. That's the distinction we're going to try to address there. As in how to learn the most from the book, how to absorb the most from the book, even with the same amount of time that you put into it. Like, even if you put in the same amount of hours, how can you get the most out of it?

Give us a couple hints about that. I know. You know, we don't have the time here, because we've got to get to our guests. But just give us a few tips, if you would.

So a couple of hints, first of all, like, I can help someone compress a book in half the time just by using the power of audio. So if you're listening to audio, there are hacks there to literally do it much faster. And not only do it much faster, almost when you do it faster, you force your brain to focus, which actually allows you to learn better and faster. So that's a really simple hack we're going to talk about.

Good. So really forcing yourself to do it more quickly, right?

Yeah.

That allows your brain to focus. I mean, we have too much brain capacity, and if we're doing things slowly, the brain gets scattered. But if things are coming at it fast, then the brain is forced to focus. And that's the fun part. That's when you can double, triple, quadruple your rate of learning.

Do you listen to audiobooks and podcasts at higher speeds?

Yep.

And what. What level of speed do you listen? Because I can't really go above about 1.5 to 1.75. It's just too fast. It's so unpleasant to listen to. But I have a friend who claims to listen at three times speed, and. Yeah, that's just crazy that. I don't know. I mean, I don't know. Do you do that? Is that effective?

Yeah, I go all the way, anywhere from 2 to 3x. I remember complaining to an audio app back in the day because they only limited it to 2x. And I was like, come on, guys, really? Let me listen at 3x.

That's so funny, because you seem. You seem so calm and mellow in.

Person, and I like to think I'm calm and mellow. But when it comes to the book, like, so one of the things people ask me is, hey, is it cheating if I'm listening to a book? And to me, that's a very weird question, because every book I listen to or read or read physically or read in a digital format, every book, I'm consuming with the intent of learning from it. So when it's an audiobook, even if it's going at 3x, as soon as I find something interesting, as soon as I find something that's really useful, I'm going to pause, I'm going to take notes, or I'm going to bookmark it so that my employee can now go and pick up all those bookmarks and collect all those notes again for me. So I'm not the one who says, okay, just listen at 3x and forget about it? No, no, no. It's all about what you do while you're listening at 3x. How do you process that? That's also really crucial, I think.

Listening with intent. In other words, as you're listening, have your mind trying to say, well, you know, what does that mean? How are they. What are they going to say next about that? You know, what does that lead to? Sort of active listening, if you will, and also combining it in a multimedia format, so taking notes, referring to the visual product, whether it be an electronic version or a printed version, combining those mediums. And you seem like you've done that very well because I love your book summaries. Here's an example, folks. This is an audiobook I'm listening to right now about stories and how to write them and so forth, because that's something I want to improve on. And here's a 3x speed. This is Manny. Full writing is to come as close as you can to identifying the underlying story you're trying to tell. So whether it's your first draft or your 15th, relax. Instead of thinking each draft has to be good, just try to make your story. See, that just stresses me out. I can't do that.

Yeah, but the good thing is the stress is a good stress. It's eustress.

Oh, really? Okay, Not. Yeah, I know about eustress versus regular stress. Yeah, but in the sense, like, it's.

It forces you to focus, and that changes everything, because the more you force your brain to focus and don't let it dwindle away or don't let it wander away, the more it forces you to create those connections and kind of encapsulate these ideas properly and think of them. But I think it's a gradual process. I don't recommend people go from 1x to 3x overnight. Maybe you go from 1 to 1.2, you graduate.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

To 2.5. But over time, it becomes really normal. And what happens is your brain starts anticipating what's coming. And even at 3x, it doesn't feel that awkward anymore because you already can see the bigger picture. It's almost like you're forced to see the bigger picture when it's coming at 3x. Because the sentence by itself, if I just turn it on. I've had this happen before where my car would automatically start playing the audio as soon as I jump in the car and start the car. And someone who just starts, who just sat with me in the car, they're like what are you listening to? I don't even understand a single word of it.

Yeah.

The reason for that you can train yourself.

Like everything is understood in my mind because I have the bigger picture perspective now of what is being talked about.

Very interesting. That's what the speed reading instructors will tell you. They'll say, stop reading words, start reading ideas. You know, so, so good stuff. Well, Manny, I'm really looking forward to your presentation. That'll be at our upcoming Meet the Masters event. We are less than two weeks away so we'll look forward to seeing you there. And we have got to get to our guest if you want to get a last minute ticket. We have not sold out yet. We got a few more tickets left. Jasonhartman.com Masters and Manny, I'll see you in less than two weeks.

Awesome, man. Looking forward to seeing you and everyone else there.

Join us March 23rd and 24th for the 2019 Meet the Masters of Income Property. What's the break this down and look at some of the strengths of income property as an asset class. I found that this event is really.

Helpful because I'm totally a newbie to real estate investment and so I picked.

Up so much information.

One of the great things about it is that it's so fragmented. Right. Embrace the fragmentation.

I've actually been learning a lot about the tax benefits, real estate and a lot of I've been investing actually well over 10 years now and I learned a lot of new things today.

The other advantage of this weekend is.

Networking, meeting new property managers, meeting new.

Area specialists and seeing the product they.

Have to offer that changes year by year.

Register now@jasonhartman.com masters it's my pleasure to welcome Jason Franciosa to the show. I had the pleasure of having dinner with him and some other friends a few weeks ago at the Capitalism Conference in Dallas, Texas. I was a speaker at that conference. After Jason saw my talk. He was bringing up some of the issues of monetary policy, inflation and things like that. I just love this topic. It is my absolute passion. He is former military officer. His business partners are all veterans, as is he and he's very passionate about helping veterans achieve financial independence. He has an Amazon business where they sell CrossFit gear as well. It's just a pleasure to have him on the show. Jason, welcome.

How are you doing? Well, thanks, Jason. Thank you for having me on the show.

I hope people can keep track because we have two Jason's here.

Yeah, exactly.

It's almost as confusing as the way the treasury, the government and the Federal Reserve operate.

Yeah, exactly. You can never follow along.

Absolutely. So we hope you can follow along. What got you interested in the things behind monetary policy and how it affects investments and the time value of money?

To be honest, it's just fascinating. I mean, it is amazing how everything correlates with each other and how most people don't even understand the fundamentals. You know, they think, oh, if I just had a bunch of cash in my bank account, I'd be wealthy. Well, yeah, maybe today you'll be wealthy, but, you know, in the very near future, that money could be literally worth next to nothing. So just seeing how everything correlates and then how the government actually works and, you know, how they can kind of essentially tax you without ever actually increasing taxes.

Right, right. It's. It's the insidious hidden tax, the inflation tax. Absolutely. Very good point. So inflation is the insidious hidden tax. And it is kind of crazy that our government taxes us twice. Well, you know, fundamentally they tax us twice, but in reality, they tax us way more than twice. But that's kind of another discussion. The discussion here just about the inflation tax is very interesting. Inflation is thought of mostly as a monetary phenomenon, and Milton Friedman was one of the big people that promulgated that idea that, you know, when you create more money, obviously, you know, the value of anything is pretty much based on its rarity. So something that isn't rare and has less value than something that is rare, if you print more, and I shouldn't even say money, I should say currency, because that's really what it is. If you print more currency, then the value of all currency in existence goes down because it is simply less rare. Right. We all know that diamonds are much more rare than sand on the beach. There's lots of sand. It's very cheap. Diamonds, there's not that many of them, so they're very expensive. And the same applies to currency. Why wouldn't it? Right. It's the same supply and demand laws that apply to everything. So, Jason, what is your view of the future? Do you think the future will be inflationary or not?

Absolutely. I see almost impossible where it's not inflationary simply because the massive amount of debt the government is continuing to amass, and they really only have two options. One is raise taxes, which even if you're on the left or the right, is typically not very well looked upon with voters. So that deincentivizes voters to give you a vote. And very few politicians are actually incentivized to increase taxes. Substantially, especially on the middle class and the working class, where the majority of their votes are coming from. So if they can't raise taxes, they have to print money. And the only way to pay off the debt is to print money so you get inflation. And I really don't see any other solution out of this in the future.

Yeah, yeah, no, I agree with you, really. There are a few more options than just raising taxes or inflating away the government's obligations. But what I really like about my own investing strategy, frankly, I'll just say I like my own strategy the best, is that it aligns the investor's interest with these very powerful forces. I mean, look, we can complain about it as much as we want, but we're not going to change it, right?

So absolutely.

So this is the business plan for governments and central banks. Every country does it. Every country has done it for eons. It's just going to continue. It is very likely that it will happen because it's a great deal. You know, they can just inflate their way out of the debt. But the six ways I came up with of, you know, how the government could solve their problems, right. We all know the government is essentially insolvent. So it can either default on its obligations and stop paying them, you know, not pay Social Security, not pay Medicare, not pay for all the entitlement programs, not pay its debt that it owes to foreign countries. This is totally unpalatable, right? It's never going to happen because there would be, you know, riots in the streets. It could raise taxes like you talked about. But really, you know, I've seen the math on this and Jason, it's mind boggling. The problem is so large at this point that you literally couldn't raise taxes enough to pay for it. And of course, you know, it's been proven over and over that raising taxes simply decreases economic activity. So you ultimately, you kill the golden goose, right? So raising taxes is definitely not a solution. I mean, the folks on the left would say it is, but there's just not enough taxes to get to solve the problem. So that's not going to happen. We could sell off assets, right? The country has assets it could sell. You know, it could sell the ports to Dubai. Like that came up in the news years ago, right? And we all remember the debate, you know, sell military equipment to foreign countries and so forth. We could steal, right? We could use our military to take property from other countries. So those are all pretty negative, don't you think?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

If we still resort into those Things, we have a serious problem.

Yeah, right, Absolutely. Absolutely. On the positive side, there is one very positive thing that could happen is just technological innovation that would grow the economy, that would grow us out of the mess, right? You know, I guess that's possible. It's kind of hard to fathom that innovation that would cause that growth would have to be America centric. It would have to happen here for, you know, if we're just talking, viewing it from a US perspective. And it would have to be pretty incredible. Right. It would have to be some major discovery because the problem is so big that, I don't know, it would have to be some major discovery that we could export to the rest of the world and would just sort of solve everybody's problems. But the most likely thing, as you say, is just inflate our way out. That begs the question of the discussion of the time value of money. So talk to us a little bit about the time value of money.

Absolutely. So the time value of money works in basically two sides. One is the money you have today is going to be worth less in the future because of inflation. And the second side is if you have money now and you invest it above the rate of inflation, then that money invested today can be worth more in the future in terms of actual dollar amount. So when you look at those two sides of it, it really makes real estate an incredible opportunity.

Yeah, you've got to beat inflation. You must beat inflation and taxes, frankly, you got to beat them both. You got to beat both types of taxes. So the easy example is to just look at a bank account and if the bank account pays, you know, say you've got a long term CD, right, that pays you a whopping 2%. If inflation is 2% and the CD is paying 2%, you're even with inflation. But the problem is now you got taxes. And so taxes will probably take away about 40% of that. So now you're just over 1%. You're losing money. You know, you're just getting beat up by saving money. So that's not very fair, is it?

Right. You're losing value, what you have today. You cannot trade for the same amount of goods as you could have in the past, right?

Yeah. Okay, so how do you see, I mean, look at, you've listened to like one episode of my podcast, right? So you know, you're not indoctrinated with my thinking. It's great because, you know, you're not prejudice. You haven't been influenced by my thinking at all. How do you see this Playing out. And why do you like income property to solve this problem?

Well, as we already discussed, we see inflation continue to grow, so you can use it into your advantage with real estate and of course, other types of leveraged assets, not just real estate. But I do know your show is more focused on the real estate side.

Right.

So first, by having cash flow, I think that's the most critical aspect of, of this equation. If you don't own an asset that cash flows, you're playing the speculation game, and that's a very hard game to win.

Yeah, folks, you know, he, he intuitively is referring right there to Commandment Number 5, Thou shalt not gamble. So good. I love it.

Absolutely. I mean, that's true across all types of assets, whether it's real estate or business investing or, or even equities. If you don't have cash flow, you're speculating. The really nice part about real estate, though, is because there's so many incentives in government backing for the banks to give you these incredible loans. I mean, very low interest rates, I think they've actually recently started to creep back down again. And a large sum of money as long as you can show the debt to income ratios upfront. So this allows you to take the money, invest it into a asset that's cash flowing at above the interest rate and the inflation rate. So you're net positive. And the value of the loan that you take is going to be worth less by the time you actually pay it off. Plus those monthly payments are gonna be worth less by the time you actually pay it off as well.

Yeah. When and where did you learn this? Where did you come up with this idea? It wasn't from me.

No, it was not. I've been interested in investing for a very long time. I started investing back when I was in high school, many years ago. And then our mutual friend, Ryan. Daniel Moran.

Right, right. Well, not that many years ago. I mean, you're a young guy and I don't know if you're going to say your age. You feel free.

Fifteen years ago, still.

Yeah.

Okay.

All right. And then Ryan Moran, our mutual friend.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, Ryan talks a lot about this stuff and then just being involved in seeing the effects of not understanding these things. So I've. When I first got into investing, I used to play the speculation game. I used to think, oh, if you just buy Apple today or whatever, stock today and hopefully go up, and sometimes it worked out great, and then sometimes I lost quite a bit of money. And it's like, okay, well, I'm losing money and I can't hold throughout this because there's no cash flow. And then I'm also realizing that with inflation, the value of my asset is going down. Not only did I lose money because I speculated incorrectly, the value of the money that I lost is also down as well.

So it's just like a double hit. And all of a sudden light bulbs go off and it's like, okay, well, I need an asset that is going to cash flow so I can hold through any dips in the asset value. And I need something that I can leverage inflation to. My favorite. So by borrowing against or using leverage, whether it's in business, I do this with my business as well. We take loans to fund, essentially investments. Purchasing inventory is an investment for my company because I know that I'm going to be able to sell it and get a higher return on that investment. In a business, you're talking 2, 300% versus more passive incomes, but still understand the power of that leverage and allowing you to allocate resources, someone else's resources, for your personal benefit.

Sure, sure. See, the thing about leverage is that you've got to have a way to maintain the leverage. And leverage is great, but not by itself. Right. Leverage will kill you if it's not offset with income to service the debt of that leverage. And that's the beauty of income property. You can basically outsource the obligation for that debt to someone called a tenant. We're into outsourcing over here.

Outsourcing is a wonderful thing, especially when you can outsource debt that's a great deal. It makes it all sustainable. I call it sustainable investing because it allows you to stay in the game. You know, we recommend investing in these linear markets that are nice and smooth markets. You know, they have minor ups and downs, not significant ones. You can really stay in the game nicely with those markets because they have very good cash flow. But even if you don't listen to my advice, and if you invest in the cyclical markets with bad cash flow, with big ugly, you know, big glorious highs and big and terrible ugly lows in the market cycle in terms of price, if you can manage to stay in the game, real estate is a game of staying power. You're going to win. The problem is in those markets with those big cycles, the cyclical markets that I don't recommend, most people can't afford to stay in the game. It's just too difficult because you'll be forced out. The cash flow is so bad, it'll just force you out of the market. That's really one of the key elements, isn't it, is just staying power. Right. The ability to stay in the game.

Absolutely. Because when you average it out over time, almost all assets typically go up over time, any major asset class. The other thing, of course, that you started hitting on as well is risk versus reward. So some people are more risk advantageous and others, you know, are less risk.

Yeah, they might be risk averse or willing to take big risk. And usually that's dictated by age and, you know, the level of wealth that someone has. So. Yeah, so what about that? What were you going to say about it though?

So I think that comes into a big play with real estate as well, because real estate is going to be predictable and it's going to be much lower risk as long as you are investing in those more stable markets. If you're investing in the high risk markets and of course you're taking on a higher risk, but you're looking for those higher reward numbers. But the beauty of real estate is it's a limited quantity. The US can't. Well, technically we could take over new countries, but within the current confines of our current country, there's only a certain amount of land in a certain amount of areas and a certain amount of real estate available to either purchase, rent or build on. And because of that, you're reducing a lot of your risk with all these other advantages, plus the cash flow, plus using the banks for your leverage. So it's really incredible.

Absolutely. Very good, very good. Okay, so here's something I want to wrap up with is this concept, and it actually has a name now. I was doing it many years ago when I was 20. I started, I guess I started doing it when I was 21 or 22 years old. I bought my first rental property at 20. I did not do this technique then. That was a traditional rental property purchase. Okay. But the term, it actually has a term nowadays it's called house hacking. House hacking. And if you haven't heard that term, let me just explain to our listeners what it means because I know you've got some plans with that, Jason, So we'll share your ideas with our listeners. Here's what house hacking is. It's really a concept designed for someone who lives in a good, solid, linear real estate market already and who's just getting started, who doesn't have much money to invest with. Right. This can be the perfect fit for that person. And basically what it is, is it just means you use an owner occupied loan to get into the house and you live in it for a year or two. And you know, that's okay because as long as you intend to live there and you really do move in, you're okay. And the owner occupied loans are much more desirable. And so what you do is you basically do a plan over several years and this gets you started. You get a very low down payment loan. If you're a veteran, Jason, like you are, you get a VA loan and this can be a very attractive opportunity. And you can also get this on a plex. Right. It could be a duplex, a triplex, a fourplex, anything up to four units. And you live in one of the units and you've still got that very, very desirable loan. Talk to us about that, if you would.

Absolutely. It's an incredible opportunity, especially for veterans or active duty military. One stipulation that I don't think it's talked about enough as well is if you're on active duty orders and you get ordered somewhere else, you don't have to maintain that full year in the home to keep the VA loan.

Right. Same with leases and that I'll give you. Just to go on a little tangent, we love military tenants. There's only one downside to them is that if they get orders to deploy, they can break their lease. So same idea. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, good. Yeah. So you can move. So what, what does that mean though? Like, what would that mean to an active duty person?

So the real advantage is not having to put that down payment down because that's more cash that you can invest in other areas and a larger leverage. Now, the risk here is if you do have a market dip and you do have to sell for some reason, you don't have any equity going into the home initially. So that is the increased risk on this type of strategy. But if you're playing for the long term like you should be, and you're purchasing in order to either rent it out immediately or eventually. And when I say immediately, I'm talking about a duplex, triplex, or quadplex, because you could rent two to three of those other units and live in one of them, then this becomes extremely advantageous because you have no initial personal investment. So you're basically getting a free cash flowing real estate asset. I mean, it's an incredible deal for people who take advantage of it.

It is an incredible deal. Just make sure, folks, you must move in to the property and you must live there. Okay. You must actually do that. Okay. So this is really a good strategy for a person getting started you're doing it with the mind of an investor, but you got to actually move in and you know, follow the rules that are required by owner occupied loans. You can get that advantageous loan, live there for a couple of years, and then buy another property and live there for a couple years and house hack again. You probably won't need to because by then you'll probably have some money. But it's a great tool for someone just starting out. Isn't this awesome?

Yeah. And I think you can always be used because you have to live somewhere no matter what. So maybe you continue to buy another income property, but your next house that you're going to live in, you can now use the VA loan again. Or you can refinance the previous loan that you had back to a traditional loan since you already have equity built in, now do a new VA loan so you're not putting any of your own money up front on the house you actually want to live in. Then instead of having that money wasted on the home you want to live in, you can use that to purchase another income property for your 20% or 10% down payment. So it's advantageous even if it's not just your first home purchase.

Good, good stuff. That's really good. Okay, great. Well, Jason, thank you for joining us today. It's just nice to get fresh insights from someone who you know is thinking on the same track like we are, myself and my listeners. It's just really refreshing to hear this stuff. So glad you're on the right track and I just want to wish you a great future and happy investing.

Thank you, Jason.

Yep. Hey, one more thing. Do you want to give out a website for your business or anything like that? You're welcome to.

Sure. If you want to check out if you're into fitness at all, so quite a few different types of fitness gear. Our website is element26co, element26co.

And you can get the products on Amazon as well, right?

Yep.

Exactly.

Fantastic. Thanks for joining us.

Thanks, Jason. Appreciate it.

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