CW 484 – Jason Hartman – Why Real Estate is Still A Better Option Than Stocks & A Real Estate Market Overview of Chicago Illinois

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Welcome to Creating wealth with Jason Hartman. During this program, Jason is going to tell you some really exciting things that you probably haven't thought of before and a new slant on investing fresh, new approaches to America's best investment that will enable you to create more wealth and happiness than you ever thought possible. Jason is a genuine, self made multimillionaire who not only talks the talk, but walks the walk. He's been a successful investor for 20 years and currently owns properties in 11 states and 17 cities. This program will help you follow in Jason's footsteps on the road to financial freedom. You really can do it. And now here's your host, Jason Hartman with the complete solution for real estate investors.

Welcome to the Creating wealth show. This is your host, Jason Hartman. We are at episode number 484 or 484. Hey, I hope you liked our Flashback Friday episode where we talk about the ultimate investing equation. What's interesting about these Flashback Friday episodes is number one, you get to hold me accountable. See if what I said is true came true or, you know, not true. I mean, I make predictions. And I interviewed an interesting guest today for a future episode that we have coming up who is the author of a book called the wealth of Nature, not the wealth of Nations. That would be Adam Smith, the Wealth of Nature. And he's a really interesting guy and he said, what do you call an economist who makes predictions wrong? That's what you call them. An economist who makes predictions is wrong. So that's what you get to do with my Flashback Friday episodes. They are raw, they are unedited. So whatever I published years ago, you're going to hear it on every Friday, Friday for Flashback Friday and today to help me with the intro portion before we get our guest on who's going to talk about Chicago. Yes, Chicago, the Windy City, one of our newer markets. We got a lot of interest and a lot of activity there, a lot of our clients buying there. So we'll talk about that in a few minutes. But first we've got my friend Randy, who is our mortgage expert who's been on the show before. Welcome, Randy. How you doing?

I'm doing great, Jason. How are you today?

Good. Good to have you. And you know, I'm really glad you came on the show. You, of course, spoke at our Meet the Masters event just over, well, about a month and a half ago. A little over a month and a half ago. Now We've talked a lot about B2R, which stands for Buy to Rent, Buy to Hold and Rent as an investor, and First Key, which are two companies who are offering some unique mortgage financing. They're really kind of filling some of the gaps and you know, I'm pretty excited about some of their programs and I wanted to have you on to talk about that as well as any other mortgage financing and lending related things we might talk about. So what's going on with first key and B2R, Randy?

Well, Jason, first of all, thanks again for having me on. I always appreciate the opportunity to talk and you know, regarding first key and B2R, again, just for people that aren't familiar with them at all, in between the world of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, which would be our, say, our preferred A tier lending and the other end of the spectrum being the, excuse me, which would be like your private money lending. Now we have this more like a portfolio type operation where these particular lenders are recognizing the value of real estate as a security and the value of real estate owners as being good borrowers. And so they're offering unique programs that allow properties to be financed inside of LLCs, which can't do with a Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac loan. It's allowing people to bundle properties into a group big one big loan, which, you know, gives you some simplicity, if you will, instead of having a bunch of little loans. And it's giving people an opportunity to get cash out of properties that they may have paid cash for and now or they've appreciated. Right. You sold in a lot of markets where home values have gone up. So they're doing all kinds of things to really help real estate investors.

Yeah, I mean, and that's one of the big ones. We've had a lot of our clients, especially the ones who had the guts and courage and faith to buy in 2008, 2009 and even 2010. You know, they've all realized some really nice appreciation on their properties. So, you know, they want to pull that equity out, engage in what I call equity stripping, which is, you know, a really good practice. As long as you can do it well and get some good rates and their fixed rates, pull that equity out and use it to acquire more properties and grow the size of their portfolio so they can control more real estate, which, I mean, I don't want to say for sure, but should lead to more wealth creation for them and more semi, semi passive income. Nothing's truly passive. So that's been a really exciting thing for Many of our clients, you can take and potentially buy many more properties when you can refinance them. So tell us what the rules are or the, you know, the guidelines here for purchase money loans, which means just money being used to purchase a property and refinance loans where you can refi and get cash out of the properties. Give us some of the guidelines. They're pretty good. I mean, this is not bad at all.

Well, they are pretty good. And you know, back to your point, just a minute ago, this is what we were talking about at the meet the Masters was using leverage. Remember the title of my presentation was Debt is not a four letter word. And you know, basically when you refinance and take equity out of the property, you're shifting more of the risk of owning that property to somebody else, to this third party because you took the equity out. That's the part that is at risk that you own. And so really this is just a smart way to not only just to grow your real estate investment portfolio, to leverage that portfolio to give you a greater return, but also actually reduce your risk. It's just a good strategy altogether. Now, specifically to your question, we can do properties that are one to four units. These types of lenders, these are one to four unit type properties, not apartment loans. We can get up to 75% loan to value on these properties, both on the cash out and on the purchase, by the way. So 75% loan to value, leaving only 25% equity.

Again, not bad at all. I mean, if you bought a mutual fund or a stock, you'd be putting 100% down. Here you only have to put 25% down or you can get cash out, you can get 75% of your cash out of it. So that's phenomenal.

Yeah. And if you, like you said, with the mutual fund, you're 100% at risk with your money now, you're going to be 25% at risk. But you get the benefit of owning 100% of the asset. You get 100% of the rent, you don't have to give away 75% of that to the lender. So yeah, it definitely is something that works for the Investor's benefit. The BTR program, B2R program, initially it started out at $500,000, was the minimum loan size they have, or they are about to lower that to $300,000. And you know, a lot of people go, gosh, I own properties that are worth 100 or, you know, $150,000. How would I ever get that loan well, this is what I meant about bundling, because we can take five or six properties worth $100,000, and then at 75%, that would be, let's say, you know, $500,000, 75%, we would have what, $350,000 that would satisfy now B2R and we can get one loan. And for all those properties.

So bundling the properties, and now they're allowing even a smaller bundle. So the bundle doesn't need to be half a million dollars worth of property. It can be just $300,000 worth of property. Right.

And that's what B2R on first key, it's even lower. You can actually have a smaller loan amount. You can have a smaller value property as well. So, you know, all these things are very specific. And, you know, I don't want to necessarily get into all the detailed detail of it. If somebody has a question, they can reach out to us and we can fill it in specific to their situation. But the point is they're getting better and they're getting more flexible and they're getting more available to more people because they're doing all the right things.

I want to ask how hard the underwriting criteria is, which isn't too bad either. But before we get into underwriting criteria and you know, those, those kind of hoops that the investor has to jump through, what about the rest of the terms? I mean, 75% loan to value ratio, that's pretty darn good. What is the interest rate? What is the term of the loan, the length of the loan, points, fees, anything else someone should know.

Okay, so the loans can be adjustable loans ranging from three, five to seven.

Years, which is the fixed period, right?

Fixed period of time, yes. So the interest rate is fixed for three years, fixed for five, fixed for.

Seven, up to seven year fixed. Okay.

Yeah. And it's not amortized over five or seven years. It'd be amortized over 30 years. So the payments are lower. You just have the interest rate that's fixed for the three, five or seven years.

So is there anything longer on the fixed rate or is 7 as far as they go?

No, actually, with one of our investors, which is First Key. First Key offers a full 30 year product.

30 year fixed rate. Okay, great. How high is the rate on that? And by the way, this is all subject to change, of course.

Yeah, I was going to say it's February 27th. Right. It's the end of February in 2015, because this is going to be on the Internet and live forever. But on the 30 year fixed rate, you're looking at the mid 7%.

Give us a comparison. I mean what could you get? Foreign investment property, not an owner occupied property. What could you get for an agency loan, a Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac type of loan that you just get from a bank?

Sure. In same, same date, same time frame. Today we'd be looking at maybe four and a half percent. So we're looking at what, 250 basis points higher interest rate because of the uniqueness of this loan. Again it's, it's that world in between the agency, Fannie, Freddie and the private money loans which are going to be more like 9, 10%, 11%, 12% interest.

That's, that's pretty darn good. I mean, you know, remember the comparison we have here, dear listeners, is we have hard money or private lending type of financing. That's all we had before. You know, now it's really nice to see that there is, there, there is a lot of money here that is kind of filling this gap. So this is, this is not bad, this is not a bad deal at all.

I also see a big benefit that people that have taken the, you know, the extra steps for asset protection to have their properties owned by an llc. These lenders are willing to make loans directly to the LLC and Fannie and Freddie just won't do that. If you have corporations, whatever type of entity, they'll lend to those entities where you can't do that with an agency loan. They'll also do loans for people that have properties in self directed like retirement plans, 401ks or IRAs that are non recourse. So that's also available through these types of programs as well.

Just out of curiosity, will they even finance owner occupied homes? Are they strictly for investors?

You know, I guess they would, but again given the choice, why would you, if you didn't have, you know, if you could get an agency loan and the interest rate's 250 basis points lower. You don't want to go that route.

Oh no, I agree with you, but I'm just kind of curious as to what their mindset is. You know, they really do cater to investors. You know, the fact that you can use entities and they don't have a problem with it. Whereas we've always in real estate been trying to, you know, kind of make the square peg fit into the round hole in that we're using residential type products that are not really designed for investors or investment properties and we're using them to finance them. But these companies are really just totally Catering toward investors.

That's what they're designed. They're. They're built and designed for investors. And you know, to answer your question, I don't even know for certain that they would lend to somebody with an owner occupied property. I don't know that it even fit their guideline. These are made for people that own investment properties for financing investments. That's what they're doing.

Good. Good deal. Okay, so tell us more. We talked about the rates. Did you want to talk any more about the fixed versus adjustable or do you want to jump into the underwriting criteria?

Well, I think I'd like to go to the underwriting criteria a little bit because I want to talk about this thing called debt coverage ratio. We've mentioned that before.

The dti, as it's known. The dti. The debt coverage ratio. Yes. Okay, go for it.

Yep. So dtr, dcr. Actually dcr, not dti. Debt to income versus debt coverage ratio. So, you know, a lot of times I ask people tell me about their properties and they're all happy that all these properties. Cash flow. Well, cash flow to some people is not the same as what these lenders are looking for in terms of they don't want to see breaking even. They want to see positive cash flow and they want to see typically about 120% of the income after the expenses, not including the mortgage that cover the mortgage debt. So if I have $1,000 mortgage payment, I want to have $1,200 of net income after paying property taxes and insurance and setting aside money for property management and vacancies. So the debt coverage ratio is very important. And you can fix that if you find yourself with a cash flow that's not quite right by borrowing less or having more equity in it, but on a Fannie Mae loan. So they don't care. They'll let you have negative cash flow. Right. These loans, you can't. You have to have a positive cash flow, and it has to be positive by 20% more than the mortgage payment itself.

Basically, that means that the. If someone goes to Jason Hartman.com and looks at the performance in the properties section, when you look at the debt coverage ratio, okay, and you see 1.2 in there or you see 1.4, 1.5, which you will see on a lot of our properties, that's just a totally easily financeable deal, right?

That's absolutely right. And if you happen to see one, I don't think you have any of these right now, but if you happen to see one that was like 1 or 1.1. All that would mean is instead of putting 25% down, you may need to put 30% down or 31 or 32 or whatever the number is to get the debt.

Yeah, that's, that's fantastic. Wow. There's some good opportunities here, people. This is nice. Now, what about the underwriting though? After that, I mean, you know, are they going to ask for your credit report? Are they going to nitpick every little thing in your file or are they going to be easy to work with?

I mean, everything changed in 2008. And you know, whether, you know, this is a product designed for a purpose and if you fit the box and fit the purpose, it'll work and you'll get the loan. But if you do that round peg, square hole, whatever, it isn't going to work again. And so it's not made. It's, this is not the fog and you know, fog and mirror type loan. You still have to qualify for it and the property has to qualify for it and there's underwriting criteria, but if you fit, it's a fantastic opportunity.

Are both lenders pretty much mirroring each other? I mean, I know there are some slight differences between, but would you say that overall they're pretty similar?

I'd say they're similar in that they both lend to investors. But beyond that, I think the products are very different. Again, B2R has this minimum $300,000 first key, doesn't have that first key has a loan design just for fix and flips, which B2R doesn't. They're more the buy and hold. So yeah, there's some, there's nuances and subtleties, product differentiation which you want to. And that's again why you got to really sit down and find out what it is that you need to accomplish and then we can find the right program and lender to fit that scenario.

Any other advice or tips that you want to share on lending in general or borrowing, I should say, more than lending.

Well, we are once again in a super, super low interest rate environment and everybody should be looking at refinancing anything they can right now. Because this opportunity, you know, we said it wasn't going to come along again and it did. But it's just not going to last forever. This is not normal. And to get 30 year financing at these below 100 year interest rates, if you will, and be able to lock in that interest rate for three decades in the future, this is going to pay off in spades if you can take advantage of it.

Today, it really is. It's an amazing time. Any thoughts on when interest rates are going to go up? I was reading an article two days ago, and it talked about how Janet Yellen was kind of setting the path for rate increases, but still inflation is very low. What are your thoughts on this?

Yeah, I think that's a really great question because, you know, fundamentally, we look at all the money that's been pumped into the system through the Federal Reserve since the financial crisis, and everybody's just waiting for this inflation to happen. Now, I have an opportunity as a lender, of course, to see what's been going on with rates going down. But I'm also a financial planner and I work with life insurance annuities, the other side of the equation, if you will. Right. And so I've been seeing interest rates being lowered on the payouts from the insurance companies who are looking as far into the future as possible. Basically, they're saying, hey, in the near future. And I'm not talking like the next six months or a year. I'm talking, like years. They still don't see a big rise in interest rates ahead of us because the world, that cold that we caught back in 2008, the rest of the world's got it now, and they got to get over it.

Right? Right. It's contagious. Economics are contagious. No question about it. I wanted to just mention to our investors before we jump into our guest and hear a little bit about Chicago. In addition to that, Indianapolis. I mean, wow. A lot of our investors, I mean, that's just been a perennial market for us. We've got some different providers there. We had problems with one of our providers, and we're really kind of phasing them out and welcoming some more business with some of our other providers there. There's just a lot of great metrics about it. USA dubbed it the number one convention city in the US now, you know, when I hear that, I say, what about Las Vegas? Well, it says, but according to visit Indy, 62% of visitors to Indianapolis came to see family members and friends. The number has risen from the 50s in recent years. They've got just a ton of good things going for them. The New York Times said they listed it as one of 52 places to go in 2014. Now, you know, there's just a lot to brag about in Indianapolis. It's kind of surprising. I mean, the reason I'm saying this and so surprised about it is that I would never really consider Indianapolis a tourist destination unless I'M going to go see the Indy 500. Right. But you know, I'm looking at this ranking right now from USA Today in terms of the best convention cities. And here they are in order, according to USA Today. Indianapolis, number one, Boston, number two. Nashville, number three, Salt Lake City, four. Atlanta, one of our markets. Five, Denver, another one of our markets. Although kind of expensive, we can't do much in Denver because of the prices. New Orleans, number seven. Denver was six, by the way. D.C. number eight. Minneapolis, nine. Chicago, another one of our markets. That's number 10. So some of this stuff actually kind of surprised me. Does that surprise you, Randy?

It does surprise me. I mean, I wouldn't think of going to Indianapolis on vacation either.

Well, but for conventions, you know, it's like it's got to be a lot less expensive for companies to have conventions there than in Las Vegas.

Right?

So I think that's one of the reasons it's really, it's just really attractive. I mean, whenever I go to Las Vegas, I just feel like everybody is in my wallet. You know, everything costs money there. It's just mind boggling how expensive that place is now. I mean, I remember in the old days, Las Vegas, you know, they used to have $99 buffets. What happened to all of that?

That's why they have all those big beautiful casinos there now. I have to say, the one thing I love about all of these types of properties in these communities is that the land to value ratios. When you look at coastal property like California, where 80% of the property value is the land and 20% the property, you go to Indianapolis, it's completely the opposite. And what a difference that makes. The net cash flow, the money you get to keep after Uncle Sam. Yeah, it's huge. It's just huge. You take the same dollar value and move it from the coast to one of these communities and you're going to increase your income by, you know, 100%.

Well, Randy, that hearkens back to one of our clients, Dave and Rebecca, that you referred to us. And we did that fantastic exchange together with them. And by the way, I have to tell you that I was just at one of my mastermind groups and one of their brokers came up to me and said that they were, you know, they brought up our names. I just heard this the other day and you know, I thought, what a small world it is here. This guy is 3,000 miles away across the country and he says, oh yeah, we were buying properties through Jason Hartman's company and we got a whole Bunch of them. And they bought one locally through him there in Pennsylvania. So he just said, what a small world. I'm going to see Jason next week.

Yeah, that was quite the exchange. That was what, a $3.7 million property into. I think we ended up with 27 single family residences that we had.

Oh, I'm gonna correct you. I. Well, I don't know. Maybe, you know, I could be wrong, but I thought it was a $2.7 million beach property in, like, San Clemente, and I think they bought 36 or 37 properties with that exchange. Could be wrong.

Yeah.

You know what?

You might be right. But the. And the point was that we did all this in 45 days. Right. We closed them longer, but 45 days, we identified that many properties that. That worked. That was. That was fun.

It's really just phenomenal. You know, that's really in. Randy, you've heard me talk about it enough times. It's the Hartman risk evaluator. There's just so much to that, you know, I mean, if you want to be a real investor and not a speculator, buy the commodities, the packaged commodities. Buy the structure, the house sitting on the land. Because that's going to give you two things. It's going to give you much better cash flow, and it's going to dramatically reduce your risk. There's no question about it.

All good. All really good. Yeah, that was quite the experience. We have to do that again sometime.

Absolutely. We will. Hey, Randy, I noticed we're going a little bit long here, so I think we're going to run Chicago on the next show. Why don't we just talk for a little bit longer here? For the listeners, I just want to ask you another question. Remember Douglas Andrew?

Oh, of course.

Or Doug Andrews? He wrote a few great books. One that I read maybe 11 years ago called Missed Fortune, and then he wrote missed Fortune 101. And it's kind of like I loved half of his philosophy. I didn't like the other half. I talked about it on the show many times before, especially in the old days. Maybe some of our listeners on one of my flashback Friday episodes will catch some of those interviews. That guy's whole concept was. Was half great, I thought, you know, have you kept up with him? Whatever happened to him and his stuff? You know, is he still around or what's his thing nowadays?

Well, yeah, he's definitely still around. The concept is still around, sort of. And just again, for the. For listeners that don't know what we're talking about, basically, the the book was about taking the equity in your real estate that, in Doug's words, was not safe, not liquid, and provided no rate of return.

And I couldn't agree more. You know, there's no. By the way, Randy, before you go on, you know, there's a metric, and I'm sure you've heard it, it's called roe, not roi, like return on investment or return on inflation, as I've coined. But roe, return on equity. And I say that return on equity is bogus. There is no such thing. There is no actual return on equity. And that is a metric that especially commercial real estate people use all the time. Return on equity, you know.

Yeah, it's kind of like, I guess, the opposite of opportunity cost. Right. So you're. If you finance 100%, it costs you X. If you finance it 75%, that savings would be your return on equity. So you could, you could argue it. I mean, obviously, just having that conversation today, if you had a home that you paid cash for, you. Oh, I have no mortgage, and so I have a $500,000 house. I paid no cash. I paid cash for it. I have no mortgage payment. True, but you also lost the opportunity to earn, let's say, 5% on that $500,000. So still it's costing you $25,000 a year to own that home free and clear. Right. That's kind of the opposite of return on equity. But back to our point, Jason, so Doug's theory was, let's take the equity out of your house. And that's the part that you did like and then the part that you didn. He was putting it in equity index universal life insurance policies, where you would have advocated putting it in real estate. Right. And I still would love to have that debate. Not today, because it'll take some time.

It will take a while.

Yeah, it'll take a while. And so now fast forward. He wrote that book, I think, back in 2002, so we're looking at 13 years later. I would say that people that followed that strategy and didn't panic when the home values went down and they had negative equity possibly, and the stock market went down. If they held on, they probably did really, really well. Those insurance contracts made lots of money. The equity and the real estate sure went away. But so what they had in another place making. Making money as well. And you go fast forward 13 years and now probably the equity's back. The real. The returns inside the investments have done well as well. It's a good. The point is that the equity in your real estate is just the part that's at risk. So who do you want to own that risk? Do you want to own it or do you want to let the bank own it? It's much better to let the bank own that risk.

Right, right. You can basically outsource your debt obligation to the tenant, you can outsource your risk to the bank, you can outsource your tax liability to, you know, give that back to the government instead of it being on your head. If you can qualify for all the depreciation and so forth, I mean, it's just the best thing going. You know, it's amazing. Why don't some people get it? I mean, you know, you work with a lot of people. You know, you've got a financial planning practice in addition to your mortgage practice. How is it that some people just get it about this real estate thing and some just don't?

Yeah, yeah. Well, you know, if they. If they get on the Internet or they, you know, they'll listen to the, you know, the. The popular gurus, whether it's Suze Orman or Dave Ramsey, whatever.

Well, dave. Dave Ramsey owns quite a lot of real estate, but, you know, he loves to brag about how it's all free and clear. And. I mean, this is just idiotic. I'll tell you two things I want to say about this. Number one is that I had Dave Ramsey's number two guy. He would not come on my show. Dave, okay? But I had his number two man on the show. I can't remember exactly his title. Like the CEO of his company or something, or maybe this cfo. I'm not sure. Anyway, he was on the show a while ago and he talked about how. Well, the reason Dave doesn't like debt is because he had all this real estate and his loans were called. And I said, that's impossible. You can't. They changed that law in the Depression. No lender can call your loan, okay? It's as long if you're making the payments. They can't call your loan if you're not making the payments. Heck, they can take the property. Great. That's the implicit. That's the. Your implicit exit option is you can let it go. Okay? So what. I mean, that's just. It's just amazing how people don't get that. Now, fast forward to today. I was doing an interview with a very bright author, and she was an anchor on CNBC and on a lot of things. But, you know, it's not her fault. She just doesn't Understand real estate, right? And we were talking in this interview, will be published soon, by the way. And you know, she was saying that people shouldn't view their home as an investment. Now of course, I agree with that, okay? Your home is an expense, it's not an investment. We're all, in the final analysis, we're all renters, okay? We don't own anything. We're not taking anything with us, okay, out of this life, right? There's no, like they say, there's no suitcase on the Hearst, okay? No suitcase rack on the, on the top of the Hearst, okay? So we're not taking anything with us. We're all renters. We just have our house that we use for utility and that's all there is to it. There's nothing more to it, okay? So you're either gonna pay rent or you're gonna pay a mortgage. Now if that property is $100,000 property, and that means it's at the lower end of the spectrum, then, you know, you should own that property, you should buy that property, you should not be paying rent. But if it's a million dollar property, you should rent it, you'd be much better off renting it because you can rent that million dollar property for a lot less than you can get the return back from a million dollars invested in other properties that are rentals. So, you know, that's one thing. And then she said, well, you know, it's been shown over the years that, you know, real estate doesn't really beat inflation. And I agree with that. But Robert Shiller said that in his book too. The famous Robert Shiller, the name behind the case, Shiller Index. The author of Irrational Exuberance Number One and Irrational Exuberance Number Two. He borrowed that phrase from Alan Greenspan and then wrote those books. I read the Number two book years ago and I just thought, is the guy an idiot or is he a liar? It's one or the other. Because to say that real estate only keeps pace with inflation is true on its face. But the reality is that in practice, most people think finance their real estate. And when you finance it and say, for example, inflation is 3% and real estate that same year appreciates at 3%, or say inflation is 6 and the real estate appreciates at 6, doesn't matter when you only have 10% of the money into the deal, you multiply that return by 10 times. So you inflation did in the first example or in the second example, 6% and the real estate did 6%, but your gross, you know, simplified Return on investment is 60% because you only have 10% of your money in the deal. I mean, that's when home ownership, even if it's your own home that you're not renting out, where you're paying the debt yourself, it's still a phenomenal deal.

And you still get the tax benefits that you get to deduct from it, and you get the property taxes you get to deduct from it. I mean, that doesn't even include that. You're just looking at pure appreciation. So yeah, with leverage and tax benefits, it's hard to say how you can't beat the stock market.

Now it gets even better because then you add to it, and you spoke about this at our last Meet the Masters event, you add to it, which, you know, one person argued with me that this is, you're just talking about leverage. But no, I'm not talking about leverage. Leverage is what happens on the top of the deal, right? So the hundred thousand dollar property goes up $6,000. If you've only got $10,000 in the deal, then your return on $10,000 in gross numbers, admittedly this is simplified, is $6,000. You just made 60% on your money in one year. In one year. But if the inflation rate is 6%, then you take a $90,000 loan that just got debased or devalued by 6%.

So that's another 5,400.

Yeah, I mean now you've more than doubled your money in a year. I mean, you take the leverage which most people get, the leverage concept, except Robert Shiller and this lady didn't want to understand that. But fine, you know, and Jim Cramer doesn't either. Because Jim Cramer on Mad Money, I, you know, I, I saw him talking about it. Or maybe this was on his radio show on KFI in Los Angeles, I'm not sure. But it was either on the Mad Money TV show that's on CNBC or on his radio show show. And he was talking about how stocks outperform real estate. Well, I mean, the vast majority of people don't pay cash for real estate. And the vast majority of people, I mean the vast, vast, vast majority pay cash for stocks. So that is a lie on its face. These people are just lying to the world. They just are not telling the real story. I mean, Robert, the highly credible Robert Shiller, okay, who, you know, I mean, it's just, it's amazing to me. So you've got the leverage, then you've got the inflation induced debt destruction and we haven't even talked about the other benefits. I mean, you know, that's it right there. You've already doubled your money in that example in one year.

Well, and just to bring you back from this, like, tangent, here.

I am, someone needs to buy me a shirt that says king of the tangent.

King of the tangent, with a bunch of lines going all over the place. So, you know, the question was, why don't some people get it? And, you know, I. Because I'm a financial planner, I run into all different types of people, and there's certainly. We can just. We can take out the group that can't qualify. That's not about getting it. They just can't do it. But there's still a bunch of people that could do it, that won't do it. And, you know, some of them are just fearful. Some of them are. They're just ignorant of all these things like we've been talking about. That's certainly a part of it. And frankly, Jason, some of them are just lazy. Because real estate, you know, the IRS calls it a passive investment, but it's the most involved passive investment you could ever own. Would you agree? I mean, you got to find the property. There's a lot involved with it. You take away a lot of that work. But buying real estate is. It's not just like sticking money in the bank account. There's. There's stuff in. You have to do that make sense.

You do have to do stuff. But I argue, and my listeners have heard me say this a lot, is that there's no such thing as a passive investment. And you know, one of my friends who, who's owned over a thousand houses. Okay, a thousand houses. He says the same thing. Nothing is passive. Even if you put your money in the bank account, you're subject to taxes and inflation, of course, but you're also subject to. If you're a. You know, if you're really a doom and gloomer, you're subject to bank failure. So you can't really say that even the bank, which would be considered a truly passive investment, is even totally passive because you're getting passively screwed. Okay, yeah, call it passive if you want you. You know, it's like there's those different things in life. You know, there's playing to win, playing not to lose. There's playing to lose. If you put your money in the bank, you are most assuredly playing to lose. The only time that won't be true is in a true deflationary environment where your cash becomes more valuable and in that environment, I would submit that if there's a significant portion of that environment, you run a very strong risk of bank failure. Okay, so. And, and believe me, the FDIC and Randy, I'm sure you know about this, the FDIC does not have anywhere near the reserves to insure the banks. Okay?

No, they don't. They don't. They don't. They don't. But they also have the, you know, the treasury to prop them up if they. Not the treasury, but they have the FDIC printing presses.

You, you are right. And they would, they would print to make good on the loans, I bet. Right. Because they have that. Right. But guess what happens? See, the FDIC says that you'll get your money back. They insure up to $250,000. Right. So they say you'll get your money back, but they don't say what the money will be worth when you get it back. And what I mean there is that the printing press is inflationary, so they can pay you back in nominal dollars, but the value in real dollars is a huge question mark.

Yeah. And, you know, I guess my point is that if, if you're willing to put a little time and effort into this, the returns are well worth it. And, and so if it's fear or laziness, I don't know which of the. One of the. Or the other or both that are holding you back. You really just got to think through that. What else could you do with your time that's going to give you those kinds of returns?

The funny thing is, you know, the people that are all into the stock market thing, they spend all this time thinking about. I know those people. You know, I know lots of those people. They spend tons of time thinking about this stuff. They spend a lot of time watching Bloomberg and cnbc, listening to it on the radio on their, you know, satellite radio in their car. They read the Wall Street Journal and Investors Business Daily and Barron's and, you know, all these publications, they, they have expensive newsletters to which they subscribe that they pay, you know, $2,000 a year. They look at the money Morningstar reports. I mean, my God, do they actually think what they're doing is passive? You know, they're online trading stuff that. There's nothing passive about this.

That's, that's how it works. And, yeah, and if you listen to the. Again, the pundits on television, they're talking the same thing as. It sounds like you're at a racetrack. Did you ever hear that?

Oh, yeah. It's like a Total casino mentality.

Totally.

That is, I would. I would submit to our listeners that CNBC and maybe to a lesser extent, Bloomberg, are designed, literally designed by psychologists, the same way Las Vegas casinos are designed. And, you know, probably our listeners have heard about this stuff. They've heard about the way in these casinos, they manage the lighting, the way they manage the ventilation, the way they pump extra oxygen in through the H vac system, the patterns of the carpet, the colors on the walls. They move the needle on this stuff by just a little bit, and that can mean millions and millions of extra dollars to them every single year. And so I would submit that the set, the design, the talk, the voices, the modulation, all of that stuff on CNBC is designed to encourage people to invest.

And it works.

And it does work, because there are people who are just. I remember. Remember when day trading was such a big thing years ago? Whatever happened to that? I don't know. But anyway, it was like a huge thing. Like, every other person I met in Newport Beach, Houston, was a day trader for a time there.

Flash crash is what happened, Jason. Wow. I can lose that much money in a few seconds. Really? Yeah.

Then. Then they were done with day trading. Right. Well, I remember these people, like, literally, Randy, quitting their job and all they would do, like, you couldn't talk to them during the time the market was open. They would not talk to you at all. They would not plan anything. You couldn't go to lunch with them. And they would sit there in their. In their room with CNBC on the tv, and they would just be watching it, watching it, watching it. And they'd have their computer in front of them and they'd just be trading stuff. I don't know what people think, you know that. I mean, you compare all this stuff to income property, and income property is really easy.

All point of view, all a matter of perspective, right?

It most definitely is. So anyway, hey, thank you for joining us today and talking about this stuff, folks. We will do the Chicago local market specialist on our next episode, which is just two days away, probably. I don't know when you're listening to this, but it's just, you know, you're gonna hear this on Monday, it'll be Wednesday. Okay? So it'll be right out. You'll hear about Chicago, a lot of our clients buying there, a lot of interest in that market. You know, I asked them some tough questions about the landlord friendliness issue, the taxes, the government, the crime rates, all of that stuff. You're going to get all your answers to that on the next episode. So again, Randy, thanks so much for joining us and happy investing to everyone.

Thanks, Jason.

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