Apocalypse Soon? Everything I've Done to Be Ready If It Hits the Fan

Welcome back to Real Estate Team Builders. Lars Hedinborg here, the founder of Real Estate B School. And this is part four in a four part series. We covered three episodes back. Part one, just like, what's going to happen in real estate and a shift in interest rates and supply and demand and like, will the shortage of inventory temper, you know, some of the economic turmoil that we're going through that I think is going to get increasingly worse. That was episode one, sort of set the stage, you know, to two schools of thinking there. One is that shit is going to hit the fan in a bad way in the real estate market. The other is like, we have no inventory if 3/4 of the buyers sat on the sidelines. And even though rates are double, we're still going to sell a lot of real estate. So I'm a little bit torn, 50, 50 on what might happen there. But part two we covered like, you still need to be ready. Your business needs to be ready and prepared for any shift. Real estate is cyclical, meaning, like it's just proven over time, it goes up and it goes down. You know, I got into real estate in 2007, left a cozy six figure, multiple six figure corporate job to get into real estate. Everyone thought I was crazy. And months after I got into real estate, you know, in other parts of the country, looking back, there were indications of a shift, I mean, significant indications of a shift. 2006, West coast, everything was hitting the fan. I wasn't plugged in, I didn't know. I left my corporate job and three months afterwards, inventory in Charlotte, North Carolina went straight through the roof. Our roster of real estate agents locally went from 15,000 when I came into real estate to three years later, we were at 5,000 agents in the Charlotte market. And so you have got to be ready in your business. So that was part two. Go back and listen to it. Part three was, you know, just being personally ready to do whatever you need to do for any situation that arises in business or in your family. And just like how to take care of your physical body and come to challenges with a level of, you know, preparedness, physical vitality, and not only physical strength, but a mental fortitude that, that you will be the common storm when shit hits the fan. And shit is about the dirtiest cuss word I will say. And this episode, the title is like what to do if shit really hits the fan. And I think for the title we're going to have to think of something how to say that word without saying that word. But I say it that way, because whether or not it happens is almost irrelevant. Your ability to prepare for it without spiraling out of control mentally and going into a hole and not getting out of the bed in the morning because you are so worried about what might happen in the future. We still need to prepare for it and be ready in our businesses to make sure we are getting enough sleep and we are fueling our bodies properly, but also just to understand what might be going on and why might it all hit the fan. And so that's the conversation I wanted to have today. And there's a footnote on this or a warning on this or, you know, I'm not the alarmist guy, I'm not the conspiracy theorist. I generally have had success in business and personal success by determining where I want it to be in the future and coming up with a plan to get me from where I am today to where I want to go. Whether it's in my business or multiple businesses, or in my marriage or my relationship with my kids or my physical body or my relationship with my creator. I just kind of see where I am today, where I want to be in the future, and I just get to work on it. And that included for a long time eliminating all distractions around social media and the 24hour news cycle and all of that. And so my warning is that some of this, I did it for a little bit of time here recently where I kind of spun out on some things that didn't really ultimately serve me. But I have settled on a few resources that keep me in the know because I think some bigger things are going on than most everyone realizes. And it's true of most real estate agents. I went on a mastermind this, this past week about six agents, high level agents. I mean, one guy's closed like 110 million in the first quarter, like high level. And I went into this conversation, but I only had 30 minutes. So essentially I took my four part podcast series and I shoved it into 30 minutes and everyone's eyes glazed over until I talked about crypto. So I will get into crypto and what I've learned about space and why I'm super passionate about DeFi, which is decentralized finance and some income generating opportunities that I've figured out. So I'll get to that here in, later in the episode. So my journey in real estate, like I said, was I got into it when things were really hairy. And in that I learned as all the agents were getting out, I did learn that if you get up every day with intention and you have a clear plan and you're willing to do the work. It may take double, triple, quadruple the work required. But I didn't know any better because I got into real estate and the market hit the fan. So but it was a bad time and it was triggered by the mortgage crisis. We don't have that going on right now. Although interest rates have doubled, affordability is, you know, at an all time high or low, depending on how you look at it, back to, you know, 2005, 2006 levels. So that should tell you something, right? And we will see to a certain extent the only thing that might temper it, temper it is the fact that we have low inventory. But bigger than all of this, I spent some time with Tony Robbins. Like I went to life and wealth mastery in Fiji. And this is back in, I don't remember the exact year, but probably two or three years into my real estate journey. So maybe 2009, 2010. So it had already hit the fan economically. Our country was in turmoil. I mean in our market I think we hit like 25, 30% foreclosures and distress sales or short sales and foreclosures. But he spoke about in general that economies and sort of the powers in the world. So on a global perspective, just because we haven't seen it in our lifetime doesn't mean it won't happen and not at the time. But I was eventually turned onto a book called Fourth Turning recently, which was written in 1997, which Tony probably had already read 10 years earlier, which just talks about these 80 to 100 year cycles and we're in the midst of, and it predicts with freak accuracy from 1997 to 2007, it essentially predicted 10 to 30 years from when the book was written, all of this stuff is going to go down. And so we're sort of 25 years past when that book was written and it just lays out a lot of things that are actually happening. And that's politics aside. I mean you could probably figure out my politics if you can catch a vibe of. But it's not even political, it's just there are things that are going on which you couldn't have fathomed in the US in terms of our freedoms. And I don't care what you believe, you should be able to say it. And some of the freedoms that are being taken away from folks that have the ability to do it and they just don't like what the other folks are saying. It's unbelievable. And so the warnings that Tony said back Then as the government was doing the bailouts and printing money and saying that this level of deficit spending and the printing of money, it's just not sustainable. If the US was a business, it would be bankrupt. It's just not run in any sort of fiscal responsible way. Again, I don't care what you think politically, but when you look at what's happening in our country right now, the way that we're throwing around money, it's just not sustainable. It doesn't matter what you think of where the money's going or if you think it's a good use of money. We don't have the money. Inflation is driven by an oversupply of money. Cash is trash. Right? It used to be cash is king. Right now I think cash is trash. And so you have to really contemplate, and I'll get into some of what I say, what I mean about that, but at the time when we were coming out of the Great Recession, that was driven by housing, Tony talked a lot about physical assets, silver. He talked a lot about physical silver as a hedge against inflation and as a place to store wealth. And whole life insurance. They're both super boring. I didn't take him up on the offer to go. Not the offer, he wasn't selling it. Um, but I did go pretty deep on whole life insurance. And so I. It's people, most people think you're crazy if you search whole life insurance. There's a whole bunch of philosophy out there that it's just a monumental waste of time. Just get term policy and then invest. Anyway, I studied it for, for years. I think I studied it for four years before I jumped in. But I went whole wholly into it. And essentially you become the bank of you. And so that's one thing I've learned, which I still, I still subscribe to. And I've also now currently invested in physical silver. And I'll get a little bit into that. So you take. We came out of that sort of Great Recession that really kind of worked its way through our market in 2011 and 12. And so we're on a 10 year run at this point in terms of real estate and just the economy being strong. And now we're just in a position where there's lots of craziness going on in the United States and globally. There's just a lot of unrest. And even as early as I think this was like four or five months ago, there was an oil pipeline that runs along the eastern part of the US that was hacked, like literally hacked. And I Don't know who hacked it, it doesn't really matter. But everyone instantly went to all the gas stations and everywhere in Charlotte, all the gas was instantly put into vehicles and there was no gas anywhere for three days. So like an actual disruption in our energy supply chain. And then you sort of think of if you're in the know at all in terms of what's going on with our food supply and we have something on the near term horizon which we've never seen globally. Part of it is just Ukraine and Russia and that conflict. But then there's just other things which you really can't explain. And again, conspiracy theory aside, we're going to go through some stuff in terms of food supply and, and it's just a time where you can't really say could that happen? Is it likely that the grid will go out in my house and I won't have viable drinking water and that people storm my house and I need to protect myself with a gun? It's not likely. It's actually a pretty small chance that those things will happen. But is it possible? You actually can't be at least a little bit in the know what's going on in the world and think that it's not possible. So my. I'll end this here and I'm going to kind of land this thing with like what I've done to be ready for, for whatever happens. And it's giving me a level of peace. I already had a strong faith before any of this. So I think if Jesus comes back, I actually think he's coming back soon. And I have a strong faith. So there's. I don't fear any of what's going on right now. I think God has a specific plan for me while I'm here. To love and look toward him and then just to love on others regardless of what they believe and to be prepared for whatever happens. So I mentioned the book Fourth Turning. I think it's something you need to read. I don't care what you believe, you need to read it and just understand it that what's happening now, it's cyclical and predictable and it's to be expected. And there's one other thing I want you to go consume. It's Ray Dalio. So go to YouTube and type in.