EP23: Beyond the NASA career: Chad Sutton's Pursuit of Financial Freedom and Purpose

Being a good person and taking care of people, you know, whether it's your investors, whether it's, you know, helping with issues in their lives, whether it's people on your properties. So important. And that's the different way that Quattro looks at doing business in the world. Because we have another saying. You don't have to do wrong by people to do well. You can do good while doing well.

Are you frustrated watching your hard earned money ride the knee jerking Wall street roller coaster? Are you looking to diversify into alternate investments and set them on autopilot to achieve financial freedom? It's time to learn the ways of the wealthy. It's time to Think Outside the Stocks with your host Madhvi Jain, an immigrant from India and ex IT professional who will bring you industry experts to illustrate a passive and holistic financial approach to build not just passive income, but also your generational wealth. Madvi is on a mission to change the financial trajectory of one family at a time. And a thousand more to go. Are you going to be part of this vision? And now without further ado, here is the host of Think Outside the Stocks, Madhvi Jain.

Hey, hey, hey. Welcome back to Think Outside this talks. I am your host Madhavi Jain and if you want to know about what made a NASA engineer, an aerospace engineer restless about his corporate career, a very successful corporate career indeed. And why did he move towards his definition of financial freedom? We have our well esteemed guest today, Chad Sutton. Chad, welcome to Think Outside the Stocks.

It is so good to be back with you. You and I recorded a couple of weeks ago and it's great to see your shining face again. So thank you for having me on and happy to be here. Happy to share.

Today we are going to dive deeper into your interesting story. And Chad, I'd like to introduce my guest with a three fun fact sequence. Yeah my listeners, the first fun fact I just already mentioned that he was a NASA engineer and he started dwelling into his definition of what financial freedom really means to him. And we will listen from his mouth his own story in a bit. But this was back in the days of the space shuttle, so very interesting flow that he has. He also worked with GE in their aviation department and he actually is now moved into real estate full time with Cotro Capital. The second interesting fun fact about him is that he has that real estate, I would say in his DNA because his grandparents also invested in DNA and now he's working with his mother and aunt in Cotro Capital and they have such a wonderful purpose Such a wonderful team. We will talk about that also in today's episode. And also at 32, Chad here is financially free with his definition. He is the youngest one in their group right now. They call him a old soul and there's a reason for that. So we will jump into your story. Chad, please let's dive into that day or that aha moment that you had such a successful career. Not only you worked with NASA, G very interestingly right, you've worked in the sustainable energy environment as well. So such a successful career, such a high figure income earning. What made you restless? Why did you think about leaving the job and jumping into something completely different?

Yeah, thank you so much for that intro and I really appreciate, you know, nice things you said about me with the three interesting facts. Now the interesting thing is when I was a little boy, you know, I was always told, look, you're going to be, you're going to be an engineer. You know, I was really good with numbers. I love playing with legos and Erector sets and all that kind of stuff. And so, you know, I followed the path. I went to college, I got a degree or two and I went to work and I always, I wanted to be a pilot. Folks like this little boy had a dream to fly. And you know, my, my eyes and ears weren't quite up to par so wound up going to engineering school to build them instead. And what I found along the way was pretty spectacular. I got to do some really, really neat things in terms of building things that go boom. I got to build rockets, I got to build airplanes, you know, and I pursued that dream. And then, you know, I looked down one day to really, you know, cut the story super short. Cause I know we have a lot to talk about. I look down one day, I have designed multiple products, I've gone through a couple of design cycles. I look to my left and I see my senior engineer and I look to my right and I see my principal engineer who's senior to him. And I'm like, wow, I literally can work for three companies in the world now. I work for one of them already because I was so specialized. I was a very hyper specialized combustion design engineer. And this is what I'm doing the rest of my life. Like do I love this? And the answer was no. Every time I did a new project and this is just business folks, the budget got smaller, I had less headcount and therefore I was working hard. Every single time you get better and so you work harder. That's how the corporate life is and so around that time, you guys may remember, you know, General Electric, by this time I'm in General Electric, General Electric had, you know, gone from about $50 in stock price to like what, 4 overnight, you remember that? So that was a huge deal for many investors and I got plucked for a pretty cool team, kind of like an internal consulting firm. But my whole job for about three years was to fly around the world to all the locations where GE manufactured stuff and figure out how to do it cheaper, more efficiently, change cult and thus improve profit. So I got a lot of business savvy experience doing that. But I wanted to broaden. I was like, I don't want to be this combustion engineer forever, right? And the second thing that really made me restless, as you mentioned, is, you know, if you Google my name, I hold some major patents in the combustion technology industry. And I came up with some pretty cool technology. It was really cool to do and, but I looked and I was part of the. I say I. It was big teams that did this, but I came up with some ideas that really, you know, put us into a multi billion dollar position. And I got $1,000 per patent and a slap on the rear and said, attaboy, go do it again right now. Fair. I would never have come up with that had I not had all the resources and power of General Electric behind me. But the point was I learned, okay, I'm worth this and I'm only ever going to get paid commensurate with how difficult what I do is and how hard it is to replace me. Now, arguably what I did was very difficult. I was a combustion engineer, for crying out loud, right? But I was a dime a dozen. If I left, they had another one of me tomorrow. You know, there's a lot of smart young guys who were able to do this job or women as well, you know, smart young women starting people. And so that's why I was restless. You know, around the same time, there's parallel trains happening here in my corporate life. I climbed the ladder, right? I figured out I was too pigeonholed. I provided massive value to a company, both in patents and in creating value. With that consultant job I told you about, you know, I saved literally hundreds of millions of dollars in production cost and I was still making that same salary, you know, with a couple of bumps every year, right? And so, you know, you start to think forward that leads to a global executive role. I was a very young executive with GE controlling a global spend and purchasing well again, adding massive value to the company, saving hundreds of millions of dollars in spend, still making a salary. And I'm looking across the table at the sales guy who are basically, they eat what they kill, right? I'm on salary, they get paid. I'm like, wait a minute, I'm doing the same thing you are. And so I start to realize you're only going to get paid and compensated what you're worth to the company. That didn't sit well with me. So the second train, and then we'll get back to the next part of the episode, is in around 2015, 2016, actually, the patriarch of our family, my grandfather, who was the first level real estate investor, gets sick, okay. And he passes away. And before that, I had been asking questions, okay, well, you guys have done this. How do I do this? Right? So I went and read all. I read all the books. The rich dad, poor dads, the richest man in Babylon, all those books. I go read lots of books and I figure out what's the common denominator, right? The common denominator for wealth in this country was some form of real estate, Right? And so I was like, okay, well, I guess granddad was pretty smart, started trying to figure that out. And that's where two things kind of intersected. One, I was restless in a career that I'd chosen because I realized working for the man isn't how I'm going to become free. And the second is, oh, the way you're going to do this is through real estate. And when granddad got sick and passed away, and, you know, that left a huge hole in the family. But it was a business that now needed someone to step in. And that's where Kim and Tammy got involved. My aunt and mother, respectively, her sister. And that's where we all started moving in the direction of, okay, how do we buy assets and make money off of them for freedom. So let me pause there and see if that's the right direction and where we should go from here.

Absolutely. And you say multiple things here, Chad, today. I often say that we all live very uncommonly common life. And what you said, it's so much relevant to so many people. You know, if you know the numbers, you got to be engineer. If you like science, you got to be, you know, doctor. That's a path Even, you know, the country that I come from, I immigrated to this country from India, right? So we have the same kind of a logic. And going into that corporate career, high paying career, and understanding your net worth, asking the question that if I am actually saving this millions of dollars, what Is my worth in this company understanding and asking that question that led to that path of you asking that restlessness and answering that question, and then at the same time parallelly, what's happening in your life in terms of your grandparents, which is really sad even, by the way, but just leading into that real estate, I love that. And many of the listeners today, they are on the same path or similar path. They understand that they are working really, really hard. But for somebody else, that worth of that day, spending that hour is for somebody else. And it's actually putting the commas and zeros to somebody else's bank account. So that realization is the first realization. So I would love to know from there on, and my listeners must be interested to learn as well, that how did Chad do it? So, you know, once you got those reins of your family business now, how did you break into the real estate and how did you start thinking of scaling to the level of multifamily?

Yeah, absolutely. Thank you for the question. And you know, so I think again, there's two parallel trains here. One was, I still have a family. At the time when I was having these discussions, I was, I still am married, but I had a wife and I had a baby girl. You know, I now have two children and dog. But at the time, you know, I had a family to worry about. I could not just afford to take risk and say, okay, bye bye job, let's go figure this out, right? And so the first, the probably the first year was a tremendous amount of education. And folks, you hear people say, oh, don't go to the gurus. I went to all the gurus. I looked, I went to everywhere I could get my hands on education. And I'm like, okay, maybe this guy's a quack, but if I see, you know, seven people like him who are good and I can garner my own strategy out of things, well, great. I went to fix and flip things. I went to, you know, multifamily things. I looked at everything out there that I could. I read books, this massive education. And of course I talked to my family who had, you know, some experience and real, a little bit of experience as well, and really was just trying to learn. But simultaneously, I'm still working this career. So how did I do it? Well, you know, fortunately I'm young, I have a lot of energy. I had a new baby at the time, and so time was short. But my corporate career at the time, I was running global teams when I started doing this. So I had teams in China and I had teams In Europe, primarily. So what worked really well is, you know, that's about 12 and seven hours difference on the, on the day, if you will. So what I would do is I would start working at 4am I'd get up and I would work from about 4am until about noon. So I get a solid eight hours of work in for General Electric, right? And that's when I wasn't traveling. I also traveled quite a bit. So when that was going on, you know, I had to, had to be gone. But. And then I would stop working at 12. And I would work from 12 until my wife and baby got home about 6 o' clock for my real estate business, you know, trying to figure out, a, what am I doing, you know, B, what type of asset classes, and then, you know, helping out the family business where I can. Anything of that sort. And then I would stop for dinner and then I'd go back to work on real estate, doing quiet work stuff until about midnight. And I'd wake over and do it all over again. And you guys are like, oh my gosh, you're crazy. You're sleeping four hours a night. You had a baby. Well, fortunately, when you have a new baby, you're not used to sleeping anyway, so it was okay to do. But, you know, I had to balance both of those things at the same time. So. And you know, my wife, she, she was, she's very intelligent. She was not quite sold on, okay, you're going to go make money how?

Right?

So what did I need to do as an engineer? You think, okay, if I'm going to prove to someone that my prototype works, I need to make proof of concept. I need to build the prototype, show that it works, and then I'll scale the prototype, right? So that's exactly what I set out to do. And you know, meanwhile, I first set out looking at, okay, how do I replicate what my family did? Because my family had a number of single, like a large number of single family homes in the Central Texas area. And studying that business, the first thing I set out to do was, okay, well, I live in Tennessee, y' all live in Texas. We've got some money, y' all have got a lot of money. Why don't we try to replicate this in Tennessee? Because the housing market's going nuts. Surely we can make money here. Well, after studying and pulling data and trying to find some rental property that made sense, I figure out, okay, this is going to be inefficient because, you know, we have to build from zero. So it's not like we're going to have 50 here that we can all of a sudden get a manager and do all that stuff like we're doing in Texas. And oh, by the way, you, you realize that things are valued differently, right? Mostly there's always the notion of market comparables, you know, for sales prices. And there's also the notion of income based approach. So typically commercial property is more on the income based approach. People like, people, they look at what the market comp is, the cap rate and such, but it's more about how much money does the property make. Well, with single family homes, people don't care how much it would make as a rental. They want to buy the home to live in most of the time. So, you know, most of the market was priced way over in Nashville because it was so it was so hot to live in middle Tennessee in general. You know, most of the market or the product was priced so far over where you could ever hope to rent it and make any money. So it was like, okay, this isn't going to work, right? And so the next question I ask myself is, and I asked my family is, okay, riddle me this. We've been buying these single family homes one at a time. I know y' all have trouble getting future loans from banks because they don't like you to have that many. They, you know, it's, it's, it's difficult. But you know, they were in a low cost part of Texas and it worked well. The rent ratios worked well. I start exploring other product types and after lots of research, lots of learning, lots of discussions, I figure out like most of the world kind of already knew. Holy smokes. We're in a housing crisis and we're going to be that way for a long time. And apartment investing is the way to go because I can go buy 100 of these things at one time instead of 100 separate properties. And I get the efficiencies of like one roof. You know, I can buy, you know, 100 washers and dryers instead of one. You get economies of scale. Oh, now I have enough income coming off of this that I can make a management company actually care, you know, and go hire the best in the business. Best in the business doesn't manage single family. They manage the big stuff, right? So I learned all this stuff and that's, that's how we moved into multifamily. So the last point is, Maud, we is I had to get proof of concept, right? So we try for about another year, you know, and so I'm probably two and a half years in at this point of trying to make something happen. And we finally figure out, okay, we're pigeonhole focusing on this. We're going to go to East Tennessee where property values are lower and we can find. And they also had a lot of smaller mom and pop old owned multifamily buildings. And we went and finally found us a quality first deal. It was 35 units. It was built by an architect who lived on a big piece of property on the hill. And every couple of years he'd go out and build himself an eight plex around his house. So it was like this. Imagine this nice house with a bunch of eight plexes all around it. And that's the complex we bought. It was beautiful, it was simple. We got our head around it. And you know what? That was proof of concept. So it was at that point that I was like, you know what, I'm making pretty good money here in real estate now and the concept is proven. Let's go scale this. That's when I left corporate America and went to grow.

Wow. And congratulations. In an order it's slightly delayed. I know it's been a while but going back to what you just said, right? So important creating that model that comes proof of concept that you can create for yourself, prove it to yourself, your wife, your family that this can happen. Right. And few important points in a way that along the way that you said are really, really important when it comes to the single family homes. Apart from the economies of scale, the real problem is that market based approach and the income based approach that we do in the multifamily. So you really hit the nail right in the head there. Because what happens is, and especially in today's when we have people w2 earners mostly they want to go into real estate. They think that hey, that rental real estate, being a landlord is the way to be. And when they're going in, they're going on the basis of appreciation only if they do not have a cash flow that can quickly become an upside down and create a trouble for them. Right. And these are the loans I mean you pointed out exactly. Well, how many loans can you have to your name? And these are recourse loans. And in a sense recourse means that if something goes wrong, your assets are going to be in trouble. That's where the lenders are going to get their money from. Right. So you pointed out the scalability of it that you know, you now you created the proof of concept model for yourself jumping into the Multifamily world. You also listed the number of hours that you spend to actually be there. And not just that, you know, 10, 15 hours a day that you spend high energy. You are such a high energy. That's the first thing I notice about you. You also spend two, two and a half years to kind of get to that first step. You spend tremendous amount of money going through the coaching programs, one program to other instead of reinventing the wheel, which is great. But now talking about our listeners, these are the, you know, people who are actually in their corporate jobs. They do not have this kind of time. Right. And this is a great place to start talking about Cortro Capital. That if they want to start thinking and it just test building their proof of concept model, it doesn't have to be that full fledged multifamily like you did. But how can they as a passive investor test that out with Quattro Capital? And great time to talk about cultural capital and its principles too. Tell us how the listeners can jump into this multi family without spending those 10, 15 hours a day, two and two, three years and going through those multiple coaching programs like you did.

Yeah, and you know, look, I always advocate for education. So whether you're going to invest passively or actively educate yourself. Right. Talk to someone like us or go, you know, it's good to educate either way. But you know, people ask me all the time, how do I make money in real estate? And I ask back to them, well, how much time do you have? Right? Because you know, there's really two main ways. You know, you can, if you are, if you're doing something already and this is just investing 101. Right. You can either create money from nothing by using other people's money to generate them a return and you take a cut of the profits for your sweat equity, so to speak, or you have something else that generates you cash. So maybe you're a doctor, maybe you're a lawyer, maybe you're, you know, a teacher, whatever it is that generates you cash and you, and you live responsibly and you have excess cash to invest. Right. Once you get to that point, you can decide, well, you know, do I want to be the person, you know, in addition to what I do that makes me cashier, do I want to be the person making a profit on that cash or do I want to go find a group to help me do it? And so that's kind of the, that's kind of the discussion to have with yourself. And so what Quattro Capital has set out to do as a firm. You know, we started off as kind of a form of family office. As I mentioned. We're, you know, third generation investors. You know, we have a fantastic team of five managing partners and umpteen people that work for us and with us across the country. It's a fantastic organization, but we build ourselves on four principles. So Quattro, to give you a Spanish lesson, does mean four. And we put that together as kind of a play on words for the four pillars. So they are the four Ps, four pillars, people, you know, a group of people. It starts with people, by people, and for people come together. Whether that's. That's people in our group, that's investors who come into our group. We come together and we buy a property, okay? That property is an asset and it's going to eventually spit off profits. And we're usually putting money into that property to increase profits. So we're at people, property and then profits. And you know what? You also have to. You got to be good to the world. That's been good to you. So we always want to put money back into the world, whether it's time, talents or treasures, you know, as our pastor discusses. And that fourth p is philanthropy. Coming back and taking care of people. So it's kind of a circle. You have people that we come together to buy a property, we put money into that property to generate a profit, we take some of those profits and put it into philanthropy together collectively, not just us, but our investors as well. And that all comes back around to taking care of people. So, you know, what I did, what I've learned and what our team has learned is, you know, it doesn't matter what business you're in, folks, you're in the people business. Yes, we are in real estate, but we're in the people business. Right? Who is my customer? My customer is twofold. I have investors who expect a return on their investment, and they expect certainty, clarity and confidence out of us, their investment leader. Right? And then I have residents, people who are. Who are living their lives in my complexes, who. It's my responsibility, Quattro's responsibility, to make sure they have a safe place, a safe dinner table to do their homework with their kids, to lay their head and not have to worry about crime at night, to have running water, to have, you know, quality places to cook meals and socialize. All those things we do not take lightly. But when you, when you remember it's not just a profit and loss statement with a property where you're trying to optimize numbers. There are people that live in these buildings, right? And when you think about that, and there's people who invest in these buildings, it's, it makes it real and tangible. And so an example of where that might take your thought process differently. We've taken over a number of buildings that were run with a different mindset, right? They were cutting costs right and left, not responding to work orders of residents, unhappy people. Well, people leave when that happens. And we had an example. This is so sad. We had an example where this poor woman who was handicapped, in a wheelchair, she was young and fit, but she did not have the use of her legs. They put her in a second floor apartment where she had stairs to go up and down. No, no ADA compliance. And so she had to scoot on her bottom up and down these stairs to get in her car to go to work. It was the saddest thing. So what do we do? We find this and we discover after we take over, she hadn't been paying rent for some time. And so we approached the problem and said, hey, what's going on? And then we're like, oh my gosh, I wouldn't be paying rent either. This is what you know. So they were supposed to move her and they never did. So, you know, at our expense, we went and moved her to the next first floor apartment. We had, you know, moved all her stuff down there. She was a paying tenant for three years after that. She was an ambassador for the community, brought people in. I mean, just that act of kindness and taking care of people that actually indirectly, you know, drove profits. So it's like being a good person and taking care of people, you know, whether it's your investors, whether it's, you know, helping with issues in their lives, whether it's people on your properties, so important. And that's the different way that Quattro looks at doing business in the world. Because we have another saying. You don't have to do wrong by people to do well. You can do good while doing well. And that is, that's the pinnacle of it right there. So folks, from an investment perspective, as we mentioned, you have two main options. You know, go, go take your money and make money on that money. But if you're too busy making the money in the first place and you need a place to put it where you know it's safe and you can get return of capital, but also have an amazing people focused team to drive return on capital. That's what we do for you. And we're Happy to have that conversation.

Wow, Chad, when you're telling this story, I'm literally getting goosebumps here. I mean that one act of kindness can go so far and to live that purposeful life in every step that you're doing to have people right in the center of the 4Ps that you just mentioned. And believe it or not, when you are actually telling me about the four P's and I'm thinking that there's people involved in each of them, right. You start off with the people, the people stays continued till the end. Right. The way that you bring in this change to the community, providing them not just a better place, but a safer place and that is continuingly improving for them so that that become their home. Many of these people unfortunately will never have the pleasure of owning their own home. So we are providing that good place, better place for them to live in in there. Right. The second aspect of it is the investors, the people in the investors, these are the people who are working really hard. Their W2 income is coming in. The income is really high, but it's not creating that financial freedom for them. So you are helping them on a parallel path start creating that multiple streams of income and philanthropy can cannot just imagine how much you have put that thought into creating those four pillars. And you know, more and more I get involved into real estate and I want to think about where my heart is, where my mind is. I keep looking back and thinking about that what is that purpose that I'm pushing in everything that I'm doing? And this is the reason I was saying that you and me have a lot of commonalities of thought process. And this is the. Is so far, I think the best one. You also talked a little bit about that if you are in passive investors, you know, you. If you want to invest in real estate, there are two ways you can do it. You can put it into your effort or you can just put it into the cash. Right. So you have to pick and choose. So that's a very important aspect that you said too. So see how you can make and be a part of this impact that you know, Chad is and his team has set to embark on this world. So with that, Chad, I think it's great that you talked about Cordro and you know, how can they get in touch with Cordro or you if they want to know more about how you're doing and what investments are coming in, what markets you're investing in, etc.

Yeah, absolutely. And the easiest way I have a little link that's easy to say, you know, so you can always go to TheQuattroway.com or just Google Quattro Capital. But Quattro is hard to spell sometimes. So. ChadSutton.info that's Chad S u t t o n.info that will take you to all the things Chad Sutton related to Quattro Real estate, Runway podcast, philanthropy. Anything you might want to know about me is right there and I'd love to have a conversation with you.

Absolutely. And I kind of asked this in middle of the interview. We still have a good couple of segments left, but I wanted, while we were talking about Cardro, if they want to get in touch with you, how should they get in touch? Right. So thank you for sharing that. With that, move to our next segment, which I think it's very interesting with you. The strategy thinking, the critical thinking that you have behind every thought process that you go through. And this segment is, you know, how do you, Chad, think outside the stocks? And the, the question is kind of loaded. It talks about, you know, real estate being your primary, what other investments that you do. And you talked about creating that velocity of money, which again, I'm a big proponent of and I think use infinite banking system and you know, hello. Or some other ways of doing it. So we'd love to talk about that. And also to kind of put a wrap around it, how do you kind of protect what you are building and are you thinking of, you know, passing it to next generation? Now you are at, at this age and you are already so mature in your thoughts. So I believe that you kind of have systems and process in place which me and my listeners would definitely, definitely learn a lot from. So there you go. How do you child think outside the st stocks tell us.

Absolutely. And I love thinking outside the stocks. You know, one of the pivotal moments that I had as, you know, go all the way back to the corporate story we were talking about. I also was looking at my net worth at the time and I was like, wait a minute, wait a minute, wait a minute. I've been putting how much of my paycheck into this 401k thing and it's doing like nothing. And it was up and down and like, I think my best year was like 7%. Like, who am I paying for to run this thing? So, you know, I was super annoyed by that. Granted, I did the company match, got some money, so that's great. But I encourage all of you if you have a way, once you leave your companies that you're with or go to another job. There are ways to get your money out of the retirement system. And I think if you were going to. So granted the retirement system has a job. It's necessary. If you're going to be someone who is passive about your wealth generation, you're never going to think about it. And you're going to be one of those people who basically has no money when they retire and lives off the system. You need to be putting money in your 401k. Like, the system does work for that. It's better than nothing. But if you're going to take an active, an active role in planning for your future and your wealth growth, get out of the retirement system. It doesn't work for you. It helps you in no way. It basically, at the end of the day, you hopefully have some nest egg and then you get to use some of it before you die, right? It's like, it's a dumb way if you actually know how to grow money. So that's the first thing I would say is get out of the retirement. So system, find a way. I did it. I have no money in the retirement system. But let's talk about cash storage because, you know, once you figure out, like, let's say you have a job or a business or whatever it is that you do that you're awesome at, maybe you're an art dealer, whatever makes you cash, okay? First thing you got to figure out how to do in systems is, okay, how do I manage that cash? So I have some leftover and some, and some. In some equations that's spend less money. In some equations that's, hey, go focus on making more money. You're not making enough money money. And all of it's possible, right? So get creative on that. We can do whole segments on that. But let's just say you have positive cash flow and you're, and you, you have some cash for a rainy day fund and you're saving money. Well, once you get to where you start to have a lot of good money left over, you know, start looking at the asset you probably have now. Y' all are going to yell at me. I know you're single. Your, your home, your residence is not technically an asset for banking purposes. It is. Okay? Trust me.

Trust me.

But yes, it's not an asset unless it puts money in your pocket. And if you're living in your home and not renting it, it's not putting money in your pocket. It's taking it. I get it. Don't yell at me, okay? But the Point is, most people have a mortgage on their home, quite literally translates to death pledge. Okay? And I'm going to give you a real short piece of knowledge. You can go look at this@replacesyourmortgage.com or I think it's called replace your, replace your university or something now. But you know, these guys I learned a ton from, and they basically have the notion of, look back in the day when someone needed a loan, they would go put a line of credit, quite literally a simple interest line of credit on their home or their farm or whatever to go buy a tractor. Right? And so let's say that someone gave you $100,000 line of credit on your farm to go buy a tractor. You went and borrowed 50 of it to buy a tractor, and that tractor immediately started earning you five grand a month, month in crops, whatever, right? Well, in theory, in 10 months you've paid back that 50 grand, let's say 11 with interest, you know, and that money would go back to the line of credit and all of a sudden you would have a full hundred thousand to spend again. Well, the banks figured out that, well, gee, people sell their homes about every five years and it's, it costs us money to do this. So they, what they started doing is putting these mortgages in place where you basically, you know, you, you pay principal and interest and for the first five years they're set up. So for the first five years of your home ownership, you're really not paying any principal, you're just paying interest. Right. And so you never really build any wealth with that. Well, blow that whole thing up. There's a whole way you can do this. It's called a first position home equity line of credit. I call it the infinite heloc. And we'll talk about infinite banking too. It's with, it's kind of like that, but this is a simpler start. If you have a home you have some equity in, you can approach most banks and go to replaceyourmortgage.com and learn the ins and outs because there's some, there's some caveats and you need to know the process. But basically banks will give you a first position line of credit on your home that sits on your books. It's simple interest, it's variable, so you gotta get comfortable with that. But I use that as a storage tank. So I have a million dollar line of credit on my $1.5 million home and I only have about 600,000 drawn. If I need to go buy an investment tomorrow, I can pull up to 400,000 and buy that investment. And I want to make sure that that investment's paying me more than the interest I have here, right?

Absolutely.

And when I get that money back with friends, I can pay that back down and use it over and over again. So it's a great way to leverage your home safely. Of course, don't go buy boats and toys. Buy assets if you do this, to have massive liquidity. So it's a great place to both optimize your mortgage payment and store your liquidity. Take that to what? And I know you talk about infinite banking in a much more sophisticated way than I can, but the simple way I think about it is it's the same strategy as the infinite heloc. Instead of taking a line of credit against my house, I'm taking a line of credit against this insurance policy that's set up for cash value. So that's pretty cool. And that kind of gives your dollars two jobs. So it's a great place to store the money. And then you wind up, you know, you let that money grow basically tax free and on a consistent, you know, guaranteed manner, plus or minus a little bit. And I can, you know, I can store liquidity there and borrow from it. So that, that way, when I. When I take 200,000 out of my whole life insurance policy, that's where. That's where I store money until I'm ready to use it and go invest. Okay, so that's. That's storage tank one and two. All right, now let's talk about buying assets. And look, I love real estate. You don't have to love real estate. What I do encourage you to love is things that actually have assets behind them. Right?

Right.

Investing in the stock market is unpredictable. Investing in cryptocurrency is unpredictable. And the fact that I said investing in crypto is a problem because something that is a currency is not an investment. People have been able to. Because we still trade things in dollars. People have been able to buy some crypto on low dollars, and when it goes up, sell crypto high and make money. They're treating it like a stock. It's just another stock market right now until we actually can buy food, eggs, and with it consistently. So stay away from the stuff where if the wind blows or someone sends a tweet or something over in Russia happens. Like when. When stuff like that makes your investment go up and down, you have no control over it. Why are you invest? Not an investment, y'. All, that's speculating. Get out of it. Okay. Unless you really, and I'm not saying don't make money here, if you really know what you're doing and you're patient enough to sit on cash, let the market drop, you know, for 10 years, pick a bottom point, and then ride it back up, fine, do that. But most people are emotional and they won't do that. You know, you'll get a bad news story and you'll sell at the worst time, and then you'll think, oh, things are good now, and you'll buy high. That's how people lose money in the stock market. Focus on things with assets. I don't care if it's real estate. I don't care if it's private equity, venture capital, like build. Invest in something that actually has the tangible ownership of something, you know, not just a paper stock that can disappear tomorrow. And I'll tell you what, the thing I like about real estate, folks, it's slow. I'm a pretty emotional guy. I get, I get worked up. You know, I watch the news, I try not to watch these, but you know, sometimes I watch the news, I'm like, oh my gosh, man, I should just get, I should sell all this stuff right now. I can't. Real estate takes time to sell. The average transaction takes me 60 to 90 days to find a buyer, market and let them due diligence. So I can't make emotional decisions. Right. That's one thing I really love about it is it's a great place to store your wealth with something that has a tangible brick and mortar thing behind it, spits off cash flow. It's one of the three basic needs. Food, water, shelter, right? So I don't do all real estate, but I love places where people live and you know, look, Steve Jobs, I invested a lot of money in Apple and I did pretty well, you know, But I can think I can guarantee you is Steve Jobs never took my phone call. Not one time, right? If I wanted to know what was going on, I could not pick up the phone. Talk to Steve Jobs. Every one of our investors has my phone number, Mo's phone number, Aaron's phone number. We text, we talk, email. You can ask questions of people who are managing your money when you invest in private equity, stuff like this. So I love real estate. You don't have to love real estate. Just focus on something that you can control and doesn't lose everything when the wind blows. I mean, that's how you invest, not speculate.

I love that. I love your perspective of how you're creating that Velocity of money and putting that into something that's tangible. And I would say that real estate is something that you can touch and feel right versus a paper stock. I think that's really important. So it's kind of a mind blowing what you just mentioned and I think listeners for you if you want to look into again, go back and listen to it at least couple of times just to understand what Chad has been saying here. That's incredible. Again, we are not any investor advisor or so, but this is just what Chad has been doing in his life that has worked really, really well for him and just an example that he's, he's mentioning it here. So thank you so much for sharing that. Chad, it's incredible to see how you have created the velocity of money into the banking system using your primary home. Sometimes you get too bogged down by having the loans. I mean I used to be one of those that, you know, having a loan was a burden to me. But if you have a right loan and especially if you're offsetting it from a cash value generating asset which is paying off that interest right for you and plus you are getting something extra using the infinite banking system too. If you are putting money, something in some investment or asset, again that small, that interest that you have that can get paid from that cash flow coming in and you are creating some extra equity on top of it, that's an incredible way of creating that compounding. And the compounding snowball just keeps on getting bigger and bigger. So thank you so much for sharing that. And while I would love to have this conversation, we are almost to the end of our show. So our last round actually has come up. I've incredibly enjoyed talking to you. Our last round is kind of a fun round. It's called rapid fire. I would ask quick questions and you know, 30 to 60 seconds, whatever, you know answers to that. So are you ready for that?

I think so. Let's see how we do.

Oh, perfect. Perfect. Sounds good. So Chad, we had had a interesting conversation with you. We learned about, you know, how you, your story got built up. It's almost like a movie plot, right? From corporate world to real estate world. But tell us that when Chad is not being an engineer or a real estate investor, what is Chad doing that he's enjoying the most? What hobbies and where do you go and lose yourself completely?

Yeah, I love that, you know, Chad loses himself playing golf. I love playing beautiful golf courses or out at our country club. I love playing guitar. I am a, I'm a, I Can't say I'm a musician because I live in Nashville and hear that means something. But I'm an enthusiast. I love playing guitar. And so actually you can't really see them. But on the wall behind me over here, I have about four relic guitars that I've acquired over time. So it's an artistic thing for me. And from there I'm a super social guy. So I love spending time with family, family friends, my children, my wife. And just, you know, we were at. We went after work yesterday and just went to the pool and had dinner at the pool and just played in the water. I mean, just like, that's where I lose myself. It's like, okay, work's done. Put the phone on the watch up. Go be present with those that matter. Because I guarantee you, no one got on their deathbed and said, you know, I wish I worked a little bit more.

You know, Bob, love that, absolutely love that. And you know, I, I was watching this video on your website. You're playing a lullaby to your daughter. That's a very, very interesting video. I can see that. Your love for guitar and with the love for golf. That actually leads to my second question. What is the most interesting golf course that you have been that you absolutely, absolutely love or you want to be in? A one that, that's kind of a dream that I want to be on that golf course and play golf.

Yeah, well, obviously I'll be a little cliche. My dream is to play Augusta national, and I will do that one day. That is, that is the, the premier course in the world, in my eyes. So one day. But it's extremely exclusive. And you know, one day, my most interesting one, I think it would be Kiawah island in South Carolina. My, my nine month pregnant wife at the time when, before my daughter was born, we went on a baby moon. That's a thing nowadays you go on, not a honeymoon for getting married. You go on your last trip as a married couple before your baby comes a baby moon. And she had been a medical resident at South Carolina, you know, Medical University College. And, and so she was like, you know, we'll go to Charleston, because I know if I go into labor, they'll take care of me. Like, you know, and so that was, that was the criteria for my medical wife. But in the middle of summer, in July, and in sticky Charleston, South Carolina, she took me out to Kiawah island for my birthday and actually rode in the golf cart. It was about 100 degrees and we were all sweating like crazy. But she Went and watched me play golf with a caddy on the most beautiful ocean course I've ever played. And so that, that still sticks in my mind. One for the specialness of the gift, the fact that she did it nine months pregnant and the fact that I just, I love ocean marsh courses. It's just so beautiful to see the, the reeds blowing in the wind and all the that. So that, that would be it.

I can picture it. It's such a beautiful memory. I bet you know, when you're tired or something and you close your eyes, you're thinking about that memory. Takes you right back in there. So thank you so much for sharing that. And with that, the last question I would have that. You know, you are too young to ask this question, but you are a very apt person to ask this question. What is the one impact that you would like to live on? This world? World.

The one impact. Wow. I'm gonna get a little vulnerable here. So at a young age even, you know, I'm 34 now, so I think since you read my bio, I probably need to update it, but about to be 35, still very young. But you know, I've lived a lot of lives already, corporate America, in real estate, investment fund management, all that kind of stuff. And I've taken over a lot of assets. And I've seen the good, the bad and the ugly. I've seen people who are living in utter poverty and they just don't have any way out. And so generational poverty is like a thorn in my side. I see people who can't break the cycle. But if they only had the right information, the right safe opportunity and good influences, they could break it. And what I finally learned is you can't break generational poverty by giving charity and handouts. You have to give a handout up, you have to help it skip a generation, right? So even if, like, let's just say I'm still developing this plan, by the way, so I'm get a little off the cuff, but let's just say like one of these days I'm going to be, I'm going to be in control of many, many, many billions of in property. I. I'm on that trajectory and I will do it. Mark my words, I have a long time to accomplish it. But with that in mind, I envision a way to actually purchase investment property using charitable donations and use it not as a profit center, but as a cost center. And we use that, we provide the education people need, the safe, stable environment they need stipends for meals, like just get people out of the slums and put good influences and good communities together where some of these children can break the cycle. Right? And so you may not, not always. Sometimes you'll save the parents, but you need to break the cycle. And so I envision one of these days the name Quattro will be associated with a generational poverty breaking of cycle, if you will. Whether it's through charity property, I'm not sure how we're going to do it yet. I have many thoughts, but that is the thorn in my side and I'm damned. I'm going to fix it, you know.

Oh my God, that's just so beautiful, you know. And then the second time I got goosebumps on this show and it's incredible. I wish you all the best for the vision and you will be successful. I am so confident about that. And with that, unfortunately, we have come to the end of this show. I really, really, really appreciate you being here and sharing your journey, your vision and what you're set to do in this world. Thank you so much, Chad, for being here.

Thank you for having me. It's been a pleasure.

Thanks for tuning in to the Think Outside the Stocks podcast. If you enjoyed today's episode, please like and subscribe. MADVI is on a mission to change the financial trajectory of one family at a time. With a thousand more to go, we hope you'll be a part of this vision. Please join our growing community and to get your journey started, visit thinkoutsidethestocks.com to download your free guide on active income with passive real estate investments. If you learn something new, please share it with one person today. And if you have 60 seconds, please leave us an Apple review to help us reach more people like you. Tune in for the next episode.