Dion Cody and Chrsitian discuss Multifamily Live!!!

It's on your guys's channel, right?

We have the ad live on the Instagram. Oh, okay. We're live on YouTube.

Wow.

Hello, YouTube. How are you guys doing today? We are coming live with Dion. Before we get too deep into all the topics, we'll do some introductions and talking so everyone has time to actually log in and show up in the chat. But Cody and I are back from Vegas, part 2. Really fun getting to speak with, uh, the one and only Troy Kearns. If you don't follow him on, uh, TikTok, he's hilarious, great operator. Um, but we got back, my flight was delayed by only 28 hours. So if you don't gamble and you don't drink, Vegas is a little bit boring. It's a little rough, but, uh, that was, uh, that's where I was at. Uh, Cody, how's your week been?

It's been a week catching up on sleep. I heard that's not a thing, but I claim to be a thing. And, um, just sent out a whole bunch of offers that went out on a really nice fourplex, a 21-unit, a 9-unit. Just signed those on my phone.

Wow.

And yeah, ready to buy some more real estate.

And, uh, we're really excited to have Dion back. Uh, for those who don't know, Dion's the one who taught us how to go live on YouTube. I had to go to his house and he showed us how to connect Zoom to YouTube, which is not as intuitive as you would guess. But Dion's a fantastic investor. He's the one on the call, the only one on the phone who knows how to get rich the lazy way. We did it the hard way. And I highly recommend following Dion on his channel, Dion Talk Financial Freedom.

Dion, thank you for that. Welcome.

So one of my next videos is why you need to be lazy. And I think that the two of you are two of the most lazy people I have ever met in my entire life. Because like me, your goal is to not have to work for more than 40 hours for more than 40 years to retire on less than 40% of what you made. And it takes that motivation to do any of the stuff that you guys are doing.

And we're lazy. I can't imagine if we were focused and intentional. No, but I love that. That is true. We— I don't want to fall into the norm. Doesn't sound fun to me.

No. No, it does not.

Yeah, I'm definitely way too lazy to work another 10 years.

Yeah, heck yeah. I, uh, we're gonna work for a long time. I've got a lot of years left and I don't want to die young, so I'm going to work on something, but it won't be at Target.

Actually applied to Target for a while. Looks like I didn't know that.

Yeah, I applied Target, Safeway. I worked at a gymnastics place in Olympia, Lacey. Tucumcá. And yeah, it was a lot of fun making it happen.

Tell it what—

to whiteboard.

So tell us a little bit about your, your experience on the Ken McElroy Show.

Oh yeah, and that happened last week.

Oh my God, was that last week? Time goes really fast. Oh, Cody, tell everyone that story. I'll let you take center camera. That was really fun.

Yeah, so that, that was a lot of fun, um, with Ken, my big goal, I reached out to him on Instagram and my objective was to chat with him, further the relationship and learn about development. He does a lot of development. He's building 600 apartments right now, and that's only 2 of his 6 projects. He put 4 on hold due to costs and just variable markets. So I got to go meet with him and I ran that like an owner meeting for before, during the podcast, and after the podcast. Got to ask him a lot of one-on-one questions, and he gave me some really good advice on what he thinks I should do for my development projects. He said that he thinks I should wait, and since all this stuff cash flows, just sit on it, and when it doesn't matter, then do the development. So that was a good takeaway.

I like the idea of letting the cash flow pile up so you could take care of things like debt structure and get it more attractive I don't know if it's— I would wait, like put everything on hold. I'd still kind of have, you know, my contractors lined up, your plan sketched out, and then have the plans ready and pull the trigger when you're, when you're ready, not when you think something changed in the market that makes it a good time to do it.

Yeah. And I do like that. I really want to get into development. My first mentors told me to get into development. But that's a very hands-on process and very cash intensive, and I'm not known for having a lot of cash. So that is— I'm probably going to take advice and hold off for another 3, 6 months and then stack a little bit of money and go from there.

Yeah.

No, even Brandon Turner's book, How to Get Started in Real Estate with Low or No Money Down, he doesn't talk about not having money. You know, he says you need money for reserves and emergencies, but there are ways to invest where you're not using a lot of your own money.

Yeah.

Well, what's new for you?

Past the 8-month mark of being retired. So I think I've almost got the schedule down. Still looking for that next rental. I've got a couple of offers out. I have one where they've countered really close to what I want, but we're not there yet. All my deals are still from the MLS, still just saving a down payment, buying the next property. I don't think I'm going to sell any. I've talked about that a few times, selling some and getting rid of some debt to increase cash flow and reduce the number of units that I take care of. But I've been tracking and for the last 8 months I have not passed 2 hours in any month as far as how much time it takes to self-manage. So I don't think I notice having a couple less units.

That— yeah, that's, that's incredible. Are you ever going to jump into bigger? I know we talked about this way back when, but would you ever 1031 into maybe an 8-plex?

So I'm looking at up to 8 units because Convoy Home Mortgage and Convoy Home Loans has a 30 or 40-year fixed rate loan option on up to 8 units. It's a DSCR loan, but they'll do up to 8 units, fixed rate debt. So I am looking at those, but I don't think I'll sell on 1031. I think it's just as I save the down payment, that's what I would look at. I agree with Zuber when I think bigger isn't better, it's which property has the best yield. So the return on investment on the actual money I put into the deal.

That— yeah, that's really cool that you can get a 30-year fixed rate mortgage on an 8-plex.

Yeah, yeah.

Convoy Home Loans, they have that option.

Hmm.

Can they do that for refinances?

That would be a good question. I haven't asked them that because I haven't looked at it. I just knew that when they first announced the loan product, I think it was up to 29 units and then something changed and they said, yeah, 8 units is the cap on the fixed rate debt. And it's 30-year for— you have to buy down another point, but you can get 40-year where the first 10 is interest only, then the 30 following is the regular amortization schedule.

Wow. I want to do that. That's pretty cool.

If you don't— if you don't have their contact, I'll connect you with an email to them.

Yeah, that's my Whiteboard Wednesday question.

Yeah, there we go. How do we get 30-year fixed rate debt on the commercial assets? That would be fantastic.

Fantastic. That— yeah, that'd be really cool. I'm thinking about the 8-plex on Broadway. Oh yeah.

Oh, that would actually make sense. We finally figured out a way to make that one make sense.

Is that 25% down?

I was going to be doing 25% down, so I don't know what their requirements are. They were okay with 25% down, so there might be other versions of it, but that's the one that I wanted to do, and they said that works.

Fantastic. Getting the feedback that our sound might be a little echoey, which might just be because we're in a big open room. Trying to think if we have a tech way to solve that or if we just muscle through.

So I'm not getting the echo from feedback on device, it's just because of the room. So if you're on an LVP or tile floor, it's going to take for future videos, don't worry about it now, put towels along the edges of the walls and it gets rid of that canny sound. Oh, the purpose for this tapestry is that softens the sound, does the same thing.

Alternatively, we could just move to a carpeted room.

That we can do.

We'll give you guys a quick tour of the, uh, of our Airbnb, which is finished as of today. Uh, really excited to have that going. So for all who are wondering, there's our kitchen. The Hood Canal. You can see it through the window. And yeah, living room doesn't have a lot going on. We're pretty echoey.

Hood Canal right there. You guys are right next to the Bill Gates estate.

We are, which is really awesome.

We are going to move and then, yeah, and then we'll just keep rocking.

So while you're doing that, I'm going to answer a question here from REI Stoners in the chat.

Do it.

How am I buying my next deals? I'm still hunting, Josh, from the MLS. So I'm not doing any off-market, no mailers, no door-to-door, no driving for dollars. Although if I see something when I'm driving, I'm probably going to try to track down the owner. I have saved up enough money to buy a BRRRR all cash. So I have a search set up for BRRRR properties up to I think it's $500,000 now where I might buy it, rehab it with my own money, finance out if it makes sense, leave the money in if I don't. Or, or I have up to about $500,000 to use as up to 25% down on something like a fourplex in our area. So I still have those searches going. The, the three offers that I have out now are on basically everything I just talked about. One's on a BRRRR, one's on an all-cash purchase, and one's on a large $1.3 million property as the down payment. The only one I've heard back from is the cash purchase, but they haven't come down to where I want it to be at yet.

Love it. And for those who just joined the channel, Dion, how many units are you at right now and what does your cash flow look like? You hit financial freedom, you're retired. It's amazing. How did you like— just give us a quick overview of where you're at today.

So the quick overview for me, financial freedom was very simple. I had a freedom number of a little under 4,000. That's what it took. 4,000 means financial independence. So I kept investing and growing my portfolio until I passed what I call the 4x rule. I wanted 4 times the cash flow coming in than it takes me to live my basic life so that I could do anything I want without having to look at price tags. I have 16 rental units. One of them is a single house. The rest is duplexes, a triplex, and a fourplex. I'm still house hacking the fourplex, living in one of the units. Cash flow every month. So I set aside about $3,000 a month for repairs, maintenance, and vacancy. I pay all the principal interest taxes and insurance. And, and after that, there's a little over $17,000 a month that goes into my account that I don't have to work for.

Love it.

That's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic. Now, for everyone in the chat, by the way, you can start asking questions. The whole point of today is that we will answer all the questions that come by. You have two unique perspectives. For anyone new on the channel, Cody and I do a lot of creative finance. We have a portfolio of a little over 100 units doing a much more busy and active way. We need property managers. We just hired another employee in Moses Lake, Washington. So we have employees, LLCs, a whole org around all this. If you want to do it the way Dion did, which I think most people can, you took it— remind me again, how long, how many years was that to pick up the portfolio?

So I had the portfolio in 10 years, but I've owned it for 12 because it's been since May 2021. That I purchased at my last property.

That's fantastic. So within a decade, buying 1 or 2 deals a year, you can hit financial freedom, have a multiple million dollar net worth, have the cash flow to live the life, lifestyle that you want to live. And it's doable without a whole lot of craziness. 2 hours a month of property management. I think most of us can make that happen.

Most of that time is actually just making sure the rent's collected. That's, that's at least 45 minutes a month to verify all of that. And so I'm around an hour, maybe an hour and a half a month on sending text messages to handyman or to tenants. I tracked in January, I think I had 2 text messages. In December, I want to say I handled a couple of emails, but it was a really light month. So it's been a good 4 months since I've had to do anything. I had a well breakdown at one property. And while it involved my time, about 10 minutes to handle that, it was a span of about 6 hours. So I handled a couple of calls and emails in the beginning and then at the wrap-up. But it wasn't me out there fixing the well. I'm too lazy to do any of that kind of stuff either.

I wouldn't want to do that.

Yeah, I will say we burn more than 45 minutes a month on collections. It takes a second. A little over 100 tenants to make sure everyone's paying, especially getting out of the post-COVID stuff. We picked up a lot of properties that we were fixing up. Problems with collections was the actual project.

So that's—

there's a big difference between the way that you guys invest, the way the Lumberjack Landlord invests, the way Zuber invests, and the way that I do. Mine got me financial freedom and it got me a net worth of a few million in about a decade. You— the way you guys are doing, in 10 years, your portfolio size, your cash flow will be like Zuber's and Millennial and Lumberjack Landlord's. Multiples of mine. So you're achieving much more than financial freedom. So there are people out there who are like me, who are just lazy and they don't want to have to work. My system worked great for them. I don't suggest doing what I'm doing for somebody who wants to create generational wealth, who wants to make a real business out of this. For me, it's, it's not a business. I'm not an entrepreneur. I'm an investor. I just saved up down payments, put the money to work, and handyman and contractors do all the actual work. I just put the systems in place. Once, once I've done that, my work was done.

And I think for safely over 90% of people, that is the best strategy. You don't need this ridiculous huge portfolio. Our mission—

a lot of work.

Yeah, like we are doing this. This is our hobby. This is our pastime. This is our passion project. Like, we love scaling real estate. This is what I do. People always ask, like, what do you do in your free time? I'm like, this is my free time. It's real estate. This is what I want to be doing. For most people, if you're seeking financial freedom and you're using real estate as your vehicle, it's not going to take you hundreds of units. You don't need all this stuff. We're building a business because we are entrepreneurs and this is what we do all day, every day. You don't have to do that. You want a great model of how this works. Just buying one rental at a time consistently, year over year. Dion is— Dion's about the perfect example of how you operate that.

Now I've got one question for Dion before we jump into the chat. Okay. Now that you can get 30-year fixed-rate mortgages, which is a big part of your strategy on up to 8 units, is there going to be a point where you transition out of these smaller rentals—

duplex, triplex, fourplex—

and just convert all that equity into sixplex, sevenplex, eightplex? Have less roofs to worry about and have the same amount of rentals?

More than likely not. Right. So my plan isn't to— my plan is I hope to have better luck with my real estate than all of my marriages. I want them to actually be until death do we part.

Right.

That's the plan I buy. I never plan on selling, but I'm not stupid when it comes to real estate. I'm stupid when it comes to relationships, but with, with real estate, I'm going to do like Zubrow and I'm going to watch. If a bunch of people have unhealthy debt and it blows up and they have loan reevaluation periods where they can't meet what the lender needs, what their needs are, and I find great deals, I would probably do that. I don't see it happening. But if it— you know, it's like when I buy a property, I get a fixed rate mortgage. I plan on never refinancing. I'm never going to take out a home equity line of credit. I'm never going to do a second mortgage, I'm never going to touch the equity. That's not my thing. My thing is to get the cash flow from having the money in the property. But if interest rates drop like they did in 2020, I refinanced half my portfolio to better rates. So I say this is my plan. I buy down the rate when I get a mortgage because I never plan on refinancing. But if rates go down or if the debt structure fell apart on a bunch of 6 to 8 units and I saw great deals, I would probably jump on that with the option of fixed rate debt. So I wouldn't be in the same situation that the current owners are in.

Love it.

Well, let's jump into some of these questions.

Rolling up to the top right now.

How are you? But did we already go through REI Stoner's question? How are you?

Yeah, that's— I did that while you guys were moving.

Fantastic. All right, let's see.

Oh, this one's for Cody. Sorry for you. Hi, Cody. How are you? I'm looking to find a new market to get into. I'm looking for cash flow, not appreciation. I don't know which market to pick. Would you please help me out?

Yeah. So I would just pick somewhere somewhat local. Even though I bought 3 hours away, I can still drive to my property. In the beginning, you don't have as much money as you will when you own all the real estate. So you need to pick somewhere that you can feasibly get to if you need to be there. I wouldn't go look at a state. You're talking about just cash flow. Typically when people think just cash flow, they think Midwest. But I don't want to have to figure out the systems or have to figure out how to fly over there because I'm not driving there, that's for sure. Mm-hmm.

You're not driving to Nebraska?

No. So I would make sure that you pick a market somewhat local to where you're at. And then as far as looking at metrics, I would look at if people are moving there, what employers are there, what are the main employers, plural, not singular. And how is wage growth going? Those are the big ones that I would look at initially, and then you just gotta drive it. If you drive through Moses Lake, streets are clean. Drive through Quincy, streets are clean. People take care of their stuff. They're wider streets. They're all brand new roads. Everybody takes care of their lawns. Can't say the same thing about anywhere in King County. So if I were just to pick based on metrics, King County may look better. But you drive it and that's a heck of a lot worse. What are your thoughts on that, Dion?

So I'm one of the teaching assistants for the BiggerPockets, um, real estate rookie boot camps on how to acquire your first or next rental. And they actually have— each week is episodical on the topic that they're covering. They do have an entire week where they dedicate it to how to pick a market. And I can't share the specifics of it because it's all proprietary. I could say things that they've said on videos publicly that, you know, economic drivers, like you said, are there enough employers, which means sources of tenants, if something changes. Population growth, is the neighborhood safe, like all of those things. But there's one thing that I want— I contribute as the teaching assistant to that. The market you pick, more important than any metric people can talk about, is that you have trusted boots on the ground. Either you live there or used to live there and know the neighborhoods, or you have somebody who lives in that area that you trust so much that you think they're going to come to your funeral, that works in the industry— property manager, contractor, agent— somebody that's going to be there and know something really basic, like if you were looking at Cape Coral in Florida, right? I went there for 2 months at the beginning of 2022 for some friends, studied the market to kind of help them kind of figure out where to invest, which, to share my research, was north of Cape Coral. But in Cape Coral itself, you can have a $700,000 house and a $250,000 house on the same street priced correctly because one was abutting the canal which is where the value in the property is. The other one was on a landlocked street. And then based on the elevation of the house, your homeowner's insurance can be as much of a variance of $1,000 a year for flood insurance, up to $8,000 a year based on how many feet your house is from sea level. If you don't know some too simple things like that local to that area, you're going to see a deal that looks amazing. You're like, wow, the comp across the street's 3 times as much. Why is this so cheap? You buy it, you can't rent it out. Airbnb because it's not on a canal, right? So each market everywhere has something specific like that. So yes, everything that Cody said, it matters, right?

But I'll add one more thing to this. So if you're looking for cash flow, not appreciation, our strategy is you always buy for cash flow first because you run out of cash flow, you lose. And the goal is to buy it and to never lose it. So cash flow is the most important. However, we buy based on cash flow. For appreciation. What appreciation does for you is it will multiply your money while the cash flow is an addition and it makes sure that you can pay your bills every month, which is the number one. Where you really make a lot of money in real estate is you find those areas where you find a great cash flowing deal in a market that can sustain great cash flow. But you look for things like, is population growth going up here? Are employers moving in here? Because values will increase with that. If you can get paid to wait, That's where all the money's really made in real estate. Like real wealth is built in the waiting game of buy and hold. Cash flow is everything, but don't negate the fact that you can find places with excellent appreciation like Moses Lake, like Grant County, like Mason County where we're at right now, where you're high appreciation but buying great cash flow deals.

Yeah. And if you want more cash flow, borrow cheaper money. Yeah.

Uh-huh.

It helps too. Figure out how to get creative on it. Saying great time.

Wow, wow, my phone decided to turn on and join our chat. So hello, there you go.

All right, our next question: where are the three of us at? We're at the Hood Canal.

Well, Dion's not, but—

well, we are now at a triplex that we bought next to the Robin Hood Village Resort. And we bought the Robin Hood because Dion does his strategy the lazy way, and while it could make money it didn't make sense for his situation, so he sent us. Thank you for that.

No, it fits your guys' strategy. So if anything else comes my way that doesn't fit me, you guys are top of my list for things that fit your strategy.

Well, where are you at, Dion? Where are you based?

So all of my rentals are between Tacoma and Olympia in Washington, but none of them are in Tacoma or Olympia in Washington. I'm in a town called Spanaway. In a fourplex that I'm house hacking. I will probably stop housing sometime. I actually talked with the Three Amigos, Michael Zuber and Lumberjack, the other day about possibly buying a forever home instead of a rental next because I'm at that financial freedom point. I don't think I'm there yet. I think I'm still one or two more rentals from— process this correctly— wasting money on a place to live. That's how my brain's going to see it, because right now I'm being— just this property, I'm profiting $2,500 a month being paid to live here. It's really hard to break that when I have all the space I need. I have my own garage, my own shed, my own driveway. Everything is mine. But someday.

But not today.

Not today. We can't edit a live video that I know of.

But yeah, if anyone's not familiar with Dion's channel yet, one, you should be too. That's one of his catchphrases. You gotta, you gotta watch that. The Untalked Financial Freedom.

That phrase actually comes from when I worked in law enforcement. Not too many people realize why.

Yeah.

Oh, that's cool.

So we have some nice comments about our Airbnb.

Rob's making fun of our bare walls. We're doing our best.

We're doing our best. We've, uh, this has been vacant at, uh, at a loss for like 4 and a half months. So as soon as we get some rents, I'll buy some art. But we need to make some money on this one.

Or you can donate art The Cody and Christian Foundation.

Yes. Link in the chat. I'm kidding. But if anyone has any ideas for art, we are open to suggestions. So feel free to drop any ideas in the chat and we will, we'll review those.

I see Dividend Dave popped in with a super chat. Thank you for that. That's awesome. Appreciate the support of the channel.

And then thank you.

Followed by Joshua, the REI Stoners.

When seller financing, do you do an inspection? Absolutely.

Every time.

Seller financing is a form of financing. You still need to know what you're buying regardless of whether you do it conventionally or not. You, you have— even if you pay cash, I still want to know if I have galvanized pipes. I still want to know if there's an active leak, if there's carpenter ants, if there's bed bugs. I, I want to know all the things that I wouldn't know otherwise. The financing is irrelevant. When it comes to actually going out and buying the real estate?

I've always done an inspection contingency. Matt the Lumberjack landlord, who's done dozens of rehabs, will actually buy properties without doing an actual inspection, but he'll usually still do an inspection contingency because after you're under contract, you want that period of days where you can back out and not lose your earnest money. So if you made an actual docu-signed offer, put earnest money into an account, I would never waive the inspection, even if you planned on I don't suggest it, not having an inspection done. Have that period where you can go and look at the property, find out everything you can about the neighborhood, and make sure it's something you want to follow through on without putting your money at risk.

Yeah.

And one of the properties where we didn't get an inspection was a 38-plex. And the only reason was we already knew everything was wrong. We knew that there's problems with the roof, problem with the septic, problem with the plumbing, and down by steel.

Yeah. Don't need to pay anybody $10,000 to tell us the building is crap.

We were well aware of what we were buying. It was part of our strategy was fixing up those problems. And that was a deal that made us over $1 million. However, no different inspection when you already know that you're going to fail all of it and buy it anyway. But unless you find yourself in that very unique situation, inspection is the best practice always. And if you have a renovation component, get your contractor in there and get quotes for everything because they're going to know your math better than you do in that market until you've done a lot of reno projects like Matt has, like we have in Moses Lake. We can skip some of those steps now only because Cody and I usually estimate more accurately than our contractors what things are going to cost because we've just done so many projects in that market.

And some of us have been investing for 12 years and don't know how to do any of that stuff. So I always hire the inspector even on a deal I've been to.

Cody actually went all the way through inspector school, did the whole home inspector thing, and almost, almost bought a home inspection company.

And then I didn't.

And then you didn't. I'm glad you didn't. That would have been a distraction. Let's see here from Aaron in the chat. See, and see, I like your strategy on meeting people. Awesome. I like it too. It works. It does work. How long does it approximately take from your guys' experience before the people you hook up with— well, the people you meet, I'm going to say the people you meet reach out to you and offer their property? Well, it's typically not on the first meeting, I can tell you that much.

Yeah, sometimes it is, but not typically. Yeah, not typically. Sometimes it can be a couple months, sometimes it can be a couple of years. One of the more recent properties we bought was a couple of years of time building that relationship, and I got to text him just recently. His name's Don, but sent him a picture because the aurora borealis is here at the Hood Canal. So I got some photos. I was like, you should come hang out, come see this. So we're gonna get him to come stay. But that was just years of cultivating the relationship and trying to figure out how to just connect, relate, and, uh, keep rapport.

Though for the, um, the resort down here, Dion made the connection for us, said, hey, you got to meet these people. I made one phone call, we came down, they showed us the whole camp. So like, okay, so how are we doing this? You guys bring a suitcase full of money? Oh no. I said yes, but we had a little back and forth and that was a, I mean, that was first meeting. We made a commitment to, hey, this is a project we want to look into. And so came back a second time, wrote it up and away we went. So it could be immediate, but more often than not, it's a repeat meeting. You meet several times, you have deeper and deeper conversations and you get the phone call from them saying, hey, my friend just had a deal that I think you guys need to look at, and it's a referral more often than it is that person selling you a property.

Kind of question I really like. What is the best advice you can give someone starting from scratch? I think that's a good one for Dion.

So if somebody's starting from scratch, I have 6 steps to getting started in real estate. I would tell them those 6 steps. But the best advice, if you're just giving advice, it's don't be yourself. The dumbest advice I've ever gotten in my entire life was be yourself. I was born poor. I was poor. I was bad with money. I was— everything was bad. Don't be that. Find the people that are doing what you've done or have done what you're trying to do and be like them. But the actual advice, the steps would be those 6 steps to getting started in real estate.

Love it. Dividend Dave did a contribution.

I wasn't going to call him out publicly. But his, his nerd failed today. So he— thank you, Dividend Dave, for the support of the channel. We appreciate the Super Chats. It lets YouTube know that people like the content and it might share it with more people. So that is appreciated. And Dave is killing it. He lives in Bellingham, Washington. He bought a duplex out of state, moved out of state. He's house hacking. He's taking actionable steps. He knows what he's doing. But my shirt is from Game of Thrones. This is the House Stark shirt. It's not a Harry Potter shirt. I did have teenagers and kids when Harry Potter was coming out, so I'm familiar with it. But yeah, so sorry.

Oh, fail.

Then again, he did ask a question of your favorite Harry Potter book. And since he's in the Super Chat, we do have to answer the question.

The Azkaban one. What's that? The second one? The prison?

Yeah.

Look at that. I knew nerd stuff that's not my normal stuff.

The Prisoner of Azkaban. I want to— I think it's the third.

Is that the third one? I wouldn't know.

I don't know. I listen to a lot. I never see the title or hold the books anymore.

So there we go. Someone in the chat let us know which one Prisoner of Azkaban is. My bet is on number 3, but that's just a gut feeling.

All right, REI Stoners, is there a date and link to the next Robin Hood event? We have a date that's going to be the 18th, right? Yep.

Yeah, that's the— and if you're staying down here, there's stuff on the 17th, 18th, and 19th.

We're gonna have a poker night. It'll be fun. You're, you're going to be speaking at that one, right?

Yes, and so is Millennial Mike.

Fantastic.

So everyone should come to that. We still have a few cabins open. Um, I think it's only 2 cabins left though. It got booked up quicker than our previous events. We have some bigger speakers. Some of the BiggerPockets, uh, rookie crew is going to be down here speaking. We have Lika from Seattle, so we have some bigger names.

If you'd like to book it, and regardless of the cabin availability, there will be day passes, but you can just send a text. The number is 360-490-8168.

I'll put that in the chat. Cody's good with numbers. Say that one more time for us.

360-490-8168. You just sent a text. That's Hannah. We'll have her on our channel someday. She helps us, helps the portfolio keep going. She's our property manager. All right. Hey, Cody and Christian, how do I finance deals with bad credit? Well, you can build your credit up, which I would say to do. I'd address the situation because there's probably an issue that happened. Whether it's your fault or not, that caused your credit to go downhill. However, if you want to do it faster than that, seller financing doesn't have a credit check typically. However, I would resolve the problem and address, okay, how did this happen? How do I ensure it doesn't happen again? And what are the logical steps to fix the situation? Because once it's done, it's done. And that's my favorite part about business and real estate. You build a brand new roof, it's done for 30, 40, 50 years. You fix your credit and you don't repeat what you did to get there. It's fixed. So any thoughts on that, Dion?

So this is on the how to get a deal with bad credit.

Yeah.

Jayden, please don't take this as, as offensive, right? Work on it and fix your credit. I understand sometimes things happen that are beyond our control. So that's the main thing, because in 5 or 10 years you're going to be wanting to do more real estate and that credit score is still going to matter. The quickest solution for me to fix a bad credit score would be to find somebody I'm going to partner with where I have the money and the deal or the work or 2 or 3 of those or one of those, and they have the credit score. That's where partnerships can really pay off. Find a way to make it work where lending isn't a barrier because you're not the only one in the deal if you can. The other thing is really you can do commercial loans in an LLC where your credit score might not be as big a factor. But most DSCR loans, most asset-based lending, even though they don't look at your work history, your income, your salary, they do look at your credit score. So it's something I'd still be working on, but maybe be looking for a partner who brings that to the table.

Fantastic. And they definitely don't care about credit as much on the commercial deals.

I'll put that out there.

On our loan, not once did they ever ask me about my credit score. Now, it's, it's not low, but it's definitely not— it's not even up for 700s. So it's just kind of average.

Yeah, we take too many business cards. We have too many LLCs with too many lines of credit to have a hyper high score. But as long as you have a decent credit score, you can get through a lot of stuff. And the beauty with seller finance is no one's ever going to ask, but you want to have the option to bring it into bank debt. We've done that on— now, as of this week, officially, two of our deals are in bank debt. We just refinanced one of Cody's first 12 collections that I'm a part of. And so having that option to adjust your debt stack, really important. However, right now, today, if you find a fantastic deal— I don't know what word— if you find the Titanic— no, you find a fantastic deal and it is seller-financable, you're not going to need a credit score to acquire it. You're going to want to up that credit score if you want to be able to adjust your pieces. So just keep that in mind. Like Dion said, your credit's bad, fix it. Don't let that stop you from buying real estate, but you're going to be able to buy a lot more. Rob's comment, Dion, buying a house next to Matt in Vegas.

I heard Matt talk about it. Matt's looking at a place down there, so I talked about getting one in Vegas. I don't know if I would follow through on Vegas or not because if I'm going to snowbird, there are better places than Vegas because I'm like you guys, don't drink, don't gamble. Not, you know, not enough to, to enjoy going to Vegas for that. Uh, so yeah, it's a possibility. It's just like 20%, not 80%.

Great speaking venues though. If you want to talk about real estate, there are a lot of places to talk about real estate in Vegas. But other than that, yeah, it's, uh, I like being there. I have a lot of friends in Vegas, and there are better places to snowbird, a lot of better places. That's why I'm looking at Texas. Get a hat like Dion. I know you're not wearing it today, but Dion has his share of cowboy hats. What do you do when properties are owned by companies and don't have a specific owner? Do you move on? No, because I want to own it.

Yeah.

Open corporate. You want to find out who that owner is. It is owned by someone. Every corporation is owned by a specific person or group of people. At the end of the day, people own real estate, whether they have that in LLC, for example, If you looked at any of Cody and my properties, all but— I have my house and one other property in my own name. Cody has no property in his own name currently, though he will this year. Yeah, they're all in LLCs. We're all reachable people. In fact, we're very reachable. We put our number all over online. If someone called me on one of our triplexes, I might actually be open to selling it, though I don't like selling real estate. We're working on some big projects right now and I don't need every triplex that I have. So if you just moved on and never made the phone call, you might never have that opportunity. I see that happen all the time. One of my favorite pieces is everyone who's skipping all those corporations and not digging any deeper is missing out on that opportunity. You're just hitting lower-hanging fruit. If you, if you're the one person who calls them and they're not being called by the other 5 people who looked up the corporation and moved on, you're just calling someone who's called less. That's fantastic.

Great.

Yeah, enough said. On to the next question from, uh, I'm calling owners and learning their story. It takes time to build relationships with these owners. I live in California, so not sure if it's smart to call owners here. What do you think? All right, well, you're doing the right thing. You're meeting with the people in your market, so that's— that part is awesome. That's what I think. As far as California as a location, Dion, what are your thoughts on Cali?

So a lot of people will say something like, I live in a high cost of living area, I can't invest here. California is huge. I mean, it's not Texas huge, but it's 3 times Washington State. So my brother invests in Washington and in California. I wouldn't suggest investing in maybe Los Angeles County. They have kind of some of that, like King County in Washington, they have some of the most insane landlord laws. So my brother invests just outside of LA County in Kern County in a little town called Rosemont. I have a friend who invests in Bakersfield. So find the local highest cost of living area that's close to you in California and then draw circles out. You're going to hit water, you're going to hit mountains, but in some area you're going to hit an equilibrium where prices and rents start to balance out and deals will make sense. You can invest at a distance if it's, if it's so far out that you can't find a place within 3 or 4 hours that you can invest at, you're going to look at Millennial Mike strategy of finding a new market and investing in a distance. Getting the systems in place to make it work. If you're like Zuber, who lives in Sacramento, you know, in the, in the Silicon Valley area where everything's expensive, he went out a couple hours till he found Fresno. Numbers made sense there. In a circle around you, in what direction do numbers make sense? How far are they? And then develop that strategy. You learn the skill even if you're doing it in an area where you can't invest by meeting people, figuring out what conversations work, which ones sounded too much like a sales pitch, which ones build relationships. Get that skill first, and then when you find that market where it makes sense, you can use the skill there.

And since we're creative finance guys, like, we have a deal in Tukwila, which is right next to Seattle. And while I agree with Dion, I won't buy more in Seattle just because the rules are crazy, the laws are ridiculous. However, it's in a market where deals typically don't make sense. We got that at 3% debt, and we got it $200,000 less than market price. I mean, it was just a great deal. You can make a great deal work anywhere. Like conventional, you might have more troubles in like an LA County or any of these really, really expensive markets. But creative finance, if you're just meeting those players, you might actually find someone who's in your market who's willing to get creative with you and give you terms that make the deal work. So don't assume just because it's an expensive market it won't work, because price is only one of many negotiable things. You have your balloon payment, your interest rate, some special clauses. We've talked about Caleb and Chuck on this channel plenty of times, but one of their first deals, they started with 6 months of no payments because they didn't have enough money in reserve. They're like, how do we build reserve? What if we just don't have expenses? That's super creative and a really easy clause for a lawyer to write. But you can change any of the variables and make any deal work in any market. You just have to figure out how to get it into long-term fixed rate cash flowing debt.

All right. Someone asked, do you do consultations on the phone or Zoom? We do. MultifamilyStrategy.com. Or can I come to Washington? I'd love to hear your suggestions how to get started. You should come to the Robinhood event that is coming up in less than 3 weeks, and everyone on this call will be there. Be there or be square. All right. Rob, take pictures of the resort. And stuff to do, put it on the walls advertising for the resort. Yes, let's advertise the resort at the neighboring triplex. I'm down. That would be fun.

We lease this place from the resort, at least we're about to, so that'll be fun. What is the best way to talk and engage potential limited partners? We actually don't have any limited partners, at least I don't. And Dion, you don't, uh, you don't partner, do you?

No, because I've met people.

Because you're what?

He's met people. Oh, the, yeah, people are messy. Limited partners are typically going to be something, not exclusively, but typically with limited partners you're thinking syndication, which means you have a lot of partners. You're going to be crowdsourcing a deal. We don't do that either because you put a lot of people on the deal and you're doing a lot of marketing, which means a lot of disclosures, SEC contract, you know, all this compliance stuff. We don't like to add steps. Cody and I will take on actual capital partners, not limited, but they're going to be partners, equity partners in our deal. And on a general partnership, we're finding them the same way we find owners. I don't want to invest with a ton of people. So people who we have an existing relationship with, we understand their goals and objectives. And when we get to the capital part, we already have a deal. We know all their objectives and all it is is a continuation of the last conversation we had. For example, we're buying a 12-plex right now. The investor that we are going to ride with on that one has been wanting to do a cost segregation on a larger building. His spouse is a real estate professional. They can actually offset some of their income beyond what an average W-2 individual could. A cost segregation study is a fantastic savings for them. We know we're running a cost seg on this property, so that was an easy phone call. You want to get into bigger real estate? We're buying a 12-plex. We are running a cost seg. We've said no to a deal in this market recently because it wasn't the right deal. This is the deal we want to do with you. And they drove out there, they looked at it, they're like, yes. And so if you want to know how to get a general partner or just invest with the right person, build those relationships before you get your deal and then use the people that you know and put them in the right opportunity for what they want to do?

If you're approaching somebody for a partnership, there are 3 things that I would do. The first is make sure that what you're doing benefits them. Find out how it benefits them. That's what you need to highlight. Second, point out how it benefits you. If you don't point out how it benefits you, they're going to smell a scam. They're going to think of something imaginary and think that that's what you're trying to pull. And third, once you have negotiated, okay, here's the deal I'm looking at, this is how it benefits you, this is what you bring to the table. I don't have the thing that you bring to the table that I'm missing, but I do have the deal. The money or the credit score or the not 10 loans in my name or whatever you're bringing to the table. The last thing, the third thing is get everything in writing right now. Once you've agreed to it while everyone's getting along, you are not going to be able to make a change to a contract 2 years in when a disagreement happens. So those are the 3 things I would do if I was going to ever have a partner, which I've made offers. I tried to purchase a mobile home park with a friend. I, with Millennial Mike, we looked at buying a 5-plex together in Indiana. So far those deals haven't come through, but That's what I would do is how does it benefit you? Here's how it benefits me. And let's put everything in writing while we're getting along. I don't say it that way, but that's why I try to get everything right.

Fantastic. And that's the point where you would do an LLC, correct?

That's one of the times where it makes it— there's more, but that's one of the times where it does make sense.

Awesome.

Rob asked, who is Dion speaking to on mute?

Did he do a Super Chat to ask that? No, then I'm not answering.

Yeah, you'd have to Super Chat to get that question answered. All right.

And no, she won't come say hi on camera.

Christian Osgood. If you don't mind me asking, what are the 6 steps? If you don't—

so I've just briefly as possible, you guys, it probably takes somewhere between 5 to 7 minutes. I mean, that's as brief as I can get.

Let's make it.

I'm going to say I have 5, 7 minutes, so let's roll.

Okay. The 6 steps to getting into real estate. See if I can remember from the top of my head, because what I do not have is a great memory. If you're going to invest in real estate and you've decided this is the asset class you're going to pursue, the first thing that we need to do, whether you own rentals or not, so you can have 10 or zero, you need to learn how to save. Saving doesn't mean spending less. It means increasing your income. How do you add cash flowing assets? Work overtime, develop a side hustle, work towards a promotion, learn a skill to be more valuable to your employer. Or change companies. Studies have shown that people who change companies every 2 to 3 years end up making more money than stay— somebody stays at a company for 10 to 20 years. That's the first thing: increase your income without increasing your expenses so you can save more. Second thing, no matter what type of lending you're using, work on your credit score. At some point it will matter for something, even if it's you want to buy a vehicle to work on your rentals with. That credit score is going to impact that purchase. So you owe no rentals or you have 10 rentals, keep working on your credit score. Lenders will tell you the goal is to have a 740 or higher. I'm telling you your goal is to have a 780 or higher, because what we see on Credit Karma is not the FICO score that the lender is going to be able to look up, and it could be 30 to 40 points lower than what we see. So if you get a 780 or higher, you're always going to have lenders see a 740 or higher to get the best lending options. Third thing, before you talk to an agent, you talk to a lender. You need to find out what your options are. If they tell you your credit score, your salary, your whatever, you are absolutely not going to be able to buy something. Why? For me, it was debt-to-income ratio. After 2008, I was laid off from the police department. I was making $17 an hour teaching CDL students how to drive trucks. Found out about $89,000 in bad debt in my name I didn't know existed till the divorce. Had 3 kids as a single parent. Lenders told me You can't borrow any money. You shouldn't even have the house that you have now unless you had rental income on your tax returns. That casual statement from a lender told me, well, if I move into an apartment and rent my house out for 2 years, I'll be able to buy any small multifamily I want because the cash flow from the rental will fix my debt-to-income problem. So you talk to a lender to find out what your options are, and I don't know what your options are, but that lender might tell you DSCR, asset-based seller financing, conventional, FHA. They're going to list out all these different options. One of them will match you and you need to know that before you talk to an agent. So that's the third. Fourth, before you talk to an agent, this is where you pick your market and your strategy. Make sure you know if you're going to self-manage, how far are you willing to drive? If it's at a distance, get your systems in place. Is there a reason why you're picking that market? Because you have those boots on the ground. Save credit lender strategy. Fifth, You finally talk to an agent, and I do it the way Millennial Mike does. I'm going to have as many agents as he has girlfriends. I just want to make sure they all know about it, right? You have to be transparent. Don't work with one agent. I have at least 3 that set up auto searches so that I have multiple listings coming in from the MLS, because it's nuanced searching on the MLS. A, an agent that works with a home buyer that's going to waste a lot of their time where they go out and they look at 10 or 20 deals, yeah, they absolutely want to sign an exclusivity agreement. But if an agent works with me, all they're going to do is set up an auto search on the MLS. Takes 15 minutes to maybe half an hour to look at my copied email that they're going to take the criteria of, put in their search, and set it up. They're not going to hear from me again until it's time to make an offer. They don't go show properties to me. I don't waste their time. I make offers on property where I know the neighborhood. I'm gonna follow through if everything that I see goes through. That's why I'm still going to have an inspection report with an inspection contingency period. Get those auto searches set up or develop how you're going to find your deals. So that, that fifth step is it could be driving for dollars, setting up mailers, contacting and getting on the list for wholesalers in your area, whatever strategy you're going to use to find the deals that match your strategy. And then the sixth thing, the last thing to getting started in real estate is from right from One Rental at a Time, from Michael Zuber, do the work, run the numbers on deals, find the great deals, learn average for your market, try to beat the yield, the cash-on-cash return in your market and make offers on those deals. So as brief as possible, that's usually an hour to a 2-hour presentation at a live real estate meetup from memory. So hopefully I didn't miss anything, but I think that was awesome. 5 minutes.

If we could get some likes in the chat for Dion, we got 50 viewers and 19 likes. That's a little bit skewed.

What the heck?

We should have like 50 likes with 50 viewers. Come on, that was awesome.

Yeah, get on in there. If anyone— I always get this in the comments— if anyone's like, I can't like it because I'm watching on my phone, you're in the chat, hit like, and then jump back into the chat. The chat is just— they, uh, is on your screen.

Create a million accounts and like it and we're famous.

Yeah, the, the likes, uh, like the Super Chat will help people think that this is an interesting video and people will come in and ask more better questions, and then it's more better. It's like magic. All right, no, we appreciate you all.

And if we had Mike here, Millennial Mike, it could be Magic Mike. All right, let's see.

Yeah, looking for the next, uh, next question here.

Scroll down.

We have a lot of comments but no questions.

No questions. Dion talk. Who is that?

Minecraft Alex. Dion, why your forehead look like that?

Not that, like That.

Narful the Garfnag, or whatever. Garthok from Conan. That's what you get.

Uh, it's funny because Dion's massively better looking than me, but he doesn't need hair to look better. It just migrated down to his face.

It went from the top of his head to the bottom.

I was given a choice. I could have hair or testosterone. I had to choose.

There you go. You made your choice. What's here?

You say to look up LLC on OpenCorporates and find the agent name. What if there is no agent name or location elsewhere to look up? So there's always going to be someone who filed it and sometimes it is going to be like a lawyer or something.

Another LLC that you got to just keep digging.

Yep. But you keep just typing in the information you have. That is the wonderful thing about Google is you just have to get good at prompting Google. So if you have an LLC name and an agent name and you have a location, type in that LLC and the location that the property's in or the location it was filed. Look for news reports. We actually found someone in New Jersey, a larger owner, but he had his lawyer file the LLC. It was a spontaneous, weird name, but we looked up the name of the LLC, the city the property was in, found a news article that related that LLC to another company, looked up that company and found out that the person who runs that is this 25-year-old person whose father was a big deal and he just took over the company. We made one phone call and he picked up and booked a meeting with one of our mentees. It wasn't that much work though. Like, that sounds like a huge workaround. It's 3 Google searches. It's like, oh, I have a new name. Let's toss it into Google next to the address.

It's the lazy way.

This is the lazy way. If you get a phone number, a lot of the social media sites like Facebook will redact the first digits but show you the last 4. If you type in that person's name, the word phone number, and the last 4 digits, Google will fill in the rest. It will find it somewhere. It is absolutely amazing. But yeah, just get good at prompting Google with the right question. You find new information, plug it back into the search.

The quality of your questions determines the quality of your outcome.

That works for computers.

I hope people realize how important, how lazy the two of you are, is. Most of us are out here working a job, saving a down payment, hunting for deals. You guys are using the seller financing strategy to eliminate that need to work a job for the years it takes to save up down payments. It's brilliant. It's very lazy. I love it.

We got a very generous gift from Aaron, but Aaron didn't have a question. Aaron, if you have a question, put that down below. We appreciate you.

Yeah, thank you for being here. And thank you for contributing to the channel.

I believe Aaron has 14 units, is, is I think no, 14 properties, 40 units or something like that. It's, it's, it's big numbers. It's more, more than what I have. And he's smart because he's continuing to learn, continuing to take in content like this.

Yeah. Well, good to have you here. If you have a question, drop it down below. We appreciate you and really appreciate the support that helps out. All right, we got a question from Anna.

Let's see.

How have you guys moved and executed at such a fast pace with seller finance deals? Are you doing cash out refinances or just continuing to finance down payments? The order of operations is deal, debt, equity. We have done a couple cash out refinances. We have tapped some of our equity, but we haven't brought our cash out refis above 64% LTV. I want to be clear, we keep an equity position. I would go to 65, but the banks seem happier at 64 and we get lower rates. So we consistently— so we keep it at 64. We don't borrow money just to borrow money, and we don't like to pull money out just to expand the portfolio because we're not willing to risk what we've built just to flex. Like, we don't need to buy more. We have enough. We are pulling money out to that 64% LTV to have liquidity, though. We don't borrow money just to go blow it on more deals. Will we buy more deals? Yes. Deal debt equity is a thing. We figure out the deal, then we figure out the debt, and then if we have to come with money down, we'll find it from somewhere. But we are making the push to hold half a million dollars in liquidity. Christian's gonna hold like probably $350,000 of that, and I'll probably have $150,000 because I have an extra little bit of obligations that he doesn't have.

Hooray, being older!

Ah, that's funny how that works.

Funny, 8 years of work and I get to hold a little bit more liquidity than Cody. Yeah, it turns out that figuring out the deal debt equity is all you need. Uh, the younger you find that out, uh, the more time you have to grow.

Well, 8 years for $150 grand, portrait, portrait. But I'm gonna say you're still doing okay. We are pulling money out to that leverage point until we have half a million joint liquidity that we don't blow on real estate. And after that, I don't think we're going to pull more money out unless we go agency debt. There's better debt products for commercial real estate than there is for small resi, not in the fact that you get your fixed rate forever. There's a little bit more work you have to do. It's not the lazy way, but 10-year fixed rate interest only, non-recourse debt, in my opinion, is a better debt product than a 30-year fixed rate recourse mortgage. And so we will do cash out on that. And if we lose it, we lose it. We're not going to lose it, but yeah, but we won't lose it. But if we did, it wouldn't tank everything else we built. So eventually we'll get there. Are we there yet? No, because we're doing our first push to half a million dollars in liquidity. And for perspective, I've never been able to hold more than like $30,000 in a bank account without re-rolling it into the real estate or paying off debt. So that's a big push.

Yeah, we will get there, but not today, but in just a few days.

Yeah, in a few days.

So it's, uh, very imminent. Um, let's see here. All Nighter joins the conversation. We've made it that far.

Yep, we can start now.

Yep, it is not a live without All Nighter. So All Nighter, we appreciate your consistent support to all of our channels. I see you in all of Dion's as well.

LeVar. He was actually in my live last night.

Oh, cool.

Oh, I— bummer, I missed it. I popped into the live just for a second and told people.

He doesn't come in until like the last half hour.

Oh, I missed it. I was there for like 10 minutes.

Fail.

Oh, bummer. Okay, one day I will meet all—

saw you guys in the chat, saw the Cody and Christian message. I appreciate that. But it was— yeah, it was a bit after that.

I missed him at Zuber's event too. That was before I really knew All Matter well. And I've missed 2 chances. Know what all-nighter looks like and I don't know yet. We will get there, but we appreciate your consistent support.

All right. Oops. So it is possible to cash flow where prices are high. I just need to be able to negotiate a good deal. Yes.

Absolutely.

Price, and I heard this at GrowthCon.

And I love this.

I know what you're going to say. And I repurposed it a little bit. But they talk about price being an objection. It's only an objection in the absence of value. And when it comes to real estate, they were talking about business, but when it comes to real estate, the value that negates the importance of price lies in the terms that you can negotiate. Because if you want more cash flow, borrow cheaper money. If you buy a positive cap rate deal, it's positive. I mean, it's possible to buy negative, but if you buy a positive deal, Your cost of capital just needs to be less than the cap rate expressed as a percentage. Your total cost of capital— if you're borrowing at 1% interest only on a 2% cap rate and you can get a 50-year loan, you're going to make a 1-point spread. Great deal, especially if you get it for zero down. Problem is, if you're only making a 1-point spread, you better be buying big enough where that 1 point is enough to weather the downturns, because stuff happens. So it just comes down to either optimizing the real estate or optimizing the debt. Those are your two categories and the only ways to increase your cash flow. When it comes to optimizing the real estate, you can increase income, decrease expenses, making it more efficient, or getting more income, more rental income, utility income, laundry facility, you name it. Or you can optimize debt, borrow cheaper money, or borrow less money. Those are your options. You can always write a bigger check.

And if you want to get into all the math behind the cost of debt versus the cap rate and all that, we put all that into our online course so it's easy to view there. So we don't have to bring up a whole spreadsheet on a live because that will lose all but probably 2 of our existing viewers. So yeah, you can always check that out there at themultifamilystrategy.com. But yeah, that's really all you have to do is keep it that simple. Terms over price. Price matters, but it's only one thing. Yeah, it's only one of many things. Uh, scrolling down here to our next question, uh, can y'all make a video on the buying from A to Z, including contracts and inspections and the in-between boring stuff?

How do you handle your contracts, Dion? Yes, we'll make a video, but do you write that up like a wholesaler, or do you have an agent? What do you do?

All of my deals have gone through agents and it's actually one of my goals is to make sure my agents are making money so that they're motivated to bring me deals in the future. So I have those auto searches set up. They actually reach out with a call sometimes or a text. Hey, of the 30 emails you got in the last 3 days, did you see this specific one? It actually meets everything you're looking for. I just want to make sure it's at the top of your— they're not doing that for their people that are trying to negotiate down their rate or cut them out of the deal.

So absolutely, that's huge. And Cody and I are— well, right now I let my broker's license expire, but for the last several years I've been a licensed broker, rarely ever broker a transaction. Cody is still a licensed broker, but when we're doing these transactions, we don't represent ourselves almost ever because I don't care about 3% on a deal. It is worth way more to pay an agent who just wants to work for you and find more deals.

And our real estate agent's going to make half a million this year, just working with us.

Cody signed 2 offers during this live when Dion was doing his, his, uh, 6 steps presentation. That was just enough time.

I signed another 2 offers for $1.6 million and yesterday signed one for $600,000. If I was trying to just get those commissions, I'm not going to have anybody bringing me those deals.

And Cody certainly isn't self-representing himself and writing a contract during our lives. That's the sort of stuff that you you get to do when you have a great broker who's working with you. As we've been discussing this, texting back and forth throughout the day, and now when the offer comes in, we just make sure, okay, is this what we discussed? Awesome. Click, click, click, done. 5 minutes of work. That is absolutely worth it. And if those 3% commissions make a material difference in your deal, it's not a good deal.

Nope, I love it. And so making an offer to me is usually one or two text messages and then hitting all the boxes in a DocuSign. It's not putting together any kind of contract or anything like that. Definitely want the agent doing that. That's what, that's what they're trained at. It's like I could replace all the shingles on my roof. I'm not going to. I'm not going to get up there and do that. I'm not going to learn the trade of being an agent to make my deals better. Or like you said, then it's not a good deal.

Yeah. And for us, I mean, our agent will make half a million. That is real money to make in a year. That's a lot of income. However, in perspective to what we're buying, if that made a difference in our deal, we'd be screwed because we have to buy a lot of real estate for him to earn that. So don't, don't let that be the driving factor. We got another chat from Aaron. Thank you, Aaron. I'd love to go to one of your Robinhood events. I didn't know they existed. I have a multifamily conference overlapping in Dallas. When would the next Robinhood event be after the one in March?

We're talking about late April. Usually we have these sorted out before here, but I spent a lot of effort on this particular March one. But we will likely have another one late April. I'm talking about possibly bringing Michael Zuber up for that one. We'll see if that pans out. Deanna, you have a thought?

Aaron, there is a Northwest Summit that Cody and Christian are the keynote speakers for this year. I don't know the date, but I think, Aaron, you emailed me. I will email you that date. So Millennial Mike, myself, Cody, and Christian, we're all going to be at that Northwest Summit. So if you wanted to be somewhere where we were all together and you could have a chance to talk, that's probably the place to go to.

Dion knows my schedule better than I do.

And Christian knows my schedule better than I do by a lot. So, fact, hashtag screwed.

Uh, but yeah, uh, for any of the Robin Hood events too, I don't think, uh, we have not done one yet without Dion. Dion is part of that. Well, Dion's such a huge part of the Robin Hood, like Robin Hood wouldn't happen without him. So we include him, uh, Millennial Mike. One of these days we're gonna get Matt the Lumberjack Landlord down here. I'm waiting for him to officially— I'm gonna see if he officially retires, and if he ever retires, then he's going to be a lot more free to travel.

I think it's 50/50 that he retires in 2023. 50/50.

Okay. We're going to see what happens if he pulls the trigger on that house in Vegas. I imagine that will expedite the process.

Yeah, I guess.

Do you recommend to self-manage for your first asset or bring in professional management? Absolutely self-manage. I believe everybody should self-manage until they get 10 rentals. Just to learn. You can choose what you do after that, but you should self-manage bare minimum your first 10. Yeah.

And Cody managed up to his first 30, but it was 3 properties.

Your first 10 rentals.

Oh, I see what you're saying.

Yeah.

Well, then we have our own property management company. We're still very, very active in. We pseudo self-manage all of our stuff still.

Yeah.

So if it's an, if it's an attempt to save time, you're either going to spend at least 2 hours managing your property or 2 hours managing your property manager. So if you have good systems in place, property manager is not going to save you a lot of time. There are two times where property management really makes sense. If you're going to invest at a distance, if you're Millennial Mike and you're investing in Gary, Indiana, but you live near Seattle, you— I would say you should have property management at a distance. You can self-manage at a distance, not something I would want to do. And the other time is know yourself, your bandwidth, your limitations. Can you have a conversation with somebody where you have to say, this is the lease, we're going to stick to it? Or when they call and they say, hey, my cat crossed the road and I need to pay the rent 3 weeks late this month, are you okay with that? If you don't have a backbone and you can't sit back and go, sure, with all the late fees, it's in the lease, go for it. I'm going to file eviction anyway. That will help you because it's going to give you the option to maybe qualify for some rent relief that being served an eviction notice helps you with. If you know you have the backbone to do that, self-manage. If you are a pushover and you have a big heart and you will cave on every request. Put a property manager between you and the tenants.

So Lumberjack said he's going to take that bet.

I said 50/50. I didn't say he's going to or he's not going to.

I was going to say, I don't know what side you follow. That is an even bet on either side of that.

I feel like you can't lose or win.

Yeah, we might. Well, since he's in the chat, Matt, you know the code to my Zoom room, so if you want to appear and weigh in on this bet, uh, we can make it official. I'll allow him in if Dion doesn't mind. You, uh—

oh, I don't mind. Matt's always welcome anywhere. Matt is like Millennial Mike. If I'm invited to something, they are invited to something.

That's fantastic.

6'3", 260, about to invade. Let's see. Oh, he's not in yet. Bummer.

We'll see if he shows up. I know there's a lag between real time and either—

whether he won't, those are the options.

We'll find out.

All right. What are you guys up to these days? Any new business ventures? Absolutely. Always. Right now I'm working on buying a mixed-use 30-unit from housing authority, 2-story walk-up apartments on top. With retail down below, working on buying 25 contiguous duplexes from the housing authority. And yeah, that's, that's my newest venture. And by I, I mean we, we are doing that together.

We are very excited for that one. That's going to be fun. That was one of the things we just spoke with Troy Kearns down in Las Vegas, and that was one of the things he recommended. He's like, at your guys' stage, what I would do is try new things. He's like, because you know how to buy multifamily and you're having fun. And almost everyone we've met with had the advice, stay in your own lane, you know what you're good at, don't diversify, just stay multifamily. The first time we're like, you know what, you're going to really enjoy a new challenge and a new adventure. You guys are young enough, I would experience as much as you can before you're 40. And for Cody, that's a really, really, really long time.

Let's go.

For me, I got 9 years.

So 17 years.

Um, but, uh, yeah, that's an adventure, just mixing in just a little bit of a different asset class to see how we like it. Um, I'm really excited, and that will be a really aesthetically cool building. We have a lot of single-story buildings built in the '50s. It'll be cool to go in front of a multi-story all-brick building and own a whole street corner in a city. That'll be a— that'll be a new thing.

DeAndre, when Cold calling owners to make connections. What should I say to avoid looking and sounding like a novice?

I think maybe the goal is to look like a novice. I think one of the brilliant points of you guys' strategy is contacting owners and saying, hey, can you show me how you did what you did? Like, I'm fascinated by what you've accomplished. What can I learn from you? Instead of, you guys, you have a nice looking portfolio. You ever think of offloading it? Like, that's an instant deal killer.

Absolutely. Those are very nice. I love that. What are your thoughts on the commercial market getting exposed in the next few years due to arms? Arms. Uh, well, so I was looking at CoStar News, and this is crazy. Similar to, uh, similar to the commercial space, hospitality, hotels, 79% of balloons that were 2 for hotels across the United States, $23 billion of real estate loans were not made, uh, they were not paid on time. I mean, they could not meet their balloon obligation and they got pushed into 2023. Another 11%, this pushes the total to 90% of total loans for hospitality in the U.S., got pushed to 2024. Meaning that 90% of all the hospitality loans, $23 billion and change, they could not refinance or pay it off or sell. They couldn't meet the nut. That's pretty scary for them. I'm excited. But, uh, yeah, that's definitely something that's going to expose a lot of bad operators that shrunk their numbers a little too tight. And the fact that 90%— like, I'd rather have 90% of people failing than 10%, because now the lenders have to work with the borrowers. They're not going to just take over $23 billion of hotels. 0% chance.

Yeah. If I'm, uh, if I'm a bank, the last thing I want to know or learn is how to run hospitality. I mean, that sounds awful. They don't have the systems for that. They don't want to take them. However, you're in hospitality like Cody and I are, we're at our resort. It's going to be interesting to see what that means for banks because they're not going to want to lend on these if no one ever pays them back by their balloon. So that is something to keep in mind. You may have a little harder time refinancing these moving forward.

All right. Hello from Spokane.

Candyland.

Hello, Josh.

Oh my gosh, I'm dyslexic. I heard that spooky land. Which, uh, Spokane, depending on what part of Spokane you're on, uh, might be, uh, Spookyland. Yeah, we manage it. We manage a property in Spookyland, Spokane. You know what I'm talking about. Not ours though, thank God.

Gross.

Thank God.

Doing it for a friend.

Oh, that's funny.

Hey, Zachary is 15, looking to get into real estate when you turn 18. You got 3 years. Okay. I was wondering what I should do throughout that 3-year period. Oh, sorry. Oh, Christian, change— stop. No, you press the wrong buttons. I'm just— you know, that was the wrong button.

We'll find out if he appears or not. You're all right.

All right. Well, I'll get to Zach later. He's got 3 years.

Gentlemen.

Well, hello.

With all this YouTube, it's a wonder we can get any real estate work done.

Well, I mean, we don't do it.

Yeah, we're just like, I'm not doing anything.

We have the brokers. We make sure the brokers get paid their fee.

Uh-huh.

It's 6'1", 260, Cody, not 6'3". Mike's 6'4". That's how I know.

It all looks the same for 5'8", Cody.

That's when it all looks the same when I'm sitting down. It's all good.

There we go.

Well, it's good to see you, Matt.

You too, Cody.

All right, we've got the squad now. We're just missing—

what's up? It's, it's been like 5 hours since it has been like together.

I feel like we, uh, and my, my brain says, okay, we're done recording the Three Amigos content, so now we're not recording and we could say whatever we want. So don't sue me if the wrong stuff falls out.

Yeah, exactly right. So true.

That's allowed. We're live. Anything can happen.

You know, it's fine. I have good media insurance. Go for it.

I am famous for oversharing.

It's true. It's true.

That's awesome.

So did you have a question for me?

We've got a question for everybody here.

Okay.

We got a 15-year-old, Zach, in the chat, and he wants to buy real estate at 18. He's curious what he should be doing right now for the next 3 years to set him up for his financial future.

Matt, we'll start with you.

Thanks for giving me the easy question. So what I would tell Zach is there is a ton of free content on YouTube and consume it. Look at people that have been successful doing what you want to do, which is Cody's been successful, Christian Osgood, Millennial Mike, Mike Zuber. We've all been successful buying real estate. Doing it a multitude of different ways, buying multitude of different types of assets. So I would say the most that I can encourage you is stay away from the types of videos where it's talking about something trendy. Stay focused on what's called green content, which is evergreen content, means it's going to be good forever. How to buy, what to look for, things to know, those loan programs that you should learn about, understanding what it takes to deal with the bank, understand how you do seller financing. All of these videos you'd find probably on those 5 channels. And then I would attend live streams as much as you can, listening to the questions that people are asking, because that's the best source of information, is listening to the live streams where people will be dealing with a certain issue. And it's just like anything, immersion is where you're going to win. So the more time you spend doing this and not doing something else, you're going to hit the ground running at 18. You'll probably have a deal that you can sign on your 18th birthday. If you take in enough content, learn some systems, learn the way to do this, you'll be eons past where most people will ever get in their life.

Thoughts, Dion?

There's two main books I think that you should listen to or read, whichever way you prefer to take in content. And they're both by Robert Kiyosaki. First one is Rich Dad Poor Dad. It'll kind of give you an idea of what money is. Most people don't know what money is. Learn the difference between good and bad debt. Credit card, student loan, car, anything that you finance that's going to lose value once you own it. That's the type of debt that will keep you poor and make it really hard to get into real estate. But good debt is the type of debt we're using to buy real estate where the tenants pay it off and we make more money than the debt costs. Then the second book is by Robert Kiyosaki called Cashflow Quadrant. When you start to get a job, you're 15, you might be like Matt and me. We were both working since we were like 10. And so, you know, that the government takes their taxes. Well, The Cashflow Quadrant is a book by Robert Kiyosaki that explains how taxes work and how the three of us, even though we can make hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in rental profit, don't pay rental income tax on most of that income. But if you work your job, which you might work a job to have the stability to qualify for loans, if you don't do what Cody and Caleb and Chuck did, which is own dozens of real estate units before they can buy a beer.

Right.

So it's totally possible that you can do that. But take in those two books, get the concept in your head that understand the difference between poor people, middle class, and wealthy isn't how much money they have or how much money they make. Poor people think the purpose of money is to buy things, so they work to buy things. The middle class think the purpose of money is leverage, so they want a good credit score so they could buy their big house and their big car and look like they're living a fancy life. Wealthy people— what you're learning from right now is people who understand the purpose of money is to make money. And the last thing I'll wrap up with: at 15, when you're 18, house hack immediately. Even if you don't buy a property, house hacking can be living with your parents when you move into a place, having roommates. You can have roommates while you're renting, reduce or eliminate that largest expense. And it makes getting into real estate and saving to get into real estate a lot easier than almost anything else that you can cut out of your budget.

And I'm going to add to that, it is a huge adrenaline rush to buy real estate. Like, it feels just like when you buy anything that's a non-asset. It feels even better when you buy a property. It feels awesome to roll up Like, we drive through, uh, Moses Lake, Washington a few years ago. It felt great to own one duplex there and be like, oh my gosh, that beautiful duplex is mine.

Now we're driving down the street, it's like, that one's mine, that one's mine, oh, that one and that one and all those.

And we painted them all the same so they match, so everyone else knows.

Yeah, it's a flex. Everybody knows it's ours.

Like, that's theirs.

What color?

Black and white.

It'll work till it doesn't.

Yeah.

So, so all of mine are Stone Harbor Gray.

There we go.

Yep. They're just like that duplex looks just like that one. Yeah, I own that one too. There's one at the beginning of the street. Yep, that one's mine too. So I own 4 buildings on the same street in downtown.

That's legit.

It's awesome.

I need to buy, buy stuff and it's really cool. And the stuff you buy is the stuff that buys your other stuff.

Exactly. You buy the asset that creates cash flow that lets you go buy a Lamborghini.

As an example, for me, it'll be a McLaren.

I'm ready for that. How far out is that, Cody?

Realistically?

Yes.

No.

Okay.

As soon as I buy the condo for my mom, the condo is going to be $130,000 down for closing costs. If I don't get them covered, it'll be about $150,000 down.

Okay.

And it'll cost about $8,000 a month and I can, I can cash flow that. So, so we'll be good. But when I can do $150,000 down, keep reserves in the bank of about another $100,000.

Okay.

Then I will buy the car and I think that'll be this year.

Okay. Well, then we need to find the right broker together and get a deal because we're buying two. Let's do it. That's how it goes. Volume purchase. And if it's a good enough deal, I'll even get a Porsche added in. Like, I'll buy another Porsche. They're fun.

We're all jumping in. I want an Aston Martin. Let's do it.

Dion, dude, when you get the Tesla Cybertruck, but I don't know if they're coming out soon enough.

Yeah, fun car.

I could see Dion whipping a Baja Bug.

I don't know.

I can't do I could just see it. That'd be so rad.

I look at the— I look at the Hummer, but everybody wants $75,000 premium. It's ridiculous.

That's just money. Money doesn't matter.

Yeah, I just— I'm allergic to overpaying for a depreciating asset that doesn't actually give me any cash flow. I'd probably afford it.

I'd probably—

I'd probably have—

I'd probably have an attack on the sales floor. Be like, I can't do it. I just, I just can't. I can't.

All right. Well, yeah, that'll be later this year, dude.

I love it. Is there a color?

There is.

So it's, um, so it's, uh, I think it's Soros Gray. It's like a blue gray.

Yeah, I know the color.

I want to get the 765, but but the 720S is a whopping half of the price.

Exactly.

And so I'll just get the 720.

Yeah, I'm battling—

These are all broken. You have the money. It's a quit looking at price tags. I'll get you there.

It's so true. He will. Yeah, it's true.

I have $12.5 million of debt I have to service.

Exactly. So what's a McLaren?

Exactly, it's a true story.

To me, a McLaren is a good drink.

Yeah, we'll get there, but not today.

But not today.

Dividend Dave says like the stream, everyone. If everyone likes the stream, we're gonna get a ton of likes. I appreciate that. Yeah, we work hard.

If more people like it, we have more likes. Now—

oh, I was wondering how that worked, and now it makes sense.

All right, let's see. Oh, we teleported. Cody, get with it. Only one without a beard. I'm trying. I focused first. I had this thing called alopecia, so I still have it right here, and I used to have it right here, so I couldn't do anything. And I've never tried to grow it out ever since.

I think you're about there though. It looks like it's fixed itself.

I mean, it's coming.

It grew back here. If I give it another month, maybe it'll work.

Let's see.

There we go. Follow the journey. You're gonna have to show up to every live and see how Cody's beard's growing.

However, if If you have watched some of our lives, you will have seen I lost 15 pounds. So I did do that. Now I just need to focus on the beard part.

Matt, how many, how many years does it take to grow a beard that long?

That is long.

This is, this is, uh, 18 months.

Wow.

I don't feel like I'd have that much beard in 18 months.

Yeah, it's, it's, uh, thank— thankfully it stays in this region right here.

Thankfully.

Yeah.

Yeah, thankfully. But yeah, that's like, that's like 18 months. Usually my kids make me shave it when I have— when we have a baby, they're usually like, eh, eh. And this, the last baby really liked it, so she was constantly yanking on it. I'm pretty sure that helped growth. And, uh, yeah, so I was really— she's my favorite child. I won't tell the other two, but she's my favorite child. She's the only one who didn't make me shave my beard.

All Nighter Hider said if I hold my breath really hard, a beer beard may appear.

It's true. Heider, I can tell with that 'stache, I can tell he's a professional hair grower.

I'm trying to find a question in the chat, but we have like a mile long of beard care.

Yeah, that's great.

The great follicle migration.

Well, we do have one question.

Yeah.

All of you guys been good with numbers or Or did real estate get you there?

Um, I know Cody's better at numbers than I am, but I, I mean, I've always aced statistics and math. Like I was way ahead in math. Math has always been easy for me.

Yeah. Relatable.

Dion, how about you?

I would, uh, up to 6th grade, math is important. That's, that's my thoughts on it. There you go. After 6th grade, that you learn a lot of things that you don't need.

Yeah. Did you pass Algebra 1? If you can get through Algebra 1, then you're, you're there. There's some basic, basic, like, yeah, addition, subtraction, and division. It's like, okay, can we figure out what a cap rate is? We have 3 inputs. You can do that, you're golden. Matt, how about you? I know your, your whole thing is you dropped out.

That's a math genius.

Dropped out. Yeah, dropped out in 9th grade, so I didn't take algebra or calculus or statistics or anything. It's all just—

you can still do all those things, right?

I got enough fingers and toes, so yeah. Yeah, figured it out.

About to count your units.

Yeah, that's true. Just to, just to figure out— actually, not at this point. I don't even have fingers and toes to count return on capital. So it's a good problem to have. I was just like, well, I passed, I passed the finger and toe test. It's a good deal.

There we go. Yeah, that sounds like a YouTube video.

The finger and toe test. Yeah, sounds like one for Millennial Mike.

Yeah, you go to Gary. Do I still have all my fingers and toes?

That's good.

Thanks. All right, one last question here.

Yeah, if anyone else has questions, this is the time to ask. We got the— I don't know what the 4 is. The Four Musketeers are all here.

So if you have another question, get it in Oh, now they all come in.

There we go.

You mentioned this property is on Zillow. Talk to the agent about seller financing and not go directly to the seller, right? Do you think the agent would be willing to negotiate seller financing?

Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's their job to sell the real estate, so I'm inclined to say yes. However, people on Zillow are not the best. Same with Redfin. The A in both of those stands for accuracy, and the C stands for competence. So they, they don't really have that with those groups. But you don't go to the seller directly.

Any time you're talking to an agent about seller financing, their first thought is this is somebody trying to save every penny possible and they're going to try to cut my commission out of the deal. So it's your job if you're approaching a listing agent about a deal to set them at ease and start the conversation with, it's my goal to get you paid. In that, I'm going to try to talk to seller financing. You'll actually have agents go to their seller and say it's illegal, you can't do it. They'll, they'll present it in the worst light possible to try to kill your deal if they don't think they're going to get paid. But if you can alleviate that with that agent, you can approach them with that. Every offer that I make right now has, and for the last, I think, year and a half, is a conventional loan offer. And then an email follow-up with my template of what a seller finance deal would look like to find those sellers that weren't thinking about it.

So I had to fire—

I had to fire an agent over it because she did such a bad job. I said, just give me access, just set something up. And I paid to put them in front of a CPA and I thought all CPAs were created equal and understood the tax benefits.

Wrong.

And then I fired the CPA too. I was like, you needed to tell me upfront what I said. I'm going to pay for an hour of your time to put somebody in front of you. You need to tell me then that you didn't understand that that note was something you could actually sell and was an asset, you dummy. Yeah, they got fired. Dummy in a nice way.

I don't usually say it in a nice way.

Jayden actually says here in the comments, I've heard from agents that subject to is illegal. And I know you guys don't do that, but how do you guys feel about that? I feel like that agent feels like somebody is trying to cut them out. Sure, they're uneducated, don't understand the system. So they're saying it's illegal because they don't think they'll get their commission. Why would they promote it? Making sure that that agent knows they're going to get paid can make subject-to seller financing. There can be an agent involved. There doesn't always have to be, but there can be.

Yeah. And we're not fans of subject-to, but it's absolutely legal. I mean, there's a lot of risks and we're not a fan of that.

Like, well, we'll pick our battles. That is not a battle we're willing to fight. So, uh, while it's not illegal, I also don't think it's very smart to build your business model off of it.

There are cleaner ways of doing things.

Absolutely. And simpler ways.

Yeah, for sure.

I like that there is no one right way to do this, but there is a right way for you. So whatever one you're comfortable with or they're comfortable with is what's going to Agreed.

Speaking of wrong ways, I see wholesaling has entered the chat. You want to buy real estate? That's not the way to do it. What are your thoughts on virtual wholesaling? Sounds like normal wholesaling. You can do it from anywhere.

Wholesaling is a job like flipping is a job. It's episodical. You stop working, the money stops coming in. So go ahead.

I was going to say any deal worth, worth wholesaling was a deal worth buying. Otherwise you're selling someone crap that you wouldn't be willing to buy yourself. That's my biggest problem with it. It's a great deal and you want to own real estate, you should buy it.

That is a short you should make right there from Christian. Any deal worth wholesaling is a deal you should own.

Yeah. One of the things that's interesting, though, is I found a couple of young wholesalers that were trying to get on the map. They thought they were going to do the deal. And I said, and this is completely wrong of me, but I said, what if I gave you $50,000 to just give me that deal? He's like, what? I said, yeah, I'm not looking to pay you $5,000. I'm looking to pay you $50,000. What if I gave you $50,000? He goes, you're gonna pay me $50,000 to assign this contract to you? I said, yes, I will. He said, well, I don't see how I can say no to that. I said, well, that was kind of my hope. And he took me up on it, did $50,000. That property appraised for $375,000 more than what I paid for it.

That is that kid's lunch, too.

I mean, at the end of the day, he named the price. I just told him I was going to give him 50 grand for finding the deal. I can't believe that he got that. And he— in that, I thought he got lucky. And then he came and brought me another one.. And I was like, I don't know what you're doing to get these people to agree to those numbers, but holy crap. Yes. Come on over. I told him, I said, this one's not a $50K special though. I said, this one I'll give you $20K on.

But he keeps on bringing deals, keeps on bringing me deals. Yeah, there's— well, like I was talking to one of our friends, they're looking at a deal in Washington. He's like, dude, you guys should look at doing this deal. And he buys in Texas. And he does not fit what he wants to buy, but he's like, this is a stellar deal. He's like, I think I can actually negotiate this. Like, this looks like what I would buy, but I have no ability to take this out. That makes sense to me to wholesale. So we knock wholesaling a lot. There's, there's certain times where it is a great deal, and I hate the word buy box, but this is an appropriate term. Like, you have criteria, you have your buy box, it does not fit it, but it is in fact a great deal. Yeah, I just wouldn't do that as a business model finding deals for other people. No, it is not nearly as cool as owning deals yourself.

Again, you stop finding deals and the wholesale market dries up a bit, and that's what happens. Like, I don't know about you guys, but I haven't seen a whole lot of good wholesale deals the last 6 months. Like, no, it's been pretty— they've been pretty garbage. You know, I was like, oh, when did you become a retail broker? Like what? It's like you're a wholesaler. I thought, yeah, that's a retail price. I don't know what you're talking about, you know?

Yeah, you lock it up at market value and you try to sell a little over market value, get a little bit of appreciation ARV in there and you can't get any returns on it either, you know, in that—

or you join Astro Flipping, do a daisy chain, find someone else's wholesale deal, then wholesale it to someone else.

Bunch of garbage.

We're deep enough into live now where no one's gonna be mad at you.

Yeah, no one's gonna watch this again.

It's fine.

We're just, we're just entertaining ourselves and the few people still watching.

It's perfect. All right. Uh, let's see here. What's the next question?

Um, let's see. Zach wants to know if the beard is necessary.

Yes. I haven't mastered that one yet.

You'll get it down. Took me until 29. And I still have a weak beard. Let's see, this is for everyone. When you first start in real estate, what was your why and how did you go about achieving your goals? That's a good question. I don't actually know your— I know some of it, but like, what was your actual, like, the why behind the financial freedom?

So I tried for a pension twice. I joined the Marine Corps, and one of the reasons was, you know, if you do 20 years, you get a pension. After Desert Storm, they downsized. So I tried law enforcement. In 2008, the recession hit, and everybody knows when a recession hits, there's no more crime, so we don't need cops anymore. So I got laid off. So 2 times a pension was pulled away due to things outside of my control. So my why was, I'm going to create my own pension. And the way I did it was creating at least a 10-year plan. So it wasn't overnight. I didn't want it to happen in 2 or 3 years. I think 10 years— if I could buy 1 rental every 2 years, in 10 years I'll have 5. That's enough of a pension for me. The income snowball kicked in around between 4 to 5 years in, and all of a sudden 5 rentals became 16 and the cash flow became a lot more than I was expecting it to be. So that wasn't part of the plan, but I'm not going to turn it down.

Awesome.

How about you, Matt? What was the why behind getting started?

I lost— so I started off, I was a 9th grade dropout, worked a bunch of different jobs through high school or what would've been my high school years, and then got a job in software at 19 as a telemarketer. Started working that job, got really good at it, and then everybody in software is in the market, and they were in the stock market. And so, I got in the stock market, and then I heard something called a hush number, and I never want to hear a hush number again. It was basically where they thought the stock was going to go to X, and then it didn't go to X, and the earnings weren't this, and then they found out that there was fraud. And my stock that I was in at $0.15 went to $0.19, and then it went to 6-week probation listing, and then it opened back up trading at $0.90. And I was like, wow, so that— yeah, that's not going to be a good long-term. And so I realized right then that the game was completely rigged. I wasn't on the inside. I wasn't having dinner parties in Manhattan. I wasn't in a hedge fund. I didn't graduate some Ivy League school where I got onto Wall Street. And so, I realized that I was on the outside looking in and I said, "You know what? I need something that moves slower that I can create value in and better understand than anyone else when it just comes to homework." And so, that's when it was like, "Oh, real estate. Yeah, this might be a thing." And I didn't understand it at the time, but my uncle was actually doing large multifamily sales in Dallas. Started Cushman Wakefield's large division, their large multifamily division. And that wasn't even anything that I understood or played in or any of the other sorts. But I just looked at it and said, "Wow, if I start investing in real estate, like I can buy this building and I can make $600 or $700 a month on this building, that's not half bad. One's not going to do it, but 10 might." And then as I built up, you know, money over the years, I chose to invest it there instead of a 401(k). I was able to negotiate with my employer and say, I want the 401(k) match, but I don't want to have to put the money in there and lock it in. And so we negotiated. I said a bunch of magic words that make people's heads break, like, that, that employee has an advantage over me because he's getting 3.5% that I'm not getting. They, they responded, and I got my 3.5 points without having to put any money in. And I just kept on taking money. And for me, it was save, save, save, buy, save, save, save, buy, save, save, save, buy. So I did 9 house hacks in 13 years, lived in them, rehabbed them. I was committed. And that's how I basically— that's how I did my first 10 deals.

They were all house hacks. Love that.

Yeah. For me, I just want to retire my wife because the school districts here got crazy. Because, yeah, much like police officers, apparently you don't need common sense Um, and I started segregating kids by color and all— No, come on, because that's a great idea for the school district. Oh my God, with sarcasm there in case that was not clear.

Okay, terrible.

Yeah, they went like, you know how we fight racism? Let's put everyone in rooms where everyone looks like them. That will, that will help.

The thought was it'd make people feel more comfortable. My thought is that that's just another form of racism.

I was like, and we are back to the 50s.

Um, yeah, yeah, screw Seattle.

Yeah, King County sucks. Yeah, invest in water fountains because apparently every school is getting separated. Uh, no, the, um, that was, that was, got politically weird here. And so I was like, okay, well, let's, let's get you into like doing anything else that is sane and normal and enjoyable. And so that was my big driver to move from like, hey, I want to be in real estate, to I'm all in and I'm going for this.

And we were at a point where as soon as that stuff started happening, we got to retire his wife, which was really cool.

Yeah, that took us, uh, from the time I committed— so I had, I had one duplex when we got into that whole mess, and when I committed to retiring my wife, 11 months later, Cody and I were at 100 apartments. I think it was about the time we hit 81 together is where we're able to retire her, but we did that in 11 months.

That's awesome. Edmund asked if we've ever had a PM company steal rents pockets money. Absolutely. Yes, that has happened. All right. My property manager. No. Yes. Yes, you can.

All right. If you could, we probably need to keep you without a beard just to prove to everyone that you don't need one to invest.

I don't know.

Beth Traverso has that covered. Unlike everyone else on this call, I don't actually have a jawline without the beard. So this is just here to let you imagine that I have one.

It's the push-up bra for men.

It is. It is. I need, I need the push-up because I'm rocking an A-cup of a jawline.

If I got a push-up bra, that'd make it better. All right, let's see.

That's a lot of text and I don't know if there's a lot of questions. Um, I see a question mark in this one. Does someone read it from Andy? How do you balance having a long-term plan but still managing rapid growth like Cody and Christian have? Oh, that's a great question. Because I want long-term stability, but I also don't want to wait forever. It doesn't take forever. So I'll answer really quick for us and then I want you guys to input. We divided everything into 4 segments. First, you identify your goal before you get into the 4 segments. What is your goal? What's the reason behind it? What is your timeline to hit that? You have a build, a build phase, a stabilization phase. An optimized phase, and a debt payoff phase. The size of your goal depends, uh, determines how fast you have to go. And so for us, it's like, I want to retire my life and I want to do it now. Like, I'm doing it this year. So that one required ridiculous action, and I had the right business partner to pull that off. And so that was really, really— uh, that was, um, I was gonna come up with an unrelated name, but I realized I can't name drop, so Um, you are the only partner. Yeah, I found the best buyer of real estate that I know. We partnered and we put it together. That was really hard. If your goal is not, I have 11 months to, uh, be financially free, which is not most people, um, you don't need to go that fast. But set that goal, stabilize all those assets, optimize what you have, whether that's adding laundry machines, maybe building on some of the land you picked up, but whatever that is, optimize what you you have. And then what we do is just pay that all off. We're still levering up to buy new things, but take that block, quarantine it into a little block, and say, hey, we're gonna use all our cash flow and pay this off, because then I'm going to own my freedom. So there's how do you own it, and there's how do you own it. And that is you pay it off, you manage it better than anyone else, and away you go. We're not there yet. Yeah, and we're getting close to managing better, but right now we have the best buyer real estate, and with Matt we have the best manager of real estate that I've ever met.

And we have— with Dion, we have the best lazy way to get there.

So with Dion, we have the best organization of how few hours can you work for absolute excellence. And that is, uh, I know for a fact none of us work less than 2 hours on our, uh, real estate. There's no way Matt spends less than 2 hours.

I know for a fact Dion has more feet pics on his Facebook up in a hammock somewhere than any of us.

That's my only homes account. So for me, the way to grow and have stable, you know, be stable and grow is I figured the next 10 years when I started investing were going to happen whether I invested or not. So I wasn't in a hurry. Right. You don't want to do anything that's going to make it take longer. But looking at it on that, that, that long horizon, Don't look at what's going to happen in 6 months. I have to have a big change. My first 2 years, I did one deal. I bought one duplex in 2 years. 2 years later, I bought one more. So in the beginning, I was thinking very, very slow. Every 2 years it got a little faster and bigger deals with a triplex and a fourplex. But plan on those 10 years happening and do the things that are going to make in 10 years your life much better, better than it is now. You'll figure out the speed at which you're going to move based on a few things: your skills, your assets, and the deals you find. If you don't find good deals, you can't force them to happen faster.

Yeah, I think it's less about speed and it's more about accuracy, you know, great deals. I think the easiest, most stable way to do it is house hacking. It's by far the easiest way to do it. You know, you sacrifice living in a single-family home and living in an apartment. Really, you were in an apartment for, I'm sure, your early 20s anyway. So you do it now, you're in an apartment, but you can do a duplex and you spend a year there. And so for us, it was like I could refi that debt. You know, rates are usually pretty flat, but I could get some equity out of it and then I could really see what the market was for rents. And so we were kind of up all those activities month 10. And that's what was so powerful for us as I was doing it month 10, where I was like, okay, I'm going to refi this thing basically like 3 days after the 1-year anniversary. And then I've got fixed rate, 30-year debt, and now I can move on to my next one and I can buy my next deal. Because I usually, in many cases, I was able to do some sort of a cash-out refi plus all the money that I saved. And I did it in 3s and tries and duplexes. And yeah, that's, that's the easiest and fastest way to do it with very little risk. Because if you ever hit a massive speed bump, guess what? You still have a place to live. And you're usually living for a few hundred bucks a month. I mean, most of the duplexes that I bought, you know, and that I hacked in the last 15 years, I bought some of them for $150 grand and they're worth $500 grand. Or $550 grand, and I'm getting more rent on one side than I was getting on both sides combined 15 years ago.

So surprised you didn't use the shooter's mantra. Which is that slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

Oh yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah. Slow is smooth and smooth is fast. I am slow. Sometimes I'm smooth and sometimes that makes me fast.

All right, let's see. How do you cushion yourself when purchasing a property for repairs or things that need to be done to it that come up unexpectedly? Cash flow and reserves. I mean, that's really it. If I had to pick one or the other, I would pick high cash flow over high reserves, because if I know I have enough money coming in every month, I can't blow through it. If I just have a, a certain egg, like a nest egg, I could blow through that. So I'm always going to opt for high cash flow. Yeah. In the beginning, the problem is you have no cash flow. The only cash flow you have is from your job, and that is cash flow. That is money coming in every month. It flows in. You just have to work for it, which is the problem. So in the beginning, I had no reserves and I had no cash flow, meaning I had to do excellent math and hope nothing too unexpected popped up. But there was an element of high risk in that situation because if something unexpected popped up that was massive and insurance didn't cover it, I would be out. So you have to get into enough deals in the beginning that won't completely tank you until you have the cash flow and you have the reserves to where you can afford to do deals that could have tanked you in the beginning.

Yeah. In the beginning, most of the time what you're doing is you're spending, you're spending, you're spending your reserves on keeping yourself afloat very often with the repair. And then as you get deeper in your journey, you start doing everything out of cash flow because you get so much cash flow. And it's, it's for us now with 137 units, I still only have $50,000 sitting there. I don't need any more than that sitting there because it's dead money. So I don't need to tap into that 50 grand. But that was Mount Everest for me the first 5 years that I was doing this. But now it's to the point where anything comes up, you know, we had a $13,000 roof that was a little bit of a surprise because it was just something structurally wrong with it and structurally deployed improperly. That was $12,000, $13,000, I think. And it was a non-factor. It was— you write a check for it because you got it in cash flow. I didn't, you know, you know, you don't tap reserves. So reserves are there when I have to pay a $15,000 insurance claim, you know, that's, that's in the— that's hasn't hit my deductible yet. And I have that happen to 3 or 4 buildings. Okay, cool. I can write that check. Not a big deal.

That's what emergencies are for. My reserves scaled on 2 different metrics. The first one was the size of the portfolio. When I had 7 or less units, I kept around $10,000 in reserves. And just like Matt, try to only use that when the cash flow is not covering the thing. And in the beginning that did happen more often. When I got above 7 units, I figured more than one thing could happen at the same time. So $10,000 wasn't enough and I increased it to about $30,000. So $30,000 was the reserves. And when I stopped working, when I stopped having the consistent W-2 paycheck coming in, I increased it to $50,000. So like Matt, I have $50,000 sitting in an account that I haven't touched. Cash flow has handled every issue that's popped up in the last 5 years. But I call it a swan account. You sleep well at night because that money's sitting there in case something happens. Lenders will also look at something if you're looking for reserves and a stock portfolio or a retirement account, they'll often look at 50% of the value of that as a reserve when you go to qualify for a loan. But I don't like using that as a reserve. I've only done that once where I actually— that's going to be my reserve for that because I was closing on a deal that took everything. I dropped down to like $200 in my account to my name to buy that one property. But I had a retirement account, I had credit cards that weren't used. So that's how you cushion against those things and you expect those expenses to come up in the beginning. You have an inspection report that basically becomes a to-do list over the next couple of years with each property. But there can be unexpected and that's where reserves are going to come in. And when you buy a deal, even if you have cash flow from other properties that can handle mistakes, when I buy a property, I still, you know, I have 16 units, not 137. I still factor in a percentage of gross rents to handle issues on the cash flow of that property so that my yield is based on that property has to pay for its own mistakes or problems in the future. Yeah.

Yeah. And one of the things that does happen, and this happened to us on the resort, actually, we had a large capital expense the first 2 weeks we owned the resort. And so sometimes you buy it and you're like, okay, well, I'll do I can do this out of cash flow. And then you find out, surprise, big bill immediately. That happens, especially if you buy enough real estate.

Yeah.

It's like the law of buying a big asset. It's like something's going to fail immediately just because it traded. It's like, I don't like new owners. Yeah. Matt knows what I'm talking about.

Yeah. 3 days after I bought one of my properties, the boiler for 4 units went.

Yep.

And we had it inspected.

Yep, we had a 38 where the septic lasted like 4 days and then poo started coming up through bathtubs, 4 or 5 units. Um, not what you want, not the call you want, and it's always Friday night late. Yes, it's like, oh, of course no one's available. Um, but when you have these things come up, what we've been able to do almost every single time is you call a service company and they quote you and you're like, wow, that's more than I have in reserves. Then I usually just go, look, I'm a new business owner, I just bought this, and if we can divide this into 3 or 4 payments, that would save my bacon. And every single time I've done that, I've gotten on the phone with the owner of the business and they go, oh my gosh, I remember a time when I needed this and they've helped me out. It's happened 4 times where I'm like, I can afford this, but it would— this would really suck if we can do something this one time. This would help me out and I'll keep using you guys. And it's a way that you can just use your cash flow.

Yes.

You can't afford it outta cash flow. Figure out how you would make it work in cash flow, divide it by that, and away you go. Put that on a septic twice, on a furnace once. Yeah, I won't say which buildings, just so the cities don't get suspicious. They don't need to know. They don't need to know which septic, but they've been handled.

Nice. All right, Ari Istoner said you gotta have your boats and hoes. Nice. All right, best way to start investing right out of college?

Buy a property.

Uh, house hack. Yeah, house hack. You got one year left, that starts stacking your 3.5%. It's going to depend on like how much that is, can depend on where you live. If you live in Missouri, you might need like $2. If you live here, you might need more than that. So figure out where you're at, what's the average cost of what you would buy— duplex, triplex, fourplex— and then multiply that by 0.05. While you could do 3.5% down, you're going to have closing costs unless you get them covered. So I would add an extra 0.5% to that. And if you can get your closing costs covered, boom, you have a little bit of extra reserves, and that's a better place to be. Don't save the bare minimum of just 3%.

Yeah, yeah. I helped somebody— I helped somebody buy their fourplex with $8,000. Geez, that they live there, they live there for free. They make between $800 and $1,000 a month and they live there for nothing. I want one of those.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

All right, we got a good one here. Cody and Christian, how much cash flow have you paid yourself so far this year? $0. However, we've sidelined almost enough to to pay off, uh, I think it's gonna be this month we're paying off $80,000 of debt. That's just like some of the little debts we have here and there. Um, we don't pay ourselves until one of the two of us runs out of money. And so sometimes I'll get a text from Cody saying, I will not make my rent, we must pay ourselves.

I'm like, okay, that's next month.

And that's next month. Uh, however, this month we're gonna pay off a bunch of debt. Every time we pay off debt, magically cash flow goes up. It just keeps happening. I don't know why, but it turns out when you owe less you get to, uh, save more. So we usually opt to pay things down or improve our assets. Everything right now is about building the boat. So I would rather pay off some of our 12% debt or refinance it into 6% debt, which is what we're doing.

And it's really just important to stay disciplined even when the numbers get bigger. By, by end of Q1, we will have had multiple six figures of net cash flow from our orgs and our real estate just for this year, we will have paid ourselves probably $10,000 each out of that. Multiple six figures, we only pay ourselves $10,000 because $8,000 of it's going to go to the pheasant counters in the kitchen and we're going to be able to release that for an extra $500 a month. Then $80,000 goes to debt paydown. Just because you have the money doesn't mean you go buy the Lambo right now. You have to build a stable base. We would rather take $30,000 put it into 3 apartments. When people leave, get the rent from the $900 it was at to the $1,400 it should be, and now have an extra $1,500 a month in income. Low 30 to make $18 grand a year.

That works. Yeah. That being said, it is very fun for— like, this year Cody and I are probably going to be headed to Mexico with some of our team, and we'll get to stay in a ridiculous hotel for $1,000 a night., and we'll get to take a little bit of cash flow and do that. And so it is fun to enjoy the money. Like if you just work and that's all you do is you buy assets to buy assets to buy assets, that's not like a fantastic goal. But we do that most of the year so that when we get to have fun, it's like, you know what, it doesn't matter. We can, we can go down with 5 people at $1,000 a night a person. We can enjoy, enjoy a week in Mexico and it, we won't feel it because we spent the money building that cash flow. Sure. So I liked that question though. I, because we haven't paid ourselves yet this year and we won't for about another probably 30 days.

I've actually never taken a dime out of my real estate. Really?

Yeah. Never a penny.

Don't have a job, though. I know. This is the only reason I kept the job. But it was every single dime I made. It went right back. It rolled, it rolled and it rolled and it rolled and it rolled. And now I've got, you know, 130+ units and it's all in preparation to be able to then not have a job, then do nothing but take money, because then everything is acquired, stabilized, optimized, and then it's just a matter of how much do I want to spend that month.

Much. I'm going to be very interested to follow your channel, and everyone's still watching, if you haven't yet— I assume most of you have— but follow Matt, Lumberjack Landlord, and Dion. Well, everyone always follows on. It's true. You know, I'm still the biggest channel.

All our people—

not anymore, you guys passed me. I think we might pass you by the end of the week, but you're still ahead of us by like 50 people.

Yeah, my whole goal is to help you guys grow your channel so that I can benefit from the fame that you guys get.

Yeah, like me more than all of you with my shitty 5,000-person channel.

Suck it. You may make more 12 months.

Okay. It's all about net, bro. It's all about—

it's all about net. When we unleash Matt, Matt's never actually like— your job, you put in what, 50, 60 hours a week?

Yeah, it's more managed now. It's, it's— I'm, I'm quiet quitting. It's probably like 40 or 50, but I'm an executive, so it's, you know, it's probably 40. Legit. Okay.

Legit. It's 40. Yeah. So when you have 40 more hours with your skill set to play real estate, it's going to be kind of just freaky.

And watch what you do. We have to get a head start if we want to. It's going to be that working on getting to 300 rentals this year. Yeah, we can start catching up to your cash flow.

We're just more units and more debt. It's— I don't know when I retire if it's going to go a hard left to Lazyville like Dion, and I might even pick up playing World of Warcraft and being part of the Horde. I don't know, crazier things have happened. Or it's going to go hard right, and, you know, I'll be, I'll be seller financing deals with Donald, you know.

So who knows?

It's going to be interesting to see. I've never— the thing that I'm retiring to is being a dad. That's, you know, I've been— I'm very lucky. I'm around my kids all the time. I have breakfast with them every morning, and I have lunch with them every afternoon, and I have dinner with them every night. And that wasn't the way that it was for a lot of years. Um, for— that's why I waited to have kids. Um, but for me, that's the thing that I enjoy the most. I'm around my 5-year-old, my 3-year-old, my 1-year-old. I'm around them all the time. And so that's the thing that I have a lot of fun with. You know, Dion likes to send me the Pink Panther. But, but yeah, he's exactly right. And so that's what I'm really excited about doing is being a dad. And, you know, it's been—

it's—

I don't know what I'm going to do truly. Like, it's like I can be a dad, but even that, it's kind of like you still love to win deals. So you're like, like you said, and the nice thing for us, I think you guys have the same thing. Where it's like when one of our students gets a deal, like, oh, look at those numbers! Oh, they're just gaudy, they're awesome! And I just get so— I get so pumped out of that. And it's like, and I didn't even have to do anything. It was like they did all the work. So yeah, that's— it's— that's a really fun part. I get, I get super pumped when my students buy something.

Love it.

Andy asked how we afford to live if we're not paying ourselves out of cash. Credit card?

No, I'm No, but some of our companies have moved on those. Uh, we can do a whole course on zero interest credit cards.

Yeah, we've got like 400 grand at 0% lines of credit. There is—

there are rules on that. You need to have real estate that cash flows that back, and you do not touch that. So if you have— if you have a year of zero interest, you are allowed to load it up, but you have to know your numbers, and the properties have to pay that off so you never pay a dime of interest. That takes discipline. That is not for everyone. We don't talk about strategy often because not everyone can have the power to use thousands of dollars of credit cards and not screw that up.

So I don't recommend that.

No, that's a hard strategy. But if you're disciplined like we are, we'll borrow $400 grand at 0% because we know we can cash flow it before the 12 months is due.

Yeah, but realistically, how do we afford to live? When we run out of money, we pay ourselves.

Yeah.

And that's That's what we do. And we've had a few major refinances where it's not like a cash flow payment, but it's like, oh, excellent, this is a $50,000 each lump sum, uh, that will float us. Uh, we live low cost of living. Well, it's going up, but I mean, it's still— if I live at like maybe $6,000 a month, which might be high for other people, for me, $6,000 is pretty inexpensive.

And, um, $50,000 floats you a lot of months. And with some of the business that I had to take on from a past partnership, I live on about 6 or 7 grand a month now. So my cost of living is higher than Christian's somehow. That's amazing. It is. Well, it turns out I have more debt than you. No, that is on a personal level.

That happens.

But yeah, that's, that's how we do it. Matt has a job beyond—

Yeah, you live on cash flow now. I do. So I didn't live on any money from my W-2 since 2018. Oh, right. So in 2018, a lot of people talk about, I want, I want to save 10 or 15% of my income for retirement. My goal was to save 100%. If you can't save 100% from your W-2 job, you are trapped and have to work.

Yeah.

If you don't have to touch any money coming in from your W-2. So I switched it. The rental income was the goal to live on. The W-2 was, I don't want to need this. So since 2018, I haven't had to touch anything from work. Um, July of last year, so July 5th last year, I retired. Uh, $17,000 a month comes in every month whether I get out of bed or not. Um, and, and then I do have kind of some side hustles. I make a little money as an expert witness, uh, and that's, I don't know, $10,000 to $15,000 a year, uh, maybe in 10 hours of work in a year. Uh, so that kind of helps. But I've, I don't think a month has gone by yet, even on the months where I've taken cruises or traveled where I don't save 10 grand. Like, 10 grand adds up every month to the next purchase. Trying to spend money—

like, my goal is to spend money, and I'm trying to figure out how to do that. If you want to lend it to—

I know a 23-year-old. My living expenses— my living expenses are obnoxious, so I'm not going to say. But they got— I mean, I house hacked until I was 40.

So you paid the price for that.

I did. I did. Yeah. Now, now it's obnoxious.

Yeah. Now it's like Dave Ramsey. You know, you did pull a Dave Ramsey. Oh, oh, yeah.

No, I'm not.

I didn't go bankrupt first. Oh, yeah.

So you missed a step. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

A step that I do not want to take. Start by 90-day loans. It was close. It was close in '07 and '08. It was bad. It was—

I mean, I went from 8 paying tenants to 3 paying tenants to 1 paying tenant.

Oh, that's really bad.

Yeah.

And that was— what's that?

Everybody's still in.

You paid your debt? Yeah. Well, you trust me on this. I know all about zero credit card, 0% credit card debt. I levered those things as soon as I saw the economy cracking. I levered all of them and I quickly created $100,000 that I could manage off of. Make mortgage payments, make repairs, do evictions, you name it.

We had to get creative. One of the things I learned from watching people like the Lumberjack Landlord or Michael Zuber from One Rental at a Time is that you don't want all of your tenants coming from one source. And in 2008, Matt had mostly construction tenants because construction was booming. And then when the, when the crash hit, he had no rents coming in. So one of the things I've done is I have about one-third military, one-third Section 8, one-third working or retired. So a pandemic, government shutdown, stock market crash doesn't hit my entire portfolio. And in the last 2 years, Matt's shifted to actually adding Section 8 to his portfolio so that he's a little more diversified in tenant base too.

Mm-hmm.

Dion, when, when you were building that income stream, were you paying yourself out of your rentals? Were you living on the W-2 job when you were in the build phase of your business?

No, the build phase, I, I was living minimally off of W-2 income, right? So everything extra from W-2, side hustle, and real estate was rolled into saving the down payment. It wasn't until 2018 where I was saving 100% of W-2 income and about 65% of rental income. So 45% of rental income is what I was living on for the next 4 years. So from '18 to '22, I wasn't touching any of the W-2 and I was only using a small amount of the rental income because I was still rolling it. I bought in 2020, at the beginning of 2020, I bought my biggest purchase was a fourplex. I was $141,000 down, down payment, closing costs, put a roof on it, some other, you know, immediate repairs. That was total cost. End of 2020, I purchased a triplex, another one of my largest ones. It was like $525,000 for the purchase.. And then in 2021, I bought a duplex. So I was still, even during the pandemic and the eviction moratorium, I was rolling everything into that so that in July of 2022 and throughout 2022, I felt kind of stupid going to work because the cash flow coming in from rentals was more than 4 times what it cost me to live my life. And I'm working like what? I put a clone nose on every day and go to work because I didn't need to be there. And that's why I finally One of the reasons why I finally— I actually quit a job I loved. I loved working. It was a great job, but time freedom is way more important than even a job that we love.

Awesome. Well, we're going to wrap it up on that. We got a lot of stuff to do, but thanks for sticking it out with us for 2 hours.

This is awesome. Yeah, we've had a couple of bonus Matt appearances on here.

I appreciate you being around. Happy to do it. 7:30 Eastern time always seems to work. It's right after I finish putting my kid to bed.

My kids to bed.

So excellent.

And Dion, thank you so much for hosting with us today. Always a privilege to have you on the channel. And of everyone in our network, you are the one person who we would not be where we're at online at Robinhood. You contributed more to us than just about anyone.

So we really appreciate you. Now, I'm happy to be here. I'm super excited to watch what you guys are doing. I think the group of us and Millennial Mike and Zuber and Beth, we are helping a lot of people. Get past all the fear porn on internet where everything's going to crash, end of the world, housing market's going to crash and we're all going to lose everything. There's so much of that getting so many views. If we can find people out here that are actually doing the work, actually creating financial freedom, willing to share the information, whatever we can do as a group to get to more people, I'm all for it.

Awesome. Absolutely. All right, well, everyone, thank you for watching all the way through. I see a few of the names have been in here the time. So thank you for a long live, and we will see you guys all next week at 3 PM Pacific for our next, uh, Multifamily Live.

Cool. Thanks, guys.

Nice. Anytime. Happy to do it. We don't have a button to end our lives though.

We're stuck here forever.

Get some more whiskey. I'm out. I'm gonna just hit the, the X on the studio and I think it'll kill the video. So we'll go there. I think I killed it.

If not, sorry YouTube. Let me see.

I don't know. How are we?

All right, awesome.

Thanks guys.

Well, see you later. See you soon. Yeah, we'll see