Going From DEBT to FINANCIAL FREEDOM

Hello and welcome back to the Owner Meeting Podcast. I'm Christian, your channel host, joined by Dion. Dion, what country are you in today?

Howdy. Today I am still in Thailand. I've been here for 3 months, uh, again, a couple weeks, and I came in November, and I'm heading to Las Vegas for the One Rental at a Time event on the 14th and 15th of February.

So, oh, we'll be back in the US.

I will see them there.

Oh, there we go. Well, it sounds like you're having a pretty good time in Thailand. I remember a, a long time ago you were like, I don't know about, uh, I don't know about getting married. That seems like bad idea. Uh, since you've been in Thailand, I feel like you've had some developments over there, if I, if I recall correctly.

To be transparent, yes, we got engaged. I proposed. I'm not supposed to say the date that we set, but I'll text it to you later.

Okay, well, congratulations. I know I, uh, the Instagrams may have indicated there was a tiger involved in this event.

Yes, uh, it was Chesla's first time to Thailand, so we did the whole, you know, swim and walk with the elephants and play with the tigers, and I I figured she was distracted enough by the giant cat knocking bowling balls around the cage that she probably wouldn't think it through and she'd actually said yes.

So, is that a financial freedom thing? Is it like, "Okay, now that we have a few rentals and we've locked down, we've seasoned the portfolio, we can now just hang out with tigers and get married and live in another country?" There was 8 years without a vacation to reach financial freedom.

It took a decade, right? But for the first 8 years, I didn't take any time off of work. I sold back every vacation hour that I earned. I worked overtime. I worked a side hustle. And then I didn't think I was going to retire. I remember several years saying, I don't think I'll ever retire early. I don't even know if I'll retire late because I loved my job. To the point where those years without a vacation, I didn't really notice or care. Everyone around me did. Apparently, I'm not myself when I'm vacation hungry, but I reached financial freedom in 2018 and kept working for 4 more years because I love my job. And then one day I did a whiteboard video on my YouTube channel and it dawned on me how stupid it was to be going to work when I had that much money coming in without having to work. And retired in 2022. And one of my goals right now, it's not a hard goal, it's just something I enjoy, is I want to travel more than I spend time at home. So I went 8 years from no vacation to 7 or 8 months a year is my goal to not be home. So 3 months in Thailand now, uh, we're, uh, looking at Mallorca later this year, uh, we talked Scotland, and we might take a trip to Texas. If I do that, I'm definitely coming to swing by and make some content and hang out with you. I got a niece and nephew that live in Texas.

Oh, there we go. I have a room for you all down here. I have a fantastic guest room. You are more than invited to stay when you're in Dallas.

Awesome.

Well, okay, this is actually— so I recently had a friend, Brian Lubin, on the podcast. And Brian, his entire decision was, "Hey, I'm going to leave the 9 to 5 early. I'm going to go travel the world while I'm young." And he's super happy with that decision and his business seems to be doing really well. But he started, he started young and rolled the dice of like, hey, I'm going to go just dive straight into the entrepreneur thing. Hopefully it works because I'm doing it while traveling. You did the responsible adult thing that a lot of us are told should work. You worked your butt off and made good investing decisions. Looking back, would you have done it differently? Because there's— I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer. There's a right answer for you. But if you were looking at younger Dion, would you have done a similar thing to the way that you set up your finances with the 8 years of sacrifice for the now you can go to Thailand and ride tigers and propose?

So, there's a one-sentence answer. Let me start with I tried to make a pension twice. I tried the Marine Corps. They downsized after Desert Storm. I tried law enforcement. It got downsized after 2008. So, my pensions, kept getting taken away due to things outside of my control. I wasn't thinking about money. I was thinking pensions. But at 40, a single parent laid off from law enforcement, I found out about $89,000 in bad debt in my name I didn't know existed until the divorce. And I started teaching at a CDL school making $17 an hour. So if I talk to anybody, most people would think, well, I wish I had started sooner, wish I'd started investing instead of working for pensions. But here's the one-sentence answer. The outcome is too great to risk the butterfly effect changing anything. So if you talk to an older person and they say, here's all the things I would do different, their outcome's not that great. I retired at 52, and, uh, yeah, I would have, you know, liked more healthy years of travel, but in traveling, I'm seeing all of these 70-plus-year-old people figuring out how to travel, who can't do excursions, who can't kayak, who can't paddleboard, who can't scuba dive, who can't walk down the ramp on a cruise or take the tender from the ship to the shore. And so I'm glad I've got decades of enjoyment travel before I'm too old to enjoy it with money not being a factor. So it's not that I would go back and change anything. I think the right question is, if I had to start today, scorched earth, something happened, I lost everything. How would I do it? I would do it exactly how I did it from 40 to 50, not from birth to 40. And that would be—

I like that.

I know this is multifamily and big portfolio and super success stuff, but that's not me.

I'm not on the Underwriting Podcast. This is just people who've done cool stuff that other people want to do and how to do it. You're in good company here. The—

what? I definitely have respect for the amount of success of some of the people I've seen on the podcast. Absolutely. Coach Carson, the small and mighty investor, I think is the one that most aligns with what I've done. And it's— I wanted the right amount of cash flow from the least amount of units. And so for the math nerds out there, I'll break down the portfolio really quick. I only have 8 properties. It's 18 rental units because it's, you know, duplexes, a triplex and a fourplex. I'm still house hacking, so I live for free. But the gross rents, gross rents on, on 17 rented out units is about 30, 30, 30, 800, 38,000 a month. I have about 10,000 in mortgages. I set aside $5,700 a month for expenses, and that's about 68,000 a year. And I've never come close to that. And that leaves me with about 22,000 a month. To live on. I spend 4. So even when I'm traveling here and I'm at a private resort this month, I'll probably spend 5 or 6 because we're doing an excursion every day. Oh no, we're not doing the Thailand experience of the— this is a really affordable country. We're doing the American version of bringing America with you where you have a private villa, a private pool. It's a Michelin star restaurant here. Oh, so no, it doesn't have to cost that much here.

But I'm doing that again on every trip.

Going to have to come here.

I will. I will. I'll be my next, my next goal. Thailand's actually way up on the list. I have never made it off of this side of the ocean, so I have to go make it to all sorts of other places.

Well, it's phenomenal. I highly recommend it. There are some— it's a huge country. It's not like a state in the US. I mean, you can come here and we went to the mountains up in Chiang Mai where the elephants and tigers are. We went to Phuket where it's beaches. We went to Bangkok where it's like, it's 11 million people. So it's like LA but condensed. We went to beach towns like Hua Hin where it's a little more remote and, you know, it's not so touristy. And now we're on the island of Koh Samui, which is one of the bigger islands here. And this is where you go for scuba diving.

Oh, that's so fun. Well, what I love is that like if you look at a normal— so, so take what you did on the back end of your career. So it took about 8 years to put together the bulk of the portfolio, at least to get to the financial freedom part of the portfolio. Where you're like, hey, I'm completely optional. In fact, I've probably worked longer than I needed to. So that's compared to a normal— what do they advertise now, 45-year career? I think they upped it to 5 more years to the working life since I was in high school. The 40 to 45 years that you work, you were able to put together in 8 significantly more revenue per year, and it comes in almost regardless of how much you work, how your model is so passive. And by the way, Dion's book is behind me, his entire model. When he sent me a book, I expected like an easy read. It's a great read. It's not a fast read. It is actually a very robust, fantastic book. But in Dion's model, it's actually pretty simple. How many hours do you actually spend managing the portfolio?

So I'm in Thailand for 3 months. I've totaled the 3 months, hasn't reached 2 hours yet. So I usually say it's 2 hours a month because when I have a turnover or, you know, acquiring a property or anything, that's time consuming. But actually running the properties, I've got handymen in place. I've had 3 issues while I've been here. One was handled with like 2 texts. The other one did take a handyman back and forth over 2 days, but it was just text messages, right? It was like, you know, the tenant says their septic system has failed. Handyman says, I found a rodent. Here's the payment with a tip. Like, that was the totality of it. One of the reasons I wanted a small portfolio is because of the scale. If you have more units, you can have more issues pop up. So I specifically invested in a high cost of living area. So yes, it's, it's, there's a barrier to entry. The down payments were larger and I wish my properties cost more because I was chasing yield, not unit count. And the more expensive your units are, as long as you're getting the yield you want, the fewer properties you need to have for more cash flow. And it wasn't that way in the beginning, right? Acquiring properties is life-consuming. Educating yourself on your market, your asset class, your stress, your systems, meeting and finding contractors and handymen to build those relationships, learning how to screen tenants and find a lease. Like those 8 years where I didn't take a vacation, it was because I was either working or working on my portfolio. Like it is life-consuming. Yes. Owning rentals is closer to passive. The IRS calls it passive. I call it close to passive because 2 hours in 3 months, that's not completely passive.

This is why knowing what you want to do when you set out to start doing it is so important. Ultimately, your original goal, like way back to like young Dion, you're like, security is pension. Let's secure the— let's still go secure the pension. So you're shooting for that. You built a portfolio that beats what your pension would have been, but you, like, you were seeking from the beginning, you're like, hey, how do I get stability? And you built it and now you have a bunch of freedom. If you want to do a portfolio like mine, the cost is I have more stuff. I spend unbelievably more than 2 hours every 3 months. I spend about 2 hours every 1 hour working on my portfolio. It's just very busy.

Uh, it is.

And if you're still in acquisition mode, which I still am at 500 whatever doors, I'll have my CPA recount them. I should know, but I stopped counting right as we crossed 500. I was like, eh, it's more than 500. While you're in acquisition mode, it's pretty much go all the time. And if you involve more people and raising capital and now you have employees, even when people are doing the work, and I have 11 people in my property management company. I have to manage all those people and they have people problems. And sometimes people problems are worse than property problems. It's a completely— you need to know what you're doing. If you were Deon and you went out and built the business that I have, you would be very, very, very far away from Deon's goals. You would not be on a beach right now. You'd be building a business right now and you'd be managing people. That is not what Deon wants to do. Building a plan towards your actual goal is so important. So what's really fun is I am still in the build phase. So no matter what content I put out, I can't write a book like Dion's and I can't have a podcast like Dion's. I, because I haven't made it to the end. Dion has a completely different perspective. He has achieved his goal and then you have surpassed your goal and now you're getting to live in that, which is, uh, I'm really looking forward to being in my, that part of my career. That is going to be a fun, uh, It's been a really fun time.

Well, you have some strong motivation to get here, right? I didn't even really start investing until my kids were late teens. So I missed out on a lot of the sporting events. My kids were in wrestling and gymnastics and I was working or working on the portfolio. And yes, in adulthood, my schedule's completely free. And so they have their spouses and their jobs and their lives.. But my schedule is always open. So when they have a weekend or when they— my son had, you know, Tuesday, Wednesdays off, I was free to spend time or go do something with them now. So I get more time with them than I would if I had to work until I retired because my schedule would then conflict with theirs. So maybe you could do that sooner than I did with mine being in their teens. And when it comes to the goal, my goal started out— financial freedom and retiring early is an accident for me. My real goal, and this is in the book Financial Freedom for the Lazy Person, when I started out was I didn't want my kids to have to take care of me when I got too old to work. I didn't want to become a financial burden to them. And I've got a lot of friends my age. I'm a Gen Xer. A lot of friends are paying their parents' cell phone bill, car insurance, maintaining the car for them. I mean, I understand helping them with tech, explaining how emails work or how to go to a website and create an account or anything like that. But financially, they're taking care of them. And I thought, I don't want to be that way when I get old enough. I don't want my kids to be stuck with that. And I thought, like Michael Zuber from One Rental at a Time, if I had a few rentals, just long-term rentals and so-so security, I'd probably be okay and wouldn't need money from my kids. And so that was the first goal. So I started targeting what would long-term rentals look like that I could manage when I'm old? And that would be low tenant turnover. So I wanted single-family houses. But in Washington State, where there is no R, but there is a bunch of liberals who make it to where single-family houses don't cash flow.

No, the cost of a house is almost impossible.

If you did the BRRRR method or you did value-add, you can absolutely find single-family houses that cash flow. I'm working full-time. I had never done a rehab, never done a BRRRR. All my deals are from the MLS, tenants in place. I needed cookie cutter. I can handle doing this while raising 3 kids and working full-time.

Well, in Washington, you have to do— it's major rehab to get it to cash flow too. It's not like a little like, hey, I got in, it was a hobby fix and flip. Like you look at the people making money in single family, it's gutting absolute zombie houses of like, wow, they brought this thing back from the dead. It's a hard job.

And that's not me. I'm the lazy investor. So I transitioned to small multifamily duplexes, triplex and a fourplex, and I house hacked a duplex, the first one, because I wasn't making much. I had a bad debt-to-income. I actually moved from my house into an apartment and rented the house out so I can get rental income on my tax returns for 2 years to get around my debt-to-income ratio. And the small multifamily, my target is as similar to a single-family house as possible, which means side-by-side units, not over-under, pet-friendly fence yards, washer-dryer hookups, lots of parking. I, I don't want to own in good school districts because that means higher taxes and planned turnover when you're tenants' kids reach a certain age and they aren't going to that school anymore. And I don't want war zones. So I want Class C properties, but I don't want high-end luxury because that, that gets hurt in bad economic times. And I don't want the war zone because everybody has really high turnover there and you can't safely go there to collect rent or talk to a tenant or send a handyman. So I want Class C properties that I can manage where tenants want to stay long term. And so I have very low tenant turnover. I don't make top rents. I use the binder strategy where I don't raise the rents, my tenants do. And then in Washington, they just instituted rent control, which is making me $3,000 more a month in profit.

So I'm going to have a question about this. Put a pin in that. I am also making more money in Washington because of rent control. That's what happens.

It makes landlords richer and more tenants homeless.

Yes. Which is why I vote against it. I'm all for making more money, but not at the expense of other people. It's bad policy. It's bad policy. I'll always I'll never support it. I will profit off it.

The very first year that it was talked about in Washington, because there used to be a revised code of Washington, RCW, that said rent control is illegal, but they were overturning and creating new codes. I went and sent a video to legislators saying, look, here's what'll happen. I'll make more money because I do 5% every other year. Now I'm going to be forced to do 7% every year. So it almost doubles my profit.

That's what I was— that's what I was going to ask. That's what we did automatically in all of our leases. Auto, auto renew at 7%. The actual rent control is 7% plus the inflation index, but 7 is nice and safe. And almost every landlord that I know immediately, oh, the new number 7. This happened every single state. You cannot fall behind. You'll never catch up again. If the market takes off, you can only go up 7% at a time. So what do you do? You max 7% forever. Every time they've implemented this, especially in the first 5 years, rents. I was doing 3% increases. We're doing 7. I'm more than doubling the rent increase because if I get behind, I stay behind for years. It's terrible.

So the real threat to the landlord is I don't care what happens to rents if they go up or down or flat. I care about expenses. And expenses can spike. Insurance doubled or tripled. They passed a law in Washington the same year. Now in 2025, when they passed rent control, they passed law where property taxes went from a cap of 1% to a cap of 3%. So if my taxes can go from $4,000 a year on a duplex to $12,000 a year, that's going to impact rents. But since I can't make a large adjustment, since I can't make a large adjustment to correct for a large expense like that, I have to do the 7% every year. So my email that went out at the beginning of 2025 was Here is the law, the, the bill that's being proposed for rent control. If it's voted down or doesn't make it out of committee, rent stays the same for 2025 because I do 5% every other year, basically 2.5% a year, but I do it every other year. If the bill passes, here's the new rent amount. 12-month notice because it's, it's coming out at the end of the year, a 7% increase. So all of my tenants were told If it doesn't pass, no increase. If it passes, 7% increase. So when it passed and every one of them said, yeah, we understand, we were told a year in advance, this is the increase.

I love that. That's like— it feels very Binder Method-ish of like, hey, we're getting the tenants on board and they're bought in and they understand the program.

I still do the Binder strategy even with rent control to show, to show the tenants what it would cost if they moved, what I would make if they moved, how much more I would make. And so they're getting a deal and here's the increase and here's the limit of the increase. And I'm like you also not doing the inflation that I could. I'm only doing the 7%. Happy tenants don't trash your property. Happy tenants don't leave and happy tenants make relaxed landlords.

And I believe listeners to the podcast, probably 90, 95% of them— I'm going just statistically— you probably understand how expenses move. Like you're listening to a business podcast and you've listened this far. However, if you happen to be one of the few who are listening and being like, wow, this is terrible, this is like there's going to be some single moms in these portfolios who rent is getting jacked. Yes. Thank your government for that. Also, when we're talking about expenses going up, do you remember what happened like in 2020, 2021 with the cost of lumber, like building costs and repair costs? I had a roof that was originally quoted at, I believe it was $90,000. By the time we were done with the roof, we spent about $160,000, $155,000, almost doubled. And then they come in, they go, oh, we're going to raise insurance. Major insurers do not insure in Washington State for multifamily. They'll still do— they'll still do deals portfolio. They'll still do single family and all the way up to a fourplex. Commercial multifamily, done. Pulled out, left the state. You have to almost every insurance quote doubled overnight. Instantly they pulled out. Done. They're not, they're not worth it. We're not doing it, especially not on something built before 2000. How do you account for that? The only way to do it is to have nominal rent increases over time. And when they cap what you can do in rent, you can't adjust when the expense comes in. So you have to frontload it. It's the only way around it. It's just a supply, demand, and policy issue. And that's what we're stuck with.

So this will probably be news to some of the people watching, and maybe it might even be news to you. You— when rent control is instituted, we've said it already, what happens? Rents spike. They go up the maximum allowable amount every year. And when there's a turnover, rents go up more. Landlords will even leave units empty for months to get the right amount of rent. Or they will offer free months, 2 or 3 free months. Yeah. As long as they get the high rent so that because they can't raise it in the future. So all of these things push rents up. Insurance works the same. So when stupid states go, we're going to cap the amount that insurance can increase every year to 15%, it's a form of rent control. But on insurance control, what does the insurance company do? Because they're not stupid. They have increased costs too. Rebuilding a house, no longer a real building. A duplex is no longer $280,000 in Washington. It's $540,000. Right. It's not quite double, but it's pretty freaking close.

It's right about there.

So they cancel policies. That tree is too close to your building. That roof has two different color shingles. You can't do that. You're just canceled. You can't fix it. It's not remediable. You can't remediate this. It's just— we're— your policy's done. Yeah, we used to get a letter saying fix this Or your policy's done. Now you get your policy's done because when you have to go find a new policy, that's not an increase, that's a new policy. Now there's no increase limit on how much more they can charge. So you get insurance that doubled when every legislator goes, "No, no, no, we have a big heart and we said they can only give you a 15% increase." Sure, you caused all insurance rates to go up with your stupid legislation.

Yep. And well, if you want to really get into stupid states, then you have states like California that force all of the other states to subsidize their insurance because of their caps. It— bad policy is bad policy, and it's not because we just hate liberals. That's not at all what we're saying. It's just that type of economic policy mathematically doesn't work. It's just like, it's an empirical— if you do this, this is what happens. It's always what happens. And as you can see, Dion and I are 2 men of— Dion's probably pretty smart, but I'm a man of average intelligence. We're not hypergeniuses. Matt Hawkins is significantly above average intelligence in our group. But this isn't rocket science. It's like if expenses go up, the income has to go up or no one will buy anything. Or who's going to leverage to buy something that doesn't make money? It doesn't make any sense. You're not going to repair stuff if you can't afford to repair it. And this is why you get all these states that have homeless and you have things in disrepair. And following that, you get drug problems and, oh, look, it looks like California.

So here's a comparison people might enjoy. You invest in large multifamily, you're creating generational wealth, and you will be a deca-millionaire when I don't want to reach deca-millionaire status. I want it enough. To be financially free. Now, my, my goal shifted from I don't want to be a financial burden to my kids to at 52, I retired. I don't ever want to have to work again, and I don't want to have to consider money or price tags or anything like that. So over $20,000 a month coming in when I live on 4, that works for me. Like, my investing down payment has grown by over $40,000 while I'm traveling in the months that I've been here, right? So that's, that's a good position for me to be in. Here's something else that we do very differently. You started some investing in Washington and I invest in Washington and you moved to a red state. You have moved to Texas because the legislation is more friendly. It's more landlord-friendly, less tenant-friendly. I specifically targeted red counties in blue states. I wouldn't own in King County, right? I wouldn't own in LA County. I wouldn't own in New York. Or on Manhattan, right? I wouldn't own in the blue county in a blue state. That's insanity level of legislation. But what happens in Washington— and people watching can Google this— it is the most appreciating market of the last 40 years because of legislation.

Yep. It is artificial inflation.

Take half a year to 2 years. Longer evictions means less investors. Now rent control means people pull out. Long-term rentals become short-term rentals. Landlords sell off properties or they leave, and it causes less building to happen because there's less demand to buy, which causes appreciation. So in the last— from 2020, and at the beginning of 2020, my net worth passed the million-dollar mark. At the end of 2023, it passed the $3 million. My net worth tripled because I'm in a red county in a blue state. Now, the caveat is the blue insanity is spreading to the rest of the state. So there could come a time where I'm coming down to Christian and saying, hey, let me stand on your coattails for a second. Which market should I look at? Introduce me to some of the handymen and contractors down here.

Which—

oh, there we go. Like, you're going to be my network when I— when my— when sanity finally takes over and I have to leave the state.

Oh, there we go. Stephenville, Texas. Phenomenal, phenomenal, phenomenal market. I know, I know a multifamily guy down there who's not buying duplexes and fourplexes. I do know of a lot of duplexes, fourplexes down there. We're investing in Abilene, Texas. Yeah, there's all these markets, all the secondary markets. When you go to Texas, it's actually very similar to Dion strategy. Avoid the blue cities in the red state. Don't invest in Dallas. Don't invest in— well, I have a property in Houston.

Houston.

This is the trickiest one I have to manage. I would try to avoid downtown Houston unless you're local to Houston and that is your market because it's such a big city. There is opportunity. Just, I wouldn't go out of area and invest in Houston. Austin, they're still coming down in rents a little bit from when they overbuilt. I think they're probably pretty close to stabilizing. You hit or miss whether you want to try that, but you go into these secondary markets anywhere in Texas. Turns out most of the state of Texas is a secondary market. I mean, there's like hundreds of cities that population growth, job growth, fantastic weather, happy people. My evictions cost $200 and take 2 weeks. The constable comes same day to pull them out. They just changed that this year. You don't even have to wait for the writ of possession. You can go back to the courthouse and go, may I please have my writ? Like, is it an emergency? Yes. Why is it an emergency? They're still there. Oh, that is an emergency. And they'll pull them out. It's great. I like that a lot more than my experience in Washington. Even in Moses Lake, Washington, red city, blue state, I had all of the problems and expenses of being in a blue state managing that market. That was my one thing is I'm like, I'm paying, I'm paying top dollar even in a red area. So I don't know if— I don't know if that's a problem with scale where that is more of a problem because you haven't had the same amount of pain that I have on some of these turnovers. Or maybe it's just the depth of turnover that I do. I deal with a different class of tenant where eviction is a higher, larger piece of the business.

So there's, there's been many studies done and why I targeted single-family houses. The average tenancy in a single-family house is 7 years. The average tenancy in an apartment is 2 years. So just by asset type, not even numbers, if you had one house and one apartment, somebody bought like a condo, one apartment, you're looking at 7 years versus 2 years. So I targeted small multifamily close to single family to keep them longer. But then I also went for washer dryer hookups, parking, pets, and all that kind of stuff to keep them longer. And then binder strategy keeps tenants happy so they stay longer. And for about a decade I said, this is why I do this. I have low tenant turnover. I have never had an eviction. Maybe, maybe it's just apartment people get evicted more often than people in duplexes or houses. And then Chesla bought her first duplex and she had 4 evictions in the first 15 months she had it. I was, I was off. I got lucky. And she had a squatter. I mean, she had a— she had the nightmare experience. Oh, and that's funny. So if I didn't have my portfolio and that was somebody's first duplex, it might have been their only one. They might have gone, yeah, this is not for me.

Yeah, but she saw what people that's happened to. First, first property, bad tenant, out and done. Yeah, you would have— you did have a, a first rough go though. Your first, uh, your first tenant, uh, subleased the apartment and stopped paying rent, didn't they?

The first tenant was so bad. And I'm— while I am just a crayon-eating Marine and blue crayons taste the best, I am able to look back and realize I was the problem. Being a landlord isn't the problem. I was completely uneducated, right? It took 13-week boot camp to become a Marine. It took a 6-month academy to become a police officer. If you want to work in any trade, you have to go through an apprenticeship or trade school. And I was just going to jump into real estate with no education, none, no audiobooks, no YouTube University. I was just, you know, I'm going to rent my house out and move into an apartment. Well, I can't trust a stranger. It's all rent to a friend, and I don't want a contract between buddies, so we don't need a lease. Like, all of the mistakes were mine, not his. I set him up to do— like, the temptation was so large, I think the average person would have done what he did, moved out, rented the house to somebody else with a lease. Like, he was doing it better than I was, and the house was trashed. It was so bad I tried to quit. So yeah, in the same situation with Chesla and her turn and her evictions and her squatter, she probably would have quit if she didn't see my end result. I would have quit. But there's the one point of luck in my entire story, right? Like Michael Zuber, I hate it when somebody says you're lucky because it was a decade of, you know, no life to get to financial freedom. So the rest of my life can be all life. The one point of luck is when I tried to quit, that first year was so bad I couldn't because of the 2008 housing crash. I owed more on my house than it was worth. I owed about $130,000. Interesting. Couldn't give it away for $100,000. So subject to wasn't even an option. And then somebody did come along, like, was going to take it over, but their lender said their credit's not good enough, so they have to make 12 monthly payments and then they can buy it. And at the 10-month point, They changed their mind, didn't become a buyer because they could find cheaper houses. And so I was stuck with it. And that's when I found BiggerPockets, looked for one rental at a time, read Rich Dad Poor Dad finally. Like, I had it sitting on a shelf for 5 or 6 years, and I told everybody, oh yeah, it's the book with the rich dad and the poor dad. I totally get it. I'd never opened it. Finally, I educated myself, and I was like, wow, you do trust strangers more than friends because you have a contract that protects them, right? You can't remove the doors, you can't shut off the utilities, you can't do any— you can't just kick them out without courts being involved. But it also protects you. They actually have to pay the rent or the courts can get them out eventually in Washington. The things that you learn, how to screen tenants, how to list your properties, like all of the small skills that make owning rentals take 2 hours total in 3 months while you're traveling. Versus being such a nightmare you want to quit. And that's why I'm making content now. Like, it wasn't— I didn't start making content to make content. I made content to make my life easier. I was answering questions on social media when somebody would ask, should I have an LLC? How do I find an agent or whatever? And I realized I was answering the same questions so many times. Why don't I make a short little 5 or 10 minute video on YouTube? And when somebody asks, I send a link. That way I don't have to type out the response. I just, or have a phone call or anything, I send them the detailed information and I thought a couple hundred people will benefit from it and my life will be easier. And then it turned into a YouTube channel that becomes a great tax write-off when you're traveling in another country.

Oh, there we go. I love, business is so fun. There's so many adventures. I remember I didn't really, I got some business credit cards. I pay off all credit cards in full. I don't use credit card debt with interest. However, the idea of having points was kind of cool. I kind of forgot about it. I just set everything to autopay and forgot about it. I am not a vacation guy. I am in the first 8 years of my grinding. So I'm doing that piece. I looked in and I had 1,280,000 credit card points with AMEX, which turns out gets you some really cool hotels. So that was— I love business. A couple write-offs over here, some travel over here. It's like, oh, wait a second, we could just go to the Bahamas and stay at the Atlantis for a week. For free. And then you get there and they're like, hey, because you bought this with points, we're gonna pay for your food. I was like, well, I budgeted for food, but I guess I get free food too. Super fun. Uh, if there's— if they're not the reason to go into business, but, uh, when you're in business, you may find there's some cool advantages to being in business.

Now it really helps to pay attention to all of the different angles that you can benefit from doing something like this. Most people focus on let me work more than 40 hours a week for more than 40 years to retire on less than 40% of what I made. And it's retirement accounts, Social Security, Medicaid, which they find out, shock, has a cost. There's a premium to that. It's not free health care. You'll still have a cost when you get there, depending on what.

And there's still a lot of money. How is this possible?

And when you I'm not an entrepreneur. I put my money to work so I don't have to. And like you said, you have to think of all of the ways that can benefit you, right? Don't let the tax tail wag the dog. But when you realize we do not have a tax penalty program— everybody thinks if I make more money, they tax me more. That's not what it is. We have a tax incentive program. Why do they tax cigarettes so highly? They don't want you to smoke. Why do they tax alcohol so much? They don't want you to drink. Why do they tax W-2 income so much? They don't want you to work. What we need is innovation, housing providing, job creation. So then this is out of Kiyosaki's Cashflow Quadrant, right? So I'm not saying anything new here and I'm not saying it's me coming up with it. But as an employee, you pay around 40% in your taxes, right? You got your state tax, federal tax, Social Security tax, Medicaid tax, like all the things that are going to be taking money. You might have pension, you might do whatever. And then people say, well, I'm going to go and create a business. I'm going to be a plumber and run my own business. I'm going to become a dentist and open my own practice. Well, great. Now you pay 60% in taxes because you pay the employee tax and the employer side of the taxes. If you grow a business big enough to where you're not working in it and you have employees, now you get capital gains and business tax and you start paying 20%. But none of that is me. Yeah, I want money to work so I don't have to. And when money works, They don't tax it, which is depreciation and write-offs. The first 10 years of investing, I didn't pay any rental income tax. I— in this year, I'm going to be paying some rental income. I'm going to celebrate. I will have a celebration party this year that I have to write a check to the IRS for taxes because I finally made so much money. Depreciation and write-offs didn't stop me from having to do that. But that's the incentive program we have. And once you realize the government wants me to do these things, they reward me to do these things because So weird. Congress is full of people who own real estate that keep making rules that benefit people who own real estate. I don't understand how or why.

But I know there's a— there's someone in the executive office who also has a lot of real estate, just a few billion. You know, it is always because real estate hedges against inflation and we'll always print money. And because most of the wealthy people who make policy own real estate, real estate typically does pretty well and there's a lot of incentive to continue to invest in real estate. I still don't want to put my exact number online just as a practice, but in total profit, my best year, I've done a little bit— I've done multiple 7 figures in total profit. My tax bill on my highest income year, which was more than $2 million, was $17,000, a little north. That was between $17,000 and $18,000, $17,000 and change. I paid almost no tax. I bought so much real estate in that year, I segregated everything. Basically zero tax on millions of dollars. If you did that in a W-2, you'd be taxed at the absolute maximum tax bracket. You'd be giving what, around $800,000 of that back? If you live in California, probably more than half of it.

Oh yeah, it's at that range. It's over 50%.

Did you see the guy who won the MrBeast Beast Games did an episode? I think it was with Graham Stephan. I forget who he is. I think it was Graham Stephan. He talked about the actual tax bill and of the $10 million, he got to keep like $4.5 million. He wasn't willing to move out of California. I guess you have the— there's also a tax for winning it on a game show. That's like a specific kind of like the lottery. Sort of thing. And then you have California. I'm like, you win $10 million and you walk home with $4 million.

So most of my life I never made more than $60,000. When I, when I started at the CDL school, I was at $17 an hour. And for those 8 years of investing, I got up to my best year in those first 8 was $61,000. That was the 8th year. The next few years, when the owners of the company realized I was making more money off my rentals than I was at work, I actually started making more money. But when 2020 happened and we had a rent freeze and an eviction moratorium and interest rates dropped to 3%, the appreciation— and because I owed banks money, I got the appreciation on their money. I had a million-dollar year and it wasn't income, it was net worth growth. Oh, that was—

that is the best.

Yeah. I, I, I know. Well, not, not, not all of it. So, yeah, it was my best W-2 earning year ever. It was 2021. Excellent. I made $200,000. It was the first time the owners of the company was like, oh no, you're the president of the company. You got to make what you should be making. Because before that, I just, I didn't need to, I guess. And my cash flow from rentals was over $200,000. So that's a $400,000 year from somebody who up until 2019 had never broken $61,000 was the most, right?

Wow. That's got to feel wild.

And then that was one of the best years we've had for appreciation in forever, was $600,000. I made more at 150% in appreciation than I made off of active and passive income. And all of that together was a million-dollar year. I was doing a whiteboard video going, hey, what's my cash flow look like this year? And I sat down, it was 7:00 at night on a Sunday. I'm in the office in 2021 making this video, and I sit down, I think, okay, I just finished working on a Sunday at 7 at night so that instructors could have the day off so they didn't have to work a Sunday. I did the training on the Sunday, and I was like, okay, I'm working. I'm looking at that whiteboard going, 2 years ago I made $61,000. This is a million-dollar year. I'm an idiot for being at work. So it was a YouTube video that told me That's so funny. I should not be doing this.

It's time to leave. I remember I met Dion in his office, which was also his YouTube studio, which was also his collectibles storage space. Dion has some cool shit, by the way. If you guys are nerds like Dion and I, Dion has some cool stuff. But I got to go there. I crashed the truck simulator pretty badly.

One of your most viral shorts?

Of everything to go viral, of course, has nothing to do with real estate. It's me crashing that. It's like first million view TikTok is crashing. And then that was it for TikTok. No one watches me on TikTok. That was it. That was the beginning and end of TikTok for Christian was crashing in Dion's office. Going from that to this, Dion, it's been really fun just because I met you right at the tail end of that, like right before you left. I meet you, you show me how to connect Zoom to YouTube, and then suddenly Dion's retired and now there's— then Dion hosts BiggerPockets and Dion puts out a book. I feel like I met you at a really cool time in your life where you were like, you had just made it and you were about 6 months away from realizing that you had made it. It was probably about 6 months before you launched that YouTube video.

It pretty much was. I hadn't realized I had made it yet. I knew I was never going to be a financial burden to my kids. Like, I had a couple hundred thousand dollars in cash flow coming in before I passed $100,000 from W-2 income. That's so cool. And so here's the reality of why I make content now, right? I'm not answering questions on Facebook anymore. I'm not making videos to do that. So I want the viewer of this video to imagine at 40, broke, in bad debt I didn't know about, single parent, 3 kids, not a lot of income. Within a decade, I reach financial freedom. I retire. I never have to work again. I get to travel and go wherever I want and do whatever I want. Imagine the emotional roller coaster of starting that, having such a bad first year, trying to quit, can't quit, figuring it out, educating myself, not seeing the income snowball, that hockey stick growth for the first 6 or 7 years, and then seeing it way late and then realizing it's taking off. This is changing my life. I have a great job. I love my job, but there's so much money coming in I don't have to work for. Why am I working to retiring? That emotional roller coaster is phenomenal to experience, right? It's like amazing. That's why I said earlier, the outcome is so positive, I wouldn't risk changing anything because the butterfly effect could make the outcome worse. Yeah, I can't—

you could have, you could have been so successful early that you overleveraged and you lost it all.

Correct. I can't imagine a better outcome because I don't need more money. So more money wouldn't change. I wouldn't be at a different resort. I wouldn't be traveling more. I wouldn't— nothing would change for me. Yeah, because when you don't have enough money is the only thing. And once you have enough, it's just a thing. But now I make content. My YouTube channel is Dion Talk Financial Freedom. And every Tuesday at 4:00, I go live for a couple of hours and answer questions.

Link below.

I get to meet people. Like you, when you— when we met, you were— I had a couple of small multifamily, I did a house hack, I met this young guy Cody, we've kind of partnered up on a few things, look what we're doing— to where you're at now. I've got to experience your last 5 years and everyone else that's come on the channel that has shared their first closing, their first offer, their first rent check, all of that. I'm— it's like me going through my 10-year journey again, and I get— I'm As long as I'm feeling that, I'll keep making content.

Yeah, that's the fun thing because I still do the YouTube Live every Wednesday as well and I don't get the attendance that Dion does. People, people love Dion, but I still, I love getting in there and just getting the questions and hanging out with people doing real estate. And that was where, like, Dion helped me start the YouTube channel we used to call Whiteboard Wednesday and just those like figuring out how to do that. That's always just been part of what I do is just hop on YouTube and talk real estate and I love it. Dion's, Dion's channel though, really has like a huge impact on this podcast and multifamily strategy, like the whole online streaming, like, hey, let's talk about the thing that we're doing. I could not for the life of me figure out how to get Zoom to— I'm like, what is a stream key and where does it go? I'm looking at the thing. There's no key port here. And I also don't have a key. How? I don't get it. Dion's like, oh, you got to put the thing in the thing and then copy this and put it over here. I'm like, oh, okay.

They made it so hard. I didn't say let's have a Zoom call to do it. I said you have to come over.

Yes, it was, it was actually not intuitive. He's like, no, you have to be at my house and we have to sit down in the living room until this connects. I'm like, okay. So I was in your, uh, that was the fourplex, right, with the, the restaurant downstairs?

That was— yeah, that was a unique situation. That was one I was working on owner financing to acquire but never did.

Oh, you never actually—

one of my properties?

No. Really?

Okay. Yeah, I was— I probably could make a whole YouTube series about that, but that was like courting the owner by renting a unit and it never went through. And then luckily, because, man, Ruston went down, I moved out of that town. That's murder central now. It's like Hilltop used to be. I'm really glad you make content because a lot of people watch my channel because they come from BiggerPockets or OneRentalAtATime. And not everybody wants to be lazy. Not everybody wants the smallest portfolio. They want something like the binder strategy works for them, or how to get the best interest rates, or something that I talked about mattered to them. But my strategy doesn't match them. So if they want to invest out of state in a low cost of living area, I go, hey, here's this Millennial Mike guy. If they want to self-manage a big portfolio and do the rehabs and the and the things themselves, I go, here's this lumberjack landlord. If they're into multifamily strategies, if they want large apartment complexes and they want to do that, get to know the owner, but don't be sales pitchy and you want to learn from them. And this is where deals come from. That's not me. I can only help someone like that by saying, hey, here's this Christian Osgood guy, but why don't you go watch his live, ask some questions? He's younger than me. You can probably get him on Instagram because I know I have comments on Instagram somewhere, but I don't know how to get to them. Right. So I like that. This is the community that we've put together where there is a strategy I watch— I've never met him, but there's a guy, Joe Kuhn, K-U-H-N, Invested in Stocks, retired at 54. I'm not a stock guy until Tesla went on sale last year. I don't own any stocks. I put 1% of my net worth into Tesla. It's over doubled. So thanks for the protest. And, uh, but if you're in stocks and you want the buckets method and retire on the 4% rule, Joe Kuhn, K-U-H-N, on YouTube. I want to find the people that I've watched long enough and met in real life, in the masterclass, and I know that I say I'm confident when I send somebody to you and that's what they're looking to do, that's the information they should be finding. Same thing with Millennial Mike and Matt and Jubert and the— there's so many ways to invest. And you said it almost perfectly at the beginning of this video. There isn't a one right way, but there is a one right way for you. For every viewer, there's a one right way. And it's sometimes a little bit of you, a little bit of them. A little bit of me, you know, all put together.

That's what I love about real estate, too. There's just so many flavors of real estate. There's so many different ways to make it work. I have friends who only do midterm rentals and they absolutely kill it. I mean, it's just absolutely incredible what they put together in a few years. Do I want to copy their model? Absolutely not. It's not what I do. I already have a thing that works. Love how it works. Don't want to change it. Every time I pivot out of my field, always regret it. I run a PM company. I like running a property management company. I'm good at running a property management company. I like doing the hiring for it. I like the pieces that could stay in my business. I like buying. I like negotiating.

Awesome.

I'm a multifamily guy. It's just what we do. It is so much simpler when you find what your thing is and then just do the thing. The worst entrepreneurs I know consistently are the people who have like 4 different businesses and they're kind of okay at all of them, or they're bad at 2 of them and okay at one of them. Just be excellent at one thing. Dion chose to be excellent at 2 things at a time and then one. You did your career and you were excellent in your career, really excellent. Your company loved you and I've seen you at your work and I know you're actually good at it. And you went all in, in small investing and focusing on, hey, I'm just going to do deals that are like a triple or a home run. You said no to a ton of deals. So you're a really picky investor and you spent a lot of time finding deals and you got really good at it. And now you're riding elephants in Thailand or whatever you do out there.

So, so cultural caveat, you don't ride the elephants here. You go to the preserves where you play with them and you swim with them. The riding—

right. Playing with elephants, riding tigers. There you go. I'm kidding. He's also— he's obviously not riding a tiger. That would be unethical.

So anyway, you're, you're right. Be excellent at one thing. I have an interview. I'm trying to set it up at the One Rental at a Time event where there was somebody that was recently in a video with Michael Zuber and basically said he had 30 rentals and they don't cash flow because he's a wholesaler and a flipper and he equity strips. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that went into that. If I had the same amount of time and the same amount of money invested and I went for 30 units, I wouldn't cash flow. I cash flow because I've never done a HELOC, never done a cash out refi, never sold for a 1031. I don't equity strip and I've bought— when you said I only go for third base or home runs, that's not always math. I've bought 3 break-even deals out of 8.

Really? Okay.

Well, I spoke because you're right with the home run, though. They were third base or home run because I have a lot of metrics. I don't want to lose money. I want to get a better yield than the area average. Right. That's important. But it's a, it's a box to check. Side-by-side units, check. Washer dryer, check. Right kind of neighborhood, check. Parking, yes. Garage, yes. Like if I checked off 8 of these boxes and the math was break even but rents were low, Binder would get them up. The mushroom farm in Lacey had lost a lawsuit, was going away, rents would go up. One of them had both sides had a den with a closet. So I was like, I had a wall, there's a third bedroom. So were they cash flowing the first year? No. Were they value add to cash flow? Were they— did they check off almost every other box? Yes. So still to me, even though the math wasn't like, oh, these people that go, I've got to beat a 10% cash on cash return, most of mine did. 5 of them did. Yeah, but those 3 break even are some of my best performing assets right now.

One of them, you have a plan on how you're going to run them, and they— the— that's the advantage. And so there's, there's two different schools of thought, and I tend to go the opposite direction, but this is the advantage of Dion's strategy. When you have a very tight buy box, every deal looks more or less like the other deal. There's not a ton of variety. So it's like, when your variety is like, boy, this one we're gonna have to add a wall, it's like, that's not a whole lot of stuff. Walls are pretty easy to put up.

This is why my strategy would drive you crazy.

Yes, because I go, oh, how do you, how do you take the opportunity and what steps would it take to make it work? And then is the juice worth the squeeze? Which means my, my range of opportunities is, is massive. It also means that each project looks completely different than every other project, which is why I work 100 hours a week and Dion works 2 hours a month.

Imagine if you could only do one deal every 2 years. That was—

I would do a— you know what I would do? This would look— this would be so— of everything I've done, the thing that always works, 25 to 80 units, 55-plus community, like specifically senior living in the state of Texas. There is so much demand. Every single 55+ community I own, 100% occupied with a massive waitlist at exactly market rent. They're so easy to run. And for the most part, when you're a senior, if you're— because like almost all of them are on Section 8— if you are above 55, you either, in Texas especially, bought a house and are deep in your career or retired, or you've been a tenant your entire life and you know how to be a tenant and you're now on fixed income, not because you're low income, just because you did the whole thing that Dion mentioned earlier. You're on Medicaid, you're on your pension plan, you're making 40% of what you used to. All of them rent qualify, but they're normal tenants. They're not slummy tenants or people in rough jobs. It's normal old people on fixed income are amazing. If you want to copy and paste, like do no work, It is the easiest. All of them are the easiest properties to run of all time. That would be Christian's super secret Dion strategy. Work 2 hours a month. All you have to do is make sure those darn people have Bible study and bingo night access in the main clubhouse. Provide them that in Texas, they will never, ever move. That is Christian's Dion strategy.

You have so many buy boxes that you can get the great deals that I'll never see because I'm not looking for them, right? But do you see how quickly you narrowed it down to this is the one that performs the best? And if I focused on just this, this is how easy my life would be. That's what I did when I started. When I started, I said low tenant turnover that will cash flow, that doesn't take a lot of work, and I don't have to do a rehab or an update or I never did a BRRRR until after I retired and I did one and I'm not doing anymore. Yep. Right. So I knew that early on because I was okay with one deal every two years working full-time, raising the kids, closing on one deal, stabilizing those tenants once every two years was plenty. There's so many people that are like, oh, if I don't do 3 or 4 deals my first year, I'm an epic failure. And I thought it took me two years to save the first down payment and then two years to save the second down payment. And that first year was so bad that it took me the next few years to educate myself. I'm still educating myself. And now in retirement, the money will pile up and every couple of years I'll add a property. Like, I'm not in growth mode, but I, I, I, it's the asset class I understand the best, right? Bitcoin was the best performing asset of the last 10 years. Gold and silver in the last year seemed to be—

I'm still sad about that. I really was not on board with the Bitcoin thing. I, I called that so crazy wrong.

So everyone who thinks, well, it's just Bitcoin, you just buy it when it's cheap and now you're a billionaire. Sure. But would you have held when it went from $100 and it got to $17,000? Would you keep it like that? Very few people bought 100 coins and have kept it for 15 years.

Yeah. If I buy anything and it 4x, I sell it immediately. I don't care about the upside. I bought every time I made $100,000, which I've done a lot of times. I have bought 1 kilogram of silver and put it in a safe. I bought them at an average of $25 a bar. The millisecond gold hit $90, I was like, that is high enough. Sold all— or sorry, silver hit $90, sold all of it. I have none of it. It's now at $118. I would have made more had I held it.

Doesn't matter.

I made enough. So to answer your question, no, I would have sold my Bitcoin because at 4x, I would have 400%. That's amazing. Phenomenal investment. I'm out.

So, you know yourself and real estate is inelastic, right? It's hard to get in and out of. You don't just go, it's gone up in value, I'm going to sell it. You go, it's gone up in value, I'm cash flowing more. Maybe in your strategy I could reduce some of the cash flow by taking out a whole bunch of the money and redeploying it somewhere else to create more money. So you still have the asset. You don't have to lose the asset to do it. Like, there's a lot of reasons for me to not be in one of those other asset classes. But I don't care which asset class the viewer picks. It can be crypto, it can be stocks, it can be metals, it can be running your own business, it can be real estate in the hundreds of ways to invest in real estate. But pick one and master it. Once you're wealthy, once your net worth passes $5 million, maybe now throw some into some other asset classes because you're probably going to lose a bunch of money. Because to take the words right from you, You got the idiot tax. You got to pay that before you start making money. And when you go into a new asset class, there, there, that tax is attached to that tax for being inexperienced.

You're the dumbest you'll ever be is at the beginning. And so you will make the most mistakes. There is no, no exception to that. You will be smarter the longer you play it until you get really old and get dementia and start forgetting it. But until then, you're always the dumbest at the beginning. So the less variety you do, the less risk you have. Dion, my takeaway from this is probably the one that I'm going to apply. I think this is the lesson I want to teach my students. As well. The tighter the buy box, the more time freedom you create. Generally speaking, you, you have to be more selective. That means you're doing less actual buying activity. You're doing plenty of searching. That seems to be a really good way to optimize for time freedom. That's what you've done. If you open up the buy box, you have more opportunity, potentially can build a bigger business. You might make— you can optimize for money and opportunity, or you can optimize for time. I think if your goal is time freedom If you tighten the buy box like Dion did, you can get there in less transactions. Had I only bought 55-up communities, the 3 that I have would cash flow— I've $21,000-ish a month. I would have done it in 3 transactions, 3 deals, and I would have just— that's— that was about my best month at CoStar was $20,000. Commissions. That would have been enough. Like, I could have just been done in 3 deals and out. Tight buy box, good idea. I think that was my takeaway from today's. Now I'm not going to go home and I'm going to— well, I'm already home, but I'm gonna go downstairs in my home and I'm gonna be thinking about what deals should I stop doing because I have all sorts of projects going on. There's probably some that I can— I'm gonna tighten my buy box. Tonight I'm going to figure out what things I don't want to do anymore because I don't have to do all the projects that I'm doing. I probably could take a book out of Dion's— Dion's— or page out of Dion's book. I was going to say a book out of Dion's book, which is— there's so much awesome stuff in here. You can take a book out of his book if you choose.

The book was written for YouTube viewers. Each section is 2 or 3 pages and can be read that section alone. So it's an incremental, like, 10-minute spots, right? Yeah. And it's not something you read through like a novel where it has a story. It's when you're doing a tenant screening, what section was that in? When you're getting interest rates and you want to get the best one from a loan, what section was that in? All the mental shifts are in there. So a lot of people talk about focusing their buy box to what they want to invest in. I think you have to think of the end goal first. Yep. What are you trying to accomplish? That tells you which buy box to go for. Which includes your timeline, when you want it to happen. And I really appreciate you having me on. Absolutely. When you go downstairs, you're going to need to get some pants because I know you're like me. And in these meetings, Deon and I are both definitely rocking pajama pants.

I don't know if I can get them all the way up in the camera. I'm going to try in this chair. There we go. This is how we— this is how we podcast. This is true financial freedom is working from your pajamas from around the globe.

So this was— make sure that I don't face the camera anywhere.

This is the great behind-the-scenes content that you get here.

Behind the scenes, end of the video, private villa, all massive marble. But this is the reason you come here. The front of the villa is the beach. You come to the back and you have a completely enclosed private pool, all privacy fenced all the way around. Uh, that's why you should come to Thailand.

I need to make it over there. That is like the very top of my list. I've talked about it for a while. Kelly, who is a, uh, Kelly Kahoot, who is a, uh, really, really, really awesome community— I, I don't even know what to call her. She's just an amazing human being in Union, Washington. She helps us with a bunch of the Robinhood events. She actually hosts most of them. She goes to Thailand frequently and just has a blast. I get pictures every time she's over there. It's like, that is like the place to go. She's seen the whole world. She's back to Thailand all the time. That is the number one place that she seems to like to land.

But I love it.

Everyone, the link to Dion's book is below, by the way. So I will link that. You can go pick that up on Amazon. It really is a fantastic read.

Paperback, Kindle, and Audible.

Ooh, I assume you are the narrator for the Audible.

I am. I narrated a couple of books for Michael Zuber. I think it was easier to write the book, 486 pages, than it was to narrate the book. The narrating is easy. It's like being on YouTube, but man, ACX, the company that runs the Audible stuff, is so picky about their tech. That's what I really struggled with that. And now that I've learned the skill, I might as well narrate my own book because I did it for Zuber.

Oh, there we go. Well, look for that later this year. Look for my book, which is not 400 pages. So far I'm at 132 after editing. It seems to get slightly longer the more takes we run through it. So somewhere around 150-ish pages.

Writing a book is hard. When you— it is. So like I said, it was easier to write than to narrate. That doesn't mean it was easy. When you go to have it audited for book format, Yeah, my book was about 180 pages. Then this is the one thing I did outsource. I hired a formatter, right? I went on Fiverr, found a book format. I said, format this for paperback and for Kindle. They have to format it. It went from 180 pages to 486. So if you have— mine was in Pages on a Mac. The number of whatever the shape of the pages, you might find yours is very different size. Than what you currently think it is.

I was looking— so when I formatted, I went to, I think it was 6 by 9 is the average books. I try to format within what is an average parameter and font for a book. So we'll see. We'll see. I think my— I've read Dion's book. Mine is definitely shorter than Dion's book. Dion did more writing than I did. But look for Dion's book below. Look for my book a little bit later this year. Super, super fun having you on the podcast.

I call dibs on the first signed copy.

I can commit to that. Actually, you know what? I need to get my copy signed. I believe I am sitting on an unsigned copy. The millisecond I learned that he has a book out, I purchased it and it arrived. And again, I was expecting, you know, something like that. And instead I got something like this. I was like, oh, this is more of a project than I expected. It took me like 2 days to get through it.

It's fantastic. I wanted to make sure I had one book And No More Real Estate book, all of my mental brain dump happened in that book. So there is no more that I know. There's no secret sauce. You get to the end and it's like, and if you want the second book, you got to come to my website. No, it is— everything is in there.

Do the Alex Hormozi, you're going to have to wait 2 more years for the third installment of this. That's going to be the best. Yeah. No, fantastic books. Fantastic having you on, especially from overseas. Thank you so much for taking the time. What time is it over there in Thailand right now?

It's breakfast time and Chesla is waiting.

Oh, well, in that case, Chesla, enjoy your rentals and your soon-to-be husband at an undisclosed date. And everyone, click all the links, buy Dion's book, do the like and subscribe thing and everything else I'm supposed to tell you at the end of these videos, and we'll see you on the next episode.

Ciao.