Jen & Joe Share Their Creative Finance Strategy That No One Knows About!

— that's millions of dollars in real estate. Like, this is more common than you'd even think, but they don't teach you this. This is a whole other strategy, and this is why I think that once we started doing this, it was like, does everybody else know this stuff even exists? Like, holy

cow. Hello and welcome to the Owner Meeting Podcast. I'm Christian, your channel host, joined today by Jen and Joe. I am super excited for this episode because these guys are creative finance masters. They do it a little bit differently than me, which is the fun thing with creative finance. You get to be

creative. Jen and Joe, welcome to the

channel. Thanks so

much. Thank you so much for having us

on. I am so excited for this. Out of the last 50 episodes, I have had one other person who actually does a significant amount of creative

finance. I've interviewed so

many. I know there's been so many different strategies. And the thing that really built my business that a lot of my friends, like, wherever your starting point is, I mean, even if you have millions and millions of dollars, creative finance allows you to buy things regardless of your current capital position. You can— the same person who has $10 can buy something that someone with $10 million does if you negotiate it correctly. I'm really excited to get into your strategy. I'm really interested to learn about your portfolio, but I do think it's important everyone knows where you started and where you're at. So question number 1, what was the starting point for each of you? Like, like, how did you get into creative finance? And Why did you get into creative

finance? Well, I got into this whole real estate thing because of him. I was a middle school English teacher and I thought that was the way it was going to be 30 years in, get my bell and see ya. But then I met this fine young lad in 2008 who said, oh, there's this whole world out there and we're about to go discover

it. Yeah. And my buddy, this was like 8 years before I met Jen, and my buddy bought some course on a late night commercial. It was Ron LeGrand talking the year 2000 about quick turn real estate and all this. So I wholesale my first deal back then after borrowing the course. My friend worked out well, but fast forward, it was 7 years. So I made my next deal. I meet Jen and end of '07, the world's crashing, right? Banks are no longer lending. There's all types of issues going on. So the end of 2008, we're finding deals. And so she was a teacher. I worked at a car dealership, but we found deals in the MLS. We were putting in low offers. We were finding junkers in the nice part of town, but fixer-uppers, right? And we buy them, pay cash, remodel, rent it out, refinance, do it all over again. But it was— but you buy a deal every year or two. Yeah. And plus we were working. Now we got married and started having a family. Jen walked away from teaching. But in 2016, I was at the bank refinancing out of our next deal and the bank was like, hey, like, you realize that 10 mortgages, we have to cut you

off. And that's a 10

mortgage. Oh yeah. I felt so defeated because I'm like,

what? That was our golden ticket, right? Like that was going to get him out of the car business. Now

what? I was like, we're going to sell cars forever, right? So I just didn't want to be that 90-year-old still selling cars. So when I realized that there was this whole world of creative finance, I went down the YouTube channel, found out what it was back in 2016, and I took Jenna to dinner one night, maybe had a glass or two of wine, and I explained to her, hey, this exists. We need to hire a coach because I could see the big picture, but there was like missing pieces of the puzzle I didn't know. And so that's what we did. And so we spent some money on ourselves, and I never went to college, so this was the first time I'm actually spending like capital on education other than like audiobooks and books and things like that. This was like a whole other

level. Um, well, and that's the way that you— that's, that's a great way to approach it. Uh, start with a couple glasses of wine and then ease into, hey, yeah, I have, I have an

idea. Yeah, he has an entrepreneurial spirit, so this wasn't like the first time he's like, hey, let's try this. And so, but we'd already had some rental properties and I didn't love some of the things about being a landlord. And so with this, we were, he started talking about, hey, there's this way to rent to own the property. We could create homeowners out of renters and we won't have all these landlord responsibilities, but we'll make more money. And I was like, okay, well, all that sounds really

great. Like, let's learn more. That's super interesting. And this is something that a lot of people who start in single family, they run into this 10-property conundrum, which first of all, an excellent problem to have. While frustrating, you're like, you've got through the first 10 deals. Like that's an incredible place to be. A lot of people never get there. And now you get there and how you pivot is always interesting. So your solution there that started out as rent-to-own, for

those— Well, when we were buying them, we were buying them with like seller finance or wraps. Yeah. When we were actually buying them. But then instead of having these rentals where, you know, if you own rental properties, like the lamp, the light bulb went out or the faucet. And so when we realized we could do rent-to-own, yeah, like that was the favorite action

strategy. We just went nuts with that, which is a cool way to do it, right? You can get in and you can— it is a way. So when you're buying these, by the way, for rent-to-own, you are, you are renting the property to own, right? Or you're buying them and then renting to own to the tenant. Yeah, we actually buy them, close on them, buy them, rent to own to the

tenant. You got

it. Yeah, we want to control the

deed.

Yep. Yeah, there we go. Thank you for that. There's— I, I am not a big fan of— there's a time and place for it, but I'm not a big fan of arbitrage. So you guys are like, hey, we're going to get on the deed, we're going to get the asset, we own the equity. Now what are we going to do? We're going to rent to own so that our tenants have to own it. It's, you know, it's not even that dissimilar from seller financing really, if you, if you look at it, but You control the deed, you control the asset. You have a tenant who has a path to perhaps one day own the property. You set all the goalposts, which is a huge part of creative finance in general, is you want to control the variables of the deal. You get to go in on the way in and on a wrap with seller financing and go, all right, here's our price, here's our terms, here's any special clauses we want to negotiate. And on the way out, here's a price we know works for us. The tenant may or may not actually buy it, but they're going to be renting it at a rent that makes our deal work. And if they opt to buy it, they have an option to purchase, it's a price that works for us. That's a fantastic

strategy. Well, we love it. Yeah. And the reason I love it, because you get the 3 big paydays. You get a big chunk when they move in, you get more cash flow every month because we don't have to worry about maintenance or management because they're taking care of all the maintenance. And then once they do buy the property, you get the big back-end check, which is great too. And Meanwhile, you're still retaining ownership. That's why I like this method the best. I'm still writing off depreciation. I still get the benefits of appreciation because every few years we might change the terms a little bit. But it's also— it helps with taxes because I've had some folks who buy with owner financing and then they turn around and immediately sell it with seller financing. So if you buy it for $300,000 and sell it for $375,000, even though you might have only collected $20,000 down, you get taxed on that $75,000 right away. And so you get taxed more than what you actually made on the deal sometimes. So this is why we love that rent-to-own strategy. The only problem with this, like, out of all the 50 states, Texas— y'all Texans don't like this stuff down there. Um, it's the only, only state, but the other 49, it works really well. In Texas, you do resell it to somebody else with seller financing. So a little bit different strategy

there. Texas has some interesting real estate rules. There are certain things that Texas is stricter on than other places, and things that we're more lax on. Texas runs a little bit unique for, for real estate. I own in Washington and all over Texas, so I deal with all of the crazy

rules. Well, your foreclosure laws in Texas are the best because if I buy a deal in New York and I put somebody in rent-to-own, or in California or so many— Massachusetts, so many of these other states— if I sold that property on owner financing and my buyer stopped paying, to foreclose could take years. Multiple years. In Texas, it's like 45

days. Texas is, is a lot easier. We are extremely landlord and lender friendly. You can play the game on both sides very simply, which I like simple legal. So it is

helpful.

Yeah. You guys did say one thing early on that I really want to make sure that our listeners understand. So you said seller financing with a wrap. And we talk a lot about creative finance. We've talked a lot about lease options. We talk about seller finance, land contracts. When you're doing a wrap, explain in layman's terms, what is a wrap when you're doing creative

finance? So what we're doing is we're buying a property. They— the seller has an existing mortgage on that property. And through a series of papers, it's not me qualifying for a new mortgage. I'm not going to borrow money from anybody. It's a series of documents recorded saying what the terms are that I'm going to be paying. And the reason why we buy it on a wrap is because it's a new note created. It protects my seller completely. So if You know, we have a seller right now. He sold us his house like 4 years ago and he's buying another property. I sent Philippa the message. And so when we bought it with the wrap, it's so easy to get him qualified for another mortgage because there's the

mortgage. It's like his third

mortgage. Yeah, this is the third time. He's like, I will never buy another house again. And here he is doing it

again. He's a great

guy. Yeah. And so, and we show him that we've made the last 12 payments and then it helps him get qualified. Also with a wrap, the paperwork that's recorded with the county also says if the buyer Joe and Jen or anybody else listening doesn't pay, the seller can foreclose and take the property back. So that's why we prefer that method over buying it with subject to, which subject to, that note is not created. So they're very similar. Just with a note, it's to protect your sellers, which ideally protects you too as the

buyer. And again, it's just so much cleaner. I like wraps a lot more just because conceptually you're not circumventing anything. It's a much simpler document saying, hey, we're just going to wrap around the existing mortgage. We're going to create a note. It's very straightforward. To the extent that you can, you really should own your debt. And so it gets more of your name on title. It is a better protection for the seller, and it's a simple way of executing functionally the same

thing. Well, and to give you an example of one we just did, we had a seller in Florida. He actually moved to Texas because of his job, had a house built 2 years ago. So it's a 2-year-old house, gorgeous property. Um, he had $12,000 of equity. So he says, if you give me $12,000 of equity I'll let you do a mortgage takeover where the mortgage, the loan stays in the seller's name. But with a wrap, we're able to buy it and get the lower interest rate. He's got a 4% rate. The payment is $1,900 with taxes and insurance all in, and it rents for probably about $2,500. And it's a 2-year-old house that's $300-something thousand that we paid $12,000 down, got a 4% rate, no credit checks, no loans, No W-2s, no nothing. It's the easiest thing. And we were able to close when they were wanting to because they were— he was already gone and she was packing

up. So how do you manage the due-on-sale clause when you're doing a wrap? You have a deal, there's an existing mortgage in place, it's in their name, there's a title change on the property. Does that ever come up? How do you protect against that? What does that piece look

like? Yeah, so we deed the property to a land trust and it's not like the bulletproof way, but it is a way where it's not deeded into an LLC and things like that. And so there's many different workarounds for that, but many times we're going to deed it into a trust. Here's the big thing, the biggest thing, you got to make sure that you're making the payment on time, which to us is

early. Don't— shocking, right? I mean, it's like rule number one, but yeah, mess it

up. And then have the proper insurance on the property because the bank, they're in business to lend money and to make sure that their assets are properly insured just in case an event happens. So pay them on time, make sure you've got proper insurance, deed it into a land trust. And I mean, anything could happen. You could, you know, get hit by a car crossing the street. Due-on-sale clause can be a thing. And if it is, there's ways to fix that. I mean, I could redo the paperwork and buy it as a lease option if the worst-case scenario happened. So there's many workarounds about it. So I don't stop that from doing business. And we've done a ton of these. I've consulted with some of the best attorneys all over the country. One is actually in Dallas that he's helped us years and years and years ago just to make sure we're crossing all the T's and dotting the I's. And I think the biggest, you know, biggest thing to talk about is making sure you're working with really great attorneys or title companies who really truly understand this. So they set up the deal the right way, cross all the T's and dot the I's. And that's crucial because some attorneys say, I know how to do it, but they really

don't. Well, and when you're building your business plan, you have to be aware of the things that can come up, right? When you're getting creative with anything, but you're doing creative finance, the more creative the deal is, inherently, the more risk it has, right? It just has more moving pieces. So you need to make sure that if you're basing your financial freedom on a strategy that has something in it, like, you know, a potentially callable note, that you're planning through it, you're talking to attorneys, and you're building a business plan so that you don't have 25 of these out and 20 of them get called, right? And not that that would ever happen. It's very rare that these do get called, but it's happened a little bit more in the last few years. Banks have been a little bit more— they've done a little bit more diligence since rates went from like 3% to 7%. There are some banks that are looking at it, and if they have a problem, they do now have a financial incentive to potentially want to recast that

loan. Well, and I think that's the point, is once again, what gets in their spotlight— deeding a property to an LLC that was in somebody's name, they'll catch that. Don't, don't make the payments on time, don't have good insurance, and these are

all— or like telling the bank, like, I think That's a really key one too, is like you don't need to call the bank and have the seller talk to them, right? Like there's just— everything has to happen like on the back end, you know, mortgage portal logins, everything with the attorneys. But the less you have to actually go and

speak— that's a good rule of real estate, by the way. RAPS and subject to, they're all perfectly legal. You're absolutely allowed to do them. However, in general, the lender is not your friend. A bank is not your friend. The less information they have, like, don't hide information that you legally need to disclose. Don't do anything unethical, of course. Great. But the lender is not your friend. Don't give them more things than they asked for. You do a deal on a wrap, provide what you need to do, pay what you need to pay. Don't be late. Don't underinsure. Be smart. I do see a lot of people who do get called. They do something silly or they don't get a mentor or they don't They don't really research how to do it. They just go, oh cool, I'll just keep the existing mortgage in place and we'll be fine. Those are the people who get called mortgages. And that's, you know, that's where you can buy the insurance in

place. Like, oh my

goodness. Well, and so this is why I love buying creative real estate, because 40% of the houses across the whole country, 40%, are owned free and clear, which is great. We don't have to worry about taking over payments. I can just pay a seller directly. Favorite, favorite way. You could get 1.5%, 2% interest rates. You could do all types of great things with that. Doesn't have to be based on 30-year amortization. You could, I mean, there's so many more creative things you could do with a free and clear property. So 4 out of every 10 are these, right? They're owned outright. And then when I look at the creative side of it, the people who actually have mortgages, out of all of the mortgages, it's like 68% have a rate under 4%. So in this current climate where rates are 7% today, We're still targeting those 2s and 3s, and that's where you're able to find deals that actually cash flow. Because I talked to somebody today, he's an investor and he wants to learn creative. He just bought his second property. He came up with $80,000 down to buy the deal. I said, great, well, how much are you going to cash flow every month? He says, well, I'm going to lose about $200 a month. And I was like, well, wait a minute, you just came up with $80,000 to lose $200 a month. Like, who sold you on that theory? And he's like, this is all I know. And I was like, well, how many times have you done this before? He's like, this is the second deal I've done that. So I'm like, you've came up with a potentially $150,000 just to lose $500 a month on your two rentals you have. And he was like, yep. I was like, yeah, we need to stop doing that conventional stuff. It's just not penciling out right

now. How much the property

was? $80,000 down? It was like in the threes, high threes, he said. He said a crack under $400,000. Wow. Yeah, in North Carolina. So I mean, this is what's going on. This is the current climate right now. So if I'm an investor, like, what else am I going to do? Am I going to have to do that every

time? Well, and the answer to this, and this is a really simple thing, I actually had a mentor really early who was, was a wizard at buying anything with creative finance and then promptly losing it. So that is where we came up with two underwriting criteria. How do you buy it? And how do you never lose it? Which is another fancy way of saying buy and then hold. If you want to be rich, hold a lot of real estate for a long period of time. It does go up, but it only works if you can hold it. The rules of the game are you buy for cash flow. Like, you buy a property that cash flows day one. Every single time, every single time you sign for something, your income goes up. That's the simple science behind it. If you don't deviate from that, and you don't have to sacrifice cash flow, you just continue to have more and more income that services the debt. And over time, debt gets devalued and rents go up over time and values go up over time and you're good. But it only works if you have cash flow. If you're buying a bunch of negative deals, there's only so much money you can afford to lose with the money that you

earn. Yeah,

right. And you're not

doing— if you do cash flow deals, you can buy infinite deals, right? If every time I buy a deal, my financial power goes up, I can just do infinite deals within

reason. And who wants to lose that much money for 25 years? Plus the maintenance. That's the other thing too. Like, that's just the payment you're losing out. What about management, maintenance? He's got to have to self-manage these. Like, one payment comes in late and you're $200 behind, it turns into more. It just gets to be in a really interesting spot. So this is the kind of the climate that many investors are facing right now. And that's why we've been doing these deals for a long time. But in the last handful of years, especially in the last two when rates have been just kind of almost steadily going up, I feel like it's just became more popular. But we didn't invent this. None of us did. This has been going for like decades and decades and decades. But this is just why I love this one strategy. It's our

favorite. Talking about scaling infinitely, how far have you scaled on this? So you got— you guys really started mastering more of the creative, the lease option. You guys started honing in your strategy around the time you had 10 properties, right? Where are you at today in your

portfolio? So when COVID happened in 2020, I got a job at a dealership. My— I just got a big promotion. They lay everybody off in New York. New York is like frozen. COVID. So I'm sitting home and my wife is telling me, she's like, this is the time where we're going to do this full time. Now is the time we're going to do it. And I was terrified in the beginning. Like, I didn't even think this was going to be really happening this soon. I thought maybe one day. And so we had a coach at the time who was like, if you're going to do this full time, you need to hire some guys and hire somebody to help you. So we brought on 2 interns, which one was a 19-year-old like pizza delivery guy. The other one was a bartender, the same guy who probably made us the drinks the night I told him that we needed coaching. But now he was working on our team as like, like an apprentice, almost an intern. And we went from doing 1 deal every year or 2 to now doing a deal a month. And that's when our business started to take off. Then we started hitting more deals per month. We started growing a team of just us doing deals. We started doing them more in other states because upstate New York was great, but we started doing deals in Pennsylvania and North

Pole. But with that, we realized that in order to buy these creative deals, we needed cash flow to keep the business up and running, to run sponsored ads, to help pay, to get sellers a little bit of down payment if they needed, or at least cover closing costs. So we did start wholesaling a little bit or assigning terms deals for a little while there. And I think that was really key as well because that's a little bit of a misconception is that you can just keep buying property. You're going to run out of money if you don't then have private money lenders or hard money or whatever it is. And that's one thing we've just always been very organic about is funding our own businesses. But now as the market's shifting, these deals are popping up more. Yeah, they're coming more and

more. So we have one right now in Cape Coral, I think. Are we closing on it tomorrow? Yeah, what's his name? And the seller has a beautiful house. It's worth $1.2 million if it's all dolled up. It's built in '98, so it's a relatively newer house. It's just dated, but it's clean. He's getting divorced. He's like, if I'll do the deal at $800,000, if you give me $40,000 down. He's got a 2.87% rate. He's got a boatload of equity, but gives a 10-year term. He just wants the $40,000 to give his ex-wife so he can move back up north. So on that deal, I actually have an investor friend of ours who buys a lot. He owns buildings. I mean, he's got a bunch of stuff and he's looking for a house in that area. We're at a meetup and I'm like, hey, he's like, do you have a really good deal right now? I'm like, I do. This is a 3,000-square-foot house on the water with a boat lift. It's got the pool. It's absolutely gorgeous. It needs nothing. So that deal we're assigning. So we do assign some of those, but I don't like to because you don't build long-term wealth from assigning those deals. So most of the deals that we do assign are going to be our cash deals. But we do some fix and flips. We do some wholesaling too. Our creative deals, we've got close to 30 right now because every year we have a handful, sometimes less, that actually buy the house and they qualify for that mortgage. And once they do, you know, you get a big old back-end check which opens up the doors to buying more properties. Our cash flow on the properties we have is fantastic because once again, we're not buying deals that don't cash flow. So this is kind of the key to success too, is finding deals that actually cash flow. Doesn't matter what the market is

doing. Now, when you're buying these deals, do you guys own all of them yourself? Do you ever partner with people to help fund the deals? What does the actual partnership structure look like if you use

one? You look at it, we only partner with ourselves, so we've never borrowed money for a deal. We've just funded them ourselves. And just what it

is. I was curious about that because you mentioned the wholesaling. And so everyone, everyone hits a point where you're scaling beyond the money you have. And though you can do zero-down deals, generally speaking, almost every deal needs some sort of down payment. So you had mentioned like, oh, you can't just buy infinite deals. I was like, well, there are a few ways to buy infinite deals, but you need to either borrow other money, have other partners, or you have to find another way to generate income out of your pipeline. So you found, hey, we have a surplus of deals. If we turn some of those deals into cash, we have more cash that we can then do as a down payment. And that's how you guys built your engine to effectively buy as many deals as you can scale to. That's the question that everyone has to figure out is, hey, for my business model, a great deal will find cash if you wanted to bring in more people. And if you don't want partners, partners are variables. That's a huge thing. I don't do, I don't do any variable rate debt ever because if I buy cash flow, I want to keep cash flow. Long-term fixed-rate debt that cash flows, that's a golden deal. The other major variable that people run into is people. People are really expensive variables. Ask me how I know. I've spent hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of dollars on fixing people things. Uh, people are expensive. If you have a model that works for your business and you can have less total partners, or in your case no total partners, and you can have the longest term fixed-rate debt possible, you end up with an effectively invincible portfolio. Of course, something horrible could happen, but statistically, you're not going to get out. And then you buy another property and another property, you bolster the portfolio. I love that. When you said you can't scale infinitely, I was like, there's a few ways that one could, depending on how you want to structure it. I, for those listening, this is the correct way to do it. You know your pieces, you know who you want to partner with, you know what you want to do and not do. You build a business plan to what you have. I'm not a huge fan of wholesaling. Wholesaling in this model makes perfect sense because you have a surplus of opportunity. Take that surplus, help other people get into the game, take the profit, buy more real estate. I like this. That's not vertical

integration. Well, and the neat thing is too, is when we generate leads, just like anything else, you're going to generate— usually they fall in a couple buckets. Either they have a fixer-upper and they're willing to give a big discount which, okay, I have the opportunity to do a fix and flip and we do some of those. But I think as the market is shifting, I'm doing less of those or

wholesaling. They're not my favorite

anymore. We've done enough. So any one of the ones will come up, but we're definitely not doing full remodels, not doing complete junkers, things like that. If it was something like— could be one thing, but I'm really not focusing on that. So of all those properties, we have cash buyers that will want those deals and we, we could wholesale those. And so you could wholesale every 2 deals and keep 1 that's a creative deal, which is going to be that beautiful house where the seller isn't going to give you some huge discount. And they're usually just turnkey. They just, they're highly motivated because they have a situation going on. And there's a whole list of the reasons why. And like you mentioned, many of those deals you could buy with very little cash down. I actually have a whole section in our CRM of sellers who said yes to terms where they just want too much money down. So either we sell off one of the properties and we roll it into a 1031 exchange and we could, you know, share that with a handful of properties and buy them all at once. But we keep a close eye on those leads and then some of those will actually have a change of heart and say, okay, I don't need $30,000 down, can you do $10,000? Right? And they say yes. And we turn that into a deal. So sometimes we move people like Cape Coral. I mean, he started off with over $100,000. He took $40,000 and he started off at 1.2 and he's down to $800,000 now because it took Time and circumstance. 10 months on that

lead. Okay, Cave Carl, tell me a little bit about this deal. How did this deal come up? What does it look like? I want to hear about an actual transaction you guys put together. What does this look like in

practice? So, Oddie's a great dude. Um, this one I was mentioning, he got divorced and he was like, hey, listen, I owe my wife all of this money. I'm moving back up north. I need this house gone. I said, okay, I'll buy it, but I would do it with terms. He says, because everybody's offering cash, he's reaching out to every investor. Nobody's biting on it for even close to what he wants. Okay. He listed with an agent, not selling at $1.2 million, drops it to $1.1, takes it off the market. He's all pissed, mad. Nice to us though, but he's just frustrated because of his situation. So as we talked to him, he reached out to us, I think it was March, been a while, beginning of March this year. Right now, as you're listening to this, it's December. Okay. So it's been that long. But when he reached out to us, his terms where I still want $1.2 million. He would do terms. He wanted $100, I think, $50,000 down. And we're like, we're not even close. And so over time we would follow up with them. He would say, oh no, Joe, I already got a buyer. No big deal. I've got my buyer. I'm like, great, when do you guys close? He's like, oh, we're 3 weeks out. I'm like, I'll cycle back. So if you ever listening and you have a seller and they say, and I've got a buyer, still follow up with them. That's when you actually follow up with them even more because many times deals fall apart. Course his did. Life right now, life changed and the climate changes. And obviously the divorce is over. He needs to give her all this money. And to the point where he's like, listen, $800,000 is his number. He's like, just give me $40,000 down and you could get this 2.8 rate. I don't care. Now he owes $500,000 in the house. So he's got $250,000 of equity left over. And he gave us up to 10 years, no interest, no payments, nothing on the $250,000 equity, as long as we could just take over that payment and get that off his

hands. I think you need to say that one more

time. He's got $250,000 of equity in the deal. We're not making any payments on that equity. We're not making— paying any interest on that equity. We don't have to pay that for 10 years. And he knows that and he's totally okay with that. And after he gets paid the $250,000, the rest of the loan balance, that 2.8% rate, they're allowed to keep that in place for the rest of the

balance. He doesn't care. And that's all it takes. For creative finance. Till you found someone who has a problem— it happened to be a personal problem, not a property problem in this particular instance, uh, a problem that you're capable of solving. They had a specific price they weren't getting. If you can't win on price, you win on terms. You figured out what he needs, you were patient, and now the opportunity comes up where you're able to solve his problem and solve your problem. If you want to deal with cash flows and you want great

terms— well, also too, you buy it at $800, you put $150 into it, and the thing is selling for $1.2 even currently right now because there's a ton of supporting comps, and his is slightly even bigger. It's so nice. It's in the right part of the, of the

water. So in this one, I gotta say, like, this is like a more of a— I don't say complex deal, but I don't think it's one as new. If we were just learning this in 2016, 2017— oh yeah, we wouldn't have the network, the know-how, the confidence, the, the real true structuring. And so like throughout all the years of spending with mentors and really getting into the right masterminds and having people that you can know, like, and trust and do business with, I think that is really like the beautiful thing that maybe we don't realize unless you stop and like take a look at it because, you know, it's been years in the making. So if you're listening and you're like, oh wow, like I don't know if I could ever do that, you can. It's just going to take a little while to get there, to, to get around those right people and be able to do deals like

that. Well, and the nice thing with that too is you get around the right people. Yeah, it's hard work and yeah, it takes some studying, but once you train that muscle, you know how to look at a deal creatively. You look at every deal differently. You're able to do deals that are just out there that other people weren't able to do. The, the first deal that really got me started in creative finance, a 38-plex that was on the market for $2 million for 13 years at the same price. Everyone and their sister has seen this deal. We were able to meet with the seller and like, what do you want? We want $10,000 a month payments. I'm like, okay, um, you have 38 units and you're only collecting $5,000 because you guys have no one paying. How would we pay that? All it took to do that deal was we negotiated a period of very, very low payments while we got collections up, and then the $10,000 a month kicks in. It was 4% interest. Most of the payment was principal paydown. We got the building bringing in $31,000 a month. The payments are 10, and most of it's paying off the debt. It got appraised for $4.1 million. And that's where I realized, if you look at the deal just a little bit differently and you figure out what do they want and what would it take for this deal to work, you just get— it's not even that creative, right? It's just a little basic tweak in the deal. It's okay. It needs to

go. Yeah. But you know what's crazy? How many other people pass on that amazing deal because they didn't know that strategy? Think about it. For 13 years and all you did was paid a good dollar for the property, but you're able to make it in a way that they felt good about it and you did

too. And I didn't even know you I knew you could do that when I bought it. I was just like, well, it would work if we didn't have to pay, if we didn't have to pay that until later. If it cash flowed today and you gave me time, I can make it cash flow later. How would one do this? It's having that muscle of sitting down and going, well, what would get them what they want and get me what I want? And if you know where the goalposts are, you can get up there and you can play the game. And you did that with this deal. It's a perfect example. That's when you say creative finance, that's the creative piece. It's saying, hey, this is something that someone else can't do. I'm going to take a little creativity and I'm going to replace money with creativity. And what you find is people like Jen and Joe, you can buy a lot of real estate in

general. Well, between— oh, go ahead. Yeah, between New York and Florida, we've got a bunch of single-family homes. We've had other friends of ours, people that we've worked with who have done multifamily. One did a car wash. So businesses, I mean, it works on so many different things. It's not just like homes. And that's what's great about it. So after you understand the concept of creative finance, like, you want to find that 38-unit, like, it works there. You want to find a single-family home, you want to do high-end stuff that's millions of dollars of real estate, like, this is more common than you'd even think. But they don't teach you this. This is a whole other strategy. And this is why I think that once we started doing this, it was like, does everybody else know this stuff even exists? Like, holy

cow. No, it feels like you're in your own world and you're able to do— again, you're able to take the deals that everyone else has looked at. I mean, sometimes you do a deal just off market, but you find a lot of deals that everyone else had an opportunity at, but you come up with a solution and now you win the deal and now you move forward where others didn't. And sometimes you actually make a ton of money on a deal that other people have passed on, which is, which is just a crazy thing. I wish everyone learned this. Speaking of you guys, you guys share the knowledge with other people. I saw your website, Creative Finance Playbook, by the way. A nice simple easy, uh, landing page. So those who want to check that out, it's very easy to go through and read and see exactly what it is you guys do. Uh, tell me a little bit about the, the story behind Creative Finance Playbook. Why did, why did you even start that? Teaching is a time-consuming

task. Yeah, well, I think part of it was my background, um, being a former teacher. Um, I, I just love explaining to people, helping, seeing the aha moments. And then Joe also was at a leadership role at the dealership and did a lot of training salesmen, you know, just getting team members all on the same page, kind of wrangling everybody like, this is the vision, and like getting everyone to understand that. And so honestly, it just like most things that happened really truly organically, like Joe mentioned, we started growing our team with bartenders and pizza delivery guys and even had one of our girls that still works with us came out of high school. You know, she just joined our team and we realized that, you know, we could teach anyone that has a desire to to learn and is coachable and teachable. And during COVID like most people, we were home and we were on our phones a lot and I just love Instagram. So we would just hit the go live button and we would talk about what we were up to, right? Like simply sharing what we're doing to the point where we were starting to get messages of like, hey, I don't see a place where I can pay you money. I want to talk to you and I'm not going to just pick your brain. And I'm like, oh, what does he

mean? At first we were like, no, we're

busy. Yeah, we're doing this, we're doing that. And then finally I was like, okay, well here's my PayPal, right? Kind of just started that and then started putting it out there a little bit more. We did like little masterclasses, we called them. And, you know, we just finally said, you know what, let's try this mentor thing out because it truly changed our lives. And we had some people pour into us and we met consistently, but we also had some things where we were like, that didn't work well. And I wish we had had that. And so we kind of blended that. I used my 7th grade English background of being like, okay, let's simplify it all. Cause some of the stuff he talks about was like way over my head. And I know like I could see the, Glossy Eyes, so that we would just take it back into small bite-sized pieces. And then throughout the years, we've had a lot of successful clients and, you know, really been able to grow

it. And I found it's so rewarding when you, when you find something and you go through all the headache and the pain of getting a business model to work, right? There's a lot of learning and a lot of time that goes into that, and you're able to help other people move faster and also make less mistakes, which is, which is a huge piece of it. I don't know what the largest cost was for you guys. I know for everyone though, when you're starting a business and you're learning, regardless of how many mentors you have, uh, the dumbest you'll ever be is at the beginning. The more you do it, the more you learn. Uh, when you guys were learning, was there a specific instance or one thing you're like, this was the highest stupid tax we had to pay learning to go from newbie to where we're at now? Is there one thing that stands out where you're like, man, if someone could not repeat that mistake? They would move forward faster and build a better business than I

did. I knew what mine was the minute you asked that question. I'm like, yup. So I do my first deal because I listen to audio cassette tapes. I watch VCR tapes. I read a book. This is back in the year

2000. Are you young people? Look up audio tape and

cassette. I think I still have the VCR tape somewhere around

here. I grew up with cassette

tapes. Sets as well. So, okay, this was out before DVDs. Yeah. Um, so if you want to know, but what happened was when I did my very first deal, it was 7 years until I did my next deal. Um, there is— yeah, the reason why was, you know, there wasn't groups, there wasn't communities, there wasn't any type of like programs that really could keep you locked in. And sometimes that's what you need, rather. It's like whatever things you got going on, if you could be in a group of people who are on the same mission, all doing the same thing, all sharing strategies. And that's why I love masterminds. Like, we are always with a coach, we always are in part of masterminds, like always, always, always, because you want to be with people who are many steps in front of you, who are help blaze that trail and they can get you through it. So the reason why it took me that long between then was I don't feel like I was getting around enough the right people. Um, and then in 2008 what happened and just deals started popping up. There wasn't Zillow even really then But deals started to come on the market. And then it just came like, I don't know, most people were leaving the market, not buying. And for us, it was like duck season. Like, here's these deals just coming out of everywhere. So we were buying. I wish we bought more because some of those deals that we bought back then, holy cow, what

a— woulda, shoulda. We only knew creative in

2008. Yeah, if we did back then. Jeepers creepers. Because we've done it. I mean, a ton of deals. We've done a ton of wholesale. We've done a ton of fix and flips. You know, we've got our portfolio now and we've had it more, but, you know, some buy and then we continue to add more to it and it grows. But I mean, if we knew back then, so like if the market is taking a dip now and nobody knows, but even if it is, some of our best deals were when it was when nobody else was buying. So be able to accumulate cash flowing assets without going to the bank, without using your credit, rather single family, multifamily, it's, you know, make, make it make money. If it does, those are— it's always a good time to

buy. And I think to piggyback on that is like if I had had more of a support system to like, it's okay to hire things out. Like I remember even just hiring a cleaner while he worked crazy hours and we had the rentals and like, like I felt guilty about that. But the more we've scaled, like I realized like you've gotta have a team and the people have gotta help you and you've gotta delegate and you've got to really be okay with other people like doing jobs for you that, cuz you can't do it all. And I don't know if it's more of like a women, like mom life thing where I, I was just like, no, I have to do all the things. Like, no you don't. You need to do the income-producing tasks. What is your zone of genius? What can make you the most money? Like, where can you really best put yourself to really put that position of like scaling instead of trying to, you know, do the dishes and make every single meal and all that. So I think that would've been really helpful for me even earlier on. We may have gotten in a better position instead of, you know, me trying to do it all while he was at

work. That's something that a friend of mine recently actually had me implement. I put the income-producing tasks in green on my calendar, and then I have the— there's the things that I have to do to run the business that are important. They're a different color. And you know, I have the things that could lead to money in the future as a different color. And so I go through and when it's like, okay, there's too much to do, I have a lot on my plate. What things do I need to get done right now? I prioritize the income-producing tasks. And it also helps as I get down the line when we get to things where it's like, okay, Um, you get a certain place in business, it's like, okay, doing the, uh, mowing the lawn, is that something that is better? I, I was raised in a very frugal family, so we saved every dollar. And so for me, I was like, of course I'm going to mow my own lawn. And then you do a cost-benefit analysis, you're like, hmm, income-producing tasks or save like $100. And it's like, let's probably spend that time on the business building what we're what we're building on. Uh, so that's something I think everyone learns at some stage, especially— a lot of it comes down to upbringing, but it may be easier or harder for you to delegate tasks. But when you really go through, just be like, okay, what things am I doing in a day, and what is the, the value that each of these tasks are bringing to my overall vision as a whole? For you too, what got you— what was the, the, the primary driver? I, I love husband and wife teams. My wife and I, I remember it was also during 2019, 2020 when my business really took off. We're sitting at home. She was also a teacher teaching kindergarten. We sat down and did— by the way, teaching kindergarten over Zoom, are you kidding

me? Uh, oh my gosh, bless her heart. That was our son. He was in kindergarten and had his whole kindergarten year, and his teacher was phenomenal. Shout out, Mrs. Beluco. But like, it was crazy, right? Like a little 5-year-old sitting there on his little Zoom call, and I'm like, he did great. Art class was Not great, but everything else he did really

great. Well, she was teaching in a really impoverished area too, a lot of refugees at the time. The area has actually changed a little bit, but at the time in that area of South Seattle, you had a lot of families, both parents worked, and they have 4, 5, 6 kids. So trying to teach a kid, their parents' first language may or may not be English, trying to teach them over Zoom how to use technology, it was

impossible.

Yeah. And then she came back and she got injured, uh, almost immediately. School district handled it horribly. They tried to cover it up. It was a— the whole thing was a disaster. So that's what changed for me is all of that happened. I was like, we need to do something else. Was there a moment for you guys, or what, what did it look like as a couple to come together and say, boy, we're going to go 100% all in into this? I'm gonna leave teaching, we're gonna leave cars, we're gonna, we're gonna get into this. Was there outside of a couple glasses of wine? Was there something that sparked the need to do

that? So I'm dating John for 2 weeks. We're in New York. It's freezing cold. I really liked her. She's a beautiful— so I'm like, hey, my grandparents are in Florida. Let's go visit Florida. You're a teacher. Don't worry, I make good money with my job. I'll pay for the trip. Her parents, her family, all friends are like, oh, he's gonna go down there and throw you off the back of a boat or something. I'm like, I could do that up here. I wouldn't take her halfway across. I'm not gonna do that, but good point. Good try. Um, yeah, so I take her down to Florida. As we're down here, we're like rented a car, we're driving around. Like, how awesome would it be if we could like move to Florida but don't have to be like in my 70s like my grandparents? Like, how awesome would this be? Like one day, right? That was like our fantasy that we thought, you know, we could do that. And we always loved being around each

other. So for— I was gonna say, it wasn't like one— I mean, there was like one final moment when COVID hit and I was like, let's go. But it was— it started when we met. I mean, I was 20 26. I was 26, he was 30. And by that point, like, we just knew. And so our schedules in the very beginning, he worked— we almost worked opposite. Like, by the time he got home some nights at like 10 o'clock, I'm already trying to sleep because I got to be up by 5, 5:30 the next morning to drive an hour to work. So like, he worked on weekends, I had summers off. Like, it was just very like— and when you find the person you want to spend your life with, you want to spend time with them. And 2 weeks a year was not enough for me or him. And so when he shared the vision of rental properties and one day we could grow a business together, I was like, that sounds amazing. Like, I would love to do life with you, right? Like, to be by your side every day, be able to work together. And so we always thought like one day when the kids are off in school and I kind of thought in your 50s, right? Like it might happen then. But then when COVID hit and everything shut down and we had everything in place, we had the 10 properties, we had We had just signed up with a new mentor. We were going to run some sponsored ads on Facebook. So we were going to have incoming leads. I was like, it is time. And like, that was just like, burn the boats. We're not looking back. We're jumping in. We're betting on us. Like, there were no date nights. There was no— we were super frugal. Like, we just kind of like hunkered down and went to work and paid

off. And by May 2020, we were doing deals. Yeah. I mean, everybody knows what March was like. And I mean, it was terrifying. You know, the 2-week flatten the curve whole thing was going

on. And honestly, we were a little scared because he does have

Crohn's.

Chrones. So he was on a special medication that, you know, lowered immune system. So like in our heads we were nervous, like if he went back to the dealership, like could he end up in the hospital on a ventilator? Like that was a real concern. And so that was not an option. Like we were bound and

determined. That's one of the fun things. This is why choosing the right spouse is so unbelievably important. Like when you share a vision— this, by the way, this applies to business partnerships as well. If you, if you're someone who chooses to do partners, uh, you guys partner with each other. But the people that you choose to surround yourself with and to do projects with, it makes such a difference. If you guys have a shared vision, you can go the same direction. I talk to so many people who are like, man, you know, 5 years into marriage, I wanted to do this entrepreneurial venture, but I can't get my spouse on board. It's like, I can't imagine what that'd be like. That would be, that would be terrible. I'm so blessed to have my wife, Dani, more or less the same boat. We've always been on board and then COVID hit and we're like, okay, here's our jumping off point. Goodbye. Very similar story. But I mean, that's who you should be looking for in a partner. That's— I love hearing

that. That's— it took me 30— it took me 30 years to find

her. I think it's big on communication, right? Like, there are times where you have to, like, you know, theoretically throw the trash can, dump everything out. Like, let's talk about it, right? Like, from head to toe to all of this. And then like, okay, now, like, pick up the pieces. Like, how do we make this part work. And as you grow multiple businesses, and we homeschool our kids now, so like you add even more to the mix. Like, it is— there are challenging moments, but when you do pick the right person, you work through them. And you have, like you said, that vision, that goal, you set that. I think the only thing we really need to work on is more date nights. I always say that, but we need— we are— we will work, work, work, and family time, but man, like, that is one thing we need to get back on board

with. So it's a question I ask a lot of entrepreneur couples. I'm actually really curious about about this. Do you guys find that you like working together so much that you end up vacationing less because you actually just love

working? I can't say that, um, although I will say that where we live, it is seriously like— I mean, one of the best beaches in the world is 10 minutes from our house. So, um, that's part of the reason why we moved to

Florida. But we haven't— so this is the first time upcoming where we act— I put the calendar off. I'm like, we are not working Christmas week. For the first time since being full-time entrepreneurs, we have not taken an entire week off. What that even really means, I don't know. I'm sure we'll still have to take a call or this or that, right? But like, I'm not scheduling meetings, I'm not doing any team things, like no support calls. Coaching is like shut down for the week. So like, this is the first time. But I think what we need to get better about that, because we do love what we do, and it like— there are times where like it's 5 in the morning and he's like, you know, telling me something, or it's Well, probably the opposite. I'm probably squawking in his ear early in the morning and late night he's like, I just listened to this podcast and oh my gosh. And I'm like, babe, I'm falling asleep here, right? But when you're passionate and excited, it's like, it's hard. It blends. There's no balance. But you know, you got, like you said, you find the right

person. But it's like, it's your business and you're excited about what you

do. It's so fun to do business when you're aligned with your spouse. You hear about people like, oh, I can't imagine working with my spouse. I'm like, ooh, that sounds rough. I, love, love working with my wife to the extent where we were looking at taking a trip to Paris. And it's like, well, we could do that, or, or business idea. I think I know what we could do work on this week. And we're like, we took the two options. We ended up canceling the trip. We're like, oh, let's just stay home and work because I love doing this. I love doing this. It's, it's, this is fun. I'd rather, I would rather move forward and keep our momentum that we have right now and the stuff we're excited about than take a break right

now. Can you do it from

Paris? Theoretically, yes. But the flight times and the— I'm looking at, I'm like, you know what would be, you know, it'd be so much simpler just being in our rhythm, doing our thing. Yeah. To me, like, I, I, I moved from Seattle, so Dallas is like paradise. If, if you guys have ever been to Seattle, oh yeah. You'll, you'll understand the, the difference is unimaginable. I can't imagine needing to go somewhere else and be notably happier because I'm like, there's

sunlight. I haven't experienced it. That's what we feel from upstate New York. Like gray, gross all the

time. I have never been to New York

ever. There's no reason to

go. Not just like blasting, blasting rain. I have only gone in horrible windstorms where you can't see 10 feet in front of you in the rain. Yeah, that has been my only experience of New York. Therefore, it is my thus far my second least favorite state that I've

toured. Well, I love Texas. I love

Dallas. I used to live there. I want to go to Texas so bad, but he's afraid if I go go, like, I'm gonna fall in love with, like, all the big houses and maybe want to leave

Florida. To be fair, my house is

huge. Rub it in, rub it

in. You look at what that costs here and you're like, well, how do all these people in Texas have, like, these big gigantic houses? And you look at the prices, I'm like, honey, there's like— Texas is a really big place and, uh, they're not running out of room anytime

soon. You have a lot of land and no

topography. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So Plenty of room to

go. I can't wait to visit one

day. We're excited to have you out here. Everyone, you can find them, by the way. You guys, you guys have a link, creativefinanceplaybook.com. I believe you're also on Instagram, also as Creative Finance Playbook, if I'm not mistaken. Yeah. Are those the best places to find you? Where else would someone go to find you guys

online? Yeah, and I have a personal Instagram, Jen DeLaFave, and it's me running it, not a team or anything. So I just love connecting with people. I was just chatting with some friends over there. Making new friends today even. And they, they were listening to our podcast, Creative Finance Playbook, and they just were implementing some of the strategies that we shared. So it was just so cool to connect with people who are doing these kind of

deals. And he likes social, but yeah, I mean, if you have a deal or you— we could partner on something, especially if you got something rocking in Florida. I'd love to connect. My cell phone, it's probably the best way to get a hold of me. Like, I'm on social media but not really. Like, I'll check it a little bit, but 585- 207-2240. That's my cell phone. So if you call me or text me, you've got especially a deal, uh, let's

connect. There we

go. Don't be surprised when I answer though, because I do answer

that. He does answer, just not at 2

AM. Thank you guys so much for joining. This is so fun to hear a different side of Creative Finance. I love what you guys have built. I love the relationship that you guys have together as husband and wife and as business partners. That is so fun to see. That's something to aspire to for a lot of people. By the way, if you guys enjoyed this episode, you listened all the way through, you might as well like and subscribe. So I appreciate wherever you're listening. I will have the links in the show notes if you want to learn more about them, connect with them. He dropped his own phone number in here, which is crazy. So, um, I suppose everyone just blow up his phone if you have a deal, and, uh, we'll see you all in the next