Christian OsgoodCEO, Multifamily Strategy · CEO at Multifamily Strategy

Take on the debt until you no longer have to!

14 Jun 2024 · 1 min

Watch on YouTube

0:49

In this YouTube monologue, Christian Osgood outlines a leveraged real‑estate investment playbook that uses debt as a tool to acquire properties, stabilize them, optimize cash flow, and then aggressively pay off the debt. He references Dave Ramsey’s popular podcast to frame the common advice of avoiding debt, but argues that strategic leverage can accelerate cash‑flow growth. Osgood supports his claim by citing interviews with numerous successful, non‑celebrity entrepreneurs—mom‑and‑pop landlords who own hundreds of rentals debt‑free after building sufficient cash flow. While acknowledging that this approach may not be the optimal tax strategy, he emphasizes the security and control of owning assets outright without debt, suggesting that debt should be taken on only until it can be eliminated.

Chapters

What do you think about Dave Ramsey? Because he's got one of the biggest podcasts in the world right now. Most of us need to lever to get somewhere. And if you can build enough cash flow, you buy, you stabilize, which gets to your cash flow goal, you optimize, which pushes that cash flow to the most it can be, and you use that to pay off all the debt. When we went around, I've gone around the country doing this, but I just interviewed all the most successful entrepreneurs that I could find. And they're not people that we both know. They're not celebrities. They're the people in every market. It's the mom and pop guy who's like, oh yeah, I have 700 rentals in the city. I talked to all of them. So many of them do not have debt. And when I'm like, why not? And how did you get there? They're like, I built, I built, I built. And at some point I had enough and I just paid it all off and now I own it and I really can't lose it unless I stop paying my taxes. It's just the best strategy. Is it the best tax strategy? Absolutely not. Yeah, but there's something to be said about owning your universe, and you can do that without debt through real estate. You basically use debt to build enough cash flow to kill the debt. Yeah, I like that.