The Secret Strategies of Wealthy Real Estate Investors with Sally Gimon

Hello and welcome to The Owner Meeting Podcast hosted by Multifamily Strategy. I'm Christian, your channel host today, joined by Sally Dieman. Sally is a master at saving money for real estate investors. If you plan to make any money in real estate, I don't care if it's wholesale, buy and hold like I do, multifamily, single family, whatever the strategy is, she will help you set this up in a way where you are actually operating like the rich. I'm actually really excited for this episode. I've already learned a lot speaking with her. Sally, tell us a little bit about you and how you actually got started in this space.

I appreciate you having me on the show. I became a real estate investor in 2018 when my mom got sick 2,000 miles from home. They drove from Goodyear, Arizona to Charlotte for a wedding. My dad calls me to say my mom's in the emergency room. Don't change my flight. I couldn't get time off because I was a Medicare broker. Worst job in the world. Don't ever be a Medicare broker. People yell at you. The wedding was October 27th, 2018. I flew in, uh, we went out to IHOP for breakfast and then my dad took me to the hospital and I walked in on the priest giving my mom last rites. Wasn't ready for that. Go to a wedding, 3 o'clock in the afternoon, go to a country club afterwards, ate too much, drank too much, danced too much, had a great time. A friend of mine introduced me to a real estate group. In 2019 with my mentor, I wholesaled 7 bank-owned properties nationwide. Just real quick. I had a bank-owned property in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. The husband and wife bought 9 years ago, went to foreclosure. They're divorced. He's in Japan with the Army. She's married to a Marine in Coronado, California. I got all the paperwork. The bank's like, we didn't know we owned this property. There was a hole in the roof. They gave it to me for $7,000. I wholesaled it for $65,000. And the gentleman who bought it, Fixed it up and sold it for over $400,000. I mean, win-win-win-win-win for everybody.

Oh, absolutely. That's fantastic. Portland's an awesome market too. So well done.

Oh, I, if I could afford to live there, I love to ski and the water. So, but the bank didn't even know they owned it. It was a crazy thing. Well, fast forward.

How do you find a deal like that where the bank doesn't even know they own it? How did, how did the deal come to you?

My mentor, Jay Tannenbaum, would get these tapes. They call it a tape, but it's an Excel spreadsheet. I went after it. Kind of a funny story. My, one of my cousins, uh, helped me finance things. We, uh, he would give me the money and then we would split the profits 50/50. And then he got 3 of his friends, you know, that's how I got all my money to do this. Uh, COVID struck, everything shut down because banks shut down, courthouses shut down. Uh, on April 1st, my 3 notes did not pay me, so I had no money coming in. On April 4th, my CPA calls and says, congratulations, I got your paperwork. You made so much money in 2019, your tax bracket went from 22% to 24%. I'm not as bad as you. I thought, I thought $94,000 was a bad tax bill.

That is still a huge tax hit if you're not expecting $94,000. That's like, that is higher than the average household income in most states. I mean, that is, that's a huge bill.

Correct. I don't know what you did when you found out about your tax bill. I went to bed that night crying. I'm like, where the heck am I going to get $44,000? I mean, I love my family, but they don't have it. You know, they think I'm crazy. Great book. I don't know if you've heard about this, Christian, but a great book to read is The Power of Your Subconscious Mind by Joseph Murphy. You put a thought in your mind, you sleep on it, and the next morning your subconscious mind has come up with the idea. In my national real estate group, there's a gentleman named Garrett Gunderson. He wrote a book called What the Rockefellers Do. I have a paperback copy of that book. It's now called What the Billionaires Do. And then I also figured out I paid off the mortgage on my house. I was going to talk to a friend of a friend who did HELOCs on paid-off houses. You know, I'm going to, I was going to take the equity out of my house to pay my tax bill. My CPA's idea was set up a meeting, get on a payment plan, pay interest rates and penalties. I'm like, That's not an idea. That's just making me spend more money. So it took me 5 months to research how, uh, the rich save taxes. I started both my, uh, business and beneficial trust in September of 2020 and started teaching in my Phoenix real estate group how to no longer pay capital gains when you sell at a profit, how no longer to pay interest income taxes if you're a passive investor doing subject-to real estate, the BRRRR strategy. My notes were on the paper in the house, on the Bank of Sally. I now have 6 seller financing houses where people are paying me their mortgage. And then hopefully in 2 years they can get their own mortgage and no longer pay rental income taxes. It's going to keep your information completely private. I don't know if you realize this, Christian, but 40% of LLCs, S corps, and C corps get sued every year. You have a better, you have better odds of winning in Las Vegas than having an LLC, S corp, or C corp. And then the third way you're going to save is I can't stop you from being sued, but all lawsuits become frivolous because all your assets are in the spendthrift trust and they can't get ahold of anything. And the fourth way, you're too young to know about this, but if you're over 65 and you're making too much money, there's a thing called the IRMAA surcharge that affects Part B and D that it doesn't, uh, the spendthrift trust, because it files a 1041 tax return, not a 1040 tax return. You do away with that surcharge. I help quite a few people. There are a lot of wealthy individuals who are investing in real estate right now.

So this is really interesting. So high level, if someone's listening to this for the first time, they're like, okay, I do have some assets. I haven't given the thought yet to my asset protection and my overall tax strategy. Instead of filing an S corp or a C corp, high level, For someone who is new to this, what do they need to do? What do the rich actually do to protect their assets and protect themselves as far as tax liability?

Great question. True story. When I started my trust, I shut down 6 LLCs 'cause I was taught as a real estate investor, get an LLC for every one of your properties. I shut them all down and I moved the properties because I was using a servicer. It took about 2 months 'cause he had to send a, Certified letter to the notes and they, you know, things like that. A sad story. If I can tell a sad story, the gentleman who ran my Phoenix real estate group, I started doing a mastermind every Thursday night for 18 months. He sat in on the meeting and I would tell everybody, please be aware. Anyone can go online 24/7 to the Secretary of State or Arizona is a Corporation Commission website. Search LLCs, S corps, and C corps, either by your name or by the name of the LLC or S corp, they can sue you for frivolous things, anything they want. I'm not going to use his name because people will know he's rather well known in Phoenix. He didn't shut down his S corp because he had business credit on the S corp. I don't know what happened to one of his Airbnbs in Scottsdale, but the people who rented the Airbnb sued the S corp for $1 million. He goes, I have the spendthrift trust. I'm like, yeah, but they didn't. They didn't sue the spendthrift trust. They sued the S corp. And he's like, oh my God, I have to pay this. I'm like, I don't know what they're suing for, but you're going to have to figure it out. And he's just like, I listen to you all the time. I didn't want to close my S corp. I'm like, there's a reason I tell people, be smart, close them down as fast as you can.

Very interesting. Now, this is true for all S corps that are like, so outside of real estate. So say you have like a, in my case, a property management company that is an S corp. Is this for all businesses or is this specific for real estate holdings?

Correct. The company, the law firm I work for, Benson Financial Trust, Paul Benson was a Harvard law professor. He wrote 5 specific trusts to save specific taxes. 78 years, not a single trust has been audited. With what you're doing with property management, that's 1099 income. That would be the business trust. You're in Texas, so you would save 90% on federal income taxes and you don't have state income taxes. Here in North Carolina, when I did my 2025 taxes, I saved 92% federal taxes. Yes, I paid 8% to the federal government and I don't pay North Carolina state income taxes. I'm not tax-free. I still pay food tax. I still pay gas tax. I pay everything else. I give for people who make 1099 income. I tell them if they're making $100,000 a year in 1099 income, I don't care if you're a chiropractor, real estate, you know, you're doing your real management company, you have a TikTok shop, you will, I can guarantee you will save 5 figures in federal income taxes yearly. It doesn't matter if you file single, head of household, married separately, or married jointly. There's 4 different ways to file your taxes. But if you make $100,000 a year, The more you make, the more you save.

Oh, that's fantastic. So if someone's trying to learn about this for the first time, what resources do you have available for people to wrap their head around this? Because obviously this is a lot more than you could cover in one podcast.

Correct.

So if someone's listening to this, they're like, oh, I need, I need to figure this out right now. What resources are available and how do they find you?

My website, www.thetrustisyou.com, has a masterclass there. Under my name is another website. It goes to the Great Discovery. When you go there, you're going to register as a free learner. You don't pay any money, just register as a free learner. You're going to get a masterclass there. You're going to get 3 articles from Forbes magazine. I did not write. 2 pages of case law. So you can go to a law library or online and research this, all the cases that have done this. It's gone to the Supreme Court 2 different times, won both times. And then examples of clients, both business, uh, people saving federal and state income taxes, and then, uh, investors. I don't care if you're selling crypto, if you're a Forex investor, if you are a, um, I just helped a, a futures, uh, trader. It's dividend income taxes. We're saving him over $89,000 in 2026 from all his profits from futures trading. People just don't know about it. I call it the secret of the rich. I, I don't wanna age you, but do you remember 14 years ago when Hillary Clinton debated Donald Trump? And she accused him of not paying taxes.

I'm young, but I'm not that young, unfortunately.

Okay, well, she said to him, you don't pay taxes. And, you know, he smirks, he says, because I'm intelligent. No. Donald Trump's father, Frank Trump, in 1972, when Donald and Frank Trump got sued by the city of New York, Frank Trump started both the business and beneficial trusts because he swore he was never gonna be sued again for for being a business person. Our current president is a trust baby 'cause it goes from generation to generation and it's an amazing document people just don't know about.

Oh, that's fantastic. 'Cause there's so many people who do think, okay, so I'm going to put all of my LLCs in parallel and after a certain income, if I want to go to W-2, I'll switch my standard partnership LLC into an S corp. And then after that you have to start using cost segregation studies and all these other things to start offsetting taxes. If you can get ahead of most of those in your corporate structure, this is, I mean, this sounds fantastic. And the fact that it's set up specifically for generational wealth, that's why everyone does real estate. I mean, after $10,000 a month of income, everyone's goals are pretty much this. This is what I've found consistently. I've coached people in buying multifamily for 6 years now. When people join, the first thing is like, hey, I want to retire myself or my spouse. That's the number one goal. And it usually costs them around $10,000 a month for it to be optional. Everything after that, I'm trying to set up generational wealth. I'm trying to pass something along to my kids. That is 100% of everyone who goes into multifamily. So this is a fantastic way to set this up. Do you do this on the front end when you first do something, or do you buy things in LLC and transfer into this? How do you, how do you set this up initially for your business?

Great question. In July of 2020, I bought a bank-owned reverse mortgage in North Carolina because my mom's in the hospital on a ventilator in North Carolina. So, you know, you're taught that you can travel and write off your travel because you're going to go look at your property and everything. The contract said I bought it for $20,000. It was going to go to auction after COVID for $50,000. So that spread, that $30,000 in between a 24% tax bracket I would have to pay $7,110. I didn't start my beneficial trust until September. I Googled this. I did two bill of sales, one bill of sale from my LLC to Sally Giman, second bill of sale from Sally Giman to the trust. I drove to the bank. Um, my banker Jose, uh, he notarized it. I happened to have $10 in my bank, in my wallet. I handed it to him. He put in his notary book. Consideration was made. It has to be a dollar or more just so it's consideration was made. He hands it back to me. So I didn't lose $10. I go back to, I go back to my house. This is now September 2020, middle of COVID I contact the attorney in Raleigh, North Carolina. I sent him both bill of sales. He writes to me the next day and goes, I need the first page of your trust so I know the name of it. I send that to him. The house didn't go to auction until, um, August 28th, 2021. I held it for 13 months, $20,000. The final bid was $64,489. You know, without lifting the hammer, I made $44,000. At 24% tax rate, I saved $10,363. I just put that into more real estate and have never looked back.

What does your portfolio look like today, by the way?

Right now, since I've started the trust, I had, I've wholesaled 28 properties. I have a crypto bot between Ethereum and Bitcoin. I get paid like 10 cents, 15 cents, 20, you know, people moving money back and forth. I make about $60 a day in crypto. Just one thing about crypto, people are like, oh, I bought it back in 2018. The federal government doesn't care. It's short-term capital gains because they make more money when you sell crypto at a profit going short-term than long-term capital gains. I have 12 notes where I'm the paper on the house. I have 7 seller-financing houses, 3 rentals, and I just bought my first fourplex and I'm spending money to upgrade my fourplex.

Oh, that's fantastic. Well, congratulations.

That's a fantastic portfolio here in North Carolina. There's a strange rule here called upset bids. Do you ever go to an auction?

I do not do auctions often. I go for fun occasionally. But I have never purchased at an auction. I've done 30 transactions over 600 units. And I, I only buy and hold, so I hold all of them. Never once have I actually bought anything at an auction.

Well, here in North Carolina, there's 101 counties and you have to know which county you're in. Either it's 10 business days or 10 calendar days. I came out Christmas of 2001. My brother and sister-in-law were living in Waxhaw, a mile from Charlotte, 4 miles from South Carolina. That's how far how far south they were in Union County. I won 3 upset bids and I wholesaled them and I made $89,000. My brother's like, did you rob a bank? Where are you making all this money? And I'm like, I'm just doing real estate. So that's why I moved here.

Oh, that's fantastic. How long have you lived in Carolina?

I moved here, moved to the Charlotte area in March of 2022. And I just moved up here to the Cary area with my boyfriend in October of 2025. And it's beautiful. It's green. I lived in Arizona for 14 years. I forgot how much I love the four seasons.

Oh, that's amazing. That's amazing. I moved from Washington to, to Dallas, Texas after 32 years in Washington. And having sunlight is an amazing thing, which you wish you could in the Carolinas as well. I am. I'm loving it. Well, that's a fantastic, fantastic place to live in tons of amazing real estate markets in both North and South Carolina. Been really strong for real estate for a really long time too. So beautiful place to live. Great weather.

Either myself or financing houses are all people from Long Island. I swear half of Long Island has moved to North Carolina.

Yep. The Carolinas and Florida are getting flooded from everyone in New York and New Jersey. So, oh, that's awesome. Well, huge congrats on that. A question that we always ask, and I'm guessing I might know the answer based on how you got started. But I always ask the most expensive mistake and we phrase it as the highest stupid tax you pay. And all that means is when you're new at anything, you're the dumbest you'll ever be at it. That's why we do things. I like to pass the most valuable lessons we can to people, and usually that's what mistakes did we make for them? I'm guessing yours might be that original giant tax bill, but I'm curious, is that the highest stupid tax that you paid to get to where you're at, or what was the largest mistake?

This is why I'm not using his name. The gentleman who ran the real estate group, we got into a real— he was my business partner. I paid him to do this and he and I did a real estate deal 50/50. I'm in North Carolina for Christmas. On Facebook, he puts up, this is a deal I just did. And I sent him a simple text going, I thought we had a 50/50 deal. What happened? Next day we get on a Zoom and Mr. Hyde showed up. He's like, you're calling me a liar. You're calling me a thief. I don't trust you. I'm putting your mastermind on hold. I'm like, Zach, you owe me $5,000 more if what you put on Facebook was correct. I'm not the one. I'm not the one that cheated. He's like, you're dead to me. You're out of my real estate group. You're dead to me.

Wow.

His last words to me was, you'll be nothing without me. I'm like, who are you to say that to me? So I purposely— that's terrible. Yes. And I didn't find out until, uh, you, when that happened to me, I was just like, I'm done. And then I had 5 other people from the Phoenix real estate group. One guy's like, he's giving me ulcers. I'm like, no, nobody should give you ulcers for— I think he was really, um, what do they call, um, what's a person who can never be wrong? Um, I just forgot the term. A narcissist. I called him out.

Yeah.

I called him out and he's just, I, I, the anger that came at me on a Zoom was just, I wasn't ready for it. I mean, I was just looking for $5,000 that I never, never got back. And he was, he was my mentor. He was my friend. He was my business partner and he burned every bridge with me and it was my biggest mistake and What he told people, because I moved right after that to North Carolina. He told people in Phoenix I was killed in a car accident. Like, who are you to lie to people?

That is the most common answer to that question. There's only two answers. We're right next to episode 100 of this podcast. I've asked this question every time. Someone can fact-check me on this, but I think it's probably 75 episodes where the answer has been not even a monetary loss. It's a, I partnered with the wrong person or someone did. It's almost always partnerships. People are such a huge variable in business. It is such a huge, like, what a horrible experience. Well, good on you for starting your own thing and not letting that stop you. That's a lot of people's success is due to someone being dumb.

So, well, I'm going to be honest, Christian. My coach, Susan Ma, I sent her a text going, I need to talk to you. She's like, We're gonna get on Zoom 7 o'clock next morning. She's like, you're moving, you're finding a new real estate group and you're starting your own business. Don't play small anymore. And I'm like, oh my gosh. You know, I, I, I, I, I was still shell-shocked at 7 o'clock the next day. So yeah, don't let, don't let someone steal your dreams. That, that's the worst thing you could do.

Yeah. And, and if, if you do it right, you could, it could be extremely motivating. You're like, well, okay, either, either I let this person defeat me or I build something even bigger. So I do, I love your response to that and it's such a huge lesson. To the extent that you can protect yourself from other people, just make sure the paperwork is amazing and do a ton of homework. And even then, if you work with enough people, you're going to run into some people like that. There's a lot of hidden narcissists in every business.

I'm sorry, there are. And you know, I never got paid back the $5,000, but it did not stop me from doing more real estate. I think my, if I, someone told me what was the one thing I would change, I didn't start doing real estate until I was 53 years old. I've changed my future. Right now I'm paying for my nieces and nephews student loans because I'm making enough money to do this. So it's beautiful what I can do. But if I started way back in my twenties, I would be in a completely different atmosphere right now with real estate.

I just had, I just had my friend Cody Davis on the channel. He bought his first 12-plex at 18, when I asked him what he would change, he's like, if I knew how easy it was to buy real estate when I was 18, I would've started younger. No matter what age you are, everyone, you know, you start when you start. And so the encouragement is, if you're listening to this now, it is definitely the youngest that you'll ever be. So from this point on, so if you're like, okay, when do I start? The best time is always now. And if you want to, if you wanna own real estate, just buy real estate where it cash flows. And my basic economic theory is if you only buy properties that have positive income, your income will only go up. So buy a long-term fixed rate debt. There, the deals are out there and they're in every market all over the country. It's, if there's a time to learn how to do it, it's all over the country.

I, I, in my real estate group in Phoenix on Wednesday nights, we had different groups and on the, on, it was a 6-unit in Amherst, Massachusetts. It was bank owned. I need $179,000. So I went to the gentleman who ran the group and the thing, he goes, when do you need the $179,000? I'm like, I'll do my due diligence and everything. We got, we got the apartment building. We put it on Facebook Marketplace. He got his $179,000 back, plus another $200,000. I got $200,000. He's like, can we do more deals together? And he's just like, That he goes, that was less than 4 weeks. I'm like, that's how easy it is to do real estate.

The beautiful thing about real estate is that it's not always easy, but it is very simple. And sometimes it is both easy and simple at the same time. But it is my favorite asset class just because there's so many different ways to make money and all of them are relatively straightforward strategies. Once you learn it, you build the muscle and it's set and forget. And there's, there's like 40 different ways to consistently make money in real estate. Pick a strategy that resonates with you, get really good at it, and rinse and repeat. I love what you're doing and I love that you share this so openly with everyone. I know I have a ton of takeaways, so now I'm going to have to— I'm going to go look back into this trust thing because I am set up as an endless series of LLCs and S corps, and I've been meaning to do this forever. So this is a great reminder for me.

In California, they have to pay every year for their LLC. In the last— the only time I had LLCs was in Arizona. We didn't have to. In Texas, do you have to keep paying every year for it?

You don't have to pay every year for Texas. I do own a little over 100 units in Washington State where I'm originally from, and you absolutely have to pay every year. It's very expensive. So Washington State, not ideal. Texas is very inexpensive and you don't have to refile annually, which is very helpful. There's a light bit of paperwork that you have to do annually, but you don't owe extra money unless your business does individually over $2 million in Texas, which is unbelievably big.

In Arizona, it was $50 to open an LLC. So that's how come I had 6 LLCs. I'm like, that's easy. You know? So yeah, it just, it, it's, that's, you just said a very key point. Every state has different rules and it's state law. The trust is on the federal level, not on the state, on the state laws.

So Even beautiful.

Even if your state has like New York, New York State, I just helped somebody there with his real estate. The New York State is using the income from his Airbnbs as personal income and he is paying taxes on that. That all goes away.

That is just an awesome strategy. I learned a ton on this. So this was super valuable, everyone. I dropped the link to both sites that Sally gave earlier in this podcast. They're below in the show notes, or if you're watching on YouTube, it'll be below in the description on YouTube. Sally, fantastic having you on. Thank you so much for joining us. Yeah, absolutely. This has been another episode of the Owner Meeting Podcast. We're meeting with the owners who've done the thing that you want to do, so you can be listening to this wherever you're at. So I appreciate you guys. Like, follow, leave a comment or review on the podcast. We appreciate you, and we'll see you on the next episode.