#24: Live Q&A - Ask Me Anything, Part 1

Foreign. Welcome to the Passive Income MD podcast where we talk about creating your ideal life through multiple streams of income. I'm your host, Peter Kim. If you enjoy hearing about this stuff, make sure to hit subscribe so I can bring it to you every week. Now let's get on with the show. Hey everyone, Hope you've had a great week and are staying safe and healthy with your families. This week on the podcast is a little different. We're going to let you in on a live question and answer session that we had on our Facebook group, the Passive Income Docs, for those who don't know what that is. It's a group for physicians to talk about creating financial freedom through multiple streams of income. We talk about entrepreneurship, we talk about real estate investing, we talk about life. And it's just nice to be amongst a group of like minded professionals who are seeking the same things in life. And so you're going to get this extra sneak peek into it. And this is where we've had some questions that were submitted beforehand. We were taking some questions live. So just know it's a completely live session and I hope you enjoy. Hello Passive Income Docs, it's Peter. Hope you've had a fantastic weekend. I know I have. I just spent time with family. It's been great weather out here in Los Angeles. Hope everyone else around the country is safe and healthy. Anyways, recently I've gotten so many questions on various subjects. People are messaging me, which I absolutely love, and they're emailing us and they're all, especially here on the group. They're, they're, they're putting up some really amazing questions. I've got questions on life, on Passive Income, on real estate, on the course hacks, things like that. And so I thought I would just address them here. I have some questions that people have already asked me that I'm going to answer as we go. Let's start with an easy one here that somebody's been, I got to ask this a couple times, how are you able to balance all these, you know, with a busy life? In essence, they're asking me like what my life hacks are. It's funny because, you know, there are plenty of people out there much busier than I am and just have amazing, productive lives. And so I think for me there are a couple tools that I use or kind of like strategies that I use in terms of a life hack. Number one, I just wake up earlier now. I mean, that's just what I've become. I'm an anesthesiologist so we're usually there, you know, before anybody else in the morning, kind of getting, you know, getting the room ready and that sort of thing. So I'm kind of used to it, But I now wake up like an hour earlier than I need to. And usually I find that time, especially now in the time of COVID when your kids are at home and everybody's at home and you maybe don't feel like you have time to yourself, like between 4:30 to 5:30 or between 5 and 6 before everyone gets up. I find it's completely quiet. The world is quiet outside. Everybody's quiet. And that's where I have time to kind of get things done that I need to get done. And so usually I'll spend a little time exercising, you know, start preparing my day, think about what I need to get done. If I have a few moments, I need to get a few things productively done and just have that quiet time, I'll spend that time doing so and so. That, to me, has been an absolute game changer for people who are wondering how to kind of use up that hour. There are a couple, you know, tools that I've used. I mean, there's a book called the Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod. And I would completely recommend that for anybody who feels a little overwhelmed, like they don't have time, they are not getting things done, especially today, not productive. They want to know how, like, an hour to yourself in the morning can absolutely change your life. The Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod is an amazing, amazing tool for that. Yeah, again, I can't recommend that enough. Another thing that I do is, like, I found that, yes, my time is limited and so is yours. You're busy, you know, you have so many things on your plate. Family, time, work, that sort of thing. And so for me, I've learned to hire and outsource as much as I can. And I've talked about it so much, both on the blog here and that sort of thing. I use virtual assistants and other things like that to really do things that I don't want to do. I mean, even if I can do them, doesn't mean I should. And people always ask me, like, what are the. Some of the things that you have these virtual assistants do? I mean, I do things like, you know, research online for different articles that I write, organize spreadsheets, create kind of basic presentations. For me, like creating like a PowerPoint presentation, for example, it's. It's timely, it's like, kind of tedious. And so what I do Sometimes is I'll. I'll literally just jot out things on an outline and then give it to my virtual assistant and they will bring in the images and they'll format it and, and that sort of thing. To me that saves me an hour, two hours, and that's a huge deal. And it's easier sometimes to tweak it after the fact. So I use virtual assistants as much as I can. I even have for my business stuff. I have, you know, obviously they're checking my emails, they're doing customer service, whatever it can do to kind of take things off my plate. Because as a physician, your time is extremely valuable. And even though you can do it, a lot of things you should. Now if you enjoy doing it, that's one thing. If nobody else can do it, then absolutely you should be doing it. But if not, utilize VA to the max. One of the other little cool life hacks that I've had recently is actually this ring. I'm married and so this is start to actually this new ring kind of replaced my wedding ring that I use, but it's still there. It acts as my wedding ring. It is called the OURA ring. O U R A And I'm not selling this. I'm not an affiliate for them. I'm not anything. But what it does is little ring here actually measures my heart rate. It actually. During your sleep, it measures your sleep. And obviously it's not as good as polysomnography or something like that, but it's pretty crazy what it can actually track. And it helps you to be more mindful of your sleep. And I found that especially now too, especially with everything going on, some of the stress out there in life, like if your sleep suffers, then it kind of really impacts everything else. We all know that how important it is to sleep well. And so this little tracker is actually, I don't know, it just made me more mindful. And so I found that I start to go to sleep a little earlier and I do that whole waking up thing that I've talked about and it allows me to, you know, I've stopped eating late at night because it's shown I can show measurable kind of effects of like kind of what I do if I exercise late at night or if I eat poorly, if I drink too high or whatever, something like that. Right. It affects in my sleep. And it's so cool to kind of track these things. And if anybody has this, I'd love to hear from you. Have anybody tried the OURA ring? There's also A band called the Whoop that a lot of people use. And those are some of the life hacks I use to try to optimize my life, my sleep, and kind of help me keep my energy up so that I can be super, you know, as productive as possible. All right, let's keep going. Hey, how you doing? The oura ring is great. Cool. I feel like other people have the oura ring as well. If you. If you use it, let me know. All right. So another question that I got was about, like, what am I investing in right now? Yeah, this is a. Kind of an interesting time. And for those. I mean, I know a lot of people right now in the stock market and doing really well. I mean, it's funny, if you've heard and you've seen all those reports like Robinhood and all that stuff, the amount of volume that's been going through there seems like the stimulus checks are going straight to Robinhood. If anything, you've seen people are buying these stocks and keeping them up. Personally, I do have a little bit of a stock portfolio, you know, that I put together just for Covid, and that's just kind of for fun. I mean, that's the way I see stocks. I mean, for me, I don't see it as really a. A cash flow machine. It doesn't impact my life in that way, but it's almost like gambling for me. I mean, it's like that's what I use it for. I mean, I don't use it as, like, a retirement strategy or this sort of thing. For me, I use real estate for that primarily, and some of my businesses, But I'm investing primarily in. Yeah, I'm still investing in real estate. I mean, that's it. I just put in an offer two days ago for an apartment building near me, and I think that there's still opportunities out there. Financing is fantastic right now, if you haven't noticed. Loan terms in terms of debt, if you can get it. The interest rates, as everybody knows, whether you're buying your own house or even in commercial real estate, interest rates are extremely low right now. And so that does allow for some opportunities for people to get in. They're able to get the financing. They're, you know, well established, their credit's good and these kind of things, and their financial strength, it's strong. Then there are some really great opportunities there for people. And I think, especially if you're thinking the long term, for me, I still think that it's a good time. There's really never a bad Time to invest. They're just bad deals. And so you just have to weed those out. Maybe be a little bit more careful because you can't just rely on the market to bring you up. But there's no doubt that there are still good deals to be had right now. And so I am still investing both actively, meaning that I own my own properties and I'm still buying those as well, and I'm still investing passively as well, meaning investing in other people's deals. Now I'm just being a little bit more cautious and maybe conservative, meaning that I need to make sure the fundamentals are good and that they can withstand another year, year and a half of whatever's going on right now with COVID I mean, for me, I do see, you know, these stimulus checks run out. You know, is there a potential that there is even more, you know, less payment or in terms of like increased vacancy? Is that possible? Yes. So I think that you have to look out for those things. And those are things to really dive into and kind of ask about when you're looking at some of these deals. And so I'm still doing it. I invested in the last two months, I've invested in two different real estate investments, both passive real estate investments, where I invested in some syndications that's in some properties. For those who don't know what syndications are, they're essentially just pulling of capital to buy a property. Somebody sets up this idea of like, hey, they want to buy this, you know, apartment building. They know they're going to fix it up and they look for investors to help them establish buy that property. But they manage everything in terms of the buying, the operating, the management, distributions, and ultimately they go to sell it at somewhere down the line. And you as an investor are able to benefit from that by getting, you know, whether it's quarterly, it's probably usually quarterly distributions, cash flow, and then a payment once ever, you know, once the building is sold. And so I still invest in that. One of the other things I'm investing in right now is debt, meaning that you just got to be careful, but meaning I like to act as the bank. And I've always liked this as well. This whole concept of acting as the bank, meaning that you use the hard earned capital that you have worked for. You know, as a physician, you work for it, and then what do you do with that money? You want to put it to work, right? You want to put it to work. And that's actually truly what passive income is, taking your income or whatever that is letting it work while you're not putting the time in. And so I love to do that, especially invest in debt, because I know that somebody else is taking that capital, is paying me interest, and then at the end of the day they have to pay me my capital back whenever that loan term is up. Now you have to, obviously you know how to do your due diligence for these type of deals. There are, you know, are they reputable borrowers? Is there any sort of collateral? You know, when it comes to real estate and real estate debt, the cool thing is they have, there's the actual property that is actually the collateral. So something happens, it'll pay you back the term. Then you have that, you can foreclose on them and take that property, you know, take that property so it's worth something. And I think that most of us know that whole concept because we, a lot of us have probably purchased our own homes. And we also know that, yes, we think we're the owners of those homes. But at the end of the day, truly the bank is the owners of those homes right now. Because let's just say you stop paying, what's going to happen? The bank will be able to take it and foreclose on you and take that property. And so in this situation, when you're investing in debt, you're on the other side of that, which is really cool. And I love making my, you know, letting my money work that way. There's also not only real estate debt, there's also something called personal debt where you can invest in. Some people need to take out these personal loans. Probably many of you actually as physicians have taken out these personal loans besides student loans, some of you maybe have taken out practice loans or maybe there's a transition time when you first became an attending and you needed to move and to do all these things. And so you needed that loan. And there's some companies, you probably get letters about them all the time. I get them. Some people have been able to take out personal loans for a short period of time. I think there are opportunities on the other side of that as investors, there are people who need those personal loans and if they're good quality borrowers, like physicians, high income professionals, I think there's an opportunity to get your money working for you. In fact, that's how a company like for example, Sofi, you might have heard of SoFi. I remember looking at Sofi early on and I think the, what they did is I thought it was for MBAs, of MBAs only. So you need to be a graduate of a certain school and they were lending two people of a certain school because they thought that was a certain level of qualification. Well, there are opportunities to do that for high income professionals, actually, for physicians as well. And some of these things. It's one of the things I'm investing as well. And so there's a lot to be excited about. I mean, even in real estate, the recent interview that I had with, if you guys haven't seen it, in the crowdstreet with Brent Higelke, we talked about what sectors are doing well, what sectors are not doing well. And everyone thinks that real estate is just this big umbrella, real estate's going down, you know, that sort of thing. But just like anything today, there are businesses, you hear about it all out there. Businesses are doing poorly, but there are some businesses that are crushing it right now. And it just depends on how they are positioned, how they're set up, how they pivot during this time. And in real estate it's the same thing. There are some things in real estate that are doing absolutely well and actually are well positioned for the future. And so you just have to know what those things are, look out for that. And so I still think there are plenty of opportunities. And we also know, I mean, here's my take, I think that we, you know, cycles are cycles. Yeah, I think that happens in real estate, stock market, whatever that is. And we've been kind of like the benefits of this unprecedented run in both real estate as well as stocks. And so for many of us, or for some of us who got investing, you know, started investing, the later end of that, maybe that's just when you had the money, when you had the experience, or when you became an attending and you're like, oh, I missed the boat. Well, there's another opportunity, in my opinion, with all this stuff, it wasn't expected. And no one wants this to happen. But I think that you just have to keep your eyes open for those opportunities. And when you see these cycles that last anywhere from 7 to 10 years or whatever normally it might be, you want to be able to be relatively aggressive at the early end of that to really reap the rewards of that cycle. And how many of those cycles do you have in your life? And so I particularly think that one of these cycles, if it's ending now, as many people say, I mean, there's still opportunities to buy through it, but there's going to be an opportunity where we, you know, if you are aggressive to ride this next big cycle, how's everyone else doing. And notes. Yes. So someone's asking about notes. So notes is essentially the same kind of concept where you're investing as the bank, meaning that you lend on a property or you lend on an opportunity. For people that are thinking about this, they're also called hard money. Loans is another term for a lot of these. There might be no, it might be a little bit different, but some of these are called hard money loans where you lend to fix and flippers, for example, or people that are doing development, short term development, or people that are in between loans and need a little bit of cash. And so there are always these opportunities for you as an investor to, to get into some of these things. And usually these are not low interest type opportunities because these are short term loans for people and they can't get that kind of lending necessarily from conventional methods or conventional banks. So these loan terms are typically higher, anywhere from 8 to 12 to 15% sometimes I mean it's a little bit high, but 8 12. And so you as an investor have an opportunity to take advantage of this. Let's keep going. Does anybody have any questions by the way? If you have questions, go ahead and put them in there. This is an ask me anything session. Dom. Just giving you my time. We're having fun here. I'm drinking some, some Starbucks here. If anyone can guess exactly what this drink is, I'm gonna throw you a. I don't know, I'll throw you a $25Amazon gift card. I don't know. Anyways, so let's keep talking. So someone asked me what VA company I recommend. So I talked about life hacks and I talked about ways to leverage your time. At the end of the day, that's our most precious and limited and scarcest resource. It's our time. And so how do we do all the things we want to do and still have that available to us? Yes, there are a couple ways to get into hiring a va. There are companies online that are kind of like agencies which will do it for you and hire you a specific va. Like going through them and you hire a specific va. There are companies that kind of are like a, a catch all. I mean they'll, they're like a one stop shop where you don't necessarily know one VA in particular, but they will. You ask them a task or service and they just complete that thing. And then there's other places where you can just without an agency you can go and find, you know, put an ad up and get one of those VAs for example like on a site called like. Upwork is a very famous one. Upwork U P W O R K. It's a great place to hire people for all sorts of things. Virtual assistants is a huge thing on that site if that's what you want to look for. Some people even go on things a little bit more significant. Like indeed. Especially if you're looking for someone more like the full time basis. But there are other companies out there, more like these agencies. I have a whole host of them on my site as well. I've got. If you look it up on, I don't know, I'd say best sites for virtual assistants. A passive income md things like Magic. You know, it depends. There's ones that are just text based only and it all depends on what you're looking for and how much time you're looking to put in. Just so you know, there are a couple of ways to look for VA's. Ones that are in the US based or ones that are foreign based. And I'll tell you, there's a huge gap in the price. I would say, just as a rule of thumb, I would say if you're looking outside the US again, it depends on which country. Usually I would say it's between three and four times cheaper. And so I have VAS personally that I hire here. I also have VAs that are foreign because it depends on the type of task and the how confidential or how secure like these kind of things. Can I trust that sort of thing? So I have VAS here in like the Philippines and I've used ones in South America as well. And so let's say the standard virtual assistant here, depending on their level of experience, it can be anywhere from 15 to 30 dollars. It all depends on what you're having them do and again how much you're using them and their level of experience. But oftentimes when you're going to these other countries like the Philippines, you're finding somewhere between, I said about three to four times cheaper. So it can honestly be anywhere from three to four dollars to up to 15 to 20. It's possible. But yeah, I mean it becomes a lot cheaper. Especially if you're just kind of just doing stuff that is repetitive tasks. And that's what I tell people to focus on. If you find yourself doing repetitive tasks that you're like, I could teach somebody really easy just to do this for me and, and standardize it. And those are tasks that I would say and you don't enjoy doing it, there's no reason you shouldn't have somebody else do it for you on your behalf and save you time and energy? That's my take on that. Hopefully that was helpful. How many times can we use a physician loan for multiplex? Okay, I already. Physician loan. So this is what I found with physician loans. As many of you know, I also run a company called Curbside Real Estate where I help physicians find lenders and agents to buy their residential homes. And so I've been in this space for four or five years. I've seen the market change, go up and change. I will tell you right now with what's going on with lending right now. Although the interest rates are low, position loans seem to have shrunk a little bit, meaning the number of banks. I mean, when I first started this, there were only a few handful banks that were offering these position loans. And for those who don't know what that is, usually these physician loans are these mortgages that have a little bit of relaxed standards for physicians. It might allow you to put down less down payment, might have let you have a little bit more student loan debt and that sort of thing. And depending on what's in forbearance or, or defer, you know, deferment, they treat it a little bit differently. They're perfect for a lot of us who, you know, have good incomes. We might come out and have good incomes, but we don't have a good amount of stuff saved up right. For a down payment or we don't have a huge long credit history with that sort of thing. So these are what I call physician loans. And just so you know, it started as a handful and now the market's grown quite a bit for them. They got huge. There's so many banks. And now I've found that it started to contract again. Some of the biggest banks that had a lot of money stored up for the physicians have started to shrink because they just can't find the margins on it. It doesn't make sense and that sort of thing. So you can only use those right now for your primary home only, meaning that they're expecting that you will be living there. So they don't want you to. You know, you can't get a. Well, you can't get a physician loan for a apartment building, for example. Definitely not a 5 and above. If it's 4 and below, it's possible as long as you're living there. There are ones that you have to be very clear on that. There are some that if you're a duplex, they'll definitely let you do it because they know that you're living in one side and you're renting out the other side. But again you have to ask for these banks specifically. You're able to do that. They don't, they don't allow you to, for example, use a 0% loan if you're living in Los Angeles, you want to buy a rental property in Phoenix, for example, you can't just buy a 0% loan and use it for your home, the second home, Phoenix. That's what. There was a situation there was before where they were allowing it for second homes position loans, but that has dried up from what I've heard, unless anybody knows differently. The other thing that you can do though is you can buy, use a physician loan to live in a place, for example, like a, a duplex or something like that, or single family home living there. And you know, whether you live in there about like a year or whatever it is, then you can actually use it again and then move into another place, but leave that other place on that physician loan and continue to rent it out. So if that's a strategy that you want to use, that's definitely an opportunity for people when they want to use these position loans. What are your thoughts about investing in farming or agricultural land? Yeah, I mean I've seen some of this before. I don't know much about it to be honest with you. I've seen things like a company called like Acre Trader for example. That's probably what some people are referring to, some of these crowdfunding things. I think that people have shown that over time, this farmland and that sort of thing because there's, I mean there's so much of it and that sort of thing that they've seen good returns from it and there are probably, if I were going to do it, I would probably do it using one of these platforms that has the whole system set up for it, that has, you know, especially if something goes wrong, that they can step in there and make sure it gets taken care of for like non payment, these kind of things. Last thing personally that I want to do, I don't know enough about it to go out and purchase my own. I mean unless you live in some of those areas, you know it, that's different. But I personally don't know much about that whole industry, to be honest. Okay, was asking me about turnkey properties and rental properties. For those who have no idea what that might mean, that's okay, I didn't either. But just so you know, my very first rental property that I bought was through a turnkey company. And what that is is that they call themselves turnkey. It's the concept that you just have to go in there and everything's set up for you. You just need to turn the key to get it started. I mean, I don't know if that's really what it's turnkey really means, but I think that's what it means, is that you just. All you have to do is they try to set it all up for you to make it easy. Meaning that oftentimes there's a little bit of differences. But the true turkey company, what they do is they find a property. They usually have rehabbed it. They oftentimes find a tenant, already put the tenant in place. So this thing is like an operating rental property. And then they try to sell it to an investor like you. So you go and you say, oh, okay. So they will sell it at a certain price and say, all right, when you're getting to the price, you know, when you buy for the price, you already know that there's already a tenant in place. And so you know how it's going to perform. So you know how much of your cash on cash return you're going to get. And so they just say you just have to step in. It's already been renovated. We have a tenant in place. In fact, oftentimes they manage it as well, too, or they have a property management company that they run with. So they say, this is going to be as easy as possible for you. You just have to pay us some funds. Now, the downside of that, just so you know, it's ease of use, but you're paying a little bit extra for that service and that convenience. And sometimes maybe you're getting upcharged a little bit on the sale because maybe they rehabbed it at this cost, but they're selling to you for this amount and that sort of thing. So maybe you're not getting as much value as for your money. But for a lot of people who are trying to get into the game and they don't maybe have the resources, the network, the team, it's not necessarily a bad thing. And I know some people who have bought turnkey properties and done quite well. For some people, especially starting at the beginning of the game, that might be something that allows them to kind of step in with a little bit of ease, to feel like somebody else has kind of already built up the system. So the key is to understand how good is this company, how reputable are they, what is their track record? You know, other people that have invested with them, how do they take care of their investors? Is there great communication? What if something goes wrong, who's going to deal with it and that sort of thing. At the end of the day, you own that property though it's not somebody else that you own the property and so you can fire them. As a property manager, you can do all these things once you buy it. But I still think turkey is a great option for people. And for me, whenever I say, look, if, if that's what it takes for you to get in terms of real estate investing, get it comfortable with it, then I'm all for it. And that's what I did when I started investing. I've since sold that property. But I thought that was an amazing first step for me because it got me comfortable with the whole rental property process, purchasing process, and then ultimately I ended up buying an apartment building. So it's amazing how one thing leads to the next. So if somebody's interested in it, look at it, weigh your options. I think it's actually a good one for many people. Is that Texas turnkey? No, that was not the company that I used. The company that I used at that time was called Home Union, which has since a little bit changed their model. But there are some other turnkey companies out there. One of the ones that I've gotten to know pretty well is a company called Memphis Invest. Their long standing history. They're great. Some people may have used them. They invest mostly in the Memphis, Dallas, Texas. They've kind of gone all over the place now. But they're a long standing company, has a great track record and they focus on education. And you know, if there are people that come to me and talk, hey, I want to do turnkey, I said give them a look. And I think it's worth looking at self storage. Yeah, I think self storage is an interesting field. I mean, I think there's just definitely room for that. As we know, we're all running out of space and people are hoarders. I mean, that's just who we are. And we run out of space in our own apartments and we put these things in storage at some point. I don't know where the market is now today. I think in certain areas it's kind of saturated, but sure, I mean, there are people who do this really, really well. And personally I have not invested in it, but it doesn't mean I'm opposed to it. I try to. Here's the thing for me, I personally found that I like you Know, I need to know how to do the due diligence for something, meaning I need to know how to look at a deal and say, ah, these numbers make sense. And this is why I'm investing in it or why I'm not investing. And for me, I'm the most comfortable with multifamily or apartment buildings just because I've invested myself an apartment, you know, a renter as well. And I've done enough of these to be able to look at a deal and quickly make a determination, at least in terms of cutting it off, saying, this isn't good for me. And so I can look at the assumptions that they make and do these sort of things. But I can't do that with self storage. I can't do that with industrial or warehouse at this point. Retail, I definitely have had issues with it. And I found that person, even development, to be honest with you. So I found that when I kind of stepped outside of it, I haven't done quite well. Doesn't mean I can't do well in the future. I just have to be willing to put a little bit more time commitment to learning how to do those things, things quite well. That's about that. But just so you know, I mean, this whole thing about doing the proper due diligence is a thing I am super passionate about. I have not. When I started investing, and I tell the story all the time, I had no idea what I was doing. And that's a totally normal thing if that's you. Totally normal. Because who knows? I mean, your first deal, like, just like doing your first iv, doing your first, you know, first rotation in the hospital, you're not expected to know anything. I mean, you know, the book knowledge, but like the practical stuff. And so how can you get better at it? You've got to do it again and again and again, spend time and unfortunately make some mistakes. But that's how you get better. And you get better with practice. The same thing happens with real estate investing or entrepreneurship or business or these kind of things. As physicians, we're not taught this stuff obviously in college or med school or that sort of thing, but to be honest with you, it's not all that difficult. I will tell you, the stuff we've learned, the stuff we've been through is way more complicated. Come on, we're dealing with life or death situations, people like, you know, that sort of thing. We're, you know, we're not dealing with necessarily, you know, what they're doing in real estate is primarily just. It's Primarily just math. It's simple math for the most part. There are some people factors and things like that, but a lot of it comes down to math and assumptions. And so it's just a matter of sitting down and learning about it, investing, learning about it and doing that sort of thing. And that's what a lot of this whole journey is about. And so, yeah, that's what I tell people. It's not that complicated. And so get into it and you know, whatever we can do. I mean, we're providing all sorts of resources to try to help people, whether it's like, you know, resources for some of these companies and that sort of thing. We're also providing, you know, stuff online for my blog, podcast, the Facebook group here. And hopefully that's providing a lot of value for you and that's helping you along your journey. We also have that course right now, Passive Real Estate Academy, that's actually on sale right now until actually tonight. So to help people really learn how to invest in these passive real estate investments, how to do the due diligence, spend years what I did instead of spending years learning about it, really condense that really down into four weeks and really avoid help, you know, making a lot of mistakes and having community to help you along the way. That is the absolute goal with this course. But otherwise I'm still trying to provide, even if you join that course or not, still try amazing content. And that's what I think on the blog podcast. And I hope you've gotten a lot out of that. Yeah. If you have any questions about the course, I'm down because I think a lot of people sent me personal questions about that and I've tried to answer as many of those as possible. Everything is fair game right now. I'm talking about for those who are just tuning in, life hacks, passive income streams. I'm talking about whatever it is, the future of passive income, MD, that sort of thing. Whatever you guys want to talk about. Okay, so are you buying in la? That's a good question. Actually, the property that I just put an offer down is a property in Los Angeles. Now you just have to realize whenever you invest in a certain area, they have their own characteristics. Some people, you know, high income areas, some people really, really try to avoid because there isn't a lot of cash flow. And so that is one of the most important things when you invest in real estate. I tell people cash flow is the most important thing. And that's why I love real estate, because it provides you that monthly check. Because let's face it, that's how we live our lives on that monthly check. Our expenses are on a monthly basis, right? When we do our credit card bills, when we do our mortgage, we do pay your probably, well, kids, school tuition might be every semester or whatever that might be. But for the most part, everything's on a monthly basis. Your groceries, what you pay for help around your house, whether it's a nanny or that sort of thing, yet you're paying everybody pretty much on a monthly basis. So it matters how much you're getting in your pocket on a monthly basis. And for all those in medicine, you're probably getting on a monthly, you know, through insurance or your salary, maybe it's every two weeks for some of you. But in real estate it's, that's the way it's set up. It's set up to basically pay you on a monthly basis. And so depending on how much you get from your real estate and your passive income, you can really drop off like your clinical time if you wanted to let it replace your clinical time because again, it's all about just having enough money to pay your expenses and live that good life that you want. So I'm looking for cash flow all the time. When I'm investing in high income, like high cost of living areas, for example, Los Angeles, you know, some people invest in the Bay Area, you have to actually think a little bit differently and you have to understand where the value is. Now for those places you have to end up putting a definitely you can still get cash flow. You just have to put in a higher down payment. So you're financing and your mortgage and your debt is lower. But the good thing about in some of these areas is that if you find the right type of properties, you know that your cash flow, hopefully your rental income can, can increase. But also you can really benefit from what's known as appreciation. And what appreciation is for those who might not know, that's just the increase in value over time of that property. You know, I, I would find that probably in LA versus some of the areas where other people live in the Midwest. Certain areas here are, are increasing at a, at a higher rate than probably there. Or even if they're increasing at the same rate, they're already starting at a higher level. So when people hear about the housing prices here, they're, they're shocked. But a lot of wealth is created in this whole appreciation. And for me, when I look to invest here in these high cost of living areas, my goal is to find that appreciation and find Places where I can actually force that appreciation mean that you want to find properties that maybe aren't operating at the best level that they can operate, meaning that, you know, you can do some rehab in there, fix it up, you know, command more rent. There are, you know, their management issues mean that they poorly manage this whole thing. Remember, maybe they kind of didn't collect the rentals, they just did a poor job of really managing the property and that's why they're, their rental income was low. So I look for those opportunities, especially here, to force in that appreciation, increase those rents, increase and get cash flow and then ultimately have this property sitting there so that, you know, if I want to sell it, I can sell it for a nice gain. Otherwise I can keep that as well for the long term and so, or potentially also trade that out and exchange that property for another property. And so that's kind of the play in L. A. And I, I still like to invest in this area because I still think that the supply here is so low and the demand is high. And so I don't see that changing even in an economic downturn. Maybe there's some depression here in terms of prices. But even in the areas where I've seen, especially if the rap they're growing, I just don't see a significant drop off that's permanent. Let's keep going. These are just questions. I hope you guys are enjoying this. Say hi if you haven't already and love to hear what you guys are up to. I just mentioned that one of the new things I got was a peloton. So I don't know if that's just wondering what you guys are doing. Who out there owns a peloton and found out people are super passionate about this thing. People love it. And so yeah, I just had my, had my second ride today. But anyways, let's keep going. So is it rent control in la? Yeah, there's rent control in la. So you have to understand that as well. There's certain areas and certain areas of the country that are a little bit more landlord friendly is what they call it, meaning that number one, you know, there isn't that idea of rent control. There isn't also maybe some of the laws and regulations around evictions and that sort of thing are more friendly in certain other states. California is notoriously very resident friendly or tenant friendly, which is okay, I've been a tenant here, so I've benefited from that. But I mean, I was always good paying tenants so I didn't have to worry about that. But there's rent control here. So there are some rent control laws that you actually have to be smart about and understand how to force. That appreciation mean that you can't just tell people to leave. So you have to understand how to do that and work it in a way that it actually can be profitable for you over time, maybe slower for you. Meaning that you can't turn over a lot of those tenants. Or if that's what your plan is, then you can't do it as quick or as fast as some other places. But trust me, it gets done. And there's certain areas of LA also that don't have rent control. Although right now, in the time of COVID that's kind of changed. And so there have been some rent freezes or some temporary rent control things put in place. But what I've seen as a result of that is that some landlords have been. I mean, it scared them, and so they're actually putting their places on the market. So I think there's an opportunity there. If you're looking for the long term, again, where some people are scared of this, the rent control, or what's happening with COVID that they're looking to just sell and get out and they don't want to deal with the issue. So that is some opportunities for people to get in. All right, just answering some questions for people. We're still going. Enjoy the show. Let me know by dropping a review in the podcast app you're listening to us in. And if you haven't already, make sure to hit subscribe. Are you part of our community yet? Join thousands of physicians who are also on this journey to creating their ideal lives through multiple streams of income. You can join us on our Facebook group, Passive Income Docs, and you can always learn more at our website, passiveincomemd.com thanks again for allowing me to be a part of your journey. See you next time.