#37: The Fastest Way to Achieve Financial Freedom feat. Kenji Asakura, MD and Letizia Alto, MD

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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.

We're lucky today to have doctors Kenji Asakura and Letizia Alto. They are well known to this community in this audience because they've been featured so many times on our podcasts, our courses, and our conferences. They are the founders of Semiretired MD Both, the blog. They've got a podcast. We're going to talk about that. Their courses and they've just been an amazing source of information when it comes to direct ownership of real estate. And so I wanted to talk to them specifically today about how to achieve financial freedom in the quickest, fastest way possible. And they say they know how. So. Hey, how you guys doing?

Hey, Peter. Always a pleasure to be here with you.

Yeah, awesome. Thanks so much for this. For those of you people who may not know exactly who you are, can you give us a little bit of a brief primer on who you are? Tell us about your blog, how you kind of got started.

Sure, sure. So Kenji and I are both hospitalists by training, and I guess it was about six years ago now we actually got married. And we're trying to figure out, like, how we wanted to build our lives. And we stumbled upon real estate when we read Rich Dad, Poor dad and really decided that was what we were going to do. And so Henji and I just completely threw ourselves into it. We bought, I think we got up to 12 doors that first year. And you got real estate professional tax status, which allowed us to shelter our income. And then just every year, we've been completely focusing on building enough income through cash flow to be able to replace our incomes because our goal has been to free ourselves to work in medicine how we want to. And we started our blog two years ago because we were teaching so many of our friends how to do this, and we were doing it really inefficiently. We would tell them bits and pieces of what they needed to know, and we really felt like we were doing them a disservice of not, like, giving them a structured way to step by step to do exactly what we had done. So that's why we started our blog. And it's been growing ever since. And it's an amazing thing. It's very fulfilling and we love the community.

You're two dual physician Couple. I mean, why not just do that, make good incomes and keep on doing that? Why did you feel the need to jump into something else like real estate investing?

Yeah. I mean, early on, I asked Leyte, what would life look like if there were no limitations? Right. And no limitations in terms of time or finances or even where we live, right? No, no limitations. Right. So. So if you think about that question, then I think, you know, your. Your mind kind of takes you to all these different places. Like, you start thinking about travel, maybe you start thinking about, you know, donate, donating your time, opening up a free clinic, going to a third world country and doing free work there, or, you know, traveling the world or spending time with your kids. Right. You kind of think about all these different possibilities. But. But then you have to ask your question, well, how am I going to do all that? How am I going to fund that? Right. And so ultimately, what we realized was that, you know, working full time, when we did that for a little bit, and I was also working on a startup, we're still working more than full time. And so clearly time is probably our number one asset. Right. Money is obviously one of the ways that we get more time. Right. And so what we realized was that if we want to live a life with no limitations, then, you know, we're already going to be so limited if it's just our two physician incomes and all of the time that we spend in the hospital. Right. And so we realized that early on that if we're going to free ourselves, decouple time from money, the only way to do that is to do something where we can make money more passively. I'm not saying completely passive, but more passively where we make. We can make a lot more money for the same amount of time that we work. Right. Or work less and make the same amount of money as two hospitalists. Full time.

Yeah. And so why did you decide in real estate for that?

Even though that the two of us kind of decided on real estate when we got together? I had been actually investing in real estate, actually not very well, using different. A lot of different strategies. And when we got together, you know, I already had that kind of love for real estate. Leyte also loves, kind of.

I just love property.

You love property? Like, loves like, yeah, owning land, owning things, you know, that type of thing. So we just kind of decided, you know, real estate and, you know, just kind of looking at historically, you know, more millionaires made with real estate investing. Saw my parents investing in real estate not very well, but setting themselves up despite not doing it well, setting themselves up where they're making, you know, essentially more than my dad's salary as a. He was, he was a researcher, he was a physician researcher. He was making more from his cash flow than he was from his salary. And I could see that. And again, he was doing it so inefficiently, so poorly, but he still set himself up really nicely. And so I could see that real estate, and we could see that real estate was really, you know, a great way to kind of create wealth and to create it quickly.

Yeah, I think, I think both of us realized that we needed cash flow every single month and that was the only way we were going to replace our income and be able to not work full time. And so when you think about like, how do you get cash flow every single month? There actually aren't that many options. I mean, you can put money into index funds, but ultimately you're needing to sell them. Right. To get that money, you can start do a startup, which Kenji had done a number of times, but that's super risky and the odds of getting a payout are so, so low. And you can work four or five, six years with nothing. So that's not going to bring in cash flow and you're just again, trading time for money. There actually aren't that many things out there that give you cash flow reliably every month. And that's what we realize.

And in significant enough quantities. Right. Where we're talking about, you know, you work, you know, X amount of hours and you get kind of an insane amount of cash flow as a result. Right. And that's kind of the key here is that what's the thing that you can essentially work less at than your clinical jobs right now and replace both your incomes and even beyond that. Right. I mean, we're at a point now where we could keep, continue to add to our cash flow, keep building our real estate portfolio, keep exchanging our smaller properties with bigger ones. Right. And with that, bring in even more cash flow. And so again, if you're.

It's a snowball effect.

Yeah, it's a snowball effect. And again, the cash flow is so key because that's the only thing that pays the bills, right? At the end of the day, is that something that's paying you money every month? I mean, I guess another one could be like a franchise of some sort, right? That could be another one, right. Where if you can hire the right people to run that franchise, then it could just be a cash cow just writing you a check every Month. Right. And you're just kind of collecting that check. Real estate kind of has a lot of those features, a lot of those benefits, but on top of that, I think it has the tax benefits. And that's one other reason why it's not just the cash flow, but we also can get tax benefits on top of it. And I think it's just a really efficient way of making money.

I mean, now, how quickly do you think. I mean, that's a question. I'm sure you get a lot. It's like, how quickly do you think people can achieve that whole financial independence status where people. You mentioned one of the reasons you did it was to replace your incomes completely with cash flow from your real estate properties. Like, reasonably, what can any person, especially physician, who wants to get into this? Like, how long will that take, that whole snowball thing?

I think it totally depends on the physician themselves. So part of it's going to be mindset. You know, there's a difference between someone who comes in and says, hey, I want to earn 10,000 in cash flow in three years for my real estate portfolio, or someone who comes in and says, I must be able to leave my job in a year or two years and I'm going to figure out a way, right, to replace my income. So I think, number one, it starts with mindset. And you aren't limited. I mean, we've seen people who are not physicians necessarily, but we've seen people who have no money, do hard money loans and do burrs, which is, you know, taking a property, fixing it up, taking the money out, doing it again, and do like 60 of those in one year and make 250,000 in cash flow. But that's driven, right? That's having a goal and making it happen no matter what. So I think it first starts with your mindset. Number two, obviously, if you have more money sitting around, it's going to be easier in some ways. Right? Because if you come and you say, okay, I'm going to go invest and I have a million dollars versus I have $10,000, it's going to be easier for you to build a bigger portfolio with more cash flow with that million dollars. But again, if you're not willing to hustle, like you're going to achieve less than somebody who has 10,000 in hustles.

Yeah. What do you think doctors said in that? I mean, do you think doctors are. Obviously, they're working a lot. They do make pretty good incomes. Do you think they're uniquely positioned to do well here or is this kind of even more of a challenge for them to, you know, succeed. When it comes to real estate, I.

Personally think that doctors are really well positioned to succeed. I mean, they, you know, you made it through med school, residency. I mean, that's a lot of hurdles and hoops, you know, and investing in real estate is much easier, in my opinion. I think, you know, Leyte would agree with that. And so learning how to be a good real estate investor, again is a lot easier than learning how to become a doctor and a good doctor. So. Yeah, so, absolutely. I do think that, you know, as Leyte was saying, in terms of mindset, you know, the difference between. And this is where most people are right? In their, in their, in their heads. Most people are like, well, I hope I can. I hope I can have enough cash flow to retire in five years, right? Versus I must have enough cash flow, you know, to retire in five years. I mean, the difference between the two, in terms of just language, right? Just the language itself, not even the mindset, just the language is completely different, right? The person who says I must is going to make a lot more completely different decisions than the person says, who says I hope? And the person who says I must is also going to put a lot more resources behind there must this, you know, I must make it happen. Right? They're going to put a lot more resources behind that, and so therefore, they're going to be a lot more likely to make that happen. Now, the other thing is, is that I think when it comes to, like, okay, well, how do you do that? Right. Certainly it helps to have a good mentor and a guide and, you know, maybe a course to kind of teach you kind of how, how to do the strategy part of things. But the, but the one thing that, you know, that you got to do for yourself is you got to kind of make. Make that mental shift to, I must make this happen. Then you implement the strategies. But then the other thing that, to answer your question, why I think doctors are really well positioned for this is that a lot of this is just problem solving. And all you have to do is just reframe the question. A lot of times to, you know, I can't do this, to how can I do this? Right, Right. How do I. I read I just ran out of money. So I. Some people say I can't invest anymore. I don't have any more money. But. But the question to turn that around and go, oh, how can I. How can I. How can I keep investing even though I've run out of money, right? And Once you start problem solving, which I think, you know, doctors are well positioned to be good problem solvers, then you'll figure out the solutions.

Yeah. What are some of the solutions? I'm sure that people come in, I'm sure you've heard of when people, they always say, look, I just don't have the money right now, or I've run out of money, or it's tight as is. I can't possibly, you know, I'm paying my student loans, I'm doing all these type of things. Like, what kind of things have you seen, especially physicians. I know the doctors kind of, you know, how they've gotten creative and been able to do it.

Yeah, I love this. I mean, the possibilities are endless, Right. I could think of. So the most common one would be what Leyte was saying, which is a. The burst strategy, right. Where, you know, again, if you buy something at a discount, and so that means that you got to be scrappy and find that really good property at a discount, you fix it up, you rent it out, and then you reappraise it, and it's appraised at a much higher value now because you fixed it up, and then now you can actually pull your money out. You can get a loan on that property now at that higher value and pull. Get your original investment out, Right? And you can keep doing that over and over again, recycle that same money over and over again, and then keep building your portfolio that way. Right? That'd be one way to do it. Another way could be, you know, know, maybe you partner with somebody, right? You partner with somebody who does have money, right? That could be another way to do it.

HELOCs a lot of our students actually have equity in their houses that they tap, and then a lot of people will actually just work and save up more money. Is another. More obvious.

What about 401ks? Right? So if you go, well, where can I find money? Right. Well, you have a lot of money locked up in your 401ks, and most people would stop themselves there, right? It's like there's some. There's a reason why they don't want to go beyond thinking of the option of maybe liquidating their 401k or tapping into their 401k or taking a loan.

Against it until the end of the year, Right?

Exactly. Most people, again, most people stop problem solving because it's like you can't touch your 401k. That's the belief, right? That's the thought that they have. So they're not going to explore the possibilities there. But if you do allow yourself to kind of think beyond the 401k and go, hmm, you know, could I maybe borrow from it or could I actually even just liquidate it? Right. Which is something that we did. Right. But then the question then becomes, well, how do I liquidate it in a way that I don't pay a lot of penalty. Right. I don't pay a lot of taxes. And that's a whole nother question that you have to solve. And just like many things, these things are figureoutable. You can solve these problems. You can figure out ways around paying the taxes, for example, on liquidating your 401k. And then the question becomes, you know, is it better for me to do that or continuing to invest in my 401k? And like we were saying earlier, you know, it doesn't matter if your 401k goes up by 30% per year. That's not paying the bills. At the end of the day when you need it and you're furloughed and you got medical bills or you got, you know, you got to pay for rent or food at the end of the day, your 401k growing at 20% a year is not going to pay the bills. And that's the reason why, you know, okay, if I take that money, invest in cash flowing rentals that does pay the bills, would that be a better decision? Right. You got to kind of think through that. But you know, again, that's just another possible solution.

Right? And a lot of our students do invest actually with student loans, right. Because their student loans are kind of a lower percentage and they know the returns they're going to get will actually help pay off their student loans. And I remember we wrote an investor spotlight and actually one of our friends, she's a single mom by choice and she's actually up to 11 units now. She started investing, I think three years ago. We, we talked her head off about it forever. And so she started herself and yeah, she, she's using it to pay off her student loans. So you know, it. There's a different.

Are you saying that she used the money instead of paying for student loans, that she applied it towards a rental property? Is that what you mean? Or did she take another loan?

Yeah, so she actually ended up doing a HELOC on her home, using that to buy rental properties, and then she's using that to pay off her student loans.

Over time she's making a better return from her rental properties. Therefore she's actually being able to take that, return that money she gets out of the properties to pay off those low interest student loans. And so it was a way for her to actually accelerate paying off her student loans rather than just taking her salary and paying her student loans or taking that HELOC money and paying off her student.

Yeah. Now she's three years in, so now she has forced enough appreciation on those original properties. She's actually turning those over and going back bigger. So it's really cool to kind of watch her along her process too. Doing it all by herself with a baby.

I mean, the. How can I question? Right. Another way could be, you know. Well, and actually we had a couple students do this as well, is that they've actually, they went into a burr like project, but then they realized, you know, actually, you know, we kind of need the money. So they just, actually just made it a flip. And you can do flipping. Right. And so that was one way that one couple also came up with money is that instead of holding onto it and renting it out, they just flipped it, got the money out, and then they were able to free up some money to invest and so just again, lots of different ways.

Yeah. Some of our students also have houses that they have from residency or condos or whatever, and they're emotionally tied to them. But when they look on the cash and cash return and they realize how bad it is, a lot of them actually sell those and use the proceeds or 1031 them into rental properties too.

Well, what about a house hack? Sorry, sorry, I keep going here, but.

No, it keeps going. This is good examples.

Yeah, exactly. Lots of examples. A house hack, right. You can, if you live in one unit, you could like, let's say, buy up to a four unit, get a physician loan and get a very, very low down payment loan. You get a physician loan actually on it, Right. You go to a commercial bank that offers physician loans. Some of them will offer a physician loan on an investment property that you live in. You live in one of the units and that'd be an easy way for you to pick up a fourplex every year if you wanted to. Right.

If you have a lot of students actually house hacking too. And we did it ourselves actually.

Right. Yeah, early on. We did actually. Yeah. So.

So why do you, why do you say that it is. I mean, you have a system. You call it, I think it's called, you call it Fast fire.

Right.

What does that really mean? And then let's dive into that a little bit.

Sure. You know, FIRE is acronym for financial independence Retire early. You know, I think when we think about retiring early, it is earlier than retirement age. Right. Because that's what they're focused on. But it's still not, it's still kind of later on in life, you still got to have that time to kind of save up. And so the question is that is there a path where you can do this even quicker? Right. Is there a path where you can do this in less than five years? And in our case, we did it in a little over three. Right. So is there a way that you can do that really quickly? Right. And so that's ultimately the strategy that we used. And it's a combination of a lot of things. It's a combination of cash flow, it's a combination of appreciation which you force. You don't hope that it appreciates. You actually force the appreciation on your properties, which we can talk more about. You get massive tax savings by sheltering clinical income. Right. And you also get that debt pay down, Right. Where your renters are paying your mortgage. So when you combine all those things, you can, you can accumulate a lot of money very quickly. And on top of that, when you force appreciate, then you use another tax deferral mechanism, just like your 401k called a 1031 exchange, and take those properties and flip them for bigger ones. Right. And you can do that in a tax deferred transaction.

Yeah. I'm going to summarize this. So it's called See the Money. The first step is see the Money, which is visualize what you want and why you want it, because that's going to get you to take the action that you need to take. The next one is get the money. And that's, that's what you're going to do when you're going to buy the property and make it cash flow and make it perform even better. So you're getting more and more cash flow out of it and you're forcing appreciation like Kenji just talked about. The next part is keep the money, which is harvest all those tax benefits that you can harvest to keep as much of that profit so you can reinvest it. And the last one is expand the money, which is when you're turning over your properties using 1031 exchanges or your cash out refiing to take that money tax free and buy more properties. And that's what causes you to expand your empire is what we call it.

Yeah. So you guys did this in a quick, very, very short period of time. Like how did you learn all this stuff in the Beginning, you know, I think you mentioned your father and you said, oh, he's not doing it the right way or the incorrect way or something like that. Like, is there a right way and a wrong way? And then how did you end up learning kind of how to do this?

Yeah, it's a good, that's a good question. And maybe it's not right to say it's the right way or the wrong way. I think it comes down to level of return. Right.

And risk.

Yeah, and risk. You know, did you extract the most value out of the opportunity? And that's kind of what I mean, more mean by my parents did it wrong is that they didn't extract all the potential value that that was there. And they could have expanded their portfolio a lot more aggressively and had been, been in a completely different situation if they had forced that appreciation in 1031 and if they took advantage of the tax benefits, which my mom was a stay at home mom, could have very easily qualified for that because she actually really was doing kind of the, the management of the properties. And so my dad was, you know, working as a clinical professor, so, you know, he wasn't really working on the properties and so.

Well, also your parents, I mean, I don't think they really understood what they were doing. They just blindly bought things.

Right.

And they still did. All right.

Yeah, they did. You know, part of it is time. I mean, time is very forgiving. Even in real estate. Like if you buy something, you know, the odds are it is going to have market appreciation. And that's why so much wealth in the country is just based on people buying their homes. Because odds are, you know, you hold onto it 20, 30, 40 years, yes, it's going to appreciate. But we're buying properties that actually cash flow from day one, not properties that we're hoping that they're going to appreciate down the road. And this is actually a really like strong fundamental piece of knowledge that Kenji came into our relationship with because he had been doing appreciation, he had been buying raw land. And you know, Keith Cunningham, actually I was reading his, his book the Road Less Stupid and he says raw land eats, eats three meals a day. And it's true. Raw land does not make you any money. You're sitting on it and hoping it's going to appreciate. You can sell it for a profit, but in the meantime it's eating three meals a day. And so Kenji literally had raw land that the whole market crashed in 2008 and he held on to for an additional, like what, 13 years paying HOA dues, paying taxes. I mean, it was brutal. So I think he came into that relationship, our relationship, with a really strong understanding that do not bet on appreciation. And so then along the way, we found mentors who had bits and pieces of our system that we eventually pieced together by talking to CPAs, talking to agents, talking to every single person you can imagine meeting and networking with other real estate investors. And that's how we put together the system. But nobody we ever met had all of the pieces together. I think in part because a lot of people who are doing real estate are not high income professionals. So they're not really focused on the taxes, they don't really care about the taxes. But for us, like one of the really important things. And so once we learned that system really kind of drove our investing.

Can you paint a picture real quick for people that are listening to this to understand, like, what kind of numbers are we talking about in terms of. Not necessarily, you don't have to say your numbers or whatever, but just paint a picture like how can those tax savings really accelerate things? Because what kind of numbers, what kind of scale are we looking at this at?

I mean, so we haven't paid income taxes in six years. So you can imagine what that means in terms of hundreds of, I mean, some, some years it was hundreds of thousands of dollars that we saved from our portfolio.

I mean, an easy way to kind of think about it is if, you know, if one, one person makes, let's say 400,000 and the other person is a real, real estate professional, they're stay at home, stay at home, mom or dad, and they're, they're the real estate professional, then you can create a situation where you shelter all 400,000 of that income. And let's say the taxes on that is a hundred thousand. Well, your, your employer is withholding a hundred thousand, right? And then come tax time when you file, you get that entire 100,000 back as a refund, right? And so that's what we're talking about is really $100,000 right back into your bank account that you can use to fund the next investment. And so.

Right. And then you have compounding, because you know this, the money we got back five years ago, we reinvested into more real estate. And so now that gave us more tax savings. And now that's grown our cash flow significantly. We forced depreciation. And so again, it's a snowball effect.

And then let's take that 100,000 and see what we can do with it. Right? You can put that down on a $400,000 fourplex, let's say, right? And we bought one of these, right? And what we do with it is we really increase the cash flow by increasing income and decreasing expenses, right? An example of decreasing expenses is billing back utilities. Right. And in a lot of communities, you know, building back utilities might not be something that's very common, but you could be the first right to build back utilities. And the key is if you build back utilities, that means that you're income and your cash flow goes up, but also more importantly, the value that property goes up because it's considered an investment property. And that means another investor is willing to pay more for that property because it's spitting out more cash. Right? And so now that fourplex, for example, you know, in 12 to 18 months could be worth, let's say, 600,000, right? And so you put $100,000 on a $400,000 fourplex. Now 12 to 18 months later, imagine if it's worth 600,000.

You have to put some money into rehabbing it as well.

I mean, so that's the whole concept of force appreciation that you're talking about. I think we get into a little bit. It sounds like that's one way. I mean, what are some other ways that you've noticed to be able to figure out how to force appreciation?

Yeah, there's a lot of ways. I mean, it's a whole list of things, right? Anything that can increase income or decrease expenses, right? And you can literally go line by line and think about, okay, on the income side, right? How can I increase income? And this is, this is where we're talking about the questions, right? You asked yourself a question. You asked about positions. Are they, you know, well positioned to do this? Yes. If you're a good thinker, if you can problem solve, then you're well positioned to be a really good real estate investor. And I guarantee you a lot of real estate investors, they're formulaic, they follow a formula, but they don't think, right? And this is what's good, I think could separate somebody who's a really good investor from a regular investor. Right? And so in this case, right, the thing, the thought process is, well, how do you increase income? Right. What are some other sources of income? Right? So there might be, should I charge pet rent? Right. So some people have these rules in their head. They go, I'm not allowing pets. Well, then you just missed out on an opportunity to make pet income. Right? And we also collect a non refundable pet Fee Right. At the time that they move in. Because that's when you get their money, right? You get their money up front and you make them pay a deposit because they're desperate to find a place because nobody else lets pets, nobody else allows pets. Right. And so you kind of, you know, you know, kind of take advantage of that. And so rent, pet income could be one you can lease out. We've leased out garages, storage units, you know, other, other things is go find a different customer. Right. Instead of renting it to a regular tenant. What we did was we went out and found a program, a state funded program called Supported Living. And we provide housing for people with intellectual disabilities. And they pay more and they pay all the expenses. They cover all expenses. So we have zero expenses. Right. And our cash on cash return, our cash flow went from 10% to 40%. Right. Just from thinking about this question, how do I increase income? How do I decrease expenses? And then problem solving. And we have actually a weekly meeting where we actually sit down for an hour or two every week and we ask ourselves these questions. Property by property.

Yeah, that's our, Some of our real estate hours. Peter, you got to get Vicki into it.

Yeah, that's right.

That's going to be tough. All right, well, I mean, what do you think? More doctors don't get into this stuff. I mean, it's funny because I feel like now maybe it's just because the circles I'm in, it's a lot more accepted or people are talking about it a bit more. It's just again, maybe I'm living in a real estate investor position bubble now, but, but still, I would say the vast majority, vast, vast majority of physicians are like, no, I'm not interested. I'm not doing it. I don't know anything about, like, why do you think more people aren't doing it?

Well, I have my, my opinions on that, but yeah, so I personally, I think a lot of it is mindset and fear, right? So it's, it's fear of the unknown, fear of trying something new, fear of, of losing your money, fear that you don't know enough, fear you don't have the right connections. Right. All these things, right. I mean, it's like people anchor on, oh, I don't want to have to deal with a leaky toilet in the middle of the night. Right. And what they don't do is ask the next question. Is that true? Right. And in fact, it's not true. Right. We've never gotten woken up in the middle of the Night for a leaky toilet. Right. So you're missing out on a whole opportunity because of your thought process. Right. And what I was talking about, the utilities reimbursement thing, where, you know, most people don't ever even ask the question, can I build back utilities here? Because what typically happens, the property manager says, no, you can't build back utilities. It's impossible. Right. Can't be done. Right. And so immediately that gets shut down and you stop problem solving. You stop saying, like, well, is that really true? Is it impossible? And so that's what I'm saying is that you got to ask yourself that secondary question. I think most people stop themselves. They don't kind of take that next step to ask whether. Whether or not something is possible, whether or not something is maybe better than what they're doing currently.

Yeah. I'm going to also hypothesize, and of course this is, you know, a hypothesis is that a lot of us went into medicine in part because of the stability of it. Right. We saw. I mean, my dad was a doc, Kenji's dad was a doc. We watched our parents always have a job, no matter where they were. My dad worked internationally. There would always need for doctors. And so for me in college to think about being an artist, it would scare me too much. Like, I love the certainty of being a doc and always having a job. And so I think that probably plays somewhat into this too. Into the mindset of this is a little bit uncertain. It's starting your own business. Right. It can be scary to people. It's. Once you do it, you realize this is not like a typical business where you're taking a ton of risk and you don't know if there's going to be any reward. You. You're actually buying a business, which is that property that's already operating. All you're doing is taking a business that already exists with systems that already exist. You know, property managers exist, lenders exist, all the systems exist. And you're buying the property that already exists. You're not building it from scratch most of the time, and then you're just making it a little bit better, and then you're adding a ton of value to it. So I think if you don't. If you don't aren't doing it, it seems scary. But once you are doing it, you see how much more, like, lower risk it is than actually starting any other business.

Yeah.

So I know that's something that would have held me back in the beginning.

Yeah. And your dad is a perfect Example of kind of somebody who is so kind of focused and driven. So he. Family doc, right, and was a professor, you know, teaching med students, residents and. But so focused on his profession and. And maybe, you know, I think he was kind of. They were happy, right? They were kind of happy. Satisfied with what.

What.

What they had. Right. They weren't really aspiring to, you know, to build like a huge nest egg or create generational wealth. Right. And so there are going to be a subset of people like that, too, right. Where, you know. But what's interesting, right, is that after all the conversations that we've had with her dad and after him seeing, like, our successes and what we're doing, I think I could see a little bit of this, like, you know, in my younger days, if I were still. And I need to ask him this question. But, you know, I could see the little. This, like, oh, in my younger days, if I. If I'd known you guys, you know, I might have done things a little bit different.

That's.

That's my sense. I don't know.

I don't. I don't know about that. But I will.

Let's ask.

I will say that, you know, my parents got really lucky and that they didn't have her have financial, like, big challenges. You know, I grew up in Papua New guinea, and my dad was like, you know, the director of the hospital. Like, if anything had bad had happened in my family, we had no savings. And so I said to my dad, like a couple of years ago, like, what would we have done? He's like, oh, we could have gone back to the US and we could have, like, gotten on Medicare. We, you know, if you got cancer, we could have gotten chemo that way.

Medicaid, I think.

Yeah. That was your backup plan. Yes, that was their backup plan, right? It was. And they got lucky. They never needed to use that. And so I think that probably also was part of it was just. They got lucky.

Yeah, yeah, I think so. Same thing with my father.

I mean, life events that, you know, it's kind of spurs people into, you know, thinking about things differently. I think this is what happened with COVID a lot for a lot of people, right? It's like, oh, man, you know, I better have a backup plan. Right?

And so, yeah, yeah, no, I'm saying I feel the same way. Just my father's physician as well, and luckily he was healthy throughout his prime years and he was able support his family, did well. Didn't think about any other sort of investments. However, his career got cut a Little short. I mean, honestly, he retired before he thought he had to retire. I mean, just the hospital, the changes in policies, and just the shifting kind of economics. And he ended up retiring a couple years earlier than he thought. And at that point, he finally realized, wait a minute, where's my income going to come from? Where's the rest of my retirement money? Where's my this? And it was definitely stressful and I helped him through it, a lot of it, his thinking and this sort of thing. But now looking back, he's like, I just got lucky. I mean, I wish I had started. Luckily, you know, now we invest in real estate because I've helped him, you know, and he uses that for a lot of his retirement account, and he kind of lives off of that. But what he's like, what if I'd done that 10, 15, 20 years ago, it would have been completely different, you know, and it would have changed kind of the way the end of his career went, you know what I mean? In terms of decisions he made, he had to change certain jobs because of the income, these kind of things. And so I totally get where you're at. And so if there are any other positions that are listening to this and want to find out more about things you've talked about, obviously we have your blog. You guys have a podcast as well too. Tell us a little bit about that and then tell us a little bit about the course that you guys have.

Yeah, so our podcast is called Rich Doc, Poor Doc. And really the inspiration is Rich Dad, Poor dad, which was the book that we first read that kind of kicked this whole thing off. This is where we got the thought process about collecting assets, which are things that put money in your pocket. And that's kind of where real estate came in. Yeah. The cool thing about Rich Dark Poor Doc is that, you know, our, our semi retired blog is so focused on cash flowing rentals and, and really growing your wealth, and it's focused on fast fire. But Rich Doc, Poor Doc just allows us to kind of expand and go in a lot of different directions. And really the theme of, of what we're doing in that podcast is really studying the kind of the mindset, the habits and strategies that separate a rich doc from a poor doc. Right. And rich doesn't just mean money. Right. Rich means, you know, friends and like, you know, having relationships and love and, and laughter and fun. Right. Those are things that are rich. Right. That create a rich life. And so, so every, every interview that we do, we ask that question, hey, what? How do you Define rich. Right. And so it's a really fun podcast.

I can't even tell you how many people have said it's like relationships or it's my family or it's my attitude.

Right, right.

Yeah, it's really cool to hear. And so it's a lot of fun because we get to interview people who we'd never get to talk to. Like to talk to Garrett Sutton was like a huge thing for me. I was so excited because we read his books very early on and it really structured our, made our whole asset protection plan out of his books. And then we got to interview him on the podcast, which was really fun.

Yeah, that was really fun. Yeah. And then our, in terms of our course, it's called 00 to Freedom through Cash Flowing Rentals. And again, the foundation is cash flow. But the thing that I always say is that cash flow is essential. Like you have, you know, if you're going to be putting, you know, if you're going to have assets, it's got to be putting money in your pocket. So we buy cash flowing properties, but remember that it's not the, the biggest component of return. Right. Tax savings, forced depreciation, those things are even more important. Right. But the foundation is Cash flowing rentals and that's why we titled it, you know, zero to Freedom through Cash Flowing Rentals. And the other part of it is, is that, you know, zero to freedom, kind of where that comes from is, you know, you could start, you know, if you're starting with nothing, you have no knowledge. The idea here is that in this course we're going to help you get to a point where you're really confident to buy, buying your first property and that's what's going to set you free. Having the knowledge. Because we don't hand things to you. We teach you how to do this effectively, we teach you how to fish. We don't fish for you. And so what, we, we equate that to freedom because once you have that knowledge and you're then able to replicate that and do it yourself and achieve your own financial freedom. Right. And that's why it's called Zero to Freedom.

That's awesome. Okay, how long is that course for?

So we're going to have course enrollments coming out soon, but the course lasts a total of eight weeks. And it's not just kind of passive learning. What you're doing every week is you're going to be actually building your team and it's really, you're going to be getting pre approved for loans we're going to kind of take you step by step. So by the time you're finished with the course, a lot of people have either put in offers or some may be even close to closing on their first property. It's. It's really cool. We just had a student tell us they just bought a 60 unit apartment complex.

Student who went through last.

Yeah, last.

No, this year. This year.

Yeah, it was this. Well, it was. Yeah, it was this year.

In the winter.

Yeah, in the winter. And then. And then actually we had another student who bought 40 units three months after our course. So just incredible the amount of progress people are making.

That's awesome. I'm going to leave a link for this course. It's only open once or twice a.

Year.

At least right now, but if you're interested, look for that link on the show notes. It'll probably be passiveincomemd.com ZeroTo Freedom. Just type that all in. Usually there's some goodies that we give along with that, but definitely you can check out the course. I know there's an amazing community that's built up around it as well, which is, I think, a huge draw for what you guys do. There's so much wisdom in that community and just having others to help you out and support you along the way and otherwise. Check out the blog. Semi retired md. There's awesome content that comes out on a weekly basis there and I really appreciate what you guys do. You're just, you're sharing so much of your information, your resources, and I've seen how so many students, including myself, have really been able to achieve so much through it. So thanks so much guys. Take care and keep up the awesome, amazing work.

Thank you so much.

Okay, bye.

Bye.

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