EP 439 – What Can I Do With My SD IRA with Nathan Long

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Worth of property for pennies on the dollar. Get educated and entertained by someone who has closed thousands of deals and lives to support you in achieving the same. Now, here's your host, CEO of We Close notes, Scott Carson. All right, good morning, good afternoon, good evening everybody. Welcome this episode of the Nook Closer Show. As always, Scott Carson. Excited to be here with you today. Hopefully you're out rocking and rolling along. We are excited and jacked up to have our good friend, the CEO of Quest Trust Company, Mr. Nathan Longjoin this morning.

Good morning, Nathan. Hey, Scott. I'm glad to see you jacked up. That's an important factor.

All jacked up, right? Jacked up.

Ready to go?

Yeah. I'm here to pump you up. Oh, good times, good times. Well, we are excited to have you. I know you got a busy schedule. You got the questies running all across the country doing amazing things and talking and speaking and sharing a lot of things. We love having you because it's our usual first Monday of the month is Money Mondays reserved for Quest Trust Company. And you and I were talking before we went live here about some of the cool things that we're going to be talking about today. But for those that haven't heard of you before or don't know you across our AM FM dials, our 80 countries that people listen to the show on and then all, of course, 50 states take a second to share who you are, Nathan.

Okay, well, my name is Nathan Long and president of a company called Quest Trust Company. Mainly what we do is we hold private assets with tax leveraged accounts, things like People's IRAs, the Roth IRAs, Health Savings Account, Coverdell accounts, individual 401ks, SEP IRA SEPLR. So tax leveraged accounts. And what does that mean? It means that most people that have those accounts hold stocks, bonds, mutual funds, CDs, all the stuff that you handle it. But you don't have to hold those things. You can hold private assets. Private assets include things like real estate or private stock. But a big asset class that works really well inside of self directed IRAs is guess what, Scott Notes. That's it.

You got it.

You guessed it right.

Ding, ding, ding. Hang on a second.

And it really, I'm joking and stuff, but it really does work well because a big portion of the way you look at note investing is not always a knock it over the fence thing. It's a Constant churning. At least for me, that is. Other people do it differently. Different skills levels. I got it. Different people are all, all over the place. But for me, when I'm investing in notes, personally, me, Nathan Long, I'm looking for long term, steady, nice return secured by assets that are going to give me overall a little bit less hassle than other things. Right. I know as you turn the volume up, as you turn the amount that return you get up, you also should understand, you dial up either your time or your hassle. And you got to figure out kind of the strategy that works for you. But the big thing is, is you can take your old 401k and instead of just throwing a blanket across it, across the market, you can buy a note.

That's right.

All that money go back into your 401k instead of owning a stock or something else.

That's the beauty about it. It's great stuff out there to be able to use that and then be able to you technically self direct. Why don't we share the definition of self directed a little bit? Because I think some people, I talked to a couple guys just, oh yeah, my accounts are self directed.

I was like, well, a lot of people get confused. Like they think that they could self direct it like Charles Schwab or Fidelity. And the reality of it is, is, is that those companies, they're licensed securities agents. So they're really limited to selling you things that are in the scope of their license. Stocks, bonds, mutual funds, CDs, and they receive a commission for doing that. And again, I'm not talking bad about this at all. Here's most of my clients, as you know, they hold an account with us and they buy unusual things with us, but then they maintain their account with Charles Schwab and they just transfer. Like if they have a note that comes up, that's $150,000 or something like that, they transfer over $150,000. Buy that note, when it pays off, transfer it back to Charles Schwab and back and forth. We just hold private assets. We can't sell them to you. Right. You have to go to someplace else. That's why we have the association with people like you. You teach them how to buy notes, what to buy, and. And then we show them how to use their retirement accounts or how to use other people's retirement accounts.

Yeah, that's a strong thing. I was talking to somebody the other day who was like, oh, I can't start investing until I save lives. Like now there's a lot of Other people's money out there or other financial friends that you can use if you're out networking and talking with people. As long as you're doing your due diligence on a deal and making sure it's a solid deal, stuff like that, there's other people's money that you can use. Because a lot of Quest clients are partnering with other people to fund deals and do other transactions, right?

Nathan, I would guarantee to bet you that most people, even some of your very well and established investors don't understand how powerful a relationship with a company like Quest can be. Because you're right, it's a two sided thing. A you start to learn how to grow your money tax free. So working the same amount but ending up with more money because you're giving it less to Uncle Sam. Sign me up, right? I always believe in working less and making more. That's my theory on life, right? But the other side of it is really learning how to use other people's money. Anybody who is highly wealthy always has leverage as a part of their strategy. We're always using someone else's money, purchase assets to hang on to them. And there's all types of variations of that. And most of those variations can be done self direction. Those two things are really important. But I think the education goes way beyond that. Here's something that you don't understand. If you talk to most of your people that you talk to finance about your insurance guy or your stockbroker or you know, your guy at Edward Jones, all of those people always as you speak to them, they have what I call a horse in the game. What choices you make affects their commission or how they get paid. At Cuesta doesn't work like that. You get to call up and you get to talk to an IRA specialist. An IRA specialist has a vast knowledge about retirement accounts and a vast knowledge about unusual investing techniques, okay? And they have no horse in their game. They don't really care what you decide to do, right? So it's this very free open discussion that you can't get most of the time. I've always said I can pick anybody out of a crowd and pick any one of my IRA specialists and I can put them together and in 15 to 20 minutes they can improve their financial life. I honestly believe that.

I totally agree to that too. Because your IRA specialists go through such a rigorous kind of training program. I mean rigorous, it's. They work at Quest, which is great, which is awesome because you guys provide so much education out there. You're the Premier IRA company in the country. Because of that, you guys provide so much education online or in person, and you've got people.

That is our business philosophy. If we can get clients that are educated and make good investment decisions, guess what? They'll make money with their investments, that they'll do more of them. And then I get more fees and we make more money and they make more funny and everyone's happy. Right? And so that is really the key is having an educated staff and then taking that education and passing that to clients. And we do that for free, whether you're a client or not, by the way. You don't have to be a client to call in and get a free consultation about what's going on.

Mm. That's a huge, huge thing. Everybody should be listening to that right now because that's a huge nugget. For those out there that are listening to this, that are in your car listening at the gym or watching this on Facebook Live, or watching this on YouTube as a replay, you can always pick up the phone, voucher this, call Quest Offices, and you'll be able to get somebody on the phone, spend some time with you, talk about what you're trying to accomplish, what you're looking for, and they'll give you a straight no bs, no commissions based answer, no commission space answer. That's true.

And which is important because if you have the proper education, then you can actually make your own decisions most of the time better than someone else can make a decision for you, because your decision is based on, do we have time? Can I give an example of.

Oh, yeah, we got plenty of time. Yes, sir, go right ahead.

So some things that people don't think about whenever they're doing this, and me and you have talked about this. Chime in and stop me at any time. It's one of the coolest things that I find and I've been doing note investing for a long time. Personally, Nathan, long. But one of the coolest things, or one of my favorite things is to bring my friends and family into what I'm doing right? For example, my mom, it's a life changing event. My mom was a good little investor. She'd always have rental properties. As she got older in life, rental properties get to be more and more difficult because she especially liked low end rental properties. You got what I'm saying? And she was good at it. Like she was good at it whenever, for most of her life, she had the thing. But as you get older, toilets and tenants and rent, that wears on you. And I Finally convinced her to start selling off some of the rental properties and purchasing notes. And now she has this phenomenal income. She always tells me, and she thanks me all the time. He says, I've only got a couple rental properties left and I'm just going to dump them. I'm like, well, mom, you don't really need to know. I just want to dump them. You don't like, like, because I've got so much money coming in now, I couldn't spend it all on you, kid. Kids don't need any of it anyway. That's the truth. It was a life changing event to her or one of the other things that my family really likes to do. My brother's expert at that. He's in Ingleside. By the way, where you grow up, I don't know. We invest together with our children at a very young age. Do you have kids? I forget.

Not that I know of, no.

Do you want mine?

No.

Okay, sorry.

Now we've got the four legged kind. When you come up with a, an animal ira, I'm all on it.

You're all on it. Okay. I got a lot of those four legged kinds too. Sometimes they're more expensive than the two legged ones though. But I mean, think back to the time when you're 18 or I think back to the time of my son and I'm an IRA specialist at Quest. And you know, I have all this tax stuff and boy, I'm excited about investing. Can you imagine me talking to my son? You know what I sounded like to him? Like that penis teacher. Right? Very traditional. My family is. As I opened, as soon as my son Derek started working, I opened a Roth IRA for him. He had some earned income and I made a contribution. I was like, son, I'm gonna give you $5,000. He's like, oh, great, dad. And I said, but I'm gonna put it in the IRA account. You can't really use it until you're 16. But I put the five grand in there. And what I would do is with this little account, I would partner it with my larger account. I take my investments that I was doing, and it might be 95, I might have $100,000 loan that I was purchasing or you know, doing a note. 95 of it came from my IRA. And I would take $5,000 from my son's IRA. And you can do the same thing with the covered L education account for minor children, or health savings accounts, or like I said, small Roth IRAs. But I partnered this. And what would happen is when I would get a check back or I get returned. 95% of it would go to my account, but 5% of it was going over to my son's account. You see what's happening over time. He's learning through the experience of a shared note experience. He's learning about actual investing. At first, he wasn't even concerned. I got that first note back and it went from 5,000, 5,600. He went, Whoo. And then I got the next time. And again, guys, I'm not like doing the $100 note deal. I am basically 90% of the time a lender. Every time, every once in a while, I get one of my notes that pay off early and I get a pop. You got that? But most of the time what I'm doing is I'm the back end note guy. In other words, you guys are finding the deals. You're doing the $100 opt. And I'm okay with that because I don't want to have to do the work right. So I'm trying to explain my position as an investor so people know that most of the time what I'm getting is What, a return, 10, 12, 13%. Somewhere in there is where I tend to range in my investment. Some get above that, some go below that, but that's that. But over time, that investment. By the time my son got out of college, he had a very good knowledge about investing and wasn't just like dumped out onto the college world without anything or anything to know. It's a great thing to talk about and have fun with and play with and understand. It really does bring your family together when all of you can understand that you're making money together as a group. Maybe it's a South Texas thing. I don't know.

You know, I don't think it's just a South Texas thing, Although I think we are very used to doing that with family and friends and things like that, you know, partnering up on different aspects of things. It's the case. But I think a lot of people, when they realize that, their whole eyes and ears start to open up. I know one friend of mine who was a student of mine was taking the Coverdells. She and her friends would get a deal and they would do the same thing. They would partner together to fund the deal. But then it will also include one or two of their kids, Coverdale, to help boost that investment. And some of the things I would highly recommend. This is just a little bit of information. I make sure if you're doing Just a flat lending thing. Make sure you're in a first lien position. Make sure you're not funding more than 70% or less of the true value of the asset. You know, I always double check who you're funding as well. You know, checking the values of the property is do the normal due diligence. I would just not, wouldn't just write.

What to do if you do have to foreclose. At least have some idea of the procedures in that state. As you know, I only buy loans in certain states because certain states that it's just too onerous. I always look at the state and then the applicable laws of the state or county or city that you're in.

Yeah, exactly. That's such a huge thing. And of course you always want to make sure there's insurance on the assets as well. In your name. Yeah, you know, stuff. And of course, you know, the beautiful thing is always have the attorneys, have attorneys create the paperwork, double check it, you know, and that's what I like about what a lot of your staff does. They're. They're reviewing the paperwork to make sure it's documented properly and things like that too before they'll fund us in your Austin office on last Tuesday before the trillion dollar mixer that I spoke at and cracking up at Michael in there, he's like, I'm gonna get a deal funded really fast. Like four minutes here because I'm double checking. Oh, not gonna happen because the paperwork is incorrect. We gotta get it fixed.

Well, it does happen sometimes.

Exactly.

Excited to know just before they turned on. They're turning on today, I guess a new ACH system. I don't think I'm supposed to announce this yet. We can now receive our ACH payments in real time. If someone makes a note payment, as soon as they push the note payment, they'll get an email back that says it's received. As soon as Quest opens up, it posts to the cow. So that's almost instant before it's been like post and it wait a couple of days in our system. But now I guess it's going to post really fast. So that should make it easier for you to check your note payments and stuff coming in.

That's awesome. That's awesome. I think that's still up to an ACH. Up to $5,000, right. Payment. Otherwise it's still got to be a wire if it's over 5, right?

I have no idea. But you're probably right.

I think I'm right on it. We've been making a lot of ACH Payments and working with the staff over there with the portal, tweaking a few things and going back and forth. But that's awesome.

Some of those tweaks are coming online now, so we're excited.

But that's one of the beautiful things I love about Quest. You guys are investing in technology, you're investing in doing some things that make it easier for your client, clients of your clients to make it easier to get paid and get the money in and back and forth and fund it and stuff like that, which is awesome. I see, I see. But you didn't know you used to be tickled pink on some of the things you're doing, huh?

I bet you didn't know this about Quest and maybe you did, but Quest, we really put all the money back into Quest. Me and my brother Quincy are the majority owners of Quest. And since its inception, 97% of all money Quest has earned has gone back into Quest. And we're an employee ran company. Our employees actually see our books and as a result they feel very invested. And when you talk to a Quest employee, they really are invested in their company. And in nine years we've never raised our fee, but we've opened up three education centers. One in Austin you've just mentioned. God, it's nice, isn't it? The Dallas one, we have one in Houston and we're going to continue to open them across the country. So we're really excited to provide that education. And as always, most of that education is for free.

Exactly. Now you do have an amazing event upcoming here in August. The 2nd Annual Quest Expo which is the 23rd, 24th and 25th of August. You had an amazing event last year around the same time with over 500.

Basically convinced the girls to do that event, didn't you?

I tried. I said, you know, they were going back and forth and I was like, you know, you keep speaking of these other expos, why don't you guys just create your own and bring the.

Yeah, I thought you were nuts too. But my God, everyone got so excited. I don't know, we had seven or 800 people there and I got such good feedback. Again, same thing with the Expo. When we do an Expo or sell tickets to the Expo, we took everything from the expo, we put it back in. So people kept doing, getting excited and they buy more tickets. Well then we put more stuff onto the show and then people got more excited. So yeah, we're really excited for it this year. And I may be partial, but I think it's one of the best expos that we've done or had in a long time. I hope I can repeat it and have that same type of thing.

I believe you are. I think a lot of people I know we had. We actually changed our schedule to fit our mastermind around the last one. And we're doing the same thing this year. It's in Houston this year instead of Dallas. The 23rd, 24th and 25th. That's a Friday, Saturday, Sunday. You can go to questexpo.com to get your tickets. If you're listening, this is a book, a ticket that you're going to want to book asap because you can save some price on the early discount tickets if you use the code. Carson 19 will give you a discount as well. We thank Ingrid for creating that for our note family and Note nation out there. But think about this. Where else are you going to go and be able to hang out with hundreds and hundreds of other real estate note investors? People have IRAs looking to invest and then the other experts, the speakers. You had some really great panels on the last one and also some great breakouts by speakers. Great vendor area where everybody got a chance to spend time.

I thought it was entertaining too. Everyone seemed to be so engaged. It was really fun. It was none of this like, wear our hair, ta da scar SATA. Like the people on stage were really animated and it was a really good show.

Yeah, it was funny. Some of the panels and everything like that you had. It was really good back and forth and things like that too. I know you've got a few things lined up. I know that Ingrid is talking with our buddy Markusyk about maybe doing a hypnotist show. You had a casino night last year and you're planning to have another casino night the second night here as well, which is a lot of fun. A lot of fun with everybody. I talked to Fuquan Bilal yesterday or the last week. He's excited about returning. I think that's one of the great things is you have such an amazing expo and like I said, it's just the energy of it just is boom. You can feel it when you walk in. The staff is excited. Everybody in the staff was working. The event was excited and pleasant and just jacked up about it. I know everybody from our crew that was there because we had about 70 plus people at it and they were just like, oh my God, this was awesome. We can't wait for it next year. That's one of the things we're doing. We're tweaking our mastermind in four months to be wrapped around the Quest Expo so that people can kill two birds technically with one stone or one vent. You know, that's the thing you look at. You go not only just for the networking, but you're picking up relationships and building relationships. I know people were coming in.

It only takes one.

That's so truth.

If you go to event like that and pick up one good one, that's all it takes. And if you don't, then maybe try a different cologne or something, brush your teeth. I have people coming from all over the country. I have the advantage of knowing what's in their pocket because, you know, not that I could tell anybody that, but I know in the amount of big name, big money type of people that showed up there to find investors was amazing to find places to put their money. I was really impressed that. So thank you for suggesting it and pushing the girls to doing it and giving us some of the guidance on how to make it so good.

Well, Ingrid challenged me Tuesday to help out, help fill more seats to make it even bigger and better this year. And I said I'd be glad to help drive engagement. So if you guys are listening out there once Again, go to questexpo.com It's August 23rd, 24th and 25th. Not meant to be a sales page. Trust me, this is an event that you want to go to. I don't get anything off the tickets. I'm just glad to have more people there because it gives us an opportunity to network with everybody and really spread the Quest gospel, as we like to say on the growth and the creative things that you can do. So Nathan, what are some of the other creative deals that you have done inside your IRAs or HSAs or ESAs out there? That gives some people some. I think about whether listening to this episode.

Well, I like to think about is once you have a deal, sometimes it's good to before completely executing the deal to what I call bring it back home and think about it like look at it a little bit and see will it where it will work best. For example, okay, had a deal, we're going to buy a note, right? And then he was selling the note off and taking the back end of the note. In other words, he was going to let the first front end of the payments flow to the person's money who he is using. He's using $100 option. But about five to six years from now, he's going to get five or six years of payments which he doesn't have to pay anything out on so costed him a hundred bucks. Now put it in the cooker for five years. It doesn't do anything and after five years it starts making payments. Where should that deal be? For a lot of people, that deal should be in a Roth IRA. Listen, I'm starting with $100. I'm going to turn $100 into a whole bunch of money. But it's going to take time. I don't really need the money now. I've got plenty of time for it today. I put that in my Roth IRA and all that happens tax free. I'm padding my retirement, right? Versus if I was doing that. I'm going to take all the money on the up front and I haven't eaten today, right? I need to pay my mortgage, I need to do things. Then I use that deal and what I call my eats bucket or I'm feeding myself now. But a lot of times I'm dealing with a deal where I'm getting a small income stream, right, that's going to increase over time or like putting up $100 and I'm getting an income stream over months. It's going to build up wealth over a period of time. Some of these longer term type of strategies really belong in different types of account. You got to pick. You could also make a mistake and go the other way. Here's something I did years ago. I invested in a note with my niece's Coverdell education account. Okay? This was a note that was secured by a business and some other things. It's a very long term note. I thought, well, look at this, it pays great. It's got a great interest rate. It's going to pay great. The problem with it, it was long term and it was a covered all education account. She just graduated from college and the investment's still going on. You get what it's like. Yeah, we had other money for college, but it was kind of funny, you know, like she'll still. The investment's a good investment, but it was so long term I hadn't taken into account the fact that hey, we actually need to pull this money out and use it before then. But most of the time I think that the way to really do it is to take a moment and look at it. I think the most underused account or the account that I think that people miss and it's expanding its powers most likely in the future is the health savings account. Health Savings account is amazing. You put the money in, you get a tax deduction, you Take the money out. It comes out tax free for qualified distribution, which are hugely broad. It covers all types of crazy stuff, including optical and dental and acupuncture and holistic medicine and massage. All this qualified medical expenses. And it's not only for you, it's you, your spouse, your children and parents. And you can pick up receipts from previous years. Health. Building money in a health care savings account, according to John Heyer, was one of the most important steps to building financial freedom as we go forward. And you go, well, why? Well, cost of health care is going up for several reasons. One's administration, but also technology. We get better and better at fixing things, but those fixes cost more and more. So we'll need more money. You get sick, you get ill, you'll destroy every bit of your wealth building up that paying off to be better. Yep. So I really think that learning to build up money in a health savings account, learning how to use them, and it could be fun. You know, once I bought an airplane engine.

I was hoping you would talk about that story. Tell us how you structured this deal. Tell us the deal. Tell us the deal here.

Okay, here it goes. I got time. You sure?

Oh, yeah.

Years ago, I had opened a health savings account. With the health savings account, like I said, you put the money in, you get a write off on your taxes. And the idea is to have some money there to pay for your medical expenses. You do have to have a special type of insurance called high deductible health plan. But 64% of all Americans that are covered under health insurance are covered by high deductible health plan. So most people qualify for to have one of these types of account. What I did with that particular account is I put $5,650 in. That's how much I could that year. The contribution limits are different now, a little bit higher. And they're expanding to get much higher as they go into the future. So I put it in. I got to write off all my taxes. And that same year, my ex wife, dirty little booger, had a dental procedure. Right. She got the girl fixed. It was about 35 grand. You got what I'm saying?

Yeah. Okay. That's a nice grill.

That's a nice grill, right?

Okay.

Any guys that were married are married, you know that you had to. I had to fix grill. Right. So I didn't have 35 grand in my health savings account. How much I have in there at five. Everyone follow me. What did I do? Well, I pulled out the Southwest card, paid for the teeth and went on with my life. But I could have simply put the money in the health savings account and the very next day taking it out. Would that have been worth doing? The answer is yes, because I got a deduction on my taxes, right? I was in the highest income tax bracket. It would save me a couple of grand in taxes. But that's not what I did, Scott. I put the money into the account and I started to invest it with the partnering that I was talking about earlier. I partnered it with other investors and I specifically did notes. At this time, I was a little bit more active. I had a little bit more time. So sometimes I was selling off the notes I did, and I was taking notes. I was looking for myself. So I would get payoffs. You know, I mean, I get the early payoff and I would get the cash flow from these early payoffs. They did pretty well over a period of about five to six, six, maybe it was eight years, that $5,000 grew to be about $46,000. And then something happened. You ever have a midlife crisis? You're still pretty young. It's coming, Scott.

I turned 42 in a few months.

Oh, I don't know if it hit me, okay, what am I going to do, Nathan? What am I. Here are some 40 on this really cool plane. It was the thing. And without having an airplane, a license to fly, I went out and bought an airplane. I did learn to fly it, but it was a very old one. It needed a new engine. It was a 1952 Cessna taildragger. Well, what did I do? Remember, my wife had that receipt seven years ago. You could pick up receipts from years past. I simply went to my health savings account and withdrew $40,000 and bought a new airplane engine, tax free and penalty free, using that dental receipt from seven to eight years ago. Right? Just remove the money. Tax free and penalty free. It's an amazing account. If you want more information, you can go to Quest. There's a class called I think it's Best of both Worlds is what it's named. And you can watch it online. It talks all about Health Savings Account. Again, most people don't understand the idea of rather than just having one type of retirement account, you have a Roth IRA for you, a Roth IRA for your spouse. As your kids get earned income, you get a Roth IRA for them. You might have a traditional IRA where some of your 401k and other money has gone into that. We're working to get to a Roth ira. We have covered all education accounts for Our children and our grandchildren and health savings accounts. And we can put those all together into one note and create income for all of those different sources at a higher rate of return than anywhere else. When you combine the two things, note investing and combine that with self direction or the knowledge of doing it tax free, it is the most powerful wealth building tool and it can be extended to your family. True wealth building isn't about having money. True wealth building is having money enough that you can make your own decisions and feel comfortable for you and your family. It's an overview of the whole thing. Don't you agree?

I totally, 100% agree. I agree with that. Yeah. It's definitely. That's the true definition of wealth there, Nathan. For sure.

Anyway.

Do you still have a plane? Do you still have the plane?

I do not. When I moved to Houston, it's like there's so much weather here. Like I was in Arizona. It's like you only had to worry about one thing. It was hot, you know, that was it here. It's like I would get up in the plane and 15 minutes later it'd be a storm over the airport. And I had to divert 90 miles out of the way or something like that. Yeah, it just got.

You almost need to make it a water plane with as much rain and flooding.

Yeah, exactly. It was like. And I got a couple. I got stuck up there a couple of times and though I'm a fairly experienced pilot at this time, I let it go. I guess it's like a boat you have to stay is when you get it, when you sell it.

Exactly. It's like definitely what I hear. I've got a friend, she didn't buy a whole plane, she bought fractional. So like eight of them.

It's not that way to go.

Yeah. And then I've got. If I'm gonna buy a boat, I go out and join the Lake Travis Boat club. And then for like 500 bucks a month, I got my pick of any boat I want for six hours a day or something like that. So it's less work on my behalf, but. Or less trouble, I should say.

That's pretty cool, actually.

Now let's talk about a couple other things. You guys, you're coming to Houston or you're coming to Dallas, you're coming to Austin. Go to the live events that Quest has because you've got a variety. Each location is a trillion dollar investment mixer that takes place. You've got a lot of lunch and learns that going on. You've got a lot of People that show up to these events, it's a great way not only just to get education, but rub elbows with people that have money. Really kind of sitting on the sidelines, not making anything right.

Yeah, often. When I closed my door Friday, there was $304 million sitting in cash at Quest. And those clients are earning 0% interest.

Wow.

So they're anxious to get that money moving. A lot of people go, why would they do that? Why would they have that money sit there? Because they know it works. They've already done it enough times. They're just out looking for the next deal. Of course, some of it's transactional. You know, sure, probably 70 or $80 million of it's in float between transactions. But the rest of it is people actually actively looking for their next deal.

That's one of the things I tell people all the time. If you're going out, no matter where you're at, I mean, you're not in Texas going out to other locations, you come across somebody who's got bought a property with a self directed ira, you know, a couple of things immediately in mind. One, they're a real estate investor first and foremost. Two, they're looking for deals. And three, it's not quite as challenging to educate them on the real estate transaction as somebody who's never pulled the trigger on a deal.

Oh, yeah, that's pretty intelligent. Yeah, yeah.

And then ideally, great people to work with, you know, for your investments out there, to fund your deals or partner or do one of the things, you know, co fund whatever you have them do. What's the biggest thing that kind of drives you bonkers? Nathan? Now, there's a variety of things. I know you're very detailed about your schedule.

People that come up to me and say, nathan, I went to your question and nobody owed me any money, nobody gave me money for my investment. I'm like, you know, I can lead a horse to water. Right. Honestly, raising money or learning to use other people, money is a talent. It's a talent that can be learned. And I try to teach people that. But you really, most of them got to slow down and learn how to talk to people and understand that when you are using someone else's money, you're really developing a relationship with them. If I'm looking for a real estate deal, I'm just going out. I'm looking for a. No, I'm going out and looking for an investor. I want that investor not to do this deal for me, but to continue to fund each deal that I do for the rest of my life. And you better slow it down and learn how to have some relation development skills. You understand this because you built your whole business on it is building relationships with people one at a time and making sure that they count. And if you're a real estate investor, you need to treat your investors that way. It needs to be a relationship. And so slow it down. Don't, don't like run to the bar and say, this bar's terrible. I didn't have anyone want to come home with me tonight, right? You're going to have to put a little more effort into it than that, Scott.

Drop, fall over, legs up in the air. Hey, give it to me.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. We're going to need some flowers and some dinner days and stuff.

Right, Chocolates.

So I'm sorry, maybe that was not the direction you want to go in.

Scott, but you're 100% right though, about that because it is all about relationships. It's building rapport. Look, you really need to have. Even though it's really not required these days by the jobs act, you really still need to have kind of a three touch approach. When you talk with people, get a chance to meet somebody, talk with them, Network event, don't get diarrhea the mouth or throw up on them with everything. Just get a chance to visit with them, talk about, I'm a big pro bono. Hey, if you have deals that need funding, walk in with some deal sheets. You guys do a really great job allowing people to get up and say, hey, what they're looking for, what they've got available. You're not endorsing any investment. You're allowing the opportunity to talk about what they're looking for and then, you know, just carry the conversation there, you know. I was at an event in Dallas recently. Some guy had like 20 page, like presentation. He was trying to show people between the booths. I'm like, whoa, slow it down there, partner. You know, it's good to get the person's name, but then follow up with a phone call, follow up with an email, you know, talk with people, tell me a little bit of your experience and the good and the bads. Because we all have goods. And I actually trust people more that have been through the bads than those that haven't been through a downturn because they know how to take care of their investors. So if everything's always coming up rosy, you gotta be careful that. Cause everything's not always rosy.

I can give a little secret. Yeah, okay. It's always best to Attend live. But we have, we're talking to some people and like hey I'm in Kansas City right now or whatever it is, right? It's gonna be pretty hard for me to get down to Houston or over to Austin or over to Dallas. But what you can do is at most of the events log on at the end and type into the chat box, hey, I have an investment. We have moderators at the event that will read off your name. Alright so last week, true story last week we had an investor at typed in said I had some notes in Dallas that I'm looking to sell. No other information than that. Okay. They posted it. Didn't get a response right away but then the little thing went online and someone saw it. Someone responded to the little post and sent him an email and said I'm not interested in notes in Dallas but I got a good friend that buys them. I'm gonna put you together with this friend that buys them. They weren't even interested. They were just being polite and says hey, I know someone that's looking put it together. And she sold all three notes and closing today. So pretty impressive. I was like surprised. Never attended the event. Literally it was like one sentence in a chat box and she found someone to buy our three note.

Just so that everybody knows that Quest does live stream their live events on their Facebook page and that's what Nathan's talking about. It's great way to do it to go on their watch. They have a whole different schedule. If you go to quest trust company.com you can see their live events or the live webinar series that they have available and livestream. I mean when I spoke with the trillion dollar make sure you guys live streamed it. So there's questions back and forth. They were actually the ones that let us know that my battery on my lapel had gone out like oh no audio I like we need to get it back on. So you're not the only product we've had students that have attended the Houston event got up and somebody from St. Louis or San Francisco reached out and said hey, I saw that you're posting or saw you're talking about your deal on the Quest Trust live stream. I'd love to fund the deal and it's such a great way that you guys embrace the technology that way and.

Use it as clear. My staff embraces technology as you know, I can barely turn on my computer.

But that's all right though. They're just extensions of Nathan and Quincy and everybody question for you, where do you want to see Quest go in the next five years. I know you have a plan you're thinking about and you guys are embracing it. You and Quincy are doing a lot of stuff, talking about, where do you see Quest in the next 60 months?

Interesting you did that. Because I put that question to my staff and I wanted them to answer the question and I wanted them to design the answer. And they had, all right, a couple of different designs. But one of our biggest things is to have an east west coast presence. We wanted to have a west coast presence because the banks are open later there. Right. So we can fund much later in the afternoon. You know, we can fund into the west coast time. But also pretty much, we would love to see more education centers where people could come together, just like we do in Austin. We come together, people break bread. The center is there for all of our investors to use for education purposes. And it's just a great way to create business and to have a lot of fun. Do you know what our motto is at Quest? We want to make more money. We want to have fun doing it right, and we want to do it in less time. No one laughs about that, but everyone really goes to work for.

Yep, that's the truth.

So let's just deal with it. Like we're going to deal with it.

Yeah, that's a price.

And I think that we really do maybe put a little bit too much emphasis on the have more fun part of it.

Well, but that's the thing. It's important. And I think it's important for everybody that's listening to this or watching this. If you're logging online, if you can have fun, what you're doing, you're gonna retain more information. You're not. The last thing you want is, like you said before, is have the Charlie Brown instructor, the people that aren't invigorated by their staff. And that's no offense, I can say this because I've been to a lot of different other events across the country. When there's somebody, it's not a Quest up there speaking, it's. You see the employee mindset, like, oh, barely gonna get through this. I'm not gonna show up on time. Boss isn't here, so I don't really care. That's not the case. Your employee, your staff is always excited, they're always invigorated, they're always smiling, having fun, top of their game. And they're really great ambassadors not only for Quest, but also for self directed IRAs out there.

I appreciate that, Scott. And you're doing a pretty good job for your industry, too.

We try. We're always trying to tweak what we can do. I mean, we're not perfect by any form or fashion. We make plenty of mistakes. But we learn from our mistakes and try to make sure everybody else learns from our mistakes so we can help each other.

I think that's really key in business, is to stop trying to be perfect. You're much better to be responsible than perfect. In other words, I'm not perfect, my staff's not perfect because we're not dealing with perfect things. Investing is not perfect. There's mistakes that get made. Title companies make mistakes. You know, there's title mistakes, there's things that happen that's okay as long as you're accountable, what matters. Like you get a hold of someone and you can fix it and you can move on. There you go.

Exactly.

And stop living a fear of, like making a mistake or whatever, because we can all get better.

Mm. That's the truth. Now, what's a big goal in 2019 that you've got for yourself, Nathan? Anything big?

Oh, to travel, slightly less. I'm letting them do a little bit more of the speeches and to do a little bit more. My personal goal is to raise personally over a quarter million dollars for some of our charities, including helping their four legged friends, which I like to do a lot. As you know, my wife is very actively involved in animal rescue. Basically, we can't have a dog unless it's so jacked up that nobody else wants it.

You know, you've had a few straight. If you've got a three legged friend that goes with you there pretty often. Just so that you know, this Nathan is a vegetarian. Him and his wife are both vegetarian. But he goes home every night and cooks the dog's meat, though. Don't you cook them?

Yeah, most nights the dogs get meat or eggs or. Yeah, so we buy a lot of meat and everyone's like, yeah, you're vegans that buy meat. But I love my dogs, so. And they need meat and sometimes I do cook for them. Yes, it's true.

We do the same thing here as well with our four legged animals here. One of our. Yeah, I had fish the other night and of course the cats got some fish with some things there as well. But it's funny, but you're headed overseas a little bit. Oh, yeah.

Me and my wife are going to London. First time in our life. We're really excited about that. I picked our anniversary. I didn't have to buy an anniversary dinner. We're on the plane, you know, we'll be eating airplane.

Just as long as you get the champagne and you hold your pinky up. That's what.

Yeah, there you go. She'll be happy.

Nothing wrong with that at all. Well, if you're heading to London, we were there last year at this time. Great place. I sent a couple of things that I would recommend. How long are you guys gonna be in London for? Are you bouncing around?

I think 10 days.

Oh, wow. Yeah, you got a lot of fun things to do there. That'll be a blast for you guys. It's such an interesting thing. We have our financial markets a little bit different. When I was over there and talking with somebody about a self directed ira, they had no clue what the heck that was in London. It was kind of interesting. They're like, oh, you allow that? You know, in the States? I'm like, yeah, you know, if you need to, you've got your jacked up teeth. HSA would be great for.

Oh God, no you didn't. No.

Guy was a comedian. We were joking back and forth on some things that was pretty funny there. But Austin Powers jokes back and forth there for the most part.

But yeah, no, the only other country that has any form of self direction at all is actually Australia. You can self direct some of their IRAs, self annualizations or something like that they're called.

I don't know.

But yeah, everyone else thinks we're pretty strange. We're the only country that allows it. Which is actually a really interesting financial freedom. I hope we're able to protect because it really does spawn a lot of small businesses. It helps a lot of Americans maintain and keep home ownership. That's something that a lot of people don't talk about notes or something which is the social aspects of what we do. I often help people. I like making money, Scott. But I think more importantly in some of the investing I do is I've actually helped people save their homes. You know, I think you should do a whole show just on that. Like honestly about some of the examples of just what we've done that are social impact while we made money.

Yep, I totally agree. That's. Well, that's one of the little things that we always like to joke. Well, no, we were joking about. I mean our model has been turning problem properties into profitable solutions. But instead of rehabbing the house, our biggest goal is to rehab the borrower and to help them stay in their house. We can. It doesn't always work out that way, but That's a great idea. Yep.

I mean, but I think that a lot of people lose sight of how much social impact they always like to make investors out to be some type of evil people. And they don't really understand without them flux of money, especially in these neighborhoods where houses are below, say, $75,000. Banks don't want to mess with that stuff.

Yeah.

Without the private industry coming in and saving and fixing and taking care of some of those notes, these people would not have their home. And that's something that people should understand politically. It's really important what we do.

I would agree with that. Totally. Yeah. We looked at our portfolio. Right now we've got of the stuff over the last two and a half years, we're at 65% of retaining the borrowers and the properties, which is amazing. We're a little more selective what we're buying. But still, though, that's our whole goal in mind, is if it's occupied, that's one thing we want to buy because it's a win win. Being able to keep somebody in their house and helping them turn that once the American dream into really the American nightmare. They're behind in their mortgage and afraid they're going to get foreclosed or evicted. And then being able to take away that fear and say, listen, hey, I get it. We've all been through things. Who is that bum? Aren't you supposed to be out working? Aren't you supposed to be working?

This is like a flower on his lapel.

I know. All fancy there. We got Nate here joining us. Oh, yeah. I just want to say hi. What's up, buddy? Nate show for two seconds. That's a Nate and Nate show. There you go. Good stuff. Good stuff there. But you're right.

Yeah. I didn't mean to interrupt you. I'm sorry.

No, no, no. It's good stuff, but we agree it's an important thing to do that if you can help give back in some sort of fashion while you're making money, it makes life a whole lot more fun.

It does, exactly.

Well, I want to thank you for taking time to come out to South Texas boys once again on the no Closer show there. How big was orange grove when you were living there? How many people were there? You remember? 3500.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Someone told me it's growing out there. I was like, are you sure? Are we talking about the same place?

Yeah, well, that's the same thing. Ingleside, where I grew up at, was 3600 when my parents moved there. I started the local hardware store when I was in the fourth grade. Now I think there's over 10,000, 11,000 kids.

There's activity. Good stuff.

The Texas Riviera. Good stuff. Good stuff. All right, Nathan.

Well, hey, thank you so much, Scott.

Thank you, bud. And once again, guys, check it out. Quest trustcompany.com or go to the questexpo.com grab your early bird tickets right now. Use the discount code CARSON19 to get 25% off. Take advantage of. Book your tickets now to the largest self directed IRA event in the country. The largest and the best. Come on out and we'll see you guys there in August. Otherwise, go out, make something happen, and we'll see you all. The top, everybody.

Bye.