Session 21 - The Note Investor's Essential Checklist: Legality, Marketing, and Your "Top 15" Actions

All right, everybody, what I want you to do with this session, and this is going to be the final session of the class here for you so you can get onto your Sundays and the rest of your day, stuff like that. We've got some more stuff that we'll send out for you. Stuff. But my throat's killing me and I know how much far I can go here for you. Okay, so Shanti asked a question. I heard from the other note mentor from another note mentor that you can rent out the place while waiting for the one year foreclosure. The program name, Reverse Aria. But I choose you instead. Well, here's the thing. That's not a good thing. All right? Could you rent out a place for a year while you're waiting for the foreclosure? Yeah, you could do that. You could do that. You could totally. But you don't necessarily own the property. You don't own the property, you own the note. So if the borrower did a deed and loan to you or consent to judgment, then you could. Could they move out? Yeah, they could do that. If the borrower is deceased, could you take control of the property and put it. But you don't own the property. So actually waiting for a foreclosure to take place, you are violating fair debt collection practices on that. That's illegal. Okay? Now if you were the bank and the property is vacant, you have all the right to go in there, change the lock, secure the property, protect your investment. Yes, you can do that. If you foreclose and there's a redemption period in your state, like there is in Alabama or Minnesota, the borrower's moved out, could you then put property in there, since you foreclose, take the ownership, could you put somebody in there on a month to month basis? Yes, you can do that. That's fine. Month to month, they'd have to get moved out. And the redemption amount is only what you paid for that property and any maintenance fees, not rehab fees, not costs like that. So a reverse reo, not saying it's full of shit in all cases, but that's bad. That's not the right way to do business. Okay? Of course, if a borrower is moved on, there's a second lien. Of course you could do that. Where they've given done a consent to judgment and go through the process that's the exception to that. Do condos foreclose from a junior lien position, evict the tenant and then put a tenant in place there to collect rents? Yes, they do that. They've already foreclosed from a junior lien position. Okay. But doing that is not accurate. And I've had people reach out to me. I'm like, that's not an accurate thing to do. Not saying it's all combat, but the stuff that we see where we're buying non performing vacant notes, I can't go out and change the locks. I don't own the property yet. I've got to take it to foreclosure to realistically own the property. Otherwise it's unethical. You can't do it. Now if the property like you're not going to get into your exits. A lot of times to stuff now if the door is wide open, can you walk in? Of course. If it's a listed short sale list on the analyst, can you go get a realtor to let you see it by using the lockbox? Yes. That's okay. But there's a lot of people out there that haven't closed deals or they close one note so they haven't closed a note in a long time. Or they're teaching shady things that should not be. You should not be doing that. You set yourself up if you don't own the property. That's what a foreclosure does. It allows the lender to take the property back of collateral. But. But if a lender doesn't get a deed in lieu or consent to judgment. Okay. Or the foreclosure action to take the property back, the lender does not own the property. Anybody saying otherwise is flat out lying to you and selling you a crock of crap. All right, I'm not trying. I'm not naming names, but there's people out there who tell you, oh, you don't need a servicing company. Yeah, you do need a servicing company. Unless you've got expensive loan servicing software, you need to have a servicing company. All right? Oh, you know, you really, you don't need this. You can get away with it. Yeah. Could you go buy a note in Georgia in your own LLC and avoid the mortgage broker? Yeah. You can do that until the attorney general finds out and then bans you from doing business in the state. Okay. My goal here is for you to do business the right way, to close deals the right way. If I'm buying an owner, a owner occupied note and I can do a loan model, I ain't got to get some weird crazy reverse REO crap. I just get them back on track. If they won't play ball, then we foreclose, take the asset back, do A modification, all right? Let somebody else take it over. There's a whole variety of ways of doing business the right way, the legal way, not the made up crazy reverse REO bullshit that people like to talk about. It's not legitimate. I'm sorry, there's crap like that that just, and this is not against you by any means, don't, don't think that. But it always pisses me off when people have to make up some weird thing that they've never done or they tell you it can't be done. Oh, you can't buy notes. Yes, you can buy notes. Okay, yes you can. You tell me I can't. I, I'll show you. I can't. Now listen, most of you are not going to go buy a note from bank of America Chase. I've bought some stuff from them in the past. Bigger pools or parva pool a carve out, stuff like that. I'm not saying face servicing. You can buy a note from them. You could. You do it occasionally, once a month. It may happen, but I would much rather deal in specifics and be in that 80% range. Okay, versus the outlier range. Somebody tells, well, I did this one time. Okay, great, call me when you've done it 10 to 20 times, okay? That's how business works. I want you to be successful. I don't want you to be doing something that you get sued for or worst case, I mean, even though we don't have a consumer finding protection bureau anymore, doesn't mean the state attorney generals can't come in. And that's the last thing you want to deal is when you deal with the securities Exchange Commission or the, you know, some watchdog agency pins you for doing something stupid. And that's what happens half the time. Okay? Do business the right way, treat people the right way, you'll make more money trying to keep people in their houses and working with them and payment plans and stuff like that than trying to foreclose and get creative. All right, do I like subject to deals? I think subject to deals are a great deal for you. All right. Nothing wrong with doing a subject to deals where you take over payments, the borrower moves out, they've signed it over, they deed it over to you, the investor, not the bank, and you put somebody in, that's great. There's nothing wrong with it as long as you do it right and you're taking care to pay the underlying mortgage. That's a great offshoot, a great way to use these non performing note leads. But when you start Getting into reverse reos. I'm like, really? An reo? Let's. What is it? Did somebody sign the property over to you and you're going to foreclose that to clean out the liens? Okay, that makes sense, but they haven't. It's too much of a complicated math situation. Yes, banks will sell you notes. No, you don't need $10 million. No, you're not too small. Look, if this ingle dink from Ingleside can buy notes, I'm just an old college linebacker who will outwork your ass, okay? I'll make more phone calls, I'll send more emails, I'll do more posts because I know what works. And when I find something that works, I'll double down. But guess what? I'm going to share with you the strategies that work because I don't want you to waste your time doing finagled, weird, outside the box things that might work once in a blue moon. Okay? Now, speaking of things that will work, we've covered a lot in the last two and a half days. Would you agree to that, ladies and gentlemen? All right. This is not, hopefully, the end of your note investing career. My whole goal, with three days of classes and two and a half days of classes to understand that there's plenty of opportunity out there to find deals. There's plenty of opportunity in the funding side. And yes, working through the different exit strategies, there's multiple ways to make money. You're not reliant upon yourself to do it. You can rely heavily on vendors, servicing companies, attorneys, and guess what, the note guy to help you succeed. All right? And there's things that everybody should do. So I want you to pull out a piece of paper or we can open up a spreadsheet or when you pull up a notepad or something on your computer that we want to go through here right now. Because these are one of the most important things that you can do, okay? And this I like to call is my top 15 list, okay? And everybody's going to be a little bit different on the top 15 with my top 15. These are the top 1015 things that you need to do starting tomorrow, all right? And some of these you can do tonight when you wrap up with me. But I think most people are tired at the end of teaching. They need to relax. They need to go watch a little college or pro football, go outside, have a stiff drink. I know what I'll be doing. I'll be outside drinking some bourbon and Sprite with a lime, relaxing with my feet up and talking to the birds and the squirrels. Okay. And just, ah, okay. This loud guy in my head, he can be quiet for a while while relax and unwind. We all need a little bit. Maybe it's a glass of Pinot Noir. Maybe it's a barbecue. That's what I'll be doing probably Wednesday. Barbecue and more stuff and relaxing. But anyway, whether you do this tomorrow on Monday or you wait till you get back from Thanksgiving, highly what I want you to do is focus on this. Save this somewhere. Print it up where you can see so it's a reminder for you to get back into doing something when you get back, either the Friday after Thanksgiving on Black Friday or the Monday after Thanksgiving. These are the things that you have to start putting into play almost immediately to help you find success. And most of these will work in your regular real estate stuff, but most of it's critical for you to do it in the notebook. And the first thing, first and foremost, number one, is update your LinkedIn profile. Okay, get rid of the glamour shots, 1980 with a gold boa there, Jay. I mean, come on, man. Put a professional photo, a professional following, smiling. Update your profile. If you've got a company LLC and a logo, put that behind it. If they don't have a logo, create a logo in Canva. Put it look professional, add some stuff into it. Add real estate investor, note investor to profile, but update your LinkedIn profile. That's gonna be the first thing. Now, if you have under 500 connections, then guess what? You all, everybody needs to do this. Go get Octopus CRM IO to start connecting with people to grow your LinkedIn and connect with asset managers. Okay, start that up. 20, 20 a day, 20 a day, 20 a Day. @ the end of a month, you'll have 600 potential new connections. That goes a long way in raising capital. Okay, third thing you need to do. All right, third thing is you need to get a CRM. And I don't care if it's as simple as mailchimp to start off with or using REI blackbook or you're using something else, some email service to send out emails to your database. You got to start doing that. All right? You need to go get one. Number four, if you don't, you need to put your contacts together and send your, hello, email you've gotten. There's such a great time for you to do not dally on this. Do it before Thanksgiving, get it out Wednesday night, get it out Thursday, get it out Friday at the worst. Okay? But get your first email out to your warm market. This is going to help you that first touch approach aspect of raising capital. Because I guarantee everybody on here needs to raise capital. And you're going to always do it better. Raising capital from a warm market. People that know like and trust you. If you don't have a database, guess what. One and two will help. Okay. Yes. Can you put Facebook out there? Yeah. Go ahead, do that too. Not going to hurt you. Okay, number five, you need. What should you need? Pull the list of SDI area investors in your top three markets. Okay. By three markets I mean three states. But you could always first pull them where you're located. Your warm market, Austin. I'm in Austin so I would target Williamson, Travis county. If you're down in Miami Dade, Miami, Broward, maybe Collier, maybe Lee County. Okay. Anything below Alligator Alley. Orange county if you're like in where rat land is, wherever it might be. If you're in Maine, Maine, maybe Boston, New England area there for you. Okay. Number six. All right, Start connecting with. No, sorry, we already said that's part of using Octopus to pull a list like that. Let me go back here. We went through this on day one. Cooling list for the Mortgage Banking association list, the licensee list in a state or so, the IMN event. Start reaching the special asset managers at those events. Okay. Start sending message out to them. So you start making touch with them after Thanksgiving the first week of December. That's something you can start doing. Hey, just want to see what else you have might have available on your books. Okay. That's important to you. Number seven. Mail out 50 letters. Postcards to SD, IRA investors weekly. Okay. And then you can also skip trace them. Just see if their names are on LinkedIn, Facebook and reach out to them. Like I talked about, guys doing okay, about 50 letters. Pretty easy to do. You can automate this through vistaprint, order a bunch, send it to you. You know, it's a big thing. One thing we use like with Vista Print every year we always create Christmas cards. Pretty simple, right? Put my smiling face on here. You know, we wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year. Okay. On the back we say thank you place for the address and a stamp. Okay. Get these little things out. People don't do much these anymore. You know, build you a list of 50 to send out. You know, do you need to send to IRA investors? No, but that might be a good idea. Wishing you and your IRA happy returns. That's a, that's not a bad marketing. You should do that to people you've Invested with might not be a bad idea. Okay, 8, 8, 8, 8 would be start your weekly email blast. Monthly asset manager blast. All right. Besides your hello. Set up once a week, you go on out. All right. Nine, if you have not done this already, forgive me. Join your local RIA club and then also take it a step further. A networking club like BNI in your local area. And then one step further. Large REI groups in largest cities of top five states doesn't mean you need to attend them. But go join the meetup group so they've got that asset. Or see if they have a website or a Facebook group that's going to help you prime the pump. Connect with people, connect with asset managers for find vendors in your city for you. Okay, number 10, if you've not done this, this is some basic stuff. I'm going to throw this out here. Create your llc, open your SD IRA or your checkbook ira if you're looking to do that, we've got a great resource for you. And then also there's one other thing that we always tell people to do. Oh yeah, check out, you know, look at your like get fundable with Merrell channel getfundable.com. find out when they're I should know what their next class is. I. Meryl usually lets me know. But those are some things to start tapping into. The more you know about asset protection, the better to know about your retirement accounts and other people's retirement accounts, the better. The more you know about lines of credit and fundability, the better there for you. And the last thing I'm gonna leave you with and you need to add the next couple things on this is your bonus. Go make an offer. On a no deal. Okay. If you need some help with that, please reach out to me. Okay. Many of you are watching this replaying. We need to talk about coaching. We need about helping you take that next level in your business in 2026 makes a video. But what you need to do one time before we do this, I need you to take a few minutes and figure out what 12, 13, 14, 15 to 16 or whatever it might be if you've already done 10 and 11 is 10 for you. Judy, congrats to making offers. Not on your first round of notes, but another round of notes. And I think it's an accepted offer. Congratulations. I'm so proud of you. Okay. We got a whole lot more to do. You and me, girl. All right. You and me, ma'. Am. All right. But take a second. Type in what 12 would be. 13 would be 14 would be 15 to be. Maybe you need to spend a little time on your social media marketing. Maybe you need to sign up for Buffer.com to help preschedule stuff. Maybe you need to. You're not afraid to make. Maybe you need to make your first video, your fifth video. That sounds dangerous. Your first videos. Maybe you need to create your pitch deck. Okay? Maybe you need to create your executive summary or go get you a website. There's things that we all need to do, ladies and gentlemen. Okay, everybody. But the thing I know is that everybody here is capable of doing what we're talking about. I don't care how old you are, how young you are, experience, lack of experience. You can either do it or there's people that you can outsource to to do it. Okay? So take a second, put it in with those other four or five things that you need to do. You've probably had a few things pop up. Maybe it's, you know, I need to pick my three to five states and figure out which way I want to go. Maybe I need to roll my 401k or IRA into a different account. All right? There's a whole lot of things that you guys can do in making offers or reaching out to asset managers or reaching out to the freaking. Just even the sellers alone on paper. Stack people selling notes in Google and those people to find those. That's an opportunity for everybody right there. Maybe you need to hire a VA to help you do things. Maybe you need to figure out what you need to teach your. Tell your VA you want to do, okay? That's a big thing. Use Riva Global. That was the other thing I was thinking about. Besides get fundables. Reva Global. Those four things will help you no matter what you're doing, okay? And I'd love for you to share what your top 15 things are. If you've done one of these things, please email me. Scott at we close notes. What your big things are. Love. They'll help hold you accountable, okay? I want you to find success, okay? Because here's the biggest thing, ladies and gentlemen. You don't know when your time is up. You don't know when God's gonna come knocking on your door and say, hey, it's time for you to come with me. It's the holidays. And as we get into Christmas and New Year's and all that stuff and into Valentine's Day and stuff like this, this is one of the most depressing time of years for a lot of folks out there, okay? There's a lot of heartache that comes with the holidays of bad memories or families being split or things like that, or the loss of loved ones. Okay. As we get into Thanksgiving and Christmas, one thing, I love it. I love spending time with my mom. Love spending time with my sister and my family. That's one of the things I do. It's all about making memories. My dad's been gone. Golly, it's hard to believe now, 20 years. He'd been 89, 19 days ago. And that was my hero. Mom is my hero now. My mom is probably as close to an angel walking this earth that you will find just as loved by everybody and does so much for so many people. I enjoy spending time with her. I'm also very blessed to have my right arm, my significant other being Stephanie. I'm very thankful that I found an amazing woman who could put up with this, you know what I mean? Because it's. It's a blessing. It's a blessing to be able to talk to somebody and share stuff. If you don't have that, hopefully you know somebody, maybe. Maybe it's your family, maybe it's your siblings you talk with. Okay. Maybe it's your coach you talk with. I'm always available. If you're having a rough day, give me a phone call. Let's flow uphill, not downhill, okay? And over the last few months, Steph and I have. We've lost some very close friends who didn't have things in place. Our neighbor across the street that we were buddies with for 15 years, who's just a great guy, passed from basically being an alcoholic, he slipped and fell and cracked his skull and died of a brain bleed in 24 hours. And he was sick already. And I was sitting there with him on his back, Patty, as he came from the hospital and draining fluid and like, man, do you have your shit in order? Do you have your stuff in order? Oh, yeah, I got in order. And talking about, you know, what he believed in, his faith wise. Oh, yeah, yeah. I'm like, okay, that's good. Your soul's taken care of. Let's get your assets taken care of. Well, he didn't have his assets taken care of, and now his family's trying to get it taken care of. Six months later is still not done. So if you can do anything for peace of mind with your family this holidays, get your stuff in order, get your will, get your trust, get your estate all taken care of. There's no type of mistakes that can be made that your will and what you want to have happen is important for you. Okay? Like I said, you never know when God's going to come calling. I've lost some buddies over the years. We've all lost family members that we were issued here, which we had one more conversation one afternoon, one more hug. I'm going home Thursday, you know, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Friday. I'm actually going to be going to a playoff game. And I'm sure I'll probably run into some friends from high school. And over the holidays, I always think about a buddy of mine and friends. But there's about a dozen of us friends that went to high school that were very close together. There's actually about 15 of us, about 12 of us still around. Someone passed away. But going growing up in Ingleside. Ingleside's a very small town. Well, it's not as small as some places, all right. But when my parents moved from Corpus Christi over to Ingleside to open up Ingleside hardware, there's about 3,000 people in the town. And they opened up, they were working open this up. The summer before I went into the fourth grade. So that summer between third and fourth grade, I would go over my mom and dad every and we would put the store together. You know, from painting things to putting things together, to putting price tags on all this stuff. We did that and across the street. And now Ingleside, it's basically a two stop light street. We were really excited. Everybody hung out the Water Burger. And we were all really excited when we got ourselves a subway back in the day. That gives you a bit of an idea. All right. Now Ingleside is down on Ingleside, the bay. It's across the bay for Corpus Christi. It's where a lot of these offshore derricks are being built. Naval Station Ingleside used to be there, which was the minesweepers. That's now a private dock because they closed that. But we used to, you know, they still make these huge derricks and portfolios. And we had a lot of those companies come in and buy all their hardware for stuff. So I was just in charge of, you know, inventory at the end of the year was never a fun thing. My hands would be sore and black from all the stainless steel and stuff and all the bolts, nuts and washers that I had to count. But my dad taught me that that aisle, that one aisle in the store, those little things accumulated for about 25, 30% of our business overall. That's a lot of washers and nuts, okay? But it accounted because we did so much. It's the little things and the little things will hold your business together. So yes, we've talked about some big things today and yesterday and the day before, but we've also talked about some little things that will hold your business together. Finding deals and raising capital is great and great in theory, but the little things is what holds it together. The little things are that marketing and the activities, your website and the things that we just went through with you guys, the little things that you do day in, day out go a long way. All right, I'm a big believer. Starting my day off every day with a little bit of marketing. All right, Marketing every day. We spend an hour a day on marketing our business, regardless of what's going on, whether it's on autopilot or something new we were doing. And I encourage you, spend 30 minutes, spend an hour, spend a little bit time, whatever you can do to market your business. Okay? It's important to do whether it's making an email, it's sending a connection request, it's making an offer, those little things or posting something that goes a long way. Most people will slough off on that this time of year. Don't slough off on this. But anyway, going back to my story, I was making grow up in the hardware store, did a lot of fun stuff, Colin fill out work. But across the street, across the main street, Ingleside, there was this little duplex commercial building. On one side was the snow cone lady and in the other side of it was the large thing was this martial arts studio, dojo I guess you could call it. And I remember watching those kids in their practice and I would be a little bit jealous because I like the Karate Kid movies and stuff like that. But I was busy, we didn't have a lot of money. So my job was working in the hardware store going on. And the kids that were in that martial arts studio, the guy that taught it, yeah, he wasn't too serious about those kids. Weren't very serious about it. They did. Okay, well over that summer it closed and then it. Somebody put, you know, newspaper of it and said, you coming soon. Master Le Doo. Master Le's martial arts. I don't remember exactly what it said. And it opened up and there was this new guy, very serious guy called Master Lee and he, he opened it up for kids and a lot of kids come out, you know what I mean? But he was much more serious about it because he's like a fourth degree black belt. Okay, third degree, fourth degree. I don't remember what it was. But he was. He was lethal, right? Okay, not. He's a little bigger, stockier than Jackie Chan, but he was very serious about what he did. So instead of practicing twice a week for an hour or two, he went to four times a week for two hours each. So when you have a lot of kids show up and you have that practice and he's dedicated about it and the discipline and being diligent and, you know, staying the course, that group wheeled down to about 15 kids, okay? Down to like, 25% of who that signed up. And in that group was a buddy of mine, Kevin Canfield. And Kevin's parents were from. Originally from Minnesota, like my family and Canfield Carson. Well, if you're sitting alphabetically, we were basically right next to each other all the time in the Alphabet, and we were the same grade. He played football, I played football. We, you know, shed a lot of blood, tears, sweat, drank a little bit of alcohol through high school night stuff, got in trouble together, stuff like that. But anyway, and this group of kids ran. But Kevin, being in the fourth grade, he made it. He was. He really enjoyed it. Took to this. So after the first six weeks, Master Lee had an open house where he would allow parents to come in to watch a practice. He wouldn't let him stay in there the first six weeks. Said, I'm sorry, parents are not allowed that way. He took away the distraction, and he got these kids to really focus on things. So here comes Kevin's parents, Guy and Sally Canfield, and his older brother, who was his hero, Eric Canfield. Okay. Eric was about five years older than us. And so he. He welcomes the parents. They're sitting on, you know, benches around there, sir. And there's the mats. And all these kids are in the middle. Master Lee, stay in the middle. And you got the dozen kids around. Master Lee Hago's parents, I want to say thank you for coming. I'm going to ask you to remain in your seats the entire time while we're going through. This is not only for our safety, but your safety as well. Okay? And they're like, okay. And so Mastle turned to the group. So I'm looking for a volunteer to, you know, to demonstrate the hip thr or the hip throw or something like that. I remember what it was. And Kevin's like, okay, get up. So all the other kids went to the ends. And then master Lee's like, okay. He looks at Kevin, okay, Kevin, throw me to the ground. And Kev's like, huh? Okay. So he comes at him. Well, Kevin doesn't throw Master Lee to the ground. Master Lee throws Kevin to the ground, right? And Kevin pops up. Masterly's on top, like, get up. Get up, Kevin. Now throw me to the ground. Throw me to the ground. And every time that Kevin charged at him, he wouldn't do the right thing. Masterly would throw him to the ground. And about the sixth or seventh or eighth time, Kevin's getting embarrassed, right? You can. He can hear his older brother Eric. Come on, Kevin. You can do it. You can hear his dad, Guy, he's kind of a big guy. Come on, Kevin. And you can see Sally up there. Come on, Kevin. You know, and he's getting embarrassed. All the kids like, come on, Kevin. You can do this. You can do this. And Masterly, every time, it gets a little more intense, a little more direct in his face. Get up. You can do it. Throw me to the ground. Get up. And the 10th time goes by, and Kevin gets thrown to the ground. And now what you have happening is you have a child breaking. Now you got Kevin's dad, Guy is about to tackle Masterly. Sally's holding him back. Eric's trying to hold her dad back because their dad's getting upset because his son's being embarrassed, right? Feels like he's getting picked on. And Master leaves in Kevin's face. Get up, Kevin. Get up. And Kevin starts crying. There's no crying in my dojo. Get up. Get up. You can do it. You can do it. About the 15th time, and I'm not exaggerating this, the 15th time, Kevin has gotten thrown to the ground. He's laying there embarrassed, crying, snot coming down. And Master Lee is in his face. Get up, Kevin. There's no crying in my dojo. You can do it. And something snapped in Kevin that he took his attack and launched it from the mat and was able to throw Master Lee to the ground. To the big of applause of everybody in the crowd going, yay, Kevin. And Master Lee's excited, with a big grin in his face and twinkle in his eyes, says, I knew you could do it, Kevin. I knew you could do it because you've done it before. Now go sit your ass down. And you know, those group of kids did well. They actually did so well and were so dedicated in their craft that they went to the state tournament and actually took second place overall. Kevin actually ended up taking, I think, second in his age group as well. And it was a really great thing. I mean, we were all excited for him, stuff like that. Master Lee did Something for that. Those kids, when they got back from the state tournament, he had gotten a plaque made and said, you know their name and said, you can do it, right? You can do it. And gave those to all the kids, which is really cool. Well, Kevin grows up. Master Lee ends up leaving town about a year or two later. We all go to high school together. You know, we're playing, Kevin are playing football together, all that stuff. There's a group of us that were. That hung out Ingleside. We only had, like, 60 kids in my graduating class. We're a really, really small group, but a really close group. Really close group of kids the year before, year after and stuff like that. Well, we go off to college. I go off to play football. Some friends go off to a. M. Kevin goes off to Southwest Texas states and Texas State, stuff like that. It's kind of a party school, stuff like that. And I get my degree from there so I can announce that it was a fun time. But anyway, and we get together. We get together. We get together on the river in the Guadalupe once a year at my other friend Scott Sauder's family house. And we have what's called a river bash. We're catching up. And our second year, sophomore year, things kind of. Kevin started getting a rougher crowd a little bit, doing things he probably shouldn't have done, drinking a little bit too much, more health not so good. And we kind of had an intervention to help him. Hey, what's going on, man? We're here to help. If we need to go to rehab, we'll do what we need to do. We came together. Well, Kevin got out of the bad situation and started better. He was seeing, going and speaking with a counselor and some stuff like that, a therapist. And the therapist went to him, said, listen, what's something that you used to do as a young kid that you really enjoy doing that you go back to doing? He's. I used to love martial arts. He said, well, why don't you go do that? So he started going back to martial arts and learning that stuff and started losing some weight and looking better. Got a new job, got a new girlfriend that he fell in love with. And he went in to interview for this new job at Dell, and they said, okay, we have to, you know, do it. A physical, something like that. And so he went and did a physical, did some blood tests. Because about three days later, four days later, they call him up and the doctor calls him, say, hey, Kevin, I need you to come my office asap. Which is not a Good sign. So Kevin goes in with his girlfriend. The doctor says, kevin, I, I have some news for you. It's not good news. And so I'm just going to come out and tell you it looks like you've got cancer and it looks like it's pancreatic cancer. Now this is news to a 24, 25 year old kid, maybe 23, I can't remember. But you think about that. And as I'm 49 years old, I realize that's a lifetime ago, that's half of my life would fall into that. But to be given really a death sentence, stage four, that's a death sentence. And he had about six months. They figured because he started losing weight, that was part of the reason he went, he was losing weight, losing weight more than it should have been. So in the six months, Kevin did a lot, he traveled, his family traveled. We spent time together as friends and laughed and cried, stuff like that. And then we were all our different universities and stuff like that, going to school. And then we get the phone call that, hey, Kevin's not doing well, he's in the hospice and the end is near and if you want to say your goodbyes, you need to get down here. And while most of us are on our way down there, Kevin slipped in a coma. We didn't expect him to wake back up. And I don't know if you've ever had to experience that of saying goodbye to your friend, laying there and not knowing if he's hearing you or not. And I remember us guys in the room saying our goodbyes, our cries and wish them well and just praying. And I had that happen a few months back with my buddy Jeremiah across the street. Being there with his family as he's, as the plug is being pulled and stuff like that, it was not, not pleasant, but it made me thankful for every day that I have. And Kevin, he was still in this tumor. I mean not this, this coma. And I don't, don't care what your faith is or if you have faith or not, but I do believe prayer works. I believe there's a higher power to remember what you want to call them. That's my faith. And I've had too many amazing things happen in my life to not believe that God is around. And I don't know if it's the power of us praying, the friends and family, but actually overnight, Kevin actually woke up from his coma. And instead of being in the hospital, he did okay enough that the doctor said, you know what, you can, he can go home you know, can go back to the house and that's do there. And Kevin lived another life. Another life, sorry, not another life. Another seven days with his family. And then passed peacefully in his sleep. One night. We went to the funeral, stuff like that. And we all remembered Kevin and a couple buddies, or our buddies, Tigger and Crazy John, wanted to do something for Kevin. And they talked about doing some sort of memorial thing because they want to do something that would help benefit hospice of New Braunfels, where he was at, because they did an amazing job making making his life comfortable these last few months. And so they put together a Kevin Canfield memorial 5K. And you know, all of us at that point are starting our careers or married or other things like that, graduating college, stuff like that. But we showed up. And not only did we show up, Ingleside showed up. And it was like a high school family reunion kind of thing there new brothel celebrating the life of Kevin. And before Kevin passed, the week before he went to the coma, he recorded an audio version of him talking about how not to take life for granted. And you hear this once strong, powerful voice because he was a husky guy, shorter than me, but kind of the same body, this once very powerful kid who was now down half his weight, talking about the dreams that he would never see achieve, the things he would never do because of what was happening. But he knew he was probably headed to a better place. He knew he was headed to better place, no probability about it, but that we should not take for granted what we have and the relationships we have and the opportunities that we have. Any wasted day is a wasted day. And he encouraged all of us to live fully, to live the dreams and accomplish the things that he was never going to see the opportunity have. And lo and behold, out of the blue, Master Lee showed up. And I remember standing there with Scott Sauder, Crazy John Tigger, Kevin's dad, another buddy, Andy Martini, and Master Lee. At the end of the 5k, we're sitting there and talking, sharing a few stories. And Master Lee had brought that plaque. And Kevin's dad looked at Master Lee, and through his tears, he goes, you know what, Master Lee? That was really something cool that you did for those kids. That was amazing what you did. I wanted to tackle you, but it. I'm glad I didn't. And Master Lee looked over at Kevin's dad. He looked at it and he had this twinkle. He had this very common twinkle in his eye, this little smirk. And he goes, you know what, Mr. Canfield, I didn't do it for those kids, I did it. So when those kids grow up and they become adults and they face obstacles that seem overwhelmingly in front of them, that they know that they can do it. And I know that life throws us all obstacles. I know that you've either been through a divorce or bankruptcy or you've been sick or had death of a loved one spouse, divorce, bankruptcy, foreclosure, I don't care. You can do it. I'm a firm believer that God does not give us things that we cannot handle. And I think whenever we're going through a trial and tribulation and a tough time, he is making us tougher so we can do bigger and better things. And I think about that story. I've had times over the years after my divorce, back in 2008, when I was just depressed, and then Also back in 20, 20, 19, I had some deals that went south. It was a tough time. We got through it. I kept thinking, you can do it, you can do it, you can do it. And that's what I want you guys to know. I don't care what lies we tell ourselves about what we can or cannot do. Guess what? You're correct. But I know the great thing, the great equalizer about note investing is that anybody can do it. If you will set your mind to it. It's not based on your credit. Don't care if you don't have any money. We can help you raise credit. There are deals out there you don't have to have a lot of money to market. You don't have to know bubba or outbid 50 wholesalers or 50 people or 100 people mail into postcards. Okay? You can do this if you'll do the simple things that we teach to do. Because that's what I had to do when I started doing this back in 2008, 2009, okay? And I want you to keep you in mind one thing, that you can do it. You can do it. There's no crying and no buying, ladies and gentlemen. And so I don't care. You can choose to be successful, you can choose to take action, but. Or you can give into the same old BS and can either be tired of being tired, if you're not tired of being tired, distressed, or whatever like that, that's your choice. But I choose to write my own rules and to choose my own destiny. And you can do the same thing that you want to do. If you want to close on a hundred notes, you can close on a hundred notes. If you want to leave your job you can set it up with a note business so that you can leave your employment and make or replace your income or do other things like retire your spouse, retire your parents, put your kids through college, buy a bigger house or whatever it might be. You can live the life that most people only dream of. I look back now what the last 20 years has entailed since I really got into being a full time real estate investor. So it's like I left my last W2 job at Chase back in 2004. And it's been an amazing, it's a bit of a but ride, I'll tell you that. Ups and downs. But when I look back now at the valleys, my valleys are so much higher than my peaks ever were 20 plus years ago. And that's a beautiful thing. And you all, and we live here in this amazing country that would many people like to think he's divided because of your color, your race, of who you vote. I'm sorry, you can't hate half the country because they voted differently from me. You just can't do it. And if you allow people to do that, you're the problem. They're not the problem. Okay? And I don't believe that most people, I believe like most people want to get along and most people want to do some things. So guess what? You can do it. And I'll say it again, get up, get up. There's no crying note buying. You can do it. You can do it. Go out, take some action, kick some ass. And we will see you guys at the top. I want to thank you for spending the last couple of days with me here. Ladies and gentlemen, your journey is only beginning. Do not let it end here. Different opportunities for you. Coming again to our Austin class, sign up for our membership, sign up for our coaching program. If you can't do that, then book a phone call with me. Let's help you get rock and rollin. I want to know that I am your biggest fans. I've seen people who have overcome amazing obstacles, amazing limitations, do amazing things in the business and you can do it too. All right, ladies and gentlemen, thank you so much for spending the time with me. Thank you to Stephanie, my whole team here, thank you to all you guys that were here in zoom, all of you guys over on YouTube as well, and all of you that are watching the replays at a later date. Please don't be a stranger, Please reach out to me and let's take you to a whole different level in 2026. Thank you so much. Have a great rest of your weekend. Happy Thanksgiving, Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanzai. Happy New Year. Everybody go out, please, take some action, and let's make 2,026 your most profitable year ever. Have a great evening, everybody. Thank you.