How to Build Multiple Streams of Income and Become Financially Free | The Mindvalley Podcast

Welcome to this episode of the Mindvalley podcast with the incredible Robert Allen. Now, Robert Allen wrote several books. He popularized the no money down model of flipping real estate. And one of his books that had a big impact on me was the book Multiple Streams of Income, which I read just as I graduated college. And it inspired me to create the little website that eventually became Mindvalley. So this dude has had. Did I just call him dude? This guy has had a massive impact on my life. Now in this episode, Robert is going to be teaching you a formula to really understand your income and how to grow your income, how to multiply your income. Here's what the formula looks like. It's called the Money Tree concept and this is what the abbreviation Money tree spells out. M Multiple streams of income. O A product that is outstanding. N little or no money down. E Employee resistant. Y Yield. T Trend. R Residual. E Essential. E Enthusiasm. Now, I know that sounds a little bit vague, but we go a lot deeper in this episode. After I graduated from university, there were two books that I happened to stumble upon that changed the trajectory of my life. The first was the Cash Flow Quadrant by Robert Kiyosaki. The second was by Robert Allen, and it was called Multiple Streams of Income. Now, both these books got me thinking about life in a different way. You see, like most of us, when I went through traditional education, I was trained to be the best programmer I could be. But if I was just programming and only doing that, I would never truly get wealthy. That book inspired me to start a business on the side as a side hustle. In addition to my regular job, I would come back from the office at 6 or 7pm in New York and start building a little e commerce store to sell meditation CDs. And in the first month I lost 800 bucks. The second month I lost 300 bucks. But that third month out, I was making $4 a day in profit. But that profit continued to steamrol and it continued to grow bigger and bigger and bigger. Eventually, that company became Mindvalley. And the book that inspired me was the book by our guest today, Multiple Streams of Income by the legendary Robert Allen. Robert, welcome to mindvalley.

Oh, that story. I not heard that story. So wow, I'm blown away by your success.

So I believe it was 1999 when I read that book and that was the same year the book came out. Right. So firstly, thank you for that. Thank you for in your way changing the trajectory of my life.

Oh my. Thank you. And you are changing the trajectory of so many people's lives now. I mean, I just was here at your event. It's unbelievable. People are so, so excited. And I asked the audience, the audience I spoke to, I said, how many of you had your life transformed by Mindvalley? Everyone raised their hands.

Thank you. Thank you. Well, you know, I do my best, as did you. You have created courses, books, seminars that have sold billions of dollars. Right. Because you have taught so many people how to reach their dreams through this concept of real estate investing as well as multiple streams of income. And that's what I want to ask you about today. Multiple streams of income and designing a life where you have multiple streams of income is a really important thing. But many people don't know how to get there. So let's talk about why is that important and how do we get started?

Well, first of all, you're going to tell me about what that is.

Okay. This gold tattoo on my arm. Robert, do you have any kids?

I have three children. Absolutely. How old are they? Oh, they're in their 40s now.

Okay. So my little girl is nine years old and we are here at a fest, the Mindvalley Festival. We just came back from this beautiful party on a fortress in a hill in Cartagena, Colombia. And when a nine year old girl goes to her dad and says, I'm gonna put a tattoo on you, a removable tatt, it is so hard for a man to say no.

Yes, that's true.

And so I have this tattoo on me and I totally forgot that I'm going to be recording today, but I'm going to keep it on.

I want one.

I'm going to have my nine year old tattoo.

You too? I'd be thrilled. Oh, so multiple streams of income. Well, what did Covid teach us? It teaches us that many people had their businesses die on the 9th March 2020. It died. The world shut down. So millions of businesses shut down. However, believe it or not, there were 5 million new millionaires created during COVID Why? Because they pivoted and probably pivoted because they had some other streams coming in from other sources. And so if one stream dies, then you have another stream, a few streams that keep you going so you can launch another stream. And in terms of my speaking business, I was speaking all around the world. China, Russia, Japan, Australia, worldwide. I loved it. But coming back From Japan on the 9th of March, we got into the country on that final day and then my speaking business died the very next day. Well, I have multiple streams of income, so it wasn't like, oh, Darn it, what am I going to do, go on welfare? No, I'm just going to turn to another stream of income. I have a database, I just go to the database. And what would you like me to sell you? If you're buying, if you want to be honest. And what they wanted me to sell them is while they're stuck at home, I said, well, everybody's got a book in them. So I've got 17 books with my name on it. So I'd like to show you how you can become a best selling author. And so they stayed at home, I stayed at home and I just taught a couple hundred people how they could launch their. So anyway, everybody needs multiple streams because of safety. You need multiple, just like everybody tells you, you need diversify in your stock market, you need to diversify your streams of income. Therefore each stream of income is from a different type of asset. So real estate would be one stream of income. Having a business where you're marketing a product, maybe online, would be another stream of income marketing information. Frankly, as I teaching these people how to make their own books, how to sell information, how to invest in the stock market, how to invest in tax lien certificates. Crypto really wasn't very big when I launched Multiple streams of Income. This was in 1999, there was no crypto. There was really not much of an Internet, frankly. So as new things pop up, you ask yourself, would that be something I'm interested in? If you're not interested in it, don't do it. If you're interested, you say, well, I wonder if I generate a little stream of income from that. And that's number one, must have multiple. Now the second fundamental principle is you want the stream of income to be eventually money while you sleep. It should be residual means when I wake up in the morning, there's money underneath my mattress that's grown there while I was sleeping. And so the entire book, Multiple Streams of Income is how to generate a lifetime of unlimited wealth while you sleep.

I remember reading that in the book and I, and I measured it, I measured it. So, so I had my, my day job, I was doing technology sales, I was living. And so I want to share some actual numbers so people watching this get, get the concrete map behind it. So I was, my girlfriend back then was a European. She didn't have a green card, so she couldn't work. We were about to get married. We were living in Manhattan, New York, super expensive city. And I was earning $7,500 from my job. It wasn't Wealthy money. Like we couldn't afford to take great holidays. We couldn't afford to stay in anything more than a three star hotel. We couldn't afford to do business class. And so what I started on the side was a little meditation e commerce store, which back then was super hard. I was a programmer, so I could code everything myself.

I could.

I quoted my own checkout, I coded my own CRM. But today you can do that on Shopify.

Yeah.

And if you can build a simple. Or even on Instagram and you can build a simple, a simple store selling something that you can order from China or. I know so many people who design their own clothing and then sell it. That can be a really good residual source of income.

Yep.

Right. And eventually we hit this point where I was making more from the store than I was from my. And when that happened, I quit my job.

Yes. Yeah.

But I do want to share a really important tip here. Quitting your job can be a dangerous thing. I strongly recommend one does not quit their job and then dive into their second stream. There was a book called Breakthrough Company and they shared a statistic on this. You are 30% more likely to succeed with your side hustle if you hold on to your day job and create your side hustle in parallel. Because the people who quit their day job, if anything goes wrong with that side hustle, you can go back. I mean, it can be dangerous.

Yes.

And if you quit your day job, you start fearing what could go wrong. So it's better to just put in more hours, maintain your day job so you have a steady salary, you're safe, and do the side hustle.

Statistically, you're 30% more likely, more likely to succeed. I agree with that. And when I teach my books, I'm always trying to design things that are safe for that ordinary person. However, I'm going to now digress in a totally different direction by saying, I did my thing in real estate. I made my money streams of income coming in from it. I had a hunch. And sometimes your hunches are really strong. So my hunch was I was a student in Stephen Covey's class at byu. So Seven Habits of Highly Effective People had not been written yet. But he'd had some other kind of regional books and he was a great teacher. We had to fight to get into his class and he had us write our goals down. And so one of my goals was to write a book. And now I'm a student at school. What am I going to write a book about? I don't know. I was probably inspired by him and all that stuff. So when I graduated, I couldn't find a job. I had an mba, nobody was hiring, bad economy. So I followed my hunch. I said, I'm just going to go start buying real estate right in my own little city. And made a million dollars in the next couple years. I became financially set. And I was reminded by what Covey had said. You know, it's time to. So I'm driving down the freeway and literally, it's almost like a voice. It was like, it's time to write your book now. And it was very, very profound. I was making some good money, and I also was selling some real estate on the side as an agent. So I was making money from my deals and money from my. So I was making good money, kind of like what you were making. And as soon as I got that message, it was like, why now? You know, it's time to write your book now. So I went into my boss and making good commissions from my selling, and I said, here is my real estate license. I will never sell another piece of real estate for commission ever again. Thank you very much for the training. And I literally gave him my license back. And I went home. And I'm saying to my wife, well, I'm going to write a book now. Not knowing how long is this going to take? What does it entail never having read a book or written a book before? And the way I sold it to her as an agent, I had sold a property to somebody who owned a house in Hawaii on the beach. And so I went to him and I said, will you let me go to your house and spend a week or two and write this book I want to write? So he said, fine. So it was basically free for me, but it was like, okay, now it's time to write my book now. That was in 79. 79. So we know that the economy in 74 was terrible. 75, 76. But as we started getting to 79, 80, interest rates started peaking. The baby boomers were just hitting at that moment. And so we have all these baby boomers wanting to buy a house and the interest rates are high and nobody can afford it. And this crazy book shows up how to buy real estate with little or no money down. And it was like, if I had written it two years later, year earlier. No, no. It was number one New York Times bestseller. Wow. And so I did just the exact opposite of what you said you had.

But you'd really made millions, Right.

So you had what kind of millions had I had? I had a million in equity. And you know, you know what that's like. I was fully leveraged up to my eyebrows. But you know, maxed in the mortgages. I was making little bits of cash flow. No, I went into the credit card life, basically. Credit card. I max those credit cards. I had a million in equity and some small, some streams of income, but I wasn't nearly as rich as maybe people would have thought. But anyway, if your intuition says, you know, and that's what we're here, mindvalley is filled with all kinds of these creative people that, all kinds of courses on how you do really step into your, into your true self. And so in that case, but like you just said, don't quit your day job. If your intuition, yeah. Saying, you know, if it's saying don't do it, don't do it. Just don't.

So, so I think there's a, there's a, there's a beautiful balance between listening to your heart and intuition, but also being practical. Right. So in my case, I call it knowing your MLR, your minimal livable income.

Nice.

So I was earning $7,500 in New York with my girlfriend who couldn't get a job because she didn't have a green card. She was a European. But we knew that we needed $4,000 a month.

Yeah.

For, for, for heating, for bills, for food. We wouldn't be able to travel, we wouldn't be able to take vacations, but we needed four grand to survive. As soon as my side hustle, my E Commerce site, was making four grand a month in profit. That's when I quit. That's when I quit. And immediately, immediately now because I could dedicate myself to this website. A few months later, we doubled it to eight grand.

Wow.

And now I was making more than what I had in my day job. So knowing your mli, your minimum livable income, and you got to track this on spreadsheets is super important because that's when. What is the quitting point?

And that's when you know that you shouldn't be spending any of the money on things that go down in value. Usually people start making little extra streams. They go buy a car, a house, they buy clothing, and you got a minimal living. You should really stay at that level.

And it doesn't mean you're going to be rich. I want to be really honest. It took me five years from that point on, five years to actually get to a point where I was now because it, it peaked and then it just, it, it stagnated. Right. So it took me five years before I finally got to a point where I could live the dream. And for those five years I was living in my parents home.

Okay, well, see you, you had the sacrifice for that. So the way you call it minimal living income, I call out your financial freedom number. And most people think of financial freedom as like, wow, I'm free. I got this big house, I got all this. I know financial freedom number means that the number that's flowing into your life where you can live your minimal living income, I want you to live like an ordinary below median income and you stay at that level because you take all that extra and you put it into your extra streams of income. But most people don't do that. They spend it all.

So how much money should we be allocating to create these new streams of income? That's my first question. And the second question is going to be what are the best streams of income to be looking at right now in today's world?

Well, easy way to teach that is the word money tree. I want a business that's a money tree. Therefore it's the kind of business that keeps growing fruit. Even if I'm not watching it, the fruit's still growing. I pick the fruit, now the tree grows another crop. So that's a, that's a residual stream of income. So M stands for multiple streams of income. I want the business itself to generate extra streams of income from all kinds of ways. I don't want it just the one stream of income because if that stream has challenges, then the business dies. So I want the business itself to be multiple streaming. Right. O stands for it's got to be a product that's outstanding, meaning it's a product that people want no matter what the economy is. So if a product is discretionary, as soon as the income starts to go, the economy starts to go. People stop buying that discretionary item. I want them to be an essential item, something that they got to have and it's got to be unique enough so that people will continue to buy it because it's not being competed out of business through commoditization. N stands for little or no money down. So you ask the question, how much money should you need? Well, I wrote the book called Nothing down. You know, I don't want to put a lot of money into it if it has to. In fact, the more money I have to put into it, the greater probability it will fail. And therefore I want a business that I can start with minimal money. E stands for employee resistant. Why? Because employee is the most dangerous part of a company. It's. You have to keep finding them. They keep giving you challenges and troubles. I want a business that I can operate without a lot of employees. So why does real estate fit that? Because you can manage 20 properties all by yourself. You can hire one company to manage those 20 properties for you. So you don't have to have any employees. So it fits the monetary formula. Y stands for yield, meaning I want to make some serious money from it. Although I put little down, I want to crush it. I want a business that has an unlimited upside. And most businesses don't. They don't scale. So like you said, your business scaled up to a certain level, a certain plateau. And then you had to figure out, how do I get this thing scale? Exactly.

We had to radically change the business model.

Exactly. To go from that one level to the level you're at today, you had to totally, radically change everything around it. And so I want a business that's scalable. That's where the yield comes from. T stands for trend. There has to be a trend. So you caught the trend. You caught it. Real estate. I told you, I caught the trend at the right time. And then for every stream of income, I want to add. Am I on trend here? So I started my businesses when there was no Internet. Yeah, but when there became an Internet, somebody came to me and they said, robert, are you making any money off from the Internet? And I. Well, I said, no, I'm making lots of money from real estate or my set real estate businesses selling information. And he said, well, I just launched this little website, and I have like 1500 people who come and I teach them how to make money on the Internet. He says, can I show you? And I said, no, I don't want to do that. He said, no, I'll come to your house. He said, I'll sit at your computer, I'll push a button, and I'll make money from you in minutes. And I'm thinking, well, yeah, come on to my house. Show me how to do that. Right? So he comes to my house and he goes, okay, I have this database of 1500 people, and I can communicate with them. I said, I'm going to. Let's send a message to my database. I'm here in Robert Allen's house. He's a famous millionaire maker, and he has this program called Multiple streams of Income. It was that tape program from Night Go Kona. And he goes, he said, how much is it? I said, it's like 100 bucks. He said, Will you give him a 50% discount? And I said, well, I could probably get some from the. From Nightingale Conant. Sure, sure. Okay. So he says, I'm here in Robert Allen's house, and he'll give this program. It's 50% off, but only have to if you respond within the next hour.

Right, right.

So he sends the message. He says, look at your watch. I'm looking at my watch on the time the second. And he goes, let's see how long it takes. So 61 seconds later, ding. On my email. Ding, ding. Does Robert Allen still have that deal? Can I have that deal? Here's my credit card number. I really. Can I. Can I do this? Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. And I goes, how much will you charge me to teach you to teach me how to do what you just did? And he said, $6,000. And I wrote him a check for $6,000 on the spot. And I said, show me how to do that, you know. So it took about nine months. You know, as busy I was, all the things I had to do. We launched my website. We built a database of 11. I remember 11,516 names on my database. And we got the live camera crews. We were shooting an infomercial, really. And I'd never done this before. I didn't know how much money I would make. But we pushed the button. I said, I've got these things I could offer you. Maybe you could come to my home and I'll teach you at my home. Had never done that in my life. We could get this or that. There's all kinds of little things. And when we finished 24 hours later, $94,000 in one day.

94,000. What year was this?

This was 1990-1990-1997-1998.

That's incredible.

Yeah, $94,000. And then it went over 100 within, like four or five more hours. And I said to myself, was that a good $6,000 investment? Well, it was a new stream of income. See, Totally different. So that's what is about all streams. They're different assets. So the system of real estate is radically different than the system of Internet. How do I find it? How do I build a database? How do I build a website? You know, what do I sell on the website? And I wanted something that I could sell, information, which was what I love about information is the cost is so low. The cost of the product. I can launch over that. 94,000, about 20,000 of it was coming to my home where I could teach them for three days. There was some digital stuff. My cost of goods was 10%. And most people, when they launch a business, the cost of goods is 80, 90%. So if they're not successful, you can't make it on a 20% profit margin. So that's one of the reasons that's.

One of the most most powerful streams of income. One can look at like e commerce stores, using Shopify or even using. And then using Instagram to drive people to your store.

Absolutely. And there was no Instagram when I got started. But frankly, I talk about finding something that I didn't do. What? I just like my Internet guy. He was my expert. I went to somebody on social media, and it was when the Internet went down or, sorry, when the world shut down in Covid, I had no social media. I was traveling around the world from 2008 till 2020. When the world. When the real estate world shut down in 2008, my seminar business died. Nobody wants to buy real estate seminars when their house is underwater. So I said, well, where can I sell this message? And I went worldwide. I went to China maybe 30 times. I went to Russia, I went to Japan, Australia, South Africa, all over the world. Wonderful business. And then it, as I said earlier, it shut down. So I said, well, I got to go to social media.

So let's go into real estate now. Real estate as a stream of income. Now, of course, guys, there is. There is crypto. We're not going to talk about crypto because it's currently in a winter. And there's also things such as day trading which we won't talk about. That could be a whole different episode. But I know I have a friend who on a bad day of day trading, makes a thousand on a good day, makes $10,000 in a day. It's insane. Day trading is really. But I have no knowledge of it.

But real estate, it's not residual.

It's not residual.

I got a day trade.

I got a day. You got a day trade.

I want a business that I don't have to trade every day.

So then let's go about. Go to real estate.

So why is real estate residual? Well, I get to own an asset. That's essential. We hadn't finished the money tree formula. Actually. T was trend. R was residual. E is essential to everybody every day. And the final E is enthusiasm. In other words, you gotta like it, because if you don't like it, your business probably won't survive. So the E that second the first is essential to everybody every day. So when people wake up in the morning, where do they wake up? They wake up with a roof over their head, period. There is no choice. You don't. We do have some homeless people, but it's a very, very, very tiny minority.

Everyone needs a home.

You need a house, roof over your head. So what I love about real estate, residential real estate is it's essential to everybody every day. Therefore, when the economy has its ups and downs, they still have to have a place to live. And so it becomes fits the monetary formula perfectly. So I want to find residential real estate. I want to find properties that were within a 50 mile radius of my own home. That's the keeping it safe side. Then eventually, when you're good at riding the bicycle within 50 mile radius, then yeah, you can go wide, you can go worldwide, you can make money anywhere in the world with real estate. But I'm looking for below medium price. I don't want expensive real estate. I want things that I could rent out easily. Make a net, net net cash flow. It's not hard, it's not easy.

So the idea is to buy a home. Buy a home, get a bank loan, buy a home and then flip it.

Well then, then, then the book nothing down shows you how to find a highly motivated seller. So we start there. You said, well, we buy a home. No we don't. We find a property that's owned by a seller. A distrust that is highly. I call that person a don't wanter.

Got it.

Now only 1 to 5% of the people are don't wanters. And what happened during COVID because all this money flooded into the world. People were taking their little money checks and they were buying real estate with it. And the real estate market just, it exploded, sometimes doubled in a short period of time. That is now winding down. But finding a highly motivated seller when everyone is buying real estate is hard to do. But like I'm saying, if you'll focus on just that one idea, that somewhere in the United States there's a place where somebody doesn't want their real estate. And how you find that person is a little tricky. It takes time to look. How many do you need? In my book, Creating Wealth, I say you should be buying two properties per year for 10 years. 2. You buy them and you rent them out. So it takes you six months to find one. If you don't have a lot of cash, well, there's 50 nothing. Now techniques I can show you how to do that. Point is make a Decision, I'm going to buy two. Now you mentioned Robert Kiyosaki. I don't know if you know this. Robert came and spoke with me and Japan. There's 11,000 people in the audience. And I invited him to speak to my audience of 11,000 people. So we had one day, just the two of us, and Robert is there and he takes out a copy of Creating Wealth. And he said, you must read this book. And he said, In 1988, I read this book and it's set in the first two or three chapters. You've got to buy two properties a year. So I turned to Kim, his wife, and he said, go do this. This is good. This is another stream of income for us.

And Creating wealth is by whom?

By me. You wrote Creating Wealth? My book. It's my second book. My second number one.

Kiyosaki turned to his wife, Kim, and asked Kim to buy two.

Kim, this is Creating Wealth. Go buy it. He was, I'm sure, successful in a lot of other businesses he was doing. She did her 20 properties in 18 months. And to this audience of 11,000 people, he said, Today we own 6,900 properties. So one of the, you know, your two authors of two books that trying.

To change your life, Robert, you actually inspired Robert Chase.

Exactly, exactly. So finding highly motivated sellers is hard and people quit. I tell them, you got to look for a hundred, you got to look at 100 properties, you got to make 100 offers. Really?

Okay, so but how do you buy the property with no money down?

Well, do you have a couple of months? Here's how you do it. You look for highly motivated sellers who own property that they don't want. And I know people are going to say that's impossible. I'm going to tell you, 1 to 5% of the people, they just inherited a property, for example, they don't want it. It's rented to some tenants. The tenants are driving them nuts. They said, they left me this property. I don't know what to do with it. What shall I do? And so now they got some vacancies and this driving them nuts. So they put the property up for sale. You talk to them. How can I solve your problem? I'd like to solve your problem in a way that solves my problem. Your problem is you need to get rid of it. What are you going to do with the money even if you did sold it? If you sold it, you'd probably put it in the bank. 2% interest, 1% interest. If it's a bond, it's 3% interest. Why don't you be the bank? How much do you owe on it? That's free and clear. My grandfather gave it to me. It has no loan on it, but it's driving me nuts. I'm making some cash flow. But I tell you what, let's convert that cash flow into a note. You're the bank, I'll make you monthly payments. Interest rates today are 6, 7%. You would take that money and put it in the bank at half of 1%, 3% if it was a secure bond. And then you know what happens to bonds? If the interest rates go up, your bonds go down. That's why these banks are failing, is they invested in bonds? No, I'll make you monthly payments. You be the bank, I'll be your customer. And then, you know, people say, well, that's impossible to find a deal like that. Well, 40% of the properties in America have no mortgages on them. They're free and clear. And so I'm looking for a seller who owns a property like that. It's rare, I mean, to find a highly moated person with a free and clear property. And you become the mortgagee and therefore you make monthly payments to that person. They say, I need a little bit of down payment. You go, well, I give you 5% down. I can scrape that together. And now you get in with all these. Bank loans are hard to get. They require these four things. You want a nice lot, so you're.

Collecting the rent and then you're paying a little bit rent plus a little bit to the motivated seller you're paying.

Exactly. You're collecting all the rents, you're taking most of that money and you're giving it back to the seller. And in the mortgage payment there's enough money to cover expenses, et cetera, and a little bit of profit for you. Well, that mortgage eventually pays down. You know, now, I mean, let's go out 20 years. 20 years. If you keep owning that and paying that mortgage down in 20 years, all of that income comes. You, you don't have any more mortgage payment. So that's why I'm saying 20 properties in 10 years, that'll set you free because eventually they've gone up in value, the rents have increased, the equity has built up. You know, within, within 10 years.

Some of them are franchise willing to do that. But why wouldn't the seller just take the rent directly? Why bring you in as an intermediary?

Because I explained to you, they're highly motivated. They don't know how to Manage it. And they didn't really buy it. Their grandfather did it.

They don't want to deal with the house.

They don't want to deal with it. And sometimes it'll be a person who got into the real estate game and he thought it'd be really easy. And they buy a single family home and I'll just rent it and I'll make this extra cash flow. And then the tenant trashes it.

Yeah.

And now they got $10,000 worth of.

So you become competent with dealing with tenants.

So dealing with tenants is challenging. Absolutely. You need to have a system for doing that. And most people, you know, they're, they say, I'll get rich, I'll go buy a couple of properties. No, no, you got to be, you got to be careful. And so these highly motivated sellers, they're. They're not every. On every street corner. So you do need to search till you find them and then you find one. For example. So, for example, I did this crazy challenge. People didn't believe when a book came out that you could buy property with nothing down. So I said, well, send me to any city, take away my wallet, give me $100 bill, and in 72 hours I'll buy an excellent piece of real estate using none of my own money. And the LA Times saw my ad to fill out my seminar using that line. And they called me, reporter from LA Times called me and said, robert, we, we don't think you can do that. And we challenge you. We're going to take you to a city we choose. We're going to give you 100 bucks. We don't think you can do that. So they flew me to San Francisco and they took away my wallet and gave me a hundred dollar bill. Now what am I going to do? I have to find a highly motivated seller. Out of all the maybe, let's say there's 5,000 sellers that day in San Francisco. Most of them are, hey, give me my price, give me my terms. I want a strong buyer. I don't want any weak buyer. I don't want somebody that's nothing down. Are you crazy? Get out of my life. But I did my system and I found the first property was listed in the paper. Nothing down was the headline. And I left a message on his phone because he wasn't home when I called. When we arrived in San Francisco, the reporter gave me $100. And now. So I call in all these ads and I'm going to real estate companies and I'm calling the news newspapers and I'm just going nuts for an entire day. And he calls me that night and he said, I have a property I'd like to sell you with nothing down. And I turned to the reporter. We were living in a small hotel room, $35 in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco because I didn't have a credit card, I didn't have any identification. He took my wallet away, but I had a telephone. And he called me and he goes, I'll sell it to you for nothing down. Now, was he highly motivated? No, he had bought it cheap, completely a bargain property. Paid for cash for it, bought it really low, fixed it up, put money more into it, fix it up, now it's beautiful, nothing wrong with it at all. Refinanced it on his strength, pulled all his money out, the down payment, the fix up costs. His money's back in his pocket. Now what he wants is to claim some profit. So he had a $33,000 in profit. And he said, give me a note, make me monthly payments, nothing down. So within 24 hours, I had found my first property from a seller who was looking for that to be able to turn that profit into cash flow. Now the next two properties I bought. I bought seven properties in three days with nothing down and gave the reporter $20 back in change. The next two properties I found were sight unseen in Sacramento, about 90 miles away from a seller who had two free and clear homes, no mortgages on them, but had traded into those homes from a mobile home park that they hated. It was a nightmare. And so a realtor has said, well, I'm a hard time selling this mobile home park, but I have this investor who will trade for these two homes. Will you take these two homes and they're free and clear? And so the owner said, yeah, I'll take that. And then when I called him on the phone, he said, well, I don't really want these two homes. What I want is cash flow. You know, send me a check every single month. And so I bought these two homes.

Sight unseen, no money down, no money. And then you're getting the cash flow from the existing tenants.

Exactly. Rent it out. I held those homes for like eight years and then I sold them myself, nothing down, took a big note. And so what I'm trying to say is, if you're looking, you find it. And most people don't look because they read the newspaper. And the newspaper says interest rates are going through the roof. You know, everybody's trying to sell because the market's really hot.

And so people can go deeper into this in your book, no Money.

Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely.

Okay. Now let's talk about tax liens. What, what are tax liens?

Well, guess who's the highly motivated seller on a tax lien? When? The. When.

Firstly, what is a tax lien?

Very good question. When you have a home, the county charges you taxes so they can pay the schools, the police, the fire department, etc. You pay these municipal taxes from the home that you bought. But if you don't pay your taxes, the state, the county of that state says, hey, wait a second, we need this money to fund the police department. If you won't pay it, we're going to put a lien on your property and we're going to sell that lien to another investor who will buy the amount of money you owe. So you owe $3,000 in taxes. I'm going to let somebody else pay those taxes for you because we need the money and we sell a tax lien. That investor buys and pays the $3,000 in taxes. The person who owns the home still owns the home, but somebody else paid their taxes for them. The county charges a penalty of sometimes 8%, 10%, 18%, 25% tax. Texas is 20 plus percent. And therefore as a lien holder, when the taxes eventually end up being paid because either the person loses the house and the taxes get to be paid, the lien holder is the state and they have the first lien. They have the first lien above any mortgage, above anything else. So the government gets paid first, period. So if a person invests money in that tax lien, they get paid first no matter what. So they get their money back plus 20%, plus 30%, sometimes 50%. And that's a tax lien. So I can invest my money and the government guarantees it. It's a guaranteed money and those people don't even think of it. But this is the sexy part. 3 to 6% of the time when you buy a tax lien certificate, the person defaults on the home. They couldn't pay their taxes and they can't pay their mortgages and they lose the house. Well, when the house gets lost, what's the first mortgage? It's the state, the lien holder. You, if you invest it, you own the lien and the government will repossess that property to get their money. And sometimes they'll repossess the whole thing and you'll end up owning the home or if it's a piece of ground, a lot, maybe even an apartment building. Craziest Reasons why people don't pay their taxes. So 3 to 6% of the time, you end owning the property itself. So that's a backhanded way of doing it.

How does one find tax liens?

You go to the county. There are 3,000 counties in the United States. You go to whatever county that you happen to live in, you say, where are the taxes, the tax deeds or tax sales from that county? Right. Listed. Most of them are listed. You can see them, and they will list thousands of them. I mean, it blows you away. Thousands of them. You can literally buy, like you were at a store, you can buy it from the county right there online and buy it, invest in that tax lien.

That's incredible. I did not know that entire world even existed.

Oh, well, there's a whole chapter in multiple streams of income that. And it's. Now, is it easy? No. Well, there are thousands of them right in America. There are probably 500,000 of those right now all across America on every county. They all have them. Some of them will do it slightly differently. There's different kind of states, et cetera. But when you go dig and you dig deeper, you find. You ask yourself, do I want this property? Well, when I got started, we couldn't go online and research things internationally. But now with west, with. With software like Propstream, for example, that's just one of them. It's cost like 100 bucks a month, and you can look at every single property in the United States. You literally. You can see it, and you can literally Google the. The. The. A drive down the street, you find a property that's available for sale. It has a tax lien against it. You look at the picture of it. You drive down the street, you see the neighborhood. You literally can do your. Your analysis. We couldn't do this, you know, 20 years ago today. It's unbelievable.

And all it takes to build these multiple streams of income is to be aware of these unusual ways to create those streams. Real estate tax liens. Love these.

Yes.

So as we wrap up, what be your final advice to our audience?

You need multiple streams of income. It needs multiple scenes of residual income. So don't buy a business that requires you to be there first. Yes, it's going to take a while. Just like your five years that you spent into it, it was five years of hard work, and then eventually it got to the point where it made you free. So you're going to do that just like you did. Your story is a perfect example. So, yeah, you got to put five years into it. And probably it'll be. And if you walked away from Mindvalley today, you love it. So that's why you're into it for 25 years. But if you did, it probably would send you streams of income forever. So find something you like, you got a passion for. Make sure it fits the money tree. Formula, multiple streams, outstanding product yield, all that. And then make a goal to set something this year. Say to yourself, I want a side hustle by the end of this year. One side hustle. Gary Vaynerchuk made that famous. The side hustle. I like that. It's a great. It's a great way of describing it. You're going to do it on the side. You're going to hustle on the side. Find something that turns you on. And then I suggest you only have. You never have more than three at a time, because if you get into 4, 5, 6, 10, you get overwhelmed. And therefore you put all your money into 10 different projects and they all fail. I want you to take one and make it work. It's exactly what you did. As soon as you got rid of your job, you focused 100% on Mindvalley and it worked then. Now you've got other things going on. You got other streams of income going on. So make it work. Have three. One is where you put like 80% of your time into. One where it's like 15% of your time. You're tinkering, you're testing it out. One, you put like 5% of your time in. Why three, like multiple streams of income. I want you to have multiple projects because you never can tell when things go nuts. So for me, when I wrote my book, because I went all in, I wrote my book and had my little seminars on the side, I didn't realize that my seminar business, my information marketing business, would be a thousand times more profitable than my real estate business. I did a little 5% and make a little extra cash flow to help with my monthly payments on my real estate deals. But that exploded into $1,300,000,000 worth of gross revenue from the products with my names on them, because it just exploded. So you always have to have two or three little things in the hopper, because sometimes one of the things you're focusing on, 80%, it ends up dying. And the little thing you thought you never would work or not, it just takes up exploding. So that's my recommendation to everybody that's watching here. Hope that's been valuable.

That's amazing. Thank you, Robert Allen, go check out Robert's books. They're available everywhere. Multiple Streams of Income is of course my favorite book. And just a tip for those of you who are Mindvalley members. So one of the other ways that you can create an online income stream is not just selling physical products, but selling information. I have a friend, Jimmy Narain. He is a teacher here on mindvalley. And Jimmy started selling confidence programs on Udemy and he built a lifestyle where he's earning hundreds of thousands of dollars in residual income from his courses on Udemy. He's shared his Wisdom with over 300,000 people. And recently he showed me he trained his father, who's in his 60s, to do it as well. His father in Poland. Now, Jimmy produced a program called called Course Pro. I'm the co teacher in that program. Course Pro is part of mindvalley. You can check it out on mindvalley again, it's spelled Course space P R O. And Course Pro teaches you how to take whatever knowledge you have, whether it's on prompt engineering or it's on confidence, or it's on style and dressing or on charisma. And it teaches you how to monetize that knowledge and create a powerful stream of income selling information. Jimmy's a master of it. He's one of Udemy's foremost teachers. And I have sold close to half a billion dollars worth of online courses. So both of us have come together to create Course Bro. So go check it out. If you're a mindvalley member, it's already part of your membership. And if you aren't a Mindvalley member, you can get a membership on mindvalley.com and I hope that is really beneficial advice for you. Thank you for joining us on the mindvalley Show. Robert, thank you for sharing your wisdom. I'm going to start checking out tax liens and properties for no money down. This was mind blowing for me. So truly appreciate you and the impact you had on my life.

My honor to be here. That's why we do this. How would I have known that you picked up a copy of my book in 1999 and today now it's 24, five years later that. But this is what happens when you're an information marketer. You end up meeting your students decades later and you realize the impact you have. So we do this not just for the extra stream. We do that for the stories.

The schooling system teaches you to get a job. Right. But that's a single stream. And so what your book did was it opened me up to the idea of multiple streams and that transformed my life. The multiple stream concept is life changing. So I hope you guys got a lot out of this and I'll see you in the next mindvalley show. Thank you, Robert.

You're welcome.

Now, if you enjoyed this episode, what I want to encourage you to do is to sign up for mindvalley's Financial Freedom Summit. So this is a whole three day event we do completely free. And we do this too to get our brand out, to get awareness of mindvalley out. But we're bringing in some of the most incredible speakers on financial literacy, on building an automatic business, making money through real estate investing, making money through trading. It's a collection of of some of the best teachers out there to help you gain financial freedom. Go check it out. Link below this video.