Latest / Money And Wealth With John Hope Bryant / Demystifying Real Estate
Transcript
- 0:00Speaker 1: Welcome the Money and Wealth with John O'Briant, a production
- 0:03Speaker 1: of the Black Effect Podcast Network and iHeartRadio. Yo Yo
- 0:15Speaker 1: John O'Brien and this is money and Wealth, and this
- 0:18Speaker 1: is my trending topic of the week. It's salute to
- 0:21Speaker 1: Mike Epps and his wife Kira. They are doing it
- 0:26Speaker 1: in Indianapolis. They are walking the talk of what I
- 0:30Speaker 1: call the silver rights movement. I didn't say civil rights.
- 0:33Speaker 1: The leaders of all of that movement are already established
- 0:36Speaker 1: in history. I'm talking about making new history, from civil
- 0:40Speaker 1: rights in the streets to silver rights SI L V
- 0:43Speaker 1: E R in the suites, cutting a business deal. The
- 0:47Speaker 1: new colors not black and white or redder blue.
- 0:49Speaker 2: It's green.
- 0:49Speaker 1: And we need some economic green in our neighborhoods invested
- 0:54Speaker 1: in you know, the legal trade of capitalism and free
- 0:58Speaker 1: enterprise that lift us up in a way that is sustainable.
- 1:02Speaker 1: And Mike Epstein just talk about it. He's doing it.
- 1:05Speaker 1: He and his wife went and bought six or more homes,
- 1:09Speaker 1: at least six homes with his own paycheck over a
- 1:11Speaker 1: period of time. He didn't do it all at one time,
- 1:13Speaker 1: as he was, you know, doing comedy and doing movies
- 1:16Speaker 1: and setting a little bit aside. He decided, and I
- 1:19Speaker 1: think this goes back even to the nineties, to just
- 1:22Speaker 1: buy a house, you know here, to buy a house there.
- 1:24Speaker 1: Until he owned the block, most of the block that
- 1:27Speaker 1: he grew up in. These the same blocks, same homes,
- 1:30Speaker 1: or the same block. He said he was arrested a
- 1:32Speaker 1: thousand times, same block where his.
- 1:36Speaker 2: Grandmother owned a home.
- 1:38Speaker 1: One of the homes he revitalized was for his grandmother,
- 1:40Speaker 1: as I understand it, same block where he's seen, you know,
- 1:45Speaker 1: go through all kinds of changes and transitions in the
- 1:49Speaker 1: course of his life, from you know, doing really pretty
- 1:53Speaker 1: good to pretty doing pretty crappy. And we complain about
- 1:57Speaker 1: things like gentrification. By the way, gentrification is nothing wrong
- 2:00Speaker 1: with that. Gentrification simply means a move in the middle
- 2:03Speaker 1: class values. Actually we want that, We want homes and
- 2:07Speaker 1: values to come up. We just wanted to include us
- 2:10Speaker 1: when it happens and not replace us when it happens.
- 2:14Speaker 1: And so sometimes you got to not just talk about
- 2:16Speaker 1: being a PhD, but a PhD too. I like both
- 2:19Speaker 1: of those things. I like people who do things. Mike
- 2:22Speaker 1: did things, went and bought these properties, slowly invested here
- 2:27Speaker 1: and there with his wife methodical about it, quiet about
- 2:31Speaker 1: it even and then got AGTV inspired and involved in
- 2:36Speaker 1: a new program I think they call buying back the Block.
- 2:39Speaker 1: Check it out and check him out. They did it.
- 2:43Speaker 1: And you know, as you can see, the black people
- 2:46Speaker 1: who've benefited, white people who've benefited, you know, Asian India,
- 2:50Speaker 1: everybody benefited, not just people who bought the homes and
- 2:53Speaker 1: are living in the homes, people who worked on the homes. Plumbers, electricians, lighting, roofing.
- 2:58Speaker 1: That's what I do with my own company. I try
- 2:59Speaker 1: to make sure that half of all of my vendors
- 3:02Speaker 1: at a promise homes company at least are minority in women,
- 3:06Speaker 1: small businesses, plumbing, heating, landscaping, rooting, roofing. This is job creation,
- 3:11Speaker 1: by the way, this is you know, wealth creation through contracts.
- 3:15Speaker 2: Painting.
- 3:16Speaker 1: Help me out here, I say landscaping already. Think about
- 3:18Speaker 1: all the stuff that goes in roofing, into fixing and
- 3:22Speaker 1: maintaining homes. And then once you do that, as you
- 3:25Speaker 1: see checking out his video, once he did that, then
- 3:28Speaker 1: the city you know, leaned in and they start, you know,
- 3:31Speaker 1: upgrading the infrastructure. You start seeing parks show up in
- 3:34Speaker 1: green spaces, right, you start seeing people with higher education
- 3:38Speaker 1: and higher income moving back into the neighborhood. Now economic
- 3:43Speaker 1: energy returns to the neighborhood, and so now nobody's getting
- 3:46Speaker 1: kicked out. You've got people who live there who are
- 3:50Speaker 1: middle income of working class and middle class. You have
- 3:54Speaker 1: people working there on the homes in the neighborhoods who
- 3:57Speaker 1: might be working class, might even be the working poor,
- 3:59Speaker 1: but they're participating and benefiting as well. Now you've got
- 4:03Speaker 1: a tax base for the city, so the city can
- 4:05Speaker 1: now afford to have proper public services, garbage removal, making
- 4:10Speaker 1: sure the lights that's in the street lights are fixed,
- 4:13Speaker 1: to make sure that there's money for I've already said
- 4:16Speaker 1: green space, public spaces. You know, frankly, the schools get inspired.
- 4:21Speaker 1: You start seeing businesses move into areas like this to
- 4:24Speaker 1: serve they look like, oh wait, check that out.
- 4:26Speaker 2: They need to.
- 4:27Speaker 1: You know, you start seeing coffee shops show up in
- 4:30Speaker 1: little corner shops, and boutiques and hair salons and barbershops.
- 4:36Speaker 1: All that stuff starts to move in when poverty and
- 4:40Speaker 1: problems move out. Prosperity moves in when problems move out.
- 4:44Speaker 1: That's not a black, you know situation, or a white situation,
- 4:48Speaker 1: or a Latino situation or Asian situation. It's an aspirational situation.
- 4:53Speaker 1: And Mike and his wife have shown you how to
- 4:55Speaker 1: do it right and make it tight and making smart
- 4:59Speaker 1: sexy again and doing it in a way that actually
- 5:02Speaker 1: enhances their economic plight like that, doing it right and
- 5:06Speaker 1: increasing their economic might. And I'm not trying to be
- 5:10Speaker 1: a rapper. It just so happens that, you know, sometimes
- 5:14Speaker 1: when you do it right, it is cool and smooth.
- 5:16Speaker 1: So tip my brother, tip my brother killer Mike. Don't
- 5:19Speaker 1: get mad at me because I'm rapping a little bit
- 5:21Speaker 1: in rhyming a little bit. I'll never be a challenge
- 5:26Speaker 1: to your talent on rocking the mic. But don't you
- 5:29Speaker 1: rock this this economic pen that I've got over here?
- 5:32Speaker 2: When I might, I might have something for you. All right?
- 5:34Speaker 1: Back to the story. The Epps family now have increased
- 5:37Speaker 1: their net worth these homes that they bought for next
- 5:40Speaker 1: to nothing, I hope you know. So there's the nineties,
- 5:44Speaker 1: so we're going back almost thirty years, these accumulating it
- 5:47Speaker 1: over time that they hopefully bought next to nothing. I
- 5:50Speaker 1: hope they did, you know. Now they've invested. Now HGTV
- 5:53Speaker 1: hopefully has invested because it's it's good for the network.
- 5:57Speaker 1: The equity I keep talking about in real estate investment
- 6:01Speaker 1: goes to the Epps family, it also goes to anybody
- 6:04Speaker 1: else who's buying a home in that neighborhood that gets
- 6:07Speaker 1: a knock on effect, meaning in other words, if the
- 6:09Speaker 1: house next door to you gets improved, then you may
- 6:12Speaker 1: want to improve your house, but certainly it improves the
- 6:14Speaker 1: value of your house. If the house next door's got
- 6:17Speaker 1: one hundred thousand dollars of rehabilization and improvement going into it,
- 6:23Speaker 1: and then you're going to get some kind of halo
- 6:24Speaker 1: effect on your house. You know, you may get a
- 6:27Speaker 1: twenty thirty thousand dollars pop in value in your house
- 6:29Speaker 1: because somebody put one hundred thousand dollars in the house
- 6:31Speaker 1: next door. You did nothing. If you then improve your
- 6:33Speaker 1: house with some new paint and some landscaping, you may
- 6:36Speaker 1: get a pop of thirty or forty thousand dollars. I'm
- 6:39Speaker 1: talking about homes that are you know, one hundred and
- 6:41Speaker 1: two hundred thousand dollars three hundred thousand dollars in range
- 6:45Speaker 1: at the moment, which sounds to me and looks at
- 6:47Speaker 1: me based on what I'm seeing is going on in
- 6:50Speaker 1: this neighborhood in Indianapolis that the EPP's family is revitalizing,
- 6:54Speaker 1: and so as it comes up, they come up. As
- 6:57Speaker 1: the community does well, they do well. That's good doing
- 7:00Speaker 1: well and doing good. I keep saying that good capitalism
- 7:03Speaker 1: is where I benefit and you benefit more. Bad capitalism
- 7:06Speaker 1: is I benefit, you pay a price for it. This
- 7:09Speaker 1: is good capitalism. Back capitalism is you know, drug dealing,
- 7:12Speaker 1: is you know, rent to own stores, title lenders, liquor stores, pawnshops,
- 7:16Speaker 1: you know check cashers, Not all check cashers, but the
- 7:19Speaker 1: predatory ones, you know, title lending stores, and all these
- 7:23Speaker 1: folks praying on our neighborhoods and low credit score neighborhoods.
- 7:26Speaker 1: This guy is actually raising the credit score, raising the
- 7:28Speaker 1: economic energy of this neighborhood. It will attract investors, as
- 7:33Speaker 1: I said, it will attract involvement, positive involvement by the city.
- 7:36Speaker 1: The police will be more respectful. I guarantee you right,
- 7:40Speaker 1: Mike's not gonna have any problem in this neighborhood. I
- 7:42Speaker 1: guarantee you. But people who live in this neighborhood are
- 7:44Speaker 1: not going to have any problem with They're taxpayers. Hello,
- 7:47Speaker 1: So what do you think about this. I mean, what's
- 7:49Speaker 1: your opinion on this? But I'm just really excited about it.
- 7:53Speaker 1: And he's my profile of the week of a celebrity
- 7:57Speaker 1: doing it right. Happens to be a black celebrity as well.
- 8:00Speaker 1: Who understands that he can't just cash the check. He's
- 8:03Speaker 1: got to write some You can't just make the money
- 8:06Speaker 1: during the day. You got to build wealth in your sleep.
- 8:08Speaker 1: You got to you know, in real estate is the
- 8:10Speaker 1: easiest way, well one of the easiest way to do it,
- 8:13Speaker 1: in providing affordable housing to people. And it's just like
- 8:16Speaker 1: plus plus plus everybody wins when you buy back the block.
- 8:22Speaker 2: Be inspired.
- 8:23Speaker 1: I am, hey, this is John O'Bryant. And there's a
- 8:36Speaker 1: lie that's been told to working class and even middle
- 8:39Speaker 1: class families and certainly the so called poor. Don't own
- 8:44Speaker 1: a home. Don't buy a home. It's a bad investment,
- 8:47Speaker 1: it's a bad bet. Enjoy your life. Don't buy a home.
- 8:51Speaker 1: By the way, everybody telling you to not buy a
- 8:54Speaker 1: home on TV, on the news owns a home. Everybody
- 9:02Speaker 1: telling you not to buy a home owns a home.
- 9:06Speaker 1: Don't take my word for it. In this digital world
- 9:09Speaker 1: we live in now, and also inner city world we
- 9:11Speaker 1: live in now because by the way, the wealthiest neighborhoods
- 9:14Speaker 1: and France or places called Paris, that's an inner city.
- 9:18Speaker 1: The wealthiest places in the UK United Kingdom, places like
- 9:22Speaker 1: London in the inner city. It goes on and goes
- 9:24Speaker 1: on and goes on. Inner cities all around the world
- 9:27Speaker 1: are invaluable, but we put the world. American leaders put
- 9:31Speaker 1: poor people, so called poor people, blacks and browns in
- 9:34Speaker 1: inner cities in the twentieth century and move to the suburbs.
- 9:38Speaker 1: Only realize with traffic and congestion they want to move
- 9:40Speaker 1: back to centrally located real estate. I'll get to that
- 9:42Speaker 1: in a minute, which means our real estate is actually invaluable,
- 9:45Speaker 1: but we are actively giving it away. But I'm getting
- 9:48Speaker 1: ahead of myself. In this digital world we live in,
- 9:51Speaker 1: you can get most information at your fingertips. So if
- 9:55Speaker 1: you see somebody on television telling you that home ownership's
- 9:57Speaker 1: a bad bet, use your smartphone to be smart. Use
- 10:02Speaker 1: it for something other than checking out you know, the
- 10:06Speaker 1: most interesting stats on sports, which is cool, or seeing
- 10:10Speaker 1: the best you know, the most recent concert or music videos,
- 10:13Speaker 1: which is cool. Use it to make smart sexy, to
- 10:18Speaker 1: understand what somebody's telling you whether it's a lie or not.
- 10:21Speaker 1: Look up the person, look up the broadcaster or the
- 10:24Speaker 1: TV personality and see if they own a home. You
- 10:27Speaker 1: put in their name and put in home and see
- 10:29Speaker 1: what comes up. And if somebody's a public figure, you know,
- 10:32Speaker 1: in you know, eight times out of ten it'll tell you, yeah,
- 10:35Speaker 1: this person owns a home, and our multiple homes. How
- 10:39Speaker 1: do I know that? Because the number one business in
- 10:42Speaker 1: the world is real estate. The number one business in
- 10:47Speaker 1: the world is real estate, all right in the world,
- 10:52Speaker 1: and it's been that way for at least the last
- 10:58Speaker 1: seventy five years. The number one sector, the biggest business
- 11:03Speaker 1: sector in the world, right, not technology, not healthcare, not music,
- 11:08Speaker 1: not entertainment, not you know, whatever it is you're interested in,
- 11:12Speaker 1: None of that. The biggest industry, the biggest sector in
- 11:15Speaker 1: the world. It's real estate. The number one way that
- 11:19Speaker 1: millionaires become such. And I know as much because I
- 11:23Speaker 1: am one. It's real estate. I happen to be, in
- 11:26Speaker 1: addition to being the founder of Operation Hope, the largest
- 11:29Speaker 1: minority owner. I think this is still true. It was
- 11:31Speaker 1: true certainly a year ago or two years ago, and
- 11:34Speaker 1: I sold the company. The largest minority owner of single
- 11:37Speaker 1: family rental real estate in America single family homes. Sorry,
- 11:41Speaker 1: is the largest owner of single family rental homes in
- 11:43Speaker 1: America is me. It was a Promise Homes company. I
- 11:47Speaker 1: built the company from twenty seventeen to twenty I sold
- 11:50Speaker 1: it to twenty twenty one for one hundred and twenty
- 11:51Speaker 1: one million dollars, did a twenty million dollars credit facility
- 11:55Speaker 1: financing to recapitalize the company. Became a partner in the
- 11:58Speaker 1: new company with my new partners. I owned the company myself.
- 12:02Speaker 1: Now I own it with partners, but we owned, you know,
- 12:05Speaker 1: at one point we own a little less than now
- 12:07Speaker 1: seven hundred homes in Georgia, Greater Atlanta, in Florida. And
- 12:12Speaker 1: I started this, you know, I started my quest with
- 12:14Speaker 1: one home, right we'll actually a condo. Then went from
- 12:17Speaker 1: one condo to a condo and an investment property, and
- 12:20Speaker 1: then three properties and then five and okay, then I
- 12:23Speaker 1: you know, decided to go into a business and then
- 12:26Speaker 1: went on supercharge mode. And my goal is actually ten
- 12:29Speaker 1: thousand homes now. But that's a whole other conversation for
- 12:31Speaker 1: another time. That it's not the strategies I'm talking to
- 12:34Speaker 1: you about. Now I'm just telling you I know what
- 12:36Speaker 1: I'm talking about. In that operation Hope, we've helped, you know,
- 12:39Speaker 1: literally thousands of people become homeowners with prime rates because
- 12:44Speaker 1: we helped them get their credits corrupt, their debt down,
- 12:45Speaker 1: their savings up. Okay, back to the topic, because all
- 12:50Speaker 1: those just underscoories that I know what I'm talking about, right,
- 12:52Speaker 1: and I want you to listen. I want you to
- 12:54Speaker 1: pay attention. My mother, who worked an hourly job, wanted
- 12:58Speaker 1: to smith an hourly job job, I mean Donald Do's aircraft,
- 13:01Speaker 1: bought and sold seven homes, making the equivalent of eighteen.
- 13:04Speaker 2: Dollars an hour.
- 13:06Speaker 1: And when she passed away September twenty twenty three, guy
- 13:10Speaker 1: rest her soul. An amazing woman. She died, you know,
- 13:13Speaker 1: with the equivalency of a rollup of a million dollar
- 13:16Speaker 1: net worth, meaning she'd accumulated a million dollars in assets
- 13:19Speaker 1: and distributed to her children and others that she loved.
- 13:22Speaker 1: But when she passed away working an hourly job, because
- 13:25Speaker 1: of real estate, she could put her kids into homes.
- 13:28Speaker 1: She did that for my sister and my brother, helping
- 13:31Speaker 1: them buy homes multiple times. And I watched her buy
- 13:34Speaker 1: and sell homes it gave her financial freedom and retire
- 13:38Speaker 1: in dignity right. And she did it as a working
- 13:40Speaker 1: class woman. So because my grandmother was on a shotgun shack,
- 13:44Speaker 1: my mother owned seven homes. I then owned seven hundred
- 13:47Speaker 1: because now I knew what I could do and I
- 13:49Speaker 1: built on that success. Can I get an amen? This
- 13:52Speaker 1: is what this is a church that was happening. Now
- 13:53Speaker 1: what have you done for me lately? So I know
- 13:55Speaker 1: it can be done and I have done it. I'm
- 13:57Speaker 1: not somebody talking about it read about it in the
- 13:59Speaker 1: book giving you a motivational speech. I'm telling you that
- 14:02Speaker 1: I made good moves and bad I'm gonna tell you
- 14:04Speaker 1: about a couple of them in this podcast. Almost lost
- 14:07Speaker 1: my rear end and would have had to file bankruptcy
- 14:09Speaker 1: if the if the lender had not been gracious towards
- 14:12Speaker 1: me when I was building a three unit apartment building.
- 14:15Speaker 1: I don't want to commend that lender. It was actually
- 14:17Speaker 1: Wills Fargo. It was a banker at Wells Fargo who
- 14:19Speaker 1: saved my bacon when I was building a home for
- 14:22Speaker 1: my father to live in. And again I'll get to
- 14:25Speaker 1: that story in a minute, but you know I came
- 14:28Speaker 1: very close to losing it all. I also made it big,
- 14:31Speaker 1: so almost lost it big there, but I also made
- 14:34Speaker 1: it big. That was a construction loan, big relatively speaking.
- 14:37Speaker 1: When I bought a home, you know, a condo townhouse home,
- 14:42Speaker 1: I was living in an apartment and I moved and
- 14:44Speaker 1: got this home and I paid you know, two hundred
- 14:47Speaker 1: and twenty thousand dollars for it in Los Angeles on
- 14:50Speaker 1: lati hera boulevard righted Lati here in four or five
- 14:53Speaker 1: for anybody knows Los Angeles. And then when the economy
- 14:57Speaker 1: took a dive, everybody was saying, you need to sell
- 14:59Speaker 1: the house two thousand and eight, you need to sell
- 15:01Speaker 1: the house. Get out of the house, all my poor friends,
- 15:04Speaker 1: and you know, sell get out, get out, get out. No, no, no,
- 15:08Speaker 1: Warren Buffet says, when people are greedy, be afraid. When
- 15:10Speaker 1: people are afraid, be greedy. I just doubled down, right.
- 15:13Speaker 1: I had a tenant in it. I figured, you know,
- 15:16Speaker 1: I'll just hold on to it. And you know, it
- 15:19Speaker 1: went down to one hundreds of one thousand dollars. Everybody's like,
- 15:21Speaker 1: get out, get out. But I had a tenant covering
- 15:23Speaker 1: the rent, right, okay, all good, And I was still
- 15:26Speaker 1: getting tax benefits from it. I'll get to that in
- 15:28Speaker 1: a minute, also the tax benefits of ownership. I held
- 15:31Speaker 1: on and somewhere around twenty fifteen, I went back to
- 15:34Speaker 1: check on the property again. This so this, this is
- 15:37Speaker 1: you know, now to economic crisis two thousand and eight,
- 15:39Speaker 1: two thousand and nine, lost my shirt. Supposedly I didn't
- 15:42Speaker 1: lose my shirt. I still owned the property and it
- 15:44Speaker 1: was I had a tenant in it in the property,
- 15:46Speaker 1: and so the rent was being covered. Twenty and fifteen,
- 15:50Speaker 1: twenty sixteen, I decided to cash out by another property.
- 15:54Speaker 2: Do you know?
- 15:55Speaker 1: I sold that property for seven hundred and fifty thousand
- 15:57Speaker 1: dollars Hello, bought it for two twenty went down to
- 16:01Speaker 1: one hundred and something. If if I'd listed that bad
- 16:04Speaker 1: advice from my so called friends, if you hang around
- 16:06Speaker 1: nine broke people, you'll be the tenth. You know, good people.
- 16:09Speaker 1: I love my people. But they gave my friends were
- 16:12Speaker 1: giving me bad advice because they didn't know better, so
- 16:14Speaker 1: couldn't do better. They weren't financial geniuses, and they couldn't
- 16:17Speaker 1: give me financial genius advice and give me be cool advice.
- 16:20Speaker 1: How to address advice, how to hang out advice? A
- 16:22Speaker 1: lot of other good advice, maybe even how to parent advice.
- 16:26Speaker 1: I'm sure they give me a lot of great advice,
- 16:28Speaker 1: but real estate advice was not one of the ones
- 16:30Speaker 1: they could give me. Investment advice was not one of
- 16:32Speaker 1: the ones they could give me. And I knew better
- 16:34Speaker 1: than to pay attention to what they were saying, as
- 16:36Speaker 1: an old Southern saying in a blind town of one
- 16:39Speaker 1: eyed man's king, if you don't know better, you cannot
- 16:42Speaker 1: do better.
- 16:43Speaker 2: Right.
- 16:43Speaker 1: And no matter how much I love you, my son
- 16:45Speaker 1: and my daughter, if I don't have wisdom, all I
- 16:48Speaker 1: can give you is my own ignorance.
- 16:50Speaker 2: That's right.
- 16:51Speaker 1: So we passed down bad habits from generation to generation
- 16:55Speaker 1: out of love. We passed down bad habits to you.
- 16:58Speaker 1: Please tell me you're hearing what I'm saying. It's so
- 17:01Speaker 1: important that you understand. The egos don't fly in packs.
- 17:04Speaker 1: You've never seen a flock of eagles.
- 17:06Speaker 2: Right. You're going to be alone in.
- 17:07Speaker 1: Some of these decisions. You're going to be a solo player.
- 17:09Speaker 1: People should tell me, oh, come on party with us,
- 17:11Speaker 1: come on hang out. No, I'm I'm good. Enjoy yourself.
- 17:15Speaker 1: And I was by behind that computer trying to figure
- 17:17Speaker 1: out what was going on. Now I don't have to
- 17:19Speaker 1: go to the club I can own it, right, And
- 17:21Speaker 1: the people who you choose used to go to the
- 17:22Speaker 1: clubs and wanted me to go with them, are now
- 17:24Speaker 1: coming to me asking me for a job.
- 17:26Speaker 2: And that's been for successive years. Right.
- 17:28Speaker 1: So you know, only in the dictionary does the word
- 17:31Speaker 1: success come before the word work, because it's alphabetical. I'll
- 17:34Speaker 1: repeat that, Only in the dictionary does the word success
- 17:38Speaker 1: come before the word work, because it's alphabetical. So I
- 17:42Speaker 1: give you one example of how I took a modest investment.
- 17:46Speaker 1: I went from renting in an apartment in van Ies
- 17:48Speaker 1: believe it was, and buying us a townhouse for a couple,
- 17:51Speaker 1: you know, a couple hundred thousand dollars, having that property
- 17:53Speaker 1: go down in value, holding on to it, moved to
- 17:56Speaker 1: I think Atlanta rented that townhouse out right, but kept
- 18:01Speaker 1: it and then turned around and that property has literally tripled,
- 18:05Speaker 1: more than tripled in value when I sold it for
- 18:08Speaker 1: seven hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and then in up
- 18:11Speaker 1: parleying that into a tax exchange. I think it's called
- 18:14Speaker 1: ten thirty one tax free exchange. I think it's what
- 18:16Speaker 1: it's called it's a tax free exchange where you can
- 18:19Speaker 1: buy one property with the proceeds from the property you
- 18:22Speaker 1: just sold and you don't pay taxes on it. And
- 18:25Speaker 1: I ended up leveraging that up into a multimillion dollar investment.
- 18:29Speaker 1: So that little two hundred thousand dollars townhouse morphed into
- 18:32Speaker 1: a multimillion dollar investment. And that's not the Promise Homes
- 18:35Speaker 1: company I'm telling you about right now. Where else can
- 18:38Speaker 1: you do that? And then the piece where I lost
- 18:41Speaker 1: my shirt, I'll just tell you this, I almost lost
- 18:42Speaker 1: my shirt. Then I would get into the basics of
- 18:45Speaker 1: why you should own a home. My dad made some
- 18:47Speaker 1: financial mistakes, made some mismoves or some bad moves. A
- 18:52Speaker 1: good guy, but was not financially literate. Nobody taught him
- 18:55Speaker 1: how money works, so it wasn't his fault. But he
- 18:57Speaker 1: didn't know better, so couldn't do better. So I'm not
- 18:59Speaker 1: blaming it on you. I'm telling you that this is
- 19:01Speaker 1: in my own family. We're not ashamed of it because
- 19:03Speaker 1: he just didn't know any better. And he worked his
- 19:06Speaker 1: whole life working in construction on his own business, meeting
- 19:10Speaker 1: a payroad to where I learned how to do it,
- 19:12Speaker 1: and payroll was every race of people out of the
- 19:14Speaker 1: front door of our home. So race to me was,
- 19:18Speaker 1: you know, not a negative thing. I had no problem
- 19:20Speaker 1: with white people or Asians or that they knows or whatever.
- 19:22Speaker 1: They all worked for my dad, so the color was green.
- 19:25Speaker 1: But my dad couldn't keep the money. He made a dollar,
- 19:27Speaker 1: spend a dollar fifty. The more money we made, the
- 19:29Speaker 1: broker we got right, and he ended up, you know,
- 19:32Speaker 1: fast forward, living with this lady. He was dating my
- 19:36Speaker 1: mom and Dady divorced, and she controlled his life. Like
- 19:40Speaker 1: I'll say, it's like he was pimping him, like, you know,
- 19:42Speaker 1: she be my boyfriend. By the way, I'm giving you housing, right,
- 19:45Speaker 1: So he lived in a house that she controlled. She
- 19:48Speaker 1: didn't live there, she controlled it and she controlled him.
- 19:51Speaker 1: I said, oh no, we're not doing this. So with
- 19:53Speaker 1: my dad's permission, I bought the house from the lady.
- 19:56Speaker 1: But then I realized I couldn't just subsidize this payment
- 19:59Speaker 1: every month of the more. So I learned the rules.
- 20:02Speaker 1: I learned the you know, get the memo on money.
- 20:04Speaker 1: That's my I think it's my fourth book, the memo
- 20:06Speaker 1: Get that Right, And and learned the game built the
- 20:11Speaker 1: knock three walls down, keep one wall up, and build
- 20:15Speaker 1: a three unit apartment building around the remaining wall. Turned
- 20:19Speaker 1: it into an income producing property. Was my strategy. Let
- 20:21Speaker 1: my dad live in the front unit and I'd rent
- 20:24Speaker 1: out the other two. Actually was supped to be a
- 20:26Speaker 1: four unit building, but my dad screwed up the sooning
- 20:28Speaker 1: ordinance and I ended up having to go from four
- 20:32Speaker 1: units to three. The numbers still work. He would live
- 20:35Speaker 1: in the front unit for free. The other two units
- 20:37Speaker 1: would pay the mortgage payment and you know, property taxes
- 20:40Speaker 1: and maintenance and little income. Not bad, right, Well, I
- 20:44Speaker 1: let my dad emotional decision. Who was a you know,
- 20:47Speaker 1: it was a construction guy. He knew what he was doing,
- 20:49Speaker 1: but I let him manage, not the job of construction.
- 20:51Speaker 1: I let him manage the money. And make a long
- 20:53Speaker 1: story short, he ran through six hundred and fifty thousand
- 20:55Speaker 1: dollars a construction loan. OUCH did not finish the project.
- 20:58Speaker 2: Ouch.
- 20:59Speaker 1: I had to go back to the lender, Tom Swanson,
- 21:01Speaker 1: that's the guy's name. If Tom, are you listening to this,
- 21:03Speaker 1: God bless you, brother? And I had to get and
- 21:06Speaker 1: luckily values at this time were going up, so he
- 21:10Speaker 1: got that property reappraised, and luckily it reappraised higher, so
- 21:14Speaker 1: I got a refinanswer the construction loan. If I couldn't
- 21:17Speaker 1: do that, I would have had to file bankruptcy. Reefin
- 21:19Speaker 1: answer the construction loan and got just enough proceeds to
- 21:23Speaker 1: finish the job, get a permanent loan put on the property,
- 21:26Speaker 1: paid off the construction loan. I also gave my dad
- 21:28Speaker 1: a americ Express credit card six thousand dollars limit. He
- 21:32Speaker 1: ran that up to the limit, and I mean, this
- 21:35Speaker 1: is back with six thousand dollars, it might as well
- 21:36Speaker 1: have been six million, And I mean, money really does
- 21:40Speaker 1: create drama in relationships, like the number one cause of divorces.
- 21:43Speaker 1: Money like this really created a problem with me and
- 21:45Speaker 1: my dad. But he's my father, so I couldn't be disrespectful.
- 21:49Speaker 1: But I'm like, he was being disrespectful to my wallet
- 21:51Speaker 1: and he met well, but just you know, just financially illiterate.
- 21:55Speaker 1: So I had to like learn to give him money,
- 21:57Speaker 1: but not a credit card, you know, give him, you know,
- 22:00Speaker 1: a gift card that you know, money on it loaded,
- 22:02Speaker 1: but nothing more.
- 22:04Speaker 2: You know.
- 22:04Speaker 1: I had to be you know, I had to find
- 22:06Speaker 1: ways to let them live in dignity but not to
- 22:09Speaker 1: have an open credit line. So I finished that and
- 22:12Speaker 1: was able to sell that property later on and clear
- 22:15Speaker 1: all my debts in his By the way, he died,
- 22:18Speaker 1: got rest his soul in dignity at eighty nine years
- 22:21Speaker 1: of age in a home that you know he controlled.
- 22:24Speaker 1: So why should you want to own a home because
- 22:27Speaker 1: everybody else who's got wealth does. Let's start there, because
- 22:30Speaker 1: it's a number one ways you build wealth in America? Right,
- 22:32Speaker 1: Why should you want to own a home because when
- 22:35Speaker 1: you buy a home, you get the benefit of depreciation,
- 22:39Speaker 1: the tax benefit. The tax system was created to benefit homeowners.
- 22:44Speaker 1: You get the benefit of depreciation, tax benefits, You get
- 22:47Speaker 1: the benefit of appreciation, the increase in value of that home.
- 22:51Speaker 1: I'm going to break this stuff down. I talk to
- 22:53Speaker 1: you in plain English. You know, if you have a
- 22:55Speaker 1: thirty year mortgage, on average fifteen certainly twenty years of
- 22:59Speaker 1: that mortgage, you write office mortgage interest. Twenty of a
- 23:02Speaker 1: thirty year mortgage is mortgage interest. Well, you write that
- 23:05Speaker 1: off against your taxes, against your income. So you're going
- 23:07Speaker 1: to get a lot of that money back as a
- 23:09Speaker 1: tax refund. You can't get that back if you're renting,
- 23:12Speaker 1: if you're renting from me, and I'd love you to
- 23:15Speaker 1: be a renter for me, right, But at some point
- 23:17Speaker 1: I want you to leave. I want you to go
- 23:18Speaker 1: from rent to own. But you're reading for me, or
- 23:20Speaker 1: you're renting from someplace you can't afford, a neighborhood that
- 23:24Speaker 1: don't want you with money. You don't have to press
- 23:26Speaker 1: people you don't know about stuff that don't matter, right,
- 23:28Speaker 1: real talk. So you're writing in this skuy scrape or
- 23:31Speaker 1: somewhere with a dormant, right, yeah, but you don't have
- 23:34Speaker 1: a dormant. You also, you also want a window taker
- 23:37Speaker 1: because you're opening that window and somebody's taking your money
- 23:40Speaker 1: as you throw that money for rent out the window
- 23:43Speaker 1: every month. By the way, I was a renter. There's
- 23:45Speaker 1: a time to be a renter. You just shouldn't be
- 23:46Speaker 1: a renter for your entire life, in my opinion. So
- 23:50Speaker 1: if you consider yourself an ALLC A limited liability corporation,
- 23:53Speaker 1: consider yourself a business. Right, where are your assets? Your
- 23:56Speaker 1: assets cannot be on your ass. You've got to own something.
- 24:03Speaker 1: And you build wealth in your sleep. You make money
- 24:05Speaker 1: during the day, you build wealth in your sleep. It's
- 24:07Speaker 1: called appreciation compounding, right, Stocks home ownership, bonds, businesses, real estate,
- 24:15Speaker 1: even education, higher education compounds. That's an investment. You know,
- 24:20Speaker 1: only in real estate are you going to get this
- 24:22Speaker 1: kind of secured opportunities. You know, real estate has never
- 24:26Speaker 1: gone down in value in the history of the modern
- 24:29Speaker 1: world in America. Now, somebody's going to say, now we
- 24:31Speaker 1: got John, this is wrong, right, there was a crisis
- 24:33Speaker 1: in two thousand and eight. There's a crisis in you know,
- 24:35Speaker 1: whenever you know two thousand No, there's a crisis. Right
- 24:39Speaker 1: in real estate. It goes up, there's a crisis, it
- 24:42Speaker 1: dips right down, right as it did in my situation.
- 24:46Speaker 1: And then when it corrects, it always corrects above the line,
- 24:48Speaker 1: which means that it goes back up above the dip
- 24:52Speaker 1: and typically breaches the value that you bought it for
- 24:55Speaker 1: if you hold on to it long enough, because they
- 24:57Speaker 1: just aren't growing in any more land it's fine, and
- 25:00Speaker 1: it is secured investment. And again, for all the reasons
- 25:03Speaker 1: I just mentioned you, the tax system is designed to
- 25:06Speaker 1: benefit real estate owners, specifically home ownership. Now I'm going
- 25:11Speaker 1: to tell you in short order why people benefit from
- 25:16Speaker 1: you not understanding this game. And this is not a
- 25:19Speaker 1: racial comment of making I'm just saying that some people
- 25:21Speaker 1: understood this game and other people did not. After the
- 25:24Speaker 1: Civil War, I want to make this really quick. After
- 25:27Speaker 1: the Civil War, you had forty acres in a mule.
- 25:29Speaker 1: And I'll do this in a separate podcast around the
- 25:32Speaker 1: Freedmans Bank. It was Field Action fifteen in Savannah, Georgia,
- 25:37Speaker 1: twenty four former slaved ministers asked by Secretary of War
- 25:41Speaker 1: Stanton General Sherman, what do you want after slavery?
- 25:43Speaker 2: What do you want? Do you want? Do you want
- 25:45Speaker 2: an apology? You want?
- 25:46Speaker 1: Well for no, no, no, no, we want land. We
- 25:47Speaker 1: want to do for ourselves. So they ultimately got forty
- 25:51Speaker 1: acres for each family, a couple order bucks for seeds
- 25:55Speaker 1: and things like the seed corn for the land to
- 25:58Speaker 1: grow and the nurture. And they worked that land so
- 26:01Speaker 1: hard they were ultimately given a mule like a tractor
- 26:04Speaker 1: because they were so industrious. When Lincoln was assassinated a
- 26:07Speaker 1: year later, that rule was reversed in the former slave
- 26:12Speaker 1: owning landowners ended up getting that land back plus some money.
- 26:15Speaker 1: Now that's not what this podcast is about. That's not
- 26:17Speaker 1: what this episode's about. But the reason I'm telling you
- 26:19Speaker 1: that story is some people think that four million slaves
- 26:22Speaker 1: got forty acres and a mule no no, no, no.
- 26:25Speaker 1: Eighteen thousand families split up four hundred thousand acres. And
- 26:28Speaker 1: that land was reversed after they got it. And it
- 26:32Speaker 1: wasn't even good land. It was along the ocean around
- 26:35Speaker 1: North Carolina, South Carolina. It was a coastal property. It
- 26:39Speaker 1: was just hard to you know, grow agriculture on. But
- 26:42Speaker 1: we took it and ran and worked it anyway, because
- 26:44Speaker 1: we we've been doing so much with so little for
- 26:47Speaker 1: so long. We can almost do anything with nothing. Meaning
- 26:49Speaker 1: African Americans were very industrious, but they took that back.
- 26:52Speaker 1: Why am I telling you that story because soon after that,
- 26:54Speaker 1: a couple of years after that, there was a Homestead
- 26:56Speaker 1: Act about two hundred and seventy million acres ten percent
- 26:59Speaker 1: of all land in America given to anybody read mostly white.
- 27:04Speaker 1: Ninety nine point something percent of all the recipients of
- 27:07Speaker 1: the Homestead Act where white settlers that were going west
- 27:10Speaker 1: would get I think it was six hundred and sixty
- 27:13Speaker 1: acres as I'm right, if I'm correct, You had to
- 27:15Speaker 1: work the land. The government created institutions of agriculture. They
- 27:19Speaker 1: created basically mentors business mentors for agriculture in these counties.
- 27:24Speaker 1: That would help new farmers to understand how to own
- 27:28Speaker 1: and grow the land. But you got this land for
- 27:31Speaker 1: free and two hundred and seventy million acres and one
- 27:34Speaker 1: point five million families took the two hundred and seventy
- 27:38Speaker 1: million acres and I think it was six thousand families
- 27:41Speaker 1: if I got that number right, were black of one
- 27:44Speaker 1: point five million total families that got a plot of land,
- 27:48Speaker 1: which is upwards of one hundred million beneficiary families today.
- 27:52Speaker 1: It's a whole another conversation, but that land represents ten
- 27:56Speaker 1: percent of all land in America. That was a homestead Act.
- 27:59Speaker 2: Okay.
- 28:00Speaker 1: Now you fast forward to the early twentieth century and
- 28:02Speaker 1: you had mortgages from the government part of the New
- 28:06Speaker 1: Deal and the FAHA fair Uh, the FAHA, I think
- 28:09Speaker 1: it's a fair housing Federal Housing Authority what is called.
- 28:12Speaker 1: I'm doing this without notes, so and this is all
- 28:15Speaker 1: memory and my knowledge and the FAHA. Unlike the rumor
- 28:20Speaker 1: that banks created red lining, the federal government created red
- 28:23Speaker 1: lining because the federal government said they would ensure mortgages
- 28:27Speaker 1: right in neighborhoods. But if a neighbor was viewed as
- 28:30Speaker 1: as risky or you know, dangerous. They would put whether
- 28:34Speaker 1: there was a green, there were green neighborhoods. Guess where
- 28:37Speaker 1: those were. There were yellow, you know markings. Those were
- 28:40Speaker 1: sketchy but you know, debatable, and then they were red.
- 28:43Speaker 1: Oh no, that's a no go zone. And the government
- 28:45Speaker 1: refused to finance, I'm sorry, to guarantee of mortgage in
- 28:48Speaker 1: those neighborhoods. Well, guess where the banks refused to make mortgages.
- 28:52Speaker 1: It wasn't necessarily racial, but if you're in a red
- 28:56Speaker 1: zone and the government's not gonna guarantee of mortgage, then
- 28:59Speaker 1: the bank's not gonna lend on a home in that
- 29:01Speaker 1: area on a mortgage. They got to go to where
- 29:03Speaker 1: it's safe. Because money is a coward. Money wants to
- 29:05Speaker 1: be safe. I understand that. So money would go to
- 29:08Speaker 1: what would in this case be white neighborhoods, and they'd
- 29:11Speaker 1: make the mortgages there. So where do you think the
- 29:14Speaker 1: values went up? The values went up in the white
- 29:16Speaker 1: or the green neighborhoods, which happened to be mostly in
- 29:19Speaker 1: this cave, you know, example, white homeowners, and it went down.
- 29:25Speaker 1: It was depressed in black neighborhoods, all right, And then
- 29:28Speaker 1: you had covenants, restrictive covenants on homes that Blacks cannot
- 29:32Speaker 1: buy in these green neighborhoods. As a whole nother game.
- 29:36Speaker 1: And then you come up through World War two and
- 29:39Speaker 1: the GI Bill ninety nine. You know, percent of all
- 29:42Speaker 1: the GI Bill recipients were non black White. This is
- 29:46Speaker 1: where the middle class was created. Again, this is not
- 29:47Speaker 1: a this is not a white versus black thing. This
- 29:49Speaker 1: is a green thing. I'm just giving you a history
- 29:51Speaker 1: lesson of why black people have a net worth that is,
- 29:55Speaker 1: you know, a mere fraction of white net worth because
- 29:58Speaker 1: you know, in one of these areas of home ownership,
- 30:02Speaker 1: we have not either taken advantage of it or mostly
- 30:04Speaker 1: it's been denied of it. Right now, we're not taking
- 30:06Speaker 1: advantage of it. Forty one forty three percent of all
- 30:08Speaker 1: home ownership is black compared to seventy five percent of
- 30:10Speaker 1: our mainstream count of parts. But in history, right, you
- 30:13Speaker 1: know civil rights moving in before it was restricted from us,
- 30:17Speaker 1: it was kept from us. But I'm demystifying the game.
- 30:20Speaker 1: I'm telling you now how this game is played. And
- 30:23Speaker 1: if you have good credit, the bank will just say yes. Right,
- 30:27Speaker 1: So the colors green. The playing field is more leveled
- 30:30Speaker 1: today than it has ever been. My mother's story is
- 30:32Speaker 1: an example of what I'm telling you, right. My story
- 30:35Speaker 1: is an example of what I'm telling you right. And
- 30:37Speaker 1: by the way, there's more poor white people than poor
- 30:40Speaker 1: anybody else, and they suffer from the same problem because
- 30:43Speaker 1: they never got the memo on money. That's another video
- 30:46Speaker 1: for another podcast or another time. I don't know anybody
- 30:49Speaker 1: here thinking that this is John making a case against anybody.
- 30:52Speaker 1: I'm making a case for you. I'm trying to not
- 30:55Speaker 1: emotionally explain to you how bad things can happen to
- 30:58Speaker 1: good people. So you had you know this. You know,
- 31:02Speaker 1: the government for the GI Bill, will give you a
- 31:04Speaker 1: mortgage and an education, sponsor you in the college and
- 31:08Speaker 1: get you through college for the skill of marketable skill,
- 31:11Speaker 1: and give you more to become a homeowner. And that's
- 31:13Speaker 1: where you know, broadly define we can see the white
- 31:18Speaker 1: middle class really emerged from and then black middle class
- 31:21Speaker 1: came from, you know, in large part the civil rights movement,
- 31:26Speaker 1: getting people and educated and all that stuff. But we
- 31:28Speaker 1: learned the cash a check, not to write it. I'm
- 31:30Speaker 1: going to teach you how to to cash a sustainable check.
- 31:33Speaker 1: You know, the upgradious skills, but also learn how to
- 31:35Speaker 1: teach you how to do what I do, which is
- 31:37Speaker 1: to write the check. I'm an employer. I have hundreds
- 31:40Speaker 1: of employees. FOREI undred employees just in my in my companies,
- 31:45Speaker 1: my direct companies and organizations payroll. You know, I'm not
- 31:49Speaker 1: afraid to say it, A million dollars every couple of weeks.
- 31:51Speaker 1: I've been doing this for thirty years, so I know
- 31:53Speaker 1: what I'm talking about. I made good choices and bad,
- 31:57Speaker 1: and I'm telling you that that one of the choices
- 32:00Speaker 1: you need to make, if you're listening to this, is
- 32:02Speaker 1: to own a home. Now, somebody's going to say, here, ah, John,
- 32:04Speaker 1: I don't know what he's talking about. You know, I
- 32:06Speaker 1: don't want to own a home. I hear this all
- 32:08Speaker 1: the time. I don't want to own a home. The
- 32:10Speaker 1: bank owns a home. This is a game, This is
- 32:12Speaker 1: a scam. I don't own a home. The bank owns
- 32:14Speaker 1: a home. If you don't pay yeah, I said it,
- 32:20Speaker 1: if you don't pay the mortgage, Yes, the bank owns
- 32:23Speaker 1: a home. As I would do, as I said in
- 32:25Speaker 1: a session with my brother Ti at our whole Global Forum.
- 32:29Speaker 1: You know, I if I lend you money to buy
- 32:32Speaker 1: a home and you don't pay me, I'm going to
- 32:35Speaker 1: own your home.
- 32:36Speaker 2: Right.
- 32:37Speaker 1: It's not personal, this is business. The color is not
- 32:40Speaker 1: black or white, or red or blue as in race
- 32:43Speaker 1: or politics. The colors green as in US currency, at
- 32:45Speaker 1: least in America. The color is green. It's economics, right,
- 32:48Speaker 1: And so as long as you pay that mortgage. Right,
- 32:51Speaker 1: and before interest rates went up, it was cheaper to
- 32:54Speaker 1: own a home than it was to rent. Now, you know,
- 32:56Speaker 1: you got to be more careful than thought about it,
- 32:58Speaker 1: thoughtful about it. But I can still guarantee you that
- 33:00Speaker 1: over the long term, it's always cheaper to own. Well, sorry,
- 33:04Speaker 1: it's always a better investment own. It may not be
- 33:06Speaker 1: cheaper on a cash on cash basis in the short term,
- 33:09Speaker 1: but your rental property is not your rental property, and
- 33:12Speaker 1: it's not going to appreciate in your pocket. Right, So
- 33:15Speaker 1: you're just living in the moment. I'm telling you, here's
- 33:18Speaker 1: your plan. If you're a working class person, if you're
- 33:20Speaker 1: a middle class family and you're listening to this podcast,
- 33:23Speaker 1: here's your business plan. I want you to buy a home,
- 33:27Speaker 1: and I want you to buy the best house on
- 33:29Speaker 1: the worst block. Right, So, if you're going to a
- 33:35Speaker 1: middle class neighborhood by the worst house and the best
- 33:37Speaker 1: block in rehabit and live in it. Or if you're
- 33:41Speaker 1: in the hood, right you would define a house on
- 33:43Speaker 1: that block and rehabit and live in it, but preferably
- 33:47Speaker 1: the best house. I'll get back to that that strategy
- 33:49Speaker 1: one second. But buy the best house right that you can,
- 33:54Speaker 1: that you can afford, so you don't have any deferred maintenance,
- 33:57Speaker 1: but rehabit and live it or sorry, upgrade it. Yeah,
- 34:02Speaker 1: you know, make that as part of the acquisition that
- 34:04Speaker 1: you build enough in for painting and anything that needs
- 34:07Speaker 1: to be needs to you know, get an inspection on
- 34:09Speaker 1: the house, right, get pre approved. Operation can help you
- 34:11Speaker 1: do that for free. If we get your credit screw
- 34:13Speaker 1: up above seven hundred seven fifty for sure. Used to
- 34:17Speaker 1: be just seven hundred, but now that interest rates have changed,
- 34:19Speaker 1: it might be a little bit above seven hundred. We'll
- 34:20Speaker 1: get you a prime mortgage. Right, We'll get your mortgage
- 34:23Speaker 1: like every other successful aspiring person in America. Right, not
- 34:27Speaker 1: when he's homeboys shopping at word mortgage is a good
- 34:29Speaker 1: one right now, one that it explodes on car loans.
- 34:34Speaker 1: We used to say, no, that's not a Mercedes in
- 34:35Speaker 1: the hood. That's a mercy these payments. That's what I'm
- 34:37Speaker 1: gonna do a whole thing on auto loans and how
- 34:41Speaker 1: that game really, how car dealerships in the car business
- 34:44Speaker 1: really works. I'm gonna unpack that whole I'm gonna do
- 34:46Speaker 1: a masterclass unpacking that whole situation so we can get
- 34:49Speaker 1: you into a home right. And that will include you know,
- 34:52Speaker 1: a budget you're gonna have for maintenance and anything to
- 34:55Speaker 1: fix up. Then I want you to to to take
- 34:58Speaker 1: over time the equity from that house you build up
- 35:01Speaker 1: and over time, have a plan over five years, ten
- 35:05Speaker 1: years max right pay patient, buy a home in the
- 35:09Speaker 1: hood using equity from your home if you can, or
- 35:11Speaker 1: you have to if you don't have other sources. As
- 35:13Speaker 1: your home appreciates, and buy a modest home in the
- 35:16Speaker 1: inner city, rehabit and rent it. Do that twice. Now
- 35:22Speaker 1: you have three homes, one you're living in and two
- 35:24Speaker 1: that you've bought as rentals. And you've now created generational
- 35:27Speaker 1: wealth for a lifetime. So within thirty minutes, we've given
- 35:31Speaker 1: you a history lesson, we've given you a context lesson.
- 35:33Speaker 1: We've unpacked the mystery of some finance, the mystery of
- 35:37Speaker 1: why good things happen sometimes to bad people, and how
- 35:40Speaker 1: bad things can happen to good people. We've talked about
- 35:44Speaker 1: the easy ways that you can figure out immediately why
- 35:47Speaker 1: you should own a home and not why you shouldn't
- 35:49Speaker 1: rent for any longer than you have to, which is
- 35:52Speaker 1: appreciation which goes in your pocket, depreciation which helps you
- 35:55Speaker 1: from a tax perspective, and writing off mortgage payments against
- 35:59Speaker 1: your income, which means at the end of the year
- 36:02Speaker 1: you have a good tax pro or even a decent one,
- 36:05Speaker 1: you'll get a refund a tax refund from some of
- 36:08Speaker 1: the mortgage proceeds that you put into your own home.
- 36:11Speaker 1: And is that home compounds and increases in value. Guess
- 36:14Speaker 1: who benefits you. No, I'm gonna tell you little bit,
- 36:17Speaker 1: a little bit of private news, just to tell you
- 36:20Speaker 1: how powerful real estate is. Less than two years ago,
- 36:23Speaker 1: we bought a home in another country, Turks and Caicos,
- 36:27Speaker 1: And I'm not going to give you exact numbers, but
- 36:30Speaker 1: you know respectable value right bought it, and less than
- 36:35Speaker 1: two years later, the realtor calls me and says, I've
- 36:38Speaker 1: got an opportunity to sell that house for you. Would
- 36:40Speaker 1: you like to sell it? Just tell me the number, Well,
- 36:43Speaker 1: the number was seventy five percent more than what I
- 36:47Speaker 1: paid for it in eighteen months, less than two years.
- 36:51Speaker 1: I could have almost doubled value, doubled my value in
- 36:55Speaker 1: less than two years on a secured real estate investment
- 36:58Speaker 1: in another country. What business, right legal can you do
- 37:05Speaker 1: that in now? I didn't buy it for that purpose.
- 37:07Speaker 1: I didn't buy it for that reason. I bought it
- 37:09Speaker 1: because it was a nice place for me and my
- 37:11Speaker 1: family to get away to. Right, and the way I
- 37:13Speaker 1: structured it, it pays for itself. That's a whole other
- 37:15Speaker 1: conversation I may get into by the way. You can
- 37:18Speaker 1: put comments of what topics you want me to cover,
- 37:20Speaker 1: by the way, But this example is like when when
- 37:24Speaker 1: when right it pays for itself and it went up
- 37:27Speaker 1: in value when I was in sleeping It made me
- 37:30Speaker 1: look like a genius. My net worth went up and
- 37:33Speaker 1: I didn't do anything but own it because there's just
- 37:36Speaker 1: not enough properties like the one I bought in the area,
- 37:39Speaker 1: and other people want the property and there's nothing else
- 37:42Speaker 1: available for sale, and I'm not selling right out on
- 37:47Speaker 1: that property as long as I as long as I can,
- 37:49Speaker 1: I'd like to buy property and hold on to it.
- 37:51Speaker 1: Some people need to you know, I this whole buy
- 37:53Speaker 1: and flip thing that's just not for me. I think
- 37:55Speaker 1: you should buy properties, cash flow them so they take
- 37:58Speaker 1: care of themselves and hold on to them because they
- 38:00Speaker 1: will go up at value if you have to sell.
- 38:03Speaker 1: If there's some strategic reason is selling like the ten
- 38:05Speaker 1: thirty one tax FI exchange I did that I told
- 38:08Speaker 1: to you about early in this podcast, then fine. But
- 38:11Speaker 1: in general, you want to accumulate wealth. And again, forty
- 38:14Speaker 1: one to forty three percent of black folks own a
- 38:17Speaker 1: home today compared to seventy five percent of our white counterparts.
- 38:20Speaker 1: There's all kind of obstacles in your way, you know,
- 38:24Speaker 1: in generations before us, but those obstacles don't exist today.
- 38:28Speaker 1: You can do this. Half of black folks not poor people.
- 38:32Speaker 1: Half of black folks today have a credit score below
- 38:34Speaker 1: six to twenty half. That means when you wake up
- 38:36Speaker 1: in the morning, you're locked out of the free enterprise system.
- 38:38Speaker 1: Operation Hope can help you. Download the Hope in hand
- 38:42Speaker 1: app or go to Operation Hope dot org. Are called
- 38:45Speaker 1: eighty eight eight three eight eight Hope and get a
- 38:47Speaker 1: Hope financial coach and they will help you raise your
- 38:50Speaker 1: credit score on average fifty four points in six months
- 38:52Speaker 1: over one hundred points in you know, less than twenty
- 38:55Speaker 1: four months. They'll help you get your debt down on
- 38:57Speaker 1: average thirty eight hundred dollars for somebody making two thousand
- 39:00Speaker 1: dollars a year, and your savings up more than two
- 39:03Speaker 1: thousand dollars that same person, and we can get you
- 39:06Speaker 1: bank qualified right, get you in the game so that
- 39:09Speaker 1: you can become a homeowner, or through one million black
- 39:12Speaker 1: business issues you know one MBB, become a small business owner,
- 39:15Speaker 1: or whatever it is you want to do. Live your dreams.
- 39:16Speaker 1: Will give you optionality in life. Freedom is self determination,
- 39:20Speaker 1: but you cannot self determine yourself unless you understand the
- 39:22Speaker 1: rules of the game and understand that financial literacy is
- 39:25Speaker 1: a civil rights issue of this generation. If you don't
- 39:27Speaker 1: know better, you cannot do better. You can go to
- 39:30Speaker 1: church every Sunday, be the nicest person in the world,
- 39:32Speaker 1: but if you don't understand what we've been talking about here,
- 39:34Speaker 1: you can win in this game, and we're going to
- 39:36Speaker 1: help you master it step by step and real talk.
- 39:42Speaker 1: I'm not going to use twenty words when two will do.
- 39:44Speaker 1: I'm the latest stuff this thing out for you. I'm
- 39:46Speaker 1: gonna use my life as a personal testimony. I'm going
- 39:49Speaker 1: to take questions and answer questions and talk about what's
- 39:52Speaker 1: going on in the moment, but also talk about things
- 39:53Speaker 1: that I call it are evergreen, that just is stuff
- 39:56Speaker 1: that will help you for the rest of your life.
- 39:59Speaker 1: This is a radical movement of common sense.
- 40:01Speaker 2: Right.
- 40:02Speaker 1: Is nothing I've said here today that can be reasonably debated.
- 40:07Speaker 1: I mean, this is just basic, basic stuff. It's just
- 40:09Speaker 1: that people have kept the knowledge from you and me,
- 40:12Speaker 1: and then people say, oh, well, you know people destroyed
- 40:15Speaker 1: black wealth in the two thousand and eight two thousand
- 40:18Speaker 1: and nine, Well, black of wealth was destroyed in part
- 40:22Speaker 1: because we bought a home like you, I don't know
- 40:25Speaker 1: what you want to buy. I mean, I don't buy
- 40:28Speaker 1: even a car. I don't buy anything this way. But
- 40:30Speaker 1: sometimes we asked the wrong question, like what's the payment
- 40:32Speaker 1: when there's an interest rate attached? We asked on a
- 40:35Speaker 1: six figure property one thousand, three hundred thousand, four hundred
- 40:39Speaker 1: thousand dollars, what's the payment on that going to be?
- 40:42Speaker 1: Without understanding that people were giving you these crappy loans,
- 40:45Speaker 1: these perfect eye side loans. Twenty points twenty percent. Injury
- 40:47Speaker 1: is twenty twenty loans. When you got the loan, you
- 40:49Speaker 1: went blind. Twenty points is like twenty cents on a
- 40:52Speaker 1: dollar in a fee going to the mortgage broker typically
- 40:55Speaker 1: and twenty percent interest or just you know what's called
- 40:59Speaker 1: a negative mamoryization loan, which means every yeah, your payment's low,
- 41:02Speaker 1: but every time you make a payment, you owe more
- 41:04Speaker 1: on the loan than next month. I'm sorry, look, yeah,
- 41:07Speaker 1: you owe more money on the loan balance the next month.
- 41:10Speaker 1: So basically it's negative amorization. It's going up in debt
- 41:14Speaker 1: even though your payment is what you want. There was
- 41:16Speaker 1: adjustable rate mortgage. You really don't want an adjustable rate
- 41:18Speaker 1: mortgage if you can avoid it at all on a
- 41:21Speaker 1: thirty year home, because as rates go up, your payment
- 41:25Speaker 1: can explode. Imagine if you had an adjustble rate mortgage
- 41:28Speaker 1: in the current environment in twenty three, twenty twenty three,
- 41:32Speaker 1: going into twenty twenty four, your payment might have doubled
- 41:34Speaker 1: or tripled. You want to fix rate mortgage. We do
- 41:37Speaker 1: that by getting you good credit so that you can
- 41:41Speaker 1: negotiate from a place of strength. There's a lot of
- 41:44Speaker 1: tricks in this game, and I know most of them.
- 41:46Speaker 1: If I don't know my team does, and we're going
- 41:48Speaker 1: to teach them to you so that you can master
- 41:50Speaker 1: this game at scale in your life and become the
- 41:54Speaker 1: leader of your life. I didn't cover everything, but hopefully
- 41:57Speaker 1: I covered enough to moisten your taste for aspirational success
- 42:02Speaker 1: and silver rights from civil rights in the streets to
- 42:06Speaker 1: silver rights in the suites at scale. Okay, go to
- 42:10Speaker 1: Operation Hope today. Take back your life and map out
- 42:13Speaker 1: how you're going to become a homeowner so you can
- 42:15Speaker 1: send your kids to college, start a business with the equity,
- 42:17Speaker 1: buy other homes with equity, go on vacations, plying your retirement,
- 42:20Speaker 1: whatever you want to do.
- 42:21Speaker 2: It's possible.
- 42:22Speaker 1: Is my mother did to live in dignity, you know,
- 42:26Speaker 1: mental years of your life because you understood that when
- 42:29Speaker 1: you work, you're just living for the day, like you're
- 42:31Speaker 1: literally just making money for the day. But you build
- 42:34Speaker 1: wealth in your sleep in One of the ways, one
- 42:36Speaker 1: of the easiest ways to do that that most is
- 42:38Speaker 1: available to most people is home ownership. Small businesses not
- 42:43Speaker 1: for most people, but homeownership, I believe is. And anybody
- 42:47Speaker 1: telling you who's successful that you shouldn't own a home,
- 42:51Speaker 1: I don't know why they're telling you that other than
- 42:53Speaker 1: they want more for themselves, they're just being provocative because
- 42:56Speaker 1: they own a home nine times out of ten. I
- 42:59Speaker 1: mean this just it's just crazy, bringing real empowerment right
- 43:12Speaker 1: to your front doorstep in this case, right to your microphone,
- 43:16Speaker 1: to your headphone, to your video reception on your mobile device,
- 43:21Speaker 1: or whatever you happen to be watching or listening to.
- 43:24Speaker 1: For this podcast, we have empowerment right from the streets
- 43:29Speaker 1: to the suites and back. We've got a fan question
- 43:32Speaker 1: we're going to answer it today. Her name is Sasha.
- 43:35Speaker 1: This question comes from Sasha King Skid and she's on Instagram.
- 43:39Speaker 1: She asks what's the best way to start investing in
- 43:42Speaker 1: real estate? It's a good question, and my answer is
- 43:47Speaker 1: keep it simple, like keep it simple and keep it modest.
- 43:50Speaker 1: Don't be dramatic. But this is no time to get fancy, right.
- 43:54Speaker 1: I want you to ask a whole lot of questions.
- 43:56Speaker 1: I asked Quincy Jones once. Man, how'd you get so smart?
- 44:00Speaker 1: He said, John, I'm just nosy as hell. I want
- 44:02Speaker 1: to know everything about everything. Well that's how I want
- 44:04Speaker 1: you to be about real estate. I want you to
- 44:07Speaker 1: know everything about everything. Ambassador Andrew Young, my mentor, my hero,
- 44:11Speaker 1: my man, the right arm to Doctor MARTINTHA King Jr.
- 44:15Speaker 1: One of the central leaders of the civil rights movement,
- 44:17Speaker 1: says that men and women fail for three reasons arrogance, pride,
- 44:22Speaker 1: and greed. Hello, I don't want you pride for I
- 44:26Speaker 1: want you arrogant.
- 44:27Speaker 2: I certa.
- 44:27Speaker 1: I don't want you greedy because you'll over you'll get
- 44:30Speaker 1: ahead of your ski, should start doing crazy stuff. And
- 44:34Speaker 1: I'll get to that in a minute. Maybe I want
- 44:36Speaker 1: to keep this simple and answer question first, but I
- 44:39Speaker 1: want you to just be humble, right, ask a whole
- 44:42Speaker 1: bunch of questions. Go to Operation Hope, talk to one
- 44:45Speaker 1: of my whole financial coaches. Just ask a whole bunch
- 44:48Speaker 1: of you know, there's no silly question, there's no stupid
- 44:50Speaker 1: question because no one taught you this stuff. No one
- 44:53Speaker 1: gives you a lesson in financial literacy or how capitalism
- 44:56Speaker 1: and free enterprise works. It's what you don't know that
- 44:58Speaker 1: you don't know that's killing you. Think you though, Here's
- 45:01Speaker 1: what I want you to not do. I don't want
- 45:03Speaker 1: you to have to listen to anybody who's trying to
- 45:05Speaker 1: separate you from your wallet. Don't invest if you want
- 45:09Speaker 1: to call it that in fractional real estate. That's not
- 45:12Speaker 1: the way to start. Don't invest in one of these things.
- 45:16Speaker 1: I mean, I did these time shares. I'm not hating
- 45:21Speaker 1: on time shares, actually I am.
- 45:23Speaker 2: I own one.
- 45:24Speaker 1: I've been trying to get rid of this thing for
- 45:26Speaker 1: you know, probably ten years. I've owned it for twenty
- 45:30Speaker 1: five years. It's just drained me. Basically, I've rented. I've rented,
- 45:35Speaker 1: you know, a piece of somebody else's what I own,
- 45:37Speaker 1: a piece of the real estate. But because I don't
- 45:39Speaker 1: own the whole real estate, I don't owe it fee.
- 45:41Speaker 1: Simple as that we call it. I own a fraction
- 45:43Speaker 1: of it that I yes, I can feel pride that
- 45:45Speaker 1: I have a piece of real estate and it's a
- 45:47Speaker 1: good location. It's in Newport Beach along the ocean. But
- 45:51Speaker 1: I have to I can't just go sell it. I
- 45:52Speaker 1: got to negotiate with in alignment with all the other
- 45:56Speaker 1: fractional owners and the master controller of that which is
- 45:59Speaker 1: a but I won't name, And I got to pay.
- 46:02Speaker 1: If I don't pay the maintenance fee every year, you know,
- 46:04Speaker 1: they can take the property from me. It just gets ridiculous.
- 46:08Speaker 1: So you don't have to like do something complicated like
- 46:11Speaker 1: that you don't even need to go buy a big home.
- 46:13Speaker 1: You can buy a condo, a townhouse, start modestly, right,
- 46:17Speaker 1: you can buy There was a when I got the
- 46:19Speaker 1: Atlanta you could buy a rundown piece of property for five, ten,
- 46:23Speaker 1: fifteen thousand dollars. There are small towns maybe where you
- 46:27Speaker 1: live you want to drive, buy something you know close
- 46:29Speaker 1: to where you can get to Trend. You know, drive
- 46:31Speaker 1: back and forth there every day if you need to.
- 46:34Speaker 1: So you don't want to do something more than a
- 46:36Speaker 1: couple hours from where you are. I'd see more than
- 46:38Speaker 1: an hour from where you are, and somebody who can
- 46:40Speaker 1: maybe help oversee the property with you if you're you know,
- 46:44Speaker 1: doing this with somebody else, doing it with a partner
- 46:46Speaker 1: or family or whatever. Right, but you want to do
- 46:48Speaker 1: it modest you want to keep it simple. Clearly, buying
- 46:51Speaker 1: your own home is smart. But if you do that,
- 46:54Speaker 1: start there's nothing wrong with the starter home. Don't go
- 46:56Speaker 1: trying to buy a mini mansion if you you know,
- 46:59Speaker 1: work for the postal service. Look, my mother worked at
- 47:02Speaker 1: Madondola's Aircraft and she when she got laid off there,
- 47:04Speaker 1: she was she was a janitor part time at my school.
- 47:08Speaker 1: I'm not hating on any kind of job occupation. She
- 47:10Speaker 1: was a security guard. I'm saying, if you are a
- 47:12Speaker 1: security guard, if you're a janitor, if you're a postal worker,
- 47:15Speaker 1: if you you know whatever, some you know, cool, really
- 47:19Speaker 1: important but modest employment situation. Don't go trying to buy
- 47:23Speaker 1: a half million, seven and fifty thousand dollars a million
- 47:25Speaker 1: dollar property. That's crazy, right, and don't listen to anybody
- 47:27Speaker 1: trying to sell it to you.
- 47:28Speaker 2: Right.
- 47:29Speaker 1: You want to buy something that doesn't stress you out,
- 47:32Speaker 1: that you can handle.
- 47:33Speaker 2: Right.
- 47:34Speaker 1: Basically, you want to buy something that would equate to
- 47:37Speaker 1: what you pay for rent on a monthly basis, and
- 47:40Speaker 1: you want to have, you know, have you know, save
- 47:42Speaker 1: up and have a little reserve on the side. Now,
- 47:44Speaker 1: maybe you don't have a big down payment, that's okay.
- 47:46Speaker 1: Go to my coaches. If you never heard of the
- 47:49Speaker 1: earned income Tax Credit and you make less than sixty
- 47:51Speaker 1: thousand dollars a year, congratulations, I've also just told you
- 47:55Speaker 1: that you've got some money coming to you.
- 47:57Speaker 2: That's right, e t C.
- 47:59Speaker 1: If you make less than sixty thousand dollars a year,
- 48:01Speaker 1: and if you have three children that check this out,
- 48:03Speaker 1: you make thirty five thousand dollars a year. You've got
- 48:05Speaker 1: three kids, the government owes you six thousand. I think
- 48:09Speaker 1: that's a number, about six thousand dollars sixty five hundred
- 48:11Speaker 1: dollars in a cash tax refund. If you never heard
- 48:15Speaker 1: of e t C is retroactive for three years. Okay,
- 48:18Speaker 1: that's now helped me with a math. That's eighteen thousand,
- 48:21Speaker 1: almost twenty thousand dollars. There's your down payment for your home.
- 48:25Speaker 1: You buy your first starter home, you want to buy
- 48:28Speaker 1: well if you need ten percent or five percent down payment.
- 48:30Speaker 1: Now you have a down payment, plus you have a
- 48:32Speaker 1: reserve for maintenance and anything that goes bumping the night,
- 48:36Speaker 1: up keep for the house, whatever. Right, if you want
- 48:38Speaker 1: to have a little count set up set aside for
- 48:40Speaker 1: you know, a pipe urset or whatever you know, and
- 48:42Speaker 1: my team can also like help you put you know,
- 48:45Speaker 1: a proper budget in place and get your credit score
- 48:48Speaker 1: up so you get you know, a great mortgage. So
- 48:50Speaker 1: you want to get pre qualified with a lender, and
- 48:53Speaker 1: you want to make sure there's not a hard money lender.
- 48:56Speaker 2: Not Booboo and Pooky and them.
- 48:57Speaker 1: You want to you want to get a proper you know,
- 49:00Speaker 1: this is a do I get married you get married
- 49:02Speaker 1: to this property, it's gonna be a thirty year mortgage commitment,
- 49:06Speaker 1: and you want to make sure it's a good mortgage, right.
- 49:08Speaker 1: You want to be cool with it as it's cool
- 49:10Speaker 1: with you, and you want to fix rate in my opinion,
- 49:14Speaker 1: and if you have a seven hundred credit score or better,
- 49:15Speaker 1: you're going to get a good rate and you're going
- 49:17Speaker 1: to lock that in through my people or whoever you
- 49:21Speaker 1: work with.
- 49:21Speaker 2: My people will for free, right.
- 49:23Speaker 1: And then you take that commitment that you maybe get
- 49:25Speaker 1: approved one hundred fifty thousand dollars, two undred ffty thousand dollars,
- 49:28Speaker 1: three into thousand dollars whatever you know, forty thousand dollars
- 49:30Speaker 1: you get approved for. I don't think your starter house
- 49:32Speaker 1: should be any more than that. Hello, and starter house
- 49:37Speaker 1: or first piece of real estate is an investment property.
- 49:40Speaker 1: And then go, you know, with confidence, get a broker
- 49:44Speaker 1: to represent you. They know more about you, know the
- 49:47Speaker 1: area and all that than you do, and take your
- 49:50Speaker 1: time and wait for something to inspire you. Again, you
- 49:54Speaker 1: got to decide whether you want to invest in your
- 49:56Speaker 1: own starter home yourself, or whether you want to invest
- 50:00Speaker 1: in an investment property like a raggedy home in the
- 50:03Speaker 1: hood that you buy, you rehab and you rent, or
- 50:07Speaker 1: you know, maybe it's a duplex, or maybe it's a triplex,
- 50:10Speaker 1: or you know, I wouldn't suggest a multifamily as your
- 50:13Speaker 1: first investment. So keep it simple and be humble, and
- 50:17Speaker 1: ask a lot of questions and take your time. There's
- 50:23Speaker 1: always a chance to do it again. But it's very
- 50:28Speaker 1: easy to get married, very hard to get divorced. And
- 50:30Speaker 1: the same thing applies to real estate. Very easy to
- 50:33Speaker 1: get into something bad and very hard to get out
- 50:35Speaker 1: of it once you're already committed to it. So again,
- 50:39Speaker 1: keep it simple, keep it humble, keep it modest, and
- 50:42Speaker 1: keep it moving. And thank you very much to this
- 50:45Speaker 1: wonderful question from Sasha. I looked forward to seeing you
- 50:49Speaker 1: the finish line. Sasha, you know, with questions like this,
- 50:52Speaker 1: no doubt you're going to be successful. All right, Love
- 50:54Speaker 1: and Light, I'm out, John O'Brien, let me know what
- 50:56Speaker 1: you think.
- 50:56Speaker 3: Piece and Light, I love you, by the way.
- 51:12Speaker 1: Money and Wealth with John O'Brien is a production of
- 51:15Speaker 1: the Black Effect Podcast Network. For more podcasts from the
- 51:18Speaker 1: Black Effect Podcast Network, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts,
- 51:23Speaker 1: or wherever you listen to your favorite shows,