Latest / REL Freedom Podcast / Michael Sarracini - Hitting Lifestyle Freedom At 25 Years Old

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Michael Sarracini - Hitting Lifestyle Freedom At 25 Years Old · REL Freedom Podcast

• 0:05
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the Real Freedom Show, where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate.
• 0:11
  Speaker 1: I'm your host, mike Swenson.
• 0:13
  Speaker 1: Let's get some real freedom together.
• 0:15
  Speaker 1: Hello everybody, welcome to another episode of Real Freedom Real Estate Leverage Freedom where we talk about building time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate, and I'm super excited about today's guests.
• 0:34
  Speaker 1: We are going north of the border here and we are talking with Michael Sarasini.
• 0:38
  Speaker 1: Michael is an award-winning entrepreneur real estate investor.
• 0:41
  Speaker 1: You started 20 years ago as a university student.
• 0:45
  Speaker 1: You've pretty much done most things anything and everything.
• 0:48
  Speaker 1: I know you've got a business partner for those that have watched income property on HGTV and other things Scott McGilvery and so you guys have worked close together.
• 0:57
  Speaker 1: Now you are the CEO of Keyspire and chairman of the Sarasini Group, focusing on adding value to people through personal development and education, and so you are just a real estate master a lot of experience and we are excited to talk to you about ways that you can help yourself in real estate and grow.
• 1:16
  Speaker 1: Welcome to the show, michael.
• 1:17
  Speaker 1: We're so excited to have you.
• 1:18
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me, mike.
• 1:19
  Speaker 2: I appreciate it.
• 1:20
  Speaker 2: I first saw your podcast in the description.
• 1:22
  Speaker 2: I knew I had to be a part of this, because of the time and financial freedom goal is how I've aligned Keyspire and our organization.
• 1:30
  Speaker 2: It's not about making billions of dollars and having the private jet to me anyway.
• 1:36
  Speaker 2: It's about having that time and that financial freedom, and so I really connected with your message and I'm pleased to be here.
• 1:42
  Speaker 1: Thank you so much for coming on.
• 1:44
  Speaker 1: That is the key for those listeners out there.
• 1:46
  Speaker 1: It really is a path.
• 1:47
  Speaker 1: For some it might happen sooner, for some it might take longer, but it's really about identifying where do I want to go, what do I want out of life and how can real estate whatever inside of real estate helped me to hit that path.
• 1:59
  Speaker 1: So yeah, michael, for those that don't know much about your story or haven't heard of you, do you want to just share a little bit about your background and how you got to where you're at today?
• 2:08
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let me talk about it, because there's things I've done that your listeners and your audience can follow and there's things that they can be inspired by.
• 2:15
  Speaker 2: That won't be directly related, but they can model after the things I've done, and I've been a real estate investor for over 20 years, but it wasn't my first business, so it's not the first thing.
• 2:26
  Speaker 2: I tried, and you've got to be okay with trying and failing a few times, and when I started I was in my early twenties.
• 2:32
  Speaker 2: I was a first year university student.
• 2:34
  Speaker 2: I came from a pretty good family middle class not too much, not too little but I knew I wanted to be like a lot of 20 years.
• 2:41
  Speaker 2: I wanted to be rich at the time, so it was not about having more time, I had a ton of time.
• 2:45
  Speaker 2: I wanted to have a ton of money at the time.
• 2:47
  Speaker 2: So I did what you probably expect I would do for my first business, which is I started a boy band.
• 2:54
  Speaker 1: That was the precursor to real estate for me, and it's one of the more common ways for people to achieve financial freedom is through the boy band strategy.
• 3:02
  Speaker 2: So right, there's not a lot of boy band podcasts out there, but that taught me some really important lessons that I took with me to then build my real estate business.
• 3:12
  Speaker 2: I'll tell you what that one lesson in particular it sticks with me today with the boy band is as we, as we practice and got better, we started doing backyard parties and Mike, by the way, when I say boy band, people sometimes ask me what instrument I played and I say no, this was singing and dancing Like this was all out.
• 3:30
  Speaker 2: We're going to do whatever we got to take to make it work.
• 3:33
  Speaker 2: We started doing festivals and we started doing bigger shows and we started getting newspaper interviews and TV interviews and all of those things.
• 3:41
  Speaker 2: This is before podcasts.
• 3:42
  Speaker 2: We got a record label.
• 3:43
  Speaker 2: We went down to Nashville.
• 3:45
  Speaker 2: We went to tour all these different amazing studios to do our record.
• 3:48
  Speaker 2: We got back from Nashville as a group of five guys and the record label called us a couple days after that trip back when we were on top of the world and they said it's over, we're going bankrupt and it's done.
• 3:59
  Speaker 2: There is no more anything with this band with us and we were so deflated it was the biggest loss I'd ever experienced in my life at that point and I was really upset we all were.
• 4:11
  Speaker 2: But I realized a very important lesson that I carry with this to today.
• 4:16
  Speaker 2: I bring it with me today is I promise to that point to never have my future in somebody else's control.
• 4:22
  Speaker 2: I always wanted to have my future in my control.
• 4:25
  Speaker 2: The decisions I make, the successes I have, no matter how good I did in that boy band, it was in somebody else's control.
• 4:32
  Speaker 2: So I looked for something new.
• 4:35
  Speaker 2: I was looking for something new.
• 4:36
  Speaker 2: What can I do where I can build this income for the future, build a lot, make a lot of money, but also be in my control?
• 4:44
  Speaker 2: And that is how I got led to real estate.
• 4:46
  Speaker 1: What I love about real estate is people find a way.
• 4:49
  Speaker 1: You know, for some people it's I started out right away.
• 4:51
  Speaker 1: For some people I did this for a couple years, 10 years, 20 years.
• 4:55
  Speaker 1: For some people it's hey, now that I'm 60, I'm looking to get into real estate as another way, and so people find a path.
• 5:01
  Speaker 1: But the funny thing I always used to tell people when I first got into real estate is everybody has thought about getting into real estate or doing something in real estate, and so whenever I would talk to people it's like oh, I've thought about getting into real estate or I thought about doing that thing in real estate.
• 5:14
  Speaker 1: And so you can kind of find common ground with people in conversations, because if they're not in real estate, they've thought about it or they have a friend who thought about it or did it, and so once the boy band was kind of sunset on that idea how did you get into the real estate space?
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 5:28
  Speaker 2: So then stumbled across real estate by accident, you know, kind of like what you're saying, like sometimes you find some great things just by accident, you're not, you're not, they just they just come to you.
• 5:38
  Speaker 2: And I remember one day my business partner, or my roommate who's now my business partner we run KeySpire together, my roommate Scott.
• 5:45
  Speaker 2: We were in charge of taking the rent checks from the other guys and we would bring them to the bank and deposit them into the landlord's account.
• 5:54
  Speaker 2: The landlord lived in a different city, so one day we'll go to the bank.
• 5:56
  Speaker 2: We deposited the money it was $2,000 for rent.
• 5:58
  Speaker 2: We'd five guys, 4,400 bucks each.
• 6:01
  Speaker 2: And the teller said, okay, here, well, here's your printout, here's your receipt.
• 6:05
  Speaker 2: So we took the receipt and we're walking back to the house and looked at it and I said, scott, what's this number here, 800, mortgage, 800?
• 6:14
  Speaker 2: He's like, oh, that's strange, that must mean the mortgage is $800.
• 6:17
  Speaker 2: And we looked at each other.
• 6:19
  Speaker 2: We said, oh, my goodness, we're paying $2,000 and the mortgage is only $800.
• 6:24
  Speaker 2: This guy's making 1200 bucks a month off of us, which anyone who's a real estate investor.
• 6:28
  Speaker 2: Yeah, of course that's the name of the game.
• 6:31
  Speaker 2: But we didn't realize at the time that if we're renting a house for this much, it only costs them this much and there's a margin in there that now, as business people, we call the profit that they make.
• 6:41
  Speaker 2: So that is it hit us.
• 6:42
  Speaker 2: It was about two months after the boy band devastation and we said we have got to get into real estate.
• 6:47
  Speaker 2: We've got to be in the other side of this equation.
• 6:49
  Speaker 2: So we dedicated everything to just buying that first property, not buying 100 properties or 50 or 20.
• 6:55
  Speaker 2: So we just got to buy one property and we've got to figure this out.
• 6:59
  Speaker 2: And that's how we got into real estate by accident.
• 7:02
  Speaker 1: I remember being in college and we had lived in the dorms for the first two years or three years and then we got a house off campus as a way to save a little bit of money, and I think we had five guys or six guys in the house at the time and I did the math too.
• 7:15
  Speaker 1: I didn't have that aha moment there, but I'm still thinking like, okay, we're each paying 400 bucks, 500 bucks, whatever it was, and I knew roughly what the value is of that home and I'm thinking, yeah, this worked out really well.
• 7:28
  Speaker 1: And it was a real estate agent that owned that property and so she was our main point of contact and actually she sold the house right as we were getting done.
• 7:35
  Speaker 1: So, like our last week, as we were finishing up finals, we had a few tours of prospective buyers coming through the property and all that.
• 7:41
  Speaker 1: But I kind of had that same moment too, and I took some real estate classes in college just enough to know about it.
• 7:47
  Speaker 1: But yeah, you see that opportunity and for many people they see it and they might research it to the point of death, where it's like I'm just trying to figure out the best way to get started.
• 7:57
  Speaker 1: And you said you got started on that first property and that's the thing I always encourage people to is you got to get started to get better.
• 8:03
  Speaker 1: Some people think like, oh, I've got to get that 100 unit property.
• 8:06
  Speaker 1: Well, you just got to get one, and then one turns to two, two turns to three and maybe you scale up from there.
• 8:12
  Speaker 1: But you got to get started and you got to get in the game you got to get started and educated.
• 8:16
  Speaker 2: You got to get educated.
• 8:17
  Speaker 2: So when I created KeySpire, scott and I said we've got to make things for people that are to get them educated right off the bat.
• 8:22
  Speaker 2: So we have so many different free resources, we do free classes, you know, we've got one on one coaching and mastermind groups but we really wanted to create a whole bunch of free resources and classes for people so that when they were, when they're standing where we were standing 23 years ago, they're not lost and they're not saying I've got to figure out this all out of my own because you've got to learn how to do it.
• 8:41
  Speaker 2: And you can either do it through trial and error or you can do it by getting educated and following someone.
• 8:46
  Speaker 2: That's been it.
• 8:47
  Speaker 2: You know, for example, the things you talk about with your guests on this podcast.
• 8:50
  Speaker 1: So tell us about that first property how did you get it, what needed to be done with it, and then what did you end up doing with it?
• 8:56
  Speaker 2: Okay, so the first property is always the hardest.
• 8:59
  Speaker 2: This is what I'll tell our members all the time.
• 9:01
  Speaker 2: The first property is always the hardest.
• 9:02
  Speaker 2: And so what happens?
• 9:04
  Speaker 2: We're looking for this first property, but we had no idea what we were doing.
• 9:07
  Speaker 2: And, mike, this was before the days of podcasts and YouTube and Googling.
• 9:12
  Speaker 2: Anything like the internet had just started, like a couple of years before.
• 9:15
  Speaker 2: So anyone who's watching now just getting started.
• 9:18
  Speaker 2: You have so many more advantages versus guys like me that were starting before the age of the internet.
• 9:24
  Speaker 2: We had to learn everything the old fashioned way, which is talking to people, going around, talking to people having conversations and just piecing it all together.
• 9:33
  Speaker 2: And after piecing it all together, after about eight months, we ended up buying our first property.
• 9:39
  Speaker 2: We put an offer and we bought our first property.
• 9:41
  Speaker 2: It was a student rental, because that's all we knew.
• 9:44
  Speaker 2: So we said let's just buy a property like the one we just lived in.
• 9:47
  Speaker 2: We ran into the biggest problem that every real estate investor runs into, and that is where do you come up with the money to buy the property?
• 9:53
  Speaker 2: So we had quite an innovative solution.
• 9:55
  Speaker 2: We realized we needed to use OPM other people's money.
• 9:59
  Speaker 2: So at the time the property was about $160,000 or so and we could get a mortgage for 95% loan to value.
• 10:08
  Speaker 2: So we needed 5% down.
• 10:09
  Speaker 2: So between the down payment and the closing costs we were about $15,000, $13,000 to $15,000 to buy it.
• 10:16
  Speaker 2: Well, we were students.
• 10:17
  Speaker 2: I had minus $15,000, never mind having extra cash.
• 10:21
  Speaker 2: It was around the same time that something was coming in, that again a lucky moment that got us the cash to buy this property.
• 10:28
  Speaker 2: We ended up using and combining partnering, combining our student loans to buy the property.
• 10:33
  Speaker 2: We figure, hey, this money's got to go to housing anyway, it's forwarded to me to go to housing and tuition and I'll just pick up some extra shifts at the restaurant where I used to work and we'll use this money.
• 10:43
  Speaker 2: So we pooled our money together and we ended up buying the property with other people's money.
• 10:47
  Speaker 2: No money down of our own Went into that property.
• 10:50
  Speaker 2: We renovated it so we fixed it up, did everything ourselves, we put in a couple of extra bedrooms and ended up renting it for $2,400 a month about maybe six to eight weeks later and our mortgage was not $2,400 a month, it might have been maybe $1,000.
• 11:07
  Speaker 2: We had never seen money like this before in our lives.
• 11:10
  Speaker 2: After our property taxes, insurance, we were probably netting about $1,000 a month to splitting cash flow on our first property.
• 11:17
  Speaker 2: Now, that's hard to get today, but back then, man, that was amazing.
• 11:20
  Speaker 2: That's absolutely amazing.
• 11:22
  Speaker 2: So what we did and this is a really important lesson that I learned that carries with me today we went back to our lender and we said, okay, well, we're going to sell the property.
• 11:31
  Speaker 2: What do we do now?
• 11:32
  Speaker 2: Because we didn't know what to do.
• 11:35
  Speaker 2: We're talking to people and we told him about it.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: He told me about it.
• 11:38
  Speaker 2: We told him about the property.
• 11:39
  Speaker 2: He says, well, I think you could get this value for it as maybe $1,90.
• 11:43
  Speaker 2: I think you could get this value for it after you've put in those renovations and now you've raised the income by putting in new rooms.
• 11:49
  Speaker 2: But he said let me ask you a question why would you sell it?
• 11:53
  Speaker 2: We looked at each other and said, well, we're going to sell it.
• 11:56
  Speaker 2: We flip it.
• 11:57
  Speaker 2: That's what all the shows say.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: You have TV.
• 11:58
  Speaker 2: They're flipping everything.
• 11:59
  Speaker 2: That's everyone's talking about.
• 12:00
  Speaker 2: Of course we're going to flip it.
• 12:01
  Speaker 2: Isn't that the real estate business?
• 12:03
  Speaker 2: We thought flipping was the only real estate business you could do.
• 12:06
  Speaker 2: He said well, you could keep it.
• 12:08
  Speaker 2: He just told me that you put all the effort in, it's brand newly renovated, it doesn't need any work for seven years, it's making $1,000 a month and you're going to sell this thing.
• 12:17
  Speaker 2: And we said, oh my goodness.
• 12:19
  Speaker 2: The next aha came in like wow, why would we sell this?
• 12:23
  Speaker 2: In fact, why would we ever sell a property?
• 12:25
  Speaker 2: So what we did is we said well, we need the money, though.
• 12:28
  Speaker 2: What do we do with the money we got to pay off some of our credit cards that we did the renovation?
• 12:31
  Speaker 2: He said here's what we can do, and this was novel at the time for us.
• 12:35
  Speaker 2: It was mind blowing.
• 12:36
  Speaker 2: Today, this is common knowledge for real estate.
• 12:38
  Speaker 2: If you're a real estate investor, if you're new, this might be mind blowing.
• 12:41
  Speaker 2: So here we go.
• 12:42
  Speaker 2: He said let's refinance it.
• 12:44
  Speaker 2: And we're like refinance, re, re, re, re, what it?
• 12:47
  Speaker 2: But he said well, now that it's worth $1,90, we could get 95% loaned value of $1,90.
• 12:52
  Speaker 2: You keep 5% in and anything that's in the middle between what you owe.
• 12:57
  Speaker 2: Now maybe it was like whatever we owed at the time and $1,90, you guys would get a check for or a line of credit we would give you cash.
• 13:05
  Speaker 2: He said oh my gosh.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: So let me get this straight.
• 13:07
  Speaker 2: We're going to get a check.
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: I said how much?
• 13:09
  Speaker 2: He's like $25,000.
• 13:10
  Speaker 2: We put in $15,000.
• 13:12
  Speaker 2: We're going to get a check for $25,000 back and we get to keep the income stream.
• 13:16
  Speaker 2: He said, yeah, refinancing, don't flip it.
• 13:19
  Speaker 2: And I looked at Scott.
• 13:20
  Speaker 2: I said let's flip it to ourselves.
• 13:22
  Speaker 2: And that is a key strategy still to this day with our members, is called flipping to yourself.
• 13:26
  Speaker 2: And so I'll end on this idea, that the story, on this idea that people ask me Michael, how did you save up, how did you take, how did you save up 20 down payments?
• 13:37
  Speaker 2: It was after my 20th house.
• 13:38
  Speaker 2: People say how did you save up 20 down payments?
• 13:40
  Speaker 2: I said I didn't save 20 down payments.
• 13:42
  Speaker 2: That's impossible.
• 13:43
  Speaker 2: I said I borrowed the first down payment and I just used it 20 times.
• 13:47
  Speaker 2: And people are like, wow, that's amazing.
• 13:50
  Speaker 2: 20 houses, one down payment.
• 13:52
  Speaker 2: So that's my flipping to yourself, that's our strategy.
• 13:55
  Speaker 2: That then carried me through the first five years of my business.
• 13:58
  Speaker 1: That's something we hear from people.
• 14:00
  Speaker 1: I think you had mentioned other people's money and eventually you guys found a way to get that to work.
• 14:05
  Speaker 1: But that's an objection we hear from so many people is I don't have the money to get my first property.
• 14:09
  Speaker 1: I'm trying to save up the money to get my first property and I tell people you just got to figure out how to scrap and claw to get the first one Because, yeah, you experienced the benefit of appreciation that's going to happen in the cash out refinance, and so we bought a townhouse when we first got married and we bought that in 2006, into 2007.
• 14:28
  Speaker 1: And so for us actually our first property the value got cut in half, so we ended up being forced landlords at that time because we could have stayed in the property.
• 14:37
  Speaker 1: We decided to rent it out and then we got a short sale that we got at a low price, fixed up and then built some equity and we're able to pour that into the next property and go from there.
• 14:47
  Speaker 1: But, yeah, the key is, you just got to figure out a way to get that first one, and all the lessons you guys learned, all those ahas, came after the first one, but you got to get into the first one.
• 14:58
  Speaker 1: So, however, you can figure out a way to get in the first property, partnering with other people, finding that money you got to get away to get that done.
• 15:05
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's the hardest one.
• 15:06
  Speaker 2: It takes the longest.
• 15:07
  Speaker 2: So everyone's in a rush to get their first property.
• 15:10
  Speaker 2: Just know that if you plan on buying 20 or 30 properties, your first one will take the longest.
• 15:15
  Speaker 2: So let that breathe.
• 15:16
  Speaker 2: Let it take longer, learn how it works and, no, have the confidence that as you buy more properties it's going to be quicker.
• 15:22
  Speaker 1: So you got your first few, your building and your growing.
• 15:25
  Speaker 1: What was some of your next moves?
• 15:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, I think the next big aha in my journey was the fact that I okay, how do these properties?
• 15:33
  Speaker 2: By the time I was 25, I hit the point.
• 15:36
  Speaker 2: In our organization, our membership, we have a very important point called lifestyle freedom day.
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: So that is the goal of us with our members getting people to lifestyle freedom day.
• 15:45
  Speaker 2: We define it as the day where your passive income meets all of your lifestyle expenses.
• 15:49
  Speaker 2: In other words, your money comes in, your rent checks come in and all of that.
• 15:53
  Speaker 2: It's all the money you need in life to be to get what you want.
• 15:57
  Speaker 2: So I hit that about 25.
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: But I realized that I was spending more time than I wanted on my business.
• 16:05
  Speaker 2: So, even though it's passive income and their income properties, it still takes time.
• 16:09
  Speaker 2: You've got to acquire properties, you got to renovate them, there's management to do and I remember at the time, like everything, you only notice things if you have a need or you have some sort of pain.
• 16:19
  Speaker 2: You know, when I first noticed that aha moment that my landlord was getting the money, it's because I had this pain from the failure from a couple of months ago.
• 16:26
  Speaker 2: So now I had this pain that I wanted more time in my life.
• 16:30
  Speaker 2: I was working a lot and I just wanted some more time to enjoy myself.
• 16:34
  Speaker 2: So around the same time I did another flip to yourself.
• 16:38
  Speaker 2: When refinanced it went to the mortgage broker and I said okay, we're going to refinance it.
• 16:43
  Speaker 2: This is pretty commonplace at this point he's like all right, you're going to check this one's $52,000.
• 16:48
  Speaker 2: It's going to go to your lawyer, perfect.
• 16:49
  Speaker 2: We're chit-chatting about the market and his phone rings.
• 16:53
  Speaker 2: He says one second, I got to grab the phone.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: So he grabs the phone and he says okay, yeah, no, I got the file right here.
• 16:58
  Speaker 2: No, you're not going to qualify.
• 17:00
  Speaker 2: I can't get you qualified.
• 17:01
  Speaker 2: No, yeah, no, I understand, we'll try, we'll try.
• 17:04
  Speaker 2: It's the credit card debt.
• 17:05
  Speaker 2: So he hangs up and I'm like sorry, I was listening, I was right here, but you know I was.
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: What's that all about?
• 17:10
  Speaker 2: Little knows you, maybe.
• 17:11
  Speaker 2: Now that I think about it, he says I have this client and he's trying to refinance his property.
• 17:17
  Speaker 2: He's got the numbers in there.
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: He's got the equities Only like 62% loan to value, which is fantastic.
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: For anyone listening or watching.
• 17:25
  Speaker 2: You know, 80% loan to value is a general benchmark of where what seems safe.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: So 62%, there's a lot of meat in there.
• 17:31
  Speaker 2: But his ratios don't work out because he's got this $25,000 of credit card debt.
• 17:36
  Speaker 2: And if that credit card debt was gone then we could get him all set up and we could refinance the house and it's all good.
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: So I said, well, I'm looking at this.
• 17:48
  Speaker 2: I got this piece of paper in my hand, a check for $50,000.
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: It wasn't a check, but it was like the printout or whatever.
• 17:53
  Speaker 2: This guy needs 50.
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: I got you got to need 25.
• 17:57
  Speaker 2: I got 50.
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: I don't really want to take this 50 and buy another property because I'm thinking that I don't really want to put any more time into it.
• 18:05
  Speaker 2: I said, well, what if I just lent him the money?
• 18:06
  Speaker 2: And he says tell me about it?
• 18:11
  Speaker 2: I said I don't even know, I'm just making it up.
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: What if I just lent him the money and he paid me and then he refinances the house and I'm just thinking about that.
• 18:19
  Speaker 2: He pays me back and he's like that would work.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: Absolutely, you could lend him the money and he's thinking a lot.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: It won't show up on his credit score.
• 18:25
  Speaker 2: So then I can get him qualified because the debt is paid down.
• 18:29
  Speaker 2: And so I said think about it, put the paperwork together, think about it.
• 18:31
  Speaker 2: We'll talk tomorrow and we'll see if there's something there.
• 18:33
  Speaker 2: So I talked to him the next day.
• 18:35
  Speaker 2: We ended up engineering my very first private lending deal and this was the tip of the spear for me to get into private lending, essentially, me being the bank.
• 18:42
  Speaker 2: My terms were 12% interest, 3% lender fee.
• 18:47
  Speaker 2: The borrower would pay for the underwriting fee, that's, the mortgage broker to do all of the work to the appraisal, the ratios, and then I would get paid for my money 15% on my money without doing any work, fully passive, and it's secured on the property with 62% loaned to value.
• 19:05
  Speaker 2: So if he ever doesn't pay me, I can foreclose on the property.
• 19:09
  Speaker 2: This was mind blowing to me and Mike.
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: This brought me into a whole new world of passive investing, which became the next stage of me growing my real estate investing portfolio.
• 19:18
  Speaker 1: Well, it's funny that you mentioned that.
• 19:19
  Speaker 1: I had a little aha back in the day.
• 19:21
  Speaker 1: We had flipped a property and we were trying to sell it and had a couple of offers that fell through when they went through the inspection period.
• 19:29
  Speaker 1: There wasn't anything major, but it was tight enough and they just decided to back out.
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: And so my real estate agent at the time this is before I was in real estate full time I worked for a nonprofit and he came to me and he said hey, I think I've got a guy that might be able to buy this property, but he owns a lot of other properties, probably can't qualify for a mortgage right now.
• 19:49
  Speaker 1: And so we would do what's called a contract for deed.
• 19:51
  Speaker 1: And I was like tell me about that.
• 19:53
  Speaker 1: And he's like well, essentially he's going to give you a lump sum of money, he's going to give you payments for a few years and once he is able to refi out of some of his other properties, he'll end up paying you off in the next three to five years and then he'll pay you interest.
• 20:06
  Speaker 1: And I was like wait a second, so I get money now, I get money every month and if, for some reason, something were happened, I get the property back.
• 20:14
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was like I really don't see the negative.
• 20:16
  Speaker 1: Now, obviously there's been times where things like that have gone south, but it was a calculated risk and so that exposed me to contract for deed.
• 20:23
  Speaker 1: And then I remember my agent called me.
• 20:26
  Speaker 1: So I had a different agent that I had worked with and she called me three or four times over the next five or six years and she'd be like I've got to buy her, like tell me how that contract for deed they were to get, because it worked out really well.
• 20:37
  Speaker 1: But yeah, you see, there's ways to do that, where you can be the lender.
• 20:40
  Speaker 1: You don't have to be slinging the hammer all the time, spending nights and weekends away from your family working on fixing up houses, but you can.
• 20:48
  Speaker 1: You can get there too, and I mean, it's not even a progression.
• 20:51
  Speaker 1: You can jump right to private lending if you wanted to and skip over having to do the flips and all that stuff too.
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: I mean if you've got enough money in our.
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: In my experience and within our group, you know when people come in and they got a couple million dollars, or they got money in their retirement savings and it's not doing anything for them, or they just got equity in their home and, like you, could go right to private lending and make yourself 200 grand a year with doing no work other than signing contracts, being the bank.
• 21:19
  Speaker 2: So for those people, boom right into private lending.
• 21:22
  Speaker 2: For people like me and it sounds like you may have been similar I didn't have millions of dollars when I started, so I had.
• 21:28
  Speaker 2: We have to swing the hammer to start.
• 21:30
  Speaker 2: We've got to do the work.
• 21:31
  Speaker 2: We've got to work hard at the beginning, we've got to work smart and then, once we get to a point, there's a calculation and inflection point where you can start shifting money, shifting your assets into private lending and private equity, which was my third aha.
• 21:44
  Speaker 2: Start shifting assets so that the capital starts to work for you without you working for your capital.
• 21:50
  Speaker 1: Real estate agents, are you tired of letting the busyness of your real estate business get in the way of your real estate investing goals in your financial future?
• 21:57
  Speaker 1: I'm excited to announce that we've created the real freedom investor agent tribe to help you.
• 22:02
  Speaker 1: We've got a ton of content, educational tools to help accelerate your learning curve and get you on the right path to hit your investing goals.
• 22:11
  Speaker 1: We also have a mastermind tribe of people just like you agents that want to grow their own portfolio and encourage you and cheer you on along the way, as well as some private one on one coaching.
• 22:21
  Speaker 1: So go to realfreedomcom click on the store.
• 22:24
  Speaker 1: You'll see the options there.
• 22:25
  Speaker 1: We're so excited to be able to help you.
• 22:27
  Speaker 1: I've priced it super low, so price can't get in the way but did want to have some skin in the game for you to help with that accountability.
• 22:34
  Speaker 1: So go check it out Realfreedomcom click on the store.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: We're excited to connect with you and excited for you to connect with your tribe of real estate agents investing trying to build their financial freedom.
• 22:44
  Speaker 1: I want to touch on a little bit more just because you had mentioned.
• 22:47
  Speaker 1: There's a few themes of what you wanted to talk about having control of things yourself, which you had kind of mentioned about learning from the boy band piece, building your income and getting it to be passive.
• 22:57
  Speaker 1: Let's go back to that control for a second.
• 22:59
  Speaker 1: There's people out there right now that are listening to this, that have a job, aren't happy where they're at, they're trying to figure out and say, well, I could never do this thing in real estate.
• 23:08
  Speaker 1: But maybe dive into that control piece a little bit more, about being able to take your own fate in your own hands.
• 23:15
  Speaker 1: And yes, it's a huge risk, but the reward on the other side will be worth it long term.
• 23:20
  Speaker 1: I'd love to just kind of hear your thoughts on that.
• 23:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, let's talk about that.
• 23:23
  Speaker 2: Because control came out of that original story, of that loss I had at the beginning, and I wanted to be in control because I didn't want to feel that pain again.
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: We're motivated by pain as humans.
• 23:32
  Speaker 2: So that pain is going to motivate us much, much stronger than the pleasure of getting some sort of financial reward.
• 23:38
  Speaker 2: And so I knew I wanted to have this control of my future.
• 23:41
  Speaker 2: But I didn't realize till later that control is a double-edged sword.
• 23:46
  Speaker 2: Most of us want to be in control of our day to day, of our present, and that's really hard to do, being in control of your presence, especially if you have two kids, like I do, and there's all kinds of stuff going on and there's relationships.
• 23:58
  Speaker 2: Control, to me, is about being realistic with your timelines.
• 24:02
  Speaker 2: You can control your future.
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: You can control the direction you're going in 10 years from now because you're going to make decisions going into that direction, whether it's your health or your wealth.
• 24:11
  Speaker 2: Health is a great example If you want to be muscular or healthy or lose weight.
• 24:15
  Speaker 2: That's not going to happen today, that's going to happen in the future.
• 24:18
  Speaker 2: But the decisions you make today are going to put you in control of your future.
• 24:22
  Speaker 2: So I realized that I wanted to be more in control of my future than really my day to day, and my day to day is going to support that goal to the future.
• 24:30
  Speaker 2: And so what does control look like of your future?
• 24:33
  Speaker 2: Well, it means financial freedom, financial independence.
• 24:36
  Speaker 2: Well, what the heck does that mean?
• 24:38
  Speaker 2: So we started really digging into it, talking to my group and our members, what the heck does financial freedom mean?
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: And we really boiled it down to it doesn't mean you have a jet.
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: It doesn't mean you have a Ferrari For some people maybe, but those are wants and not needs.
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: It means that you have a very intentional list of all the things you want in life.
• 24:56
  Speaker 2: You have a number of what that costs you every single year.
• 25:00
  Speaker 2: This is a specific activity we do with all of our members, called the lifestyle designer.
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: All of our members design their life intentionally a list of what they want, what that costs.
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: And now your goal is to make that number with passive income.
• 25:14
  Speaker 2: It might take a year, it might take five years, it might take 10 years, but now we have a goal and that's to me what it means to be in control of your future.
• 25:22
  Speaker 2: I know it costs this much money to get everything I want, and I know that I can use income properties to get there.
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: So it's just a matter of filling in the blanks at that point how many income properties, how much passive income?
• 25:32
  Speaker 2: Is there private lending involved?
• 25:33
  Speaker 2: And then you get tactical.
• 25:34
  Speaker 2: But being in control, knowing that number, is the most important thing.
• 25:39
  Speaker 2: And the last thing I'll say about control is when you feel in control of your future, you feel confident about your future.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: And when you're confident, you feel happy.
• 25:47
  Speaker 2: You're just having a good life.
• 25:48
  Speaker 2: When you feel confident, and when you feel unconfident or uncomfortable, that's where life gets stressful and difficult.
• 25:53
  Speaker 1: That's a huge learning for me, because I majored in entrepreneurship in college.
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: Wow, that's pretty cool.
• 25:59
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's great.
• 26:00
  Speaker 1: Well, and that was before.
• 26:01
  Speaker 1: Entrepreneurship was cool and people are like, what is entrepreneurship?
• 26:05
  Speaker 1: But the funny thing was is I wasn't ready to start my own business out of college.
• 26:09
  Speaker 1: I knew that I wanted to learn those skills, but I wasn't ready to take that risk and I still did rental property on the side.
• 26:16
  Speaker 1: But it was up until 2019 that I decided to quit my W2 job and go all in.
• 26:24
  Speaker 1: And I'll say it's been a challenge, especially during the COVID season and all that just getting started.
• 26:30
  Speaker 1: But it's fun to be able to do what you want to do, set the vision of where you want to go and really build the life that you want to live.
• 26:37
  Speaker 1: And so it is scary, it's challenging, but it is a lot of fun and it's very rewarding.
• 26:42
  Speaker 1: I'm excited about where we're going in the future, and so it just took me 20 years or 15 years to have that spot where I was like, okay, enough is enough, I'm ready to go all in on building my own future.
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: Yeah and this is a really important point, mike that I don't want to be lost on.
• 26:56
  Speaker 2: People Like you're building your future.
• 26:58
  Speaker 2: You want to be in more control and you said a great word there the things you're excited to do and that's a really important philosophy for me in terms of lifestyle freedom day isn't retirement Retirement is a bad word in our community that key spire.
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: You know what retirement means.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: I looked it up.
• 27:15
  Speaker 2: It means to be no longer of use, and how many of us want to no longer be useful to the world, to life?
• 27:21
  Speaker 2: Some people maybe, but I think the vast majority of people don't see their future as just sitting on the couch eating chips and watching Netflix.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: I mean, that is not lifestyle freedom day.
• 27:30
  Speaker 2: That might be financial freedom, but it's very different than lifestyle freedom day.
• 27:33
  Speaker 2: And I want to be very clear to everyone just because you are financially free doesn't mean you don't work.
• 27:39
  Speaker 2: It just means you work on the things that you love to do, the things that excite you.
• 27:43
  Speaker 2: I work harder today than I have ever worked, but I do the things that I absolutely love doing with the people I love doing them with and building the relationships that excite me.
• 27:51
  Speaker 2: So that's a really important piece that when you're in control of your future, it's not about you're not going to work one day.
• 27:57
  Speaker 2: It's you're going to increasingly and more often work on the things that you love and leave out the things that you don't want to do.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: Really what it's about is, if you had to get done what you wanted to get done in five hours a week or 10 hours a week, great, you can do other things, but you're also doing the things you love.
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: So who cares For people that want to learn more about you and learn more about Keyspire?
• 28:17
  Speaker 1: How can they do so?
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: Yeah, what I'd recommend is they go to our website, keyspirecom.
• 28:21
  Speaker 2: We got a little link up top that says start here, and that's where we have free resources, free masterclass, some other free resources that they can use right away and and will be extremely helpful for them whether they're buying a first property or a fifth property.
• 28:34
  Speaker 2: The start here resources on our website, keyspirecom, are the best place to go.
• 28:39
  Speaker 1: Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story.
• 28:41
  Speaker 1: Just a fun, cool story to hear and I know it wasn't without work, it wasn't without pain, wasn't without complications.
• 28:47
  Speaker 1: But best luck to you in the future in which you guys are continuing to do at Keyspire.