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Why One Paycheck Is Riskier Than Most High Earners Realize · Brick by Brick - Wealth Building Conversations

• Carl Lenocker: I mean, you know, my career started, you know, thirty years ago in in enterprise technology and it it didn't take me long to figure out that, you know, you needed more than one stream of income to to get where I was trying to go, which was from zero to hero. I mean, it came from a very, very impoverished situation, you know, growing up with with folks who you know, were doing their best, but they just didn't have a plan at the end of the day on where they were going. And, you know, over time I I expanded, you know, from having a high income, you know, first stream of income to having real estate in my life, to having side hustles to, you know, buying and selling. I was doing arbitrage way before Gary Vee came along and made it a thing. so yeah, I mean I wrote a book, but you know, Success Plan for Life. I know we're gonna talk about it later, but it it goes over all of that, how I kind of, you know, did that and became a multimillionaire and enterprise software with the side hustles with real estate. with all the things that I think your your viewers are interested to hear about. Loren Wernette: Welcome to another episode of Brick by Brick. Today I'm fortunate enough to have Carl Leneker with us. Carl runs a customer service and enterprise software company and has spent twenty years quietly building the things his salary couldn't afford. He's the author of Success Plan for Life. Carl, thanks for joining us today. Carl Lenocker: Well thanks for having me on the show, Lauren, big fan. Glad I could be here. Loren Wernette: Yeah. So I'm I'm pretty excited to talk to you today for a number of reasons. One, you know, we both started out with, you know, kind of very little and have worked our way up. But it's also we're both kind of we both had good paying jobs and we chose to start something on the side and take that into the future with us. And that's a spot that a lot of people don't do. They get to a comfort level in their role and they just stay there. And so I'm really interested to Talk to you about that journey as well as how you made it happen in this book that you have just come out. Carl Lenocker: Yeah. Well, I'm happy to be here and talk about all of it, man. I mean, you know, my career started, you know, thirty years ago in in enterprise technology and it it didn't take me long to figure out that, you know, you needed more than one stream of income to to get where I was trying to go, which was from zero to hero. I mean, it came from a very, very impoverished situation, you know, growing up with with folks who you know, were doing their best, but they just didn't have a plan at the end of the day on where they were going. And, you know, over time I I expanded, you know, from having a high income, you know, first stream of income to having real estate in my life, to having side hustles to, you know, buying and selling. I was doing arbitrage way before Gary Vee came along and made it a thing. so yeah, I mean I wrote a book, but you know, Success Plan for Life. I know we're gonna talk about it later, but it it goes over all of that, how I kind of, you know, did that and became a multimillionaire and enterprise software with the side hustles with real estate. with all the things that I think your your viewers are interested to hear about. So Loren Wernette: So tell me about that that moment that you're like, I can't make this get where I want to go with just this one stream of income. Because I think you glossed over it a little bit. Or like, it became very clear to me that this but it doesn't become very clear to a lot of people. A lot of people think that the only way to success is climbing that corporate ladder and staying loyal to a job. Carl Lenocker: Yeah. So I mean, I would say that, you know, I my first real job in in Enterprise Tech was with Hewlett Packard. And, you know, I was a contractor first, but I got hired on permanently March first of two thousand. And I show up, they move me to Colorado Springs. you know, they pay me, I think, a twenty twenty three thousand dollar moving bonus to get all my stuff from California to here, which I didn't have any stuff. I had like a U Haul full of crap furniture that I should have just lit fire to in the driveway and and left behind. You know, I I paid like five hundred bucks to move all this stuff and I got out here and I use the rest of the money to pay off my debt because I'm coming out of college and I got twenty-three thousand dollars in debt, you know, to get started in my life. I had, you know, a bit of a gambling problem in those days. I was overspending at the bars at night, trying to impress the the ladies, you know, buying rounds that I should, you know, had had no business picking up the tab for. just you know, just being generally stupid with my money, right? And so I got out here and I kind of got a chance to. To wipe the slate clean and Hewlett Packard gave me a bunch of stock options and we all thought we were going to be rich. And I went out and I bought a convertible red BMW 328. you know, immediately over-leveraging myself into this new position that I was in. You know, I probably had a thousand dollar car payment with insurance, which in those days was insane. And then, you know, 20, 25 days later, the dot-com crash hits, and my stock options are worthless. HP tells me you're taking a 15% pay cut, and we're not even sure if you're gonna have a job, you know, going forward. And I went from like thinking, my God, I got this thing figured out with this job, to suddenly, wait a minute, you can't depend on a job like this. Is as good as it might seem, it's just not something you could depend on long term. And so the wheels started spinning from that point, and you know, it became you know, the the foundation for for something that would would. grow much larger in the future. But I realized pretty quick that that you had to have more than one stream of income. I mean, this was not gonna work. Loren Wernette: Yeah, I I think that's a hundred percent true. And it's a very similar like there was something that happened in our company that I was working for, which was a large chemical company, and all of a sudden my super well, it was COVID happened. I went from five days in the office to five days at home. And while I didn't lose my job or take a pay cut, it just felt all of a sudden not nearly as safe as it did before because if they can move us home that quick, then then my job isn't nearly as secure. There were some books that were read during COVID also, you know, Rich Dad, Poor Dad that kinda shaped some of my thinking. but Definitely a similar kind of mentality shift that happened on my side. So that was in like the beginning of 2000. And you started in 2004 with a company that's gone been going since then, right? so most people never bother to go ahead and start a business. Your business been going for 22 years. What made you really start that entity before you needed one? Because some people think, well, you just hold your job until you can't afford to do something, and then you j take the leap. Versus trying to basically have two jobs at once. Carl Lenocker: Well, there were two different things that were going on kind of in my life at that time. I mean, the first thing was, you know, I was a renter. I had this this apartment that was seven hundred dollars a month and I lived there for one year. and they raised the rent on me. At the end of the year, they sent me a notification that, you know, hey, your rent is going from seven hundred to I think it was eight hundred a month. It was a pretty big leap for me at the time. And I was just like shocked. Like I was kind of already living hand to mouth again at that point. You know, I had the Hewlett Packer job. I had this red BMW convertible. I'm barely able to make the payments on. You know, I'm trying to go out and do the club thing at night, like most young people, and and meet, you know, the opposite sex, and I'm just completely broke again. You know, like I went from from being bailed out to being completely broke again. And I thought, this is not gonna work for me. So the first thing that I did was I went out and I looked at, you know, houses for sale. And I ended up finding, you know, a little rundown half duplex across town. It wasn't exactly in the best part of town, but You know, if I bought this thing, you know, with I think it was $2,000 down in those days, you know, first-time home buyer, my mortgage payment, including in insurance and property tax, would be $700 a month. I I wouldn't have this huge rent increase. So it was like, okay, I gotta do that. Like that just makes total sense, you know. And I signed for that and I went and I bought this house. And then the other thing I started doing was I started kind of driving around on the weekends looking at secondhand stores at the time there were, you know, thrift shops in my neighborhood. people were selling stuff in there that they didn't exactly know what it was. And this was the early part of kind of the the big eBay boom that happened in the early 2000s, where folks probably don't remember now, but in those days, you could go to a garage sale, you could go to a thrift store, you could find an item that was like five dollars, and sometimes they didn't know what they had. You could go on eBay and sell it for like a hundred bucks. And I was I was doing a lot of that right off right out of the gate. I mean, I was doing eBay arbitrage. And I started making, you know, a thousand bucks a month, two thousand bucks a month doing eBay arbitrage while I, you know, was was you know fixing up this house that I had just bought. And then, you know, the momentum started to started to move, right? I started to feel like, wait a minute. Okay, that now I'm I'm suddenly kind of safe because I can actually make my mortgage payment with this little business that I've started on the weekends. And my day job, if it happens to go away tomorrow, it's not so devastating for. Loren Wernette: So you know yeah, it makes a ton of sense. So did you ever get to the point where you're like, Well I or when did you get to the point where you're like, I don't want to have this day job anymore, I just wanna focus on this other thing. Carl Lenocker: Yeah, you know, I mean I so that's the neat thing about my career is that I've been able to stay in technology and have, you know, a a high paying day job for the last thirty years. I've I've never left. I've always kind of made that the core pillar of of my wealth building strategy because I feel like it is important to have a four or one K. It's important to get a match, you know, little things like health insurance become much more important the older you get. I mean, I just turned fifty. And you know, I'll tell you the warranty kind of expires somewhere in your mid forties. You start to have a lot of little aches and pains, you're taking a lot of pills. Loren Wernette: Ha ha ha. Carl Lenocker: Next thing you know, you need all these tests, right? It's health insurance becomes kind of an important thing. So I would say to young folks who are out there listening, you know, while it's tempting to want to go all in on your own business at any given point, I'd say my story is a good example of where I didn't have to go all in. I mean, I I could do these other things on the side. still generate a lot of income and maintain a you know a respectable career throughout it all because you know to the earlier point if if something goes wrong with one of my side businesses and it has over the years, I can always fall back to the career which I'm very good at. I'm I'm top one percent in my industry. I'll give you an example of when that happened actually I you know at one point when I was doing the eBay arbitrage thing, I found out that this one item that I was acquiring at thrift stores was being dumped by a mail order company. It was a lazy boy recliner cover in the early 2000s. And I was buying these things that were they were essentially returns from this mail order company for three to four dollars a piece. And I'm going on eBay and I'm selling these recliner covers for 50 bucks because what I learned is that old people buy these lazy boys, they spend thousands of dollars on them and they want to keep them for the rest of their lives because they've like completely overpaid for this this recliner. And what you know, one thing they do is they try and fix them up and maintain and they buy parts and do all this stuff. And so my recliner covers were kind of like essential. These people would pay almost anything for these things 'cause they didn't want to throw away these lazy boys that they'd overpaid for. And so before long I started generating five thousand and then it was ten, twelve thousand dollars a month in net profit off of lazy boy recliner covers. I actually found the manufacturer and I went direct and I started buying truckloads of these things and dumping you know, onto eBay and people were buying And You know, sooner or later, you probably heard the story before. Somebody figured out what I was doing. They were following me on eBay and they went to the the manufacturer themselves and they bought the same covers and they came in and they started undercutting me on price. And then somebody else did the same thing. And before you know it, my business that was making twelve thousand dollars a month went down to where I was barely making, you know, five hundred bucks a month. so I mean it's you know, it's one of those things where, you know, whatever you're doing, you know, you have to be kind of prepared for for the rug to be pulled out from under you at any given time. Loren Wernette: Yeah, yeah. We started out doing FBA on Amazon and we would find a good a winner, you know, we'd make a bunch of money and then someone would come and just destroy the market. And so it was a constant hunt for that new product. And and what it made me do was value the security of some other business where I had more control over who my customers were. And so we got out of that just for that reason. But totally understand where you're coming from on that because I felt that pain before. So so Carl Lenocker: Yeah. I mean, I will segue it back to real estate though. I'll say that that's kind of what got me into into more rental real estate and being a residential landlord is I realized that that was a more resilient business to getting the rug pulled out from under you, right? There's market conditions and things that can happen, and we could we could talk more about it in a second, but rental real estate has been a core part of my portfolio ever since because of what happened with those recliner covers. I mean, I realized that Houses are are a pretty safe investment and people need a place to live, especially in a place like where I live here in Colorado Springs. There's just always a short of you know, shortage of rental real estate. And so by going there and kind of making that a a a core focus for me, I was able to create a lot of stability, I would say, in my in my side huss hustle strategy. Loren Wernette: Yeah. So let's talk about someone that is a high earner and they want to diversify their income. You know, what is your current recommendation on kind of the path to do that? You obviously went and did, you know, the arbitrage stuff and then eventually got into real estate. But if I'm a three hundred and fifty thousand dollar a year, you know, earner, I have a pretty high demand job, use a lot of my time, where should I look to start diversifying to make sure I'm Not relying on just one in Carl Lenocker: Well, I mean, you know, the easiest thing to do is is rental real estate. And I and I say easy because it depends on, you know, where you live, if you're buying that near your house, you know, where you live. But I mean, there are opportunities in this country where you can still buy residential real estate that cash flows. And you mentioned Robert Kiyosaki's book earlier, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I read that book in the early two thousands when I was just getting started, and completely blew my mind. It completely changed my world. I know people kind of make fun of the guy now because he's gotten broke. I think at least once, maybe Loren Wernette: Mm-hmm. Carl Lenocker: twice. But the concepts in that book were you know earth shattering. They were they were completely mind-bending for me at the time. And, you know, one of the concepts was that you could use leverage to go out and and purchase, you know, a large asset, you know, a house with very little money down. You know, in the early two thousands, I mean, you know, as a first-time home buyer, I think it was one or two percent down. and then we actually had this crazy credit crisis caused by, you know, the ability to buy houses with zero dollars down. for a period of time that that I took advantage of, you know, at will. I mean, I was, I was like, sign my name, get a house, sign my name, get a house. And at one point I was up to a dozen houses by doing that. And, you know, what I realized is that at the time, you know, I had millions of dollars of of real estate under my control with very little investment. and so the core concept of leverage, you know, is is key. Now I just happened to get sort of lucky, you know, it was sort of strategic. By the fact that I live in Colorado Springs, which never, you know, experienced a real estate boom like some other parts of the country where real estate went up really high and then it crashed. due to the, you know, large military population here and federal government employees and retirees, our real estate market has been very steady over the years and never experienced a big crash. So In two thousand eight, two thousand nine, when we had the the credit crisis and a lot of folks, you know, lost their shirts. I knew a lot of guys around the country who were in investing clubs with me. and we were talking and we were on, you know, chat boards together, and they were saying, Hey man, I just lost all 20 of my houses to the bank because we were so underwater on them. And I just, you know, I made a deal to just walk away from them at that point. I I was very grateful, kind of lucky that I never had to do that. because, you know, essentially kind of I picked I picked a good location. So When I moved here from California, a lot of people made fun of me in 2000. They were Where the hell is Colorado Springs? It's not even on the map. I don't you know, it's like Hickville, right? But it turned out to be strategically a really good move because it's affordable, it has all this stuff that props up the market. So I'd say if like young folks are out there listening and they're like, Well, I can't buy real estate, Carl, where I live. I live in California, I live, you know, Austin, Texas, somewhere where it's Loren Wernette: Yeah. Carl Lenocker: been run up through the ceiling. I would say, you know, hey, there's you know, have you looked at You know, maybe Biloxi, Mississippi. Have you looked, you know, down in the in the south in the Sunbelt? Like there's places down there where you can get a house for seventy five thousand dollars right now and it probably cash flows two hundred bucks a month, and you can get started doing this and do exactly what I did. You know, you're just gonna have to get a little more creative with location. Loren Wernette: Yeah, and looking at you what your goal is, right? If you need cash flow, then maybe the Midwest might be a better play. Or if you're looking for some just straight appreciation than some of the coastal states, you know, the their different markets have different fits if you're just trying to park cash versus actually trying to get cash flow. Carl Lenocker: Yeah, absolutely. And then, you know, the concept of of you know, buying a home for yourself too, that's the other thing, right? If I lived in a really high, you know, overvalued area right now, I'm not sure that I would buy a house to live. And if I was a young person, you know, I think being a renter is just fine because this roof that's over my head right now is is I don't consider it to be an asset. It's just a shelter. It's just a place where I I live. I want to live as as cheaply as possible, you know, and I want my assets to be outside of the home. generating revenue. I want a bunch of ATM machines out there spitting out hundreds at me. the Loren Wernette: Mm-hmm. Carl Lenocker: last thing that I want to do as an investor is live in a, you know, a million, two million dollar house because I think, it's going to go up in value one day. Right. That's that's kind of a, you know, a fool's bet. I've seen a lot of guys do that, you know, and lose money or end up stuck in this house for the next 10 years and they pour money into it. And, you know, it's costing them $50, $60,000 a year to just maintain the house and, you know, an AC unit goes out or some of these big houses have two or three AC units and all of a sudden you got like a hundred thousand dollar a year. I just don't believe in that. And I think, you know, I think young people who who are smart are seeing that a lot of young folks that I know that are investors do rent their primary or they live as cheaply as possible and then they're out there trying to buy investments with their money to get the cash Loren Wernette: Hund hundred percent agree with that. So let's shift a little bit to your background in customer success because I really want to dive into how that kind of world that you worked in or work in has influenced your thought on this and how and I I know you talk about it in your book, but how that customer success mindset should be applied to your personal financial situation. Carl Lenocker: Yeah, so you know, my book Success Plan for Life basically takes the lessons that I've learned, you know, being a customer success manager or executive for the last twenty years in tech, and it applies it to, you know, your your own life and your own situation in terms of you know strategic planning. My role for those who aren't in tech, you know, to to just explain it quickly is kind of like a a consultant. Like think of me like a you know, a McKenzie consultant who comes in and he takes a look at your business and says, Hey, you guys want to save money over here, you want to make money over here. You know, how do I use the software that we've sold you to help you accomplish those goals, essentially? And let's create a plan to kind of get there. And what is it going to take? And maybe I need to bring in, you know, resources and services and and you know, technical help and all these things, but I've got a plan and I've got a list of resources and we're going to make it happen. And I I applied that to, you know, kind of how I built my life because I couldn't help but think when I looked you look back on my life, like everything great that ever happened to me in life kind of came from a plan. And when I realized that I needed to have a plan, that's when things actually started to get a lot better for me. You know, before that I was just drifting. And a lot of people do just kind of drift through their lives. They just hope that it's gonna get better, whether that's with their money or, you know, even something like finding a mate, right? I mean, I know a lot of a lot of friends who used to say, Well, you know, if it if it's right, it's right and If she walks into that coffee shop that morning that I'm in there buying a bagel and, you know, we have a meet cute, then, you know, it kicks off and I'm gonna feel good about it and we're gonna fall in love and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, no, like that's not that's not how it works, bro. Like you gotta, you know, you gotta become the type of person that is i worthy of meeting, you know, that that top mate that you wanna be paired with, right? You can't just expect it to happen. she's not gonna fall in love with you just because you're you're you. You know, you you might wanna be You know, maybe, you know, fit. You might want to be financially stable. You might want to have a track record of success. You might want to own a home. You know, you got all these things you got to do before you go out and find a mate. So it's just one example of how building a success plan, it's not just about money, it's about relationships. It could be about being a good parent. It could be about being a good dad. it could be about leaving a legacy for your kids. It's it's kind of something that you can apply to all aspects of your life. And I get really in in in depth in the book in terms of how I did it. Loren Wernette: So with customer success, you know, a lot of that has to do with r retention and quarterly reviews. There's lot of KPIs and stuff around it. Do you apply that to a financial a personal financial situation as well? And also keep in mind that, you know, in a customer success standpoint, you've got customers or people you can call to get feedback. But if you have assets like a building, you can't call the building and say, hey, why aren't you performing the way you're supposed to? Carl Lenocker: Yeah. Well, so I mean in in the book I talk about how my wife and I sit down every month and we do, you know, what's a a monthly review of our financial situation. We kinda go through, you know, kind of how things are performing, what debt looks like, what investments look like, what cash flow looks like, what plans we have for the rest of the year so that we can kind of be prepared for what's coming. you know, that's a like a monthly KPI review. And then we talk about, you know, well, we've got a QBR that we do where we go out to a restaurant once a quarter and we might, you know pull out a higher level view of where things are and kind of talk about our bigger goals. You know, one of our things right now is that, you know, one of our daughters has moved to Florida after college. And you know, we might want to have a a home in that area at some point so we can spend more time in Florida, you know, maybe a beach house. maybe it becomes an Airbnb that we rent out part time when we're not there so we can generate revenue while we're, you know, kind of not using it. So that could be an example of one of the goals that we're planning for. And then we talk about, you know, what's it gonna take to create a a down payment for that? What type of cash flow do we want to create? How much of our, you know, liquid assets do we want to kind of park in this versus the stock market right now? Because stock market's been really good to me. I mean, we talked a lot about real estate, but you know, the stock market I think is is two thirds of our portfolio at this point. And it's not because we tried to make it that way, it's just because it's performed that well. So, you know, important to kind of sit down and take a look at this stuff. I think a lot of couples that I talk to, you know, when I'm like in my executive coaching practice, I ask people about how are things at home? Like, you know, when's the last time you sat down with your husband or wife and and talked about the money? And I've been a little bit shocked to hear that, you know, maybe like 75% of people do not have these types of meetings. They don't have even the discussions. And a lot of marriages, even in this day and age, Folks just outsource the finances to one person or the other in the relationship and they say, Well, I trust my wife to handle it or I trust my husband to deal with that. And they never really go and ask the hard questions like, you know, when are we gonna actually be able to retire? And what does retirement look like for us? Like, does does retirement look like we're living in a mobile home in a 55 plus community in Florida? Or does retirement mean we're in a multi million dollar house in Scottsdale playing, you know, pickleball with our friends and going to the cocktail hour every night. Like what does that look like? I'm I mean my mind has been blown. Yeah, a lot of people just don't don't even think about that stuff. Loren Wernette: Why do you think it is that that conversation just doesn't happen? Carl Lenocker: You know, I think that there's a lot of different components there. I mean, fear, you know, is is a big one, right? Fear of of, you know, angering your partner, fear of losing your partner, fear of exposing yourself, that maybe, you know, you you didn't care about these things soon enough in the relationship to bring them up and now it's too late. one of the things that we did, you know, after we were married for about 10 years was that we started seeing a a certified financial planner not to have him manage our money or like take anything over, but more so to, you know, kind of perform the function of being a a a financial, you know, marriage counselor, essentially, to kind of look at the plan that I had built and throw holy water on it if it if it needed it and you know, kind of explain to both of us what the different outcomes were that, you know, were possible depending on what happens in the market, depending on what happens with with our futures, our jobs and so forth. and the thing that we came out of that meeting. That first meeting, you know, with was that we both looked at each other and said, We should have done this 10 years ago. Like we should have done this the day we got married, just to level set and then maybe gone back like every two or three years and just checked in and been like, hey, are we still on on plan or we've changed the plan or whatever? I don't think enough people do that. They wait till they're like 65 and they're getting ready to actually retire. And then they bring the the CFP in, right? And they say, you know, hey, are we ready to do this? And the CFP's like, Are you kidding me? You only have like, you know, half a million bucks in savings. Like what are you planning on living on? Like, you know, you're probably gonna live to be, you know, guy your age is probably gonna live to be at least eighty-five. You know, maybe with modern medicine you could be like ninety plus and you've gotta have more money than ever to sustain retirement, you know, now because of just how long people are living. Loren Wernette: Yeah, d depends on what the definition of retirement is for that person. But yeah, I mean I plan on living to a hundred, but plan on working until I'm in my eighties, right? but okay, so let's say that someone hasn't had that conversation. What's the first step to either prepare to have that conversation or to have that conversation with their spouse so they can get themselves or is there a step that needs to happen before that conversation happens? Carl Lenocker: Yeah, I mean I would say that there is kind of a step that needs to happen before because money is such an emotional, you know, topic for people. I I I find that people can be upset by it very easily. You know, they if they're asked to come to the table and discuss money, sometimes it can feel like someone's attacking them or accusing them of being irresponsible with money before we've even gotten to the the topic that we're trying to get to, right? And so there's a discovery phase that I I talk about where you've got to kind of sit down with yourself and and eventually with your with your spouse your partner and look inward in terms of, you know, what are the experiences that built me and my beliefs around money? Like, you know, what what traumas did I go through as a child? What did I witness? What did people around me think about money? How did money make me feel as a kid? You know, as I grew up, how did how did what does money mean to me now? when you start to look at some of that stuff, and for me, you know, it actually meant going to therapy. It actually meant sitting down with a with a therapist and digging pretty deep. you know, I uncovered a lot of stuff in terms of, you know, I I grew up in a house where, you know, making rent wasn't like a guarantee. It was kind of like, you know, amazing every month that we were able to do it. And and, you know, our house was continuously kind of, you know, having things break. And I had a, you know, no air conditioning in the Sacramento Value in the in the valley and the hundred degree heat in the summers. My dad would come home and kind of, you know, fix this rag tech swamp cooler we had. And it would run for a week or two and then it would go out again and we would just be sweating and just dying in the heat. you know, in the wintertime, my mom would would, you know, turn on the gas furnace that we had in the in the living room. It was one of those wall furnaces, and you had to have a screwdriver to turn it on. And sometimes when there wasn't enough money, she would turn it way down and then she would hide the screwdriver. So I couldn't find the screwdriver to adjust the furnace. So I mean, having memories like that, you know, you think, boy, man, money is really important to a guy like. Me because I don't ever want to go back to that again, right? I I want to live a life where, you know, I can I can take my kids and my wife and and and my family on vacation, you know, two, three times a year and pay for the whole thing, right? I ideally in the future I'd like to be able to do that flying private. I'd like to be able to, you know, have a have a really nice accommodation instead of staying at a timeshare in Kaaba, we're staying at the Ritz-Carlton or the, you know, four seasons, things like that, right? You know, but to get there I've I had to kind of look back and overcome a lot of that childhood trauma in terms of, you know, why money y is is such a scarcity, you know, psychology in my mind, you know, why I I I'm terrified of of going broke again, why I you know, maybe I'm overly conservative with my investments sometimes because I'm I'm scared that I could lose it all tomorrow, right? And so these are these are things that everybody's gotta wrestle with and go back to the beginning and kinda really think about deeply before you talk to your your partner and make a plan. Loren Wernette: Got it. So figure out where your mind's at, talk to your partner and make a plan. And then once that once that's happened, at what stage do you start working on the execution and how do you know when what you're executing is succeeding? Carl Lenocker: Yeah. Well, I mean, I think, you know, knowing if it's working or not goes back to kind of having that monthly meeting to review metrics and that quarterly, you know, QBR and maybe you're doing an annual review. and then, you know, when you go back and and you know, meet with your partner in terms of a plan, I mean, the first thing is to kinda envision what the future looks like for for you guys, right? I mean, are you are you living where you're living now? Do you have a second home? Do you you know, you have kids and and you know, vacations and all these things and you know Are we, are we in the best health of our lives? You know, what type of wellness activities do we want to do? Do we want to join a country club? You know, all these things. Like what does life really look like, you know, five, 10 years from now? And then you got to think about, you know, what does something like that cost? I mean, how much, how much are we gonna need? You know, and then it's as simple as is figuring out a plan to generate that that kind of revenue. And, you know, I think a lot of folks, you know, they focus so much on their their day job, right? It's like, my God, I'm gonna kill myself sixty hours a week for this job. And then you might get a 2% raise at the end of the year. And if you think about it, you know, the guy sitting next to you probably is not killing himself at that day job. He's doing the 40 hours and he's getting the same 2% raise. So at some point you have to think about this: like, am I really serving myself by killing myself just at the day job? If I get all this extra effort and all this extra time, maybe I should spend it, you know, working on something for myself. And that's where you start kind of thinking about. You know, is rental real estate for me or is there a little business I could start in my garage tomorrow? not talk about going out and buying like a Burger King or a McDonald's right away and getting into like some big, you know, multi-million dollar franchise. Just something you can do for like, you know, go take five hundred bucks this weekend and and see if there's something that you can buy that you can sell for a profit, you know, and just kind of start getting good at that motion, start getting good at it the idea of business and then You know, if it works and and you y you like what you're doing, you know, maybe you expand a little bit, maybe you kind of create a a formal business. I mean, there's all kinds of obvious tax benefits, you know. When you get into rental real estate, you you do it a lot for the tax benefits because sometimes it's not it's not the best business in the world. It doesn't generate like insane revenue, but the tax savings that can flow back into your W two can be really great, right? So Robert Kiyosaki talks a lot about that in Rich Deadport ads. Some of it's outdated by now, but there's still a lot in there in terms of, you know, if you invest substantial money into your rental real estate business while you have a W 2, you know, it's a a lot of those losses can pass through if you're considered a real estate professional. And if you're, you know, either licensed as a realtor or you're, you know, investing, you know, enough hours in the year to to be considered a real estate professional that You know, you can offset a lot of your W-2 income with with investment and rental real estate. So I encourage folks to kind of look at that and and decide what what interests them. You know, these days I'm doing so much with AI and agentic AI on the side that I think that probably a lot of side hustles over the next couple of years are going to be there as opposed to the the the silly stuff I was doing, you know, 20 years ago, driving around looking at thrift stores and like, what can I buy and sell? It's going to be, you know, like I can build websites for small businesses. Let me call around and see if anybody wants to buy those. Like, or I can help you set up a smart home and and you could put, you know, smart switches in and smart plugs and things and I can help you turn all that on and make it all work. how much are you willing to pay me for for a service like that? Loren Wernette: Mm-hmm. Carl Lenocker: There's all kinds of neat businesses that you guys can start right now, just using AI to kind of, you know, enable you. So Loren Wernette: Yeah. So I agree that there's going to be a lot of opportunity. I think I disagree in that doing something that's well, let me start with it depends on what people don't spend enough time thinking about what they want their life to look like in the short term and and long term. Right. let's take a someone that's making a bunch of money, they work a lot of hours, they have got a couple kids, and they just want to spend time with their kids and their wife, and they wanna have, you know, do stuff with their friends on the weekends. Taking on a job like going to set up AI or setting up someone's home or having rental real estate may be not the best fit for them. And so they need to find things that are a better fit for the lifestyle that they're looking for. And in that case, looking at passive investments, LP investments in different real estate syndications, in different funds, those are great ways to get into real estate, get some of the real estate backing without having all the extra work on them. Now, If they have extra time, right? There's there's you have extra time or you have extra money, you generally don't have both, then then it makes sense to do the more hands on active thing, like doing real estate. And and I tell this to investors all the time. Like they I have had number of people come to me, hey, I'm making a lot of money. I want to buy rental real estate. I'm like, Okay, are you ready to give up your weekends or evenings? Well, no, I'll go to basketball with my one son and hockey or you know, or volleyball with my daughter. I'm like, Well then you probably should look at a different different vehicle than that because what you don't want to do is trade your time for money. That's what you're trying to get out of when you're, you know, stepping a kind of away from your W two role. Carl Lenocker: Yeah. I mean I would I would say that, you know, one thing that I've done is I've kind of automated all that stuff because I do have a W-2 that's so demanding, right? I can't drive around and fix toilets in the afternoons. I've I've got a job. So, you know, a lot of the the stuff that I do is is dependent on, you know, having really good relationships with contractors and folks that I've built, you know, business partnerships with over the years. My plumber knows that he's my plumber because He's replumbed like two houses for me from top to bottom and yeah, he's made he's made a lot of money off of me. So when I call him at eleven o'clock at night, he actually answers the phone and he gets over and fixes stuff at my at my rentals where, you know, if I didn't have that relationship with him, I probably couldn't depend on on him in that way. But I would say that works for me because I've been doing this for such a long time and I've got my business really refined and I and I don't need to go fix a toilet to save two hundred dollars, right? but when I was getting started in the business, I I did a lot of those things hands on. Absolutely. And that was a great way to learn. You know, I taught myself all the trades. not very good at any one specifically, but I could do a little bit of everything, right? And when you're when you're 22 or 23 and you you decide, well yeah, I want to get you know into rental real estate, I mean sure. Like, you know, you got some time. you you know, you're you're you're probably kind of broke. So you got to do some of those things yourself. It keeps you busy in terms of, you know, keeps you out of the bars, keeps you out of the casinos, whatever it is that you're trying to avoid doing on the weekends because you're always working on these houses and stuff. But as you get older, when you when you become 50 like me, you don't want to do any of that stuff anymore. So I'd say if you are going to do it, find a find a plan to kind of transition out of those things as you as you go along. And just know that you you won't always be hands on, probably if you're if you're getting into this now. Unless you really want to be, right? I got a I got a buddy who's seventy. And he has like twelve properties and he just works on all day on the week you know, all week and he's retired. I mean, that's that's his job and he loves it. Like he feels like he's being useful and staying busy. So it gotta figure out what's right for you, I guess, is is the right answer there. Loren Wernette: Yeah, I mean figure out what you want your life to look like and then plan towards that. Like I have no desire to do that, and so I have a different plan. I also have no desire to do my own lawn care, and so we Carl Lenocker: Mm-hmm. Loren Wernette: have a plan for that as well, right? So, but there are things that I do that other people don't want to do and I I've got no problem with that to each his own. But the point is to have a long term plan and then put things in place to make sure it happens, which I think is kind of what you're saying with your book. You can't just hope. Carl Lenocker: Absolutely. Yeah. I mean don't don't go in blind to anything. Kind of know what you know what it's it looks like, you know, one, three, five, ten years from now and and kind of execute according to that plan. Loren Wernette: Perfect. Perfect. So, you know, we we talked a lot about like the younger, the younger crowd. What if someone's hearing this and they're they are sixty-four, right? They're right on the cusp of of that retirement age. And they've kind of either maybe not negated it, because if they're listening to this podcast, they probably haven't totally foregone, you know, their their planning, but they haven't negated it, but maybe they're not where they want to be. Are the steps the same? You still need to have that talk with your spouse and do the financial planning, or is it an escalated path to doing something or a different path altogether when you're kind of further along? Carl Lenocker: Well, I would say it kind of depends on how well you've you've done saving and preparing for retirement up until sixty-four. I read some of these finance articles sometimes that are posted, where people write in and say things like, you know, hey, I'm sixty four and I've saved up two hundred and fifty thousand dollars and I have a, you know, a mortgage of two hundred thousand still can I retire yet? And like the the poor editor of these financial journals is like, my god, like Like, I guess you you can retire, but only if you, you know, retirement for you means that you're still working a job. Like, you know, you're gonna have to do something. So, I mean, it really depends on on where you're at. you know, sixty-four is not considered as as old as when I was a young person, right? It's it's what are they saying now that fifty's the new thirty and so sixty must be the new Loren Wernette: Mm-hmm. Carl Lenocker: forty. So there's there's time for you to still make changes and make, you know, make things work, especially if you're a high, you know, income earner. at 64, you should be pulling down some of the biggest dollars of your life in terms of career if if you, you know, are a white collar worker, which is good news because there's still an opportunity to stack some some income and kind of, you know, figure out what you want to do. in a lot of those situations, though, like you mentioned earlier, I mean, if you don't want to do hands on rental real estate and and go all in with your time on some of these things, there's other things you could do. You can invest in an ETF, you know, go go buy a REIT. You know, put a bunch of money into something like NNN that, you know, yields, I think six percent and it goes up every year too. So it's really like a 10, 11% investment over time, but it's it's it's a you know revenue creator for you. Stuff like that exists if you have enough money. And so that's you know, if you're on that that side of the the spectrum where you're like, I just want to get out of this game and I want safety and I don't want to be in the stock market anymore because it's too scary. I mean, there are investments like that that folks should look at where you can you can make a safe you know, six, eight percent investing in real estate through stocks and ETFs still. So Loren Wernette: Yeah. Yeah, I I think it's important to diversify. And I mean, I have a good chunk of money in in stocks and it does it does well. And then other times it doesn't do so well, but that that's investing, right? Overall it's doing doing well. So you mentioned AI a few minutes ago. So I want to touch on that a little bit and kind of what your thoughts are and how that is going to impact, you know, this whole conversation we're having with planning for the future, personal finance, as well as how it may impact some of our listeners and their kind of high paying jobs. Carl Lenocker: Yeah. Well, one thing that I've noticed, you know, I'm I'm adopting AI at a really rapid pace and I'm using it for everything from how to, you know, aggregate my health record into AI now so that I can have, you know, all of my my doctor visits and my medical reports and my blood tests and everything kind of right there at at fingers reach and I can ask AI, you know, hey, like what if I took this drug instead of this drug? Or what if I added this supplement to my regimen? Like What do you think I should do if I wanna, you know, not get dementia or whatever, you know? And it looks at all my stuff and it gives me ideas. I love that about AI because when I go see my doctor, I get like five minutes with a guy. And with AI, I can spend hours on their researching and then I can be like, show me your sources and I can read the research, you know, directly and things like that. I mean, same thing for, you know, career right now. A lot of folks are, you know, using AI to kind of agentically do things like go read their email or manage their calendar or, you know. Do basic tasks like you know, outreach, you know, like like you can have a sales development representative or an SDR created in agentic AI right now that just sends emails on your behalf to potential customers and tries to sell your product. You don't need to hire somebody anymore. That's that's something you can kind of outsource to AI. So these things are are changing really rapidly in terms of of how we're using it and You know, I I mean, I think that the productivity benefits are are undeniable at this point in terms of what it can do for business. When it comes to financial planning, if I was a financial planner, I would be a little bit concerned, you know, because I do feel like it it's going a long way to kind of replace some of these folks at this point. just you know, for the same reason that I I talked about using it as kind of a augmented doctor earlier. I mean, I can go in there and I can ask questions anytime I want. I don't have to worry about bothering my CFP or that he's going to charge me another 500 bucks for a phone call or a meeting or whatever. It's just I got a simple question. I want to run it past. and so that's a good example of how that business is going to transform, and it already has really into like a relationship-based business where you know you're not really necessarily managing, you know, people's finances anymore. If you're a CFP in the future, you're probably managing relationships a lot more. Which is what the best of these guys already do anyway, right? I talked about how ours is like a marriage counselor. And he comes in and he knows what I'm afraid of, he knows what my wife's afraid of, he makes us feel better based on the numbers. You know, he walks us through the different scenarios and kind of, you know, reassures us that we can get to our get to our goals that are on our plan. and I would say, you know, in the future, that's that's gonna be, you know, what how that role evolves and how all roles are kind of going to evolve, especially like my own. Customer success, right? Where I'm I'm looking over large accounts, you know, at my current job. I I carry a book of business that's fifty million dollars plus. And in the past, maybe where customers may have come to me and they expected me to be able to answer like technical questions or bring some expert onto the phone that could talk to them about technical stuff. they're gonna be able to self-serve on a lot of those things and and answer their own questions using AI. And and when they engage me, it's gonna be more about the relationship. It's gonna be about our Our long-term partnership and about, you know, the outcomes that they have on the horizon and where is our product going roadmap wise and does it align? And, you know, how are we going to be looking after them as a customer so that we don't lose them in the future? You know, all these relationship-based tasks I think are going to be so much more important because AI is just going to take all the technical stuff away and it's just going to make it so much easier. I mean, it's already reading my my email every day. And when I log in, you know, at work, it tells me, hey, you got. Two emails that are really important, you should probably respond to. Like the rest of the stuff in your inbox is probably garbage. You know, it saves Loren Wernette: Yeah. Carl Lenocker: me all that time waiting through my inbox and it and and hey, you got an important meeting here at one o'clock today. Like keep an eye out for that, that type of thing. So already that's taken, you know, eighty percent of my morning stress away. I just feel great. I get my coffee, I put my feet up on the desk, I see that, and I'm like, I'm good to go for the day. I I don't have to sit here and worry anymore like I used to about what are you know, what are we doing today? So Loren Wernette: Yeah, I a hundred percent agree. The the amount of evening of the playing field it does on the technical side of things is just in incredible. But the need to have those soft skills, being able to talk to people, being able to create relationships is gonna become more and more important because it's gonna become a little harder, but probably not always hard to figure out what's AI and what's not. And just knowing people and being able to re form those relationships is gonna be a differentiator. Carl Lenocker: Hundred percent like I'll bet, you know, in your business, I mean, maybe to put a question back to you, you know, relationships are really important because as a lender you need to know who to trust and you need to know who can execute and actually deliver on on the work that they're gonna do in order to be able to pay you back, right? And so over time you've developed those skills to kind of identify how to how to, you know, figure these folks out. so I mean, with AI in the future, do you see any of that changing? Loren Wernette: No, I think that the the loan officer role of the of lending is always gonna have a big component of human aspect because sure you can it's very numbers focused lending is and very document focused. Great place for AI, and we've used it a ton to keep our number of headcount down low and still put through a ton of loans through the system. But being able to have a conversation with someone and they may tell you the answer to your question. But you hear it in their voice that there's something else and be able to dig deeper and find that that thing that maybe helps solve their problem or pr prevents some, you know, bad loan from going out is something that you can't teach an AI. but on the other hand, it does allow you to do more things with less people because you know, I have I had two free phone calls while we were on this call here that my AI assistant picked up. took the message and then I'll make those phone calls back to them once we're done here that would have just gone to voicemail before. And now I have information about who those callers are. They've hit my CRM. They'll get emails from me from now on. And I'm able to follow up with them and track KPIs on who they were and how long it took me to follow up with them for better customer experience. Carl Lenocker: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it kinda reminds me of like when I was I was a big house flipper one time and we used to flip three or four houses a year. And one of the things that I would do to find houses to flip, would be to follow around other flippers that had really great reputations and then I knew that they were making money. Like if they were working on this particular street and they were I knew they were gonna make money, so I would wanna get a house on that street and flip it at the same time they were flipping it. And I used to go in in, you know, assessor records Or anything I could do d just driving around us to find out where they were working. And now with AI, like if I was a flipper and I had folks, you know, that that I feel really good about following, I'd I could probably just have my agent go out and look every day and like let me know, Hey, Bob just bought a house on on Sycamore Drive today, like Carl, you might want to go there and take a look. So things like that are gonna be really cool. Loren Wernette: Mm. On the other side. So the thing when I was flipping, what I would do is I would drive around and find the contractors that were working on flip houses because those guys are all the good ones were always so busy they never had a Google presence or any other presence. But if you find their truck, usually it was the beat up old van, you know, with like some number painted on the side of it. And those guys were the best for tile work, but you could never find them anywhere else. All the guys you found on Facebook or Google were overpriced or didn't show up. So cuts both ways, right? Carl Lenocker: Hundred percent. Well, another one on relationships and contractors is kind of a funny story. I used to have a guy running my crew when I was flipping who he had run into some trouble with the law. I think he had some some problems with with drinking and driving, and he ended up having to go to jail at night and sleep in the jail, you know, but he would get released for work in the morning to come out and go to work for us. And when he would go into the jail at night, sometimes I would say, you know, hey man, we need like a guy who's a master tile setter. Can you f is there anybody in there? And he'd be like, Let me let me ask around. And then the next morning when I Loren Wernette: Ha ha ha. Carl Lenocker: pick him up from jail to take him from work, he'd be standing there on the curb with a master tile guy. And he would build these relationships while he was in jail to get us some of the best tradesmen and at some of the lowest prices, because obviously they they all had records. Loren Wernette: Ugh, that's hilarious. No. All right. Well, as we kind of wrap up, I want to give you the opportunity, just anything that we didn't touch on pertaining to your book or your business that you think that the listeners would really get some value out of. And then finally, just leave us with, you know, how to get a hold of you, what your book's called, and and where we can buy it. Carl Lenocker: Yeah, you know, I think that the way we wrapped up was really nice talking about relationships because, you know, when my wife read the book, she said that this book really is kind of like a like a love letter to all the people in your life that have kind of, you know, made made you who you are and and helped you get to the next level. And there's a lot of great stories in there about folks, you know, that have been relationships for me, you know, along the way that have opened doors, gotten me jobs, helped me into, you know, get it get into deals that you know, have kind of made me along the way and That's one thing that I would say, you know, as we kind of tie, you know, the knot on this conversation about AI and relationships, you know, if you're if you're getting started in the business or if you're just, you know, if if you're, you know, middle aged and and things aren't going as well for you as you you thought they might be, you know, go back and and you know, think about relationships in your life that you can pour some water on and and and grow, you know, so that you can kind of, you know, help help kind of, you know, get a little bit more reach and get exposure to opportunities and people. Who are doing things that are interesting, you know, that that you want to be around, like exciting projects, successful people, you know, interesting ideas. The more you can surround yourself by all those things, the more successful you can be. And with that said, I mean, you guys can get my book on Amazon and Audible. It's available at successplanforlife.com. It'll take you right there. It's got 33 five-star reviews right now. I'm really grateful for everybody who's read it and left a review. And if you read it and you leave me a review, shoot me a message on LinkedIn. My profile's at rockstar csm dot com and I will definitely send you a special thank you back 'cause I'm so grateful for reviewers out there. So Loren Wernette: Awesome, Carl. it's been a pleasure. certainly enjoyed the conversation. And I think that the the way you think about planning for the upcoming life and how you help people out is phenomenal. And I recommend anybody that is hearing this and gets any value out of this to go out and get the book and follow Carl on LinkedIn. And if you got any value out of this podcast yourself, follow us and share it with somebody you know that might also get value out of Carl's message or hearing this podcast as How we grow is by you all sharing out this to people that will like-minded people. So Carl, thank you again. and to listeners, we will see you again next time. Carl Lenocker: Thanks for having me. Much prosperity to everybody out there.