Blogs

November 2021 Monthly Market Update

https://youtu.be/pHJuJvksZU4

Hey, what’s up folks. We are live. This is the November 2021 monthly market update where I quickly go over what is going on is some of the news out there impacting investors, mostly real estate investors. If you guys want to get a hold of my new book coming out next month, I’ll go to simple, passive to cashflow.com/book.

And shoot me an email if you guys are able to help. Need some folks to help me out with the launch. Give me a review, I’ll buy you a book. We also have the the audio version there at simplepassivecashflow.com/book. So help out the cause get the good word out, we appreciate it guys.

 

And we’ll get started.

If you guys haven’t met before my name is Lane Kawaoka. Currently 6,500 rental units need to update this slide and used to be an engineer. And I show you guys how to escape the rat race, investing in alternative investments and stop doing stuff like buying a house to live in, paying off your debt. Instead buying real assets that produce cashflow and grow for you.

You guys haven’t yet checked out the free podcast, simple passive cashflow, passive real estate investing found on all the platforms. And if you’re tuning in on the YouTube version of this with the podcast version. You want to see the slides that we have check out the YouTube channel and also check out the podcast version.

But before we get going, if you guys have any comments or anything, please type it into the comment box below, we’ll try and answer it if it comes up. So the first thing here, you know what I see a lot of people doing and what I try to do as part of the simple passive cashflow. Just to get people from being victims of the consequences of their own action.

This little picture of this dog who got stuck under a picnic table and it restricted his movement because he went all over and it’s got the leash tangled under all the legs of the table and again, those things are buying a house to live in.

I think if you’re in credit card debt, you need a way to force savings account for your self. Yeah, buy a house because it’s a forced piggybank, but for most of you guys listening, you guys have good financial skills. You guys are the max out, your 401k crowd. Push your money to investments and not necessarily a house to live in.

I still rent today. Next thing is investing in your 401k and getting that company match thinking that’s all cool. And maybe the company matches okay. I guess it’s free money, you’re investing in my opinion, garbage retail investments turbo tax, you guys are just still turbo tax.

You got to get with it, spend some money other than free and, get some deductions in there. But if you don’t have any real estate, go through turbo tax because you’re not going to get any deductions in that thing anyway. And then doing a Roth IRA or any kind of IRA, I just don’t really see the point to if you’re investing in real estate because real estate gives you passive losses.

And that’s what you can use to effectively shelter your passive income. And why are we doing this? Why are we going into good assets? Will inflation is upon us. If you guys haven’t seen here, we’re looking at a little picture if you guys have seen how much a pound of coffee costs in Walmart and it’s not $6.79 anymore.

If you look again, it’s $8.49, the cost of inflation is around us. So here we go. Let’s get into some of the headlines here. Wallet hub released a couple of reports of some of the safest cities in America, and those are Columbia, Maryland, South Burlington, new Hampshire, Yonkers, New York, Madison, Wisconsin, Portland, Maine Warwick, Rhode Island, Raleigh, North Carolina, Burlington.

Think that’s for bond. Winston-Salem North Carolina. Now some of the unsafe cities in America, Lubbock, Texas, south St. Petersburg, Florida, Anchorage, Alaska, Birmingham, Alabama, Baton Rouge, Memphis, Tennessee, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, San Bernardino, California, Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Missouri.

Some of the people who aren’t sophisticated investors might say yeah, I don’t want to invest in these least safe cities, but I had four rentals in Birmingham. A lot of the investors still go there for rental properties. I have a couple of apartments in Oklahoma city.

I invest in the top 10 worst safest cities in America, and I think it all comes with part of the territory of investing in the right sub markets, even in these bad unsafe areas. You can just invest some generalities of these stupid top 10 list. That’s it, if you’re looking for the safest cities in America.

You’re probably ain’t gonna cash flow there and it’s probably not going to be a good investment. Partly I bring these types of figures up to call up the BS, right? Safest states in America, Vermont, Maine, New Hampshire, Minnesota, Utah, Connecticut, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Maryland, Washington.

Now you’re not investing in a particular state. You’re investing in a MSA, a city and if you dive down even deeper into a certain MSA or sub market within the market. So for example like Seattle has maybe a couple dozen sub markets within the greater Seattle area. And even within one of those sub markets, you might have a good side or bad side or good block, bad block.

What we tell investors is get away from these stupid top 10 lists and really start to dive in and just know that some of these safest states, a lot of these just won’t cash flow. They’re not going to be good investments. Sure. They’re nice place to live in. And maybe it has a good school district or two, but is it going to be make good investment?

And that is where you separate the real investors to those people who just like to collect houses in random areas of the country, because they feel like it is safe for them. Some of the least safest states in America, Tennessee, Missouri, Florida, Alabama, Montana, Oklahoma, Arkansas, Texas, Mississippi, Louisiana.

If you went off this list, you wouldn’t invest in Texas, Alabama, Florida. I’d say three of the top eight states to invest in quite frankly, so bad data. Michael says he’s jumped St. Louis. It’s only bad in certain areas. So St. Louis and Kansas city, I don’t know what it is about those towns, but man, it isn’t really like block by block those certain areas.

And that’s just go to show you, even in the right sub market, you have to go look block by block.

Okay. Thanks for the comments, folks feel free to drop more comments in, and also if you guys are checking this out on replay, drop the comments below, I might get to it. If I happen to be playing around with social media, which I try not to, I think it feels to me it’s a waste of time. This next slide is some Arbor.

Arbor is one of the the few direct Fannie Mae Freddie Mac lenders that we’ll work with to get these large direct Fannie Freddie loans for apartments, not a good data and newsletters they come up with. So this is an article on affordability and some of the highlights here.

The pandemics economic effects combined with this year, surging rent prices have straightened low-income renters facing housing of 40 back in the spotlight. So as we know that the pandemic impacted a lot of the low end, the class C type of stuff, the class A stuff in a traditional recession, the class A people lose their jobs and move to the Bs and Bs to Cs

but in this particular COVID-19 pandemic slash recession, the A-class were pretty much unimpacted other than paying for a grub hub and not having to go to their college sports games or professional sports games and big, nice vacations. But other than that, they’re pretty good. Some of our class A apartments they ran into a rough month there when a lot of people were realized that

interest rates were low and they bought houses. And this is why it’s nice to invest in stuff that your tenants aren’t exactly economically mobile. Now that could be insensitive, but, Hey, when you’re in an investor, you don’t want too much turnover amongst your tenant.

Next point here reduced business income due to the pandemic and related downturn may decrease the value of tax credits and require affordable developers to seek alternative financing sources. So there’s a lot of developers out there that will develop these properties for the lower income, or it might have say 20% of the units designated to be 20% under the market.

I think it’s a good idea. It’s the government’s way of ensuring that you have ample supply of lower income because even in a good area, someone’s got to take out the trash or do those types of jobs. So it’d be cool if they live close to where it’s at. I think this is a hell of a lot better idea than making a bunch of projects and we’re a bunch of more people are living.

There’s just a lot of unsafe conditions and high crime areas where I think that the it called this the lurk different acronyms L I HTC is another program, but developers will take advantage of these government incentives to build and get either get credits or great loan.

But the give back is they need to have these rent restrictions on a certain amount of units. We’ve got a couple of apartments that have these exact same thing where 20% of the units are designated lower.

The share of the LIC HTC mortgages utilizing the 4% tax credit remain elevated at 40% through the second quarter 2021. Reflecting the continue to attract the of rehabbing versus ground up development. The housing choice voucher program. Another major affordable housing initiative is set to be expanded in the proposal of 2022 federal budget by 5.3 billion.

A 13.3 increased from the fiscal year, 2021 now 3.50 several trillion, still pennies amongst the big stimulus package. So it sounds like a lot of money, but just a drop in the bucket in my opinion.

Now, this article is a doozy here. We’re going to try and break this down. This is from the joint center of housing studies of Harvard university. And if you guys are ever looking to sound really cool and smart in front of your coworkers, friends about investing in rental properties. This is a great source to read about.

So what this article is, and I’m gonna summarize from a real high level here just so you guys have the major takeaways. This is discussing kind of the whole debate, whether you should have zoning restrictions on certain areas of your market, of your MSA or submarkets. Now, if you guys have been paying attention to the last investor letters, the last one we had.

I think it was one month or two months ago. You guys can access the old versions of this monthly newsletter at simplepassivecashflow.com/investor letter. But if you recall, California gotta love California. Probably the most progressive state in the union. They had a restriction on certain single family home zoned areas and due to some of the need for more housing due to high costs, they are starting to break up those traditionally single family home zoning and allow for some more densities and duplexes drop Webster claws or smaller apartments in those.

And a lot of affluent people get upset at this type of stuff. Because it’s not in my neighborhood, right? This is for the rich folks, leave us alone. I don’t know why I say it in that accent, but it’s the battle between the haves and have nots once again, and this has been going on since the beginning of time in the 19th century in America, cities started to itch institutes.

And the builders of homes are lightly regulated in the early 20th century. Progressive reform include the practice of land zoning from Germany in order to provide working class families with low density housing on the urban health score. If you guys are history majors or you love geeking out on this stuff, you guys can look at the 1917 Buchanan versus Warley Supreme court decision which prohibited zone by race.

And in 1926, the courts gave it blessing to zoning that segregated land uses and building types in Euclid versus Ambler. The court endorsed single family homes on the grounds that they excluded parasite apartment buildings that blighted neighborhoods and lower property values. I guess that’s a better term to call those types of the projects right?

Where they just, Hey, let’s just stuff, all the poor people into these really dense populated areas. And I think this is what you think of when you think of the slums of India. I think that’s what they do, generally. The idea and the movement today, at least with the current administration is to break that up, bring spread apart.

People into different areas, which means that the poor people will be amongst some more middle-class people. And then, also the high ends will be intermingled with the middle-class people, single family home at this greatest impact in the suburban boom took place decades after the world war two.

And this is where the FHA, the federal housing administration and the veterans administration. Got together and develop these areas called Greenfield, such as old farms, which generally took the form of single family houses on individual lots. As they say, a lot of the guys who came back from war they wanted to start all life.

And this is where the overwhelming choice to Americans will be to the suburbs developments, cater to this taste carefully Cabernet, calibrating the size of the lots and price point. For these different income levels what the encouragement and approved by FHA such developers, such as William Bevin, explicitly fought barred black Americans.

And in some cases, Jews from buying into these subdivisions. And that was where, we think of it as duh, that’s not right. Back not too long ago, stuff like that.

That Supreme court case Jones vs Mayer prohibited discrimination in real estate transactions. Fun fact, just a little while ago, I saw, I used to have a lot of properties of Birmingham, but Birmingham or the state of Alabama just got rid of a law that said that you could not teach yoga in public schools because they thought that it was the hokey-pokey or kind of mix of churches.

Type of stuff strange, right? This country is so diverse, so amazing, great to live here. So no matter what size of home and yard that possess some urban communities felt like they had a stake in maintaining the social or physical characteristics of their neighborhood to ensure that new development would serve only high income brackets, suburbs, commonly imposed, minimum, large minimum.

House lot size is often up to three acres, but sometimes up to 10 over time, many came to see any new development as a threat to their quality of life. The not in not in my neighborhood. When I was an industrial engineer, we would study things like, they would design like bridges on not really highways, but major thoroughfares to eliminate buses coming through cars.

Buses. So it was one of those like social engineering type of things to keep the poor people out.

Local officials responded by making it more difficult for home builders to obtain construction permits from the 1970s onwards, they implemented measures that impure or block new construction in the name of saving nature. A process that the late Bernard Ferdin a long-time professor at MIT. Describe as the environmental protection hustle, suburban cities and towns became composing outright limits and moratoria on new construction to slow or to scorch development.

In addition, building development, official city engineers, the fire marshals, each impose increasingly demand requirements on new residential development in the 21st century. No large municipalities Metropolitan’s continued to impose non zoning. Anti-growth measures these included, not wanting environments and building Coles, which was their sly way of living growth, but also requirements for project approval from two or more government entities, extracting fees for developers and formal design.

Such restriction, constrained development and thus could contributed to the rise in housing prices. I used to be a city engineer and city controls the permits they can designate who builds and who does it, and they can guide the growth of a city and who moves in and what kind of clientele that they serve.

It’s. So this, if you guys are living in fairytale land, where you believe that, you, anybody can live where they want, you may be mistaken,

but there’s been a movement to increase density and remove barriers to housing developments sometimes called yes. In my backyard has brought about the. Single family zoning fans, as well as new rules to apply accessory dwelling units in single-family houses in states and localities, most notably, Oregon, California, and Connecticut, but the efforts to get rid of single family districts have not addressed the plethora of obstacles to residential development on a scale that would affect housing prices.

Many places have a little. Have failed to increase the level, height or size of the building to allow for more density in Oregon zoning reforms allowed them to Sally’s to acquire large lot sizes, California and new laws allows local jurisdictions to impose more occupancy restrictions on subdivided, lots, these local zoning and design requirements in place and accept lands that have been deemed prime farmland, wetland, or part of conservation.

The new zoning rules usually allow building up to four units on a previous, the single family, a lot, a single number that will remain likely the most development that had been done on one lot at a time by homeowners and small skill builders. Overall, this is a small process. And if you want to grow your YouTube channel and you want to scare people to clicking on your video and watching your videos so you can collect ad revenue that way you scare the crap out of people.

And you tell them that the world is coming to an end, like California housing bubble is going to pop because a handful of inputs are now allowing some duplexes, triplex, or pods to be. As opposed to a traditionally single-family home neighborhood. I just don’t believe that impacts things too much.

That’s why do we need this? Because our country’s population is growing and we need more of this. Value-based. Type of housing to house the Lord middle-class because the shame, the middle-class are dying out. It’s endangered species and they’re becoming the lower middle class and they need, they don’t, they can’t afford these larger single family home lots and generally moving into multi-family apartments.

Last point here merely eliminated single family zoning histories just is light unlikely to increase housing stock. Significant, as I just said, To at least residential development will require peeling back layers of regulations that have accrued over the decades. This could mean reducing minimum, lot sizes, relaxing, overly stringent construction, and site requirements, easing design reviews, and rolling back some environmental controls.

Being certain provisions for wetlands and open space, the political efforts necessary to reverse such entrenched practices, how it will be formidable so that the recent laws against single-family zoning are, but the first steps in a large March. So what they’re saying is, yeah, sure. It can be open to single family home or duplex surplus applause, but good luck trying to get a permit.

Moving on. So the next slide here is taken from the Yardi matrix. A great data source. The image below is basically showing com the January of this year, as the vaccine started to roll out. Man rent increases have been pretty much skyrocketing asking rents nationwide, continue to break records.

Although there is some signs of deceleration, which, normally the rent increase go up two to 3% every year, which kind of goes up with the pace of inflation. You know what I mean? A lot of this growth for the first part of the year, until now, in my opinion, it just wasn’t sustainable. And it’s got to cool off at some point, but asking rents were up 11.4% year over year in September.

Monthly rent growth was 16%. He read a 1%, which is the last month he gained since the housing market began to accelerate in March. And you say, oh my God, we’re going back down. No rent increases kind of goal or a lot more smoother in terms of increase and decrease the fact that it went up 11.4% year over year.

It’s just phenomenal. That’s usually what the top market in the nation. Like the best out of the top hundred, 150 markets did. And that’s what the average is across the country. Just phenomenal. Sunbelt tech hubs are still leading the nation in rent growth as markets in the Southeast and the Southwest benefit from rapid domestic migration and job growth.

The migration story has been playing out for a number of years, but accelerated quickly during the day. Yeah. This is why I used to have apartment in Iowa or we build what best in Kansas city, Indianapolis. I just don’t really like those types of areas. Population growth might be, I might be going up.

I think of it as more stagnant. At the end of the day, the rents are not really increasing too much as it is. The Sunbelt states, your Arizona, your Texas, your Alabama is your George’s Florida. Is your care lines. Single family built to rent continued to grow at even faster paced and multifamily.

The nation rents are up 14.3% year of your occupancy keeps rising up 1.2% year over year. Andrew comments is the build to rent the next phase in your development or an offshoot. So the builds to rent to me is. I just don’t. The big institutions are getting into the space because we’re becoming more and more of a nation of renters.

I just feel there might be a good exit. What is hard to do is if you buy out 50 or you developed 50 houses, the loans don’t allow you to piece off sell a onesy twosy property here, there. So it makes your exit strategy pretty much impossible with that. I’ve looked in. But, with why do we like apartments?

We have one freaking roof, a lot of times, one major Shiller or individual HVACs. Whereas in the apartments, all we’ve got to worry about are the interior walls. We don’t have to worry about all these stupid roofs or all these, like backyard, all this, like landscaping. There’s just, there’s this double amount of things that can go wrong with a single family home.

Other reasons. I feel like single-family yeah. Tenants are a little bit more needy. They’re a little more entitled, right? They, they literally have a Fort to themselves where apartment dwellers, they know their role, they’re renting an apartment, a box within the box, and it’s just easier to keep open mind.

I dunno. I never say never, but I dunno. I just see the large institutions going into it and their property capitalize and they can do things that, the mom and pop investors can do, and they can do things that the private equity guys, folks like us can’t do. No. We don’t build, we don’t build little houses.

I, and I think that’s another thing, right? A lot of this is predicated on relationships. And who do you have in your Rolodex? There’s a lot of house builders out there, it’s just it’s a different type of business. The good.

Bill for. So John Burns reports, the build for rent story, the tenant preferences. So what’s mattering more is spending more money on some pet friendly home designs. So what matters less is don’t spend on head walking and services such as dog walk walking. So for us, we like pets. If it’s in like a.

The plus, or especially a because to me and this one, I’m just speaking in terms of generalities here. So give me a break. If somebody has a house, a dog or a cat, they’re typically a little bit more stable and they’re not going to move with what I’ve, that’s, what’s important to me as the investor.

Whereas you get into the class C housing. Animals are more like guard animals or they’ve you have cats. Now you’re talking about the cat lady at cat dude with 60 cats and they can be destructive. So I think that there’s a different, there’s a paradigm differential between the lower class, the higher class rentals that said.

That’s do cause damage. So it’s supported to collect more rent, which typically anywhere there’s a pet fee cleaning fee and then maybe a bump in rents, maybe about 10% plus every month for those pets, things that other people are looking for. Other high-quality finishes such as a fabulous kitchen.

And this is just, people have been in, locked up in their houses for two years and a lot of people are working from home. So it makes sense to spend a little bit more money than. Typical one-third that your budget kid budgeted, supposedly on your housing, some things that they’re skipping out on a spending less premium Florian, smart tech.

So the premium flooring and the real wood, I don’t know why people would want those. I like the luxury bile vinyl. It looks super cool. It looks sometimes even better than the hardwood and it’s indestructible. And when you get tired of it and if it happens to break, you can just fix it. I think that’s up to the game changer amenities so that people want more relax, relaxation areas and spend less on coordinating social activities.

So if you guys check out my last podcast on apartment life.org. We still feel like the social aspect is really the added value for residents to increase that community aspect of it. So we still like to do things to increase the community aspect or that’s wild seeing why people pay more or stay, they don’t move out because they have a community of friends.

The home office as suspending on a full office or den for single family renters with children, that having met nook is something that we’ve been designing into our new development for that, that dedicated work from home person. But they’re went, they’re seen as lot of people offer that extra bedroom for that.

People aren’t spending the money on. Not spending money on a full office for single and couple single founding renters merchandise, a bedroom for flexibility,

the national association of realtors and an article about renter demand shifts toward more affordable and suburban class B and C apartments. Go figure. They’re setting the apartment demand has surged during the pandemic, continued to soar to a decade high level as 2021 quarter three with a net absorption of nearly a billion units since 2020 quarter to absorption.

Just so you guys don’t know, absorption is new stuff coming online or vacant things be filled up with people or observed. Yearly quarter of a million units in the past 12 months as of 2023, the vacancy rate has fallen to a decade low 4.5%. And the asking rent has soared to a historical high of 10.5%.

So whenever you’re looking at, the demand or the hotness of the barn we look at a lot is not only it is where they asking rents are going. And obviously it’s been on a tear for this beginning part of the year, but what does that the vacancy rates too, can also be an early indicator of, or symptom of a better market or a worst market in the future.

So as vacancy starts to creep up, that’s how you know that there’s too much inventory coming online. And I think at that most cases, in my opinion, you’re going to see that the rent’s late. The vacancy tips. You guys are more graphical people. We have a lot of English in years. So the graph at the top, this coming from the highest 12 month net absorption declining vacancy rate in rapid rent growth as of October 13th, 2021.

So the top growth top graph is the absorption of units. As you’ve seen as of the last 20, 20 quarter three absorption has gone a way. Almost two to three times what it’s normally been. Vacancy rates have also come down. Typically we’re hovering anywhere from six to 10% vacancies. That seems to be the healthy about the vacancy across the board.

But now, Lowe’s are 4.6%, which is indicative of a good, hot, healthy. Asking rent year over year growth, obviously that has skyrocketed 11.4% since last year.

I will just comment, so when the 20, 20, 20 21 quarter one was the part of the pandemic, which you had, and I think my cursor is on at this point, I guess you guys can’t see my cursor. At that bottom of that low scenic rents cuff on a frozen, because what a lot of people, a lot of investors or operators we’re doing is just holding rents where they are.

It was seemed a little unfair with people not working, to bump up the rents. So that was appropriate at that time. At the same time, vacancy remained about the high, it didn’t spike due the pandemic. And that’s what we all thought it would. Maybe thought people were going to lose their jobs are not working, turned out that the pandemic actually froze everything, how it was, which is actually a good thing, right?

Heads and beds rents do collect your rent checks. That was the impact of the pit. That

now this is a breakdown of construction of apartment units by class in 2021 for. And the class is designated by class a, B and C. So eight glasses, your luxury stuff, B class it’s, they’re still pretty nice stuff, especially if you’re talking brand new, definitely not luxury stuff. Class C stuff is your lower income.

And this is why, like, why is there no class C stuff? The cost of that built the dang thing just doesn’t make any sense when you’re billing. Which is why barely any supply comes online. 1.3, 4% of new construction is class C what it is, it’s a split between class a and B, but there’s an interesting phenomenon happening here.

It’s so if you’re looking at the graph, this is probably a graph for a lot of you guys listening on the podcast to go and check out later in the year 2011. You have more class a and class B, but the spread was very thin from 2011 to 2016, they diverged. So the class a share of new construction greatly increased and the class B stuff declined.

That’s the same adverse relate relationship. Now here’s what I’m speculating around 2016, maybe there was just too much nice stuff. Which is why, which is typically what happens when the market gets a little bit overheated. The developers go a little bit too much have on building the class, a stuff that they can’t really get the breaths because there’s too much class, good class space.

So that’s why I think you’ve seen this backtrack and now you’re seeing the class a builds 56% class V builds 42%. They’re coming together against, so one would assume that this is a good sign for investors and the market that this is, will this kind of, this cyclical pattern will continue to have.

I don’t think you’re ever going to get it. It’s just, if I don’t, I never say impossible, but it’s just, it doesn’t, it’s not going to happen where there’s going to be a lot more class B than a, it’s just stupid to do that because you to, again, to build something brand new, it just makes sense that just build it a class.

So I w one would assume that that the just cyclical pattern where it squeezes and expanse will continue to happen over time. It should there be a recession? I, what I would think is the whole quantity would decline, but the percentages will remain the same. This is a graph from ALNF a L N price class averages of effective.

Everybody always says what’s the difference between a B and C D class. One of the big things is, the age of the property. If you want to generalize, I’d say 19, maybe the year 2000 and newer as class, a 1990s, 1980s is more class B 1960s, 1970s, his class C plus D is just kind of garbage.

That’s older than 67 a year. But this is a graph of kind of showing what is the effective rate rents, and you can see how they line up for the class. A slightly above $2,000. A unit class B is around 1700 class C is 1400 in class D is 1100. Of course these are a lot higher because we’re including high priced areas, such as New York, California, Hawaii, Seattle, because a lot of the class C properties that will.

We’re average rents will be around 800 bucks, usually about a little less than a dollar or two, a dollar, a square foot.

If you go by this graph, we’re certainly not buying class D most of the California pricing is a lot higher than this. This is again, we’re an investor needs that, take this all into account and understand this is just the whole United States clumped into one. As we all know, we are very diverse.

Culture political mindedness and also a wide range of housing options. You got a lot of different class, a pricing. Class a and California could mean 3,500, $5,000 a month. And in bourbon, Huntsville, we’re building this stuff. That’ll rent for 1400 to $1,600 for class a, if you guys see that little orange dot there, that is actually.

Percent change of the rents have been changing. And a lot of the increases has been happening in the a B class types of markets or types of assets.

Everybody’s been talking about the supply chains, sorta judges. This is why we like to go into stabilize assets because, and this only kind of impact. Development where you aren’t able to get in front of the problem where the shortages that in our world is 63% are the windows is that’s the primary, the issue getting those windows 17% is getting the lumber.

13% is the engineered wood products. And 8% is the concrete. So it’s. I don’t. I don’t think that this is taking into account appliances. Appliances are another issue too, but this is the building material causing contractor project deletes

overall rental. Market’s been skyrocketing. If you’re an investor being left out or I feel bad for you, jump on board and ride this inflation wave for the next several years. But are the top three challenges for the rental industry, putting out by the multi-housing news. First one recruitment and retention of staff, a lot of people, or if you guys have heard of the great resignation, I’m going to restrain myself from telling you my real thoughts about this whole thing.

People are burnt out. So people are like leaving their jobs. And a lot of it is like lower level staff. Although I’ve have talked to a few of you guys, who’ve booked calls with me. Some of you guys just done. You guys are all white collar workers or you guys are done with it, but most of the people partaking in the great resignation are the, the service workers, the people on the front lines.

And those are the people that typically will employ as the property management staff at these properties and the maintenance handyman staff. So that’s number one, number two. Finding high quality vendors representing the number one challenge, I guess I goes with number one, number two, loss rent, more severely impacting smaller companies.

And there are many positions in this industry that don’t require a college education. They are looking to create programs, promote the industry, to attract workers. There is a lot of churn in the industry as we need to see that labor pool open up. And one way to do that is to advertise industry and all the benefits it offers.

Reminds me of the whole teacher shortage. What anybody wants to teach a bunch of kids and not get paid too much sign up. It’s like property manager, right? Anybody wants to interact with tenants who. They only write two and one star reviews when they are on set, but when they’re happy, they don’t tell a single soar.

They say, thank you. They assume that they’re entitled for good shipments in their $800 apartment. It’s a thankless profession. It requires a lots of tact, lots of project management skills, lots of people’s skills and it’s a very key, critical position in my opinion.

If you guys haven’t checked out the family office, Ohana group, I think we’re getting up to actually, I got to change the site 80 members, or so the initial fee to join is going up next year. So please reach out before the end of the year to partake in 2021 pricing. Cause ain’t going to go down. If there’s one thing that is true in life, it is rents typically don’t go down and the family offers Ohana initiation fee don’t go down either.

Most people who join, should we save them or makeup four or five times that initial fee in their first year. So get on the inside and unless if you’re not tired of listening to the same old stuff, a podcast land, or just to give you just the tip to just get you confused enough to call the guest

and figure out what product and sales funnel you want to fall into. And lastly, help me out and check out my book simplepassivecashflow.com/book. Shoot me an email at lane@simplepassivecashflow.com. If you would like to help me out for a few minutes, giving me a review on Amazon so that my parents can be happy with me.

They don’t know what I do these days they’re upset, or I think they’re just confused I’m not an engineer but unless there’s any other questions, thanks for joining us folks. The legal disclaimer here, of course. Do your own due diligence and think for your guys selves.

 

Takeaways from Recent Family Office Meeting

https://youtu.be/6iE7Fi3C8Lw

On today’s podcast, I’m going to be going over some family office concepts that I picked up from a recent family office workshop I attended. 

So in this a workshop,  they had a keynote speaker, Tony Robbins, which is cool. He’s been getting involved with cross-promoting with guys like Peter Mallouk. For those of you guys who have read his previous book. I don’t think he works with them anymore. I think he works at the sky agent cooped up, but all these guys advise high net worth, a hundred million dollar families and above. 

Here at simple passive cashflow, myself and my other folks in my family office group, we are folks getting from 1 million to $10 million plus. There’s not really any groups for that so I decided to create it. If you guys want to learn more, go to simplepassivecashflow.com/journey. 

So a lot of the stuff I’ve been talking about today are geared for those hundred million dollar net worth families and above. So you take it with a grain of salt and I’ll try and add in some color what really applies to the broke guys under $5 to $10 million net worth.  For those of you guys checking out the  YouTube version of this. This is just a part of the e-course. The ultimate e-course, which I’m going to add in the notes in here later on. If you guys haven’t checked out all the e-courses we have, including the free infinite banking one, you can check that out at simplepassivecashflow.com/banking  and check out all the e-courses. If you go to the top, I think there’s a section for e-courses.

But here’s the first lesson that I learned. To get rich, you need to  really concentrate what you do first. Now a lot of you  listening, you guys are just salary guys. I paid salary guys. A lot of you guys make a hundred, 200, $300,000 a year plus per person. But the concept that they talked a lot about is, if they looked at the people who got up to the Forbes 40 lists. Your top billionaires and then you take a look at the people that left that list. I think you’ll find some very similarities where the people who got up though this, they were very concentrated. And the people who left the lists lost a lot of net worth . They did that  because they weren’t diversified and what got them there was ultimately what got him kicked off the list. . 

A great example, if you guys are familiar with Forever 21, it was like this Korean couple. They went all in on retail and just expanded like crazy. Some bad luck. Which of 2008 recession happened and the  rise of e-commerce. But, what they should have done is they should have found a way that diversify maybe in the same industry to leverage their networks,  current infrastructure but perhaps they should have diversified. I think they lost well over half of their net worth.  They got a billion bucks  I’m sure. But I think the bad way of taking this advice as being like I gotta be diversified. I don’t want to lose my money. But if you’re under like 10 million, a hundred million dollars net worth, I still think you’re in the “hey  concentrate how you’re making your money” and you’ll got to that point where you really can diversify. Just important to keep in the back of your mind. Once you hit your end game number and for a lot of us in our family office group, the end game numbers, we’d be up $5 million. 

Oh, so what does this mean for us? Since a lot of you guys are just salary workers or  entrepreneurs, business folks focus on how do you trade time for money at the best, which is likely at your day job? But invest on the side to get you up to that certain point.  Build up a  portfolio of concentrated real estate was all a lot of the people on this top Forbes list got their money and they diversified it. 

So another point I had here. I don’t have a BlockFi account. I have a BlockFi account but I don’t really invest more than a couple of grand in it. For me, it’s a waste of time, right? My time is better spent finding real estate deals.  If you guys are working pretty simple, 40 to 50 hour a day job you’ve probably got some time on your hands. But no offense. Your time might be better spent, learning a little bit about Coinbase, BlockFis, D5 platforms playing a little bit of money on there than to deal with a bunch of turnkey rentals or something like that. If you guys make over a couple of hundred thousand dollars, $200,000 a year, I would say perhaps, unless you’re really ambitious and you don’t have kids, you’ve got some free time on your hand. You’ve got a little bit extra bandwidth and you find it fun. If all those things line up. Then yeah, knock yourself out. Learn the Lord bill bought it. I like  the world of crypto was going, but for me, I’ve made the conscious decision as an operator of apartments that I need to focus on that and stay in my lane. 

Another thing that they talked about was this concept of avoiding locker room talk or the common guy. What’s a common guy starts to talk about, deals or ” Hey, there’s this great startup company or tech company that’s coming up my friend knows them, he trusts them” or the taxi cab driver talking about some kind of deal, whether it’s real estate or tech or just some business. And you start to hear these wordings of ” we’re going to go eight to 12 X in the next few years but you got to get in now this is the last week”. It’s just a sign of a sucker deal  and that’s what’s really hard. When you’re just some average guy, I still put myself in this category, you’re not getting access to  good deals. You’re just getting access to these sucker deals. If there were not great deals, you and I probably wouldn’t really get access to them. 

 Whenever there’s like that false sense of scarcity, right? You got to get in now, man, there’s this crypto thing is going to blow up. That’s a sure fire way to know it’s a scam, multilevel marketing type of thing. We’ve talked about that the past and the investor letters where, groups will pump up one garbage coin and it just becomes like a Ponzi scheme where the first people who were in, they got out  and then  everything tanked as everybody’s in that kind of investing  period. 

Another idea they talked about was if somebody came up to shark tank, And with Mark Cuban, Mr. Wonderful and they use that same conversation line that we’re going to eight to 12 X in the next few years, but you got to get it now. You get laughed off the set in that situation. 

For a hundred million dollar net worth families. Again, you take it for what it’s worth. The goal is to have eight to 12 non-correlated asset. In your portfolio. First question, what’s a non-correlated asset,? Non-correlated assets are like things that  are not correlated with the economy. Now there are different varying degrees of this, but I probably put real estate. Commercial real estate in this bucket to some extent. Other pure non-correlated categories are life settlements. It’s a morbid thing, but you can bet on people dying as you buy out their life insurance and you get paid up when the person passes away. It’s nothing more sure than death and taxes. 

Other non-correlated things are this is what the life insurance companies they invest in right. Large institutional class A assets, primate markets. Really nothing’s more certain let lower return than  that type of stuff. 8 to 12 kind of seems like a lot, I think what they’re talking about is multiple deals. Spreading your net worth out and having each of those to be non-correlated or to like hedging each other within  there. 

Me personally, most of my worth is in multi-family apartments, which I feel like is pretty safe. The need for lower middle-class housing. I don’t think that need is going to be going away. In fact, I think that demand is stronger and stronger every day as our population in our country and the wealth cap increases. But, I’m nowhere near a hundred million dollars net worth, but I need to be thinking, all right, how am I going to start to take, maybe I don’t want the best returns, but I just want certainty. I looking for those non-correlated assets in the future. Some of this might be crypto, so it might be gold. I don’t do that stuff quite yet, but it’s something I’m thinking about in the back of my head. The other thing that they said is Cassius trash, and this is coming from the high net worth folks. Inflation is a lot higher than you think. Somebody mentioned that 40 years bull market in bonds in the last year, guys. Where now $128 trillion is globally looking for parking right now and you guessed it, it’s going into real estate. As you’ve seen, Blackstone and just picking up little rental properties, I think they’ll fail. They did this back in 2008 when the big institutions just aren’t really good at managing assets, especially small little ones when they’re all separate around. What they really want to be in is large multi-family apartments. Where they could buy them within big dozens sets. 

Another point was don’t chase what is running. So crypto and tech are two things that are running in this point right now.  We talk a lot about emerging markets buying in places where the population is growing because of some economic growth and that’s more from a geographic standpoint. But what they’re not talking about is more from the assets sector approach. 

Real estate is another place where it’s always been even kill. People think, look, real estate is getting really expensive, but on all the highs and lows are pretty much smooth it up. Compare to tech bubbles and the crypto market. Try and look around what is the things that people aren’t doing? Something that I was looking at was maybe a development deal in New York. I’m not going to do that but like just thinking outside the box, right? Where is it that the unsophisticated money is not going into or is definitely afraid of. Maybe now is the time to go into shopping malls. No, I don’t really believe that I’m just joking there.  That’s traditionally been beat up over the last several years, perhaps now’s the time to go into it. Getting outside the real estate world, what is something that people, the rush has got passed and gone. 

Another thing we mentioned that the bond market is flipping. If the bonds can’t get the yield we want. Where do we go? So what are the high net worth families doing is they’re buying businesses or alternatives investments, the outer world.  That’s essentially the world that I tell a lot of people to get into. Get off of the retail main street or wall street investments where you’re getting killed by all these hidden fees and carried interest. 

Get into more alternative investments where you’re directly investing with the sponsors, cut out all the middlemen and get into more non-correlated assets because the problem with all the retirement funds and 401ks and all these mutual funds is you’re in this  heavily correlated to the economy types of assets. It doesn’t take a genius to make money.  In Tesla, when the stock market is going like crazy, like how it is because of all the quantitative easing and fake money.  It’s always going to make a run. The point is you don’t know when it’s going to drop so smart families, what they do is they diversify and like you said, non-correlated assets. 

One thing, bonds are a way to get cashflow and for people in our group,  once we hit around three to $5 million net worth, our mindsets starts to  to change. $5 million for most folks is enough money to just safely cashflow it. Maybe you’re not going to get 12, 15% plus, but you can save the cash from maybe eight to 10%. Take something like AHP, for example, you’re not going to load up your whole entire portfolio with non-performing note fund like that, but it’s going to be a small piece of your portfolio so you can get diversification and it operates like a bond. In a way where it’s just meant for cashflow and security. 

But with the bond market going away and where do you go? The high net worth families, they buy businesses. Not really for the growth potential, but the business is producing that cashflow every single month for them.  Take it for what it is! Some of you guys are probably taking like that I need to go buy a laundromat or I need to buy a carwash on those drive through car washes. Some of you guys, me personally, that’s what tells me is I’m going to go buy an apartment building or jumped into a syndication where I don’t have to do anything and I can get all the tax benefits without all the headaches. 

 Maybe some of you guys you’re a little bit more ambitious out there. Maybe you go buy franchises. From another perspective. What you want to be doing is getting away from ordinary  income. That’s what you get from your day job, your 1099, as you guys contractors out there, you guys want to move from that spectrum to the passive income side so you can use these passive losses to possibly offset your income on  that side. 

Ajay Gupta, the guy that Tony Robbins kinds of self promotes with. I think there’s probably some kind of partnership there with referrals. All of these gurus, they’re just marketing referrals to other people in the space. I think Tony Robins used work with that Peter Mallouk guy, but there was some kind of scandal or something you guys can look up that type of stuff if you’re interested. 

They asked Ajay Gupta what’s your asset allocation model and we’ll do this in our family office group. You know where it’s more applicable, right. People between one to $10 million net worth. If you guys join up that we’re not going to show you what people in our private group are doing. 

But what I’m going to outline here is what Ajay said, what high net worth   hundred million dollar families are doing I’m not saying it’s right or wrong. But when I go through this again, make sure that you’re taking it with a grain of salt. Y’all are a hundred million dollars net worth. You guys are barely even five or 10 minute dollars network. Don’t emulate what they do, but kinda take some things and maybe if you can emulate what the high net worth are doing. 

First of all, he said 50% of his stuff isn’t real estate and of that the 40% which is the 80% of the 50% is in cashflowing  multi-family self storage, like bonds, we were talking about earlier for cashflow. The other remaining 10% of the 50% or the minority port is 50% of his real estate portfolio is in  land, which the purpose of that is to preserve  value. 

This is exactly what I’ve been preaching to you guys all the newbies, they buy land and I’m like that doesn’t cashflow. That’s what you do when you get to be five, $10 million plus, or what Ajay is saying here is a hundred million dollar net worth families. They don’t need the cashflow. They’ve got $40 million in cashflowing, multifamily and stuff like that. That they can afford to have some money just sitting in a land bank, not doing anything. This is what they do. This is probably not what you guys should be doing. 20% of their total portfolio are equities. Now this is the stocks. Probably on their own and mutual funds and stuff like that they’ve probably got private managers to  do it. 

But this is what the high net worth family is. The very small portion of their money. 20% is in stocks. It’s just, it should be shocking, right? Like, why is it that the average American is like 80 to a hundred percent, this stuff? This is where success leaves clues. Do what the high net worth families do and they are very small minority in equities. Probably because it’s just convenient, easy for them and they’ve got 50% in real estate cash flowing like crazy for them. 

The next thing that they have is private equity. So this is approximately 20% of their total portfolio and private equity is seen as businesses, but not necessary the LP  part. Now,  when you’re a hundred million dollar net worth family and above, you can push your weight around and there’s a reason why you got to that point in the first place. So there’s some kind of operational value that you bring in that you can contribute in some substantial way to the general partnership. 

 This is where the rich are getting richer. These families will go into the general partnership, not saying it’s real estate. But more like operating business is where the family has built up at the network and the synergies and experience to add value in that system. 

So for example, say you are a guy doing a pizza franchise and you make dozens of these things. You’ve got your net worth to 50, to a hundred million dollars. Something that I’m just making this up on the fly. Something that might make sense to you is going and buying similar franchises that supplement either it’s very similar business model to the pizza franchises, or it is a supplement or adds on and augments the returns of the featured  franchises. 

Maybe you go buy a bunch of breweries, I don’t know, and combine the two. So these are seen as more asymmetric returns. So this kind of counteracts the cashflowing assets the 10% of their luggage sitting in lazy equity and land. This is the asymmetric part of the portfolio where the private equity is somewhat speculative, depending what kind of business you’re getting into. 

It’s not really like cash flowing  apartments or anything like that. These are more like businesses. It could just fall. But these are the opportunity for them to grow their net worth even more. And but it’s also heads from the other side and in this thing called what they call this tailrace. Or you could think of this as insurance. So this was a new term that I caught on a little bit. So what they said is, Any bet that you’re making maybe take two to 3% of that bet and put it in something that hedges your investments. So that should your investment go bad. That two to 3% greatly increases to offset your loss. I’m not, maybe in the stocks, maybe it’s like kind of buying I don’t know what it’s called. Maybe like a call position or put position and something that does the complete opposite. Or. Maybe buying a business that kind of supplements. Or it’s the opposite when one does well, the other does well. So for maybe if you have a short term. Rental, maybe you have some long-term rentals. So again, this is the concept of tail risk. This is what high net worth families do, right? When you have a hundred million dollars net worth and above. When you’re less than $10 million net worth. I don’t know if you, if a TRS is really that appropriate. I don’t know if putting money in land, is that appropriate? But it’s just something to think about, right? When you go into a deal, what is some way, where are you putting some money? So if the deal doesn’t go as well because of the economy, because it’s correlated with the economy. That piece can burrow and make the hurt a lot less. Just some side notes here. And they said maybe they like two to 3% in crypto. If not real estate. Where do you go for storage of wealth now, real estate just checks all the box off this stuff. It’s a hard asset. But the reason why you would want to do maybe just a little bit of crypto is because maybe you don’t have the ability to operate real estate. Then you get into syndication. But then again, the question is what if you don’t have the ability to find good, honest people to work with? And for those people. You’ve got to look elsewhere. There, there are other groups out there that, they’ll teach people all about index funds all day long because their assumption is that you guys out there are unable to build relationships with people. If you guys have been listened to this podcast for quite some time, and we haven’t talked, you haven’t joined our investor group and sign up for our lists. What are you guys waiting for? That’s probably the majority you guys. I’ve probably have maybe two calls a day with you guys and we’ll continue to do so until it becomes too much. But if you guys are one of those people out there that listing for several years now, and if never really engaged with me, Yeah, like real estate, probably. Ain’t your thing. You’re just not a good people person. And that’s cool. You’re really losing out. But then, yeah, that’s, if you’re unable to play nice with others and build. Real relationships because for high network people, your network is your net worth. Then that’s what you get. You get the scraps go after your index funds and go off of that. 

They say two to 3% crypto, if not real estate, where do you get the storage of wealth? Maybe they’re saying gold and silver, which is alternative to crypto. It suffice for the same thing, which is just a storage apart assets. And this is a big mistake I see for people that are under $5 million net worth. They load up on a large amount, maybe like five, 10% plus of their net worth in gold. And this is what I was saying. My first point was just because the high net worth people are doing this stuff doesn’t mean that you should be very careful. The people that you see, the gurus that you see on the internet, a lot of the time ask yourself, how are they making money? A lot of these guys will just be pushing out as affiliate marketers for gold and silver. And just trying to, scare the heck out of UC Bowen to gold and you buy from them that they make their three to 5%. So I don’t have any gold. If I were to, if I really wanted to hedge myself for currency and I wanted to. Just store wealth, which I don’t know if it’s very prudent. If your net worth is under $10 million. I’ll be do crypto. But I don’t trust myself to hold those cold storage wallets. So I’ll be doing it in an index fund, which sure. I’ll pay an expense ratio of 1%. There might even be some carried interest. There’s a lot of good ones out there. There aren’t really that many ETFs really yet. But very soon, I’m sure you’ll be able to get into this stuff where you don’t have to run around with a plate of engrave, You’re garbled means have your password and have to worry about that type of stuff. To me. That’s where I, I’ll pay for that convenience. And at least that I’m not the single point of failure to forget my password. Another important thing that these guys preach was reshuffling your asset allocation. Now this is, I tell a lot of people on our group write every year, take a look at your investments. Maybe 20% off that are your losers that don’t have the good return on equity. I’m going to say what’s return on equity. What if you have debt equity sitting in your homes or rentals? Get that out. Check out thePage@simplepassivecastle.com slash Roe for that worksheet there. But yeah. Reshuffling your asset allocation, figuring out what is your. Your most pain in the butt properties too. And then always be pruning it right. Selling off those assets, putting it into new stuff, keeping it fresh. Same thing that the high net worth do and something that they said that really stuck with me is. Do this, when things are good. Because selling the good ones. Is hard. Because essentially what you’re doing is you’re increasing the losers, right? But when things are bad. You’re going to be really wishing that you did this. Some of you guys might have, you started with, very crude at 5% of your net worth that the crypto. I still think that’s a lot, but now it’s 30 and 40% in crypto and you’re still riding that. But what happens when you lose half of it overnight? You’re going to be wishing you, what you put 25% of your net worth into real estate. Where yeah, you weren’t, you’re not going to make off potentially high return. But in that next. Reshuffle, which will always happen. You have it there. And part of this is just like mindset. If you’ve made a bunch of money in crypto or some other elsewhere or your business. What into somewhere where you can reliably make good cashflow and it’s a good store wealth. I don’t think anything is better than real estate. I doing this. And of course diversify it out over multiple assets. But, it’s kinda like this thing where it’s A lot of the stuff we talked about here from these family offices, maybe don’t apply to listeners here today. You still have to grow your network to me. Until you get up to $10 million net worth. Now maybe $5 million, you should have number, that’s where you’ve personally hit zero gravity or escape velocity. At that point, now start to change your portfolio to more the bond model. you’re going after more cash line businesses for cash flow, you’re going into asymmetric risks or limiting your aims to metric risk types of deals. Going into insurance, oh, yeah. I forgot to mention that. 5% of these guys’ network is in life insurance. That type of stuff. Infinite banking, right? That’s exact stuff we’re talking about. Simple, passive castle.com/banking to read all about that and get the free e-course by signing up there. 

They also mentioned there was some follow-up questions too, but like NTS, that’s the big rage right now. And, they said They were very like, timeless about how they gave us advice. Because I think right now you have a lot of YouTube videos everybody’s into NTS is the thing that talk about. Other than AOC stress or write text or rich type of stuff. But they say collectibles have always got up and down and in waves. And, the NTS is just more of a virtual thing, but, collectibles, like art. Wine. Maybe not baseball cards. But the time these are timeless. Rare valuables that always come up in waves. And it’s important to understand when it’s high, when it’s low and now it’s high. So don’t be the. PETA sophisticated investing do not buy now. And they always, they said the same it’s always been a very timeless piece of advice to buy two cases of rare wine. Save one, but drink the other. 

And they also close things out. And this is what we talk a lot about in our family office group is, more of the legacy creation teaching the next generation about wealth. All too often, I think what typically happens for first-generation wealth people is that. We spend all this time. Maybe we do it the wrong way. The 401ks mutual funds buying a house to live in right out of college, that type of stuff. Or as soon as we get money, ultimately it just we do this the wrong way where it doesn’t, it takes. Maybe to your fifties, sixties to get finally get financially free for most people. And in that time your kids have gone there. The. Once they hit 15, 16 years old, you’ve lost that opportunity to model the next generation. And that next generation. Sure. You’re going to pay for every means to go to that. To get college educated. But I think the problem is where you lose impact of the next generation on born generations, the grandchildren, because all their parents, all your kids are going to be able to teach them is how they went to college. And that may or may not be their thing. And we all know that what. Where they’re going to be putting their money, investing their money is going to be at the wrong places. They’re not going to learn how to make money. This is why, for a lot of people. That have joined our groups. I tell them, Hey. Give them that incubator investor e-course to your kids have them learn about this baseline level of stuff. They’re not a credit investors. Yeah. They don’t, they shouldn’t be going to syndications yet, but haven’t learned about the basics now to learn what’s inside the black box so that when they are passed on the wealth, They know about how rental property works. They just know basic business skills. And how the world works. And of course the last thing here is, health as well. The difference between somebody with a hundred dreams and only one is. In the, so the difference between someone with a hundred dreams and only one is their health. If you think about it, 

Right now, a lot of you guys are healthy. But if somebody told you in the next few months, you’re going to die because you have some terminal illness. You only have one thing in mind, which is your. It’s just surviving. Unfortunately, most people make changes. In life until they’re forced to. 

This can be said for a lot of things. Might them something. I’m thinking about lately is, the choice to quit my day job. And do this stuff full time. So people learn about real estate and get into deals. No, that was a big choice for me. 

But once I made that choice. My destiny was formed and I moved along this path. 

I, in that case, I made the decision. It wasn’t like a situation where things just got so busy and I was forced to do it. Maybe if you guys are thinking in the back of your head or something that you guys need to make a big change on, be proactive. Don’t be somebody who lets destiny force you into making that change. Make it yourself and control and all that. So that’s all we got for today, guys. If you guys like if you guys want me to share more stuff like this, let me know. And we talk a lot about this stuff every couple of weeks in our family office group. Which we don’t have any a hundred million dollar net worth families and above and nor I don’t think you would want to. 

I think if you guys are somewhere between a million, 3million dollars net worth, that’s pretty much where the average in our folks are at. Everybody’s still working. Everybody’s really busy. It’s meant to be a side financial club onto already what busy plate you guys are working on. Every group out there they’re trying to teach broke guys how to get rich, doing big deals. There’s really no other group than our family office group where  we’re teaching you guys how they just keep doing what you’re doing in terms of your highest and best use at your jobs, your salaries, your businesses. But how do you invest the right way and what deals to go into, who to stay away from. We help cultivate best practices for tax, legal then we connect you with the right professionals to make that happen. 

But the biggest benefit is the network and as you start to create your own family office, start to emulate what the hundred million dollar families are doing and above you’re going to meet  up to your group, the people that are on the same trajectory and on the same path as you. People you trust that you can rely on. More information on that, visit simplepassivecashflow.com/journey and I will see you guys next time. Bye. 

Dumping your 401k, Helocs, 529s, IBC, Spouse Help Accredited Investor Coaching Call

https://youtu.be/Acn5oHx-DRc

Hey, simple passive cashflow listeners. Today, we are going to be doing a coaching call where the topics are going to be withdrawing money from your 401k. Should you do a 5 29 plan for college savings? If not, what should you do? And a little bit review on infinite banking. I know a lot of you guys have been asking about that.

If you’re like, what the heck is infinite banking? And if you guys want to hang out with more of the folks, just myself and the person you’re going to hear on this next coaching call. Join us in Hawaii in January.

Go to simple passive cashflow.com/ 2022 retreat. And we’ll see you there.

 

 

Hey folks.

He just went to this syndication e-course. Why don’t you give people a little context before we get going through some of your questions?

Sure. I’m just looking to understand the syndication laddering. I jumped in there’s a little bit of a lag before I start cash flowing. And I’m dealing with spouse support, so she’s in this wait and see game. I am also looking at my 401k, I’m 41 years old. I’m pretty heavy in my 401k accounts. So what I’ve been looking at is what’s the option as far as borrowing and paying myself interest.

And I wanted to see if that’s what relates to this infinite baking concept that you’ve mentioned before and some of your content. And one of my other questions which I put these together about a week ago. You posted something about 5 29 plans and infinite banking. I have two toddlers and I’m trying to go after I’m thinking capture this time. This time my kids are four years old trying to do like a 50% discount on college so I am heavy in my 529s.

How about we come back to the college 529 savings after? Just a quick teasers. The 5 29 plans are like 401ks. 401ks are like investing for the clueless, 5 29 is they’re essentially the same.

Everything we’re gonna talk about 401ks carries over to the 5 29 plans. I don’t know why anybody does it quite honestly. Just because something’s labeled a retirement plan or education plan, doesn’t mean that’s what necessarily you should use it. If you just want to do what everybody else does, it gets killed and has a bunch of garbage options go with a 5 29 plan or 401k.

First things first, like taking money out of the 401k retirement plan. Let’s kinda talk about that first because it’s a very common thing. Most people don’t have too much in their checking savings account. Why would you, that’s just not good use of your money.

But then they started investing and then now they have to go. They start to realize that this alternative investing is real and now they start to go look for low-hanging fruit. So the order of operations is money in your checking and savings, your liquidity, your home equity, and you can get a Heloc or a cash out refinance.

And then in conjunction somewhere in there it might be tied in order of operations. But your retirement fund possibly getting a loan or just similar to like HELOC in that you can put it back, should all this not work. But most people start to get to this stage and they’re like, yeah, screw that 401ks stuff.

Because the issue that I have it is it’s retail investments. It’s all the stuff they want you to invest in so they hit you with these high fees, carried interest. Vanguard, I used to be in that stuff a long time ago and I thought, whoa, it was these are low expense ratios, right?

That’s nonsense! Like you don’t see all the hidden fees behind it, the marketing the salaries, expense, accounts and that’s the problem with the 401ks you’re trapped with that stuff.

I do have a HELOC and it’s untapped. Between the HELOC and the 401k loan. I figured the 401k loan I think now the maximum borrow is 50% or a hundred grand, whatever is, lower, I believe.

Most people take it all at up to 80 to a hundred percent actually, but you must have what’s your house worth now? And what do you owe on it?

My house is worth about 1.8, live in the bay area and I just refiled pulled cash out. I owe about 1 million.

Okay. So you have a pretty good equity position, which is actually not good in our world. Because we’ve got to get that moving. There’s a lot of people in the family office group that are running around trying to find the best HELOC banks.

Usually it’s just a community. They usually can be in like the 3, 4% range easily at 80% on the value so you have some shopping there to do, to go find that community bank.

Yeah, I went with my local credit union and I got a 3.2.

You could probably do better. It should be a lot lower rate for 50% of the value should be able to take it up to 80. But for now you’re good. You’re not going to blow through 500 grand a million dollars. But put this on the docket to be your next three to six month project is to go find that next HELOC . That’s going to get you 80% and that’ll keep it rolling for another six months to a year maybe two, depending how much you want to deploy.

Got it! And so I just figured though that the 401k borrow would be better for me because I’m paying myself interest.

That’s what people say in theory. You’re paying yourself such a small percentage that doesn’t really matter and you’re prepared to pitch yourself repair. You just throw it down the drain in my opinion. Again, follow the numbers. All of this stuff is just, what other people say. If your coworker saying this type of stuff, you need to stop it, question it.

You’re paying back yourself the interest, but then what you got to really think about is the sunk costs or the opportunity loss of keeping it in there. All this money is not making anything right especially the format. I dunno, you can make an argument either way, right?

What’s going to go off the stocks or the house. Both of them is a kind of a crap shoot to me. But most people they go on raid the home equity first because most people were really skiddish about taking money out of their retirement. They say it like that because you’ll get really freaked out when you start to do that type of stuff.

But if it were me, I would feel a lot more skiddish with money in my retirement plan right now, because that all that stuff is just pumped with money. Equity in your home I feel like there’s a little bit more secure, not just because in 2008 real estate, what the hell? That was a real estate crisis. That’s what triggered the recession in 2008. But typically it’s like most times it’s a crash the stock market with home equity values.

Yeah, I agree. I think that a hedge on the 401k with the market would be the way to go as far as pulling money out of that.

 

Before we move off the house, are you guys going to stay, you got a younger family, you guys going to stay in the house for the next five, 10 years or at least 15?

Yeah. All I gotta say is most people in my community. They say, screw the house. Let me go get like a little bit smaller, like rental or apartment that has a really sweet luxury pool. And let me spend my time instead of screwing around in the yard where somebody else cleans my pool for me but just saying right because you can unlock a lot of equity that way.

Shoot with a million dollars of equity right now, you could put into something AHP. I would have put all my money in there. That’s for sure. But that could give you a hundred grand passive income a year . That pays for 1, 2, 3, 4 kids college today. I’ll be four college kids in the future. There you go! That’s your 529 done. But they’ll choose to just keep it locked up in our home equity, Jack.

Doing the home equity loan, pulling money out that way and not moving.

For the time being that’s a great plan. I think you’re fine with that for the next couple of years. But if I ask that question and some people have that hint of Hey, I want to move in to a bigger house or a smaller house.

Then I say move out now and just dump the equity up now. But if you’re going to stay there long, What I would say is just refinance the whole damn thing right now and suck out all the equity, do a cash out refinance, suck it all out as much as you can. But of course, I think you’re still in the beginning stages, right?

So that’s where you want to use the HELOC a little bit longer just to make yourself a little comfortable. But at some point, you drain the equity because the HELOC can only get you so far. It can only get you to 70, 80% of the value in most cases.

Yeah. I will shop that. I’ll look into that and I’ll even ask my credit union, the next month or so rates are really good right now, too.

What do you think about the syndication in the laddering with the development at county line?

Developments I would personally go to more of a stabilized cash flowing asset, especially if you’re new to this type of world. You think of in deals in terms of risk adjusted returns, right?

Stabilized assets is like buying an existing lemonade stand with existing profit and loss statements. You can see what it runs or a development is just a shot in the dark in a way. Technically, if you could build it there’s more margin room for error but you have to wait a lot longer to see the egg hatch.

The way I did it and the way I preach general wealth building to people is start off with singles and basics. And in the syndication, that is more stabilized assets that give cashflow quickly and have lighter value add or in the rental property world for people under half a million dollars net worth just go buy rental properties one by one like how I did.

Yeah, I think in my situation though, I need to be a little bit more passive. I’m not going to go out and buy individual properties. That’s what makes your multi-family deals attractive to me because I can be passive.

I just have to say it because something Dawn, who is a young, kid’s going to listen to this podcast and then think they’re going to go into an apartment deal and they have no money.

And so I have to say that. But yeah, if you’re an accredited investor, in my opinion, people joke about this all the time in my groups. Can you really tell me any good reason to own a rental property, debt in your name, the headache, the fact that you’re getting abused as a robot rental? Let’s not get started with all this BRRR stuff, right?

I think that general strategy is going into intermittent deals, spacing it out and just dollar cost averaging, same technique they taught you with stock market investing.

My biggest challenge now is just negotiating it with my spouse because the conventional way to invest is just through the 401ks and all these other vessels to invest. I’ve got to convince her that this is going to pay off and be able to produce some passive income but the current deal is two years lagged.

You screwed yourself. You shouldn’t have done that, man!

I know I screwed myself but I think that county line projects going to be fun to watch and be a part of. This is why I’m going back to the 401k, because I think it’s a good strategy with Harton negotiating with her that it’s, if I wanna retire early let’s, use some of my retirement and not really hit the fan.

Which is just an emotional thing, right? Whether it’s retirement or money on your wallet, it’s all the money at the end of the day. I think where people get gummed up, they emotionally feel like 401k, Roth IRA, that’s your retirement. And I even have like sophisticated investors earmarking things in their own mind that way too. So I get it. They think one is more, long-term. One is more short term, but to me, it’s all the same.

You figure out what your asset allocation or time horizons are and money is money.

Yeah, that’s where my current head is at in as far as the syndication deals, you have the one presentation coming up today. I think it’s a Rora.

Do you see the fluctuation or the opportunities to tailing off or increasing? What do you see as far as the market conditions?

Right now, it’s getting’s good, right? Because the residential market has gotten really overheated in my opinion, because of low supply. I think demand has even gone in lower, but because supply has dropped so much, that’s what dictates the prices, which is very emotional driven.

That’s why I don’t like residential properties. But in the commercial world, we haven’t had that big run-up yet. But you’ve seen rents rise the first half of 2021. It’s all completely obvious what’s happening and cap rates are dropping. You’re having cap rate compression.

But it’s not to a p lace where, your average internet investors like jumping into commercial properties quite yet. Right? Maybe this time next year, for sure. There always be deals because what makes for investment? The banks lend money at X and the cap rates are Y and there’s always a difference between X minus Y.

There will always be a differential or always be a difference and when you apply leverage and that’s how you make yield. The cap rates will always be making yielding more than interest rates in a world where gravity works. I’m sure it could go backwards for a little bit.

I don’t think it ever has, but that’s what makes the world run right. I think what you’re getting to is Hey, what if I wait? If you wait, the best time to do anything was yesterday. They always change, like for example, infinite banking they always change the rules.

Best time to get it was yesterday, the best time another one was yesterday. It’s just constantly going to be that, you guys are just like making it tough for your guys doing this. Just be prudent, stoic, and just constantly dollar cost averaging into stuff that makes sense.

And it’s difficult now because you’re getting started. But to me, that’s the outlook that you have, you don’t need to be like me and have a hundred percent of my stuff in alternative investments. That’s for sure. I totally respect if you want 20 to 50% into paper assets.

That’s fine! But over time, the kind of the percentage definitely goes to alternative asset size. You look at I seen as a tiger 21, it’s all $10 million dollar families and above all paper assets. They don’t own like mutual funds and stuff like that.

I do think that we’ll always try to be conventional in some manner from our perspective. But I have a job to do and just convince my spouse that this is legit and try to jump into one of these like more conventional deals with you.

Let’s talk about that a little bit. Your spouse do they work too, or what did they do? You guys single income?

She works. She makes more than me and she’s in tech.

Good for you, man!

She’s really involved in our finances and that’s good I have to say.

Did I send you those videos from our bubble event where we had like a spouse’s panel? I can send. Shoot me an email later and I guess everybody listening, you guys want this spousal tips and webinars. Shoot me an email with the subject line spouse, and then we can send it off to you guys too.

The takeaway is everybody does it differently. It’s just like sick parent. You never tell another person that wants to do cause they always just turn around to get their own way. And you shouldn’t talk about it. But we talk about in our group and we acknowledged the fact that everybody has different marriage structures, different ways of dealing some your spouses, involve, which I think is good.

Some don’t care but tell you absolutely you can’t do anything that’s the most frustrating thing. So I guess be grateful that’s not the case. Sometimes, you have to make deals, right? Like marriages and negotiation. Did your spouse out of your family and their family which have more money growing up?

It was about the same but our backgrounds are completely different. I’m coming from a farm. She comes from the bay area. We have similar backgrounds.

Whenever you’re working with differences and people, it’s always cool to understand the backgrounds of the people then you understand more. Some things I noticed a lot of times is when like the spouse, if they didn’t come from money then they’re really gonna like in the scarce mindset kind of way. Again, not a bad thing. That’s just how they are. They want to cling onto the house so that home equity thing is a big thing.

Which doesn’t seem like the case here. I think that’s the cool thing with people who had money, lower middle class, we’re not talking like low, low end. But they know that there’ll be okay. So they’re okay with you doing things like, taking money out of your HELOC and refinancing or renting. Not owning, you don’t need to own, right? But in this case, there might have an issue with the retirement fund.

I don’t know if you’ve ever had that discussion. Okay, if I were to do one of them take a couple of hundred thousand, which is a very small minority of the whole net worth out of retirements or our home equity. Which one would you prefer? That’s a good starting point. And why?

Yeah, and I do think it’s going to towards the 401k because it affects me and my potential retiring early. And it may be more like palatable to her to accept that.

Something I’ve picked up from Chris Voss seminar he’s said, never split the difference. Funny! He puts you in a high stakes like hostage negotiation. One of the tactics in the book you can pay attention is like, when you negotiate and you’re in a negotiation in this case. Get you label the other side. So then you asked the question, it’s that doesn’t mean that you rather have the security in your house is what I’m hearing.

You labeled them so you get the conversation going, right? No, I’m not. I just think that, and then the retirement stuff is more your longterm thing and you’re, you would retire and that type of stuff, and that’s what our family wants. And then you draw out the information, as opposed to each side stonewall.

But it sounds like you have it sounds like a totally functioning relationship to me. Just got to figure out, you’re not going to go balls to the wall in the first year or two, for sure. But which of the two is the lesser and in this case, it’s the maybe leaving the home equity alone a little bit and going after retirement.

I think that’s what I’m going to do.

Good segue! We’ve talked about the home equity. So what’s your plan of attack is probably the whole the retirement fund. Like you said, you can take a loan on it. I don’t buy the whole thing about paying yourself interest. It’s just like a HELOC that the interest paid as a wash anyway. Next investment you’re just gonna take a loan, the retirement or something like that. Is that the plan?

Yeah, I guess my options would be withdrawal penalty with a penalty or take the loan and then I have my current employer’s account and then I have my own self-directed IRA so those are really like the options I’m playing with.

Okay. You have some IRA, 401k money that has with a previous employer that you haven’t gone over yet? I think one, one rule is you never really want to roll it over. You just want to keep it how it is, because once you roll it off through the existing employer, now it’s probably stuck there.

Actually what I did was I rolled it over into my own self-directed IRA so none of my previous employers have my 401ks.

What’s your plan and that’s talk about it with what the tax implications are?

Currently, my plan would be to take the loan out of my current employer. There’s very little risk that I’m gonna, I’ll work there at least five to 10 years. I had to have to pay the loan back either a time of when I’m terminated or terminate the employment over the life of the loan. I think it’s like a 10 year term.

Again, we’re talking about loans, right? We’re not talking about withdrawals. Okay. So for the folks listening your loans, you’re not taking it out, right?

It’s the withdrawals that now triggers the taxable event shows up as income. What we’re doing here is we’re dancing around it and which is fine for now. If you were more gung ho about this stuff, I would say just take it out. And in this case if we were, let’s just play that scenario out.

What approximately is your adjusted gross income?

Mine’s about 250, individually.

What about combined? Married.

Okay. Sorry. You guys are screwed. You guys are in a tough spot because ideally what you want to do is married filed jointly right now. We try and keep people under 330 cause that’s when you really start to get hammered with taxes. And again, you guys are listening to this in the future, these things, the tax brackets dance around a little bit, but the same idea of poppy ship prevail.

You want it to leak money out of your 401k slowly as withdrawals so you don’t go into that next higher tax bracket. it is whatever, if that’s your plan, but ideally you’d like to stay under there. If you guys made $200,000 a year, married filed jointly, you could take 130 out theory and not be too bad. That probably be a good bet because you’re probably paying less tax brackets today than in the future more than likely.

So I need to encourage her to take a pay cut or change jobs and take a pay cut.

Yeah. Both of you guys make high salaries and for those you guys, in that situation, it might make sense to just suck it up and just work, for burning the candle on both ends a little bit longer.

As opposed to some of our plants that have like disproportionate incomes like doctors and stay at home spouses, that’s the ideal strategy right now. They can do real estate professional status strategy, use the passive losses to offset income. Of course, there’s a lot of hoops to jump through with that rep status strategy.

And we’re not going to get into that now, they have a little bit of options where you guys. Good news. You’re gonna make a lot of money. As far as tax is options there isn’t too many, right? And I think now you start to look at less desirable options or exotic options such as like land conservation easements.

Are you on the lookout on these next solar credits? Coming out with the next infrastructure bill who knows what happens with that. But that’s where I would be looking out to next. Or, if one of you guys are burnt out, our time, right? Like I said, you guys have enough dry powder pretty, you should just be able to make a hundred thousand dollars a year.

The fact that you guys are not is on you guys. That’s just a choice that you guys are making, but you should have that much income coming in that I think that will sustain life for you guys. Most people in our group are pretty frugal. I don’t know why you guys are going to work tomorrow, but you are.

But that just takes a time to understand how this all works because right now, this is what frustrates me. Everybody’s stuck in these 401k, 529 garbage investments and that’s why you all are still working right now.

Make more. And then you try to defer your salary to no, yeah.

Paying at our tax bracket in the future. That’s exactly what the government wants. I don’t think they meant to do that cause I don’t think the government is that smart, but in a way they have a pretty much blank check on all your money right now, the retirement on the 5 29 and not 5 29, because technically you can use it for education expenses.

They can’t touch it. But your 401k, you got to pay taxes on that eventually in your IRA.

And who knows what that is at the moment, we won’t know until I retire.

But I’m betting, that’s going to be higher than what you are now. But the game is what we’re going to try and take it out or withdraw at some opportune time from now to the next few decades, when the opportunity to jailbreak it out, the word tax needs is there.

Again, it’s good right now for you guys. You don’t have very many, right now. But what we do know is like the money is in there now. It’s not making Jack it’s just retail investments, but the idea is to take it out slowly to get it into good stuff, which is still trying to land on your feet a little bit so I get that, but just do it in a tax smart way.

Some people are like, screw this is messed up I’m gonna take all my money out of that stuff, right? Whoa. I don’t know if you can invest that quickly and you just want to be a little smart about this, that’s just going to balloon your adjusted gross income.

You’re going to pay a boatload of taxes on that. Just fly under the radar, stay under a certain threshold, leak it out slowly as the idea. But, for now you’re just going to do alone. And that’s fine. You don’t really trigger taxes at that point. Another hangup people get emotionally is they’re like have to pay to make these loan payments right.

To myself, that’s just an emotional thing for me. If it really bothers, you just set aside a certain amount to extra, to pay.

Yeah, that doesn’t really bother me. It’s just, it’s moving money around in different pockets, right?

Yeah and I think that’s the hard thing , first of all they get emotionally tied that this is a retirement plan. You’re taking money out of your retirement and make no mistake. We’re not doing that. We’re not going and buying like fun vacations with that money for long-term savings in retirement. But it’s not going to be an account with a government for your future.

In regards to the loan, do you know, and there’s certain requirements that I need to abide by to take the loan, right? Or can I just take the loan freely?

I’m not sure on that, but usually they want you to have some kind of hardship thing or you’re buying a house, which should not. So I would think the only thing you guys have is the hardship. I think at this point, it’s going to be hard for you guys. Good luck you can get the loan! All roads just take the thing out.

Yeah we’ll see if we can get it. If not, I guess we’ll do withdraw.

I’m pretty sure you can take a long where your guys at there’s no there’s opportunities for that type of stuff. I’ve seen people like lie, say we’re using it for our home equity because something broke the kitchen bathroom bottle and then turn around and use the money for something else.

I don’t know how legal that is, but whatever I guess. You’re probably not gonna lie. You’re probably come back alright loan is eliminated as sort of option. So you gotta either choose it, withdraw money from your retirement or take a loan from your HELOC. So when you come back to your boss, which is your wife, what do you think?

I’ll be optimistic. She was gung ho for the county line and I think she’ll go for it.

For the loan, HELOC? Yeah. And I would recommend doing that.

I think what I’ll do is I’ll just lay it out, then I’ll try to sacrifice my 401k temporarily, and then that probably won’t work out and then I’ll land into the HELOC.

Yeah, loosening her in a way.

I just can’t share this with her.

Yeah, don’t worry. We’ll probably released this months later so you’ve got a lot of time.

I’ll just look, to hopefully, I can draw on that HELOC that I already set up now any time and when I see a good deal, come by, I’m probably going to jump in.

Yeah and what you have right now, I’m sure it will get you going for the next six months to a year. But you got a lot of equity there so , I would shop around. There’s a lot of disparity between rates and all the values. But what you’re looking for is like 80% on the value, the same rate or better for the most part.

And I think there’s another emotional thing people are like, oh my goodness, this guy’s got 3.2%. I want three, I want to get that. I don’t want to get 4%. It doesn’t matter. Playing a different ball game than most people, because you’re using the money for something else to make more money. I think that will probably get you bonded for a couple of years.

And I think once we get into the first deal and we get that first check, I think it’s going to help me with my negotiations with the boss.

Yeah. I hope so. I really hope so. Yeah. So are we’re good on that subject?

I think the next thing on your list was yeah college savings. So you’re a new father father I’ve taken a conventional road and with the 529 plans and you recently posted about that, right?

Yeah, 529 plans they’re just like 401ks, right? The jacked up thing about them is they keep you within a set of options that they want you to take because they’re high fees. They’re crap. And that’s my only beef with it. If you can self-direct you can self-directed retirement funds. That’s fine. I still don’t recommend doing that. I think you can self-direct your 5 29 self, it’s very limited. If anything, the Coverdell is better. Coverdell is like a self-directed 5 29, there’s more options that you can invest in.

But if you’re investing in real estate pros, tax free anyway, I think that’s why you do real estate. So the gates, all the reason for using this stuff, that’s my opinion. I just think if you invest in cash, you can pay so much less taxes. If you’re smart, because you get the passive to be losses that it negates any of these types of traditional, conventional things.

If you haven’t been tipped off yet, you guys that’s when you get slaughtered with the cows, it’s not a good plan to go conventional in my opinion, but what I would do for education is I would do like an infinite banking policy and just have that as your mark money, especially the kids are a little bit older, just put it in there for safe keeping. But now your kids are younger and my kids like the youngest thing yet for the most part now is the time where you want to be more aggressive, right?

Yeah. So unfortunately I did get aggressive with 529 so at this point, I don’t know how I could get out of the 529 without taking a penalty.

What do you got in there?

I’ve got two kids about 80 grand each.

It is what it is. You can just leave it in there. Start to do, what’s going to do. Not everybody needs to be a 100% like alternative investments. If you want some stocks, there’s your stocks right there. I think that the risk adjusted return isn’t that great. But if you’re trying to satisfy some diversification in terms of different asset classes, there you go.

I would say, maybe stop doing it. You could take it out too, but you already have money to invest, so just leave it where it’s at for now. Just, I wouldn’t put more to it. Does that sound like?

That’s pretty much where I’m at now and I do just designated as like diversification against alternative.

I got some flack for that post, cause like people are like, you’re such a a-hole dare you get rid of your kid’s education fund. Like dude, chill out, man. I have my other retirement and I’ve got all these like money elsewhere just because I don’t call it a 529 plan that you know, it’s not a 5 29 plan.

It doesn’t mean I don’t have a kid’s college, like I’m not heartless other people I don’t know anything about kids. Yeah. So you never want to give parenting advice, but people are like it’s so like it’s very true. Yeah. Very true. Yeah. So for the record folks, I do have a college saving’s plan.

I just don’t put it in that 5 29 plan and I’m sorry if I offend you guys for saying that stuff is nonsense, but it is. You’re putting it in exactly the stuff that they want you to put in with all these big brokerages and their cafeteria garbage options. I’m okay with the 5 29 idea in general, but I’m not okay with the options they gave you to invest.

Very limited!

Yeah, but even with that said, I don’t like the 5 29, because what if your kid doesn’t go to college too? Yeah, to worry about it just make a boatload of money. Something I got really frustrated the other day. A lot of people, especially here in Hawaii. Have a million dollars equity in their houses that are grandparents.

Their goal in life is to pay off their mortgage a million dollars, put it into something I always use AHP. They sponsor the show too, but there’s just an example of a very lazy type of investment fund where you can get 8% I think now when you speak 10%, you speak 12% actually.

Long time ago, if you have a million dollars equity at 10%, that’s a hundred grand a year. That pays for college for three kids today, at private and I forget how much school costs. But I’m like, why don’t you like grandma, grandpa why don’t you get a whole home equity loan and get your money working.

They’re just don’t know about this stuff too but to me is a little selfish because it’s like they’re putting their security higher than they could be paying for their kid’s college today or that could be growing just so much more 18 years from now.

It’s probably bad that I call it selfish. It’s just they’re ignorant to the fact that you can do this type of stuff and if we’re all brainwashed to do exactly what they’re doing right, but I just got frustrated the other day, this is very prevalent,

Very true. Just taking advantage of that gift. You know the gifting.

It comes down to being good stewards with wealth, right? Some people have wealth and they don’t do anything with it. They just squander it for the rest of their life. Other people you know , they understand the risks and prudent debt and they able to have it grow or stay where it’s at.

90% of people or 90% of wealthy family and two or three generations for reason. Alright, good point. . If I were you I know you got other investible funds. I’ll just leave it where it’s at. It is what it is 160 grand in 10, 20 years. Isn’t going to be enough.

They say Stanford and 18 years will be $450,000.

Apparently the side doors closed no, I watched that Netflix special. A bad joke though. The one where all these, like the rich parents were paying for their kids to get in to the colleges. You got to go in the back door and that’s really expensive. It is what it is, with the college stuff for you.

Yeah, I just I’ll look into if I ever need to what’s your on 10% penalty, it’s some money, but it’s not a whole lot.

It’s very similar to some people like have really bad life insurance policies, right? The whole life policies that were just configured the wrong way, their long lost college, high school friends that they never taught. Yeah, it takes them off the lunch, puts them into this really bad policy. Most cases, you can just 10 35 into a new infinite banking, more friendly policy. But in some cases it’s just better just to throw the baby out with the bath water.

Another bad joke too, to just get rid of the life insurance. So the same thought process with the 529. Keep going with it. It is what it is as opposed to withdrawing and starting over again. Yeah. Like the infinite banking comes in because, especially if you have a skeptic spouse, at least that gets your money working 4 or 5% tax-free.

You can sell them on the idea that it’s off the table, litigators, who doesn’t like that and it’s not like you’re putting the money out to an investment where there is perceived risk on, investing in some dishonest person to infinite banking stays. It’s way more I probably shouldn’t say this, but it’s way more secure than any bank or any mutual fund.

It’s a life insurance it’s backed by some of the most like credit rated companies that’s been around since the civil war. If you want anything more secure, let me go to a life insurance company, the good ones, right? The top rated ones, not one of these.

That can be a way, like for somebody in your shoes who has a lot of dry powder. That you’re going to responsibly deploy over the next several years, at least, you’re probably antsy to get it done, but your spouse probably wants to pump the brakes. But as a compromise, maybe just do 50 grand- 100 grand a year into one of these infinite banking policies and invest out of it.

But at least your money is working in that and it’s building up that cash value over time. Everybody over a dollars net worth should have one of these things. It’s a no-brainer. And again, we’re talking to you non- accredited investor who has no money. Don’t do infinite banking.

Don’t get caught up in all the podcasts, marketing hype. It’s not for you yet. There are some fees associated, of course, but in the long run, it makes more sense than that.

Yeah. Cause you’re new to this stuff and share all these ideas. We want to get moving, but yeah, got the ball and chain in a way. The infinite banking is a very logical idea. I think that is very prudent and safe.

Do you have any content on that as far as the background of infinite banking

Yes simplepassivecashflow.com/banking is the place where I through all the webinars and stuff like that. But if people want more in-depth we’ve recorded some FAQ’s, and then if people need like referrals to folks, they can shoot me an email just put IBC in the subject line and I can send that to you.

Yeah, it’s a rabbit hole though. First, like when people come into the mastermind group, is trying to get them to get educated on syndication deals, right? Because the syndication deals is, first of all, you don’t want to invest in a bad deal, with somebody who’s going to steal your money.

So that’s the first thing we try and mitigate. So that’s always like a third of the pop curriculum. Like your first few months are focused on that and then taxes. Especially for somebody in your kind of, income level tax is a big thing, but infinite banking is at the end of the first year, Pete more, most times people who like to lone Wolf and do all this stuff themselves, which I think is dumb because good buck, I’ve took me so long and mistakes and wasted money to learn on my own in my whole, that’s why we have the family office group. Fold your hand and kind of teach you exactly what to do. And then we set you up with people within the group. Who’ve done it already. So you can both build a relationship and a process with that person that you can carry on forever.

Talk, whatever investing or deals do you want to talk about, or, and more importantly, the soft subjects, right? How do you pass this off to your kids? Without them becoming nincompoops.

But then, you talk with them, the pros and cons, how they did their infinite banking policy, why they did $75,000 instead of 25,000. But why did they do $250,000 a year, for example. And then you come up with your own idea, you formulate it, and then we send you off to all the tax legal guys after you’ve already had your plan, because in most cases, if you go off to a professional.

They’re just going to sell you what they’re trying to sell you. There’s so there’s so many things in this financial world, that’s just a bunch of products. You really need somebody who’s going to architect it and that’s going to be you. You gotta be educated in power to talk intelligently and to know what you don’t want.

But yeah, the infinite banking is at the tail end of it. It’s a huge rabbit hole for sure. Huge in terms of burning it. No most people who’ve done it. Say, there’s sort of stuff on it, but just get it then. And don’t complicate it. Just get get like a policy. Like my ch my golden rule is start off with a third of your annual net.

So you guys, I don’t know how much you guys net at the end of the year, but maybe you guys net $120,000 to savings. You could put that to me. Four houses a year. If you want it to, if you want it, if you didn’t value your time and energy, you could buy four axles with that. But my general infinite banking and start off with Elisa third of your debt every year.

And then that way you learn how the infinite banking works. You take loans from that. You invest it, then you have more money. You put it back in there and you learn how it works. And so it’s always good to start off with a little bit of a test investment first and then then go bigger.

My, my first one that I did for myself was $50,000 a year. And then I did bigger after that, after I got the hang of it. But yeah, if you guys net one 20,000 after income minus expenses for a year, do 40 grand every year, but because you have. Like liquidity in a way I think based on the little bit, I’ve refreshed myself in this last, 30 minutes hour talking, I think you should, you guys should probably do 50 to a hundred thousand dollars a year, right?

Because you have all that fullback equity not to check, which you want to do is take that and put it into here for now. You can take it right back with the next day as opponent. That’s the whole point. That’s what you’re trying to do in banking. Yeah. So in fact, I would probably do a hundred grand just shooting from the hip or at least 40 grand a year for five to six years.

I always like to do the shorter period personally. The insurance salesman is always going to try and get you the longer ones. So they get requisitions. They don’t have to deal with you less, every 10 years instead of every six years, but that’s yeah. That’s just my take on it, but we’ve got a lot of content on it.

I’ll just shoot me an email, the subject line, and then I can give you the videos and then I’ll connect you once. You’ve studied up. Okay. Yeah. That sounds good. Yeah, you do something right? Because it’s fun. Stuff is fun. It’s different. And it’s, but it’s totally different. Like we talked about this stuff, cookie. Yeah. I’ve, haven’t heard of it until now. So yeah. It’s interesting stuff. Yeah. And that frustrates frustrating is like everything in mainstream financial advice. If you look up Dave Ramsey, he absolutely heres this whole life thing, afar, he says it’s a total scam. And I’m like dude, you’re not even we’re not even configuring it the way you’re talking about.

And we’re using it for something totally. He says, we’ll get it. If it’s for, if it don’t get whole life, get term life, that’s that’s, what’s like it transformed, but it’s dude, we’re doing it for a totally different way. The wealthy use things very differently. They’re doing this as a way to put money in it.

Suck it right back out as a law firm, ourselves and taking money off the table litigators. That’s all we’re doing. And the fact that it’s like insurance that’s because we can keep it under this what’s called back level. We don’t have to pay taxes. So it’s texting people is what it is.

It’s a text loophole that the Congress people and progress Spain that were just falling if we’re not done. So it makes you wonder who Ramsey’s representing to to poop, right? He’s not representing any. I think he, I think he does a good job. Am and sees the army. A lot of these people, they just cater towards majority of people, the conventional, traditional people, the conventional traditional people are horrible with their finances.

They just can’t seem to save more money than they make. And, or they just don’t make more than $50,000 a year. And I’m sorry, if that’s you, I went to college and I was lucky enough to go. And I’m in the situation where I am. And I think some people in this world are in the same situation, but they play by a different set of paradigms than the people who are still at financial one-on-one level and all that.

So I think Dave Ramsey, I think their heart is in the right place, but it’s totally guided towards other people. Argument about buying a house, not buying house. Like I, I personally believe that you shouldn’t buy a house unless your net worth is two times, three times greater than what the health support.

So if you, if your house is $2 million, you should buy a house to your net worth of 6 million. That’s very unconventional thought. Yeah. House is a Dre. You need to be investing, bring your money. And so sinking in at a house. Not too much just going with the pace of inflation, but for the Dave Ramsey, Susie Orman, and people on the world, a house as a forced savings account, it’s something that they put, a thousand, $2,000 a month to, if not, they’d spend it like little kids. There’s just, there’s paradigms in the world. You need to figure out which side of the paradox.

Yeah, that’s a good point. Yeah. But just do the math. The math, the other day, the math to tell you what to do. Just need to go in with a very different lines. So yes. Bring that paradigm a concept up when I’m negotiating with the boss. Yeah. I do it to myself all the time.

Like I think the biggest thing that I see successful people have is an open mind and they look at something very, without any emotion or prejudices attach, like something that happened to me lately. Like I’m doing this for fun, like this exotic car hacking force. It’s kinda, it’s really cool.

But like the whole idea of leasing a car for some reason, I thought that was a good idea. And that’s too long ago and at least a car a year or two ago, I thought it made sense to me, especially because I was using it for business and I was able to write it off, but what they show me, it was like they showed the numbers, they show how wrong that thinking was.

And the whole premise of all our hacking is there’s a depreciation schedule and it closed and then you want to buy it, but it’s low and that maybe when it comes up or it doesn’t just bleed depreciation as heavily, that’s essentially a hacking at all. But yeah, I was really gung ho about thinking that he says, we’re good now I see the light and I’m sure my ideas would change in the future.

So I reserve the right to change my night. Fine. This is not financial advice. Yeah. But but yeah, anything else? Yeah. The family office mastermind I’ve looked into that. I’m considering it. I don’t think I’m ready yet, but I will probably eventually I don’t think they never ready for it.

I think you just need to do that now. In fact, now’s the time to be doing like you’re starting from square one. Yeah. It’s like shooting arrow. Now’s the time to figure it out, get something with a shooting in the right cow .

I’ll let you know when I am ready and hopefully it’s sooner.

When you got five hours a month to dedicate to something that’s when you know. We have over 75, 80 people in there. It’s not for everybody. Do you want to just keep doing it on your own? That’s cool too.

For me, it’s just deploying my capital. First I got to get through the boss and then I got to put some numbers together, how that investment would return in our household.

I think we have like at least a two X, maybe three X guarantee that you get that first year back.

Cool. Appreciate it! We’ll stick this in the archives with the other coaching calls and then if you guys want to learn more about that family office group go to simple passive cashflow.com/journey and I’ll see you guys next time.

 

Travel Hacking with Geobreeze Travel

https://youtu.be/kjiVzFbfjRg

Aloha everybody! Those of you guys who’ve been following me for quite a while, it’s been a journey from 2016, doing this podcast. I have always been interested in the financial blogs sphere, podcast space. It was early when I started to read all these financial blogs.

Back then it was silly things like which credit card you would get and you could get these 6% rewards checking accounts. What I would do is I would get these balance transfer offers stick 30 to 40 grand in the bank with all these business and personal credit cards, balance transfers at 0% and make the arbitrage of my 6% rewards checking account as I would go to the bank at 20 degrees outside and ring up 12 transactions at the gas station.

Those are the days where I just would waste my time because money was more valuable than time at that time.

Probably around 2010, I ventured into the travel hacking community a little bit. I went to one of these seminars. Didn’t really enjoy the people because a lot of those people are very scarcity mindset. They collect points, they burn up their time. It’s a hobby. I get it. It’s fun!

It’s like playing an RPG game. Getting points on a video game, but for real life, getting miles on different airlines and using those airline miles in different ways. I know a lot of you guys are into that because if you guys don’t get credit card points or miles you guys don’t spend the money on nice vacations and whatever I can do to get you guys to get those experiences in life.

That’s the point of today’s show is to bring on a travel hacking expert. And this is new to you guys. I think it’ll be a good primer. Some are old to the sport of travel hacking. Maybe in a way I think this would be a good refresher on what’s the newest stuff to be on the lookout.

 

 

Hey, simple passive cashflow listeners. Today, we are going to be talking to the creator of geo breeze travel.com and sync up on what’s been happening lately in the travel hacking industry. You guys are probably wondering why I’m wearing this like weird shirt and I’m not in my normal white collared shirt attire.

We just closed the deal in Huntsville and this is their minor league baseball team going up. Probably near one of our apartments. It’s a trash pandas. My dog’s name is Panda. It’s not trashed paddles. It’s trash pandas, but this little stupid panda bear right here, it’s going to make me a lot of money.

Cause we’re going to check in there in Huntsville. Why don’t you introduce Julia on the line here?

Hi everybody. How are you? I’m excited to be here today.

I think a lot of people listening they used to be into financial blogs. Maybe they’ve moved on as life has gotten busier as their network has grown buying rentals, going into syndication deals, but I can speak for myself.

I selfishly brought you on here because you’re a travel hacking expert and I’ve been out of the game for quite some time. I remember over 10 years ago, I went to FTU was that frequent travel university or something like that. My friends and I was like into all this getting all these credit cards getting points.

Back then you could get like 0% balance transfer and then throw them into a 6% savings account and just chart it that way. Let’s give people a little bit of like high level. What are we talking about travel hacking?

For anybody who’s not familiar with travel hacking at all, it’s a way that you can get free travel or a lot of cash back, if you want.

Just by leveraging the loyalty programs that are set by credit card companies or airline companies or hotel companies. And if you’re not aware, there are dozens of different credit card options and different loyalty programs out there. And it’s all about how to strategically approach the game so that you can meet the travel goals that you want.

You can get the travel that you want for almost free, very close to next, to no cost while just learning to play the game and plan strategically, which I think a lot of people in your audience obviously do as they’re researching different real estate and different passive income opportunities.

Yeah and I think that people listening, they’re like myself, optimizers and this whole travel hacking thing. You’re literally collecting points and then you have to figure out where to cash in those points at the highest value and it’s like a video game. It really is addicting. It can be a time suck. Maybe let’s start off with, you have a list here of some highest and, or biggest bang for your buck type of tactics. What’s at the top of your list, Julia?

It’s not a game just for how to use the points, but also even how to bring in those points. And so my number one advice to people is I have a few, the first is, the best travel hack is finding friends who can show you even more travel hacks because so many people do it.

The very unoptimized way of I’m going to watch 14 hours of YouTube videos and read blogs. But really if you just join a community, whether it’s on Instagram or a Facebook group or something, I host different Hangouts. If you just find somebody who’s already into this kind of thing, like you went to the frequent traveler university conference, it speeds it up so much.

If you can just ask your questions there. Secondly. If you’re like, I really just don’t want to interact with people. How do I do this quickly on my own? My advice is to work backwards. Some people will make the mistake of researching different cards and saying, I’m going to get a Chase card and then an Amex card, and then a Citi card, a Hilton card, a Marriott card or United card then I’m going to figure out what to do with all of those.

And that’s a really inefficient way to go about it. Instead, I would recommend start with the goal that you have in mind for free travel and work backwards from there. If you’re telling yourself, okay, I want a free trip to New York city and I currently live in Hawaii.

Here are the airlines that fly from Hawaii to New York city. I want to stay in this area of Manhattan. Here are the different hotels that are servicing in that area. Here’s how many points I would need to get that free flight and to get however many nights in a hotel for free. And then here are the credit cards that can earn me kinds of points that can actually be transferred correctly to that airline or that hotel.

Then it really narrows down how many things you actually have to research and figure out and how many points you need to get in the exact currency that you needed in rather than just shooting all over the place in the dark. Make some travel hacking friends and also work backwards to get to your goal faster.

And then, at some point you have to get some credit cards, right? Where a bunch of points. I think a lot of people in our sphere, we know about the old chase Sapphire reserve card, but is that one of the best today? Or what are the cool kids using?

If you are a very beginner, like this is the first you’ve ever heard about this, the most popular beginner card these days is the Chase Sapphire Preferred.

And as of yesterday or two days ago, March 21st, they just increased the signup bonus to 80,000 points instead of 60,000 points. That’s worth more than a thousand dollars in travel credit. So Chase Sapphire Preferred is one of the most popular ones for beginners these days. We always recommend start with your Chase cards instead of starting with American express or another family like that because of something called the five over 24 rule. Which says that if you have already opened five or more accounts with any carriers in the last five years, Chase is just going to reject you if you apply with the Chase card.

So it’s good to get the Chase cards out of the way first and then you can move on to American express that doesn’t have this rule. You can move on to Citi cards, bank of America, something else like that.

 

Good advice! I have a love and hate relationship with Chase. I do the tradeline cooking thing where I kind of piggyback authorized users of my cards. People want to learn more about it, go to simplepassivecashflow.com/tradeline. I have a little e-course on that. But Chase cancel all my cards so not like that but nominal rewards credit cards. It’s a great place to start there.

Why did they cut off all of your lines? Too many authorized users?

Yeah, it was getting a little ridiculous. I was turning people a lot quicker than I do these days and I have to log about it. It’s good that you see a company actually has checks to make sure that there’s no weird activities that just bind. I think it’s good business, I don’t know. It’s like surreal but I applied Chase for data shows that they have their S together.

How many points did you lose when they shut you down?

I think at the time, I think I lost myself Westpoint’s 200,000 points and which goes to show, right? Savers are losers. Just like people with all this equity in their house, or, the bank.

There is a strategy called churn and burn where earn and burn where you’re earning points really quickly and then you want to use them quickly as well. You don’t just want a whole bunch of points sitting there in your account, not being used because a lot of airlines will de-value their awards programs.

And so if you just have hundreds of thousands of points sitting there and you’re thinking, okay like around the world trip or something is going to cost 200,000 points. And then the next year they’re like, Oh, now it costs 250,000 points and your points were just sitting there and never use.

Those aren’t going to accrue interest on points. You have to earn them and then burn them pretty regularly. So you want a high cashflow game.

Yeah, I was being an idiot. I don’t know what I was doing. I just wanted to see the points go up again that’s why I was thinking.

A lot of people who are in this hobby are really frugal and they’re just like savers by nature and they don’t like to go out and spend the points but it’s not like money. You don’t save these points until retirement or something. You want to earn the points, know how you’re going to use them and then know how to get more points.

Yeah. I was like that precious guide or what are their rates with my points, but how do we use them? What is the biggest bang for our buck to using these points? Since we get a book, a couple of hundred thousand points or so.

There’s a lot of different sweet spots that you can use for these points. I would say you should definitely learn about transfer partners. A lot of people, once they get the Chase card, they just always go through the Chase travel portal.

And then you’re going to get a set amount there where it’s maybe 2 cents per point or something, but if you could figure out how to transfer them to the different transfer partners, you can get a lot more bang for your buck there. One of them are advanced tricks. For example, if you were to Google United excursion as perk you can

book some kind of triangle itinerary, let’s say from New York to London, to Paris, back to New York and that middle leg is going to be free for United. And so you can super hack that in different ways where I had a hangout and a meet up last night with some people who listened to my podcast and I showed them a trick where you can do two little domestic flights.

It’s only going to cost 10,000 points total and then you just get a free flight across Africa or something. And you save yourself thousands of dollars if you learn the different redemption, sweet spots that way.

Once you’re getting into that type of stuff, to me it gets a little freaking complicated, right? Like all this like field dumping and all these chicks like that at some point, is it, at what point does it make sense for someone to just hire somebody like yourself to book that trip for you and how much do those things take costs? I guess Yeah.

So I would say if you’re the kind of person where you really like watching YouTube videos and really like reading about award charts and learning about fuel surcharges and all of those transfer partners, some people really enjoy it. If you’re a person, go ahead and spend a 14 hours doing DIY. If you’re like.

I really just need to get this free trip. And I don’t know where to start. Definitely hire somebody like me or travel hacking coach. And I do 30 minute free calls all the time just to get people on the right track. And I say, okay, here’s your rough plan? Please use my credit card links. That’s how I get affiliate income.

Or if they want to actually hire me to do a full 12 month structured plan to say, okay, each month, I’m going to check in with you. This is the car that you should get. Here’s where you should be. Just to stay on track and meet the sign up bonuses, because that’s where most of your points are going to come from.

I do that as well. And as far as how much it costs right now, I charge 125 for my coaching package for 12 months. And. That includes two video calls and a monthly check-in for a year, just to make sure you’re staying on track with the credit card plan that we put together so that you can earn the most points.

And then you’re not floundering around and being like, I don’t know what card to get, and I don’t know how to use these points once I earned them. So those are the kinds of things that I help people with. Yeah. So this is makes, makes sense for someone like myself. Like I have a halfway decent amount of points.

I think I need help on the backend like I kinda know what cards to go and get. I love to DYI because I’ve been in tradeline hacking and I’m always trying to get new cards cause after a couple of years and I can start tradeline. I get that but where my big blind spot is I don’t know how to use the points.

So to go someone like yourself I’d just be like, all right I got 150,000 points. Here’s where I’d like to go. Can you just book my flight for me?

That’s what card currency is it with? Is it American express?

I think that my American express, I try and stay with the cash back cards on that more, but I think I have a halfway decent amount of like airline.

I fly a lot to Dallas, so like 160,000 with them. We’ve got like 80 with United and then some with Alaska in September, actually butterfly with Delta too, but I never get enough. Here’s my problem, I’m always traveling for like business. I’m always writing it off. I never really traveled like a hundred percent personally.

Yeah. I haven’t done that for a while, but that’s where I would like to use my points because I can’t deduct that price of that flight. I’m just thinking like most things you hire the expert, you’re going to get the biggest bang for my buck for those points and then we’ll tell us two women.

Maybe tell me how you look at like, all right. Lane scholars points. What would you do? How would you book Meyer to Kurt for me?

Rather than saying, okay, we have all of these different points. Let’s see what to do with them. That’s the position we’re in now. So I could figure out an itinerary that way.

But if it’s somebody who’s just starting out, I would say, avoid that situation. And then instead say, where would you like to go on your personal trip? And let’s work backwards from that? You’re like, what do I do? I have some Delta points. I have some United points, so we could you’re out something like that.

And look at different routing maps and say, okay here’s some sweet spots if you want it to go to this city. But really the best points to start off with are the super flexible ones. The chase points, because they transferred it 28 different people, I think. And then American express is really good too.

I really like the American express points because. The membership rewards points can be transferred to ANA airlines through Japan. And they have a program where you can fly around the world in business class for let’s say 125,000 points or so it might vary a little bit. But 125,000 points, which is two credit card signups.

You get one Amex platinum, one Amex, gold, you have enough points for this and you can fly around the world like in stop in eight different cities, all in business class for just that. So those are the kinds of sweet spots that I can show people how to do and it’s very easy. You don’t have to do 17 different cards, which I think some people fall into that trap of if you don’t know how to do the award side of it. You’re suddenly having to open a whole bunch more cards and spend a lot more effort to get the same kind of redemption.

And I tell people like I’m like a recovering frugal cheapo. There’s two things that I’m fascinated with these days that’s Ford Raptors, these big monster trucks. And YouTube videos of people in first-class like Singapore airlines, Emirates and I don’t know why. But I think it’s really cool! You can get like, How much points do you need to have that kind of experience? And because those are like $10,000 flights, right?

Oh yeah! They go for more than $10,000 so it completely depends how far you are flying. I’ve seen them go for as low as 30,000 points for a one-way short segment.

If you just wanted to do a trans European flight or something. From like Paris to Greece. If it was six hours or five hours or so you can probably find some good sales for 30,000 points, which is half of a credit card sign up most times.

Because I’m here in Hawaii and I understand how you use the American carriers, but I think where I would need your help would be like the foreign carriers, just like the Emirates or ANA.

How do I get to use my points of those way better areas? So I would say researched the Star Alliance transfer partners, and you can go through chase with a lot of those. I like to search for award availability on united.com. It’s probably the most user-friendly and then you can also see the different transfer partners with United.

If you’re trying to say, okay, if I want to fly from Hawaii to tokyo, that’s probably gonna be Ana airlines. Which you would want American express points to transfer to that. But if you want it to do like Cathay Pacific or something through Hong Kong, down into India or something like that, then you can transfer some chase points over.

You can do some research on Star Alliance . So it involves knowing a little bit about the different routes and the transfer partners and also where you want to go.

Yeah. What’s the website that everybody’s using these days for all the route maps stuff like that, where they do, they just go to United or American?

I personally just use United and then I try to see what transfer partners are available from there. There used to be a site called award hacker.com that you could use to try to figure out the routing maps. It’s not that good. Honestly, it just ever since the pandemic, all of the routes have changed.

They haven’t been able to update their website because the routes keep changing so often. So I would almost say instead of a website, find a person who can help you with these types of things. I link to all different kinds of people who do this kind of work in my podcast, where I interviewed travel hackers from all walks of life who are able to get super cool redemptions.

What’s the coolest experience you’ve gotten as a points?

One of the coolest ones I got was super easy. I have the Hilton card where I got a free night certificate that I could use in any Hilton hotel in the world. Pretty much. So of course the next question was what is the most expensive hotel where I can use this.

And it was at the grand Wailea in Maui, which starts at $500 a night and it’s so fancy. Have you been there since you’re in Hawaii?

I’ve seen it. I don’t go anywhere near, cause I probably cost like locals, like 50 bucks to park your damn car so I stay clear those places.

It’s super expensive, but I had a Hilton free night and not only did I get the free night with a standard room, but I wrote to the hotel in advance and said, Hey, if you have any upgrades available, I have status with Hilton.

Can you do me a solid, an upgrade me, do a room and they ended up upgrading us to a $900 a night suite for free. And it was overlooking the ocean. It had a balcony and it came a free breakfast. It came with free dinner. They wheeled in a cart of all these local Hawaiian snacks and champagne and it was incredible.

Probably saved a thousand dollars just off of that one night and just have one credit card that did this. And so if you want to, I can make a link for your listeners on where to get that email template that I use. Oh yeah. I downloaded that from your website. Yeah, we can put, we’ll put the show notes on small passive cashflow.com/credit card, and then we’ll link to your website so people can download that.

But this is the cool thing. Like you had this like template of what you email hotels to get like all the free goodies and stuff like that. It’s kinda reminds me of if you Google the a hundred dollars trip and Las Vegas or fifth or $20 trip, I think it’s now a hundred dollars, but you tip the guy where you stick a hundred dollars and then they might give you an upgrade.

This one doesn’t cost any money. This is just a “Hey, I’m celebrating a special occasion. If you have any availability here’s my reference number for my confirmation. Here’s my loyalty number”. And so it’s just the information to provide hotels to make it as easy for them as possible to make a mark on your hotel reservation and say ” Oh yep, you’re here now we do have an upgrade”.

So that they’re ready for you. Especially do this if you’re celebrating a honeymoon or an anniversary or something, because the hotels really do want to be nice to you, but it’s almost just rude to show up and be like, we’re on our honeymoon scramble now and get it figured out for us with an upgrade.

If you’re being a little bit considerate, giving them some time to figure this out, email them a week ahead or something so that they can make some arrangements for you and they’re not scrambling. Yeah. Like when you arrive and processes, yes. It’s so much nicer for the hotel too, because then they’re not scrambling.

It’s nicer for you because it increases the probability that you’re going to get an upgrade. So have these processes in place templates are great. Any other thing, cool. Chick like that you want to share with folks that one’s a good one.

What else? Really? The other one is just connect with other people and there’s so many free places to do this.

There’s Facebook groups where you can ask people different tricks. I have my free 30 minute calls. I have monthly Hangouts every month where all of us will just ask questions of each other and then group think ways to hack things and it was like $5 to join. And I really only charged money to keep a way people who don’t care.

And also that the people who had to pay at least a little bit will actually pay attention and use the advice that we give. So those are some of travel hacker.com or that website, or like those credit card websites, those forms still good. I know what was another one that I used to stat wallet went away.

I haven’t been on any of these. I always just connect with individual people who run these websites. There’s somebody called pack your bag with points. He runs a Patrion where he tries different credit card techniques and does different experiments and then lets us know which ones will get you in trouble.

And which ones work. There’s a guy who runs a website called straight to the points and he is like really into researching all of these award charts and then has a paid newsletter where he just searches for award availability. There are two first-class seats on these different flights go grab them.

And so you, he just spends his time searching for these award availabilities and then emails his email list about them. So those are some ways to get the next level hacks is probably like something you pay a little bit of money for. You’re going to get a lot of savings.

And that’s a good technique guys.

Like just don’t be a free loader like it’s just a big difference between free lowers and people that pay a minimal. It’s a good appreciation. But let’s let’s end with this, like ciao hacking has sometimes connected with the dark side of the world, which is like manufactured spent. Can you maybe just highlight what is that for people who don’t know.

Yeah. So manufacturer spending for anybody who doesn’t know is a way to maximize the number of points that you are turning through your credit card. So you’re spending a lot of money or it looked like you’re sending a lot of money, but really it’s going straight back into your bank account. So it’s almost like this closed loop, but you’re getting points for running things through the loop.

And in the past, there have been different techniques to do. This. One was when the U S mint used to sell gold coins for a dollar, you would buy a $1 gold coin. With your credit card, they would mail you a bunch of gold coins, and then you would just take them to the bank and redeposit them in the bank. So you were basically buying money and getting points for it.

You can’t do this anymore. You guys know who you are, you guys did it. I know you guys did it back in the day. Yeah. Back in the day, that used to be a thing. So with manufacturer spending, there are all sorts of. Questionable things that people have done in order to turn all of these points. I have multiple podcasts episodes where people laugh at themselves about getting the police called on them.

If you do enough weird gift card things, people will assume you stole the credit card. Or that you’re money laundering or something like that. So it’s sometimes associated with. The dark side with manufacturer spending there, but I have a really good trick for everybody. Who’s listening on how to do a manufacturer spending technique that I would actually encourage because it does good in the world rather than destroying things.

So there is a website called kiva.com, k I V A. And if you haven’t heard of this, you can loan money to small businesses who need money for just a few months. And so you’ll learn however much you want $500. It could be less, I think it starts at $25 and then you loan some money with your credit card so you get points for the loan.

And then six to eight months later, they’ll pay you back with PayPal. So you’ve redeposit that into your bank account. You have to float the money for a few months, but I do this all the time because I feel good about helping small businesses. I get points on the credit card. I never actually had to increase my budget in order to get those points.

I just have to wait six months to get the money back. So that is a good way to turn a lot of points without spending way more money, because some people, they get these credit cards and they’re like I’m just going to buy a whole bunch of like purses and shoes so that I can get more points and that is not.

I repeat everybody. That is not how you should approach this game. Do not buy a whole bunch of stuff from Amazon that you do not want or need just to get points, approach it strategically. I just got a text message here from Bob. Bob wants to know what the interest rate on that Kiva loan yet. So you don’t make any interest.

You just get paid back the principal amount. They do charge interest to the people who are borrowing, but that’s how they do their operational costs.

You’re doing a good thing and you get all the credit card points for it. So if you have to meet a minimum spend, like if you’re earning 80,000 points for $4,000 of spend and you’re like I’ll have $4,000 worth of spend to do, what am I going to do? And then you just loan out $4,000 Kiva.

How quickly do they pay you back? The shortest time is about six months. Okay. Because I got a card that does 2% for general stuff. And all that does to your five to four, like just 2% back on everything. I would say really it’s only, I only do this. If I’m meeting a minimum spend and don’t have a good way to meet it for just general everyday spend, if I’m like, okay, which card do I use for this?

There is an app. It is called card pointers and it answers the simple question. What car do I use for this? So you just tell it all the different cards that you have, and it will say. Out of the cards you have currently available in your wallet. This is going to be the Westland to use for groceries. Use this one for guests.

Use this one for gross for restaurants. So card pointers is a really good app for that. Yeah. I will actually use the blue cash preferred card or American express, excuse me, 6% back groceries and uncle and buy like a thousand dollars worth of Amazon gift cards and other random gift cards from Safeway.

And I have a little shame. That’s what I do. Oh, no, no shame. That’s a really good strategy. It is a good idea. If you’re going to just buy a whole bunch of gift cards from the grocery like that, to also actually mix it in with groceries so that you don’t look like your money laundering, actually also buy groceries and charge those first.

Make sure the first thing going onto your receipt is like a banana or cool. I feel accepted as a safe place. Yes. Yeah, no judgment. No, this is encouraged because this is how you actually optimize points and how you approach it strategically by saying, okay. If I have to go to target anyway, rather than just getting my one point per dollar at target, I should go to the grocery store, get six points per dollar on target gift cards, then go spend those gift cards at target.

So some people are like, Oh, it’s really inconvenient to add in that extra step, but you can get so many more points that way. If you. Figure out these additional steps that you can take. What are you like someone like yourself for I have 20 credit cards. So I think I got them all almost once you get to end game and you there’s really, you’ve gotten all the bonuses right.

For these new cards. What do you do is manufacturing spend you’re really only means to get points. No, because they’re always coming out with new cards and new products. You can always close down a card and then get it again at some point in the future. So one of my first cards when I got into this four years ago was the chase Sapphire preferred.

I used it for a couple of years, got some other cards closed down my chase, Sapphire preferred, and then I’m going to get it again in a couple months because. You have to wait 48 months since getting the bonus last time. And so it’ll be right at that four year Mark. So then I’m just going to open, reopen a card that I already had before.

And so if you’re slowly turning through cards like that, you can keep sustaining the game. Plus they’re just always opening new cards. So you’ve got like a tracker on it, like a sauna four years later to get it. I one’s just burned into my mind because it was my first card, but there is a tool called travel freely.com and it’s a really good calendar app where it will send you email reminders about when your minimum spend is going to be due about three months from opening the card.

You’ll send you calendar reminders and email reminders when it’s about to be your one-year anniversary with the card or any year anniversary with card, because your annual fee is going to come due. So you’ll get an email that says, Hey, do you still want to keep this card? If you do, you’re going to get charged $95.

If you don’t want to keep the card, then you should close down the card. So you’re not doing, you’re not doing any manufacturer, spend yourself. Other than just keep It’s mostly just Kiva. Yeah. But that’s just where your minimum spends to get the bonus since. Yeah. Just the minimum spends. And then also, if any of the cards are doing some kind of spending challenge where if it has a special promo of this month, if you spend at least $1,000, you will get an extra 5,000 or 50,000 points or something, then I’m like I didn’t have anything planned for a thousand dollars.

I’m just going to turn it through Kiva. So sometimes I do that. Yeah. 2%, 2% for six months. So 4% a year. Tax-free right, because they don’t tax you haven’t yet actually on this stuff. I don’t know if anybody’s heard of this, but there was. A couple that was churning through like $300,000. In two years, they got cash back and through manufacturer spending and the IRS says they have to pay taxes on it.

So keep that in mind. Don’t go insane. Don’t turn through $10,000 a day or anything like that. That’s why I always encourage, just do the Kiva thing. If you need to meet some kind of minimum spend Or else you could get eventually caught and have to pay taxes on it. But there are people who try to make that their living is just to turn through points and lots of different ways.

I’m of them more legitimate than others and grab the cash back forward. And then they live off of that. But. Everybody who’s listening to this might be thinking, Oh, that sounds like a genius, like efficient thing to do. It is not. It is, you are driving all over town to get gift cards, to turn into money orders.

If your town even still allows this because it’s very location dependent. And so you are driving all over town. Because no store is going to let you just buy $20,000 in gift cards. They’re going to limit you to $500 or something each time. So it gets really inconvenient. You have to go back every day.

And I think a lot of people, when they’re doing this game, don’t take into account how much their time is worth to be driving around the stress of doing this. People do get their cards shut down. They get their bank account shut down the same banks where they might have their mortgage. So that would be very unfortunate.

You could get kicked out of your local Walmart or grocery store. They might just say you’re not allowed to shop here anymore. And that would be very unfortunate. You could get the police called on you. That would also. Very unfortunate. So I know I’ve been there too, because I’m very into the whole optimization efficiency productivity thing.

And it seems like manufactured spending is like the next logical step where you’re like, Oh, I got to sign a bonus. This is the awesome hat. What’s the next step? Is it manufacturer spending? It is not, that is not the next step. The next step is learning how to strategically allocate things and how to learn a word charts to optimize the redemption portion.

That’s the next piece is don’t just keep trying to say, I’m going to earn as many points as possible. Spend time researching how to optimize the points that you are getting at a reasonable rate, fun stuff.

But yeah, I think once people get to, simple passive cashflow, they start to invest in more passive opportunities and get away from being the landlord. It’s where I’m at in my life. Yeah, we’re busy, but stuff is fun. So I’m trying to find that, get back in the game and trying to find that like minimum effective dose that 80, 20, or maybe the 95 five in this case where I can.

Job a little bit more and have some, extra stuff on the side. It’s perfect too, for people who are into house flipping and real estate, because if you have to go to home Depot a lot, or you have to go to Lowe’s or really do anything with home improvement, because you’re doing real estate, you can get a ton of points that way, just from buying different supplies and.

I don’t know if anybody’s maintaining an Airbnb or something like that, but it also opens you up to a whole bunch of the business credit cards, which are really lucrative when it comes to points.

If you guys are gonna spend the money, do it. But you’re not going to spend the money again don’t make the transaction. I think we always have to end with that common sense.

Yeah. Don’t buy things that you don’t need just to get points instead, strategically figure out how to get more points from what you’re already spending and by doing things like the key metrics.

Any last thoughts, and then you want to give your contact information out there?

You can read julia@geobreezetravel.com. My website is geo breeze travel.com. My podcast is the geo breeze travel podcast, and I am most commonly on Instagram, my handle is also geo breeze travel. And if you guys want that email template to get a whole bunch of free upgrades, I’m going to give that to Lane to put into the show notes.

It’s at geo breeze travel.com/download-gifts. And if you go to the website, it’s going to pop up anyway with it. Hey, do you want this thing sign up for it, but I’ll put it in the show notes for you too.

W e’ll put it at simplepassivecashflow.com slash credit card. And if you guys liked this stuff check out tradeline hacking, simple passive cashflow.com/tradelines but have fun with this guys.

Don’t get in trouble but remember your highest and best use is like yet your guys’ day job. I know you guys are fortunate. You may not like it, but it beats flipping houses and having a second job. Thanks for listening everybody. We’ll talk to you guys next time.

 

Tax Benefits for Married Couples

Changing your relationship status from being single to married has additional benefits besides being with the one you love. This includes going on a journey in life together, dealing with your in-laws, adopting the family name of your husband as well as a change in tax filing which could mean some tax savings

Once you get married, you will have an option for tax filing if you want to do it together or separately. Once you decide to file jointly, you are affected by your spouse’s income, tax credits, and deductions (e.g. from real estate). 

single to married

However, if you prefer to file separately you cannot declare the standard deduction and you cannot take tax credits (like a child and dependent care credit).

Benefits of Filing Jointly as a Married Couple

Lower Tax Bracket

This has been a problem for some married couples before due to the marriage penalty. The marriage penalty used to happen when both earn almost similar salaries if combined, which drives their tax bracket to a higher level compared to when they were single. Luckily, Congress took action and reduced the penalty. If the spouses have significantly different salaries, the one who has a lower salary can pull down the other (with a higher salary) into a lower bracket. Thus reducing their overall taxes. Off the top of my head, this helps those single pilots who are plentiful in our investor club who make a great salary but are getting killed with taxes.

Securing the Estate 

When you are married, you have the advantage to protect the assets of your spouse when they leave behind. Because under Federal Tax Laws, you can leave an amount of money to your spouse without the need to pay an estate tax. This privilege can protect the deceased’s estate from taxation. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0d5CAh682VI

Is your spouse still skeptic about real estate investing?

   👈Watch this! 

Save Time 

This especially applies to the wealthy since for them time is gold. Of course, it will save a bunch of time in accomplishing the paperwork when filed jointly. 

Implementing Real Estate Professional Status

If you are able to implement a Real Estate Professional status tax strategy (REP) you can use passive losses from syndication deals to lower your ordinary W2 income. If not (i.e. two full-time working spouses) your only other option is going into land conservation deals, solar deals, or oil and gas deals – all of which have some risks.

Note:

1) There is ordinary/W2/active income on one side. Let’s call that the 😔 side.

2) And there is the ☺️ side! Coming from passive income (syndications, passive partnerships i.e. medical/dentist offices) and passive losses (depreciation, bonus depreciation via cost segregations common in syndications).

You can use passive losses to neutralize/eliminate passive income. That’s the good side and why passive losses are called PALs too (Passive Activity Losses).

From spouse about investing

There is a barrier between 1) Active Income and 2) Passive Income above.

You cannot offset passive losses (PALs) for active income UNLESS you are a real estate professional for tax designation purposes and able to create a “grouping/active participation”.

We work with our FOOM folks to help them craft their individual plans if REP status is possible for them.

It’s frustrating because most people:

a) Don’t stick with this and try to learn it. (Trust me it’s easier than first year college physics) It will take a few times before you get it as well as after networking with real people doing this 

OR

b) Say it’s risky and listen to their lazy/ignorant CPA. Who by the way has been stuck in they same occupation for 20-30 years.

Why would you want to take financial advice from someone who is not financially free? If you come to our Bubble/Masterminds or meet a few sophisticated investors in our community you would likely fire your current tax professional.

Listen

When a deal is successful and sold (full cycle) what happens then?

All investors will have to pay back the depreciation recapture (losses taken throughout the hold) and capital gain (the big payout on the end which is sale minus cost basis).

But don’t despair because although this is the case when you look at it myopically, in reality most investors go into multiple deals accumulating 100s of thousands of passive activity losses in their first few years investing. Those losses do not go away, but they become suspended to be used to offset future passive income and sales/capital events like this in the future.

When you exit a deal, what normally ends up happening (like Tom Brady keep winning more Super Bowls) is that you go into two more deals (with now double the amount of capital) and you will likely find that with those new K1s you could result in you having way more passive losses you began with.

If you can see where this is going… Yes, experienced investors with a lot of capital deployed might have 500k-1M+ suspended passive losses and have not paid taxes in years and do not appear to pay taxes for years!

Note: You can find how much suspended passive losses you currently have on your IRS Form 8582 – which your CPA is likely not giving to you and in that case you should get a new one.

Reasons to File Tax Separately

Your Spouse still has Unpaid Student Loan

Most student loans are not being paid much attention after graduation and at times it is being neglected.

Separate tax filing

This can cause problems since federal student loans are on an income-driven plan which means the amount that you pay for your loan (each month) is based on your salary. If this is the case then it is better to file it separately. 

Unsure with your Spouse

If for any reason you are having doubts or trust issues with your spouse then it is better to file separately to avoid being liable with your spouse’s taxes on their income. This will benefit you if you’re considering divorce in the future.

Remember:

  • When investing with a spouse, it’s important to have a plan when managing finances and investing. 
  • Every couple is different.
  • Discuss different strategies on how to talk finances with your significant other.
  • Recap of Breakouts. 

 

‼️Very Important‼️Communicate with your spouse.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65knagQEczg

In essence, proceed with the tax filing process where you would benefit most. Also, seek expert advice (from CPA) which is the key to understanding the whole process and you can maximize your tax benefits.

Check out this page with some tips on communicating these new ideas to your spouse.

More semi-useful info to be 1% better every-other everyday.

 

Creating Community With ApartmentLife.ORG

https://youtu.be/7IHIEHqI__w

Hey, simple passive cashflow listeners. Today, we are going to be talking about something we’re doing on a lot of our properties and some tips for you landlords out there to increase the community at your properties. Ultimately, it’s going to lead to higher rents and better revenues for you guys.

If you guys haven’t yet joined our club at simplepassivecashflow.com/club. We don’t bite, it’s free. I don’t know why you haven’t jumped in and hung out with us yet.

The new California SB nine bill. As you guys know, California has the population is increasing and there is a lot of homeless there. Basically, the way they used to have before is there were a lot of these single family home neighborhoods.

It’s one of those bills where it’s trying to distribute wealth and trying to get these traditionally single-family homes to be duplexes or multifamily so it can allow for more dense population growth and lower housing costs. What I think it’s going to be doing is opening up California.

In the short term, it’ll relieve some of that need for housing. A lot of these things take a lot of time and a lot of people freak out when they see stuff like this, they’re like,” oh my God, world is ending the California real estate market is going to crash because now you have all these single family homes now double in model supply and flooding the market”.

It doesn’t happen like that guys. In a year, I don’t think you’ll see a decrease in prices because I still feel like there’s a low enough supply and there’s a decent amount of demand so I don’t see, you’ll see prices go down at all, let alone crash.

But I do think that it’ll start to help out the situation where people need that dying middle market and the lower middle-class housing, or maybe it will not do anything, who knows? But I think the one president sending thing with this whole SB 9 California and Oregon are typically be durable, proactive states with these types of things where you might start to see this other more neutral states where they start to break open a lot of old money neighborhoods and bring in more debts building in those areas.

If you’re a rich person in a single family home neighborhood, you probably don’t like this. But for rest of the majority of the population probably allows and opens up the market a little bit. A lot of people are talking about this last week if you haven’t been paying attention, there’s a bill going in Congress right now to change many things. What this is they’re going after a lot of IRA owners and supposedly the rumor is this may or may not impact solo 401k folks. And so the big changes that are supposedly. Coming down the pipeline.

We don’t know yet and been telling people at my inner circle don’t freak out yet. Don’t be like these guys who watch YouTube all the time. I guess you guys are watching this. So keep watching YouTube. It’s fine. It’s good news. Good entertainment. Congress is saying now you guys can’t invest in their self-directed IRAs of private placements and syndications, which is jacked up in my opinion because it’s like how dare you tell us what to invest in. Some people who are the conspiracy theorists are saying, “well, it’s because the government is getting in cahoots with all of these companies like Vanguard, Fidelity, TD Ameritrade. It’s force them into all these garbage retail products where there’s high fees”.

Maybe that’s the case. It probably is the case, but I just find that connection loose a little bit. But what they’re saying, for those you guys who are investing in your retirement accounts, Lane told you a long time ago, not to do this stuff because I don’t know why you would want to invest in a retirement account into something that’s tax advantage already.

You invest in use retirement accounts for things that are non tax advantage, such as, like crypto, goes up but you gotta pay up bit lower taxes which is why you put it into your qualified retirement plans, such as this or things where you don’t get the bonus depreciation or even passive losses, like hard money lending, which is ordinary income.

What you want to be doing with iRA’s is those types of crypto or not tax advantage things. I wrote a really long article and it made multiple videos on this. If you go to simple passive cashflow.com/qrp, if you guys want the whole argument email me, lane@simplepassivecashflow.com. I’ll give you the big blurb of why I’m not a huge fan of investing in retirement accounts, unless you make over $330,000 adjusted gross income and you already have like maybe more than half a million, million dollars in your IRA. If you’re both of those two such criteria, various portion of people out there where it actually makes sense to have a solo 401k or a qualified retirement plan or self-directed IRA even a Roth case, but a bigger topic. But anyway, going back to the news here, people are like “if you’re gonna not allow me to invest in private placements, what am I going to do?”

And then people are like freaking out. ” Oh, my God. I’m going to have to liquidate my positions”, and keep telling people this hasn’t been signed into law yet, but supposedly what they’re saying is they’re going to give to people two years to transition out of the IRA and to dispose of those assets.

Or you can just take, do what I said, you know what I told everybody to do it. Just take a distribution, pay the taxes and the penalties. It’s not that much, any way.

This will probably change a lot of times that they’ll put something out there just for negotiation to get something else and some other. And call me asking why is this all happening?

You can think uncle Peter Thiel backdoored a lot of like class B shares of PayPal and created like a $10 million plus IRA. And he’s screwed the system. And now the system is looking to get back at him. Unfortunately, the millions of Americans who use a retirement accounts as a mechanism for sheltering taxes is also being collateral damaged.

What I personally think they should do to just fix the Peter Thiel’s of the world is just put a cap at $10 million on IRAs. Most of us fit under $10 million in the IRAs so that would solve that problem. But again, why are they not allowing people to invest in private placements?

I dunno, maybe that’s again, that’s the conspiracy theories out there that think that it’s possible trying to force peopleinto this retail, mainstream wall street products.

If you guys have any questions, comments, type it into the comment box below, I’m sure it’ll make people angry and probably wondering what to do. Well email your Congress person, whoever that is. I’ve never personally done that before, but supposedly that’s what a lot of people do.

 

 

I have Pete Kelly here. If you guys want to go to apartment, life.org if you guys want to Google their website, also take a look at what they’re up to. Welcome Pete, thanks for jumping on.

Thanks for having me lane.

So what is apartment life? What is the service that you guys provide?

Sure. Back up a little bit, we are a faith-based nonprofit that’s been serving the multifamily industry for 21 years. And so we help apartment owners and operators with two of their greatest needs, which is resident retention and resident satisfaction. And we have a program that saves our average client $188,000 a year and turnover, marketing costs and staff retention. And the way we do that as we address one of the biggest needs that residents are facing, which is loneliness.

Interestingly enough you’ve probably realized this since the pandemic, but America is dealing not just a COVID pandemic that they’re dealing with the loneliness pandemic. It was bad before the pandemic, but it’s gotten a lot worse since then. In 2019, the insurance company Cigna found that 60% of Americans would describe themselves as lonely.

Now, initially you may be thinking, okay, I’m an apartment owner. Is that a really big deal? If you are an apartment owner, that actually is a really big deal, because what that means is that your residents don’t have any roots in that community and it’s a community just down the road offers a good enough rent incentive.

They’re going to pick up and move and go to that community. What we found is that the more relationships an apartment resident has in their community, the happier they are and the longer they stay. The magic number seems to be seven. If seven of your neighbors, you’re almost twice as likely to renew your lease.

 

 

We have a program that facilitates building relationships and apartment community. We have two models: we have an onsite model and an off-site model. The basic idea is that they create this environment where people actually know their neighbors, they feel connected, and they do that through welcoming people throwing parties and events, looking out for opportunities to care for people, connect them to one another. And as they do that, it’s just the sticky community where people love where they live and they don’t want to stay.

At some point, resurface countertops, new flooring, nice stainless steel appliances only can take you so far and especially when competition is getting a much higher for the apartment owners or real estate investors perspective, tenants are gonna go to where the best value is and that value just doesn’t necessarily mean that box for the house that they live in the community.

Whether it’s, as the business owner, you see this as your responsibility or not, it is what it is. And this is where we got to a certain point. We would take over an apartment. We would do all the things you’re supposed to kick out a lot of the deadbeats, the shady characters and the way we feel is that benefits the greater community. That’s what most people want. They want those people out, right? Rehabbing units, exterior improvements, playground equipment, all those such new clubhouse. They start to put the money in, but the hard thing to get the property managers on board with all these extra curricular activities that didn’t really hit KPIs.

A lot of our properties we use third party property managers on. We hold their feet to the fire in terms of expenses, how much revenue, how much they’re leasing. Hard KPI numbers but it’s really hard and for those of you business owners out there who have staff or employees, you guys know it’s really hard to keep people accountable to these more softer KPIs on trackable KPIs.

We decided to bring in apartment life folks into the apartments in order to focus on this one aspect of the business and to really give it the emphasis that it really needs. These are the things like a mother’s day, barbecue or Easter egg hunt. It was really hard for us to get the property manager to do that type of stuff, because as things get busy, what’s the first thing that gets thrown to the wasteside.

Pete, I want you go over those two types of models, like how it works coz the first thing I thought of is ” Hey, this is like those two teenagers of the college kids in the red bull car that run around and spread joy and give free red bull around”. This is kind of the same thing.

It’s like that only they’re there to stay and they keep coming back. Our two models that I mentioned, one is the onsite model and what we do is we place a couple that lives in that community. They’re like the welcome wagon like they agreed every new resident when they move in, they throw all the parties and events.

They look for opportunities to care for people. Sometimes it’s the birth of a child, sometimes it’s a layoff or maybe a neighbor’s car broke down in the parking lot and they just help them out. And 90 to 120 days before that residence lease has set to renew, the team will go by and visit them again and just say, “Hey, we’ve really enjoyed getting to know you. We’ve liked, the feel of this place. And we’re just wondering, are you thinking about sticking around for another year?

As they did that time and time again we see retention go up. We’ve done focus groups actually on this. We’ve sat down with residents and said, “Hey what was it that motivated you to stick around? To what degree did the community make a difference?”

And I can remember one focus group out of South Carolina they said,” rent went up by 18% this year and we’re still here so that tells you how much we value it. That’s the on-site.

Those two guys are they like undercover? Does everybody know that they work as an extension of the property management company or apartment life, or are they seen as undercover, like field tenants that happen to give you a helping hand when you move in to carry your boxes in?

We come and we represent the management company and so rather than doing it undercover. We want the management company and the owner to get the credit for the program and so we just say, we’re apartment life. We’re here on behalf of your management team. We’re also residents. So we also live here.

And so they live in that interesting spot where they’re representing the management company but they’re not technically part of the management team. They’re a third party but they live there so they’re also a neighbor. And so that’s why we love the onsite model is because it’s that mediator between the two entities.

And so residents often will tell our teams things that they won’t tell the management company. And so they’re in a wonderful place to get Intel.

Even though in some cases they are wearing the polo of the third-party property management company.

They are but they relate differently because they really are seen as neighbors and friends. So I think about this one woman in Houston, her name was Kathy, single mom. The team went by to do a renewal visit with her and they were friends with her. She came to all the parties and events and said, “Hey Cathy, are you thinking about sticking around? “

She goes, “no, actually I’m not. I’ve had this bug infestation that the management has not been able to address and I already put down my deposit on the next place and they’re like, oh gosh, we’re really sorry to hear that. We’ve just really enjoyed getting to know you. And we’ve loved getting to know your daughter. And so they politely left and then she wrote him back that night and she goes, I’ve been thinking about you guys ever since your visit and the kind of community that you’ve built here.

And this is the kind of neighborhood I want my daughter to grow up in. And so she goes, I decided to let go of my deposit and then I’m going to remain my lease. And so that’s an example where maybe she was frustrated with the management company, but she didn’t voice it quite as directly but because there was a neighbor there that she knew was associated with the management team. But she viewed them in a different light.

Yeah. Like your resident your RA back in college dorms in a way it’s an intermediary, but understand your guys’ business. Like the people are those intermediaries are they typically younger people or I am assuming they’re getting free rent, that’s part of their compensation? Is it to help the people in those situations?

The economic benefit to our teams is the reduction of rent and that’s, what’s in it for them. I would say our two biggest groups of people who do the program would be young marrieds either without kids or just with one or two young kids.

And then the other largest group would be empty-nesters. We’ve had several empty-nesters that have sold their houses or rented their houses out and said, “Hey, we wanna go back to living in an apartment community. We don’t want to have to sweat mowing the lawn, and we love the idea of getting to know our neighbors.

So they’re usually like pretty extroverted people and you just find them off job boards. Unusual job description, right?

It is! Although we can promote it all kinds of ways, the best source of teams or other teams and so we find that the highest quality coordinators come from other coordinators who tell their friends about it and ” Hey, you would be great at this”.

I’d say the ideal profile, if it’s a married couple, one of them, as you mentioned, would be extrovert. The other could be extroverted, but what we really need is at least one person who’s administratively gifted or organized because there’s a reporting function to what we do, because we can do all kinds of great things.

But if we’re not recording that and sending that back to the management team, they don’t have any idea of what’s really going on there and they don’t know how to quantify the value of the program.

I’m selfishly interested in how you do this because trying to get a little bit better outreach with on the investor relations side, see what people are, what we can do to help.

And as you said, most of the times, the example with the person who had the bugs or whatever infestation, they didn’t say anything, right? That’s very typical of clients. Of course you have the 5 to 10% of people who just complain about every little thing, but the majority of the people are just good citizens.

They don’t speak up. So what is like your guidance on those, your employees? Is there like a spreadsheet where they go down every single unit and they need to have a touchpoint barcodes for them to sign scan? What is the, how do you keep them accountable?

We have an in house tracking system that we use where they can do it in real time or they can do it at the end of the month but they have to do it at least once a month record everyone that they visited. What their sediment score was when on the move in so if they’ve visited somebody, they’ll weave it into the conversation, “basically on a scale from one to five, how would you rate your move in?”.

And anything that is lower than a three or lower that automatically get sent to the management team and so that they know, “Hey, here is a retention alert”.

Because what we find is that people are already making the decision to renew within the first month of living there. And so if there’s anything that the team can do onsite to improve that experience, we want the team to know about that and so that’s one of the things we do. We have an in-house tool that the teams log in and record all this but we also partner with Modern Message. And are you familiar with Modern Message?

It’s an interesting gamification, a tool that has become very popular in the apartment industry, but it’s basically an app or a website that rewards residents for engagement. So you probably have some kind of hotel reward system.

Let’s say you’re a part of the Marriott and every time you stay at the Marriott, you get points and then you can redeem those points per stay. Modern Message done is they created a similar tool for apartment residents and so we partner with modern message. There’s electronic tool and then our team encourage residents to use it.

For our clients that have Modern Message, some of the reporting is actually done through the modern message app and we struck up a partnership with them so that at the end of the month we have an API that pulls the data from modern message and we can print it up in a PDF that’s sent on to our client.

Pretty advanced stuff and then I think that data gets fed in with the property managers, as leasing comes up maybe influences dynamic pricing, maybe it doesn’t. But what about the workload of these people? Is it expected to be a 40 hour day, a week job or meant to be more part-time for them?

This would be a part-time role that they do and their nights and their weekends. Because when you think about your average apartment community, most of your neighbors aren’t around until the nights and the weekends and so we look for people who already have regular jobs, but they’ve got some margin in their life at nights and on weekends where they can serve the community.

Again, one of the dynamics could be: young, married husband and a wife, and maybe the wife is wanting to get pregnant. She’s not wanting to work. She’s wanting to work part time and this is a way to lower their cost of living and in a sense, having a part-time job that facilitates neighborliness and their partner and community.

And then the other type of arrangement you guys do if we don’t have a free unit, you guys just operate on a mobile service. Can I just stop it at certain times of the day?

We do. Our oldest model is the on-site model and we feel that by and large, that’s going to be the most effective longterm in terms of actually building community.

But we’ve seen a lot of our clients have them pleased with the offsite model. For a lot of management companies, they want to throw parties. They want to throw events, but they can’t put a lot of attention in it because of the demands of their job. Working in the office, you’re just worried about leasing and you’re worried about maintenance requests and people paying their rent on time.

So the idea of throwing some kind of event or party that brings community together, it’s just one too many things and so we’ll take care of that. In some situations we’ll do what we call electronic visits where we’ll email out or text out all the new residents and say,” Hey, we’re having an event this Saturday. We’d love for you to come down and get to know your neighbors.

Let’s talk about some of those events. What kind of sizes, shapes have you guys pulled in the past?

If you get on our website, you can see like an insane number of pictures and event ideas. People who aren’t yet our clients will from time to time send out event ideas, some of the examples, something simple, like what we call a wine down Wednesday, where you can come down to the clubhouse, get a glass of wine, get to know your neighbors.

Sometimes communities that have a lot of pets will have what’s called a yappy hour and so we’ll have, bring your dog out. We’ll have a special treats. We’ll array for food trucks to come out. Sometimes we’ll have painting classes that we’ll bring in fitness classes. We’ll bring in a chef and teach them how to make a meal.

Pool parties are a big deal. You’re pulling it up right there at poker nights. You see all kinds of ideas up there. What we tell our coordinators is obviously you need to get to know your community and what works. And so we encourage them, especially when they’re new to trial, a wide variety of things to see what works with their community.

Some events are going to appeal to some of their neighbors and other events are going to appeal to other neighbors and so that’s the other reason you want to do a wide variety is you don’t want to keep bringing out the same 10 or 15 residents, but you want to really throw out a wide net that really helps people we’ll get to know others in their community.

Maybe talk a little bit about as the class changes, the clientele more A-class apartment communities versus the C class side. Do you guys cater more towards the other? If not, what are the events?

Historically we started out actually on the nicer end and so we’ve worked, I would say for the first 15 years of apartment life, class A and class B assets. More recently we’ve been doing more classy and even affordable housing. That’s actually a new division of ours is working on affordable and low income housing. The same principles apply, but rather than just throwing a party, which you can still do sometimes what’s helpful is to have what’s called wraparound services.

And one of the communities that we serve in Salt Lake City, our coordinator, who’s an offsite coordinator, organized 1500 meals in the month of July for 30 families. And with one of the residents who was blind, she helped him fill out lengthy paperwork in order to sign up for social services.

Again, we started probably more in the class A, class B assets but over the years, we’ve realized we want to have a tool in the toolbox to serve any apartment community that’s out there.

Yeah! You want to use the right tools. It reminds me of when the first had the pandemic and all these celebrities had sing that stupid song. It just made idiots of themselves. If you come to the wrong apartment community with the wrong event, you can come out the wrong way a lot of times. You would think a lot of the class C places, they need this stuff more than the class A side.

What we really encourage our teams, whatever community you’re serving throw the best looking event that you can. Cause what we don’t want to do is have like for a class C, like a Wiener boil or something like that, you really want the residents to feel like, “Hey, you put a lot of thought and effort in this”.

We have what we call eight layers of the event. Where the coordinators are thinking very carefully about the ambience, how do you create a sense of buzz around it? How do you facilitate people actually making friendships there? How do you take pictures and post about it on the back end? And so we just want the events to really have a sense of sparkle and shine to them.

Have you ever ran into issues with some tenants being like I don’t want cupcakes or on Thursdays, just cut my rent by 20 bucks. That’s where I really need the help has that ever happened?

To my knowledge, I’ve never heard of a resident asking to cut the program for rent reduction. What we actually find is a lot of residents say, I didn’t know, people still live this way in the United States. I think of one particular couple that moved down to Dallas. In the heat of summer and their apartment life coordinator was watching them unpack their truck. And just really unprompted.

They just went over there and took icicles for the kids or like lollipops or what do you call the frozen obstacles and waters for the parents. And this family happened to be moving in from Oklahoma and the wife, “I didn’t know people still did this in America. This blows me away”.

I was like, “oh yeah we have a great community here. We encourage you to come out to the events”. They became really good friends with them. What we find is that people really want to go, they want to get to know their neighbors, but they have lost the art of neighboring if you will.

And it just takes that one or two instigators, the catalyst to get that culture going in the right direction.

It does and I think all the more, since the pandemic has all of our social muscles have atrophied over the last 18 months. It was that catalyst that you mentioned was needed before the pandemic, but it’s needed all the more now because people really have lost that ability to make small talk and they’re frankly intimidated.

Again, they’re lonely. They want to get to know their neighbors but they almost need somebody to hold their hand and say, “Hey welcome! I want to introduce you to Bob over here. He likes hunting just like you like hunting or he likes fishing like you liked fishing”.

They really want that. And again, the management team is too busy to really provide that kind of level of connection. The most they’re going to do for an event is throw food out on a table and say, “Hey, free food”.

It’s just like you guys at work, if your boss asks you to plan a retirement party for somebody it’s really, is this my job description?

That’s a great analogy and honestly some on-site staff because their interactions with the residents often are pretty negative and needed cause the residents, some are always complaining. The last thing they want to do is throw a party for these complaining residents and so having a third party that you can outsource that to can be a good move.

Is this something, some of the listeners might have single family home. Is this a service that you guys would provide to like single family home operators? As opposed to one apartment where you can control the community. Is this something that you guys have branched off or thinking about branching off into some point?

Yeah, especially for single family build to rent, we have given that a lot of thought because that is a really big deal. And that you see a lot of the big players in the apartment industry going that direction where they’re building whole neighborhoods in single family homes, but they’re all owned by the same entity.

So they’re run very much like an apartment community but they have the feel of single family homes. We’ve met with several people in that space who said, “Hey, we would really like the apartment life model, but we would rather not call it apartment life. And so for that group, we’re looking at the name neighborhood life.

And so a name like that would probably fit better for a single family, residential neighborhood.

Apartments have the common space, right? And like you said, if you can get them to be friends, you just create so much value for the tenants in that type of setting.

It will be more challenging to do in single family neighborhoods. Now, I’m looking out my front window and last night hung out and had a glass of wine with two of my neighbors. We just sat in our lawn chairs and caught up and talked about life and it was great. We didn’t have a common space to meet in.

It would be hard to do Texas in the summer, but we we did at 7:30 at night, so it was a little bit cooler then. Even without a community space, there’s ways to build community that sometimes weather is a factor.

Any other cool events or other things you think the folks would like to know about what you guys do?

One of the other things that we’ve realized through the pandemic is a lot of our clients said you’re the only amenity that’s open right now. And they’ve said, we’ve got a fitness center but we can’t let anyone in there cause we don’t want to spread COVID and so I think that was a kind of an interesting discovery.

We were wondering actually, if we would lose business in the midst of the pandemic, but actually the opposite happened. We had a great year of growth because again, we were the only amenity that was open and some of the needs that we were able to meet were just really cool. Like we had this one coordinator up in the Seattle area who was really burdened by the food and security in his community and he got a lot of food donated.

He just started to reach out to churches and government entities. Before you knew it, he just had this whole operation going, all this food being donated. He was able to serve his apartment community and then the one across the street and it grew into its own nonprofit that has in the last year delivered.

I want to say 8 million pounds of food to apartment residence. Which is just crazy. There’s a lot of needs out there since the pandemic and it’s been a joy to be part of helping people meet with those needs.

I think, you guys are a perfect example of trying and find consultants, you put to work with. You seem to pay more money on the front end, but it’s something that you could have never done in-house. It’s just a very special,unique t alent and focus that you guys provide.

If people want to get a hold of you guys apartment, life.org, is there your URL. Pete, you want to give your information in case somebody wants to utilize you guys?

If you’re interested in talking further, you can email me at Pete Kelly. That’s P E T E K E L L Y @apartmentlife.org and either I’ll follow up with you or connect you with the right regional leader. And if you want to read more about us, you can go to just our website apartmentlife.org.

Thanks for listening guys. I think normally I don’t really talk too much about improving the communities. This is the whole part of increasing value and ultimately that’s how we make money. You don’t make money in my opinion, for a long-term basis by buying something low selling high something, buying something on Amazon, flipping it on eBay.

And that’s what traders do but people who make the sustainable wealth create value. And in this case, improving the units, improving the community with services, such as Pete Kelly’s apartment life, those are the things that create longterm value and create wealth. I probably empathize more with the investors.

A lot of you guys are hardworking folks at home, investing your money the right way in tax advantage things that utilize great wealth building strategies. We try and help you guys out. You guys are people I think of first. At the end of the day, you can think of them as are the clients, really the tenants who pay us rent? Or the clients investors, you could go either way on this?

This is what we’re doing on the tenant side. But thanks for joining! We’ll see you guys next week.

Why Investors Must Consider Real Estate in Huntsville Alabama

As of today, half of the year 2021 has passed. Though there is presence of COVID- 19 vaccine in the market, uncertainty in what things may come and in the real estate industry still never left. While we cannot eliminate the presence of uncertainty in our lives and what lies ahead, these two indicators drive real estate investors’ confidence: market history of real estate and how our country’s economy is slowly gaining its momentum back.

Can opportunity still exist in real estate with uncertainty at hand?

A big YES!

Real estate investing in Huntsville

Imagine we just started with less than a hundred apartment units in 2018 in Huntsville, Alabama.

As in any other state where we diversify our real estate portfolio, let us appreciate and get to know more about Huntsville, Alabama.

Why Huntsville, Alabama? 

Huntsville is located in the southeastern state of US, Alabama. Its population is approximately more than 450,000, almost grew by 12% and is one of the most heavily populated cities in Alabama. This growth is brought about by the growth in information technology, aerospace, and advanced manufacturing industries.

Years back, Huntsville was heavily acknowledged for its agricultural industry but now they are home for the NASA Marshall Space Flight Center, US Army Redstone Arsenal and big manufacturing industries such as Toyota and Boeing. 

Aerospace

A switch from agriculture to industrial is the fundamental change causing their booming economy.

Main Qualities Leading Huntsville Real Estate Market

Huntsville Economic Framework

Who knew that Bama… of all places would house this aerospace and defense Mecca. We previously referenced NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center and the U.S. Armed force Aviation and Missile Command and they are just two of the significant businesses in the city which blaze the trail for countless of other ancillary tech and hardware companies – more than 300 aviation, protection, and government workers for hire notwithstanding the many, numerous different organizations in the area. 

A large number of these workers for hire have practical experience in IT and designing. Government contracts are normal. Redstone Arsenal (the U.S. government) is the top business in Huntsville for 37,000+ workers in the area. NASA comes in third spot with 6,500 representatives, surpassed by the Huntsville Hospital with 9,352 workers. 

IT

Moreover, Huntsville is a city with solid aviation, designing, and protection areas. Supporting these businesses in significant manners are data innovation, bioscience, progressed assembling, and medical services areas. Likewise, retail assumes an important part in Huntsville. 

The strength of Huntsville’s monetary spine is plainly exhibited in the insights. In September 2019, Huntsville boasted a joblessness rate of 2.8 percent.

Job Opportunities

Occupation development hits 3.6 percent (2018-2019), showing a pattern that drives specialists to foresee future occupation development of 40%. Obviously, COVID-19 introduced critical difficulties as far as occupation development and work. In spite of this, the Huntsville region has kept on demonstrating itself to be hugely strong to a difficult, remarkable year. Across our 600+ units in the region we saw occupancy increase and rents go up even in 2020… and even more in 2021.

Notwithstanding a 8.3 percent drop in work among March and April 2020, Huntsville stayed well in front of public insights. Specialists anticipate that the economic recovery should require two years and three years for the GDP and vocations rates to get back to pre-pandemic levels, separately. 

In the prior phases of the pandemic, generally March through June, Huntsville saw a year-over-year distinction of 7.5 percent in business – contrasted with the national drop of 13%. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgF9o3aekak

Consistently, from 2000 to 2020, we see that, all things considered, Huntsville experienced work development twice that of the United States all in all.

Living Wage

In addition to the fact that Huntsville stands out from the rest as far as joblessness rates.

Huntsville is home to altogether more workers with a yearly compensation of $75k – 200k+ than the remainder of the territory of Alabama. 40% of the populace in the Huntsville metro acquires in this reach, though just 29.6 percent of all Alabama occupants fall into this class. In other words, the workforce is highly skilled compared with most US cities.

Local Amenities & Conveniences 

Here in Huntsville, Alabama, we appreciate and focus on open air spaces especially due to the  COVID-19 pandemic. Let’s admit it, Huntsville isn’t simply home to a hotter, more lovely environment, yet it is home to numerous city conveniences and administrations that advance outside amusement. 

Huntsville is home to various recreational areas , scenic routes, and trails. 

As investors we can breath a sigh of relief that we don’t have to worry much about Hurricanes coming anywhere past Birmingham which is a couple hours south of Huntsville.

Huntsville trail

Obviously, there are business impetuses. The economy normally assumes a significant part in the strength of the housing market. Huntsville gives different motivators to draw in a developing, various economy. Given its achievement in work and pay development, it is protected to say these motivators are getting the job done!

Culture and Population

Like in any other area in Alabama, the real estate market in Huntsville is impacted by the economy, culture and population. The most recent U.S. Registration shows that Huntsville is en route to turning into the biggest city in Alabama which is not surprising at all. Additionally, they have had a development in population of a few thousand every year. In fact, individuals realize the region’s peculiarity is due to steady employment, great schools, a perfect local area, and delightful open country.

Why Huntsville Alabama Real Estate Market?

Link to chart

Let me guess, you might be wondering why we are “pushing” the Huntsville real estate market well in fact there are other regions such as Birmingham or Montgomery

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MymYO40wx9s&t=3s

Believe it or not, Huntsville unmistakably has a strong establishment as a housing market. With its consistent development in population and a different yet specific economy, it just draws in more land interest as time passes. On the off chance that you plan to put resources into the Huntsville housing market, nonetheless, you need to know explicit land measurements alongside the remainder of the city’s economy and segment setting.

Factors Contributing to Huntsville Real Estate Market

Real Estate Statistics

What contributes to a solid housing market? There are many elements we could name, in any case, two are at the core of long haul wellbeing: solidness and reasonableness . Huntsville possesses all the necessary qualities. Studies show that Huntsville flaunts the best housing market in the entirety of Alabama. SmartAsset gave the city a 88.41 rating on the Healthiest Markets Index, which depends on four variables: reasonableness, dependability, smoothness, and hazard of misfortune.

On their rundown, Huntsville positioned 26th in the country. Despite the fact that Huntsville is a more well-off (and expensive) city than most other Alabama markets, homes just expense a normal of 17.2 percent of family pay. This is well inside the edges of reasonableness. 

Renovation

Likewise, Huntsville was remembered for the U.S. News and World Report ‘s rundown of best places to live in 2020. Lucrative positions joined with a minimal expense of living and an exceptionally instructed populace added to its positioning, among different components.

Value and Demand of Property

Huntsville is a moderate market by numerous different norms in the country, it isn’t pretty much as reasonable as it used to be. As indicated by Redfin, the middle deals cost in Huntsville was $270,000 in December 2020. Only four years prior, the middle deals cost was $199,000. And with this, 30.2 percent of homes are sold above list cost. This is more moderate compared with the public middle – $335,519 in 2020 contrasted with $254,093 in 2016. 

There’s no question that the Huntsville market is appreciating. Twenty years prior, the middle home cost in Huntsville was an insignificant $98,000. Moreover, home estimations are on the ascent.

Note, in any case, that this development has been, over all things, stable. Once more, when we take a gander at the numbers, we see market flexibility in this information alone. Huntsville middle home costs scarcely recoiled through the 2008 Great Recession. With few special cases, the patterns in Huntsville have been consistent or up for as long as twenty years. All markers highlight this pattern proceeding later on, especially when we think about the splendid monetary viewpoint for the metro region.

Evidently, Huntsville has seen speeding up land interest for quite a while at this point. It appears to be like the COVID-19 blast just advanced this continuous pattern! Like in January until November 2020, Huntsville saw an aggregate of 8,223 home deals (748 deals each month). 

House construction

Deals alone don’t disclose to us a full image of market interest. We should contrast these numbers and the quantity of properties recorded available. In contrast to different business sectors in the country, Huntsville didn’t encounter a critical stock in Spring 2020. Consistently, the Huntsville market has kept up approximately within the range of 1 and 1.8 long periods of supply without huge change in the quantity of properties recorded. 

Month’s inventory is demonstrative of the connection amongst market interest in land. The fewer months (or long periods) of supply shows more grounded market interest, while additional time available (more long periods of supply) demonstrates lower interest. A lower number discloses to us that there are a bigger number of purchasers than merchants and in this way, there is greater action and contest inside the market. 

In December 2020, Huntsville homes saw a middle of 44 days available as per Redfin. That is down almost 12% from a similar time last year. Multiple offers are genuinely normal, as are homes sold above list cost.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gZoqxo9VH3w

Be that as it may, most homes sell for list cost inside just shy of two months.

Real Estate Rentals in Huntsville

Based on studies, 45% of Huntsville’s populace lease their homes, dominating the 32% Alabama state portion of rental occupants. By far most of the properties in Huntsville are single-family homes (64%) with three-to-four room homes being the standard. Rental occupants had a middle move-in year of 2015, where property holders moved in at the middle of 2006. 

Thus, this focuses toward longer rental periods (subsequently, inhabitant maintenance), as the middle number of rental occupants have been leasing their homes for a middle of five years. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqln54QS5Ss&t=17s

Huntsville additionally experienced lower opening rates (at 4.49%) than that of Alabama (9.69%) and the United States (5.97%) overall in 2019. This has not generally been the situation, yet opening rates in Huntsville have forcefully dropped in the course of recent years. 

Yet, shouldn’t something be said about the expense of leasing?

Rental Cost

Multifamily homes and single-family rentals comprise the real estate investment scene in Huntsville. Like the lease costs for multifamily units in Huntsville have been consistently on the ascent. Truth be told, consider that they have one of the quickest developing rates in the country. This measurement probably will not identify with our particular properties, it shows rental patterns that are important. With the developing Huntsville populace and tight home stock, rentals are popular. 

Simultaneously, single-family rentals are more copious (and alluring) in Huntsville. This exhibits the excellent chance to put resources into Huntsville SFRs. 

Yet, shouldn’t something be said about the expense? 

Clearly, multifamily properties don’t lease for similar numbers as SFRs – they have a higher month to month lease installment and hold occupants for longer periods. So, a benefit as far as inhabitant maintenance can be found in the middle lease cost.

While in midtown Huntsville lease expenses can undoubtedly hit $1,200, the middle lease is at $858 – $866. This is higher than Alabama overall however lower than the United States middle and normal. This is a 9% year-over-year cost increment. 

Rent payments takes an average tenant 15.33% percent of occupant pay – contrasted with 18% in Alabama and 20% across the country. This shows a degree of reasonableness that is empowering to purchase and-hold financial backers. 

Presently, these numbers are not characteristic of our particular venture properties but signals that the overall market of renters can pay more!

About real estate

Why Invest in Huntsville Real Estate?

Huntsville gives so many of the key pointers that make for an advantageous value market. We have seen consistent property appreciation for the past twenty years. Indeed, even after the Great Recession, we see a market that is still developing and amazingly versatile. With dependable government work (FBI headquarters coming in now) assuming a significant part in the area and financial development, financial backers can anticipate a consistently developing monetary base, low joblessness, and generally safe of an economy-based land slump.

Factors to consider in real estate investing (Huntsville, Alabama)

Continuous Growth in Population

Family

Population brings rental interest. 

Modest Housing

Even if lodging costs here are higher than in the remainder of Alabama, a more wealthy local area implies that these expanded costs just take a moderate level of pay, both as far as purchasing property and homeownership. Obviously, the costs here are as yet moderate comparative with other comparative business sectors in the United States. In a country experiencing where rents and costs have skyrocketed, Huntsville gives relief to proprietors and rental occupants. 

Occupation Growth and Security

To sum up, Huntsville, alongside numerous other southern business sectors. This creates an ideal climate for rental occupants.

In a post-COVID world, we’re seeing needs moving to support reasonableness, open air spaces, and positive environments. Huntsville possesses all the necessary qualities. 

Glad to share with you all Huntsville details… we have been here since 2018!

Father and son

Why Invest in Houston Texas

Houston, Texas is one of the hottest real estate markets in the country right now, luring droves of newcomers from California, the northeast, and other pricier real estate markets. 

From 2017 to 2018, the Houston area saw an average of 250 people moving to the region every day, a trend that has stayed mostly on track since then. There is no shortage of reasons to move to Houston. The city boasts major league sports, popular theater and museum districts, world-class dining, and is located fifty miles from the Gulf of Mexico, offering plenty of outdoor recreation

https://youtu.be/wCOPdZedPKY

On top of all that, Houston has a thriving job market. If Houston were its own country, it would rank as the world’s 27th largest economy. The city has more Fortune 500 headquarters than anywhere in the United States, second only to New York City.

Investing

Houston is known as the energy capital of the world, with 4600 energy-related companies in the city. Other major employers include Texas Medical Center, the Port of Houston, and NASA. In fact, NASA is such an important presence that Houston has been nicknamed “Space City.” Houston is a magnet for younger professionals especially, with the average age of Houstonians being 33 years old, making it one of the youngest cities in the US.

Along with its booming population, Houston has seen a booming real estate market. The Houston Association of Realtors reported a 24.4 percent jump in single-family sales last month, compared to the same time in 2020.

As Houston real estate agent Tiffany LaRose told Houston’s ABC 13, “We’re seeing things we’ve never seen before, multiple offers within an hour or two of properties being listed. People are waiving their rights to appraisals. They’re going 30, 40, $50,000 over the asking price and still losing out on those houses. It’s competitive out there.”

While that level of demand might dim prospective homeowners’ hopes, there’s an important silver lining: compared to the 20 most populous metro areas in the country, housing costs in Houston are 36.6 percent below average.

So while you’ll be competing with a lot of other potential buyers, the cost of buying in is far less than you’d see in other big cities.

Deal

From an investment standpoint, buying in Houston offers an opportunity to reap the rewards of rapid appreciation. Since 2012, the middle-priced tier of Houston’s homes has appreciated on average from $117,000 to $199,976, an increase of 71 percent, according to Zillow’s Home Value Index. Last year saw the eighth consecutive year of home price gains, and over the past year alone, prices rose by 5.2%. Zillow also projects a similar rise in home values over the next twelve months for Houston.

real estate investing

There are a couple of caveats to this robust market. Houston can be brutally hot and humid in the summer, and the region is vulnerable to hurricanes and flooding. Investors should mitigate this by checking the FEMA flood maps as well as getting adequate insurance. Of course, these drawbacks are offset by the opportunities Houston offers. In addition to the job market, affordability, and area attractions, Texans do not pay any state income tax. On top of that, the percentage of homeowners in Houston is only 42 percent, so investors will be able to tap into a huge market of renters. 

So, if you can brave the hot summers and the hot competition, Houston is one of the best markets in the country to invest in right now.