Insights from Studying the Rich: The connection between wealth and property. (Part 1)

Oh, thank you, Marco. Thank you for your kind words. It’s my absolute pleasure to be here. And I know that we’re going to get along just from the title of your show. And congratulations, by the way, on the success of this show. It speaks to what you do out there in the world. But the title, passive Real Estate Investing that is so close to my heart, that’s kind of what I’ve dedicated my life to, to showing people how they too relatively easily can generate passive income. And, you know, I want to, to give accolades to everyone who deserves them. And Warren Buffet is credited with having said, if you don’t figure out a way of generating passive income, then you’re condemned to working for the rest of your life. And so, you know, with all that, it is it my pleasure to be here.

I just love hearing anything about real estate. If I come across a book marker that I haven’t read yet, I’ll get it and read it because my theory is, if you can spend $30 of your money and three hours of your life consuming a book, even if it’s not well written, but you get just one idea from that book, that idea could be worth 200 a month for the rest of your life. It could be worth 10,000 a month for the rest of your life. So you never learn less. And that’s why I’m such an enthusiast of, of learning and reading and absorbing and watching videos and going to events. And you are a big proponent of getting messages out there in the world. So I wanna congratulate you too, for the success you’re having with this show.

Yeah, thank you so much. And, and that just tells me something about you, that you’re a perpetual student, you’re always a sponge to learn more, and absolutely, I can appreciate that. It’s great because I have 10 rules of successful real estate investing and my first rule, top of the list is educate yourself. Right? It’s knowledge is power and it should be the first thing you do because the investment in yourself goes a long way. And if you don’t invest in yourself, obviously, you know you’re gonna fail in so many other things.

Absolutely. And I love that saying that if you think education’s expensive, try ignorance. That’s gonna cost you a lot more in the long run, <laugh>. And you know, I, I speak with some authority on this because I spent eight years at university getting a PhD in electrical engineering. Not the easiest topic out there. And everything I learned in those eight years has been made redundant by new technology. I learned, I’m so old, I learned the operating characteristics of valves. And I’m not talking about fuct type valves, but valve radio type valves. Well, they were replaced by transistors and transistor, by integrated circuits, <laugh>, and then via the site, very large scale integrated circuits and asics application all be made redundant. But what you might have learned 40 or 50 years ago about real estate, what are mortgage is what equity is, what collateral is, it’s still the same. You can learn in eight weeks, probably 80% of all you need to know in real estate to generate passive income. And yet we spend 18 years at school, kindergarten, lower school, middle school, high school, sometimes a tertiary institution. And not one hour is devoted to teaching what you teach on your podcasts. It’s a shame.

It’s sad. It’s really sad. So much of what I spend my time on now is to educate people about money and investing and just financial education, financial iq if you want. Right, right. So that’s great. So I guess that that segues into the question, like, what motivated you to get into real estate? I mean, obviously you didn’t start off that way with your PhD.

No, <laugh>, but I did get started before I finished the PhD. I came from a family marker that never had the chance to go to university. So it was indoctrinated in my sister and I that when you finish school off, you go to university. So off I went, didn’t even know what I wanted to study. I didn’t like the sight of blood. So medicine was out and I didn’t rub the thought of looking inside people’s mouths all day. So I eliminated dentistry and I quite liked the idea of law, but then you’re limited to practicing in the country or jurisdiction where you study. And so I went through a process of elimination and engineering is what I ended up with. But when I was at my first week at university, I looked around at me at the engineers who were the, the, they’d made it, the professors, the tutors, the lecturers.

And it occurred to me that they weren’t uniformly wealthy. Now obviously there are some extraordinarily wealthy engineers out there. The person who put all the starlink satellites out into space, he’s doing all right, I understand. But on average, it seemed to me they weren’t doing that well. So I decided to make a study of the rich. I wanted to know what do the rich have in common thinking, perhaps naively that if I could identify 30 or 40 things and then emulate some, or most of them, I’d have a good shot of being rich. And that’s a good theory, of course. But the challenge was, Michael, I could hardly find anything that the rich had in common. It wasn’t age, you know, bill Gates was pretty young when he made his first billion. It wasn’t gender, it wasn’t race, it wasn’t religion, it wasn’t country of origin.

It wasn’t whether you’re an immigrant family or not. Whether you were the first born or the last born or anywhere in between. I could hardly find anything that they had in common. I just knocked my own books off the table. But that’s all right with my enthusiasm. But I found two things, and one of them is that almost without exception, the rich had integrity. Now, when I was 17 making the study, I didn’t know what to do with that. But I’ve since learned a lot about integrity. I won’t dwell on it. And the main thing being that integrity is not genetic. So anyone can decide in a heartbeat. Someone listening can decide before I finish this sentence, to increase their level of integrity. And to the extent that they’re willing to do that, they’ll find that more good things happen to them for the simple reason that if you don’t have integrity, then you end up hanging with people who don’t have integrity.

And if you live by the sword, you die by the sword. Right? But back then, I, I didn’t quite know what to do with that. So I filed that thought. The only other thing I found that the rich had in common is that almost without exception, the rich either made their money or they held their wealth in real estate. Mm-Hmm. <affirmative>. And I thought, gosh, if that’s all it is, I can do that. And it wasn’t easy for me because I went around looking for my first property. I found what I thought was a great deal, and I had to go and fund it. And when I was 17, I looked about 12, which, you know, when you’re older, you, everyone wants to look younger. But it’s devastating as a 17-year-old kid when you are trying to date a 17-year-old girl and everyone thinks you’re 12, and even if they know you’re 17, they don’t wanna be seen with you because you look 12.

So you imagine this young looking 17-year-old going to the bank and putting forward a proposal to get funding. And the first bank manager I went to, he listened very attentively and carefully, and he waited for me to stop talking. And then he leaned forward and he said, are you done? And I thought, that’s an odd question. But I said Yes. And he said, this is a hoax, isn’t it? He thought it was a university prank. And I was devastated because Harold was seriously trying to buy this property. And he thought I was kidding him. But fortunately, I didn’t give up. It didn’t say, well, clearly I’m not cut out for real estate. Let me try my my hand at something else. But I went to bank after bank after bank, and I think I had to go to 11 before one finally said, I’ll take a chance on you.

And I would’ve much preferred to hear, that’s such a great deal. I’d buy, of course we’ll fund it. But I was happy with, I’ll take a chance on you. So it was tough getting started, but it was because of this correlation between property and wealth. And you know, looking back, it’s not so strange because when you look at just about any other activity that people are involved, think of inventions. I’m old enough that telex machines were around, they were being phased out and we were being introduced to fax machines. Mm-Hmm. And I’m sure that young people today, they may have heard of them, they’ve probably never seen one, let alone used one. But when they came out, they were revolutionary. You’ll probably remember, mark, you could take a document and insert it into this machine, that Wisdom Bird and a facsimile of it, a copy of it could appear anywhere else in the world where there is a phone line.

You’d pay the charge for an international phone call. Of course, it was still not cheap, but it was a lot cheaper than sending a courier bag taking three days to get from one country to another. So we thought it was revolutionary. And I’ve got a friend, he was the foremost sales salesperson of fax machines in the southern part of the Netherlands. And he thought he was doing well. Well, he is not making a dime from fax machines now. They’ve been, they’ve been phased out. Yeah. And all these technologies get replaced. And even companies on the stock market, the companies that made fax machines, they, they’re not doing well. Certainly not in that division. Yeah. And, and yet real estate is one of those things that has stuck around. Not only do we not have to replace our houses every 20 times because that was using old technology.

They had copper pipes and now we use packs or, or they had clay sewage pipes and now we use PVC. No, they’re still in use. You can go around and see properties that are 50 years old, 80 years old, some even sell at a premium because they’re in better parts of town. Occasionally they’ll get demolished and replaced by new ones. But then the value to the developer of that property is still high because he wants the land in that area. So my point is that real estate doesn’t go outta fashion. And a really stark example of this is, for a while I used to shoot videos. Now this will sound odd because we’re in a day and age where everyone has a smartphone. You shoot a video and you can post it straight away to YouTube. But not that many years ago, I’m talking about the early two thousands.

There was no YouTube, there was no, none of these video streaming service. So I had a program, you’ll laugh at this, but it was called Discussions With Dolf. And I’d shoot it every Tuesday morning, wherever I was in the world. And I ended up doing it from 27 countries. And I would start off with saying, welcome to another Discussions with Dolf Today. I find myself in Coraba or Aware if it’s on the island of Borneo, I’d give a sentence or two about what makes it unique. And then I’d answer questions that people had emailed me about real estate. And the thing is, we had about, I don’t know, a thousand subscribers paying $50 a month. Many of you have done the math already. You can live off that, right? Yeah. but then an event happened in the world where my subscriber base linearly went to zero over about six months.

And that event was the introduction to the world of YouTube. Why pay me $50 a month for four me of videos when you can get an unlimited number free of charge on YouTube free. Right. So that, that’s a background to that. But I shot one of these in Tokyo, Japan in a suburb called Akihabara. And that’s sort of the electronics capital of the world. And there was a stunning view of, of a scene. There was a railway line go over overhead, a big wide zebra crossing and shops all around. And the, the reason I bring this up is the shop next to me sold Walkman. Now you remember Walkman were those cassette players? Yeah. That you put a cassette in it. Japan had the latest in technology, auto reverse and track search and you name it. Yeah. And about 10 years later, I was back in token and I thought, you know, I’m gonna shoot another one of my Discussions with Dolf videos here.

So I went to the same spot and there was still the store there, but they were no longer selling Walkman. They were out of fashion. It was CD players. And those little disc men, they called them. And the next time I went back, they went out. It was MP three players and what do we call them? The iPod at the time. And the last time I was there, which was only a couple of years ago they weren’t selling any electronics. It was anime accessories. And it occurred to me the people who invested the time and effort and intelligence and brilliance into knowing everything about Walkman so that they could sell more, they’re outta business. The disman player outta business, the any player went out of it’s ’cause we now have our music collection on our smartphones. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And now it’s animate. But the owner of that commercial premise that leased it firstly to the Walkman shopkeeper and then the Disman shopkeeper, and then the, he was still there.

He was still collecting rent. So the point is that real estate tends to stick around over the decades, over the centuries. The activities that are conducted there tend to vary. But one of the reasons, Michael, I’m still optimistic that property will be around for the long term, is everyone, no matter how technology changes, no matter how our job titles change, they say that young people today will be doing jobs in 10 years time that we don’t even have descriptions for today. No matter what jobs they’ll end up having, they’ll still be sleeping in a bed somewhere or something, a kinder, a bed, a futon, or they’ll still need a kitchen to cook food. They’ll still need a bathroom to do the tions. They’ll still need a living room to watch whatever version of TV we’ll have then 3D or holographic or whatever. So we still need to occupy space. And that’s why I have confidence that in the long term real estate will serve its investors much better than investors of things that tend to go up and down because they’re just fads.

Yeah, no, I agree. I like to say that everybody needs a, a roof over their head, a place to sleep and a place to work. So real estate’s not going anywhere. No. Very interesting. You’ve been around for so long. It ma it makes me wonder, did you have way back when any mentors or influencers, I mean, it’s not like there weren’t real estate investors when you got started, but now with social media and the internet, it like, you can find information about real estate investing everywhere all the time. But back then it was like, you know, I mean you’re talking about telex and fax machines, <laugh>, you know, like I know. Did you have any mentors?

No. When I started I didn’t really, there, there were no books. I remember going to a warehouse in New Zealand, a book warehouse, and I bought a book by Robert Allen called Nothing Down. Yep. And it was very US centric. And by that, and I, I imagine many of your listeners probably not all a US based. So let’s talk for a moment about a foreclosure. A foreclosure is a uniquely American phenomenon. It’s not that banks don’t take over properties where the, the borrowers of money have failed to meet their mortgage commitments. They take them up, but they call it something different. Down under it is a mortgage sale or a mortgage in possession sale. And sometimes it’s called a redemption sale. Yep. And we have appraisers in this country and everyone knows what an appraiser is. In other parts of the world, we have valuers here we have escrow companies, uniquely American.

In other places we have conveyancing solicitors. And a solicitor is not someone that is right. Looked upon in a shady manner ’cause they’re walking the streets. A solicitor is the name for an attorney. An attorney, yeah. So my point is, when I read this book, nothing Down the Language, even though it was English was pretty foreign to me. ’cause It was all American concepts. But I could relate to that. And, and I, I sort of, I, I loved the book. I devoured it, I read it multiple times. And ironically years later, about the two thousands I met with Robert and, and we went on tour together throughout Asia. And more recently I’ve been working with and we’ve put on events together and that sort of thing. So it’s sort of gone full circle. But you’re absolutely right. There were very few people to mentor you.

Luckily I got on the speaking circuit somehow relatively young. And one of the mentors that, that I relish having worked with, I toured with him too, was Jim Rohn, love Jim and Jim Love Jim wasn’t even hardcore real estate, he was more mindset and philosophy. But I’ve come to realize that much of one’s success in real estate is not just knowing the facts and figures. It is understanding the mindset. Because if you’ve got the the wrong attitude, you know you’re never gonna make it. I’ll give you an example. One of my favorite sayings, it’s sort of my signature saying, is that the deal of the decade comes along about once a week. And here’s my contention marker. If you don’t believe that, if you think that by definition and to be absolutely accurate, the deal of the decade has to come along exactly every 10 years.

Well then when one of your listeners hears that you have done a great real estate deal this week, they’ll say, well, there’s this decades deal gone <laugh> and I’ll have to wait 9.9 years before we get an opportunity for another one. Whereas if like me, you believe that the deal of the decade truly does come along about once a week because you believe it, you open it, you look a bit more insidiously, you’ll find them more regularly. And your belief that it comes along once a week will also be vindicated. And in that sense, we create our own reality. So you know, there was Jim Rohn and there were a few others, but, but there were very few. So you’re right. But the, the thing is, when you learn through your own experience, that often is a better lesson. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> than when you learn secondhand through someone else’s experience.

So the trick is yes, educate yourself, read a lot, listen to podcasts, watch videos, join investor groups and organizations. But don’t use that as an excuse not to take action. At the end of the day, you’ll only generate passive income when you close on a deal. Hopefully not in your own name. That’s a whole nother story. Buying in your own name is only, it’s the second worst entity to use other than what we call tenants in common. But that’s another story. So, but acquire it, you only get passive income when you have control over an asset.

Yep. It’s interesting, the names that you mentioned. Robert Allen’s a friend of mine, he was one of the original OGs as well. I referred to him as an OG.

Absolutely. Yes.

Yep. And you know, I’ve got all of his books. Nothing Down was one of the early books I read long, long time ago. That’s how I figured out and understood how to buy real estate with nothing down. It was because of Robert Allen. Right. And then you mentioned Jim Rohn, who I adore and love and I’m very good friends with Kyle, his business partner. The two of them work together to, you know, to put Jim on the platform. So Right. And so Kyle’s a really good friend of mine, but that’s great. So man, there’s so many. As you talk and as I listen to you speak, I, it just, I keep thinking of all these other things I want to talk about and bring up and it’s just, we wouldn’t have time in one day to do it all. Lemme transition to a little bit about your investment philosophy and maybe some advice.

And then we will deep dive a little bit deeper into the whole thing about, you know, studying the rich and the insights you’ve learned. Because I think that’s a very interesting concept and really is the core topic of the day today. ’cause We can go off in 10 different directions if we wanted to, just briefly, what is your investment philosophy? I mean, I think I know, and I could probably guess and just from everything you’ve just said, but did you start with one investment philosophy and and did it evolve over the years? Or have you always had the same investment philosophy?

I think my philosophy has been pretty steady over the years. I know there are some people out there and they’re willing to make a dollar no matter what. It’s all about the money. And they have this belief for me to make a dollar, I have to extract a dollar from you. You’re a dollar poorer. I’m a dollar richer. And that’s just how it works. And if I’m smarter than you, I’ll become rich and tough luck for you. That’s not my philosophy. To give an example, many property investors or would be property investors don’t want to get into real estate because they think you tenants become your adversaries and you have these ongoing battles with tenants. And Marco, full disclosure, I’ve had my fair share of, of battles with tenants. I had won here in Phoenix, a tenant paying 700 a month on a residential property.

And they failed to pay the rent five day notice. It went to court, they turned up in court, they didn’t defend themselves. And there was summary judgment against them. But then they sued me for $750,000 on some spurious ground of nonsensical statement. And, you know, I had to get a defense attorney and they said, you’ve got no chance of losing this. But it still took a year and resources and time and effort. So there are challenges, but for the most part, I treat my tenants not as my adversaries, but as my clients. And just like a client coming into a shop, if you make the client happy, if you treat them with respect, then they will treat you with respect. And my theory is that while tenants don’t relish paying me rent, they know that if they weren’t paying rent to me, they’d be paying rent to someone else.

So let’s make the transaction between us fun and, and interactive. And I think the success of my philosophy manifests itself in the longevity of my tenants in that, well not longevity in terms of life terms, but how long they stay as a tenant. So on the residential side, I’ve got an extraordinarily long average tenancy length. It’s something like 7.8 years that they Wow. Track all these things. It’s easy to do. You just put the date when they first become a tenant and if they leave, you have to put today’s date in for the new tenant. Wow. In my commercial realm, it’s even longer. My, my average length of tenure for a commercial tenant is just on 11 years. That’s extraordinary. And it’s a matter of, of meeting their demands, not ridiculously. If they say, Hey, Dolf you know, times are tough. I want you to pay for a holiday to Paris for me and my wife.

That’s not gonna fly. But if they’ve got a reasonable request, we’ll put it in or we even preempt it. We go ahead of the game by, by putting in improvements that benefit everyone. So, you know, to give you an example my commercial tenants pay their own electricity bill. That’s just part of the deal. Most commercial leases are like that. They’re triple net, a net of, you know, utilities and insurance and maintenance. They pay all of that. So if I do something to decrease the electric bill, like I’ll put a special paint on the building that reflects more ultravit light and allows infrared to radiate through, it lowers the heat load on the building, it’ll reduce the electricity consumption. Doesn’t bother me directly, doesn’t affect me. They pay the electric bill. But knowing that I’ve done that and it benefits them, that’s an example of something where you preemptively help them out.

And I think at some level they appreciate it. Not all of them. Some are indifferent, they don’t care. They’re making so much money perhaps that the electric bill doesn’t really figure on their, in their brain processing power and good for them. But doing things like that I think really helps and being responsive when, when they have a, an inquiry about something. So if you treat people like the human beings that we all are and you know, there, but for the grace of God go, I like we could have been in reverse role positions. It’s, it’s, yeah. So that’s I think a very important philosophy. Yeah. I I can the other thing is, you know, many people struggle with aspects of, and I know we are, we’re touching on topics that you’re right. We could spend a whole podcast discussing, but I don’t wanna discuss another one.

‘Cause It’s really interesting and it might help listeners. And that is the, the biggest fear in the world is not the fear of some untimely death or something horrible like that. Apparently the biggest fear is the fear of public speaking. Right. And for those of us who’ve been on the stage a, it, I mean, I’ve a sympathy for it, but I don’t have empathy. ’cause You know, if I turn up, some of this will sound horrible and there are 10 people in a room, I thought I’d traveled all this way for 10 people. It’s like, you want more, right? So that’s sort of the opposite of being scared. So I don’t get that. So the biggest fear is the fear of public speaking. But the second biggest fear is the fear of going to the bank to ask for money. And people always say, how, how can I ask for money to give me a better chance?

And I’ve flipped that situation completely around. I tell people never ever ask a bank for money because whenever you ask anyone for anything, you give them the power to say no. Right. So I’m gonna flip the whole script around, and it’s based on this, we all know that the EE is the tenant and the lessor is the landlord. That’s pretty obvious. But who’s the mortgagee in a deal and who’s the mortgage or, and we think, well we go to the bank, the bank to get a mortgage. So the bank gives us the mortgage. They’re the mortgage, or we get the mortgage, we are the mortgage E. Right? And the answer is no, that’s wrong. I mentioned before that what an America’s called a foreclosure elsewhere is called a mortgage e sale. That’s a bank sale. The bank is the mortgage e we are the mortgage or, and here’s the reason why we want to buy a property, don’t have the money.

The bank has the money and fortunately doesn’t want to buy the property. I say fortunately ’cause they have the money they could buy. So we go to the bank and we say essentially this Mr. Bank manager, I wanna buy this property. I don’t have the money. If you’ll lend me the money to enable me to buy the property in my name, then I will give you a pledge wherein I faithfully promise to pay interest. And at some stage in the future, depending on the type of mortgage, I’ll pay back. The principle, that pledge that we give them is called the mortgage. They give us the money, we give them the, the mortgage. So we are the mortgage or so you don’t go to a bank asking for money. I go to a bank offering them a mortgage, and I have a, a document that I create, it’s called a proposal for finance.

And it starts off with very specific wording. A mortgage is offered of 380,000 or 2.9 million, whatever it is to be secured against a property located at sector. The income is X and percentages y in addition to offering you a mortgage, I’m offering you collateral to secure the mortgage. Yeah. Being the very property that I’m trying to buy. So I’m offering the bank something. And it’s a subtle thing. You might say, well what difference is that gonna make? But it’s, it makes a lot of difference because instead of going there cap and hand saying, Mr. Bank manager, would you condescend the bank, this grand bank to considering me a mere mortal for a, for a loan? No. You’re saying, Hey, I found a great deal and I want to offer you a chance to finance it. In fact, I tell people, when you go to a bank, don’t just print one proposal, print 10 of them and have a stack of them in your hand. And then when you get to the bank, say, oh, this is, which bank is it? Chase, here’s your cop. Or excuse me, that’s for Wells Fogie. <Laugh>, here’s your copy. <Laugh>. And odd as it sounds, they now think they’re in competition. Right. <laugh>. And I’ve had banks say to me, Dolf, if we commit to funding this property right now, will you commit to not going to the other banks?

That’s hilarious.

And turn the tables. So a lot of it is attitude and it has to be based on something real. You can’t make something up. But it is real that we are the mortgagee and we are, we are the mortgage officer and the bank is the mortgagee. That’s, that’s the way it is.

That’s hilarious. What a great strategy. I mean that’s just a, almost like a classic negotiating strategy.

It it kind of is. And that’s what I love about real estate too. It’s not just cranking a hand with the same silly thing every day. Yeah. And you can use your creativity. Yeah. And it’s, again, your people skills. It’s, it’s a matter of being confident but not arrogant. There’s a fine line between two. Yeah. And we see plenty of evidence out there in the world of people who are just arrogant and that doesn’t fly Yeah. In any realm of life. Yeah.

Interesting man. I can go off on so many tangents. Let’s kind of circle back a little bit to, you know, your insights and study of the rich. What, I mean, you can go as deep as you like on this, but I’m just curious, what insights have you learned over time from studying the rich and rich people? I kind of differentiate rich and wealthy. I don’t know if that makes a difference and how you want answer the question. I mean, rich just, you know, to me it’s just someone sitting on a pile of cash, whether they earned it or not, you know, they’re just, they’re just cash rich. To me, wealth is more about time. It’s, you know, the sustainability of you having passive income forever, like indefinitely and you know, that just creates a form of financial wealth. You can be rich but not wealthy, you know, and you can be wealthy not being rich. But that’s how I differentiated in my mind. But I’m curious what you’ve learned in studying the rich.

Well, I fully agree with you. There are many people who seem on the surface to be rich and that is the image they want to project. They drive the latest car, they have immaculate clothes, they always have an expensive watch on their wrist. And you know, if they see you, oh, what, what kind is it? What brand is it or something? Whereas a $40, I don’t wanna name a brand in case I’m considered favorable, it doesn’t matter. Swatch and to such and all that $40, it tells the time just as well. Quartz watch technology is so advanced now that they’re pretty accurate. And if you get one of these digital watches and they’re hooked into the satellite time system and they’re accurate to the last second all the time. So if you like wearing an expensive watch because you personally like the look of it and the feel and the way it makes you feel good.

But too many people do things to impress others. And we always say they buy things they don’t need with money. They don’t have to impress people they don’t know. And one of my observations is when you get to hang with, with the ultra they don’t wear designer clothes. They don’t have, you know, any fancy exotic car that they roar around them with a loud exhaust to impress people. I don’t get it. And a manifestation of this, I think is when young men and particular men are particularly prone to this desire. They’ll have a car with a loud exhaust and they’ll have music so loud that even with the windows shut, I can hear it in my car. So boom boom is vibrating through their windows. It comes through the air to my car with its closed windows and it, it penetrates my car.

And I think they think it’s a babe magnet. And yet invariably when I see a car with a loud exhaust and usually low and very darkly tinder, windows and really loud music, there’s, there’s no babe in the passenger seat sort of thing. So even that theory I don’t think works. So the, the trick is with rich people, they, you know, I have it myself. And when I get enough money together to replace my car and full disclosure, I drive a Lexus, it’s the ultra luxury version of the Lexus and it’s from 2004, it’s got leather seats and the walnut wood grain panel, it’s a V eight, it still drives beautifully before electric vehicles became the norm, kind of it was the quietest car on the road. And it still serves me well. The number of my friends who mock me for having an old car, surely do, you can upgrade your car and Marco, I’d like a new car.

I dunno if you’ve sat inside the Lucid, they’re particularly nice. They’ve got a long range for electric vehicles. And, but my concern there is will they be around in five years time? And I know my critics will say, well, you replace it after two years. People spend more time. Most American males spend more time every two years studying consumer reports and auto magazines to figure out which new car they’re gonna get, how many brake horsepower, how many Newton meters of torque, and how long does it take to go from Naugh. They spend days and days pouring over these things and weeks deciding on their next car, and yet they don’t spend five minutes buying their first investment property that will feed them for the rest of their lives. So the point I didn’t finish making is when I get 70 or $80,000 together enough to replace that car, I think, well that would be nice.

A new car. And then I think, but that’s also the down payment on a property that will generate passive income forever. Yeah. Index for inflation. You know, so I think when you look at those things, when I look at the average family all over the world, this is not just an American thing all over the Western world when they retire, you know, that 60% of people can’t put their hands on 25,000 bucks cash. Yeah. That’s, and for most of them, not all, but for, for most of them, their biggest asset is their home that they live in. And it wasn’t even an investment. They, they needed a place to live. Yeah. And you’ll often hear them lament, if only we’d bought the place next door when it was on the market. Remember honey, when the grass was really tall and the paint was fading, we said, we hope someone buys that old donger because it looks horrible at degrades the event.

We should have bought it. If only they’d bought that one. If only they’d bought five more, they would’ve been financially free. Yeah. So part of my mission and yours too, is to, to get people to realize that all these fancy things we, we show people to show how rich we are, they are not as important as just having some passive income. And then once you get to a certain level, the desire to show off your wealth sort of diminishes. In fact, if anything, you don’t want to flaunt it. You want to just be a little bit more circumspect, a little bit more low key off the radar. Not because you’re doing anything nefarious and relate to that. And coming back to mindset, I, I love the story of two guys who are mowing the lawn on a sunny Saturday morning and their neighbors, they mowing the lawn and they take a break halfway through and they’re leaning over the fence and they motion up to the, the young Asian immigrant family up the road who had the same size home, but they built a two bedroom extinction on their home and they’ve got three foreign cars in the driveway.

And one of the neighbors said to the other, huh, I wonder if he’s in drugs, <laugh>. And that question, I wonder if he’s in drugs, says nothing about our Asian friends up the road. It says everything about the mindset of the two neighbors because their mindset is, I’m honest, I’m kind, I’m diligent, I work hard, I have a job, I support my family, I work hard, and I can’t afford a two bedroom extinction on my house, nor those three exotic cars. So in order for him to do that, he must be doing something illegal. He must be in drugs. And it’s that very mindset that holds them back from doing better because they think they have to stay with their job. But the truth is, you use your job to justify getting mortgages and then invest in real estate. And if you buy just one property a year for five years, at the end of five years, you’re financially free.

You can give up your job and then you can start building that extinction. That’s why we can’t judge anyone on anything. And one of the things I love about America is that it is a melting pot of all these different races and attitudes and, and backgrounds, but we are also very quick to cruise on. Well, that’s odd. They eat with not a knife and a fork. You know, that’s, instead of that, we should try it. Go to one of these ethnic restaurants and trading with your hands, trading with chopsticks, trading with everything. And you don’t have to like it, but just experience it because by doing things differently, you might stumble across a new way of succeeding in this passive game.

I hope you’re enjoying this interview with Dolf as much as I am. He’s a very interesting guy full of stories and information. Because we interviewed for more than an hour, I decided to cut this interview into two parts, about 30 minutes each so you can listen to them back to back and consume them in a 30 minute period of time. So if you’re driving to or from work or you’re just doing something casually and you’re listening to this in the background, you can just listen to them in two easy 30 minute blocks. I’ll probably release them within 24 hours of each other. So just keep an eye out for it. If you’re listening to this first part, you’re gonna get part two here very quickly. I hope you continue to enjoy the interview and there’s more good stuff coming. It just kept getting better and better. And I planned to have Dolf back on because there’s just so many things you can talk about having written 11 best selling books on the topic of real estate and investing. So I figured why not? And he’s definitely interested in coming back onto the show. So with that, we’ll see you on part two.

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