TBT: The One Minute Millionaire with Robert G. Allen

Hello my friends. Welcome back to Passive Real Estate Investing where we dive into the world of real estate investing among other related topics. To help you with your real estate investing journey, today we’re doing something a little different. We’re going to take a trip down memory lane and showcase an important episode from the past on what we call our throwback Thursday episode. Now, whether you’ve been with us since the beginning, which goes back to 2015, or you’re tuning in for the first time, this episode is a must listen, we are revisiting one of our more popular episodes from the past, and believe me, what we discussed back then, whether it’s six months ago or six years ago, is just as relevant today. So sit back, relax, and let’s rewind the clock for this great episode. Enjoy. 

Well, it’s my honor and pleasure to welcome back to the show. My good friend, Robert Allen, and as you know, Robert is an author and a mentor he’s beloved for his down to earth style and highly effective systems. He’s been teaching and coaching for so many years. And as I know him, his purpose in life is to help you achieve your dreams. He’s been teaching and writing towards that purpose for 40 years. Maybe more. I’m not even sure anymore, but his first book, the colossal number one, New York times bestseller Nothing Down, which is on my bookshelf times two, cuz I have two copies of it is the largest selling real estate investment book in history. And then he had another book which was a massive bestseller called Multiple Streams of Income. And it was used to coin that phrase, multiple streams of income, which I hear often from so many different people. And one of my favorite books that he’s written, which is what we’re gonna talk about today is the One Minute Millionaire. So with that, Robert, welcome back to the show.

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Throwback Thursday Episode (The episode originally took place in the year 2022)

This episode is part of our Throwback Series and may include references to older content such as web classes, events, promotions, or links that are no longer active or available. While the conversation and insights still hold value, please note that some information may be outdated.

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This book right here, right?

That one there. And guess what? I’m holding it up too. I have my own copy with your autograph in it.

There you go. Okay. So do you see the the butterfly flies up? You know, there’s the butterfly. Yep. Bottom right hand corner. Is it flies up? You can do yours to see that fly up there.

<Laugh> it’s such a novel book. I mean it’s purple. The pages are colored inside with purple. It’s got a butterfly that flies up as you flip the pages. It’s really cool.

And it’s two books in one, it’s a non-fiction book and a fiction book. Right? So because some people are left are left brain. Some people are right brain. So a right brain person reads a book that’s left brain and they go, oh, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to do that. And then a left brain person, you know, they, they they’re part of them is right brain. And so they need to see pictures and images and they, so this book kind of combines both the left hand side is a, is, is the how to side the right brain side is the, the Y two, you know, how, how do I really pull it off when it’s really, really important to me? So it’s, I think it’s, there’s never been a book like this.

I’ve never seen it. It’s a very interesting book. And I was gonna ask you about that because it’s really half novel, half collection. So you’ve got the, you’ve got the tactical left brain stuff on one half, but the other half of it is fiction, but it’s fiction that in weaves in all the lessons, teaching and tactics that you have in the book to put it into a story format. So you’re really training both half halves of your brain.

So the, and this is the, the story side. So whenever I go deeper into the left brain stuff as the little tiny, well there’s number 198, it tells you to go to that page page 198 and read more about how that left brain would work. Cuz when you’re in the middle of a story, you don’t wanna be taught anything. You just wanna enjoy it. So, but if you wanna learn about that one concept, then you go to page 198 and you can learn about it. So it’s a pretty unique book. That’s I that’s one of my favorite books.

We’re here to, to help whomever is watching our podcast right now or listening to our podcast, reading our podcast to have a better life. So who cares where other Robert Allen is an author of a book or not? How does it help you? So that’s what we wanna do today. How do you make your life better? How do you make a million dollars in a minute?

<Laugh> well, that that’s gonna be the first question I’m gonna ask you. Why did you title it the one minute millionaire?

Great question. Great question. We our friend is who wrote one minute manager.

I know the book.

The very, very popular book out there. And then there was a lot of other one minute books came as a result of it. And I like to talk about being financially free. And so I thought I said one minute million, that sounds like a good title, bounce it off a mark, who is my co-author? And he said well that’s a great title. He should write that one. And I said, well, we should write that one. And he goes, well, I don’t, I, I can’t because I got this contract with my publisher and I, I can’t do it. And and, but you know, one of these days we, we ought to work. We ought to write a book together somehow. But anyway, I found out when he was flying to a city and I bought the, the ticket right next to him on his seat.

And the airline airplane found out from his secretary, what seat he was sitting at, bought the seat right next to him. And we flew together to Vancouver. That’s where it was. And I said, we oughta write this book. And he said, you know, I still have that problem with my publisher. I can’t do it. And, and I said, well, what can we do? He said, well, let’s do a movie. Let’s do a movie. I’ve always wanted do a movie. I don’t have any restrictions there. So we started writing the movie, what the story is gonna be about, about this woman who loses her husband and needs to make a million dollars in a short period of time. And I said, well, that’d be a great movie. That’d be a lot of fun. And started writing a screenplay. We had never written a screenplay, neither one of us.

But we, we were way into the movie. We thought this is great. Well, just have a movie. And so we showed up with, at his literary agent’s office to have her help sell the movie. And she said, well, you can’t sell a movie without a book, a book, you know? And by that time, mark had escaped his contract from his publisher. And so he says, well, I can do it now, but it was way down the road into trying to figure out a way to work with this. Mark is the all-time bestselling author of a nonfiction book in the history of the world. Like all books, mine, little real estate book might be the most published book in the real estate world in America. But he is the all-time bestselling author of the Chicken Soup for the Soul. His name’s on that cover with Jack Canfield and they have now sold get this 500 million copies of the chicken soup series books.

500 million. I mean, we’re, it is just unbelievable. And so obviously to have his name on the cover of my, of our book, frankly, was a a major accomplishment. Then our agent went to New York and sold it, you know, and we got a very, very, very large advance to write it. Not because of me, but because of Mark and, and but anyway, that’s awesome. That’s how it came about the, the story came about, you asked, well, how did the one minute million come about? Yeah, because we were trying to figure out a story for somebody who needs to make a lot of money in a short period of time. Yeah.

It’s a catchy title.

So can you make a million in a minute? Can you make it a million in a minute? Yeah. It just takes you maybe a year to set it up. So yeah. Could you push the button and earn a million dollars in one minute? Yes you could. Yes, you could. Yep. Have I done that? No, I’ve made a million in an hour, you know, but I’ve never made a million in a minute. So point of being is it’s how you teach ’em person. How to think. So the novel side talks about this woman who does lose her husband and it’s tragic. She has two children and she married the son of a very rich family. And she was not from a rich family. So they never did like her. They felt she was not qualified to be the wife of their son and that their grandchildren should be raised better.

And the son was an entrepreneur and he wanted be on his own and didn’t want family money. And they were kind of a little more out there. You know, the son dies in a car accident. So now what are the grandparents going to do? They’re going to pull whatever legal shenanigans they can. And they’re going to separate that poor mother from her children. Cause they want those grandkids. And therefore they do. And they literally steal her grandchildren from her. They got inside judges and all that kind of thing. And so now she’s out, she’s she, her kids are gone. Her husband’s dead. She’s working as a waitress in a hotel and she’s serving a small private party inside a private room. And there are the enlightened millionaire club and Sam who is the leader patterned after Oprah, by the way, is teaching her little group.

And she’s saying, you know, I’m, I’m writing a book, but I need a Guinea pig. Somebody who can, who I can, you know, start from nothing and show ’em how that you can make the money. And Michelle who’s, our poor waitress is says, that’s me. I need to do that. And though, and so he tracks down Sam later after the meeting and says, you need to pick me, I’m your Guinea pig. I’m at I’m I’m her. Let’s do it. And long story short, she ends up working with Sam to teach her how to get back on her feet and how to get back stable and how to start earning money. And in the middle of all this, Michelle is inspired to go talk to her. Father-In-Law she’s inspired by Sam she’s. She feels like, Hey, we, I can do this. I can make money.

I haven’t made it yet, but I’ve got my mentor, Sam and Sam will show me how to do it. And so she goes to her father-in-law and she says, I want to get my kids back. And the father-in-law says, no, you’ll never get ’em back. It’s impossible. And she, she says, cuz you’re poor. She says, I could be a millionaire. And she says, you could be a million. You couldn’t be a millionaire in a million years. And she says, I could do it in a year. If I could show you, I could make a million in a year, will you let me have my children back? And he goes impossible. But if you could do it in 90 days, yeah, I’d do that. He likes to bet, you know, I’ll I’ll bet you, you can’t do that. So now she’s got the deal. She goes back to Sam and she says, guess what?

I just need to make a million dollars 90 days. And I get my kids back and Sam goes, you did what you promised, what, you know, that’s just almost impossible. You know, what, what are you thinking? You know? And so now they put their thinking caps on. And the story is meant to give you the reader a way to imagine, like, what if I seriously needed to make some serious money in a short period of time? What would I do in this case Michelle’s children are at risk. And if she loses, she’ll never see them again. She’s committed. She’d agreed to do that. If I don’t bring you a briefcase full of cash, you could literally see a million in cash in 90 days that I have earned by myself. Then you can keep my kids and I will never agree to never see them again, which is a dumb, obviously a very stupid wager, which no one should ever do ever.

But in this case, fictionally, Michelle did. And the, so the right hand side is about how she forms a team how she figures out, which multiple streams of incomes to pursue. And we using examples from real estate, from some, one of my students who went to a seminar of mine in 2000 and see this book came out in 2002. So my student came in the year, 2000, working in Las Vegas with her husband in the January of 2000, they were both fired from their job. And they were part of my, my little family. They’d read some of my books, they’ve done a little investing, but now they’d have to decide whether they’re gonna go back. This is a real story, by the way, real story, should they go back to a job at work at a thing they don’t like and have the risk of being fired again?

I mean, or should we just let’s we got a little money saved up. Let’s just go make a million dollars. Let’s just become millionaires, which is crazy. And so they did, and they did it in four months and nine days and they bought property. They had equities in them and, you know, acquired all these units and worked 24 hours a day and just really hard. And so a lot of the deals they did ended up being in the fictional story. We had Michelle do the deal as if she fictionally was doing it. But Karen actually had done it with her husband Duncan.

I actually remember those people.

They had to make the money to, to be able to survive. And so they did it. And so been with, you know, obviously now Karen is Karen became the co-author of the Nothing Down for Women book. That’s right here. And she talked about, this is how I did it. And I co-authored this with her fabulous book. If you’re a woman, even men, this is a good one. It’s, it’s not a print. It’s hard to find, but Nothing Down for Women anyway. So the real story is melded into the, the fictional story. And now, how would you, you, as the, as our podcast member here, how would you get yourself back on your feet? If you had a disaster, would you use real estate? Would you use information marketing? Would you sell a product? You know, which would you start a business? You know, there are just, there are ways to do this, but you’re not gonna do it in the stock market.

You’re not gonna, you’re not making a million dollars there unless you got a million dollars to start with. You have to earn it. And it has to be earned by yourself in active investing. So most people are not active investors. They’re not entrepreneurs. Seven people you see walking around the streets. Only one of them is an entrepreneur. Six of them are not six of ’em are employee minded. So they think like an employee, they think about security. They make, they think about making small, slow money, means a little bit of money over a long period of time and then retire on half of their income. You know, hopefully they’ve got enough and a little small money they’ve been making to put a little aside to put into some kind of investments. That’ll grow into their retirement, but most people don’t do that. So employee mind, people trained in school by employee minded people, by the way, teachers are employee minded.

Therefore they’re trying to teach their children how to get jobs, where there’s some people sitting in that same classroom who don’t want a job. They are entrepreneurial. They want to, to create something, to create some kind of stream of income. They wanna be the, they wanna be the boss. And so for this book, the One Minute Millionaire it’s Michelle doesn’t have a job. Now she has to, as an entrepreneur, make it and make it happen quickly. And most people are never trained to think that way in school. It’s it’s 40 year thinking, you know, five 50 year thinking. Yeah. And this is so the entrepreneur is slow is, is big, fast money. The employee is small, slow money, big, fast money means five years from now. I wanna retire. I wanna make a couple million bucks. I want have friend player, real estate. I wanna be financially free where the money flows to me instead of me flowing to get the money. So this book, the one minute millionaire is about how Michelle has to leave the employee world, go into the entrepreneur world as a brand new novice and figure it out with a mentor to coach her Sam as her mentor.

Yeah, the way I look at it first of all, the way I see this book is a book about creating wealth. You know, maybe you call it the enlightened way to wealth, but it’s about creating wealth. And I’ve always looked at wealth creation as being faster, slow, everybody. And anybody can get there. You could just take the fast lane or the slow lane. And I was actually gonna say that before you mention, you know, the two paths, because that just comes down to the, what you call the theme. And I’ll get to that in a second here. But I like the way how you start the book with the concept of the millionaire mountain, you know, it’s just a very simple visual of the three parts that make up what you call a millionaire equation. And I’ll just kind of throw it out there and then I’ll let you kind of take it, but you essentially break it down this way. It’s, it’s a dream, a team and a theme equals millionaire streams. Yeah. There you go. Yeah. It’s a beautiful, simple visual. So essentially it’s a dream, a team and a theme gives you a millionaire streams.

Yeah. Now there are two maps here. Yep. This is the right brain map. And this is a, a visual and simplified. This is the way, right? Brain people think, yes, this is a left brain map. This is the way left brainers. They love to see this chart right here they go. Oh, this is wonderful. Leave that chart. I get to, I get figure it all out. But we, people we people think in totally different ways. Yeah. So the right brain book is, this is what Michelle is doing. She’s getting a, a dream, a dream is to make money. She forms a team. She figure has to figure out which stream she’s going to pursue so she can get to the top of her mountain. But the same millionaire goal is put here on this flow chart. I’m just trying to highlight that every reader is either left brain or right brain or a combination of both, you know, they’ll lean one way or the other.

I wanted to capture both because if you read both sides, then you end up, you really get it. Yeah. Because if you just read like the right brain side, the story, you could say, oh, that’d be neat. Great, Michelle, good for her. That was interesting. That was a fun, novel. What I’m trying to have them realize is, oh no, I’m not talking about Michelle. I’m talking about you trying to say you are Michelle in this story, you, the reader, you, the viewer, you are her. You’ve got challenges. Maybe they’re not the same as hers, but you got challenges. Yep. And you gotta figure out a way to overcome them. And so that’s my favorite book. It is, it took us a while to write out.

And there’s a lot to potentially unpack there, especially for someone who hasn’t read this book, you know, the dream is really about the compelling, why, and it also gets into, you know, the millionaire mindset and things about self-confidence and whatnot. You know, you’ve touched upon that. You can, you know, comment more if you like the team part is pretty interesting because that’s where you start to use a concept that I just love, love, love. And that’s leverage. Leverage can be not just financial leverage, but it could be, you know, other people’s expertise, other people’s time, other people’s money, other people’s, whatever. Do you want to talk about team a little bit?

If you’re trying to move the million dollar goal, if you wanna make a million dollars, you’re the fulcrum. You’re the one that makes it go. But the leverage is, well, you need, I have, in this case, six different kinds of leverage. You need the leverage of a mentor. And I think even before that you need the, the leverage of a dream, a very clear, specific, necessary target. You’re trying to aim in order to get in this case, that’s the million dollars. So I need a mentor and you need somebody who has paid the price already to learn the lessons and paid all the mistakes. So why do I wanna replay their mistakes? The mentor shows me what not to do.

Don’t reinvent the wheel.

The team helps me organize myself so that they do the things I can’t do or the things I I won’t do or the things I don’t wanna do. I wanna find somebody who on my team who does a network means that’s part of the leverage part. It’s we all have a network of people around us of a hundred people. We know that are successful people. When you think through your friends, look at your database, look at your phone, you got all their numbers in there. I bet you got a hundred successful people at something. Maybe, maybe it’s weight loss. Maybe it’s a good long marriage. Maybe it’s, they’re good at exercising. Maybe they have a degree in some, some microbiology or something like that. You know, they’re successful at something I’m not talking about just money. Maybe they maybe they’re horrible, horrible at money, but maybe they’re really good at having a long term financial relationship with a, with a spouse.

So of your 100 successful friends. Yes. You have an asset there that nobody very few ever tap into because every one of those, a hundred people who are successful because they’re successful in one little area of their life. They have a hundred successful friends too. So if I can leverage that one friend out of the hundred, who has the one thing I need and what is that I need to succeed. I need financial resources and non-financial resources. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> financial resources. I need cash, credit, cash flow collateral. If I don’t have that, somebody I know does, but I’ve not been massaging that relationship. I send them a Christmas card every once in a while, maybe a birthday card, we don’t talk, we don’t go out to dinner. We don’t have fun. We don’t go on trips. You know, we, we just run off and do our thing rather than cultivating this crop of friends and in contacts and people we know, because just like ahead of wheat, one grain of wheat on the stock itself on the head, there are a hundred grains in that one head.

And what I’m trying to say to you is that that one grain grows into at least one head where there is a hundred other seeds on it. So this is a strange metaphor that I’ve never used before and I’ll have to clean it up. But the point is, if that one person is cultivated and planted, they grow a hundred in their network. Yeah. And that’s 10,000 contacts with one phone call, 10,000 contacts from one person cuz a hundred times a hundred is 10,000. And remember that other layer of another third row out there that all of those 100 have another a hundred. So within your cultivation of your network, you have a million contacts, but I’ll bet you, you don’t have more than a hundred right now in your database from your network. Maybe you’ll have a few friends who you’ve all networked with the other.

Maybe you have 200 names as a result of the a hundred that you know, 300 maybe, but you have access to a million mm-hmm <affirmative>. So that’s why I’m talking about leverage here. This leverage is the network leverage with, if you cultivate it, it becomes every resource you’ll ever need. Every non-financial resource, every, every bit of knowledge, every connection, every idea, you know, there’s just like 10 different kinds of non-financial resources you can tap into that are available in your network. So anyway, that’s one of the leverages. The next one is, is skills and tools. Yeah. If you have a tool that gets you access to the world it’s powerful. So for example, I think you you’re a real estate. You’re, you’re an amazing a real estate investor, but more importantly, you help thousands of people get into this marketplace. I’m so impressed with what you’ve accomplished. It’s amazing. What tools make your job easier. So I’m gonna ask you, Marco, do you use any tool to research and evaluate all the properties in the United States to help you find any deals out there? Which software do you use?

Well, the short answer is yes, you have to, you just can’t invest blindly. You can’t do anything blindly. Right? So yeah, I, we use online resources and we also use offline resources and we compile data. I buy a lot of data and you know.

So gimme some data. What kind of data do you buy?

Okay. So some of the online resources that other people can tap into, for example, include neighborhood scout, core logic. There are free reports from the commercial real estate brokerages. There is a tool housing trends have to look up the website. These are all subscription based. They’re not free, you know?

Yeah. Of course, of course. But they’re tools. They’re tools. Yeah. So somebody else had done all the work.

Yeah. And then I licensed data as well, which is not available to the public, but you know, it comes as, as raw data as well as trending data that have filters as tools. But again, they’re tools.

Do you use propstream or anything like that?

No. I, I go straight to larger database sources like CoreLogic

Where propstream would go to those, the same database sources and sift through in a different way. You just go right straight to the source. Yeah. And so what I, what I’m saying is tools, give you leverage and someone else that did all the work. So you go pay a little subscription fee, you get access to that. You gives you speed. And that’s what leverage means. Leverages speed. So skills and tools. Yeah. Systems. You have a system for finding deals. There’s the way that you package it together. This step one, step two, step three. That’s a system. Yes. One minute million errors, a system. It’s, it’s the whole book of it. The final leverage, if, is what I call infinity, meaning what is your belief in a higher power? Some people they run off and they do their own thing and they make their own mistakes and they never even agree.

Or even believe that there might be, why would God help you? You know, why would God, God help me? How does God? I don’t even know God exists. Really, but if you have a belief there, which obviously I do, I say to myself, well, rather than going to the source of all somebody’s collected here in the United States on all their details, I’m trying to find a highly motivated seller. That’s really what I really want. I wanna find a don’t want her. So shouldn’t, I include at least in my sourcing of data, shouldn’t I say to higher power, you know who they are, you know, where they are. They’re praying to you right now. They’re desperate. They want get rid of this property. You know, where they are all across the United States, you know exactly where there’re 10,000 of them right now. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>, you know, let me help you in any way.

I can figure out a way for me to get to ’em I’ll take care of ’em mom. Won’t take advantage of ’em. I wanna make em win. I’ll help. ’em Move into another property, whatever I want, but I’m a real estate investor. I need a bargain. And so I want to help him, but I I’m still gonna get a bargain out of this. Now this is a very woo woo <laugh> woo. Right. Concept. Right. But you know, as I look back over my career, things had just dropped into my lap. Oh my gosh. And there’s no way that could have happened just through chance.

Right.

So it was absolute direction, frankly. And if you have that as a belief, even if it isn’t true, the placebo effect kicks in. Yeah.

Yep. So whether it’s it’s belief, faith, power of the universe, law of attraction, you know? Yeah. Label it however you want, but there’s something there, something beyond ourselves and energy that you can’t put your finger on, in touch, but it’s there. I just knew there was a lot to unpack. I mean, we’re just scratching the surface. And I want listeners to understand that we we’re really talking about literally two pages in a, like a 300 page book. There’s just so much to unpack, but even just this one formula, you know, the, the millionaire equation, you know, we’ve talked a little bit about the dream side, then the team side, you know, there’s, we’re talking about other people’s money, other people’s experience, we’re talking about other people’s ideas, other people’s time, other people’s work. And these are all leverageable side note. Number one is, I think I mentioned in the previous episode with you, Bob, is that you are a member of the mastermind.

I do mention from time to time on the show called power room. Yes. And you can find out about it at powerroom.com. You are an active member and we love having you as a member. You’re just a great character and a resource and a wealth of knowledge. But you know, I always talk about networking and you know, the power of networks and that’s how you can start to tap into other people’s networks and build your own network. So you can leverage, you know, these resources like ideas, time, and energy and skills from other people. So a lot there, I dunno if you had a comment there, but I, I was kind of just jump to theme, cuz that’s kind of a little confusing if you don’t know what you’re talking about with theme, but theme is really all the different avenues, whether the slow or the fast road to creating wealth, but theme is where you start to implement these investments, investment ideas, whether they be business real estate info products and whatnot. So maybe let’s kind of jump from team to theme and well, you know.

When we get to multiple streams of income, I kind of summarized into the One Minute Millionaire this entire book. It’s so it’s basically, let’s start from, from the beginning of that one. You need multiple streams of income. Yeah, it is true. Those words because of this book are now part of the vernacular everywhere you look, people will say those words, multiple streams of income. It’s just become part of like nothing down. You know, it’s I have, my career has kind of popularized two concepts basically. And multiple streams of income. You need, you need multiple streams of income, but most people don’t understand it. The depth of it, it’s multiple streams of residual income. That’s where you go to financial freedom. But if you’re working in a job at 18 hours a day or working in a business that you own, the business owns you and you know, that’s not what you want.

You want a business that sends you the money instead of you having to go get it. So in this book, I talk about 10 streams of income that are residual, meaning making money while you sleep. So for example, this book, I got a royalty check from this book. It wasn’t much, it was only a couple thousand bucks. Well I had for my half of the royalty that Mark Victor hasn’t got his half, but I didn’t do any work for that. I just got a check. It just showed up. <Laugh> it just showed up in my bank account. And I thought, oh, that’s kind of cool. Cuz I worked hard once. And then it unleashed a steady stream of income that didn’t require my presence. And most people really don’t get that. So they, they, they let’s go make some money and then, but they never asked the question, will there ever be a way for me to escape from this source, this stream, this theme so that I’m no longer tied to that.

So, and that’s why I do publish books, but they’re hard to keep going, frankly. And the streams to keep going. You need to have places to go online where people can find you online and figure out to make money while you sleep. That’s the point. So Michelle is making active income now in this book in this 90 days, but eventually we want her income to be passive. So that’s a sexy word. These days, a passive income, cuz it kind of means like you’re kinda lazy. Well, I get money, it’s passive. It just kind of shows up, but how nice. But I work my butt off to get that, to set it up. And most people, they they’ll work their butt off and they’ll start a business that requires them to be there. And then they, then when the business dies, like for example, I’m, I’m on the phone this morning with talking with a, with an accountant who had a heart attack and he had a whole business set up. But if he had died at that heart attack, he didn’t have any disability. His wife would’ve had a business that would’ve been able to support his life insurance policy. She would’ve been destitute within a year because he hadn’t set things up. Right. So what I’m trying to say is most people don’t set up their, their wealth, right? Yeah. And I I’ve made some mistakes on that myself. So I, I know the, the things that can happen that can turn your life upside down.

I think for most people they want to transition and, and I’ve said this multiple times they wanna transition away from active sources of income, to what we’re talking about. Passive sources of income, because the more passive income sources you have, the more financial freedom you have and therefore the more time freedom you have and just a word of encouragement to people listening to this who have one job, no side hustle or side business, you know, they’re W2 or 1099, you know, it’s your starting point. It’s not that you can’t get there, but I’ve said many times, look, you know, if you are working a full-time job, W2, your goal should be to set up a side, hustle, a business of some sort on the side that can start to replace your existing active income. The one that you have to show up for.

And then you build upon that. And then once that has legs and it can stand on its own, then you start a second one, you start a second business, you’ll get to the point sooner or later where you can step away from your active source of income. And now focus more full-time on those businesses or side hustles that now create more income that have no cap. There’s no ceiling you’re capped with a w two job. You can work your way up the corporate ladder and get, you know, bonuses and raises. But there’s still a ceiling when you run a business or invest in real estate or have an info entrepreneur type business, there really is no ceiling, you know, sky’s the limit. So what would you say, I don’t wanna put words in your mouth, but when it comes to these theme, what do you suggest people look at first? Would it be an online business? Is that kind of the easiest thing to get into or focus on real estate or do both?

Great choice, same kind of choice that Michelle had to make in this book she had to. So we got her into real estate. Yep. Real estate is the reason it’s the fastest is because we’re used to it. We live in it. We rent it before we’ve owned before. It’s easy for us to go, well, let’s just get two, let’s get three, let’s get four. You know I had a statistic the other day that was shocking to me, 65% of the people in America own homes. But guess what percentage of them own two homes as an, an investment, not as a vacation home.

As true investment?

Own a rental as an investment. Guess how many own two or three or four as a real estate investment?

I can’t imagine it’s more than four or 5%.

Very good number. It’s 6.7%.

That’s but for me, I, I was stunned by that number. I thought, how can you possibly live in a home? That’s double in value. You’re living in it for crying out loud. <Laugh> how can you cannot figure this out, right? That if you had two, you know, it’s just, hello, wake up. So the first stream of income I think, is real estate. And then the second stream would be either you’re going to launch other business. You can launch a business that markets a widget of a physical product, or you can market information, which is a digital product. And if it markets a digital product, I think your story of how you made your first money in real estate is a great digital product, which is what mine was mine was. You know, I made my first fortune in doing the physical thing real estate. Then I wrote this book about it.

And yeah, I made my millions here with real estate, but hundreds of millions from the information world. So, cause there’s no upside, well, even when you’re in real estate, what’s your upside. Okay. You own a piece of real estate. Good. it’s fixed in a lot in a city. The rents are pretty well locked. You know, you’re gonna raise it, you know, regularly, but very limited. Really the upside is limited on real estate. It’s fixed. And then a limited upside where you go into information marketing, you can do it in the world on all my books have been published all over the world. So I get streams of income from Russia, you know, from China. And then there’s no upside cuz there’s almost 8 billion people on the planet today. And how many of those are gonna be entrepreneurs? Well, I know one in seven is an entrepreneur. So I got a billion people I can talk to. And then there are new babies being born constantly and new families being formed. I mean, I’ll have an unlimited number of customers who will end up picking up a copy of a book of mine. So you’re either gonna sell have a business or you go online and you form a way to market online whatever you’re selling, which is good. So those are kind of the few really simple ways of doing it.

If I can add to what you said, the one thing I would point out if I was talking to somebody about this topic is that if they don’t have a lot of energy, time, high motivation, high skill, or the thick skin or grit for being an entrepreneur, whether it’s writing a book or starting an online business or whatever, I would suggest everybody move in the direction of real estate because there’s the upfront work. But once the upfront work is done, now you’ve got a piece of property or multiple properties that you can put under professional management. You don’t even need to manage them yourself, but now you’re on the equity train. You’re building equity over time. You’ve got cash flows that will grow over time. You’ve got tax benefits, all that stuff. It’s kind of, to me, it’s the low hanging fruit, but it’s, it’s the thing that I think everybody should be participating in, whether you’re an entrepreneur or not, because you’ve got the tax benefits and you can pass that along to your children, your heirs. It’s just where everybody should go. Really?

<Laugh> why don’t people get this? So you call it the equity train. I like that. Because once you get on the train, the train is just gonna move forward in increasing cash flow and increasing equities. Yeah, yeah. Increasing problems. Yeah. There will be problems. No doubt about that. You’ll have some issues and challenges.

Yeah. But how is that different than owning a car? If you have a car you’re gonna have to change the tires every once in a while, you’re gonna have to change the oil every once in a while you have to fill it with gas every once in a while. Right. It needs to be tuned up every year or whatever. It’s no different. You’re gonna still do maintenance and repairs on a car. So what, you know, if you have a piece of real estate.

Analogy’s the same thing. Love that. You’ve used that before. That’s a good one.

The difference is cars don’t appreciate. Whereas the property will appreciate.

Oh, that’s a good one. I’m gonna borrow that one.

Okay. Well we’re gonna write a book together.

<Laugh> okay. All right.

That’s funny. Well, Bob, thank you for your time. I know we can go on and on and on. We just scratched the surface. I had so much more. I wanted to talk to you about, but we’re going long at, you know, 45 minutes already. So any closing comments, and then after that, just share, you know, where listeners can find your books. Obviously they know it’s on Amazon, but you know, where they could find more about you.

Let me give ’em a free book, go to robertallen.com and opt in and you’ll get okay. You get Think and Grow Rich and the audio versions of that. And then I think you’ll get a copy of The Challenge, which is one of my favorite books, but you know, just go there, let get involved in my world. Let me share with you what I’m doing. That’s how you do it. Go to robertallen.com and opt in and see what kind of fun stuff you get for doing that.

Awesome. That’s great.

Final advice is, let me ask you, where are we in the, in the real estate cycle Marco? Where, where are we,

Bob? I’m not gonna give you a simple answer.

<Laugh> well, this, this one I got started in 74 huge recession. Then there’s 81 and there was 89. And you know, we all have these bottoms in there that where are we? Here’s the question? Are we, are we here? Are we here? Are we here? Are we here? Where are we on that cycle? Are we right now? Would you make

A well, I’m looking at this from a fundamentals perspective, which is supply and demand available housing stock, and what’s in the pipeline to fulfill current demand and growing demand. If I look at it through that lens, I would say that we are somewhere. I hate to use the word bottom, but we’re on an upswing in terms of future growth. So right about there. If people can’t see what you’re writing on a, on a whiteboard, but oh, it’s basically shortly past the trough. Okay. Is what you’re ticking off.

I think we’re over the peak. The fun is gone for a while, but this is our time. This is a good time. Cuz we used to wanna get our bargains this time. This is time to buy it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> employees are not gonna buy now because they don’t think like entrepreneurs, entrepreneurs like bargains. Yeah. They’re like wholesale. So this is wholesale time. Yeah. So go buy some.

Yeah. I mean, I’ve always said, it’s not a question of if I should invest in real estate or even when the time is now, it’s just a question of where, where should you invest? Cuz all real estate is local. You know, it’s local, there are 500 plus MSAs or metropolitan statistical areas. The question is where do I invest? Not when do I invest? The time is always now there are certain times in that cycle that you’re talking about, where there’s gonna be more inventory and more opportunity for better deals. But that doesn’t mean there are no deals out there. There are always deals. There are always don’t wanders. There are always markets that are growing, that are transitioning from kind of a stable, boring market to a growth market because of employment trends, population trends. There’s always opportunity. It’s just knowing where, not so much when, but where.

So on that note, those of you who’ve been listening to Marco for a long time. That was wisdom. That was absolutely true. What he said absolutely.

Coming from you, Bob. That means a lot cuz you no, you, you were my mentor early on. So I appreciate it.

I am honored that I’m in there somewhere. <Laugh> cool.

All right, sir. Well, listen, I won’t see you in lake Tahoe at power room there, which is next week in a few days, but I will see you in December in Vegas and by the way, people listening to this, if you want to come as a guest, if you qualify and you know, just fill out the application on powerroom.com. My understanding is you’re gonna be there Bob, so you can meet the one and only famous Robert Allen <laugh> at our next event. So all right, well have yourself a great day, Bob, thank you for taking the time and we’ll see you again soon.

See you, everybody.

Thank you.

I hope you enjoyed this week’s throwback Thursday episode. If you haven’t already, remember to subscribe so you don’t miss out on a single episode. If you have a question about real estate investing or finance, simply go to passiverealestateinvesting.com and click the Ask Marco button. . I read all of them, I reply to many of them, and sometimes I cover them on the show, and I’m gonna try and do more of that. So, I am going to encourage you to go to passiverealestateinvesting.com and submit your question for Ask Marco.  Lastly, help us share the show with other like-minded people that you know who can benefit from it as well. Just visit us on your platform. Most of you are on iTunes and leave us a rating and review. I would greatly appreciate it. I read them all and I will thank you in advance. And that is it for today. Thanks for listening. I will see you on our next episode.

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