TBT: The Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor

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. 

You know, I’m bringing a good friend and a past guest back onto the show today. It’s Chad Carson, or he’s also known as Coach Carson. Great guy. He reached out to me just not long ago and he said, Hey, I have a book coming out and I want you to take a look at it. So I did. I took a look at it and I thought it was great. It’s just another perspective and approach and view on real estate investing. And so for those of you who are not familiar with Chad or haven’t heard the past episode in the past, Chad or many people know him as Coach Carson is an author. He’s an investor, obviously a podcaster, a lifelong learner. And he used real estate investing to achieve financial independence in his thirties.

So he’s done what a lot of us always aspire to do or think about doing. But he’s publishing a new book soon called The Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor. How’s that for a title? He sees the book essentially as a manifesto and guidebook for small rental property investors. And these are people who simply want to create financial independence and time freedom, not the, you know, the 10 Xers, the go big or watch me until I scale to the moon type of people out there. This is kind of like in the way I look at it, it’s kind of like the building blocks or building bricks to build up a passive income portfolio without having to have goals that essentially are reaching for the stars. Why not hit the moon?

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Throwback Thursday Episode (The episode originally took place in the year 2023)

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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So with that chat, hey, welcome to the show.

Great to be back Marco. Thanks for having me and appreciate that intro.

Yeah, no, it’s great to have you back. Now for everybody to know you’re actually in a d much different time zone cuz you’re still in Spain. You’re on a l a long vacation with your family. Is that true?

Yes. So we, I’m in Grenada, Spain, so if anybody’s been to southern Spain, it’s the kind of older, hotter part of Spain. It’s about 104 degrees out outside today. I was just telling Marco that before we got on the call today. But we’ve been on an adventure. I have a 12 year old daughter, 10 year old daughter, my wife. And we moved to Spain for a year and at least for us, kind of part of our bigger picture story as we like to have the time freedom to travel and not only take vacations but also live different places. My wife teaches Spanish. We wanted our kids to become fluent in Spanish. So we decided to enroll them in schools here in Spain. And I took Spanish classes every week. I still kind of do my thing podcasting here and there, writing a book, but this has been a year for me just to get away from the normal routine. My wife has been teaching English, she’s also taking classes here locally. So yeah, that’s, that’s been our, our experience for the last 12 months. And you know, real estate’s always at the foundation of that though. That’s what’s enabled us because I’ve been doing it now two decades, 20, 21 years and build, building up to this point where you have enough income and also enough free time to be able to make this kind of stuff happen has been, it’s been my goal and what I like to share about.

Well, that’s huge. You basically are spending a year in Spain using the rental income from your portfolio and not necessarily working a W2 or active job in order to support yourself. You’re basically doing it off passive income, right?

Correct. That’s it. Yeah. I mean, a hundred percent of a hundred percent of what we spend in over here in Spain and we’re not skipping either. We spend about eight to 10 grand a month. Somewhere in there is is rental income. So yeah, that’s, I I do have other businesses and I teach a few classes here and there, but I’ve taken a sabbatical sabbatical from that this year as well. So it’s kind of something my, my main gig is, is the rental income and, and having real estate properties. Yeah.

Yeah. That’s incredible. Just real briefly, how did you get started in real estate investing for those people who are wondering, well, you know, how was Chad living in Spain for 12 months on rental income? How’d you get started <laugh>?

Yeah. The, the quick version of that is I, I jumped into this right outta college and I was just a, i, I didn’t have a lot of debts, I didn’t have a lot of expenses. That was the good part, but I also didn’t have a lot of money. But I just, I thought it’d be cool to get into the flipping side of the business. So I got into finding good deals for other people cause I didn’t have enough money to buy ’em myself. And as I got good at finding deals, I learned to partner with other people who had the money either through real joint venture partnerships or progressively I started borrowing private money seller financing. So I got creative with the financing and I have a, a business partner and I have been investing for 21 years together now. And so we eventually got out of the flipping and got more into the rental properties, which is what we do today. And we just, we built a buy, a buy and hold portfolio in Clemson, South Carolina. It’s a small college town in the northwestern corner of South Carolina between Charlotte and Atlanta. And we rent primarily small multifamily properties to students or grad students. We also have some single family houses, some mobile homes, things like that, kinda outside of Clemson as well. But yeah, it’s just one location in a small town and that’s how we’ve, we’ve built it up.

Yeah, that’s great. So right before we got started recording here, we were just talking about, you know, many vacations and travel and whatnot. You know, you refer to ’em as many retirements, but you kind of made a point that too much delayed gratification is dumb. Can you explain that?

Yeah, it’s, you know, one of the maxims of investing, which I do subscribe to is that you can’t have it all. You know, you have to, a friend of mine, Paula Pant, who has the, the afford anything podcast always says, you, you can afford anything, but you can’t afford everything. Like, you have to make some kind of calls, right? So you have to decide to save money and invest here. And I think most of us get that if we get into investing, there’s some delayed gratification that goes into that. But I think what I’m speaking to there is if you’re ambitious enough to save money, invest in real estate, buy properties, you have another problem that’s kind of the opposite problem, which is you’re probably good at deferring and deferring and deferring and never really cashing in on the enjoyment of why you built this in the first place.

And I’m speaking, you know, anytime I say you, I’m speaking to myself as well because I’m, I’m, you know, I’m the number one, I, I could keep climbing and going and going and going. And my wife has been a really good partner in that respect of just us figuring out like, what do we want our life to look like and why not do it now instead of waiting till 20 years from now, 30 years from now. And there’s sort of an art in the science to doing that. Like when we first started before we even had kids in 2009, it was the middle of the great recession. We were not financially independent. We had a, you know, a thousand or 2000 bucks a month coming in from a rental properties. But it was kind of inconsistent. And, you know, we were just not confident that we could live off of it.

But we saved up some money and we built up our systems in our rental property business to the point where we could travel, could take our backpacks, we could go and it’s sort of like a forcing function, like by, by you leaving and deciding to leave, even if you’re not ready yet, even if it’s for two weeks, three weeks, four weeks, maybe a year, someday, if you ever wanna do that, it forces you to build your systems and your business in a way that allows that to happen. And that’s the real key is that if you only, you know, work, work, work, work and never force yourself to take a little bit of time off, you’ll never test out whether this thing will work or not. Like, can you really live off your passive income? Can you really build systems that run without you? Well, you’ll never know until you test it out.

And so that’s, I think part of it is, yes, enjoying the, it’s like climbing a mountain. You wanna enjoy the journey. You wanna take some plateaus along the way and camp out, enjoy the, enjoy the flowers, enjoy the scenery. Right. That, that’s part of it. And then the other part of it is, it’s a, it’s a business strategy. It’s a business strategy to, to, if that’s the business you want over the long run, to have rental properties that take a little bit of your time and produce all your income, if is forced me over the years to, to build systems, to hire people, and to build, build my business in a way that I have to be able to step outside from it.

Yeah. Well that’s a smart way to even build a business. So that’s the right way to do it. So you have this book coming out called The Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor, interesting title. How are you Defining a Small Investor?

Yeah, I’ll give you a, an actual definition, then I’ll give you some, a couple of examples on the bigger end. Okay. And the small, smaller end that the way I define it in the book is that a small and mighty investor has a goal of of the, the least number of properties of owning the least number of properties possible that still accomplishes your, your financial goals. So I’ll paraphrase that. All of us wanna accomplish our financial goals, we wanna have a certain amount of income, a certain amount of wealth. That’s, that’s a given, right? But there’s a, there’s multiple paths to get there. And whether it’s explicit and said or not, a lot of the, you know, the rah rah real estate stuff out there that I’ve been listening to for, for, since I was a beginner, often assumes that bigger is better. And that the more you do, the faster you do, the better it is.

And I, I just wanted to push back on that because my own experience has been that, that if you can choose an alternative path where you have the simplest solution to a problem, the most elegant solution to a problem, it’s easier to actually step outta your business to do that thing I was talking about earlier. Because the bigger it is, and the more moving parts you have, the more properties you have, the more things can break, the more tenants you have to manage. And yes, there are people out there who systematize and, you know, create a business of thousands and thousands of units that’s supposedly passive, but that’s a hard road for most of us to do. I’ll speak for myself mm-hmm. <Affirmative> having five properties, 10 properties, 20 properties, and especially if you have a property manager doing for that for you, which I know a lot of your listeners subscribe to what you teach of having long distance and hiring a team if you do that, I mean, it’s not unreasonable to have two hours per week, an hour per week, three hours per week that you spend on your rental properties, which is kind of where my, where I’ve landed now.

And so that, that’s kind of the story of the small Mighty Investor. But what does that look like in practical, you know, in the practical execution of that on the small end? I know I feature some people in the book who had 10 properties and they paid them off. They had some properties in South Carolina. I featured other people who had 15 or 20 properties. I’ve had a couple people I featured had one or two. Their goal wasn’t to replace all of their income, they just wanted to pay for a couple of things with a couple of properties. And that’s fine too. But then you could all, I mean, depending what your goals are, like I have a business partner, 50 50 business partner, so you can kind of divide everything we have into two, we have 33 properties, and some of those are multi-unit properties, some are single family, but it’s about a hundred units total.

So I, I would consider myself on the larger side of a small and mighty investor mm-hmm. <Affirmative>. But I, I definitely had a fork in the road in our business. We were full-time investors for the last 21 years where we could have reinvested a lot of our profits into growing and growing and growing. And I could have syndicated it, I could have done a lot of other stuff, but the choice we made was to reinvest a lot of those profits once we got to this point where we had built enough wealth to reinvest our cashflow, our profits into the properties we already had, and to actually pay off debt <laugh> to do some things like, you know, going the opposite direction from what I did before. Leverage, leverage, leverage debt, debt debt actually started paying off some of the debt, which kept our portfolio at the same, relatively the same size for the last five, six years. But our wealth has increased, our increase, our cash flows increased, our risk has decreased. And I’ve just had a lot more peace of mind and simplicity mm-hmm. <Affirmative> because of that fork in the road that we took.

You’re making me think of all kinds of interesting things. One thing that came to mind as you were talking is, and maybe this is a math question, but at what point do you decide that your portfolio size is big enough and you switch gears and you start applying that income from the properties towards paying down the mortgages, maybe, you know, one at a time just in sequential order. Is there a subjective answer or is it more mathematical where it’s a is more of an objective answer?

Yeah, what I tell people in the book is it’s nice to have a specific goal when you’re, when you’re planning your real estate investing. And this is kinda like the Eisenhower quote I think, who said, you know, plans are worthless because you’re never gonna get exactly like you planned. But the planning process is super valuable. And so what I try to encourage people to do is to work it backwards. Like if you’re a brand new investor or early in your wealth building journey, shoot for a number of properties and you can do it pretty simply. I can explain just the basic process is that, let’s say you had a, a house that rents for $1,800 per month. That’s kind of the median price rental in my market in Clemson, South Carolina. And let’s just assume that the expenses, operating expenses, so every, every expense except for your mortgage payment is about 800 bucks.

So $1,800 per month minus 800 bucks is a thousand dollars. Nice round number. And if you just said, all right, my number, let’s say your number’s 10,000 a month, which is my number for kind of like a nice cushy financial independence living for me and my family, then having 10 properties like that paid off free and clear would produce enough income to pay for your lifestyle. So that’s, that’s kinda, that’s a starting point. You see, all right, in my area, 10 houses would, would do. But then you start asking, this is where you get into the tactical side of things, and I talk about in the book, there’s several different ways to get to that end result of 10 properties. And so one way I, I’ve done several of these myself. One way is to a overbuy to buy more properties than you actually need in the end.

So I, you know, the breath math might have been like, if you need 10, maybe you buy 15, maybe you buy 20 of them. And the, the interesting thing about that is as you buy 20, you’re gonna learn what the best 10 properties you have are the ones that attract the best tenants, the ones that, the lo lowest maintenance, the ones that stay full the longest, and your tenants stay a long time. And then you’re gonna find some that are on the opposite end. These are gonna be the ones that, oh man, there’s always a maintenance issue. It always turns over for whatever reason. That’s not my ideal property. And I actually made a list of all those over the years my business partner and I did. And those are the ones we sold first. And sometimes we did a 10 31 exchange and bought another property.

But in this mm-hmm. <Affirmative> kind of, I call it an ender phase or a harvester phase, where we’re definitely trying to pay off debt and we’re trying to rearrange our portfolio more for safety and income and, and living off of it. We would sell properties and just pay taxes on ’em. And you could be a little strategic with that. If you’re if you’re a w W2 earner and you’re earning a lot of money, you’re gonna, you’re gonna pay your higher tax rate. But the capital gains rate’s, what, 2020 2% at this point? Some, somewhere in there. So you’re gonna pay taxes, you’re gonna use the leftover profits to pay off debt on the rest of your properties that you own. So, but over buy, sell some strategically use the profits to pay off some debt. And then the other, you can do, you can use the personal finance tool like the, the, the rental debt snowball.

You could just take all the in. So especially if you’re a W2 earner, you’re, you don’t live off your rental income, don’t touch it, leave it all in the business, and you can recycle that money to start paying off one debt at a time instead of getting right, 10, 10, 15 year loans, or 2015 year loans, get interest only or 30 year loans if you can. And then use all the cashflow, apply it to one property at a time, and then if that gets paid off in two or three years because you’re concentrating your cashflow, now, you freed up a thousand dollars a month on that one, and then you kind of pile your snowball up and go for the second property and the third property. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative> and how far you want to go is really up to you. And it’s up to the math you wanna look at, we actually didn’t pay off a hundred percent of our properties, but we went from, when we first started investing, we averaged about 70% loan to value on our whole portfolio.

You know, cuz we buy properties are lower, we put a little bit of a down payment to the end where we’re now about 15%. It kind of fluctuates a little bit. But we’re, you know, we’re definitely below 20% loan to value, whereas some properties are free and clear, some properties are worth, you know, 300,000 and we owe 50,000 or a hundred thousand bucks on it. It just depends on the property. But the point is, for me, I had an objective of reducing risk and increasing income, which is a kind of an undersold benefit of paying off debt because if you have a debt that’s been, you’ve been paying off for 10 years, for example, I had one example I’m thinking of, it was a thousand dollars payment, a hundred thousand dollars loan on a property that’s now probably worth two or 300,000. And by paying that a hundred thousand dollars debt off, I now free up a thousand dollars per month, or $12,000 per year.

And if you look at it, kinda a rough cash on cash return, that’s about a 12% cash on cash return in terms of mm-hmm. <Affirmative> hundred, a hundred thousand invested, 12,000 back. And when your objective is to live off your income and also to reduce your risk so that in case something happens, in case you know, some, who knows what’s gonna happen. That’s anything I I can’t predict exactly what’s next. Right? But by ha, by having that at least some of your properties paid off, you, you’re building what I call in the book an income floor where it’s, it’s kind of like annuities or bonds or something else in the other parts of the investment world where you’re, you’re just saying, this part of my portfolio is my foundation, my fallback plan, I don’t wanna slide back down that mountain. And it’s just a, it’s a, it’s a good way to, to put a plan together, execute it by saying, I’m gonna pay this property off, this property off. It gives you some objectives to, to shoot for, which is very helpful in your long-term goal setting.

So since we’re on the topic of debt, there’s a lot of things we could talk about there. You know, you bought that a hundred thousand dollars property of now it’s worth 300,000, you have an extra 200,000 in equity. So let’s just say you paid it off to me looking at that, it would be tempting to tap into that equity, not all of it, but even a third of it, and use that equity to acquire more rental properties that generate positive cash flow. I mean, the aggregate total would be more so than just keeping that one property paid off free and clear, typically. So why wouldn’t you, I’m just curious what your, what your thought process was, why didn’t you tap into that, that additional equity when you had essentially a 200% gain on the, on the value of that property?

Yeah, so there, there’s two different mindsets. And I, I get this, and this is probably what a lot of people, if you’re a good investor, you’re probably like pushing back on me now and say, wait, wait, wait. Like this is not the optimal way to grow your portfolio. Right? And I, I agree, I agree with you. Like, I, I think the, the shift is, and I I think about this in stages. Like you could basically roughly say like, as an investor, you start off as a, a beginner starter. The first two or three properties you buy, you’re kind of just learning. And then you go into a phase, the second phase, which is like a wealth builder where your objective is just to maximize your roi. Like get, grow as quickly as you can, as safely as you can. You don’t wanna go crazy, but your goal is to go go bigger and that’s fine.

Like, that’s great. That’s where leverage makes sense. That’s where re return on equity is one of the most important metrics you can look at. That’s where you wanna refinance, pull it out, reinvest it. So those are all great tools. What I’m, who I’m speaking to is when you made that decision to, to metaphorically take some chips off the table, you’re, you’re making a sacrifice of your return on investment in exchange for reducing risk, increasing income. And you could still have a line of credit or something on that property if you really had an amazing opportunity so that you’re not having debt equity. But I I I, I consciously made the choice knowing that saying, this is a great property, I wanna reduce my risk on this property, I’m gonna free up the cash flow. So if I want to borrow money on another property, for example, that’s a little more aggressive, I’ve got an extra thousand bucks per month here that I can use to supplement that debt over there, but I’m, I’m mm-hmm.

<Affirmative> almost like you’re building a castle wall around those properties and saying like, yes, this is, I’m having to shift my mindset about what a successful investment looks like. But this is not a, this is not unusual in a lot of ways. Like if you look at mature s and p 500 companies, if you look at Warren Buffett, you, you look at all of them as they mature, they’re loan to value on their whole portfolio goes down to the point where some of the most long, you know, the companies with the most longevity, the most mature companies have either zero debt or like 15% or 20% of what their assets are. So, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s a balancing act, right? And if you feel like, Hey, I’m, I still have more room to grow, then by all means don’t start paying off the debt.

But I have found at some point, if you, you’re probably gonna know it, I had a stu, a student of mine who asked, he, he emailed me and said, you know, we have 20 properties. You know, I wanna leave my job at some point here pretty soon. Like, I keep thinking to myself, why am I buying more properties? And I, I, I, my feedback to him was that you’re transitioning into this next phase. You should consider, you know, selling some properties or paying off debt, just see how it feels. Do one or two, see if it’s right for you. And it’s, it’s kind of a gut check feeling. It’s more, it’s definitely, there’s some objective measurements you can make, but it’s also, is this enough? Like, am I ready to transition to a new part of my life? Do I wanna take a break for a while? Those are the kind of questions I think lead to this, this type of strategy making.

So it’s subjective as far as when and how to pay off the rental property debt. That’s, that’s just a matter of preference. Do you want to be, I mean, you refer to it as the phases of, of the rental investor journey. You’ve got your starter phase, you have your wealth builder phase, and then it’s something you call the ender phase, which maybe you should expand upon. But if you’re shifting from that wealth building phase to the ender phase, I’m gonna assume that’s when you make a decision about paying off debt mm-hmm. <Affirmative> and either go debt free or maybe just in a low debt environment.

Yeah, exactly. And the, the end is a term I borrowed from a, a teacher down in Florida named Pete Fordo. And I, I love the term, but I’ll also kind of torn about it. It’s like, I like to use the term harvester as well because it sort of implies that you’re done growing, you’re done with it. Like you’re not done. Like it’s, you’re ending the phase of maximizing and prioritizing growth. You’re still gonna grow. Like, I, I give the example, if you have a free and clear property, and let’s just use rough numbers, like if, let’s say the income portion is about a 7% return of what your total equity is, you know, if the property appreciates at 3%, a 5%, yeah. You, you, you could make a 10 to 12% return on a free and clear property. And so you, it is not, it’s not that your growth is done, it’s just, again, a shifting, a shifting of priorities and it’s, it’s gonna be partly what your lifestyle is.

But it could, you could also set a number, like you could set a net worth number. You could set a amount of income number, for example. Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>, if, going back to my 10 property example, if you knew $10,000 per month was your number and you got up to 15 properties that all had about those that profile $1,800 a month in rent, you know, a thousand bucks is the net operating income after all your operating expenses. That means you’re, you’re, you have more than you need if they were free and clear. And so at that point you might say, all right, I’ve kind of, from my wealth building standpoint, I’m pretty close. Maybe I should start experimenting with some, some different tools in the toolbox, some different strategies. And again, it’s not a permanent thing. Like you can my business partner and I did this in stages.

We, in 2009 when I told you we went on that four month trip, we were in the kind of baby ender phase. Like we just, we just had to do it to survive <laugh> during the great recession. We had to refinance some properties, we had to pay off some second mortgages. We had just had to clean up our portfolio a little bit. And then if you fast forward to 2016 and 17, we had another period where we had a lot of cash sitting aside and we’re like, all right, we could just go pay off all of our properties right now, or we could reinvest this, but do it more conservatively. And we actually chose to reinvest it. We bought a 28 unit apartment complex, but we did it with a huge down payment. We did it, you know, with a, you know, 50% debt instead of 80% debt. And, and that deal kind of pushed us from like a normal financial independence level to like, Hey, this is, you’re, you’re in a much more stable position, luxurious financial independence. So it’s really like, you can measure it by net worth and cashflow, but you also have to get a feel, I think, for where you are in life, are you ready to do this? Or you still wanna work for another 10 years?

Yeah. So you, you may have partly answered, you know, this question about focusing on building a small portfolio, again, that’s a subjective term, but whatever small is, if you build a small portfolio, what is the strategy in turning that into, you know, what you might refer to as a lean and regular cashflow producing fat financial independence generating portfolio? Is it obvious or is there a strategy around that?

Yeah part of it’s this conversation we just had about debt. I think, you know, over time it’s like you pay that a hundred thousand dollars debt off, you have a thousand dollars per month, you freed up. So if you’re just working it backwards, saying, all right, and I’m gonna define those terms for everybody who hasn’t heard of that, you can make a goal for yourself for financial independence and roughly breaking into like three different sub goals. Maybe you could say lean, lean financial independence is, you know, just figure out what is your, your basics, like your mortgage payment on your house. If you have a mortgage, your insurance, health insurance, your car insurance. Just like, look at the things that, like if you just had to spend that, like during covid, you couldn’t leave the house. Like, what, what did you spend money on?

What did you have to spend money on? That would be like a, the necessities. The necessities, exactly. So that’d be like a lean financial independence, regular financial independence. If you looked at your budget today, you know, what are you spending roughly right now? Like just on a normal year, not counting luxurious vacations or something, but just normal stuff like eating out, paying for normal things, you know, don’t, you know, just figure out what that is. And I’ll just give you real numbers just to in the book, I shared examples like maybe you know, middle, in the middle of the country, not the east coast, west coast, but maybe it’s 3000 a month might be lean by maybe 5,000 per month is a, a regular phi, maybe 10,000 a month is a fat financial independence where you’re building a little bit more cushion. Now, maybe you double that in big cities somewhere else.

I don’t you, you can pick your number like that. That’s where it’s personal. That’s personal finance. But the, the math is the same. Whatever you’re trying to accomplish. Real estate’s beautiful because it’s really simple math. It’s just addition to subtraction, maybe a little bit of algebra here and there. But you, you, you figure out what does that property produce that I’m my ideal property and my location, and you figure out what’s the net operating income on that property? That’s the rent minus my operating expenses, everything except for my mortgage payment. And then you just stack those up. You just say, how many, if my fat financial independence number is $10,000, then having plan A might be having 10 free and clear properties, or Plan B might be all right, I’m not gonna pay off all 10 of them. Maybe I’ll have five of them free and clear and I’ll have another 10 of them financed.

And you could, you could kind of roughly figure out what that math would look like, whether you’re gonna have some leverage all free and clear. But the point is, you can pretty simply figure out just by doing some rough subtraction of how many properties you need in your end ender portfolio, like that portfolio that you can actually live off of. And the key to that is partly math, and partly, like I talked about earlier, getting the right properties, because I’ve had some properties over the years that were super inconsistent. The rent was up and down, the expenses were up and down. And as I’ve had to live off my in income, I’ve wanted to get rid of those properties because I, I can’t depend on that. Like I, what I want is a nice stable, consistent property where a tenant stays for 10 years, where it’s a low maintenance. I like, I like brick houses, I like hardwood floors and tile in the kitchen. You know, those little details matter because you could have one property that produces a, a lot of maintenance cost, another property produces 10% of that. Right. And so I, I think that it’s, it’s partly the math and it’s partly being choosy on which properties you, you keep for that, that long term portfolio.

Right. Yeah, that makes total sense. And actually, I like those types of properties too, the low, low maintenance. Yep. Easy to fill properties in desirable neighborhoods. Those are definitely my favorite.

Me too.

You’ve mentioned mighty, and I know in the book you talk about being small and mighty or a small and mighty investor. Can you just briefly explain what do you mean by that? Because you wrote a book essentially about being a small and mighty investor <laugh>

Yeah. Yeah. So you may, you may go into more detail, detail on the, the mighty side, what that means, or is it.

Dive down on the mighty side because you know, a lot of people might be thinking, well, I don’t want to be a small investor <laugh>, and you know, maybe they, they’re not just, you know, understanding what small is. Cuz you, you know, you talk about starting off with four properties. I mean, that’s kind of a starting point. Focus on building a a four property portfolio and then build from there.

Yeah. Yeah, part part of the, I think the, the marketing challenge of what I, I had to do here is, is is sort of a, it’s almost like a oxymoron to say small and mighty, right? Like, yeah, typical guy, I go big to be mighty, I got a 10 x I gotta, and, and also there’s a psychological thing, like for me personally, like I’m aspirational. Like any of you who have been saving money and buying properties that you’re, you’re probably a go-getter. You’re probably somebody who likes to accomplish things. But what, what I would like you to like consider here is that you can accomplish everything you want in your life by having something, a simpler solution. So everything you want, like, let, let’s just think about what, what does mighty mean to you? Like, what is doing everything you want in your life? Does it mean that you would work part-time at a job you like?

Or does it mean you go to your boss and say, I’ll work, but I’ll work these hours and I’ll work this schedule and these are the things I’ll do, these are the things I won’t do. Or does it mean I wanna stay home with my kids part-time? Or does it mean I want to travel the world? Does it mean I want to go go an RV and travel to all the national parks in the country? Like, it’s probably a combination of personal family type stuff. It’s probably combined with some kind of work. Like you probably, especially if you still have some energy left in you, which most of you do, you’re probably not gonna sit on your, sit on your hands and do nothing. So it’s, it’s a combination of saying, what would I like to do professionally that would be better than what I’m doing right now?

Like, what would be more enjoyable, a better schedule, a better way of doing this? And then what, from a personal standpoint or some of the, you could call ’em bucket list items or you could call ’em like, what am I not doing at enough of right now that I’m this eating at me at night when I’m thinking about it? That I should be doing that more. I should be spending more time at my kids’ practices when they’re playing sports, or maybe I should be spending more time contributing to this cause in my community. And so that to me, I have another mantra, like, do what matters being mighty to me is defining your own success. Not defining like Instagram success that has 150 properties and that’s the most successful person. Like, we really have no idea who the most successful people are because each of us defines success for ourselves.

And it’s an internal thing, it’s a relationship thing. It’s how we spend our time behind closed doors type thing. That’s really hard to capture with a social media post. But what I would put forward to you is that’s the most essential thing like that, the good life. If you were to be on your deathbed at the end of your life, like which things would you regret doing? Would it be buying that extra five properties? Would it be taking a trip with your family? Would it be, would a little bit better schedule so you have more free, free time for your health and for your family? Like those are only questions that all of us personally can answer all. But what I’m trying to say is the solution to that, at least in my opinion, my, it’s not the only solution. There’s lots of solutions out there.

The reasonable solution that’s worked for a lot of people. And then I think for most people who aren’t gonna try to be full-time in real estate is to have a, have a smaller portfolio than maybe what they they considered before. And it, it can still accomplish all of those things you want in life. There’s no compromise. You don’t have to, like, I feel like I have not compromised, I’m pinching myself all the time. Like this is amazing. Like the life I’m living, the things I’m having to do. I haven’t had to, from a money standpoint, from a time standpoint, any of the things I’ve wanted to do in my life has been more enabled because I’ve chosen to keep it simpler than the all than the other way around. There’s been nothing I’ve had I’ve had to sacrifice. So I don’t know, like that’s, that’s my perspective.

And yet I see, I have friends I have and myself earlier in my career who went big and went fast and there were things that were sacrificed. And yes, there’s a sometimes an end of the goal where you can sell out and, you know, all that pay a hard work pays off. But, you know, what’s the collateral damage like in the meantime? Like, what kinds of things happen when you go big and go fast and it doesn’t end up like you thought it was in the end and you miss out on some of those things in the, in the meantime. So I, I think that’s, that’s my, you know, that’s my messaging. Everybody’s gotta choose what’s what, what that means for them. But I, I do, I’m a big believer that the simpler you can keep it, the slower you can keep it, the smaller you can can still accomplish everything you want.

There was a lot of golden nuggets and wise wisdom and what you just said in the last 2, 3, 4 minutes, Chad. I mean, I’m just reflecting on my life as you were talking about the things that I could potentially regret, you know down the road on my deathbed and you know, what I’m not doing today that I wish I were doing or what I could have been doing. So yeah, I I you, you made me reflect actually quite a bit in listening to what, you know, everything you had to say, which actually kind of ties into, you know, what you have in the book is the seven rules of a small and mighty real estate investor. And, you know, you reminded me of rule one and, and rule two the first one being, you know, put life first and business second. And sadly, I do the opposite often, you know? And so I know I’m aware I’m doing it, but it’s good to hear it and you really need that refresher and you know, that’s why you’re the coach.

And I, I do it as well. So I, I wanna, I wanna repeat this. Like, when, when you, when you make big messages like this, you, you have to be like humble about it. And I I I I’m with you up Marco. Like I, I, I feel like I need to write in a book to remind myself. And we’re, we’re all a work, we’re all a work in progress. I’m a work in progress. I like working. Like, I think it’s fun. Yeah, me too. The cha the challenge is for us, those of us who do like working, who have a capacity, like we’re, we’re good at what we do. We have an entrepreneurial ability, is to find a space that makes sense for our lives. And there’s seasons in our lives, right? For me, be early in my career, I had to spend the 60 to eight hour weeks.

Do I wanna do that right now with, you know, kids who are in a kind of season their life, not, not right now. So it’s like there’s always a, you know, a season for everything, but I, at least I think somebody needs to say it. And I’m, I’m, I’m trying to say it and it’s not as, it’s not as sexy to say that, but it’s in the end, I think it really is. The thing we regret is, are those moments or those things that we didn’t do that we could have in the, in the name of making more and doing more and moving the goalpost.

Yeah. Your second rule is you know, be the real estate tortoise, which is what you were just talking about, you know, not the hair. You wanna expand on that for half a minute?

Yeah, I, I’ll borrow my, one of my mentors, John Shabb, who wrote Building Wealth one House at a Time. He, I think he says it best, he always says, buy a property, take a deep breath, just buy one property per year is what he recommends. But the way I, I think about it’s like, buy a property, take a deep breath, learn from what you just did. Instead of doing what I did in 2007, let’s buy 20 properties at one time and then I’m gonna make 20 mistakes, and then I won’t learn about those mistakes until after I buy 20 properties. A better approach, especially early in your career when you’re learning so much, is to buy one at a time. Give yourself a couple months, absorb those lessons, learn from them, do something else for a little bit. And that’s, that’s the tortoise approach. The tortoise can go pretty fast in the end, right? It kind of compounds, it’s like that growth curve that it can really accelerate and the, the tortoise is still winning the race <laugh> in the, in the investing world. I, I believe that. And so you have to kinda ignore a lot of the fast talking news and all that and just plot along, do your thing, have your strategy. It it works in the long run.

Is that why you suggest starting with just four properties as opposed to, you know, trying to hit a home run?

Exactly. I think buying, but that’s my next rule is that if you buy four properties, it’s a good goal for beginners when you’re first starting. It’s so overwhelming. But even to think about the stuff I talked about earlier, 10 properties, 20 properties, oh my gosh, that’s, I don’t even have to get my head around that, but if you have one property right now, or two properties or zero, you can get to four, you could probably do that in the next two to three, four years. You could do that and you’re gonna learn a lot and kind of look at your career as before I got four properties and after I got four properties, not because that’s a magic number, although there are some financing, you know thresholds you get over once you get above four properties. It’s a little bit more difficult to get conventional financing, but it’s just a, it’s a good place to take a pause as you’re climbing up the mountain. Think about, do I still wanna do this? Is real estate good for me? Is it not you, you can still get out <laugh> if you, if you don’t like it at that point.

Yeah, for sure. So Robert Kiyosaki talks about real estate investing as being a team sport, and we all recognize that and we know the importance of it. We need our attorneys, we need our CPAs and bookkeepers and property managers and all those people. You broke it down in, in a very interesting way. You, you actually defined three groups. You got inner circle team members, you’ve got your support circle team members, and then the service circle team members. I like the way you broke this down a lot. Can you define what those three circles are?

Sure. And I borrowed this idea, by the way, from the, the Millionaire real estate investor, Jay Papasan and Gary Keller, one of my favorite real estate books. But just borrow, borrow the idea. And, but the idea is that you think about it in circles, like your inner circle is your most trusted team members. These are, if you have a spouse or partner, they, they need to be on board, right? I get the, I dunno if you get this call, this question a lot, Marco, about how do I get my spouse on board? And I’m like, Hey man, that’s like, that’s outside my expertise here. <Laugh> ha ha, have a conversation, have a, but, but what I can say is that if you’re, if you have a partner significant other, and they’re not, you’re not on the same page, it’s gonna be a really difficult, they’re, that’s part of your inner circle just by default.

And so having those tough conversations, maybe proving maybe they have some reason to have some doubt in you from past experience. Maybe they do, maybe they don’t, I don’t know. But your, your partner or spouse is definitely on the inner circle. Mentors if you have them, if you have a, sometimes it’s a family member, but often it’s not a family member. Sometimes it’s, you know, your family might be concerned about you and, but not always give you the best real estate advice. Sometimes they, they’re trying to care for you, but don’t want you to take the risks. And so having a mentor or a mind mastermind group of people who can be your, either your peers or maybe somebody a little bit ahead of you who can give you some perspective, who has your best interests at heart? And is isn’t somebody who’s getting a fee from you for like buying a property, right?

Like if you ask your barber whether you need a haircut, what are they gonna tell you? <Laugh>? They’re, you know, they’re, they’re gonna tell you need a haircut. And that’s what they do, right? If you ask your real estate agent on your property manager, they, they, they’re on your side, but they’re always gonna have a little bit of a bias. I, I like having that inner circle people who you trust, who you can pick and choose. That’s number one. And then as you move outta that circle, you have these long, long range members of your team. So for me, this is a property manager. This is a, probably a real estate agent to help you acquire properties. Maybe they’re the same person in some cases. But property manager for me is like the number one team member on my, my long-term rental property team.

Because they often find contractors for me, they often find other team members. They know closing attorneys. They know all the other people you need to get. And so starting with like two or three, definitely a property manager, definitely a real estate attorney in the state you’re investing in. I think that’s a really important one. Just because this is a, this is a property, the sticks and bricks game, but this is also a legal game. And you might not use your attorney all the time, but you need to use ’em early on, help you with your LLC or whatever entity you’re setting up, help you with contracts, help you understand what you’re doing. It’s just, it’s a no-brainer because you can get a attorney, you can get their rate, you can talk to them by the hour. Yes, it might seem expensive at first, but that’s a good investment in your, your long run.

So having your property manager, maybe a real estate agent, attorney, cpa, those kinds of people who are gonna be on your team long run often have a fiduciary duty to you. Those are your to your next circle out. And then you have your service circle is the, the, or your, your subcontractors. This might be your title company or closing attorney. It might be your plumber, it might be your electrician. And sometimes these people come and go, but I’ve had plumbers I’ve used for 20 years, handyman I’ve used for many, many years. So you can have some long-term relationships there as well. But I would say if you, if you’re building your team, you can’t build all that at one time. Start from the inside, right. And work, work out.

Yeah. Well said. Let’s transition. So, you know, everybody’s got different buy box, you know, I like to use that term a buy box. I’ve been using that for many years. And I know you talk about it too. Do you have some general advice or recommendations or maybe just direction for investors, whether they’re just starting out or not, in terms of location for property? Now, I’m not saying suggest specific markets, I’m just saying, you know, defining the location where they should be investing the property type and then the numbers, however you want to define that because that, that makes up your buy box.

Yeah, and I, I mean, I, I, I kind of think about it in two categories and one category, which we’ll get into a little bit of the numbers. This is a math game. It’s got a, you got your analysis has to work is whether it’s cashflow or cash on cash return or unleveraged yield, like that, that’s part of the equation. So there’s the math part of it, but the other part, which I think you do a amazing job of, and I send people your way to, for the, the data and the analytics is you, is your location. And I call it like a qualitative criteria, like the, the location and the property are sort of separate from the numbers, but they’re interrelated. And I, I made the mistake early in my career at focusing so much on the numbers and saying, oh, it’s a great cash on cash return, therefore I should buy it.

And I often bought in the, the worst locations or the, or at least kind of down the ladder of locations. And so it is a, it’s a balancing act there of setting a criteria on your numbers, but then looking at it with a fine tooth comb or getting help from people like you to figure out on the big picture, which markets have the best demographics, where there’s population increasing and there’s a limited supply in a, in a certain location. And then taking that from the big picture down to the micro level. So if you’ve chosen a region that you really like, so I mean, let’s just say you chose metro Atlanta, Georgia, for example, then zooming in and I, I like a, a concept thinking, I don’t know if I borrowed this term from somebody else, but I think about it like satellite cities of big cities.

Like I grew up in a town called Nonan, Georgia, which is about 30 miles southwest of Atlanta. And if you think about Atlanta is like the sun, that’s where the big job centers are. There’s everything’s revolving around that. I like the Newnan’s of the world and the Fayetteville’s and the, you know, Decatur and d different places that are, they’re yeah, they have their, they have their own center in gravity. Like they have their own town center, they have walkability. I’m a big fan of, of, of finding places that are suburban, but they feel like a little urban environment because those are the, you know, the people are moving outta the big cities, all the millennials and people after them. They like the big cities. They like the, the feel of being in New York or something, but they like the prices of Newton, Georgia. And so that, that’s, that’s what you’re going for.

You at least that’s my strategy is, and we’re in a college town, so a college town has kind of a quality of life component, even for non-students. People just like to live there. And, but if you get, but you gotta have jobs. Like that’s the, the thing that is so important. And so if you go to the major cities, and there’s always gonna be jobs there, like, there’s such a huge network of effect of jobs and, and things happening in the big, big cities. And if they, if if it starts changing, you’re gonna be able to see it. Like people saw it in Detroit 20, 30 years before it really happened. I mean, it started going, it wasn’t just overnight kind of thing, and now it’s coming back, right? Mm-Hmm. <Affirmative>. And so, but if you go to Atlanta, find a little satellite city where the prices are reasonable and kind of fit your numbers, whether that’s a, you know, looking at the, you know, around the 1% rule, I know that’s kind of a little bit more difficult to, to, to make work some kind of metric that says this is a reasonable investment.

And, but you’re starting with the analysis of the market, of the demographics of, and I, and on the, the local level. I even get down the street to street level using a, a term called romance. Like if, if it has, if you’re on a street that has big oak trees and sidewalks and a park nearby mm-hmm. <Affirmative>, there’s just a feeling about that there, there’s, there’s people who live there because of that, because of that emotional attraction. Because real estate’s emotional. Yes, it’s got numbers, but yeah, pe people live in those houses for emotional reasons. And so you need to tie your investment strategy to those emotional triggers of what’s causing those. And if you do, you’ll get properties that people stay in and fight over. Like, I have one property in Clemson every time it comes empty, I have 5, 6, 7, sometimes 10 applications, <laugh> within a week or two. Like, that’s unbelievable. Like that makes your job so much easier as opposed to some of those bad ones I had before where I’m, you know, out on the street with a sign saying, rent me. Right, right here, come on, rent right here. This is a great property. Right. And is that you want a property that markets itself, a location that markets itself?

Yeah, a hundred percent. One of the questions I get asked quite often, even my team here is, you know, is now a good time to get started in real estate investing? Or is now a good time to buy, you know, for various reasons. Either it, it has to do with the economy or potential recession or mortgage rates changing, or you know, you fill in the blank. Right. In your opinion, especially as you define a small investor, is now a good time to get started as a small investor?

I think it’s a challenging time, but I still think it’s a good time. And I’ll give you a sports metaphor. I used to play football at Clemson University. I was a middle linebacker, so I was a lot bigger, a lot stronger. But I was, you know, when, when we had to play football, you played in all conditions. Like sometimes it was raining, sometimes it was sunny, sometimes it was windy. And I had a coach, some coach Bowden, Tommy Bowden, who used to say, some, some person complained about, well, what was raining coach? How are we gonna, are we gonna pass the ball when it’s raining? And he was like, I’ll buy, I’ll buy as many new balls as I need to so that we have a dry ball on every single play. I was like, wow, really? Okay. I thought about it like a ball might cost $50 or I don’t know what an notch cost, but like everybody was complaining about how we, let’s change our whole strategy.

We can’t throw it anymore because it’s raining outside. He’s like, I’ll just buy a dry ball. <Laugh>. I always stuck with me because it’s like, you gotta play the game. And so in real estate investing, I just, I’m a big believer in not trying to time the market. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pay, pay attention to the market. Yes. Interest rates are high. Like, I’m not Pollyanna, I’m not saying like it is harder to make it cash flow, but the question is, well, what’s your equivalent of the, the 50 or 60 dry footballs? Like what’s your strategy to adapt to the market? That’s the question. Like what’s your competitive advantage? How can you adapt to what we have today? And typically it comes down to financing, like the, the location stuff, the stuff that you teach about fundamental locations, that, that’s not changing. Like people are still moving to towns, right?

People still have to have to rent a house. Like life happens. They do life, life continues to happen. So that, that’s part of the equation. Doesn’t change. The equation is how do I make the numbers work? And that’s where you have to get, you have to think outside the box. You gotta get creative. And I, I, I luckily didn’t start off my career having conventional financing. I had to think outside the box from the very beginning because I was a college grad with no job. I didn’t have any income coming in. And so I had to get creative from the very beginning, even in good times to figure out how to finance my deals. And I started using private money, joint venture partnerships, lease options, seller financing. Yeah. Even some terms like kind of coming back popular again today. Like subject two and different things like that.

There’s a whole toolbox of things. Some, they’re good, there’s some good and some bad to each of those, right? And you have to learn them. They’re like, learning how to use a powers saw. You don’t just go like, start using a power saw and never having used it before. That’s kinda how I see subject two these days. That’s a little pet peep of mine. That yeah, let’s just go use this thing as a brand new beginner without understanding the full you know, spectrum of what, how, how this tool, this power tool works. But regardless, that’s the, that’s the way you approach I think 2023 is to, number one, figure out a way to use financing better or differently. Number two, figure out a way to buy better deals. Mm-Hmm. Like, you just might mm-hmm. You know, every deal works. If you buy it at a low enough price, that doesn’t mean you’re gonna get deals 50 cents on the dollar every day.

But I think at least I’ve, I’ve been experiencing myself and also talking to students around the country. You, you have a little bit more negotiating room. It’s not a, it’s not a hundred percent buyer’s market, but I would be making, I would be making lower offers. Like I, I’m not, I’m not afraid to make a low offer. This is what I can do. These are how the numbers work. The seller can accept it or not. But that’s how, that’s how you adapt to a market is you have to change your financing, change your offers, change your approach.

Yeah. Yeah. Good point. Good point. And that’s always been true. Well Chad, let’s wrap it up with this kinda last question if you will. It’s, it’s really based off your seventh and last rule for your 10 rules there. And that is measure success differently. It’s, it’s interesting when I hear comments about that, you know, how do you define success? I mean, obviously it’s subjective for individuals, but it can be objective to that individual. So what do you mean by measure success differently?

Yeah, I, I alluded to it a little bit earlier about how success is an inside game. Like every one of us has to define it, and yet we’ve gotta measure it. Like we’ve gotta make progress against it. And so for, for me this is an idea I got from the four Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss early in my career of, you know, if we ju I think my problem is using money as the only metric is it is just lopsided. It just, it’s, it’s typically what we do. It’s easy to measure, but it’s a little lazy. If you really wanna define success at a minimum, start adding some other currencies, you know, so instead of just money, add free time to your equation for what makes you a successful business. So maybe you say, you know what, this year it was a record income year, but I had less free time than I did last year.

Was that a success? Maybe, maybe not. Maybe you chose to do that deliberately. Maybe you’re in the growth phase of your career. Like you, you know this, I don’t, you know, no, none of us outside the outside the your room will know this. But if you made a goal that year to say, I want to increase the amount of time I have doing other stuff, like hobbies with my family travel, and yet you didn’t do it this year and yet you made, you know, half a million dollars more than you made last year, is that successful? Like, I don’t know, like that’s, that’s, that’s the kind of thing I I’d like to play around with. So money, time, mobility, those are three that I learned from the, the four hour work week. Those are three criteria that that really, that really kind of helped me guide my business so that I define success a little bit differently because I could buy this property, it could make me a lot of money, but is it gonna require me to spend an extra five to 10 hours per week for the next three to five years to make it work, right?

Like, no, thank you. Like I, I’ve passed on tons and tons of opportunities that could have made me a lot of money because of having a framework then that between money, time, mobility, but also other things like personal health contribution. Like I, you know, going back to our conversation about work, like work is a wonderful thing, like I say, is it makes you feel on purpose. It makes you feel like you’re contributing. And so I, like, I never plan to stop working, but asking yourself the question, is this job feel like stale to me? Does it feel like I’m contributing? Am I using my talents or is there maybe a different way I could measure success? That I like to work in a, an environment that I’m, I’m feel like I’m connecting with the customers, like the people I’m delivering my service to. I, I feel like it’s a mission.

Like I’ll be, I’ll pay to do this. Like, instead of just getting paid to do it. And I know that’s a pretty high standard, but that’s the beauty of financial independence is like once you have incrementally more and more cashflow coming into your life without having to work for it, by having assets, you can start saying no to things. You can start negotiating with your boss and saying, Hey, look like this used to be the way we’re doing it. I’ve now got enough money on the side that I don’t have to do it. I’m willing to do it like this, this, and this. Otherwise, I’m, I’m out <laugh>. That’s, that’s beautiful. Like, that’s, that’s the place you want to get to. And that’s the whole purpose for me of the small mighty real estate investor book is that’s the goal. That’s what success looks like. And I can’t tell you what you’re gonna do when you tell the boss to go do whatever you needs to do, but you know that the person listening to this knows that you know what those dreams are, those aspirations and, and use that as your measurement of success. And then business and money is just a tool. It’s just a tool to help you accomplish whatever it’s you wanna do. But it takes some self-discipline to define that for yourself and then to stick to it.

Yeah. Beautiful. Well said. So Chad, hey, final comment or takeaway before we wrap up?

Thank you. You asked great questions and really appreciate your listeners sticking with this concept. I hope they, they check out the book, it’s gonna be available on the BiggerPockets website. I’m sure you’ll have some, some links if people wanna check it out. But biggerpockets.com/uh small and mighty just small and mighty. I was gonna say wrong, biggerpockets.com/smallandmighty and hope you, hope you find it helpful to your, your journey. I wrote this book because I had a itch in my head because I’ve had these ideas. I, I wrote another book called Retire Early with Real Estate, but it was more of a purely of a strategy book, kind of a financial independence book. Whereas this one, I wanted to get people the tactics I wanted to show you, here’s the strategy, big picture, but the meat, the hamburger of this book, the meat is the tactics. How do you find properties? How do you analyze markets? How do you run the numbers? How do you hire people? How do you build systems? And so that’s my goal is that you have, this book is something on your shelf to read once or twice, go back to and be sort of a business model for you if you feel like this, this type of small mighty model resonates with you.

Beautiful. Yeah. And I’m sure the book will be available on Amazon as well as you know, all the usual book sellers.

Yep. It will, yeah. The first month is on Bigger Pockets, does it where they, they sell it on their, their website the first month, August 22nd. It’ll be Audible and Amazon, Barnes and Noble. But you can get you can get the, all the audio, the digital and the, the physical book on Bigger Pockets as well.

Cool. Very good. Well, Chad, I know it’s late for you there in Spain, so I appreciate you staying up and taking the time to come on and it’s, it’s been a great interview, so thank you.

It’s been a pleasure. Thank you, Marco, for having me.

I appreciate it. 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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