The Real Estate Way to Wealth and Freedom

Brian Burke is the President and CEO of Praxis Capital, a vertically integrated real estate private equity investment firm. Praxis currently manages a portfolio of active funds for the acquisition of multifamily and single-family residential assets nationwide.

So why multifamily investing? Let’s take a look at the business model in a very simple way. As a multifamily investor, you borrow other people’s money to buy a property. You hire a property manager to manage the property. The tenants pay the debt for you, and the extra money left over goes in your pocket. Talk about leverage! You’re leveraging other people’s time, money, and resources! But this doesn’t mean you’re the only one winning in this game. When done correctly, everyone wins.

Daniel Roca a real estate and finance professional with a diverse background. Throughout his career he’s had the experience of looking at business opportunities from different perspectives: firstly as a corporate lawyer, then as a corporate lender and lastly as real estate lending professional. He is currently employed at Zeus Mortgage Bank, a Houston-based mortgage and crowdfunding provider of home-equity loans and mortgages to individual consumers. The Houston Business Journal and Inc. magazine placed Zeus Mortgage Bank on the list of the fastest-growing companies in the United States.

First to develop your strategy, you need to identify what your goals are. Do you want passive income? Do you want to build a business that you operate on a day-to-day basis? Once you determine your goals, you can build a strategy that will get you to those goals.

Before entering the multifamily investment arena, Dr. Robbins owned a number of companies including multiple medical practices, a coffee shop, a 1,500 member gym, and a number of real estate investments. These real estate investments included a small apartment complex, a 32,000 square foot retail shopping center which houses his medical practice, and a number of single family properties. Dr. Robbins received a congressional nomination to attend West Point Military Academy but his lifelong passion for baseball led him to accept a collegiate baseball scholarship. He and his wife Anita live on a farm in South Central Virginia where they have raised 10 children including 8 that were adopted. Dr. Robbins is now fully committed to helping others reach their financial goals using the Wellings Capital multifamily wealth generation platform.

Knowing the market you invest in is critical. There are a lot of things you can change with a property – you can paint it, fix it up, convert it to a different use, etc. The only thing you can’t do is change the location. You can’t pick that property up and follow a market condition, or jobs, or population growth. That’s why knowing your market is so important.

Michael Blank is a serial entrepreneur. He has a Master’s Degree in Computer Science and spent several years working for larger companies including AOL, Michael joined a software startup and was involved with a taking the company public. Michael then opened up a number of pizza restaurants, before he finally started investing in apartment building. Michael and his asset management partners control over $58 million of real estate assets. Michael is a passionate coach who loves to help people do their first deal. He’s also the host of the popular Apartment Investing Podcast.

All you need to be a successful real estate investor is passion and the willingness to learn. Today I’m going to share the best resources you can use to educate yourself. In today’s age, there are endless resources at your fingertips. I’m going to share some podcasts and books that will accelerate your learning curve, by learning from others.

Garrett Sutton is an attorney, best-selling author and one of Robert Kiyosaki’s Rich Dad Advisors. A clear and engaging writer, Garrett demystifies legal topics and presents them in a very understandable and accessible manner.

Getting started investing in real estate can sound daunting. There are so many things to consider – location, property type, loan products, dealing with tenants, etc. Just one of these things is enough to deter most people from ever getting started investing. I’m going to tell you the easiest and best way I know to get started investing in real estate. That is buy a fourplex!

Steven Rinaldi owns a law firm in Maryland where he concentrates on business law matters and intellectual property matters since 2005. Prior to 2005 he was software licensing attorney for Mercury Interactive. He also was the Associate General Counsel of the American Bankers Association, and was responsible for all business agreements for a $30 million dollar a year division of the Association.

Your Time is Now! Theodore Roosevelt said, “The only man who never makes mistakes, is the man who never does anything.” I believe that 80% of success is just showing up., taking action, and learning as you go. Afterall, luck favors the prepared. It’s said that the best time to plant a tree is 20 years ago. The second best time is now. So what will you wish you would have done today, in 20 years? No, really. Think about it. What will you wish you would have done today, in 20 years? Watch the next episode of House of Cards? Scour pinterest for DIY ideas for pallet bed frames? Or maybe start educating yourself on a topic that you’ve been putting off? So why should you stop procrastinating and get started taking action? Well, for one, it’s much simpler than you think! Think back to a time when you put something off because you dreaded doing it. Maybe the dishes, or getting an oil change in your car. Once you did it, you probably realized it didn’t take as much effort or time as you thought. Taking action towards your goals is the exact same. More good news is if you break your goal into small steps, it immediately becomes much easier to accomplish! The hurdle to getting started is often in your mind. You might be afraid that you don’t know everything about the topic, before you get started. Well guess what? You’ll never know everything! It’s not even possible to know everything without doing it! SO why try to learn everything there is to know about it, before getting started? This is the single biggest mistake people make when setting out to accomplish something. So how can you learn to not let that get in your way? Start by breaking your goal, task, dream whatever it is your working on into smaller steps. This immediately makes things achievable through small actions. Don’t wait. It’s not going to get any easier. You won’t be more sure about it tomorrow. If you’re having concerns about your probablility of success, find someone who has done what you want to do. Join a network, find a mentor, or surround yourself with like-minded people. Let’s put all this into a scenario: You want to retire in the next 15 years?! Seems pretty daunting! So instead of just making excuses of why that’s not plausible for you, or convincing yourself that’s not what you really want, rather put together a plan of action! Simply start by setting your goals. – Let’s say you want to have $4000/month in passive income in 15 years so that you can retire. Great! That’s the first step already done! You’re already on your way to accomplishing your goal. Next outline what it will take to accomplish your goal? Let’s say that’s 20 rental properties the produce $200/month each. Now you’re making real progress by turning a dream into reality! Here’s where it starts to get hard. Now you have to start taking action. How are you ever going to buy 20 rental properties? Well, start with educating yourself. Read books, listen to podcasts, surround yourself with like-minded people. You’ll eventually learn how to find properties, analyze the deal, and find the best loan. Next thing you know, you’ve bought your first property, then second, then third, and before you know it, you’re truly a real estate professional with 20 properties in 10 years, not 15 years! By 15 years, you’ll thank yourself for taking that one day to write down your goals and taking action! You see how this all started with taking the first step? The best news, you can accomplish literally anything with this simple mindset! Anything in this entire world! Things you can’t even imagine today! Things you didn’t know existed! So take that first step. Take action. One day, you’ll look back and be glad you did.

Nathan is a real estate investor and adventurer. He owns a fourplex in Oklahoma City, and has been travelling through Central and South America for the past two years. Nathan began his real estate investing career understanding the power of multifamily properties. He is now actively searching for 80-130 unit apartment communities. Lightning Round 1. What was your biggest hurdle getting started in real estate investing, and how did you overcome it? Nathan wasn’t sure where to invest initially. With time, he became more familiar with the areas he was interested in. He started looking at a market, and refined it into areas of that market, then specific neighborhoods, down to the specific street. 2. Do you have a personal habit that contributes to your success? Determination and Visualization. 3. Do you have a favorite online resource? BiggerPockets and MeetUp 4. What book would you recommend to the listeners and why? Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, Richest Man in Babylon 5. If you were to give advice to your 20 year old self, what would it be? Have focus and avoid the “shiny object syndrome”. Key Points 1. Investing in Fourplexes 2. Travelling while owning a property 3. Finding your first deal Nathan’s Reasons Why Nathan knew he wasn’t good at being an employee. Nathan wants to have time freedom. He’s not motivated by material possessions, although he appreciates them just as much as the next person. Nathan was naturally drawn to real estate as his vehicle to achieve time freedom. Resources Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki 4-Hour Work Week by Tim Ferris, Richest Man in Babylon by George Clason Visit Audible for a free trail, and a free audio book download. Interview Links http://www.bluealamo.com/

Cash Flow over Retirement Many people start their life with a blue print from their parents. This blue print looks the same for most people. Go to school, get good grades, go to college, and then get a good paying job. While that’s certainly a path you could take, and most do, it has one major flaw in my opinion. That plan only get’s you to your early to mid twenties, and then you’re left working for an employer until retirement. Now I know our parents didn’t intentionally give us bad advice. It’s just what they knew at that time. Now days there are no pension plans to supplement your retirement. The average lifespan is constantly increasing, which extends your retirement years. Unfortunately, retirement isn’t what it used to be. That leads the next point. I want to take a minute and talk about the concept of retirement. Retirement has never quite made sense to me. In this context, I’m referring to retirement as working until you are 65+, while saving money in a retirement account such as a 401k, IRA, or even in a shoe box. Retirement is deciding you have enough money to live the rest of your life on. So is the goal to die before your money runs out? What if you outlast your money? Is that good or bad? Well you’re alive, but don’t have any money to live on. Our actions around retirement are even a bit strange. Here’s a quote by R.C. Sherriff that says. “When a man retires and time is no longer a matter of urgent importance, his colleagues generally present him with a watch.” The whole idea has never made much sense to me, and I never realized it until I made it to the final chapter in my blueprint. So I set out to redesign my blueprint. I don’t want to wait until I’m 65+ to retire. That’s not to say I don’t want to work. In fact, I like working. I just don’t want to be forced to work for someone else on terms other than my own. Rather than focusing on saving money for retirement, I have turned my efforts towards building multiple streams of passive income that will last well beyond my lifetime, through real estate investing. Through this route, you could become financially free (or retire, in theory) as soon as you had enough cash flow to support your basic needs (this is your freedom number). Say for example you need $4,000/month to pay for your housing, transportation, food, clothing, utilities, etc. That is your freedom number. Now those are only your basic needs – not the extras, such as vacations, gifts, donations, entertainment, etc. By calculating your freedom number, you can determine how much passive income you’ll need to be financially free. With real estate investments, you can achieve financial freedom much sooner that you could by saving a large nest egg to last the rest of your life. The earlier you want to retire, the larger your nest egg has to be to support your longer retirement. This lease less time to build that retirement nest egg. So what does your blueprint look like? Become financially free through passive income? Or work for the rest of your life and defer income and life experiences until your later years? Or something else? I would be interested in hearing your ideas. I know those aren’t the only two routes in this life, and there are many blueprints out there. I want you to live a life of fulfillment you deserve. Life is short. Make the most of it!

Jeff is the Managing Partner of Synergetic Investment Group. Since 2007 Jeff has been investing in multi-family assets in emerging markets. He focuses on acquisitions, investor relationships, contract negotiations, business systems development, business management and asset management. Jeff has over forty years’ experience in management, staff supervision, development and training. He has proposed, implemented, and supervised million dollar budgets for government agencies, as well as private and public organizations.