$89,000 in Debt at 40 to Retired at 52: Dion McNeeley's Model

Original automatic captions. Names, numbers, and punctuation may contain transcription errors.

0:00 Hello and welcome back to the Owner Meeting podcast. I'm Christian, your channel host, joined by Dion. Dion, what
0:05 country are you in today? Howdy. Today I am still in Thailand. I've been here for three months uh again
0:11 in a couple weeks. And I came in November and I'm heading to Las Vegas for the one rental at a time event on
0:18 the 14th and 15th of February. So Oh, we'll be back in the US. I will see them there. [snorts] Oh, there we go. Well, it sounds like
0:25 you're having a pretty good time in Thailand. I remember a uh a long time ago you were like, "I don't know about uh I don't know about getting married.
0:31 That seems like a bad idea." Uh since you've been in Thailand, I feel like you've had some developments over there if I if I recall correctly.
0:37 To be transparent, yes, we got engaged. I proposed. I'm [clears throat] not supposed to say
0:43 the date that we sent set, but I'll text it to you later. Okay. Well, congratulations. I know. I
0:49 The Instagrams may have indicated there was a tiger involved in this event. Yes. Uh, it was Chesa's first time to
0:56 Thailand. So, we did the whole, you know, swim and walk with the elephants and play with the tigers. And I figured
1:01 she was distracted enough by the giant cat knocking bowling balls around the cage that, you know,
1:09 she probably wouldn't think it through and she actually said yes. So, is that a uh is is that a financial
1:17 freedom thing? is like, "Okay, now that now that we have a few rentals and uh we've locked down the, you know, we've
1:23 seasoned the portfolio, we can now just hang out with tigers and get married and live in another country."
1:30 There was eight years without a vacation to reach financial freedom. It took a decade, right? But for the first eight
1:36 years, I I didn't take any time off of work. I sold back every vacation hour that I earned. Uh
1:42 I worked overtime. I worked a side hustle. And then I didn't think I was
1:47 going to retire. I remember several years saying, "I don't think I'll ever retire early. I don't even know if I'll
1:53 retire late because I loved my job." To the point where those years without a vacation, I didn't really notice or
1:58 care. Everyone around me did. Apparently, I'm not myself when I'm
2:04 vacation hungry. But I reached financial freedom in 2018 and kept working for
2:10 four more years because I love my job. And then one day, I did a whiteboard video on my YouTube channel. And it dawned on me how stupid it was to be
2:18 going to work when I had that much money coming in without having to work and retired in 2022. And one of my goals
2:24 right now, it's not a hard goal. It's just something I enjoy is I want to travel more than I spend time at home.
2:30 So I went eight years from no vacation to seven or eight months a year is my goal to not be home. So 3 months in
2:36 Thailand now. Uh we're uh looking at my Orca later this year. Uh, we talked
2:44 Scotland and uh, we might take a trip to Texas. If I do that, I'm definitely
2:49 coming swing by and make some content and hang out with you. I got a niece and nephew that live in Texas.
2:54 Oh, there we go. I have a room for y'all down here. I have a fantastic guest room. You are
3:00 more than more than invited to stay when you're in Dallas. Awesome. Well, okay. This is actually So, I I
3:06 recently had a friend Brian Luben on the podcast. And Brian, his entire decision was, hey, I'm I'm going to leave the 9
3:13 to5 early. I'm going to go travel the world while I'm young. And he's super happy with that decision and his
3:18 business is seems to be doing really well. Uh, but he started he started young and rolled the dice of like, hey,
3:24 I'm going to go just dive straight into the entrepreneur thing. Hopefully, it works because I'm doing it while traveling. Uh, you did the responsible
3:30 adult thing, uh, that a lot of us are are told should work. Uh, you worked your butt off and made good investing
3:37 decisions. Looking back, would you have done it differently? Because there's I don't know if there's a right or wrong answer. There's a right answer for you,
3:44 but if you were looking at younger Dion, would you have done a similar thing to the way that you set up your finances
3:49 with the the eight years of sacrifice for the now you can go to Thailand and
3:55 ride Tigers and propose? So, there's a one-s sentence answer.
4:01 Let me start with I tried to make a pension twice. I tried the Marine Corps.
4:07 They downsized after Desert Storm. I tried law enforcement. It got downsized after 2008. So my pensions kept getting
4:12 taken away due to things outside of my control. I wasn't thinking about money.
4:18 I was thinking pensions. But at 40, a single parent laid off from law enforcement. I found out about $89,000
4:24 in bad debt in my name I didn't know existed until the divorce. I started teaching at a CDL school
4:29 making $17 an hour. So if I talk to anybody, most people would think, well, I would
4:34 wish I'd started sooner, wish I'd started investing instead of working for pensions. But here's the one sentence answer.
4:41 The outcome is too great to risk the butterfly effect changing anything.
4:50 So if you talk to an older person and they say, "Here's all the things I would do different," their outcome's not that
4:55 great. I retired at 52 and uh yeah, I would have, you know, liked more healthy
5:01 years of travel, but in traveling, I'm seeing all of these 70 plus people, year old people figuring out how to travel,
5:08 who can't do excursions, who can't kayak, who can't paddle board, who can't scuba dive, who can't walk down the ramp
5:13 on a a cruise or take the tender from the ship to the shore. And so I'm glad
5:19 I' I've got decades of enjoyment travel before I'm too old to enjoy it with
5:24 money not being a factor. So it's not that I would go back and change anything. I think the right question is
5:30 if I had to start today, scorched earth, something happened, I lost everything. How would I do it? I
5:38 would do it exactly how I did it from 40 to 50, not from birth to 40. And that would be
5:44 I like that. I know this is multifamily and big portfolio and super success stuff, but that's not me. I
5:50 I'm not on the owner reading podcast. This is just people who've done cool stuff that other people want to do and how to do it. You're you're in good
5:56 company here. The Well, I I definitely have respect for the
6:02 amount of success of some of the people I've seen on the podcast. Absolutely. Um Coach Carson, the small and mighty
6:08 investor, I think, is the one that most aligns with what I've done. And it's I wanted the right amount of cash flow from the least amount of units.
6:16 And so for the math nerds out there, I'll break down the portfolio really quick. I only have eight properties.
6:22 It's 18 rental units because it's a, you know, duplexes, a triplex, and a forplex.
6:27 I'm still house hacking, so I live for free. But the gross rents gross rents on on 17
6:33 rented out units is about 30 3800
6:39 38,000 a month. I have about 10,000 in mortgages. I set
6:44 aside $5,700 a month for expenses and that's about 68,000 a year and I've
6:50 never come close to that. And that leaves me with about $22,000 a month to live on. I spend four. So even when I'm
6:57 traveling here and I'm at a private resort this month, I'll probably spend five or six because we're doing an excursion every day.
7:02 Oh no. We're not enjoying the Thailand experience of the this is a really
7:08 affordable country. We're doing the American version of bringing America with you where you have a private villa,
7:13 a private pool. Uh it's a Michelin star restaurants here. Oh, so no, it doesn't
7:19 have to cost that much here, but I'm doing that against me on every trip. I'm going to have to come here.
7:25 I I will. I will. That'll be my next uh my next goal. Thailand's actually way up on the list. I have uh never made it off
7:31 of this side of the ocean, so I have to go make it to all sorts of other places.
7:36 Well, it it's phenomenal. I highly recommend it. Um, there are some, it's a huge country. It's not like a state in
7:43 the US. I mean, you can come here and we went to the mountains up in Chiang Mai where the elephants and tigers are. We went to Phuket where it's beaches. We
7:49 went to Bangkok where it's like uh it's 11 million people, so it's like LA but
7:54 condensed. Um, we went to beach towns like Huah Hen where it's a little more remote and and
8:00 you know, it's not so touristy. And now we're on the island of Kosamoy, uh, which is one of the bigger islands here.
8:05 And this is where you go for scuba diving. Oh, that's so fun. Well, what I
8:10 love is that like if you look at a normal so, so take what you did on the back end of your career. So, so it took about eight years to put together the
8:16 bulk of the portfolio at least to get to the financial freedom part of the portfolio where you're like, hey, I'm completely optional. In fact, I've
8:22 probably worked longer than I needed to. So, that's a that's compared to a normal what what do they advertise now? 45 year
8:28 career. I think they upped it to five more years to the the working life since I last uh since I was in high school.
8:35 the 40 to 45 years that you work, you were able to put together an eight significantly more
8:42 revenue per year and it comes in almost regardless of how much you work. How
8:48 your model is so passive. And by the way, Dion's book is behind me. His entire model, when he sent me a book, I
8:54 expected like an easy read. It's a great read. It's not a fast read. It is
8:59 actually a very robust uh fantastic book. Uh, but in Dion's model, it's
9:05 actually like pretty simple. How many hours do you actually spend managing the portfolio? So, I'm in Thailand for 3 months. I've
9:12 totaled the three months. Hasn't reached two hours yet. So, I usually say [laughter]
9:18 I usually say it's two hours a month because when I have a turnover or uh you know, acquiring a property or anything
9:24 that's timeconuming, but actually running the properties, I've got handyman in place. I've had uh three issues while I've been here. One
9:30 was handled with like two texts. The other one did take a handyman back and forth uh over two days, but it was just
9:36 text messages, right? It was like, you know, the tenant says there the septic system has failed. Handyman says I found
9:43 a rodent. Here's the payment with a tip. Like that was the the totality of it. One of the reasons I wanted a small
9:50 portfolio is because of the scale. If you have more units, you can have more issues pop up. So I specifically
9:56 invested in a high cost of living area. So, yes, it's it's there's a barrier to entry. The down payments were larger,
10:02 and I wish my properties cost more because I was chasing yield, not unit count. And the more expensive your units
10:08 are, as long as you're getting the yield you want, the fewer properties you have need to have for more cash flow.
10:14 Yep. And it wasn't that way in the beginning, right? Acquiring properties is life
10:20 consuming. educating yourself on your market, your asset class, your st your systems, meeting and finding contractors
10:26 and handymen to build those relationships, learning how to screen tenants and find a lease. Like those eight years where I didn't take a
10:32 vacation, it was because I was either working or working on my portfolio. Like it it is life consuming.
10:37 Yes. Owning rentals is closer to passive, right? The IRS
10:43 calls it passive. I call it close to passive because two hours in three months, that's not completely passive.
10:48 This is why knowing what you want to do when you set out to start doing it is so important. [snorts] Ultimately, your
10:55 original goal like way back to like young Dion, you're like security is pension. Let's secure the let's still go
11:02 secure the pension. So, you're shooting for that. You built a portfolio that beats what your pension would have been.
11:08 But you like you were seeking from the beginning. You're like, "Hey, how do I get stability?" And you built it and now
11:13 you have a bunch of freedom. If you want to do a portfolio like mine, the cost is
11:19 um I have more stuff. I spend unbelievably more than two hours every three months. I spend about two hours
11:27 every 1 hour uh working on my portfolio. It's very busy. Uh it is. And if you're
11:33 still in acquisition mode, which I still am at 500 whatever doors, I'll have my CPA. Recount them. I should know. But I
11:41 stopped counting right as we crossed 500. I was like, it's more than five. While you're in acquisition mode, it's
11:47 pretty much go all the time. And if you involve more people and raising capital and now you have employees, even when
11:53 people are doing the work, and I have 11 people in my property management company, I have to manage all those
11:59 people and they have people problems and sometimes people problems are worse than property problems.
12:05 It's a completely You need to know what you're doing. If you were Dion and you went out and built the business that I
12:11 have, you would be very, very, very far away from Dion's goals. You would not be on a beach right now. You'd be building
12:17 a business right now and you'd be managing people. That is not what Dion wants to do. Building a plan towards
12:25 your actual goal is so important. So, what's really fun is I am still in the build phase. So, no matter what content
12:30 I put out, I can't write a book like Dion's and I can't have a podcast like
12:37 Dion's. I because I haven't made it to the end. Dion has a completely different perspective. He has achieved his goal
12:43 and then you have surpassed your goal and now you're getting to live in that which is uh I'm really looking forward
12:48 to being in my that part of my career. That is going to be a fun uh it's be a really fun time.
12:55 Well, you have some strong motivation to get here, right? I didn't even really start investing until my kids were late
13:02 teens. So, I missed out on the uh a lot of the sporting events, like my kids
13:07 were in wrestling and gymnastics and I was working or working on the portfolio. And yes, in adulthood, my schedule's
13:14 completely free and so they have their spouses and their jobs and their lives, but my schedule's always open. So when
13:21 they have a weekend or when they my my son had uh you know uh Tuesday Wednesday Wednesdays off, I was free to spend time
13:27 or go do something with them now. So I get more time than with them than I would if I had to work until I retired
13:32 because my schedule would then conflict with theirs. So maybe you could do that sooner than I did with mine being in
13:38 their teens. And when it comes to the goal, my goal started out financial
13:44 freedom and retiring early is an accident for me. My real goal, and this is in the book,
13:50 Financial Freedom for the Lazy Person, when I started out, was I didn't want my
13:55 kids to have to take care of me when I got too old to work. I didn't want to become a financial burden to them. And I've got a lot of friends my age. I'm a
14:01 Gen Xer. A lot of friends are paying their parents cell phone bill, car insurance, maintaining the car for him.
14:07 Um, I mean, I understand helping them with tech, explaining how emails work or how to go to a website and create an
14:14 account or anything like that, but financially they're taking care of them. And I thought, I don't want to be that way when I get old enough. I don't want
14:19 my kids to be stuck with that. And I thought, like Michael Zuber, from One Rental at a Time, if I had a few
14:24 rentals, just long-term rentals and so so security, I'd probably be okay
14:31 and wouldn't need money from my kids. And so that was the first goal. So I started targeting what would long-term
14:37 rentals look like that I could manage when I'm old. And that would be low tenant turnover. So I wanted single family houses.
14:43 But in Washington state where there is no R, but there is a bunch of liberals who make it to where single family
14:48 houses don't cash flow. No, the cost of a house is almost impossible.
14:54 If you did the Burr method or you did value ad, you can absolutely find single family houses that cash flow. I'm working full-time. I've had never done a
15:01 rehab, never done a burr. All my deals are from the MLS, tenants in place. I needed
15:06 cookie cutter. I can handle doing this while raising three kids and working full-time. Well, in Washington, you have
15:11 to do it's major rehab to get it to cash flow, too. It's not like a little like, hey, I got in, it was a hobby fix and
15:17 flip. Like, you look at the people making money in single family. It's gutting absolute zombie houses of like,
15:23 wow, they brought this thing back from the dead. It's a hard job. And that's not me. I'm the lazy
15:30 investor. So, I transition to small multif family, duplexes, triplex, and a
15:36 forplex. And I house hacked a duplex the first one cuz I wasn't making much. I had a bad debt to income. Actually moved from my house into an apartment and
15:42 rented the house out so I can get rental income on my tax returns for two years to get around my debt to income ratio.
15:49 And the small multif family, my target is as similar to a single family house
15:55 as possible, which means sidebyside units, not over under pet friendly fence yards, washerdryer hookups, lots of parking. Uh, I I I
16:03 don't want to own in good school districts because that means higher taxes and planned turnover when your
16:08 tenants kids reach a certain age and they're aren't going to that school anymore. And I don't want war zones. So, I want class C properties, right? I
16:15 don't want high-end luxury because that that gets hurt in bad economic times. And I don't want the war zone because
16:21 everybody has really high turnover there and you can't safely go there to collect rent or talk to a tenant or send a
16:26 handyman. So, I want class C properties that I can manage where tenants want to stay longterm. And so, I have very low
16:33 tenant turnover. I don't make top rents. I use the binder strategy where I don't raise the rents my tenants do. And then
16:40 in Washington, they just instituted rent control, which is making me $3,000 more a month in profit. So,
16:46 I'm going to have I'm going to have a question about this. Put a pin in that. I I am also making more money in Washington because rent control. That's
16:52 what happens. It It makes landlords richer and more tenants homeless. Yes. which is why I vote against it. I I I'm
16:59 all for making more money, but not at the expense of other people. It's bad policy. It's bad policy. I'll always uh
17:04 I'll never support it. I will profit off it. The very first year that it was talked
17:10 about in Washington, because there used to be a revised code of Washington RCW that said rent control is illegal, but they were overturning and creating
17:16 [clears throat] new codes. Uh I went and sent a video to legislators saying, "Look, here's what'll happen.
17:21 I'll make more money because I do 5% every other year. Now I'm going to be forced to do seven every year." So, it almost doubles my profit.
17:27 That's what I was That's what I was going to ask. That's what we did automatically in all of our leases. Auto autorenew at 7%.
17:34 The actual rent control is 7% plus uh the inflation index.
17:39 But seven is nice and safe. And almost every landlord that I know immediately,
17:45 oh, the new number seven. This happened every single state. You cannot fall behind. You'll never catch up again. If
17:51 the market takes off, you can only go up 7% at a time. So what do you do? You max 7% forever. Every time they've
17:58 implemented this, especially in the first 5 years rents,
18:03 I was doing 3% increases. We're doing seven. I'm more than doubling the rent increase
18:09 because if I get behind, I stay behind for years. It's terrible.
18:16 So the real threat to the landlord is I don't care what happens to rents if they
18:22 go up or down or flat. I care about expenses and expenses can spike. Insurance doubled or tripled. They
18:28 passed a law in Washington the same year. Now in 2025 when they passed rent control, they passed a law where property taxes went from a cap of 1% to
18:35 a cap of 3%. So if my taxes can go from 4,000 a year on a duplex to 12,000 a
18:41 year, that's going to impact rents. But since I can't make a large adjustment, since I can't make a large adjustment to
18:50 uh correct for a large expense like that, I have to do the 7% every year. So, my
18:56 email that went out at the beginning of 2025 was here is the law the the the bill that's
19:03 being proposed for rent control. If it's voted down or doesn't make it out of committee, rent stays the same for 2025
19:10 because I do 5% every other year. Basically 2.5 a year, but I do it every other year.
19:15 If the bill passes, here's the new rent amount, 12 month notice because it's
19:20 it's coming out um at the end of the year, uh 7% increase. So, all of my
19:26 tenants were told if it doesn't pass, no increase. If it passes 7% increase. So,
19:32 when it passed and every one [clears throat] of them said, "Yeah, we understand." and we were told a year in advance this is the increase. I love that. That's like a that it feels
19:39 very binder methodish of like, hey, we're getting the tenants on board and they're bought in and they understand
19:44 the program. I still do the binder strategy even with rent control to show to show the tenants
19:50 what it would cost if they moved, what I would make if they moved, how much more I would make, and so they're getting a
19:56 deal and here's the increase and here's the limit of the increase. And I'm like you also not doing the inflation that I
20:02 could. I'm only doing the 7%. Happy tenants don't trash your property. Happy tenants
20:08 don't leave. And happy tenants make relaxed landlords. And I believe listeners to the podcast
20:14 probably 90 95% of them I'm going just statistically you probably understand
20:20 how expenses move. Like you're you're listening to a business podcast and you've listened this far. However, if
20:25 you happen to be one of the few who are listening and being like, "Wow, this is terrible. This is like there's going to be some single moms in these portfolios
20:31 who rent is getting jacked. Yes, thank your government for that. Also, when we're talking about expenses going up,
20:37 do you remember what happened like in 2020 2021 with the cost of lumber like
20:43 building cost and repair cost? I had a roof that was originally quoted at I
20:49 believe it was $90,000. By the time we were done with the roof, it we spent
20:54 about 160 155 almost doubled.
21:01 And then they come in, they go, "Oh, we're going to raise insurance." It major insurers do not insure in
21:07 Washington state for multif family. They'll still do they'll still do Deion's portfolio. They'll still do single family and all the way up to a
21:13 forplex. Commercial multif family done, pulled out, left the state. You have to
21:18 almost every insurance quote doubled overnight instantly. They pulled out.
21:24 Done. They're not They're not worth it. We're not doing it. Especially not on something built before 2000.
21:30 How do you account for that? The only way to do it is to have nominal rent increases over time. And when they cap
21:37 what you can do in rent, you can't adjust when the expense comes in. So, you have to frontload it. It's the only
21:42 way around it. It's just a supply, demand, and policy issue and that's what
21:48 we're stuck with. So, this will probably be news to some of the people watching and maybe it it
21:54 might even be news to you. When rent control is instituted, we've
21:59 said it already. What happens? Rents spike. They go up the maximum allowable amount every year. And when there's a
22:05 turnover, rents go up more. Landlords will even use leave units empty for months to get the right amount of rents.
22:10 or they will offer free months, two or three free months. Yep. As long as they get the high rent so
22:16 that because they can't raise it in the future. So all of these things push rents up. Insurance works the same. So
22:23 when stupid states go, we're going to cap the amount that insurance can
22:28 increase every year to 15%. It's a form of rent control, but uninsurance control. What does the insurance company
22:34 do? Because they're not stupid. They have increased costs, too. Rebuilding a house no longer re building a duplex no
22:39 is no longer $280,000 in Washington. It's $540,000, right? It's it's not quite double, but it's pretty freaking
22:46 close. It's it's right about there. So, they cancel policies. That tree is
22:51 too close to your building. That roof has two different color shingles. We can't do that. You're just canceled. You can't fix it. It's not reme you can't
22:57 remediate this. It's just we're your policyy's done. We used to get a letter saying fix this
23:04 or your policy's done. Now you get your policy is done because when you have to go find a new policy, that's not an
23:09 increase. That's a new policy. Now there's no in there's no increase limit on how much more they can charge. So you
23:15 get insurance that doubled when every legislator goes, "No, no, no. We we have a big heart and we said they can only give you a 15% increase." [snorts] Sure.
23:23 You caused all insurance rates to go up with your stupid legislation. Yep. And well, if you want to really get
23:30 into stupid states, then you have states like California that force all of the other states to subsidize their
23:35 insurance because of their caps. It bad policy is bad policy. And it's not
23:41 because we just hate liberals. That's not at all what we're saying. It's just
23:48 that type of economic policy mathematically doesn't work. It's just like it's an empirical
23:54 if you do this, this is what happens. It's always what happens. And as you can see, Dion and I are
24:02 two men of of Dion's probably pretty smart, but I'm a man of average intelligence. We're not uh we're not
24:07 hyper geniuses. Matt Matt Hawkins is significantly above average intelligence in our group, but
24:15 this isn't rocket science. It's like if expenses go up,
24:20 the income has to go up or no one will buy anything. Who's going to leverage to
24:25 buy something that doesn't make money? It doesn't make any sense. You're not going to repair stuff if you can't
24:31 afford to repair it. And this is why you got all these states. You have homeless and you have things in disrepair. And
24:37 following that, you get drug problems. And oh, look, it looks like California.
24:43 So, so here's a comparison people might enjoy. M you invest in large multif
24:48 family, you're creating generational wealth and you will be a deca millionaire when I don't want to reach deca millionaire status. I want it
24:54 enough to be financially free. Now my my my goal shifted from I don't want to be a financial burden to my kids to at 52 I
25:02 retired. I don't ever want to have to work again and I don't want to have to consider money or price tags or anything like that. So
25:07 over 20,000 a month coming in when I live on floor that works for me. like my investing down payment has grown by over
25:14 $40,000 while I'm traveling in the months that I've been here, right? So, that's that's
25:19 a good position for me to be in. Here's something else that we do very differently.
25:24 You started some investing in Washington and I invest in Washington and you move to a red state. You have moved to Texas
25:30 because the legislation is more friendly. It's more landlord friendly, less tenant friendly. I specifically
25:36 targeted red counties in blue states.
25:42 I wouldn't own in King County, right? I wouldn't own in LA County. I wouldn't own in New York or on Manhattan, right?
25:48 I wouldn't own in the blue county in a blue state. That's insanity level legislation.
25:54 But what happens in Washington, and people watching can Google this, it is the most appreciating market of the last
26:00 40 years because of legislation. Yep. It is artificial. inflation
26:07 take half a year to two years. Longer evictions means less investors.
26:14 Now rent control means people pull out. Long-term rentals become short-term rentals. Uh landlords sell off
26:21 properties or they leave and it causes less building to happen because there's less demand to buy which causes
26:27 appreciation. So in the last from 2020 in at the beginning of 2020 my net worth
26:32 passed the million dollar mark. At the end of 2023, it passed the $3 million. My net worth tripled because I'm in a
26:39 red county in a blue state. Now, the caveat is the blue insanity is spreading
26:46 to the rest of the state. So, there could come a time where I'm coming down to Christian. I'm saying, "Hey, let me
26:52 stand on your coattails for a second. Which market should I look at? Introduce me to some of the handyman and contractors down here. Which a
26:59 like you're going to be my network when I when my when sanity finally takes over and I have to leave this state. Oh, there we go. Stephenville, Texas.
27:07 Phenomenal phenomenal phenomenal market. Uh I know I know a multif family guy down there who's not buying duplexes and
27:14 forplexes. Um I do know of a lot of duplexes and forplexes down there. Uh it's we're investing in Abene, Texas.
27:20 Yeah, there's all these market. It's all the secondary markets. When you go to Texas, it's actually very similar to Dion strategy. Avoid the blue cities in
27:28 the red state. Don't invest in Dallas. Don't invest in Well, I have a property
27:34 in Houston. [snorts] This is the trickiest one I have to manage. Uh I would I would try
27:40 to avoid downtown Houston unless you're local to Houston and that is your market because it's such a big city. There
27:46 there is opportunity. Just I wouldn't go out of area and invest in Houston. Uh Austin, they're still coming down in
27:53 rents a little bit from when they overbuilt. I think they're probably pretty close to stabilizing.
27:58 Hit or miss whether you want to try that. But you go into these secondary markets anywhere in Texas. Uh turns out
28:04 most of the state of Texas is a secondary market. I mean there's like hundreds of cities that population
28:10 growth, job growth, fantastic weather, happy people. Dion, my evictions cost
28:16 $200 and take two weeks. The constable will come same day to pull
28:21 them out. They just changed that this year. You don't even have to wait for the RIT of possession. You can go back to the courthouse and go, "May I please
28:27 have my RIT?" Like, is it an emergency? Yes. Why is it emergency? They're still there. Ah, that is an emergency. And
28:33 they'll pull them out. It's great. Uh, I like that a lot more than my experience
28:38 in Washington. Even in Moses Lake, Washington, red city, blue state, I had
28:44 all of the problems and expenses of being in a blue state managing that market. That was my one thing is I'm
28:51 like I'm paying I'm paying top dollar even in a red area.
28:56 So I don't know if I don't know if that's a problem with scale where that is more of a problem
29:02 because you haven't had the same amount of pain that I have on some of these turnovers or maybe it's just the the
29:07 depth of turnover that I do. I deal with a different class of tenant where eviction is a higher uh larger piece of
29:13 the business. So there's there's been many studies done and why I targeted single family houses. The average tenency in a single
29:20 family house is seven years. The average teny in an apartment is two years. So just by asset type, not even numbers. If
29:26 you had one house and one apartment, somebody bought like a condo, one apartment, you're looking at seven years versus two years.
29:32 So I targeted small multif family close to single family to keep them longer. But then I also went for washerdryer
29:37 hookups, parking, pets, and all that kind of stuff to keep them longer. And then binder strategy keeps tenants happy
29:43 so they stay longer. And for about a decade I said this is why I do this. I have low tenants turnover. I have never
29:48 had an eviction. Maybe maybe it's just apartment people get evicted more often than people in duplexes or houses. And
29:54 then Chesa bought her first duplex and she had four evictions in the first 15 months she had it. [laughter]
30:01 I was I was off. I got lucky. And she had a squatter. I mean she had a she had the nightmare experience.
30:07 And that was funny. So, if I didn't have my portfolio and that was somebody's first duplex, it might have been their
30:13 only one. They might have gone, "Yeah, this is not for me." Yeah. But she saw what I know people that's happened to. First
30:18 first property, bad tenant out and done.
30:24 Yeah. You you had you did have a a first rough go though. Your first uh your first tenant uh subleasased the
30:30 apartment and stopped paying rent, didn't they? The first tenant was so bad. And I I'm
30:35 while I am just a crayon eating marine and blue crayons taste the best. I am
30:41 able to look back and realize I was the problem being a landlord isn't the problem. I was completely uneducated.
30:47 Right? It took 13week boot camp to become a marine. It took a six-month academy to become a police officer. If
30:52 you want to work in any trade, you have to go through an apprenticeship or or trade school. And I was just going to
30:58 jump into real estate with no education. None. No audio books, no YouTube
31:03 university. I was just, you know, I'm going to rent my house out and move into an apartment. Well, I can't trust a stranger, so I'll rent to a friend and I
31:10 don't want a contract between buddies, so we don't need a lease. Like, all of the mistakes were mine, not his. I set
31:15 him up to do like the temptation was so large. I think the average person would have done what he moved out, rented the
31:23 house to somebody else with a lease. Like, he was doing it better than I was. And the house was trashed. It was so bad
31:29 I tried to quit. So yeah, in the same situation with Chesa and her
31:34 turn and her evictions and her squatter, she probably would have quit if she didn't see my end result. I would have
31:40 quit. But there's the one point of luck in my entire story, right? Like Michael Zuber, I hate it when somebody says you're
31:46 lucky because it was a decade of, you know, no life to get to financial freedom, so the rest of my life can be
31:52 all life. Um, the one point of luck is when I tried to quit. That first year was so
31:59 bad. I couldn't because of the 2008 housing crash. I owed more on my house
32:04 than it was worth. I owed about 130 something,000. Interesting. Couldn't give it away for 100,000. So,
32:10 subject two wasn't even an option. And then somebody did come along like was going to take it over uh but their
32:18 lender said their credit's not good enough. So, they have to make 12 monthly payments and then they can buy it. And
32:24 at the 10-month point, they changed their mind. didn't become a buyer because they could find cheaper houses.
32:30 And so I was stuck with it. And that's when I found Bigger Pockets, looked for one rental at a time, read Rich Dad Poor
32:36 Dad. Finally, like I had it sitting on a shelf. Yeah. For five or six years. And I told everybody, "Oh, yeah. It's the book with the Rich Dad and the Poor Dad. I totally
32:41 get it." Had never opened it. [laughter] Finally, I educated myself and I was like, "Wow, you do trust strangers more
32:49 than friends because you have a contract that protects them, right? You can't remove the doors. You can't shut off the
32:55 utilities. You can't do any you can't just kick them out without courts being involved. But it also protects you. They
33:00 actually have to pay the rent or the courts can get them out eventually in Washington. Uh
33:07 the things that you learn, how to screen tenants, how to list your properties, like all of the small skills that make
33:13 owning rentals take 2 hours total in 3 months while you're traveling versus being such a nightmare you want to quit.
33:20 And that's why I'm making content now. Like it wasn't I didn't start making content to make content. I made content
33:26 to make my life easier. I was answering questions on uh social media when somebody would ask, "Should I have an
33:31 LLC? How do I find an agent or whatever?" And I I realized I was answering the same questions
33:36 so many times. Why don't I make a short little 5 or 10 minute video on YouTube? And when somebody asks, I send a link.
33:42 That way I don't have to type out the response. I just or have a phone call or
33:47 anything. I send them the the detailed information. And I thought a couple hundred people will benefit from and on my life will be easier. And then it
33:53 turned into a YouTube channel that becomes a great tax writeoff when you're traveling in another country.
33:58 Oh, there we go. I love I Business is so fun. There there's so many adventures. I
34:04 I remember I didn't really real I got some business credit cards. I I pay off
34:09 all credit cards in full. I don't use credit card debt with interest. Um however, uh the idea of having points was kind of cool. I kind of forgot about
34:16 it. I just set everything to autopay and forgot about it. I am not a vacation guy. I am in the I am in the uh first
34:22 eight years of my my grinding. So I'm I'm doing that piece. I looked in and I had a,280,000
34:28 credit card points with AMX, which turns out gets you some really cool hotels. Uh
34:34 so that was uh I love business. Couple write offs over here, some travel
34:39 over here. It's like, oh, wait a second. We could just go to the Bahamas and stay at the Atlantas for a week for free. And
34:46 then you get there and they're like, "Hey, because you bought this with points, we're going to pay for your food." I was like, "Well, I budgeted for
34:53 food, but I guess I get free food, too." Super fun. Uh if there's if there not
34:58 not the reason to go into business, but uh when you're in business, you may find there's some cool advantages to being in
35:04 business. No, it really helps to pay attention to all of the different angles that you can
35:09 benefit from doing something like this. Most people focus on let me work more than 40 hours a week for more than 40
35:15 years to retire on less than 40% of what I made. And it's retirement accounts, social security, uh Medicaid, which they
35:23 find out shock has a cost. There's a premium to that. It's not free healthcare. You all still have it a cost
35:28 when you get there depending on and they're still out of money. How is this possible?
35:33 And uh when you I'm not an entrepreneur. I put
35:39 my money to work so I don't have to. And like you said, you have to think of all of the ways it can benefit you, right?
35:46 Don't let the tax tail wag the dog. But when you realize we do not have a tax penalty program, everybody thinks if I
35:52 make more money, they tax me more. That's not what it is. We have a tax incentive program.
35:57 Why do they tax cigarettes so highly? They don't want you to smoke. Why do they tax alcohol so much? They don't
36:03 want you to drink. Why do they tax W2 income so much? They don't want you to
36:08 work. What we need is innovation, housing providing, job creation. So, this is out of Kiasaki's cash flow
36:14 quadrant, right? So, I'm not saying anything new here, and I'm not saying it's me coming up with it, but as an employee, you pay around 40%
36:21 your taxes, right? You you got your state tax, federal tax, social security tax, Medicaid tax, like all the things
36:26 that are going to be taking money. You might have pension, you might do whatever. Then people say, "Well, I'm going to go and create a business. I'm
36:32 gonna be a plumber and run my own business. I'm gonna get become a dentist and open my own practice." Well, great. Now you pay 60% in taxes because you pay
36:39 the employee tax and the employer side of the taxes. If you grow a business big enough to where you're not working in it
36:44 and you have employees, now you hit capital gains and business tax and you start paying 20%.
36:51 But none of that is me. Yeah. I want money to work so I don't have to. And when money works, they don't tax it
36:59 because of depreciation and write offs. The first 10 years of investing, I didn't pay any rental income tax. I and
37:06 this year I'm going to be paying some rental income. I'm going to celebrate. I will have a celebration party this year that I have to write a check to the IRS
37:12 for taxes because I finally made so much money. Depreciation and write offs didn't stop me from having to do that.
37:19 But that's the incentive program we have. And once you realize the government wants me to do these things, they reward me to do these things
37:25 because so weird. Congress is full of people who own real estate that keep making rules
37:31 that benefit people who own real estate. I don't understand now or why, but Oh, I know. I feel like there's a there's someone in the executive office
37:37 who also has a lot of real estate. Just just a few billion, you know,
37:42 it it is always because real estate hedges against inflation. We'll always print money. And because
37:50 most of the wealthy people who make policy own real estate, real estate typically does pretty well. And there's
37:56 a lot of incentive to continue to invest in real estate on I I still don't want
38:01 to put my exact number online just just as a practice. But in total profit,
38:08 my best year I've done a little bit I've done multiple seven figures in in total profit. My my tax bill on my highest
38:16 income year, which was more than $2 million, was $17,000.
38:22 Little north that it was between 17 and 18. It was 17 and change. I paid almost no tax. I bought so much real estate in
38:28 that year. I segregated everything. Basically zero tax on millions of
38:35 dollars. If you did that in a W2, you'd be taxed at the absolute maximum tax
38:40 bracket. You'd be giving what? Around $800,000 of that back.
38:47 If you live in California, probably more than half of it. Oh, yeah. It's at that range. It's It's
38:54 over 50%. Did you see the the the guy who won the Mr. Beast Beast Games did an episode I
38:59 think it was with Graham Stefen. I forget who he I think it was Graham Stefen. He talked about the actual tax bill and of the 10 million he got to
39:06 keep like four and a half. He wasn't willing to move out of California. I guess you have the high you there's also
39:12 a tax for winning it on a game show that's like a specific kind of like the lottery sort of thing. And then you have
39:18 California's I'm like you win $10 million and you walk home with four.
39:26 No. So most of my life I never made more than $60,000. When I when I started at the CDL school I was at $17 an hour. And
39:33 for those eight years of investing I got up to my best year in those first eight was $61,000.
39:39 That was the eighth year. the the next few years when the owners of the company realized I was making more money off my
39:45 rentals than I was at work, I actually started making more money. But when 2020 happened and we had a rent
39:54 freeze and an eviction moratorum and interest rates dropped to 3%. The appreciation
40:00 and and because I owed banks money, I got the appreciation on their money. M
40:06 I had a million dollar year and it wasn't income. It was net worth growth. Oh, that is the best. Yeah.
40:12 I I had maximal. No. Well, not not not all of it. So, yeah,
40:18 it was my best W earning year ever. It was 2021. Excellent. I made $200,000. It was the first time
40:25 the owners of the company was like, "Oh, no. You're the president of the company. You got to make what you should be making." Because before that, I just I
40:32 didn't need to, I guess. And I my cash flow from rentals was over $200,000. So that's a $400,000 year from
40:39 somebody who up until 2019 had never broken. 61,000 was the most, right?
40:44 Wow. That's got to feel wild. And then that was one of the best years we've had for appreciation in forever
40:52 was 600,000. I made more at 150% in appreciation than I made off of active
40:59 and passive income. And all of that together was a million dollar year. I was doing a whiteboard video going,
41:04 "Hey, what's my cash flow look like this year?" And I sat down, it was 7 o'clock at night on a Sunday. I'm in the office in 2021 making this
41:11 video. And I sit down, I think, okay, I just finished working on a Sunday at 7 at night so that instructors could have
41:18 the day off so they didn't have to work a Sunday. I did the training on the Sunday. And I was like, "Okay, I'm working." And I'm looking at that
41:23 whiteboard going, "Two years ago, I made $61,000. This is a million dollar year.
41:29 I'm an idiot for being at work. So, it was a YouTube video that told me,
41:34 "That's so funny. I should not be doing this. It's time to leave." I remember I So, I
41:40 met Dion in his in his uh office, which was also his YouTube studio, which was
41:47 also his collectibles storage space. Uh Dion has some cool by the way. If
41:53 you guys are are nerds like Dion and I, Dion has some cool stuff. Uh but I got
41:59 to go there. I crashed the uh the truck simulator. uh pretty badly. One of your most viral shorts
42:05 of [snorts] of everything to go viral. Of course, it has nothing to do with real estate. It's me crashing that. It's like first first million view uh Tik Tok
42:13 is is crashing and that that was it for Tik Tok. I no one watches me on Tik Tok. Uh that was that was it. That was the
42:18 the beginning and end of Tik Tok for Christian was crashing in Dion's office.
42:24 Going from that to this Dion, it's been really fun just because I met you right
42:30 at the tail end of that. Like right before you left, I meet you. You show me how to connect Zoom to YouTube and then
42:38 suddenly Dion's retired and now there's then Dion hosts Bigger Pockets and Dion
42:43 puts out a really I feel like I met you at a really cool time in your life where you were like you had just you had just
42:49 made it and you were about six months away from realizing that you had made it. It was probably about six months
42:54 before you launched that YouTube video. It it pretty much was. I hadn't realized I had made it yet. I knew I was never
43:02 going to be a financial burden to my kids. Like, I had a couple hundred,000 in cash flow coming in
43:08 before I passed a hundred thousand from W2 income. That's so cool. And so, here's the reality of why I make
43:14 content now, right? I'm not answering questions on Facebook anymore. I'm not making videos to do that. So, I want the
43:19 viewer of this video to imagine at 40, broke in bad debt. I didn't know
43:25 about single parent, three kids, not a lot of income. Within a decade, I reach financial freedom. I retire. I never
43:32 have to work again. I get to travel and go wherever I want and do whatever I want. Imagine the emotional roller coaster of starting that, having such a
43:40 bad first year, trying to quit, can't quit, figuring it out, educating myself, not seeing the income snowball, that
43:47 hockey stick growth for the first six or seven years, and then seeing it way late, and then realizing it's taking
43:53 off. this is changing my life. I have a great job. I love my job, but there's so much money coming in. I don't have to
43:58 work for it. Why am I working to retiring? That emotional roller coaster is phenomenal to experience, right? It's
44:05 it's like amazing. That's why I said earlier the outcome is so positive. I
44:10 wouldn't risk changing anything because the butterfly effect could make the outcome worse. Yeah.
44:16 You could have you could have been so successful early that you overlevered and you lost it all. Correct. I can't imagine a better
44:22 outcome because I don't need more money, right? So more money wouldn't change. I wouldn't be at a different resort. I
44:28 wouldn't be traveling more. I wouldn't nothing would change for me. Yeah. Because when you don't have enough, money is the only thing. And once you
44:33 have enough, it's just a thing. But now I make content. My YouTube
44:40 channel is Dion Talk Financial Freedom. And every Tuesday at 4:00 I go live for a couple of hours and answer questions.
44:45 Link below. I get to meet people like you. When you when we met, you were I had a couple of
44:52 small multif family. I did a house hack. I met this young guy, Cody. We've kind of partnered up on a few things. Look
44:58 what we're doing to where you're at now. I've got to experience your last five
45:04 years. And everyone else that's come on the channel that has shared their first closing, their first offer, their first
45:11 rent check, all of that. I'm It's like me going through my 10-year journey again. And I get I'm as long as I'm
45:16 feeling that, I'll keep making content. Yeah, that's the fun thing because I still do the YouTube live every
45:22 Wednesday as well and um I don't get the attendance that Dion talk does. People People love Dion, but I still I love
45:31 getting in there and just getting the questions and hanging out with people doing real estate. That's that was where
45:36 like Dion helped me start the YouTube channel. We used to call Whiteboard Wednesday and just those like figuring
45:42 out how to do that. That's always just been part of what I do is just hop on YouTube and talk real estate. And I love
45:50 it. Dion's Dion's channel though really has like a huge impact on this podcast and multif family strategy like the
45:56 whole online streaming like hey let's talk about the thing that we're doing. Uh I could not for the life of me figure
46:01 out how to get Zoom to I'm like what is a stream key and where does it go? I'm
46:07 looking at the thing. There's no key port here and I also don't have a key. How I I don't get it. Dion's like, "Oh,
46:13 you got to put the thing in the thing and then copy this and put it over here." Oh, okay. They made it so hard. I didn't say,
46:19 "Let's have a Zoom call to do it." I said, "You have to come over." Yes. It was It was actually not
46:24 intuitive. He's like, "No, you have to be at my house and we have to sit down in the living room until this connects."
46:30 I was like, "Oh, okay." So, wasn't your uh That was the Forplex, right, with the the restaurant downstairs.
46:36 That was uh Yeah, that was a unique situation. Uh, that was one I was working on owner financing to acquire,
46:43 but never did. Oh, you never actually my properties? Nope. Really? Okay.
46:48 Yeah. I was I I probably can make a whole YouTube series about that, but that was like courting the owner by
46:54 renting a unit and it never went through. And then luckily, because man, Rustin went down.
47:00 I moved out of that town. That's murder central now. It's like Hilltop used to be. Um, I'm really glad you make content
47:06 because a lot of people watch my channel because they come from bigger pockets or one rental at a time and not everybody
47:12 wants to be lazy. Not everybody wants the smallest portfolio. They want something like the binder strategy works for them or
47:18 how how to get the best interest rates or some thing that I talked about mattered to them, but my strategy
47:24 doesn't match them. So, if they want to invest out of state in a low cost of
47:30 living area, I go, "Hey, here's this millennial Mike guy." If they want to self-manage a big portfolio and do the rehabs and the burrs and the things
47:36 themselves to go, here's this lumberjack landlord company. If they're into multif family strategies, if they want large apartment complexes and they want to do
47:42 the get to know the owner, but don't be sales pitchy and you want to learn from them and this is where deals come from.
47:48 That's not me. I can only help someone like that by saying, "Hey, here's this Christian guy. Go why don't you go watch
47:54 his live, ask some questions. He's younger than me. You could probably get them on Instagram because I know I have comments on Instagram somewhere, but I
48:01 don't know how to get to him. Right. So, like that's this is the community that we've put together where there is a strategy.
48:07 I watch I've never met him, but there's a guy Joe Ku HN invested in stocks. Retired at 54. I'm not a stock guy until
48:14 Tesla went on sale last year. I don't own any stocks. I put 1% of my net worth into Tesla. It's over doubled. So,
48:21 thanks for the protest. And uh but if you're in stocks and you want the buckets method and retire on the 4
48:26 percent rule, Joe Kuhn on YouTube, I want to find the people that I've watched long enough and met in re real
48:34 life in the master class that I know that I say I'm confident when I send somebody to you and that's what they're
48:40 looking to do, that's the information they should be finding. Same thing with Millennial Mike and Matt and Zuber and
48:45 the there's so many ways to invest and you said it almost perfectly at the beginning of this video. There isn't a
48:51 one right way, but there is a one right way for you. For every viewer, there's a one right way. And it's sometimes a
48:56 little bit of you, a little bit of them, a little bit of me, little, you know, all put together. That's what I love about real estate,
49:02 too. There's just so many flavors of real estate. There's so many different ways to make it work.
49:08 Uh I have friends who only do midterm rentals and they absolutely kill it. I mean, just absolutely
49:15 incredible what they put together in a few years. Do I want to copy their model? Absolutely not. It's not what I do. Just I already have a thing that
49:22 works. Love how it works. Don't want to change it. Every time I pivot out of my
49:27 field, always regret it. I run PM company. I like running a property management company. I'm good at running
49:32 a property management company. I like doing the hiring for it. I like the pieces.
49:38 That could stay in my business. I like buying. I like negotiating. Awesome. I'm
49:44 a multif family guy. There just It's just what we do. It is so much simpler when you find what your thing is and
49:50 then just do the thing. I The worst entrepreneurs I know consistently are the people who have like four different
49:55 businesses and they're kind of okay at all of them or they're bad at two of them and okay at one of them. Just be
50:01 excellent at one thing. Beyond chose to be excellent at uh two things at a time and then one. You did your career and
50:08 you were excellent in your career. Really excellent. your company loved you and I've seen you at your work and I I know you're actually good at it and you
50:15 went all in in small investing and focusing on, hey, I'm just going to do deals that are like a triple or a home
50:21 run. Like you you you said no to a ton of deals. So, you're a really picky investor and you spent a lot of time
50:26 finding deals and you got really good at it and now you're riding elephants in Thailand or whatever you do out there.
50:33 So, so, uh, cultural caveat, you don't ride the elephants here. You go to the preserves where you play with them and
50:38 you swim with them. the writing. Sorry. Playing with elephants, riding tigers. There you go. There you go. I'm kidding. He's also He's obviously
50:45 not riding a tiger. That would be unethical. So anyway, uh
50:50 you're you're right. Be excellent at one thing. I have an interview. I'm trying to set it up at the one rental at a time
50:56 event where there was somebody that was recently in a video with Michael Zuber and basically said he had 30 rentals and
51:03 they don't cash flow because he's a wholesaler and a flipper and he equity strips and there's a whole
51:09 bunch of stuff that went into that. If I had the same amount of time and the same amount of money invested and I went for
51:15 30 units, I wouldn't cash flow. I cash flow because I've never done a
51:21 heliloc, never done a cash out refi, never sold for a 1031. I don't equity strip and I've bought when you said I
51:27 only go for uh third base or home runs. That's not all always math. I've bought
51:32 three break even deals out of eight street. Okay. Well, I spoke because you're right
51:38 with the home run though. They were third base or home run because I have a lot of metrics.
51:43 I don't want to lose money. I want to get a better yield than the area average. Right. That's important. But
51:49 it's a it's a box to check. Side by side units, check. Washer dryer, check. Right
51:54 kind of neighborhood, check. Parking, yes. Garage, yes. Uh, like if I checked off eight of these boxes and the math
52:01 was break even, but rents were low. Binder would get them up. The mushroom
52:06 farm in Lacy had lost a lawsuit was going away. Rents would go up. One of them had a both sides had a den with a
52:13 closet. So, I was like, I had a wall. There's a third bedroom. So, were they cash
52:18 flowing the first year? No. Were they value add to cash flow? Were they Did they check off almost every other box?
52:25 Yes. So, still to me, even though the math wasn't like, oh, there's people that go, I I've got to beat a 10% cash
52:30 on cash return. Most of mine did. Five of them did. But those three break even are some of
52:35 my best performing assets right now. One of them and you have a plan on how you're going to run them. And they the that's the
52:41 advantage. And so there's there's two different schools of thought and I tend to go the opposite direction. But this is the advantage of Dion strategy. When
52:47 you have a very tight buy box, every deal looks more or less like the other
52:53 deal. There's not a ton of variety. So it's like when your variety is like, boy, this one we're going to have to add a wall. It's like
53:01 that's not a whole lot of stuff. Walls are pretty easy to put up. This is why my strategy would drive you
53:06 crazy. Yes. because I go, "Oh, how do you how do you take the opportunity and what
53:11 steps would it take to make it work?" And then is the juice worth the squeeze? Which means my my range of opportunities
53:18 is is massive. It's massive. It also means that each project looks
53:23 completely different than every other project, which is why I work 100 hours a
53:28 week and Dion works two hours a month. Imagine if you could only do one deal
53:36 every two years. That was I would do a You know what I would do?
53:43 This would look This would be so of everything I've done the thing that always works
53:51 25 to 80 units 55 plus community like specifically senior living in the state
53:57 of Texas. There is so much demand. every single 55
54:02 plus community I own 100% occupied with a massive weight list at exactly market
54:09 rent. They're so easy to run and for the most part when you're a senior, if
54:15 you're on because like almost all of them are on section 8. If you are above 55, you either in Texas especially
54:23 bought a house and are deep in your career or retired or you've been a tenant your entire life
54:29 and you know how to be a tenant and you're now on fixed income, not because you're low income, just
54:35 because you did the whole thing that Dion mentioned earlier. You're on Medicaid, you're on your pension plan, you're making 40% of what you used to.
54:42 All of them rent qualify, but they're normal tenants. They're not slummy tenants or people in rough jobs. It's
54:50 normal old people on fixed income are amazing. If you want to copy and paste
54:55 like do no work, it is the easiest. All of them are the easiest properties to
55:00 run of all time. That would be Christian super secret Dion strategy. Work two hours a month.
55:06 All you have to do is make sure those darn people have Bible study and uh bingo night access in the main
55:13 clubhouse. provide them that in Texas, they will never ever move.
55:19 That is Christian's secret Dion strategy. You have so many um buy boxes that you
55:25 can get the great deals that I'll never see cuz I'm not looking for them, right? But do you see how quickly you narrowed it down to this is the one that performs
55:31 the best and if I focused on just this, this is how easy my life would be. That's what I did when I started. When I
55:36 started, I said low tenant turnover that will cash flow that doesn't take a
55:42 lot of work and I don't have to do a rehab or an update or I I never did a burr until after I retired and I did one
55:48 and I'm not doing anymore. Right. So, I I knew that early on because I was okay with one deal every
55:55 two years, working full-time raising the kids. Closing on one deal, stabilizing those tenants once every two years was
56:01 plenty. There's so many people that are like, "Oh, if I don't do three or four deals my first year, I'm an epic failure." And I thought, "It took me two
56:08 years to save the first down payment and then two years to save the second down payment." That first year was so bad I that took
56:14 me the next few years to educate myself. I'm still educating myself. And now in retirement, the money will
56:20 pile up and every couple of years I'll add a property. Like I'm not in growth mode, but I I I it's the asset class I
56:26 understand the best, right? Bitcoin was the best performing asset of the last 10 years. gold and silver in
56:32 the last year seem to be I'm still sad about that. I really was not on board with the Bitcoin thing. I I
56:38 called that so crazy wrong. So
56:44 the everyone who thinks, well, it's just Bitcoin, you just buy it when it's cheap and now you're a billionaire. Sure. But would you have held when it went from
56:52 $100 and it got to 17,000? Would you keep it like that? Very few people bought a hundred coins and have kept it
56:58 for 15 years. Yeah. If if I buy anything and at 4xes I sell it immediately. I don't care about the upside. I bought every time I made
57:05 $100,000, which I've done a lot of times. I have bought one kilogram of
57:11 silver and put it in a safe. I bought them at an average of $25 a bar. The
57:16 millisecond gold hit 90. I was like, that is high enough. Sold all or sorry, silver hit 90. Sold all of it. I have
57:21 none of it. It's now at 118. I would have made more had I held it. Doesn't matter. I made enough. So to answer your
57:28 question, no, I would have sold my Bitcoin because at 4x I would have 400%. That's amazing. Phenomenal investment. I'm out.
57:34 So So you know yourself and real estate is unelastic, right? It's it's hard to get in and out
57:40 of. You don't just go, it's gone up in value. I'm going to sell it. You go, it's gone up in value. I'm cash flowing more. Maybe in your strategy, I could
57:46 reduce some of the cash flow by taking out a whole bunch of the money and redeploying it somewhere else to create more money. So you still have the asset.
57:52 You don't have to lose the asset to do it. Mhm. Like there's a lot of reasons for me to not be in one of those other asset
57:57 classes, but I don't care which asset class the viewer picks. It can be crypto. It can
58:03 be stocks. It can be metals. It can be running your own business. It can be real estate in the hundreds of ways to
58:09 invest in real estate, but pick one and master it. Once you're wealthy, once
58:16 your net worth passes 5 million, maybe now throw some into some other asset classes because you're probably going to
58:22 lose a bunch of money because to take the words right from you, you got the idiot tax. You got to pay that before
58:28 you start making money. And when you go into a new asset class there, there that tax is attached to it. That tax for being inexperienced, you're
58:35 the dumbest you'll ever be is at the beginning. And so you will make the most mistakes. There is no no exception to that. You will be smarter the longer you
58:41 play it until you get really old and get dementia and start forgetting it. But until then, you're always the dumbest at
58:46 the beginning. So the less variety you do, the less risk you have. Dion, my my
58:53 takeaway from this is probably the one that I'm going to apply that I think this is the lesson I want to teach my students as well. The tighter the buy
59:00 box, the more time freedom you create. Generally speaking, you you have to be more selective. That means you're doing
59:06 less actual buying activity. You're doing plenty of searching. That seems to be a really good way to
59:12 optimize for time freedom. that's what you've done. Uh if you open up the buy box, you have more opportunity potentially can build a bigger business.
59:18 You might make you can optimize for money and opportunity or you can optimize for time. I think if your goal is time freedom
59:25 if you tighten the buy box like Dion did, you can get there in less transactions. Had I only bought 55 up
59:32 communities, the three that I have would cash flow,
59:38 I've $21ish,000 a month. I would have done it in three
59:44 transactions. Three deals and I would have just that's that was about my best month at CoStar was $20,000 commissions.
59:52 That would have been enough. Like I could have just been done in three deals and out tight by box. Good idea. I think
1:00:00 that was my my takeaway from today's now now I'm going to go home and and I'm going to well I'm already home but I'm
1:00:05 going to go downstairs in my home and I'm going to be thinking about what deals should I stop doing because I have
1:00:11 all sorts of projects going on. There's probably some that I can I I'm going to tighten my buy box tonight. I'm going to
1:00:17 figure out what things I I don't want to do anymore because I don't have to do all the projects that I'm doing. I I
1:00:22 probably can take a book out of Dion's Dion's uh or a page out of Dion's book. I say a book out of Dion's book, which
1:00:28 is there's so much awesome stuff in here. You can take a book out of his book if you choose. The the book was written for YouTube
1:00:35 viewers. Each section is two or three pages and can be read that section alone. So, it's it's it's an incremental like
1:00:41 10-minute uh spots, right? Yeah. And it's not something you read through like a novel where it has a story. It's
1:00:47 when you're doing a tenant screening, what section was that in? When you're getting interest rates and you want to get the best one from a loan, what section was that in? All the mental
1:00:53 shifts are in there. So, a lot of people talk about focusing
1:01:00 their buy box to what they want to invest in. I think you have to think of the end goal first.
1:01:06 Yep. What are you trying to accomplish? That tells you which buy box to go for. Uh, which includes your timeline, when you
1:01:13 want it to happen. And I really appreciate you having me on. Absolutely. When you go downstairs, you're going to
1:01:18 need to get some pants because I know you're like me and in these meetings, pants. D and I D and I are both definitely uh rocking pajama pants. I
1:01:25 don't know if I can get them all the way up in the camera. I'm going to try in this chair. There we go. This is how we This is how we podcast.
1:01:31 This is true financial freedom is uh working from your pajamas from around
1:01:36 the globe. So this is make sure that I don't face the camera
1:01:42 anywhere. This is the this is the great behind thescenes content that you get here. Behind the scenes end of the video private villa all massive marble. But
1:01:50 this is the reason you come here. The front of the villa is the beach. You come to the back and you have a
1:01:56 completely enclosed private pool, all privacy fenced all the
1:02:02 way around. Uh it's why you should come to Thailand.
1:02:08 I need to make it over there. That is like the very top of my list. I've talked about it for a while. Kelly, who
1:02:14 is a uh Kelly Cahoot, who is a uh really, really, really awesome
1:02:19 community. I I don't even know what to call her. She's just an amazing human being in uh Union, Washington. She helps
1:02:26 us with a bunch of the Robin Hood events. She actually hosts most of them. Uh she goes to Thailand frequently and
1:02:34 just has a blast. I get pictures every time she's over there. It's like that is like the place to go. She's seen the whole world.
1:02:40 She's back to Thailand all the time. That is the number one place that she seems to like to land.
1:02:46 But ah I love it. Everyone, the link to Dion's book is below by the way. So I
1:02:52 will I will link that. You can go pick that up on Amazon. Uh it is fan. It really is a fantastic read.
1:02:58 Paperback, Kindle, and Audible. I assume you are the narrator for the
1:03:04 Audible. I am. I narrated a couple of books for Michael Zuber. think it was easier to write the book, 486 pages, than it was
1:03:11 to narrate the book. The narrating is easy. It's like being on YouTube. But
1:03:17 man, ACX, the company that runs the Audible stuff, is so picky about their tech. That's what I I really struggled
1:03:23 with that. And now that I've learned the skill, I might as well narrate my own book because I did it for Zuber. Oh, there we go. Well, look for that uh
1:03:30 later this year. Look for look for my book, which is not 400 pages. Uh so far I'm at 100 uh 132 after editing it. It
1:03:37 seems to get slightly longer the more takes we uh we run through it. So somewhere around 150ish pages.
1:03:43 It's writing a book is hard when you it is. So like I said it was easier to write than to narrate. That
1:03:49 doesn't mean it was easy when you go to have it audited for book format. Yeah. My book was about 180 pages.
1:03:57 Then this is the one thing I did outsource. I hired a a a formatter, right? I went on Fiverr, found a book
1:04:02 format. And I said, "Format this for paperback and for Kindle, right? They have to format it."
1:04:08 It went from 180 pages to to 486. So
1:04:14 if you mine was in pages on a Mac, the the number of whatever the shape of the pages, you might find yours is very
1:04:20 different size than what you currently think it is. I was looking I so when I formatted, I went to I think it was 6 by9 is the the
1:04:28 average books. I I I try to format within what is an average parameter in font for a book. So, we'll see. We'll
1:04:34 see. I think my I've read Dion's book. Mine is definitely shorter than Dion's book. Dion did more writing than I did.
1:04:41 [snorts] Uh but uh look for Dion's book below. Look for my book a little bit later this year. Uh super super fun
1:04:47 having you on the podcast. U I call dibs on the first signed copy. I can commit to that. Actually, you know
1:04:54 what? I need to get my copy signed. I believe I am sitting on an unsigned copy. The the millisecond I learned that
1:05:00 he has a book out. I purchased it and it it arrived and again I was expecting you
1:05:06 know something like that and instead I got something like this. I was like oh
1:05:11 this is more of a project than I expected. It took me like two days to get through it. It's fantastic. I wanted to make sure I had one book and
1:05:19 no more real estate book. All of my mental brain dump happened in that book. So there is there is no more that I
1:05:25 know. There's no secret sauce. You get to the end and it's like and if you want the second book, you got to come to my website. No, it is everything is in
1:05:32 there. Do do the Alexosi, you're going to have to wait two more years for the third installment of this. That's going to be
1:05:37 the best. And it's Yeah. No, fantastic books. Fantastic having you on, especially from uh from overseas. Thank
1:05:44 you so much for taking the time. Uh what what time is it over there in Thailand right now? Uh it's breakfast time and Chesla is
1:05:50 waiting. Ah, well, in that case, Chesla, uh, enjoy your rentals and your, uh, soon to be husband at a undisclosed
1:05:56 date. And everyone, click all the links, buy Dion's book, uh, do the like and subscribe thing and everything else I'm
1:06:02 supposed to tell you at the end of these videos. And we'll see you on the next episode. Ciao.