BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 129: Live-in Flips, Frugality, and Finance with Mindy Jensen

Episode Date: July 2, 2015

On this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast, we’re going to talk about a unique strategy that combines the power of house flipping with the benefits of home ownership. You’ll meet Mindy Jensen��and discover how she uses the “live-in flip” strategy to build wealth through real estate. You’ll also learn how a live-in flipper can save significant money on taxes as well as a discussion on the benefits of doing your own work. Don’t miss this enlightening, and hilarious, episode! In This Episode We Cover: Who Mindy Jensen is Her thoughts on personal finance Frugality, as defined by Mindy A debate on Starbucks (as well as Priuses) and frugality Where she spends her money How Mindy got started in real estate Details on her deals 7% as a steal? The ins and outs of performing a live and flip Getting a real estate license as a means to invest What you should know about For Sale By Owner (FSBO) properties How she advertises her houses The pros and cons of live and flips Why women can and should fix houses The importance of home inspections And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Keyword Alerts #AskBP Podcast BiggerPockets Blogs BiggerPockets Forums BP Podcast with Jeff Brown How to “Hack” Your Housing and Get Paid to Live for Free FSBOMadison Zillow Trulia BRRRR Strategy 3 Real Life Examples That Prove the HIGH Cost of Ignorance in Real Estate Want to Make $1,000 or More Per Hour? BiggerPockets Forums: New Member Introduction Books Mentioned in this Show The Book on Flipping Houses by J. Scott The Book on Investing with No Money Down by Brandon Turner The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder The Warren Buffett Way by Robert G. Hagstrom The Richest Man in Babylon by George S. Clason Tweetable Topics: “Frugality is save money where you can, so you can spend it where you want to or where you need to.” (Tweet This!) “I didn’t get my license to sell houses. I got it so that I could invest and have access to MLS.” (Tweet This!) “Nobody likes your house more than you.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Mindy Mindy’s BiggerPockets Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast, show 129. Well, real estate is, it's never going to end. People always need a place to live. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Stay tuned and be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from BiggerPockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. What's going on, everybody?

This is Josh Dorkin, host to the Bigger Pockets podcast here with my co-host, Mr. Brandon Turner. What up, Brandon? For once. Now, I get to be the one to say, good to have you back, Josh, Mr. traveling all around the country, not being around. Yeah, good to have you back. Yeah. I was gone. I was gone for a week.

That was like a lifetime for me. I missed you, buddy. It was like a lifetime for me. But I looked in the calendar. and you're gone like two out of the next two days a week for the next six months. I'm gone pretty much continually. Yeah. But yeah, I was gone, man.

Took the family to New York. And that was exciting. Got to see the Statue of Liberty, Ellis Island, F.A. Schwartz, Central Park. Nice. Yeah. So all sorts of cool stuff went to the beach. And then we went to this, there's a meetup put on by Darren Sager of New York folks. and that was awesome.

There were like 200 people there. Whoa. Yeah. How many have you went? Like 130. You win. People like you more than me. That's not what I hear.

I get that all the time. You're like, you're cool, but Josh, he's the man. That's not what I hear is I walk in the room and I forget her name. She's going to kill me. I walk in the room in this room. The first person to walk up to me is like, oh my God. Oh my God. Oh, my.

So it's Brandon here? I'm like, I don't understand. I can't enter a room without them wanting you. It's never, no, they want us. It's not enough because whenever I'm there, they're like, where's Josh? But, you know, they leave out the lady crush part, but, you know, I don't know. I'm not saying anything. I'm not saying, I'm not judging. Yeah. Anyway, it was awesome. It was awesome. And, you know, Darren does a great job getting people together. And it's, it's so cool just seeing all these folks, you know, come together, working together. I had a great the New York trip was awesome. And I do want to just use that as a transition to today's quick tip. All right, guys, today's quick tip is make sure you have keyword alerts set up on BiggerPockets.com slash alerts is where you will do this.

You need to go and set up alerts for your local area, wherever you are at. Like if I'm in Denver, so I would set up a keyword alert for Denver at Denver. If I'm investing in Milwaukee, I might want to set up alerts from Milwaukee. You could say, up things for other keywords as well. But this stuff is going to alert you for deals that people have in your area. It's going to alert you for opportunities in your area. And it's going to alert you to meetups in your area. And it's so important to get together with people locally. And one more point on that. This, this week, I don't know if it's going to be out by the time the show comes out, but it's very, very soon anyway. You can now set keyword alert specifically just for marketplace stuff, which is pretty cool. So you can

choose. I just want to know about Milwaukee if it's in the marketplace, nowhere else, which is very, very cool. I think people will find that very helpful. Yep. Yep. For sure, for sure. All right, guys, so that's today's quick tip is make sure you've got those keyword alerts set up. And you could also change frequency. If you don't want to get them as soon as somebody mentions it, you can set it to send them out to you on a daily basis and or on a week, well, or on a weekly basis. So definitely do that. So that is today's quick tip. Here's why savvy real estate investors are obsessed with bonus depreciation. It lets you take that rental property or commercial building you own and depreciate most of the cost against your income.

Legally, 100% IRS compliant. That's instant cash flow improvement. Cost segregation guys is the number one firm nationwide, specializing in identifying these faster depreciating assets in your property. They've completed tens of thousands of studies across all 50 states from remote cash. cabins to apartment complexes. So if you own investment property, this is a no-brainer. So visit costsegregationguise.com slash BP for your free proposal and find out how much you could save this tax season.

Have you ever lost a DSCR deal because the financing just took too long? Red flags popped up late. The lender needed more time. The deal fell apart. Well, our friends at Dominion Financial just launched a program to help prevent that. With their new express rental loan, you can close in 10, days or less. And they still offer their price beat guarantee so you can get great pricing and a timeline you can count on. Fast, simple, reliable. That's Dominion Financial. Check them out at

BiggerPockets.com slash Dominion. That's Biggerpockets.com slash Dominion. Here's the thing about traveling. If you buy food at the airport, a burrito, salad, bag of peanuts, you start wondering if you should have opened a savings account for snacks. So wouldn't it be great if you could actually earn money while you're traveling? Well, you can. Airbnb, has something called the co-host network. While you're away, you can hire a vetted local co-host with hosting experience to help take care of things, communicating with guests, preparing your space, managing reservations, everything runs smoothly while you're off making memories.

Your home might be worth more than you think. Find out how much at Airbnb.com slash host. As I mentioned before, this is show 129 of the Bigger Pockets podcast. And before we get into this, we started doing this. We like doing it. I think it kind of, I don't know, feels good. Make you feel warm and fuzzy. We're going to share some reviews.

Here's our first review from Pingless 17. Love the podcast from Brandon and Josh. It's like talking real estate with two of my sarcastic friends who know their stuff. I've gotten in the habit of listening to one a day on my commute and I'm really getting a lot out of it. These guys keep up the good work. And here's one from Melissa. Melissa A, Josh and Brendan.

Close enough. Close enough. It's close enough. It's my superhero name. Yes, Josh and Brennan put on a fantastic show. They bring some incredibly knowledgeable and motivated individuals

to the program that share the details of how they made their way through the real estate game that we all love. The guests have all been open and honest ideas and strategies are discussed, which open up avenues that I've never thought of all around.

It's a good time, and I would highly recommend the podcast, anyone in real estate. So thank you. If you have not yet left us a review, please do so. We're reading these things. Obviously get your five minutes of fame, so to speak, to the other six people listening to the show. No, we're at 55,000 listeners.

You get a lot of exposure. So leave us a review. They help us. They help the more reviews we have, the more exposure we get on iTunes. So go to iTunes, please, and leave us a rating and a review. And we definitely appreciate it. With that, why don't we get to today's show, Brandon, today we've got an awesome guest, don't we?

We do. Today's guest is a stocker of mine, which we'll explain in the show. We will. And yours. And yeah, Mindy J. Mindy Jensen. Mindy Jensen. She is a very, very bright real estate investor and financial wizard all around.

She's very, very smart. I actually go to her when I have questions about financial stuff. And that's why she's also teaching weekly on the Ask BP podcast. So you guys can find out more about her. there as well because she is very smart. So we're to talk to her today. Awesome. Awesome. Yeah, Mindy's great. She's, she's been in the game for a little bit now doing lots of living flips and some other real estate and we're going to talk about that. We're going to talk about a little personal finance, some travel hacking, if you're not sure what that is, and frugality.

Yeah. Which is a good way to build wealth. So let's bring her in. All right, Mindy, look at you on the Bigger Pockets podcast. Awesome. Very exciting. It's good to have you. It's so exciting to be here. Thanks for having me. We're happy to have you. This is fun because we've never actually had a stalker on the show before. But do you want to, but I don't know, should we tell? But the first time I ever met Mindy, she came out to me and I think your first words to me, we're at a conference and your first words to me. I think we're something along lines of, you're Brandon Turner. I'm your stalker or something along that. Do you remember that? She had a knife when she met me. Listen, you have to protect yourself.

You do have to protect yourself from Josh. Yes, indeed, indeed. So, Mindy, yeah, Mindy's been a fan of BP for a while, and we've met Mindy a number of times over the years at a little personal finance conference that we've gone to called FinCon. And Mindy started right. for bigger pockets. And lo and behold, one day we put out a job listing saying, we are looking for somebody who can help us create content and do cool stuff. And Mindy's like, I want to do it. And so we

hired her. So, you know, you're not on here necessarily because you work for us. You're on here because you've got a cool story and we just want to share it. So hopefully we can dig into that. Yeah. Well, ask away. Fire lightning round. What is it? Fire. Fire. way. For our biggest thing, not knowing what it's called, just put a demerits on the record. But, all right, Mindy, let's talk about you. I mean, you're somebody who's kind of big into personal finance and you have been for a long time. And so, you know, before we, usually we start with, how'd you get started in real estate? I think it might be interesting to kind of start with. How'd you get into this personal finance space and, you know, why is it so interesting to you?

Well, the personal finance aspect of my life started at birth. My parents were both, both of my parents come from a really big family. And they went through, my grandparents were part of the Depression. They were very frugal because they had to be. My parents were very frugal because that's how they were brought up. And I'm very frugal because that's how I was brought up. And I met a man who was also very frugal. And we got married.

we just have always lived below our means. Are you guys Jewish? We are not. But don't hold that against us. I mean, you know, cheap. Yeah, just, you know. Josh is Jewish. He can say that.

I can't say that. So Josh is part of the tribe. I'm not. You know what? I get that a lot, but, you know, it's not true what they say. All right. So you're frugal, your husband's frugal. This frugality is deep.

What does that mean, though? Like, you know, people think frugal people are cheap. bastards who don't want to spend two cents on anything. And that's not true, right? Frugality means something a little bit more, right? You don't spend money on frivolous things. I don't have a brand new car and I haven't in several years. I will probably never buy another brand new car. We, there's this concept of early retirement where you don't have to work until you're 65. You can work until you're 25 or 30 or 40 and you just save aggressively and you spend less than you make and you get enough money to live on. You don't ever have to work again.

So we started exploring that concept and we discovered that we do almost have enough money to retire and continue our frugal lifestyle. And part of that, part of what will help us do that is investing in real estate, having a passive income stream. Maybe, Brandon, you're familiar with rental properties? I've heard of that. I've heard of the concept. You know, you have money coming in that you're not really working for. I mean, yeah, it's still work being a landlord, but you're not out there nine to five every day making a living, and then you can spend more time with your kids and you can,

you know, do all this. I happen to just get this really awesome job, so I'm not going to be retiring early, but my husband may choose to reduce his hours a little bit and, you know, spend more time with the kids, pick up some of the slack that I'm going to be giving now that I am gainfully employed. I was a stay-at-home mom for eight years. We had part of being frugal is you can, you know, you can plan ahead, if you plan ahead. You can have kids and stay at home because you don't have to worry about child care. You don't have to worry about making ends meet.

because you've already made Ed's meat. We planned for me to be a stay-at-home mom, and I've been a stay-at-home mom for eight years, and now I'm ready to jump back in, and I already did jump back in about a month ago. I worked for this awesome little startup called Bigger Pockets. Maybe you've heard of them. Yeah.

All right. Yeah, they suck. I want to dig in more on frugality here. No, no, but, you know, I think it's a topic that would be fun to explore a little bit more. So frugality, let's take a, I've got you on split screen, you and Brandon next to each other. So on the right side, I see Mindy. Mindy buys Folgers and makes her coffee at home out of the tent, spends $2.50 per week in coffee. Now, on the other side, Brandon shops at Starbucks. He goes there twice a day, buys a cup of coffee for six. $6 per cup and spends $6.5 as $30 plus per week in coffee.

Multiply Brandon's $50. You know, you multiply that over a year. And you've spent a lot less money on coffee than Brandon has. Is that the frugality? Is that what we're talking about here? Careful, Mindy. There are aspects to that. However, I actually don't buy folders.

Do you want to Starbucks, too? I don't go to Starbucks very often. Yeah, I grow my own coffee. Well, that's really being frugal. She sells her own clothes. Actually, I do. I was making fun of you, but it's true. Uh-oh. Take foot out of mouth. My background is in fashion design as most home flippers. No, but back to the coffee. I actually have a friend who has a coffee company. It's called Epic Thien and I buy coffee there. But I shop at the thrift store for my clothes, for home items that I don't really need the pay full price for. You know, it doesn't matter that that dish has been used by somebody else. You go to a restaurant, those dishes have been used by somebody else. It's not like, I mean, I don't buy underpants there. That's gross.

But, you know, that's really gross. But I don't mind buying a shirt there or a pair of pants or I bought a VCR a couple weeks ago at a thrift shop. And my mom did a Warren Buffett videotape. Nice. We should watch it together. Yeah, we'll watch it together. Nice. Look at this Bigger Pockets podcast, putting people together for very useless purposes, like watching 30-year-old technology.

So back to frugality, you know, you save money where you can so you can spend it where you want to or where you need to. Oh, that's a tweetable right there. That is tweet. Mindy J with the tweetable. I save money on clothes because even though I have a fashion design background, I really don't care what the latest styles are. Honestly, I'm a mom. I have two kids.

The latest styles don't, aren't that flattering to my body type. By the way, body type was in little finger parentheses there, everybody. My mom. I said that, not them. So this is a side note, but my mom has a, my entire life has had this habit of putting air quotes around things that don't belong. So she'll be like, like, Brandon, you need to go to your room to go and clean up. And like, all growing up, there's air quotes all the time.

And I never understood them. Your mom is inappropriate air quote lady. She would be a Saturday night live character. I know. There should be one. Anyway, so air quote mom. So anyway, to go back to the frugality thing real quick. So first of all, I do spend a lot of money.

Starbucks, but not that. I think my budget's like 200 a month total for me and my wife, which is a lot. However, however, I am $2,400 a year. It is. However, Starbucks coffee. There are two types of people. There are two types of people on Earth. There are people who want to go and save $6 a day, and there's people who can go out and make $6 a day. Which type of person are you? I am, I am hands down the guy that will go out and find a way to earn more money so I can enjoy the things I like in life, and I always will. Now, it doesn't mean, I lived in a one-bedroom, 350 square foot house for when I got started because I needed to save money and be frugal to get the money to be able to invest.

And so I house hacked this little tiny duplex, Kirk Cobain's, that one, people know the story. And, I mean, we grow our own vegetables in our garden. So, I mean, we pick and choose. Yeah. Everybody, I mean, picks and chooses. Like, yeah, I don't drive a new car. I bought, you know, an old Prius, but it's a cool Prius. Nice.

That's your house on wheels. This is my house on wheels. I slept in that for five weeks. Well, a bunch of work on. That is, that is ridiculous. That is frugal. You are frugal. See, I didn't want to pay. So you didn't spend money on Starbucks so that you'll sleep in your car so you can spend money at Starbucks. That's pretty much it. Because I don't mind sleep in my car, but I like my Starbucks. So you spend money on what you like. And, you know, I think the other side of frugality, too, is the idea of as you make more income in life. I wrote a post a long time ago about called like the one thing you need to do to do, become a millionaire. And the whole premise was, as you get more and more money in life,

if you keep spending more and more money in life, you'll never become a millionaire. But as you make more more money, if you invest more money, you will become a millionaire. It's like as simple as that. So anyway, yeah, so I think everyone's a little bit frugal. And most people are a little bit. It's just deciding what they want to be frugal about is my theory. Exactly. You choose what you want to save on so you can spend it where you want to. Exactly. Like you said, way to bring that back, Mindy, where do you spend it? I mean, obviously, you're a frugal person. We lay no judgment. We love you, you know, are you spent it on your, your kids, on traveling. What, what's your, and real estate, I'm assuming is probably the primary. Well, real estate is in limbo right now. We're in

kind of a ridiculous market and I'm having a hard time finding deals in my current market. I know nobody else is because real estate is just exploding everywhere. But, um, no, where do I spend money? I spend money on, uh, the stock market. I just invest a lot right now. Um, I want to hear about that. We do travel. We do travel a lot, but we do travel hacking. We take credit cards and you sign up for a new credit card. You spend X amount of dollars in a certain amount of months, like $3,000 in three months.

And then you get 20,000 bonus miles or 50,000 bonus miles. One time we did it with British Airways, and we got 100,000 bonus miles. And I had a card. My husband had a card. So we had 200,000 bonus miles. And we used that to travel quite a bit. when we lived in Madison, Wisconsin, we could fly out of Chicago. And Chicago is an American Airlines hub, which is a sister airline of British Airways.

It kind of gets convoluted. You have to do a little bit of research. But we went to Hawaii for free. Really? Just for signing up for that British Airways? Just for signing up for the British Airways card. We went to Hawaii for free. Four of us. I think it cost $95 for the annual fee for each card.

So that's what? $190. I got four round trips to Hawaii. So here's what's going to happen. I'm going to cut you off right now. You are going to write an epic post on the Bigger Pockets blog about travel hacking. I'm familiar with travel hacking because of this personal finance community, this FinCon community that we're part of.

But I don't think a lot of people on Bigger Pockets are necessarily familiar with this. And I've talked to my mom about it. And I'm like, mom, you got to get this card. and this is the right card so you could get the miles. And she's like, it's too much work. I don't want to do it. You know, my mom, just do it. That was a different mom accent than usually do.

Yeah. She moved to the south or something. I don't know what happened to her. Something weird. By the way, everybody just got to witness a moment of bigger pockets corporate culture. Josh handing down an order to Mindy. Wasn't that great right there? Like, this is what you're going to do.

Mindy Jay. Mindy J. Check it out. Travel hacking. No, it's, you know what? It's such a cool topic. It is. And I think it would benefit our community and everyone within it for us to kind of talk about

it a little bit. So, you know, it's a polite suggestion from the man upstairs that we do that. Now Josh is calling himself, God. This is amazing. Wow. I spent enough time with you, Brandon. And, you know, it just, you know. I guess.

All right. All right. Where were we? I was not calling myself, God. Let's let the record show. I was just saying I work upstairs in the office or something. Can we move to something else besides me? No, we're going to talk about this for a really long time.

I want to talk about her real estate. I do. How did you go from this frugal person to buying real? I mean, it seems like the anti-frugal. buying this property. Oh, no. So tell us about it. Please. See how I changed the subject. That was good, wasn't it? That was very smooth. Like silk. So I am frugal. I don't want to pay for things that I don't find value in. And I was living at home because that's what all 24-year-olds do. I was living at home in my parents' house. I just finished up college. I had my first real job. And a friend was going

through a kind of sticky divorce. She had rented an apartment to sleep in at night, and then she would go home during the day and take care of her kids and whatever. That stopped working for her, and she was stuck with this apartment lease that she couldn't use. And I said, well, I'll take it over, not knowing that you're supposed to clear that with the landlord or anything. I was much younger. So I took her, I took over her lease, and it was like $410 a month for a one bedroom in my town, and at the end of the lease, I just canceled it. I said I don't want to live here anymore because, you know, that seems kind of expensive to pay $410 whole dollars a month to live in this apartment

when I could buy a place that would be the same price. So I looked around. I found a condo for $49,000, two-bedroom condo in a suburb of Chicago, and I bought it. I moved in. My whole payment was $417 a month. So for $7 more a month. I'm now owning this property. And to give you an idea of how long ago this was, I got a smoking

deal at 7% interest on my mortgage. Wow. I wasn't going to ask, but you know, since you open the door. It was 1998 that I bought this property. I sold it. I actually had my dad, power of attorney, signed the papers for me when I was on my honeymoon in 2002. I sold the property for $74,000. I made about $25,000 on the property just for holding it for six years. I had a place to live. The property went up in value, and it was just this really amazing experience because at the time I wasn't making very much money, and that was just about a year's salary in an instant because you know, you still need a place to live. And if I was renting and stopped, you know, to move in, my husband had a house.

So I was selling my condo. If I would have rented, I would have had nothing at the end of that except just a place to live. And I thought, oh, I'm going to have to buy another one of those properties. So we lived in his place for a couple of years, and then we moved into the city of Chicago itself and rented out his house. And that was an experience. It was his grandmother's house, and we bought it from the estate for what it was worth. and then housing prices just shot through the roof in the early 2000s, and we sold it for like $100,000 more than we bought it for.

And it was, we did very little work to that. We might have put in $1,000. It had like a leaking pipe or something. It just, it wasn't, there wasn't that much. And we took that money and rolled it into another property that we flipped, or we fixed up head to toe. So, and I want to go, I want to go there for sure and talk about those. I know it's okay you keep you keep talking just talk talk talk talk we're not here the guests you know

you can just don't worry about the host we you mentioned that 7% in steel and so there's a lot of people who are listening to the show right now and they're thinking 7% are you out of your mind well so 7% was a steal back then and you know rates change and and so the environment that you're in I just want to talk about it because I want to make sure people understand you know there were times this and I don't know if it was the 80s or 70s when rates were twice that you know weights were early 80s yeah I think I remember Jeff Brown telling me about like 20% or so rates something I mean that might have been in the 1900s you know too bad Jeff isn't here to defend himself but yeah I mean rates have been far higher than they are today and we're in a really

good environment as an investor uh to acquire properties with with low rates so just keep in mind as you're buying things and realize we're in as good a time as we've ever had for buying property at least as far as mortgage rates are concerned. That's actually kind of funny you bring that up. My college was paid for because my dad bought savings bonds when I was little and they matured right around the beginning of the 80s and he put them in a CD that was locked in at some ridiculous like 14% rate or 11% rate or something like that. And you, you know, you. You just, for like five or ten years, he just got this ridiculous amount of money. And that's how he paid for my college, my sister's college, my brother's college was just this amazing interest rate.

That's cool. Nobody buys savings bonds anymore. Nobody buys savings bonds anymore because they're worth almost nothing. They're worthless. Yeah. It's sad. It's sad. Well, all right.

So you bought this property. You sold it. You made some money. Did it again. Then you start getting into these living flips. Let's talk about that. What is a live-in flip? A live-in flip is when you take yourself and you live inside the home that you are flipping.

So you're living through the construction, the drywall, the hammering, the no electricity, the new furnace installation, all of that. It is super awesome fun. It's actually not. It can be a little trying, actually. We lived in one flip with no kids, and that was awesome, because we worked on it, and we worked on it, and when we didn't want to work on it, we didn't have to work on it. And you could take a little break, and you could work until midnight if you wanted to. And then once we started having kids, it was a bigger deal.

I can't help you when the baby's crying. I have to attend to the baby. And so a lot of the work kind of got pushed off on my husband for a while. And now we're in a house where our kids are eight and five, so they can kind of take care of themselves while we're working on. on the house, but it's still, you know, mom, I need something. So a live and flip is most successful, I think, when you don't have children or small children that really need your attention. For a while, my live and flip, my current, we're fixing it up.

We're not really flipping it, but we're living in the fixing up. And I had a washing machine in the kitchen, and my kitchen is like 10 by 12. I had a washing machine in my kitchen because all the rest of the house had no plumbing, or there was no heat. so I couldn't hook it up in the other side of the house. Well, the benefit of that is when you have a dirty dishes, you just toss them in the washing machine with your clothes. Everything comes out good, right? Yeah.

That's, that's... Wait, what? Hold on, hold on, hold on. I'm just kidding. No, I don't do that. The washing machine was in the kitchen. It's like right in the middle of the kitchen. Okay, just making sure.

She doesn't wash her dishes in the washing machine. Come on, Josh. Come on. I would pass the frugal lady here. Save that water. Sox, socks and plates. on the same load. I mean, come on. Nice. But yeah, just live and flip is another way to be frugal because I don't have to rent a separate place. I don't have to pay a mortgage on a separate place.

I'm living in the property that I'm fixing up. And I save big money on the capital gains taxes at the end of two years. There was a recent law passed, not recent anymore. It's, this is 1997. That's a long time ago. Whatever. Time lies. Yes. There was a law that was passed, I can't remember the name of it now. But people, you don't have to pay capital gains taxes if you live in a property for two of the last five years and own it for the two of the last five years. You can just write off $250,000 in capital gains if you're single and $500,000 if you're married. I never made $500,000 off a house, so I never reached those limits. But it's still nice to wrap up to not have to pay capital gains taxes on $100,000.

or $150,000. You know, I've known, I've known some couples over the years who have, like, that's what they do for a living pretty much is they'll go and buy a house to live in. And every two years, they buy and sell it and they make, let's say, $100,000 on each flip. And that is basically $50,000 a year of an income. And all have to do is live in a property and flip it and it's tax free, which 50,000 tax free is equivalent to what, 80,000, you know, as a job. So they're basically making like $70,000 a year just living in a house that they're flipping. And so, I mean, it's a strategy. It's not a terrible idea.

Pretty much like every house that I've bought in the past has been a live and flip for kind of that same reason. So anyway, very cool. I love that. I love the concept of a live and flip. So how many of you done now, Mindy? Do you mind me asking? I have done five live and flips. And what's the average whole time? The average whole time is two or three years. I don't sell them before two years because then I won't be able to get the capital gains deduction benefit. And sometimes it takes longer to sell. I have tried FSBO. because that's always a successful. Which of course stands for. For sale by owner. I am currently a licensed real estate agent in the state of Colorado.

I have sold zero houses, so I'm super successful. I didn't get my license to sell houses. I got my license so that I could invest and have access to the MLS and get the commission when I sell and buy and yada yada. I've had a bunch of questions. But before I was a licensed agent, I tried to sell it by myself twice. The first time I tried was in a not very FSBO-friendly real estate market, and it took about 18 months to sell the property.

It was also a difficult to sell property. It had a pool. It was a split level in an area of the country where split levels are kind of shunned. So it was a difficult property to sell anyway, but then when you do it by yourself, it just seems to take longer. The second property that I sold FSBO was in Madison, Wisconsin. The largest real estate company or the largest real estate listing company in Madison is called FSBOM Madison.com.

I should say when I listed it, that was the largest. I don't know the current Madison market, but in 2012. And it took 18 months to sell that one as well. And it was a lakefront property. So, again, it's a difficult house to sell no matter if you're selling it by yourself or selling it with an agent. Both times we did FSBO, we offered an additional commission to the selling agent. And I don't know if that helped or not because they were difficult to sell houses. Interesting. Well, so let's dig in a tiny bit on this for sale by owner because I think it's something we've actually never covered in 100, I don't know, 30 shows or so.

people do for sale by owner, I think primarily because they say, hey, I can save this commission, because when you sell, you pay the commission, right? I'm going to save all this commission by selling. You know, why would I want to spend that? But then you're stuck, you know, in your case, 18 months, it may have, you probably, I'm guessing probably would have turned the property over sooner. And, you know, personally, I have an, I have issue with all this. I think I should be able to go and list my house for sale by owner. Like in 20, what, what are we in, 2015? 2015 with sites like Zillow and Trulia, I mean, you know, I can post a property up and get all the visibility I want for it. You know, so the marketing, where does that extra marketing come in for first sale by owner versus realtor?

You know, personally, I think what realtors are doing is they're black, a lot of them will blacklist for sale by owners because they're saying, well, I'm not going to get my full commission. so why would I encourage that? And I think it's not taken as seriously by real estate agents, which as a real estate agent you could probably speak to. But I think at some point in the coming five, 10, 15 years, there's going to be some kind of equality that comes to independent sellers who want to just sell their property and not have to deal with an agent. What's your take on that?

Well, I get why people don't want to sell with an agent. understand why they want to try and sell it themselves. And with, like you said, with Trulia and Zillow and Craigslist even, there's a lot more options to getting your household by yourself than, you know, in years past when I was doing it, we had the newspaper. What's that? Yeah, I know, right? It's this paper where they print the news on it. I don't understand. I know. It's a very foreign concept now. But that's a very foreign concept now. It was like yesterday's news though, right? Well, exactly.

I still get newspapers today. It's kind of a habit. Warren Buffett believes in newspapers. He buys them. He said that he got his start as a newspaper carrier every year at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, which I attend. I am a Berkshire Hathaway B share owner. I'm not an A share owner. For those that don't know, the A share is $250,000 per share.

and the B share is like $100 a share, $120. So I went with the frugal option, the small option. Anyway, at the Berkshire Hathaway annual meeting, they have a newspaper throwing contest every year. And the prize is a dilly bar. If you can beat Warren Buffett's throw onto the porch, they have this fake porch. Everybody should go to the Berkshire Hathaway meeting.

It's a super fun time. That's cool. So anyway, he still loves newspapers and he buys them even though they're going out of business. But yes, back to this. to advertise my house in the newspaper. I had to hold my own open houses. What I would do is walk people around the house to make sure they saw everything and then I would step outside so they could really look around. Honestly, I think that threw people off. They don't want the buyer

there or their seller. The buyers don't want the sellers there when they're looking at a house. They want to look and they want to peek in the drawers. They want to talk to each other and say, hey, I really hate that color on the wall. And I don't think they feel as comfortable when somebody's there. When there was a real estate agent showing my property, of course, I would leave before they got there. But as far as the industry goes, I don't know, they've been around for a really long time.

Real estate agents have. And they're not going to go down without a fight. We're not going to go down without a fight. And I can understand why people would be really, as a homeowner who sold houses for sale by owner. Why am I paying you 6%? Oh yeah, no. It's a lot of money.

When it's $100,000 on the list price, that's $6,000. Okay. My house is for sale right now, my personal residence, and it's a lot of money that I'm paying somebody. So it's crazy. But let me ask you this last question on FISBO is, do you see FISBO as an effective strategy? question mark. Not currently, with the exception of Madison, Wisconsin, because of the FSBO

Madison. And you would not believe how Fisbo-friendly Madison is or was when I was there three years ago. And it was, you know, it was really nice to be able to list my house and sell it for a 4% commission instead of a 6% commission. And that was my most expensive house. That was the lakefront property. And, you know, $24,000. It was a lot of money. It's a lot of money. It's a lot of money. No, was that, I can't do math. It was more than that. But that's still, I mean, that's a lot of money. Maybe it was 30,000. I wasn't following the math, but I was assuming you were right.

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I mean, it's like house hacking. We talk about a lot. House hacking is perfect for young people in their 20s. It gets harder when you're married and have spouses. It just kind of becomes more of a challenge. But beyond that kind of obvious, are there other negatives to doing live-in flips? And I guess I'll put it to Mindy and Brandon, you could chime in too. Well, it's dirty. It's, you know, you walk into a kitchen. My first live-in flip, we ripped out the whole kitchen. And then I was, washing dishes in the bathtub and I was making dinner in my bedroom and you know that's not such a huge deal when you're an adult you can just make a sandwich or you know hey look it's peanut butter and jelly tonight um but when you've got kids you have to kind of it's a lot easier when it's just adults in your um in your flip drywall days are the absolute worst because dust just gets absolutely everywhere and it's a massive mess so you are washing dishes and in the bathtub and you are making dinner in your bedroom. And that's, you know, it's kind of a pain in

the butt to wash your dishes in the bathtub because you have to bed over and your back hurts and, you know, you're already dirty. Can I ask an obvious question? If you're living flipping and you have one bathroom and you're working on the bathroom, how do you use the bathroom? Are we using the kitchen sink? Or should we not go there? I have two bedrooms. Thank goodness. I'm not. So don't Don't ever do more than one bathroom at once while you're doing a living flip. Oh, no. Yeah, absolutely. We have the house that we're currently living in.

It was a one-bath two-bedroom house. And we just finished the bathroom two weekends ago. And before we could finish that bathroom, we had to add the bathrooms, the other bathrooms. Now we have a four-bedroom, three-bath house. So we had two bathrooms done before we started on the original bathroom. I'm just making sure. So there's always a working functional bathroom at any given time is the key here. There has to be.

Yeah. I was going to put a potty in a hose. That works for me. Which would be horrible. Okay. That is not my ideal. No, that's not my idea. But I have limits.

So, okay, so the live and flips that I do. Here's the problem a lot of people do, right? Not even problem. Just the downside of live and flip, right? is you never get to fully enjoy the property you're living in because it's like, all right, we finally just finished this today. We're going to list it today. It's like you never get to fully.

So what I try to do, and I did it in my house I'm in right now pretty well, I got it. And then I spent three months remodeling it. Every day my wife and I were over here fixing every single thing we could up. So that way when we moved in, we'd at least be able to experience the house mostly done. And still, like, I mean, that was two years ago. I moved in now. and now we're thinking about maybe we'll sell it soon. But I'm like, we never really got to enjoy.

And that's what my wife keeps saying is, I don't really want to move until we, at least can say we lived in a finished 100% house and not just finished the day we moved out, which is how it usually is. But anyway, so I don't know, people can keep that in mind. You can do that.

You can fix it up first and then move into the house, live there for two years and sell it and still get that IRS tax thing. Of course, I'm not a CPA. Neither is Mindy or Josh, but consult with your CPA and all that good stuff. And that's a good idea, by the way. Yeah. So, okay, so let's talk about real quick. You know, what I just said there is I came in and I worked, my wife and I worked for like three months fixing our house up. Do you guys do your own work as well, Mindy, or do you hire things out? Ah, we have hired people twice. And each time that we hired somebody, we had to fire them and hire somebody else because the first guys didn't work out. And we do a lot of work ourselves. We do most of the work ourselves. When we add a story onto the house, as we've done our last two flips,

We pay somebody to actually build the structure and put the siding on, the windows, and the roof. And then we come in and we finish it. We coordinate the drywall and never doing drywall again by myself. We coordinate the drywall. We do the tile work ourselves. We do the plumbing. We do the electricity. We do everything once the structure is waterproof, weatherproof on the outside.

I would never do insulation myself because it is actually cheaper to hire something. to come in and do it than it is to buy it yourself. Hey, Mindy, quick, quick question. And when you say we, you mean your husband, Carl, right? I mean, but you're a female. Why would, you know, females do this work too? I mean, I, you know, I've never heard of such a thing. Yes, females do this work all the time. Yes, they do. Oh, I wasn't being sussed. I was proving a point that this is something that, sure, more women, a women are doing, and B, you know, not enough attention is being paid to those women who are actually doing this and see to the women that are listening. This is something that you can definitely do. And I definitely

want you to talk more about that because that's one of the coolest things about what you do is you're like playing with power tools and rough and stuff up, aren't you? I am. I have my favorite power tools, Betty and Joe Joe. No, it's, no. It's, I think a lot of people, women and men, are afraid to try. They don't want to mess something up. And, you know, you don't start by building a house from scratch. You start on small projects, and you gain confidence, and then you move on to something else. You know, anybody can paint a wall.

And I'm sorry to all the professional painters out there, but it's really not that difficult to task. And, you know, you don't have to tape off the ceiling. You can learn how to cut in, which is painting up to the wall without painting the wall. ceiling too it's a concept or a procedure it's not a concept it's an actual thing I'm looking up at my ceiling because I haven't we sprayed it to to paint in here and I haven't gone back and cut into the ceiling yet I'm sorry anybody can paint a wall anybody I installed all the hardwood floors in my house and if you can do this it's a hammering motion if you can do that then you can install a

hardwood floor it's really not that difficult cult. And there's, sorry? You're probably going to say what I was going to say. There's a million videos on YouTube on how to do everything. There's a million videos on YouTube. You are a mind reader. I am. That's what they say about me. Jedi connection. That's why they call me the Jedi. There's a million videos on YouTube to show you how to do anything. You know, and you can do electricity. You start off small. Turn off the power is step number one. And then you take out the outlet that doesn't work. You match the wires. The black one goes with the black one.

The blue one goes with the blue one. And then you stuff it back in the. wall and turn the power on and try it again. See if it works. You know, you turn off the water to the sink and replace the fixture. You can do it yourself. You can watch videos. You can get books at the library. It's really easy to do your own work. And nobody likes your house more than you. Nobody cares about your bottom line more than you. And I am so sick of paying contractors to why. I will add that. So I agree. I do all my own stuff as well. A lot of states, including those state I live in, I can no longer do electrical on my rental properties at all. Like, even if I'm the owner of them, there's a law. So some states have that rule now. I can't touch electrical in a house,

even if I own. Now, if it's my own primary residence, I can, but a rental I can't. So anyway, just people make sure you know your laws. But live in flips. See, I do almost everything myself. Yeah. Yeah, no, I haven't, I don't have any rentals right now. It's been a while since I had a rental. So that's good to know. I should look at it before I start bunking around with rental property electricity. Here's another quick. tip for you. Well, for everybody out there. So my contractor that I'm working with right now just hired a new employee. And the reason he hired this employee is because the employee just got hit with a $10,000 fine from the L&I, like our Department of Labor and Industry, the ones

in charge of having workman's comp insurance on your people. Anyway, because this guy was up on a roof, roofing or whatever, for somebody else. Anyway, like, and he didn't have his own license in bond. Anyway, they came by, asked for his whatever information, didn't have it. and he got hit with a $10,000 fine. So that's my quick tip for everybody is if you're going to do work for anybody at all, that's not your own property, make sure a thousand percent you do it right and follow the rules because you'll get in big trouble.

Hey, hey, Mindy, and I appreciate everything you said, and I do try to make a point anytime that we have somebody of the female persuasion on the podcast to actually emphasize the fact that they are of the female persuasion, because, you know, you go in bigger pockets and we are a male dominant industry.

You know, we are a vastly male dominant industry. So I think, A, it's important to have strong, you know, female role models in the business, and you are one of them. Indy Jensen, you're my hero. You are. You are. But, you know, I think, you know, it's always important to hear from kind of the horse's mouth, so to speak. So, you know, come on. Everybody's, you guys are ridiculous.

It's all right. Grow up. You ought to call somebody a horse. horse, it's fine, whatever. You know, we get a lot of, we get a lot of guff in the comments about childish jokes, you know, like, come on, Brandon. Jeez, man. From the horse's mouth. All right. And Mindy. Tell, no, like, to all the female listeners, you know, what would you tell them if, you know, to those who are like, hey, I'm afraid to do this or, you know, I don't want to deal with the,

the nonsense from the guys and the contrary, you know, what do you say to others who might be listening? Well, that's a really interesting question. I just, read a couple of forum posts. Well, one forum post, this woman said that she doesn't, she doesn't contact contractors by herself. She'll have a male friend come over so that she gets a decent price because she has found that when she doesn't ask a man to come over to her house, she's given just ridiculous prices because it doesn't seem like people know. And then that same woman sent me an email just a couple of, I think this morning, saying, you know, I'm so inspired by you and the men just don't understand and thank you. And that really like made my week.

That made my year that somebody would say that because, you know, honestly, I don't really think it's that tough. You just have to jump in. You know, I installed the hardwood floor all by myself, this one right here that I'm looking at. You can't see it. But it's gorgeous. I install that by myself. You have to, your first line has to be absolutely straight. So you take your time with that line. And then you just go. It's just, it does, you stop when you're done. And, you know, it's easy. You take your time and you do it right.

And, you know, like I said, you watch YouTube videos, you read books. And none of this is really all that hard. I said that anybody can change out a plumbing fixture. I actually hate plumbing. Nice. I always slam my hand into the wall or, you know, pinch my finger in some way. My record is 11 trips to Home Depot in one day. For plumbing. I hate plumbing, too.

Okay. So, yeah, they never have, you never get the part. Never get the right part that I need. And it's, yeah. I was checking out at Home Depot and the lady's like, hmm, you look familiar. I'm here every day. Every single day. Literally, I am here every single day. Of course I look familiar. I'm here more than you. Hey, Mindy. So you're, you're doing living hip flips. You're doing floors. You're doing all this stuff. is that is that all that you guys are doing

or you guys you said you're not doing any rentals are you doing actual non-living flips or is this really the strategy that you guys are going to be following here to forward here to forward we are looking for non-living flips we want to do that

burr that Brandon always talks about burr by the way he made that up he made that word up and now I'm seeing it all over the place I know people say it For people to know what it is, it's the buy, yeah, the buy rehab, rent, refinance, repeat. That's what it stands for.

And that's a really great, you know, that's a really great term. I want to get some rental properties. Like I said, my current market is just absolutely ridiculously hot in my price range. If I wanted to buy $500,000 houses, then I would not have so much competition. But, you know, there's nothing under $200,000 in my local market. And up to about 300,000, everything is all cash offers for going appraisals, for going inspections. And I don't want to subject myself to that kind of risk. I don't want to buy a property with no inspection and discover that it needs a whole new foundation.

And it's built on top of a snake den. That's very smart. And so what would you tell to people who are in a market like yours? I mean, because it's really easy to get caught up in the, you know, I can actually actually get this if I go all cash and forego this stuff. Is that a good idea? I don't think so. I have bought and sold like 10 houses. We did five live and flips. And I don't think that it's a good idea for a new investor to go out and buy a property that they don't know what they're walking into. You don't know what you don't know. I just had a post recently

and I'll just say this again for the three people who didn't read it. I, my, my My husband and I were going to buy a condo closer to the city of Chicago. And we went through and looked beautiful. We had a home inspection. And the guy offhandedly said, oh, make sure that this exterior stucco is real stucco and not ephus. What's epis? It's fake stucco. And when it's used in drier climates like Colorado and Arizona, it's not a big problem.

They don't have a lot of moisture. But when it's used in the wetter climate, sometimes the window seal. fail and water gets inside between the stucco and the wall and there's no place for it to go and mold grows and there's been homes that have been just they've had to tear them down completely there's no fixing if the mold is just gone everywhere and without a home inspection I would have known that and that would be pretty scary to lose that much money that early in my career in my you know investing career you don't want to lose the whole pot um I and and a home inspection is like $500. If you spend $500 and you find nothing, then, you know, that's money well spent. And if you spend $500

and find a potentially hazardous condition or a potentially problematic fix that you don't want to handle, that's money well spent. Yep. Yeah. For sure. So, yeah, no, I wouldn't suggest foregoing inspections. And with an appraisal, if you're paying $300,000 for a house, it's only worth $250, that's just foolish. There you go. Good advice. Good advice. All right. All right. All. All. Let's get this thing move towards the end. Next, we're going to go to the world famous. What's it called, Mindy? Lightning Round.

The Fire Round, the Fire Round, the Fire Round. Famous Four. No, we have the Lightning. We have the Fire Round. All right. Fire round. It's time for the Fire Round. She's all red and embarrassed now. I love that.

Lightning Round. Plus some little sunburn. All right. The Fire Round are questions we ask directly. from the forum. So we don't actually ask them. Bigger pockets members do. So Mindy, I know you're in the forums a lot. So you've probably seen these. Maybe you've even jumped into the conversations, which will make this cheating. But that's okay. Number one, why invest in real estate?

After all, there are a lot of things to invest in stocks, bonds, precious metals, collectibles. What makes real estate so attractive to you? Well, real estate is, it's never going to end. People always need a place to live. And you can get by without having stocks. You can get by without having bonds. precious metals, but you have to have a roof. Well, I guess you don't have to, but most people want to have a roof over their house, over their head. I do. And their house. Cool. I like it. All right on. All right. Next question. Is flipping still a good business in 2015? Yes, if you're in the right market. There's a guy in my market who buys houses at

full market value and flips them into some of the most amazing houses I've seen. and sells them at even more full market value. He'll take a smaller house like I did and top of the line, everything. He takes a two-bed, one bath and makes it a four-bed three bath or a five-bed house, and he puts in sub-zero refrigerators and who's the oven guy? What's the oven company? Viking, maybe? Viking ovens.

Yeah. He puts in the high quality. The really high-end finish. I don't have a Viking oven in my house. I've got a Maytag or whatever. pool or something. Because they're frugal. Frugal.

A Viking is a very good product. If somebody gave me one, I'd be happy to have one. But he puts all these high quality finishes in and it looks awesome. And he sells them for $150,000 more than he bought him for, $200,000 more than he bought him for. So he's making a good living. But that's not my personal goal. Well, I don't want to make a good living. No, that's not my personal flipping style.

And so I'm having a hard time finding a flip. in my current market. I'm going to go north to Cheyenne, Wyoming and see what I can do up there. Cool. They have far less lower priced houses. That's what I hear. On that topic, flipping, so like I have a lot, you know, obviously a lot of Facebook friends now from bigger pockets. I mean, like, I don't even know most of the people

that friend requests me anymore and I just like accept everybody. So like I have this wall like of just BP people that are talking about their real estate. My whole Facebook wall is just like real estate stuff now. It's kind of fun. But the thing I'm noticing over and over and over is people saying three days on the market and I have 14 offers. You know, like, you know, six days on the market and I've got seven offers. Like every day I see two, three of those posts come up about people bragging about how, I mean, in a good way about how wealth. So yeah, to answer that question also is flipping still good business. I think right now flipping is probably the best business I've ever seen in the past, you know, since I've been involved in real estate. You know, it's, beginning to look a lot more like 2005, six, and seven. So I don't know if that's a warning sign or not, but man, everything is going quick and for lots of offers. When everybody gets excited, listen, I'm the biggest proponent of real estate as an investment, but when people start getting excited, when you hear people talking about it at McDonald's and all over the place, I mean, when the average guy is talking about how good the real estate market is,

I start to get a little nervous. I'm starting to get a little nervous about how hot the market is, feeling in a lot of areas. I'm nervous with Denver because you guys are insane. It is nuts. It is really. I can't wait for it to pop so I can buy something. I know. Yeah, I talked to somebody today and she's like, yeah, I'm working. I'm learning. I'm learning. She's like, I'm just waiting for it to happen. I'm like it. She's like, oh yeah, she's like, I'm waiting for the market to completely collapse. I'm going to buy like crazy. I'm like, all right, that's a great strategy. Sit on the sidelines. Yep. Warren Buffett says when everybody's buying, you should be selling. When everybody's

selling, you should be buying. When everybody's selling, you should be buying. You just said that. He doesn't say anything about selling. Yeah. No, he doesn't say anything about selling, though. He holds it forever. That's true. His favorite, his favorite holding period is forever. I like it. I love that. You're a big fan, aren't you? I am a big fan of Warren Buffett. I do like him quite a bit. He's pretty smart. He is. Yes. He would have to be. All right. What are the common things that you can do to reduce a rehab budget and save money, without being shady or doing shoddy work. Ah, well, yeah, let's, yeah, number one, you could be shady.

Number two, you could do shoddy work. Good. No, you should do it yourself. You know, why hire a painter to come in and paint your room for $300 when you can do it for $30, which is a gallon of paint? Why hire an electric... Minus your time. Minus your time.

Plus your time, whatever. You're still making money on the end. If you're, you know, it all adds up. you hire an electrician and it's, you know, a minimum, $1,000 that they're going to be there because they have to charge for the time there and charge their hourly rate and, you know, do all of the information or all of the work that they need to do. The plumber is we had a, when we were selling our house, they wanted an air gap added to the dishwasher that we had forgotten to put in. And it cost us $1,000 to do. It was

an hour of work, maybe two hours of work, and it was like $50 in parts. And that doesn't translate to me $1,000 versus, you know, I don't make $1,000 an hour. Although I'd like to, Fossilu. Do you hear that? Yeah, me too. Wait, you don't make $1,000 an hour? Oh, come on. Come on.

What a disappointment. Jeez. This is. I really thought you were just loaded. I did write a post on the Bigger Pockets blog and on Entrepreneur.com a while back called How to Make $1,000 an hour. So I'll link to that in the show notes. It's actually really cool.

That would be great. Yeah, how to make $1,000 an hour. That would be nifty. Maybe you could teach it to me. I could teach it to you. You do make a thousand dollars an hour. I'm sure. So do you, Mindy, probably.

You only make it for a couple minutes a day. So the goal is, how do you make it for longer periods of time? That's a little teaser. Go read the post. It's on the show notes. That's awesome. All right. Mindy, last question.

I'm a first-time investor. Should I purchase a duplex or a boardplex? Ooh. Well, how much money do you have, Mr. First-time investor? a duplex, a fourplex, I don't think there's a real lot of difference there except in price.

I mean, you're going to have, if you're going to live in one unit and rent out the other unit, the duplex is going to pay all your expenses or most of your expenses. If you have a fourplex, when you live in one unit, you'll probably make money

when you rent out the other three. I don't think you'll make a lot of money in the duplex just by house hacking it. Both of them, you can get a first time FHA loan, which has a low down payment so you could afford more property in theory. There's a lot of reasons to, there's a lot of information that goes into that question. That's kind of a big question just for.

I think you answered it well. It was a good answer for sure. And yeah, it all depends on a lot of things. But I do think, I think if you can do a duplex, you can do a fourplex. I firmly believe that. So as long as it's within your price range, like trying to learn how to handle three other tenants instead of one other tenant is not that big of a learning curve. You know, coming up with three leases, picking up three rent checks.

I mean, it's, people can do it. People get overwhelmed with that stuff, but it's really easier than they think. Anyway, moving on, let's get out of here and end with the world famous. Famous for. All right, these are the questions we ask everybody. So, Mindy, number one, what is your favorite, besides mine? What is your favorite real estate book? My favorite real estate would have to be.

the book on flipping houses by Jay Scott. That is a great book. That is a great book. He, I can't believe there's anybody that knows more about flipping houses than Jay Scott. Maybe Brian Burke, who did that awful cat litter house. Did you ever see those pictures?

Yeah, that was terrible. It's disgusting. So, yeah, they are probably tied, but Brian didn't write a book. Jay Scott did. There you go. The book on flipping houses. Biggerpockts.com slash flipping book.

Yeah, conveniently it is printed by Bigger Pockets Publishing, but that's not why I like it. I just, you know, I'm a big fan of the site. All right. That's a good book. I do also go. That is the best flipping book I've ever read. It is. It's the best flipping book.

That's the best flipping book. Yeah. Our business book, best business book, what is you, what is your most preferred or best business book? Can I guess? I'm going to go with the debt snowball. The debt snowball. Is that what it's called?

No, the something snowball. The Snowball is something. I'm saying the Warren Buffett way. The Snowball's about, no, well, Snowball is about Warren Buffett. That's why I assumed it was that one. Oh, what's that book? That's upstairs. I think it's called The Snowball.

I think so. Is that the book? Yeah, there's somebody wrote a book about. But is that your answer? Did I guess all right? Oh, dang it. That's not. Oh, what's the book?

The richest man in Babylon by George S. Clayson. Clason. Clason. Clason. Clason, whatever. Sorry, George. I don't know how to pronounce your name.

I think he's like long gone. Yeah, it was published in like the 20s, which makes it an even more amazing book. The basic premise is don't spend more than you make, save a little bit, invest it, invest it wisely. And you can do what you want with life. Very good. By the way, the book was called The Snowball, Warren Buffett and the Business of Life by Alice Schroeder. That's the one I was guessing you were talking about. But that is the one bit.

That's number two. Close second. Nice. Okay, good. I'll take it. Excellent. All right. Mindy, hobbies, what do you do for fun?

Oh, my goodness. When it's wintertime, I snowboard when it's summertime, I'm on my bike or playing with my girls. Well, I'm playing with my girls no matter what time of year it is. But wintertime, it is snowboarding and summer. It is biking. Excellent. Where do you snowboard? My favorite place is Breckenridge.

My backyard. I was a backyard. seven square inches. I have the smallest yard of any house I've ever owned in my life. It's nice. Well, you could like put the snowboard on that and just jump up a down a few times. I should. Obviously, you're a snowboarder. That's what I do. I jump. Clearly, clearly. Clearly. Right on. Okay. My final question of the day. Mindy, what do you believe sets apart successful real estate investors from those who give up fail or never get started? Getting started. You have to do a deal to be a real estate investor. I don't think you can call yourself a real estate investor if you never invest in real estate. There's a lot of people who read about it and then they just, they're scared, they don't have enough money. You don't have enough money. Read the book on buying and selling houses with no and low money down. What's the name of that? It's close enough. Close enough. Yeah, by this little known author, Brandon Turner.

You forgot good-looking and talented. Good-looking, amazing 7-9, Brandon Turner. Yes, thank you. Josh is shaking his head. Why are you shaking your head? Because he just, he's incorrigible. Well, thank you for bringing up my book because, you know, I didn't do it. Actually, I did it like three times already, but, you know, I'll take it.

I'll take any plug. BiggerPockets.com slash no money. There you go. Yes. You need to jump in and do a deal. And, you know, that doesn't mean jump in blindly. You have to do your research or you are going to lose giant wads of cash. Yes.

We've all lost giant wads of cash. And you just call that education. And I don't think you can write it off on your taxes. But you, unfortunately, I'd have a big tax write off. You can try. They do have a spot for education for deductions. Let me know how that goes, Mindy. Yeah.

So when I'm audited, I'm going to refer them back to here. Brandon, my CBA, make the legal advice. No, don't do that, please. All right, Mindy, show 129 on the Bigger Pockets podcast. You can check out the show notes at biggerpockets.com slash show 129, and you can leave Mindy feedback, ask her questions, or just interact with her on Bigger Pockets. Outside of all that, Mindy, where can people find out more about you?

Pretty much that's it, BiggerPockets.com. Right on. I was a stay-at-home mom for eight years, so I have a pretty thin resume as of late. Nah, you got a great resume. I'm in the forums. I'm in the forums a lot. I'm on the blog. Current podcast, the AskBPP podcast.

You can find me on almost every facet of bigger pockets. Perfect. Perfect. Well, Mindy, thank you for joining us. We really appreciate it. And we will get you right back to work as soon as we hang out. up with this call. So get back to work, Mindy. Thank you very much. This was this was a lot of fun. All right. When do I get back? When do I come back for number two and number three?

Don't don't start being like Ben. Hi, Ben. Nice. All right, Mindy, take care. Take care. Okay. Bye. Have a good day. All right, guys, that was Mindy Jensen. Big thanks again to her for coming on the show. Obviously, if she didn't come on the show, I could force her to, but I wasn't I couldn't force her too. She would take me on. Yeah, yeah, she would. She would, she would. Now, it was great. Is she taller than you, by the way? She might be. That's not hard to do. We should back to back you guys sometime and we'll see. Oh, yeah. Why? Is there anything? I mean, do you get anything out of that other than the joy of making me look even shorter? I want to know if you guys fought in a ring, who would win? If you guys were upheld... What is your obsession with people fighting in a ring? I don't know, but next Bigger Pockets conference we have. What is wrong with you? We are fighting in a ring. You have problems.

I think you and I might be putting those sumo suits. We should get into a fight. We should do that. We'll do that. That would be a lot of fun. I like it. Awesome. Well, guys, thank you for listening.

Hopefully you enjoyed the show. Big thanks again to Mindy for coming on. And if you are not already engaged on bigger pockets like Mindy is, jump on today, get involved. I was talking about the New York meetup. The cool thing about the meetup with 200 people. Like I said, Brandon only brought about 130. But beyond that being cool, because it was,

was the fact that the people there, A, they were amazing, but B, they had talked about how engaging on bigger pockets was so valuable to them. And those people who hadn't were hearing that from their peers and were really kind of getting that and understanding it and feeling it and jumping in. And a lot of people said to me, they're like, hey, Josh, I don't know anything. I'm new. What do I do?

And we said, start out welcoming new people. Welcome other people who've joined the site and just talk to them. You'll at least start to network and build connections. This is a business that requires connections. You know, you can be successful without them. But the more connections you have, the more likely you are to find success because, you know, these peers of yours are, you know, they can be your partners. They can provide leads to you. you name it. So get out there, make things happen, jump on Bigger Pockets. We are the place for investors to connect. So get on there and make it happen. Do it. With that, let's get out of here. I am Josh Dorkin. Signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio, simplifying real estate for investors large and small. If you're here looking to learn about real estate investing, without all the hype, you're in the right place. Be sure to join the millions of others who have benefited from biggerpockets.com. Your home for real estate investing online. Let's get out of here and end with the world famous.

Fire round. Isn't that the famous? No, that was the fire round. Now it's the fire round. All right. Okay. Fire round. Fire round.

Wait, famous four. This is the famous for. Dude. Come on now. This is my first podcast, not yours. Wait, wait a, for it for. Thank you all for listening to the Bigger Pockets Real Estate Podcast.

Make sure you get all our new episodes by subscribing on YouTube, Apple, Spotify, or any other podcast platform. Our new episodes come out Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. I'm the host and executive producer of the show, Dave Meyer. The show is produced by Ian K. Copywriting is by Calicoe content. And editing is by Exodus Media. If you'd like to learn more about real estate investing, or, to sign up for our free newsletter, please visit www.w.w.com.

The content of this podcast is for informational purposes only. All host and participant opinions are their own. Investment in any asset, real estate included, involves risk. So use your best judgment and consult with qualified advisors before investing. You should only risk capital you can afford to lose. And remember, past performance is not indicative of future results. Bigger Pocket's LLC disclaims all liability for direct, indirect, consequential, or other damages arising from a reliance on information presented in this podcast.