BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 329: Financial Freedom Before 30 Through Just 10 Deals With Felipe Mejia

Episode Date: May 9, 2019

Financially independent before 30 years old! Today’s guest Felipe Mejiasits down with Brandon and David and shares the incredible story of how he scaled from a $3,000 mobile home to 10 units and financial independence! Felipe has created a unique system that involves multi-unit properties, short-term rentals, and leveraging others to help run his business. The result? He is currently crushing it! You don’t want to miss the insanely powerful “no-why principle” he’s used relentlessly to succeed whenever he’s told no. Felipe also discusses how he leveraged the job of communicating with his Airbnb guests to buy his time back, and how he took advantage of a construction boom in his hometown to service its workers. He also talks about how he lost 30 pounds after realizing he was in the wrong profession, and how he bought a mobile home for $3,000 and then later got paid $30,000 for it! This episode is jam packed with fun, exciting content and practical advice for those looking to exit the rat race and achieve financial independence through creative strategies with real estate. Download it today! In This Episode We Cover: How he took his disappointment from missing out on a police career and turned it into RE investing success His “no-why principle” How he got his wife to buy into his vision How he took advantage of a booming construction industry to rent rooms out to builders His advice for pushing through being told no How he would listen to the BiggerPockets podcast in headphones while working in a construction job Real estate replacing his full time job before age 30 Delegating the work of his various businesses How he lives for free in Nashville How he leverages out communicating with his Airbnb guests and loves it How he got paid $30,000 on a property he paid $3,000 for And SO much more! Links from the Show BiggerPockets Forums BiggerPockets Webinar PNW Real Estate Wealth Expo BiggerPockets Podcast 232: The Four Lead Sources Nathan Brooks is Using to Flip 120 Houses a Year BiggerPockets Podcast 238: Becoming a Real Estate Millionaire on a Teacher’s Salary with Michael “Swanny” Swan BiggerPockets Pro BiggerPockets Podcast 322: 3 Things Every Leader MUST Do to Scale with Ben Kinney BiggerPockets Bookstore PayNearMe BiggerPockets Podcast 170: The Journey From Flipping Houses to Owning 1,470 Units with Andrew Cushman How to Find Overlooked Opportunities in a Hot Market with Andrew Cushman The Founder | Netflix David’s Instagram Brandon’s Instagram Books Mentioned in this Show Miracle Morning by Hal Elrod Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki Richest Man in Babylon by George S Clason Lifeonaire by Steve Cook Why the Rich Are Getting Richer by Robert Kiyosaki Tweetable Topics: “Success is the other side of fear.” (Tweet This!) “People stop at no and don’t ask why.” (Tweet This!) “Do whatever works for you.” (Tweet This!) “My rentals feed my life, my flips feed my rentals.” (Tweet This!) Connect with Felipe Felipe’s Company Website Felipe’s Instagram Felipe’s BiggerPockets Profile Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show 329er. My flips buy my rentals. So most people will flip a house by a car. I flip a house by a rental. That way, I don't, again, I don't work even for my rentals. Like, my flips do that for me. So my goal was always to have everything paid off by something else. 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, everyone? This is Brandon, host of the Bigger Pockets podcast here with another amazing show alongside my co-host, Mr. David Green. What's up, buddy? What's up with you, Brandon? Are you, are you excited for the Pacific Northwest Rail Estate Expo that we're going to be speaking at?

I am. And in fact, this episode, comes out just after we got back from that. So it was awesome. It was so fun. It was amazing. Yeah, you did great. You crested it. I've never seen you better. Well, thanks. No, yeah, I'm excited for that. I'm also actually, while this episode comes out, oh, no, you would have just left Hawaii as well. You were hanging out with me. We had a blast. It was so much fun. I can't wait to go back. That was a ton of fun. Yeah, I love, I love future recording episodes. Anyway, no, we're recording this thing here back about a month before it comes out. But today's show is so much fun.

This was an amazing episode that I think this might go down as one of our more popular episodes ever. And I say that because our best shows, like, I don't know how best shows, but our shows that tend to get the most downloads are the ones where people are like, that person is just like me. Do you know our number one show of all times? Do you know what it is, David? Most popular show of all time?

Probably like a Nathan Brooks show or something. It's even, it's, it's, uh, the, how I became a millionaire on a gym teacher salary. Ah, yeah, yeah. The school teacher. Yeah, yeah, Michael, Michael Swan, Swany Swan. Yeah, like, he was like our, I think he's our number one, maybe number two, but he's up there like number one or two because it's like real person doing amazing things. Today's episode is about Felipe, who just a few years ago was on a totally different path.

And the last like few years, he was able to obtain financial freedom. He is not even 30 years old yet. And he actually, the day this, two days after this podcast comes out, I think he's turning 30 this year, I think. Maybe it's next year. Yeah. Might be next year. He might be 29. Anyway, and he's only got like 10 deals.

It's an amazing story of how it doesn't take that. I say this all the time on webinars. It doesn't take that many real estate deals to obtain financial freedoms. It just takes the right ones and the right strategy. So you're going to hear all about Felipe strategies today on how he built his business using like mobile homes to begin with. I got some crazy stories there. He shifted in.

He's got some multifamily, some single family houses. He actually like his entire career was built off a massive. of his lifelong goal, his dream. He's gonna tell you that story. He's gonna tell this great story about his tenant, how he didn't know his tenant's name for the first three years, which is hilarious. And then one of the more powerful things

I think we've ever talked on the show is he calls it the no why principle. Listen for the no why principle. And also, you'll hear how, like why Felipe and I are actually working on a deal together right now. It's one of the reasons I wanna bring him on the show, because I want you guys to understand what it takes to be able to work

and build a portfolio and why did I want to work with Felipe? How did he pull that off? How did we get to know each other? Anyway, and then, of course, his strategy on buying single-family houses and cash flow in like an ATM machine. There's so much in here. Anyway, I don't want to give you guys a few heads-up of what's coming. A lot of property managers think their job is answering tenant emails

and coordinating repairs. That's not the job. The job of a property manager is protecting and growing your operating income and earning your trust while they do it. And that comes down to three. three numbers, occupancy, delinquency, and net promoter score. If those numbers slip, your income slips, and your trust slips too. And most PMs don't hold themselves to performance standards. They focus on activity, not outcomes. Mind is different. They obsess over the metrics that actually

grow your cash flow. Go to mine.com slash show me to see how mine performs and get a month of management for free. Because if you're going to hire a property manager, hire one that manages your investment like an investment. 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 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. And now, before we get to the interview with Felipe, let's talk about today's quick tip. Today's quick tip is very, very short and simple. If you are not a BiggerPockets Pro member, that's fine. But do me a favor this week. Head over to BiggerPockets.com slash pro and check it out. We redesigned the pro page. It's got all like the features of what you get with a pro membership, like, chances are you will find you will make more money or save more money by being a pro member than by not being one. So it's at least worth looking into. And at the end of

today's show, actually kind of in a humorous way, but legitimately actually works, I made a coupon code based on kind of a something we talked about, kind of a joke into the show. So stick around for the end and you actually get a discount on a pro membership if you've been thinking about that. So hang tight for that. And that's all I really got. Anything else you want to add, David, before we get to the today's show. Yeah, I want the listeners to let us know what they think about today's show. So if you guys could listen to this and then message Brandon and I on Instagram and let us know you like this style of show or you prefer the stuff that's a little more serious.

Or if you like it kind of mixed up, today was definitely a little bit more lighthearted fun. Somebody who's maybe a couple steps ahead of a newbie, but he's still doing really, really well as opposed to the person that has 400 houses or 400 apartment complexes, whatever. Let us know what you guys think we want to make the show as good as we can for you and we need your feedback to do that. Please do. All right. Well, with that, let's get to today's show.

All right, Felipe, man, welcome to the Bigger Pockets podcast. Good to have you here. Oh, man. It's such an honor to finally be on this podcast. It's great. Yeah, this is going to be fun. This is exciting. We've been chatting here for the past hour while waiting for Mr.

David Green here's computer to start working and him to get Internet back. What's up, David? You're back. Yeah. Thank you guys for being patient here. Apple's supposed to make the best products on the world. Let's get you another one. 30 minutes for that computer to restart.

Yeah. See, this is because I dump all my money in real estate. I can't afford a decent computer. You can't afford a new computer. It's like hanging by a thread or whatever, but he's got a million dollar listings. That's funny. Well, okay, so in the last hour, while we've been waiting for David here, it hasn't been quite an hour. But we've been, uh, we've been chatting here just a little bit of a story,

what we're going to talk about today. And like, I probably, I don't know, how many times have I said in the last like half hour or whatever like, okay, make sure you talk about that today. Like that's so good. Yeah, there's a bunch of good stuff in there that you're like, you got to make sure He was like, we basically had done a podcast already. Yeah, pretty much. We just did the whole podcast.

So we're going to do it this time in front of everybody else. So with that, let's jump into this. Actually, before we get into how you got into real estate, you want to tell the story of how you and I first met? No. But yeah, I'm just kidding. So this is awesome. And this gives so much honor to my wife.

I love this. I have the best wife in the world, guys. Seriously. So what happened was my birthday was coming up back in May last year. And my wife was like, what do you want? And, you know, it's really hard because I have everything that I could. want. You could say, if I'm comfortable, I'm really, and I was like, I don't know. And so she was able to look into what I, she just knew what I wanted in real estate and all this kind of fun stuff. So she got

me a book. And she sent a DM to Brandon on Instagram. I was like, hey, well, you talk to my husband for 30 minutes on his birthday? And you said no. I say no to, I've never said yes to that ever. No, you said no. And then you said, because that's my wife's birthday, too, or something. It might have been. Yeah. And then she, like, DM'd you again. And then anyway, so she finally got it set up with you to where it worked out. And me and you had like an hour, hour long conversation.

And I was like, all right, man, I know you only gave me 30 minutes. So I'm going to, I'm going to let you go. I can talk forever. And you're like, no, that's cool. And then I just said, hey, man, before you get off, do you mind if I save your number and maybe just ask you some questions going forward? And I bet you're like, well, if I say no, he's going to do it anyway, which I was. I just, I just asked your permission.

kept it and, you know, it's kind of flourished into a little friendship here. Yeah. Yeah, that's basically what happened. So I never say yes to things like because I don't have a lot of time, right? I always say no to everything, right? That's my rule. But you found the one chink in Brandon's armor, which is to send your wife into his DMs. And you're guaranteed to get a response.

You've cracked a code for leap. Oh, gosh. Now everyone's going to be, hey, babe. Yeah, I know. Yeah, no, I will not likely talk to you on your birthday, anybody else. But I don't know. I honestly, I don't know why I did. Yeah, I don't know.

Other than, like, I just felt like I should do it at this one time, right? And here's the funny thing. It's now, like, Felipe and I are actually working on a deal together right now. I don't know. Who knows if it'll work out, but it's just funny how those things kind of happens. So, anyway, funny story, very random, how we met and we've been keeping in touch. And here's what's cool about, let me just tell everybody before we get into this story. What's cool about Felipe is that, like, we started chatting, right?

Occasionally we were text messages, but you didn't, like, blow me up all the time. You didn't ask a million questions. You just kept it around. And then you provided value whenever you could. and then you found some deal and you shot it my way and you're like, hey, this looks kind of interesting, right? I tell the story in the podcast a lot about how Ryan Murdoch did the same thing. He brought me the mobile home part that me and him and Mindy ended up buying together.

And it just was like provide value, you know, being a friend, like a normal person and don't blow somebody up all the time. But you've been awesome about that. I think that's what people don't understand. I think people try to come in and one, they hold people to like this pedestal. I mean, they put you guys probably like at top of the world and they're like scared to talk to you and that comes across that way. Like, you're scared to talk to this person.

And that just doesn't work. I mean, just you guys are regular, you know, you put your pants on the same way I do. Except David, I bet he jumps into his. But no. He does. Like, you guys are regular people and things. You're also assuming Brandon wears pants. There's a reason that it always shows him from the head up when we're recording these things

on YouTube. He's on Hawaiian time. Oh, he scared me. Whoa. I just kids watch it up. Yeah. No, but yeah, I think people really just don't realize that, like, you guys have good days and bad days and like don't annoy you every day or don't try to send you a gazillion emails.

Like if the email doesn't provide some type of value, is it worth sending? I've written up 100 texts that I didn't send to you because I was like, this doesn't add any value to him or I realized they didn't have a question in it. A lot of times I get even messages from friends that are like, whatever with no question. And I don't reply. And they're like, oh, did you get my message? I'm like, you didn't ask me anything. Like what's funny.

You're like what's going on anyways. Yep, I hear you. Well, anyway, I just wanted to give you a shout out on that because you are very good at building relationships I've found and something that a lot of BP people would learn a lot from of how to build relationships, how to talk with people, how to network in your market. And we can talk more about that as we go through your story. But I thought we just kind of prep, start this thing with that. So let's go into your story. Let's get into your real estate. I don't actually know a whole ton about your history of how you got into it. So first deal, how'd you get into real estate? Why real estate? Where'd you come from? What's your story? And stuff. So I'm actually born and raised here in Nashville, Tennessee. All right. My family migrated here in 1989. I was born in 1990. Nashville is a great city.

I love it here. The way I got started in real estate, it's funny. Once I graduated high school, my mom and my family didn't really have a lot of money. We weren't like by any means well off or anything. So for graduation, most people get cars or a ring or whatever. I got a mobile home. My mom owned a mobile home and that's what she gave me. And she was like, you know, this is all I can give you.

You know, but she said it with like, I'm giving you a fishing rod. Go fish. So what I did was I moved in, you know, I started going to college and I was like, whoa, I have to pay rent there and over here because I was an hour away. So I quickly just found a tenant. And it was just a painter from a construction site that I used to work at that lived in the same area. And he was moving out. And he was like, yeah, I'll rent a room.

And I was like, okay, the lot fee is 300. I'll rent you a room for 350 plus the bills. He said, sure. So I lived for free my first year of college. So that mobile home was basically just kind of paying itself, paying the lot fee. So I would come home and be able to live there for free on the weekend. After I graduated college, so I was in Cookville, Tennessee. I came back to Nashville.

And I was like, okay, what does everyone do after college? They get a house, they get a car. They get a job. I was like, okay, I'm a guess I should do that. And a dog. A dog. And a guitar. And a guitar.

And a guitar to sing. country songs with. Maybe, yeah, Nashville. You're absolutely right. And you can write the songs about the mobile home and the dog and all the other things that you just mentioned. Yeah. So I came back and I moved back into my little mobile home and I was like, okay, I need to buy

a house because I just thought that was next. I didn't know anything. My goal, and I'll talk about this more, but my goal is actually to become a police officer. This is why I know this is going to work out because David, the cop thing. But anyway, my goal was to be a police officer here in Nashville. So I moved back into my mobile home and quickly realize like this isn't, this isn't it, man. I need to buy a house.

So I sold that mobile home, used it as a down payment for my first single family resident, moved into there and brought my tenant with me. You want to hear something? Really funny? I still don't know. I still didn't know his name at this time. And this is three years into our rental agreement. Why?

Because he moved in while I was in college. And after the first three or four months, it was just rude to ask him his name. So I would just come home and get rent and then leave. Like that was it. So I bought the house and I was like, hey, do you want to come with me? And he was like, sure. I have nowhere else to go. So he came with me and he's been faithful for rent.

by the way I still have him as a renter today oh no way do you know his name now I do his name is victor the painter okay good in my phone in my phone it says Victor the painter anyway so I sold the mobile home I bought the single family and I moved to Laverne Tennessee and I started my my nine to five after that and after that that that the cell that house I or after I got into that house I moved into the master bedroom I rented out one room to Victor the painter and then I Airbnb'd the other room so I got Airbnb a renter and me in that house. Airbnb would usually come on the weekend and that covered everything. So up to this up to then, I still hadn't paid a mortgage or a lot fee or anything.

Like I was living for free since like 18 since my mom gave me that mobile home. You were house hacking before you knew what house hacking was. That's absolutely true. That's cool. So from there I was really focused on becoming a police officer. Like that's what I wanted to do. So I took a job while I was applying for the police department. knows it takes about a year and a half roughly here in national because you have to go through

like applications and they do background checks and i mean it's just on and on and on which i think is great don't get me wrong i think that's awesome so i took a job at a company here uh in national in their human resources department that sounds like and no it was terrible i gained like 30 pounds i mean it was it was terrible i didn't realize what god was doing in my life though because in while i was pursuing like this goal that i had of a police officer and like doing all this stuff you can kind of real estate in my background. Like I did the mobile home thing. I got my first single family home.

Like you can start seeing it slowly play out. So I was focused on that. And then after during, well, let me backtrack one. I do have one backtrack. So in there, I actually bought another mobile home and we'll talk about that in my deep dive. Remind me to talk about that. So I have another mobile home during I had my house in LaVern. I bought another mobile home after I had sold the original one for the down.

payment on my single family home. Okay. Do you guys keep up on that? Yeah? Okay. Yes. So I got another. So I ended up with just one mobile home and a single family home. And I'll talk about the other one in my deal deep dive. Anyways, so I was at the other company after college and I hated it, man. I gained like 30 pounds. I was sitting at a desk all day. It was, it was terrible. I did not enjoy it at all. And I was like, this isn't the way to go. I got to figure something else out. During this time, I met my wife and she owned a town home. So, or I have my single family home. me and my girlfriend then and then now wife she has a town home and I had the mobile home so you can see real estate in my background while I'm pursuing something else yeah me and her end up getting married

we move in together we Airbnb her town home because it's a national by the airport national is you know blowing up like everywhere else I'm assuming oh Airbnb is just taking off so we Airbnb her house we live in my master Airbnb one room rent to Victor the painter and have the other mobile home renting as well all right so I need to jump in here so I hear a lot of people saying you can't, my wife would never let me house hack or I would I would house hack but, you know, I would rent out a bedroom or whatever, but my wife just would not let you. What do you think made her okay with that idea of getting started that way? Getting started that way. I mean, she saw the, the potential in it right away when we're renting,

when I was renting one room a month for 400 or getting $1,600 in Airbnb for the same month. I was like, man, this is, this is not where it's at. Like Airbnb is a way to go. And she saw the money. I mean, she, and she believed in me and saw, and she, you know, agreed with my leadership. And she was like, I get it. Like, you read all these books and you understand everything that you're doing. You come at me with facts. You're not coming at me with maybes or ifs or buts. Like, you have history with this.

So I think that's why she agreed. Yeah, that's cool. All right. So one more question then before we move on. Mobile homes. I'm sure we'll talk about them a little bit more lately later. In fact, the deal that Felipe and I are working on together is trying to buy a mobile home park. But I want to talk about, I mean, mobile homes.

Like you actually bought a mobile home that you then are paying a lot rent to somebody. Like a lot of people just look at that and they go, wait, what? Like I heard those are horrible investments. I heard they just go down in value. Yeah, why would you buy a mobile home? And obviously you weren't like, you know, the top notch investor already. I just had one. So the reason I bought it was because I realized, because I remember I was in college

and I had a renter and one who paid everything. So I came home and lived for free in Nashville. No one lives for free and national. And so what I did was I bought the mobile home. And this will kind of get. into how I do my real estate now. I rented out each room single to the construction workers that work in Nashville. So Nashville is having a boom, but everyone forgets that there's a bunch of construction guys that have to make that happen. So what's going on is these guys come from other

states and they come to Nashville and these big old companies will rent out almost full hotels, which is why hotels prices go up, which is why Airbnb goes up. Anyways, you can see kind of how that works. But these construction guys sometimes can take a thousand dollar buyout a month and go rent rooms. So they get on Facebook, Craigslist, whatever, and they'll say, hey, I'm looking for a room 400, 500, whatever bucks, because they're making $500 on the other end, because they're getting $1,000 a month. So I would rent out each mobile home room for about $400 or $500,000, a lot fee is $350, do the math. Yeah, that's awesome. It was an easy, I mean, I'd go buy one for $10,000, and I'm renting it out for $1,400. Yeah. Okay, that's fantastic. All right, so you had the townhouse,

you've got the mobile home, and then you've got the single family house that you lived in when You went to the bedroom and Airbnb. Correct. So then going from there, we got married. We decided to sell her townhome to buy another single family to Airbnb. Okay. We said, okay, awesome. So we don't have kids at this point.

We sold her town home, made, I don't know, maybe 15 grand on the sale. I've been nothing crazy. We put 10,000 towards our next single family we're living at now. And we lived in the master and Airbnb three rooms plus the bonus room. It was crazy. We were making it killing. we would make $700, $800 per room a month and then maybe an extra $1,500 in the bonus room. And we had people just in and out, in and out, in and out, in and out.

And we both worked full-time jobs. So, I mean, we didn't really ever see anybody. We put a little code on the door in and out. I had a camera by the front door, see when they check in, check out. It's fantastic. Most of the people were people traveling through the airport needed to stay overnight. Yeah, okay. That makes sense.

All right. So then what happened next? Sure. So after we got into that, into our single family home that we're in now, this is where the story gets a little sad. So I wanted to be a police officer so bad. I mean, it was a dream of mind. Born and raised in Nashville, bilingual, college degree. I don't know what better police officer there is than that. And that was my, like, that was what I wanted to do. Again, bilingual, born and raised in Nashville. I know my city. I wanted to be in Antioch, which is like the rough part of Nashville, if you will. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was like, perfect. So I finally got into the Academy three. days into the academy. One of the training officers told me to leave. Really? Yeah. So he told me to leave. I don't know if I can say this on the podcast, but he basically said, we have enough Latino police officers. You're welcome to leave. And I was like, oh, okay, this is just part of the way they train. This is fantastic. Like, I love this. He's like drilling me. This is great. Like, it was cool. And he said, no, I'm not kidding.

You're going to get a pink slip if you don't leave. And from there, I'm going to blacklist you from the police academy to ever come back until I leave. And I was like, wait a minute, you're serious. Wow. So after lunch, I came back and I had a pink slip on my desk. Pink slip, if you get three, you get booted out. You can't reapply for five years. I'm sure David knows a little bit about that.

And they said, no, you have a pink slip on your desk. And I was like, oh, flip. So I signed it. I took it in, and he was like, I'm not kidding. And I kept thinking it's just a scare attack. But once I realized the legality of that pink slip, and I knew of a series. So I just left and didn't come back. Oh, yeah.

Sad to say, I'm like, life cried all the way home yeah i was gonna say that's gotta be like how do you go from i mean like when that's like your entire dream in life is to be that police officer like i don't know what's going through your head then are you are you thinking right away hey i'm just gonna go do real estate instead no heck no i was depressed for not depressed but yeah i mean it was just down i don't know what depression feels like but yeah i think that's the closest i've ever been to that it was terrible guys again three years of college i did a four-year degree in three years because i couldn't i mean I mean, that's how I am.

I couldn't wait to be a police officer. It was my life dream to do that. Well, I think there's something to this that I think there's a lot of value that listeners can get out of it because we've all known what it's like to be really excited about something and get like the wind knocked out of you. That's what that is, right? Like you were geared up. You've been training for this thing for like, you know, God knows how long.

You show up and then something beyond your control happens and you realize it's not going going to happen right now. So how did you rally together to not quit? and use that as an excuse to get into, you know, alcoholism or or other kind of like self-pity behavior. Instead, it sounds like you came back and you made something happen that was pretty special. How did you process that information so that you didn't quit? Sure. So that's an excellent question. I love that you asked that. That's why you're on the show. I love it. He, so I had one or two options. I was either going to do what you just said, either was going to go

become a drunk or just really get into myself, pity, or get down. The way I got over it, and this is why I still have respect for this police department. I just accepted the fact that I was not what they were looking for. And I have to be okay with that because knowing that someone was better and I am okay with that. I had to say, okay, they saw something in me or didn't see something in me that didn't allow me to earn my badge. And I'm okay with that. That's your answer. Like that's how I got through it daily.

I told myself, I have to respect that they know what they're doing and I am not. that's it. That's powerful just right there because it was probably very tempting to be like, these guys don't know what they're missing out on. I'm so great. Like it's their loss. And now I'm just going to go party or I'm just going to go back to human resources or whatever. And I'm just going to let the bitterness towards them carry me through. Instead, it sounds like you just accepted it really fast. Like Brian and I have a friend Hal Elrod. And he has a saying that he wrote the book The Miracle Morning, really inspirational guy. And he always says, if you can't change it, then why dwell in it, right? So he'll give himself with like five minutes or so to just rant and rave and

scream at the world and get it all out. At a certain point, you just take a deep breath. You're like, all right, well, I can't change it. Let me not be overcome with bitterness. So let me just say, hey, maybe it wasn't in the cards. Maybe I'm not what that department's looking for. Maybe this isn't the right time for me. But what can I do? And you took all that energy. And instead of focusing on something negative, you redirected it to your next pursuit, right? That's exactly right. In Spanish, we have a saying, which means the guy that gets mad is going to lose. So I wasn't going to be a loser.

I wasn't going to be the guy that lost. And I just accepted it that. Was it quick? I wish I could say it was. It took a little time. To this day, I can get sour about it. You can hear it on my voice.

But I know. But I know that I know that I know that I am on the path that I'm supposed to be on now. And I told you you heard some of my story. Like real estate was always in my background. I just, my vision was somewhere else and I felt like the Lord was leading me this way. I just wasn't paying attention to that. Like I should have.

oh my gosh, I can't imagine if I had put in the effort that I put in to be a police officer into real estate. Brandon, I'd be sitting beside you in Hawaii. If I put that much effort, seriously, guys, like, I put in a lot of effort into doing that. And that's what my conclusion was they saw something in me or didn't see something in me that a police officer needed. And I find comfort in that. And that's it.

Like, I just find comfort in that. Now I can see it. I get to spend all day long with my son if I want to or I go out and do real estate stuff or flip homes or whatever. We're able to talk more about than a minute, but being a police officer, I wouldn't have had that time. David, you agree? No, you don't have any time at all. I mean, not only do you not have time, but you don't have anything left in your brain to think about the stuff we talk about right now because you're constantly trying to turn yourself into this like perfect machine of part lawyer and part warrior and all the stuff that goes into being a police officer. I think that what I love about your story the most is that the piece that you felt like you were missing, that as a man probably made you feel like a loser.

That's what no guy wants to hear. You're not good enough. We don't want you. I mean, that's like straight to your soul, the worst thing you could hear, right? So the piece that you felt like you were missing that could have led many people to quit is actually what allows you to be very successful in what you're doing right now. Right? And I don't know what that piece is yet because we're just meeting each other. I'm sure we're going to talk about it more.

But that's kind of what I want to get into is what do you think you learned that like, well, I don't have that so this isn't going to work. But because I've built this way, it's allowed me to excel like this. So all the listeners can hear, oh, that's why he's successful because he's got this thing. And then maybe if they've got it all so they can bring it out of themselves. Sure. And it's an opportunity that I missed, which is now why I am successful. And that's my no why. My no why is, okay, I'll accept your no, but why.

And if I feel like I'm going to pursue that, then I need to know what. and like why is it? So if you're like, no, you can't be a basketball player because you're not six, five and can dunk, I'm like, there's my why. But there's a no, but I also have my why. And you can translate it in real estate when I go to the bank and they're like, no, you can't get a loan. Well, why? Because you haven't worked two years and da, da, da, da, and then the list goes on and on. I'm like, okay, so that's my no why. No comma why. If I get a no, I'm asking you why. And I think I miss that opportunity as a police officer where I could have asked, okay, that's fine. I get it, but why? Oh, well, da-da-da-da-da. The reason we don't ask is because we're kind of

afraid that they're going to give us an answer that's going to cut even deeper. Like, maybe you don't want to hear someone tells you, well, it's because you're too soft or, well, it's because of whatever, right? But what you're showing is if you're willing to walk that path into the part of you where you're most afraid, that's where the reward is, right? Because you did ask that question when it came to real estate and boom, your success. Oh, my gosh, exactly right. I think success is like, and it's so cliche, but success is definitely on the other side of your fear. And if I would have just asked why, he made it, he made it would have said, well, this is just one pink slip. Maybe you were supposed to come back. Maybe that was the answer. You know, I'll, I have

all these whys that I didn't get answered and that'll never happen again. I tell people that I have failed in one thing in life. And it was, it was the police officer thing. And I didn't ask why. And that's why I failed. I didn't fail because they told me to leave. I failed because I didn't ask why. But no why. Yeah. I feel like there's a book in your future called the no why principle. that might be. David and I are all about putting like frameworks around certain things.

Like the fact that you did that like this, like the no why like you know, yeah like you, I can't get a loan. Why? Like no, you can't invest in real estate.

Why? Like it's like it's always asking that why thing and that does separate people who are who never get anywhere. Yeah, I love that. The no why principle. We're definitely gonna make that a thing.

People stop at no and don't ask why. And that's the answer to everything. No, but why? And you know what's sad is when you get to the other side of it, you realize how simple. that why usually is. I honestly believe that he would have told me this is a pink slip. If you would have came back, you would have been okay. Yeah. I believe in my heart of hearts.

And I know that I'm supposed to be doing something else now. But if I would have said why or got an answer, I bet. If I was a betting man, I would say that he would have said it was just a test to see if you were grit through it. Well, we, uh, Brandon and I just interviewed Ben Kinney not too long ago. And he buys a lot of companies. And he's a buddy of mine. And he's told me several stories if you made an offer on a company. The person said, no, he said, okay, why? They said, well, because I don't know what I would do if I didn't have the company. I don't really want to work here, but what else would I do with my life? And I'll be like, well, what do you want to do? I want to retire with my family. What if I give you enough money every year you could retire

with your family and I'll just take care of the company? Oh, I would do that. It was like literally that simple. Right. And when Brandon worked at a bank, people come in, they say, can I get a loan? No. Okay. And they slink away and they say real estate's terrible. Bankers are horrible. or if they just said why. You asked Brandon Turner why. Well, you have too much debt. Pay off this credit card and you can get a loan. Oh, that's all I got to do.

And then what you learned in the process of paying off your debt will probably serve you when you get into the next phase of your life. You got more discipline. You've got more focus. So yeah, I think that's a great, great point just in general to point out to our listeners that like having the guts to ask that why is one of the things that makes successful people. Successful. And it then becomes like an addicting habit.

You hang around with Brandon. And he's asking that question for like everything, everything. We go somewhere and he's like, can I get the hamburger? And they say, we don't have any hamburgers. He's like, why? And like, well, we didn't order enough this week. And he's like, oh, how many guests do you get? How many burgers are you selling?

And like, he goes into this really long, yeah, like, he fixed their business problem. I believe it. But he's that good. So that's what happened. I didn't get into the police department. I got three days in and they asked me to leave. And then from there, I kind of went on to an entrepreneurial show Kip. I said, I'm working for myself.

I'm going to do this on my own. I'm going to figure it out. I didn't have anything else to do. So from there, I started just, I think I went like Ubered for like three months or something while I got my head back together. And then I started working on construction sites, cleaning the construction sites and just like just kind of like wishy-washy trying to figure out what I wanted to do. But real estate was always there. So I was like, okay. So I'm going to buy another rental property.

And then like I, let's see, I quit my job. And like two months later, I was at the bank asking for a loan. And they were like, no. And I was like, why? because you, there it is again, sorry, I didn't know why. I was like, they were like, no, I was like, well, why? And they were like, well, you haven't been self-employed for two years. And I was like, I quit three months ago.

They're like, sorry. I was like, no. Why? So why did I quit? No, so I started an LLC, just like a handyman LLC, very general. And I started working on my two years. And I call those, my terrible twos. I have a 16-month-old, so I'm going to get eventually there, I guess.

But I call those my terrible twos because I read tons of books. Some of my favorites are back there. You can see it. But I just read tons of real estate books. That's how I came across bigger pockets. And I just got tons of knowledge, just tons and tons and tons of knowledge on real estate. And I was like, itching for a deal. I was just like, oh, my gosh.

And the banks were like, no. I didn't know about hard money. And if I did, I didn't want to do it because in my life, that's not what I wanted to do. Like, I knew all these little bits of how to get money, but that's not what I wanted to do. And for some of the listeners, I would tell them that that's okay. You don't have to use Brandon Turner or David or everyone else's, you know, gimmicks or whatever to get real estate. Do what works for you, where you're at, how you're at, what stage in life you're doing. I mean, I'm married and I had, you know, back then I had a three-month-old and just hard money

and that kind of stuff didn't work for me because I didn't have time to build those relationships with people. For me, it was all about making sure that I could provide for my family while still trying to get these two years put in. So I did what I did, I just saved a bunch of money. I read every single book that I could get my hands on, everything. And then I was starting to come up on my two years. And I don't advise this for everyone, but what I did was I was itching so hard for a deal that I bought a condo cash during those two years because I couldn't get money.

So I was like, I'm not going to have my money sitting in the bank. So I put it in a condo, which I know you guys don't like prefer. But I really, really looked into, I had the renter before I had the property. I had, I mean, I did a lot of research before. before I bought it. And I was like, I'm only going to sit on it for a year. I'm going to have my money sit there instead of the bank. I'm going to get a better return. So that's how I did it, setting myself up, knowing that when my two years were up, I was going to go bigger, go home. Like, I'm going to buy the biggest thing that I can, assuming my two years were up.

Okay. So I love that. A lot of people go through this phase. So let me backtrack here a second. Scott Trench and I talk a lot about this. Scott Trench is the current CEO of Bigger Pockets, right, after Josh kind of, we'll call it, retired. Scott stepped up as kind of the C. or a CEO, he's running it in Denver. Anyway, so Scott and I talk a lot about this, but why do people come to bigger pockets and then get really excited? And maybe they buy some books,

they join the pro-membership, whatever, and then they disappear for years. And then maybe some of them come back later, but there's this common thing, which happens, is people come, they're excited, and then they go away. We call it the dip oftentimes. It's like, and this isn't just real estate, it's all business.

And the thing that we've determined is that people jump in and then they realize this is harder than it looks. Oh, I can't get a lot. alone quite yet. And so what they do is a lot of people just stop. They give up. They stop reading the books. They stop going to like, you know, like trying. They stop saving money. They just say, I can't do this right now. Therefore, I am done. They've never been told no. And I'm so sorry to cut you off. But I know those people. They've never been told no. They've never been told it's going to be hard.

They've never been told you're not good enough to become a police officer. They've never been given an obstacle, you know, that they give up. They give up. And then that's, And they don't understand that all they have to do is why. They get a no and they don't ask why. That's it. That's powerful, right? So I love that you were like, you asked the why. You learned you needed two years.

Great. You went and built a company so you could have the two years. Like who does? And then you, during that time, you worked on like learning how it's done and analyzing deals and making connections and doing everything like like sharpening. You know, the whole if I had six hours that chopped down a tree, I'd spend the first four sharpening my axe. You spent your terrible twos sharpening your axe.

So that way. I worked on the construction. with headphones on listening to every single one of your podcasts. Brandon, I know your voice like the back on my hand. My gosh. That's awesome. I've listened to every one of your podcasts on the construction sites. I'm so sorry.

That's okay. And, you know, people ask me how do I fund my deals? Working and that's what I did. So for my first two years, I would be on the construction site with another college education listening to my podcast picking up sticks with a college degree hanging out my house. And it wasn't because I couldn't go get a job. It was because I knew that there was something different that I wanted in my life. And people would criticize. I got a crazy story where a guy that knew my mom would say, look, you sent your son to school. My mom paid for my college cash.

Let me throw that out there. My mom paid for my college cash cleaning houses. It blows my mind to this day. He would say, look, your son's out there picking up sticks. He's got a college degree. I thought you told us he was going to do this out of the other. And she was like, he knows what he's doing. Like just, just he knows what he's doing. And I'm not going to bug him. I've given him the rod, remember my mobile home? He's going to do fine. And she was right. She's actually have a deal with her right now.

I can talk about that later. That's cool. So in other words, like what I see is like you weren't afraid of hard work. And that they go like the picking up sticks. Like who cares? Like there's this like entitled mentality sometimes. And maybe I'm going to get some backlash for saying this.

But like I got a college degree. I'm not going to go work that. Like I've got friends and family who, you know, they got a college degree. So they would never catch themselves. working at a construction site or doing anything that's physical labor or whatever, right? Because they got a college degree. So instead they just stay unemployed for a long, long time or take a job they don't like and can't get ahead in life because they don't want to work hard because they got a

college degree. And that means you don't have to work hard, apparently. That's exactly true. There's a lady that's been asking my mom for work for about a year. My mom's like, yeah, come clean house with me. She just won't do it. She won't do it because she has a college degree. She's like, I'll help you run your business. I'll do this. It's like, no, just come clean houses with me. You'll, you'll make $100 a day and you'll be fine for until you find what you want and she won't do it because of that. Yep. There's like, I mean, yeah, I got a college degree and then afterwards I went and worked at like, I mean, a number of different places, but like for a while there, even when I quit my job,

I worked at a bank. It was horrible. I went and like did construction work where I had to climb under houses. Like I remember I spent three or four days under a house that was like eight inches of clearance. Like I meant I was on my face in the dirt, putting insulation up, like getting it fills in my lungs and I'm going to die 10 years earlier now. And like I needed I did what I had to do.

And it was like, yeah, like I had to do it at that point. Like it was partially relationship building. And yeah, I could have outsource more things and done better there. But like, you know what though, Brandon? I want to ask, I wonder how much resolve was built up during that period of time in your life where you subconsciously were just like if I ever get a chance to not do this. I'm never going to let it go. So that when obstacles come your way that other people would quit at your you don't even think about it. You just know this isn't that.

bad because I'm not sticking insulation up with 80s of clearance, right? And that's just something people don't talk about. Like, yeah, I was a police officer, but I don't talk often about the fact that I had to apply at 11 departments before I finally got hired. That's exactly true. It was like all day long, going on the internet, looking to see who's hiring, filling out hours worth of applications, showing up for oral boards, showing up to take tests, showing up to take physical tests, showing up to interview, showing up to interview with a different person. People don't know that. It's insane. And there's like three or four months of time in between every single. one of those tests, right? And then I got turned down for all kinds of stuff. I had too many speeding

tickets. I didn't get in enough fights. I hadn't, I didn't have enough, like, what they called life experience. Like, I hadn't been drunk or high enough times. And they thought the job of being a cop would, like, break me because it was just too hard, right? My GPA was too high in college. I got too good of grades to be a cop. Or, like, then there was the other side. Like, well, you seem like you're super into athletics and we want someone who's going to be committed to the department. So I don't know if you would be able to do this and pursue some of your other things. It was just constantly being told no, no, no all the time. And during that period of time, you just build up this resolve to push through that, that when you finally get your chance, you know you're not going to let it go. So when I got in the

academy, I went into like an animal, right? I was just so prepared for what I was going to get into. But we don't consciously sit there and think, oh, I'm just going to go do this. It happens during that struggle phase. And I know there's people that are listening to this right now that are driving like a forklifter. Well, maybe you shouldn't be listening to this while driving a for this, but doing some kind of manual labor that they don't love thinking, when am I going to break through? But this phase of your life is what's setting you up so that when that shot does come, you take advantage of it when the next guy lets it pass. No, that's exactly right. I also applied for so many police departments. I can't even remember how many orabors I went to, how many questionnaires I went through,

how many physicals I went through. And the same thing, he's not kidding. They'll ask you the weirdest questions. They'll be like, oh, what do you do if you weren't a police officer? I'm like this. well, why don't you go do that? Because that's not what I do. Or like, yeah, they would ask like, you know, have you ever smoked pot? And I'm like, no. And they're like, well, we're looking for someone that at least understands. I'm like, that's illegal. Like what? That doesn't even make sense. And they're not. They're serious. And I was like, oh my gosh, okay. But yeah, so like he said, when I got in, I was gung ho. I mean, I was, I was going to do it, which made it just that much more harder. So I don't think we've asked you. Tell us where, where's your portfolio at now?

How many? Okay. So I have a sixplex. four single families and a flip right now. And then how much income would you say they're generating a month? Each one is way different. So like my six- I mean in total, your whole portfolio. 4,500. Oh, gosh, I wasn't ready for that question.

So let's, I mean, I can go through them. So like my six-plex easily does 1,300, depending on, you know, what, what comes, like during the winter, we don't have cut in the grass and things like that. But then I have a single-family home that also does about 1,500. a month and I'll explain why it can do that versus because I don't rent the whole house out. I really want to talk about that too. Like I rent all my single families, I rent out per room.

So I'll explain all that as well. And then I have mobile homes that rent out differently as well. Okay. So let's go there next. I mean, first of all, so you don't have, I asked you this earlier. So you do not have a full-time job right now. I mean, you were able to, you had the band. Are you still doing handyman stuff?

Are you still? The handyman became a moving labor-only company. So people rent trucks and my guys will go out. load and unload. Okay, but you're not actually doing that physical labor anymore. I mean, sometimes if I want to go out, if I'm missing a guy or something, if somebody calls it, I'll go do it. I'm not opposed to work. So if the guy's like, hey, man, can I want to spend time with my kid? Heck yeah, dude, I got you. I'll go in and unload the truck if I have to, but now typically no. Okay. So you don't have another job. So you're able to, like, I mean,

we could call that like, and we need a better word for this. There's like financial freedom and then there's like whatever that, which I would call that financial. Let me answer. Let me answer this way. Let me answer this way. If I wanted to, I could sit in here the rest of my life. I would be okay. Yeah. So I would call that financial independence. Yes.

That's the point I was trying to get at is you went through that garbage so that now if you wanted, you could be retired at this point. You're financially independent. Now you don't have what Brandon, I would say is like F you money. Level two. Yeah. That's a nice way to say it. Yeah.

But that's awesome, right? Because like, and this is all from someone who thought that his story was over before it even started. And as you're just getting started in this real estate journey, you're already at that point. And that's how powerful real estate is. I live for free. I mean, I'm in Nashville. And yeah, I definitely live for free.

Me and my wife talk about it almost every night, how blessed you are that we don't have bills at all. I was able to buy my wife's Lexis when we had our baby cash because I don't have bills. So everyone's like, well, how do you save so much? I'm like, because I don't pay a mortgage and I don't pay the light bill. And I don't, because I don't, all the money I make literally goes into my savings account. Yeah. Like it's the craziest thing to walk into the bank. and the ladies are like, oh, hey, how are you doing? Oh, Mr. Mejia. Like, as soon as everything

else having, it's because of that. I've been able to build that. So, yeah, I don't have to work if I don't want to. How long has this been going? I mean, like, give us an idea of the time frame from like, let's say the cop thing when that failed and you started the, how long? Two years. Two years. You've been done all this for two years. Yeah, amazing. All right. So, yeah, it just took two years. After that two years. I'm going on my fourth year now. So my third year is when I was financially, done working. I mean, my real estate really just holds me up. That's amazing. Okay, so in your flipping house, you said you have a flip going right now. So let's talk about that. What's your flipping strategy look like compared to your rentals? Why do you choose one or another? What's that like?

Sure, so I'll go into it. So my flips buy my rentals. So most people will flip a house by a car. I flip a house by a rental. That way, I don't, again, I don't work even for my rentals. Like, my flips do that for me. So my goal was always to have everything paid off by something else. So my rentals feed my life. My flips feed my rentals. And it's just a continual thing there. So like I'm flipping a house in Riversboro right now that we bought for $75,000 cash. And we're probably going to sell it for 220, $225, easy.

And that's if we just want to do like open house and, you know, best, best, best person gets the house. My rental properties in like the very first six, the very first rental that I bought was a sixplex in Cookville, Tennessee. And that was like three months after my two years went up because I had all this money saved up because I hadn't spent anything for two years because I was like I want to get into this rental thing. So the moment that my two years were up and the bank was let me borrow money, I went out and bought the biggest thing that I could afford. And that was a six unit apartment complex. That's great. What have you learned? What have you learned on the six unit?

Because some people have a lot of luck with those, like the mediums, like the small multifamily that are larger than the residential. And some people love them, some people had them. What have you found? They pay my mortgage. Okay. I don't care if they call me and say, hey, the toilet's out. Cool. I got a guy and cook for that. I'll fix it. So every month, that unit pays off all my mortgage completely. So I'm literally just answering calls to make sure that everything that gets taken care of. I have somebody there that takes care of everything. I can go do it if I want, if I don't feel like calling him or paying the guy for that month or whatever, I can go out and do it. But most of the time, I just have my guy out there who does all the work for me. So it's not, I don't think that's any harder or any different than how I manage my other. properties because, for instance, I have single family homes. And this is what I do with those. This is my strategy with, is it okay? Can I start on that? Yeah, you're right. Yeah. Cool. I was actually just going to ask you that, so. Cool. So my strategy with my, so the six

plex is simple. You rent it out to anybody there. It's just really cut and dry. It's really simple. My single family homes are pretty cool. This is going to be awesome. So what I do is I buy single family homes in Nashville that have a giant two car garage under the house. That's how a lot of houses here built. They have four bedrooms upstairs, two bath, and then giant two car garage on the bottom. So what I do is, I go there and then I build four bedrooms downstairs. So now I either have four or now I either have seven or eight bedrooms and I rent them individually out to the construction workers that work in Nashville. So what happens is this boom that's going on brings in a lot of construction guys.

They want to get some of that money. So the company pays them $1,000 a month to go find a house or wherever. They pay me $500 a room to live in this place. They work 12, 13 hours a day. They work 7 to 7. They come home, have dinner, eat, sleep, do it the next day again. So every single one of my rooms rents for, let's say, anywhere between four and 500 bucks, you have eight rooms, do the math.

So I just, I constantly do that with single family homes. I put it, it's down to like $15,000, maybe $18,000 to build the whole downstairs. But now I've converted a single family home into a duplex. Now I have the top and the bottom rent it out. And usually they're all friends too because they, so one guy gets a room and he tells all his buddies, hey, come living here, you're going to make $500 more a month or a week. Yeah. I'm sorry, a month.

And then if one leaves, he tells the next guy, hey, I'm leaving if you want the room. Boom. So I rarely do advertising on any of my rentals. That's so cool. All right, so I want to dig in a little bit deeper on this topic and talk about some of the pros and cons of it. You are basically taking these single family houses.

You're adding another level. You're taking the garage or basement, or you want to call it, turn it into more bedrooms, which then now you can rent out by the bedroom, which is super cool. But now you're dealing with, roommate situations. You're doing with people who are, you know, like, I don't want to, I don't want to, like, stereotype, but, like, probably single men who aren't always the cleanest, right? Like, I've rented

to a lot of roommate situations. My infamous toilet story was for roommates that lived it out. I laugh every time you've got. I wish somebody had a video of that. That would be fantastic. No, you know. So, tell me about, like, what's, what's it been like? What have you found? What's the hardest thing with that? Yeah, what's hard about it? What works? What have you found that it helps you. Sure. So the hardest thing with that is actually everything's paid in cash. Look at that real estate problems. Cash. Yeah. Yeah. They always end up calling me to come pick up cash. And that's what I do. I just go and pay up cash. But like I said, most of them are friends. They will call each other to, you know, hey, I got there. I got a house with three rooms and all their

buddies come in. And they're not messy because they don't kind of have the time to be, if that makes sense, because they're all construction workers. So they literally, like I said, have dinner, shower, do it all over again. So the biggest thing that I have is maybe the kitchen gets a little messy, but that's okay. And then most of these guys have like sleeping bags or they don't even have furniture because like I said, they're only here on a one year contract or whatever. So they go out and buy a mattress or two and a TV. And like, that's it. I don't have laundry rooms. I don't have anything like that. They have to go and do their own laundry somewhere else. And another key factor in that is a lot of these guys can't go out and get apartments because they're construction

workers, most of them don't have the documentation they need to go pull, I don't know, a lease at an apartment, or they're not going to be here long enough or whatever the case may be. So a lot of times they're, they're scared to get kicked out. They're super respectful. They call me to pick up rent. They, if there's any problems, they're like, hey, sir, you know, there's an issue. And they're like real conscience about it. And they tell me immediately.

So it's fine. It works out great. Someone asked me once, like, is it hard? Is it, I'm like, no. it's not at all actually it's really really easy i don't they they don't feel entitled by any means they know look they're not stupid they know that they're in this country undocumented and and it's and it's i don't know not to get political but they know it's wrong and they are very self-conscious i mean like they come in they're quiet they're not trying to stir anything up they're trying to get enough

money to make sure their family has food to eat that month and and i'm not going to kick you out because of that yeah they're awesome they're my favorite tenants to be honest cash Hispanic guys that pay cash single go construction work all day come back sleep that's great yeah yeah I had a number of tenants who paid cash when I first took over like my when I first got started whenever and I would go pick up cash I shifted eventually over to something um I don't even know if it's still around for everyone else I heard that they shifted but it was called like pay near me I think it's still around anyway pay near me basically all my cash tenants now just go to 711 down the street yeah and they pay cash at 711 that way I don't have to actually physically deal with it so there is that as well something to throw at you

because like people sometimes shocked at like why I don't like like like especially early on like like I didn't take rent we don't really have like an easy way to pay rent online I was like because half my tenants don't have bank accounts like what are they going to how they're going to pay it online they don't have a bank account and that blows people my like why don't I use like there's some like great software out there like cozy is a fantastic program yeah I've seen all that and most of these guys don't like you said don't have bank accounts because they can't or exactly or computer what I've done is I've always noticed that there's like a crew leader that lives in the house, who is the crew leader on the construction site, who collects all my rents,

who I meet at the taco shop or at the gas station or whatever, and then pick up all the money. And he handles the house, basically, if you will, because he's the construction leader. So when he gets home, things really don't change. I usually end up knowing that guy pretty good. What's so cool about this is, like, a lot of people are probably listening to this right now going, oh my gosh, I would never do that. I couldn't rent. I don't want to pick up rent.

I want to meet people, right? But the other people are listening to this going, I'm working a crap 9 to 5. job in an HR department right now. This sounds so much better than what I'm doing. And he did it in a couple years. Yeah. Like, who cares? Like, you know, like, it's just, there's so many ways to invest in real estate and so many different strategies that work for different people. And this works perfect for you. And I love that. And I wanted to point out what Felipe is doing is he is solving a problem that nobody else wants to solve other than a hotel. Right. These guys need a place to stay. They don't have a bank account. They're ideal tenants, but it's tough for them because they, they can't spend 200 bucks a night on a hotel

room, right? So you've solved that problem for them. Now, in solving that problem, you created a few smaller problems for yourself. How am I going to collect the rent? How am I going to manage these guys? How am I going to go to go cash? Yeah, how am I going to go create money, right? But you're also showing a lot of those problems take care of themselves. The guy who runs a cruise at work runs a cruise at the house. So I'm really only dealing with one person who deals with the other five, right? Like, that's the same way corporations are structured for a purpose, right? They don't want to manage 300 people. They manage one guy who manages five and then five of those guys get managed. managed by another guy and you create this hierarchy, right? As you're talking, I'm thinking about if I

was to do what you were doing, how would it look? And one of the things that keeps popping up is this Airbnb thing definitely will help you generate more income, but it creates a little bit more work. You've got more turnover. You have to clean things more often. You have to reset things. So I would imagine you have to have somebody who is assisting with some of the logistics as well as some of the bookkeeping. Is that so? Oh, I love that you asked that because I hadn't even thought about saying this. But yes, So listening to your podcast, I'm mixing the processes that you guys talk about a lot and then kind of my Latino heritage, if you will. So like, let me go back really quick. Those construction guys also fix a lot of things in the house because they're construction guys.

Like they fix a lot of stuff. Like they rarely call me for stuff. I come home and like the whole place is painted. I'm like, oh, that was really nice of you guys. Thank you. Because they get bored. So I still do do Airbnb in a couple of my single family homes. and I've got into a cool process where someone handles that for me.

So I pay a young lady to handle all my Airbnb interactions and I don't have to worry about that anymore. So eventually I'll probably hire her to go pick up my rent as well. And I just have to, I'm in that process. I love that I'm doing this podcast because a lot of times that when I listen to you guys, people are like way ahead on step like 20 and I'm still on step four or five. And I think a lot of your listeners will be like,

oh, okay, cool. So I'm like, he's only two years into this. Yeah. It's doable. And I'm like, yeah, it really is. You've got to solve the steps that you're working on at four and five before you can get to 20. But it's really that simple, right? And for the people that are thinking, I don't want to pay somebody to do that work.

That's cutting into my bottom line. You're not. Your investment is paying them. Your buildings is paying them. The rent you're generating is paying that person's salary and then some. And you're able to generate their salary because you're doing it Airbnb, which is a way that requires you to have help. Right. And that's just one of these principles of business that you want to understand is

If I can do it this way and it's four times as profitable, but it's only twice as much work, well, I take half of that money and I dedicate it towards paying somebody to do it, and I'm still making twice as much as I would have been, right? That's just a smart way to run a business. And you're doing this at successfully at a level that in my guess, Felipe, will be very small compared to where you are in five or 10 years because you've learned these principles at step two, three, four, that you'll then be able to apply when you're doing this with like 200 unit complexes. Our buddy, Andrew Cushman, is very similar to what you're doing.

He's just doing it with like 300 unit apartments, right? And he's analyzing all of them. And I've just been relentlessly beating on this guy. Andrew, if you're listening, you're welcome to hire an assistant to help set him up to analyze stuff, right? Like, he's got to be the one to look at the numbers, but he doesn't have to be the one to gather and verify all the information. He can have somebody else that does that.

Just that one step will probably allow him to close on three to four times as many properties with the exact same amount of work or less because he's leveraged something off. real estate is super powerful. And when you combine it with just very little fundamental business practices like you're doing Felipe, hiring the right or finding the right kind of tenant, hiring people to help with some of the stuff you don't like, it allows you to leave your nine to five a lot quicker than you would think. I think people get stuck on their wage for time. They're like, oh, well, I wouldn't pay somebody, you know, $150 a month to handle Airbnb and do the text messages or talking to the clients or whatever. And I'm like, well, when I looked at it,

I would spend a lot of time talking to these people where I would be in a bank meeting or I would be talking to, you know, trying to put together a deal or something. And I got Airbnb coming through. And I'm like, I feel like I've graduated from that. Like, I need to really hire this out. And I was, but, but same thing. I was like, man, $150. That's a lot of money to pay. You know, I would think that is. But now I'm like, oh my gosh, I just bought myself so much time for only a hundred. You know what I mean? Well, that's, that's key. One way that I look at this is like, let's say, let's say I was going to hire someone to, okay, I'll give you a real example. Like, I don't. I don't, mow my lawn or take care of my landscaping. I could. I like hard work. I actually enjoy

landscaping. Instead, I pay a guy and he's probably making 50 bucks an hour to do my landscaping, right? So some people would be like, that's crazy to spend $50 an hour doing your landscaping. I'm like, no, I'm not paying him $50 to do my landscaping. I'm paying myself, like I'm paying $50 so I can hang out with my daughter Rosie for an hour for $50. Now is hanging out with Rosie for an hour for $50 worth it? A hundred, you know, a hundred times, right? Yeah, I would pay for an hour of time with my daughter, it costs me 50 bucks. So it's like shifting that. Like, what are you, what's the opportunity cost? What's your time worth? What's your time worth? What are you losing because you're out there running Airbnb issues or if a person is or or,

or, or, or like my next thing is hire somebody to pick up rents for me. I think I thought I would never say that. Like, no, I'm going to go pick up my own rent money or I'm going to handle my Venmo account or like all this stuff. It's like, no, you hire that out as quick as possible so you can free up your time because that's the end goal. Right. We do. Everyone does. real estate to get their time back. But if you just went from one job and then got into real estate and created yourself another job, then you didn't really get out of your job. You have to get comfortable with real estate covering all that for you. So if I'm making an excess of, let's say, I make an excess of a thousand dollars a month or more, then I'm going to use 150 of that to buy back

another day. This is the way I look at it. So if I have 30 days in a month or whatever, whatever month it is, then I need to find a way to buy back every single one of those days. And if one day is took up by Airbnb, then I'm going to purchase that out. And if at the end of the month, I made $0, but I have all my time back, then that, I mean, that's worth it to me because I can go build something else in that next thing or whatever the case, or something that I love to do. And I think people don't realize how important that that is. Yeah, that's powerful stuff. Very cool. I was going to throw one idea at you. And again, you've maybe thought of this before, but it's an idea. I've never done it, but I've heard people doing it. For those who like get cash like this,

if you don't want to do like a pain near me kind of a situation, what some people will do is they'll give their tenant a bank account number, because you can deposit money in any bank account. A lot people don't know that, but you can go to a bank. You don't sign to deposit money. You only sign to withdraw money. So what I know people will do is they'll give all their tenants deposit slips and with the account number on there. Now, it could be a different account number that you just transfer the money over.

That way, you don't have to worry about them knowing your account number. But anyway, you give them all like the account number where rank is deposited. And then every tenant gets a different penny number on their rent. So if the rent is 500, it's 500 and one cent. $502. Right. Now you know who paid, who dropped. Now you don't have to deal with it at all.

There's no cost for the tenant. You're just putting the hassle of having to pick up rent on this cash tenant who then goes to the bank and has to just go and drop off $0.501. And then you know exactly who paid right. I don't think about that. That's really good. Kind of a cool strategy. There you go.

I'll bill you later. All right. So let's move on to how you're finding deals in today's crazy Nashville market, one of the hottest markets in the entire country. So true. I've just built a relationship with a good. realtor. Oh my gosh, realtors, I think, work for free. It's crazy. I don't understand how you guys live. Man, she does so much good work for me. She finds personal homes. She finds flips. She knows what I want.

And her husband does it as well. So we work on a lot of stuff together because they both have their licenses. So they're like, hey, Felipe, we should work on this together. And they know that I work hard because they saw me through my two years. They're the ones who helped me purchase all my properties. And they saw how I hustled for two years. People don't understand. People are watching you, dude. You can see. say all you want, but people are watching what you're doing. So you can talk the game. I mean, you can really talk about it. But if people are watching you, this, my realtor watched me. And she saw for my two years, me grinding it out and talking about real estate. And when I finally bought my first purchase, my first six flex, she was like, oh, he's about it. Like, okay,

that makes sense. So then her husband was like, hey, you worked really hard and you like real estate. Why don't we flip homes? And I was like, let's do that. Like, that makes sense. And, and it was because they saw me work, right? I was, I didn't just talk about it, but I was about it. You know, I was about my business. And they saw that. And that's why. Yeah, that's amazing. Do you remember earlier I said I did that? I insulated under a house for days and I, like, I made like 300 bucks, but I ended up hiring people. I don't know. Like, it was like the worst experience, right? That was actually my attorney's house that I did that job for. And so, like, I did that because, like, and to today, like, he sees me as a hardworking, enthusiastic young

kid and now like he he is willing to put like he's going to be one of my investors like soon like on one of my deals like he keeps telling me like bring a deal to me i want to fund you because i built the reputation somebody who works hard and and under you did the exact same thing you work hard you understand real estate and people are longing for that combination right like no that's exactly right i can bring that value to to to a lot of people because they know like oh this dude's not scared to work he's also got a little bit of change and he's done real estate deals before and he's got like, you know, a little stuff behind him. But it's only two years also. Like, I really want your listeners to understand that. I'm not Brandon Turner. You know, I'm not 10, 15

years into the game. I'm two years in. And it is doable, guys. Like, like, just pull the trigger. Like, you'll get it. Just do it. Why do you think when you brought me, I mean, like, this is a good lesson for everyone here. Like, when you brought me this idea of this mobile home park, you just got brought it up to me kind of casually. Like, why would I jump at it with you and not other people who bring, I mean, it leads a lot from a mobile home parks. I rarely jump at them. It's because you've proven yourself as somebody who's got the hustle and got the education down. There's a thing I talk about in the book on a, well, I talk about a few different places, but the how to invest in real estate book, me and Josh Dorkin wrote, I call it the deal Delta.

Basically, it says any deal, you have to have three things to pull it off. You got to have money. You got to have hustle and you got to have knowledge. Those things are required in every deal, but you don't need to have all of them. So in this deal, what I'm hoping is that you're bringing the hustle and the knowledge. I'm bringing knowledge and I'm bringing the money, or at least like we'll raise the money and we'll buy this park, hopefully, and if not this one, we'll do another one, right? Because you've proven that you have the hustle and the knowledge.

When people are out there going, I don't have any money, who cares? Go out there and prove that you got hustle and knowledge and you'll do fine. Exactly. All right. Felipe, real quick. Brandon, you've said what you looked for in Felipe, which is why you're willing to do a deal with them. Felipe, what do you look for in a realtor or a partner or someone who's going to bring

you deals? You know, at first, my first initial reaction was to tell you someone like myself, but that's wrong. My business partner that we do flips on is nothing like me. He has money and knowledge, and he's applied that knowledge into wisdom. So he has all, like I've seen it in his past what he does. He might not be a super, super hard worker, but he's got money and he's got knowledge. And he's done it slowly in the past.

So he'll do one a year. That's it. He'll flip one or two properties a year, make a hundred grand and not do one until next year. And I'm like, dude, you could do like one every two months. It's like, what are you doing? So that's why me and him clicked because I can do one, I can do a flip every two or three months. He sees the hustle in me. I saw that he's done this before.

I saw that he, that he's proven that he can do it. He's proved himself to me by doing it over and over one or two a year, one or two a year. I've just come in and did kind of like, what's that guy with McDonald's did? I was like, dude, we can really blow this up. Like this isn't, like let's make this process and let's just make this like a machine, boom, boom, I just watched that movie The Founder on Netflix last night. Yes, that one. That's exactly right.

Okay, so what I hear you saying is you were drawn to him because of his knowledge. He knew what he was doing, and that's something that's very difficult to fake. His track record, it wasn't just him telling you, hey, man, let's go do this. You could look back and you could see he has been doing this, right? And then maybe his sense of restraint. Like, he wasn't running out there and doing a deal every single month just to say it was done. and he he wanted to do a good deal. And you recognize I can take all his strengths and add like some gas to the fire,

which is my drive and we'd be a good partner. It's that right? Yeah, he's like this like 65 year old guy who like I said, doesn't have to do it. I don't think he just does it to like, okay, he does a house and he lives for a year. He doesn't have a house. He lives for another year. It's great. So that's perfect.

See, now people know what they should be looking for when they go look for a partner. I think that's really helpful. Yeah. That's great. All right. So I got a note here, before we move with the deep dive, I got a note here from Kevin, our producer, who says to ask you about the ending of the story

of one of your early mobile homes, something drastic happened. He won't tell me what it is, but you know what he's talking about? Yeah, so that's in the deal deep dive. You want to do it now? Oh, okay, that's part of the deal deep dive. Okay, let's go, let's actually go there. We'll go there right now. It is time for the deal deep dive.

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Go to stessa.com slash mkTG slash bigger pockets to try Stessa Pro and get six months free. All right, it's time for the deal deep dive. This is a part of the show where we dive deep into one of your deals. And apparently we're going to talk about one of your mobile homes here. So why don't we start with, number one, what kind of property is this? It's a mobile home. All right. And you don't own the land.

It's just you're renting the land. Yep, exactly. It's just a lot pay a lot fee. and I just owned the mobile home. All right. How did you find this deal? So I was in college and I was driving back home that, I think it was a weekend. And I was driving by it.

And if I'm being 100% honest, I drove by it. I wasn't into real estate as much as I am now. And I really felt a tug at my heart. I just felt like the Lord was saying, buy that mobile home. I already had one there. If you can rewind the podcast, you'll see that I owned another mobile home there where I rented with the painter, now known as Victor, the painter. Right?

And I just felt like I was supposed to buy it. Is it just weird? Doesn't that sound like a Game of Thrones name that you would have known somebody? Victor the Painter. That's right. That's right. Okay, that's cool. Okay, so you felt like you should just buy this.

Sorry, how much, how much, what? I mean, was it for sale? Is there a for sale sign of front of it? Or like, like, like. I don't think it was for sale. I think I don't think it was for sale. I think I just walked up and told the guy, hey, all I have is $3,000. I'll buy it.

Okay, so that was my question. How much was it? $3,000. It's terrible. It was listening to me. If it wasn't for a pull out of my heart, I wouldn't have bought it. I had. I don't know anything.

Yeah. So I want to ask how you negotiated it, but I think you've already answered that. You just said, listen, I have $3,000 I'll buy your house. Is there anything more to it? Did you have like puppy. Did you practice puppy dog eyes in the mirror or something like before you went to go talk to it? No, dude. I just totally told him, hey, I got three grand.

And he was the right time for him. He probably needed three grand. I think I later did find out that he hadn't paid his lot fee in a bunch of months. So he was going to lose that. house. So he sold it to me for three grand. I called the owner if that was okay. And he said, yeah, that's fine. Because he knew that I had history there, which is the mobile home that me and Brandon are looking to buy. The guy knew that I had history paying all my rent on time. So I bought it. And he was like, oh, well, I was going to have to evict him and get 30 days and da, da, da, da, da.

And I was like, instead of paying him cash for keys or anything, I'll just buy it for $3,000 and I'll take over. And he was like, okay, cool. So then I bought it from that guy. He moved out with $3,000. I got the mobile home that he was going to lose anyways. So he got $3,000 out of the deal. And I got a, I got a mobile home. That makes you wonder if he was sitting there praying, please help me find some way to get out of this. He could tell the same story. Let me tell you about the time I was praying for somebody to come and find.

Dude, walked up with three. Yeah, this guy just walks up and says, I threw a gun. It's just what I needed. That's exactly right, dude. I think that's exactly what happened. How did you fund the purchase and did you have to do any rehab and how did you fund that? Yes, so I funded it from saving up all the money that I had made because remember I don't pay a lot for you where the mobile home that my mom had given me.

So I just saved up all my money that I had while I was in college, which was like $3,500. So I had like $500. So I gave the guy $3,000 and he moved out and the house was trash. Okay. What did you do with that at that point? Yes. I walked into the mobile home and it smelled like cigarettes and there was holes in the walls. So I didn't know how to do anything at this point.

I hadn't worked on any construction sites yet. So I just started fixing one room. So I did the master bedroom first. I just kind of started with YouTube and, oh, this is how you put up. a drywall. Okay, cool. Let's try that. So I just started fixing one room at a time, which is what my plan was. So you had no money. So your construction background came in pretty handy, since you couldn't afford to fix this thing up and you could do it yourself. And your previous plans of, hey, I'm going to rent it out room by room led you to, well, I'll just do it room by room. I'll

fix up a room. I'll rent out that room. And then I'll move on to the next one. Is that right? Boom, boom, boom. That's exactly. You didn't even have the construction experience, right? at this time? Like, you were just figuring it out. I was just trying to figure it out. Yeah, I was just starting to figure it out. Yeah, I was going to say, this sounds too much like, like Mr. Miyagi teaching you how to wax cars and then that became like karate moves. I just started fixing one room. We didn't get into it, but I actually did like carpet installation through high school and stuff just to kind of make a little bit of money. I've always been a worker. So I'd lay the carpet in the room and then

kind of fixed up the wall slowly and enough to be able to use the restroom in there. And I actually moved all my stuff into that room from the other house. Nice. So people might think this is crazy. So I actually did my own carpet for a long time. Actually, the carpet installation is interesting because it's actually one of like the, I think not easy to do. And it's like a little bit complicated to learn how to do it.

But it's so expensive to hire other people. Like, it's really easy to do. You watch a YouTube video on it. That's how I learned it. I learned how to do it watching YouTube. And I would haul in these big 12 foot rolls of carpet. Like up two flights of stairs to my rental units and I would lay the carpet in afternoon.

I'd be like, now granted, I know we just talked about like how hiring other people. But when I was young, when I was like, You do what you got to do. Yeah, you do what you got to do. And so I would install my own carpet and save myself a thousand bucks or whatever, and it would take me a couple hours to lay a carpet. This explains the size of Brandon's biceps now. I've been trying to figure out how he's so rock without ever touching a weight.

My little pencils for arms. Yeah, exactly. It was very lightweight carpet. It was very lightweight carpet. It was a rug. It was a rug. All right. It was several.

He went to doing carpet. He just threw rugs all over the place. He just used a stapler to tap. to tack them down around the corner. It looked like a quilt on the floor. All different kinds of rugs together. Okay. Well, I was going to say, so funny thing, actually,

one thing I loved about doing carpet, I still to this day like this, is it's like a challenge to seem carpet. Can you seam carpet without people seeing where you seamed it? It is such a challenge. That's the hardest part, right? It's the scene. It's just doing it away from the windows

because it's the lighting that makes it show. Yes, it is. You just do it in the sides. There's a little trick's like, you gotta use a sharp knife, right? and you gotta have like, it's gotta be this same direction of the carpet. Once you learn the stuff,

like it's like an art project every time. How excited you are. Like, I get so, I get so. I know. I would have so much fun. Carvericket with Brandon and Felipe.

I often, well, I often think if everything in my life exploded and I lost all of my money and I lost everything that I have today, I would probably go start a flooring company. And I wouldn't do all the flooring, but like,

I think like people will always need flooring. So well. And it pays well. It does. I just, the flip that I'm doing right now. Oh, I'm sorry, back to deal,

deep dive. But, but, but, the flip that I'm doing right now, actually, I order like 15 boxes of laminate, or I'm sorry, I have LVT to put into that property. And 10 of those were wrong. Like only two of them were the right color. I was so upset. And I had to pay my installer's lunch to come back because I had to go pick up more flooring. But I'm paying this guy like tons of money to lay this. I'm like, dude, I could do this.

Now I'm at the point where I can pay someone to do it because, you know, it's better for my time for him to do it while I can be doing something else. But yeah, flooring pays very, very well. People don't understand. Yeah. Okay. Next question. What was the outcome? Okay.

So this is where it gets really crazy. And it's really hard to believe, but I can't make this up. So this is exactly what happened. And if you're in Nashville or you're from the South, you know this, you know what happened in Nashville in May 2010. Nashville flooded completely. It was insane. And in the mobile home park, three of the mobile homes are in flood zone.

Only three. And one of those was mine. So I bought the deal and about three months later, the mobile home flooded. And I was so upset. Like, I was like, I really felt like God had failed me because I was like, Lord, you told me. Like, I really felt like you told me to buy this mobile home. So what happened? It's flooded.

Now what? 30 days later, rent still due. That's another hashtag of mine. I don't care what happens. Rents do. If someone's complaining about something, rent still do. It doesn't matter. Rent still do, boss.

So anyway, so that place got flooded. And 30 days later, I started to pay the rent on it. I remember I had 500 bucks and the mortgage on it was $350, the lot fee. So I'm down to like nothing. I think it was like 15 days later. I got a check in the mail. And I was like starting to open it, right? And like you're like opening your mail.

And I'm like, okay, oh, this is going to be a bill. But no, it was like a $300. I thought, I opened it. It was like 30 bucks, 300 bucks. I was like, oh my gosh, I'm getting the money back for the mobile home from insurance or FEMA or whatever. I was like, this is great. Okay, I'm going to get some money back.

Thank God. I can pay the law fee this month. I keep opening it. Nope, $3,000. I was like, oh my gosh, I made the money back for my mobile home. And then I took the whole checkout and it was a $30,000 check. Wow. Like FEMA sent you?

Yep, for that mobile home. Wow. That's amazing. They came in and saw that I was redoing that one room and I had all my college books in there and my laptop and all that fun stuff. And the FEMA guy was like, do you live here? And I was like, unfortunately, yes. He's like, you're a college student?

I was like, yeah. And he was like, man, I'm going to give you. the most that I can give you for this property or for what's going on here. And I was like, and he was like, I'm trying to give you the full value of this mobile home whenever it was first purchased. I was like, okay. So that's why I was like maybe 300, 3,000 bucks. Nope. He came back with a $30,000 check. What kind of return is that? Yeah. Sorry, did you fix it up then and keep it and hold onto it? Was like, what were you at today? We still have it. I went with that check. At this time, I was like, mom, what do I do? Like, I'm 18 years old with a $30,000 check.

And she was like, well, do what you felt that you were supposed to do in the first place, except now you have the financing for it. And I was like, what? You're so right. So we fixed that property. We fixed it, and now we just rent it out. And it's been in my family for still. We still have it.

And then I bought a 350 Z with the rest of it. Like every other financially responsible 18 year old. I was about to say, did you go try to buy all the other mobile homes and the mobile home part? I should have that. Oh, my gosh. What an idiot. I went out and went out and bought a 350 Z cash. I put in like $10,000 into the Moe Home and then bought a car.

That's funny. Well, you need a car. So well done. We're going to call that, we're going to phrase that FEMA hacking from now on. So we're going to write a book called FEMA hacking. It's going to be great. What lessons did you learn from the deal? Don't buy a sports car.

I sold it for like $6 grand later. It was trash, terrible. I love the car. But yeah. No, I learned to pull the truck. trigger, don't be scared. I mean, all my eggs were that was like, that was everything I had. And I just, I felt like it was the right deal at the moment. Now I don't much go on gut. I go a lot of what wisdom I have and what knowledge I've acquired, but I still do listen to my gut. Like, that's

important. People need to remember that to you. You can have all this information. You can have all this stuff. But go walk the property. Go feel it out. You'll know, man. Like, you'll know if it's right or wrong. And just me being, being, being, you know, a spiritual person. I walk the deal. I get all the numbers. I get as much information I can. And then I pull the trigger. I'm not scared to pull the trigger. And that was a big thing for me.

I think that I learned in that, in that deal, I said, okay, I'm going to, I'm going to listen to my gut. I'm going to pull the trigger on deals that I know. For instance, today before this podcast started, Brandon and I were on here. And I was pulling a trigger on another deal. I don't know if it's going to go through or not. But, I mean, I pull the trigger all the time. Yeah, I was actually going to mention that.

Like, we were literally, like, during that time when David Green was trying to take his computer out of the 1800s, he, like, literally made an offer on his, phone while we were sitting there. And I think it's such a good reminder. Like making an offer doesn't have to be scary or overwhelming. And I put people understand that. Like you can make an offer while sitting on a podcast waiting for David Green to boot up his computer. Yeah, it's that easy. People don't understand that it's free. Yeah, it's free. And offers. I'm going to get a thousand nose. Yep. And that's okay. Like, and then I say why. Yeah. Oh, well, I need. Back to the no why thing. Yeah. I know why thing. I go back to that. And they're like, oh, well, because I need a hundred.

$170 to pay off the loan. Okay, well, then now we've got conversation. So what if we do it this way or that way? You know, we just, we figure that out to the best, to where it works out and boast of both of our favors. I never try to make it completely about me. I try to figure out a little bit if I can about the seller. Oh, well, I have this or that or whatever the case.

Maybe, okay, what about if I just paid you out the rest of the month or, I mean, just whatever. What if I got my movers to move you for free? That would help you out because you're going to have a $3,000 cost. I'll do it for you. And I'll pay closing. Boom. We got a conversation started. So no, but why? No, but why? I love it.

No, all right. Well, that was a fantastic deal, Deep Dad. Very cool about that property. I mean, interesting that that happened. Lucky or, you know, blessed, however you want to look at it. Like, it worked out and very, very cool. All right, so let's head over to the next segment of the show, our Fire Round. It's time for the Fire Round. All right, it's time for the Fire Round. These are the questions that come direct from the Bigger Pockets Forum. I'm going to fire them at you right now, Felipe. Number one, from Ryan from Grand Rapids, Michigan. I need some advice about staying organized in the beginning of my investing career.

I have a habit of keeping track of everything in my head, and I know that's not going to work long term. What tools do you need or what do you use to maybe like keep track of your life? Any programs or tools or tips? I try to worry about the big stuff and just make sure that if I worry about all the big stuff in my life, the little stuff seems to get taken care of. And a lot of times people say, oh, well, take care of the little stuff. you're going to drive yourself nuts, I think, doing that. I just take care of the big stuff.

Like I said, I write 100 offers. I don't worry about all the little details because the offer hasn't even been accepted yet. So if someone's like worrying about all the little stuff in their life, I think they're never going to get to all the important stuff. So worry about the big important stuff and just make it down the list. And then write things down. I mean, that's helped me a lot. I just write things down and I check them off the list.

And I'm like, okay, done, done. All these things got done. Perfect. So for me, making a list, what's most important? and then usually I end up finding out that 80% of the things that I thought were important aren't. Only focused on that 20%. Yeah, that's true. Very good.

All right, next question. I want to hand over my Airbnb to a full-time manager. This is a smart person. How should I find this person and what systems should I set up? Sure. So for Airbnb, I have, there's no keys. So I found out really quick. That was an issue.

People would steal my key or lose it, whatever. so I've put in a little lockbox or a little punch-in code thing. Boom, that takes care of one of the issues. And then I just copied and paste my response to each room, and I just saved it on my phone. So every room has the exact same response to the same questions, same check-in instructions, same everything. So I processed all that. So I set it up to where all I had to do was text, text, text, text, here's the code, boom, boom, boom.

And then I handed that off to another person so they could not mess it up. And then if there's anything crucial, they call me. And you can just put on Facebook, hey, looking for someone. to handle my Airbnb and you'll get tons of responses. That's a business in any city. People will look out for that. And then you just go through some references, make sure that they're legit, see about their history.

And then, I mean, just hand them over literally an SOP, a standard operating procedure for how you want your Airbnb to be run. They handle all of it. Process at all. Yeah, that's great. You bring up a great point about like somebody to manage your Airbnb. Like typically the person doesn't have to be there in person, which means it's a perfect job for like that stay-at-home parent, right?

Who's at home and would love to bring out in a few-hundred-old. hours a month extra working completely flexible, generally flexible hours, that all they needed a smartphone to be able to run. That's exactly right. Copy and paste. Whoever made it of copy and paste is a rich man. Yeah. Number three, we'll call this maybe the last one of the fire on because it's getting

a long show, so we'll wrap it up here. We don't know when the next major, this is from Chris from L.A. We don't know when the next major downturn is going to come or what it's going to look like. We do know that it will come. So what are some of the things that you're doing now to be prepared in case prices take a big hit. I focus on cash flow for myself. I'm in it for the long run. If you're if you're doing flips, the first flips that I used to do, I had huge like 300,000 to sell for 400,000 or something. You know, to me, that was a lot. So right now I mainly focus on small but consistent returns, 30, 40 grand,

30, 40 grand. I told my guy that I was like, look, we don't need to do these huge properties that take years and years or a year to do. Like, we just do small properties at 30, 40 grand every three months and we're safe there. If for any reason something happens, we're going to be stuck in a deal that cost us 30 grand. It's not going to be the end of the day or the end of the life for us. So we focus on those little things. And then I do cash flow on the other ones. And me personally, this works in my life. I do about a 60-40 split on debt. So every one of my properties is paid off about 40 percent. And then I keep bringing that down. And I don't buy anything that I can't afford to at least be in between 40 and 30 percent paid off debt when I get that property.

Cool. That's a great answer. Yeah, I have a little bit of a little bit of room there. A little little bit of a little bit. A little bit of room in case market does drop a little bit. You're going to be fine. Hopefully I have a little more cashful. Smart. All right. Well, with that, let's get to the last segment of the show. This is our famous four. The Famous Four. These are the same famous four questions we ask every guest every week. Felipe, I know you've heard this while you're bumming around a construction site back in the day. You hear these coming. So let's throw my view. Number one, favorite real estate related book.

Rich Dad, Port-Dat. Is that a surprise to anybody anymore? I am shocked. Oh, my gosh, right? It's true and true, man. It's the book that I think, has impacted a lot of people. Rich Dad, Dad, Porta, if you read that book, you'll understand, and it'll speak to you. I think it's a lot. The book is alive. All right. How about your favorite business book?

The Riches Man in Babylon? There's plenty of books, man. If I could give out more, life and error, why the rich are getting richer by Robert Kiyosaki. The richest man in Babylon is such a boring read, but it's so good. I got my wife to listen to it on the ride back from Florida once, and she hated it because it reads so boring. And then the other one is that is life and air. Man, if people just kind of grasp that book, I think it's a fantastic book.

It really fits into what I want. Yep. Brandon talks about it all the time. I know. Didn't I send you a copy of it yet, David? No. You should read. It's actually right there.

I'm just your side chick you forget about. Maybe when you're out here next month, you can pick up one of my, I have two copies sitting on my bookshelf. Oh, yeah, it's a good book. Squeeze me in there between the guys you really like, you're really like. real friends. The real guys he invites over, but not really real ones. I'm the friend that he thinks of at 2 a.m.

when no one else is answering his text. Then that's when I hear from. Then you get a text. Yeah, one. Hey, what's up, yeah. I guess it was someone else I sent that life in air book too.

Sorry, I get you guys all confused. All right. Next up, what are some of your hobbies, Felipe? Man, right now I'm really into, like I said,

I have a 16-month-old. I really enjoy playing with him, and real estate has given me that opportunity. I used to work out all the time. There's a lot of things. that I used to do, and then real estate gave me back my life, if that makes sense, gave me back my time, my minutes, my days, my hours. So I'd like to spend my time with him, whether it's riding a bike, going to the park, going to anything with my son is fantastic.

And real estate has given me that opportunity. Yeah, very cool. Fantastic. Well, my last question, what do you think sets apart successful real estate investors from those who give up, fail or never get started? The comfort zone, that's an easy answer for me. I think a lot of people get stuck in their comfort zone. And I can say that because I really feel like I never had a comfort zone. Being Latino in Nashville is really hard because, like, everyone is not Latino. So, like, for instance, when I was in high school, I was too Mexican for the white guys, and I was too white for the Mexican guys.

So I was never in a comfort place because I spoke perfect English. But, you know, the American people were like, no, well, you're brown. So, you know, go over there. And the Hispanic is same thing. So I think a lot of times people get stuck in a comfort zone and they don't step out of that. And the reason I was able to be successful in real estate is because I never had that, quote, unquote, comfort zone. So if I go to the bank and they're like, you know, no, no, you can't have that loan. I'm like, yeah, but no, why can't I?

So I get out of that. People don't want to ask that to not be rude. They don't want to be rude to whoever's in front of them. I'm not being rude. I just want to know why. Like, just give me the answer of why. And that has set me apart, I think, asking that next question. why. Like I told you guys earlier, I think I have failed at one thing and I was becoming a police

officer and it was because I didn't ask why. I think that's a very, very, very insightful observation that you never were able to sink into a comfort zone. And so it makes it easier for you to be more successful. And as you talk, I started thinking about when I was hanging out with cops, it was always like, I was much more ambitious. They were people that said all the time, well, you don't get in law enforcement to get rich. Like it was their excuse for why they're not good with money or they're not building wealth because, well, you're a cop, right? And then in the other sense, when I was hanging out with like the entrepreneur types who were all about money, I was always irritated because they had no substance and they had no grit. And they're like, they're not the guy that I want next to me in like a dark alley on a bad night, right?

So I never really fit in on either side either. And I think that for the people who have lived that life, they get it immediately. They know what you're talking about. People who don't, they're just completely clueless as to the understanding of, well, I get along with everyone, but I don't really fit in with anybody like what you were saying it. But the reward is you get to kick butt. Use that to your advantage. Absolutely. There you go.

Don't be a victim about it. I love it. All right. You are a fascinating individual, Felipe. So tell me, where can people find out more about you? Sure. So I'm going to answer this question like this. A lot of people are like, oh, how can I find mentors?

We'll bring value. You know what? You can find me at side guymovers.com. That's my moving company. If you want to learn how I did everything in two years, come work with me. I'm going to be loading the truck with you sometimes. And you can ask me two hours worth of questions. And I can tell you everything you want to know.

because moving to me is just second nature so I can talk real estate with you all day. You can find me at side guy Nashville at gmail.com. Just shoot me an email and we can chitchat, man. It's that easy. I'm on Instagram, Nashville side guy, side guy movers. You can find me there.

That's how you can get a hold of me. Cool. And we'll put links to all those in the show notes as well. BiggerPockets.com slash show 329. And with that, Felipe, this has been amazing. This has been awesome. I loved hearing your story like in one full picture instead of like the little bits and pieces

of guide over the last year. so, but yeah, unbelievably cool. So keep it up. We'll have you back on the show again when you hit the, you know, when you keep crushing this in the next few years. We'll do it again. Let's do it. All right, dude. Well, thank you so much. And everyone else, thank you for listening to the show. I hope you enjoy not just this episode, but all of our episodes. And you can get updated on new episodes by subscribing to our show, of course, on wherever you listen to the show. If you're on YouTube right now, you know, hit that subscribe button. If you're on iTunes, hit the subscribe button. Leave us rating and reviews over on iTunes, Stitcher, SoundCloud,

and Google Play, if you can, that helps us out a bunch as well. And come hang out on bigger pockets. I mean, that's where things are happening, right? Bigger Pockets is the world's largest real estate investing social network. Make sure you have a free account there or a pro account if you want to be a pro member. And in fact, use code Felipe to get 10% off a pro membership. Like that, I made a code just for you. Wow.

I love that. You've just been immortalized in the annals of bigger pockets lower. They can spell my last thing. They should get an extra 5%. Use coupon code Felipe. How do you even say the last name? I told you he doesn't know how to say last name. Go ahead and say the last name.

It's just what a Kili's heel. Mejia. Mejia. Yeah. David got it. Magia. Oh, that's how all my middle school teacher said it. That's terrible.

All right. Use code Felipe Magia. Mejia. M-E-J-I-A. Come on. To get 15% off your pro membership. That's awesome. All right.

Cool. All right. Well, David Green, you want to take us out? Felipe, thank you so much. This has been awesome. Felipe, what's your IG handle? Instagram. Instagram, side guide Nashville. He is side guy Nashville.

Brandon is Beardy Brandon. I am David Green 24. At us on Instagram so we can stay in touch. This has been a blast. And this is David Green for Brandon. I love my daughter more than my landscaping Turner. Signing off. You're listening to Bigger Pockets Radio.

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