BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 889: How to Build Generational Wealth Without Losing it Along the Way w/Whitney Elkins-Hutten

Starting point is 00:00:00 This is the Bigger Pockets podcast show. 8-8-9er. What's going on? This is David Green, your host of the Bigger Pockets Real Estate podcast, joined today by the handsome, talented, successful, and incredibly wealthy co-host, Rob Obisolo, and we have cooked up a great show for you all today.

Starting point is 00:00:17 Wealthy and quaff hair. Listen, I'm in my head today because I don't know if I wore this shirt on the last podcast that we did. And I only have like three or four, and I try to cycle them out. So it may look to anyone watching on YouTube that I'm wearing the same shirt for like the last month. Insecure much? A little bit.

Starting point is 00:00:35 My goodness. This is why I introduced you as incredibly wealthy. So people would just assume you're like Mark Zuckerberg and you wear the same shirt every day. Not wealthy in confidence. But you know what? I am wealthy in an amazing podcast show that we're going to have today. We're actually bringing on Whitney Elkins Hutton. And she's going to be talking about how to create generational wealth that lasts and the biggest

Starting point is 00:00:56 levers that you can pull to stop losing money while you're building wealth through. real estate. That's right. So many investors get into real estate because they have this drive to build wealth, but not just by themselves, but to create generational wealth for the others and their family. And the good news is even if you don't have a family, even if you're brand new to investing, Whitney's advice is still going to help you build wealth smarter and faster. And listeners may remember Whitney from episode 340, which resonated a lot with investors, and now she's written a book. It's called Money for Tomorrow, How to Build and Protect Generational Wealth. and you can actually pick up a copy over at biggerpockets.com slash m4T.

Starting point is 00:01:32 Use code MFTPod for 10% off. Whitney, welcome to the show. Great to have you back. Okay, so let's talk about your book. Who did you write this book for and who could benefit from the content? Well, thank you so much for having me back. It's been a few years. So I'm super excited to be here.

Starting point is 00:01:48 I wrote money for tomorrow. Originally for myself and my family and as a blueprint for my daughter, just in case I got hit by a bus, you know, having for a bit, you know, something happened to me. She would have a full understanding on how all the lessons and learnings that I had accumulated over a couple decades of investing, she would have in, you know, ordering all the steps on how to create wealth, you know, grow and scale the money in our portfolio as well as protected. She would have all that laid out for her. Now, I'm putting together this blueprint for my family.

Starting point is 00:02:25 and I'm also mentoring several people on the side on scaling their real estate portfolios. And I kept hearing some of the common themes over and over again. Like, I make good money in my job, but I still feel broke. Or I don't know if I'm doing the right thing when I invest. And will it be enough when I get to retirement? Or I hate talking about finances. I just want to do deals. And that's when I realized, I'm like, wait a second, I have this blueprint, this framework that I've been developing for my family.

Starting point is 00:02:53 Let me test this out with some of my mentors. touring and coaching clients. And lo and behold, we saw amazing results for it. Now, who does this book most appropriate for? I would say one of two camps of people. And I would say almost every single one of us falls in one of these two camps. And that is somebody who's just starting off on their investing journey that wants an end-to-end blueprint on how to create wealth, protect it, grow it, and then pass it on. And then somebody who's more of a seasoned investor that has knows, a lot of these strategies, these rules of the wealth game already, that wants to kind of go back and make sure that they have a very fortified foundation and that are prepping either for

Starting point is 00:03:38 retirement or to pass this wealth on to the next generation. Out of curiosity, when you're working with somebody, do you prefer to work with a newbie investor or a seasoned investor in that season investors, I imagine, probably have a lot of habits that you may have to correct, but do you have a preference? You know, both are kind of fun to work with. Like, I feel like with a new investor, I get to kind of mold them. I get to, you know, kind of lead them along the way. But the more seasoned investor, it can be really fun because they, you know, tend to have, like, money set aside.

Starting point is 00:04:09 They have a war chest of funds ready to deploy. So we can kind of get, you know, once we get the foundation cleaned up, and it gets really fun on helping them deploy capital. Okay. Now, Whitney, you also point out that even for people who build massive wealth, it's extremely common for them to lose that massive wealth, which frankly is very rarely ever shared on podcasts or something called survivor bias, which basically states that you only hear about the story from the survivor, right? The people who had a bad experience don't get a chance to share their side of the story. And when people lose money in real estate or lose money in business, they're not typically going

Starting point is 00:04:43 to Instagram to post that information or the worst selfie that they ever took or the snot coming out of their nose pictures, right? Like everything we see is very carefully curated. of what's working against people is what you call the four horsemen. Can you tell us what those four horsemen are? Yeah, so I learned about the four horsemen in reading a book published by Garrett Gunderson. And then also, again, from my own mentoring coach, a financial coach, Chris Miles. And, you know, just really quick to list them out, the four horsemen are interest, insurance, taxes, and feed. And so these are four of the big seven gaps that I pretty

Starting point is 00:05:22 steadily see in people's portfolios. And if we can learn how to plug these gaps in their portfolios, fortify what I call your financial moat. Not only are you going to be a more fortified investor should the market turn south like it has in the past 12 to 24 months, but also you're going to have more capital to deploy in the future and create greater velocity with your money. Now the concept here with the four horsemen is there are sort of these four different aspects that can creep up on you, is my guess. And if you're not, if you're not good at mitigating them ahead of time, when there's a perfect storm, you get hit by everything, then it could pretty easily put you in a bad situation. Yeah, they're really kind of sneaky. I mean, a lot of people call them money leaks.

Starting point is 00:06:06 And so, you know, a good example would be interest. You know, a lot of people listening here might know Dave Ramsey and they might, you know, study his snowball approach to eliminating debt or is debt avalanche approach to eliminating debt. You would assume that paying interest is bad, right? We should eliminate all interests. But really, there's a difference between destructive interest and productive interest. And so, you know, if we're kind of picking apart this horseman, we want to kind of put that debt, you know, evaluate that debt and put it on a sliding scale between being destructive and productive and really figure out, okay, where does it lie on this sliding scale. Is it hurting me or is it helping me? And then, you know, clearly evaluate it and take

Starting point is 00:06:52 the next steps to eliminating that. Sure. Yeah, yeah. And do you think you could clarify? I mean, I feel like I have a good understanding of interest. Insurance is a big one. We just found out, I haven't told you this, David, but our insurance on our property, the premium went up $4,000 last again. Yeah. So that's fun. It already did that. Yeah, I know. It just keeps doing it. Help us, Whitney. Insurance is a big one. Yeah, that is, especially property insurance rates have gone up across the board across the United States.

Starting point is 00:07:23 Yes, they have. Fun fact, I actually started an insurance company and then couldn't do anything with it because we literally can't get policies in California. Insurance companies will not write insurance here. And in Florida, it's getting to be the same thing. This is like the one thing that's not talked about in the world of real estate investing. And so people don't hear about it until it's too late. Does this something that you find there's like a cat.

Starting point is 00:07:44 of things that are just not discussed amongst real estate investors and is sort of oversimplified and glamorized in a way that isn't realistic? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what I run into, you know, with real estate investors often is, you know, maybe not so much about like, you know, insurance or taxes or anything like that, but they kind of get the steps out of order. They're so focused on the real estate, you know, as a vehicle to grow cash low, grow equity, create tax benefits for themselves, that they kind of forget that there's some foundational work that they should do here, which is understanding how they're creating wealth for themselves, and more importantly, how to protect that wealth as they're creating it.

Starting point is 00:08:25 And so I think those are the things that don't get talked about. So when we go circling back to the four horsemen, people do a ton of due diligence on an investment for themselves to figure out how to protect the capital, generate cash flow, grow the equity. But when it comes to their personal finances, it boggles my mind that they don't take all this lessons and learning these translatable skills and apply it to their personal financial situation. I love your points about starting from a strong financial foundation in order to build wealth. I echo those sentiments myself. We're going to take a quick break.

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Starting point is 00:11:22 Welcome back. Whitney Elkins Hutton is here with us talking about how to build the kind of wealth that lasts for generations and how not to lose money along the way. The last book that I just wrote, now that you've written a book here, was called Pillars of Wealth. and I cover these principles that real estate investing is one of three pillars that you need to do if you want to get wealthy. The other two are making money and saving your money. And we have bookkeepers that will look at a profit and loss statement for a property and we

Starting point is 00:11:48 will meticulously look at every expense. Where's my insurance? Why is it going up? Why did maintenance cost this much? How much cap X do I need to set aside? And then when it comes to our own personal budget, it's like people don't pay attention to it at all. They put zero effort into where all their money is going. and they're working so hard getting frustrated at not having success with real estate investing.

Starting point is 00:12:07 While all of the work that they're doing for everything else in life, that money is just flying right out the door and they don't even pay attention to it. Absolutely. I mean, I have a coaching client that I'm working with right now, you know, not going to share any specific details. But it's a theme that is cropped up again. You know, they are very proficient in creating income and deploying that into investments, into growing their business.

Starting point is 00:12:30 but the personal finances are, you know, for lack of better words, hot mess. We're going back and, you know, they need a certain amount of cash flow to be able to exit from their business. And I'm like, great, we could spend all this money over here, you know, growing your investments, which granted we should could do. But we also can go back up here and pick up probably like another $3,000 or $4,000 a month in just your personal financial statement. that's less money going out the door. That's less income that you have to generate to cover it. Sure, yeah. Well, we're going to get into a few more of the horsemen,

Starting point is 00:13:07 the four horsemen here that you were talking about. But before we move on to a couple of these, I didn't want some clarification on the insurance side of it. Is there something that investors can do to mitigate insurance? Because that kind of seems like one that's out of your control for the most part. Yeah, so, you know, really, you know, in the blueprint, what I see more often is that investors are not using insurance wisely in order to outsource their liability. You know, really whenever you get an insurance policy, that's what you're trying to do.

Starting point is 00:13:38 And so I hear you, Rob, you're trying to, maybe the question or what I hear here is like, how do I lower my insurance cost or maybe cost compare, you know, that line item on my profit and loss statement. You know, really there, you're calling around to get the most optimal policies, you know, try to compare Apple's apples, right? But more often than not, where people are actually missing a gap here is that they don't have the right, say, type of disability to guard against their job loss. Okay. There's type of disability policies that guard against you working your current job, like current line of employment or any line of employment, right? You know, let's guard our income. Let's guard our health, right? The number one type of insurance that's going to be tapped into is probably going to be somebody's health insurance. You know, what most people do, they try to get

Starting point is 00:14:29 the cheapest policy that they possibly can, thinking that nothing's going to happen to them. And so health insurance, auto liability insurance, renter's insurance, you know, as an investor, if you're an investor or a business owner and you have a home office, you need to understand if your home office is actually covered on your insurance policy. Oftentimes, a homeowner's policy does not cover a home office on the policy. It doesn't replace that equipment or if you have to shut down your business for whatever reason. Say like there's a natural disaster in your area. It doesn't cover any of that loss. So we want to make sure that we're utilizing insurance correctly in order to outsource a liability. Got it. Yeah, yeah. So we've got interest insurance. Those are two

Starting point is 00:15:17 of the four horsemen. What are the other two? Taxes and fees. Taxes tends to be a really fun one that most real estate investors love because that's, you know, they're drawn to real estate because they hear, oh, I can, you know, I can use all these losses to offset my income or earn tax-free or unearned income in real estate. And that's great, but you can also do the same thing with businesses as well. So there's an amazing book out there by Tom Wheelwright called Tax-Free Wealth. And so I really highly suggest everybody pick that up. But really the five things that he's trying to teach in that book is how you're going to utilize deductions. Okay, a big deduction in real estate is depreciation.

Starting point is 00:16:01 You know, how do you use these to offset income that's coming in? How do you shift your income from earned income to passive income? That's another tactic to implore here. How do you take advantage of lower tax brackets? So, you know, for me, I can take advantage of, of, you know, my tax bracket for me as my child, my child, like, I can take advantage of her tax bracket. She gets tax very differently than I do. I can also take advantage of other dependents tax bracket. Like if I had a parent that it was living with me or something like that, like, how can

Starting point is 00:16:39 I take advantage of other tax brackets? How can you take advantage of tax credits? That's a one-to-one offset on your tax liability. And then how can I defer income? using like retirement accounts, qualified retirement plans, pension plans. But most of us are taught to do the last one first. You know, get a good job, buy a house, get married, somewhere in there, right? Yeah. And then stuff money in your 401K. And there's four other things that we should be looking at probably first in order to optimize our taxes.

Starting point is 00:17:11 Okay, so we shouldn't just be thinking get a paycheck and stick it in a 401K. There's a couple steps that we can look at to save us money and taxes before we get there. What are those things? Now, if you just don't have a business or don't have any real estate, you have very few deductions available to you, right? But as soon as you open a business or buy a piece of property, you have a wealth of deductions that are open to you. You learn to use those wisely.

Starting point is 00:17:38 And I think the number one deduction that most people miss, especially when they start off investing in real estate, is using depreciation wisely. So make sure that you're partnering with a tax professional that is not, scared to take that depreciation deduction. That's a huge one. That's, I mean, that's really one that most people are, I feel too lazy to really dive into that and learn why it's so powerful. And you're just like, yeah, deduction, it doesn't really change things too much or one way or another. But when you are a full-on real estate professional, meaning you're in the business 750 hours a year, plus it's more than half your time, or yourself managing your short-term rental,

Starting point is 00:18:17 you can really start unlocking the tax depreciation very, very, in a very significant way with bonus depreciation. And this is really something I wish that I had learned as a real estate investor at the very beginning of my journey. I feel like as real estate investors, we really don't worry about taxes until it's tax time. And then we owe a lot of money. And then we're calling our CPAs. We're like, dude, what can I do to save $10,000 or $20,000 really, really fast? Whereas what sounds like you're suggesting is implementing the right systems. in place, learning about it, having a foundation at the beginning of all of this so that you're never really scrambling in the final hours. I would even challenge, you know, we're recording

Starting point is 00:18:56 this early 2024. You should be talking to your accountant or a tax strategist on how to plan. What are those moves that you can take during the year this year to lower your tax bill for your 2025 filing? Right. Like, get out ahead of it. And, you know, I see investors, they balk at paying for tax professional help because, you know, they think it's costly. I will tell you, I mean, my tax prep bill is a few thousand dollars, but what I save is it's priceless. I will play that slot machine every single time. I can think of a couple practical examples because this is a really good example of investors know about depreciation, but they don't always think about deductions. Because investors forget that they're still running a business and they need to think like a business

Starting point is 00:19:41 owner. When we talk about passive income and real estate, it gives this idea that you just made one good decision and then you benefit forever. But businesses aren't passive and real estate is included in that. So one thing is to set a business up that's like an LLC or an S corp with which you buy your real estate through. And then you talk to your CPA and say, hey, I am planning on going to Florida for this. I'm planning on going to California for this and I'm planning on going to Tennessee for this. What would I need to do for this to be a write-off? And then your CPA will say, well, if you look at vacation property like vacation rentals when you're there. If you meet with staff like a real estate agent or a property manager or a title company,

Starting point is 00:20:19 when you're in that area, this can now be considered a business trip that you are going to be taking anyways. A lot of people go to dinner and they just pay for dinners. But if you make that dinner a business trip where you discuss things like business, so like every time Rob and I go to Chipotle, that's a ride off because all we do is talk about our rental property. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people pay for a,

Starting point is 00:20:41 vehicle. We all have to have one, but your vehicle can be for many businesses, something that the business needs in order to perform. And now the expenses associated with that vehicle become a right off for the business. And if your income is coming into this business, and now you have expenses that you're going to have anyways, but they're also necessary for the business. You're going to use it in your personal life, of course, but you can ride it off as a business expense because it's necessary. I'm glad you're bringing this sub-witney because this stuff doesn't come up on real state podcast very often, but it's still a part in building wealth and saving money. Absolutely, right? Because, you know, every time you can, you know, bank some of those

Starting point is 00:21:16 deductions, in the case of going to Chipotle or driving your car, you were going to spend that money anyways, but now you can write it off, right? And you don't have to pay taxes against that income that you would, that you use to offset it. You know, another one is business use of the home. If you have a home office, it's now a portion of the mortgage interest you pay on the property, the taxes, the insurance, you know, get allocated to that home office. I know for me, I have a desk in a dedicated space in my home that I run my real estate business from. I'm going to take that 200 square foot area and write it off against my taxes. Why wouldn't I? Why wouldn't I? So there's just things that think about there. You know, internet. You know, I can, you know,

Starting point is 00:22:04 deduct, you know, through that home office, a portion of my internet. I have a phone dedicated for the house. Therefore, my phone that I carry, my cell phone that I carry is dedicated to the business. Right. So, you know, partner with a professional that understands how to use all these things. One thing that I love about Tom's book, you know, tax-free wealth is that, you know, he views the IRS code as a treasure map. Like, you know, there's the first 10 pages are all about how you can actually pay your taxes, right? And I'm not saying we shouldn't pay our taxes. Yes, we should pay our fair share.

Starting point is 00:22:39 But you can arrange your affairs as such to lower your liability legally. So we've covered three of the four horsemen, interest, insurance, and taxes. And right after the break, we'll hear from Whitney about the last horsemen fees, including one of the sneakiest fees and how to avoid it. Stick around. People love to call real estate passive income. which is interesting because most of the investors I know are very busy. Busy finding deals, busy managing teams, busy worrying they pick the wrong market.

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Starting point is 00:26:13 Welcome back, everyone. We're here with Whitney Elkins Hutton talking about her book Money for Tomorrow. Let's jump back in. Yeah, okay. So that brings us to the fourth horsemen. We just talked about interest, insurance, taxes. What is the fourth one here? Fees. Notoriously hated amongst everyone. That's the one unity we have in this world is fees. We all hate them. Oh yeah. I mean, you know, there's a low hanging fruit, your bank fees, your ATM fees. Ticketmaster fees. Oh my gosh. Ticketmaster fees. Airbnb fees. It's more expensive than a hotel. Sorry, Carrie, carry on. I 100% agree on all those things. Then, you know, if you're, you know, a real estate investor, you've got your closing title

Starting point is 00:26:52 fees. Right now, I'm getting a house under contract to sell. And they're like, you know, here's your title fee, here's your closing statement, here's your inspection and all these things that we have to split with a buyer. And I'm like, oh boy, okay, more fees for this transaction. Now, those are all great. We go into detail on that in the book. But I think the one that most people kind of are taking their eye off the ball on is actually the fees associated if you have retirement funds. I don't know about you, but if I'm setting money aside in retirement, I will probably want to have more than $500,000 in that retirement account, which means when I start taking the required minimum distribution as I approach retirement, it's going to be above my

Starting point is 00:27:34 standard deduction. So my husband and I, we're married. We get a standard deduction of about $26,000 a year, I plan on retiring or pulling more than $26,000 out of that account. $26,000 per year? For year, for year, right? Like, my living expenses are much more than that. So now, here's the thing. There's two things that are compounding here. One, there's the fees that I've paid on those investments the whole entire time, right? I'm, and I challenge, people should do the math on this. Like, they think that 1% total fee or 1.5% or maybe even 2%, or maybe even 2%, you know, total fee in their retirement account just to administer the account, just to be in the stocks, bonds, and mutual funds doesn't, you know, is worthwhile to them, you compound that out

Starting point is 00:28:22 over 30 years. You're losing not just tens of thousands of dollars, but in some cases, hundreds of thousands of dollars, just to fees, okay? But let's say you get to retirement. That money's all gone. You've lost the ability to compound and grow that. You can't generate velocity with that money. It's gone, all right? But now you want to retire. And you want to start pulling the money out of your retirement accounts. It's going to be larger than your standard deduction. Now there's a thing here called provisional income that you're potentially triggering, which means you now get double taxed on things like Social Security. So this can be a big train wreck for people. And so again, I really want to encourage people to model out what kind of fees that you're

Starting point is 00:29:06 paying as you grow your retirement accounts, but also sit down with their professional. and fully understand, you know, am I going to be triggering this provisional income whenever I start taking things out of my retirement account? This is why we hear a lot of people doing Roth conversions, you know, the five to 10 years before they start approaching retirement because Roth IRAs are not subject to provisional income. Yeah, so one of the things that I've heard, and this probably goes into the fee side of it, is the compounding effect of having other people manage your money, which again, this is like the standard way of doing it, usually hire a professional, you'll get charged a couple percentage points to do that. But over time, that compounds to actually eat away at a lot of

Starting point is 00:29:48 the earning potential that you're actually stacking away in your retirement accounts, right? Oh, absolutely. Yeah. In the book, I walk an example of somebody who is invested in their company 401k, getting a match, but they have like a 1% total fee load between expense ratios, fiduciary, plan administration, all that, which is quite honestly pretty low. out. Yeah, seems like a very innocent, like a very innocent fee. Yeah, yeah. Great. Like, I'm, you know, 1%. That's no big deal. I'll pay that all day long because somebody else is doing the work. Now, again, like you said, that's compounding over time. You want your retirement account to compound, right? But the more money you put in there, the more company match that goes

Starting point is 00:30:31 in there, that, those fees compound over time as well. So it's innocent enough, you know, in your late 20s, early 30s, you might just be paying like a couple hundred dollars a year. But by the time you're pulling that money out 30 to 40 years later, you're probably paying hundreds of thousands. You've already paid tens of thousands of dollars in fees, but you're going to be accumulating 100,000 or more in fees. I have a hang up here. I really do. Yeah. And I'm curious because it is sort of the standard, like what's the actual solution to that? because I know self-directed IRAs seem to be very popular, and this is the notion where you get to control where the money is being put into. So a lot of real estate professionals like them because they can effectively use it to invest in more real estate if they wanted to.

Starting point is 00:31:19 But is there like an actionable step for real estate investors on maybe how they could not pay six figures and fees over time? Well, I think it's going back to those five steps that you need to take in order to limit. and significantly reduce your tax bill that Tom lays out is that, you know, make sure that you are opening businesses like real estate, your investments, whatever you can to take advantage of those deductions, that you're shifting your income as much as possible from earned income to passive income, okay, to change how it gets taxed, that you're taking advantage of other tax brackets. Like if you can, if you have a business, pay your kids. You know, that's a neat little, I shouldn't say trick, but it kind of is, you know, why not? I pay my daughter. We have a camper van rental

Starting point is 00:32:10 business, and not only is she learning good skills in managing a business alongside of me, but I can now pay her because she now has earned income and she can now put that in her Roth account. That's a very powerful wealth transfer and wealth building strategy, and it's completely legal. And then we can get into tax credits. And then the last part, If you still have funds left over that you need to tax shelter, now we can start getting into how do you best leverage these retirement accounts and qualified retirement plans. So it's not necessarily in either or. It's just making sure that you're doing things in a lead-out strategy and in the right order.

Starting point is 00:32:53 Now, Whitney, you mentioned your daughter and how you pay her. I think that that's brilliant. You've also mentioned that she's one of the reasons that you wrote this book. Can you talk about how you're passing on generational wealth to her and not just through wealth, but also through knowledge and action that she sees you taking? Yeah, absolutely. Well, we actually started the wealth journey with her at our early age and just by playing games. So we started playing cash flow for kids, you know, at a very early age.

Starting point is 00:33:19 And then whenever, you know, she got to be about seven, eight years old, we started reading a book like The Richest Man in Babylon. And from there, you know, we talked about how she could create value around the house, earn an income, doing things in the household, but also outside the household, like that's sitting. You know, now she helps out in our camper van rental business. And then we started talking about how she needs to save that, you know, save a certain percentage, but also set aside a certain percentage to give away. And then there, of course, she has the bucket that she can spend.

Starting point is 00:33:52 And then we're teaching her how to spend that money. Now, this is kind of the scary part as a parent, right, because you don't want your kid necessarily just going out. Like she loves buying squish mellows. We walk into Costco. She wants to buy every single one of those like gigantic three foot round pillows and bring them. Oh yeah.

Starting point is 00:34:12 My niece is right there with her. Nothing makes her as excited is when I send her a new squish mallow. Same. Same here, by the way. Nothing makes me more excited than getting one when you send me one, David. Well, David, if you have an extra, I've got an 11-year-old that would love some. So there you go. Anyways, it's the cringe factor, right?

Starting point is 00:34:29 Like she wants to buy these squishmel. And I kind of like cringe. I'm like, really, this is how we want to spend our money. But I'd rather her make these mistakes now with like $10, $20, $50, maybe even $100 versus leader in life with $10,000 of dollars or even more. So, you know, she's really learning the value of, you know, creating value, getting paid for it, learning how to save it, learning how to give it away to charities that she is,

Starting point is 00:35:00 you know, passionate about, but also how to spend it, which is, I think, and it's not even just spending, but getting a good steward of that money as she moves forward. And last piece is that we have her invest alongside of us in our real estate deals and various other opportunities. And so she's starting to learn about how her investment babies make babies and continue to grow that way. So I want her to have a very solid fundamental base. And quite honestly, I want her, that is the most important thing that I can pass on to her is that knowledge because, you know, she can go out and create her own portfolio from that. So that's kind of my passion in is helping her do that, but also helping other people do the

Starting point is 00:35:45 thing. I love it. Yeah. I mean, that's obviously, it's very clear. That's the, you know, the mantra of the book here, right? I've got one final question as it pertains to this. And we talk a lot about on this show, this concept called Financial Freedom, but you introduced this concept that we don't talk about as much, which is impact freedom.

Starting point is 00:36:03 What does impact freedom mean? This is really a journey that I went on as I was, you know, throughout growing my portfolio, but even like writing this book. So I think many of us, when we enter in real estate, you know, we have this focus that we want to have like, say, $10,000 a month and path of cash flow and we're going to be able to, like, quit our jobs. you know, right off into the sunset, you know, and everything's going to be a okay. That's great. That's a great milestone to have. But what is that doing for you? Like,

Starting point is 00:36:34 what's the why behind that? And, you know, if you've ever done Tony Robbins seven layers of why exercise, you know, most people have challenges getting like three or four layers in, right? They say, I want $10,000 a month. Why that? So I don't have to sit at a cubicle for 40 years. Okay, great. Why do you want that? Well, I want more time back, right? you keep kind of picking away at it, most people arrive at five reason that they want to do what they want to do, okay? Financial freedom, which you already said, Rob, okay? But then they say, I want to have choice in my life. They want choice freedom. They want time freedom. They want to have the time back. They don't want to be told what to do. They want to have it back to do what

Starting point is 00:37:15 they want with whom they want. And they want to be able to go wherever they want. Think of these freedom milestones. But eventually, and this is where I'm so excited for people, you're going to have all of those top four freedoms. What's after that? And that is the impact freedom. And a lot of people actually discovered this early. I think for me, I couldn't put a finger on it so much for myself, but I just knew that there was something more than I needed to do. And that is creating impact in the world. Now that I have financial freedom, now that I have more time back and I can choose what I want to do with it and I can do it anywhere in the world. Now the world opens up for me and I can create change in other people's life and create that impact. Sweet. Well, thank you, Whitney. Rob,

Starting point is 00:38:01 I know that you have read Burr and Scale, and I'm very proud of you, buddy, by the way. It's definitely going to be reflected in your Christmas present this year. But do you think you'll ever read a third book? And if so, what book might it be? Well, it's going to be money for tomorrow because I've got a coupon code for everybody at home, which is MFT Pod, MFT POD, which will give everyone a little something something at checkout, including myself. So go pick up a book today, everyone. There you go, folks. Don't ever say we did nothing for you. Not only do you get a free podcast, but you also get a discount on Whitney's book. We'll get you out of here. This is David Green for Rob the Squish Malo Abasolo Skoishing away.

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BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast - 889: How to Build Generational Wealth Without Losing it Along the Way w/Whitney Elkins-Hutten

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