The Iced Coffee Hour - Housing Expert: Everything You’ve Been Told About Real Estate Is WRONG! | Ken McElroy

Episode Date: November 23, 2025

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Okay, when I sell my business, I want the best tax and investment advice. I want to help my kids, and I want to give back to the community. Ooh, then it's the vacation of a lifetime. I wonder if my head of office has a forever setting. An IG Private Wealth advisor creates the clarity you need with plans that harmonize your business, your family, and your dreams. Get financial advice that puts you at the center. Find your advisor at IG Private Wealth.com.

If people just looked at the way money works, it's quite simple. I've owned tens of thousands of apartments, managed billions in real estate, and had every luxury that I could even ask or hope for. And what do you think is the biggest misconception about money that tends to hold people back? That you need it. You just have to find an asset that actually has a tremendous amount of value add to it. And then you need to go find the money, either debt or equity. And how much debt do you have?

About $1 billion. And does it scare you? No, I love it. Here's why the rich own nothing, and you should too. I'm a cash flow guy. Like, I'm very different than you guys. Like, I get where you're coming from, but we get millions a month coming in and cash flow.

And why did you succeed when so many other people fail? Money goes where it's treated best. You know, what is risk really? To me, it's predictability. Everyone can and should buy real estate because you can find money anywhere. What do you see to the people who say it's unethical? to own so much in real estate.

Ken McElroy, thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. You own about 8,000 units of real estate with $1 billion in debt. Does the $1 billion in debt scare you? No, I've been more in debt than that. I get scared when it's not covered by somebody paying it. So, you know, I have 10,000 tenants, so they basically pay it off. Doesn't $1 billion scare you at all? Like, that's a lot to be owing to the banks.

Well, it's kind of like the frog in the pot, you know. You buy one and then you buy two and then you buy three. And next thing you know, you got 8,000 units and you've accumulated debt. And one day I added it up and it was a lot. But, you know, it's one at a time. So each one, there are individual projects that scare me, but certainly not the number. And how much do you have in assets? Probably one and a half to two.

Right now we're probably probably. valued at 1.5 billion, I would say. How do you have one and a half to two? That's a pretty large swing. Based on it, yeah, yeah. So you know how cap rates work? Yeah. Okay, so cap rates went up.

And values went down. That's it. And when cap rates went up, how much money did you effectively on paper lose? When cap rates went up, easily, quarter, quarter million, probably 250 million, 300 million, 400 million, easy. So when cap rates go from four to five, that's a 20 percent. And so how does it feel to lose hundreds of millions? Yeah, it's a great question.

I think a lot of people hang their hat on how much equity they have in a home or something that they own. I don't do that. It's important. I want to have equity. But I'm more concerned on cash flow. So it's just like the single family housing market right now, it's not great in a lot of areas. It's great in some areas, but it's not great in other areas. So when the equity goes down, you know, it was fake equity in the first place.

Now, why not sell if it's fake equity in the first place? And you see the values maybe starting the fall. That would be a good time to exit. I'm a cash flow guy. Like, I'm very different than you guys. Like, I get where you're coming from. I get it. But I like the cash flow.

I like the reoccurring revenue. And, you know, we get millions a month coming in and cash flow. And so if I sell, yes, I get the money. But then what do I do? I stick it in an index fund. You know, I mean, I would rather have it in hard assets that. somebody else is paying off for me. And plus I get the tax benefits, plus it's levered, which I like. I like low leverage, but I do like leverage. Now, Warren Buffett has a great

quote when it comes to leverage. Can we pull that up? I'd love to get your thoughts on this. Sure. To make money they didn't have and didn't need, they risked what they did have and did need. And that's foolish. That is just plain foolish. I don't make any risk what your IQ is. if you risk something that is important to you for something that is unimportant to you, it just does not make any sense. I don't care whether the odds are 100 to one that you succeed or a thousand to one to succeed.

If you hand me a with a thousand chambers, a million chambers in it, and there's a bullet in one chamber, and you said, put it up your temple, how much do you want to be paid to pull it once? I'm not going to pull it. What do you think? Well, it's no surprise.

He's not a real estate guy at all. I mean, if you pull up Zamzell or some of the other people that I follow, they would say something very different. I think the difference here is you guys are paper and I'm not. I don't love the paper asset world. I don't like the volatility of it. I don't feel like I can control it. I can control what debt I have. I can control the interest rate. I can control the monthly payment on whatever I borrow. I don't over leverage. And I can largely, control my apartments. I can control the occupancy, I can control the rents to a certain extent, even though they're also market-driven. I can control a lot of the expenses. So, you know,

what we're really talking about here is control. And the paper asset market, I don't understand it to the point to where I can control. It doesn't have the predictability as real estate. But still, for just a peace of mind perspective, just like a philosophical perspective, If you exited all of your real estate, you're not even exited, you just paid off your debt consolidated. So you had $500 million in real estate or whatever it may be, $600 million. Your life doesn't change between $600 million debt-free and $1.5 billion in real estate with $900 million in debt. Correct, right. That's why it doesn't bother me. But having more wouldn't necessarily change your perspective either, right?

Having more cash flow, assets, debt, having more. So, so like, when am I done and how much is enough? Is that what you mean? Yeah, to a certain degree. Oh, sure. Well, right now I'm rolling out really a legacy play with my kids, so my kids are involved now, and they're going to, you know, succeed. And they will, it's more of a succession.

So really what I'm doing is I'm handing over the reins. But you're right. I don't personally need more. And what do you think is the biggest misconception about money that tends to hold people back? That you need it. Actually, I think that's the issue. I think people believe that they need it to invest. Now, in your world, they do, but in my world, you don't. You just have to find an asset that actually has a tremendous amount of value add to it, something that's broken that you can fix. And then you need to go

find the money, either debt or equity. So how can people practice that in their own life if they don't have the kind of money that you have? Sure. Well, it's no different than what you did here, Jack, you bought this place where we're in right now. It used to be a church. You rented the front. You got the back for free. That's a value ad. It's exactly what I do except on a bigger scale. But Jack had a decent chunk of cash ready to deploy. It took everything. It took everything. I may be borrowed a little bit of money from a very good friend of the left of me. Interest free. Interest free loan. He's not paying anything for this. So now you're just talking about syndication. So this is exactly the point. Like, this is a great deal. This space you guys have is amazing. And that's all I do. I look for

things like that. And I'm very selective. Very selective. I mean, in the last four years, we actually haven't bought very much. So how much then did you buy this year? This year, we'll do about somewhere between six and seven hundred million, depending on what we can close by the end of the year. But how did you say we haven't done that much in the past few years? If this year alone, you've bought 600 million. Well, this year, yeah. But if you go back, three years prior to that. We only did a few deals. And where is the opportunity this year? Why this year are you expanding your portfolio by that much? It's a great question. So what's going on in my world is when interest rates got spiked after inflation in, I think it was June of 22, I believe,

went up to nine. And the Fed raised their rates really, really high. They got really, really aggressive. And so if you were going to build something, buy something, refinance something, you couldn't, you could it because rates were up so high. So that changed the landscape. And what it did is it stopped people from actually pulling out construction loans to be able to build aggressively because construction loans are 8, 9 percent. And of course, they all have to make sense. If you're going to build something, the loan is a big, big piece, not just the land and not what you're going to build, but the loan is a big piece. And so they pulled back. So if you take a look at what's happening in the market right now, things that are that are being leased up today actually got started

three, four years ago. That's how this, that's how the deals work. So you break ground, you don't even really open for a year and a half, and then you have another year to two years of leasing depending on the size of the property. So we have a long runway. And so what, what's happened is there's over 500,000 units hit the market in 24 and 25, the largest ever in history in 50 years. So what you have is you have a big glut of units that got hit into various markets. And it's all a result of low-priced debt. Then the debt repriced. So, and the interesting thing about construction is that in construction loan,

you don't actually have fixed rate. It doesn't exist. It's a floater and it's personally guaranteed. So we have all these units that are being built right now, all over the U.S. And it's creating, it's actually creating really an advantage for the renters because, you know, you can get month free, two months free all over the place. That is a result of the excess supply. Then what is going to happen is come, let's say, 26, just you've got to look at the permits

when you start building these things. It's pretty easy to track. it drops off like a hockey stick. So what you're going to have is you're going to have a housing shortage for apartments again in 27, 28, 29. And then what will happen is you'll start to see rent growth again. And so this business is somewhat predictable if you're paying attention, certainly nationally and a submarket driven.

And that's why particularly we're buying now, because there's blood in the streets right now, because people started building with three and four percent debt, five percent debt construction, and it got reprised while they were under construction. And so their mortgage payments went up a lot. And so they finished the projects. And in some cases, they didn't finish them at all. And they're everywhere.

And so these new projects are all over the place. And they can't get out of them fast enough because of the high-priced debt right now. Now, is that only for multifamily or does that apply for single-family? It's mostly multifamily, right, which is the space I'm in. Got it. I thought you saw that a little bit with single family homes and like the developments that occurred here in Vegas. Like they were trying to like sell off their land at a discount and they were offering

incentives because they were hurting. Or was that not really happening? Those are home builders. So we're talking like Toll Brothers and Holti. What they do is they buy a whole mountain here and then they create these sub-communities within the mountain and they sell the lots and then they build the house. So they're making money on the land. They're making money.

building the house, they're making money on the house. But when they have so much construction going on, they just need volume. So they don't have this high overhead. So what they're doing is they're buying down rates or what's very common right now is that they throw on free upgrades. So let's say the house itself is going to cost you a million dollars to build, but they say, hey, we'll buy down your rate to four and a half percent for 30 years. And we're going to throw in this really nice refrigerator. You get these really nice appliances, this really nice backslash. We're going to throw some money towards these upgrades. That's how they get you in.

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Yeah, that makes sense. So instead, they keep the price high, and then they never want the price to do. below because once it does it starts that cascading effect of like I'm not going to pay you know more than my neighbor did and the new thing is the rate by now yeah well I guess it's not new but but I looked at the Lenar the public reports and they what they're doing is they're putting up under marketing fees right but if you look at the net it's there's a massive discount on what their profitability is based on all those things that you mentioned yeah but multifamily is getting

hit especially hard right now for sure saying yeah yeah what about office space Yeah, well, I've looked, I've owned office. I got, I sold my one, after the pandemic, I sold my last one. But I think that one's going to be in flux, would be my guess, because of the, not only the work from home, but, you know, there's, there's a lot of the Class A space that was priced out really, really high that they're just not seeing a lot of the numbers. So on the topic of property management, what are the most important things to getting, the highest rent possible and what are the worst ROI things to spend money on? Great question. First of all, I don't believe that we should always have the highest rent possible. So there's a time to do that and a time not to do that. So I actually believe that we should be under market in a good, good way. That could be $20, $30, $40, $50 under market. I'm fine with that. Because what's going to happen is my occupancy is going to be higher.

if I'm trying to get that extra $40 or $50, I'm not getting anything for it, maybe higher vacancy, because now I'm pushing into more comps. There's other people trying to find that renter. So I'd rather, especially because I'm a long-term hold guy and low debt, I would rather be highly occupied than have maximum rent. I always know it's there, but it could go away, you know? I mean, rents go like this. So I always know it's there. But I would rather, I just left a place before that on a condo project I did in Vegas. I have the same person in there for 15 years.

And I had a conversation with the guy today. And I said, what do you want to do? He goes, I think we should just keep the rents well below market and renew them for another year. I go, I completely agree. Because in 15 years, I've had zero vacancy. Now, when that guy moves out, that thing's going to be a mess, right? I'm going to have, I already was calculated. I'm going to have probably $10, $15, $20,000 with the work for sure, but they've been there for 15 years.

So that's a better philosophy. Jack, when you're trying to maximize rents, that's actually when you're trying to get a refinance. So, for example, I'm refinancing a property right now that I've owned for 15 years in Flagstaff, Arizona. them. And so six months before, six months ago, we're like, let's refinance this project, you know, and we got so much equity in it. Let's do that. And so we said to the manager, let's push the rents on the one bedroom, let's push the rents on the two bedroom, let's push the rents on the three bedroom at the expense of vacancy. I don't care if I'm at 90% or 88% or 89% because the lender's going to look at the rent role. And if I'm renting units at

that, then the whole rent roll is going to be priced and I'm going to get a better loan. Now, on a hold, I would rather be at 96, 97 percent cash flow all day long. And even though I might have some rent growth in the rent roll, it's not worth it. I'd just rather provide a good value for the person in the market. What was the first property that you bought? That was a two-bedroom, two-bath condo. How much was it? Oh, my God. It was $116,000. And I used to, you my own cash. And this is, I was actually in the property manager business how I started. And, um, this, this crazy Canadian came down. He was, he's buying this project. And he's like, hey, we're going to do a condo conversion in Scottsdale. And, um, so I was helping him put the whole

thing together. And, uh, he brought the money and the debt. And I didn't know, you know, I was young. And, and, um, he said, you should buy one of these. I'm like, well, I got like, 20, 30 grand in the bank, man. There's no way. But I did. I end up doing it. And I barely cash. And I, I mean probably I want to say early in 50 50 bucks a month then 75 then 100 and then after a couple years I sold it which again I was chasing the equity right but then I paid tax on that and then I was like okay now what do I where do I put this now and so that kind of well did it gave me the courage to kind of move forward and start doing this on a bigger scale I started buying more like that and why did you succeed when so many other people fail and you might be noticing that the investment

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The biggest reason when I look at that, I just look at this last run with all these syndicators. Oh yeah, it's been brutal. Right. A lot of people pausing distributions, capital calls. Oh, my gosh. So, okay, so it's a great question at a perfect time. When somebody who raises money online, like, you know, I call them TikTokers. or whatever you want to call them.

And they hand it over to somebody. They oftentimes, they don't know. Like, you know, what are they really investing in? What are the blind spots? What are the risks? And that happened. That was happening for syndications. And so what's happening now is,

so I've been doing this 25 years. I've been through some ups and downs. I went through 2008, you know. And the thing that Saul was, every issue is fixed rate debt, lots of cash, and transparency to the investors. That's it. So have I reported bad news? Of course, a lot over the years. You have to. You have to say, this is going on. We're going to withhold distributions or this is where we are. And so a lot of it is transparency. But a lot of it is also based on what they paid, what kind of debt they used.

because what I was seeing, and so when I said to you earlier that I wasn't buying during that period, it's because I was losing out to syndicators. So I'd be in deals. I'd be literally at best and final with deals, 20, 30, 40, 50 million dollar deals. And, you know, I have a 25-year track record.

I have our own financials. Obviously, I know the operating expenses. And we have an analyst and we have investor relations, people that help to figure out what these should be running at. And what was happening is that people were buying these at one, two, three, four, five million more than my top price. So I have a, I have a going in price, a medium price, and then, you know, I got a shutter down price as most people do that have been in the game a while. And so I saw this coming when we were losing deals because don't

forget, I get the rent rolls, I get the financials. I'm looking at the exact same thing as somebody else. And so I was seeing these trades at these high numbers. Now, we couldn't have foreseen the interest rates going up for sure. But one thing that you could have foreseen is getting fixed rate debt versus floater. That was a choice. So if you were to simply then explain what led you to succeed while many other people fail, how would you answer that? Property management. So you manage properties more effectively than others do? Well, also, I see what I'm buying. So that's the, you know, operations is everything. So hopefully that's super simple. Yeah. It's, it's all it is. It's, it's math. It's rents minus expenses. So how are you getting

the math right while other people that are professional real estate investors get it? Are they? But what's the difference? What's a professional real estate investor to you? Is it, is it somebody that has property management experience and understands operations? I don't think so. They're, they're money raisers. What is a professional investor? Really? So you're saying the syndicators, fail because they're not necessarily professional real estate investors. A lot of the times, they're just marketers, they're money raisers. Well, of course, for sure. Look at their track record. I mean, some of these people have been in business a year, two years, three years. Of course. And they hire a property manager, if not try to do it themselves, but they don't know what to

ask. It's just like you guys. I mean, you know, you've been doing YouTube forever, right? You know exactly the ins and outs based on your personal experience. Somebody knew. That's how I looked at it. This is somebody new in the space. That's it. How did you get into property management? Why that, of all things? Yeah, it was not strategic. So I will tell you.

Seems very stressful. No. No? Well, let me. I'll just walk you through it. So I ended up, I ended up getting offered free rent in college for exchange of collecting checks, doing the maintenance, cleaning units.

And I did that on a 60-unit building up in Washington, which is where I'm from. So for me, it was a way to not pay rent. And I grew up in construction. My dad was actually in the Navy, in the C-Bs. And so I always knew how to fix stuff. That was not a problem. So I went in there and I fixed everything I could. And I, it's property management is not that difficult.

it's not it's if you rent a really good people with really good credit and you manage the expenses and you have to learn how to do all those things you can be super successful with it because high turnover bad tenants are what everyone talks about so there's all these things that you can mitigate as a property manager and so so what i would go jack to a property we pass on so many properties. Why? Because like I went to one recently and it was it was a good price in a horrible neighborhood and based on all my experience of having to manage and stuff like that and knowing I'm not going to get good tenants, they're just not going to move here because of the school system and the crime and all that stuff. I pass because you can't manage your way out of a bad

neighborhood. So there are things that you learn as you buy. And and so one of those is what to buy, what price to pay, and, you know, is there forced equity? I love forced equity and everything I buy. I don't buy and hope the market goes up. I buy with a whole plan. I buy with vacancy. I buy with 25-year-old units that need $10,000 or $15,000 in them, and I can slowly over time, you know, improve the rent base. It's very strategic. It's not short term. It's not three, four, five years. at all. It's 10. You know, it's even more than that. How did you meet Robert Kiyosaki? I'm in a group called E.O. YPO. And one of my friends said, listen, this guy just wrote this book called Rich Head Porta. I had not read it. I was already doing my thing. And at the time, like I said,

when I was syndicating, he said, you really need, you really need to meet him. He's exited some stuff. He's doing okay and so I went and met with Robert and Kim and I started showing them deals and uh almost a year later they invested in one of our deals but what he did was he said you should come to one of my events and and I went and I was I said wow this is really something he had four or five hundred people there he was teaching them and he he he I went up and started talking about real state and debt and all that kind of stuff and cash flow and he ended up um we ended up because I'm my really close friends after that. And what's your relationship with Robert like today?

It's great. And he's texted me three times this morning. What is those conversations like? Like, what is he texting you about? Well, it just depends, right? Robert's a character. I was not expecting that. We had him here on the podcast, and he was saying somehow.

Like, he's funny. Well, I think you guys will, you know, as you get older, you just have that, you know, I don't care. I don't give him. He's not care. Yeah. That's what I say, like, I don't know if that's F you money. if that's like, what are you going to say to me?

It's a little bit of both, I think. Also, yes, I, you know, we have, we study together. We go to a ranch a couple times a year, literally in West Texas and study together. We study books. We're on a, we're on a Zoom every week talking about, right, this next week is actually Thursday is going to be, why did silver hit $50? You know, we always are picking something. So it just depends.

Most of, obviously he's an investor with me. And so I talked to him about those kinds of things. But mostly he's just a good friend. But he can be a loose cannon at times, that's for sure. Now, I think for the average person, they just want to get started buying their first home. Yeah. Do you think that home prices today are sustainable

at the levels that they are? Not at all. No, no, no. Well, here's the interesting thing. If you look at, let's say, Phoenix, Atlanta, you know, Nashville, some of the areas that were overbuilt, Austin, that'd be in another one.

What goes up must come down, right? And so not every market is like that. To me, Gramut always has to be cash flow-based 100%. So I don't buy on a capital gain strategy. Don't like it. So I always want to have that cash flow. So where are prices? So I don't look at the home price like a stock.

I don't look at it that way. Do I want home appreciation? Of course. Doesn't ever want the same way that they want stock appreciation. But what I look at is cash flow. So if I can buy a $500,000 house, which you can still buy in Scottsdale, and it rents at $3,500 a month, and, you know, I can figure out my expenses. Then I tie it back to my return. That's on an investment standpoint. One of the one of the problems, I think we have, going back to the same example I used with multifamily, is when rates went up, it also affected home builders. It slowed everything down. And so what the way to cure high prices is high prices. And the way to cure the rent price, bring that down, the way to cure home prices and bring that down is supply. That's it. So if there was a lot of supply hitting the market, like I went through in 2008, 2009, prices came down, you know, like a balloon, boom. And we haven't seen that yet, which is really, really interesting.

In fact, I think we've had a little bit of rent growth, one or two percent or something this year. I wanted to come down. The problem is, is that if it does, everybody's going to bitch. No, it's down, right? Now I've lost my equity. But, again, I look at cash flow. So, you know, sometimes I have many times I bought things where, you know, cash flows and the price goes down. It happened to me in Austin, actually. I bought apartments

in 05-06 and the values went down. But what saved me were the tenants, the cash flow and it got me through. And then eventually Austin came rockety back. And that's when we did a 1031 and moved to money. What about for the person who's not looking at cash flow? They just think, is it worth it for me to buy a house today at these prices, at these interest rates, or should I continue renting? It's a heck of a point. That's exactly. why I'm bullish on renters, you know, and I know you've known, I've talked about renter nation. I don't like this. It's not, I have two kids in the 20s and they're supposed to be able to rent, build credit, buy home. But they can't. It's unaffordable. And so the reality is it's far better to

rent today than to buy, far better. From a, you know, from a cash flow standpoint, right? And that's not even covering the mortgage is one thing. But then there's the, I BankRate did a great study that said it's $1,500 a month just to cover all the other stuff, insurance and CAPEX and all the other things. So the real cost is actually quite high. And so what we need is we need better priced homes, you know, and I think people are trying to solve that right now. But it's a problem. And so if you take a look at what's really interesting, one of the facts, one of the things that I follow is a home ownership rate. So home ownership rate under Obama got to 69.1 percent.

Okay. And if you look at the presidents before that, it was Bush, he's like American Dream, even Clinton, American Dream, American Dream. And it pushed home ownership rate up. This episode is brought to you by FedEx. These days, the power movement. isn't having a big metallic credit card to drop on the check at a corporate launch. The real power move is leveling up your business with FedEx intelligence and accessing one of the biggest data networks powered by one of the biggest delivery networks.

Level up your business with FedEx, the new power move. Well, it's also what created the great financial crisis. Now, it's a whole story there. Of course, we don't need to go down that road. But essentially, it popped, right? And then it went all the way down to 63, 64%. Now, why that might not seem so meaningful, when you go that far down,

you're talking about millions of people went from homeownership to rent. And that's actually what created the rent growth that we just had. You know, it's not because, you know, I magically started doing it. Like, what happened with these is all these people, home affordability got out of reach. And all of a sudden, it didn't become a choice as much as a

necessity, unfortunately. And so we had all these people being forced over into the rental side. And just from 2020, it's over four million people. I'm with you. I believe that people should, I believe that rental should be a step toward homeownership. And I believe that people should be in hard assets and not be renters for life. How concerning is it the average home buyer right now is 40 years old. That's horrible. Yeah, the median. I saw that. Yeah, the median. It's super concerning. And that's another reason why I think, you know, I'm not, I didn't start this freight train. I'm just trying to be somewhere out in the middle of it. You know, the reason I'm buying rentals right now, the reason I'm bullish on multifamily and rentals right now is because I don't see an affordability

solution yet. And so when I've when I've seen that in the past, it certainly happened with Clinton and Bush. They said, listen, everybody needs to own home. And then they moved from apartments to home to single families. They bought single families. Now, that didn't end well for a lot of people. But the reality is it's heading that way now. Now, what do you think of Ben Shapiro saying that, you know, homes aren't necessarily unaffordable? It's just you can't afford to live in Manhattan or Beavis. Beverly Hills and there are plenty of houses out there. Yeah. You could buy right now for $200,000 that would be cheaper than renting and it might not be the best area. But you could buy a home today in your price point if you were willing to move there.

In Las Vegas, you can find places for like in the 200,000 range. Obviously, it's not going to be in the nicest area. It's not going to be the nicest home or realistically condo. You can still find places for 300. Yeah. And they're nice houses. Everything in Vegas is like a 20 minute drop. Yeah.

With 300 grand, you get a great house. Cole, if you're listening to this, that's my brother. I'm trying to convince him to move to Las Vegas because he lives in Seattle and Seattle is horribly expensive. My hometown. Horribly expensive. It's my hometown.

You're right. And it's just out of reach to buy a place there. And I'm telling him he should move to Las Vegas because he works remotely and he can buy a piece of real estate. I would say he should rent. Because the rents are so affordable in Vegas.

He is renting. But he's like, I want to have a garage. I want to have a backyard. You can do more with that. Those are luxuries, Cole. So I was looking at a house that was down the street from me like a half a mile away.

and they're selling for like $500,000, but you could rent the house for like $2,100. I would rather rent the house for $2,100,000 than buy it. That math works. So I think just Cole, I would rent instead. I think a lot of people should be renting in this market. What do you think? What's he going to do?

He wants to buy, but buying is going to be difficult in Seattle. I hope he can buy because I know a lot of people, they have this like emotional attachment towards buying. And I would say the exact same thing. I have a friend that lives in Manhattan, Sean Rizwan, if you're watching this, and he wants to buy over there, and it's not a good idea.

And we were talking with Ryan Sourhan about it because he's the New York real estate guy, and I was like, my friend in New York wants to buy a place, but it's too difficult. Yeah. And there are co-ops there, and then you have to circumvent the co-op, and they have very strict rules,

and you're just, you're overpaying for a piece of real estate. You have no control over. The interesting thing is, is when I was your age, I would go to New York, and it was the same. Like, everybody else was the same.

Like, it was all. always like significantly above everywhere, right? Seattle wasn't, by the way. It was less expensive. Yeah, yeah. That's where I grew up. I imagine Las Vegas was dirt cheap. I lived here 20 years ago. It was crazy. I come back. I'm like, I cannot believe the prices. I got a funny story on this. In 2010, I made an offer on a property in Las Vegas. Side unseen, it was listed for $69,000. And I got the offer except that it was a short sale. So it had to go through the bank to get approved at that. time and the bank could take, you know, a year, two years, whatever. So I get the offer accepted and then I drive to the area after it was accepted and I think this is in the middle of nowhere

in Las Vegas. Who would live out here? It was like 20 minutes from the strip. I didn't see it. It was dirt lots around. It's like to me it was so far out. It was on the edge of Las Vegas. And then by the time the short sale was approved was like two years later. I had already bought something else and I declined it. The bank, I think at the time, wanted like 75 grand. I thought it wasn't worth. It was so far out, so I declined on it. I looked it up recently.

Oh, you're not supposed to do that. Just for fun, I didn't realize that was Summerlin. It was Summerlin. It was Summerlin. How much was it? 75 grand. Now it's probably about $400 and something thousand dollars. So not awful, but it was in the middle of Summerlin.

And I remember seeing that 15, 16 years ago. And just having it be in the middle of nowhere. There are places to buy real estate that right now are very, very, very cheap if you want to buy. But it seems like buying is a very emotional decision at this point and not so much a numbers-based one. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah. In the path of growth would be one of those places, I would think. But yeah, you never know.

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prices right now are not sustainable what are you expecting then for the price of single family homes do you think that they will be a correction they will go down i don't no i don't i don't i first of all i think 60% of mortgages are under 40% or 4% they refinance So you got a tremendous amount of people sitting on these low rates. And so what we're seeing right now is we're seeing broken Airbnbs or, you know, flippers or something like that that got caught. And that's kind of adding to a lot of inventory. But, you know, if you go back and look at MLS, what's supposed to be average is four to six months on the MLS.

That's supposed to be average. That's historical. We're not even there yet. So, you know, do we have a supply problem in some areas for sure, but not in all areas? And so I don't, I don't, I don't see home prices going down in the foreseeable future. And I think the only thing that's going to make them go down is more supply or there's going to be a massive shift somehow. So what's driving up the cost of real estate? If it's just not a smart thing to be buying, what is keeping that outside of that

smart to invest a range. Yeah. Well, and that's why we're buying below replacement costs, actually, is because that is the play right now, we believe, is if we can buy things that are, you know, like you've all driven by things that look amazing when they're built and 10 years later it's vacant. Well, you're going to buy that for pennies on the dollar. So the question is, can you make your cash flow?

So to answer your question, And the components to build something are not a secret. It's land plus the construction plus the interest rate to build it. That's it. And then is there margin on there or not? There's only three things. Now, inside of the, what does it cost to build it? There's lots of things you can do on the framing, on the appliances, on the flooring,

on the roofing, you know, on the drywall, concrete and all that stuff. All those components mean something. And they ran up during the pandemic, as you know, the supply shortage. You know, we're a builder too. So we have hundreds of units under construction right now. We got caught with that, you know, cost went up a lot. Now we've seen a repricing. And so why would we see a repricing?

We've seen a repricing because just like anything, well, my partner said, we're getting electricians. They're calling us back, you know, less construction. means more contractors looking for less work. And so you have a little bit more negotiating room. So believe it or not, our prices are actually much, much better than they were just several years ago. The interest rate is still high, though. How much does government policy affect housing prices?

Everything. It's everything. Regulations are everything. You know, rent control, big one, rent caps, big one. property tax, big one, all those things. You know, government has their hand in utilities. What is the worst thing a government could do for their local real estate market? Well, I think if what's happened is when we saw Oregon pass

rent control, for example, and I understand why. Listen, I mean, I'm a massive proponent of affordable housing. It's just can't, we can't build it. it's just it costs too much so when Oregon passed that law and California of course has a lot of those laws and so does New York and so is some of the other you know so I was talking to one of the bigger lenders um in the country out of San Francisco and I said hey like where are you guys where's the money going right where's the big money going he's like not on the coasts and what he basically said there was you know when you cap your ability to profit

from the market rent, and then you are exposed to the property tax increases and the other things. So the government can essentially increase your expenses, and they can also cap your income. The money, as you guys know, money goes where it's treated best. I mean, that's why you're talking to your brother about coming to Vegas versus Seattle. It's the exact same thing. People are smart. They make those kinds of decisions. And so I've had people call me and say, you know, I can't.

sell my I can't sell my property in Oregon and Portland, Oregon, specifically because, you know, it falls under this rent control. And he said, I'm getting, I'm getting hammered on the expenses. And so his profit has gone significantly down. So he's worried. So when you talk about regulations, that's the first thing that comes to mind. What do you see to the people who say it's unethical to own so much in real estate? Yeah. Well, there, I mean, I understand. I mean, if they don't own anything, that, I mean, that's actually what's happening right now. Just take a look at, you know, what just went down in New York, right? Like, I mean, shouldn't rent be free?

Shouldn't transportation be free? Shouldn't everything be free? I mean, right? Welcome aboard via rail. Please sit and enjoy. Please sit and sip. Play. Post.

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Or say that corporations shouldn't be buying real estate? Who should own it then? I guess would be my question back to you. Somebody asked to own it. You want the government telling it? Their logic is that corporations should not buy real estate. Investors should not buy real estate. That real estate is a human right to have housing. and therefore the only people who should be buying real estate are owner, users, or people buying one property, one property, one person, let's just say. Well, I know there's a lot of people that believe that. If you take a look at, you know, government has failed on housing.

I mean, there's history just proves itself. We don't even go down that road. They're not good at it, right? So then where do you go? And you go to the private sector. So if you want to throw regulations around that, then go ahead. But right now there aren't any.

but, you know, corporations have gotten the game for sure. I mean, they started buying up single families, you know, after the JFC. And, you know, but listen, I get the argument,

but what they don't understand is who's going to build them? Seriously, like answer that question. We have, what, five, six million undersupplied right now? I mean, that's where we are. We have, depending on the study, I mean, if the low income housing coalition is even higher.

But National Multi-Housing Council, the National Department Association, Realtors, Zillow, they all say it's $4, $5, $6 million. So, okay, so where's that going to come from? Who's going to do it? Somebody. So is you going to do it by one-offs? Like, it's not going to work. The math doesn't work. You know, if maybe, maybe you get it to stability and then you implement a regulation, I guess.

But, you know, we have a supply problem. So to better understand this, your claim is that if they make it harder to, for people to buy multiple houses, for institutions to buy real estate, and there's, you know, people with less money bidding on houses, it will decrease the cost of housing, which will disincentivize builders from building more houses, which will disrupt the real estate market. Well, I don't know if it's a claim as much as it's a fact. Like, you take a look at, um, where, we're undersupplied. Let's just, let's cross that box out first. Do you guys believe we're under supplied? You know, we've talked to several people in real estate who say there is not a housing shortage. It's just people can't afford to live where they want to live. And if you look throughout the country and you go to other areas, there's plenty of housing for everybody. So the reason I think that's not right is because of the 40-year median that you brought up. Why is it? But that's,

but that's more to do with prices. And it's more to do with people not making an income to support the house. Correct. But they could. That's my point. But those people could buy a house somewhere else in the country. But supplies everything. Like, like, if you guys, you want to go to the Super Bowl, you're going to pay a lot for the tickets because everybody wants them. Or they're going to go to one that nobody shows up to.

Well, the tickets are going to be half off. It's a supply demand problem. Yeah, but you can't add more supply necessarily to dense cities. Like, let's just say the coastal areas without tearing down what's already there and building up. That's 100% true, which is why we have urban sprawl, right? It's been going on a long time for sure. But this is a supply problem. It's, it's, it's, we have, if you go back and look at, um, one of the things that you guys, um, when in 2008, I don't know, you guys were 18, I guess.

Um, I was 18. There's 10. How old? It's 10. All right. Say it again, Jack. Hold. 10 years old?

10 years old. Well, so. here's what happened and I went through this. In 2008, it was bad, right? People were losing their homes and it was not good, right? And there was a big repricing. Here's what did not happen. Building 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012. So when there's big corrections, and by the way, here's what did not stop. People kept being born. People kept graduating from college.

You know, the population growth, as you guys know, is growing by a million to two million a year. Okay. So the math, it's really simple. Like, you have, when you have that many people, during that period of time, we needed, we needed housing. So we never corrected from about 2008 to about 2018. And then it started again, actually. we started getting going again, right? And we started and then pop. We had the pandemic and then now, you know, now we're in the situation. But we never caught up. This is a, you know,

this is going back to nearly a 20 year, that started nearly a 20 year problem. And if you look at the 20 years prior to that, we didn't have problems. And, you know, there's a, there's a flow when when people are born and people graduate and people go move into their parents or out of their parents or whatever, there's a flow. Household formation is another big piece, but there's a flow. And if you restrict the supply of the flow of the demand, which is the people, you're going to have high rent, high prices. And then that's just a fact. And that's where we are today. And, you know, the last time we saw low prices was after the GFC or during the, the GFC. Can you make an argument against why institutions should not own homes? Yeah. Oh, yeah. Yeah. First of all,

last I looked, they only own like 600,000 houses, which is still a lot. Don't give you wrong. I think that's too many, you know. And, and, but, you know, I don't believe, I think real estate should stay at Main Street and Wall Street should stay at Wall Street. That's what I believe. And it is a lucrative business real estate. And I think what happened, well, I know what happened, because I've been in this business for 30-some years. In 2008, when there was all those single-family homes on the balance sheets,

and there was a lot. I want to say at one time, it was it 6, 8 million homes on the MLS or something, the Wall Street got involved. they started buying them for pennies on the dollar. And they didn't know how to manage them. And I had friends getting into this business trying to figure that out. They were actually managing for some of these big, big institutions. And then they started exiting.

And then, of course, you saw Zillow kind of got into that game and Open Door. And some of these others got into the game. And who knows if they were price fixing or not, who knows. But at the end of the day, is that a corporation? You know, and so I think, you know, I, I, I don't think it should be there personally. Yeah, I don't think so fun. I did this whole analysis on Wall Street buying real estate, and when I came down to it,

just unbiased, it's really unpopular to say this, but they have very little to no impact on housing prices at all. I agree. And it's really hard for people to accept that Wall Street isn't to blame because it's so easy to point and be like, oh, this faceless corporation's buying single family home. No, they're not. They're not buying it. They don't care about Susie down the street listing her single family. home and bidding against you. It's 75% other owner users. That's it. And then another 10%

mom and pop investors. And then everyone else is like a mix between someone buying like a vacation home or a second property for themselves. The corporations really only buy about 1% of properties and most of what they do buy are development communities that were never meant to be for sale to begin with. It's not profitable for them to like buy Susie's home over there. by Joe's home over here and like manage them separately. And imagine like BlackRock going and trying to like fix up someone's faucet. It's like they're not going to waste their time on this. They're not going to waste your time on that.

And so people want to say like, oh yeah, LLC shouldn't own a home. Well, everyone owns their house in an LLC for liability purposes. And then the corporation comes in. They buy a whole complex to rent it out that never would have existed if not for them. So I actually think I'm going to say it, I think they're actually doing a service to the housing market by providing a lot of homes that never will. would have existed otherwise. So you're saying they're guaranteeing some sort of income for developers and then the developers will, based off of that note or whatever it is, build a community?

Correct. So you have like invitation homes, we'll buy all this land and they'll make like 200 single family homes. They're not interested in going and developing all of that to sell them individually. But instead they do it with the contingency that like, you know, another large conglomerate is going to buy this whole community and rent it out because they could operate at scale. That never would have existed had it not been for the development and the corporation going in, and that corporation is not doing it with their own money. They're taking investor money. And so, like, you could go in or grandma could go in, invest some of her pension in this fund that rents out the houses. It's not like some evil dude pulling the strings. It's really unpopular.

I say it. People hate the idea. But instead, the biggest competition is, your neighbor, is your friend, is your cousin going and getting a 7% mortgage and buying the house and overpaying for it because they fell in love with the house. That's the reality of it. Yep. It's worth mentioning. So in terms of ethics, it really doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. If anything, okay, I'm going to be one last thought here. I do think it makes sense if someone buys a second, third, or fourth home, that property taxes should not be as subsidized as they are in a primary residence.

So maybe if you buy a primary, you get a property tax decrease, but the person buying their third home as an investment, they get a slight increase every year. Something like that. So it's a small little tax. But with that being said, you should also be able to carry your note

if you were to buy a new property. That would be awesome. That's impossible to, to actually implement, but I'm in favor of that, but it wouldn't be possible. It just won't happen though. No. So for the average person out there to get into real estate, it's incredibly unaffordable.

How does someone who doesn't make that much money get into real estate by their first property? Well, to live in, it would be very difficult. To invest in, not so difficult. So, again, I always go back to the basics. I have friends right now that are crushing it in Ohio, as an example. And they're raising money, somebody else's money, and they're using that as the down payment, and they're signing on a debt and at cash flows. And then they split the cash flow with the investor.

So that's how you buy real estate with no money. It's not about money. And I think that if there's one thing that people, like, to hang on, it's that. I need money before I can do something. It's just not true. You actually have to find something that you can create massive value with or cash flows and then find an investor that will ride along with you, you know, just like you did here. It's the same. Is there any area you won't invest in? Oh, yeah. Which ones? Well, areas that are highly regulated, for sure. We've never invested in California. Why not? Because of those.

reasons, mostly around the eviction laws. Now, I just believe that they're pretty heavily weighted toward the renter. I know personally people that owned small places, two units, four units, eight units, that they rented to the wrong person and they stayed in there for a long time and they couldn't get them out and they still owed the mortgage, they still owed the expenses, and they lost the property. They had to file bankruptcy. So, um, You know, those kinds of things are big. Property taxes are big. Insurance is one.

So I almost bought in Florida, but the insurance rates are over double what they are in Arizona. If you buy in the Gulf of Texas, like say Houston, Baytown area, they're double. And Dallas is less than Houston, as an example. So there are things that you know and you find out over time that, you know, you want to be careful of. but government regulation, anything that capture income and expenses that, you know, could go out of control. The other one, of course, on a, on a smaller level, are these HOAs. You know, what's happening right now with the HOAs is that they're, you know, they're managed by people that are just regular people, right? They don't understand, you know, like a 10-year

CAP-X study is and how much money should be put into the reserve. account every month. And so what happens is you're starting to see these big assessments hit. Oh, yeah, I got hit with so many. So that's what it is, right? It's just poor management. And, you know, I've done a bunch of these types of buildings. And so, you know, that's another one. I know, my wife had a listing. She sells real estate. And the price was a one bedroom was like 300 grand for a nice building. an elevator and beautiful billing, but little dated. The HOA was 800, the HOA, not the payment, you know, not, you know, so, so that's just the HOA. So the seller was having a top time selling it and there was also an assessment. So, so, so, so I think, I think HOAs and condo projects are

going to be the next ones that you see poorly run, where you're going to, to start to see because as these properties get older they need roofs they need paint any parking lot they need all that kind of stuff i just walked on to you know this morning and i was looking at the i was looking at the trees and i was like you know that's what i do when i walk properties i look at the deferred maintenance and drives me nuts and you know immediately i'm calculating all the costs um that somebody is neglected and whether it's the pool the common areas or or whatever um and that rolls up for a condo owner into their into their pocket So I had an interesting HOA story.

I didn't share this with you recently. But a couple years ago, I got a letter on my front door that said, you need to trim your palm trees. And so what did I do? I called my landscaper. I said, hey, could you trim the palm trees? He said, yes. And then he came over.

He trimmed them. I solved it in a few days. I emailed evidence to the local HOA. And I said, hey, look, I trimmed the palm trees. Here's a picture. And then they said, oh, thank you so much. I'm forwarding this over. I'm just going to use the name Jim.

I'm forwarding this over to Jim. Jim says, thanks so much. I appreciate the evidence. Everything should be good to go. And then I emailed back and I'm like, just confirming everything is good to go. Never heard back from Jim again.

And then I assumed everything was okay. Fast forward two years to a couple weeks ago and I get a letter in the mail from the HOA and they said, just letting you know, you owe a bunch of money and fees because we increased the HOA dues. And I didn't know that.

I had it on auto pay. I assumed it was like Spotify, like Netflix, when they increase the monthly subscription. It just automatically pulls the correct amount. They never notified me of a higher HOA. It was only in the documents that they provided for the new budget of the year, which I'm not going to read. It's like a 20-page document. That's where they informed me of the new dues. And so I had all of these back fees for not paying it.

And then they had penalties. They charged interest. They did everything to make me owe hundreds of dollars because they didn't notify me, except in this new budget document that they sent out like 10 months ago. I go into the HOA office because they don't answer their phone. I tried calling them for weeks. I show up to the HOA office, wait in the waiting room, go into the ladies' room, and she says, oh, on top of these fees, you also owe fees from two years ago for this palm tree

incident. And I owed over $1,500 dollars. Yes. And this is because they started charging me $50 a week for not trimming my palm trees, even though I sent evidence. I said, here's my email chain. I had it solved. Here's all the evidence you need.

And then she said, who were you talking to Jim? And I said, yeah, I was talking to Jim. And then she said, I don't know Jim. And I was like, well, what do you mean? This is who I was forwarded to. And she said, oh, that Jim passed away. And he had actually passed away. And he never fully confirmed that I had submitted evidence of me trimming the palm trees.

Whoa. And then I was like, well, I am so sorry. you hear that. That's awful because I was all up in a rage. Like, I was ready to like, okay, well, then I did this and I did this and you told me to do this and I did this. And then she told me he passed away and I was like, oh my gosh, I'm so sorry to hear that. But also, what are we doing about these fees? And then she said, it should probably be okay. I'm like, what do you mean probably? Like, I did what you told me to do. Imagine she passes away the next day too. And then I just have to deal with this again in two years and I have $10,000.

So I don't know. H-O-A is like this was a whole pain in the butt because of things. that are so simple to solve. Notify me instead of just, they never notified me that I was not paying the full AHAA mail. No, they didn't. They never sent it. They never emailed me. They never sent me a notice

that I was not paying the correct amount in fees. It was only in the budget. And then finally I got this notice saying you owe hundreds of dollars in fees. By law, it has to be over mail. You probably got... They never sent me in the mail. I went up to them and they said, oh yeah, we never sent it to you. So maybe there's something there.

If you guys know a lawyer, I'm kidding. The HOA is fine. It's not that expensive. But it's this whole ordeal that you have to deal with with HOAs that you don't have to deal with if you don't have an H-O-WA. I think it would be great to do a parody like a movie, you know, like an H-O-A board?

Yeah. Would that be the best? Gosh. It was actually comical. It was comical walking into the H-O-A office. I go into this lady's office and there are boxes of paper stacked. Floor to ceiling in this tiny, tiny office, papers strewn across her entire desk.

There's a check sitting right here. There's another check over here. And it's just like, she's like, okay, let me find this. My desk is cleaner than that. It's still messy, though. But it's a complete mess. Like there's no organizational skills going on whatsoever. I was honestly impressed.

I thought it was a governmental agency based off of how the DMVs. On my HOA, this was like two years ago. I saw the budget and I was blown away at how much they were spending on things that you could just get done for way cheaper. Like I'll give you an example. We have a whole exercise room. They are leasing the equipment. And for the cost of the lease, you could just buy the equipment outright within, in six months. So why lease

the equipment? And they say, well, it's for maintenance issues. But you could own all of it in six months of the cost of the lease. That doesn't make sense. And then I saw they do decorations on the front gate leading up and they put Christmas lights on some of these things. That was $12,000.

I was like $12,000. It's maybe $500 with the Christmas lights. And it's maybe two days worth of someone time. How is that $12,000 to Christmas lights? The other one is that they have a roaming patrol car that goes around the entire neighborhood 24-7, the lease cost of that. You could just buy the car outright within about a year.

Why lease it? And again, they say, well, it's for maintenance so that, you know, it's under warranty and it doesn't matter. You own it outright. You could just keep buying a new car every year for the same cost as leasing it. And you get to have an extra car left over. So it's all these little things that, like, when you have a budget of all these, you know, hundreds of homes going together.

You know, over, I think it's just people are getting crazy bids because it's an H-O-A. And they're like, all right, well, let's just do it. We have the cash of that. Yeah. Let's just do it. All right. That's fine. No one's like sitting in nickel and diamond.

It's not their own money. Correct. It's someone else's money. That's right. It's inefficient to sit there and be like, all right, I'm going to get three bids and then I'm going to go and negotiate all these line by line. Yeah. And it's easier to just charge $20 more dollars per house, 50 more dollars.

Yeah. And they don't know how either, right? Because most of them don't maybe even own real estate, Except maybe the one that they're in. Our HOA is comprised of other homeowners. Oh. But there is an over like seeing management company on top of that. Is it profitable HOA?

No, I don't believe H.O.A can be profitable. Like there's going to be money left over in reserves. They can pay the H.O.A. Like board members, correct? No. Uh-uh. No, they don't. Oh, really? Yeah.

I did not know that. That's why you had such good service. That's interesting. Yeah. They donate their time to do this. It's like you don't get paid to be on the H-OA. You do it because you want. want to better the community.

There's no way that my HOA office does not profit. They maybe can deduct maybe like a salary or they can deduct an office space. They just have to deposit some of those checks. Yeah. But no one's making money. No one will notice. Yeah. Charge me a few extra fees and whatnot.

Yeah. I don't think they're making money. Okay. I don't think it's something that's like a profitable endeavor. Typically they're not. Yeah. Run an HOAW. Right.

Normally they're nonprofit. But what they fail to do is the, the deferred maintenance piece, right? Like the, you know, the capax, we call it, or capital improvements that, that, you know, what the normal HOA do's are supposed to cover are just your normal operating costs, like the landscaping and the water and the sewer

and the electric and that kind of stuff. But the buildings, the roofs, the parking lots, you know, all the stuff, maybe a big break in a water line or something, that's typically not covered in that monthly. That's called a reserve, and that's what most of them fail at. And then, of course, they're in a precarious situation, too, because they're your next

your neighbor, and they're like, hey, it's 100 more a month or 50 more a month. And then, you know, then you don't want to meet them out by the mailbox, right? Yeah. So you have that too. I got a dude that surveillance is houses. And then you get an email that says, hey, we have a violation. Of course. He'll just walk around and kind of, like, look and see, like, if I have dead plants in front,

he'll be like, just cite that. Oh, I've gotten cited for having a trash can by my... Of course. A trash can left out. That was a no-no. Can't do that. You know, it makes the neighborhood look nice and uniform, but it's like sometimes a little wiggle room here might be kind of nice. Yeah, I know.

We had one where all the cars had to be in the garage every night. Now, I like cars like you. So that became a problem. You know, I had four-car garage. but, you know, sometimes they spilled out, right? And I was getting notices all the time. So that's another one. And especially if somebody comes and spends a night, you know,

well, I'd say a family member and they're there for a week or something, I would get notices. What cars do you have? Right now, well, I have a 57 Porsche Speedster. I have a 458 Ferrari and I've got a Range Rover. So just the three now. The Speedster is awesome. Yeah, great car.

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I've had a Shopify store. Graham's coffee company was ran off of Shack. Shopify. We've had so many people that have came on this podcast that have had very successful Shopify stores. It's $1 to try it out for a month. Couldn't recommend it more at Shopify.com slash ICH. Thank you so much to Shopify for sponsoring this episode. What do you think of the 50-year mortgage? Do you think that that would benefit most people? Is that a good thing? Well, it's interesting. There are 50-year mortgages out there. They're New Zealand, Japan. There are places that have them. And there's pros and cons, of course.

I'm a proponent of getting people, back on the affordability thing, what it does is it lowers the payment, you know, and that is if you're using apples to apples, the same interest rates, let's say. So there's a big what-if, but I'm a proponent of getting people into houses. And if it's based on the monthly

and their monthly, then I'm a proponent. Now, I don't like the fact that's being kicked down the road past 30, you know, and I think, you know,

the 30 was debated, I don't know if, you know, by Roosevelt back in the, what was it before the 30? I don't even know. It's called basically cash and short-term high-interest debt.

So before the 1930s, it was customary for people to either save up and buy them in cash or what they would do is take out a short-term loan that would, was less say six percent.

Yeah, like a hard money loan or something. Yeah, basically like six percent for five years. And the expectation is that, you know, by the time the loan comes due, you would either have the money to pay off the loan or you would just get another loan. Was the house collateral for the loan? Correct. Yeah. But what happened is that in the 1920s Great Depression, people were losing their homes because they couldn't afford to pay back these loans. The government got involved because so many people were becoming homeless.

And they started to develop the 30-year mortgage that was initially for new constructions. that you'd be able to buy a new house, get a 30-year mortgage. That was a success, and then they rolled it out to older homes as well. Yeah. But pushing a mortgage out just means in debt longer, right? So that's not good. But it also gets people in what I would consider to be a hard asset. I believe that we're going to see inflation, you know, in the next 10 years, right?

I mean, even the Fed, I think they're right around three. They're on their website. They say they're good with two. So even that is 20 to 30 percent, depending on how you pencil it. So I think if somebody can be in a hard asset, no matter what, I think that they're going to benefit from inflation. Yeah. The other thing I do want to mention that going back to the 1930s to 50s is that the average home size at the time was like 1,300. Yeah, small. My grandparents, they bought their house in West Los Angeles. They paid $36,000 for their house in the 1950s, but it was a lot of. 1,100 square feet. Oh, wow.

And that was for a family of five, by the way. It was them with three children and a three-bedroom, one bathroom, 1-bathroom house, 1,100 square feet, five people. And now people want a 4,000-square-foot house. A starter home is like 2,800 square feet. That's probably even small for a start. A starter home now is probably minimum 3,000 square feet. My mom still has a house I grew up.

pin. Really? Yeah. Yeah, they bought it for $10,700 in the late 50s. How big is it now? Oh, it's worth over 700. You know, and my mom was a hairdresser. My dad was in construction and, you know, they paid it off. Like, you know, this before the, you know, Dixon took the dollar off the gold standard, right? But things change after that. But before then, paying off your house meant something, right? And I actually remember when they did it. And she's still. owns it today. Now, did you not tell her to refinance at like two something percent? Yeah, she could pull out an equity, buy a wedge deal. I know. She's like, what are you doing? Yeah. I'm like, here's it. Here's a, here's a, this is very, really interesting. When my,

when my dad passed away, I had the uncomfortable task of my brother and sister, too, to dig into their stuff, right? And we dug into their estate. And my dad had bought, and I remember I'm telling me this, He bought a $10,000 life insurance policy around in the 60s. So he had a $10,700 house and a $10,000 life insurance policy. So fast forward, seven or eight years ago, I pull it out, the policy, 10,000. That's what it was. It wasn't inflation adjusted. And so he had a $10,000 insurance policy.

And so I was talking about it was. talking to my friend about this and he said, so basically the insurance policy was equal to the house. At the time, that's the way my dad thought, right? But that's what inflation did to that policy. Obviously, I'm taking care of my mom, but she still owns the house. And then she fell during COVID. And so we were in this weird situation where we had to help her and, you know, she broke some bones and her hip. And so what we did was we put her into a place where she wanted to go, an assisted place. and we rented her house to cover the cost. And so she is very happy because her home is actually paying for her care.

And so that's how that worked out. What do you think of the future is going to be with the dollar? That's a really, really, really good question. I've studied this a fair amount. I don't think in my lifetime that we will see a change from the U.S. dollar. because of the trust in anything else. So it boils down to trust. So dollar is only as good as,

or currency is only good as the trust in the currency. So if you look at bricks or you look at, let's say, some of the other things like Bitcoin, just in the last week, or actually 10 days, it's gone down over 10%. So, you know, it's not there yet. Could it be, yes, of course. But in my lifetime, I just don't see

it's changing. There's too much disruption to move to the peso or the euro or the remand B or whatever country you want to pick. Somebody has to be that central bank or there has to be something that everybody agrees on and the euro didn't work. Really. What do you think of Bitcoin? I don't mind it. I mean, we own some. My wife and I own some. You know, I'm not heavily into it, but I think it's a little volatile for me. I don't know why it goes up and down other than hype. And so I look at it more like a stock, and I know a lot of people probably aren't going to be happy with me saying that,

but that's how I see it, even though I have some. You know, I'm not heavy into it. I'm diverse, so I have lots of different things. What's a piece of money advice that you would give yourself 30 years ago to be able to grow faster? Compound interest, I think it is an incredible thing, and I think leverage, low leverage. And I know you guys don't love leverage, but... I'm indifferent to it.

Yeah. Yeah. But I think, you know, if you really look at the way money works is, and this really hit me once, you know, everybody works their butts off and puts their money into a bank, well, that money becomes a problem for the bank. They owe you interest, period. It's an expense to them. So the bank's sitting there with your cash or an insurance policy or a pension or whatever, a retirement fund. Somebody owes you something if it's your money.

So what do they have to do? They have to repackage it and put it out somehow into some kind of loan or something, some kind of vehicle that makes money to pay you because they don't just pay you. The money doesn't come out of thin air. So when we're talking about other people's money, it's already there. You know, Wall Street, the whole reason for Wall Street is to reach in the pocket of Main Street. And that's what they do. They do it through the banking.

They do it through pensions. They do it through insurance. They do it through retirement plans. And it is a way to take people out of the education piece of finance, you know, which is why I love your show. is, you know, you guys are trying to teach the stuff around that. And I think people need it. I really think people need it. That's the only reason I'm doing mine is for that reason.

And so I would say to them, just look how money works. It's your money. Like, you know, if you're putting money away somewhere, like I'm borrowing from life insurance companies. I'm borrowing from pensions. I bought maybe three or four hundred million dollars of real. real estate in Texas using the RRSP or retirement savings plan out of Canada, that money. That's how Wall Street works. It all gets funneled.

If it's a local loan, where does the money come from? It comes from, you know, the strength of the depositors. So, you know, it's all based on Main Street anyway. So I always tell people, you know, take a look at how money works. It's actually not, it's actually quite simple. What's the best investment you've ever made? So the best investment by far has been into myself, right? There's a lot of stuff I had to clean up from a kid, as I think a lot of people do.

And I poured myself into personal development from the very first time I discovered it, which was in college, and I never stopped. And, you know, through books and podcasts and speaking and going to seminars and conventions and things like that, which I still do. I was just at a white fuel convention. last week in LA, listening to Michael Milken and some other really, really cool people. So that's something that I always try to do is try to stay ahead of what's really going on right now with the markets, with the interest rates, with the financial markets, with tech, with crypto,

all those things. And so I always try to stay ahead of that. From a finance development, it definitely has to be 182 unit building that I bought, senior project that has hardly any turnover. I bought it for $9.7 million, and it's worth maybe $40 today, and we still own it. Wow. How did it go from $9.7 to $40 million? Inflation, inflation and rent growth, and, you know, again, like,

let's go back 15 years ago. What was the price of a house? It's the same question, right? So, exact same question. Why did a house go from 200 to 400? So same thing. It's just, you know, with the department says, it's just math. It's literally math.

I like that a lot. You know, I was just thinking that 50 plus communities are so nice. The people that move into them usually have the money that they just don't want to be bothered, but they have the cash flow. That, to me, seems like a really good opportunity. Like they never want to move. Right. And they just want stability and peace and quiet.

They're gone half the time traveling. Can you discriminate, though, against age? Is that one of those things? No. So technically, though, if I wanted to move in a 50-plus community, could I? So the property that I'm talking about specifically is actually age-restricted by the covenants of the area. So it's Sun City, which is an area of Phoenix that a lot of seniors live in already. So it's already a community for seniors.

And this apartment property is inside of that. So we are governed by. that. And so they have to be 55 or older. And there, but to your point, last year, we had 42 moveouts. Like, that's not much. That's, that's two, three, four a month. That's nothing. Compared to another 182 unit project, like in Vegas, we might see, you know, 150 moveouts. So the difference between 42 moveouts and 150 moveouts is significant because you have turnover costs, you have marketing costs, you have cleaning, you have maintenance, you have vacancy, all of that. So finding communities that, you know, people want to live in and stay in long term, those are

the ones that obviously I want to have. So could you not just go and buy a 50-unit apartment building in like a decent area and just say, hey, it's 55 plus? You probably could, yeah. We haven't done that. But, you know, we bought four now and age-restricted. areas. And the seniors typically, it's been my experience, they like to hang out in senior communities. That's been my experience so far. So you could try it. But this area has like nine golf courses,

three community centers, a bunch of pools. It does have an HOA. There are things that it has that that they can enjoy inside the community itself, not just in the property. In the property, we have all that too. We have pool, fitness center, all that kind of stuff. And then we also have a 20, person van with the driver that drives them around to grocery stores and, you know, getting their hair done or the doctor or whatever it might be. So those are things that they need. That sounds so nice. Graham would want to live in an age-restricted to 80. Well, you can buy one and then buy the one you want. And then just make one car. And then by the time you move in, you'll have the pet house and you'll own a free and clear. It sounds nice. I was just thinking, too,

you could offer services of like cleaning. cooking services. We have all that. And actually beyond that, once, depending on their health, you know, we've seen, some people are extremely healthy at 75, 80, 90 years old.

Very, very mobile and some aren't, right? So you have to have, you know, those kind of services available to them. What separates those people? Do you ever get down to the weeds and you see someone who's like 90? I've talked to so many of these people. By the way, they're just incredible.

Yeah. Like they're, they have such wisdom. And, you know, they're present. You know, they're looking at you. Yeah. It's the greatest thing ever. But like the people who are 90 plus and really just like doing well active, like what separates them? How are they different?

I think it's a combination of a few things. My mom, by the way, is 93. And I always ask her, you know, we go to this place and she's like, you know, everyone thinks they're so old in here. You know, she thinks she's young. My mom thinks she's young. And I think that's it. I think the mindset is that, you know, they walk. They eat well.

you know, they're healthy mentally and physically, you know, as much as they can be, right? What happens is they fall. You know, I've seen that happen a few times and then that could be a bit of a game changer. Yeah, when we were talking to Dave Asprey, he was saying that the biggest thing for longevity

and living a long time, socializing and exercise, and that if you cut yourself off socially or you retire and you stop working, your cognitive ability goes down, and then you stop socializing, you start getting out there, you start exercising, you stop exercising as much,

then you're more prone to injury, and then you're more likely to pass away from the injury. Yeah. And so it seems like the more social you are, the more engaged you are with work, the longer you could live.

Yeah, I'll tell you a fun story. My uncle, Dwayne, he passed away recently. He was in his 90s, and he called me, and he's like, hey, you got any 1030 words? And I'm like, what are he talking about?

He goes, I just got out of a deal. And he's in his 90s. And he's like, you have a deal? I need to roll this in. I'm trying to avoid tax. And I called his sons, you know, and I'm like, that's awesome. Like, you're dead still going at it. He's like, oh, yeah, he gets up every day.

He still manages his stuff. And, you know, he's still active. And he was that way, you know, right up to the time he passed in his 90s. And I think it just connected him to things. And, you know, to your point, community is everything. I had a buddy whose grandpa I really, really liked. He owned a very large block right off of Beverly Hills. All of the retail was his.

And he was in his mid-90s. And he'd show up to the office every day to manage the buildings, even though there was really nothing to manage. But he would show up there. He would walk out and, like, find things to fix. And we'll be like, all right, we're going to repaint this. We're going to repaint this. he said his favorite thing to do was he had a vending machine.

Yeah. And he would sit at the office watching the vending machine as people would go by and put a dollar in the vending machine. And this guy is probably worth like 200 million bucks. That's awesome. But the guy would put the dollar in the vending machine. He would see what the guy would get. And then he would come out to open up the vending machine to take the dollar and put it in his pockets. That's awesome.

And apparently this guy also would go to restaurants and steal the silverware. and he just wanted to feel like he got one of the restaurants. That sounds like you. I wouldn't steal the silver. Graham would not steal the silverware, but he always wants there to be an imbalance of value. Graham wants to be like, I feel like I got ahead.

You know, I got away ahead from whatever trade direction. The most I've done, and I haven't done this in a while, but if I lose money at a casino and they've been serving me drinks, I'll just take the cup. Nice. Yeah, just because, why would you? I do with the cup. I keep it.

I drink from it. I still have my life. little coffee cup that I got, the little nice glass one that I fill up sometimes, that's from, really? I think that was from Red Rock Casino. Are you incriminating yourself? I don't care. I lost so much money that it's what?

You never lost a bunch of money. You maybe have lost $150, $200. It evens out in the long run. So sometimes I lose $300. Sometimes I'll make $300. Whatever. You're shouting them out right now. So hopefully they got a couple dollar.

I got your top. It might have been Aria, by the way. I don't know. It's one of the casinos. You probably don't want him as a tenant. But what would be. the worst investment you've ever made. A gold mine, actually in Nevada, of all things.

Yeah, I think as I was trying to diversify, this is going back a while. It was probably your age, actually. I was trying to figure out, oh, I had money in the stock market. I had some money in real estate. And, you know, I'm trying to figure things out. And I invested into a gold mine that just went poof. And it, you know, it just all went away.

How? Like an hour or about a year later, it was gone. An hour later. It was an hour later. It was about a year later, it was gotten. They just stopped communicating and the money was out and no email. Yeah, basically. Could have been.

Obviously, what I should have done is I should have physically gone there, physically done the due diligence. It was, you know, through a buddy, right, you invest in this gold mine. And it wasn't a ton of money because back then I didn't have a ton of money, but it was a great lesson. And it actually, you know, it can happen. And I've seen it in oil and gas. I've seen it in other things. You know, that's precisely why I like the hard assets.

I like something physically I can touch. Even my gold and silver today, it's physical. I have actual gold coins with brinks. I keep it in at the brinks. And I've been buying, you know, since it was under 1,000. And now it's over four, but that's luck. I don't buy it for an investment. I buy it as a hedge against the U.S.

right yeah that's why i buy it how much real estate have you sold from your portfolio i i want to say it's probably close to a billion a billion dollars worth of real estate you've sold and would you have been better off just hold oh for sure for sure that's so interesting sometimes i look at those i'm like oh it's like it's like that place that yes i i i did i actually looked at a building today in Vegas and I was just oh and and I did I had another one in Portland that I that I sold and you know what happens is like a lot of us is you see the equity you want the equity right you think you need the money and sometimes you do need the money but um I look back at some of those deals and I just shake my head but do you think it's going to be the case in the future because you could make the argument that that is

true because interest rates since the 70s have constantly just gone down at the same time as underbuilding over decades, and that's what's really led to this discrepancy. Yeah, that's fair. I think, you know, if I just bought something, let's say, here today and came back in 10 years, I think it would be worth more because of inflation. And, you know, obviously that's not what I would do. But I think inflation is, you know, it's what made my mom go from $10,700 to over $700,000. You know, she's not a real estate investor, my mother.

You know, over, she held real estate for a long period of time, paid it off, lived in it, raised a family, and it still owns it. You know, there's nothing wrong with that. My sister is a bookkeeper. And at the Everett Clinic, which is where I grew up, she did the same thing, you know. She bought five rentals over a long period of time. And, you know, now they're worth, I don't know, a few hundred, a few million, I think, you know, a few hundred, three, four, five, six hundred each, probably. And, you know, it's far better than she would have done, you know, just trying to live off a bookkeeper salary. Would you have been better off investing in the S&P 500?

It's interesting. Yeah, I've looked at that, you know, the index funds. I would say that's obviously one of the bigger ones most notable. I looked at over 90 years, it's been 10%, I think, right? Seven, that's nominal, though. 7% adjusted for inflation, I think. So maybe. You know, the thing is, if I'm, if I'm, if I'm cashing that out, I'm paying tax on it as well.

And in real estate, I can make more than 7%. And I can get it out, I can get my money out tax free. So I get, I get the tax benefits from real estate. I get leverage, of course. And I get the tenants pay my loans off. And I get inflation. So I get all of those things on the real estate side. So I think the index fund is easy, certainly.

Doesn't take a lot of knowledge to do that. I'm certainly not averse to it at all. I do believe in diversification. And I'm heavy in real estate right now. See, it's interesting. You talked about being better off not selling anything because I remember when I got into real estate, I would ask all these people that were buying

multi-million dollar houses, what their thoughts were on the market, and their advice for me, and they always said, my biggest regret is selling this piece of real estate that I bought, and I wish I had just never sold anything. And I'm at a point now

where I'm starting to sell off my rental properties because they're located in California, for one, but also I don't want the headache, the liability, the management, the headache, and I'm looking at my income that I make from those rentals,

and it's not bad, but I look at it in proportion to everything else, And I said, why bother when that's taking up 80% of my mental stress for these things that just really don't yield anything else in comparison to what else I could do? Oh, you have to look at it that way. I agree, actually. I look at my equity against my return, no matter what I bought it. So I call it imputed equity. Whatever the equity is today. You know, obviously it's gone down in the last few years. Apartments have for sure. So, but I always look at that. Like what is, you know, how much money do I? have sitting there and what is it making and what could I be doing with that then I calculate tax and all that kind of stuff in there so I'm not averse to that at all I'm continually we just did a a very very big five property it's called a recap so I took five properties that I've owned a while and we had a significant amount of equity in there we actually pulled 77 million out of that of those

five and I had refinanced them multiple times and I had a tax problem too because you sell it you got a depreciation recapture and all that so so we did a 1031s into new assets so he's basically taking 80s property 80s and 90s property and rolling the equity tax free into into new stuff 2022 2021-2020 construction less cash flow initially but I'm upgrading and And the reason I did that is because the amount of equity sitting in those assets versus the return was not what I thought I could do by moving. Because, again, I'm looking at aging properties. You know, an 80s property is, you know, it's 45 years old. And so you start to have these serious big things that happen from a KAPX standpoint in property.

that you own for a long period of time. It starts to creep up. Things get older and it costs money. And so you start to take a look at that and you start to calculate, you know, where's this money best? How can I move it around? And that's all I'm doing right now. It's like the end of a monopoly game, you know, when you're just moving stuff around. And that's essentially what I'm doing.

And that's why I'm here, actually. This is a 1031 exchange into this property. that's what it is. Is there an ideal amount of money to have, to do mostly whatever you want to do? And what do you think that number is? Just a good net worth to have. I think it's all excessive, honestly.

I mean, you know, I think at some point, we brought on a full-time director of philanthropy and she works for us. She's on our payroll eight years ago. We started doubling down on that. You know, there is a point where you're like, okay, we have enough, right? And then the next question is, is how do you preserve what you have? Should I grow it?

Should I not grow it? Should I educate? You know, why do I do my YouTube channel? That's precisely why. So I'm having fun doing all that. You know, I think it depends on what different people believe, their beliefs are, you know. So some people never stop, you know, and I think that's dangerous. Some people, you know, stopped too early.

And I think that could be dangerous. You know, I just heard a story the other day where, you know, somebody stopped at $5 million and they live in Newport Beach. I said, well, that's going to be maybe 10 years, you know, right? Okay. Well, so there you go. So five's too little. It seems like a lot to me, you know. So I think it also depends on what your expenses are and what you spend money on, right?

You know, I used to have a lot of cars and lots of houses and stuff like that. I don't anymore, right? I'm like, I'm going the other way. I'm paring down. I'm simplifying. Now, we've heard from other guests, though, that say that, you know, with 10 million, you could do pretty much whatever you want.

With 50 million, you could get 98% of what a billionaire has access to just outside of like mega yachts and flying private. I agree with that. Yeah, I completely agree with that. Yeah, yeah, I know the math. I mean, that's right. I mean, aside from, you know, those kinds of things, But the reality is, I still rent those yachts.

I mean, it's just for a week or two and they'd throw the keys and same thing, right? Like my wife and I, we just went down to Manhattan Beach and, you know, rented a huge house on the beach for a couple summers ago. There was a big check to write, but boom, done, move on. And so I don't have to own a $20 million dollar home, you know, when you can rent it for 60 days in the middle of the summer.

So, yeah, and part of that is, you know, I was getting to the point where it was a pain in the butt. Like, you feel guilty. You buy something somewhere and you're like, I need to go use it, right? So you go use it. Or then you have a whole team of people there watching it and all this crazy stuff.

And it just turns into nonsense. It's precise. I had nine cars at one time. Same thing. You got to drive them, you got to run them. You need somebody to, you know, I mean, the batteries die.

And, you know, there's all kinds of things that you realize as you start to, get excess and then there is a point of excess too. What was the biggest pain in the butt to maintain? The main house is all the houses. Yeah, just the pains in the end. So with my properties, I have 300 employees. So I have maintenance guys.

We have leasing people. We have managers. You know, we have really, really, really smart people running everything. I own the management company and the asset management company and the development company and the construction company. So we have four main companies. The ones that are paying the butts are the single house over here that I owned that I had nobody, right? Because I had to find somebody that I didn't trust or know yet maybe or, you know, in some remote area.

And, you know, you're trying to cobble that together like the landscapers or the maintenance people and you're not there. You've got to fly out there. And so there's all these things that you have. So there's that. And then we would show up sometimes to, I had a big home on a lake in Lake Cortaline up in Idaho, right downtown. I would get up there and it'd be two to three weeks of meeting with all those folks to try to get it back to, you know, stable, you know, whatever, stuff from the winter or whatever it was. And we live in the house for a month or two. And then, and finally my wife's like, you know, like, you know, half your time is bent on the maintenance of this house.

So I said, you're right. So started cutting back on all that stuff. What net worth do you have to have or that you should have to buy a $10 million house? Well, a lot of it depends on your cash flow. So if you have no, if you're, and I will get there, you can be an extremely high compensated person in a tech business with a lot of equity on paper and buy a house like that, as long as you have the income coming in. Same thing with the surgeons or whatever. But if you're going to retire on something like that, it depends on your age. But I think you need easily, you know, 30, 40 billion would be probably comfortable for me.

And that, you know, I don't have debt on anything personal. That's the interesting thing. All my cars and houses and anything that I have is paid off, boats, all that stuff. It's all paid off. I was always under the assumption that the house should be one-fifth. of whatever a net worth should be. So if you buy a $10 million house, you should be worth or have liquid assets,

50 total. We're talking to someone recently who is saying that a lot of people will stretch. They'll max out whatever they could buy and their net worth could be way less than something like that. But they get in because they can afford it every month, but they're one paycheck away from losing it.

That's really dangerous. Yeah, extremely dangerous. Yeah. I don't agree with that at all. You know, if you have significant cash coming in and it's consistent. So as an example, all the properties I own pay my management company every month. So I'm the general partner and I own the management company.

So I pay myself. That's how that works. So that company does three, four hundred grand a month. Then I have an asset management company. Same thing. So the assets I own pay the, so I have a guaranteed. stream of income coming in from from assets that I already own indirectly plus I get distributions from them too right in cash flow itself but somebody has to manage it and

and so the management company so so does and so when you have certainty in something like that then then I think buying something like that where the payment might be 20 30 40 50 thousand dollars a month which is about what it is is not a problem. Again, it depends on the cash flow, but if you're, you know, like what you describe, I think that's risky. Does money buy happiness? No, God, no. Not even close. Not at all. Have you found, though, that your life satisfaction has increased the more money you make? No, it's gotten more complicated. For sure. The more money you make, the more complicated it is. The why keep going?

Why not scale back to a point where it's just the ultimate balance? Yeah. So because I don't equate money to happen as I equate money to time. That's it. So time is the reason I do this. So time is super important. Time with my kids. Time coming here.

You know, time away. Time with my wife. I'm here in Vegas with my wife. That's really where it's at. So if you have money coming in, then, you know, then that's what you use it for. And why do people have money but don't feel wealthy? Where is that? Like this guy.

Wow. Like Graham. Yeah. Well, I think it's interesting. It's a phenomenal question. I go back to mindset, I think. It's something else here now. Something new.

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I remember as a kid, we would be checking out somewhere. My parents and my mom would say we can't afford that. And it was true. You know, they couldn't, right? They're good people. Don't get me wrong. But, you know, we shopped at their stores and that, you know, that we, a lot of our stuff, that's what we did. So, so how, so you break through, you have to break through the mindset, that mindset, right?

I had to. And now, of course, I want to, like, what is risk? You know, what is risk really? Is it, to me, it's predictability. and that's why I get freaked out a little bit with stocks and crypto is I feel like I, because I understand the management, I understand I can predict

to a large degree the direction of an asset, especially if I buy it correctly. So getting back to the money and the mindset, I think that it's a belief system. The belief system creates the mindset, for sure. It's how you think. And then from there,

It's habits and routine, right? Is there any dark side of success that people don't talk about? Oh, health, I would say, is a big one. Mental health, physical health, for sure. What have you seen? Oh, all kinds of bad things. Like, I mean, I think, well, money makes people have big egos. They think it's money.

Like, somehow they think, look at this. I've made it. and all of a sudden they're better than someone else. I see that a lot. It doesn't really mean, you don't have to be really wealthy for that. I usually see it in the first time. Like, I see it in young people.

You know, a lot of young people, they make something real quickly, and then all of a sudden they feel like they're better. The problem is it goes away pretty quickly unless they can sustain that. But on the dark side, to answer your question, And so ego oftentimes doesn't allow you to shut off the health and the mental piece. So like what's what's most important?

If you were to ask me what success is, I would say that it's family and health, period, right? And those are interswitchable at times. But I would say without your health, you got nothing. So I see there was a time I went to, in my YPO, I went to a top. talk where a guy owned a series of these health spas, like these, you know, and it was pretty big. And he was putting them on cruise ships, and it was a real big brand. And he would say, this really hit me, he said, the CEOs will roll in here, extremely unhealthy, big guts, poor health, can't even walk up a hill. And they come here for a week, and they want me to fix them.

And it kind of summarizes everything. I think what happens is people prioritize money over relationships and health. And I think that's a huge danger. Do you ever get people just asking you for money? Oh, yeah, of course, all the time. All the time. I have a rule. And, yeah, I give money out.

What's the rule? It's really simple. I got this from my good friend who started California closets. And when he exited, you know, we were talking one day. And he's like, this is my rule. like, well, that's a great rule. So if somebody comes and says, hey, I need, I don't know, usually it's a low number, right?

Right. He's like, always take it, always take the first one, and say, listen, it's not a loan. It's a one-time gift. So you give them the money, and you don't have to pay it back, but you can't ask a second time. So that's worked.

Can I have $50,000? Yeah, one time. Deal. Don't deal. No, no, no, no, no. No. What do you know? No.

It's one time. No. It's a gift. No. I'm not. I'll take 51. No, I wouldn't, no. But that's it. That's it.

It's simple. And so have people ever came back to you after you gave them that first? Very rare. But because I give them the release. Like, you know, I, listen, if they need it, I'm good with it. Like, you know, if they're friends and depends on what they want it for. I do ask. So I am curious, though, if everything you do is to get back time, the purpose of money is time.

Aren't you at the place now where you don't have to pursue money anymore and you have enough to be able to do whatever you want with your time? Yeah, yeah. But see, that's a great question. Now, you know, but I got my company on autopilot. Like, I don't have an office in the office. Yeah, but you're here in Vegas. Yeah, I'm having fun. I know.

You got a free water. Well, here's why. again, I'm managing my money, right? It's coming out of a 1031. So I definitely want to see where it's going, right? It's moving into a new asset. So it's worth a trip, you know, and we're going to... And we're going to a show tonight.

What are you saying? I don't know. What are we? Comedy? Yeah, comedy. How much do you work? 10 to 20 a week. A lot on the YouTube, actually.

Probably half of that is YouTube. I know, because I'm trying to figure out. out like it's so bizarre to me it's fun yeah uh i i'm enjoying that piece a lot your youtube video is really good i found you a while ago when you made a video about having f u money yeah i remember seeing that i'm really enjoying it thanks yeah yeah i wish i could say it was my idea but um i had a youngster that and said this is a great video we should do it we did it i'm on my uh on my jet yep yeah i remember seeing that and i loved it yeah i thought it was really well put together Yanks, yanks.

When did you realize you had FU money? And what is FU money? Well, I have a really good friend that took his company public, and I was playing golf with him a couple months ago, and he's like, I can't spend what I have. And I think that's it. You know, you can't. Like, you get to that point where there's so much cash flow coming in,

you got so many assets that, you know, it's basically going to transfer to someone. So when did you realize you had that? Over 10 years ago. And did anything in your lifestyle change because of that realization? No. The only thing that changed is I figured out my trusts for my kids, right? And I want to make sure that they're taken care of.

I did buy a jet because I'm flying around. And, you know, I like a flu here today to check these out. And, and, and I actually, um, it's, it's nice. It's nice to, you know, pop in somewhere and fly back. I mean, we'll fly back in the morning. How much was the jet? How much does that cost to run? Yeah, was it?

It cost us about 400 a year,ish to operate it. Yeah. And how much was it to purchase? Uh, we, we paid about three million for it. That's not bad. No. No. That's a, it's a, it's a, it's a, it's a phenom 100.

And, uh, that's hangar, pilot, fuel, everything. thing. By the way, my partner and I own it together. So you split it. Yeah. So, you know, call it 20 grand a month each. And that's really not bad. That's not bad at all. How far can you go in it? It's a, we fly to, um, it's like 1,200 nautical miles, I believe. So we can fly to Dallas. We fly to Houston. And, and, and so what, what, sometimes what I do is we'll fly somewhere land in the morning in Austin, let's say. And, um, and we'll have a car picks up, we'll go look at four or five of our projects, and then we'll literally be heading back at three, four o'clock that afternoon.

Oh, that would save us so much time. I mean, the travel that we do, we spend an extra day getting somewhere because we know that we have to book on these times and we finish the podcast. There's not a good flight. And then we have to wait a few. It's a dream to be able to go and like just get on a plane. You start to think of these things like, you know, what is time worth? So when can you buy a private jet?

How do you know you're ready? When you have the cash flow coming in. So we have cash flow coming in on all our businesses, and I wanted to make sure. So I like you, don't like to take, I don't like to dip from my nest egg, right? I want there to be enough cash flow to be able to pay for whatever I'm going to do next.

I very rarely take chips off the table. I'm usually, right at this point, moving money around from asset to ask. So that's the same thing that Graham kind of does. And I try to do, which is however much money your investments make, that's the amount of money that you can spend as opposed to

like your active income, the active income. Yeah, this, I never count any of this as income because it, like, I've seen it disappear. Yeah. So this is just store as much of it as possible. Right. And then spend maximum 4% of what your investment portfolio is.

Yeah. So I'm very similar to believe it or not. It's just that we have so much coming in now because of our assets. So what are the best things to spend your money on? The highest ROI, not necessarily from an investment perspective, from a quality of life.

Yeah, I think natural path, your blood work, I'm on a cleanse right now, like literally. Really? Yeah, in the middle of one. It's a 10-day one, so it's not that far,

but I've done 21 days. Certainly anything health-related, gym, for sure, relationship stuff. I just took my kids two weeks ago. I did a big fundraiser for the Navy Seals in San Diego, Coronado. So we raised 300 million, or 300 million, 300,000 for them. Beyond the Brotherhood, great organization.

I brought my kids. We did some Navy SEAL training. So those kinds of things. Like, where can I take my kids? I'm taking them to Mexico soon. How old are they? They're in their 20s. They both work for me too.

So it's very exciting. Not directly. Do you feel like you need to overpay your children? I don't even know what they make. I swear. They're paid market, whatever that is. So there's no nepotism involved here. They're just getting paid market.

Do you think nepotism is a bad thing? It can be. It can be harmful to the culture. So, yes, I mean, obviously parents love their kids and they want them to work with them a lot of times. But sometimes they're, you know, if they're rubbing shoulders with, you know, a C-suite person or somebody, a director

or a manager of a department, and they're not capable, then for sure the culture gets pulled down. Was there intent and purpose behind the way you raised your kids to make sure they wouldn't become the person to rub shoulders with a C-suite or executive? Well, they're on different paths, but I will tell you how I started.

I started with barter. I've never given my kids money or allowances or anything. So I always started with, okay, like you guys can figure out, how to make money. And so we started with barter. So really simply, I belong to a golf club up in Idaho. And they used to get,

we used to go out and get golf balls at night. Now, it doesn't seem like much, but when you're six and eight years old, you know, they would make $1,000 a summer, right? And then I would take half of that money and I'd stick it in a jar. And I said, okay, you can spend half, but we're going to take half.

Now, you need to decide what's the next business. And then they would go on YouTube, and go figure stuff out. The next business was duct tape wallets. I was like, okay, great. So we'd take them to Home Depot. And there were lessons in all of these things. Okay, how much is the tape?

How much is the cutter? How much is this? How much is that? Okay, so you need to sell 10 wallets to get this back. And so there's, and then the next thing is we actually created a website for them called Create Your OwnTune.com. And so by the time they got in high school and college, they were, they were buying stuff on eBay selling it.

They were, they were doing things. for money. My son was repairing iPhone screens back when you could and making whatever. And so by the time they, and by the way, that's not all foolproof either, but by the time they got to the company, you know, they just appreciated things because they weren't giving them. That's interesting. I resonate with that as well because when I was growing up, I didn't have an allowance. When I finally did get one, it was only achievable through a bunch of chores throughout the house, so I kind of had to earn it. It wasn't anything that was necessarily gifted to me. And I remember the only other job I could have was I could pick up palm fronds.

When wind would blow, it would blow these long, skinny palm fronds onto our front lawn. And for every palm fron, I lifted up and threw away, I got one penny. Oh, one penny per. And you can confirm with my dad next time you see him. It was one penny. How old for you? Like, 13? Oh, like, I literally, this was, like, one of the only ways I could make money. So I would do this as long as I could. You would make more just picking of change off the strings.

Oh, it was annoying because I had to, like, count them, too. And so I would be able to pick up a couple hundred, though, so I get, like, $2 or $4, maybe max. They were not huge. They were, like, skinny and long, so. But, yeah. And that actually. The lesson, though. The lesson was the value and importance of money.

Right. And hard work and how money can only be achieved through work. Yep. And it worked, obviously. Look at you. Did, thank you. Seriously. Thank you.

Your dad raised a good kid. Thanks. And this guy will sometime soon. Isn't that right, buddy? One day. So, okay, that's it. Thank you so much for coming on the iced coffee hour. That was a great conversation.

Yeah, I really enjoyed this. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, we'd love to have you back on at some point again in the future. I'm sure everyone watching would like to have you back on like a year from now. Yeah, yeah. We'll see what a half. We'll make another $500 million. I don't know.

I don't know. more charities, right? So we'll see. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you guys so much for watching. And you may notice the shot looks a little bit different. We're filming in a new location. Yeah.

We still haven't really revealed much about this, except to the members, if you want to join the members down below. Yes. Oh, you know what? For the members, if you join, you're going to see a full office tour. We haven't done it since... Should we do a new one? Yeah, let's do a new one. Okay, we'll do a new one.

So you guys get behind the scenes content, but also thanks for coming on. Thank you guys for watching. We're only able to do this, because of you. So this warehouse is because of you guys. We could not thank you more. Thank you for watching. Till next time. See it.