Live Let Thrive Podcast
Airbnb, PadSplit, Corporate Rentals, Arbitrage, and Live Let Thrive cover all the creative ways to rent out your properties to maximize profits. We also cover creative ways to buy properties. Come along for the ride and have some fun along the way!
Live Let Thrive Podcast
Pivoting for 2026: Why I’m Stepping Back From STRs and Refocusing on Long-Term Wealth
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Myka announces a major pivot away from short-term and midterm rentals for 2026, driven by slow holiday bookings, rising overhead costs, and burnout from the operational demands of managing STRs in a rural Arkansas market. She's shifting to long-term rentals while strategically using the short-term rental tax loophole and cost segregation on new acquisitions - running properties as STRs for the first year to capture tax benefits, then converting to long-term tenants the following January.
The episode covers what worked in 2025 (a 4-bed/2-bath STR grossed $72,000 in half a year, and turning ChatGPT into a CFO agent that analyzes QuickBooks data), what didn't (construction and insurance clients dried up, SBA loan payments squeezed cash flow), and the new strategy for 2026: acquire 7-8 more doors that cash flow as traditional rentals, focus on new-build duplexes, reduce subscriptions and overhead (switching from Monday.com plus Slack to ClickUp), and build toward 12-13 paid-off properties by age 50.
Work with us. Interested in professional management or consulting?
Myka — Sharebnb: www.sharebnb.com
Steve — Argest Rentals: www.ArgestRentals.com
Sign up for PadSplit with Steve's link and get a free 1-on-1 PadSplit strategy call with Stevie Stacks: padsplit.com/hosts
Myka's other podcast, Entrepremarriage — building wealth without losing the marriage: youtube.com/@Entrepremarriage
All our links: linktr.ee/liveletthrive
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Solo episode: pivoting away from STRs in 2026
SPEAKER_00Welcome to Live Let Thrive, a podcast about the Airbnb life, the share economy, and everything in between. Here are your hosts, Micah and Steve.
SPEAKER_01Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the final episode of Live Let Thrive for 2025. This will be a solo app, just me today. Uh Stevie Stax is out of the country. He's down in Mexico. Shout out to Stevie Stax and his family enjoying that new year in Mexico. I just wanted to run run one more before the year ended, all about short-term rentals, midterm rentals, all that good stuff, real estate. Because we're going to be talking about like how I'm pivoting for 2026, uh, things that I'm changing, things that I noticed didn't really work in 2025, things that did work in 2025. You know, 2025 wasn't terrible, but it did test us, you know, changing economy, things with the economies changing, things with, you know, how how people may be traveling, you know, and midterm rentals. You know, midterm rentals are really heavy on the economy because you have to, you know, depending on who you're who you're serving, you know, me, the state of Arkansas that I'm in, I serve mainly construction and construction workers
Slow holiday season and the midterm market pullback
SPEAKER_01and the insurance clients. So, you know, and things are starting to pull back a little bit. So we're kind of I'm I'm pivoting this year. So, like this holiday season, you know, we were really slow this holiday season, and I don't I don't like the holiday season like as far as like short-term guests because you get a lot of more needy guests. However, this holiday season, the guests we did get were great. We got really good guests. However, as you guys know, the last few months, last year, like middle part of this year, we were doing like 1031 exchanges, getting rid of bad units, and onboarding really good units, onboarding like new builds, and then just keeping the ones that were good for us. But this season we got a couple of good midterms in, but the majority of us of my rentals, we didn't get the midterm, so it's kind of showing me that we are kind of maybe be taking a step back, like as far as like the midterm rental clientele for us and where we are, because location matters too, because I will be talking about location as well. So 2025 for sure, 2026 for sure. I know if you guys listen to our last episode, I definitely talked about us moving, pivoting more towards long-term. Um, my goal is to get more long-term clients in and
New strategy: STR tax loophole year one, then flip to long-term
SPEAKER_01not only just get them in, like, I'm gonna try to leave my places furnished. So if they want to pay like an extra thousand 500 to a thousand on top of like normal long-term rent, I'll probably keep the furniture in there. But if they don't, if they just want to do a traditional long-term, I'll probably just take the furniture out, do like a you know, get a storage shed or even look at selling it in the future. But I am more or less looking to go towards long-term in the state of Arkansas in particular. But my goal is with the short term, because I'm still gonna be doing short terms. My goal is to basically use the short-terminal tax loophole along with the cost segregation studies to basically basically if I pick up a new property because I'm saving all money on taxes and I, you know, probably get a larger tax return, pick up more properties. Like one, I'll try. I'm really trying to go small multifamilies like duplexes, quads, triplexes. If I can get like a new build duplex, I love the new builds, the new builds, way less square and tear, way less maintenance issues. Um, I haven't done a long-term one, but I'm pretty sure there's gonna be less maintenance issues. So I want to move more towards just using the short-terminal tax loophole and the cost segregation study for year one, right? So first year, I get the property, I short-term rent, midterm rent it, use it as like, you know, do the cost seg thing, and then the beginning of the next year. So in 2026, my goal is to pick one up probably by May or June, if I can pick up a new property by May or June, short-term rent, midterm rent it until the end of the year, mainly short term, because it's gonna have to be short-term, so I can fit the short-term rental tax loophole. Then the first of January, flip it to long term. And if I can flip it to long-term January, I can get the tax benefits. And that's one cool thing about like the short-terminal cost egg. You don't have to do short term for the whole year. You can do it as long as you get, I think, three reservations, uh, average stay a minimum seven days. You can start it in, let's say like the last one I started. I started it in July. You can start it in November if you're able to get, you know, people in that fast, you know. Um, so that's what I'm trying to do. And I'm trying to do that so I can still use the tax benefits of short terms and go that way. And then the next year turn it into a long term and then pick up another short term because I want to, you know, pick up another property using the loophole, you know, the tax savings. Because my goal is to get like five more, because I have five doors right now. I need about seven, eight, seven to eight more. If I can either do like a couple, even if I get a triplex in there, I could probably just get seven more properties, get the cash flow number I want, and go into pay down phase. Because I always tell you guys I'm in the my whole goal is to pick up property, pay them down so I don't have any mortgage, and then just live off the larger cash flow. Um, shout out, we actually have a friend from the podcast
Goal planning session with Mahogany and teaching the kids to set goals
SPEAKER_01who's on the podcast. Shout out to Adam, he's actually paying off properties right now. I think he has seven paid off, which is really good because I want to get to at least I think 12, 13 paid off. I will be in really good shape because that's why I'm trying to move more towards that direction. I'm trying to my goal in 2026 is to remove overhead, like decrease that extra overhead, you know, cleaning teams, not only cleaning teams, you got extra maintenance you got to do, like, you know, you got to have your systems in place and all that cost and it's great, but at the same time, you start looking at it in a way of okay, if I want to eventually have more time freedom, and you know, I have a VA and stuff, and then when things slow down, now I have to make sure, you know, you have to go and go into that creativity mode, which is a good thing because it's always good to get into that creativity mode, you know, make sure things can still operate and flow. Now I'm kind of like, if we just go long term, turn these things into long term, have like one short-term rental we're managing at a time, like from our portfolio and the rest, you know, we still will, of course, manage for other people. We actually have a couple more coming on board to manage for other people. I think that would just relieve like a lot of headache, and not only relieve a lot of headache, it would just like put us in a position in the future to just be ready to, you know, have that consistent just cash flow coming in, and then we can like really dial our systems back to more or less like having systems for long term, and we'll still have like you know, the short terms that we manage. So that that's like in my 2026, that's my 2026 goal is to dial back on short term and midterm and then go into like you know the long-term side. And that's the thing why we've always talked about this on the show. I don't touch properties if they don't cash flow long term. If you can get something that cash flows long term at this point, you're winning because all of ours, because we've have I think two where there's 7% plus interest rates, but they still cash flow long term. Um, and that's why one good thing I will tell y'all is small multifamilies cash flow long term, like if you can get something like that. Um, but I also think like the short term and midterm does kind of slow down because of the area that I'm in, right? Um, I'm in Arkansas, it's a little bit more rural, and I think it's kind of slowing down, just economy slowing down, you know, people getting laid off, and so it's kind of slowing down. So I'm like, even if I were to go to Texas, my only issue, like I've always told you guys with Texas, has been the property taxes because property taxes with the high interest rates, you can't cash so
Why properties must cash flow long-term in high-interest-rate markets
SPEAKER_01long term. Now you have people here, you know, God forbid something ever happens to like the economy slows down and messes up, mess starts messing with Texas. You have a lot of properties out there that just don't cash so long term, you know, and it's just not a good place to be in. And that's where the midterm rental thing helps. But if anything happens, you're kind of in a bad position. So I think I'm gonna continue picking up properties in Arkansas, but they're gonna have to cash so long term because it just seems like I wanna, I wanna scale, but I also want to dial back on like the big operations that come with like the midterm, the short-term rental play. It's just like a lot of stuff, you know, and then it's kind of like it was just really slow during the holiday season this year. And I was just like, oh man, which worked because you know, we got good guessing, but I just don't like the holiday guests. I don't like the I think Steve said it best on the last episode. I don't want to compete with the Airbnb hosts. That's just not our that's just not our gameplay anymore, or our, you know, not our tagline of what we do, you know. And I I will be having to compete with them with the uh short-term rental tax loophole, but it's for a bigger payoff, you know, it has a more long-term effect. So that is one thing in 2026 that we are doing is more or less pivoting more towards long-term rentals and using short-term rentals as like a cash flow tax benefit, especially now. Like me, like me and my wife, you know, we both have W-2, so that loophole helps us tremendously, tremendously. So, you know, one thing that you know, another thing that I will say 2025 that I I don't think I took full advantage of it was the AI thing. I did some good stuff in 2025. Some good stuff, like I did make a chat GPT agent that's my CFO, right? So anything I'm not good at, like financial stuff, I'm good at it, but I'd rather have us someone else looking at it. That's why I created like a CFO agent inside of Chat GPT that knows all my financials, knows everything, how we operate. Hey, do we need to? I can ask it, hey, do we need to cut back here? And it'll it thinks and acts like a s as a CFO, and it really helped us this year. It really helped us. Like it was like, hey, let's dial back here. It can go back and I let it get go into my QuickBooks. Hey, what can we dial back on? Hey, this cost is a little bit too high. Um, then it also helps me do better bookkeeping as well because some stuff the cost will be too high, but you'll find out you may have it categorized wrong.
ChatGPT as CFO: QuickBooks analysis and cutting subscriptions
SPEAKER_01So, like a good man, if you use chat GPT to that extent of like having it become your CFO, it really helps you, really help me out. That that's one thing I did really, really well this year was um, you know, utilizing Chat GPT. I want to really utilize it more in 2026, kind of like seeing okay, how do we set aside something so we can buy another property and then just give it my goals, you know. And the one thing I will tell y'all, if y'all haven't, everyone in 2025, if you have not written down your 2026 goals, get on top of that. Definitely stay on top of that. Me and Mahogany, if you guys follow me on Instagram every year, we'll just book a room out for three or four hours on like a Saturday. We take our kids too, because we I teach my son to uh my son Malachi, I teach him how to set goals, write out goals. What are your goals for the year? Then it really it's really powerful because like we I have it like right here. Like I can look at my goals every day and see where I'm like hitting, where I'm falling short. Okay, how do I plan this week so I can hit these goals? So yeah, the goal planning's huge. So that's one of the biggest goals is getting to there to that point to where you know we can go all long term. Because another thing is this SBA, because I always talk about those SBA loans because we did get a huge SBA loan. So I'm like, man, I'm having to pay that. And then like if it gets slow on short-term side, I'm like, oh, now we have to figure out how to pay that and pay the rents. But if I was to go all long term, I'm like, man, if I we ran the numbers, me and mahogany sat down, we ran the numbers. Like, wow, if we turned everything into long term, we'd have enough to sit aside for CapEx and we'd have enough to sit aside for uh for the SBA. And then, you know, we still have our property management company, you know, to still run the operations for other people that that we're running their short-term rules for, you know, we have that system set up so we still get the money from the management side. So it's like I think we've set ourselves up in a really good position, and that's why I tell people, you know, if you position yourself like when you buy, like make your money when you buy, if you're positioning yourself to where your properties can cash flow long term or you're in a market where they cash flow long term, use that as best you can, you know, and then just use the short term as cherry on top. But if that cherry ain't what ain't there, it's time to go a different direction. So that's the kind of direction we're kind of moving in right now. It just seems like it's it's it's just not, you know, it's just been a headache, like there's the short-term side, the the midterm side, you know, keeping them filled. Like once we get a good guess, we get a good guess, you know. And another thing was the type of type of property. Like, if I was to do, like, for example, if I was to go back into the single family home side of short-term and midterms, um, I would tell anyone go to 4-2 method. Like, 4-2s right now are like the big cash flow.
The $72,000 4-bed/2-bath that outperformed projections
SPEAKER_01If you can get a 4-2 um in any market, it is gonna help you stand out, it helps you stand aside. Because my mom, we we so we took on my mom's property, hers is a 4-2. Her property made, I think, $72,000 this year, and we started in the middle of the year. I want to say uh probably about Q2. We started Q2 with her property, and it like the projections of what we were expecting this thing to do, it blew it out the water. And this is like $70,000 a year on a property that's in Arkansas, right? But it's a 4-2. Now, when we first started doing short terms, we did have a 4-2 and another, like probably 15 minutes away from this property, but we ended up having to let it go because my my one of my parents, my parents moved back into one of the four-twos. But if you are if you can get like a 4-2, those work really well, and that's why I like the dupley play, the duplex, duplex play. You know, the new duplexes are coming like the three beds, two baths each side. Um, so you can turn that like you can have three listings a three uh two three-twos, and then you can also have like a six-bed, four-bath. And those are great during the holidays because those went really well during the holidays because people want their families, big family together. But that's like the short-term side, but midterm, it was great because the construction crews, but the construction clues kind of slowed down. So I'm like, man, what's going on with all this construction work that's not, you know, construction's not coming through, and then you're dependent upon now. Okay, if the construction's not there, where's the insurance? The insurance is not there if there's no disasters, or let's say someone you know, like you'll have a flood every now and then in someone's house or whatever, just from like old pipes, or with something breaks where they need it, that slows down. You're like, oh man, you're stuck. So going after multiple avatars is really huge as well. If you can go after multiple avatars, like I used to just go after two and call it a day on a market. I would say if you can go after like three, like if you can have construction, insurance, maybe like, hey, if things really go bad, go pad split, like Steve's doing pad splits in my market. I don't know. I don't know if pad split would work. I haven't tried it, so I won't tell anyone that it wouldn't work. But like Texas, if you're in a market like Texas, California, anywhere in those the coastal areas in Texas, like the DFW, pad split works great because interest rates are high. The rents, the rents have not caught up to the uh to the mortgages here, you know, so you're not really cash flowing. But if you do pad split where you where you're essential essentially housing people long term in a room by room basis, you know. Um, and you know, most people are like I think most pad splits are six bedroom minimum, you know, they come in there and they build the walls up like Steve's been talking about. You know, pad splits are working great, and just in my market, but if I was to pick something up in Texas that cash flowed long term, I would consider all options. But I'm just I'm just not the type to just go somewhere where it just doesn't cash flow. It's just not not really what I want to do and not the business that I want to be in. Because at the end of the day, and this is what I tell people too, when you're in this short-term, midterm space, you have to always remind yourself of your goals, which is your goal to get into this, you know, for the extra cash flow. But at the end of the day, I'm a real estate investor, so I have to still be looking at okay, what's the long-term impact of the things that I'm doing? You know, if we're getting caught up on this short-term, midterm stuff, okay, cool. Let's pivot to long-term so we can focus elsewhere and then focus on maybe the tax savings, the tax breaks, or something else to really jump start, you know, for the future. Because I think that's the future right now for me. It's I got to get the doors, but to get the doors, I have to make sure I'm not being we're not our team's not being burnt out by the short-term and midterm stuff. So right now, you know, the long term, it's gonna be fewer fires, you have to put out fewer fires, less overhead, and just the matter of, you know, something can always go wrong. But the power of just having a really good solid 12-month tenant in there, you know, even my one that's a section eight, it had maintenance issues because we kind of, you know, we cut some quarters on the on the uh rehab. But if like with the new build play that I'm looking at,
Better units, fewer fires, and the new-build duplex play
SPEAKER_01I think that's where it is, man. So in 2026, better units, everything that cash flows long term, and then flip them to long term after we do a cost seg and a short-term rental tax loophole on it. Um, I think that's the best thing right now. I mean, you know, things change. And that's one thing I've learned in business, like these last eight years since 2017, these last like eight years, things change. And I think that's when you're able to adapt and pivot, like especially in short-term and midterm space, I think that's when you win. I think like if you see a lot, like especially on social media, people are saying, Oh, Airbnb is going away. And I've always told people Airbnb can go away, but short-term rentals won't go away because there's always a market for it, especially if you know what you're doing. But you have to be willing to invest your time there, right? You have to be willing to, okay, who's coming to town? How do I market to them? You have to have marketing teams, things of that nature. It's a whole business, you know. I tell people short-term rentals are a whole business, and you have to be very good at it. You have to you can't just sit on Airbnb, right? And I tell people that all the time. You can't just sit on Airbnb if you want to be good at it. You want to be good at it, you got to be on Airbnb, VRBO, uh, advertising. You have to uh be advertising through Stafi, but all that comes with a cost, so you do have more overhead. But if you're in a good market, that overhead doesn't matter because you're gonna have really great cash flow. So I will say my market, it's not the best market right now. So I'm moving more towards, you know, even Texas is a great market, but you're in that non-cash flow. That's why I do wish another thing that in the future, because Arkansas did allow ADUs by right, I do want ADUs on some of my places, however, I want it, you know, if you're in a place where you have ADUs and you can build an ADU and it adds value to the property, like out California, Oregon, Washington, and those areas, yeah, you have an advantage. Matter of fact, those are great areas to still do the birth strategy in because your cash flow is tremendous and your equity is tremendous after you complete like an ADU. So in Texas, that's not that isn't here yet. It's in a few cities like Mansfield, Austin, you know, and then in the state of Arkansas, they kind of did it like the West Coast way. You get ADU by right. However, they're still not to the point where it's raising the property value. Um, but I do like a like a 1031 the property this year, and it had a huge backyard. And I 1031 it and I just like ah, which it I didn't really hurt me too bad. Everything's a learning lesson. But I could have kept that property and built another three-bed, two-bath in the back, and now I would have had the same duplex, you know. But you live and you learn, so you know, and stuff you can't time the market, you know, stuff's gonna happen. Murphy's Law, whatever, you know, it it can definitely happen. Um, but that short-term rental, you know, those those extra costs I was talking about, like the Stay Fi costs, the QuickBooks costs. Well, QuickBooks you'll pay for anyway, like StaFi, Monday.com, and then with the because I said earlier, I turned Chat GPT into CF into my CFO, and I also had my VA help me as well. And so we were looking at, okay, how do we cut back on like subscriptions, right? So one thing we use is Monday.com with Slack. However, there's another little app called ClickUp where you get the benefits of Monday.com and Slack in one app. Now you kind of reduce overhead. So you have to look at things like that. And Chat GPT CFO, if it knows what items you're using, it can go and do all that for you. Like, hey, look at this app. Okay, this app can replace Slack and it can replace Monday.com and you can reduce overhead. So it's really
Reducing overhead: ClickUp replacing Monday.com and Slack
SPEAKER_01cool things. And there's also free stuff like Notion and stuff, but I'm not I'm like the person where I don't want to build things, but I then that's what I was saying earlier while having really fully utilized AI in that sense because I want to be having I I can have Chat GPT build things in Notion for me. And I I really want to do that. So um Chat GPT is gonna be one thing we focus on as well in 2026 because we're gonna free up the time to where we can focus on those things. And we and you know, we may even hop back into short-term rentals, you know, if we find like some AI tools that'll really work great with us on advertising and marketing, you know, but we'll still have a couple of them, you know. I'll probably be for myself, I'll still be managing, but I'll probably have one that I'm operating, and that'll be for you know the tax benefits. Um and just the for more or less we're looking at more or less long-term strategies, right? Long-term strategies. How do we make this so we can keep going and not, you know, we get burnt out or whatever. But yeah, it it it's you know, that's why I love this podcast because we talk about the real, we talk about what's really going on, you know, we're not into scare tactics or like overselling it because it's hard, all of it's hard. Like you've been listening to the last few episodes. Me and Steve, we've been going on and on about pad split, but yeah, Pad Split has its issues, you know. Um, you know, but everything, and this is why I tell people everything that you do is gonna have its issues. It's this are those issues worth it, and then not only are they worth it, is it worth it, is it aligned with who you are and where you're trying to go, right? So I have to always look at that. Is it aligned with okay, is this the direction I want my business to be in? Do we want to still be doing this in 10 years? Or is this something that we can kind of push back, push back on and go pivot and do in a different direction? And that keyword pivot is where it's at. You have to learn how to pivot in this business because I tell you, the biggest pivot I seen in short-term rentals was probably when 2020, when the pandemic hit, that was the biggest pivot. A lot of people got out, a lot of people stayed in. Me and Steve stayed in and it paid off. It paid off for us staying in because you learn a lot. Cool thing about any business you continue to do, because we've almost been doing this business for 10 years. If you do something for 10 years, I would consider you an expert in the field, but there's a lot of things you learn about how to pivot and you can help other people out. And that's why I love this podcast podcast. We've helped out other people. Other people have had came on this podcast and helped us out. You know, we've learned a tremendous amount, but I do, you know, in 2026 too, even on like our podcast goals, we do want to have um, we do want to have more guests on because I there's a lot of good guests out there who are really killing it. We want to get more guests on because it's been a while since we had guests, because man, we used to have guests all the time back in the day. It got so important. Me and Steve were like, man, we got to get a me and you episode in, you know, and then now even this year, we pivoted this year and last year, last year and the year before, we even pivoted to like, you know, us doing the solo episodes. Like right now, I want this episode to drop on Wednesday, the 31st of the year, so you guys have this before you go into 2026. And also, I want people to email us too to see what changes you're doing in 2026. Like, if you're in a vacation rental market, what changes are you seeing there? If you're in a like me and Steve are more or less in like urban, city, suburban markets, what changes are you seeing to keep up with, like, you know, are you to stay on the short-term or mid-term rental flow to where you're, you know, to where you're still profitable? Um, but yeah, this year overall, like our books, we're profitable on our books without a doubt, but it's just like the extra headache of having and then also just having too much overhead. I would say watch your overhead, don't get into any bad loans because one loan that we got into was the SPA. Wasn't bad, it saved our business, but it's like now, okay, dang, things slow down. How do we get this paid back? So, and then like staying away from you know, if you can't operate in cash, be very careful. Try to be able to operate in cash full time because, like, right now, like next year, that's what we're going more long term, so we can stabilize everything, get one or two property, what maybe like a small multifamily, and then kind of you know be more stable and be more strategic and intentional with our pickups. And last year we were we we were we did 1031, so those 1031s were
2026 goals, the rent payment credit score change, and the road to financial freedom
SPEAKER_01great. You know, I love that 1031 duplex we got. I can't I'll I'll never be mad at that. That was a great purchase, it's a great property. Um, but just looking to do more of those in 2026, you know. But yeah, I would really love to hear what y'all are doing in 2026, how y'all are operating, things that you can see, because you guys know things that y'all see. And as you guys may know, I made a video probably a few months ago on my Instagram and I said I I wouldn't be surprised if the 2026 the real estate market crashed, you know, after Fannie Mae removed. 620 minimum credit score. I was like, I didn't really like it. However, I did see the other day. So they removed the credit score. However, they are now pushing to where they're allowed to consider how often a person has paid their uh rent, how many on-time rent payments someone has. And they're considering that now in the home loan application, which I was like, okay, I felt a little bit more comfortable. I'm like, okay, so they they're they may be eliminating that 620 credit score, but they are looking at other factors, like, okay, this person does pay their rent on time. We can consider that in the home loan application process, which is really cool. And it does, you know, it will, I think that'll help, you know, help the economy, help like houses move a little faster, get a little a lot more buyers inside of houses, um, which is a good thing, especially people that are qualified. Uh I was more or less scared of like, oh wow, y'all are letting unqualified people into these houses. And we know 2008, when that happened, it wasn't good for anybody. What I will say in 2026, be strategic, be intentional, make sure you write down your goals, stick to your goals, and then just like, you know, attack. Don't stop, don't slow down, come up with your routine. One thing I did this year, last year, I guess really got off my routine. Like, I gotta stay on my routine, like, stay on your routine. You know, it's all good to fall off, but get back on it. You know, you wake up someday, especially like if the business is slow, you're like, oh, it drains you, but you can't let it drain you. You gotta just keep pushing forward. And those days when like the business is draining you, those are the best times because as my mentor always says, that's when your brain goes into that creativity mode, and that's why I know in 2026 I know what I want to do. You know, I uh I got into this business to be, you know, I wanted financial freedom. But then, you know, me and Steve, we got dragged into the short-term, midterm rental thing. And it's been great though, you know, it's been great, but we got dragged into it, and sometimes I get distracted by that to where I'm so distracted by that I can't get to my true goal of having more doors. So I just want to really focus on having those more doors, getting more doors, um, having that financial freedom for my family. Matter of fact, shout out to Al Williamson. He was on the podcast, so I talked to him the other day on Facebook because I made a video about cost eggs and tax, you know, the short-term rental tax loophole. And uh he was talking about like the long-term effects of that. Like, yeah, if you sell the property, the IRS can come and recapture that depreciation. So I will tell people if you are doing these things, I'm doing these on properties that I plan to keep a whole lifetime, maybe even pass down to my kids, whatever it may be. So you have to do kind of keep that in mind because you just do a cost egg or a short-term real tax loophole on a property and you sell it, you know, that can come with some implications, but you can, you know, get a good CPA, get the right people around you, and you should be able to figure that part out. But yeah, it's just thinking long term now. Because right now I'm turning 37 next year, getting closer to 40. And I said by the time I'm 50, I want to have the number of doors I want and I want to have them paid off, you know, and that takes a while, you know. So I'm pushing for that 50, that 50, and I want you know those eight more doors, so I'm pushing hard for that. And sometimes when you when you get really clear on your goals, that's when pivots have to happen. Those are good pivots. So don't just stick to something just to stick to it. Uh, but yeah, I hope y'all have a really good 2026. I hope y'all accomplish all y'all goals. I hope y'all, you know, write everything down, crush it. Um, yeah, and email us, uh, live let thrive at gmail.com, send us an email. And also you can always follow us on TikTok, Instagram, follow my page, Steve's page, and the Live Let Thrive page. And I hope y'all can accomplish all y'all goals in 2026. I hope that this episode drops Wednesday morning so you guys can listen to it as the last day of the year, and y'all continue to keep living, letting, thriving. We will see y'all in 2026. We are out.
SPEAKER_00Thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of Live Let Thrive. Be sure to tune in next week for all the latest in the world of Airbnb and all that entails. Bye-bye.
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