Cold open

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome 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_02 0:11

Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to another exciting episode of Live Let Thrive. I am your host, Stevie Stax, coming at you from Fort Ward, Texas. And this is your favorite short-term, mid-term, long-term rental podcast in the world. And we have a special guest today. Who is that special guest, you ask? Well, it is a Miss Aaron Hell. Do you say it, Aaron Hell?

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Heli.

SPEAKER_02 0:38

Heli, okay. She's gonna give us hell today, for sure. Well, Erin is a self-made millionaire who achieved financial freedom through real estate investing in less than four years. To date, she has helped over 600 other investors to build cash-flowing real estate portfolios. A U.S. Army veteran, thank you for your service. Erin understands what it's like to work for the man and be limited by a schedule and fixed income. Aaron created a system to allow her to live a life by design and now has the time and resources to give back and focus on her family. She is a realtor at EXP Realty and has a passion about growing her team of agents and mentoring them to build the business of their dreams. She currently has 13 agents with plans to continue for growth. Erin has a real estate portfolio that includes 95 rental properties. She's gonna get that to 100 soon. Uh Aaron's courses and conferences empower investors to dream big and ruthlessly pursue their goals. She has a personal goal of creating a million millionaires. Welcome to the show, Erin.

SPEAKER_01 1:54

Thank you so much.

SPEAKER_02 1:56

That was a mouthful.

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Yeah, that was a lot.

SPEAKER_02 1:59

Man, where do I start with all this stuff? I mean, uh, first of all, you mentioned uh on the on your bio, because you you I guess you did short-term rentals

Four short-term rentals took more time than 96 long-term units

SPEAKER_02 2:09

before, but you you got you stepped out of that and just and you're just doing long-term rentals. What what uh caused that shift?

SPEAKER_01 2:16

Yeah, it was just honestly, it does not align with my why. I thought we thought that it did. We thought that we wanted to own properties in places we would want to travel to, but what we kind of learned was we would rather explore a new place than feel obligated to keep going back to the same place over and over again, which is kind of what was happening with us with the short-term rentals. And then an even bigger thing was just how hands-on short-term rentals were or are. And even with professional, you know, full service property management, we still had to be involved a lot more often than we'd certainly a lot more than we do with our long-term rentals or even like our midterm, what I call corporate rentals. So it just ultimately did not align and just wasn't worth what we were putting into it. And we just found that it kind of hindered us from living the life that we wanted and continuing to scale.

SPEAKER_02 3:14

And that's the key word right there is scale, right?

SPEAKER_01 3:17

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 3:18

Because I mean, uh, you get a whole bunch, especially I don't know how many you had, but if you had 95 rentals, I don't know how what percentage that was uh of short-term rentals, but man, they are time consuming. And yeah, and and you're doing rental, uh, there's it's it's just so so many turnovers, so many different people in and out, of course. Uh, we talk about it, you know, a lot on this show, short-term rentals, and that's what we do. But yeah, I mean, if you're if your goal is to maximize every single penny out of every single property, maybe you should you should do that, go that route. And and but it's gonna be a lot of time that you're gonna be pouring into these things, a lot of design. You got to refresh the design every year, every couple years. I mean, there's so much to it. Well, instead of just um four walls and a roof, you know, empty house and let's lock someone in for one or two years and on to the next one.

SPEAKER_01 4:10

Yep, exactly. And to to give you a picture of the numbers, we only ever owned four short-term rentals at one time. So at one point we owned over a hundred units. So four, like four percent of our portfolio short-term rentals, but without a doubt, those four took more time than the other 96. And that was the deciding factor for us.

SPEAKER_02 4:36

Yeah, that's like the 80-20 rule, but the the 496 rule, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:42

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 4:44

Man, that's crazy. But so you you were in the US Army, uh, you're working for the man, as you say, right?

SPEAKER_01 4:51

The the actual man, the the the man of the man, I guess.

SPEAKER_02 4:55

The man of the man. And and so what drove you into um starting your real estate journey?

SPEAKER_01 5:02

Yeah, that's a loaded question. Cause I I loved the military and I was good at it. And my husband is still active duty. We were dual military, which is what they call people who are married and both serving. And we had our first daughter, and we were both set to deploy

Dual military deployment with a six-month-old

SPEAKER_01 5:20

when she turned six months old, or when she would have been six months old. And it just wasn't a life that we wanted. Um, so even though I would have been able to get out of that deployment, I would have had to move the following summer, which would have put us geographically separated for three plus years with a newborn baby. And we also wanted to have another baby. We have two girls now. So, you know, the army just didn't really obviously, like lifestyle is a big thing for us, and they just didn't allow us to have any kind of a lifestyle like we wanted. So I got out really honestly without much choice and slowly got into real estate, um, you know, sort of trepidatiously at first, and started pursuing a lot of things that I'm no longer pursuing, like flipping houses, things that took a lot more time and energy and effort. And really, finally, a couple of years in, we're we're six years in now, and I feel like we finally have our portfolio where we want it, and we're able to just do whatever we want and travel and not be limited to any specific place. So, um yeah, a very long-winded answer to your question. But yeah, the army just did not make it conducive to start a family and live a life that we liked. And I'm so grateful that it played out the way that it did because I could still be in the military right now, and our net worth would probably be about $200,000 as opposed to 2.1 million.

SPEAKER_02 6:49

So wow. I mean you mentioned something else there. You even tried flipping houses, right?

SPEAKER_01 6:56

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 6:57

And of course, if you could hit a few home runs with that, but it's uh another time-consuming thing,

Four good flips erased by one HOA disaster

SPEAKER_02 7:03

right? With so many variables that could go wrong.

SPEAKER_01 7:06

So true, right? Like I feel like I would do like four in a row and they'd be great, and then one would be a freaking disaster, and all of my profit was out the window. And I think I made good money, but I didn't grow my wealth. And once I realized that that's what the goal was, flipping just wasn't gonna accomplish that.

SPEAKER_02 7:26

I like that. So you you you terminate the the what is it called the pinch points or the the pain points in your lifestyle, you know? It like you said, it's come it might be profitable, but it's not conducive to what you're going for. And I love that so much because yes, I mean, uh in my own journey, I've acute, you know, got up to like right now. I'm at around 50 properties that are short-term rentals, right? And that's oh my god. But um, but I I I always told myself, and I started with a partner and everything, and and uh we just started growing, and all of a sudden more people started asking us to to manage for them, their properties. You know, we had our own uh ones we owned, arbitrage, and then we had other people started taking on management and it started growing and growing and growing. But I was like, man, my whole goal in life, and which I started before I started this like midterm uh short-term rental business. Sorry to go on a tangent about me, but uh was was I'm gonna buy me a house every single year, and then maybe get to a point where I buy a couple a year and just plug them

The $60,000 first rental and $300 monthly cash flow

SPEAKER_02 8:26

in, put some renters in there, you know, make them nice. And that was my plan. Easy, soft, you know, easy peasy. And and but I just got distracted and started trying to accumulate everything. And then I started looking on Instagram and trying to, oh, that person has a hundred units, I gotta get to a hundred units. Oh, that person's doing this. I gotta, I gotta put a golf course at my places. I got, you know, I like, wait a minute, wait a minute. Do I want to be freaking stressed out, like uh, you know, the rest of my life, or do I want to like a chill, easy life that, you know, that have some a few rentals that pay for my lifestyle? That's that's yeah, man, this is refreshing.

SPEAKER_01 9:01

Yeah, I can relate to that. And you know, I learned this at a women's conference, a women's investor conference. I I've had to kind of go out of my way to find women who are doing this because our motivations tend to be really, really different. And the industry is all about doors, right? And every like everyone gets up and introduces themselves by the number of doors. And I remember this lady, she's actually my sponsor at EXP and her name is Shelby. And she was like, Shelby Johnson? Yes, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 9:32

She's been on the show. We love Shelby.

SPEAKER_01 9:34

Yeah, she's awesome. And so she was like, forget number of doors. Like, why are we measuring ourselves by number of doors? And that was really eye-opening for me because it's true, right? Like one door could make you a hundred bucks. So you would need 10 of them to make a thousand bucks a month. So it's just kind of a stupid, it's just this competition thing. And your your business and the quality of your business has nothing to do with the number of doors. So I hope that we get away from that. I'm not sure if we are, but that is really interesting. And I I hate almost when people say, you know, they they ask number of doors and it's in my bio and stuff like that. And it does show like a certain amount of credibility, but there's a lot of ways to get to those doors, right? You could put you could put $10,000 into a syndication that has a hundred units, and you could say you own a hundred doors and you wouldn't be lying, or you could own a hundred single-family homes outright, and those two numbers are very, very different, right?

SPEAKER_02 10:32

Right. So if I owned 10 houses, but every house that I owned had at least 10 doors inside them, I own a hundred doors, right?

SPEAKER_01 10:41

There you go.

SPEAKER_02 10:42

There's my hack to brag on Instagram. Um so yeah, you mentioned that. I mean, it's in your bio. You have, I mean, 95 doors. Is is a is that your goal to maintain this many houses, or are you gonna try to do something like sell off some and buy a small apartment complex, or what what's in your cards?

SPEAKER_01 11:03

Yeah, so right now we're just offloading the ones that aren't performing. Um, and what uh what we do after that, honestly, I have no idea, but we will look for the most passive thing we can find, which probably means sticking to our like three main markets where we have a really good team and it can be hands-off for us.

SPEAKER_02 11:24

Now, do y'all do things like you're saying offload? Do y'all do things like you you sell them to people, maybe um, you know, rent to own or owner finance in a way where you're getting passive income and they're able to buy it that way instead of just you know selling it on the through a bank or whatever?

SPEAKER_01 11:43

Well, not our we so we have one on the market right now, and it's we have a mortgage on it. So we don't have a lot of flexibility there. Um, but the ultimate goal is to own all these properties until the mortgages are paid off and then seller finance our entire portfolio so that we continue, you know. Hopefully by then we'll be making even more money than we make now and not have any responsibility to be a landlord. We just collect that that debt payment every month. So that is the long-term goal.

SPEAKER_02 12:15

Um, I've never subject two, right? The subject two, you can do it while you have a mortgage.

SPEAKER_01 12:21

Yeah, you could do subject two. Um the reason we've not done subject two is because the the homes that we own with um that have a good deal of equity and have a really good interest rate are VA loans. So those are a little bit more complicated because you have to get somebody to assume assume the loan, or you're you don't get back your entitlement, your VA entitlements. You can't like reuse that loan. So we haven't done that. Um in a lot of our hard money loans, the rates are not that great. They wouldn't be that compelling for somebody to want to buy those. And to me, I would only do I wouldn't do that strategy unless I could get a premium on them or had trouble selling them. So we've had those as like a backup plan, but we've never had to use them. But to, you know, honestly, I've only sold a couple of properties in my entire um, you know, in six years, we've sold those four short-term rentals, um, which three of them did really well. One of them we ended up selling for exactly what we paid for it. Um and we would do it again just because it wasn't worth it. Our biggest issue with that one was the HOA. The HOA went on a power trip and was canceling reservations. They would find a reason for your paperwork to not be in order or the guests to not have done something they were allegedly supposed to do. And it it was criminal, honestly. And they're actually going through copious amounts of lawsuits because of it. Um, but until somebody puts a stop to their activity, they're still able to do it. So, anyway, you know, those are all really, really great strategies and strategies I've used to purchase, but never used to sell.

SPEAKER_02 14:08

Hmm. Okay. And so, okay, how did you get up to 95? I mean, how did you get the money to buy all these things? That's that's what you know people are gonna say. But yeah, how did you and you said and you mentioned something, you mentioned VA loan. So, so go ahead and and and tell us how you were able to scale up to 95 properties.

SPEAKER_01 14:27

Yeah. So our very, very first unit was um a new construction single family home that we put 20% down on. So it was like a $220,000 purchase. By the time we paid all the closing costs and the fees, we were like almost $60,000 into it. And yeah, I was blown away because that was like my entire

$25,000 seller-financed flip at eight months pregnant

SPEAKER_01 14:47

savings. And I just had, we were pregnant with our second child, and I was like, I don't understand how you're supposed to scale this. Like, we just bought one door and there's nothing left, and we're making $300 a month. It's gonna take 175 million years to make enough money for a next down payment. And so I didn't really get it. And so I started um, you know, really listening to the podcast and getting tied into all this creative stuff, right? Everyone talks about creative financing. And so I started looking, looking, looking for a flip I could do, but it essentially had to be seller finance um because I didn't have any money. I had we sold my um I hasn't my husband deployed, so I sold my car while he was gone because we needed to get a bigger car with our second child. So I drove his truck while he was gone and I sold my car for $25,000. So I had $25,000 to play with to flip an entire house. So what I did was I found a home that cost $25,000. And I and I offered $12,000 down, seller financed the rest. So my note was like $230 a month, right? It's like nothing. And then I had the rest of that money, like another $12,000, $13,000 to do to flip this entire like 800 square foot house. So not a big budget, didn't have any clue what I was doing. I didn't know how hard it was gonna be to get contractors to show up and all that. So I was also super pregnant, but because I found like this holy grail that I'd been looking for for like a year, I ended up buying it and we me and my dad flipped it, did so much of the work on our own. Like I was literally laying floors, eight months pregnant, and sold that house for um 58,000. So it was all into it for like 25, turned it into 58, ended up doubling my money essentially by the time I paid the realtor and stuff. And so then that allowed me to get into the next one, which I bought a somewhat distressed triplex, but I was able to get into it with really favorable long-term financing. So I at that point I kind of realized the power in finding something a little bit distressed that I could get a good loan on and not have to like refinance it and pay all the fees. So that kind of became my model. And then I also discovered that you could self-direct your IRA. So I purchased a duplex in my IRA that was making me

Self-directed IRA duplex: $958 a year to $1,140 a month tax-free

SPEAKER_01 17:14

more per month than my previous mutual funds were making me in a year. Yeah, so that was like literally made like $958 the year before. And I was I was netting like $1140 a month.

SPEAKER_02 17:29

And it's tax-free.

SPEAKER_01 17:30

Tax-free. Yeah. So that was super eye-opening. And then the the first like big purchase, we ended up selling our house. So my the army moved us from Tennessee to California, and we decided to sell our house. It would have made a great rental, but they were building a battery plant, and there was going to be like a certain amount of lead emitted that they were like, it's a safe level of lead. And we're like, Yeah, we don't really think there is such a thing as a safe level of lead. And it was a big house, right? We knew a family would live in there, and we're like, we don't want our kids playing in the dirt, so we don't want another family doing that either. So we decided to sell it, and we took the proceeds from that, which was about 120 grand, and then I had a little bit in savings, and we bought a 10 unit. So we bought a property, 10 unit, it was 10 single-family homes on one plot of land, and it was $518,000. We got a bank, uh commercial bank loan on it. And when the rates went way down during COVID a little bit later, I ended up like restructuring that loan. So I didn't really do anything but pay for an appraisal. My initial interest rate was 5.75. I got it down to 5%. But because the property had appreciated, I pulled out like $100,000 in cash and then I redid all the roofs and then slowly started flipping the interior. So I've made that property go from we purchased it for $518, and the mortgage on it is probably like $340 at this point, and it's worth over a million dollars. So that's just what one, you know, one property that we sold, we sold one door to get us 10 units, and that made us half a million dollars in net worth in just a couple years. Um, so yeah, so it just kind of scaled. And then I we kind of discovered um syndications. So we've started to invest. We probably like 50 or so of our units are in syndications. So we do not own them outright, and a lot of them are leveraged as well. Um, so yeah, we just at this point, like whenever we find a good opportunity, we just see if we want to sell something to take advantage of it, or you know, we figure out how to find the money to do it.

Scaling through Zillow's ugliest listings

SPEAKER_01 19:42

Um but yeah, just it's just like you said, it's it's about scaling.

SPEAKER_02 19:47

It's addicting, ain't it? Real estate.

SPEAKER_01 19:49

It's addicting, absolutely. It really is.

SPEAKER_02 19:53

How many hours of Zillow do you look at a I know?

SPEAKER_01 19:56

I that's what I tell people. I'm like, buy your first unit, just buy your first unit. There the number of the percentage of uh landlords that own one door is like four percent because everyone buys, you know, every landlord has multiple units.

SPEAKER_02 20:12

That is true. I never thought about that. That's crazy. Because yeah, how I got my start, I was I started, I was doing the house hacking thing. I was hopping from house to house until I got to around four houses, and then we happened to we happened to find uh find a house we loved, and so I was like, ah, we can't hop out of this one. Um but so I had and then I had to start doing the 20% thing, and then learned about creative financing bought one uh owner financing, you know, not man. It was it was funny, it was a little condo, but it did the owner financing thing, and I think I I think I um at the closing table I was out like a couple hundred bucks.

SPEAKER_01 20:50

Amazing. I know it's amazing. Good for you.

SPEAKER_02 20:54

There's no excuses, man. And and um I I love I so I I noticed a theme. You you look at properties that need some work and to get a better deal, right?

SPEAKER_01 21:05

Yeah, I like I like some work. I don't like the full, you know, borderline tear down. Yeah, I like I like something you can get long-term financing on and then just slowly improve it, force that appreciation and take advantage of the natural appreciation.

SPEAKER_02 21:23

I like that. I like that. Just enough to keep the the regular buyers away, right? Just uh to keep the turnkey buyers away. Just enough.

SPEAKER_01 21:34

Yeah, and you know, during COVID, everyone was like, How are you still buying? How are you still finding your deals? All of my deals were on the MLS, all of them. People were like, I don't get it. How are you finding them? Like, what's your secret sauce? I'm like, Zillow.

SPEAKER_02 21:50

Look at the ugliest ones, and there you go. And um, but it and it's so funny because so people, so many people get scared of like here in North Texas, it is the foundation. People are afraid of, you know, there's a lot of foundation issues because of because of the ground, of course. And um, and so they'll say something like, 'Oh, I saw this nice house, but I saw that it had foundation issues.' I'm like, Okay, did you get a quote? No, right. I was like, it could be five thousand bucks could fix it, you know. Right. It could be twenty thousand, but you don't know.

SPEAKER_01 22:19

But you're getting a hundred grand in equity. It sounds like a no-brainer to me. I agree.

SPEAKER_02 22:25

Scares them away.

SPEAKER_01 22:26

There's so something about foundations is terrifying. We're just look, we're looking at properties here locally. Um, and they I was going through with this guy who was like, Oh, this is a total teardown. And we go in, and the foundation guy is like, it needs a new beam here for 12 grand, it needs a new beam here for 14 grand. I was like, So you want to tear this whole thing down and rebuild for a million bucks when you could put 25,000 into it and have a brand new foundation? And he's like, Well, when you say it like that, like that's the reality.

SPEAKER_02 22:58

When you lose, when you use logic, yeah, and roofs too. And a lot of a lot of things, a lot of times, um, when you buy when you there's a house with a bad roof, when you're in the buying process, they can actually file the claim with their insurance, get it fixed before they even sell it to you. It's gonna cost zero dollars to fix the roof.

SPEAKER_01 23:17

So true, yeah. That's true. Yeah, roofs are really straightforward, yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_02 23:21

And then they'll even uh you can even work it in the contract that they pay for the foundation repair too, out of the, you know, it's so much, so much things you can do.

SPEAKER_01 23:29

There's so many ways you can do that, and so many ways you can frame it. You can make the seller feel like they're in charge too. You can say, look, you can leave the money in escrow, you can get it done before we close, or you can just knock some money off the purchase price so that I can handle it afterward. Like let them choose what makes the most sense for them, probably from a tax perspective. But that's always been really like a good strategy for me.

SPEAKER_02 23:54

That was like the power of three right there. You mentioned give them three choices.

SPEAKER_01 23:58

Yeah, let them feel like they're in charge.

SPEAKER_02 24:01

You read the book, um, never split the difference.

SPEAKER_01 24:04

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 24:05

Oh, so good. So good. Oh my goodness. But yeah, he mentions that, yeah, you give them the choices and act like, like you said, act like they're in charge, right? You know, and this guy, you know, dealt with um saving people from host, you know, hostage situations and stuff. So buying a house is like no big deal, right?

SPEAKER_01 24:23

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 24:24

But I did notice you have a ton of books behind you. So are is is reading like a huge part of your life?

SPEAKER_01 24:30

It is, you know. I for the first like probably three years in business, all I did was read business books. I have like every single book about house flipping and building wealth and then business development. And then I recently I kind of like burned out from that, and I got back into reading novels. So I probably read like a book a week, I would say I love to read.

SPEAKER_02 24:54

That's funny because like same thing with me, like with with but with I loved when podcasts started coming out, you know, and and of course I have my own podcast, but I just was like a podcast junkie with all the the business ones, all the real estate ones, and all this stuff, but you just got burned out after a while. Okay, they bought a house, they paid this much, and blah blah blah. You know, not not anybody listening right now thinks that about my show, but I'm just saying no, of course not. Gotta cleanse the palate every now and then. And and I like listening to you know, all kinds of different shows about you know, self-improvement or sports or whatever, you know, it just there's so much, so much more to life than just uh real estate, but I love real estate a lot.

SPEAKER_01 25:32

I do, yeah. Yeah, I agree with you. I'm I'm kind of on like a mental health kick right now, I think, because I every year in January I kind of reset for the year and I set all these huge goals, and then I get completely overwhelmed, and then I have to like reset and put everything back in perspective, reprioritize. So that's where I'm at right now, and then typically like I get my bearings around like the summertime and and get all the stuff done by the end of the year, and then repeat the cycle every year.

SPEAKER_02 26:03

That's funny. Um, so does does um the background of the military, has that helped you like with your invest uh investing journey too?

SPEAKER_01 26:13

Um, I would say like the the network piece of it has been awesome. Like the military veteran network is absolutely amazing. I'm a West Point grad. So like the Service Academy network is really awesome too. Um, and then I think the focus on systems is has been really, really beneficial to um, again, my ability to scale.

SPEAKER_02 26:38

Nice, nice. Now when you do grow to a certain point, I mean, like

Leveling up CPAs twice and the 20-minute Friday accounting ritual

SPEAKER_02 26:44

like I said, uh 95 doors or you know, you said 50 of those as syndications, so you really don't have to do too much in those, correct?

SPEAKER_01 26:52

Correct, yep.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

Okay, but it's still, and then you got 50 other doors yourself, so that's still a lot. So um, so with with all that, is was there a moments like uh let's say uh accounting? Did you outgrow QuickBooks? Did you have to find uh a higher level CPA? What what did you do when you started growing like a lot?

SPEAKER_01 27:15

Yeah, that's a good question. So, yes, I have like leveled up twice now with accounting, um, with CPAs. I just hired uh a bigger firm. So first year I did it myself and quickly learned that wasn't sustainable. And then also learned that there's so many loopholes and tax benefits that it didn't make sense for me to do it myself. So then I use um uh sort of an individual, and he he was really good for me at the time, but I think I've gotten a little bit too complicated. So I hired a big firm, which is pretty expensive, but they will find me more money than they'll cost me. Um, and they're also just really big on strategy and structure, and they're having me set up things a little bit differently. Uh, you know, everyone has their opinions, and then also things are changing constantly. So you kind of have to stay up with that. Um so yeah, that's how kind of how it worked with accounting. Um, I would tell people though, don't wait until you need it. Like, don't tell yourself, I need to do this myself until I outgrow it, because that's the one thing that's gonna prevent you from being able to scale. Like if you're spending hours every single week accounting, then you're not finding the deals. Um, so I would tell people like, use a realtor, use a wholesaler. If if you're trying to be an investor, if you're trying to grow your portfolio, don't wholesale because you think it's gonna save you money, because the amount of time you're gonna spend wholesaling, you're just gonna turn into a wholesaler and not an investor. So I'm really big into my team. And right now I'm doing this week, I'm doing taxes. I actually like time blocked 30 minutes every day to gather all my tax documents, but I actually almost got it done all today. Today's Monday. So because I have all my properties are professionally managed, so they send me a report every single month and I just put them in the appropriate folder. And then at the end of the year, you know, they send me my 1098, the mortgage companies or they send me my 1099, the mortgage companies send me the 1098. I get my, you know, everything comes to me and I organize it as I get it. And then I just uploaded it today to the portal, took 30 minutes. But if you're not organized and you're not doing your accounting, you're not staying on top of it, this could be like the worst time of the year for any business owner. So I think that's what it really comes down to is um priorities and organization and sort of cutting out all the extra stuff. You know, there's a lot of things that we tell ourselves we need to do that don't contribute to the bottom line, don't have any income producing anything, you know, don't even support an income-producing activity. And we do it because we want to feel productive in a lot of ways. And I've really learned to cut all that stuff off.

SPEAKER_02 30:07

The low-hanging fruit, right?

SPEAKER_01 30:09

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 30:10

Um, so so do you do you have like a full-time bookkeeper that helps you?

SPEAKER_01 30:17

I don't. So my strategy is that every single Friday I spend about 20 minutes accounting, and it only takes 20 minutes because I remember every single transaction because it's only been, you know, five, seven days. If I do it monthly instead of taking, you know, 80 minutes, like 20 minutes times four, it ends up taking me three hours because I have to go track down every single transaction, remind myself what was this check for? What was this, what did I swipe my card for? What property was this for? But if you do it every week and it's fresh in your brain, it just takes a couple minutes. And then once a month, I do all of my like net worth tracking and my goal setting and make sure that I'm on track personally and professionally. And that takes a little bit longer, but it's very fulfilling for me. Um, so the reason I haven't really uh off outsourced that part is because I enjoy it and I like to track my money and see it grow. Um, and it kind of fills my bucket. A lot of people, it definitely drains them. So those people should totally hire a bookkeeper, but it doesn't take a lot of time for me. It'd probably take a lot more time for me to outsource it, and then I would be checking on it all the time anyway.

SPEAKER_02 31:32

So it brings you joy. It brings you joy.

SPEAKER_01 31:35

Yeah, yeah, I enjoy it.

SPEAKER_02 31:37

That is cool, and it reminds you this is what I'm doing it for, right?

SPEAKER_01 31:40

Exactly. Yeah, and yeah, I mean, you see, like I didn't feel like I did a lot this month. Um I only I think I saved like $2,000, but my net worth went up $30,000 in a month just because of all the mortgages that are being paid down by the tenants, and the properties are appreciating, and it's just really, really powerful to see those numbers play out.

SPEAKER_02 32:05

Yeah, it keeps you motivated too.

SPEAKER_01 32:07

Yeah, for sure.

SPEAKER_02 32:09

And so um, do you do anything like have you heard of uh the profit first method? We we bring that up on the show. You do anything.

SPEAKER_01 32:16

I have refresh my memory though.

SPEAKER_02 32:18

I I I can't remember quite that's the one with you got the buckets, you got the different buckets, which means you open up like a whole bunch of different bank accounts, right? And and then one of them, you know, it's a percentage goes to your tax bucket, percentage goes to your you know, pay yourself bucket, the other one goes to debt, goes to whatever. And and just it's just um I know uh you know, my buddy Micah, he always talked he would talk about profit first. So I don't know. I I thought it was pretty cool method.

SPEAKER_01 32:45

Yeah, it is cool. And there's another method, there's the shred method. Have you heard of that one? They um it's all about uh it's like you go after your highest interest mortgage and you like you pull out a HELOC, home equity line of credit, which is balanced like every single day, and you put that like let's say you have a $30,000 HELOC, you put that toward your highest interest mortgage rate or just your home if you own a you're just a you know, you just own your home. And then you like pay off your HELOC as quickly, as quickly, as quickly as you can, and then you repeat that until your mortgage is paid down. So people are like paying off 30 year mortgages in seven years. Um, so it's a super cool method. Um, but I think it ultimately just comes down to what your strengths are. Like for me, I'm doing those things, but I don't have to set up a system of multiple bank accounts to do it just because of the way that I track. And I I use good old-fashioned Excel. I find that to be the easiest, most user-friendly thing because I can't stand it when you like get all situated in an app and you finally got it working and you get it, and then they upgrade it and you're like, what the heck just happened? And you have to like relearn it. And I feel like people listening to me are probably like, oh, this lady's 65. No, I'm 37 years old and I struggle like crazy with technology. Um, but I just have no patience for that. So I do it all in Excel. I do all of my like accounting with my calculator on my phone, like nothing sophisticated about it. Um, but if you like if you're not setting

Excel and iPhone notes beat every new app upgrade

SPEAKER_01 34:28

aside the right amount of money to pay your taxes or you're not paying down your mortgages, and that's your goal, then you totally should invest in those methods and focus on those methods.

SPEAKER_02 34:37

Yeah, yeah. It helps, it helps. Some people really need that. Um some people, um but it's funny that you said about the apps because um, so so in my business, you know, my ex-partner in the business, he he loved those apps. He loved we try on a new one every few months, and and um, and I'd be like, dude, okay, how do I find I need to find a door code for oh, you just go through here, go to this, go to this, and and there's the door codes. I'm like, yes, but that's like four, five steps, you know. I was like, and then it's a new thing, and I like maybe I didn't put forth enough effort, but every time it was something that was just a little bit complicated, it would it would just send me into a blue ocean. But um, I I do I keep everything in my notes on my phone, and that's what and then you just search.

SPEAKER_01 35:26

That's exactly what I do. I just search for it.

SPEAKER_02 35:29

I agree each house has its own notes and has all its stuff. I'm like, you ask me something, I'll get it to you in like two seconds. I can get it.

SPEAKER_01 35:36

Yeah, and it's in some cloud somewhere, so it's not going anywhere.

SPEAKER_02 35:40

It's on my computer when I fire it up, it's on my phone, it's everywhere. I love it. Yeah, that's but I mean that that works for my brain. If someone can, you know, do this, do something with uh you know Notion or whatever the the other ones are, uh Slack, um, more power to them. It helps that and they know how to do that stuff. I just uh to me, you know, I'm running the company and and um I put the people in place that know how to do those things, you know. And if I you know and I make it, and I'll tell my my my lead, okay, make it where I can find it easy. If you're gonna do something, that's fine. But make it, you know, put me some some cheater notes or some some something easy and I can find, you know, because I'm not gonna go searching through five or six or seven different clicks to find something. Uh my brain, my brain.

SPEAKER_01 36:25

And I think that's like business 101. It's like don't don't get sidetracked, and this applies to these small little tasks, but also applies to like bigger opportunities. And I think like the theme of my business ventures has been saying no and staying on track, you know, because you could spend hours and hours and hours getting all these apps and setting everything up, or you could just pull out your calculator and you could make sure that you're saving the right amount of money, right? It might take a little bit, a couple more minutes as opposed to the couple of hours it takes you, and then the app goes out of business or whatever, like Mint did recently. Oh, it's you know, and then you then you're back to square one. So I but again, it's it like you said, it comes down to figuring out what works for you, which can be hard in this world of podcasts. Like we hear these people come on, they're like, Oh, this is the best thing ever, and you feel like you got to do it because it sounds like everyone's doing it, and then you spend a ton of time doing it and you realize, well, that just took away a bunch of time that I could have been working on my goals.

SPEAKER_02 37:29

That is so true. Uh, the shiny object syndrome, as they say. Yep, yeah, but but it is funny, it reminds me because because my lead VA, her name's Princess, and she pretty much runs the show. You know, of course, I'm the owner of the business, but I gave her a lot of power and showed her what we needed done, and she figured out brilliant ways to accomplish it. That's that's a cool uh thing. But but I told her, um, oh, the the accounting, speaking of accounting, I was like, all right, where am I gonna send these receipts when I get when I'm buying something, if I'm buying something for a property or I'm paying somebody or whatever. And then um, we were using uh Notion, and you gotta click here, go to this, and this, and you know, and if you if you hit some the wrong thing, you could erase some data. It was so to me, it was just so frustrating. She made me uh she dumbed it down for me quite a bit. She made me my own WhatsApp group, just me and her, and I send every receipt just send there. She goes, just send it there, and I'll take care of it, and I'll put it in the right.

SPEAKER_01 38:26

And it's there. Yeah, that's smart.

SPEAKER_02 38:29

That's what I needed. That's what I needed for my you know, simple thing. But but so you got into teaching, you you you teach women or you teach everybody? Are you what are you what are you doing?

SPEAKER_01 38:44

Yeah, everybody. I I've actually started to host events. Um, I I was doing some one-on-one coaching for a while, but really was limited to how much time I could put toward it in a day, and then realized that I could I could reach 300 people in one day by hosting an event and then bring in a whole bunch of different people who know a lot more than I do and have a lot more expertise and more experience. And um, so events sort of took root, and there's nothing like being at an event, you know, listening to a podcast is awesome and reading a book is awesome. But going to an event where you can meet the author or meet

Events over one-on-one coaching

SPEAKER_01 39:25

the podcast host and be in a room with people who are just fired up and ready to go. Like, you know, people that go to events are are the ones that are taking action or the ones that are ready to take action. They're the doers and they're the people you want to set yourself, you know, put them, put yourself in the same room as them. And the energy is just wild. Like, I always come out of those things. I usually go into the event like drained from all the planning, and then I come out of it like super energized and on fire and ready to accomplish the next thing.

SPEAKER_02 39:54

And that's that's big time events. I uh I haven't really gone to a lot of those, but you know, I've just been so busy myself. You know how this this this business can grab you, you know, especially you're doing all short-term rentals, um, but or short-term and midterm, midterm is just as you know, crazy. But um, but I even I'll I'll I'll find time to to host little meetup groups, you know, once a month or every couple weeks. And even if it's just a handful of people, man, every time I end up making a connection that leads to something else, it's so insane. Instead of just listening, like you said, listening to podcasts or reading a reading a book or audiobook, whatever you who however you digest your stuff. Um, but actually meeting people out there, like-minded people, because like you know, I still technically have my day job, I go a couple of days a week, but everybody there, it's a different mindset. They're not nobody's an investor. There's like maybe one person that has an uh rental property because they asked me a million questions, they finally got one, you know, they dove in, which is cool. I'm happy, yeah. Um, but but no one else, you know, everybody everybody's just like, you know, this job owes us and they need to pay us more, all that stuff. They're in the wrong mindset. Yeah, to me, I'm like, we gotta we gotta build the life we want. We can't trust a uh corporation to build it for us, whatever. But meaning going out and doing groups and meetups with people that think the same way that aren't gonna wait for something to happen for them, they're gonna they're trying to go out and get it, and then they're doing this and doing that, and then it it kind of aligns with what you're trying to do, and y'all can work on something together, or they can send you some business your way or back, or vice versa. Oh man, it's so powerful.

SPEAKER_01 41:34

Yeah, I agree with you. There's nothing like it, and it's to be with people who are on your same path and like operating at the same wavelength, is it's awesome.

SPEAKER_02 41:45

Yeah, big time, big time. So, when are you writing your book?

SPEAKER_01 41:49

I actually had a goal of writing a book last year, and I tried and tried and tried, and I didn't know what to write about. So maybe it's for some reason I want to write a book, but I I'm not putting any pressure on myself. Maybe when my kids are a little older and there's some more space in my brain, I might try again, but I I'd rather just read them right now.

SPEAKER_02 42:10

Just just the title has to be real estate is hell. Heli, heli. But uh I mean I it's it's so crazy that um a lot of people out there, and and I've seen it, man. It's it's you know, it's you go to Instagram, it's guru central, right? Everybody's a guru. They buy one, they have one property. I think a lot of them don't have any properties, but they're gurus, and they'll sell you a program and a book and all that stuff. And all they're doing, a lot of these freaks are doing, is going to Chat GPT and saying, Hey, write me a book about this, or write me, you know, this is it's insane.

SPEAKER_01 42:46

And it'll write them the so that is like exactly why I got into events because I'm like, I kept going to these events, and it was like, come to our free brunch.

The $30,000 guru seminar that cost a friend his retirement

SPEAKER_01 42:56

And I'd go to some hotel and they'd be like, it would be like two hours long, and they'd be like, Okay, now you have to come to our three-day seminar, it's only $200, huge discount. And then you'd go to the like, oh, okay, that must be where they're gonna teach me something. That must be where I gotta go to learn and meet the people, and then you get there, and they're like, Okay, now spend thirty thousand dollars on this program. And I'm like, Well, shouldn't I be putting that money into a property? Like, never made any sense to me. But those, you know, do you know that you can use your IRA to buy those programs? Oh my god. That's legal. I know it's it's like highway robbery, and then they never hear like half of them don't ever hear from them again, and but then they find out like what they purchased was consulting, and I'm doing air quotes, consulting, and there's no way to ever get that money back. It's not like you invested it and you have a tangible asset to show for it. You just gave it to someone, you line their pocket, they probably move to another state, and there's nothing you can do.

SPEAKER_02 43:55

It's terrible. My a buddy of mine, um he You know, he was approaching 60 and he was already on his way. You know, he saved up all his life. You know, his you know, he was working in the hotel industry. And I've talked to him about talked to him the show about it before. Um, but he wanted to hit a couple, he'd never done real estate in his life. He wanted to hit a couple home runs before just to pad that retirement on the way out, you know. And um he went to uh one of those seminars, like he said, and paid $30,000 for these guys, and they set him up with their people to go, you know, scout out a of course, all he's buying, he's scouted out houses, they got them under contract, and they had to fix them up. Oh, we got a crew for you, too. Well, a crew wasn't worth a flip, but anyways, everything went wrong because he never done it before. And he and he was buying these $400 back then, $400,000 for a house was a lot of money back then, and their goal was to sell it. It was in a nice neighborhood in Dallas, they're gonna sell it for $800,000, you know, put $100 or $200 into it and make a couple hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, four hundred, whatever profit. And that was their goal, and he ended up losing all his um life savings, all his um, yeah, all his savings was gone. And that's devastating. Because these two houses, they made every mistake, but it but so many lessons to learn from that. But the first thing was he spent 30,000 to to get these guys to he paid guys to rip them off, you know? And they gladly did, and he had no recourse. What's he gonna do? Sue him? I mean, that's what you paid for, right? And and so anyway, so yeah, that that just reminded me of my my good buddy.

SPEAKER_01 45:31

Yeah, such a shame.

SPEAKER_02 45:33

Yeah, and but I mean that was back when I was starting my real estate journey, and I it made me really think uh to be more a little more conservative than I had to be when going in on a deal or something like that, you know, just not go crazy with it and and um and you know, take risks, but don't take crazy risks, right? I've never played, I've never played uh I've never played baseball, but I'm not gonna go in the major leagues and pretend like I'm I can know how to hit two home runs real quick, you know.

SPEAKER_01 46:03

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 46:04

So I start off with just the three, two cookie cutters and just and went from there, you know.

SPEAKER_01 46:09

That's smart. I mean, it but that's what if you that's what the the real deal investors are doing, you know. That's where there's there's no reason for you to be on the far left and the far right, you know. You don't need those D class properties, you don't need those A plus properties, you need to be right in the middle where there's good rentals and it's easy to sell.

SPEAKER_02 46:30

Yeah, my buddy sends me these mil multi-million dollar properties around here all the time. He he's talking about meeting investors. What do you do with that? You know, your market is so small for that, you know. You get you a 1500, 2000 square foot, three, two. I mean, those things will always sell like hotcakes, totally always rent like hotcakes, always be in hot high demand, right?

SPEAKER_01 46:51

Yep, exactly.

SPEAKER_02 46:52

If you know what you're doing, yeah, climb your way up to flipping mansions. That's cool. But start out, you know, get some reps in.

SPEAKER_01 46:59

Yep.

SPEAKER_02 47:00

Man, sorry, this is a coffee talking. Um so this has been a cool show. Um, I I I love I love your enthusiasm for this. Um, 95 doors, 95 units, but that's not it's not about the doors, as you said, right? It's about um it's about the lifestyle, the life by design. And go ahead and go into that a little bit more. What you mean by life by design.

SPEAKER_01 47:28

Yeah, I mean, it's about being able to do the things that you want to with your time. And that looks different for everybody.

Life by design: the $2,500 cheerleading trip

SPEAKER_01 47:35

But for me, I have a five-year-old and an almost eight-year-old, and that means I get to be there every day when they walk home from school and I get to do their after-school activities and and travel. That's a big thing for us, is being able to travel and not having to say no to opportunities, you know, whenever we can all get the time off. We're almost always going somewhere. And I don't I don't want to say money is no object, but money doesn't restrict us. We might be limited to certain hotels or something, but it doesn't restrict us. And the other big thing, the other really cool thing is being able to give back and have um have influence and a power that we didn't have before when we were hardly able to um, you know, essentially cover our bills and just survive. Now we have a cushion and we have some padding and we created a foundation and we're able to directly touch people in in such a simple way and help people with things. It's it's for kids, it's all for kids. And we just don't want any kid to ever be limited. Like one of the things we just helped this little girl. Well, she's not little, she's like a 16-year-old girl whose cheerleading team made some huge competition and the trip was like $2,500 and her parents couldn't afford it. And so we were able to help with stuff like that because a cheerleading team can't not take a certain person, you know. So um anyway, it's just really cool to be able to do stuff like that and to give back in a way that I don't think I ever really thought about before. Um I created the space to do it, you know, because it's not just about money, it's also about being able to see that there's a need and being able to like plan to do that, which takes brain space.

SPEAKER_02 49:27

Man, that's powerful right there. That's powerful, especially the the giving back part, man. You I mean, you're helping out people and you're doing, and I like that. You're giving, and it sounds like you're giving like kind of local, you're local giving that you could see an effect.

SPEAKER_01 49:41

Yeah, yeah. I mean, we want to we want to be the people that when somebody hears of a kid who needs help with something, like we want them to call us, and we want to just be able to like pick up the phone and give them a credit card number.

SPEAKER_02 49:53

Yeah, I like that. I like that. Um, it's it's kind of like you know, there's so many different charities, and okay, you want to round up, you want to give to this one. Okay, but you don't know where you don't know what's you don't feel it as much, right?

SPEAKER_01 50:05

Yeah. Well, yeah, and there's so much bureaucracy too. And that's and that, you know, paid, you have to pay to salaries and stuff like that. And so why we we created this foundation so that a hundred percent of what we gave could go directly to people who need it. And even though a lot of them would probably get the help that they need, we are able to do it in such a quick and easy way. Most of the time they don't even know. Like, we'll just hear about something and they'll be like, they'll give us a phone number, we call the dance studio, or we call the school because their lunch account is overdue. Like, can you imagine being like a seven-year-old and being hungry and your lunch people are like, you can't get lunch today because your parents' account is overdue? Like, and I I say, can you

For The Kids foundation and overdue lunch accounts

SPEAKER_01 50:47

imagine? But that is what my childhood was like. So I it's it's just like so cool to be able to um do things for people without them even having to ask.

SPEAKER_02 50:59

And what's your foundation called?

SPEAKER_01 51:01

It's called for the kids.

SPEAKER_02 51:03

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 51:04

Super, super creative, right?

SPEAKER_02 51:06

That's perfect. Yeah, that's perfect.

SPEAKER_01 51:08

You know, creativity is not my strong suit.

SPEAKER_02 51:11

Straight to the point right there. That is cool. And and and you built the you built it yourself, the foundation.

SPEAKER_01 51:18

Yeah, we just I mean, it's super small. It's just we just have a um our board is our old pastor and my cousin, and me and my husband, and we just keep it, we just want to keep it as like anti-bureaucratic as we can.

SPEAKER_02 51:31

Now, uh you're the first person to ever come on the show talked about uh uh you know something like that, um, a foundation. Now, are there tax benefits to a foundation forming a foundation?

SPEAKER_01 51:43

Yes. Well, so there's there are rules about you know 501c3 status. First, you have to get that status from the IRS, and then you also have to maintain it. Um, and you have to have board a board in place and certain things depending on your state. Um, and I think we're pretty limited, like once we hit like more than $10,000 contributed personally, um our tax situation will change. Um, in terms, I I don't really know how because we haven't hit that yet, but I think next year we probably will, or this year rather, because I just did our last year's. Um so because you can't, there's so many ways you could do this wrong. Like you could just be sending money to a foundation and then doing whatever you want with it. So it's it's supposed to be pretty closely monitored. This last year is the first full year we've had it up and running. We started it in like November of 2022. So I'm not entirely sure what it's gonna look like this year when we do our tax return and stuff. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 52:55

And it's not the main reason you're doing it, of course. I'm just saying if it has tax benefits, that's just an extra cherry on top, you know. Uh, you know, for someone to do a foundation instead of just, you know, just it's good, it's great, always to give money. But if you could build a foundation and the money that was be going to taxes to the government, to the man, whatever, anyways, where it could go to help kids, it's a lot better because the government's gonna waste it.

SPEAKER_01 53:19

Right. Yeah, you still gonna you still get the typical tax write-off for it's just a charitable donation, you get the same benefits from doing that, but it's like we get sort of dual benefits, like we get the benefit of the writing off the business income, and then we get the benefit of having control over where that money goes.

SPEAKER_02 53:37

I love that. I love that. Well, this has been a great show, Aaron. Thank you so much for hopping on. Where can people find you?

SPEAKER_01 53:45

Yeah, so you can check out my website, bcglobalinvestments.com. I have a real estate team. It's Aaron Hellley's real estate team. Um, you can check a little bit out on my website too. But if you're interested in becoming a realtor or you already are a realtor and you're looking for a cool brokerage, please reach out. You can email me, Aaron E R I N dot M dot H E L L E at gmail.com. And you can find me all over social media. Um at the Aaron Hellley underscore investor coach on Instagram and the Aaron Helly on Facebook, and I'm also on LinkedIn.

SPEAKER_02 54:19

You know, that's that's awesome. We'll get all that in the show notes. But one thing I notice things sometimes. Um, you said your name gmail.com, and there's this whole, you know, if you follow Instagram, you gotta have a business email. I'm like, man, you don't have to have that crap. No, we can't. Nobody gives a damn. And I am starting to look at it the other way. I see someone out there doing business with the Gmail. I'm like, that's a freaking hustler right there. They're not just they're not just playing business or pretending business, they're actually out there hustling. And I say that and I have you know an email in my business, whatever, but I'm uh the live let thrive, live let thrive gmail. We still that we still hit that hardcore. And I don't care, people don't care. We message with big wigs in the industry with our freaking Gmail. So whatever. Quit everybody quit quit trying to be like everybody else and pay all this money for all this crap you don't need. Just get out there and hustle.

SPEAKER_01 55:14

Totally. And it just it's just another one of those things that takes up your bandwidth when your per, you know, your personal, you know, your name and your birthday at gmail.com is gonna do the same, the same amount of you know, outcome, the same action's gonna come of it.

SPEAKER_02 55:33

Yeah, yeah. Long live the hustlers.

SPEAKER_01 55:36

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 55:37

Well, thanks so much, Aaron. And uh, we'll hop on and do another chat again. This is a lot of fun.

SPEAKER_01 55:42

Awesome. Thanks so much for having me.

SPEAKER_02 55:44

All right, take care. Live let thrive out.

SPEAKER_00 55:48

Thank 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.