We Achieved Financial Freedom in 5 Years with Rentals (Doing These 5 Things)

In just around five years, these two investors went from zero rentals to financial freedom through real estate. In their own words, “I want as few doors as possible with as much money as possible.” That’s what we’re all after as real estate investors. How can we generate the most passive income with the fewest properties, headaches, and issues to deal with? A little over five years ago, Amelia McGee and Grace Gudenkauf were willing to buy any property with any problem, to get in the game. They wanted to quit their jobs, become their own bosses, own their time, and live the lives they imagined—not be tied to a paycheck. Now, they’ve achieved financial freedom and are sharing the five things that got them there. What’s the one thing Grace and Amelia say every new landlord should put in place at the start? Why is day-one cash flow overrated, and what’s the thing that actually makes you wealthy? Plus, why do they think “growing” to a big portfolio is too risky and not worth the effort? Grace and Amelia learned all these lessons the hard way over the past five years. Today, we’re giving them to you in under an hour so you can get to financial freedom even faster. In This Episode We Cover Why you don’t want a big real estate portfolio and the much better alternative Stop focusing so much on cash flow: Why chasing passive income is delaying your financial freedom Stop growing, start selling: The single most important piece of advice for current investors The one crucial metric that shows whether you should keep a rental or sell it One type of rental property that Grace says is solving all her problems And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠BiggerPockets.com⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠ and ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠h⁠ttps://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1253 Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠[email protected]⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Dave Meyer?

  These investors reached financial freedom in less than five years of real estate investing. Today, they're sharing the five most important lessons they've learned along the way. Grace Gudenkauf and Amelia McGee started investing less than a decade ago. By 2021, they both left stable jobs to go all in on real estate. In the early years, it felt like the cash would never roll in. They were grinding, grabbing any deal they could get, wondering if they'd made the right choice by leaving their jobs. Then the shift happened. By year three, they started seeing real results, real cash flow. They could start being selective about what properties they bought and which partners they worked with. Now, five years in, they both have stable portfolios and financial freedom.

• 0:45Dave Meyer?

  They're optimizing to achieve the simple, stress-free real estate businesses they envisioned from the beginning. With these five lessons, you can follow the same path and soon have your own life-changing passive income streams.

• 1:03Dave Meyer?

  Hello again, friends. I'm Dave Meyer. He's Henry Washington. Our guests today on the show are Grace Gudenkauf and Amelia McGee. You may know them as the founders of The Wire community. They've spoken at BPCon and wrote the BiggerPockets book, The Self-Managing Landlord. Grace and Amelia have each accomplished so much in this industry that it's hard to believe they've only been investing in real estate for about five years. But it's true. They both started separately right around 2019, and we wanted to have them back on today because I think their journeys have been very typical of what most investors experience. At the beginning, it's a grind. There are strategic pivots.

• 1:46Dave Meyer?

  And then, if you hang on long enough, you achieve financial freedom. Grace and Amelia have learned a lot of lessons even during their relatively short investing career, and today, they're sharing the five most important lessons that will help you get to that financial freedom even faster. So let's bring them on. Grace and Amelia, welcome back to the show. We're excited to have you here.

• 2:09Speaker 01

  Thank you.

• 2:10Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 2:11Dave Meyer?

  So we're going to get into these five most important lessons you've learned from five years of investing, but actually want to start at the end so people can hear what's on the other side of all the hard work that you've done. So maybe each of you can just summarize your investing careers and where your portfolios stand today. Amelia, let's start with you.

• 2:30Speaker 02

  Absolutely. So I've been investing since 2019 and I would say I'm your self-proclaimed bestie girl, big sister, real estate investor, here to share the lessons we learned over the last five, six, seven years. I invest in Des Moines, Iowa, and I currently have a portfolio of around 40 doors. I've dabbled in a little bit of everything, long-term, midterm, and short-term rentals. Grace and I are also the co-authors of the BiggerPockets book, The Self-Managing Landlord. So if you haven't grabbed that yet, definitely make sure you do that. But I invest in real estate as a means to an end, as a way to live a true life of freedom.

• 3:12Speaker 02

  And I think that's truly possible. My goal is to have as few doors as possible and make as much money as possible. So I can't wait to share all the lessons we've learned as your big sister in real estate.

• 3:24Dave Meyer?

  Fewest doors as possible, most money as possible. I can, I can get on board with that. All right, Grace, what is your portfolio? Maybe give us a little background as well.

• 3:32Speaker 01

  I'm also an Iowa investor. I'm in eastern Iowa. Everything I own is in a 15-minute radius. I have about 25 doors, just like Amelia, tried a little bit of everything. And I've landed on new construction lately as being the key to all of my problems. Really looking for low maintenance, easy assets that make sure that I don't have to be anxious looking at my phone and things can just be taken care of and I can be really proud of my units while doing the things that I love in life. But also been investing for Five, six years and I primarily do right now new construction in midterm and long term.

• 4:10Dave Meyer?

  All right. Well, now that you all have been doing this for a couple of years, we want to hear your top five lessons for your first five years in real estate investing. Grace, lead us off. What's lesson number one?

• 4:21Speaker 01

  Lesson number one is that systems matter more than you think and should be implemented right away sooner than you think. And here's a few examples of why. Number one, you have like the scrappy investor like Amelia and I who got started, learned how to buy really quickly and quickly built a portfolio. And it wasn't until things started to get really crazy and maybe slipped through the cracks that we realized that systems mattered. And we do talk a lot about what systems specifically we think you should have in the self-managing landlord. But on the other hand, there's also the investor who maybe only has one rental. You get a tenant, you put the tenant in, they're amazing. They stay there for 10 years and then when they leave, you have no clue how

• 5:06Speaker 01

  to get another tenant because you didn't write anything down. You don't have any SOPs and you don't have any systems.

• 5:12Henry Washington?

  I learned this lesson pretty early on. I probably didn't implement my learnings from this lesson as early as I should have, but I still to this day, remember my first few rentals, I would like, I didn't care how people paid me rent. I was so blown away that people actually wanted to pay me rent. And then when I got to like five doors and I realized I was running around at the first of every month, between the fifth of every month to multiple houses and going to the bank four times and realizing I didn't remember who paid what, like it was a nightmare. And that's when I started looking at property management systems and that made my life a whole lot easier. And I was like, oh, there's got to be other systems then. Why am I doing all this so manually? But when you're new, like especially when you're trying to get proof of

• 5:57Henry Washington?

  concept, I was like, yeah, any way I can get the money, pay me the money. But systems definitely changed things for me. I think the hard part for new investors is knowing what systems they need first and what makes sense in terms of a price point for them.

• 6:12Speaker 01

  I think that we would probably all be in agreement here that the very first system that you need is a strong property management software.

• 6:20Speaker 02

  Like you were saying, Henry, like running around and collecting rent every which way gets exhausting real quick. After the dopamine hit runs off of getting your first three rent checks from a tenant, you're like, oh, man, this is way more work than I bargained for. So a property management software that not only is able to collect rent and e-sign leases, but also has a strong maintenance request department. I think that's really important. If your tenants are texting you, Facebook messaging you, emailing you, calling you, literally all of Instagram messaging, like that is so disorganized and honestly, it provides a poor experience for your tenants. And our ultimate goal is to keep tenants as happy

• 7:02Speaker 02

  as possible so that they stay for as long as possible. Because if we have a lot of turnovers, number one, our cash flow gets cut and significantly gets cut down. And number two, it's just draining and you're gonna hit burnout. So I think number one, property management software, a lot of them these days can do a lot of different things. So you might not even need more than that for the first year or two.

• 7:25Dave Meyer?

  And actually, if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, you can get Rent Ready for free. That's just part of the subscription. So that's absolutely something that you can do. And I think people wait way too long for this. As you said, I think the challenge though is they don't know how to even evaluate the tools because they've never done any of the processes before. So you're like, how do I know what a good property management software is if I don't even, I've never even communicated with a tenant before. Are there any things that you think are like particularly important? Or should someone just, should you just go buy one of these reputable softwares and trust that it has everything you need?

• 8:01Speaker 02

  Don't pay for one that is gonna charge you per unit because it's gonna get expensive quickly. And then, like Amelia said, e-sign, maintenance requests, communication, and rent payment. As long as it has those four things, you should be pretty good. And when it comes to not even knowing what to do with a tenant, another piece of advice that goes along with this is write down what you do, even if it's just bullet points so that you can turn it into a standard operating procedure later.

• 8:29Speaker 01

  That's going to be so helpful for when you go try to do something a second time. You don't have to recreate the wheel or do what I call is the sit and think where you sit and think, hmm, what am I supposed to do next? You can just read your own notes and not even have to use your brain.

• 8:43Henry Washington?

  Especially now, what an advantage new investors have with the with AI being implemented. Because I use ChatGPT and other AI tools to do SOPs now. And you honestly don't even have to write it down anymore. You can just talk to it and tell it the steps and tell it to create an SOP. A that's easiest, but the biggest cheat code I found. If you're using software tools and you want to create an SOP on how to use the software tool, ChatGPT has an agent mode now. You can say, log into my system, do this task, write down each step, and you can have it create an SOP for you.

• 9:23Dave Meyer?

  Man, you trust ChatGPT way more than me. I'm not giving it my. That's crazy.

• 9:27Henry Washington?

  Dave.

• 9:28Speaker 01

  It already knows.

• 9:29Henry Washington?

  It knows your passwords, Dave. It has access to everything already. You're not that.

• 9:35Speaker 02

  Baby, it knows your password, your social, your blood type.

• 9:40Henry Washington?

  You sound like a boomer right now. It already knows, Dave.

• 9:43Dave Meyer?

  No, I'm still terrified and don't remind me. What about other systems outside of just property management? Are there other things that you recommend getting started really early with?

• 9:52Speaker 01

  A little bit more advanced, monday.com as a project management software. I'm building and I was laughing the other day because my GC messaged me and said, this project's moving faster than your Monday chart can be updated. He knows that I love my Monday chart. I want to see the budget, the timeline, when everything is happening. And that is a great system to also build out SOPs and tasks. Like when you're closing on a property, when you're inheriting a tenant, when you're turning a tenant over, it can lay out all those tasks and add deadlines and who's supposed to do them.

• 10:24Dave Meyer?

  I love that advice. I think that just like the order of operations or remembering to do things is so good. Henry and I were joking the other day about how we always forget to move our utilities over when you close on a property.

• 10:35Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:36Dave Meyer?

  Like, I use Airtable. It's very similar to Monday.com, similar kind of thing. But like, you could just program it to send you a text or to remind you to do these things. And it's, it is so fricking helpful. I just can't imagine how much time and money I would have saved. Alright, so those are two great systems that you should set up. I'm just gonna throw in bookkeeping, too. Just find someone to do your bookkeeping. It will save you so much fricking time.

• 10:59Speaker 02

  I was gonna say that. As a big sister here in real estate, my biggest piece of advice is, once you get past like, three properties, you should really be hiring out a professional bookkeeper. That is not the best use of your time as an investor, unless, of course, you're a bookkeeper by trade and you can do it really, really well, very quickly. Otherwise, you can make more money elsewhere.

• 11:21Dave Meyer?

  I would just want to say and summarize this whole conversation. It's like, we're talking about systems, we're talking about these softwares that you should use. It might sound like a lot, but the basic gist here is just treat your rental property like a business. These are things that any business has to do. Set up bookkeeping, get a good email, figure out the software that's gonna help you run your business most effectively. We call it investing. Real estate is really entrepreneurship. You're a small business, just figure out the right tools that are gonna help you run your business effectively. Amelia and Grace have given awesome advice for how you can get that set up. We do have to take a quick break, but when we come back, we're gonna hear Amelia and Grace's four other lessons from their first five years of investing. Stick with us.

• 12:01Henry Washington?

  As a real estate investor, the last thing I want to do or have time for is to play accountant, banker, and debt collector. But that's what I was doing every weekend, flipping between a bunch of apps, bank statements and receipts, trying to sort it out by property and figure out who's late on rent. Then I found Baseline, and it takes all that off my plate. It's BiggerPockets' official banking platform that automatically sorts my transactions, matches my receipts, and collects rent for every property. My tax prep is done, and my weekends are mine again. Plus, I'm saving a ton of money on banking fees and apps that I don't need anymore. Get $100 bonus when you sign up today at baseline.com/bp.

• 12:42Dave Meyer?

  Summer bookings sound great until someone slips by the pool, gets hurt on your dock, or damages your property during a long holiday weekend. A lot of short-term rental investors don't realize their standard policy may leave gaps when it comes to short-term rental activity. That's why investors use Steadily. They offer landlord insurance built for real estate investors, including short-term rentals. And if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, you'll also get 5% off your landlord insurance premiums. Visit biggerpockets.com/landlordinsurance to learn more.

• 13:14Henry Washington?

  Here's a strategy that most W2 employees have never heard of. Normally, if you want to write off a rental property against your regular income, you need real estate professional status. That means tracking hundreds of hours a year. Rent to Retirement just launched a program that skips all of that. It's called the STR loophole tenant placement program. Here's how it works. You buy one of Rent to Retirement's Class A new construction investment properties. You set up an Airbnb listing and self-manage it for the remainder of the year. Rent to Retirement then rents the home as a short-term rental to establish it as an STR for the year. No furnishing required, making this the easy button to save five or six figures in taxes this year.

• 13:56Henry Washington?

  And because you're the sole manager, there's no hourly minimum to meet. That lets you use a cost segregation study to accelerate the depreciation and potentially write off over $100,000 against your income, even on your first rental. Add in cash back up to 13% of the home price, which exceeds $60,000 on some properties. With this massive cash back incentive, investors are seeing total returns up to 126%. New construction, A-class properties, and inventory is limited. Learn more at biggerpockets.com/retirement or text REI to 33777. Again, text REI to 33777.

• 14:38Henry Washington?

  Quick word about a new pro perk you'll want to know about. Aven, if you're a homeowner, there's a good chance you're sitting on equity that you're not using. The problem is tapping into that usually means a cash out refi, a traditional second mortgage, or weeks of paperwork just to get approved. Aven built something different. It's a credit card, but it's backed by your home equity. So you get a lot of the rate benefits of a HELOC with the flexibility of a card you can use anywhere. Rates are typically well below a standard credit card. Approval is fast and mostly online, and you can use it for anything. A renovation, paying down high interest debt, or just have more breathing room in your budget. And if you're a BiggerPockets Pro member, there's an extra reason to check it out.

• 15:17Henry Washington?

  Get approved for the Aven card and you'll get a $400 statement credit after spending $400 on your Aven card. Enough to cover your entire annual Pro membership. Head over to aven.com/biggerpockets to see if you qualify. Aven Financial, NMLS #2042345. Cards issued per 2020 license from Visa USA, Inc. by Coastal Community Bank. NMLS #462289. Member FDIC, equal housing lender. Terms apply. Visit aven.com for details.

• 15:41Speaker 04

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• 16:14Dave Meyer?

  Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I'm here with Henry, Grace, and Amelia talking about lessons Grace and Amelia have learned from their first five years of investing. Lesson one, was systems matter earlier than you think? Let's move on to lesson two. Grace, what is it?

• 16:30Speaker 01

  Number two is the biggest wealth builder is not cash flow, it's time. And as we hit years five and six in our portfolio, we're really starting to feel this. For example, rentals that we bought on day one that were okay. With time where the debt's getting paid down, it's appreciating, of course, we're getting cash flow and tax benefits. Now on paper, those deals are looking a lot better and investors forget that they think that they can only get in the market with a grand slam. And they're too scared to take any risk where if you just get in the game and get time on your side. You see so many more benefits down the road.

• 17:09Henry Washington?

  I always get screamed at when I say this, cash flow is the least important way that my real estate pays me. I want to shoot for cash flow every time, but it is not the only metric I'm using to evaluate whether I'll buy a deal or not. And I would buy a deal that breaks even if some of the other metrics were wholly in my favor. If I I'd buy a deal that breaks even, that's in a great part of town, that's appreciating massively. That's going to give me amazing tax benefits and that I walk into a hundred to a hundred and fifty thousand dollars of equity on day one on. Yes, I think investors should be focused on cash flow because cash flow is a measure that you bought yourself a decent deal. But the cash flow itself is not what's going to make you wealthy.

• 17:54Henry Washington?

  It's the time in the market, it's owning that asset over time, watching it appreciate, watching that debt pay down. And then all of those benefits give you additional options, additional buying power. You can cash out refinance, you can pull a HELOC, you can let it continue to pay itself off or accelerate the payoff. There's so many more options that you get the longer you have an asset in the market. And it's that compounding that truly builds the wealth, not the one to four to five hundred dollars a month of cash flow that you're getting off that asset.

• 18:25Speaker 01

  And that cash out refinance, which is tax free money because it's debt, of course it's debt, you got to make sure you can cover that and service that. But once you hit your five minimum, you're able to start doing cash out refinances. And get more and more chunks of equity to play with. And as I've been saying, like really play chess within your portfolio once you have a basis. And make moves that make the most sense for you. And when you have time on your side, it continues to give you optionality. Like you said, Henry and flexibility because you're building equity on all ends.

• 19:00Dave Meyer?

  It's a tired analogy, but like it's just a snowball effect. It just starts slow and it builds and it builds and it builds on yourself. And like, by the time you're five years into this, 10 years into it, you just realize like you have enough capital to do really the things that you want. And you just, it becomes a different game. Like Gray said, it's just portfolio management. It's capital allocation, which to me is way more fun than stressing about whether you made a hundred or a hundred and $25 every single month. And it's just, it gets you to the big picture just so much faster. I do respect though, like when you're getting started, it's hard. Like it is hard to see that five years out. And so you just got to trust us. Like, I don't know what else to say.

• 19:44Dave Meyer?

  It's just going to work out as long as you buy a good deal. Like just give it time and it will work out.

• 19:49Henry Washington?

  I think the caveat we need people to understand is you do need to have cash reserves so that you can hold on to your properties. In the event they aren't hitting the numbers that you want, right? Cause the only way you really lose out on this benefit is if you sell. And so some deals are going to cash flow amazing. Some deals might not cash flow as well. Even if you underwrote them to perform excellently, it sometimes doesn't work out like that. Your renovation takes longer. You don't get the rent you were expecting. Something happens in your market. You gotta have the cash reserves to hold on, but if you can hold on, the benefits are great. I am in the middle of refinancing one of the first multifamilies that I bought back in 2020. And when I tell you I closed on this deal, January 1, 2020, March COVID hit.

• 20:33Henry Washington?

  My renovation budget went from a hundred thousand dollars on this asset to $250,000 because labor and materials went through the roof during COVID. It took me two years. I was stressed out. No rents coming in. It was costing me so much money every month and I just kept thinking, man, why did I buy this asset? And now I'm sitting here on an asset I owe $750,000 on. That's going to appraise for 1.5 million. Like you just have to hold on.

• 20:58Dave Meyer?

  Nice dude.

• 20:59Speaker 01

  We did an interview on our podcast with a gal who had one rental property, bought it in 2007. She's up 50K in equity. Two thousand eight to two thousand thirteen, she's able to hold on to it, but she's negative fifty thousand in equity. So she's gone up, down, she's down for a long time. She still has this property today. Cause like you said, Henry, she had the reserves, she had the income to basically feed that property through the low. Now she's up sixty, seventy thousand dollars in equity. So time heals all if you set yourself up for success to be able to hold on to the asset when the market is down.

• 21:37Dave Meyer?

  The one thing I'll, I'll add to this is I, I completely agree. It's changed my buying strategy a little bit. Sort of, I, I haven't bought new construction, Grace, but like I've totally stopped buying really old assets, or I'm trying to stop buying really old assets because of this.

• 21:53Speaker 01

  So have we.

• 21:53Dave Meyer?

  Because my, I looked it up today. The first building I bought was built in eighteen ninety six.

• 22:02Dave Meyer?

  But, uh, you know, I just, I think it's really changed my perspective. Cause like there are great deals on old houses and I've made a lot of money on old houses. But as I've matured as an investor, I'm just like, I'm only buying stuff that I want to hold on to for a really long time. Cause I've had to sell a lot of those older houses. It's been fine. They were good deals, but like now that I'm in a different, less growth oriented stage of my career, I'm like, I'm just gonna buy a place that I know, even if it gets bad, even if it lose equity, even if I have a vacancy that this is just like a great asset that I want to hold for twenty years. Those, that's like my number one buy box criteria right now, more than anything else.

• 22:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, Dave, that is a perfect transition into number three on our list, which is that your buy box should change with time. As you become a better investor, you should be investing in better deals. Grace and I also, we've stopped investing in old properties. We've stopped investing in monster houses, which that's what we call single family conversions that are all wonky.

• 23:03Dave Meyer?

  Yep.

• 23:03Speaker 01

  So weird. Like we don't want those in our portfolios anymore.

• 23:07Speaker 02

  We've sold some of our rentals to reinvest in properties that we really love because now that we have five, six, seven years in the market, we've been able to realize, okay, this is the type of property that I really like. This is the type of property that's gonna get me to my end goal of having the smallest portfolio possible while still making great money. And Grace has taken it even a step further to where she's now just doing new construction projects. So Grace, I feel like you should share kind of what that looks like and how also a lot of women in our community that we call mid-level investors in the wire community have also kind of switched to this new construction strategy.

• 23:47Speaker 01

  When we get started, a lot of us are just like, can I get into a property? Anyway, doesn't matter what it is, where it's at, or the strategy. As long as I can burn it or do creative financing, I'm interested. Once you get a few use into your portfolio, you can't be in growth mode forever. You've got to start stabilizing and really looking at what works for you. For me, I realized the pain of my existence is maintenance. And so my buy box really started to change to new construction. Like I said, I fall completely backwards into it. I never set out to do that. I bought an old home, thought I could save it in an area that was incredible. Couldn't save it. So I really, the only way I could

• 24:30Speaker 01

  get my money back out of it was to build and then refinance. And so I did. And now I'm on to new build number five and six and seven. But I really had to think about like, okay, what makes me annoyed during the day or stresses me out? And it was realizing it's coordinating maintenance because so much decision making. Are you gonna keep it? Are you gonna replace it? Are you gonna troubleshoot? Are you gonna tell them it's not an issue that you cover and that it's just cosmetic? There's just so much to coordinate and make decisions on there that I wanted things that just didn't involve it. And for me, new construction, when it presented itself as an opportunity, made sense. And so my buy box has changed to adapt that.

• 25:11Henry Washington?

  Oftentimes investors start investing based on an exit strategy. They think they want to do a certain type of real estate deal. But in actuality, that real estate deal may not be as profitable as you think it might be. So just because you want to buy a certain asset, doesn't mean like that's the asset that you have the best skillset for, or that's the asset that your market gives you the best opportunity for. And it takes a few years, like Dave said, for you to start to see like, is my property performing like I underwrote it to perform? It takes time to figure that out. So your buy box should change. I absolutely thought I would snap up any multifamily deal that I could buy under a

• 25:53Henry Washington?

  certain loan to value percentage, but I operated one in a market in a neighborhood that I now know I will never buy another asset in that market, in that neighborhood. And it took me having to own that asset for a couple of years for me to figure out that I didn't want to own that asset, even though all of the numbers made sense and all of the particulars of that property fit my buy box at the time. Time will tell you what you should buy. Time will also tell you if you should do what you think you want to do. Cause oftentimes you hear a lot of people say, I want to get into this and I want to be a short-term rental operator. I want to get into this and I want to be a house flipper. You may not be built for that and it's going to take you some time to figure it out.

• 26:32Speaker 02

  I started out as a house flipper and it took me one deal. Took me one flip to say, wow, that was way more work than I bargained for. I'm going to buy rentals.

• 26:42Dave Meyer?

  I recommend to most people when you're early on, just find ways to build equity. Like if that means that you need to do annoying maintenance, do it. Like you have to go do a burr, even if it's a lot of work. Most people aren't starting with enough capital that they can go out and buy newer deals that are easy to maintain. That's just the reality of it. So you need early in your career to hustle a little bit. As you get to this like harvesting stage that you're, you get to eventually, like then you don't want to do it and you don't have to do it. So your buy box needs to change. That is totally normal. The one thing I will say though, is like if you're in acquisition mode and you're looking to Buy a deal, try and keep a fixed buy box like for that deal.

• 27:26Dave Meyer?

  I think that's where people sometimes get confused with this advice because it's like, when you are going out and buying something, you should have a clear idea of what you're going to buy. But in sort of the big picture, as your career progresses, your next acquisition between acquisitions, that's when you should be thinking about changing your buy box.

• 27:42Henry Washington?

  All right, these are great lessons and it's actually a good transition into our next lesson, which we will get to right after this break.

• 27:50Dave Meyer?

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• 28:35Dave Meyer?

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• 28:51Henry Washington?

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• 29:35Henry Washington?

  So when it's time for your next Toyota, you could trade in for more from a great deal today to a great value tomorrow. A Toyota is right for you. Shop toyota.com for deals and details or stop by your local Toyota dealer today. Toyota, let's go places.

• 29:51Dave Meyer?

  I just booked a ski trip to Park City and I've already got the whole thing planned out. Five days, first tracks every morning before the crowds show up, my knees reminding me I'm not 25 anymore by the second run, and an embarrassing number of overpriced burritos at the lodge. I don't even care. This is the trip I look forward to all year. But here's the part I actually appreciate. The practical side of my brain kicking in is that my place doesn't have to just sit there empty the whole time I'm away. I can list my space on Airbnb and bring in a little extra income while I'm out getting humbled on a mountain. And with the co-host network, I'm not the one handling all of it.

• 30:32Dave Meyer?

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• 31:17Dave Meyer?

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• 31:58Speaker 04

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• 32:31Henry Washington?

  All right, we are back with Amelia and Grace and we are covering the five lessons they have learned as their time as real estate investors. And we're moving on to our fourth lesson, which is what Grace?

• 32:43Speaker 01

  Growth mode cannot be permanent. And this also can be attributed to some of the themes that Chad Carson talks about. And I love the idea of pruning. We as investors have to understand that we can grow, but we have to get to a baseline stability and almost check in and reevaluate before growing again. The investors who never do this, they just go, go, go forever. Those are the investors who end up over leveraged when there's a market shift. And I was just talking to a friend who was looking at selling some things that she thought she'd never sell. And I said, hey, you got to liquidate and stack up capital and reevaluate from a place of strength. When you're feel good, you've got time, you've got, the market's going well.

• 33:27Speaker 01

  What you don't want to wait for is you lose your job or the market has a downturn and now you're scrambling to free up some capital. So you've got to always get back to a base level stability and really looking at your LTV as a whole, especially if you're borrowing private money or accessing different types of creative financing is crucial for the investors who want to stay in this for the long game.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  One thing that we talk about often in wire is return on equity. And so we evaluate that often, which is basically your cash flow divided by the equity that you have in the property. And if you're sitting at like a one to four percent return on equity, your money is not working as hard as it could be for you. And you need to be looking at either refinancing that property, selling it, doing something with it so that you can take that money and put it elsewhere so that you're making a great return on it. And Grace and I, we are pruning our portfolios right now. We are in that stabilization kind of mode where we're taking a great look at our portfolios and figuring out, okay, what really worked well for us?

• 34:35Speaker 02

  What can we get rid of? What can we refinance? And how can we make our money work really hard for us?

• 34:41Speaker 01

  And sometimes a property has made its money. It's done its job. It did well, but it's time to get out of that property. I'm selling a fourplex literally today that I never thought I would sell, but I had to really evaluate it using my bookkeeping and my numbers and understanding my time and effort and energy and know that this got me from A to B, but it's not going to get me from this phase to the next phase that I want to be at. It's not going to give me the peace of mind that I really want it to. And so really understanding that it's okay to sell. Sometimes a property has done what it needs to do. And maybe you need to go get ROE elsewhere, or maybe you need to add some cash to your reserves or just decrease your workload. That's okay. Real estate's two steps forward, one step back,

• 35:26Speaker 01

  as is everything in life.

• 35:28Dave Meyer?

  There's a lot of bad real estate advice, but some of the worst real estate advice out there is when people are like, buy and never sell. Why would you do that? Like, that's just a stupid thing to say. Just do like, if you have a deal and you could get a better deal elsewhere, why wouldn't you sell and then just reallocate your capital elsewhere? It just makes so much more sense. I think like, holding on no matter what through thick and thin is bad advice. Even though we earlier in this episode just said, just hold on. All you have to do is hold on in real estate. It is a fine line. I think the thing that Grace said that really is the important thing is like, she's making decisions based on math and ROE and information and not on fear. Not, you're not selling because the market dipped 2%.

• 36:12Dave Meyer?

  You're not selling because like, you, you get fearful. It's because, hey, I have this money and I could be doing something better with it. I'm not running from something. I am running to something else that's going to be a better use of my time and money.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Well, Dave, I'm really glad that you said that you think that's terrible advice. Because number five on our list, you'll be very happy about this, is that you won't hold all of your rentals forever. And it took us a long time to realize that because we had also heard the really crappy advice of you buy and then you never ever sell. And so that was a really hard learning to get out of our heads and to shift our mindset of, okay, not every property is going to be with us for 30 years. We're going to have to sell some of these and reutilize that money elsewhere.

• 37:01Speaker 01

  It took me, yeah, at least three years to sell a rental. And honestly, within the last six months to a year, I've gotten cutthroat. Like, if you are not performing, you're gone.

• 37:12Dave Meyer?

  You're gone.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  And yeah, you're axed. Like, we are doing some major rearranging because at the end of the day, it's to get the lifestyle I want, which is ease and stress-free and simplicity. So that's not the same thing I wanted when I first started. When I first started, I was trying to quit my job. So any way I could make money, I was down to do that deal.

• 37:32Henry Washington?

  The beauty of real estate is it can allow you to live the life that you want. But the only way that works is if you're evaluating your portfolio along the way and making changes in your portfolio that supports the lifestyle you're trying to achieve. If you're trying to achieve a certain lifestyle and keeping a property is hindering you from doing that, you need to get rid of that asset, period.

• 37:52Dave Meyer?

  I think the sentiment that a lot of this, like, never sell is probably based around is like, don't take your money out of the market. Like, don't stop investing. And I do believe in that. But thankfully, in real estate, you have these powerful tools, like a 1031 exchange, where you can sell an asset and just go buy another one without paying taxes on it. Like, that's an incredible benefit where you could just constantly be optimizing your portfolio. And like, as you get out of the growth mode and into sort of a later stage of your career, optimization is the name of the game. For me, at this point, I don't put a lot of new capital into real estate. I'm just moving stuff around and optimizing and trying to do better and better. And usually that works. You don't need to continuously be hustling out there.

• 38:35Dave Meyer?

  You have to be willing to be cutthroat, as Gray said, and to be constantly evaluating new priorities. I talk about a bit in my book, this concept of of benchmarking, like the thing I do is like, I constantly evaluate deals in every market I'm in, even if I'm not really actively looking to buy, because that's the only way I know if my other deals are performing, because I could say, hey, oh, I thought this deal was doing great. It's getting a 9% return on equity. I could go buy another deal. It's 11 or 12%. Like, then I'm going to go do that. And I only am able to do that because I'm like constantly monitoring the market. It's not that much work, but like as your career grows, that's kind of what your job becomes is just like

• 39:15Dave Meyer?

  weighing different investing opportunities against each other instead of just like hustling constantly.

• 39:21Speaker 02

  This conversation is actually giving me butterflies a little bit because it's the fun part of investing in real estate.

• 39:27Dave Meyer?

  It is, yes.

• 39:28Speaker 02

  Moving money around, the money management, the portfolio management. I love that aspect of it. I'm like, ooh, how can I get my money just to be a complete workhorse for me and fund all of the amazing trips that I get to go on and all the fun things that I get to do? You know who never gets to do that, though? The people who never get started. I think that is the biggest thing. And we talked to so many people who are like, I really want to invest in real estate. And it's like, yeah, you've been talking about it for five to six years. I mean, buy something already. It's just a house. It's just a house.

• 40:03Dave Meyer?

  I love that.

• 40:05Henry Washington?

  I laugh because I say that all the time. Again, people get mad at me when I say it.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  I know. People get mad at me a lot, too, but you know what?

• 40:12Henry Washington?

  It's a single family home. No one's gonna die. If it's a decent market and that deal's semi decent and you've got cash reserves by the house, you'll be fine.

• 40:21Speaker 02

  Right. And if you hate it and it's a dud and it's a total turd and you lose a little bit of money on it and you decide you hate real estate investing, that's okay, too. You can stop saying, I want to be a real estate investor now, right? Like, you can scratch that itch. You can say, that wasn't for me. I hated that. I'm going to go do something else with my time. As Amelia would say, or get off the pot.

• 40:44Dave Meyer?

  Yes, exactly.

• 40:45Speaker 02

  Okay, and bonus number six that we want to share really quickly is

• 40:51Dave Meyer?

  Free advice here.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  Community is everything. Grace and I have been able to scale because we had each other and because we created the wire community, which is for women investors. So we were getting input from multiple different sources. We were not investing in a silo. I think it's really hard to continue scaling and to get through hard times in your portfolio. If you don't have anyone to talk to about it, you don't have anyone to bounce ideas off of. And there are so many communities out there now, you should not be doing real estate investing alone.

• 41:25Speaker 01

  You can think of it like leveraging other people's knowledge. We're used to leveraging capital in real estate. Why do you think that you have to do it yourself and reinvent the wheel? When you can just go be a part of a community or listen to other people's experiences and learn them through their own actions and mistakes? That you don't have to make them yourself. And like we talked about, real estate is two step forward, one step back. And you don't have somebody to dig you out of that hole when you start spiraling of like, oh, I'm gonna sell it all. I'm gonna sell it all. Somebody to be like, no, you're fine. It's just a bad day or a bad week. That could really be detrimental to the progress of your portfolio.

• 42:03Henry Washington?

  I don't think enough people talk about the ups and the downs of real estate. I think it's amazing that real estate has amazing upside. You can make a lot of money. You can build a lot of equity. You can build a lot of wealth. But there are so many downs in between the ups and they can truly weigh on you. And so having a like minded investor that you can bounce things off of can really bring you back down to reality and help you realize that, hey, this is just the nature of the business and you're going to be fine. But B, the amount of times that I have talked to another investor about a problem I was having, or maybe not even a problem, just hearing them talk about their business and realize. That that's a solution that I could implement today and it would save me so much of a headache. We just get tunnel vision sometimes when we're just dealing in our own

• 42:46Henry Washington?

  problems, dealing in our own portfolios. And then you hear somebody else talk about how they handle a similar problem and you go, I have no idea why I didn't even think about doing that. But that fresh perspective from a like-minded investor can really, really save you money, make you money, and just help you stay mentally strong.

• 43:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, Grace and I probably joke on a weekly basis, not weekly, monthly, that we're selling it all and we're done with it.

• 43:09Henry Washington?

  Oh, man.

• 43:10Speaker 02

  And we're on it. But you know, then the other one brings us down to earth and it's just nice to have somebody to vent to also at the end of the day. But yeah, I think that's a very undervalued part of investing is surrounding yourself with other people that are doing what you want to do.

• 43:26Dave Meyer?

  Awesome. Well, I'm glad you all have found such great community. I think it absolutely is true. This is much more of a people business than people give it credit for. Obviously, you guys have communities. We also have a community of three and a half million people at BiggerPockets where you can go and join and join the conversation and get advice for free as well. Henry, Amelia, Grace, thank you guys so much for being here. This was a lot of fun. Amelia, Grace, if people want to connect with you, where should they do that?

• 43:51Speaker 02

  You can find us on Instagram at wire dot community with two I's. I'm on Instagram at Grace Thought Investing and Amelia is Amelia Joe REI.

• 43:59Dave Meyer?

  Awesome. Thank you again for being here and thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We'll see you all next time.

• 44:06Speaker 05

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• 44:14Speaker 06

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• 44:31Dave Meyer?

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