Pod Insights BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast You’ve Bought a Few Rentals…Now What? About this episode You’ve bought a few rental properties…now what? Odds are, like most real estate investors, you’ve got a small portfolio, but you definitely don’t feel “rich” yet. When does the actual wealth start coming into play? If you’re in this position, you’re already closer to financial freedom than you think. So, how do you move forward, and what moves do you make to get there faster? Both Dave and Henry have sat down and asked, “So…where’s the money?” years into their real estate investing careers. Now, farther down the line, they’ve created millions in wealth and thousands (if not tens of thousands) in monthly cash flow. This took time, but it also took some pivots. That’s why today, both these experts are laying out how you actually get to your financial end goals even if you feel like you’re not even close. Should you quit your job and go full-time into real estate? Should you reinvest cash flow or pay yourself first? Should you switch strategies if you feel like there’s more money to be made? And what do you do when you feel burnt out on buying rentals? This is how to unlock the real wealth in real estate after your first properties. In This Episode We Cover Yes, you can still reach financial freedom in 10 years with real estate How to use your cash flow to invest faster and get wealthier quicker Why you always need a “job,” even if that means working for yourself How Henry pays his bills while investing (he does not touch the cash flow…yet) The two benefits you must get from your real estate investing strategy (or change it ASAP) What to do when you’re burnt out on investing or dealing with tenants And So Much More! Check out more resources from this show on BiggerPockets.com and https://www.biggerpockets.com/blog/real-estate-1199 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
Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Dave Meyer? So you did it. You bought a property, maybe even two or three of them. And they're even cash flowing. You listened to us. Great job. Except your life hasn't changed. You're not getting rich. So where do you go from here? And when do you actually see the payoff in your bank account? Today, we'll explain how to go from owning your first few properties to actually life-changing wealth with real estate.
0:30 Dave Meyer? Hey, everyone. I'm Dave Meyer, head of real estate investing at BiggerPockets. And today with me on the show is my friend, Henry Washington. Henry, good to have you here. What's going on?
0:39 Henry Washington? What's up, Dave? Glad to be here. This is a fun topic because I think we all have this realization at some point.
0:44 Dave Meyer? I know. I'm surprised it's taken us so long to make a show about this because this is probably maybe one of the most common questions or just dilemmas I think people have in real estate investing is like, you get into the game, which is a huge accomplishment. It's probably the hardest part is just getting into the game. But then you kind of just start asking yourself, what comes next? I don't know what I do now. Do I just keep doing the same thing that I've been doing? Do I try new strategies? Do I diversify? Do I double down? Do I quit my job? All of these are good questions and it's kind of hard. So I think that's what we're going to jump into today. I'll just start by asking, did you face this point in your investing career?
1:25 Henry Washington? Yeah, it was more like a thought process that I was having, but like not voicing out loud. And then I remember I sat down to lunch with a couple of other investors who were doing more than me and had more property than me. And I remember one of them said like, so when's the money part happen? And I was like, oh, my God, it's you too.
1:48 Dave Meyer? Hilarious.
1:49 Henry Washington? Yeah, 100% had that thought process. And then it was, I don't know, there was almost like comfort in the discomfort when he said that, for sure.
1:56 Dave Meyer? Yeah, I think that's the money part is a big question and you sort of run out of cash at some point. You start talking to other investors who are doing totally different things. You're like, should I be doing that? It's not the thing that I've been doing.
2:10 Henry Washington? I think what I realized is when you're doing real estate the way I was doing it and the way I still do it is I buy distressed. Right? And so like you underwrite your properties to perform a certain way. And then you buy them not at that level. And it just takes time for you to. Get your properties from distress to performance. And remember, I got to thirty doors in like two years. And that's not a lot of time to get things performing optimally. So I had a, I bought a lot of pain and then it was painful.
2:46 Dave Meyer? And then the tap came through. It just takes a long time to replace your income with rental properties. We've talked about on the show all the time, like on average, I think if you're doing this consistently, doing it well, you can do it in five, seven years. That's like a realistic timeline. If you're being aggressive about it, if you're a little bit more passive about it, eight to 12 years, still a fantastic timeline, in my opinion, still way better than anything else you can do with your time or money. But that's sort of just the reality of it. And so I think there's, this sort of goes to the point of the show, which is, how do you scale knowing that? It sounds like you've said, hey, you know, rental income is great. That's for later.
3:27 Henry Washington? Yeah.
3:27 Dave Meyer? Right now, how am I going to live? You know, what am I going to live off of? And for you, that decision was flipping.
3:33 Henry Washington? Yeah. And that's really the realization that hit me is that, yes, I got into the business thinking, I'll get enough properties to have enough cash flow to leave my job. And then the realization hit that like, I can actually get to the financial freedom I'm truly looking for faster. If I don't do that and I use my experience in real estate to have another more consistent flow of income. And I know that like flipping houses can't be super consistent, but it can be if you are buying deals consistently and you start systematizing it. So I know if I buy a deal, that's money in four to six months, right? So you can plan that out, right? You just need to be buying deals consistently throughout the year and buying enough.
4:17 Henry Washington? So it was a little more easy for me to plan out how much money I would need to make, how many deals I would need to do. And I started to also think about real estate in these three buckets. Those buckets to me are your growth bucket, which is typically where people are starting out. And then you've got a bucket of stabilization and then you've got a bucket of protection. When you're first starting out, you are buying assets, but they're not performing like you want them to perform because you're buying them under value typically. So you're growing. It takes money to grow, right? And so you're typically reinvesting some of that cash flow into growing more. And at some point you'll say, hey, I've got enough volume. I need to focus on making sure everything's stabilized and performing.
4:59 Henry Washington? And that's when you're taking the money that you were spending on growth and now you're spending that money on stabilization and making sure that your properties are performing. Maybe you're reshuffling some of your assets, selling some, paying off some other ones, right? And then there's this bucket of protection. And that's where you're like, all right, I've got the properties. They're performing like I want to. Now I need to start getting as many of them paid off as possible so that you're actually getting to that real cash flow that you're looking for, that unlevered cash flow. And across all three of those buckets, you need money to do these things. And so I said, all right, well, if I'm going to be growing, I need money. If I'm going to be stabilizing, I need money. And if I'm going to be paying off, I need money. Well, I'll flip houses to create my income so that I can operate in these three buckets
5:44 Henry Washington? at the right timeframe. So now I'm more operating in the stabilization, in the payoff bucket, more so than the growth bucket.
5:52 Dave Meyer? I think that framework makes a lot of sense. I have followed a similar pattern where you buy some stuff that takes a year or two to get it up to performing. Some stuff you are reinvesting in to optimize it. Other stuff you're just trying to pay off. But I think your point about needing money for all of it is very true. That's just the reality of the situation. You've obviously chosen to scale by going full time into real estate and generate money from being a flipper to put into your long-term portfolio. I faced basically the same situation, right? I said, hey, I've been doing this for a little while, generating some solid cash flow. It is not enough for me to live off currently, nor is it going to support the lifestyle
6:37 Dave Meyer? I desire to get to in the next couple of years. Because I know people say, don't have lifestyle creep. But when you start at 23, you kind of want some lifestyle creep because that's not the life I wanted to live for the rest of my life. I'm sorry.
6:50 Henry Washington? More importantly, that's probably not the lifestyle your wife wants you to live either.
6:53 Dave Meyer? No, no, absolutely not. She calls herself a visionary. I was living in my friend's grandma's basement when we left to save money. But yeah, so we needed to do a little better than that.
7:05 Dave Meyer? But so I faced the same question, you know, I thought about being an agent, not really a flipper. But then ultimately decided the way I could generate the most income for myself and my first principle of how I was going to scale was to stay in my job.
7:21 Henry Washington? Yeah.
7:21 Dave Meyer? I decided to abandon this idea that a lot of people have, and it's not wrong, that a lot of people in this industry say, I want to quit my job in X years. I want to quit my job in three years or five years, seven years. I sort of took the opposite approach. I was like, I'm going to work as long as it takes to hit X dollars a month in real estate and have really passive income with a good DTI ratio. Like I'm going to have 50% down on all of them. And once I do that, I'll stop working. How did that decision go for you? Like, why was your path to scaling through full-time real estate instead of staying in your job because you had a good career too, or being an agent? Like, why flipping?
7:58 Henry Washington? I had decided, okay, I know I need income. I can generate income by flipping houses. I can generate income by education and helping people and I can generate income by my day job. And so like having those three or four streams of income was kind of super helpful to me. And so I kind of made a mindset shift, kind of like you did a couple of years in to go, you know what? Maybe I'll work a little longer than I was thinking about working because it'll help me grow faster and it'll help me initially get to the ultimate goal, which is to have enough income to just not have to do anything else if I don't want to. It will help me get there faster. And so I had decided to go ahead and continue to work. And what happened was my employer, at some point, even though they said they were okay
8:40 Henry Washington? with me investing on doing my thing on the side, decided that they weren't as okay with it and wanted me to give them more hours. And when I did the math on what I couldn't make and what I was making outside of real estate versus what I was making at the job, it just didn't make any sense. It was costing me money at that point to have my job. And so that's when I made the shift.
9:00 Dave Meyer? Yeah.
9:00 Henry Washington? But I didn't quit until I had to.
9:02 Dave Meyer? I think we sort of skipped over what I would maybe say is the first step in figuring out a scaling plan, which is probably like setting your own goals, personal financial goals, figuring out what you want, whether you're one deal in, five deals in, 10 deals in, if you don't really know like why you're doing this and what you're trying to accomplish, you're going to struggle to scale because that's the whole premise of strategy, right? Strategy is a means of pursuing a goal. If you don't have a goal, you can't create the strategy.
9:27 Henry Washington? I think you need to create goals when you start. And then I think you need to reevaluate those goals once you do one to five deals.
9:34 Dave Meyer? A hundred percent.
9:35 Henry Washington? Because you'll learn so much about yourself as an investor in those first few deals. And you may completely change your mind about exit strategies that you like, or you may change your mind about how you're going to acquire your properties, or you may change your mind about like, how many deals you think you want to do. You could get in and do one and you go, you know what?
9:54 Dave Meyer? Totally.
9:54 Henry Washington? I don't want to do 10 deals a year. I want to do two because this was a lot.
9:59 Dave Meyer? Yep.
9:59 Henry Washington? And some people make it in there and say, I wanted to do two and I love it. I need to go and do 10 a year, right? Like, you just need to reevaluate those goals before you really truly work on that scaling plan.
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14:06 Dave Meyer? I think for, I don't know, 95% of investors, this question that Henry and I have been discussing is the next thing. How are you going to make active income? Because, you know, I've talked about this in my book, but you got to have money to invest to generate passive income. You don't just get passive income out of nowhere. You need to invest money. And so, for me, and it sounds like for you, it's like, how are you going to make the most money? Doing something I think you reasonably enjoy. Yes. You know, if you can make a ton of money and you're miserable, probably not worth it. But if you are in a situation like me, where you can have a solid income and invest it, that's a perfectly fine approach. I think if you want to do what Henry's doing and go into flipping full-time, that's a
14:51 Dave Meyer? perfectly fine approach. If you want to become a real estate agent and you think you can make money doing that, that's a good approach. I think the thing people get caught up in is assuming and sort of getting confused about being in real estate full-time and where they're getting their active income. Because some people are like, should I become an agent so that I can be a passive investor? To me, those things are sort of unrelated, right? It's like, if you want to be an agent because you think you'd be good at it, or you think you'd enjoy it, or you think you can make a lot of money doing it, great, that can help your investing career. And don't get me wrong, being an agent can help you find great deals and you'll learn the industry. But if you're going to hate being an agent, you absolutely do not need to be in real estate full-time to be an investor.
15:34 Dave Meyer? You could do what I do, or what honestly, the majority of BiggerPockets community does, which is just keep working at their regular job and invest. But I think whatever. Whatever you do, whichever decision you make, if you're trying to figure out, if you're feeling stuck in where you're going to scale, making this decision, at least for the next three years, you can always change it, but the next three or so years will really help solidify your next steps because you'll know where that money is going to come from, at what rate it's going to come in, and that will help you decide, I can afford X number of deals for a year, I can afford this kind of property per year. If you don't have that basis of where the capital is coming from, it's just a guess, you're just kind of making it up, it's all hypothetical.
16:15 Henry Washington? And like I said, the active income can be in real estate, but I think sometimes people confuse house flipping and being a landlord as these passive strategies. Like, house flipping is a job. Now, you can remove yourself from different parts of that job, right? You can have a project manager who manages your renovations, you can have a general contractor who does that for you, or you can do all those things yourself. But like, trust me, if you take your finger off the pulse of any part of a business, whether you're doing it or somebody else is doing it, you will not make money.
16:46 Dave Meyer? I think the other thing about, I just wanted to add, about active income, is that it also takes away that pressure to be like, oh, my cash flow this month was only a hundred dollars instead of three hundred dollars a month. If you quit your job prematurely, or you are expecting to live off of your cash flow immediately, those times when expenses hit, when a radiator breaks, like, you're frustrated, you're stressed. If you know I'm making active income, and that's what I'm living off, and I'm going to invest the excess money that I make into my portfolio, at least in my experience, I don't know about you, it takes a little bit of the pressure off. Like, it still stinks, like, you don't want these huge expenses, but if you make five hundred bucks a month versus two thousand dollars a month in a given month because of expenses,
17:31 Dave Meyer? it softens the blow, because you're like, I wasn't going to live off of that, and I'll make it up in the next three months when I have less expenses.
17:36 Henry Washington? Here's what I think people forget, like, when you underwrite a rental property, yes, you're underwriting it to cover your capital expenses, because we know a roof's going to go bad at some point, we know an HVAC's going to go bad at some point, right? So you're like, well, you should be putting money away for capital expenses and you should be putting money away for maintenance. You're right, you should. But what happens if you underwrite a property to perform a certain way? You buy that property and then one month in, your HVAC goes out. You hadn't put away enough money on the side from your income coming in off that property to cover your HVAC yet. You've only put away a couple hundred dollars, but your HVAC is going to cost you six to eight grand. Where's that going to come from? So if you're truly going to live off of your cash flow, you need a lump sum of cash or you need to be in a position where you have
18:21 Henry Washington? operated your portfolio for a couple of years, long enough to have put away enough of your rental income into your maintenance or savings account. So that when those expenses come up, you can cover them.
18:35 Dave Meyer? Yeah.
18:36 Henry Washington? That happened to me. My second rental property, the HVAC went out, literally the week after I closed on it and I had to come up with five grand. And it felt like all my cash flow got eaten up. It didn't. We underwrote it to cover that. But you're not really going to see that until year's end. Does that make sense?
18:51 Dave Meyer? I totally agree with that. So we've talked about in scaling, super common issue that everyone has, you know, starting with setting your goals, super important. When do you want to stop working? What are you doing this for? How long is your time horizon? What level of risk are you going to take? Think about that stuff, then go on to how you're going to generate active income, unless you have a boatload of cash. Then just go buy stuff for cash and stop listening to us.
19:15 Henry Washington? Why are you here? Also be a private lender for me.
19:20 Dave Meyer? But if, if you're not one of those people, figure out your active income. Then though, I think there's this question of strategy, like, okay, I have my active income. What types of deals should I do? What kind of operations should I set up? I still have this. I'm going to just be honest. I'm always kind of thinking about this. But it's not that useful to always be imagining, oh, should I be a flipper? Should I be doing this? So like, how do you make sense of that? Like, how do you hone in on, out of all the amazing different ways that you can scale a portfolio, like, how do you pick the one that's right for you?
19:55 Henry Washington? I think when you're picking a strategy, you have to consider exactly what you said, your goals and then the timeframe in which you're trying to get to your goals, right? Cause you need to pick a strategy that's going to monetarily help you get to that goal in the timeframe that you choose. The cool part about real estate, guys, is that all of these real estate strategies make money. You can make money in single family, you can make money in multifamily, you can make money in, in commercial. Some you can make money faster than others and there's pros and there's cons to all of it, right? But how do you stray from like, hey, I should be going and doing this because I can make money faster. I should be going and do this. It's so cool. And so how, what keeps me grounded is you need to pick a strategy that will monetarily help you get to your goals in the timeframe you're
20:39 Henry Washington? trying to get to them. And then you also need to pick a strategy that gives you what I call the warm fuzzies, right? So for me, I don't just invest in single and small multifamily real estate because it makes me money. Yes, it makes me money, but I invest in single and small multifamily real estate because it gives me the warm fuzzies because I love that single and small multifamily real estate allows me to help people more within my investing strategy because single and small multifamily real estate is more about the people.
21:10 Dave Meyer? It's personal, yeah.
21:11 Henry Washington? When you get into larger multifamily real estate, it's about a P and L. It's a business, right? You have to, you have to decrease expenses, increase NOI, right? You're trying to make the property more profitable and you've probably taken other people's money to do the deal. And so you now you have this obligation to those investors to get them the best return. And sometimes that's going to be at the expense of people, right? Companies do it all the time. I have to get my investors the best return. That means I need to lay off these people, right? And so with single and small multifamily real estate, I can be flexible because it's less risky. I can buy a house. I was on the phone with the seller this morning and he was like, I need to sell this house. I need to get the cash, but I also need to find a place for my son to live. And I said, great. Well, I can buy the house. I can close in seven days. You can have your money and we'll
21:54 Henry Washington? just let him live there for 90 days. I won't charge you a thing. I can do that. Does that cost me money? Yeah, it costs me a little bit of money, but I can do a couple of things. I can either underwrite that into the deal and pay less for it, or I can just eat. That cost, it's only a few hundred bucks a month that I'm losing out on, but it gives that family the peace of mind and the, and the convenience that they need. And it makes me feel good that I'm able to do that for people.
22:15 Dave Meyer? I love that.
22:16 Henry Washington? Like I can just be helpful to people more in this space because it's less risky and it's a more people focused niche. It makes me feel good. And so when I see a new shiny object in real estate, you know, right now, people are loving RV parks. You know, uh, two years ago it was Airbnb's and
22:34 Dave Meyer? Yeah.
22:34 Henry Washington? You know, there, there's always going to be a shiny new thing. And I don't stray to those shiny new things because typically they don't have the same warm fuzzy feeling that I get from what I do. And so I can stay focused. I know I'm going to hit my financial goals. I know that what I'm doing has an impact on other people and that helps me feel good. And that keeps me going when things get hard because every investing strategy you try is gonna get hard at some point. And it's so easy to give up when things get harder, to pivot to something else when things get hard. But when you're doing it for reasons beyond just the money, you won't necessarily be looking to just get out of a strategy because it's harder. You'll be looking about, well, how do I figure out how to make this strategy work in the time that I'm in? Because I'm doing it for more than just money, but that's, that's me. That's how I do it.
23:19 Dave Meyer? I love that. No, I think, I think it's an amazing way to think about it and really commendable to, one, look for mutual benefit. I, I think this is just such an important part of being a real estate investor is finding ways, yeah, to earn a return. This is your business. You, you know, you deserve to earn a profit for the effort that you're putting into it. But if you're doing the business right, you should be able to do it in a way where you're also helping the sellers that you work with, the tenants that you have, the agents, the contractors, everyone in, in the whole ecosystem can benefit. This is not a zero sum industry. And so I, I think just thinking about it from that perspective is awesome and should be the way that everyone in the bigger pockets community is thinking about how they're approaching real estate.
24:04 Dave Meyer? And the second thing is true. It's like you have to like what you're doing. Otherwise, all these people, you know, you get into this industry rightfully. I think many people do because they want to quit your job. But if you start up going and doing real estate deals that you Don't like, you're gonna want to quit that too. So what's the point of being in real estate? If you're just gonna hate it and want to quit it anyway. So finding something that is personally fulfilling to you. Like, you know, I, I'm dabbling and flipping. It's not something I, I think I'll ever love, but like, when I see you do it, or I see James Danner do it, like, you guys just like really enjoy it. Like, it's, it's cool to see people do that. There are people who are way, way better short-term rental operators than I am, who are really good and care a lot about hospitality and guest experience.
24:47 Dave Meyer? And that's super cool. And I think that's a great way to start filtering down all the types of deals you can do in real estate. It's just, what do you like? What are you attracted to? And maybe you do need to do a couple of those deals to see which ones you like. I did a short-term rental and I was like, I'm never gonna do this again. I still have it, but it was so much work. I was like, this is just not worth it to me. And I, I learned. I, I think that's a great sort of framework to look at scaling. I have one that I often advise people on, because I guess people often ask me like, oh, should I go into a lot of different markets? Because I'm always talking about markets. And so people are asking me that question a lot. Or, you know, I've done long-term rentals. Should I try flipping?
25:30 Dave Meyer? I'll say two things about this. First, you don't have to. There is nothing wrong with just sticking with what you're good at. And although I have deviated at certain points in my career, I've kind of come back to just investing in the same kind of stuff. And even though I do a lot of passive investing now, I do passive investing in residential real estate. I don't do it in retail or self-storage or industrial or warehouses. Just it's the thing I know. It's, I don't want to learn anything new. I'm too old for that. No, I, I know. I just, I'm sticking with what I know because I feel like I'm good at it. And there's nothing wrong with that. But if you are going to expand and diversify, which is also not wrong,
26:11 Dave Meyer? I recommend one of two ways to do it. I call it horizontal or vertical scaling. Horizontal is sort of what I've done, which is like try different markets and invest in different markets, but keep your strategy the same. You know, so I invest in small multifamily, on single family. I do that in multiple different markets across the country, but I'm keeping one of those two things, the marketer, the strategy, the same. You know, I don't want to change both of those at the same time. I wouldn't start flipping in Los Angeles. I wouldn't start a self-storage facility in Raleigh because that's a new strategy and a new market. That's a little too much risk for me. The other option, which I think you've done, or I think James Dean, or another good
26:54 Dave Meyer? example of this, is like going all in on your market. Just be an expert at your market and then you can be very opportunistic about what deals you do in that market. Cause like you, you could flip a house, you could do a short-term rental, you could do a midterm rental, you could do any
27:10 Henry Washington? I have all of those.
27:11 Dave Meyer? You have all of those because you're so good at your market. So I think you need to sort of pick, either be really good at one market or be really good at one strategy. And you can sort of work towards the other one, but trying to change both at the same time, to me is a big red flag.
27:24 Henry Washington? That is fantastic advice. I don't think I've heard it said that way before, but that makes a ton of sense because you're really just hedging your risk, right? You're, you're choosing to leverage your superpower, right? And so either your superpower is that you understand your strategy wholeheartedly and you feel like you can copy and paste in a market, or your superpower is I understand my market so well that I can do multiple strategies here. That's just smart investing.
27:50 Dave Meyer? Yeah. And I think a lot of people want to make a pivot and that's okay. I would just recommend moving towards it in steps. Just as an example, I started investing in the Midwest. And yeah, I want to do bigger burrs, you know, like that's kind of the goal. I think that's a great way to make money out there. The first deal I bought was pretty close to stabilize and I did a cosmetic one because like I knew I could handle that in a different market and thought I'll meet some contractors, I'll test my team out and then the next one will do a little bit bigger and the next one I'll do a little bit bigger. And I get the idea that you want to hit home runs, but again, this comes down to your goals. I'm in this for the long run. I look at my portfolio on a 15, 20 year timeline. I'm like, you know, Realistically, to hit my goals, I'm gonna have to do 50 deals. I don't know, a lot.
28:35 Dave Meyer? And so like, if it takes me one extra deal, an incremental deal to reduce risk and figure out the right path for me to scale, to learn which is going to be the sustainable path for me, that's just, that's just worth it.
28:47 Henry Washington? Yeah, I agree.
28:48 Dave Meyer? So we gotta take one more quick break, but when we come back, we're gonna talk about the motivation to keep going as you scale, because as Henry said, it can get hard at certain points, and that is real. That is a real part of being a real estate investor. And so we're gonna touch on that when we come back. Stick with us. For my wife's birthday, I wanted to make her a new website for her landscape design business. So I researched a lot of different options. I tried out a couple, but honestly, it was really overwhelming. It was pretty time consuming, and still, the site wasn't coming out the way I wanted it to. Then I tried Hostinger, and everything was super simple. I asked Hostinger's AI to build a clean site for her business, and it had a working version up in minutes. No coding or designer needed. Plus, its AI
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33:14 Dave Meyer? Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. Henry and I are here talking about scaling and it's just such a common challenge. There's no one who gets through this. 100% of real estate investors have this challenge. Henry and I both presented frameworks of how we think about scaling. I love your way of thinking about which things to pick, by the way. But I want to talk less tactically and more just kind of mindset thing because you mentioned it earlier. When you're not living off your cash flow, when you want to get into this to maybe retire early, but you're still years from retiring or something hard happens, like, how do you mentally stick with it? Or like, what are your tricks to staying motivated even when you're still a few years from getting the full benefit?
33:56 Henry Washington? Yeah.
33:56 Dave Meyer? And you're having to work a good amount to make progress towards that goal?
34:01 Henry Washington? What I think happens is we get fatigued, right? Because deals are hard, the market gets hard, the work gets hard and tedious. And so what I do is I think about, right? Like, what's the end look like? And if I'm in a place where I feel like I want the end to be sooner than later, like, it's just a math problem. So I can look at my current portfolio now and I can say, all right, Henry, if you want out and you don't want to have to work, what can you do with what you have to get there faster? So I can literally look at my portfolio. I can look at my equity positions and I can say, all right, well, how many of these properties paid off give me X amount of cash?
34:41 Henry Washington? Right? And so I can say, all right, well, maybe I don't want hundreds of doors. Maybe I just want 10 paid off houses. I have enough equity that if I sold most of it, I can probably just pay off 10 properties. And then I don't have to do anything anymore.
34:55 Dave Meyer? And the average home in the US right now, if you had 10 paid off, single family homes, you would make 20 grand a month.
35:01 Henry Washington? Yeah.
35:02 Dave Meyer? In tax advantaged cash flow.
35:04 Henry Washington? Yeah.
35:04 Dave Meyer? 10 properties. That's it. A lot less headache.
35:08 Henry Washington? Yeah. So when you're feeling overwhelmed and you've got a portfolio, you can, I can literally look at it and go, you know what? If I, it'd be a pain in the butt to start selling a bunch of properties. Sure.
35:17 Dave Meyer? Sure.
35:17 Henry Washington? It'll take me probably a year, right? To fully exit everything. And then I can have 10 paid off houses producing 20 grand a month. And then I can, you know, walk off into the sunset or I can decide to do more deals.
35:29 Dave Meyer? Come play golf.
35:29 Henry Washington? You've got, yes, you've got these options, right? And so I guess my answer to your question is when I start feeling like that, I'm like, look, if I want out, I can get out. Will it be a little bit of a pain in the butt? Sure.
35:41 Dave Meyer? Yeah.
35:41 Henry Washington? Is that really what I want though? And typically what I'll realize is no, I want to keep going, right? I want to keep going and things will be fine. But there's comfort in knowing that if I want out, if I truly want out, I can get out.
35:56 Dave Meyer? I like that a lot. It's a really good thing to keep in mind. I have a couple of other things I'll share that I personally do when it gets hard. And one is, I think what your, your point about the warm and fuzzies is true. Like you can get rid of property.
36:13 Henry Washington? Yeah.
36:13 Dave Meyer? I've sold properties. That's just a headache, even if it's a good property. Cause it's just stressing me out and that's not why I got into this. And so like, you can cull your portfolio anytime you want. I think that's a really important thing. Personally, a couple of years ago, I made a decision that while I was still working, I was only going to spend 20 hours a month on real estate. Like I just start setting rules for myself about 20 hours a month. Like that's a rule I set for myself just to keep things normal. So that I'm remembering that like, yeah, I'm working hard for this long-term goal. I've been doing it for 15 years, but like, I'm not going to let this consume me and be obsessed about it. So that I don't have a good life. Right now, and you have to do that at the beginning. Like I grinded, I'd self managed, I'd fix
36:55 Dave Meyer? things myself for years when I didn't have capital, but I encourage people as they go through their investing career to just think about how to make it sustainable, even if you have to make less money on every deal, just find systems that make it sustainable for you. I buy a lot of on market deals. I pay property managers to do things for me. Yes, I earn lower return, but this is why my strategy is I'm doing this for 20 years and I'm going to keep working. So it doesn't matter to me. I'm like, I have to make this sustainable for myself and something that I still enjoy. And 15 years into it, I still enjoy it because I've sort of put these guardrails in place for myself. So that's number one. Number two, it is totally fine to just stop for a while. If you just don't want to do a deal for a year, don't. I've gone years without doing
37:40 Dave Meyer? deals, like just don't. I like, it's fine. This is especially, you know, I know in your situation, Henry, if you're flipping, it's different. But if you're working full time and you're like, I'm just busy, it's totally fine. Actually, this summer I was looking at a bunch of deals and I just texted my agent. I was like, you know what? I'm just super busy for like the next four months. Just stop sending me stuff. I'll like, I'll get back to you this winter. And they're like, okay.
38:06 Dave Meyer? Okay, fine. Like I don't have to do it, you know, it's just, it's up to you. So I think that's really big. And then the third one is honestly, in the last few years, I've found a tremendous amount of comfort in just like having more friends in real estate. You know, for the first couple of years I was doing this, I was the only person I knew who invested in real estate. And it's kind of lonely, but I can't even tell you all the amount of hours Henry and I have just complained to each other about real estate investing or, you know, shared wins with each other or with all of our other friends in the BiggerPockets community. It really does matter and it really does help. So I think if you haven't gone to a meetup in your community, if you haven't made any friends in your neighborhood or acquaintances in your market,
38:51 Dave Meyer? I encourage people to do that, even if you're not doing deals. I think it's just good way to sort of make this more sustainable.
38:57 Henry Washington? Absolutely.
38:58 Dave Meyer? Well, this has been a great conversation. I just want to Stress to everyone that if you have faced this dilemma and question of how to scale, how to keep going in your investing career, everyone does. This is just part of it, whether you're in real estate or anything that is entrepreneurial. It is, it's hard. It can be lonely at certain points. So, you know, there are tactical things. We've given you tactical advice on what you can do, but also just remember that this is something you're doing for yourself. You don't have to be doing it and just find ways, I think, to make it sustainable. The more longevity you give yourself in the industry, the more probability you're going to have to be successful. And as Henry said, feel warm and fuzzy about it. So that's, that's what we're in it for.
39:38 Henry Washington? That's right. And look, if you are in the Midwest or in the Northwest Arkansas market, and you're just tired and thinking about getting out and wanting to sell some properties, then you just reach out to Dave or I, we can, we can help you with that. We would be, we would be happy to.
39:53 Dave Meyer? Yeah, exactly. Or if you're one of those super rich people who just has all this money that they wanted to play, just call us.
39:58 Henry Washington? Just give us a call.
39:59 Dave Meyer? Awesome. Well, thanks, man. I appreciate you being here. This was a lot of fun.
40:02 Henry Washington? Thank you.
40:03 Dave Meyer? And thank you all for listening to this episode of BiggerPockets Podcast. We'll see you next time.
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