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Ralphs. Fresh for everyone. ♪ Today on the show, I have an interview for you with renowned real estate investor and author, John Schaub. We're going to talk about how to get rich with real estate, but we're going to do it in the non-sleazy way. Just straight up information, a little bit of inspiration, but not based on grandiose stories, but on straightforward facts.

Enjoy. ♪ Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets, and today is Monday, December 15, 2014. Today, we're going to spend some time on the investing side of the three-legged stool that we talk about all the time of income, expenses, and rate of return. We're going to talk about how to maximize your returns and grow your wealth with real estate investing.

♪ You know, I've learned over the years to actually tread very carefully in the world of real estate investing. I learned the hard way, which you'll hear about a little bit in today's show. But I've learned the hard way, and I really respect and admire, though, people who can share information about real estate investing and who can do so in a straightforward way where they can share ideas, strategies, tools, tactics, techniques, and most of all, encourage you toward action.

My guest today is one of the good guys. He is the author of actually my most recommended real estate book. He has a book that he wrote called Building Wealth One House at a Time. He has several books. His book, Building Wealth One House at a Time, is my go-to resource for somebody who says, "I'm interested in becoming a real estate investor, but I haven't done it, and I don't know much about it, and it is my best go-to introduction." John's a really great guy.

He's a class act in every way, and he brings a wealth of knowledge and experience to the table. So sit back, grab a pen and a piece of paper. You're going to want one for today's interview, and enjoy this interview with John. John, welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast.

I appreciate you making time for me this morning. Thank you, Joshua. I'm happy to be here. I brought you on to discuss one of my favorite topics and topic that you're an expert in, which is real estate. I've got some specific lines of questioning that I want to pursue, but would you start by sharing a little bit of your background with real estate, how you got into it, and what your experience has been over the decades as a real estate investor?

Yeah. Well, I got into it. I had, as a kid, like many folks did, had several different jobs. I worked in restaurants. I worked in construction. I went to college. While I was in college, I managed an apartment building, and I got lucky one day, a guy came along and wanted to buy it, so I sold it to him.

I collected my first commission back when I was in college. So, I got my real estate license early, and I was in the brokerage business for a few years, but decided I didn't like the brokerage business, and then started investing back in the early '70s. I still have the first property that I ever bought, bought in 1973.

I still own it. Through trial and error over the last 40 years, I've been buying and managing properties and learning which ones were the easiest to manage, and which ones made me the most money, and which ones had the least amount of risk, and gave me the best lifestyle.

I'm kind of a lifestyle guy. I'm in favor of owning properties free and clear. We pay cash for our house, and we bought it back in 1980-something. I've encouraged kids. I wrote a book back in the '80s called "How to Own the House of Your Dreams Free and Clear." So, I'm a guy who likes to be free of debt, but I do understand leverage, and there is a safe way to borrow money in the real estate business.

There is safe leverage, and I know it's hard to accumulate a lot of money without using some kind of leverage, but you have to have your head on straight about it. There are some people who are just totally anti-leverage, and I respect that, but it is very hard to accumulate a large capital base unless you use some leverage to start with.

So, that's it in a nutshell. Today, I own and manage my own properties. At one time, I had a lot more property, and I had a large staff. Today, I operate just my wife and myself, just the two of us, and we manage our own properties, and it gives us quite a lot of freedom.

We travel a lot. My daughter lives in Australia, so we're in Australia quite a bit, and I can manage my properties today from any place in the world because I have good long-term tenants, and it's like family. Everybody likes everybody. Everybody benefits from being a part of a group here.

People who live in my houses, I own nothing but houses. The people who live in my houses want to live in my houses. They respect the houses. They respect me, so we don't have any big issues, and that's totally different from where I started. I started off buying apartments and duplexes and commercial buildings and all sorts of different kinds of income properties, and I can tell you that end of the business is a constant battle because people are always coming and going, which requires you to work a lot as a landlord, and then the other side of it is many of them are trying to beat you out of your money, and they negotiate all the time, so you're fighting with folks, and that's not a situation I'm in today at all.

We have team players as tenants, and if they don't want to be on the team, it's not a problem. They can leave, but the only people that live in my houses are team players who respect the property, who respect me, who pay on time, who take care of the property, and who stay for a very long time.

My average tenant stays eight or ten years, so that makes life better, and that's a different model than most people are used to. Most people think of landlords as somebody who's charging too much rent and extracting too much for folks and taking advantage of them, and that's not our game plan at all, so that's it in a nutshell.

You must be one of the leading champions of at least the advantages of single-family housing. I remember the first book of yours that I ever read was Building Wealth One House at a Time, and it really, I thought you made a compelling case for single-family housing versus other forms of real estate.

What would cause somebody to look at other forms of real estate instead of single-family housing, though? You just made a little bit of the case for it, but what would send someone in the direction of looking at apartment buildings or other ways of investing? Well, if you had a lot of money, if you're trying to invest billions of dollars, the hedge funds are investing billions of dollars in houses now, but this is the first time I've ever seen that kind of money come into the house market, and they won't stay in it very long because the management style that they are using is not going to work for them.

Their expenses are going to be a lot higher than they projected, and they're going to have a lot more turnover than they thought because they don't operate like I do. They don't have this team. They're trying to extract as much money as they can from their tenants, and that's not a good plan long term.

But I have owned other property, and if I had to invest $50 million in a year, I wouldn't buy houses. I'd have to go out and buy something bigger, probably land or maybe a large-income property that would be professionally managed. But for the little guy getting started, I started with no money.

I was a little guy. I didn't inherit a bunch of money or anything, so when I started buying property, I had to buy with a relatively small down payment, $500, $1,000 down and find somebody who would finance it for me because the banks wouldn't let me any money. And I learned over the years that there are a lot of people that would do that, that would finance a purchase of a property, and especially people who didn't want properties.

And some of those, of course, were kind of rough. They needed work. They were harder to manage. So if you wanted to get started in this business, you can buy all the run-down houses and duplexes and apartment buildings you want that are mismanaged. You can buy those properties easily with owner financing today, but they're a job.

It takes a lot of work to manage those. So the key long-term, your strategy long-term, if you want a good lifestyle, is to end up with some properties that sort of self-manage. And I don't want anybody to believe that there's no work at all involved here, but I can do everything I need to do to manage my properties with my cell phone from Australia.

And I do it with email. I don't even have to talk to folks. So if something breaks, it's easy to email somebody and get it fixed. And somebody does move out when I'm far, far, far away. The house just is empty for a month until I come back, but that's part of the price I pay for my lifestyle, and I can live with that.

But I resist the temptation to get into bigger properties for a couple of reasons. One is liquidity. If you look around most markets today, you'll find there's still quite a bit of empty commercial building. And same thing with office space. And these buildings sometimes become obsolete. The markets change, and there's no need for them.

So it's not unusual to see a building sit empty for a year or two, or even somebody tear down a 10-year-old commercial building just because it's obsolete. A house is a whole different animal. And if you buy houses in neighborhoods that are stable and improving, those houses will probably be there 50 years from now.

And there's neighborhoods in most towns that have been there 50 years, and some of those neighborhoods are getting better and better. So I tend to buy in those neighborhoods. It's certainly a simpler way to buy real estate. And again, for the person who's getting started and wants to own maybe five or 10 income properties that'll produce enough income to support their lifestyle, it just makes more sense to me.

If you're sitting down having a cup of coffee with a bright, energetic, young high school graduate or college student, and this young man or woman is saying to you, "Mr. Schaub, can you give me some advice of how I can be rich and financially independent like you?" What would be the path that you would lay out for this person of how to go from nothing to wealth?

Well, if you're going to do it in real estate, one of the keys is management. So you have to learn how to manage people, how to talk to people, how to recognize folks who are going to do business with you if you're buying property, and how to recognize a good tenant, and then how to attract that potential tenant.

So probably it wouldn't be a bad idea. I have three children, by the way, so I've given this advice before. It wouldn't be a bad idea to get involved in some business where you're managing other people and develop that skill, because that's a very valuable skill. From a real estate perspective, it's important to know where you're going to be.

Buying property far away from where you're going to live is not a good plan. So you have to -- and the challenge I think most young people have is they're not sure where they're going to live for the next 10 years or who they're going to live with, and a lot of things are going to change in their lives.

So for most people, probably I wouldn't recommend that a 20-year-old go out and buy property unless they were confident that this is the town they're going to stay in for the next five or 10 years. Because if you buy it and have to sell it next year, you're probably not going to make any money.

But once you establish that, then a systematic accumulation of good properties -- if I look at the mistakes I've made, and I've made many mistakes, it's generally buying something that didn't turn out to be a good property from a management standpoint, or that I thought it was in a path of progress, and progress never came, or I got involved with some bad financing.

So I teach people, when I teach classes or I teach people the danger and the advantages of borrowing money. But you have to be careful when you borrow money. People get excited about asset protection, about getting sued, but very few people go broke because they get sued. A lot of people go broke because they borrow money and can't pay it back.

So debt is the enemy. That's what you have to worry about and understand. And once you know how to use that properly, then it's a terrific tool for you. When someone is getting started learning about real estate, my experience in the real estate education business has been that there are a lot of scam artists selling information that may or may not be accurate.

How can someone who's interested in learning learn to detect the scam artist information versus the solid information from wise and experienced investors? And that's a good question because you're absolutely right. There are a lot of smooth talkers out there who are not actually in the real estate business, don't actually own anything, but they will sell you their system or their idea.

And generally, one sign is they'll charge a lot of money for it. I've been teaching seminars for nearly 40 years and I think the most I've ever taught charged for a seminar, for a three-day seminar, is about $600, about $200 a day. So if you find someone that's charging you thousands and thousands and thousands of dollars, you know, $20,000 or $30,000 for some secret, they're just ripping you off.

There's a lot of legitimate education taught by people who are really in the business who don't charge that much because they don't have to. It's not their main business. They're not paying somebody a large commission to get you in the door. I would think that unless you have a referral from somebody who has heard somebody speak and thinks that they're legitimate and thinks that they know what they're talking about, I certainly wouldn't write a check.

I might go listen to somebody, but my advice to people if they're going to some of these come-on seminars, you know, free seminars, is to leave your checkbook at home because they have some very good salesmen in the back of the room at those seminars. And I've seen them sign people up for credit cards and then book their credit cards for thousands of dollars.

Those are common. So stay away from those outfits. There's a lot of great books written on real estate investment. I mean, one of the first ones I read was Bill Nickerson's book, "How I Turned $1,000 Into $1,000,000 in My Spare Time." And he's rewritten that. It goes dead now, but he and I shared the same birthday.

We were friends years ago. Jay DeSima's written some good books. Donald Trump's first book, "The Art of the Deal," is good. Bill Secondor's book is good. I think my book is good. Al Lowry, who was Bill's partner for a while, wrote a couple good books. And Bob Ross wrote some good books.

He's a student of mine. Bob Allen is a student of mine. He's written a couple good books, and I'm going to call nothing down. So there's a lot of stuff you can read out there that'll get you started. But then it's trial and error. I mean, the lessons you're going to learn the best are when you make a mistake and it costs you $1,000.

I can talk to you about the mistakes I've made. They cost me a lot more than that. And you'll probably remember some of it, but when you make a mistake, you will remember. So the answer is that you have to get into the field. You have to go out and take some chances.

And that's why I've always encouraged people to take small chances. I taught a class for years I called "Making it Big on Little Deals." And I explained to people that you're much better off doing five little deals a year than one big one, because you're going to make some mistakes in there, but the chances are pretty good if you make five deals.

If one or two of them will turn out really good, and then if the three other ones are not very good and you're just beginning, that they don't cost you much money. You don't lose much money. You're still in business. But if you get into one big deal and it goes bad, you're probably done.

The real estate education industry, I remember when I was in college, I went to a seminar, and it was a Russ Whitney seminar. And I didn't know what I was doing at the time, but I just remember being so hot under the collar to sign up for the $35,000 coaching package.

And I was at the back of the room, ready to put it on a credit card. And they're like, "You got to do it now." Well, I had to, "No, I got to wait." And thankfully, I'm so thankful, one of the biggest, it would have been one of the biggest financial mistakes I ever made.

Thankfully, I let my dad talk me out of it, and he talked a little sense into me. I'm so grateful to him now that he did so. But just that, there's something about the real estate industry where it seems as though people take the statistic and say, "More people have become self-made millionaires in real estate than just about anything else," which is probably true.

And they twist that into a sales seminar that is heavy on hype and low on density of information. And I'm so thankful I avoided that now. But it's sobering to realize how close I was to wrecking my financial life at that stage in life. Well, keep spreading the word because high-priced education, and it's not just in the real estate business.

I even think that some colleges are going the wrong direction, charging people more money than $35,000, sometimes hundreds of thousands of dollars for a degree that they can't use to get a job. People think just because they get education, they're going to get a paycheck. Obviously, that's not true.

So it's a challenge. It's a challenge. But again, I got all my college education in the public school system. I went to a junior college here in town. I went to University of Florida, both good schools, but a lot cheaper than going to some private school. And I feel like I've received a good education.

And so I encourage kids. I've been on boards of schools. I really encourage kids to get a good education at a reasonable price. And that's why I continue to teach. You mentioned leverage and the advantages and pitfalls. I'd like to come back and ask you to expand on that a little bit, because this is one of the biggest debates and concerns and questions that people face.

How would you give an outline, a framework of a way to think about leverage and to appreciate the advantages of it and the disadvantages that would help somebody think through their situation and see what would be best for them? Well, I've written a lot on this, so it's going to be hard to condense it into two or three minute answer.

But the short answer, I guess, is whenever you borrow money, first of all, I don't think you should borrow money unless you're buying investments. I don't think you should borrow money to live on. I don't think you should borrow money to buy a house to live in. I don't think you should borrow money to buy cars or get into credit card debt.

I think personal debt is just an anchor. It's going to drag you down. So unless you can afford to buy that car for cash, unless you can afford to buy a toy or take a trip on cash, I'm against it. Now, I know that's not that popular. Most of the world operates on credit nowadays, and people who have jobs can pay those credit card bills back, but I've never been a fan of personal credit.

On the other hand, investment credit's a different animal. If I find somebody who will sell me a house and will sell it to me with a down payment that I have today and will carry back a note, will carry back the financing with payments that I can afford to make with the rent I collect after paying my expenses, that's not a high-risk debt to me.

If I lose that house, and I will say I've never lost a house in a law like that, but if I did lose that house, I would simply give it back to the people I bought it from. They would probably be happy with that transaction, but they haven't been hurt.

I mean, they keep my down payment. They get their house back. They haven't been damaged, and the law is pretty clear on this. If I finance a house, if I buy a house from you and say I buy a $100,000 house, and I give you $10,000 down, and you finance $90,000 for me, and the payments are going to be $500 a month, and I can afford to rent that house for maybe $950 and pay the taxes and insurance and maintenance and still have $500 left to pay you and maybe a little bit for myself, if I can't make those payments and give that house back, I don't owe you the $90,000.

You've received the house back, so there's no debt to pursue there. So I see that kind of leverage as a totally different animal than either borrowing cash from a bank to go out and buy property or to borrow from a credit card company or a car dealer to buy a car or something else.

So it's important that people understand that difference. If you go borrow cash and then use that cash to buy a house, it puts you under some pressure. I've seen people do that. I've seen people refinance maybe their personal residence or some other property they have, and now they have $50,000 cash in the bank, earning 0.6%, and they're under a lot of pressure to use that $50,000 cash to go out and buy something, and they're paying interest on that $50,000 cash.

Well, that's not a strong strategy. It's a much better strategy, and I will say something that will make sense to some of your listeners, not to all of them, that you make your best deals in this business not when you have a lot of money. You make your best deals in this business when you're broke, because when I find somebody who wants to sell a house and I want to buy that house but I don't have any money, the only option we have is for them to finance it for me, and they will.

If I have $50,000, then I can give them $50,000, and that makes the deal maybe better for them, but it doesn't make it better for me. It puts me at higher risk. So when you're leveraging an investment property, and you've got to get your head around this, but the more you put down, the more you have a risk.

It is safer to buy that $100,000 house with $5,000 down than it is with $100,000 or $50,000 down, because if I put $50,000 down, I have $50,000 I can lose, and if I mismanage it or something goes wrong with the real estate or something goes wrong with the real estate market, I have a lot more risk than I do with $5,000 down.

I'll tell you a story. I've sold a bunch of properties here. I buy and sell. I mostly buy and hold, but we sold a property to a young man here a couple years ago before this last downturn. He paid me a price for it. It was a retail price at the time, and I financed the house for him, and then the prices of the houses dropped.

In my town, they dropped almost in half in some areas. So this house went from about $250,000 to about $150,000 in value, and he came back to me and he said, "John, it's not worth $250,000 anymore. He gave me a small down payment, and he owed me the money." And I said to him, "We'll make a deal.

Rather than you walking away from this, we'll adjust the payments so you can afford to keep making me the payments," because the house was rented and it was making money. But then we stretched out the loan so he could pay me back years down the road when prices went back up, and they had to come back up.

So now he's got a profit in this house, and I'm going to recover my money at some point, and it's been a good deal for both of us. Well, that's a conversation that it was easy for me to have with somebody because I sold him that house and carried the financing.

If he would have borrowed the money to buy that house from a bank and gone down to the bank and tried to have that conversation, it wouldn't have worked. He probably lost the house. So there's some major advantages to learning how to do this right, and the people that do master the idea of buying property and having sellers finance it for them buy a lot of property, but they're not limited in how much they can buy, and they make money every time they buy something.

- You made an astounding statement in one of your books where you said that in many decades of investing in real estate, you've never borrowed money from a bank to buy property. Is that true? - It's absolutely true. It's absolutely true. If you've had that experience, if you've had experience of going down to a bank and borrowing money to buy a house, you know how aggravating that can be to start with.

They want all your financial information, tax returns, and here's the really bad part. The paperwork you sign when you borrow money from a bank gives them a lot of power. They can weigh a lot of your rights. They don't even have to, that they can foreclose pretty much when they want to because if they feel like they're collateral is in jeopardy or you're not maintaining the house for a lot of little reasons, they can foreclose if they want to.

Now, as a practical matter, banks don't want houses that are not going to foreclose unless you stop making the payments most of the time, but it puts you at risk. And also, you know, in a state like Florida and a lot of states that do have personal liability when you borrow money, the bank, you can get what's called a deficiency judgment.

You know, if you borrow 200,000 for a month and your house sells for 150, and most times, there's been some unusual times lately, but most times you would still owe that other $50,000 and the banks would pursue you for it. So if you had a savings account or other assets, they wouldn't forgive that $50,000.

They would make you pay it back. So it's the most dangerous money you can borrow from a bank. And because of paperwork and, you know, the other part, if you're an investor and you own a lot of properties, you may not want to buy a bank statement every time you buy a house and show them everything you have.

I certainly wouldn't. So in all my years, I've never borrowed money from a bank to buy a house. My listener base of this show varies from very experienced to very new. And so to the experienced people, what you just said would sound fairly normal. And I recognize that I think real estate financing strategies is better taught with a book.

But could you just mention to the listeners who, "That just sounds crazy. How can I buy houses without borrowing a bank?" Could you mention just a few of the ideas in general that have been helpful? You mentioned seller financing. Just give a brief overview on seller financing to explain to somebody how that works.

And then also some of maybe the other strategies that you can use to avoid borrowing from a bank. Well, I'm looking at a house right now. I bought three houses this year. I'm looking at another one right now that folks have had for sale for more than a year.

It's been empty for more than a year. Their mother owned it and the mother has moved far, far away now to live with the children in a different state. So they thought they were going to sell this house. Our market's pretty good right now. But they have not been able to sell it.

And so I'm making them an offer, asking them to carry back the financing for the next 20 years. The mother is in her late 70s. There's a good chance she's going to live 20 more years. And the fellow told me one time it's inconvenient to run out of money before you run out of life.

You know, you're going to take a 10 year loan if you're going to live 20 more years. You want that income to come in forever. So I'm going to make them an offer and asking them to finance that house over the next 20 years at today's interest rates. Now, a major advantage we have is today's interest rates, I think, are below what they should be.

You know, when you can get a house loan, a 30 year house loan, for some place in the 4% range, that's unusually low. I've been doing this for a long time. And you go back and look at historical interest rates, back as far as you want to. They're all online, of course.

And you'll see that 4% doesn't seem to be normal. Normal is more like 5% or 6% or 7% or 8%. So I think when you can borrow money at a rate like today's rate, 3% or 4%, it's a terrific deal. Well, if I can borrow money, if these people, and I'm not trying to, you know, understand, I'm not actually borrowing money.

They're not lending me money here. What they're doing is financing the sale of this house. If they will finance the sale of this house for me with a 4% interest rate over the next 20 years and let me make a down payment that makes them comfortable, and you know, my first offer is going to be 5% down, but I'm willing to put up to 20% down if the deal works for them.

But, you know, the reason people hesitate to finance sales of properties is one, they're not sure they're going to get paid back. Well, you can tell them stories about how you've lived in this town all your life and you've always paid your debts and they can check you out and that'll probably make them feel somewhat better.

But what really makes them feel good is for you to put down a bigger down payment. So if I can afford to put down 10% or 15% or 20%, then they're pretty confident that after that kind of investment that they won't get the house back, that they won't get their payments every month for the next 20 years.

Well, you know, you have to do the math now. You have to know what a house will rent for. You have to know what your expenses are going to be, your taxes and insurance, and then you have to estimate maintenance. I would caution you not to buy houses that are in really poor shape.

I like to buy houses that are in good shape. I buy houses sometimes that are brand new. I bought 20 or 30 brand new houses. I bought a number of houses from folks who have rehabbed them and done a nice job. If somebody has rehabbed the house, check it out carefully and make sure that they have done the wiring and the plumbing, up the code and the air conditioning, the heating, working on stuff so everything works well.

Because sometimes people rehab things themselves and they'll cut a corner. You don't want to buy something that has a bad, bad wiring. But if you're buying a house in decent shape and you're buying it with payments that are low enough to cover it so you can rent it and your tenants can pay back the payments plus the taxes, insurance, and maintenance, and you can buy it with a relatively low down payment, your rate of return on your investment is good.

I hold houses until they at least double one time in value. That's my policy. Most houses I own have doubled two or three times in value. But if I buy something for the short term, and sometimes it takes seven or eight years, sometimes it takes 10 years for a house to double in value, if I buy a house with 10 or 20 percent down and I hold it until it doubles in value, let's say this house is a $300,000 house, if I buy it with $60,000 down and wait for it to go up to $600,000, which could take 10 years or so, my $60,000 is going to turn into about $300,000 profit.

You can calculate how much of a return that is if you'd like. In addition to that, of course, I'll be collecting rent during that period of time. In addition to that, I'll be paying down the loan. Those types of investments, if you compare them to other things you can do with your money, generally will outperform anything else you can do.

That's why I continue to do it. Interviewer: Probably the missing piece of information for somebody who's a novice is the art of—correct, make sure I'm accurate in this—but the art of real estate investing, probably the primary skill is being able to find and negotiate and set up the deal.

You can't do that on a retail house where you have a young family that's moving from one town to another and they need all the cash up front out of their money to fund the down payment on their—out of their equity to fund the down payment on their next house.

But if you can find the deal where it can work—and maybe you can make a deal like that work if you can get it at a wholesale price and use an alternate form of financing other than seller financing—but the key is to find those deals. That's what, one out of ten?

It's not nine out of ten, it's one out of ten that you can find to make it work without needing a bank loan. Is that accurate? David Morgan: Well, I'll tell you this. When I teach a class, I only teach it once a year. I teach it here in Sarasota, Florida, and I'll teach it this year on January the 31st and February the 1st.

The students in that class actually go out. We have an exercise one night, and we go through neighborhoods in this town. I identify about a half a dozen neighborhoods or so. And they walk down these streets and they talk to people they meet, and they knock on doors, and they find empty houses, and they investigate the empty houses.

And we look for situations where we can find a seller who will carry owner financing. That's our goal. And on a house that's in good shape, in a decent neighborhood, on a good street, a house that we can rent, so it's got to meet all that criteria too. And we've always found one.

And we do that in two hours. So the lesson here is that there are always those properties available. And you have to do some work to find them. People aren't going to call you and say, "I want to sell you my house." I mean, I have had that happen because I've been doing this for a long time, and people know I buy houses.

But probably if you're just starting, you're not going to get many phone calls like that. But you can go out and find a house that's been sitting empty for a while. And it's just, this is a common sense business. If you think about yourself, if you had a house that was sitting empty for a year, and you've been mowing the grass for a year, or shoveling the snow, or whatever you have to do in your town, and making the payments, and paying the taxes, and paying the insurance, at some point, you're going to wake up and say, "Let's just get rid of this house.

We're not going to make any money on this house, but maybe we can make it back someplace else." And once you make that decision as a seller, if I can find you as a buyer, I can make a really good deal for me, and you'll be happy too. I have never had anybody that I bought a house from be unhappy.

They're all happy. They are happy to get rid of a house, because that house is not doing them any good. I'm happy to buy the house, because I know what I'm going to do with it. I know I'm going to rent it, and hold it until it's free and clear, and continue to enjoy that income the rest of my life.

And if my kids get in the business, they can enjoy it the rest of their life. I mean, that income goes on forever, and it goes up a little bit every year. So, there are opportunities out there in any market. And I guess there are probably some towns that are so small that it might be harder to find the right one.

But if you live in a town of any size at all, and some of my most successful students come from towns of four and six thousand people, so they're making a work there. It works. There's always opportunity. And this is not a new idea. I mean, it probably goes back to the ancient Greeks or something.

But I've talked to people who are my grandfather's age who have been buying property like this, you know, 50 years ago, 7,500 years ago. So, you know, this is not a new concept. People have been financing property when they sell it for a long time. There's a practical matter during certain times in the economy, that's the only way you can get rid of some properties.

This show, we talk a lot about building wealth, and how to start, and how to build a wealth plan. You have the story of something I've mentioned briefly, but that when you were getting started on your wealth plan, you actually chose to rent your residence while accumulating investment houses.

Could you explain why you did that, how that helped you, and why that might be a useful consideration for a young person getting started? That seems a little odd to many people. Well, if you think about what happens, most people, when they go to buy that first house, will buy probably the most house they can afford.

And sometimes they buy a house they can't afford. They buy a nicer house than they can afford, and they really stretch to buy that house. And then, of course, after you buy a house, it's not over. You get to buy furniture, and then you get to fix that house, and then pretty soon you'll get to remodel that house.

And what young folks find that go out and buy a house to live in early in their lives, is that house consumes all their money for a long, long time. And it can be forever. I mean, that may be the only property they ever buy. So you have to ask yourself a question.

Is this house that we're buying to live in a good investment? And the second question might be, for who? It might be a good investment for your children, if they inherited. But the whole time you own that house, if you think about what's going on, you're putting money into it.

That house is never giving you any money back. There's never going to be any cash flow coming to you from that house, and it can consume a lot of your money. Well, if you own the house, free and clear, it would consume a lot less of your money. And of course, in our society, it's not unusual at all that people would refinance the house that they live in and take some extra cash out to go buy a car, go on vacation, or put a home equity loan on the house they live in and use that money to go out and buy something else.

So they pretty much, you can find people who are 65 years old who are still in debt on their house, they refinance it two or three times. So they may never own that house free and clear, and that house may be really a burden to them at some point in their life.

My advice is to kind of take a contrary approach to that. And what I did, and what I recommend others to do, and a lot of people have followed this advice, is rather than going out and buying a house when you're first getting married and first getting started, consider renting a house.

You can rent a nice house in a nice subdivision for less than what it costs you to buy it. And I've always rented nice houses that are on my living, a waterfront community here in Sarasota. So every place I've rented has always been on the water. And I have found that when I go and buy, rent a house in a very nice part of town, in a nice community, I can rent it for a fraction of what it costs me to buy it.

So I don't give up lifestyle, I get to live in a nice house, but I get to live in a nice house for a lot less money than it would cost me if I bought that house. Now, because I don't have the burden of a big house payment, and I don't have the burden of having to remodel that house, or even buy really nice furniture.

If you live in a rental house, you can get by with even secondhand furniture if you like. You don't have to go to the store and buy all new stuff. Well, you can live pretty cheaply. If I was a single guy, I would probably have roommates. I would be living really cheaply.

I'd be having other people pay most of the rent. But I've been married for 34 years, so a roommate and I share expenses. But we rented a house, and for 10 years before I bought the house, and I paid cash when I bought it, for 10 years before I rented, before I bought a house, we rented at really good rates.

And I would use my money then to focus on buying investment properties. Well, the investment properties I bought and held for 10 years went up in value enough, the loans paid down enough, that I could take two or three of those investment properties after 10 years, sell them, and take the cash and buy the house we wanted to live in for cash.

So I didn't have to finance it. And by doing that, and because I was a cash buyer, I was able to negotiate a good price on a house that we finally bought. And now we've lived in that house for more than 30 years. We have remodeled it three times.

So I don't even want to think about how much money I've invested in that house since that time, since we bought it. But I can tell you this, if I'd bought that house the first day, instead of waiting 10 years, and if I'd financed that house with a 30-year loan on it, I probably, it would be paid for now, but it would have kept me from buying a lot of investments.

If you think about what an investment house does for you, it's instead of buying a house to live in, you go out and buy a house as an investment, you rent it, you're paying down the loan, it's going up in value, you actually get some tax shelter if you need it.

And then if you need some money, it's not an emotional thing to sell an investment house and take the cash and go out and use it to do something. It is an emotional thing if you have to sell the house you live in. If you're forced to sell that house, or if you go borrow more, you have to have that house do something, that's an emotional event.

So I want to emphasize that it's just a better strategy not to get into a lot of debt and tied into a lot of debt, and especially by buying too much house to start with. If you're going to buy a house, buy something simple. Back when I was a kid, my parents lived in a very small house, my grandparents lived in a smaller house.

What we've seen today, and I've been involved with a group called First Habitat for Humanity for about 25 years, and now I chair the Fuller Center for Housing, both the non-profit housing providers, and we build very simple, decent houses for people who don't have much income but who need a place to live.

And even those houses are bigger. The Habitat houses have become bigger over the years, and we started the Fuller Center to build smaller and smaller houses. So we focus on building houses we can sell to families for about $50,000 with no interest and no profit, and that allows a family who doesn't make much money to afford a house.

Well, my suggestion, you move into a Fuller Center house or a Habitat house, but you can find some pretty simple houses out there to buy for a lot less money. And if you start off with smaller and then work your way up, that's a more fun path in life than having to step down.

There was a lot of people during this last recession that owned a really nice house, and they lost it, and now they're in a much smaller house. So start off in a smaller house. Think about a strategy of renting for a while and investing in it. It's not something you have to do forever, but when you accumulate some capital and you're able to buy a house for cash, you'll get a lot of satisfaction out of owning your own home free and clear.

Economic cycles change over time, and you wrote an entire book on this called Building Real Estate Wealth and a Changing Market, and it was published in 2007. What impact do economic conditions, recessions, growth periods, inflation of real estate prices, decreasing of real estate prices, what impact do those conditions have on a real estate investor, and how does a wise real estate investor negotiate and navigate successfully through whatever the economic cycle we're in?

Well, we could go on for a few hours here. Well, you did write a whole book on it, so I assume you've got a few things to say on it. First of all, accept a couple things. Number one, there will be cycles. There'll be cycles in the business world, in the credit market, in taxes, in your personal life.

You have good days and bad days. You have good years and bad years, and there's opportunities during all those different times, different opportunities. Number two, you can anticipate. It's very hard to predict what's going to happen. I had a guy call me the other day and said he's predicted the last five recessions to the day.

I said, "When did you predict them?" "Well, I think you predicted them last week." You know, it's easy to predict them five years ago. It's hard to predict them in the next five years. Nobody that I knew anticipated the last downturn. Now, there's people now that claim they did, but they didn't do it in advance.

So, you can't foretell the future. So, what you have to do is you have to have a strategy that protects you and the continent that you profit from if we're going to have the Great Depression or big runaway inflation, big runaway economy. You have to play both sides of it.

So, you have to have some assets that are safe in case we have the big downturn. Then, on the other hand, you want to have some assets that are in a position to make you a big profit if we have a great market. So, it's an interesting discussion. I've gone through four major recessions in this town in the last 40 years, and the first one was a real learning experience.

I've been fortunate. I've never gone broke because I've never had a bank loan. I've always had owner financing. So, when we have these recessions, I can go back to the people I bought the houses from and say, "You can either have the houses back, or we can talk about what will work during this economy." An interesting thing we've learned is this last downturn, even though prices dropped by about 50 percent in our town, the rents didn't drop that much.

They came down 10 or 15 percent. People needed, you know, they still wanted to live inside, and then folks who lost their houses, of course, became tenants. It created an interesting situation where we had a shortage of houses that were available for rent because a lot of the houses in foreclosure were not available for rent.

A lot of the houses that were being rehabbed were only half fixed up, so they weren't available for rent. So, we ended up with a shortage of rental houses, and we ended up with a lot of folks who wanted to be tenants because they were moving out of the houses they lost.

So, the rents didn't come down as much, but every cycle is different. And the next major cycle we have is bound to be different than the one we just went through. This last one was caused by a credit crisis. The next one will probably be caused by something else.

The '86 one was caused by a big tax law change. So, you just can't, you know, anticipate exactly what's going to happen next. But you can have a safe portfolio. You can have a portfolio that if prices do drop 20 or 30 percent, you survive. If they go up 20 or 30 percent, you're in a position to take a nice profit.

And some of this just comes through experience. And as I say, you know, I teach people. I tell stories about what I've done and what has worked for me and the mistakes we've made. But you're really going to learn this by doing it. So, you know, if you'll learn to be safe, as safe as you can be, then hopefully you'll never go broke.

And when you have a downturn, you'll be in a position to survive. And then when everybody else is getting out of the business, if you've got your head on straight and you have the ability to buy, you make some of the best deals of your life, of course, when everybody else is selling and everybody says real estate will never come back.

It's a terrible idea to buy real estate. That's the time to buy. A lot is made when you go to a real estate investment seminar about the tax efficiency of real estate. And for many people who've never owned investment property, it's kind of a new concept. Could you explain just briefly some of the general principles that do make independent real estate investment useful and efficient for a tax perspective as to why it is so advantageous in many ways?

Well, probably two simple things. One, when you buy a property at a below market price, of course, that profit that you're making is tax free to you today. I like to tell the story about Donald Trump who came down to West Palm. He bought a six million dollar house for three million dollars.

Well, you buy a six million dollar house for three million dollars and those are real numbers. You actually made three million dollars, but that three million dollars isn't taxable to you. And what Donald did shortly thereafter, I think, is I think he borrowed against it. So he may have put a million dollars in his pocket.

He may have borrowed four million dollars against the house he paid three million dollars for. And of course, that borrowed money is not taxable to you. So in his situation, he bought a six million dollar house for three million dollars, borrowed four million against it. I'm just making these numbers up, but that's probably somewhat true.

And all in, he hasn't paid a dime of taxes yet and he still owns his house with two million dollars in equity in it. Well, you're not going to buy a six million dollar house, but the same tax laws apply to you when you buy a hundred thousand dollar house for ninety thousand or eighty thousand.

You're making that profit and you're making it without paying taxes. I have a student who's a medical doctor and makes good money practicing medicine, but he pays a lot of taxes because the income that he makes practicing medicine is all personal income, it's taxed at the highest rate. So he decided years ago to start taking a couple of months a year off.

And when he took a couple of months a year off, his goal during that couple of months a year was to go out and buy two or three houses. And he would do that. And he'd go out and buy a house and he'd buy it below market, because he knew if he could go out and buy a house that was worth one hundred and fifty thousand for one hundred and twenty five, that's twenty five thousand dollars in profit that he can push off and not pay taxes on today.

And it would grow over time. And of course, that growth is also tax free. So if he buys a hundred fifty thousand dollar house for one twenty five and he holds it until it doubles in value, and now it's worth three hundred thousand dollars, all that profit is accumulated is still tax free to him.

And the rents that come in, they're going to be taxable. But if he wanted to borrow against that house or if he wanted to sell that house, he could pay taxes at a lower rate on his profits than he would on money he earned practicing medicine. The highest tax rates are charged to people who work and are subject to payroll taxes, Social Security taxes, Medicare taxes and ordinary income taxes.

Those folks often live in a state, this fellow from California, who lives in a state that has a state income tax, he would spend about 50 percent of his income in taxes, round figures. Well, if he can stop and if he has enough money to live on and he can stop, you know, live, stop earning income and then use some of his time to buy property, buy investment property to provide him tax free income and long term capital gain profits down the road, he can accumulate a large net worth and at the same time live a more tax efficient life.

Now, if you think about it, if I buy a house, the house I bought in 1973, which I still own, and it's doubled in value several times, I don't have to pay taxes on that profit until I sell it. And I don't ever have to sell it. There's a good chance that I'll leave that house to my children in their estate.

And when they inherit that property, there's a part of the law that talks about what happens to the taxable basis when you inherit property. But the current law is that the people that inherit the property get a stepped up basis. And what that means is if I bought that property for thirty thousand, it's worth more than three hundred today.

Let's say when they inherited it, it's worth four hundred thousand dollars. They would receive a basis, a new basis of the fair market value of my debt, which might be four hundred thousand dollars. They could then sell that house for four hundred thousand dollars the next day and pay no taxes on it.

So that whole transaction, that thirty thousand dollar original investment that grew to four hundred thousand dollars, they inherited and now they sold. That whole transaction is tax free. There's no income tax paid on it. So there are some strategies that benefit rich people, just to say it out loud, and that rich people understand, and it has to do with asset accrual and asset appreciation that benefit folks who do this.

And wealthy people have been using these for years, of course. Do you have many people in today's world of uncertainty, especially with some of the fluctuations in the publicly traded stock market, look to real estate and their money's in their IRAs? So I've seen a real growth in the interest of using self-directed IRAs, self-directed ESAs, HSAs, and investing in real estate through those accounts.

Do you have any perspective, opinions, observations, or experience on people doing that and the advantages and disadvantages of that type of approach with real estate? Well, when you say IRA, you may be talking about more than one type of vehicle here. You could have a traditional IRA that distributes its profits, its taxable income to the beneficiaries because when they make contributions to that IRA, they deducted the contributions.

That's certainly a different type of investment vehicle than the Roth IRA, which started about 14 years ago. And a Roth IRA allows people to make contributions to a retirement plan that are non-deductible. You don't get a deduction today. But then when the withdrawals are made and profits are taken out, they are tax-free.

So first of all, you have to separate these two ideas because there's different strategies for these two different types of investment plans. If you have a Roth IRA that allows you to take profits out tax-free, you can always take your contributions out tax-free, but you can take your profits out tax-free too.

Then investing in something that's going to have a lot of appreciation over time makes a lot of sense. If you have a traditional IRA or a qualified pension plan, investing in an asset that's going to produce capital gains does not make any sense because if you have a large capital gain personally and you pay the tax on that, your rate's going to be relatively low, it's taxed capital gains rates.

If you have a large capital gain inside a retirement plan, a qualified plan or a regular IRA, when that profit comes out, it's going to be taxed to you at ordinary income rates. So you might be paying twice as much in taxes. So hopefully everybody's clear on that. The Roth IRA is an excellent tool to use for real estate investors who understand how to use it.

Unfortunately, and we're seeing a lot of this now, but there's a lot of people investing in business properties in the Roth IRA, which is not allowed. There are people that are self-dealing, they try to sell things to themselves, or they try to borrow money from the Roth IRA. They make prohibited transactions and they don't understand they're doing this.

They're getting bad advice sometimes. And if you do this, then when you get caught, if you get caught, the penalties are stiff. You're going to have to pay taxes on all the money, probably, plus penalties. So investing in real estate in an IRA is possible. And I would encourage it, but I'd encourage it only with really good information.

If you don't know how to do it, you need to get some good advice and not from one of your high-priced seminars, you know, not from a $30,000 seminar. Those guys will just make up some good stories for you. But, you know, from a real CPA, from a real tax attorney, from somebody who's in the business, and there's some good folks in the business who will give you the straight scoop.

It's the law. You can read the law, but too many people try to get around the law somehow, and that's not a good strategy. So the important thing to understand, though, at the beginning is there's two types of plans. You don't want to invest in a traditional plan in assets that produce long-term capital gains because you're paying twice as much in taxes.

- I think he's a friend of yours. Is it Peter Fortunato? Is his seminar a good resource for people? I think he does a whole seminar on that. Am I right? - There are a number of people who do. Yeah, Pete Fortunato and Dykes Botterford teach a class in Atlanta once a year on IRA investing, and I would recommend that.

They're both very bright people. - Yeah, I've got that one on my list of classes to take because I'm familiar with the tax law side of it, but not from the specific real estate perspective. So it's on my list of classes to take. Do you have any sense, one of the things that I encourage people to look at when they're building out their wealth plan is to try to figure out where their highest rate of return is going to come from as far as where their investment highest rate of return potential is, and that's going to be different for each person.

But I'm just curious, with your decades of experience, do you have any either sense, gut sense, or do you have any metrics that you've actually tracked to have an idea of how much, what your average rate of return has been over the years with your good deals and bad deals just over the course of your career?

- Sure. It's our business. That's what we do. We pay a lot of attention to which investments make us the most money and on an after-tax basis because that's the only part that really counts. And a lot of the things I've talked about today come into play there. This untaxed part of the capital gain that you're able to defer until you sell or leave it to your kids is a big part of that.

Long before I was in the real estate business, I was involved in charting stocks and playing commodity options, did some other things where I was trying to make some money in a hurry. And I learned by studying the securities business a little bit and commodity options, stock options, different things that there's a lot of different ways to make money.

There's thousands of different ways to make money. You can start a restaurant and make money. But what it comes down to for me is safety, being able to sleep well at night, lifestyle, being able to get away from something. I have good friends who play the stock market every day and they won't take a day off because they're afraid something bad will happen to them.

And in the real estate business, you can take a day off. I take months off sometimes. My view of retirement is a little different than some people. I wrote a course on retirement investing a couple years ago, a year and a half or so ago. And I like to be able to retire on a day-by-day basis.

If I want to take a day off, I want to be able to take a day off and not have anything bad happen to my investments. And so I've set my life up that way. I invest in things that work with or without me. If I get run over by a bus or crash my airplane someplace, I want my investments to continue to produce income for my spouse and my heirs.

I don't want to just disappear on me. So it's not just investments. I have a lot of personal input. Now I've had some, of course, to buy the right properties and to manage them well. But without me, it still works. So that's the important part. As far as the amount of money we made, our overall rates of return over time, if you want to use just a round number, it's about 20% compounded over the last 40 years.

So numbers do go up. And if you do that math, you're not going to figure out my net worth because I spend a lot of money. We enjoy traveling. We live in a nice house. We have kids scattered all over the world. So we love taking our kids on good vacations, scuba diving and skiing and doing things all over the world.

But 20% is not a return you get on an annualized basis over 40 years unless you're pretty darn conservative. It's not a speculative thing. And people who speculate try to play markets, try to tie markets, rarely get those kind of returns. I've served on several foundation boards that have a lot of money that are professionally managed, and they're pretty happy if they can make 5% or 6% or 7% over a 20- or 30-year basis.

So to make those kind of yields, you have to have information and exercise it. Other folks don't have. You have to know how to do something that most people can't do. But it is learnable. This is not rocket science. I'm certainly not a rocket scientist. I'm one of these guys who's steady, who has a plan, who stays the course.

And I continue to teach so other people can learn how to do that. Three final questions as we finish our interview here. The first one, how would somebody, if they're doing some self-evaluation and they're looking at what their skills are, what their abilities are, and they're trying to figure out if real estate is the right forum for them to dig into for their wealth plan, what does it take to be a good investor?

And how would you know if you have that, whatever it is, versus knowing whether you're better off, better served pursuing wealth in another career or another area? Well, I think number one is probably delayed gratification. If you can invest in something, knowing that if you hold onto it for 5 or 10 or 15 years, it'll make you a lot of money or probably make you a lot of money.

But it's not going to be a short-term profit. It's going to be a longer-term profit. I think that fits well for real estate investment and it's worked well for Warren Buffett. The people that buy with the idea of not selling an investment, that hold in it for a long time, are true investors.

People that buy with the idea that they're going to sell it in a year or two and make a quick profit are speculators. And so to be an investor, you have to have this long-term outlook, I think. The second thing is understanding money. If you're not good at math, if you didn't do well in the fourth grade, that's about as far as you need to go.

But you need to be able to add, subtract. Percentages are not a bad thing. Understanding the rule of 72 is a good thing. Knowing how long it's going to take to double your money at different rates, understanding compound interest, and being comfortable with the math side of it so you have some confidence in your ability to grow money.

And then the third thing is people skills. We talked about earlier, if you are not willing to talk to people, manage people, probably you're better off hiring somebody else to do that. That doesn't mean you can't invest in real estate, but the management is a key piece of this.

You've mentioned a few different names. Somebody for whom this is their first introduction to real estate and they're interested and they say, "I fit those criteria. I'm interested in pursuing it." What would be some suggested recommended resources, a reading list, courses, and make sure to mention your own course that you do as well.

Well, it's a little self-serving, but I have been teaching people for a long time and have had some success. So I would suggest you get on my website, which is just Google John Schaub. That's C-H-A-U-B. It'll pop up. We've over the years written a lot. I've written a number of books.

I've been writing newsletters since the 70s. I've recorded probably 15 different courses. Some of them are not available anymore, but about 10 recent courses that are one-day courses on specific topics and they're very helpful to folks. Other than that, I haven't read a contemporary book in a while that I thought was right on point, but the books I mentioned earlier, you've got no reason to repeat them, but the books I mentioned earlier were all good books.

I continue to read and I continue to listen to other people speak and look for people who are ahead of me in the business so I can learn from them. Of course, if you're just starting, you need to be looking for folks who can get you started. I have a whole list of folks on my website, different links you can go to.

So I would start there. I would go to the website and read what I've published and while I work for free and then look at the links and study those people. I know, final question. I know Habitat for Humanity is a cause that's near and dear to your heart and you've been involved over decades, as you mentioned earlier.

Take just a moment and mention Habitat, the work that you do and what you've learned in helping and then how people can get involved with Habitat and what would be helpful and why they should consider it. Well, I was involved with Habitat for more than 20 years. I chair a board now called the Fuller Center for Housing, F-U-L-L-E-R, Fuller Center for Housing.

And both of them do good work. The Fuller Center was started a couple years back to help people that are even poorer than the folks that Habitat's able to help. We take existing houses, we renovate them, and then we sell them at no interest and no profit. So that's the focus of my efforts right now is with the Fuller Center.

But both Habitat and Fuller Center do well. They're both widely known. So if you can Google either one and if they're active in your area, volunteer, it's a great way to learn how to build a house. All my kids build houses and picked up those skills. And it's a great way to help build community in your town where you bring people together to work on a project and improve your town, improve somebody's life, improve your life.

So it's all good work. It's all good news. Awesome. John, thank you so much for making the time to come on. This has been a wealth of information and I thank you for being willing to do it. Okay. My pleasure and best of luck with all you're doing. Did you learn something?

Remember, you too can do this. This is not out of reach. Many people have done it. You too can do it. If you're interested, if this is something that appeals to you, start doing your homework. And we're coming up on a new year here. It's December 2014 as we come up on a new year here.

Be thinking about what is your plan for the investment side of the equation? What's your plan for how to grow your wealth? Real estate can be a powerful way to do that. And so I encourage you to begin the journey. John's books would be a great place. I have four of them.

I have his book Building Wealth One House at a Time, Building Wealth Buying Foreclosures, and Building Real Estate Wealth in a Changing Market. I also have a book called Buying Right. So I would just recommend start with Building Wealth One House at a Time. That's the best overview. Consider his seminar.

I've heard great things about it. It's at the end of January in Sarasota, Florida. And so that would also be a great place to start. It might be a good place for you to go to enhance your education and your knowledge for this new year. That's it for today's show.

I thank you all for being with me. A couple quick announcements as we go out the door here. Number one, the schedule for the rest of this week, tomorrow I have an interview for you with Scott Young. Scott is the man who did the MIT Challenge. And he was the one who essentially recreated his own MIT degree without ever going to the school, without paying for it.

On Wednesday, I'm going to bring you another technical show. We're going to do some technical end of the year planning topics. And that'll be the last of the technical shows for the year. I'm getting ready to take off for the next two weeks, working on a lot of business stuff behind the scenes and really trying to make some progress on that.

So I'm just going to be releasing some interviews next two weeks. But I will be releasing shows so that way you don't have to go without a show. Thursday, however, I'm bringing Jim Rawls, author of Survival Blog, back on the show. He was very...many of you really enjoyed the first interview that I did with him.

And it's an interesting topic. So we're going to talk a little bit about moving as a way to improve your lifestyle and save money, both moving across the country and expatriation and different ideas for that. Friday, I'm going to be doing another Friday Q&A show. And the next week, I have an interview on Monday for you with Ben Falk from Whole Systems Design up in Vermont.

Tuesday, I will be releasing an interview with Dr. Vern Poitras, who is a professor at a theological seminary, former mathematics, also a mathematics PhD. We're going to talk about children briefly. Friday is an interview with Jeff from the Sustainable Life blog. We're going to talk about investing in your house.

Then the following Monday will be Eva from Teens Got Sense, a fascinating young lady who writes a blog on finance for kids. And then I got a couple more as well that'll be coming up that week also. So if you'd like to get in touch with me, Joshua@radical personalfinance.com.

Twitter, we're @radicalpf. Facebook.com/radicalpersonalfinance. Thank you all so much for your support. Consider joining the membership program, The Irregulars. If you haven't, details are at radicalpersonalfinance.com/membership. And it may be in your best interest to join now because I am going to be substantially increasing the price of making some progress on kind of the business planning ideas here.

I'm going to be substantially increasing the price in the future, but I'll keep it the same for those who join now. Thank you for listening to today's show. This show is intended to provide entertainment, education, and financial enlightenment. Your situation is unique and I cannot deliver any actionable advice without knowing anything about you.

This show is not and is not intended to be any form of financial advice. Please, develop a team of professional advisors who you find to be caring, competent, and trustworthy, and consult them because they are the ones who can understand your specific needs, your specific goals, and provide specific answers to your questions.

Hold them accountable for your results. I've done my absolute best to be clear and accurate in today's show, but I'm one person and I make mistakes. If you spot a mistake in something I've said, please come by the show page and comment so we can all learn together. Until tomorrow, thanks for being here.

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