Today on Radical Personal Finance, I'm going to share with you a review of John Schaub's Building Wealth One House at a Time of a seminar. Recently I had the opportunity to go to it, spent two days there at the seminar. I'll share with you the outline of the seminar, some of the things that I learned and my impressions and feedback as to whether or not this might be something that you should consider going to.

Welcome to the Radical Personal Finance Podcast. My name is Joshua Sheets and I'm your host. Thank you for being with me. We talk real estate, love the seminar, love John's plan. It's a plan I'm pursuing as I talked about on a recent show. I'm going to share with you some of the reasons why, but I'm also going to tell you why would a guy sell his house and talk about why there are myths of home ownership and then turn around and want to get right back into real estate investing.

When you think about it, that'll probably be some of the more interesting part of the show. I will answer that question, although I can do it here in one sentence. It's very simple. Houses are personal consumption items. They are not investments. Everything that I said about real estate was related to houses as a personal consumption item.

Basically, all of the flaws that I talked about were flaws of – well, many of them were the flaws of viewing a house as an investment, as a wise financial move. The end of the day, when it comes to a place to live, if you view a house as a consumption item, as a luxury lifestyle decision, nothing wrong with that.

We all need a place to live and I think for many people, a major goal that many people have is to live in a luxurious house. Now how you define luxury is up to you, but that really is the case. But when we talk about investing, they're night and day.

So I'll cover that more in a little bit though. But last weekend, I went to John Schaub's Building Wealth One House at a Time seminar. This comes – it's a seminar that's related to a book that he has written called Building Wealth One House at a Time. Book has been out.

It's been updated a few times. He's coming out with a new version of the book, I believe this summer. And so when he releases that, I'll have him back on the show to talk about that personally. But we've interviewed him in the past on Radical Personal Finance and that was a great interview.

He shared a lot of the strategy that he follows and pursues and a lot of his personal story. If you'd like to go back and listen to it, it was episode 119 of the show. I will put a link in the show notes for today's show. You can go back and hear that episode.

But Schaub is one of my favorite real estate guys. I shared in the past that I got involved in the real estate guru world about ten years ago. What's interesting is since that time, there have been real estate market crashes and recession and all kinds of issues. When you go through times of recession, you can find out who are the people who know what they're doing and know what they're talking about and who are the people who are just talking about what they think they want you to think that they know what they're talking about.

As the axiom goes, when the tide goes out, you can see who was swimming naked. Unfortunately, that's what happens with real estate gurus. There's so many just total frauds out there and there are so many of them in the real estate space. A suggestion to you, if you're reading a book written by a real estate guru, the first place that you should go is to John T.

Reed's website and look at his guru ratings and read what he has to say about that guru. That should be the very first thing that you should do. I will also link that up in the show notes for today if you are not familiar with those ratings with the work that John T.

Reed does. There are many systems and many ways of investing in real estate. John Schaub's approach that he teaches in Building Wealth One House at a Time is not for everybody. There are dozens of approaches. You could be a house flipper, buying properties and reselling them. You could be a rehabber.

You could work in commercial rentals. You can rent out trailer parks. You can invest in tax liens. There are dozens and dozens of niches and specialties in real estate. If somebody says, "Oh, I'm a real estate investor," your spider sense should go up a little bit and say, "Well, wait a second.

What kind of real estate investor are you?" Because there are very, very specialized types of real estate. But what appeals to me about John Schaub's system is the fact that it's an appropriate scale and appropriate system for what I'm looking for personally. I do not want to operate a real estate business.

My business is radical personal finance and that is what I want to serve as the primary economic engine and driver of my financial life. That's the business that I want to have and that I want to run. However, I also need to be busy with investing. Good for me to invest into my business.

That's likely where the highest returns are going to come and I'm investing into my business and I will continue to do so. However, it would be a poor decision of mine if I were to put everything into my business. That would be a bad asset allocation decision. This is one of the things that entrepreneurs often do is they often invest everything into their business and they keep investing everything in their business and that leaves them vulnerable to things that could happen.

Now, I don't know what those things are. I don't know if I could fall into a situation where all of a sudden some laws or rules change and now my content is meaningless. I could say something that angers 90% of my audience and nobody wants to listen to me anymore.

I could wind up being sick or hurt and not be able to come and do the show every day. If that were to happen at the moment, my business would fall apart because everything is built upon me continuing to do it. If I were to focus everything on my business, I don't have any backup plans.

I need an investment plan. Now, in the past, I've shared with you about some of the different challenges I've had with figuring out an investment plan. I've looked hard and fast at different options for me and I've had to figure out what is an appropriate investment plan that fits where I'm at, fits my skills, fits my inclinations and fits the scale, the amount of capital that I have to invest.

That's a big decision. So, when you get into the world of real estate, Shab's system is, for me, perfect at this point of my life. His system – let me just lay it out. I don't want to beat around the bush. Let me just lay it out for you.

He teaches his students to go out and simply focus on buying one rental house each year until they have enough rental houses owned to be able to supply all of their economic goals and all of their income goals. Right in the very beginning of his seminar, he talks about the meaning of building wealth one house at a time and he says, "Why houses?" His reasons, number one, there's plenty of opportunity.

There's lots of houses. Number two, houses are little deals that can be bought with little down and little risk. So you can survive any mistakes that you make in a deal. Bankers like houses for collateral, so financing is generally available at lower costs and better terms than commercial loans.

The tenants of houses stay longer than apartment tenants. You're dealing with a different type of tenant. Houses are easier to sell at close to a retail price for cash than other types of property and many buyers are interested in buying on terms that can be profitable to you as a seller.

So he teaches to buy houses, not land, not apartments, not trailer parks, but houses and a certain type of house. One of the big things that he focuses on is finding and investing in rental houses that are squarely in the middle class market. So you want a house that's big enough to fit a family and their things.

Buy a three-bedroom house that has either a garage or a basement, at least a three-bedroom house that has a garage or basement, a place for stuff. You want normal houses, good construction quality in quiet, well-maintained neighborhoods on streets that have more owners than renters with lots that are appropriate and adequate for the needs of a family that are near popular schools, that are close to employment centers and shopping, and you put together deals that can produce an acceptable cash flow for you that you can buy at a bargain price.

And this helps you to solve one of the major problems of real estate, which is finding and attracting the perfect tenants. John teaches in his seminar that you want a house that will attract a perfect tenant, and a perfect tenant is a tenant who stays forever, who pays early, who never calls, and who fixes everything.

That's not necessarily a normal rental tenant, but with John's experience and his story, that's his normal rental tenant. And if they're not, then he fixes the situation so that they are. That's the fundamental premise, and the idea is to build a house investment plan that is passive. The goal is to have a passive investment plan, not an active real estate business.

To me, that's important because I don't want to get into the business of actively flipping real estate. I don't want to get into the business where I'm looking for passive investments in the real – that happen to be through the context of real estate. In a moment, I'll talk about the advantages of real estate, of why it can be such an attractive financial opportunity, and I'll also go through some of the financial results of John's plan, if you just buy one house a year.

And then I'll also talk about his rules for investing, and then we'll go in-depth on the seminar. Before I go into that, I want to talk about the sponsor for this half hour of the show is Trade King. Trade King is the official brokerage company sponsor of Radical Personal Finance.

Awesome company, very inexpensive trades, $4.95 stock trades, very high quality level of education and information. The best thing that I love about Trade King is I've been in their offices. I've met their CEO on multiple occasions. I've looked them straight in the face, and I've been able to get a sense of who they are as a company and how much they work to serve you, the client.

I've been in their call room standing next to their customer service reps as they're working there to solve customer service issues. Today we're talking about real estate, and real estate can be a tremendous way of investing. However, it is not the only way. It's not the perfect way, and there are major advantages and disadvantages that real estate faces.

For example, listen to what I just said. Trade King will do trades for you, $4.95 a trade. Every single real estate transaction is going to be way, way more expensive than that. Think of all the costs involved in closing your real estate. You're talking big dollar amounts. It's hard to figure out.

There are a couple ways in real estate you can do it with tax liens and bundled instruments, but it's hard to figure out how to invest in real estate for a couple thousand bucks. But you can put some trades in place on a stock trade, whether that's direct purchases or whether that's setting up options trades.

You can do that with a couple thousand bucks, and if your trades are well chosen, you can do very well with your rate of return. When you get a cost of $4.95, it's hard to beat those costs. The other great thing about stock investing and a disadvantage of real estate, real estate is much less liquid than stocks.

With stocks, you can hit sell and your stocks can be sold. With real estate, one of the major things that John Seminar was trying to talk about ways to sell more quickly at close to retail value, but it is certainly not as easy to do – sell a real estate property as quickly and easily as it is a stock.

So if you'd like to open a brokerage account, if you have an IRA or a Roth IRA, or if you have a stock account at another firm and you'd like to get low-cost trades and also really great customer service, consider transitioning to Trade King. If you use the special Radical Personal Finance referral link, that helps them to track you as a customer, but you get a $100 bonus for doing that.

If you open an account with Trade King, fund it with at least a thousand bucks, you can get a $100 bonus from them. So if this is the year that you'd like to start experimenting with trading, consider going to TradeKing.com/radical, go to TradeKing.com/radical, open an account and get an extra $100 courtesy of – well, it's courtesy of Trade King, but courtesy of Radical Personal Finance to fund your account and let me know how you do this year.

There might be some opportunities. Volatility might be a good time for some of you to really be trading well. So on John's one house a year plan, I'm just going to read one page to you from the workbook from the course and it's as simple as this. Quoting from the book, "For more than 30 years, I have suggested to beginning and seasoned investors alike that they simply but consistently buy one house a year as an investment.

The result of steadily buying through all types of markets spreads your risk and allows you to learn the business and make better deals over the years. As the houses increase in value, you can increase your cash flow by selling some and paying off the rest. Or as the following example shows, just sell your weaker houses and replace them with better houses, keeping some cash for yourself.

Here are the rules. Buy one house a year using John's advanced 10-10-10 rule. 10-10-10 rule is buy at least 10% below the market, pay no more than 10% down on the property, and produce a 10% cash flow return on your down payment." Just a side note here, that rule used to be pay no more than 10% interest.

That was in the past when interest rates were much higher. He modified that rule to be this one, "Produce a 10% cash flow return on your down payment. Hold on to the houses until the first one doubles in value, and then sell the first house you bought and buy a replacement house," again, using the 10-10-10 rule.

And what's so amazing is in the beginning of the seminar, John doesn't start his seminar with a lot of motivation, a lot of talk. Many real estate seminars, especially the bad ones, are all motivation, all hype, all pictures of riches. Look at the lifestyle you can live. Look at that.

He doesn't do that. His seminar is very practical. It's very tangible. But he does have one page right at the front where he says, "Here are the potential results of buying one house a year," and I'll share them with you because this example could really be life-changing for some of you.

It really could be. And so as an example, let's say that you start with an initial house with a fair market value of about $180,000. So this would vary depending on market, but remember, we're going with middle-class housing, houses that you and I would want to live in. That's the goal.

That's the type of house that we want to own because we want to attract the type of tenants that will stay and be there for a long time and pay us consistently and never call. So you want to buy a house that's worth $180,000. Well, if the house is worth $180,000, remember, you're not going to pay $180,000.

Your maximum purchase price is 90% of that, which would be $162,000. You've got to buy 10% under market. Next, you're going to make a down payment of no more than 10%. So you're going to put a down payment of no more than $16,000 into that property. That means your original loan balance would be $146,000.

Under this example, let's say that you finance it at 5% for 30 years. That would mean that your principal and interest payment is $783. Then you hold the house until it doubles in value, so let's say about $400,000. Who knows how long it will take for the house to double in value?

This is one of the most interesting things about John because he's been an investor for over 40 years. He's seen many of his houses double in value multiple times. He's got the benefit of hindsight. But sell the house when it doubles in value, $400,000. Assume for a moment that it takes 10 years for that house to double in value.

Well, if that were the case, then your loan balance at that time would be about $120,000. You would sell the house, pay off the loan for $120,000, and you would net $280,000 cash. Well, you have to replace that house, so you go out and you replace a house that's in that $350,000 to $400,000 price range.

Let's say that you buy it for $300,000, about 10% below the market. You need $30,000 on the down payment, and you wind up netting off of that house $250,000 before taxes of cash in your pocket, and you've gone ahead and replaced your rental house. Now obviously those are round numbers and it's just an illustration, but it's a pretty good illustration.

What's remarkable though, at the bottom of the page John has you do a little bit of math. If you did that, one house under those rules each year for the next 10 years, after 10 years, you would own approximately $4 million in real estate. You would have approximately $2 million of debt in mortgages on that real estate, and your equity would be about $2 million.

I repeat, if you bought one house a year using that formula each year for 10 years, under those assumptions, you would own about $4 million in real estate. You would have about $2 million in mortgages, and you would have about $2 million of equity in the properties. Now that's remarkable.

You can figure out whether you buy the assumptions or not. Is it 10 years? Is it 12 years? Who knows? Does it take 10 years for a house to double in value, 15 years for a house to double in value? You can argue that stuff endlessly. Go find a real estate forum and talk about that.

Conceptually though, think about how powerful that is as a wealth building tool. The reason that it's so powerful is because the fundamental premise of this type of real estate investing is that your tenants pay off your debt. As the saying in real estate goes, the quickest way to become rich is go out, borrow a million dollars, and then let your tenants pay it off for you.

It's obviously not as clear as a simple investment because you're involved in the work. This is where the business comes in. You have to be involved in finding the potential deals. That takes work. It takes effort. Then you have to be involved in managing the property, which is basically it's a part-time business.

You have to be involved. Those two things can sink many potential real estate investors. Number one, some people aren't willing or aren't able to go out and do the work of finding the deals. You may have to look at hundreds of potential properties until you find a deal that works.

You may have to discard plenty until you find a deal that works. Many people aren't going to be involved in the deal – in the management of properties. They don't want to deal with the toilets and the tenants and the turnover. But if you can solve those problems, if you are willing to be involved in the management of the properties and if you are able to put in the time and the work to find the properties, you can produce tremendous wealth from your part-time business.

For many people who are working at a job and looking for a side business, for many people this type of real estate business is a much better type of part-time endeavor to be involved in than a brick and mortar business or than a part-time extra job. Now, if you need cash quickly, then this is not the strategy for you.

If you need cash to pay off credit card debt, then you should go and deliver the proverbial pizzas. But if you're looking for investments, spending some time, spending 10 or 15 to 20 hours a week on your part-time real estate business can reap huge rewards. You need some time and you need some money, but it can reap huge rewards.

There are many, many, many people who have done it, many ordinary men and women just like you and me who have done it. There are a bunch of ways that you can massively improve the system. But that's the fundamental basis of John's system and it's so elegantly simple. But with his positioning of it, at this point, you check back in a couple of years and I'll let you know my personal experience, but I'm convinced it is definitely a doable system.

For me, it is the best type of real estate investment plan that fits my ability, the amount of time I'm willing to devote to it, the amount of money that I have to invest and my goals for financial independence and financial freedom. It fits those things. It also fits my local market because – well, it fits my local market.

If you have different investment goals, if your goal is to transition to a full-time real estate business as quickly as possible, this approach is probably not going to be for you. You might need to work as properties that are smaller dollar values and do more management, more intensive – excuse me, intensive management for those properties to generate higher cash flow returns.

You may need to have a different type of system. If you don't have any money, you've got to use other people's money or you've got to develop some sort of synthetic equity or you've got to flip deals and assign them. You've got to do something else. But if you fit that type of person like me who you have some investment capital and you're looking for something that it takes a little bit of time where you can compete but it's not too much, then John's system is really the best that I've ever been aware of.

Again, the most important thing to me is the type of tenant. I do not want to manage a 30-unit apartment complex. That's not something that I want to do with my time. That can be a very profitable endeavor. I don't want to do that. But I could manage 10 or 20 or 30 rental houses.

If you go back and listen to John's interview on episode 119 of the show, you'll hear me question him about that and he'll point out his management systems that are very, very simple. He does – a couple of my requirements with real estate, I do not want to do any hands-on construction work.

He does no hands-on construction work and I want good tenants and he has excellent tenants. He talks in the seminar about the amount of time that he spends in management and it's minimal. Probably averages out if memory is correct to be an hour or two a day. Some days more, some days less but an hour or two a day on average.

He lives a great lifestyle, has done a great job. So it's definitely a proven plan. That was why I wanted to go. Now before I chose to go to the seminar, I had read John's books and so I know that I knew that this was exactly what I wanted and I had done enough other research to know what I was looking for as far as an approach to a seminar.

Quick comment on seminars versus books. Seminars can be wonderful things to attend. They really can be and John's seminar is a great – is a very, very good one. I really enjoyed it. It was exactly what I was hoping that it was. But you shouldn't go to seminars if you don't know what you're trying to get out of it because that is crazy expensive.

Now one of the best things about John's seminar is that his price for it was only $550 I think. That was what he was selling it for on his website. I was able to work out a deal with him where in exchange for my reviewing the seminar publicly and also I want to help him with some publicity for his books.

I'm hoping we can do more. I actually have some ideas. I want to work with John on my own projects and try to build out some educational stuff for the media for radical personal finance in the future. I've got some ideas of ways I want to work with him.

So none of that stuff is set in stone. But he gave me a complimentary review ticket to the seminar which helped me and saved me $550. I still had to pay to get there and pay for the hotels and all that. But that saved me a bunch of money.

But John's entry price of $550, that is among the cheaper – I mean it's one of the most reasonable seminar prices that I'm aware of, especially in this real estate world where usually the prices are so, so high. But think about the number of books that you can buy and read in exchange for the seminar price.

So I do not think it's a good plan for people to go to seminars as a way of getting exposure to different ideas. The first thing you should do if you're interested in ideas is read books, listen to the BiggerPockets podcast, spend time on their forums, find any landlording or real estate forums that you can be involved in, spend time on the internet looking for stuff there.

And then only after you've built a base of foundation, you've invested in the books and the things that you need, at that point in time then go to a seminar. And then what I was looking for at the seminar was I was looking for the comprehensive plan and the personal access to the seminar leader.

And that's exactly what John's seminar delivered. I was very, very impressed. I'll give you some specific points on the seminar and then some of the things that I really loved and some of the things that I didn't in just a moment. Before I do, sponsor second half of the show is Paladin Registry.

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Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/Paladin and that's where you should start your search. It's the best solution. If I were looking for a new financial advisor, that's exactly where I would go. So let's talk about the seminar. I've been to a lot of seminars. And I've been to a lot of good ones and I've been to a lot of bad ones.

And I do think seminars are worth, as long as you're not just becoming a seminar junkie without doing anything, they are well worth the money. I've spent a lot of money on seminars. I'll tell you some of the things that just most impressed me with John's seminar. Number one, it was no nonsense.

It was straightforward. It was packed with information and it wasn't overhyped and oversold. One of the things, and I've written the outline for a potential seminar that I want to do in the future, and it's always a challenge when you're thinking about how to design a seminar because you can go over the top and you can make the thing so fancy.

You've got to rent a fancy hotel room, do all kinds of beautiful fancy signage. You can do all kinds of great marketing stuff. But that stuff all costs money. And the question is, does it really add value for the seminar attendees? Sometimes yes, maybe. Sometimes no. But I was glad that John's seminar was not hyped up.

As I remember, I don't think he had any signs. It was just him and his wife who were there welcoming people. There were, by my count, I think there were about 75 attendees there. We got in on Saturday morning. We got started all day Saturday. We went out in the evening and knocked on doors.

We'll get to that in a minute. And then all day Sunday. And the best thing about it was the atmosphere. It was enough people to feel like you were there learning with a bunch of other people. But there was plenty of time to have tons of personal interaction with the seminar leader.

I think that's so important at a seminar, if possible, to have time for that interaction with the seminar leader. So I thought it was a great deal, a great price, and just an awesome thing. Seminars can be so expensive to go to if you're paying for expensive tickets, plus you've got the cost of getting there, plus you've got the hotel costs, plus you've got the opportunity costs, the things you're giving up to get there.

And so I thought $550 for a two-day seminar. Basically you add hotels and food and transportation. Most people are looking at $1,000. And that to me is a very reasonable price. And it was packed with value. I really was glad that John's seminar was practical. He gave specific tips.

He gave at the beginning very practical goal setting, building a plan of how to do it. He gave very practical examples of financing. And the best part of the seminar was Shab's experience. He's done hundreds of – I don't know if hundreds. He's done dozens and dozens. He didn't say exactly, but dozens and dozens of deals.

And so he was able to use all of these examples from personal deals that he's done, properties he's bought, properties he's owned, properties he's sold. He gave examples where he was the borrower and gave examples where he was the lender. He's able to give – because of his 40 years of experience, he's able to give examples from all different economic cycles.

John studied real estate in college and then he got out of – when he got out of college, he quickly went full time into the real estate business. He for a while had an agent's license, started to build that, found out that wasn't working and then it wasn't worth the time and the hassle, and then focused on investments.

And he built his entire real estate empire as a full-time investor, starting with nothing, starting broke. But he built it and did a great job. He did a good job of using clear, specific examples that were real world examples, not pie in the sky, this is the best deal I ever did, real world examples, lots of them.

He did a good job of giving the basics and going a little bit deeper. One of the things I ask myself is who is this seminar appropriate for? I would say at least 50 percent probably my guess would be at least half of the attendees in there were already active real estate investors, some of them very experienced.

There were some very experienced investors with many, many properties, managing 10, 20, 30 or even more units. There were investors there with decades of experience. So I would say at least half of them were experienced investors. The other half were probably newbies and some of the newbies had never had any investment experience and that was cool to talk with some of the people who were totally new.

If you are totally new to the world of real estate, I don't know that I would necessarily start here or at least if I did start here, I would expect to need to do some homework because John does a good job of going into some of the practical nuts and bolts of investing.

But some of the language might be a little bit foreign to you. For example, John is an expert with lease options and he has done a lot of deals buying with lease options and selling with lease options. If you don't know what a lease option is or just the basics of how the contracts are structured or what the benefits are, it's going to be hard to benefit from the in-depth discussion of how this particular deal was structured.

But if you have at least a cursory understanding of, "OK, here's what a lease options are. Here's how you could structure a note," then you could really benefit from the content of the seminar. So I wouldn't say it was for rank beginners but you could be a pretty good beginner and still do it.

The best thing about the conference was the access that John gave to his content especially for beginners. On the first day on Saturday at lunch, he had all of the new investors, people who had never bought properties or who were just new investors. He sat at lunch at a table with us.

So I got to sit next to him at lunch and ask him all of my questions and that was really, really beneficial. Then he had one of his friends who was also an experienced investor take another table of newbies. So everybody who wanted to sit at those tables was excluded.

So that was awesome. On the first – on the night, Saturday night, he invited all of the attendees over to his house and that was really, really gracious of him. He and his wife hosted everyone and his son hosted everyone at their house and got a chance plenty of time to talk to them and ask all kinds of questions.

So there was plenty of access which to me speaks wonders. I hate going to a seminar when you don't have access to the seminar attendee. If I go to a seminar and you don't have access to the seminar – to the presenter, excuse me, to the presenter and if there's no structure there to build relationships with the other attendees, I just say, "What's the point?

Why didn't I just buy the CDs? I don't want to waste my time going and sitting in a classroom if I'm not going to access the presenter or if I'm not there and going to have specific time that I'm going to really be able to engage with the other attendees." It's a waste of time.

Let me just buy the audio from it and listen to it. I learned better as a self-directed student in that situation. But because of all of the access John gave to him for personal relationship and then also the time with other attendees, it was really, really good. I really appreciated how the focus was on action.

Obviously when you're at a seminar, you're there to learn. But on the first day, one of the primary ways that John encourages people to find deals is to go out and knock on doors. The process goes, because we're looking for a specific criteria, you start with what location do you want to invest in, specifically what neighborhoods.

Not just going out and saying, "Can I find a deal?" and building this thing in a non-planned fashion, whatever deal happens to pop out of the woods at you, but rather you're building very strategically. What neighborhoods, specific neighborhoods do you want to invest in? He gave us a map of all of the different neighborhoods that he owns houses in, neighborhoods that he's chosen that fit his criteria.

Then we split out into teams of two or three people and we went out and knocked on doors. Basically just trying to find out about any possible leads on properties. You have a lot of competition in the real estate investment world. One of the ways to beat your competition is to find the property before it's available.

You got to find the properties before they go on the market. One of the best ways that John has found to do it is just to knock on doors and start getting connected in those neighborhoods and find out any leads on properties in specific neighborhoods. That's kind of scary for many people who haven't gone.

I've never done that, but it was pretty cool because we got to prove to ourselves, "Yes, we can go knock on doors." All of us found leads or options on things that we could follow up on. The guy that I went out knocking on doors with, we found a couple of properties that were definitely worth following up on.

Passed along the address to John in case he wanted to invest in. I don't own real estate in Sarasota, but in case he wanted to pursue it, some opportunities. So it was definitely a really great solution. My favorite thing about the seminar was how John talked about the buying process.

One of the big things about his system is to finance the properties with less than 10% down, but not to use banks for financing. John said in 40 years of investing, he's never borrowed money from a bank. So you say, "Well, how do you do that?" Well, it takes a little bit of a different approach.

He went through example after example of his own buying, and then he also went through example after example of his own selling in places where he sold. He's lent money. He's done co-investing on different deals. One of the things that most attracts me to John's system is because that method of borrowing, the way that he teaches people, that method of borrowing substantially reduces the risk.

Borrowing on real estate is much less risky than many other forms of borrowing. Even if you're just buying with traditional mortgages, because the mortgage debt is non-collectible, usually at fixed rates, it's very, very safe debt. It's also very, very liquid debt. You can sell the notes easily. Banks like real estate is collateral.

That's why the debt market for mortgages is so filled. So borrowing on real estate first and foremost has much less risk than many other things. I would never personally – I would never – I shouldn't say never. At this point, I have never been willing to think of any scenario that I would ever consider borrowing on margin for stocks.

Some people do it. I would not be willing to do it. But borrowing on real estate is a totally different animal. It's much less risky. Then also if you can structure a debt in a certain – in different ways where you don't actually own the banks but you own individual – owe individual investors, you owe the seller of the house, you structure it in a bunch of different ways, then that in and of itself substantially lowers your risk.

Then if you manage the way that you have – manage the way that you owe the debt on the properties, that lowers the risk. One of the things that was very encouraging to me was that John confirmed even something I had figured out that I covered in the Myths show that your lowest – you should always keep your debt on as few properties as possible.

So let's say you have a portfolio of ten properties. You're better off having five of those properties financed almost to 100 percent and five of them free and clear than you are having all of the properties at 50 percent debt to equity ratio. So he confirmed a lot of the things that I figured out the hard way over the last few years and it was nice to have my opinions confirmed by someone with much more experience and much more wealth than me.

So that was really nice. So that was my favorite aspect of the seminars, him going through the deals. How to structure them, how to build notes. Now, it wasn't a course on paper. It wasn't a course on how to structure paper and notes to buy and sell. But it was just awesome to see it because that's where I could see my skill and my ability really developing, being able to creatively structure deals in ways that are win, win, win, win, win across the board.

A little bit of creativity, a good property, a good situation, that's where you can really do well. The other thing I appreciate about John was just his ethics. He's a very upright and ethical man of integrity. And that to me is very important because I don't want to be in a situation where I'm a leech on people.

I don't want to be – I don't want to take advantage of people. And the cool thing is if you can find the right situation, then you can solve people's problems at a profit and everybody is happy. You can solve people's problems at a profit and everybody is happy.

And John gave so many examples of that. And even he gave examples of how when – in the past where he was a lender and how he talked about the lender's interest and the borrower's interest and when he was a lender and he had deals go bad and how he would sit down and renegotiate and how if you understand the incentives, basically your whole – one of the major things to make a good real estate investor is to craft the proper offers, to craft the offers that fix all of the problems and figure out how can you keep everybody happy.

And that's the good basis of negotiation. In a successful business deal, I believe everybody should go away happy. Everyone should go away feeling like they won. And so not everybody who's living in a house is saying, "Well, my way to win is just to sell this house for the maximum profit." So you got to find those people that you can help and they're going to go away happy with the deal.

The investor needs to be happy with the deal. The tenants need to be happy with the deal and you can do that. John did a great job of talking about tenant management, of his property management systems and I could just see how his systems were developed through trial and error to weed out the bad tenants and it's not an accident that he has very low maintenance tenants.

And then also it was very valuable, his checklists, his agreements, his contracts and his mortgages were all part of the workbook for the seminar. So I came away without question feeling just totally impressed and ready – totally impressed with the seminar. I may go back in the future. I was impressed at how many experienced real estate investors were there.

I was also impressed. I had breakfast one morning with one seminar attendee who had traveled from Singapore to Florida to go to the conference and he had been going to Shobb seminars for years. I was very, very impressed with that. I talked to him. I was thankful to live in the United States of America as far as from an investment perspective after hearing the investment situation that he faces living in Singapore.

Just amazing how the different challenges that investors face around the world. But it was just packed, packed with value. Very, very impressed. I even appreciated how John sold at the seminar. One of the keys to running a good marketing business is you should always give your students next steps, ways to go on with you.

So if you're having a seminar, you always want to make sure that you have an offer to present to your attendees that's the way that they can continue. And so John did a great job with that. He has a bunch of self-study courses and he did a good job offering a very, very strong deal with good discounts on his products but for quality products.

And because the seminar was packed full of quality and content, I don't know – I didn't count the percentage but plenty of people were thrilled to buy his additional products and I'm looking forward to them too. He's got great products. And then also just the additional seminars. But he didn't go over the top because there's that fine line I believe that needs to be done of good professional presentation and selling without going over the top and starting to put psychological tactics on people and hammering it too long.

And I just thought – I thought they did a great job. When you combine all those things, the content, the plan, the access, the value, I mean I was very impressed and been to a lot of seminars, very impressed. Points of improvement, suggestions that I would make, there weren't many.

But I would say probably the two things. Number one, in the very beginning of day one, we started with talking about kind of what's the plan. There were some points in John's workbook of some pages to fill in and some lines to fill in of, OK, what's your goal?

What's your cash flow goal? What is your shopping list? I really appreciate that because it's so important I think for people to have a specific plan of here's what you're trying to do. You don't need $30 million of real estate to be wealthy. That's absurd. I mean if you want it, fine, but you don't need it.

How on earth are you going to spend the money from that? There's no way to spend that money. So most people could manage what they need with just a few rental houses. I mean if you have in my neighborhood or my city here, if I had five rental houses and let's say net rent on houses this size that I'm pursuing because I know specifically what I want, I know some of the neighborhoods already that I'm targeting, if you have five houses and they're renting for $1,800 a month gross, let's say you're netting $1,400 a month after expenses not including financing, that's $7,000 a month.

Most people, $7,000 a month, that's $84,000 a year. That's double the median income in the United States of America. So five to ten houses is really about all most people need to be very, very financially comfortable. But I think coming in with a shopping list, one of the suggestions I make to John is that if you would in advance like have people create the shopping list, have people create what do you want to buy, how much money, specific numbers so you can come in and the plan can be okay, I need to create $10,000 of monthly income, $10,000 of monthly income that in my neighborhood here are the types of houses, here's what the rents can be, so this is the number of houses that I need and here's when I need them paid off so I can own them free and clear so I can have that income very, very safely.

That could be done in a simple PDF sent out in advance and I think if seminar attendees did that, it would help to come away with a more applicable personal plan. I think that would be one really beneficial idea. Secondly, I would love – John doesn't permit recording at his seminars and I think that's fine, but I think it would be a really nice touch to go ahead and include an audio of the seminar, of that specific seminar as a go-away present.

That can be done so inexpensively and for people who have just bought the course and who would like to go back and listen to it again because there's a lot in two days that's not passed into the book and so to send seminar attendees away with an audio or offer it as a $50 or $100 or purchase price to be able to have a nicely recorded audio of the same seminar delivered previously, I think that would be a really big value.

So those are my two suggestions to John of ways to improve it and create even more satisfied customers. But those are my thoughts and that's my review. So that's my review of John's Building Wealth One House at a Time seminar. Again I went January 16 and 17, 2016 in Sarasota, Florida and it was great.

If you get an opportunity to go in the future, read the books first, but it was without question a great seminar. I may go back in the future, I don't know. But I was thoroughly impressed. I want to thank John for letting me come. Again, he was very generous to allow me to come and I wanted to – I was ready to buy the ticket if he didn't allow me to come, but he graciously allowed me to come in exchange for – I just said I want to help you publicize your stuff and I hope you guys can hear the value that there has been in the seminar.

Hope this review even was valuable to you. So if you're considering thinking about it, hopefully with the information that I presented you'll be able to make a good decision and I'm looking forward to having John on the show with his new book. When the new book comes out, that will be extremely valuable for you as well.

In the meantime, if you haven't read Building Wealth One House at a Time, Amazon used books, that's the way to go. It's just amazing how cheap information is now. You got to – it's cheap in dollar prices. It's not cheap in time. You got to put the work in to educate yourself.

But just think again as we go today. Just think about the numbers that in that example scenario. One house a year, 10% down, hold them until they double in value. If they double in value, under those conservative assumptions after 10 years, you would wind up owning $4 million of real estate and have $2 million of equity in that real estate.

Rents, your tenants paying off the mortgages for you. You do the work of finding the properties and of managing them. For many of you, that should probably be the most productive part-time job that you could do. That could be the most productive way for you to invest 15 or 20 hours a week.

A couple hours, two nights a week and Saturdays, it could be very, very productive for you. That's the ticket. That's the plan. So consider it. Start with John's book. Go back and listen to episode 119 of the show. I think you'll really enjoy that. I think that's it. Thank you all for listening.

If you'd like to support me and like to support the show directly, financial, please consider becoming a patron of the show. Go to RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron for all the details of that. Oh, I need to promote this conference I'm doing, online investing conference. I'll do a special standalone deal of that.

So RadicalPersonalFinance.com/patron and I'll talk with you soon. Don't just dream about paradise. Live it with Fiji Airways. Escape the ordinary with Fiji Airways Global Beat the Rush Sale. Immerse yourself in white sandy beaches or dive deep into coral reefs. Fiji Airways has flights to Nadi starting at just $748 for light and just $798 for value.

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