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Visit AskForPrevnar20.com. Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, the show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua, and today we tackle the Invest Wisely portion of the Radical Personal Finance curriculum.

Talking about investing in land, my guest is Mark Podolsky from TheLandGeek.com. Mark, welcome to the show. Joshua Sheets, I am excited to be here. Thank you so much. So you have a great brand. TheLandGeek is a really great brand, so now it's time to deliver on that brand. I'd love to hear what was your story and your path into real estate investment.

All right. So I used to do investment banking and mergers and acquisitions with private equity groups. And just mid-market stuff, you know, $500 to $500 million in enterprise value, so nothing too crazy. And I hated it. I had no control. I was micromanaged. I had a 45-minute commute to work and back.

And it was, like, Josh, it was so bad that I wouldn't get the Sunday blues anticipating Monday coming around having to go to work. I'd get the Friday blues anticipating the weekend going by really fast and having to be at work on Monday. So my firm hires this guy, and he's telling me that on the side he goes to tax deed auctions, and he buys up raw land, pennies on the dollar, and he flips it online, and he's making a 300% return on investment.

So I'm looking at companies all day long, right, and a great company, a great company has 15% EBITDA margins, right, a great company. – EBITDA is an accounting term that means earnings before interest, taxes, deductions, and amortization. – Yeah, depreciation. – Oh, sorry, depreciation. – Right, right. So, yeah, just free cash flow, right, 15%.

Average companies at 10%. I'm looking at companies all day long, less than 10%. So I'm from St. Louis, Missouri. I'm from the show-me state. I don't believe him, right? So I go to this auction with him. I've got, like, three grand saved up for car repairs. And I buy 10 half-acre lots at an average price of $300 each.

Like, not much, right? And I just do exactly what he says to do. I put them up online. They sell the next week at an average price of $1,200 each, 300%. He was right. It worked. So I took all that money, and I went to another tax deed auction in Arizona, where I live, and I bought up as much as I could.

There's no one in the room. This is 2,000. And in the next six months of flipping that land, I made over $90,000. So I go to my wife. I'm like, "Honey, I'm going to quit my job, and I'm going to invest in land full-time." So she says, "Absolutely not," right?

So I said, "Fine." So I invest in land part-time for 18 months until the land investing income exceeded my investment banking income, and I quit, and I've been doing it full-time ever since, and I absolutely love it. So your exposure to the niche of real estate, of investing in land, sounds more accidental and circumstantial rather than a planned path.

Is that right? Absolutely. Absolutely. The only other piece of real estate I'd ever bought was my house. So I had no real estate background, but this was so up my alley because I have no skills as far as being a … I'm like the worst homeowner you've ever seen.

I could barely change a light bulb. So the fact that I can buy a raw piece of land I don't have to maintain, I don't have to protect, I don't have to deal with a tenant calling me at 3 in the morning, my roof is leaking, and make it cash flow.

It's the reason I have a podcast called The Best Passive Income Model. I can automate it with software, and it's amazing. So it's 90% automated. I work two hours a week in the business, and it's amazing. Okay. So the fundamental question in terms of land, you listed off some of the advantages, and I'll just tick them back and ask you to expand upon them.

Land – and by here I'm using the term land to mean raw land, undeveloped, no buildings or facilities or equipment on it, just simply bare land, whether it's virgin forest or whether it's just land. Is that a good use of the term? Yeah, that's absolutely correct. Okay. So here we're talking about something that in a sense is very simple, a bunch of dirt or rocks as the case may be, with some imaginary lines drawn around them and a deed.

We're not dealing with maintenance. We're not dealing with tenants. We're not doing any of those things. So those things can be characterized as advantages. As you said, you don't have to unplug the toilet. You don't have to rent it out. You don't have to go and find somebody and court potential renters, et cetera.

Are there other advantages to the investment in raw land that you look to? Yeah, because it's a massive market and it's unloved. It's not sexy. You don't go on HGTV or the DIY network and see "Flip this land," right? They'd have to come to my office and just watch me press the keys on my computer and shuffle paper and that's it.

So that's the other advantage is there's billions of acres of land in this country and literally there's no big money doing this. There's no hedge funds. There's no private equity groups. It's all mom and pop. It's a very inefficient market. So it's truly what a buyer and seller agree to.

And in our model, because we're able to buy these assets so low, we make a 300% to 1,000% return on investment. And the way that we make a cash flow is we do owner financing. So let's say for example I buy a five-acre parcel in Colorado for $1,000. Well, I'll flip it to you for $10,000 for $1,000 down, $249 a month, like a car payment at 9% interest.

And you don't care. Like $249 a month, I can afford that. Now I've got five acres in Colorado that I'll own free and clear in five years. Because we use a land contract and not a deed of trust, we actually own the asset until you pay off your note.

So there's no costs of foreclosure like you would if you did a deed of trust. So that's another advantage. So we have very low overhead to run the business. And literally you don't need a lot of money. I mean, these examples are very low money. So you don't need outside funding.

You don't need to go to private money. You don't need to get investors. Even if you're dead broke, you can still lock up properties on an option and wholesale them out to people like myself that will allow you to have 100% markup and I'll make 200%, right? So there's a lot of advantages to it.

There's also real estate legislation advantages because we're not dealing with a tenant. We are exempt from Dodd-Frank. We're exempt from RESPA and we're exempt from the SAFE Act. So those are also useful. I mean it's notes of those are useful benefits when you look at them, especially some of the exemptions could be.

So is your example here that you're using, five acres in Colorado, is this a kind of a good useful example of what you're doing? And obviously, you've developed other information programs and coaching programs. Is what you're teaching other people to do, to do things like buy five acres in Colorado and flip it to another buyer?

Yeah, absolutely. Right. So in that context, what are you using as your primary source of the deal? You mentioned that you started at the tax deduction. Is that still a primary focus for you? Well, when I started in 2000, there's nobody in that room, right? But if you remember between 2001 and let's say 2006, right, the market started heating up.

And so at that time, it was kind of crazy as those rooms got larger, I had to pivot and think, "Well, how can I get this property before it goes to tax deed auction?" And so now what we do is we send out offers, a direct offer to the landowner.

So let's say for example, Joshua, where do you live? West Palm Beach, Florida. Okay. So you're in West Palm Beach, Florida. Let's say for example that you actually own some property in Texas. And I get a list from the county treasurer and says, "Oh, Joshua Sheets is in West Palm Beach, Florida and he owes $200 in back taxes for this 10-acre parcel in Texas." Right?

I immediately know that you're advertising to me that you no longer value that property because you haven't paid your taxes. Right? And because you live out of state, I know that you're not emotionally connected to that property in any way. So what I'll do is I'll take a look at the comparable sales and I'll divide by four.

And that gives me the Warren Buffett margin of safety of 300%. So let's say for example, the comparable sales are $10,000. So the most I can pay for that property is what? $2,500. So I send you an offer for $2,500. Now, you've been getting tax notices all this time.

You're like, "Well, if I don't pay my taxes, then I'm going to lose this property anyway, so I'll take Mark's $2,500." Right? So we go through our due diligence. We make sure that you actually own the property. There's no breaks in the title chain. There's ingress and egress or legal access to the property.

There's something compelling about the property that someone else would want to buy it. And then we then close with you either directly or with a title company, depending on the amount. If it's $5,000 or less, we usually just close directly. If it's $5,000 or more, we go through title.

And then now I own the property. And then I have a built-in best buyer, Joshua. Do you know who that is? - No. - It's the neighbor. So I go out and I send out neighbor letters saying, "Hey, before I put this property out to the open market, here's your opportunity to increase your current land holdings, right, and control your view and who might your neighbor be." Right?

So a lot of times, neighbors are like, "Oh, my gosh. Who's going to be my neighbor?" They'll buy up that parcel. Now, if they pass, then I'll put it out to my buyers list, people that are already, you know, say to me, "Hey, I'm interested in buying land." If they pass, I'll go to a little website you've probably never heard of called Craigslist.

And then I'll go through Craigslist or Facebook buy/sell group. So you can see my cost of marketing are really low. And so as a result, I'm able to sell these properties 30 days or less and make a 300% to 1,000% return on investment, and I have this passive income coming in every single month without having to deal with the renters or rehabs or renovations or rodents because it's just raw land.

- So we'll get to the passive income in just a moment. But to understand kind of the investment model, basically this falls under the category of finding a better owner. So you say, "Okay, here's somebody who doesn't value something particularly highly," especially if you're using tax auctions and tax notices as your source of leads.

And then you're seeking to find somebody else who will really value the ownership. And then you're functioning as the middleman to bring those two together, as the broker to bring those two people together. All the way through for the last 17 years, have you used tax auctions or tax notices and tax lists as your primary source of leads?

- Well, no, because that's our lowest hanging fruit. So I take the low hanging fruit first, and then I'll go ahead and I'll get the entire real property list from the county assessor, and then I'll scrub that list and I'll get out the residential property and the commercial property and the industrial property.

And the next thing you know, I'm left with just raw land. And then I'll go through my formula. I'll send them out offers because, again, Joshua, I don't want to be in the appraisal business where I say, "Hey, I'm interested in buying your land." Well, then I go, "Oh, I'm interested in selling my land.

How much are you going to pay me?" I actually send them an actual offer. And then 3% to 5% of people will accept that offer, and then we go through the due diligence process and close. - With regard to your criteria, are you doing this dispassionate of the broader market?

Meaning, "Well, whatever, I got a list in Colorado. I scrubbed it and I found 247 offers or 247 applicable properties. Let's send this out there." I also was able to get good data from Nashville, Tennessee, and from Bangor, Maine. So I've got good data there, so I'll just go ahead and send these out.

Or are you trying to ride a larger macro trend, a regional trend, a city trend, etc., and take advantage of broader appreciation because of the local market conditions? - Yeah, I like to look at the macro trend. So nobody wakes up and thinks to themselves, "Boy, I'd really love to own some raw land in Minnesota," unless you live in Minnesota, right?

But as far as Florida, Colorado, Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Oregon, Washington, California, right, the sunshine states, these are states that are growing fast, have an abundance of raw land and inexpensive raw land. So I really focus my efforts only on those areas, and I pretty much ignore the rest of the country.

By ignoring the rest of the country, I don't have to worry about issues like superfund sites, like you might find in New Jersey or Pennsylvania. So already I'm eliminating a lot of due diligence headaches just by focusing on these fast-growing states. - And it's my impression that you're focusing on lower dollar amount properties.

You're selling something for $5,000, $10,000, $15,000. You're not trying to put together $1.5 million deals. Is that accurate? - That is accurate, and the reason being is, let's say, for example, you've got a ranch worth $1.5 million, right? The odds of you going to selling that to me directly and being distressed are really low, right?

You'll go to a local realtor, right? So for me, I want to go where I have the lowest hanging fruit. This asset has now become a liability for them, and they just want to get rid of it. - Are the buyers that you're flipping to, would you say that these purchases, obviously the neighbors, their incentive is evident, but beyond that, are the purchases impulsive?

- I don't know. I'd say that we go to people that already tell themselves that raw land is a valuable asset. So Ted Turner has this great quote, "Buy raw land. It's the only thing that lasts." And when you think about it, it is the only thing that lasts, right?

It lasts longer than Styrofoam, and Styrofoam lasts for a long time, right? So if you grew up hearing, "Own raw land," or maybe your uncle made millions of dollars one day buying in the path of growth, it looked like just vacant land. They bought it before the development came, and they made millions of dollars.

There's this huge prepper movement out there, millions of people hoping for the best, preparing for the worst. They need a place to bug out to and get out of the city. You have people that want to use property for recreationally. There's people that don't like other people, and they just want to be in the middle of nowhere, right?

So after I've done this over 5,200 times since 2001, I've discovered that there is a pig for every barn. I've never been stuck with a raw piece of land. - What's the longest you've held one of your land investments? - I typically sell on an average of 30 days or less, but the longest I've probably ever had to hold a piece of property that was really hard to sell, gosh, I want to say between 90 and 120 days.

- So in that context, I would--and this is not an insult, so don't take it that way. I would not characterize what you're doing as investing. I would characterize it either as flipping or as brokering or as just running a business of being a real estate broker. Would you agree with that assessment?

- Well, not at all in the sense that I'm not a broker, right, because I'm buying the property for myself, right? So it's in my company name. So I'm not the middleman. I think what you're alluding to is the fact that I don't hold it very long. - Correct.

- But that's actually a misnomer because I actually do hold it very long. So let's say, for example, that I buy that five-acre parcel in Colorado for $1,000 and I sell it to you for $10,000. Well, I might hold that property for five years in my name before you pay off that note, right?

Well, let's say, Joshua, that you hit hard times and you decide, hey, that $249 a month is too high, right, and you let it go. Well, now I've got my money out from day one. I've been profitable for, you know, let's say three years of getting $249 a month, and then you let it go.

Well, now I've owned it for three years, and then I sell it again for $1,000 down, $249 a month, and for another five years. And I can keep going like that with these assets, right? So technically speaking, I do own them longer than just the 30 days. It's just that I'm making it cash flow very quickly.

- The reason I'm pointing it out and when I use the term "broker," I'm using it in a broader sense, not the specific real estate licensed concept. I'm using it in the sense of a merchant who finds an asset in one place, buys it at a low price, and turns and finds a buyer in another place who values it more and is willing to pay a higher price, thinking of them as brokering the sale.

The reason I use that is because when a lot of people – investing in land has some distinct disadvantages as well. Probably the most prominent – well, instead of my listing them, why don't you start? What are the disadvantages of investing in land? - Well, the traditional disadvantage of investing in land is that you don't get depreciation, and you are going to have it – if you're holding it, right, then you're going to be paying the property taxes on it every single year.

So you've got an asset now that is not cash flowing, and you can't take the depreciation on it because it lasts forever. So in that sense, it's an illiquid asset that can kill your cash flow. So if we go back to, let's say, a speculative play of buying in the path of growth, and I just hold it for 15 years, I would consider that a speculative play because I don't know if it's going to ever hit the path of growth or ever sell it to a developer.

So your traditional land selling model is a hockey stick, right, where the hockey stick is flat, and then all of a sudden, development comes, and then boom, right, you cash out, and you make a tremendous return on investment. I prefer my model. I prefer the Warren Buffett or Ted Turner model where a billionaire will buy up hundreds of millions of acres of productive land, and they'll make 8% on that land in like a bond, if you will, right?

I also prefer my method of making it cash flow as fast as possible. And with this asset that you buy at $0.23, it's a one-time sale, and you get this recurring income every single month without having to deal with the traditional headaches of a rental property like a house or a multifamily.

So in that sense, I would say that traditional land investing is extremely risky and not for most people, right? I'd say that my model of doing it is really a phenomenal way to create a side hustle and hopefully your passive income exceeds your fixed expenses, and you can work when you want, with whom you want, where you want.

>>Right, exactly. And I think that's why I'm pointing out the difference between what you're describing and I guess what we'll term the traditional model. Major disadvantage with land is there's generally no income from it, and there are continuing expenses. So you purchase it, you have a basis, a set cost, then you have ongoing expenses of taxation or upkeep if it needs some sort of upkeep, and then your only ability to profit in the context of just land is on the sale.

So you're either waiting on external market conditions, which are maybe regional, maybe you're buying on the outskirts of a city that's expanding, maybe this region of the country is becoming more popular for whatever reason, thus there's higher demand. Or as you said, you bought in the path of growth, there's a new highway coming through, new school was built, etc.

This is becoming a desirable community. And you basically have to wait and then time your sale to try to line up with those external market conditions. So I don't like that personally. It doesn't fit my personality because it subjects me to market conditions that I can't control. Ted Whittemore Right.

That's what I would definitely define that as speculating. And I don't like to be in places and things. I like to have as much control as I can just in terms of personality wise. I can't control the macro economy. I can't control a region. I can't control whether the local politicians raise taxes, lower taxes.

I can't control if the big corporation that the mayor is trying to court comes to town or doesn't come to town, etc. I can't control those things. And so thus betting on the land and speculating on the land could work out really well or it could not. Now what I hear you doing is your income is coming from two functions and both of those are more business functions.

One is the financing piece which I want to describe in just a moment because I think that's really valuable. And the second function is the marketing piece where you're marketing this product on a broader basis and you're taking something that's an underutilized, under-marketed asset and marketing it to a better place.

And that's more – that's almost more of a land business where you're using the underlying asset. But for you, the actual value of the asset is not so important as the efficient marketing of it. Example would be this. The used car business is exactly the same way that you have a commodity of a car and the way that a used car dealer makes money on their transaction is number one in marketing the asset.

They find the product. They find the car that's for sale. They buy it at an inexpensive price from somebody who doesn't want to do the work of marketing it themselves. It's a lot of work to sell a car and for a lot of people, it's just not worth it.

That's why so many of us trade cars in. It's not that you can't make more on doing it all yourself. It's that you don't want to do it and you trade it into the dealer because that's the easy choice. So the dealer has a supply of cars, the fundamental commodity at a low price and then they sell it and they hopefully will sell it at a higher price and make a profit.

And then they also – their other profit margin comes from the financing of it, from underwriting that financing and receiving the commission from – usually, the car dealers don't finance themselves as you do. But they receive their commission on the underlying – from the financing company. Of course, the other context there is they have a service department which doesn't apply to land.

So you're fulfilling kind of more of a business function and land is the underlying commodity that allows you to do and earn from your business of brokering the property and financing the property. Yeah, I think that's exactly what we're doing. I love it. Exactly. And by the way, I like to classify it and explain the business model because some of my listeners may be able to do it with land and get on your website and buy your courses and all of that.

And some people might be able to do it with pizza ovens, finding used pizza ovens and flipping them and financing them. That's basically the fundamental business function and the commodity is in many ways irrelevant. It's nice if a commodity is standardized. That will work the best if it's something that has standardized values because that allows you to be able to get your comps and get a standardized value.

That allows you to feel confident in making your buy just like a car dealer has their black book and they can feel good about the values. It's a little harder when you have to be a specialist in appraising the value of heirloom diamond rings. But I love it. It's a cool business model.

Tell us more. You've solved – you advertise on your site. You advertise the concept of cash flow. Your tagline which I think is fantastic is "The Land Geek, build passive income quickly and efficiently." So you're focusing on passive income. "Learn the art of engineering geeky systems that create, grow, and protect your cash flow." This is an excellent marketing copy.

I love that. Tell me how you use something that doesn't create cash flow, meaning raw land, and use it to actually build cash flow and passive income through your financing scheme. Right. So basically what we do is we'll get our money out on the down payment or within six months of the down payment and we'll automate those payments using software called geekpay.io.

Okay. Right? Did you build that? I did. Nice. So it's a one-time set it and forget it system. And actually car dealers can use it as well. Anyone that needs to finance anything has the amortization schedule. And what it does, it allows your borrowers to log in, see their current balance, make a prepayment, and have total transparency on their loan to you.

Right? But what's great about this is it's an automated financial CRM. So it's a one-time set it and forget it system with your borrowers so that every day I think to myself, "Well, if I can always make more money and I can't get more time, right? It's my only not renewable resource.

How can I create more time for myself?" And so this was a pain point in my own business. So I created the software. And we've done this in every aspect of our business so that it's 90% automated with software. So when I first got started, I'd have to have a VA in South Carolina do my mailings, right?

And I'd have to pay Janie. And she'd have to put the stamps out and she'd have to go get the letters and she'd have to handwrite the envelopes. And then when they came back, I would have to call the seller and say, "Hey, got back your offer. I'm going to do due diligence on it and then we're going to close in seven days and I'll send you a check." Well, today all I have to do is upload an Excel list into my software.

The offers immediately go out. They've already been priced in the spreadsheet. When they come back, then we have fancy hands to actually contact the seller and say, "Hey, we've marked out your offer. It's going to take them seven days to do due diligence." We have our due diligence done in the Philippines for $11 because they have access to an American title company.

They go, they give us all the title information, they fill out our property report. We have somebody on a local Craigslist gig go out and actually visit the property, take photos and shoot video so that we're never buying a piece of property site unseen. So my cost of due diligence are super low.

And then when we close, we use a program called lob.com to actually send out the check. And then for our marketing, we put it into our software and it pushes out the ads. And we use a program, it's a little complicated, but I can put out 124 ads on Craigslist with the press of a button.

And then the closing and the contracts, what used to take me 20 minutes in contracts, now takes two seconds with software. So between myself, my acquisition manager, we actually tracked this. We saved 124 hours last month just with software. That's fantastic, man. What a great story. What you just described is a perfect picture into the increasing efficiencies that so many individual entrepreneurs like you are bringing to so many parts of the market.

That is brilliant. Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate it. I'm tempted to – I don't know how far to go on discussing land and how far to go in terms of entrepreneurship. I'm going to spring a question on you. How much of your income – just on a percentage basis, would you say in the last couple of years?

Or how much of your income in the last year, couple of years has come from your personal investments versus how much have come from the beautiful business that you just described of pulling all of these disparate parts together, designing the system, and then selling access to your tools? So as far as – I have basically three companies, right?

So I have the land investing company, I have the education company that teaches other people how to do what I do, and then I have the software company as well that is for land investing but also can be applied in other industries. So between those three companies, the breakdown is typically like any Pareto principle, right?

So 80% of the revenue comes from land investing. And then because the software is actually still – just got developed, we're losing money on software. And then the other 20% comes from education. That's cool. Do you think that will flip in the future? I mean it's going to be hard to have that flip because I've been investing in land for so long.

And we're so automated in that sense where the teaching is great and it's really gratifying, right? Nobody ever called me and thanked me and wrote a letter saying how I changed their life with that land investment, right? But I have people now, they've retired their spouse, they quit their jobs, they're traveling the world because their passive income from land investing business exceeds their full-time jobs and they quit.

And so that part has been the most gratifying even though it may not be the most profitable, right? And that's okay. It's just that I've only been teaching for a few years where I've been investing for so long. Right. What are the secrets to your investment model? And let me give you an example of what I mean.

One of the benefits of lowering risk is working at the lower end of the market. If you can buy a piece of property for $2,000 and as you said that you can finance it yourself. Well, if you finance it yourself, you can open up your buyer pool more broadly.

You can be a little bit less – you don't have to have such high standards for creditworthiness, et cetera, because you have a low risk. And so therefore, if you have to foreclose on the property, that's okay. If they own the property for a couple of years, you got your money out of it.

So that would seem to me to be a really important component of the model that you're playing out here. That's different than doing million and a half dollar ranches and trying to work in that market. What are the other fundamental aspects of the investing system that you've designed that help it to work?

Or if you took it away, it wouldn't work anymore. Well, I think that what makes it work is buying right. So in real estate, we make our money on the buy. So if you don't get your pricing right from day one, I would argue that it's a very risky model, right?

Which is why when we went to the tax deed auctions back in like let's say 2003 and 2004, and we were buying it 80% of retail, that wasn't a large enough margin of safety to justify the expense of going to these places and taking the time and doing that.

So we had to pivot. So I think that you've got to buy right and you have to have that discipline and not have what we call it, got to have landitis, right? I always tell people, deals are like the bus. There'll be another one coming down the pike. So I never get emotional about a deal and you never want to overpay.

So I stick to a very disciplined principle of having a margin of safety of 300%. And that has served me all these years. We don't over leverage. So we're not going deep into debt to do these deals. And I have done larger deals. I mean I did a deal in Nevada that I paid a million dollars for.

But I sold it over a few years and I made over five million, right? So you can do larger deals if you have the capital to do it and you can finance it. It's just that the sweet spot of this market is buying these properties, these unloved properties that typically tend to be very inexpensive.

Do you use financing and debt on your own personal portfolio or do you do it with cash? Well, you know what's awesome about the cash flow model is let's say for example, let's go back to your example where I sold that property to you for $10,000. I paid $1,000 for it and you're paying me $249 a month for the next five years, right?

Well, I might sell that cash flow of $249 a month to an investor. And the investor will make let's say 12% on that deal, right? So they'll buy it at a discount and they'll make 12%. Well, now I'll take that let's say $2,000 in this example and I'll reinvest it and I'll make another 300% to 1,000% on another deal.

So technically speaking, I can sell a tranche of my cash flow so I never have to use debt, right? I'm just using my own personal cash flow as the leverage and then reinvesting it in that sense. And then that passive income reverts back to me in 12 to 18 months.

The investor is super happy. They got an incredible return. I'm super happy I was able to deploy that capital to a new deal without having to use my own money or go into debt. Does that make sense? It is. Your investment banker is coming out here all over the place.

Yeah, yeah. Exactly, exactly. And then it goes the other way, right? So here's an asset that I love the most, right? So I can go and I can take my SEP money or my Roth money and I can buy other people's notes, right? Because the worst case for me is I might make a 12% return on my investment.

But the best case is that they default and I get the underlying asset, which I can then sell and make 300 to 1,000%. So when the worst case for me is making 300 to 1,000%, right, that's not so bad. Yeah, yeah. When you're happy, seller financing is the ability to finance an asset that you own is so powerful.

Because if you're not pressed to get all of the capital out of it and if you can use a stream of payments, you can structure the deal in such a way that you're going to win if you get the stream of payments. And you're not too upset if your buyer defaults.

I knew a guy one time who he owned a commercial building and he – it was a movie theater. It was a former movie theater and he had bought it and he sold the thing three times. And each time the buyer bought it, they put money down, bought it, owned it for a few years, defaulted, marketed it again.

Another one came in and then finally after the third buyer, he went ahead and moved his business into it. But it was because he didn't have to lean on it and say get it all right now, he was able in the aggregate to make a lot more money by doing the seller financing.

And because he was able to efficiently handle the foreclosure unlike sometimes a large bank that has to have whole teams of people and whole systems set up, it was easy for him to do it on an ad hoc basis when he needed to. Yeah, absolutely. I mean it gives you so much flexibility and it's really incredible because when we have this community that we built in LandGeek that people want to buy land, they want to sell land.

You have a built-in buyer pool for your notes, I buy notes. And so really money should never be the issue in this business. Mark, earlier you mentioned that you try to structure your sales using a land contract. What is a land contract and why is that important? Well, a land contract is stating that you are going to pay off this land contract backed by a promissory note and a purchase sale agreement over a specified period of time.

And the underlying asset remains in the ownership of my company. So that's a land contract. A deed of trust is like when you bought your house. So the deed then goes into your name. You now own the home even though technically speaking the bank has a deed of trust or a lien on that property.

So if you don't pay the bank back your mortgage payment, they will then go through the foreclosure process to get that asset back and then essentially use that lien against you and get the asset. That's a deed of trust. But the underlying asset is no longer in the bank's name.

It's in Joshua Sheets' name until you stop making payments and they go through this entire lengthy foreclosure process. So if you're an attorney, you love deeds of trusts. It gives you business. You get to go through the foreclosure process. You get fees by doing it this way and deeds of trusts make a lot of sense.

If you are the buyer of the asset, you want to have a deed of trust because you want to have the asset in your name to do what you want to with that property. You don't want the bank to own that property for 30 years in their name. So there's advantages for the buyer and there's advantages for attorneys.

But in the land business, because these assets are, let's say, relatively speaking, very small and because we're not dealing with a tenant, they're not going out on that property and typically building their dream house on it where they need to get permits and they need to have a deed to show the planning and zoning department they actually own the property, then we use a land contract and what we do is we avoid the costs of foreclosure and the costs of attorney fees.

I'd like to ask you a couple of questions on two themes here as we wrap up the show. The first theme is with regard to your students and a little bit of just insight into human psychology. I would guess that you've had students come through your educational products and programs that have succeeded and that have failed.

What are the attributes of the students that you've observed that have succeeded and what are the attributes of the students you've observed that have failed? Why did they succeed and why did they fail? Yeah, I think it all comes down to grit. So ultimately, and this is not my business, it's any business, if you're able to embrace the suck.

So a lot of times what we see is very successful people that want to come into land investing, they want to have the side hustle, they want to start building their passive income. Let's take a doctor for example. So I have two doctor clients. One's a very successful oral surgeon and the other is a very successful internist.

Now, the internist is, they're both very bright, but the internist came into it thinking that this should be easier for him than it was. The oral surgeon embraced the suck and struggled and kept going and kept making offers and kept asking questions and was determined to not quit. The oral surgeon is doing amazingly well.

The internist is frustrated and thinks it should be easier than it is. Just because the model is simple doesn't mean it's easy. And we go back to the beginning of the podcast, he made the argument, "Well, this is a business." Well, when my son started to learn basketball, he would start dribbling and he'd hit his knee and his foot and he'd have to run out in the street and he'd have to keep doing it until eventually now he's got like handles.

So it's sort of that putting away your ego and saying, "Okay, I'm going to just suck at this for a while until I don't." And those people go on and become extremely successful where the other people I don't hear from anymore. As a society, we have a tendency to praise people who have high cognitive ability.

Those are the people who shine in our schooling systems. Those are the people who rise to the top in the various social sorting mechanisms that we have in place. Unfortunately, though, high cognitive ability doesn't necessarily connect or correlate directly to grit, as you said, and being able to embrace the suck.

And I've seen in every business I've ever been in. When I was in sales, I've seen it in almost any business. Most business models are simple. But the people who are the smartest, have the highest cognitive ability, often don't want to do the simple things over and over and over again that are required in order to lead to success.

Yeah, I mean, absolutely. I couldn't agree more. And oftentimes, they don't like the feeling of frustration because they've gone through their whole lives avoiding it. School was easy. They got praised. Right, all As. And their parents praised them. And in business, it's messy. In order to succeed, you almost have to fail.

And if you've never failed at anything, you hate that feeling. Right? So, the problem with business is that it's constantly changing. You have to constantly change. And the problem with marketing is the marketing is constantly changing, and you have to constantly change. And if you're not, in a way, sort of able to have that flexibility and have that mindset of, "I will eventually figure this out, and I'll take my lumps, and I'll keep going." Seth Godin calls it the dip.

Right? If you're not able to get through that dip, you shouldn't be in business ever. Mark, you described that when you started back in the year 2000, you were working in a job that wasn't a good fit for you, feeling pretty miserable. You didn't have a lot of money.

You had a few thousand dollars saved and had started there. And you've given us the impression that you've done well, done a lot of deals with high profit margins, built a good business. So, we have the impression that you've done well over the years. I'd love to know what your experience of that journey has been, reflecting back on the last 16 or 17 years.

What aspect of being rich today is fantastic? And the ability to run your own business and all of these things that you're describing, what of it is better than you ever thought? And what aspect of where you are today is worse? And it's just not, you know, years ago you were dreaming about being rich, you were dreaming about having control of your schedule and being able to have passive income.

And today you look at it and say, "Well, it's not quite like what I thought." Yeah, it's so funny because I had quite a roller coaster ride there. So, from 2001 to 2010, I was making more money than I ever dreamt of. And it came pretty easily, right? It wasn't that Mark was so smart.

It was just the market. Well, land is interesting in the sense that it's the long tail of real estate. So, when housing is getting crushed in 2008 and the whole economy is going to hell in 2008, I was doing really well in 2008 and in 2009. But my land investing business and my note business suffered in 2010.

And, you know, sure enough, I thought, "Well, look at all this money I have. I should buy the big house." So, I bought the big house. Well, that wasn't enough. So, I bought the big car. Well, that wasn't enough. So, I have three kids. So, I thought, "You know what?

They should all have private school." And that wasn't enough because, well, even though my wife didn't work, we should have a nanny so we can go out whenever we want. And why should my wife have to clean the house? So, we had a nanny and we had a housekeeper five days a week.

So, unwittingly, I created this incredible personal overhead for myself that in 2010 kicked me right in the teeth. And very slowly, we started whittling it down, right? We got rid of the big house. We got rid of the big cars. Sorry, kids. You're going to have to go to public school, right?

We didn't need the nanny. We didn't need the housekeeper every day, right? So, suddenly, instead of going out to five-star restaurants on a random Tuesday night like we would, like, you know, celebrating an anniversary or a birthday, we started playing charades with the kids. And in the simplicity of downsizing and finding out really what made us happy, and for me personally, the journey of feeling like, "Okay, now I'm enough," took many, many years.

And so, today, what really makes me happy are the quality of my relationships, right? I've got a lot of friends who have a lot of money, but they don't know their children. Their wives can't stand them. And they're stressed out all the time because they've got to pay a $6,500-a-month mortgage.

Where I, on the other hand, have a very nice house and I have very nice cars, but I'm saving every month. I'm not going crazy, and it's enough, right? What is really interesting to me today is what I call my terminal days. My wife hates when I say this, by the way, but every Monday and every Friday, I take off, and I say to myself, "If this is my last day on Earth, how would I want to spend it?" And ultimately, it's always the same answer.

It's with my wife and my kids. And either I'll take them to school, I'll pick them up, we'll do some activity. My wife and I will have a date if my other kids are in school, and we just kind of hang out. And then Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I work on my businesses, and I love it.

But I always look forward to my terminal days. And really, for me, success has been the luxury of working when I want, where I want, and with whom I want, and having that freedom to do that. And not having to stress about what are the three big stressors in life.

So the three big stressors in every relationship are money, sex, and the kids. Well, I've eliminated money from that equation. You know, the other two we'll still work on. I was going to find out what hole you're digging yourself into and how deep you're going to go with this.

Right, right. But you know, life is messy. It's not perfect. No one derives from every joshpa. But I will say, though, that not having to worry about money is really – I think it does really improve your relationships where my wife and I can spend that time. Like we did the other day.

We just went out for coffee, went out for lunch. We had a really nice date. And then we took the kids to a movie. And not having to be exhausted by a job I don't love is really quite a luxury today. I think that, for me, is success. I've never found financial stress in my own life to be an aphrodisiac for my wife.

Yeah, exactly. How old are you now, Mark? I'm 46. Do you plan to retire? Never. I love working. I tell my wife this all the time. I will die in front of my computer. Yeah, I love working. I'll never retire. When you look around and see people who are anxious to retire, what advice do you give them?

Oh, find a purpose. You need a why. It doesn't have to be for financial gain, but go volunteer. Be a mentor. I really think that a lot of unhappiness comes from a focus on yourself. And when you focus on other people and helping other people, it's really nice. I really think you need a purpose to wake up every single day.

And as we get older, I think it's important to know what that is. And even if you don't know what it is, I think it's important to think about it and figure it out. And maybe have a few different purposes. Elon Musk is changing the world. He doesn't need the money.

It's incredible. Man is built for conquest. And if you ignore that, we ignore it at our peril. Mark, as we go here, tell us about your various websites, anything that you would like to promote. Share with us information on your podcast, your products. Go ahead and take a few minutes and promote the different products and services you have that could benefit my audience, please.

Yeah, I think the best place to go is thelandgeek.com. You can download for free our passive income blueprint and the e-book, "How to Avoid the Three Fatal Land Buying Mistakes," and get our "Art of Passive Income" podcast delivered each week to your email inbox. I really think that's just the best place to go to get started.

Great. Mark, thank you for coming on the show. I have deeply enjoyed our conversation and hope that you continue to impact many more thousands of lives with your systems and your technology. Thanks, Joshua. I really appreciate it. This show is part of the Radical Life Media Network of podcasts and resources.

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