SPEAKER_00 0:01

So as we pick up part three of our origin story, hope hope you all are getting some inspiration from this. Or at least you're humored. Or at least you're humored. I I remember, you know, at several different points in the journey, we kept thinking we would get to the next level where everyone had their act together and had it all figured out and knew how it was going to work. And the truth of the matter is that everyone's just figuring it out as they go. Elon Musk doesn't know what it takes to get the next generation rocket in outer space. He just has the courage to try and fail forward. We, you know, we had the privilege to get to know really successful people. You know, there's one individual, and I'm always asking, you know, what's one of the best decisions you ever made? I always like to, you know, have high quality questions. And this individual said that, oh yeah, during you know the 08 crash, we bought all of the foreclosures from Ginny May. And billions of dollars of you know distressed real estate. I'm like, well, how the heck did you do that? Like, how did you plan that out? How did you and he's like, Oh, there's I mean, there's no way you could plan that or know what to expect, or you just do it. You just do it. So someone who's you know many steps ahead of us on that journey, a multi-billionaire, just do it. So hopefully this is an inspiration to y'all. And this is where our journey starts to really pick up steam. We're people who really love scale. If you're doing things right, things should get easier as they get bigger. If you're doing things in a way that get harder as you do them bigger, you need to reexamine your path because you're probably on an unsustainable path that'll lead to burnout. And we had a feeling that there was going to be an end to the time when, you know, I remember back then a week ago, just there was like 10 REOs on the MLS at any given time. We could scoop them up for 50 cents on the dollar, do these you know, sweat equity kind of scrappy renovations, and get to a full cash-out refi. And something told us that this was probably a limited season. So we said, how can we do as many of these a time as possible? We started working with investors. We offered them a you know a 10% fixed rate of return. That was kind of the origin of our you know secure freedom fund today. We tried different models. You know, some people would invest at six or seven or eight percent, but at 10%, that was when it just became like a no-brainer for investors. And it gave us the investor capital we needed to do a whole lot of deals. And we had started to build relationships with more and more uh laborers. I was, you know, getting some kind of repetitions in to where I could go walk, you know, 10, 10 properties in succession, write 10 offers like very quickly. Elaine was kind of running a lot of our, I would say, like uh back end operations. Like I would be kind of out running a gun in, and she would be, you know, between patients or something, looking at the MLS. Hey, here's three. I think you can get this showing in, you know, between work and when you have to pick up a daycare, then pick up a kid, then go look at these two properties, and then I'd go write offers on all three of them. Maybe we'd get none of them, but we just got offers out there.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

And we tried to write one offer a day.

SPEAKER_00 2:52

One offer a day.

SPEAKER_01 2:53

I mean, that's truly so it started with we tried to look at a house every single day during that year-long period where our money was tied up in the duplex that we couldn't do the cash at refi because we had a conventional loan on it. So we wanted to look at one house a day so that we could get to that unconscious competence. And then when we had cash and we were ready to go, we tried to write an offer every single day. We wanted to put in the reps.

SPEAKER_00 3:15

Uh after a while, it got to a point where we had, you know, more deals than we could handle, than capital we could raise, whatever. And we figured out, wait a second, I'm a licensed real estate agent. We could sell real estate to other people, which is a great, great side income for anybody. If you're uh thinking about reading a real estate investor, you should absolutely become a licensed real estate agent. I hang my license with Kelly Williams and absolutely love the you know mission and energy of that organization. Couldn't recommend it enough. But I I definitely remember times when we had you know 10 of these things in flight at once while we were both working full-time jobs. And there was a there's a season, a summer season. We'll talk more about seasons here in the future, where you know, Elaine was like working overnights, you know, in residency. We had you know our second baby, and I would say there's a several year period, you know, where one of us was working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. I'll say it again, because it sounds like hyperbolic, but there's probably a two to three-year period where either Elaine or I was working 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We knew this was our ticket. We had found something that worked. And if we could just work like no one else was willing to work, eventually we would not need to work at all. And at the time, and until you find financial freedom, you don't really realize that sitting on the beach is not exactly a an amazing lifestyle. You know, the purpose of life is the search for meaningful work. But at that time, I mean, nothing motivates you like having such extreme clarity. Like, if we could just do like 20 or 30 of these things, we were set for life. And that that kept me up. I mean, I was sleeping like two, three hours a day, you know, writing offers at two o'clock in the morning, walking properties at six in the morning or nine o'clock at night. I loved the Minnesotan latitude because you'd have daylight from like 5 a.m. till 10 o'clock at night in the peak of summer. You could walk a lot of houses when you've got that much daylight, and uh still had time to kind of run my software engineering teams by day somehow, had a lot of coffee, and we would have like a dozen of these deals going on at one time. We got very, very, very fast at it. You know, there's one property, for example, I remember one, two, five, two, and uh it hit the market. It was listed for like 105,000. We offered, I think like 79,000 all cash, you know, contingencies. That was always our offer. We did like 10,000 in renovations. We got really good at renovations. We had turned the whole property over in about 30 days when we were done. It appraised for I think like$170,000. And so we had made, you know, almost$100,000 in a month on that one property. And that was just one of like 10 properties that was uh that was going. And Sam and Mary were the tenants that I placed in that property in 2019, and they still live in that property today. They still live in that property today, and that property today is worth about$250,000, probably a little bit more than that. And that that season has passed. You can't do that anymore. But we sensed that season was upon us then. And we, you know, we made hay while the sun shined, as the saying goes, and we worked harder than we have worked in our entire life. Because if we knew if we could just do that for a very short period of time, we would be set. And there's a lot of wisdom or strategy or tactics we love to share with you. But at the end of the day, you just have to be willing to do the hard work. There's nothing glamorous or sexy. It's a grind. It is a grind to go walk properties at five o'clock in the morning to make offers every day, to be lining up investor dollars. And we had to, you know, be constantly hustling with lenders to get, you know, the lending in place to return the investor capital. And it was a it was an insane amount of work, but I'm so glad we did it. You know.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

I remember learning the phrase from Dave Ramsey, and there's a lot I both love and hate about his financial teachings that's outside of the scope of this episode. But he had a phrase that really resonated with me and you know, still to this day. And the phrase was live like no one else, so later you can live like no one else. And, you know, basically what he's saying there, you know, he's he's targeting your typical family and things like getting out of debt, living lean, eating simple meals, driving simple cars, you know, maybe staying in a simpler home for longer than you want, kind of, you know, busting out of the closets and those sorts of things. But live like no one else, so that later you can live like no one else. And we didn't know what that second part meant, but we knew what the first part meant. And we were just doing it so joyfully, that level of joyful sacrifice and knowing that there's a meaning and a cause behind the behaviors that you're doing. So, way back in the beginning in episode one, we shared that, you know, when we bought our first rental property in that post-2008 collapse, people said we were crazy, we were greedy, all sorts of things. But we knew we had a bigger purpose. And then as we're going through these years of really intense work, you know, we easily could have looked at that and said, well, first of all, we could have said, like, I'm just not doing this. This is crazy, right? Keep in mind we had, we had good careers, right? Nick had a career in tech. I was on the path to become a physician. Like we were, we were set for all intents and purposes. And yet we knew we wanted a level of freedom in finances that was beyond what we could get in those traditional careers. So, first of all, we were willing to do it. And then we were willing to do it from a place of joy. And I am, I'm not a believer that like anything worth doing takes hard work. I think there's a lot more nuance to things than that. But I do believe that when you're experiencing something that you could perceive as hard, you can choose to perceive it a different way. I remember coming home from the hospital at it was probably 7:30, maybe 7.45 in the morning. I saw Nick and our kids for like a minute and a half before he, you know, needed to take them out to daycare and get to work himself. And I'm delirious after a long shift at the hospital. And I'm, you know, home alone. I remember it so well. I was in my scrubs. I was sitting in the living room of our home, and I pulled up YouTube and I pulled up the music video, The Good Old Days, by Macklemore, and I listened to that song on repeat, I don't know, however many times you can fit it into half an hour. So maybe five, six times. It's probably, you know, a five or six minute song. And I just had this sense that we were living the good old days. And that if I chose to be mad or sad or just to refuse to say, you know, it's unacceptable to me that I rarely see my husband and I rarely see my kids and Nick's working, you know, all these extra evenings. And instead, I chose to say, if we do this for just a short period of time and we get this snowball going, maybe we'll get to experience what that second part of the phrase is, live like no one else so later, you can live like no one else. It's my belief that if you are willing to go through a period like that in your investing, regardless of your age, regardless of your income level, married, if you have kids, you know, what's going on, if you can go through a period where you push your expenses down as much as possible and you push your income up as much as possible, and you take that difference and you snowball it into wealth creation, you will look back at that time joyfully. You will look back at that and say, yes, it was hard. Yes, it was exhausting. Maybe I wouldn't want to do it again, but I'm glad I did it. And the sooner you can go through that period, you know, we started the very first line of this whole podcast at episode one was it's time in the market, not timing the market. The more you can get dollars into the market as quickly as possible and just start to allow that wealth accumulation to happen, the better off you will be. And that morning, you know, when I listened to that song until I basically just, you know, passed out because I had been up all night at the hospital and I went to sleep. It was kind of when we were at like the midpoint of this, you know, several year period of just working our hearts out, building this portfolio. And it gave a lot of meaning to the years that we had just finished, and then also gave me a lot of gas in the tank to get through the next several years. Can you make today the good old days? Can you decide that you're going to see things from the perspective of meaning and abundance and legacy? Maybe you like that phrase, live like no one else so later you can live like no one else. You like the idea of joyful sacrifice. You like the idea that you get to choose how you interpret whatever is happening for you. I remember, you know, years later when I would be a guest on many podcasts, you know, a common question on podcasts would be something like, well, tell us about your failures. And I had trained myself so well to believe that there's no such thing as failure that I couldn't come up with an answer. And it wasn't from a place of arrogance of like, oh, I'm just good at everything. Absolutely not. It was just that I just didn't, I just didn't see things as failures. I would see things as like, oh, we got a rejection here or no here. Oh, we, you know, pulled out these cabinets and we thought the kitchen would be great. Turns out there was a wall of mold behind it. So then, you know, we needed to do a much more extensive renovation or, you know, whatever it was, got told no from the bank, you know, whatever. I just didn't see those things as failures. I just saw them as like, well, they're just part of the process. Like if you get told yes all the time, it means you're you're not living big enough. You need to be, you know, making bigger decisions and and going for bigger outcomes. And it just, I look back at those years, you know, just so, so, so fondly. And if I could just wish for everyone one thing, it would be that they choose to experience years like that. It's a tough sell for people. It's a tough sell. People, you know, and rightfully so, they want to find the shortcut, they want to find the easy path, they they want to, you know, continue with whatever lifestyle they've already created and maybe not have any of the sacrifice because they don't believe that sacrifice can be joyful, that it can be joyful sacrifice. But I'm telling you, like, I would just encourage you to think, to, you know, explore your heart and to think if there was a period where you had some joyful sacrifice, how could that change your investing journey? How much faster could you get to your financial freedom goals? And could you do it from a place of joy and of creating, you know, not just the financial resources that you want in your life, but grit and work ethic and values. And if there's, you know, children or young people involved in your life, like showing them the value of sacrifice and long-term thinking. Those were some crazy years. And I'm so, so, so grateful for them.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Well, that sounds like a great place to kind of put a pin on this episode here. Next episode, let's talk a little bit about our investing decisions and you know, tactically, what did that look like, financially? What did that look like as we navigated a shifting financial environment, regulatory environment, and kind of what took us to the next chapter of our journey? So check us out here in the next episode.