Part I: How To Integrate Income Properties Into A Financial Plan

How do you invest in real estate when you live in an area where there aren't any good properties within driving distance? 

What should you do if you own a property outside of your market?

It's a 4 step process:

• Sourcing Qualified Properties
• Financing the Properties
• Implementing a Property Management Strategy
• Finding a Tenant, then Keeping Them

Who is Randy Luebke?

I'm a registered financial consultant. I'm an investment advisor representative. I'm also a certified wealth protection planner and a certified Medicaid planner. And I'm a light, I'm a mortgage broker, I'm a real estate broker. I'm a life insurance agent and a securities fiduciary. Right. So I do a lot of stuff. And I'm also a co-author of this book with my partner, Mark Kohler. It's my name down here in a really small print, but I'm the co-author. Yeah, we're in here.

This started out as a pretty small book and ended up to be pretty large, but it's got a lot of great information in it. And the reason I point that out is a lot of the things I'll talk about in our presentations in the previous two is in this book, and because I don't have time to go deep on it. If you want to go deep, there'll be a little float and you'll know that this in the booking go deeper that way.

We're gonna talk about how to manage properties when you live in an area where you can't buy properties to drive to.

My offices in Newport Beach, California. So Southern California. And I forget what the average value of a property is right now. It's something crazy ridiculous, right about $1,000 a square foot.

We were I was telling somebody here at breakfast, there's an MLS listing for a property in lieu beach, which is just south of Newport. And it was about a 400 square foot property. So the size of a nice hotel room, right? And 14 and a half million dollars. Right now. Yeah, 14 half million. So I don't know how you know, your RV factor on that how much you're going to get read on a 400 square foot home, right. And the point is that in a lot of higher-priced areas and hot lakes, not there yet, this is a great area, you can find properties that make sense. Your son from Chicago, there's a lot of great properties around there. Orange County, the whole county is going to work right anywhere.

From basically San Francisco to San Diego, it isn't going to work on the east coast and all that, you know, New York, Boston isn't going to work. So we got to get out of our markets to own real estate. And because I deal with clients all over the country, I have client clients in Hawaii, I have clients who you know, there's nothing in Hawaii. That makes sense, right? Nothing. So they're buying properties in Oklahoma, right? I live in Newport Beach, but I own a property in Park City, Utah, it's 700 miles away. So this is what this part of the presentation is about is how do you do that? Right? How do you go about owning properties and in areas where you don't live?

Steps to Evaluate a Potential Income Property

When you are valuing a property, there are three different factors that are important to look at:

1. RV Factor
2. Debt Coverage Ratio
3. Cap Rate

RV Ratio

RV Factor is the simplest and easiest step--and that's your first filter. You only need to know two pieces of information. How much does is it rent for? and what's the value of the property?

If I have $700 rent, and I have a $100,000 property, I have a 0.7 RV factor (that's the lowest number you want). Most of the properties you want to buy are going to be greater than that 0.9-1.1.

Here's a test: I have a $150,000 property and I want a 1.0 RV factor. How much does it rent? $1,500. Pretty simple.

If you find that they want $300,000 for that $1,500 a month right? Now, instead of being a 1.0 RV factor, I have a 0.5. It's probably not good enough.

The one caveat I have in there is... don't make think like "oh I have a 2.0 I RV factor, I should just buy it." Because most of those properties are in ghettos. I mean, they're literally in you know, areas that you're buying a house for 30 $40,000.

It's running for $600 a month. So it looks great until you pay for all the property damage, and the evictions, and all the other stuff that goes along with it. But it is a good first filter, right?

Because if it doesn't have that number, you know, you can probably pass on and continue to look for properties that are.

Debt Coverage Ratio

What is the debt coverage ratio? The debt coverage ratio is how much more income (after expenses) do I have to cover the actual mortgage payment on the property.

You want it to be 25% more. So if I have a $1,000 mortgage, I want a $1250 net operating income net operating is gross rent, minus all your expenses right before the mortgage, and I want it to be 100 125%. It's the only one of these three numbers you can actually fix. And you fix it by making a larger down payment, right?

Because I can lower the mortgage, I can still the rent stays the same. And so my debt coverage ratio automatically goes up. The problem with paying more down is you can buy fewer properties. Number one, right? Number two, you're creating more equity for a lawsuit. So you're less asset protected. Number three, your rate of return goes down because you're less leveraged, right. So there are all kinds of benefits by having high leverage properties that you lose when you have to increase it. But again, if you have a point seven or higher RV factor probability is you'll have a 1.25 debt coverage ratio to that'll work.

Cap Rates

What are cap rates? A cap rate is the rate of return if I had no mortgage at all. If you pay cash for the property.

You still have management, maintenance, and vacancies, and all the other expenses to get that net operating income. Multiply that times 12 divided by the cost of the property.

You typically want your cap rate to be 5% or greater. Why 5%? Because properties are a hassle, right? And I want to get paid for that hassle, right? Ideally, it'll be more, right. And when you take a 5% cap rate, and you put an 80% mortgage on the property, your rate of return is going to go up a lot anyway, you're not going to get 5% you're gonna get about 20. Okay, so we talked about that. I'm gonna back up here one. The Cap rate was in Hawaii divided by the purchase price. That's what I said. Yeah, in a way divided by the purchase price. Yeah, net operating income, divided by the purchase price. It's I did the monthly, I multiply it times 12.

Why do we like real estate investing?

What's the number one reason we like to own real estate? Equity or return on your investment. You put money and you get a good return on your investment.

The other reason I like real estate, working with my clients is all the tax benefits, right? It's one of the most tax-efficient investments, you can buy it right, you get tax deductions for owning it, you get to defer those taxes forever. It's awesome. It's an investment that you can pass down to generations, right. So your kids, your grandkids, and whatever. And then, you know, the other thing, and again, I wish there were more people in the room, but I think we'd all agree that one of the reasons we like to own real estate is the control, right?

I have a lot of my client's money invested in the stock market, we have no control over that money, right? We just go along for the ride, and hope we got on the right boat, right? And if we did nobody make money, and if we didn't, we don't. But with real estate, you get to control much more of your ability to earn money from that investment. So that's another reason people like it. Why don't they like it? It's complicated. It's messy, right? It's expensive, you can't get into it for $1 costs you lots of money to get into it. Right? And I had another reason I can't remember. But yes, if you're buying stocks, and the company goes bankrupt, you got a piece of paper.

It's brilliant. And I should have mentioned that your real estate can't go bankrupt. Yeah. So what he said was, I'll give you another reason. Because if you buy company stock, and it goes bankrupt, you've lost, you've lost it, and you've done nothing wrong, you may be even invested in a good company like Enron, right, which was great company stock, stellar, making money hand over fist, and all of a sudden, all the money just evaporates.

Now your house can get burned to the ground, you got insurance, right, your house can be in a real estate market that gets, you know, hit by a big, you know, deflation in the value of the property. But in most instances, it doesn't mean you had a big hit in your rent, the rents gonna stay the same. And the thing, the secret with real estate, as I said before, and we're talking about acquiring the profits in the purchase, if you buy it right, it'll do what you want it to do. If you buy it wrong, you hope for a miracle to happen. But the other secret with real estate is holding power, it's your ability to own it, and hold on to it for a long period of time. Because if you can hold on to it long enough, you can ride out those bumps in the market.

This all along is going to provide you rent, and it's never going to file bankruptcy in its own right. So all of those bad things I was talking about real estate is complicated, it's messy, takes a lot of money to do it. All of those things really provide opportunities for us as real estate investors because if we can control those things, then we can take advantage of all the good things that come with real estate. I so we like it for those reasons.

We talked about real estate, we talked about integrating into a financial plan. Now we're going to talk about what we're going to do if we own property outside of our market.

It's a 4 step process.

You have to find the properties

That's the hardest part. You know, America is a big country got 320 million people live in here we got billions of acres of land. How do you find, you know, you get your little google map out, start searching for houses? How do you do that?

Then you got to finance them

Which can be another problem. Again, I'm a mortgage broker, I've funded over a billion dollars of home loans in my career, and I've still funding loans today. It's harder today than ever, right? I mean, actually, I take that back, it was really hard in 2010. And now it's a little bit less hard to do it.

But it's still much more difficult than it was before 2008 when we would just give away money, right? Because we want to do our code. So financing is important.

Then you have to implement a property management strategy,

which we're going to talk about ways to do that using local property managers, or perhaps doing it yourself.

And then finally finding a tenant and keeping them...

By the way, all this stuff that I'm talking about here. It's what the Fourplex Investment Group does. It's kind of cool. I didn't know that they did all that. I thought they basically just found the multifamily properties. But they really have a package. You can come in as an investor and they've done due diligence (and I'll talk about types of FIG properties later) but FIG seems to do way more than what I've seen other investment groups out there do. Do you hear the term turnkey? They're really turnkey and I love it.

Step 1: Sourcing Qualified Properties

So first step sourcing qualified properties. And again, I put a little comment here, remember, the prophet is in the purchase. So use a turnkey provider, like we're talking about turnkey providers find those properties for you, they have local sources to start finding those properties and filtering out those 10s of 1000s of properties, getting down to a few properties.

They have local property managers, which is really important right to, to manage a property remotely by yourself is virtually impossible. but not impossible, virtually impossible, but not impossible, virtually, but not totally. dare think difficult, but not impossible. Because I self manage my property here in Park City, Utah, right. And we'll talk a little bit about that.

You can also use Google today to look at properties, which I love. Not that you're going to search the United States to find the properties. But once they say here's a property you can buy. Now with Google, I can see that that property backs to a railroad track, or backs to a school or you know, or size to a busy street. So I get to see all these things that you're never gonna see in the photograph that looks so cute with the flowers in the front yard. Right, you're not going to see that. So you have the ability to do it. Trulia other websites. And you also have the ability to look up schools, the schools in see how well they rate, you have crime statistics, you have all this data available to you now that you can do from your bedroom, right?

It's all there and available to you. And then the other thing that I like, and this goes back to the tax thing as you get to travel, right, so when I leave here, tomorrow afternoon, I'm going to travel to my condominium and Park City, Utah, right. So even if I wasn't here talking to you today, which makes us a total write-off for me, if I had to go visit my property to do some maintenance on it, right? That whole trip becomes a write-off. So if you own properties in markets that you might like to go visit, maybe it's in Nashville, right? Maybe it's in California even right. And you wouldn't necessarily buy one in Newport Beach, but you could buy one that gets you out there Hawaii, whatever. The point is that the travel expenses can help you, again, source the property and give you additional tax benefits as well. Right?

There's a lot of rules again, in the book that we go through in terms of writing off those things. A lot of people ask me, hey, if I go to, if I go to Orange County, California, to look at properties, and I don't buy anything, do I still get the write-off of the trip? The answer is, of course, no, no, sadly, no. If you don't, that doesn't make any difference. If you made an offer, or you made 20 offers if you don't actually buy something that was just a vacation, an expensive one, okay. But if you go and actually end up buying, you can write off the whole trip by the time you're there.

That's how we source properties.

We use turnkey providers...like the Fourplex Investment Group, and other sources out there. I have about half a dozen of them that I work with, to help my clients find properties. And that's how we go about doing it. And then once they give us those properties, then we start drilling down on it using the spreadsheet tools that I had in the previous session, right to help analyze them financially. We use Google and all the other websites to help us look at the other statistics.

Step 2: Financing Out-of-State Properties

Now we're talking about financing. And I mentioned a few moments ago, the benefits of financing right? So the first benefit is that you will get to leverage your money. So if you think about an investment, it has its own intrinsic risk, right.

The biggest risk with real estate is that you lose a tenant right now you got to get a new tenant in. So You don't have any income, everything else you can insure for floods and fires and, you know, earthquakes even, you know, we can ensure for all that stuff. But if you lose a tenant, actually, you can get tenant insurance to some degree to in an apartment, commercial buildings, you can't get tenant insurance. For properties, but the point is that the investment has its own risk.

By leveraging the property, we increase our rate of return, but we don't increase the risk, the fundamental risk of the investment itself.

So the risk of the investment of having more mortgages is that you have to make that mortgage payment. So how do we mitigate that we create cash reserves? So for every property we buy, we're going to set aside extra money in cash reserves, because if something does happen, then you'll have the money right to keep going. And my rule of thumb, there's three months, right three months for every property. So if I have three months' rent for every property, if I have 10 properties, we'll have 30 months of rent, sitting in a safe liquid cash reserve account, right? So that if the roof does blow off, or the house does burn down, or whatever, I have cash reserves to take care of me through the downside. Make sense? Okay. Okay, so we like financing it.

I like using long-term financing again, I when I started in the mortgage business, back in 87, the 30 year fixed rate loans was about 15%. I know sounds horrible, isn't it? Yeah. And I made the joke in the last session when, when rates got below 10%, I announced it to the Board of Realtors and I got a standing ovation. Because they were so excited. And today I will be like, actually, it's illegal. Because the hard money loans at 9.99 you know, your that's where you stop out? Yes. 12% 12% Yeah, I bought my first one and 14 14% and I was happy to get the loan from Wells Fargo. Do you know?

In all fairness, though, my first house cost $70,000. Right. I mean, that was my, you know, my first little condo. So my down payment was like 5000 are something which I had to sell everything I had in garage sales for months to get the $5,000 I just sell my piano. That was the hardest thing to sell, you know. But anyway, yeah, that's what you do you make the sacrifices to get what you want. And so homes were cheaper, mortgage rates are higher.

Now mortgage rates are lower. Right. So I like I used to love adjustable loans. And when the market turns again, I'll favor those again. But right now 30 years of fixed-rate financing is a way to go three decades, an interest rate under 6% on a non-owner-occupied property. That's awesome. Why? Because that interest rates locked in and your rents are going to go up? Yep, yep. So your rate of return on your investment is going to continue to go up and you've locked in that benefits the 30. year fixed is the best.

The gold standard for 30 year fixed rate loans, of course, is Fannie and Freddie, Fannie and Freddie after 2008 became very stingy with their money, right, we used to be able to before 2008 give you an unlimited amount of loans, right, you can have as many properties as you want it with 20% down, and you could that you could get you could do it all day long. No more, right. Now, your first four properties were 20% down, you want to do that every one of the 20% down, you want to use the leverage. Now 5678 910 you have to put 25% down a little bit more buy get the increase your downpayment, reduce the rest of the Fannie and Freddie, but you're tapped out at 1010 properties. And you're done with 30 year fixed-rate financing unless you're married, right? Because if you get 10, and you get 10. Now I got 20 loans 20 properties, right? And your primary residence doesn't count.

Okay, so if you could finagle away, which is where you work with me, right, to get that primary residence to zero, we can actually get 2130 year fixed rate loans out of a married couple, right? That's a lot of properties. For most people, that's a lot of real estates. Now, if you go over that, that's what we call a sequence of financing. If the third bullet points down there if we go over that, it doesn't mean you're out of business, it just means you're out to Fannie and Freddie loans. And we have to go to private money investors, which are going to cost you more money. So you just put that into the equation. And if it still works, it works, right? It's not the end of the world, you can borrow money at 9% and still make money in real estate, you can, okay, it just gets less desirable.

You need higher cap rates, higher RV factors to cover that debt servicing. Because if you don't, by the way, if you don't have those higher rents to offset the higher interest rate, it's called a positive arbitrage. If you don't have a positive arbitrage, the only way you're going to bail yourself out on that property is if you have that one of those miracles called appreciation, right? And it will bail you out. But it's not a guarantee. Right? So it's there and those are the options. Okay, so 30 year fixed-rate we talked about fixed If so, financing. I think we got that covered. Any questions? Anyone? Thank you for coming back, by the way. I'm glad we got a couple of you back here. Yes, sir.

So those 10 properties, if you get, like residential property, that's over four units, and it's not commercial, does that count as a great question? So if I buy residential properties are considered one to four units, right? So five or more are considered commercial properties, and they don't count. They don't count. You have to disclose it, you have them, you have to disclose that you have the debt on the Fannie Freddie application because it's still constant in terms of your qualifications, but they don't count as one of the 20. Yeah, yeah. In fact, that's another way we get more loans, we can aggregate a bunch of loans, smaller loans into one big commercial loan, right, and finance the properties.

Now we've paid off all of our Fannie and Freddie loans. And now we can go get a whole bunch of new Fannie and Freddie loans, even though we still own the same properties, what we put that all those other loans into one commercial loan. that's doable. Very good. That's a great question. Yeah, absolutely.

Step 3: Implementing a Property Management Strategy

This is the number one rule. This falls under the category of asset protection too. I say the number one asset protection strategy is to be a good landlord. Okay. Now, what do I mean by being a good landlord? You know, screen your tenants, have a good property manager, take good care of your property, something breaks, fix it, right.

My little property in Park City, I was terrified, initially about renting it. Because I heard all the stories about you know, you rent it out and all the college comes out, kids come in, and they trashed your house in whatever. And during Sundance, you know, all the wild and crazy people from Hollywood will be your property.

My strategy was, I didn't rent to them. I didn't rent to those people. How did I do that? Well, I just charged a lot of money for my condo, every night. And because I charge a lot of money, the people I rent to are awesome people, right? And they take care of my place. Like it's theirs. You go into my condo, and you feel like you went into my home, why? If you open the junk drawer, everybody's got a junk drawer in their home, I have a junk drawer in my condo, there are batteries in there, there's change.

There's duct tape, this is my rental, right? I have a printer and a computer, I have everything that you would have in your home in that home. And people go in there, I even have a wine rack stacked with a wine like that I keep there. And I'll fill it up at the beginning of the year. And by the end of the year, I usually have more wine than I started with. Because people buy wine, they'll use some of it while they're there. But they'll buy wine in the leaves the wine, there they go. They can't take it on the airplane, whatever. And the point is that being a good landlord as a vacation rental owner means making an awesome experience for your tenants, right. And I just want them to walk in there and go wow. And then they enjoy their trip. Right the whole time they're there.

Step 4: Finding a Tenant, Then Keeping Them

Being a good landlord important. And it doesn't matter if I'm renting. Again, vacation rental by owner or long-term rental is a good landlord. I think the number one mistake that real estate investors make is they delegate too much of the tenant screening to the property manager. Okay, this is kind of a double-edged sword, right? So first of all screening tenants is a hassle, we know that. So you should let your property manager do the bulk of the screening and then get it down to the few candidates that you want to look at. Right. And you want to see the credit report and you want to see the application and you want to be involved in it. Right? I say it's a double-edged sword, because when you look at your management contract, and I may have something I'm going to mention this later.

A lot of them you know your property management fees, typically seven to 10%, right seven to 10% of your you have your monthly However, a lot of them have rent up fees, right? So the rental fee could be one month's rent, right. So you know, you have your $1,000 a month property that you're paying $70 a month for, but you're getting $1,000 a month rent. And so if the property manager, for whatever reason keeps finding a new tenant once a year, they're getting $1,000 for that month, they would have only got 70. Right? So you see you're on the wrong side of the equation with that they're incented to not have a tenant state, you want them to stay 234 510 years, right? That's what you want. So get involved with it. That's part of being a good landlord.

If you're a good landlord and take care of your property screen, your tenants get involved with it, you're going to have a much, much better experience in owning income property from afar. Okay. Make sense? Okay. Oh, and then the second level of asset protection is getting good insurance. That's easy. It's easy, it's cheap. Third levels, you get up, you know, an umbrella insurance policy to go on top of that. Right, and And then when you depending on the type of property you have, that's where you bring in the LLC. Because if you have a property that's maybe riskier. Marc has a story about he has this little meth lab in the South Side of Chicago.

That's kind of a scary area. Yeah. And so, you know, if that meth lab blew up the whole neighborhood, right, which could happen, I do not think that would happen. And it was probably a bit of a did, it would blow through the insurance policies and the umbrella policies and all those other things. So we have the LLC or around it to put a firewall around liabilities going outside of that property. Make sense? Okay. Okay, so now let's talk about property managers. They are your link right there, your local link to the property. So of all the things you if you think finding a property is hard, finding a property manager is even more difficult right?

Now, I remember when I started in the mortgage business back in 87, the only property managers that were in the real estate offices that we found most of them were the men and women that couldn't sell any real estate. Right. So they had no they couldn't make any Commissions on real estate. So they started, you know, managing properties for a few bucks. So they had some money coming in. So you had these guys that really weren't good realtors that were managing the properties. And they weren't very professional. Yeah, right. That's, yeah, that managing a property manager is very difficult. Again, personal story. I had Deer Valley lodging initially managing my property in Park City, Utah.

Deer Valley lodging was the premier property manager in Park City until they filed bankruptcy and stole $4 million worth of their client's money. Yeah, about 6000 of mine. Right? Which wasn't bad compared to what other people lost. Right? So this is what I'm talking about the golden rule. Okay. So this isn't the one you learn in church, right? This is the one you learn in, in finance, which is the one who has the gold rules, okay? Meaning whoever has the money wins, right? Or is it in charge or has the controller have the power. What do I mean by that? In most property management agreements, the money goes from the tenant to the property manager to you.

Okay, so what's the problem with that whole bunch of them, they've got your money in for a long period of time, and you don't know when they got it. And you don't know anything except you see that statement 45 days later, right? That the problem the rent came in, and you know, a light bulb burned out, or a switch had to be replaced, or what you don't know anything, right.

So instead, what I recommend is that the tenant pays you the rent, right? You can do this or direct deposit, they're not really sending a check, you can do that. But you know, direct deposit, the first benefit of that is, you're going to be known notified the second that deposit hits your account, you know when the rent was paid on the first of the month, and the second of the month, or the 16th of the month when it's late because again, the property manager gets the late fee. Right? If he doesn't tell you about it, right, he collects the late fee, and but he just gives you the full rent, where you were entitled to it, you don't even know about it, right?

Or even worst case, they might have a buddy or somebody in the property and a month or two goes by or, you know, they were short a little bit this month, and so they're gonna make it up for it next month, you just don't know. But that check goes from them to you, you know, right. And I would add to the advocate, getting to know your tenants, right? A lot of absentee landlords don't want to get involved with it, they feel that exposure, you may not want to necessarily let them know where you live, per se. But again, if you're being a good landlord, who cares, right, they're not going to come and go after you if you're being a good landlord. But if you can create a personal relationship with those tenants, they're going to treat your property like it's yours. It just happens to work that way.

In the summers, I had somebody stay in my condo, and they had their kids there. And they bought these little protectors for their little kids, right? Well, they left them in the condo, they asked me can I leave all those protectors for you? And all the kid's toys we bought? And we're going to come back next summer. And you can you know, this is what they do for you. Right? So, you know, get to know your tenants, right? He who has the gold rules. Now 99% of the property managers will not want to do that. They want to take your money, they want to keep your money. And you know, I would say I don't know what percentage but a lot of them are perfectly honest. And it's perfectly legitimate right for them to do that. But you don't have control.

The other reason I like you to take the money and control it is Is anybody in the room a real estate professional? Anybody? Does anybody know what that means? No, there's only a handful of people here. So real estate professional is not a licensed Realtor is to somebody that It primary work is to be actively involved in real estate. That doesn't mean that you're fixing toilets and changing lightbulbs. It means that guess what you're you're helping to select the tenants that are coming into your property. you're collecting the rent from the property, you're looking at your books in the property, you're authorizing the expensive repairs, right, you're authorizing all that you're involved with it and the benefit Doing that a husband and wife, especially if one of you do that.

The other one makes a lot of money, the passive limitations on write-offs for real estate, which is $25,000 a year goes away. So now I can make a million dollars a year, write off a million dollars of passive losses and pay no income tax on it. Right? So that's a huge opportunity for couples. And you can't do that unless you're actively involved in real estate. So that's just another reason again, to take collect that check upfront. Makes sense? Okay. I learned that the hard way makes you do your Valley lodging. Okay. And then lastly, consider self-management.

It's difficult but not impossible. But to do this. So. I have a keylock, a cordless keylock on my condo, right, which is the most awesome thing ever, because I was skiing down in Southern California, and the tenants were checking into their condo call me up, I forgot what our combination was. And I could just take my cell phone and go boom, the doors open, right remotely. And given you know, the needs text on the condo comp combination.

So I don't have a property manager anymore. I have a crew that does my cleaning that you know, they go in, and they and I pay them extra to do an inspection. That was another thing I learned. So the cleaning crew charges $80 to clean the condo, and I give them another $30 to walk through everything. I have a checklist that they sent, they take a picture of it, they sent me the checklist, so they know what to do. And they know what to look for. And you know, it's and they get basically a 40% bonus tip, right for just looking around and tell me what's going on. And the same thing with the relationship. Somebody during Sundance Sundance, there's like, you know, all kinds of people on every condo on our complex.

Some of my plates end up in another condo, right? But my, my, my housekeeper noticed that, and she went and got him out of the condo right now. Awesome. Yeah, so self-management is possible, right? It's about getting involved. It's about being good. And, and being involved with your property. Okay, so Oh, good. So we're almost going to wrap up here, which is good because I only have 10 minutes left. So you missed the first two sessions, listen to them. We use a tool called the shopper. The shopper is a spreadsheet that allows you to filter through lots of properties, and help you evaluate them financially, whether they're good or bad rentals, right? Even if you own them now, right? Or if you're shopping for new ones.

The second one is the transformer is where we took a look at properties you owned, including your primary residence, we looked at the money in your 401k and your savings and other accounts. And so what if we could redeploy that money and put it into a better position for you, using real estate as the example in the Transformers is the tool we use to do that.

The three takeaways from this little session, then is that money trapped in 401k plans can be freed up how we use them in-service, nonhardship withdrawal privilege, or we use a $50,000 maximum long we can borrow money out of a 401k. It's not trapped forever. And these are the wrong things. No, this is the first one's the wrong thing. But leverage can improve your rate of return and give you asset protection. But then finding acquiring and managing a real real estate remotely requires a team, you can't just do it by yourself, you gotta have some people involved with it. But you can control that situation. If you get involved a little bit more yourself.

Trust me, it's worth the effort. It really is.