Beyond The Trenches
"Beyond the Trenches" is your guide to navigating the messy middle and emerging victorious. Join host Jay Bunte as he sits down with successful entrepreneurs, industry leaders, and experts who have not only survived the trenches but thrived beyond them.
In each episode, you'll discover:
- Real-world strategies: Uncover the tactics, mindsets, and habits that have propelled successful individuals to the next level.
- Actionable insights: Gain practical advice and tools you can implement immediately to make progress in your own journey.
- Inspiring stories: Hear the raw and unfiltered accounts of overcoming obstacles, achieving breakthroughs, and building a life of purpose and impact.
- Motivational fuel: Ignite your passion and drive as you learn from those who have walked the path before you.
Beyond The Trenches
Building Castles in Real Estate Investing (And Watching Them Fall) with Logan Hassinger
Logan Hassinger shares his rollercoaster journey from corporate finance to real estate investor, experiencing both incredible success and devastating failure along the way. His candid story reveals how he went from convincing his wife to invest their life savings into his first property to accumulating substantial wealth, only to face crushing debt and personal challenges that forced him to reinvent himself.
• Starting with little knowledge but inspired by "Rich Dad, Poor Dad," Logan purchased his first fourplex using direct mail marketing to find off-market deals
• Successfully leveraging equity from early properties to rapidly expand his rental portfolio, generating substantial cash flow
• Pivoting to note investing after tenant issues, purchasing distressed mortgage debt at steep discounts and achieving 1000%+ returns
• Discovering opportunity in Broken Bow's vacation rental market during COVID, initially thriving before construction challenges created mounting debt
• Taking over as general contractor when his builder partner stopped paying subcontractors, leading to cost overruns and eventually $400,000 in credit card debt
• Finding new purpose through launching Sage Senior Support, helping families navigate the complex transition of moving loved ones into assisted living
• Learning that taking imperfect action is better than endless analysis paralysis when pursuing financial goals
If you're considering real estate investing, Logan emphasizes getting educated but not waiting for perfect conditions before taking action. Connect with him on Facebook or visit sageseniorsupport.com to learn more about his current ventures.
You got six months. You need to bring in a million bucks and we'll go from there. I got about three months in and I said, dude, this is not for me. My wife would beg to differ right now. I'm going to take all of your life savings, I'm going to take what little that I've had and I'm going to go buy this piece of property.
Speaker 2:Trust me.
Speaker 1:I've got $400,000 in credit card debt right now. It was a shit show. It was bad.
Speaker 2:The. So buying multifamily, zero down and living in one unit while you rent out the others. There is no other mortgage product out there in the world that you can buy a multifamily for zero down.
Speaker 1:I've hired a general contractor, turned out he was just stealing money materials off job sites, fired him after I've already lost a few hundred thousand on that. I'm then sued by the builder for fraud man. Unfortunately he committed suicide. I got that news and I'm like what I understand? I get it and I'm just like what the fuck?
Speaker 2:You don't have to go to college for this degree, and then this is going to be determined, like your life, but once you get a taste of working for yourself and being successful.
Speaker 1:It's really hard, I hear you. I hear you. You've got to take the things that you've learned and go do something. You've got to take risk and risk doesn't necessarily mean losing it all but if you're wanting something that's up there, you've got to start climbing. Tell me your story.
Speaker 2:All right, welcome back to beyond the trenches. Today we're joined with Logan Hassinger. Logan, appreciate you coming on. Thank you, jay.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 2:First time actually meeting in person.
Speaker 1:Yes, we've talked a lot over the phone, facebook, plenty of groups that we've been a part of.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so that's how we met. I think it was in a Broken Bow Facebook group, so I at least found out about you.
Speaker 1:Yeah, which is what a business partner and I started together to kind of do a few things help share what we had learned about broken bow back in 2020 and um, and put like-minded people together and figure out how we could all work together yeah, so let's go.
Speaker 2:Let's go back, though, so prior to being the guy in 2020 and having a few things going on that which we're about to talk about here, in a minute, but prior to that, like, tell me where you grew up, how you even got into this. Did you go to college?
Speaker 1:for this.
Speaker 2:Tell me your story.
Speaker 1:I started out. I went to school in HEB. I graduated from ULIS Trinity. I bounced around a little bit with college. I had a couple of experiences. I went out to Texas Tech. I went there for a year. My girlfriend now wife was supposed to follow me. She did not. Saw us out there with my sister-in-law A couple of experiences of college.
Speaker 2:I like that. I wanted to remember that A couple of experiences with college.
Speaker 1:I like to try them all out. I came back, went to community college. I then went to UTA. I failed out of UTA unknowingly. I went in to visit with my person that helps set your classes for the next semester and she was like what are you doing here? I was like came back to put my next round of business classes in. She was like oh, you've got to change your major, you need to go to another school, you can go to nursing. I was like, oh, oh man.
Speaker 1:Okay, took those credits transferred up to UNT and finished at UNT. Okay, credits transferred up to UNT and finished at UNT. I got my finance degree there and rolled into an internship with a wealth management company very small mom and pop shop out in Richardson, and I was working with him for about two and a half three years. I was in an analyst role, helping build out portfolios and helping advise, kind of on the back end of client engagements. That rolled into more of a sales role. Hey, I need you to get out there and grow assets under management. And I'm like, huh, I can't go out and talk to people guys that are in their 40s, 50s about moving a million dollars over and joining you. So he's like you got six months, you need to bring in a million bucks and we'll go from there. I got about three months in $200,000, $300,000. And I said, dude, this is not for me, I can't do this. It was networking, it was going to putting yourself out there and at 24, I was not ready for that. Now, fast forward 15 years later. This is all I do. So it's just funny how it's come full circle.
Speaker 1:But I bounced around to TD Ameritrade, then I was working in Dallas at an analytics firm for private equity, I was taking some exams for trying to pass my CFA, which is a chartered financial analyst. Okay, one of the toughest exams in the world to try to go out and get. It's three levels it takes three years to accomplish and I had taken the first one and it was about a month before you get your results because it's not immediate. I remember I was in this large downtown Dallas, kind of like the World Trade Center area, and there was 500, 600 of us all in there taking this proctored exam. So I finished up and I was riding the train back and forth from Dallas to back over here to HEB and I don't know who gave me the book, I don't know the recommendation or whatever, but it was Rich Dad, poor Dad. I had no clue, what you know. I wasn't interested in real estate, I wasn't involved in real estate in any way. And I read that book and I was like, if I fail this test, I'm going real estate and I'll do it on the side until it becomes something. So I failed and at that point was my biggest failure that you know turned into be something pretty cool.
Speaker 1:So I hit the ground running and started accumulating a couple of rental properties. I was on BiggerPockets. I ran into a mentor of mine that we're actually good friends, lives out in Phoenix, named Ben Levovich. He was an up-and-coming guy on BiggerPockets that always had some articles that he was putting out and liked to poke the bear when it came to real estate. So I gravitated towards him and he started doing syndications out in Phoenix and so I've invested with him all over the years. As their Whitehaven capital is what they do or who they are, they do syndications out there. And then I was buying rental property 2016, 2017. I had some really bad experiences with some tenants. At that point. I was up to five properties, ten doors. I had a fourplex, a couple of duplexes and some tenants that were just nightmares. I think if you've done it long enough, you've got a couple of horror stories and I just I was like I'm done, I'm out and you're self-managing at this point.
Speaker 1:And I was self-managing and I just I was like I'm done, I'm out and you're self-managing, and I was self-managing, you know, I was, you know, again trying to build this portfolio of I think it was like 73 properties. I needed 73 doors I needed before I could quit my job and like live the passive mailbox money dream.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so there's a lot to hear. Okay, so I was going to ask you. I failed.
Speaker 1:Okay.
Speaker 2:And then you were like okay, I want to get into real estate. Yep, and when you say you were on BiggerPockets, does that mean you were researching on the website?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was just researching how to acquire rental property, how to get a lease agreement, just all the things that come along with trying to build up All right, how to even talk with a potential landlord. So I was mailing out yellow letters and trying to get people to answer my calls back and say, hey, I want to buy your property.
Speaker 2:So you got a full-time job. What are you doing during this time At this?
Speaker 1:time I'm working for a company out in Dallas doing kind of entry-level analytics for private equity Okay gotcha. So I wanted to go into the private equity route, which is why I was taking the CK, so an entry level.
Speaker 2:I did a good job. Yeah, it was a good job. I mean I was making good money.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was making $80,000, $85,000 a year at 26 years old.
Speaker 2:Couldn't complain, yeah, so After experiencing a few colleges. I experienced a few colleges, didn't like them and crack so okay. So talk to me about this, because we've all been there. Um, you know, especially if you're you own your own primary home and you're like I want to get into real estate investing, I hear all these advantages of building a wealth through equity. I hear there's tax advantages even possibly. So you find a home, you run the numbers on it and you buy it. Like talk to me about that first purchase.
Speaker 1:So, um, it was, uh, a callback from a guy that I'd mailed a letter to. Okay, so I was using yellowletterscom and it's been popular forever. But the fact that you can mail a letter and maybe somebody calls you back, it's just in the numbers. So he was the first batch. I mailed out four or 500 letters and he called me back and he said hey, I'm interested. I get these all the time, man, but I don't know why I called you. But I called you. I said, okay, I'd love to meet with you and my biggest thing is I want to meet with you face-to-face. We can accomplish a lot over the phone or in a Zoom. At that time there wasn't.
Speaker 1:Zoom and this old guy wasn't getting on Zoom. So we met, I think, at a local hamburger spot and he was selling the property because he had bought the home in a foreclosure from an attorney friend of his. He had used his parents some of his parents money to buy it. This guy was in his 60s and his parents were in their 90s. They had passed away. He had property all over the place. He had just gotten this one. He had fixed it up Fourplex over in Ulus.
Speaker 1:He's like I need to pay off my siblings for, you know, they passed away and part of their money, their inheritance was in that. So he's like I sell this and I can just be done with it. And so I'm like, okay, I ran the numbers I had a little spreadsheet that kind of backed into, based on the rents and what I could afford to pay, and I offered him $170,000 for a fourplex over on ULIS. And he said, man, you're getting a deal, but let's do it. And I've got this little checklist of things I'm supposed to be looking at when I'm walking around this house. I have no idea what I'm doing. Okay, so hold on. This is an off-market property. Off-market property, yeah.
Speaker 2:Which is for one. That's really impressive, because when I'm looking online sometimes I was like I want to get an investment property especially here in Texas where property taxes and everything on the MLS is, sometimes I'm like dude, the math isn't math.
Speaker 1:I can't afford this and I did that For three months, while BiggerPockets and jumping on Zillow and whatever was out there at that time I was like I can't afford it. A, I can't afford it and the numbers don't work, yeah, a, I can't afford it and the numbers don't work, yeah, so I've got to go find something off-market. So then I have bigger pockets again off-market properties, and so that's kind of what was my strategy and how I acquired everything, and I'm assuming this wasn't cash or hard money?
Speaker 2:Nope, it was not cash. Nope, 20% down, all right.
Speaker 1:Yep. So my wife and I were living in Watauga. We paid $95,000 for our first house. The guy had just flipped it, so I was kind of leveraging some of his experience, because I stayed in contact with him, I was learning a little bit about. Oh man, so you bought this yeah, it was a hoarder house Bought it for $45,000. Put a little bit into it, sold it to you guys for $98,000. And so, as we went to sell because I was going to take all of our money, all the equity, and put it into this fourplex We've been saving along the way, so we had enough to buy my wife's grandmother's home, which is what we did, so we moved and we took all the equity and I put it in this fourplex and she's like what are you doing?
Speaker 1:It's like $37,000.
Speaker 2:And y'all are in your 20s and we're in our 20s.
Speaker 1:That's a lot of money and it's't have any money at the time, my money was simply her money that she had saved since she was like 16, working at Sonic all the way through her jobs and I came in with debt, student loans, ATVs that I'd bought and having a good time.
Speaker 2:Just dumb things, just dumb things, really dumb things. Toys.
Speaker 1:So reading that book Rich Dad, poor Dad also changed my financial mindset around spending and so I got really I mean I complete flip-flopped from careless spending into like on a budget using mint, I think, at the time. Now I use personal capital, but I just I watch my numbers and so here I am telling her I'm going to take all of your life savings, I'm going to take what little that I've had and I'm going to go buy this piece of property, trust me.
Speaker 2:It'll work, and I've never done this before and I've never done this before, but I've read a lot about it.
Speaker 1:I read this book. We get through that. We make the purchase, bought the property off market, like you said, and I'm introducing myself to the tenants and I'm trying to create an arm length distance between me and the tenant. Yeah, I'm just a property manager, all. I am the owner, right, um, and so that was good. I mean, it was little bitty 600 square foot, one bedroom, one bath, uh, four units all stacked in there, and one of my, one of my good friends, uh, from high school. He's a euless police officer and he was like dude, you bought that thing, you're crazy. He's like I'm on that street all the time, that's a rough street.
Speaker 1:There's a little roach motel just down the street from it. Activity going on.
Speaker 2:So do you remember what roughly your?
Speaker 1:mortgage was versus the monthly rents. Rents were at the time $6.50 a unit. By the time I had sold it I'd bumped them up to about $8.25.
Speaker 2:And I think all in I was paying like $900 all in on that, on that thing.
Speaker 1:Yeah, wait, wait. So 900 all your expenses and then I was cash flowing about a thousand dollars a month that is, that's like a hundred percent cash on. Yeah, it was good I was like the numbers, the numbers are amazing. Look at this. She was like okay, I believe you there what year is this.
Speaker 2:This is 2015. I mean, maybe those are out there 2025 when we're recording this, but that's really good. It was really good, that's really good.
Speaker 1:So everything I so over. So I was like this works, I just gotta keep mailing out letters. Um, I went through a. You know, I gave six, gave myself six months to kind of work out the kinks of being a landlord and all that stuff. Um, I was a handyman for a lot of it. I had an HVAC guy and a plumber and some of the bigger stuff I couldn't handle. But for the most part if they had a leaky toilet or had something, I was the guy doing it. And so I wanted to stay close to home because I wanted it to be less than a 20-minute drive for me to get there, fix it and get out of there. But so I was like, okay, this strategy works.
Speaker 1:I mailed out another batch of letters about six to nine months later. Okay, I get another call back from a guy in Grapevine over behind Baylor Hospital. So I'm like, cool, and I built my list within a 20-mile radius. So I wasn't mailing out to Dallas, I was only mailing to very select zip codes. Okay, when I was doing it I was being very strategic with it. It was the absentee landlord list.
Speaker 2:Um, what's a rough cost per letter um?
Speaker 1:roughly all in. I was about a dollar after you pay for the list. You pay for the letter and you get it mailed out.
Speaker 2:It was about a dollar so not chump change, but not like you're spending your life savings. Yeah, I mean, I was.
Speaker 1:You said under 750 bucks, okay okay, and so I'd send out a, and I'd wait three more months if I didn't really get much feedback on it, but at the time I was tracking it, anywhere from 3% to 5% of calls would hit back to me from the letters.
Speaker 1:Okay so it wasn't terrible and so it kept me going. So this guy calls me. He was a business owner. He lived in one of the duplexes he had rented out the other side and he owned the one across the street and he rented out both of those and I was familiar with the area because both my daughters at the time were born at that hospital. So I was like that's a good little area yeah.
Speaker 1:And so he's like he needed to sell because he had just gotten divorced when he wanted to put money back into his trucking business. He's like, but you got to buy both of them. I was like both of them, I mean I, I just I don't have any. So at the time I'm in dallas and I'm I'm talking with my manager and my manager at the time he's like man, you're dude, you're doing this, like you're doing this real estate thing. And I'm like yeah, I want to see what happens. He's like I'll put some money into it if there's a return.
Speaker 1:So I built out you know he was familiar with investing and just the concept of investing, not real estate and so I built out a spreadsheet and kind of gave him some equity into. Basically, look, my plan is to I'm going to buy this with an investor loan. I had a good lender that knew what I was trying to do and then I'm going to cash out refi this in six months. Okay, he's like well, how are you going to cash out refi it? And I said, well, I'm buying this. At the time Tax rolls were like $340,000, and I bought it for $225,000. He's like you've got to buy both of them. So I mean it was a $450,000 purchase for me, two duplexes. I got Lending-wise, I borrowed money for the down payment. That wasn't necessarily talked about with my lender, but I had the money and the money came from my account and it was seasoned in my bank account.
Speaker 2:Hey, season 60 days. Season 60 days, so I knew the season rule.
Speaker 1:And so we get it purchased and people are already in there. We're chugging along. Five-month mark hits and I submit all the docs to get it refied and they both appraise at like $390,000. And so at that time I pulled out $175,000, $180,000 in cash Nice, and I don't remember exactly what the mortgage payment was after the fact, but I was still cash flow, positive, still cash flow. I was making about $250 a door, I think, and that was $250, $500, $750. I was making $1,000 between the four.
Speaker 2:So you're making $1,000, and now you've got some money in your pocket and I've got some money in my pocket, so I recouped a lot of money and I got my investor paid back and he got some money in his pocket and he was like dude, this is great.
Speaker 1:You let me know any time this happens. So now you're feeling real good. I'm feeling really good. I haven't lost yet. So I mail out another round of letters. In the meantime, I have applied to work at Hillwood. Hillwood's, a Rossboro company out in Fort Worth. I go on the interview, I get a couple of rounds in and I'm meeting with the CF controller for the business His name is Vishal and I don't get the job and I go home and they gave it to another guy that I'm actually friends with, just in a roundabout way, which we get to, and it's just funny how real estate works. So he calls me about a week later. He's like hey, man, sorry. I said oh, it's all good, I'm still trying this real estate thing, and he's like but I got a lot of money and I'd like to invest with you. He was like I see what Hillwood does. I don't really get the opportunity to. He co-invests with them when he can. But he's like I want to do this on my own too. I'll invest through you.
Speaker 1:This is the guy that got the job you were interviewing for. This is the guy that didn't hire me. He was the hiring manager, oh he didn't have the real real estate, they hired the guy that went to Pepperdine.
Speaker 2:I can't blame him.
Speaker 1:He went to Pepperdine, I went to North Texas so a little different background, and so he said but I want to invest with you, so let me know. I was like, actually I've got these other properties and that was kind of my interview. Experience into real estate was that I personally owned property, not to any level that Ross Perot and his company owned but that, and so I mailed out some letters and I got another.
Speaker 1:Hit on an older guy that over in North Richland Hills had a duplex, wanted to sell because he wanted to go buy some land and go deer hunting for the rest of his life.
Speaker 2:So you're specifically looking at multifamily, only multifamily Is what I hear.
Speaker 1:I like the ability to have. If one door wasn't rented at least I knew this one would most likely cover my mortgage and it wasn't going to be upside down on a monthly basis, and so I was just looking for duplexes, triplexes and fourplexes. So, and now you know that's. You know, I hear numbers today and I'm like golly, I don't know how you do that on market. You know so. My strategies were always built off off market. Multifamily.
Speaker 2:If I could go back in time to quick tangent the VA loan, as you know. Yeah, but the smartest veterans. I know gosh smart of it If y'all are watching this buying multifamily with zero down and living in one unit while you rent out the others. There is no other mortgage product out there in the world that you can buy a multifamily for zero down.
Speaker 1:I just sold a property over in Grapevine to a guy about three months ago who's doing that very thing same thing house hacking with a VA loan and he's like dude, this is amazing.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I wish I would've and he's in his 30, he's 35, 40, and he's like. I wish I knew about this so much sooner.
Speaker 1:Yeah, bmw car auto loan because I wanted to be flashy and I'm like you, idiot.
Speaker 2:If I could, go back in time. I would have put it in the real.
Speaker 1:Anyways, sorry to no no, but exactly I mean, that's how I was going about it and so I got that one and at that time that was probably so that's pushing 2018. And the tenant that, so I fixed it up. It's costing us anywhere from $12,000 to $15,000 to, you know, repaint the whole thing new flooring, granite countertops. I made them look good.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:And then I charged. You know, the theory behind it was I want the most value, the best quality for the best value in the neighborhood. And so, looking at the other comps and rentals that were in there, it was all you know for micro countertops and basic this and basic that. So I wanted to go a little bit above and beyond and and get a flood of tenants, which always worked and and it was and so. But then I get a tenant in there that in my grapevine duplex that at the end of the day they had a cockroach infestation, that, uh, the exterminator was like I've been in this business for 25 years, I've never seen one worse. And I was like, oh, I mean, they were on the ceilings, the walls, the doors and this lady was running a child daycare out of it. They broke their lease and so that's why they left. But I don't know why they broke their lease, other than I could assume that she couldn't run her business out of my unit any longer with the amount of cockroaches.
Speaker 1:Then the other guy on the other side. I'm like I go over to his house and I'm like, hey, man, we're doing extermination on this side, do you not have any cockroaches? He's like no, we have a lot of cockroaches. I said why haven't you told me in the year that I've been your landlord he goes. Well, I was afraid you'd jack our rent up or leave. And I said my role is to make sure. So then we do a house walk and we get into his bathroom and the faucet down here and the showerhead. There's no tile on any of that area. It all fell apart years ago and he never told the guy that I bought it from, and so he didn't want to flag it to me in fear that we'd fix it and then raise his rent Right. And so I was like all right, I'm not dumping more money into this. I got so much equity on the table, so I got with a friend of mine, john Westrom, and put everything on the market.
Speaker 2:So this is the ugly side of owning. Yeah, I know, we talked about it.
Speaker 1:You get all this cool stuff and you're like, yeah, man, I own 10 doors and this truck is paid for by my rentals and that's all great. But there's good and bad to both sides of it.
Speaker 2:And when he talks about cockroach infested, and then I mean I'm not an insurance expert but I'm pretty sure running a business, a child care business, can't do that, not supposed to be doing that, not supposed to do that.
Speaker 1:So once all that kind of came through and then that duplex in North Litchin Hills that I just bought, she wouldn't let us in. She kept giving us excuses, kept giving us excuses Because we had some showings scheduled and every last minute canceled so it was hurting me trying to sell the property. Well, it turned out she had a pit bull in there that had just destroyed a room.
Speaker 2:You got a lot of strikes going on in this place, yeah.
Speaker 1:So we finally get in there and she's calling the police on us and I'm like sorry, this isn't so the police finally get us in and we get it sold for, I think, right what I was asking for. I think I bought that one for $325 and sold it for like $390. And so that's, and even at that, that's when I kind of saw the market, the values of what I was having to pay off market versus what we're on market. We're starting to tighten.
Speaker 2:So what year is this roughly? This is 2018. Okay, okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I was like market's changing, Market's changing. I got to get out. If I would have held on for a little bit longer through COVID, oh my God it would have been nuts, but I dumped everything and I was looking for my next thing. So I had sitting on I don't know, $300,000, $400,000 in cash.
Speaker 2:So I mean, let's just pause there, because not too long ago in the story you were asking your wife for her life savings.
Speaker 1:Life savings, yeah.
Speaker 2:Not ever even going down this path Correct.
Speaker 1:And then, just a few years later, yeah, real estate can make it happen really quickly.
Speaker 2:You're on hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash Now can make it happen really quickly. You're on hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash Now.
Speaker 1:That's not a guarantee by any stretch of the means. No, it is not a guarantee.
Speaker 2:But that's proof that the college degree doesn't necessarily matter, right? No, like it's. Well, it's the self-education that you started, with bigger pockets, and then the networking, and then obviously you've got to have drive and all that, but it goes to show you don't have to go to college for this degree, and then this is going to be determined, like your life.
Speaker 1:It just doesn't. I mean, did it help me get my foot in the door at my first job? Sure, then, where I took it from there was up to me, exactly, exactly. And so for three years, I didn't know what real estate was. I didn't know that there was investing into that area. My brain was in the stock market because that was my role. I was in the stock market because that was my role. I was in wealth advisory and we used common ways of investing, which were building portfolios on ETFs and picking stocks.
Speaker 2:Less risky.
Speaker 1:Less risky, more liquid, diversified, diversified, all that normal stuff that I had just ingrained in myself, which I still use today. I invest with my HSA. I invest with my 401k.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that still serves a role, still serves a role.
Speaker 1:So I'm not saying kick it out, but for me real estate was what I thought I could, was more tangible and I could put my hands on and wrap my brain around. Okay, we can do this. I can physically add value to this. I can't add value to Dell. I can look at Dell and hopefully they're doing the right things to add value to them and I'm going to be a part of it. But I can if I buy right and if I do the things right. I can. I can add value day one. And what's that?
Speaker 2:crazy statistic that you hear that X amount of percentage of millionaires multimillionaires have made it through real estate. It's something crazy. A huge amount of people are all based in it just comes from real estate. It just does.
Speaker 1:Or some type of business owner, an entrepreneur that has most likely lost everything, but you never saw that part of it, and so yeah, so I'm sitting on a pile of cash and I'm looking into other ways in real estate and I'm looking for a little bit more passive.
Speaker 1:I don't want to own property, so I get into notes and I start buying. I run into a guy on a listen to a podcast, so I'm listening to a ton of podcasts at this point, trying to figure out my path. Next, and a guy is doing distressed mortgages and he's buying the paper. And so I'm like okay, I like that, I like that you can try to either get them to either going to foreclose you're either going to get them to modify or the property is you're going to sell the distressed paper at a little bit more of a price than what you bought it at.
Speaker 1:And so I go down to austin, um, I spent nine, ten thousand dollars on a course, on a three-day intense course, and my wife's like what are you doing? You can't. I was like what are you talking about? I'm winning, we're up like hundreds of thousands of dollars and you're mad that I want to go spend nine thousand. And so I, and so I had to sell that to her that, hey, I'm going to go to Austin for three days. I'm going to learn from this guy on how to buy notes.
Speaker 2:I mean that's a hefty lump sum and I had never spent that much on education other than college, right, right.
Speaker 1:And so she was just trying to wrap her head around it, and I'm an action taker, so all I'm looking for when I go to pay for education is a spark.
Speaker 2:I can jump two years ahead of everybody instead of trying to figure out myself, you're paying to expedite your learning curve.
Speaker 1:All I'm trying to do is expedite my path. And so it expedited it and I leave there with a company name and I've already followed it with the Texas Secretary of State and I'm rolling, and so I come up with Sage Notes. My previous business that I was owning the real estate was Sage Equities. Sage only because my first house, we were planning some stuff, and Sage was. I was like oh, it smells good, it looks good, sage sounds homey.
Speaker 2:Sage Equities did not sound homey at all and what's the quick uh cliff notes version for the people that are watching and listening that don't understand? Like, wait a minute, how are you're buying a note? Sure? Is there another company like servicing the more like?
Speaker 1:there is. So how does?
Speaker 2:that work?
Speaker 1:what give us the quick like yeah, so the short and sweet of it is you know you're getting a loan for $150,000 from Wells Fargo. Most of the banks, the big banks or any of the big originators, are taking that paper and immediately selling it off to either the government or a private individual. Okay, and so generally those are trading or selling for the same roundabout value that they underwrote it for $150,000, I'll sell it to you for $147,000, $148,000, maybe even a premium, based on the borrower's qualifications. And so I wasn't interested in the grade A paper, I wanted the grade F, I wanted the bad paper. It's still a good property, so you still have to do your due diligence and understanding.
Speaker 1:But I was doing it on. You know, I was so focused on a 20-mile radius of Dallas-Fort Worth or my home in Bedford that his was like no, no, this is national, you've got to buy loans everywhere. I was like everywhere. The paper can be easily traded as long as it's paying. It's a performing loan, a performing note, easily traded as long as it's paying. It's a performing loan, a performing note. As long as that individual is making their payments, great, you can buy the paper at probably about what's owed on it.
Speaker 2:So over the course of 10 years, let's say, you owe $110,000 on it that paper is going to trade for about the same and you don't have to be like an accredited investor or like Joe or Susie or whoever is watching.
Speaker 1:This can buy notes. You can go buy paper.
Speaker 2:Buy paper. People watching this can go do this Paperstackcom Okay.
Speaker 1:Paper and stack is S-T-A-Ccom Two guys out of North Carolina, I think genius around what they did, but it's a trading platform for notes Good notes, bad notes, re-performing notes.
Speaker 1:So you're doing like arbitrage, but with paper, with paper, okay yeah so my job was to start making connections and now I'm doing not cold mail, I'm doing cold calls. So now I'm calling up banks, regional banks. I was using a website called distressedprocom. Okay, distressed Pro is. An interesting thing about the banks is they all have to file their FDIC reporting every quarter, so that's identifying everything on their loan portfolio and, among other things, their good notes and their bad notes in automobile, credit card, home and a few other things non-secured. And so this guy put in some software that would aggregate all this data from the FDIC that's access to everybody and then put it in a dashboard for you to go filter through banks and look for crappy loans or good loans.
Speaker 1:And then the contact people at those banks. And so I started building up okay, I want to buy loans in this state, this state, this state. I was looking for ease of foreclosure. So in Texas we've got, you know, much more bank-friendly laws to foreclose on versus somebody in California. Trying to foreclose on somebody in California is going to take a little bit longer. So I'd narrowed down okay, these are the people I want to call. I had some cash, you know, like I said.
Speaker 1:But then I went back to my two buddies Vishal, the guy that interviewed me I said, hey, I've got this idea, I'm going to do this. I went back to my manager, todd, and I was like hey, can you put in some money? And then, and some friends of mine that I've been friends since eighth grade and they're like we want to invest with you too. So I'm like $200,000. I put in a little bit of my money and my whole thing was OPM other people's money, still be a good steward with it, but I wanted to leverage other people's money so you're basically starting your own syndication, correct At this point?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So I was putting in low-level amounts of capital and going out and buying onesie-twosie loans just trying to get my feet wet. So I bought a loan out in Augusta, georgia, and so I was talking with either banks or a hedge fund that was dumping bad debt, and so this debt was all pre-2007, 2006 crisis. So most of these loans that had originated you know, giving anybody a loan and now they can't afford it and it's been delinquent for most of my loans were delinquent for five years or more. The banks just weren't foreclosing on them and you're buying these up.
Speaker 2:So how does that work when you go to somebody like, hey, I need a lot of money and we're going to buy some notes of people that haven't been paying on them for five years.
Speaker 1:But trust me, we're going to make some money on it?
Speaker 2:How does that conversation even?
Speaker 1:happen. So I broke it down on a very small scale of OneNote and so the Augusta Georgia one was the first one that we did. It was a nice home just outside of the golf course and the funny thing was I was trying to get that one too, because if I had an address in Augusta I could go to the tournament. Yeah, or I one too, because if I had a had a address in augusta I could go to the tournament. Yeah, I get access to the tournament. Um, because I was big into golf then not so much anymore with kids but, um, I was selling it to him. I was like, look, man, we're gonna pay. I think that note was like 42 500 is what was owed. Now I bought the loan for 3700. So I bought somebody owing me 42.5, most likely not going to collect that, um, but I paid 3700 for the right to be paid 42.5 really okay and so I've got this paper, you know.
Speaker 1:So there's, you know, the loan. I'm looking at the loan origination docs, um, the collateral file for it, um, I do a title search on it, um, so there's a couple of companies out there that will do that. Bulletproof Title is a book that I read. It's written by an attorney that does specifically for this and how to follow chains of title to make sure you're not getting screwed when you are buying notes. And so I was like, look man, how can we get hurt? It's $3,700. And let's say the job was to get them to modify. They were still occupying the property. Um, they just they'd make a payment and then not, so I mean, but the course, over the course of five years they hadn't paid but you don't own the property.
Speaker 1:No, you're not on the property, I own the right to it. Right if they don't, if they were able to foreclose on them. But I got them to modify okay. So, um, really, what you want to do is you want to get the note re-performing and so, after about 12 months of seasoned payments, you can turn around and sell the loan for 80 cents on the dollar. And so I eventually, at about month 18, we held on to it because it's good cash flow, but I turned around and sold it for like $35,000. And I bought it for what? $3,500. So I mean, you're not huge margin.
Speaker 2:What's the easy, like thousand percent, yeah, a thousand plus percent Rate of return on that.
Speaker 1:Not great money in terms of okay, cool, you made 30,000. I could go do that with something else. I was like, yeah, but I didn't, it cost me nothing to do it, but this is not your full-time job.
Speaker 2:You're doing this on the side.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it cost me nothing to do it, but this is not your full-time job. No, you're doing this on the side. Yeah, I'm still working. At this time I've left the Dallas place and I've worked for Caliber Collision, so I was in their finance department Okay, not doing financing collision repair, but in the finance department doing FP&A. Okay, so you have a stable.
Speaker 2:W-2 job. Yeah, I'm making $100,000. Yeah, great money, and you're doing this on the side making great money too, making better money.
Speaker 1:I was making more money over there than I was at my job, so are you killing yourself.
Speaker 2:Do you have children at this time? Talk to me about that aspect.
Speaker 1:My first daughter was born in 2014. My second daughter was born in 2016. I'm up, so I would come home 5 o'clock, spend the evening with everybody. I'd go to the gym at nine o'clock when they went down, and then I get home, I'm still wired on pre -workout and it's 11 o'clock, and then that's when I did all my online stuff, and so 2 AM was about my bedtime for for most, and I did that for eight years.
Speaker 2:We could not be on complete opposite schedules.
Speaker 1:Now I wake up well, my wife would beg to differ right now, spring break and everything. But now I'm getting up, usually around 5am and I get to the gym and I'm off my. I try to be off work at three, three, 30.
Speaker 2:Nice, I've completely flipped it back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, but when you're working a full-time job, you know you, you just don't you try to get away from at the office and take a phone call or whatever. But I mean, for the most part, yeah, I mean I was two kids and the third one was on the way in 2020. And so you know, but you know that caused an issue at home, though you know I wasn't present. It caused, you know, just arguments that would that would fester and boil up and yeah it's hard, there's a cost.
Speaker 1:There's a cost, it's not free. Yeah, so I don't want to fool anybody thinking that, because the joke was always not a joke, but it's man. I wish I were in your shoes. You have no idea.
Speaker 2:Yeah, it's not condescending. No, they don't mean it. Like oh, it must be nice, right, no, no, no, these are close friends of mine. Like it must be nice, we're like yeah.
Speaker 1:There are some nice parts to it. No doubt about it. But if you really want to know, I'll be happy to share with them. Like, yeah, sure, so. Then they're like oh dude, I had no idea, I know.
Speaker 2:It's not something that I. Then I wear a t-shirt that says I've got $400,000 of credit card debt right now. Okay, well, let's get to this, we'll get to that. So right now I'm winning. I'm in the notes. This is 2018, 2019.
Speaker 1:Yeah, this is 2019.
Speaker 2:Okay, cause I haven't met you yet. I think I met you, like right at 2020, 2021.
Speaker 1:Okay, so 2019, I'm buying loans onesie twosies and then I run into a guy at PennyMac. I buy a loan from PennyMac and it's a condo out in Asheville, north Carolina. This thing was cool the guy that had originally developed the building. He had gone bankrupt and he hadn't paid in 10 years. The bank just didn't want to foreclose on him how in the world I don't know so well. In this case his loan docs were lost in the shuffle. His loan was sold four or five times by the time it got to me.
Speaker 2:So he's still living in the property? No, no, no, it was a rental.
Speaker 1:It was at a before Airbnb was really around. It was just a condo that you could go rent, like if you go to Colorado and you rent out a place that somebody owns it. It's not like a timeshare they do own it, but they rent it out with the property management company there locally, gotcha. So it was that type of situation. They were still renting it, but all the money was going back to the bank that he owed. So he had owed $250,000, and I bought that loan for 170 and the whole thing was like and I couldn't get access to it so I was paying somebody to try to like.
Speaker 1:It was on the fourth floor so I was trying to get like my end with the cleaners to see if they could like open the door and just get some a few photos. The guy had like taken the oven and kind of damaged some walls and stuff and beat up. But I mean, at the end of the day it was a 250 000 dollar condo and so I bought the. So the guy from penny mac's like he's even talking to me how are you doing this man? I want to be you. I'm like okay, like this guy's been working for penny mac for 20 years as a uh, as a distressed loan, uh trader dumping their bigger portfolios right you know thousands of loans um that are on the good side, but he was happened to be on.
Speaker 2:Yeah, PennyMac's one of the biggest loan servicers in the country.
Speaker 1:So I'm talking with a guy at PennyMac which was just cool in itself that I'd gone through that level within six to eight months, right. And so we get it and it's going through the foreclosure process as we're buying it. It's just the bank was just done with it. They just wanted to get their cash and move on, and so I put it on the market with a local agent, sold it for like 260 and I was like, okay, that there's some money there. That's, that was cool. Um, and then my next deal came after I'd put all this money together from some friends and we bought 2.2 million dollars worth of distressed debt for 170 180 000 um loans all over the country. So some stuff here in Texas. Most of the stuff was in the Midwest.
Speaker 2:Is that common when you're doing this? Because that's roughly 10% or 15% is what I just heard you say that one was.
Speaker 1:If I remember the deal, it was like 5 cents on the dollar. Okay.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's deep, that.
Speaker 1:That's a pretty good, yeah, that's deep.
Speaker 2:That's where you want to be at.
Speaker 1:Okay, if you're going to buy a distressed debt, you want to be under 10 cents, and this is y'all's biggest purchase to date.
Speaker 1:Correct With you and your investors Doing this note thing Doing this note thing and so we're getting it, not knowing COVID's coming and all the moratoriums on foreclosures, because that was the main exit here. We were going to foreclose on the houses. I had paid for a couple of due diligence companies to A do the title work to run actual, get physical pictures of the property. Some of the homes were gone, it was just land.
Speaker 1:I was buying a lot, but on average my average deal was $2,200. And if I could sell the lot for six grand?
Speaker 2:that's good money.
Speaker 1:That's great money and so I mean I was stuff in Minnesota, stuff in Michigan, iowa, philadelphia, oklahoma, texas, 63 loans in total and I just started working through them. So I'm calling this guy, calling this guy, I'm sending letters trying to get them to either re-perform let me move forward with a foreclosure, um, or, uh, modify the loan.
Speaker 2:And you're still working your W-2 at this time Still working my W-2.
Speaker 1:So at that point I was on the phone a lot, um, and my boss, who's also in real estate and actually in senior living, he, he does residential care homes, uh, which actually got me into this business that I'm in today. But so I'm on the phone a lot and trying to get through all this and we're trying to make 500 grand at the end of this, and so everybody's trying to double their money. And then I didn't put next to nothing in it. That was my role, using OPM and the knowledge of buying notes. And then COVID hits. By that time I had recovered all the capital, so I'd gotten back everybody's money. So now we were just playing with house money House money at that point, house money at this point. So, but COVID hits and we more and more start trickling out, especially from the more democratic states of hey, you're not foreclosing on anybody, regardless of circumstances. And so I'm trying to call local authority is like, what are you talking about? Like this, they haven't paid in eight years.
Speaker 1:This isn't a COVID induced nonpayment.
Speaker 2:They were already not.
Speaker 1:They were already not paying and so it halted everything. Um, I found paper stack and posted all my loans on there and a guy that I'd kind of networked with I'm kind of networked with, I'm out of Florida he ended up buying the rest of them. I think it was like 30 loans in total, 40 loans in total. He bought the rest and we made about, I think, around $150,000, $200,000 on that. So everybody made good money on it. It just wasn't nearly what we were forecasting, Right.
Speaker 2:You know, is what it is, which it goes that way. Yeah, it goes that way. At least you're positive, we're still positive.
Speaker 1:We're still good, and so I'm out of the note business. Now. This is middle of COVID. This is May of 2020. And we land in Broken Bow, so two couples and their kids and our kids, we go rent a cabin We'd been there previously, but totally different than what it is today and we get up there and we're in this cabin, cabin and there's a couple of for sale signs up and you know no one. We paid for the rental and I'm like man these numbers look good.
Speaker 1:And so I go home and I'm putting my spreadsheet together on it and I ended up calling a local agent there, paula Beauchamp, and I'm like, hey, I'm looking into some, some property up there and the numbers seem to work pretty good. She's like, yeah, yeah, I've got a couple off market that, um, I'm like, oh, I like off market, yeah. So, um, I'm in Broken Bow and about three months later I bought a, bought a cabin that was already existing. The guy was a pilot and so just funny how stories work together. He was in a pilot during COVID. He's not working, he needed the money, so he sells. And I bought that cabin, fully furnished for $445.
Speaker 2:Okay, with the intention of being a short-term rental. Short-term rental, you're going to be Airbnb, airbnb.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I was not staying in it. I mean, we didn't stay in it until about six months later. Okay, so I bought it sight unseen.
Speaker 2:Which is the craze If you go back in time, especially here in GFW, because people, because of COVID, are not flying, we're not flying, nobody's flying, so where can I drive within?
Speaker 1:and then within three weeks I'm like I need another one. I'm sitting on all this cash. I was burning a hole in my pocket, good or bad, and so I call her back up. She's like, hey, this builder he's working on, he just bought a lot and he's building a little one bedroom cabin. I said, all right, I like the smaller ones, so you know, more spontaneous bookings. So that was. You know. I had some rationale about what I was going through. But it's a little one-bedroom, fully furnished for $375,000. I was like can't go wrong there.
Speaker 1:And they were doing $60,000 to $70,000 in rental income a year, so the numbers were already paying for something. I wasn't expecting anything more than that. I was just going to keep it and let it do what it's doing. So I get that one, we get built In the middle of that. I'm talking with the builder and we're having lunch and we're checking up on the property. By the time I've quit my job at Caliber, because this building thing is taking off and starting to compound, okay.
Speaker 2:So you're going all in, I'm all in at this point and the wife is behind you. Yeah, I mean you've got a pretty good track record by now.
Speaker 1:Her biggest thing was insurance. So she's a diabetic and been diabetic since she was 12. And so her biggest thing was insurance and having to go one way, I was like, well, we'll get COBRA, we'll keep your insurance for at least the next 18 months and I'll figure it out in between there.
Speaker 2:Obviously more expensive, but we'll keep it More expensive.
Speaker 1:Yeah, it was $1,800 a month versus what I was paying of $700. I got to pay the employer's portion because I was the employer now, yeah, and so she was behind me. So we jumped into that and my goal at that point so I had these two rentals. You know they're bringing in. As COVID starts progressing, they're bringing in more and more money. Hand over fist. I was like, oh my gosh, we're making good money here. I was like this can't be sustainable. But I think there's a way we can jump in and make some quick money and do the construction side of it.
Speaker 1:So I'm talking with the builder and he's like look, man, you seem to be like a pretty smart guy. What if we partner it up? Okay, well, what does that look like? He's like well, you go get the land, you get financing for the construction side of it and I'll build and we'll split profits 50, 50. I'm like, all right, well, what are the numbers look like? So at that time this is 2021, 2020, and you could build a cabin for at least a one bedroom my size size that I was looking at for $160,000, $170,000. You're buying the land for about $70,000, and you're selling them for around $400,000. Good margins, that's great margins. That's great margins. We can do that all day long. So I hit the ground running. I go buy 11 lots. I got financing on all of it because we already had plans ready and the banks were financing the construction based on plans Are these conventional financings?
Speaker 2:Are they DSCR?
Speaker 1:These were mainly because I already had the equity in the lot. I had paid cash for them. I was using that as my down payment.
Speaker 2:Okay, so they saw that piece. Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, and at that time you could sell a cabin off plans. So a lot of of times we already had a contract paired up with the lot and the plans. Damn so, that's how fast things were moving. So a lot would a development, would open up with 100 plus lots and it was like a free-for-all. I mean guys, people grabbing 5, 10, 20 lots at a time and then you get the ones and twos where I just want that lot. It's beautiful, that's for my family.
Speaker 2:This is happening, so like this is not even probably being talked about too much on the internet, or like this is just happening, so this has happened very quickly, yeah, I mean over the course of six to eight months of me being, you know, involved in what broken bows um real estate market was that's how fast it evolved.
Speaker 1:And you, because of a vacation that y'all took, and your boots on the ground, you're like dude, look around.
Speaker 2:There's an opportunity here. There's luck involved for sure, there's no doubt.
Speaker 1:Now it takes action to figure out if that luck's going to do anything for you. So we get into it and I buy a bunch of lots and I get a bunch of financing ready, and then it just comes to a grinding halt. Three months go by, I'm like, hey man, I'm going up there every week.
Speaker 2:The construction Construction yeah.
Speaker 1:Okay, so my builder's not building and I'm like man, what's going on? And I'm not going to throw names and everything out there.
Speaker 1:But I'm like, okay, this is odd. I'm like man and I've raised a lot of money. I've raised close to like $700,000 from a couple of other guys that raised money from family members and I mean there was a lot of money being put into it. So I had a lot of pressure on me to perform and so we get four months in five months in, the lot got cleared, the form boards went up for the foundation, but like this is not like you told me six months in we'd be in and out of these, because that's what I mean.
Speaker 1:He built my cabin. I had a track record with him personally. Yeah, yeah, he was building cabins in six to eight months or less and beautiful ones, did a damn good job. And then here I am, four months in and I don't have anything.
Speaker 2:On multiple lots, right On multiple lots, with a couple of trees knocked down.
Speaker 1:So what's happening? So I find out that he's not paying his, his subcontractors, he's not paying his subs and his subs refuse to work for him rightfully so. And so I'm now calling him like hey, man, this isn't going to work like he's. So we, over the phone, amicably agree hey, lot 107, we're not doing that one together anymore. Lot 102, we're not doing that one together. Hey, the one up in pine hills, we're not doing that one together. Okay, slowly but surely, they're all off the table and I'm now the builder, I'm now the guy that has plans, has a bunch of lots has a bunch of construction loans behind me and I need to go find a gc that's up there in the area and so I'm asking around.
Speaker 1:I'm talking with a couple. You know, at that point it was hard to find work, hard to find guys that were willing to work for you.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because they already had a plethora of work working for other builders, and this is combined, probably compounded, with just the stuff that came with COVID as far as labor shortages material shortages, material shortages, high-priced materials, everything we're not even talking about broken-bowl infrastructure. We're not even talking about that. Yeah, so you've got some challenges ahead of you.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of things. There are a lot of headwinds going into that.
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:But with how fast they seem to be moving. When I was getting into it I was like, yeah, this is a no-brainer. And then so I've become the builder. And it was a shit show. It was bad. And so we're working through it. I've hired a general contractor. Turned out he was just stealing money and materials off job sites. Ended up he had a theft problem in the past at other employers and so fired him after. I've already lost a few hundred thousand on that in construction loans. So I'm taking draws from the bank to funnel this and I'm trying to get up there and watch progress. But part of his fee like how did you not see it going Well? Part of his fee was just $5,000 a month per cabin as he was GCing them, so a decent chunk the money was not nothing you could track to see progress management.
Speaker 1:It's just a management project management project management fee, and so I had at the time eight going out, so that's 40 grand a month, that adds up real quick.
Speaker 2:So this is the first part during this conversation where I've heard this is pretty big l, you're taking yes, yeah and it's and it's spiraling quickly, quickly.
Speaker 1:Um, you know, the money is still there, we just need to get them sold. We had contracts on most of them. So it's spiraling quickly. The money is still there, we just need to get them sold. We had contracts on most of them. So it was like dude, we just got to get them done and I was throwing out bonuses. Not yet, but if you finish this in the next three months, I'll pay you a $20,000 bonus. At least I'll make some money and save and kick other people back.
Speaker 1:Yeah, yeah. Well, some went that way, others did not, um, so he ended up getting fired and I hired another guy, um, who was one of the subs on the job that you know I'm having to promote, to become my, my boots on the ground while I'm there, and that went a lot better. So we started picking up traction and getting getting things done and we took on some some challenging builds. Um, we took on, um one that was, you know, 30 feet in it, off off the ground on the side of a mountain. Um it weather delays and everything that just compounds into essentially.
Speaker 1:I'd gotten to a point where the three or four that I had left that were either 90 done or just about to get started, had contracts on but I'd run out of most of the money from the construction loan. So now I'm at the point of swiping cards. I'm opening up chase cards because I'm not walking away. My integrity was I'm not walking away, I'm not doing that. At that time I had opened up our candy store in Broken Bow, so I've got Sasquatch's Candy Den pretty popular spot, up there now over the course of three years.
Speaker 2:This is when I met you, so I've got a reputation, so you've got residential and commercial stuff going on in.
Speaker 1:Broken Bow, me and my business partner had bought five acres for $1,050,000, and we're developing this concept that we call the yard under the pines, and so it's the candy store. It's about 10,000 square foot of artificial turf, yeah, naaman's barbecue, a gift shop and the cave VR, which is a virtual reality business. That was all in our head. It wasn't done yet it was still. We'd present it to the bank. We'd present it to four banks that all said no. We finally got a yes.
Speaker 2:And I'm still in the middle of all my other. So you kind of went all in. Oh yeah, I went all in. You're seven figures worth of stuff going on. We're, we're a lot in.
Speaker 1:And now you're swiping, you're opening credit cards just to like, just to keep get these, get these cabins built so that I can get everything and it'll pay the pay the cards off.
Speaker 2:Does your wife know the extremity of this.
Speaker 1:Yeah, okay, okay. Yeah, I mean it. Yeah, it was taking a huge toll on me, okay.
Speaker 2:Okay, yeah, that was rough.
Speaker 1:So you. So what comes next? So in the middle of that, I'm then sued by the builder. I get a lawsuit.
Speaker 1:The original builder Mm-hmm, Okay, Because I was for fraud. I get sued for fraud and I'm like fraud. So I call my lawyer and I'm like man, what is this suit? He's like? Well, he's suing you because of breach of contract. I was like we never, my dumb ass, never had an official contract put together and it ended up saving me that we didn't have one, but it also hurt me because it just drug out.
Speaker 2:Okay.
Speaker 1:Yeah, how can you breach?
Speaker 2:something that is not technically there. Yeah, okay.
Speaker 1:But the real substance of the suit was for fraud, because I was supposed to substantially grow his business. You were supposed to substantially grow mine too.
Speaker 2:I thought it was a reciprocal business here. Okay, so he got with some lawyer that talked him into suing you yep, and eventually what it?
Speaker 1:what I gathered was you know again, this is the bill that wasn't paying the subs where he had run out of money and so he was looking for a way to get get some cash. That's just my estimate. I'd never confirmed it, but it's just kind of what I put together given the circumstances can you say what the outcome of it is? Man. Unfortunately he committed suicide. The builder, mm-hmm, and I got that news and I'm like what?
Speaker 1:And so I'm like I'm in the middle of it too and I'm like I understand, I get it because I'm in the hole middle of it too and I'm like I understand, I get it because I'm in the hole, yeah and uh, he, he commits suicide and um, and I'm just like what the are you serious? And then you know, at that point there's more lawsuits that are getting tacked on to those vote, to the, to the family, for breach of contract because they're not finishing the cabins that they signed up for. And um, he's just, you know, the family's just trying to figure it all out. And then eventually the suit got dropped. Um, so you know, it cost me twenty thousand dollars and to defend myself, um, it's free to sue somebody. It the money costs. Where, when you have to defend yourself and I was just I couldn't believe it. I I was like what do you mean, man? What are you talking about? You know wouldn't take my phone calls, nothing, and so I was at a pretty dark place just business personal money, finances and everything.
Speaker 1:And I'm in the middle of building my own home in Colleyville. So I bought a lot. I'm building a house a million-dollar home in Collieville. So I've I bought a lot, I'm building a house a million dollar home in collieville. You know, because things just happen, yeah, um. So now I'm like okay, so yeah you're in the.
Speaker 2:I mean, you were way up top, oh yeah, and now you're literally about as low as you can go. I'm running that facebook group page page.
Speaker 1:And two-fold get people together, like-minded share numbers. I love kind of the bigger pockets thing, but more niche into Berkeley, More niche yeah. And so that's what I was doing, what turned out to be just a hassle to manage the 4,000 people that were in it, the different opinions and everything I was like oh, you're the moderator. I'm like no, no, I'm not I'm just just the organizer yeah, let's do it together, and so I I'm slowly just I'm off that, because you know, it just became a place to bash people and social media.
Speaker 1:It's just the social media aspect of it it's still a place, it's still a running group and, um, there's, it serves a purpose. Um, it just it became more than what I had envisioned it to be and so I kind of let that go and um and do its thing with, uh, with a new moderator or a new owner of the group, but, um, yeah, I mean that was over the course of two and a half years. I mean it really spiraled out of control. Um, and you know, I got the last cabin sold and then we had one that we were going to sell but they had backed out just given the market and rentals weren't doing what they were doing and it was my biggest cabin to date.
Speaker 1:So now I've got a 5,000 square foot cabin that I'm trying to figure out. Okay, we're going to put this back on the market, we're going to finish it up and get it rented. So we furnish it, we get it rented. I don't even have enough money to pay for all the furnishings to get it rented.
Speaker 2:Yeah, because what happened to the commercial stuff? The commercial stuff is still chugging along, it's still going along.
Speaker 1:And that's doing okay, that's doing okay.
Speaker 2:Thankfully that was a saving grace.
Speaker 1:That candy store is God's blessing. To what Is it still going on? Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:It's still going.
Speaker 1:We sell about a million dollars a year in candy so I was living off the distributions from that. Me and my partner. He was like look man, I'm doing my real estate thing, he's a broker and so he's got listings and he's doing all his normal stuff and so he's allowing me to siphon off more money than what equally 50-50 distributions should be to kind of keep me afloat, and so the other commercial thing is doing its thing.
Speaker 1:We're finally it was late last year that the other building got finished out and so all the tenants moved in and it's paying rent, but then right now the rent isn't enough to we're about two thousand dollars underwater every month on it even with all that yeah, even with all that, it just is what it is because it was so far over budget.
Speaker 1:Yeah, um, we get into the middle of it and we get the septic uh, commercial septic plan for the install, and I had budgeted about $150,000 for the septic. My rationale was each little cabin cost me about 10, five. This is, you know, this square footage. So I kind of broke the math down. That way Nobody could give me a real quote over the phone or even in person, and so I just came up with my own number. Well, that septic bill estimate came in at 325,000. And then this thing came in, you know, 50,000 over budget, and this thing was a hundred thousand over budget. The cost just exploded on everything that COVID. I mean, it just kind of is what?
Speaker 2:it was. Well, and just in general, I think there's a good time to give a shout out or plug to any small business retail shop, if you made it. But I mean it just shows you. In this as an example, you're selling a million dollars worth of candy a year and still cash flow negative. Yeah, it shows you how hard it is for small business to compete against some of the larger, you know, the Amazons or whoever. So if you're listening to this, like, give the small business, like this weekend, maybe shop at the moment.
Speaker 2:Shop local Shop local shop small, rather than just ordering online.
Speaker 1:I get it as convenient, but yeah, it's easy to to pull up amazon and have it tomorrow yeah, I have it on your doorstep at five o'clock tonight.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I do it all the time yeah, but when you've got a chance, yeah, stop in it at a small store because their, their margins, aren't as big as you think they are, and they're. They're not going home to a to adollar home I am, but I've got other things going on. So I don't mean to sound like a dick about it, but I did it because I had a bunch of other stuff that I thought would be promising.
Speaker 2:Well, it didn't, and now I've got a bunch of debt, but you've also had hundreds of thousands of dollars on credit cards, right On credit cards that I still have on See that I'm paying $8,500 a month in minimum payment on credit cards.
Speaker 2:All from the Broken Bow, all from the Broken Bow experience. Okay, yeah, see, people don't see that Right, especially in the day and age of social media, where you can live through whatever lens you want to live through and show people whatever you want to show. I want to show them my million dollar home. I want to show them my nice car, but I'm not going to show them my $200,000, $300,000 credit card bill.
Speaker 1:I drive a 2016 Nissan Titan. That's paid off check engine lights on. It is what it is. I've had to replace the rear axle. Now I need to go in for some coolant leak. It's not all just because you see the one thing. It kind of masks and can hide some other things. So but I'm very open with it. My friends know what I've gone through and what I am going through. Um, but going through that I never would have started the business that I'm in today which is called sage senior support okay um, and so I you know I'm this is 20, 22, 23, this is 2022, 23.
Speaker 1:This is 2023. December 2022, going into 2023. And I'm like I got to get back to what got me successful.
Speaker 2:So before you get into Sage Senior Support at this time, with all the turmoil and the hardship, the mental, physical, emotional at any point did you think about just throwing in the towel and giving up and saying I'm going back to W2 corporate American life?
Speaker 1:I did last year when things got rough. It's always crossed my mind Okay, but once you get a taste of working for yourself and being successful, it's really hard to go back.
Speaker 2:I hear you Before what I do now. I was in oil and gas and so people ask me could you ever go back? I'm like no. I couldn't, I could never go back, even though my job now is way more. It's a different type of stress. Obviously, going to combat in Iraq, that's a stress, but I tell you what the mortgage industry is more stressful than that.
Speaker 1:I don't know how you did it the last year and a half.
Speaker 2:It's wild.
Speaker 1:I know it sounds weird, but you can say the same thing about what I was doing too. It's um, it just it created. I think what it really did is I've always had it in me. It just brought it out. Yeah, Um, it was either sink or swim. Um, because now I had all this, had I not had a bunch of debt, had I not had a home that I have a $3,900 mortgage payment plus taxes and insurance, and a family.
Speaker 1:And a family of three girls that play club soccer and all this stuff that, frankly, you don't need, but also, I worked damn hard to get it so I don't want to also give it up. Part of me was like, well, why don't we just sell it? And that crossed our mind multiple times over the course of the last year and a half, two years of just sell the house. No, I fought too hard, I will sell my way out of this, and so I was trying to think of where I came across, this guy that was selling this program. But you know again, an education.
Speaker 2:So you go back to your roots, right? You're like I'm going to go, I'm going to pay, get some education, I'm going to pay for education and I'm going to go, I'm going to pay, get some education.
Speaker 1:I'm going to pay for education and I'm going to expedite my learning curve. While I'm in a bunch of debt, I'm going to go swipe a card for more debt.
Speaker 2:Well, that's what you know. Yeah, that's what I know.
Speaker 1:It's what you know. And so I fly out to St Louis and I learn about this way of marketing real estate in the senior living industry. And so, in reality, what it is is buying homes, fixing them up and reselling them. That's what I knew. That's what kind of what I was doing with on the side of the rentals. I was doing a few fixing clubs with a friend of mine, so I knew that it was local.
Speaker 1:Um gave me a little PTSD when thinking about construction and contractors. But, um, I was like, okay, I can, I like this. It's a growing um part of the population, the baby boomers, and how to position yourself in that niche. And so really, what my job today is is I guide families through the transition of a loved one that is in a home and going into some form of assisted living or long-term care, and so what comes along with that transition is the emotional side, the finances, the physical move, and what are we doing with the house and all this stuff? So a lot of times I get chalked up to just an investor. You're just taking advantage of the situation, you're lowballing grandma, but I'm not Rarely. Do I ever meet with a senior themselves? I'm meeting with their decision maker, their daughter, their son, their uncle whoever that's really the one making the decision.
Speaker 1:And so I've built this business based off of thinking back to my wife's experience and my in-laws' experience with moving their grandmother three times in assisted living into different levels of care, their grandfather with Alzheimer's and transitioning from trying to get VA benefits he served in the Korean War and eventually with Alzheimer's and getting placed around and some aggression with that disease and seeing just the toll on what it took them to just facilitate all this stuff of just trying to get them in the right place. Right, they had them living at home at one point. That didn't work out and that's that's tough with with your mom moving back in with you, who's 82 and you're in your 60s or 50s at the time so how do you do that, um?
Speaker 1:and so we ended up buying their home. This was their house over in bedford back in 2018, 2019, and we we bought their home to facilitate the proceeds that could, you know, help pay for care and things like that and so I built that business around my story. And now here, more recent, with my mom's, with my grandparents and grandmother passed away over the summer of last year and then helping my grandfather navigate, mom navigate what this looks like and uh, so, yeah, I mean it's just been three years of of networking and putting myself out there and doing things that I would have never done had I not gone through what I'd been through. Um, so everything that I've in, I'd never been closer to God either. Um, so my relationship and you know and people can laugh or your Bible beater, it's my testimony I was riding high all the way through 18, 19, 20, and I'm like God, I can do no wrong. This is amazing.
Speaker 2:You've blessed me so much, literally on top of the world. Yeah, you've blessed me so much.
Speaker 1:And then I get in the middle of that and I'm like on my knees yelling why, why me, what did I do? But that just got me closer to the word and just more involved in having God be the center of how I do things and why I do things, and so that's to me that's been the biggest life-changing piece to it all is being able to be just closer to the Lord.
Speaker 2:See, that's really fascinating because now you're taking that and you're going through. Okay, there's people that are going through an emotional time, and I know this firsthand because we went through this process in 2022, 2023, where my parents were still living in the same home in Arlington. But it was time that my dad had MS and it was like he can't live here anymore.
Speaker 1:Right, it's hard to live independently anymore.
Speaker 2:Yeah, my mom, she can't take care of him.
Speaker 1:She's the caregiver. She's got her own ailments, yeah.
Speaker 2:And they're getting physically older. There's just no way. It's the point to where I could hurt both of them if he falls, yep, and so having to go down that route, I'm like okay, we've never done this before. Like how do we find a place that we trust? How do we find a place that can give him the care that he needs? That's within the budget.
Speaker 1:I mean, there's so many things that you have to go through, then you go into those places yeah, like how much a month? Yeah, this one's 5200, this one's 61, this one's 42 and I feel bad because my siblings are across the us.
Speaker 2:I'm the only one still here okay and but I'm busy, yeah, you know, and so you feel you're the primary person that's got to get it all done and I'm like I'm trying to help my mom, but I'm also trying to do all the things that I'm trying to do, you know, with my family, and so it's like if there could be a company or a person that could help be this champion, and that's, and that's, the primary objective.
Speaker 1:Yes, my, my. The role in which I play um has a lot of different facets. The role that I get paid in is real estate. So if and when a family needs to sell a home and they decide to choose me, awesome. If not, it doesn't mean that I stopped doing any less of the um, the, the work or the or the helping them through that transition. I mean, sometimes it's just being.
Speaker 1:I've had a couple of folks call me that just needed somebody to talk to. I mean, yes, they called me to figure out how I could help them and they're like, oh well, mom's in an apartment, okay, great, well, how else can I help? And so it's just I'll be on the phone for an hour, an hour and a half trying to help them figure out what hey, have you called the placement agent? The placement agent is basically an apartment finder for a senior. They know the ins and outs of these communities. They work for free. They get paid by the community, but it's a free resource to you. Maybe you're more on the lower income side of things, which that happens a lot, and have you looked at Medicaid and how Medicaid planning can help you facilitate getting the care paid for for free. There's a lot of different resources out there VA, pension benefits. Anytime I go into a home and there's a flag on the wall I say thank you for your service and are you receiving aid and attendance? They're like what's that? And I'm like great.
Speaker 2:So you need to call Clifton-Sufall.
Speaker 1:I'll make a plug there because they can help you with your aid and attendance benefits. As long as you served in a wartime period for 24 hours, I think, then you've got money owed to you, even if you're a surviving spouse. So that's always cool to see that. Even the families that we don't help with, the real estate side of things is just the guidance that we're able to help them with. There's a lot of resources out there Place for Mom, elderlivingcom, there's a lot of online resources and I think nowadays we're just we're very inclined to, we don't trust a whole lot of people and we're a lot of DIYers. I'll figure it out, we can just get it done with. But for the folks that have gone through it, I'm just sharing my experience four times now of how this could all transpire. And you know, depending on what side you want to be on, do you want, do you want some guidance and some help, or do you just kind of want to figure it out?
Speaker 2:Yeah.
Speaker 1:And just the natural planning of, okay, you get the move settled in. You know that's probably a three to six month window of just an emotional toll, not only on you still having to take things up there and visit them, but also on them getting accustomed to a loss of independence, a loss of just not being able to. They just feel like you ripped me from my home. You know there's guilt involved on both sides In my grandfather's case. As soon as my grandmother passed, he's like I'm out of here, I can't do this myself. He was an only child, married for 60-plus years she did everything for him.
Speaker 1:So he was like well, I need somebody else to do everything for me. So in some cases it's really smooth. In other cases there's family dynamics. One sister wants him to go to one place, Another one's like no, no, no, People come out of the woodworks when money's involved. So I've had some interesting phone calls from families that we've gone under contract to purchase the home, and then I back out real quick once those dynamics come in because I'm not getting the reputation that I'm a Robin grandma.
Speaker 1:So my business was built with integrity and honesty around real estate and how we can help enlighten you on some different options, whether you want to sell as is. You want to sell it to me directly or you want to hire us to GC, fix it up and sell it for top dollar. Giving them some options on how to navigate the sale of the home and all the stuff is one piece to it, and then trying to help them through everything. But this business would not exist had I not gone through everything that I've done over the last three, four years.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's amazing.
Speaker 1:I've learned a lot and I've lost some, I've won some, but it's been one hell of a journey and there's still a lot more to go. So it's just a look back and you know, like, don't you regret anything? Or if I change anything, it changes where I'm at today. That is true, it's not one without the like. You can't just not do that thing and then everything else stays the same.
Speaker 2:You can't just pick and choose the good and the bad of what you want to do in your past. It's the journey, right, it's the journey, not the destination.
Speaker 1:In the middle of it, it sucked.
Speaker 2:No doubt, yeah, and so let's recap this. So we've talked about a lot, right, a lot lot. And so the people that they're still watching, I appreciate it If they're watching this and say you're talking to somebody that has a decent job, maybe they got a little bit of savings, maybe they got a little bit extra cash flow every month and they're like I want to get into something. Yeah, whether it's notes, whether it's single family investments, whether it's Short-term rentals. What advice would you give that person that wants to start today?
Speaker 1:Get educated. Don't spend too much time getting educated, but take action. Take action. You've got to take the things that you've learned and go do something. You've got to take risk. Owning a piece of property doesn't come without some form of risk. Risk doesn't necessarily mean losing it all, but you've got to be able to take what you've learned. You've read from a book or talked with a friend, whether that took you six months, nine months, maybe two years. A lot of us get analysis, paralysis, and you're just waiting for that right. Well, this one's not right. This one, at the end of the day, you just got to do it.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'm glad you said that because I, out of all, I have a lot of friends that are similar to you, that have wild success and the biggest thing that I've seen, the difference maker is y'all took action. You didn't sit there and analyze spreadsheets for three years and then be like, oh dang, I missed out on that one and then feel like I can't.
Speaker 1:So you took action, imperfect action is better than no action, than no action, because you know what you're going to get with no action, which is what you're getting today. Yeah, but if you're wanting something that's up there, you've got to start climbing. You've?
Speaker 2:got to start somewhere, you've got to do something, and I'm glad you mentioned education too. Yeah, because I truly think that that's the big difference. I'm not saying just go buy a house.
Speaker 1:Yeah, all you've done is rent and now you just want to go own property. Get educated first, try to talk with a lender. Learn their vernacular. Try to go talk with a real estate agent. Just talk with people. Hey, do you have an investor guy that would be willing to talk with me? Yeah, sure, just put yourself out there and make connections with people. Real estate is like like any business is relationships.
Speaker 2:And the amount of information that's out there for free between podcasts and YouTube.
Speaker 1:Yeah, I mean seriously, it's mind boggling you could probably go Google or YouTube how to buy a house in 10 days and you'd find somebody oh, you're going to get You're going to get some hits, you're going to get into a lead funnel for somebody, but you're going to get there's a guru waiting for your $999. The guru is no offense.
Speaker 2:Well, cool man, if so. If somebody wants you know what's next for you, how can they find you? If somebody wants to pick your brain on any number of these topics, if you're cool with that, how can they find you? You can find me on Facebook at Logan.
Speaker 1:Hassinger, it's my picture right here. I've been very consistent in my front facing image, so it's the same image everywhere. You can find me on my website, sageseniorsupportcom, and then I'm happy to connect with you on messenger and then go from there awesome, and we'll put all these links in the show notes too, so people can find you.
Speaker 2:Man, I appreciate your time thanks, logan.
