a rental property is not going to solve all your problems it’s probably just going to create more problems I moved to

South America for 3 months and my savings rate shot up to 80% and I was

like whoa there’s so many different ways that you can make money through real

estate and I really believe that real estate investing is fantastic because we’re not Reinventing the

wheel welcome to the hybrid real estate professional podcast today’s episode is a special one because we’re sitting down

with someone who has truly mastered the art of real estate investing on her own terms Sarah Weaver Sarah has built a

real estate portfolio that allows her to live and travel anywhere in the world all while continuing to scale her business using the medium-term rental

strategy in this conversation we’re diving into how she built a location independent real estate business the

strategy behind her High cash flow midterm rentals and tips and tricks for identifying win-win Partnerships to

accelerate your real estate investing Journey let’s get into

it all right welcome to the hybrid real estate professional podcast today I have a very special guest Miss Sarah Weaver

Sarah I’ve been following you for several years but this is the first time I had the opportunity to sit across the screen from you I’m really grateful to

have you on the show and although I’m familiar with your story i’ would love for you to just give a quick intro to my audience in your own words oh well thank

you Erin no it’s nice to be here I am a real estate investor I started investing in

2017 um at the time I was working remote as a digital nomad kind of before

digital Nomad became a true thing you know with the pandemic and so many people moving to remote for me travel

was always my number one I looked at my 20s as an opportunity to work really

hard accumulate a lot of skills but really just tick off a lot of those life

experiences that I wanted to have before um it’s funny Aon we were talking before we aired about being 35 and this just

being like a different chapter and so I saw my life in chapter um and one of those things that I happen

to do was pick up some rental properties so I invested in the midwest which I know we’ll talk about um at length and

those rental properties really changed my life I started talking about investing posting about investing which

is you know how you came to follow me wrote a book about investing and now I turn around and I help people um like

you who have a W2 job but want to invest in real estate that’s really what my time is dedicated to doing is helping

people inv in real estate I love that yeah our timelines are pretty similar too we’re both the same age uh I bought my first property in

2017 and um similarly invest in a few different markets but and when you bought that property did you know it was

a rental or like were you house hacking because mine like I went in knowing this

is a real estate investment property like I definitely knew I wanted to build a portfolio but it’s funny Erin I didn’t

know at the time what I know now and so I just thought oh if I just buy one

every other year for 10 years I’ll own five properties and that’s good I

guess yeah that would that does work right and I think there’s something to be said for like that plan can work if

you’re going to have a a W2 consistently for you know multiple decades and yeah you know diversify and have that be part

of your portfolio that strategy absolutely works But to answer your question no we did not know the first primary we bought it was before my wife

and I got married we got married the the year after that and we bought our first rental intentional rental property in

2019 but that first house we bought in 2017 is a funny little story about it we

got four different uses out of it we bought it and we lived in it for three years we used the cash out refi to you

uh pull Equity out and buy two more rental properties with it then we moved out of the house and kept it as a rental

and then we eventually sold it before we hit the 5year capital gains exclusion

deadline for the IRS so we were able to sell it I think it was $165,000 gain uh taxfree

so this is like our kind of beta property right where we learned we learned all these new tricks as we went

but I would be lying if I said that was entirely intentional we just followed the signals as they appeared yeah I

think that the ability to Pivot is really important as a real estate investor and entrepreneur and yeah I

think a lot of investors or I should say want to be investors get so paralyzed

because they think they need to know everything like I can’t tell you how many new investors who haven’t invested

yet are like yeah but what about a 1031 exchange or how do I buy the fourth one won’t I run out of funds and I’m like

Steve just buy your first one like let’s get your first one done and then let’s talk about all the things that happen

after that or how many llc’s should I form oh my gosh that question yeah you I

can’t even like I made a joke about it and I feel bad I got asked that question on stage and I made a joke and probably

about 30% of the room got the joke because they know that question gets asked all the time but the poor woman

who asked it I really offended her and so later I had to go find her like after the the conference you know in the

hallway and be like hey I did not mean to like you know rid I was not ridiculing you it was just a joke um but

for those of you that don’t know the joke so many investors are like how should I open an LLC do I buy it in an

LLC everyone is like obsessed with this LLC question and the funny part is is

that if you go ask your attorney they’re going to have a different answer if you go ask another attorney they’re going to have a different answer and then your

CPA has a totally different answer and then a tenured investor has a different answer so good luck figuring out the

right answer for you I am not an attorney I will not advise on that anymore well and just to like put a bow

on this point right I think sometimes people mask uh these types of tasks it’s

it’s procrastination from doing the actual work of going out and finding a deal right find find something that’s

worth protecting and and then you can answer those questions exactly I call it uh procrastination through

education so how many people do we know I mean we met in a mastermind how many people do we know that join all these

masterminds uh to get all their questions answered but really they’re just procrastinating and they’re scared

and I think it’s important that we talk about that fear so it it is scary like

if your family is relying on you to you know head your household and control

your finances and you make a bad investment that can be scary and so I think we’re here to educate people on

how to buy a rental property that isn’t going to ruin your life so there’s a lot of threads I want to pull on in this

conversation but I like where this is going so let’s talk about 2017 maybe let’s say the year or two leading up to

that um like what was going on in your head in your lifestyle in your professional life that led you to that

first property and then some of the fears that you just talked about where hey I’m I have a big chunk of money I

don’t want to screw this up but I know that you know I’ve done enough research to know that real estate is where I want to invest like how did you personally

get through some of those barriers in that very very first deal yeah I was probably at a very different place than

a lot of your listeners I was making very little money um and I was spending

very little money and so the cool thing is is that I didn’t know what this was called at the time but my savings rate

was so high and I’ll give numbers so I was making 47,000 a year which I I

realize now it is common like when you’re in your early 20s however I ran around in a really high achieving group

of friends so I know that they were making 80 100 and I was like wow that’s so much money and now I confidently can

say I’m making more than that and it it’s definitely it’s it’s all perspective because my expenses have

also gone up and so at the time my savings rate was 40% wow and and then I

moved to South America in 2016 for 3 months and my savings rate shot up to

80% and I was like whoa I’m on to something and I think for me at the time

before I bought my first rental property I looked at money as definitely had

abundance mindset around money and so I think that that’s something I want to mention because I think that that

carried me to where I am today is I don’t live very many areas of my life in a scarcity mindset so I looked at my

first rental property as can I flip it can I live in it which is going to be

you know either I’m going to rent for free or not pay rent so live for free or at least have my rent lowered which at

the time already my rent clearly was very low um can I do a cash out refi so

can I buy something increase the value through renovation pull money out can I

do a heck like I I call that treating your property like an ATM and so there’s

so many different ways that you can make money through real estate and I first

educated myself on that so I don’t want to PO poo on education that was not what I meant by you know procrastination

through education I definitely educated myself on all of the different exit strategies um so I I truly had very

little fear it also helped that the house that I bought was

$217,000 and my Piti was $429 I still remember and I could rent out

each room to roommates for 700 so I was like sweet if I get two roommates that’s

covered and I pay a third of utilities and I knew at the time at least like

then I have principal pay down prices will appreciate I bought in a really nice neighborhood um and then I forced

appreciation by doing renovations and so I did a lot of Blood Sweat and Tears in that first house um which again is

probably something that your listeners are like yeah I’m not doing that like I have a high paying job I’m not like you

know laying vinyl plank flooring and killing my back but at the time at 27 that felt like a really good investment

of my time um and so fast forward that same house my monthly payment has shot

up to just shy of 1,600 uh because of you know taxes increasing and and insurance

increasing um but my rent I now rent it for 3,100

and then it has appreciated like over $100,000 and I actually conservatively

have not pulled anything out of it so I didn’t do a cash out refi I haven’t done a HELOC so I have all that appreciation

sitting in there so with all that being said I wasn’t scared when did I become

fearful probably property number three and property number four that’s when fear really started to sit in why do you

think that is think that you have I mean at that point I owned I mean I bought a

couple multifamilies so then it’s like oh I own four air conditions of all air

conditions crap out this summer or I own four furnaces so that dollar amount got

higher um and then also instead of having $429 as a mortgage a principal interest

tax and insurance I need to pay I now have three of those and so I’m up to let’s say 6K um and so that that was a

little bit more stressful um also I I got riskier so I bought in a city I had

never been to I did a longdistance renovation which means I had to hire a contractor I had never met and I used

hard money and private money with the plans of doing what’s called the Burr strategy so I renovated it wanted to

rent it out refinance and be able to pull that money out so that’s a that’s risky is your renovation going to cost

more than you think is your house going to appraise lower than you anticipated um I definitely was approaching a much

riskier strategy so there’s so many things there that are wonderful for especially the listeners of this show to

to hear the first is I think that you had a business owners’s mentality long before you bought your

first property and so when you talk about how you you weren’t as afraid heading into that you were very well

your foundations were very solid you had a high savings rate in your personal life so you had kind of control over your personal finances and then you also

premeditated these several different potential exit strategies you had a really really rock solid plan and even

though you were doing a lot of the work yourself you know which may not be achievable if someone had I’m not doing

that now let’s let’s fast forward I’m doing a full-on renovation currently I’m not swinging a hammer you guys like

that’s things have changed yeah no but I mean I think there’s something to be said for for kind of learning some of

those motions on your own in the beginning and then when you go to delegate them in the future or even like

you said hire people from afar cuzz that’s the other thing you know out ofate investors is that’s the main you

know audience that I typically serve the getting over the discomfort of being so far away from your Investments not only

your Investments but your teammates right it’s that that feeling of like the lack of oversight or not knowing what’s

going on like that’s the real fear that I encounter with most of the people I talk to yes but what I just wanted to

point out about your first s right is that you you had a plan yeah a very very solid plan on very solid footing and I

think when people talk about the fear that they get around their first deal you can arm

yourself not just with courses and education and all that but with an actual like solid business plan and that

Dr risks at least in your own head and then also when you’re talking it out with people that you trust in your network that’s one of the best ways to

drisk and then the other thing is that you’re talking about as you continue to scale most people think about the upside

of scaling without thinking about the downside they’re like oh I can add additional cash flow but they’re not

thinking like what you said where it’s like oh I have this much Mortgage Debt I put out a post a few years ago we hit

our you know eight property was like I’m a debt millionaire now I have over a million dollars in debt now and I’m not

saying that to brag I’m saying that for Consciousness to be aware and also to

show that that’s not bad debt it’s backed by pretty solid loan to value and

then also by cash flow but it is something to be aware of and I think it’s so funny that you said sorry last thing I’ll say is that I work with a

financial adviser who helps me with my stocks and all my non-real estate and he doesn’t come from a real EST background

but when I onboarded with him and I told him I had eight properties the first thing he said to me was that’s a lot of

appliances Aaron and uh so when you said the AC comment I just couldn’t help but think of that yeah so for your audience

I didn’t mention that I have been fully nomadic for the last six years and so I joke that that’s just like a fancy way

of saying homeless and I regrettably have said this multiple times but actually own more units than shoes

because I quite literally like live out of a carry on case um and and as a girl

that does care about what she looks like that that’s not necessarily A brag like I do hope to own more shoes um but

what’s funny is that I own you know what 12 couches I think I own like 15

mattresses now because I own half my portfolio is furnish rentals and I am

finally buying my own primary so a house that I plan to live in and you guys

buying a cou was like a huge for deal I think I was more emotional about buying this damn

couch than I was about anything else that I’ve bought in the last eight years um because one I’m GNA have to sit on it

right so I want to like it but also it feels the permanence of owning a couch

feels so real and it’s laughable because I own you know 11 furnish rentals I own

20 rentals overall now um and I own a lot of things but this feels so

different it really does one interesting thing that you’re kind of explaining is that you had this abundance mindset

around money but you had this minimalist mindset around how you built your own life right you built it to be light and

agile and able to relocate quickly and I say this almost a little bit out of Envy because I’m the opposite I’ve I’ve

accumulated stuff everywhere I go I have more stuff not less and I always wondered what it would be like to have a

light footprint but it allows you to do things like what you’re talking about which is be location independent which I

know is a goal of a lot of the people that you know I talked to and that that listen to this show but I think that was

a conscious choice that you made and you you built your life and your portfolio to support that which is I think some

people call it like lifestyle investing right you you’re building a portfolio to support the life that you want to live

versus trying to just kind of wedge it into your existing life um without you know understanding what it enables which

I think leads to the one of the other topics that you literally wrote a book on which is um the midterm rental

strategy and was telling you before we hit record as I’ve run this show for almost 18 months and I have yet to bring

someone on to talk about midterm rentals but it’s one of the you know most popular kind of trendy ways to get some

extra squeeze out of a a standard single family home so at a super high level

maybe you can explain not only what the strategy is but then how you kind of evolved from the long-term rental into

this midterm rental absolutely so that first property that I mentioned um I did

furnish it because I lived in and so I had the experience of Furnishing something with the Avatar

guest or tenant in mind so that first house I decorated it in a way that it would attract the type of Roommates that

I wanted who would eventually become my tenants when I moved out and so I had that experience and then also I

mentioned that I went abroad in 2016 one of the things that happened on that trip

that I didn’t realize at the time would be influential but I met a lot of travel nurses on that back packing trip so I

was at a hostel in the north of Columbia and there were a bunch of girls that were all travel nurses and so for those

of you not familiar they they get usually a 13-week contract at a hospital

somewhere else in the US that they don’t live and they go there and they work that contract and to put numbers to it

they may the staff nurse at that hospital might make $35 an hour but

they’re going to make somewhere close to like $115 an hour and and so what happens at

the time is a lot of these travel nurses they take maybe two three or four 13we

contracts back to back and then they’d Go backpack South America backpack Europe take some time off and so I

remember meeting them and thinking like wow that’s so cool so later when I was a

real estate investor I knew that I wanted to own an Airbnb because I I was an Airbnb guest like all over the world

I thought how cool will it be to own an Airbnb however I knew enough Real Estate

Investors that manage their own airbnbs their short-term rentals and these two

night three night stays you know needy guess guest questions that was not going

to work with my lifestyle sometimes I’m on a 12-hour flight or I go off grid and

I hike kilamanjaro like it was not going to work for me to run a true short-term

rental and that’s when I went back and I remembered these travel nurses and I was like they told me that they stay in

airbnbs and so that became my ideal Avatar when I bought my third property

which is a 4 unit in Omaha Nebraska I knew that I wanted to turn at least two

of the four units into a furnish rental fast forward today and I own 11 midterm

rentals and about 90% of my guests are travel nurses wow you know what’s so cool is that now that I’m thinking about

so you did the house hack which essentially taught you to think about what people might want if they move into

a furnished home and then you thought of it really from also your perspective of like if I’m sharing space with people

how do I want this place to feel and then the second thing is like you were traveling and you met travel nurses who

they work really really hard for these Sprints 13 weeks maybe multiple contracts in a row and then they like to

blow off steam and they also like to have a light footprint yes so I think your ability to relate to both of those

situations probably set you up very very well to then you know explore that strategy not that you have to have that

all that parallel experience but it sounds like it was another example of like organically evolving into a

strategy just based on what you were observing is that accurate yes that and just I approached my real estate as a

business so one of the things I want to add Is Not only was I making you know under 50,000 I don’t come from money so

I really had no backup plan I’m single so like this had to work and so if any

of you listening are like yeah I want to invest in real estate but like it has to

work I’m like trust me I feel the same way like this had to work and so I went

about each and every investment that I’ve made with what strategy is going to work for one and then two

maximize my outcome so I want to know how can I you know get the most money out of this property and that’s where

mid-term rentals came in so to put some numbers to it uh one bedroom one bath in

Omaha might rent longterm for $750 but as a midterm rental I can get

anywhere between $18 and 2,200 and so yes there’s an initial cost

of Furnishing it and yes there’s now the cost of Maintenance and utilities that

may not go along with a long-term rental but overall I’m getting way more of a

return on my money using the midterm rental strategy without the headache and

the time commitment that a short-term rental might bring yeah that’s amazing so I know it’s very Market specific but

what you just kind of said with those numbers is that you can get more than twice the amount of revenue from a

midterm rental as you can with long-term rental at least in Omaha is that pretty standard for it to be 2X or more or are

there some markets where it’s you know 30 40% more like what is there a standard there there’s not a standard

I’m so sorry for those of you that love rules like there really is not a rule to this um and let me be very clear the

midterm rental strategy doesn’t always work so one example is my very first house the single family that I told you

I’m renting for 3,100 as a long-term rental I’m not paying gas electric water

internet or lawn care or snow removal on that property as a longterm so you need

to add all of those expenses if I were to furnish and then you need to add in

that you’re going to have higher vacancy for a midterm rental there might be times in between guests where the

property sitting vacant and you guys if your property’s vacant you’re not making any money and so in that case there

wasn’t enough of a margin between a longterm and a midterm once I also added

the cost of Furnishing a four bedroom not only the money like the monetary

cost but my single family home happened to become vacant

at a time that it was just going to be really inconvenient for me to furnish uh

which brings me to another point you need to recognize before you launch a midterm rental that you need to design

it you need to curate all the furniture you have to uh manage the delivery schedule of all the furniture you likely

need to fly out to the property you’re going to break your back putting things together or you can hire someone to do

that um which is going to have a cost associated with it it is a a good plug

that I do own a company where we offer that service but I think that it’s really important that people realize the

cost associated with changing your longterm to a midterm I would say six

times out of 10 it’s worth it but about four times it’s not worth it and so make sure you analyze the deals I love the

midterm rental strategy I wrote a book about the midterm rental strategy and I’m telling you it’s not always the

right strategy for every property that’s a really good point because I think a lot of people hear oh great I

can just increase my cash flow if I just flip this switch and all of a sudden start advertising on Furnish finder and

I’ll make you know 2x money that’s definitely not the case you have to back out a bunch of expenses that you wouldn’t have had to pay as a long-term

rental owner and then you know the Furnishing and then all the potential you know additional operational

complexities but so I think the majority of the listeners most likely have

full-time jobs and the idea of flying to a remote market and setting things up and coordinating delivery schedules and

getting things online is probably Out Of Reach so the second option right where you hire a firm to do that is that a

pretty common service in most major markets like whether it’s your company or other companies and if so like what

could someone expect to pay for that type of service yeah I think that um the fees are really going to depend on like

what they offer so for example my company Arya Design Services we offer where we’ll analyze your property for

you so before you even make the investment into furniture and making the switch is we’ll tell you what it would

rent as a long-term midterm or short-term rental so that you can make an educated decision it would be in my

best interest to always tell my clients to turn it into you know a a furnish rental uh but I also um am a person of

morals and I’m an investor first so like I always am looking at everything as an investment and so I would say about 50%

of the time we tell people like do it as a long Ral um that’s why I gave you know 60% of the time it it does make sense to

turn into a midterm and about 40% it doesn’t so we probably tell every you know one out of two people that it

doesn’t work so we first we analyze it then we will curate your design and

choose everything that goes into the property and again we are investors before we’re interior designers I do

have a designer on my team and she’s in charge of choosing everything and what’s fun now is we’ve done enough that we

have probably both touched every item so like I know that these inexpensive spoons are actually good quality whereas

like this inexpensive nightstand like dissolves after like anyone puts a glass on it right like Ikea dressers just like

disip dissipate over time so I think that it’s important to hire someone who knows what what the cost of every item

is and then also where to spend money so we look at your competition so like in certain areas is

you need to go all out on this type of design whereas in other areas as long as

it looks good and clean and like a good design you could go pretty budget friendly so for example we’ve done about

eight units in Detroit Michigan for a client and his budget is very small and

his units look great and they’re fully occupied cuz he beats out his competition um so so I think that when

you’re hiring someone at that level you’re going to get all of this or you can hire your property manager might

even offer to put the furniture together but you’re going to be picking all everything and just the Cure rating of

furniture takes about 80 hours and we’re experienced and if you’ve never done

this before you might find yourself at like 11:00 p.m. like debating on what lamp to get let me tell you that is not

a good use of your time you guys like don’t do it um and then also i’ I found this that

sometimes they’re like oh like I love design so like this is going to be fun and it’s like yeah you love design when

your budget’s really big but when the budget is really small it’s not actually that all that fun to like choose every

piece of furniture um and so that was a very long way of explaining that the cost is going to really depend on the

level of services but we start at consultations you know as low as $1,000

we we’ll consult on your property um all the way up to on a three bed two bath it

might cost 8 8,000 for us to curate the whole design that includes us flying out

there putting everything together but doesn’t include the cost of the furniture yeah well so much good stuff

there there’s I think you hit on one thing which is that a lot of people love the idea of Designing their midterm

rental but then when in actuality when they’ve got their job or they have their other properties in their portfolio or

they’ve got their kids that they got take wherever they’re going to go in actuality when you’re trying to put it into practice that idea the excitement

about the idea Fades quickly and then it turns into a pain and it turns into oh crap I bought this property now I need

to put it into service and three weeks have gone by because I got busy with my life so when you’re the cost of time yes

exactly and so that’s um no that’s a great point we don’t have any midterms in our portfolio my parents run one and

it is by far the most profitable house that they have in their portfolio and um

but they learned a lot of that the hard way like they did all the Furnishing themselves and I saw don’t think that 80 hours is an exaggeration at all they put

a ton of time into Furnishing and and getting the right features in each room figuring out all the you know the locks

and how the common areas were going to work it’s a lot of thought and energy that you have to put into it and even

it’s different than a short-term rental where typically it’s one person or one family that’s using the space not a

bunch of people sharing the same house uh which has its own kind of unique challenges but thank you for I I

recently heard a Chris Saka talk on Tim Ferris is podcast he and his wife were about to do a new build he’s a angel

investor he was on Shark Tank if you don’t know who he is he’s he’s just an incredible serial entrepreneur and he

and his wife were about to do a new build and they were like two weeks into the process and they looked at each

other and they’re like what are we doing we are about to commit like two years of

Our Lives to making 1,000 decisions and I can tell you I am C currently in the

process of renovating a house and I don’t know if you know this but for those of you that haven’t done this like

the sure you pick the countertop right so you need to pick what material it’s going to be but then there’s a type of

edging like now I know seven different types of edging on quartz countertops I

don’t need to know that information like I am so bogged down by these tiny little

decisions and so I encourage all of you before you commit to doing things on

your own like really think about the cost of time because my time has been so

sucked up by every little decision that I’m making on this it’s a pretty big renovation um and I I don’t over

recommend it for everyone and keep in mind that I own my own business so I don’t have to go to work or you know

report to a boss but I do have a lot of things pulling on my time yeah and I think it’s always in any context for any

person on this planet it’s a good idea to ask yourself what is the highest and best use of my time right now based on

the goals that I have and the lifestyle I want to build if you ask that con question in any context I think it’s a

good use of time to to you know at least understand where your priorities are and if what you’re doing actually serves

those priorities or not AB a great example of that that’s why I love the midterm rental strategy for small

multifamilies so for this four unit building I was already paying water for

the whole building I was already paying lawn care and snow removal and so the

additional cost was only the the electric and gas and internet on a tiny

little one bedroom so that cost increase was so small compared to the single

family that I used it as an example earlier whereas I didn’t have any cost and I was adding a lot of cost and so I

I definitely want people to really consider what’s also the best use of that property that you’re going to buy

um because I want everyone here whether you have a really demanding W2 or no W2

or whatever your life situation is I want every investment that you make to be a good use of your time and to tie

that back to what even the first property you bought which wasn’t a midterm rental but you had a plan you treated like a business owner you had a

business plan you had thought about what the potential exit strategies might be and you had a plan financially to make

it make sense for you in your in the context of your life at that time and I think that’s where a lot of people you

can alleviate the anxiety and the fear is if you just have a plan uh as simple

as it may sound but today’s episode is brought to you by the remote real estate Academy the community I launched last

year where I personally coach investors and Empower them to buy rental properties anywhere in the United States

my business partner Nathan and I have a collective 15 years experience with over 20 cash flowing out of-state rental

properties we provide a step-by-step Playbook on how you can build your own portfolio and start accessing the

life-changing benefits of real estate investing starting today go go to remote realestate academy.com for more info or

better yet shoot me an email at Aaron aam.com with subject line r r a and I’ll

throw in a special bonus for podcast listeners who join the academy now let’s get to the show I think fear comes from

uncertainty um and so if you’re not sure like how this rental property is going to work then of course you’re going to

be fearful and so I encourage everyone listening you don’t need to pay a bunch

of money to join a mastermind unless it’s m I would love to have you um you don’t have to pay a bunch of money and

don’t get so stuck in the weeds and so like I recommend like find a mentor and

just take one step at a time um and then most importantly just don’t buy a bad investment so make sure that it has

multiple extra strategies you really thought through it and the first one doesn’t have to be a huge home run is

what a lot of people say but I kindly disagree I actually think that your first one needs to be a great deal

because otherwise that’s where we get a lot of people who say like I tried real estate investing and it wasn’t for me

and it’s usually because that first one was a d dud o I love the contrarian Viewpoint um on the first deal I do

think it’s you need it to not suck for sure and um but there is something I

always talk about this dial right of people who spend they’re they’re professional preparers they take the

course they listen to the podcast they read the books but they struggle to take action whatever action looks like

sometimes ction is just picking a market or like going to the next step in the journey But ultimately you have to start

submitting offers at some point you have to start being comfortable and those offers will eventually lead to a deal if you’ve followed the sequence correctly

but I think a lot of people they just like are comfortable in that preparation phase because it feel it’s soothing of

like oh I’m arming myself with information and I’m building the case but if you never tip the dial to the

action lever then nothing’s ever going to happen right and so there is a point at which you have to let’s apply that to

other parts of people’s lives like let’s think of any of our single friends so we’re we’re both 35 and so we have

friends that are like yeah I want to get married we’re like okay are you going on any dates well you know I thought about

it like I thought about or I’ve downloaded hinge and deleted hinge and downloaded hinge it’s like okay that’s

not going to result in a successful partnership same thing with the gym like me thinking about going to the gym and

like researching between orange Theory and power life yoga like that’s not creating any good healthy physical

habits in my life and so it’s the same thing with investing exactly so I think if you know yes we all want every deal

to be a home run but I think if you you got to be conscious of where you sit on that dial and then on the other side is

is a bias for action and sometimes people take action without preparing at all and so I think there is kind of a

sweet spot of like hey I’ve prepared enough that I’m confident that I have the skills and I have the support

network and and the things that I need and now it’s time to act um it’s always

like you said people want certainty you’re never going to have 100% certainty in anything you do real estate or otherwise so I think it’s a finding

that sweet spot where you feel comfortable enough to take action and you trust yourself that you’re going to navigate whatever comes up because

whatever your plan is there are going to be deviations from it so at some point you just have to you just have to be willing to jump in and weather the storm

right yeah and I think something that I rarely talk about is what you touched on earlier is I had a really good

foundation of personal finance um and so if you’re not good at managing a

$47,000 salary you’re not going to be good at managing a $400,000 salary and so I also see a lot

of people come to me asking questions about real estate when they have a lot of Consumer Debt when they haven’t you

know they’re not even taking advantage of like a company match on their retirement plan and so like a rental

property is not going to solve all your problems it’s probably just going to create more problems if you haven’t

figured those things out I think that’s really important absolutely and so one

other lever that I I love you came and did a call on in The Mastermind that we’re both in action Academy on

Partnerships and when we talk about different strategies especially for people who are busy right the the deal

triangle you either have time money or knowledge and most people that are working full-time don’t have a lot of

time for to spend on on real estate so one of the best ways to unlock that potentially is to find a partner who has

time but maybe they don’t have the same resources that the full-time employee has so you’ve talked a lot about

Partnerships you came in and did a call that really really resonated with me where you explained you know how you

appli the the disk profile which we’ll explain what that is in a second uh to try and figure out not only your

personal strengths but how you might interact with other people based on their personalities too so I know it’s a

big topic and we don’t have a ton of time but maybe this is a really fun angle of your skill set and personality that I

would love to just hear some of your thoughts on especially in the context of how busy professionals might be able to leverage Partnerships absolutely so I’m

sure a lot of your listeners um have worked with managers maybe they’re even managing people and so it’s really clear

at this point that people hear and speak differently so I might see something as

oh wow like Aaron gave me like a really detailed PowerPoint that was so helpful

or I could say Aaron gave me a really detailed PowerPoint and it was a huge waste of my time I wish he would have

just got to the point and that is all about behavior and so I love the disk

behavioral assessment because it’s not about personality it analyzes about how people behave and so dis it’s DC and the

way that it works is usually people have one to two dominant letters so for

example the C stands for like someone who’s really consistent and loves

correctness and the reason that they love correctness is they hate criticism so think of your you want your CPA and

your accountant or even your it person you want them to be a high SE because they’re going to make sure every you

know ey is dotted and te is crossed an S which is actually about 70% of our

population love steady they’re good teammates they they believe in loyalty

um and they love systems and then a high ey is all of the

real estate agents that have their face on a bench uh Your Life of the Party

friend or I think everybody has that friend that if you’re about to buy something you’re like oh I’m going to

ask jonno like he loves giving recommendations like he’s always like the person that’s about to give a

testimonial maybe he has like given the most Google reviews that tends to be that person and then a d which is only

3% of the of the population but probably the loudest these are your very direct

decisive people um think of like any movie that’s had like an angry boss

they’re probably a high and I speak as a high that were not all like that but

that’s that personality and so why I like this tool and again it’s just a tool it’s not going to solve all your

problems but I just like this tool because I can identify what someone is

and I can speak to their biggest fear as well as their greatest desire so a high

eye their greatest desire is recognition and accomplishments and their biggest uh

fear is rejection so they want to know that like this is going to make them look good if you buy this duplex and it

C and when it’s cash flowing $600 like your husband is going to be so proud of you that you like made this good

financial decision for your family that would be how I would talk whereas if they were a high see I would say listen

the you know cash on cash return for this duplex is the cap rate in the area

is this like the cost per square footage is this that that would be how I would

talk to a high SE and I have been using this tool for you know over 12 years and

I think it’s made me a really good salesperson but to your point it helped me recognize what I was looking for in

Partners so my portfolio is made up of 20 units it’s nine buildings and three

of the nine buildings I own with partners and I was very clear on the

kind of partner that I was looking for so as a highd I did not want them to

also be a high D I wanted them to be a high s maybe a little bit of C so that

we would complement each other well and our communication style would work well so if you’re listening to this and you

are that busy professional who doesn’t have a lot of time and maybe is really scared or fearful about your

first deal maybe it’s a good idea to partner with someone who has experience

you may end up bringing more money to the table and they are what I call the muscle or the on the ground you know

work um that might be a really good partnership for you and that’s what worked for me is I found someone who had

a good salary they needed to spend less time on the deal

than I was willing to do and so they brought the down payment I found the deal manag the renovation manage the

tenants really manage everything the bookkeeping the taxes everything um and they just get a nice you know owner

distribution every quarter or you know at least an update every quarter um and we split profits um uh meaning the cash

flow and then eventually we will split the equity in the property that’s amazing yeah I love using those

methodologies and those systems to try and understand not only yourself but how to communicate with other people who

value different things and communication style and the way that people like you said that the PowerPoint is a great

example some people might love just getting all that information because again information is soothing to them it

it answers questions and it reduces uncertainty and it’s polish and it’s cool looking the other person might be

like dude what’s the point what are you trying to tell me just tell like just either put it in a sentence or whatever

right text it to me like I don’t need the fancy presentation so knowing your audience when you’re talking I think

also to investors right if you’re trying to raise money trying to understand like who’s the type of person I’m talking to

do they want me to drown them in metrics or do they want to buy into the vision like what do they what is it that they

care about not only qualitatively but then you know what is the return or what

is the outcome that they’re looking for as a result of this so just training yourself to think along those lines is

valuable in and of itself and then Partnerships can provide you know they can fill gaps where you might have them

and they can also potentially even though you might think to yourself like we were saying earlier oh I’d love to design that house or I’d love to be

on the ground and handson maybe you don’t actually love that and you just want to vicariously do that through

someone else who actually does um so you can find all that stuff out if you’re willing to kind of explore this route

the one thing I want to ask you about Partnerships though is um so there it can answer a lot of uh it can solve a

lot of problems answer a lot of questions it can also create new problems yes because you know when

people I always think when people start a partnership it’s easy easier to gain

alignment at the beginning when you’re excited about something but as life goes on and as time passes and as each

person’s circumstances changes yes whether it’s life events or jobs or career changes what whatever it is

maintaining that alignment is very difficult so what are like some of the protections that you would suggest

putting in place or or whether it’s in your own mind or legal or otherwise to

kind of um manage that that Journey if you enter into a partnership yeah absolutely so the legal

side again this is not legal advice I’m not an attorney um but from my own experience we have a very detailed

operating agreement and we talked about things um one of my partners was engaged at the time so I wanted to be very clear

that I didn’t want to be in partnership with her husband not I mean nothing against him but I know that if there’s

too many cooks in the kitchen that can cause a problem so we wrote out like what is that going to look like um and

then also what in the case of death what happens um if a partner wants to get out

um so one of my partners is wanting to pull more like have more owner distributions than I would want I like

I’m pretty conservative when it comes to money and I would like for there to be a pretty good amount of reserves in that

property’s savings account um and so we we have conversations around what do we do in these

situations um and a lot of those conversations happened before I even identifi a property and so I’m having

conversations with potential Partners on what it would look like to partner with me and it probably looks very different

to partner with me I am looking for a silent partner so you don’t get an opinion on what tenants move in you

don’t get an opinion on how I’m going to furnish it if it’s a furnish rental and for my partners they are like Hallelujah

I am super busy I have no desire to like do anything related to tenants like I

just want to own rentals for tax purposes for the cash flow for the

appreciation and one of them was kind of toying around with can I do this on my own so they wanted to like see you

behind the curtain um and so I was very very clear that I wanted a silent partner whereas I have a a very good

friend and he has a a a partner that they buy rentals together they’re both very involved and they like that they

like chitchatting about what’s going to happen bounce ideas off of each other and I’m like that is not what I was

looking for and so so you need to ask yourself before you enter a partnership what are you really looking for and it’s

okay if the answerers I don’t know um at the beginning at my very first partnership I I had a I had an idea

again because I look at everything as a business but I definitely learned a lot from that very first partnership that

then dictated how I was going to approach Partnerships in the future that’s amazing so very important

follow-up question where can my listeners find their own Sarah

um gosh so many places you probably work with them so um if you’re willing to be

the on the ground I call it the hustle in the muscle uh your money partner is probably a few cubicles over or maybe in

your past job think of like one of your favorite people that you worked with there are so many hidden millionaires

out there uh who have a ton of money sitting around if that’s the partner if

you are the one with the money um then I recommend putting yourself in the room with people who would act as the hustle

and the muscle so these are Retreats uh my company invested Adventures host

Retreats for Real Estate Investors and you’re going to spend four to 10 days um

either doing a like on the ground Workshop like uh like one of my Nashville Retreats or we’re going to you

know hike uh kilamanjaro this summer and go on an African safari and you really

get to know somebody when you know do something like that together we’re also exploring Japan during the cherry

blossom season eating at Michelin star restaurants all alongside other Real Estate Investors that’s a great way to

find your next partner because you see how they handle stressful situations how they communicate do you even like them

and what’s their kind of investing um strategy and does it align with what you’re doing it’s such a good point if

you meet somebody for a 30- minute Zoom call and it’s specifically about hey would we be good partners together and

you’re learning your style you can accomplish push a lot that way but when you start breaking bread with people and

you know staying for multiple days in a row you see them in the morning you see them in the evening you see like what

kind of person are they truly and um there’s something different that you can learn when you’re kind of integrated

into a more of a realistic life situation then versus like a a more

structured like networking environment and that’s that’s and that’s just an equity partnership so let me be clear

that there’s also more short-term relationships that you can so one thing I highly recommend people

do before they join an equity Partners is act as a private money lender so um

an example is I’m actually a private money lender on a deal right now so I’m lending out a set dollar amount for a

set amount of time with a set return and so I’m going to be able to figure out

how good of an investor is this person do they communicate do they give me my money back on time um how do they

operate and then after you lend as a private money l then I would you know get into

conversations about Equity partnership cuz Equity Partnerships are likely going to last 3 to 10 years and so this is not

a short-term relationship so you do want to make sure that you enjoy at least a quarterly Zoom call with this person

yeah very important distinction there well I know we’re almost out of time but I would love for you to give an opportunity to talk about your kind of

program that you’ve booted up what does that look like and who is your kind of typical person that you serve yeah so

the mentorship program is a year-long program for busy professionals so I cut

out a lot of the noise um Let me give a good example so Paul joined the program he is a busy professional in Northern

California he owns zero rentals and he had the money to invest and he with in

my program I gave him the conventional lender so mortgage lender I introduced

him to the agent the agent went and found him the deal I happen to also invest in this town so I gave him my

cleaner my handyman my lawn guy and so Paul would tell you that like he

wouldn’t have the portfolio that he has right now had he not joined the mentorship program and I really believe

that real estate investing is fantastic because we’re not Reinventing the wheel and so it is a proven strategy that does

work I think it’s very important that you don’t try to do something um brand

new for the first time without some guidance so that’s why the mentorship program is there and so if anyone’s

interested in joining I’d love to have a chat with you just send me an email or slide into my Instagram DMS um I love

helping people like you who know that they want to invest in real estate and

they’re scared to do it the wrong way and so I think uh the cost of the mentorship program is a really good

investment um I almost guarantee that you’re going to either make that money back through your first deal or you’re

definitely going to avoid a mistake that would cost you that much money yeah

that’s a really good way to think about making an investment in education mentorship Etc is it’s not so much oh

I’m going to make it back from the cash flow which you can over time but it’s also like what avoidable mistake can I

not make because I got good information from someone who’s already done what I’m trying to do so that that’s one one

really good way to think about the value of it so well Sarah it’s been so much fun I could probably talk for another I

have so many other topics I was thinking we would get to but time just flew on by I appreciate you coming on the show and

I hope we can do it again sometime soon thanks Aaron I really appreciate it thank you for making it to the end of

today’s episode as you may know podcasts are very difficult to grow organically if you’re getting value from today’s

episode I’d deeply appreciate if you can take 30 seconds to leave my show a five star rating and review this will go a

long way to helping me reach more listeners just like you thank you so much in advance