you’ve managed to pull eight rental properties together while working a full-time job my wife and I own eight

single family rental properties the closest rental at this time is 1,000 mi away and the furthest one is almost

3,000 so the very first property we bought we got four uses out of it the agent who sold us our first property

about 4 months after we bought it he called us and he said “To this day those two properties have been the best performing about 40% above market rent.”

Real estate is so sick it’s the people that are risky most people just don’t make enough to save enough for that

whole plan to work with real estate you own your own upside

[Music] please help me welcome to the Epic Real

Estate Investing Show Mr aaron Amin aaron welcome thank you very much for having me you bet so I enjoyed our

conversation we got to talk about a month ago and I want to learn all about you so you’re in real estate and tell me

to what capacity and how did you get there yes sir first of all it was a pleasure having you on my show i appreciate you taking the time to to

come on yeah my name’s Aaron Amin i live here in Houston Texas my wife and I own

eight single family rental properties across Iowa Washington and Nevada the

closest rental at this time is 1,000 miles away and the furthest one is almost 3,000 so we are long-distance

single family buy and hold investors at least that’s the foundation of our portfolio i also work full-time W2 job

as a management consultant and I am a proud father of three young children

ages three and under three and under h busy light

yeah we got one-year-old twins and a three-year-old daughter running in circles around us oh my gosh you know

what i can’t even imagine what that would be like but I wish that was my experience because I’ve been thinking

about a second child but they’d be 13 years apart i wish I would have just had them but at the time when I had the

first one I was like “Oh my god how well would I do with two?” But that part would have been over

by now that was our thought process we’ll have them close together and get the crazy part out of the way at the

same time and of course now that we’re right in the thick of it we’re questioning our thesis there but but

it’s a beautiful time and we’re not rushing any of it by that’s good no you shouldn’t but I couldn’t wait for it to

be over so I remember that what my situation was but I wouldn’t wish that on anybody or I wouldn’t wish you to rush through that is what I’m trying to

say well sweet so you got the kids you got the family you got the job you got the properties and you got this podcast

so that’s not like the normal background of someone that has a podcast so what inspired that and what’s that all about

yeah so I’ve always enjoyed content right writing getting thoughts out of my head so it started with me about two and

a half years ago i just I took a writing challenge i’ll give them a shout out it’s a program called Ship 30 for30 and

the whole idea was that you for 30 days straight you create what they call an atomic essay which is like a 250word you

take just one thought and you figure out how to express it and explain it right it could be a concept or it could be any

idea that’s floating around in your head the idea is to just get it out and get it on paper and more importantly publish

it out on the internet to get some feedback on your ideas and spur some conversations and so I did this

challenge 30 pieces published in 30 days and I basically never stopped and so

what happened is over time I started building I started understanding and refining at first I was writing about

all sorts of stuff like my background in the concerts industry or I’m a drummer and so I’m very passionate about music

and I I tried all these different ideas out and where I landed is what my podcast is mainly about now which is our

journey to build a real estate portfolio while working full-time and building a family there was this natural evolution

of the content that I was writing so it was started as daily content and then it turned into a newsletter and then

ultimately I had a library of all these ideas that I had been getting real-time feedback for and it spawned what is now

the hybrid real estate professional podcast which is primarily guest interviews people in my network

dissecting their success stories and then also sharing some ideas and experience from my journey that has

helped us including some of the harsh kind of lessons and maybe mistakes we made so that other people can avoid it

so a natural evolution of content creation sweet so that’s why why I wanted you on is because you’re doing

something that a lot of people aspire to do because they’re a full-time something and they want to be a real estate

investor some people like what they do for a living and they want to have it on the side and do it part-time some people

want to pursue real estate investing to go ahead and replace their day jobs income but you’ve been managed to pull

eight rental properties together while working a full-time job so have they all come about the same way or do they each

have their own unique little story well each one has their own unique story but there’s nothing crazy or particularly

unconventional or creative about what we did we three of them were what we call the live then rent strategy so we

occupied them at one point we bought them with owner occupied financing slightly lower down payments and we

lived in them for at least a year and then we moved out and kept them as rentals right so three out of eight kind

of tick that box that’s you know uh house hacking and then that strategy two of the best ways to get an early entry

into real estate investing right beyond that we also long-distance investing was

a muscle that we built organically so the very first property we invested in was in Las Vegas i know you live there

now we lived there for 5 years 2015 to 2020 and so the very first rental

property we bought was in our backyard it was like about one mile away from our primary residence so we did not start as

long-distance investors but we moved to Washington during COVID and we had four

rentals at the time and so we by necessity learned how to do long distance once we conquered a little bit of that emotional anxiety around being

far away from our rentals it gave us confidence to be able to go into new

markets we ended up investing in an area called the Quad Cities in Iowa which is

a more affordable stable run-of-the-mill Midwest market and I always joke that

the purchase price of a property in the Quad Cities is less than a down payment

of a property on one of the coastal markets where I grew up like in Washington so we over time like I said

strung together a few uh with that lived and rent strategy and then we found a more affordable market where we could

snowball the profits from those first properties uh use it plus our income to

save for down payments into a more affordable market so there’s definitely stories behind each one but that’s at a

high level that’s great it’s something that I I promote all the time because I used to be of the mindset buying your

primary residence is a terrible investment terrible idea you can rent a property and live in much nice

neighborhood but then buy income properties and you can still get all the benefits of owning real estate i was subscribed to that for so long until I

met the guy and he totally changed my mind on this whole idea right on my podcast while I was interviewing him

four rentals or something like that michael Zuber maybe was it Michael Zuber no it was a guy gosh darn it i watched

his YouTube channel and I think something about four rentals or just four rentals or I know who you’re talking about and they have the same

thing but it’s not the same thing but anyway he had said he thought it was that it’s actually a really good idea if you’re going to get started not be a

full-time real estate investor this live and rent strategy right get in with a three and a half% down and anyone can do

that anybody can do that and if you can’t do that then you got some other problems that you need to tackle first

right but 10,000 bucks with a three and a half% down loan down payment that can pretty much get you into something

anywhere in the country and you can live there it doesn’t have to be your dream house it doesn’t have to be your castle

it’s it’s going to be a temporary situation but then you move out and then you keep that what is in a rental and

just do that you did that every other year for 10 years you’re so far ahead with everybody that did not do that

i would add to that too that you know when you’re younger or maybe you have a little more flexibility i wish I learned

about that earlier in my 20s so that I could do it more because you pretty much do it every single year how old are you

35 35 okay yeah gosh you look like you just got out of high school all right

but very good but the three kids aren’t aging me yet i have one quick anecdote if you don’t mind about So the very first property we bought we got four

uses out of it so that we bought it as a primary house before we were ever investors and we didn’t I would be lying

if I said all this was intentional but we lived in it for three years my wife and I got married in the backyard made a

ton of great memories as our first starter home then we refinanced it used

the money from the refi to buy two more rentals then when we moved away from Vegas we turned that house into a rental

so adding one more rental to our portfolio m and then before the 5 years

expired on our capital gains exclusion we sold it at a $165,000 gain taxfree so we learned all

these skills and strategies along the way and we were able to get four separate use cases out of one house and

that’s something again it wasn’t fully intentional along the way like we didn’t engineer that whole plan from day one

but it’s just an example of how you can take a primary house and get multiple uses out of it and turn it into an asset

where it otherwise could be a drag or a liability for sure yeah and it’s that’s

such a good point because I started as a real estate person because I was really

interested in the money i made a bunch of money in the music industry that thing collapsed so I had to start over again and real estate looked like it was

going to pay me the most either I was going to sell real estate or I was going to sell liter jets whichever had the highest commission just real estate

seemed a little bit easier and I didn’t know anything about jets at the time so that’s how I got into it and but over so

now here we are 21 years later since I became a real estate agent and turned into a real

estate investor and I say now like my YouTube channel my podcast it’s less and

less of a real estate channel it’s more of a money channel disguised as a real estate channel just because the real

estate is the actual vehicle that gives the average person like you and I the chance to do amazing things like you

just described what else could you have put that money in that would allowed you to do that

yeah not very many things tick all the boxes that real Yeah you would had to pick Amazon out of a million stocks to

really pull something like that off you know what I mean and still I don’t even know if you could have because you wouldn’t have had the ability to

leverage you couldn’t have accomplished as much as you ha have in that small amount of time so yeah it’s like I’m

only think myself as a real estate guy anymore i’m just a money guy i’m an economics guy inflation guy let’s I’m a

passive income guy it’s just that real estate is the vehicle that allows you to do it without a whole lot of

intelligence there there is some easier entry points than most people think i think some

people stop before they even learn about the fact that you can do a 3.5% down payment on your first owner occupied

house right some breaking through that kind of educational barrier can be difficult when you’re talking to someone

who’s not exposed to channels like yours places like Bigger Pockets or podcasts

so I think yeah challenging that kind of default assumption is another thing that is a benefit of being able to spread the

message for sure yeah the subtitle of my latest book Escape it’s all about challenging or sheesh I don’t even know

the name of my book challenging or overcoming unconventional wisdom with real estate or something like that but

but conventional wisdom with uncesh whatever go get the book it’s great

but it’s all about it it most of the book is about what we’re con taught through conventional wisdom and how most

people just don’t make enough to save enough for that whole plan to work and it’s certainly not work in a time where

you’re still young enough to enjoy it and just by being able to leverage someone else’s money to purchase

incomeroucing real estate whether you know what you’re doing or not like what you’re saying it just checks all the

boxes and moves you right along with the system and you grow with the system the system always wins so that’s awesome i I

love hearing stories like that my my grandparents were accidental investors and very much the same way and I got to

witness them and so cool so you also said a first few of the properties were through owner financing so as your

primary residence how did you seek those out if someone was interested yeah sorry maybe I should clarify i was

saying lived in rent none none of them were actually purchased through seller financing a couple of them were found

offmarket but when I say it’s a conventional kind of boring path everything was either found on the MLS

or through an agent that we had met through a previous transaction on the MLS got it so I would say we don’t we

didn’t go color too far outside of the lines to try and find these properties we just you know tried to keep ourselves

lendable that’s part of my idea behind the hybrid real estate professional is we kept our jobs we kept our balance

sheet fortified we made sure that we only bought you know income producing properties that would we understood that

the way that we showed up on our tax returns was going to influence our ability to continue to scale and get

loans and and we built great relationships with the agents that we worked with and three the three best

performing properties in our portfolio these were not ones that we lived in they were bought off market through more

or less pocket listings from agents that we had worked with in the past got it and we got a first stab at them no they

never hit the open market and we pretty much jumped on them at the right time we were hungry we were ready to go and we

had built a reputation as people who could close deals and so I would say we got good deals on those but part of that

is because we were willing and able to move quickly and we recognized the opportunities when they popped up i can

share a little bit the kind of the most unique story in our portfolio these were

our second and third rentals respectively the agent who sold us our

first property about four months after we bought it he called us and he said “I have these two single family houses and

they’re currently being leased out to an assisted living operator and it takes a certain type of buyer to want these

they’re on these five-year commercial style leases yes they cash flow really well but they come with this kind of

additional risk that you have a business basically operating inside your house.” And so we had to study up on what the

implications of that would be you know do I need a huge several million dollar umbrella policy is this operating

legally what’s all the licensing requirements etc but basically we did a

quick scramble to figure out hey does this make sense is this fully legit and

then we jumped right on it right so like within that really short pretty much three or 4 day period before he was

going to go call someone else we said “Yeah we definitely want first stab at this.” And to this day those two

properties have been the best performing in our portfolio they were at the time they were about 40% above market rent

they were locked into these five-year leases that had built-in renewals and

they had rent escalators every year so we’ve had zero vacancy we have a company operating and providing a great service

providing assisted living support for adults with developmental disabilities and they are great tenants we have even

extra layer of oversight because the state and that company both enforce good living standards so we have extra eyes

taking care of our houses and that those opportunities never would have come up if it weren’t for building that initial

relationship with the agent and sharing with him what our intention was for our investing goals for our family so that’s

one story I always like to share about a good one it’s a great one and those were early on this was part of your first few

right yeah yeah and I would say that the moment we closed on those two that was when we really felt our identity

shifting this wasn’t just some random experiment or side idea where we were going to own one or two rentals no this

was really part of our identity and that’s when I started coming out of my shell a bit more and telling the story

that hey my wife and I we are real estate investors that started I started being able to proudly share that’s

something that was part of our life now so what have you learned from those first few what lessons did you learn for those first few that actually helped you

in the later purchases yeah so I didn’t read a single Bigger Pockets book or listen to any podcasts

the only this is not a little thing but the only exposure I had to real estate was my parents they are very experienced

real estate investors they started in the early 2000s they invested while I was growing up i didn’t pay a ton of

attention at the time but I was very aware of their journey they went through the ups and downs of the recession and I

saw them come out on the other side i saw the stressful moments and I saw the highs and I saw them doing it all while

they were working and while they were raising us so I guess it makes sense that I believed that was possible from

day one but some of the lessons that I learned is that immediately I did not expect everything to go perfectly there

were a lot of mechanics we had to learn with those two assisted living deals the loan almost fell through 3 days before

closing we had to switch lenders and like we had to get involved and learn some of the legal we had to basically

defend the fact that those homes were lendable under that situation we also

were self-managing all three of those properties for the first several years we actually just six years later brought

on a property manager so we learned to self-manage and we wanted to build that skill of building relationships with the

tenants running all the rent collection leasing etc on our own because we knew

that property managers come and they go i had seen that a few times in my parents’ journey uh and then ultimately

I saw their decision to self-manage because they wanted to have real control and influence over their own properties

and they saw a lot of people doing a not so great job so I think in summary we

went a little lone wolf on our first few properties we got some scars and scrapes

and I wouldn’t trade those lessons for anything in the world however on the

other side of that once our that identity shift started settling in and we started actually utilizing the

abundant resources of the internet and podcasts and books and communities and coaches we saw that there was a

straighter line path and a bit more of a measured approach to real estate investing that could probably avoid some

of the mistakes we made and that’s part of why I’m so passionate about turning it around and telling some of the

stories of of the maybe shortcuts or just some of the kind of you call it

what the stupid tax or the ignorance tax that we paid at the beginning but like I

said I wouldn’t change anything i just I wouldn’t wish those same avoidable mistakes on anyone else either yeah it’s

good though because they’re unavoidable everyone kind of experiences different things but there are tough lessons

because they’re typically connected with finances and those can be most painful at least they felt immediately right um

but there are lessons if you walk away with the right lesson they’re invaluable

if you walk away like in 2007 2008 there are so many people that walk away oh damn real estate what a scam i’ll never

do that again i was like you just paid so much for that education now when you do it again make sure you’re applying

the right lessons right yeah I think nobody can take the experience away from you even if you

lost money on a deal whatever you learned from that is with you forever right and so we’re very lucky that at

the beginning of our journey some of it was timing some of it was that we bought the right types of deals at the right

time and with the right type of financing the early lessons we learned

uh stayed with us forever and I would say the biggest lesson that we learned and the biggest scar we got was on deal

number six so this if you go long enough you’re going to run into something crazy and this was the first property we

bought in Iowa we basically were building a team from scratch we had researched a ton of markets across the

Midwest and the South and my wife and I honed in on this area called the Quad Cities because it had affordable houses

nice steady the other two markets we were in were very volatile they went up a lot and they pulled back in

2021 when things were peaking they peaked high and then they drew back and what we wanted was stability so we found

a market that we thought would provide that and then we were really eager and hungry to start investing right then and there so we rushed through the process

of building a team we had a playbook and interview questions and all we felt like we were asking all the right questions

but in hindsight I was just hearing what I wanted to hear from the people that I was interviewing and so we built a team

somewhat haphazardly we did not do reference checks with other investors we just let the questions and the

conversation and the gut feeling guide us and long story short the first property manager we hired was the middle

of January in Iowa and they said they promised us we could get a certain rent that the data didn’t back up they

advertised it it was about 7 weeks on on market not a single showing and we come to find out because we were 2,000 miles

away at the time that the gas had been turned off for the full seven weeks the house was sitting at 37 degrees just

above freezing and nobody had been there in that entire time so we were being

lied to the whole time and it was being advertised above market rent so this was our first truly long-distance sight

unseen out of state investment and that of course basically made us feel like we

made a huge mistake we got in ahead of ourselves and this is a horrible idea and that was a turning point in our

journey where we had to decide are we gonna quit or are we gonna try and figure it out and luckily very luckily

the agent that we worked with had another person who was starting up a property management arm she was able to

swoop in more or less saved the day for us go figure she made the adjustments and advertised it at the right market

rent had a tenant secured and ready to move in within seven days we were able

to get through all the there was some damage for sure but it didn’t cost an arm and a leg we survived right we were

emotionally scarred we survived we had some cash flow from our other rentals and from our W2 job to make sure that

didn’t financially ruin us and we ended up building a relationship with this new

property manager and we ended up buying two more houses in that market later that year so nice i think we learned

some of the toughest lessons in the second half of our journey so far just

by being hasty and trying to rush through things that deserve more time and attention than we gave it yeah a lot

of those big lessons come in the expansion phase hey we got two or three of these things worked really well let’s

go and get bigger let’s do more and I think what you probably learned one of the biggest lessons that I eventually

came to one of my talk main talking points is that real estate is so safe

it’s the people that are risky right and if you really want to live off of passive income you really want to live

off of cash flow you got to do just as much due diligence on your property management as you do the properties

themselves maybe even more right and then you find a good one and now you want to take care of them and so I

always say your dentist your car mechanic and your property manager once you find a good one treat them well and

hold on to them for dear life because finding finding bad ones can be very costly and frustrating absolutely and

this is also part of why I think that the skill of self-management whether or not you want

that to be your long-term plan just understanding the mechanics of how to deal with tenants how to do leasing how

to do collections learning the local regulations yes maybe you want it to be more passive in the long term and you

want a property manager to run stuff for you but if you don’t know that stuff and something ever happens your property

manager retires or god forbid they do something horrible and you end up needing to fire them if you don’t have

any of those skills or knowledge what are you going to do in the interim while you wait for somebody to take over

having the ability to flex into that and take control when you need to that was something we felt very strongly about

from the beginning are we better than a property manager absolutely not someone who’s profession to do that is gonna

hopefully in theory do it better than us but having that skill to fall back on we still to this day view as a very

important part of our toolkit you keep saying Lee and you it sounds like you’ve

been very fortunate to find a like-minded wife when it comes to money when it comes to

entrepreneurship because stuff like this anything with finances but even real estate and having some bad

experiences depending on the background that each partner has when it comes to

money and investments and entrepreneurship that can cause a real divide but it sounds like you two have

been aligned and been a force to move forward is that always been the case

yeah I consider myself very lucky i appreciate you calling that out we are on this journey together i would say

there there are different times where you know we’ve had different levels of involvement depending on what’s going on

in our careers obviously we had three kids in the last three years so there are there was a lot of push and pull

just in our personal lives we’ve also moved across the country three times in the last four years and so I would say

we’re pretty battle tested in our relationship as far as navigating the trials and tribulations of life and this

is all part of the bigger picture right we I always say that our path our investing path was not linear at all

even though it sounds like oh great you went from zero to eight properties but it wasn’t a straight line path of the

three properties that we lived in and then rented two of those were because we moved for reasons unrelated to investing

and we just happened to decide at the time that keeping those was a better decision than selling them and so I

think we’ve always made all of our big decisions together we always have healthy discussion about that we don’t

always agree and it does put additional strain on your relationship when you’re building businesses and crafting a

vision together you’re not always going to be in perfect harmony but I do consider myself very lucky that we are

both passionate about what real estate and investing can do not only for the two of us but for our family and our

kids and generations to come and I feel that we recognize have a concept I

always like to say that with real estate you own the upside you own your own upside and as a W2 employee which I

currently am and still plan to be for a long time no matter how hard I work even

if I’m in a sales job or something where it’s commission based you don’t own 100% of the upside of the company you’re

working for you don’t but in a real estate portfolio that you’re building through responsible leverage and

operations and value ad strategies and whatever you do you do get to own that upside and ultimately decide how you

channel that into the impact that you want to have in your communities and the rest of your life so I think my wife and

I are aligned in feeling that way and that’s what helps us get through the tougher times when they come yeah i

think you are extremely fortunate it’s it speaks volumes of you recognizing your good fortune because when people

reach out to us here and we get two types we get the type that you know

they’re the busy professional they’ve got the W2 that is their career but they recognize that they have a need for real

estate to incorporate that somewhere into their financial plan and so a lot of them will work with my wife and our turnkey operation cash flow savvy and

then then there’s others that they don’t like their job and they want to get out and they want to find a new thing and

they want to be a little bit more hands-on and they want to get into flipping and being a landlord and creative financing and they reach out to

me and most people that reach out to us if if it if there’s a good fit and

everything and the finances aren’t too strained they almost always go forward they almost always do it with the

exception you know let me see if I can get the spouse on board and it’s not always the wife and it’s not always the

husband it’s both sides but we’ve seen most commonly that the saddest part of

how white people don’t move forward is they just don’t get on the same page with their spouse financially and I

remember when I was younger I guess if I’m remembering back I was always younger but what I remember

I had a job of cleaning golf carts i was 15 and a half and that’s what you needed to have your work permit and I’d get up

at 4:00 a.m i’d ride my bike to the golf course before school put them all out for all the golfers then go to school

and then I’d come back and I clean all the golf carts up and plug them back in then start all over again in the morning so I did that for a long time and I got

to meet a lot of people that show up and play golf early in the morning and there was a lot of regulars and they had I

remember the some of the pieces of advice that I did not follow but now being where I am today I was like what

valuable or invaluable advice that was one was certainly marry someone that you

can talk to you know and when you’re younger and the hormones are raging no I just want a hot wife that’s kind of

where I was at that age and I went through two of them that didn’t work out so well and fortunately the third time

around I really did marry my best friend it’s so cliche but I just I can’t wait to talk to her when anything good or bad

happens she’s the first person I want to call it’s and so that’s who I’m going to grow old with and it’s going to be a great life the second one was make sure

that you you like their family cuz you’re going to marry their family as well and so that was another one and the

third piece of advice like when you’re picking out a spouse was make sure that you guys are on the same page when it comes to finances when it comes to money

and I think those are just so invaluable when you’re picking out your spouse because if those types of things like

financial freedom and wealth and doing well for yourself economically is important to you it’s got to be

important to your spouse as well and I that wasn’t my intention to go down that

those life lessons but I see it so often here now and when I hear someone like

you talking about it it stands out it’s like the big giant Oh what’s the word it

just stands out as obvious every metaphor I had was not a good metaphor but it sticks out like like the turd in

the punch bowl but it’s but it’s a it’s just that obvious to me now and

obviously the turd being the good part boy this is not going where I planned no the point thing is I see it important if

you want to better yourself financially that you and your spouse agree on it so what is that and I think that’s really

important i know someone that’s listening right now they’re like gosh if I could just get my wife on board if I could just get my husband on board to

support me on this I know I could crush it i know I could kill it so knowing what they’ve heard me talk for like this

is my 15th year doing the podcast and I’ve talked about this a lot but someone fresh and someone who’s experienced it

and is thriving because of it what would be your advice to somebody that that might be having those challenges of

getting their spouse on board with their financial future yeah no it’s a really

good and somewhat complex question right because I always think about marriage as

the decision to marry somebody you have you love them in the moment and you’re in love with them in that moment but you

also have to think is this someone that I can grow together with knowing that over life over five 10 20 years things

change when my wife and I got together we were 23 years old we were party animals me more so than her at one point

even five and a half years ago I ended up having to check myself into rehab and get my together pardon my language

but I I had to clean up my act and the things that we used to do together we no

longer did together and there was a question that we thankfully very quickly answered about if we’re not able to have

this kind of party concert live music lifestyle that we so bonded over are we

capable of growing together in this new version and thankfully the answer was yes because we had also been through other things in our life that had stress

tested are we built to endure change and so I think when you’re to answer your actual question the idea of investing is

typically a fork in the road or a turning point for someone where they’re making a conscious decision maybe to

decouple from making 10% 401k contributions on their paycheck and

instead peeling off some of that money and investing it either in themselves uh for skills and personal development or

into something like real estate and so I think when you’re trying to uh explain or rationalize or even just get some buy

in from your partner explaining it as an investment right and instead of treating it as this line item on your guy’s

personal balance sheet of hey I need to take 15 $20,000 i’m not spending it i’m

investing it and I’m investing it because I believe in and understand the potential of what this can do for us and

our family it has to tie back to a vision of what you want your future to look like and if you believe I think

sometimes it’s hard for people when they see the first property and they say “It’s only going to make $150 a month in cash flow how the heck is that going to

do anything?” Yes for our family that’s amazing i think you have to be able to explain and articulate that you’re

starting a snowball rolling down the hill and it’s only with time and with good strategic effort and some element

of luck that you will that snowball will grow and compound and usually it’s not the first three or five years that feels

like it’s impactful it’s the year 10 and year 20 and your ability to endure

through these strategies i don’t know if sell is the right word but you have to be able to articulate the vision of what

these investments can do for you and your family and of course that may or may not land it may or may not work but

hopefully you know a partner who loves you and wants what’s best for you and wants what’s best for your family will

at a minimum hear you out and understand versus hey some guy on the internet told me I should buy houses can we go

withdraw from take a 401k loan a lot of it’s in the delivery and the and how you connect it back to your overall vision

for your life together or just go find a new one that would have been a quicker answer

yeah no that I think you’re right and and from my experience I this is really important things i think this stops a

lot of people because they just not in agreement with their partner and it’s the reason there’s disagreement or

there’s the reason that one side is holding the situation back from any sort of progress in this context is that the

one part that partner that wants to move forward that wants to take the chance that wants to take this calculated risk

there’s somewhere in that past relationship where they gave their word to something and they didn’t follow

through and now the partner doubts you and it might be totally in the subconscious it’s not like they’re

remember that one time you said you’re going to it might it’s just there it’s in the ethos it’s in the relationship

and so just if you’re going to go out and you really want to do this and the partner is not on board just you have to

keep your word this time you got to follow through you’ve got to succeed you got to prove to them that this is the right move and it’s your responsibility

to do that because somewhere whether you know it or not or you’re aware it or aware of it or not

you didn’t keep your word and now it’s in the space so totally and I think you

have to set yourself up to succeed as well right so if you’re coming and saying “Hey I want to invest $10,000 in

this one-on-one coaching program.” The first thing your spouse who’s never heard of this coach is going to say is “That sounds like a scam how is that

going to get us any closer to your goal depending on who you select of course it probably hopefully is not a scam.” And

what you have to lean back on to your point just now is this is the accountability and access to the

information and the roadmap on how to do this successfully with not only without giving up but without making what could

be avoidable mistakes the faster path to successfully doing this versus going

lone wolf and tackling it on my own where not only might I give up at the

first sign of adversity but I might make a mistake that could cost a lot of money so that’s the other thing too is like

when you’re rationalizing an investment in a personal development program or a coach or some sort of community that can

give you the guard rails to be successful you have to articulate it that way too right is these are

guardrails this is a playbook here’s some people that have had good results i’ve done the research on this person

maybe hopefully you’ve even run a basic background check or something to make sure that the same way that you deal do

jails on your investing team if you’re bringing on a mentor or a coach they’re

an important part of your team and you got to make sure that they’re the real deal as well a lot of it’s in the delivery and ultimately these are

investments they’re not expenses they’re investments in yourself and in my opinion that’s the best place you can

invest amen to that i can’t disagree with one word that you just said um I’ve

just always I wish someone would have told me in high school that one of the real hacks or shortcuts to success is

just be intentional about creating your environment who are you spending your

time with whether it’s mentors or a community or a group of people a

mastermind group or a coach whether you paid for them or not just be very intentional about that and that’s going

to get you there shoot i always say peer pressure like when we were in high school that was a negative thing you did

bad things because of you were pressured by your peers but if you get around a good group it works both ways all of a

sudden you’re like gosh everyone’s succeeding and I’m looking like a loser here i better get off my ass and do and

that peer pressure once you understand that it worked both ways just choose better peers cool aaron it’s been a

pleasure you said you were a drummer yes sir my son’s a drummer so I got a a

self-s serving question um how long you been doing it what type of music and what advice would you give a 13-year-old

that just has been playing the drums for a year or so and is showing signs of hey

this he’s got some God I love this question yeah so I’ve been playing drums since I was 10 so 25 years now and I

played in every type of band you could imagine starting in the concert bands at school so I did symphonies I did jazz

band I did pep band my in my early phase of my drumming career marching band was

my thing and I know a lot of people are probably rolling their eyes right now because they think it’s nerdy or crazy

but as a band nerd I played the trumpet go ahead there you go so you get it but marching band is where I learned most of

what I still to this day feel are the core fundamentals of teamwork discipline

taking my physical health seriously a lot of the best habits that I built came from my time in marching band in high

school and in college but from there I turned into kind of your more prototypical drum set rock drummer i’ve

always listened to and enjoyed playing rock especially heavier hard rock i was in a regional touring band called The

Good Hurt Shout Out Good Hurt for a few years so we did some touring around the Western US and a couple times on the

East Coast and that was more like radio friendly rock mhm my advice to a 13-year-old because I just remember so

vividly how passionate I felt about becoming a better drummer when I was 13

just lean into what you enjoy i think that was some of the most fun I ever had in my entire life was coming up as a

drummer while I was also coming of age don’t be afraid to wear that as a badge of honor and if you want to practice

four hours a day that’s what I did at that time i just was so obsessed with the idea of getting better not because I

was competing with other people but because I truly embraced uh competing with myself to develop a skill and I

think the skills I developed at that age again carry forward into everything I’ve ever done ever since then that’s awesome

that’s awesome all right I’m going to tell him to practice that’s what I’m going to tell have you seen that little black

girl on YouTube i think she’s got like a a a British accent or an Australian

accent i’m not sure so hope I didn’t offend the Australians and the Britain Brits out there but uh have you seen her

before i have not but I’m going to have to go figure out she’s amazing and she’s younger i think she’s 10 or 11 and she

was on there’s this one channel I follow just because of my son it’s all just about drummers right they just did a

long two-hour special with Phil Collins which was really interesting and they got the guy from Leopard was on there I

think so anyway they just always have these drummer sessions and so she got on and like these two amazing guys I forget

which bands they are cuz I wasn’t a rock guy but she just sat in the middle and they would play something and she would mimic it and she could mimic everything

at that age it’s it was remarkable it’s fascinating to watch what I will say one cerebral comment about drumming right is

that I learned coordination right your arms and your legs are doing different things at the same time in the band I

was in I was also singing so I had five things at the same time and skill

but it was interesting because you have to rewire your brain to be able to move different things in different ways at

the same time and I think that skill for better or for worse you know set me up to multitask and have different things

running in my brain at the same time sometimes I think that’s a curse but other times I think having built that

muscle is a extreme strength that has also served me well it’s awesome yeah I’m I’m amazed on how his arms and legs

do all these different independent things but Erin it’s been a pleasure getting to know you and I know that

you’re going to get some listeners from this because I think we talked about a couple subjects that I think are right in the forefront for a lot of people how

do you do this with a full-time job how do you do it with your spouse so the name of the podcast is the Hybrid Real

Estate Professional is that right yes sir the Hybrid Real Estate Professional Podcast so can probably find that

anywhere that you’re listening to the podcast if you’re hearing my voice you can certainly find it here and is that the best way for someone to get in touch

with you or is there a better way yeah so that’s a great place to just hear some of the conversations and experience that I’ve had if you like anything that

I said so far hopefully you’ll like that show my favorite kind of asset that I love to give out my business partner and

I run a coaching program called the Remote Real Estate Academy where we teach people how to invest long distance

but within that we have what we call the 20-minute investor which is how we built

and grew our portfolios in a system that fits in 20 minutes per day so we ran a

workshop on that that includes all the workflows software tools that we use to keep it manageable and for taking over

our lives so we can still spend time with our families and and succeed in our jobs so you can find that at

20inutinvestor.com like I said it’s a free workshop and all our workflows it’s a good good thing to check out if you’re

trying to do something similar to what I’ve done perfect you can catch Aaron at the 20minutinvestor.com or go catch him

at hybrid real estate professional podcast let’s stay in touch buddy and again it

was a pleasure and I’m looking forward to the future for you and coming back and sharing what you’re up to thanks so

much i look forward to staying in touch perfect take 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 could take 30 seconds to leave my show a fivestar rating and review this will go a long way to helping me reach

more listeners just like you thank you so much in advance