Why Real Estate Isn’t Fair and Why That’s an Advantage?!

Ben Lee, welcome to Radical Wealth Plan. Thank you for having me. Good to be here. Obviously, you've had a great real estate sales career. And I want to talk about your investment in real estate. You mentioned that the first thing that you did was buy a note. And so what, you know, I know your dad was a lawyer. I'm going to tell you, it is a crazy story. I'm a first year in law school, okay? And I was always interested in real estate. My dad had, he had bought and sold some apartments over the years. And we're talking five unit, three unit, eight unit, smaller buildings, but cool stuff. And he had talked to me for years about, you know, back of the envelope, you know, numbers. This is what the cash flow looks like. So I always was interested in real estate and my dad knew it. And he was a lawyer. He said, I have a client who her late husband subdivided a bunch of land in unincorporated Acton in Antelope Valley. And she, over the years, has sold off. He had sold off lots, but he had carried notes. And she got rid of everything. She got everyone to pay off the notes except for one. The debtor, the owner, owed her $90,000. And my dad and she wanted out of it. So my dad said, hey, Ben, I think I could kind of make this deal for you. You're in law school. uh, I think I can get a few for 50. And I was like 90, wait, 50 for 90. That sounds awesome. So I said, I don't have $50,000. And he said, I've got a line of credit on my house and I'm going to loan you the money. Just you pay off a line of credit when, when you can and you'll pay the interest and you pay the line of credit. He basically put me into that deal. Okay. And, um, I got the note and it was in arrears the second I bought it. This is why she wanted out of it. And I was like, I'm going to go foreclose. I'm going to be a cowboy. I'm going to get this property. I'm going to sell it for more money. And my father-in-law, who was an amazing lawyer, he said, hey, Ben, you know Ron? I won't mention names. Down the street, he is a hard money lender. and he maybe can help you with this property. And I said, great. And so I go by his office and he's doing loans. He's doing loans. I mean, he's making loans here and there and foreclosing and working out deals. And I said, this is what I did. And he looks at the paperwork. He looks at all this stuff and he says, here's what's going to happen, Ben. On Saturday, you're going to pick me up at eight in the morning. we're going to go to Acton. You're going to drive and you're going to buy me lunch. And I said, sounds great. Thank you. And he said, I'm going to help you with this. And so I go and pick him up in Brentwood and he gets in the car, my Volvo wagon, and we drive to Acton and there's a little fence around the property. We, uh, we step over the fence and there's chickens and there's a trailer and there's nobody there. And he said, okay, now you're going to take me to lunch. I said, cool. So he gets in the car, we go to lunch, we order burgers. And he says, you want nothing to do with this property. You are in way over your head. This is horrible. You do not want it. And he said, I'm going to help you. I said, oh, how are we going to do that? He said, let's call, let's call debtor. Let's call borrower and get him into the office. I said, great. So I called the borrower and he comes into the office. He's dressed like a cowboy. Uh, and he gives us cards, says insurance salesman. And he sits down and he had been paying 7% on the note. And I said, and Ron says, all right. He schmoozes the guy, they're talking, they're making, they're laughing. It's just a normal day. And he says, okay, we're going to work out this deal for you and Ben. Okay. Ben, what do you want here? And I said, I want to up the interest rate to 10%. He said, I won't do it. And then I said, but he said, and Ron says, Ben, stop talking. I said, okay. And he says, okay. So what, so we keep the interest rate at seven. Are you good with that? And he says, I'm good with that. And he says, can we, uh, how can you pay your arrears? And he says, yes. I said, great. Pay your arrears right now. He said, no problem. And he says, can you accelerate the payments? So instead of paying, you know, $800 a month, you're paying 3000 a month. He says, I can. And he says, great. Uh, we're going to extend you. And meanwhile, I'm kind of like, and he's like, stop talking. And he negotiated this deal with a 10% late penalty. And I was paid back in about 18 months. And I paid for a couple years of law school with that. I did a development deal that turned out not to be a development deal. And it was very creative. It was mostly created by my cousin who had really a great negotiation and people skills, but we were in it together. And, you know, I. It was the first deal in real estate that I made money and I got a check in my first year in law school for one hundred and fifty grand. And I remember going to the bank like I didn't have fifteen hundred dollars to to the pie. I never deposited $1,500 in the bank. And I went to the teller with that. I mean, it was like, I mean, it was euphoric. It was euphoric. It's a million dollars. I mean, you literally make a copy of the check and you want to frame it. Yeah. Like, oh, you know, I'm going to go in, we're going to go to Wendy's and then, you know, we're going to go to the bank. I'm going to deposit a million dollar check. I mean, that's what it felt like. I, my first big flip, I deposited a $600,000 check. Yeah. $606,000. And I remember it was, I could not in my life believe it. I could not believe it. So you went from that experience. So that experience, and that was one of the experiences that made me want to go into real estate law because I loved it. I was so like excited. And then I took all these secure transactions courses and land use and all this other stuff. I became a real estate attorney and I immediately went and bought an apartment building, which was not great, but I made a few bucks on it. I eventually got out of it. And I've bought others since, but I didn't start. So I always wanted to be an investor and I was investing. I was putting money into property, but I wasn't doing it shockingly successfully. I mean, it was okay. It was kind of like slow grindy real estate investing. When I started selling real estate as an agent, I would represent some builders because that's kind of one of the holy grails of being a real estate agent. You get the listing up front. You get the listing on the second time when they go to sell it. but I would watch how much money they made because I can do math and I would, I would see the money that those builders were making. And of course they're taking risk. So risk is no small thing, but it was quite impressive to me, especially given the fact that it was my information that they were trading on. Yes. So I, maybe I had a little bit of an outsized view of the actual nugget of value, but I do believe that the nugget of value is the information. That's what we trade. I mean, in, in, in real estate, it's actually legal to trade on information that, you know, that nobody else knows. It's legal. And so, and there's many times when you know of a situation that nobody else knows about and it's okay. And there's, you know, there's disclosure and there's all sorts of, for example, one of my clients had a property tied up and he tied it up. He's a neurosurgeon. He's a smart guy. And he does a lot of research. He tied up this property. And it was like such an amazing deal. And he starts wiggling on the property purchase. And I was like, why are you wiggling? And he says, I'm just wiggling. And it was in 2010, let's call it. And he says, I don't know if I like it. There's too much work to be done. And I was like, bob and so i'll tell you the situation was the person who owned it had been a surgeon who was very into drugs and he was a plastic surgeon he had a bunch of lamborghinis in the driveway and he had died in the bathtub okay and um his estate was selling the property and it didn't look good and no one had fixed it up sure and we were under contract for a price that i thought was amazing. I said, you, Bob, I said, you scored. And he says, no, I don't think I want to buy it. It's like, well, would you mind if I take your position? And he said, sure. And so I called the listing agent and I said, do you mind if I take over this buy? And he said, not at all. I want to sell the deal. And so I took it over and I brought in a partner because I didn't have all the money and I made a ton of money on that deal. And that was just a, everything was legal, you know, and, but I had information that no one else had. You know, okay. What was the information? The information was the house was undervalued. The, uh, they had already received probate approval without being contested at a certain price and uh that they were desperate to get I mean there was even further credits that were negotiated I cannot believe that I been doing this for so long I cannot believe that I been hosting the podcast and I've had so many guests and all I do is think about real estate and I go on somebody else's podcast and they're jamming me. Love her. She's top two or three podcasts in business. I'm on her network, Nicole Lappin, shout out to her. And she's jamming me on the, on the, you know, well, the S and P 500 does on average 10% and real estate on average does four and a half percent. So why invest in real estate? Defend yourself. And I'm, you know, I'm, and these are not prepared questions, but I should be able to handle that question, you know, and I'm doing the best I can. And I am gobsmacked that, that it's the first time that I've heard or thought of just put that way. Insider information is okay. It's the only business that I know of where you can, and by the way, many times they want you, they, they are desperate to close that deal with you. You're doing everyone a favor. I had one this year where there was a mold situation and it had fallen out of escrow a number of times and the sellers were wanted out of the property. And I said, I'll even fix it for you. But they said, we just want to sell it. And we'd like to sell it to you, Ben. You know everything about it. There's going to be no disclosure issue because I'd gone through four escrows, four failed escrows. And they said, we'd like to sell it to you. And I said, we came to a number and I said, that sounds great. And they carried and it was a great deal. And it was fine. And you just, I think there is, it's an imperfect, um, the information in many ways, there's humans involved and it's imperfect. And frankly, at the time, the buyers in escrow, we were telling them you can have it at this deal, the deal that they ultimately gave to me. They ultimately offered it to me, but you can have it at this deal. Just close escrow. And they said, no, we're nervous. There's mold. There's, and you know, and fixing it up was not easy. All the drywall came out, all the flooring came out, all the subflooring came out. We hired Paul McGrath, who's great to do all the ventilation. He put in four units in the basement or under the house. We did the roof. We did all sorts of things to make it right. And we compiled the binder. We did full remediation, separated into different zones. And I compiled a binder that was this thick about how this property was safe now. And by the time it went back on the market, no one had an issue with it. It truly is amazing. And the first deal I did was this development deal. I credit mostly my cousin. The second deal, I bought a property with my business partner. We bought it on the auction steps with every penny that we had. How'd that go for you? Actually, it went great. I mean, we bought this. There's a great street in Pittsburgh called Beachwood Boulevard. It was way too far out of the great section, but it was still on this great street and we bought this house it was a disaster it was a single family home that was split into three units illegally and there was like all these people in there and kitchens and all this kind of stuff and we finally got everybody out of there and we and we our idea was to get everybody out of there get the thing fixed up and turn it back into this beautiful single family home that was the idea we didn't get there because one of our childhood friends was like hey you know what i've got a husband and we've got kids and, and we'd like to, we'd like to buy that and turn that into our home. And we got a, got a huge profit. We didn't do anything. It's every now and then things, good things happen. When you're in the, when you're in the game, good things happen. And, and my, and we had every penny to our name stuck in that one. And then, then we found this, there was a family trust. They had all these like beautiful properties and they had like the total dog and the total dog had had two major issues one of them was uh they not they didn't just have a dry cleaning uh uh not just a dry cleaner there was a dry cleaning plant so there's environmental issues yeah environmental and then then it was old school there was a hundred it was a big commercial and it had a hundred units and the units were these like six unit like little townhouse things and underneath the street it was old school old school it was all it was all heated by boilers there's this giant boiler under the street and the street is caving in okay so between those two things and and so much of the property was going on at the same time that they were bidding up the these like great properties and you had to do your due diligence before. And so my business partner and I paid for the due diligence on those two items. We did a, you know, what a circle of one or wherever it was, it came up clean. So we had the certificate, it was a guarantee. We were okay on that. We had sort of two paths to fix the, to fix the, the heating plant and the, and the, and the, and the, uh, this, the street caving in and we're like, okay, so, you know, this is the cheapest we're going to get out of it. This is the most expensive we're going to get out of it. And even when we took the most expensive, we worked that way into the price, times five, reduce that from the price. And we had no money. We went to each of our brothers and we made millions of dollars on that deal over time. It's, I mean, the deal, that one deal, the one that I told you about, the $606,000 check that I put in. And that was not all profit, but it was a very profitable deal. That was an interesting deal that we bought a property. I had a client. I brought it to a client. I thought it was a good deal. And he said, Ben, I can't get a loan right now. This was in the tougher times. And he said, I don't have the credit to get a loan. And I said, I can get the loan. So we partnered up and we did this deal. We close on it. The day we close, there's a rain. It's in Beverly Hills post office so it's at the uh it's up on a um it's on lieb drive i don't know that street it's that house just sold for like i don't know 12 million dollars we wow we got that for 1.2 million dollars so we um we uh bought this house the day we closed someone behind who could be listening to a podcast like this he uh had been doing unpermitted grading up above and had dumped dirt from a pad that he was grading into a canyon. The rain hit, the entire property flooded with mud, literally a foot deep in front of, so we close on it. The next day we go up there, we can't even drive in to the cul-de-sac. There's just mud. The city cleaned it. We figured out how to deal with it. We figured out the drainage. I mean, it was, but we did really well on that property. We did really well. And that was in 2010. So that was a long time ago. And just for clarity and safety, you can absolutely trade on insider information in real estate. And one of the things that you mentioned too was, especially if you disclose everything. You have to. You have to be very transparent and you have to be like, I don't care about the deal enough to do anything that's not proper. Yeah. When you stepped in for the neurosurgeon, you didn't have to tell. I don't know if you do or not. Maybe you do. But you told the other side. You said to the neurosurgeon, can I step in? Nothing weird. He says yes. Then you tell the agent, hey, you know what? I want to take over the deal. And they're like, your money's as good as his. Let's go. Exactly. And I think if you go into things and have the conversation that you're nervous about having, that you're really, because sometimes you're nervous. I mean, I'm not nervous anymore about it because I have no investment in the outcome. Right. If it's not a good deal for everybody, I don't want it to happen. Right. That's right. And I think early on in my career, I would be like, oh my gosh, do I, you know, is this, you know, I'm nervous about talking to people about my involvement. And now I'm on a podcast. I have no problem saying I also invest in real estate because actually, interestingly for my real estate clients, this is really interesting. So not only for the buyers who understand that I know everything about the construction process, but also for the sellers who say, hey, maybe I don't want to spend real estate fees. Maybe I want to do a quiet transaction. And they know that I'm a potential buyer. I go to every single one of them and I say, listen, I have bought real estate. I've built houses. I've built a bunch of ground up houses by now. But I, I, that is potentially if I like your property, if you like the money, if you like the price that's available to you. Absolutely. But I advise that you go on the market. Absolutely. If you go on the market, you will know for sure that you've gotten top dollar for this property. And that is my core mission as a real estate agent. Now, as a real estate investor, if there's a deal that works for you and that works for me, then we can make that deal. And so it's just like another tool in the toolbox, I think. Sure. No, I think that makes perfect sense. And the other thing I would add is just, you know, have the conversation. Don't be afraid to have the conversation. Like you say, there's lots of real estate out there. It's not going to make anybody angry, especially if you disclose it in front. Say, you know, I could be the buyer if that makes you feel weird. Forget it. We won't. You know, we'll go ahead and market it. And then the next piece is, as we're both lawyers, put it in writing. You put it in writing. It's my disclosures are so awesome. I love my disclosures. And you know what? If it's something that I'm making disclosures, I actually have a lawyer that I used to work with at my firm. He's now my lawyer and he's a great guy. I send it to him. I say, hey, this is the situation. How do you feel about this? How do you feel about this disclosure? And if he says, I don't like it or I like it, I listened to him. If he says, I don't like it out out. And the the the thing too is that you know even even the information we call it insider information You know a lot of times it a lot of times it real It really not insert No it not What it is is that you know even the information we call it insider information You know a lot of times it a lot of times it really it really not insider information What it is is that you willing to do, you're willing to dig a little deeper than the next person. And that information is available to you. You have it. Nobody else has it because they didn't look for it. You don't have a public duty to say like, oh, I found this thing. You know, it's actually, it costs less to fix this and you think, you know, you've paid for that due diligence, so it's yours. What you and I and what our listeners can learn about a piece of property, and this is why, you know, I've said it a thousand times, but, you know, I have three rules. I've invested in real estate for 30 years. I've never lost money on a deal, and I have three rules. That makes one of us. Right, and you have these three rules, and even when I tell seasoned investors what the three rules are, and they're like, okay, fine. If you follow those, you're right. You'll never lose money. It's not like rocket science. And I follow the three rules, never lose money. One of the, oh, sorry. So one of the rules is buy where you know. Okay. A hundred percent. Okay. So that's rule one. So now you and I, we're looking at property that's local. So we know about the area. We know there's, you know, we could get a surprise, not likely. And so you buy where you know. And then if you're already buying where you know, and now we're looking at a particular property. So can you imagine buying in Chevy at Hills? Like, how are you not going to know? Right. And now you take the particular property. Now you call the right inspectors in there. There's no way that the best stock analyst on the planet could ever know a stock as well as, you know, that house in Chevy at Hills after you've had the inspectors come by. So I'm going to tell you, I'll tell you one that I just did. This is someone contacted me and said, would you be interested in buying my house? And I said, let's take a look at it. I looked up the stats online. I was like, that's a good one. I like this one. I like the lot. What about it? What about it makes you, it's a good lot. It's a flat, big lot in a good, on a good location. I said, I like it. Build, I could build a house there, a really nice two story. Cause I've done a lot of three story houses, Those big basement elevator houses. But it's a lot of work. You know, it's more time. It's more money. It's more potential for shoring issues. So I said, I like this property. I go to meet with her. She's a former financial manager, I guess. You know, a wealth manager. She was a wealth manager. Okay. So she was a wealth manager for many years. Very smart. Older woman says, I want to, I'm going to tell you the story. She says, I want a particular retirement community. They have no space available. Okay? So what I need to do. I know where this is going. What I need to do is I need to sell this property to you or to somebody. And I need to have the unlimited ability to lease it back at a fair price. And I want to have a 30-day cancellation. Right? And I said, the answer is yes. no problem i gave her all the comps i gave her lawyer the comps i gave her financial manager the comps we all looked at it we all looked at the contract and everyone said good to go bought it closed it she stayed the um the retirement community had a space open 30 days later right and i was counting actually on an 18 month rental sure so now i have a vacant house that I purchased on a 1031 exchange, which means I need to rent it. I need to have it rented. So I have this vacant house, which I didn't inspect, by the way. That's why I brought this up because you're talking about inspection. I didn't inspect the house because I wasn't concerned about the house. I was going to tear it down. But now I have this rental requirement, you know, like kind for like kind. So, and if the viewers need explanation on that, I could talk about that. But it's so I decide I'm going to rent it to a good friend of mine at a discount. This is my former assistant who just got married and he had they're pregnant and it's great. He's the greatest guy on the planet. And so I rent it to him. I clean it up. I put floors in. I paint it. The house looks good. They move in. Boom. Gas line breaks. Gas line breaks. Have you ever heard of that? like $14,000 boom sewer underneath the laundry room breaks $12,000. I mean, it just keeps going, but, and he says, I feel so bad for you. Cause I know you're going to tear this house down. I said, I made a deal with you to rent the house from me. I, I said, if you want to leave, I will give you back every penny that you've given me to date. And I hope the answer is yes. but if you want to stay, I'm going to make it, I'm going to make it good for you. And so I did, and he's living there and he's loving it, but I still feel it. I still feel like it was a good deal. Yeah. Even after all that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because you can, you can, you can, you can build that in. It's fine. Yeah. You figure it, you figure out that that's the thing about real estate. You can figure these things out. Yeah. Now, what advice do you give to people, um, about a fix and flip. And I'm going to tell you, for example, I always, and I know you do the same thing, but I always say, you know, I make the money on the purchase. So I make the money on the buy and I generally will not do the buy unless there's so much room in it that there's a lot of room for error because I'm not a good, I don't do fix and flip. I do a fix and hold. And then, especially if I don't have investors, and that's changing because we're doing syndication. But I make the money on the buy, and then I just know it's going to work out. Yes. I would put my mom in it. I would put my brother in it. No problem. When you put an investor in it, you've got to figure out like, okay, so we've got to make perfect use of the money and the timeline and everything else. But it's good enough that like, really, I would put my brother in it. No problem. Because I just know we're going to be fine. Um, but what, what, what, what advice can you give someone when they're looking at a fix and flip? Because I, the, some of the deals that I see even professionals doing, they're so tight. I'm like, I couldn't do it. My, my advice after doing this, uh, after doing this now for a long time is, uh, only buy deals with room. like you're saying. My other piece of advice is be very careful of expensive money. I get very concerned. I'll tell you, I had eight projects going when the interest rate changed in 22. I only had four. So there you go. Okay. So I, and they were on construction loans and construction loans are adjustable. They're floating loans. They went from 4% and I almost, it was about 17 million in debt it went from four percent to ten and a half percent very very quickly um and i think that those are the moments that can sink you so i think if i could give anyone some advice that um look a lot of people who do fix and flip they want to get in and they want to make that their sole, you know, way of wealth, their sole method of wealth building. I think that you shouldn't do something that you can't quite afford. Yes. And I think that there's a lot of people who will buy these deals because they are super, they're optimistic and they're excited and they take a hard money loan for 90%. And I feel like that is setting, they're setting themselves up for failure. And I also feel like they may be doing a lot of work for a very low return or no return. I think the debt is really important and the buy is really important. And I think if you can, you know, I know a lot of people who I know this one investor who he's an investor and his wife has a really good job. So it's like a, it's a really nice match because there's some steady income and then he can do the investing and they've done very, very well. Uh, for me, I have to be both, right. Both spouses in terms of having the day job and then having the, uh, fun creative job, but it's also very, very high pressure. I think investing is very high pressure. And I think people who, uh, don't acknowledge that, I mean, look, the first few deals you do, you don't quite realize what kind of risk you're under. If you do, you're never going to do them. Yes. So I think the first few deals you do, you're just, you've got these rose colored glasses. You've got these, you're so excited. It's going to be amazing. And when you start hitting problems, well, you figure your way through it. And if you can, all right, maybe you do it again. I mean, you got through it because you're going to hit problems. But if the margin is too tight, those problems can sink you. And it's not just that asset. It's all your assets. Cross collateralized. Okay. You hit my three rules, by the way. And then in addition to the three rules, there's another thing too that I use and you hit that also. So I said, buy where you know and you are buying properties that you really deeply understand. Yes. Rule two is the value add. It must be a value add property. And you hit that when you said there's got to be room in the deal. Absolutely. And so that's your value add. And the insider info, by the way, that goes hand in hand with that because I always say, I call it brain damage. And that's just- That's where you make your money. It's a problem that somebody else doesn't want to figure out. I feel that way all the time. Yeah. And actually, as a real estate agent, too, I was just talking to another agent who was like, I'm so scared to go to the seller and tell her that she's not going to get what she thought she was going to get for the property. And I said, you can't be scared of that. If the property has been marketed, then the market is speaking to her. You're not speaking with her. The market's talking with her. And really, when she came to you, she had a problem. The problem was she has a house that she doesn want to own anymore So if you can help her solve that problem you doing your job The number is I mean the number is important but it not the only thing There's other aspects to the problem that I think are important for you to handle. And that's why you're hired. And anyway, it's the same thing with investing. There are problems that if you can solve that problem, you, there's, there's money in it, I guess there's some sort of a profit in it. Oh, for sure. And that's, and solving a problem is hard. Many times. Yeah. If it's not hard, then you've lucked out. Then you've lucked out. But I think a lot of times you might think it's not hard and it becomes hard. And I think that I agree with you. I think that if there's hair on a deal and right, I think inside information may have been sort of the wrong way to put it. In some ways, you like it? No, no. It's the first time I've heard it that way. But I feel that. I feel that. Because you can be, there's a small group of people who have the information. And everybody knows that only a small group of people have that information. But if you are willing to act on it and have the ability to act on it, and everybody understands what's happening, I think it can be really good. Mm hmm. So you also change. This doesn't happen for me very often because you also changed one of my other one of my other three. I've been teaching the three forever. And my three are by where, you know, it's got to be a value add and it has to cash flow. And then and then and I let that morph a little bit because people people call BS on that because they're like, you know what? You're never going to find something that cash flows in a market like LA. But I go, okay, fine. So we'll morph that one a little bit. It doesn't have to cash flow, but you've got to have a real straight line, not like, you know, change the entitlements in order to make it work. You know, you've got to have like, okay, so I buy the value add, it's underwater. It's not cash flowing. But I have the money set aside and I'm going to do this, I'm going to do that. And there's a very short, straight path to cash flow. And so that's how I let the third one go in terms of it has to cash flow. And that's how you make sure that you don't lose money. But guess what you said? What did I say? Which is, to me, it's a nuance because I've been teaching this thing for years. And what you said is what you can afford. And so that's really sort of what I meant when I said it has to cash flow. because the deal is not going to take you down if you can afford it. So I had a much less dire problem because I had five properties, not I forget how many. It was eight. Yeah, I had five, not eight. And then my total outstanding debt was probably just over $2 million, so it was a whole different ballgame. But I'm like, I can afford it. Worst comes to worst, I'm okay. There you go. No problem. Yeah. Because I know that I had, and there was a lot of room in the deal. So I'm like, I know that I'm going to be able to fix these up and sure. I bought it for 500. We're going to put 250 into it and it should be worth a million. But now it's like, oh, okay, whatever it's worth now, I still put the 250 in. I'm definitely at 750, 800. I'm fine. You'll be okay. Yeah. That's how you weather that storm. Um, you know, I think, I think being a real estate investor, I think there's a lot of courses, no money down, get into real estate with no money down. Look, I'm going to tell you, I will bet you that a thousand people who watch this have made money with no money down. That's not me. I have only done well when I have put my own skin on the line and I have made a calculated, I've, you know, you, you, you, you, you put your, you put your, you put yourself on the line, you're on the chopping block and it's risk. But in my, in my experience, and this is a lot of this maybe comes from law school from seeing, because I studied, um, this California secured transactions in real property. It was the best course I've ever taken in any, in undergrad and anywhere in high school, the best class ever. It was fascinating. It was so cool. And you see real people getting into real problems in case law. We studied only case law. You see real people getting into real problems because of debt. Yeah. And I think I had that ingrained in me. So the first apartment building I bought, I bought it with a partner. It was $535,000. Okay. And I put up my life savings, which was a hundred grand. And that's what I did. That's what I could afford. And we got, we got debt on it. We cashflowed a little bit. It was kind of a mess. Sure. We ultimately made a few bucks on it. Sure. Sold it for seven 50 a few years later. You're in the game. We're in the game. So, but I think people underestimate the importance of having some capital to get in. And I, maybe this is an unpopular point, but I think if you don't have the capital, I mean, you can go to friends and family and relatives and all this other stuff and raise money, which people do. And you can make a couple bucks. You can make a slice of the profit. But it better be a really juicy deal or why are you doing it? Or why are you doing it. It's a lot of work. I think you and I split the difference. Together we do. We have the same philosophy. And that is that, you know, I have to listen. I'll have to listen to Ramsey a few times instead of just think that I know what he says. He's very popular. And my understanding is that he sort of believes in no debt. And I understand that, you know, there's consumer debt and most Americans, you know, the average Americans getting crushed by consumer debt. And if you did no debt, you'd be better. And you're going to say what I believe. Yeah. I already know what you're going to say. Yeah. And then, and then, you know, so we're not going to go there. You're talking good debt. Yeah. We're not going to go there. Good debt's good. Yeah. And then, and then we're going to go on the other side of it. I'm going to say, if I did not use debt that I would have, you know, one third or less of the wealth that I currently have. Other people's money is wonderful, but just be careful. To me, I consider other people's money, mostly bank money, mostly big bank money. that doesn't want your asset and doesn't want to hold you over a barrel with expensive debt. They want you to, they're going to make you a loan. You're going to pay them back and you're going to shake hands and say, thank you for the transaction. And to me, that's good debt. And that requires a down payment. That's correct. And then otherwise you're just, you're chasing it with the, you're chasing it and it's so much pressure and you can pull it out. You can pull the rabbit out of the hat but and these people do it and we know it we've seen it and we saw these people making gobs and gobs and gobs of money before 2008 and then 2008 came and they had you know 18 projects going at the same time so bad yeah and you know and i was sitting on the sidelines going like i wasn't sitting on the sidelines going like these guys are gonna you know get punched in the nose real good here i was sitting on the sidelines going like i'm so amazed by what they're i can't do it. But, you know, like what they're doing is crazy and good. And they're making, you know, tons of money. And then when the crash happened, I was like, OK, so that's why I couldn't do it. Large builder who is a client of mine. I mean, this is and this is a good sort of example of just being creative as well. This is a client of mine. He's a builder. He was very big into leverage and he would raise the equity portion and then he would get hard money. And I think that didn't turn out the way built a beautiful company that I don't think is profitable, but, um, there, and you probably know what the company I'm talking about, but, um, what I was, I had another thought, which was, it was so brilliant and it's gone. No. Um, but you know, I think that, um, I think that if you just methodically go forward and just put, just if you, if, if there's something that's worth 10 and you can get it for six, even if in your mind it's worth 10, you know, and you can get it for six and you can put in $2 and sell it for 10. I think you can't lose. Yeah, that's right. Well, I mean, we could go on and on. I enjoy talking with you. How, how many, do you know how many flips you've done or how many I've done about? Well, if you say flips, do you include ground up as well? Sure. Ground up. And also you can include, I would also include ones that you bought fixed and held so like probably done 50 yeah 50 51 that's amazing yeah it was a lot and some of them are expensive yeah which makes me nervous but uh it makes me nervous no it makes me nervous i mean there's nights when uh there's nights when i'm about it yeah there's nights when i'm up in the middle of the night yeah but but you got room in the deal and when you when you're uh when you're diligent what's the word i want to say when you're we've been talking for so long uh when you're um i guess diligent when you're methodical about your debt yes you're gonna be okay yeah you're gonna be okay and i think as long as you just be uh be you know regimented yeah about your debt position i think you'll be okay and these people there are people that are going to get, you know, I can see it in the front, not the rear view mirror ahead of us. 2026, $1 trillion worth of debt is going to mature. 120 billion of that was taken in. Yeah. And that's going to create real problems and it's going to create amazing opportunities. I think that's right. That's why we're people. I think people like, uh, probably like you and hopefully people like me. I mean, I just closed one yesterday, which is a great one. And I have two more to close the next six months. And, and then let's get ready and let's get ready. Maybe we'll do something together. I'd love to. Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.