LISTEN TO THE FULL EPISODE ON:
Timestamps:
0:00 - Intro to Lila & Ethan
2:00 - Lila's Background
3:59 - Ethan's Start in Investing
7:11 - How to Get Your Kids Interested In Real Estate
9:13 - Mistakes, Failures, and Learning Experiences
11:31 - Started an LLC at $1000
12:40 - Ethan's Second Deal with Not Enough Money
17:22 - The Creativity of Investment Real Estate
19:12 - Parenting Strategy
26:20 - How to Find Lila and Ethan
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Minnesota Real Estate
Read the full transcript here:
Mike Swenson
Welcome to The Real freedom show where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some real freedom together.
Mike Swenson
All right, welcome everybody to another episode of The Real freedom show. And we're talking about building time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. And so we have an amazing family on the show, well, half of the family on the show, and it will absolutely blow your mind if you're thinking about investing in real estate. And you're trying to come up with all these different barriers and reasons why you can't start, how about been inspired by a person who first started getting in real estate investing at the age of seven, and at the age of 13, now has 39 units. And so that is Ethan and Ethan and his mom, Lila are here with me today. And we are going to talk about their real estate investing journey. So we're so excited to have you guys on the show. Welcome.
Lila Wohlwend
We're very excited to speak with your listeners, a lot of people don't realise that kids can invest in real estate. And my family is a testament to how kids can do that. Because we never gave our kids any money for this, we never got a bank loan for them. They had to be very creative and figure out how they could purchase real estate, how they could negotiate their own deals, how they can find their own deals. And they've managed to do all of that.
Mike Swenson
And I'm talking with my kids, we're talking about like selling Pokeyman cards, that's where we're at right now. So still work it up to the real estate, but super excited for you guys. And what you guys are doing. So yeah, why don't you just share like a little bit about your journey, because you guys have had a lot of in your background and overcome a lot to get where you're at today. So we'll talk about that. And then we'll we'll get into your kids and raising them and, and then obviously the success story of where you guys are at?
Lila Wohlwend
Well, it really all started because I had a frustration in school where you know, I could play the game and I could memorise all these answers. And I could get A's but I didn't really understand the information. And so when I left college, I was very frustrated. And my real education started when we started going to things like these real estate groups. And we were learning about, you know, business and marketing and finances and, and my real education came from seminars, not from actual school. And I knew that when I had kids, I wanted them to have a better education than I did. So I actually convinced my husband to homeschool, which was great, because it would allow us a lot more time freedom, location freedom. And we were investing in real estate at that point. So when we would go to these different RIA meetings or these conferences, we would actually take our kids with us. And at first people kind of look at you funny, because they're not sure how kids are going to do at a conference, but ours actually did very well. And as they were going to all these educational events with us, they started learning the same information that we were learning. And they started getting curious and asking questions. And it was really when his brother when Ethan's brother was five, he said he wanted to start investing. And he did what your kids did. He didn't start with real estate. He started with what my husband told him to do, which is invest in what you know. And he literally looked at my husband and said, but all I know are Legos. So my husband told Devin to find a way to invest in Legos. And so Devin did, he figured out that Lego retire sets and so if he buys them before they're retired, and he holds on to them, then the price goes up after it's retired. So he figured out how to make money in Legos. And if you can do that at the age of five, well, he kept learning all of these different investing information. And you know, he would do a little bit of silver or he would do he learned about Bitcoin. And so he was doing all these these different investments. And when he was seven, he decided it was time to invest in real estate. So it was kind of natural. When Ethan started getting to that age, he started becoming curious about real estate as well. Do you want to talk about how you got started?
Ethan Wohlwend
Yeah, so we both we had grown to grown up around our family, going to real estate meetings. Every week. There was a Wednesday morning breakfast, which is now a Wednesday night dinner, which we're gonna go to tonight. And we just went to events like that we went to seminars, because like she just said she learned a lot from going to those seminars. And as we grew up, we started learning and understanding more and more of what some of the people were saying at those meetings. And we had seen the benefits of having stuff like passive income and actually investing instead of working in a job. And my thought process was, well, I see that my family has what seems to be a lot more freedom than other families. Because the other people like my friends, families would, they would always worry about I'm not going to be able to do this. I'm not, I don't have enough time for this. And I didn't want to worry about that. And my family didn't have any problems like that. So I thought, how can I get that same freedom? How can I have a good life like that? And I had learned about passive income. So and I had seen my brother start investing, so I figured, if he can do it, there's, I can do it, if I can do it, so can you, which is the name of his first book, that he ended up writing from his experiences doing that with your goal of teaching other kids to start investing?
Mike Swenson
Because if he can do it, so can you that's awesome, well, talking about the importance of upbringing, you know, sharing my story, as you know, my parents told me, you know, they they worked for a W two job, and said, get a good job that pays health insurance, so that you have stability. And that's going to be what you want in life and save in your 401 K. And both of my parents were kind of pushed out maybe five years before retirement age from their jobs. And, and that was kind of a defining moment for me, because I had all of this brain training of get a good job, get get health insurance, save in my 401k. And then I looked up and I saw well, they actually didn't get to finish that, because of where they were at, you know, that somebody could they could bring in somebody younger and cheaper and replace them. And so they both ended up retiring at about that time, because they were close enough to where they could. But I saw that and I said, I want to be able to control my own destiny. But that was a lesson that I learned at the age of 25. Not necessarily were you guys were starting out being able to see that freedom happen. So that's amazing that you were able to be exposed to that at such an early age,
Ethan Wohlwend
I didn't see my parents going to a job every day. And I they never taught me to when I grew up to go to school get good grades, so I could get a job. They, they didn't shelter me, which is one of the things I really am glad they didn't do. That's what makes them such amazing parents, because I definitely could not be where I am today without my parents.
Lila Wohlwend
And that's one of the things we recommend for other families, a lot of times a real estate investor, you know, they work with their investments, and they come home and they talk about all the frustrations about the tenant that damage property or this bad thing that happened or that bad thing. And all the kids see is the bad and they see you know, sometimes that the parents, if they're the ones that go out and do all the repairs themselves, they sometimes just disappear in the middle of dinner to go fix something. And so all these kids see is the negative side of real estate, we wanted our kids to have a global view, we wanted them to see the good and the bad. And so when they got interested in real estate, that was because they got to see all the benefits as well as the challenges that they might have to overcome. And they've learned to overcome quite a few challenges a lot. A lot of people ask me, how do kids do this. And honestly, for some of it, it's been easier for them than it is for an adult getting started. For example, kids are great at negotiation. I still remember Ethan, Ethan was buying a property from a retiring landlord in the area. And I happen to know him because he runs a maintenance crew also. But, uh, so I walked into this office that we're recording in right now. And I'm just trying to grab my iPad, and I realised Ethan's on the phone. So I'm trying to rush and get out of the room. But all I hear is him saying, Well, you know, Jim, this house is gonna need Windows. So can you put the windows in for me? Or do you want to knock so much off the price, and I just I leave the room quickly because I've started laughing. And the next day the seller comes into my real estate brokerage office. And he calls me up to the front and he just looks at me says your son. He goes, I have never in my life thought that a nine year old could negotiate with me and hold his own as good as any adult. He goes in your son impressed me so much. So it was just a story that he still tells to this day. And so do we because it really illustrates that kids aren't afraid to do these things. They they may not know how to do it in the beginning. But if they have a little bit of education or guidance, they can do all the same things that the adults are doing.
Mike Swenson
How did you guys get your start then in terms of investing? Like what asset class kind of what location?
Ethan Wohlwend
Where did you guys get started, as you mentioned before my brother started investing in Legos. Because invest in what you know, and he knew that best and since he invested in it. One of the benefits for investing in something small like Legos, is when you make mistakes, because you're going to make mistakes, but don't think don't think of them as failures. Think of them as learning experiences. So my brother wanted to buy the Lego death star which is the biggest set he put together. And he didn't have enough money and took too long to get the money and eventually partnered with me and still didn't have enough money and made the mistake of waiting too long. And then they retired the leg have set, which made it cost a couple 100 more dollars. And then we finally did get the Lego set. And he tried to sell it, but he didn't want to pay. It was eBays 10% fee, whatever it is. And he put it up on Craigslist because he didn't want to hire a professional and pay the professional fees. And it ended up taking too long to sell. And it Lego ended up coming out with a new Deathstar, which caused the price of the one we had to go back down to what we paid for it. So we completely screwed up on it. And I really, I shouldn't have partnered with him. Because I made the mistake of I got into something that I didn't know, I didn't know anything about it. I wasn't into Legos as much as him. And I didn't understand investing, because I was three at the time. But that's why you invest in what you know. So you can avoid these mistakes. But I mean, he's five. So no one's perfect. We're all bound to make mistakes. But he learned from those mistakes. And the benefit from it being a $500 Lego set, is he could only lose like $500 Instead of losing that money on a $50,000 real estate house,
Lila Wohlwend
you want to tell him what what your first deal was.
Ethan Wohlwend
Good idea, my first deal. When I started investing, I started investing, or when I started in real estate, I started an LLC, which is one of the ways that I bought it as a seven year old. And I, we put $1,000 into the LLC, I put that in. And then I use that to buy a mobile home that I found. And I bought it with the intention of renting it out. And like cleaning it up and renting it out. So I went I cleaned it out. And someone who worked for my mom's management company had called me and said, Hi, I'd like to buy your mobile home for $2,000. And since I only paid $1,000 for it, and didn't do much, except for clean it up, that was a pretty good deal. So I sold it for $2,000. And said, All right, and I went out and looked for a house to buy. And then a contractor who works for my dad called my dad and said that he just wanted out of the six unit he just wanted done. And my dad told me that and I thought, You know what it might be cool if I bought a six unit for my second house, or for my second deal. But I didn't think that the $2,000 from the mobile home would be enough to buy it. So I did my due diligence. And I figured out that the person who was trying to sell the six unit was behind on payments. And then I figured out who he owed his payments to. That's when I saw my opportunity. There were two mortgages on the six unit. The first one was to my home school evaluator and friend from a RIA group. And the other was from a lady I had never met before, which kind of scared me because I had to convince her to let me take over her mortgage. And since she didn't know me, people do business with people who they know, like and trust. So it was kind of scary because we didn't know each other. So I started off by talking to my homeschool evaluator. And she said if I paid the past few payments, if I can't if the past few payments, she would let me take over the mortgage as is right now. Luckily, the $2,000 covered those past few payments. So all I had to do was talk to a lady I had never met before and convinced her to let me take over her mortgage. So I called them I asked my dad if he would call her because I was scared she wouldn't take a seven year old seriously. So my dad called her and said, Hey, my son wanted wants to take over the mortgage on your six unit. I think he forgot to mention the fact that I was seven. But she invited us over to her house anyway. And we talked for a little bit at her kitchen table. And since people who do business with people who they know like and trust, I decided she should get to know like and trust me. So we talked for a bit at her kitchen table. And then I realised she knew my grandpa. My grandpa was a dentist in a very, very small town, and she worked for that same town. And I was very lucky that everyone in that town knew each other and that she liked and respected my grandpa since she had known my grandpa and he had a good reputation. And then she figured I would probably be a better. And since she wasn't getting paid by the person who she had already loaned the money to. Since there wasn't much she could lose, and because my grandpa had a good reputation, then she figured it would probably be better if I took over the mortgage, then if she left it with the adult that hadn't paid her at all, so we worked out the deal where she would lower the interest rate from 10% to 5%. And I would pay her off in five years, all right, actually, I think was seven years. And she would get her first payment in two weeks. So I figured out how I could make the deal work for her, how I can make the deal work out for me, and how I can make the deal work out how I can benefit the person who was selling it, because the person who was selling it just wanted out. So person who had never met me, she just wanted to be done with them. With the mortgage she just wanted out. And then my homeschool evaluator, obviously, she would want paid because neither of them had been paid before. So you make the deal work out for everyone use creativity, that's one of the lessons my brother teaches is be creative and take action, I had to be creative and work out a way that the steel worked out for everyone and only use $2,000 out of my pocket. And I had to take action because if I just sat on that deal, then it would be gone, someone else would have taken action on that deal. And I wouldn't have been able to buy it.
Lila Wohlwend
My kids have had to get really creative. Because if you can't get a bank loan, and trust me, we've sent them to banks to try. And they literally would come home to having came home and said I found a lot of different ways that banks will tell you no. But they've had to get really creative on how do we buy a property? How do we finance it? How do we negotiate it, you know, who will you who will work with us? How do we build that reputation. And a lot of people that have now worked with them know them enough that even though they're kids, they're under 18, they will absolutely work with them, they'll sell them properties, they will finance properties for them. So they have built that reputation on their own over the years, and didn't really do that.
Mike Swenson
Yeah, and I think that's the thing, you know, having worked in the residential real estate space previously. And now moving to the investment space, that's the thing that residential agents have a hard time wrapping their mind around the creativity of investment, real estate, because they tend to think in a certain box of here's how the residential project process works. And I'm moving from this step to this step to this step to this step. And they just can't get their head wrapped around that somebody wouldn't go get a mortgage or couldn't go get a mortgage, and then the whole negotiation piece, right, you're finding out kind of what are the pain points? And how do you help people get what they want? And I think too, that's why sometimes investors might get a bad reputation saying, Oh, you're trying to take advantage of people? No, that's not the case at all. You're just trying to solve problems for people. And in this case, you did an amazing job of solving problems, right? You saw a problem. Okay, how do I help solve that? How do I help solve this, and then you helped all parties win. And you want as a result of that. And so that's the creativity piece that I think sometimes the non investor agents and non investors just can't get their head wrapped around.
Ethan Wohlwend
You always want it to be a win win for everyone.
Mike Swenson
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. So Lila, why don't you talk a little bit, let's shift gears and talk about how you are intentionally raising your your, your two boys to be self sufficient like this to be results oriented, going and doing these things. And not necessarily just being the parent that's going to step in and say, well, I'll do this for you, I don't want you to go through hard things. So obviously, both of them have been very successful at such a young age. So talk about, you know, your maybe your parenting strategy or your style here to expose them to these things that most parents wouldn't even think of at their ages.
Lila Wohlwend
Well, the the point of parenting is to raise a kid that is going to be a mature, responsible, self sufficient adult. And in order to do that, I think the key is that everything has to be a learning experience. Everything has to be something that drives them towards that goal. So starting from the time they were a baby, everything we did, I tried to make into something they could learn from, and learning should be fun. You know, kids, when they're really little when they're, you know, 234 they're curious about everything. They want to hold everything, touch it, taste it, feel it. They want to understand the world around them, and then we send them into school. And a lot of times you know, it's more of a sit down, be quiet. Listen to what I'm telling you answer these questions on a test. And for a lot of kids, they don't learn that way. And So when they get into that environment, their curiosity actually starts going down, they stop getting excited about learning, I actually had that problem with both of my children because they learned so differently. Devin is very visually oriented. So I could teach him with flashcards, I could teach him with pictures. And then when it came to eat, then I mean, I was trying to teach him how to read. And he's a very physical kid. So I'm trying to teach him how to read words on a page, and he's bouncing all over the place. And I knew there was no way he was going to see the letters in the words and be able to put them together if I couldn't figure out how to teach him in a way that he could learn. And so we would end up with these blocks that had letters and, and partial words and put them together and, and I figured out if I gave him some that he could play with in his hands, his body would still in his mind would focus. And so we actually taught him a completely different way than we had to teach my first son. And I think a lot of kids are like that, you know, we tried to put 30 kids together. But if you can't address all the different learning styles, they stop losing interest in the learning. But if we can get them to keep the love of learning the whole way through, then they will take that with them, and they can learn anything that they get interested in. And I think instead of us trying to do everything for our kids, we need to just teach them how they should accomplish something or how they can accomplish something, and then set them free, they may find ways that we don't even think of to get something done. And yeah, are they going to fail? Yeah. Are they going to fall on skin? Their knee? Yeah.
Ethan Wohlwend
Am I going to flip my four wheeler? Yes, yeah. Which is fun story, you can read in their book, family success triangle.
Lila Wohlwend
So sometimes, as a parent, we've just got to understand that kids need to get out there and figure out that a decision they're going to make may have a positive result or a negative one. And we started that as early as we possibly could. So we'd be in a restaurant, and we'd be holding a menu. And then the waitress would come over and say, Well, what does he want? And we'd say, well, I don't know, ask him. And so as kids, they would literally point to what they wanted in the menu even before they could talk. And if they got something they didn't like, well, they still had to eat it. So that was their learning of, hey, I get to make a decision. But if I make a bad decision, well, I'm not going to like the result. If I make a good decision, then I'm really gonna like the result. So they learn how to even start asking questions. Hey, Mom, do you think I would like this? Hey, Mom, is this similar to this kind of food? And so they started learning to ask questions, so they can make a better decision. But that learning process, how do we think through something was so critical? And then when it comes to real estate, now, they can use that the same lessons that they were learning that Ethan was talking about what they were learning, just from investing in Legos, the mistakes they made? And how can they not repeat those same mistakes when it comes to investing in real estate or something else,
Ethan Wohlwend
You can be told one way that you'll fail 100 times and you might not get it. But the best way that I've found to understand something, is I I'm not saying this is a good thing. But I really learned from stuff when it hurts me physically or mentally. I learned Oh, hey, don't try and do a wheelie on your bike. And I figured that out when I fall down and skinned my elbow. Yeah. At that time, I don't think of it as uh, oh, I failed. I'm not going to be a good bike rider. I think that is, okay, let's not do that again. How can I have fun without falling down? And don't be afraid that let your kid fall down? Just be there. Say, all right, cool. That's one way not to do that. Don't do that again. And if they, they'll learn from that. And then no, don't do this. Again.
Lila Wohlwend
No parent wants their kid to get hurt. But we do want them to learn the lessons that come from making a bad decision or trying something the wrong way. And so I think there's a fine balance in there of making sure that they learn the right lessons. And they, they start to do things on their own and make decisions for themselves. Because in the end, when they're adults, and they're out of the house, we're not going to be around to always help them. So we've got to teach them how to think through all of that. And that's been really key for them. Whether it be their schoolwork, or their investing or the real estate, or their businesses or even their the group that they're now running to teach other kids how to do this. They are literally using all those lessons.
Ethan Wohlwend
That groups you mentioned. It's called MIT millionaires in training, but we'll talk about that at the end of the episode.
Mike Swenson
So I in a mindset coaching group with other people that are a lot of them are real estate investors. And they talk about, you know, we run into obstacles and we think, Well, maybe that means I'm not supposed to invest in real estate or maybe I'm not supposed to do that. But you know, Ethan, you made a good example of, if I fall down on my bike, and I scraped my knee, I get back up because I just know I'm probably going to have to go through through some scrapes to figure out how to ride my bike or once I figure out how to ride my bike. Sometimes a stick comes out or you hit something wrong and you fall Don't get scraped. But yeah, when it comes to business, we think when we hit an obstacle, it means well, maybe I'm not meant to do this. Or maybe I've got to like reshift gears? No, it just means I'm riding a bike here and stuff happens. And I got to work my way through it. And so let's not be so quick to give up or question our motivation or question, you know, all these challenges we're facing, let's just treat it like a kid riding a bike and just keep pressing forward, after you get your scrapes
Ethan Wohlwend
Or think of it like learning to walk as a kid, if you felt down the first time and thought, Oh, I'm not going to be able to do this, no one would be able to walk.
Mike Swenson
We wouldn't have anybody walking in this world, because they just gave up after the first try.
Ethan Wohlwend
You gotta keep trying never give up real estate agents.
Mike Swenson
Are you tired of letting the busyness of life get in your way from achieving your real estate investing goals, I'm super excited to announce we've created the real freedom investor, Agent tribe, it's a place for you to come, get educated, and network with others, so that you can make sure that you're hitting your real estate investment goals. So find out more on our website, real freedom.com. Click on the store link, we've got a membership, we've got a mastermind group and some private coaching as well. Check it out, I've priced it super low, the goal is to get you in not have price be a determining factor to keep you from your goals. So come check it out, schedule a call with me, and we're happy to see where your real estate journey is gonna take you.
Mike Swenson
Yeah, so I know, there's a lot of things that you guys had mentioned in terms of books and other things that you're doing. So why don't you just share that and then let folks know how they can reach out to you as well.
Lila Wohlwend
So we do have books there on Amazon, we've got the family success triangle, which is more for adults. And it is about how we raised our kids and the things that we taught them and how being a better parent made us better at our business and investing and vice versa.
Ethan Wohlwend
And you can learn about the fun experiences I've had on the fun learning experiences of rolling over my four wheeler multiple times.
Lila Wohlwend
Ethan's got his book, The treehouse, which is more for kids. It's a fictional story. But it teaches all of the same lessons.
Ethan Wohlwend
It teaches lessons with a fun story of a group of kids who come together and use scrap wood to build a tree house. And then they get into a conflict with the city, the city code inspector.
Lila Wohlwend
If people want to learn more, they can also find us on social media @realpowerfamily. And we also have a website clearskytrainer.com that has a lot of free educational content as well as memberships for those that want to have more time freedom, location, freedom and financial freedom in their life.
Ethan Wohlwend
We also have a free newsletter on the clearskytrainer.com You can get our ebooks there. And there's also the link to millionaires and training which we talked about before millionaires and training is a free youth entrepreneurs group that my brother and I run, which we have I think it's 160 members across a centuries eight countries and multiple different continents. And we have meetings every Monday at four o'clock Eastern time. And you can join in it's for people eight to 824 year olds. Or if you don't have a discord account or if you're too young to use discord then you can watch us through YouTube and Twitch we stream the meetings there and if you join the discord there's multiple places where you can talk to people chat with people no one else is in the meeting it's pretty much a one on one conversation with us.
Mike Swenson
One on one training with a with a real estate moguls what kid wouldn't want to be a part of that? Awesome. Well, thank you guys so much for coming on and sharing truly an inspiration we probably could have had about five episodes and if we dug deeper into the content here but thank you so much for sharing Ethan your story. I think you've inspired a lot of people and it's fun to see a family that's doing all this cool stuff together working hard together and and achieving great results together. So thank you so much for your time and best of luck to you guys.
Lila Wohlwend
Thank you
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