Steve Werner - From Active To Passive Investing
After amassing a real estate portfolio of 150+ units as an active investor, Steve Werner knew there had to be a better way. He was still caught on the hamster wheel of trading time for dollars. This journey led him to become the Chief of Investor Relations for Home Invest, where he now invests, and helps others invest, in multifamily apartments. Find out why Steve is so passionate about building passive wealth through real estate investing, and how you can do it too!
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Discover lucrative real estate syndication investment opportunities from Steve that can diversify your portfolio and generate passive income.
- Learn how to achieve financial freedom through strategic real estate investments, taking control of your financial future.
- Unlock the potential of self-directed IRAs for real estate investing, maximizing your investment opportunities while enjoying tax benefits.
- Overcome fear and hesitation in real estate investment by gaining valuable insights and actionable strategies to build confidence in your investment decisions.
- Maximize tax benefits through effective real estate investment strategies, optimizing your returns and creating long-term financial stability.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:23 - Pursuing Financial Freedom through Real Estate
00:01:25 - Steve Werner's Real Estate Journey
00:05:39 - Active vs. Passive Real Estate Investing
00:08:29 - Syndication Model and Economies of Scale
00:13:24 - Retirement Planning with Real Estate
00:15:38 - Taking Action and Learning
00:21:07 - Utilizing Deal Calculators
00:25:06 - Getting Started in Syndications
00:27:40 - Overcoming Fear and Anxiety
00:31:32 - Connecting with Steve
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Steve Werner
This is the really surprising stat I hinted at it earlier. We have now helped, I would say at least 100 people that were active move to passive. And I can tell you in 99% of the cases, they make more money a better rate of return passive than they made active.
Mike Swenson
Welcome to the REL 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 REL Freedom together. Hello, everybody. Welcome to another episode of REL Freedom, Real Estate Leverage Freedom, where we talk about different ways that people are pursuing time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. Everybody's path is different. Everybody starts in a different spot and their journey takes them in different areas along the way. And that's certainly the case here for today. So we've got Steve Werner here. Steve is the chief of investor relations for Home Invest, has a background in doing events, public speaking, as well as working with such a great company where you get to help people achieve financial freedom or grow financial freedom through real estate. So we're certainly going to talk about a lot of those things today. Steve, I'm so excited to have you on the show.
Steve Werner
Welcome, Mike. Thanks so much for having me. I'm looking forward to it.
Mike Swenson
Why don't you just share a little bit about your background and we'll just dive in from there.
Steve Werner
Sure. I mean, the really short version, 2001, I was in college. I red rich dad, poor dad. I picked it up, I actually bought it for my dad for Father's Day and I read it before I sent it to him. And I lost my job about two months later, waiting tables. And I decided real estate was what I wanted to do. I dove in. It took me about six months. I got my first seller, finance place, because, you know, I was a broke college kid. Fast forward 2006, I sold everything because I kind of saw the market changing. Honestly. I also got really burned out because I made some really, I made some mistakes. I was managing everything myself. And I was the landlord, the electrician, the plumber. Like, you name it, I did it anyway. Then fast forward 2012, 2013, I started the events company and started holding events. And more and more my clients were in the real estate space. I helped them perfect fundraising and that led to my position at Home Invest where we focus. My focus at Home Invest is going out and helping build our investors. So we do syndications where we take down large apartment buildings. And I help people find time freedom, protection from taxes, we help people write off a lot of their tax income through real estate investments. We help people find great, safe investments that help them reach time, freedom, build generational wealth. Our company, we're a Christian company, and we are based on the Matthew 25 principle, which is be great stewards of what God has given you.
Mike Swenson
So talk a little bit about your journey of pairing up what you love. And I think this is the cool thing, Like, I tell people that in real estate, it's kind of this entrepreneurial playground where you can do whatever you want. There's so many different options of things you can do. You got to take your background of doing events and working with people and speaking and then pairing that with real estate, and now they really fit well together. And that's really what I love of sharing people's stories, is everybody's story is different. And you took your passion and put it into real estate in a way that's going to help you long term, build wealth, help others build wealth. So just kind of talk about that journey of pairing what you love with. You know, how that all kind of came together.
Steve Werner
Yeah, absolutely. So when I left real estate in 2006, honestly, it was super painful for me. I had about 150 units, and like I said, I did everything. So I'm working a gazillion hours a week. And I hadn't structured all of them correctly for cash flow. So at the end of the month, there wasn't that much money going around. There should have been. I had a good amount on paper, but it was a lot of pain. Right. I'm also not a spreadsheet guy. I'm not a details guy, and I'm not a guy who should be fixing stuff. I shouldn't be doing wiring and plumbing and electrician. Right. But I had done all of that because I was like, well, that's how you do real estate. I. When I quit, I didn't think I would ever come back to real estate, to be honest. I thought that was it for me. And then as I found people that were involved in real estate, to your point, Mike, I was like, hey, I don't have to be the spreadsheet guy. Nate, my partner at home invest, loves analyzing deals. He loves negotiating deals. Rodney, who is on our team at home invest, he's our chief of management. Like, he goes out, he manages the managers for each one of our properties. He makes sure that the properties are running well. I don't have to do that stuff. And he loves it. He's a software engineer, so he loves systems and processes and checklists. I hate all of that stuff. What I like doing is meeting with people. I love talking to people. I love getting to know people, I love helping people. I love consuming knowledge and sharing that knowledge with other people. And in the real estate fundraising space that is the like diamond skill set, I learned something in real estate. I learned how we're going to get people massive tax breaks. And then I, I can put out a short video on social, I can write a short email newsletter. I share that with other people and then I have conversations, kind of like you and I are having, Mike. And people end up investing and it's a win, win, win across every area. But it all starts with taking action, right? It all starts with just getting your feet wet and doing stuff.
Mike Swenson
Now you talked about a journey that I find a lot of people discover and it was a little bit of your journey too. The I want to do it myself. I'm kind of getting in and over my head by. And so now in your world, now it's, it's, you've got multiple people, each operating in their specific skill set. And together the sum is more than the parts, right? And that really is kind of the syndication model is, you know, hey, let's do this together. You know, I hear the example of would you rather have, you know, a piece of a watermelon or a whole grape? You know, and I think sometimes when people get started in real estate, they start to think like, I want to do it all on my own. I want to have 100% of everything that I put my work into. And you can realize, like we can maybe get further factors master together. And so talk about your journey with that.
Steve Werner
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, it's what you said. The watermelon grape analogy is perfect, right? I'll take it two different ways. The first one is, I think it comes from a mindset of lack versus a mindset of abundance. So if I think, and this is exactly what I did when I was in college, right? I was like, I'm going to go buy a duplex, I'm going to go buy this triplex, I'm going to go buy this eight unit building. And I don't want because I, when I negotiated the price, I didn't negotiate enough in for a manager, I didn't negotiate enough in for maintenance. So that's why it all fell on me. But I was like, I'm gonna maximize my profit, right? And to be honest, I was a dumb 22 year old kid, right? Like, I was like, I can work a Gazillion hours a week. Well, that's not true. And that's not the life that we're trying to set up for. At the time, I saw the dollar signs, right? I was like, I want the Lambo. And that's what motivated it. Whereas when I got involved with this in 2000, like, 15, 16, 17, I started looking at stuff and I was like, you know, I have a good deal of cash, and I'm looking for a place to park that cash, that it works for me and it gives me some tax breaks and I don't have to do all the painful things. And I was highly skeptical at first. I was like, is there really a way to do this? How am I going to lose money? But if. Learn how to. How to judge a syndication. You can find syndications that are good. Now, not every syndication is perfect. None of them are perfect, right? And some of them will have things happen. It's real estate, but it's such a protected, positive class. Like, even if you end up losing some money because of the tax breaks, you might end up making money, and you'll probably get out of it unscathed or close to unscathed. You can't promise. I mean, it's. I have to put asterisks in front of all that. The second piece that you're talking about, I think I. I see doctors. I see people that have invested with us. They first went out and they were like, I'm going to buy a duplex because I can manage everything I want. I want this myself. And I still talk to some of those people. I also talk to them after they've bought one or two, and they realize that they're making less money than they would if they just would have joined the syndication. And their properties running horrible. They're getting calls from their property manager. Or worse yet, they're a doctor, chiropractor, dentist. Those are the main verticals that we work with. They come to us and they say, you know, hey, we bought two properties. And they're calling me at work. They came into my office and, like, they're not happy because their garbage disposal is clogged. And it's like, dude, you don't like any of that, and you're making like 8% return. Why don't you come into the syndication? We'll help you sell that duplex. Take whatever equity you have, take the same amount of money, put it in the syndication. You're going to see a return of up to 18, maybe 20, 24%, plus you're going to get a huge tax write off and you don't have to worry about anything.
Mike Swenson
The issue that we would run into a lot of times is, you know, hey, you buy a duplex and it was, you know, so. And so is moving out. We've got vacancy now. So I'm, I'm only getting 50% of my rent this month and maybe that vacancy spills into a second month. And now it's two months of only 50% vacancy. And so the economies of scale on these larger properties just make more sense. And the numbers that, you know, my clients were looking for in terms of returns, it was getting harder to meet that for them. Where you look at some of these larger properties and because you have those economies of scale, you can meet those returns and they don't have to deal with those headaches themselves and they don't have to worry about 50% occupancy when one person leaves, you know. And so it is really that together we can do more than we can do on our own.
Steve Werner
So I mean, if. It also depends what your goal is. I mean if we're really honest, if you're. I have, I have really good friends that they own two duplexes and they're paid for free and clear. Like they paid them off, they took them on, on shorter mortgages. They took them on 15 year fixed and they paid, they paid a good amount down. They, I think they put 30 or 35% down. And their whole goal is they wanted to build a retirement income for themselves using two properties. And there's nothing wrong with that. They now are sitting on probably 6 or $700,000 in equity. They've also got good cash flow. They've got seven grand a month coming in free and clear that they can sit there. And if it. To your point, if one half is vacant, it's not the end of the world to them. And they don't mind managing four tenants. The difference that I see is that is now capped. Like they might gain some appreciation, right? Like that's going to continue to go up. Whereas if you're in a syndication and you're looking at it as a retirement strategy or a wealth building strategy, if you start investing when you're 40 and that syndication rolls every six years, at the end of 18 years you're going to be 58, you're going to be headed into retirement. You should have had three full turns and each one of those turns you should have doubled again, big asterisks. It's real estate, but you should have doubled you exponentially end up with way more in your retirement account. It just depends what you're looking for. Do you get a little bit less cash flow along the way? Yeah, you do. But are you looking? I. I would tell you, don't invest in real estate ever for the cash flow like to live on. Right. You should invest on cash flow first, appreciation second. Get the cash flow coming in that goes in the account to buy more real estate. If you're looking to do active, the this is the really surprising stat I hinted at it earlier. We have now helped, I would say at least a hundred people that were active move to passive. And I can tell you in 99% of the cases they make more money a better rate of return passive than they made active. Because even though you can shoehorn the numbers together to make active look a little better, at the end of the day you are. Most people are not going to be the rockstar operator and they don't have the economy of scale that you're talking about. So you end up with a duplex that has a two month vacancy when you only planned on 15 days for the year. You're going to be hurting cash flow wise. Whereas a syndication deal with 150 units that we have, when we underwrite, we underwrite really aggressive in terms of safety. We almost always come ahead of our predictions, which I think you do. You do as well. Any good syndicator I found kind of does that. So those are my general thoughts. I know that's a big spaghetti answer, but.
Mike Swenson
Well, and the other thing for people to think about, as you had mentioned about, you know, coming up to retirement, you know, a lot of times the traditional model of retirement is I build this nest egg and then when I hit retirement age, I just slowly pull from it until it goes to zero and hope that I live long enough or don't outlive my savings. Right. With real estate, you can passively have that money working for through your retirement versus like will I outlive my savings? And so obviously you want to diversify. Obviously there's, you know, strategies there to be smart with your money. But you can continue to see that grow versus this minimalist mindset of will I outlive my retirement? What happens if I, you know, live long?
Steve Werner
Right. I am really passionate about this. I think the worst thing you can do is not have retirement. The second worst thing you can do is have it in some kind of managed account where they talk to you about 4 or 5% is what you're going to live on. Like Come on. I don't want to. I don't want to shop at Walmart for like my everything. I don't want to live a life where I live in a shoebox apartment when I'm retired. And sad. I mean, data backs us up forever. Right. Retirement in the US Is grossly underfunded. And they're. I talk to people about this. I'm sure you do as well, because we both do fundraising. I talk to people all the time and they don't know the tools that are there. But just through a real estate syndication, and people are like, well, I'm not accredited. You can find an unaccredited offer out there. You can find an offer you can get into without being accredited. You can self direct any one of your retirement accounts. You can figure out how to make that happen and get started. Like, I don't care if it's 10 grand. I don't care if it's through your Roth IRA. Like, find a way to get into it. Pay attention. Figure out how to pick good syndications because that money is going to grow. And to your point, if you build your retirement using real estate, you can flip it into active so you have cash flow. You can keep it in passive, and you're going to appreciate at, at a 15 to 25% on average return. That gives you so much more room in your retirement years. It frustrates me and it makes me really sad to see people depending on Social Security and, you know, a 4% drawdown of a $700,000 retirement nest egg. Like, come on now.
Mike Swenson
You talked about the future here. We've got all these grandiose plans for what our retirement's going to be, boiling it back to where we're at today. Right. You had kind of talked about taking action. You also talked about learning and adapting.
Steve Werner
Right.
Mike Swenson
You started with a strategy and saw the pain of that strategy and adjusted to something else. What advice would you have for people kind of starting out maybe in the earlier stages to help them move to where they want to go?
Steve Werner
Sure. I mean, there's so many things that you could do. I think you need to decide whether you want to be passive or active. That's the first question. Because that's going to change what you do if you want to be. The second step is kind of the same, though. Go find somebody and learn from them. Read books, listen to podcasts, start getting there. But you and I were talking about this before the show. Don't get stuck in that like one to two months. Get, get a little bit and then go make an offer or go get on a call to learn about syndications. Don't. I mean there I have to put a huge asterisk in this. I, I jumped off a cliff. Like I literally didn't have a job. Went and made seller finance offers until I got one. That was in college. You can do that now. Same thing, still works. I've seen it happen time and time again. We just had a guy, he was like, okay, I'm gonna go do that. It took him two months. He ended up finding a seven pack of duplexes. So it was 16 units. One was a two or triplexes. I think it was 16 units in a seven pack. Seller financed because nobody wants to pay the interest rates. He ended up raising the capital for the Dow money. He's into it, he's cash flowing at a good rate. He's got one investor in with him and he's off and running. And like he did that because he took action. He learned for about. We see this inside. We did a training program for years and we see inside the training program four to six months of ingesting knowledge and then start taking action. And the action if you're active is go make offers. If you're passive, it's, you want to sit on as many syndication calls as you can and you want to test the numbers. So, so I, I want to give a, a real quick framework for this because people are like, well, I'm scared if I invest in a syndication, I'm going to lose everything. Here are the three questions that we tell people to ask syndicators. Whether you invest with me, whether you invest with Mike. I don't care who you invest with. You should be investing in real estate. These are the questions you want to lead with. The first one is where is the property located? Real simple. Red states are going to way outperform blue states. As a general rule of thumb, if you want to go a little bit deeper, you're looking for a landlord friendly state. You can google the list of those. There's about 14 of them. If you want to go even a little bit further, you want to pick a state that is running a surplus budget. Why? States that run a negative budget end up usually raising taxes, changing things around. Last but not least, as kind of a protection piece in there, stay out of a natural disaster zone. Florida kind of falls in there. So that's, that's the first general rule. Where are they investing? The second thing is what is their investment thesis? It should be value add. You don't Want to get involved in a brand new A plus property. You don't want to get involved in, in my opinion, development, especially right now because banks are going to start holding loans. We've already seen that happen. You want a performing asset that is going to move forward. And usually we look for a 1.7 to 2x multiple. That means when you exit the property you're going to get 1.7 extra money or 2x your money, your money. The third thing, and this is where it can get a little bit complicated, you want a syndicator that has gone through the last downturn 08092010 and bought and sold properties during that time period. The other thing that you want to look for in your syndicator, in my opinion is a non, you don't want to see a flexible waterfall. Waterfall is the payments change as the property matures. I, I think there's plenty of money in syndications. They don't need to do things that way. You want to see a fixed return on your money. If you don't know what that means, learn what that means. Like go, go do the real. Go do some research. That's the stuff you need to know. And then get on calls with people, ask questions, go through the rent rolls. Like look at all the documents. If you don't know where to start, when you do a 15 minute or a 30 minute call, say hey, can I see, can I see the T12s? Can I see the T3s? T12s are the, the trailing 12 month documents. Go through them, ask questions and you know what? The deal of the century comes along every week. Like you will, you, you will find a better deal over and over and over. My, I'm sure you know that like the first great deal I saw was actually a horrible deal. But I thought it was great because I was in college and I was like, hey, like look at this. It's two units and they're willing to sell or finance. But the more I looked at it like the numbers didn't work. That's, that's how you do it. And then just start having those conversations, putting deals together and before you know it, your mindset will shift and you'll be able to invest.
Mike Swenson
One of the things that I like telling people is in terms of getting started is get comfortable using a deal calculator. Now I know, I know you're not a spreadsheet guy. I'm a spreadsheet guy. But it helps you to understand what goes into the problem, right? There's two things. Income and expenses, right? And so what is the income? Well, either you look at what's it currently doing or what do I think it's going to do? How do I know what it's going to be? Will I go look at potential rents and this could even be just a single family or a duplex. And then expenses, okay, what are the utilities, what are the taxes, what's the mortgage payment? And even if you start analyzing deals that way, then if you move to a different category, right, let's say RV parks, let's say self storage. Well, what happens? I have income, I have expenses, right? And so it's a basic thing I tell people. You know, it's like going to the gym and picking up the five pound weight, right? I'm not going to start with 100 pounds. I'm going to start with five pounds. And I've in my five pounds grows. I view a deal spreadsheet as that five pound weight. Like I'm learning about the process. It's bigger numbers. It's a different strategy, whatever it might be. But if I start to learn how to think through those tools critically, it's going to help me pretty much anywhere in real estate.
Steve Werner
Well, that's 100%. And I don't love spreadsheets, but I would never invest in something unless I did the spreadsheet. And the thing is, the spreadsheet does not. It's not that difficult. And to your point, Mike, what's. It cracks me up. Realtors, brokers, not all of them, but so many of them don't like, you'll look at it, you'll look at a pro forma that they have together and they don't have anything budgeted for maintenance, right? Or their rents are the same across the board for month after month after month. And you're like, dude, did you, did you actually dig into this? This is the stuff that I'm talking about. When you join a syndication, if you look at the T12s and you see that there are huge gaps. And these you will learn very quickly. If you look, if you analyze five deals, you'll learn really quickly. Oh, they don't, they didn't estimate anything for maintenance or they didn't estimate vacancies, or their rents are all like, they're 30% over market rent. That doesn't make any sense. Or you can ask the person, hey, I see here, like, I, I did some research, I looked down the street, it's a 2:1, same as we have here. And you're 30 more on rent. Why Is that. Oh, well, you're. You're going in and you're putting in marble and Jacuzzis and whatever. Right. Or. Oh, I. Well, that's what we think we can get. Oh, well, you know, I appreciate it. Send me your next deal. Thanks. Like, that's how you learn this stuff. And I don't like spreadsheets. I hate spreadsheets. But I can spend. If I'm. If I'm going to put a hundred grand into something, I'm going to sit down and spend 30 minutes looking through it. Right. I mean, that's the. If you don't. I would. I would say, like, what's the saying? If you can't spot the sucker at the table, then you are the sucker. Right? Like, if you're. If you're looking around and you're like, yeah, this seems great, and you're just going to throw money in. Fools are quickly parted from their money, but that does not mean where most people are is they just want all the information and they want to feel 100% great. That's. You're never going to feel 100% great till you do it.
Mike Swenson
Yeah. Typically what I find is when I've talked to people and then I circle back with them a few weeks, a few months later, and they kind of feel in the same spot. You know, I've asked them, how many deals have you looked at? How many deals have you put into a spreadsheet? Well, zero. Well, how are you going to get any better? How are you going to feel more comfortable? How are you going to know what questions to ask? Right. Like, I remember when I Learned what a T12 was. Okay, great. So now I feel pretty cool when I go to the agent and I say, hey, send me the T12. Right. That's an important tool. But there was a time I didn't know what a T12 was. Right. And so you learn that by doing it, and then your knowledge is going to grow and you add more knowledge on top of it.
Steve Werner
That. I mean, if there's anybody listening to this who is doing fundraising or wants to do fundraising, if you. If you're listening to this and you're like, I'd love to invest, but I don't have money. I don't have a retirement account. You can go fundraise for people, that's the easiest way to get started in syndications. So what we found and what I do is I try to educate my investors. If they don't know what a T12 I have, I have, like, little training Videos that I'll send them. Hey, here's what a T12 is. Here's how I look at it. Here are the things that I'm looking for. The more you educate people. You heard me say it earlier on the show. I don't care whether you invest with me. I don't care whether you invest with Mike. You should be investing in real estate. If I can help you a little bit on your journey, that's, that's my goal here because I think there's plenty of pie to go around. I think the watermelon is huge. You know, I'm not, I'm not dancing over a bunch of grapes like, I love that analogy because it's. The watermelon is a giant watermelon. And there's a ton, a ton of deals out there and there's more deals coming every single day. We're going to see a lot more of them. You should be investing and teaching if you are looking to get into the game, learn the stuff and then teach people that would invest with you what you're learning and if you do that, they will trust you.
Mike Swenson
I love educating people and showing them different ways that they can invest in real estate because a lot of people think, well, I want to get started investing in real estate. What do I got to do? Go save up a big pile of money to be able to buy a single family or to buy a duplex. You don't need that much money to invest in syndications at all. And we talked about the risk, we talked about the economies of scale. It's just a totally different approach. And then even too, you had mentioned we're not going to be able to get into this. But like a self directed ira, how many people have worked a job, left that job and have an IRA account sitting there and they don't know what to do with it. Well, when I tell people you can actually put that in real estate, they're like, really? Yeah. You can? Oh, geez. Well, that's just sitting over there. And I didn't know what I could do with it. You can make your money work for you in a lot of different ways. And so that's a fun one. I enjoy being able to unlock these secrets for people where they're like, I didn't even know that that was possible. And then we had our last deal, we had five people had a self directed IRA that they invested into the deal and that's pretty cool to help them.
Steve Werner
So many people don't understand what self directed is. And it's exactly what you said, Mike. If you have, if you left a job and you had a retirement account, you can roll that account into what's called self directed, which means you can invest in, in not everything, but just about anything you would want to. And that alone will, will grow. I've seen people grow their IRAs like way faster than their traditional 401k at their job because they can self direct it and they can get into deals. I want to, I want to take one giant step back though and talk about one last piece that we can wrap up with. And I think what stops people from doing any of this? I talked, I'm sure you've had, in your last raise, you probably talked to people who could have done a self directed. You showed them and they, they, they're like, I don't know, people are so scared when it comes to money that they would rather stick their head in the sand and they have all this fear and anxiety and I wish, I wish I could like push a button and remove that for people. I understand that money ties to what we do in our life. Right. If you don't have money, you're not gonna have anywhere to live, you're not gonna have food to eat. But take a deep breath and let that like, sit for a minute, you're gonna have a job. Tim Ferriss has something called the, the fear setting practice, which is you sit down, you write down what's the absolute worst that could happen. Let's say you put 25k in a real estate investment and it goes south and you lose all of it. Chances are you will recover from it. It might suck, you might miss that money a little bit, but if it's coming from a retirement account, it's not going to make a huge difference. The chances of that happening too are probably 1 out of 100. Maybe like 1 out of 100. That would go to zero, in my opinion. I would say maybe 1 out of 1 out of 20, it loses 50% and it's probably 18 out of 20 that it makes money. So is it worth, is that a calculated risk? That's way better odds than you're getting in the stock market.
Mike Swenson
I've invested in stocks that have lost half or more of what I put into it at a time. Right. And so that possibility is out there outside of real estate too.
Steve Werner
And no tax advantage. That's the other piece here. I mean, if you're in an ira, it's tax advantaged anyway. But what I'm getting at is like if you let go of the fear mindset that stops you from learning. Because I found most people like you mentioned iras, I have these conversations. I probably at least three times a day I talk to people about self directed. And I've had, usually one out of three will be like, that's not real. I like, yeah, you can like Google it. Don't, don't take my word for it. Type it into Google talk to you. And they say, well, I'm going to talk to my financial planner. Cool. Do you understand, like, nothing against financial planners. I think there are good ones, there are bad ones. Just like anything. But your financial planner gets paid based on the amount of money that you keep with them. Their incentive is directly aligned to you keeping money with them. They will not lie to you. They can't say that an A self directed is illegal or they can't say it doesn't exist, but they will tell you it's a bad idea most of the time because they are incentivized to keep the money with them. And they are. They don't always act in your best interest. I hate saying that I have friends that are financial planners, but it's. That is true. You need to take responsibility. Where I was going with this whole piece, take responsibility for your financial outcome. Yes, you might work really hard. You might make 100, 150, 200k a year. But if you are not taking responsibility, and that doesn't mean you need to spend hours a week. If you listen to one podcast a week and you read one book a month on financial literacy and investing, if you, yeah, I mean you're listening to this podcast, so you're obviously listening. You're interested in growing. If you do something like that, your financial freedom will change. Just don't be scared of learning about it. That's where I think most people just hand their money to somebody else and then they see the bad things happen, right? They're like, well, I didn't know what to do and I was worried and I felt all this anxiety. So I sent them all my money and he lost it. It's like, whoa. Like, take some, take some personal ownership so that you have agency real estate agents.
Steve Werner
Sure, Steve. Coffee S T E V E C O F F E E will take you. There are four things there. So one is a public speaking course that is 100% free. It's called Death to Bad Webinars. It's how to build a great presentation. The second thing there is called the five Landmines of Passive Real Estate Investing. It's a free course on what to look for in syndications. Third thing, you can book a call with me if there's something I can do for you. If you're interested in hearing about our deals, happy to run you through them, talk to you about them, help you out however I can.
Mike Swenson
Awesome. Well, thank you so much Steve for coming on and sharing us. And best of luck as you continue to grow in the future.
