
585: The Fed's Quiet War on the Middle Class with Doug Casey
22/12/2025 | 46 mins.
Keith discusses the Federal Trade Commission's (FTC) new regulations on rental pricing transparency, following a settlement with Greystar. Legendary author, Doug Casey, joins the conversation to argue that the Federal Reserve is waging a quiet war on the middle class. Casey explains that by creating trillions of new fiat dollars to push interest rates lower, the Fed fuels inflation, which erodes savings, distorts markets, and quietly reduces the average American's standard of living. He warns of an impending economic downturn due to inflation and government debt. Resources: Find the FTC article here. Visit internationalman.com to read Doug Casey's weekly articles and watch his "Doug Casey's Take" videos on YouTube. Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/585 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: [email protected] Invest with Freedom Family Investments. For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text 1-937-795-8989 to speak with a freedom coach Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com or text 'GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript: Keith Weinhold 0:01  welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, the Fed keeps escalating their quiet war against the middle class. I'm talking about it with one of the most influential financial figures of the past century. Today, also what the recent FTC decision on rents means to real estate on get rich education.  Speaker 1 0:25  Since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold rights for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit get rich education.com  Corey Coates 1:11  You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.  Keith Weinhold 1:27  Welcome to GRE I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, let's get right into it, as there's a lot to cover here on our last big show before Christmas. Briefly before we get to the Fed's quiet war against the middle class the Federal Trade Commission just fired off a warning shot to landlords, and here's the translation about what this means to you, advertise your real all in rent amount with mandatory fees included in that amount or expect company and by company, the FTC means attorneys, paperwork and a long headache, and I'll tell you why I think this is a good thing. But really, first what this is all about is that it stems from the antecedent settlement with the massive global real estate company greystar, about transparent pricing. You might know that greystar is the massive global real estate company. They specialize in rental housing. In fact, greystar is the largest apartment operator in the entire US. They're in about 250 markets. The FTC cracked down on greystars add on fees, those fees added on to the rent amount that aren't clear and transparent right from the beginning. Now, in their case, it's things like Package Concierge charges, valet, trash service fees and some of these other line items that magically appear after a renter has already emotionally moved into a unit. Now for your rentals, they might be other things like Pest Control fees, gym fees, pet fees, utility add ons and notice that I use the word might, because clarification is still being sought here, but suffice to say, the least that you should know is really three things, advertise a rental price that excludes mandatory charges and that could be a violation of the law. So then state the total cost of renting the unit up front, no fine print gymnastics. Secondly, do a compliance check. You need to review your ads to confirm that they honestly convey your rental unit's price. That includes working with third party marketing vendors like Zillow or Facebook marketplace to see if they accurately state the all in price, because if they understate the price, it's still your problem. And thirdly, know that the FTC is reviewing harmful practices in the rental housing market. They'll take action against landlords that try to hide mandatory fees, so no hide and seek. And the FTC resource is in our show notes, and I sent it to you in last week's newsletter as well, if you want to read it, all my take here is that this type of transparency is a good thing. I mean, come on, we all know how annoying it is if, say, an airline states like, Hey, we've got prices to this destination. You can fly there for as low as $200 Yeah, but what if it's a 28 hour, four layover journey to fly 300 miles? Okay? What about buying an event ticket to go to a music concert and say you've already got 10 minutes wrapped up in this, but they don't show you the final price with all the fees until you've already invested that 10 minutes a. Then you learn about this in your shopping cart. So that type of thing is deceptive, all right. Well, what this FTC case does is it eliminates that effect in the rental housing market. So if you're a landlord, your competitors shouldn't be able to advertise base rents minus fees against your unit that appears higher priced than it's really not. And then for renters, I mean, the clarity helps expedite their search process. So this lets good assets compete on real value, and that is good business. Now, as far as the Fed controlling the economy, Jerome Powell announced interest rate cuts both last year and some more again this year, and though the effect isn't immediate, mortgage rates do come down with them. Mortgage rates have also fallen this year because the yield spread premium is lower. And you know what the prevailing sentiment is among a lot of armchair economists, it is squarely this, you ain't seen nothing for cuts yet. People say, Oh, watch, once Trump gets his guy in there in May, meaning that's when the newly appointed Fed chair is in power. Oh, you're really going to see some giant rate cuts then, yeah. I mean, a lot of people talk about this like it's certainly coming. They say then the Fed funds rate is going to go way down, meaning mortgage rates are then going to go way down, meaning that home prices are therefore going to soar next year. Well, all that could happen, but it is nowhere close to the certainty camp for everything to respond exactly that way. As you know, as a listener here, paradoxically, mortgage rates have little to do with home prices. Look at history over hunches. In fact, it might be more likely that those things don't happen and don't all break exactly that way, then the probability that they do, and that quickly gets into conjecture territory. As we know, lowering rates is bad too, because it signals that a weak economy needs the help. Typically. What could be different this next time. Well, whether we're in a good or a bad economy, Trump still wants lower rates, and he really imposes his will on the situation.  Keith Weinhold 7:30  We're about to bring in the author of a new book called The preparation. It's about preparing for the economic future. A lot of the book is mostly for young men and their parents, but we'll speak to both females and males. Today is the middle class both worse off and in a way, better off today than they were a generation or two ago. Talk to your grandparents. They didn't pay for a college education. They didn't get one. They rarely ate out at restaurants. They didn't have a smartphone, which is now practically mandatory to even exist. Today, people are paying for all of that, so no wonder that prospective first time homebuyers almost seem to be going extinct. Let's meet this week's guest.  Keith Weinhold 8:21  Are we going to get a painful financial reset in the form of runaway inflation, a market crash or something else? We'll answer that before we're done today, the Fed is engaged in a quiet war against the middle class. They are going to create trillions more Fiat dollars to lower interest rates further and create inflation that's according to today's guest. He is the International man himself, a legendary and generationally popular author, and he does a lot more than that. He's back with us for a sobering look at this today. Hey, welcome in. Doug Casey,  Doug Casey 8:57  Thanks, Keith. It's nice to be here with you, although care for me is in Buenos Aires, Argentina, where I spend a good part of the year.  Keith Weinhold 9:05  Such a nice place, good year round weather. There. A piece you recently wrote is titled, The Fed's quiet war against the middle class. The Fed recently announced that they're stopping Qt, which basically means they're stopping the destruction of dollars and opening the floodgates to print dollars. You've been known to say that the level of interest rates is the most important single indicator of an economy, and the Fed has made several quarter point cuts over the last year plus, although the President is supposed to stay independent of Fed influence. Oh my gosh, he has been more vocal than any other president ever over how badly he wants low rates. What are your thoughts with regard to all this Doug?  Doug Casey 9:53  Well, the Fed, which most people have been taught to believe, is part of the cosmic firmament. Right? It should be abolished. It serves no useful purpose. The Fed is an engine of inflation. It's what creates Federal Reserve notes. It's an engine of inflation and purely destructive, and it's used by the government to finance itself. So that's the first thing I've got to say. And they don't know what interest rates should be. Neither does Trump neither does anybody else. That's for the market to determine right and interest rates are set by the amount of savings that's done by the people and the amount of borrowing that's done by other people. The problem is with the Fed printing up lots and lots of money, which they are through the banking system, it makes it rather foolish to be a saver. In other words, if you produce more than you consume, which is something everybody should do, you want to save the difference. That's how you become wealthy. But if they destroy the currency with inflation, it's pointless to save, and if there's no savings, there's no capital to lend. This is why we're sliding off a slippery slope in the direction of a third world country where there's no savings, where the money's no good, it's a real problem. I think the average American, despite increases in technology that we've benefited from over many years, the average American has found his standard of living go down a lot, and it's basically because of the destruction of the currency that makes it impossible for him to save and get ahead of things, and results in wild and crazy moves in the stock markets and the real estate markets and the interest rate markets, where things become unpredictable. So everybody's being turned into a speculator, whether they like it or not, and frankly, we're headed towards a real reckoning in the US and in the world generally. So my approach at this point is to hold on to your hat, because we're in for rough running in the years  Keith Weinhold 12:14  to come. To create low rates, the Fed basically needs to create trillions of new Fiat dollars. Tell us about how that works.  Doug Casey 12:25  Well, it's a question of the supply and demand of money. You've got two things happening. Number one, when the Fed has quantitative easing, as they call it, which basically means inflating the dollar. Quantitative easing, or QE is just a nice word for inflating the dollar. They're increasing the supply of dollars out there. You increase the supply of dollars, the price of money goes down in the short run, but in the long run, the value of the dollar also goes down. And nobody's going to lend money if they can't get more in interest than it's being depreciated at. So you've got these two forces fighting against each other making for an unstable system. That's why I say that look before 1933 and when Roosevelt took gold out of the dollar, or in fact, before 1913 when the Federal Reserve was created, before that, there was no central bank. There was no Federal Reserve in the US. Money was just a medium of exchange and a store of value. It wasn't a political commodity, which it is now. Today, everybody is looking at the government to do something to make a decision to raise rates. Some people want them higher or lower them. Some people want them lower. But this is for the market to decide. It shouldn't be a political decision.  Keith Weinhold 13:53  Low rates, which most think are coming, produce an inflationary environment, which then means that longer term, there need to be new higher rates in order to combat that.  Doug Casey 14:05  Well, what we've got is a situation where conflicting advice and beliefs are causing rates, and indeed, most of the economy, to go up and down like an elevator with a lunatic at the controls. And actually, that's a very good analogy.  Keith Weinhold 14:22  And low rates to your earlier point, Doug, they don't encourage anyone to save. And you know what? Government policy doesn't encourage anyone to save either in times of crisis, like, look what happened during covid. Oh my gosh, if these people can't go to work and generate an income, they don't have any savings, obviously. So then let's go ahead and intervene even more and send them stimulus checks, basically a bailout. So low rates discourage anyone from saving, but so does our policy, because every time there's a big catastrophe, oh, they just come in with a safety net anyway. That's Part. The reason why we have such a problem with capital formation of the average American today?  Doug Casey 15:04  Well, it's actually worse than that, because over generations, a lot of debt has built up in the country. In other words, to maintain your standard of living, a lot of people have borrowed. They've done this either by taking the savings of past generations and borrowing it or mortgaging their personal futures. Either way, look, if you and I went out and borrowed a million dollars today, we could raise our standard of living artificially, sure, for the next year, but at the end of that year, we have to pay back the million dollars to lost interest, and that artificial rise in our standard of living will result in a very real decline in our standard of living. And a great deal of the borrowing that's been done to stimulate the economy through the banking system is for consumption, not for production. In other words, a lot of the borrowing is not to create new technologies and new infrastructure and new capital goods to create more wealth. A lot of it's just stuff that you wind up. People are borrowing things to fill their basements and their garages with more junk, consumer borrowing, borrowing for vacations, borrowing for to go to music, shows, all kinds of things. This has become a habit in the US, right? So let's look. It's going to end very badly. It's going to end and is ending as we speak, actually, in what I call the greater depression. It's going to be what we're looking at here, largely because of monetary manipulation, but also because taxes have gone up, up, up, up from zero level. Basically, in 1913 there were no income taxes in the US, the US government lived exclusively on minimal tariffs and excise duties. But today, there's right and they're very high, high levels of inflation, high levels of borrowing. So I think we're coming to the end of the road, as far as that's concerned. And it's bad news. Of course, most of the real wealth in the world, when you have a financial collapse, when you have a depression, most of the real wealth still exists. It just changes ownership, that's all so you want to position yourself so that you're not too adversely affected by what's coming  Keith Weinhold 17:31  this inflation and more coming inflation pumping up the asset values of the asset owners and then ruining the lifestyles of those in the lower middle class and making them trend down lower since they spend a greater proportion of their income on everyday needs like clothing and food, which is a small proportion of people that are well off and the poor don't have the assets to benefit from that inflation. And you know, Doug, it wasn't until I read your recent article that I realized something that initially the fed only had one mandate, price stability, and then later they added that maximum employment was their second mandate. I didn't realize that. So really, it's been an expansion of what they're paying attention to, and a de facto expansion of their powers and influence and control.  Doug Casey 18:23  Well, actually, they have a third mandate now, which is to control long term interest rates, to prop up the mortgage market, to prop up the real estate market. Because, as you know, the real estate market floats on a sea of debt, and if you can't get a mortgage, if you can't borrow, you can't buy real estate, or, for that matter, you can't sell it. So this makes it a very unstable situation, and most people are unaware of the fact that before the last depression, the longest mortgage you could get was five years, and that was with a 20% down payment. So things have changed a lot since then, and the more debt you use to finance anything, the more unstable things become. And the fact that things have become so unstable, and the average guy's standard of living has been sinking, and he has more credit card debt, more mortgage debt, more automobile debt. Used to be paid cash for a car, then was financed for two years and five and seven, and then it was leased where you never even owned it. I mean, this is, this is a trend that's coming to an end at this point, so it's going to be quite a comeuppance for people.  Keith Weinhold 19:42  I think long term financing and the easing of getting financing makes the cost of anything higher. There's probably no greater example than that of what has happened with college tuition over the decades. But you know Doug, when we talk about this centrally planned economy. Rather than letting free market forces take over, I love it. I just absolutely love it when the answer to a problem is actually doing less than what you're currently doing, let go of the reins, rather than the Fed controlling interest rates. If there were a free market doing it, you would have bank loan rates that couldn't become too high, or else they wouldn't attract borrowers. So rates would naturally fall, and then you also couldn't have bank loan rates that are too low, because you've got to compensate the bank for bad borrower risk. So rates would come up, and they would find some natural level, kind of to the point that you made earlier. There would be a natural set point price discovery. That's how I think of a free market working for interest rates rather than announcements by a Fed chair.  Doug Casey 20:51  Well, you're right. The problem is that the high government officials, the elite, if you would, think they know best and try to manipulate things, but they don't know best, quite frankly. And one other comment that you made, which I think is very appropriate, is college tuitions. For years, I've recommended that young people forget about college. It's a huge misallocation of your time and money, you wind up studying things well after you are through partying and drinking and chasing the opposite sex, and the things you learn about have no practical application in the world. And I'm not talking about learning history and the classics and mathematics and science, okay? Those are valuable things. Most of what people are taking in college today are hobby subjects, if you would, or things that are fun to learn in your spare time, but you shouldn't burden yourself with a lifetime of debt to do those things and get a worthless degree. Everybody has a degree and with grade inflation, they're a waste of time. That's listen. That's why I wrote this book with Matt Smith. Is my podcast. It's called the preparation. It's on Amazon, and it explains talking about your standard of living, which is what this is all about, really, why it's foolish to go to college today and exactly what especially a young man should do, instead of misallocating The four most valuable vibrant years of his life, sitting behind a desk listening to Marxist leaning professors corrupt you with all kinds of really bad ideas. So that's why we wrote the preparation. And it tells young men exactly what they should do, instead of burdening themselves under hundreds of 1000s of dollars of debt, which can't be discharged and serves no useful purpose, what they've learned in exchange for it. So, I mean, this is one of the one of the things that people should be doing, but not enough are.  Keith Weinhold 23:07  AI changes things fast. I mean, for a four year college graduate today, what you learned as a freshman three or four years ago could quickly be outdated, and that effect just wasn't nearly as great as it was a few decades ago, but if you're listening in the audio only, Doug just held his book called The preparation, which he co authored with Matthew Smith. If this way of thinking resonates with you, here's some actionable things that you can actually do. You're listening to get rich education. Our guest is international man. Doug Casey, when we come back, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold  Keith Weinhold 23:41  you know, most people think they're playing it safe with their liquid money, but they're actually losing savings accounts and bonds don't keep up when true inflation eats six or 7% of your wealth. Every single year, I invest my liquidity with FFI freedom family investments in their flagship program. Why fixed 10 to 12% returns have been predictable and paid quarterly. There's real world security backed by needs based real estate like affordable housing, Senior Living and health care. Ask about the freedom flagship program. When you speak to a freedom coach there, and that's just one part of their family of products, they've got workshops, webinars and seminars designed to educate you before you invest. Start with as little as 25k and finally, get your money working as hard as you do. Get started at Freedom family investments.com/gre, or send a text. Now it's one, 937, 795, 8989. Yep, text their freedom coach directly again. 1-937-795-8989  Keith Weinhold 24:52  the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 420, Five, six, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President Caeli Ridge personally, while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com that's Ridge lending group.com.  Robert Helms 25:23  Hi everybody. t's Robert Allens of the real estate guys radio program. So glad you found Keith Weinhold and get rich education. Don't quit your Daydream.  Keith Weinhold 25:34  Steve, welcome back to get rich Education. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, we're talking with Doug Casey about how the Fed is quietly intervening and hollowing out the middle class when it comes to interest rates. Since you state about them being the most important indicator for an economy, I think a lot of people don't realize Doug, and maybe you run into this too, that interest rates are not high today. I mean, on the long run, the Fed funds rate averages 4.6% and today it's in the high threes. So they're not actually high today. But with all these crises where we had all this money printing in these low rates, they feel high, but they're not.  Doug Casey 26:22  Well, you're quite correct. The question is, at what rate is the dollar losing value? The official US government figures say, Well, I don't know what they say. They vary, and the numbers are jumbled. And I think the general price level in the US, if we were realistic, is going up well over 5% probably closer to 10% you can make that case. Yeah, I think so, because I'm talking to you now from Argentina and for years, the figures were notoriously and outrageously concocted, made up to make people think things weren't as bad as they are. And here in Argentina, we've just had a revolution, actually a peaceful revolution, with replacing the Peronist government with a man named Javier Malay. It's probably the most unusual and most important election, believe it or not, in world history, because Malay was elected here in Argentina on the platform of basically getting rid of the government disbanding it. In other words, Elon Musk's Doge, but on steroids times 10, and things have gotten a lot better here because of that. And it's too bad that Doge has been eliminated in the US, because a lot of people don't understand that the government doesn't really produce anything at all. All it does is take taxes from you and pass that money around to other people with a lot skimmed off the top to do things that entrepreneurs would probably, or certainly, I'd say, do by themselves, and they make it worse by printing up money to give to people to do those things, and borrowing money, which acts as an albatross around everybody's neck. So I'd make the case that I'm not promoting either the Republicans or the Democrats, I'd kind of say a pox on both their houses. They're just two sides of the same coin. What I think we ought to have is a much smaller, much much smaller government. But are we going to get one? No, we're not getting it right now, because I think a lot of people aren't aware of the fact that the government is running 2 trillion, $3 trillion per year deficits, and those deficits are going up, not down. So where's that money coming from? Well, most of it's being created out of thin air. It's being inflated through the banking system. So the prognosis is not terribly good. Now, along the way, of course, people have hid in real estate, made a lot of money in real estate. Real estate prices have gone up faster than retail inflation has gone up. Yeah, but I'm asking myself whether it's not possible that the real estate market could come unglued at this point, because it floats on a sea of debt. What do you think, Keith, do you have any fears about that?  Keith Weinhold 29:27  Homeowners are in great shape today. They have record equity positions. They're not going to walk away. Many of them are still locked into these really low mortgage rates, so they're in really good shape. This is something very different from the 2008 global financial crisis, when you had irresponsible borrowers that had negative equity positions and an oversupply of housing so they could move out and get something cheaper. Today, if you move out in the great situation that you're in with your low mortgage rate and a high equity position, you'd lose your high equity position and. Might have to go pay rent that's higher somewhere else, so I don't see a lot of real estate appreciation coming over the next year or two, but I don't see any impending crash, largely due to that condition, there's not distress in the market.  Doug Casey 30:17  Are you worried about the fact that most local and state governments are on the ragged edge of insolvency and might be raising their real estate taxes and of course, insurance costs seem to be going up a lot faster than most other costs as well. Right now, utility costs are relatively low because oil and gas prices are low, but that could change too. I mean, is there anything that could take the real estate train off the rails?  Keith Weinhold 30:47  Not that I see. In fact, real estate values have only fallen substantially one time since World War Two, and that was during the 2008 global financial crisis, when we had conditions that are largely the opposite today. That's back when we had an oversupply and an irresponsible borrower that had negative equity so they wanted to walk away, and that created the down drain. To your point, yes, I do see property taxes continuing to increase, but because values aren't increasing as much, they would have to increase the mill rate to get further increases, and then most of the big insurance increases, many feel they are done. They had to come up. Because with inflation, the replacement cost of a property, if you would have a loss, rose and increased that way. So because we're still supply challenge in a lot of places, I see prices holding up but not appreciating like 10% anytime soon, and that's due to an affordability constraint. I don't see how they could possibly do that. And when we talk about that average person Doug, that person trying to make their mortgage payments or their rent payments, I was talking on a recent episode about the K shaped economy, I think it's something that we often visualize in our mind. You see the upper branch of the K rising, the lower branch of the k falling, which is emblematic of this hollowing out of the middle class. But I recently saw it graphically represented, where you have the capital share of income going up for people over the decades. That used to be 5050, between capital share of income and labor share of income. Back 60 years ago, it was 5050, but now, with this K shaped divergence, one's capital share of income is about 57% today, and their labor share of income is only about 43% today. And it's kind of sad. I sort of hate to say it out loud, but it's like, hard work just does not pay off, like it used to. Much of this due to inflation pumping up asset values.  Doug Casey 32:52  Well, I understand what you're saying, and I think you're correct, because there's an old saw. They say the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, and that's kind of what this K shaped economy is telling us. You've got the super rich in the top 1% or 1/10 of 1% that are becoming Ultra double wealthy, and the guy at the bottom, well, his social security taxes have risen from almost nothing to 15% of his wages, and it's a real problem. And it's said that the members of Gen Z can't afford to buy a house today as well. So what do you do about this? Well, my suggestion is, if possible, you don't want to get a job working for somebody else. If at all possible, you've got to work for yourself as an entrepreneur. That's the first thing. It's very hard to get wealthy working for somebody else. The best is to work for yourself, but in order to do that, you have to train yourself with lots of skills and lots of knowledge. And I'm not sure if people are doing that to the degree they ought to either. So I don't know how this is going to end. And of course, you mentioned earlier, artificial intelligence and robotics are tied up hand in glove with artificial intelligence. It's clear that within five years, we'll have robots that may not look entirely like people, but can do almost anything that a human being can do, and this is going to put a lot of pressure on people that don't have special skills, especially with artificial intelligence being programmed into these super competent robots. So the whole world is changing right before our very eyes. Right now,  Keith Weinhold 34:39  when we talk about the middle class struggle. I probably follow the housing market more closely than you do. The NAR recently gave us the latest statistic. Two years ago, the average age of the first time homebuyer was aged 35 last year, it rose to 38 this year, it's now 40 just the average. Age of the first time homebuyer. So in high cost areas, that could very well be 45 I mean, people are getting gray hair before they make a down payment for this middle class that's trying to get into the ownership class.  Doug Casey 35:13  And the further back you go, the younger the age right people were buying houses at So, I mean, it used to be people would try to buy a house right out of school. Frankly, that's out of the question today.  Keith Weinhold 35:27  Yeah, I sure don't remember those days myself, but Yeah, it sure was substantially younger just a couple decades ago. Well, Doug, where are we going with all this? I mean, does a reset eventually happen with either runaway inflation? Do you think that happens first, or some sort of market crash, or is it something else? I mean, what cataclysmic act is likely to happen first?  Doug Casey 35:52  Well, look, I hate to be too gloom and doomy, because everybody, first of all, generally speaking, trends in motion stay in motion, and everything has been maybe gradually descending standard of living wise, but the economy's held together, and we haven't had any catastrophic collapse. Well, almost in 2008 and a couple other times, but I think we're headed for one. So what should you do about it? I would say, consume less if you possibly can, and save what you can, if possible, take a second job while it's still possible, to go out and get a second job or found an entrepreneurial activity so that if you lose your job, you've got a backup system. But with the changes in technology and of course, what's happening in robotics and AI are just part of it. You're not going to be able to rely on what you relied on in the past, because the world is changing very, very radically as far as real estate is concerned. Look, I actually own a lot of real estate, but, you know, I've come to the conclusion that at this point I want to treat my house and other real estate, basically as a not so much as an investment to make money, but to store value. That's right, a store of value where I can put some capital aside. I don't want to keep a lot of money in dollars. That doesn't mean I want debt either. That's risky. For many, many years, I've advocated and bought gold and silver because they are money in its most basic form, and it's worked out really well. I started buying gold at about $40 it's at about 4000 today, and I've always treated it, almost always, as a savings vehicle, not as a speculative vehicle, although, if I want to speculate, I speculate in mining stocks, which are a leveraged way of playing gold and silver, the most volatile class of securities on the planet, actually, and I understand that a lot of people today have Robin Hood accounts and are speculating on the stock market, desperately trying to stay ahead of currency debasement and somehow build a nest egg for themselves by speculating in the market. Generally, that's not a good formula for success you're playing against, you know, extremely smart and well capitalized and knowledgeable big boys, and the fact that everybody's doing it is also, in itself, a tip off to the fact the stock market could be at the tippy top right now, I kind of think it is a bubble in the tech stocks. It's tough, Keith, there's not a lot of places to run and hide at this point.  Keith Weinhold 38:39  Price to earnings ratios are really bloated in the s, p5, 100. I'd love to get your thought on this. Doug, if a person can get a 30 year mortgage rate for a rental property where the rent income meets or exceeds the expenses at a mortgage rate between six and 7% should they do that?  Doug Casey 38:57  Look, if you can cover your mortgage a fixed interest rate mortgage 30 years. One thing that you can almost plan your life around is that dollar is going to lose value every year. So the actual value of your debt, your mortgage, is going to go down every year, right? And presumably the rent that you can charge on your house is going to go up every year. So yep, doing it the way I think you're doing it is an excellent plan for slow and steady long term success. Yeah, it makes sense. You're right.  Keith Weinhold 39:30  We actually have some listener questions on the thing that you brought up, which I call inflation profiting when you borrow long term fixed interest rate debt and get to pay it back with more plentiful dollars down the road. Some people don't understand what you just explained. One way I brought it up with my listeners is we'll just look back 30 years ago, in 1995 the average home cost 130k an 80% loan would be 104k so here, 30 years later, that median home costs over 400 K, and you still just owe 104k on the loan. That's the benefit of what I call inflation, profiting on long term fixed interest rate debt. And of course, your tenant would have paid that down to zero as well. But that kind of makes the benefit be more apparent when we look back into the past 30 years. Well, Doug, as we're winding down here, you have any other thoughts about, just say, the average American out there, what they should do with the Fed behaving and controlling the economy like we do. We're talking about the average American, maybe someone with a mortgage, some rental properties, some savings, maybe a 401, K. How do these potential shifts in Fed policy translate into real life consequences and actions for them. Is there anything else?  Doug Casey 40:44  Well, look, don't count on some outside force to kiss everything and make it better. You've got to look out for number one. And as I said before, the way you do that is you should cut back your expenditures every way you can at this point and when you cut back your expenditures, save that money. Now, what do you do with the money that you save? It's not as easy making that recommendation as it was a few years ago, when I was recommending gold, when it was much cheaper than it is. Now it's at $4,000 now look, save money, get an extra job, earn money, cut back your consumption, learn some new skills, because we don't know how things are going to reorient with the immense advances being made through AI and robotics. That's just generalized advice, but that's all you can do, is well and buy real assets. Nothing wrong with buying a house the way you're talking about if you can buy it and the mortgage is cracked with rent. Eventually, I think we're going to see interest rates go back up to the levels that they were in the early 1980s people don't remember this, but the US government was paying 1518, even 20% for its money, and mortgages were, well, 15, 16% it's going to happen again. So I think if you can lock in a mortgage anywhere in here, on a good piece of real estate that covers the mortgage, that's simple, it's doable. Everybody should try to do it. In addition to the other things I mentioned  Keith Weinhold 42:20  in 1981 the 30 year fixed rate mortgage peaked at over 18% to our earlier point about the fact that mortgage rates are actually historically low now so are fed funds rates. Well, Doug, tell us one last time about your new book and then any other resources. If our audience wants to engage with you  Doug Casey 42:40  I do a blog will know who he is. We've had him here on the show twice, yeah, well, he writes there for us every week, and we've got great articles. That's number one. Number two, I do a podcast with Matt Smith every week called Doug Casey's take on youtube.com third, I urge everybody to get this book, which talks about, if you have a grandchild, a son, it talks about why you should not go to college and what you should do exactly instead of going to college. So that's another thing to do. And we have a newsletter that also covers mining stocks, which is where I'm concentrated in at the moment. They're very cheap, very volatile, and one of the few places in the market, and I hate to say this, that offer the potential of 10 to one or more returns in the near future. So I guess those are the areas where you can find out more about me.  Keith Weinhold 43:49  Again, the new book from Doug is called the preparation. It shows a compass on the cover, and then internationalmen.com. Is actually where Doug wrote a piece called The Fed's quiet war against the middle class, which spawned this very conversation right here. Doug, it's been valuable as always. Thanks so much for coming back onto the show.  Doug Casey 44:08  My pleasure. Keith, thank you.  Keith Weinhold 44:16  Yeah, real estate is positioned for price stability. I was actually investing directly in real estate through the 2008 global financial crisis, and I know what happened is that people walked away from properties when the economy got rough and they couldn't make their payments. It is almost impossible for that to happen today. Homeowners can make their payments. Look through Census Bureau data in realtor.com we know a couple things here. Four in 10 homeowners have no mortgage at all. They own the property free and clear. And then among that group with mortgages, 70% of those borrowers still have a mortgage rate locked in at. Under 5% yes, still today I'll amalgamate those for you. This means that 82% of borrowers either have no mortgage or they have a rate under 5% so that is really affordable payments, along with the protective equity and inflation can't touch that principal and interest amount in addition to real estate, Doug Casey is a longtime gold and silver guy. Of course, both of those have sort to fantastic new all time highs this year.  Keith Weinhold 45:34  Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays from me and everyone here at GRE. Next week is another big one. You'll get GRE home price appreciation forecast for next year to the exact percent. I'm Keith Weinhold. Don't quit you daydream.  Speaker 3 45:53  Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively  Keith Weinhold 46:21  The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building, get richeducation.com Â

584: The K-Shaped Economy for Real Estate Investors: Capital Compounds. Labor Doesn't.
15/12/2025 | 36 mins.
Keith discusses the K-shaped economy, where income from capital assets is rising while labor income is declining. In 1965, 50% of income came from labor and 50% from capital; by 1990, it was 54% and 46%, respectively, and today it's 57% and 43%. Keith emphasizes the importance of how capital compounds over labor and advises on building ownership in real estate and businesses. Finally, he answers your listener's questions about: agricultural real estate inflation, profiting on mortgage loans, transitioning from accumulation to preservation and a fast-growing state that no one talks about. Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/584 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: [email protected] Invest with Freedom Family Investments. For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text 1-937-795-8989 to speak with a freedom coach Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com or text 'GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript: Keith Weinhold 0:00  Keith, welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, capital compounds, labor doesn't realizing this can change allocation decisions for the rest of your life. Then I discuss giving. Finally, I answer your listener questions about agricultural real estate inflation, profiting on mortgage loans when it's time for you to stop accumulating properties and a fast growing state that no one talks about today on get rich education  Speaker 1 0:33  since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki, get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast or visit get rich education.com  Corey Coates 1:18  You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.  Keith Weinhold 1:34  Welcome to GRE from Williamsburg, Virginia to Williamsport, Pennsylvania and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you're listening to get rich education, and I'm somewhat near Williamsport, Pennsylvania today. For years, I've told you about the widening canyon between the haves and the have nots, and that's something that you might have only visualized in your head or merely considered a theory, but now you can see it. There's a chart that I recently shared with our newsletter subscribers that might just make your spine tingle and look, I don't like saying this, but hard work just does not pay off like it used to. This is emblematic of the K shaped economy. Just visualize the upper branch of the K, a line rising over time, and the lower branch of a letter k, that line falling over time, both plotted on the same chart. So what steadily happened over the last 60 years really is quite astonishing. And look, I don't want the world to be the way that I'm about to tell you it is, but that's just what's occurring. The share of one's income from capital assets is rising, while the share from labor keeps decreasing simultaneously. Now just think about your own personal economy. What share of your income is from your invested capital versus how much of your income is derived from your labor. When you're the youngest, it's all labor. When I got out of college and had my first job, all of my income was from labor. I certainly didn't have any rental property cash flow or stock dividends. But for Americans, here is how it's changed over time, and this K shaped divergence is alarming people in 1965 it was 5050 by 1990 54% of income was from capital and 46% labor. Today it's 57% capital and only 43 labor. Gosh, the divergence is real, and it's only getting wider, and I really had to dig for the sources on this K shaped economy chart. They are the BLS, the Tax Foundation and the International Labor Organization. Increasingly, asset owners are the haves. The upper part of this K shaped economy, that line is drifting up like a helium balloon that you forgot to tie to the chair. It just keeps going up and then the labor share of income, which is shrinking, that is also known as how much of the economic pie goes to people who actually work for a living. That is another way to think of it. So frankly, that's why I say hard work just does not pay off like it used to, because with each wave of inflation, assets, pump, leveraged assets, mega pump and wages lag behind, and we can't allocate our resources in the way that we want the. World to be, but how the world really is. In fact, the disparity is even greater than the chart that I just described to you, because it doesn't even include value accumulation, also known as appreciation. I was only talking about income there, and the reality is that working for a paycheck just pays off less and less and less. No amount of working overtime on a Saturday can make you wealthy, but it might make you miserable. Owning assets pays off more and more. In fact, the effect is even more exaggerated than what I even described, because, as we know, the tax treatment is lighter on your capital gains than it is your income derived through labor. As the economy keeps evolving, those who benefit the most, they do not sell their time for money. They're not trading their time for dollars. In fact, let me distill it down here are, yeah, it's just four words that could change the way you allocate your time and your effort for the rest of your life. Capital compounds, labor doesn't. yeah, there's a lot right there. If you want to keep up or get ahead, you need to be on the capital part of the K, the upper part. And what would that really look like for you in real life? What does that practically mean? It means building ownership into your financial life, owning real estate, owning businesses using prudent leverage, owning things that produce income, and even merely owning more things that appreciate. And here's the great news, though, real estate is still the most accessible, leverageable, tax favored capital friendly asset class ever created. That's whether you're just patching together like 43k for a down payment on your first turnkey single family rental, or making a tax deferred exchange into a 212 door apartment complex. Okay, this is how that can look in real life. The bottom line here is that as the economy gets more and more K shaped, with this divergence between Americans capital share of income increasing and labor share decreasing, that you want to stack real income generating assets. That is the big takeaway.  Keith Weinhold 7:44  Well, this is the time of year where a lot of people feel compelled to give donations. And as a GRE listener that's paid five ways, you've got more ability than others to give, I need to caution you about some things. I'm sorry that it is this way, because I do want to promote giving. It's kind, it's virtuous, and it's not a completely selfless act either, because when I give, it makes me feel good too. You're making a difference, and that feels great. Let's talk about the downsides of giving, though, because few people discuss that. We already know about the upsides when I give to an organization, say, 1500 bucks here, $1,000 over there, well, inevitably, you do get on that organization's contact list. And yeah, I suppose that it is easier to retain a customer or donor than it is to find a new one. Sometimes I just make what I expected to be a one time donation, but they will keep contacting you. Now, I was once on the other side of this. I served on a volunteer committee that organizes athletic events, and a friend of mine, John made a $1,000 donation to our organization one year, which was really kind, and he's just a day job working kind of guy when he didn't make the donation. The following year, someone made it a line item in our meeting minutes to say that John's donation was not renewed. Like that's the only thing they brought up. Oh gosh, that really struck me the wrong way, because here's a guy that traded his time for dollars at a job that I happen to know he doesn't like very much, and the committee statement was that the guy didn't renew his donation. Sheesh, now, when it comes to the tax treatment of, say, $1,000 that you make in a donation, there's a lot of misunderstanding about how that works, and this is the type of subject that you're thinking about now, because sometimes people want to get a tax break tallied up before year end, because some people think that after the year ends, well, the IRS pays you back the $1,000 you donated because it's tax deductible. No, that's how a tax credit. Works. But a tax deduction, which is all that you might be eligible for, means that if your annual income is 100k well then a 1k donation lowers your taxable income to 99k so if you're in the 24% tax bracket, then you'd get 240 bucks back. But you know, in many or even most cases, you're not going to get any tax break at all for making a donation, and this is because you did not exceed the standard deduction threshold, which is now almost 16k if you're single and almost 32k married, you get to deduct those amounts from your taxable income no matter what. So the standard deduction, in a way, it's nice, because you don't have to keep receipts and do all that tracking for everything. So I've had that experience myself where, huh, feeling a little generous throughout the year, giving $1,500 here, $1,000 there. Oh, and then realizing that it does nothing for me on taxes, you have to give more to exceed the standard deduction amount and start itemizing them. And mortgage interest does go into that amount. Okay, it does go into the amount to try to get your total above the standard deduction threshold. So go ahead and give freely, but in a lot of cases, keep in mind that it often does nothing for your taxes, because you're taking that standard deduction if you indeed are. There's been another tip flation trend that's annoying, and that is increasingly when I give a donation online, I'm asked to if I want to leave a tip on top of the donation. That is so weird, a tip is for good service. I'm serving you by being generous enough to give a donation. Sheesh, a tip request on top of a donation. But please do give when you do, one thing that you might want to specify is that it is a one time donation, if that is your intent, or they will constantly follow up with you.  Keith Weinhold 12:06  Coming up next, I'm going to answer your listener questions. A member of Team GRE, who you haven't heard before, is going to come in to ask me your listener questions, and one of them is going to be among the most important topics that our show has never addressed, and it's about time. I'm Keith Weinhold. You're listening to get rich education.  Keith Weinhold 12:28  You know, most people think they're playing it safe with their liquid money, but they're actually losing savings accounts and bonds don't keep up when true inflation eats six or 7% of your wealth every single year I invest my liquidity with FFI freedom family investments in their flagship program. Why fixed 10 to 12% returns have been predictable and paid quarterly. There's real world security backed by needs based real estate like affordable housing, Senior Living and healthcare. Ask about the freedom flagship program when you speak to a freedom coach there, and that's just one part of their family of products, they've got workshops, webinars and seminars designed to educate you before you invest. Start with as little as 25k and finally, get your money working as hard as you do. Get started at Freedom, family investments.com/gre, or send a text now it's 1-937-795-8989, yep, text their freedom coach, directly again, 1-937-795-8989  Keith Weinhold 13:40  the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President Caeli Ridge personally while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com that's Ridge lending group.com  Kristen Tate 14:14  this is author Kristin Tate. Listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.  Keith Weinhold 14:32  Welcome back to get rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, they say that it takes a village to get some things done and well, it takes a team to prop up this slack jawed operation one GRE team member, capably behind the scenes for more than a year and a half now, is Brenda Almendariz, welcome in. Brenda, Hi, Keith, thanks. Rather than me asking the listener questions this time you. You get to do it, but before we do that, just tell us a bit about your real estate investing.  Brenda 15:07  Sure. So I started maybe learning a little bit about investing and kind of looking into other options to grow my wealth. And I came across the GRE podcast and a few others. So I think about 2018 I did a little bit of just learning and kind of educating myself. And then 2019 I bought my first turnkey property. Turned out well. And then 2020 I bought my second one. And then in 2021 I decided, okay, this is working really well. Maybe I'll do a house hack. I'll do something a little different, and in a year, then maybe I'll do something else. But I've been in my 2021 home now for about almost five years. I'm looking for the next one, hopefully within the next year. But yeah, it's been great. Turnkey. Just met real estate investment company here at my local REIA, and then I learned that I could actually connect with other companies across other places through GRE but yeah, it's been great.  Keith Weinhold 16:02  Brenda lives in Phoenix, just about as close to the center of Phoenix as you can possibly be. I sat down with Brenda for lunch the last time that I was in Phoenix, and like a lot of people, almost everybody that works here at GRE they started out as a listener before they ever worked here. And really, it's that same story with Brenda as well. So yeah, Brenda will want to ask us the first of what we have about four listener questions today  Brenda 16:31  we do, so I'll go over the first one here. Question is, I would love for you to revisit some of the non traditional example, coffee plantation, CBD manufacturing, teak plantation, Belize resort properties and syndication projects you've discussed on the GRE podcast just to see how they turned out. I'm sure some of them failed to deliver the expected returns, and it's the failures that many of us learn the most from  Keith Weinhold 17:02  Yeah, totally. Okay, so not so much a listener question here, but a comment to discuss more of these agricultural real estate investments or ones that are in syndications off of the investment type that you can't do yourself, is what we're talking about here, rather than direct ownership of residential rental property and an appeal to follow up down the road to see how they really turned out. And you know, Brenda, I'll address you because we don't have the listener name with this question. Most people in my position, if an investment has been discussed on the show, and then that investment didn't go as well as was hoped for, you know what? They never tell the audience about it. However, there's the Panama coffee farm investment. We first discussed that here way back in 2015 and we had a GRE field trip where I met a lot of you in person there in Panama. And as I often do when we discuss a particular investment here, I bought and still own Panama coffee farm parcels myself. That investment, it paid cash flow from the crop yields for a few years, and then it stopped. The good yields stopped due to covid disruption, and since then, there have also been erratic weather patterns like drought and precipitation of the wrong levels and at the wrong time of year, and there's been more of a prevalence of pests in disease like coffee leaf, rust and the operator. They have been communicative and forthcoming all the while they're still issuing the annual report that I read, and sometime after that, I think that a lot of investors were assured, because it sort of made national news, international news, that markets for both coffee and cacao have been suppressed, at least from the standpoint of there's not enough crop yield. I mean, that is a problem in a lot of places worldwide. Now I hope that turns around, and it very well may. In fact, we did something here that very few shows do. Back on episode 431, we had the Panama coffee farm CEO come back on the show to describe exactly what I just told you about there. And few shows are willing to do that. Some people just want you to think that every single investment that's discussed goes as well it was hoped for, or even better than expected. But that is not real world. You got to be authentic in real So, okay. Listener, comment, well, taken there. They appreciate that sort of follow up, and they would like more of that. All right, that's great. What's the next question? Brenda.  Brenda 19:40  Sure. So the next one comes to us from our audience over on YouTube. So in response to our real estate pays five ways in a slow market, YouTube video matrices wrote, There is no inflation profiting. You would have to be paying off the loan with an income that goes up with housing inflation. That's plausible if you are a wage earner, but if your source of income is rental properties, then there isn't a wage increase that reduces the effective loan amount. You are double dipping in the inflation profiting column by counting appreciation which you earn as a real estate investor and inflation profiting, which you earn only if your wages go up at the rate of housing inflation, and you use those wages to pay off the loan, which you don't  Keith Weinhold 20:33  Okay, again, somewhat of a statement here. I suppose there's a question implicit within that for matrices. I'm not sure how you say that name exactly. Wondering about inflation profiting. Are you counting it? Right? I don't know about that. The part about paying off the loan faster if you're a wage earner, I mean, that's plausible, but not if your income is from rental properties. I mean, see that's actually backwards, because your cash flow goes up faster than the rate of inflation due to your biggest payment, your principal and interest staying fixed, so your net rent income goes up even faster than the rate of inflation. So inflation profiting, therefore it's even better than how I've been presenting it and calculating it. Now with that understood matrices, here's one way for real estate investors to understand inflation profiting on your loan if you still have trouble getting with that. 30 years ago, in 1995 the US median home price was 130k with an 80% loan, your mortgage balance at origination would have been 104k and the monthly mortgage payment is 763 with the 8% market mortgage rate level that you would have gotten at that time. Now, even if we don't apply any principal pay down at all, your mortgage balance today is still just 104k and your payment is still just 736 bucks, and it is substantially easier to make that payment today, because your wages and salaries and rent incomes are multiples higher. When you originate a loan, the bank doesn't ask to be repaid in dollars or their equivalent. The loan documents only say dollars and dollars are worth less and less and less. So today, your median priced property is worth over 400k despite still having that tiny 104k loan balance. And of course, your tenant would have paid that down to zero, and we aren't even counting that part, I think, to really exaggerate the effect and help make the inflation profiting concept crystallize for you, matrices. If you go back 100 years, the median home cost was 11,600 bucks. An 80% loan would be just over 9k that you borrowed. Okay, so at a 7% interest rate, 30 year loan, the monthly payment would be 94 bucks, laughably small. That's less than the cost of a nice dinner out today. That's all you owe on a median priced property, which is over 400k today. So because it doesn't feel like you're tangibly walking away with anything when you sell a property, hopefully that helps make it real mitricas. And one last way to think about it is, let's just forget real estate for a moment. Would you loan your best friend 100k for 30 years interest free, even if we're somehow absolutely guaranteed that he would pay you back? Well, of course, he wouldn't do that, because inflation destroys the lender and benefits the borrower. So you would want to be the borrower in that case, because the borrower profits from inflation, profiting just like you're the borrower with income property. That's the position that you want to be in. But I'm glad we brought this up, because a lot of people have that question. That was a good one. Matrices, even though you seem to sort of be doubting if inflation profiting is a real thing with the way you approach the question, hey, I really appreciate it. Anyway, what's the next one? Brenda  Brenda 24:10  yep. So the next one we have is Mark. He wrote into our general inbox, and he says, I have been listening to your podcasts from the beginning, and I believe I have not missed a single show. Wow. Yeah, it would be hard to argue with your strategy of using debt to rapidly increase your returns and expand your rental real estate portfolio. This method is great for the accumulation phase of one's life. However, I believe that you have never addressed the next chapter of everyone's life, phase two. I am, of course, talking about preserving your wealth, which is phase two. Yeah, I only ask this because that is what stage of life I am in. For background, he has 15 rentals, seven mortgages. Age 62. Currently all managed by a property manager, and he is married and an empty nester. Please note, no matter how much money is made from rentals, he said, his wife's view is that it is work, and so she does not want any more homes or work. This would be a great idea for an upcoming show. Please consider thanks, Mark.  Keith Weinhold 25:20  Yeah. Great stuff, Mark. And before Brenda came on, we discussed which questions that she's going to choose. And I definitely wanted to have this one in there, because, I mean, this is one of the most important topics that's never been answered on the show, and it really needs to be answered today. The accumulation phase of Mark's life is done. He wants to know about how to approach the preservation stage. First of all, Mark, congratulations. You've listened to every GRE episode, 584, of them now, and you've clearly benefited from acting so good for you to be in this position. In fact, this show had its inception in 2014 and it doesn't even take these 1011, years to reach financial freedom, if you follow my plan. So you are there. All right, so, Mark, you've got 15 rentals, seven mortgages. You're age 62 they're currently managed by a property manager. You're married in an empty nester. I mean, you've made it, and you know that you've made it when you have enough income to support your desired lifestyle. That's what we're talking about here. Financially Free, beat step free and all of that, I'm going to speculate mark that if you had tried paying all cash for every property, you wouldn't have gotten very far. You wouldn't have made it to this point. You know why this question resonates so well with me, Mark, despite being quite a bit younger than you, I am at that stage as well. I definitely don't need to add more properties for the rest of my life. Now. I don't have kids yet either, so there's no clear air there. In fact, one reason that I hold on to my properties is to help educate our audience to be a real investor in the game and to be able to keep up with trends. You can just kind of tell when someone's not investing in real estate themselves. So if I talk it, I want to keep doing it now for you, Mark, it's not about rushing to pay off your seven mortgages, as you know from listening, that's usually not your best return on capital. If you've already made it, there is absolutely zero reason to add more properties, I would agree, especially if you know, in your wife's eyes, that creates a headache, and maybe yours as well, once you get to a certain point. So as far as this preservation stage, since you've moved away from the accumulation phase, the LLC is the favorite protection structure, not a C or an S Corp. And I have done shows on that with attorneys before. Since I'm not one of your 15 properties, if one or two are less profitable or for whatever reason, you just have difficulty getting those rented during vacancies, okay, you can sell those off if you don't want to do the 1031, exchange into more property, you can pay the tax. That's an option, but you will also have to pay depreciation recapture on those properties and mark. If there's one thing I wish I knew, it's that if you do have children or clear heirs, but the gold standard for passing along properties to heirs is a revocable living trust, and if you only remember one thing about that, a properly drafted living trust is the number one way to pass along rental properties smoothly. And why it's great is that it avoids probate. Probate is a court supervised process. It takes months or years of delay. So instead, with a revocable living trust, heirs get access to your properties almost immediately. Now you are age 62 hopefully this isn't happening anytime soon, but you do keep full control while you're alive, it's easy to update a revocable living trust, but the big one probably is that it prevents family disputes and it keeps everything private. That way there's no public probate record. And the bonus is, if you own properties in multiple states, a trust avoids multiple probates, that's huge. So those are some considerations. Mark as you've Congratulations again. Move from the accumulation phase to the preservation stage. It's a completely normal, natural process. You sure don't have to keep adding properties for ever and ever. Congrats. You made it. You did it.  Brenda 29:37  Great. We've got another one, Keith. This one is from Tim in Philomath, Oregon, and he says, I would be interested in the days ahead, if you would be able to help us understand why North Dakota is projected to grow so much.  Keith Weinhold 29:54  Okay, thanks, Tim in follow math, Oregon, another word I'm not sure how to pronounce. Now, yeah, you might think it's unusual that I would want to answer this question. For a low population state of under 1 million people, like North Dakota, from today to 2050 there's forecast to be 9% population growth nationally, but in North Dakota, it is 34% that is quite a surge, and that is per visual capitalist via the University of Virginia, but North Dakota's projected growth, it looks surprisingly strong on paper, especially for a cold, rural, low population state. But really, there are at least four major forces behind the fast 2025 to 2050, Outlook, and when you break them down, the growth actually makes sense. So I want to talk about this, because it's really a template for what makes for a growing place and a good future real estate market, no matter where it is. But in North Dakota, you've got this continued energy sector, strength, oil, gas and next generation energy. Part of what's driving the growth is something that's definitely not a new story. It is still the Bach and shale. It's still one of the top US oil fields. You got advances in drilling. That means more production with fewer rigs. That makes a sector more resilient. You've got global demand for liquid fuels projected to remain high through 2050 I know people like to talk about renewables, and there probably is a future there. But it's not like we're going to go all renewable right away. North Dakota is aggressively expanding carbon capture. So energy equals jobs. Jobs equals population retention and in migration, there's a national labor shortage in North Dakota. It's got this skilled worker hole. The US is going to face a major labor shortage through 2050 that's because of trends that you really can't change, like an aging population and low birth rates. That makes these high wage, high demand energy and engineering jobs stickier. North Dakota consistently leads in labor force participation, job availability, good starting wages for skilled trades, and they always seem to have a low unemployment rate, lower than the national average. So in other words, people move where the jobs are, even if it's cold. They really have one of the best economic outlooks in the country. There's a report called Rich states, poor states. In their latest one, they ranked North Dakota fifth nationwide in economic outlook, and that's above Texas and Florida and Tennessee, and that's because North Dakota has low taxes. They're business friendly, they're light on regulation. Businesses like that, their budgets are stable, and they've got strong public finances. So states with those fundamentals, they tend to grow pretty well over long horizons, and North Dakota has this demographic momentum. It's a younger state than all the surrounding states. They have a younger median age, high birth rates, so they've got this faster natural replacement rates, and they have really strong university systems, both und and North Dakota State, and what that does is that retains those graduates for jobs like energy and engineering and agriculture. So North Dakota benefits from this high stay rate, like a lot of people move for jobs, and they end up staying there, and their population growth seems fast, but the overall population small, so a net gain of 150,000 people, that really seems huge in percentage terms. It's steady rather than explosive growth. We're talking about annual gain. So really, a takeaway for investors is that North Dakota's growth is not a fluke. It's from strong economic policy, a big, durable energy engine, high earning jobs. You got this favorable business climate, and really unexpectedly young demographics. I read that the counties that will grow fastest are Cass Williams and stark and, you know, Brenda. If we learn about a reputable North Dakota property provider, maybe we'll talk about them here on the show. So if you the listener or anyone else know about one, write into us at get rich education, comm slash contact, and we'll check them out. And also, more broadly, if you want your listener question answered in the future, that's where to write to us as well, again, at get rich education.com/contact, thank thanks for the North Dakota question, Tim and Brenda, it's nice to have you here to ask the questions in a different voice.  Brenda 34:29  Thanks, Keith. Yeah, it's good to be on this side of the show instead of  Keith Weinhold 34:34  a listener. After all these years, there's one episode I'm sure you'll be listening to, and it's this one that you're on today.  Keith Weinhold 34:48  Yeah, much of our team here were GRE listeners before they ever worked here. We just made another hire two months ago. That woman worked for a payment processor. I said at the time, that sounds really boring. It definitely sounds more interesting to work at the GRE podcast. To review what you learned today, capital compounds labor doesn't though I promote being a giver, there are downsides to giving, but they're manageable. Inflation, profiting is the most often misunderstood of the five ways, and you will reach a tipping point where you've won in which you no longer have to add properties. That is transitioning from the accumulation phase to the preservation phase. That is one of the more important unaddressed things on the show until today, and finally, North Dakota's booming growth projections coming up soon on the show, I'll reveal GRE national home price appreciation forecast for next year, where you will learn the exact percent appreciation or decline expected in the future. Until then, check us out at get richeducation.com I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.  Speaker 3 36:00  You nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education LLC, exclusively.  Keith Weinhold 36:32  The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building, GetRichEducation.com Â

583: "Getting Your Money to Work For You" is a Middle Class Trap
08/12/2025 | 55 mins.
Keith reviews the state of the real estate market, noting that existing home sales are down about 33% from their 2021 peak, while prices remain firm due to low supply and high demand. Affordability challenges are driven by stagnant wages, inflation, and higher mortgage rates, with 70% of mortgage holders still locked in at rates below 5%. He observes that in certain markets, new construction may now offer better investor terms than comparable existing properties, especially where builders buy down rates. The episode highlights a comparison of nearly a century of asset class returns, reporting real estate's long-term annual appreciation at approximately 4.7%. Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/583 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: [email protected] Invest with Freedom Family Investments. For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text 1-937-795-8989 to speak with a freedom coach Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com or text 'GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation  Complete episode transcript: Keith Weinhold 0:01  welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, how do other audiences feel about the GRE mantras that we've come to love here, like financially free beats debt free and don't get your money to work for you? Then sometimes it's not what you're attracted to in life, but what you're running away from finally comparing the returns from six major asset classes over the past century all today on get rich education  Keith Weinhold 0:29  since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki, get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast or visit get rich education.com  Corey Coates 1:18  You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.  Keith Weinhold 1:34  Welcome to GRE from Kennebunkport, Maine to Bridgeport, Connecticut and across 188 nations worldwide. It is the voice of real estate investing since 2014 I'm Keith Weinhold, and I'm grateful to have you here with me, and we're doing something a little different today, as you'll soon listen in to me as I was on the hot seat being interviewed on another prominent real estate show. But first, when you pull back and ask yourself, why you're really an investor in the first place? There are so many reasons. Maybe you just want a few properties in order to supplement your day job income. Maybe you want to have more than a few so that you can completely replace that active income, or perhaps rather than going the route of building up your cash flow, which is valid, but some think that it's the only way to real estate financial freedom. Instead, you could own, say, nine doors or 22 doors, and even if they all had zero cash flow, you can just keep borrowing against that leverage and equity tax free and live off of that whatever you do when it comes to your day job, income, your degree of disdain for your nine to five job that is going to be greater or less than it is for some others. So your motivation for self improvement, it isn't always about what you're running to in life, which could be real estate investing, but it's also what you're running away from, especially if you don't get a deeply rooted sense of meaning from your job. So you could have both a push factor and a pull factor in what motivates you. There's a scene from the 1999 movie Office Space that just does this incredibly unvarnished job of saying out loud how so many of us feel today. What I'm going to share with you, I mean, you know that you have felt this at least once in your life. Office space wasn't supposed to be a mega hit movie, but it kind of was, because it's so relatable. Let's listen in to part of this clip. This is Ron Livingston playing a disgruntled male employee talking to Jennifer Aniston at a restaurant about his job in the movie Office Space.  Speaker 1 4:09  I don't like my job, and I don't think I'm gonna go anymore. You're just not gonna go. Yeah, won't you get fired? I don't know, but I really don't like it, and I'm not gonna go.  Keith Weinhold 4:24  Then it continues when she asks. So you're just gonna quit? No, not really. I'm just gonna stop going. When did you decide all of that? About an hour ago? Really? Yeah, aren't you going to get another job? I don't think I'd like another job. What are you going to do about money in bills and all that? I've never really liked paying bills. I don't think I'm going to do that either.  Keith Weinhold 4:53  That's it. That is the end of that classic dialog from office space that we can. All relate to you did not wake up to be mediocre, but a lot of people's jobs pummel them into a rather prosaic state. You were born rich because you were born with this abundance of choices, this huge palette in menu, but society often stifles that and makes you forget it, and it gets really easy to just fall into your groove and stay there. The main reason we aren't living our dreams is really because we're living our fears. Failure doesn't actually destroy as many dreams as people think fear and doubt. Does fear and doubt destroy more dreams than failure ever does financial runway? That is a phrase for the amount of time that you can maintain your lifestyle without the need for a paycheck. And it's critical for you to lengthen this runway if you hope to retire early, and it will dramatically reduce your stress level. An example is say that you currently earn 150k per year after taxes, and you spend 126k of that, all right. Well, that means you've got a surplus of 24k a year. Well, it's going to take you a little over five years to accumulate that 126k that you need to annually support your lifestyle. That's what happens if you don't invest. And see investing helps you lengthen your financial runway, that amount of time you can maintain your lifestyle without the need for a paycheck. That's what we're talking about here. Last week I brought you the show from Caesar's Palace in the center of the Las Vegas Strip. So therefore, what I've done is I have gone from the ostentatious and flamboyant over here to the familial and simple as this week I'm in Buffalo New York, broadcasting from a somewhat makeshift GRE studio here, the Buffalo Bills had a home game yesterday, so the city and hotels are busier than usual. Next week, I will bring you the show from upstate Pennsylvania, as I'm traveling to see my family. Let's listen in to me on the hot seat. I was recently a guest on Kevin bups long running real estate investing show. You're going to get to see how I present information and GRE principles for the first time to a different audience. And as I do, you're going to hear me provide new material, but you'll also hear me say quite a few things that I have told you before, even then, the concepts might land differently when I'm explaining them to a new audience. The show is based in Florida, so We'll also touch on the real estate pain and opportunity there. After I'm interviewed, I'm going to come back and tell you about something fascinating. I'm going to compare the returns from six major asset classes over the past century, since 1930 anyway, and that's going to include the first time on the show where I'll tell you real estate's annual appreciation rate over the last entire century. Just about what do you think it is? 8% 5% 3% you're gonna have, perhaps the best answer you've ever had. Here we go.  Kevin Bupp 8:31  Now, guys, I want to welcome back a guest that we've had on. It's been a number of years now. Keith Weinhold, I went back to look at the last episode we had him on. I think it's been about four years. So, you know, four years ago, the world was in the very different state. It was a very different time. And so, you know, thankfully, we're out of the covid era and on to newer and greater things. So for those that don't know Keith, he's the founder of get rich education. He's the host of the popular get rich education podcast. He's a longtime thought leader in the real estate investing space, and like myself. Keith was also born and raised in Pennsylvania. For those that know don't know, I was born and raised in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, Keith, I believe, a couple hours away from where I was. But Keith has very much a unique perspective on wealth, building debt, and really the housing market as a whole. And today, you know, we'll be diving into everything you know, from why the property itself? This is something that Keith kind of coins, why the property itself is less important than you think, to how the housing crash has already happened in a way that most people don't even realize, to the role inflation and debt play in building long term wealth. And so again, it's been a number of years here, so I'm excited to welcome Keith back here. So my friend, Keith, welcome to the show. It's it's a pleasure to have you back here again, my friend.  Keith Weinhold 9:43  Oh, Kevin, it's good to be here and be in the auspices of another fellow native Pennsylvanian as well.  Kevin Bupp 9:49  That's right, that's right, yeah, no, Pa is rocking and rolling as I think I told you this little, this little tidbit last time everyone, every time I speak with someone from Pennsylvania, they never know this. But I'm going to share this fun fact. Are you already know, Keith. I'm gonna share it with the rest of the listeners here today, Pennsylvania, those that are born and raised there. It's the only state where, if you're from Pennsylvania, you refer to it by its initials, and you assume that everyone else, everywhere else across the country, they know what you're talking about when you say I'm from PA and that's the only state that does that. So I think it's pretty neat.  Keith Weinhold 10:19  That's right. No one else does that. No one else says, I'm from TN, if they're from Memphis, right?  Kevin Bupp 10:24  They don't, they don't. So with that, my friend. So, you know, it's, again, it's been a number of years since we, since we had you last on here, you know, let's start with just, let's back up a little bit. You know, what have you been up to? I mean, what, what have the last few years look like for you? Where have you been spending your time, energy and efforts? Obviously, it's, you know, we've gone through some quite a bit of turmoil over the last five years, and would love to just get an update as to what's going on your life.  Speaker 2 10:48  Well, one of the big words in real estate investing, we all know it, even the person that cuts your hair and cleans your teeth knows it, and that's affordability. You know, really, affordability has been under fire, under pressure. By a lot of measures, we have the worst affordability for home buying since the early 80s, when the Jeffersons was on television. So it's been helping a lot of people deal with that. It's really the effect of three things, general inflation, higher home prices and higher mortgage rates. Really, those three things the crux of the problem. It's not exactly inflation, really. It's the fact that over the long term, wages don't keep up with inflation. And really that's the crux of the affordability problem. So I've been helping people deal with that and put that in perspective, really, Kevin,  Kevin Bupp 11:42  what does that mean for, you know, investment, real estate? I mean, are you still still doing deals? Are you seeing deals still get done by your students? I mean, what? What's your world look like?  Keith Weinhold 11:52   Yeah. I mean, I think you're asking, you know, how many deals are taking place? One way to measure that on a national basis is existing home sales. You know, existing home sales have been down substantially. And when a lot of people hear that, they think, prices, oh no, we're not talking about prices. We're talking about existing home sales. That means sales volume. That means the amount of overall transactions. So to give an idea of a real estate market, a residential one that's become pretty lethargic and not very vibrant, is that sales volume. It had its recent peak of about 6 million home sales back in 2021 I mean, 2021 was crazy, kind of the crux of the pandemic, you know, Kevin, that's when for an open house. You saw cars wrapped around the block for just one open house. Okay, well, that year 2021 there were 6 million existing home sales. Today, we're on pace to do about 4 million, and we also did only about 4 million last year. So if you put that in perspective and think about what that means, prices have stayed stable, but that's a 33% reduction in transactions. So investors, you know, people like you and I, Kevin, we're not as affected by this as some other industries. But think about the mortgage loan industry. If you're doing 33% fewer transactions, think about the hard decisions companies have to make and lay people off. 33% fewer transactions for title companies. It's probably close to 33% fewer transactions for furniture companies as well. So really it's both affordability that's been a problem, and that's led to this relative lethargy, kind of a slow, not very interesting residential real estate market, at least from the transaction perspective, really, really slow.  Kevin Bupp 13:58  But Could, could one not argue, I don't know the data points. Keith, I guess, what did it look like? 2021? Was kind of the peak. I think you'd reference 6 million units a year. Transactionally, what did it look like prior? What, what was, what was a more normal year like? And maybe 2020, wasn't a normal year either, right? Because a lot of folks thought the role was ending for a period of time. You know, 2019 maybe just again, trying to, trying to find maybe a better baseline to use. And then, you know, does, I guess, in my mind, and I don't follow these data points as much as you do, is that maybe 2021, was, you know, somewhat artificial inflation, right? Lots of lots of money pumping into the marketplace. And ultimately, we had to get back to a sense of normalcy at some point in time. And so are we at a at a place of normalcy? Are we still behind the eight ball a little bit?  Keith Weinhold 14:44  We're still behind the eight ball a little bit. 5 million is more of a normal long term number. But yeah, I mean, if we've got 4 million now, that's, you know, 25% less still than 5 million, sort of this long term normalcy rate of existing. Home transactions. And if you're a careful listener, you notice I've been using the word existing that doesn't include new build. So you know, when you the listener out there reading headlines, always look at that closely. We talking about existing? Are we talking about new build? You can learn a lot from that when you introduce new build data that introduces an awful lot of noise. For example, even when we look at prices, sometimes we want to exclude new construction. So why is that? Why do we want to focus on existing a lot? Well, because new build can introduce a lot of aberrations to the market. For example, the size of new build properties has dropped substantially the past few years, again, coming back to the central theme of affordability to help make a home more affordable. So we're not looking at same same when the square footage of a property drops a lot. And also, another thing that's been happening as a response to the lack of affordability is you have more builders building further and further out from a central business district where there are lower land costs for that new build property as well to help meet affordability. So the takeaway is, yeah, we want to be careful when we look at numbers. Are we looking at existing? Are we looking at new? Are we looking at overall properties.  Kevin Bupp 16:22  If you believe that if rates come down, we really is that the is that the lever that has to be pulled in order for that transactional volume to kick back up and, you know, make homes more affordable for the average home buyer,  Keith Weinhold 16:34  yeah, it's certainly going to help. I mean, really lower rates is the most likely significant lever that can help with the affordability crisis. Prices are pretty firm. Home prices are up 2% year over year. It's difficult for home prices to fall. In fact, home prices have only fallen one time substantially since World War Two. A lot of people don't realize that. So home prices are firm. I expect them to stay firm. And then the other lever is if we get a huge surge in wage increases, which I really don't expect anytime soon, unless we have another really big bout of inflation. So to your point, yes, lower mortgage rates like, that's the biggest lever that can help affordability return. And to speak to mortgage rates, Kevin and help put all of this into perspective, including this affordability component, is the fact that today, mortgage rates are low, and that gives a lot of people pause. They're like, What are you talking about? Mortgage rates were 3% even as low as two point some percent, just as recently as 2021 and early 2022 What are you talking about? Like, mortgage rates are 2x to 3x that today we look at a long term perspective when we look at the arc of mortgage rates, instead of in setting up expectations where we think rates could go. And we need to look at a frame of reference. Mortgage rates peaked over 18% in 1981 that's if you had a good credit score and everything on a 30 year fixed rate mortgage. That's what we're talking about here. In fact, Freddie Mac, they're the ones that have the best, most reliable stat set for mortgage rates, and that goes back to 1971 the average mortgage rate since 1971 all the way up to today, through all these presidential administrations you know, Nixon and in the Reagan years, and Clinton and the bushes and Obama, everything You know up to today, from 1971 until today, the average 30 year fixed rate mortgage is 7.7% so that's why I talk about how mortgage rates are, you know, moderate to a little low today. That takes a lot of people back. I don't see any impetus. It's going to get us back to, say, 3% mortgage rates. So some real perspective here.  Kevin Bupp 19:06  Yeah, yeah, no. And, you know, the interesting thing again, you might have data points on this to see, is a lot of the lack, do you feel that a lot of the lack of transactional volume is also related to those folks that have locked in, you know, 3% you know, mortgages, right? Like they're they, why would they sell and ultimately trade into a, maybe a, you know, a, you know, upgrade of a home, but ultimately be paying significantly more than that of what they're paying at the present time, you know, double the cost of capital. Your rates today, 30 year, rates are where the six and a half, 7% range, I don't follow it, but yeah.  Keith Weinhold 19:42  I mean, as of today, 6.3% is is where they're at. But yeah, you have a lot of those homeowners locked in to low rates. I mean, first, if we just pull back and look at the overall homeowner landscape, four in 10 have a paid off property. So just to talk to those about the other. Or 60% that percentage that are mortgage borrowers, among borrowers, 70% still have a mortgage rate under 5% meaning it starts with a four or less. So yeah, you're bringing up astutely Kevin the lock. In effect, people are reluctant to sell and give up that rate to trade it for a higher rate. And here's what's interesting, a lot of people if they couldn't make the payments on their home and say they lost their home, something that actually happened a lot in 2008 when people were locked into in sustainable mortgages because they didn't have good credit and they didn't have good income, the borrower is in good shape today. But even if, for some reason, they couldn't make the payments on their home, and they lost their home and they had to rent. Rents are actually higher in many cases, than what that mortgage principal and interest payment is. Maybe even the mortgage principal interest, taxes and insurance that they pay today are lower than what comparable rent would be, and this helps stabilize the housing market, people are really motivated to make their payments, and they can easily do it when it is so low, speaking to that lock in effect, and we're bringing up another reason now why transaction volume is so low, that lock in effect. So homeowners are in good shape. Their payments are sustainable. They don't want to sell, and they're just staying put. They're staying in place  Kevin Bupp 19:42  tying that all back around. Keith, what does that mean for us real estate investors? I mean, is there still good value out in the marketplace? I mean, is the rent to value ratio still, you know, Is there good opportunity to be had, as far as ROI for an investor that wants to buy into a residential investment or a multifamily investment, or anything related to that of residential housing?  Keith Weinhold 19:42  Well, the deals in the one to four unit space, single family homes up the four Plex buildings, yeah, just are not as good as they used to be. The ratio of rent income to purchase price is lower than it was five years ago. And that's so simple, but that's just really the simplest formula for profitability for a real estate investor, you don't have to look at cap rate or or NOI in the one to four unit space. Let's just look at that ratio of rent income to purchase price. 20 years ago, it was easy to find a full 1% meaning, on a 200k property, you could get $2,000 worth of rent income. That's that 1% ratio. But now oftentimes you've got to find something that's more like seven tenths of 1% that would be a $1,400 rent on a 200k property. So that simple formula, and I love that, the rent income divided by the purchase price when I'm looking at properties, when I'm scrolling or scanning like that's a calculation you can do in your head. It's only if I would see a ratio that appears really good, oh, that I would like drill down and look at that property more closely. So of course, when you have something that is that simple, though, rent income divided by purchase price, there's a lot of things that doesn't tell you. You know, what kind of mortgage interest rate can you get? What kind of property tax Do you pay in that jurisdiction? But really, I love the simplicity. That's it, rent divided by price, but it has been under attack. Now today, I still don't know where you're going to get a better risk adjusted return than you do with a carefully bought income property with a loan. I've always liked fixed interest rate debt the best risk adjusted return anywhere. I really don't know of a better one than with buying real estate, because real estate investors have so many profit centers, five simultaneous profit centers, which few people understand. Yeah.  Kevin Bupp 19:42  So using that, I want to, I want to unpack the the 1% rule a little bit for those that aren't familiar with it. And again, there's a lot of variables there, as you had mentioned, you know, mortgage rate, taxes, insurance and that respective market that you that you're buying in, and so what? What are you really trying to back into when applying that rule? Is there? Is there? Is there a true cash on cash return that you're hoping to achieve, again, assuming all these other variables that we just don't know, what they are at this point, you know? Is there a target range of actual ROI that you're actually looking to achieve when applying that 1% rule?  Keith Weinhold 19:42  No, I'm just looking for any positive cash flow. You know, to your point, yeah, there's nothing like the cash on cash return needs to be at least three and a half percent or something like that. But, yeah, I still like buying a property that's that's greater than a break even. Inflation is probably going to increase your cash flow over time, even if you bought a property that that broke even or just had a trickle of cash flow or a $100 cash flow today, a lot of people don't understand that fact that right there you can't count on it, you shouldn't count on. Getting rent increases. But we all know it generally happens over time at a rate of about 3% a year, but it actually increases your cash flow. If you increase your rent 5% your cash flow can often increase something like 12% why is that? How could that happen? That's because, you know, it's key for the person that was listening closely, you get fixed interest rate debt, so your rent income goes up, your expenses increase, except for that mortgage principal and interest. Inflation can touch it. It's kind of like a mosquito buzzing against a window and always trying to get in. And inflation can't touch that in a way. It's sort of like debt that's an asset in some unusual way, or some play on words, getting that debt so So yes, you can't count on rent increases over time. We know what typically happens, and that's really part of the compelling value proposition of buying income property with a loan. You're sort of leveraging inflation. You're really on the right side of it.  Kevin Bupp 20:08  Are there any particular markets that you feel are ripe for opportunity today where you're spending your focus and energies in?  Keith Weinhold 20:08  Yeah, it's still in high cash flowing markets like Memphis, okay, little rock and a good part of the Midwest and the Midwest still has home prices appreciating faster than the national average as well. So those are some of the areas that I like. Those jurisdictions also tend to have laws, as your listeners might know this already, Kevin, they tend to have laws that benefit the landlord more so than the tenant, where you can get a prompt eviction, but those are still the areas where you do get that high ratio of rent income to purchase price on a single family rental home, you might still find eight tenths of 1% meaning $800 worth of rent for every 100k of property purchase in places exactly like that.  Kevin Bupp 20:08  I was hoping that you tell me 1% rule would is applicable.  Keith Weinhold 20:08  It's pretty rare. You know, if you do see, if you do see a property that has a full 1% rent to purchase price ratio, it could be in a sketchy area, you need to make sure that you can actually get the rent in like you would get a respectful rent paying tenant in there. That's something that we would have to look at more closely.  Kevin Bupp 20:08  Have you explored building new product? Is there an opportunity there getting at a lower basis by building ground up?  Keith Weinhold 19:42  You asked such a smart question. This is actually the first time ever, as long as I've been an active real estate investor, Kevin for more than 20 years where new build purchases for income property make more sense than existing purchases. Why is that? It's because builders know that investors and borrowers are struggling to buy and afford property and make the numbers work. Like you're talking about, that builders are incentivized to buy down your rate. For you, to buy down your mortgage rate, we deal with a lot of providers that buy down your mortgage rate to 5% or less for you, and this is a fixed, long term loan in order to help get the numbers to work. You know, especially where you might see a new build property where the rent to purchase price ratio is less than seven tenths of 1% and it's just like, ah, the numbers wouldn't work paying a higher mortgage rate, but some are willing to buy them down to as little as four and a half. However, if you're looking into buying a new build income producing property, you do want to look at that closely. Who is paying for the discount points to buy down the rate. Is it the builder, or is it you? Because some builders just suggest, hey, you can buy down. You can have your rate bought down. But yeah, the next question is, yeah, okay, who is actually doing the buy down? Yeah.  Keith Weinhold 19:43  I mean, just getting tacked on. I mean, in that instance, I'm assuming that a lot of it's just getting tacked on to the to the back end of the purchase price, or it's being baked into closing costs somewhere somebody is paying for it. More than likely the borrower is paying for it. Paying for it. Is that? Is that? Again, I'm assuming we probably have that here in Florida. Again, I don't really follow the residential market too much, but there's, as you had mentioned, like, kind of on the the outskirts of Tampa, the tertiary, necessary, tertiary, probably more secondary areas. That's where a lot of the builds are happening. Lots of these, you know, planned subdivisions. You know, hundreds and 1000s of homes being put up. And in my understanding, through the grapevine, is I hear that they're, you know, sales volumes is incredibly slow, and a lot of these builders are now offering some creative loan products, again, to what you've just stated there, to attract, not necessarily even just homeowners, but also investors, to come in and buy their product from them. Is, is there a real opportunity there, though? I mean, have you seen investors be able to benefit from buying brand new product at a fair price, with economics at work keeping as a rental?  Keith Weinhold 29:53  I have and Florida has some builders that are almost desperate. I'm a long time investor. Know personally, directly in Florida, income property, Southwest Florida, places like Cape Coral, they have been ground zero for real estate depreciation, a contraction in real estate values year over year of 10% or more in some southwest Florida markets. So like the post pandemic, migration boom is certainly over in Florida. And you know, Kevin, as little as 10 years ago, people used to talk about buy in Florida. It's cheap, it's sunny, cheap and cheerful, like you would sort of hear that sort of thing about Florida real estate. That is no longer true. Florida just is not as cheap as it used to be. It's the same or higher than the national median home price now in Florida. So yes, some builders are rather desperate. The other benefit of buying new build, especially in a place like Florida, where a lot of new building has taken place and the supply actually exceeds the demand here in the short period. You can take advantage of that, not only by getting the rate buy down, but because homeowners insurance premiums are substantially less on new build property, because they're built to today's wind mitigation and other standards than they are existing property. I have a friend that just bought a new Florida duplex through us in Ocala, Florida. That's sort of a central, North Central Florida, on that new build duplex that he paid 400k for. I saw the actual insurance premium, the the rate sheet, $694.06 $694 694 so the benefit of buying new build is you get a lower insurance premium. You get these rate buy down. Sometimes what your builder will buy for you make for you rather and of course, you're probably going to have low maintenance costs for a long time, since it's a new build property, and you get a tenant that is probably going to stay longer than the average duration. They're the first person to ever live there. It's difficult for the tenant to improve their housing situation when they have a new build income property, unless they would go out and buy, and it's a very difficult time to go out and buy. So through that lack of affordability, really, the advantage for a real estate investor is tenants are staying put longer. The average tenancy duration is up because they can't run out and be a first time homebuyer.  Keith Weinhold 32:32  You know, most people think they're playing it safe with their liquid money, but they're actually losing savings accounts and bonds don't keep up when true inflation eats six or 7% of your wealth. Every single year, I invest my liquidity with FFI freedom family investments in their flagship program. Why fixed 10 to 12% returns have been predictable and paid quarterly. There's real world security backed by needs based real estate like affordable housing, Senior Living and health care. Ask about the freedom flagship program when you speak to a freedom coach there, and that's just one part of their family of products, they've got workshops, webinars and seminars designed to educate you before you invest. Start with as little as 25k and finally, get your money working as hard as you do. Get started at Freedom, family investments.com/gre, or send a text. Now it's 1-937-795-8989, yep. Text their freedom coach directly. Again. 1937795898, 77958989  Keith Weinhold 33:44  the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President chailey Ridge personally while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com that's Ridge lending group.com  Todd Drowlette 34:17  this is the star of the A and E show the real estate commission. Todd Rowlett, listen to get rich education with my friend Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.  Kevin Bupp 34:38  That even trickles down to the to the space that we're in. We're in the mobile home park space. And while we don't have a lot of rentals inside of our portfolio, most of our residents own their home and they rent the land, but throughout our portfolio, we have roughly 400 units that we own that we have as standardized rentals, and we've noticed that trend as well. Historically. 10 years ago, you. Yeah, we track actually about, I can take it back about eight years, where we actually have data to support this. This claim is that our average renter would stay about 16 months. That was fairly standard. Whereas today it's over, it's nearly three years. At this point in time, the majority are staying nearly three in there's probably, there's some variables in there. You know, eight years ago, we weren't bringing a lot of new product into our communities, whereas a lot of the mobile home parks that we purchased today do have a lot of newer mobile homes in them. So again, to your point, it's, it's a it's a newer home. It's fresh. There might not be the first person that lived there, maybe they're only the second, right? But it's still a very new home. It's only a couple years old. All the appliances are new. It's fresh, you know, it's well insulated, and it's just a high quality product, but, but it's nearly double of what we used to experience and what we used to underwrite. It's, you know, which is, which is interesting. You know, I am, I want to, I want to circle back, you'd mentioned Cape Coral. I've got quite a bit, quite a bit of experience with Cape Coral. This is not the first time that Cape Coral and Port Charlotte in those areas have crashed. I mean, like, they've got quite an interesting history in time, back during the GFC, that area down there took probably one of the biggest hits in most of Florida, while, you know, the rest of Florida got, you know, pounded pretty hard with home values and decreasing home values decreasing rents, Port Charlotte, Cape, coral, in those areas as well. It's just It looks very different down there today. As far as you know, the job basis. I mean, there's a little bit more of a, you know, you know, an economy than what existed maybe 1015, years ago. But I don't know if you know the story of Port Charlotte. Is it some interesting history that you can if you want to spend some time, go on YouTube. There's some documentaries out there about, basically when that area was created. There's a two brothers that, essentially, you know, sold, subdivided and sold swampland and sold the dream to the northeast centers to come down and buy, you know, parcels of land down in Cape Coral, port, Charlotte and in that general area. And it took a lot of time for it develop over the years, but it's a beautiful area down there. But again, I think what happened to your point? A lot of folks during the covid era were wanting to come to Florida. We were fairly free down here. The sun was shining, you know, the Gulf of Mexico was warm, and that was a good value for a lot of folks. You know, the values were driving up there. Was home inventory down there. You got a good bang for your buck back at that point in time. But again, there's not, there's not as much as many amenities and supportive economy there. And then to me, there, like you might find in the Tampa area, or you might find Orlando, or even Ocala cow is a phenomenal market right now. And yeah, oh, Cal is, for those that don't you know you mentioned, you referenced the insurance there, which is, that's a great, that's a great price for that, that policy, you know, 700 bucks, basically, that is inland. For those that don't know the geography here in Florida, that is inland. So you are fairly protected from storms, you know, hurricanes and things of that nature, which crush us here on the on the Gulf Coast. But in any event, I just thought I'd share that there's some good, pretty cool documentaries out there in Port Charlotte, in the whole area down there, but a beautiful part of the country. But just Yeah, it's, it's suffering right now. There's, I think there's, I was looking the other day on Zillow. I just play around and check and see what waterfront home prices are going for. And down there, you can basically get a you can get a canal front home going out to the Gulf of Mexico for about $500,000 which was probably closer to 800,000 during, you know, the the boom era of 2021 2022 So historically, we used to buy properties down there. This is back in 2000 and 345, before the the GFC, we could buy those same properties for 150 and $200,000 waterfront home, waterfront homes, deep water canals going out to the Gulf of Mexico. But when it crashed, some of those homes were selling for $120,000 $100,000 so it's interesting to see how things have come kind of full circle multiple times, not just down there, but in all of Florida as well. Florida is always boom and bust. You know, I think they say that with you know, you could probably speak to that most of these coastal towns, whether it be in Florida, whether it be up the eastern seaboard, the coastal markets are definitely more of a roller coaster ride than the Midwestern markets, where you invest in would you? Would you agree with that?  Keith Weinhold 39:09  Yeah, I would. And yeah, you talk about Florida being a boom and bust, and what you said is certainly true in the shorter term. Back in the global financial crisis, we saw more price blood letting in Florida than we did in other states as well. But over the long term, the long arc, I'm bullish on Florida because of just the obvious constant in migration story. In fact, if you go back to decennial censuses, all the way back to the early 1800s every single decennial census, every 10 years, the population of Florida has rose, and it rises faster than the national average, almost all of those 10 year periods. So yeah, over the long term, I certainly like Florida, but Yeah, you sure can, you know, nitpick over the. Short term, but as little as five years from now. If you bought today, as little as five years from now, I could see someone saying, like, yeah, I bought back five years ago, because we're actually in a in a short term, overbuilt condition, and builders bought down my rate. For me, this could look savvy and this could look wise. So if you're looking for opportunity, new building Florida is definitely something to look into.  Kevin Bupp 40:22   I agree. No, absolutely. Like, the long term, you know, opportunity here in Florida, it's there, you know, it's interesting. We've got the we get these hurricanes every year. Last year was a pretty impactful year, at least here on the on the Gulf side, and the neighborhood I lived in, we got flooded. Luckily, our homes in newer builds built up. But, you know, 70% of the neighbor I lived in had 444, or five feet of seawater. And as did the, you know, the long stretch of the Gulf Coast here, and it was the first time this area has ever this immediate air right where we live, has ever had a it wasn't even a direct hit. It just happened to be a massive storm surge. But it was, you know, catastrophic as far as the damage that it did. And a lot of folks that we knew in our neighborhood here. Have lived here for 1020, 3040, or 50 years, and they had never had any floodwater whatsoever. And and there was two camps where they fell in either one camp where they didn't, they whether they had the money to rebuild or not, didn't matter. Like, mentally, they were never going to end up. They were never going to deal with that again. They were moving away, like they just didn't want to go through the heartache of that again. In the second camp, we're basically, I knew it was going to happen at some point in time. This is the kind of price to live, to pay, a live in paradise and and what ultimately occurred is, you know, you saw homes going up for sale, and in the initial chatter for those that that were impacted, is that, who's going to buy that? You know? You know, they're not going to get hardly anything for it. You know, it's just like, who's going to want to live here now that has been flooded. I said, Just wait. I'll say people have us as human beings, have short term memories. We do and and I can promise you, within a few months, those homes will be gobbled up, some will be knocked down, some will be rebuilt, but inevitably, the prices will come back incredibly strong, and you'll see very limited inventory, at least in desirable markets that are here on the water. And that's exactly that happened. Within six month period of time, prices are back up. You can't get your hands on a flooded property now, or one that had been flooded, right?  Keith Weinhold 42:12  I can believe it. And this is not the way that you want to have a waterfront property when the water inundates you and comes to you, that is not the way to buy waterfront property.  Kevin Bupp 42:23  Yeah, interesting, but, uh, no, Keith has been a fun conversation, my friend. So let's, let's talk about, you know, I like to you'll peek inside your brain if you were going to start all over again, from scratch, you know, you've been at this now, what? How long? Almost two decades. It's been, been quite  Keith Weinhold 42:38  Yes, yes, more than two decades. Is that what you're asking, how would I start, starting from today?  Kevin Bupp 42:47  Yeah, like, what would you do? Where would you focus, what asset type and any particular strategy outside of what you're doing today? You know, where would you focus your time?  Keith Weinhold 42:55  Actually, it is quite a coincidence. The way that I would start all over again in real estate is the way that I did start in real estate. It worked out phenomenally, in a way it makes sense, because if it hadn't worked out phenomenally, you never would have heard of me, and I wouldn't have become this real estate thought leader or whatever, because this is a way, an everyday person with virtually no real estate knowledge and very little money. Can start out, what I did is I made the first ever home of any kind, a four Plex building where I lived in one unit and rented out the other three. This is something very actionable for your for your audience as well, Kevin. Or if maybe you're a listener that has a an adult daughter or son and they want to get started in real estate with a bang without much money, is to buy a four Plex, just like I did. You can use an FHA loan, a three and a half percent down payment. You have to live in one of the units at least 12 months, and at last check, your minimum credit score only needs to be 580 now you will get a lower interest rate if you have a higher credit score. But those are the only three criteria you need. I mean, what a country talk about? The American Dream. You can use that FHA program with a single family home, duplex, triplex or fourplex, that's the formula. That's how I began. Actually ended up living there a little more than three years. But what that did for me was remarkable, and in fact, you know what it taught me? Kevin and every listener can benefit from this. It's paradoxical. A lot of times I say things that you would not expect to hear that make you go, wait what? Whoa, how can that be? Is what it taught me is that I don't want to focus on getting my money to work for me. You probably wouldn't expect to hear that. It's actually a middle class paradigm to say, well, I don't want to work for money. I also want to get my money to work for me. I'm telling. You that that's going to keep you middle class, or worse, that's going to keep you working until old age, and you won't have an outsized life and retirement and options. If you think that the best and highest use of your dollar is getting your money to work for you, it's not what's the paradigm shift if this four Plex building taught me the way I started out, which is still the way that I would start out today, and you probably heard this before, but I'm going to put a new twist on it. Is you want to ethically get other people's money to work for you, and we can be ethical. We can do good in the world. Provide housing that's clean, safe, affordable and functional. Never get called a slumlord that way. You can employ other people's money three ways at the same time, ethically by buying an income property with a loan, like we've been talking about in Florida, or with this fourplex building. How do you do it three ways at the same time, using the bank's money for the loan and leverage, which greatly amplifies your return beyond anything Compound Interest can do. The second of three ways you're ethically employing other people's money is you're using the tenants money to pay for the mortgage and some of the operating expenses on this fourplex. And then the third way you're simultaneously using other people's money is using the government's money for generous tax incentives at scale. So the lesson is that the best and highest use of your dollar is not getting just your money to work for you, it's other people's money, in this case, the banks, the tenants and the governments. That's what you can do. I mean, what an opportunity. A lot of people just don't even know about that FHA program.  Kevin Bupp 46:41  Yeah, I actually, I wasn't, I wasn't aware that it was that low of a down payment key. That's no idea. Three and a half percent, you said, a 550 credit score, believe me, 580 minimum credit.  Keith Weinhold 46:51  And you have to, thirdly, you have to owner occupy a unit for at least 12 months. And hey, I'm not saying it's always easy. You know, you got to think about that. Your neighbors are also your tenants. And I don't know how to fix stuff. I still don't. I'm a terrible handyman, but it's good to learn a little about about human relations. And you know, letting finding a general way to let the tenants know that you have a mortgage to pay every month. I mean, just that alone can can help them ensure timely rent payments. But, and this also doesn't mean every area, or every four Plex building is is good, but, yeah, that's the opportunity. That's how I started. I would totally do it again.  Kevin Bupp 47:27  Can you use that FHA program more than once? Or is that just the one time you know your first, first, first primary home purchase?  Keith Weinhold 47:34  It's generally you can only use one at a time. There are some exceptions, like if you and your job move, like, a certain mile radius away from where you got the first one, but, yeah, generally it's only going to be one at a time. A lot of people don't use it. Don't know about it. In fact, if you have VA benefits, Veterans Administration benefits, you can get a similar program, like I was talking about, but zero down payment, rather than three and a half with an FHA loan. It's a really good, amazingly good opportunity.  Kevin Bupp 48:05  That's incredible. That's incredible. Keith, my friend, I appreciate you coming back going. It's always good to catch up with you. Good to see that you're doing well.  Keith Weinhold 48:17  Oh yeah, a terrific chat there with Kevin. I hope that you like that really. At our core, real estate investors are not day trading. We are decade trading. Now I'm in western New York today, at the other end of the state, NYU compiled some terrific statistics that you want to hear about for nearly the past 100 years. It is the annualized returns of six major asset classes. This spans, the Great Depression, a number of recessions, World War Two, the New Deal, gold standard, abandonment, brendawoods, the Cold War, Civil Rights Movements, oil shocks, Volcker rate hikes, the.com boom and crash, the 911, attacks, the housing bubble, covid, 19, AI revolution and 16 presidencies, all those ups and downs and war and peace and economic booms and economic lows, and now there is going to be a mild tongue in cheek element here, because stats like this drive real estate investors crazy, but this is often how mainstream media portrays asset class comparisons. All right, the six asset classes are stocks, cash, bonds, real estate, gold, and then inflation, which isn't in an asset class, but it's a benchmark. All of these begin from the year 1930 so spanning almost 100 years. Let's take it from the lowest return to the high. Best return the lowest is inflation. And what do you think the CPI inflation rate is averaged over the last 100 years? Any guess at all? You might be surprised. It is 3.2% Yeah, even though the Fed's CPI inflation target has long been 2% it runs hot longer than most people believe. So therefore, today's inflation rate isn't high, it's just normal. The next highest return is cash at 3.3% How did NYU measure that the yield from three months T bills? Next up is bonds. They returned 4.3% that's the 10 year treasury average of the last 100 years. The next highest is real estate at 4.7% that uses the K Shiller Index. Now we're up to the second highest. It is gold at 5.6% and the highest is stocks at 10.3% using the s, p5, 100, and this was all laid out in a brilliant chart that also shows the returns by each decade for all of these asset classes. You'll remember that I shared the chart with you in our newsletter a few weeks ago. Now you are smarter and more informed than the layperson is, you know, but they see this chart and they think, Oh, well, that's it. I've got my answer. Real Estate's 4.7% appreciation loses out to gold's 5.6 and stocks 10.3 and then they go back to watching Love is blind. But of course, rental property owners like us know that we often make five times or more than this 4.7% when we consider all those other income streams and profit centers, leverage, rents, ROA and inflation, profiting on our debt, it's often 25 to 30% total. It's sort of like judging a Ferrari by only measuring its cupholders or something. Now, would stocks 10.3% get adjusted up as well? Yeah, probably a little, because the s and p5 100 currently averages a 1.2% dividend yield, so that might be added on the 4.7% return for real estate. That cites the popular Case Shiller Index. And the way that that index works is that it uses a repeat sales methodology. So what that means is that the Case Shiller measures the sales price of the same property over time. Therefore a property would have to sell at least twice in order to be measured by this popular and widely cited K Shiller Index. So then the 4.7% appreciation figure excludes new build homes, and new builds appreciate more than existing homes, but you do have more existing homes that sell the new build homes, so we can pretty safely assume that real estate's long term appreciation rate is higher, likely between five and 6% there it is. So yeah, making comparisons across asset classes like this is pretty tricky, because investment properties leverage and cash flow gets nullified. And when you make comparisons like this, it's a big reminder that even if you can't get much cash flow off a 20 or 25% down real estate payment, sheesh, most people put a 100% payment into stocks, gold or Bitcoin, and they don't expect any cash flow. And Bitcoin isn't part of what we're looking at for this century long view, because it did not exist until 2009 and also NYU had to use some alternative statistics. Sometimes the s, p5, 100 index only came into being in 1957 and the Case Shiller Index 1987  Keith Weinhold 54:02  next week here on the show, I expect to answer your listener questions from beginner to advanced. You've been writing in with some good ones for the production team here at GRE. That's our sound engineer, Vedran Jampa, who has edited every single GRE podcast episode since 2014 QC in show notes, Brenda Almendariz, video lead, brendawali strategy talamagal, video editor, seroza, KC and producer me, we'll run it back next week for you. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.  Speaker 3 54:36  Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively.  Speaker 2 55:04  The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building, get richeducation.com Â

582: 7 Proven Ways to Get a Lower Mortgage Rate with Caeli Ridge
01/12/2025 | 39 mins.
Keith discusses seven ways to get a lower mortgage rate, emphasizing the historical impact of the 1940s GI Bill on homeownership and wealth creation. Caeli Ridge, founder of Ridge Lending Group, digs into smart tactics like adjustable rate mortgages, DSCR loans, and down payment options, plus insider tips on boosting your creditworthiness, timing your rate lock, and planning ahead so you can maximize your returns. They also explore trends like 50-year mortgages and portable mortgages, and the benefits of FHA and VA loans for first-time buyers. Resources: Want expert guidance on your next real estate investment or mortgage? Reach out to Ridge Lending Group for personalized support and a full range of loan options—whether you're a first-time buyer or seasoned investor. Visit ridgelendinggroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE to take your next step! Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/582 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: [email protected] Invest with Freedom Family Investments. For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text 1-937-795-8989 to speak with a freedom coach Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com or text 'GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript:  Keith Weinhold 0:01  Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, seven ways you can get a lower mortgage interest rate. We'll break them down loan types available to you that you never heard of, and learn how the 1940s GI Bill shaped the mortgage that you get today on get rich education  Speaker 1 0:22  Since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors, and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit get rich education.com  Corey Coates 1:07  You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education. You Keith,  Keith Weinhold 1:23  welcome to GRE from the Romanian Black Sea to the Egyptian Red Sea and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold, and this is the indefatigable get rich education before we discuss the seven ways that you can get a lower mortgage rate and more in the 1940s before my dad was born, the GI Bill gave veterans returning from World War Two access to cheap home loans, and that single policy decision might have done more to shape the modern American Housing landscape than Anything else in the last 100 years. Think about it, millions of young men, almost kids, really had just spent the better part of their early adulthood in Europe or the Pacific. They came home, married their sweethearts, started families, and suddenly America had this booming demand for housing, but demand alone doesn't build homes. You also need money. You need access to credit, and that's where the GI Bill stepped in. It didn't just thank returning service members for their sacrifice. It handed them something way more powerful, the ability to buy a home with little money down a low interest rate and underwriting standards that would frankly look like a fantasy today, that access to credit sparked one of the biggest housing booms in American history. You had these entire suburbs that sprang up overnight, Levittown in New York, Lakewood in California. These were master planned communities, and they really became a blueprint for Post War America. We had the booming 50s, and this had a lot to do with it. Here's the part that most people don't understand. This wasn't just about housing. This was about wealth creation, because for better or worse, home ownership has been the primary wealth building vehicle for the American middle class these past 100 years, when you give millions of people a subsidized path into property ownership, you're not just giving them a roof. You're giving them equity appreciation, leverage, tax benefits. You're giving them the engine, this flywheel that spins up generational wealth in a lot of ways. The GI Bill is the earliest institutional example of what I at least tell you here on the show, real estate pays five ways. Now they didn't call it that in 1947 but that's exactly what it was. Veterans earned appreciation as suburbs grew. They had amortization working for them, they collected tax advantages. Inflation slowly eroded their fixed rate mortgage balances too. And here's the thing, these weren't even speculative investments. They were homes that they lived in. Now, of course, the GI bill wasn't perfect. It expanded opportunity for millions of people, but it excluded a lot of people too. Lenders and local governments often blocked black veterans and other minorities from accessing the same benefits. That's a whole story unto itself, but the takeaway for today is, when you combine demographic momentum with favorable financing, you can remake a nation, and that's why housing policy still matters today, which we'll get. Two shortly, when you change access to credit or just tweak it, you change the trajectory of families and markets for generations, and the GI Bill proved that. So when we talk about interest rates, affordability, supply shortages, or any of the high frequency housing data that we cover here, remember that the stories aren't just about numbers. They really are about people. They're about giving ordinary Americans the chance to build wealth the same way that those World War Two veterans did through ownership, stability and the quiet compound leverage, not compound interest. Compound leverage that real estate delivers over time.  Keith Weinhold 5:49  I'm bringing you today's show from, I suppose, a somewhat exotic location. I am inside Caesar's Palace, which is right near the very middle of the famed Las Vegas Strip, that's where I'm at. The hotel staff is always accommodative of the show setup. This might seem a little strange to you, because I'm not a gambler. The reason I'm here is that my brother lives 25 minutes away, and I've been with him during Thanksgiving. Next week, I'll bring you the show from Buffalo, New York, and then two weeks from now, I have something heart warming to tell you about that, and it is a real estate story. I'll be broadcasting the show from upstate Pennsylvania. I'll be there to visit my parents. My brother's also coming in from Nevada to be there. That's where the four of us, mom, dad, my brother and I will sit around the same dining room table in the same kitchen of the same home that my parents have lived in since the 1970s nothing has changed, and all four of us know our spots at the table. And actually, it's not even called the dining room table. It is the supper table, as my parents call it so, from flashy Caesar's Palace today to Buffalo and then to Appalachian simplicity in Pennsylvania, the stability and continuity of my parents living in the same home and four wine holds sitting around the table during the holidays, it is so rare. I imagine less than one or 2% of people can do this. I'm just profoundly grateful and proud of Kurt and Penny Weinhold for being the best, most stable parents I could have asked for. It's almost too much to ask, and if you don't have that in your life. Ah, you can do something about that. You can provide the same decency and stability for your children.  Keith Weinhold 7:50  Let's talk about seven proven ways you can get a lower mortgage rate with this week's terrific guest. Though, we'll focus on investment properties. A lot of this applies to primary residences as well.  Keith Weinhold 8:07  We are joined by the founder of the lender that's created more financial freedom for real estate investors than any other mortgage originator in the nation, the eponymous Ridge lending group. And though that sounds impressive, my gosh, she didn't even need that introduction for you the listener, because she's one of the most recurrent guests in show history. Welcome back to GRE Caeli Ridge,  Caeli Ridge 8:30  I am delighted to be here as always, Keith, thank you for your support and acknowledgement. I love what you do, and I'm hoping that I can bring more value today to your listeners in what it is that we do, educating the masses, right?  Keith Weinhold 8:42  You've been doing that here for about 10 years. And yes, we're talking about a woman with a reputation for writing emails in all caps, yet still maintains a great relationship with everybody. I mean, congrats, shaile. I couldn't possibly pull that off myself.  Caeli Ridge 8:58  Thank you, Keith. And you know, I'm going to stay by my all caps, man, it's a speed thing. It all boils down to the number of seconds in the day that I can just move quickly through an email. Yeah, I love my all caps.  Keith Weinhold 9:09  Apparently recipients are still replying, well, you can get a lower mortgage rate in at least seven ways. You can get an adjustable rate mortgage, do a midweek lock in, negotiate seller credits. Have a high credit score. Do a two one buy now, which is kind of old school, but some home builders are using it boost your DTI or buy now, not later. Those are some of the strategies for lowering your mortgage rate. What are your thoughts with regard to that?  Caeli Ridge 9:39  I think all of those are viable. I would just say on the adjust for a mortgage. The pushback I would give there is, is that for residential property, specifically, single family, up to four units, we are not finding that spread between the arm and a 30 year fix. We've been the industry as a whole, secondary specifically been on the inverted yield. Now this gets a little tough. Nickel, and I won't go down that rabbit hole, but 08, 09, the housing and lending crash created an environment within secondary markets where an inverted yield has made a 30 year fixed mortgage more favorable in the rate department. Now that's not always going to be the case. I am a huge fan of the adjustable, but what would work right now is an adjustable with the all in one not to take too much time on that topic, but that would be an adjust rate mortgage that I think would save interest or reduce the rate of which interest is accruing,  Keith Weinhold 10:30  the all in one loan, which we discussed extensively back at the beginning of this year here on the show. Long term, though, I have seen adjustable rate mortgages work for a lot of people, because really, the compelling proposition of the arm is that it guarantees that you get a lower rate in the near term, and yet there's only a chance that you're going to have a higher rate in the long term  Caeli Ridge 10:53  and further. Let's I mean, let's dissect that a little bit. I am a huge proponent. I love an adjustable rate mortgage when the arm is pricing a half or a full percentage point plus over a fixed especially for non owner occupied and the reason for that is, and this is statistically speaking, feel free to look this up, guys, the average shelf life of a mortgage for an investment property is about five years. Great point, right? And we know that if that's the case, right, we're refinancing to harvest equity. We're refinancing maybe to reduce an interest rate from where the market was before, et cetera, et cetera. So that would be the first thing I would say. And then also remember, you guys the first 10 years of an amortized mortgage, 30 year fixed, amortized mortgage, how much of that payment is going to the principal? Because people will often push back by saying, well, either an interest only, or an adjustable and what happens if it changes or it goes up? Most of your payment is going to the interest anyway, and that reset to harvest equity. Borrowed funds are non taxable. We always say that, right? I think it's fully justified. So I love an arm, I just don't know, in comparison to a 30 year fixed today, like a five year ARM versus a 30 year fixed we are in a place that it makes sense, but normally, to your point, absolutely. Fan  Keith Weinhold 12:06  that spread needs to widen for the arm to make more sense. What about doing a mid week rate lock in? Is that a thing?  Caeli Ridge 12:13  Yeah. And you know, I don't have any empirical evidence here. Okay, I don't have any data points that actually prove this, except for 25 years in the business and locking loans every day of my life. There's something about a Monday and a Friday. And I have some conspiracy theories. I don't know that. I it's necessary to share them here, but midweek locks tend to be more favorable in both points and interest rate than you'll find on a Friday and a Monday. I think largely it has to do with, you know, the stock exchanges shutting down for the weekend, right? You got a Friday, you got two days in between. You got foreign markets, and all the things that can explode and happen during that amount of time. So I think they hedge a little bit. So on Friday, going into the weekend, I think that there's something about that and why interest rates are a little less favorable. And then Monday, of course, coming off the weekend, similarly, maybe there's some truth to that too.  Keith Weinhold 13:02  Now, negotiating seller credits has really been a trend to help with affordability. Tell us about specifically what you're seeing there, what's common.  Caeli Ridge 13:11  So we're talking to investors. I can tell you that the loan products you guys are going to have access to are going to cap you, okay, you're going to cap at, per guideline, 2% of the purchase price. Okay, remember that your points that you're paying when you get into locking an interest rate are going to be calculated on the loan size, all right. So the first thing to know is seller paid closing costs, maximum is going to be 2% per underwriting guidelines. That 2% is based on your purchase price. Anything that you're paying points for is going to be on the loan balance, the loan size, so there's going to be a little extra there for you that can contribute or can pay for some other closing costs, right, depending on the numbers. Now, if you're smart enough, or lucky enough, or whatever, the market is viable enough that you can negotiate more than 2% from the seller to pay towards closing costs, you're going to be limited on what you can do on the loan side. But let's say that you go and you've negotiated 4% seller will pay 4% towards your closing costs. Then in that case, you can reduce, you got the two points that you're allowed per guideline. And then you can reduce the purchase price by the difference you don't want to leave that money on the table.  Keith Weinhold 14:15  That's how it's done. And then there's just simply having a higher credit score. What's the highest credit score that really helps you get the lowest mortgage rate for both primary residences and non owner occupied properties. Loan product  Caeli Ridge 14:29  type dependent. But I would say overall, 760 and above is kind of that threshold. There are products that go 780 maybe even on the rare occasion, 800 and above. If I had to pick a number as the absolute pinnacle, I'm going to go 780  Keith Weinhold 14:41  All right, so having a credit score above those thresholds really doesn't help get you a lower interest rate. It's really just a little flex that you've got an 811, credit score, or whatever it is. Now the two, one buy down. That's something that we used to see long ago. A few home builders are bringing it back. And what that does it allow? Homebuyers to pay a lower interest rate for the first two years with the seller covering the difference, and that allows the seller to get their price. They don't have to lower the price of the home at all. But the two one buy down, and you see that written, two, one that has been employed more recently. Tell us about that.  Caeli Ridge 15:18  Well, the builders are struggling in some cases, right? The affordability buzzword is all over the place. So they've had to get creative and find ways in which they can move their inventory. So I think they've done a good job at kind of shaving off some of their margins to satisfy or improve the terms for the consumer. So I like the two. One, if you can get it  Keith Weinhold 15:37  now, one can boost their DTI as well their debt to income ratio and Taylor. When we've talked about that before, we've usually talked about reducing your debts in order to improve your DTI. However, a lot of people don't think about the fact that, oh, well, you can increase your income that lowers your DTI to help you qualify. So tell us what is the max DTI that you can have  Caeli Ridge 16:00  maximum debt to income ratio, in most cases on a full dock loan is going to be 50% now, depending on the type of income that you earn or that you've demonstrated, how you calculate that can get a little bit tricky. But if you're just a straight w2 wage earner, we don't have, you know, commissions or bonuses or anything that we consider variable income, then you just take your gross income times 50% whatever that number is, all of your liabilities on the credit report, we do not count ordinary living expenses like food and gas and utilities and cell phone bills. It's the minimum payments on the credit report. As long as whatever that add up is fits within that 50% you're good to go.  Keith Weinhold 16:37  Now, when it comes to improving our DTI to get a lower mortgage rate, I tend to think it's easier to knock out some debts to improve your DTI. But what about the other side of it? What about increasing your income to improve your DTI, lower your mortgage rate and qualify? Can you talk about some of the strategies for increasing your income with respect to DTI?  Caeli Ridge 17:02  Absolutely. And the biggest one, I think that we probably want to focus on most is going to be on a schedule E, right? That's the one that you're going to have more control over. So when we talk about rental income and how we might be able to boost that first, it might be important to share that there are two ways in underwriting that we will calculate or quantify rental income. The first way is called the acquisition year formula. I'll give you that in just a second. It's very easy, but the way I think we focus on here, because acquisition year is going to be what it is, you're going to have very little ability to manipulate or change that once our rental properties fall on our tax return, specifically the Schedule E of a federal tax return, you as the taxpayer or the borrower are going to have some access to maximize or increase the income, or, let's actually get a little bit more granular there to maximize the gain or minimize the loss, by means of depreciation, maybe a cost seg, maybe we make sure that one time, extraordinary expenses are demonstrated on the tax return in the appropriate way so that underwriting can add those things back. So I know that this sounds technical, but the scheduling is the way that I would say is the easiest for an investor to maximize income, reduce debt to income ratio. And I will close by saying that ridge lending, I think one of our most valued value adds is the ability to help our clients look at their draft tax returns on an annual basis and present them with, Hey, listen, Mr. Jones, if you file this way, this draft tax return, if it files this way, this is what it means to your debt to income ratio. Here's my advice, right? We go into a lot of depth there with our clients.  Keith Weinhold 18:39  That is a smart, long term planning piece that most mortgage companies are not going to give you. They're not going to be forward looking, looking out for your next three years of growing your income property portfolio. And shortly, we'll talk about a way for you to qualify loans where you don't have to show tax returns or W twos or pay stubs. But while we're talking about how to get a lower mortgage rate and some creative ways to do that, I brought up, buy now, not later. And what do I mean by that? What I mean is say, properties appreciate even 3% over time. Buying now, I mean that is going to net you more equity if you buy now rather than waiting, than it would in the savings from a rate drop, when you look at the appreciation run up, however, if rates go up, then you get both the lower price and the lower rate by buying now, not later.  Caeli Ridge 19:32  And I would add to that, we have to remember that in addition to a very modest 3% in the home appreciation, we should be appreciating our rents at even a modest 2% a year, right? Depending on where you are, et cetera. I know that there's exceptions to the rule. And then finally, we got to add in that tax benefit, what you're going to get in your deductions, et cetera, et cetera.  Keith Weinhold 19:51  Yeah, great point. Well, I brought up seven ways that you can get a lower mortgage rate. Can you share a few more with us? Some common ones? Because I know. That almost everyone that calls in there wants to inquire about mortgage rate as well.  Caeli Ridge 20:03  Everybody wants, yep, everybody wants to talk about the rate, despite my vervet opposition to say, do the math. Do the math. Do the math. You know, the easiest one there would be buying down the rate. I'm going to try and formulate an example. Let's say you've got a really high wage earner and in the thick of their earning years, and they're trying to prepare for retirement down the road. It's a longer term burn. They desperately need tax deductions, and the deal that they're looking at, yeah, it's okay, but they want some extra expenses on the Schedule E, maybe they buy the rate down by three even 4% because points on an investment loan transaction are tax deductible, so that might be something, and they obviously benefit from the lower interest rate. Now I may push back on this, and I think again, I know I sound like a broken record here, but we really need to do the math. What are we getting versus what are we giving up to get a 6% or five and a half percent interest rate? What does that mean in real, tangible cost, and what's that? Break even? It's actually a fairly simple calculation. When you just divide the difference in what you're getting versus what you're paying for, and that'll give you the number of months that it takes to recapture the incentive versus the expense. But that would be the easiest one. Keith, I would say buying down points, using paying additional points to get that lower interest rate,  Keith Weinhold 21:20  buying down your rate. It could feel good in the short term, but it's often not the best long term or even intermediate term move when you do the math, as you always like to say, well, you the listener here, you know that you can qualify for mortgage loans, for rental properties without needing a w2 without needing a pay stub and without even needing to show tax returns, because you need all those things for a conventional loan, but for a DSCR loan, debt service coverage ratio, you don't. So talk to us about the pros and cons of a DSCR loan versus a conventional  Caeli Ridge 21:53  loan. Okay? And I've got a hook here too, because I think the listeners are gonna be very, very pleased to hear at the end of this statement, what's happening with DSCR in conjunction or comparison, rather to the conventional so DSCR everybody means debt service, coverage ratio. It's a very simple formula. We are going to take the gross rents and divide it by the principal and interest and taxes and insurance and association. If it applies, that's it.  Keith Weinhold 22:18  $1,000 in gross rents, $800 in p i, t i, that yields a DSCR of 1.25 Correct?  Caeli Ridge 22:25  Yes, you're absolutely right. The one that I use as I, just to keep it simple, is 1000 rents, 1000 piti. That's a 1.0 right? As long as the gross rents are equal or greater than the p i, t i, you're going to be in a position to get the more favorable rates. Now that's not to say that we can't go below a 1.0 ratio. You can actually have a property, we have products that will allow the DSCR to be a point seven five. That would mean, in this scenario, if you had rents, gross rents of 750, and the piti was 1000 you can actually get that loan done. That is allowed. The rate gets a little bit hairy. So more often than not, we're at the 1.0 and above. So this is just a really great way for investors who are either recently self employed, maybe they're adjusted gross, they just write everything off for reasons that you can imagine. Why? Right? They don't want to pay the taxes. It could be 100 different reasons. The DSCR option is such a great solution to provide a 30 year fixed mortgage same same similar leverage, if not sometimes even better than a Fannie Freddie, than a conventional loan, you can usually leverage a little bit more, in some cases, on a DSCR like a two to four, for example, two to four unit residential property, Fannie Freddie, they kind of cut those loan to values a little bit, and the DSCR loans don't care about that. So you can get the same leverage as a single family would in a DSCR. The only other primary difference is these DSCR loans are going to come with prepayment penalties. Typically, the standard is about three years, but we're usually not refinancing in the first 36 months. Anyway, if you know that that's applicable to you, then you'd have to buy the prepay down or out, which you can do otherwise. DSCR is amazing. Oh, and I'll give you the little hook here. So something I have observed this is maybe very recent 4550 ish days, the margin for interest rate difference between conventional and DSCR is really starting to narrow. DSCR products are really performing well, and that interest rate improvements that we've been seeing for those products is not far off from what the Fannie Freddie's are, and I've even seen examples where DSCR beats a 30 year fixed Fannie Freddie rate. Now those are for the higher loan amounts. I can explain if you want, but otherwise, that's good news.  Keith Weinhold 24:36  Okay, this is really good news. It's a time in the cycle where dscrs could very well make sense for you without that huge documentation Shakedown that you need with W twos and pay stubs and everything else. There are a lot of nascent trends in the mortgage industry, and we're trying to separate some of them from being rumors, from being something that can truly happen. We're talking about 50 year mortgages and poor. Affordable mortgages. More on that. When we come back, you're listening to get rich education. Our guest is Ridge lending Group President, Chaley Ridge  Keith Weinhold 25:07  You know, most people think they're playing it safe with their liquid money, but they're actually losing savings accounts and bonds don't keep up when true inflation eats six or 7% of your wealth. Every single year, I invest my liquidity with FFI freedom family investments in their flagship program. Why fixed 10 to 12% returns have been predictable and paid quarterly. There's real world security backed by needs based real estate like affordable housing, Senior Living and health care. Ask about the freedom flagship program. When you speak to a freedom coach there, and that's just one part of their family of products, they've got workshops, webinars and seminars designed to educate you before you invest, start with as little as 25k and finally, get your money working as hard as you do. Get started at Freedom family investments.com/gre, or send a text now it's 1-937-795-8989, yep, text their freedom. Coach, directly, again. 1-937-795-8989,  Keith Weinhold 26:18  The same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage, start your pre qual and even chat with President Chaley Ridge personally, while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com, that's Ridge lending group.com  Dana Dunford 26:50  this is hemlanes co founder, Dana Dunford. Listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.  Keith Weinhold 26:58  welcome back to get rich education. We're talking with Ridge lending Group President and Founder, Chaley Ridge about how you can get lower mortgage rates, and also about some trends in the industry, separating what's really a rumor in what could really happen squaring on 50 year mortgages and portable mortgages, those are both things only being discussed by the administration to help with affordability. FHFA Director Bill Pulte created some jarring news recently when he publicized this. What are your thoughts on the 50 year mortgage?  Caeli Ridge 27:39  You know, on a primary residence basis, I'm not so sure I need to maybe put some more thought into that. But for an investment property, I love it. Man, anything to keep that payment down so that, because, remember, we talked about earlier in the show here the percentage of mortgages, let's just use our 30 year fixed for a second that for a rental property that start on day one and then stroke a check 360 times later to pay that to zero. Is a fraction of a percent right? We are refinancing these things. We are selling them and doing 1031 exchanges. So anything that can keep my cash flow higher and my payment lower, I am all for it. Now, the people that push back and say, Well, I want to pay off my mortgage in 15 years. I don't want to pay extra interest, you are welcome to do that. So there's a second piece to this that I think is equally as important as maximizing cash flow, and that is your qualification. All right, if this comes to pass, and right now, it could just be noise, okay, and I'm speaking specifically for investment property, but if this is available to us, the debt to income ratio component, because think about it like this. So I'm going to keep using my 15 year and my 30 year, because that's kind of what we understand. The payment difference between a 30 year 360 month and a 15 year 180 month can be substantial depending on the loan size. I mean, it can be hundreds and hundreds of dollars for the individual that is dead set and say, I don't want to pay the higher interest. I want to pay these things off. We may have arguments about that whole strategy to begin with, but overall, if they still want to do that and that's their decision, Fine, take the 30 year fixed payment. Take the 30 year fixed mortgage. Apply the difference. You can figure out that payment difference very easily. Apply it religiously. Every month. You will cross the finish line in about 15.4 years. Download an amortization calculator online. You can find them everywhere. Plug in your numbers, and you'll see what I'm talking about. If you were to do this, let's say the difference is 200 bucks a month, and you send it in every month with your 30 year fixed mortgage payment, you will cross the finish line to pay that thing off in about 15.4 years. So yes, you'll pay a few extra months of interest. But what have you done to your qualifications, right, your payment now on your debt to income ratio, when we're looking at this thing for a future optimization, never take the shorter term amortization, ever, ever, ever, you won't pay the higher interest that the 30 year or the 50 Year will probably come with because you've accelerated the payoff so long, if that's your choice. Now for everybody else that really wants. To maximize that cash flow. And they get that, they're going to be refinancing this every five, six, whatever it is, years take it, man, I am all for the longer term amortization on a rental.  Keith Weinhold 30:10  I agree with you. I even like the 50 year on a primary residence, but yeah, Chaley, right here on the show, several weeks before Bill Pulte made the announcement, I actually talked about the 50 year mortgage and compared it to the 30 and the reasons that I like it because I knew there was a chance it could be coming, since this administration is trying to do so much to help out with affordability, people buy based on a payment, not a price that lowers the payment. A 50 year mortgage helps you benefit from inflation, and there are a lot of other advantages that have to do with that, although you probably are going to pay a higher interest rate on a 50 than you would a 30. And you know, Chaley, when the 30 year mortgage had its Advent just after World War Two, I'm going to guess 75 years ago, people were having this same conversation like, oh, 30 years, my gosh, you're never going to pay off the home. And really, that's not what it's about.  Caeli Ridge 31:01  Not at all, not at all. And remember, you guys, I would encourage everybody listening to this to actually go get that amortization table and see how much interest is baked in and how it is applied and paid. It is the back end of any of these amortized mortgages where the principal actually starts to get applied in a meaningful way. The 50 year mortgage, or the longer term amortization is a huge advantage. I'm speaking for investors. Mostly. I love it.  Keith Weinhold 31:26  Some people say, are you nuts? Look at how much more interest you're paying over the life of the loan on a 50 year mortgage versus a 30 year mortgage. We already touched on that you're not going to keep that loan for the life of it, and if you just take the difference from the lower payment that a 50 Year gives you, and invest that in 8% return, you are going to crush 2x to 3x oftentimes, what the paltry interest savings are over several decades,  Caeli Ridge 31:26  and somebody else is making that payment right. We have tenants that are responsible  Keith Weinhold 31:47   100% and then there's something that I don't know if portable mortgages would fly. And what this means is that when borrowers move, they could keep the rate, keep their term and keep their lender, presumably for the new home you might have seen it in the news. You the listener that Fannie May remove the minimum credit score requirements from desktop underwriting. And Chaley, I think you let me know elsewhere that those changes don't affect non owner occupied, but of course, it could affect the broader housing market in pricing. What are your thoughts about lowering the credit score requirement  Caeli Ridge 32:28  so similar to the portable stuff, until it really reaches mainstream and it affects the non owner occupied I'm not deep diving into those things. The basis of it, though, is, is that, yeah, they're removing that minimum credit score requirement from a du underwrite that stands for desktop underwriter, as you said, that is Fannie Mae's sophisticated, automated underwriting system, and I think it's just going to give more eligibility to lower income households and people trying to become homeowners that have found the barrier for entry very restrictive because They have credit issues.  Keith Weinhold 33:00  Well, let's talk about FHA and VA loans, something that we have rarely, if ever touched on. Our listeners know that I started out making my first ever property of any kind, an FHA loan with three and a half percent down on a fourplex, living in one unit, renting out the other three. Tell us about some trends there in FHA and VA loans  Caeli Ridge 33:21  we actually just did house hack campaign. We did a webinar on it, co living, all those different ways in which, you know, the younger generation, especially, and this is true for anyone. I don't want to pigeonhole it, can get themselves into home ownership and propel them into the real estate investing as an asset class. I am such a big fan of this model, in this strategy, for anybody that's interested and willing to kind of coal mingle or habitat, like you did a four Plex at three and a half percent down, you've got three tenants that are making your mortgage payment. VA, likewise, any of the Gubby loans, which include VA, FHA, USDA, you can get high, high leverage and up to four units. So I'm a huge fan of that. And then the CO living is another thing that I think is not quite mainstream, but I think it's gaining steam  Keith Weinhold 34:09  for those that don't know what we're talking about, you can use an FHA loan with a three and a half percent down payment, as long as you live in one of the units, your credit score can even be pretty low, and you can do that with a single family home, duplex, triplex or fourplex. You can get those same benefits with a VA loan and zero down  Caeli Ridge 34:29  USDA also zero down if you're in the right zip code. How does one qualify for a USDA loan? You know, there's a website I would have you check out. We don't do a ton of those. We have the ability, of course, but there's income restrictions and all of this. They've got, actually, a pretty slick website where you can go online, type in the zip code, make sure it's in a rural area, what your income is. There's all these inputs, and it'll tell you if you'd be a candidate for it. But yeah, it's good. Rates zero down. I like the product.  Keith Weinhold 34:56  Well, there have been a lot of newsy items when it comes. Comes to mortgages. Caeli and I think we should drop back before we're done here and talk about the basics. Just basically, what does it take to get a non owner occupied loan for residential income property?  Caeli Ridge 35:12  You know, there's so many options for investors today that I would say that if you have access to and even with what we just said, house hack. I mean, listen, if you've got 3% down, three and a half percent down, you can probably assure yourself you can get into a property. And if you can't qualify from a income debt to income ratio perspective, you've got three or four other models, which include DSCR, bank statement loans, asset depletion loans, overall, I would say that this is an individual conversation. Chances are you could probably qualify today, and if you can't, one of the things that I love about Ridge lending is, is that we're going to help you plant the seeds and show you how to qualify. If it takes you three months or six months or a year, that's what we do.  Keith Weinhold 35:56  Yeah, we've definitely noticed the difference here and that you do help that investor with long term planning? I do my own loans at ridge, and my assistant here at GRE she recently got the ball rolling with you in there at Ridge as well.  Caeli Ridge 36:11  Brenda, yes, yes, that was fantastic. We are very looking forward to helping her.  Keith Weinhold 36:16  Well, you know, chili, I've come here with a lot of questions that I had. What's the question No one's asking you, but you wish that they would.  Caeli Ridge 36:25  I think it probably would be for me, planning. You know, we get a lot of questions about interest rates. That's kind of top of mind for everybody. More about planning, having people that are interested in real estate as an asset class and an investment have the conversations to say, this is where I'm at today. This is where I'd like to be in five years. Tell me how to get there, and we can have those high level conversations that really sort of reverse engineer it and say, Okay, this is where you stand today from an underwriting perspective. This is where you need to be, and here's how we're going to get you there. It's always about planting seeds and creating those roadmaps, as I like to say so I would say that that would be top of my list.  Keith Weinhold 37:02  That's exactly what you do in there, and that's really what sets you apart. Well, remind our audience how they can get a hold of ridge.  Caeli Ridge 37:11  Yes, there's a couple ways. Of course, our website, Ridge lending group.com Please email us info at Ridge lending group.com and then call us toll free. 855-747-4343, 855-74-RIDGE is an easy way to remember.  Keith Weinhold 37:25  It's really been valuable this time. Chaley, thanks so much for coming back onto the show.  Caeli Ridge 37:29   Appreciate you. Keith.  Keith Weinhold 37:36  Oh yeah, good pointed info from Chaley over at Ridge, I think that the important things for you to remember from our conversation is that, gosh, isn't it so glaring like in your face that you have options. All these options when you engage with a lender, you're going to learn that there are probably loan programs that you've never even heard of, some that you might fit into and even if you aren't adding more property, if you're not in that phase, there are ways that you can take your existing loans and consolidate them or refinance them, or use them to produce a tax free windfall for yourself and the US is often the envy of other world nations with the flexibility that we have here in our mortgage market. I've never known anyone that does this better than Chaley and her team. I mean, they are real difference makers. If you learn something on today's show, hey, Don't hoard the good stuff. Engage in the nicest kind of wealth redistribution. Tap the Share button right now and share this on social, or text this episode to one friend who'd appreciate it. That would mean the world to me. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.  Speaker 2 38:57  Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice, please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively  Keith Weinhold 39:25  The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building, getricheducation.com Â

581: I Really Mean It
24/11/2025 | 43 mins.
Keith tells how much he paid for his first property and how he traded up for more and larger properties. He highlights the benefits of owning real estate, noting that 63% of the median American's net worth is in home equity and retirement accounts, while the top 1% has 45% in private business and real estate. He also shares his personal journey and emphasizes using other people's money to grow assets. Discover why outdated rent control policies harm housing supply and affordability. Learn innovative ways to turn your property's unused spaces into effortless cash flow with today's best peer-to-peer platforms. Sign up at GREletter.com to grow your means, and join a thriving community passionate about breaking free from financial limits! Resources: These platforms let property owners creatively monetize underutilized spaces. Neighbor.com – Rent out your garage, basement, driveway, or unused space. Swimply.com – Rent out your swimming pool by the hour. StoreAtMyHouse.com – Rent out your attic, closet, or other home storage spaces. SniffSpot.com – Rent out your backyard as a private dog park. PureStorage.co – Rent out extra storage space such as garages or sheds. PeerSpace.com – Rent out your space (home, backyard, loft, warehouse, etc.) for events, meetings, or photoshoots. Episode Page: GetRichEducation.com/581 For access to properties or free help with a GRE Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE or e-mail: [email protected] Invest with Freedom Family Investments. For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text 1-937-795-8989 to speak with a freedom coach Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" For advertising inquiries, visit: GetRichEducation.com/ad Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— GREletter.com or text 'GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Complete episode transcript: Keith Weinhold 0:01  Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, talking about how I personally built and grew wealth myself with real numbers and real properties, what a rent freeze actually means to you, and how you could be losing income by not creatively generating more rent from properties that you already own. I'll talk about exactly how today on Get Rich Education.  Speaker 1 0:27  Since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit get rich education.com  Corey Coates 1:12  You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.  Keith Weinhold 1:29  Welcome to GRE from Stonehenge, England to Stone Mountain, Georgia and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you're listening to get rich education. I visited Stonehenge and made, by the way, today I'm back for another incomprehensibly slack jawed performance here, still a shaved mammal too. Status hasn't changed. And remain profligate and unrepentant about the whole thing. You probably know it by now that if you're listening here and you want to learn and do things the same way that everyone else does things, then you are squarely in the wrong place. I really mean it more on that later. But you know, Wall Street doesn't scorn real estate because it's risky. They dislike it because it doesn't scale the way that they need it to private real estate can get messy, operational, illiquid. Every real estate deal is different. Every market has its own physics. You can't package it into a fund with a push button deploy strategy. And that's precisely the point. The modern financial system rewards frictionless products that trade constantly and generate fees instead building real, durable wealth has never been frictionless. Here's what the wealth distribution actually shows for the median American. 63% of net worth is in home equity and retirement accounts. For the top 10% that tier, 25% is in real estate and private business ownership. But for the top 1% that highest tier, 45% combined is in private business equity and real estate. So as you approach the top 1% it's more skewed toward owning a business and directly owning real estate. Wall Street, they only offer derivative exposure to real estate through mega funds and REITs. But exposure isn't ownership. Your best risk adjusted returns live in the deals that are too small and too messy for institutions to touch, and that's where your yield lives. The control, the opportunity, the world's enduring fortunes weren't built just by buying exposure. They were built by owning things, land companies, assets that require some sweat to get them going. The next decade favors owners over allocators, the stuff that pays you perpetual dividends. So the irony is that the very things Wall Street avoids the messy hands on part of real estate. Oh, well, that's what makes it such a powerful wealth builder. And see, even, as we somewhat found out last week when we talked about AI property management here on the show, you can't fully automate relationships or construction or management, but that friction is exactly where the margin lives. What makes real estate frustrating for institutions is exactly what makes it valuable for operators and long term owners like you and I. It's the nuance, the inefficiency and the need to actually. Know something about a market, rather than just model it. Wealth that lasts comes from assets that you can influence, not just monitor, and that is the difference between you having mere exposure and true ownership. You can't outsource legacy, the messy path of ownership is often where meaning in real freedom is found. You've got to tend to the garden somewhat, whether your properties are professionally managed or self managed, but some people get overwhelmed if they're asked for a log in and a password, even we all know that feeling somewhat well, then they stay metaphorically logged out of success. Think about how easy remotely managing your real estate portfolio is today. Sheesh 200 years ago. There was no anesthesia. We had smallpox, brutal physical labor, no electricity today. What if a website tells you that you've got to reset your password? Oh my gosh, is the deal often just overwhelming? Can you imagine the effort now, two weeks ago, I mentioned to you that I went back and visited the first piece of real estate that I ever owned, that seminal blue fourplex. But did I ever tell you how I grew that seed into a massive real estate portfolio, and how you can do it by following GRE principles? Let me take you through the early steps here so you can see how you can get something similar going. Of course, your path will look different, but this is going to spawn a lot of ideas for you. I think you already know about my 10k to 11k down payment into that first ever fourplex as the FHA three and a half percent down. Owner occupied, but I didn't buy another piece of real estate for over three years, because real estate just was not that driving thing in my life yet. So I lived in one of those really modest four Plex units longer than I had to three plus years after that, I moved out to a pretty modest, still single family home five miles away, that I had just bought. And since I vacated one of the four Plex units in order to do that. Now, I had four rent incomes instead of three. But here is really the pivot point with what happened next. Now, what would most people do? They might hold on to that four Plex, keep self managing it, and when they could, perhaps aggressively, make principal payments, getting the building paid off before its organic 30 year amortization period. And then what else would they do once it was paid off? Say that would take them 12 years, which would entail a lot of sacrifice, like working overtime at their job and skipping vacations. Oh, they think something like, Oh, now the cash flow is really going to pour in with his paid off fourplex? Yeah, it sure would increase a lot, but after 12 years of toil and sacrifice cashflow off of one fourplex still wouldn't even let you quit your job. Staying small doesn't work, plus you live below your means for a really long time that is sweat and time that you're never going to relinquish. You started working for money. Rather than letting other people's money take over and work for you, it is right there waiting to do that for you. So instead of that path, what I did is when equity ran up in that first fourplex building. Its value increased from 295, to 425, in three and a third years, I did exactly the opposite. I borrowed the maximum out of that first fourplex building, 90% CLTV, and used those tax free funds. Yeah, tax free funds, when you do that to both spend money, well on vacations and make a 10% down payment on a second fourplex building that costs 530k now I'm still living in the single family home while I've got the two fourplex buildings, both with 90% loans on them, still cashflowing A little so eight rent incomes, more debt than I ever had, 10 to one leverage on two fourplexes, and this was all less than five years from the time that I bought the first fourplex. And yes, it probably took some password resets in there. Then next I learned that investing in only one Metro, which is what I had done to that point, that's actually pretty risky, because all eight of my rent incomes, plus my own primary residence, were exposed to the whims fortunes and misfortunes of only one economy. This was in 2012 now, so I started buying turnkey single family. Rentals in other economies that make sense. Investor advantage places is what you've got to look for, Florida, Texas, Ohio, Alabama, Tennessee. My first turnkey was bought in the Dallas Fort Worth metro. I know I've told you that before, all right, but how was I buying more even though I was still working a day job in a cubicle for the D, o, t. Well, it wasn't from my job, because that job is working for money. What it was is borrow tax free and grow, borrow tax free and grow, borrow tax free and grow. By then, enough equity had accumulated in the first two fourplexes that I traded, one for an eight Plex and the other for an 11 Plex. Now we're getting up to $3,500 of monthly cashflow at this point, which is probably 5k plus per month in inflation adjusted terms. And the 8plex cost 760k and the 11 Plex cost 850k back then, and I still remember that that was a big day for me back then, those buildings closed on either the same day or on consecutive days. I forget. Well, that was 1.6 million in purchases. Maybe that's two to two and a half million in today's dollars. And see that is sure more than what one paid off fourplex would have given me on that old slow track, yet I had all of this faster than waiting 12 years to aggressively pay off one fourplex. And you know, some could say back at that time, they would look at that situation from the outside and say, Keith, where did you get the money to make 20% down payments on that 1.6 million worth of real estate, that is 320k cash? Did you save up all the money? No, I didn't. I didn't have the ability to save that much money at my job. Did you use your existing properties like ATMs, raiding one property to buy another. Yeah, that's exactly what I did. That is the use of other people's money that is wiser than spending my time away from loved ones by selling my time for dollars that I'm never going to get back. And by the way, I have always been the sole owner of properties. No partners here. Now, at this point, I've got dozens of running units spread across multiple states, all professionally managed. And by the way, eight doors is the most that I've ever self managed, because I got professional management involved after that. Oh, there are a ton of lessons in there about what I just told you, many of them, which I've sprinkled through more than 500 episodes now, but now that I told you where I came from, do you know the lesson that I want to leave you with here on this one, for the most part, it's that I'm not even using my own money to do this now, I did add some of my own money for down payments. Sure, by far the minority portion, primarily and centrally. I keep leveraging the bank's money, and they make the down payment for me on the next property. Borrow tax free and grow, borrow tax free and grow, borrow tax free and grow. Yes, the pace of you doing this is going to fluctuate over time, but that is the playbook that I just gave you right there. Now I've done it in cycles that feel slower because appreciation is lower, but interest rates tend to be lower during those times. And I keep doing it in cycles that move faster because appreciation is higher and interest rates tend to be higher during those times. I've done it when lending was loose, like pre Dodd Frank, and I've done it when lending was tight and inflationary. Times supercharged this whole thing. Sooner than later, you would rather get $5 million worth of real estate out there under your belt, all floating up with inflation and appreciation, not just $1 million worth, $1 million worth, that's more like sticking with one fourplex and trying to pay it off. Anything worth doing, anything in your life is worth doing. Well, look, other people's money is still available to me and to you. So using my own money back when I was an employee, I mean, that's exactly when I would have had to trade more of my finite time for dollars and see, that's what the masses do, and that's precisely what keeps them as the mediocre masses. I really mean it. Now, I wanted to make things real for you with that soliloquy.  Keith Weinhold 14:47  Later today, I'll discuss the GRE principles. Did that formative story spawn? A few weeks ago, it made substantial news inside and outside the real estate world that Zohran Mamdani was elected to be the next New York City Mayor. His first day on the job will be the first of the coming year. And actually, it's easy for you to remember how New York City mayoral terms work, because it is the same as the President of the United States. Each term lasts four years, and they can serve up to two consecutive terms eight years. Let's you and I listen into the audio from this short video clip together. This Mamdani campaign spot ran back before election day, but it tells you what he stands for and where he's coming from with regard to rent. In a slightly corny way, the ad shows various tenants popping their heads out of apartment windows and such, saying like, Hey, wait, what? You're going to freeze my rent?  Speaker 2 15:50  I'm Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani, and I'm running for mayor to freeze the rent for every rent stabilized tenant.  Unknown Speaker 15:57  Wait, you're gonna freeze my rent?  Speaker 3 15:59  Yes, did I hear rent freeze?  Speaker 4 16:02  Yes, this guy's gonna freeze the rent. No. Pike none. This guy's gonna freeze the  Unknown Speaker 16:09  rent. It's true.  Dani-Lynn Robison 16:12  As your next mayor, I will freeze your rent paid for by Zoran for NYC.  Speaker 5 16:17  The banner at the end of the ad reads, Zoran for an affordable New York City. Oh, yeah, slogans like that are so catchy for anything. All right, he says he's going to freeze the rent for every rent stabilized tenant. And rent control and rent stabilization, they mean very similar things, ceilings on the rent. I'm soon going to tell you what I think about that, and I've got more on Mamdani shortly, but it's not going to be political This is not that kind of show. This is an investing show. I think that even our foreign listeners know how big and influential New York City is. It's not the political capital, but it is the capital of so many things in the United States, it's America's largest city by far, eight and a half million just in the city proper, 20 million in the metro. And New York's growing in sheer number of people. The Metro gained more population than any other city, almost a quarter million people added just last year, even if you doubled the population of the second largest city, LA, New York City would still be larger. All right. Well, how did we get here? A quick story of New York City rent control is that in 1918 New York City passed its first flavor of rent control, and that was the first US city to do so that didn't solve the problem. So in 1943 Congress passed the emergency price control act, and its name implied a temporary patch during World War Two. But even after it expired, and even after the war ended, New York State chose to make it basically permanent in 1950 that didn't solve the problem. So in 1962 New York state passed a law allowing cities to enact expanded rent control if they declared a, quote, housing emergency. Well, New York City did, and that housing emergency has essentially continued unresolved. Still, what they consider an emergency condition persists today, yeah, all these decades later. I mean, really a what, 60 to 70 year long emergency condition that didn't solve the problem. So in 1969 new york city passed what they called rent stabilization. It's really just a new flavor of rent control, and this greatly expanded the number of properties that were subject to these rent regulations. And about half of New York City's apartments are subject to that law that didn't solve the problem. So more expansion and more tweaks of regulating the rent were made in the decades that followed. You had notable ones in 1997 2003 2011 in 2015 but none of them solved the problem. So in 2019 New York expanded rent stabilization to include what they call vacancy control. Now what that means is rent caps are now applied to new renters, not just those existing tenants renewing a lease, and it also granted more tenant protections that didn't solve the problem. So in 2024 New York State passed what they call good cause eviction. That is a third expansion of rent regulation in these tenant protections. This time, they just gave it a slick name, kind of apropos of Madison Avenue's famed market. Marketing prowess. I suppose that didn't solve the problem. And by the way, rent caps came in below not only the rate of inflation, but also below household income growth almost every year over the last decade, and in some years, no increase was allowed at all. That is a rent freeze. But that didn't work either. And meanwhile, New York's public housing agency has 80 billion in deferred maintenance needs, and it's running a $200 million plus operating deficit. So government run housing that hasn't worked either. All right? Well, that brings us to 2025 where New York City is electing a mayor who campaign on freezing the rents and expanding public housing. So New York City now has, for over a century, chosen to expand and rebrand these ideas that just haven't worked, and yet they keep coming back for more and yeah, what exactly is the word for doubling and tripling and quadrupling down on ideas that have proven not to work? Is that word stupidity? Hmm, so throughout that history that I just brought you from 1918 whenever I say that didn't work, what do I mean by that? And here's the big takeaway for you. What I mean is that rent control hasn't worked in New York City because it discourages landlords from maintaining rental housing, and certainly from building new rental housing. So what that does is that it shrinks the supply over time When demand exceeds supply, you know what happens to price? And in Manhattan, just the studio apartment now averages $4,150 and the average rent citywide, that's Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx and Staten Island, which does include some rough areas in this average rent is $3,560 so as a result, what really happens here is that rent control helps a few lucky tenants while driving up rents and then worsening the shortages for everyone else. So what is the solution here? It is simple. Actually do less. I mean, isn't it great when you can solve a problem in your life by actually doing less? Yeah, drop the regulations against building and drop all forms of rent control, that way we'll have more building, and with higher supply, natural price discovery could take place. So he says he's going to freeze the rent for every rent stabilized tenant. And you can start to understand why we don't discuss investing in New York City Housing very much on GRE what we do. We talk about it as a model of what not to do. The good news is that I don't have any evidence of rent control spreading into the investor advantage areas that we talk about here, like the southeast and the south central part of the United States and the Midwest. But here's the thing, just ask yourself this question, what if there was a force imposed on you by popular vote that froze your income. Okay, I'm talking about no matter what you do from work you're a software engineer, a doctor, a nurse, a paralegal, a carpenter. Would you think that was really unjust if your profession were singled out, and then voters said, hey, no more raises for you. We don't care if there's inflation, we don't care if you're getting better at your job. We don't care if you have rising expenses. We're going to put a cap on your income. How would you like that? Well, look, in New York City, they're voting for landlord's income to be frozen. They are singling out one profession, and these are really important people. These are the housing providers. So by the way, I've heard two people describe New York City mayor elect Zohran mandami. Is a good looking man? Is he good looking? I had to go look again. When people said this, I guess he's not bad looking. And hey, despite being a heterosexual male, I can say that some guys are good looking. I just never thought that with him.  Speaker 5 24:32  Now, do you have one friend kind of have that type of friend who always just seems to know what's happening in the housing market? Well, that person could be you. There is a way to do that. Boom, it's easy, and you're going to sound smart without reading a single boring, fed report. I don't sell courses. I don't wear sunglasses indoors, and I definitely don't tell you. To flip houses on Tiktok. I just talk here, and I send you a smart, short real estate newsletter. That's it. This is smart stuff that you can brag about at boring dinner parties, and you've got a lot of those coming up here at the holidays. It is free. I write our letter myself, and I'd love to have you as a reader, sign up at greletter.com it's quick and easy. Your future wealth will thank you for it. See what I did there. It takes less than three minutes to read, and it is super informative. GREletter.com Again, that's greletter.com, I've got more straight ahead.  Keith Weinhold 25:45  You know, most people think they're playing it safe with their liquid money, but they're actually losing savings accounts and bonds don't keep up when true inflation eats six or 7% of your wealth. Every single year, I invest my liquidity with FFI freedom family investments in their flagship program. Why? Fixed 10 to 12% returns have been predictable and paid quarterly. There's real world security backed by needs based real estate like affordable housing, Senior Living and health care. Ask about the freedom flagship program when you speak to a freedom coach there, and that's just one part of their family of products, they've got workshops, webinars and seminars designed to educate you before you invest. Start with as little as 25k and finally, get your money working as hard as you do. Get started at Freedom family investments.com/gre or send a text now it's 1-937-795-8989, yep, text their freedom coach, directly again. 1-937-795-8989  Keith Weinhold 26:57  the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President chailey Ridge personally while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com that's Ridge lending group.com  Dani-Lynn Robison 27:30  this is freedom family investments, co founder day. Lynn Robinson, listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.  Keith Weinhold 27:37  welcome back to get reciprocation. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, earlier this year, I talked to you about new ways where you can generate more income from the properties that you already own, and doing that through peer to peer leasing platforms, I got feedback from you that you loved it when I talked about it on that episode. Well, I've got more of them to tell you about today. This is exciting. Is there money sitting right under your nose and you haven't even collected it yet? And sometimes this happens in the world. This has nothing to do with finding Uranus, but it is similar to how they just discovered a new moon of Uranus, even though it's only six miles wide. Yes, that's something that scientists recently discovered, yes, much like this new small moon of Uranus that was really always there, but just discovered, metaphorically, this is what we're talking about with your real estate here now. This is a lot like how Airbnb rattled the hotel world about 15 years ago. These platforms let you rent out space and amenities that you already own but barely use. Neighbor.com, is the first one. I'm not going to say.com every time, because most of them are that way, and they've got a mobile app of the same name, all right, neighbor that's like Airbnb for your garage or your basement or even that creepy crawl space that you never go into. So instead of letting junk collect dust, you rent out your unused space to people who need that storage, meaning then that their clutter pays your mortgage. So customers request space and then you approve it. That's how it works. In fact, we have a woman here on staff at get rich education that easily made about 1000 bucks personally on neighbor, she rented out a parking space in her driveway. She rented that space to a college student that needed a place to park her car while she went back home for the summer. You can easily do that too. Then there. Swimply, S, W, I, M, P, L, Y, rent out your pool by the hour. Yes, your pool is no longer just for cannonballs, awkward barbecues and tanning sessions that you regret, although not typically, I've read about how some people have made passive income streams of $15,000 per month this way. I mean, gosh, did Marco Polo just get turned into a side hustle? Or what that is, swimply. Then there is [email protected] Do you have an empty closet or an attic? You can turn that into a treasure vault for stranger stuff, and you can get paid while their clutter hides in your home instead of their home. So think of it as maybe some pretty passive income, only dustier, and who even lives there in your attic right now? Anyway, a bunch of raccoons. They're not paying your rent again. That is called store at my house. Sniff spot. It turns your backyard into a private dog park. Yeah, local pet owners can book your yard by the hour to let their pups run and sniff and play. You provide the grass. They bring the zoomies, and you pocket the cash that is sniff spot, Pure Storage. That one is a.co when people need storage, you swoop in like a friendly capitalist neighbor with your extra space. So you rent out your garage or a shed, or, say, even a corner of your basement, and you watch empty become income, you are basically running a mini Self Storage empire without the neon sign. I mean, sheesh, you are kind of like Jeff Bezos with cobwebs here. Okay. Again, that is purestorage.co, then there's peer space. Now I've used this one before, personally, and so has someone else here on staff on GRE she actually told me about it. What I did is I paid for a few hours as a renter, not the landlord on peerspace. In fact, I rented this space this past summer to give an in person real estate presentation where I covered real estate pays five ways and the inflation triple crown and all of that with peer space, you rent out your space for events, okay, so your home or your backyard or loft or some funky warehouse, you rent that out by the hour, and those events could be film shoots or workshops or parties or other events. That's what peer space is for. I mean, that could be a cool backdrop for an influencer or a film crew that has a pretty big budget. Renters come to you with alacrity. They will come to you because they can often save 50% or more versus using more traditional avenues. There, in fact, even public storage, like that's the company name Public Storage. They're the nation's largest self storage space operator. They even use neighbor.com to help lease out their leftover inventory. And so do some REITs that have extra space at their office or retail or apartment properties. They use neighbor.com as well. All right, so that's my roundup of more peer to peer leasing platforms, a few more of them than I told you about earlier this year, and the types of listings you can get creative. People are getting creative. They are monetizing everything from empty barns to vacant strip mall storefronts to church parking lots. I mean, consider how often church parking lots are empty. They're empty almost every day except Sunday. So get creative and think about space that's not being used. One thing to look out for, though, is that your HOA might try to crush your entrepreneurial spirit here. So keep that in mind. Just look around. Do you own any underutilized space or asset that you can rent out. Well, chances are there's already a peer to peer rental platform for it. And when you visit any of these platforms that I told you about, I mean, you're probably already going to see people offering space in your neighborhood. You'll be surprised.  Keith Weinhold 34:39  And this is not some unproven fad. Turo really took off about 10 years ago when they realized that most Americans' cars just sit idle, more than 95% of their time in their driveway or in their garage. Well, at that point, everyday people started to lease out their cars. Cars on Truro. So the bottom line here is that if you own most any real estate, then you've got options, and you can often make the rules peer to peer. Leasing platforms add new income streams to your life, and if you read my Don't quit your Daydream letter, you'll remember that I wrote about those resources and gave you their links and everything. See, that's the type of material that I put in the letter sometimes and again. You can get it at gre letter.com It shows you how to build wealth, much like I've been talking about on the show today. This is vital, because the conventional consumer finance world, you know, they just don't tell you about things like this. For example, did you ever wonder why economists aren't rich like maybe you would think that they would be Well, it's because schools and universities, they don't really teach you how to make money so someone can have an advanced degree, a Master's, or even a doctorate. That degree will be in finance or in economics, but they're still broke, or they're still trapped by their job, because the only way they know how to make money is by having a job. There's nothing wrong with having a job, but that's the only thing they know. They never learn how to earn and multiply money like with what I've been discussing today. Economists make between 70k and 180k per year in America today, you know, school taught both us and them the theory of money, how it's counted, how it's tracked, and how it flows through the system, but it really didn't teach them how to build a little diverter device on that flow to earn it or create it or leverage it to build freedom for themselves. And that is why this show is here. That's not a knock on economists. Economists are brilliant people, and some of the best known ones are guests on the show here with us. At times, we don't just want to live in a world of models and charts, though, when you build real world wealth with mortgages and markets and moves that don't always fit inside a formula, and certainly not a conventional one that you grew up with. So when you hear the experts talk about where the economy's heading, sure listen to them. I listen to them, but be sure to apply that to your own balance sheet, because you don't build wealth in theory, you build it in real life.  Keith Weinhold 37:44  Then how do you get a good deal? Build a relationship with a GRE investment coach like Naresh. Here you can do that on just 130 minute call with him, and then when the deal that you want becomes available, he'll let you know. By the time you find something on the internet, it's going to be too late, because that means a lot of people have already passed on that deal. If it's already out there publicly, like I said earlier, if you want to learn and do things the same way that everyone else does, then you are squarely in the wrong place. I really mean it. And why would that be? In fact, what does everyone else have? Not enough money at the end of the month, a budget where they constantly have to make sacrifices to meet it, because they think that is the way and they live below their means instead of grow their means. The underlying philosophy here at GRE is, don't live below your means. Grow your means. In fact, we have a T shirt with Grow Your means on it and our logo on it in our merch shop. That's why GRE has a tree in the logo. Grow your means. Instead of shrinking your lifestyle to fit your income, it's about expanding your income to fit your ambition, so don't cut your dreams to match your paycheck. Grow your paycheck to match your dreams. This really reflects the abundance mindset behind get rich education, that wealth isn't built by pinching pennies, but by creating more cash flow and assets and income streams in practical terms, like with what I talked about, about growing my own portfolio back at the beginning of today's show, this means buying cash flowing real estate that's growing your means leveraging good debt that's growing your means using inflation to advantage, that's growing your means investing in yourself or in new ventures. That's growing your means it's the mindset opposite of budget, harder. It is earn smarter at its core, grow your means. What that means is expand your capabilities in. Not just your comfort zone. Use creativity and leverage to multiply your results. View financial growth as a positive, proactive act, not a greedy one, because you're going to serve others with good housing and maintain it. This all encourages abundance over austerity, and it's the same idea behind the tagline financially free beats debt free.  Keith Weinhold 40:27  Thanksgiving is coming up this week, and I'll tell you something. Luckily, American ingenuity improved since the Pilgrims left England, traveled to a totally new continent, and called it New England. Fortunately, we have become more innovative since then, you are about to have more topics for conversation with family at the holidays. And note that Gen Z, ages 13 to 28 they are more likely to talk money today than they did previously. They are kind of the share everything on social generation. Tell relatives about your real estate investing, or at least some of the ideas you have. Tell them, perhaps something that they would be surprised to hear, that you learned on this show, like mortgage rates are, in fact, historically low today, actually, or something like that. And at Thanksgiving or Christmas, please tell a friend about the show. GRE is the work of my life, and that would mean the world to me. If you like listening every week, tell a friend about the show. Now use the Share button on your podcatcher if this show helps you see money or real estate differently. On Apple podcasts, touch the three dots and then the Share button. On Spotify, I think you can just hit the Share icon, the little rectangle with the arrow, and post it to your social feed or social story. That's how more people learn how to build real wealth like we do here at GRE and even better, Don't hoard the good stuff. If you learn something here, engage in the nicest kind of wealth redistribution. Tap the Share button right now and text this episode to one friend who'd appreciate it. Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Weinhold, have a happy Thanksgiving, and don't quit your Daydream.  Speaker 6 42:29  Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively.  Keith Weinhold 42:57  The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building get richeducation.com



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