Get Rich Education

Before our PA Governor-appointed public official guest joins us, I discuss how autonomous cars expect to change real estate. Richard Vague, Pennsylvania’s Secretary of Banking and Securities from 2020-2023 joins us. We’re in the state capital of Harrisburg, PA. We discuss America’s beginnings in real estate and banking from around 1800. He tells us about the health of banks in the wake of recent failures due to higher interest rates. I ask Richard about full reserve banks vs. fractional lending banks. Great Britain prohibited colonists from owning land west of the Appalachians.  The basis of early land wealth were crops grown on the land—wheat, corn, tobacco, indigo, and rice. Mortgages around 1800 were often 50% LTV and 6% interest rates. Here in the 2020s, Richard believes that private sector debt is a larger problem than public debt. Wherever debt growth is most rapid are where the economic cracks exist. Inflation benefits the Top 10% of the economic strata. Private debt becomes unsustainable around 225% of GDP. In the US, it’s currently 160%. You become insolvent when you cannot make interest-only payments. That’s true for you as an individual, or a nation. If these topics interest you, check out Richard’s new book, “The Paradox of Debt” at ParadoxOfDebt.com. Timestamps: America's beginnings with banking, real estate, and debt [00:00:01] Discussion on the historical influence of Pennsylvania banking on the formation of US banking, including figures like Robert Morris and Alexander Hamilton. The impact of autonomous vehicles on real estate [00:02:54] Exploration of the potential effects of autonomous vehicles on real estate, including reduced need for parking and changes in commuting patterns. The role of the Secretary of Banking and Securities in Pennsylvania [00:09:20] Insight into the responsibilities of the Secretary of Banking and Securities in Pennsylvania, including oversight of banks and consumer protections. The fractional reserve lending system [00:10:44] Explanation of how banks operate through fractional reserve lending and the possibility of full reserve banks. The origins of the US banking system and the role of Thomas Willing [00:12:06] Discussion on the founding of the US banking system and the involvement of Thomas Willing, the first banker in the United States. The land crisis of 1796-1797 and its impact on Robert Morris [00:14:14] Exploration of the financial crisis caused by land speculation and how it led to Robert Morris, a prominent figure in credit ratings, ending up in debtor's prison. The formation of the nation and its intersection with banking [00:21:50] Discussion on the short-term loans and interest rates during the formation of the United States and the role of debt in the westward expansion. Private sector debt and its growth [00:25:30] Exploration of the significant increase in private sector debt since World War II and the focus on the potential issues associated with it. Debt growth as an indicator of economic crises [00:28:23] Insight into how rapid debt growth, particularly in the private sector, can serve as a predictor of economic crises and the shortcomings of economic models that exclude debt as a factor. The paradox of debt [00:31:47] Debt creates wealth, using leverage and appreciation to generate wealth. The end game of private debt [00:33:29] When the requirement to service debt slows the economy down to near zero. Inflation profiting with real estate [00:37:42] Real estate is not just an inflation hedging vehicle, but an inflation profiting vehicle due to fixed interest rate debt and rising rents. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/472 Richard Vague’s new book: ParadoxOfDebt.com For access to properties or free help with a GRE’s Investment Coach, start here: GREmarketplace.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Complete episode transcript:   Speaker 1 (00:00:01) - Welcome to. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. I'm sitting down in Pennsylvania with the governor's appointed state secretary of banking and securities. What were America's beginnings with banking, real estate and debt? Learn how this affects you as an investor today. And what does America's day of debt reckoning look like today on Get Rich Education?   Speaker 2 (00:00:28) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get rich education.   Speaker 1 (00:00:44) - Welcome from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, to Harrisonburg, Virginia, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold and you're listening to Get Rich. Education has been the Keystone state of Pennsylvania this week. In just a few minutes, you'll hear my sit down with secretary of banking and Securities for this great state of Pennsylvania from 2020 to 2023. The rather distinguished guest also sits on the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania's Board of Trustees. And before we're done, I'll be sure he understands at least one core principle here and get his opinion on that. Yeah, I visited seven US states so far here in the past month and I'll continue to visit so much of the United States.   Speaker 1 (00:01:28) - In fact, I might have done more driving this past month than at any time in my life. Now. Some people are really car people. We have this kind of car culture in the United States for some evidence that younger people aren't as interested in that is older people. I mean, some people, they get really excited about new car features or new dashboard interfaces or hybrids or EVs and charging stations. You know, none of that is really that interesting to me. However, you know, the one new car feature that I actually really care about and I'm waiting to go more mainstream. Any idea the one game changing car feature that I really can't wait to get here because it's really going to improve your quality of life. And mine and I talked about this way back in Get Rich Education Episode 13 in the year 2015 is something that is still expected to have substantial ramifications for real estate, and that feature is autonomous vehicles, also known as driverless cars. I mean, as much of the world that's automated these days and digitize, it feels like something is out of whack to have all of this technology that you have in your car today.   Speaker 1 (00:02:54) - Yet even if you're on cruise control out on Interstate 80, like I have been a lot lately, you've mostly got to keep your eyes glued to the car bumper in front of you. Yes. And the car that reliably drives itself. That's the new feature that I really want. I mean, imagine for you to be able to get some sleep or scroll your phone or I know that it sounds funny, even exercise while your car drives itself. And of course this still pretends to have a real impact on real estate. Cars will really need to be owned. It's just the subscription service that you order. A car comes to pick you up and then it drops you off where you need to go. So these cars just continue to stay in motion out there. You don't need a garage so much. And this means that cities won't need nearly as much parking. So parking lots are less important, parking garages are less important. And since you can be more productive while you're a passenger in the car drives itself, well, therefore, those neighborhoods that are say no one hour outside of the center or metro area, well, those areas won't have as much of a price discount because autonomous cars lower your time expense in commuting.   Speaker 1 (00:04:16) - But autonomous car adoption has been slower to develop than a lot of people, including me, expected. I mean, there have been a lot of experiments, But see, what happens is an experimental autonomous car crash that just makes more news than a human created car crash. And that has really slowed adoption. So yeah, I'm not so into cars. The only feature that's on the horizon that really gets me interested is winning back some of my time with autonomous cars. Hey, we have a ton of great podcast episodes lined up here at some of the most brilliant minds in the real estate and money world. Continue to join me coming up soon. Here on the show is the return of a really dynamic guest. He goes by the nickname the mad scientist of multifamily in the industry. Some call the amount of multifamily, mobile home parks self in other commercial real estate investors that have these floating interest rates, the amount of those people, it's almost insane. Higher rates are going to bring those deals down and investors will keep losing money in those deals.   Speaker 1 (00:05:27) - That's what the mad scientist of multifamily and I are going to focus on them. Yes, these people that learn how to perhaps do syndications through TikTok videos, they are losing their deals. Isn't that really is too bad because that reputation seriously that. The good operator, so we're going to sort that out for you. Then on a later episode here, one of the sharpest economic minds in the entire world joins us to discuss why the recession didn't happen as soon as he and a lot of others thought and what that means for the future of stocks and real estate and commodity prices. All of that is in the near future here on the show. But today I'm visiting my home state of Pennsylvania, where I've lived most of my life. It is the fifth most populous state, despite not being that large by area and despite the fact there are still a ton of rural areas in Pennsylvania, and of the five biggest states, Pennsylvania may very well have the deepest history. So we'll dig into some real history today.   Speaker 1 (00:06:31) - Pennsylvania banking was influential on the formation of United States banking, including that of Robert Morris. He's a pretty well known name, but he was succeeded by a better no name. Right after Robert Morse, we had Alexander Hamilton in that banking role. But yeah, Pennsylvania Robert Morris, he is known as the very financier of the American Revolutionary War. As we're about to discuss the nation's beginnings, America's formative years in land and real estate hundreds of years ago. Look, if a hundred years ago, a colonist or an early American, if he or she said this, I'm going to buy a piece of property and develop it. Okay. What do you think that meant when they said that today? If you said, I'm going to buy a piece of property and develop it, well, most people would think that you're going to build a housing development. But back then it probably meant that you were going to clear your land of trees and planted for agriculture and you're going to grow wheat or corn or tobacco.   Speaker 1 (00:07:37) - That was the discussion you were having then. What crop are you developing on your real estate? It sure wasn't. Are you going to develop apartments or condos or single family homes? That's how it might sound today. In fact, the 1790 census that shows that roughly 90% of the American population was employed in agriculture. 90%. So your real estate income was largely derived on your crop yield, which you might use to pay your debt on your land. Let's start this interview that I expect to be wide ranging as we'll take it from yesteryear up to the present day. This week's guest has served as secretary of banking and securities for the great state of Pennsylvania from 2020 to 2023. It is a cabinet level agency here in the state capital of Harrisburg. He was appointed to that position by Pennsylvania Governor Tom Wolf today. He is managing partner of Gabriel Investments as well based in Philadelphia. And today he's the author of an interesting new book. It's titled The Paradox of Debt A New Path to Prosperity Without Crisis. Welcome to Richard Vague.   Speaker 3 (00:08:53) - Thank you so much for having me.   Speaker 1 (00:08:55) - It's good to have you. For those of you listening in, the audio only vague is spelled vague. You and Richard, as Pennsylvania's secretary of banking and Securities, I know that you have various deputy secretaries that assist you. Tell me. I'm going to venture to guess that that role includes acts like the oversight of banks and various consumer protections. Are they important parts of that role?   Speaker 3 (00:09:20) - Without question. The fundamental job is looking to the safety and soundness of the banks chartered here in Pennsylvania to make sure they don't fail. And we all saw the importance of that recently. Silicon Valley bank failed in California. And I think if we'd had the caliber of examiners out in California that the folks here in Pennsylvania or that might not have happened.   Speaker 1 (00:09:44) - That's a nice compliment to those that have that oversight here in state, Richard. It sure has been interesting with interest rates actually not being historically high, but at the rate that they change and the rate that they spiked, making some things break everything else to tell us about that role with the oversight that you had of banks and consumer protections in Pennsylvania and really what everyday depositors are concerned with.   Speaker 3 (00:10:10) - Everyday depositors are concerned with getting the highest yield they can. Sure. And certainly they've been rewarded more lately than they have been over the last, let's say, ten years prior to that. But they also should be concerned about the safety and soundness of the bank they deposit with. And I think a lot of folks forgot that lesson. You know, a few years passed from a crisis and folks aren't worried about whether their bank's going to be around so much anymore. I'm really pleased to report the banks here in Pennsylvania are in really good shape.   Speaker 1 (00:10:44) - Richard, I don't even think that everyday depositors understand the fractional reserve lending institution system, which is really how most banks operate, and that is when a depositor gives the bank money or the money goes ahead and lends that out, that difference, that spread being their arbitrage, which is how they stay in business. I've got a rather interesting question, perhaps are full oil reserve banks feasible as the norm? And what I'm talking about there is banks that can't lend depositors money out and instead that bank needs to profit by charging fees to depositors.   Speaker 1 (00:11:23) - Now, I know everyone likes to get something for free, but would that be a more responsible system? Are full reserve banks feasible at all?   Speaker 3 (00:11:31) - If you did that. You know, that's something I've studied quite a bit, and that was a very active question, by the way. Yeah. In the founding of our banking system here in Pennsylvania in 1781, it's a question that's been around forever. Any economy needs to have money created in order to grow, and the banking system is what does that now. But if you banned that in the banking system, it would just have to happen somewhere else.   Speaker 1 (00:11:58) - Were there any prominent names that were involved with the setup of banking in Pennsylvania?   Speaker 3 (00:12:06) - The name that you hear the most is the guy named Robert Morris, who was the head of it was in effect, the secretary of the Treasury during the Revolutionary War. But his senior partner was the original banker in the United States, and his name was Thomas Willing in history has more or less forgotten him. And that's, by the way, the subject of my next book.   Speaker 3 (00:12:30) - I'm in the Middle of writing a biography of the origins of the US banking system and our first banker, Thomas Wells.   Speaker 1 (00:12:38) - There is a Robert Morris University in Pennsylvania, of course, and we're talking about history here, Richard. And I know that you have an excellent sense of history about the nation's beginnings in land and in real estate. Can you speak to that?   Speaker 3 (00:12:55) - The United States was all about land from the very beginning. You had massive land grants like to William Penn to found the state in the first place. But almost immediately after the founding of the country, you know, one of the reasons we had the American Revolution is because Great Britain prohibited colonists for owning land west of the Appalachian Mountains. And that was very frustrating to people like George Washington and others who had surveyed really lush pieces of land in the Ohio Valley. Immediately after the success of the revolution, the wealthy investors in America began buying millions and millions of acres towards the west, in the Ohio Valley, in Kentucky, in New York, in western Pennsylvania and the like, and got into trouble and brought the first financial crisis in US history, the land crisis of 1796 and 1797, because they were buying all that land on credit, either from the landholder, the private landholder or the the state or commonwealth that the land was in.   Speaker 3 (00:14:14) - They bought this under the presumption that the value of real estate would always go up and of course it just didn't go up fast enough. And Robert Morris to speak of someone actually ended up in debtor's prison because he overextended himself, which is somewhat ironic since he's something of a icon for credit ratings and credit prudence. And yet he was very much of a wild speculator and ended up in prison destitute.   Speaker 1 (00:14:45) - This is really interesting. Okay. And nefarious character early on in America's private real estate development, when the Appalachian mountain range in the late 1700s was deemed as the frontier to a lot of people.   Speaker 3 (00:14:59) - Absolutely. Everybody was looking west of there for the big games and the big opportunities.   Speaker 1 (00:15:06) - I mean, this is part of Manifest Destiny and the American Dream. So can you tell us more about a lot of that land in the early days west of the Appalachian Mountains? How much did the government claim is theirs and sell to private landowners on credit? And then how much were private landowners taking and were they allowed to make land claims and then sell it to someone else? Or tell us more about those early beginnings of that real estate setup?   Speaker 3 (00:15:34) - Well, that's exactly right.   Speaker 3 (00:15:35) - Most of that land was owned by the colonies, which in 1776 became states. The states own that land. The states all incurred massive debts in prosecuting the revolution itself. So by the time you get to 1783, 1787 states are deeply in debt and bondholders of state debt are not getting paid interest. And one way to alleviate that crisis was to sell land and selling it an acre here, an acre. There wasn't going to do you any good. So the states were selling land of 100,000 acre parcel a year, a million acre parcel there. Now, the guys that bought that, at first they were thinking, we'll do it, we'll develop towns, will lay out the towns, will survey them, will sell them, will attract settlers into this realm, will sell it plot buy plot to these settlers. But it was pretty clear that was a pretty slow way to make your money back. So they started looking to the wealthy in Europe and started sending brochures and agents to Europe to in essence, be able to flip their land in Early on, they were very successful at that.   Speaker 3 (00:16:54) - Guys like William Bingham, who was the richest man in America, and Robert Morris, who was one of the richest, would make, you know, 100,000 here and 100,000 there, which is tantamount to making tens of millions. Now that ended. They started doing bigger speculations. There weren't the settlers to buy it. The Europeans got a little bit smarter. You had a major national financial crisis, including, by the way, it wasn't just those Western lands. One of the biggest parts of the financial calamity was in the new town of Washington, DC, where they were moving the government, and people came in, including Robert Morris, thinking it's the seat of government where this is going to be a boomtown. And a lot of folks got into deep trouble speculating on plots in Washington DC.   Speaker 1 (00:17:42) - And if you're the listener, think that this sounds rather unorganized and free wheeling. Of course, we just need to think back a little bit earlier as to what happened when we as colonists went ahead and wrested the land away from the natives as well, of course.   Speaker 1 (00:17:57) - But yeah, Richard, you talked about some of the draw and the appeal to some of the land around Washington, D.C. there along the Potomac River. But just generally overall, in a lot of cases, this new American government, who were the land sellers trying to attract or were they trying to attract them to do, for example, was it to only and to set up a farm for agriculture or was it for trapping or what attracted people to this new land grab, if you will?   Speaker 3 (00:18:24) - The basis of wealth early on in the United States was the crops that we grew. And that obviously, first and foremost was wheat and the biggest supplier of wheat, not just in the United States, but to Europe was Pennsylvania. That's why Philadelphia became the largest city in the United States. Then just south of US and Maryland and Virginia. You had tobacco, which was our number one crop, but it was our number one export. South of that, you had indigo and rice. The further north you got, there really wasn't a lot of arable land.   Speaker 3 (00:19:03) - And that's why, you know, places like Massachusetts had to turn the manufacturing so heavily. It was really that. And fishing for cod were the only thing they could do. So, yeah, absolutely. We were a breadbasket for not just the country, but the world almost from the beginning.   Speaker 1 (00:19:21) - You talk early on about the extension of credit and how that enabled settlers to go ahead and own some of this new land? Is this sort of the early formation of long term mortgages? When did that.   Speaker 4 (00:19:35) - Occur?   Speaker 3 (00:19:36) - Well, absolutely. You know, really from well before independence. One of the problems you had is that there wasn't enough currency to really facilitate economic growth. So they began issuing paper currency in various forms. And a lot of these were very successful. This was done at the state level. And what they would do is they would create land banks. And so you would go in and take your land as a farmer. You would take it to the land bank and you could get currency up to half the value of your land and you'd pay interest on it.   Speaker 3 (00:20:14) - So it was really was a de facto mortgage, a.   Speaker 1 (00:20:18) - 50% mortgage, a.   Speaker 3 (00:20:19) - 50% mortgage, and you could spend that currency. They were well managed early on. Most of these didn't work, failed. And the first real commercial bank was Thomas Williams Bank in 1781 and Philadelphia.   Speaker 1 (00:20:35) - What were interest rates like at this time in these formative years of our nation.   Speaker 3 (00:20:40) - For bigger transactions, the range was really just 5 to 6%. It might get down to four, might get up to seven. Interest rates in the U.K. were closer to five and us, they were closer to six. There were breakdowns by a slice of an interest rate, so there wasn't an interest of 5.1% or 5.2%. And for high risk transactions, you could easily get into the same interest rate realm that some of our usurious lenders do today. Yeah, you see situations where folks in dire straits would borrow for an interest rate of 5% a month. A lot of loans in those days were very, very short term. There were the land loans that were long term.   Speaker 3 (00:21:28) - Most commercial banks made loans for 30 to 90 days, and they really were meant to bridge the period from when you, as a merchandiser bought your wholesale supplies to when you sold them as goods to the folks in your town. You could roll those loans over. But they were very short term back in those days.   Speaker 1 (00:21:50) - That is interesting. Those are really short term loans. And this is pretty parallel with what I've read around that time, that interest rates seem to be about 5%, something like that. We're talking about the formation of this nation, its beginnings in land, in real estate, and how that intersects with banking and the mortgage market and really part of the manifest destiny in the westward expansion of the United States. Yes, we are talking about a popular four letter word debt, and that word debt has only become more popular in America with consumerism here in past decades. So when Richard and I come back, we're going to talk more about debt today in the United States. In his new book, The Paradox of Debt, you can get that at Paradox of Debt.   Speaker 1 (00:22:35) - More we come back with Richard. I'm your host Keith Wayne hold you're listening to Get Rich Education. Jerry listeners can't stop talking about their service from Ridge Lending Group and MLS 42056. They have provided our tribe with more loans than anyone there truly a top lender for beginners and veterans. It's where I go to get my own loans for single family rental property up to four plex. So start your prequalification and you can chat with President Charlie Ridge personally, though even deliver your custom plan for growing your real estate portfolio. Start at Ridge Lending Group. You know, I'll just tell you for the most passive part of my real estate investing personally, I put my own dollars with Freedom family Investments because their funds pay me a stream of regular cash flow in. 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We're talking with the guest that served as the secretary of banking and securities for the great state of Pennsylvania since 2020. Today, he's the author of an interesting new book. It's titled The Paradox of Debt A New Path to Prosperity Without Crisis. His name is Richard Vig. He's joining us from here in Pennsylvania, where we are together today. And Richard, I know that you have a lot of commentary about modern debt and what we can do about today's debt and how debt really seems to have expanded a lot since Nixon pegged us from the last vestige of the gold standard back in 1971.   Speaker 1 (00:25:14) - I guess really the preeminent question, Richard, is should debt be a concern? We read all these stories about unrelatable numbers, about how the United States has $33 trillion of stated public debt. What's problematic?   Speaker 3 (00:25:30) - There's a lot more private sector debt than public debt. And I think private sector debt is the area where we need to focus and where our concern needs to be. Private debt has increased since World War two from 35% of GDP to 160% of GDP. Wow. So it's almost quintupled. There's about $41 trillion worth of private sector debt. That's a bigger number than the government debt number, and that's globally as well. There's about a $150 trillion worth of private sector debt and only about $90 trillion worth of government debt.   Speaker 1 (00:26:09) - And what is private sector debt? Are we talking about automobile loans, credit card loans, student loans?   Speaker 3 (00:26:14) - It's roughly divided between business and household debt. So if we've got 40 trillion in debt, it's about 20 business and 20 households. And within both of those categories, the single biggest type of debt is real estate by far.   Speaker 3 (00:26:31) - So within household debt, it's about 20 trillion. Almost 14 trillion of that is mortgage debt. On the business side, it's about 20 trillion. About 6 trillion of that is commercial real estate debt. So there's never been a time where real estate debt, household and commercial has not been really kind of the driving force of the economy.   Speaker 1 (00:26:57) - You got public sector debt and you got private sector debt. And, you know, it's kind of funny, Richard, if someone asked me what the difference between those two is, there's a few different directions you could go. What I like to tell some people is, well, the government can just print dollars, okay? Everyday consumers in businesses, they don't have that handle. So the government can print dollars and they can call that whatever name they want to quantitative easing. Maybe they want to call it currency creation. But over here, if the individual tries to do something like that, it's called counterfeiting. So, yes, it can be more problematic. Individuals cannot print their own dollars at home.   Speaker 3 (00:27:32) - That's exactly right. And that's why private debt is the area that we should focus more on. If you think about the great financial crisis of 2008, mortgage debt in 2002 was $5 trillion. By 2007, it was $10 trillion. It had doubled in less than five years. And we all now know that was millions of mortgages that it should never have been made. That was mortgages where the individuals had no income, no job, no assets. Those were homes that stood empty for years. And in many cases, they had to get torn down.   Speaker 4 (00:28:10) - Yeah.   Speaker 3 (00:28:11) - If you want to look out for trouble, the place to look is in the private sector debt. And the way to detect it is wherever it's growing very, very rapidly, that's where you're going to have a problem.   Speaker 1 (00:28:23) - So that's therefore a way to help predict economic crises. It's debt growth or I guess you could really call it credit growth as well, right? I mean, both credit and debt are basically the same terms for the different side of a transaction wherever the growth in that is most rapid is really where the economic cracks are.   Speaker 3 (00:28:43) - That's exactly right. And the fact that the Federal Reserve did not spot that in 2005 and six is one of the great stories of our time. They build economic models that don't even include debt as a factor whatsoever. Everybody finds that very surprising. It's called the DSG model, and it models the future of the economy without taking into consideration anything about debt.   Speaker 1 (00:29:12) - Why is that excluded? Mean, I'm a bit taken aback by what you just told me. Think you can tell.   Speaker 3 (00:29:18) - It's the fact. And economists got so theoretical going back a couple of decades that they started separating out financial economy from what they call the real economy. And they just stopped studying the financial economy as kind of a secondary matter to the real economy. The real economy would be, you know, the wheat and the automobile that gets manufactured and so forth and so on. My argument is those two things are inseparable. You shouldn't and cannot consider one without the other. And that's a huge blind spot in our Orthodox economics profession.   Speaker 1 (00:30:01) - Tell us more about how what we've discussed ties in to the thesis of your book.   Speaker 1 (00:30:06) - Richard The Paradox of Debt. What's the paradox?   Speaker 3 (00:30:10) - Paradox is that debt creates wealth, but it also creates calamity. So, for example, in the pandemic, 20 through 22, government debt alone increased by $8 trillion. Household wealth increased by $30 trillion. So the money the government spends does not disappear. It actually goes into the checking accounts of households. So at the end of that three year period, households had 8 trillion more in deposits in their checking accounts. And the flood of new money had pushed up real estate and stock values. So cash in bank accounts increased by 8 trillion, and the value of real estate and stocks increased by 20 something trillion. So households were $30 trillion better off at the end of 22 than they had been at the end of 19. However, most of that, like 80% of that benefit, went to the top 10% of the population. And that's for the very simple reason that most assets, most stocks and real estate are held by the top 10%, like 65% of all the stock in real estate in the country is held by the top 10%.   Speaker 3 (00:31:32) - The bottom 60%, six 0%, only hold about 14% of the stocks in real estate. So for real estate and stock values go up, it's the most well-to-do that get the benefit.   Speaker 1 (00:31:47) - That's right. And it's really the listeners on this show that we want to help take from poor or middle class and help them understand something you said in just a couple of minutes ago, that debt creates wealth, which is a paradox to many. The title of your book is The Paradox of Debt. So here what we often do is get 75 to 80% loans on an income producing property where the rent income meets or exceeds all of the expenses. And this is creating wealth. How is that wealth generated debt? A 75 to 80% loan debt is leverage and leverage appreciation actually makes compound interest look pretty slow. So a very concrete example in a sense of the paradox of debt that we're using right here at Get Rich education. Richard.   Speaker 3 (00:32:31) - You have described something that is not just true about real estate transactions, but it's true about the economy as a whole.   Speaker 3 (00:32:40) - That's the essential analysis. Yeah. And to put some macro numbers on it, in 1980, total debt in the economy, government plus household was 125% of GDP. Today it's 260% of GDP. Yeah. Yeah. And that exact same time span, household wealth, net of debt went from 352% of GDP to 600% of GDP. Debt created. Well.   Speaker 1 (00:33:12) - Yes, those are some astonishing figures. I guess as we're winding down here, Richard, one might wonder, well, where is the ceiling? When is the day of reckoning? When do we reach a calamity? How do we know that there's too much private debt and how does that actually look?   Speaker 3 (00:33:29) - We have a chapter on that very subject in the book there. It's pretty easy to see that there's an end game on the private sector side. And right now we're at about 160% of GDP. We think that that's probably somewhere in the 225% of GDP range here in the United States when there's so much debt that the requirement to service that debt slows the economy down to near zero.   Speaker 3 (00:34:00) - On the government debt, for the very reason you suggested that limitation doesn't really exist, the government could refinance its debt in perpetuity. As we said a moment ago, that ends up in the bank accounts of households anyway. So the thing I look to and I'm concerned about is private debt. Even though if you go flip on the cable news channels, you would think the world's about to end because of our government debt.   Speaker 1 (00:34:26) - Now tell me, am I oversimplifying things here, at least with private debtors, everyday Americans, when an interest only payment on your debt exceeds your ability to service it each month? Is that the path to bankruptcy right there?   Speaker 3 (00:34:42) - You got it. And whatever you say about an individual, you can say about the economy as a whole, because GDP is really just the sum of the individuals and businesses in the US. So if all the individuals and businesses are approaching this, the circumstance you just described, economy is not going to grow well there.   Speaker 1 (00:35:03) - Any last things that you would like to tell us about you very well received book because again, it's called The Paradox of Debt in the subtitle is A New Path to Prosperity Without Crisis.   Speaker 3 (00:35:14) - We cover the same material for the other six largest countries in the world. So if you read the book, you're not just going to learn about the US, you're going to learn about China, Japan, Germany, France, England and India. And I think it gives you the kind of fulsome grounding you need to better understand the news stories that we get such a barrage of every day.   Speaker 1 (00:35:38) - That's right. We need a frame of reference and putting our own more domestic debt into perspective here. Well, Richard, if someone wants to get a hold of the book, remind them of how they can best do that.   Speaker 3 (00:35:49) - Thank you so much. Go to Paradox of Debt or go to Amazon or Barnes and Noble and just search for that and it'll be right there.   Speaker 1 (00:35:58) - Oh, Richard, you've helped expand our debt mindset somewhat here on the show today. It's been great having you here.   Speaker 3 (00:36:05) - It's been such a privilege. Thank you for having me.   Speaker 1 (00:36:14) - A lot of interesting history with Richard Vig today, this great state of Pennsylvania's secretary of banking and securities.   Speaker 1 (00:36:20) - One concept that really hasn't changed throughout history that we discussed there is that inflation mostly benefits those at the top. Again, check out Richard's book at Paradox of debt.com. But yes, real estate, it is still known as an inflation hedge. You still hear that term thrown around a lot but I really try to use a different term not hedge I don't like hedge. Okay. In the investing world, the word hedge means something that you do to offset risks. I don't like that word used with real estate. So therefore, the word hedge that really correlates with a defensive strategy. I mean, hedge, that's probably a better term for gold. Gold is a hedge against inflation. That makes sense to me. But where I draw the distinction is that investment property bought with a loan is not merely a hedge against inflation. That's why when I coined the real estate pays five ways back in 2015, the fifth benefit, it's not called inflation hedging. It is called inflation profiting. Now, if you're only looking at the overall capital price of your real estate, even your own home, well then it's dollar denominated price alone.   Speaker 1 (00:37:42) - Well, that could be a hedge against inflation. But that's only the beginning, because when you get the fixed interest rate debt with it, now you're profiting because inflation debases your debt while the tenant makes all of the payments. And then as your rents rise with inflation, the reason that your monthly profit, your cash flow rises faster than inflation is, of course, due to the fact that your principal and interest payment stays fixed and feels really low over time. That's the inflation Triple Crown that I just described right there. And that's why when you buy investment property, REIT real estate is not just an inflation hedging vehicle, it is an inflation profiting vehicle. And today real estate isn't just scarce. It is still about 60% below the needed supply. And then amidst that, within that, single family homes are even more scarce. And then entry level homes that make the best rentals are even more scarce than that. But here on the show, we connect you with those builders and providers that are making the most in-demand properties available.   Speaker 1 (00:38:59) - Oftentimes these single family homes that are entry level. So therefore, in this environment, if you can get a hold of those, you are going to own a scarce asset that everyone wants. That's what we help you do here. But mortgage rates have been a hindrance for adding investments. But with our referral network here, we have largely solved that problem for you. We have providers that offer 5.75% mortgage rates because they buy down your rate for you less. We're going to show you've heard how a Marketplace income property provider is offering an astounding 4.75% mortgage rate. And although it has some shortcomings, there are also 2.99% seller financed investment properties that you can tie up. Yes. Today. So profit from a scarce asset that everyone wants and benefits from higher inflation. And today it really tilts toward you, often giving more consideration to new build properties because builders, they're the ones that are aggressively buying down your rate for you today. And new builds also have lower insurance rates last year. To make it easier for you, we started our free investment coaching service so contact your investment coach to help get you started.   Speaker 1 (00:40:19) - Some of our more popular markets lately are in Ohio, Indiana, Missouri, Tennessee, Alabama, Florida, Georgia in summer. So whether you like to connect with the provider on your own, if that's what you like to do or if you don't, you can then just utilize our service free of charge investment coaching. You can do all of that at GREmarketplace.com thanks to Richard Vague today until next week I'm your host Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream!   Speaker 5 (00:40:57) - 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.   Speaker 1 (00:41:25) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. Get rich education.    

At age 20, you’re actually happy to trade your time for money.  At 30, many have realized that they don’t want to work at their job for the rest of their lives.  At 40, if you have collected things that pay you to own them, you’re financially-free. Instead, by age 50, corporate ladder-climbers often realize that their ladder was leaning up against the wrong building. Most people play the wrong financial game all their life. You want to get financially-free first. You can get debt-free later. “The Debt Decamillionaire” concept is revisited. Learn how to get 4.75% mortgage rates for Florida income property with what is known as a “builder-forward commitment”. Start here.  What about hotly spiking Florida property insurance? We discuss how premiums have been kept in-check with post-2004 built property and more. Expect $3,200 rents on a new-build $474K duplex with 4.75% mortgage rates in Southwest Florida. SFRs are available too. Start here.  There’s free PM for the first year too.  Resources mentioned: Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/471 4.75% mortgages in Florida: GREmarketplace.com/Southeast If you’d like help with one of  GRE’s Investment Coaches (free), start here: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Monologue transcript:   Welcome to GRE! I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. Financially, you need to play a game worth winning. It’s not about being debt-free. Instead, I discuss how at each age-when you’re 20, 30, 40, 50 and beyond, it’s about being financially-free.   Then, in an era where mortgage rates are 7 to 8%, we go straight to the source, in Florida, on how to get 4¾% mortgage rates on new-build property. Today, on Get Rich Education. ___________   Welcome to GRE! From Framingham, MA to Dillingham, AK and across 188 nations worldwide, yeah, you & I are back together here on Episode 471 of Get Rich Education. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold.    You’ve got to play a game worth winning - with your personal finances. Most play the wrong game.    Now, you’re already initiated on this. Debt-free just means that you don’t owe anyone anything. FF means that you’ve got enough passive income that you can do what you want to do, when you want to do it. FF is the flex.   Now, when you’re around age 20 - you might be new to full-time employment.  And you know what, it actually can feel kinda good when you’re in your early twenties are you’re being paid what feels like a respectable income for the first time in your life.   Now, ten years go by, and by the time that you’re 30, you know, I think that a lot of work-a-day job types - you might tell yourself, ya know, making money is alright at this point. But I really don't want to do this for the rest of life.   Maybe around age 30, you pursue alternative avenues of more RESIDUAL income.    But some people just keep plowing ahead hating big chunks of their life and devoting energy at a full-time job, because somehow, you feel like you HAVE to.   Others, though it’s a minority, it’s you. Because, instead, maybe around age 30, you tell yourself that you’d rather start building things that pay you to own them.   The mindset supersedes the grindset.   And by age 40, you’re out. You’re out of that soul-sucking job and you’re living that life that you’ve always dreamed of living already. It sure could happen earlier.   And by age 50, you’re so glad that you chose the financially free financial track in life - rather than the debt-free track.   Back on the slow, scarce debt-free track - the people that mistakenly think that debt-free is the game worth winning - they’re still losing their zero-sum, non-replenishable resource of time in their 30s and 40s and 50s and 60s and maybe 70s.    Perhaps somewhere around 30, abundantly-minded, aware people like you developed your divergent, not-running-with-the-herd FF path instead.    You believe that money is an abundant resource - because you start having it all around you.    You built a financial windfall for yourself with simultaneous RE cash flow, leverage, and arbitrage while you’re young enough to enjoy it.   Instead, the “work at a soulless job” type tries to get debt-free, climb the corporate ladder, and believes that money is a scarce resource (which is why they think they need to be debt-free). They defer their life and get eaten up by inflation and zero passive cash flow.   THAT person, by age 50, is asking themselves where all the time went. It went to a job that you’re not passionate about - and you can’t change history. All those time chapters of your life… are… gone.    And you begin to realize that the corporate ladder that you climbed… was leaning up against the wronggggg building for decades.   Those are two paths of those in their productive working years - the “there’s never enough” debt-free world vs. the “money is abundant” FF world.   If you retire debt, like paying off a mortgage early, all those dollars are gone, when they could have been leveraging, say, 5 properties at once.   Now, if you’re late to realize this, like you didn’t have the FF epiphany by 30 or whatever. It’s not too late.   You’ll remember that in recent months here, we had two GRE listeners come on the show for two different episodes - Scott Saunders and then Shawn Finnegan.    Shawn - you might remember that was the inventor of a home gym system - he didn’t hear this show & start until he was 52 and he’s gotten to his first $2,000 of passive cash flow fairly quickly.    FF beats DF. And FF is the game worth winning.   Retiring debt early means your dollars can't be employed in true wealth-building activities.    Now, look. You might call me old-fashioned on this. But I like the integrity of doing what I say that I’m going to do, following through, and following up.   We check back at the end of the year to see how GRE’s housing price appreciation forecast from the previous year actually went.   Back in January, we had the return of an agricultural RE principal where the cash flows DIDN’T hit what were targeteded, so we followed through and discussed why THAT happened.   And now…   You might remember that a few years ago, here on the show, I introduced you to the novel concept of being the Debt Decamillionaire.    That means that you’ve achieved $10M in debt - which doesn’t sound like an achievement to most people. That’s the Debt Decamillionaire. I recommended this as a desirable path for you - though many could deem it iconoclastic or even heretical.    If the only thing that I knew about you is that, say, you had $10M in real estate debt, I’d know that the chances are good that you’re a financial WINNER.    Yep, it’s actually unlikely that $10M in debt would make you a loser.   Not only would you have to be creditworthy to even get $10M of debt… just think about if you would have tied up that much debt, say, five years ago.   Well, how has it actually gone for the person with $10M in income property debt over the past 5 years?    We've had perhaps… 25% cumulative inflation since then - with higher wages, prices, salaries, and rents.   So then, your $10M debt is whittled down to just $7½M of inflation-adjusted debt.    So inflation passively beat down your debt for you, plus your tenants would have paid it down to somewhere below $7M.   So now, you’d be $3M wealthier, just off the debt debasement alone.    Meanwhile, over on the asset side, your property value that you borrowed against might have gone from something like $12M up to $18M… and all   While it created ALL that leverage plus some cash flow and tax benefit for you at the same time.   If you only managed to tie up $1M in investment property debt, then just take 10% of all those numbers.    And pat yourself on the back for being a debt MILLIONAIRE. Ha! Not Debt Decamillionaire.   Instead, high inflation made the debt-free approach hurt - really sting over the last five years. The opportunity lost!   DF is playing small ball, saying money is a scarce resource, and it even correlates more with people being addicted to a paycheck.    There’s a benefit to a paycheck. But is the trade-off worse? Paycheck dependence is like you being addicted to a TIME thief.    That is, unless you get an unusually extraordinary amount of meaning from your work. In that case, great.    Now, a high interest rate environment could narrow the gap between how much better FF is than DF. But we’re not in one of those. We’re in a historically average interest rate environment.   But in just a few minutes here, we’ll bring in a prominent American homebuilder of BTR homes that’ll tell you how to still get mortgage rates as low as 4¾%.    In fact, the time in the market cycle is really right for talking about this. You’ll remember that last month, Housing Intelligence Analyst Rick Sharga & I discussed why today’s market is a good opportunity for residential REIs.   It’s a bad market for primary residence HBs It’s a bad market for flippers   It’s a bad market for real estate agents - with lower sales volume.   And it’s a… decent market for many homebuilders.    I am in Chicago today.    Next week, I’ll be in - my home state - the Keystone State of PA. I’ll Sit down with Richard Vague, the Secretary of Banking and Securities for the great Commonwealth of PA from 2020 to 2023, there in the state capital, Harrisburg.    It is a cabinet-level agency.   He was appointed to that position by PA’s Governor. He also sits on the Ivy League University of Pennsylvania Board of Trustees.   I’ll be sure he understands some core GRE principles here and get HIS opinion on those. That should be a really interesting episode next week. I don’t know what kind of turn that’s going to take.   To review what you’re learned so far, I think you already know that FF beats DF.    Rushing to be debt-free exacts an opportunity cost on you. It postpones what you really want - Financial Freedom… and once you get FF, if you do desire to be debt-free then, hey, great!    Let’s discuss how to get lower Florida insurance premiums, 4¾% mortgage rates and a free year of property management.    A lot of our listeners have acted on this. And I don’t want you to miss out because I don’t know how long it can last. ___________   Usually, you see fewer investors that want to exchange their properties in a higher interest rate environment, because you’re trading in a lower rate property for a higher rate property.    But here, 1031s look more attractive because we’ve bent that back with rates down to 4.75% + lower insurance premiums on post-2004-built Florida property plus 1 year of free PM.   So many of you have been acting here on this - either by yourself at GRE Marketplace, or working through one of our free Investment Coaches. So, if it can help you, don’t miss out. This won’t last forever.   You can get started at: GREmarketplace.com/Southeast   Until next week, I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. DQYD!

Crime, homelessness, poverty, immorality, theft and urban decay. What are US cities turning into? NYC Mayor Eric Adams has said that 100,000 new migrants will destroy his city. With business and residents moving out of many urban cores, property tax revenues decline.  San Francisco’s Union Square neighborhood has been especially hard hit. 60,000 people left SF county from 2020 to 2022. There’s homelessness, crime, higher housing costs and more remote work. There are now shuttered storefronts. Nordstrom and Whole Foods closed there. Vacant office buildings often can’t be turned into residential housing. This accelerates decay and urban stagnation. Author Doug Casey joins the discussion. We discuss the “Defund the Police” movement. The fall of Rome and Babylon are compared. Learn what other nations think about America today. If America is so bad, why are migrants attracted to it? We need to be mindful that nations, states, and cities all vary substantially by crime and demographics within them. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: GetRichEducation.com/470 Doug Casey’s website: InternationalMan.com Doug Casey’s YouTube: Doug Casey’s Take If you’d like help with one of  GRE’s Investment Coaches (free), start here: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold

Learn how to permanently reduce your tax burden. The greatest tax breaks for real estate investors are revealed. But first, home prices are permanently elevated because they’re larger and with more amenities than they had in the 1970s.  Today’s homes have vaulted ceilings, multiple fireplaces, granite countertops and more square footage. I describe. John Hyre, the Tax Reduction Lawyer, joins us for the first time. The top federal income tax rate is 37%. Learn where it’s headed next. On your short-term rentals (like Airbnbs), sometimes you can reduce your taxes by legally stating that it’s a “hotel”. Your rent income is taxed at less than your day job (W-2) income. Rent income is not burdened with social security and self-employment tax. Learn exactly how tax depreciation lowers taxable income for real estate investors. You’ll legally never pay any capital gains tax with a 1031 Exchange. We review how. Will the 1031 Exchange go away? John tells us how to get $100K tax-free out of your property—without doing an exchange. Timestamps: The direction of the marginal income tax rate [00:08:19] Discussion about the current marginal income tax rate and the potential for changes in the future. Tax changes under the Trump administration [00:09:22] Explanation of the Trump tax changes and the potential impact of those changes on real estate investors. Taxation of rental income [00:10:08] Explanation of how rental income is taxed differently from regular job income, specifically regarding self-employment and social security taxes. Opportunity and traps of Airbnb rentals [00:10:25] Discussion on the potential to convert Airbnb income into losses and the tax implications of Airbnb rentals. Making an Airbnb an active trade or business [00:11:41] Exploring the distinction between treating an Airbnb as rental income or hotel income for self-employment purposes. Accelerating depreciation with cost segregation study [00:14:17] Explanation of cost segregation study and how it can help real estate investors lower their taxable income by depreciating certain assets more aggressively. Tax Depreciation and its Benefits [00:21:34] Explanation of how tax depreciation works in real estate investing and its value in reducing taxable income. The Basics of 1031 Exchange [00:26:13] Overview of the 1031 exchange, a tax-deferred exchange that allows real estate investors to swap properties without paying capital gains tax. The Long-Term Benefits of 1031 Exchange [00:28:37] Discussion on the strategy of using 1031 exchanges until death to maximize tax deferral and potentially convert it into tax-free gains for heirs. The 1031 Exchange Trick [00:30:36] Speaker 3 explains a trick to maximize the benefits of a 1031 exchange by utilizing passive activity losses. The Pass-Through Deduction [00:33:21] Speaker 3 discusses the concept of the pass-through deduction and its application to rentals, providing insights on how to maximize the deduction. Future Tax Policies [00:36:15] The potential tax policies of Democratic and Republican presidential candidates are discussed, with an emphasis on their stance towards real estate and taxes. The 1031 tax deferred exchange [00:40:03] Explanation of the 1031 tax deferred exchange and its potential benefits for real estate investors. Disclaimer and advice [00:40:36] Disclaimer about the show not providing specific personal or professional advice, and the need to consult appropriate professionals for individualized advice. Sponsorship message [00:41:04] Acknowledgment of the show's sponsor, getricheducation.com, as a platform for wealth building. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/469 Learn more about John Hyre: www.TaxReductionLawyer.com If you’d like help with one of  GRE’s Investment Coaches (free), start here: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Complete episode transcript:   Speaker 1 (00:00:01) - Welcome to. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Real estate investors get tax breaks like you'll find absolutely nowhere else in the entire tax code that can help you legally work the tax system like you're a billionaire and actually work your way toward becoming a billionaire. Today on Get Rich Education.   Speaker 2 (00:00:22) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get rich education.   Speaker 1 (00:00:38) - Welcome from Belgrade, Serbia, to Bellingham, Washington, and across 188 nations worldwide with 5.2 million listener downloads. I'm your host Keith Weinhold and this is Get Rich education. Yeah, you're back at that abundant place and you gotta be because the scarcity mentality is abundant in the abundance mentality is scarce so be frugal with your time, not your money. You can afford to be because you live by the mantra that financially free beats debt free. Throughout our nine years of weekly shows here, Waiting in the Wings is just the third ever expert tax guest we've had on the show. The other two are Tom Wheelwright and Kristen Tate.   Speaker 1 (00:01:18) - You meet the third one in a few minutes. Here I am sitting the first half of this month in Denver, Omaha and then Chicago checking out real estate markets and more. Before we talk taxes. All prices have risen this year, just like they do most years, and they expect to stay elevated. I've talked before about all those reasons why demographic and supply demand and all of that, but why else are houses permanently more expensive today than they were decades ago, even when adjusted for inflation in some cases? Well, it's not all the dollars given to people during Covid or anything like that. It's just the fact that houses are bigger and more complicated than they were in the 1970s and 1980s. I mean, they used to build houses that were just 1000 or 1500 square feet. I mean, often it would be like a three bed, one bath house with a one car garage that used to be sort of the suburban staple. Well, today it'll often be four bed, three bath, three car garage with things that didn't exist in yesteryear.   Speaker 1 (00:02:26) - I mean, today you have things like multiple fireplaces and vaulted ceilings and more overall size and more amenities that would have just been considered a luxury home like 50 years ago. So the home quality is better and you also have more strict building codes that leads to things like more insulation or egress windows or different roofs or wiring or Hvac and plumbing in that courts are going to countertops, even in rentals. That was an unthinkable luxury 50 plus years ago. And also today, it's just more expensive to develop land. It takes years to get approvals for drainage and utilities and roads and environmental requirements. And after all that, all those factors that make us real estate more expensive. The US still has some of the most affordable property prices in the entire world. Now those changes that I talked about aren't bad. It just makes real estate more expensive. And a lot of times those changes are actually good. It means we have a higher and better standard of living now and now seemingly everyone from Warren Buffett, with his big investment in home builders to shark tanks, Barbara Corcoran's bullishness, I mean, all these people have made either bullish bets or bullish remarks on real estate, all these prominent figures.   Speaker 1 (00:03:52) - And we are to, in future episodes of the show here, someone who admits that he's a gloomier guest. He and I are going to produce a fascinating episode on the collapse of American cities, what's happening in some of our inner cities, How bad is it and how bad will it get? Yeah, we're talking about the collapse of American cities in that episode. And also in a few weeks, I will be in the Keystone state of Pennsylvania for a different, fascinating episode. That's what I'm going to sit down with. The Honorable Secretary of Banking and Securities for the great state of Pennsylvania. He's in that role from 2020 to 2023. That's a cabinet level agency there in the state capital of Harrisburg. And my guest for that show there, yes, he was appointed to that position by Pennsylvania's governor. And he also sits on the board of trustees for an Ivy League university. That is Penn there in Philadelphia. And I'll be sure that the secretary of banking and securities for Pennsylvania that he understands some core principles here and get his opinion on those.   Speaker 1 (00:04:58) - So, again, that's the secretary of banking and securities for the great state of Pennsylvania appointed by the governor. Coming up here on Gray. Now, when we look down the road into the more distant future here on the show in, well, I guess, 31 weeks on Monday, May 6th, 2024, do you have any idea what that day is? That day is episode 500 of the Get Rich Education podcast, and I'm going to take you on an abundance mindset journey then that I hope you'll never forget for episode 500. That's on May 6th of next year. So many other great episodes are in the works here for the show. The housing market has momentum. I have a lot of great material that I want to share directly with you, and we really have some of the top guests in the industry. And I guess they're attracted here because they know that they'll reach a large, passionate, actionable audience and that's what you are. So if you're new here to the podcast, I invite you come along with me.   Speaker 1 (00:06:01) - I think you'll find it valuable. If you immerse yourself, you'll find it life changing and everything that we do and offer here is free. This show reliably recurs in your life every single week without any exceptions, just like it has since 2014. And we have never replayed an old show. I am here for you. I'm inviting you. Be sure to subscribe or follow in your favorite pod catcher. And the reason that I tell you about the Get Rich Education mobile app is that if you have someone in your life whose life would like to be changed by real estate investing or could be changed by real estate investing but doesn't know about podcasts that way. For iOS and Android, you can just have them grab the Get Rich Education mobile app. We are in Q4 and it is time to think about your taxes before the year ends. Today's expert tax guest is brilliant and understands nuances about the tax code that I sure don't. This centers on the US tax code. But you know what? If you're outside the United States, many nations provide similar incentives to the United States.   Speaker 1 (00:07:08) - Now, I don't know about you, but in my opinion, tax talk, you know, if one isn't careful, it can quickly feel like an abstraction which can make it hard to understand. We are get rich education. I'm here to help you understand things. So what I'd like to do to help aid in your comprehension is jump in and use concrete examples during our interview here. And then after the interview, I'm also going to review what you learned. Hey, today's guest is making his debut. He's a tax reduction professional. He caters real estate investors and small businesses. In fact, he is pretty well known as the tax reduction lawyer. Hey, welcome on to John Hiatt. Thanks for having me.   Speaker 3 (00:07:57) - Glad to be here from Argentina.   Speaker 1 (00:08:00) - Yeah, you're joining me from a most interesting place today, a place with high inflation and tasty steaks and a lot of other things going on in Argentina today. But back here in the United States, where so much of our listenership is, I want to get into the real estate part and how real estate investors can lower their tax burden shortly.   Speaker 1 (00:08:19) - But first of all, just in general, John, every one of us that has an income pays an income tax. Now, Obama had the highest marginal income tax rate of 39.6% under the Trump administration. That was soon lowered from 39.6 down to 37 when the Biden administration came into power. A lot of people felt like that 37% rate was going to be raised back up to 39.6, but it was not, and it's still at 37%. So with that context, can you talk to us more about the direction of the marginal income tax rate?   Speaker 3 (00:08:55) - Gridlock, glorious, wonderful gridlock, when those people in DC are unable to, quote unquote do anything mean? I'm happy in one sense. I get a lot of opportunities to make content when the law changes. But in terms of the good of the country, when very little is changing in DC, yeah, usually I'm a happy camper and right now with the gridlock and they're not agreeing on things, I would say the most that's likely to happen, I don't think marginal tax rates will change.   Speaker 3 (00:09:22) - There is some negotiation on some of the Trump tax changes, which were almost all very positive, are fading out. For example, bonus depreciation is dropping by 20% per year. Right? So the Republicans are trying to keep it at 100%. The Democrats want more spending. That's the polite term. Let's leave it at spending. And so there is some discussion going. We'll see if they can agree or not. But I don't see any massive changes coming given the gridlock.   Speaker 1 (00:09:51) - Now as real estate investors and we think about the income tax, one often wonders, even when someone's been a real estate investor for a little while, John, I don't quite think they understand how the rent income is taxed differently than their daily job income. Can you tell us about that?   Speaker 3 (00:10:08) - Yeah, really important in two contexts. I'm going to give you the straight rentals on straight rentals. The rental income had schedule E instead of schedule C or some other schedule. So like W-2 income, the extent it's tax, there's no self-employment or Social Security.   Speaker 3 (00:10:25) - So that is a positive. Also, with things like depreciation, you have a lot greater opportunity to zero out the income or even convert it into losses. Now, if you manage to convert it into losses, we have a separate struggle which is making those losses useful. In other words, they're not being passive losses which we can have a discussion on. Another up and coming area is short term rentals. I'll just call it Airbnbs generically, even though there are a lot of other systems, it's really important to understand there's opportunity here, but there also traps. Airbnbs can be taxed as rental income or hotel income. And which one do you want? Well, the lawyer answer, of course, is always it depends. Usually we want it taxed as rental income for self-employment purposes. In other words, your Airbnb normally belongs on schedule E, not schedule C, which is good because you avoid self-employment tax. Most CPAs don't understand that. Second, from a passive loss standpoint, in other words, converting these passive bad losses into good losses that might offset your W-2.   Speaker 3 (00:11:36) - You want the Airbnb treated from that standpoint as a hotel.   Speaker 1 (00:11:41) - And when John's using the word hotel, he's using his fingers to make little, quote, signs around the word hotel.   Speaker 3 (00:11:48) - Yes, because hotels are considered not rentals. It's an active trade or business. And the definition is different. So we have the code might take the same word and define it 15 different ways depending on which part of the code you're playing with here. That helps us real brief one your audience, A lot of them have a day job. A lot of them would have a hard time becoming real estate professionals, which would allow them to take passive losses on rentals. Right. Well, for those who happen to be in Airbnbs or even just temporarily want to get into Airbnbs to get a loss, here's a classic strategy for people who have a W-2 job or otherwise have too much work time outside of real estate. They cannot ever be a real estate professional. It's just not going to happen. And again, the impact of that means passive rental losses stay passive.   Speaker 3 (00:12:40) - They. On the return. They don't help you in the present. A way to wake up those losses and make them active is the first year you have a rental for passive loss purposes. Make it an Airbnb and be personally involved with it. So let's talk about that. How do you make it an Airbnb for passive loss purposes? There are a number of ways because I can talk for hours and you don't want that. The most common way to make something into an Airbnb for passive loss purposes is on average rented for seven days or less. If you rent it for seven days or less, it still goes on schedule. E No social security tax. But instead of rental passive loss rules, you deal with the normal ones. What does that mean If you spend 100 hours or more and by the way, you means you and your spouse, if you're filing married, filing jointly, your hours both count so you can split the burden. If your hands on renting the Airbnb, let's say you buy it late in the year so you don't have to run it all year and you spend 100 or more hours on it between the two of you and no other human spends more time than you, then it is considered active.   Speaker 3 (00:13:51) - People will want to rewind and listen to that because it's a great strategy for in the first year you own something going to be a rental, maybe buy it towards the end of the year, run it as an Airbnb for the end of the year. Not a big time commitment. 100 plus hours. Take the cost segregation study, write that all off and use it. It's actually will lower your W-2 income. It's useful. And then in year two, if you want to go back to it being a normal rent.   Speaker 1 (00:14:17) - So we're talking about accelerating your depreciation and therefore decreasing the amount of your taxable income with this strategy.   Speaker 3 (00:14:27) - Yep. So the cost segregation study where the basics of cost segregation, when you hear the term, first of all, you only use it if you can use the loss. But if the loss is going to be passive, don't add cost, it's going to cost you money and get you not. But if you can use the law, what is cost? Segregation? We depreciate more aggressively.   Speaker 3 (00:14:46) - A very brief description. Everything outdoors that God did not put there. Fences, sidewalks, decks, landscaping. It was put there by builders like the oak tree that the squirrel put there. We give God credit for that one. But if the builder actually planted a row of trees, they get the credit. All these things that God did not put outdoors can be depreciated very rapidly and get you a much larger write off. And then all personal property which we define as anything a tenant can steal without using power tools. So furniture, some of the carpeting, maybe some of the cupboards, window treatments, etcetera. That's a cost seg study that will draw your income. Usually it produces a loss. And then we have to ask, can you use the loss?   Speaker 1 (00:15:33) - We hit on a very specific and valuable strategy there for reducing you, the real estate investors, taxable income. But just pulling back to something more basic, you said something important in the beginning there when asked about how rental income is taxed differently than the bank.   Speaker 1 (00:15:50) - You did let us know that rental income is not subject to self-employment tax and Social Security tax. And I know it's difficult to do 1 to 1 because certainly it depends. But oh, if one is in the 24% tax bracket, so therefore they're $1 from their job, that really only resulted in them getting $0.76 if they get $1 from rental income, just roughly or perhaps give us a range as to how much after tax income they get from that dollar of rent income.   Speaker 3 (00:16:19) - Classic Lawyer Answer It depends. Here's a rough rule of thumb. So self-employment and Social Security tax are pretty much the same thing.   Speaker 1 (00:16:26) - And how much percentage are they alone?   Speaker 3 (00:16:28) - So here's how the bracket work. That's the reverse of the normal bracket. It gets lower. The more you make. Roughly speaking, I'm just rounding here. If you have 150 gram of Social Security or self-employment taxable income, for example, your W-2, this is per person, not per couple. If you have 150 up to 150, your Social Security tax bracket is roughly 15%.   Speaker 3 (00:16:52) - Then it drops after that 150 grand to right around 3 to 5%, depending on factors you don't want to know. So it depends on your total income. For example, if you have a $200,000 W-2 and you run out and have a side business that generates self-employment tax, your self-employment tax is probably only 3 to 5%. So it depends on how much you're making that is self-employment taxable.   Speaker 1 (00:17:18) - Right. So we're talking about how you will have a chance to keep more of your $1 of rent income than you would from your $1 of day job income. And that's interesting with the Social Security tax, I actually didn't realize that, therefore, Social Security tax is a regressive tax policy. With increasing income, you pay a lower tax rate where generally overall in the United States, we would have with the income tax what's called a progressive tax policy, where you pay a higher tax rate with increasing income.   Speaker 3 (00:17:47) - Correct. And here's the theory to make it pass politically. Back when they did this in the 30s, they had to sell it as it's insurance and we're going to cap out your insurance, but we're also going to cap out your benefits.   Speaker 3 (00:17:59) - And so if you look in that regard, it's not really regressive because your benefits are also capped out. Now, what's one of the proposals? Let's make it flat so that people who make more subsidizing, those who make less, making it functionally progressive because you don't get any more benefits past a certain level.   Speaker 1 (00:18:17) - You're listening to get raises occasionally. We're talking with the tax reduction lawyer, John. Here we come back, we're going to talk about some more of those real estate tax advantages and get into the nuances of some things that people don't understand that well, like tax depreciation and the 1031 exchange. More with John. I'm your host, Keith Reinhold. Jerry listeners can't stop talking about their service from Ridge Lending Group and MLS 42056. They have provided our tribe with more loans than anyone there truly a top lender for beginners and veterans. It's where I go to get my own loans for single family rental property up to four Plex's. So start your pre-qualification and you can chat with President Charlie Ridge personally, though, even deliver your custom plan for growing your real estate portfolio.   Speaker 1 (00:19:04) - Start at Ridge Lending Group. You know, I'll just tell you for the most passive part of my real estate investing personally, I put my own dollars with Freedom family Investments because their funds pay me a stream of regular cash flow in. Returns are better than a bank savings account up to 12%. Their minimums are as low as 25. K. You don't even need to be accredited. For some of them, it's all backed by real estate and I kind of love how the tax benefit of doing this can offset capital gains in your W-2, jobs, income. And they've always given me exactly their stated return paid on time. So it's steady income, no surprises while I'm sleeping or just doing the things I love. For a little insider tip, I've invested in their power fund to get going on that text family to 668660. And this isn't a solicitation If you want to invest where I do, just go ahead and text family to 66866.   Speaker 4 (00:20:15) - This is author Kristen Tait. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Reinhold and don't Quit Your Day dream.   Speaker 1 (00:20:32) - Welcome back to Get Rich. Okay. So we're talking with John here. The tax reduction lawyer is how he's known. You can learn more about him at tax reduction, lawyer John's real estate investors. We get some of the very best tax breaks anywhere. In fact, they're so generous that I consider it to be a profit source. And I don't know that you can really say that about taxes in all contexts. I talk about how real estate actually pays you five way simultaneously appreciation cash flow, loan pay down made by the tenant. Fourthly, is that generous basket of tax benefits that we'll discuss. And then fifthly, is the inflation profiting benefit that you get on the long term fixed interest rate debt? But coming back to the fourth one, the tax advantages, really the two big ones that I predominantly think of, the quickly come to mind for a lot of us are tax depreciation, which is a deduction that reduces the investor's taxable income and the 1031 exchange, meaning that we can defer all of our capital gains tax all of our lives, which is incredible.   Speaker 1 (00:21:34) - But do you want to touch on the tax depreciation portion first, John, and tell us why that's so integral and valuable to real estate investors? Sure. When you buy stock.   Speaker 3 (00:21:43) - For example, on the market, it does not produce any paper deductions. Basically, you get the stock, whatever you paid for, it is your tax cost, your basis, and when you sell it, you just look, what did I sell it for, minus the tax cost. That's my gain. There are no benefits in the intervening time. You just sit and hold it. Nothing really happens. Real estate is different and that you get a paper deduction. Why Congress said so. You get something called depreciation and it's formulaic. You take the cost that you have in the property, what you have invested, and you multiply it by some number. Now that's where the cost segregation gets interesting because we debate which number. But for the moment, let's just pick a number. The most typical one is 3.6%. Multiply the building by 0.036 of what you have invested in it.   Speaker 3 (00:22:33) - And annually that's a deduction you get because and so that goes a long way when you add it to other expenses to reducing your income to zero. So the so if you have the income tax rate is much lower.   Speaker 1 (00:22:45) - So if you have a $1 million building, we're not talking about the value of the land with the building, just a $1 million building. Therefore you'd have about $36,000 each year that you do not get taxed on. That $36,000 is deducted from your rent income.   Speaker 3 (00:23:03) - Exactly. Try that with stock or mean you can. So that was a hypothetical non suggestion. Yeah, but that's one of the big benefits of depreciation. Now what's the downside? Because there's always strings attached. It drops your tax calls. So if I bought for a million, I took 36,000. Now my tax cost is 964,000. And so when I sell, if I sell will get into that, I have a larger gain. So there's a trade off. Now, in fairness, one of the other benefits of rental real estate is if you do sell for cash and you choose to pay taxes, we're going to talk about an alternative.   Speaker 3 (00:23:39) - If you choose to pay taxes, the tax rate on selling real estate are almost always 98% of the time lower than your normal tax bracket. So even if you sell after getting this depreciation benefit, the bracket is almost always considerably lower than your normal income, which is nice.   Speaker 1 (00:23:59) - I don't want this point to be lost on people. With that example I give of the $1 million building that you buy and the fact that say you get $100,000 of rent income from that, you'd only be taxed on $64,000 worth because you're able to deduct 3.6% of the value of the million dollar building against your rent income. And that $36,000 deduction typically with a lot of other investments, in order to get that deduction, you would have to make a $36,000 expense, like, for example, buying a new heating system for the building. But no, you don't have to buy a new $36,000 heating system for the building where you might qualify for that deduction. It's just the magic of appreciation. You can just take this $36,000 deduction out of thin air because the tax code says that you can.   Speaker 3 (00:24:47) - Yep, it's pretty much automatic. In fact, the code says you have to take it.   Speaker 1 (00:24:51) - That's right. I have learned that the tax code actually says you must take this benefit. And who wouldn't want to do that? Would there be any situation in which someone would not want to do that job?   Speaker 3 (00:25:02) - Yes. If they're going to sell later on or if they're going to sell in the comparatively near future, let's say they're going to buy and hold rent for three years and they're going to sell after three years taking the depreciation if it did not help them, let's say, created a passive loss, raises their bracket a little bit when they sell in three years. Now it's still lower than your normal bracket. It's just not as. Much lower as you would like. So yeah, there are a few spots where people resisting depreciation. It's pretty rare, but it happens.   Speaker 1 (00:25:32) - So you must take that depreciation, which is going to be a benefit to most investors in most cases down the road when it comes time to sell this million dollar building, oh, say ten years later, you wanted to sell this million dollar building for $2 million.   Speaker 1 (00:25:47) - Oh, I'm certainly oversimplifying here, but say that gave you $1 million gain because you bought it for 1 million and you're selling it for $2 million down the road. We have something known as the 1031 exchange. It's called the light kind exchange. It's also known as a tax deferred exchange. Tell us more about the 1031 exchange when it comes to selling this example, building ten years down the road for $1 million more than what you bought it for.   Speaker 3 (00:26:13) - You want to avoid paying tax. Here's the basics and then we'll get into a little bit of the process. The basics are you're swapping one house for another, but you don't have to direct swap. It's not barter. You don't have to go find someone who wants your house and you happen to want their house. That's just not practical. Rather, you sell your house, the money goes into the hands. This is really important of what's called a qualified intermediary. There are tons of them and that's pretty much a commodity at this point. So they're not that expensive.   Speaker 3 (00:26:39) - The money has to go in their hands. If you touch the money with your hands, it becomes dirty money and it's taxable, which sells. It goes straight from closing to the qualified intermediary. And you have certain deadlines, 45 days to find properties that you want and 180 days total from the sale date close, which kind of can help you time, especially if you have a cooperative buyer helps you. You need a time. For example, maybe I want to find the property I want sooner and then get out and sell the one I've got and you can do it in reverse order. You can go buy a property and then sell something afterwards and say to the government, Listen, I want the funds from this later sale to apply to this prior purchase. A reverse reverse fixture. Yeah, reverse exchange. And there are some creative games we can play with reverse exchanges. They're looser rule wise than the normal ones. I enjoy those 1031 exchange.   Speaker 1 (00:27:36) - Such a benefit where you can defer your capital gains tax.   Speaker 1 (00:27:40) - Hey, in this example you had $1 million then that would be subject to the capital gains tax, which is going to be a rate of 15% or more. And if you don't do a 1031 exchange, you have to pay back to the government all at once that tax depreciation that we discussed earlier. So there are actually consequences. It's going to feel like there are consequences to not doing a 1031 exchange. So you kind of get your money trapped in this real estate game. It might be the best place to have it, but that's something that I think investors need to understand for the long term.   Speaker 3 (00:28:12) - And it's the classic strategy. 1031 Until you die. Now, what typically occurs with investors and then life cycle, they want a little more time, so they start 1030, letting in some more passive type investments, whether it's with a management company or a property that by its nature tends to be a little bit more passive, but the object is to die and not sell. I'm not suggesting everyone go out and die right away.   Speaker 3 (00:28:37) - That's great tax planning. But in terms of reality, it's not so great. But if you. 1031 let's give an example. You bought for a million, many years later it's worth 10 million. Your basis in the property is 100,000. You've depreciated it. So if you sell, there's a huge gain, you die. Whoever inherits is going to love you. At least we hope they will, because when they inherit the property that's worth 10 million, their tax cost, their basis at law is 10 million. They can sell the next day with no gain. That's the infamous step up in basis. And the object is to convert the deferral into tax free. If you defer long enough, it becomes tax free. That's the goal.   Speaker 1 (00:29:18) - And John touched on it. There is no limit to the number of times that you can do the 1031 tax deferred exchange. As a real estate investor, you can trade up from a $1 million property to a $2 million property. Ten more years go by to a $4 million property.   Speaker 1 (00:29:33) - Ten more years go by to an $8 million property. Now I'm certainly oversimplifying this, but at each step you don't owe any capital gains tax. So because you can defer it endlessly, you really never have to pay it and effectively becomes tax free with that step up and basis to your heirs like John just described. John, I'd like to know your thoughts. You know, it seems a few different presidents lately. I know Biden, at least he threatened to do away with the 1031 exchange. I just wonder if the 1031 exchange is ever going to get precarious. I think some people, though, don't understand that the 1031 tax deferred exchange has been around for more than a hundred years.   Speaker 3 (00:30:12) - They've been talking about getting rid of the 1031 since the 1930, and Democratic administrations have threatened to do it since the 1930. They've never had the supermajority they need to actually get away with it. And even then they've come close to it. And even then, some of the lobbyists on the Democratic side said, listen, this is not a good idea, freezes up capital.   Speaker 3 (00:30:36) - We want people to be able to buy and sell and not be frozen into a property because of tax reasons. So, look, could it happen? Sure. We live in a crazy world, but the probability of the 1031 going away I think is pretty darn low. Let me give one real quick trick that's going to help. Some people won't help very many, but the ones that helps it help big time for you. 1031 A property. Ask your accountant. Do I have any passive losses tied up in the property? They're going to know there's going to be a form on your larger tax return. There are different versions of your return. The big thick one is not. The one that goes to the government. Ask them how much passive activity loss you have in the building. Whatever that is in a 1031. Take out the cash. It's tax free and in fact, it's tax arbitrage. To give you an example. We are selling a property. You had a million and you're selling for 2 million.   Speaker 3 (00:31:29) - Let's say you had 100,000 of passive losses tied up in it. Go ahead and take out 100,000 cash from the exchange. Go ahead, ask double check with the 1031 intermediary because they know the rules. But go ahead and take out the 100,000. What happens? You get the 100,000 tax free because your passive losses that were hibernating on the return are now activated and wipe out. Normally when you pull cash out of a 1031, there's gains. Normally we don't do that. But here the losses are activated. They not only offset the 100 you pulled out, they drop your tax bracket because you're getting a capital gains tax bracket offset by a normal loss that was now brought out of hibernation. So just a little trick for those of you always before 1031, always ask your CPA, what's my passive activity loss? And think about taking out exactly that amount of cash, tax rate, tax arbitrage.   Speaker 1 (00:32:28) - I just learned something as well. I've got a number of 1031 exchanges in my life and that's one tip that I sure didn't know about.   Speaker 1 (00:32:35) - So thanks for that. And if you, the listener, if you want to learn the nuances of the 1031 exchange, which John and I aren't going to do here, because that really goes a mile deep with the three properties rule and the 200% rule and all of that. You can listen to episode 143 where that entire episode is dedicated to the 1031 tax deferred exchange and just how you can best pull it off for maximum tax efficiency so that you can then go ahead and re leverage those dollars into a larger property later. Well, John, that was very helpful on both tax depreciation and the 1031 exchange. Do you have any last things to share with us? Any last strategies so that a real estate investor can pay less in tax or anything that's particularly helpful?   Speaker 3 (00:33:21) - Yes. There's this concept of the Trump tax law called the pass through deduction or qualified business income tax code, Section 199 Capital A First of all, it applies to all rentals. Unless they're triple net least. A lot of accountants still don't get that.   Speaker 3 (00:33:38) - You have to have a trade or business that's tax term trade or business rentals that are not triple net leased are a trade or business, which is a good thing under the code. So there's this deduction. It's large. If you're showing that income even after depreciation and everything you buy is typically 20% of the net income. So if I'm showing 100 grand of net income, I get a $20,000 deduction because Congress said so. Protect that. In particular, if you make roughly I'm rounding here 164 grand total taxable income on your 1040 single and roughly 370 filing joint, there are special things you need to do to maximize the QBI and you need to do it before the end of the year. Nothing pains me more than to see high income people who benefit the most from this deduction because of their high bracket and they're in these high brackets. And if they would have done a little bit of talking to their CPA, hey, I think I'm going to make married filing jointly 370 or more for the year. It's going to cut my QBI based on the mechanical rules.   Speaker 3 (00:34:41) - What can I do to preserve my qualified business? Income tax deduction might pass their tax deduction. To do that, you need a really good set of books and returns. You have to have good books in the knowledge of your income so your accountant can look and say, Hey, here's how much we think you're going to make. B Here's what we can do to preserve this deduction. That is the number one easy pick up by C in tax returns. I review for planning purposes that people missed in prior years and we tell them going forward, please, please towards the end of the year, start thinking about if you're going to show gain. Doesn't matter if you're showing a loss, but if you're going to show gain in any business, not just rentals, please look at the deduction. Please make sure you're getting the full 20%.   Speaker 1 (00:35:25) - John is an expert at looking at your recent tax returns and pointing it to one area and saying, hey, there's a quick ROI for you if we change this. And right over there is another quick ROI for you if we change this.   Speaker 1 (00:35:37) - Well, John, that's been great with what we can do with the existing tax code to help optimize our situation. But wrapping up here, a lot of people are interested in what's coming down the road in the future. It can be a little bit speculative, but it also can be a proxy for how people and politicians are thinking. And that's. Is there anything that the presidential candidates are offering tax wise? It's very interesting whether that be an RFK Jr or a Ron DeSantis or a Vivek Ramaswamy or Nikki Haley or anyone else with this potential future direction of where an influential candidate wants to take taxes.   Speaker 3 (00:36:15) - I think the parties are pretty consistent regardless of candidate. Now they each have their subgenre of flavor, right? Do you like your chocolate? Dark or milk chocolate or with or without salt, but it's still milk chocolate. So likewise, the Democratic presidential candidates are going to be looking to increase taxes, get rid of what they view as loopholes, and they are aware of real estate having a lot of special benefits and they don't care for it.   Speaker 3 (00:36:41) - The Republicans, by contrast, are going to be more for lowering taxes. They are not hostile to real estate. They're generally pro-business, especially pro small business. And I think that's consistent across the board. I don't think there's a lot of deviation there with either party. The specific proposals will vary. For example, the Kennedy candidate strikes me as less hardcore left wing and a little more common sensical than maybe some of the more progressive sorts and might not be as harsh in that regard.   Speaker 1 (00:37:13) - Well, that's helpful in knowing what future policy might be and that might affect the way that you want to vote. This has been really helpful, particularly to real estate investors and small business owners. You are the tax reduction lawyer, so if our audience wants to connect with you and learn more about what you can do for them, what's the best way for them to do that?   Speaker 3 (00:37:33) - Not coincidentally, tax reduction lawyer.com and I put out a ton of content. I take a few clients but it's really getting more and more content based.   Speaker 3 (00:37:43) - So if you like what you heard, you might hear more.   Speaker 1 (00:37:47) - Sometimes in the video, hear you and the audio only might not be able to see that. For example, when John was using the word loopholes, he was using his fingers as air quotes. He understands that these are intentional incentives that help direct behavior because the government knows that society is generally better off when the private sector and the mom and pop investor are the ones providing good housing for society. A lot of public housing projects really haven't fared so well. So that's what John is here to help you do provide clean, safe, affordable, functional housing for others and get all the tax benefits that come along with that. Hey, John. Hi. It's been great having you here on the show.   Speaker 3 (00:38:26) - It has been an absolute pleasure. Thanks for having me.   Speaker 1 (00:38:35) - Oh, yeah. Nice clear breakdowns from the tax reduction lawyer John Heyer. I was talking with John Moore outside of our show. He read the entire some 1000 page long inflation reduction act that was passed last year.   Speaker 1 (00:38:51) - He did that to try to help understand its tax implications for his clients and was kind of impressed that he had the endurance, I suppose, to read all of it. And I asked him how many members of Congress he thinks read it and we both answer the question at the same time. Zero To achieve one looks like the top 1%. You must act like the top 1% does. And that might include tapping the expertise of a pro like John to review what you've learned today with our expert guest John. No changes to federal income tax rates are expected. There are ways to lighten the tax burden on your short term rentals, which you might not be aware of. Your dollar of day job income that's taxed at a higher rate than your dollar of rent income. Because on your day job income, you must pay Social Security and self-employment tax. You don't pay those tax types on your rent income. Real estate tax depreciation is kind of like magic. It means that you can write off a portion of your rent income each year, meaning that you can make it non-taxable even if you don't have a real expense associated with doing that.   Speaker 1 (00:40:03) - You learn more about the 1031 tax deferred exchange and the fact that it will persist as a benefit for real estate investors is highly likely. Again, if you like what you learn each week on the Gerry podcast, I invite you to subscribe or follow within your favorite podcasting device. For those non podcast listener friends you might have, they can try the Get Rich Education mobile app. Everything that we do is free until next week. We'll all be back to help you build your wealth. I'm your host, Keith Wild. Don't quit your day dream.   Speaker 5 (00:40:36) - 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 1 (00:41:04) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building Get rich education.com.

With skyrocketing property insurance costs, more homeowners are skipping insurance altogether. That proportion is estimated at 12% per the WSJ. Single-family rents are up 6.5% annually. Next, we discuss what might be America’s best cash flowing real estate market. Home prices are up this year for four main reasons: large Millennial demand, scarce supply, mostly healthy economy, interest rate levels that are actually normal. As we discuss one of America’s best cash flowing markets, it’s in a state that has strong legal protections for landlords. The cost of living there is 17% below the national average. Unemployment is 2%, according to the provider. Single-family rents are $1,200 to $1,500; prices are $115,000 to $140,000.  You can own a freshly renovated property, complete with granite countertops. Average tenant duration is 3-4 years. With higher interest rates, more buyers in this market are paying all-cash or making a larger down payment. Contact your GRE Investment Coach, a free service, if you consider purchasing property in this investor-advantaged market. Timestamps: National home prices and insurance costs [00:00:01] Discussion on the increase in national home prices and the impact of rising insurance costs on homeowners. Rise in single-family rent growth [00:04:04] Exploration of the increase in single-family rent growth and its implications for the rental housing market. America's best cash flow real estate market [00:07:54] Introduction to an area with low property prices and potential for cash flow, including its job growth and investor advantages. The lost luggage incident [00:11:27] Keith shares his memory of his luggage arriving late during a trip to Little Rock and going for a run in street shoes. Little Rock's recognition as a top place for young professionals [00:13:15] Forbes Advisor ranks Little Rock, North Little Rock, and Conway as top ten places for young professionals to live, highlighting employment opportunities and affordability. Growth and economic drivers in central Arkansas [00:15:20] Discussion on population growth, job creation, and economic drivers in central Arkansas, including the presence of distribution hubs, major retailers, tech companies, and government and medical sectors. The demand for single family rentals [00:20:40] The speaker discusses the shift in multifamily housing, the increase in demand for single family rentals, and the lack of new construction in this sector. Arkansas as a landlord-friendly state [00:21:42] The speaker explains that Arkansas has landlord-friendly laws and a simple eviction process, with evictions typically taking 30 days or less and costing less than $1000. Criteria for properties in the investor market [00:24:59] The speaker talks about the areas and property types that fit their buy box, focusing on working-class tenants and B-class properties in the Little Rock metro area. The availability of properties in Little Rock [00:30:51] The speaker discusses the current tight inventory in the Little Rock market and how it affects both homeowners and tenants. Demand is high, but there are fewer places to rent or buy. Interest rates and cash buyers [00:31:52] The speaker talks about the impact of higher interest rates on investors and the increase in cash buyers. Some investors are willing to pay all cash now with the intention of refinancing later when interest rates come down. Advantages of investing in Little Rock [00:33:48] Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/468 Get access to Little Rock properties: GREmarketplace.com/LittleRock If you’d like help with one of  GRE’s Investment Coaches (free), start here: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Complete episode transcript:   Speaker 1 (00:00:01) - Welcome to. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. National home prices continue to increase for at least four big reasons. There's also a hindrance that's getting so bad that it could keep more price growth in check. We look at why single-family rent growth is increasing. Then we focus on one particular metro area that could be America's best cash flow real estate market and why today on Get Rich education.   Speaker 2 (00:00:30) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get rich education.   Speaker 1 (00:00:53) - Walking from Whitney Island to Mt. Whitney, California, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. And this is Get Rich. Education, National home prices continue to increase and no one knows what mortgage rates are going to do. There's one factor that could slow the home price growth party down. It could be impeded a little by these rising insurance costs. Now, in years past, do you know how many American homeowners decided that they were just going to skip insurance and not buy it so that they don't have to pay the premium? Any idea what percent? Well, the longer term norm is that 5 to 8% of homeowners skipped insurance.   Speaker 1 (00:01:38) - They just said we'll handle any risk and not buy it. Hm. Maybe that's sort of like not using a case for your phone, perhaps, which I don't actually. I never use a case for my phone, but I do have insurance on all of my properties. Well, The Wall Street Journal was just reporting that the number of homeowners that have decided to forego insurance has increased. Okay. The longer term historic number is 5 to 8%. That decided to skip insurance. And now amidst insurance premiums that in a lot of places have risen faster than inflation, that proportion of those that skip homeowners insurance is now from 5 to 8%, up to 12%. Yeah, 12% of homeowners electing to skip insurance. And they're going to be those people that are free and clear of a mortgage. And if you have a mortgage, you must have property insurance. The Wall Street Journal also found that it's mostly lower income people that forgo it, lower income people that skip the insurance. Now, of course, homeowner borrowers, you have to eat that premium increase if you're a homeowner, borrower, they have to eat that.   Speaker 1 (00:02:53) - You're going to remember that just seven episodes ago on Episode 461, I went into a lot of detail on the areas of the nation that do have skyrocketing insurance premiums. And if you're a landlord in any of those markets, you can pass along the hot potato because you can raise your rents in order to offset that. But primary residence homeowners, they cannot do that. They cannot pass along the hot potato. Homeowners have to eat the hot potato. And sometimes that hot potato can burn the roof of your mouth. That's why the proportion of those that skip insurance has about doubled. And also some areas have become uninsurable. If you want a new policy, think of some of the forest fire prone areas out west and you know, the eastern half of the nation, they can get forest fires, too, of course, But east of the Mississippi, it stays more humid and you get more rain. That's why it's just not as much of a problem in the eastern half of the US. Well, you've taken my guidance to heart and you sure are passing along the insurance hot potato, raising the rent on your tenants.   Speaker 1 (00:04:04) - Here's some evidence because John Burns, real estate and consulting shows us that in the latest stats, single family rents are up 6.5% year over year. Yeah, single family rentals are also seeing higher occupancy and lower vacancy, and that's 6.5% annual growth rate in single family. So that's worth watching if you forecast inflation because of course that does make up part of the CPI like Rick and I recently discussed. Now single family rentals. They are roughly one quarter of America's rental housing stock. And this differs, by the way, from the rent growth on larger apartment buildings. Apartment building rent growth is slow due to so much new construction of larger apartment buildings where they're just still not building enough single family rentals in so many markets. So with this low, really just awful affordability for wannabe homeowners, what's happening in this area is that single families, they're attracting quality tenants. As this affordability worsens, the quality of the single family tenant is therefore increasing. The Fred charts tell us that the median sales price of the new build home is now $437,000 for 37.   Speaker 1 (00:05:31) - Note that that's for a new build, not existing. And home prices are up, up, up for four big reasons. It's really for major reasons that home prices are up. There is high home demand from the large millennial generation, this astoundingly scarce supply. Thirdly, there is a still pretty strong economy and. And then fourthly, believe it or not, if you're new to real estate, fourthly is, yes, historically normal mortgage interest rate levels. All these things are supporting these higher and higher prices and this scarce housing supply. That is a genuine American problem that we have here. Now, President Biden, he's tried to address it with a five year plan that he announced last year. And in just two days, Republican presidential candidates are going to take the stage in California for the second GOP primary debate. And the presidential candidates, they should be asked, what would you do about the housing shortage? That question was not asked in the first presidential debate. If I could ask them one question, yeah, it would be about housing and our next president matters whether Biden wins reelection or whether it's someone else.   Speaker 1 (00:06:44) - But my gosh, America spends too much time wrapped up in all this debate posturing and all this media hype over the positioning of the candidates. I mean, this is already been going on for months and months. Trump, Haley Pence, Ramaswamy DeSantis. Yes, the primaries are sooner, but the presidential election is still more than a full year into the future, even from this point. And this has already been going on for this long. I mean, virtually no other nation in the world drags it out for this long. It's almost a two year cycle of vetting these presidential candidates with two years. That's half of a presidential term right there. My goodness. Next week, as I'll be leaning on my team for a makeshift studio, I'll be joining you from Chicago, Illinois. And I will be checking out the sites and also the real estate opportunities there and those still in Chicago land. It's typically on the Indiana side of the Illinois Indiana line, where you'll tend to find the better real estate deals and the lower taxes is back to this week's show.   Speaker 1 (00:07:54) - We're not talking about Chicago today. Straight ahead, is this America's best cash flow real estate market? It's an area that has population and job growth, but it's slow growth. You'll be surprised with how low the property prices are. I mean, they're often below replacement cost, which is remarkable. But what that means is with today's high materials and labor and regulatory costs, it would pay more to build a new home on that site than what you can buy that completed existing for home today that was built decades ago. And I've walked these very neighborhoods. A lot of them are nice. They're not in war zone areas. The city has a great base of distribution jobs. It says sector where it's hard to outsource distribution jobs over to a less developed nations because those jobs need to be fixed right there where you need to move the goods. So in this city, they are building fulfillment centers. That's warehousing in this highly investor advantaged place is also a state capital. So they have another base of government jobs that are not going away.   Speaker 1 (00:08:58) - I'm talking to an experienced principal in this market that offers freshly renovated property to out of market investors like you. That's next. I'm Keith Windell you're listening to Get Rich Education. Jerry listeners can't stop talking about their service from Ridge Lending Group and MLS 42056. They have provided our tribe with more loans than anyone there truly a top lender for beginners and veterans. It's where I go to get my own loans for single family rental property up to four plex. So start your pre-qualification and you can chat with President Charlie Ridge personally, though even deliver your custom plan for growing your real estate portfolio. Start at Ridge Lending Group. You know, I'll just tell you, for the most passive part of my real estate investing personally, I put my own dollars with Freedom family Investments because their funds pay me a stream of regular cash flow in. Returns are better than a bank savings account up to 12%. Their minimums are as low as 25 K. You don't even need to be accredited. For some of them. It's all backed by real estate.   Speaker 1 (00:10:10) - And I kind of love how the tax benefit of doing this can offset capital gains in your W-2, jobs, income. And they've always given me exactly their stated return paid on time. So it's steady income, no surprises while I'm sleeping or just doing the things I love. For a little insider tip, I've invested in their power fund to get going on that text family to 668660. And this isn't a solicitation If you want to invest where I do, just go ahead and text family to 66866. This is Perrin Life's Patrick Donahoe. Listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Wayne Mold. And don't quit your day dream. Hey, well, I'd like to welcome in one of our marketplace providers in such in Investor advantage geography, that is in Little Rock, Arkansas. Brian, we're going to be listening to one of the voices of Marketplace today. Hey, thanks so much for being here. Hey, thank you, Keith. Appreciate being here for the second time. This is great. Great catching up with you.   Speaker 1 (00:11:27) - Well, that's right. Now, it's been a few years since you and I got together in person in Little Rock, Arkansas, and we toured the market. If we walked the number of properties. But I think the thing that stands out most to me with that trip to Little Rock, where I spent the day with you, is that my baggage arrived late. Now, we had good accommodations at the Capitol Hotel, kind of the stately nice hotel right in the center of downtown. But my luggage to Little Rock arrived about 20 hours late. I've had really good luck with luggage all my life, but didn't this time. And my most enduring memory maybe, is that I had to go running in street shoes. And I still remember near the end of my run, I was running over the bridge that spans the Arkansas River between North Little Rock and Little Rock. Looking down while I was running at these slightly dressy black shoes on my feet, thinking, My gosh, it's a miracle that my feet don't hurt me.   Speaker 1 (00:12:24) - Yeah, that's exactly what I remember, Keith. I remember piecing it together. So you didn't come right out and just tell me you'd mention your bag had been lost. And then you mentioned that you went for a run that morning and thought, What did you run? So, yeah, you described basically running in your loafers from the day before. So I was like, This guy's a real machine from the north, the Great North down here. So I was impressed. Yes. And you're probably also wondering, did you really have to go running it? Right? That's the other thing. Well, right. Hey, you and I were just discussing this great media clip that we watched there from the local news there in Little Rock. This tells us quite a bit about the economic drivers in Little Rock as well as the low median home price there in the Little Rock area. Let's listen to this together. This is about two minutes in length and then we'll come back to comment.   Speaker 3 (00:13:15) - We turn now to the national recognition that three communities in central Arkansas are receiving.   Speaker 3 (00:13:20) - Little Rock North, Little Rock and Conway ranked in the top ten places for young professionals to live by for.   Speaker 1 (00:13:27) - Some great news channel. Seven's Brenda Lipinski is on your side tonight. She joins us now live in our studio. Brenda, tell us a little bit about these rankings.   Speaker 3 (00:13:34) - Yes, Chris. So Forbes advisor analyzed 99 of 100 largest cities and found that Little Rock North, Little Rock and Conway had great opportunities for young people. Little Rock North, Little Rock and Conway named Top ten Best Places for Young Professionals to Live by Forbes Advisor. And some agree. I think that there's no no doubt here in Arkansas, central Arkansas that we foster some of the greatest minds in talent. The criteria for the ranking included employment and pay, housing affordability, lifestyle and cost of living. North Little Rock Chamber of Commerce saying investment in young people is crucial for the area.   Speaker 1 (00:14:11) - They're the next leaders. So we need to make sure that we can continue to recruit them and develop them because they're going to be the next people on our board of directors are going to be the next city council members.   Speaker 3 (00:14:19) - Mayor Frank Scott Junior, who's a millennial, says good public education and jobs are a must.   Speaker 1 (00:14:25) - We've seen historic job growth for close to 10,000 new jobs.   Speaker 3 (00:14:28) - Young professionals saying there's a ton of reasons why they like the area, the community affordability.   Speaker 1 (00:14:34) - Every single time I connect with someone and I'm I'm able to find a new opportunity, whether it be inside of work and with my career or outside of work with just having fun.   Speaker 3 (00:14:44) - And for the future. So I'm hoping the state will create policy that will continue to attract more young people and think about the ways that we can continue to attract diverse professionals and how policy can impact people's image of the state and of the area specifically. Now, Forbes advisor also says that the areas are evolving into an entrepreneurial and innovation hub, which may also attract young professionals on your side. I'm Brenda Lipinski.   Speaker 1 (00:15:09) - Okay, Brenda, thanks so much. Forbes also likes the cost of living in central Arkansas, where the median home price is about $200,000. Right. So that's what the media is reporting.   Speaker 1 (00:15:20) - But you're right there, you're the boots on the ground. So tell us more about population growth and job creation and just overall the market vibe in the drivers there in central Arkansas. We have continued to see growth here. You know, I think it was mentioned that over 10,000 jobs created in just the last five years. One of the things that stands out here, too, is really driving that growth is that we're kind of known as a distribution hub or an upcoming distribution hub. A lot of that has to do with our geography and where we're located very centrally in the United States. And we're at the crossroads of two major interstates, I-40 and I-30. And so we've seen in just the last five years a very large Amazon facility put in actually three different fulfillment centers put in. So that's said to have brought in around 2000 jobs just right there. Then we've seen other big retailers come in like Lowe's and Ace Hardware and Dollar General, and they've all built distribution fulfillment centers here as well. And then even still we seeing growth with manufacturing moving into our river port here.   Speaker 1 (00:16:26) - It was just announced this year that a big Trex facility, they manufacture decking materials and from environmentally friendly sources and they're putting a major operation here. And they were drawn here for the location in proximity to the interstate. So those things really are driving us right now. A lot of our growth is accelerated by this sort of fulfillment warehousing distribution space. We have other drivers, too, and just the last few years, very diverse in the economy here. But we have a large tech company here called Apta. G. They were created right here in Little Rock and have really accelerated their growth. I believe they're said to get up to around 800 jobs. And those are all young professionals that could be working in Silicon Valley if they wanted to. Very diverse. We have aerospace here with Disso Falcon Jet, and then we have lots of government jobs here. We are the state capital. So we have all of our state government here. We're also a major medical center. So all of our medical professionals train here.   Speaker 1 (00:17:24) - Our medical school for the state is here in Little Rock. So all of our large hospitals there's on that note, things that we have coming now, they're announced they're building a new dental school here in Little Rock. So there's not a dental school in Arkansas currently. Also building a veterinarian school here in Little Rock. These are both going to be attached to another college that's here in Arkansas. So starting on a good foundation for those two schools. But that's another exciting move for Little Rock. So all these things are driving the workforce and bringing in younger workers, generating out workers from the medical school, for example, putting them out into the marketplace here. So we have a lot of young professionals, and I think that's why Forbes ranked us in the top ten of places for young professionals to live being the state capital there. Yes, you have that base of government jobs, some of the private sector jobs you mentioned you mentioned the expansion of medical. You know, these are two areas, government and medical that rarely contract very much, especially with the medical often growing and then with the government jobs, with the state capital being there in Little Rock, those just aren't the type of jobs that are going to be outsourced.   Speaker 1 (00:18:32) - And they're also not going to move the capital from little Rock to Pine Bluff, Arkansas, anytime soon either. So you do have that base there. And Brian, you and I were looking at different media articles recently and studying more statistics. No one area has it all. Little Rock has a lot of advantageous drivers, especially a high ratio of rent income to purchase price for investors. And we'll get into that later. But really with one of the statistics that we were consuming together, basically, if you think of it as gradients in an area's population growth and job growth, maybe let's think of five of them. There's high growth, there's slower growth, there's no change, there's slow decline or there's fast decline. And of those five, it seemed to be pointing to that second one, slow growth for the area. Yes, I mean, we're a very linear market here. Our growth is consistent. We haven't had a major increase or a major dip. We're just very consistent in linear in our growth.   Speaker 1 (00:19:32) - But it is continuous. We've seen that happen with even with housing, we've seen a lot of permits increase in the last few years, more multifamily permits even than single family permits. And it kind of tells you that the demand that's there for housing that rises along with the growth we are in that category, I would say, yeah, that's right. When we think about slow population growth, obviously those people need to be housed somewhere. And in the past decade you touched on it. To your point, both Little Rock and North Little Rock have had more multifamily built than they've had single family homes built. And nationally we are just so undersupplied depending on what numbers you look at. Were millions of housing units undersupplied nationally? How does that translate to the local picture there in central Arkansas, including Little Rock as far as being oversupplied, adequately supplied or undersupplied with housing? Well, I think we're undersupplied with single family housing first, and there's a real demand there. And there has been an increase in multifamily and most of that multifamily increase is at the top of the market.   Speaker 1 (00:20:40) - So there's been a real shift in multifamily. And what maybe used to be an A-class multifamily building is now A, B or a C because new A-class has been built to replace it. So we've seen some shift there. But where the majority of the housing stock is coming from is the multifamily sector and that puts more demand on the single family rentals. I mean, that is still a very desirable place. I think most anyone who lives in an apartment or has lived in apartment aspire to eventually have their own home or be within their own four walls in a yard that, you know, they belong to them or they control or rent or whatever else and have their own piece. So their demand stays there for single family rental, but there's not as much being built. So we've really seen an increase in our single family rental rates. I know there's been increases across the country in rental rates, but usually it's linear here. But you know, we've with not a great big jump, but we've really experienced a significant jump over the last few years.   Speaker 1 (00:21:42) - And I think a lot of it is driven with the demand for the single family and there's just only so much of it Now. We think about investors. Of course, most of the investors that you provide product for come from out of state. They live in areas that aren't nearly as investor advantaged as Littlerock is, but that's about more than the numbers. Oftentimes it's about that local landlord tenant law. I've got to say, it's been a while since I've consumed any material about this, but I remember in the past reading for years that oftentimes Arkansas comes in as one of the most landlord friendly states. That's correct. And it's been that way for a long time here. Our process is very simple and it's very much in favor of the landlord. But here an average eviction, if you get to that point of having to evict, typically it takes 30 days or less to actually get the tenant that's fast and less than $1,000 and that's hiring an attorney. So you're hiring an attorney? We have several that specialize here in the Little Rock area, for example.   Speaker 1 (00:22:45) - They can turn this thing around in about 30 days. And the process is it goes to an unlawful detainer if you filed for eviction and the tenant hasn't followed the eviction process and hasn't followed the proper notices and the proper days to get out, then the legally you can follow a unlawful detainer. And once that process gets moving and it moves pretty fast, a writ of possession is issued. And so at that point, the tenant is actually served by a police officer and they don't it's not a harsh dragging out with handcuffs, but they show up and generally escort them out of the place. It's pretty quick process overall and it's backed up by law enforcement. So but in no means is it a bullying or a brutal process or anything like that. And most residents here in Little Rock in Arkansas in general, that's the way it's been forever. They understand it. And usually when you serve an eviction notice, it means business. And most tenants know it means business and they just abide by it. So really, we don't have to enforce all that many evictions all the way through other than that, we serve, so we serve evictions and they generally just get out.   Speaker 1 (00:23:51) - That's sort of the process in Arkansas is known as to being one of the most landlord friendly states, and it's been that way for quite a long time. Of course, we're highly interested in that long history of the law reinforcing landlord interests more so than tenant interests, since we are interested in being long term investors. And when we talk about a metro area there in and around Little Rock, including their MSA, which includes North Little Rock and Conway, and we sometimes want to think about, all right, now, what parts of town would fit ones by box? Because even in an investor advantaged place, you probably don't want class A+, single family homes because of those higher price points. Rents don't keep up proportionally. And then we also typically want to avoid class areas. Those properties are shabby. They can't attract a rent paying tenant and properties don't typically appreciate very well on those low end class properties. So tell us about those areas in the criteria that fit your buy box that you know that investors want to put in their portfolio? Yeah, that's correct.   Speaker 1 (00:24:59) - I mean, we really stick a lot into the space. We're looking for kind of that working class tenant. They've got a good job. They are, you know, blue collar. They're hardworking people. Generally it's a family. Those are the areas where we're focused on and we're not exclusively in Little Rock. As you mentioned, the metro area is about a 55 mile radius. There's about a million people within that radius, the metro area. And that encompasses other areas around us other than Little Rock. So the city of Little Rock. There's the city of North Little Rock, which is actually not just the north side of Little Rock. It's a separate city from Little Rock and the other side of the Sherwood, Cabot, Jacksonville, Conway, Benton, Bryant. All of these are communities, cities around us enjoying Little Rock. We find rentals in those areas, too. We target specific areas within those different cities where really that B-class property in that B-class tenant is looking to live. And so we're not just in Little Rock.   Speaker 1 (00:25:56) - We do venture out into some of these other areas and we're talking about the Little Rock, Arkansas, and the investor market there and its growth story. However, a slow growth story, perhaps it's not growing as fast as some Floridian counties are, where you have a lot of foreign in-migration, you're going to have less foreign in-migration, for example, in Little Rock as compared to a lot of other places. We think about where the tenant income stream is going to come from. We've talked about that. All of those market drivers there, we start to think about, all right, what are the properties like in the prices in the rents? So can you tell us about the property types and then get into some of the important numbers for investors, Brian, And tell us about the quality of the renovation you do to get that property ready and make it effectively turnkey for investors. Tell us about the properties, the prices in the rents. We try to target mostly single family and we do come across and dabble in some multifamily as well, and it's mostly smaller multifamily.   Speaker 1 (00:26:58) - So you know, anywhere from a duplex up to maybe a 20 or 30 unit complex and fits within our box. But mostly we're focused on single family rentals. Our criteria is a three bedroom. Obviously it's going to have a bath, but three bedroom, two bath is what we like. We do come across a lot of three bedroom, one and a half baths. A lot of these homes were built in the 1960s, 1970s. Those homes are going to have some of the more modern things, sheetrock versus plaster wire versus knob and tube. So, you know, those are reasons why we want to focus on those 1960s, 1970s homes. Again, most of them are three bedroom, one into two baths. Most of them are around 1200 square feet. And we do a fairly extensive remodel. We have a lot of boxes to check. But I would say our average home ends up with a new roof, new Hvac, new hot water heater, almost all new flooring. We always put in granite countertops.   Speaker 1 (00:27:53) - It's a staple in Little Rock. We find that that just is a little bit of a wow factor compared to some other competitors out there and what they're offering as a result. So we pay attention to the finishes. We want all the hardware to match, we want all the light kits to match. We want everything to feel uniform. And our whole philosophy is we're trying to attract best quality tenants we can, but we want this to be it. Hope this is the best rental property they've ever had as well. We want them to really fall in love with the property and our number one goal is to retain tenants for as long as possible because one of our biggest killers is turnover cost. So, you know, if you lose a tenant, you've got to get that thing rent ready and put it back out on the market. And you've got to go through the whole process of finding a new tenant. So what we find is by providing a better product, it equals longevity of the tenant and then staying with us for a long time.   Speaker 1 (00:28:46) - And we typically start with an 18 month lease with escalators there with rent increases built in. But we find that we keep tenants for three and four years. Really good success with that. And think a lot of it is due to the areas we pick and then the product that we put out in the market. That's an excellent tenancy duration between 3 and 4 years with what you just laid out and describe there with these fresh rehabs and even granite countertops in your single family homes, it kind of feels like your own. So therefore you want to be a tenant longer. And I think that tenant duration, as long as mortgage interest rates stay high, really is set up to lengthen because it's that much more difficult for a renter to go out and be a first time homebuyer. So therefore, if you put them in a rental that they're really happy in and get that right right from the beginning that you guys do, it's unlikely that they're going to move into another rental because it's hard to do better than that.   Speaker 1 (00:29:40) - And it's also difficult for them to buy their own home due to this affordability constraint with the higher mortgage rates and higher prices. And when it comes to property prices, we listen to that media piece earlier where it was stated that the average or median home price, whatever it was, is about 200 K. So tell us about what rent we would see with what price for one of your typical properties there that you prepare for investors? Long var properties once they'd gone through the full turnkey renovation process and have been rented, they fall somewhere in a price range of 115 to say $140,000. Maybe our average sweet spot there. And those rents range anywhere from 1200 to $1500 a month, just sort of depending again on the location where it is and that sort of thing. So that medium may be up there in the 200 range. But again, we're sort of focusing on the B-class areas. And so that's where our price points tend to fall, that sort of like 120 to 140 price range. And if you're new to the show and you're a listener in Brooklyn, New York or Burbank, California, we're not talking about the 20% down payment amount here.   Speaker 1 (00:30:51) - We're talking about the complete purchase price amount with what we've discussed there. Tell us about your availability just in general over time. The inventory here, not unlike a lot of places around the country, is very tight right now. I mean, a lot of people are staying in homes and real estate just isn't moving like it was. So we're still finding opportunities, but not like we were. And that goes all the way down to home owner occupants. They're having a hard time finding places to buy because the sellers aren't selling. And that I think, trickles down to tenants as well. They're just fewer places to rent. That's what we're seeing. There is less supply than demand. And when something is coming on the market, I mean, it's getting gobbled up pretty quick, be it a rental or a property to buy. So the demand is still very strong and inventory is low. No, I'm curious, with prices that low, 150 K or less now that mortgage interest rates are higher, I think you know that I'm a leverage fan and we have ratios like that.   Speaker 1 (00:31:52) - You might be able to pay a higher interest rate yet still have cash flow but with higher interest rates. Brian Have you seen it where anyone is interested in making an all cash payment, a greater proportion of those people than there used to be? Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we're seeing people bring more money to the table for the down payment. We've seen quite a few cash buyers that we didn't normally see before. So yeah, people are just, you know, using their resources to write some of these things out or there's understanding to that this interest rate level is probably short term. And so they're like, you know, hey, let me go ahead and get this great property and hold on to it. Now, put a little bit more money into it. I'll refinance it later. So we are seeing a lot of people think more with that type of strategy in mind. I guess one approach is paying all cash now and then mortgage rates come down to a level where an investor is comfortable.   Speaker 1 (00:32:40) - They could maybe do an 80% cash out refinance. In my experience. What I've found, though, is that usually when someone pays for a property, all cash, no matter what mortgage rates do, they don't go back and get a mortgage on it. They just leave it paid all cash. That's what I always tend to see happen. Absolutely. And that's not a wrong way to go at all. I'll tell you what. And with appreciation built in and then, you know, all the other benefit tax write off benefits and those types of things. I mean, it ends up being a great place to put your cash if you had your cash, if you look at the full picture of the return. So to your point, people who go there temporarily end up staying there, right? Yeah, it goes from temporary to permanent and keep that paid off condition, even though it probably doesn't make a lot of financial sense. But it can depend on what situation. Well, in conclusion here, is there just anything else that an investor should know in general about the Little Rock market or Little Rock property or the particular renovations that you make to the property there? One thing just to point out kind of from an earlier part of our conversation about why, you know, the city is great for young professionals and had that Forbes ranking.   Speaker 1 (00:33:48) - And, you know, our cost of living here in Little Rock is 17% below the national average. So your money just goes further here. I believe. And I think that translates out right. And you know, at our unemployment is around 2%. So it's a very low unemployment rate. So the cost of living is lower your dollars go farther. Your tenants here tend to be more stable. There's job opportunities for them. So I think all of that builds into why Little Rock is a great investment market and why we see tenants stay in units for longer than their lease periods. As far as availability and quality of renovations, I mean, we certainly have availability. We have deals popping up all the time. I mean, we're known for our renovations and being at the top end of our renovations and a lot of our tenants come to us almost word of mouth. They've been in one of our rentals before with a friend or neighbor, and a lot of times they are knocking on our doors as we're renovating, asking when is this going to be available for rent? So a lot of it is reputation of product out there, even among the tenant population, not just the buyers out there.   Speaker 1 (00:34:53) - So I think those are some of the things we have going for us here. We continue on our our journey here. We've been investing in Little Rock since 1997, so we've got a great track record here and a lot of great experience. Yeah, Your volume of repeat investors that want to keep buying there is really a testimony to what you're doing. Well, thank you so much for sharing this. It's really an opportunity a lot of people don't know about or a lot of people don't think about. It's hard to find a more investor advantaged place than Little Rock, Arkansas, and surrounding central Arkansas. There for you, the listener from Marketplace, you'll see our little rock provider there or contact your investment coach If you don't have an investment coach yet, you can visit Marketplace com slash coach and pick your coach It's been great chatting about Little Rock. Oh yeah, a great chat about Little Rock. You know, one of the things that I visited while in Little Rock, it was the Clinton Presidential Library.   Speaker 1 (00:35:56) - It's worth checking out. But, you know, the one thing that I did not see, despite all the memorabilia and historic tributes to Bill Clinton there, there was not one mention, nothing about Monica Lewinsky. I could not find one in the whole place. I guess it's his library and he'll be remembered how he wants to be. But yeah, these numbers really work for investors 1200 to $1500 rent renovations like what we discussed in purchase prices of 115 to 140 K, So you can start with one of those properties or get a pack of these smaller sized single family rentals and then they can manage them all for you long term. They seek tenants for life there, quote unquote. So we're talking about working class, stable families now here in central Arkansas that should not be confused with higher priced areas out in northwest Arkansas. Okay. The provider and I were talking off air about a story that's emblematic of that area, Northwest Arkansas, a schoolteacher priced out of Bentonville. She couldn't find housing there. So she lives in a Fayetteville rental and commutes into Bentonville.   Speaker 1 (00:37:12) - Okay. Those are both northwest Arkansas cities. Of course, Bentonville is famously known as the Walmart headquarters. So we're not talking about northwest Arkansas here, which is an area that just doesn't work as well for long term rentals as Little Rock, central Arkansas. Forbes Even highlighting that Little Rock ranks as one of the top ten places for young professionals to live in, pointing out those super low house prices, Little Rock should be considered to see if it fits into your portfolio as a stable place with some of America's very best cash flows, which you can do is from Marketplace. You'll see our little rock provider there. If you want to connect with the provider yourself, you can also go directly to Marketplace slash Little Rock or if you prefer, contact your investment coach. It is free and Jerry marketplace slash coach until next week when I'll be back to help you build real estate wealth. I'm your host, Keith Winfield. Don't quit your day dream.   Speaker 4 (00:38:16) - Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice.   Speaker 4 (00:38:20) - 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 1 (00:38:44) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. Get rich education.  

The Fed can raise interest rates, but they cannot create housing supply.  Housing intelligence analyst Rick Sharga joins us for the second week in a row. This housing market is awful for primary residence homebuyers. But at GRE Marketplace, you can still buy income properties with rates as low as 4.75%. Rick tells us that the most prosperous markets now favor the: Midwest and Southeast, single-family homes, rental property investors with buy-and-hold strategies. National home prices are appreciating modestly. Home sales volume is still down. Investors now account for more than one-quarter of property purchases. Mortgage delinquencies are near an all-time low. Rick and I discuss why this market is so bad for flippers.  High homeowner equity positions ($300K+) support this housing market.  Timestamps: The impact of rising mortgage rates [00:02:37] Discussion on how the Federal Reserve's raising of short-term rates has caused mortgage rates to go up, affecting the housing market. The affordability challenge [00:03:38] Exploration of the impact of higher mortgage rates on homebuyers, particularly first-time buyers, and the decrease in affordability. Low supply of homes [00:08:48] Analysis of the low inventory of homes for sale, with a decrease of 9% from the previous year and 47% from 2019, leading to a challenging market. The mortgage rate lock in effect [00:11:05] Discussion on how the mortgage rate lock in effect can crimp demand but cannot create supply. Hottest markets in the Midwest and Southeast [00:11:05] Analysis of the hottest real estate markets in the Midwest and Southeast regions of the United States. Positive turn in home price appreciation [00:13:06] Explanation of how home price appreciation went down but has recently turned positive again. Housing Permits, Starts, and Construction [00:21:24] Discussion on the trends and levels of housing permits, starts, and construction, and the need for builders to increase production. Investor Activity in the Residential Market [00:22:28] Exploration of the percentage of home purchases made by investors, with a focus on small and medium-sized investors and the misconception of institutional investors dominating the market. Delinquencies and Foreclosures [00:24:36] Analysis of mortgage delinquency rates, foreclosure activity, and homeowner equity, highlighting the low delinquency rates, the presence of equity in foreclosed homes, and the importance of early-stage foreclosure sales. The future direction of rents [00:32:00] Discussion on the potential upward pressure on rents due to low affordability and high homeownership rate. Inventory coming to the market [00:33:03] Exploration of the impact of expensive inventory coming to the market and its effect on rent prices. The overall economy and housing market [00:34:03] Consideration of the possibility of a recession, unemployment spike, and foreclosures affecting the housing market. The coach's role in finding real estate deals [00:43:06] Explanation of how an investment coach can help you find the best real estate deals in the marketplace. Advantages of buying properties from marketplace [00:44:20] Reasons why buying properties from marketplace can lead to good deals, including lower prices and absence of emotional seller involvement. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/467 Rick Sharga’s website: CJPatrick.com Rick Sharga on X (Twitter): @RickSharga Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   (00:00:01) - Welcome to. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Hold a terrific discussion today on the direction of the housing market, including lessons that you can learn for all time plummeting home sales volume and direly low home inventory. Why home price appreciation is taking place now. Could the government soon penalize you for owning too many rental properties? What's the best place for a real estate investor to position themselves in this era? And more today on Get Rich Education.   (00:00:33) - You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get rich education.   (00:00:56) - Walking from Horseheads, New York to Nags Head, North Carolina, and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold. And you're listening. To get rich education, you are going to get a fantastic market update today. And along the way, you'll also learn lessons if you're consuming this 5 or 10 years from now. Our expert guest was with us last week to discuss the economy. This week, it's episode two of two as we discuss the real estate market.   (00:01:25) - He has been the executive VP of markets at some of America's leading housing intelligence firms, and today he's the founder and CEO of Patrick Company, either a market intelligence firm for the real estate and mortgage markets. And he has 20 plus years of experience in those industries. It's the return of Rick Saga Part two of two. It's not imperative that you listen to last week's Part one of two that we can help you see the big picture. Enjoy this long, unbroken interview and then after the break, I'll come back to close it. Just you and I. We're talking with Rick Sagar, expert housing analyst, previously. We talked about the general condition of the economy. And now Rick and I are going to break down the housing market with what's happening there. There's so definitively connected. Keith One of the things to that the Federal Reserve has done by raising those short term rates is caused mortgage rates to go up, right? Mortgage rates tend to run loosely in line with the yields on the ten year US Treasury bonds that we talked about at the end of the first segment.   (00:02:37) - Those are now up around 4%. And typically a 30 year fixed rate mortgage will be between one and a half and two percentage points higher than that yield. So in a normal market, we'd be looking at a mortgage rate today of about five and a half to 6%. Instead because of the risk and the volatility that the market is pricing in because they're not sure what the Federal Reserve is going to do next. We're looking at mortgage rates for a 30 year fixed rate loan of over 7%. The most recent numbers from last week from Freddie Mac, we were at almost 7.2% on that average, 30 year fixed rate loan and 6.5% on a 15 year fixed rate loan. You and I were talking before the show and and you know, historically speaking, if we keep these things in context, we're still actually below the 25 year average, which was 8%. But we have a whole generation of homebuyers who've come of age during the period of the lowest mortgage rates in the history of the country. They got spoiled, they got spoiled.   (00:03:38) - And to be clear, it's one of the reasons that home prices rose as rapidly as they did and got as high as they are is because you could afford to make monthly payments with a two and a half, three, 3.5% mortgage. Now, you still have home prices about as high as they were then, and you have a mortgage rate that's doubled. And for most home buyers, particularly first time home buyers that make your monthly mortgage payment was going to go up by 45 to 60%. And most of us didn't get that 45 to 60% raise last year. It really had a huge impact on affordability. In fact, this is such an unusual occurrence that according to Freddie Mac, it's the only time in US history when mortgage rates doubled during a calendar year and they didn't just double in a calendar year. Keith They doubled in the space in a few months. It was that kind of systemic shock to the system that really hit the housing market as hard as it did. Right. And they've also nearly tripled in a pretty short period of time.   (00:04:35) - Yeah, they really have. And again, going back historically speaking and and get this from Gen Z folks and millennials, when I talk about, you know, the old days of mortgage and I do remember my first mortgage had two numbers to the left of the decimal point. I forget if it was 11 or 12%, but it was something like that. And they basically say, okay, Boomer, but that 11% mortgage was on your $70,000 house, Right. And not, you know, today's median priced home of $430,000 or whatever it is. So it's a fair point. Mortgage rates are not high, historically speaking, but that monthly cost, because of the combination of home prices and higher interest rates, is choking some people and making affordability a problem. And because of that, one of the forward looking metrics that I take a look at is the purchase loan mortgage application index from the Mortgage Bankers Association. So this is the number of people that are applying for loans with the purpose of buying a house.   (00:05:35) - They're off almost 30% on a year over year basis right now. You can see without straining your eyes at all the impact that these higher mortgage rates are having on the housing market. And we had almost record numbers of purchase loan applications from the time people who are allowed out of their house during the pandemic until these mortgage rates doubled from 2020 through the early part of 2022, mortgage rates were in the threes and fours and sometimes even in the twos. Yeah, everyone wants to talk about mortgage rates and it is an important discussion to have here at Marketplace with our investment coaches. Rick Some builders, as you know, they commonly offer rate buy down incentives to buyers of new homes. And what some of our providers are doing here, Rick, is we have one builder where if you use their preferred lender, they're buying down your income property's mortgage rate to 5.75%. And we have another builder where if you use their preferred lender, they're still buying down your mortgage rate to 4.75%. And of course, with Non-owner occupied property here, you know, previously you had talked about mortgage rates in excess of seven.   (00:06:47) - They might normally be about 8% for non owner occupied property, but you're able to buy them down to five and three quarters or even four and three quarters with one of our providers for new builds right now, that's a great deal and your listener should really be taking advantage of those opportunities. We'll get into new homes in a few minutes and what we're seeing builders do for consumers, But have to tell you, those numbers are better deals than consumers are getting right now. And you're being generous when you're talking about private lending rates right now. Most of the lenders I'm familiar with are nine, ten, 11%, depending on the nature of your investment. So your folks are getting a great deal with those rates. We talked about purchase loan applications. The other advanced predictor I look at is pending home sales. These are people that are entering into contracts. The deal hasn't been closed yet. Has it been recorded yet? This comes out from the National Association of Realtors. And those numbers are down on a year over year basis as well.   (00:07:42) - There's a lot of rate sensitivity in the market, though, Keith. And if you go back to March when rates went down just a fraction of a percent, we saw more purchase loan applications. We saw more pending home sales. But as rates have climbed back up over seven, we've seen both of these metrics go down. Yeah. So we're talking about pending home sales. We're talking about sales volume that's down in this discussion, not sales price. And anyone might be hard to say, but when you see sales volume that's down, including pending sales, how often is that due to worse affordability and how often is that due to low supply of homes? Why don't we jump right into that? Keith That's a great segue. And this is a very difficult time in the housing market because it has both of the factors that you just mentioned, two very difficult headwinds for the market to try and overcome. And and we'll get into details on both of those in just a minute. Because of that, existing home sales were down in July and they were down pretty significantly on a year over year basis, about 16%.   (00:08:48) - And that's the 23rd consecutive month where existing home sales were lower than they were the prior year. January was the lowest month of sales this month, and it broke a streak we started this year. I was forecasting that we'd see between 4.3 and 4.4 existing home sales. That's down from about 5.2 last year in about 6.1 million the year before. Right now, we're trending at a little over 4 million existing home sales for the year. So even my relatively low forecast for the year may have been overly optimistic. You mentioned inventory and inventory is a huge headwind for the market. Inventory of homes for sale today is down about 9% from where it was a year ago. It's down 47% from where we were in 2019, which was probably the last normal year we've had in the housing market. In a normal year, we would be looking at about a six month supply of homes available for sale. That's what economists or housing market analysts will look at as a balanced market balance between supply and demand. We're at about two and a half months supply right now nationally and in many states it's much lower than that.   (00:09:56) - So there's just not much out here. And the only reason the inventory number looks as good as it looks and it doesn't look very good is because it's taking a little longer to sell properties once they hit the market. If you were looking at new listing data, it's even worse. There's very little inventory coming to market in the way of new listings, and that's because of the rate increases we talked about a minute ago. 90% of borrowers with a mortgage have an interest rate on that mortgage of 6% or less. 70% have an interest rate of 4% or less. If you're sitting on a mortgage rate of 3.5% and you sell your house and buy a house at the same exact price with a 7% mortgage, you've just doubled your monthly mortgage payment. It's not that people psychologically don't want to trade a low rate for a high rate. There's a financial penalty for them doing so. And until we see mortgage rates come down a bit, probably into the fives, we're just not going to see a lot of inventory coming to market except for homeowners who need to sell or have so much equity and maybe you're going to downsize into a smaller property that they don't care about that kind of shift.   (00:11:05) - Yeah, that is the mortgage rate lock in effect. Perfectly explain. And the Fed with the raising rates, they can crimp demand. But one thing that the Fed cannot do is create supply. As much as you might like to see Jerome Powell in work boots with a nail gun, that just doesn't happen. There's an image for you, for your listeners. Yeah, and I'm not sure I'd want to. I'd want to live in that house. That's not Chairman Powell building, but inspection. Yeah. Good economist. Maybe not a carpenter. We were talking about this a little bit earlier, too. And if you're an investor, this is probably worth noting, whether you're a fix and flip investor or investor who's buying properties to rent out a lot of the interest. This is from the sharing some data from Realtor.com and they've taken a look at where people are searching for properties and where transactions are taking place and they're finding that Midwest Southeast are really the hottest markets, places that are a little off the beaten path, you know, places in New Hampshire and Connecticut and Maine and Ohio and Wisconsin.   (00:12:06) - But interestingly, some of the markets that had been suffering a little bit, they're starting to see a little more interest in whether it's California, but off the coast or markets in Colorado or Washington state. But clearly, a lot of the activity, a lot of the money is moving into the Midwest, in southeast. That's right. With the work from anywhere trend, you might see this small flattening and not as much of a disparity in home prices between markets. You're certainly still going to see that, but that can just help create a mild flattening when it doesn't matter where you live anymore and you can go ahead and purchase in lower cost markets. Yeah, and what I'm sharing now is national home prices, home price. And I'm glad you mentioned what you just did, Keith, because the fact of the matter is this has been a very localized correction. And if you're in San Francisco or San Jose, if you're in Seattle, if you're in Austin, if you're in Phoenix, you're in markets where prices are off 10% or more from peak.   (00:13:06) - If you're in Boise, Idaho, you're off more than 10% from peak of Boise had oil prices go up by 47% in a single year, a year or so ago. So he just overshot the mark. One of the reasons the national numbers don't show more volatility is because of what Keith just mentioned. It's because people are trading in where they are in a high price, high tax state moving into a lower price state and candidly outbidding local buyers and probably overpaying a little bit for those properties. So you're seeing home prices go up in some of those less expensive markets much more rapidly than they would under normal circumstances. And what we're talking about here is national home prices that are appreciating at a modest rate now. Yeah, and they are. So if you look at whether you're looking at the Case-Shiller index, it gets published monthly or the National Association of Realtors data. We saw home price appreciation start to go down last year. It was still positive but going down and that was true until pretty much the end of the first quarter this year when the data went negative for the first time in years.   (00:14:15) - So we were seeing on both a month over month and year over year basis home prices go down and that happened until June, June, things flatlined in July. Prices actually went up ah, year over year. So if you're looking at the median home price compared to the peak price a year ago, it's actually up about 1% from where we were last year, which is kind of amazing. The Case-Shiller index is a little bit of a lagging indicator and it rolls three months together, but it also started to turn the corner with its July report. So after almost a full year of price appreciation coming down and prices in decline, we've seen both of these indexes turn and are starting to go positive. It does show you that there continues to be demand for properties that are brought to market. And while home price appreciation certainly isn't soaring by any means, it's back in positive territory now. And that's something that a lot of people hadn't predicted this year. When the supply of homes is this low, it keeps generating a few bids for any available home.   (00:15:21) - Now, not as many bids as it did back in 2021. But besides generating bids, you have these huge population cohorts of millennials and Gen Zers that are growing, and they're in their prime homebuyer years moving through the system to go ahead and place those bids and keep just modest home price appreciation here lately. That's sort of how I see it. Rick If you want to add any color or thoughts to that, I think you're spot on. Keith It's the largest cohort of young adults between the ages of 25 and 34 in US history. That's prime age for forming a household. 33 to 34 is the average age of a first time buyer right now. And so these people would like to buy a house. And for people who are investing in single family rental properties in particular, at least short term, the affordability issue is something that definitely works in your favor. If somebody was looking to buy a house, they might prefer to rent a house rather than rent an apartment. I've read research that shows somewhere between 20 and 30% of people who had planned to buy have decided to rent for the next year or two while market conditions settle down or while they can put aside more money for a down payment.   (00:16:27) - These market conditions are playing in favor of people who have rental properties to offer. One other metric I'd like to share in terms of home prices, Keith is the FHFa puts out its own index. FHFa is the government entity that controls Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. So these are your conventional bread and butter, vanilla kind of 30 year fixed rate loans. If you look at their portfolio, home prices are actually up 3.1% year over year. And every sector of the country is showing positive rice appreciation except for the Pacific states and the mountain states. And those are some of the markets we talked about earlier. And even those are very close to breaking even at this point. So HFA breaks it into about ten regions, nine of those ten currently appreciating year over year. Yep, something like that important for you to know again as an investor as to what's happening in your region. Again, whether you're you're planning to sell the property or rent it out. You talked about what builders are doing for your investor folks.   (00:17:28) - Yeah, we're seeing new home sales actually improving to consumers as well for a lot of the same reasons, incentives. So a lot of builders are coming to the closing table with cash. They're paying points on mortgages and getting those rates down where they're short term or long term. They're offering discounts, they're offering upgrades to properties. And so new home sales are still down, but just slightly on a year over year basis and have actually been beating last year's numbers for the last four months. My original estimate for new home sales this year was about 600,000. I think we're going to probably coming closer to 675,000 this year. And the only reason we won't sell more is because the builders aren't building that fast enough. But one of the reasons people are buying these new homes is because that's what's on the market today. People would have bought an existing home, can't find one. Here's the other factor. New home prices are down 16.4% from last year's peak. Now, this is informative. Think this would surprise a lot of people? Well, it surprises me.   (00:18:28) - It should surprise people because new home prices almost always go up, right? This does not mean builders are discounting homes 16.4%. What's happening is they are building less expensive homes, They're less expensive per square foot, and they're building smaller homes. And they're doing that in acknowledgement of the higher cost of financing. That also, by the way, is in sending people to look at these properties as either a starter home or a minor move up kind of property. But it is one of the reasons why new home sales are doing better than existing home sales right now on a percentage basis. That's an interesting number, Rick. A few weeks ago, I shared with our newsletter audience that builders are building homes smaller and closer together, which might be reflected in lower prices, but just didn't think it would be 16.4% lower from peak. Now, if you're doing year over year, it's probably not that big of a drop, but from the peak price we are off. And it is to your point, it's a pretty significant number.   (00:19:26) - It would be a problematic number if it was the existing home market, right, because then you'd be looking at the same property being worth 16% less. But a builder can kind of play with those numbers a little bit. Single family housing starts after falling for quite a while, are now back going back up only slightly from where they were a year ago, but they are moving in the right direction. Multifamily starts have actually tailed off a little bit after reaching record high numbers. There could be as many as a million apartment units coming to market this year. Yeah, which would be an all time record. So we've seen building on those multifamily units slow down a little bit. If you look at at new home starts for single family properties still below where they were a year ago. But again, for the first time in quite a few months, starting to trend up. A couple of things to share with your viewers here, Keith. In terms of construction, we're seeing construction continue to grow in the multifamily market because of all the starts we saw previously.   (00:20:23) - We are seeing single family construction slowed down, but that's because the builders are working their way through a glut of homes that was under construction. So we had a really weird happenstance about a year ago, a little over year, we had the highest number of homes under construction ever. And this data goes back to the early 1970s, and we had the lowest number of completed properties available for sale ever. And a lot of that was due to supply chain delays and to labor shortages. And over the last year to 15 months, the builders have gradually begun working through this glut of homes that were started but not finished. And we've seen the number of completed homes go up a little bit, almost back to normal levels, not quite there. One of the reasons they're not quite there is people are buying these homes before they're completed. They're working with the builder. Buying a home is it's almost ready to go, but still under construction. What's been encouraging, looking into the future is that permitting has increased a bit over the last two quarters.   (00:21:24) - We know builders are betting on the future. They're not necessarily breaking ground on all these properties they have permits for because they don't want to oversaturate either. And they're being very judicious with their building because they got caught with a ton of inventory during the Great Recession that they wound up selling at fire sale prices. But the trends are long term, looking like they're going in the right direction right now for new homes. So to help the viewer and listeners chronologically, we're talking about housing permits followed by housing starts. And then finally, housing construction. Right? Permits are up, starts are up recently, but down year over year. And the construction numbers are getting back close to normal levels. And we need the builders to build more because even before the rate lock effect took effect and existing home inventory got so scarce we didn't have enough housing in the works, we were depending on whose numbers you believe, somewhere between 2 and 6 million units short. We need the builders to come back to market. Note for your folks.   (00:22:28) - Keith Investors continue to account for a fairly significant amount of activity in the residential market. Over a quarter of home purchases 26% in June, which is the most recent data we have, were made by investors and believe this number actually under reports the number of investor purchases because it's from a company called CoreLogic, it's accurate data for what they count, but they only count investor purchases where the buying entity has an LLC and LP Corp kind of entity. And we know that a lot of buyers don't do that who are investors. So it probably understates it. But the fact of the matter is that historically speaking, 26% of residential purchases being done by investors is pretty high number. That's a pretty high number and as you alluded to, is probably actually higher than 26% of home purchases being made by investors. And so the headlines will breathlessly tell you that Main Street is being gobbled up by Wall Street. Oh, I know. And those institutional investors are evil people. They're buying everything that the truth is is completely the opposite.   (00:23:31) - If you look at investors who are buying properties, it's really the small investors who are buying about 46% of those investor purchases and medium sized investors about 35%. If you're looking at the biggest of the big investors, they're buying less than 10% of what's going out today. And they still own collectively about 3% of the single family rental stock. It's the mom and pop investor who continues to drive the market. Yeah, I'm glad you bring this up, Rick, because there seems to be this outsized perception that institutional money through someone like, say, in Invitation homes is just gobbling up all the good investor homes. And and they're really not. It's mom and pop investors that rule. In fact, there's some legislation pending in D.C. right now that's aimed to keep these institutional investors from doing what they're already not doing and have some tax penalties for anybody who owns. Here's the number that's important. More than 50 properties well, Invitation Homes owns significantly more than 50 properties. I know a lot of medium sized investors who own more than 50 properties.   (00:24:36) - Yeah, they're certainly not institutional investors. They certainly don't have a hedge fund behind them. Important again, for folks in this market to be in touch with their legislators and let them know what's really going on in the marketplace so we don't get this kind of bad legislation. It makes it tough for the average investor to really take full advantage of the opportunities that are out there. 100%. Mom and pop investors might need more than 50 units to obtain financial freedom. Yep. Just to wrap up, Keith, a couple of points on delinquencies and foreclosures. I know a lot of investors got into the business, you know, a decade or so ago and there was just a rash of foreclosure activity and you could buy a distressed property by just walking down the street and knocking on doors. It's a little different these days because of that strong economy we talked about earlier. In that low unemployment rate. Mortgage delinquencies are at an all time low. Mortgage Bankers Association reported that the midpoint of this year, at the end of the second quarter, the total delinquency rate was 3.37%.   (00:25:36) - To put that in context, historically the number is somewhere between 4 and 5%. So not only are we not seeing a lot of delinquencies, we're seeing less than we would see normally as seriously delinquent loans. The ones that are 90 days plus past due is as low as we've seen it in probably the last 6 or 7 years. That's really interesting. So not very many homeowners are in trouble with making their payments, which to some people might seem like a conflict with what we described back in the earlier part of the chat about low savings and higher credit card debt. So many of these homeowners are locked in to these really low payments where they got low mortgage interest rates. Plus inflation cannot touch those fixed rate payments. And that's an important point for those people that are in these homes. It would be more expensive for them to go rent right now, probably because they got such a good deal on the mortgage rate. There's usually a pretty strong correlation between unemployment rates and mortgage delinquency rates. So I mentioned that the most recent report had unemployment at 3.8%.   (00:26:37) - I think at the end of June it was a 3.5%. So we might see delinquency rates tick up a little bit. There was also some really bad social media memeing going on during the government's mortgage forbearance program. There was even an economist who predicted that almost everybody who got a forbearance was going to go into default and that would have been a catastrophe. If you look back a little over a year ago, actually more like two years ago when there was there were a lot of people in forbearance. You saw delinquency rates very high, but that was because people were allowed to miss payments. They were just being counted by the industry as delinquent. The fact is that less than a half of a percent, less than one half of 1% of the borrowers who were in forbearance and there were 8.5 million of them have defaulted on their loans. The overwhelming majority have done very, very well with that program. So it really didn't contribute to any kind of delinquency or default activity. So strong economy, extremely high, low quality because lenders really haven't been making many risky loans since the Great Recession.   (00:27:40) - The record amount of of homeowner equity that's out there. Yeah. Is keeping this market pretty solid to the point where foreclosure activity today is still running at a little bit less than 60% of pre-pandemic levels. So in a normal market, about 1 to 1.5% of loans are in some state of foreclosure. In today's market, it's about a half a percent. So we're just not seeing much go into foreclosure and the properties that go into foreclosure. The homeowners have a significant amount of equity. 92% of borrowers in foreclosure have equity in their homes, which is wildly different from where we were during the great financial crisis, when a third of all homeowners were underwater on their loans. At just about everybody in foreclosure was upside down. And people push back at me when I'm out talking at conferences about this. Keith Oh, yeah, they have equity, but they don't have enough equity to make a difference. Oh, yes, they do. 88% of the borrowers in foreclosure have more than 20% equity. That's typically the magic number that a realtor will tell you you need in order to sell your property and avoid any other kind of complications with one of these foreclosures, preventing any sort of fire sale and lowering of prices that makes all home prices go down in a neighborhood where not anywhere near that.   (00:28:57) - No, not at all. And in fact, some other data that I'll share with you and your listeners is that about 62% of the distressed property sales we see right now are properties in the early stage of foreclosure prior to the foreclosure auction, which means these distressed homeowners are protecting their equity by selling the property before it gets sold at a foreclosure sale. And so they're protecting the vast amount of this equity. But if you're an investor in today's market, there's some really important information in what I just gave you. You can't wait for the bank repossession. In this cycle, bank repossessions are running 70% below where they were prior to the pandemic, so there's fewer properties getting to auction because 67% of these distressed property sales are prior to the auction. Properties that get to auction are selling through at about 60% rate. So there's nothing going back to the lenders. So if you want to buy a property in some stage of foreclosure, your best bet in today's market is to get a list of people in the early stages of foreclosure and reach out directly to them.   (00:30:01) - Your second best bet is to get to that foreclosure auction. Be ready to move at the auction, and your worst bet is to wait for the lender to repossess the property. And in fact, I've seen anecdotal data that suggests that those properties are actually more expensive than the ones you could buy from the homeowner or at the auction because the lenders are fixing them up and selling them at full market price. Good guidance for those chasing distressed properties. So that's what's going on in the foreclosure market. I don't see foreclosure activity being back to normal levels until sometime next year. And I don't see activity bank repossessions being back to normal levels even next year. It's a very different marketplace. This is what I was just talking about. Keith If you were to break up what selling and what stage of the foreclosure process right now, about 64% of distressed sales are taking place prior to the foreclosure auction and less than 20%. Distressed sales today are those background properties. So it's a very different world than what a lot of investors grew up in.   (00:31:03) - Rick is about to share his summary with us, his closing thoughts. Before he does that, I've got two questions for you, Rick. I hear some people out there, it seems to be oftentimes the real estate agent type, maybe that's trying to be a big cheerleader for the market. And I hear a few of them say something like, hey, you know what? You better buy now, because when mortgage rates fall, home prices are really going to shoot through the roof. I don't really know that that necessarily happens because when mortgage rates fall, okay, that might increase demand of capable homebuyers, but it should also increase supply. Now, the mortgage rate lock in effect, goes away and more people will want to bring supply onto the market. And I also like to think about what happens when rates are falling. Typically, that means the economy needs help and unemployment might be a little higher. So my thoughts, Rick, are if mortgage rates do fall substantially, that might help home price appreciation a little bit, but I don't see it as any sure thing that that would make home prices go through the roof.   (00:32:00) - What are your thoughts? It's a great question. You make a very logical argument. A lot of it comes down to supply. And that's where I would hedge my bets. I don't think we see a ton of supply come back to market until rates are back in the low fives. So there's a point and a half of interest going from little over seven to maybe 5.5%, where we're probably going to see more buyers come to market than we're going to see inventory come to the market. My other thought we touched on it earlier is with rents. Talk to me about the future direction of rents. They were horribly hot a year or two ago, up 15% year over year. Rents have moderated substantially. But with this really lousy home affordability and a high homeownership rate, it seems like with this low affordability, we're set up for the homeownership rate to go lower in the proportion that rent go higher, which could put upward pressure on rents over time here. What are your thoughts with rents? Yeah, offsetting what you just said is a record number of apartment units coming to market this year.   (00:33:03) - There are likely to be some markets across the country that wind up oversupplied because of the amount of inventory coming to market. Now, don't get me wrong, the inventory coming to market is going to tend to be expensive inventory. And so that in and of itself could make rent prices come up a bit. I do believe in the short term I would tend to agree with you that the lack of housing stock available for people who would like to buy is going to play in the benefit of the folks who own properties to rent. And that will, I believe, be particularly true for people that own single family residential units that are like houses to rent. I guess we're going to split the difference on these two questions. I'm going to mostly agree with you on the second one. I do believe there's a chance prices will go up a little bit more than you think as mortgage rates come down until we get down to about 5.5%, mortgage rates are lower when we see more of that inventory coming to market. And what is the real wild card in all of this, of course, is what happens with the overall economy.   (00:34:03) - Do we enter a recession? Does unemployment spike? If that's the case, that should weaken, demand a bit and you could have a little bit of an uptick in foreclosures, which will weaken the market as well. So a lot of different components at play. And I think what people ask you questions like that, Keith, about, you know, mortgage rates come down, is this going to happen? They kind of oversimplify the equation quite a bit. There are a lot of other variables that go into it. 100%. Why don't you go ahead and share your closing thoughts with us? A lot of stuff we covered, so I won't dwell on too much of this very long. But from my perspective, a recession is still a real possibility. Probably not until next year if we have one. And if we do, it's likely to be pretty mild and fairly short and we shouldn't see a huge, huge spike in unemployment. I do believe that as the Fed decides it's done raising the Fed funds rate and announces that we'll see mortgage rates gradually decline back toward 6% by the end of this year.   (00:34:57) - And we'll be back in the fives next year. And by the way, historically, every time the Fed has stopped raising the Fed funds rate, we have seen mortgage rates come back down. Existing home sales right now are on pace for their lowest number since 2009. Likely, we're going to see somewhere in the neighborhood of 4.2 million existing home sales. But we're likely to see more new home sales than a lot of people had forecast beginning of this year, maybe 650, 675,000 of those sales in 2023. And we've seen prices decline in the new home market, but they might have bottomed out in the existing home market because of the supply and demand thing that Keith and I have kind of beaten to death during this podcast. Again, importantly for this audience, investors continue to account for a very large percentage of residential purchases and a lot of you seem to be shifting toward buy and hold strategies, which again makes ultimately good sense in a market like today's. And then that anticipated wave of foreclosures that all those folks on YouTube were trying to sell you courses to figure out how to maximize never materialized.   (00:35:57) - And at least during this cycle, not likely to any time soon. Probably won't. Yes, A lot of people a couple of years ago, especially on YouTube, were talking about a certain price collapse is coming and it never happened. And I never saw how it would have happened and I never made those sort of dire predictions. Well, Rick, this was a great chat about the overall economy, the housing market and what investors need with the housing market. I'm sure our audience learned an awful lot. It was a terrific update. If our audience wants to learn more about you and kind of wish this chat would just go on and they could learn more about you and engage with your resources. What's the best way for them to do that? Well, you can certainly follow me on social media. I refuse to say my Twitter handle is just Rick Saga. I'm on LinkedIn to hard to find there. You can also check out my website which is Patrick. Com. Enjoy doing these conversations with you Keith.   (00:36:51) - Think the first time we talked you reached out because I had come down like the wrath of God on somebody who was predicting a housing price crash because I didn't see one coming either and thought he was doing investors a disservice. So keep the faith and keep the good fight going. Keith And I'll be here whenever you want to talk. Jerry Listeners can't stop talking about their service from Ridge Lending Group and MLS 42056. They have provided our tribe with more loans than anyone there truly a top lender for beginners and veterans. It's where I go to get my own loans for single family rental property up to four Plex's. So start your pre-qualification and you can chat with President Charlie Ridge personally, though, even deliver your custom plan for growing your real estate portfolio. Start at Ridge Lending Group. Com. You know, I'll just tell you for the most passive part of my real estate investing personally, I put my own dollars with freedom family investments because their funds pay me a stream of regular cash flow in. Returns are better than a bank savings account up to 12%.   (00:38:00) - Their minimums are as low as 25. K. You don't even need to be accredited. For some of them, it's all backed by real estate and I kind of love how the tax benefit of doing this can offset capital gains in your W-2, jobs, income. And they've always given me exactly their stated return paid on time. So it's steady income, no surprises while I'm sleeping or just doing the things I love. For a little insider tip, I've invested in their power fund to get going on that text family to 668660. And this isn't a solicitation If you want to invest where I do, just go ahead and text family to six six, eight six, six. Hi, this is Russell Gray, co-host of the Real Estate Guy's radio show. And you're listening to Get Rich Education with Keith Reinhold. Don't Quit Your Day dream. Yeah, terrific insight from Rick, as usual. It's remarkable how much this interview is aligned with what we're doing here. As Rick discussed how, though, it's a tough environment for homebuyers, it's better for investors, especially for single family rentals and especially in the Midwest and South are core areas.   (00:39:23) - It's a better market for the buy and hold investor than it is for flippers. It's a tough chase for flippers. Sometimes you don't flip the house, the house flips you. There are still so few homeowners in delinquency and foreclosure. Rick believes that when lower mortgage rates come, home, prices could appreciate more than I tend to think. We'll see how that turns out. And, you know, historically here, as we talk about the direction of home prices and the direction of rent growth Now with respect to home prices, when I provided you with the home price appreciation forecast, I keep somewhat undershooting. The market appreciation tends to outperform what I think by just a bit. Back in 2018, 2019, home price appreciation rates, they were just kind of bumping along at 4 or 5%. Back then, interest rates were super low, housing supply was more balanced. And I said right here on this show then about five years ago, that I don't see what will make home price growth like really accelerate or shoot up from here.   (00:40:32) - Well, then we had the pandemic, something that no one saw coming when the pandemic fog cleared. You remember that all here on the show in late 2021, I forecast 9 to 10% home price appreciation for the coming year, which back then I was talking about 2022. And then that appreciation rate for 2022 came in at 10.2%. Although I was close, I shot just a touch low. Now at the end of 2022, well, about nine months ago, I predicted zero home price appreciation for this year. As we near the fourth quarter, it looks like we'll get low single digit appreciation, but that remains to be seen. However, I've long been undershooting the market just a bit, though. Close and mortgage rates. No, don't even ask me. I don't try I don't make mortgage forecast. That is too hard to do. Making a mortgage rate prediction is almost like a certain way to be wrong. Although Rick and I talked about how this is a good market for investors, to my point from last week, in some markets, cash flow has become an endangered species with some of these increasing expenses for investors.   (00:41:46) - And again, I have some really good news for you here. We have largely solved that problem here at Gray of higher mortgage rates, hurting your cash flow. And that's why investors like you are still snapping up rental properties from Marketplace right now because of the strength of our marketplace network and relationships. Here we have a new build provider offering a mortgage rate to investors of 5.75%. Yes, they will see that your rate is bought down to 5.75%. In today's environment, another new build investment property provider is offering a rate buy down to 4.75%. Yes, you heard THAtrillionIGHT? And we have another builder provider where our investment coaches have been sharing with you a 2.99% seller financing option. There is more to it than that. And these builders, though they are in business to move property. So take advantage of it where you can. And besides buying down your mortgage rate for you like that, some are even waiving their property management fee for you for the first year. In addition to buying down the rate. I don't know how long all that's going to last, so this can be a really good time for you to contact your in investment coach.   (00:43:06) - Your coach will help you shop the marketplace properties, tell you where the real deals are and tell you how to get those improbably low mortgage rates for income properties. Today, your coach guides you and makes it easy for you If you don't have an investment coach yet, just go to Marketplace. Com slash coach and they're there to help you out. And marketplace properties they are often less expensive than elsewhere in addition to the low rates from some of the providers. But now you might wonder why often are the prices not always, but often, why are they lower? Well, first of all, investor advantage markets just intrinsically have lower prices than the national median. And secondly, there is no real estate agent to compensate with the traditional 6% commission, you are buying more directly. Thirdly, these property providers, they are not. And pop flippers that provide investors like you and other people where they just flip like one home a year instead. These are builders and renovation and management companies in business to do this at scale so they get to buy their materials in bulk, keeping the price lower for you.   (00:44:20) - And another reason that you tend to find good deals at Marketplace is that you aren't buying properties from owner occupants where their emotions get involved and they get irrational over there on the seller side. So you can go ahead and get started with off market deals at GRI, marketplace.com. If you'd like the free coaching from our investment coaches, then contact your coach. And if you don't have one yet again you can do that straight at GRI marketplace.com/coach that's an action item for you this week that your future self should thank you for until next week. I'm your host Keith Winfield. Don't quit your day dream.   (00:45:04) - 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.   (00:45:32) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building get rich education.

In many world nations, if you’re born poor, you stay poor. I discuss how in America, you can be upwardly mobile. Back in 2010, real estate prices had fallen, but rents had not. This created years of cash flow. Today, as prices have outpaced rents, cash flow keeps shrinking. Our Investment Coaches have access to income properties with 4.75% and 5.75% mortgage interest rates. It's a way to "bring back cash flow". Get started at GREmarketplace.com/Coach Terrific housing intelligence analyst Rick Sharga joins us for the first of two consecutive episodes. Rick & I discuss the condition of the American consumer, inflation and interest rates, concerns about a potential economic downturn, the housing market, the impact of consumer confidence on spending, and the actions taken by the Federal Reserve to control inflation.  There’s flagging consumer confidence and a yield curve inversion. Are these finally harbingers of an economic recession? Rick’s informal survey of economists find that there’s a 50-50 chance of a recession this cycle. Earlier this year, 80% of economists felt that a recession was imminent. If there is a recession this cycle, Rick thinks there’s a probability that it will be mild. Average hourly wages are $28-29 / hour. Wage growth is 4-5%. Wages are finally running higher than home price appreciation. Timestamps: The Future of Real Estate Investing [00:01:33] Discusses how owning real estate can help individuals move into a different wealth class and the benefits of owning rental properties. Changes in the Real Estate Market [00:04:06] Explains how the real estate market has changed over the years, with property prices catching up to rents and the decrease in cash flow opportunities. Taking Advantage of Low Mortgage Rates [00:07:53] Highlights the opportunity for investors to take advantage of low mortgage rates offered by builders and the benefits of using their preferred lenders. (Yes, even here in 2023. We have 4.75% and 5.75% rates that builders buy down.) The housing market correction [00:11:31] Discussion on the correction in the housing market and its localized impact on different regions. Economic landscape of the United States [00:16:09] Overview of the US economy, including GDP growth and the strength of consumer spending. Wage growth and home price appreciation [00:20:16] Comparison of wage growth outpacing home price growth, impacting housing market affordability. Consumer Confidence and Spending [00:21:24] The correlation between consumer confidence and spending during the pandemic, the impact of subsequent waves of COVID, and the role of pent-up consumer demand and government stimulus. Red Flags in Consumer Spending [00:22:25] The disconnect between consumer spending and low confidence scores, the record level of consumer credit card use, and the decrease in personal savings rates. Inflation and the Federal Reserve [00:25:44] The high inflation rate in 40 years, the actions taken by the Federal Reserve to control inflation, the impact on housing costs, and the potential for a recession. Yield Curve Inversion and Recession Predictions [00:31:07] Discussion on the yield curve inversion and its historical correlation with recessions. Impact of Recession on the Housing Market [00:32:04] Exploration of the potential impact of a recession on the housing market. Part Two: State of the Housing Market and Future of Investment Real Estate [00:33:03] Teaser for the next episode, which will analyze the state of the housing market and the future of investment real estate. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/466 Rick Sharga on X (Twitter): @RickSharga Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Keith Weinhold (00:00:01) - Welcome to. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Today, it's part one of two of my exclusive interview with one of the nation's foremost housing intelligence analysts. How's the condition of today's American consumer? What's the future of inflation, the Fed interest rates? And should you really be concerned about a downturn today on get rich education?   Corey Coates (00:00:28) - 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 (00:00:51) - Welcome from Orange County, Florida, to Orange County, California, and across 188 nations worldwide. You're listening to one America's longest running and most listened to shows on real estate. With nearly nine years of weekly episodes. You're listening to Get Rich Education. I'm your host, Keith Wine expert, housing and mortgage analyst Rick Sugar is back and he is figuratively waiting in the wings. Here to give us an update on the economy shortly. In many nations of the world, if you are born poor, you stay poor. It's really hard to change wealth classes because you can't own anything in so many world places.   Keith Weinhold (00:01:33) - If you're born middle class, you also stay middle class. There's no way out of that. Owning real estate is the number one way to move yourself into a different wealth class. Owning your own business is another way, but with owning real estate, it's quite easy to follow a template and do what someone else has already done. Within a proven system. You don't have to have a new out-of-the-box business idea. For example, in the US, if you start collecting assets that pay you each month, you can quickly become upwardly mobile. In America, even if you were born into poverty and have a long line of impoverishment in your family, you can own your own home and that can help you go from poor to middle class. You can add rental properties and go from poor or middle class to wealthy because if you're in the US you are allowed to own things. Yeah, keep accumulating properties and keep getting rent money from tenants. In so many nations of the world. If you come from modest means, you just cannot get dozens of people or hundreds of people to pay you one third of their income every month.   Keith Weinhold (00:02:52) - But here you can get all these tenants to pay you one third of their salary in rent so you can close that class divide. It's up to you. That's what makes the US great. You can move into a different wealth class, the GSEs, the government sponsored enterprises. They will even give you backing on a bank loan so that you can do this. They're really encouraging this and enticing you to do this with as little as a 3% down payment on your primary residence or 20% down on rental properties. It's like they're almost forcing you to succeed. And there's even a 1% down program for primary residences now available in some places. So the bank gives you the loan, the tenant pays you the rent, and the government gives you the tax break. Like I say, that right there is using other people's money three ways at the same time, the bank, the tenant and the government, it all sort of falls in your lap if you want it to, but you do have to ask for it and you do have to do some arranging and you need to be diligent and attentive to.   Keith Weinhold (00:04:06) - But most Americans, they just aren't wise to this. Now, the real estate market, it has changed from a few years ago. It was spring of 2020 where we had that big inflection point, as you know, because I often discuss it. That was that supply crash. And since that time, home prices have run up faster than rents. But I'd like to give you some broader perspective here. There's something important with real estate investing that you may not have realized coming out of the global financial crisis 2008, 2009, 2010. At 2010, when we really started to lift up out of the rubble because by 2010, property prices were still down low. They were near the rock bottom. They're even lower than replacement costs in a lot of markets, which was artificially low. But see, rents didn't really fall much in the GFC. Rents stayed the same. So you know what happened in 2010 and all the years following it will cash flow began. And that's because all over America you then had these high rents and low purchase prices that had been beaten down by the GFC.   Keith Weinhold (00:05:18) - Cash flow like that wasn't really normal, but by now property prices have caught up to rents and even surpassed them. So besides investors being used to low mortgage rates, these ultra low rates, they also got used to this ultra high ratio of rent income to purchase price. That's just not there like it used to be. So today, in more places, you can't expect much of anything for cash flow now with a few years of. Income property ownership. Say if you bought something late this year, a few years later, now you shouldn't count on it. But rents, as we know, historically rise to then start providing you with cash flow to complement the other four ways that you're simultaneously paid. So my point is that today the deals aren't as good as they were ten years ago and five years ago, and that is all part of the provenance and perspective that I'm sharing with you from the real estate investing landscape starting from back around 15 years ago. But today I posit that it is still difficult to find a better place to invest a dollar than with a loan on carefully bought income property.   Keith Weinhold (00:06:31) - And I have some really good news for you here. All right. We know higher mortgage rates. They're not just a pain point for first time homebuyers and second time homebuyers for that matter, but they're a pain point for you, the investor. Well, if you didn't already know, we have largely sort of that problem here at Gray. And that is why investors like you are still snapping up rental properties fast. From Marketplace today, owner occupied mortgage rates are about 7% in income. Property rates are about 8%. But because of the strength of our marketplace networks and relationships here we have one new build provider offering a mortgage rate of 5.75%. Yes, they will see that your mortgage rate is bought down to 5.75% for your purchase. Yes, right here in today's environment, another new build investment property provider is offering a buy down to 4.75%. Yes, you heard that right. And we have another builder provider where our investment coaches have been sharing with you a 2.99% seller financing option. So is cash flow back? Yes, a lot of times it is.   Keith Weinhold (00:07:53) - The builders know that it's a pain point for buyers and our coaches and I hear a Gary know it too, So we have rubbed salve on the wound here, I suppose. 5.75% interest rates, 4.75 or even 2.99. At times you'll have to use the builders preferred lender to get those terms. Otherwise I like to use Ridge lending Group because they specialize in income property loans. There is even more to it. These builders are in business to move property, so take advantage of it. And besides buying down your mortgage rate for you like that, some are even waiving their property management fee for you for the first year, in addition to buying down the rate and don't know how long all this is going to last. So this could be a really good time for you to contact your investment coach. Your coach will help you shop the marketplace properties, tell you where the real deals are and tell you how to get those improbably low mortgage rates for income properties. Your coach guides you and makes it easy for you If you don't have an investment coach yet, just go to Marketplace slash coach and they're there to help you out.   Keith Weinhold (00:09:11) - Hey, it's really great to have the savvy and the experience of Rick Shaka back on the show today. His mind is always in the market. He's often doing these public speaking appearances informing audiences about it. He's been the executive vice president of markets at some of America's leading housing intelligence firms. We have so much to discuss that Today's episode is part one of two back to back episodes with Rick. This week, we'll discuss the direction of the economy. Next week, we'll go deep on the housing market. But even our discussion on the economy today is probably going to be viewed through the lens of having real estate investors in mind. So this intelligence is fresh and it is timely here in fall of 2023. But even if you're listening to this, a decade from now, in 2033, you are going to get lessons for all time. It's the economy this week and the real estate market next week. It could be a day or two until we have today's episode on Get Rich Education YouTube. But you can watch us there as well if you want the visuals and charts that complement our discussion.   Keith Weinhold (00:10:19) - Many of the sources that he cites today will be from Trading economics in the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. What's the present and future of the economy, especially as it pertains to real estate investor interest with Rick and I straight ahead. I'm Keith Reinhold in this is get rich education. Jerry listeners can't stop talking about their service from Ridge Lending Group and MLS 42056. They've provided our tribe with more lows than anyone. They're truly a top lender for beginners and veterans. It's where I go to get my own loans for single family rental property up to four Plex's So start your prequalification and you can chat with President Charlie Ridge personally, though, even deliver your custom plan for growing your real estate portfolio. Start at Ridge Lending Group. You know, I'll just tell you for the most passive part of my real estate investing personally, I put my own dollars with Freedom Family Investments because their funds pay me a stream of regular cash flow in. Returns are better than a bank savings account up to 12%. Their minimums are as low as 25.   Keith Weinhold (00:11:31) - K. You don't even need to be accredited. For some of them, it's all backed by real estate and I kind of love how the tax benefit of doing this can offset capital gains and your W-2 jobs income. And they've always given me exactly their stated return paid on time. So it's steady income, no surprises while I'm sleeping or just doing the things I love. For a little insider tip, I've invested in their power fund to get going on that text family to 668660, and this isn't a solicitation If you want to invest where I do, just go ahead and text family to 66866. This is real estate investment cogeneration. Listen to get Rich education with Keith Reinhold and don't quit your day dream. And you're going to get a fantastic market update today. And you're also going to learn lessons even if you're consuming this 5 or 10 years from now. Our expert guest was first with us here six months ago. He's been the executive VP of markets at some of America's leading housing intelligence firms. He was twice named to the Inman News Inman 100 most influential real estate leaders.   Keith Weinhold (00:12:54) - He is one of the country's most frequently quoted sources on real estate, mortgage and foreclosure markets. You've seen him seemingly everywhere CNBC, CBS News, NBC News, CNN, ABC News, Fox, Bloomberg in NPR got about just every letter of the alphabet in there on that one. Today, he's the founder and CEO of J. Patrick Company. They're a market intelligence firm for the real estate and mortgage markets. He has 20 plus years of experience in those industries. Hey, welcome back to Rick Saga. Thank you for having me, Keith. Happy to be here. It's an interesting time. Rick. I think some people are rather confused because you have such unusually low housing supply still. You have higher mortgage rates and we're careful not to call them high mortgage rates because we know historically they're pretty normal. And you have what I would characterize is a rather distinct regional variation in home price appreciation. So we're going to get some clarity today from that confusion. Now, if you're listening on audio only, Rick will describe the charts in a way that gives you a good experience.   Keith Weinhold (00:14:03) - If you're watching this on YouTube, go ahead and give us a like. So we really anticipate, Rick, your take on both the broader economy first and then the real estate market. That's exactly what we're going to go over today. And before we get started, I think you said something I'd like to emphasize a little bit. And this is something we talked about. I believe the last time we chatted is I've been saying all along that we were not going to see a housing market crash. We were going to see a correction of sorts and that the correction was going to be very, very localized. That the results you see in coastal California, in the Pacific Northwest, in markets that were overpriced, like Boise and Salt Lake City and Phoenix and Austin, we're going to be very different than what you saw on the East Coast, particularly the southeastern states, places like Tennessee and Florida and the Carolinas and virtually everywhere else in Texas other than Austin. So it's really worked out that way. There are some markets where we're seeing double digit price declines and other markets where prices continue to go up.   Keith Weinhold (00:15:05) - And we'll get into the national trends in a minute. But thought that was a really important point. Keith Yeah, Thank you for adding that, at least for a while there. Rick. It was one of the most unusual home price appreciation maps I have ever seen. There were some exceptions, but generally the nation east of the Mississippi River, you had rising home prices and recently west of the Mississippi River, you had falling home prices like a river divided it. It was really weird. To your point, it's normalized a little bit. I live in California. Speaking of weird and the pricing out here, the month over month prices and year over year prices went down for the first time in quite a while for about four consecutive months before normalizing in July. Now, even within California, you see different price trends depending on where you are in the state. But the point is really important for investors to remember that you almost threw the national numbers out, that they're important from a trend perspective, but you really need to become an expert in whatever market you happen to be investing in because the local conditions really determine how successful you're going to be.   Keith Weinhold (00:16:09) - Like the national outdoor temperature average is pretty useless, almost somewhat like the national home price average is. I guess the national home price average Still has some meaning to it though. Yeah, and you don't find quite as much variation in home price trends as you do in temperatures, but your points well taken. And again, it's important to be looking for economic trends. It's important to be looking for housing market trends and the markets that you're interested in investing in because that makes all the difference. So we're just going to talk about the general economic landscape of the United States, and then we're going to pivot into real estate and just what's going on with the housing market and getting the latest there. Yeah, why don't we jump right into it at this point, Keith, We're going to do a fall update on the housing market for this year. We're going to take a look at the economy. We'll take a look at what's going on in housing. I have a few slides to share on what's going on to delinquencies and defaults because I know a lot of investors are interested in foreclosure properties.   Keith Weinhold (00:17:11) - And then we'll have some closing thoughts and then you can chat a little bit more about some of the observations we're making in the market today. Let's start talking about that economy, including that part where some people anymore, year after year, they're always predicting this recession that never quite seems to happen. Well, we have predictions of a recession that are very much like predictions of a housing crash. And if you keep predicting that terrible thing long enough, someday you'll probably be right. It'll be right eventually. Just like a broken clock is right. Broken clock. It's right twice a day. So the GDP, the gross domestic product is the way that that most economists measure the strength of the economy. And the second quarter, this number was just adjusted downward a little bit, but we still had over 2% growth for the second quarter of 2023. That was a higher number than most economists had forecast. It was certainly a higher number than what the Federal Reserve was expecting. But it really shows you the strength of the US consumer.   Keith Weinhold (00:18:09) - A lot of people probably don't realize that almost two thirds of the GDP is comprised of consumer spending. There's other factors that go into it business spending, government spending, productivity, trade and the like. But two thirds of it is consumer spending. So when you see the GDP showing strong numbers, it typically means that the consumer is doing pretty well. And that's an important consideration as we move forward. Yeah, that's right. One of those reasons consumers are spending is because we're in this economy where pretty much if you want to have a job, then you've got a job. Yeah. The headlines read about tech companies doing layoffs and mortgage companies doing layoffs. Bottom line is the most recent unemployment numbers we saw were 3.8%. I think we're getting a little spoiled by some of these low unemployment rates because people forget historically, anytime you were under 5% unemployment, it was considered full employment. And the fact of the matter is there's still more jobs open than there are people looking for work. There's about 9.5 million open jobs in about 6 million people who are looking for work.   Keith Weinhold (00:19:11) - So employers have to compete with each other for those employees. And so these low unemployment levels are actually one of the things that's causing wages to go up, which continues to stoke inflation when there are more open jobs than there even are workers that makes employers want to entice employees with higher pay. Yeah, they need to do that to keep employees on the payrolls and they need to do that to hire new employees. So whether you look at hourly wages, which at the moment are up around 28, $29 an hour, or you're looking at annual wage growth, which is running around 4 to 5% a year. Wages are very strong right now. And this is the first time, Keith, in many years that I've been able to tell people that wage growth actually is running higher than home price appreciation for well over a decade. We saw home prices appreciate much more rapidly than we saw wages. And this is the first time in a while where that situation has been reversed. That's a really interesting takeaway, Rick.   Keith Weinhold (00:20:16) - Wage growth that's outstripping home price growth and that's going to be important going forward because one of the big headwinds that the housing market faces today is affordability. Despite what we just talked about, home prices nationally are running at all time high levels. We're going to talk about the cost of financing be much higher than it was just a year ago. And wage growth is the one positive in that category. As wages continue to grow and if home prices settled out a little bit, affordability ultimately will be a little bit better for potential homebuyers. Average wages at 28 to $29 an hour, Americans are basically making a dollar every two minutes now yet could be worse. And that varies, again, market to market, shock to job, but it shows you what's going on on average, partly because of this, consumer spending continues to be very strong. But one of the the real unusual situations we're looking at today is that there's usually a direct correlation between consumer confidence and consumer spending. And the more confident consumers feel about things, the more willing they are to spend money, particularly on big ticket items like cars and houses.   Keith Weinhold (00:21:24) - And that was all true. And the correlation held true until we hit the pandemic. And as we started to come out of the first wave of Covid, you saw consumer confidence start to go up, but then it came back down as we had subsequent waves of Covid. Then we had the war in Ukraine that we had high inflation and all sorts of other odds and ends. And consumer confidence has really never recovered back to pre-pandemic levels while consumer spending has continued to go up. And part of that is pent up consumer demand. We still hear people talking about supply chain delays, trying to order appliances and the like and having to wait for months. Part of it is all the stimulus money that the government poured into the economy during the pandemic and probably overstimulated the economy to a certain extent. One of my economist friends refers to what the government did in terms of stimulus, is trying to stuff $15 trillion into a $3 trillion hole. And the numbers may be a little lost. But think the visuals is image is kind of good.   Keith Weinhold (00:22:25) - But this disconnect we're seeing between. How much money consumers are spending and their relative low confidence scores is a red flag of sorts in a couple of ways. It's a red flag, among other ways, in that if consumer confidence doesn't recover, consumers ultimately could pull back on spending, and that really could ultimately lead us into a recession. Consumer spending outpacing consumer confidence. There are other two other red flags with this consumer spending, and we'll cover them pretty quickly. What is that? Consumer credit card use is at an all time high in the last quarter. For the first time ever, consumer credit card use topped $1 trillion. And the concern here is that consumers in a high cost of living environment may be tapping into credit cards to make ends meet. That's not a good scenario and ultimately is not a scenario that would end well. So part of what we're seeing kind of backstopping or enabling consumer spending is an increased amount of credit card use. The other red flag, Keith, is that consumer personal savings rates have gone down below historic averages.   Keith Weinhold (00:23:33) - So we hit an all time high in savings rates during the pandemic when the government sent out stimulus checks and unemployment benefits were enhanced. And candidly, there wasn't a lot consumers could buy. So they socked away a lot of this money post-pandemic. We saw savings rates drop down to almost historically low levels and they haven't come back much up from that. So the two red flags that we really are looking at right now, that could be indicators of trouble ahead for the economy are record level credit card use and lower than average savings rates. And again, both of those suggest that families who are sort of on the margins financially might be tapping into credit cards, might be tapping into their savings to make ends meet. In fact, I read some recent research that suggests that on average, most households have higher credit card debt than they have savings. It's not a great scenario, and this is consistent with many sources citing the fact that between 60 and 70% of Americans live paycheck to paycheck. Yeah, and it almost doesn't matter how high that paycheck is, which is a little bit counterintuitive.   Keith Weinhold (00:24:43) - I remember doing an interview on CNN years ago when Evander Holyfield mansion was being foreclosed on. It was a $30 million mansion outside of Georgia with two bowling alleys, swimming pool, indoor boxing rinks, basketball courts, the whole nine yards. I had to explain to the reporter that just because you're wealthy doesn't mean you're not living paycheck to paycheck. It's just sometimes there's more zeros to the left of the decimal point. Their cost of living tends to be much higher. So expenses are keeping up with income. All right, Expenses keep up with income. What's been going on in terms of consumer spending, in terms of wage growth, in terms of the GDP being strong has all contributed to inflation. And we had the highest inflation rate in 40 years. Not too long ago, we were up over 9% inflation year over year. And the Federal Reserve has taken very aggressive actions to try and get inflation under control. The primary tool they use is raising the Fed funds rate, which is basically what sets the rates on all short term interest.   Keith Weinhold (00:25:44) - And they've raised it more rapidly and higher than it pretty much any time in history. If you go back to the 80s, they actually raised the Fed funds rate higher because inflation was completely out of control then, but not as quickly as they did this time. So typically what you see is something more like what the Fed did say back in the 2015, 2016 period, where inflation ticked up a little bit. So they raise the Fed funds rate a little and they waited a while to see what kind of impact it would have. Then they raise it a little bit more and it's kind of a step by step process until they feel that inflation is peaked and they can then drop off the Fed funds rate. This time they raised it at higher increments they'd ever done before and much more rapidly. The good news is it does seem to be having its effect. The most recent inflation numbers are around 3% year over year, which is close to the Fed's target rate of 2% year over year. And a lot of the inflation rate that is reported on is housing costs.   Keith Weinhold (00:26:42) - And most of the housing costs are actually rental rates or what the Fed refers to is the rental equivalency. If you have a mortgage. And what we have seen is rental rates have gone back down from ridiculously high, asking prices. A year or so ago, it wasn't unusual to see an asking rent 15% higher than the prior rent rate. And that's in a market where the usual increase is 1 to 4%. So it was just completely off the charts. Those numbers have all come back to normal. And in some markets, we're actually seeing slight declines in year over year rental asking prices. The reason the Ric is bringing rents into the inflation discussion here is because rent and something called owners equivalent rent are a substantial contributor to the. They comprise more than a third of the CPI basket. Exactly right, Keith. And thank you for reminding me why I started this dissertation. The fact is that that decrease in rental costs has not hit the Fed's inflation numbers yet. There's about a full year lag in the housing numbers that the Fed uses in its CPI analysis and what's going on in the real market.   Keith Weinhold (00:27:52) - So if the Federal Reserve does nothing else, these housing costs get caught up. We will see inflation come down a little bit more. A lot of us are hoping that the Fed is done with its increases because of what's happened historically. Historically speaking, if you go all the way back to World War Two, the Federal Reserve not counting this cycle, has raised the Fed funds rate 11 times to get inflation under control. Eight of those times it's waited a little bit too long or it's waited for inflation until inflation got too high and it was a little bit too sticky and they had to overcorrect. And that ultimately steered us into a recession. There were three times once in the 60s, once in the 80s and once in the 90s where the Fed acted proactively to try and get inflation under control. And in those three cases, they were able to steer us into a soft landing and avoid a recession. In this case, they've already admitted they waited too long. They admitted that inflation got much higher than they expected.   Keith Weinhold (00:28:48) - It certainly wasn't as transitory as they'd hoped. So the likelihood is that they've already overcorrected and we will see something of a recession. They may get lucky this time. They may have actually walked the tightrope correctly. And assuming they don't continue with this aggressive course of action, they may have actually managed to work us into a soft landing this time. Yeah, and that is a terrific history lesson that you gave us, Rick. I often like to tell my audience about when you want to predict the future direction of something. I'd like to take history over hunches. It's easy to have a hunch that something's going to go a certain direction. But you look at history. You talked about basically how the Fed was late to identify inflation because they had called it transitory for a while, so they started hiking too late. Now, maybe they've overhyped or maybe they haven't. But if they have, maybe they will need to lower them too quickly. If they don't have that desired soft landing. The economists that follow right now are split about 5050 on whether we'll actually see a recession coming out of this cycle.   Keith Weinhold (00:29:51) - It was more like 8020, looking for a recession just a few months ago. Right. The economy is slowing a little bit. The last jobs report had about 187,000 jobs created, which was a good number, but it was lower than what we've seen in recent reports. So the economy slowing down, but not going to full stop or going into negative terms is an indication that maybe we do escape a recession. Good news, by the way, is even if we do have a recession, the rest of the economic measures that you look at are also strong, that it's very likely it would be a very short and very mild recession, and unemployment probably wouldn't get over about four and a half or 5%. So that's something to keep in mind as you go forward. You talked about history, Keith. I big on that too, history as a predictor of what might happen. Yeah. The other thing that points to a recession is something called a yield curve inversion. And without getting too inside baseball on people, people track the yield on a ten year US Treasury and they track the yield on a two year US Treasury and typically your yield on a short investment like a two year Treasury is lower than your yield on a ten year or longer investment because there's more risk involved in the longer time period and so forth and so on.   Keith Weinhold (00:31:07) - Every now and then, the bond market senses a disruption in the force. Darth Vader is looming over the market and you see these things switch places and suddenly the yield on a ten year US Treasury is lower than the yield on a two year US Treasury, and that's called a yield curve inversion. Now yield curve inversion doesn't cause a recession, but the last seven times we've had one, it's correctly predicted that a recession was coming and this current period we're in is one of the longer and deeper inversions that we've ever seen. So again, if you look at history as a predictor of the future, this yield curve inversion points toward us having a recession at some point before we get through the cycle. And I know yield curves can confuse a lot of people. If you're the listener or the viewer here, make a very long term loan to a friend, well, you'd want to get compensated with a higher interest rate for that higher risk amount than if you made a short term loan to a friend and he was paying you back.   Keith Weinhold (00:32:04) - Tomorrow, you might not charge him much of any interest at all because there's more certainty that you're going to get paid back. But that condition has been inverted, where when you make the long loan to the buddy, you're compensated with a lower interest rate yield. That is what is known as a yield curve inversion. Yeah. And I think yield curve throws people off. If you just think of it in terms of the yields, that probably makes it simpler. But again, if you're looking at recession predictors, these are the two. That I typically look at. And that's kind of important to know if you're going to be investing in the housing market because recessions can have an impact on the housing market. Rick thinks there's a likelihood that the Fed has already overcorrected with too many interest rate increases. If we do have a recession, Rick believes that it's most likely to be mild without many layoffs. Rick and I, we actually seem to agree on a lot of things. We see a lot of things the same way.   Keith Weinhold (00:33:03) - Maybe it would be more interesting for you if we disagreed a bit more to stay up on the latest moves in the real estate market. You can follow Rick Saga on X, formerly known as Twitter. His handle there is simply Rick Saga. Well, Rick made a Darth Vader reference there. And, you know, much like the original Star Wars movie had the sequel, which was called The Empire Strikes Back. You know, that was one sequel that some people liked more than the original. And that is atypical because usually people like the original more. But The Empire Strikes Back was a fantastic sequel, and I think that could happen here next week. Rick and I are back together for part two of two, the sequel. We are probably going to analyze and break down the state of the housing market and the future of investment real estate. And we should go on for twice as long on that as we did for today on the economy. So therefore, next week is kind of like the Empire Strikes Back, although I don't expect that next week Darth Vader is going to cut off Luke Skywalker's hand like what happened in the movie.   Keith Weinhold (00:34:10) - That just wouldn't be proper. And we're clearly not into improprieties around here.   Darth Vader (00:34:18) - You are unwise to lower your defenses.   Keith Weinhold (00:34:23) - Oh, Luke lost his hand this week. Not next week. Well, that's not even the scene where Luke loses his hand, But, hey, that totally worked. So. Getting back to real estate here, you need properties to be an investor. The builders know that higher mortgage rates are a pain point for buyers. Our coaches and I hear a know it too. So we have. Yes. Rubbed salve on the wound 5.75% interest rates, 4.75% or even 2.99%. And at times you're going to have to use the builder's preferred lender in order to get those terms. But really some remarkable Bibles that we've negotiated for you. So take advantage of it since I don't know how long that is going to be around. In fact, I'll even bring up those rate by down terms to Rick Saga next week and get his take to help you out on the cash flow side. We also have access to properties that would make good mid term corporate rentals in the southeastern US midterm rentals.   Keith Weinhold (00:35:27) - They often have higher cash flow than a traditional long term unfurnished rental. For any and all of that, contact your investment coach, you're probably working with one by now. They'll help you shop the marketplace properties, tell you where the real deals are and tell you how to get those improbably low mortgage rates for income properties. Your coach guides you and makes it easy for you If you don't have an investment coach yet, just go to Marketplace. Com slash coach and they're there to help you out until next week I'm your host Keith Winfield. Don't quit your Adrian.   Speaker 4 (00:36:08) - 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 (00:36:36) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building. Get rich education.

Why is gold even worth anything in today’s modern world? Isn’t it just a lump of metal?  In fact, I tell today’s guest that I believe gold is a poor wealth creation vehicle. Our guest is Dana Samuelson, Founder and Owner of American Gold Exchange. He’s one of the most influential, pedigreed and respected names in the gold industry. Major central banks have been hoarding gold recently—like Russia and China. Last year, central banks bought the most gold on record. We discuss why. A recent survey found that only 11% of Americans own gold. The case for owning gold: no counterparty risk, millennia of value, liquidity, limited supply, it’s like “money insurance”. The case against gold: storage burden, no yield, few industrial applications, difficult to lever. Though gold is historically a poor wealth *creation* vehicle, it’s excellent for long-term wealth *storage*. Dana generally agrees with me there. Most gold that’s been mined in world history still exists today. Learn how to identify fake gold.  Dana discusses how you can store your gold. You effectively pay “closing costs” on bullion. I describe. We also quickly cover: silver, platinum, and palladium. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/465 American Gold Exchange: www.AmerGold.com info@amergold.com 1-800-613-9323 Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold

Today’s guest, Shawn Finnegan, failed in California real estate investing pre-2008. But in 2019 he listened to GRE, came back, and succeeded. He now benefits from $2,000 in monthly residual cash flow from 11 Memphis income properties. He wants a fourplex next. Shawn and his family moved from Los Angeles, CA to Costa Rica where he now lives financially-free. He’s a former abdominal model, appearing on magazine covers. He invented “The Anchor Gym” home gym system. By listening to GRE, he had the confidence to invest with our “Financially-Free Beats Debt-Free” mantra. “Don’t Quit Your Daydream” resonates with him most.  Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/464 The Anchor Gym: www.TheAnchorGym.com Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold

More homeless people have been created due to the housing supply crisis. Homelessness is up 11% since last year, per the WSJ. The opioid crisis, consumer inflation, and NIMBYism have contributed too. California has the most homelessness on both a total and per capita basis. States with higher housing costs have more homeless people. I share our poll results: “Should we pay to house the homeless?” Are you a NIMBY? We find out today. We can increase housing supply with rezoning, construction training, and lower mortgage rates. The cycle of investor emotions led to wild investing manias. It was tulip bulbs in the 1600s Netherlands and Beanie Babies in the 1990s United States.  I discuss exactly why “buy low, sell high” is more difficult than it sounds. Timestamps: The correlation between homelessness and the housing market [00:00:00] Discusses the relationship between the housing market and the increasing problem of homelessness in America. Investing manias and lessons from history [00:00:00] Explores the phenomenon of investing manias and the lessons that can be learned from historical examples. The tight inventory market conditions and potential solutions [00:04:56] Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist of the National Association of Realtors, discusses the tight housing market conditions and suggests tax incentives to increase housing supply. Timestamp 1 [00:10:32] Affordability of moving to different cities and the proposal of a tax incentive for real estate investors. Timestamp 2 [00:11:49] Discussion on the housing supply crisis, mortgage rates, and the homeless population in the US. Timestamp 3 [00:14:14] Increase in homelessness in America, reasons behind it, and the correlation between housing prices and homelessness rates. The impact of high density housing on quality of life and home value [00:21:12] Discussion on the potential negative effects of building high density housing near single family homes, including reduced home value, increased traffic and noise, and loss of nearby open space. Alternative solutions to increase housing supply and reduce homelessness [00:23:30] Exploration of alternative measures to address homelessness, such as trade training for the homeless and relaxing excessive safety requirements in home building. Giving real change to the homeless [00:25:50] Encouragement to give directly to homeless shelters or soup kitchens instead of giving small change to individuals on the street, with the concept of "give real change not small change" explained. Note: The timestamps provided are approximate and may vary slightly depending on the podcast episode. The Origins of Tulip Mania [00:31:37] Tulips were introduced to Europe in the 1500s and became a luxury item for the affluent. The cultivation of tulips locally in the Netherlands led to a flourishing business sector. The Tulip Bubble [00:32:55] By 1634, tulip mania had swept through the Netherlands, with the demand for tulip bulbs exceeding supply. Prices reached exorbitant levels, and futures contracts were being bought and sold. Lessons from Tulip Mania [00:37:53] Tulip mania serves as a model for financial bubbles, with similar cycles observed in other speculative assets like beanie babies, baseball cards, NFTs, and stocks. It highlights the dangers of excess, greed, and speculation without tangible value. The cycle of investor emotions [00:44:32] Explanation of the different stages of investor emotions, from optimism to panic, in relation to stock market investing. The peak of the stock market [00:46:43] Discussion on the peak of the stock market being the point of maximum financial risk and the difficulty of selling at the right time. Real estate as a stable investment [00:51:56] Comparison of real estate investment to speculative bubbles, highlighting the stability and income stream provided by real estate. Explains how the integration of HOA (Homeowners Association) helps maintain uniformity and cleanliness in the rental property investing world. Details about the upcoming real estate event [00:38:31] Promotion of a live event where listeners can learn about new construction fourplexes and have their questions answered in real time. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/463 Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY’ to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I’d be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREmarketplace.com/Coach Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free— text ‘GRE’ to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Complete episode transcript:   Welcome to Get Rich Education. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. America’s homeless problem has become FRIGHTENING. I describe how that correlates… with the housing market.  Then, investing MANIAS. What drives people to spend more for one tulip flower bulb than they would for an entire luxury home?    And lessons you can learn that’ll benefit you the rest of your life from other manias throughout history. All today, on Get Rich Education.   ___________   Welcome to GRE! From Seaford, DE to Carmel-by-the-Sea, CA and across 188 nations worldwide, you’re listening to one of America’s longest-running and most listened to shows on real estate investing. Along with plenty of ongoing hot takes on wealth mindset and the real estate economy.    I’m your host, Keith Weinhold.    See, the crash in the SUPPLY of available American homes is bad and it isn’t just creating more upward prices, it’s a contributor to homelessness.    Let’s talk about some of the drivers of homelessness, understand the problem a little more, how many homeless people ARE there in America, and then… what can we do about it?   As you’ll soon see, one prominent real estate industry influencer actually suggests that you actually SELL your rental single family homes in order to help serve the homeless. More on that shortly.    Also, I have the results from a GRE Instagram Poll. The poll question is: “Should we pay to HOUSE the homeless?”    And the answers that you - the GRE listeners gave… actually surprised me. I’ll give you those super-interesting poll results later, because I have more to explain there.   But first, what IS a homeless person? Let’s define it. I think most anyone knows that since it’s a person without a home, it’s thought of as living on the street.   Really, then, that person might not be homeless but “houseless” in a literal sense. Even if they live in a tent under a bridge, that is then, their home. Though it might be INADEQUATE housing.   More accurately, the unsheltered or undersheltered population could be more apropos.     Then there’s vagrancy. A vagrant is defined as a person without a settled home OR regular work… who wanders from place to place and lives by begging.   So vagrants are PART of the homeless population then. This all helps DEFINE what we’re discussing.   Now, the lack of available American housing supply - especially the affordable segment - is OBVIOUSLY a big contributor to homelessness.   For example, anymore, how many builders even construct a new-build entry-level home for $200 or 250K? Practically nobody… anywhere.   And just how bad is the supply problem now? Well, the NAR has been tracking housing supply since 1982 and it just hit its lowest level ever this summer - EVER - and that’s in 40+ years of tracking.    That’s one reason why just last week, it was announced that Warren Buffett is making a big bet on housing by investing in homebuilders.   Now to keep consistent with the same stats I’ve been reporting to you for you, to update that, again 1-and-a-half million available homes is the baseline supply. That’s the long-term “normal” per the FRED Active listing count.   And through last month, it’s still under 650,000. That is STILL a housing SUPPLY crash of 57% from its peak of 1 ½ million.   I want you & I to listen to this upcoming piece together. This recent interview with NAR Chief Economist Lawrence Yun is from the 8th of this month.   Yes, HE is the one that basically wants you to sell your SF rental properties. And he makes his case for an inducement to get you to do this. (Ha!)   He’s not proposing anything COMPLETELY ludicrous. It’s REALLY interesting. Listen closely for that.   This about 5 minutes in length and there’s a lot of material here within this clip - a nutrient dense piece, so I’ve got SO much to say about this when I come back to comment.    [Yun clip]    Yeah, the NAR Chief Economist there talking about how, much like I have for years, great opportunity is in the Midwest and Southeastern parts of the US.    With this greater ability for people to work from anywhere, when people move in from the pricy coasts, it’s sooo affordable to them.   Moving from Manhattan to Cincinnati feels incredibly affordable.  Moving from San Francisco to St. Louis feels like you’ve upgraded from serfdom to a kingdom. Moving from Boston to Jacksonville feels like a total life makeover.   That’s why, here at GRE, we’re focused on properties in those INbound destinations.    Before I continue, especially for those outside the US, I know that it seems a little odd that Ohio and Indiana are in what we call the Midwest when they’re actually in the northeastern quadrant of the nation.   But the fact that they ARE midwestern states is rooted in history and in cultural tradition.   So, getting back some new angles on the housing supply crisis.   Lawrence Yun proposed that a tax incentive be introduced to unleash the inventory of SF rentals from individual REIs.    And says that there are over 20 million single-family housing units that are rented out.    If we reduced or canceled the capital gains tax & just got 1% of that inventory on the market, he states that that would help.   Well, yeah, but even that then would only put about 200,000 units of the market - and they’d get snatched up so fast.   Now, if mortgage rates come down to say, 5%, it would unleash both housing demand AND supply.    Both - like Lawrence Yun says. So it’s not apparent that that would help this shortage, if both demand and supply go up.   In a nation of about one-third of a BILLION people now - that’s how I like to express it this year - America now has one-third of a billion people… also known as 333 million - how many do you think are classified as homeless?   As you think about that - as you think about how many of America’s 333 million Americans are homeless, this homeless population figure that I’m about to share with you is from HUD and it’s through last year, so it’s their latest year-end figure.    And I’ll tell ya, it’s hard to believe this number. The Department of Housing and Urban Development states that about 582,000 Americans are experiencing homelessness.   Now, how HUD does this is that their number is a snapshot of the homeless population as of a single night at the end of January each year.    The total number of people who experience homelessness for SOME PERIOD each year will be higher than that.   I just did the math and then that means that just 1 in every 572 Americans are homeless. C’mon. Do you believe that? Only one in every 572 Americans are homeless?   I might believe that it’s something like more than 1 in 200. What are your thoughts?   Even HUD would probably concede that there are shortcomings in that stat and that it’s only a starting point.   And over the last decade, according to HUD, the homeless population is little changed… apparently until just this past year.   Homelessness is surging in America. The number of people experiencing homelessness in the US has increased 11% so far this year over 2022. That would be the biggest jump by far in equivalent government records beginning in 2007.   Now this 11% homeless jump is according to a WSJ analysis of hundreds of smaller & local agencies.    Most  agencies say the alarming rise is because of the lack of affordable housing and rental units, and the ongoing opioid crisis.   Inflation is part of that affordable housing problem. Inflation widens the disparity between the haves and have-nots.   To cut some slack to census-type of surveying, homelessness can be hard to measure. Some live on skid row, some live in the woods, some homeless people live in their cars.    Some aren’t interested in being counted. Others are essentially invisible. I mean, if someone’s between jobs and needs to couch surf at their aunt and uncle's place for three months, are they homeless or not? So, to be sure, there’s a lot of leeway in those numbers.   One in 572 as homeless - that should just be a minimum - a starting point in my opinion.   Now, homelessness broken down by STATE is really interesting.   California at 171,000, has the most of any state, more than double of next-most New York, and then Florida is third.   But let’s break that down by rate - on a per capita basis. So… think of this as the highest CONCENTRATION of homeless:   Washington DC has 65 homeless per 10,000 people. That’s not really a state though, so…   #1 on a per capita basis is STILL California, with 44 per 10,000. So California leads in the nation in homeless on both bases then - both absolute and relative.   The second highest rate is Vermont.  Third Oregon Fourth Hawaii Fifth is New York And then numbers 6 through 10 on the most homeless per capita are Washington, Maine, Alaska, Nevada, and Delaware.   Now, strictly anecdotally. You’ve probably seen just what I’ve seen in the last year-plus - more visible homeless people in your city and other cities.   The state with the FEWEST homeless of all 50 states is Mississippi - and see, housing is quite affordable there. MS is one of the most affordable states for housing.    There is at least SOME correlation between your cost of housing and homelessness.   Recently on our Instagram page, and the handle there is easy to remember - it’s @getricheducation - if you want to participate in future polls, we ran a poll on homelessness.   Here is the poll question that we ran - and I’d like you to think about your answer to this too.   “Should we pay to house the homeless?”    That’s the question.    And in polling, the way that the question is phrased, of course, can skew your answer.    See, if instead, we phrased it as, “Should the government house the homeless?” you might have more ‘yes’ answers - even though it’s the same question - because you FUND the government.    But the question as we phrased it: “Should we pay to house the homeless?” - it also showed a photo of vagrants on a street curb under the question.   Here we the results, which surprised me, to:  Should we pay to house the homeless?   Those answering “Yes” were just 6% The no’s were 45% But we also had a third option: “It’s complicated”. 48% answered with that option.   So again, just 6% of you said we should pay to house the homeless and 45% said “no”. “48% said it’s complicated”.   In a way, that makes sense to me since we have a largely entrepreneurial, self-made type of audience. I thought that might have happened.   But what surprised me is in how emphatic it was. It was a landslide. 7 to 8 TIMES as many of you said we should not pay for the homeless as those that said we should.   Well, the reason that I added - and I’m the one that ran the poll myself - they’re quick to do. I added the paying to house the homeless “It’s complicated” option because it IS complicated… that WAS the most popular answer.   I mean, why should you go to work and pay to house a stranger that has no income because he or she doesn’t want to work?   But what if they’re disabled and they can kinda work but not really work… or a zillion other complications.    Substance abuse is obviously a big problem that keeps homeless people homeless… and there’s a substantial thought paradigm that says, if they’re an abuser, then why would I pay for THEIR housing?   Substance abuse is just one reason that there is a population that’s VOLUNTARILY homeless. They don’t want to have to comply with a group home’s ban on substances.    I wanted to address the homeless problem somewhat today, because here we are on Episode 463 of a real estate show and this is the most that we’ve even discussed it.   I think the perspective it gives you is that it helps you be grateful for what you’ve got.    But it’s abundance mentality here. You can be grateful for what you have and at the same time, grow your means.   What else would help with more housing supply which would also move us toward mitigating the homeless problem?   Well, we’ve already discussed a number of them so I’ll only go in depth with some fresh angles here.   Obviously, more homebuilding. We’ve done episodes on how 3D printed homes and shipping container homes are not quick, easy answers. Tiny homes might be but then you could get into a zoning density problem again.   Just last week, my assistant brought me this Marketwatch article that reported that the average American home size is shrinking just a little & that often times, new-build houses tend to be a little closer together.   That’s what gets us into relaxing zoning requirements. But you know something, OK, this is going to be interesting.    This plays into NIMBYism. Not In My Backyard: communities saying that they don’t want high-density housing built next to them.    Now, I think that there are a lot of critics of NIMBYism. But the criticism comes from people that live far out of that area and aren’t affected.   Let me just play a fun little experiment with you here. Let me paint a picture of a fictitious life for you and just… place yourself there.   Say that you live in a nice single-family home, with a quarter acre lot. It’s not a sprawling estate but you’ve got a good measure of privacy that way.   You’re in a SFH, quarter-acre lot and two car garage. That is classic suburbia.   And… just a hundred yards away from your home there’s a big, wide-open field where you walk your dog and use as a little makeshift golf driving range or whatever. Nice open space nearby.   Say you’ve got a fairly idyllic life here. It’s always been this way since you bought the home years ago.   Suddenly, in your neighborhood of all SFHs, you learn that they want to build a bunch of fourplexes in the nearby lot where you used to throw tennis balls to your dog.   What can that do to your quality of life & your home’s value, now that a bunch of new fourplexes and eightplexes were built nearby?   It reduces your home’s value because there are less valuable, high density properties nearby.   It also increases the amount of traffic & even noise in your neighborhood. Now you can’t use that nearby park anymore - it’s been all-built up with these higher-density apartments.   So, let me go back and ask - point blank - did you really want all those new high-density developments near your home?   If that made you uncomfortable, that’s NIMBYism. So it’s quite natural to evoke that feeling type. You’re just a human being.   How else can we increase housing supply to help reduce homelessness?   NOT with rent control. Over time, capping the amount of rent that a LL can charge gives property owners no incentive to improve their property and neighborhoods end up dilapidated.   We need more training for tradesman and laborers. How about training the homeless for that? But then someone’s got to pay for that training.   Another measure that’s become ridiculous is that we’ve gotta relax these excessive safety requirements in homebuilding. Now, some safety is good.   But when every single home - entry-level and all needs to have fire-rated shingles and fired-rated doors and GFCI outlets and smoke detectors in every room and carbon monoxide detectors all over the place, sheesh! Well, that raises the cost of housing for everyone.   In some earthquake-prone areas, you’ve got to have seismic restraining straps on your water heater or you can’t even sell your home. Do you know how big of an earthquake it would take to damage your water heater like that?   And an excessive safety PROPONENT might say, yeah, but did you hear about that one family that died ten years ago that would have lived if they had carbon monoxide detectors?   Well, the counterargument to that is, yeah, but what about all the homeless people that were exposed to the elements and died in the cold because they couldn’t AFFORD the more basic housing, the prices of which have escalated for all this excessive safety stuff.   Are you saying a middle class person’s life is worth more than a poor, homeless person’s life? That’s the counterargument.    Again, some safety is good. But we’ve gone overboard in too many places - in housing & beyond.   Rising housing costs keep people homeless. A few weeks ago, I did that episode about escalating insurance costs.   I now own some properties that have extremely low mortgage rates and the insurance has gone up to the point where I pay more in monthly escrow expenses than I do principal & interest.    But, hey. I’m not homeless, and if you’re listening to this, neither are you.   So when it comes to helping the homeless in the short-term, that campaign called, “Give real change, not small change.” - that really resonates with me.   Don’t give 5 bucks to a vagrant on the corner. That just keeps them showing up at that corner, plus they’re going to spend your 5 bucks on a cheap bottle of Monarch vodka.   Instead, if you’re going to give, give to a homeless shelter or soup kitchen.    That’s what’s meant by “Give real change, not small change.” And that’s something actionable.   Coming up next, investing MANIAS. How wild it gets - paying more for a tulip flower than a SFH, shooting and killing someone over a Beanie Baby toy… and then I’m going to wrap it all up with what all this has to do with the cycle of your investor emotions.   Around here, we don’t run ads for the Swiffer. This week’s sponsors that support the show are people that I’ve personally done real estate business with myself and have benefited from.    Ridge Lending Group specializes in INVESTMENT property loans in nearly all 50 states. Start your prequalification at: RidgeLendingGroup.com    Then, for super-passive real estate returns, check out Freedom Family Investments. Right now, what you can do, is just text “FAMILY” to 66866.   I’m Keith Weinhold. You’re listening to Get Rich Education. ___________ Welcome back to the GRE Podcast. I’m your host and my name is Keith Weinhold.    If you’ve got a friend or family member that you think would benefit from the knowledge drops here on the show, you can simply tell them to grab the free Get Rich Education mobile app.   That’s a convenient option for listening every week for both iOS and Android.   Today’s topics of homelessness and investing manias could very well bring a new audience here, so…    A little more about my backstory. I’m from PA but got my real estate comeuppance in Anchorage, Alaska of all places & grew out nationally & internationally from there. I had humble beginnings and wasn’t born anywhere near wealthy. I had to figure out how to build it myself.   But see, if I were born wealthy, I wouldn’t have learned how to build it, and then I wouldn’t be of much help to you. Likewise, if you’re building it yourself, you’ll be able to help others too.   BTW, I was born in the same PA town as Taylor Swift.    Though she & I don’t have much ELSE in common, I guess that she & I are both best-known for using a microphone.   Though I think that I’m about as likely to start using this microphone to sing into your ears like Taylor Swift does… as Taylor is to launch a real estate investing show.   For hundreds of years, the tulip has been one of the most-loved flowers in the Netherlands. It’s an enduring icon - as synonymous with the country as clogs, windmills, bicycles, and cheese. The tulip has a long and storied history - including the infamous shortage in the 1600s known as “tulip mania”. If you’re someone that has even a fleeting interest in investing, you should at least know what this is.   Tulips first appeared in Europe in the 1500s, arriving from the spice trading routes… and that lent this sense of exoticism to these imported flowers that looked like no other flower native to the continent. It’s no surprise, then, that tulips became a luxury item destined for the gardens of the affluent.  According to The Library of Economics and Liberty, “it was deemed a proof of bad taste in any man of fortune to be without a collection of [tulips].” Hmmm. Well, following the affluent, the merchant MIDDLE classes of Dutch society sought to emulate their wealthier neighbors and also demanded tulips. So to start out with, it was purchased as a status symbol for the sole reason that it was expensive. But at the same time, tulips were known to be notoriously fragile, and would die without careful cultivation. In the early 1600s, professional cultivators of tulips began to refine techniques to grow and produce the flowers locally in the Netherlands. They established a flourishing business sector that persists to this day. By 1634, tulipmania swept through the Netherlands. The Library of Economics and Liberty writes, “The rage among the Dutch to possess tulip bulbs was so great that the ORDINARY INDUSTRY of the country was neglected, and the population, even to its lowest dregs, embarked in the tulip trade. Now, everyone’s in - rich to poor. It’s a little hard to say for sure how much people paid for tulips.  But Scottish journalist Charles Mackay, wrote an extremely popular 1841 book - you’ve probably heard of this book - it’s called the Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds… It does give us some points of reference such that the best of tulips cost upwards of $1 million in today’s money (but a lot of bulbs traded in the $50,000–$150,000 range).  By 1636, the demand for the tulip trade was so large that regular markets for their sale - like a little Dow Jones Industrial Average - got established on the Stock Exchange of Amsterdam, in Rotterdam, Haarlem, and other towns. It was at that time that PROFESSIONAL TRADERS got in on the action - that’s all that some people do now - is trade tulips… and everybody appeared to be making money simply by possessing some of these rare bulbs.  Dutch speculators at the time spent incredible amounts of money on bulbs that only produced flowers for a Week—many companies were formed with the SOLE PURPOSE of trading tulips.  To everyone, at the time, it seemed that the price could only go up forever. Pretty soon, demand for tulips EXCEEDED THE AVAILABLE SUPPLY of tulips by so much that people were into buying futures contracts, basically saying, I’ll pay you this much money TODAY for a tulip that you provide to me in 3 years. By the last 1630s, these futures contracts were like a crack that appeared in the price runup. Demand began to wane when people were just buying a token for a future tulip that hadn’t even started growing yet.  People felt like they weren’t buying anything tangible anymore. That’s one factor that helped create an oversupply of tulips in the market and started depressing the prices. Supply caught up with - and exceeded - demand. A large part of this rapid decline was driven by the fact that people had purchased bulbs on credit, hoping to repay their loans when they sold their bulbs for a profit. But once prices started to drop, holders were forced to sell their bulbs at any price and to declare bankruptcy in the process. So people had begun buying tulips with leverage, using margined derivatives contracts to buy more than they could afford. But as quickly as the run-up began, confidence was dashed. By the end of 1637 is when prices began to fall and never recovered.   And the bubble burst. Buyers announced that they could not pay the high price previously agreed upon for bulbs, and that made the market fall apart.  While it wasn’t actually a devastating occurrence for the entire nation’s economy, it did undermine social expectations. The event destroyed relationships built on trust and people’s willingness and ability to pay. It’s been said that “the wealthiest merchants to the poorest chimney sweeps jumped into the tulip fray, buying bulbs at high prices and selling them for even more.” Well, this is what can happen - today it happens with financialization and nothing real backing up purchases. Tulipmania is a model for the general cycle of a financial bubble. That’s what happened with Dutch tulips. Now, here in more recent times, similar cycles have been observed in the price of Beanie Babies, baseball cards - I got caught up in the baseball cards as a kid, owning more than 100,000 baseball cards at one time, also non-fungible tokens (NFTs), and shipping stocks.       The example of tulipmania is now used as a parable for other speculative assets, such as cryptocurrencies today or dotcom stocks from around the year 2000. So, when you hear someone likening an investment to a Dutch tulip bulb, now you’ll know what they’re talking about. It’s a symbol of excess, greed, and FOMO. But there has been a good bit of more modern scholarship that tells you that tulip mania did indeed occur in the 1600s Netherlands. But that the tale has been exaggerated and it’s something that the upper classes of society were mostly involved in. Now, that’s the Dutch tulip bubble. But for a more modern-day parable about an investing mania, there’s a new movie about the rise & fall of BEANIE BABIES that’s on Apple TV+. These were little stuffed, plush toy animals that became more popular among adults than children. The rise and fall of Beanie Babies—toys that people mistakenly thought would make them rich. The movie is called “The Beanie Bubble”.  It’s a MOSTLY TRUE account of the lovable toys’ boom and bust in the ’90s -  comparable to the meme stock frenzies that took place during the Covid-19 pandemic. These $5 pellet-stuffed plush toys had astronomical appreciation estimates: Stripes the Tiger, released in 1996, was predicted by collectors to surge from $5 to $1,000 by 2008.  Forecasts like these were so enticing that one dad invested his kids’ college funds in Beanie Babies, thinking he’d resell them later for a hefty profit. At the height of the frenzy, people were ruining relationships and committing felonies to get their hands on some of these sacks of fuzz. Border officials confiscated more than 8,000 smuggled Beanie Babies at a US–Canada border crossing in 1998. A West Virginia man shot and killed a former coworker in 1999 after an argument partly about $150 worth of Beanie Babies. That same year, a divorcing couple couldn’t agree on how to split up their collection, so the judge made them divvy up the toys in person, right on the courtroom floor. How did that all happen? Barely anyone cared about Beanie Babies when a company called Ty Inc. launched them in 1994. Stores only got lines out the door once the toy’s creator, now-billionaire Ty Warner, began pulling strings to juice demand. Here’s what Warner did. OK, so here’s how you induce people into a speculative bubble. He refused to stock Beanie Babies at Toys R Us and Walmart. Instead he created an illusion of rarity by only selling them at small toy stores and independent shops. Even if you did find a retailer, every store’s supply of Beanie Babies was limited to 36 of each animal, so inventory restocks drew a crowd. This, combined with Warner’s decision to start “retiring” certain animals in 1995, created artificial scarcity and a mass panic to stock up on Beanie Babies.  Soon, an aggressive resale market was born, replete with magazines and blogs and even trade shows for these Beanie Babies. One woman’s guide to the secondary Beanie Babies market got so popular that she was selling 650,000 copies per month and, on many days, she did two or three radio interviews before her kids woke up for school. Ty Inc. later gave her an award for boosting sales. At Peak Beanie mania, Ty Inc. and legions of speculators actually made hordes of money: The stuffed animals accounted for 6% of eBay’s sitewide sales in 1997 and 10% in 1998. Beanies averaged a resale value of $30—six times their retail price—but rare ones, like the Princess Diana bear, went for hundreds or thousands of dollars (and now you can find one online for $15 bucks). Ty Inc. hit $1.4 billion in sales in 1998, which is what Mattel grossed in Barbie dolls in 1995. At the end of the year, Ty Warner gave all ~250 employees holiday bonuses equal to their annual salaries. But most regular people didn’t sell their Beanie Babies at their peak price. And unfortunately for them, the hype subsided. Anticipating a drop in interest as more kids reached for Pokémon and Furbies, Ty Inc. announced it would stop making Beanie Babies at the end of 1999, and that poked a hole in collectors’ this-will-never-not-be-popular mentality and that sent demand plummeting. There were no underlying fundamentals to Beanie Babies’ value. That’s all that I’ve got on that speculative craze.   So let’s review how this happened with both speculative crazes - Dutch tulips and Beanie Babies: Investors lose track of rational expectations. Psychological biases lead to a massive upswing in the price of an asset or a sector. A positive-feedback cycle keeps inflating prices. And soon, investors realize that they are holding an irrationally-priced asset. Prices collapse due to a massive sell-off, and an overwhelming majority go bankrupt. Now, much stock market investing is based off of buy low and sell high mentality. And stock investors can get caught up in similar crazes.    But because many stocks are tied to productive companies, the stock investor deals with smaller bubbles. A lot of times, the stock price can double, triple, or even 10X even though that company is not even profitable. Buy low & sell high. Well, that sounds easy. But why is this harder to do than it sounds? It's called the cycle of investor emotions.   It starts here with… optimism. Because you HEAR about 10% stock returns or people making money with Dutch tulips or Beanie babies.    Let’s say that you aren't fully invested in the stock market. But some friends are, and they're achieving small gains.   Then comes excitement. The market is now up some more. Hey, what’s in motion tends to stay in motion.   More friends are telling you how much money they're "making".    You're soon experiencing a full-blown case of FOMO—Fear Of Missing Out.   The next stage is the Thrill you feel. So you jump into the stock market fully, rationalizing with something like, "Hey, I'm a momentum investor". Sounds pretty good, I guess.   Now that you’re in, it actually feels fantastic to you for a short time. You figure that some days, you're making more from stocks than your job. Winning activates dopamine.    Dopamine is a brain chemical that’s known as the “feel-good” hormone. It gives you a sense of pleasure. It also gives you the motivation to DO SOMETHING when you're feeling the pleasure.    So then, you add MORE shares… at an elevated price until you are FULLY invested. Now everyone is "making money", even your Uber driver.   The next stage is Euphoria - The peak! As you can see, this is the Point of Maximum Financial Risk.    OK, now, remember the simplicity of “buy low, sell high”?   Well then, savvy stock investors should now be SELLING here in my example - at the HEIGHT.   Now be “selling”? Leaving the party at its crescendo? Stopping the dopamine flow? Yes, exactly… and THAT’S why it’s so difficult.    What happens after the stock market peak? Overbought, with bloated price-to-earnings ratios, the market soon drops 10% from its recent high.    That’s what’s known as a correction - a drop of 10% or more. Now you feel a little ANXIETY. Your dopamine flow is stifled.   Next, you tell yourself, "I shouldn't be worried because I'm a long-term investor." It's down 15%. You're experiencing DENIAL & FEAR.   Now you're checking the Robinhood app almost hourly to see if it will recover.   Next, comes Desperation & Panic - Stocks are down 20%, that’s the definition of a bear market. You're devoting more mindshare to this each day than what's healthy.   Then there’s Capitulation - Down 30%, you finally surrender to a FEAR of FURTHER LOSS. You’re getting so sick of months of losing. You finally do it and cash out your stocks into a safe money market fund. Now you’re out.   And you rationalize and justify doing this because you tell yourself, "You know, at least when I wake up tomorrow, I'll know that I haven't lost money AGAIN. And THAT gives me certainty.”    The next stage in the Cycle of Investor Emotions is Despondency - You realize that what you've done is the polar opposite of successful investing. It’s complete. You’ve now bought high… and then sold low.    Next, stocks completely bottom out. But this is actually the Point of Maximum Financial Opportunity. Instead, you should be buying.   But you can’t. Because you’re experiencing the next investor stage - Depression. You're so full of contempt for the situation that the idea of actually buying at bargain-basement levels again is simply inconceivable. You've been burnt badly.   Then, there’s Hope & Relief - The market has begun ticking up after the crash. It soon should be clear that share prices are FAIRLY VALUED again.    But you don't buy the recovery story. You wait until enough price growth occurs that the confidence and Optimism stage is felt again before you’ll even consider getting back in and buying.   And the entire pattern repeats.   That's the “cycle of investor emotions”. There's an average of 3-and-a-half years between each stock bear market, BTW.   Of course, we've been kind to call this all “investing”. It's more like speculating.   But here's the real problem—most investors THINK they're better than average stock pickers, so they keep playing this game. This effect has a name. It’s called illusory superiority.   It's like how at least 70% of people think they're better than average drivers, despite the statistical impossibility.   Even professional money managers fall prey to this! Fewer than 10% of active U.S. stock funds manage to beat THEIR benchmarks.   The renowned British economist and value investor Benjamin Graham once said: "The investor's chief problem—even his worst enemy—is likely to be HIMSELF." Well, as real estate investors, we largely SIDESTEP the cycle of investor emotions for two main reasons.   Returns are more stable.   Real estate, we sidestep this emotional roller coaster. Not only do we have stable prices, but appreciation is one of just 5 ways that you’re simultaneously paid.   RE also has monthly income. Dutch tulips or Beanie Babies don’t pay you a durable monthly income stream. They don’t provide an income stream at all.   And finally, RE is a REAL asset that fulfills a REAL human need.   I hope that you enjoyed this journey through speculative bubbles today and how they play into human psychology and investor emotions.   Go ahead and tell a friend about Get Rich Education.   If you’ve got a friend or family member that you think would benefit from the knowledge drops here on the show, you can simply tell them to grab the free Get Rich Education mobile app.   That’s a convenient option for listening every week for both iOS and Android.   My name’s Keith Weinhold and I’ll be back with you right here… next week. Don’t Quit Your Daydream!