

Get Rich Education
Real Estate Investing with Keith Weinhold
This show has created more financial freedom for busy people like you than nearly any show in the world.
Wealthy people's money either starts out or ends up in real estate. But you can't lose your time.
Without being a landlord or flipper, you learn about strategic passive real estate investing to create wealth for yourself.
I'm show host Keith Weinhold. I also serve on the Forbes Real Estate Council and write for Forbes.
I serve you ACTIONABLE content for cash flow on a platter.
Our bottom line in real estate investing together is: “What’s your Return On Time?” Where traditional personal finance merely helps you avoid losing, you learn how to WIN.
Why live below your means when you can grow your means?
Since 2002, international real estate investor Keith Weinhold owns multifamily apartment buildings to single family homes to agricultural real estate.
New episodes are delivered every Monday.
Wealthy people's money either starts out or ends up in real estate. But you can't lose your time.
Without being a landlord or flipper, you learn about strategic passive real estate investing to create wealth for yourself.
I'm show host Keith Weinhold. I also serve on the Forbes Real Estate Council and write for Forbes.
I serve you ACTIONABLE content for cash flow on a platter.
Our bottom line in real estate investing together is: “What’s your Return On Time?” Where traditional personal finance merely helps you avoid losing, you learn how to WIN.
Why live below your means when you can grow your means?
Since 2002, international real estate investor Keith Weinhold owns multifamily apartment buildings to single family homes to agricultural real estate.
New episodes are delivered every Monday.
Episodes
Mentioned books

Apr 6, 2020 • 46min
287: How To Invest In Timber
It grows through recessions. No tenants. No loans. Own trees and the land beneath it, titled how you choose. Experience growth in both the timber size, and often, value of your investment. A long-revered timber type is teak. Its natural oils make it unusually resistant to fire and termites. Demand - Today, teak is used in flooring, countertops, veneer, furniture. It’s been used in boatbuilding 2,000+ years. It was used on The Titanic. Supply - Teak is being harvested at 10x its replanting rate. I first learned about lumber in my youth when I spent a summer doing forestry and timber-marking work in upstate Pennsylvania. You can own teak trees and the land beneath it, ¼ acre at a time. Get started with your free Teak Resource Guide at: www.GetRichEducation.com/Teak Trees grow through recessions, wars, stock market crashes, and real estate market crashes. Teak expert and friend Rachel Jensen joins me in discussion. Plantation teak grows well in Panama and Nicaragua. Teak is native to southeast Asia and India. You can own teak at age: 0, 14, or even 20-year-old teak. Cash, bitcoin, IRA funds may be eligible for funding. There are discounts for GRE listeners. Teak field tours are offered. Investors have the option of gaining second residency in Panama or Nicaragua. It is a nice “Plan B”. __________________________ Resources mentioned: Free Teak Resource Guide: GetRichEducation.com/Teak Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold

Mar 30, 2020 • 37min
286: How To Protect Yourself Financially During The Pandemic, Collecting Rent, Mortgage Update
A 10-step plan to ensure that your tenant pays the rent is revealed. In order, they are: proactivity, commitment, empathy, requirement, options, late fee, installments, security deposit, assistance, documentation. Real estate investors have time to react to the pandemic. Stock investors often didn’t. They lost 10%, 20%, 30% within weeks. Learn how volatility hurts stock investors. If the pandemic were as visible a threat as a fire-breathing Godzilla, more would adhere to shelter-in-place orders. For active real estate offers, pay more attention to where the tenants’ income originates. Large retailers are hiring, small retailers are firing. Caeli Ridge, President of Ridge Lending Group joins me to tell us about how coronavirus has changed the mortgage lending landscape. Jumbo loans and non-QM loans are no longer offered. Credit score, DTI requirements could soon become more stringent. Verification of employment now occurs right before loan funding. Mortgage rates still hover near historic lows. Loan forbearance, loan modification discussed. __________________________ Resources mentioned: Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold

Mar 23, 2020 • 39min
285: Your Pandemic Investing Strategy & Mindset
Unemployment is rising. Mortgage rates hit record lows two weeks ago. Stocks have fallen 32% from recent highs. Oil has fallen with a thud. Your life has changed in order to control the spread of the novel coronavirus. (**The entire episode transcript is below. You can read along as you listen.) Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and HUD have suspended foreclosures and evictions for at least 60 days. This could soon be extended to a year. The IRS tax filing deadline moved from April 15th to July 15th. There are opportunities for you today that you’ve never considered before. Recessions are normal. They occur every 7 years on average. In three of the last five recessions, real estate values appreciated. Consider drawing against your HELOC before it’s frozen. Bill Gates’ epidemic prediction audio clip played. Stocks: the bull market died of coronavirus. I discuss my recent chats with national Mortgage Loan Officers. Good news? Shelter-in-place means you might have the time with your family that you’ve always wanted. __________________________ Resources mentioned: Coronavirus forbearance is here: Housing Wire article RE appreciated in 3 of last 5 recessions: Article & Graph Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold Complete episode transcript: Welcome to Get Rich Education, I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. As the pandemic unfolds, how do you best position yourself as an investor to be profitable and mitigate loss? We’re talking about the real estate market, the stock market, and specific, actionable things that you can do for your family and your real estate. Today, on Get Rich Education. _________________________ Welcome to Get Rich Education, I’m your host, Keith Weinhold and no matter where you’re listening to us - any of the 188 nations - your life has changed … due to the pandemic. Just when you learned to replace your handshake with an elbow bump, now you can't do either one. Yes, your life looks different now. We are here in the social distancing era. With major events all cancelled and the closure of businesses & schools, & entertainment venues; it is clear that the global efforts to slow the spread of the coronavirus is an unprecedented experience for you and I. With people needing to stay home, it creates some new ways of socialization. For my haircut this week, I don’t think I’m going to go out to get it. I’m hoping that my wife can cut my hair at home. I can’t go to the gym. Thank goodness that I have a home gym - modest as it is. This is literally life-changing - altering the patterns and habits of you & I’s daily life. You might see more of your spouse now. You might be homeschooling your kid now. This is an emotional process for you and I - your relationships with people & things have changed. You’re now more likely to be listening to me from home rather than out & about - not from work. But wait. Now, for you, maybe work ... is ... home. Kinda. If you’re working from home, you’re now ... ... about to find out which meetings really could have instead been ... an email. Yes, it's simply a strange time to be a human being. The pandemic has stirred up more uncertainty than just social faux pas and awkwardness. It's created a breathtaking 32% stock market drop - more on that later. The slowing economy means that oil prices have fallen with a resounding thud. Mortgage rates hit record lows two weeks ago. The combination of those things might make you, the REAL ESTATE investor, giddy with your predicament. You might even have - what feels like - an extended adult Spring Break at home with your family. But the larger economic slowdown can ensnare everyone - yes, the real estate investor too. Some help is on the way. Just last week, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac announced that they are suspending foreclosures and evictions for at least 60 days - so we’re talking about a lot of conventional loans there. HUD is doing the same thing. HUD basically means FHA loans. So I guess that property owners don’t have to pay their mortgages and tenants don’t have to pay their rent for a little while either. That was followed by the state of New York declaring that certain borrowers in the state could forgo their mortgage payments for up to 90 days. And there’s just so much NEWS about payment forgiveness and everything else related to the economy and the pandemic that it can be difficult to keep up. I’ll tell you, I’ve had to scramble - more than normal this week - to pull together the more relevant stories that affect you - because so much is changing so fast. Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin said just last Friday - three days ago - that the deadline for Americans to file their taxes would be pushed back from April 15 to July 15. That’s got to be welcome news! In fact, Mnuchin tweeted: "All taxpayers and businesses will have this additional time to file and make payments without interest or penalties.” That’s what he said. That’s a 90-day extension. Some relief from the IRS for you. Now, how long will this kind of alternate society that we’ve now reluctantly formed linger on? How long will it last? Self-isolation and playing the ol’ Risk board game or Battleship with your kids might be kinda cool at first - but it gets a little old after a while. It really gets old once you find that your kid is improving at chess faster than you and he’s starting to beat you. Well, no one really knows. No one in the world knows how long it’ll last. So therefore, it’s hard to know whether people are overreacting or underreacting to the news. It’s really hard to know. Will this last one month? Six months? Or even longer? The best, most trusted source, I know of thinks that this will probably be with us … through June. Yeah, that’s three more months. Now, it might peak before that time, but who knows? And a lot of forecasts change … because, again … there are a lot of unknowns here. But there are a few things that I do know. So let’s think about what we do know. There will always BE an economy - even if things got far worse. There will always be an economy as long as there’s a civilization. Sheesh, there’s an economy in Leavenworth - a maximum security prison. When this thing ends, if you’ve got a friend or a tenant or yourself that’s been laid off - you’re probably going to return to your job. But some people might never return to their job. You might see this - as an opportunity. If you have - or have had - a job that you’re not in love with - this could give you time to find out what you’re good at & what you like doing rather than working for a paycheck. Use this time to ultimately find out what you want. Then learn some new skills at the Khan Academy online - or somewhere else. See this as an opportunity. There’s an old saying. If your neighbor loses his job, it’s a recession. If you lose your job, it’s a depression. And more people are probably thinking about that today ... But recessions are indeed - a frequent occurrence in the modern economy. This 11 year economic expansion, was an all-time American record. In response to the pandemic, The Fed is effectively printing tens of billions of dollars - and more - to help keep banks liquid. This is a process … that devalues the dollar. This is inflationary - which is good for borrowers long-term, and this dollar printing makes investors scurry for real assets that can hold their value. Yes, real things that can’t be inflated away with profligate monetary policy. I’m talking about assets like water, and timber, and real estate - especially residential real estate. Now, if for any reason, your income is disrupted, either because you’re out of work or your tenant is having trouble making rent payments ... If you're losing income and must play defense, and you’re a homeowner, you might have something to work with. Relief can come from your Home Equity Line Of Credit (HELOC). You can make withdrawals for emergencies. Sure - I’ve been talking for years here about how if you’ve got excess equity in your home, you can originate a HELOC. Since home equity is unsafe, and illiquid, and it’s rate of return is always zero, you can use that excess equity in your home. MAKE it liquid. The HELOC can come in the form of a second mortgage. At last check, on a primary residence, you could get an 80% combined loan-to-value ratio HELOC. How that works is if you have a $500K home, you could have $400K of debt against it. That’s the 80%. So then if currently, your home has a $300K loan balance, you can potentially get a HELOC second mortgage for another $100K. OK … your $300K first mortgage plus $100K HELOC has a sum of $400K - which is 80% of your home’s value. So now, you’ve got $100K out of your home. The way that this $100K HELOC works is that your interest rate generally follows the Federal Funds Rate - which the Fed has essentially dropped to 0%. Now, you’ll pay a margin on top of the Fed Funds Rate - but HELOC rates are really low now. Their interest is often tax deductible - and you can spend the HELOC funds on anything at all. You also have the flexibility of making interest-only payments on the HELOC - or paying back extra toward the principal if you prefer. Nice option there. And I’ve gone deep on how HELOCs work on prior shows, so I won’t do that here. But here’s the message if you think that you need some - or want some - liquidity. Originate your HELOC and consider drawing against it - which means pulling the money out - before the bank FREEZES withdrawals from your HELOC funds. Look, here’s what happened during the 2007-2009 Great Recession. Homes were losing value then, and banks flash-froze HELOCs. It happened to me. I still remember getting the letter - it was from a major bank that you’ve heard of. I do remember getting that letter from the bank because I was frustrated that they froze my funds - which was equity in my home that I had previously had access to. So, I’ve told you on past shows, that I can’t think of any reason not to have a HELOC second mortgage on your home, as long as you have adequate equity in it. That way you can choose to either use it by drawing against it - or not. My point today is - consider making a withdrawal on that HELOC before its frozen. Now, say you do that and you’re paying a 5% interest rate on that money. Maybe wherever you put those borrowed funds, now you’re making more than 5% on them because you’re taking those funds and putting them on offense. If so, that’s great. That positive arbitrage. Gotta love that. But what if you take those HELOC funds that you’re paying 5% interest for and you’re playing DEFENSE, and you have them invested in a vehicle that’s MAKING less than 5% interest for you. You know what I would say? What you’re doing is like … you’re paying an insurance premium. You’ve got access to the funds, you’re keeping them liquid, you could be hemorrhaging a bit each month, but it’s like paying an insurance premium in order to have access to your funds. I don’t like to tell people what to do. I like to tell people what I do, and I provide ideas and information here. Now, if you don’t need funds or want funds, well, then there’s less reason to tap your HELOC. Remember too, a high mortgage balance is a great asset protection tool against a bank foreclosure. In an adverse circumstance, the bank doesn’t want to come after you if you still owe $400K on the loan. But they’ll come after the family that only owes $40K on their loan - because the bank could get the property as collateral, and only lose out on the $40K that they would have had coming to them. See, the bank doesn’t want to foreclose on your property where you, the homeowner, would have still owed them 4-HUNDRED K. My point is - if you need to play defense, have a HELOC and consider using it before it gets frozen - IF it gets frozen. It might not get frozen. See, a big reason that HELOC draws were frozen during the Great Recession 12 years ago is that housing was at the CENTER of the 2007-2009 Great Recession. From the time that those HELOCs were originated, properties had lost value. As they lost value, that means loan-to-value ratios went up, often in excess of 100%. So banks froze HELOCs so that they didn’t get exposed to that risk. If you’ve got zero equity in the home or skin in the game, you’re more likely to walk away - as a homeowner. But see, if we have a pandemic-induced recession, it’s NOT housing-centered like the Great Recession was - with their irresponsible lending practices and overbuilding that occurred then. Today, we’ve got RESPONSIBLE lending practices and an UNDERsupply of homes. We’re UNDERbuilt. So, the Great Recession was different - and special. Now, I don’t know whether we’re set up for a pandemic-induced recession or not. But I’d say that there’s a good chance that we’ll have one. I’d say, a more than 80% chance that we’re in one now. We don’t actually know that we’re in one until in the future, we look back and see two consecutive quarters of year-over-year GDP contraction. That’s the definition. But we’re definitely due for a slowdown. We’re in one now. It’s worth remembering that recessions are actually a normal part of the economy. We have one every 7 years or so. Our previous five recessions began in 1980, another one in 1981, then 1990, 2001, and finally the aforementioned Great Recession beginning in 2007. In three of those five recessions - three of the last five, do you know what happened to home prices. Home prices went up. They INcreased in 3 of the last 5 recessions. Home prices increased in value anywhere from 1.9 percent to 4.8 percent. I’ll link that in the Show Notes for you. So, a recession definitely doesn’t mean a drop in property value. Residential real estate is a recession-resilient asset class. The thing that you need to keep your eye on is, is your tenant keeping their job during this crisis so that they can pay the rent. By the way, do you know the difference between an epidemic and a pandemic? As Oxford defines it: An epidemic is a widespread occurrence of an infectious disease in a community at a particular time. A pandemic is a disease prevalent over an entire nation or the world. They mean about the same thing, but the pandemic is on a larger scale. Now, MicroSoft co-founder Bill Gates has received attention recently in predicting that a pandemic was potentially humankind’s greatest understated threat. In fact, let’s listen to this short clip - this is Bill Gates, more than three years ago in Davos, Switzerland: Bill Gates clip: “An epidemic - either naturally-caused or intentionally-caused - is the most likely thing to cause, say, 10 million excess deaths. It’s pretty surprising how little preparedness there is for it.” Yeah, Bill Gates said a lot more than that about it. But he’s appearing to be rather correct here. Well, what has administration in the United States done for a response? Our political leaders? Well, initially, Trump and company seemed to throw more money & fewer regulations at the problem. That’s changing somewhat, as we’ve got more social controls and border closings now. With the list of these administrative & … policy news stories longer than a Walgreen's receipt, the least you should know is that President Trump and Congress are aiding homeowners and renters alike. Free testing, and an expansion of unemployment insurance. A stimulus package of one trillion - with a “T” - one trillion dollars or more that looks to involve direct payments to American households … is really going to help provide relief to people. There is lots of precedent for government bailouts in times of crisis. The U.S. government provided $15 billion to airlines after 9/11, $700 billion to banks to army-crawl through the 2008 financial crisis, and $17 billion to automakers just after that. Whether you see bailouts as the right way to do things or not, there is that precedent. Fortunately - some of that help should include your tenant. We might see multiple injections of $1,000 each or more - directly into consumers’ hands. That’s the plan that’s formulating - just write virtually everyone a check. And $1,000 means more to your tenant than it does to you. This can really help Trump and Congress “fill the gaps” between cushions like paid leave and unemployment insurance. Though that’s gonna cause more long-term taxpayer DEBT - yes, I think a lot of people need the relief in the meantime. Think about it this way: To save their economies over the long run, countries around the world are actively putting themselves into recessions. Productive nations are actively plunging themselves into recession left and right. Can you imagine that? But even though I’m a finance guy and a real estate investor, I think that it’s the right thing to do. As odd as it sounds, the best way to heal the likely recession, is not to try to fix the recession. It’s to get into a recession by killing activity in order to control the virus. The best way to heal the economy is to get people to stay home, stop the spread, and end this sooner. Look, if you’re riding a bicycle and get a flat tire because there are nails on the road, well then, you don’t get to your destination … by patching the hole in the tire over & over again. You get to where you’re going by cleaning up the nails on the road - which means that you & your bicycle go nowhere for a while - and then when the nails are picked up, you quickly roll along to wherever you’re going just like the economy should quickly roll along nicely - like it was - before the pandemic hit. The fastest way to fix the economy is to stop the virus. As we’ve now learned, even though you might feel like you’re in a digital age with TikTok videos, and an app that digitizes your dinner receipts, and everything else ... Humans still generate trillions in economic activity by coming into close, physical contact with one another—sitting at restaurants, assembling auto parts, traveling on planes, getting haircuts. But public health officials stress that to slow the spread of the coronavirus, we must all maintain a safe distance from each other, even if we’re healthy. But that still doesn’t square with our economy’s structure. Be mindful that recessions and surprises happen constantly. But this one feels a little more surprising for a few reasons - a virus is sort of intangible - you can’t see it - and there’s the fact that we just had a great loooooong run of 11 years. That was the longest economic expansion in American history. I think that this pandemic is the biggest news story since 9/11 - where you’re just kind of like, “I can’t believe this is happening.” But this WILL pass. It always does. Look at what we’ve had in the last - not even 20 years: 9/11, Hurricane Katrina. The great recession. Superstorm Sandy. And now, you might call this the great shutdown. With the economic slowdown, I’d expect sudden, deep, and brief. I hope and expect that it will be sudden - it already has been sudden, that it will be deep - with massive layoffs, - and that it will be brief. There are two prior Get Rich Education episodes that are getting a lot of attention right now. One of them is named “A Recession Is Coming”. I released that in November of 2018. One year later, I released an episode named “Planning For A Recession”. That was released in November of 2019, just four months ago. “A Recession Is Coming” is Episode 215, and “Planning For A Recession” is Episode 265 if that makes it easier for you to find them. I’m coming back with more here - with “Your Pandemic Investing Strategy & Mindset”. This is “Get Rich Education”. ____________________________ Hey, you’re back inside Get Rich Education. And welcome, you’re squarely in the #WFH Era. The “Work From Home” Era. Yes, this alternate world where working from home is NOT frowned up - and going into the office IS frowned upon. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. I’d like to emphasize that no one really knows about the next turn that society and the economy will take during this pandemic. That’s because we are in uncharted territory. Because I don’t think very many people were alive to remember the Spanish Flu of 1918. As far as the most recent territory that HAS been charted ... Last Friday, stocks, as measured by the S & P 500, fell more than 4%. So as of today, Monday, March 23rd, 2020, stocks have now fallen more than 32% from their recent high. How many people with 401(k)s have lost 32% of their account’s value? Some of them, even more, oh … and that’s just in the last month or two. And last week, stocks posted their worst week since the height of the financial crisis. The bull market died of coronavirus. That’s what happened. Now, why am I talking about stocks more than usual both this week & last - since I’ve talked about the pandemic quite a bit on both of these shows? It’s because stocks are often a LEADING indicator of what investors expect is coming. (And note that I’m being kind by calling stock buyers true “investors”. A lot of them are just speculators.) Now, a stock bear market is when stocks fall 20% or more from a recent high. Do you have any idea how good of a predictor a bear market is of a recession? Well, I can tell you. 73% of stock bear markets have been accompanied by a recession. As a forward-looking mechanism, the stock market usually sends warnings about the economy before shrinking growth shows up in the data. So yes, in the 11 stock bear markets we’ve had since WWII, 8 of the 11 have resulted in a recession. That’s that 73%. While it remains to be seen, real estate may be insulated to some extent - and that is because of tight residential inventory, high buyer demand, low mortgage rates, and lower prices for lumber and oil. Recessions are not officially declared until the economy is already deep into them, or until after they’ve passed. We could look back later and say the recession started this month. That’s because so much of our economy has to do with consumer spending - you buying a frappucino, you filling up your car with gas, you buying a boat. Consumer spending accounts for about 70% of GDP. Now, here on the show, we’ve spent the last few years focused on rental SFHs and properties up to four-plexes in size. Though it’s still a developing story, there’s been some evidence that the ventilation system in larger apartment buildings - can transmit the virus. I … sure hope that’s not true. I talked to two prominent national MLOs last week. One of them is Caeli Ridge, where they are just doing a TON of mortgage origination business for both income property purchases and refinances. The other mortgage loan officer is prioritizing new property purchases ahead of refinances there in THEIR office. Low rates will outlast coronavirus. Markets are anticipatory - so once the virus is past it’s peak, prices of real estate should be rather buoyant. Be mindful too, that because we focus on investing in the United States Midwest & South - what i call the stable markets - instead of the volatile, coastal markets. Just generally here, coastal properties and stocks here near the start of the decade - are very much alike. They’re both overpriced, they’re both low yielding, and they're both susceptible to fall in value. In these times, RE could be like the cleanest dirty shirt in the investment world - where you get the best risk-adjusted return. Better than bond yields, and better than 2% dividends from the S & P 500. With factories closed, supply chain kinks can LIMIT housing supply - and housing was already in short supply. I think that some people either won’t have the confidence or capacity to buy a home. Well, good. Then what they’ll do, is rent. You want them renting from you. More people in the renter pool … is to your advantage. But they’ve got to have an income. It’s important to remember that a pandemic is different from a financial crisis—bargain-basement interest rates can help keep businesses afloat, but the “social distancing” measures recommended by health officials mean canceling events and avoiding crowded places, which will curb spending. Interest rates can’t fix that, though low interest rates are great for borrowers. Think about how this has affected society - maybe in some other ways you haven’t thought about. I know friends that spent months training for marathons that were cancelled. MLB, the NHL, NBA seasons suspended. Think about college & HS seniors that might have played their last game - without even knowing it. The pandemic ended their career - did you ever think about that? Of course, this is minor. Some people have lost their lives, others have lung damage. How’s your grandma doing - hopefully you get some time to video chat with her. Maybe, just maybe, there is a huge silver lining to all of this with people staying home. Maybe more time as a family is what we need. Maybe we’ve gotten so caught up in following the madness of busy-ness, and that this is a reset - and you can have some health benefits - and exercise more. Maybe, after the short term economic losses have faded, some might place a much higher value on what is most important in their lives. Maybe. We should salute and express our gratitude to the millions of frontline workers who are making tremendous efforts to help us all. That includes our world class medical staff and others that you’re not thinking about too many others too - the calm grocery store & pharmacy workers and the tireless drivers bringing important supplies to hospitals & warehouses & stores & our own doorsteps. Think about the spouses of some of those people too. My wife is a medical worker and I’m a little fearful that she’ll bring the virus home. Realize that fear of the Coronavirus may keep people away from restaurants and small businesses who usually operate on small margins. So here’s something you can do!! From your favorite local business or restaurant, you can buy a gift card. Buy it directly from that favorite place so they get the use of your money for the next few weeks or months. Then ....when things have settled down, treat your sweetie to an evening out or buy something for someone and use your gift card‼ That’s something simple and actionable you can do to help the economy and your community. Thank you delivery workers. Thank you doctors, nurses & medical staff. Thank you grocery workers. Thank you truck drivers. If you like to see the headshots of the guests we have here on the show and see the show notes, it’s easy. For this episode, #285, simply go to GetRichEducation.com/285 Now, we might only have the complete lyrics for the episode transcribed for maybe ten percent of episodes. But for both today’s show and last week’s show, you can see the entire transcription there. That way, you can read along as you listen, or share that transcription with someone else who, perhaps, wants this content but isn’t able to hear. So you can check out: GetRichEducation.com/284 for last week’s show notes with complete transcription or GetRichEducation.com/285 - for this week’s. I’ll be back with you next week. If you want to help the economy, then, you might be best off, just staying home! It’s part of doing the right thing before you do things right. I’m Keith Weinhold. Don’t Quit Your Daydream!

Mar 16, 2020 • 41min
284: Coronavirus And Your Money
The novel coronavirus threatens life, business, and the economy. 11 years of U.S. economic expansion could end soon. (**The entire episode transcript is below. You can read along as you listen.) Closed businesses mean that supply chains are disrupted. This could make it difficult for flippers and value-add apartment projects. Travel, hospitality, and leisure business troubles mean that short-term rentals like AirBnB will have high vacancies. Short-term rentals cater to business travelers and vacationers - both vulnerable in this downturn. Long-term rentals are better positioned. As long as people are alive, they need a home. Mortgage interest rates have hit their lowest rate EVER since they’ve been tracked in 1971. The Fed made a 0.5% emergency rate cut. Expect more cuts. This punishes savers and rewards borrowers. Stocks recently fell more than 20% from their recent high; that's the definition of a bear market. Coronavirus’ effects are fast-moving and no one really knows the future. This is uncharted territory. With this in mind, I’d expect real estate to fare better than other asset classes. Also expect: Stronger: dollar, bonds, gold. Weaker: many stocks & businesses, short-term rentals, oil, silver. The unemployment rate will likely rise; I discuss what this means for your tenants. Low mortgage interest rates can be locked in for 30 years, outlasting the coronavirus pandemic. Check out our two new property providers in Orlando and Des Moines: getricheducation.com/orlando and getricheducation.com/iowa __________________ Resources mentioned: Properties, with two new markets: www.GREturnkey.com Recommended Coronavirus resource: Peak Prosperity YouTube Channel Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith’s personal Instagram: @keithweinhold Complete episode transcript: Welcome to Get Rich Education. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. The coronavirus, COVID-nineteen, has infected humans and financial markets too. This creates both problems and opportunities for you, the investor. Today, on Get Rich Education. Welcome to GRE. From Uruguay to the Ukraine to the UAE to the USA and across 188 nations worldwide, this is Get Rich Education. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. Yeah, you’re back in that abundant place, where your QUALITY OF LIFE exceeds your cost of living. The novel coronavirus (COVID-nineteen) that began in Wuhan, China in November of last year when it transferred from animal to human is poised to affect the economy of every world nation and every U.S. state. It's not SARS or Zika. This transmits easily and it is perhaps 20x more deadly than the common flu. Some experts believe it's the worst outbreak in America since the Spanish flu of 1918. That was the worst pandemic of the 20th century. And you know what, it didn’t have to be this way ... with coronavirus. As my chief informant on the matter, Dr. Chris Martenson says, it didn’t have to be this way. Often placing the economy ahead of human life, health organizations and governments have often done a DEPLORABLE job of handling this, often understating the threat. The World Health Organization was even reluctant to acknowledge that the coronavirus is a global pandemic … which it surely has been for a long time. Well, they only acknowledged that five days ago. Well now that agencies weren’t preparing people sooner - coronavirus is poised to threaten even more people - which in turn, will make the economy even worse than if the threat had just been accurately represented in the first place. I’m going to focus on coronavirus’ likely effects on real estate and the other financial markets shortly. But let’s - you and I - outline this together first. The virus causes only mild or moderate symptoms for most people, like a fever and cough … … but it can progress to serious illness including pneumonia, especially in older adults and people with existing health problems. The World Health Organization says mild cases last about two weeks, while most patients with serious illness recover in about three to six weeks. Based on what I said earlier, consider the source there. My heart goes out to the victims of this - past, present, and future. The most credible source that I follow thinks that the virus will reach its peak in the U.S. 1 to 3 months from now. I've followed this story closely since January and if you receive our Get Rich Education newsletter, you’ve known for a while that my favorite source of TRUSTWORTHY coronavirus information was and still is: the Peak Prosperity YouTube Channel, which Chris Martenson hosts. In fact, I’ve mentioned that resource in our GRE newsletter for you twice - the first time was back on February 6th. So if you get the Get Rich Education Newsletter, you’ve had plenty of time to get in front of this. You know, it’s interesting. I had Chris Martenson on the show here earlier this year and we talked about “The Fed” printing money. That was right before coronavirus literally went viral. Before I tell you about the affects on your real estate - both good and bad - let’s establish a baseline here. Coronavirus is threatening because it has a substantially higher R-naught value than the flu. If the R-naught value is greater than 1, that means that one infected person will spread the virus to MORE THAN one person then the disease can spread. The way a virus dies out is for it’s R-naught value to be less than 1. Then, one infected person, on average spreads it to fewer than one person. Well, the common flu has an R-naught value of about 1.3. Coronavirus (COVID-nineteen) is believed to have an R-naught value of more than 3 and maybe even more than 6. So it spreads easily. It spreads asymptomatically - and that’s bad. There’s no vaccine available - and most believe it’ll take a while to develop one. And, you can find resources elsewhere on how to prevent the spread like social distancing, avoiding gatherings, and lots of handwashing. But because this is an investing platform and I don't have a degree in pathology or epidemiology, and much of what I just told you there, I learned myself in the past month or two … Let me now get into my lane: how do I think coronavirus will affect your money and your real estate? Well, it probably already has. Businesses are closing. Colleges have suspended classes. Many events are being cancelled or postponed. SXSW in Austin, Texas was one of the first major EVENTS to be cancelled in the U.S. March Madness basketball won’t have any crowd there. We’ve got an entire country - Italy - that’s essentially shut down. When businesses close and more people work from home, this disrupts supply chains. That COULD include less supply of sheet rock or faucet handles or whatever - and affect value-add properties because so much building material comes from China. It could be a tougher time to be a flipper then if you’re about to start a rehab or if you’re in the middle of a rehab. If you're upgrading an apartment building, that could slow things down. You need materials. This may or may not create disruptions for turnkey property providers. We’ll see. You’re in a better position if you’re a prospective turnkey buyer waiting on a rehab - maybe that’ll create a delay until your property is ready. Maybe it won’t. China accounts for nearly 30% of world manufacturing. But importantly, they also make component goods for finished products. An American car can't be finished if it doesn't have the battery and exhaust system from China. Virtually every major car company has a component made in China. Now, I see conflicting reports of whether some previously closed Chinese businesses have really come back online or not. We need to learn more there. Travel, hospitality, and leisure businesses are already hurting. Now, where hospitality meets real estate, we’ve got hotel rooms, Bed & Breakfasts and short-term rental platforms like AirBnB and VRBO. Like I’ve said before, and not too long ago on the show at all - is that these short-term rentals are not very recession-resistant. That’s because short-term rentals cater to two main groups of people - business travelers and vacationers. That’s who occupies those properties. Well, what are business travelers and vacationers doing right now? They are postponing travel or cancelling travel left-and-right due to coronavirus concerns. How great would you feel about owning AirBnBs right now? Short-term rentals like AirBnBs are not as recession-resistant as long-term rentals. Just a couple, three months ago, it probably sounded different to you when I mentioned that short-term rentals aren’t very recession-resistant. Because perhaps you were still feeling good about our 11-year-long economic expansion. But those same words probably sound and feel different to you now that some think that a coronavirus-induced recession could even be imminent - though that remains to be seen. Also, expect big hits to: chemicals, pharmaceuticals, and electronics. Apple Corporation is so dependent on Chinese manufacturing for their iPhone. That’s the bad news. Now, let’s talk about the good news. Mortgage interest rates have hit all-time lows - yes, lower than their lows that they hit in 2012, shortly after coming off of the Great Recession. All-time lows - as long as Freddie Mac has been tracking them - which is since 1971. They’ve never been lower than they are now. Today, you can get a rate in the low 3s for primary residences, I’ve even heard of a few people closing 30-year fixed amortizing loans for less than 3%. Just astoundingly good. And of course, investor loans are often about ¾% higher than those. The Fed has been pumping tens of billions, even hundreds of billions into the system lately … for bank liquidity. The Fed's emergency interest rate cut of 0.5% two weeks ago is first time we've seen such a move since 2008. That 2008 cut was in the wake of The Great Recession - that was the Lehman Brothers emergency one-half-of-one-percent cut. Just a quick economics primer if you’re a new listener - lower interest rates for loans stoke the economy because they make you more willing to borrow & spend. Interest rate cuts help the investor class like you, and not poor people. That’s just the truth behind who cuts actually help. It’s you! It helps the Get Rich Education listener - you again - even more because we’re such strong proponents of responsible and sensible borrowing here. Now, note that lower rates don’t help contain the diseas. If your grandparent gets sick, Jerome Powell’s decisions aren’t going to help that. Right, how low would rates have to be to get you to travel to China or Italy tomorrow? By the way, after the rate cut, President Trump was not satisfied with the amount of easing and cutting. “More easing and cutting!” is what he tweeted following the central bank’s announcement. But realize, of course, that long-term mortgage rates don’t move on that Fed Funds rate. The Fed controls the short-term rate - though there’s generally still a correlation there. Long-term mortgage rates - like the ones that you really care about for real estate - they move with bond yields. Now, bonds are like the boring can of beans or soup in the finance world - they’re safe and they’re stable. Vigorous bond-buying makes bond prices go up and makes bond yields go down. So this strong bond-buying … this safe have ... has dropped the 10-Year Treasury Note yield below 1% for the first time ever … and it’s fallen substantially below 1% in just a fantastic fall off the table. OK, so they’re below 1% - and that’s a rate that was unthinkable just a few months ago. Do you know what the average spread is between this bond yield and the 30-year mortgage rate? On average, mortgage interest rates hover 1.8% above this rate, so you can see how low we could be going. I think that the historic spread will widen, but despite the fact that we now have record - I mean all-time record low mortgage rates, there’s a good chance that they’ll go a little lower yet. This is great for your new real estate buys. Refinance activity is surging right now. But back to short-term rates that the Fed influences - more cuts there seem imminent too. The next one could happen at the Fed's regularly scheduled meeting, which happens tomorrow and the next day. So you’ll hear an announcement from The Fed this Wednesday about their rate cut decision. The Fed loaded up with dry powder in 2018 when they raised rates, so that they can lower them at a time like this. Every time they cut the rate like this, it punishes savers and rewards borrowers. No one knows if rates will go negative - and only a few places in the world have those right now: places like Japan, Denmark, and Switzerland. We’ve never had them in America. U.S. stock market investors are getting killed with all this uncertainty. Indices are whipsawing with volatility. Fear pushes stocks around, but not RE. The U.S. stock market dropped 3% in just minutes when a report came out that in CA, a large number of people were exposed to coronavirus, but weren’t. Last week was the first time that major stock indices dipped into bear market territory. That’s defined as a 20% loss from a recent high. There was one recent trading day - just one day - where the S&P dropped 7%, triggering a circuit breaker, which paused trading for everyone for 15 minutes. Yeah, now we’re talking about all these automatic fail-safes. When the stock market loses so much, so soon, there’s a pause in trading. By the way, the way it works is that if the S&P had declined 13% in a day, trading would’ve paused another 15 minutes. 20% in a day, and everyone would have gone home for the day. That’s how it works. Yeah, they put those circuit breakers in place after 1987’s Black Monday, when the market fell between 22 and 23%. Stock drops are always sickening,l and if you’re within 5 years of retirement, stock drops are really scary. I’ve told you before that I haven’t owned any stock, mutual fund, or ETF since 2014 and that’s still true today. Being in something stable like real estate has rarely felt as good as it has lately. And you know something, “volatility” is a funny word. It seems like “volatility” used to mean something that changes rapidly, and anymore, it’s morphed into something that only means a change for the worse. Warren Buffett says, "The stock market is a device for transferring money from the impatient to the patient." I believe that. I’d even say that - not just the stock market - but just that, “MARKETS OVERALL are devices for transferring money from the impatient to the patient.” Real estate investors like us are more patient. There’s no flash-selling in real estate. It might take you 30, 60 days or more to sell a property … or to buy a property. I’d expect to see a stronger U.S. dollar because the world views it as a safe haven asset. I expect this to be a nice tailwind for real estate too, because the world views U.S. real estate as a safe haven asset in times of uncertainty. Gold should be strong with coronavirus concerns. That’s easy to say, since gold is the classic safe haven asset. But remember that gold might not APPEAR stronger to Americans if the dollar strengthens. That’s how it works. Because if gold goes up 10% and the dollar also gets 10% stronger, well then it takes just as many dollars to buy the gold. The dollar-denominated gold price would look the same then. I’ve read that a number of experts predict silver prices to rise on coronavirus concerns, but then I don’t see any sound rationale for them thinking this. I disagree. I would NOT expect silver to rise. That’s because silver has more industrial use than gold and more industrial slowdown is expected. Let's talk more about your income properties in this coronavirus environment. Though I'm speculating now, what if your tenant is required to self-quarantine at home and they lose their income? This is not far-fetched. Washington state officials were really some of the first in the U.S. to recommend that workers stay at home when they suggested that Seattle-area residents work from home. More & more people can work from home today than anytime in modern history. But when we’re talking about your tenants, it's unlikely that all of your tenants will lose substantial income. Now, there are some positions where people can’t work from home so well, like mechanics, janitors, chefs and wait staff, sure. Let’s consider that ... The current unemployment rate is 3.5%. I’m really speculating here, but if 1 in 10 of your tenants is both laid off & without income, that’s a 10% increase in unemployment. That would be huge. That would be like the unemployment rate going from 3.5% all the way up to 13.5% - which seems unfathomable! And yes, realize that if 1 in 10 people were laid off it wouldn’t exactly make the 3.5% unemployment rate shoot up to 13.5%. It doesn’t exactly work that way with how it’s calculated. But, I think you get my point. If 1 in 10 of your tenants were both laid off and without employment, that would be massive. So keep that in perspective. Even 1 in 10 would be a lot. Last week, Trump floated the idea of a payroll tax cut, which I don’t think would do much of anything to help - and also, extending paid leave which seems more helpful. Companies, especially those in the service sector, are under pressure to provide paid sick leave to workers who may not be in a financial position to take time off. Wal-Mart and McDonald’s put in safeguards for their employees. Congress might step in. A bill has been introduced that would require companies of all sizes to provide paid sick leave. Could your overall rental income go down? Maybe, though you have to speculate quite a bit to even think that 1 in 10 would go without an income. So that’s a maybe. But does your mortgage interest rate go down? Definitely. It already has. What about you? If you lose your job, you need multiple income streams ... from places like your rentals. And if 9 out of 10 … or 10 out of 10 of your tenants still have jobs, you probably still have that income stream because you set up your life for multiple income streams if you’ve been listening to this show & acting. What about you - what about your job? Well ... The lower your financial freedom, the higher the risk. The more income streams you’ve built, the better off you are. What about your job? The lower your financial freedom, the higher the risk. Another benefit of a paid sick leave movement gaining momentum, is that “When people gain access to paid sick leave, the spread of the flu decreases.” Because they’re more likely to stay home then. So that makes paid sick leave seem like more of reality. It’s important in this situation that when you have people who have symptoms and don’t feel well, that they do not go to work and spread diseases to slow the infection rate and buy time for public health officials to develop a vaccine. Let’s look at oil prices - because that’s a substantial input to inflation and oil is a real proxy for what’s going on in the economy. Oil prices have crumbled faster than a Nature Valley Granola bar. And that’s even before a coronavirus-induced slowdown. What’s happened, is that with President Trump in the White House and the Republican Party controlling the Senate, environmental activists have shifted their focus from pressuring the government to pressuring the private sector instead. Since JPMorgan is such a big financier of the fossil fuel industry, activists have really turned up the heat on them and other big banks to stop financing oil projects. That’s significant - on top of a slowdown in the economy - if fewer goods need to be produced and shipped, it uses less energy and then there’s less demand for oil. Low oil prices are generally good for consumers but bad for producer countries. In the U.S., low oil prices are not good for real estate in areas like west Texas, parts of Louisiana, and Alaska. But, of course, there’s the flip side of all this. At some point, low stock and oil prices mean that bargain hunters come in to float the market again at some point. In fact, billionaire investor Sam Zell recently made remarks that oil looks like a “buy low” opportunity. So let’s look at the bottom line - real estate is still quite well-positioned as long as you’re in residential, long-term rentals that you bought for cash flow. Elsewhere: Bonds win, gold wins, the US dollar wins, many business sectors - like the ones I mentioned - lose, stocks lose, oil loses, and silver loses. Of course, let me qualify all that by telling you that that’s my outlook and that we don’t have any recent precedent for anything else like the coronavirus. No one REALLY knows. That’s my take. -------- If you happen to be a new listener to the show, you may not know much about me. I’ve authored many written articles for both Forbes and the Rich Dad Advisors. Business Insider recently wrote two stories about me and Get Rich Education - and how I’ve helped everyday people create financial freedom through real estate investing. That’s what I do here! I’m a current member of the Forbes Real Estate Council. But maybe the more important things I can tell you are that I’ve been the host of this show every week - and I mean EVERY week continuously since 2014 - you can count on me to keep showing up here. I own three real estate trademarks. In 2017, I authored an international best-selling book on how real estate makes ordinary people wealthy. And perhaps the most important thing I can tell you is that I invest right alongside you, from the exact same providers that we talk about here. Though I travel pretty well, I’ve lived my entire life in the United States, dividing this life of mine between two states - Pennsylvania and Alaska. I have spent the last 2-and-a-half weeks visiting four countries - the United Arab Emirates, Oman, India, and Sri Lanka. Though I’m a real estate guy, I have a degree in geography so I like to travel. One of the coolest things I did is sandboarding on a sand dune in the Arabian Desert there in the United Arab Emirates. I couldn't find another interested person, so I did that activity all by myself. Going high in the world's tallest building, the Burj Khalifa in Dubai, was a “must” while we were there. Muscat, Oman has some surprisingly beautiful sights, and buildings, and mosques that we toured. Really clean-looking there in the nation of Oman. Immersing myself in Indian culture is something that was really novel to me - the food, the way that - the women especially in some of these outlying provinces like Goa and Kerala, India - the way the women dress in such colorful outfits ... just if they’re walking to the market to buy some guava. Such an exotic feeling there. The coolest thing that I did is visiting the world's largest slum. It’s called Dharavi and it’s in Mumbai, India. It's just sooo different from my world. There are actually bustling little businesses inside the slums there - from plastic recycling to pottery. And the Indian people were so welcoming - even in the slums - which was just amazing to me. As I like to say, seeing poverty enriched me. :o) I’ve got more on coronavirus and your money straight ahead. A fair bit of what I’ve discussed here about coronavirus and your money and your real estate, is material that I sent in our wealth-building Get Rich Education newsletter about 12 days ago. The newsletter is a nice, written supplement to the podcast. Of course, you can unsubscribe at any time - but very few do. My wealth-building newsletter is something that you can subscribe to … for free … at GetRichEducation.com You’ll be glad you did. You’re listening to Get Rich Education. _____________________________________ Welcome back to Get Rich Education. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. It’s unknown whether coronavirus will tilt the economy into a recession or not. It’s too soon to know. I’ll keep you updated on that here, of course. For you, I think it helps to listen to a perspective that’s invested through a recession before. I’ve been investing directly in real estate since 2002 - which was before the Great Recession. I made a major income property purchase in 2007 - which was just within that recession (in fact, I mentioned that four-plex purchase last week on the show). And I kept buying in 2010, as the recession wound down - and in 2012. Well, what’s the common thread there? It’s that I continued to prosper because I bought for cash flow first. It’s that I bought in multiple geographic markets for diversification - a recession-resilient strategy. Residential rentals that were leased to long-term tenants. People need a place to live. And as long as they're alive, a virus is not going to change that. But see, a virus might mean people stop using vacation rentals and stop taking business trips and stop going to the mall and stop going to the office to work. We’re talking about HOMES. Well, we could soon have more people working from … home. Not office, not retail, not short-term rentals. They all look vulnerable now. And by the way, that doesn’t mean I’m a permabear on those asset types. There’s always opportunity. But recession-resistence just isn’t one of their qualities. I’m not saying short-term rentals never make an ounce of sense or anything like that. Some companies are basically using the coronavirus as an experiment for that moment when “working remotely could broadly replace working in-person.” Some people think that time is coming. This can ACCELERATE THE - you’re seeing the acronym “WFM” around a lot more now - the “work from home” movement. As people get more used to using workflow software and using platforms like Slack or Trello from home because they HAVE to, you know, when coronavirus passes - and it will - some might ask, now why return to an office all? With each passing day, the camp of people believing that this is all fear-mongering loses troops. We’ll see if the peak for coronavirus will be that 1-3 months from now like some experts predict. That’s the latest I’ve heard from credible sources. But again, we really don’t know. That’s why I like to focus on things that we do know. So let’s focus on what we do know now: The coronavirus threat will pass sometime. We just don’t know when. But it will pass. A second thing we know is that people will continue to need a home - a place to live. And thirdly, mortgage interest rates have hit their lowest level in American history. So with those being the things that we DO know - this can be QUITE an opportunity to not only lock up investment property buys at historically low rates, but potentially, do that cash-out refinance of your existing home if you think that that’s in your best interest. Procrastinators often aren’t rewarded. But, hey, maybe you are this time with rates being this low - or maybe you really weren’t because you had dead equity accumulated in one place for too long. With borrowing rates underneath the basement, a lot of homeowners are racing to lock in cheaper loans. I think we could see low to mid 3% rates on investment properties, and below 3% on primary residences. Mortgage refinancing applications have more than doubled in volume from the same time last year - that’s according to the Mortgage Bankers Association. And industry records are being shattered. Bloomberg reported that : The country’s No. 1 mortgage lender, Quicken Loans, recently had its busiest day for mortgage applications in its 35-year history. United Wholesale Mortgage approved a single-day record of $2.5 billion in loans. These stories are all over the place. The thing is, to process this flood of applications you’re going to need a lot of people. So the mortgage industry is on a hiring spree to take advantage of the gold rush. Our preferred mortgage provider is doing a lot of volume now as well - RidgeLendingGroup.com - that’s R-I-D-G-E. Just calculate your ROI just from principal reduction alone at these low rates. It’s pretty remarkable. I think that the thing that you need to remember is … that long-term thinking. "Investing should not be about a MOMENT; it should be about a PROCESS OVER TIME.” Some of the classic problems with GETTING STARTED in real estate are ones that I’ve helped solve for you here. I think that Problem 1 for people is that they feel like it costs a small fortune to GET started. Problem 2 is FINDING the property. Often times, it’s because properties in your area don’t make sense with your 20% down payment and 80% loan. I’ve really helped solve both of those problems. By selecting investor-advantaged markets, with down payment & closing costs you can get started with as low as … about $18K - and they’re in areas where the numbers make sense … all at the website … GREturnkey.com In fact, at the top of the page there, there’s that 8-step flowchart where I walk you through the process. You start by getting pre-approved for a mortgage - I even suggest where - and then reading an investor due diligence report … … all the way through to viewing properties, making an offer, getting your third-party inspection, appraisal, signing your Management Agreement, Closing on the Property … and then the really good part - years of owning and collecting the rent. It’s rarely been easier - though the process still takes time & you need to supply your mortgage loan underwriter with plenty of documentation. That’s all outlined at the same place where I buy my property: GREturnkey.com What about some current highlights over there? Well, it’s a great time to invest in Florida for a lot of reasons - you’ll find providers in Tampa, Orlando, and Jacksonville. Our Orlando provider was recently added - they’re now - and they have NEW CONSTRUCTION - yes, newly-built, never-before occupied - single-family homes and duplexes … and they’re in locations from the Space Coast to The Villages, through Orlando, and nearly out to Tampa. We’ve got another new provider on the page if you’re looking for more cash flow and less appreciation than what you’d typically get on new construction, and that is in … Iowa. Yeah, I’m proud to introduce the Des Moines, Iowa market to you today. It’s a model of midwestern stability and Des Moines has an MSA population of 600 to 700,000 people. Des Moines has seen an average 3.6% appreciation over the last twenty years. I think of it as a cash flow market. A lot of times, you might be buying for, say a 4 or 6 or 8 or 10% cash-on-cash return today. If you have a little more patience and you want to potentially double your CCR, then, rather than the turnkey model - where you buy a property that’s already renovated - you might prefer the BRRRR model. That stands for Buy – Renovate – Rent – Refinance – and Recycle Model - recycling your money to re-use right away. That BRRRR model is suited to Baltimore, Maryland - within commuter distance to Washington, D.C. at just a fraction of the price. All those markets - including the new turnkey markets with inventory TODAY in Orlando and Des Moines, plus the Baltimore BRRRR market, plus that 8-step flowchart that helps serve as a roadmap for you are all in one convenient place - all on one page - at GREturnkey.com Market uncertainty is a short-term phenomena. But when you lock up these lowest mortgage interest rates in American history - they can last you 30 years. When the dust settles from any current news, you know what, you’ve still going to have your mortgage rate. Stay safe. Enjoy these historically low mortgage interest rates … I sure am. Take action at GREturnkey.com I’m Keith Weinhold and I’ll be back next week to help you build your wealth. Don’t quit your daydream!

Mar 9, 2020 • 37min
283: Don't Save For Retirement with Daniel Ameduri
You’ll struggle unnecessarily in life if you “maximize” conventional retirement plans. How can this be? Historically, rather than deferring your income into the future with a 401(k), 403(b), 457 Plan, TSP, IRA … … you could invest in a real, cash-flowing asset that improves your life BOTH now and later. I make a case that a “dollar per dollar” employer match in your 401(k) could be worth it. But only up to that level. Today’s guest, Daniel Ameduri, author of “Don’t Save For Retirement”, discusses this with me. Future federal income tax rates will likely be higher. That’s one risk of deferring your tax. The biggest risk of conventional retirement saving is that you sell your todays for tomorrows. Would deferring your compensation ever “pay off” for you? Children & money tips are also discussed. The top role of most financial advisors? To keep the naive person from losing all of their money. In retirement, many retirees pay their financial advisors 25% to 50% of what the retiree withdraws! I explain. Summary: Don’t invest your income for savings; invest your income for more durable income. __________________ Resources mentioned: Future Money Trends: www.FutureMoneyTrends.com/save Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Find Properties: GREturnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation

Mar 2, 2020 • 37min
282: Predicting Your Economic Future with Brian Beaulieu
The next recession, and your next 3-10 economic years are predicted by our guest today. He is Brian Beaulieu, CEO of America’s oldest privately-held continuously operated economic research and consulting firm, ITR Economics. Prediction: Interest rates should stay low through 2023. By 2025, they could rise 3% to 3.5%. Inflation should increase in the second half of the 2020s decade. Why? De-globalization. We discuss how long this longest-ever economic expansion will last. Declinism is people’s predisposition to view the past favorably and fear the future. Brian tells us why the economy is likely to accelerate before it falls into decline. Millennials and Gen Zers are large generations. As they age, their affluence increases. Brian tells us that the widening gap between stock valuation and corporate profitability is concerning. I tell you the difference between fiscal policy and monetary policy, and why the 30-Year Fixed Rate Mortgage might be the most undervalued “asset” today. Of course, your economic future is based more on your individual decisions than the broader economy. If you want an economic forecast for your business or personal investing, visit: ITReconomics.com __________________ Resources mentioned: ITR Economics: https://itreconomics.com/itr-economics-podcasts Book: Prosperity In The Age Of Decline Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Find Properties: GREturnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation

Feb 24, 2020 • 40min
281: Real Estate’s Secret Market
One of America’s most underappreciated markets is right in the heart of cash flow country. Rent-to-price ratios are often 1%. Americans are moving from high-cost, high-tax places to low-cost, low-tax places. Look, the biggest mistake most real estate investors make is emphasizing “the deal” rather than “the market”. You are making an investment into an area’s underlying economy before the property. Follow the data, not the money. I discuss why health care employment is an important gauge of economic vibrancy. Learn why sellers prefer investor-buyers like you, not owner-occupant buyers. To buy cash-flowing properties in this underappreciated, “secret” market, start here at: www.GetRichEducation.com/Dayton __________________ Resources mentioned: Dayton Cash Flow Properties: GetRichEducation.com/Dayton Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Find Properties: GREturnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation

Feb 17, 2020 • 47min
280: Your Questions: Housing Bubble, Inspections, Student Loans, Report Cards
Before you buy a property, I discuss something crucial that you’re probably missing. Five of your listener questions are answered. (The entire episode’s lyrics are in the Show Notes below!) 1 - How should I reward my child for their good school report card? 2 - How reliable is a real estate income stream? 3 - Are we in a housing bubble? 4 - Should you pay off $200K in student loans or invest? 5 - Should I get an inspection for a new construction property? “Packaged commodities investing” is a way to think of real estate. You have a buying opportunity for income property in Florida, Alabama, Indiana, Maryland, Tennessee, Arkansas and more all at www.GREturnkey.com. __________________ Resources mentioned: Inflation Lesson: Sears & Roebuck DIY Homes Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Find Properties: GREturnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Welcome to Get Rich Education. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold - answering your listener questions today. How do you reward your child for a good school Report Card? What about the long-term DURABILITY of a real estate income stream? Are we in a Housing Bubble? What should I do - pay off student loan debt - or invest? Should I get a Home Inspection? And what’s the one thing you should do before you buy ANY property that you’re probably not doing? All today - and more … on Get Rich Education. ___________________________ Welcome to GRE. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. From Colombo, Sri Lanka to Columbia, South Carolina to Columbus, Ohio and across 188 nations worldwide. This is Get Rich Education. We’re having my favorite guest on the show today. That guest is you! Because I’m here with your listener questions today! The first one concerns a kid’s school report card and then the rest are about real estate investing. Rebecca from Los Angeles, California asks, Keith: What reward should I give to my 11-year-old son, Mason, for having a good report card at school - all As and Bs? I love your show, keep up the great work. Well, thanks, Rebecca. I love this question. Even though we’re largely a real estate investing show, I think there can be so many lessons about life for your 11-year-old son, Mason here. The reward you can give them for their good report card is cash. Tell Mason that he’s getting $100 - or maybe it’s $40. But in any case, let’s just stick with the $100 example. Divide it in half. Tell him that he’s getting $50 in cash. And tell Mason that, as a bonus for later, another $50 is going to be invested for him. Over time, Mason will probably see that the invested $50 grew and the $50 that he spent on video games or whatever didn’t. But see, he still gets rewarded with “short-term” fun. That way, it’s not ALL delayed gratification. As you know, the abundance mentality isn’t about either / ors, it’s about “ands”. This way, he can have his cake and eat it too. What good is cake if you can’t eat it? Now, I didn’t say that he had to SPEND the $50 cash part of this. $50 gets invested - and you’ll have the fun of keeping Mason updated on his investment over time. He can do whatever he wants with the $50 cash part. And over time, if he sees the invested portion gained value, he might choose to actually invest some or all of the $50 cash reward too. But for now, let’s be realistic - he wants to spend his $50 cash on Minecraft or Fortnite or the latest release of Grand Theft Auto. A video game like that. That’s fine. You need to let him be rewarded now - because that might incentivize more near-term good school performance - which is what you value seeing in Mason. Thanks for the question, Rebecca. Now, before I move onto the next question. There’s … I think … a real extrapolation here for you, the adult listener, with the way I recommended that Mason’s report card could be rewarded. Really, there’s a real estate investing lesson there. Mason gets rewarded both now & later. A employer-sponsored retirement plan punishes you now by reducing your salary and make you delay gratification. Real estate investing reduces your salary now - in way - when you make your down payment. But it begins returning that to you in the form of cash flow now - and gives you the asset appreciation for later. As you know, I’m not in love with the term “delayed gratification”. Now, I do think there’s a little something to be said for it. When I made my first-ever property that four-plex building where I lived in one unit and rented out the other three, I could have bought a nicer SFH. So I delayed some gratification there. I see some investors buy-in to “delayed gratification” so much that I wonder how long their postponing happiness and if they’ll EVER find it. Sometimes, people get shocking reminders of this, but they soon forget it. I know this hits close to home for an Angelino like you, but you think about 41-year-old Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gianna being taken away from the world a few weeks ago. There are really all kinds of analogies for life here. Sometimes “later” becomes “never”. Would you say that IF 11-year-old Mason spent half his report card reward - the cash half - if he spent it all on video games, would you say that he “blew that money” - that he “wasted that money”. I don’t know. What about you - the adult listener. Sometimes I hear people say that you should save all your moeny and not “blow it on a vacation” - as if you squandered money if you went on a vacation. I don’t know that that’s necessary true. Look, what is money for? What if you’ve wanted to travel to tour the beautiful Croatian coast or see glaciers in Greenland. How can a person say that you’re necessarily “blowing your money” if you go out and to that. You’re getting out and seeing the very world that you live in. You’re living the life you’ve dreamed of. What would you want to do any less? Most people just don’t have a vehicle - they don’t know about a durable vehicle like real estate that pays them so many ways - both today & tomorrow. See, a lot of investment promoters WANT you to delay gratification. They oversell that stance. They’re selfish. They want you to invest your money with them so they get the sale first and that they get the commission first and that they get the referral fee first. They’ve convinced you that paying yourself first … means investing with them first … so that you can accumulate dollars in an account with your name on it so that you can only then consume it in years or decades. Use your dollars in years or decades? That’s not paying yourself first. How did that get to be paying yourself first? It’s because that promoter of salesperson is only thinking of themselves first. There’s something to be said for delayed gratification, yes. But delayed gratification should not be a permanent condition. When are you really going to start living the life you’ve always wanted? The year 2052? Or do you have a plan to compound your cash flows so that you can do that in three years. You know that that’s the big reason - the #1 reason for me, in fact - that I don’t care for conventional retirement plans. They only invest for later instead of both now & later like cash-flowing real assets do. Now, I don’t think you’re going to find it self-redeeming if you go broke trying to LOOK rich with ostentatious displays and classic CAR status symbols like the Lambo - unless that’s sustainable for you. Then … that’s great. So be gratified both now & later. Give Mason cash - half now, half turned into an investment that you make for him. And to 11-year-old Mason, if you listen to this now, I know you might want all $100 bucks right now. Most 11-year-olds would. If you listen to this in 2030 when you’re age 21, you still might not understand. If you listen to this in 2040 when you’re age 31, it’ll probably all make sense. Thanks for the question about your son Mason, Rebecca. ------------------ The next question comes from Gerald in - Oxnard, CA - that’s just up The 405 and 101 - west from L.A. where our last listener inquiry was from. I went through Oxnard on my last drive from L.A. to Santa Barbara. Gerald writes. “Keith, thanks for your show. Nobody anywhere makes real estate investing more clear. It’s my favorite 40 minutes of the week.” Now, see, with a comment like this, it really increases your chances that I’m going to read your question on-air here, Gerald from Calabasas. :o) He asks, you discuss the importance of multiple income streams. How PROVEN do you think that real estate income streams are long-term. How do I know it will still perform as an asset class for me in 30 years? Thanks for the question, Gerald. I know I’ve discussed elsewhere that people are going to keep needing a place to live, like they have for centuries or millennia now - and that inflation is the long-term trend and your long-term friend for a leveraged real estate investor. It’s also what makes your cash flow rise faster than inflation since rents move up with inflation but your principal & interest cost doesn’t - it stays fixed. So, I’m going to take this in a different direction, Gerald. You’re asking about the durability of real estate an asset class and I think it’s a good question. I recently had another listener write in to me about a concept that … I’ve thought about it before but I never heard it articulated in such an elegant way. And, I’m sorry that I don’t remember this listener’s name. But she referred to real estate investing as “Packaged commodities investing”. I love the … ingenious thought of packaged commodities investing. When you buy a rental home, yes, you’re buying the cost of the utility and the construction labor. But think about those materials in the home, those commodities - you now own brick, lumber, glass, copper wire, styrofoam insulation, granite, ceramic, paint, oil in the roof shingles, masonry, concrete, rebar, you own an HVAC system - every one of these individual commodity components are hedges against inflation. Gerald, a while ago, Reddit had a trending article over these Do-It-Yourself Houses that Sears used to sell over a hundred years ago. Look, this is fascinating - I’ve got this one-page ad in front of me - it looks like a newspaper ad. It’s for Sears Roebuck and company from the year 1913. This ad - that’s more than 100 years old - is interesting to any investor or economist - or marketer even. This ad is for - like a kit you can buy where you help construct the home. Let me read it to you. It says, “By allowing a fair price for labor, cement, brick and plaster, which we, Sears, do not furnish, this house can be built for about $1,530 - including all material and labor! Now, this looks like a small, single family home plan that Sears was offering you here, back in 1913. I can’t quickly find the square footage on it - say it was 1,500 sf. So, you’re buying this house over a hundred years ago, for say a dollar per square foot then. They show you the flooring layout plan. This is a livable-looking place, complete with a nice, wide porch. It’s not a tiny home. Ha - this is so quaint! The Sears ad goes onto say, for $872 (which is more than half of your all-in cost of $1,500 that I just mentioned) - we will furnish ALL of the material to build this 6-Room bungalow … … consisting of mill work, siding, flooring, ceiling, finishing lumber, building paper, pipe, gutter, sash weights, hardware, painting material, lumber, lath, and shingles. NO EXTRAS - is in all caps. We guarantee enough material at this $872 price to build this house according to our plans. So that was $872 for the material - and then, remember, your all-in price with labor and everything else is the $1,530. This home, that’s giving us some historical commodity and real estate PRICING perspective here - doesn’t look like a piece of junk. Reading on - the large porch is sheltered by the projection of the upper story and supported with massive built-up square columns. A unique triple-window in the attic and fancy leaded art glass windows add much to this pleasing design. Ha! That’s all I’ll read from the ad. So … I think this is representative of this concept of “packaged commodities investing” that a listener introduced me to. It tells us a lot about monetary inflation, and at the same time - it speaks to the durability of residential real estate as an investment. This IS less sexy than the “five ways you’re paid” stuff here. We’re just looking at an element of durability here. When you have direct ownership of rental property, you simultaneously own all of these vital commodities. You own a basket of products. You’ll see this Sears ad linked in the Show Notes. It’s fascinating to see. And a lot of home construction here in the 2020s decade is still done largely the same way that it was decades ago. 3-D printed homes are not being adopted into the mainstream. Now, if they do, that could lower labor costs. You’d still need to add a lot of things to make a 3-D printed residence livable - components and penetrations and mechanicals and the - all those commodities we mentioned, plus, you’ve got the cost of the land. Decently-located land, is a commodity in itself - and IT’S of a limited supply. By the way, this is a learning show, and the first definition of the word “commodity” when I Google it, is: “A raw material or primary agricultural product that can be bought and sold, such as copper or coffee.” That definition is from Oxford. Ha - they even have copper as the first example - and you expect to own copper with each home that you buy. I think yet another angle to your question, Gerald, about the durability of where your income stream comes from - is that we focus on RESIDENTIAL properties here. As the office and retail real estate sectors KEEP feeling pain - residential has become even more important at the same time - and you already know all the reasons - more people can work from home, order products from home, and do more from home than they ever have before. AirBnB properties might work in the short run, but we haven’t yet seen what happens to them in a recession yet - and as we know, the short-term rental market cater to business travelers and vacationers - and durability is what you need your income stream to have. That’s why, for durability reasons, I favor long-term residential investing above all else … and love to consider the elegance of this “packaged commodities investing”. Thanks for the great question, Gerald from Oxnard, CA. ---------- The next question comes from Andrew in Ridgefield, Connecticut. Keith, I have been listening to your podcast for a while. Your mindset resonates with mine. I am a small animal Veterinarian, I own - and run - my own small animal hospital. On the investment side...….I have a balanced Wall street portfolio (Stock, Bond, Mutual Funds). On the Real estate side I have a $280 cash flowing SFR, and am involved in some multifamily Syndications. I wrestle with Buying more SFR properties vs. more syndications. I feel that since money is so cheap in today's economic climate there is not much room for appreciation when buying RE. Should I sit on the sidelines and wait? (wait for Blood in the Streets?) I like the Tampa area...but go back and forth with my thought process. I look forward to hearing from you. Signed, Andrew (his last name), DVM - DVM is Doctor Of Veterinary Medicine, BTW Yeah, it is interesting that I’ve noticed a good deal of doctors & dentists listen to Get Rich Education. But I doubt that it’s #1. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that for some reason, we seem to have a really high proportion of listeners that are in LAW enforcement - like police officers & such. Thanks for the question, Andrew, veterinarian from Connecticut. On the first part of your question, buying more SFR vs. real estate syndications - that has a lot to do with both your risk tolerance and your desire for passivity. Direct investing, like turnkey investing, does require a little remote administration - even when you’re not the property manager, but you’ve typically got higher returns and you’ve got control - versus a syndication. In many cases, direct investing and that great control actually means you’re more liquid with your funds. You could sell in a few months if you had to … and with syndications, if you’re in Year 2 of an apartment syndication where it’s 7 years until that deal matures … then good luck getting your money out. You can’t access it. So, those are some more of the trade-offs between direct investing & syndications. Ah, I know you wrote that money is still cheap - meaning that interest rates are low and that you think that might be an indicator that appreciation has run its course. Well, I’m still buying direct property, where I own the deed. See, interest rates have basically been low for over a decade and we’ve had appreciation the entire time. Let’s look more recently. In 2018, interest rates really began a march higher and there were some people predicting that it would make housing prices go down. It didn’t. In 2018, national appreciation rates were about 7%. In 2019, mortgage interest rates went lower and appreciation went lower, down to about a 5% annual gain. Now, yes, there’s a lag effect between mortgage interest rates and pricing too. But mortgage interest rates are one of - at least 10 different macro factors that effect the price of housing, so one doesn’t lead to the others. There might be more substantial factors skewing the numbers than interest rates affect housing prices. Housing prices can be more affected by things like chronically low supply like we’ve got today, wage growth, job growth, in-migration, birth rates, death rates - and did lending requirements get more stringer or more lax - did credit score requirements get more stringent or more lax and on and on. But you do ask a good question, Andrew. Ah - if I didn’t think it were good, I wouldn’t be answering it here. Now, I know that you didn’t bring up the word bubble. But a few weeks ago, I described why I don’t think we’re in a real estate bubble. Prices are sustainable for a lot of reasons. But on the flip side, I don’t see any scenario in which real estate, nationally, hits any high-flying annual appreciation rates of 10 or 12% anytime soon - like we saw back in 2005 either. Low supply can only push prices so high. Affordability is the component that governs and tempers the upward price escalation. Affordability is what’s moderating the rate of appreciation rate right now. Of course, whenever we talk about the future, no one REALLY knows what’s going to happen. These are just my thoughts - and the basis and the reasoning for why I have them. You mention that you like Tampa - I do too. I really like so much of Florida - of course, you have to get your submarket right. And I need to say that’s generally Florida north of Miami - because the numbers don’t work so well in south Florida. Around Miami, you just don’t get a higher rent income proportionally to the much higher purchase prices there. Think about this! When you look at net migration by state for this past year, Texas was 2nd in the U.S., and they had a net in-migration of 190,000 people. Florida, even though they have a smaller population than Texas, is #1 with 322,000 people. Yeah, net 322,000 moving into a smaller state - Florida. And 190,000 into a larger population state - Texas. Florida has rent-to-value ratios that are favorable. And as an investor, your property tax rate is substantially lower in Florida than it is in Texas too. There are a lot of reasons to like Tampa and Florida. Of course, that’s why we had our real estate field trip there last October in Tampa … as well. Thanks for the question, Andrew! If you want to hear your voice on the show, ask your question at GetRichEducation.com/Contact I realized that on earlier listener question episodes, I had only left you with our mail address so that’s why I have mostly e-mail questions today and only one voicemail question. I’d really prefer to hear your voice on the show. So by visiting GetRichEducation.com/Contact, that way, you’ll have the option of either leaving a voicemail or an e-mail, whatever you prefer there. Two more listener questions today. What should you do first, pay off your student loan debt or invest … … and I need to tell you why you should always get a property inspection before you buy a property - and do one other crucial thing - before you buy property - that you may not have ever thought about before. That’s next. You’re listening to Get Rich Education. ---------- Hey, you’re back inside Get Rich Education. I’m your host, Keith Weinhold, answering your listener questions today. The next question comes from Dillon in Nebraska - I’m not sure which Nebraska place he’s from. Let’s play the audio: https://www.speakpipe.com/msg/p/120531/30/p15zsoamb252hyob35bvfc8d6uwrqv3ml1yh3h1suwgf6 Yeah, thanks, Dillon. And I do consider student loan debt as bad debt because YOU have to pay it back yourself … … that is, you can’t directly outsource those payments to someone else, like tenants in a rental property where they pay all your mortgage loan interest, all your mortgage loan principal, and hopefully, another couple hundred dollars on top of that called cash flow. Not to mention, Congress passed an act in 2005 which made student loans quite difficult to discharge in bankruptcy. With your question, being basically, “Should I pay off $200K in student loan debt as quickly as possible before starting real estate investing?” Well, the answer ... as it often is, is “It depends.” But I’ll tell ya what it depends on. The short answer is - if your real estate cash-on-cash return could beat the interest rate on your student loan debt - only then would you invest in real estate and make the minimum student loan debt payment. Now, that was really good insight on the inflation-hedging or even inflation-profiting that long-term debt can provide you. I can tell that you’re a careful listener to the show, Dillon. Of course, that's just one tailwind. Just one consideration. And the reason why inflation-profiting is lower in priority than your cash-on-cash return is that you need liquidity. You need cash to service your student loan debt. I don’t know what your student loan debt INTEREST RATE is. But let’s just say you’re paying a 6% interest rate on that debt. Now, I understand that it’s really easy to look at all 5 ways that real estate pays you and think - aw, I can get 20, 30, 40, maybe even a 50% ROI when I buy right. So I’m just gonna pay the minimum on the student loan debt and plow all the extra into real estate. I would say, not so fast. Even though that might work out for you, we need to be more conservative … … because real estate appreciation isn’t liquid, tenant-made loan amortization isn’t liquid, and neither are real estate’s tax benefits or the aforementioned inflation-profiting. So, to use the simplest example, if your rental gives you $100 of monthly cash flow, which is $1,200 annually - and you’ve got $20K of skin-in-the-game on your rental as down payment and closing costs. Well, that $1,200 annual cash flow divided by your $20K down is 6%. That’s your Cash-On-Cash Return portion and if you can get THAT at 6% or above, then reduce your student loan paydown dollar-for-dollar for every dollar that you put into real estate. That’s really the upshot here. Yes, there are some smaller things to consider. Last time I checked, student loan interest in the United States is a tax deduction up to $2,500 annually. So, your 6% interest rate might effectively be 5, 5-and-a-half or whatever it is. Understand the risk. You don’t want to be left cash poor. Your TOTAL Rate Of Return on real estate will almost certainly beat your student loan interest rate. But that's not enough. Let's be conservative. To summarize, because you service your loan debt with cash, not equity, the key question you must ask yourself is: "Am I confident that my cash-on-cash return from real estate will exceed the interest rate on the student loan debt?" If your answer to this key question is "yes" - invest in real estate and stretch out the student loan and only pay the minimum on the student loan. Otherwise, you're walking away from an arbitrage opportunity. If it's "no", retire the student loan debt balance sooner. Otherwise, then you're hemorrhaging cash. What did I personally do? After college, I retired my student loan debt fairly promptly. But this was before I knew about REI. I still thought budgets were good and that the best way to financial betterment was cutting expenses and all the wrong stuff. That was an awesome question, Dillon in Nebraska. Because I know that so many people have that question - how do I best allocate a dollar toward debt retirement versus expanding my upside. ---------- The next question is from Monique in Quebec City, Quebec. Monique says, Keith, I love your show. I’ve listened to every new episode since 2018, and now I’m also going back and listening to them from the beginning. Thanks, Monique. I’m grateful for your listenership. Monique goes on to say, “I’ve bought four cash-flowing properties from the providers at GREturnkey.com. (Good job there, Monique) They were all EXISTING construction properties. Though I expect the cash flow to be less on my fifth one, because it’s going to be a brand new construction property.” Is the HOME INSPECTION a required expense for me when the property is completely new? Thanks for all your help. Signed, Monique. Monique, the answer is “yes”, you should. Always have a pre-purchase inspection done, even for new construction property. Sometimes people think of a NEW CONSTRUCTION property as “perfect”. Well, I don’t think of any property as “perfect”. But an example of a mistake made in a new construction property is that, maybe the air conditioner is too small and doesn’t have the capacity to cool all, 1,800 sf of the home or whatever it is. Maybe some new flooring wasn’t installed correctly and it’s showing signs of de-lamination. An inspection provided by a local, independent, third-party inspector is a cheap insurance policy for you, the buyer and you need to factor it in as one of your closing and due diligence costs. Now, an inspection on a SFR, is probably going to cost you somewhere in the neighborhood of $400 - of course that’ll vary based on the area. You have the inspection performed shortly AFTER you & the provider agree on a purchase and sale contract. The reason that you want to get the inspection scheduled shortly after you’re under contract is because sometimes it can take a while - weeks - for your provider’s contractor to fix the deficiencies that your inspector finds. Now, how do you find an inspector for your property, anyway? There are a few ways of going about it. You can ask your provider to recommend one. If you’re leery of that or think that your provider might be in “cahoots” somehow with the inspector, you can Google your own, or thirdly, get an opinion from friends or if you don’t have friends that have invested there before, then use an online real estate forum. Seek an inspector that’s ASHI-certified. A-S-H-I stands for American Society Of Home Inspectors. Those certificants are educated, tested, verified, and certified. The inspections that they do are really quite thorough. They go everywhere in the home you’re planning to purchase, even looking in the closets and pantries, making sure all the doors & windows open & close. If there’s a crawl space, they’ll climb down into the crawl space looking for deficiencies, taking notes, and taking photos that they compile in a report and send to you. Before you buy the property, the inspector might even go up on the roof - or at least zoom in and take some photos of the roof. And of course, they go all through the home and check everything in between. They do the entire inspection same-day. It takes a couple of hours. Some common findings that your property inspector might have are: The outdoor rainwater downspout discharges water at the foundation. Add extensions. That’s a super cheap, easy fix for your seller to do for you. The kitchen window doesn’t close all the way because it has a broken crank. The exhaust fan in the bathroom doesn’t have any power and it’s not pulling any air. The outdoor water spigot is missing its valve. The backdoor is bent at the bottom. A porch this high off the ground needs to have a railing added. So, Monique, as you can see, some of these are deficiencies that could occur in a new construction home. Now, let me touch on a couple of these. The backdoor is bent - that could be pretty minor. If you don’t think it’s aesthetically detracting and the door still closes - then maybe you do ask the provider to fix it - and maybe you don’t. If I were you, I’d usually just ask. But if there’s a minor dent in the door instead, and it functions well, then asking for something like replacing the entire door might make you appear unreasonable to deal with. There’s some judgment there. But if the backdoor won’t close, you’ve at least got to see that it closes and latches properly. The last example that I mentioned - if the inspector cites a finding that a porch this high off the ground needs to have a railing for safety, you’ve got to be sure that’s done. In fact, a reputable provider will be sure that’s done for you. This is part of you being a good operator. Remember how I’ve discussed that having an LLC is only your fourth line of protection, at best. Make sure any health or safety findings are addressed from the inspection. Do that good in the world. If an accident ever did occur at the property - you can always point to the inspection that you had done - and it was an option that you paid for. The inspection is an option. So, these are all the findings that the inspector reports to you - and he’ll send you a report of a few dozen pages in a .pdf format. Some things might be noted in the report, but the inspector won’t list them as deficiencies that NEED to be remedied - like small cracks in the sidewalk. Often, in the report, the inspector makes a clear delineation as to when a condition is poor enough … such that it falls to a deficient level - and he puts them all in one punchlist at the end of the report. That way, you’re not having to split hairs and do too much interpretation. You look the report over, and then you ask the provider to fix them for you before you’ll close on the property. The provider might take, say a week or so to have their contractor fix those punchlisted items. When they’ve finished them, then you’re on your way to having your appraisal and moving closer to the closing table. But, I’ve got to tell you something kind of disappointing here. I’ve been directly investing in real estate actively and continuously since 2002 - and I’ve got to tell you … … many times, even when the contractor says that they’ve completed fixing everything - even when they send you pictures … something really wasn’t quite fixed right. So what I suggest, is that - existing construction or new construction - when you hire your inspector, tell him right then & there, that you are also going to want a follow-up re-inspection that occurs after the initial inspection. The purpose of a re-inspection is confirming that all of the deficienies noted in the original inspection were indeed done. And by the way, there will ALWAYS be original inspection findings. An inspector will always find at least one deficiency and I’ve dealt with properties from Pennsylvania to Florida to Alaska to Texas and in-between - and outside the U.S. too. Inspectors always find stuff that’s wrong. Always. It’s like a universal law. But, getting back to re-inspections. Upon scheduling your original home inspection, if you point out AT THAT TIME that you’ll also be getting a re-inspection - tell both the inspector & the seller this, I tend to think it helps keep parties on their toes and that they try harder to get the original inspection findings handled - the first time. And look, re-inspections are super cheap. If a SFR ORIGINAL INSPECTION costs $400, a re-inspection is going to be less than $100. I’ve even paid $50, $60 in some markets for the re-inspection. It’s hard to believe that you can even get a trained, qualified professional to make a field visit somewhere that inexpensively. Now - and I have this happen too - what if after your RE-inspection - which would really be a second inspection, that the provider or their contractor STILL didn’t get things repaired properly? Then the responsibility shifts to your seller - to schedule and pay for a second RE-inspection - which would be a THIRD inspection then - to prove that it’s right. That’s correct, in every state and nation I’ve ever invested in, the seller-side pays for your second re-inspection … if it comes to that. That’s fair. Because after the original inspection findings, your seller said they’d make the repairs. If the re-inspection that you paid for to confirm that it was done, instead shows that it wasn’t done. Your seller had their chance and messed it up. That’s why it’s customary that they pay for the SECOND re-inspection. So, Monique, to summarize for you here. Always pay for a property inspection, even on new construction. Expect there to be findings every time. And my own personal experience shows that at the time that you book an inspection, it helps to indicate that you’ll be getting a RE-inspection too. Now, getting a re-inspection makes so much more sense than getting a re-appraisal - if you get a low appraisal, which doesn’t happen often, maybe I’ll discuss that another day. Re-appraisals are a waste of time … more than 95% of the time, they just come back with the same valuation you got the first time. An appraisal protects the bank. An Inspection protects you - so be sure to have one done. Excellent question, Monique from Quebec City, Canada. Next week on the show, I’m going to discuss Real Estate’s Secret Market - a geography where the numbers really work for investors that might have been off your radar. After that, we’re going to talk with a prominent economist that’s never been on the show before that’s going to help you see your economic future over the next 1-3 years. We’ve hosted a lot of economists here on the show that give you those long-term investing insights like Richard Duncan, Harry Dent, Jim Rickards, Jim Rogers - and also, though they might not be economists, Robert Kiyosaki and Chris Martenson are here with us to give us those types of insights. Then there’s “Yours Truly” - I’m your armchair economist without an economics degree. But this new guest is the leader of the oldest continuously operating economics prediction company in the entire United States, so I’m excited to chat with him and bring you that show soon. As you know, nationally, housing inventory is scarce, especially with these types of single-family homes that make the best rentals. You can’t make any money from the property that you don’t own. So whether you prefer to call it “packaged commodities investing” or the “get paid up to 5 Ways” vehicle, next time you’re looking to connect with a provider at GREturnkey.com … As we spoke of Florida earlier, you’ll see that Jacksonville has brand new construction property, where you’re probably more of a fan of appreciation than cash flow on those. Rents are $1,350 on a $180K purchase price. That’s a 0.75 rent-to-value ratio. Tampa has existing construction property where you have a 0.8 or .85 ratio and might get, say $150 of monthly cash flow. Alabama has numbers that work - like rent-to-value ratios near a full 1% and really low property taxes in either Birmingham or Huntsville. If you’re looking for low cost property - as low as $80K in decent neighborhoods that really cash flow well, Memphis and Little Rock could be the places for you. The Indiana State side of Chicagoland is advantageous too. All those places - Memphis, Little Rock, Chicagoland - you can get a full 1% RV ratio or even more than that sometimes. If you’ve got more patience and want to benefit and capture some forced equity along with your cash flow, the BRRRR model in Baltimore could work best for you. Check out all of those markets and more - at GREturnkey.com Thanks! I’m grateful for all of your excellent listener questions today! I’m your host, Keith Weinhold. Don’t Quit Your Daydream! -------------

Feb 10, 2020 • 34min
279: Trump Could End Fannie & Freddie Backing with Caeli Ridge
Donald Trump’s re-election could end Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac conservatorship of mortgage loans. This could mean that fixed rate mortgage loans disappear! It could also lead to higher mortgage interest rates and more changes. Ridge Lending Group President Caeli Ridge and I discuss why. We compare Fixed vs. Adjustable Rate Mortgages (ARMs). Your personal DTI - debt-to-income ratio - is thoroughly discussed in qualifying for rental property loans. I made my last two mortgage loans personally at www.RidgeLendingGroup.com __________________ Resources mentioned: Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Find Properties: GREturnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation

Feb 3, 2020 • 43min
278: How The Fed Is Corrupting America with Dr. Chris Martenson
You’re affected by interest rates and inflation as both a consumer and real estate investor. A 50% return is not necessarily risky: I review the 5 Ways Real Estate Pays You and pass it through a new filter. Dr. Chris Martenson joins us to discuss how The Fed manipulates monetary policy and interest rates by running up staggering debt levels. To solve our problems, can we just keep printing money and paving over the world with dollars? Interest rates are artificially low. Why you’re in a Fed-induced bubble. Chris tells us why Fed Chair Jerome Powell is a liar. When the credit cycle bursts, everyday people will be harmed. Chris thinks the next crisis will be twice as bad 2008. Solutions: have multiple income streams, cash, and real assets. Join Chris and PeakProsperity.com for their annual seminar May 1st to 3rd, 2020 in Sebastopol, CA. For the best event pricing, use Discount Code: GRE2020 __________________ Resources mentioned: Find Properties: GREturnkey.com Meet Dr. Martenson & his tribe: 2020 Peak Prosperity Seminar QRPs: text “QRP” in ALL CAPS to 72000 or: TotalControlFinancial.com By texting “QRP” to 72000 and opting in, you will receive periodic marketing messages from eQRP Co. Message & data rates may apply. Reply “STOP” to cancel. Mortgage Loans: RidgeLendingGroup.com New Construction Turnkey Property: NewConstructionTurnkey.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation