Get Rich Education

Keith explores how real estate investors can use mortgage strategies to build long-term wealth. 
Seasoned lending expert and repeat guest Caeli Ridge joins Keith to discuss why debt isn't something to avoid but to optimize, and how negotiating terms can matter more than price. They walk through practical approaches for new and experienced investors, from house hacking to scaling a rental portfolio. The conversation also tackles common myths about qualifying for investment property loans and what really matters to lenders. 
Finally, they emphasize focusing on fundamentals—cash flow, risk management, and informed decision-making—rather than fixating on interest rate headlines.
Episode Page:
GetRichEducation.com/604
For access to properties or free help with a
GRE Investment Coach, start here:
GREmarketplace.com
GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com
Get mortgage loans for investment property:
RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE 
or e-mail: [email protected]
Invest with Freedom Family Investments. 
For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866 
Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes.
Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" 
For advertising inquiries, visit:
GetRichEducation.com/ad
Best Financial Education:
GetRichEducation.com
Get our wealth-building newsletter free—
GREletter.com 
Our YouTube Channel:
www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation
Follow us on Instagram:
@getricheducation



Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:01  
Welcome to GRE I'm your host. Keith Weinhold Some mortgage guidance out there is costing you wealth today. I'm talking about how you can negotiate to get better terms. I'll tell you the exact questions to ask. Then a guest clears up mortgage myths and misconceptions and how you can borrow to win today on get rich education
 
Keith Weinhold  0:28  
let me ask you something, if you've worked hard to build wealth, is your money positioned to actually support your goals? A lot of accredited investors leave capital sitting in cash because it feels safe, but inflation and missed income opportunities can quietly erode its value. Freedom family investments offers freedom notes for investors seeking structured income backed by real estate. It's a straightforward approach built on real assets, not speculation and full disclosure. I'm an investor myself. What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk and nothing is guaranteed, but with a track record of consistent on time investor payouts, they built real credibility. Go to freedomfamilyinvestments.com to book a clarity call or text family to 66 866, that's family to 6866
 
Speaker 1  1:32  
you're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
 
Keith Weinhold  1:48  
Welcome to GRE from Albany, New York to Albany, Oregon and across 188 nations worldwide. You're listening to get rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, as we know, debt isn't something to avoid. It's something to optimize. As a real estate investor, I would rather have lower mortgage rates than higher ones, and now you can call me Captain Obvious. Yet there are some reasons that higher mortgage rates benefit us as investors, though they're not as great as the lower rates are I'll discuss some of that today. This stuff obviously influences marketplace behavior. In fact, here we are now, years after rates made their historic surge and nearly tripled between 2022 and 2023 and yet still, 70% of mortgage borrowers have an astoundingly rock bottom rate below 5% today, lower than the ocean floor, and they won't sell those properties. That's just one contributor to the low supply hangover that still lingers. Are today's buyers still anchored to an unrealistic baseline. It certainly reframed how investors think about normal borrowing costs and what that word normal means. My first ever rental property, many years ago, was purchased at a 30 year fixed rate of six and three eighths percent. One year later, I got to refinance a full 1% lower at five and three eighths. I'm happy that I bought one I did because starting year earlier, got all my real estate benefits rolling that much sooner, the leverage and everything else, and when I did that, refinance many years ago, from six and three eighths down to five and three eighths, I was able to roll all of my loan refinance costs into the new mortgage balance, and that way I didn't have to pay anything out of pocket. So financing is negotiable. A lot of investors don't realize that buy down your rate if you want roll the loan costs into the loan amount, like I did. In fact, I would usually rather have a higher mortgage rate and then not have to come out of pocket at the table. I would rather do it that way. Sometimes I take a higher rate and even get cash back at the closing table. So I walk away from the closing table with a property and cash, but yet with a bigger mortgage. And what's the strategy there? Well, with more inevitable Inflation, I want to load up on the dollars that I get now and then make those paybacks over the long term with future cheaper, diluted dollars for 360 months, sometimes I don't have to ask the lender for any sort of favor to get that zero help from the lender at the closing table to get cash back. How do I do that? Well, I ask the seller to give me cash at the closing. Closing table in return for offering the seller full asking price, or sometimes even over the asking price. I have done it the strategy of offering full price or even a little more than the full list price. See, that's often easier than getting a price cut from the seller, and that works great, because getting the closing table, cash is going to benefit you more than the price cut would anyway, in almost every circumstance, and when it comes to your lender, ask them questions that cut through the noise. Now, lenders have to make their profits somewhere and stay in business, but I've asked the question, what's the break even point on this rate buy down. That's something you can ask today. That can be an even better question for you to ask of builders with all of the buy downs that they're doing for you now, most people know about a mortgage rate lock. That's when you're in contract to buy a property. At some point, you and your mortgage company, you lock in your rate for, say, 30 to 60 days, and that way, if the rate rises before the deal is completed, you are protected. You are locked in. But some lenders also offer float downs. That's for if you lock and then rates go lower before you get the deal closed. In that case, you get the lower rate, and now you successfully played both sides, but most borrowers don't know to ask about a float down for larger apartment buildings, sometimes you can negotiate away prepayment penalties or instead a shorter penalty window. The thing to keep in mind is that smallest borrowers negotiate price, but savvy investors negotiate structure. That's what we're talking about here, and that's why you often hear that terms are more important than price. So there's plenty of opportunity here, even if historically low rates is not where today's opportunity lies. Today, we're going to discuss some things about mortgages that most people believe but are just flat out wrong. Also, what separates the borrowers who build real estate portfolios from the ones who stay stuck on property one, let's have a conversation with this week's repeat guest, a real favorite here at GRE for her mortgage clarity.
 
Keith Weinhold  7:35  
Hey, the president of ridge lending group, Chaley Ridge is back with us. We'll get into things like rates and loan strategy shortly, but first, let's discuss some fun. What would you do? Chili, what would you do if you're 35 and have 100k to invest in real estate? What's your first move? Ooh, good question.
 
Caeli Ridge  7:55  
So let's think five years ago for me now I'm 35 what would I do if I had that was a joke for all you listeners, obviously, you know, I think that if I could go back and knowing what I know now, I would probably invest that into an owner occupied house hack using an FHA loan. Probably look for newer construction if I could find it, and I would probably target a four unit residential property. I'd probably put three and a half percent down lowest rates with that. FHA, I would leverage my money, and I would get three other tenants in units, two, three and four to pay my mortgage, and then I'd use the rest to go buy an investment property
 
Keith Weinhold  8:32  
much like I started out with the owner occupied four Plex, live in one unit, rent out the other three. FHA, three and a half percent down. What if someone, however, lives in a market where the numbers just don't work and the law really tilts toward the tenant rather than the landlord.
 
Caeli Ridge  8:47  
You know, that's a good point. There's a lot of factors, obviously, right? And there's exceptions to all rules, etc. So I don't want to generalize, but I would probably take the 100,000 and maybe look at some kind of a burr in that case, maybe pivot and do some math and see if buy rehab rent refi might be more applicable. To take that 100 grand and leverage it that dollar bill, as far as I could make it  go
 
Keith Weinhold  9:10  
sometimes you have to get scrappy when you're starting out another what would you do now? Say you've got some more experience. You already own two rentals. How do you scale that to 10.
 
Caeli Ridge  9:21  
You know, my biggest piece of advice for investors, especially newer ish investors, is to make sure that you've got your eye on some level of diversification. Scaling from two to 10 can sound pretty daunting to some people, but I think that diversification advice comes in handy when you're not singularly focused on, let's say, a core philosophy of single family, residence, cash flow only in one market instead, maybe layer in some appreciating markets where you can earn and count on longer burn appreciation that you can then leverage from to then purchase the next to the next to the next, right. Cash. Refinances borrowed funds are non taxable. I would probably say diversification is the core answer to that question. For me, 
 
Keith Weinhold  10:07  
yeah, if you've already got two properties, maybe if you've had those for a few years, yes, you can do a cash out refinance and basically use one of your first two properties to fund that third and fourth and so on, right exactly? How about if rates drop 1% tomorrow? What's the next thing you would do? Immediately? 
 
Caeli Ridge  10:29  
I would do the math. Is what I would do, Keith, and I know you love that answer. So if I had a portfolio of X number of properties and rates just dropped 1% tomorrow, I would take a hard look at what I had in the queue, and I would say, Okay, how much does a one percentage point rate save me in monthly payment, aka, earn me in cash flow, and what is it going to cost me? It is imperative that the investor is actually doing the math. 1% may sound amazing, but if it's only going to save you 5060, bucks a month, and maybe that's enough, but it might cost you five grand. Does that math work for you? So that's my answer. Do the math?
 
Keith Weinhold  11:08  
Yeah, if rates drop 1% does that make you want to perform more purchases? Does that make you want to refi something that you already have and at the same time that you do that refinance? Okay? That may or may not save you a lot in payment. But another consideration is, okay, well, at the same time you do that refinance, oh, maybe you could take cash out and use it as a down payment for another property, or just use that money for something else, 
 
Caeli Ridge  11:33  
absolutely, and you know what we're talking about. That from a purchase perspective, if rates drop 1% tomorrow, from an investment perspective, what do we think is going to happen to the rest of the market? The homeowners are going to be coming out of the woodwork, right? The owner occupied the competition is going to get very, very stiff, steep. I would say that if you are banking on or waiting for rates to do X, Y and Z, you are missing massive opportunities today. So there's a lot of reasons not to hesitate and be waiting on some magic, massive rate drop.
 
Keith Weinhold  12:04  
All right. Well, those were three interesting what would you do scenarios you mentioned the possibility, and it's surely only a possibility that mortgage rates will drop sometime in the near future. Let's expand on that. If someone is indeed waiting for rates to drop. What are they risking in the meantime?
 
Caeli Ridge  12:25  
You know, this is such a good but complicated question. There's a lot of layers to this. If someone has a magic number in their head, again, I'm going to press back and say you have to be doing the math. All right. So a lot of people conveniently, maybe not so conveniently. But a lot of people forget that interest rates, by nature, always drop or reduce much slower than they're going to climb. Okay, historically, go back and do your own research here. Interest rates, when they go up, they tend to kind of go up quickly. When they come down, they really kind of trail, and it's a slow, progressive landing. It's not a quick thing when they come down. So if we know that that's true, or at least historically, that's been true an interest rate reduction of an eighth or a quarter or three, it's of a point. Maybe that takes us a month or two or six or a year. What does that really mean to that payment? You have to be doing the math so, largely dependent on the loan amount. Okay, if you think that interest rates are going to be reduced in a month from now by a quarter of a percentage point, what does that mean to the payment? Does it mean $12 a month? Does it mean $100 a month? And in that scenario, in that calculation, what are you giving up by waiting the month or two or six for a what if I think that you are diminishing your rates of return by waiting on a come that one may never happen, and two, the significance is probably far less relevant than you are giving it credit for. 
 
Keith Weinhold  13:52  
Now, I think generally real estate investors want low mortgage rates. Obviously, it gives us a better refinance opportunity. It gives us a better purchase opportunity, potentially, okay. In general, we want lower rates. However, there are some reasons a lot of people don't think about as to why lower mortgage rates are actually bad for a real estate investor. If you just look historically, when have we had extraordinary low mortgage rates here in these past 20 years? Well, they've been to get us out of huge economic problems, late to global financial crisis or the covid pandemic. So if you're wishing for really rock bottom rates, which again, is tempting to do, and is advantageous, in a sense, there is a downside as well. If there are super low rates, a lot of people might be out of work, including your tenants. So that's the reason that we want to be careful as to what we wish for, with rates being super low and artificially low, like they were a couple times in the past two decades. And you know, Caeli another reason why I'm not fully in love. With low mortgage rates, although I liked them, is the fact that I look back and notice as being a property investor for more than two decades now, is that I have had tenants leave when mortgage rates are too low and lending is too easy, especially leading up to the global financial crisis, it was so easy to get first time homebuyer loans at really attractive rates. So I had higher vacancy because mortgage rates were so low that my tenants left and became first time homeowners. So yes, we generally want lower mortgage rates, but there is a downside to that as well. 
 
Caeli Ridge  15:35  
And I think there's probably a sweet spot, I think such a good point that most people probably don't think about Keith, and I couldn't agree more, when rates have been at their lowest. To your point, all hell is breaking loose economically in so many other sectors. Yeah, be careful what you wish for.
 
Keith Weinhold  15:51  
Any old time, real estate investor would find it really humorous and almost cute that people think mortgage rates between six and 7% are high. You and I know they're historically low. 7.7% is the long term owner occupied, 30 year fixed mortgage rate going back to 1971 per Freddie Mac the most reliable stat set that we have. But now that we have come up back into what's really a more normal range, just like we started to do in 2022 How should someone think overall in not a high but a higher mortgage rate environment? What are some things that actually matter more now than they did before back five plus years ago? 
 
Caeli Ridge  16:32  
 I want to give you some statistics. So from 1990 to now, the average owner occupied rate was 6.08 now that's owner occupied, and more often than not, you can add about a point percentage point spread between that and non owner occupied in general. So we are right in line with the last 36 year swing of where interest rates have been. So please keep that in mind. Again, that psychology piece. But overall, I think that what we need to be paying attention to, even if, over the last five years, 10 years, interest rates are a little bit higher than we came to recognize them, the pandemic was an outlier. You guys. Okay, let that lie that's hopefully never to repeat itself. But what we want to be focusing on, and I know that I'm beating a dead horse here, is that you have to get rid of the mental block that you have about that number that we call an interest rate. You need to be looking at a property holistically that says, does it cash flow based on this tenant application? What about this tenant application? What is my exit strategy? Is my property management doing the job that it needs to be doing? Can I trust them to ensure that my vacancy is low? And if I have to evict somebody that they know what they're doing and they know all the rules in the different cities and counties, I think that those are going to be more prevalent to the successful real estate transaction that gives you the financial freedom that you want long term, stop fixating on the rate. That's my advice. 
 
Keith Weinhold  17:53  
Some of those operations that you talked about are controllable, and the mortgage rate is largely uncontrollable outside of maybe getting a better credit score to get a lower rate or something like that, focus more on what you can control. And Caeli, you touched on something interesting that I think a lot of people don't understand, and that is investor financing versus owner occupant financing. A lot of people just don't understand the differences as to why investor loans cost more, tell us about that.
 
Caeli Ridge  18:25  
Yeah, good question. It happens to be about secondary markets, so I won't get too technical, but when we talk about mortgage backed securities right Wall Street, and this is an asset class that is bought and sold and traded, etc, etc, there are demands, obviously, and then you've got layers of risk. So the baseline thinking is that an owner occupant is less likely to default on the home that they live in, right? Something is going on financially with them. They've got some hardships, etc. They're going to cut loose the rental property before they're going to default on their primary so that's just kind of the overall basic. There's other variables in there, but that's the one that makes the biggest difference. Is default rates on an owner occupied versus a non owner occupied. Now I may argue, if I can just add to this. So this is a little bit of a history lesson for those that maybe remember or too young to remember this. 08, 09, housing and lending implode on each other in this country, the financial crisis, et cetera, et cetera. It was the Wild West before that. You could have a pulse and get a mortgage, even investors right, 0% down. They had some pretty risky things out there. We didn't do that kind of stuff, but they were out there, and I certainly contributed to what happened with the oh eight financial crisis. So fast forward, and I feel like when things like that, especially in this country, happen and devastate big, huge sectors of our economy, we knee jerk. And we knee jerk in a way that is almost the 180 of irresponsibility. Let me explain so when we talk about what it used to be like, fogging a mirror, right, having a pulse and getting a loan as an investor or anyone. For that matter. Now fast forward to post, 08,09, you've got Dodd Frank, all that sweeping legislation, etc, they raised the qualification bar. Okay, that's fine. Now I want to come into today's space, and I want to give you guys an idea of the qualification markers between an owner occupied let's just use an FHA and a non owner occupied purchase. So you can have 580 credit and put three and a half percent down and have slightly over a 50% debt to income ratio and get an FHA loan, a GSE government sponsored enterprise loan. All right, a non owner occupied you've got to walk on water. Man, I make that dumb joke, files of blood and DNA samples, you've got 20 25% down minimum. You've got to have x higher in credit score, all these extra reserves, etc, etc. So I would argue that secondary mentality, thinking the non owner occupied is, in my opinion, probably a more stable loan as it relates to default. So there's some disconnect. I think that the way that that is thought about in secondary market speak, but maybe a little TMI for the listeners. In any case, that's the reason that they're looked at differently. The ideal, or the idea is, is that the owner occupied is less likely to default than the non owner occupied. I would disagree with that premise,
 
Keith Weinhold  21:19  
and I think you would agree that things are still pretty tight because lending requirements are still pretty rigid, still pretty strict. You have to have a good credit history and assets and income, unlike what we had to have 20 years ago, when I was a real estate investor myself, back when things were irresponsible and back when things were free flowing, and money was flying, and a lot of nefarious things were happening. Even though I had a good credit score all my life, I was the beneficiary of those High Flying Wild West times myself. I remember on the first four Plex I owned after I had moved out of it so I didn't even occupy it anymore, I got a generous appraisal for a 90% combined loan to value, cash out, refinance 90% that I would not get today, no way.
 
Caeli Ridge  22:10  
Yeah, but that knee jerk is, I think, also part of the problem. They go the opposite way that pendulum shift is, I feel like there needs to be a little bit more reasonability in the mix and different markers to justify who should be getting or being able to take advantage.
 
Keith Weinhold  22:26  
When we talk about investor loans versus owner occupied loans, that really begs the question. Now, when does it make sense to house hack versus go straight into investor loans? What are some of the trade offs there.
 
Caeli Ridge  22:41  
I would argue that if you are in a position and you're willing to share your primary residence with you know, tenants house hack is always a great idea, because you've got these great loan terms, you've got this massive leverage, and almost always you've got other people making the entire mortgage payment for you, or the vast majority of that mortgage payment, I'm such a big fan of that is a strategy for real estate investing. You've got to do it right. You got to do it by the rules. But I can't think of a downside if you qualify and you're willing to do that, to live with other people right next door, etc, etc. Some families don't think that that works for them, whatever, but I just think it's a fantastic way to jumpstart someone's real estate investment journey and then continue it. If you do it right every 12 months, then you'll be able to continue to parlay into the next, the next, the next. One thing I would say about that that I don't get a lot of opportunity to talk about, but since we're talking about here, if you're going to house hack and you've got, you know, a duplex, triplex fourplex, and you want to manage it yourself, which I think everybody should be responsible to manage at least one rental property in their lifetime, maybe official, yeah, yeah. More often than not, people will tend to pay for that service down the road. But having the experience is valuable. Do not tell the other tenants that you are the home owner, do yourself a favor and just you're another tenant, but you're taking care of you know, you don't want to let them know that you actually own the property. There's lots of emotional and different things that you want to avoid giving that information away to the tenants.
 
Keith Weinhold  24:17  
I have had two friends, and each friend owned a fourplex, and what they did is they would manage the other person's fourplex. That way, they were able to keep it more professional and less emotional, since it wasn't the owner directly dealing with the tenant, and that provided a buffer that really benefited them. I haven't done that myself, but I found that such an interesting way to approach it? 
 
Caeli Ridge  24:42  
Yeah, that's smart. If that ends up being your situation, definitely horse trade that way. Otherwise, you're just a tenant and you can be on call whatever, just avoid giving that information back to the other tenants that may be there.
 
Keith Weinhold  24:54  
Well, there's an underwriting reality out there that chili can share with us versus. Some of the online advice that you get, and what some of the biggest myths are that borrowers believe. We'll talk about that next. You're listening to get rich education. Our guest is Ridge lending Group President chailey Ridge, more we come back. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold. 
 
Keith Weinhold  25:12  
Flock homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio through a 721 exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture. It's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now Mom and Pop landlords can 721 the residential real estate request your initial valuation, see if your properties [email protected] slash, slash GRE, that's F, l, O, C, K, homes.com/gre 
 
Keith Weinhold  25:47  
the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President chailey Ridge personally. While it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com that's Ridge lending group.com
 
Ted Sutton  26:22  
Hey, it's corporate directs Ted Sutton, listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.
 
Keith Weinhold  26:29  
 Welcome back to get Rich's case, we're talking with a familiar and recurrent guest Ridge lending group, President Caeli Ridge Kelly, talk to us about your underwriting reality there, versus some of the advice that one gets online sometimes, including what really gets a loan approved with some of those things like income and reserves and DTI. 
 
Caeli Ridge  26:59  
You know, this can be so confusing for the consumer, because there are so many different vehicles in which to get Mortgage Funding, and there's something in our industry called an overlay. Okay, an overlay is taking the purest form of a guideline and adding layers of risk to it. I'll give you an example. Let's say that we know, or most of us know that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac allow for up to 10 finance properties per qualified individual, right? That is a straight Fannie Freddie guideline B of A, and this could be wrong, but a big boy bank may have an overlay and layers of risk that say we will only allow up to four, right? So all of this differing information, conflicting information, when the nice thing with ridges is that we go by the purest form of the guideline, we are not going to impose those overlays. So in working with us, you're always going to be sure that we know exactly what those guidelines are. We know them like our own faces, and that we're not going to impose some additional risk layering or overlay that might prohibit or preclude the qualification. It's pretty basic stuff. I mean, if you're going full doc, Fannie Freddie, and this can apply to our owner occupied and, of course, all of our non owner occupied income, debt to income, credit and assets, it's a pretty basic formula that we use. And then we've got all the other products that we have. Again, knowing those underwriting guidelines like the back of our hand, is very important to making sure that we can navigate the battleship in a creek. That's the analogy that I give that tends to be mortgage lending, or what feels like mortgage lending anyway. So it's pretty basic. We have to understand what the borrower's qualifications are out of the gate, and then we can provide them with a schematic of options that they can tell us which direction they want to go in 
 
Keith Weinhold  28:42  
for quite a long time now, one could get 10 conventional investor loans, single or 20 married. It wasn't always that way. I remember attending a real estate workshop in 2012 and you could only get four loans, or at least you could only easily get four investor loans before that expanded to 10. And we just shouldn't always assume that it's going to be this way forever.
 
Caeli Ridge  29:06  
Yeah, so I kind of going back before 08,09, there was no limit to the number of finance properties Fannie and Freddie would secure per individual. After that crash, it shut off, and it got to four to your point. And then it stayed there for a while, until we kind of brought it back to that 10. You know, there's been rumors for years that they're going to up it to 12 or 15 or some random number. I don't even know where it's coming from. I always make a joke and say, Yeah, between now and my death, we'll see that. But it would be nice. It would be nice if they increase that number a few
 
Keith Weinhold  29:35  
now, as someone is qualifying there, you probably run into a lot of borrowers that believe certain myths or have to have misconceptions corrected. Tell us about some of those 
 
Caeli Ridge  29:45  
the biggest myths, I'm going to say that it's probably one of three things they believe that they've got to make 10s of 1000s of dollars a month or hundreds of 1000s of dollars a year to qualify. Absolutely not true. It's so much less about the monthly. Income than it is the monthly income in relation to your minimum payments on your credit report. So just as an example, I could have a client that only shows $1,000 a month of income, but if they truly have no debt and some of the other qualifying criteria, they can qualify for a mortgage on an investment property, because the investment property has income to offset that mortgage payment. So it dispel the myth about having massive amounts of monthly income. That's not necessary. It's about the income and your monthly debt that we find on your credit report. That would be the first thing. The other thing, speaking of credit reports, I would say, is that a lot of times, people think that the overall debt that they're carrying matters. I mean, Mr. Jones could have $300,000 worth of debt, but his monthly payments are only 1500 All I care about is that monthly amount. I do not care what the total outstanding debt is. I hear that one a lot inquiries, credit inquiries. Every time you have your credit pulled, it drops the score, 20 points. Not the case. Now I can go down that rabbit hole, Keith, but it is a rabbit hole, so maybe I'll just leave it there. Your credit score does not drop X number every time you have your credit pulled. That's a misnomer.
 
Keith Weinhold  31:07  
Well, actually, that brings up a thought. Then once prospective borrower initiates with you in there and gets the ball rolling in qualifying for a loan, what are some reasons that deals die late in the process? So what does it take to be sure to hold that together?
 
Caeli Ridge  31:23  
You know, I think it all boils down to communication. And we tell our clients this on the front end, treat us like your attorney. You tell us everything, do not own anything, so that we can ensure that we're guiding you appropriately. So lack of information can derail things. Let's say, for example, they change jobs, and it's a completely new line of work, and it could prohibit or preclude the amount of income that we could have we were using now DTI gets changed, or they buy a new car in the middle, and they don't think it's going to come up. And now it's a DTI issue. It can be all kinds of things, but the point there is communication is key. Just keep us informed, and then we will give you the input or advice, and then you do what you want with that. But at least it's not once the bell is rung.
 
Keith Weinhold  32:05  
Live pretty conservatively and safely until that loan closes. Yes, sir. Well, does that bring up any stories? Sometimes people learn better that way. Is there a deal? Perhaps that should have worked, but it didn't.
 
Caeli Ridge  32:20  
That's a good question. You know, I think that the answer is no, and mostly because we have such a diverse menu of loan products, even if something did happen and even if it was outside of anyone's control, let's say we would normally just pivot to another loan product that would accommodate whatever that event ended up being. I cannot think of an example where a deal fell apart that could have gone differently, that we weren't able to just simply pivot into another path and close the loan for 
 
Keith Weinhold  32:49  
well, America is a place that promotes entrepreneurship, and it seems like side hustles as well are more popular than they've been before. So can you talk to us about how self employed borrowers get evaluated? 
 
Caeli Ridge  33:04  
Yeah, it is different. I mean, the simplest way to describe it is, we're going to take the adjusted gross income, but there are something called add backs. So depending on what their deductions are, there are certain things like Depreciation or Amortization or, I mean, there's a whole slew of things that we're able to take those numbers and add it back into the Adjusted Gross and then divide by 12 or 24 whatever it needs to be. That's typically what we're going to be looking at for a self employed person, versus the straight w2 is just the gross income divided by 12 months.
 
Keith Weinhold  33:35  
Well, Caeli, this has been really good with some strategies and some actionable tactics. Before I ask how one can learn more about ridge? Is there any last thing that you'd like to share with us, whether that's to expand on anything we discussed, or any of the more nascent things that have happened, like banks holding less in capital reserves, or Fannie Mae, except in crypto back mortgages? Is there anything else we really ought to know? 
 
Caeli Ridge  33:57  
You know, I think my advice right now for anybody that is in real estate investing, thinking about getting into real estate investing, be informed. Listen to people like Keith, ideally, listen to people like me. I've been doing this for a very, very long time. I'm an educator at heart. Get your information from sources that you can trust, and try to avoid the analysis paralysis the best you can. I know that people get hung up on that, but now is the best time ever, and I would say that tomorrow and the next day and next year and the year after that, to invest in real estate.
 
Keith Weinhold  34:27  
Yes, the only thing that could possibly make now better than ever is now is sooner than it's ever going to be again. Well, Caeli, if someone wants to get a hold of ridge so they can tell you their situation, and you can then help them find out how you can best help. What should they do? 
 
Caeli Ridge  34:43  
There's so many ways. Check out our website, ridgelinengroup.com you can email us [email protected] you can call us toll free at 855, 74, Ridge. All of those ways get to us, and I look forward to speaking with each and every one of you
 
Keith Weinhold  34:58  
that's been valuable. Always It's been great having you here. 
 
Caeli Ridge  35:01  
Thanks. Keith
 
Keith Weinhold  35:08  
Caeli brought up a great point from the lender's view, when they make a loan, it might be safer for them to lend on an income property loan, actually, than it is for your own home, because on the income property, you have a substantially higher qualification bar to clear, and you have to make a higher down payment on it. I hadn't thought about it that way before. As far as Fannie Mae accepting crypto backed mortgage structures, that is still new as of this year. How it works with a crypto backed mortgage is that you're usually getting two loans. First you get a normal mortgage, and then for your down payment, it's a separate loan that's backed by your crypto. Your crypto stays locked up for years and you can't trade it while it's pledged as your home down payment. That's generally how it works. But notice the attraction. You would also get to keep your crypto while you're leveraging it. Also notice the risk there, and very few banks offer this, think Coinbase and not JPMorgan Chase. It's still new and niche, and it remains to be seen whether or not crypto backed loans will gain any real traction. It's only likely going to accept Bitcoin, Ethereum or stablecoins, not altcoins. Only about 1% of homebuyers use crypto in transactions. Most of what the current presidential administration has done focuses on making mortgages easier to get, not in making homes cheaper. Making mortgages easier to get means more bidders and higher prices. Washington can make it easier to get a mortgage, but they cannot make a $400,000 property cost $300,000 we talked about how to borrow to win today, and big thanks to our terrific guest. Until next week, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, though you might quit your day job, don't quit your Daydream.
 
Speaker 2  37:17  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice, please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively you
 
Keith Weinhold  37:45  
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, get richeducation.com

Keith shows how simple buy-and-hold real estate can be a powerful path to long-term wealth. 
He explains how the tax system and inflation often reward property owners—especially those with fixed-rate debt and rental income—turning modest rent increases into outsized gains in cash flow.
Keith also explores how broader economic forces and neighborhood trends shape real estate markets, and why even an extra $1,000 a month in passive income can meaningfully increase your freedom, reduce reliance on a single job, and move you closer to financial independence.
Episode Page:
GetRichEducation.com/603
For access to properties or free help with a
GRE Investment Coach, start here:
GREmarketplace.com
GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com
Get mortgage loans for investment property:
RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE 
or e-mail: [email protected]
Invest with Freedom Family Investments. 
For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866 
Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes.
Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" 
For advertising inquiries, visit:
GetRichEducation.com/ad
Best Financial Education:
GetRichEducation.com
Get our wealth-building newsletter free—
GREletter.com 
Our YouTube Channel:
www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation
Follow us on Instagram:
@getricheducation



Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:01  
Welcome to GRE I'm your host. Keith Weinhold. Learn how rent inflation makes real estate investors wealthy. Do certain grocery stores in your neighborhood stoke real estate prices, then how just $1,000 of extra monthly cash flow can be surprisingly life changing. Today, on get rich education,
 
Keith Weinhold  0:24  
Let me ask you something, if you've worked hard to build wealth, is your money positioned to actually support your goals? A lot of accredited investors leave capital sitting in cash because it feels safe, but inflation and missed income opportunities can quietly erode its value. Freedom. Family investments offers freedom notes for investors seeking structured income backed by real estate. It's a straightforward approach built on real assets, not speculation and full disclosure. I'm an investor myself. What I like is that their team walks you through how it all works, so you can decide if it aligns with your portfolio and income goals. Every investment carries risk and nothing is guaranteed, but with a track record of consistent on time investor payouts, they built real credibility. Go to freedom. Familyinvestments.com to book a clarity call or text. Family 266, 866, that's family 268, 66
 
Speaker 1  1:28  
you're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education. You Chris,
 
Keith Weinhold  1:44  
Welcome to GRE I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, it's the show that coined the phrase real estate pays five ways. This is get rich education. You learned how to work at your job. The reason we're here is to make you aware that capital compounds labor doesn't, and that's almost why you have to be an investor today. A couple weeks ago, we had tax day in the USA, and that's not quite a holiday. Virtually no one celebrates it. Yes, here in our 250th year of existence as a nation that erstwhile mentioned semi quincentennial. How did America go from fighting a revolution over a 2% tax on a breakfast beverage at the Boston Tea Party to what we pay today? Have you really processed what this has come to now we're taxed when we earn money, taxed when we spend it, taxed when we save it, taxed when we invest it, even taxed when we die with it. And that's just the start. Think about your typical day, your routine. We commute to work in a car, were taxed to register driving on roads. Were taxed to build fueled by gas that's taxed again and then often paying tolls on top of that. Well, those taxes are supposed to maintain the infrastructure, like bridges, highways and tunnels, but yet, they already have billions of taxpayer dollars allocated to them. Then we arrive at an office that's taxed to exist inside a business that's taxed to operate that requires permits and licenses that act like other layers of taxation. When we finally get our paycheck, our employer matches payroll taxes on top of our wages, just incredible. And at the end of the day, we go home to a property we're taxed to own every single year, purchased with income that was already taxed in the first place, and somehow all of this is considered normal. Here's the turning point. Most people when they realize this, feel frustrated and saddened and even victimized. But instead, real estate investors flip the frame from victim to strategist, the same system that taxes seemingly everything quietly rewards those who own assets through depreciation, we report a loss even when the property produces real cash flow. Last week, I told you how you can specifically lower your property taxes step by step, then through mortgage interest and operating expenses, we can reduce that amount of our income that's even taxable at all through long term leverage, we're often repaying debt with inflated dollars, while our tax burden stays surprisingly low, and then it gets even more power. Powerful, more advanced real estate investors use a cost segregation and bonus depreciation to pull years of deductions forward into today. And it's something that's not really that sophisticated or tough to understand either. And then when we sell a property 1031, and 721, exchanges help us defer the capital gains tax. And when you start to think about it, could these turnabouts even get us patriotically excited for a dare I say, semi quincentennial.
 
Keith Weinhold  5:36  
our system of taxation, it can feel punitive. Some high earners lose more than 55% of their income to taxes, both federal and state. Real estate investors don't just earn gains in income. We reshape it. We continue to thrive in a tax system that rewards ownership. Not only is wealth built from owning things rather than having a high salary, tax breaks are gained by owning things rather than having a high salary. And now it's somewhat common knowledge that war leads to inflation. The latest Middle East conflict entails a lot of military spending, and it's been made worse by disrupting an energy producing region. Four weeks ago, I told you about why wars are inflationary and just how bad it can get. That is why the first major wartime inflation reading that we got was so telling. And wow, inflation grew at the fastest annual rate from one month to the next since the pandemic spike back in 2022 it went from 2.4% up to now 3.3% just like that. And with more inflation poised to come along, even if the war winds down, and I want to talk more about how this benefits you shortly. And yes, if you're a newer listener, you're not used to inflation benefiting you, but it benefits the educated and the aware. GRE listener. And first, here's what fewer people pay attention to. M2 money supply that's jumped 4.8% annually to a record of almost $23 trillion now the money supply, this is the 24th consecutive monthly increase the supply was only about $5 trillion back in 2000 10 trillion by 2012, 15 trillion in 2020, and then the pandemic made the money supply explode, and it's almost 23 trillion today. And what does this all mean that the US dollar is losing purchasing power at a historic pace, because, look, inflation is actually not rising prices. The thing that's now up to 3.3% the CPI. Rather, inflation is an expansion of the money supply. It inflates. That is the very etymology of the word people often overlook that. That's why I'm talking about the historic expansion rate of the money supply, and how that can show up in higher prices later. High prices are not inflation. Rather, they are a consequence of inflation. And I want to tell you more about what this means to you, and explain how this builds your wealth in a new way. But first, I mean, my gosh, have you been as flabbergasted about inflation as I am, just at the consumer shelf and aisle level in a store, and I'm a guy that likes to spend money, yet I've got to say sticker shock. It still gives me pause when I'm in a store, even on the cheapest of items, I recently went inside a gas station convenience store after I filled up a regular size York Peppermint Patty, 1.4 ounces cost $3.19 this consequence of inflation has left me slack jawed, but already was a Slack jaw however, has it left you slack jawed? All right, let me tell you about how the wildly overpriced York Peppermint Patty makes real estate investors rich in their sleep. Did you know that the classic economist, Milton Friedman, discussed the concept of get rich. Education's inflation, Triple Crown, essentially. Now we didn't call it that. In fact, he discussed it before GRE existed in 2014 let's listen into this. Friedman won a Nobel Prize in 1976 I'm going to guess that this is him speaking in about 1980 essentially, he. Discuss the first two crowns, which are also the ones that homeowners with a mortgage benefit from which are asset price, inflation and debt debasement. This is about two minutes in length.
 
Speaker 3  10:11  
If I ask people, are you in favor of inflation or not? Everybody is against inflation. But when I explore a little bit further, if I say to people, tell me, have you gained from inflation? Oh, no, you say I haven't gained. And yet, the fact is that a great many people have gained from inflation. There are many, many people who have benefited. Of course, the major gainer from inflation is the federal treasury, as I've already said, but almost everybody who has bought a home in the past 30 years has gained from inflation. He was able to borrow on a mortgage, which inflation has paid off, along with paying off the government debt, so that almost all homeowners in this country are beneficiaries from inflation. Indeed, one of the things that makes inflation such a bad social disease is precisely that it tends to be divisive, because some people do very well during an inflation period, and some people do very badly. And as a result, the population gets split into people who are seeming in great prosperity and people who are in great distress. When most people say they want to stop inflation, what they mean is that they want the prices of the things they buy to go down and the prices of the things they sell to go up. But since what one man sells is what another man buys, that's a neat trick, if you can do it. And as a result, people aren't really serious when they say they want to stop inflation, certainly not in the early stages, not before they fully understand, not before it's gotten to the point where it is really creating serious social problems. Everybody wants to stop inflation at somebody else's expense.
 
Keith Weinhold  12:11  
That was classical macro economist Milton Friedman discussing the rarely talked about benefits of inflation. He also served as an advisor to President Reagan and to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher Friedman extolled the virtues of free markets and minimal government intervention. Well, yeah, he discussed the first two crowns of get rich, education's inflation, triple crown. So let me discuss the third one, because you benefit from this when you rent out property. And what's interesting about what I'm going to tell you is that this example is going to make it more apparent than it ever has to you, that rent inflation makes landlords rich in their sleep. In fact, the positive effect on you is even greater than I thought I double checked these numbers I'm about to share with you before I came on the air, because I didn't expect this high of a degree of cash flow enhancement. And also, I was talking about what I'm going to show you on YouTube earlier, and it generated a negative, biting comment from a viewer. I'll tell you about that, but yeah, I showed this to a guy that's been investing in real estate for 36 years, and he didn't even understand this. Here it is with general monetary inflation. Rent inflation is a consequence. So let's keep this simple. Say that you charge rent of $2,000 and that could very well be a realistic rent amount for a single family rental property that our GRE investment coaches help you find today, although the average is probably a little less than that. So in any case, $2,000 rent. When you subtract out your fixed rate mortgage payment of $1,000 and your operating expenses of $800 This leaves you with $200 of monthly cash flow. We'll say that's your scenario today. Next rents rise 3% This means you're getting $2,060 now. Doesn't sound so exciting, yet your mortgage payment stays locked in at $1,000 inflation can't touch it. That's the key to this. Your operating expenses also rise 3% up to $824 This leaves you with cash flow of 236 okay. So what happened there is your cash flow went from 200 up to 236 that's not a 3% gain, inflation gain 3% this is an 18% increase in your income. 200 up to 236, an 18% cash flow spike off just a tiny rent adjustment will extrapolate that effect. Right across your portfolio. I mean, this is like your annual income going from 100k up to 118k and then compounding like that every single year. That is power, because inflation couldn't touch your fixed mortgage payment. And this is something I've explained before. It's the third crown of get rich education's inflation Triple Crown called Cash Flow enhancement. But it's a better example than I've ever had for it, and it's a germane time to talk about it with inflation on the rise again. Now here's an angle. Does what I just explained feel wrong in any way. The thing is, you aren't fleecing your tenant. It's just an adjustment to inflation, a little 3% bump to them, a big 18% difference to you. You didn't get rich off your tenant. You got rich because, again, you're leveraging the bank's money, but you're doing it in a way that most people don't see or think about and of course, mortgage free owners lose this entire benefit. It is just another way that real estate investors get rich in their sleep. Yet few ever understand how. But like I said, I was talking about this on YouTube just a little bit ago, and a commenter simply wrote, this makes you a bad person.
 
Keith Weinhold  16:27  
Now, the viewer of GRE YouTube channel, sometimes it's you, but you know, sometimes it's someone that doesn't listen to this audio show here, where we do more learning, the casual or occasional YouTube viewer. They just probably don't understand all of what you do. But yes, like me, you have probably run into people out there that think that landlords are bad because they charge tenants rent and they adjust the rent as their expenses rise. And some of these people even say something like, I believe housing is a human right. I seem to hear that more and more, okay, that's one thing, but they imply that the taxpayer should pay for their housing. I mean, does that even work over time? You can see how often government provided housing fails and it ends up being exorbitantly expensive when the free market prevails. Instead, you know, I think that this sentiment has gotten a little worse because of the K shaped economy, more people having to sleep in their cars makes those people resentful. America, you know, we're in better shape when we have a strong middle class. What can really help you a lot is if you haven't yet. Finally, watch the three part video series, the inflation triple crown. The video really helps reinforce your learning well, because it's helpful to show numbers on screen, like you can in a video. You can watch that directly by going to get rich education. COMM, slash inflation, Triple Crown, or shorter. You can just go to the abbreviated get richeducation.com/itc, it takes you to the same place. It really shows you how to optimize your income increases and do it the right way. I mean, if someone thinks you're a bad person for raising the rent 3% commensurate with 3% inflation, well, you know what? Then if that person is an employee, should they also feel bad for getting a 3% pay raise at work? Well then they should, right, because they're charging their employer 3% more for their services as an employee. Well, of course, that's okay. So that sentiment doesn't make one bit of sense, all right. Well, let's temper the 3% rent inflation that I used in our example here. There's both bad news and good news around this, because today, rent increases are below average nationally. In fact, Zillow has forecast only a 1.1% rent increase in single family rentals this year. And then the good news is that the average rent increase since 2020 is 6% and we only used 3% in our example. The bottom line here is that few real estate investors ever have the epiphany that cashflow enhancement is yet another significant way that inflation makes them wealthy, and it's just another reason why carefully selected simple buy and hold. Residential real estate makes people wealthy. Just buy and hold you don't have to dig in and do a bunch of aggressive value add or get into a niche like self storage or short term rentals or assisted living homes that you sure can do those things. And there's nothing wrong with niching down. You just don't have to, and sometimes we even discuss those nichey vehicles here on the show. In fact, we've done four episodes on assisted living homes, but it's hard to beat the relative passivity and the durability of simple buy and hold residential not the latest hot thing, not speculation, but just what's proven. But you have to understand these forces and then act on them. I mean, I gave an example there of $200 in cash flow, and since that's only the most visible component of the five ways real estate pays. When you add it all up, you might be getting $1,500 of monthly benefit on a single family rental property that only costs 300k 1500 a month on a 300k property that you might have only put 20% down on. And for that 1500 a month, it might only take one hour per month of your asset managing of your property to get that $1,500 of benefits. So that is $1,500 an hour. That's great, but it's only one hour a month, and that's exactly what makes you want to scale with buy and hold property as soon as you get into a lot of real estate niches, which, again, it can be worthwhile, whether that's self storage or assisted living homes or something like that. Well, now it's more like an active business that you have to run, and you're probably going to spend substantially more hours there. But yes, a guy that's been investing in real estate for 36 years. Did not understand cash flow enhancement from Rent inflation until I showed this to him and watch it all. He watched the three part video series, which, again, you can watch for free at get rich education.com/inflation. Triple Crown or shortened simply, get rich education.com/itc. Open it up now and watch it later, because I'm back with more next. I'm Keith Weinhold on episode 603 of get rich education.
 
Keith Weinhold  22:13  
Flock homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio through a 721 exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture. It's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now Mom and Pop landlords can 721 the residential real estate request your initial valuation, see if your properties [email protected] slash GRE that's F, l, O, C, K, homes.com/g R, E, 
 
Keith Weinhold  22:49  
the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President chailey Ridge personally, while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com that's Ridge lending group.com
 
Tarek El Moussa  23:23  
What's up? Everyone? This is hgtvs Tarek El Moussa. Listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream. 
 
Keith Weinhold  23:30  
Welcome back to get rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, I'm here in Las Vegas today and staying at the Bellagio with a terrific fountain view room. Yes, the paradox of having a giant water show every 30 minutes in the middle of the Mojave Desert, as it is today, just up the street at the Venetian the big Bitcoin 2026, conference kicks off. I might attend some of the sessions, and I might not. While I'm here in Vegas, I'm more focused on spending time with my brother's family. I know I've mentioned to you before that they live in nearby Henderson, Nevada, and I come here pretty often. You could call me a real estate investor. That's crypto curious. I own a little Bitcoin because I think it has some compelling value propositions as well as a number of problems. I think, like a lot of people, I have more questions about Bitcoin than I do answers, and each time I get a new answer, it just prompts three new questions. Now I plan to shop at Trader Joe's shortly. I'm kind of a weirdo here in Vegas, in the sense that I don't gamble, and rather than eating every one of my meals out, I like to be a little healthy shop at a grocery store and bring good food back to the fridge in my room. Well, how? Do certain grocery store chains impact local real estate prices. And you might have heard about this before, but there's a good new study about it that just appeared in the USA Today. And I kind of like the USA Today, because you can easily find a USA Today article where a columnist wrote a story about me as well. But what happened is an analyst matched more than 32,000 store openings to property prices over 50 years. And one conclusion found that homes in the same zip code as a trader joe's saw their values rise about 6% faster than the national average over three years. Another study found that over five years, home prices near Trader Joe's rose by 49% compared with 45% for homes near Whole Foods and 58% near Aldi. I wouldn't have expected that Aldi is a low cost bargain grocery store. Now there are a couple twists here. First, a higher end grocery store, like Whole Foods, that might very well correlate with a good, more affluent neighborhood, sure, but it also might reflect the fact that home values are high, and that usually is not profitable for long term rentals. And the other takeaway is that grocery stores don't actually cause price appreciation. Instead, they reflect it. These grocery chains, they really invest heavily in site selection, so their presence signals that an area was already trending upward, even before a Trader Joe's arrives in an area, the median household income in a neighborhood hovers around $82,000 and that was the highest in the chains that were studied with a typical home value of 425k and the flip side is also pretty noteworthy, the study found that Walmarts tend to be built in neighborhoods with an average household income of only $49,000 and home values of under 200k plus the home price appreciation Proximus to a Walmart, it ends up trailing the national average by 4% over three years. So really, can we say then that the K shaped economy runs through the grocery aisle? I want to get back to discussing your wealth shortly, but first, let's have a checkup on the economy that you're invested inside every day. Over the past year, the US economy has continued to do well, which has surprised some people, some saying that the economy seems to defy gravity. I mean, look at this point. It has withstood chaotic tariff changes, labor supply shocks, swings to the stock market and then a kinetic war on top of that. And how is it pulling this off? Probably starting with AI investment, including all the data center building you see taking place technology innovation and a consumer that you know, it's funny all these consumer surveys where the consumer feels negative, probably because they keep seeing higher prices, but yet, even though they feel negative, oh, they just keep spending more anyway, the unemployment rate is still really low. The AI build out is significant, and that drives jobs and rents and incomes realize, though, this is a new infrastructure build out. This is substantial, just like railroads in the internet were, and companies racing not to fall behind in the AI boom, that's exactly what fuels the economy and productivity and therefore supports real estate. It's similar in spirit, to the.com boom, really, but this time, there's real revenue, and it ALL Fuels wage growth, which is an antecedent to rent growth. And by the way, have you ever noticed how economists and corporations, they're so addicted to growth in the notion of growth, that if something goes down in value, they call it negative growth. What is negative growth? That's always been a funny phrase to me. Don't you mean a decline? Negative growth? That's kind of like calling growth a positive decline. That's nonsense. Some people are allergic to saying that something is a dip or decline, so instead, they say that it's negative growth. That's sort of like how companies they don't want to say that they're undergoing a round of layoffs instead of layoffs. Oh, they say that we are right sizing. She should just tell it like it is. Now, when it comes to building your wealth, this. Say that you're more of a beginning real estate investor, say that your income from your job is 100k and you might wonder, if I add, say, five properties each with $200 a monthly cash flow, that equals $1,000 a month. That's an extra 12k per year. You know, that really isn't that much of a lifestyle difference. You know, even though there are four other ways real estate pays, let's just talk about this. That's only 12k per year, on top of 100k You know, I contend that that really does make quite a difference. Okay, if your real estate cash flow gets up to 1k a month, and you might only spend four hours a month managing that. It matters more than you think, because of your 100k of job income. All right, after all, your expenses are taken care of, like you pay for your housing, your transportation, your Trader Joe's, groceries, all of that stuff that you spend on. Well, what's left over your discretionary income? That might only be $2,000 per month. So if you add 1000 to that, that is a 50% increase in your discretionary income. What really matters? That's why real estate cash flow is actually a bigger deal than a lot of people think. You just bought back your time. This can help you replace a second job. This can let you cut back hours or even fund a sabbatical buffer for beginners. That's why even a kind of paltry sounding $1,000 a month in cash flow from, say, five rental doors that can actually be a life changer. When you get right down to it, it really starts to change your control over your time, and an extra $1,000 a month can, of course, help fuel your next investment, if you so choose. But that's not all. A psychological shift begins to happen inside you. You're no longer dependent on one income source. This is really the underrated one, because before $1,000 of real estate cash flow, a job loss that could mean stress and urgency and bad decisions, but afterward, now you have margin. Now you're making better decisions in life. You negotiate better you think longer term. That shift alone improves your entire life. And what else can just 1000 a month do for you an extra 1000, it can give you lifestyle upgrades without guilt. Let's say you do spend some of it that can fund travel without touching savings, that can give you better housing or a better location, that can give you experiences instead of a life of what feels like just bills. And here's the key, it does not cannibalize your future. Just $1,000 a month gives you options, like we say around here, don't live below your means. Grow your means. I mean, if you're a beginner, this is something that you could have in less than a year. That extra 1k that comes whether you work that day or not. And for a more advanced investor, you can imagine what multiples greater than 1k per month do. So can you see how everything compounds here? Capital compounds labor doesn't earlier, I discussed how even a 3% rent bump can increase your cash flow 18% all right, and then your cash flow has a greater impact than you thought, because it is discretionary income where a small change can make a world of difference in your life. And when you layer all these things together, it almost makes you wonder why more people aren't real estate investors. Well, most people just have not had it explained to them this way before, and then other people give up after starting in real estate because they don't buy the right property in the right market. 
 
Keith Weinhold  34:16  
Here at GRE we really help you avoid those mistakes. And in fact, let me give you an example of what I mean. This can really help. Redfin reports that national home prices have jumped up again, rising 2.1% annually, but yet, a place like Florida, they still have year over year housing price declines, not negative growth declines, and that's due to a temporary overbuild, like I've talked about before. But Cape Coral, Florida homes that area has been hit harder than most with more building than most places, they're actually down in price 3.8% it looks like an opportunity, and people say they want an opportunity. What they really want is certainty, and once certainty arrives, the opportunity is gone. Winners often embrace the heterodox. They're willing to lean into the sort of uncomfortable, mildly contrarian, awkward moment right when others are hesitating, some Florida brand new property builders. They're getting creative, and the translation to creative is that they are motivated. They're offering to throw in the kitchen sink and the backsplash. Here's one example, a duplex in Cape Coral, Florida. The listing price is 550k it's in an A class neighborhood. The rent is 3890 both sides of the duplex are already leased, six beds, four baths. It's 2474 square feet. The down payment you can expect to make is 25% the projected cash flow is up to $1,096 per month. Yeah, you've potentially got your surprisingly life changing 1k in cash flow in one fell swoop here and here's where it gets interesting, a 3.75% mortgage rate, buy down and one year of free property management. They're either giving you that or take $25,000 cash instead and structure your own advantage. All right, that's what this certain builder is offering. Now, a reputable builder, in fact, they've been a guest on the show here before. You can push the envelope a little further than that. I encourage you to make an offer below the list price on these property types. Yes, offer lower than the 550k how much lower should you go? That's where a free chat with our investment coach gives you an inside edge, because, see, they know what other offer amounts were accepted previously by these sellers, so they know where the real flexibility is, and they've got all kinds of what I'll call specific deal knowledge like this that you're just not going to find anywhere else. Our coaches can also help you with other inventory, if it better meets your personal objectives than something like a Florida new build duplex. Usually, those places are in the Midwest and South, from Ohio out to Missouri and Georgia out to Texas. In full disclosure, what I just described is a better deal than any Florida properties that I personally own myself. Now it is clearly a buyer's market in Florida. We're in that fleeting window where long term demand is strong, short term supply is high, and builders are motivated. So take the free consult, or maybe no properties are right for you. Once our coach learns more, if you're interested, we can help you structure a smart offer. Talk to us. We can help you build an entire portfolio, if you so choose, and find the right markets and properties with a management solution, we've got the team and the contacts, you can make your process easier than guessing and figuring it out on your own. Often like to leave you with something actionable at the end of the show. I encourage you, if you think it's right for you, book time with a friendly GRE investment [email protected] you can find an open slot on their calendar and book it [email protected] Until next week, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.
 
Speaker 4  38:54  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively,
 
Keith Weinhold  39:14  
the pre preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, get richeducation.com

Keith explains how to increase real estate cash flow by appealing and reducing property taxes. 
Then welcomes high‑energy real estate investor and educator Thach Nguyen. 
Thach shares his refugee‑to‑multimillionaire story, breaks down his roadmap to retiring with rentals, and explains how ADUs (Accessory Dwelling Units) are transforming both investor returns and affordable housing—especially in Seattle.
Resources:
Follow @ThachNguyen on Instagram and all major social platforms.
Episode Page:
GetRichEducation.com/602
For access to properties or free help with a
GRE Investment Coach, start here:
GREmarketplace.com
GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com
Get mortgage loans for investment property:
RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE 
or e-mail: [email protected]
Invest with Freedom Family Investments. 
For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866 
Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes.
Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" 
For advertising inquiries, visit:
GetRichEducation.com/ad
Best Financial Education:
GetRichEducation.com
Get our wealth-building newsletter free—
GREletter.com 
Our YouTube Channel:
www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation
Follow us on Instagram:
@getricheducation



Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:01  
Welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, talking about how to increase your cash flow by obtaining a successful appeal and reduction in your property taxes. Then real estate personality Thatch Nguyen and I discuss mindset and some creative real estate techniques today on get rich education,
 
Keith Weinhold  0:23  
the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President chailey Ridge personally while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com that's Ridge lending group.com
 
Speaker 1  0:57  
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
 
Keith Weinhold  1:13  
Welcome to GRE from Mount Holly New Jersey to Hollywood, California and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold. This is get rich education, and I'm still not wearing Dockers, and I am in Hollywood, California today. More on that later. Among all the major investment classes when it's bought right real estate is the second safest investment class to bonds. Bonds are the safest among them all. Real estate has the highest returns, so it's the second safest and has the highest returns. And that's why it's our focus on this show. But if you want to be in real estate for two years or less, well, then it's likely best to invest elsewhere, at least with long term rentals, because you need time to defray your transaction cost. And for real estate pays five ways to start compounding. Coming up shortly, it's pretty popular real estate personality Thatch Nguyen. He will be here, and I did not know Thatch until recently, when we were introduced by our mutual friend Scott Saunders. And Scott, who I had on the show here a few years ago, is one of the nicest guys you'll ever meet in real estate. Well, besides those high return, low risk real estate attributes. Of course, when you own property directly, you also get a big measure of control if you want it. Now, control comes really with that option A lot of times to get involved and make your real estate investing less passive, just an option, because successful real estate can be as simple as buy and hold, but today we're discussing strategies. If you want to get a little hands on, if you so choose, you can attempt a successful appeal of the amount of property tax that you're paying. And of course, every dollar that you lower your property tax is $1 where you increase your income. And this feels like a germane conversation, since tax day in the USA was just last week. Ah, yes, property tax, hmm, it's like a version of the government charges you rent on your own property in perpetuity. That's what it is. And before I get into how to potentially get your property tax lowered, property taxes are under pressure. Some states are still making their serious push to completely eliminate the property tax, namely in Florida, Texas and Indiana. Those are three of the front running states, probably the big three. And I won't get into all of that again, because I devoted an episode segment to that topic a few months back. Others are considering elimination too, Georgia, North Dakota, Pennsylvania, Ohio, Oklahoma, South Dakota, but it's just more talk than anything in those six states. Now, if a state undertook property tax abolition, it would probably only apply to owner occupied property, homeowners or voters, and those property values would soar. But these new comparables, what they could do, in turn, is lift the value of your out of state rental property as well, because you could always sell your investment property to an owner occupant. But in my opinion, no state is going to eliminate the property tax. I mean, sheesh, it's kind of like trying to eliminate gravity. It's just too hard to replace the revenue from elsewhere. Schools, police and fire and infrastructure heavily rely on property tax, so instead, what's realistic is a tax cap, a ceiling on the amount of property tax that you pay, and with an income producing property of course, your tenant essentially pays the property tax for you now, even before buying a property or for one that you already own, the most accurate way you can check the tax amount for your exact address is on the county assessor's website. 
 
Keith Weinhold  5:38  
The next best places are listing websites like Zillow and Redfin. This is all public information. The way to find a county assessor's website for your property is with a simple four word search. What you should google is the county name, and then the words assessor property search, those are the only four words that you need. And then what if you discover that you're paying more than you are for nearby, similar properties? Oh, well, there we go. That's a sign that you're over paying. You can usually file an appeal form at the same website. And before we talk about how to do it, realize that only about 5% of property owners ever file an appeal, and in a bit, I'll tell you what your percent chance for success is at lowering your property tax, your chances of it being lowered. So if you believe that you have a case for lower property taxes, first, it helps to know what you're arguing. And this is important, it's something that can trip you up. You're actually not arguing that taxes are too high. You're arguing my property is overvalued compared to the market. That's it. That's your basis of contention. Yeah, if you walk in talking about things like fairness or inflation or government spending, then you've already lost the county assessor's office isn't the place for your best rant on how fiat currency is garbage or something like that. Now you might not even have to physically walk in anywhere today. Sometimes you can get your appeal rewarded informally. Other times you go before what's called a Board of Equalization in most places and in person, hearings have become less common. Video calls have become quite a bit more common since the pandemic, but you want to review your property details with them. You want to be sure to point out if there's incorrect square footage or the wrong lot size, or missing depreciation, or condition issues or upgrades that are overstated and even small errors can swing your value by 10s of 1000s of dollars and then, and it's whether this is with rental property or with your own home build your comparables Like an investor, not a homeowner, because this is really where you win or lose. You need three to five strong comparable sales in the same neighborhood, or really close ones that sold recently, ideally within the last six months, and they should be of a similar size and age and condition. And then make adjustments. Inferior comps support a lower value. And we don't just want to cherry pick garbage comps. We want to keep it credible, and then for your best chance of getting your property tax lowered, find your angle, and really this is your leverage point. Most winning appeals hinge on one clear argument, either a condition gap, meaning that your property is worse than the comps are, or it's an argument like market timing, and this is if values have softened since the assessment date, or the income approach for rentals. Therefore it's the value based on noi, not emotion. You could take that track or other external issues like noise or location drawbacks or obsolescence, so only pick one of those four primary arguments here, condition, gap, market timing, the income approach or external issues and document everything. This is really where you separate yourself. You want to show photos and have them dated and be clear and honest. Nothing dramatic there repair estimates or contractor bids, inspection reports, rent rolls or income statements. So you're not telling a story. You're presenting evidence this way, and be sure to package it cleanly. This matters more than you think. Assessors see sloppy appeals all day. So you're going to stand out by being organized and concise, like a one to two page summary and some exhibits, and keeping it professional meaning, no emotional language, so you're making it clean and easy for them to agree with you, and this is the place to be. Calm and not combative. It isn't a debate club. It's the right form to be respectful, stick to facts, not interrupt and not get defensive, because the person across from you, they actually did not set your rate, they didn't set your tax rate, they're evaluating your evidence, and then it's helpful for you to know the likely outcome. You don't need a gigantic win, even a five to 10% reduction, that can mean 1000s saved over your life of owning the property. You want to remember that some jurisdictions are more flexible than others, and if you're denied informally, like just doing it online, then you can often escalate your property a tax appeal to a board review. And this is a long game, not every swing is going to end up in a base hit. Investors have an advantage. If you own rentals, you've really got a stronger argument, because you can use that income based verification like cap rate and noi, you can show actual rent versus market rent, and you can highlight your expenses, and assessors often default to sales comps. So this is how you can shift the frame here. The blunt truth is that when people lose appeals, it's usually because they show up unprepared, or they argue emotionally, or they just don't understand valuation. And so this is one of those rare moments where being methodical is actually better than being smart. 40 to 60% of property tax appeals succeed nationwide, and with professional level prep, you can make that 70 to 80% for a success rate, and the typical result if you win is a 10 to 15% reduction in assessed value. So that can be worth doing. And you know, just like buying your first out of state rental property seems to be the hardest. Making your first property tax appeal seems to be the hardest as well. And there you go a way to reduce your expenses and increase your cash flow. Yes, I am in LA today, West Hollywood, California. Though I do expect to produce some real estate media here. That's not the typical Hollywood type filmmaking that I'm doing, I just happen to be staying in Hollywood, although I do plan to run up to the Hollywood sign and do some fun stuff out at Venice Beach. Later next week, I will be in Las Vegas, and will probably even bring you the show from the Bellagio with a view of the Bellagio fountain. As for this week, let's meet our guest.
 
Keith Weinhold  12:49  
This week's guest has an amazingly powerful story. Today. He's quite well known in real estate circles for his high energy in person events, but he came to the United States as a Vietnamese refugee, experienced homelessness early in life, and went on to build a real estate portfolio valued at over $100 million I'm not making light of the fact that he's homeless. Once I started talking about this, he kind of, you know, beat his chest a little bit. He's a high energy, playful guy here, but he's completed more than 1000 real estate projects and transactions through his mentorship program, he's helped 1000s of people build long term Real Estate Wealth with his platform, it's called springboard to wealth, and along the way, he's built a strong audience, with 1.4 million followers on Instagram. Hey, welcome to the show Thatch Nguyen.
 
Thach Nguyen  13:41  
I'm honored to be here, my man, I'm honored
 
Keith Weinhold  13:43  
to hear, Oh, it's so good to do it Thatch. And before we're done, we'll discuss some actionable tactics. But first, that is just an amazing story to have started from homelessness. I guess I'm most interested to know what you would identify as kind of that turning point from destitution to success. Talk to us about that.
 
Thach Nguyen  14:03  
You know, coming from Vietnam, we was a refugee. We left out of the last plane. My dad was a translator for the US Army. Back in the days, military pulled out of South Vietnam during the war, they asked my dad, would you want to leave with us? And so we decided to leave. But of course, my dad, the owner, who actually spoke some bit of English. None of us didn't speak no English. We only had $100 one suitcase for eight of us, gosh, and I was five years old. But if my dad didn't leave, he would have been captured, and then he would have been killed. Because you work for the US government, because it's still, you know, is a communist country, right? And so we left, we came over here, we landed in San Diego, lived in the shelter out there, and then we moved up to Washington State, Seattle, and lived in a shelter there for a few months. And then finally, we lived in a sponsorship house, right, with a guy named Charles Zettler. I graduated from high school in. 88 I went off to fix aviation airplane my two older brother, because they in the aviation business. And then I got a job working for Alaska. But I didn't want to leave to Denver to go work out there, so I decided to stay back. And I went to work at, you know, like, odd job, like at a body shop. I was the dairy manager at a grocery store, like, called Ralph. Was called Safeway, and I was parking car in Chinatown. And I think the pivoting point was, I'm sitting there, and one of my friends says, you know, you would do very well in real estate, yeah, because you have a good energy, you have a good mouthpiece, I think you do well, see, but I didn't hear all that. I heard you get 7% commission checks. Oh, Sign me up. You know what? I think, but I didn't realize quickly, selling real estate, you don't make that kind of money unless you do a lot of volume. I got to real estate. I started doing well in real estate as a agent. But the tipping point, I think, for me, was a mentor named Saul. And Saul said to me, Keith, I know you appreciate this. He said, You can be rich selling real estate for the rest of your life. Yeah, you'll never be wealthy unless you own the real estate, right? And that was the light bulb that came off of me that I need to take the money I make from selling real estate to then Park the money in long term rental. But I didn't quit my real estate. I just bought real estate, rented it, let it ride. And I just kept selling real estate for years. And at the moment I made, the more property I bought. The moment I make, the more property I bought. And then from there, I just start to learn new construction. I start to learn fix and flip. I start to learn about the BRRRR strategy. And then today, you know, we're going to talk more about this. But today, the hot thing is adu and accessory dwelling unit, and that's what I do a lot today is a lot of new construction, a lot of ADUs.
 
Keith Weinhold  16:49  
Oh, that's great to hear about your come up. Fetch, yeah, I find it remarkable, too, the amount of people that are in the real estate industry, and they're doing something adjacent to being an investor, which I think is the best place to be. For example, they're a property manager, or they're a mortgage loan officer or the real estate agent, but yet they don't own rental real estate, right? They're so close. How could you not be doing this?
 
Thach Nguyen  17:13  
And I say today, because I understand this. Now, if you don't take the active income you make from whatever you do, say, as a real estate agent, then you always trading your time for money for the rest of your life, and you're always on that treadmill and that grind, but you can't get off, because the moment you get off, Keith, you got no income, and you got no passive income either. So you're stuck on this wheel like a hamster that you got to keep running until you old and die.
 
Keith Weinhold  17:40  
Well, you know, it's unavoidable to talk about you've got the word mindset on big letters on a hooded sweatshirt that you're wearing right now, so, you know, I think you're touching on it somewhat. But yeah, talk to us more about this mindset and how to break through the barriers. Because most people's connotation with income is merely that they have got to trade their time for dollars.
 
Thach Nguyen  18:01  
Of course, you know, mindset is 80% of the result that we want, that we get. Because someone could have a mindset to go, I'm going to be the top real estate agent, and that mindset would drive them to be the top agent for many, many year. But they always trade their time for money so they never get wealthy. I have that mindset because I was selling 100 homes a year in my early 20s. But when Saul said to me, you know one day that when you get into your 40s and your 50s, do you want to keep trading time for money, or do you want to trade your money for time? And see, that's a mindset shift. And of course, who want to be in their 50 Keith with a gun in their head, always trading time for money. And so when I heard that, it shifted the mindset to, you know what, I'm going to make money selling real estate because I need that money, then I'm going to take that money and park it into a rental. So when I get into my 40s and my 50s, I have the option to work or not work, and that was a mindset shift. So owning rental property is a mindset more than a strategy.
 
Keith Weinhold  19:08  
I and I think a lot of us, came up with the mindset that, oh, you get wealthy by obtaining a high salary, and then no later, you learn you don't get wealthy through high salaries, especially if wealth equals freedom, you get wealthy through owning assets. So Thatch after you know your homelessness, and you're new to the United States, and you've come up like you described, and you realize that real estate is the way in doing it with a relative amount of passivity, rather than actively being in it as a realtor, you sort of get this roadmap for retiring with rental properties, even from starting at zero like you did. So tell us more about that roadmap to retire with rental properties.
 
Thach Nguyen  19:47  
You know, when I started, I had this roadmap where you got to learn what you need to learn about real estate investing, what why do you want to own it? What's the benefit? What would it do for you? At the end of the day, and a lot of that is goals and vision and mindset. For me when I got clear Keith on the knowledge, because I start off with knowledge. And of course, I want to own real estate. But here's the thing I always want to say to people, nobody want to own real estate. Just to own real estate, right? They want to own real estate. So what it would actually do for you. And so for me, I think when I was younger, I was counting the doors, but now I got older and wiser, I count the hours I get to have back. So the mindset for me is that when I got clear what I wanted to do was I wanted, you know, the option of working at work, that I also wanted to retire my mom, my dad, right? And then I also wanted to actually help my kids learn how to do this one day, so that they have the same mindset. So those are the reason I in want to invest in real estate. Of course, have an asset, have a net worth, come along with a secondary so once I understand the knowledge of why I'm doing it, I got this clear vision. I got this horizon. Now I'm inspired to actually go out there and take action. Now the action is, what do I want to buy for me? I started with single family. I started with buying ugly houses and rehabbing and keeping it, and then worked my way into multifamily and apartment building, all doing value add today. So those are my action, right? So I'm inspired. I take the action, I make money doing what I'm doing. But then I asked myself, How many property do I need? But it's not even how many property I need. How much passive income do I need to get out of the rat race? I have the option of working at work. For me, when I was like, 21 years old, I said to myself, I have $30,000 a month in passive income, and I'm debt free. I mean, who couldn't live off 360,000 of you debt free, right? Yeah. So I had to go to go after so many doors based on what the rent is, to accumulate it and then to pay them down so I can be out of the rat race as soon as possible. And once I did that, then I started playing the game accumulation again. So today I have a whole set of properties paid off. That's why I have over 100,000 a month in passive income. But I also got a whole bunch of property paid off yet, which I don't care, because this ought to get paid up by itself anyway. But now I'm playing this game where I'm gonna accumulate more property or trade up at the same time pay down other property I want to pay off, so that when I get into my 60, my 70, a lot of it paid off, and I still got other property. I don't know. I don't mind accumulating, because I love to play the game of real estate. So this is the road map that I you know, that my mentor saw. He's a very wealthy Jewish man that taught me. And today I'm just taking that lived it my own life now I'm just sharing it back to other people
 
Keith Weinhold  22:42  
that you said so many interesting things there. I think the most is how you talked about your metric is more outcome based. I think we all think through how many doors we have, and you know, even how much passive income that translates into, but you talked about how many hours you're able to win back way that you can quantify that.
 
Thach Nguyen  23:05  
If I ask someone, I go, Hey, how much does it cost you to live personally every month? And most American will probably say, 10,15, 20,000, Max. And I said to them, what have you had that much in passive income? How would you feel? And 99.9% of it were like, my god, that will be amazing. But the problem we all go to the seminar, we see people on stage. They got 100 doors, 200 door. They got 1000 doors. And nobody needs that much to get out of the rat race, right? So I say the most American is, look how much it costs you to live. Look at the lifestyle you live. You have that in passive income, and if you choose to keep working in active income, it's just a cherry on top of the cake.
 
Keith Weinhold  23:47  
Yeah, there are so many ways to do it. We talk here about being financially free rather than debt free, and sort of letting leverage and inflation in tenants work to our benefit. But you've got this separate way of doing it. You're listening to get rich education. We're talking with real estate, personality, Thatch Nguyen, more when we come back, including some actionable tactics. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, 
 
Keith Weinhold  24:09  
let me throw out a simple idea, sometimes doing nothing with your money is actually a decision. Leaving it parked might feel safe, but over time, purchasing power changes. So the conversation isn't about chasing returns, it's about intentionally placing money somewhere. Freedom, family investments works in real estate people use every day. Housing, senior communities, essential properties, things tied to living and not trends. Their freedom notes offering is built for accredited investors looking for structured income backed by real assets, not speculation. I am an investor with them myself. The Freedom team makes themselves available to walk through their approach, structure and operating philosophy so you can ask questions and determine. Alignment before moving forward, while past performance doesn't guarantee future results, their historical operating philosophy has yielded 100% investor payouts backed by over 20 years of experience. If you want clarity before making any moves, book a clarity [email protected] or text family to 66 866, text the word family to 66 866. 
 
Keith Weinhold  25:31  
Flock homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio through a 721, exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture. It's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now Mom and Pop landlords can 721 the residential real estate request your initial valuation, see if your properties [email protected] slash GRE, that's F, l, O, C, K, homes.com/gre,
 
Caeli Ridge  26:09  
this is Ridge lending group's president, Shaylee ridge. Listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold, and remember, don't quit your Daydream. You Keith, welcome
 
Keith Weinhold  26:27  
back to get rich Education. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold we're talking with Thatch win real estate personality, and you know Thatch, on the way up, you've really employed a lot of methods. You're knowledgeable about House hacking and burrs and small multifamily in ADUs. ADUs is something that we haven't talked about here very much. And for those that don't know what that is, we're talking about an accessory dwelling unit, right? Typically, a secondary housing unit on the same lot as a primary residence. You can sort of think of it like a backyard cottage in a lot of cases. So tell us Thatch, what got you into ADUs,
 
Thach Nguyen  27:03  
well, Seattle, about five years ago, was one of the first city and state to adapt this Adu, because the biggest problem we have across America is affordable housing, yeah, and a shortage of housing, let alone a shortage of affordable housing. So Seattle came up with, Hey, we will let you. Got built an accessory dwelling unit in the backyard, maximum 800 square feet, but you have to live in the front house to build the back house. Okay? People got excited. They built it so they can rent it in the back. They live in the front house. But then that didn't really solve as much affordable housing for you to buy. It helped with rental. And then about a year, you and a half later, they came over stage shoe to go, you know what? We're gonna allow up to 1000 square feet of adu. But you don't have to live in the front to build the back. Now, people got excited. Investors go, Oh my God, let me go buy a property. Let me go build something. Rent both of these out, right? And then if they want, they could sell the whole entire piece, you know, with somebody, and that was great, but it still wasn't enough. And then about a year you'd have, later, they came up with stage three. They go, You know what? We want to help create more housing for you to buy. So now what we're going to deal with, we're going to actually give people separate APN tax number for the house in the front and the adu in the back, so you can sell off any one of the and by doing that, they value the house as a single family, and they value the back as a single family, so they can comp it like a house, not as a duplex. And that blew the lid off. I mean, in Seattle, that was a game changer. I mean, like builders started coming in, they're buying property. They they building and they selling these. They're making a killer on it. And then show you how much crazy it is. Okay in Seattle, if you buy the house in the front, you gotta get the land the back freak, because it came with the house. We could build 1000 square foot all in it cost us about $400,000 but with a separate parcel number, they comp it as a regular house. So regular houses right about 1000 square feet, they sell for about $700,000 so you build for four is worth seven, and you can actually design it in four months. Get permit, because they have a special line for adu. And then you can build this. You can actually have it all done in one year. So you instantly create massive equity in one deal. But here's a beautiful part of it. In Seattle's expensive city, it's hard to get the 1% rule. You know the 1% rule with, you know 1% of what you pay for a property, a $200,000 house, you get $2,000 for rent with Seattle, a $700,000 house, you get 4000 but the Adu, it only cost us 400,000 but it's worth 700 but my mortgage is based on 400,000 I can write it for four grand, and I meet the 1% rule Now
 
Keith Weinhold  29:52  
a way to recent rent to value ratio, right?
 
Thach Nguyen  29:56  
So now Adu, they are all. All across America, because two years ago, all the city planners and all the people for other state they came to Seattle for a private, hush, hush meeting to ask Seattle How you guys doing this, and so they can go and copy. So in the last two year, Adu has spread across America like wildfire.
 
Keith Weinhold  30:19  
This is great. Tell us more. And of course, it's going to depend on a lot of factors, but tell us more about that cash on cash return that you're getting after stabilization with an adu.
 
Thach Nguyen  30:29  
Yeah, it's beautiful. So when you have a property that's worth 700 and it only costs you 400 it has so much equity, the bank will finance 100% of the construction cost, so you don't have to come up with no money. Great. So then if you finance 100% which is 400 right, 400,000 the mortgage only three grand, and you ran for four in Seattle with making positive cash flow with zero down payment. So that's infinite return on your money. 
 
Keith Weinhold  30:56  
Yes, that's a really beautiful thing to get the infinite return when you don't have any equity left in That's right?
 
Thach Nguyen  31:03  
And the thing is, people can do that across America now, but most city right now on stage two, they don't have the APN. But right now, a lot of city right now are on the verge of going from two to three. Right now, I've been going out there buying home that you could actually Burr, make the house in the front. Work make a cash flow. Have the backyard sitting there, and then you can build it anytime. You can build it now, just for the cash flow. Or you can build it when you get the separate APN. So you can get two separate parso You can sell one, keep one. But bottom line is, if I was anybody out there, I'll be buying property. Now, make it work like you would already be buying, but just make sure you get a backyard so you have access to the back.
 
Keith Weinhold  31:46  
Okay? So in some situations, using the burr strategy on the primary residence with an adu, burrs, buy, renovate, rent, refinance and repeat, beautiful.
 
Thach Nguyen  31:55  
That's what I call the atomic bomb, the burr. Add the adu to the back. Boom. But I'm gonna give your audience something that they can even look forward to. Seattle in November of 2025 this went into stage four. Now in stage four, single family in the front, if the lot's big enough, you can put instead of one, you can put 234, or five property in the back, if the lot's big enough.
 
Keith Weinhold  32:23  
Yeah, this is great. I mean, it solves the problem of affordable housing, and it increases the density in a lot of these metro areas. Yes, right, Thatch, it sounds like Seattle's having a good deal of success with the ADUs. How is that when you extrapolate it out nationally, and are there regulatory bottlenecks out there.
 
Thach Nguyen  32:40  
The only bottleneck right now is most people right now are in state two, where they can't separate it. So if they buy a burr, they can add the house in the back. They just have to be able to comp it where there's a house and another house in the back. So what they do is they look at two different type of comp. They look at, what does it duplex sell for in the area? They could use that as a comp. Or if this is a 2000 square foot home, and you got another 800 square foot, what's a 2800 square foot home is going for? Because they can be added this to the main house, so they can create the ARV. Does that make sense? Yeah. And the only challenge, challenging is that a city that's new, they have to use comp like duplexes and square foot. It to come up with the ARV.
 
Keith Weinhold  33:23  
That's really good. Okay, so Seattle's had these four phases of ADUs, if you will. And then what's next for ADUs?
 
Thach Nguyen  33:30  
I think what's gonna happen after phase four is that all these single family one day will all go to multifamily. It's already in multifamily. You got a single family in the front. You can build three in a back. They're all three single family. But technically it's multi unit, right? It's called multi unit, but it's still on single family zoning, because, you know, the bulk of the real estate where I still have land, or the residential, because most commercial, you and I know, they built out on all the land on the lot, so the biggest portion left is the single family. So this is why I've been doing the adu. And I think in the future, Phase Five could be those single family that whole area might get up zoned to multifamily, more density.
 
Keith Weinhold  34:11  
Yeah, upzoning, that term for allowing more dense housing term really originated because you're building up vertically, although that doesn't have to be the case every time. And yes, I mean, this is really a great way to solve the affordable housing crunch in the United States. I've seen other cities where single family zoning only was allowed now allows for duplexes. That's a common way to upzone as well and fetch you really often talk about creating affordable housing, like we're discussing here, while you're building wealth. Can you speak to us more about that? You kind of get a give back that way?
 
Thach Nguyen  34:46  
Yeah. This is a mindset thing. There's a mindset that says, right? And some people believe it. Some people don't. I love what Zig Ziglar said, Right? Zig. Zig says, If you help enough people get what they want, you eventually get what you want. Yeah. And so. If you go out, then you make enough difference to the world. Take a look at Bill Gates. One day, he probably saying, You know what, I'm going to figure out how to make a computer to actually help your life better, faster, more efficient. And his goal was to do it worldwide. So he solved that problem, and in return, he has massive financial freedom. So for me, real estate isn't just real estate. Real estate what it would do for me as an outcome, real estate also give me an emotional contribution, which is, if I make a difference out there, creating more housing right, to make it more affordable, to make it most of people gonna buy it. What does it do? For me? It will actually fulfill the hierarchy of life, which is contribution. Because once you have money, the only thing that fulfill human being beyond money is life fulfillment.
 
Keith Weinhold  35:48  
That's right. I mean, hey, it's a little brash, but in the business world, really no one cares about you until they know how much you can help them.
 
Thach Nguyen  35:56  
You got it, brother, you got it right. That's why do you think so many wealthy people do thing in nonprofit world, because at some point it was all about them at the beginning. Now it's about basically giving back. So imagine, on your way going to success, you do both, you make a difference and you benefit also. And it's a more fulfilling journey than a journey just push, push, push and grinding and not taking care of you in the process.
 
Keith Weinhold  36:23  
Well, if that's your events, they give you this mentorship platform. And I think you've actually pointed to how mentorship accelerates your own real estate success, even though you're trying to help others first. 
 
Thach Nguyen  36:34  
Yeah, you know for me, I always knew that the more you learn, the more you earn. And so what? 1995 I met my first mentor, Saul and then I met my other mentor, Mike ferry. And if I'm there, I met Wayne Dyer, who became one of my great mentor, Tony Robbins, Deepak, Chopra, Abraham Hicks, I mean, all these great people, right, that I got exposed to. And today I still have multiple different mentor from fitness mentor, spiritual mentor, business mentor, you know, financial mentor, and they I have regular meeting with these folks, because I want to constantly, always feel I'm growing mentally, emotionally and financially, physically, and I know that the more I learn, the more I can actually make a difference to other people coming behind me
 
Keith Weinhold  37:21  
 even Michael Jordan had his own team of coaches. Yeah, you see, that's why, that's how we all get better with that, you've really helped so many people with your mentorship, your contribution to the industry. Let our audience know how they can learn more about you.
 
Thach Nguyen  37:36  
Yeah, if you gotta go to my Instagram, it's Thatch Nguyen this my name, and you go to YouTube, I drop YouTube every single week. It's my name. Also that's when. And you can find me there. You can find me on Instagram, tik, Tok, Facebook, everywhere. That's where I inspire and empower people all over the world about real estate and mindset.
 
Keith Weinhold  37:54  
If that's before, I ask you if you have any last thoughts as you look him up, it's spelled T, H, A, C, H N, G, u, y, e n, fetch. Let us know if you have any closing thoughts.
 
Thach Nguyen  38:04  
Yeah, this has been on my mind lately a lot. If you want to be successful at anything, you got to get single minded focus. And I remember when I was in Tony Robbins training, we used to do fire walk a lot. And when you are doing fire walk, you have to get single minded focus. And the only thing that you will focus on is perfect health, perfect health, perfect health. As you walk in across five feet, six feet, seven feet, and you have to really stay focused on perfect health, perfect health, perfect health, perfect health. And if you don't, and I've seen what, people lost their concentration and they burn their feet halfway through. But I also see people so powerful where they can walk halfway stop, bend down, pick up a coal and keep walking. Don't burn because they really focus on single minded focus. So I want to say to everybody, make sure you clear on where you want to buy, what you want to buy, and then once you know where you want to buy, what you want to buy, get focused on your main job is to figure out how to find deals every day, because that's your main job. If you can find deal, you solve all of your personal problem. 
 
Keith Weinhold  39:15  
I am so with you on the focus of concentration, because diversification is a word that we're fed, and there's something to be said for that. But if you want greatness in anything, you really need to double down and focus. It's sort of like Andrew Carnegie said, put all your eggs in one basket and then watch that basket. Yeah. Well, that's when this has been great. It's been good to have you here on the show.
 
Thach Nguyen  39:35  
I appreciate everybody we talk to y'all soon. Peace out. 
 
Keith Weinhold  39:44  
Yeah, good energy from Thatch Nguyen. He's based in Seattle. When you don't live in an investor advantage area, you have to get creative or scrappy, and he's doing it well, using ADUs and a lot of value add if you're merely investing. Investing on the side, well, then you're probably better off with a turnkey type investment, something that's not quite so hands on, but if you're devoted full time to real estate, then you really have some ideas there that you might want to pick up on. He wore a sweatshirt that says mindset on it during our chat. I like that. I mean, real estate investing isn't all about mindset, but that's surely where it begins for the production team here at GRE that's our sound engineer, bedroom Jampa, who has edited every single episode since 2014 QC and show notes, Brenda Almedares, video lead, brendawali strategy, talimagal, video editor, seroza, KC, and producer me, we'll run it back next week for you. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.
 
Speaker 4  40:50  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively.
 
Keith Weinhold  41:18  
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth building get richeducation.com

Keith explores how long-running social and economic shifts are redefining the American Dream—especially for younger adults who are putting off milestones like moving out, starting families, and buying homes. 
He connects these trends to today's housing scarcity, elongated renter stage, and what that means for long-term rental demand and real estate investors.
Keith also zooms out to place the current moment in the sweep of American history, then welcomes Redfin Chief Economist Dr. Daryl Fairweather for a data-driven conversation on affordability, supply constraints, renting versus owning, and how demographic changes could shape the next wave of opportunities in both ownership and rental markets.
Episode Page:
GetRichEducation.com/601
For access to properties or free help with a
GRE Investment Coach, start here:
GREmarketplace.com
GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com
Get mortgage loans for investment property:
RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE 
or e-mail: [email protected]
Invest with Freedom Family Investments. 
For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866 
Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes.
Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" 
For advertising inquiries, visit:
GetRichEducation.com/ad
Best Financial Education:
GetRichEducation.com
Get our wealth-building newsletter free—
GREletter.com 
Our YouTube Channel:
www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation
Follow us on Instagram:
@getricheducation



Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:01  
welcome to GRE I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, learn just how far behind today's 30 year olds are then American history by decade as the nation approaches its 250th birthday. Finally, a conversation about what's next for the housing market with Redfin's chief economist Darrell fairweather today on get rich education.
 
Corey Coates  0:27  
Since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki, get rich education can be heard on every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android. Listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit get rich education.com
 
Keith Weinhold  1:10  
the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President chailey Ridge personally, while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com that's Ridge lending group.com
 
Speaker 1  1:44  
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
 
Keith Weinhold  1:54  
Welcome to get rich Education. I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, the voice of real estate investing since 2014 almost nobody talks about a really important story going on in America today. And I find this really astonishing. I mean, you could almost never think of America the same way again, as you'll hear while you've got these other headlines out there, constantly sucking oxygen out of the room, like decisions from the White House and inflation and wars. One big story. It moves so slowly that it kind of creeps up on you. It is the jaw dropping change in American society over the last 40 years. And then we'll discuss its seismic changes for real estate. And this is sourced from a Census Bureau supplement. It's about how fewer us adults reach typical life milestones by age 30, and this is partly because more adults opt for college than in previous generations. Oh, well, college doesn't sound like such a bad thing. I'll get to that. And by the way, 30 is an age that has come and gone for me, so I've lived through it. We're looking at a period from 1985 to 2025 so 40 years first, it's those that live on their own. In 1985 it was 83% today it's just 67% so then the percentage that don't live on their own and probably live with their parents or roommates, that has doubled. You see even more drastic declines for other milestones since 1985 those that have ever married from 77% down to 45% those that live with a child and the responsibility that this entails that's fallen from 59% down to 36% and those that own a home 48 down to 29% and again, this is for all 30 year olds since 1985 this steady, sliding, relentless decline of those who live on their own, are married, have a child, or own a home, is pretty stunning, and this is inside the most powerful nation on Earth. And here's the thing, this pattern from about 40 years ago, it unabatedly crosses through booms and busts and bubbles and bailouts, sort of like it didn't even notice those things. Somewhat ironically, what's grown during this time is the percentage that have a bachelor's degree. It's gone from 25 up to 43% so therefore, here we. Are. We've got this generation that's better educated than ever, and yet more of them are stuck down on the launch pad. It's like we built better rockets yet we can't light the fuse. And before I help you make sense of this and tell you what I believe the main force behind it to be, you just got to consider what an unfathomable aberration this has all become. At age 25 James Madison was the key architect of the US Constitution. A lot of constitution signers were in their 20s and 30s. At age 21 Steve Jobs started Apple in a garage at 20 Bill Gates co founded Microsoft at 19 Mark Zuckerberg built Facebook in a dorm room. And sure, some of these are exceptional examples, but these people committed early, and then they figured it out on the fly.
 
Keith Weinhold  5:59  
Well, what about women? The US birth rate has hit an all time record low, because today, nearly half of 30 year old women are still child free. Okay, so some of this is logical. You can connect a few dots here more time in school, yeah, all right, that means later marriages and later kids. Sure, student debt that equals financial Gravity Boots that keep you in place. Urban living means smaller spaces. But when you stack all this together, like I just laid out later, it's not just later anymore. It is really later. That is the huge change that really startles you when you put all of this together and again, remember, over this same time span, 1985 to today, I've mentioned before how the average age of the first time homebuyer has ballooned from 29 up to 40. I mean 40 that can really take some time to sink in. And again, that's just the average in high cost housing areas. This number could be 45 or higher. I mean, sheesh, the starter home is now like a midlife purchase, and it's made right around the time that your back starts to make decisions for you, consider where we are here now, the term home ownership that is increasingly linked to older people. Those things home ownership and older people are increasingly synonymous terms. Now, owning a home, it's like a luxury good for the already established. I mean, it is pretty jaw dropping. And one contributor to these friends is the lack of available housing supply, still a 60 to 70% collapse in some populous northeast states, but really something like that. That's just a small thing. When you amalgamate it all together, it's become cultural really. The bigger trend that underlies this decline in meeting life milestones at age 30 is that long term true inflation exceeds wage increases over the decades, but there are big social shifts too. And by the way, I left my parents home for good at age 23 and some surely do so younger than I did marriage and children, they are the classic triggers to buy a house, and the longer that these type of milestones get postponed, the more likely people are to favor then flexibility over committing to a mortgage, and this then means that there is an elongated renter stage of life. Renters are no longer just passing through they're no longer just graduated from college, renting a year or two and then buying a home. Instead, they are planting flags and really pounding in stakes. And there are countless surveys that show that renters value the ability of being able to relocate without the hassle of having to sell a house. And on top of all of these trends as America ages overall, something really interesting starts to happen. This is why single family rentals have really begun to shine over the past few years, and why you had this Advent and popularity of new build and build to rent rental properties coming onto the market because single families give people the feeling of home and space and privacy and a backyard for the dog, but yet at the same time, it's commitment light, a lighter version. Now apartments benefit too, of course, and for investors, this isn't just. The trend, this is a long term tailwind, fewer life transitions. It means more stable occupancy and longer renter life cycles that lead to fewer turnovers and vacancies and repairs, so less churn, more consistency and better predictability. So the bottom line here is that this delay of life milestones, it's not subtle. It is pretty seismic, and increasingly people say that the American dream no longer even includes home ownership. Demography is destiny, and they must rent from you. And here at GRE we invest like these trends are real, but I really want to emphasize that this elongated renter stage of life really is a long term, long tail phenomenon. And I want to emphasize that because, like I said last week, in the short term, we really aren't seeing any significant rent increases due to that affordability constraint. Now we're nearly five years after America had a big wave of consumer inflation, and that really hurt kind of people this age that I'm talking about, people in their 20s and 30s, that really hurt them the most because they don't own assets that compound with the concurrent asset price inflation, they only had to deal with the bad stuff, the consumer price inflation. 
 
Keith Weinhold  11:30  
And as America approaches its 250th birthday, let's think about how this era compares to other decades. And by the way, do you know what a 250th anniversary is called? I put a line about this in my newsletter that I sent you the other day. It is called a semiquincentennial, or, I guess, semi quincentennial. I don't think that anyone's going to be using that word after the fireworks. Semiquincentennial. That sounds like a word that an Economic Committee came up with during a recession to kind of mask a worse problem or something. I suppose that the etymology makes sense. If you break it down, quincentennial would be 500 and semi would be half of 500 in any case, as you try to compare this American era to others, listen to this from the parallel truth. This is about three minutes long, and then I'll come back to comment. It's America by decade, starting all the way back in the 1770s This is a decent summary here, although it can get unnecessarily gloomy at times.
 
Speaker 2  12:41  
Imagine you could live in the United States one decade at a time, not the America you see in movies, not the America in textbooks, but the real America. Let's start with the 1770s the decade of independence. This is not a freedom story, yet. It's a war story. Most people are farmers, roads are mud, medicine is almost nothing. And if you're a young man, your future is simple, fight or starve. Then came the 1800s The decade of expansion. America is still small, but it's hungry, new land, new states, New promises, but there is also growing slavery. Native tribes are being pushed out, and the country is quietly building a conflict it can't avoid. Now it's the 1860s the decade America almost died. There is civil war, Brother versus brother. Cities are burning. If you lived here, you didn't watch history, you survived it. Next is the 1900s The decade of industrial America, factories, railroads, steel, oil. The country becomes a machine. Cities explode with workers, but life is brutal, long hours, dirty air, child labor, you might earn money, but you will pay with your health. It's the 1920s now, the decade of jazz and madness. This is America's first big party decade, cars, radio, Hollywood. Everyone thinks the future is unstoppable. Then came the 1930s the decade the party ended. The Great Depression happens, banks collapse and jobs disappear. People line up for bread. A man with a suit could be broke in one week. This decade teaches America one lesson, that money is not real until it's in your hand. It's the 1940s now the decade America became the world's boss. World War Two turns the US into the world's factory. While Europe is burning, America is building. And when the war ends, America comes out richer than anyone in history. It's the 1950s the decade of the American dream, suburbs, big houses, one salary supports a whole family, TV dinners, new cars, new highways. This is the decade America sells the world the idea of perfect life. Next came 1960s the decade of rebellion, civil rights, Vietnam assassinations, the country feels like it's splitting. You could be hopeful or terrified, sometimes both in the same week, 1970s was the decade the system started breaking, oil crisis, inflation, crime rate, and in 1971 America quietly changes money forever. The dollar stops being backed by gold. From this point onward, America runs on trust. It. The 1980s the decade of Wall Street, America, big business, big spending. The stock market becomes religion. America looks confident again, but the middle class starts weakening slowly. Then came the 1990s the decade America felt unstoppable. The Soviet Union has collapsed and the US feels untouchable. The internet is born. This is the decade where Americans truly believe that they have won. It's the 2000s now the decade of shock, 911, wars, fear, surveillance, then 2008 hits, banks crash, housing collapses, and America learns something painful. The people who caused the crisis don't pay for it. It's the 2000s and 10s, the decade of the digital trap. Social media becomes reality, politics becomes war. Everyone is online, but nobody feels connected. The economy recovers, but normal people don't. And finally, it's the 2020s. The decade, chaos became normal. Pandemic changes everything. Supply chains are collapsing, inflation returns, AI arrives and trust collapses. And by 2026 America is still rich, but it feels exhausted. People are working harder, owning less, and trusting nobody. And the strangest part is that America didn't collapse. It just slowly became a different country, not through invasion, not through revolution, but through decades of small changes that added up to a completely new reality. So the real question is, if you could choose one decade to live in? Which one would you pick?
 
Keith Weinhold  16:22  
 Yeah, which decade would you pick to live in? A lot of people say the 1950s where we had, like they touched on there the post war boom and how one salary could support an entire household. Some people say the 1990s because the Cold War ended, we had the start of Wide Internet use, and it's before you had these stark political divisions where people started to put party ahead of country. Now some people would probably say, Are you kidding me? I'd rather live in this decade right here. I can work from home more easily than I ever could have before. And I think you can make valid cases for all of those things. And speaking of this era, a quarter just ended, and we do this quarterly at most. It's our asset class rundown. Year over year, national home prices are only up about half of 1% per the nar 1% Case Shiller and totality, single family rent index shows just 1.3% rent growth. That's year over year. This quarter, the s, p5 100 was down 5% stocks of all types are down largely to the Iran war. The yield on the 10 year treasury note rose from 4.1 up to 4.3% due to higher inflation expectations. Why does that matter so much? That's what influences 30 year mortgage rates, which also rose from 6.2 up to 6.5% West Texas Intermediate oil prices soared from 59 bucks to over 100 last quarter. Gold hit an all time high of 5400 bucks in the quarter, and then fell to about 4600 by the end of the quarter. Other precious metals hit their all time peak. Bitcoin fell from 88k down to 68k That's the asset class rundown. I'll return with Redfin's chief economist, Dr Darrell fairweather and more. I'm Keith Weinhold. You're listening to get rich education. 
 
Keith Weinhold  18:18  
Let me throw out a simple idea. Sometimes doing nothing with your money is actually a decision. Leaving it parked might feel safe, but over time, purchasing power changes. So the conversation isn't about chasing returns, it's about intentionally placing money somewhere. Freedom, family investments works in real estate people use every day. Housing, senior communities, essential properties, things tied to living and not trends. Their freedom notes offering is built for accredited investors looking for structured income backed by real assets, not speculation. I am an investor with them myself. The Freedom team makes themselves available to walk through their approach, structure and operating philosophy so you can ask questions and determine alignment before moving forward. While past performance doesn't guarantee future results, their historical operating philosophy has yielded 100% investor payouts backed by over 20 years of experience. If you want clarity before making any moves, book a clarity [email protected] or text family to 66 866, text the word family to 66 866, 
 
Keith Weinhold  19:41  
flock homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem, property or your whole portfolio through a 721, exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture, it's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now. Mom and Pop landlords can 721, the residential real estate request your initial valuation, see if your properties [email protected] slash GRE, that's F, l, O, C, K, homes.com/gre.
 
Robert Helms  20:16  
Everybody. It's Robert Helms of the real estate guys radio program, so glad you found Keith Weinhold and get rich education, don't quit your Daydream.
 
Keith Weinhold  20:35  
This week's guest is the chief economist of Redfin during the housing crisis. She worked at the Boston Fed, studying why homeowners enter foreclosure. Since 2023 she served at the Federal Reserve Bank of Dallas. She holds her BS from MIT, and she really knows her way around campuses, because she received her Master's and PhD in Economics at the University of Chicago, where she specialized in behavioral economics, that's interesting. Welcome to GRE. Darrell fairweather,
 
Daryl Fairweather  21:06  
thank you for having me. 
 
Keith Weinhold  21:08  
Hey, Daryl. I'd like to get to some of the statistics later in the things that Redfin does and compiles, but tell us about the behavioral side of the housing market that's often so interesting and evencounterintuitive
 
Daryl Fairweather  21:22  
yeah, one of the most interesting things about the housing market is that people get really emotional when making this huge financial decision. It's something that people don't have a lot of practice with. Most people maybe buy a home once or twice in their whole life. There's so much social weight that's put on it. It's the American dream. There's a lot of family pressure, and there's a lot of hurting behavior that can happen. People get swept up in the moment. Maybe they overbid on a home, or maybe they miss out because other people are avoiding the housing market. So it's a really interesting place to both study psychology and economics.
 
Keith Weinhold  21:56  
Sure, most homeowners are just inexperienced at this whole thing. Yeah, behavioral economics, it really has this strong gravity in real estate. Maybe something that you've said touches on what I call the Zestimate illusion. A lot of times, sellers anchor their price to not just the Zillow estimate, but sometimes even the peak sale price in the whole neighborhood, and that's what they think that they should get for their home?
 
Daryl Fairweather  22:21  
Yeah, that does happen quite a bit. And I don't think a lot of people realize how much those estimates can move once a home is listed. The list price tends to move that estimate quite a lot. So it's not a fact. And those estimates don't really know many details about the home, like what upgrades might have happened, or what internally is happening within the home, like if people have gotten new appliances or gotten a new air conditioning system, it doesn't really take those things into account. So you shouldn't just anchor off of the Redfin estimate. You should definitely talk to an agent. Look at the comps. The comps can tell you a lot in terms of what homes have sold for recently, and then track your local market in terms of whether it is going up in value or down in value, because those comps might be a little bit stale, and you have to adjust for where the market is right now.
 
Keith Weinhold  23:06  
There's some really good points there. And when I think of the behavioral side of economics in the real estate market, another nascent thing that comes to mind Darrell, is the rate shock paralysis that really set in in America in 2022 mortgage rates are still historically on the low side. But few people think about it that way. They're really swayed by the recency bias
 
Daryl Fairweather  23:31  
yes. And one thing to take into account, though, is how much home prices have gone up since the last time rates were this high. So if you're looking at the monthly mortgage payment and how much that is compared to people's monthly incomes, it is quite expensive to buy a home. In most metros, you cannot afford to buy a home on the local median income. There's only maybe four metros that are in the middle of the country where it's still affordable to buy a home on a middle class salary. So combined the rate and the price those mortgage payments are still quite expensive, although they have gotten slightly more affordable since last year because rates are slightly lower than last year, they did come up a bit with, you know, oil prices coming up, but still, compared to last year, rates are a bit lower and a bit more affordable to get a home.
 
Keith Weinhold  24:13  
And of course, all this is besides the point that those 2021, mortgage rates, they were born out of a collapsing economy, and I don't think that we really want that either. But yes, to your point about affordability, that's been such a buzzword in the housing market for quite a while, and for good reason. It wasn't very long ago that we reached a 40 year low in affordability. Can you tell us about what can improve affordability next? Darrell or what's most likely to happen? For example, it seems like insurance rate increases have really leveled off.
 
Daryl Fairweather  24:50  
Yes, the reason why affordability is so bad, especially in coastal cities, the places that have the most opportunities, is because of a lack of supply. Existing homeowners, they are fine. They like when their home goes up in value, but it really is a problem for first time homebuyers, when prices just keep climbing and when new housing gets proposed, it's often the existing homeowners who are blocking that housing from getting built, and so supply is constrained. You can see this very clearly in a place like San Francisco, which had a huge economic boom in the 2010s yet housing did not keep up with all of the job opportunities that were coming to the area, and when you have all these people moving in with higher incomes, it drives up prices when there isn't adequate supply. You take Austin as another example. Austin had a huge boom during the pandemic, but supply responded. Builders built, there was a lot of development that happened, and as a result, prices came right back down. They're still above where they were pre pandemic, but nowhere near the heights that we saw back in 2021 so it just goes to show that when you allow supply to get built, it does help keep prices more moderate and keep things more affordable.
 
Keith Weinhold  25:59  
Yes, and nimbyism is rampant, is consumer inflation or some of the other big forces out there, for sure, but yes, this national dearth of supply something that's existed even well before the pandemic, for example, it's bounced back somewhat, but still not quite enough, and it's really part of what, in my opinion, has helped support housing prices, even when mortgage rates tripled back in 2022 Can you tell us more what you believe about the future of housing supply with all the data that you do with there at Redfin Daryl,
 
Daryl Fairweather  26:37  
housing supply improved a bit during the pandemic, but we're still far below What we need in order to make housing more accessible to middle class people. But there are new challenges that are coming. One that you mentioned is insurance. Insurance costs are going up. So even if you have a fixed rate mortgage and you've locked that in, you still have to worry about the rising cost of ownership because of insurance costs are going up. Property taxes are going up in many places, and maintenance costs are increasing. So that is going to make home ownership, and just the cost of ownership in general, whether you're an investor or an owner occupant, more expensive moving forward. And that's going to vary depending on where you are. There going to be some parts of the country where insurance goes up much faster, like in Florida, and other parts where insurance will probably be more stable like in the Midwest and Great Lakes region. So it's important now even more so to really research the neighborhood, research the home, and figure out how those expenses could increase in the future.
 
Keith Weinhold  27:32  
Yeah, here we are in this housing market where, you know, Darrell, I think of it in a lot of ways, is, you know, maybe for three years now, we've largely been stuck in the mud, much of it due to lower supply, where we have a lower overall proportion of both buyers and sellers.
 
Daryl Fairweather  27:48  
Yeah, what's happening right now is really an hangover from the pandemic, because so many people locked in 3% mortgage rates during the pandemic, and if those homeowners were to sell and buy again. Even if they bought the same priced home, they would end up paying more in their monthly mortgage payment because of how much higher mortgage rates are, and that's holding back supply quite significantly. It's the reason why prices have not come down despite rates going up, is because the higher rates are holding back both demand and supply at the same time, and contributing to the overall lack of inventory that's out there,
 
Keith Weinhold  28:24  
this aberration where we have a big proportion of American homeowners living in homes where if they tried to repurchase that home at today's terms, they couldn't even do it. To your point about people not wanting to move, and that's a big reason why they almost can't. They might pay more in rent elsewhere for a like property if they were to sell what they own, if those still locked in terms and Darrell here, I think, you know, our audience is largely real estate investors, a lot of them investing in one to four unit properties. So with what you're seeing there at Redfin. And I think a lot of us know that, yeah, rent growth has been pretty slow as well. What do you see for rents in 2026 and perhaps 2027
 
Daryl Fairweather  29:08  
originally, when we went to go do our predictions for 2026 we said that rents were going to increase this year. Now, I think that rents will continue to stay flat, and that's because there's still a lack of demand for for sale housing. People are staying in the rental market, but people are overall tightening their budgets because they're worried about the economy. They're worried about inflation. So if they can, you know, get roommates or live with family, they're going to choose to do that to keep their overall expenses lower, which will reduce demand for both for sale housing and for rental housing. And I think a lot of home sellers, they've tried to sell their homes. We saw many people try to sell their homes last year and then end up delisting their homes, and they're trying again. We saw more of those people come back in January, but I think those people are going to continue to kind of try to test the market, be a bit disappointed that there isn't enough demand, and then some of. Up for sale housing will end up as rental housing. Just driving around my neighborhood, I see so many rental signs on single family homes that I never saw before, almost more for rent signs, and I'm seeing for sale signs, so that added inventory from these accidental landlords who would like to move but don't want to give up their mortgage rate is going to increase the supply of single family rentals, and that will mean more competition for those investors that are trying to rent out the homes.
 
Keith Weinhold  30:27  
Talk to us about rental occupancy. That's something that we're seeing at a historic low in apartment buildings, for one thing. But can you talk to us about what you see for future occupancy levels of both residential one to fours and apartments. Going forward,
 
Daryl Fairweather  30:43  
a lot of new supply came online during the pandemic, especially in places that build a lot of condos. Many one bedroom or zero bedroom condos got built, and then those are really difficult to rent out, because, you know, they're just not that attractive. We really have more of a shortage of types of housing that's appropriate for families and those one bedroom units that are really targeted at like affluent young people. There aren't that many affluent people right now, so they're they're difficult to rent out. I think that trend is pretty much over. We're not seeing too many more condos being developed because the condos that were developed during the pandemic are still having trouble finding owners or finding renters in those apartment buildings. Now, I think we're going to start to see an uptick in single family rental vacancy, because I think a lot of those people who would like to sell their homes are having trouble selling their homes because of how mortgage rates are and how skittish people are about making a commitment to ownership right now, and they're going to alternatively try to rent out those and that will mean more availability of those rentals and not as much pressure on rents to go up in that segment of the market.
 
Keith Weinhold  31:51  
Woe for the builder that targeted young, affluent types, they don't really exist so much anymore. That's really pretty interesting. Well, Darrell, do you have any last thoughts overall about the housing market? Maybe something I didn't think about asking you that's really important, whether that's for an investor or a prospective homeowner. 
 
Daryl Fairweather  32:12  
Yeah, I think if I was an investor right now, I would be paying attention to what economists and housing people call the silver tsunami that's older generations starting to sell their homes. We did a study recently that showed that people who are 70 years and above have as much wealth and housing as middle aged people, which is the first time that group has exceeded in terms of the wealth that they hold. And if you're 70 plus, there's definitely a clock ticking on how long you're going to stay in that home, which means that a lot of new inventory will become available in those homes. They probably need work. They probably need some renovations, and that could be a really great opportunity for an investor to buy a home that maybe has been neglected for a while because it's been a senior living in there who hasn't been really keeping it up to date. You can renovate it and perhaps sell it again to a younger buyer by doing some updates and make a nice profit there. 
 
Speaker 3  33:03  
Oh, well, Daryl, this has been a great update laced with plenty of practical things that someone can actually do. Do you have a resource you'd like to share in case our audience would like to connect?
 
Daryl Fairweather  33:16  
Yes, you can find me basically on any social media channel. I'd recommend checking you out on YouTube to start. And then if you would like data on what's happening in your local housing market, you can check out the Redfin data center. Just Google Redfin data center, it'll bring you right there. And you can find lots of local data on your market,
 
Keith Weinhold  33:34  
Daryl Fairweather. It's been great having you here on the show.
 
Daryl Fairweather  33:37  
 Thank you.
 
Keith Weinhold  33:44  
Yeah, insightful material from Dr Darrell fairweather today, no end to the housing scarcity in sight. She says, rents continue to stay flat, partly due to this accidental landlord. They didn't plan to be a landlord, but they need to move and yet they don't want to sell the single family home that they got with a good owner occupied financing a few years ago. And the reason that's a headwind for single family investors, because it keeps more rental supply on the market. Last week, I touched on how you should not expect rent increases in the near term, I own a lot of single family rentals myself, and I am not getting rent increases. It's not so much that single family vacancies are high now, but apartment building vacancies are high. That fact alone that actually does hurt the single family rental market a little, because even though a renter might desire a single family, and maybe you think, Well, an apartment couldn't compete with that feeling. But yet, if an apartment is so much cheaper than the single family, and they often are now, well then that renter will go for the cheap apartment instead the one. You can think of Redfin is that they're part Zillow, part real estate agent, and part data company, and they can give you early signals on things like buyer demand and price direction and days on market, those types of indicators. So for the latest housing market research and news, you can do a search for the Redfin data center, and then for Daryl, start on YouTube. You can follow her on x at fairweather PhD, thanks to Dr Darrell fairweather today, until next week, I'm your host. Keith Weinhold, don't quit your Daydream.
 
Speaker 5  35:36  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively to
 
Keith Weinhold  35:56  
the preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, get richeducation.com

Keith challenges the belief that all debt is bad and reframes it as a tool for building wealth when used intentionally. 
He contrasts destructive consumer debt with productive investment debt, especially in real estate, and explains how inflation, long-term fixed-rate loans, and rental income can work together to grow net worth. 
Keith explores the mindset shift from prioritizing safety and being debt-free to pursuing growth through leverage, highlights the opportunity cost of avoiding debt, and offers practical guidelines for using borrowing rationally rather than emotionally. 
He also shows how modern economies and many wealthy individuals rely on strategic debt, positioning it as a key part of a more intentional, asset-focused version of the American Dream.
Episode Page:
GetRichEducation.com/600
For access to properties or free help with a
GRE Investment Coach, start here:
GREmarketplace.com
GRE Free Investment Coaching: GREinvestmentcoach.com
Get mortgage loans for investment property:
RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE 
or e-mail: [email protected]
Invest with Freedom Family Investments. 
For predictable 10-12% quarterly returns, visit FreedomFamilyInvestments.com/GRE or text  FAMILY to 66866 
Unlock truly passive real estate income—visit flockhomes.com/GRE today to see if your properties qualify for a 721 exchange with Flock Homes.
Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search "how to leave an Apple Podcasts review" 
For advertising inquiries, visit:
GetRichEducation.com/ad
Best Financial Education:
GetRichEducation.com
Get our wealth-building newsletter free—
GREletter.com 
Our YouTube Channel:
www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation
Follow us on Instagram:
@getricheducation



Complete episode transcript:
 
Keith Weinhold  0:00  
welcome to GRE. I'm your host. Keith weinholder, there's bad debt, good debt and great debt. Are you using debt wisely, and are you ensuring that you stay in debt? Because debt is the American dream today, on get rich education milestone episode 600
 
Corey Coates  0:23  
since 2014 the powerful get rich education podcast has created more passive income for people than nearly any other show in the world. This show teaches you how to earn strong returns from passive real estate investing in the best markets without losing your time being a flipper or landlord. Show Host Keith Weinhold writes for both Forbes and Rich Dad advisors and delivers a new show every week since 2014 there's been millions of listener downloads of 188 world nations. He has a list show guests include top selling personal finance author Robert Kiyosaki. Get rich education can be heard in every podcast platform, plus it has its own dedicated Apple and Android listener phone apps build wealth on the go with the get rich education podcast. Sign up now for the get rich education podcast, or visit get rich education.com
 
Keith Weinhold  1:06  
the same place where I get my own mortgage loans is where you can get yours. Ridge lending group and MLS, 42056, they provided our listeners with more loans than anyone because they specialize in income properties. They help you build a long term plan for growing your real estate empire with leverage. Start your prequel and even chat with President chailey Ridge personally while it's on your mind, start at Ridge lending group.com that's Ridge lending group.com
 
Speaker 1  1:40  
You're listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is get rich education.
 
Keith Weinhold  1:56  
Welcome to GRE from Kennewick, Washington at Kennebunkport, Maine and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold, and you are inside get rich education. Yes, America's favorite slack jawed mammal on a microphone has got his act back on track, for your listening pleasure, since 2014 This is our 600th wealth building week in a row, you've been misled, not maliciously, not even intentionally, but somewhere along the way, a really expensive idea got planted inside your head, and it was once planted inside my head, that debt is bad, just blanketly bad, that the goal is to be debt free, that owing money to somebody else is something to escape as fast as possible. And look, I get it, if your mindset is in the old middle class consumer credit world like mine was for much of my life, debt feels heavy, it feels like risk, it feels like obligation, but the people telling you to avoid debt, they're the same people that never built much wealth now a reliance on 22% APR, credit card debt just To pay basic living expenses, because it's the only way that you could do it, merely making the minimum monthly payment that right there is the road to ruin. Why? Well, because the interest rate is high, because you have to pay it back yourself, and because it's unsecured, meaning that there's no collateral, and at the same time, the people quietly getting rich, what are they doing? They're using debt every single day. So debt is not the enemy, it's just the tool, and like any tool, it can build a house, or it can smash your thumb if you miss the nail. Well today we're going to separate the two, because if you understand this one concept, then you stop playing defense financially and start going on offense. In fact, I'll go further. Debt isn't the opposite of the American Dream used correctly. Debt is the American dream. Now, my turning point was really fueled when I made my first ever home, that $295,000 blue four Plex Building Two decades ago, with just my three and a half percent down payment. That meant that 96 and a half percent was borrowed. That's debt, and that fueled everything for me, and got the ball rolling on using that seminal four Plex to leverage even more debt and more property with 1031 exchanges and cash out refinances debt made that American dream free. Me because I could not have afforded $295,000 all cash back then. Now, a guest that we had on the show last year and the owner of a commercial lending company, Hannah Hannan, she recently talked about the virtues of debt. I met Hannah because we were both faculty members on last year's real estate guys Investor Summit at sea cruise. Well, Hannah went on a different cruise and saw in Jamaica that there were all these vacant and uncompleted houses just sort of weirdly stuck at different stages of construction. She asked the tour guide, why are these houses all abandoned? And and the tour guide answered, we don't have loans here in Jamaica. People have to work make money and then start the build, and then the build pauses while they make more money, and then they have to construct the next phase of the build as they go and go back to making more money like that. I mean, sheesh, that's awful. Can you imagine if you had to build a home or a rental property for yourself that way? Well, back here in the US, access to debt is what allows people to build wealth faster, especially in real estate, you can use other people's money control large assets, pay less in taxes and compound off a much smaller amount of capital. That's the difference. Debt availability is really good in the US compared to other nations, and that's the emphasis on the American part of today's episode. Debt is the American dream. Now, when it comes to the big misunderstanding, most people think that debt is really just one thing. They just lump it all like it's all bad, credit cards, car loans, student loans, mortgages. A lot of people, they really do. They just still throw it all into one mental bucket that's sort of labeled da, avoid that at all costs. I'm telling you, no way you cannot do that. I mean, this is like saying food is bad because candy exists. No, there's junk food and there's fuel. It's the same with debt. Consumer debt is a wealth killer. Investment debt is a wealth creator, and if you don't know the difference well, you end up avoiding the very thing that could move your life forward. Here's another way to think about it, debt doesn't make you poor. Using debt poorly makes you poor. 
 
Keith Weinhold  7:36  
In real estate, inflation is quietly paying your mortgage, even if you never made a principal payment at all. When you really understand this, it almost sounds too good to be true. Most people think inflation is just rising prices, and it is that, but they miss the other side of the equation. Inflation also shrinks debt, something I've been talking about for more than 10 years here. If you have a 30 year fixed rate mortgage, you're paying back that loan with future dollars that are worth less, and meanwhile, rents tend to rise, wages tend to rise, and asset values tend to rise, but your mortgage, it stays fixed. Inflation can't touch it, and that means that over time, your payment gets easier and easier to make. Oh, and then if you've got a tenant in place as well, oh, they're the one sending in the check for everything. And inflation is not just happening to you. It's now working for you. If you've got, say, a $500,000 mortgage loan, and inflation is 3% well, then inflation enriched you by $15,000 every single year. That's $1,250 a month just on this 500k mortgage loan. And if you've got an investment property rented out. You've even got the tenant paying down, oh, maybe $400 in monthly principal for you on the property, plus this $1,250 in inflation profiting, plus $100 of cash flow. This is $1,750 in monthly benefit before we've even added in your tax benefits and the appreciation potential. What made this all happen debt is what made it all a reality for you. When we talk about why the middle class fears debt, yeah, there is a mindset divide here. On one side, it simply says, get out of debt, stay out of debt and avoid risk. On the other we ask, How can I use that to acquire assets? So it's really like the first group is focused on safety and the second group is focused on growth, and after a while you have to ask bigger X. Potential questions like, do you want to live a life of safety, or do you want to live a life of growth? Now, I'm not knocking discipline, but there is a hidden cost to avoiding debt entirely. It's called opportunity cost. When you pay all cash, oh, well, then you lose leverage, you lose scalability, you lose tax advantages, and you often lose time. Hey, just like I would have by postponing my first four Plex purchase for, say, five plus years until I could have saved up all that money by myself. That's why playing it safe is often the riskiest move, because while you're sitting on the sidelines, inflation and rising prices are still in the game, and you've taken yourself out of the game. When we talk about the American dream, look, America was built on debt leverage. 
 
Keith Weinhold  11:01  
Zoom out for a second. This isn't just about you and me. America itself was built on debt. Railroads were financed with borrowed money that helped Cornelius Vanderbilt build his railroad empire in the 1800s in the 1900s highways were funded through government debt. Today, our entire suburbs are built on mortgages. Leverage didn't break the system. It built the system. So it's kind of ironic that today people are told the safest move is to avoid the very mechanism that built this modern economy that you and I are living inside every day. Debt is how things get done. Now, practically, yes, debt can absolutely wreck you if it's used poorly. So we think about some simple guardrails then favor fixed rate debt over variable match long term debt with long term assets, and you want to chiefly borrow for cash flowing or appreciating assets, and also stress test your deals assume that things won't go perfectly. So this certainly is not about being reckless. It's about being intentional. Debt should serve you, not the other way around. And now notice how I said to chiefly use debt for cash flowing or appreciating assets. I didn't say solely because you'll remember how last year, I talked to you about how I bought a new car for myself and financed as much as I was allowed, almost 100% debt. I had to make, like, a two or 3k down payment on the car because it was a special order. And once they start, you know, building it and customizing it for me, well, then they're at risk if they don't have a deposit, all right? Well, I found a way to make this car debt pretty good debt. Oh, and you might be thinking, oh, yeah, of course. Well, if you use it for business, you probably get some deductions that way. Oh, no, no. Business use totally a personal car, almost leveraged to the hilt, but it's not bad debt, and I'll tell you why. By the way, this isn't some high end exotic car. It's a BMW x3 SUV. It was like 53 or 55k and now how could I possibly call this good debt? Nope, I'm not running it out to other people or anything like that, because here, unlike income property, where a tenant pays it down, I do have to make these car payments myself. Well, in a word, the reason I did it this way is for the arbitrage. I got a fixed 3.99% interest rate for five years. Call it 4% Oh, I am almost certainly going to beat that by investing those dollars in real estate. So the 55k almost that I did not have to allocate to a car. Oh, well, that amount is enough for a down payment and closing costs on a cash flowing rental. That's probably going to pay me five ways with a total ROI that I expect to be multiples above the 4% interest rate, but the car's value depreciates. What about that debt on a depreciating asset? A car depreciates at the same rate whether it's bought all cash or all debt. It doesn't matter. Here is the better question, why tie up that much in a depreciating asset? 55k if I had paid all cash which I could have, I would have foregone returns and paid opportunity cost. Now, arbitraging car debt this way. That's not great debt. I don't put it in that category like real estate that pays for itself is and that is mostly because no tenant services. My personal car debt. For me, this car debt is just good debt, not great debt. Now how about some more guardrails? How can you keep yourself from going nuts and just trying to arbitrage everything. How would you know if you've gone too far? I mean, any person that's savvy with personal finance has to ask themselves a question, and that is always, what is the risk associated with this investment, or what is the risk associated with this debt, right? Because I already talked about the upsides of car debt this way. Well, the first risk is that I don't successfully arbitrage it. Rather than having the 55k sunk into the car, I have it invested elsewhere than say, it doesn't achieve a greater than 4% return. Well, the risk of that happening is small, maybe about a 10% chance. What's another big risk of leveraging car debt this way? Well, it's if you cannot make the monthly payment, which for me is about $1,050 a month, 1050 that's a comfortable payment. For me, if you can't make the payment that's called, you got yourself into an over leveraged condition. But for me, these risks are manageable. And this is applied thinking. This is clear eyed thinking, rational decision making, a level headed approach, a long term approach. It's common sense investing. Have a strategy and then invest your plan, not your emotions. Look paying off debt. That's often an emotional response, like when the debt is at a low interest rate and yes, understanding that debt is the American dream. Okay, this is still a pretty unconventional understanding, for sure, but it is pragmatism over emotions. When emotions go up, intelligence goes down. You can see that in a lot of places in your life. I can too. I think that a lot of the emotion happened to us when we were really young, perhaps age 12. And maybe you're saying, Oh, well, grandpa, he would not have arranged his finances this way. Grandpa wouldn't have leveraged all this real estate debt, and he sure wouldn't have thought that arbitraging car debt is savvy, but your grandpa was born before 1971 back when the dollar was still gold, backed if you're older now, your grandpa might have even been affected by living through the 1930s Great Depression. Our world does not work that way. Today, the dollar is no longer tethered to gold. It's just borrowed and lent into existence, and another Great Depression that's actually really unlikely. In the 1930s President Herbert Hoover refused to provide government support to prop up the economy, and sheesh today, any crisis is like immediately propped up by us printing a ton of dollars and then giving them out, just like covid stimulus checks and mortgage loan forbearance and all of that debt, debt, debt. Now I don't think that all of that is good, but you got to acknowledge that that's the world we live in today. If you're debt averse, because grandpa always said to stay out of debt, well then you know what you can take solace. Take comfort in the fact that today, ultimately, grandpa would have understood that the world changed, and he would want what is best for you. 
 
Keith Weinhold  19:03  
I'm get rich education. Host Keith Weinhold, this week, we're talking about why debt is the American dream on episode 600 with guidance that's practical, contrarian investor first and non emotional. Contrarian does not mean reckless. And by the way, just because something is mainstream, well, that doesn't necessarily make it bad, but in this case with debt, it often does. Here we're kind of back onto the old Mark Twain quote. Go out on a limb, that's where the fruit is. This is independent thinking for real world investors. It's where theory meets what actually works, and I'll discuss some specific actionable guidance for you before we're done today. But this is largely about ignoring the masses and following a clear incentive path. And what do the masses do? Now they kind of all gel together and get pumped up when they follow these debt free call in radio shows where the host advises the caller to always desperately retire debt at all costs. They'll even tell you work a second and a third job. You got to postpone vacations. They'll tell you to defer your life and go into lifestyle debt. Then in order to desperately stay out of financial debt, we're never going to get that time back. So just chill, take it easy with a lot of debt types inflation and sometimes tenants both passively pay it back for you. I mean, on these debt free call in radio shows, almost every time they give guidance, I kind of chuckle when I listen to this stuff. I sort of quietly ask myself, how would that path ever build wealth like when people are advised to retire 3% mortgage debt? Why dreadful sounding guidance like this happens is because it keeps irresponsible people from going over a cliff. That's all it serves to do. I mean, you're here listening to me because you're good with money, or you desire to be good with money and not give all your money away to creditors used intelligently. Debt isn't reckless. It's a tool, and it's one that lets you scale without trading every hour of your life for dollars. It seems to me that some of the groups of people that need to hear the debt is the American Dream message. They tend to be in a few groups. I need to be careful here, but I'm talking about groups like people with less financial education, engineers and women. It doesn't mean that people with less financial education are any less intelligent. And then when it comes to the engineering profession, you know that type of person tends to be unusually conservative, and I've worked for engineering firms in the past, so I wouldn't know this is somewhat of a paradox. Since engineers are the calculating types, you would think that they would have leverage and arbitrage figured out, and then women are a group that they tend to be more debt averse than most, and this is not a knock on women at all. In fact, women generally do a lot of things better than men do. I mean, I could go on and on there, like emotional intelligence and social awareness and relationship building and even multitasking and sticking to a plan, but I know couples where the husband does understand that it does not make a lick of financial sense to pay off the home, but he did it because the wife wants it so badly she deems that as security. But yeah, there was a time in my life where I thought that being millions of dollars in debt. Oh, that just sounded awful, like I thought that after graduating from college, but Oh, position well, with leverage in real estate, after a long time, you might get yourself where you're increasing your debt half a million bucks every year, but right alongside it, you're increasing your asset value 1 million bucks every year. Well, right there, since net worth is assets minus debt, you're increasing your net worth by a half million bucks a year because you have a big amount to leverage, because you've been a real estate investor for a long time. For example, debt made that American dream possible. But, yeah, the needling engineer type that's conventional and is like still the guy faithfully contributing to their 401 k which is locked up until their age, 59 and a half and keeps paying down debt. You know, they're the ones showing up to their engineering job in a pair of Dockers pants. I'm telling you, people that wear Dockers are not good debtors. I mean, do they still make stupid Dockers? I've got to look that up. Do those pants have pleats at the front or not? I don't even know. 
 
Speaker 2  24:16  
Levi's 100% cotton Dockers. If you're not wearing Dockers, you're just wearing pants.
 
Keith Weinhold  24:21  
Oh jeez. And yeah, they still do make Dockers. I mean, the stereotypical needling engineer that dutifully contributes to a 401, K, he's got to have a complete dresser drawer full of stupid Dockers, no doubt.
 
Keith Weinhold  24:37  
Hey, I can make a little fun of them, because I spent a lot of time in that world. I think it makes sense to contribute to a 401 K, by the way, but only up to the employer match amount. That way it's tax advantaged, and you're using other people's money one to one, but above that, oh, every dollar you lock inside a 401 k is $1 that can No. Longer leverage other people's money. That means no debt, no leverage, and a steep opportunity cost. Now to get a holistic picture here, we need to think through what are some reasons to pay down debt, or to pay off debt and completely retire it? Because there are some good reasons for doing that. I talked about credit cards earlier, student loan debt is also not good debt, because you must pay that debt, not somebody else, like a tenant, and now their interest rates are not as high as credit cards, but there's also no collateral with student loans. Maybe you could arbitrage it, like I did with my car, but student loan debt can't be discharged in bankruptcy. Like most other debt types, can you also want to pay off debt when an interest rate is working against you and not for you. Also, if you want to buy more property, but you need to lower your DTI in order to qualify with your mortgage loan underwriter that is lower your debt to income ratio before you take out another mortgage. Oh, well, that would be a reason, for example, to pay off a car loan. Another reason to pay off debt is if you're approaching retirement and you expect a decrease in your income, then you would want to revisit that here at GRE you might be structuring things to increase your income once you retire. That's its own discussion. They are some of the reasons to pay off debt. It makes sense sometimes, and with all those reasons, we've kept emotions out of it. But otherwise, yeah, bring on the good debt. Debt and loan are my two favorite four letter words the wealthiest people have the most debt. I've discussed that reality before on previous episodes, and I gave a lot of examples, like with Mark Zuckerberg and also with Jay Z and Beyonce, so I won't go into all that again. So therefore, let me discuss how, not only do the wealthiest people have the most debt, I mean, for example, I'm wealthier than I've ever been, and I simultaneously have the most debt that I've ever had. Not surprisingly, the wealthiest world nations have the most debt too. Let's look at it from the perspective of household debt as a percent of GDP. There are about 200 world nations, and sure enough, the US ranks pretty high 13th in this measure of household debt, the top 10 nations, counting them down from 10 to one is and look, they're all wealthy nations that have the most debt, Sweden, Denmark, Hong Kong, Norway, South Korea. Up to fifth is New Zealand. And then you've got the Netherlands at fourth, and then Canada, Australia, and number one is the nation that you probably think of as the most wealthy and stable in the entire world. It is Switzerland. They are number one in household debt per GDP, and then the poorest of the 200 world nations have the least debt and the highest interest rates and the least stable currencies. But see, the wealthy nations can borrow the most. These countries can borrow trillions because investors trust them. Their economies are productive and they can service the payments just like you see, say that I know you've got $5 million in debt. Just say that's true. All right. Well, now that's an interesting thing that I know about you, and now I can automatically deduce something else about you. I know that you must be pretty credit worthy for anyone to have even extended you that much credit. So a high debt level is a mark of creditworthiness. The richest people have the most debt and the richest nations have the most debt too. Debt is a contract with time. Here's the deeper idea, debt lets you pull future resources into today. It's financial time travel. But there is a catch. You need to deploy that capital into something that grows faster than the cost of borrowing. If you do that, you win. If you don't, then you just brought future problems into the present debt is time travel, and most people just waste the trip. That's why debt has a bad name. Debt Free surely is not the goal. But you know, even hitting a certain net worth or income mark is not an end goal. Their financial goal. But not the end. The end goal is genuinely living the best version of you. And in fact, let's listen to this together for a minute or two from the parallel truth. Are you really living? It's a little oversimplified, but this is quite a bit more substantive than civil engineers wearing Levi's 100% cotton Dockers. Don't be startled by the sound effects.
 
Speaker 3  30:23  
If you really think working 50 years at a job you hate just to get a few years of so called Freedom makes sense, then I'm sorry to say, you have been brainwashed. This is not living. It's a trap. From the moment you're born, the system starts programming you. School doesn't teach you to think. It teaches you to obey, to sit still, follow orders and wait for permission. Then comes work, where your best years, your energy, your creativity, all get drained away to build someone else's dream. And they call that success. Retirement is the prize they dangle in front of you. Work hard now, they say, so one day you can finally rest. But by the time that day comes, your body's worn out, your fire's gone, and all those dreams you once had, they faded into routine. You traded your time for money and then your health to earn it back. And here's the cruel truth, that's not an accident. It's designed that way, a system built to keep you tired, broke and too distracted to notice what's really happening. They want you so busy surviving that you forget to actually live the scam is simple. They steal your youth when it's full of energy, passion and possibility, and then hand you back your freedom when you're too weak to use it. And the worst part, most people defend the very system that's enslaving them. They call it normal life. They laugh at anyone who questions it, because it's easier to believe the lie than to face the truth. But nothing about this is normal. It's just comfortable enough to stop you from revolting. They give you weekends, holidays and Netflix tiny doses of relief so you don't question the cage you live in. You were born to create, to explore, to build your own path, not to clock in and out until the day you die. The world doesn't need more workers. It needs more thinkers, more dreamers, more people brave enough to walk away from the illusion. So ask yourself, are you really living or just slowly dying inside a system that calls itself freedom?
 
Speaker 4  31:59  
Yeah. Are you truly living or just existing with GRE plan, you can often retire in five to 10 years. So no debt isn't something to fear. It's something to understand. Because the difference between being stuck financially and moving forward faster than you thought possible, it often comes down to one thing, whether you avoid debt or you learn to use it, the American dream is not about being debt free. It's more about owning assets, leveraging wisely, and then letting time tenants and inflation do some of the heavy lifting for you, all of your life. Debt is the American dream, and I've got more on this for you today, coming up here on the show in future, GRE episodes, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. Author Robert Kiyosaki publicly states that he has $1.4 billion in debt, billion with a B, not because he's irresponsible, because he understands leverage and debt often entails a tax advantage with it too. Later this spring, Robert Kiyosaki returns to the show with me here. He's been one of our more recurrent guests over time. Next week, Redfin chief economist, Darrell fairweather, PhD, sits down with me here. Also a lot of other prominent guests lined up, like real estate influencer thatch Wynn will be here with me and lots of other great episodes coming up, including a lot of content that you wouldn't expect to hear that can make a real difference in your life. Be sure to follow or subscribe to the show and also tell a friend about the show today could very well be one of these paradigm shifting episodes that you want to share on social media. More straight ahead you're listening to debt is the American Dream On get rich education. 
 
Keith Weinhold  33:50  
Let me throw out a simple idea, sometimes doing nothing with your money is actually a decision. Leaving it parked might feel safe, but over time, purchasing power changes. So the conversation isn't about chasing returns. It's about intentionally placing money somewhere. Freedom, family investments works in real estate people use every day housing, senior communities, essential properties, things tied to living and not trends, their freedom notes. Offering is built for accredited investors looking for structured income backed by real assets, not speculation. I am an investor with them myself. The Freedom team makes themselves available to walk through their approach, structure and operating philosophy, so you can ask questions and determine alignment before moving forward, while past performance doesn't guarantee future results, their historical operating philosophy has yielded 100% investor payouts backed by over 20 years of experience. If you want clarity before making any moves, book a clarity call. At freedom familyinvestments.com or text family to 66 866, text the word family to 66 866. 
 
Keith Weinhold  35:12  
Flock homes helps you retire from real estate and landlording, whether it's one problem property or your whole portfolio through a 721 exchange, deferring your capital gains tax and depreciation recapture. It's a strategy long used by the ultra wealthy. Now Mom and Pop landlords can 721 the residential real estate request your initial valuation, see if your properties [email protected] slash, slash GRE, that's F, l, O, C, K, homes.com/gre
 
Tom Wheelwright  35:50  
This is Rich Dad Advisor Tom wheelwright. Listen to get rich education with Keith Weinhold, and don't quit your Daydream.
 
Keith Weinhold  36:02  
You welcome back to get rich Education. I'm your host, Keith Weinhold its debt is the American dream on episode 600 now, just before taking the mic, about 30 minutes ago, I ate some raspberries. I looked at the package to see where they were grown Mexico. Someone in Mexico supplied them. There was a supply chain. Those raspberries were planted in rows with trellising grown, and then they need to be hand picked. They're highly perishable, and they need to be shipped a long way fast, therefore, I just simply had the exorbitant privilege of buying those raspberries from a lit refrigerated store shelf with my dollars. Well, effectively, a bank lent me those dollars. Most of my debt is real estate debt, where time, tenants and inflation service my debt for me. I mean, what an amazing world. I'm just here to control those flows, those flows of money between Mexican raspberry growers, for my property managers that manage my tenants and for the banks that provide the loan. I mean, gosh, debt really is the American dream. It made raspberries appear. This is a contrarian way of thinking, but it's calculated. It's unconventional, but it's first principles thinking, rather than emotions from grandpa. You know something I've said it before that. Hey, I'm proud that throughout my life I have never ridden the government dole. Once. Never have I done that. I've never accepted a subsidy, no covid stimulus checks. I've never accepted an unemployment check in my life, even though I could have been eligible one time. I'm proud of that, because otherwise taxpayers would have had to work for me and pay for me. But in a way, since so many of my mortgage loans are subsidized, I am riding the government dole to get 30 year mortgage money at a 7% interest rate, that's also tax deductible, so therefore maybe I'm paying 5% I mean, that's a really good deal, and the government backing makes banks want to provide lucrative loans to us, just like the FHA program that I personally began with on a fourplex, and Just like these first 10 Fannie, Mae, Freddie Mac backed investor loans that you can get for one to four unit properties. So although it's indirect, it's really like a government handout that we're getting. And what can we do when we can do our part in giving back by doing good in the world and providing good housing, not being slumlords. That's the path that we're on here and the future, it's always going to feel uncertain. Always, I'm encouraging you. You've got to plant the tree, you've got to take the leap. You've got to choose to believe that there is something worth building toward optimism is not about ignoring what's broken in the world. It's about deciding anyway to keep on going, and you're probably doing a lot right, working hard, earning, well, a little saving, but more investing. There's a problem that very few people talk about, labor income is taxed heavily, asset income is treated better, and then 401, K income, well, that doesn't even start arriving until you're about 60 or 70. And really, this is why a lot of high performing. Professionals eventually hit a wall. They make more money, but they don't feel much freer. The people who break out usually do one thing differently. They stop relying on one income source, and they start building income producing assets, and that's where I come in, you already know how to do things like budget and save. We all learned that quite a long time ago, and we've all heard the usual advice about maxing out your 41k waiting for years and just sort of hoping, and that might build a nest egg like that usually does turn into something, and it's better than nothing. It usually won't build outsized returns or freedom, though, and surely not while you're young enough to fully enjoy it. So get rich education is about a different path, building durable wealth through income, property, financial education and smarter leverage, certainly not day trading, certainly not get rich quick, just a proven framework for escaping overdependence on a paycheck, a generationally proven vehicle here and here you get the mindset and tactics to make generationally proven real estate a life changing investment because most people are Climbing the wrong mountain. A lot of smart professionals spend 30 years trying to save their way to freedom, but wealth usually grows faster when you own assets that produce income appreciate over time, offer tax advantages and can be financed with long term debt. That's how you get a lot of them. That is the difference between working hard and building leverage. So you can't out earn a broken wealth strategy. 
 
Keith Weinhold  41:47  
Most people earn income, but few people own income. You own the source of the income when you have rental property. A lot of smart professionals really learn that too late, Your salary alone doesn't even have the ability to make you wealthy, since wealth is freedom. So we use an abundance mentality to invest in assets that are scarce. Most people use a scarcity mentality, leading with loss aversion, to invest in something that's abundant and plentiful. So there is always opportunity out there in a market as big and as broad as the US residential real estate market. Where is that opportunity today? Well, I'll tell you that list prices rose 2% year over year to a median of 423k that's in the four week period that just ended according to Redfin. But notice I said that was the list price buyers haggled them down to about 389k that's really significant. It's really proof that sellers are willing to bend in today's markets. So therefore in most markets, I'm encouraging you to make an offer that's below the list price, as we know, available for sale property that is still scarce in a lot of the Northeast and Midwest, and supply is abundant in Texas and Florida. But here's the thing, although Florida inventory is higher now than it was pre pandemic over that six or seven year stretch, here's the new trend, and it's worthwhile to identify inflection points like this on a year over year basis. So looking at only the past one year, Florida inventory is now down 4% it's no longer going up. So it's possible that we've reached the peak of this new Florida supply. We could have hit the turning point now, and yet, builders are still buying down your mortgage rate to about 4% giving you that long term fixed rate on new builds. So I'm telling you, that's where the opportunity is now. As far as the rent side, nationally, I don't see rents going up significantly anytime soon, and that's for most everything, single family rentals all the way up to huge apartment buildings. Rent increases in the single family to fourplex space, they showed some real promise last spring, a year ago, but as we got into summer, they didn't really materialize. Now, although you get rent increases historically, it's never wise to buy and just assume that that is automatic. But I want to underscore the fact that you really should not count on a rent increase over the next year. So that's new builds. 
 
Keith Weinhold  44:53  
The other area ripe for opportunity. Here is burrs, buy, renovate, rent. Finance and repeat properties and among GRE listeners, burrs have been our most popular investment over the past two years. Yeah, Memphis, Little Rock, Birmingham and Kansas City, they are our hottest and most reliable burr markets, and we've really improved our burr operations since first helping you with those found the secret sauce, as far as helping you get the right provider that doesn't leave you hanging on the renovation, burrs are also good for you if you have fewer investment resources than what new build properties require. GRE coaching calls and our coaching program are completely free to help you with this now. Of course, our investment coaches listen to all the GRE episodes like you. They're aligned, and we have family guys that work here, like our investment coach Naresh. He has a wife and kids, and he's just the type of person that you want to see succeed in life and that you would enjoy working with over time. And we are all investors ourselves here, every one of us, so it doesn't hurt to set up a 30 minute consultation call to see if our GRE coaching program is right for you, some good, abundantly minded council for free. Our investment coaches have access to the best deals in real time. That alone is worth a connection. We're in constant communication with the top national providers in the best markets. So there might be an incentive today, like, say, a builder rate by down to 4% that didn't exist just two days ago or yesterday. So this is why investors are succeeding. They're also succeeding thanks to our recent Florida online live event. Connect with us to watch the replay and get in on these deals yourself. In fact, we have never seen so many incentives and price reductions in GRE history as we are right now. And see, here's the thing, when it comes to you making an offer below the list price, because our coaches work with other GRE listeners, they're going to know how low that seller is really going to go for you on that price. So that negotiation is some key information that you can learn. We have access to more than 200 deals nationwide, so contact our real estate investment coaches to get access and these burr properties can give you a super high ROI, because sometimes you can end up with as little as 10k or 20k of equity invested in an income producing single family rental. That's probably going to be 20k or more. And then with some of these developers that overbuilt in places like Florida, make that offer use good debt and take advantage of that interest rate in the fours. Buy low. And the reason that these new build deals provide positive income is because you buy at a lower purchase price overall, and you get a fixed rate in the fours, and you get a low property insurance rate, since they are new build properties, you don't need urgency right now so much as you need clarity, because there are opportunities, real ones, whether it's burrs in the Midwest or builder incentives in places like Florida, where you can Get those 4% rates. But the challenge isn't finding opportunity, it's knowing which one is right for you, and that's exactly what we help you do. And since our coaches are active investors themselves, they follow the same markets and the same providers and the same strategies that we talk about here on the show. So instead of guessing or going back and forth in emails, just get clear book, a quick call. It's free, it's 30 minutes, and it could save you months or years of going in the wrong direction. You can do [email protected] that's greinvestmentcoach.com the best thing you can do next is get aligned with the right opportunity. I'll chat with you in a week. I'm Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your Daydream.
 
Speaker 3  49:35  
Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own. Information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of get rich Education LLC, exclusively the.
 
Speaker 4  50:03  
The preceding program was brought to you by your home for wealth, building, get richeducation.com