BRRRR & Over-leveraging Question

[Alex Shapiro]

So I just had a discussion with a retired family member who made her money (millions) in real estate. I brought up the BRRRR strategy and she got upset that I brought this up as an actually viable strategy. She asked, "well what do you do with the crushing debt service?" She said that she lost me at the refinance stage, and that pulling out all of the equity to just go buy another property creates a crushing debt service and is not sustainable and reckless. Every time I would indicate that the BRRRR strategy allows you to build a real estate portfolio with leverage and that the tenants pay down the mortgages she would say that the world is not perfect and things will go wrong, this strategy over-leverages you and creates a "crushing debt service." She asked me where I was getting this info and pretty much implied that I was getting this strategy from a fraudulent guru and that I was misguided. I tried to argue that using leverage is a smart strategy to build a real estate portfolio. I then brought up out-of-state investing, and she almost lost it. Lol.

So there were have it: how should I have responded to her questions? Is the BRRRR strategy not as cracked up as it seems? If it is a great strategy, how do I convince someone like her to accept it as legitimate? Is the BRRRR strategy more geared to a younger real estate investor, dare I say.. new school?