How To Become Free From Wall Street

My goal always long term passive wealth creation. I didn't know exactly how we would do that, whether that would be through single families or duplexes or quads. Our first commercial deal I always thought would be something like that. In the residential space because we're finding residential deals in our wholesale and flip business. So I thought it would be a natural progression. It wasn't, we started looking at some other mentors of ours that have thousands of units under management into the large commercial space, meaning multifamily, self-storage, student housing. And so we started doing some study, what are the benefits and detriments of both spaces? Why would we want to do one versus the other? And so we made the decision in the last 18 months to go full time commercial real estate in those three asset classes that I just mentioned. And we really did it because of stability. We're looking for that stability, consistency and safety.

My dad passed away about six years ago. He lost a good percentage of his wealth during the downturn and then didn't live too live long enough to watch it rebound. So the money they lost in the stock market I recognize the volatility in it. I was already in real estate at that time and I just liked it more so. But I also saw the volatility in residential markets as we saw in the downturn. So I wanted to kind of explore is there a safer asset class to be in?

“If you don't take earned income and create passive income with it, you'll work forever.”

Wall street was out for me, residential, although profitable and gave us a great earned income wasn't a long-term retirement plan. So as we started recognizing that these larger assets were much more stable, that's where we went into. So our first deal was a $14 million self-storage complex that we built ground up almost 1200 units and a stabilized value of almost $30 million once it's up and running. So we, we kind of dove right in. So when people say, what do you do now, really what we do is we try to educate people in the space and try to get them to understand that there is stability, consistency and safety in these larger assets more so than some of their other investments and can give them the opportunity to partner with us and jump in with those deals.

I love the flipping business and I'm really grateful to it, it got me to where we are today. But if you read Kiyosaki’s cash flow quadrant, you're in as an entrepreneur or a small business owner, worked yourself into the highest tax bracket that exists. W2 employees pay less taxes than we do as entrepreneurs. We pay the highest taxes, large businesses like Amazon and Google, they pay less tax. And then the commercial real estate investor pays almost nothing. And there's a lot of reasons through the IRS tax code that that is true. But what I found is I can create almost half of the income that I've created in my earned income job through commercial real estate investments and keep the same amount of money in my household.

So it's been an evolution of, okay, so now I've done well in this earned income business, but unless I transfer it into a passive income business. Warren Buffett says, “if you don't take earned income and create passive income with it, you'll work forever.” And my mindset was I want financial freedom. I read rich dad poor dad when I was younger, but I didn't recognize that what I was doing was actually working myself into a great job. And the next evolution of that was, okay, now we have a good job. It's a good paying job, but if we don't take the money out of this business and put it somewhere else, we'll never really be financially free. And it's definitely a different sector. It's definitely a different space.

If you have questions please contact me: https://integrityhg.com/contact