How to know your "Enough" Number w/ Kurt Buchert

Nine times out of 10 It was a great relationship is a great time with the customer. But then you get that one person but 10% of society or just nut jobs 90% of the problem. Yeah, and 87% of stats are made up on the spot. Welcome to the action Academy podcast, staring bags while I celebrate freedom, the show where we help you achieve financial independence with the mindset methods and actionable steps from guests who've already earned their freedom blank the freedom fly. Choose to do what you want, what you want, with who you want, with who you want, when you want when you want with another episode today. Now, here's your host, Brian Luebben. What's up, what's up, this is your host, as always, Brian Luebben, bringing you a little bit of the mindset, a little bit of the methods in a little bit of the actionable steps to help you earn freedom in your life in business today with another episode of the action Academy podcast. Today's guest is freaking hilarious. And one of my good buddies. He's well known in the Goeben IDs community for his absolute love of masks and COVID. And all things politics Kurt Buchert. So Kurt had a pretty traditional upbringing, he went to LSU, he was from New Orleans, Louisiana, got a corporate job right out of college, and then realize he hated that. So then he ended up starting a spray foam insulation business after Katrina hit. And that was the genesis of his cash flow originally. But then he came to the realization that he had less freedom, less time, and less interaction with his family with this business. So he decided to sell that off and then go into real estate investing and dump all of his money into there. So him and his wife actually went and moved abroad for a year they lived in Argentina and around the world, and then moved back to Florida at the end. And now they both live in Florida on the beach and 38 and are running a pretty solid real estate portfolio. So today's episode is chock full of information, everything from starting and selling a business, to beginning a real estate portfolio, how we finance all these houses, the cash flow, the numbers that he's getting from these. And also knowing your enough number, because he's reached a point now where he's like, he's pretty good with where he's at in life. And now he's still investing, but he realizes that starting up a bunch of ancillary businesses aren't going to help him they would actually detract from him now, so pay attention all that in the show. As always, if you are getting value from the show, and this content, please leave us a rating and review. It grows the show. That's how we grow the show. It's one of the only ways that we're able to get exposure organically. So please help and share that. Follow us on Instagram at action Academy podcast. And without any further ado, I'll let you get to it. Kurt pucher. Kurt, buddy, what's going on? What's up, Brian? How's it going, man? It's going fantastic over here but could be a little bit better could be down in the sunny beaches of Florida, where you're currently residing. Man today is like a perfect day today. It's beautiful out there. It's 60 degrees Sunny. It's just an awesome day. Awesome. Great day to be alive. It's always a great day to be alive, man. We're just going we're just going through life. Just going to Florida mask for you just hanging out. I know you're a huge fan of masks personally. Yeah, we don't do that stuff down here. COVID. It stops at the state line. It just doesn't. It doesn't go past the state lines weird just stays over there. Bother Georgia. Alabama just doesn't come across the state line waves across the border. Yeah, that's kind of how it is for us over here in Georgia. We're just kind of like we've been operating this entire time. But I want to get into your backstory talking to max. I know you started over in Louisiana, and about your kind of migration with your business, everything from your business to your family and why you up and ran from over from no low over here to the sunny beaches. I know that there's a couple different chapters your life and it's pretty cool to watch both of them and see the transition and see how you and Erica and everyone been handling it. So it's been fun to watch man. And I think that there's a lot of value to be offered and all of the story. So I'll let you take it from there, man. Tell us about how you started over in Louisiana and how you started up the business and all that good stuff. Yeah, absolutely. So I'm born and raised in New Orleans. That's where I'm from and I live pretty much my whole life until a COVID hit and then we moved to Florida. I grew up middle class kid in New Orleans and I went to Catholic school my whole life and went to LSU study finance out of LSU I became a financial adviser and I became a certified financial planner. I was the youngest certified financial planner in the history of Louisiana thick at at age 20. For 25, which was cool, and worked for a couple fortune 500 companies and in the financial services industry, which I really liked, I really liked that industry. But when Katrina hit in 2005, my company moved me to Dallas at the time, I spent a year in Dallas had a great time, but I really kind of had to guilt trip about leaving New Orleans when it was all, you know, messed up from Hurricane Katrina. So I was brainstorming, like, Hey, man, it's maybe a great time to start a business like in the construction industry, but I didn't really want to be a contractor. So I ended up starting a spray foam insulation business. And the reason I came up with that is I had a few rental properties at the time, and one of them that I did a gut renovation to, we did spray foam insulation, and I thought that I thought it was a coolest product ever, especially in a hot and humid climate. I was like, this stuff's awesome. And they really didn't have any competition. There's only a few guys doing it. So I ended up starting that business, it almost failed in the first three months, because I really didn't know what I was doing. And I picked the wrong business partner. But I ended up turning it around. And we did really well. And I did it for six years. And I probably worked 20 years and those six years, we it was very stressful. We did we insulated 3000 houses, and it was a lot of fun. And we made some good money. And then I got totally burnt out, like totally burnt out. There was one day I was driving around. I was like doing estimates myself, I was running the business myself, I never installed the product myself. But there was times I would go I'd go in a lot of attics. And there was times like when they needed me to remove old insulation or something and I'd be up there and 150 degree attic doing that stuff. And it was nasty work. But there was one day I was driving around. And I was so stressed out that like my heart started beating like crazy, I thought I was having a heart attack. And I was I don't know how old I was like 30 years old or something like that. And after that, I was like I gotta get out of this, I gotta like, the money is not even worth it. I'm done. I need to get out of this, like, I need to sell this business. So I ended up finding the guy to sell the business to, I kind of gave it away because I was just like, I was about to fold the business anyway, because I was just so mentally done with it, but ended up selling to a guy. And then I just I got married. My wife and I took a year off. I was financially free at that point, I my expenses were low, and I had all the profits from the insulation business, I had invested into rental real estate in New Orleans. So my rental income was above my expenses. So I was financially free back then. And when my wife and I got married in 2012. In November, by January, we decided we're going to quit our jobs in January and we quit our jobs. I sold my business but my wife quit her job. And we took a year off and we went and travel around the world. We did some really cool stuff. We actually did Airbnb arbitrage where there was times, we were renting our house and in New Orleans on Airbnb for 250 $300 a night. And we were in Argentina at the time. And we were renting our like pretty decent Airbnb is there for 40 to $60 a night. So there were a lot of times we're actually making money by traveling around the world, which is really cool. So we did that for almost a year. And then she got pregnant, came back. And then I just started doing real estate investing at that point full time. And been doing that ever since. So I have a lot of time freedom, you know, pretty much do what I want make my own schedule, I'm not the type of person that's gonna work myself to death anymore. I feel like I did that. And I don't, I think life's too short to do that at a point in my life. I do a couple projects at once. I've got a good real estate portfolio right now. And I manage those and try to enjoy my life. I'm married with four kids, four kids under seven. So I want to see them grow up 20 years, I don't want to look back and say, Hey, I'm really rich, but I didn't see my kids grow up. But I don't want to be one of those guys. Yeah, that was gonna be one of my questions that she halfway answered was when you were doing the spray foam business and you had that up and running. First off, it's just it's cool that you just like ready fire aim that you're like, hey, cool, Opportunity. Opportunity. I have no idea what I'm doing. Like you didn't sit around for three years reading, reading like blogs and watching YouTube videos about it. Like you just were like, Hey, I'm gonna figure this out. This is an industry this is a niche that I haven't seen. There's no competition. It's a great product. That's something I'm interested in and passionate about. Let's run it. So can you give a little bit more color and a little bit more detail to when you're driving around your heart speed now to your chest? Can you provide some more context to that because a lot of people I feel are still in that position. So it's either a lot of people listening to this are either in WT position working a job they don't like. Or the other side of the coin the flip side of the coin is people talk about being an entrepreneur that end up buying themselves another job And then they just keep working that same job, keep working work, and now sudden you're working 90 100 hours instead of working the 40. Keep it a little bit more context. So that kind of that breaking point where you're like, hey, this isn't worth it anymore. Yeah, owning your own business now, obviously, in a lot of ways is more stressful and tougher than just working for somebody else. If you have a W two, nine to five, five o'clock, you're done, you can go home. And most jobs, you can just hang out with your kids watch, watch Netflix, and then go to bed and do whatever. But when you own the business, it really never stops. So it was high stress. I liked it because it was mine. It was my baby. And I liked it for a long period of time. But it got stressful. And I also learned that I didn't love having customers. And that sounds terrible. You're like, oh, this business thing. Like I thought it was for me, but I just didn't like the whole business part. Yeah. I just don't like capitalism. Just kidding. Hear me out. Because your your customers or your boss? So like, yeah, some ways. You're trading one boss for like, 100 bosses, because your customers are your boss. And nine times out of 10. It was a great relationship. Everything went well. It was a great happy go lucky time with the customer. But then you get that one person but 10% of society or just nut jobs. 90% of the problem. Yeah. And 87% of stats are made up on the spot. But because that data science, but you get that crazy customer and it just really puts you out and you're just like, why am I doing this, and it might have been something you missed, maybe you did make a mistake, and the customer just handled it really poorly. And just like, wring your neck over it. And there's, you know, a certain segment of society, they think if they're paying you for something like they own you. And I never like that anyway. So I was like, What business? Can I do that I don't really have any customers. And I was like real estates like that, because you have tenants, they're not really your customers, you're not really their customers either. It's like a hybrid thing where it's in some ways they have power over you. But probably in more ways you might have some power over them. So I really like that the symbiotic relationship is a symbiotic relationship. There's really no like customer thing on there where they can just leave a bad review as your landlord, you're like a one star for Kurt. Yeah, yeah. And there is some of that stuff. There actually is some of that stuff. But like, at the end of the day, if you have a nice property, and you treat people how they want to be treated, even if you've gotten complaints before people are going to rent your house, when you go when you rent an Airbnb, I don't care if the guy's a jerk or not, if it's a nice place and a nice location. And it's where I want to be, I'm going to run it the price, I want it, I don't really care what the people are like, and I don't have to deal with them that much. I'm just renting their house. So that's one thing I really like about real estate. And then the fact that I like the kind of complexity of it, there's so many just different parts of real estate. I mean, you can do self storage, you can do multifamily, you can do small multifamily, you can do single family, you could be a real estate agent could be a real estate broker, you could be a contractor, you could be a sub, you could be a property manager, there's just so many different parts of it so many moving parts that I really liked that a lot. And I also like architectural like I like wood properties look like and I like the feeling that you get certain types of properties, like I try to make my properties nice and like really look good from the street to my kind of rule of thumb is you want to look at a property and feel good like an uplifting feeling about it. And I like that a lot about Southern architecture, a lot of southern architectures, you have a front porch. So it's very inviting, but it's not. They're not properties with like big walls in front and the people are inside a southern architecture is very inviting, where people are on the front porches. And you just feel very neighborly, I like that a lot about our architecture down here in Florida as well as New Orleans. Yeah, and I'm going to take you on a couple of different angles here chronologically, so something that you said stuck out to me was about how you exited your business. So right now, I think that there's a prime and this is something we talked about and go abundance a lot. It's a prime time to buy businesses, small businesses. People are looking to exit left and right. And you said something there that stood out to me and you were like, Hey, I sold this thing for basically pennies on the dollar. Oh yeah, I wanted out. I was done. I was sick of it. It was a profitable business. It was making me enough money to make me financially independent. I was done. I'm past the stage in my life for this is worth it to me. So then somebody was able to come with an offer that made sense to probably both parties. And it wasn't top dollar that you could have gotten For a bit you agreed to it. Can you talk a little bit about that? Because maybe for people on the receiving end of this that are talking about when we talk about, hey, like there are a lot of businesses for sale that you can go and have creative structures and creative financing with, can you maybe talk a little bit from the actual business owner side that went through the selling process that maybe someone that's listening to this can understand what to hit on when they're trying to submit an offer to buy a business? Maybe? Well, yes, I'm installation as an example, but it's applies for a lot of industries. Oh, yeah, totally. Yeah. First of all, first off, I was young and dumb, when it when it came to selling a business, I had no clue I probably I should have consulted with a business broker, I should have sold the business. When we were doing the most amount of sales, I sold it when I had already purposely shrunk the business, which is selling a business. That's the stupidest thing to do in the world. So I was dumb, I could have probably sold, you know that business a couple years earlier for a couple million dollars. But I just didn't know, I just didn't think that way I just thought about the monthly profits. That's all was really in my brain. I didn't think about the equity I was building in the business and what I could possibly sell it for one day. That's just not how my brain was working. So if I would give advice to somebody looking to buy a business, you want to find somebody like me find somebody that just wants out. And dummy. Yeah, good. Tell me by mmm, somebody that kind of wants out either wants to retire just wants to do something else, or something less stressful. And maybe they don't know what they have. They don't know how to value it. And they're thinking about closing up shop, a lot of businesses just closed, they don't feel like they have any equity or any worth in the business. And that would that would be a perfect person to buy a business from because you could probably get it pretty cheap. Because that because the owners thinking, hey, I'm about to close this up anyway. Even if I only get 100 grand for it in the grand or whatever. Like, that's just extra money for me. Wow. Whereas you're thinking like, wow, I'm getting this business that's profiting $150,000 a year for it. I'm only buying it for 300 grand, but you want to find some somebody like that. And in the small business arena. There's probably a lot of people like that. Yeah, yeah, I would imagine, especially when you're starting to like really be persistent with your outreach and stuff like that. Yeah. Cody, Cody Sanchez. Exactly. You know her she talks about all this stuff a lot. And she's very knowledgeable on those things. Exactly. My my personal preference for finding businesses is I drive around New Orleans, and I look in parking lots and I look for people that are sitting in their cars having a nervous breakdown, looking like they're about to have a heart attack. That that's that's who I'll go after, personally for Yeah, those people were probably just carjacked. So those are business cards, or cars. Yeah, was an attempted carjacking. So, yeah, shout out New Orleans, Louisiana. So let's pivot past this a bit to where we get and I want to go into the Airbnb, where the ratings do matter that you alluded to, and how you provide a really great service in that front. But I want to talk about the freakin year of travel, man. That's cool shit. Like, y'all just went up. And that's something that me and my girlfriend are looking to do right now, maybe people will see how the outcome would get like y'all ended up pregnant. Maybe, like, I have no idea what's going on there. But you don't know what we're about to do that. We're about to go do our little six months, your travels. So I want to hear about how you plan for that. We're rolling out in July. So we're gonna hit first and then go up from there. But yeah, a little bit, maybe do spend about 1015 minutes on this about how you were planning for this, how you're intentional about it and some levers that you pulled while you're traveling around? Because that's the ultimate freedom. Yeah, absolutely. And that was a total ready fire aim type of thing as well. So we had never done that before. We had taken trips, but I think our longest trip was, I don't know, 10 days or something like that. Yeah, we just said we want to do this, and we're just gonna figure it out. And that was before COVID Not many people were like, remotely working that much back then. And it was 2013 there were some people but not a ton wasn't sexy yet. Yeah, it wasn't sexy yet. It wasn't cool yet. And we just decided, hey, we're gonna do this. So we just figured out a way and I got some systems up to deal with my my subcontractors and my repairman, my handyman and all that kind of stuff and figure out how to collect rent. And I have a business partner and some of our property so he helped a lot as well. And yeah, we just figured it out. And it was it worked actually pretty smoothly. There wasn't no it actually went really smoothly. A lot of stuff. Like even when I was in New Orleans, when issue would come up at one of my properties. Nine times out of 10 I would never go to the property anyway. I was just calling somebody or texting my handyman ago anyway. So it really wasn't that big of a difference between sending him a text from ours. Tina versus sending him a text from two miles away. So no, you just have to like, yeah, just just don't be scared about it. What's the worst thing in the world that can happen? Somehow you got to get back on a flight and headed home. But that would be some catastrophic situation. And that's not going to happen. Yeah, exactly. And then talk a little bit more about the Airbnb arbitrage shows that when you is that were like when the first thing you did is that your first run in with Airbnb is when you put your house up for that in New Orleans. But that was the first time we had ever used Airbnb to rent our properties. And that was the beginnings of Airbnb as well. And yeah, we lived our house at the time was kind of near where Jazz Fest is Jazz Festival in New Orleans, which is really popular. And I said, Hey, let's run our house for jazz bass. Let's go stay with our mom. And we rented it for 10 days for 600 bucks a night made six grand I was like, wow, I was like cool. We're doing this when we travel. And yeah, we ended up doing it and a lot of times we were making money while we were in other countries, which was awesome. Not everybody can do that because maybe your house is not in a place where people want to rent and maybe you just don't feel comfortable renting your personal house with that but I did I'll rent anything so didn't bother me at all parents about to start and only fans after this one. Yeah, only fans I'll rent my kids out for child labor. Whatever you guys need. I'm in for it. So alright, I do rent my truck. I rent my golf cards. I do that as a side income streams. Horizontal income so yeah, that was gonna be my one that was gonna be like about one clarifying question on that was when you rented your house. What did you do with all of like your personal belongings in there? Like was it it? Was there anything different that you made like when you were changing them? Did you hide in your stuff? We had one closet we locked and we we stuffed all our like personal clothes in there and everything but everything else all the utensils, all the art on the wall, all the furniture. We just left that there just like normal Airbnb and nobody cared. So that worked out. So y'all traveled on the road, what was your some of your favorite places that you want? So our goal was to go places and stay in those places for actually a long period of time. We didn't want to go stay in a place for three days and then hop around too much. Yeah, because I had done that before. Like I went to Europe for three weeks as a college and we just went to so many places. It was like we were in a train the whole time. Like we were traveling too much. And we went to like we were in Argentina for two months. We were in Italy for six weeks. We were in Greece for a month and a half and like we were in Argentina we'd stay in one place one city one Airbnb for two weeks. There was one time we were in Argentina for this one town called Bariloche, j say a little bit more Spanish. And we're staying with this family like we were staying in their house. And they had the St. Bernard dogs and they had these little kids. And the dude, I became friends with the guy. And he was like, Hey, do you I'm going I do this cattle drive every year with my friend a couple hours away. And you want to go on it with me. I was like, Yeah, of course I did. I ended up just going on like an impromptu cattle drive in Argentina, for a few days, when I was down there, which was really cool. Like I left actually left my wife behind and went by myself with these guys. And I almost froze to death because like, one day just started raining and sleeping, the temperature dropped like 40 degrees, and I wasn't dressed for it. But yeah, it was just a really cool experience. So things like that. And we went to Hawaii went to Mexico, Argentina, GLA, Italy, Greece, and we went to all different places inside of those countries. It was really cool. It was just a really special time. That's yeah, that's freaking awesome. If you could give maybe two to three pieces of advice for anybody. Obviously, I'll take them for myself selfishly, but for anybody that wants to go do a gap year gap month, whatever you want to call it a couple pieces of advice for them to pull the trigger on it. And I'll just sit around and wait. Yeah, I would say whenever I want to do some cool, I just scan I just pay the deposit and or just just pay the money and then worry about it later. Like I just booked the Go abundance Croatia trip which volun in the Balkans. Yeah, that's gonna be like the best trip ever. And honestly, part of me, doesn't want to pay for it. And part of me doesn't want to leave my kids for two weeks or whatever it is. But I know it's gonna be incredible. And I know I'm gonna look back and it's gonna be like one of the best times ever, so I just pay the deposit and I'm worried about it later. And I'm just gonna do it. People listen to this. Tell them about you need to add to this trip. Tell them how badass this trip is. Yeah, so they're renting. They rented a I think 170 foot yacht, the Phoenix on the called the Phoenix on the Mediterranean. So it's gonna be like 20 of us. And we're going to be on this insane yacht in the Mediterranean, and we're going to be island hopping and going all over Croatia. And yeah, it just looks badass. I've never done something that badass before. Like, I've always seen the I've seen these yachts in the Mediterranean before and been like, What in the world do you do to what? Yeah, be on a boat like that? Like how rich you have to be? How just insanely cool. You have to be on one of these boats. And I'm gonna be on one of these now and I'm like, really fired up. It's total like imposter syndrome. But like, why not? Yeah, you're gonna have a whole like staff and everything on the boat to Oh, yeah. Not boat. Yeah, people are gonna be looking at us. Like I was looking at these people years ago that Jeff Bezos I'd be like, Yeah, my letter, Kurt. Yeah, that's me. I'd be our boat up Jeff basis is now you probably on like, testosterone roids kangaroo fetus stem cells or something. I don't know what he's on. Have you seen that? D lately? Yeah, he's looking. He's looking looking healthy. Well, this will say healthy. Look. Yeah, he's looking really healthy with his new girlfriend or wife or whatever. Yeah, whatever. You want to call it. That danger. Nicholas. Yeah, so you get back so yeah, we just fast forward to the bed toy. You're gonna be balling on a yacht that's gonna be freaking awesome. Yeah, my buddy Ryan is going to rhyme voted. He's going and he just emailed the the the moose, the tourism. I don't even know the names of this because they don't even exist anymore. who organizes the vacation? The have no idea. The travel agency travel agent like that was that's not a thing anymore. So I don't know how we have a travel agent. Anyway, he just email the travel agent, because we go spearfishing. So he's trying to set up some some scuba gear and some spear guns. So we could just jump off our 170 foot yacht and scuba dive down and spear some fish and pull them up in barbecue right there. Next in the hot tub. So that's literally like my dream scenario. Like that's combining all the best things. I have the things I love in the world. Hopefully we get to do that, too. Yeah, so if you could go back to 24 year old Kurt, that is the youngest Fishel certified planner, financial planner and New Orleans. And you could say hey, man, like, here's a couple shifts that you're gonna make that are gonna have you spearfishing off of a yacht, what would you go back and say to young Kurt, I would say don't limit your thinking, have a growth mindset. Always think big. Always look for a network. And what's great about the modern world is your network does not have to be in your hometown does not have to be in your neighborhood does not have to be at your workplace. It can be anywhere, anywhere around the world. It can be anywhere around the country because of the internet, and the technology that we're on right now. So just don't limit your thinking think big. And then just always be around people that are doing cooler things that you are and that are smarter than you. And you always want to run, rub shoulders with those type of people because those people will inspire you to do much bigger things much better things become wealthier, healthier, and you just never want to stop growing. If you look, I think David Osborne said this, you look back on yourself 10 years ago, and if you're the same person, then something wrong, like you should always be changing. Always be evolving. But I feel like you should always have the same principles. But those probably shouldn't evolve that much. You should always have rock solid principles based on something but you yourself should always be improving and getting better every single day. Yeah, I find it I find it frustrating when people when they're like, oh, that's just how I am. That's just the way I've always been. Yes. Like, that's bullshit. Like you just simply you're just saying and where do we hear this a lot. Our parents Yeah, all of our parents. They're like, this is how I this is how I've always been this I'm always gonna be like, that is the most backward statement ever. Because if I'm 27 right now, if I'm 37 If I'm saying me at 37 something drastically went wrong. If I'm saying me at 47 something drastically went wrong. Look back if for you listening, look back if even you five years ago, if the person you are today is pretty similar to the person you were five years ago or you're meeting people from college graduation, maybe going back to your reunion and they're like, oh, man, you haven't changed a bit. Yeah, that's bad. be a red flag my guy. You, you maybe you want to hear that like about yourself physically? Hey, man, you haven't changed a hair. Yeah, you still look 20 And you're still in great shape, that would be awesome. But yeah, in other ways, you don't want to hear that. I also give advice that there's different phases in life. There's different seasons in your life, when you're in your 20s, I look back and there was so many things I did look back, and man, you're a total idiot, I did a lot of partying, I grew up in New Orleans. So we did a lot of partying back then. And that was a season of my life. And that season is over, like, I barely drink anymore. And I just don't, I already did that. I don't really do that stuff anymore. Like now to be outside. I like to hang out with my kids. I like to be in nature. I don't even like cities anymore, really. So they're different seasons of your life. So don't try not to judge yourself too harshly looking back on that season in your life. And then when you're going into the next season of your life, be optimistic about it, if you're about to be a dad, you're about to get married, I look forward to it, hey, I'm about to go into the season of my life, I'm gonna be a husband, and we're going to be newlyweds with no kids. And then when you do have kids, like, it's going to be the season of being a father and it is gonna be a season of you're going to be an empty nester and then a season of hopefully B, you're going to be you're going to be a grandparent. So there's a bunch of different seasons in life. And it's good to embrace all of those when and not dread any of those seasons in life. Because all of them have all of them have pros and cons, obviously. But you know, no, that's, that's well said. And every single season has lessons and purpose to it. Because I'm thinking back to when, you know, I went through college, and I was partying like crazy, like looking back. I'm like, how am I alive? Right now? No idea. Yeah, but what's good about that is don't regret it. No, not necessarily because now it's like that itch is scratched, right? Yeah, like you scratched it so it's like now you're not gonna be I'm not gonna be 4045 like having a midlife crisis where I decide I need to buy a Lamborghini and go to the clubs like it's just not going to because I've scratched the itch when I had time to scratch it and I didn't just postpone postpone kick the can down the road so let's I want to move now into your kind of recreate like your where you recreate everything. So you're in New Orleans, we'll call it chapter one. You're in New Orleans, you getting cards left and right. You're selling your spray foam insulation business you Erica go you travel. It's fantastic. You almost freeze to death, why you're bringing in cattle. And then now you decide to COVID Hence you make the decision to move to Florida. Now, talk to us a little bit about how you've set up your lifestyle design. Now you're pretty heavy into Airbnbs and real estate right now. Correct? Yeah, so now my main income source is I still want a bunch of duplexes in New Orleans of 20 Something duplexes in New Orleans. So that's actually my main income source. But my Airbnb income is starting to grow a lot too. So I own a few in Florida, building a few more. And then I also own one in Colorado with a couple partners. So I really liked the Airbnb business. And we like hosting people. I think it's a fun business. And it's a very good business, especially here in Florida since COVID. It because Florida has been really the one of the only places it's been wide open. And a lot of people are nervous about booking overseas trips. So everybody's been coming to Florida. So it's been awesome. It's been a lot of fun down here since COVID hit New Orleans went like completely loony with COVID. And they're still nuts with it. And just seeing that contrast. It's just hilarious. Like they're four hours, four and a half hours away from my house here in Florida. And it's like another world with Kodak. They're just nutty over there. It's almost ironic that the New Orleans where I first got COVID So I went ahead and knocked it out. It was that last Mardi Gras. Yeah, I was there. And it was I came home and oh man, that thing's Mac me. Yeah, I was out for about four or five days, but I got smacked by COVID it was it was a blessing and a curse because I knocked it out fast. So I kind of antibodies. I didn't like it. My wife had it nine months pregnant. We had at the same time. It was not fun. And we had overdrawn which was That was pretty easy. And actually the Delta thing. I like to say I earned my COVID because I had that after Mardi Gras and then we had the own Omicron after Brazil. We just got back from Brazil for three weeks. Yeah, and that it was like a head cold. Yeah, I got the shots because I had to go to get him to go to Brazil. But so it wasn't that bad. But as we finish up I want to hit about the financials of these duplexes and how you acquired them. So what did you do to originally acquire these 20? Was that just straight capital from your business? Did you put these in your personal name, or how did you acquire all these 20 in New Orleans, I bought my first one in 2003 bought a duplex and I lived in the back unit. And then from that unit, I rent it out. And then their rent was $900 a month. And my note was 833 a month. I'll never forget that because I was like these, like they're paying my mortgage. I was like, why? I was like, why doesn't everyone do this? I was really confused. Like why every single person in the world didn't live in a duplex. I was like, this is weird to me, because this is like awesome about that. 2000 2003. And then I just another one came up for sale in the next block. And I didn't really have the money at the time. And I asked a friend of mine if you wanted to go in with me. So we bought that one. And then I just started buying stuff in the neighborhood around me and stuff come up for sale. That was back when banks were lending us money hand over fist and I didn't really have any money back then. But banks were lending me money because I had a W two job and that was before the crash and banks were just eager to lend money. So What year was this? Yeah, sorry. I first was 2003. I think I bought my second one in 2004 2005. Oh, you had these ninja loans? Well, it wasn't ninja headed income. But yeah, no, but they're like they're not verified anything. Yeah. They Yeah, it was crazy. It was weird. I was like what's going on here. But luckily, we had Katrina, not luckily, but Katrina happened. So we never have big giant bubble like other places had. So when the crash came, we just saw like a little small blip of a correction, we didn't see like a big crash. So I was actually in good shape. And then but really New Orleans, the best time to be buying was like really 2010 to 2012. That's when we were getting crazy deals. And I tell this one story. This is funny. There was a house for sale for $10,000. And my business partner and I were like, we really he was such a joke. Some of these houses were so cheap. We really wanted to buy a house for $1,000. Because we were just like, we thought that was funny. So we offered $1,000 on this house, it was for sale for 10. They said no. But they countered at $2,500. And we said no, we did not buy it. So we could have bought a house for $2,500. So he had a lot of work, but we don't. And we didn't buy it. And four years later that house in the same exact condition sold for $99,000 We couldn't afford the extra money. And we didn't buy it. So that's how stupid things were back then. So where do you see where do you see the trends going? Right now? Are you going all in on these Airbnbs new builds? So you know I'm of two minds here like i One Mind is the government's going to keep printing money and keep inflate inflating everything and all these assets are going to keep going up in value when the other mind is maybe rates are gonna go up. Maybe we're gonna have a correction, I don't think we're gonna have a crash. Like 2018 already going up. Yeah, just slightly. I'm talking about like major rate shifts, maybe we're gonna have a correction, but I don't think we're gonna have a crash. But I have a few lots of develops a kind of, I'm not being aggressive on buying other things right now slowly developing the things that I have. And then just maintaining, like I said earlier, I met like a season in my life where I really want to see my kids grow up. I don't want to work 100 hours a week right now and do a total grind, and not enjoy my life and not enjoying my kids. So that's just not me right now. My net worth has been going up a good amount every single year, I have the cash flow that I need to do that do the things that I want. So I'm not just like in a crazy growth moment of my life. No, that's also important that's also valuable to both know and acknowledge that because you can't be 100 miles an hour all the time. Like it's got like David and Tim like it for people listen, and David is my interview that I forgot which show number he is but he's $100 million advice on health, wealth and self. And so he kept charging ahead because he wanted to keyword and then you've got Tim road who's coming on and he retired at 40 He just wants to go ski so big Tim's been a big influence on me because I really like his lifestyle. And now that I live by the beach I What's that old like story with the Mexican fishermen and some rich guy comes down and says hey, man, you own this boat. Why don't you buy 10 boats and you can retire and fish every day. And he's I already fish every day. Why do I need to do that? It's a more detailed story, but you get the drift. So I like that tip. Do I need $100 million to go to the beach every day? I can go to the beach every day right now. Yeah, exactly. So as we wrap up your brother any more advice that you would give to someone that's in maybe phase one Chapter one that you're in where they're still in the W two, or they're fantasizing about this travel. They're fantasizing about what this passive income financial independence life would be any more advice that you would give just a couple pieces as we wrap things up on stuff that they can do today, outside of just go for it? Because that's your recurring theme. If I could say if I could title this episode be like, Kurt, just go for it. Yeah, totally. And that's just a big advice would be one of my big regrets was not getting into some type of mastermind. Early on, I would be so much farther ahead. Now, if I did that, in my 20s. I didn't know what a mastermind was. I had no I had never heard the term mastermind. I even know their word. Sure, there were but I didn't know any. And I didn't know that was really a thing. So that would be one of my top piece of advice, get into a really good mastermind. When you're young, because man, you instead of having one mentor, you can have 100 200 mentors and things. Yeah, we're both in abundance. And that's an awesome one. I think there's some others out there too, but and then also learn as much about how money works as possible. I was I've always been a big reader about personal finance, I have the Certified Financial Planner background, learn as much as you can about money and about mindset. Never stop reading that you should be reading two hours a day I read. I probably read three, four hours a day, every single day. And I've done how to read. Yes, I learned how to read recently. Oh, yes, cool. But I read three or four hours a day, wake up or read the Wall Street Journal every morning, you know, when also when I say read a lot of it's audio and listen to podcasts, I listen to audio books. So probably three or four hours a day, I'm either listening to something or reading and man you just learn by osmosis. It'll just it also increase your confidence level when you know things. It'll give you that confidence to, to pull the trigger when you need to win when you see a big opportunity. Having that knowledge and also having maybe a mastermind will give you that confidence to pull the trigger when you need to. Yeah, I love it. And by and that's why I'm so grateful and thankful to be in the position I'm at because that's what I'm doing. But 27 I'm rolling with you. With all you all you guys. And it's it's fun, man. And that's why it's been very cool to do this show and to do this podcast, because for two years now it's I've been chopping it up with y'all, we've been having these conversations privately. And before I was like, Oh, look at this thing that I've got. That's so cool. I'm going to keep all this information myself, because we all go through that phase where you're like, Oh, I worked so hard for all this information. I'm gonna hold it to the chest, get the edge, when you really realize is that life rewards you with more abundance. When you I just did an episode with DJ Savoy, and he's you have a cup. Same as getting filled with abundance, you just cut the bottom of that thing. You just let it flow through you. You just be a vessel for it is the more abundance you get, the more you give. Totally, yeah. Flows. Yeah, I mean, you and that's how the world works. That's how you have to be you cannot look at the world as a pie that's a certain size, the world is an ever growing pie in my mind. But we're not trying to hoard a bigger piece of pie for ourselves. We're trying to grow that pie as much as possible and help other people out. Because if you're not helping other people out, that's just part of life. And then you're just going to you're going to leave you're going to lead a angry, greedy existence if you're not willing to help others out. And I will say about your generation, probably every generation sounds like a seller, a grandpa here, but there's just so much opportunity if you guys grew up in the internet generation, I wish my friends and I talked about this all the time, we would have had YouTube and podcasts and all this stuff. When we were teenagers and in high school and college, we would had such a head start. Because we only had the influence of our parents and people in our high school and our neighborhood. My parents never spoke to me about money. I had my first like savings account when I was 18 Earning whatever 1% And that's all I knew. I didn't know anything about money and opportunity you guys have so when I see people younger people bitching and complaining about it's world's not fair student loans blah, blah, blah, like Mike, give me a frickin break. Do you have so much opportunity? You have the entire knowledge base of the entire history of the world on your compelling I remember having a little flip like Motorola like razor phones like 1020 years ago, and it's now you have now you have the entirety of all the things information in the entire world set in your pocket. And you can learn, you can listen to the most knowledgeable people in the history of the world on direct direct access, direct access within three clicks. And maybe you should do that instead of watching tick tock dancing videos. On the flip side of that, that was gonna be sorry, there are also people making millions of dollars on tick tock dancing. Yeah, that's true. That's that's where that's where maybe this is the end of times. I don't know. Yeah. Now, I mean, that little kid Ryan that my kids watch sometimes on YouTube, and he's like, playing with slime and toys. And that day, like, makes my net worth and my two months or whatever, like 12 years old. Oh, I always say that. No matter what you're good at. Just know that there's a small Asian child. That's probably better than you. Totally at any given moment at any given task. But anyways, brother, it's been freaking fun. I knew this was gonna be a good one. It's been a long time coming. Where can people find you? Probably the easiest Instagram Curt B, you see. So at Kurt, Kurt B. You see, that's my handle. Yeah, I'm on Facebook too. But probably Instagrams easiest. Don't tick tock yet. Nowadays, I've never signed up. That would just be the biggest time suck of all time. I can't. That's too it's too far. One bridge too far. Okay, one step at a time. All right, buddy. This is Brian and Kurt with the action Academy podcast signing off. You've been listening to the action Academy podcast helping you to choose what you want with who you want. When you want to be given the gift of freedom. Don't turn your back on that. We hope you've enjoyed the show. And we hope you've gotten some practical and useful information make sure to like rate and review the show. We'll be back soon. But in the meantime, hook up with us on social media. Remember financial independence is freedom. The freedom fly