How To Travel The World (w/ A Young Family) Through Long Distance Real Estate Investing w/ "Coach" Chad Carson

Bu amigo, how are you buddy?

Bu today it's great to see you, Brian. Thanks for having me, man.

I'm so excited. Tell the people where you're recording this from because we accidentally just went international again.

Yep. I'm in Granada, Spain, so Espania and southern Spain and enjoying a, a year here with my family. So we're this is it's dark outside. While you're in the US I'm about six hours.

All right, so keynote here, Chad. So you're with your family and then what does your family look

like right now? Yeah two, two young kids. My wife and I and our kids are 11 years old and nine years old, so they're right on kind of elementary, early middle school age.

Whoa whoa, man. This does not fit the narrative. . You're not supposed to be able to do this with young kids. Didn't you read the books? Didn't you read the blogs? What are you talking about? You're traveling around the world with a young family. I thought this was impossible. How the heck did you pull that

off? Yeah, this has been a long time coming. I the root of this story has to, the very first date I took with my wife, we were hiking and hanging out at a waterfall in South Carolina. And I was like, we were like what do you wanna do with your life? What do you wanna do? The first thing you ask on a date, right after two or three hours, and we talked about it, is now. Traveling abroad. Yeah. And living abroad and particularly in Latin America and some other places, Spanish speaking places. Cause my wife's a Spanish teacher and I was interested in taking Spanish and just expanding, my, my language skills and cultural horizon. So it was kinda like that was the seed. And so once we started a family, we were like, Hey, let's we had traveled some before, kids as well, did some cool mini retirements and backpacking and going all over the place. But once we have kids, Typically, all right, I don't want to uproot that their routines and do all this, but for us it was just, we saw as a gift to them to allow them to be able to do that. It was also something that was a lot of fun for us, just push ourselves as parents, how can we do this? How can we, uproot ourselves and put ourselves in a new place? It's sorta I think the family dynamic and the growth dynamic and growing closer together is a big part of both the motivation and the challenge of it. But it's been a really cool experience. There's been some rough spots, but it's it's a lot of fun to do it as a family, having also done a lot of traveling on my own. Yeah,

that's really interesting, especially from my perspective, because it's like now that's what I wanted to build as I was, it's one of my core principles and values is travel and fun. Yeah. That's something I want to have like for my entire life. And I think that a lot of people that listen to this show share that same value. I'm curious, when you met your wife, was that back when you were playing football for Clemson, or was it shortly.

It was shortly after I'd already taken the retirement from my, I thought I was gonna play in the NFL for a little bit, and that dream got crushed pretty quickly. Luck, luckily for my body and my head, probably it got crushed quickly. But so I was in South Carolina and I just decided to be an entrepreneur. I was still in like the fledgling stages of, we were flipping houses at the time and had a business partner, and so I was just, , we might have flipped our first house and I was at yoga class, just trying to de-stress a little bit. And that's when I went met. I met her and she was doing in the yoga class as well and teaching Spanish in town. So it was not a college kind of relationship, it was like, Just getting started in the real world and we were both trying to figure things out. All right, so that's

two for two. Shout out to Matt Ambel because he was just talking about doing yoga and he was like, I'm gonna meet my wife in yoga class. So then that's the universe saying two for two. So guys, I've gotta start yoga now. , I gotta find love, I gotta do yoga. . The reason I ask all of that is because when it comes to dating as an entrepreneur, I find that it's it's different. , right? Because you have your core beliefs on life and you have your core values, especially now that you make the decision to leave the rat race and live an untraditional, unconventional style of life to where you, on you and your wife, on your first date, you were saying, Hey I wanna travel abroad. I wanna travel around the world. This is very important to me. Do you echo the same value? I'm curious about your perspectives on that. Especially when it comes to an entrepreneurial relat.

Yeah, I think it's it could put a lot of stress at times because entrepreneurs we're not that easy to deal with probably, we have schedules that are hectic. , we have ambition, we have all sorts of other pluses and minuses of our personalities, but I think that, I don't have any recipes for what works, but I do know the thing that we, I did at the beginning of the relationship, which was weird on my sleeve. I was an entrepreneur. I had. I was a fledgling entrepreneur too. I'm just struggling to get by. So I had the signs for my business with my phone number on the side of my car. Like I was one of those like local, let's just get it going. Entrepreneurs. Like I gotta spend 200 bucks to throw plaster my car with signs so I can try to survive out here. And it was funny though, cause my very first date, that same date, we went hiking. I went to pick her up with my signs all over the side of my car. is she, I was just waiting to see what her face was saying. I'm like, Hey she gonna get out. Is she gonna go back into her house? Uhuh, I'm not doing this. It she got in the car, she went with it. She didn't say anything about it, and we rolled with. I love

it, man. I love it. So I wanna take you down, a couple different rabbit holes here before we get into the real estate itself, which you're obviously very well known for. This is your entire brand as you help people achieve financial freedom through real estate investing. Hit a little bit about many retirements because you just mentioned that. Talk about that concept and how you applied that in.

Yeah. It, it came to me, it was freedom and flexibility. I think you said that was one of your core values and travel was always something that I knew I wanted to do, but as a new entrepreneur, I f I felt like there's this path you would take, and you probably are familiar with this path as well. It's like in the entrepreneurial world, you can take the, I'm gonna build this big business. I'm gonna make it grow. I'm gonna build systems, I'm gonna have people, I'm gonna make a ton of money, and then I'm either gonna like cash out at the end, or I'm just gonna somehow put together this org, this organization that's gonna run without me somehow, and then I'm going to go travel and let the, do the thing. So there's always like that dream, hopefully business. And when I was as a new entrepreneur, I kinda. went down that path a little bit and oh, I gotta scale. I gotta systematize, I gotta do all that. And that's cool. Like I'm, there's nothing, I guessed it, but I got a wake up call both with the real world and was just reading some books at the time, like three or four years outta my business. One of them was the 2008 recession. , you just all right. Here's a big slap upside the face. You gotta survive and figure things out. And we, that kind of grow big, go big kind of business was difficult when you have debt and we have growth and all of a sudden the economy pulls out from under you. So that's one kind of thing in the background. The other though, right at the same time, I was reading books like the four Hour Work Week with Tim Ferris talking about. Not just waiting until the end of your life to have the fruits of your money and the, your business like to intersperse that throughout your life. What's the point here? Like when you're in your twenties, you're gonna have different benefits to travel and enjoying life that you will in your thirties that you won, your forties, your fifties, your sixties, your seventies. Like all of them have their own benefits. But to defer your entire life until you can enjoy it in your fifties and sixties like that sucks. That's not what I wanted to do. And so that message. really hit me hard and I tried to apply that to my own real estate investing style and it's become my own, it was my personal disbelief, but also my personal brand as well have been keeping it small and mighty and not trying to shoot for the moon in terms of selling out and buying a thousand units and eventually making enough money, like no build in these mini retirements, building the these, it's almost like you're climbing a mountain. and yes, you wanna get to the top, you wanna have this ultimate financial freedom where you really can do anything you want for as long as you want. , but have some plateaus along the way, build in these mini retirements and these times to travel and these times to take a breath and to enjoy life a little bit, both throughout the journey and at the end of the journey. And don't make it an either or thing.

I like that. And what you're describing is called binary thinking, right? And that's what I try to avoid. And sometimes I find myself falling back into the trap of binary thinking to where it's either this or that. I can either be this, do this, or it's this. A or B, and the reality is that the spice of life is found in the gray in between. It's a balancing act, not a balance. And so that's why I'm really interested to have you on the show because A, you live a really interesting life because you're real estate, and B, you don't talk about it as much or at least as much as you'd like to. I don't feel like you got this twinkle in your eye. And we talk about real estate, we talk about all these vehicles to get us to an end destination, but I feel we don't spend enough time discussing what the end destination actually looks. So that's why I'm really interested about you and what you do. Talk about your money life manifest. because I really like that you sprinkled a little bit of Aristotle in there. I think that's a pretty cool concept.

Yeah, so the money Life Manifesto was my personal, everything I do with my online stuff is to me first, right? I'm the first student, the first reader, and the idea was was reading, I like philosophy and I was reading about the stoics and all the way back to Aristotle as well in ancient Greece. And he had this concept that, anything. , if you take it too extreme, too little or too much becomes a bad thing. So take courage for example. If you have too much courage, you're the type of person who's gonna jump out of a para, jump out of an airplane without a parachute. Let's go, let's do this. And you might survive with some wings every once in a while, but that's a pretty stupid thing to do. That's the extreme. Too much courage. And then two little courage is being a coward, like never getting outta your room and never facing the challenges of life. So either one of those. is a bad extreme. And so you wanna try to find that the happy medium that you know the middle point, and that was what Aristotle tried to say when you're living with virtue is finding for yourself that personal balance point between the two. And for me, it just struck me that money's pretty similar to that. I think a lot of us as entrepreneurs, we tend, and this is me too, tended to be a little bit too extreme on the money's really important side of things. . it is. Money's great. It is a wonderful tool, but when you emphasize it so much, you let it dominate your life. Then you lose all those other things that are important to you as well. And you let you become either you're just grinding too hard and hustling too much and that hustle culture kind of thing. Or you start doing something where you're getting greedy and you're trying to go for too much. You're taking too much risk. And so that, that's the extreme. I tended to fall on early on, but then it was funny going back to the story with my wife. We, the first money conversations we had, she was a little bit more on the money's not that important side of things. She had been traveling and camping and kind of was frugal, like I was, but yes, like a bag of bone. Yeah. Like kind of vaga bonding and environmentalist and cared about, how you treat people and being a good person. And so we gotta have these conversations and then this

guy comes with his face on the side of the car and she's obviously future father of my

children. Yeah, exactly. She's I don't think I'm gonna marry this capitalist. But we had some good conversations about it and it was like we found some common ground there because. I think we were both on a little too far of an extreme, and she was on the extreme where money's not important. And my point to her was like you say money's not important, but when money's when you act like that, then money just controls your life and you can't, you have never have any options. You never have any freedom. And so that, the idea of that the money life manifests though, it was like, let's not make it too important. Let's not make it too little important. , let's find that middle ground. Let's build our business, build our investments in a way that allows us to have that flexibility and freedom we want. But ultimately let's treat our business and our money like a tool. And when we need another tool, we put it back in the toolbox. We don't worship the tool and make it like more important than it is.

Yeah, you use the tool. You don't let the tool use you. And ladies and gentlemen, you may have heard a beeping there. I'm not gonna edit that out because that was the thermometer going off because Chad was speaking some fire. All right. Yeah, exactly. He's preaching it was the thermometer going. We got a fever over here and we need more

cowbell. My little exercise timer. So it's for me, we need to get up and do my do my burpees, but I'm not gonna,

Okay, that's fair. Yeah. And Aristotle called it the golden. and I love that concept because that's something that I've had to apply and implement in my life thankfully at a younger age because I was able to get that feedback and that wisdom from those that are further down the path to me that have hit that 20 million, 50 million, a hundred million billion net worth, and they say, Hey man just so you know, like you think it's worth it, but it may not. right? Yeah. Because everyone has their different goals sometimes. It's crazy to think about, especially coming from this podcast, but people come on here with thousands of units, sometimes 15 paid off properties, cash flowing. That's all you need. , that's all you need. And maybe a better quality of life too. So you wanted to say something to that? ? chad: No I think that's it. I'm just, yeah, a hundred percent agree and that, that was the realization and everybody has to come to it in their own way. That's why I don't wanna give somebody and say, Hey, 50 units is good, or 10 units is good, or a thousand units is bad. All I'm saying is my big message with business and with real estate investing is like, instead of making like 10 xing and going try to get for the most with your business, try to find that elegant solution like that. What's the minimal. Amount of properties, what's the minimal amount of structure? What's the minimal amount of complexity I can have that still accomplishes all my financial goals? . . Like If you can shoot for that, if you can make that your goal, then the rest of it can take care of itself. Cause you start creating more time and you start creating more flexibility. And those are other currencies. Like those currencies are the most rare parts. You can always create more money. Like money's cool. Yeah. But if you start tying yourself down to a job, to a business, to a structure like that's that's always been like my biggest like repulsion, like I, anything, any deal, any business deal, any structure, any partnership is threatening to take my time or flexibility, forget it. Like I passed on jobs, I passed on careers and venture capital. I passed on all sorts of stuff that could have made me 10 times more money. But I was like no. Like freedom, flexibility earlier, more of it. And that's the way I measure my, my, my Money Life manifesto. That's the way I measure a. Yeah, people don't think about true profit. And true profit is revenue minus expenses, minus headaches. So there you go. I had a guy, me, so I had a guy mention something to me where he said, yeah, I could take this deal from this private equity guy and I could. Ramp up my portfolio to take maybe an additional 50 to 100 units down each month. He goes, but then I thought about it and how much extra time would that take from me to be able to operate that or even manage the manager that's managing that because it's just degrees and degrees. And he goes, okay, cool. I have to remove that period of time. Cause we all have a finite amount of hours. Have to remove that period of time from another part. , all I have left is my family. So am I willing to remove six hours away from my family to do that, to where I can make more monies, to be able to allow myself to spend more time with my family? Yep. And then all of a sudden you've just got this giant catch 22 where you're like, just not even worth it. It's not worth making the decision. So I love what you said there. Another point in, and then I want to get into how logistically you're going about traveling around with your family. And then don't worry, ladies and gentlemen, we're getting into the real estate. A quote that I heard that really changed my life was that your greatest weakness or , your greatest weakness is, are your greatest strengths overused? And I think that applies exactly what you're saying to your Golden Me and the Money Life Manifesto. So my question to you is, what do you think is your greatest weakness? That's a strength over. . chad: Yeah, man, that's a good one. I love it. Love these deep questions. Yeah, we can talk about cap rate. , . No, this is better. This is better. I, I struggle personally, like with the ambition, and this is the Money Life Manifesto, this is the same struggle. Because I love the game. I played football in college, like I was a middle linebacker in the middle of the hustle, like I was in the middle of the fire. . 80,000 people in the stands. Let's get this, get it going. Play in the defense. Intense. It's like I, there's a part, there's something in your gene sometimes, like you love the arena, you love the game. And so for me it's always been like what's this happy medium? And it's never a perfect balance, right? It's always, All right. I wanna be in the game. I want to be pushing it. I wanna make a difference. I wanna impact other people. At the same time, I want to have some balance in my life. I wanna have some, I wanna have some relationships. I think that's really what it comes down to, that relationship with yourself, relationship with your wife, relationship with your kids, with your friends, with your family. It requires space, it requires time, it requires slowness. And so that's a a big part of why I love Latin America and traveling in Spain, I know there's other parts, I was about to say siestas but slowness. Like they, they really, my friends in Spain and in Ecuador where we lived really I appreciated the quality time they had with family so that when you had a meal with family, it is not something to rush. That's something you take your time with. You don't put a, you don't have a watch on and say, I gotta be honest, 60 minutes. It's something that you take your watch off. and you focus on the people and you focus on quality. And I so that, so my struggle going back to your question, like my strengths, ambition being the linebacker, being tenacious, going after it also a weakness because it can be, it can be used to, to an extreme. And so I don't know that it is what it is. I think I'm finding my way with that and I. Part of the teaching other people is happy medium I've found lately. I love being in the game with real estate investing still. And teaching other people and seeing their successes. Also investing my money with other entrepreneurs and letting them be the on the ground. person that I was early on, and me being the money person who's consulting behind the scenes and helping out , that's pretty fun. Like I've found that to be a way to still have some ambition and also, grow the money pot in a way that's just a fun game to do. And then use that money and use that as a tool to do more cool stuff. So that's where I am at this moment. Yeah. My couple ones are It's confidence. So huge strength, but what happens when confidence is overused to get perceived as cockiness, right? Yep. So that's a big one. Another one for me is casting vision. So I found that casting vision is a really big strength of mine, cuz I'm really good at calling my shots and then making 'em appear in reality. But then that's also a weakness because then I tend to force others into that vision. where it's like, Hey, I don't share this vision. That's also how a relationship of mine ended to where I was like, this is the vision. This is happening . And then all of a sudden she, I don't want this this isn't the vision I'm looking for. And sometimes friendships as well. I tend have a tendency to force people into that. . So that's something I'm working on. And then patience. So , I take massive action and I get things done. I get things done fast. And the opposite of that is, hey, slow down, like you said. Yep. Have patience. And to your point in Latin America, in Spain, People aren't really doing the fast food thing. I found that as a key differentiators. You're sitting down, you don't really sit and eat in your car. Americans eat in our cars a lot. Or we eat, I'm eating while we're walking.

Yeah. Or we eat while we're walking. There're I was walking eating a banana sandwich the other day and people What you doing, man? Sit on the bench over there and eat your banana . brian: Yeah. So people are snacking and picnicking in the parks. When you go get coffee in the morning, you're not sitting in a line in your car. You're going to the cafe and you're having a shot of espresso and you're sitting there and it's a social thing and lunch and dinner it's a social thing. And I think that services a pretty cool transition point into how you're doing this with a young family. Let's talk about a little bit of the logistics of that, because there's a lot of guys listening to this that make, they got big old businesses make a. boatload of money and you got guys that are trying to have a big old business and have a boatload of money to be able to do exactly what you're doing with young kids. So they use it as an excuse for never being able to do it. They say, I've got the young kids, we're not gonna be able to do it. So how did you pull it off specifically in the context of doing this with your entire family and not just being a young whipper snapper like me just able to fly around and do whatever I feel. Part of it I will qualify is that when you have two parents on the same page, like that's cool. have friends who and family members who are like, oh, I'd love to do that, but my spouse really isn't, that's not their thing. And so I'll qualify that. Like our first date we were talking about going and traveling abroad. So I think it helps having both partners, really willing to do that. But with kids, I think the earlier you start, the better. I think sometimes, if they're a brand newborn, you don't wanna travel with a newborn baby, but some people do. I've seen people do it, but the don't be afraid to start testing it. So we tested road trips like when our daughter was. Three or four months old. Our first daughter, we took off and went for a month and a half to Colorado and just went out west and stayed in hotels and hiked around. I'd have her, I just love those little carriers and I could carry 'em, you carry her hiking up the mountain for five or six hours. That was cool. Bring the food and bring the diapers, all that stuff. So just start testing your limits in small ways and just get in the habit of doing that in smaller ways. And then, , we then expanded from, a month to, Hey, let's do this for a whole year maybe. And so that's when we went to Ecuador. Our daughters were three and five at the time, and so a three year old, they just go with the flow, right? They're, she remember some of it, but it wasn't like, she's daddy, I don't wanna leave my friends yet. She was. She just likes to be with daddy and Mommy. Our five-year-old was in the same boat, but she had some kindergarten. She was in kindergarten, so again, starting early was nice. And they got used to, I think being on the road, just something they did. Although our style of travel is not as much, some people go place to place. We're much more find a place, get your apartment, settle down, go to a local school, slow school, get to know people slow. Yeah it's totally a slow travel thing. We've done the backpacking stuff too, but we just like to get our. And settle in and try to be like, just local in another, we're never gonna be local, we try to settle in. So that, that is probably the biggest recommendation for kids is if you're a family who can handle like the backpack thing from place to place and travel around the world, new place every week. That's cool. But, , our style and our temperament. It works better. Kids like routines, kids like to have some rhythm to life. I like to have some rhythm to life too, with my own projects. Yeah. So I, I think that's been very helpful for us is, Airbnb is so cool for that Now I can't imagine. There were ways to do this before, but Airbnb makes it so easy all over the world to find relatively easy to stay in places that are, you can see is it family friendly, is it got places for our kids to play? And so we would start, like when we looked in Ecuador, we had never been to Ecuador. We went there in 2017. We, went on some Facebook groups, chatted with people, Hey, where're the cool places, where are the cool parks? And then we would just, for us, it's walkability and parks are everything, both within our real estate, investing in our travel too. So we would just find those cool parks, they're relatively safe places. And then we just looked for Airbnbs near there. and we would research everything, but we wouldn't over plan it. We just like to helicopter in, figure it out once we get on the ground. So we'd have a list of schools to look at. We'd have a list of, Airbnbs staying in a place for a few nights, and then just get on the ground and walk around, check it out, look around, and we'd find our happy spot there. And we ended up staying 17 months instead of 12 months like we originally planned. But it was, I think the flexibility in addition to. Just being, having some criteria you want as a family, like for us, parks, playgrounds, near cool green spaces where mom and dad can exercise near the school. So we wanna be able to walk to the school. So you start kinda listing your criteria like that and you, you back into a location that's pretty fun and good to work at and the money's a whole nother part of the equation. I'm happy to talk about the mechanics on that. But those were the core logistic criteria that we

looked. Oh, we don't talk about money at all on this podcast. What are you talking about, man? . Yeah, no, that's exactly what we're gonna talk about. Yeah, so my, my, I guess that serves as a really good pivot into going into the real estate and everything, because you are doing things in a way that interest me because you, obviously there's difficulties that I can't see, but you are operating to where you. have this freedom, have this flexibility to do what you want, when you want, with who you want. People are listening to this right now and they're like, holy shit, Chad can. Must be nice, right? You can go travel six months check out Colorado, see if it's a fit. And that's what I did with Austin. I got an Airbnb for two months. I came over here to check it out, land the helicopter. As soon as the helicopter landed two days in, I was like, I don't wanna stay in an Airbnb. I'm getting an apartment here. And I got an apartment for 12 months, and now this is the beginnings of my new podcast studio that's gonna be finished by the end of this week, and it's really sweet. So yeah, let's do a transition there. What's the portfolio look like today? What's the cash flow look like today? And then let's dissect it.

Yeah, so the portfolio is mainly, it's in Clemson, South Carolina. And so going back to, if you remember the beginning of my story, I used to flip houses. And so I'm in the upstate of South Carolina and I used to have a pretty broad area. When you flip houses and try to buy houses way below value, you gotta have a pretty big territory to, to find those deals. And so I was wholesaling, I was fixing and flipp. And I say we, we had a, I have a business partner. We've been 50 50 business partners from the very beginning. We were buddies. When I played football. He had a kinda online sports information business, a website that was new during those days. And so the two of us teamed up and we both were interested and started. Doing that. And over time we transitioned from being a flipping business where we just, you know traded hours for dollars flipping instead of trading hours for dollars on a regular job. Yeah. And we, we started building the kind of long-term hold, buy and hold rental properties. And for us it started off with like single family houses. That was the main thing we did. And we, like a lot of people, we start with the lower price houses cause that's what we could afford. That's what seemed like the best cash flow. and we've transitioned over time to have higher quality median price houses in our target location of Clemson, which is a university town. So we still have a lot of, single family houses. But then we also, after I started moving into properties and living in house hacks like little fourplex units or duplexes, I really got a, developed a love for the niche of student housing. but not just student housing. Some people think student housing get a house with six bedrooms and pile a bunch of students in there. We have small apartments like the smaller, the better Studio apartments, one bedroom, two bedroom units, and I try to have 'em walkable to campus or on the bus line. So again, of back to my kind of core values that also align with my investing. and so they're all within a couple miles of Clemson, the university, and so about over half of our units we have 110 we've sold off a couple, but just under 110 units. And some of those are. 12 units. Some of those are duplexes. The biggest is a 12 unit. So it's just a lot of smaller, older multi-family that we've remodeled. My favorite kind of units are like brick. One story hardwood floors, a studio or a one or two bedroom. The smaller the better is for efficiency units. And so that's we have two different property managers who manage most of those in Clemson. And then we have a few handful that we kinda legacy properties in different, kinda a little bit outside of town that we still manage ourselves. And I can do that mainly through technology through. Through just talking with my team, my property managers have really good property managers who I vetted very carefully before I worked with 'em and knew them personally, trusted them, and was slow to hire in that way. And so I depend heavily on my property managers on the ground and then have a point person there that I communicate with. And so that, , what that looks like on a weekly basis is, Hey, we've got a maintenance issue that's above the $500 you gave us to kinda make a decision on our own. Should we do that? I've got a quote here for this $900 refrigerator. Can we go for it? And for me it's yes, go. Just like a simple text. So that's a normal week. And the most of the time I spend in my real estate business is the strategic stuff. Hey, we've got an offer on this property. Should we ignore that or do something with it? And playing chess with maybe selling, over the years we've been selling off the properties that were less optimal and then trying to replace those with properties that were better to the point where we're pretty happy with where we are. We have a, the very low level of debt. I think uh, I figured out the other day like probably 15% loan to value. Man, it's outside to third parties really. And about 30 per some of the money we have, Private lenders family members, things like that, which, so the total debt's probably 30%, 25, 30% of what the portfolio's worth, which is where we wanted to do, we wanted to get the risk down, we wanted to get our cash flow up instead of growing out out. Let's grow our balance sheet and make that safer and lower risk and higher cash flow. That's so we're, there's always improvements to make, but that's where we are. Sweet.

And then what's the cashflow looking like right now? If you're comfortable with sharing, you can share, tore the greed that you want.

Yeah I'll share my personal part cause I have a business partner and I don't know how sure how comfortable he is with that's fair. All his numbers as well. I'm the one who choose to go out on the podcast and do all that stuff, but, I live on a, we have just, it's grown over the years. 10 years ago, my wife and I had a 3000 a year budget and then we had kids and we got a 5,000 a year budget. Now, like in. I think we take out of the business 8,000 bucks a month. And there's still cash flow left over on my 50% portion. Plenty of cash flow above that. So that kind of gives you an idea, like I would say, eight to 10,000 a month is pretty standard kind of distributions that I can live off of. And then there's other money in there that we can grow and re reinvest and buy other stuff and pay down that. You wanna hear something

crazy? Yeah, I didn't realize, I didn't realize the concept of distributions until recently. I had no idea what that was. . And this is good for me to share these things too with the podcast audience because it's like, , I'm in this entrepreneurship journey too, and now I've got a business that's all of a sudden, like I blink and now it's popping out like, 50 K a month. And I'm like whoa. Cool. This is fun. I like this. So revenue minus expenses, here's what's left over. Like I can have fun with that. No . No you can't. , you can't do that. You need to have a distribution that you take. So I'm about to have probably about a similar distribu. . I think I'm gonna stick to probably conservatively about that, probably six to eight range. Cool. For myself. But yeah, that was a new one where I was like, okay, like I can only take a percentage of what I make and then all the rest needs to be reinvested. So what percentage, that's interesting. What percentage are you reinvesting in everything and like, where does that kind of go? Just new acquisitions.

Yeah I mean for a long time it's been debt payoff and new acquisitions and so really, so that's been a focus of. . Yeah. Yeah, for sure. And I, and this is actually something, it's been fun. I read, I'm read writing a book and about to publish it later this year called The Small and Mighty Investor. And something I think a lot of real estate investing books and education don't talk about is the end of your career, like the transition or the end of the journey of the financial independence. And this is relevant for where you reinvest your money. Like it is pretty straightforward when you're early in your career, you have a little bit of money and you try to grow that into a lot of money. And so like the only. The goal and the mechanics of that are to safely compound your money as quickly in as, as much as possible, right? That's the name of the game. So you just try to get compounding vehicles, whether that's like a retirement vehicle or a business. Real estate's a great retirement or a compounding vehicle because there's a lot of tax efficiency there. There's a lot of ways you can sell properties and reinvest it. And so the journey most people talk about. But the thing that I think is not talked about enough, and this is where it comes into the many retirements and the lifestyle and all that, is that there's always a tension between growth and risk. Great. And then also there's a tension between ambition and growth and enjoyment and lifestyle. And so for me, like the mechanical way to release some of that tension is you have a choice. And my business partner and I had several forks in the road over the last seven to 10 years where we had to make a choice where we're like, we had a big pile of money from being successful, from selling properties, from saving cash flow. Do you go and buy more properties? , do you, and if you do buy more properties, do you, how much do you leverage it? Do you keep that traditional leverage that you've used, like 20 to 30%?

You knew that was gonna be my next question. Yeah.

That's why paying us a little bit, right? Yeah. And so that's we started doing two things. Like one we, even when we started buying more properties, we started buying them more conservatively. So we bought a, one of our best deals we ever bought was a 28 unit property. Some small multi-family on. about six acres of land and we got a good deal on it. I was count in 2016, still the tail end of, there's still a few deals left over from the recession and everything. And, but the way we bought it was about a million dollar purchase, a little bit over a million bucks. We put we got a $500,000 bank loan and then put a half a million dollars of our own money. And so that's something we couldn't have done earlier in our career, but we chose to do. That was an easy loan to. banker's no problem. Got it. Yeah. 50% . Yeah. Yeah. What do you wanna do? The loan. It's like easy loan. You can negotiate the terms a little bit more. But it's, for us, it was a choice of we were thinking about paying off some debt with that money and we were like, okay, we can buy this great deal and buy it conservatively, or we can go pay off more debt. We chose, we felt like comfortable with that kind of growth. It wasn't like aggressive, we're gonna lose everything kind of growth. It was more conservative style of. . And so I guess that's my point here. The long, long-winded answer to say there's a transition you wanna start making. You can make it in intervals, you can make it one big fell swoop, but you should, my own personal opinion is if you wanna maximize for lifestyle, if you wanna reduce your risk and be sustainable with your business. you need to start reinvesting in more risk reduction and debt pay down or debt securing better kinds of debt. That's the biggest way that I know people have gone out of business in real estate investing and other businesses too. Think about 2008 and nine, both in real estate and the whole business world. Who were the businesses who went out of who went bankrupt? Yeah, were the people super. We had their loans called due cuz they said, Hey, pay us our money. All this commercial debt that has three year and five year terms, that is a ticking time bomb waiting to happen. Like balloons are nothing to mess with. People talk about 'em casually and it's just, hey, I got, millions and millions of dollars worth of debt that could come due at any point. Like, how are you gonna raise that money when nobody's loaning money and when you can't go out and get any. So those are the kinds of things you need to think about if you want to get over that hump to have a mature, sustainable business as opposed to a kind of high growth and more risky type business.

Yeah, and it's the two different stages. There's accumulation and there's preservation, and it's two different skill sets. Like making money and keeping money are two completely different games to play. So honestly, I admire you for having the balls to sit with. and maintained because debt was cheap back then. Like debt has been cheap. You probably, what was your interest rate on that loan? For 500?

Yeah, it was 3.1, something like that. Yeah. So the

fact that you kept to your guns with a 3.11, I'm sure everyone was probably telling you the same thing that I'm thinking as like a steelman argument, right? Dude, what are you talking about? Yeah, 500 K. Put that at a 3% interest rate. You're just buying fixed rate, low interest debt. Come on man. It's a no-brainer. There is no risk. Exactly. But you want through 2008 and you have young. . chad: Yeah. And I have enough, honestly, it's like, all right, I could get more, like I'm not, I'm never like gonna be completely settled, but there's these two meters. Like when you have enough money, going back to that like lifestyle what's the minimum number of properties, the minimum amount of assets you have to pay your bills. And I've just told you my cash flow. Hey, I have seven gr eight grand a month coming in. , anything above that is great. I wanna secure pad my wealth and that's happening, right? But I can do anything I want. Like I'm not I don't need, I'm not lacking for any kind of financial resources that do the kinds of things our family wants to do. So why take more risk? What game am I trying to play? Because I love that. Uh, There's a quote from Warren Buffet that always repeated in my head over and over. I'm just gonna paraphrase it. But it's basically says to, to risk the things you already. for something you don't need is just folly. It's just craziness. , what? What's your motivation like? There might be a mo good motivation. It might be that I'm the type of person who wants to prove to myself I can do big things. Cool. Just call it what it is. Don't call it I'm going for financial freedom, or I, whatever it is like that. That's been what I've tried to have the conversation with myself is, , it's really difficult to stop moving the goalposts. It's really difficult to say you have enough and, but if you can flip that switch a little bit and we just, the way I did it for myself and trick myself psychologically, is to do it in increments. Like we've never stopped growing, but we've taken the GU gas pedal. down some, and we've reinvested some and we've bought properties in more conservative ways. And I think my wife and I paid our house off 3% fixed debt. That's crazy, right? , best decision I ever made though for us personally because she was more adamant about it and I'm like, ah, no, we could loan this money out. Easily low risk at 6%. Like we're having a 3% note, but it was it was 2019 and as soon as the the covid lockdown happened and everything turned out okay after that. But like during the middle of that kind of march, April Madness, I was like, huh. , I'm really glad I have no payment on my house. I'm really glad we're very conservatively finances because you can't take for granted that things didn't turn out the way it was. It was kinda that V recovery, right? But what if it had been a sustained downward spiral? Or what if it had been a two year kind of depression or recession? Like things could have gotten ugly really fast for a lot of people. And the less debt you have and the more cash you have in reserve, the more you could have sustained that kind of situ. . brian: So how did you originally I wanted just for the sake of some of the audience that's listening to this, that's maybe in the beginning stage, in the accumulation stage, how did you go about financing the original properties when you didn't

have money? Yeah, private money was a big part of it and all and local banks, local commercial loans. So it, for me, it. 90% private money. found a cool story. A guy who was my management professor in college. I was a biology major. I graduated from college, was trying to do the NFL thing and that didn't work out. So I went back and just took a few business classes and I met a management professor, Dr. Stone, who was kind, became a mentor, became a friend, and I circled back to him when we started buying properties. And I was like, I need some money. I'm finding good deal. and I'm finding properties at 70% loan to value. But I don't have the money to buy them. And he is don't worry about that , I got the money. And so he would loan money at 10% interest and I would pay him back and then flip a house and pay him back. And it was pretty cool. I figured out I taught him a thing. He taught me a lot of stuff, but I taught him how to use self-directed retirement accounts. And so he had a ton of money in his retirement account. that was sitting there over overexposed to stocks. He wasn't that he was okay with stocks, but he wanted more into real estate. Sure. And I've taught him about the fact that you could use these kind of boutique retirement account companies that let you self-direct your money and make loans on private to private companies or to real estate. And so for. 18 years. I just paid his last loan off earlier this year, , or end of last year. But we, for 18, 19 years, I made him tons of money. I was helping him pay for his retirement groceries through private loans, and I had several people like him and seller financing, lease options, creative financing. I really got into all that because honestly, I had to I didn't have a job. I didn't have a W2 income, so I had to go the creative. Whereas if I had a W2 income and solid job and all that, I probably would've gone more traditional and used FHA loans, used the conventional route. But I just, you have to take the financing journey that your own path gives you.

I feel like it was almost advantageous for you to not have done what I did. to where I was making good money in the W2 corporate job and I was like, okay, cool. I need to say I need to do more sales so I can make more money. Save more money so I can do this F hha, make more money. Save more money so I can do another F H A and right. The way that you did it was, okay, cool. I gotta get scrappy. Like we're living in the same reality. We're just viewing it from a different frame of re. . chad: Yeah, it was kinda Like I forced myself to get into that scarcity. I don't have much money. I don't have any money actually, so how am I gonna be creative enough to make this deal work? And that's such an important entrepreneurial skill I have learned since then. So you're right. Like it was, I was super fortunate to have a business partner like I did, who we really teamed up well and I feel like I love our team and how we've always worked together, but then that kind of forced scarcity of all. I don't have the money I gotta make, it really forced me to get good at deal making. Like I had to get really good at understanding the mechanics of how rental properties worked, how flips worked, what the numbers were to be good, were, and every deal. I just looked at it like, all right, how do I make sure my private lender is taken care of and can sleep well at night? And if he or she can sleep well at night and make their interest, they want, I can buy an unlimited number of deals because they'll tell their buddy about it and they'll tell their buddy about it. Like never after you take care of the first one or two private lender. No problem getting more money because it's virtually unlimited for a small mighty investor. Somebody you ultimately, you're gonna, maybe have four or $5 million worth of debt. You can find plenty of private lenders and small bank loans to do everything you need. If you keep it in that price range. All right, everyone. Remember the deal triangle. You need money, you need knowledge, or you need hustle. Yeah. So what Chad's talking about is if you're listening to this right now and you're sitting, you're thinking in your head, must be nice. Must be nice. Check yourself and remember that if you don't have the money, and you are in the beginning stages. What actions can you take this week to be able to move forward in the direction that Chad's life is right now and where my life is right now that you can take, and that action would be really damn good at deal funding. Go underwrite five deals a day, send out the mailers door knock, go drive for dollars, do whatever you can to find the deals, because I know a lot of people with a lot of money right now and they cannot find deals. So if you're the person that has the deal and you use the hustle to find it, You will not be hurting for money, my friend. So Chad, what's the vision for the next couple of years? Where are you trying to take this? Let's plug the book that's future in a little bit, and then we will tell people where they can find you. . chad: Yeah. It, it is been I mentioned that ambition conversation earlier. It's been a journey just to figure out like, all right, what's the next thing that really draws my curiosity? And I'm still curious and interested in teaching. think teaching is calls at me as much as entrepreneurship does. I love both. And so I'm playing that teacher entrepreneur role at the same time. I'm enjoying as a real estate investor, I've got a couple like pilot deals where we're investing with some other people. The let the person who's finding the deals and hustling like I always did just be their silent partner behind the scenes. That's been fun. Like I'm enjoying that and we'll see To be the capital. Yeah. Yeah. Be the venture capital person. So that's, I think that's for the next few years. I can see that continuing. And then just the teaching role. Like it's I'm playing around with the online media business. Like I've, it started off as a hobby. I was a blogger just sharing my, I was writing writing. Oh, wait a minute, there's a hundred people reading this. Wait a minute, there's a thousand people reading this. And so I'm really intrigued by new media by online media, by online courses, by YouTube's really caught my attention a lot. I'm sure. I'm just, I'm getting into to the craft of storytelling and teaching and how do I make sure I present something in a way that people really get it and that it really makes sense to them and that they have progress. And then I get a. A lot of, have a lot of high and fun out of seeing people go full circle, seeing them buy the first two, three properties, seeing them go from two to 20 or, and then pay those properties off and go on their own journeys. So that's a, it's a fun, it's a fun journey to play the role of guide a little bit alongside other people's heroes journeys and not, and be, support them and what they're doing. I love that man. And I love that you've really truly stuck to your guns and you had your enough. . That is freaking awesome. We don't hear that enough on the show, and I know a lot of guys with a lot of money that are listening to this right now and they're saying, woo, I've got 80,000 a month coming in. When Is this enough for me? And man, I greatly appreciate you coming on, man. I like being able to highlight some sides of you that you don't normally get to highlight. So this has been an absolute blast. Where can people.

Yeah, I'm at coach carson.com or if you Google Coach Carson on any of the platforms. I'm active. Got a podcast comes out every Monday. That's kinda where I'm having a lot of fun. Lately. It's on YouTube, it's on all the normal podcast platforms. And as Brian, behind the scenes, I'm doing a little rebranding with the podcast, but if you see Search for Coach Carson podcast, it's, you'll find it. And I would love to connect with you. Sweet.

With that is Ben Brian and Chad Carson with the Action Academy Podcast, say with the Action Academy Podcast saying, when is no chess? To all of you, . See you

guys.