Aileen: [00:00:00] Thank you, everyone for joining today’s episode of the, How Did They Do It? Real Estate podcast. We are your hosts, Seyla and Aileen and today’s guest, we have Chris Larson. Chris is the founder and managing partner of Next Level Income. He has been investing in and managing real estate for over 20 years.

While still at college, he bought his first rental property at age 21. And from there, Chris expanded into development, private-lending, buying distressed debt as well as commercial offices, and ultimately syndicating multifamily properties. He began syndicating deals in 2016, has raised more than $15 million and has been actively involved in over $150 million of real estate acquisitions. Chris is passionate about helping investors become financially independent.

Welcome to the show today, Chris.

Chris: [00:00:45] Thanks guys. It’s great to be here.

Aileen: [00:00:47] So before we get started, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about your background and how you got started in real estate?

Chris: [00:00:52] Yeah, thank you. And look, if anybody wants to learn more about it, for you guys out there listening, you can check out our book Next Level Income, and just go to the website nextlevelincome.com and click on the book link. And I even send you a copy of it if you put your address in. So I started, you mentioned my journey in the real estate world at 21. I bought my first property in college and it came at a time, I was racing on my bicycle. I went to Virginia tech, then the engineering program, but I really wanted to be a professional cyclist between my freshmen and my sophomore four years, in my book, I talk about how my best friend died and it put me back on my heels. It was a really tough year for me academically.

I didn’t really want to be in school and I ended up racing a year later. And I had this moment where I was floating around in life, like I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. And it taught me a couple of things. I was racing my bike. I wanted freedom. That’s when I first started to invest in the stock market.

I was day trading, but, I didn’t like the uncertainty that the market had, the volatility and I was looking for other alternatives and I came upon real estate. And after my friend died, I told myself I’m not going to let an opportunity pass me by ever again. I needed to live like basically two lives that my friend didn’t have the opportunity to live and I wanted the freedom to do that.

So I started my investing journey and my goal was to develop enough passive income to replace my active income, my living expenses. I didn’t have a lot of money. So I bought first townhouse with less than $3,000 and I bought another property and another property and held onto those properties for a long time.

As you mentioned, about, let’s see here. It’s about seven years ago. I started to unwind that portfolio, sold off all those properties and started to invest in multifamily, which I call the Holy Grail of real estate, just because all the great benefits, the cashflow, the appreciation and the tax benefits, and also the ability to have it be a passive investment.

So you can really do what you want to do with your life.

Aileen: [00:02:46] That’s unfortunate. I’m sorry to hear about your friend passing away.  How did his passing help you get into that mindset and wanting to, get into real estate and, just continuing to want to grow and become successful?

Chris: [00:02:59] Yeah, I think, through some introspection and also some research, people that lose, an individual. Like I also lost my father when I was five, but I think losing my friend was even more influential, but it gives you a perception or perspective that time is finite and it’s valuable. When you think you’re going to live forever, everybody knows that if you divide something by zero it’s an infinite, right? There’s no true value to that. You can’t really assign a value to that. But when there’s a finite amount of something that value increases. And if, especially if you’re comparing it to infinity, it’s exponential.

So that perspective really hit me and I thought, okay, I can’t let a day pass me by because my friend was 18. He was 18. He just turned 18 years old, two months before. I was only 19 at the time, so I thought, okay, I need to make the most out of my life and probably racing my bicycle, it seems silly at that point. Actually, picked it back up again later, but in a different capacity. More for fun, more for friendship and for staying in shape, but it really helped me to be driven and push and get the most out of every day, including my investment options.

Aileen: [00:04:06] That’s great.  Some people, you know, after losing someone, they spiral down into a depression and, forget about what life has to offer for them. But it’s great that you were able to turn that into a positive and, be where you are today.   

Seyla: [00:04:19] You are also the author of the Next Level Income you mentioned earlier, in your book, you discuss about a concept of the infinite banking.

Can you please talk about what this is and how people can utilize this?

Chris: [00:04:31] Absolutely. Infinite banking is a concept developed by Nelson Nash and what it is, it’s utilizing a special type of whole life insurance contract that maximizes cash value and minimizes the insurance, which is the yeah.

Opposite of what a typical policy is. Normally people go to an agent and they say, Hey, I want a million dollars of life insurance. And then they get a cost for what it is. The way these policies are structured is that you go in and you say, Hey, I’m going to put a thousand dollars a month or $10,000 a month, whatever that number is, into these policies to maximize the cash value and then you back out the amount of insurance. You may be thinking like, why would you do something like that? And there are laws around insurance. Because they’re so efficient from a tax perspective, the government passed laws back in the eighties.

So you couldn’t basically use them as tax shelters. So that’s why that’s why you do that. And a lot of people, if you’re a real estate investor, if you think of insurance like real estate, it’s like getting a mortgage, right? If you’re 30, Hey, I’m going to get this life insurance policy. It’s going to be paid off at 60.

That policy, a lot of people don’t realize this accumulates equity and just like a property, you can pull the equity out. So what we do and the strategy we teach, we actually have a white paper and a video up on our site. Under the banking page, we call it the investment optimizer and the goal is to put cash, put money into these policies and remember, it’s working for you, it’s in there. You have the insurance benefit. You’re getting dividends. You’re getting appreciation on that money. I don’t really consider it an investment, but then when you need money, I call it my opportunity fund in my book and chapter three, and actually rewrote the book and included that chapter specifically for it.

But the reason I wrote that is because so many people were saying, Hey, where do you get your money for the deals? And the answer was my insurance policies and people say, how do you do that? And what you do is you actually borrow that money out of your policies. You take that cash out of your policy.  It still accumulates dividends while it’s in there. And then you can put it into a high interest paying or hybrid investment, cashflow real estate. And then recycle the money back in. And what happens is it supercharges the policies, the cash values, and you can do it over and over again.

You can use it to buy cars. You can use it to pay for college. You can use it to invest in real estate. or you can just use it to fund retirement as well.

Aileen: [00:06:46] Are there any penalties for doing that?

Chris: [00:06:47] Great question. So the money’s after tax, so it’s a lot like a Roth IRA. So you put your money in and you can take out the basis tax-free so those policies, if you put a million dollars of cash and a policy over your lifetime, which, if you think that’s a lot of money, but over 30 years, that’s not a tremendous amount of money.

If you average it out, you can pull all that money out. Tax-free. Now the trick is what do you do to get the rest of the money out of there without paying taxes? And there’s multiple different strategies that you use. You can roll it into an annuity. You can take those dollars out as a loan. And what’s interesting is because your life insurance policy is the collateral. The value is the collateral. The life insurance company does not require you to pay that loan back. So you can have that loan on your policy until you pass away and your life insurance proceeds will pay that loan off. Now there’s typically the difference between the dividends and the interest. There’s a spread there, a couple percentage points. So there’s a cost in there, but you bake that in on the front end and it’s a very tax efficient way to utilize those dollars. And it’s also, like I said, it’s very flexible. Unlike say a 529 plan, or even a traditional IRA where you have limits of when you can take that money out and how much you can take out.

Aileen: [00:08:02] I see. So then are there any limitations on what you can invest in using those funds?

Chris: [00:08:07] No. So it’s a hundred percent your money. So you just call the insurance company, say, Hey, let’s say you have a hundred thousand dollars of a policy and you want to take 50 out to invest in a real estate opportunity or investment or buy a car that you’re going to pay yourself back. Instead of paying a loan back to a current car company, what you can do is you just call the insurance company, or send an email, fill out a simple, it’s usually about a two page form and that money for us, it’s in our it’s in our checking account, wired or a ACH deposit within typically four to five business days.

And then they don’t care what you do with it. And if you think about it, insurance companies, they have to do something with their money while it’s sitting idle, waiting to pay out on these policies. So they invest in a lot of the same things that we like to invest in, very stable insurance. I’m sorry very stable bonds, very stable, real estate that’s cash flowing. You do the same thing, but they would much rather loan the money out to their own policy holders because they know it’s secured by the policies that they themselves own. There’s no safer place for them to loan the money out.

Aileen: [00:09:19] I see. And is there a timeframe where you have to pay the money that you borrowed back into the fund or into the insurance policy?

Chris: [00:09:26] There’s not, and that’s where the discipline component comes in. So the group that I’ve partnered with, Money Insights, they specialize in working with investors. They’ve been doing this for over 10 years, hundreds and hundreds of investors that they’ve helped set up these policies. And really what you want to do is set it up like a loan.  You want to pay it back. You need to have that discipline because you really don’t want to put the money in and then just take it out and spend it on stuff and not pay it back. That’s not ideal. So this isn’t have your cake and eat it too. So if you’re listening and thinking, Oh, I can just put the money in there, take it right back out, go spend it on a new car or boat or whatever, that’s not an ideal way to do it.  We talk about the investment optimizer strategy, which is basically you take the loan out. You take the interest or the dividends from the investment that you make and you put that back into the policy, that’s going to typically exceed or should exceed the interest that you’re paying.

And then when that investment pays off, maybe it’s two years, maybe five years, maybe it’s 10 years, then you pay the loan off and you do it over and over again.

Seyla: [00:10:26] That’s really good information and good strategy. Why do you think this is not being, taught to a lot of people or a lot of people do not know about this strategy?

Chris: [00:10:34] Yeah. I think the answer is pretty simple, guys. When you think about it, you say, Hey, where are the incentives? And who’s talking about them and the government likes to incentivize things like IRAs. People are paid to invest your money and do those, if you talk to an insurance advisor and look, I was a life insurance agent with state farm, I’ve done this.

If you minimize the insurance component, you minimize your fees. You minimize your commissions. So if you think, why on earth, wouldn’t an advisor do this? The answer is, you put, typically a client is going to, or investor is going to want to put a lot more money into this policy. So even if you’re making a smaller commission on the total amount, of, or on the total of the policy, the combination you’re probably still doing okay.

Yeah. Providing a lot more value to these people. Also it’s a fairly complex strategy versus just buying term and then investing the difference in a mutual fund. That’s pretty easy. You buy a term policy one time, say I’m going to need this until I’m 60. Which I disagree with that philosophy because I think everybody needs life insurance. Throughout their life, if you’re trying to create legacy wealth, and then you say, Oh, I’m just going to put money in my 401k or invest in the same mutual fund, until I retire that’s pretty simple. This is more in tuned towards investors that are listening that say, yeah, I invest in real estate. I believe in other investments other than the stock market, I want to create legacy wealth for my family.

I want to invest and act like the rich do. And I say the ultra rich, this is what centi-millionaires do. This is what people that are worth a hundred million dollars and more do. This is how they protect their family wealth. And there’s a reason why, the Warren buffets, the Romneys, the Rothschilds, all of these families have set up strategies like this.

And, it’s, like I said, it’s very tax efficient and very flexible.

Seyla: [00:12:23] You touched base a little bit earlier about the Holy Grail of real estate investing. Can you elaborate in more details?

Chris: [00:12:30] Yeah. So I stole that.  So, Ray Dalio who manages Bridgewater capital, who by most accounts, the most successful hedge fund investor of all time. People talk about Warren Buffett being the most successful investor of all time. Ray Dalio is right up there. Some would call him more successful, but he talks about the ability to increase return and decrease risk, which that increase return or risk versus earned is called the sharp ratio. So if you can increase the Sharpe ratio, increase your return and decrease risk, he calls that the Holy grail of investing. And when I began learning about real estate and or learning about multifamily real estate, I realized that, and I put this right in my book.

If you add it to a typical portfolio, you can increase the return and decrease the risk. And I was like, this is the Holy grail, just like Ray Dalio talks about, so I added that in the title of my book and it might be a little controversial if you’re listening. And Oh my gosh, he’s using the Holy grail to talk about real estate.

But it is a quote from Ray Dalio. And  when I discovered all the different benefits, for me, again, I talk about the cashflow, the appreciation and the factor there is that it’s controlled appreciation. So some people don’t realize the difference between a single family home and a multifamily property.  Is that a single family home? The one I’m standing in right now is valued based on comparable sales. So if your neighbors, their home sell for $300 a square foot. Yours is probably worth about $300 a square foot. If you have a hundred unit apartment building and it’s producing a million dollars of cashflow versus the one next door is only producing $500,000 of cashflow, all things basically being equal.

That first apartment building is worth twice as much as the second apartment building, because apartments are valued like a business. So I always tell investors, think about this like we’re buying a business, but we just get all the great benefits of real estate that are wrapped all the way around it.

So I call that the ability to control appreciation, because you can control income and then the tax benefits, if you buy a single family home, which is a great area to get started, that’s how I got started, you can use what’s called straight line depreciation. So that property goes down over 27 and a half years, it gets depreciated.

You have a $275,000 house on a piece of land. That’s worth $50,000. you’re buying it for 325,000. That $205,000 gets depreciated $10,000 a year on a straight line. What you can do is you can actually do a cost segregation study on any property. It makes sense to spend the money on a single family home, but if you do on a multifamily, you can do it on all the units and you can get significantly increased appreciation because all those washers and dryers, refrigerators, HVAC units, even the landscaping, they depreciate at 15 years or sometimes even faster, like five to seven years. And then the law, the tax law that passed in 2017, it accelerates that. So we’re seeing very high rates of first year depreciation, which means you’re not typically paying taxes on the income that’s produced from those properties. And if you’re listening, saying, yeah, but you got to recapture that, but not if you do a 10 31 exchange or utilize some other tax strategies that we’ve talked about on the podcast and other things, there’s a lot of wonderful opportunities out there too, to you know, either minimize or paying taxes and again, the longer you wait to pay taxes, the more that money can compound and grow and create that legacy wealth that we were just talking about.

Aileen: [00:15:54] You mentioned the 10 31 exchange. Can you just briefly talk to what is a 10 31 exchange?

Chris: [00:16:00] If you’ve heard of it, Donald Trump not paying taxes, president Trump to be respectful, people are like, Oh, that’s not fair. He’s not paying taxes. Or, multimillionaires or billionaires, hardly pay any taxes. It’s like playing a board game.

If you play monopoly with a friend who knows the rules in his plate, they’re probably going to beat you. So nobody would typically play a board game or poker without knowing the rules. And you certainly wouldn’t want to sit down somebody across from the table that not only knows the rules that is more experienced, but we do that every day with our money, with the tax code.

So what I did in college, I went and watched. I took a seminar from an, a former IRS agent. Because I’m like, if I can learn what the IRS does and incentivizes, then I can figure out how to invest. And that’s really what a 10 31 exchanges. It’s one of the rules that the government has and government incentivizes behavior, that’s going to help out the economy and the country grow.

So what it says is if you take a like kind property, so if you have a single family home and sell it and buy a similar value or greater value property and you take all the proceeds, all the gain and roll it into the new property or new properties, the government says you don’t have to pay taxes on that original gain. Now, at some point, the government says you do have to pay taxes. So when you take that money out and you pull it back and that’s where you need to talk to your tax advisor and say, Hey, how does this work?

But again, this is what very rich ultra rich families do. They play by the rules and they say, I’m never going to sell this property. I’m going to let this money, this capital grow and grow. We’ll take a loan against the property. We’ll buy another property. Let the cash flow pay for that.

That’s how you can multiply because if you’re thinking, if my money’s locked up, I can’t do other stuff with it. You certainly can. You just have to play by the rules and do what the rich do. And you can do that as well.

Seyla: [00:17:46] Thank you for going over all those strategies. And it seems like there’s a lot of benefits in investing in real estate.

So now the question is as a passive investor, now that I know I’m going to be investing in real estate, how do I know which market I should invest in? Where do I go?

Chris: [00:18:01] That’s a great question. So I always talk about the three risks of investing in multifamily. The first risk is, where you invest.

There’s a investment. A location risk, a geographic risk because when you buy property, you can’t do like they did on the Simpsons episode and pick the city up and move it or your property up and move it. It doesn’t happen unless you’re one of those tiny homes, the wheels, which those are, that’s pretty cool.

That’s a whole nother thing. for another conversation. But there’s location risk there’s operator risks. So you have to make sure that, and trust the operator because anybody can make up numbers on a spreadsheet and tell we’re going to have great returns. So you want an operator that, trust that has experienced that can say, Hey, this is why we have these assumptions.

So if you have an operator that says, Hey, it’s 2020, we’re in the midst of COVID, we’re going to increase rents 20%. That’s probably not true. It’s you gotta be conservative when it comes to stuff right now. So you need to know and trust the operator, then you look, get the deal, then there’s the deal level risk. So what we did, my wife and I moved from the DC area to the Carolinas, to North Carolina Asheville specifically because of the great demographics of this region.

We love the Southeast because people are moving here. And I always tell, I tell young people that I mentor or just anybody that. For advice it’s I call it geographic arbitrage, move to a geography that’s growing, because if you can make the same money in the Northeast, that’s more expensive as you can in the Southeast, which is less expensive and growing faster.

What’s a better option. You’re young, you’re mobile. If you’re listening, move to an area where you have greater earning capability and the tide is rising. So I talk about the rising tide in my book of multifamily. It’s the same thing you want to invest in large cities that are growing faster than the national average.

So we like cities like Charlotte, North Carolina, where we’re making our current acquisition. Raleigh, North Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina, Atlanta, Georgia, Jacksonville, Florida, markets in Houston, Texas.  You want to be in large and growing cities. It’s not magic. You can look at the United van lines, annual study, and they’ll tell you where people are moving state to state. And then once you’re comfortable with a market, find an operator that’s working in that market and say, Hey, how are you finding these properties?

How do you have you built these relationships? Where else have you invested? Then start looking at deals at that point. That’s when you can start going to deals and deciding if the returns, if the strategy makes sense for you, and your overall, strategy for your personal self.

Seyla: [00:20:21] So now as a passive investor, now that I got the market pinned down, I know I like the market. I like my sponsor. And then now they start sending me more investment deals to review. What are metrics. that are most important when evaluating those deals?

Chris: [00:20:38] Yeah. There’s a lot of metrics that are important.

And again, that’s why it’s so important to work with, a sponsor and operator that, understands how to underwrite a property. First off, I think you have to look at, what are you getting? Where are you getting your income growth? So I always look at, occupancy, I say, okay, where’s the occupancy?  So if you’re buying a property, that’s a hundred percent occupied. I probably don’t want a property, a hundred percent occupied if you’re thinking, why on earth would Chris say that? The reason is typically, if you’re a hundred percent occupied, your rents aren’t high, so you’re leaving money on the table. It’s great if people want to live in your property, it’s wonderful, but you want high occupancy when you’re buying. You want rents that are lower in the market, and then you also want to look at a vacancy trend. Hey, this is an area that has outperformed other properties, in that time, or maybe it’s underperformed.

And you can say it’s under underperformed because it’s had poor management. Once you look at okay, where’s occupancy, where are rents, then you want to, okay. Where has management been? Has it been self-managed have they, what have they, what have the prior owners done? If you want to implement a value strategy, like we do, maybe you want to buy from an operator.

It doesn’t implement the value, add strategy. So there’s some meat on the bone for you. If you want to buy a stabilized property, maybe you’re a small group of investors and you say, we don’t want to do a bunch of heavy lifting on the property. We just want to own it, operate it, have a company, manage it for us and collect a nice stable revenue stream.

Maybe you want that renovated property and that’s good for you. And then you want to dig into the numbers and the assumptions and say, okay, we expect X return. Where’s that coming from? You wanna look at the rent growth in the market. So if you’re in a strong market that’s producing, above average rent growth, three, four, 5% a year.

You want to look at the assumptions, especially if you’re looking at an operator’s underwriting and say, Hey, what did they assume? Do they assume greater than the market, if they did. Why is that? Is that because rents are really low, what’s going on there. If it’s, at the market level or maybe a little bit, that’s typically a good, we like to be conservative or underwriting.

So a lot of the deals we’re underwriting in 2020, we’re assuming flat rent growth. So the last deal we closed, we assume no rent growth, but we’ve actually been achieving rent growth. So it’s a really nice sign that we’re outperforming even in a tough market. then, again, you want to see what those occupancy measures, so you have to go back and revert verse order after you’ve gone through that process where the property is, see where the sponsor says he going to take the property to take it full circle, and then ask questions, say, Hey, why do you assume this?

Why do you assume this? How do you, how did you get your costs? Do they, are they going through due diligence? Are they bringing in teams to walk through every unit and figure it out? Do the roofs need to be replaced? Is what the seller telling you, is it accurate? It’s no more complicated than buying a house when you have it inspected.

The challenge is you have to do it for all a hundred or 200 units that you’re walking through and you need somebody that’s competent and is at the right scale to make sure that they can attack all of those things and get some really solid metrics to put together some numbers that make sense to get the results that you want to as a good investor.

Aileen: [00:23:47] Absolutely. And also we need to make sure that the sponsors willing to be transparent and answer all of your questions.

Chris: [00:23:53] That’s right. Yeah. Yeah. The sponsor like either can’t or won’t answer a question and look, I’m not saying I have all the answers every single time, something like I had an investor asked me a complicated number yesterday.

That’s abstract, but I found that number today. I was like, okay, where’s that number? A sponsor doesn’t have to have all the answers right away, but they certainly need to be able to give them to you and then the other thing is reporting. You want to work with a sponsor that report frequently, you want good communication, especially in 2020, things have been tough.

We’ve over-communicated, we’ve doubled, tripled, or sometimes even quadrupled the timing of our communications to make sure that investors know what we’re doing. We deliver good news and bad news, but we let them know what’s going on. What’s happening, how we’re attacking it and making sure that they’re comfortable because we find that exact anxiety comes from ignorance or lack of knowledge.  So we want to reduce the anxiety levels of our investors and provide them as much information as possible.

Aileen: [00:24:50] Yes. And provide them the warm and fuzzy that you guys are taking good care of our money. And, for preserve their capital.

Chris: [00:24:55] Absolutely. Cause it certainly is it’s a very sacred duty when some, somebody takes the money that they’ve traded their time, their life for, and entrusts us with it.

Seyla: [00:25:04] So since 2016, what has been the most difficult challenge that you have faced in scaling up your real estate business?

Chris: [00:25:12] Yeah, that’s a really good question. I think the biggest challenge is always the people.  Whether you’re talking about investors and making sure that you’re communicating with investors, making sure, like we were just talking about on that aspect, partners finding the right partners, the partners in the right people.

So you need to make sure the right people are in the right place.  You gotta make sure that you work closely with your investors. You also have to make sure that your partners are understanding what aspects of the business that they’re working on or experienced in those. And then it gives them energy, my partner that handles the renovations in that aspect, he has a background in commercial real estate, underwriting and insurance, and then he also had a construction company.

So he loves that and you look at them and you’re like, he’s the guy with, yeah, like a little bit of drywall dust on his shoulder when you see him. So it’s, I think it’s, it all comes down to the people and that’s, that’s the biggest skill is developing those relationships and also the most important as you scale.

 Seyla: [00:26:05] So you have raised $15 million and now owning, multifamily investments valued over $150 million in acquisitions, what is your next focus from here?

Chris: [00:26:18] Yeah. So I’ve been working closely with a group here in Asheville called Open Doors.

So if you go to our website, nextlevelincome.com, not only can you get our books, you can learn about the banking. You can listen to our podcast and blog. We try to put a lot of information, educational resources up there. It’s all free. And that’s our first part of our mission, which is helping investors achieve financial goals, independence through number one, education. We think education is the most important, and I think there’s a real lack of financial education in this country. And it’s tough. We just don’t talk about money. I had a, the last guest I had on my podcast, his name’s Rocky talks about profit first and he talks about how he grew up talking about money and his family.

Which a lot of people don’t do. That’s not common. I was like, wow, that’s pretty cool. We talked a little bit about it. But I talk about it with my family all the time about what I’m doing with open doors, we have an initiative to teach all the way from elementary school children all the way up to college financial skills, the skills for financial success that may start with opening a bank account, and then it may end, it may go through buying a car, negotiating, a lease for an apartment, buying a home.

Teaching that you can negotiate, you can ask for concessions, like a lot of people don’t realize that, if you’re, buying a car, buying a house, renting an apartment, you can ask for a discount. We got a new washer dryer. Our dryer was dented. I said, can I get a discount?

Oh yeah. We’ll give you, we’ll give you a gift card for that. So it’s okay, terrific. It’s on the back of the dryer. I don’t really care, you just ask and you get that. So teaching young individuals, a lot of them from underprivileged homes or neighborhoods,  the skills, but also just the general knowledge that you can be financially successful. It might take some time. but we’re working really hard on that effort and it’s a lot of fun to see some of these, fruits, come to bear.

Seyla: [00:28:13] Yep. But thank you for organizing that initiative. I totally agree about the financial education is a must, definitely.

Especially now with a COVID-19, so hopefully with this education that will really help, giving back to the society. So thank you for doing that.

Chris: [00:28:29] You guys are doing it with your show, it’s amazing.  This is, we’re all part of this effort.  It’s a pleasure to be on because I think we’re all working towards the same goal.

It’s awesome.

Aileen: [00:28:38] What has been the highlight of your real estate journey so far?

Chris: [00:28:41] It’s going to go back to the people.  It really is, the relationships, when you talk to, an investor that thanks you and says, Hey, thank you for sharing this with me. Or, thank you for teaching me that’s, to me, that is the.

That gives me the most fulfillment. And a lot of investors, they were friends and a lot of investors have become friends over the years. Yeah. Then again, like I went, going back to talk to me about how sacred is to be able to help someone invest their money and grow their money. you learn about a lot about people.

I’ve heard some really amazing stories and really heart wrenching stories too. Sometimes investors will say, listen, I know, other members of my family, you can’t tell them this, or, Hey, like I haven’t told anybody yet, but I’m getting a divorce and you hear these things.

And, sometimes it’s good news. Sometimes it’s bad news, but it really is the relationships that you build. And at some point. if you become an investor and you follow all the advice, on shows like yours, and hopefully what we teach at Next Level Income, you’re going to have enough money to do what you want to do with your life.

And at that point, it becomes about the relationships and the experiences. And that’s really what it’s all about in my mind.

Seyla: [00:29:49] What is one thing that sets the successful people apart in the real estate investing business? 

Chris: [00:29:54] I think it’s the view of the longterm. So I always talk about real estate being a, get rich slow game.

So you can get lucky. You can buy a property, you can double in value. You can sell that property and go buy a watch, Or a nice car. And that’s great, but those that have discipline. So a young man that I mentor, and what we were talking about on our last call was taking the money you make in the real estate and just letting it stay in there.

Yeah. And compound and grow and grow and I think, when you look at some of these multimillionaires that are real estate owners, you see them, they’re driving around in their trucks, fixing toilets and stuff like that. If they have single family homes, I know guys like this and a woman.

I’ll just say guys, cause I’m from the Northeast. I may not be politically correct anymore, but whatever. But sees people driving around in their trucks and fixing stuff and like they talk about in the book, the millionaire next door. These people have one thing in common.

A lot of times it’s just the discipline that they’ve saved up over a lot of years. If you’re listening and you have yet to buy your first property, or if you’ve already bought your first property or major first investment, just remember the key is the discipline of continuing to let that money grow and go back into these investments and achieve the magic, the miracle of compound interest, that Einstein talks about, being another wonder of the world. 

Seyla: [00:31:11] what tools or techniques have you used to improve the efficiency of your business or personal life?

Chris: [00:31:17] Yeah. So I will say personally, meditation has been key here over the past four years. I’ve meditated every morning, almost every morning, I should say. And, just bringing your baseline down because if you got a lot of stuff going on in your life, you’ve got a family you’re juggling with a career with your relationships, significant others and friends.

You just need to always kinda take it down. Remember what’s important and start with that. So personally that’s been really important. professional, again, going back to the people has been good, tools I’m big on time management, like how you can allocate your time and block time. So from a professional perspective like today, this is my second podcast.

I’m gonna, I’m going to block the time that I do things. You set up, you say, okay, do a podcast and I’m going to do another podcast, your setups all there, you’re in the right mindset. You’ve done your research. You put on the right shirt and you save a little bit of time with that every time and same thing, if you’re doing research, you go in your research mode, you turn all your stuff off. Maybe you go to a quiet room and do that. If you’re calling investors or, whatever it is you’re doing. I think the ability to block and be able to focus on what’s important and most productive during your most productive time is super important.

Aileen: [00:32:29] Thank you, Chris. And where can our listeners find out more about you?

Chris: [00:32:33] Yeah, we try to make it easy. Next level income, nextlevelincome.com. Get the Next Level Income book. You can also check out our Next Level Income Investor Club, so you can learn about, some of the different options that we have.

Again, we try to provide not only education, but also the opportunities to financial independence. So if you wanna apply and see if you’re a good fit for our group. Yeah, you’re more than welcome to check that out. Please subscribe. And like this podcast, you can check out our podcast as well, right there at nextlevelincome.com and it’s chris@nextlevelincome.com is my email.

Aileen: [00:33:04] Thank you so much, Chris. We really appreciate your time.

Chris: [00:33:06] Absolutely. This has been great fun guys. Thank you for all you do for your listeners.

Aileen: [00:33:10] and thank you as well.

Chris: [00:33:11] My pleasure.