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MISSION ACCOMPLISHED. In this ep, Mat and Tim reflect on the journey they've been on as part of Season Two of Earbuddies. Are we better equipped to face the pop music landscape of 2023? Find out!Thank you for your continued support of Earbuddies. Regular episode releases will continue in the fall of 2023. You may also receive bonus episodes in your feed as the summer progresses. So, you know, don't unsubscribe! Gosh, please don't unsubscribe.SONGS PLAYED:Cody Fry - I Hear a Symphony

On this midweek show, Crystal chats with former Seattle Mayor Mike McGinn and his former Senior Communications Advisor Robert Cruickshank about the missed opportunity for generational impact through how decisions were made about Seattle's waterfront and the SR99 tunnel. Mike and Robert review how the vision of the scrappy People's Waterfront Coalition, centered around making a prized public space accessible for all while taking the climate crisis on by transforming our transportation system, nearly won the fight against those who prioritized maintaining highway capacity and those who prioritized increasing Downtown property values.  The conversation then highlights how those with power and money used their outsized influence to make backroom decisions - despite flawed arguments and little public enthusiasm for their proposal - leaving Seattle with an underutilized deep bore tunnel and a car-centric waterfront. Some of the decision makers are still active in local politics - including current Mayor Bruce Harrell and his current advisor Tim Burgess. With important elections ahead, Crystal, Mike and Robert discuss how political decisions tend to conflict with campaign promises rather than donor rolls, how proven action is a better indicator than value statements, and how today's dense ecosystem of progressive leaders and organizations can take inspiration and win the next fight. As always, a full text transcript of the show is available below and at officialhacksandwonks.com. Follow us on Twitter at @HacksWonks. Find the host, Crystal Fincher, on Twitter at @finchfrii, Mike McGinn at @mayormcginn, and Robert Cruickshank at @cruickshank.   Mike McGinn Mike is the Executive Director of national nonprofit America Walks.  He got his start in local politics as a neighborhood activist pushing for walkability. From there he founded a non-profit focused on sustainable and equitable growth, and then became mayor of Seattle. Just before joining America Walks, Mike worked to help Feet First, Washington State's walking advocacy organization, expand their sphere of influence across Washington state. He has worked on numerous public education, legislative, ballot measure and election campaigns – which has given him an abiding faith in the power of organizing and volunteers to create change.   Robert Cruickshank Robert is the Director of Digital Strategy at California YIMBY and Chair of Sierra Club Seattle. A long time communications and political strategist, he was Senior Communications Advisor to Mike McGinn from 2011-2013.   Resources “Seattle Waterfront History Interviews: Cary Moon, Waterfront Coalition” by Dominic Black from HistoryLink   “State Route 99 tunnel - Options and political debate" from Wikipedia   “Remembering broken promises about Bertha” by Josh Cohen from Curbed Seattle   “Fewer drivers in Seattle's Highway 99 tunnel could create need for bailout” by Mike Lindblom from The Seattle Times   “Surface Highway Undermines Seattle's Waterfront Park” by Doug Trumm from The Urbanist   “Seattle Prepares to Open Brand New Elliott Way Highway Connector” by Ryan Packer from The Urbanist   Transcript [00:00:00] Crystal Fincher: Welcome to Hacks & Wonks. I'm Crystal Fincher, and I'm a political consultant and your host. On this show, we talk with policy wonks and political hacks to gather insight into local politics and policy in Washington state through the lens of those doing the work with behind-the-scenes perspectives on what's happening, why it's happening, and what you can do about it. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, the most helpful thing you can do is leave a review wherever you listen to Hacks & Wonks. Full transcripts and resources referenced in the show are always available at officialhacksandwonks.com and in our episode notes. Today, I am very excited to be welcoming Robert Cruickshank and former Mayor Mike McGinn to the show to talk about something that a lot of people have been thinking about, talking about recently - and that is Seattle's new waterfront. We feel like we've spent a decade under construction - from a deep bore tunnel to the tunnel machine getting stuck - that's not even covering all the debate before that, but all of the kind of follies and foibles and challenges that have beset the process of arriving at the waterfront that we have now. And now that we are getting the big reveal, a lot of people have feelings about it. So I thought we would talk about it with one of the people who was at the forefront of criticisms of the tunnel and calling out some red flags that turned out to be a very wise warning - several wise warnings that have come to pass, unfortunately - for not listening to them. But I want to start early on in the beginning, both of you - and I had a short stint in the mayor's office - worked on this, talked about this on the campaign, really got it. But when did you first hear that we needed to replace the viaduct and there were some different opinions about how to make that happen? [00:02:06] Mike McGinn: Okay, so I'm sure I can't pin down a date, but the really important date was, of course, the Nisqually earthquake in 2001. And so it gave the Alaska Way Viaduct a good shake - the decks weren't tied into the columns, the columns were on fill, which could liquefy - and everybody understood that if that quake had been a little stronger and harder, the elevated would come down. Now you might think that that would call for immediately closing the roadway for safety reasons, but what it did call for was for reconstructing it. And you have to remember that highway was really one of the very first limited access highways - it was built long ago and it was just at the end of its useful life anyway. Certainly not built to modern seismic standards or modern engineering standards. So the conversation immediately started and I don't know when everything started to settle into different roles, but the Mayor of Seattle Greg Nickels, was immediately a proponent for a tunnel - and a much larger and more expensive tunnel than what was ultimately built. And it would have been a cut-and-cover tunnel along the waterfront that included a new seawall. So they thought they were solving two things at one time - because the seawall too was rotting away, very old, very unstable. But it would have gone all the way under South Lake Union and emerged onto Aurora Avenue further north, it would have had entrances and exits to Western and Elliott. And I seem to remember the quoted price was like $11 billion. And the state - governor at the time was Christine Gregoire - they were - No, we're replacing the highway. We don't have $11 billion for Seattle. And of course had the support of a lot of lawmakers for obvious reasons - we're not going to give Seattle all that money, we want all that highway money for our districts. And those were immediately presented as the alternatives. And so much of the credit has to go to Cary Moon, who lived on the waterfront and started something called the People's Waterfront Coalition. I think Grant Cogswell, a former City Council candidate - now runs a bookstore down in Mexico City, but wrote a book about the Monorail, worked on the different Monorail campaigns before that - they launched something called the People's Waterfront Coalition. And the basic proposition was - We don't need a highway. This is a great opportunity to get rid of the highway and have a surface street, but if you amp up the transit service - if we invest in transit instead - we can accommodate everyone. And so that was really - as it started - and actually I remember being outside City Hall one day, going to some stakeholder meeting - I went to so many different stakeholder meetings. And I remember Tim Ceis saying to me - he was the Deputy Mayor at the time - You're not supporting that Cary Moon idea - I mean, that's just crazy. I was - Well, actually, Tim. So the Sierra Club was - I was a volunteer leader in the Sierra Club - and the Sierra Club was one of the first organizations - I'm sure there were others, I shouldn't overstate it - but the Sierra Club was persuaded by the wisdom of Cary's idea and supported it in that day. And so that was really how the three different options got launched - no public process, no analysis, no description of what our needs were. The mayor went to a solution, the governor went to a solution - and it was up to members of the public to try to ask them to slow down, stop, and look at something different. [00:05:42] Crystal Fincher: And Robert, how did you first engage with this issue? [00:05:47] Robert Cruickshank: For me, I had just moved to Seattle the first time in the fall of 2001 - so it was about six months after the Nisqually quake - and I came from the Bay Area. And that was where another earthquake had damaged another waterfront highway, the Embarcadero Freeway in San Francisco. And that was where San Francisco had voted - after that quake had damaged their viaduct beyond repair - they voted to tear it down and replace it with the Embarcadero Waterfront, which is a six-lane arterial but they built a lot more transit there. So they did the - what we might call the surface transit option - and it worked really well. It was beautiful. It still is. And so when I came up here and started to learn a little bit about the place I was living and the legacy of the Nisqually quake, I thought - Oh, why don't you just do the same thing here? It worked so well in San Francisco. Let's just tear down this unsightly monstrosity on the waterfront and replace it with a surface boulevard and put in a bunch of transit - San Francisco's made it work successfully. And the more I learned about Seattle, I realized there's a legacy of that here, too. This is a city where we had a freeway revolt, where activists came together and killed the RH Thomson freeway, which would have destroyed the Arboretum. They killed the Bay Freeway, which would have destroyed Pike Place Market. And so I naturally assumed - as being a relatively new resident - that Seattle would stay in that tradition and welcome the opportunity to tear this down and build a great waterfront for people, not cars. But as we'll talk about in a moment, we have a lot of business interests and freight interests and others who had a different vision - who didn't share that community-rooted vision. And I think at numerous points along the way, though, you see people of Seattle saying - No, this is not what we want for our waterfront. We have an opportunity now with the fact that this viaduct nearly collapsed, as Mike mentioned, in the Nisqually quake - we have an opportunity for something really wonderful here. And so I think Cary Moon and then Mike McGinn and others tapped into that - tapped into a really strong community desire to have a better waterfront. I wasn't that politically engaged at the time in the 2000s - I was just a grad student at UW - but just talking to folks who I knew, anytime this came up - God, wouldn't it be wonderful down there if this was oriented towards people and not cars, and we took that thing down? So I think one of the things you're going to see is this contest between the vision that many of us in Seattle had and still have - this beautiful location, beautiful vista on Elliott Bay, that should be for the people of the city - and those in power who have a very different vision and don't really want to share power or ultimately the right-of-way with We the People. [00:08:05] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, definitely. And I was involved in some things at the time - some curious coalitions - but definitely I was around a lot of people who favored either rebuilding the viaduct or the tunnel. Definitely not this roads and transit option - there's no way that's workable. That's pie-in-the-sky talk from those loony greenies over there. What are you talking about? But as this went on - I think no matter what camp people were in - there was always a clear vision articulated and people really focused on the opportunity that this represented, and I think correctly characterized it as - this is one of these generational decisions that we get to make that is going to impact the next generation or two and beyond. And there's an opportunity - the waterfront felt very disconnected with the way things were constructed - it was not easy just to go from downtown to the waterfront. It wasn't friendly for pedestrians. It wasn't friendly for tourists. It just did not feel like a world-class waterfront in a world-class city, and how we see that in so many other cities. You talk about the decision with the Embarcadero, Robert, and looking at - that definitely seemed like a definitive step forward. This was sold as - yeah, we can absolutely take a step forward and finally fix this waterfront and make it what it should have been the whole time. As you thought about the opportunity that this represented, what was the opportunity to you and what did you hear other people saying that they wanted this to be? [00:09:38] Mike McGinn: Yeah, so I think there are - I think that's really important, because I don't think there was a real discussion of what the vision was. People will say there was, but there really wasn't. Because what was baked in and what you're referring to is - well, of course you have to build automobile capacity to replace the existing automobile capacity, right? In fact, this state is still building more highways across the state in the misguided belief that more highway capacity will somehow or another do some good. So this idea that you have to replace and expand highway capacity is extremely powerful in Washington state and across the country. And there were very few examples of highway removal, so that was just a real challenge in the first place - that somehow or other the first priority has to be moving automobiles. For me, at that time I had become - the issue of climate had really penetrated me at that point. And in fact, when Greg Nickels took office and the Sierra Club endorsed him over Paul Schell - I was a local leader in the Sierra Club and a state leader in the Sierra Club - and my goal was that Mayor Nickels would do more than Paul Schell. And Paul Schell, the prior mayor, had done some good things. He had made Seattle City Light climate neutral - we'd gotten out of coal plants and we didn't purchase power from coal plants. He was really progressive on a number of environmental issues and we wanted Mayor Nickels to do more - and Mayor Nickels had stepped up. So we put on a campaign to urge him to do more. And he had stepped up to start something called the Mayors' Climate Protection Initiative - which was the City of Seattle was going to meet the standards of the Kyoto Protocol, which was like the Paris Agreement of its day. And that was - it set an emissions reduction target by a date in the future. And that was really great - in fact, over a thousand cities around the country signed up to the Mayors' Climate Protection Initiative. And I was appointed to a stakeholder group with other leaders - Denis Hayes from the Bullitt Foundation and others - to develop the first climate action plan for a city. Al Gore showed up at the press conference for it - it was a big - it was a BFD and a lot of excitement. And one of the things that was abundantly clear through that process of cataloging the emissions in the City of Seattle and coming up with a plan to reduce them was that our single largest source of emissions at that time was the transportation sector. We'd already gotten off of coal power under Mayor Schell - we received almost all of our electricity from hydroelectric dams. We had good conservation programs. Unlike other parts of the country, transportation was the biggest. Now what's fascinating is now - I don't know if I want to do the math - almost 20 years later, now what we see is that the whole country is in the same place. We're replacing coal and natural gas power plants. And now nationally, the single largest source of emissions is transportation. So how do you fix that? If we're serious about climate - and I thought we should be - because the scientists were telling us about heat waves. They were telling us about forest fires that would blanket the region in smoke. They were telling us about storms that would be bigger than we'd ever seen before. And flooding like we'd never seen and declining snowpack. And it was all going to happen in our futures. Honestly, I remember those predictions from the scientists because they're in the headlines today, every day. So what do we do to stop that? So I was - I had little kids, man - I had little kids, I had three kids. How are we going to stop this? Well, it's Seattle needs to lead - that's what has to happen. We're the progressive city. We're the first one out with a plan. We're going to show how we're going to do it. And if our biggest source is transportation, we should fix that. Well, it should seem obvious that the first thing you should do is stop building and expanding highways, and maybe even change some of the real estate used for cars and make it real estate for walking, biking, and transit. That's pretty straightforward. You also have to work on more housing. And this all led me to starting a nonprofit around all of these things and led to the Sierra Club - I think at a national level - our chapter was much further forward than any other chapter on upzones and backyard cottages and making the transition. So to me, this was the big - that was the vision. That was the opportunity. We're going to tear this down. We're going to make a massive investment in changing the system, and this in fact could be a really transformative piece. That's what motivated me. That climate argument wasn't landing with a whole bunch of other interests. There was certainly a vision from the Downtown and Downtown property owners and residents that - boy, wouldn't it be great to get rid of that elevated highway because that's terrible. There was also a vision from the people who still believed in highway capacity and that includes some of our major employers at the time and today - Boeing and Microsoft, they have facilities in the suburbs around Seattle - they think we need highway capacity. As well as all of the Port businesses, as well as all the maritime unions - thought that this highway connection here was somehow critical to their survival, the industrial areas. And then they wanted the capacity. So there were very strong competing visions. And I think it's fair to say that highway capacity is a vision - we've seen that one is now fulfilled. The second priority was an enhanced physical environment to enhance the property values of Downtown property owners. And they cut the deal with the highway capacity people - okay, we're here for your highway capacity, but we have to get some amenities. And the climate folks, I'm not seeing it - never a priority of any of the leaders - just wasn't a priority. [00:15:44] Crystal Fincher: How did you see those factions come into play and break down, Robert? [00:15:48] Robert Cruickshank: It was interesting. This all comes to a head in the late 2000s. And remembering back to that time, this is where Seattle is leading the fight to take on the climate and the fight against George W. Bush, who was seen as this avatar of and deeply connected to the oil industry. Someone who - one of his first things when he took office - he did was withdraw the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol, which is the earlier version of what's now known as the Paris Agreement - global agreement to try to lower emissions. And so Seattle, in resisting Bush - that's where Greg Nickels became a national figure by leading the Mayors' Climate Action Group - not just say we're going to take on climate, we're going to do something about really de facto fighting back against Bush. And then Hurricane Katrina in 2005, Al Gore comes out with An Inconvenient Truth. And by 2007, people in Seattle are talking a lot about climate and how we need to do something about climate. But then what you see happening is the limits of that - what are people really actually willing to do and willing to support? The other piece that comes together, I think - in the 2000s - is a revival of the City itself. Seattle spends the late 20th century after the Boeing bust - since the 70s "Will the last person out of Seattle turn out the lights," recovering in the 80s somewhat, recovering in the 90s, and then the tech boom. And by the 2000s, Seattle is a destination city for young people coming to live here and living in apartments and working in the tech industry. I think that unsettles a lot of people. One thing that really stood out to me about the discussion about what to do on the waterfront was this vision from old school folks - like Joel Connelly and others - we've got to preserve that working waterfront. And it's very much the sense that blue collar working class labor is under threat - not from corporate power, but from a 20-something millennial with a laptop working at Amazon who comes to Seattle and thinks - Gosh, why is this ugly viaduct here? It's unsafe. Why don't we just tear it down and have a wonderful waterfront view? And those who are offended by this idea - who are so wedded to the 20th century model that we're going to drive everywhere, cars, freedom - this is where you see the limits of willingness to actually do something on climate. People don't actually want to give up their cars. They're afraid they're going to sacrifice their way of life. And you start to see this weird but powerful constellation come together where rather than having a discussion about transportation planning or even a discussion about climate action, we're having this weird discussion about culture. And it becomes a culture war. And the thing about a culture war is people pushing change are never actually trying to fight a war. They're just - This is a good idea. Why don't we do this? We all say these - we care about these values. And the people who don't want it just dig in and get really nasty and fight back. And so you start to see Cary Moon, People's Waterfront Coalition, Mike McGinn, and others get attacked as not wanting working class jobs, not wanting a working waterfront, not caring about how people are going to get to work, not caring about how the freight trucks are going to get around even though you're proposing a tunnel from the Port to Wallingford where - it's not exactly an industrial hub - there are some businesses there. But dumping all these cars out or in South Lake Union, it's like, what is going on here? It doesn't add up. But it became this powerful moment where a competing vision of the City - which those of us who saw a better future for Seattle didn't see any competition as necessary at all - those who are wedded to that model where we're going to drive everywhere, we're going to have trucks everywhere, really saw that under threat for other reasons. And they decided this is where they're going to make their stand. This is where they're going to make that fight. And that turned out to be pretty useful for the Port, the freight groups, the establishment democratic leaders who had already decided for their own reasons this is what they wanted too. [00:19:11] Mike McGinn: It's important to recognize too, in this, is to follow the money. And I think that this is true for highway construction generally. You have a big section of the economy - there's a section of the economy that believes in it, as Robert was saying, right? And I do think the culture war stuff is fully there - that somehow or another a bike lane in an industrial area will cause the failure of business. Although if you went to the bike - outside the industrial building - you'll find a bunch of the workers' bike there, right? Because it's affordable and efficient. So there's this weird belief that just isn't true - that you can't accommodate industry and transit and walking and biking. Of course you can. And in fact, adding all the cars is bad for freight movement because of all the traffic jams. So there's that belief, but there's also a whole bunch of people - I mentioned Downtown property owners - that gets you to your Downtown Seattle Association. The value of their property is going to be dramatically enhanced by burying, by eliminating the waterfront highway. But then you also have all of the people who build highways and all of the people who support the people who build highways. Who's going to float $4 billion in bonds? It's going to be a Downtown law firm. And by the way, the person who worked for that Downtown law firm and did the bond work was the head of the greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at that time. So you have the engineering firms, you have the material providers, and then you have the union jobs that go with it. So really at this point - and this isn't just about the waterfront highway, this could be any highway expansion - you've captured the business community because a big chunk of the business community will get direct dollars from the government to them. And you've actually captured a significant chunk of the labor community as well, because labor fights for labor jobs. In the big picture, service workers are taking transit, service workers need housing in town, and you can start to see a split - like in my ultimate run for mayor, I won some service worker unions, never won any construction trades. In fact, they held a rally my first year in office to denounce me, right? Because I was standing in the way of jobs. So that's a really powerful coalition. And I think what you see today in the country as a whole - as you know, I'm the ED of America Walks, so I get to see a lot more - this is a pattern. Highways aren't really supported by the public. They don't go to the public for public votes on highways anymore - the public wouldn't support it. And in fact, the data suggests the public gets that building more highway lanes won't solve everything. But you've got a big, big chunk of the economy that's gotten extremely used to billions and billions of dollars flowing into their pockets. And they need to protect that in every year. So you get that level of intensity around - Look, we're talking about $4 billion on the waterfront and a bunch of that money's coming to us. Better believe it's a good idea, and what are you talking about, climate? [00:22:03] Robert Cruickshank: You talk about public votes, and I think there are three crucial public votes we got to talk about. One is 2007, when these advisory votes are on the ballot - and they're not binding, but they're advisory. Do you want to rebuild the viaduct or build a tunnel? They both get rejected. And then the next big vote is 2009, the mayoral election, where Mike McGinn becomes mayor - in part by channeling public frustration at this giant boondoggle. And then ultimately, the last public vote on this, 2011 - in June, I believe it was, it was in August - about whether we go forward or not and the public by this point, fatigued and beaten down by The Seattle Times, decides let's just move on from this. [00:22:43] Mike McGinn: There's no other alternative. And it is worth returning to that early vote, because it was such a fascinating moment, because - I think the mayor's office didn't want to put his expansive tunnel option in a direct vote against the new elevated, fearing it would lose. So they engineered an agreement with the governor that each one would get a separate up or down vote. And by the way, Tim Ceis, the Deputy Mayor at the time, called in the Sierra Club, briefed us on it, and one of our members said - What would happen if they both got voted down? And Deputy Mayor Ceis said - by the way, Tim Ceis has got a big contract right now from Mayor Harrell, longtime tunnel supporter. Tim Ceis is the consultant for most of the business side candidates. Tim Burgess, another big supporter of the tunnel, now works for Mayor Harrell. Oh, and Christine Gregoire has been hired by the biggest corporations in the region to do their work for them as well. So there's a pretty good payoff if you stick around and support the right side of this stuff. But anyway, Mayor Ceis, Deputy Mayor Tim Ceis, when said, What happens if they're both voted down? He goes - Well, that would be chaos. You don't want that, do you? And I remember all of us just kind of looked at each other - and we all went out on the sidewalk, there were like six of us. And we went - We want that, right? And so we joined in and supported the No and No campaign. And The Stranger came in really hard. And I think Erica Barnett wrote the articles. And Cary Moon was in on it. And the defeat of that, for the first time, opened up the possibility - Well, let's think about something else. And so a stakeholder group was formed. Cary Moon was appointed. Mike O'Brien was appointed. The waterfront guys were appointed. And the Downtown folks were appointed. And the labor folks were appointed. And I think a really important part of the story here is that it was advisory - they weren't making the decisions, it was advisory. But they got to a point at which the head of the State DOT, the head of the Seattle DOT, and the head of the King County DOT all expressed to their respective executives that surface transit worked and was worth it. And this was extremely distressing to the business community. So they mounted a big lobbying push and went straight to Gregoire. And Gregoire, for the first time, became a tunnel supporter. And they were promised that this new tunneling technology - the deep bore tunnel - would solve the cost issues of the deep bore tunnel. And not only that, the state's commitment, which to date was $2.4 billion - they had committed $2.4 billion to a rebuild - the state wouldn't have to pay anymore, because the Port would put in $300 million and they would raise $400 million from tolling. And coincidentally, the amount they thought they could raise from tolling was the exact amount needed to meet the projected cost of using the deep bore tunnel boring machine. So the deal was cut and announced. And the whole stakeholder group and the recommendations from the DOT heads were abandoned. And that occurred, basically, late 2008, early 2009 - the deal was made. And that was about the time that I was contemplating - well, I think I'd already decided to run, but I had not yet announced. [00:26:14] Crystal Fincher: And this was an interesting time, especially during that vote. Because at that time, I had an eye into what the business community was doing and thinking, and it was clear that their numbers didn't add up. [00:26:26] Mike McGinn: Oh my God - no. [00:26:28] Crystal Fincher: But they just did not want to face that. And what they knew is they had enough money and resources to throw at this issue and to throw at a marketing effort to obfuscate that, that they wouldn't have to worry about it. And there was this sense of offense, of indignation that - Who are these people trying to come up and tell us that we don't need freight capacity, that we don't need - that this extra highway capacity, don't they understand how important these freeways are? Who are these people who just don't understand how our economy works? [00:27:02] Mike McGinn: They were the grownups who really understood how things worked. And we were the upstarts who didn't understand anything. But there's a great line from Willie Brown talking about - I think the Transbay Bridge, and Robert can correct the name, in California, which was way over budget. And people were lamenting that the early estimates had been made up. And he goes - Look, this is how it works. You just need to dig a hole in the ground so deep that the only way to fill it up is with money. I think that's pretty much the quote. So that's the strategy. You get it started. Of course you have rosy estimates. And then you just have that commitment, and it's the job of legislators to come up with the cost overruns, dollars later. [00:27:43] Robert Cruickshank: And I think it's so key to understand this moment here in the late 2000s, where the public had already weighed in. I remember voting - it was the last thing I voted on before I moved to California for four years. I'm like no - I was No and No. And that's where the Seattle voters were. They rejected both options. And then you start to hear, coming out of the stakeholder group - Okay, we can make the surface transit option work. And I left town thinking - Alright, that's what's going to happen, just like the Embarcadero in San Francisco and done. And the next thing I hear in late 2008, early 2009, there's this deal that's been cut and all of a sudden a deep bore tunnel is on the table. And this is Seattle politics in a nutshell. I think people look back and think that because we are this smart, progressive technocratic city - those people who live here are - we think that our government works the same way. And it doesn't. This is - time and time again, the public will make its expression felt. They'll weigh in with opinion poll or protest or vote. And the powers that be will say - Well, actually, we want to do this thing instead. We'll cook it up in a backroom. We're going to jam it on all of you, and you're going to like it. And if you don't like it, then we're going to start marshaling resources. We're gonna throw a bunch of money at it. We'll get The Seattle Times to weigh in and pound away at the enemy. And that's how politics works here - that's how so much of our transportation system is built and managed. And so people today, in 2023, looking at this monstrosity on the waterfront that we have now think - How did we get here? Who planned this? It was planned in a backroom without public involvement. And I think that's a thing that has to be understood because that, as we just heard, was baked in from the very start. [00:29:11] Mike McGinn: Well, Robert, the idea of a deep bore tunnel was brought forward by a representative of the Discovery Institute, who you may know as the folks that believe in creationism. [00:29:21] Robert Cruickshank: Well, and not only that, the Discovery Institute is responsible for turning Christopher Rufo from a failed Seattle City Council candidate in 2019 into a national figure. [00:29:31] Mike McGinn: The Discovery Institute, with money from local donors - major, very wealthy local folks - they actually had a long-term plan to turn all of 99 into a limited access freeway. It's like - we need to get rid of that First Avenue South and Highway 99 and Aurora Avenue stuff - all of that should be a freeway. So they were the architects of the idea of - Hey, this deep bore tunnel is the solution. But Robert's point is just right on - transportation policy was driven by power and money, not by transportation needs, or climate needs, or equity needs, or even local economy needs really. When you get right down to it, our city runs on transit - that's what really matters. Our city runs on the fact that it's a city where people can walk from place to place. The idea that our economic future was tied to a highway that would skip Downtown - the most valuable place in the Pacific Northwest, Downtown Seattle. No, that's not really what powers our economy. But it certainly worked for the people that were going to get the dollars that flowed from folks and for the people who own Downtown property. [00:30:42] Crystal Fincher: And I want to talk about money and power with this. Who were the people in power? What was the Council at that time? Who made these decisions? [00:30:50] Mike McGinn: The Council at the time was elected citywide. And I think some people have concerns about district representation, but one of the things that citywide elections meant at the time was that you had to run a citywide campaign, and that's expensive. There's no way to knock on enough doors citywide. I did not have a lot of money when I ran for mayor, but at least I had the media attention that would go to a mayoral candidate. A City Council candidate would kind of flow under the radar. So you had people come from different places, right? They might come from the business side, they might come from the labor side. But ultimately, they would tend to make peace with the other major players - because only business and only labor could finance a campaign. They were the only ones with the resources to do that. So the other interests - the environmentalists, the social service folks, neighborhood advocates of whatever stripe - we chose from amongst the candidates that were elevated by, they would unify - in some cases, the business and labor folks would unify around a candidate. In fact, that's what we saw in the last two mayoral elections as well, where they pick a candidate. And so this doesn't leave much room. So when I was mayor, almost the entire council was aligned with the Greater Seattle Chamber of Commerce at that time, either endorsed by them or had made their peace with them so the challenger was not being financed. So Robert said something about those outsiders - I went under the radar screen as a candidate at the beginning of my campaign. When I entered the race, nobody was running because everybody thought that Greg Nickels had the institutional support locked down. [00:32:33] Crystal Fincher: But then a snowstorm happened. [00:32:35] Mike McGinn: Well, it was even before that - honestly, everybody thought that he could win. And long before the snowstorm, I was like - We're getting a new mayor. And I was actually looking around to try to figure out who it was going to be - because I wanted a mayor who actually believed in climate, who had my values. But nobody - I was looking through who the people were that might run, and it dawned on me - Well, nobody's going to run. But we're going to get a new mayor and I have my values - and I've actually run ballot measure campaigns and had a very modest base of support. So I was really the first one in the race that got any attention. So I got some great media attention off that. Then my opponent in the general, Joe Mallahan - whatever else you may think about Joe Mallahan - he actually saw it too. He saw that there was an opening. And then we were joined by a long-time City Councilmember, Jan Drago. And I remember the headline from The Seattle Times or the comments at the time was - Okay, now it's a real race. But it just really wasn't. So I was really under the radar screen in that race because they were disregarding me. But there was in fact a lot of anger about the tunnel. There was a lot of just - Greg, for whatever his positives or negatives that history will deal with - and by the way, I actually think Greg did a lot of good. I just was disappointed in his highway policies and his climate policies at the end of the day - I have a lot of respect for Greg Nickels, but he wasn't going to win that race. And I came out of the primary against Joe Mallahan. And all of a sudden we had these two outsiders and the business community's freaking out. All of it - I remember watching it - all of the support, the business support shifted to Joe. It took about a month, it took a few weeks. But all of a sudden - there was actually one week where I think I raised more money than he did, that was pretty unusual - and then all of a sudden all the money was pouring in. And boy, did Joe believe in that tunnel. And did Joe believe in what the Chamber of Commerce wanted to do. In fact, he believed in it so much that he believed that Seattle should pay cost overruns if there were cost overruns on the tunnel - an admission I got from him during the televised debate, I was shocked he admitted to it. [00:34:41] Crystal Fincher: I remember that debate. [00:34:43] Mike McGinn: Yeah. So you were kind of asking about how politics worked. It was really something. Yeah - here's another memory. About two weeks before the election, the City Council took - three weeks before the, two, three weeks, four weeks - they took a vote to say that the tunnel was their choice. Even though there's a mayoral election in which the tunnel is on the ballot, so to speak - in terms of the issues of the candidates - they took a vote for no reason to say it was a done deal. And then WSDOT released a video of the elevated collapsing in a highway, which is the first time a public disclosure request from a third party was ever given straight to a TV station, I think, in my experience in Seattle. I had Gregoire and the DOT folks down there working on that campaign too - their tunnel was threatened. So it really was something how - I indeed was kind of shocked at - it was such a learning experience for me - how much the ranks closed around this. I didn't appreciate it. I had my own nonprofit, I had been on stakeholder committees, I'd worked with a lot of people that weren't just Sierra Club members and neighborhood types. I'd worked with a lot of business people, many of whom had supported my nonprofit because they liked its vision. But they were very clear with me that as long as I supported the surface transit option, there was no way they could be associated with my run for mayor in any way, shape, or form - even if they liked me. It was a complete lockdown - right after the primary where Greg lost the primary and it was me and Joe, I was - Okay, open field running. I can now reach out to these people. There's no incumbent - maybe some of them can support me now. And they were abundantly clear on all of those phone calls that - Nope, can't do it. Until you change your position on the tunnel, we just can't do it. We have business in this town, Mike. We have relationships in this town. We cannot do that. So it was a real lockdown - politically. [00:36:38] Crystal Fincher: That was also a big learning experience for me - watching that consolidation, watching how not only were they fighting for the tunnel against you and making the fight against you a fight about the tunnel, but the enforcement to those third parties that you were talking about that - Hey, if you play ball with him, you're cut off. And those kinds of threats and that kind of dealing - watching that happen was very formative for me. I'm like - Okay, I see how this works, and this is kind of insidious. And if you are branded as an outsider, if you don't play ball, if you don't kiss the ring of the adults in the room - which is definitely what they considered themselves - then you're on the outs and they're at war. And it was really a war footing against you and the campaign. Who was on the Council at that time? [00:37:30] Mike McGinn: Oh my God. Let me see if I can go through the list. No, and it really, it was - your point about it was a war footing was not something that I fully, that I did not appreciate until actually going through that experience - how unified that would be. Excuse me. The City Council chair was Tim Burgess at the time. Bruce Harrell was on the Council. Sally Clark, Richard Conlin, Nick Licata. Mike O'Brien was running on the same platform as me with regard to the tunnel and he'd just been elected. Jean Godden, Sally Bagshaw. I hope I'm not leaving anything out - because - [00:38:04] Robert Cruickshank: Tom Rasmussen will forgive you. [00:38:06] Mike McGinn: Tom Rasmussen. Yeah - because City Councilmembers would get really offended if you didn't thank them publicly - that was another thing I had to learn. You have to publicly thank any other politician on stage with you or they held a grudge. Yeah. So I had - I didn't know all the politicians' rules when I started. [00:38:25] Crystal Fincher: There are so many rules. [00:38:27] Mike McGinn: There are so many, there's so many rules. But really what you saw then was that the Council tended to move in lockstep on many issues - because if they all voted together and they all worked citywide, there was protection. None of them could be singled out. So it was very - and it's not to say that some of them didn't take principled votes and would find themselves on an 8-1 position sometimes, but for the most part, it was much, much safer to be - it was much, much safer to vote as a group. And they tended to do that. And they had coalesced around the tunnel, except for O'Brien. And that could not be shaken by anything we brought to bear. [00:39:04] Robert Cruickshank: And this is wrapped up in not just the electoral politics, but the power politics. Because Mike McGinn comes in - mayor leading the 7th floor of City Hall, the head of City government - and smart guy, nice guy, willing to talk to anybody. But is not from their crew, is not from that group. And as Crystal and Mike said, the ranks were closed from the start. This is - again, 2009, 2010 - when nationally Mitch McConnell is quoted as saying, It's his ambition to make Obama a one-term president. I don't know if he's ever caught on record, but I would be quite certain that Tim Burgess would have said the exact same thing - that his ambition was to make Mike McGinn a one-term mayor. As it turned out in 2013, Tim Burgess wanted his job - one of the candidates running for it. So these are all people who have a reason to close ranks against Mike McGinn and to use a tunnel as a bludgeon against him to do so. [00:39:58] Mike McGinn: There were other bludgeons. After I won the general election and before I took office, they passed their annual budget - they cut the mayor's office budget by a third before I even took office. Just boom - I know - they were determined, they were determined. And so that was when the planning - that council then and with WSDOT - that was when basically the contours of the waterfront were locked into place, including what we now see as that very wide surface road. That was that Council. So if you're wondering, if you're looking at that going - Okay, wow, who decided that and where did it come from? Again, our current mayor and his current advisor and others - they've always been for that. Building that big surface road has always been the plan to go along with the tunnel, because highway capacity was their highest priority. And the park on the waterfront, along with a lot of money into the aquarium and into these new structures - that's their signature thing for so many other people. But the idea that you should, that there was an opportunity to transform our transportation system and transform our city to make it more equitable and climate friendly was never a priority in this process. Just wasn't. [00:41:20] Crystal Fincher: It was never a priority. It was never seriously considered. And to me, through this process - lots of people know, have talked about it on the show before - I actually didn't start off Team McGinn. I wound up Team McGinn - didn't start off that way. But through that - and you won me over with logic - it was you being proven right on several things. You pointed out that their projections, their traffic projections were just so far out of left field that there was no way that they were going to come close. And they even had to come down on their projections before we even saw the traffic - the actual traffic turned out to be lower. You were right on that one - the laughable - [00:41:59] Mike McGinn: They're under 40,000 cars a day - for a highway that was carrying 110,000 cars a day beforehand. So even as a traffic solution - to put that into context, 40,000 cars a day is like the Ballard Bridge. And I can guarantee you the replacement costs of the Ballard Bridge is not $4 billion or $3.1 billion. The E Line, I think, carries 15,000 people a day. Metro carries 220,000 people a day. What you could do with that $3.1 billion or $4 billion in terms of bus lanes, bike lanes, rolling stock for Metro, maybe pay raises for bus drivers so that we could actually have service - you could do so much with those billions of dollars. And we put it all into moving 40,000 cars a day? It's just pathetic. That's three Rapid Ride lines we could have had for a 10th of the cost, or even less. I think the investments in Rapid Ride lines are about $50-100 million a line to make the capital investments to make it work. So the waste - even if you don't care about climate, the waste of dollars - and who's paying those taxes? To a great degree, we have the most regressive state and local tax system in the nation. And we'll have a ballot measure soon, and I know a lot of environmentalists will be out there if the package spends for the right thing saying - Hey, we need money for local streets. Imagine if we'd taken that gas tax money and the Legislature had allowed cities and towns to use it to improve their streets - which they can do. I know that the constitution says highway purposes, but when you read highway purposes, it says roads and bridges. It includes everything. You can use gas taxes for anything that improves the road. And they do. WSDOT has used gas taxes to pay for bike lanes and sidewalks. It's legal. That's a choice. So we're driving around potholed streets. We have - we're putting up little plastic dividers because we care more about the car getting hurt than the bicyclist on the other side of that plastic divider. We're watching our transit service melt away because we can't pay bus drivers enough. But hey, man, somebody's got a really rapid - 3,000 people a day get to skip Downtown in their private vehicles. Where are our priorities for equity? Where are the priorities for economy, or even just plain old-fashioned fiscal prudence? None of that was there - because all of those dollars were going to fund the needs of the most powerful people in the City. And they captured those dollars - and all of us will pay the taxes, all of us will breathe the smoky air, and all of us will watch our streets deteriorate and our transit service evaporate. [00:44:52] Crystal Fincher: Yeah. And to me, it was such a foundational lesson that the people that we have making decisions really matter - and that we have to really explore their records, their donors, their histories - because over and over again, we look at the decisions that wind up being made that frequently conflict with campaign promises, but that very, very rarely conflict with their donor rolls. [00:45:16] Mike McGinn: And yes - and every one of them knows how to make the value statements. So if I had any advice for people in this year's election - everyone is going to say they care about housing, everyone's going to say they think biking safe. I don't - one of the things that I came away with - I don't care about the goals you put into some policy anymore. Show me the hard physical action you will take that might piss somebody off, but you're willing to do it because it's right. And if you can't do that, then your value statements are meaningless. So take a look - who actually, and that's the question I always ask candidates for office - Tell me about a time you did something hard that might've caused you criticism, but you did it because it was right. Or that you made somebody who was an ally or friend upset, but you did it because it was right. Tell me about that time. [00:46:04] Crystal Fincher: Yeah, it's a challenge. And to your point and learning through just watching how people operated through that and some other processes - but that certainly was a big learning for me - is the role of coalitions, the role of accountability, and understanding. You have always had your finger on the pulse of Seattle, really - you're extraordinarily good at that. You're actually - both of you - are great strategists. But our political class is so detached from that sometimes - certainly I'm feeling frustration at some recent actions by our Legislature - we just had our special session day where they increased criminalization of substances, personal possession of substances - just reflecting on legislation to provide school, kids with free meals at school, things that seem like really basic and foundational that we should be able to land this. If we can call a special session to hand Boeing billions of dollars, we should be able to feed kids, right? [00:47:00] Mike McGinn: At the time we were cutting school budgets - when we found money for that. But I don't want to be too gloomy. And then I want to turn it over to Robert to get a last word in here, 'cause I just loved - his analysis is so awesome. I don't want to be too gloomy because - I look at what happened in the Legislature this year on housing, that we're finally going to allow housing, people to build more housing in places so people can actually live closer to their jobs and live more affordably. 10 years ago, we would have thought that was impossible. There's a lot of hard organizing that did it. At America Walks, we're the host of the Freeway Fighters Networks - there are people in 40 cities or more around the country that are organizing to remove highways. And while it's just a small amount of money compared to the amount going to highway expansion, there's actually federal funds to study and remove highways. So it's a long, hard slog. What felt for us - for Robert and me and Cary Moon and others fighting this - which felt like an impossible fight at the time is a fight that is now winning in places. Not winning enough - we're not winning fast enough - but it can change. And so that's - I don't want to be too negative. They got money, but organizing and people - and we actually have the public with us on this, just like we have the public with us on housing. So we just have to do more. We just got to keep at it, folks - got to keep at it. We can win this one. Don't allow this story of how hard it was to deal with the unified political class in the City of Seattle for their climate arson - should not deter you. It should inspire you, 'cause I actually won the mayor's office and we actually did do a lot of good. And the next fight is right in front of us again today, so get in it people. We need you. [00:48:46] Robert Cruickshank: I think that's spot on. And I remember coming to work in your office at the very beginning of 2011, when it seemed like the tunnel was just dominating discussion, but not in the mayor's office, right? When I joined, I fully expected to be like - roll my sleeves up to take on that tunnel. Instead, I'm working on the mayor's jobs plan, the Families and Education Levy, on transit. That's the stuff that was really getting done, and I think McGinn left a really great legacy on that. But we didn't win the tunnel fight. And I think we've diagnosed many of the reasons why, but one thing that really stands out to me as I look back from 12, 13 years distance is we didn't have the same density of genuinely progressive and social democratic organizations and people and leaders in Seattle that we have now. I think that matters because Mike's been talking about what's the next fight. I think one of the big fights coming up next year - when it comes time to renew that Move Seattle Levy - that's nearly a billion dollars that's going to be on the table. And we keep getting promised - when we are asked to approve these massive levies - that a lot of that money is going to go to safe streets, it's going to go to protect vulnerable users, we're going to do something to finally get towards Vision Zero. And instead it all gets taken away to build more car infrastructure. At what point do we finally stand - literally in the road - and say, No more. Do we look at the broken promises on the waterfront where we were promised a beautiful pedestrian-friendly waterfront and got another car sewer? We're going to have to organize and come together. We have many more groups now and many more leaders who are willing to stand up and say - We're not passing this levy unless it actually focuses on safe streets, unless it focuses on pedestrians and cyclists and transit users, and gives iron-clad promises to make sure stuff gets built so that some future mayor can't just walk in and start canceling projects left and right that we were promised. That's the lesson I take from this is - we're better organized now, we have more resources now, but it's still going to be a slog, and we're going to have to stand our ground - otherwise we get rolled. [00:50:34] Crystal Fincher: Absolutely. I thank you both for this conversation today - reflections on the tunnel fight, how it came to be, what it was like in the middle of it, and the lessons that we take moving forward in these elections that we have coming up this year, next year, and beyond. Thanks so much for the conversation. [00:50:50] Mike McGinn: Thank you, Crystal. [00:50:51] Robert Cruickshank: Thank you - it's been wonderful. [00:50:52] Crystal Fincher: Thank you for listening to Hacks & Wonks, which is co-produced by Shannon Cheng and Bryce Cannatelli. You can follow Hacks & Wonks on Twitter @HacksWonks. You can catch Hacks & Wonks on iTunes, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts - just type "Hacks and Wonks" into the search bar. Be sure to subscribe to the podcast to get the full versions of our Friday almost-live shows and our midweek show delivered to your podcast feed. If you like us, leave a review wherever you listen. You can also get a full transcript of this episode and links to the resources referenced in the show at officialhacksandwonks.com and in the episode notes. Thanks for tuning in - talk to you next time.

Today's guest is Jesse Burrell   Jesse is the co-founder and CEO of real estate data and technology leader BatchService. He previously spent 10 years in the real estate market where he did more than 500 wholesale deals, sold more than 50 flips, and built a successful REI business. Join Sam and Jesse in today's episode. -------------------------------------------------------------- Proprietary Algorithm for Data Cleaning [00:00:00]   Jesse's Real Estate Investing Journey [00:01:23]   Challenges of Data Quality and Overcoming Them [00:06:50]   Building a team [00:08:05]   Developing leadership skills [00:09:18]   Developing processes [00:12:01]   Challenges of finding parking lot owners [00:15:26]   LLCs and corporate veil [00:16:57]   Real estate investment opportunities [00:19:05] -------------------------------------------------------------- Connect with Jesse:   LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/jesse-burrell/ Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/jesseburrell/ Tik Tok - https://www.tiktok.com/@jesse_burrell REI ebook: https://batchleads.io/blog/real-estate-investing/real-estate-investing-secrets-the-pros-dont-usually-share   Connect with Sam: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/ Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com   SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f -------------------------------------------------------------- Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Jesse Burrell (00:00:00) - We've created a proprietary algorithm to where we're, we're pulling from a bunch of different vendors, um, cleaning, testing, and then we also have, um, a dialing and testing platform to where we're able to validate and, and use, um, information to where we could see, you know, uh, not necessarily what's right, but for bad numbers. Like numbers that are actually no longer numbers. We're able to extract those out and make sure that people aren't calling a dead phone number or having that pull up into their list because time is money. And the cleaner we could have the data, the more right party contacts we could have for, for people to call through and get in touch with homeowners that may or may not wanna sell their houses. Um, it's something we put a lot of time and effort into.   Intro (00:00:45) - Welcome to the How to scale commercial real estate show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.   Sam Wilson (00:00:58) - Jesse Burrell is the co-founder and c e o of real estate data and technology leader batch service. Jesse's got a wealth of experience from wholesaling. Reynolds Flips, multi-family, you name it, he's done it. Jesse, welcome to the show.   Jesse Burrell (00:01:12) - Sam, thanks so much for having me on. Excited to be here. Absolutely,   Sam Wilson (00:01:15) - Jesse, the pleasure is mine. There are three questions I ask every guest who comes on the show in 90 seconds or less. Can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now, and how did you get there?   Jesse Burrell (00:01:23) - Where did I start? I started working for, uh, out-of-state. I'm in Phoenix, an out-of-state investor, uh, in California. He was buying in, you know, 20 14, 20 15. I was basically a acquisition rep for him, finding on market deals, you know, pre foreclosures and short sales. I would call agents, negotiate distressed properties and he'd either flip 'em or he'd, uh, turn 'em into rentals and then sell 'em off to, uh, his friends and his property management company. So that's how I got started. Uh, what was the next one?   Sam Wilson (00:01:56) - Where are you, where'd you start? Where are you now? This's question number two,   Jesse Burrell (00:01:59) - Where am I now? Now, uh, I'm the c e o of actually a real estate data and technology company. So, uh, active or real estate investing isn't my active income anymore. It was for about six years, and we started to try and build software solutions for my investing company and it, it turned into such a big thing that, um, I mainly invest into some syndications, buy some multi-family, some commercial here and there, but really focused on just making sure real estate investors could go find deals on or off the market. That simple.   Sam Wilson (00:02:34) - Man, that's awesome. I love that. What was, what finally gave you this idea that said, Hey, I can start, it's batch service, right?   Jesse Burrell (00:02:43) - Yeah,   Sam Wilson (00:02:43) - Batch service. Okay. Sorry, I'm sitting here looking at this going, my notes, my notes have are, are off this screen. But, but what gave you the idea that you could start batch service and and, and then turn it into a product that you can market then to other end users?   Jesse Burrell (00:02:56) - Yeah, I, uh, I mean, just in the real estate technology and software space five, six years ago, there wasn't much there. There wasn't even ways to, you know, curate lists and keep data managed and, you know, there wasn't good ways to go skip trace and unmask property information. And we were trying to streamline it for our specific business to be more successful. And we soon realized that we had something on our hands and just started servicing the community and it came to an inflection point to where do we continue to compete against the community or just serve them since we were doing it as well. And, uh, you know, I I just love helping people and I love this. And I had been doing real estate investing full-time for a while and it was a new challenge and opportunity and I'm still able to invest. Uh, it's just not, you know, my primary income anymore. And, you know, ultimately that's probably how most people would like it is, you know, not having to chase every deal forever. But man, it's lucrative. And golly, it changed my life to be honest with you. You know, I was serving tables and working at golf courses, uh, you know, before I started working for a real estate investor. So real estate definitely changed my life in so many good ways, man,   Sam Wilson (00:04:12) - That's really, really cool. What was the, what was the, the turning point for you for when you said, cause I think a lot of people struggle with focus, but for you when you said, all right, look, we're gonna sell whatever it is of your portfolio and I'm gonna focus on batch service and just be that service provider to, uh, the rest of the, of the, of the real estate industry. When did that happen and why?   Jesse Burrell (00:04:35) - Yeah, we were spread too thin trying to run, uh, multiple businesses and to, to scale a software company like at scale and really pour into your team and grow it. Uh, we, we just couldn't have a bunch of small businesses. We had to choose to go all in on something and truly commit to it. And I, I see a lot of, um, I guess, you know, a lot of people that own small businesses want to own a bunch of small businesses instead of trying scaling one, it's actually more profitable and less of a headache if you do it with that way. And, um, just because you can make 10, 20, $30,000 a month, uh, spooling something new up that's still diverting time away from your other business or businesses to where, uh, some of the most successful people I've talked to is, you know, how much more could you have made if you went all in and is your company sellable? If you have a bunch of small businesses, people aren't gonna wanna buy those. Um, you're always gonna have to work in them and manage people working in them. So it was just a, a decision me and my founding partners decided to make. And uh, it's been a pretty good one luckily for us,   Sam Wilson (00:05:43) - Man. And those are hard decisions. I will, I will say that cuz cuz I think, I think as entrepreneurs we struggle, we struggle to say no because we, all we see is opportunity where it's like, I agree, oh, that's cool, that's cool, let's go do that. And then like you said, you've now diluted your efforts to a point to where it's, you know, you're ineffective at best at all of them as opposed to being amazing, uh, at one. The, the thing I want to hear about here, I wanna talk really dive into batch service, what you guys do a little bit more and, and just get the nuts and bolts of it. I mean, I've done plenty of my own back in the day, database building, skip tracing, finding, finding owners, and there's, there's this and that. You know, what I've found is that the quality, and I've not tried your service, so I'm not telling you yours is the same way. Clearly it's not, but Right. The quality of the data you could buy was okay at best. Oftentimes the phone numbers didn't work. Stuff like that. I mean, how, how have you guys overcome, I guess, that challenge of unmasking the, uh, unmasking the owners making that data clean? I mean, it's gotta be a constant work in progress. No,   Jesse Burrell (00:06:50) - Uh, it is and it's, it's very expensive. We have, uh, honor engineering and data science team, and I just call it our whole entire product side. We, we have over 90 people that work for us. Wow. So we have a lot of people, we have some very brilliant people and we aggregate and clean from a lot of different sources. There's a lot of big industry leaders that, that have data or phone numbers, and they just sell what they have. We're, we've created a proprietary algorithm to where we're, we're pulling from a bunch of different vendors, um, cleaning, testing, and then we also have, um, a dialing and texting platform to where we're able to validate and, and use, um, information to where we could see, you know, uh, not necessarily what's right, but for bad numbers, like numbers that are actually no longer numbers. We're able to extract those out and make sure that people aren't calling a dead phone number or having that pull up into their list because time is money. And the cleaner we could have the data, the more right party contacts we could have for, for people to call through and get in touch with homeowners that may or may not wanna sell their houses. Um, it's something we put a lot of time and effort into.   Sam Wilson (00:08:05) - Yeah. I can only imagine 90 people on the product side. I mean, building a team, building a team of that size with the skillset, you know, that that is needed to do what you guys are doing. Tell me, tell me how you got that done. What were some of the challenges there or some of the, uh, things you feel like you did really well in building a team like that? I bet that's a story all in itself.   Jesse Burrell (00:08:25) - Yeah. Uh, I have a very smart co-founder that's good on the product side, but, uh, it's really, uh, having it's, I I look it at it as a production line. So we have our core, so we have this huge core API to where that's what enables one our customers. It also enables our apps and our solutions. So we're always pulling from our core. Uh, once core builds something, it goes to product, product scopes that, uh, they make sure the business use case and deliver all those things, button everything up. And then the last steps actually, engineering, engineering is just giving you a timeline, but they're just building what core started on product, made sure these are the requirements, and then engineering goes and execute it. And then next it's marketing's job to, to let people know about it and it's sales job to close the deals. I mean, it is, it's all just one big funnel to be honest with. You.   Sam Wilson (00:09:18) - Do, do you do, did you have the, I mean, I know you said, you know, prior to real estate you were waiting tables, working at the golf course, doing whatever you could do. Um, but how did you develop that leadership skill to be the c e o of a company now that, you know, has at least 90 people, probably a lot more than that now, working for it and taking it to where you have, I mean, that's, that's a, that's that's either a natural gift or something that you've really refined and worked hard at. So tell us how you did that.   Jesse Burrell (00:09:47) - Yeah, we have about 250 people today, uh, in our organization. And I think part of it came from, uh, being a leader on the sports teams, uh, when I was younger and what I did, and the next part when we started growing, this is me and my partners refer to what we do as, you know, we're, uh, building a plane as we're flying it. Um, I had to read a lot of books, um, grow a lot. Um, there was a lot of immaturities in me, uh, when I started this company that I, I could no longer have or it's detrimental to, you know, the company to act certain ways. And being very self-aware of how you act, how you treat people, and how you lead people. And that, that just came with time and practice. And I also think I have a natural charisma. I get very excited, I get very passionate about things we're doing and it just oozes outta me. And, and people wanna follow that and get excited with me. And that's, that's just who I am as a person. But I, I had a lot of growing to do and a lot of growing up to do, um, to become the c e o and, and a good one at that. And I've, I've worked really hard to just be a better person in general, um, because it shows, um, it shows it, it really does. Yeah.   Sam Wilson (00:11:04) - Yeah. Absolutely. No, and that's, and that's a, I mean, that's a challenge to all of us. I think anytime we start becoming responsible for people and for other members in our organization, it's like, okay, well we've gotta grow up and just accept, accept the role that we have. And that's, uh, that, that can be, that can be both invigorating and, and at times a daunting thing. What about systems and processes? I know you mentioned here kind of the, you make it sound easy. You're like, oh, okay, we developed product, we go from core and then we go to product, and then it goes to engineering and then marketing, they just sell it and off, off we are to the races. But at one point in your organization, there was not all of those people and all of those processes in place. How did you guys develop that, even though you say you're building the plane as you fly it, which is, I certainly understand that, that, uh, analogy, but how did, how did you get to this point and then what were some of the things that, some challenges you had to overcome in building those processes inside of your organization?   Jesse Burrell (00:12:01) - So luckily for us when we first started building a lot of our products was we were still in the business the first two, three years that we started this business. So we were just solving pro problems. So product, uh, figuring out where we wanted to build and do, you know, product initiatives was, was very easy when we're solving problems inside our own business. And I was lucky enough to be a around and in inner circles of a lot of highly functional wholesalers and investors that are flipping in wholesaling, you know, hundreds to thousands of homes a month, or not a month, but a year. And it's seeing, you know, where their shortcomings was, what their teams need. And that's how we started building. And luckily with us, I got to partner with some great people that were using our product at the beginning. So, uh, the affiliates really pushed and grew our product at the beginning.   Jesse Burrell (00:12:51) - We had, I don't know if you know who Paces Morby or Jamil Dam G, they're on, they have a house flipping show now. And some of these bigger influencers and the niche that we had focused on at that time, they, they really, uh, shouted it from the rooftops is like, if you wanna be successful to get started in outreach, homeowners, these are the software tools that you need to use. And it was a lot of organic growth through word of mouth from them at the beginning. And, and the product road mapping was, was quite simple. As we grew, a lot more complexities came in and that's where we really focus and run our whole company with OKRs. I don't know if you're familiar with OKRs, is objectives and key results. It's what Google uses, what, um, Adobe uses a lot of the bigger or organizations, uh, run all of their stuff through, uh, objectives and key results. And it really holds teams accountable and makes sure everyone is aligned in, in people knowing, uh, what their job is and how what they do. Is it important to some of our top line goals as a company.   Sam Wilson (00:13:54) - That's really, really cool. Yeah. You know, I've heard of KPIs, OKRs is a new, a new phrase, uh, to me. But certainly those, those are invaluable as it pertains to bringing on team members, holding them accountable, establishing where we want this to go. I think that's really, really cool. And I love, I love how you guys have worked, worked your way through that. And also just the idea of, of how to market it in the beginning on bringing on bigger names that kind of help. Uh, you know, like you said, shout, shout from the rooftops about the product that you have. I do wanna clarify here cuz I've heard you mention, um, finding homeowners data, but you guys do a ton of work in the commercial space, correct?   Jesse Burrell (00:14:34) - Yeah. Uh, so I, I I normally say homeowners, uh, but yes, we have contact information for commercial multi-family people that, not just people that own homes, but people that own investment properties. If it's corporations, we have actually, we've run a lot of tests and we have the best, uh, skip tracing and uh, masking and we're creating even more proprietary stuff to where we could pierce corporate veils and figure out who those owners are and can't really go into the logistics of how we do everything. But really finding out who the owners are past that reverse engineering and, and figuring out how how do we get that information and you know, there's uh, companies like krei that uh, use us to, um, and to unmask and, and give contact information to people that are using, um, their platform. So it's been cool to start partnering with some other companies, um, and helping them make their data better as well. Yeah,   Sam Wilson (00:15:26) - Absolutely man. And that, and that's the challenge I think, you know, cause we were, we're, we're involved in, and I have been involved in several niche asset classes that have not had anyone doing any of the data research on it. One of those was parking lots and parking garages. We were into that up up until the, uh, the pandemic and it was like nobody knows who all these random parking lot owners are all across the country. I mean, I'm really, you go into a city, you're like, okay, that's a, you know, 10,000 square foot asphalt lot in the middle of the central business district, but nobody knows who owns that, right? And so, and so we had to self create that data and going out and figuring out, and we used paid services, but even then it was, I mean you could spend 20, 30 minutes researching using, uh, shoot, I forget who I used Lexi Lexus Nexus back then.   Sam Wilson (00:16:12) - But using Lexus Nexus, finding out that, then finding out who those owners are, then researching the addresses attached to it and finding if there's names, then finding out those names have phone numbers. And it was, I taught some people how to do it and we really did it at scale, but oh my gosh, building that data was just, I mean, just a nightmare really, truly. So you guys are able to go out and aggregate and like you said, you're not gonna tell us how you do it, which I don't wouldn't expect you to . Um, but, but you guys are doing this at scale. Are there, are there asset types that are harder than another? Or is it all just the same thing? Is there, I know you mentioned multifamily, but I mean, I guess let's, let's, let's start with that first question. Is there, is there some that are easier to find owners on than others? And if so, you know why?   Jesse Burrell (00:16:57) - Yes. So we don't necessarily have to go asset type, but anything that's a LLC is, is always gonna be harder, right? Because you have a homeowner tied to a property. Now, once you get into and, and you know, that's where a commercial industrial, larger multi-family is gonna get harder because you're having to pierce a corporate veil and figure out who owns this or who's registered, how do I get in contact with the right person? And that's where you have to go even deeper into corporation commissions, uh, crawl, those do do a bunch of different things and um, us and some other providers are, are working on that. So what's good is, you know, uh, how competitive we are with, you know, the people that we're competitors against is all we're doing is making stuff for you guys easier to go find the people that you want to get in contact with. And it, it gets, it's getting better, but it's still tough. You know, people will have layers and trusts and this and that. So it's more of, it depends how title's taken the harder it could get in certain ways, if that makes sense. So it's not necessarily an asset class, it's just how title's taken, uh, with that property and, and how hard or how, how much privacy someone wants the harder it could get, if that makes sense. Oh   Sam Wilson (00:18:13) - Gosh, yeah, it absolutely does. Cuz you could have LLCs that are members of LLCs that are members of LLCs and it's like, okay, how far down this do we chase this? And it, and at what point, and you probably at, at that point you ran, you wind up with a random registered agent in Montana, right? And you're like, okay,   Jesse Burrell (00:18:29) - Well   Sam Wilson (00:18:30) - Now we're, we're back to where we started, which is nowhere. So it, uh, yeah, it is, it is an interesting, interesting thing and, and you know, overcoming that challenge, I think is where the, that's where the, uh, the gold lies. So tell me this, uh, you're all in on your business right now, you know, tell me what are some cool things maybe on the real estate side of things that you're looking for personally? You said, hey, here's, here's where I see opportunity. I know you mentioned okay, you're kind of doing more the more the syndication side of things, but is there anything right now that is particularly striking your, uh, fancy as you look at real estate and kind of the risk profiles that are out there right now?   Jesse Burrell (00:19:05) - I, I'm really interested to see with interest rates where they are and loads coming due, I, I see a lot of potential in commercial, uh, potentially, uh, just depending on what type of discounts are gonna happen and, and where interest rates are. And if you know there's gonna be foreclosures or people are gonna, I, I see a lot of interest there. Uh, everything else i, I currently still see is too expensive. I, I think the market went up so much. I still think there's some pullback and I've learned from a lot of smart people and from my own experiences, uh, if you're in a rush to buy real estate, that's when that's when you could lose is, is be patient, wait for the right deal, don't force deals to come upon you. And um, if something fell into my lap that, you know, was single family or even multi-family, I would be open to it.   Jesse Burrell (00:19:58) - But I just still feel like there's, there's still more room to go and unless that cap rate makes sense, it's just, I, I'm not interested. And I have some friends, uh, in the industry that are doing some really good syndications that bought the land, uh, before covid happened and they're finally, you know, getting through and getting the building. Uh, why, why do anything if I could just invest in them and, and see really nice returns, I, I, those are the opportunities I really look for right now, cuz I don't have the time to actively participate and, and focus on, on, on building something or managing something. Even, even if you, if I go buy a multi-family and hire property manager, they're still going to call me. This happened, that happened, that happened, right? I, I don't have time for that. When I say I'm singular focused on growing batch in our data company, that's where my focus lies and there's a lot bigger return on investment on what it would look like to sell this company than to buy a few one-off real estate things is I wanna sell this for nine to 10 figures and then I want to go back into real estate full-time and deploy my capital into very, very large deals.   Jesse Burrell (00:21:10) - Is is the ultimate goal of what I'd like to do in the next five to 10 years. Got   Sam Wilson (00:21:13) - It. I love it, man. Jesse, thank you for taking the time here to come on the show today. I've learned a lot from you here on growing companies on what it means to grow yourself as a leader and things you've had to overcome on that front. We've talked about processes, we've talked about team, uh, we've talked about, you know, you selling off your real estate in order to singularly focus on batch service, which is a word I think to us all, which is to, uh, absolutely focus. I'm looking forward to trying out here your, uh, your program. It looks pretty cool. If our listeners do want to get in touch with you or learn more about batch service, what is the best way to do that?   Jesse Burrell (00:21:46) - Yeah, just my first and last name on Instagram. Not a big social media guy, but I check my dms if you have any questions, I'm always, I'm always here to help and give some insights on some of the experience I've had.   Sam Wilson (00:21:57) - Fantastic. And there, those of you who are just listening, that's Jesse Burrell, b u r r e l l, and then, uh, your website there as well as batch service.com. Make sure we put all of that there in the show notes. Jesse, thank you again for coming on the show today. I do appreciate it,   Jesse Burrell (00:22:12) - Tim. Thanks for having me.   Sam Wilson (00:22:13) - Hey, thanks for listening   Sam Wilson (00:22:14) - To the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can, do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google podcast, whatever platform it is you use to listen.   Sam Wilson (00:22:26) - If you can do that for   Sam Wilson (00:22:27) - Us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.

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Anne and Gillian discuss setting up a home studio space and the necessary equipment for it. A home studio space should have proper sound absorption, emphasizing the need for high-quality audio recording equipment and internet connections for efficiency & consistency in their work. They mention the importance of finding a quiet area with proper sound absorption to minimize noises from in & outside of your home. Anne & Gillian also discuss the importance investing in a good computer, as it is a foundational technology that helps run your voice over business. For more insight and recommendations, tune in!    Transcript    It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza.   Anne: Hey guys, welcome to the VO BOSS podcast. I'm your host Anne Ganguzza, and today I am excited to welcome back once again to the show audio engineer, musician, creative freelancer Gillian Pelkonen for another episode for our BOSS Audio series. Hey Gillian, how are ya?    Gillian: I am good. How are you, Anne?    Anne: I'm excellent. So I thought we had a great conversation about picking your home studio space. And I think we should expand upon that a little bit in this episode and maybe get into a little bit about the equipment that we have into the space for our home studios.    Gillian: Yeah, I think totally a necessary point at the conversation because if you didn't listen to last week's episode or whenever it was, the last BOSS audio episode, you gotta go back and catch up because we talked about finding a space in your home for your voice setup. We talked about a little bit about treatment and how to get your space sounding a little bit better, whether you're at the pro level or if you're a beginner. And then we also had the conversation of what's it like to work in a professional studio versus home studio. And now we're gonna dive into getting that home studio, what you need for it and perfecting the sound a little bit.   Anne: What you need and what you don't need necessarily, right?   Gillian: Yeah, definitely.    Anne: Especially because of your experience working in professional studios where I get overwhelmed looking at the equipment there because I'm like, ah, I'm just a voice actor and (laughs).   Gillian: I'm just a voice actor.    Anne: I'm just a voice actor. I'm not an audio engineer, but I do audio engineering. I know what I know, and I know just what I need to know for that. And I'm very happy, Gillian, to give people like you my business when I need something more from my engineering. So just a little bit backtracking on the absorption factor or the sound factor of your studios. We had talked about finding a quiet area in your home, in an area that maybe isn't near a window or open doorways or places that you can't close off from external noises. So there's external noises coming into your booth, and then we've got the noises within your booth possibly, right, that get reflected back into your microphone. So there's external and then there's internal noises that we want to protect against and have some sort of absorption. And one thing I did wanna mention, and this was a misconception that I had, is that, is there a way to 100% soundproof anything (laughs)?    Gillian: Yes. You know, it's so crazy. This is a slight tangent, and I don't know the details so it's gonna be a half story, but there is a room --   Anne: I know where you're going with this.    Gillian: There's this room where they've completely soundproofed it. And supposedly, I mean, I, I just got out --   Anne: You could go crazy in five minutes.   Gillian: You could go crazy in it. And I feel like I'm in a quiet space right now, and my Apple Watch is telling me that there's 73 decibels of sound going on.    Anne: Oh my God. You have that on your -- see, you are absolutely an audio engineer.    Gillian: I love to know.    Anne: I cannot tell you how many decibels right now on my watch, no.    Gillian: I can tell you from my watch because it's important to -- oh my gosh. We could do a whole episode on ear health and keeping your ears because that's very important.   Anne: I agree.    Gillian: Which is why I have it on there 'cause -- I wish Apple would sponsor us, 'cause I just talk about them all day. But there's a ton of ways to check and make sure that your hearing's not being damaged both by --   Anne: Oh, fantastic.    Gillian: — what you're listening to and the environment you're in. That's super interesting and really important to me, near and dear to my heart, because this is my livelihood, like your voice.    Anne: Absolutely.    Gillian: The way you care for your voice, I care for my ears. But there is a place where they completely soundproofed it and supposedly people can't stay in there for more than five minutes.    Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: It's so uncomfortable. It's so quiet --   Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: — you can like hear your blood moving in your body.    Anne: So I'm sorry I have to tell you about this. So a while back, my ear got perforated. I had a head cold, and I went to a doctor who wasn't the best doctor, and they said, well, we can't see in your ear because you have a buildup of wax, so we need to take care of that. And they took a syringe to clear out my ear and I said, well, that typically doesn't work for me because I've really tiny eardrums. And they're like, no, no, no, no. And so they flushed my ear out and proceeded to poke a hole in my eardrum when that happened. And it was really scary, number one, because my equilibrium just got completely thrown.    I had to sit down for like 45 minutes, and I should have, this could be a whole ‘nother episode, I should have probably sued them (laughs) because I told them not to do it.  And so, they punctured my eardrum and I know because I could taste the fluid going down my throat once the syringe went. I know it's gross. Sorry. But anyways, I will tell you about the recovery period. So when you have a hole in your eardrum, your eardrum performs many, many important functions, right? Keeping sound out and also sound in. And so when you have a hole in that (laughs), the sounds that you hear are incredibly different.    So for a good year after that happened, if not longer, I would hear wooshing sounds in my ear because it was literally fluids in my body that I could now hear. And it was like I could hear when I had sinus issues. I could hear when it was an allergy day, and it would get very loud. And this white noise I call — like it wasn't a white noise 'cause I couldn't stand it. It was like whooshing, whooshing in sounds that were constantly, I couldn't go into a room full of a lot of people talking because my brain couldn't process all of the sounds. And it made me very confused and very foggy. It was very upsetting. So for a long time, while my ear was healing, and it still hasn't completely healed, my brain had to get used to the fact that I could hear noises both from inside my body and outside my body. So it does not surprise me that if you had 100% pure quiet in a room — and by the way I think that's like miles like below the earth, that room that you go down into, and they've soundproofed it -- it makes a whole lot of sense that you would go crazy, because I was able to hear all sorts of noises, my heart beating. It was incredible.    Gillian: Uncomfortable.    Anne: It's very uncomfortable. Very unsettling.    Gillian: Yeah.    Anne: So (laughs) in terms of --   Gillian: No, you should not want to get a completely soundproofed room.    Anne: Yes. But, and that's why also they have signs in studios, shh, recording. Because you cannot possibly really 100% soundproof. Like if you're gonna run screaming down the hallway in a studio, I think still you'll be able to hear some of that sound coming through a door. Maybe not, depends on how loud, you know, you still don't wanna make any extraneous noises that you don't have to.    Gillian: Well, it is interesting because a lot of the studios that I work in, there are certain things that will really help.    Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: And I learned in school about the things that you do. You do floating floors, which is like the regular floor and then another one. So that --   Anne: On top of it.    Gillian: And then just basically rooms within rooms, which is what --   Anne: Oh, I was gonna say --   Gillian: — a booth is. Same thing.   Anne: A room in a room. And that's the protective like walls on the outside that protect the sounds from coming in.    Gillian: Well, they also, when they build them, it's like double paned everything. And the doors are really heavy. I mean on important rooms that need like the control room where we blast music doors are, they've gotta be like a hundred pounds of those doors just to, and solid wood to keep everything out. Even the glass, there's like double paned glass and it's slanted, like kind of like we talked, you don't want complete parallel surfaces anywhere, 'cause that just creates for reflections everywhere.    Anne: And what's interesting is that I've not had a window on any of my booths. Now I know a lot of the booths that are pre-fabricated, you can buy with a window, and it and it's cool looking and it's pretty. But when it came time to designing this particular booth, I said, oh I want a window. ‘Cause I never had a window. And Tim Tippetts said to me, do you really want a window (laughs)? He said, did you have a window in your last booth? I'm like, no. And he goes, so the window kind of brings up a whole ‘nother set of things that you have to protect against because it's a different surface. Right? It's not the same as a wall. And so it's a pane of glass so you also have to protect that. So when I was recording he said, really you need a sound panel to put over it when you record to keep all of the noise out. So I just said, you know what, I don't need a window. I really don't.    And my door, by the way, which has always been a really heavy part of my booth -- I have double doors here. So not only do I have double walls, but I have double doors, and that's to help keep noises from the outside from coming in. And now in terms of inside, I also have sound that's traveling inside this booth. My booth is probably built at a very tiny angle. It's not like a huge angle, it's not visible at all. But the walls are not completely perpendicular to one another. And also I have these panels that are the acoustic panels that are on the walls. Again, any of the sound that right now is in my booth will bounce around and get absorbed by these panels.    And I mentioned before that they're slightly offset from the wall. So like by a quarter inch maybe? I'm looking right now. They sit off the wall a quarter inch so that if it hits that wall, it has space to travel back through the back of the panel and then get stopped again before it could travel back into this microphone. And that's typically what you're trying to do is to stop the sound from reflecting and reverberating off the walls and coming back into the microphone as feedback or some sort of echo. So that's a little bit more on the absorption part. But now once we're in the studio, (laughs) and we're recording --   Gillian: Once we're in the studio that you've built and whatever says…   Anne: — there's equipment. And of course we could probably talk about microphones all day. But I, I really think that there's other pieces of equipment that I wanna focus on today, and maybe this will even go into another episode, in regards to what's important for voice actors. I'm gonna start the conversation with your internet connection.    Gillian: Yeah. And we kind of talked about this a little bit last time. Like internet computer, without those two things, you don't have a job. You can't connect with anybody.   Anne: So true.    Gillian: I mean it's different when you're in a recording studio 'cause that's all there for you and you don't think about the fact that they have the computer, they have the recording equipment, especially since as a voice actor just standing in front of the mic, putting on the headphones. Like those are things that you think about. But we worry about that all the time, and less the internet connection, which we've had to do that and configure things to be on Zoom with people to send audio that way. But it's definitely very important. And my computer is my, I don't wanna say baby, but kind of (laughs); more important than my phone, it is the most important thing in my professional life, and I spent a ton of money on it to get the most updated one and it, it hurt.   Anne: It's an investment.   Gillian: It hurt a little bit.   Anne: (laughs) There was some physical pain when you invested --   Gillian: Emotional pain.    Anne: — but it's an investment.    Gillian: I have someone that I work with that we talk about this all the time 'cause we both have, you know, brand new Macs, iPhone. What -- I don't have the newest one, but when I upgraded I got pro Macs, the best phone. Because why would you not invest in something that you use every single day and that you use every single day for work?   Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: Like you're paying to have less trouble issues, be faster. I think that's a worthy investment.    Anne: Well, I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna backtrack a little bit because I'm adamant about the internet. I love the internet and it's always been said that I would marry the internet if I could (laughs). Like, like Vince Surf is like one of my heroes, okay, the inventor of the internet. And so I guess my point is I have some people that say when I'm connecting to them for their sessions and I use ipDTL to connect exclusively with my students for their sessions because of the fact that it's a high quality audio connection. It allows me to hear them better so that I can direct them better. We can record our sessions. There's lots of wonderful advantages to using ipDTL. Also source connect, all the other methodologies that people use to connect to each other, to their clients and to studios, you need to have a quality internet connection.    And sometimes when I have students say, well, my connection -- yeah, well, I think we have like a 300 connection, 300 speed. Most people don't necessarily know what speed connection they are connecting to the internet. And I think that it's important for you to know as BOSSes, first of all, what speed is your internet connection? And if you have the capability of getting a gig or a faster speed, why not choose the top of the line speed for that internet connection? Because your business, not just your audio and connecting with clients, but your entire business runs on the internet and the communication. Because we are pretty much an online business. Right? And we're connecting globally to people. So why on a daily basis -- I probably am on the internet, oh goodness, 8 to 10 hours a day, possibly more.   Gillian: An embarrassing number of hours a day. (laughs)   Anne: Well, yeah, because we watch our televisions now, which are, you know, everything is fed through the internet. And so if you can get the fastest speed, absolutely, it's an investment in your company. I just say that over and over again. And as a matter of fact, when I said this before on an episode, when I moved here to my new house, I actually checked and said, what speeds are available in my area? If I cannot get fiber to my house, I will not move here. I will not move here.    You know, it's one of those things they say, oh, fiber's coming, fiber's coming. But you know, if it's years until fiber's coming, and I know how important that connection is to my business, the livelihood of my business, I actually chose where I was going to live based upon my internet speed. Because again, until I retire, guys, this is it. This is where I make my money, and I know how important it is. So, alright, I've stepped down off my soapbox for the internet, but get the fastest speed, guys. It's an investment in your business and write it off. Right? It's your business. Okay. Now Gillian onto the computer thing. So.   Gillian: Well no, no. I feel like this doesn't get, and maybe it does get talked about. I'm not hearing it, so we're talking about it (laughs), but like --   Anne: I'm rambling on and on about it. (laughs)    Gillian: Computers, XLR cables, like these are not exciting purchases. A microphone is an exciting purchase to some degree.    Anne: Well, I think they're exciting. Gillian. I'm sorry. I was gonna marry the internet, remember?    Gillian: That's true, that's true. That's true, in love with the internet. But I think that there's a ton of things that make your space great that are not flashy --   Anne: A microphone.   Gillian: Or exciting. I mean, unboxing my computer was like a spiritual experience. I loved it. It was like so awesome. I just, when I got my Apple Watch last week, I took a video of the unboxing because I was like, oh my gosh, it's so aesthetically pleasing. (laughs). I mean --   Anne: Wait, did you say that to yourself? This is so aesthetically pleasing. I love that.   Gillian: I said it in my head. Yeah, of course.    Anne: I love it. I love it.    Gillian: Everything with Apple. I made my boyfriend hover above and take the video while I unbox it and I was like, don't move.   Anne: Wait, wait. Get the lighting. Get the lighting perfect. I would do that too though. I'm such a geek about things like that. I really am.   Gillian: You only open an Apple box once. Once it's opened, it's not the same. Anyway sorry, little BOSSes; you're listening to us ramble about Apple. All of you PC lovers, I'm sorry.    Anne: Yes.    Gillian: You just will never, never understand (laughs). Or maybe you will.    Anne: Well, they have their own unboxing, so that's absolutely fine. You can get excited about -- but I know a lot of people that build their own computers, and that's exciting.    Gillian: Oh yeah. That's an activity. That's fun.    Anne: That's definitely a very cool thing to do. So your computer, again, it's part of your livelihood. Now there are people out there that say for voice acting, you don't need to have a very powerful computer, and no, you don't necessarily for the actual physical audio recording of one track perhaps. I'm gonna say that, yeah, you don't have to have a billion megabytes of RAM or, or a ton of space. But honestly, everything we do combined together along with the audio recording -- I am connecting with clients. I am looking things up on the internet, I'm researching, I am doing so many activities on that computer for my business, marketing, connecting with clients, audio recording, audio editing — why wouldn't I want it to be as optimal as it could be?   And so there might be people that are using multiple computers. Like one is just for recording my audio. That's fine. Whatever works works there for you. However, there's still -- I think Gillian and I were discussing this a little bit earlier, and we can continue this discussion about the speed of your computer, when you're recording, your audio does play a factor in the quality of what you're getting out. And you certainly don't want your computer to be an ancient piece of equipment that can't handle your interface or it keeps crashing. Like I know for a fact -- Gillian, you use Adobe products?   Gillian: I do. Yeah.    Anne: Right? I mean, just any Adobe product for me has always been a little bit of a memory hog. And so if you've got Adobe Audition running in the background and you're recording and you've got it on a kind of an older computer and you don't have a lot of RAM or you're running out of space, whatever it is, it can cause that to crash and cause many, many frustrating problems. So as good as your performance is, right, if your DAW's gonna crash time and time again…   Gillian: And there's nothing worse than being in the middle of an edit, and it crashes and you lose all of your hard work on an edit. That's happened -- I mean, not as much with ProTools. There's always like automatic save. So I'll just go back to previous version, but it's happened enough --   Anne: Or a good take. Right? You could be actually recording like, and you've got the best take of your life, and then something, you know, happens. I mean, that would suck.    Gillian: Yeah. So it's interesting because computers become important when you're doing everything off of it. Kind of like we're saying, you're sending emails, you're uploading auditions places, you are, I don't know, creating your post for social media in Premiere, you're recording, you're editing, you're -- all of these things, they take up space and why would you not — obviously don't go into debt for a computer.    Anne: Yeah.    Gillian: I mean, do what you want, but --   Anne: But it's an investment.    Gillian: Again, it's a worthy investment, and I think people always -- from my experience of talking with voice actors, people would be much more willing to jump to buy another microphone or another, something that's, in air quotes, fun versus, you know, really splurging on the super important things.    Anne: So true. Like a foundational technology that helps you run your business. You're absolutely right. And not to say that microphones aren't important, but again, no, you don't need like the U87 (laughs). Well, I kind of want one, but(laughs), I still am holding off on that one. But microphones like, I feel like the microphone technologies, they last a little bit longer than — you don't have to worry about updating them. It's not like you're upgrading the OS on your microphone, right?    Gillian: No.    Anne: Or upgrading the RAM, uh, microphones, they work and they just work unless you're gonna beat it up.    Gillian: They're completely different.   Anne: And pour water into it. Yeah. It's a completely different, it's a piece of hardware that…   Gillian: It's a piece of hardware. I mean five years and who knows, but five years down the line, at least for me, I'll trade in my, yeah. Mac for another Mac through Apple. That'll be great. But if you have a microphone, you can sell that at any point. If anything, it's probably gonna go up in value the longer you keep it and take care of it. And yeah, I mean, I'm kind of a U87 hater. I don't like them. I don't like them at all.    Anne: That could be another episode. I'm not sure how many people would disagree with you there.    Jilian: I think, I don't know. I don't know how much of it is just, it's a -- I mean I've used it, I've done shootouts with mics for myself for other things where you just line them all up and you sing into them. And the one that I'm using now is my favorite from a lot of mics that I've tried within my budget. My favorite mics are like $20,000 ones that I can't afford and don't need to afford, because why would I? But producers, clients, nobody's gonna know what your gear is. They just care about how you sound. And so I don't personally think that everyone needs to spend upwards of thousands of dollars on gear. I think there's really smart ways to make less expensive gear sound great when you're starting out.    But then the expensive gear is room to grow within your business, within your voiceover experience. And isn't that like something to look forward to or know that, you can resell your gear to someone who's starting off and then upgrade to something bigger, and just all of these big purchases are investments. And they are important.    Anne: And another thing that, I'm just gonna say that like equipment that you don't think about for your voiceover business, your online storefront, hello, your website. Oh my goodness, I cannot tell you how many people want to -- and I'm not saying you can't do it on your own. However, look, I worked in technology for 20 years. I did websites back when they were easy. Okay? They're not -- when you could write HDMI Notepad and it was simple. And then all of a sudden like CSS came out and I was like, I was overwhelmed. I was like, okay, no, I just know what functionality I want in the backend of my website. I'm not a graphic designer. I'm a functional person, so I know what I want, and I know what functionality I want.    And so at some point I said, okay, I am not making my own websites anymore because it is a face of my business. And so I wanna pay someone who actually does this eight hours a day, if not longer. And that's what they were trained to do. And a lot of people try to skimp on that. And I hear that constantly from voice actors. And I guess my question is, back in the day when there was more brick and mortar things, like actual studios, Gillian, you know, you go to them all the time — you used to have to front the bill for leasing once a month. If you had a store, you had to stock it with inventory so there were all these like monetary investments you would make.    And then all of a sudden when things became easy from technology and easier from technology and online, all of a sudden people think that, well, it's so easy, I can just do it and cheap out on it. It frustrates me. Like that mentality -- I understand that yes, doing anything online at home is a great business to start, but you have to still invest in it. And there's so many worthy things to invest in, and your storefront, if it's not brick and mortar, it's online. The impression you make is so, so important in order to be successful in this industry.    Gillian: And there are just ways to -- I love my website. It's very important to me. I've gotten like compliments on it that it looks really professional, and I didn't make it. I hired someone to make it for me. Obviously the content that I fill it with is mine. I do that. But I would've never been able to make the website that I have now. Both from how it looks and a functionality standpoint, I feel like people are not really using their websites in a functional way where you could, you know, manage contacts and, and communicate with people that way.    But for me, I mean, I work with voice actors, I do sessions with them. Every once in a while I will have to look someone up and the first thing I look for is a website. And if I can't find a website for someone, I kind of don't know what to do. I'm like, if I can't find you and listen to your demo right away — and if it's not easy for me, and especially like if you could get your demos online, easily downloadable for anybody in casting, anybody working at a studio that kind of gives you a leg up. It really like, it just does because you're easier to work with, you're easier to find. And I kind of know who you are. I'm like, okay, this person is a legit voice actor. Which might not be the right answer, but it's what I do.   Anne: Well, and a professional voice actor. Right? So, again, there are people who, well, you know, do I need to buy a domain? Do I need to, you know, I can do my own website right now, and I can upload my files to a pay-to-play. But honestly, when I shop and I shop a lot online, hello? Gosh, I can't remember the last time I was at a mall. Although I do love getting out and seeing people. But honestly I do a ton of online shopping. And so for me, the trust factor and the value factor has everything to do with the website. And when I first get an impression of somebody, when I go to the website, right, I can tell, oh, are they trustworthy? Are they professional?    And if you've got a website that you made and you don't do that for a living, right, it's gonna look homemade. Here's an old school thing. I always talk about business cards, right? If you walk up to somebody and they hand you a business card, which still happens these days, not as much as it used to, but then that business card was printed on a printer in your home versus something that was professionally made, you can absolutely tell the difference. Same thing with a website, right? You can absolutely tell the difference, but there's just a level. It's like a movie and a B movie, (laughs). It's like, it's absolutely a level of professionalism that comes with something that's been professionally designed.    Gillian: And unfortunately it's kind of all the aesthetic versus, and that analogy is incredible. I mean, I've never really lived in a business card world. I know (laughs), but when I was like 10, I had professionally made business cards for my babysitting business.    Anne: There you go.    Gillian: So I kind of did. And those were --   Anne: It made a difference, right?    Gillian: I, I don't know, I still have them, but I got work probably 'cause people were impressed that a 10-year-old had business cards.    Anne: Right?    Gillian: But for me, I mean I'm in my 20s, I first look at people's website, and off the bat there's just a different pro versus not pro vibe that I immediately, it just goes off in my brain. And same thing. And then if I can't find them immediately, the next thing I look for is Instagram. And if I can't find you and see that you're doing any sort of voiceover work, then I'm kind of confused. You know, if you have a great voice, I'll email you, but it's a different world.    Anne: So that's interesting. So you go Instagram, what about TikTok? At what level is TikTok or other social media channels for you?    Gillian: Um, it really is for me. I use my Instagram, it's like professional now. Everyone that I meet on a session, artists that I work with, I connect with everybody on Instagram. And that's like the way that I keep up with what people are doing and what people are up to. I personally don't really use LinkedIn. I did when I was in less creative field, but nobody that I work with uses it.    Anne: Right. But our potential clients do. That's why I'm just gonna say that for us.    Gillian: Well, yeah. I think it's different for what I do versus what you guys do. But I, I think I'll go to LinkedIn as a last resort if I can't find somebody. But for the most part, like Instagram and websites. TikTok, I don't really use for work. That's like fun for me. I would never like look for someone on TikTok or like look for voice actors on TikTok. But I do know that there's definitely --   Anne: But if there were creative voice actors, I was gonna say if there's creative voice actors that are doing something entertaining on TikTok, you'll take notes.    Gillian: Yeah. I'm also not a client. I'm coming at this from a strictly studio perspective. I do, every once in a while some voice actors will come up on my feed, or I know there's some people that I know that are like voice actors and musicians and they talk about stuff like that. Um, so I can't say that I know too much about it, but yeah, Instagram is like the thing for me that I can check if someone's legit or not.    Anne: I think the last little, I'm gonna call these the soft equipment requirements. I'm gonna talk about how before it was a voice actor, always, well I've got a face for radio, that kind of thing. I loved voice acting initially because there weren't the requirements of being on camera. I thought, well, I can act and I can be behind that microphone. However, it has evolved and times have changed. And I do believe that there's a video element and there's a face element because people wanna connect with humans. And so for us as voice actors, there are the times when we need to connect with others as humans. And a lot of times I'll have live sessions where they'll wanna connect and watch me via Zoom. I don't always have the camera on. Sometimes I will always to say hello.    For obviously my podcast, yes. I do this and I do some, if you were going to do some social media posts, I have a YouTube channel called my Teachable Moments. So the other equipment purchase that people don't necessarily think about is a good camera and good lighting. And then also I hire a video person to help me to actually create videos and edit videos. So again, it can present to my online clients. My online presence can be of a more professional nature. Again, I don't do video production, but I do know lots of people that do. So I think camera and lighting so that you can look professional. And then if you have videos that you upload, make them look professional and have people who do video editing. And so what a good conversation. And we didn't even get to the hardware yet, really.    Gillian; I know, I'm sorry, guys. There's one more --   Anne: Or the microphone or the headphones and, and all that. So that's for our next --   Gillian: Sorry, guys.   Anne: That's for our next episode.   Gillian: But I got, one more thing I got for you. It's so interesting because obviously I'm learning about the voiceover industry. I know about audio; I record it, but learning the ins and outs of the industry or what people are doing, sometimes it's confusing to me because sometimes stuff goes like against what I would think or things that I think are obvious, people aren't doing. But for voice actors, I feel like, and this is my take, you can tell me if I'm wrong, I feel like it'd be easy to be yourself on social media because anything that you do with you talking, just being yourself. It's your voice. And that's --   Anne: Uh, yes, it's true. It's so true.    Gillian: Wouldn't that make so much sense? I'm on social media a decent bit. I'm on TikTok. People are always like, this is my morning routine, this and that. All these videos with voiceover. And when I make my tos, I do voiceovers. I don't do voiceover, but you know, I'll talk in them, but really, I hear a lot of people getting hung up on like, I have to be talking about my booth or voiceover. But really anything that you're doing --   Anne: Anything you're doing.    Gillian: — using your voice is showing off your voice --   Anne: Who you are and your brand.    Gillian: Yeah. But then if, if you're being yourself, then it's kind of like sneaky, you know, it's like I'm just being myself. People are getting to know me, and they're realizing that I have a great voice and a great sound. So that's what I always think about and I don't see a lot of.   Anne: Yeah. And people buy from people they know, like, and trust. And I've always said this podcast, I have gotten so much work from this podcast. There's so many people that come up to me and say, oh my gosh, I feel like I've known you for years because I've been doing this podcast for years and, and I'm pretty much myself on this podcast. And ultimately that is a really wonderful way to get your brand out there and to have people know, like, and trust you. And then, when they do come to you, they're ready to purchase. And that just becomes a really cool thing. So yeah, guys, so this has been a great talk about the soft technologies. I don't even know what to call them. The soft technologies or the technologies that most people don't think about, right? The hardware people don't think about.   Gillian: Or just things that people don't think about that are not the --   Anne: It's not the microphone --   Gillian: — exact gear. I'm sorry, guys. We're just leading you on. I'm so sorry (laughs). But there's just not so much to say.    Anne: Next episode. All right, well, thank you, Gillian. It's been fun. We're gonna talk next time about maybe some equipment that people have been thinking about. Well, what about my headphones?   Gillian: I know.    Anne: So good stuff. So BOSSes, as individuals, it can seem difficult to make a huge impact, but as a group, we can contribute to the growth of our communities in ways that we never thought possible. Visit 100Voiceswhocare.org to learn how. All right. And a big shout out to our sponsor, ipDTL. You too can network and connect like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys, have an amazing week and we'll see you next week.    Gillian: Bye.    Anne: Bye.   Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

TRANSCRIPT   Listen to ASCO's Journal of Clinical Oncology essay, “Cemetery Rounds” by David Steensma, a hematologist-oncologist in Boston. The essay is followed by an interview with Steensma and host Dr. Lidia Schapira. Steensma describes the complex emotions that result from encountering graves of former patients on walks through a cemetery in his New England hometown. Narrator: Cemetery Rounds, by David Steensma, MD, FACP  In the summer of 1784, the body of a 4-month-old infant named Sally was the first to be laid in the earth of the hill next to my home. The gravedigger's backhoe still cuts into the ground about once a week in what has become the largest cemetery in this Massachusetts town. During the recent pandemic, the graveyard was an open place with no need to wear a mask, so I often walked its quiet paths in the evening to stretch my legs after long hours hunched over a computer. These unhurried ambles were a chance to reflect on the day's events and make plans for future days—and sometimes to ruminate on life and how it ends. Little Sally's simple slate marker, with a willow and urn carved above the names of her parents and a short, grim epitaph—“A pleasant plant, a blooming flower, Cut down & wither'd in an hour”—has been joined by thousands of other tombstones over the past two centuries. After a dozen years living in this Boston suburb, I now recognize some of the names on these memorials: Stones that mark the final resting place of people who were once friends or fellow members of the same Congregational church that Sally's family belonged to long ago, and stones with surnames shared by nearby schools and streets.  There are too many gravestones that recall young people who were once classmates of our children in the town's schools. Walking past those memorials means remembering moments of shock and sadness: news about car wrecks and ski accidents, suicides, sudden collapses on hockey or football fields, and the other disasters that take the lives of the young. Stones for the 21st century children are all in the newest part of the cemetery, with its memorials for those who died within living memory. In that part of the cemetery, visitors still often leave toys, Boston Bruins or New England Patriots pennants, lacrosse sticks, and horse reins.  Sally's stone, in contrast, is the oldest part of the cemetery. It is surrounded only by close cropped grass and stout trees. Once I saw a freshly cut flower laying on Sally's grave, and I wondered who left it. It is rare to see those ancient graves get special attention—a bracing reminder that no matter how bright our star might shine in our own era, we will all eventually be forgotten. The largest and most prominent gravestone in the cemetery recalls the grandson of a local eccentric. This boy drowned in New Hampshire's Lake Sunapee at age 17 while trying to save another teenager who had fallen from a boat. It was the second time a close family member of the man had drowned: In 1893, as a child, he watched his older sister slip beneath the swift water of the Annisquam River. He reacted to this pair of tragedies by declaring a lifelong war on gravity.  Grief is not always rational, although it may be productive. The eccentric man became wealthy—by predicting the 1929 stock market crash and by starting a successful business analysis firm—and he created a well-funded private foundation to understand and combat gravity. This Gravity Research Foundation sponsored important conferences attended by Albert Einstein and other luminaries and awarded prizes to Stephen Hawking, Freeman Dyson, and a half-dozen Nobel laureates in physics. Gravity, however, remains unconquered and incompletely understood. All of us will eventually be pulled into the earth by its unrelenting grip. A growing number of gravestones bear the names of people who were once my patients at a Boston cancer institute. Some days it is hard to see those stones on my evening walks, noticing name after name that once graced a clinic schedule or hospital rounding list, and to be so starkly reminded of how our best efforts ultimately failed them.  Most of the time, though, what I recall are the happier moments with these patients, which keeps these walks from being morbid. Cancer centers are not known for being joyous places, yet surprisingly, often there is laughter in clinic rooms or on morning hospital rounds. We oncologists celebrate milestones with our patients: remissions achieved, college degrees completed, new grandchildren, and long awaited weddings attended. We know that graves like these await all of us, but for a while, we can put that aside and not just live but thrive. In one corner of the cemetery, a small marble bench faces a stone that marks the final resting place of one memorable former patient: A young woman with a wicked sense of humor who, as a grieving relative said at her funeral, was wise beyond her years, and taken before her time. When I rested on that bench last night, I was reminded of what French vascular surgeon Ren´e Leriche wrote in 1951, at the end of his long career: Every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, where from time to time he goes to pray-a place of bitterness and regret, where he must look for an explanation for his failures. For me that cemetery is a physical place as well as metaphorical.  Yet when I think of her, I always smile, remembering who she was, and the happiness she brought to those around her. When she was alive, her hospital room was a place of laughter and hope rather than bitterness and regret. Even after a long day in the clinic, when I made hospital rounds in the evening, it was a joy to see her and discuss the events of the day. I do not know how she kept it up for so long in the face of so many disappointments and frustrations. Everything we tried to treat her cancer eventually failed her—every antibody, cell therapy, and drug after drug after drug. Even when new treatment regimens were declared at national meetings to be active, well tolerated, and worthy of further study, she always seemed to be one of those who had not responded or who suffered intolerable side effects. One door after another closed so that soon the only available doors were the ones that took her back home, with the support of a kind and skilled hospice team. At times, she could sense my sense of failure as I sat by her bedside and would try to reassure me as if the sorrow was mine instead of hers. It's all right, it will be OK. We did what we could. You did what you could. Now it's time to move on. Where did she get the strength? Eventually, as evening turned to night, it grew cold in the cemetery. I moved on, buoyed by her memory. Saying good night to Sally, I headed home. Dr. Lidia Schapira: Hello, and welcome to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology, which features essays and personal reflections from authors exploring their experience in the field of oncology. I'm your host, Dr. Lidia Schapira, Associate Editor for Art of Oncology and a Professor of Medicine at Stanford University. Today we're joined by Dr. David Steensma, who currently leads hematology early development for a biotech company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was for many years a faculty member in the Leukemia Program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School, and also a past Editor for Art of Oncology. In this episode, we'll be discussing his Art of Oncology article, “Cemetery Rounds.”  Our guest disclosures will be linked in the transcript. David, welcome to our podcast and thank you for joining us.  Dr. David Steensma: Thank you for having me. Dr. Lidia Schapira: I'd like to start by asking you a little bit about your process for writing. You have published beautiful essays in JCO and in other venues, and I know you've always been a writer. Talk a little bit about that, especially for some of our younger listeners  Dr. David Steensma: This is the first article that I've submitted to the Art of Oncology in a number of years, actually, and this one was a long time in gestation. One of the things that I found over the years is that whether I'm writing and how much progress I'm making is a really good barometer of where I'm at mentally. And I think the fact that this took the better part of three years to write probably illustrates how difficult these last few years have been for me as they have for so many of us. Sometimes writing happens very quickly. You get a germ of an idea, something maybe you've been mulling over for a long time and it all falls into place. But much more often, it's a process in which one is trying to express what is very difficult sometimes to say appropriately. Dr. Lidia Schapira: Some of your articles, including this one, have elements of history in it, and I think that's something that you've always been interested in, not only medical history but history in general, sort of what was happening at a time when somebody was ill or an illness was first described, or in this case, people were buried. Tell us a little bit about that, about combining your interest in history with your medical writing.  Dr. David Steensma: I think I like to tell stories and really always have. If I didn't do medicine, one of the other two alternatives was journalism. And I've always been interested in how things got to be the way that they are. So I think that naturally is reflected in the writing.  Dr. Lidia Schapira: I know you're also an avid reader, so what would I find now on your night table or on the desk alongside the medical journals that probably are unopened? Dr. David Steensma: Wow. I have some science. I have Ed Yong's amazing book about the microbiome. I just started reading I'm Glad My Mom Died by Jennette McCurdy, a former child actor, which has just got rave reviews, so reading about her difficult upbringing in this memoir and her mother's death from breast cancer. And so the third one over on the shelf over there that I have off is ASCO-SEP because I'm doing the 10-year medical oncology board renewal next week. I've been doing the LKA for hematology, but I've also kept up MedOnc and internal medicine. It was just too painful to think about all three. So I have all these NTRK and ROS1 inhibitors and pathways for advanced cervical cancer jumbling around in my head right now, which I'm sure a lot of our listeners could relate to. Dr. Lidia Schapira: I can relate to the anxiety I felt the last time I was recertified, and I swore it would be the last time. So thank you for spending a little time with us. Maybe it's a distraction from the other. Yeah.  I wanted to talk about “Cemetery Rounds.” We were so happy to get your paper after all these years. A reviewer said, “Oh, thank goodness, Steensma's writing again.” Tell us a little bit about this quiet, meditative practice of walking along the cemetery near your home, especially during the pandemic. Dr. David Steensma: Well, the pandemic did so many weird things, and just everything was different, from the way we bought food to the way that we caught up with loved ones to the way we structured our days. Everything changed, and one of the things we ended up doing was spending even more time in front of our computers. And I'm kind of fidgety, always have been. So by the end of the day, I'd had a lot of energy I needed to get out and thought about where I could walk nearby that was a good place to stretch my legs. And we lived right around the corner from an old cemetery and quite a large one, a cemetery that actually got quite busy during COVID, so I didn't really think about that part of it. But they brought in at the beginning of the pandemic, all kinds of extra materials for digging graves and cleared out some additional area. It was really quite striking just seeing that happen.  But one of the things I think I didn't prepare myself for mentally, walking through that cemetery, which is a beautiful place, very respectful, and well kept, was how many patients and other people I would recognize. And just walking past stone after stone with names that I recognized, people who had been my patient or those of colleagues that I'd interacted with on inpatient services over the years, a number of children who had been our kids' classmates in the town's public schools and who had sadly run into one tragedy or another. It was really quite striking how many of the people I felt like in a very old cemetery, how many names I recognized. There were a lot, of course, I didn't, but their surnames were on the streets nearby and the town founders. And this sort of made me reflect, particularly when I noticed that we don't normally see our patients' graves. We may attend their funerals or their memorial services, but even that often the last time we see them is when they're going home to a hospice setup or to an inpatient hospice or sometimes just at a last clinic visit, and then something sudden happens.   So this seemed like something that could have been very sad. But I think partly because of the tranquility of the place and the mindset of the pandemic, there was actually a lot of reflection of positive things, interactions with these patients - the happiness sometimes that we brought to each other, conversations that had been difficult, but also events that have been happy milestones that they got to see because of our care. And then also the hard realization that ultimately modern cancer care failed them that's why they were there. So just a lot to reflect on in a time when it seemed like death was all around anyway because of the pandemic. So I thought, gosh, this would be something I think people could relate to.  Dr. Lidia Schapira: It struck me that you describe your approaching these gravestones as an intimate space that we normally don't get to be part of, that sort of belongs to the family and the friends and the community, but the clinician is often not there. And it struck me also that the immediate thing you talk about was how therapies have failed them. And I just wondered if you could talk a little bit more about that. Maybe because we're both part of the same culture, it's so easy immediately to think that we did something wrong and that's why they ended up there. But can you reflect a little bit more about that particular aspect of our work? Dr. David Steensma: Yeah, just because an outcome was sad doesn't mean that mistakes were made, but may reflect the limitations of the science and art of medicine as they currently are. I think surgeons wrestle with this a lot. And in fact, I included a quote in the essay by Rene Leriche, a well-known French vascular surgeon in the 1950s, who talked about how each surgeon has their own personal cemetery of a place that they go to reflect from time to time. And that's something that in M&M conferences I was always shocked as a student and trainee just how brutal they were on each other and on themselves. It's part of this surgical culture. But I think surgery naturally lends itself to thinking that somehow you did something wrong.   And perhaps in medicine, we're a little bit more in touch with the fact that we followed the guidelines perfectly. We got advice from colleagues, patients were presented at conferences. We enrolled them in clinical trials of things that seemed interesting and promising and just that the disease just kept coming back. And so that's not necessarily a personal failure. And I think in that circumstance, there's maybe a little bit more space, a little bit more permission to connect with the memory of that person in a positive way and reflect on who they were and what they meant for their families and for the others that they interacted with. And so when I see these stones, I don't think, "Oh man, I really screwed up, and that's why they're here." Never, never. I think about, "Gosh, we tried so much, and he or she went through so much, and yet this was where they ended." Dr. Lidia Schapira: It seems to me a very healthy approach, certainly. And I loved the surgeon's quote here in the essay, that every surgeon carries within himself a small cemetery, not just the surgeon. I think, as you said, we do as well. I also love the framing of the fact that it's not so much guilt but sorrow that we carry for them and also that they affect our lives. I remember when you talked about your patients, I remember the article you published about Michaela, the little girl who played the cello on the Leukemia ward and got to be famous. And in this particular article, you talk about a young woman who somehow seemed to think that she needed to comfort you and reassure you that you did everything that you could. Those are such beautiful memories, and you have such a talent for sort of paying tribute to your current and past patients that this is really so beautiful to read. And with that, I just wanted to ask a personal question, if I may, and that is, do you miss the clinical work? Dr. David Steensma: I do, definitely. So, yes, I am always impressed by the strength of patients and of their families often, and people manifest that in different ways. But I've just seen so many amazing things over the years. When I decided that I wanted to try to influence cancer care and hematology care in a different way and move to direct hematology and early development in a research institute affiliated with a company, I, unfortunately, had to step back from seeing patients at Dana-Farber because it was considered a conflict of interest. It hadn't been until just a few months before but, you know, new rules. So I do miss that. And I've been thinking a lot about ways to get back to making those connections because, yes, it is meaningful to be developing new medicines, but there's something also very immediate about being there for a person in a time of need. And those relationships that you build, by far, that was the hardest part of making the job transition with so many patients that I had long-term relationships with; that was hard.  Dr. Lidia Schapira: So my last question is more philosophical. I am teaching a course for undergraduates that involves explaining how people experience illness. So I've been reading a lot of illness memoirs throughout my career, and I was looking for scholars who had worked on this and found, of course, Arthur Frank and his themes of how illness is portrayed by patients, stories of shipwrecks and catastrophes or quests or restitution of meaning. And I wondered if you had given any thought to the same sort of narratives that oncologists play in their heads of how they treat patients. What do you think are the most important themes in the way oncologists think of and remember the patients they've treated? Dr. David Steensma: One of the things that's special about oncology is that even though it's a profession that is very much scientifically based, that we connect with patients at a point in their narrative and often get to know them over months, years, and that narrative and who each of us is along that journey change over time. So I think that's what makes our field really compelling. At least it was very attractive to me. That's very much true. I think of other fields as well, where you do have longitudinal care of a patient, but there is something special about a cancer diagnosis and what that makes people think and how their families and people around them react. That I think, is unique.   It really is an honor to be with patients through this narrative, and Arthur Frank has written about that and about the sort of patient story and how that evolves. And I think that's a healthy way of thinking about what people go through. And we also have to remember it's their story that we're fortunate to be able to witness. And when you walk past a tombstone, you know maybe a little bit about how that story ends, but there's always a birth date and there's a death date, and there's a dash in between, and we know very often very little about that dash. Maybe we were a little part of it, but that encompasses their whole lived experience.  Dr. Lidia Schapira: I think that's a beautiful way to end this. I tend to think of us when we're in our clinician roles as co-editors of that story if we are invited to play that part, and that's such an honor and privilege.   David, thank you so much. I hope and ask that you please continue to write. We all have so much to learn from you.   Until next time thank you for listening to JCO's Cancer Stories: The Art of Oncology. Don't forget to give us a rating or review and be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. You can find all ASCO shows at asco.org/podcast. The purpose of this podcast is to educate and to inform. This is not a substitute for professional medical care and is not intended for use in the diagnosis or treatment of individual conditions.   Guests on this podcast express their own opinions, experience, and conclusions. Guest statements on the podcast do not express the opinions of ASCO. The mention of any product, service, organization, activity, or therapy should not be construed as an ASCO endorsement.  Show Notes:  Like, share and subscribe so you never miss an episode and leave a rating or review. Guest Bio:  Dr. David Steensma is a hematologist-oncologist in Boston, and formerly long-time faculty member in the leukemia program at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School. Additional Reading: A Cello for Michayla, by Steensma

Get a 4.75% mortgage rate or 100% financing on new-build Florida income property. Start here. If I gave you $10M, learn why that probably wouldn't even help you. We revisit how “Real Estate Pays 5 Ways”, a concept that I coined right here on the show in May 2015. Some think real estate pays three, four, or six ways. I revisit why there are exactly five. Real estate has many paradoxical relationships. I explore. Americans are living in homes longer than ever, now a duration of 10 years, 8 months. The active supply of available housing dropped again. Get an update on the gambling industry. A major sports gambling platform has offered to advertise with us. Take my free real estate video course right here.  Zillow expects US home values to rise 4.8% from April 2023 to April 2024.  Months of available housing supply is currently 2.7 per Redfin. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/450 Active Supply of Available Homes: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/ACTLISCOUUS Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Find cash-flowing Jacksonville property at: www.JWBrealestate.com/GRE Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY' to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free—text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Complete transcript:   Welcome to GRE! I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. If you were gifted $10M right now, why that very well wouldn't help you at all.   Learn a fresh take on how Real Estate Pays 5 Ways at the same time. A housing market update with perennially sagging inventory supply amounts and more outlooks for stronger home price appreciation than many expected. Today, on Get Rich Education.   Welcome to GRE!    From Montevideo, Uruguay to Montecito, CA and across 188 nations worldwide, you're listening to one of the longest-running and most listened-to shows on real estate… the voice of real estate investing since 2014. I'm your host and my name is Keith Weinhold.   How would you like it if I gave you $1M?   You know what? That's not enough to make my point. Make it $10M. I adjusted for inflation - ha! How much would you like it if I gave you $10M? How would that feel?   But what if it comes with this one condition.   What if I told you that I'll give you the $10M, but you are not waking up tomorrow?    Not waking up tomorrow? No way!   Now you know that waking up tomorrow is worth more than $10M.   This is how you know that your time and your life are worth infinitely more than any dollar amount.   Hmmm… if your time is so valuable. Then why did you check Instagram 15 times yesterday to see who viewed your Stories? Ha!   Why are you spending time with your AI girlfriend? Ha!   Get Rich Education is ultimately about living a rich LIFE - whatever that means to you.   And we do approach that from the financial perspective here. Money does matter… because leverage, cash flow, and inflation-profiting enable you to BUY time.   We're really one of the few investing platforms… this show is one of the few places with the audacity to tell you that - sure, a little delayed gratification is good… but the risk of too much delayed gratification is DENIED gratification.   Denied gratification is a terrible investing risk that most people either don't give enough weight to - or don't factor in at all.   And getting a $10M windfall is not as great as it sounds either.    History shows that the $25M Lottery winner quickly loses their money. Why does that happen?  Because it seemed like it was effortless to get the windfall, and because they don't know how to handle an amount like that.  It's really similar to a capital gains-centric investor that gets a windfall.  See, cash flow investors like you & I - we can be more measured because your income stream is metered out over time. That's why you are less likely to be irrational with your gains.     Now, I touched on some of those ways that you're paid in real estate investing.    Real Estate Pays you 5 Ways™ simultaneously. That's a concept that I coined right here on the GRE podcast. We since went on to have it trademarked.   Do you know when I first introduced that concept right here on the show - the month & year?    And I've since gone on to do a lot with “Real Estate Pays 5 Ways” to help other audiences understand real estate's five distinct profit sources.   Well, I had someone on Team GRE here do some digging into some of our legacy shows - our past episodes… because I wanted to know when I first said it… and it was apparently in May of 2015, so 8 years ago that I introduced it.   Since then, many other thought leaders have gone on to cite the phrase. Someone other than me even wrote a book on it. And that doesn't bother me at all. I'd rather that other people and readers get good ideas. That's more important than getting the credit.   Of course, c'mon, you can recite these 5 now like they're the Pledge Of Allegiance or something.    This is as automatic as the Lord's Prayer is for Christians. The five are: Appreciation Cash Flow Your return on Amortization and Tax Benefits and finally Inflation-Profiting But now, let's dissect this frog here a little. Why five ways? Why not another number, like real estate pays four ways or six ways?   It is five. There are no more or less. Each of the five are a distinct benefit.   A common flawed case that Real Estate Pays 4 Ways is that most real estate teachers omit the Inflation-Profiting benefit on the long-term fixed interest rate debt.   Any GRE devotee knows that with 5% inflation on $1M in debt, you only owe the bank $950K of inflation-adjusted debt after year one, $900K after year two, etc. (And in the meantime, the tenant pays all of your mortgage interest.)   Some that make the 4 Ways case question the Tax Benefit. Could the tax benefit really be considered a profit source, or is it just a deal sweetener?   It's a profit source.   Outside the real estate world, to obtain a tax write-off, you must have a real expense backed up with receipts, like building a new computer equipment or buying a new farm tractor.   Instead, the magic of real estate tax depreciation says that you can just write off 3.6% of the improved property value each year just for doing... nothing all year. No improvements necessary.   It's a phantom write-off, yet legitimate to the IRS.   Then the 1031 Exchange means you can endlessly defer all of your federal capital gains tax for your... entire life.   Yes, it's one of the few places in life where procrastination actually pays.   I've even heard some say that they're a fan of GRE's Real Estate Pays 5 Ways™, but they've discovered a sixth.   This often involves an event that's either unlikely or falls into one of the existing 5 Ways.   For example, "My appraisal value exceeded the contract price. I'm buying it for $320K, but the appraisal is $340K. I got $20K in instant equity. See, I was paid a 6th way."   No.   I mean, good for you, $20K of instant equity is a nice sweetener - that's a $20K credit in your net worth column that you received the moment you opened up that appraisal e-mail from your lender and saw it. Nice!   But an appraised value that exceeds the purchase price is not COMMON enough to be expected… and the 5 Ways are.   Also, you can make the case that "instant equity" is covered in the first way you're paid, Appreciation.   The reason that we invest in real estate is because there's virtually no other vehicle in the world where you can expect to be paid five ways at the same time.   That's a foundational principle - it's a core concept here at GRE.    It's why we do what we do. It answers the compelling “why” for real estate better than any answer there is…   …and that's why anything less than a 20 to 25% combined return when you add up all five ways is actually disappointing - and that's done with low risk - which is paradoxical almost anywhere else in the entire investing world.    If you haven't yet, take my free “Real Estate Pays 5 Ways” course in order to really understand each of your five distinct profit sources, where they come from, and how that all fits together.    It's at GetRichEducation.com/Course. The free “Real Estate Pays 5 Ways” short course is free at GetRichEducation.com/Course    Let's talk about real estate trends.   You know, real estate investing has a lot of relationships that you just wouldn't expect.    Part of that is because it intersects with the economy. Economies are complex and you get these relationships that are counterintuitive.    For example, in a recession, mortgage rates and all interest rates tend to fall, not rise.    Another exhibit is how debt BUILDS wealth with prudent leverage.   Another one that I've explained extensively here and the show and elsewhere is that higher mortgage rates correlate with higher home prices - not lower ones. That throws nearly everyone off.   Some physical real estate trends have been counterintuitive.   About 30 years ago in America - the 1990s - a new trend was fueled that everyone wanted to have a big kitchen.   New homes were often built with a big, fancy kitchen in the center of the home. Open floor concept - no galley kitchens anymore. That began back then.   And this was really the advent of - at the time - what we considered luxury amenities like granite and quartz kitchen countertops.    Anymore, that's become standard. Even our build-to-rent providers at GRE Marketplace often have new granite countertops in rentals.    But the paradox here is the assumption that a big emphasis on kitchens would mean that more people would start cooking at home.    Oh, no. Just the opposite, in the last 30 years, despite the big kitchens, more people eat out at restaurants and fewer people eat at home. Another real estate paradox.   Another counterintuition was the pandemic. Society locked down, people lost their jobs and you think that there are going to be mass foreclosures because with no job, no one can afford their mortgage payment.   People thought the pandemic will cripple the housing market. Oh, it was just the opposite. That created a housing boom. Everyone wanted their space. Another paradox.   Remember here on the show, shortly after Biden was elected, I told you that this administration - for better or for worse - will not let people lose their homes.    Then we had high inflation on the heels of the pandemic. That was bad for consumers and good for real estate.   But high inflation is supposed to mean that bitcoin and gold would surge. Well, another paradox, that brought crypto winter, and gold did nothing in high inflation, until more recently here.   Rather than high delinquency rates we've got low delinquency rates. In fact, the mortgage delinquency rate has been steadily falling for almost 3 years now. That's because of strong borrowers and tough lending standards.   Now, another real estate investing trend, though there's nothing paradoxical here, is mortgage rate resets.    Here in the US, on 1-4 unit rental properties, you're in great shape, whether you locked in your interest rate at 3% or 7% - the thing is that you have a steady payment… and on an inflation-adjusted basis, your same monthly payment amount goes DOWN over time - it's a tailwind to your personal finances.   Inflation cannot touch your steady, locked-in P & I payment.   But many Canadians are up for renewal with their 5-year fixed rate, 25-year amorts.    Yeah, just across the border in Canada, they don't have these 30-year fixed rate amortizing loans.    Their rate resets every five years.   One Canadian homeowner that I talked to, he doesn't live in that posh of a home in Ontario, it's just a little above the median housing price.    His family's loan terms are about to reset on the primary residence and it's expected to increase their monthly payment by $1,280 / mo.   How would you feel if that happened to you overnight? It's a nuisance at best. It might even crimp your quality of life - or worse.   That can't really happen to you in the US.    Having a 30-year FRM is like you having rent control as a tenant.    In coastal areas, some tenants that have a rent control deal - New York, California, Oregon - they want to live in their home for decades under rent control because there's a ceiling on their rent. Move out of their unit - lose the deal and they'd have to reset somewhere else.   It's the same with you as an American homeowner or REI in the 1-to-4 unit space. Your P&I price cannot rise.    And, I've talked about the interest rate lock-in effect before, constraining the housing supply.    Get this. Just last week, First American Title Company informed us that the average resident duration in a home hit a record high.    Amongst this lower intrinsic mobility rate, interest rate lock-in effect, and other societal trends, the average resident duration in a primary home in now 10 years, 8 months.    Lower mobility. Studies show that people are holding onto their cars longer than ever, and people aren't parting with their real estate either.   So, then, with fewer properties coming to market, let's update the available supply of homes.    This is pulling from the same set of stats that I've been citing for years, in order to be consistent. Check this out. This is the FRED Housing Inventory - the Active Listing Count of Available US homes.   Remember, historically, it's 1-and-a-half to 2 million units available. In 2016 it was still 1-and-a-half million.   Then in April of 2020 it dipped below 1 million and fell sharply from there - which I've famously called this era's housing crash.    It was a housing SUPPLY crash - which hedges against a price crash.   It fell to as low as 435,000 a year later in mid-2021. Gosh, under a half million.   It's rebounded as builders know that they need to build more homes. Six months ago it got up to 750,000 available homes - which is still less than half of what  America needs.   And now, today, did the supply get up toward at least 1 million yet? No.    It has dropped back the other way to just 563,000. This astounding dearth of housing supply - it's a condition that we could very well be in for over a decade.   This scarce supply is a long-term American condition. Yes, it's good for your real estate values - both present and future. But it is a problem too. It's a contributor to homelessness!   The Covid home improvement boom is officially over. So says Home Depot. They posted a revenue drop in the first quarter and warned that annual sales would decline in 2023 for the first time in 14 years.    Home Depot said that shoppers are now holding off on the big-ticket purchases they made during the pandemic and are choosing to break up larger projects—like remodeling a bathroom—into smaller, bite-sized pieces.   There's a fascinating new study from a bipartisan think tank shows that everyone wants to LIVE ALONE.   That's what Business Insider just reported on. Now, of course, the term “everyone” is an exaggeration.   But Statista and Our World In Data tells us that - get this - this is the number of SINGLE-PERSON households in the US - people living alone.   Back in 1960, that figure was just a paltry 13%.   By 1970, 17% of households were people were living alone.   Every ten years, that percent crept up to 23, 25, then 26%. By 2010 it hit 27% and by 2022 it hit 29%.   Now, you can't think that's good for society - to have all these single-person households. Almost 3 in 10 living alone. C'mon. Find a good spouse.   But in any case, that's good for you as a REI, when, say, 10 people live amongst 5 homes rather than 3 homes - absorbing all that housing supply and keeping it scarce.     Even if the US population stayed the same, there's more home demand - with that trend.   Of course, the US population is growing, though really slowly, probably just a few tenths of 1% this year.   But because of all the Millennials and the embedded “Work From Anywhere” trend, housing demand is pretty strong.   The recent rental housing demand and rent boom came almost entirely due to a surge in household formation -- young adults leaving the nest and roommates decoupling to get their own space... especially in urban areas.   People working from home want more space (without a roommate) AND are willing to pay more for it -- and able -- to pay more for it.   So if you're bullish on work-from-home remaining the norm for at least a chunk of the population (and I am), you should be bullish on the rental demand outlook.    And this has really revitalized America's SUBURBS - that's the area where you find that space.   The WFH-fueled rise of the suburbs is a wake-up call to cities, where, in the case of NYC, 26 Empire State Buildings' worth of office space now sits empty.  The typical office worker is spending $2,000–$4,600 less annually in city centers. Because even if they GO to the city to work, they might only do that 2 days a week now - not 5. I've got more for you straight ahead, including a new forecast on how much home prices are expected to rise this year.   Again, check out my free video course if you haven't “Real Estate Pays 5 Ways”. Get it at GetRichEducation.com/Course   I'm Keith Weinhold. You're listening to Get Rich Education.   Yeah, big thanks to this week's show sponsors. I'm only bringing you those places that will bring real value to your life.   Now, here at GRE, I recently read an offer that one of these major sports gambling platforms sent us. They want to advertise on the show here.    Do you want to hear sports gambling ads on GRE? I've got an opinion about that, that I'll share with you shortly. Gambling is not the same as investing.    If you're wondering why you're hearing more about gambling, especially sports gambling than you had just a few years ago, well…   Now, just last week, it was FIVE years ago that the Supreme Court lifted a federal ban on sports gambling in the US.    That spawned a multibillion-dollar industry that's transformed how Americans watch, talk about, and experience sports.   Americans bet $95B on sports in legal jurisdictions with consumer protections last year. That's more money than the amount spent on ride sharing, coffee, or streaming… and you can bet that the off-the-books gambling number, if added in, would make that WAY higher. Two sports betting companies, DraftKings and FanDuel, control 71% of the US market, per gambling analytics firm Eilers & Krejcik. Gosh, that's almost a duopoly right there. But despite that, these companies have struggled to turn a profit. FanDuel recorded its first quarterly profit just last year, and DraftKings has YET to report a profitable quarter. Well, I'll just tell ya, it's one of those two big companies that inquired about advertising on GRE. Of the 50 states, the number is 33 that allow it. That's 2/3rd of the nation that has legal sports betting (Washington, DC, has it too). Another four states have legalized sports wagering, but don't have any sportsbooks operating yet. Interestingly, the three most-populous US states—California, Texas, and Florida—have not legalized sports gambling. And they account for 26% of all teams in the major North American pro leagues. The number of women joining sportsbook apps jumped 45% last year, marking the third straight year that new women users exceeded men. Hmmm. I guess that's the growth market there. My inclination to have gambling advertising and associating with these companies is NOT to do it… not to accept that advertising income. I don't see how that's serving you. This feels like a conflict in my gut and in my heart. Gambling is sort of the opposite of investing for a stable rental income stream.  I mean, either way, I guess you're putting your money at stake. But that's about the closest common ground I can find.  At least at this time… and probably all-time, it's a “no” for gambling content here. That's not any sort of moral judgment on the activity at all. I mean, gosh, as a teenager, I was really into sports gambling, but it was the informal kind. My friend & I each lay a $10 bill next to the TV - Phillies vs. Mets. Winner gets the $20 bucks. So, my inclination is a pretty easy “no”. Hook up with our sponsors - they support GRE. That's Ridge Lending Group, offering income property loans nationwide. JWB Real Estate Capital - if you want performing income property, JWB really has Jacksonville, FL sewn up & locked down. They do one thing and do it well. Then, Freedom Family Investments. Get started with them for real estate funds that are ultra-low hassle. Text “FAMILY” to 66866.  Where will the next ten years take you & I on the show here? I would love to be along for the ride with you. I hope that you'll be here with me.   Let me just take a moment to remind you that I'm grateful to have such a large, loyal audience to… well, listen to the words that I say every week. Thank you for your support.   This show has almost reached the 5 million download mark. I've been shown that it's between 4.8 and 4.9 million downloads now. I'm genuinely honored and a little humbled about that even.    Let's listen in to this 3+ minute CNBC clip. This is Lawrence Yun, Chief Economist at the NAR - the National Association of Realtors talking about the housing market just last week.    Now, a little context here - historically, the NAR has tended to give these dominantly sunny side-up, glowing, everything is always good & getting better kind of remarks on the housing market.   But I've been listening to the NAR's Lawrence Yun for quite a while and think he's been rather balanced.    Here, he discusses how real estate sales volume is down - which has a lot to do with low supply, that mortgage rates are steady, and that prices are slowly rising in most parts of the nation.   [OK, Vedran. Here's where we play the insert.]   0:09-3:42 First words to keep are: “Lawrence Yun…” Last words to keep are: “... half of the country.”   https://www.cnbc.com/video/2023/05/17/home-prices-still-rising-despite-sales-dropping-says-national-association-of-realtors-yun.html   Now, Lawrence Yun did go on to say that he thinks that the Fed should lower interest rates by a half point, and more.    Let us know if you'd like us to invite Lawrence Yun onto the show. As always, you can leave your suggestions, questions, or any comments about the Get Rich Education podcast or any of our other platforms at our Contact center at: GetRichEducation.com/Contact   When it comes to national HPA, just last week, we learned that Zillow revised its home price outlook upward.   Between April 2023 and April 2024, Zillow expects home US home values to rise 4.8%.   You've got more signs that more & more American markets are being considered a seller's market rather than a buyer's market, which tilts toward price appreciation, though I still think pretty moderate price appreciation this year.    CNN recently published an article where they even posited the question: “Are Bidding Wars Back?” Yes, they are in a few markets.     Another measure of housing supply is the MONTHS of available supply. I think you know that 6 to 7 months of inventory is considered a balanced supply & demand market.   If it gets up to 10 months of supply, you tend to see little or no HPA.    Well, indicative of the low housing supply, we hit a winter high of 4-and-a-half months of supply.    And today, it's down to just 2.7 months per Redfin. 2.7 months. That's just another sign that demand is outpacing supply.   Then, among those entry-level homes, like the NAR's Lawrence Yun eluded to, they're even harder to find… and they're the ones that make the best rentals.    How hard are these to find? I mean, in some markets this can be even more rare than finding a true friend? Ha!   Is it as rare as the Hope Diamond? Or perhaps a Honus Wagner baseball card? Ha!   Well, the good news is that we actually have the inventory that you want at GRE Marketplace.   Besides that, we actually have something that you really like and that is - mortgage rate relief to help you with your cash flow.    Purchase rates have been hovering around 6 1/2% lately. That's the OO rate, so for rentals, it could be 7%+.   Well, how about rolling back the hands of time? Through our great relationships here and our free investment coaching, you have access to 4.75% interest rates on investment property - and many of these are new-builds in path-of-progress Florida.   Yes, our free coaching will get you the 4.75% mortgage interest rate, they'll even help write the sales contract for you if you're new to this, walk you through the property inspection, the property condition, the appraisal.    Yes, a 4.75% interest rate… today, from these homebuilder buydowns. I don't know how much longer that can last.    To be clear, you're not buying an income property FROM us. You're buying it with our help and our connections. It is all free to you. This is educational support for you.   In fact, our coaching support like this through our sole investment coach, Naresh is becoming so popular, that I can announce that we soon plan to add a second investment coach. Yes! A new one.   And interestingly, you have heard of this soon-to-be second investment coach because they've been a guest on the show here a number of times. Yeah, we'll make that introduction on a future show. You'll find THAT interesting.   But, our Investment Coach, Naresh, does have some slots open to talk with you and help you out. A lot of the best deals currently with these 4.75% rates are with new-build Florida duplexes and fourplexes.    You can use them for rental SFHs too. Last I checked, the deals were a little better on the duplexes and fourplexes.   You probably thought that Sub-6 and sub-5 mortgage rates are about as unlikely to make a sudden comeback as AOL or Myspace, but we've got them here now.    Now, that 4.75% is just one of two options that we have with some Build-To-Rent builders that are fairly motivated. So to review the first one fully… you can get a   4.75% interest rate with a 25% down payment 1 year of free property management and $1,000 off closing costs per deal That's one. Or, option 2 is: Zero down payment - yes, 100% financing 2 years free property management $1,000 off closing costs per deal Negotiable price, open to offers They are the two options.  It's rarely more attractive than this. If you hear this in a few weeks, or perhaps months, I doubt that these options will be there any longer.   So I'll close with something actionable that can really help you now.    If you want to do it yourself, that's fine, like thousands of others have, get a selection of income property - despite this national dearth of supply at GREmarketplace.com   Or, like I said, right now, it's really helpful to connect with an experienced GRE Investment Coach - it's free - our coach's name is Naresh - for those 4.75% interest rates or zero down program - whatever's best for you… you can do all that at once at GREmarketplace.com/Coach   Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. DQYD!  

Have you ever heard the saying, "feel the fear & do it anyway"? Is there an opportunity in your life that is CALLING you... but your brain is telling you every logical reason as to why you SHOULDN'T do it? Well, we have questions for you bestie...WHAT IF that thing that scares you is exactly what YOU need to CHANGE you?WHAT IF that thing that scares you is exactly what the WORLD needs you to do, so that YOU can TRANSFORM, step in to your POWER & create the IMPACT only you can create?When we decided to purchase tickets to EmpowerHER Live last year, we had every logical reason as to why we SHOULDN'T do it... but we had a VISCERAL GUT FEELING tell us that we HAD to do it. We decided to jump into the unknown & invest money into our tickets, hotel room, flights & more, ALL because of that intuitive feeling...& besties... thank GOSH we did... because our LIVES were COMPLETELY TRANSFORMED from it.In this episode, we really dive into what this experience was like for us from the moment we thought about attending to how the event still impacts who we are TODAY. We have been talking to you all about the EmpowerHER community & EmpowerHER live since the first few episodes of this podcast... and now we are PROUD affiliates of EmpowerHER Live 2023, happening in Denver, Colorado, from September 22nd-24th, 2023You can use the code BESTIES to get $50 off of your ticket! Check the link below to see more details & purchase tickets! PLEASE feel free to reach out to us with any questions you might have!kaciaghetmiri.com/empowerher-liveThis isn't the first episode where you've heard us talk about EmpowerHER Live and how impactful it was for us.... & we promise you it won't be the last! Call your shot, bestie. Put yourself in this room & be ready to step into your power and transform in ways you never would have thought possible!Any questions?! Reach out to us on instagram! @besties_and_business @heyimjessjacobs @stepherhard

Shelben and Gosh met up with Ava, Chloe, Ellie, and Kate from Die Spitz. In the last year, they've taken over Austin with their energetic shows and  new LP titled, "Teeth".  Music, socials, and more HERE Living Room Recordings©

Just how perfect do you have to be before God walks with you and guides you? How much more cleaning up do you have to do before Jesus wants to hang out with you? What would need to change in your life to get God to listen to you. Gosh, and then imagine how much […]

Anne & Lau answer a question many have about the voice over industry: "how long will it take?" The truth is, becoming a successful voiceover artist takes time, discipline, and dedication. There is no set timeline for success, and it is important to have realistic expectations. Investing in coaching and training is essential, but it is equally important to be selective about where and how to invest. Building a recognizable brand identity and having a viable business is important. Respecting the voiceover industry as a business is crucial. Hard work, commitment, and effort increase the chances of success, but there are no shortcuts. Success is not only measured financially but also in time and commitment to your voice over business.    Transcript   It's time to take your business to the next level, the BOSS level! These are the premiere Business Owner Strategies and Successes being utilized by the industry's top talent today. Rock your business like a BOSS, a VO BOSS! Now let's welcome your host, Anne Ganguzza.   Anne: Hey everyone. Welcome to the VO BOSS podcast and the BOSS Superpower series. I'm your host, Anne Ganguzza, and I'm here today with the lovely and most wonderful BOSS, co-host, Lau Lapides. Hey BOSS.    Lau: Hey BOSS. How are you?    Anne: I'm doing great. How about yourself?    Lau: I'm doing good. Feeling BOSSy today.    Anne: Today I think we should answer a very common question that is asked, I think, both of myself and you, I can imagine. And that is for people just starting out in this industry, how long will it take for me to become a voiceover artist? Or how long will I have to spend coaching or training so that I can do voiceover?    Lau: Hmm. Gotta get my calculator out for that one. So I can just do different variables, different scenarios, right?    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: Variations on the theme. That's a biggie.    Anne: Is it gonna take me, okay, in three months I wanna be able to make $10,000 a month, and I want to be able to secure 20 new clients, right? So it's very hard for people when they're first starting out. Again, we had another podcast all about this, like, you don't know what you don't know yet. So how long will it take? Well, let's see. Where's my crystal ball?    Lau: (laughs) Where do you start? Where do you start?   Anne: Where's my crystal ball? How do even I start?    Lau: Where do you start?    Anne: Boy, it depends on so many things, Lau.    Lau: Mm. There's tons of variables involved with that. That's not even possible to answer that question. One could Google and look up, okay, voiceover talent, 2023, North America, what's the average? But it's really not going to tell you what is going on in individual scenarios and situations that can cause a tremendous amount of loss and a tremendous amount of gain.    Anne: Yeah. Well, maybe let's start with how long will it take if somebody's just starting out in the industry, right?    Lau: Wait, can I do my theater moment? Can I do my like, wait, give me six months. I gotta do jazz hands. I will give you a VO career.    Anne: Woohoo!   Lau: Did you like that? Did that sound credible to anyone?    Anne: Wait, I'm sorry. I couldn't hear you. I was running fast and far away from that.   Lau: (laughs)    Anne: From that claim.    Lau: You know, I had a colleague one time, he told the greatest stories, and he said, listen, would you go to a dentist who did a weekend workshop? Or who even did a one-year certificate program to become a dentist? Would you do that? And everyone laughs at that.    Anne: Would you get your tooth drilled from that dentist? Mm.    Lau: Probably not. Probably not.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: Because not just about the physical pain of it, but the idea that, how could they become a dentist in six months or one year? There's a lot to learn. There's a lot to delve into, right?    Anne: Oh my gosh, yes. Absolutely. Such a great point. And I think that's like one of the first things that I'm always saying. My gosh, we go to school for years to learn a craft. Like doctors go for eight years minimum, I think, right? Dentists as well. And maybe not even doctors and dentists. I mean, just back in the day, okay, now I'm starting to sound my age, but I had a four-year program in college that I went to for a bachelor's or a two-year program for an associate, whatever it is, right? We go to elementary school for so many years to learn all of these things.    So why is voiceover any different? Like, I'm not saying we need to spend 12 years, but in reality, we probably are continually honing our craft and spending our entire lives being a student. But why would you think it would only take two months or three months even, or even a couple of sessions before you're ready to make that demo? You have to just sit back and does that make logical sense?    Lau: I think it could only make logical sense if I am really invested in the media blitz of our society and having very quick images and sounds about being in entertainment, being in the entertainment industry, which looks to us on the outside as very fast and very polished and very rich and very quick. When we know on the inside, on the other side of it, it takes years and years oftentimes to get to that place of what you're seeing in that media image.    Anne: Sure.   Lau: So I mean, that's kind of like the collateral damage of being in this whole entertainment industry under that umbrella is that you have whole generations now that think and feel like, if I jump on TikTok or if I jump on this social media channel, I'm instantly this, I'm instantly that. It's like stir and mix, you know? Pull it off the shelf, stir and mix, and you're instantly a star.    Anne: Yeah, yeah.    Lau: We have to combat that because we know for longevity in careers, it's just never that. It's always a, an investment, a creating, a recreating, a re-envisioning throughout your life. This is a craft.    Anne: Yeah. And it doesn't happen overnight, for sure. Does not happen. If it looks easy, well, yeah, it probably took us, what if that overnight success was 40 years in the making?    Lau: Yes. We were a 40-year overnight success. You like it? (laughs)    Anne: And everybody is different. Now, of course, you might have a different story. Maybe you've been an actor all your life, and you've turned to voiceover, and you got hired because maybe you're a little bit of a celebrity, right? And people know you and they know your brand, and so you were able to lock in a big video game right away, or a national campaign. And so that is where I think people, they look at it and go, oh my gosh, I should be be able to do this. You know, if I set my goals, I should be able to do this in three months or six months. But honestly, BOSSes out there, I mean, to really be a BOSS, I think that there has to be some longevity. There has to be some due diligence. There has to be some hard work, some sweat, blood, tears, mistakes. We just had a whole podcast on mistakes -- that really make that career a possibility. And it does not typically happen in two to three months.    So with that being said, the other question is, how much is this going to cost? Well, it's going to cost, right, whatever you're going to invest in your coaching and training. And I don't mean to be impatient, but it's so many times I get people who come to me thinking that it'll cost them much less to get that demo so that they can get working and be successful as a voiceover actor. And somehow they're thinking, well, just a few hundred dollars, maybe a thousand, and I'll be good to go, and I'll be able to make some money. Lau?   Lau: I almost don't know what to say to that though. We always have to have something to say to that.   Anne: Right? We do. We do.    Lau: One of the first things I always say is, what you put into it, what you invest is exactly what you're going to get out of it. So be careful how you invest. And how much you invest and what you invest. You have to really sit down with a master plan and think, okay, maybe I don't know much. I'm in my first year. Now I'm in my third year. I know a lot more. And you have to invest and reinvest in, what are my goals per quarter? What do I want to achieve? What is achievable? What is realistic? I always joke with my clients and say, I may want to be a 22-year-old Scandinavian supermodel, but that ain't happening.    Anne: (laughs)   Lau: Can I just say? And I'm glad it's not happening, ‘cause that leaves me room to be what I can be, what I want to be, and what is possible for me.    Anne: Love it. Sure.   Lau: So I don't look at that as a limitation. I look at that as opening the door to spending the energy and time and everything that I should be investing in.    Anne: Yes.    Lau: Just because I have money and I can invest doesn't mean I should invest in that. I have to be very specific. I have to be very goal-oriented, and I have to be reasonable. I have to be realistic and pragmatic in my goal. There's a difference between a dream and a goal, right? Who is the famous person who said this? I have to look this up. A goal is just a dream with a deadline. But it's more than that. It's something that is realistic for my talent, for my skillset, for my time, for my money. It's like a whole portfolio. You sat down with a financial advisor, they're not just gonna say, hey, how much money do you have? No. They're gonna look at you and build a portfolio on who you are, what your background is, what you're capable of, what you want, and really come up with scenarios and variables that are reasonable in terms of it not being a gamble, but being an investment, a calculated risk.    Anne: Yes. Absolutely. Absolutely. I feel like we say this so much, but I feel like we, we need to say it. There is an investment here. There is an investment here. It's not going to come — can you learn voiceover on YouTube? Can you learn voiceover from reading books? Can you learn voiceover from Googling? There's a lot that you can take from that. But then there's also so much more that you can garner by investing some money into a good coach. This is all about you and your voice and your acting. And so it really helps to work with someone who specializes in taking your voice and teaching you techniques and principles of acting so that you can showcase the very best for your potential clients. And so that's going to cost money.    And I always think, if you are invested enough to want to create a business selling your voice, well, you have to also understand that as a business, you respect other businesses, right? Other businesses, coaches are out there. They have to charge for their services. It's not like I can exist just on my good heart, which I do have a wonderful heart, and Lau, you too.    Lau: You do. You do.    Anne: I can't just spend my hours every day giving away voice lessons. And so there has to be some semblance of a business there. And I always have to say to myself that I need to present a good example of a voiceover business. I've got policies. If they can't make their lesson, if they don't notify me in a certain amount of time, I can't fill that spot again. So that costs me money. So there are things that need to be enforced in business, which I think as a student, right, or as somebody entering into this industry, wanting to be a business, that you also have to learn about and also respect and understand.    Lau: You said a total mouthful too, when you said, you know, respecting the businesses that are in your business. I mean, we wanna respect everyone in the world, but when we're talking about our industry, like be respectful of others' businesses that are working alongside you, with you, and for you to help you create and grow a business. Their time is valuable. Their time is money, in essence, right? We don't like to think of it that way, but we never wanna apologize for having value monetarily. You have to have value.    Sure, you can do pro bono work. Sure, you can do projects without getting paid. Sure, you can do all of that. But it has to live alongside a paradigm of career and really building something that is viable, meaning I'm getting my return, and I'm also investing, and I'm also having some luxury of profit. And that is called building a business. And so when we come out to people, we say, oh, well, how much is this gonna be? Well, that's expensive. Well, I can't afford that. You're automatically unintentionally disrespecting that person's not just time and effort, but their education. You're paying for their history, their value --    Anne: Their experience.   Lau: -- their schooling, all the connections they have and know, their studio. I mean, on and on it goes. You are paying for that. It's not just about a product; it's about a a process. And so really just making sure people understand that. If you feel like someone is charging you too much money, that's fine. Then walk away from it and don't spend it. But just know they're basing their value off what they think their value is based in all those areas. It isn't just, oh, I'm slapping on a price tag of this. It's like I'm bringing this to the table and guess what? I'm not 20 or 30, I'm 50, I'm 60. So I'm bringing you all those years of knowledge and wisdom.   Anne: Experience. Absolutely. Absolutely. And yeah, respect the business. Respect the people that are in the business that are helping you get into the business. And also expecting things to be easy or cheap, I would say educate yourself enough about the industry to know that with anything, right, you're going to have to make an investment. I wish that there weren't people out there selling the dream, but I think you're gonna have that for just about anything, not just voiceover, right? There's gonna be, I'm gonna sell you the dream. Gosh, there were so many and there probably still are infomercials on, come to my seminar. You too can flip a house and make thousands of dollars, and you can make thousands of dollars in, in a short amount of time. So that whole selling the dream, if it seems too good to be true, typically it is.   Lau: (laughs)   Anne: And so that's something to be aware of. So how long will it take me? This is the other question, how long will it take me to get a return on my investment?    Lau: That's a really tough question to answer. It really is. And I, I just have to say to your point for people to remember --I had a colleague that gave me this really adorable sign one time from my birthday. It was like a mechanic with this old fashioned truck, and he was fixing the truck, and it said on it, good work ain't cheap and cheap work ain't good.    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: And I never forgot.    Anne: Yep. I love that love.    Lau: I don't know if I have the signs still, but I never forgot that. I thought it was funny and kitchy, but it's so true. Like you get what you pay for oftentimes. You really, really do. Not always, but much of the time, that principle is really true. And to be perfectly honest with everyone and all your peeps, I'm gonna be honest with, I don't feel I can give you an answer to that question of what am I gonna make and how much time I'm gonna make it in, and when am I gonna be successful? That really is an individual's journey and choice as to how much time, effort, investment, heart, soul, blood, tears, whatever you're gonna put into this. The harder you run at it, the more you put into it, the more you focus and intensify, the more opportunities tend to come because there's that work breeds work kind of energy that you're putting into the world. Like, I'm working, I know you're this way, Anne. If someone says, are you busy? Are you bored?  Say there's no such thing. Bored is not in your vocabulary.    Anne: Never, never.    Lau: Because you're always working, you're working. Whether you're being paid or not, you're always working. And that energy, that mystical energy goes into the world, and people are attracted to that. There's an attraction to that. It's not just being busy, it's being engaged, it's being excited. It's being enthralled by things. People want to magnetically latch onto that. So I would say in order to get that success, whatever that is that you're looking for, get busy. Get busy on being busy and get engaged. And the more you're engaged, the more potential outcomes that are pleasing you are gonna happen.    Anne: Well, I think return on your investment, okay. So investment, usually when people say that to you, or they're asking you that question, when will I get a return on my investment? They're talking about their money. And in reality, what you've just wrapped all into, besides the money, is your effort. Right? And your time and what you put into it. So in reality, when you're asking me, when will I get a return on my investment? Well, I will come right back to you and say, well, how committed are you to investing your time, your energy into making this a success? And a lot of it does depend on you.    Now, if you're gonna sink a few thousand dollars into some coaching and a demo, then you expect to get a job how long after? A lot of times two people will say, all right, now that I got my demo, how long will it take for me to get my first voiceover job? And again, that really shows up into your effort in terms of how are you going to go out and get that job? Because you can have the best voice in the world, you have the best demo in the world, but if nobody knows about it, they can't hire you, and they can't pay you for it.    Lau: And aren't you and I constantly breaking down the map biology of, okay, I will answer that question with a question, which no one likes, but okay, let's break down your day. Can we break down your week? Can we look at actually what you're investing day to day and week to week? And then all of a sudden, the door opens of knowledge, and sometimes it's like what you don't wanna see of Pandora's box coming out. Like, oh, I'm only doing this. I don't have time to do this. Or this is harder for me.   Anne: Or I don't have time to do the homework. I give my students homework. And I'll be like, okay, so I saw that you were able to record a couple of pieces of copy , and I'll just say it like that. Okay. So they'll be like, well, okay, so am I ready for my demo? And I'll say, well, I noticed that you only recorded two out of your 20 pieces of copy. And so if I'm giving you too much homework, you just let me know. But I will say that you need to invest the time in doing this, and I give you homework not to make you cry or not to overwhelm you. It's to kind of get you in a discipline where you can be working.    This is what it's going to be like to be working every day. This is what it's going to take for you to record this, edit it, prep it as if you were doing an audition, and just store it in that Dropbox and name it appropriately. Right? So all of these things that I'm giving for homework are really lessons in, here's what a voiceover artist does in their day. I'm submitting an audition, I'm naming it correctly, I'm uploading it on time. And so, most of the time I'll come back and say, I really need you to put in this time. Or they'll reschedule lesson after lesson after lesson, and then it will be like six months before I see them again. And I'm like, we've lost the momentum.    Lau: That's right. And it's like, can you see the forest through the trees?    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: Like is there logic to your line of, is there reasoning even to your line of thinking?    Anne: Yeah.    Lau: Like one of my coaches recently, an anecdote, one of my coaches said to me, I'm frustrated because this person wants to get on the demo track and wants to do the demo and is quickly, doesn't have money, da, da, da, but is not doing the homework and is coming to the table and just using a lot of excuses as to why they could not prepare for the session.    Anne: Yeah, exactly.   Lau: And he said, said simply, he was frustrated, but he said, do they realize they're going into voiceover? Do they even know what that profession is? And I said, no, they haven't made that connection yet. It's for us to do the teaching moments and making the connection that what you're going into is extremely demanding, and very fast, and crazy hours and blah, blah, blah, all this stuff. But a lot of our clients, Anne, I think you could say the same thing, right? They're not seeing the forest through the trees where they're seeing this overview of what they think the industry is, but the weeds, getting really into the weeds of what it is the coaching is simulating, trying to simulate what a work experience might be like. So if it's hard for you to do your homework, then it'll be near impossible for you to do the auditions and jobs.    Anne: Yeah. Oh, I teach a lot of long format narration, right? So when I give homework, they are the full spots. They'll be two to four minutes, sometimes even longer if it's e-learning. And they'll say, okay, but that was a really long spot. And I'm like, well, that's the reality of it, right? And so I need to make sure that you as an actor are completely committed to that script three quarters of the way through. Three minutes in, are you still as committed as you were in the beginning? And I want you to edit that entire thing as if it were an audition. So they're like, well, do I have to edit? And I'm like, I'm kind of giving it to you all at once so that you can understand what it takes, right, to put out a job that is a four-minute job. How long will it take you to edit that? And I want you to get better at it. I want you to get faster at it.    Lau: It's a simulated journey of --   Anne: Exactly.    Lau: It's a journey that you pay for to invest so that you can go with very little to no stakes. Right? To go into a high stake situation.    Anne: Yeah. And if you're working with me, right? And you wanna know how long it will take before you can do voiceover -- I mean, if you're just gonna meet with me once a week, then that's an hour out of your week that you've spent doing voiceover. You're gonna progress an hour at a time. And if you're gonna ask me 10 weeks later, I'm like, well, you've spent exactly 10 hours with me. And in a given workday, we might work eight hours a day or 10 hours a day, or we work a 40-hour work week. You've only worked with me for 10 hours total of your lifetime, and you wanna know if you're ready for a demo. Now, does that make sense? Does that make sense?    Lau: There's no sense to it. But then again, there's no understanding of the logic of what actually goes into it. Right? Like they literally may not get just yet what goes into building a career and building voiceover. And if someone is coming to me, which I get a lot; a client saying, I'm frustrated Lau because I'm already doing an hour or two a week of this. I can't put any more time into it, this is where I have to be kind and say, um, I get that. And you're busy and you work full-time, you have — I get that. But just continually regroup. And is your vision clear, understandable, and realistic about what you're going into?    Anne: Sure. Absolutely.    Lau: Because what you're going into is going to demand that you give as much as you can to it.    Anne: Yeah. Yeah. It is the hardest thing. And I will be the first to admit, because when I worked part-time and voiceover when I was working a full-time job, a family, a full-time job, and voiceover is tough. There's so much focus that has to go into voiceover. Because remember, people, this is our business. It is. We are entrepreneurs. And unless your full-time job is your other full-time business, and it's yours, you are typically also navigating an unfamiliar world of, oh, I have my own business. I have to generate my own business. I have to market myself. I have to put on a trillion different hats. And so there's more than just getting in the studio and recording and editing. Now there is all the marketing, there's all the --I've gotta have a website. I've gotta be able to do auditions so that I can present myself with opportunities so that I can get work. So there's a lot, in addition to just doing voiceover in your booth.   Lau: We're like one man bands. One woman bands. We really are. It's like putting on hats, hats, hats, hats. You have to own a lot of hats to be in this profession, because you're always gonna be shifting your hat. Any kind of business owner, if you're a solopreneur and you work alone, you're always shifting the hats. I think also too, Anne, we're fighting against the new mantra of teaching business leaders or teaching people who wanna be BOSSes that you can work for two or three hours a week and then sit on a beach for the rest of that time. That's like this new mantra that's out there in marketing. Like make six figures, make even seven figures. Lay on that beach with your children and just work a couple hours a week.    Anne: Couple hours a day. Yeah. If that, yeah.    Lau: I'm not gonna say it's a lie. I'm not gonna say that, but I am going to say there's a slight fabrication, maybe even an embellishment in that, because I know for a fact that even the tech billionaires are working all the time. And why are they working all the time? Because people who own stuff, run stuff, and lead stuff are innovators. They're inquisitive, they're interested. Whether you like what they do or agree with it is another thing. I'm just saying, they're invested in it. Their whole life is that. Even after they sell it sometimes.    Anne: Entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs, that is the definition.    Lau: Entrepreneurs.   Anne: Of an entrepreneur, Lau.    Lau: Yeah. We have a very, very well-known furniture company in New England that has been around for ages like 40 years. And they were run by two brothers, and they were constantly on TV together, constantly. The face --   Anne: Oh, who? Do I remember them?    Lau: Jordan's Furniture.    Anne: Oh yeah. Okay.    Lau: One of the brothers sold his piece years ago. Well, guess what? We never see the brother that owns it. We only see that brother on tv. And he's constantly there. And I believe, correct me if I'm wrong, I believe he's the one who still has the shares. I mean, they sold the whole company now. They've been in business for a long time. But the point is, I still see him. He's on all the time because he's the face of the company. He's the feel of the company. He's much older now. He still does all the commercial campaigns. He could say, hey, I'll be on the beach. Good luck. Good luck. He made his money, he made millions.    Anne: That's true.    Lau: Doesn't matter. His heart and his feel as a human being is to wanna stay connected to the company, to wanna stay connected to where it's going. So my point is, is like, are we ever laying back doing nothing to build a company? No. That's false.    Anne: Yes. Yeah. My return on investment, I mean, honestly, right? Investment is so much more than money. So I want you guys to really think in terms outside of money -- blood, sweat, tears, effort, practice, and of course money when you're investing money too. But that investment falls not just in your wallet, but in your time and in your commitment. And how long will it take? I think that that really is entirely up to you, (laughs). How long will it take to get a return on investment? And will you get a return on your investment?    I wish I could guarantee people things. And I always say, honestly, if you put the work in and you're committed, and as long as I can understand what you're saying, right? There's so much out there. Do I have the voice for voiceover? We all do. We all have our own unique voice, and it's beautiful, and it's beautiful to people in different ways. And so yeah, sure. It's not about the voice, to be honest with you. It's not really about the voice.   Lau: And sometimes there's just no real rhyme or reason. You could call it fate, you could call it mystical, you could call it whatever you want, as to what jobs are coming to you. In the same day, I mean, when I do my agent work, I'll get a $400 job in perpetuity with nothing residual or whatever, and okay. And then in the same day, I'll get a $15,000 job, which doesn't take a whole lot more time to record or a whole lot more effort. It's just the nature of it is very, very different. And the usage is very different, and the client is very different. And how they came to me and us, sometimes it's just fate. And other times it's the hard work of your branding, your marketing, your staying with it year after year that your name just floats into the universe and they get it.   Anne: Sure. And it just becomes a known brand. Yeah. So how much will I make (laughs)? Will I get a return on my investment and how long? BOSSes, it's up to you. It's up to you. So, and we have all the faith that you can absolutely do it. So, ah, good conversation. Good conversation.    Lau: I love that. I love that. So empowering.    Anne: So BOSSes, here's a chance, not only to be a BOSS at your own business, but here's a chance for you to use your voice to make an immediate difference in our world and give back to the communities that give to you. Visit 100voiceswhocare.org to commit. And a big shout-out to our favorite ipDTL sponsor. You too can connect and network like BOSSes. Find out more at ipdtl.com. You guys have an amazing week, and we'll see you next week.    Lau: See you next week, bye.   Anne: Bye.   Join us next week for another edition of VO BOSS with your host Anne Ganguzza. And take your business to the next level. Sign up for our mailing list at voBOSS.com and receive exclusive content, industry revolutionizing tips and strategies, and new ways to rock your business like a BOSS. Redistribution with permission. Coast to coast connectivity via ipDTL.

Are you living the life that you were created to live? I explore.  People have harbored unfounded real estate fears for years. Here they were: 2012: Shadow inventory 2013: Boomers downsizing 2014: Rates spike 2015: PMI recession 2016: Vacant units 2017: Home prices above pre-GFC peak 2018: 5% mortgage rates 2019: Recession? 2020: Pandemic 2021: Forbearance crisis 2022: Rising rates 2023: Recession US houses prices are heading up this spring. The latest FHFA's Monthly Housing Report shows 4% national home price appreciation. We explore apartment reputation scores. This is a great proxy for what's happened in housing the past three years. As an investor, you have a low “loss to purchase” with your tenants. It's difficult for them to buy their first home. I discuss 12 Ways that you can raise the rent and increase the value of your property. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/449 Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Find cash-flowing Jacksonville property at: www.JWBrealestate.com/GRE Invest with Freedom Family Investments. You get paid first: Text ‘FAMILY' to 66866 Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free—text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold Credit to BiggerPockets.com   Welcome to GRE! I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. We get clear together - Are you truly living the life that you were created to live?   A housing market update with some perspective that can totally shift your real estate thought paradigm.    Then, 12 Actionable Ways that you can raise the rent and add value to your property. Today, on Get Rich Education.   Welcome to GRE! From Johannesburg, South Africa to Harrisburg, Pennsylvania and across 188 nations worldwide, I'm Keith Weinhold and this is Get Rich Education.   Last night, people were losing sleep over money. At the same time, last night, you made money… as you slept.   Are you living the life that you were created to live?   Your big ideas, your grandiose hopes and ambitions that you promised yourself that you would follow through on someday… have they turned into fears?   Even ones that you had as a child - like to be an astronaut or a firefighter. Today, it might simply be that you would have quit your soul-sucking job by now.   Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs - how many are you fulfilling? All five? There are five levels. The base level are your… What are you doing to be the most that you can be?    With financial freedom, you can control your time and have a chance at living the life that you were created to live.   How do most people think of financial betterment? In a faulty way, like…   If you get your hair cut at home and brew your own coffee at home, you figure you could save 6 bucks a day.   Hey, Men's Fast-Pitch Softball at the Moose Lodge is still free. Oh geez. So that's why it's your entertainment?   You could save a whopping $80 on flight tickets by adding an extra layover on your trip itinerary.   Or… it's buy-one-get-one free week on Hillshire Farm brand bacon at the supermarket.   Alright, how do you know that all those things right there don't move the meter in your life? It's because, ask:   How many times would you have to do that activity - like add an unnecessary flight layover - in order to acquire wealth?    None. It doesn't apply. You could practically do that an INFINITE number of times and you wouldn't acquire wealth to create the time to live the life you want.   But how many times would you need to add a flight layover in order to make you MISERABLE? There IS a number. There is a certain number.   Doing those trivial things only helps ensure that you stay at a soul-sucking job.   Because rather than taking your time - a zero-sum game - rather than HAVING your time engaged in expansionary activities, you were focused on contracting.    You were focused on where there's a low upside rather than activities that have an upside with no ceiling.   Another way to ask if the activity is expansionary and moving you toward financial freedom is: Did you overcome FEAR in fulfilling that task?   Yes, it's an inconvenient truth that facing & overcoming fear is what makes you grow.   Did you overcome fear when you brewed coffee at home or got some stupid discount on grocery store bacon?   What are the activities you do that move you toward financial freedom - not debt-freedom - but financial freedom & overcome fear & grow.   That's an activity like:   Making your first home a fourplex with an FHA loan… or repositioning your dead equity, like Caeli Ridge & I discussed here two weeks ago… or buying an income property across state lines… or learning how to become a savvy private lender… or finding out how to become an accredited investor.   Are you living the life that you were created to live?   Now you've got some examples, some milestones, and some checkpoints so that you'll know if you're either on the right trajectory - or hopefully - if you've been listening here long enough… you're living that life… now.   Why would you live one more day of your life “below your means” than what's absolutely necessary. That should only be a short-term life mode.   Don't live below your means, grow your means.   Live the life that you were created to live.   But the major media channels stir up so much fear - and even niche ones - that it can often paralyze, even some clear thinkers.   Despite the fact that today's real estate appreciation rates are quite normalized and modestly growing, some people still have unfounded fear over real estate.   And non-doers are always trying to time the market… and timing the market doesn't work.    Here's what fearful permabears are concerned about. It's always something in real estate.    In 2012, it was “Shadow inventory”. Remember that? Never came to pass, just like most of this stuff.   In 2013, the fear was Boomers are downsizing   In 2014: Rates spike   In 2015, it was a PMI recession   In 2016, it was vacant units. Ha! A terrible miss.   In 2017, it was, look, nominal home prices are above the pre-GFC peak. Yeah, so what? They should be.   In 2018, it was 5% mortgage rates. That was the fear.   In 2019, I actually don't remember what the fear was that year. That was a fairly uniform year but people stirred up fear about something in order to get clicks. Call it a recession.   In 2020, it was the pandemic   In 2021, it was fear of a forbearance crisis.   In 2022, the fear was rising mortgage rates will cause a housing price crash and there's a collapse in sales volume.   In 2023, what's the fear? Are we back to recession fears again?    Gosh, people have been steadily forecasting that for 12-18 months now, it still isn't here, and it still isn't on the horizon either, as job growth numbers keep beating expectations.    If you're waiting to invest in the most proven investment of all-time - real estate, or even something else like gold or bitcoin or stocks - if you're waiting until the uncertainty dissipates, then you'll never be investing again for the rest of your life.   About the only certain thing in the investing world is persistent inflation and the fact that people are going to need a good place to live.   I invest in the certainties, not get paralyzed with uncertainty.   This way, we don't get too caught up in the latest investing fad, often like stock investors do.    In 2017, it was anything around “blockchain.” In 2021, it was the “metaverse.” In 2023, “AI” is the term that's instigated a Pavlovian response from investors salivating over the potential hundreds of billions in value that could be unlocked by the new technology… until that gets oversold. There IS some opportunity in some of those things, but as soon as people lose money in them, they revert back to principles. In a lot of ways, we stick to principles here, even if some of them are countercultural principles - like FF beats DF. Keep your debt & get more of it. More debt means you own more RE.   US house prices have stabilized and are heading up. They've gone from modest declines or steady prices… to modest growth in most regions.   That's the summary from my latest "light reading" duty—FHFA's Monthly Housing Report. It's released every month.   Some highlights from the latest one, all stats through February, and with nominal pricing… Every division east of the Mississippi is up 5% to 8% annually The Pacific division, which was hurt most, saw a 3% decline National home prices are up 4% And this index covers 400+ American cities Spring numbers will be factored in soon. Since it's property-buying season, appreciation rates will likely rise.   Like I've stated before and am becoming really somewhat known for talking about in the industry. In fact, just last week, I was in Arizona and shared this on Ken McElroy's show - the housing crash is a 100% certainty. That's because it already happened.    It was a housing supply crash three years ago, which prevented a price crash.   So then, let's look at some of the best appreciating markets in the US here, just the quick, Top 10.    And notice how widespread the national HPA is. It really just excludes the western third or western quarter of US states.   The market with the 10th most appreciation - and this is all YOY, through Q1 per the NAR:   Santa Fe, NM up 12% 9th is Hickory-Morganton, NC up 12% 8th is Appleton, WI up 12-and-a-half per cent 7th? Milwaukee-Waukesha-West Allis, WI. Up 14%. I'm doing some rounding here. 6th is Oklahoma City, up 15% Elmira, NY - hey I grew up near there - is up 15%. That's 5th.   4th is Burlington, NC up 15% YOY 3rd is Warner-Robins, GA, up 16%  2nd is Oshkosh-Neenah, WI at 17% #1 in the nation is… the Kingsport-Bristol area, which spans Virginia & Tennessee. Up 19%   I'm going to discuss apartments in a minute. But they are the 10 US areas with the largest single-family home price increase annually.   In the Information Age, a bad reputation will follow you around like your cat, internet tracking cookies, and a song that you can't get out of your head.   Apartment reputation scores are a broad measure of renter satisfaction.   It's amazing to see how closely they track the macro trends that impact tenants and property managers (PMs).   What I'm referencing here is J Turner Research's Online Reputation Assessment scores from today, and going back to March 2020.   This is a very telling pattern here.   Spring - Summer 2020: COVID descends. Lockdowns are here. Reputation scores plummet. PMs struggle to rapidly adjust to a new era where renters live and work inside their units 24/7. Everyone started using Zoom. Maintenance techs could rarely even go inside units for repairs.   Entropy ran rampant. Parents didn't know what to do with their children. Fear reigned. Common spaces closed. Neither tenants nor PMs were happy.   Then, in the…   Fall 2020 - Summer 2021: This was the boom period for apartments. PMs have solved for the new era, adopting new technologies and new strategies. They also re-open amenity spaces and in-unit maintenance.    Hey, foosball in the clubhouse is back. Apartment demand surges, and reputation scores go back up.   Late 2021: Apartment occupancy rates hit record highs. PMs again wrestle with on-site staffing shortages. Could ultra-low vacancy and still-robust leasing traffic put so much strain on property managers that reputation scores start to drop again?   Nope! Because in…   Early 2022: Reputation scores climb back up to new highs again. PMs once again adjust to the rapidly evolving climate, many leaning on early-to-mid phase adoption of centralization tech and management practices.   Mid - Late 2022: Apartment reputation scores inch back again. That's when consumers saw peak inflation—including renewal rent increases.    At the same time, demand (for all housing types, not just apartments) slowed down and you didn't see the high rent growth that you had. This puts more strain on PMs.   Inflation hit everyone, with big price hikes in property insurance, taxes, maintenance, turnover, labor, and utilities.   Early 2023: Apartment reputation scores are on the rise again, hitting new highs. Consumer inflation is cooling, while vacancy rates and leasing traffic return to more normal levels.   Some semblance of normalcy has finally returned.   At the same time, new tech adopted in the pandemic era proves to have long-term benefits to both tenants and managers.   In recent years, PMs have focused on resident satisfaction, so it's no coincidence that reputation scores keep improving.   Now today, as an investor, changes are that you have a low LOSS TO PURCHASE.   What's a “loss to purchase”. Your tenants are leaving to go buy something very often.    You, as an investor in either single-family rentals or condos or apartments - you can retain residents right now because it's so hard for them to go off and buy their own starter home.   Why's that? Well, it's not just the higher mortgage rates. It's that fact coupled with the fact that credit availability is still tough.    As you know, you need to have a lot of good documentation & income & assets to get a loan. That keeps your rent-paying tenant in place.   In 2005, we were in the opposite condition. Back then, tenants fled my units. I had a hard time retaining tenants in 2005. Why?    Because it was so easy to get a loan, you could just lie about everything on a mortgage application and no one even checked the accuracy. Bloated appraisal values even came flying in.   That's why my rental property tenants kept leaving. It seems like it was always to buy a first-time condo back in 2005.   Today, you can retain tenants. That's your upside of today's harder housing affordability and stringent lending requirements.    So, in this normalizing housing era where tenants have to live in your rental unit longer - because they have no alternative - you can find the properties most conducive to this strategy where thousands of other have created a quick account - at our marketplace: GREmarketplace.com   It's not like a big box store. It's more like an organic farmer's market. That's where the good stuff is. So, check back often for new inventory at GREmarketplace.com   You're listening to Episode 449 of the GRE Podcast… and of those 449, I think that two of them were quite good!   Haha!   Coming up shortly, 12 ways for you to raise rent and add value to your property.   If you get value from the show, please tell a friend about the show. I'd really appreciate it. Share it on your social media.   More straight ahead. I'm Keith Weinhold. You're listening to Get Rich Education.  

Gosh, it feels like The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom will never get here. This wait is torture–hold on, you're saying Tears of the Kingdom is out now? Oh wow. Holy crap. Uh…let's start talking about the biggest game of 2023! (So far.) We brought in Tom Marks from IGN, who reviewed the game alongside Polygon's Mike Mahardy. We have a pile of discourse about what Tears of the Kingdom does differently from its direct predecessor, Breath of the Wild, as well as what it does better…and worse. (Gasp!) Our talk is spoiler-free, so jump right in like a half-naked blonde guy leaping down into Hyrule from an impossible height. Also in this episode: Rumblings of a new Nintendo handheld. We'll probably see it in 2024, but when exactly? Dragon Age: Dreadwolf is likewise looking at a 2024 release Summer of Korra goes into episodes 4, 5, and 6. Long live pro-bending! If hearing bells out of nowhere means you're losing your mind, what does hearing the Zelda theme out of nowhere entail…? Music used in this episode: Do Your Best! [Breath of Fire III] The Legend of Korra Main Theme [The Legend of Korra] A Curious Tale [Secret of Mana] The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom Main Theme [The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom] Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today's episode features an interview with real estate investor, Al Curiel, who specializes in performing notes. The interview covers Al's background in real estate, his decision to focus on notes, and how he scales his note investing business.  -------------------------------------------------------------- Al's Real Estate Journey [00:01:03] Investing in Notes [00:03:33] Avatar and Mentorship Program [00:05:38] Building a Virtual Assistant System [00:08:29] Scaling with Trial and Error [00:10:08] Getting Meaningful Deal Flow in the Note Space [00:13:37] Buying Non-Performing Notes [00:16:58] Pricing Changes in Non-Performing Notes [00:19:17] Rehabbing Strategies for Non-Performing Notes [00:21:40] -------------------------------------------------------------- Connect with Al: Web: www.AssociatesinRealEstateHoldings.com Email: info@associatesandrealestateholdings.com   Connect with Sam: I love helping others place money outside of traditional investments that both diversify a strategy and provide solid predictable returns.     Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/HowtoscaleCRE/ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/samwilsonhowtoscalecre/ Email me → sam@brickeninvestmentgroup.com   SUBSCRIBE and LEAVE A RATING. Listen to How To Scale Commercial Real Estate Investing with Sam Wilson Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/how-to-scale-commercial-real-estate/id1539979234 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/4m0NWYzSvznEIjRBFtCgEL?si=e10d8e039b99475f -------------------------------------------------------------- Want to read the full show notes of the episode? Check it out below: Al Curiel (00:00:00) - I don't want to be a process junkie, right? I, I do what I do best, which is raising capital, talking to customers, shaking hands, and kissing babies sort of thing. Um, the, the, the, the other stuff, the day-to-day grind, I lead to someone that is going to be managed by a supervisor that is going to give me results at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month. And we compare those in a gigantic spreadsheet as to what our production goals are for that specific quarter.   Intro (00:00:28) - Welcome to the How to Scale commercial real Estate Show. Whether you are an active or passive investor, we'll teach you how to scale your real estate investing business into something big.   Sam Wilson (00:00:42) - Al Curiel is a real estate investor that focuses on performing notes, and he also has a mentorship program that focuses on investing in real estate using the power of meditation. Al, welcome to the show.   Al Curiel (00:00:53) - Thank you, Sam. Good to be here.   Sam Wilson (00:00:54) - Absolutely. Al the pleasures mine. There are three questions I ask every guest who comes in the show in 90 seconds or less. Can you tell me where did you start? Where are you now, and how did you get there?   Al Curiel (00:01:03) - Started back in 19 90, 83 when I was, uh, 22 years old. Started with my first, uh, building, uh, it was a rental building, and, uh, I learned quickly that, uh, you need a whole lot more than just money to, uh, to succeed. And, um, my brother and I started the business. We, uh, survived through some of the corrections and, uh, eventually became wholesalers fixed and flippers, renters and all that stuff. And then finally in 2008, as a result of the waterfall from the 2008 debacle of the, uh, subprime market, we started focusing on performing and unperforming notes.   Sam Wilson (00:01:45) - Wow. So you've been in real estate. Gosh, you're going on four decades at this point. That's   Al Curiel (00:01:50) - Exactly right. I hate to admit it, Sam, but that's exactly right. .   Sam Wilson (00:01:53) - Hey, luck to you. Some people, some people don't make it that long, so, you know, there, there, there is that bright side to it. Um, but you've seen a lot. I mean, you've seen the savings in loan crisis. You've seen the.com bust. You've seen the oh eight crisis and now on, on the verge of who knows what right now, uh, just we see banks starting to collapse and things like that. So, I, I, I don't wanna dig in too far really into each of those sections. We just don't have time on the podcast. I'd love to hear kind of all the different things that you've done in that, but tell me why you do what you do now. I know we talked about this a little bit off air, and you kind of gave me some insight into the mess versus message or mess being your message sort of thing. So if you don't mind, give us some insight on that.   Al Curiel (00:02:36) - Not at all. I'll try to be as brief as, as I can, given the, the time constraints that we have, Sam. But basically what happened was I, being in, in so many markets and seeing so many adjustments, I couldn't tell, I didn't have a, a, a, a crystal ball to predict the future. But I certainly had a rear view mirror to see where he had been with, as you mentioned, the, the, the, the dark, uh, Monday of October 29th, 1989, that what happened in, with the doc, with the, uh, Y2K anticipation, with the savings and loans collapsing and, uh, now the 2008, nine and 10 issues with, with subprime markets, that made me realize that I was not gonna have time to recover from what I had seen in the past. So I decided to research for something else. And that's when I discovered that, uh, uh, the passive income that you realized from investing in performing and unperforming notes is where it's at.   Al Curiel (00:03:33) - Um, and that was a result of, of, again, what happened in 2008. Um, so they had, they had, they had the fallout of that mess still happening. Now you have Covid that happened in 2020. So we had a revival of that. You had the waterfall of 2008 that was still not resolved. The world stops, but commerce didn't stop. Commerce continued to work. So you had the supply supply chain issue. You had the perfect storm of covid and then the fallout of 2008. So what was gonna happen to all that inventory of, of properties? And the answer was in the banks inventory that were not being sold. So we did some research. My brother decided, you know, he's had a family, so he says he couldn't, he couldn't withstand the rigors of, and the stress of, of not having inventory to flip. So I, I did it along and, and, uh, I discovered that investing in notes was a lot easier than investing in, in fixed and flipping, because you can make money with a pen instead of swinging a hammer. Right. And that's what bedwin focus in for the last, uh, well now 10 years now.   Sam Wilson (00:04:40) - Wow. That's really, really cool. And are you buying just performing or performing and non-performing nodes?   Al Curiel (00:04:46) - We, yeah, we, we, we purchase a performing notes for our P portfolio. We pur we purchase those for our retirement. Hmm. Um, through your, through our, our Roth IRAs and the nonperforming notes, we rehab, we rehab them. Just like you can rehab a house, you can rehab a loan, right? Um, you can, you have three, three different ways of, of rehabbing, quote unquote a loan. And, uh, those we sell to our customers by way of partials. So let's just say, Sam, for instance, you have a, I bought, I buy a 30, 30 year loan from, let's just say Bank of America. Bank of America, send me a loan that is not performing. I buy it at a discount. I fixed it a little bit, and then I flip it to Sam. So outta that 30 year loan, I sell Sam 10 years. At the end of the 11th, uh, month, the 11th year, the, the note comes back to me.   Al Curiel (00:05:38) - So why do I do that? Two things. I share the risk with my customer and, uh, the customer gets the truly passive income that he wants for a certain period of time while he tries it out. If he likes it, he'll continue on with it. If he doesn't, we part company friends and everything is cool. So that's our mantra, that's our model. Um, my avatar, our personal avatar is as I, I told you before, the, the start of the show, uh, is somebody in, at or near retirement age that has three concerns. His health not of living his income and, uh, establishing a legacy for his descendants and his descendants. So that, that was my, that was my issue. So I figured that this is something that most people in my age group would, would probably want to hear about. And that's what we created the mentorship program.   Sam Wilson (00:06:27) - Yeah, I mean, cuz I, I can only imagine, you know, I think you shared, I don't know if you said your, your age here on the show, or you told me that beforehand, but either way, you know, you know who your avatar is and you know what their concerns are mm-hmm.  and I would imagine mm-hmm. , the, the, the note space is something that, like you said, you can, you can make money with a pen, not with a hammer. And the person in your, your avatar. That's, that's   Al Curiel (00:06:52) - I'm 62, Sam, I'm full disclosure. I'm 62. I'm not afraid to say it.   Sam Wilson (00:06:55) - You're not afraid to say it. Great. I didn't, I didn't wanna I didn't wanna, you know, air your dirty laundry. No, I'm joking. It's not dirty laundry , uh, here on the show. But I think that's a really powerful thing cuz you, you've defined who your avatar is and what it is that they need. And I think so many people haven't, especially as we are raising capital as we are doing deals, don't necessarily know who our investor base is necessarily. They haven't figured out what their areas of concern are, and then they can't appropriately bring a product necessarily to market that that particular person may need. Tell me, I I guess from a more, more, um, just just the nuts and bolts of what you do, how, how do you scale the node investing business?   Al Curiel (00:07:37) - We have, um, I, I reali initially it was just a one minute operation, right Sam, and then with the editor of my brother, after we, we decided that our spark company, because we ran out of inventories and we found ourselves empty handed after 89, after 2000, he just couldn't stand it. So he says, we have no inventory. What, what now Einstein? And I said, I says, I got a family, I gotta, I got offend him. He says, okay, God bless you. Go. So I had to be a one man operation, and as I started investing in it, it was, it was just me. But as I started to get more properties and I started raising more money and I started getting more investors, then I had to seek the services of virtual, uh, assistance. So now for that, I have specific, I have, I have, I have several, um, assistant firms that, that help me with different tasks.   Al Curiel (00:08:29) - I have an acquisitions manager, I have a sales manager, I have a due diligence manager, and then I have a sales manager. Those sales, and these are people that are in the Philippines and do some of my calling. Um, I have people in India that do some of my systems and social media management. And then I have people in Jamaica that do the actual negotiations, and the sales manager is there so that I hold everyone accountable. We have meetings every Tuesday afternoon. We, uh, we find where we were last year, how many leads came in, where we're at right now, how we are in raising money and where we go next month. So we have to keep everything in a journal. And I write, I mean, I dunno if you can see, but I got back here. I got journals that go back about 35 years of everything that I do every single day of my existence. I journal every day. I meditate every day, and I draft a plan of action for how my day is gonna shape out and how it ended up looking at the end of the day. So that's keep, that keeps me focused and allows me that flexibility and the latitude to pivot if I make changes to my scaling business.   Sam Wilson (00:09:36) - Wow, that's really, really cool. I, I, I would the, the building the system with that many, uh, or building your systems around virtual assistance, I think that's one, you know, you hear a VAs handling, you know, certain repetitive tasks, data mining mm-hmm. , you know, whatever it is. But scaling it the way you have done it, it's, it sounds pretty powerful. I mean, what are, what are some of the, what are some of the tips or maybe challenges that you faced when scaling with VAs and how did you overcome those? Because I think   Al Curiel (00:10:08) - It was, it was, it was a, it was a trial and error, uh, uh, enterprise, um, uh, Sam because you, I initially started with one individual and I thought this person was going to be the be all and all. And, and it's trial and error, Sam, because sometimes they don't work out. Sometimes they do. And so what I try to do is I try to keep them motivated and have three of everything. If I have, if I have a, a solid, lemme just give it, for instance, without getting too deep in the weeds and, and bore you to death. But basically, let's just say for my due diligence, I have someone that is, uh, I got hired somebody that is really good. And then, uh, through this other website that I, that I go for Upwork or, uh, assistant.com or something like that. I get a mediocre one and then one that is, it is okay, but it's a workforce by works when he or she wants, which is not really effective.   Al Curiel (00:11:02) - So I have three of those so that I'm constantly hiring. So if the, if the bad one falls off, then I have another bank of, of of VAs that I can pick from that is going to replace the not so good one with a mediocre one. Well then if the mediocre one in the middle falls off, then I have a, a, uh, the really good one to, to replace them. And I just keep con I continue to mix an experiment with their motivation with, with what, what Dr. Their why. You gotta find out your why. And then I let 'em, and then I let 'em go with, uh, with, with what they do, always keeping them on task and always having meetings to, to hold them accountable. It was really difficult, but we had the system down really good so that I know who I can call on what task on any given day. And when you motivate 'em like that, when you keep 'em on a, on a, I don't wanna say short leash, but it is a short leash, then you know what the ex they manage your expectations and you manage theirs.   Sam Wilson (00:12:01) - Right? No, I think that's super powerful. And that's, uh, I like the, the the doing things in in in duplicate or duplicate there where if some something isn't working out, you're not dead in the water because you've put all your eggs in one basket and, and they move, you know,   Al Curiel (00:12:17) - It, it, it, it is huge when you, you know, when you realize, I mean, and I'm paying these, these folks, uh, you know, nominal amounts by, by by us compare standards. But still, nevertheless, I need the activity. I need to continue to be out there. I I don't want to be a process junkie, right? I, I do what I do best, which is raising capital, talking to customers, shaking hands and kissing babies sort of thing. Um, the, the, the, the other stuff, the day-to-day grind, I lead to someone that is going to be managed by a supervisor that is going to give me results at the end of the day, at the end of the week, at the end of the month. And we compare those in a gigantic spreadsheet as to what our production goals are for that specific quarter. And we match those. And if we need to tweak it, we tweak it.   Sam Wilson (00:13:03) - That's really, really powerful. I love, I love the thought process behind that. And also just the idea that it's trial and error. I think. So oftentimes thank you. We get right the first time where it's like, okay, we're gonna do this and this is the way we're gonna do it. Whereas it's, it's probably more of an iterative process than we want, uh, want to admit. Let's, it   Al Curiel (00:13:20) - Usually is   Sam Wilson (00:13:20) - . Let's talk a little bit about deal flow. I mean, how, how do you, uh, when it comes to the scaling side of things, how do you get meaningful deal flow in the note space? Like, who sells 'em, who buys 'em? How do you get in front of sellers? It seems like an obscure market.   Al Curiel (00:13:37) - Yeah, it is a rather obscure market. Not many people know about it. It's a specialized niche that again, was, was found through trial and error and, and just investigating. And I'm one stubborn son of a gun. I, you know, the more you tell me you can't do something, then the more I'm gonna try and, and, and prove you wrong. So that's, that's part of my stuff. That's my makeup, that's my father's teachings. And, and, and us and, and what have you. He was an entrepreneur himself, so I don't give up easily. And so I decided to look as to, into what was the problem, getting inventory of houses to rehab in 2008 and through again, research and research. And I found out that banks and hedge funds have a specific asset managers that are tasked with getting rid of, of pro inventory, of notes that they don't want, that are not working, that are not performing, or that are performing.   Al Curiel (00:14:32) - And the bank and the hedge fund needs capital to redeploy to be able to lend for cars, uh, personal items, appliances, whatever, what have you. So I decided, let's just say for instance, one day I decided to call the Bank of America, of the world the asset manager or the Wells Fargo, uh, person of the world or at digital capital hedge fund on any given day. And say, Mr. Asset Manager, this is Al Curiel from the name of my firm, blah, blah, blah. Do you have any, uh, assets that you wish to get rid of this quarter? And initially, Sam, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna sugar code. It, it was, it was a lot of rejection. They didn't know me from Adam, but I stayed consistent. I decided when it was a good time to call, I ne I decided, hmm, let, let's be smart here about this curio, I don't call on Monday.   Al Curiel (00:15:17) - I didn't call on Tuesday, I didn't call on Wednesday. I started to call them when the week was kind of dying down Thursday and Friday at two o'clock, they're more likely to pick up the phone. So I started establishing more dialogue. So after a, you established report, more dialogue, then one day, one day, Sam boom, I got an inventory of 20 non-performing loans. And lucky for me, I was able, I had capital that I had raced before that I was able to buy in bulk. So now I have a set of 20, 20 a list, or what they call a tape, I don't know what they call it, a tape. It's a spreadsheet of 20 loans. And they said, all right, pick whatever you want here and uh, if you want to buy 'em all, we'll give you a greater discount then buying on a per piece basis.   Al Curiel (00:16:03) - I, we'll sell you the case and you can sell 'em off by the bottom. I said, okay. So I, I had enough, I had enough of a discount built into it because we're still talking 2008 when you can get a hundred thousand dollars loan for $13,000. I was able to do that. I bought all 20 of 'em. I established a rapport with that company. All I need is five. All I need is five for the number of investors that I have. So I established rapport with another one and another one and another one. And that's how the scaling came about. I'm, I'm, I'm giving you the Reader's Digest version of it. It's this lot more that goes into it, Sam, but for our purposes, that's basically how it happened.   Sam Wilson (00:16:41) - That's, that's really, really fascinating cuz that, that was gonna be one of my questions was when you're dealing with Wells Fargo, bank of America, I mean they, I can't imagine that they'd wanna sell one at a time loans off. That's, that just seems just not, it's not the way they're gonna do business.   Al Curiel (00:16:58) - Correct. They don't, um, and they give you, when, when those asset managers, those asset managers are people like you and me, they get up in the morning, they have families they have to feed, and they have quotas to get rid of loans that they need to get rid of. And if they don't, there's hell to be paid, right? So, uh, it, it behooves them to work with as many investors and to show how these investor, how serious these fit investors are. So if they offer me a bulk of a, a a lot of twin 25, whatever, maybe commercial loans, I have to have enough backing meaning capital so that I can build my credibility, continue to keep that credibility so that, uh, the inventory keeps coming. So that's why on the, you have to anticipate, you have to plan how much money you're gonna raise before you approach these people.   Al Curiel (00:17:46) - And, and I'm just using the example of, of Bank of America, regional banks are very good for that. Regional banks sell assets that, that sweet, that sweet spot for us is anything between 25 and $120,000. Hmm. Right. That's our sweet spot. That, and you find those mostly in the Rust Bell states. Right? All right. It's hard for investors in New York and in California to re to get their minds wrapped around the low ban assets in those states. And I'm talking about Michigan, I'm talking about Indiana, I'm talking about Ohio, maybe some Georgia, maybe some South Carolina, and definitely some Texas. And so I can get an answer again, to give an example, to be very simple about it, a hundred thousand dollars loan that I can now I can, I can pick up for about maybe 40 cents on the dollar.   Sam Wilson (00:18:37) - Wow.   Al Curiel (00:18:38) - So, you know, when I, when I have these people in, in San Francisco, the investors in San Francisco were in mailbox is $150,000 . Right? I mean, they, you can see how there's like, oh, okay, well then I don't have to, I don't have to deal with toilets trash or non paying tenants. Right? I can be the owner, I can take the place of the bank, be the bank, right, and not worry about servicing anything. And I get the monthly income. All I get, all I get is a servicing company that is going to allocate your escrows your taxes and your insurance. And then the difference goes in Pocket National Bank every month.   Sam Wilson (00:19:17) - How th this is really fascinating. And I, and I love, uh, I love personally the, uh, non-performing note strategy. I think that's, that's, it's a great one. It's, it's where there's opportunity, I think still. And I'm, I'm invested as a passive investor, uh, in some other non-performing note funds. Even one I think's spaced outta your hometown there in Chicago. Um, okay. But, but the, how, I guess, how has that pricing changed? I know you mentioned before and you said maybe in 2008, like 10 to 20% maybe was the range that you were buying those on, and now you're saying it's, you can still pick up NPNs in the 40%.   Al Curiel (00:19:54) - 40%. Yeah. And the reason for that is because now, now that it's, now that the catch outta the back, so to speak, it's a sexy thing to invest in. Now most people are now finding out about non-performing notes, right? As you get more demand, the pr obviously the price goes up, right? So that's, uh, that's what happened. But with volume, with volume now you continue to have the discount. So I'm beginning to see those, it, it used to be 65 to 75% for non-performing known. Now they're, they're coming down to like 55, 45, 40, 40, 40 cents on a dollar. That's how I'm able to get 'em. Um, but initially in 2008 they were, because they were virtually unknown by anybody, right? Um, that this discounts were greater. But now with, with time or more invest investors being involved, more mentorship programs out there, more gurus teaching this kind of thing, it's become more of a, of a, of a, of a sexy thing to invest in.   Al Curiel (00:20:50) - And not as readily available as, as it was. But still, you can make very, very healthy, very healthy returns. And the, if I may share with the, with the group, what, what with your group, what, what some of those Strat rehabbing strategies are. Yeah. One is to modify the loan. Yep. Um, if, if you can modify the loan and, and if the person loses his job, person stops paying his mortgage for a variety of reasons, not the least of which is divorce, loss of a job, loss of some kind of loss of income, right? But they, they, they love the house. They, you know, they, you see flowers are on the flower bed and mama don't wanna move, right? She just wants to do whatever they want, whatever they need to do to make it. That's, that's number one thing. So you modify the loan, even though they get a job at a lesser paying thing, you can reduce the mortgage, you can reduce the interest rate, you can modify it, period.   Al Curiel (00:21:40) - The other thing is, if, if they, if they modify the loan and they are still not able to, um, to pay it, then I like to be really tough on the problem and soft on the people, Sam. So I say, why don't we part friends? You know, you've clearly you've been, we've tried this modification of the loan, you can't pay it. Um, I'll tell you what I'll do. I will not report those, those four or five months that you're behind to the credit bureau. I will back up the U-Haul. You put all your stuff in there, you leave the house just as clean as when Bank of America or Wells Fargo sold it to you when you got your loan. And upon inspection, if everything is, is copacetic, I'll drop you a check for a thousand dollars. You gimme the keys, you gimme the deed, and we're we're good. Right? That's,   Sam Wilson (00:22:26) - They avoid a foreclosure on the record that way.   Al Curiel (00:22:29) - It's a deed and lie. Exactly right. Cash for key de and lie. That's what they foreclosure. And there's no deficiencies that I de demand. So we all, we we leave in good. He's, he has a chance to start life, I knew. And the third thing, which is more, the more drastic, uh, uh, measure is, is foreclosure. Um, and that, for that, and that is the reason why I do not buy in judicial states. Judicial states like Illinois. I do not buy in my own backyard because in Illinois, foreclosing on somebody is gonna take me about 298 days. I can't afford that. Cuz I deal with the velocity of money with my investors. They can't sit there waiting for their money to be, to be, to be returned. Right? So I go to non-judicial states like again, Texas, um, uh, Michigan, Indiana, even though it's, it's traditional non-judicial, there's special ways that you can do to, to speed up the process. Georgia and one of the car Carolinas, that's where we focus our investments in. And, uh, so that's, that's how we are able to, to scale how you were to rehab the loans. And, um, if somebody's not paying, I'm taking it all the way to foreclosure, I can wait no more than 120 days.   Sam Wilson (00:23:37) - That's fantastic. Al I'm I, I got about 25 more questions for you. We're at the end of the show. This has been absolutely fascinating. I love your strategy. I love the way you do it. You've shared with us systems, you've shared with us the value of non-performing notes. You've shared with us the ability, a a and kind of the mindset behind finding who your investor avatar is and how you solve their problems. If our listeners wanna get in touch with you or learn more about you, or maybe even the notes that you guys are working on right now, what is the best way to do that?   Al Curiel (00:24:05) - You can contact, uh, our website. You take a look at our website, it's Associates and real estate holdings.com. I know it's a long one, but it's Associates and Real estate holdings.com. Or you can, uh, uh, get a, on our, our list, it's info at associates and real estate holdings.com, we're gonna have our, our our first, uh, three day, uh, event coming up at the end of of May. So if anybody wants to get details, they can find 'em at info.   Sam Wilson (00:24:32) - Fantastic. We'll make sure we include that all there in the show notes. Al thank you again for coming on the show today. I do appreciate it,   Al Curiel (00:24:38) - Sam. Take care.   Sam Wilson (00:24:40) - Hey, thanks for listening to the How to Scale Commercial Real Estate podcast. If you can, do me a favor and subscribe and leave us a review on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Podcast, whatever platform it is you use to listen. If you can do that for us, that would be a fantastic help to the show. It helps us both attract new listeners as well as rank higher on those directories. So appreciate you listening. Thanks so much and hope to catch you on the next episode.  

How do people think about your company? What do you do to support how they feel? How do you influence their feelings? Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not so secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom and pop to major brands. Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector, and storyteller. I'm Stephen sidekick and business partner, Dave Young. Before we get into today's episode, word from our sponsor, which is, well, it's us, but we're highlighting ads we've written and produced for our clients. So here's one of those. [Travis Crawford Ad] Dave Young: Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, Dave Young and Stephen Semple here. And today's topic is so secret that Stephen wouldn't even tell it to me before we hit the record button. Stephen Semple: Well, yeah, and there's a couple reasons for it. One, we have to keep our eye on the timer because with this topic you could go probably two, three days. We're going to keep it to 15 minutes. Dave Young: Oh, I'm sorry. Are we talking about me today? Stephen Semple: No, we'll save that one for another day. This comes because of an experience that I had recently. So I was on LinkedIn and I was reading comments from a group. So this is a professional LinkedIn group of marketing people. Dave Young: What are you doing hanging out with a professional group of marketing people in the first place? Stephen Semple: I don't know. I really don't know. It's a problem. My name's Stephen Semple and I'm filling the blank. Dave Young: Yeah, Okay. Okay, so you're hanging out with marketing people. Stephen Semple: Yes. And they were having this debate about this question. The question was this, "Does how I answer the phone impact my brand?" Now, the fact that the answer was being debated made me crazy. It made me realize that what we need to talk about with people today is what is a brand, what is branding and, why do you want to do it? Dave Young: Oh, man. Stephen Semple: So I want to start off with what is a brand? So let me define that to- Dave Young: Wait, you don't want the answer to the question that's asked? Stephen Semple: Sure. Give me the answer to the question that's asked. Dave Young: Of course, it does. Stephen Semple: Of course, it fucking does. Jesus Christ, man. Dave Young: How you raise your kids affects your brand? Everything you do. You didn't tell this group of marketing people that you have a podcast, did you? Stephen Semple: No, I did not. What I realized was- Dave Young: I don't want him coming over here and arguing with us. Stephen Semple: What I realized was this was one of these moments where I just shut up and left. Which as you know for me is a very hard and painful experience, but what it made me realize is people don't understand what a brand is, and it's really simple. So let me simplify it for everyone. A brand is how somebody feels about your business, period. That's your brand. And what impacts how people feel about your business? Everything, everything you do, the people you hire, how you dress, the clone you wear, how the phone is answer, everything impacts your brand. Your brand is the sum of all the things that impact how somebody feels about you. Dave Young: Exactly. Stephen Semple: So when this debate was going on, I was like, "Are you freaking kidding me?" Because the answer is really simple. Yes/ Dave Young: Yes. All the things. Stephen Semple: Right. So how I answer the phone, does it impact my brand? Yes. Dave Young: I know this phenomena. Gosh, I've seen it over the years, over the decades. You and I both used to be in a B&I group, right? Stephen Semple: Yep. Dave Young: And so, you're at this networking meeting and everybody has 45 seconds to a minute to talk, and the person that is the graphic designer blathers on fo...

Hello, and welcome to Beauty and the Biz where we talk about the business and marketing side of plastic surgery, and how Dr. Kontis is the 2nd female president of AAFPRS. I'm your host, Catherine Maley, author of Your Aesthetic Practice – What your patients are saying, as well as consultant to plastic surgeons, to get them more patients, more profits and stellar reputations. Now, today's episode is called "2nd Female President of AAFPRS — with Theda C. Kontis, MD". I had the privilege to interview Dr. Theda Kontis, a facial plastic & reconstructive surgeon in a private, multi-surgeon practice in Baltimore, MD. Dr. Kontis has been very active in the American Academy of Facial Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery for the past 30 years and was recently elected to serve as the AAFPRS president, making her the 2nd women to hold that title.  We talked about her vision for the Academy under her presidency and the challenge of juggling her duties there, while also managing a big practice with multiple surgeons and lots of staff.  She also shared her opinions on private equity, the change she has noticed in cosmetic patients' attitudes, as well as staff tips to keep turnover at bay. Visit Dr. Kontis' website P.S. Please review!

Oh I am SO EXCITED for this one! I asked people to send me a clip about what prayer means to them, and in this episode we hear them all! I start off sharing one of my greatest experiences with prayer and my greatest disappointment with it. And then, I pass the mic and you get to hear from some people I love dearly and it is SO FUN! Gosh. I love this episode a WHOLE lot. Grab a drink, pull up a chair, and join me as we all pour it out! If you were someone who shared in today's episode, THANK YOU! What a joy to hear so many different perspectives! --- Support this podcast: https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/ccwa/support

Jennifer Jones Lee hosts your Wednesday morning Wake Up Call. ABC's Ines De La Cuetara has more on the Russian Defense Chief wanting wartime missle output doubled. Then, KFI's Tech Reporter Rich DeMuro joins the show for another edition of 'Wired Wednesday'! Apple and Google are teaming up to better protect people when it comes to the use of trackers, Shutterfly will now begin deleting photos from inactive accounts, and Farmers Fridge is coming - Rich explains what it is, and how it might impact your life if you're an avid traveler. ABC's Mike Dobuski talks about the "Godfather of AI" speaking at MIT following his departure from Google. And ABC's Jim Ryan shares more information on the suspected Texas gunman having been caught just miles away at his sister's home, hiding under a pile of laundry in a closet.

The workplace is constantly evolving, and we've certainly noticed more rapid change these past few years. Fractional leaders, like my guest today, see the effect of those changes first-hand and bring solutions to a variety of organizations.Jen Hamilton is a Factional Chief Operating Officer, with Wolf's Edge Integrators. On this episode of The Clarity Advisors show, Jen and host Ken Trupke discuss the changes she's observed in the workplace and how she takes clients "from chaos and confusion to sustainable growth".Related content: Check out this previous episode with guest Ben Wolf, “How Fractional Leadership can improve your business,” on audio or video.Timestamps(01:03): Chaos and confusion to sustainable growth.(02:05): Explaining a fractional COO.(04:19): Leading multiple companies at once.(05:41): Finding companies to work with.(09:30): Jen's background in accounting.(14:46): Workplace changes over the last several years.(15:56): Attracting and retaining team members.(18:56): Job posting vs. job description.(23:01): Your team is your competitive advantage.(26:03): Jen's recommended reading.(28:03): How to connect with Jen.Episode Quotes “This fractional idea is relatively new concept in some ways, but not in others. In the accounting world, they've been doing it forever.” (Jen)“I'm constantly getting the best practices from all my clients to share with each other. They don't even know it sometimes.” (Jen)“In the past you could capitalize on the market because of maybe your access to capital or you had the latest, greatest technology. Now it's all about the workforce. How you win and how you compete is having the best team.” (Jen)“In the small business world, one bad hire has a stronger ripple effect than it does in a large company. But the same thing happens with one good hire.” (Jen)“A posting is really more of a marketing piece to attract aligned employees. And then once they are interested, send them the position description so they can see if they have the qualifications.” (Jen)“Ultimately, what we want to do is help business owners who are struggling, who are feeling that chaos or are feeling like, “Gosh, I can't, I can't control it like I used to. It's just too messy.'” (Jen)Recommended Reading and ListeningWho Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork by Dan Sullivan and Dr. Benjamin HardyThe Speed of Trust: The One Thing That Changes Everything by Steven Mark CoveySimple Numbers, Straight Talk, Big Profits!: 4 Keys to Unlock Your Business Potential by Greg Crabtree and Beverly HerzogSimple Numbers 2.0 - Rules for Smart Scaling: A Play-by-Play Analysis for Pure Growth by Greg CrabtreeProfit First: Transform Your Business from a Cash-Eating Monster to a Money-Making Machine by Mike Michalowicz Connect with Jen HamiltonWolfsEdgeIntegrators.com/ContactJen Hamilton on LinkedIn

Learn how to harvest equity without giving up your low, fixed-rate mortgage. Today, I discuss: conventional loans for single-family rentals, DTI, refinancing, accessing equity, student loan debt, and down payment requirements for income properties with Ridge Lending Group President, Caeli Ridge. Learn what's better for a second mortgage—the pros and cons of a HELOC vs. Home Equity Loan. You also get a mortgage market overview. We discuss changes in cash-out refinance seasoning requirements.  Caeli also describes where she believes mortgage rates are headed later this year. Resources mentioned: Show Notes: www.GetRichEducation.com/447 Ridge Lending Group: www.RidgeLendingGroup.com info@ridgelendinggroup.com Join us for tomorrow's free GRE Florida properties webinar: www.GREwebinars.com Ridge's All-In-One Loan Simulator: https://ridgelendinggroup.com/aio-simulator/ Get mortgage loans for investment property: RidgeLendingGroup.com or call 855-74-RIDGE  or e-mail: info@RidgeLendingGroup.com Find cash-flowing Jacksonville property at: www.JWBrealestate.com/GRE Will you please leave a review for the show? I'd be grateful. Search “how to leave an Apple Podcasts review”  Top Properties & Providers: GREmarketplace.com Best Financial Education: GetRichEducation.com Get our wealth-building newsletter free—text ‘GRE' to 66866 Our YouTube Channel: www.youtube.com/c/GetRichEducation Follow us on Instagram: @getricheducation Keith's personal Instagram: @keithweinhold   Speaker 0 (00:00:00) - Welcome to GRE! I'm your host Keith Weinhold. You can get a conventional loan for a single family rental with less than a 20% down payment. Learn why you might want to refinance today. Even though mortgage rates aren't as low as they were a couple years ago, how do you qualify for loans if you've already got student loan debt? All things mortgages and financing today on Get Rich Education, Speaker 2 (00:00:29) - You are listening to the show that has created more financial freedom than nearly any show in the world. This is Get Rich Education.   Speaker 0 (00:00:52) - Welcome to GRE from K Patis North Carolina to Hattiesburg, Mississippi and across 188 nations worldwide. I'm Keith Weinhold. This is Get Rich Education, the voice of real estate investing since 2014. Before we get into a great education on all things mortgages today, there is still a little bit of time left for you to join us on tomorrow night's G R E Live event. You can join us from the comfort of your own home. This is for new build single family rentals, opt to four plexes in Jacksonville, Ocala, and elsewhere in Florida. Purchase prices are still below 300 K on the single families. Yes, still in the two hundreds in some cases. I don't know how long that can last. Yeah, these are the property types that are quickly vanishing. Our investment coach Naresh Stars in that event tomorrow, he finds you the good deals with the national providers that are actually giving incentives despite the fact that the product that you're buying is in really short supplies.   Speaker 0 (00:01:59) - You're gonna get a good, solid, fundamental education on what makes a durable income property market and a arrest in the Florida provider are going to share with us just for webinar attendees. Those even better than two and two incentives. Yes, for you, the incentives on the webinar are even better than that 2% of your purchase price paid do you in closing costs cash and 2% of free property management. It is going to be even better than that. That's gonna be rolled out tomorrow night, May 2nd at 8:30 PM Eastern, 5:30 PM Pacific. It is free to attend. You can ask questions live, get your questions answered and get access to the actual properties should you so choose. That is the final reminder. So if that's of any interest to you, be sure to sign up now@grewebinars.com. I'm coming to you from the Mojave Desert today here in metro Las Vegas.   Speaker 0 (00:03:04) - It's Henderson Nevada. To be technical next week I'll bring you the show from Phoenix, Arizona. And you know what? It's kind of funny. Sometimes you hear people refer to this general area of the nation this southwest and they say they are going to the desert if they were doing what I'm doing. Well this unrepentant geography nerd will clarify that it is the deserts plural. Yes, Las Vegas is in the Mojave Desert in Phoenix is in the Sonora Desert. There are differences in vegetation type and others that distinguish the two. And the most obvious difference perhaps is the presence of the big iconic Saguaro cactus down in the Sonora that you don't find up here in the more northerly Mojave and perhaps the Joshua tree is the more distinct plant type here in the Mojave. Yes, we're talking about two gigantic pieces of real estate here. Much of it is baron. Two disparate deserts with their own distinctive flora and fauna. As you're about to learn about financing real estate today, let's remember that there is a cash out refinance and then generally if you're performing a refinance without pulling cash out, that is known as a rate and term refinance. Let's get into it.   Speaker 0 (00:04:30) - Well hey, well how do you qualify for more mortgage loans at the lowest interest rate available, Americans have near record equity levels in their homes. What's the best way to access that equity yet keep your low mortgage rate in place? And what about your student loan debt and how that factors into you getting a mortgage or getting a refinance? We're answering all that today with a GRE regular guest and though it's her first appearance back on the show this year, it's the return of the company president that's created more financial freedom through real estate than any other lender in the entire nation, Ridge Lending Group. It's time for a big welcome back to Caeli Ridge.   Speaker 3 (00:05:08) - Keith Wein. Hold. Thank you. You flatter me sir. I appreciate it. Love being here with you and for your listeners.   Speaker 0 (00:05:14) - Well yes, the president is back and everyone loves this type of president because it's not about being a Democrat or Republican. So hail to the chief, great to have you here. And Jaylee mortgage rates, they have settled down a good bit from their recent highs now they peaked back in the fall of last year. So with that and some of the other things in mind, why don't you talk to us about the big picture first, sort of your mortgage market overview.   Speaker 3 (00:05:40) - Interest rates is always top of mind for everybody. I think they're doing pretty well. I do believe I've been sharing with our listeners and and my clients on a day-to-day. I do believe that rates will continue to kind of increase here and there. There's gonna be some ups and downs. Of course the Fed has been very clear with us. Jerome Powell is gonna continue to raise the Fed fund rate just for anybody that doesn't know the two between a mortgage rate and a Fed fund rate while connected, not the same thing. So when they raise that does not automatically mean that we see the increase on the the 30 year mortgage bonds. I think that that's gonna continue to happen, but I think the pace in which it happens or continues to happen is gonna be a lot less aggressive. So I think that's gonna bode well overall.   Speaker 3 (00:06:21) - For interest rates. I know everybody is very, very interested in in are they going up, are they going down, when are they going up, when are they going down? I think that we'll continue to see a little bit of upward movement. I think it's gonna be sometime next year that we start to see interest rates come back down in any meaningful way. And remember gang rates go up much, much faster than they come back down unfortunately. So I think we've got a little bit of way to go. But I'm always the one saying, Keith, you and I have talked about this, um, many, many times you must be doing the math and that the rate as a function of the return of the investment isn't the most important thing. So I'll leave it there for rates. Otherwise, I think that the industry is doing really, really well.   Speaker 3 (00:06:58) - One big announcement that we had this year was that Fannie and Freddie both have extended the seasoning period of time to where a cash out refinance when leverage was used to acquire is applicable. So now you have to wait 12 months to pull, to pull cash out of a property using the A R V that after repair value if you use leverage to acquire the property. Quick distinction because this has been confused. If you paid cash for the property, your source and season funds, that still falls under what's called the delayed cash out refi and no seasoning is required. It's only when leverage was used to acquire the property and then they're trying to use an after repair value to pull cash out in hand. Is that 12 month seasoning rate and term is different. So that doesn't apply either.   Speaker 0 (00:07:45) - Okay. So if you make a purchase and then say it less than 12 months down the road, you want to do a refi but not pull cash out, is that still all right?   Speaker 3 (00:07:55) - That's absolutely fine. No seasoning is required and we can use the arv. It's only when you want cash in your hand that that 12 months is is applicable.   Speaker 0 (00:08:04) - Got it. Okay. That's really helpful to know. Just big picture before we winnow down, are there any other big substantial mortgage stories out there that some should know about? Um, it was only a couple weeks ago, there was a lot of misinformation going around on TikTok and elsewhere about 40 year loans from F H A without people understanding that's just for loan modifications and really other stories like that. Any other big picture things where you can help us see what's happening?   Speaker 3 (00:08:30) - It seems to be par for for the course? I have not. There's nothing that's come across my desk that I would say was newsworthy or noteworthy to share. I think we've got more to unpack here than any of that.   Speaker 0 (00:08:40) - Yeah and things sure are picking up here around G R e. People wanna buy more properties this year. It really slowed down toward the end of last year, right about when the mortgage rates were at their peak. So when we talk about getting loans, we think about leverage. Leverage is created with debt. Has anything changed with the down payment requirements for an income property? And we're largely here in today's discussion talking about one to four unit income properties. Properties that you don't live in yourself,   Speaker 3 (00:09:08) - Correct down payments have have remained the same. There isn't been anything that has changed there. Just to reiterate, for those that may not be aware on a single family residence, conventionally 85% loan to value is applicable. You can leverage all the way up to 85, you're putting 15% down. Keep in mind everybody that that will have pmi, private mortgage insurance attached to it, I would have you look at them side by side. The PMI factors actually pretty low and depending on the loan size it may only be 20, 30 bucks a month. So if you're able to leverage extra, it may make sense. You're gonna have to look at the numbers so that single family and then two to four unit on a purchase transaction different on a refinance transaction but purchase is 25% down or 75% leverage is required for those duplex, triplex, fourplexes.   Speaker 0 (00:09:54) - Okay, so as little as 15% down on a rental single family home. So you're getting up to six to one, seven to one leverage in that case. Sheila, do you find very many people doing that or would they rather pay the 20% down for a rental single family home and not have the pmi?   Speaker 3 (00:10:10) - I find that right now I think that it's less common than maybe it was because interest rates are up from where they were, uh, a year, year and a half ago. So more often than not we see the 20% down. But I still think it's worth looking at. I mean you're never gonna know unless you run the numbers right side by side.   Speaker 0 (00:10:25) - Okay, so we're thinking about how much cash we have to have put aside for a down payment in closing costs. And one thing that we need to do in order to qualify for that loan in the first place of course is some people get hung up on the dti, their debt to income ratio is too high to qualify for property and chaley. Over the past few months I've had a few listeners write in with questions and I thought, well I'll say that question until we have chale on again. And one of them really has to do with student loan debt. Student loan debt often contributes to one having too high of a debt to income ratio so that they didn't have to repay their loan. I know that Biden said that you wouldn't have to pay back student loan debt for a while, but can you talk to us specifically about student loan debt with D T I?   Speaker 3 (00:11:06) - There's gonna be a few pieces to share with everybody depending on whether we're talking about Fannie Mae or Freddie Mac and we won't know who we're gonna end up selling to after the loan funds. And they have slightly different guidelines between the two of them. Similar. But there are some differences as it relates to student loan debt regardless of whether you're in deferment or you've been told that you don't have to repay. If it shows up on an individual's credit report, the calculation will be as follows. They're going to take the outstanding balance times 1%, that's Fannie Mae's rule or the outstanding balance times half a percent. That's Freddie Mac rule and that will be the payment that we include in the debt to income ratio. Uh, I'll mention that the all-in one, which is a very popular loan right now. First Lean HeLOCK, maybe we'll talk about that here today. They will defer to Fannie rules so it'll be 1% of the outstanding debt pulling on the credit report even if it shows a zero payment listed. Now there is one caveat, if the individual has a letter, this happened maybe in the last six months and I'm trying to think about, there was a title, it's pretty rare. But if they're able to gain access to documentation that specifies that they are not going to have to repay that debt and we can take that documentation, then we can zero out that payment in the D T I.   Speaker 0 (00:12:22) - Alright, there's some strategies for how you can approach D T I with respect to any student loan debt that you have and what is the maximum D T I that a borrower can have?   Speaker 3 (00:12:34) - Conventionally and non qm, you're gonna get to 50% debt to income ratio for the all-in-one since we just touched on it, 43% is the absolute max.   Speaker 0 (00:12:43) - Okay. And on prior shows, Chile and I have discussed specifically with examples just how that D T I is calculated. If you're wondering, you can hear that in some past episodes Chile one one goes ahead and they continue to add income properties to their portfolio. Often I recommend that one does that with high leverage but not over leverage. How does one keep their D T I ratio down over time as they continue to add properties so that they can qualify for more properties in the future? Is there a good strategy for that?   Speaker 3 (00:13:14) - There is, and it's such a good question because as investors, right, our qualification primers are not static. They're going to change over time as we buy and sell and refinance. So it's very, very important, especially with the debt to income ratio that we're keeping an eye on it. And there's a few ways in which you can kind of strategize or optimize that D T I. The first is going to be the Schedule E, okay? The Schedule E is where all the rental properties are going to live once you've filed the annual tax return. The easiest way for the time that we have here today, Keith, is gonna be to tell the listeners, send us your draft returns. So on an ongoing basis we tell our active clients do not file federal tax returns until you send us the draft. We're going to run that draft through the pre-formulated calculation that comes straight from Fannie, Freddie and then we're gonna provide you with some feedback, one of which may be Mr.   Speaker 3 (00:14:03) - Jones, you forgot to include your insurance as a deduction and that's actually an add back that's gonna be to your disadvantage. Make sure that you put that in there. You didn't claim the full number of days of income for the property, you forgot to put depreciation on there. That's also an add back. There's a whole slew of things that we can look at and look for and give the individual that feedback so that they are filing at that optimal way while maintaining what the maximized tax credits are, right? There's a nice balance there. The more aggressive you are with the tax deductions, the more it can impact the D T I. So we wanna have eyes on that and work closely with the client and or their CPA is a very common part of what we do. So schedule E a little more complicated, that would be one of the the ways in which we wanna maximize debt to income ratio.   Speaker 3 (00:14:45) - Obviously not obtaining new debt, new consumer debt is is not gonna be to our advantage, right? We don't want more liability than we have income. Another thing is, is that when we talk about credit and a lot of clients that we talk to, they pay their credit cards off monthly, right? Maybe they charge up five grand, eight grand, 10 grand, they get a miles or whatever it is. It's very important to communicate with us to find out when in the month we wanna strategically pull the credit. Because what will happen is is that the day in which we take that snapshot, if there's a minimum payment due, a balance with a minimum payment, that minimum payment will be used in the individual's debt to income ratio regardless of whether they're gonna pay it off at the end of the month. That doesn't matter to us.   Speaker 3 (00:15:26) - There's a payment here, we gotta hit you for it. So strategizing on the day in which we wanna run credit might be another helpful way for D T I. And then finally, and there's probably a few other things, but I think high use would be, I don't like the shorter term amortizations. I think this is something else you and I have talked about many times, Keith, where people wanna pay off quicker, which is great if that's really what they wanna do, that's perfectly fine. I'm not sure that that would be my strategy, but whatever. Don't get yourself into a 15 year fixed mortgage because it's only gonna jack that payment. It's gonna really increase that payment. It's ultimately going to, for long-term optimization, hurt your D T I. You can do the same thing with a 30 year mortgage and not pay extra interest by accelerating the debt if that's what you chose. So those would be the the few things I'd comment on   Speaker 0 (00:16:10) - 100%. And for you the listener and viewer right now with what you just heard from chaley, you can begin to understand the value of working with a lender that works specific with income property investors rather than those lenders that are more geared toward primary residents, borrowers. Nothing wrong with them but they're in their lane during their thing. And you can understand why Chaley over there at Ridge is really a specialist to help you qualifying for as many income property loans as you possibly can and optimizing those loans as well. Chaley, when we talk about interest rates, oftentimes it's of interest to people to look at what are refinance interest rates like versus new purchase interest rates.   Speaker 3 (00:16:54) - I would say on average there's a variety of of variables that dictate what the rate is gonna be. Okay? I talk about this a lot. They're called LPAs loan level price adjustments. And a loan level price adjustment is a positive or negative number that attaches to the characteristic of the loan transaction. So purchase or refi, hash out refi rate and term refi credit score has its own L L P A loan to value, loan size occupancy. All of these come with a positive or negative number attached to them as it relates to purchase versus refinance. Generally speaking, let's take a rate and term refi where you're not getting cash out, you're just maybe taking an arm and making it affix. You're taking a higher rate and making it lower, whatever, maybe about a half a point difference. So if a purchase was at six and a half, the re rate and term refinance might be at 6 75 or 7%, cash out's gonna be a little bit different. I would add a quarter point to that and then if, if it's a two to four unit, add another quarter point on top of that. So those variables do make a difference.   Speaker 0 (00:17:53) - And maybe the listener might think, well why are you talking about refinancing at a time like this? If I wanted to refinance, I would've been more likely to do that about two years ago when mortgage rates read historic lows. But today Americans are sitting on near record equity, oftentimes it might be tied up in a low mortgage rate loan with that equity chaley. I talked to some people out there just lay people, people that aren't even investors and they have a big equity position with a really low mortgage interest rate loan and they seem to think that to refinance it, they would need to go ahead and refinance their entire mortgage and lose that maybe three or 4% loan, but they don't necessarily have to if they can do a second mortgage. So I guess really what I'm getting at and the question chaley is what is the best way to do a rate and term refi versus a cash out refi? And I know there are a lot of scenarios there.   Speaker 3 (00:18:44) - Yeah, lots of scenarios. So to your point, it is not necessary to give up a very low fixed rate mortgage if you want to harvest some of that equity. The ways in which, and I'm gonna have a plug after this for the all in one, but I'll get to that cuz I'm just such a big fan. But the ways in which you can do that both for your primary residents, a second home and an investment will be through a second lien mortgage, whether it be a heloc, home equity line of credit or a he loan, the HE loan is applicable for the rental properties. I do not believe, I hope somebody can give me alternative information, but I do not believe you're able to find second lean HELOCs for rentals today. I feel like those have really dried up if they're out there, the ones that I know of that used to do them are not doing them anymore.   Speaker 3 (00:19:27) - If they're out there and anyone's listening to this, somebody please let me know. Keylock for rental probably not an option. He loan for rental absolutely is an option. And this is guys a fixed rate mortgage in second lean position, just like your 30 year fixed first, this will be a 30 year fixed second interest rates are gonna be higher. And since we were talking about interest rates, I'm gonna say that they're probably anywhere from 10 to 13%, but they're smaller amounts. C L T V combined loan to value for a he loan on a rental would be 85% is what we have access to. So as quick math guys, if you have a value of a home of a hundred thousand and you owe on your first mortgage 50,000, the CLTV would be 85% of a hundred. So 85,000 minus the 50001st, which stays in place, you'd have access to about 35,000 in that example. And that would be access to rental properties that you just do not want to mess with that first lien mortgage different for owner-occupied. And I'll take your queue on when you want me to get into that.   Speaker 0 (00:20:26) - Yeah. Okay. So we are just talking about income property second mortgages there. Tell us about primary residences.   Speaker 3 (00:20:32) - So primary and secondary should be in the same bucket. You can leverage just 90% C L T B, same math as before but up to 90% And these are gonna be, you have HeLOCK and he loan. I'm gonna assume most people are gonna go for the HeLOCK, right? The open-ended revolving is definitely more attractive than a closed-ended fixed I believe in a second lien. And you know Prime is at eight I believe right now. Gosh, I should have checked before we go on, but I think Prime is sitting, it's an index. An indices like the Fed fund rate, that's an index two prime is at about eight. And then depending on the characteristics, those l LPAs that I mentioned, loan level price adjustments are gonna come up with a margin. Maybe it's 2% over prime or one or whatever it is depending on those things. So I would anticipate a HELOC and second lie position on a primary residence will be anywhere from eight to maybe 10%. More often than not is what you should expect. Interest only open-ended.   Speaker 0 (00:21:24) - And on the second mortgages, whether that takes the form of a HELOC or a HE loan, how long is the initial fixed rate period? Typically   Speaker 3 (00:21:32) - There are hybrids where you can fix in for a year or three years, et cetera. Those are available. I'm not sure that you wanna do that in a high rate environment. You probably wanna avoid any fixed rate right now if you had the option to get into it a couple of years ago, you're looking really good right now because you fixed in at at some ridiculously low rate for a period of two, three, maybe five years. I would tell people listening, fixing in on a HELOC right now is not gonna be your advantage when we believe that rates are gonna start coming down over the next year, et cetera. But for the HE loan, it's fixed for 30 years. Just like a 30 year fixed first lie mortgage, it's fixed, you have it four 30 years, it's amortized, it's closed ended. You're making your regular payments until you pay it off after the 30 year period of time.   Speaker 0 (00:22:13) - We're talking about how you can more efficiently borrow in this environment where people and investors have high equity positions and we have hopefully come off the mortgage rate highs from late last year. You're listening to Get Risk Education. Our guest is Ridge Lending Group President Chaley Ridge Morton, we come back. I'm your host Keith White Hole with JWB Real Estate Capital. Jacksonville Real Estate has outperformed the stock market by 44% over the last 20 years. It's proven to be a more stable asset, especially during recessions. Their vertically integrated strategy has led to 79% more home price appreciation compared to the average Jacksonville investor. Since 2013, JWB is ready to help your money make money, and to make it easy for everyday investors, get started at jw b real estate.com/g rre. That's JWB real estate.com/g R E GRE listeners can't stop talking about their service from Ridge Lending Group and MLS 40 2056. They've provided our tribe with more loans than anyone. They're truly a top lender for beginners and veterans. It's where I go to get my own loans for single family rental property up to four plexes. So start your pre-qualification and you can chat with President Chaley Ridge personally. They'll even deliver your custom plan for growing your real estate portfolio. start@ridgelendinggroup.com.   Speaker 4 (00:23:45) - This is Rich Dad sales advisor, Blair Singer, listen to Get Rich Education with Keith Wine Hold and above all don't quit your daydream.   Speaker 1 (00:24:03) - Welcome   Speaker 0 (00:24:04) - Back to Get Rich Education. We're learning about how to be a savvy borrower with President of Ridge Lending Group, Chaley Ridge and Chaley. One product you have there that's really flexible and has helped out so many people and helped save borrowers tens of thousands of dollars in interest or more is what's called your all in one loan. Tell us about it.   Speaker 3 (00:24:25) - This is a first Lean HeLOCK everyone. I'm such a big fan, it's not for everybody, but for the right individual, I don't know that there is a loan product to rival it. It's got all the flexibility in the world and as Keith said, the mechanics of this and the concept of this arbitrage, it's called Velocity Banking, infinity Banking. If anybody's familiar with those terms, that's what this does. It allows you all the open flexibility to sort of become your own bank where you have this line of credit. It is a first lien line of credit. So let's take a a step back and talk about those low interest rates that everybody has secured over the last couple of years. We were very lucky to have to two and a half, 3% interest rates. And I'm constantly having this conversation and I'm really trying hard to dispel the psychology of you can never do better than that when it's just not the truth.   Speaker 3 (00:25:14) - And mathematically you will be able to figure this out. I'm gonna plug our website here. There is an interactive simulator that will take you to the all-in-one simulator where you can compare your existing fixed first lien mortgage to the All in one and and the input data is very, very simple. No vials of blood here guys, but if the input is accurate, the results page will tell you very clearly if the all-in one will save interest and Trump over the 30 year fixed at two and a half or whatever it is, or if you're fixed rate mortgage is more to your advantage, it will be very clear there'll be no mistaking it from that. I think further conversations will be necessary for those that see some real value in the All In One. I won't go too far down that rabbit hole, it's a little bit more complicated than we probably have time for here. But the first Lean All In one is such a fantastic tool. I really encourage your listeners to go ahead and and check out at the very least the simulator and see how it applies to you.   Speaker 0 (00:26:08) - The all-in one loan operates much like a first lien heloc. I don't think we have time to describe it all. Like you said, you do have the simulator there on your website@ridgelendinggroup.com where one could see if their existing mortgage it compares favorably or unfavorably to the all-in one loan. But as we know with the first lien heloc, therefore one feature of the All in one loan is the option, not obligation, but option of making interest-only payments to keep your payment down.   Speaker 3 (00:26:34) - Yeah, this is where it gets a little bit tricky for some people when we start talking about payments FirstLine Open-ended HeLOCK, where it's called the All In one because you're replacing not only your mortgage with this revolving open-ended heloc, but also a checking and savings account and combining those two elements whereby simple depository income is being used at dollar for dollar driving down principle balance to save in daily interest accrual. I'm gonna give a quick example and then we can move on and, and I encourage everybody to do the simulator email us, let's talk through it. We'll take you by the hand. It's the learning curve's a little intense, it was even for me. But here's an example of velocity of money and kind of how the all-in-one works. So take a 30 year fixed mortgage and a 15 year fixed mortgage. Both of them started at $400,000 each.   Speaker 3 (00:27:22) - You lock the 30 year at 4% and the 15 year was locked at 7%. Without exception, everybody runs to the 30 year at 4%. I would've done the same if I didn't know the math when in fact the reality is is that you will pay $40,000 more on that 4% 30 year than you would on the 7% 15 year because the amount of time that you're paying on that mortgage is greatly reduced. And that's, I guess a, an easy concept. It's a, the first step of trying to define this for most people, they can kind of see it in those terms because they understand the amortized mortgage. It's the amount of time that you are paying interest. So if you're utilizing your depository checking savings and your mortgage and all of that money is going in there month after month before it's going back out the door for whatever your living expenses are. And then whatever's left over is, is stays in there. 24 7 access. Nothing changes about your current banking techniques or or strategies. It's all the same. But now you're in control. You've become your own bank. It's amazing. I can't say enough about it   Speaker 0 (00:28:24) - Talking about the all in one loan there. You sure can learn more from Ridge on that. Jaylee, is there really like anything else that I guess is noteworthy specifically in helping a borrower qualify for income property loans, maybe a common problem or a borrower hurdle that you see in there at Ridge?   Speaker 3 (00:28:43) - I would just boil it down to education. Just lack of information. It's not dear Google stuff. The guidelines and what's available. All of these things are changing on a consistent basis that real-time information's not available to them. So if I had to pick one thing, I would just say education. And I'm very proud to say that we really focus on that. If there's a value add about Ridge, I think there's quite a few. But the one that I think sticks out for most people is the education that we provide to our investors and shining a light and giving them a look under the hood and what they need to know, teaching 'em how to optimize their qualifications and all of the stuff that we've been talking about here today.   Speaker 0 (00:29:19) - Well that's a good point because when we talk about real estate investing, you're really, they're in one of the more dynamic and fast-changing parts of the industry as opposed to something like home construction where a lot of the methods haven't changed for 50 or more years, if you will. So yeah, it's really staying up and staying informed on that and engaging with a lot of the educational resources increasingly that Ridge has for you to help you stay on top of that as an income property bar yourself. And Shaley can tell us a bit more about that shortly. But why don't you tell us about all of the loan types, the mortgage products if you will, that you offer in there.   Speaker 3 (00:29:52) - That's another great value add about us. We have a very diverse menu, if you will, of loan products that don't just start and stop with the conventional. We're not a one size fits all. So we've got the Fannie Freddy's, we talk about that a lot. Our all in one, my favorite. We have a very diverse non QM product line and for those that aren't familiar with that term, QM stands for Qualified Mortgage. Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are the, uh, epitome the definition of what a qualified mortgage is. There's a whole definition we don't need to go into today, but, so everything outside of that QM is now non qm. And within non qm, like I said, extremely diverse. There's things called the debt service coverage ratio product where we're not showing borrower income, we're just looking at the properties income offset by the new mortgage payment. There's bank statement products. If you can't show tax returns, we're gonna take deposits and average them asset depletion. If you've got large self-directed ira, we can come up with an income calculation for that. The list goes on. We've got commercial products for commercial properties, but also for residential properties. Cross collateralization. It's pretty diverse. We have a lot for everybody.   Speaker 0 (00:30:54) - When you excel in there, you've been such industry leaders at originating income property loans for investors were proportion of your businesses income property loans and what proportion is primary residence loans?   Speaker 3 (00:31:06) - A lot of people don't realize we can do both and we do both very well. But I would say that it's probably 70 30 not owner-occupied. To owner-occupied. A large part of what we do is the investor loans. But most of our investor clients come to us for their primary needs too because we already have their life on file and, and can get that done very competitively   Speaker 0 (00:31:24) - Too. , right? And you keep growing. You're in almost all 50 states now.   Speaker 3 (00:31:27) - I know. Can you believe it? We're in 47 states. We're not in North Dakota, New York, or Vermont, otherwise we're everywhere.   Speaker 0 (00:31:34) - Letter audience know how they can learn about your resources.   Speaker 3 (00:31:37) - There's a couple ways to find us our website, ridge lending group.com. They can email us, info ridge linen group.com. Our toll free is 8 5 5 74 Ridge 8 5 5 7 4 7 4 3 4 3. And while you're on our website gang, uh, check us out on our community. I have a live event every Tuesday, one 30 Pacific, uh, four 30 Eastern. Uh, lots of good information register and it's free. Lots of good information and, and education like we've been talking about here. Hope to see you.   Speaker 0 (00:32:05) - Oh, it's been a terrific and crucial mortgage market update. Chaley Ridge, thanks so much for coming back into the   Speaker 3 (00:32:11) - Show. Thank you. Appreciate it.   Speaker 0 (00:32:18) - Oh yeah, lots of good concise information there from Chaley. It's a type of content that can have you hitting the rewind button on your pod catcher at times. All right, so we learned that in a lot of scenarios there. Second, mortgages come with rather high interest rates that is prohibitive. But then on the other side, it's encouraging to learn, learn that on primary residences, for example, you can get up to 90% loaned value. That means you only need to keep 10% equity in your home. And as far as that all in one loan simulator, we'll put a link directly to that in the show notes for you. But like Chaley said, you might wanna reach out to them@ridgegroup.com and then they can help walk you through it. Thank you to Caeli for the generous contribution to your learning today. Until next week, I'm your host, Keith Weinhold. Don't quit your daydream.   Speaker 5 (00:33:15) - Nothing on this show should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Please consult an appropriate tax, legal, real estate, financial, or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests on their own information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Get Rich Education L l C exclusively.   Speaker 6 (00:33:43) - The preceding program was brought to you by your home for Wealth building. Get rich education.com.