About Me

My "Financial Freedom Journey" began in Real Estate/Business by accident. Ever since I was a young boy, I dreamed of becoming a lawyer. After all, I was brought up to believe that going to school, specializing in a prestigious field and getting a high paying job was the way to wealth and happiness. So, after graduating from college, I applied to both the University of Iowa and University of Minnesota Law Schools to pursue my dream.
In the meantime, my wife had accepted a position up in the Twin Cities and I had not heard back from The University of Minnesota so I took a year off to work. I found a job working in downtown Minneapolis with a company that was going through bankruptcy. I got the privilege to work with corporate attorneys from some very prestigious law firms. What a great experience, after all, these people were doing exactly what I wanted to do.
I soon found out that the life of a corporate attorney was not all that it was cracked up to be (or at least the illusion I had created). These lawyers were traveling 6 days a week and putting in 80-90 hour weeks. Most of lawyers looked like a heart attack waiting to happen. During this job, I began to question whether becoming a corporate attorney was really the road to wealth and happiness that I had set out to achieve. I began researching other methods of creating wealth and learned about investing in real estate and owning businesses as a way to create passive residual income.
In the meantime, I was given a full scholarship to St. Thomas University School of Law. How do I turn down free? I didn’t think that there was any way I could so I went to school. I was late for my first class buying an investment property. I should have known then never to show up to law school. Needless to say, I didn’t last long in law school. Two months into the first semester, I decided to take a leave of absence from school. I never went back.
I had been fascinated by real estate since I was young. My father owned a little bit of real estate and I remember a conversation about how he made $400 a month from his real estate investments. I never saw him doing anything with it; I didn’t even know he owned one of the properties he told me about. The idea that you could own property, not work very hard and it paid you every month sounded like a great idea, even to my young mind. After my wife and I got married we purchased a small 5 unit apartment building in Clinton, IA where we were from. We put 20% down (it was only $12,000) that we had saved up from our wedding and working. That investment took all of our money so I started to look for ways to purchase without money.
We purchased a duplex that we moved into with no money down through conventional financing, and then I found some money partners to help me purchase a house (the one that caused me to be late for law school). Getting conventional financing for these deals was too much work and took too long. Then I discovered buying real estate with owner financing and a whole new world opened up to me.
My first deal was from an older gentleman that owned a property that was in a blue collar neighborhood but was very well maintained. This gentleman liked selling with owner financing so he sold it to me for $6,000 down and at very reasonable price. I agreed but I had to find $6,000. So I got permission to market the property to a tenant. I decided to try selling the home on a rent to own basis. The idea of rent to own worked great. I received $15,000 down from a tenant buyer, which solved my $6,000 down payment problem and still left me with $9,000. The tenant’s option price was $35,000 higher than my purchase price. She ended up getting financing in 3 months after moving in and I received another $20,000 profit for a total of $35,000 in 3 months. I thought I was on top of the world.
The next few deals were a different story. I was taking negative cash flow, spending money on repairs, and had a tenant destroy a place. If I would have went to a mentor and asked for help in looking at these deals, it would have saved me well over $15,000 in mistakes.
That is when I started investing in my education instead of learning on the fly. It is much cheaper to have someone else make the mistakes and pay them for their knowledge. I have easily spent 5 times as much for courses than I have for down payments on property. The return on investment for my education has paid me back at least 1000 times over in learning what to do but also what not to do.
I started to acquire quite a bit of real estate. I had about 50 leased units. It was taking up a lot of my time managing the entire business. That is when I realized that I needed business systems. Business systems allowed me to put people in place to take care of the activities that didn’t make me a lot of money. These systems also freed me up to purchase more property and grow my wealth even faster.
Business systems also had another great benefit in the form of more freedom. If I wanted to go on vacation for 6 weeks I could. If I wanted to go and visit my family in Colorado for a couple weeks I knew I could leave and things would get taken care of.
I have decided to share my knowledge and business systems with my mentorship students. This allows them to create wealth faster, and have the quality of life that we are all looking for. In my opinion, creating great wealth is of no value if you miss out on relationships, you are in poor health, and miss out on the great experiences of life because you are trying to be rich. I hope to help people create wealth so they can enjoy all the wonderful things in life. My motto is: Foster Abundance. I want to help people have abundant wealth, relationships, health, and growth, which will result in a balanced life.
If you want to fast track your Real Estate Investing and Financial Freedom please send me an e-mail today to get started.