Building Wealth: First Responders to Financial Freedom- Alec Evans & Lewis Weaver

Intro  
Hi, everyone, and welcome to this week's episode of enduringthebadgepodcast. I'm your host, Jerry D, Lund and I don't want you to miss an upcoming episode, so please hit that subscribe button. And while your phones out, please do me a favor and give us a review on iTunes or Apple Podcasts. It says, Hey, this podcast has a great message and we should send it out to more people. So please take that 30 seconds to a minute to do that review. And just maybe by doing that, it will push this up into someone's podcast feed that really needs this message. 

Jerry D. Lund  
Today. In this episode, we're going to talk about something a little bit different something that wears on your mental health and physical health and probably after the first of the year, you've probably been thinking about a lot and that's money. Well, we had two former firefighters that are going to tell us how as first responders we can develop wealth and financial freedom. Let's jump right into this episode with Alec and Lewis.

Jerry D. Lund  
All right, welcome to Enduring the Badge Podcast, my very special guest today are two real estate moguls that have left the fire service. And now doing real estate, we have Lewis Weaver and Alec Evans. How're you guys doing today? 

Lewis Weaver  
Awesome. 

Alec Evans  
Doing great. Doing great. 

Jerry D. Lund  
I know you guys are some patient, man, man, we've had a powerful message to get out today. And, you know, the world has been fighting this a little bit, but this is gonna be good. So Louis, tell the audience a little bit about yourself. 

Lewis Weaver  
Okay, so I'm Lewis Weaver. I live in playing City, Utah. I been in real estate for 17 years, I did fire for 10 years. I still love fire wish I didn't have to go. But I did have to leave the fire service. The youngest of eight kids, kind of an underdog. A lot of people heard my story. So I will go on and on about it. But I've had four open heart surgeries. I've almost died a couple of times wasn't even supposed to live had a less than 5% chance when I was born. So I feel like I'm on borrowed time. And every day I wakes up is a great day. You know, it's a wonderful day. So the reason why I got into fire, people might be asking what the heck, you have heart issues. Why did you get into fire? Well, I've always been an entrepreneur, I've always wanted to be self employed. The issue is nobody wants to give you health insurance, you know, this guy's a ticking time bomb, or I give it a health insurance away. So as I got married, and my wife covered the health insurance, at some point, we were thinking we want to have kids. And Natalie doesn't want I mean, she would have worked forever. But with me working her work. And we just thought it might work better if I had a job that had some kind of stability and health benefits. I'm sure everyone understands that, right? So I talked to a couple fire chiefs. And they said yes, as long as you can pass the physical and you don't have any outstanding heart problems. Now, you should be able to be a firefighter, I went through the fire academy, got my fire serves lucky enough to get hired on a few different departments started down that road, you know, and I also just loved the doing, actually real estate. So what the interesting thing that happened was, the fire world taught me a ton about how to become a better real estate agent, because I was just your average guy, there's nothing special about me. And I got into real estate. And the reason I didn't fail is I didn't give up. I just kept going and just kept going. I just kept going I didn't really have processes in place. I didn't have a mentor. I didn't have people teaching me how to elevate my game. I didn't understand power proximity, I didn't understand anything. I just didn't quit. Okay, so when I got into the fire world, guess what that does that teaches you how to use algorithmic thinking, how to use your dynamic thinking how to put up with people that maybe you don't like, how to get a job done, and work in a team atmosphere, that no matter what results matter. That's what the fire world did for me. So as I owe a lot of my success in life, to being a firefighter and being in the fire world, so fast forward, get too busy. Now I'm too Successful in Real Estate doing too many deals. This one, I'm working in South Jordan, I'm working 100 hours a week, just getting beat into the ground. But I got to give everything to my clients, I got to give everything to the fire. And I'm leaving my family behind, you know, and but I think I'm doing what I'm supposed to be doing a provider. The more I work, the more value I have, the more that's how I that's how I was blueprinted. That's how I thought, right? The more work the better. I'm a good man, I'm a good man, when my son said, Is there any way that I could become a client so you could spend some time with me? That was that was hard to take. And then I took a step back and start to realize I was starting to fail in all three quadrants of my life. And maybe I need to make a change, not to mention multiple heart surgeries. I talked to my cardiologist and I said, you're stupid man. You can't you can't do this fire thing. It's it's hard on a normal person's heart. This is really hard on yours. You got to make a decision. And leading up to that decision. It was a lot of heartache a lot of didn't want to leave the fire service. I don't want to leave the Brotherhood. But I was working days I was working with Alec. And that's when really our friendship bloomed if you want to say because we knew each other through the fire academy in South Georgia, but he was working in logistics and I got hurt. I was working as a training officer. And I think he thought, Well, this guy can do real estate. Anybody can do real estate. And so he jumped in and got his real estate license. I ended up half of the league. And the rest is kind of history. He followed suit there soon after. 

Jerry D. Lund  
Yah, just still the audience a little bit about yourself. 

Alec Evans    
Yeah, so I'm really prototypical in that, like I wanted to be a firefighter from a young age when I was a little kid. I thought being a firefighter would be cool. And so you know, very early on right after high school. I didn't do any of that. And I put it off for like 12 years. Of course that's just kind of, you know, my path that I took I joined the Air Force right out of high school. I kind of had some second thoughts about fire and getting into fire EMS right after you know, right after high school when I was joining the military, so I joined as a military police officer, and in law enforcement for my six year enlistment there, and got out, did a couple of other things got a little bit of experience in some, some customer service and with a couple of different companies. And then I decided that when I got laid off, from my job, that that was as good a time as any to go to the Fire Academy, I felt like it was kind of like God's way of telling me, now's the time, now you've got nothing standing in the way no job to, you know, prevent you from being able to go, you know, jump in with both feet into the fire world. So I did, and I got hired on at Saratoga Springs, where I worked for, for about a year, part time before I got hired at South Jordan. And the thing that I think drove me to fire the most was my military experience and the team atmosphere that I got out of being in the Air Force. I love that I love that, you know, for better for worse, everything that you do in both fire and in the military, you do together and anything that's difficult is made much easier when you have a group of people that are sort of suffering right alongside you. And you build that camaraderie through, you know, the suffering, or you know, the tough times, I really enjoyed that. Because it just feels like you ease that burden that you're going through, and it kind of gets distributed on to everybody around you and the team. So that was what drove me to fire. By far, the most got into it, I really enjoyed it. I got a sort of an office administrative type job fairly early on in logistics with South Shore fire. And I didn't realize it at the time, but it was sort of teaching me all the intangibles that you need to have to be good at a career in business, a career in real estate, it's basically being a real estate agent is your logistical master, that's you're just juggling all these different things all at the same time. And you can't let any of them drop, or there's potentially massive consequences. So yeah, I think that all those things kind of snowballed for me. And culminated with the moment I started working with Louis and seeing how busy he was seeing a lot of the things that he was doing. And I really did fairly early on, and it was nice friendship, I started seeing, I'm like, Man, this guy does all these things, he's really busy. He seems like he enjoys it, sometimes most of the time, every once a while, he's like having a good time with it. But he's making good money, he's doing some good things, people are very grateful. He's got a lot of clients, and he's helping a lot of people. And a lot of that just struck me as something that I really liked to be involved in, I was working a lot of hours to at, you know, between both of my fire jobs, it wasn't uncommon to work, you know, 72 hour shift, six hour shift, in addition to what I was doing in my full time job. So for me, part of it was I just, I know that I can do something similar to what Louis is doing. I know I can help people, I know that if I get involved with the right team, the right coach that I can put, I can be put in a similar position. And so I took a leap of faith, I got my license, and I decided that, you know, I was going to do whatever I could to, to work with Lewis as his partner, or as you know, he's going to be my coach. And, and we just kind of took off from there. So yeah, that's a little bit about kind of what I was doing right before and then obviously, the transition to full time real estate, I attribute all of the good things that I've been able to do and what we've been able to do as a team, to exactly that to our team, and the great people that I have around me. So that for me, is kind of everything is the team and everything that we can accomplish together really. 

Jerry D. Lund  
Yeah, that's I agree, working as a team in the fire service or in the police services. There's just something very special about that. And I think it keeps you there sometimes in the fire service or police service, maybe longer than you want to be, because or should they just because you love that atmosphere so much. So yeah, isn't it so like a little bit isn't a little bit scary to leave the fire service to jump into being an entrepreneur, be a solopreneur you're the sole provider now for your family, and you're going to leave this opportunity to get this pension in 2025 years, you know, 50% Maybe a little higher of your highest three years. You're gonna leave that?

Alec Evans    
Yeah. I know. For me personally, it wasn't nearly as difficult as it was for Louis. I think Louis has got kind of a unique situation. I'm him leaving the fire service and kind of how difficult that was. So 

Lewis Weaver    
Yeah, I'll tell you, it was hard. It was extremely hard. You'll find that 80% of your success is mental. That's what it is. I'll talk to the people who are making multiple, seven figures. And they still don't think they're enough or they're worried about the future or this or that. Everyone thinks that if you're at this level, you must make better. You must be smarter. You must be better than me. We're not. Because there's another 50,000 levels above us. We're all doing the best we can, right. So when I, when I was working both, I was making a lot of money. Sure. But I was still holding myself back quite a bit because of that pension. And if you read the book, The Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, it'll talk about blueprinting. And all of us have been blueprinted. Basically, from the billionaires and the central banks and the people who run the country. Do you think all the politicians run the country? They're actually getting paid for by a lot of the bankers? I don't want to get into all that. But money. Let's just say money runs a lot more than you think. And if you're let's pretend you're running the world, you're king for a day. Do you want everyone to quit and go be self employed? No, you know, nothing will get done? Nothing. Yeah, you need workers, you need workers. It's that simple. So for society, we need and that's why we're taught. We're not taught in school, how to really become successful. We're taught about how to get a job, to work anywhere from 25 to 50 years, retire for seven to 10 years and die. Yeah, that's what we're taught. And if you think about it from a kings perspective, like, that's what you need society to do, or you're gonna destroy everything that they have in reserves to keep you alive for those years when you're not producing. I mean, you got to look at it more of a global way. Right. And I didn't learn a lot of this stuff till I already made the leap. So how do you make that leap? Well, it took me forever. Why do you think I worked 10 years in both career fields. I literally didn't leave till I had a few $100,000 in the bank. And I already had rental properties I'm like, and I was loot. I remember I went to work one day, lost a radio, Alec remembers. I started screwing up a whole band. And I lost a $10,000 commission because I couldn't take the day off of work. And I remember thinking, I wonder how much it's costing me to come to work. But I love my job I love for several months, I didn't even receive a paycheck. I was just putting all of it into retirement until they said, You can't put any more in retirement. You have to take a paycheck. And I'm like, Okay, fine. And I realized that sounds kind of crazy, but and then my accountant said, You're doing this wrong, you should be you know, investing different ways. Rather, you know, there's other advantageous ways to invest and where to put your money. And I could go into that for a long time. But basically how I made that leap. I decided that if, if I'm going to leave the fire service, now's the best time I've got money in the bank, real estate's kicking butt, it was September 25, 2018. What could ever go wrong? So I believe the fire service and then I start hearing about this like Corona. What is it a Bud Light or is that a Coronavirus? Yeah. That's probably better. Probably not. But you know, so literally, right after I left, Boom! Coronavirus, you know, and a lot of us in the real estate world, we can look back and say we knew everything, we knew what was gonna happen. A lot of us were terrified, thinking the markets just gonna go to nothing. And I'd already lived in that, oh, 708 era of real estate and watch people go bankrupt. I'm like, great. I just gave a pension. I just gave up, you know, health care. I just gave up all this stuff. For now a major pandemic hit perfect. You know, so I can go into the mindset of that. I don't know how far you want me to go. I can explain it later. 

Alec Evans    
I will. Yeah, I will say I think the you know, you leaving the career field of the profession, really just depends on the people that you have around you. And it was touched on the power of proximity and the people that you have around you, I think that plays such a major role in your your ability to either transition fully, or to spend more of your time to spend more of your resources, your money, whatever that looks like for you. I think that that all starts with again, I'm going to keep coming back to this whole thing. As far as like the team who's your who's your, your person who is your team, is that your family is that a mentor, if you don't have anybody that you can consistently call and rely on to get you through those moments of self doubt, and you know whether or not this is something that you can handle, then it's eventually I think, going to overtake most people and that's such a hard thing to do by yourself and to do so low. I'm super lucky because by the time I was ready to transition more full time into the real estate world, I already had that setup. I already had Louis for years, I already had him kind of coaching me through deals and I was part of groups that were doing the same thing. And so for me, I was able to make that leap with so much more confidence and so much more, you know, self assurance that I was making the right decision, that I was going to be just fine. But that doesn't also have to look like what I did what Lewis did as far as this full blown, just jump in with both feet. I know most people that that's either not what they want to do, they can't do it, they they're just not willing to give up, you know, the guaranteed paycheck, the pension, all the great things that come from from the job. But it still doesn't get away from the fact that you do need that group, you need that support system around you. Because you are going to have so many moments where you're not sure. And you can start talking to yourself and telling yourself things that that aren't going to help you at all, but they will affect you big time.

Lewis Weaver    
100% I'll say a good analogy that I just thought about listening to you. If I was like I was pushed off the cliff, I had to make that decision. And all of my burdens of I have clients, I have my family. I have the real estate. I mean, I have the fire career, they want to push me to promote all of this pressure, I'll call it where I got to that edge. And I was like I don't have any choice make it or not I'm freakin jumpin. You know, at this point, Alec had me a couple times where I walked in, I'm like, today might be the day. Right this second, you know what I mean? Like, this might be it. And it was so much pressure, I was pushed off that cliff. Luckily, I flew. And I elevated. I think I doubled my income that the next year, but I know I did. And so it was a big difference for me, Alec, I felt like I was able to kind of run a jump off that cliff. And by his own decision, he was able to plan and go, You know what this is going to happen rather than being forced off. And that's the power of working with a team. I will tell everybody, I did real estate wrong for the first eight years, I did real estate. Okay, 90% of people fail in real estate. If you just walk down the street, there's an 80% attrition rate one out of 10 fail in their first year, the ones that make it in the next five years looking forward, only one of those 10 survive, and then take the survivors two out of 10 do 90% of the work. So the Pareto rule. You don't I mean, hey, you know, 10 to 20% of the agents make 80% of the life in all reality. I was not one of those for the first almost a decade of my real estate career. Because I just didn't give up. I didn't work on systems. I didn't go to masterminds. I didn't work on power, proximity, any of that stuff. I just worked man, I just worked my butt off and correct and continue made mistakes, move forward, made mistakes correctly. Continue. That's all that's all I knew to do. Well, leaving, like when I became really elevated and started making a lot of money it was when I surrounded myself with others that were so much better. Like I say, do you want to bench more weight? Go lift with somebody who can work out way more than you. Right? So okay, I'm gonna get around other agents that are a lot better than me that bring me up. And what I found out is they're not any different than me. They just think a little bit different. Their mindsets a little bit different. And then they brought me into the world of how do you self validate? When you're an entrepreneur, how do you get over the pension and the fear and everything else? You have to validate yourself because I will tell you, I go out on the street and ask 10 people, they think I make the right decision. They'll tell me no. They'll say No, you shouldn't be self employed, go get a job. Go do this. Go do that. I have to validate myself. And if I would have started on a team like Alec, did you mind Alec me saying a little bit about money and different things? Like what we made? Sure yeah, so yeah, sure. It probably took me eight years to make 100 grand a year in real estate. Alec blew that out of waters first year. Right? So imagine if eight years ago, I would have started with a team and learning from the people I'm learning from today, I would probably be making in the millions every year. It just you need to surround yourself with the right people. It's that simple. And for me, that was that was the biggest struggle and we can get into EMDR therapy, we get into a lot of stuff if you'd like because when I when I left in 2019 everything was great. Summer kickin bought like 15 deals I'm working on I'm about to make 107 grand that last whatever, it's going great. I go into January, and everyone's worried about this Corona stuff. That's it, there's just things are happening. Yeah, they kind of shuts down. I go from like, more business than I can handle to I think one deal. And I'm sitting there going. That was probably a crappy decision. And now all of the trauma I dealt with in the fire service as a child and I had a great childhood. I'm not saying I had any problems, but everyone has trauma. Everyone has issues, right? Yeah, yes. Guess why I never dealt with any of that. Because I was too busy. I don't know how to do with that crap. Got to work. You know, 

Jerry D. Lund   
That's that's like almost every first responder right there. That's insane. 

Lewis Weaver    
Yeah, so once you have time just to ponder and some of those bad calls come in your head and all this other stuff is self doubt you suck. You're stupid. I can't believe you did that you gave up a pension all the world. All the negativity starts getting in your brain. I, one day I was just out picking up rocks in the snow throwing them back onto the gravel just for hours. Just my wife thought I lost my mind. Here, I had more money than I've ever had my life.

Lewis Weaver 
Probably more successful than I've ever been in my life, but I'm in this low of, I don't know where to go. So I found a mastermind, and always give credit to Colton Lindsey who our mastermind, I got on a call with him. And he he coached me through some things and completely changed my life and welcomed me into this group of people who are high achievers, but they do it with balance, and they, they have time for their family, they build systems, they're able to scale their business, they're able to work with people like Alec, if anyone knows Alec, you know, Alec's got a great guy, he's brilliant. So you hire talent, you get the guy like Alec around you, you hire him, no matter what you can do, and just find the place and he will level you up, he'll take you to another level. But from his point of view, you have to back me up on this unless I'm wrong and told me I'm an idiot. But from his point of view, he gets somebody with all the experience, you get somebody that he can watch and model and help them through any transaction, but he can sit back and go, you know, you got to change a couple of things here and here and here. And this could let him grow even bigger. We can grow together. When we say that's true, Alec?

Alec Evans  
Yeah, 100%. And, you know, we've got this book that we, you know, it's basically our Bible for our business that we use Lewis and I, it's very highly recommended book, it's called rocket fuel. And it's, it's basically, you know, a partnership or any kind of, you know, team dynamic, there's, you know, people that have strengths and weaknesses, and, you know, who should be doing what, and, you know, it's just, it's a great way that it kind of lays it out. And that's Lewis and I, you know, to a tee, that's what we tried to do is enable it, you know, any place that I have a little bit more experience, or I have a little bit more of a knack for doing something that that's probably going to be my job, right. And it's same thing for him, he's going to handle a lot of things that I don't have any experience in, I have no desire to do I don't have any skill, you know, at doing. And so I don't know any other way. This is all I know, is to work in that dynamic where we've got sort of a blueprint, or an outline on how to make that work. Yeah, that's, that's absolutely a huge part of it. Again, it comes back down to who is who is around you, who is who is your rallying group to get you the support you need, whether you are a career firefighter, police officer, and you're just looking at, you know, buying a rental property, buying an investment, you know, getting your real estate license, whatever it is that you're looking to do, you do need that dynamic of who is it that's going to help you get there. And just know that any of those goals that you have anybody that's thinking about doing that, there are so many people already doing exactly the thing that you're maybe a little bit worried about, you're already you're super nervous to jump into buying your first investment property or to like, you know, Lewis and I have transitioned completely full time into the real estate world. It's, that's a huge part of it is I knew that, okay, well, I'm not the smartest guy in the world. But I know that there's a lot less qualified people than me out doing way more with their abilities than I'm currently doing. And if you recognize that you have that faith and that confidence in yourself, you can do anything, especially when you combine that with your system of people that's going to be pushing you. 

Jerry D. Lund  
Yeah, let's, let's throw out a little scenario, some hypotheticals here. What we'll see is myself kind of as a little bit of an example, that all things are true and applicable, but okay, I've got 22 years full time in the system. And I'm looking to get out and like, I don't have anything, you know, that I'm like, I really want to do, I'm just gonna spider my time waiting. I think that maybe some rental property would be good or buy an Airbnb or, like, like, where do I go? Like, what do I do? Like, you know, I don't have this team around me. Like, how do I go find?

Lewis Weaver  
Give us a call. 

Alec Evans  
Lewis and Alec. 

Lewis Weaver
I've literally done this. I'm going tomorrow with a captain who's I won't say his name, but he's looking he's looking to retire soon, up here in Weaver County, and he's trying to decide do I want to flip houses do I want to run on rentals? I don't want to do Airbnbs. The good news is I flipped houses and Alec do own rentals. And I like to I'm on an Airbnb and we run a wholesale company that we have people in the Philippines who call 6000 people a month to try and find off market properties so we can find you a deal right but rather than us keep all the deals and we just did a flip where we made 65,000 bucks it was awesome yeah, but we we don't have to flip all alone. We can split that we can we can take 10 or 20 and give you guys the rest and then you go do the work it depends the hardest thing is actually getting the deal you'll find this all these all these people say well I know how to swing a hammer I know Yeah, that doesn't matter. Finding that nothing happens without finding the deal you'll find because you're oh hey I want to buy rental property hey, I want to buy an investment property in Airbnb cool. Go buy one. I don't know what I'm gonna do. It doesn't matter how good of a contractor you are. Doesn't matter how good of a real estate agent you are. If you don't get the deal, that's where it starts with, right? So that's what we ran into. We'd like to own more properties. But where do you get that property? And we differ, we jumped in, right? Like, I mean, we 

Alec Evans  
Yeah, for us this came about because if anybody who's tried to buy a house in Utah over the last year, if you've gone through that process, you know how tough it's been, as a buyer, you've been looking at, you know, increasing home prices, it's taking longer than ever to build a home. And that all comes back down to this core issue of inventory. There's just not enough housing available. And whether you're looking to buy your house to live in, or you're looking to buy an investment, property, rental, whatever that is for you. If there are certain websites are certain places that people will gravitate towards looking online, and they'll say, Well, I'm gonna find me a property that I think would work as a rental, so I can make passive income, they start going to those websites, and there's just not a ton available. So what do you do you just kind of give up? Do you wait, that's what a lot of people, that's their plan, I'm going to wait for the market to be different, I'm gonna wait for more inventory to be available. But Louis, and I were like, that's not an option, we need to create inventory, we need to make it so that there are more houses available. Because we've got clients, we've got buyers, and they're ready to go right now. And we're trying to make a living, we're trying to get paid as well, we need to help them buy a house. So ther are earlier this year, were times where I would take a buyer to go look for a starter home. And we would be looking in the you know, for 25 for 50. And under range. In say, Utah County, we'd have all day Saturday to go out and look. And we'd have like three options. There just wasn't anything available. It was depressing. And the ones that we were finding, they were just like, really basic starter homes for a sky high price. And there's a line of people out the door, just begging to put in an offer and buy the house. So Lewis and I are looking at each other like, this sucks. Like this is just this is an awful way to try to, try to do business. So I mean, there's a million houses everywhere I drive I see houses, why aren't any of these for sale? Why can't I buy any of these houses or help somebody else do it? So what do we do? I mean, we've got a, we could just go knock on everybody's door, we're going to talk to me, how are we going to do that? So we started this company to where we were able to get in touch with more people, we've got systems in place now to be able to reach 1000s of homeowners every month all over Utah, all over the country, to just start that conversation and say we've got buyers, usually we've got buyers in your area specifically, they're looking to buy your house, are you looking to sell? The market's great. Are you looking to move? And more often than not, we are able to at least start that conversation. We've had a bunch of people that are like, yeah, sure, you know, send me an offer, you know, and we get the ball rolling with the buyer that way. So it's provided an additional value for the people that work with us that rely on us to know what we're doing in the market to try to get them a house as well as us, you know, for our company being able to acquire investment properties for ourselves. 

Lewis Weaver  
And I'll say for your situation, specifically, this is what I do with anybody remember, there's a lot of real estate agents that go out there, and they try and talk to you into something. And this is not bashing real estate agents. There's wonderful real estate agents out there. But they they follow a script, they get you to say yes, a lot. And they talk you into what they want. I've never done that. I meet with you and say, let's make sure this works for both of us. You're comfortable with me, I'm comfortable with you, you understand what I can do for you. I need to understand what your problem is. Are you wanting to sell your house? you're trying to buy a new house? you're buying a rental, you're buying a VRBO? What are you doing? Let's first learn that, see if I can be of assistance. If that works for you, and then go from there. I want to solve your problem. Because if I come in and give this whole spiel, and at the end, you're like, "Great, I'm not even looking to do that." You know, here's what here's what else I'm doing. You're like, oh, well, now I look like an idiot. So I've just always started from value first, what value can I bring to you? How can I help you? If that doesn't work? That's totally fine with partners friends. So in your situation, you're saying I'm looking to retire I need some more passive income, or I like to call it leveraged residual income. What am I going to leverage to get some residual income that I don't have to go and work for? Right? So we'd sit you down and say, Okay, do you understand what a cap rate is? Do you understand what return on investment is cash on cash return? Do you know what rates you like? What cap rate do you need for an investment property to make sense? Okay, no, let me explain those to you. Alright, do you understand how to purchase let's say we do find your property? Do you want to Airbnb it? Do you want to keep it as a rental? Let's look at both scenarios. If you keep it as a rental, here's how much you can run it for. You're gonna pay a management company, I suggest you pay a management company because if you want to manage it yourself, it turns into a job. And I have friends who have stuck with only two or three rentals because they're like, Well, if I get 10 rentals, that's 10 toilets, I have to punch. I don't have 100 rentals because I didn't do any of that crap. Somebody else has done with that. And it's not a good enough deal to buy it and not pay the management company on it anyways because I need a different exit strategies. If the market changes, I need to adjust my rent I need to sell property. I don't want only one exit strategy. So with your situation, let's look at a standard rental lease. Okay, here's the advantages. Here's the disadvantages, you can probably make more with an Airbnb, here's how much you'd make with the Airbnb financing is going to be tougher, they're going to not count the rental income, because it's not a steady income with the least side. Does that make sense? You might be stuck with one rental property, because your debt to income ratio might be too high living on more of a fixed income as a unless you have lots of money, right? But if you're looking at your rental history, okay, I want this rental to pay for itself and also be a net positive, so I can make some money off this rental, which will increase my income, which will help my debt to income ratio, then I can go buy another rental property, then you're going to want a standard lease. Right? Then there's other options too, that we're exploring now that we're learning from our coaches are called subject to and seller, finance, and a lot of other things, we understand that every other real estate agent will act like the other. So I understand. So finance, I know, I know, subject to, but how do you get to a level where you can explain that to someone who doesn't understand real estate and why they want to sell you a house with potentially no money down from my end as the buyer. Because once you figure that out, you can buy as many houses you want one of our coaches, I don't want to brag, but one of our coaches, I mean, the guy map here, he makes like $600,000 alone, and his coach makes millions every month and buys over almost two houses a day, nationwide. Now, he can't do that with his own money. Right? He's he's, he's learning creative ways to do it. So we're getting into that realm to where we're really gonna look towards that. And I can't over promise under deliver. But what I'm saying is, anybody who looks at him wanting to get into investments, we will explain what we know, we will explain what we think is best for you. But you get to decide because all you can take all the information in front of you, and then decide which direction you want to go, whether that's get your real estate license to do real estate, whether that's, hey, I want to invest in this type of property, or this type of property, or I want to flip or what is flipping look like and explain how it works.

Alec Evans  
Yeah, our clients just just so everyone knows our clients range from people that have no experience in real estate, they don't own any rental properties. And they don't know the first thing about how to get started. They're all the way up to people that have hundreds of properties. And they're just looking to add to their portfolio. So we're sort of like that's what Lewis and I that's what we do is we act as the middleman of basically brokering that deal between an existing homeowner on an off market property, presenting that option to a list of buyers or people that are looking to get into investments and say, here's what this deal looks like, here's what your purchase price would be. Here's what you could expect to cashflow, whether that's Airbnb, whether it's a long term rental. So we work with everybody, anybody who was willing to get started into investing in real estate, anybody don't have a lot of money, that I understand how these firehouse kitchen table conversations go. And I understand one thing about firefighters specifically is it, if it by their very nature, they're all problem solvers, right? And everybody's sitting around the table, and everybody's gonna have an idea of how to solve the problem. And everybody's gonna, you know, be pretty confident their ability to do so. But then you throw out a topic or something that maybe nobody at that table really knows a whole lot about, what typically is going to happen is that there's going to be some misinformation given out maybe some speculation on how that's supposed to go. And then very quickly, it's sort of getting me just dismissed as this pipe dream of something that you probably just can't do. Because I don't have a million dollars, I don't have a ton of money to invest into a fix and flip. So it's just not for me, I just don't think I'm going to be able to do that. And I promise you, you can I promise you that person who is thinking that, and that conversation that's happening, you too can also get get started into, you know, whatever it is that we're talking all the different options that we've talked about here, you can do it, it comes right back down to who's your team, who's your people? Who are you going to call? Who are you going to have help you with that process? That's Lewis and I, one of the strengths that we have is that for any one of our clients, or any issue that we run into ourselves, there isn't any problem that we can run into that we don't know exactly who to call, or exactly how to find the resources to help you solve that problem. More than anything, we are professional problem solvers, because in real estate transactions, there are a million of them, they come up every five minutes, there's another issue that we have to help you figure out how to navigate. So we've gotten really good at solving those problems. And if you have a financing issue, if you have an inventory issue if you have a fix and flip issue, no matter what it is we can call somebody very well connected and very experienced, if that's not us, and we will get you the answer to your to your problem. 

Jerry D. Lund  
So what I'm so what I'm gathering and hearing from you, guys, is that I need to find the right person to direct me or find the right team to go to. So and I also have to do my homework on my ends, I have an understanding what my wants and needs are for the for the future. Because that if I don't, then that's I'm not going to be able to give you guys the information that you're going to need to help solve my problem. So that's kind of one scenario right where I'm, you're you're in kind of into your career looking for, you know to do some properties do have to be at the end of my career can I be like in the first few years of my careers is a is first responder and do this too?

Lewis Weaver  
I was I flipped my first house at 23 years old. I went to the courthouse steps shaking like a leaf almost got in a fistfight. Because this guy kept telling me if you knew what was good for you, you would quit bidding. And what he meant was all these old millionaires are this courthouse steps. And they dress like bums first of all, not like they're really trying to buy clothes with a sharpened flannel pants and they're torn and the rich of the people are normally the crappier they dress I swear, so and they don't want to get mugged out on the street in the middle of August at the courthouse step, right. So they're, they're telling me Don't did you need to quit bidding, what they were saying is, we will give you some money to stop bidding. But the problem with that that's coercion, and you can go to prison for that, right? Because any money derived from the sale should go to the second mortgage or the owner, right? So we're gonna bid it above what's owed, that money is already owed to somebody else, not each other. And I knew I at least understood that because I was a mortgage lender before I got into real estate. And I was like, That's coercion man, that's not good. So I told him to back off and he kept bugging me and I said, if you don't get out of my face, I'm gonna knock your teeth to the back your throat you know, I'm here. This was before I learned a lot of people's skills. I was just an aggressive you know, like, get out my face. So he backs off by by the house and I was throw up, I was signing the paper, just like, you know, just looked at terrified. And then I had to put 5000 non refundable, earnest money down. If I didn't have money, within 24 hours, I was going to lose or lose it. And then my five grand and somebody else will get the house. Well, luckily, my wife worked with the title company, we were figuring all this out. We were able to make sure title was familiar. There was no encumbrances. I did two years of research before I bought my first house, just as a background. So like, I walked down there, you know, I looked up the foreclosure sites, I went in broken homes, you know, with a flashlight, the cops called on me cuz I'm looking at properties. And hey, it's vacant. I'm an investor. You know, I had all these different things I would say or do if someone caught me. And then I finally went and bought a property. But I got my friend to invest with me, he gave me some, we pulled our money together into the line of credit on my house, he didn't like it on his house, we bought the house, we made 29,500 bucks in 60 days, and I thought, hey, I don't even get paid that much on my job. That's pretty awesome. You know, the problem with real estate is there's too many ways to make money. So you'll get someone who says I want to flip somebody I want to rent, I want to own commercial, I want to sell retail, I want to do this, I want to do that I want there's I want to lease I want to just buy rentals and Airbnb and I'm just going to rent them out. I'm not going to buy the property, I'm gonna get a long term lease on a property that I'm going to Airbnb it and make money, the spread in between, I'm going to subject to I'm going to sell a fine, there's tons of ways to make real money in real estate. Say, so you can sit around and I don't want to say mentally you know, what about Yeah, you can? 

Jerry D. Lund  
Yeah, it's my favorite statement to say about things like that. 

Lewis Weaver  
You can overthink it. And remember, action doers are the ones that make all the money. I don't care if it's buying a rental and Airbnb, a subject to a seller, finance or commercial. Once you decide once you get kind of the basics of all of it, I want to move forward. Then the action takers are the one that make the money like when we were at this mastermind, and Cody Barton and Matt beard got up and started presenting about wholesaling. I'm like I've been in this, like 15 years. This sounds amazing. They're making a fortune. And it sounds fun. And it sounds challenging. I want to try that. And Alec sitting there, like what are we doing? We're, we're hiring people from the Philippines. I'm like, I don't know what the hell we're doing. But we're doing that. It sounds awesome. We're gonna do that. And I told him, the mastermind isn't till next summer or next spring. What do you think we just start a business now? We make all the mistakes now. So when we go to the mastermind, we'll have a ton of questions ask Alec's like, Yeah, I'm in. Let's do it. So we literally hired some virtual assistants and just started making phone calls calling man Cody, can you help us out? Let me send you some videos. Let me show you what to do. And just been how many mistakes that we make out? 

Alec Evans  
Yeah. Oh, it's yeah, it's so cliche. It's so cliche, but if you're not making those mistakes, you're probably not pushing yourself far enough to you know, grow and, you know, new things, you know, that you're doing. And that's what we try to preach with Lewis and I and our team and the people that that we work with, is we have this culture of like, you know, imperfect action and discomfort along the way that, you know, if you're not uncomfortable and you're not taking imperfect action, then you're probably getting a little bit down the other way where you're just sort of thinking about it. You're, you're doing a whole lot of thinking and perfecting and back to the drawing board. Okay, it's not perfect. It's not perfect yet, so it's not ready. And so what you're doing all along that way is you're just thinking about it, you're not taking the action, and there's no money there. There's no way for you to invest your thoughts and get a return financially. It's only just by taking that action. And and that's always in perfect Lewis and I, we've been doing this for a little bit, and I don't think we've had a single day or a single god, we talked to a lot of people we made phone calls. Lewis, do you have a lot of perfect phone calls? Perfect meetings, everything that we do is sort of like, okay, well, that was, that was good-ish, I think kind of maybe, maybe not, but at least we did it. And that's the big thing that can kind of get lost in that whole thing is, I know a lot of people like that. And I know that I used to be that person with just about everything where I would just prep so much. And I would spend so much time just on the back end of it, just making sure that nothing was going to be left out, nothing was going to be imperfect. And then like six months would go by and I'm like, I haven't even started, I haven't even done any of the things that I know, deep down I have to do in order to get whatever goal done. So imperfect action, being uncomfortable being kind of thrown into uncomfortable situations. From day one, that was Lewis's goal with me as a newer agent was, I'm just going to force you into situations that you're like, your palms are sweaty, and you're like, Oh my God, I don't know if I can do this. And I have so many so many different, you know, things that I went through where I'm like, Oh, my God, like this is just so much anxiety to go through this, but you look back and the things that I can do now. And the way that I can contribute to our team are all totally related to all of those things.

Lewis Weaver  
100% I always say one of my favorite lines is perfect makes you poor good enough makes you rich. And that sounds opposite people like what so you just do crappy work? No, we're, we're constantly fighting the errors to bring us back to perfect, right? How do you do that without making mistakes. And I never understood why. When someone makes a mistake, they're so damn afraid of their ego. And there's their significance that they don't want to admit it. So the second they make a mistake, they blame somebody else. And I'm telling you, you will never be successful. If you're that way ever you have to change this person, you have to change who you are. Because the second you blame other people that's like going to work and not getting the paycheck, you've already made the damn mistake. Everyone already knows you made a mistake, own it, learn from it, learn from it and be like, Hey, I'm not doing that again, or I'm gonna move forward. I'm gonna change the way I do things. How do you think we get science? How do you think you think the first Tesla just rolled off and just took off? You know? I mean, how do we progress in any way? It's finding the mistakes fail often fail fast. They welcome the failures. We don't Alec and I have a saying that we we never lose, right? We either win or we learn simple. We went to we learn all right, we learned something there. We're gonna move forward. And what's funny is all these high achievers that we go to these masterminds with. They're the same way thrown in a crowd. You're like, hey, let's do this. Alright, let's figure it out. Let's just get in and start making mistakes. Let's get it done. And the people who are worried about their ego and their significance and maybe want to brag and talk about how great they are, they're not actually takers, man, because they're about to look stupid when they go in there and just go after it make mistakes. So it's almost harder to mastermind that we go to everyone wants to talk, you know how you go somebody raise your hand and there's like crickets and one for like this one frickin person is going to do the talking for everybody. Oh, my gosh, you go to a high caliber mastermind Evelyn's like, Yeah, throw me in the hot seat. Let's get up there. I'm sucking right now. And I need to make my business better. I'm making a lot of mistakes. They're like, what'd you do last year? I made 2 million last year, we made $2 million dollars last year and you think you suck. And your systems need work? Well, yeah, I can improve a lot. Let's let's dive in. Let's see how about I suck? Let's figure it out. Yeah, and they're open to feedback. And you're going, I would have put that guy on like a frickin pedestal and he's up there a regular guy saying I make mistakes every frickin day. And I need help. 

Lewis Weaver  
100% I always say one of my favorite lines is perfect makes you poor good enough makes you rich. And that sounds opposite people. Like let's say you just do crappy work. No, we're, we're constantly fighting the errors to bring us back to perfect, right? How do you do that without making mistakes. And I've never understood why. When someone makes a mistake, they're so damn afraid of their ego. And there's their significance that they don't want to admit it. So the second they make a mistake, they blame somebody else. And I'm telling you, you will never be successful. If you're that way, ever you have to change this person, you have to change who you are. Because the second you blame other people that's like going to work and not getting the paycheck, you've already made the damn mistake. Everyone already knows you made a mistake, own it, learn from it, learn from it and be like, Hey, I'm not doing that again, or I'm gonna move forward. I'm going to change the way I do things. How do you think we get science? How do you think you think? First Tesla just rolled off and just took off? You know? I mean, how do we progress in any way? It's finding the mistakes fail often fail fast. They welcome the failures. We don't Alec and I have a saying that we we never lose, right? We either win or we learn. It's that simple. We went to we learned all right, we learned something there. We're gonna move forward. And what's funny is all these high achievers that we go to these masterminds with, they're the same way throw in a crowd be like, Hey, let's do this. Let's figure it out. Let's just get in and start making mistakes. Let's get it done. And the people who are worried about their ego and their significance and maybe want to brag and talk about how great they are. They're not action takers, man because they're about to look stupid when they go in there and just go after it make mistakes. So it's almost hard in a mastermind that we go to everyone wants to talk, you know how you go somebody raise your hand and there's like crickets and one for like this one frickin person is going to do the talking for everybody. Oh, my gosh, you go to a high caliber mastermind Evelyn's like that throw me in the hot seat. Let's get up there. I'm sucking right now. And I need to make my business better. I'm making a lot of mistakes. I like what you do last year, I made 2 million last year, you made $2 million last year and you think you suck and your systems need work? Well, yeah, I can improve a lot. Let's let's dive in. Let's see how bad I suck. Let's figure it out. Yeah, and they're open to feedback. And you're going I want to put that guy on like a frickin pedestal and he's up there a regular guy saying I make mistakes every frickin day. And I need help. 

Alec Evans  
That's, that's that's the bait. Yeah, that's a it's a double edged sword and fire guys, they can relate to this completely where you're a doer, you are expected to have the answers you're expected to just by any means necessary. Get it done. So that can be a huge blessing and a huge curse. And I've been that way for a long time. I'm trying over the course of the last year, it's been a huge point of emphasis for me. I know Louis has had some epiphanies this year, like kind of some light bulb moments, exactly what you're talking about where man like, why am I doing these things? Because we talked about like the high dollar activities, what could you be doing to bring in more business or serve your clients better? Those are the things that we want to focus on as, as the business owners and the people that are kind of interested to do those things. And really doing yard work for somebody or you know, doing maintenance on a house. That's not what that looks like. Lewis did this for way, way too long. Way too long. He'll tell you that. And it was only just recently in in September of this last year, I think that we had like a huge lightbulb moment of Okay, no more we've got to figure out consistently going forward another plan to to the whole maintenance thing. Yeah,

Lewis Weaver
I love it. Let me hit on that because this is burned into my core. Okay, I was the king of I mean, I was doing 40 deals a year in real estate. That might not sound a lot but your average person has six to 10 deals. So I was made about four times what a normal agent would do a closing almost every week, with no help. No Assistant, no transaction coordinator, my wife helped I take that back. My wife's amazing and she's helped a bunch. But we I didn't scale at all I didn't leverage and that does work. Yes, working your guts out and doing everything yourself will get you to 100 grand a year. They'll also get you to want to suck starter a baller. So be careful. If you want to actually get to seven figures a different lifestyle. Financial freedom is not why we all work hard. Right? Well, financial freedom you don't you want to go to Hawaii or Bora Bora and spend a month there and still make the same amount of money. Isn't that what we all want? Well, you do that by leveraging skill. So if you want to leverage and scale your life and your business, it doesn't have to be real estate, it can be anything. You need to go read the book who not have, we're all taught our whole lives. How do I fix this problem when the first thing you should ask is who, who's amazing at fixing this problem? And maybe a five minute conversation with this person will make it so I can get this task done in three minutes. Right, rather than three days. Yeah. So I mean, anyone who's done mechanic work in their life, maybe if they just talk to the right person before they pull the training out. Did you know what I mean? 

Jerry D. Lund  
Yeah, I know. I know what you mean. 

Lewis Weaver  
So you got to ask what's your highest paid activity. And when you're new in your career, your highest paid activity is absolutely going on appointments, setting out, you know, yard signs and doing open houses and doing all the things. Yes, that's your highest paid activity. But when you get to more successful, more successful, and there's the skiff, there's five levels of agents, we call it where you don't want, you're making less than 50 grand a year to you're getting up to 100 grand a year, level three, now you're above 100 grand a year, you've got really steady business, the way you're going to get more is by hiring a system, hiring a transaction coordinator, hiring someone to do some of the stuff you don't have to do. You your highest paid activity is going out and talking to more agents. So are more clients, do you want to go land another deal that's gonna pay you 10 grand? Or do you want to spend three hours on paperwork that you could pay someone 15 bucks to do right? Not 15 bucks, you know what I mean? 15 bucks now. Well, you, you get to that level level four. Now you're making multiple six figures. And you need a team of agents. Because now my biggest problem is I have too many clients. That's great, right? That's a good, but does that bug you a little bit if I was your real estate agent, you're like, I want to use Lewis? Well, the problem is he's got 15 houses to show and he's listed five houses and I can't get ahold of him. That's a problem. Now you're going to actually hold yourself back. Because the fear of hiring someone, the fear of sharing any money is the sphere of scarcity. And everyone who's worried about saving a penny, and oh, like, I'll do it myself, I'm not gonna pay the management company, they'll save $100 a month, that's great. But you also didn't buy 10 other properties. And if you were to buy 10 other properties five years ago, you'd have made over a million dollars. So over 700 bucks a month, you'd lost a million dollars. So if you believe in abundance, guess what there is anyone know right now that they're printing the hell out of money. They're printing money, like it's going out of business, right? Like it. I mean, they are just printing it left to right. So why don't we worry, there's not enough. There's plenty of money out there. So you bring in the right people like Alec, I just make more money. And guess what he makes a ton of money. That's great. He fills voids, he helps me get to that next level. Level five is where you just own the business. I know a lot of realtors, now, they don't even do real estate anymore. All they are is coaching, training. And they have their their clients are still getting the best care ever. Because that agent has set the standard for their entire team. So now somebody comes into my life, they need a health spa, they deal with me, they don't want Alec, they might know Jackson, they get the same product, they get the biggest better care than I could have done on my own because maybe maybe, you know, Jackson throws the sign in the yard. And maybe he does the open house. But the negotiations are me and Jackson together, you know that you get the the highest quality of someone who's been doing it for 17 years, and the person who's brand new and eager to get out there and get it done. So once you get to level five, you can have somebody like Alec, run your real estate team. And then I can just focus on coaching, and mentoring and getting everyone on my team to multiple six or seven figures. Does that make sense? Yeah. Or I could be worried about spending 100 bucks, right anyway, so my friend who didn't buy a lot of properties, because he wanted to do the work himself. I have multiple friends that have done this in the fire service and everything because they're fire guys, they understand it. They own one or two properties. They could have bought 10 or 15 and retired in a way that they couldn't even ever believe if they just got out of that scarcity mindset. So you've always wanted to your highest paid activity and pay other it's now like I don't want my love anymore. If I can go make $10,000 in a weekend, why would I not pay someone 40 bucks to mow my lawn? Right right now? Which would you rather do you know what I mean?

Jerry D. Lund  
Yeah, totally understand that. So there is a certain kind of mindset for someone that is looking at moving into real estate or buying properties or whatever some type of residual income from real estate properties, what kind of mindset would that person need to move into that area?

Lewis Weaver  
Not be afraid of failure, you've got to be coachable. Right, Alec? the number one thing if you're on my team, you have to be coachable. You have to have your mind gates open, you've got to, you can't come in with an attitude and say, My Uncle Joe knows this, and I know everything and I, I need your help. But I know everything you need to come in and say, I want to learn and be a sponge, and not be afraid of education. Because what I'm going to do for you, if you want to really learn about real estate, I'm gonna probably give you five bucks to read, I'm going to give you some homework to do. And you got to be willing to take risks. without risk. It's a calculated risk. And there's multiple exit strategies. But at the end of the day, you're paying that mortgage payment if the renter cancels not me. Right? Right. So I can coach you to that point that you got to have the ability to take that risk, allocated, allocated, take the risk of quit, I didn't tell out to quit his job. Alec chose to quit his job and then made a lot more money. But he had to make that decision. 

Jerry D. Lund  
What if I just wanted, I'm just so I want to be a client, I don't want to actually get into real estate. But I just want to maybe look to a team like you to help me a secure some properties. 

Lewis Weaver  
That's that, well, that takes a ton of pressure off, we do 90% of the work, we just sit down and go to lunch, we go over what the different strategies look like you pick what you're most comfortable with. And then we go to work, find a new property, and then you ultimately get to see yes or no, we say, Hey, here's the property this plant makes sense. Let's take a look at all the numbers. Is that something you want to invest in? You know, here's that what we're expecting the market to appreciate. And I would say don't go into it with the fact that like, the first property I get, I'm going to make a bunch of money. Like, I'll give you an example. I bought a property eight years ago, at about retail price, but the rents were a lot higher than what my payment was going to be because interest rate was low. I'm like, I don't mind paying full price for the property because the market areas appreciating it's an apartment and I paid 165,000 for this point home. Now that sounds insane. Yeah, that's what it was worth. But I can rent it for 1400 a month, and my payment is 700. So I'm like, I don't see I don't forecast any major problem. And I could back I could sell it and get most of my money back if something happened in the next year. But I'm going to have a two year lease signed right upfront, I can probably make it at least through that two years, I'll have some appreciation. I could sell it and get rid of it if I needed to. Right. But that first couple of years, I didn't make any money. I was cash flowing. But I was putting it in the bank for reserves when they damage the property when I needed a new furnace, man. And because you want at least $5,000 in reserves for each rental property you have, right. So the first few years I was building it up, then I just didn't worry about the cash flow. I just let the money kind of build up. And then I would take the money and go buy another rental property. Well, now I've only after eight years, I owe less than 100 grand on it. It's worth almost $400,000 But I've never managed it a day in my life. I just get a check. But but I'm not worried about the get rich today. I'm trying to build wealth long term. So if you're trying to get rich and cashflow a lot today, we look more at the Airbnb possibly cuz you're gonna cashflow more per month and it still appreciates. But we would just have to everything's tailored to you what at what point? Do you want to start cash flowing decent money and live off that cash flow? I buy rentals for wealth accumulation more than cash flow. If that makes sense. Yeah, you can do both. If you're going for just cash flow, there's two different strategies we can look at. So again, it's tailored to you 

Alec Evans  
Now it's your willingness to do something, it's super basic, it's your willingness to, to jump into something that you're probably not sure about. And that you have doubts about whether or not you can even do or you're even qualified to do any of those things. That's where everything stems from. That's that taking action, whether that's just getting in touch with us and having having us you know, go through a game plan for you and say like, what are your goals? What are you looking to accomplish? And Is that realistic? Can we help you get there? And what what is it that you're trying to accomplish the biggest thing, but the willingness to go forward and take that first step. Just it can't be overstated. That's, that's a big part of it. Embrace that uncertainty, embrace the fact that it's going to feel unfamiliar, or uncomfortable. That's okay. Like, that's the people that are successful, that are doing whatever it is that they're doing. They keep hitting these moments of uncertainty and self doubt, but they just kind of power right through it. And they just know that I'm not gonna let that feeling right now. I'm not gonna let that dictate my actions. My actions are, I'm going to go to work. I'm going to keep going. I'm going to just keep keep going after it because my systems are there. I know I'm doing the right thing. It just takes time. But you can easily get derailed completely. If you let those feelings sort of take over and say, you know, that's that's what your actions are going to be based off of. There's that feeling. 

Lewis Weaver  
And you got to understand that most investors aren't real estate professionals. A lot of them are high powered attorneys, they're, they're plumbers, they're electricians, they're doctors. They're that what I mean, is there anybody, and they just realize what's funny is let's take your retirement, you've worked 27 years, you've got, however much 500 200 million, whatever saved in your retirement, and you're going to get this pension. But normally, the biggest majority of your wealth is in your house. Yeah, unless you refinance constantly and use it to pay off stuff. But most people are like, Oh, my gosh, I have $700,000 equity, I got 400,000 equity in my house, but you're taught your whole life, just pay your house off. That's it, leave it for your kids, let them get all the money. And I look at real estate as a really, really powerful financial tool that's a bank that appreciates quite a bit. So I'm not afraid to use the money. With real estate. There's some neat tax advantages you can do when you own a rental property as an appreciates, you can plan to basically never sell the property. But if you want to access the cash, you can do home equity lines of credit, you can refinance and pull that cash out as rents go up and buy your Ferrari or do whatever you want with your money, buy your cabin and let somebody else pay for it. Now, if you sell it and stop that appreciation process, you sell it. Now you pay a capital gain tax, right and you pay a lot you just got a $300,000 return night and 40% taxes or you refinance, pull the money out rents have raised anyways, you go buy your Ferrari, and you pay nothing in taxes. Does that make sense? Yeah, there's there's some different ways to look at wealth, and how to become financially free. And it's the the there's more millionaires made in real estate than any other industry. Now that's maybe changing with crypto and then FTS and everything that's going crazy now, but for a century, it's been real estate, that's how you make the most amount of money. Because imagine, if you have people putting money into your retirement, that's what you have, as a rental, you have people paying off your and paying for the property itself, you're you're actually getting paid money to own the property, while this large amount is growing its compound and you have a $300,000 home, it's around 10%, what you made $30,000, an increase in one year and your cash flow at six grand you made $36,000 from checking your monthly statement. That's 1005 as if you had three, that would be like having full time employees contributing their money into your pension into your retirement. So it's, it's simple to understand real estate, it's not going anywhere, you're not going to lose it. And let me ask you this question, Jerry, do you think inflation is going to get better or worse? 

I think it's going to get worse before it gets better. Right? It's gonna go up, right, they're gonna keep printing money, like we talked about. So is that when inflation goes up, does that make your house worth more or less? 

Jerry D. Lund  
You know, I honestly don't know the answer to that question. 

Lewis Weaver  
So it makes your house your house probably values the same, but you have to spend more dollars to pay for the same Yes. Because inflation, right? So what's your hedge if you keep $100,000 in the bank, and this year, you lost a ton, because now that 100 grand can buy way less than it could last year? Right? Right? But if you have 100,000 Sit in real estate, what did it do? So because now it's going to cost more dollars to buy that same house. So I went to a mastermind this year, that was all about financial freedom. And that's what we talked about is in your will of finances. Where do you put all the money? Where do you where do you allocate it? And assets is a big thing right now, honestly, owning tangible assets, real estate's number one, gold, stocks, even guns and ammo, lots of different things that are gonna go up in value. There's cool ways to invest. So wait, that's a whole nother topic we could get into for hours. I love that stuff. Does that answered your question?

Jerry D. Lund  
No, it does. Before I let you guys go, though, I'm gonna ask just two quick questions from each of you. And I'll start with you, Alec, what two thing could you see, would you recommend to first responders to take action and to get started in building some Real Estate Wealth, what to actions with those be?

Alec Evans  
Get in touch with people which is obviously mean Lewis, number two, number two would just start to start to educate yourself, start to understand some of the basic processes and what that looks like so that you just are a little bit a little bit more ready, a little bit more familiar when that opportunity comes. Because when those opportunities come, they're really quick. That's the thing that you've got to be ready to take action and you've got to be able to take action. You're gonna miss out on the opportunity to buy the property and you know, your inability to process that information fairly quickly. Make that decision jump on something quick and cost you flatbed down the road. So I would say absolutely, yeah. Have your team how Have your people that can help you with that. But then also just take a take a more of an interest in the educational part of just understanding how it works.

Jerry D. Lund  
Awesome. Lewis how about yourself? 

Lewis Weaver  
I would say buy your first house whether that's your primary residence or a rental property which just so you know the average homeowner his net worth is 44 Zero 40 times higher than a renter it's it's the building block of finance of financial freedom so buy your first house whether that's a rental or not, if you have multiple ones great you already you're excited, you know all this stuff. Now, the second thing is that same thing with educate yourself, I'd recommend some books. I grew up super poor, youngest of eight kids, mostly one of my family support. I had to read blueprint my mind. I would read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, and Secrets of the Millionaire Mind, I can give you 15 other books, but I would highly, highly recommend those. And that's going to change because nothing's going to change you cannot change your mindset. Remember 80% of your success is right here. Yeah, yeah, that's that's what it's not some secret thing. It's becoming a multimillionaire is decisions that's all it is it's having the right mindset and making correct and continued decisions along the way it's nothing special it's no inheritance it's nothing like that so it start changing the way you think I'd also add Extreme Ownership in there by Jocko Willing that's good for anybody and when you start looking at yourself of like okay I need to change to see a difference in my life I need to reach out to that person I need to change the way I think the way I look at money though the fears I have the limiting beliefs I have all of it starts with right here. 

Jerry D. Lund  
Awesome awesome. Where can people find you guys to maybe reach out to you to hear are you throughout the country? Can you guys help people throughout the country or just here in Utah? 

Lewis Weaver  
Oh, we can help throughout the country shore we don't have real estate licenses throughout the country but we're part of a mastermind that does so anywhere in the country you give us a call we can help coach you through real estate anywhere. For me, we have LW real estate.com You can get us on Facebook LW real estate. Alec, you can get yours. 

Alec Evans  
Yeah, I'm just Alec Evans on Facebook and Instagram. So yeah, contact me there. Send me a message. Yeah, so we're pretty easy to find where we're at. Yeah, 

Lewis Weaver  
Yeah, if you just Google Lewis Weaver in Utah, you'll find me but my Facebook and Instagrams LW at LW real estate. Yeah, we will give you your phone number if you want to. But yeah, give out the phone numbers. If you want all my phone numbers 801-668-1737 And my email's lw@lwrealestate.com. 

Alec Evans  
I'm at 801-870-7262 alec@lwrealestate.com. 

Jerry D. Lund  
Awesome. Thank you guys so much for being on today. I hope if you're listening, you learned enough to just take that action, right? That imperfect action that they talked about, take some action reach out to if you can't reach out to Alec and Lewis for some reason, you should sounds like a very knowledgeable on this and they could take care of you. But if you don't, you should just take that imperfect action and reach out to someone and start taking those steps. And that's how we're going to create if you want to stay in this job, you know, until you get your pension, you're going to create a lot better pension. That sounds like to me if you're doing some of these things that Alec and Lewis talk about here. So thanks for being on today. I really appreciate you sharing the information and bearing through some of the technical difficulties on this podcast. 

Lewis Weaver  
Thank you so much. We were honored to be here, 

Alec Evans  
Heck yeah, thank you again. 

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