Game-Changing Masterclass in Unlikely Investment Strategies and Circumstances with Brandon Elliott

Transcript

[Mattias]
Welcome to the REI Agent, a holistic approach to life through real estate. I’m Mattias, an agent and investor.

[Erica]
And I’m Erica, a licensed therapist.

[Mattias]
Join us as we interview guests that also strive to live bold and fulfilled lives through business and real estate investing.

[Erica]
Tune in every week for interviews with real estate agents and investors.

[Mattias]
Ready to level up?

[Erica]
Let’s do it.

[Mattias]
Welcome back to the REI Agent, again, no longer The WELLthy Investor. So yeah, guys, today we have an awesome guest, Brandon Elliott out of San Diego. He had this, yeah, we’ll let him get into it, but he comes from a background where, you know, most people wouldn’t expect him to be successful.

He was very creative in the way he became successful in real estate. And we will let him explain some of the strategies and he’s got some resources now that he provides people as well to let you have that same success. Some of the stuff seems too good to be true when you hear it, if you’re not familiar with this world of real estate investing.

But guys, that belief itself, of course, you need to be wary of scams. There are scams out there. But in real estate, there’s often these really cool things that if you familiarize yourself with these strategies enough, like you hear the BRRRR strategy repeated a bunch of times.

If you hear that enough and you start understanding why it works, I think that’s a key thing to understanding how to protect yourself from getting scammed, is to understand how this actually works. If you don’t understand how something works, you probably shouldn’t put your money in it or you shouldn’t put your name on the line that will have that risk. Because really what he’s doing, what he’s talking about, is really not putting any money into buying real estate and then owning real estate free and clear.

Not free and clear, there’s a mortgage on it that a lender, a tenant will pay eventually. But you don’t have to actually put money down to buy that real estate. So it is an interesting, fascinating strategy.

And again, guys, if you think everything is too good to be true, you probably won’t get anywhere. Just do your research when you hear something that’s really interesting like this and see if indeed it is too good to be true or something that you could actually pull off. And this is a prime example of the BRRRR strategy.

Google it, there’s BiggerPockets episodes. We’ve talked about it multiple times. I’ve done it multiple times successfully and it’s just a magic trick.

And what that is, is basically you buy a house that needs work to be done on it at a discount because of that work that needs to be done. You renovate that house instead of selling it like a flip. You refinance that money out that you put into it initially.

That leaves you with just a mortgage and not a down payment because the equity that you would have realized in a sale as your profit from a flip is now your equity in the deal. And then you rent it out and somebody pays for the mortgage that’s on it. You only do this if you can cash flow at the end of the day and that cash flow, so now you have a rent income producing property and that is the BRRRR strategy wrapped up in a fine little box.

Hopefully that makes sense. A little bit about our personal life. We have a sick kid at home right now and it was the first day of our daycare.

We have them in a university early child program, which is awesome, super great, but one of our kids, it was the first time they went there, the other kid went there and was not acting right, ended up having a fever, threw up on the way home. And so we have that going on in the house. Yay, that’s why Erica’s not with us today.

I just got back from a CrossFit competition this past weekend where I didn’t feel quite right. I’m wondering if this was kind of going on in the background a little bit. I just didn’t have quite the same level that I normally do.

And so it was unfortunate. I pushed through it. I didn’t do horrible.

We got ninth out of 12th place. My partner was much better than me and would have been normally anyway. I’m not saying that she’s better than me.

In CrossFit, has been doing it for a while. It’s a great gymnast, all that kind of stuff, really strong. But we had fun.

I learned some things about competing. We competed against some crazy people, including somebody who was wearing shorts that indicated their number when they were competing in the games, which is, if you’re not familiar with CrossFit, that’s like the Olympics of CrossFit. So we were competing against some really good people.

So we might’ve done a little bit better had I been in a little bit better form. Working together is always an interesting thing. So there’s different transitions that you gotta get down, Pat, and all that kind of stuff, which we planned pretty well.

For the most part, we did a really good job thinking ahead since we were familiar with each other at the gym and how we operate and what our strengths are, et cetera. But yeah, so that was a lot of fun. That was in Richmond, SuperFit Games, if anybody is a CrossFit person in Virginia.

But yeah, so without further ado, more importantly than CrossFit, mark my words, I actually said that. And we have Brandon Elliott, who is, again, got a really interesting story about how you can get access to capital to fund these kind of deals. And that is often the barrier of entry to most people.

People that wanna get into real estate, they say they can’t because they don’t have the money, or they wanna do it one day when they have the money. But this, he explains how he did it and how he got started without money. So listen to this one, guys.

It is legitimate. You may have different risk tolerances than he does, and that’s valid. But within it, you don’t have to do everything and play a book that he does.

But understand the concepts behind it, like the BRRRR strategy, and you start realizing that money is kind of a game, real estate’s kind of a game, and you need to be very smart about it. But if you play your cards right, you can do some really fun things like the BRRRR strategy, where you ultimately build a nice rental portfolio without actually investing your own money in it long-term. So without further ado, we have Brandon Elliott.

Welcome to the REI agent, also kind of formally known as The WELLthy Investor, like we talked about last episode, we are going through a transition here. This is gonna be an investing more special. We are here with Brandon Elliott.

Brandon, thanks so much for being here. You’re out of San Diego, is that right? Yes, sir.

How we doing today? We’re doing great. And look at him.

He is the perfect example of holistic health. He is keeping his, he’s getting his steps in while he’s in this podcast, I love it.

[Brandon Elliott]
I’m like the poster child for it now, right? One day, one day.

[Mattias]
Now Brandon has a really interesting kind of niche, or your story of getting into investing in real estate is really interesting. So can you give us that airplane pitch, or elevator pitch is I guess what it’s called?

[Brandon Elliott]
For sure, yeah. So I grew up American poor, if you will, right? Like very blessed, grew up in New Jersey, single parent mother.

She’s diagnosed manic depressive bipolar. Money was the biggest issue in our household. I met my father when I was 18 years old in court so he could stop paying child support.

And so at the end of the day, we grew up on food stamps, section eight housing, and help from local schools and local churches. And so money was a big thing in my household that we needed. At age nine, I was trying to get my first job.

At age 12, I actually got my first job. And so long and behold, I fell in love with real estate because in 2011, 2012, I was working for a real estate company. I was doing door-to-door sales for Kirby Vacuum Cleaners, actually.

For about a year. And I got, I knocked on the right door and I got recruited into an investment company. And they taught me a lot, you know?

They taught me, like I got a little bit of education, I got a hell of a lot more motivation. And that’s when I just went down this rabbit hole of figuring out real estate, books, podcasts, just like this, YouTube, and local REIA groups. I started soaking up that information for two full years, four hours every single day.

Like no exaggeration, no BS. Two full years, four hours a day. And that’s when I realized, after trying to get started here in San Diego for those two years, it wasn’t working.

I kept on getting beat out by real investors. Stuff that I do now, all cash, no contingencies. I started looking in some other states.

Eventually I found Ohio. And I fell in love with the BRRRR strategy, personally.

[Mattias]
Yeah, BRRRR strategy’s great. I do wanna ask you a question quick, though. I mean, we hear all the time about family patterns.

That can be mental, how the way you see things, your outlook on life, that kind of stuff. And I know that oftentimes, poverty can also kind of be a family pattern. So I mean, what got you to break through that?

I mean, what got you to really invest in the education you’ve got with this real estate investing group? And yeah, how did you not just like, ah, that’s just for the rich people or something? It could have been easily to write off, I’m sure, right?

[Brandon Elliott]
For sure, yeah, that’s so good. It’s a really good question. What’s funny behind that is like, when the ultimate real estate crash happened in 2008, I was graduating high school.

I was of the age that I should probably start acknowledging or realizing like, oh, something’s happening. What’s funny enough is like, in my area, in my circle of influence, I had no idea, like clueless. I didn’t realize any of that stuff because it really didn’t affect, you know, the- That age, yeah.

Yeah, that age or that poor level. It’s like, you know, it just, it didn’t even make sense. So I definitely believe there was, you know, and still fighting a generational curse of, you know, poverty and poor mindset.

What has helped me the most is kind of constantly investing in myself over the years, I would say. Constantly investing in myself and not allowing money to be over my head, like playing me like a puppet, but instead me putting money beneath me and using it as more of a controlling piece, putting it to work. A tool.

Yeah, as a tool. What I would say though is, at a very young age, something that kind of, like made me change a little bit was, you know how like when you’re young, you want something from your parents and you’re like begging them, like a little pesky son of a gun, you know? And so some of my friends, they had quads and dirt bikes and I was like, hey mom, I want a quad, I want a quad.

And I just kept on, you know, going up to her and asking that for years. And at first she was always like, no, no, like no, you know, you’re crazy, get out of here. And then eventually you could tell, you know, one day like she just had like pain in her, like her face of like, I can’t do it.

The reason I’m saying no is that like, I would love to, but I can’t afford that. It’s not going to happen. And at that young age, that’s when I realized like everything shifts, like if it’s meant to be, it’s gonna be up to me type of philosophy.

Like I had to put that on my own shoulders. Anything that I want in life, I can’t rely on other people. There’s not gonna be any like handouts.

Like I have to work hard to be able to get it myself.

[Mattias]
That’s the lesson right there. Wow, that’s amazing. Because I mean, that’s when you start, when you stop pushing your results on other people on the outside and you start just accepting that that’s, I mean, I feel like it’s a fundamental path to whatever you want.

And I think, and again, like we talked about money as a tool, like it’s just another thing to get good at. It’s a, I mean, it’s kind of a game. And I mean, shoot, what you did with credit cards, I mean, I think is case in point.

So talk about that a little bit more.

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, so I definitely agree. I think it’s just like a game. I think, I always call it like real life monopoly.

See the banks, we put all of our money in the hands of the banks and they give us how much percent back last year. You know, like, you know, next to nothing. It’s 0.00% basically. You know? It’s just coming down. Yeah, yeah.

And then what’s funny though is that they’re actually lending it back out to us for personal loans, auto loans, student loans, mortgages, you know, credit cards, and they’re getting anywhere from 500% to 3,000%. Nine times over. Wow.

They’re doing it nine times over back to us and they’re getting 500 to 3,000%. That’s a lot of bucks.

[Mattias]
Yeah.

[Brandon Elliott]
And so, you know, what’s cool is you can actually just follow what the rich do, like what the 1%ers do, where the money goes, right? What the banks do. And when you start realizing that, you can actually flip the script on the banks.

You can do exactly the same thing. You can get 0% funding from them anywhere from six months to 22 months. And on average, about 18 months.

That’s exactly what I did. And what I constantly do and what we teach in Credit Council Elite. And so, at the end of the day, I was able to get several hundred thousand in new credit lines, 0%.

And I was able to buy real estate with this money off credit cards. Afterwards, I completed the renovation with credit cards because, again, I’m doing the BRRRR strategy, which is buy, renovate, rent, refinance, repeat. So I don’t have any money in any of my deals, which is great.

I’ve got it all back. Get tax benefits. I get the appreciation.

I get the cash flow. But I utilize credit cards to do all of it because, again, I grew up poor. I had very limited beliefs around money when I first got started.

I didn’t think, I didn’t even know it was possible that anybody in this world would actually lend any money to me. You know, like, it wouldn’t even make sense. I was shocked that the banks were actually giving me these huge credit lines.

And I was just saying all the right things, doing all the right things, and positioning myself right, mistakenly, a lot of it. But after I started going down that rabbit hole for the two years of education, it wasn’t just books, podcasts, YouTube on real estate. It was also credit and financing and how to actually get this funding from the banks because that was the only option that I really had that I believed at the time to be able to get started in real estate.

[Mattias]
Okay, so, all right, let’s break this down a little bit. You’re buying places in Ohio. Sure.

And those are, I mean, often in certain places in Ohio, they’re a lot cheaper than certainly San Diego.

[Brandon Elliott]
That’s right, for sure. Yes, sir.

[Mattias]
Like, what were your prices when you were buying?

[Brandon Elliott]
Okay, dude, so my very first, yeah, my very first property, this was back in 2015. My very first property, it was a single family house beat up from the feet up in a bad area. I bought it for $9,000 cash.

Wow, okay. Yes, and then I put 35 grand into it, maybe 40,000, and I refinanced it, praised at 60,000. I got all my money back, and it rents out for, so the mortgage is a couple hundred bucks.

It rents out for about $1,200 a month.

[Mattias]
Okay, so you funded the renovations and the purchase through credit cards? And is that like a cash advance kind of scenario?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, yeah, it’s a great question. So, basically in the bank’s eyes, they are going, the easiest lingo for them to understand this is either a balance transfer or a cash advance, but at the promotional rate of 0%. Okay, and that’s the key thing you’re looking for is that 0%.

That is the key thing. Otherwise, you’re gonna be paying mafia rates. Right.

You know, you don’t want that. That’s no good.

[Mattias]
Yeah, let me put my Dave Ramsey hat on for a second, and. Yeah, yeah, exactly. No, that’s amazing.

So, you didn’t have to have, I mean, you didn’t have to have then a six month seasoning period, right, to, even if you got the flip done faster, to refinance the money out, was that a requirement at the time as well?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, it was six months. The good part is, see, I actually made, even though I read all the books, all the podcasts, like I knew what not to do, I made all the mistakes. When it comes down to contractor, I went through five contractors.

It took a full year. I made every mistake. And even though I was paying with credit cards, sometimes I was liquidating the cards into cash and then paying them cash, and I was like, oh, I shouldn’t do that, you know?

Oh, yeah. Sometimes they ran off with my money. So, luckily, I bought a triplex exactly two months after I bought the first one.

And so, that one ended up producing a lot faster for me, and it really, it showed me the power of multifamily, like multiple doors, and it showed me cash flow stronger, it was less headache that I needed to deal with, and so that actually saved me on the first one.

[Mattias]
Okay. So, the first one didn’t go smoothly, but you had a good one to help you smooth it out. Correct.

What did it feel like when you pulled it off? I mean, everybody has, people can read all they want, and they can have analysis paralysis until you actually hit the road, and especially doing something like you’re talking about, it just feels like a magic trick. Having gone through BRRRR strategies myself, not with credit cards, how’d it feel?

[Brandon Elliott]
It felt amazing, but it was also just naive and ignorance. Just truthfully, I didn’t know anybody would give me time, or I didn’t know about mentors at the time. Again, I grew up very poor mindset, and so I was working restaurant jobs.

I was saving up as much as I could, but I also made tons of mistakes, because I used to be a big pothead back in the day. So, I had an explosion in my apartment making hash oil, Wow, okay. Yeah, I was on fire.

Oh my gosh. Yeah, I was induced into a coma for a full week. I burnt 40% of my body, and I had to learn how to walk again, and then I got court charges pending on me.

I ended up receiving two felonies, and a misdemeanor, and house arrest. So, that was the pivotal point that I needed to, not just a slap on the wrist, I needed to literally blow myself up for me to realize, hey, enough is enough. I need to get on the right track.

And so, it felt really good being able to pull these deals off, because then I, it was a proof of concept. I pulled off two deals. The very next year, I ended up doing six deals.

[Mattias]
Okay.

[Brandon Elliott]
You know, and I just started running with it, and it worked.

[Mattias]
So, that incident, was that before you started this, going down this rabbit hole? Had you already been listening to stuff, or how does that fit in the timeline?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, that’s a good question. So, I was working at that company, and for about six months, and the company started falling apart. We were focusing on NODs at the time, notice of defaults, and foreclosures, pre-foreclosure, right?

The company, I got to see a lot more motivation, because there was a lot of impact we were making. There was a lot of money being made in the company. There was like systems.

I’d never seen that.

[Mattias]
Right.

[Brandon Elliott]
But, they weren’t giving as much education, so I had to go on my own rabbit hole. But, the motivation was more than enough, because there was a lot of money coming in, there started being some management issues, and frustration on that end. So, it started kind of falling apart on its own, and once I left there, then I just, I went running into as much credit, or credit, and real estate stuff that I could.

[Mattias]
The education part, and then.

[Brandon Elliott]
The education part, and then 2013, September 24th, 2013, is when I had the explosion in my apartment. Yeah, very stupid.

[Mattias]
Oh, but yeah, so what did that teach you? I mean, obviously you said that was a huge turning point.

[Brandon Elliott]
For my personality type, I needed, if I would’ve just got a little arrested, or a little slap on the wrist, nothing would’ve changed for me. I literally needed this huge time out. I needed, the courts ended up assigning me a mentor.

That was incredible. It was the first time that I actually had a male guidance, a male figure that actually believed in me, and sat down with me, and spent time, and gave a damn about my success. And so, that was imperative as well.

It was super impactful.

[Mattias]
Even just the knowing that that’s an important thing to have, or a good thing to have, yeah.

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, I didn’t know it. I didn’t know what I was missing out on. You don’t know what you don’t have, and so once I started getting these things, and just realizing, man, all my goals were in the wrong area, the wrong track.

And so, once I got on the right track, and then this real estate thing started actually making sense, and it was working, then I started doing more and more of it, and then I started, I was excited. I was doing more networking, and more networking, everybody, I realized everybody was shocked. They were all giving me that look in person, like, oh, you did it with credit cards?

Like, you’re still working in restaurants, but you did it with credit cards? How’d you do that? And I realized, I acknowledged that everybody wants to be in real estate in some form or fashion.

Like, they like the idea of getting cash flow, and they’ve heard it’s good, but they typically put it on a back burner because of money. Right, yeah. You know, they think they need a ton of money first, so they always say, okay, well, once I get money from this thing over here, then eventually, whenever that comes to fruition, hopefully, then I will jump into real estate.

And I was looking at them like, well, what if that doesn’t work out? And what if that takes three, four, five, 10 years? What if you lose hope?

What if you never do real estate? Like, real estate changed my life quickly.

[Mattias]
Yeah.

[Brandon Elliott]
Really quickly. Credit was the catalyst to do it, but real estate was like, the thing. And so, I was just looking at it like, man, I’m not the high IQ.

I grew up in special ed when I was younger, so it’s like, if I can do it, I know you can do it. You just didn’t think about credit cards because we grew up with this stigma against credit cards. Like, credit cards are bad for you, and you should only have two cards, or a third for a backup, or whatever it may be.

But when you can actually utilize the bank’s money at 0%, leverage it properly, be a good steward of it, just as if you were borrowing it from grandma, then you can actually put it to work and flip the script on the banks.

[Mattias]
Well, and you also had to have some confidence in the deals you were investing in. I mean, that’s really the key here. So, if you find a property that you believe is worth one third of its value, and it doesn’t even need another third to get it to its value, I mean, that’s where a lot of this magic happens.

So, I mean, what were you doing to analyze deals? I mean, you said you made mistakes in the beginning. I could imagine the analysis could have been a hard thing to learn as well.

What did that look like?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, I think a couple pieces here. One is, Ohio’s very cheap, like you mentioned originally. So, when I was originally, for two full years, I was looking here in San Diego, I literally put in 30 to almost 40 contracts, you know, like offers, and I kept on getting beat out.

And so, just looking at those numbers versus the numbers over in Ohio, it was just a big difference. And so, it made me feel better first, because it’s different numbers, right? And then second, I was also, it’s part of my personality of like, I just, I wanna go, and two full years doing it four hours a day, it started driving me crazy, honestly.

And submitting all those offers, I was like, man, I’d rather, I hear of all these people being very cautious and not wanna make mistakes, and eventually they do make mistakes, but I’m like, well, it must just be part of the process. I’d rather just get into something sooner than later, even if I screw up, hopefully I learn from it, but I’d rather do it now while I’m young, and just run through this thing, because I need to do something.

[Mattias]
Yeah, well, and yeah, exactly, that’s amazing. And then also, the fact that you weren’t playing with hundreds of thousands of dollars at the first one is awesome, too, because your mistake probably, I mean, it’s rarely a zero-sum game, right? Like, I think you said you were at about 40-ish thousand with the repairs and everything, maybe a little more?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yes, yeah, it was all with credit cards, though.

[Mattias]
But yeah, so that could have burnt you with the interest rate, but that’s also a lot more manageable than like $400,000.

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, yeah, and it’s all, at the end of the day, like over the last couple years, I’ve acknowledged that that’s all just a mindset, it’s all just a number, a number is a number, you know, a number, that’s all it is, it’s a couple extra zeros, a couple extra commas, maybe. Like, the properties that we deal with now here in San Diego, they’re all a million plus.

[Mattias]
Yeah, right.

[Brandon Elliott]
You’re not getting away, anything that’s good is not gonna be less than a million out here, that’s just what it is. But the cool part is, we can make extra zeros off of that, like we’re making a quarter million to half a million dollars on our flips. That’s amazing.

Wow.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that’s awesome, and yeah, you’re absolutely right. I guess the thing I was more getting at was like with getting into it, getting started, probably was an easier barrier to step over. But yeah, so talk more, you said that the, you started with two that year, and then you moved into six, so talk about your scaling.

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, so basically I ended up, I think it was either four properties, the very next year, and then two, or vice versa. But yeah, just slowly, one after another, just started taking down more properties. Acknowledging that multifamily was really the single family, sorry, residential multifamily, like four units and under, that’s what I wanted, that’s what I really aligned with, because easier financing, and it just seemed like a no-brainer, it was just enough units that it was still like, it was enough to still drive me crazy a little bit with contractors and get things done.

Practicing and improving on my leadership skills, negotiating, all that stuff, it was very, it was a very pivotal moment in my life at that time to develop me as a character, and really set me up for success.

[Mattias]
Yeah, that’s great, and you said something in there too that I was curious about. So financing, so once you did the refinance out, was it hard to get a mortgage at the beginning, especially if you weren’t making it as high of an income?

[Brandon Elliott]
Well, the cool part is that all those properties, they ended up, the refinance was, ended up being a couple hundred dollars a month. So I wasn’t, yeah, on paper, like taxes-wise, I wasn’t doing that much, because I was working, I think I was working like a bus, as a busser, and then just a server at an Italian restaurant. And so I wasn’t, you know, on paper, I think I was collecting maybe 30 or 40 grand a year here in San Diego, like, it’s not that sexy, not that much, but at the end of the day, I still qualified on paper for these mortgages that are just a couple hundred bucks, and then, you know, finally realizing DSCR loans as well, because I was able to, you know, they all cash flowed extremely well.

You know, the mortgages are all very cheap, and then, you know, they all rent out for 1,000 plus.

[Mattias]
All right, we’re back. We had a little bit of technical difficulties, we actually switched platforms, because it seemed like the platform server or something was down, it wasn’t letting us reconnect. So sorry, you actually get to look at us both at the same time now, what an honor.

Yeah, I love it. Yeah, Brandon, what I was asking was, you know, sometimes if you do the birth strategy well, you actually, the value exceeds the amount you’ve owed, at being close to 20% or whatever, so like, were you able to take advantage of that sometimes as well, like, did you ever get more than what you owed on the credit cards, or did you try to keep your debt minimum so it cash flowed more?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, great question. So most of them, I was like just able to get some of my money back, like all my money back, which was great, and then there were a few that I actually had the opportunity to take out a little bit more, which was awesome as well. And so in those particular situations, you definitely wanna go for that, because I know how to put the money to work stronger than just leaving it in there.

You know, there’s different strategies when it comes down to investing, somebody that’s younger and like has drive, I like to stay in as much good debt as possible. The key word there is good debt. You don’t wanna go buy $20,000 Gucci sweatshirts, you wanna buy properties that cash flow.

And so I wanna be in as much debt of that as I can, and then, you know, when I’m older, and thinking about retiring, if I wanna keep those properties, maybe at that point I’ll start paying them down, paying them off, or have life insurance cover it when I pass.

[Mattias]
Sure. And something that’s key there that you talked about is cash flow. So I mean, it still had to cash flow for you to wanna do that, right?

Yes.

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, so it’s all about cash flow. For me, that’s the big piece of it. Of course, now I’m really interested in more tax savings as well, and appreciation, but like Ohio, it doesn’t appreciate that well, but over in San Diego, I mean, my God, you should never bet on appreciation, but you can rest assured knowing that, you know, in a couple years, you’ll probably be taken care of.

[Mattias]
Yeah, no, it’s really true. And when you start looking at your return on equity, that’s where this really, really, really makes a big difference. So currently, I have about $200,000 of equity in our first house.

Just to give a little bit of perspective of my journey is we actually started off with a ton of student loans, and we decided to go down the Dave Ramsey plan to pay them off, and, you know, not gonna, you know, what you do and what you did and what he preaches is very different.

[Brandon Elliott]
It’s a different avatar. That’s all it is, and so I’m not a huge fan as well, but that’s because I’m more aggressive, and I like to invest, but it’s not for everybody. Somebody that doesn’t know financial literacy and constantly is spending their cards without thinking about it, like, you need Dave Ramsey.

Don’t come to me, I’ll mess it up with you.

[Mattias]
It’s like a finance 101, maybe, like it’s kind of fail safe. So what you’re doing is a lot more, yeah, it’s not necessarily risky, because again, if you’re thinking about a property that is like worth one third, or you’re paying one third of what it’s actually worth, I mean, it’s not, I mean, there’s risks involved, sure, but it’s not like you’re gambling.

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, investing, there’s always some kind of level of risk. I like to lower my chances of risk. I also like to have multiple backup plans.

So instead of using your hard-earned money that you’ve saved up, use credit. Use your cash as a backup plan. Use credit, get the protection, get the points.

I go on free vacations because of all those points. And then also, you can just set yourself up a little bit stronger using credit.

[Mattias]
Well, and just to go back real quick to that return on equity thing, too, which plays into the debt here, is so the place that I have, I put it on a 15-year mortgage again when we lived there. We kept it as a rental after we moved. Again, kind of in that Dave Ramsey mindset at the time.

So now we are sitting in a great position because it’s appreciated a ton, and it’s been paid down by tenants a lot as well. So we have about $200,000 of equity in this. And mind you, we put like $7,000 into this place when we bought it, so fantastic, right?

But we’re cash flowing like 100 bucks a month, and that doesn’t really even factor in CapEx and vacancy and all the other things that you’re supposed to factor in. So we’re really not, it’s like a break-even kind of thing. We get like nine to $10,000 paid off a year in the debt, and it’s going up in value, so it’s still a good thing.

But if you take that money and you reinvest it somewhere else, I’m gonna make a much better return. For example, I invested in a syndication where I’m making around 13% in so far in that. And so that would be about $2,200 a month as opposed to basically break-even.

And I would have no hassle and nothing to do, I wouldn’t have to do anything with it. So that’s why the good debt for you is good, right? I mean, you’re trying to maximize that so you can use that capital to, yeah, cash flow better in other areas.

[Brandon Elliott]
Exactly. And I think you did everything right. I think there’s so many deals out there.

There’s a couple things that could have been improved for next time. That was your very first one, right? Yeah, that was my primary residency, yeah.

Yeah, exactly. But next time, keeping the CapEx involved or vacancies or maintenance or all those additional things. Once you add up all that, a lot of my mortgages over in Ohio, they’re like $200, $300, right?

It’s crazy. Even my triplexes are about $500 and then $700. But they rent out for anywhere from 1,000 plus and then the triplexes, they bring in about $2,500, $2,600 a month.

So you would think all that difference is cash flow. No, it’s not. There’s also vacancies, maintenance, there’s capital expenditures.

You have to prepare yourself for all those additional things. And then afterwards, you have that buffer. And so if you can do that, have no money into it, and then you’re paying it off sooner, great.

That’s awesome because maybe you don’t know what to do with the capital now. I would still invest in real estate because down the road, it’s always gonna bless you in one form or solution.

[Mattias]
Well, and so in this circumstance too, we did tap into the equity with credit lines. Actually, somehow we were able to double down. Like we have one line of credit on it and then we got a second line of credit with multiple properties, including that one in it.

I assume we had to pay off the first one, but we didn’t, so like. Let’s go.

[Brandon Elliott]
See, banks, you’re in banks. If you find the right ones, they can really be serving for you. I love it.

[Mattias]
And then you’ve probably done this. Did you ever start going to the banks now now that you’ve gotten a little bit more experience? You’re probably more friendly to banks as far as your net worth, your income, all that kind of stuff.

Have you gone in and done the, where you buy the property and they finance more than what you’re paying for it, so you actually get a check at settlement that you can use to fund the deal?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, and so the best part about real estate is you can get very savvy with these business bank relationship managers, but when you know how to talk to the banks properly and set yourself up for success, the banks want to lend to you. That’s their job, right? A lot of people get very defensive and pissed off with these banks because they’re getting denied or low limits or whatever it may be.

When you understand how these banks and lenders are judging you so you know how to fit yourself within the box of lending that they’re trying to put you in, then afterwards, you can really open up the floodgates on yourself and get a ton of funding in so many different ways. But working with certain wealth management, business bank relationship managers, they’re some of the key pieces that will actually, it’ll be the breaking point for sure.

[Mattias]
Absolutely, that’s so true. And getting that experience, I think, is probably a key thing, right? You can’t start there if you haven’t done some of these projects before because they do see it as a risk.

If you have experience or you have a partner that has experience, it probably helps a lot.

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, the cool thing is within Credit Council Elite, we have resources and contacts that we’ve worked our butts off to be able to get. And so it really doesn’t matter if you’re 18 years old or 70 years old or have no job at all or you’re Warren Buffett. Utilizing our resources, our business bank relationship managers, our connections, we can damn near promise you basically that you can be set up to get up to 150,000 with Chase, up to 250,000 with American Express, up to 150,000 with US Bank, 50K with Bank of America.

I mean, the list goes on. So those resources are really beneficial and it doesn’t, the connection who’s introducing and making those, that’s a big deal versus you doing it all by yourself for the very first time. Like you said, they’re gonna look at you as a high risk.

[Mattias]
Yeah, and guys, if you’re hearing this and you’re doubting it or you have some concerns, this is where sometimes that analysis process takes over. There are things out there like this that make real estate feel like a magic trick. Like walking away from a closing with a check and said that you bought a house and you received money at the closing instead of having to give money, like that stuff happens.

So listen to people like this if you’re having doubts, like this is how you, if you don’t take the step, if you don’t jump in, you’re never gonna learn that it can be that easy. It’s not just a scam or whatever. So tell us more about your program and how do people find it?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, so at Credit Council Elite, we really focus on working with business owners and just individuals nationwide that are looking to take their business to the next level, diversify, start, grow, scale. So if you’re a business owner nationwide looking for up to $500,000 in new capital, we can show you how to do it every six months, repeated per person and getting interest rates as low as 0%. So at the end of the day, you can get a bunch of funding like this, not just credit cards, but also lines of credit, really any products and services that these banks offer, we can show you how to get a 90% approval odds and afterwards taking this information, not just being able to get the education, but fix credit quickly, how to be able to boost up your score, get to the 800 club, stay there, get the best rates, business credit, personal credit, liquidating the cards into cash and then travel hacking, infinite banking structures, really putting the money to work. And so that’s what we like to focus on at Credit Council Elite.

[Mattias]
That’s awesome, yeah. And so if they Google that, that would be the website I imagine?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, creditcouncilelite.com. We have a 10 minute video on there that explains more in detail what the heck I’m talking about here. Also, we’ve done some webinar trainings for like two hours that break down a lot of education on this and shows how this is even possible.

So if that feels like a good fit for you guys, by all means, steal that education and then you can always sit down and book a free consultation with either myself or somebody on our team for about 45 minutes to just go over where you’re currently at, where you’re looking to go and how to be able to position yourself to get there.

[Mattias]
Okay. And are you on social media? Can people follow you on like Instagram or anything like that?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yeah, yeah. So on Instagram, check out our business page. It’s creditcouncilelite.

Otherwise, my personal page is Brandon Elliott Investments.

[Mattias]
Okay. Awesome, yeah. And before we let you go, we have to ask you your favorite book.

If you have a book that’s been like pivotal for you in your foundation or one that you just really liked right now. Do you have one that comes to mind?

[Brandon Elliott]
There’s a bunch. I love reading at this point. So I love this question.

It’s hard for me to pick just one, but this one right here, I would say, is really awesome for infinite banking and kind of understanding. So, What Would the Rockefellers Do? It’s a great book.

There’s another one though that I read recently, 10X is Easier Than 2X. And so that really started challenging my mindset of like, you know, every year we just keep on doubling, which is great. But I was like, hey guys, like how do we actually take this to the next level?

Like how do we work smarter versus harder? And once you start writing it all out and seeing, hey, we’re not going to accept 2X, how do we actually do this 10X thing? It was pretty eyeopening to see everybody just start getting creative of like, oh yeah, well, we wouldn’t do these little things that we were gonna do.

Let’s do these higher level stuff and see how we can outsource it, you know, elevate and delegate.

[Mattias]
That’s awesome. I have that one on the list. I haven’t read it yet.

And I am also looking at the, Who Not How, I think it’s the same authors, right?

[Brandon Elliott]
Yep.

[Mattias]
Yeah.

[Brandon Elliott]
It’s a great one too. Yeah, I love it.

[Mattias]
That’s awesome. Thank you so much for this really inspiring conversation. Again, guys, can I repeat this again?

If you’re hearing information like this, it seems too good to be true. This is one of the circumstances that it’s not. Real estate is one of those things that you can really take advantage of money in the banks because banks like real estate.

I mean, real estate has historically gone up in value, right? There have been crashes, et cetera, but historically it goes up in value and it’s a hedge against inflation. All these reasons why it’s good and that’s why I think, you know, credit cards aside, like banks wanna lend to real estate, to people that are savvy with it.

So this is the magical world out there. Brandon, Elliot, thank you so much for being on the podcast and teaching us about your strategies.

[Brandon Elliott]
Thank you, brother. I appreciate it. I had a lot of fun, man.

Thanks.

[Erica]
Thanks for listening to the REI Agent.

[Mattias]
If you enjoyed this episode, hit subscribe to catch new shows every week.

[Erica]
Visit REIAgent.com for more content.

[Mattias]
Until next time, keep building the life you want.

[Erica]
All content in this show is not investment advice or mental health therapy. It is intended for entertainment purposes only.