274: How to Become a Prolific Investor!

Buck: Welcome back to the show, everyone. Today, my guest on Wealth Formula podcast is one of us. His name is Chris Odegard. Chris is a member of pretty much Everything Wealth Formula. He’s an investor in our accredited investor group. He’s also part of Wealth Formula Network, and he has his own financial blog. He’s got all sorts of good stuff on there called TheProlificInvestor.net. Chris, welcome to Wealth Formula podcast. You’re on the other side now.

Chris: Yeah. Well, thanks for having me on. This is a real honor. I appreciate it.

Buck: Yeah, it’s great. You know, the idea for these shows that are coming up in the next few weeks was Chris is part of Wealth Formula Network, and I had posted in there trying to figure out what people are interested in learning more about or if there was people that they heard another podcast that they found particularly interesting. And one thing that happened in that Facebook page was that there was a consensus, the number of people asked to hear from others within our community to find out what their journey was. Just because so often we’re just focusing on you guys like last week Marin Katusa or Dave Steel, and the guys that we’re looking at, who are the guys putting together deals. And this is an opportunity for us to kind of understand a little bit about each other. So, Chris, why don’t you start out kind of take us back and take us back? I don’t know, 10, 15, 20 years, however many. Tell us about where you started and maybe with a little focus on your financial, you know, your personal finance journey?

Chris: Sure. Well, today, as you mentioned, I’m The Prolific Investor, but I wasn’t always that guy. I grew up in a middle class family in the suburbs of Cincinnati, Ohio, and learned exactly what my parents knew was go to college, get an education, get hired on with the company that has benefits and a pension, and invest your money in a diversified portfolio of stocks, bonds, mutual funds. And what they didn’t say was that will put you on this very slow path to mediocrity, right? Yeah. Someday, way down in the future, way past when everybody should be working, you might actually be able to retire. So that’s what they knew. And that’s what I knew and I did to go to College and got a job.

Buck: What was your work? What was your career?

Chris: I went to every little aeronautical University down in Daytona Beach, Florida, and I’m an aviation guy. And so I started off as a mechanic and avionics technician. And I actually started off at the Kennedy Space Center in the 80? S when the space shuttle first going off. So I got to see a lot of cool stuff being down there. But I’d spent four years learning about aviation and aerospace, not Rockets. And so I got an opportunity to interview at Boeing out in Seattle. And so I moved out there and worked there for the next 33 and a half years and did all kinds of things, traveled over 30 countries. And at the height of my career, I was the director of contracts, and I was on the selling team selling airplanes. So that’s kind of where my love of business was born. When you’re negotiating the sale and all the terms and conditions of 100 or 200,000,000 dollars airplane, it’s pretty interesting. And that’s kind of where my love of business was born. A lot of what I learned in that job helps me with what I do now because I actually like the details and reading contracts and the fine print.

Buck: So what do you do now?

Chris: Well, now we back up just a little bit when I was talking about the path. And then in 2009, I had what I fondly referred to as an illiquidity event where I lost 55% of my assets and thousands of dollars in cash flow and something called a divorce. And so my mediocre path to retirement someday just got really, really bad. Coincidentally, around that time, a friend had recommended a book to me. No surprise here. I bought the book, the Purple Book. I put it on the shelf, and it sat there for longer than I care to admit. And I was on a business trip and I was flying. I thought, I’m going to finish this book, and I did. And that kind of just lit a fire in me like it has and a lot of other people. And I moved completely out of conventional investments into alternatives and single family rentals, small, multifamily performing and non performing notes. And actually, my first introduction to syndication was through a number of different note funds. And so that’s when I kind of realized, well, I could actually get my hands out of the details and just be the money guy and get all the benefits. And frankly, make as much as I was making before without having to do any work. I left Boeing at the end of 2018 started my blog, and I thought, man, if I could help somebody else get off of the Highway of conventional investing into something else, or even better, help some young person never even get on that Highway to begin with. That would be a lot of fun. So that’s kind of what I’m doing now.

Buck: So you’re a full time blogger?

Chris: Well, it doesn’t take all of my time, but that’s kind of my passion. I am a very active investor, as you know. And then I do my blogging, and I have a book coming out this fall called Get Off Your Ass and Manage Your Money: Why You Need Alternative Investments. And I compare conventional investments and alternatives across 13 different categories and alternatives win in 11 of the 13. So I go, well, why would anybody go down this other path unless we sure don’t know any better?

Buck: Well, let me ask you this because, again, if I’m listening to this as somebody in the audience, I’m thinking, well, that’s great, Chris. But where did you get all the capital to quickly replace your income at Boeing and become a full time investor? Because that is certainly one of the challenges that I think a lot of people have. Frankly, if you don’t have a lot of cash flow coming in, even if you’re making hundreds of thousands of dollars per year, a million dollars a year, it takes some time to pivot and then ultimately kind of live off your investment. So how did you do that?

Chris: Well, I had a couple of things. I did work for a company for a lot of years. It had a pension. So I had that. And back when I had the problem that a lot of conventional investors and E Quadrant guys had, I had money, but it was locked up in a 401K. As a matter of fact, right. About the time that I connected with you, I was part of another investing group. And the guy said to me, he said, Hey, Chris, can you do an in service transfer? And I said, Well, what’s an inservice transfer? And he said, Well, that’s where your company will let you take summer all of your money out of your 401K and transfer it to another custodian while you’re still working for the company. And I kind of I’m sure I rolled my eyes and laugh a little bit, because I’ve been working at the Boeing Company for decades, and I had never heard this before. Sure, I kind of set it aside for a little bit. And then for some reason, I was reminded of it. And I asked the question, sure enough, the company allowed me to transfer out all of the matching that they had done over the years. And so I was able to get that out of the stock market and get it into alternative investments. And just pulling every lever that I could, using debt, getting higher rates of return, getting smarter with taxes, all the stuff that we talk about in your group all the time, just using as many of those tools as I could to supercharge what I was doing.

Buck: Yeah. So you had three decades of retirement funds to work with. It wasn’t like it was overnight and you had a switch

Chris: Less 55%.

Buck: It looks like you got the short end of the stick on that one. But then one of the things that happens, it sounds like at least since 2009 is that you probably turbo charge your investment. So talk a little bit about what did you notice in terms of growth of your portfolio? What was it before? What was it after?

Chris: Well, I wasn’t very sophisticated back in 2009, when I had a liquidity event. And then as I was doing all the investing and tax savings and using leverage and all those things, and I got about nine years had passed, I was ready. I don’t like to use a retirement word anymore where I use fire the man because retirements are kind of like taken out of service. I’m certainly not out of service. And I started writing this blog and I thought, well, what credibility do I have to do this in 2018? I had a balance sheet, and I knew what my net worth was and I thought, but Wow, it’s too bad I didn’t have all that information back in 2009. And then a light bulb went off and I went, What the attorneys make you do when you get divorced, they make you create a balance sheet. So I did have one. And so I was able to go back. And between 2009 and 2018, my net worth increased by 5.6 times. I don’t know. Have you ever heard of a guy named George Antone who does a lot of financial training?

Buck: I heard about him.

Chris: Anyway, if I was sitting here with George, he would go, is that all you did in 10 years? 5.6 times. But anyway, some people never recover from stuff like that. So anyway, I was relatively pleased with a number and said, okay, I actually did something here, and maybe I could teach others a few things.

Buck: That’s great. When did you find Wealth Formula and how?

Chris: Part of the journey was alternative education, which was in the form of a podcast. I can remember. I had partnered up with a real estate guy through the local RIA kind of early on, and he said, you should listen to the Real Estate Guys podcast. And my first question was, what’s a podcast? Next question was, who are the Real Estate Guys? So anyway, you downloaded whatever app I was using and started listening to them, and that led one thing led to another, and some guy named Buck, you know, his name kept coming up. Every once in a while, I finally went, okay, I got to find this guy named Buck. And so sure enough, I found your podcast, and it has been your group. And the podcast has probably been the most valuable thing that I’ve come across this whole holiday.

Buck: That’s very nice of you to say. I’m curious, though. Tell me the things that and I’m not asking you this so much to get a pat on the back, but especially maybe people started just listening or something like that. Tell us about some of the revelations or some of the big changes that you got specifically from, Wealth Formula and the things that we’re talking about here. If you were trying to describe the podcast and the types of things that you learned and how it has changed your life, what are those types of things? What are some of the more impactful lessons?

Chris: I would say one of the biggest one is taxes. The average E Quadrant person has got about when you add all the different sources of taxes and government fees together, it’s probably spend about 50% going to the government. And every dollar you don’t spend in taxes is a dollar that stays in your pocket. And it’s kind of unbelievable. But taxes are really the low hanging fruit, that it’s easier to increase your investment from 10 to 20% through reducing taxes that it is through doing a better investment or taking on more risk. And so the entity structures which provide both tax benefits as well as asset protection, that’s a huge thing. The life insurance, the cash value, life insurance has been a game changer.

Buck: Well, Let’s back up first. So the first thing is the first lesson is, it’s not how much you make, it’s how much you keep.

Chris: Exactly right.

Buck: And a lot of people don’t really believe that there are ways to legally mitigate taxes. But what you find and I think you’re right. I’m not a CPA. But I find out that’s probably the most common phrase I have in the show is I’m not a CPA. But this is really a big lesson, I think. And I think people who are really sticking to some of these lessons and trying to implement them are noticing huge differences. So would you rather make a million dollars a year and pay of it and taxes, or would you rather make a thousand dollars a year and pay nothing? That’s really what it comes down to. How difficult, though, is it? Was it in practice to implement some of those things because it sounds like a significant portion of your net worth was well, it was retirement funds and pensions and stuff like that. The pensions, ordinary income. And that kind of thing is that right. So how difficult was it to implement some of those lessons on taxes?

Chris: I guess I would say it’s work. It’s study because it doesn’t work Here’s. My experience is you don’t find a good CPA. And he lays out all these strategies for you the way it works for me as I participate in groups like yours. Listen to Tom Wheelwright, read his books, and you go, Oh, if I do think somewhere along these lines, I can make some changes, and then it’s the CPA to kind of validate and help you implement those things and get your structure. It’s like everything in alternatives. It takes more work than conventional stuff. You got to get smart and you got to learn. But it’s not impossible. I’m not a CPA. I don’t have an Army of CPAs. I have one. And, you know, it’s interesting that Robert Kiyosaki talks about it all the time, but he doesn’t pay any taxes. And, you know, I hear that. And internalize. And I go, well, yeah, I’m definitely gonna minimize my taxes. And you might remember this from a comment I put on the Facebook site in 2019, I paid zero federal income taxes. Trump paid 750. So I said he’s kind of an underachiever. I mean, if kind of an average guy like me can do it, anybody can do it. If you want to put it in the time, and you got to have some help from people that are specialists

Buck: And one of the lessons I think is really important in what you said is we talk a lot about these things on the show, but a lot of CPAs don’t even have a clue, right. About some of the things that we’re talking about. So that’s okay. It’s like CPAs. Tom Wheelwright, who is Robert Kiyosaki’s CPA. He also happens to be mine. We’ll say that CPAs are no different from doctors in that I used to head ex-surgeons and neurosurgery training, all that stuff. I wasn’t a dermatologist. Right. At least you started asking me about skin issues or whatever. I wouldn’t know. CPAs are sort of similar that way. And also, some CPAs are much better than others, and some would rather just collect checks and not put in the work, and others are going to actually work for you. But a key element that I think that’s important in what you said is that it’s a little bit of work. It is a little bit of work, for sure. And that is part of the ethos of personal finance, the way it really ought to be done. We have so many smart, smart people in this group who are doing extraordinary things with their careers. But when it comes to personal finance, they have tremendous potential that they have not untapped and financially, that might be some of the most rewarding and easiest things to implement. So I find myself today, believe it or not, I have concepts that I bring to Tom Wheelwright who says, well, gosh, that’s a good idea. Let me think about it. Right. So you want to be interactive when it comes to personal finance. You do not want to be passive. If you sit there and let anybody, no matter how good they are, they don’t know your finances as well as you do. And so ideas that you have are not necessarily going to come to their mind. So that is critical. Have you found that to be the case?

Chris: Absolutely. And I think that was negative. As the world is today. We still hold certain professions and kind of high esteem doctors and lawyers and CPAs. And like you said, not to disparage any of them, but there are good ones and bad ones, just like there’s good car mechanics of bad car mechanics. And I’ve been through four CPAs in the last decade and three and 3 different CPA firms, frankly, because they couldn’t do they couldn’t solve some of the problems that I was pretty sure were solvable from being part of your group and following Tom Wheelwright. And so I just had to move on.

Buck: By the way, anybody who’s interested, wealthability.com, that’s where you would go to find, like, I think, a competent Tom Wheelwright influenced CPA. And I highly encourage people to do that. People have a little bit of anxiety about that, because it’s a little bit more expensive, especially on the front end to do that. But these things end up making you keep so much more of your money. It’s probably the highest return on investment that you’re going to get is finding a very, very good CPA. And that’s even for people who right now are sitting there in the W2, as you call it, the employment Quadrant, the E Quadrant. Just because that’s where you are today doesn’t mean that’s where you have to be five years from now. I mean, gosh there’s guys in our group who really, really ramped up their investor Quadrant funds and guys like in the poster boys for this. So just really, really done significant work and really try hard. And it is very doable. And frankly, it can be kind of fun. It’s like a little bit of a puzzle. But yeah, so definitely CPA is a huge one. The next question. So you were talking about another thing that you thought was big, and I did, too. And it is something you refer to as cash flow banking. Of course, we call it Wealth Formula Banking just for just because we like to brand everything we do. But how did you discover it? What was your aha moment and how are you using it?

Chris: Well, I think you probably had Rod and Christian on your show, and they started talking about the two different policies the whole life based in the IUL based. And it’s just one of those. It’s one of the handful of things that have come my way on this journey. Where you go? Oh, my gosh. That sounds too good to be true. And if I had run away from everything that sounded too good to be true, I would have left so much money on the table. So I’m a guy who does a little bit of thinking and then acts pretty quickly. So as soon as I heard that I got on the phone with Rod and Christian, and the whole life policy was the one that worked for me, because being 59 years old, I don’t need a 15 year time horizon in front of me. But I look at it as a giant line of credit. So all my income that comes in from the various sources that’s above my expenses gets plowed into a couple of those insurance policies where it makes five plus percent tax free creditor protected. And then when the next Western wealth deal comes along or whatever it is, I just start buying, borrowing it out. And it’s just one big circle. And I just moved from the Seattle area to South Carolina. So I had a liquidity event with the sale of a couple of properties in there, I guess, where all that money went. It first topped up those life insurance policies. And then I was kind of, like, fully tapped. I was like, okay, well, let’s pay down all the existing debt that I can with that money until it’s time to pull it out again for the next investment is.

Buck: Well, I think for people who don’t really understand what Chris was talking about, I encourage you to. Wealth Formula Banking com. There’s some good webinars on there, but I think the benefit of it maybe you can talk to this is that it’s more than just a line of credit, right? It’s a line of credit that basically keeps paying you even though you borrowed. Right. So effectively, you are putting money into something, and it’s growing at a compounding rate at five plus percent. Like you said, when that in itself doesn’t sound that impressive necessarily, although, frankly, there’s something that’s that stable. It’s pretty darn good. But then when you’re borrowing it, you’re borrowing it at not a compound rate, but you’re borrowing at a simple interest rate. And right now, the simple interest rate, whether that is from the general ledger of the insurance company or from one of these lending institutions that we’ve been talking about in Wealth Formula Network might be, you know, right. And then all of a sudden you’re borrowing at three and half, but it’s simple interest. So not only do you have the arbitrage of the actual number on the interest, but you have an arbitrage between compounding and simple interest. So it takes a while to wrap your head around it.

Chris: And you’re not borrowing your cash value. You’re borrowing insurance company’s money, using your cash value as the collateral.

Buck: Exactly. So that’s power. How do you use that? So you’ve been using it for investments? What have you noticed in terms of. I mean, have you seen some of these numbers? I mean, obviously, seeing is believing. So I’m curious what you’re seeing.

Chris: Well, I had that time period from 2009 to 2018 where I could compare, and I haven’t really done that kind of how many X comparison since 2018 to 2021? I made my first Western wealth investments. So only three years ago in 2018, I’ve only been through one sale and no liquidations. I feel like there’s kind of a hockey stick thing come, but those things are getting refined and selling along with what I call the Super charging, but it’s still a little bit early for me on that.

Buck: I know you were doing notes. Are you using that for notes at all?

Chris: No. I was really enamored with notes in the beginning. The whole benefits of real estate without toilets, tenants and all that kind of stuff. And notes, they were so much harder than a rate.

Buck: So much harder, so much. This is hilarious that you say that because a couple of years back and a number of people know exactly what I’m talking about. Jorge Newberry, who I’m a big fan of George, and he’s such a smart guy. He kept telling me, hey, this is really easy. It’s not that hard. Right? So I said, okay, Jorge put on this event and teach us how to do notes. We went to this event, and there was a number of, Wealth Formula people there. And I think we were all so freaking confused. And it was like, this is not easy, Jorge . This is not easy at all. And, in fact, if you see the trajectory of AHP, when Jorge stopped sort of being the guy, the money guy, they kind of didn’t perform quite as well as when he did. And he brought in some real professional from a large institution who spent her life doing this stuff. Well, Jorge comes back in and everything, and he’s staying there, by the way, because I’m like, there’s no way you’re leaving that spot ever again. And all of a sudden it’s magic. But that is a difficult business. Now, the other thing about notes, there’s no tax advantage. You’re losing. Yeah. Okay. Maybe you’re making, but now it’s ordinary income, maybe passive, but it’s still ordinary. And boom, all of a sudden, you know, you’re losing a big chunk of that in federal and state taxes. So I’m guessing that was one of the reasons, too.

Chris: Yeah. It’s so highly regulated. And it’s funny because my biggest complaint about the notes is the services all sucked. And so what’s Jorge done, he’s created his own service is the same problem. There was a little bit of a story around that. I was listening to the Real Estate Guys podcast, and this is stuck with me forever. They said, you know what? Every year or so, you should take a look at all the assets that you own and ask yourself this question, knowing what I know. Now what I rebuy those assets. And the answer was hands down, though. It took a couple of years, but you liquidated a whole bunch of stuff. And now I’m the syndication guy. I love syndications. And you get all the benefits with none of the hassle, and the returns are just fantastic. And the taxes and the leverage. Right.

Buck: One of the things I know that I remember you resonating with, and one of our in one of our meetings was my emphasis on the fact that boring is good. Right. And that we have our journeys. And I had it, too, where you start looking at things and you’re like, well, that sounds interesting. It’s in a different country. It’s a different asset and all this stuff. But you pretty quickly learned that, you know what? Keep it simple, keep it boring. And that’s how you’re going to make money. Did you go through something like that, too?

Chris: Oh, yeah. And you might remember that I did a little bit of private equity where I put some money into some startups. And it’s funny when I look at it if you go back to Tom Wheelwright, the four asset classes. You got paper, and you got real assets and commodities, whatever the other one is. I look at things and those four quarters I go, which ones are having problems, the paper ones that are having problems. It’s none of the real stuff.

Buck: Anyway, tell us a little bit about your experience. You joined Wealth Formula Network. So. Wealth Formula Network is our private group. How would you describe Wealth Formula Network?

Chris: Well, they say that you become what you think about. And your income is about the average of the five people you spend the most time with. And if you’re hanging out with some of your not so successful buddies, drinking three cases of beer every Friday night, you’re not really, really raising it up. And it’s just a community of people that are really serious about investing and moving forward in financial freedom. And at least we’re getting educated about every lever that we can pull from using leverage, taxes, the entity structures, the cash value, life insurance. And we live and breathe that stuff. And the landscape is always changing. So here’s what was working. Conservation easements, you know what was working one day, maybe it’s not working as well now. And maybe there’s some legislation on the horizon, and cryptocurrency things are constantly evolving. So if you want to stay on top of that, stay on the crest of the wave in terms of your investing, to be part of a group that’s really doing this kind of stuff.

Buck: Whether you’re in Wealth Formula Network or not. And for those who are interested in Wealth Formula, now, you go to WealthFormulaRoadmap.com, and it’s basically a course. And then there’s this ongoing discussion, biweekly Zoom calls. And also we have our Facebook group. But whether you join our group or any other group, whatever. I think if you’re interested in personal finance, it is really, really, I think, useful to have a group of people that you connect with on a regular basis, particularly if they’re your peers. There are people who are kind of like you and in similar situations, or there are people who maybe where you kind of wish you were or where you’d like to be, because your point about the idea of people going people becoming sort of the average of the five people they spend the most time with is very true. And I’ll just tell you from my own perspective, even going from I lived in a Chicago suburb where there was affluence, but nowhere near the affluence that’s around me here in Montecito. I mean, this is insane, right? It’s like and just having that perspective of Where’s your thermostat at. Right. I always call it the wealth thermostat. But where are you? And if you’re around a bunch of people who make 50 Grand a year and you happen to be the guy making 100, you’re feeling pretty good. And, hey, that’s okay if you’re feeling good there, but chances are you’re going to just stay there unless you surround yourself with people who are doing bigger, better things. And pretty soon your brain starts kind of bi osmosis becoming one of those people. And I think that that’s a big part of it. The other thing that’s really great about having a community like that is that the five people that you spend time with in real life might be your wife and kids and or your neighbors. And they have zero interest in talking about personal finance. And if you want to learn about personal finance, you really need to be around people who are really into it. And I’m always just totally blown away by some of the level of conversation in these meetings because there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know about that other people bring up. And so it’s been a real opportunity to learn from one another. So, again, if you’re interested in Wealth Formula Network, great. But if you have your own group of people, I highly encourage you to get together with them and on a regular basis, talk about these issues and find some people who make more money than you that will help you even more.

Chris: So a question you’d asked me earlier about, what were some of the big things that I learned? And one of them that just came to mind when you were talking a little while ago, it was the fact that a lot of us are making money in E Quadrant or W two people. But that doesn’t mean that you have to invest in shifting your income from the E Quadrant to the I Quadrant? Because I’ve always said, look, I don’t consider myself an entrepreneur. I’m an investor, but my business is investing. Chris Odegard doesn’t invest in anything. One of my entities does the investing. And now you’ve shifted over, and now you’re getting the asset protection and the tax benefits. If I go to Apple, Boeing and Campbell Soup. And all I did was say, Let’s not invest personally anymore. Let’s invest as a business. And so you start shifting that over. And that’s a huge thing.

Buck: Yeah, that is a really big thing. And that’s an important concept, too, because I am an entrepreneur. But I was born this way for better or for worse. And Jorge Newberry and I have talked about this a great length. Entrepreneurs have it’s almost like people who are looking for, like jumping out of planes or stuff like that, who are looking for that thrill. And the way they keep score is by how much money they make. So it’s really not always how much. It’s not always about money. It’s about creating and see if it works. It’s hard on the people around you sometimes because you take a lot of risks and that sort of thing. But this is a very important concept that you’re bringing up, which is if you go back to the Kiyosaki Quadrant. On the left side, there is the employee and the self employed individual. Neither one of them have significant benefits to taxes. But on the other side of the Quadrant, we think about the business owner, which is the entrepreneur. Yes, that is a good way to do it. But the other one is the investor. And so the path of least resistance, no doubt, for the vast majority of the listeners of this show, we are making a lot of money is not to go from the employed person to the business owner. That is a completely different lifestyle. That’s completely it’s a huge jump with lots of risk. But to go from then to take that money that’s generated in the E Quadrant and to build passively the investor Quadrant, that is, in my view, the path of least resistance and one that I think that just about anybody can do. It just takes a little bit of work.

Chris: That entrepreneur thing. But it’s probably a problem for you because you want to get dragged out of the boring stuff into other stuff.

Buck: It was a problem, I have to tell you. And again, early on, that shiny object syndrome is a real thing. But for me, I think I had a couple of significant failures and the business side of, like, losing millions of dollars and that kind of thing. And when that happened, what I realized was the things that kept me afloat were the things that were boring, because I grew up in a real estate family and I never invested in the stock market. I just kept when I was making money as an entrepreneur, early on, I kept buying real estate. And when my business activities went South, Luckily, my real estate was still there and I made a lot of money. And the rest is history. But it has been a little bit sometimes. Maybe you get a little older, you get burned, you get a little bit of scar tissue, and you’re a lot more careful. But you’re also, I think, able to read situations better with some failures. Right. As you know, in this podcast ecosystem, there’s lots of opportunities, but there’s also a lot of, you know, pitfalls. Just because you get behind a mic as a podcaster doesn’t necessarily mean you know what you’re doing, but that somehow lends credibility. So you have to be very, very careful. Not only the podcaster, but also individuals who you’re bringing on to your show or you’re writing about, in your case, that you feel comfortable with, you do have to narrow it in. And the more you can narrow things in and make things more boring and systematic, I found the more money you’re going to make.

Chris: Yeah. You said something one time about how you decide on a syndicator, and it’s like, well, if it didn’t come from somebody that I wasn’t recommended from, somebody I know, like and trust they don’t even get in the front door, that’s a good policy.

Buck: It’s funny, because, again, the evolution there is no, like and trust is huge, right? But no, like, in trust is not enough because you might know, like and trust your brother in law, but your brother in law may not have a clue what he’s doing, even if you think he has a clue what he’s doing. So it’s know, like and trust. And also take a look at the track record because the track record does not lie. He brought up Western wealth capital. That came from know, like and trust person initially for me. And then ultimately, it’s beyond that, though, every webinar, they do, every investment that they’ve ever had. So there’s a track record there. So those are some basic things that I think once fundamentally you get those down. I mean, you know, the Wealth Formula, the math, and, you know, this now even just leverage and math and velocity and all these it’s not that difficult. The hard part is the people. The hard part is the people. The hard part is the team, the operations and all that. If you can get that down, which I think I’d like to think we’ve done a very good job in our investor club. It becomes fairly systematic. And not that it’s not that difficult anymore, but that’s the hardest part.

Chris: Well, I say that you don’t really invest in assets. You invest in people. The team. You could have two apartment buildings identical, one on one side of the street and one on the other, and one would be wildly successful and the other one would be running in the ground. And the only difference was the people that were running it. So there’s no doubt you’re picking the team.

Buck: I mean, you could take that same asset, that same asset that gets bought by one group, and it makes investors like annualized returns, and then the other one is losing money on it or loses the property. So real estate is not or this type of investing is not like putting money in the stock market where you can buy Apple stock at Ameritrade, ETrade or Schwab. You have to pick the right way to get in because it’s a very personal thing. Well, good. Anything else you’d like to share with us before we wrap it up here?

Chris: Just to follow up on that topic. The scary thing is anybody that can put together 10 or 20,000 dollars to hire a security attorney can put together a private placement and fund and go out and raise money. Just because somebody has done that, gotta watch out for those.

Buck: Yeah. It’s easy on a pro forma. Chris, I can sell you swamp land in Florida, make it look really profitable to you by making a big, shiny, glossy executive summary. Well, good. Chris Odegard, theprolificinvestor.net. Chris, thanks so much for sharing your experience in your journey with us.

Chris: Yeah. Thanks for having me on Buck

Buck: We’ll be right back.