Why 72% of Investors Fail: Learn to Avoid Their Mistakes I Steve Davis DSH #518

Rip their freaking heads off before they move in.

It's a bear bunny rabbit strategy.

See, but again, intuitively, everybody thinks they're supposed to be nice to the tenant before they move in, when in reality, you need to be a bear.

It's not rocket science, but people need to treat it like rocket science if they're going to get into it.

72%

of our competition doesn't know what they're doing.

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All right, guys, from Houston, Texas, we got Steve Davis.

We're going to talk real estate.

We're going to talk investing and the proper ways to invest these days because there's a lot of information out there.

A tremendous amount.

And sadly, the majority of it is ineffective.

So which methods are you?

referencing in terms of ineffectiveness?

Well, it really comes down to people trying to do it on their own.

And what they're doing is they're using logic.

And

real estate investing is not intuitive at all.

One of the big ones is when you're leasing,

if you're in single family, when you're leasing, People think, oh, you should be nice, you should be kind, saccharine, and just show them you're going to be a good land.

No, rip their freaking heads off before they move in.

It's a bare bunny rabbit strategy.

See, but again, intuitively, everybody thinks they're supposed to be nice to the tenant before they move in, when in reality, you need to be a bear.

You need to run their credit, run their criminal, talk to two landlords, not just one.

Because if you talk to one,

one of them is going to tell you, oh, yeah, they're great because he's trying to get rid of them.

But if you talk to the previous landlord, he's going to go, wait a second.

The Smith?

Oh, they destroyed my property and didn't pay the last three months' rent.

And then when you call the employment, you don't just verify income, you verify the likelihood of continued employment.

So, again, it's not rocket science, but people need to treat it like rocket science if they're going to get into it.

72%

of our competition doesn't know what they're doing.

How do you know that to be true?

72%, that's a specific number.

Yeah.

Okay.

I got it because a friend of mine, Stephen Rosenberg,

owns a property management company, and he did some research.

So it may be anecdotal, but he came up with the number.

He goes, man, seven out of ten homes that I'm competing against are not made ready correctly.

They're not doing credit and criminal reports.

They're not running the properties correctly.

So that's where I got it.

And Steve Rosenberg is a very competent property manager.

Wow.

And are you still buying properties today with the interest rate super high?

Are you just maintaining your existing portfolio?

We are still buying.

We are still buying.

We've gotten stuff as low as 6.5%

and we've done stuff as high as 8%.

But that was because the seller gave us,

they had to give us this incredible discount.

So we were able to still cash flow even at 8%.

Wow.

But the good news is when you buy real estate at a high interest rate, you're married to the property.

You're not married to the interest rate.

As soon as the interest rates drop, you can refi.

Right.

So hopefully in a couple of years, it'll be back down to five, maybe four.

Oh, that'd be nice.

You know, I doubt it, though.

You doubt it?

I doubt it.

Wow.

I think it's going to be, I think six is going to be the bottom.

But again, I hate predicting the future because every time I do it, I'm wrong.

I mean, if anyone could do it, they'd be rich, right?

Yes, exactly.

But real estate over time, like if you zoom out, you know, it's a good investment.

So it's safe.

Now, you said 95% of Americans fail to retire by age 65.

Yes.

That is super high.

They're working beyond 65.

Where I got that statistic the first time was from Robert Kiyosaki's book, Rich Dad, Poor Dad, incredible book, by the way.

And I was reading through it.

The statistic comes from the U.S.

government.

But the U.S.

government doesn't come right out and say what's going on.

They explain, hey, some people only have 200 grand, some some people only have 400 grand.

And it's kind of, in my opinion, deceiving because if you retire, the average 65-year-old has 400 grand.

All right.

Divide that by just 10 years.

That's just 40 grand a year, 3 grand a month.

Well, divide that by 20 years.

That's 1,500 bucks a month.

They're screwed.

Once you look at the amount of savings that the average 65-year-old has and divide it by, by, you know, you hope you live at least 20 years in retirement.

When you divide it by that, it just doesn't work.

Yeah.

So, the whole concept of saving your way to retirement is flawed.

And it comes down to

as soon as you retire, no matter how much money you've saved, you're praying to your God, whichever one you choose, would you kill me before I run out of money?

We had a client, his uncle or whoever saved up $5 million.

He ran out of money at 95.

He's 102.

Wow.

So for seven years, he's been a burden on his family, on the government.

He doesn't want that.

That's not a good way to live.

What we're doing is we're building a second stream of income like Warren Buffett said.

Warren Buffett said,

Never rely on a sole source of income, a job.

Always invest to create a second source of income.

So we buy big apartment complexes, self-storage complexes, senior living complexes,

strip shopping centers, hotels that produce cash flow.

And you recommend people when they retire to invest in something like that?

They need to do it before they retire.

Got it.

Because if they wait till they retire,

they would have this.

It takes three or four years to generate a second stream of income, depending on how much money you have to start with.

It could take as many as 10 years.

So if you retire and then start building, what are you going to do that 10 years?

You really need to start, and I wish people in their 30s would start.

People, this one bothers people, but

when I see a 30-year-old in my audience, I will remind them, hey, or ask them, hey, how fast did that 30 years go by?

And they'll go, it went real fast.

And I'll go, I got bad news for you.

The next 30 years are going to go by even faster and you'll be 60.

And you've got to wake up and realize you need to start building your second stream of income as young as you can.

Now, I started at 27.

By the time I was 30, I had enough to quit working.

I wasn't rich or anything, but I didn't have to work anymore.

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So the second stream of income changes your life right and not a lot of people have that or they call it a side hustle these days right yes i love the term side hustle um i actually did an interview on tv where i used it and the reporter was so uncomfortable using the phrase because she thought it was like some kids phrase yeah it's not a kid's phrase anymore it is the real mccoy you need to use that phrase everybody needs a side hustle and it's got to be passive if you have an active side hustle that's just another job And sooner or later, you have to retire from that too.

How much of your skills did you learn in high school and college?

Zero.

Zero.

Unfortunately, high school and college does not prepare us to build wealth.

It just teaches us how to get a job.

It was,

I got a job.

I worked for five years,

70 hours a week.

and won first place in a national sales contest.

They gave me a trip to Hawaii because I was so good.

When I got back from Hawaii, they cut my pay by 20 grand a year.

And that was what woke me up that having a job is a high-risk position.

So I bought every set of books and tapes off late-night TV I could on real estate investing.

And

I know it comes across as bragging, but two months later, I was able to quit my job because I was making more money wholesaling than I was at my job.

And the wonderful thing about that was it allowed me to save my marriage.

When you started to making more money, you're saying?

No.

When you're working so nobody loves this joke.

If you're working 70 hours a week, who's romancing your wife?

It ain't you.

Right.

So I almost lost her.

And once I quit that job, I was only working about 10 hours a month to wholesale.

That's it.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Wholesaling is about, if you want to wholesale one to two deals a month, it's about 10 hours.

Wow.

If you want a wholesale four or five, 20, you can figure it out.

The math is pretty easy.

But I would make $5,000 to $10,000 per wholesale deal.

I was only making $6,000 a month at my job.

So I was able to save my marriage, make more money, and have a lot more fun.

Yeah, I think it's a new era.

I think the older generations getting a job was common and that was standard, right?

But I feel like now with entrepreneurship, it's different.

I think it was 74 that they kind of did away with pensions.

There's still a few pensions around, but before 74,

you you could, almost every company had a pension.

When you retired, you got some pay.

And in 1974, they created the 401k in the IRA and said, look, guys, you're now in charge of your retirement, but they didn't add any classes on how to invest to high school or college.

Facts.

They need those.

That's right.

What do you think of IRAs and 401ks?

Because that's what my accountant told me they use.

I like them.

If you use them properly,

you

would I put money in an IRA or 401k?

No.

Do I like them?

Yes.

Because if it weren't for the IRA and 401k, nobody'd have any money.

They'd blow it all.

That penalty forces people to save.

So it's a good thing.

The other reason I like the IRA and 401k is you can use it to invest in real estate without tax or penalty.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I just don't like, because you don't know if you're going to live to 65.

You know what I mean?

I hope you do.

Like, I hope you do.

Yeah.

You really, am I going to wait 40 years?

I don't know.

For me, I just, I stopped investing in it.

You'll love this.

Did you know that an IRA doesn't, IRA in 401k does not save you taxes unless you fail financially?

Think about it this way.

If you make $100,000 a year, you're in the 23% tax bracket.

If you save up $2 million in an IRA and retire and you pull out $100,000 your first year of retirement, guess what tax bracket you're in?

23%.

The same as when you were working.

Wow.

So the reason I don't like IRAs and 401ks, they only help you if you fail financially, if you retire with low income.

So you're in a low tax bracket.

The goal is not to retire with low income.

The goal is to retire with high income.

Interesting.

So what safety net are you advising people to retire with?

You almost need like a million these days, right?

Wall Street Journal says 4.3.

I say 3.

4.3.

4.3.

But that's before taxes.

I'm saying 3 million after taxes.

So we're pretty close.

But if you use the 4% rule, there's a rule out there that says you can only take 4% of your savings after you retire.

4%

of $3 million is $120,000 or $10,000 a month.

So to have $10,000 a month in retirement plus your Social Security, you can live an okay life.

You can at least pay your bills, not become a a burden on your kids and things like that.

So it's 3 million bucks.

And people need to stop being afraid of the phrase millionaire or thinking millionaire means something anymore.

It doesn't.

A million dollars is not that much anymore.

Look at people's homes.

They're $3,000, $4,000, $500,000 for starter homes.

By the time they retire, that house is worth $2 million.

So they're going to have some money, but they can't get to it because it's in the house.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Millionaire doesn't hold the same weight it used to.

No.

Yeah.

It's pretty, I mean, a million won't even get you a nice house in Vegas.

No.

It's crazy.

It is crazy.

You almost need 10 million to be a millionaire.

Yeah.

If you 10 million, everybody could retire on 10 million.

I agree with you.

Yeah.

I think 3 million is the minimum.

So you have 10 grand a month in retirement.

But if everybody could generate 10 million, but here's the challenge.

That's really, really hard to do.

But with to generate $10,000 a month in in passive income you only need six hundred grand at a twenty percent rate of return which these syndications that we do produce you're getting about a hundred and twenty grand a year if you've got six hundred thousand invested wow so it's a lot easier so your syndication is able to get twenty percent a year yeah yeah it's it comes in oddly though You might only get 10% the first year, 10% the second year, but you might get 40% the third year when you refinance.

Got it.

Then back to 10%, 10%, and then 50% 50% when you sell it.

When you average those, it comes out to about 20% internal rate of return.

That's phenomenal to be able to get that.

Oh, yeah.

We kill the stock market.

There's no question.

Because stocks is like 7%, right?

That's right.

Over the last 75 years, about 7%, 7.5%.

So you're just putting all your money into real estate.

Absolutely.

Nice.

Yeah.

If you invest with what you know, I mean, you can't really lose.

Yeah.

It takes some education, though.

You want to study it.

And there's the wonderful thing about that, there's so many good books out there.

People like, oh, I don't know how to find the education.

Really?

Go to Audible.com.

Go to amazon.com.

Type in real estate investing.

I love Carlton Sheets' work.

I love Robert Allen's work.

And of course, I have courses on it, but they don't have to choose me.

They can choose any one.

There's a huge number of great mentors out there.

All right.

So you mentioned Kiyosaki's book.

The opposite of him would be, I'd say, Dave Ramsey.

What do you think about Ramsey?

You know, what I like is a combination of Ramsey and Kiyosaki.

See, Ramsey gets you out of debt.

But what are you once you're out of debt?

You're broke.

Get it?

It's like you started negative 30 grand.

Yeah, I paid off that 30 grand.

Great.

Now you're broke.

But I don't like Ramsey's strategy for building wealth.

So I stop my students at that point and I send them over to me, Robert Kiyosaki, Robert Allen.

And we focus on building wealth wealth more rapidly than you can in the stock market.

Right.

Through debt.

Yeah, we and leverage, absolutely.

I don't think you can really get rich without debt.

It's tough.

I don't know how Ramsey did it, but yeah, it would take so long.

Well,

with all due respect, he's making money off of his books.

He's making money off of his radio show, his podcast.

I'm not sure

that...

He speaks to not having debt, but he's got all these businesses that are producing income.

Okay, sure.

If you've got a bunch of businesses, yeah, you don't need to take debt.

But if you're a normal human being, you need to leverage your money effectively to build wealth.

What do you think about seller financing?

That's a hot thing right now.

I don't like my students to do it, but I used to love to buy seller financing.

I bought probably my first three or four apartment complexes owner financed.

Okay.

Yeah.

So I love it.

If you're buying if you're selling i don't like it because if you rent a property you get cash flow equity buildup and principal pay down right if you sell it on an owner finance note all you get is interest so it cuts your rate of return down on the property usually 50 60 percent wow i didn't even think about it that way but that makes sense yeah yeah

So what exactly is a dumb doctor deal?

The dumb doctor deal, it's

high-income earners, because that's really what it should be called,

the dumb high-income earner, are notorious for doing bad deals.

Notorious.

Doctors are notorious for doing bad deals.

And it comes from a little bit of arrogance.

I think that doctors, attorneys, CPAs, sports people, actors, they go, oh, look at me.

I got 10 million in the bank.

I make a million a year, $2 million a year.

I'm a stud.

I'll be a great investor.

That's the same as me going, I got 10 million in the bank, I make a couple million a year as an investor.

I'd be a great doctor.

It doesn't work that way.

Investing is a skill set.

And people need to recognize that and educate themselves so that they make the right investing decisions.

And again, like I said, there's books, there's us, there's all kinds of places where you can educate yourself.

Yeah.

A lot of these high-income earners, they get targeted by wealth managers who take a percent and they only get them like 5%, 7% a year.

Yep.

And they diversify them, which I hate diversification

because it's an excuse for not knowing what you're doing.

They diversify them, which means they don't know what they're doing.

They're just throwing them in 10 different things.

Five of them make money.

Five of them lose money.

Why didn't they put all their money in the five that made money?

Because they don't know which ones are going to make money.

That's That's why they diversify them.

See, I focus.

My students focus.

We know what we're going to make off our real estate because it makes money in both the up and down markets, differently, but in both markets.

So that's why all our money is in real estate.

Yeah.

How was the 08 crash?

Did you come out with that on scale?

That's a good question.

Go back to 2008 and 2009.

I was in about 4,000 apartment units.

Wow.

My

values plummeted 20, 30%.

In 2006, I was making 80 grand a month profit.

In 2009, after the crash, I was making $80,000 a month.

Oh, wow.

So yeah, the property values drop, but your cash flow stays the same.

And the interesting thing is it went up because people were moving out of homes and into apartments.

Oh, wow.

So you actually made it out pretty well.

Very well.

And then when it recovered, you never sell in a down market.

That's the bottom line.

See, if you are wise, you live off your cash flow, which comes in both the up and down markets.

That way you never have to sell in a down market.

And being in apartments was convenient too.

If you were in houses, it would have been tougher.

I'd say.

You know,

it wasn't that much tougher.

Okay.

Because I've got a lot of students in single family.

What was tough is about 10%

of their deals got hammered with the,

hey, you can't evict them because they've got a letter from the government saying that they lost their job due to

so, but in the apartments, it was only about 5%.

Okay.

Yeah.

Wow.

I didn't know that was a real letter.

Yeah, you had to have it.

And they didn't have to pay rent for how long?

I want to say it was almost nine months.

Damn.

Yeah.

That's a lot of rent.

That's almost a year.

Yeah.

But you're not going to believe this.

Rent collections went up.

Really?

Because the government was feeding them, sending them checks.

So a lot of the tenants that we had trouble getting rent from suddenly were paying their rent on time.

Wow.

Shout out to the government for printing all that money, right?

Yeah,

they printed a little too much.

Yeah, a little too much inflation going on.

Absolutely.

I spend $300 at Whole Foods now every time I go.

They're saying it's $11,000 more a year to feed a family of four.

Oh, my gosh.

Yeah, Costco used to be under $100 when I was a kid.

Now it's like $200,000, $300 every time.

Wow.

It's crazy.

And the average family, that's a lot.

It's rough.

I pulled this up recently.

The average income for a four-person family is $101.

The average bills are $106.

Holy crap.

So that means people are in debt.

They're in negative cash flow.

Well, I don't know if you know this.

Discover card write-offs doubled in the last year.

They went from 3% to almost 6% in the last year.

It's escalating at Visa, MasterCard, American Express.

We're in for some tough times.

Wow.

So 6% of people at Discover aren't paying their bills.

And they're non-collectible.

That means they're selling it to collection agencies.

They're not even trying to collect it.

These credit card companies are probably losing money at this rate, right?

Well, they make so much money.

I mean, you think about it.

You charge $20,000.

The credit card company gets $600 of that.

Right, and they did nothing.

Yeah.

So I doubt they're losing money, but it could happen maybe at 10%, 12%.

I have no idea.

But

the P ⁇ L I saw, they were still making money.

Okay.

Let's talk about lag, laziness, arrogance, and greed.

Sure.

Laziness, arrogance, and greed or lag is something that most people have.

And

it came

into my life when I bought my first apartment complex.

I had over a hundred rental houses.

Ego.

I went, man, I'm going to go buy an apartment complex.

If I can run 100 houses, I can buy an apartment complex.

I bought a 10-unit apartment complex.

It almost destroyed me

because I didn't know what I was doing.

Apartments are totally different from single-family.

So I was too lazy to fly to California to take this week-long course on owning apartments.

I was too arrogant to think I needed it, and I was too greedy to pay the 35 grand to do it.

When I sold that thing, I made $140,000, right?

Sounds pretty good.

I sold it for $349,000 less than it was worth.

Whoa.

I lost $349,000 because I didn't take that $35,000 course.

Wow.

So watch out for laziness, arrogance, and greed.

Real estate is just about rocket science.

You need to educate yourself before you get into it.

Do you think it's human nature to possess those traits?

Yeah, because we've got our

wonderful

effort-minimizing brain.

Our effort minimizing brain doesn't want to work,

it just wants to conserve energy and survive.

It's our mind that takes us beyond survival into thriving.

So, yeah, I think it's in everybody.

But if you use your mind, what you've learned since birth, you can get past it.

You can get past it easily.

Love it.

Now you have eight parts of a balanced life.

Yeah.

At Total Wealth Academy, we study,

I think I can get them all, family, romance, fitness, charity, fun and entertainment,

personal growth, career, and wealth.

And career and wealth are separate.

Career is your earned income.

Wealth is your passive or second stream of income.

And what we do is is we focus on

learning all of them and

getting an IQ in each arena.

We call it a financial IQ, a romance IQ, a family IQ.

And it comes from the concept that

it's

easy as hell to get rich.

Just sacrifice your family, your fitness, your charity.

It's easy as hell to get rich.

The trick is getting wealthy while maintaining a wonderful marriage, while raising great kids, while giving to charity.

It's that's the difficult part.

And so at Total Wealth Academy, we have classes on all eight parts of a balanced life.

Yeah, I love that because a lot of people just chase the money part.

Oh, yeah.

I've got a friend with 100 million bucks, right?

He is a mess.

Wow.

He's alienated his children.

He's on wife number three or four.

He's sacrificed his health for $100 million.

He's going to be a very rich man in the graveyard.

Yeah, it's not even worth it at that point.

No.

Yeah, it's all about balance.

Yeah, I didn't put any time in the family the first five years, and now I take weekends off, but for five years, I worked seven days straight.

Wow.

I had gray hairs at 21.

Yeah.

It feels so good because you never get perfectly balanced.

You know, it's never a perfect circle.

Yeah.

But when you've got that family and you've got that connection with your children, then you got your romance.

You got that romantic connection with your spouse or girlfriend.

And you got your, you're giving a little bit to charity here and there with a goal to give more later.

Yeah.

It just feels good when you make money.

If you make money and you're not taking care of family, romance, charity,

personal growth, it feels empty.

It's very empty.

It's like retirement.

I joke about this.

Retirement sucks.

The first three months are fun.

Golf, fish,

travel.

But all those selfish things get old really quick.

By the end of my third month, I retired at 30.

Wow.

By the end of my third month, I was going, why am I here?

What am I doing?

And by the sixth month, I went back to work.

I bet.

They're doing brain scans on people that retire.

It actually increases the aging process.

I believe it.

One of my mentors, Colonel A.I.

Thomas, U.S.

Marine Corps retired, he worked till the day he died and he made it to 84 and he was healthy.

He just literally, his heart gave out.

He was able to work out.

He was able to have fun.

His cognitive skills were excellent.

He just had a sheer heart attack.

Yeah.

You see when people retire, they kind of lose their touch almost.

You lose your mission.

You lose your vision.

You lose your mission.

Your why.

If you don't have a big why to get up in the morning, why are you getting up?

You're not going to.

Victor frankl's book man's search for meaning um talks about that how he was in the nazi prison camps and he was able to survive because he had this why

he wanted to teach in universities to prevent the holocaust from ever happening again that was his why so he could put up with the torture the humiliation the starvation where a lot of the other people would just die

wow that's deep they didn't have why yeah that book's phenomenal yeah why is important, man?

Took me 25 years to find mine.

Takes some people their whole lives.

Some people never find theirs.

That's the sad case.

A lot of people never find it.

Yeah, which is a shame.

But it's easy when you're in that corporate lifestyle to not find it because you're just so almost like a slave almost to the company, you know?

Yep.

And they keep you distracted.

If you try to find your why, they're going to go, what are you doing?

You need to get back to work.

Focus on this.

It comes down to having a set of written goals for yourself.

See, your corporation has a set of written goals.

The government has a set of written goals for you.

But most people don't have their own set of written goals.

So they're easily distracted.

Wherever the wind blows, that's where they go.

And you're right.

They never find their why.

Yeah.

Even in school, they don't want you going off the rails.

They want you to just follow the teacher and just be a student.

That is true.

I didn't think about that one.

But yeah, even in, yeah, the...

They've got that goal too written down.

They just want you to be a cog in the machine.

They want you to be an employee and that's it.

Yeah.

I mean, I find a lot of these entrepreneurs that I have on the show did not do well in school.

They got detention.

They got suspended and it's because they were just trying to find out their why if you look down at the bigger vision of it.

Yeah, I failed out of Texas A ⁇ M.

By the second year, I was like...

bored out of my mind.

This is exactly what happened.

I went to my counselor, Lieutenant Purdy, U.S.

Navy.

I was in the Marine Corps at the time.

And I said, where are the classes on getting rich?

And he went, there are none.

I quit school that day.

Really?

Yeah.

And as a Marine, that's tough to quit, right?

Yeah.

But it was, I was fortunate.

Lieutenant Purdy got me an honorable discharge.

Oh, wow.

So I'm very grateful to him.

Shout out to him, man.

Very grateful.

You must have had a good bond with him for him to do that.

Yeah,

I connected with him right away.

He was a great leader, very principally centered.

He was just a guy who cared.

You knew he cared about you.

And he knew that I needed to be an entrepreneur.

He actually said that at one point.

Wow.

He said, You need your own company, man.

You need to be an entrepreneur.

That's cool, man.

Find out in the Marines.

I feel like that's rare.

Yeah.

Those guys are

so engulfed in that lifestyle, you know, especially the higher-ups.

They don't really like it when people want to quit.

No, not at all.

What's next for you, man?

I really want to expand Total Wealth Academy.

We're nationwide, and we even have a few students

in other countries, so we are international.

But I really want to expand and get this information out to as many people as possible.

I watch my parents suffer financially.

I watch my brother suffer financially.

I watch,

like we talked about, 95% of Americans suffering financially.

And the difference between saving your way to retirement and building a second income stream is like that.

It's just a little different education, a little different strategy.

So I love teaching that to people.

And I've had,

I get a lot of hugs, let's put it that way.

Nice.

Where people come in and they give me a hug.

They're in tears and they go, I finally got my first passive income check.

Thank you.

Wow.

That is a good feeling.

Yeah, you're good.

Inspire millions.

Trickle-down effect of this, you know?

Yeah.

You inspired 10,000 families.

Each of them have kids.

So I really love what you're doing, man.

I appreciate it.

Yeah, thanks for coming on.

Hey, thank you.

Absolutely.

Thanks for watching, guys.

As always, I will see you next time.