Achieve Peak Investing through Networking – Bronson Hill

Bronson Hill  00:00

When you buy a property, your buying price is fixed. So whatever price you buy at, there’s discounts we’re seeing where there’s discounts on some of these properties, which maybe 10% or 15%, a little bit, but you can’t change that it’s fixed, but your interest rate can be adjusted later. Welcome to the passive income

 

Greg Lyons  00:17

brothers podcast.

 

Tim Lyons  00:18

Here we take the fear out of real estate investing using real life stories of everyday successful investors. Let’s go. Welcome to another episode of the passive income brothers podcast. My name is Tim Watkins, and I’m joined today by none other than my brother, Greg, how’re you doing today, buddy?

 

Greg Lyons  00:33

I am doing fantastic. Tim 2023 is well off and running for us. Excited to be here and excited about our guests that I think it’s gonna be a great episode.

 

Tim Lyons  00:43

You’re not kidding. Before we started recording, I shared a story with Bronson because I had a call with him a long time ago, a couple years ago, like before, I was even slightly educated about real estate. And I’m surprised at my invitation. But you

 

Greg Lyons  00:57

probably thought you knew everything, which is amazing. So I’m happy. He’s even here right now.

 

Tim Lyons  01:03

Thank you, buddy. Thank you for the vote of confidence. But no, exactly. So we have a Bronson hill here today. And what I love about Bronson is that he is one of those guys who puts a ton of content out on social media. He’s got a great YouTube page. He’s got a podcast. And he’s really just one of those make it happen kind of guys. And I’m happy and I’m looking forward to diving into his story. So and I hope it resonates with you as well. So without further ado, I wanted to welcome Bronson hill to the show. How you doing today, Bronson.

 

Bronson Hill  01:32

Hey, great. Tim. Greg, great to meet the passive income brothers. You guys need your own TV show on HGTV. I think it’d be awesome. So most I’m sure would make it entertaining.

 

Tim Lyons  01:41

Yeah, you’re the one in LA if you know anybody’s listening, that we’re ready.

 

Greg Lyons  01:45

I do have a face made for podcasting. So I think we’re about in the lane we need to be right now.

 

01:50

Yeah, that’s okay. Baby steps, right. So

 

Tim Lyons  01:53

Bronson, I really want to dive in today, because I’ve heard some of your shows. I’ve seen some of your videos, and you do a really nice job about really making the case for passive income. So with that kind of lens, can you kind of bring the listeners through a little bit about your backstory. What did you do? How did you find real estate? How’d you find passive investing? And then we’ll take it from there. Yeah,

 

Bronson Hill  02:13

well, I always knew I wanted to be a real estate investor, I kind of took a roundabout way to get there. But in my mid 20s, actually, I was able to buy my first house, a house I lived in, in another state, I moved to Montana for a job. And I ended up keeping it a couple years later, when I moved back to LA and became an accidental landlord, but I kept it I rented it out, it worked out, okay. I mean, it appreciated over time, and thought, I’m doing good. I’m getting some income from this, and maybe a few 100 bucks a month after a while, after 510 years getting some income from it. But then I thought, Okay, I’m going to scale up this investing, I’m going to get a bunch of single family houses. And so I ended up with a total of four or five houses, mostly in the Cleveland area. And I thought my goal is to get to 30 of these houses. And then I can have quote unquote, passive income. And I can retire from my corporate job, I had a job I was doing in medical device sales, I was making over 200,000 a year, selling surgical equipment to doctors for heart surgery. So it was a good job. But I didn’t really have freedom or my time. So I wanted to get to a place where I could travel more I could create more. I love writing. I love writing. I write music as well. I love like I mentioned travel. So just lots of things that I really are important to me that I wanted to do. And so I thought I’ll get a bunch of single family houses. Well, I have a cousin that I hadn’t seen in years. But I shared this plan of like, hey, I want to get to 30 houses and turns out he was a multifamily guy. And he said, Why don’t you this seems like a lot of work like doing single family. Why don’t you do multifamily? And I thought about I was like, Yeah, it really is kind of a lot of work. I’m spending a lot of time even though I’m not the property manager, I’m getting calls and the property manager. There’s all these headaches with the tenants and nothing’s working out the way that it looks on paper. And it just I started to look at multifamily. But I told my cousin I said I don’t have the money. And he said well, you can raise the money. So that basically took me on a journey to learn how to raise money. Third, now four years later, having calls you were one of my 1300 calls with investors raised $30 million. We have about 200 million in multifamily assets. And I was able to quit my corporate job about a year and a half ago and just really be able to live more life I want to live.

 

Greg Lyons  04:09

That is so interesting. Tim and Bronson. It’s we hear this time and time again. So many people get started investing in real estate in the single family world and you became the accidental landlord that happens as well, where it’s like, oh, yeah, I guess I’ll just keep this house and passive income. This is great until you get five houses and it’s people are calling you all the time and those sorts of things. And putting property management on five single family rentals is just not as cost effective. If you ever want to get out of your W two job or kind of build wealth. Finding multifamily is challenging for a lot of people because a lot of times it’s long distance. You can’t touch and feel it and you really have to know like and trust the operator when getting into multifamily versus Single Family, did you look at anything else outside of the multifamily world to kind of create that passive income? Or did you just keep coming back to multifamily?

 

Bronson Hill  05:08

Well, honestly, to me, I think there’s a saying when the student is ready, the teacher appears. And I think it has to do with both an internal sense of when you are ready when I was ready as a student, and also just kind of when the universe was ready to give me this mentor, right. And so I had this mentor, as a cousin who had been doing multifamily for 25 years was a super high net worth guy. And I just thought, man, here’s a great opportunity to have a mentor to do this for somebody is really not trying to sell me anything except on how can I better my life. And so I just thought, I’m gonna go fully into this. And so I did. I basically read every book I could get on multifamily. I ended up love these books started talking about starting a meetup. So I did, I started a meetup in Pasadena, California. That’s where we had 60 people show up at the first meeting, I had partnered with somebody else who had a general real estate meetup and I say, Let’s partner and all run this whole meet up, and you just show up and she said, that sounds like a great idea. And then this guy never met before shows up. And he says, Hey, I’d invest in one of your deals. And so which is so interesting, there’s kind of a lesson there, too, that like, I didn’t own any multifamily real estate. But this guy that I’ve never met, but simply because I was in the front of the room, I was not an expert, but I was a leader in the space said, Hey, I’d invest in one of your deals. And so I got coffee with him. I showed him a sample deal. And he said, Yeah, I’d put 100k into that. And so then I basically introduced him to another guy at that same meeting that I met for the first time who had a deal. And I brought them together. And that’s how I got my first deal done. And that’s all that people wonder, like, how do I get started? How do I do this? And zero to one is really the hardest in any field, I think especially in multifamily, it’s hardest to just get a deal to raise some money or to get a deal that you found or get something going.

 

Tim Lyons  06:41

And that’s a great story, right? I mean, it’s so funny, because when you look at the gurus, or the more experienced folks out there, especially if they’re on social media, you can kind of be like, no, what, I’ll never get to that point. I’ll never be a Grant Cardone, I’m not going to have the private jet. And it’s really the story that we tell ourselves. It’s the mindset, it’s the knowing why you want to do something, it’s the goals, right? And I’ve often talked on this podcast, I can save everybody their money, or the How To books, or the one on one real estate books, right? You got to know your why you got to have your goals, you got to build out a team, right? All these little things that you keep on hearing over and over and over again. And it’s really hard to get started. But you got to get in the pool, you simply have to get in the pool, right? If you keep on telling yourself, I gotta go to one more meetup. I got to listen to one more podcast, one more conference, maybe next year, maybe next quarter. Like it’ll never happen, right? And Action begets more action. So the law, the first deal, I mean, Michael Blanc, somebody that we both though, right? He always talks about the law, the first deal. And then once you have that first deal, it’s so much easier, whether you’re on the active side or the passive side. So Bronson, now you have a deal on your belt, right? You build in that credibility? What what’s next for you?

 

Bronson Hill  07:51

Yeah, so from there, I really kind of try it was trying to figure out how do I do more? How do I get involved, maybe with other partners, or I was trying to build my brand. Again, this was 2018. So I started a website just started doing a lot of stuff and trying to get things moving. And what I realized is, I can do it myself, I can try to kind of find other people that are doing and try to find partners in single family. Really, it’s not as much of a partnership game. It’s more like you can kind of I know people that have 4050 houses and they do most of the work themselves. And maybe they have a property manager and they’ve got an agent, and they’ve got people but it’s primarily them. And multifamily is it’s very difficult to do 100 units or more unless you have other partners. And so you kind of delegate, okay, who’s going to raise money, who’s going to be the operator who’s going to find the deal, and you can kind of separate those type of tasks. And so for me, I had went to this summit, I was actually on a cruise and I, somebody quoted this quote from Jim Rohn. It’s kind of a paraphrase, but it’s saying make yourself valuable to valuable people. And I had never heard that phrase before. But what I realized is oh, people that are providing incredible value. If you can make yourself a value to them, then that’s a way to create value and get paid, right. And so I went to a successful syndicator. And I said, Hey, how would it work? How’s it going raising money, and this person had a huge audience, but they didn’t really have anybody focused on passive investing. They didn’t have anybody really doing calls and answering questions and things like that. And so I was able to just put it out there as Hey, well, what if I died, I wasn’t really serious. I didn’t really want to leave my own thing, but I just put it out there. And then they came back and like, yeah, actually, we’d like to do that. And we’d pay you and give you certain equity and things like that. So I was able to basically form a partnership. And I had to kind of leave my own brand behind for a bit but I said, Okay, well, I’ll partner with you. And I’ll do this work for you. And it gave me a ton of experience. That’s when we had a call years ago. So I basically had over 1001 on one phone calls over the next 18 months, and we raised 15 million together, right? So I was able to use just trying to find a way to be intuitive and add value. And that’s the amazing thing about really successful people is they’re thinking about the challenges in their business all the time. And people always coming to them say hey, I want you to mentor me, I want this from you. I want this from you. But if you approach somebody who’s really successful When you say, Hey, how can I help you with this specific problem? I don’t just approach somebody and say, Hey, how can I help you? Or what can I do? That’s like a big general, I don’t know, what can you do? But if it’s like, Hey, how’s it going in this specific area? Can I help you with this? They’re asking that question, but nobody else is. And so that’s really where I was able to really get ahead. I think, adding

 

Greg Lyons  10:16

and creating value. It’s what you do when you get started. It’s what you do when you try to form a partnership. It’s what we do for our investors all the time, it’s creating value for them. And a lot of times when people are getting started, if they don’t go the passive route, they’re more active. Do you have the time to put into things? Do you have the money to put into things? Or can you be boots on the ground? Are you hands on? Are you at the property, those are all ways to kind of get started on the active side of things. And when you do create value, partnerships just kind of happen. When the student is ready the teacher will appear. The more value you create, the more opportunities you get, and you found your way into multifamily. And you’ve built a career and a portfolio. Why do you think right now we’re in early 2023? Why do you think is a great time for multifamily? Whether it’d be an active or passive investor or multifamily?

 

Bronson Hill  11:11

Why? That’s a great question. I mean, I think really what it comes down to I tell people, you know, I’m not in love with real estate. And they’re kind of surprised. Yeah, I’m not really in love with real estate I’m in love with their real estate does for me. So as a passive investor is to think about what are my goals? Right? What are the goals, the goals of reducing taxes, are they to really have passive income, I thought maybe to get passive income through single family, but it really wasn’t passive, right? Anybody that owns a rental house, or a few rental houses knows, man, it’s just not that passive. And so I always tell people that if you can’t 10x, your current investing strategy, then you’re not a passive investor. Let me say that again, if you can’t 10x Currently, what you’re doing with your investments, if you have three houses, and you can’t go to 30, then it’s not really passive. And so a lot of us we trick ourselves into thinking, we’re passive investors, because we own a rental house or two, but it’s not passive. Versus multifamily is much more of a passive experience, it has a lot of as I find that I was getting paid as much or more investing in larger multifamily deals than simply doing it myself. And it didn’t take up my time. And so a lot of people listening are gonna be business owners, they’re gonna be professionals, they’re gonna be people that are looking to try to maximize time, well, the best way to leverage your time is to have somebody else do it. And it doesn’t mean you get paid less, it just means that you have someone else do it. But going back to your question 2023 Why I love right now for multifamily is I think the Fed has raised rates for a period of time, historically, the last 100 years, they’ve only the longest they’ve ever waited from the first raising interest rates to the time they cut has been 13 months, it’s only happened one time, typically it’s five months. So we’re at like nine or 10 months. It’ll be a year in March. So my thought is in the next three to six months, rates will start to drop again. And then there’s all this money on the sidelines, Bloomberg recently had an article that came out and said that there are $5 trillion of American savings sitting on the sidelines waiting, which is five times the amount that there was in 2020. So there’s 5x. And so what’s going to happen is when rates start inching down again, I think we’re gonna have some sort of recession or some sort of reason why rates are going to have to start coming down. And when that happens, I think all this money’s going to flood into multifamily. But there’s a lot of benefits to multifamily. I don’t be too long winded. But that’s I think, why like right now?

 

Tim Lyons  13:19

Well, yeah, and I just want to pull on some of those strings right there. I mean, so first of all, I want to give you a lot of credit, because a lot of people we accepted question two or something, no one really wants to answer that question. But nobody wants to be wrong. Nobody certainly has a crystal ball. So I can give you a lot of credit for that. So thank you for doing that. Number two is when rates are going up, and the stock market is volatile. And people are using the R word recession, people can become very fearful and a confused or fearful mind will always say no, and they’ll stay on the sidelines. Right. And we just came from a conference in Orlando back in, I think it was November, early November. And one of the speakers was talking about Look, when there’s blood in the street, and there’s fear and uncertainty, people kind of pull back and they say you know what, I’m gonna wait. I’m gonna wait until conditions improve or rates come down or prices come down or whatever the case may be. And real estate’s not one of those things where you can pull up your phone and see the asset mark to market every single minute of every single trading day. It just doesn’t happen that way. So by the time you say, You know what things are improving, I feel a little better about things. You’ve already missed the boat, maybe, right? And now prices start to go up again. And now you’re like, I’m gonna wait for a good deal. The deals kind of peak and I’m talking over a period of time. And you’re saying, well, deals are too expensive right now, right? I’m not gonna get in right now. It’s too expensive and like you just missed a whole cycle, because you’re on the sidelines, right? And now I’m not saying go buy anything. I’m not saying be reckless. I’m not saying do any of that stuff. Do not pencil with the deal on a spreadsheet just to go buy a deal. But if you buy it right, and you finance it right with the correct debt, and you have an investing thesis that supports that that asset in that market and that sub market with maybe a certain partner over two, there’s really no reason not to right people make money in up markets and down markets. So with that, I mean, can you comment on some of them? You know what we just don’t? Yeah, yeah,

 

Bronson Hill  15:13

absolutely. So you brought up a point and confused mind while we say to wait, or I’m not sure, I’m going to wait till this settles out? Well, in reality, there’s a couple factors going I mean, inflation, at least at the time is recording December of 22. They’re saying it’s 7.1%, officially. But if you actually look at actual inflation, it’s actually about 15%. Shadow stats is a site that basically looks at actual costs, the CPI is a manipulated index. And they’re, I guess, a whole nother topic we can get into, but let’s say it is 15%. If you have 100k, in the bank, you’re losing $15,000 a year. And if you do that over a couple years, you’re going to just do kind of keep waiting, keep waiting, it could be a while and then I don’t know, I think is interesting about multifamily right now, it can be challenging to get a deal done, the lending has changed a little bit, there’s been some different changes in the market, but there’s this incredible demand for multifamily real estate. So over time, what’s going to happen is those valuations will have to go up rents are continuing to rise, especially in the markets that we’re buying in some markets or not, but in the markets we’re buying, and they’re continuing to rise. And so when you buy a property, you’re buying prices fixed, right? So whatever price you buy it, there’s discounts, we’re seeing where there’s discounts on some of these properties, which maybe 10% or 15%, a little bit, but you can’t change that it’s fixed, but your interest rate can be adjusted later. So if interest rates do start dropping down, then you can readjust, you’re gonna you have Soliday, even a lot of the lending about 85% of the lending is more of an adjustable rate. So it will kind of drop down itself. So I think for a lot of people that are waiting, I just think it’s you got to look and say, well, compared to what right, I’m going to sit in cash or I’m going to invest I’m about 95% deployed in deals multifamily, and other types of deals. Because I don’t want to be sitting in cash, I don’t want to have the loss, almost a guaranteed loss of sitting in cash and losing my purchasing power. And that’s really how people actually take advantage of inflation. I wrote this ebook, it’s on my website, it’s called How to Use inflation to your advantage. And how you do that is instead of just being feeling the pain of it at the pump, or the pain of it at the gas station, or at the at the grocery store, you get to be on the other side where you own assets that will hedge against inflation. That’s an excellent

 

Greg Lyons  17:20

point. And you could either talk about inflation being bad, you could talk about gas prices being high and food prices. Or you could do something about it and getting into something like multifamily where you use inflation to your advantage. Again, it’s not going to lower your grocery bill, but you’re in the game. And that’s the most important thing. When you talk about investing in multifamily now non inflationary times, what markets do like to be in and kind of what are the characteristics of a market that you look for, for your investing?

 

Bronson Hill  17:53

Yeah, so I think if you buy in the right market, you can do a lot of things wrong and still make a lot of money. And so there’s this idea of the rising tide will raise all ships, right. So if I’m buying in a market that simply has growth, it has population growth, it’s got job growth, it’s got income growth, that’s going to put incredible upward pressure on rents, right? Because there’s more people coming to that area. There’s more jobs available, there’s more income available, and there’s only so much housing and it takes them all those years to add new housing. And so we’re seeing that that my favorite market in the country where we own a lot of stuff is Jacksonville, Florida. Love that area, because like where I live in Pasadena, California, this house is a three bedroom 1200 50 square foot house, it’d be about 1.2 million today. In Jacksonville, that same house is about 300,000. Right? And I’d say across the city, it’s about 96 97% occupied of all housing units, even ones that are under construction, or are ones that are being renovated or things like that. So we’re buying in an area where we’re seeing just so many new people move in why are they moving? Right? They’re moving because of the weather, because it’s Florida, because there’s a lot of retirees that like warmer weather like Florida, and also there’s no state income tax, you can live there have no state income tax, people that are remote workers with COVID, are also still continuing to move to this area. And for every person that moves there, especially older people that’s better retiring, they need health care, they need retail, they need restaurants, they need people cleaning the house. So there’s all these other people and those are the people that were really serving are kind of working class folks that are in those markets. So I love just areas that see are seeing a lot of growth. But I love that

 

Tim Lyons  19:23

there’s a second, third fourth order effects of providing a clean, safe, affordable place to live. Right. And I think we talked about it on multiple shows like when we have investors look at investment summaries, like some of the times when we have something in Florida and there’s palm trees and a sexy pool and like this out of this world gym at this class A or B plus property that we’re investing in, it gets a ton of demand, right? It just simply gets a ton of demand. It shows well, and all this stuff, but in reality, I mean, it doesn’t have to always be the glossy sexy pool and the marble or granite countertops, like we are providing a service where we’re clean, safe, affordable, streamlined, properly managed, properly priced assets. And that reward that gets rewarded right for investors and for active folks. So I love that Ronson, you are a big proponent of passive income, kind of talk a little bit about passive income, what it can provide you, why are you so passionate about teaching about it about talking about it having a podcast about it? What is it that passive income just really gets? You go?

 

Bronson Hill  20:30

Yeah, that’s a great question. I mean, I think passive income is really what we should all aspire to, we should all aspire to be full time passive investors, Warren Buffett has this quote, it’s my favorite quotes. It says, Unless you learn how to make money, when you sleep, you will work until you die. And so the idea of it’s really interesting that I think it’s something like 65, or 70% of people say they don’t like their jobs, they don’t like what they do. And I think passive income, it allows you the flexibility, especially when you can replace your living expenses. Now there’s different ways you replace your income, you replace your living expenses, your living expenses, kind of the most basic one, it’s more your rat race number that if you knew you had enough passive income to cover your basic living expenses, then you could leave your job if you wanted to. Maybe that would just get more satisfaction. No, I have my boss is me. And I could quit. And I would be okay. Most people can’t. Right. So the idea though, that you can actually make money when you sleep, you can make money, when you travel, I traveled six times this year, internationally, I’m writing a book, I’m doing things because these are things that I value, these are things that I wanted to do now, to me, it’s not about simply yachts and my ties and just not working and just not doing anything. I think it’s not about not having purpose. But it’s really it frees people up to really be able to live out their purpose. Now, some people are working a W two, or they have a business and is exactly what they want to be doing. And that’s great. But a lot of people or not a lot of people really, there’s more in them. Right? You know, there’s this saying I remember who said it, it was some famous person said, some people will die with their music still in them, kind of the idea that they have songs and they have things that are in them. And I don’t want to be somebody that dies with my music, still, I mean, actually write music as well. But there’s people that we have gifts that the world needs. And because we’re stuck in a job, we’re not really able to pursue those things. So I think I’m really passionate about it. Because most people don’t really understand what it is, or they have a misunderstanding that if I buy a house, or if I invest in Wall Street, these things are passive income, which I don’t really think they are, I mean, I guess you can have some passive income through those sources, but truly having things that you see your assets growing over time. And you’ll see like the name of my podcast is called the mailbox money show where you see the money to showing up every month or every quarter. It’s a really magical experience.

 

Tim Lyons  22:37

There is nothing better than getting an email or like the series of emails and beginning of the month, where it’s like doing your deposit of 291 67 has hit your account and you’re like, dang, like that is awesome, like, whatever it might be right. And it’s funny because to me, I still work as a lieutenant in the New York City Fire Department, but I used to be an ER nurse. And the reason why I got into this was because I was trading my time for money. 7080 90 hours a week, I have three little girls, 11, nine and three. And I was missing their lives, I was always in the car or at the hospital or at the firehouse. And when I came home, the last thing I wanted to do sometimes if I got a crush at work was to get on the forum play. And it made me crazy, right? And I realized you can’t save your way to wealth, I realized that there is something called passive income out there. If you can get past the YouTube ads, cheesy ads, or whatever it is. Passive income is real, right? It’s one of the hashtags that I use sometimes in my social media posts. And to me building out the stream of passive income, it starts small, I started small a couple years ago, it is now grown. I’m not an ER nurse anymore, right? We built cityside capital. But to me when you can play on a bigger scale and say you’re an orthopedic surgeon, or you’re a tech guy or your whatever, and you love doing that no problem, right? But having the optionality of having that passive income stream so that when something does happen, like COVID, where our physician friends who are co owners of surgery centers were shut down, right. And the government tells you you can’t practice medicine, you can’t do elective surgeries, you can’t do dental procedures. You can’t do orthodontic procedures, right. I mean, they still had mouths to feed, right? They have the receptionist and the dental hygienist and the surgical technicians and the nurses write, and all of a sudden people are like, Tim, what is it that thing that you do? What was that passive income thing you were talking about? And let me know how that works, right? Because it’s a real thing. And I find that it’s hard Bronson from our end where we raise equity for deals to convince people that passive income was real. And I’m wondering if you have that same sentiment and people will try day trading options trading. They’ll try single fan, whatever it might be. Why do people resist the passive income? I’m kind of play. Yeah, it’s

 

Bronson Hill  25:02

a good question. I mean, I think we have been conditioned to talk about Pavlov’s dogs, right? The whole thing when our bell was rung, after the when these dogs were being fed, after a while the dogs would simply salivate. In the study, they would ring the bell, and the dogs would start salivating cuz they knew that food was coming, right. So they’ve kind of so it’s almost like we’ve been conditioned by really by Wall Street, Wall Street with retirement accounts. And really what’s happened is that we’ve been convinced that these are safe, traditional investments, which I don’t think they are, I think they’re incredibly risky. I think if you have any investment that you could say, you know, this investment could drop by 30 to 50% in the next 12 months. And it’s happened multiple times historically. That’s pretty risky, right? But why do we feel like that’s traditional, it’s because they spend billions of dollars advertising and the reality most people haven’t heard of multifamily syndication, they haven’t heard of these private deals, and legally says you can’t share it. And again, that’s just why, again, why Wall Street is kind of an insider’s game, that they’re gonna make their fees. Regardless if you make money or not, I was an investment advisor for a few years. And I really saw behind the curtain as well, just to see, it doesn’t really serve people. And so I think for people to really understand, they sounds tough to meet somebody who’s a passive investor. That’s why I encourage anybody who’s listening who’s kind of on the fence, go to a meetup, go to a conference, go. If you’re in a city, you can find meetups that talk about multifamily or real estate investing. And you meet somebody who’s like been a passive investor for a number of years, that’s one of the most valuable conversations or relationships you can have, because this person has no incentive to sell you anything right there. Just simply like, I did this, and I can I know 10 People that have quit their jobs just through passive investing. And they sometimes are involved in 30, or more passive deals. And that’s a lot of deals, but some of them, they just started by doing one deal. And so I think of a call I had with a physician, who had a net worth of $5 million. And he started investing in just one deal, right? It’s just, you know, putting 75 or 100k in one deal is not a lot of his net worth. Now, for somebody who has a lower net worth that is a lot of money. But for some people there had no worth. It’s not a lot of money. And and the biggest thing you’re looking for is growth and learning, right? Is it Do I like this? Is this something I enjoy? Is it something that actually works the way that it should, and for the most part, as long as you are not following somebody who just simply advertise on the internet about a deal that you have somebody who’s got a reputation, and the deal will probably go fine. But the most important thing is that you learn and it’s really that skill of when I see people that they’ve invested in the cashflow starts coming in all of a sudden something shifts in their mind. And I can see they actually start figuring how they’re going to deploy more capital and invest in more deals, right? So it’s not just even the the money you make initially with the invest, it’s basically you’re almost convincing yourself, whether this can work or not. Right.

 

Greg Lyons  27:37

That’s an excellent point. And, you know, Tim, and I often say that real estate has a marketing problem, versus Wall Street, right, because it’s that same Pavlov’s dog, you know, we’ve been getting conditioned to do the same thing with our money. But with people like you are different podcasts and stuff like that, hopefully, the marketing is going to shift a little bit to make this a little bit more mainstream, I’d say yes, this is a good part of my portfolio doesn’t necessarily have to be the whole part of your portfolio. But if you allocate a little bit towards real estate, syndication, and different things like that, I think it’s a really good balance that people can achieve. You’re very passionate about passive income, real estate, you know, your stats, but you’re also writing a book, you’re traveling, you’re basically a machine. Okay, and we’ve loved having you on the podcast because of that. Can you talk about your mindset, right? Because you probably weren’t always into passive income and those sorts of things. You’ve always had your passions, but talk about your mindset and kind of getting into the real estate world and how that served you going forward?

 

Bronson Hill  28:45

Yeah, so I have 42 years old. Now, as I approached 40 people before that, I started to realize, really what is important to me what I want my life to be about. And I feel like if you’re in your 30s, or 40s, or your 50s 60s, we only have so much time. And as you get older, say say the time goes faster is when you have kids, it goes so fast. And people already says that. And so I think it’s really important. I do a lot of a lot of time reflecting just what do I want, whether it’s putting a whiteboard out there, or what do I want life to look like in 12 months? Or in five years? Or what sort of impact do I want to make in the world? And I think these things are really, really important. Because if you can do that, if you can say, hey, I want to be out of my job in three years, and that’s not my dad, I want to be out of my job for years, and I was able to do it. And how did I do it is I created an intention, right? Tony Robbins says that it’s in your moments of decision that your destiny is shaped so if you make some goal, it’s a big lofty goal. If you make that goal, and then you read it, you keep it in front of you every day. Yeah, I literally have my goals I read every single morning, I read my intentions and my affirmations every single morning and that stuff can sound a little hokey but like, what happens is as you say it and as you look in the mirror and you’re basically saying these things to be true about yourself, your life begins to change. So my net worth has gone up 20x In the last four years, right, I’ve been able to travel a lot. I’ve read 77 books this year. You know, these are things that like I’ve had goals and intentions around. And they wouldn’t happen unless actually created those intentions. So it can sound a little woowoo. But really, it starts with, if you’re not where you want to be, then you’ve got to look and say, Well, I want to be here. And then you just start, what are the actions that are going to get me closer to that, right? And it may not be the you don’t know, maybe you just okay, well, I’m gonna go to a meet up, and I’m gonna go to a conference, and I don’t, maybe it will help and all these things, they kind of help redirect us. And over time, you kind of you find it. So it’s not like there’s any specific path of like, you just do this, and you go here to there. And some people, if you have like $5 million in the bank, I can create a plan of yours, you start investing in a deal or two. And then after 612 months, you start investing and more, there’s things you can do like that. But for a lot of people, it’s just what don’t want life to look like. And it comes down to really spending time with understanding your values, and then just saying, How do I live daily to work toward those things?

 

Tim Lyons  30:47

Oh, that my friend, it’s called a mic drop moment, if you miss that, or you didn’t take all that in, I highly encourage you pull the car over and get the notebook out. And you have to just re listen to that, because that was just gold. So that’s why we brought Bronson on to the show, because that’s what I’ve heard him do in the past. So I love that. So thank you. Thank you for that. Bronson. It’s been awesome. I feel like I could talk to you about a ton of things. I feel like we’re gonna have to have you on probably quarterly because no short, no fewer than about five different topics that I want to cover, but we just didn’t have the time. So with that being said, We’re gonna transition into our short answer piece. And the first question we ask all of our guests is when someone and you’re going to be really good at this one having done 13 101 on one calls, when someone you talked to says, You know what, Bronson real estate is too risky? What is your retort to that kind of statement?

 

Bronson Hill  31:43

And one hand, I don’t try to convince people if they’re not convinced there’s plenty of people that they’re reasonable. They’re gonna say, Well, I would ask, what’s the reason you say that, and usually, there’s some story associated with it. They were a bad landlord, and they gave up on real estate, whatever. But in reality, you look at large multifamily, super safe asset class during the worst point in the Great Recession, the single family and again, the people who lump real estate together recall one thing, but single family multifamily very different at the time, the Great Recession, and there was a time where single family defaults were 4%. So one out of 25 houses in the US were actually in delinquency or foreclosure or default, or there was some problem with the payment of the home, which is high, but at the same time, large multifamily meaning 60 units or more was point 4%. Right. So it’s 10 times less. So it’s one out of every 250. So I would say if you look at history, and you look at the stats, I mean, it says it’s probably the most stable bread and butter of you know, it’s called the bread and butter of investing. It’s just such a great asset class. So I mean, I would just ask people, what’s your data? How do you why do you say that? And it’s usually some story where they didn’t learn from the kind of mismatch or something or didn’t learn. So that’s my answer. I guess.

 

Greg Lyons  32:51

A lot of times great uncle Charlie lost a couple of dollars to some guy and the whole thing so we hear that as well. Second question is from Robert Kiyosaki. A lot of people in real estate have gotten their start reading Rich Dad, Poor Dad. And in one of his books, Robert Kiyosaki says savers are losers. debtors are winners. What does that mean to you? Yeah,

 

Bronson Hill  33:15

I quote that a lot. Savers are losers. And it’s not that they’re not winners. As far as personality and prospects. They’re losing, they’re losing money, right? They’re losing money. And like kind of what we said about the 100k in the bank right now is losing, I think over $15,000 a year. So if you’re in debt, there’s two positives to being in debt. By buying real estate, right, you’re buying an asset that you know, is going to be worth more than five to 10 years due to inflation, rents and inflation go hand in hand, which means the value of these properties is going to continually go up over time. And so it’s going to be worth more and then you’re also paying it off with dollars that are gonna be worth less in the future. So it’s a double positive, right? You know, that spread is going to grow because it’s worth more and the dollars that used to pay off the loan is gonna be worth less. So I think, yeah, getting into debt, as much debt as you can good debt, not credit card debt, buying crap, but buying assets,

 

Tim Lyons  34:02

boom, buying cash, flowing assets, that’s the name of the game. And once you once you can wrap your head around that it’s a whole different lifestyle. So number three, in the final question is from Jim Rohn. And he has said something that means a lot to Greg and I and he said, a formal education will make you a living and a self education can make you a fortune.

 

Bronson Hill  34:24

Yeah, so I couldn’t agree more. I just was listening to Jim Rohn book. And I think there’s two things that there’s actually another quote that I love, it says, you’ll be the same five years from now, except for the books you read, and the people that you meet, right. So the books you read, or the educational part of that. And then the people you meet, that’s the networking and I’ve just looked at like my life and how my net worth has gone up. Oh, it’s because I made this partnership with this guy over here. Or because I was able to learn how to syndicate I would learn a little learn about these other types of investing or about inflation or other things. So I think those two things are incredibly powerful. So Brian Tracy says if you want to earn more, you have to learn more. So that’s one of my goals is to always be learning something.

 

Tim Lyons  35:03

Well, it’s funny. I have my masterminds that I attend in person, virtually. And then I have my masterminds like Napoleon Hill talks about, and it’s Jim Rohn. It’s Brian Tracy, it’s Robert Kiyosaki. I’ve never met these folks. Right. But I read their stuff. And I listened to their audios and just, it’s incredible what can happen. And I agree, some of it sounds woowoo. And I used to be incredibly, incredibly skeptical about all that stuff. But once you start living it and you see the power of it, it’s something else. Bronson, how can people if they want to reach out find out more about you, your podcast, your YouTube channel, all that stuff? How can they find you?

 

Bronson Hill  35:41

Yeah, so I run the mailbox money show. That’s our show, we do weekly on passive investing similar topics to this, we just had Ken McElroy on recently. So which is a lot of fun talking to guys like him about investing. And then I have this guide, which is how to use inflation to your advantage. It’s 52 color pages, some strategies I mentioned about how you can not be hurt by inflation, but a actually help you and grow your wealth. So I’m also on social media, but my website is the best way Bronson equity.com. It’s the best way to reach out. I

 

Tim Lyons  36:09

love that. So Bronson, thank you so much for spending your time with us here today. We’re grateful that you made time. We look forward to serving all the listeners again next week. Thank you for listening to another episode of the passive income brothers podcast. We would be grateful for your support of our podcast by giving our show a five star rating and review and subscribing to our show on your favorite podcast platform. Don’t forget to take inspired action after listening to this show, so that you can start building out your passive income streams. Finally, head on over to cityside cap.com to connect with us and find out more information about how to get started passively investing in real estate