Unlock Your True Earning Value Through Real Estate Investing – Dustin Heiner

 

Dustin Heiner  00:00

We build the entire business, get everything in the business to run itself. And then we buy the property and put that property into our business as a piece of inventory. Now gurus will say, your property is your business. No, no, my business owns inventory and the properties are my inventory. Welcome to the passive income

 

Greg Lyons  00:17

brothers podcast. Here we

 

Tim Lyons  00:19

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 Lyons and today I’m joined by two rockstars, one of which being my brother Greg, how you doing today, buddy?

 

Greg Lyons  00:34

Tim, that introduction will never get old when you call me a rockstar, I really appreciate that. I mean, that one feels good, but not making this about me when we bring Dustin on. This is a really cool story. And I think a lot of people are gonna get some value out of it. He has a great tagline successfully unemployed. I mean, you can’t beat that. So I’m really looking forward to today’s conversation.

 

Tim Lyons  00:56

Likewise. And listen, I got a chance to meet Dustin after being introduced to him by a friend of mine, Andy Dickerson from good egg investments. And I had a chance to go fly out to Arizona last year and go to his conference called The Real Estate Wealth builders conference Rubicon. And it was awesome. I mean, it was really truly an awesome conference, I got a ton out of it. I got made a lot of great connections, even had a chance to speak on a panel on his stage. So I appreciate that, Dustin, but enough about us. Let’s hear about you. So welcome to the show. And thank you for taking the time to speak with us today. Yeah,

 

Dustin Heiner  01:33

thank you so much, guys. Yeah, really appreciate being on the show. I love real estate investing. In fact, that’s what really allows me to be successful unemployed, that’s where you don’t work for somebody else. But you have the ability to make money to provide for yourself and your family. Without working that I call it the j ob that just over broke job. And so I love being able to get my podcast, I go to the gym, come on my hang with my family and come on podcast, and Dr. Pig great people like you guys. So thank you so much for having me on the show.

 

Tim Lyons  01:58

Yeah, I mean, listen, it’s amazing that we can spend a Tuesday afternoon for us morning for you, and just kind of chat with friends. So Dustin, I’ve heard your story before it is very powerful. And I think the listeners would get a lot out of it. So can you bring us back to pre successfully unemployed? What’s that look like? Keep in mind that psychology and mindset plays so much into real estate investing. So if you’re driving, I highly encourage you pull the car over, get the notebooks out, get the pens out, because this is going to be a great, great episode. So without further ado, Dustin, take

 

Dustin Heiner  02:32

it away. Yeah, so I love real estate investing. But I didn’t start that way. So I’ll quickly go to the end. But go right back to the beginning, when I was 37 years old, I was blessed to be able to quit my job. I had enough rental properties, enough real estate to make me money passively. I love passive income, that I didn’t need to work eventually, at 30 Plus properties. I was like, man, even though I’m making $75,000 a year at this job, I’m losing money, I better quit so I can make more money. So let me quickly go back to the beginning. So all my life, I’ve been entrepreneurial starting businesses, that idea and stuff like that to start businesses, but I was taught just like we are all taught to go to school, they get good grades, and then take those good grades, you go to college or university, and you get more good grades get in 1000s and 1000s of dollars into debt. And you get a piece of paper, they call it a degree and you try to go to companies and try to get a career at these companies and then hopefully work 40 plus years of your life till you’re 6570 years old, and then retire on what you manage to save that entire time. Well, I’m doing that exact same thing. In fact, I was doing it so well that I got the most stable, secure job I could ever think of. I was working in California at the time, technology at a local county government. So California is not going away. Technology’s not going away. And the government is absolutely not going to go away. And so I’m working. And I have a couple businesses. So when I was young, I had a newspaper route that a lot of people nowadays don’t really know what newspapers are, but it’s you know, obviously printed news on a paper. And I would ride around on a bike at 5am and throw them and beg them on garage doors. waking people up. I had a graphic of website design company, I had a skateboard manufacturing business. I even had a pizzeria and a convenience store built them all from the ground up. But at the same time still working that nine to five, j ob and I bought one rental property. And I thought my goodness, the first check I got in that first month was $317 absolutely clearly remember that number, but it was passive income $317 Because I had a rental property that worked for me. Now I knew I needed to be an investor and Tim McGraw. You guys would know how this actually happened. Everybody realizes this, that life got in the way. I knew I wanted to be an investor, but my wife and I started having kids I had my job and all that. And so here’s what really shoved me or catapulted me into becoming a real estate investor. So by the time my wife and I had our fourth child, I went on paternity leave. That’s where the dad stays home with a mom changes poopy diapers and bonds with a baby and all that good stuff and I go up Are you leaving to get back to work? I get a call from my boss’s boss’s boss’s secretary at 330 on a Friday, and she says Dustin, would you please come to the office? And I said, Sure. And I hung up the phone, and I pause for a second. I thought, This isn’t normal. Why are they calling me to the office. And at the same time, I was thinking a couple months prior, before I went up maternity leave, there were some rumors or some rumblings going on that there could potentially be layoffs because the county was hurting on money. And I immediately took it off. So there’s no way I got plenty of seniority here. I’ve literally been here 1213 years, my bosses think you’d do a great job, shook it off, get up and I start walking down to my boss’s office. Now, guys, this hallway isn’t very long. In fact, it’s kind of short. But every single step that I took, it felt like the hallway got longer and longer and longer. And it felt like my feet became lead bricks, because I started getting to the idea that I could potentially lose my job. Well, I get down the hallway, I turn the corner, and I see my boss’s door, his doors closed. And I see his secretary, they’re super sweet, nice, old lady. And she says Dustin, would you please have a seat and she’s kind of trying to console me with her eyes and kind of sheepishly grinning at me because she knows everything about what’s going on. I know nothing about what’s going on. So I go, and I take my seat, and I think about my life. If I lose my job right now, all that entire plan that I was told by other people, if I lose my job, did I just waste my life doing that? And then I’ve thought, Oh, my goodness, how am I gonna feed my family? And if I can’t feed my family, does that make me a failure as a father? Does that make me a failure as a husband, as a man trying to provide for his family? Well, as I’m sitting on my hands get all clammy, my forehead gets all sweaty because the nerves of everything is just crashing down on me. And then the door to my boss’s office opens up and now walks a lady, a coworker of mine. With a piece of paper and her hands, she is noticeably distraught. Notice we have said she’s not necessarily crying, but you can absolutely tell her world has been rocked, she passes by me. And my boss says Dustin, would you please come to my office. So I get up and I go into his office and I get laid off. Remember, this is the government, nobody gets fired or laid off from the government. But I did. And this is the reason why I tell the story. So hopefully, everybody listening will understand these two principles that I learned from this. So I take that layoff notice. And I go back to my desk, and I realized two things right there. The first one is, I need to get another job, like I’m dependent on that job to feed my family. So I was really blessed praise the Lord to find another job in the same county, a different department, the sheriff’s department wasn’t having issues, check blessed to be able to get another job to bill a few my family sitting in a chair. The second thing that I realized, and this is the reason why I tell the story, I need to make sure that this never ever happens to me again, I didn’t make sure that nobody has the ability to take away my ability to feed my family. So right then in there, I realized whenever anybody would ask me the question, Dustin, what do you do? You know, we all get that question. What do you do? Well, I basically would say, I work for the local county, I do technology there. Well, I’m basically projecting the value that on myself that I put on myself as coming from my job, no, my value doesn’t come from my job. My value comes from myself and from my gun from my family. Right then in there, I realized I needed to be an investor but life got in the way, no longer would I let life get in the way. Right then then I would start telling everybody, I am an investor. Now it may so happen that 100% of my money came from my job. That’s now my part time job. I am a full time investor. So fast for the story, started buying property after property after property, each one making the a minimum of $250 a month in passive income. And then eventually, I had enough 30 Plus properties, I realized I’m gonna go ahead and quit. So last part of story. I went to my new boss, great boss and all I said, boss, here’s your two weeks notice, like I’m laying you off. You know, we laugh and joke a little bit. He says, Dustin, what are you going to do? I said, I don’t have to do anything. I literally own real estate that works for me, without me working. I make money in my sleep. And I don’t need to work a job. So the last part of the story, if you remember that hallway that got longer and longer and longer is rather short, but got longer. Well, I would walk to and from work a mile and a half every single day I’ve done this 1000 times I was downtown. I don’t want to pay for parking. I’m too frugal for that. And so this last walk that it took away from my job to get to my car, I felt like I was walking on clouds because I knew I would never ever need a job again. Because everybody your listeners you need to realize this, that you are getting paid so much less than you are worth your boss will never pay you what you’re worth. And this is how you’ll know that your boss is paying you just enough to keep you working without quitting, but not so much money. He’s taking money out of their pocket. So if you got paid for the value that you brought to whatever it is, they would go broke. So instead of that start thinking of passive income, that’s why I love your guys’s show, developing passive income. And with that, you have money coming in. You’re not dependent on somebody else who could literally take away your ability to feed your family. You’re now in deep pendent in every walk of life, and so when you have passive income, you change your life. For me, it was real estate investing. And now since then I have 40 plus hours of my life back that I now build businesses that become passive income business by hiring people, or getting investments or whatever it might be. But the only thing that I do now is create passive income. So I’ll pause the story because you guys probably got plenty questions, oh,

 

Greg Lyons  10:22

boy, I’m tired even listening to this. That is what you get yourself a drink of water, take it all in. And for our listeners, I don’t know if you could feel the energy. But I feel the energy from Dustin. And it wasn’t going to be I’m going to just do tech sit behind a desk. I mean, this man has energy to go make it happen. I think a lot of us feel that I want to be an investor, or I wanted to be an investor. And Tim, and I like to refer to that as the Daydream investor. I have the internet. So I’m on Zillow. I’m on all these loop net all these different size. What if I bought that? What if I took action? And it sounds unfortunate for you, but you almost became like a forced entrepreneur? Because you lost that job? Yeah, you got another one right away, which was great. But sometimes without that force, or that nudge, nothing ever happens. Some people never get in shape until they have a heart attack. Some people never become an investor until they get laid off from a job but kind of building up your portfolio little by little while you still have your job is a wonderful way to do things. Let’s just get in. Oh, Tim, did you hear the other thing Tim? He didn’t want to pay for parking. And he was frugal? Well, I like that. I wrote that down on my notes right resonated with me, I knew this was gonna be a good interview. But when you went from that first property to 30 properties, let’s kind of get into the nuts and bolts a little bit of what kind of properties single family with a mobile home parks? What was your kind of strategy going into building your real estate portfolio? Yeah,

 

Dustin Heiner  11:56

so I love residential, so not single family, and I have one property or one house, but residential. And so IRS and banks and all that stuff, residential before units and below. So I love for you, it’s about No, don’t get me wrong, I absolutely invest in multifamily apartment complex, I’ve got hotels and and let’s say storage units, like I invest in everything. But my bread and butter, where I make the most of my money is through residential 14 Some below. And so buying that first property, it was in 2006. So this was before the crash. And I was living in California at the time. And getting that first property. I knew that in California, the prices were so high and rents so low that I could not make money in passive income. Because remember, my only goal was to become independent, financially independent, so that I needed passive income in order to do that, like I can’t eat appreciation, or I can’t feed my family appreciation. So what we do is I went to Ohio of all places randomly, I didn’t know what I was doing at the time, and I bought a house in Ohio. But here’s what happened led into that. In 2006, I had no clue how to invest in real estate still working at dead end, j ob and I was up late like 2am Watching TV for some whatever reason. And an infomercial came on. That guy said, Hey, we’re coming to your town do a free two hour seminar. I was like, Yes, I’m gonna go teach you about real estate. So I went, it was all hype, all sales pitch to now say run to the back. It’s normally $80,000 is $1,000. Today, oh yeah, in the back. I went to that two day seminar, horrible, all more sales pitch for more coaching, like it’s now $100,000 or $20,000. For this little book, it was ridiculous, all sales pitch. Now what I did, though, any little bit that they taught me, I said, Well, I don’t have that money. So let me just try. So I did what they told me to do on that first property. The first check was great $370. But six months later, my property manager started stealing from me, because I didn’t know what I was doing. I was just taking what they said. And they literally told in my opinion, everything they’ve said, and we’ve all heard these this way to do. It’s all backwards. And so what I did instead was I created a business. And that business is now what runs itself. That’s how I scale from one to 30. I think it took me about seven years so we can get into all of that. But that’s literally what got me to scale now in residential for you it’s a blow is because I had a business that ran itself without me working.

 

Tim Lyons  14:18

So let’s unpack that. Dustin lives I think in Arizona, and he’s now investing in Ohio, he’s got a nine to five now he has kids, and you realize that you needed an alternative, right? You couldn’t just rely on your job. And I think for me as a New York City firefighter and I was a former ER nurse, that was me like I felt there. I still feel very secure as a New York City firefighter but doing that almost 18 years ago, two plus years ago. Same thing as a nurse. There’s a nursing shortage, a perennial nursing shortage I felt very secure but what I didn’t feel secure in Dustin was my time. I found myself working 7080 90 hours a day. weak, right? And that’s the time I had one. Now I have three little girls 11, nine and three. So I was bereft of time with my family. That’s what I was really losing. Right? That’s what I didn’t have my independence over. So real estate for me was solving my own problem, right? Because I needed to invest for cash flow, I needed to invest for appreciation, but I didn’t have a ton of money to get started. So I really had to get intentional and get educated about debt about structuring deals about multifamily single family. That’s the classes. How does it work, right. So, for me, Dustin, I started with a little bit of money, and I was scared, right. So I partnered with a friend of mine, Craig, love you, Greg. And we bought a three family property. And neither craigory are handy. We can’t my wife won’t let me hang pictures on the wall. Everybody knows that on the show. But we paid for a new siding and a new roof to be put on, we renovated the first four unit by ourselves, right? So we painted and we scraped and we put down new LVP flooring in the bedrooms that would tore out the old carpets. And on one hand, I really wanted that landlord experience. I wanted to know what it was like, oh, because I really wanted that end paycheck. I wanted that $317 like you talked about. And then we got it right. We’ve rented it. We had all three units. Right? We rented them out. And the reason why the triplex Dustin was because I was scared, right? I didn’t want to do a single family home because I didn’t know what I didn’t know, right. But I didn’t know that I wanted to be in real estate. And I got educated on the tax benefits and depreciation and cash flow and the five ways that real estate pays you. And that all made sense, but I needed to do it. And once I did it, I got to cash flow. I got the renters in there. Two out of three units paid for the entire project, right? If they were fully occupied, I felt good about it. But what I found was that I bought myself a third job I was self managing, right? So can you talk to the to the listeners a little bit about some of that for you, right? Like why single family? Why in not in your own neighborhood. So many gurus out there Dustin talk about financial freedom with real estate. But sometimes people like their job I love being in New York City firefighter, right? I love it. I wear it on my sleeves, like to walk away one day, right with my health and my pension and benefits and everything. But I’m not dying to leave my job. Right. So can you talk a little bit about that for how it kind of played out in your life? Yeah, totally. So

 

Dustin Heiner  17:33

I’ll address the like the thought of leaving a job. That was my goal I wanted Well, it wasn’t necessarily my goal, to not have a job it was to be independent, and not have anybody have anything over me. But that’s not everybody’s goal can easily just use financial independence. So you want to take time off, you can if you want to work whenever you want. I have had plenty of doctors work with me, because they wanted to not always be strapped to always be working at their clinic or whatever they’re working out. But they can have more time and further time. So whatever everybody’s goal is, that’s absolutely what you need grafters. Now, for me when I first got started, the reason why it was so bad the first time because I didn’t know what I was doing. When I say bad, the property manager started stealing from me within six months. So I’ll quickly give you what the quote unquote gurus will tell you. And I want you to forget it. So I’ll tell it to you really quickly, you’ll forget it, then I’ll tell you the right way to do it. And this is how I make it to where the My business is now automatic my real estate investing is automatic. So if you heard of the book, The Four Hour Workweek, the premises work, tried to build your life. So you can only work four hours a week instead of 40. Let’s get it all but I don’t want to work for hours week, I think after suckers, I don’t want to work four hours a week or four hours a month, I only work 30 minutes a month on all my properties because I have a business that runs itself. Now, let me give you what the Guru’s said what I did, following them, and how was wrong. So this is what they say, find a property anywhere in the country. And you run the numbers, making sure that you’re gonna make $50 a month of passive income, but you’re gonna be going for appreciation. From that, well, I’ll pause this and say, I don’t invest for appreciation, I will literally give these properties to my kids in generational wealth. If I sell it, then I won’t be making money. So I will literally keep it and give to my kids. So they say run the numbers, make sure you’re gonna get appreciation what you’re gonna love and make sure you’re making $50 a month in passive income, then they say spend 1000s of dollars to fix up the property, buy the property first, then spend $1,000 to fix up their property. And then you find a tenant. And then you find a property manager. Well, in my opinion, that’s just about backwards. What happens is people do this, and I did the exact same thing where I’d go and try to find a property manager and it’s hard to find I’ve had so many people come to me say Dustin I bought this property I did exactly what the Guru’s said. And then now I go to call property managers and they say, No, I won’t manage that property because I’ll get shot there. But you no longer have an asset anymore. You have a liability and then you have to try to manage yourself from let’s say, 1000s of miles away or even if it’s in your same neighbor or your city where it’s a really bad area. Instead, what we do remember now we’re Got to forget that let me give you the right way to do it. This is what I realized. So it didn’t work for me the beginning because my property managers are stealing from me. But then if I would have hung my head and say, Oh, it doesn’t work, and just give up and go back to my work in my job, I would not be where I’m at today. Now, what I did was I said, You know what, I’m a businessman, I’ve started plenty of businesses. Let me approach this from a business mindset. Let me give you example of what that will look like. So a lot of people have heard about convenience stores, you know, candy bars, and so on machines and a little store. Well, if you’re going to start a convenience store, you’re not going to sign a lease on a location, open the doors and set a box of candy bars in there on the ground. Now, you wouldn’t do that you go out of business in two seconds. What you would do though, is you would build the business. First, you get the gondolas, other shelving units, you get the countertops, cold storage, bank accounts, cash registers, insurance, employees, managers, everything in the business, before you buy any inventory. Same thing with real estate investing, we build the entire business, get everything in the business to run itself. And then we buy the property and put that property into our business as a piece of inventory. Now gurus will say, your property is your business. No, no, my business owns inventory, and the properties are my inventory. So what does that look like? Now the Guru’s told us the wrong way. This is what it looks like you said of let’s say you bought a house, you did everything that Guru has said, you say, hey, property manager. Here’s my house. Number one happy street, you know, it’s random number, address, will you manage a property to say No, I won’t manage it. I’ll get shot there. Instead of that. You built the entire business. You got experts there on the ground, you say, property manager, I’m looking to buy this property number one happy street and they say no, don’t buy it like, okay, good. They’re not going to manage it. I don’t buy that because they’re the experts on the ground. Instead, it’d be so much better. Hey, I’m gonna buy number two happy street. They say well, that’s a great area. And in fact, we have a house right around the corner, same size and everything. Zillow said it was $1,400 in rent every single month. And we tried to get 1400 but we can only get 1300. That’s expert information like Zillow is not expert Redfin, Trulia. LoopNet. Like those are not experts, who are the experts of the people on the ground. So when we build the entire business, finding the property managers, the contractors, roofers, plumbers, insurance agents, mortgage brokers, handyman, hard money, lenders, realtors, wholesalers, everybody in the business, and then we find the inventory and buy it, and put that into our inventory. That’s how I was able to scale my job. That’s literally how I don’t work at all in my business, because I’ve built my businesses so that I give everybody the systems, procedures and processes to run the business the way that I want them to run it. Now, it’s automatic now for me, because my properties work for me. And I have my managers, everybody else in the business running the business. That’s how we can scale it. That’s how we make sure we do it, right, because we have the experts on the ground doing it for us. Does that all make sense?

 

Greg Lyons  22:50

It absolutely does. And that’s the most important thing. You’re not buying yourself another job, kind of like how Tim did. But you don’t know what you don’t know when you’re getting into these things. So as you took those 30 Odd single family properties, and now you’re in a bunch of different properties, if you can tell people what are the verticals you’re in? You mentioned self storage, you mentioned hotels, have you taken that same system and bought those to those other self storage hotels? How have you been able to transition that system?

 

Dustin Heiner  23:20

So I personally have not gotten to storage, at least we’re hopefully going to get one we got one pretty close to getting under contract and everything. But anyways, 100% everything in real estate investing is all about building a business, that’s going to run itself. In fact, if you go and talk to anybody who doesn’t know investing very well, they’re gonna think of a couple different things. How do I find properties? And how do I get the money to buy them, that’s the only thing that they really think about, I thought that way when I first got started, and you know what happened to me with my property manager stealing from me, but what we do is we figure out how to run the business to run everything. And now if you’re going to buy a piece of land and just have it sit there and appreciate that’s totally different. Now, if you’re going to have a business, though, you need to make sure that you hire right. And so it’d be like starting that entire convenience store, get everything set up. And you see somebody walking on the street and say, Hey, you got a pulse, come on in here, you grab them, pull them in and say you manage my money, manage my inventory, manage my customers manage my business, not interviewing them, that would be not wise at all. What you would do is you would interview many, many people to make sure you find the right one to manage the business. Same thing with multifamily or apartment complexes, hotels, storage units, how do you want to make sure that it runs day to day today? The reason why the Guru’s tell you like they don’t even talk about that is because that’s the harder part is making sure that you have the right people in place. It’s easy to find a property and then run the numbers and then buy it. That’s the easiest thing. And so that’s what people go to. Now what I try to do help everybody to realize that’s the easy part. In fact, I have a lot of students that I coach and you also help them find a new city to invest in anywhere in the country. We invest all over the place. Nice. And with that, they say, Hey Dustin, I found it good city, I already have five Realtors sending me deals, I’m like, Whoa, stuffs up, how are you going to manage that property? If you got it, I don’t know, I don’t have property management, well, don’t go with the realtor yet, we make sure that we can manage the property I have gone to places gone to cities, couldn’t find a property manager, so I don’t invest there because I can’t manage it. Same thing with every type of real estate business, if you can’t do it for the long haul with it takes you out of the business. So the passive income is gonna be growing. If you can’t do that, then don’t do it. I make sure I can help other people do it. I’ll give you example, like the Real Estate Wealth builders conference that I built. So it’s a conference, we have every type of investing from syndications down to storage units, and Airbnb, all that sort of stuff. But I’m trying to build it or I am building it to where I have employees that are running it. So I’m trying to create a passive income business where obviously, I would oversee, I’m still working some, but nowhere near I’m working one hour and getting paid for that one hour. But for me, if you approach everything in investing or building a business, you approach it with a business mindset, how am I going to make sure it handles itself without me, then you build the systems, procedures and processes in so that it runs without you?

 

Tim Lyons  26:15

Dude, I love that if you didn’t get all that I highly suggest pull the car over, hit rewind about two minutes and really take notes about that. Because I would argue the same thing. And I’ve talked about on this podcast that buying the property or looking for the property is like probably your fifth step. And I’m going to do this off my memory. I don’t have my notes in front of me. But step number one, like I’ll save everybody the time on an intro to real estate investing book. Step number one is understand your why or your goals. Why are you doing this? What do you want to achieve out of real estate investing? Number two, is going to be building out your team, right? Your mortgage broker, your attorney, your realtor, your property management company, right. Number three is understand the market, right? What market do you want to invest in? Where do you live? Where are you comfortable investing in? Where’s the jobs going? Where are the opportunities? Where’s the household formation? Number four would be what kind of vehicle Do you want to get you to your goals? Right? Is it multifamily single family triplex is residential one to four unit? Is it industrial flex space, there’s so many ways Dustin, to make money in real estate, you really have to do those four steps first. And then the fifth step, I’d argue is finding the property that’s going to satisfy what your goals are. So I really love how you put that in there. And I mean, something I always think about Dustin, whether I go to a conference or a year I taken I listened to an incredible amount of podcasts. It’s the same information over and over and over again. How many times does Tim Lyons need to hear the same information about either goal setting financial education, financial independence, real estate investing, a psychology mindset, whatever it might be? I mean, I hear it at different ways. And sometimes it takes me 81 times to implement it in my life. Right? So doesn’t what’s holding people back from getting started taking action? I know you’re a coach, you have a coaching program, right? What are some of the things that you’re seeing, especially given today’s dynamics, rising interest rates, high inflation, and stuff like that?

 

Dustin Heiner  28:20

I’ll jump right in to the last part, rising interest rates. I’m excited, then I’ll go back to the beginning. But rising interest rates as an investor, I am so excited because other investors are not my competition. In fact, well, Dustin, if you start coaching people, aren’t you going to be coaching your competition? I’m like, No, absolutely not. Investors are not my competition. Who are my competitions, homeowners, they’re the ones that way overpay for properties that pay 10 to 20%. There, they fall in love with it, and they over bid know what I do. As an investor. I capture equity when I buy the property. And so what I do is I make sure I buy it for less than it’s worth. So I capture that equity. And so with that, interest rates rising is good for me because it priced out all the homeowners because they can’t afford that 400 to 500,000 our house. In fact, in the desert here in Phoenix where I live houses are going for like three bedroom, two bath $450,000, almost 500,000 hours, I thought I’m thinking to myself, this is the desert, nobody pays $500,000 for a three bedroom, two bath. This is stupid. So prices are going to correct. So I’ll just quickly say that. I’m super excited. I think 2023 is gonna be the start of the best time ever to invest in real estate. So you guys need to be listening to Tim and Greg and if you’re listening to this, like stay listening to keep growing because you need to be there because there’s gonna be a wave of amazing real estate investing. And just like if you’re surfing, you don’t want to paddle after the wave passes you you will never catch it. You want to paddle before the wave cancer’s you so you can catch that wave, right all the way in. So start now now with that what’s holding a lot of people back and what held me back honestly, was two things risk and fear, the risk tolerance that people have and the fear of what could happen. The reason why I tell that story, the very, very beginning I lead with my story of me being laid off, literally just had our fourth child is because I realized, and I hope everybody listening to this, you realize this, it’s more risky working for somebody else, it’s more risky, putting your life in somebody else’s hands, then making sure that you have your own life in control of yourself, where you’re independent, is so much more risky. So it’s more risky to work for somebody else than to invest in real estate. We’re taught from the very beginning when we start going to school to be a cog in a machine work one hour get paid for. And that’s literally how we’re taught. So that’s all we know, we don’t we look at Oh, that investing in that thing, or that thing over there. That’s risky, because you’re not taught that you don’t know that. The biggest reason why I have my podcast, the master passive income podcast, it’s just a solo show, basically, rarely do interviews, and I just literally just give out all this information, because I found that information or knowledge is power that really helps them to realize, you know what, it’s actually not as hard as I think it is. And it’s not as risky. Because Tim, you just gave up the steps. Now, I personally would just order them just a little differently in order, but they’re the right steps. 100% the right steps. There’s a simple steps, it’s not easy. If it was easy, everybody would do it. But it’s simple. Just step 1234, and five, and if you do that, you’re realizing that, oh, my goodness, that was so much more simple than I made it out to be. And it’s not as risky as I thought it was, here’s a great thing. One of my students get past that risk, and fear, they buy their first property, once we build a business, we have the experts do the work, we buy our first property, I kid you not. The first property takes maybe three to four months, once they start working with me. And usually it’s like a year or two years of them trying to do on their own. And eventually we get to working three to four months, I kid you not the second property usually comes within the next month after that it’s so much faster, because you’re like, Oh, my goodness, it was that easy. Yes, it’s that easy. But you already have the entire business built up so that it runs itself. And what you got to do, like I said, Buy another piece of inventory, just like a candy bar, putting that into your business, you’re gonna just find another piece of candy bar and other candy bar other piece of inventory and put into your business. So what I see is people getting out of their own ways, and realizing what we’ve all been taught from the very beginning where we’re born. That’s probably good for 75% of the population, but the 25% of population and listen to your show, Tim and Greg, that’s not them. We need to make sure that we now listen and learn and grow so that we can say how do I create more passive income and get out of being a cog in a machine but then start employing other people. So that’s what I’ve seen it being the biggest hurdle for most people.

 

Tim Lyons  32:36

Again, a mic drop moment from Dustin Heiner. Right? That’s incredible. Well, first of all, I want to stack on top, this is the law, the first deal kicks in. And then across the the whole real estate investing landscape, you do your first deal, and the second one, a third one and fourth one and come right behind it. And there’s so much easier, right? And here’s the thing, Greg, and I and Dustin, we didn’t invest, we didn’t invent real estate investing, right? We’re simply taking the ball and running down the field with it from all the predecessors, all of our coaches, all of our mentors, people who came before us, because if you’re chasing somebody that’s not doing the thing that you want to do, you’re chasing the wrong person, you have to be chasing somebody that’s ahead of you, you got to paddle like Dustin said, paddle ahead of that wave, right? And out of your comfort zone, because the growth doesn’t occur in your comfort zone, it occurs outside of your comfort zone, right. And also, I really think that in 2023 that we’re in right now, people are really focused on the event, right? We always talk about Greg and I talked about the event, the Bitcoin billionaire, hitting the lottery, picking the stock, right? That’s gonna go to the moon, and you’re gonna be on easy street tomorrow. And that’s not the way it works, right. But I want to tease it out. I want to tease it up. Because Wall Street has a great marketing machine saying, look, the buying, Lord, say and I’m just making up numbers here, over the course of you know, history, the real estate, the stock market returns 8% per year, so just sock it away, sock it away, dollar cost average. And then you’ll be on easy street one day, and they’ll show you a nice picture of a yacht, you and your honey bunny walking down the beach. That’s not how it is right? You have to take your control, you have to build it out right here right now. And it’s one piece at a time, it’s one step in front of the other, right, because Dustin didn’t have 30 houses on his first day real estate investing. But he had the proof of concept with 317 a month in passive income. And he took that proof of concept and he moved into the second property and the third, and he refinances the first one and uses that for the fourth one. And you can see how very quickly you can snowball this thing into your two weeks notice into your boss. So Dustin, I want to be super mindful of our time. We still have a lot to get through. So we have the last three questions on our show, but it usually takes a little longer than we expect. So with that being said, let’s get into the first question and you You being an investor and a coach and a mentor and being in the space, right and running your own conference, which is amazing. By the way, you know, I’m sure you come across this question quite often. And it’s maybe from a brand new investor, or maybe from a non real estate investor, they’ll say, Dustin, I really want to get involved in real estate investing. But isn’t investing in real estate too risky? If someone tells you that, what is your response?

 

Dustin Heiner  35:27

It’s more risky, putting your life in somebody else’s hands, who has the power to literally just take that away from you. Because I have literally experienced that firsthand. Now, the reason why I tell the story is because I believe and then the same is really holds true. A smart man learns from his mistakes, which is great. But a wise man learns from other people’s mistakes. I literally got laid off. And there’s another saying, that is just terrific. I didn’t understand when I first read when I was 17, or 18. I heard of it says, it’s not if you get fired or laid off from a job, it’s when it will happen, obviously, what did the government I said, I’m gonna work for the government, it should be totally fine. No, absolutely not. One more saying I love losing the same. Because when you think about the risk that you’re thinking, Ah, it’s too risky to do that with all retaught. But if you learn something new, you’ll be able to do that just like you’re doing ever you’re doing now. I love this quote, When is the best time to plant a tree? Well, it was 20 years ago, the next best time is literally today. You don’t want to be listening to this podcast, and 20 years from now thinking, oh, man, I was listening to Tim and Greg, and I really wish I would invest back then No, no, you want to be 20 years from now saying I’m so glad I took action now. Because life doesn’t change. Unless you make a change. Life doesn’t get better unless you do something about it. If we just keep being complacent, or we just keep going for this, not to say status quo. But like, you don’t put yourself out there. Nothing ventured, nothing gained, in fact, for me, apparently got a bunch of quotes, because these are all coming to my head right now. But yeah, necessity is the mother of invention. I lost my job. So I had to do this, I would not let this go. If that never happened, I might not be here where I’m at right now. Because that woke me up. And so the reason why I tell this story is so that hopefully wakes you up so that you can be wise and learn from my mistake, because it will happen. So my suggestion is get past the idea of risk. If you learn something new, that risk kind of melts away because you understand it, and you’re able to do it. But once you do that first one, you’re 100%. Right, Tim, the second one comes so much faster.

 

Greg Lyons  37:32

Yeah, it really seems like you were able to plant the flag and say from this point forward. I’m a real estate investor, no matter what other things you had going on kids jobs or anything. I’m an investor. And I think a lot of people miss that sometimes because they think they have to hit the home run, rather than investing just a little bit at a time building a portfolio, whether passive or active. So that’s a great answer. Our second question is from one of our de facto mentors, Robert Kiyosaki. And this is an interesting one just because of the state of the economy and higher interest rates. But but he said savers are losers. And debtors are winners. What does that mean to you? 100%,

 

Dustin Heiner  38:13

right. And, in fact, I was always doing the work one hour get paid one hour, you know, earned income. Until I read Rich Dad, Poor Dad, I was like, what? What’s this new thing about passive income? What no work? How do I get that. And that’s what got me the route of let me figure out how this passive income thing works. 100% If you’re saving just inflation alone is going to destroy your wealth. If you’re thinking, Well, I’m getting, let’s say, 3%. That’s the if you put a savings account, you might be like point 1% at most. But if you actually find maybe a CD or something a mutual fund, money market account, three to 4% inflation right now is at least 10%. Now the government trying to say it’s 7% 8%, whatever, and I I know my bill is at least 10 to 10% more than it should be with that you’re losing seven, let’s just give you fair, like easy numbers 3%, you’re trying to earn in passive income, in a sense with interest when you put your save your money. And then inflation is 10%. Well, you’re losing 7% in buying power, your money is worth less than $8 that you have. So that’s number one. Now, I love borrowing money. Because we think about we borrowed money to buy a car, we borrow money to buy a house. Well, those things usually don’t make us money. But what does make us money is if we borrow money to make money, I’ll give you example, again, back to the convenience store analogy. Let’s say you have a candy bar, you know without a shadow of a doubt you can sell it for $1 all day every day many, many people would want it for $1 but it costs you 50 cents to buy the candy bar you make 50 cents. Well, that’d be great. But let’s say you don’t even have the 50 cents to buy a candy bar. It costs you 25 cents to borrow the money other people’s money to borrow 50 cents your out of pocket. 75 cents total. Remember 25 cents to borrow They 50 cents, so you’re out 75 cents total, we’re going to be making 25 cents every single category. So why not do that over and over and over again. And the reason why we do this is because we build a business, if you’re going to build a business, and you buy the candy bar for $1.25, and you could only sell for $1, why would you do that business, you’d be losing money 25 cents every single candy bar, what we do is we build a business that makes money for us, every single property, we don’t buy the property, unless it makes $250 a month in passive income every single month. And I’ll give you the quick numbers of how to scale it. One property at $250 a month is $3,000 a year in passive income 10 properties is $2,500 a month, $30,000 a year without working 20 properties is $5,000 a month, $60,000 a year without working. And when you do that, you could just keep scaling it from there. Now I personally believe if you’re going to borrow money to make money build the business first. So you know, just like the candy bar analogy, you will always make money.

 

Tim Lyons  41:05

I love that right there. Again, that’s a third mic drop that Dustin had for us. If you missed that, you gotta rewind that, because that was incredible. That was in the third question is from a guy named Jim Rohn. He’s another de facto mentor of ours. And we’ve covered it. So I’m going to pivot to another Jim Rohn quote that I have right, memorize them in the back of my mind. He says that you are the average of the five people you spend the most amount of time and width I should say. Now for Greg and I that’s been instrumental in our business. What does that quote mean to you, Dustin?

 

Dustin Heiner  41:38

It is 100%. Right? In fact, I’ll give you this real estate is not about properties. Business is not about a product. Life is not about experiences, but real estate’s about people. Business is about people, life is about people. And so if you have that perspective, how do I help people? How do I serve people? How do I get them what they want, so they can eventually get me what they want, or what I want, which is Zig Ziglar said that I believe he said that if you get people around you that you can serve, and they serve you at the same time. Hopefully you get around people that are givers just like yourself, then life gets better and better. In fact, my goal now is to serve as many people as possible. And so the more people that I serve, the better my life gets, the better other people’s lives. But in order to get there, though, I have to get beyond myself of my limited view of what I see. And what I know. Remember, we all grew up telling every tells us get active income work one hour get paid for one hour. It wasn’t until I got around Robert Kiyosaki in his book Rich Dad Poor Dad that my mind was blown at my goodness, you can make passive income. That’s why I created MasterPass avec my branded podcast and everything like that was because once I bought one rental property, it made money without me working, I mastered passive income, let me teach other people how to master their own passive income. And so with that, what I’m seeing for myself is that as we have more and more people around you, more books to read more podcasts and listen to I keep listened to Greg and Tim’s podcasts, you’re gonna be getting around other great people that aren’t getting their insights. On top of that, that’s the knowledge that’s the learning. But on top of that, those people they don’t know you, like, if you’re listening to podcasts right now, if you listen to my podcasts, I don’t know you. But it’s better if I know you, then we can help each other out. So that’s why I created the Real Estate Wealth builders conference. I love in fact, it was so great this last year 2022, I brought 28 of my friends, other podcasters they have their own coaching their own students, everything, their audiences, we brought them all together, like my high level friends. I brought them for everybody to meet. This year, we have 37 I think 37 Now, expert investors, bringing all my friends together. So sharing it to everybody else at the Real Estate Wealth builders conference. Because I found as I get around people who have a different perspective, different mindset that are higher level than me, oh, my goodness, I can’t help but grow because they’re saying, Hey, did you see this? But have you seen it this way? I’m like, Oh, my goodness, that blows my mind. Like what? No, I didn’t see that. Thank you so much. Also, one more thing. I also love being around people who are below in a sense, like they’re steps behind me to help them along because it helps me to teach better, so that I know my own business better. But at the same time, I’m serving them. Eventually, like people that I’ve coached. They’re now coaching with me, because they come on to master passive income as coaches one on one coaches, because they’ve done so well, and they want to get back as well. So all the above real estate is about people, not about properties. Business is about people not about products.

 

Tim Lyons  44:41

I love that. And you know what, Greg and I always talked about this when we’re climbing the ladder of success, and we’ve had a rapid rapid growth in the real estate space. The people who we learned from were on a higher rung on the ladder, right? And they had one hand up on the ladder and they had one hand reaching down below for them to pull us up and now that we’re in a position to kind of do that through their podcasts and through just phone calls, like we don’t have a coaching program yet at least. But that’s the power of this space. I literally couldn’t believe it being in New Yorker where everybody kind of squirrels their own stuff away, and it’s not very, I guess, comforting maybe where the guy couldn’t believe how this space everybody’s in to help everybody else and it’s awesome. So Dustin, thank you so much for your time. I’m grateful for you to come on to the show and really share your knowledge with everybody. If people want to get a hold of you and want to connect or they want to find out more about your podcasts or your book How can they best connect with you? Yeah, actually, I

 

Dustin Heiner  45:42

have a free course I just love to give out because I want to help people do you mind if I shut up everybody? Absolutely. Awesome. So if you text the word rental, r e n t a l 233777. Rental 33777 Or you can go to master passive income.com Ford slash free course all one word forward slash free course master passive income Ford slash free course. I’ll give you this course. Literally outlining everything and walking you through how to I’ve had I’ve given this out to people, they literally use this to build their business, show you how to build a business anywhere in the country. We invest out of state we love investing out of state how to build the business scale the business to where you can quit your job making $23 or more in passive income. So get that text word rental 33777 I also have my own podcast, the master passive income podcast. Like I said, it’s a solo show me just literally giving out all this information because I knew I know because I’ve seen in my students is that knowledge helps them to get more confidence that they can do it because it’s demystifying. It’s not that hard. The other thing is I have Instagram but you can find me the Dustin Heiner and I’m not that arrogant. Tim and Greg is just the only handle I could find the th e. Dustin Heiner so definitely check me out you could DM me I love chat with people on there. Also, I have the Real Estate Wealth builders conference if you want to hang out with me and all my friends these awesome investors like you mentioned, Annie good. Dickerson from good egg, she’s gonna be there as well as well as like I said 35 other investors go to rukh khan.com, R ewbcon.com, rukh khan.com, get your ticket. It’s going to be in May of 2023 2020, Florida, probably closer on the East Coast, maybe Tennessee ish. So hopefully, you guys will be able to come by. But if you use a promo code podcast, just use that promo code podcast. I know you came from Tim a great show, you’ll get 10% off, I want you to be there. I just want to see everybody invest in real estate because my goal now in life is to see 1 million people and help 1 million people to invest in real estate and hopefully become financially independent. So this is just another way for me to do that. But I really appreciate you guys having me on the show. Love

 

Tim Lyons  47:47

that. Well, Dustin, it’s been a pleasure, man. I am so happy we had a chance to connect and finally make this podcast happen. So thank you for coming on our show. And we look forward to serving you 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