 Hey, what's up guys? So today I wanted to tell you the real story behind how I lost a million dollars in my mid-20s during the late 2000s real estate crash. If you're not familiar with the story, here's how it went. I got in real estate when I was 20 years old It was 2002. I came in took me eight months to make my first sale started making a little bit after a year So I was making a lot of money selling the real estate and the way that I lost all that money was I took that money And I started flipping houses. I wasn't buying for rental income I was buying literally to sell at the next day. And so what I did was is I was leveraging I would take money I would put down on a house. I would take a loan and I would flip that property. Well every time I sold a house I would flip that money into another house I would take out another loan and I got to where I was doing multiple houses And so when the real estate market turned on a dime, I had nowhere to run I had about a million and a half worth of debt that I was paying on all the equity that had in my properties literally Evaporated overnight. I sold many of my properties for exactly what I owed on the properties and got out from under them But at the end of the day, I had to let a couple of properties go back from foreclosure I literally went through all the savings I had trying to hang on as long as I could why well all the gurus at The time were telling me that the real estate market is only going to be down for a year or two and it'll come back Well a year or two went by and it was still going down another year or two went by it was still going down This was the real estate crash that never ended So I was really young but the golden rule for me and my family who was a blue collar family that never really had any Money, but the golden rule for us was always to buy real estate But nobody ever told me that there's a right way and a wrong way There's good debt and there's bad debt and at the time since I thought I was a real estate mogul and that this is how real estate was Done. I was just buying and flipping and really thinking super short term I was not thinking about long-term at all and there my friends and lies the problem and the lesson that I learned now Let me come back to the real estate investing lessons and what I'm doing now to Secure my portfolio and really build it long term But let me also dive into the real estate sell side as a real estate agent So the one thing I did wrong there was I didn't realize that closings continue to happen And so in that market again, I was thinking short term I would sell a property and never talk to the client ever again Of course, they were never talking to me either because they weren't fixing to jump back into that highly Overvalued market and all I had to do was go out and make 10 more phone calls to make 30 more grams So again, this is how I thought real estate was done. And so I was all in I was working hard I was making it happen, but I was not securing my future. I every move I made was for a short-term gain I could not see past the next few months and I was not thinking about worst-case scenarios If I knew then what I know now Then I would have been building a database doing a weekly email building it as big as I can making sure everybody knows I care about them and I'm here to work hard for them no matter what I would also understand that closings happen No matter what regardless of market conditions and I can go out there and succeed in any market Yes, there'll be some years with less transactions than others But it's never gonna go to zero and it's always gonna be a massive amount Right now is the most incredible time for you to go out there and begin your real estate career or take your Struggling career to the next level or take your incredibly successful career and four and five and ten Exit over the next three to five years as I am your completely free real estate coach And my 60-day challenge can be found at zero to diamond comm you can go there and collaborate with the other 16,000 agents around the world as well as click the like and subscribe button so that you never miss another video in terms of What I'm doing differently now in my real estate investing portfolio What I do is is for all flips that I do right now. I pay cash for now I know a lot of gurus and a lot of people say that that's not the way to go They've even told me but listen real estate investing and investing in general is all about your specific Personal risk that you're willing to take and your comfort level around what you're doing so my current model I go out and I buy flips. I may do one a month something like that. It's pretty passive for me I'm gonna pay cash for those and I'm gonna roll those over everything that I buy. That's long-term rentals Which is quite a bit. I'm always gonna borrow money on those and look at the cash flow against expenses and Income each month So I've got a nice portfolio of long-term rentals that have debt and nice cash flow And I have several flips that are going on at all times that I pay cash for this puts me in a very comfortable Position whereas if I own house is free and clear that I'm flipping and I get caught with the market or a bad Analyst or something like that then I can just simply turn around and rent that property out Refy it and then boom. It's a long-term rental with debt so I'm always playing it super safe and Part of that is because I lost everything back in the crash So my current model is a very conservative model, but it works for me You have to go out there and figure out what works best for you. I enjoy sharing some of my stories some of the mistakes I made I hope that you can learn from them I hope you enjoyed this video and let me know if there's anything in the world that I could do for you Have a good rest of your day