 If you want to learn what not to do when you're investing in real estate, keep watching this video. I want you to know that this is my life. This is real. Relationships are universal. What's up everybody? Ricky Caruth here. Welcome back to my channel. So today I want to talk about real estate investing. Most of my content here on my channel is focused towards real estate agents and helping them succeed because that's what I do. I'm a real estate agent for 17 years, highly successful and I've turned around written two books and I coach real estate agents for absolutely free. However, I do a lot of real estate investing as well on the side and I wanted to do a video here and just give you my story behind what I did, how I've done it and where I am now and just give you a different perspective. I'm not the guru of real estate investing. I'm just here to share with you my experiences so hopefully you can pick something up for me and go out there and succeed. I'm going to start creating more content around my real estate investments, give you guys some inside details about what I'm doing and how I'm doing it. So if you haven't already, click subscribe. Now will be a good time to do so and don't forget to hit the bell and smash that like button. So today is kind of my introductory video into the real estate investing world. So I just want to give you my background and story real quick in this video. So I got a real estate as a real estate agent in 2002. I made a million by the time I was 23. So as a 23 year old with a million dollars, never had money, parents never had a lot of money, didn't know quite what to do with this pile of money that I had. I started to invest in real estate. So I was a complete beginner in the real estate investing game and I was in a very inflated market that had really surged over the last couple of years. So here I am 23. You know, I got in real estate just as the market was starting to heat up. That's why I made a million dollars so quickly because I just was in the right place at the right time. Now I'm thinking back. A lot of people would have said I was in the wrong place at the wrong time, but I feel like I was in the right place at the right time because I made a lot of mistakes, but I learned from those mistakes and now I'm on the right track, which I'll explain here in a minute. So when the market crashed, I lost everything I had. I was negative. I went bankrupt, slept in my car, went back to the roofing house, was working on the oil rig. I was at absolute bottom. So how did this happen? How did I go from millionaire overnight to broke sleep into my car? The answer is really simple. What I was doing was I was flipping properties. So I was going for short term investments. I would buy a property, flip it immediately, make whatever I made, 30, 50, 100,000, and I would take that money, roll it into another property, and flip that property really quickly. So I was just short term investing and I was borrowing a lot of money. So as this went on, I got to the point where I had several properties that I was flipping at once. And I just kept going and going and going. So as the market went up, I was flipping and flipping and as it teetered off, I said, uh-oh, what's going on here? And I was borrowing most of the money to pay for these properties and that was paying interest only. So my notes were really large because I had so much debt and as the market teetered off and started to come down, it ate up all the equity that I had. And then the interest payments ate up all the cash that I had because I hung in there as long as I could because nobody thought that the crash was going to take that long to recover. It just kept going and going and going and going. It was just a never ending crash. It was just a never ending recession. And you know, when the market started to teeter, I was about at a million and a half in debt, which is a lot for an old country boy roofer from Alabama. So as the market started flattening out and go down, I ended up selling a lot of these properties for exactly what was owed. So I got those paid off, but I didn't sell all of them, ended up having to foreclose on some of these properties. And that's how I ended up losing everything. So it was a really eye-opening situation. And everybody knows my story that's subscribed and been following me for a while. But during that time, I read 100 books. I was really curious of why I failed. And I was really in a search for knowledge to figure it all out. And one thing I figured out in my real estate business was that it could have kept going if I would have valued relationships over transaction and more focused on the people instead of the deal. And on the real estate investing side, I realized that I was thinking too short term in my investments. You know, when you think short term and you're betting big on short term and then something happens, you're going to lose big. So in 2008, I was laid off from the oil rig and kind of forced back in a real estate, which had already kind of started dabbling back into it. I had a couple of deals on the works and luckily a few things closed. I was back in the business and so I just started building my business based on relationships over transactions. I focused on the people and I just focused on my real estate commission business, my real estate agent business for many years. And then after about three years, I was able to have a friend co-sign for me to buy a little condo for 68,000 in Gulf Shores and ended up paying it off in about two years. And since then that condo is worth 150,000 today. And I own it free and clear. I rented out long term and it's something I'll probably never sell. I also picked up a couple other little condos when the market was at the bottom that I still own today. They've all doubled or more in value and they're just properties that I probably will never sell. I paid cash for all these properties so I didn't go into debt. I was scared of going dead after what happened to me last time. But then as time went on and the more comfortable I became with investing in real estate again, I took the plunge and did get into some more debts. I now at the point of this video have 10 rental properties. I owe about 400,000 on these rental properties and together they're worth about 800,000. My income is much higher than my expenses, therefore they are paying the loans off for me as well as giving me a nice little cash flow. So I have some condos that I own free and clear that I'll never sell. I have 10 rental properties that I owe about half of what they're worth and give me a nice cash flow. Okay, those are all long term investments for me. I'm just letting them sit there and just build and build and build and build. Meanwhile, I'm looking for more good deals on rental properties. I would love to get those 10 up to 20 and up to 30. I would like to have 30. I guess that would be my goal is to get it up to 20 and then maybe up to 30 and then kind of see how I feel at that point. Of course it's probably going to take me a good three or four to five years to get there. I'm just doing it slowly. I'm being patient. I'm not in a hurry. I'm waiting on good deals and good locations. I also like to invest really close to my home. All of my long term rentals are actually in Foley, Alabama, which is only about 15 minutes away. So it's a good location. It's where I went to high school and it's far enough away from the beach where it won't really get any hurricane damage. There's no flooding issues. So there's a lot of benefits to being right there in Foley and it's still close to me. If I need to go there for something, I can easily do that. Now let's talk about my short term investing in real estate. So I also flip about one house a month. I have two other partners. We buy them when we find good deals. We normally pick up on average about one a month. Flip it. We fix it up. We flip it and we pay cash for everything. We're not barring a dime on that and it's easy because you have three partners. So you know it's third of the cash, third on everything. We get back a third when we sell it and it's worked out really nicely. We've been at that for maybe two, a little more than two years, probably maybe two and a half years. So that's my little short term investing, real estate investing, you know, operation that I have going on on the side and it's worked out really well. I feel like when you're flipping properties, you know, you should be in a situation where you're buying them, selling them quickly. I'm also diversified with my long-term investments and I have plans to grow that business as well. I think the key here is diversification. And if you're flipping them quick and the market starts to change and the market crashes, you can't get hurt too bad if you only own a couple houses at once. Right? Especially if you own them cash, you have a lot of options at that point if the market turns on you. If you borrow a lot of money and you're flipping, right, if you're in debt on short-term investments, then you could get into a buying really quickly like I did. So I like to be cash on my short-term investments and I feel comfortable that if the market changes, you know, maybe we'll lose money on a couple of investments if the market changes drastically. However, we can get out of those investments and then whatever the new market levels will be price-wise, we can make adjustments and start buying things under the new market level. So I'm in a position where I can't get hurt too bad on my short-term investments. Really, it can't get hurt at all. And on my long-term investments, that is a recession-proof situation. People are always going to need places to live. Regardless of what the market does, those investments will always pay theirself off. Even if the market crashes really hard, say rent comes down a little, I still have enough positive cash flow of cushion where the rent, if it did come down, it would at least still continue to pay the properties off for me. I don't see that happening, by the way, just so you know, I don't see rent going down. Rent may even go up in a recession a little bit, just due to the fact that people are having to foreclose other houses and forced into renting. So this video, like I said, is just an introductory video just to kind of give you the foundation of where I've been, where I'm at, what I'm doing as far as my real estate investing portfolio goes. And like I said, I'm not a guru. I'm not saying that I know everything about real estate investing. I just want to share with you what I do and what I've done, and hopefully you could pick something up that will help you. And I'm going to make more of these videos to go in depth with some of the details of particular deals moving forward, just so you can learn from them. I think the moral of the story for me is I don't want to borrow a lot of money for short-term investments. I want to have a pretty good safe bet on a lot of different things. I want to be diversified. I want to have long-term game plans. I want to have short-term game plans and everything in between. So I hope this video helps you. Hit that like button, comment below, let me know what you think, and let me know if there's anything in the world I can do for you. Let's go!