How to Buy Time and Freedom with a Simple Rental Portfolio (2-Hour Workweek)

Dave:
Investing in real estate can give you so much more than just money. Today’s guest only works two hours per week. Sometimes I got to move to Amsterdam for five years. So today we’re going to explore the often hidden benefits of a life on the road to financial freedom. Hey everyone, I’m Dave Meyer. I’m the head of real estate investing here at BiggerPockets. I’ve been buying rental properties for more than 15 years. Today we have one of our all time most popular guests, someone I really look up to. It’s Chad Carson. You may know Chad from his book The Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor or his YouTube channel coach, Chad Carson. Chad is just a great example of the investing philosophies I talk about on almost every episode. These are things like finding a strategy that fits your lifestyle, keeping your portfolio manageable, and focusing on properties that fit your specific goals.
Today with Chad, we’re going to talk a little bit about the behind the scenes of real estate investing. There’s so much focus on the financial side and that is of course super important, but I want to talk about how real estate can change your life in other ways. Chad and I have both been able to live in Europe because of real estate. We’ve both made close friends through investing. Chad has had time to spearhead a park project in his local community that he’s seriously passionate about. You may not have the time to do these things if you invest in stocks or other assets, but real estate investing sort of uniquely makes them possible. So that’s what Chad and I are talking about today. Let’s bring ’em on. Chad, welcome back to the show. Thanks for being here.

Chad:
Great to be here. Thanks, Dave.

Dave:
You are, I think probably maybe the best person in the entire industry. It’s sort of zooming out and putting real estate and why we do this thing in the first place in perspective, and so I’m really excited to dive into that with you today. Maybe we could start by just having you share with us how you first realized that real estate investing could have this outsized impact not just on your finance but sort of on your total life.

Chad:
A real short version of this story is I started in 2003 and so I was 23 years old and fast forward to 2007, my business partner and I were on the go big path. We were like all in on let’s flip a bunch of properties, let’s own a bunch of properties, and we scaled up big time right before the great recession. That was brilliant right before everything crashed. The other thing I realized though was how busy we got with that kind of go big style of real estate investing. We were just going 80 hours a week flipping, making good money, but I first realized the intangible side of real estate when we made a list of things my business partner and I did. We were like, why are we doing real estate or why do we start real estate investing? Why do we start business in the first place?
And for me it was things like I want to go hiking in the middle of the day. I live in part of South Carolina that’s near the beautiful waterfalls and lots of good outdoor spaces. I wanted to travel abroad, which you and I both have that connection. My wife is a Spanish teacher, so we wanted to actually live abroad once we had kids and do that some. So I had this list of things like that, some of which involved money, but most of them were lifestyle I wanted to use. They needed time for me that was the most important. And so a certain style of real estate, which for me has been small and mighty investing of having a lifestyle real estate business was really, really important. And real estate can give that to you, but it’s not every form of real estate. If you’re always growing, if you’re always going big, if you’re always leveraging more, I think at some point it’s hard to have those intangible benefits because you’re making the most money, but you don’t necessarily have these other currencies of time and flexibility and things that you actually need to live your life and do some of those other things.

Dave:
I completely agree. People sometimes say, oh, real estate’s passive, or It’s not passive or it takes so much time or it buys you this or it buys you that, but there is just no one size fits all approach. Like you said, it can give you flexibility, but it has to be a deliberate and intentional choice to build your portfolio in that way and you deserve a lot of credit for figuring out a way to do that because I see this a lot in the industry is a lot of people start out seeking exactly what you’re talking about, seeking time, freedom and flexibility, but it is tempting, at least for me, it is tempting to sort of want to go for everything and you see people succeeding and you want to do the same thing. So how mentally did you figure out a way to step back and resist that temptation to go go and sort of just accept a portfolio and start building that portfolio that really is in line with what you actually want?

Chad:
If you want it all fast, those are two different things. The amount of money you have and the amount of time. And so I guess one way I’ve reconciled it is like if I’m just patient, if I just play the long game, I will make more than enough money. It is going to be just fine. But what I had to reconcile with myself was I specifically started choosing to intersperse these, we call ’em mini retirements. We got that from the four hour work week back in the day where we said, you know what? I’m going to press pause on my real estate business and I’m actually, instead of waiting till I’m 65 or 70 or 80 years old to try to enjoy my life, I’m going to intersperse enjoyment in these intangible benefits. I’m going to actually taste test that. I want to make sure I actually like it and instead of just waiting for this one big moment, when you get to the peak of the mountain, why not have a bunch of little plateaus throughout your career, which means you have to press pauses, which means you have to, this is where the small and mighty investing comes in.
If you’re buying one property per year, two or three properties per year and they’re residential, they’re stable, they’re small, they’re easy to manage, it is not as difficult to press pauses on that. You can buy a bunch of properties, press pauses, they’re managed, they’re good. Whereas I’ve also done things like you do a big development project or you do a big syndication that’s a 3, 4, 5 year cycle, maybe longer, and if you get caught in the middle of that cycle, there’s a lot of risk, but there’s also just a lot of time even if you’re successful. So it’s just a different business model. So I think the answer to your question is one business model being very deliberate about one property at a time, keep it simple, but then also having a long horizon. You can be super wealthy, you don’t have to throw away your ambition just to enjoy your life. Now you can do both. You just have to have a longer timetable.

Dave:
Yeah, it’s almost like how much do you want to give up upfront? You can speed it up. You can get financial freedom through real estate in, I don’t know, probably seven years, 10 years if you’re really aggressive about it. I think I’ve taken a much longer approach because it’s more aligned with my own just lifestyle preferences and risk tolerance, but there’s no wrong thing, but I think the idea here is that intention is what really matters. Honestly, I love the idea of many retirements. I’ve never done that actually just taking time off work. I’ve worked at BiggerPockets for 10 years straight now, but it is amazing how in time you do get to build your portfolio to be flexible. Sometimes maybe those mini retirements are really positive, but I actually sort of had the other experience earlier this year. I just went through a difficult time personally and just was drawn into some family stuff and I thought about it and I think I spent one hour on real estate for two months and that’s not going on a vacation for three months or retirement in the traditional sense, but I have this really high performing portfolio and I didn’t have to touch it for a while, and if I were flipping houses constantly or like you said development, I couldn’t just step away from my real estate for a month or two, it wouldn’t be possible.
I love this. I think it’s a real gift to give yourself is that level of flexibility, even if it means going a little slower, that’s just me.

Chad:
Life doesn’t happen in these straight up lines. You make a graph and you put a spreadsheet for all the math people out there and I love spreadsheets, but our life does not happen in a spreadsheet. It doesn’t work. I’ve got a friend, Ariel Shihi who always says, you need to start measuring return on your life, not just return on your investment because life is why we do this. So it is like the numbers matter. The numbers are a tool. They’re great. We love ’em. You’re the numbers guy. You wrote the book on numbers and real estate, but why are we doing this? We’re doing, it’s the real estate’s, the dog that we’re walking and we are the person walking the dog. Don’t let the dog drag you all over the place. That’s what a big business that runs out of control is like. It’s like pulling you around, dragging you on the sidewalk instead of you calmly walking towards your destination.

Dave:
I love that. I actually think being good at math and focused on data is a gifted a curse because at first, at least for me, it helped a lot earlier in my career once I just understood the power of compounding and reinvesting and the longer you do this, it just makes sense. You put as much principle as you can, highest rate of return for as long as possible. That’s the way to maximize wealth and you can get kind of obsessed with that to the point where it really has not just diminishing returns. I think it has negative returns on your life when you start thinking about it because it isn’t as easy as I think people think to sort of take your foot off the pedal.

Chad:
I think especially for people listening to this podcast, if you’re anything like me or Dave, you’re probably ambitious, you’re probably good at math, you’re probably an entrepreneur, you have the entrepreneur itch. So what everybody thinks is hard when you start is the math and finding the deals and the financing, which those are definitely hard, but I have found and other people that I know have found the more difficult thing is figuring out what you actually want so that you can know when you have enough to go do that thing or take that mini retirement. That’s not easy. I’ve gone through some, the first time I took a mini retirement was in 2009. Right after the recession, my wife and I kind of figured some things out. We survived the recession and we went for four months where we went to Spain and we backpacked around and it was six weeks into the trip in Spain.
We were sitting on this little bench in kake Spain looking over the Mediterranean ocean and I finally after six weeks let relaxed, I was so uptight and so tightly wound that I felt like my chest kind of release and that’s the kind of thing I’m talking about is I finally kind of clear the fog of go, go, go, go. And this is everything that matters is go next to actually figure out, oh, there’s actually some other things in my life. Yeah, enjoying a nice meal with my wife or spending some time with building relationships and relationships aren’t measurable and fast and you can’t put people into a spreadsheet, you got to respond to them. You got to be there if your family’s sick. You can’t put that in a spreadsheet. You got to open up these spaces in your life and that’s the only way I can think about. It’s like I’m investing in real estate, I’m making money to become a time billionaire, to be flexible enough to be able to do all these other things that aren’t measurable but that are actually the good stuff, the good stuff of life that makes your life meaningful, purposeful, enjoyable. That’s why we’re doing this.

Dave:
I couldn’t agree more that this is this kind of stuff that people skip over and I guess I get it because at first most of us I think get into real estate investing because if you have this sort of acute need for me, I was started, I was waiting tables, I just needed 200 bucks a month. I was like, if I could generate some cashflow, that would be great for me. And you sort of get into this mindset of just like, oh wow, could I have a thousand bucks a month? Could I have 3000 bucks a month and just sort of growing for the sake of growing. But I got to say, I don’t think anyone gets happy that way, just growing your bank account for the sake of doing it. If you have an ambitious goal and you’re saying, I need 50 grand a month and why you’re doing that, go for it. But I think the idea of just saying, oh, I need 50 grand a month because it sounds like a cool number and it’s bigger than my neighbor, that’s not a good reason. You’re going to just get to 50 KA month and then you’re going to be like, I did a hundred KA month, and you’re just going to keep sort of just chasing this ambiguous goal that’s not actually going to get you anything you want.

Chad:
It’s go ahead and try it because just like me, you’re probably going to have to touch the fire. You’re brand new and you’re like, Hey, make the money. That’s cool. Make the 3000 a month, make the 5,000 go do it. But just remember this conversation later like, oh yeah, Dave and Chad were talking about while I’m making the money, I actually need to figure out why I’m doing this in the first place so that I can build this thing around the real thing, the real picture.

Dave:
Alright, we got to take a quick break from our conversation with Chad, but we’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here talking about the lifestyle benefits of real estate investing with Chad Carson, but I’m curious Chad, so what does it look like for you? You are sort of the expert on this. How have you crafted your portfolio and your lifestyle now that you’ve achieved a level of success that gives you some flexibility? What have you built?

Chad:
Yeah, so I have a 50 50 business partner, so that’s one kind of context that kind of gives you the overall profile. So the two of us built this together. We have a variety of different types. We have single family houses, we have small multifamily. The biggest property we have is a 14 unit property on one, so two buildings with 14 units total right in. And we’re in Clemson, South Carolina, so it’s more of the apartments are more student rentals and they’re more of the affordable student rentals. We’re on the bus line close to downtown, and so we deliberately picked these long-term properties that were easy to rent to students but not competing with the top price. The location was the amenity that we’re looking for. So that’s the kind of profile of the type of properties we’ve built. But one of the things that I really believe in, I think we’ve talked about this on a prior conversation, is that you have different strategies for different times of your career and when you’re a starter, you’re just getting your first deal or two do the house hacking, you don’t have much money, just leverage whatever you can just get your foot in the door, get in the game, learn a bunch.
That’s the starter you get in the builder phase, which is the long grind and that’s when you’re just trying to use the B strategy, grow, leverage as much as you can but do it safely, but you’re trying to reinvest money, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow. The hard part though is, and where we are now is transitioning from this builder phase to the harvester phase and it is hard because of the psychological reasons we talked about here. Taking your foot off the gas saying you have enough or taking a break or taking many retirements is psychologically not easy for me at least for the type A kind of person, it requires you to play a different game from a tactical standpoint, from your actual strategy. So we actually started reinvesting money in the existing portfolio that we have. Sometimes paying off debt for example, we’ve upgraded our types of properties, so if we had a property that was sort of high maintenance, didn’t attract as good of attendance, we’d sell that one, trade it for another one that was better, higher quality, we’re focusing on maintenance a lot capital expenses, trying to optimize that. Again, it’s a different game. It’s a different game from a capital allocation standpoint, it’s a different game from a maintenance and focus standpoint, you’re not as focused on acquisitions at this point. You’re focused on optimizing the equity that you already have so that you can have more cashflow, so you can have less risk and then a ton of time, a ton of flexibility. That’s really what we’re trying to optimize at this point.

Dave:
And this might sound sort of contrarian to real estate investors, but I agree with you and I think it’s also important to note that this sort of mimics the advice you are likely to get from a financial planner even if you don’t invest in real estate over the course of your career. As you build wealth, as you get a little bit older, any financial planner is going to tell you to reduce risk. That might mean slower growth, but if you’re an equities investor, you start your career 80 20 stocks to bonds, stocks are more risky than bonds, but as you get closer to your retirement, a financial planner is going to tell you you should shift more to bonds, a safer investment and you have less volatility. It’s kind of the same idea here. The same thing happens with debt and real estate is that it does allow you to grow just like stocks allow you to grow, but you’re inviting risk, you’re inviting volatility into it and there is an appropriate time for that depending on your lifestyle and who you are, but protecting what you have is priority number one. Growth almost becomes sort of a secondary priority.

Chad:
I had a hard time with this, so here’s maybe a mental trick that we can all think about is you have your whole portfolio. I’m not saying you have to do that with all of your portfolio, but what I am saying is you build a fortress around part of your portfolio so that you never go back because think about the worst case scenario. The worst case scenario is you screwing up something or the economy screwing up and you had nothing to do with it and you losing everything. All this that you built for the last 10, 15, 20 years gone away. This is what Warren Buffett says. He says it is ludicrous or it’s crazy to risk what you already have, this wealth you’ve already built for something, you don’t even need to get extra two points of return. It’s just saying. So what that might look like is take five properties, pay those five properties off and have another five or 10 that still have long-term 3%, 4% debt.
A guy I respect in California named Mike Cantu, he’s an investor out there. He says each property has a job description and so there’s five free and clear properties. Maybe one of them pays for your health insurance. One of them pays for your travel, one of them pays for your housing. So you’re building this, I call it like an income floor where you have this floor that your whole financial independence rests upon and that has low debt or no debt, it produces income. That’s your best properties. Those are the ones you never want to sell. Single family, small multifamily, something’s in a really good location. And then if you want to be aggressive, you want to keep flipping, you want to have some leverage over here, do that over here, but do it separately and either mentally separate those or maybe LLCs separate those. You’re not trading like always growing or always being aggressive. You’re just acknowledging that, alright, look, I don’t want to slide all the way back. I don’t want to lose the game after having, I’ve already won. I’ve won the game, so let’s not lose.

Dave:
I love the idea of just putting it into plain English. This property pays for my health insurance or it pays for my kids’ college tuition or whatever it is. That’s a super cool idea. You told us a lot about how you had deleveraged, you have lower LTVs, you’ve built this really strong safe portfolio. Tell us about the lifestyle element of that. What has that given you in terms of your day to day?

Chad:
Well, part of it’s just flexibility to figure out what I want to be when I grow up. It sounds kind of funny, but when most of us are in our teens, I have a 14-year-old and a 12-year-old kid right now and part of the growing up process it’s like what am I going to do? Who am I going to be when I grow up? And I found for myself that when you ground down in the twenties and the thirties, I think we kind of lose that curiosity about what we want to be. And so I think one of the coolest things about what real estate freedom has bought me is this opportunity to be whatever I want to be. I had no box, nobody has to tell me what to do. And so this is sort of a little bit philosophical, it’s taken years to reflect on this, but as I’ve journaled and thought about it, what have I enjoyed?
What activities do I really like to do? Or one cool journal I exercise is ask yourself what would you do if you would pay to do it? It’s the kind of activity if you find yourself on the weekend, just doing it for three hours on the Saturday because that’s just what you want to do. For some people that’s building stuff with their hands, carpentry, some people that’s gardening, some people that’s caring for other people through volunteering and donating. For me it was teaching. I really, really like teaching and so I’ve just leaned into that and said, where can I do this on my own? Still fit flexible in my life. And so having a podcast and teaching has been something I’ve leaned into a lot and bigger podcast was really awesome enough to let me write two books.

Dave:
Yeah, you did a great job.

Chad:
Thank you. So that’s kind of one part of my life that I’ve been able to explore that a little bit. It wasn’t a money choice. This turned into a little bit of a business now too, so that’s kind of fun. But for many, many years it was just like this is just a hobby. I’m writing a hundred thousand words a year just because I like to do it and I just like ideas and exploring. So from a personal standpoint, it’s been kind of cool to not have the constraints of a job, a boss, a career that’s saying you have to go this way of just saying what do you want to do? And I think even more importantly for me is my wife when we have that conversation, she admits that she’s a teacher. She always worked in the classroom as a professor of Spanish and so for her, the box was actually kind of nice showing up at a place and going there and she appreciated that side of the work, but she also didn’t like the meetings and all these hassles you have to do in a university system.
So she’s sort of explored her own career of how can I teach privately, how can I learn? She’s a Spanish teacher but she also teaches English now and so she’s practicing. How do I teach that privately in the community even if I don’t make any money? That’s something we’ve talked about her model of being a private teacher. She’s like, well, all the people who need me can’t afford to pay me any money. I’m like, well, you can charge whatever you want. You can say, Hey, bring me a meal, pay me 10 bucks, whatever. We don’t need the money. And so that’s been really cool to lean in on what would you do professionally as a calling, whether you made money or not.

Dave:
Oh yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m so glad for you and your wife that you figured it out. I happen to be one of those lucky people who likes their full-time job, so I have not left that. But honestly, one of the things I’m most proud of in my life and especially in real estate is my wife used to work in tech. She had a very successful career but just sort of never really liked it and over the last couple of years has been able to, she goes back to school and she wants to be in landscape design and she’s become one, but she spends a lot of her time now volunteering in community food gardens that grow food for underprivileged people. She donates a lot of her time to different organizations around town and I just love sort of similar with what your wife, I just love that our real estate supports that we are good. She doesn’t need to maximize every single hour of her day for making money. She could do some part of it for making money she wants to, but other parts she just does because she’s super passionate about, and I think it’s one of the greatest gifts that real estate has given us as a family and I’m just super proud that real estate and being in this for so long has allowed us to give back to the community and do what we both love.

Chad:
If you’re doing, I don’t know, bookkeeping for the last 20 years because that’s what pays the bills or you’re a doctor because that’s what makes a lot of money, but you should have been a high school football coach and that’s what you know should have done that because that’s what your passion is. That doesn’t go away. By the way, if you push that down, you’re going to have regret. You’re going to have, I should have done that. I wish I would’ve done that. We talk about this as like, Hey, this is kind of cool. But no, I think this is the imperative of why financial independence of freedom can be so life-changing is because you as a person, we as a person need to be able to evolve and find the thing that’s really important to us if we want to be really fulfilled and have a life that’s really enjoyable and purposeful over a long period of time. So that’s my little soapbox there about this is beyond just real estate numbers, this is really important.

Dave:
It is, and I know that of course being in real estate and being professional investors, there is of course a financial element, but you have to be. So what? It can’t be money for money’s sake as you said, and look at just these couple of examples that Chad and I are talking about of the avenues that financial independence opens up for you. It doesn’t mean I’m not proudest of the number in my bank account. I’m proudest that my wife gets to go serve our community. And that’s super cool and I hear that consistently, not just from you Chad, but from a lot of people who I respect in this industry. That’s what they’re proudest of and for me, that’s what motivates me. It keeps me going and makes me, when you do get those inevitable things about your real estate portfolio that annoy you or frustrating or don’t go well, it’s not, oh, I wish I had three grand more in my bank account. It’s you think about these actual tangible things in your life. At least for me, I find that super motivating.

Chad:
I’ve got one more example if you don’t mind me sharing it, that I think will bring this idea home. There’s this, my wife and I we’re into walking when we’re in Europe and we visited you in the Netherlands. We were walking over the place we liked to bike. It is just a thing for us like active lifestyle and when we had kids, they’re now 14 and 12, when they were like one and two, we would push them in the stroller in our local town of Clemson and we got so frustrated that the sidewalks were bad and they ended and we had to cross this road with a bat, no crosswalk. And so this is a very particular problem. Not everybody was worried about this problem, but we were very passionate about this, like this got to be fixed. And so we got involved and helped start a nonprofit called The Friends of the Green Crescent Trail to build this network of walking and biking trails in a small college town in the south that was all autocentric.
It was not very walkable at all. This project is something we’ve been working on for 10 years now when our kids were two, now they’re 12 and 14 and it’s coming along. But this is one of those examples of we had to use all the skills that we’ve used in real estate. So those of us who are entrepreneurs, we learned how to market and sell things. We learned how to raise money, we learn how to go talk to local city officials and figure out how things work there with the laws. All these skills that I used in real estate, I’ve had to use the same skills to solve this local social problem, which is really important to us. So it’s been very, very satisfying. And then I’ve used my professional skills. I’ve made zero money. In fact, we’ve donated a ton of money to this.
I don’t ever want to make any money, but those asphalt and cement paths that are now three or four miles in our town and then we have another three or four miles that are about to come on are some of the most satisfying things that I’ve ever built better than any rental property I’ve built. I walk on those things and I’m just this pride, all this this is to say is that you can use these assets, these mental skills, these knowledge you built, the money you have to solve some problem, whether it’s building trails, whether it’s affordable housing, whatever it is for you, there’s this huge opportunity as many problems and needs as there are in our community, there are needs for entrepreneurs and problem solvers like us who have resources, who have time, who have energy to go out and solve those problems. If it’s anything like my experience, it’ll be like 10 or a hundred times more satisfying because nobody else is doing this stuff. There’s just nobody trying to solve these problems from our entrepreneurial standpoint. And so it’s super rewarding and I encourage everybody to use your time for that. Figure out something that has to be solved and use the same energy you use to go build your wealth to go solve that problem and it’ll be very rewarded in the places where you live.

Dave:
That’s truly, truly inspirational. I think it’s really commendable that you did that, so congratulations. We do have to take a quick break, but we’ll be right back with more from Chad. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. We got to hang out in Amsterdam. I lived there for five years, which is part of my own real estate journey. I didn’t stop working, but I guess you’d call it a mini retirement. Is that a break from my normal life to go try something new? I know you took your kids there, right? For a year. Can you tell us about that experience?

Chad:
I kind of finished my mini retirement story from earlier that we’ve done that periodically every three, four years. So we did it before we had kids. We went for four months to South America and Spain when we had kids and they were three and five. We went to Ecuador for 17 months and our specific goal was, Hey, this would be cool. We want to live abroad and it would be cool for our kids to speak a foreign language. So they went to local schools, local preschool, local elementary school, and it was the moment that about five months in where we were sitting around the dinner table, I was ahead of my kids in Spanish before they had five words, but we started speaking Spanish five months in and they were correcting me saying, Papa, no. And they were embarrassed about my accent and how bad my accent was. I was like, yes, this is great. Yeah, you’d be

Dave:
Proud to be that embarrassed,

Chad:
Proud papa. And so it was really cool not only to have us have that experience, but give that gift of our kids when they were three and five and then we did it again in 2022. In 23 we lived for 12 months and Granada, Spain and southern Spain and just had an amazing experience. The kids went to school in this case a little bit older in elementary school. I don’t know what those experiences will be like for them long run, but I feel like from a family standpoint, we really grew closer. Anyone who has kids, how fast things go. For us, it was like pressing pause for a year at a time and just really slowing things down and that to me has been one of the biggest gifts that real estate investing and this time that has been given for me as a family member.
It’s just been amazing just to be able to walk to school every day with them, to see their evolution and growth just to experience these things with them. Not everybody’s into travel and going abroad, but if you’re able to do that, whether you have kids or whether you don’t have kids, just the experience of living abroad, whether it’s a month, two months, a year, five years like you did to me is just a game changer. It is one of those really life-changing experiences that not only you have enjoy it, but it changes how you think and how you experience people and the relationships you built. And so that was definitely the case for us.

Dave:
Yeah, it was probably one of the best, if not the best experience of my life. I’m glad it was the same for you. I didn’t do it with children, but the thing I love about it is you don’t need to go abroad. If you don’t like traveling, that’s fine. But I just sort of taking a break to challenge myself was kind of the goal and just to get out of the comfort zone. I had a great life in Denver. I loved it, had a lot of friends, had a great job, and it was kind of like let’s just shake things up a little bit and I think I’m so much better for it. You have to sacrifice. You give up some things, you gain some things, but it was an absolutely invaluable experience for me. So tell me a little bit just about the real estate side of this because you’ve obviously created this. How much time are you spending on real estate? How easy is it for you to unplug for a

Chad:
Month? It goes in cycles. When I was in Spain, I measured this when I was in Spain, in Ecuador, I would typically spend two, three hours a week on my everyday pay, the bills, that kind of stuff. And the reason is I used to work 80 hours a week in real estate, so let’s put this in perspective. It took me years to build up a team and systems to get to the point where I could have be passive enough where I had two or three hours a week and I can do it remotely. That’s the goal. There are seasons of your career though, where if we’re going to sell a property, if we’re going to buy a new property, then yeah, it’s not going to be two, three hours a week. I’m going to have to put more time into it, but the baseline properties that produce the income, it’s two or three hours a week.
It’s do the tax return at the end of the year. And I have a really awesome team though. I have two different property managers who manage most of our college student rentals. Those are a little bit more intensive for the leasing and the maintenance kind of side of things, and I work really closely with them. But the thing is, when problems happen every week, there’s something, but it’s typically like, Hey, this hot water heater went out. I know we have a $500 limit on what we spend. This is going to cost more than 500. Are you okay with us replacing the hot water heater? Yes, replace it. It takes me half a second. So very rarely is it like me having to do some hard thinking. Sometimes I went into a property recently or I had some pictures of a property, then I decided to go look at it where it needed beyond the normal landscaping. I’m like, oh man, this tree needs to come down. These bushes need to be, it was more like use your creative energy, your real estate knowledge to sort of help this property out. So every once in a while you do a little more involvement.

Dave:
You’re talking about putting your head to work occasionally when you don’t do it that often. It is kind of fun when you have to do it and you’re just in it all the time. It’s work. Since moving back to the US, I’ve really fallen in love with real estate investing. Again, I was just investing passively. I did buy a couple properties, but just being there and being on site, looking at deals, going to acquisitions, talking to contractors now that I do it and have more of a system where I’m not just frantically just responding to things and panicking and freaking out all the time, which was probably the first 10 years of my investing career. It’s fun again, and I think that’s the really cool part of this is being able to do it when you choose, as you choose and having it fit into your lifestyle makes it fun. You just can’t let it run your life or it sort of defeats the entire purpose of you getting into this industry in the first place.

Chad:
I agree. There’s this other benefit that is non-monetary that I wanted to say is that I didn’t think this of it originally, but now that I’ve been in the business for 22 years, the craft of real estate is super satisfying. I like the details. I think that’s something different about real estate. A lot of people, it is a negative word to say, real estate’s not passive. I’m going to go buy stocks. I’m like, okay, that’s cool if you want to be completely hands off. But people get into real estate, they actually, there’s some part of the business that is satisfying to them, the actual craft of it. There’s the people who want to turn a property around and have it look beautiful after it used to look ugly. That’s satisfying. That’s a legacy. You’re leaving with that property. Some people love the spreadsheet, Hey, I got to run the numbers and I’m involved and I’m having to figure that out.
Some people like the team and the maintenance, and to me the bottom line is it is a never ending process of mastery. It’s a craft. It’s like the person who’s a carpenter has to for the rest of their life, they get a little bit better and a little bit better. It’s never over. I’m 22 years into this business and I’m still learning things that I didn’t know yesterday and that’s awesome. That’s a good thing. We need these things. We need something to use our skills and our time and our brains. It is okay to have some passive investments, but the benefit of real estate is that you get to contribute you time and you get to have a little control over it. It’s not a totally passive thing that you can step into it when you need to and you get to because you have real people as your tenants, you have real people as your property manager. I’m close to those people. I have relationships with them and that’s so satisfying and I undervalued that in the beginning. But it’s one of the most satisfying parts about it is the reality of it. The fact that it is tangible, it’s not passive. It’s something I’m connected to.

Dave:
Yeah, I think that the malleable part of real estate is so nice. You could craft it and shape it and form it to whatever you want it to be. And I agree that saying that it’s not passive. I agree. It’s a benefit. If you want to be passive, just go invest in the stock market. That is a perfectly fine way to build wealth and plan for retirement if you want to be a little bit more hands-on and a little bit more creative and involved, which is fun. I think that’s why, like you said, that’s why people become entrepreneurs is because you want that degree of control. And like you said, it’s needed and I think it’s needed in the community. I love the fact I get a lot of pride when someone moves out after five or six years and says, this is the best place I ever lived, or I love living here.
I’m sad to leave. I love that being able to provide a positive experience, a mutual benefit between me and my tenant. That’s what business should be. And I like being able to create my own business that sort of lives up to the expectations that I would have if I were a renter and sort of just creating these positive experiences. And if you are so in it and you’re just focused on that number in your bank account going up, I think you miss that because you see every hot water heater breaking as some money out of your pocket instead of sort of just this inevitable ebb and flow of building a long-term stable, profitable, mutually beneficial business. Well

Chad:
Said.

Dave:
Well, Chad, thank you so much. This has been a lot of fun. Anything else before we get out of here? Again, this has been so fun. I think you’re such an inspiration to the community. I think you really embody everything that BiggerPockets was founded on, and I just truly respect your perspective and approach to real estate. So thanks again for being here.

Chad:
No, thank you. Thanks for having me. It’s been a lot of fun. And if people hear this and they think if you’re a brand new investor and you’re on your journey wherever you are, you can figure this out. It’s not something you’re going to figure out overnight. So I just encourage people to keep looking at the long run of the business, why you got into it, and you’re on the right track. Even if it’s hard right now, especially if it’s hard, this thing goes up and down, but over the long run, you’re making a really good decision to do what you’re doing. And Dave and I are fans, obviously, and I’m even more a fan now 22 years later than I was when I started. I love this business.

Dave:
Well, if you want to learn more from Chad, like I definitely do, you can check out his YouTube channel, which is Coach Chad Carson. He’s also written two great books for BiggerPockets, which you can find on biggerpockets.com/store. Thanks again, Chad, and thank you all so much for listening to this episode of the BiggerPockets podcast. We’ll see you next time.