Building Community and Adding Value as a Multifamily Investor

We are mostly targeting the business towards people that are busy professionals, that don’t have a lot of time. So I started with meet-ups in Austin and I quickly realized, people want to be passive for a good reason, they don’t have time. And beating Austin traffic and coming to a webinar in the evenings isn’t quite the model that was suitable for those set of people because I am working, let’s say nine to five. By the time I beat traffic, I come home, it’s 6:30 in the evening and the last thing I want to do is leave my kids and step out to drive somewhere for half an hour or an hour to just learn something.

So there’s a gap between people who want things to come to them now. It’s the information technology where people want information to come to them and not have to go to information, to get information. I started doing webinars now so that’s been very positive for me, also, the Facebook group. I’m able to share blogs, I’m able to share information with them that I feel like a lot of people don’t know about, like depreciation. I didn’t know I could write off my income if I played it right. Get the qualified real estate professional and write off my income. So things like that, that a lot of people are not aware of, like investing for their retirement. I look at 401(k)’s and I’ve asked a lot of people about this. It’s like, “Do you know how much your 401(k) is making? What is it invested in? Two very simple questions. People always are like, “No idea, it’s like probably some 20, 43 retirement fund, I could retire in 20 years and what is it making? Almost I don’t know, 80% of the people have no idea what it’s making. If I look at the retirement fund and go, “Okay, they’re making maybe four to five percent and could we use that better? A lot of people are not aware of how they could use that better. 

Listen to the full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/10/ws346-building-community-and-adding-value-as-a-multifamily-investor-with-kavitha-baratakke/

You know, could you roll it over to us for solo 401(k) or to an IRA and invest that in alternative investments like real estate. I felt like I took a longer path to learn all that and I want to help people short circuit that a little bit. You don’t have to go through on this hopes to learn this. This has to be more common place knowledge. Because what we get from most financial advisors are this whole 80/20 stocks split, put it 80% in stocks, 20% in bonds. I mean, the usual canned advice. But when I started attending the events and conferences, what I got out of it was the wealthy don’t invest like that. It’s the middle class that invest like that and the middle class stay middle class until they’re 65 so you most of the time have to wait till you’re 65 and maybe you’ll have enough money to actually retire. I learned from attending all of these conferences and seeing wealthy people that this is not my fast track to retirement, it’s not going to work like that. So, I think I want to bring some of what I’ve learned to people and I hope to be able to do that through my group.

I find that retirement accounts is the best place to start with most people because people who think they don’t have money, they usually have money in retirement accounts and they’re not doing anything much with it where they’re actually growing that income. So I feel like that is one of the best places for me to educate them on how they could be using their retirement accounts better. How they could create either a QRP or solo 401(k) to invest that money better. The other thing was also multifamily. Since I work in a multifamily space, it’s natural for me to teach them, “Okay, this is how typical passive multifamily business works. I’m not only planning to teach them what I know but I also want to get guest speakers on in my made up here. I did like a 1031 exchanges. Topics around real estate and investing that people should know about, right? 1031 exchanges, hotels, assisted living, there are just so many investments out there that are alternative investments. Like still real estate, because I find that a lot of my friends and family and people that I know, when they think real estate, they think, “Go buy a single family home.” It’s just something that we’ve all been conditioned to think. So I want them to think outside that box of single family homes and that being an investment because it’s not always a great investment, it was probably in 2008 when it got crashed. But right now, it’s the higher the market and I don’t want people to get into single family homes, thinking it’s a great investment because if you do the returns on the paper, you don’t make much money.

Listen to the full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/10/ws346-building-community-and-adding-value-as-a-multifamily-investor-with-kavitha-baratakke/