Taking Your Wealth To The Next Level With Chris Larsen
"Find somebody that has achieved what you want to achieve and either have them mentor you or learn from them. Really find somebody that has walked the path that you want to walk and follow them."
Chris Larsen is the founder and managing partner of Next Level Income, through which he helps investors become financially independent through education and investment opportunities. He's been managing and investing in real estate for over 20 years. He has a degree from Virginia Tech and he started out with just a single-family house when he was 21, and then quickly figured out that multifamily is one of the best ways to create and preserve more wealth.
Watch the episode here:
Taking Your Wealth To The Next Level With Chris Larsen
Brett:
Our next guest is the founder and managing partner of Next Level Income, through which he helps investors become financially independent through education and investment opportunities. He's been managing and investing in real estate for over 20 years. He has a degree from Virginia Tech and he started out with just a single-family house when he was 21, and then quickly figured out that multifamily is one of the best ways to create and preserve more wealth. And he has raised over $12 million and has over $150 million of real estate acquisitions with him and his team. He also invests in equities, oil and gas, and small business lending. He's a part of a venture capital group. He's out of North Carolina. He hasn't quite told me who his team is yet, but we're going to get to the bottom of that here in a minute. Actually, he did tell me, but it's not what you're thinking. It's actually Virginia Tech because that's where he went. Please welcome the show with me, Chris Larsen.
Chris:
Brett, thank you so much for having me.
Brett:
And as a reminder, you can find Chris at nextlevelincome.com. Hey Chris, maybe give us a little bit about your background, your story, and a bit about your current focus?
Chris:
Brett, you did a great job already. Thank you very much. Next Level Income, what we do is we focus on providing education opportunities for investors, with the goal of helping them achieve financial independence. And as you stated, I started myself a single-family property back at age 21. I was in college. I was day trading prior to that. I was doing pretty well in the market in the late 90s. And as we've seen here, I'm not sure when this show's going to air, but it's been a historic drop here in the past week in the markets. And back in the late 90s, it was not much different. I saw some big gains. I saw some big losses in the stock market. I'm by nature a risk-averse individual. And I was looking at other financial options, other investment options at the time. I knew a little bit about real estate because my family, my mother, and my stepfather, had a few single-family rentals that they managed. I was raised very much middle-class, but the more I looked into it, the more I realized that buying real estate and being able to control it and ultimately the tax advantages that went along with that, that was a great spot to be in. I built a portfolio of single-family properties from the age of about 21 to 25. I managed it on myself for nearly 15 years. And then ultimately in 2013, started moving into the multi-family space and commercial space, largely for the ability to invest passively, as well as a lot of the tax benefits that go along with that. As we were talking before the show, I spent 15 years in the medical device industry. It can be very stressful, a lot of time that's put in. I was on call for 12 years of my career and I was working 60, 80, sometimes 100-hour weeks on call for sometimes months at a time. I think the longest stretch I went with seven months straight without a day off on call. It was challenging with young kids. I did not want to manage the property myself anymore and ultimately moved our entire single-family portfolio into the commercial space. And then with one of my former partners, we started syndicating. We formed a partnership in 2015, syndicated our first deal in 2016. And we will be about 1,500, 1,600 units here around the time show airs.
Brett:
That's amazing. And thanks for sharing that. And before we dive into some of the tactical parts of making that transition from single-family homes into commercial real estate properties, and some of the tax deferral strategies you've used over the years, I'm curious. Take us back to Chris growing up. In particular, I'm curious. What gifts were you given that helped you help your clients most today? I believe we're all given God-given gifts. Some people call it a superpower, but what particular gift were you given and how does that help how you help people today?
Chris:
I think I was fortunate to be able to assimilate a lot of information and distill it down and ultimately act. I think you hear a lot of times like paralysis by analysis and you can just sit there like a deer in the headlights. And you look at all these numbers. And for me, spreadsheets are very comforting. I like to look at numbers and break things down. So I've always been fairly adept from a mathematics perspective. So it's been easy for me to look through those. It's funny though, being at an engineering school at Virginia Tech, I felt like I was kind of the odd man out because I really didn't feel like I fit with the engineers. I really didn't fit in with the fraternity, so to speak. I'm in this middle space and same thing with my medical device career. I was joking around like I wasn't smart enough to be a doctor, wasn't smart enough to be an engineer, but I can communicate between the two groups. So I think the ability to assimilate information and then communicate the information and ultimately take action is what I would consider my greatest gift in this space.
Brett:
That's great. And when did you become fascinated and/or obsessed with helping others? I know you also run a podcast and of course your syndication groups that help to buy real estate. So when did you become obsessed and really focused on helping others achieve financial freedom through wealth in real estate?
Chris:
I think it kind of happened over time. It's hard to pinpoint one specific area, but my father passed away when I was young when I was five years old. I always had family, friends, people from church, or people from the community that helped me out and pointed me in directions that either wanted advice or I needed advice or needed help. As I kind of went along my path, whether it was when I was racing bicycles, I was a captain of my cycling team when I was 15. I was the first captain of my junior team. And then, I started coaching people in college. I guess I always felt like it was my responsibility to pass it on - my responsibility to pass it on, pass on the information, pass on the knowledge to the next group. I think when it comes to the financial space I did have help, but I was doing my MBA in finance, I was learning about the financial industry, and I did all this research and I realized that in large part a lot of the financial industry is driven by salespeople and they're just selling a financial product. And what I felt was a better way through investing in real estate or looking at some of these quote-unquote alternative assets that people they're like, "Oh, they're alternative." Well, what is the alternative? Their alternative to the stock market. But what's ironic is the products that we call or the investments that we call alternative today were mainstream 100 years ago. You look at what the rich are investing in, real estate, precious metals, small businesses, oil, and gas, it's just ironic that these things are called alternatives today. I think as I learned this information and then I went out into the working world and started to see how people were investing it really became apparent to me that I needed to share this information. And then when we started really what became next level income about five years ago I would get phone calls, I would get emails every week and the questions weren't, "Hey Chris, what should I invest in?" I'd get that and they'd say, "Hey, what do you have? What are the opportunities?" But I got about the same amount, Brett, from young people that said, "Hey, how can I get to where you are?" And it hit me that there's a real need for the ability to understand the financial world that's out there, the ability to say, at Next Level Income we say, "Here, we're going to help you make more money, keep more money and grow your money." And the first step is to make money and I think a lot of us have gotten to the point of investing and some of these asset classes we forget that "Hey, there was a time when I was making $1500 bucks a month and I didn't have that information." So specifically with our podcasts and now our website we have the print edition of our book that's coming out. You can go on our website and find that as well. People can come, they can get the information, and then hopefully get to the point where they can start on their first step towards financial independence.
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