So just the other day, I was having a 101 coaching call with another real estate investor.

Now, this person was not a brand new investor.

They'd already been in the business for several years.

They had four rental properties.

They'd done a good job of getting long-term financing, four and five percent

interest rates. Their properties were in good locations. So they've had some success. And their ultimate

goal is to own a portfolio of properties. I call that a small and mighty real estate investing portfolio.

But eventually, they wanted to get to the point where they can live off their rental income. They work a

full-time job. They want to be able to have this as a part-time job, maybe working a couple hours a week like I do, and then living off the rental income. But here's the reality of where this person is and why they were talking to me. The portfolio they have, those four properties, is not producing enough cash flow to get anywhere close to their goals. And on top of that, their acquisitions

goals to try to grow and buy more properties has sort of been turned upside down. The financing

they got at 4 and 5% where they could actually make it cash flow is now 7 or 8%. They're having a hard

time even making deals make sense when they run the numbers. And they're also finding that they

thought with interest rates going up, it would be much easier to find properties, which is a little bit easier, but they're finding that it's still the prices are high, there's low supply, so it's not that easy to find good deals either. So in other words, this person feels very stuck, kind of frozen, even to the point where they mentioned to me, I think I'm just going to sit on the sidelines, kind of wait it out, see what happens, maybe prices will come down, maybe interest rates will come down, but in other words, they're trying to get out of the game for a while. Because I've had a lot of conversations just like that recently, I'm willing to bet that many of you also share that frustration. So I want to tell you what my response was to that person. My response was really in two parts. The first part is addressing what they've already done. They have these properties that aren't producing as much cash flow. And they kind of feel like, am I doing the right thing? Am I actually on the way to my ultimate destination? And I want to point out and just remind you, this is something I talked a lot about in my book, The Small and Mighty Real Estate Investor, is that we go on this journey as a rental investor. We begin as a starter where you're just trying to get momentum, buy those first one, two, three, four properties, and then you get into the wealth building phase, and eventually you get to the harvesting or the ender phase. Well, this person and these people who I've been talking to are squarely in the wealth building phase. It is natural to look at your portfolio and say, you know what, I just bought these properties. I'm using a lot of leverage. They don't produce enough cash flow yet. But what they have done is they've bought these assets. They secured debt over the long run. It is going to get better and better over time. So my first feedback was just be patient. These properties are like fruit trees. You plant the seed, you water them. It takes some time to grow. You can't force the growth process. And being a wealth builder is all about growth. So part one, just be patient. But part two is they're not done yet. They want to grow some more and they're frustrated by this current environment. And my feedback there is not to sugarcoat the truth. You know, I could tell, I could put rose colored glasses on and say, oh, things will get better. Interest rates are going to come back down. And I'm not a crystal ball person. I don't know exactly what's going to happen, but I do know, and I believe to my

bones, that you can't sit on the sidelines in real estate investing if you want to have success

long run. The idea, the cliche is you want to have time in the market, not trying to time the market.

So what do you do then? You have to figure out a way to solve the problems today because it really has changed. Financing is such a big piece of the puzzle. You know, the other fundamentals are the same. Rental properties haven't changed. People still move to locations. You still got to find tenants. You still got to buy good properties. All those fundamentals are the same. But the techniques of applying those fundamentals, particularly

with financing, particularly with finding good deals, those have changed.

And so you've got to change with it.

And the way I'm thinking about this is this is kind of like going from being an amateur to being

a pro if you were playing sports.

In the last four or five years in the market we were in, it was kind of an unusual time where as an amateur, as a real estate investor amateur, you can still make things work. The interest rates were so low that you could still make cash flow happen. The difference now, and this is good for some people, this is not good for other people, is that you have to commit more to improving your skills. I think about this like mastery.

If I were coaching you in basketball, we've got to go back to the fundamentals. We've got

...