Rental properties are supposed to produce consistent monthly cash flow. But then you actually buy a bunch of rental properties and you realize the reality is there are months where you have negative cash flow and then you have a lot of ups and downs like a roller coaster.

If this has happened to you, you might wonder, am I doing something wrong? Everyone else seems to be making a lot of cash flow with rental properties.

And you might start wondering if rentals are even a good strategy and if you'll ever get out of the financial rat race. After 21 years of investing in real estate, this has definitely happened to me, especially in the early years. So in this video, I wanna give you some hope. First, I wanna explain why this cash flow roller coaster is normal and why it happens. Then I want to give you solutions both right now and over

the long run so that you start having a lot of cash flow every single month so you can free up your

time to do whatever you want. If that sounds interesting, stick with me because I'm jumping into it

right now. Welcome to the podcast Real Estate Investing with Coach Carson.

I'm your host, Chad Carson.

You can also call me Coach Carson.

And this is a show to help you get out of the financial grind so you can spend your

time doing more of what matters.

So I want to start by drawing it out because visualizing always helps me. And as I said earlier, remember, you're not alone in this. This happens to everyone. And it's more a function of how rental properties work. So as you can see in this graph, on the one hand, we have time. So over time, this is like month to month or year to year with your rental properties as you go to the right. And then on the top axis is money. So if you

collect rent, that's the blue line here at the top, you collect rent and every once in a while, maybe once a year, once every two or three years, you're going to miss some of your rent. So you're not going to collect the rent, even if the rent is $1,500 or $2,000. Maybe you have a vacancy. That's the kind of normal thing that even in a good scenario, you're vacant for a month.

And so you all of a sudden have zero. for $2,000. Maybe you have a vacancy. That's the kind of normal thing that even in a good

scenario, you're vacant for a month. And so you all of a sudden have zero money. Your income line here goes all the way to zero. You have no money for a month or two. So that happens consistently. And it's just part of the business. That's called vacancy. And there's something we have to build in when you're running the numbers on a rental property, you have to do that. So that's the one hand.

The income is not always consistent. It's pretty consistent every two, two, three years. And this is also a reason I love single family houses and small residential properties, because if you can get someone who stays for five years, 10 years, you don't have these big gaps. That's another story. That's another

part of why I like to invest in certain types of small rental properties, small and mighty style.

But another thing is, in addition to the rent going down, you also have something called repairs

and capital expenses. So CAPEX stands for capital expenses, as I mentioned, but these are your

big repairs. So you're heating an air unit. You don't spend money on that every month, but every 10 years, you might have to spend $8,000 or $12,000 replacing that heating and air. Your roof is the same way. It might be a 30-year roof, but if you bought a property with a roof that was 15 years old, then 15 years from now, you have a big expense. Same with plumbing, same with your

driveway. Everything is constantly deteriorating. So it might kind of look on paper like you're not having

to spend money at first, but these big Kappex hit you. And when they do, you have these big

spikes of expenses. I've recently had some five and 10 and even $15,000 expenses and think how

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