If I had to start over in real estate investing today, would I take the same approach or do things

completely different? With mortgage rates the way they are today, how do you even find deals or get financing that makes sense? And once you bought your first rental, what are the next steps to go from one property to two? I'll be tackling those questions and more in today's question and answer episode. Let's get started. Hey, welcome to the podcast Real Estate Investing with Coach Carson. I'm your host, Chad Carson. You can also call me Coach Carson. And in this show, I teach you how to use real estate

investing to achieve financial freedom so you can spend your time doing more of what matters. So I'm going to jump right into these questions. And by the way, all of these questions came from those of you on Instagram and Facebook, who submitted questions to me. I did another episode about a week ago that was Q&A as well,

and all of those questions were from YouTube and also from my rental property mastery community. If you haven't heard of that, that's my private community where I do coaching and teaching, and we help each other on our journey to financial freedom as small and mighty real estate investors. So if you're interested in that, you can see a link in the podcast and the YouTube description below. But this first question comes from someone on Instagram named D-Bull-110. That's their username. And I love this question because it's all about what I would do if I started over. And so the question is, if you had to start over today, what would your strategy be? And would you take the same approach? Would you do something different? And so I think the way I'm going to answer this question, I'm going to tell you what actually happened, kind of a summary of my journey, how I got started, how I grew, and got to financial freedom, just kind of a quick version of that. I'm going to tell you the kind of pattern that I think worked, that is worth replicating, and then I'm going to tell you how it might pivot and change a little bit. There's some things I think I would do the same, but there's definitely some things I would change today if I had to start over. So my story, I started in 2003. I was 23 years old. I graduated from Clemson University. I played football there. I thought it would go to the NFL. That didn't work out flat on my face. NFL was a dream that didn't happen. But I also was a pre-med major. I thought I would go to medical school, but I was so

burnt out that I decided, I'm just going to take a break. And I had a family member, my dad, who had been at rental properties. And so I started reading books from his shelf and was interested and intrigued by being an entrepreneur, not having a boss, doing my own thing. And I owned my Toyota Camry free and clear. And I didn't have any debt from college because I got a college scholarship. So I had the opportunity. I didn't have a lot to lose to become an entrepreneur and just jump into it. I thought I would go back to medical school or do something real job down the road. But I loved it so much that I've stayed in it for 22 years. And my very first dabbling and real estate investing, though, really wasn't real estate investing at all.

It was not investing because I didn't have any money. What I was really doing was being a deal finder for other people. You can call that wholesaling is one way of thinking about it, but I would find other investors. I would have a network of investors who were looking for deals,

who are either buying rental properties or fix and flips or both,

and I would go out and find deals for them. Sometimes I would put them under contract and then sell my contract to them for a fee. Sometimes I would just be a bird dog and say, hey, here's a deal. If you buy it, pay me a finder's fee. And I'll make a couple thousand bucks or a few thousand bucks on that. Other times, I would buy it and then flip it to them after buying the property. So that is the business model of flipping properties, but it's more like inventory. It's like you're in the sales business. You're not necessarily owning the properties. So I had a business partner when I did that. We're still business partners 22 years later. And I survived because I lived in the spare bedroom of his house for about nine months because we didn't make any money for the first nine or 10 months of our business. And so I had to live off savings, you know, live off, eat ramen noodles. And I love that time looking bad about it. There's not a lot to lose for me because I don't have a family or anything else, but it was exciting because I had these dreams of one day having financial freedom and passive income and I was just doing it. I was out there living this goal and it was not easy, but I loved it. It was a lot of fun. But eventually we started making enough money to pay some bills with flipping and wholesaling. And we got into also fixing a flipping houses. So instead of selling it to another investor, we figured out how to get private money from other investors who were just more passive investors. They loaned us the money at 10% interest. One of my lenders was a guy named Dr. Stone. Louis Stone was a professor of mine at Clemson. I also did rentals. So I went to him with the idea of, hey, if I find a deal this worth $150,000 and I can buy it all in for $100,000, including all the repairs, would you loan me $100,000 at 10% interest? And he said, yes. And I taught him how to use his self-directed retirement account. So he had some money sitting in the stock market or in CDs or something. And I had learned how you can

use retirement accounts and with particular custodians who would let you direct it and loan it to

other investors and also buy rental properties. And so he loaned me money. And that became a source.

He and other investors of our money to flip houses. So wholesaling, flipping houses,

flipping houses made us allowed us to

make 20 or 30,000 bucks per deal instead of like five or seven. So we were able to do fewer

deals and make the same amount of money. And we accelerated that 2003 to 2007 was a great recession.

We had 33 closings in one year in 2007. Got really good at finding deals,

but we made a bunch of mistakes too. And some of the mistakes were buying a wrong locations,

you know, getting over our skis, trying to do too much too quickly. The positive thing we did,

though, was we used a lot of private money, seller financing, we didn't use a lot of commercial debt. I was just nervous and kind of paranoid about that. I'd heard stories like Dave Ramsey, even back then, borrowing commercial debt and how the banks can, in a downturn, can pull the rug out from under you and take it back. So we didn't have much commercial debt, and we were able to sort of survive through 2007, eight, and nine by pivoting

our strategy and really buying and holding more. So we evolved into, like from the, if you hear

me talk about the stages of real estate investing, the starter phase for me was wholesaling,

flipping. And then I got into rental properties two or three years after that, and especially

that 2006 and seven. And we started holding them

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