Hello and welcome to Choose A Five. Today on the show we have our good friend Chad Carson back and Chad is one of my absolute go-to's in terms of real estate investing.

He's just absolutely brilliant and he has the right ethos and I think that comes through loud and clear in his brand new book that's actually coming out this week called the small and mighty real estate investor.

How to reach financial freedom with fewer rental properties and I really emphasize that word fewer because I think it's so important especially in the real estate world where you hear more more more how many quote unquote doors do you have how much leverage can you pile on how can you make this bigger.

But what about enough and I think that word enough is just so critical and Chad's book is a wonderful focus on what is truly enough to achieve your financial and life goals with that welcome to choose a five.

Chad it is so good to see you welcome back to choose a five my friend it is good to be back Brad thank you for having me back.

Yeah it should be great so we have a lot to talk about because clearly you have this book that's coming out this Thursday July 20th 2023 and the books fantastic you gave me an early copy of it I was fortunate enough to be able to give it a little blurb and I really think it's important and I told you that personally I just I think this is important because I just find that the real estate community and of course this is a broad brush and I hate to do that but they seem focused on the wrong things to me.

And this book kind of corroborates that thought in my own head and I love for you to talk about how you see that like how this idea coalesced in your mind in opposition to what this drum beat is from the real estate community.

Well thank you for your feedback and your support this has been a book this the seedling was been many years ago and it really started for me as a new real estate investor because like you said I've experienced a lot of good education a lot of helpful education.

But my very first three or four years in real estate investing I went to seminars and was sitting in a hotel room and there was a lot of rarah you know like hey let's go big you know there's a kind of a mix of psychology and you should have your head on straight and really shoot for the moon and if you're not you know buying 100 properties you're not shooting big enough you should 10x you should do all these big things and you know this is a part of us like it especially if you're ambitious you know everybody listening to this has some kind of ambition and them and you know what somebody challenges you like that you like well that must be success that must be the way it is and I sort of bought into that earth.

I ended that early on in my career but do a series of just some mistakes that I made where I was buying too many properties going into 2007 and eight in the great recession that was a fun experience and a combination of that and also just you know getting introduced to the fire community to reading your money or your life that was a huge game changer for me where this concept of enough was put on my plate and as one of those ideas when you first read it you're like wait a minute this is something I'm known all along and yet I haven't

incorporated it into my investing style into my business and so reading that reading the four hour work week by Tim Ferris back at the same time there's just a couple of those moments both in my real estate business and reading books that said wait a minute you know what about trying to do it simpler what about trying to do it smaller and we had to sort of implement that in the middle of the recession thankfully we were able to survive some of our early mistakes in our first five years of real estate investing by having a lot of cash reserves by hustling by just making it through the great recession but on the other side of the world we're going to be able to do it.

On the other side of that my business partner and I have a 50-50 business partner our strategy was we didn't call it the small and mighty investor at that time but it was about how can we simplify this thing how can we systematize it and most importantly how can we work it backwards from why are we doing this thing in the first place why are we even investing in real estate why are we doing this we're doing this to have life to have to travel in my case I wasn't married yet but I knew that I wanted to travel I wanted to have flexibility I wanted to do other things with my life not just real estate investing in my life.

So that was my challenge as a real estate investor as a business owner to say how could I do this so that I still have the income and the wealth benefits all those things that real estate is great for but to do it in a smaller amount of time to simplify it and that's really what you know last 15 to 20 years in my real estate invested business has been all about.

Wow yeah I love that and I think we're going to put a pin in that right there because I want to talk about that working backwards that's the place we'll pick it up but since you set this up on a silver platter in terms of

hey what do I want my life to look like what do I want to do what is this all for right like these are the essential questions that we should all be asking especially right as you're saying people are not doing this in the real estate investing community you and your family have been off on adventures now for the better part of how many number of years it's been a lot and I know you're actually finishing up an amazing 12 months stay in Spain right now and I love first to just take a couple of minutes to talk about that.

Because I think that is so important that why why are we doing this and you've had these remarkable things going on in your life.

Yeah so go back to that 2007 8 episode where I was sort of up against the wall think what why am I doing this I made a list at that time that said here are the things I want to do and one of the highlights was I want to travel abroad and I went to when I was at university I play football and I've studied abroad a little bit but I just got this itch to travel and explore the cultures to learn new languages so I just knew that was a kind of center

part of my what I want my life to be about and what you know it I met somebody who I ended up marrying who on our first date we talked about the same thing we're like she's like I really would love to go live abroad and do this and travel around and I said huh that's interesting.

I work said okay let's do this all right so as we started working on the financial independence adventure we tried to say how could we do this and so we've taken a series of trips before we had kids we went abroad for four months and traveled around to Spain and South America when we had three and five

three and five year old kids actually the first time I came on the two ZFI podcast was I was an Ecuador with my wife and kids and we lived there for 17 months and my kids learned to speak Spanish there I took Spanish it was just there's no purpose and being there other than less sleuth things down this press pause let's test this experiment of whether we can actually have rental properties back in the United States and only work two to four hours per week and live a life somewhere else and so that was you know experiment number two and then experiment number three was us going

this last year went to Granada Spain and so we've been living here we rented a house our kids went to local schools here my wife has been teaching English and taking classes I was telling you one of my favorite things to do just as a hobby is just to walk the streets like I love walkable communities and I my home base our home base and the United States is Clemson South Carolina which is relatively walkable town as a university town but it's got a long way to go and I've been trying to get it to improve it but being in a town like Granada which is thousands of years old we're not going to do that.

Here's a hold where you had these little narrow streets and you can wander around like an amaze for hours and hours and just walk and walk and walk and study history that's been between that and studying Spanish and writing a book that's pretty much what I've done for the last 12 months.

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