Want to learn how to create generational wealth? You know, the type of wealth that your children’s children’s children’s children can rely on. The type of wealth that allows your family to live a life of financial freedom, pursue their passions, and make a real impact on the world without having to sit behind a cubicle or screen all day long? That’s the wealth Whitney Elkins-Hutten is teaching you how to build in today’s episode.
After achieving financial independence for herself and her family through real estate, Whitney knew that she didn’t want her knowledge to go to waste. So, she developed a wealth-building blueprint for her daughter, which became her new book, Money for Tomorrow. In it, Whitney teaches you how to build a wealth legacy that will endure for generations to come and ensure that your descendants won’t gamble or spend away your life’s work.
To protect your generational wealth, Whitney walks us through the four financial “horsemen” that will drain your savings, crush you with taxes and fees, and lead you to financial ruin. So, if you want to ensure your wealth is built to last and will be there for generations, stick around for this episode and pick up your copy of Money for Tomorrow using code “MFTPOD” for a special discount!
David:
This is the BiggerPockets Podcast show, 889er. What’s going on? This is David Greene, your host of the BiggerPockets Real Estate Podcast joined today by the handsome, talented, successful, and incredibly wealthy cohost, Rob Abasolo. And we have cooked up a great show for you all today.
Rob:
Wealthy and quaff hair. Listen, I’m in my head today because I don’t know if I wore this shirt on the last podcast that we did, and I only have three or four and I try to cycle them out, so it may look to anyone watching on YouTube that I’m wearing the same shirt for the last month.
David:
Insecure much?
Rob:
A little bit.
David:
My goodness. This is why I introduced you as incredibly wealthy, so people would just assume you’re like Mark Zuckerberg and you wear the same shirt every day.
Rob:
Not wealthy in confidence. But you know what? I am wealthy in an amazing podcast show that we’re going to have today. We’re actually bringing on Whitney Elkins-Hutten, and she’s going to be talking about how to create generational wealth that lasts, and the biggest levers that you can pull to stop losing money while you’re building wealth through real estate.
David:
That’s right. So many investors get into real estate because they have this drive to build wealth, but not just by themselves, but to create generational wealth for the others in their family. And the good news is, even if you don’t have a family, even if you’re brand new to investing, Whitney’s advice is still going to help you build wealth smarter and faster.
Rob:
And listeners may remember Whitney from 340, which resonated a lot with investors, and now she’s written a book. It’s called Money for Tomorrow: how to Build and Protect Generational Wealth, and you can actually pick up a copy over at biggerpockets.com/m40. Use Code MFTPOD for 10% off.
David:
Whitney, welcome to the show. Great to have you back. Okay. So let’s talk about your book. Who did you write this book for and who could benefit from the content?
Whitney:
Well, thank you so much for having me back. It’s been a few years, so I’m super excited to be here. I wrote Money for Tomorrow, originally for myself and my family, and as a blueprint for my daughter, just in case I got hit by a bus, heaven forbid something happened to me, she would have a full understanding on how all the lessons and learnings that I had accumulated over a couple of decades of investing she would… And ordering all the steps on how to create wealth, grow and scale the money in our portfolio as well as protect it. She would have all that laid out for her.
Now, I’m putting together this blueprint for my family, and I’m also mentoring several people on the side on scaling their real estate portfolios, and I kept hearing some of the common themes over and over again like, “I make good money in my job, but I still feel broke. Or I don’t know if I’m doing the right thing when I invest, and will it be enough when I get to retirement. Or I hate talking about finances, I just want to do deals.” And that’s when I realized I’m like, “Wait a second. I have this blueprint, this framework that I’ve been developing for my family. Let me test this out with some of my mentoring and coaching clients.”
Lo and behold, we saw amazing results for it. Now, who does this book most appropriate for? I would say one of two camps of people. And I would say almost every single one of us falls in one of these two camps, and that is somebody who’s just starting off on their investing journey that wants an end-to-end blueprint on how to create wealth, protect it, grow it, and then pass it on. And then somebody who’s more of a seasoned investor that knows a lot of these strategies, these rules of the wealth game already that wants to go back and make sure that they have a very fortified foundation and that are prepping either for retirement or to pass this wealth on to the next generation.
Rob:
Out of curiosity, when you’re working with somebody, do you prefer to work with a newbie investor or a seasoned investor in that? Seasoned investors, I imagine probably have a lot of habits that you may have to correct, but do you have a preference?
Whitney:
Both are fun to work with. I feel like with a new investor, I get to mold them. I get to lead them along the way, but the more seasoned investor, it can be really fun because they tend to have money set aside. They have a war chest of funds ready to deploy so we can get… Once we get the foundation cleaned up and it gets really fun on helping them deploy capital.
David:
Okay. Now, Whitney, you also point out that even for people who build massive wealth, it’s extremely common for them to lose that massive wealth, which frankly is very rarely ever shared on podcasts or something called survivor bias, which basically states that you only hear about the story from the survivor. The people who had a bad experience don’t get a chance to share their side of the story. When people lose money in real estate or lose money in business, they’re not typically going to Instagram to post that information or the worst selfie that they ever took or the snot coming out of their nose pictures.
Everything we see is very carefully curated. Part of what’s working against people is what you call the four horsemen. Can you tell us what those four horsemen are?
Whitney:
Yeah, so I learned about the four horsemen in reading a book published by Garrett Gunderson and then also again from my own mentoring coach, financial coach, Chris Miles. And just really quick to list them out, the four horsemen are interest, insurance, taxes, and fees. So these are four of the big seven gaps that I pretty steadily see in people’s portfolios. And if we can learn how to plug these gaps in their portfolios, fortify what I call your financial emote, not only are you going to be a more fortified investor should the market turn south, it has in the past 12 to 24 months, but also you’re going to have more capital to deploy in the future and create greater velocity with your money.
Rob:
Now, the concept here with the four horsemen is there are these four different aspects that can creep up on you is my guess. And if you’re not good at mitigating them ahead of time when there’s a perfect storm, you get hit by everything, then it could pretty easily put you in a bad situation.
Whitney:
They’re really sneaky. I mean, a lot of people call them money leaks, and so a good example would be interest. A lot of people listening here might know Dave Ramsey and they might study his snowball approach to eliminating debt or his debt avalanche approach to eliminating debt. You would assume that paying interest is bad. We should eliminate all interest, but really there’s a difference between destructive interest and productive interest. And so if we’re picking apart this horseman, we want to put that debt, evaluate that debt and put it on a sliding scale between being destructive and productive and really figure out, “Okay, where does it lie on this sliding scale? Is it hurting me or is it helping me?” And then clearly evaluate it and take the next steps to eliminating that.
Rob:
Sure. Do you think you could clarify? I mean, I feel like I have a good understanding of interest. Insurance is a big one. Just found out, I haven’t told you this, David, but our insurance on our property, the premium went up $4,000 last week.
David:
Again?
Rob:
Yeah. So that’s fun.
David:
It already did that.
Rob:
Yeah, I know. It just keeps doing it. Help us, Whitney.
David:
Insurance is a big one. Especially property insurance rates have gone up across the board across the United States.
David:
Yes, they have. Fun fact, I actually started an insurance company and then couldn’t do anything with it because we literally can’t get policies in California. The insurance companies will not write insurance here and in Florida it’s getting to be the same thing. This is the one thing that’s not talked about in the world of real estate investing, and so people don’t hear about it until it’s too late.
Is this something that you find there’s a category of things that are just not discussed amongst real estate investors and it’s sort of oversimplified and glamorized in a way that isn’t realistic?
Whitney:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, I think what I run into with real estate investors often is maybe not so much about insurance or taxes or anything like that, but they get the steps out of order. They’re so focused on the real estate as a vehicle to grow cash flow, grow equity, create tax benefits for themselves that they forget that there’s some foundational work that they should do here, which is understanding how they’re creating wealth for themselves, and more importantly how to protect that wealth as they’re creating it.
So I think those are the things that don’t get talked about. Circling back to the four horsemen, people do a ton of due diligence on an investment for themselves to figure out how to protect the capital, generate cash flow, grow the equity. But when it comes to their personal finances, it boggles my mind that they don’t take all those lessons and learning these translatable skills and apply it to their personal financial situation.
David:
I love your points about starting from a strong financial foundation in order to build wealth. I echo those sentiments myself. We’re going to take a quick break, but when we come back, Whitney will break down the most impactful things that you can do to keep your wealth, including some ways that you might still be able to save on your taxes this year. So stay tuned.
Rob:
Welcome back. Whitney Elkins-Hutten is here with us talking about how to build the kind of wealth that lasts for generations and how not to lose money along the way.
David:
The last book that I just wrote, now that you’ve written a book here was called Pillars of Wealth, and I cover these principles that real estate investing is one of three pillars that you need to do if you want to get wealthy. The other two are making money and saving your money. We have bookkeepers that will look at a profit and loss statement for a property, and we will meticulously look at every expense. Where’s my insurance? Why is it going up? Why did maintenance cost this much? How much CapEx do I need to set aside?
And then when it comes to our own personal budget, it’s like people don’t pay attention to it at all. They put zero effort into where all their money is going, and they’re working so hard getting frustrated at not having success with real estate investing while all of the work that they’re doing for everything else in life, that money’s just flying right out the door and they don’t even pay attention to it.
Whitney:
Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, I have a coaching client that I’m working with right now. I’m not going to share any specific details, but it’s a theme that has cropped up. Again, they are very proficient at creating income and deploying that into investments, into growing their business, but the personal finances are, for lack of better word, is hot mess. We’re going back and they need a certain amount of cash flow to be able to exit from their business. And I’m like, “Great. We could spend all this money over here growing your investments,” which granted we could do, but we also can go back up here and pick up probably another three or $4,000 a month and just your personal financial statement. That’s less money going out the door. That’s less income that you have to generate to cover it.
Rob:
Sure, yeah. Well, we’re going to get into a few more of the horsemen, the four horsemen here that you were talking about. But before we move on to a couple of these, I did want some clarification on the insurance side of it. Is there something that investors can do to mitigate insurance because that seems like one that’s out of your control for the most part.
Whitney:
So really in the blueprint, what I see more often is that investors are not using insurance wisely in order to outsource their liability. Really, whenever you get an insurance policy, that’s what you’re trying to do. And so I hear you, Rob, you’re trying to… Maybe the question or what I hear here is, “How do I lower my insurance cost or maybe cost compare that line item on my profit and loss statement. Really there, you’re calling around to get the most optimal policies, try to compare apples to apples.
But more often than not where people are actually missing a gap here is that they don’t have the right, say, type of disability to guard against their job loss. There’s type of disability policies that guard against you working your current job, like current line of employment or any line of employment. Let’s guard our income. Let’s guard our health. The number one type of insurance that’s going to be tapped into is probably going to be somebody’s health insurance. But what most people do, they try to get the cheapest policy that they possibly can thinking that nothing’s going to happen to them.
And so health insurance, auto liability insurance, renter’s insurance. As an investor, if you’re an investor or a business owner and you have a home office, you need to understand if your home office is actually covered on your insurance policy. Oftentimes a homeowner’s policy does not cover a home office on the policy. It doesn’t replace that equipment. Or if you have to shut down your business for whatever reason, say, like there’s a natural disaster in your area, it doesn’t cover any of that loss. So we want to make sure that we’re utilizing insurance correctly in order to outsource a liability.
Rob:
Got it. So we’ve got interest, insurance. Those are two of the four horsemen. What are the other two?
Whitney:
Taxes and fees. Taxes tends to be a really fun one that most real estate investors love because they’re drawn to real estate because they hear, “Oh, I can use all these losses that offset my income or earn tax-free or unearned income in real estate.” And that’s great, but you can also do the same thing with businesses as well. So there’s an amazing book out there by Tom Wheelwright called Tax-Free Wealth, and so I really highly suggest everybody pick that up.
But really the five things that he’s trying to teach in that book is how you’re going to utilize deductions. A big deduction in real estate is depreciation. How do you use these to offset the income that’s coming in? How do you shift your income from earned income to passive income? That’s another tactic to implore here. How do you take advantage of lower tax brackets?
So for me, I can take advantage of my tax bracket for me as my child. I can take advantage of her tax bracket. She gets taxed very differently than I do. I can also take advantage of other dependents tax bracket. If I had a parent that was living with me or something like that, how can I take advantage of other tax brackets? How can you take advantage of tax credits? Hey, that’s a one-to-one offset on your tax liability. And then how can I defer income using retirement accounts, qualified retirement plans, pension plans.
Most of us are taught to do the last one first. Get a good job, buy a house, get married somewhere in there, right? Yeah. And then stuff, money in your 401K. There’s four other things that we should be looking at, probably first in order to optimize our taxes.
David:
Okay. So we shouldn’t just be thinking, get a paycheck and stick it in a 401K. There’s a couple steps that we can look at to save us money in taxes before we get there. What are those things?
Whitney:
Now, if you just don’t have a business or don’t have any real estate, you have very few deductions available to you, but as soon as you open a business or buy a piece of property, you have a wealth of deductions that are open to you. You learn to use those wisely. And I think the number one deduction that most people miss, especially when they start off investing in real estate, is using depreciation wisely. So make sure that you’re partnering with a tax professional that is not scared to take that depreciation deduction.
Rob:
That’s a huge one. I mean, that’s really one that most people are, I feel too lazy to really dive into that and learn why it’s so powerful. And you’re just like, “Yeah, deduction. It doesn’t really change things too much or one way or another.” But when you are a full-on real estate professional, meaning you are in the business 750 hours a year plus it’s more than half your time or you’re self-managing your short-term rental, you can really start unlocking the tax depreciation in a very significant way with bonus depreciation. And this is really something I wish that I had learned as a real estate investor at the very beginning of my journey.
I feel like as real estate investors, we really don’t worry about taxes until it’s tax time, and then we owe a lot of money, and then we’re calling our CPAs and we’re like, “Dude, what can I do to save 10 or $20,000 really, really fast?” Whereas what it sounds like you’re suggesting is implementing the right systems in place, learning about it, having a foundation at the beginning of all of this so that you’re never really scrambling in the final hours.
Whitney:
I would like to even challenge… We’re recording this early 2024. You should be talking to your accountant or a tax strategist on how to plan, what are those moves that you can take during the year, this year to lower your tax bill for your 2025 filing? Get out ahead of it. I see investors, they balk at paying for tax professional help because they think it’s costly. I will tell you, I mean my tax prep bill, it’s a few thousand dollars, but what I save is priceless. I will play that slot machine every single time.
David:
I can think of a couple practical examples because this is a really good example of investors know about depreciation, but they don’t always think about deductions because investors forget that they’re still running a business and they need to think like a business owner. When we talk about passive income in real estate, it gives this idea that you just made one good decision and then you benefit forever. But businesses aren’t passive and real estate is included in that.
So one thing is to set a business up that’s like an LLC or an S Corp with which you buy your real estate through. And then you talk to your CPA and say, “Hey, I am planning on going to Florida for this. I’m planning on going to California for this, and I’m planning on going to Tennessee for this. What would I need to do for this to be a write-off?”
And then your CPA will say, “Well, if you look at vacation, like vacation rentals when you’re there, if you meet with staff like a real estate agent or a property manager or a title company, when you’re in that area, this can now be considered a business trip that you are going to be taking anyways.” A lot of people go to dinner and they just pay for dinners. But if you make that dinner a business trip where you discuss things like business, so every time Rob and I go to Chipotle, that’s a write-off because all we do is talk about-
Rob:
Business.
David:
… our rental property. Yeah, exactly. A lot of people pay for a vehicle. We all have to have one, but your vehicle can be for many businesses, something that the business needs in order to perform. And now the expenses associated with that vehicle become a write-off for the business. And if your income is coming into this business and now you have expenses that you’re going to have anyways, but they’re also necessary for the business, you’re going to use it in your personal life, of course, but you can write it off as a business expense because it’s necessary that… I’m glad you’re bringing this up, Whitney, because this stuff doesn’t come up on real estate podcasts very often, but it’s still a part in building wealth and saving money.
Whitney:
Absolutely. Because every time you can bank some of those deductions, in the case of going to Chipotle or driving your car, you were going to spend that money anyways, but now you can write it off and you don’t have to pay taxes against that income that you use to offset it. Another one is business use of the home. If you have a home office, now a portion of the mortgage interest you pay on the property, the taxes, the insurance get allocated to that home office.
I know for me, I have a desk in a dedicated space in my home that I run my real estate business from. Well, of course I’m going to take that 200-square foot area and write it off against my taxes.
Rob:
Of course.
Whitney:
Why wouldn’t I?
Rob:
Why wouldn’t you.
Whitney:
Why wouldn’t I?
Rob:
Yeah, exactly.
Whitney:
So there’s just things to think about there. Internet. I can deduct through that home office, a portion of my internet. I have a phone dedicated for the house, therefore my phone that I carry, my cellphone that I carry is dedicated to the business. So partner with a professional that understands how to use all these things. One thing that I love about Tom’s book, Tax-Free Wealth is that he views the IRS code is a treasure map. The first 10 pages are all about how you can actually pay your taxes. I’m not saying we shouldn’t pay our taxes. Well, yes, we should pay our fair share, but you can arrange your affairs as such to lower your liability legally.
Rob:
So we’ve covered three of the four horsemen, interest, insurance, and taxes, and right after the break we’ll hear from Whitney about the last horseman fees, including one of the sneakiest fees and how to avoid it. Stick around.
David:
Welcome back, everyone. We’re here with Whitney Elkins-Hutten talking about her book, Money for Tomorrow. Let’s jump back in.
Rob:
So that brings us to the fourth horseman. We just talked about interest, insurance, taxes. What is the fourth one here?
Whitney:
Fees.
Rob:
Notoriously hated amongst everyone. It’s the one unity we have in this world is fees. We all hate them.
Whitney:
Oh, yeah. I mean, there’s the low-hanging fruit, your bank fees, your ATM fees.
Rob:
Ticketmaster fees,
Whitney:
Oh my gosh. Ticketmaster fees.
Rob:
Airbnb fees. It’s more expensive than a hotel. Sorry, carry, carry on. Carry on.
Whitney:
I 100% agree on all those things. Then if you’re a real estate investor, you’ve got your closing title fees. Right now I’m getting a house under contract to sell, and they’re like, “Here’s your title fee. Here’s your closing statement. Here’s your inspection.” And all these things that we have to split with a buyer. And I’m like, “Oh, boy. Okay. More fees for this transaction.”
Now, those are all great. We go into detail on that in the book, but I think the one that most people are taking their eye off the ball on is actually the fees associated if you have retirement funds. I don’t know about you, but if I’m setting money aside in retirement, I will probably want to have more than a $500,000 in that retirement account, which means when I start taking the required minimum distribution as I approach retirement, it’s going to be above my standard deduction. So my husband and I, we’re married, okay? We get a standard deduction of about $26,000 a year. I plan on retiring or pulling more than $26,000 out of that account.
Rob:
$26,000 per year?
Whitney:
Per year, per year. My living expenses are much more than that. So now here’s the thing. There’s two things that are compounding in here. One, there’s the fees that I’ve paid on those investments the whole entire time. And I challenge, people should do the math on this. They think that 1% total fee or 1.5% or maybe even 2% total fee in their retirement account just to administer the account just to be in the stocks, bonds and mutual fund doesn’t is worthwhile to them. You compound that out over 30 years, you’re losing not just tens of thousands of dollars, but in some cases hundreds of thousands of dollars just to fees. Okay?
But let’s say you get to retirement, that money’s all gone. You’ve lost the ability to compound and grow that. You can’t generate velocity with that money. It’s gone. But now you want to retire and you want to start pulling the money out of your retirement accounts, okay? It’s going to be larger than your standard deduction. Now, there’s a thing here called provisional income that you’re potentially triggering, which means you now get double taxed on things like social security.
So this can be a big train wreck for people. And so again, I really want to encourage people to model out what kind of fees that you’re paying as you grow your retirement accounts, but also sit down with a professional and fully understand, “Am I going to be triggering this provisional income whenever I start taking things out of my retirement account?” This is why we hear a lot of people doing Roth conversions, the five to 10 years before they start approaching retirement because Roth IRAs are not subject to provisional income.
Rob:
So one of the things that I’ve heard, and this probably goes into the fee side of it, is the compounding effect of having other people manage your money, which again, this is the standard way of doing it. Usually hire a professional, you’ll get charged a couple percentage points to do that, but over time, that compound actually eat away at a lot of the earning potential that you’re actually stacking away in your retirement accounts, right?
Whitney:
Oh, absolutely. In the book, I walk an example of somebody who is invested in their company 401k, getting a match, but they have a 1% total fee load between expense ratios, fiduciary, plan administration, all that, which is quite honestly pretty low.
Rob:
Yeah. It seems like very innocent, like a very innocent feel.
Whitney:
Yeah. Great. 1%, that’s no big deal. I’ll pay that all day long because somebody else is doing the work. Now, again, like you said, that’s compounding over time. You want your retirement account to compound, but the more money you put in there, the more company match that goes in there, those fees compound over time as well. So it’s innocent enough in your late 20s or early 30s, you might just be paying a couple hundred dollars a year. But by the time you’re pulling that money out 30 to 40 years later, you’re probably paying hundreds of thousands.
You’ve already paid tens of thousands of dollars in fees, but you’re going to be accumulating a hundred thousand or more in fees. I have a hang-up here. I really do.
Rob:
And I’m curious because it is sort of the standard. What’s the actual solution to that? Because I know self-directed IRAs seem to be very popular, and this is the notion where you get to control where the money is being put into. So a lot of real estate professionals like them because they can effectively use it to invest in more real estate if they wanted to. But is there an actionable step for real estate investors on maybe how they could not pay six figures and fees over time?
Whitney:
Well, I think it’s going back to those five steps that you need to take in order to eliminate and significantly reduce your tax bill that Tom lays out is that make sure that you are opening businesses like real estate, your investments, whatever you can to take advantage of those deductions, that you’re shifting your income as much as possible from earned income to passive income to change how it gets taxed, that you’re taking advantage of other tax brackets.
If you have a business, pay your kids. That’s a neat little, I shouldn’t say trick, but it kind of is. Why not? I pay my daughter. We have a camper van rental business. And not only is she learning good skills in managing a business alongside of me, but I can now pay her because she now has earned income and she can now put that in her Roth account. That’s a very powerful wealth transfer and wealth building strategy, and it’s completely legal. And then we can get into tax credits. And then the last part, if you still have funds left over that you need to tax shelter, now we can start getting into how do you best leverage these retirement accounts and qualified retirement plans? So it’s not necessarily an either or, it’s just making sure that you’re doing things in a laid out strategy and in the right order.
David:
Now, Whitney, you mentioned your daughter and how you pay her. I think that that’s brilliant. You’ve also mentioned that she’s one of the reasons that you wrote this book. Can you talk about how you’re passing on generational wealth to her and not just through wealth, but also through knowledge and action that she sees you taking?
Whitney:
Yeah, absolutely. Well, we actually started the wealth journey with her at an early age and just by playing games. So we started playing cash flow for kids at a very early age. And then whenever she got to be about seven, eight years old, we started reading a book like the Richest Man in Babylon. And from there we talked about how she could create value around the house, earn an income, doing things in the household, but also outside the household like pet sitting.
Now, she helps out in our camper van rental business. And then we started talking about how she needs to save that, save a certain percentage, but also set aside a certain percentage to give away. And then of course, she has the bucket that she can spend. And then we’re teaching her how to spend that money. Now, this is kind of the scary part as a parent, right? Because you don’t want your kid necessarily just going out. She loves buying Squishmallows. We walk in Costco, she wants to buy every single one of those gigantic three foot round pillows and bring them off.
David:
Oh yeah. My niece is right there with her. Nothing makes her as excited is when I send her a new Squishmallow.
Rob:
Same here, by the way. Nothing makes me more excited than getting a loan when you send me one, David.
Whitney:
Well, David, if you have extra, I’ve got an 11-year-old that would love some. So there you go. But anyways, it’s the cringe factor. She wants to buy these Squishmallows, and I kind of cringe. I’m like, “Really, this is how we want to spend our money?” But I’d rather her make these mistakes now with 10, 20, 50, maybe even a hundred dollars versus later in life with tens of thousands of dollars or even more. So she’s really learning the value of creating value, getting paid for it, learning how to save it, learning how to give it away to charities that she is passionate about, but also how to spend it, which is I think… And it’s not even just spending, but gain a good steward of that money as she moves forward.
And last piece is that we have her invest alongside of us in our real estate deals and various other opportunities. So she’s starting to learn about how her investment babies make babies and continue to grow that way. So I want her to have a very solid fundamental base. And quite honestly, that is the most important thing that I can pass on to her is that knowledge, because she can go out and create her own portfolio from that. So that’s my passion, and it is helping her do that, but also helping other people do the same.
Rob:
I love it. I mean, obviously it’s very clear that’s the mantra of the book here, right? I’ve got one final question as it pertains to this, and we talk a lot about on this show, this concept called financial freedom. But you introduced this concept that we don’t talk about as much, which is impact freedom. What does impact freedom mean?
Whitney:
This is really a journey that I went on as I was throughout growing my portfolio, but even writing this book. So I think many of us, when we enter in real estate, we have this focus that we want to have say, $10,000 a month in passive cash flow, and we’re going to be able to quit our jobs, ride off into the sunset and everything is going to be A-okay. That’s great. That’s a great milestone to have, but what is that doing for you? What’s the why behind that? And if you’ve ever done Tony Robbins, Seven Layers of Why exercise, most people have challenges getting three or four layers in, right?
They say, “I want $10,000 a month.” “Why that?” “So I don’t have to sit at a cubicle for 40 years.” “Okay, great. Why do you want that?” “Well, I want more time back.” And you keep kind of picking away at it. Most people arrive at five reasons that they want to do what they want to do. Financial freedom, which you already said, Rob, but then they say, I want to have choice in my life. They want choice freedom. They want time freedom. They want to have the time back. They don’t want to be told what to do. They want to have it back to do what they want with whom they want, and they want to be able to go wherever they want.
Think of these as freedom milestones. But eventually, and this is where I’m so excited for people, you’re going to have all of those top four freedoms. What’s after that? And that is the impact, freedom. A lot of people actually discovered this early. I think for me, I couldn’t put a finger on it so much for myself, but I just knew that there was something more that I needed to do, and that is creating impact in the world. Now that I have financial freedom, now that I have more time back and I can choose what I want to do with it, and I can do it anywhere in the world, now the world opens up for me and I can create change in other people’s life and create that impact.
David:
Sweet. Well, thank you, Whitney. Rob, I know that you have read BRRRR and Scale, and I’m very proud of you, buddy. By the way, it’s definitely going to be reflected in your Christmas present this year. But do you think you’ll ever read a third book? And if so, what book might it be?
Rob:
Well, it’s going to be Money for Tomorrow because I’ve got a coupon code for everybody at home, which is MFTPOD, M-F-T-P-O-D which will give everyone a little something, something at checkout, including myself. So go pick up a book today, everyone.
David:
There you go, folks. Don’t ever say we did nothing for you. Not only do you get a free podcast, but you also get a discount on Whitney’s book. We’ll get you out of here. This is David Greene for Rob, the Squishmallow Abasolo, squishing away. Squish, squish.
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