How goes your balancing act with life, work, investing and charity?
Last week for us was definitely pushed our limits to the edge. My wife and I are parents to a three and five year old, Cherry is in her final stretch for tax season doing Accounting to over 100 local real estate investors, our charity for which Cherry is VP Finance and I am President had one of our three major events this past weekend fulfilling the wish lists of 32 of Hamilton’s poorest families.
Thank you to all our donors and volunteers. If you see my post on Instagram you’ll see Batman and Thor, God of Thunder were in attendance to spread some cheer.
On top of all of that, we closed on our newest investment property on Thursday and it’s one of the worst closings I’ve ever seen mostly our own fault and the general difficulty of the lending market and lots of learning lessons.
The biggest lesson here is to start your financing process earlier than we did. Most of you are on the ball as you have your financing in order before conditions are lifted. We did not have a financing condition so we let that deadline slip a bit too far. I do however want to thank Butler Mortgages, specifically Dave and Michelle as they bore the brunt of our challenges but got it done.
Also I’d like to thank Crystal at CAP Law for getting our deal closed and doing an excellent job coordinating with the sellers’ lawyers.
Real estate investing can be all things: easy, challenging, fun, challenging, rewarding, challenging yet worth it.
Tonight is game seven of my hockey team the Toronto Maple Leafs vs. Boston and my favourite team, the Toronto Raptors game 5 of their playoff series. But guess what I’ll be doing? I’ll be in Hamilton with a wet/dry shop vacuum to get the water out of the basement at our newest property.
This is one of the realities of investing, the best deals are often houses with challenges, this one the basement is known to leak but it’s a very easy fix by rerouting the downspout away from the foundation. I’ve already done it but now I need to get the rain water out of the basement to prevent mould growth in our unfinished basement. I’ve always wanted to own a shop vacuum anyways and I’ll be home in time to watch the remain two thirds of the game.
If you don’t like doing any work on your properties that’s totally ok. I was just way to slow in booking my handyman to do this job and again, I’ve always wanted a shop vacuum :)
Speaking of investing being challenging and worth it, that brings us to this week’s guest Evelyn Lamarsh, our client since she was 26 years old when we met in 2011. Fast forward to today she is one of those few investors with 10 properties and living in financial peace.
Evelyn and husband Mike are living the dream. Evelyn has her dream job, Mike retired from his job in his early 30’s, they have two young children they get to spend lots of time with and they just bought a 30 foot boat to spend family time on and entertain friends and family. A boat paid for by their investments.
Financial peace and living the dream are indeed possible with some early hustle as explained by our client and more importantly friend, Evelyn Lamarsh.
What is the deal with AirBnb rentals and short term rentals?
First off I’d like to thank everyone for leaving their reviews on itunes results in this show being one of the top investment podcasts in all of iTunes. If you have any constructive feedback or questions please send them in and not write them in a less than 5 star review.
We received a less than stellar review about my lack of understanding of RESP. Admittedly, I don’t understand the nuances of RESP’s nor do I care to but don’t listen to me, my investments for my kids education plan returned only a couple hundred thousand in less than five years.
Personally, I’m a problem solver and the problem for a dad with young kids is affording their education is going to be expensive. A Globe and Mail article forecasted my kids’ education costsing $70,000 each for a four year undergraduate degree for tuition alone.
I have two kids so I need to make an extra 70k times two as I have two kids so how do I solve this problem of affording university?
In hindsight, investing in real estate has worked out quite well based on the results of equity gains in the hundreds of thousands while my kids are only five and three years old.
In asking Certified Financial Planner, Masters of Business Administration holder, investor of 10 properties and upcoming guest of this show Kathleen Van Den Berg, she informs me the nuances of RESP’s maximum grants per lifetime are $7,200 each kid. Again I don’t understand the nuances, I have shiny thing syndrome bad enough but my problem is saving $70,000 big, not $7,200 in grants.
I’m not saying don’t invest in RESP’s, I think for some they make a lot of sense but personally for my kids, I need a lot more savings and flexibility as more and more, I see tremendous quality of education for Sales, Marketing and Business to be better outside of traditional brick and mortar universities. Back we can talk about that another time.
While we are talking about my kids’ houses, one of them we have changed strategy from student rental to college kids to a short term rental and what a coincidence I had an in depth learning session, I mean interview of a full time AirBNB operator Bryan Kirow of Northern Host Kirow Management Inc with over 400 overnight stays in his units and counting.
As you can tell from the interview, he’s quite bright, upon graduating university he worked for the Canada Revenue Agency (CRA) for our American friends listening, that’s the equivalent to the IRS in the USA. Bryan worked there till life had him move out of town and he decided to make a full time gig of operating short term rentals remotely as some properties are over 300km’s apart, and he’s acquiring more properties. Currently he owns four properties with seven units but his portfolio is doubling in size in just a few months.
His investments have worked out quite well as he’s often doubling or tripling the rental income of a long-term strategy, and at the same time avoiding many of the tenant issues from long-term tenancy. Bryan even shares the little known renovation to try and double his already tripled annual rents on his property in a vacation town. Doubled his tripled rents. I know that sounds weird but when you listen it will make more sense.
Would you like my show notes? The notes I’m taking during the interview as I know many of you listeners are pre-occupied while commuting or cooking or working out while listening to this so if you are interested, I will include my notes in my weekly email that let’s folks konw the episode is available. Like you, I’m an investor too here to learn and I’m finding typing my own notes is a good practice for learning and my notes can be yours too if you simply go to http://www.truthaboutrealestateinvesting.ca/ and enter your name and email to subscribe.
Are you ever really sure you know what you’re doing?
I regularly check in with our investment decisions and more importantly what my wife and I are doing as parents. No different than investing, a custom approach is best and kids with their personalities is no different.
Admittedly I’ve taught my kids some controversial things and today is international bully awareness day so I thought I would share. My son enjoys hitting and wrestling, my older daughter not so much so I’ve told her to tell him to stop, if he doesn’t, walk away, if he keeps pestering you then hit him just not in the face.
I know many don’t believe in violence but from everything I’ve read on bullying and from my experience, there are people out there who don’t understand words, such as bullies so I view this as a learning experience under the safety of our home. My daughter learns to stand up to bullies and my son learns that unacceptable behaviour will result in being hit by the victim.
Even though their fighting drives me bonkers, to see how they are best friends makes it all worth it. Here they are, my daughter is riding my son’s bike because she got tired of riding her scooter and my son is copying me how I was pushing my daughter when teaching her to ride without training wheels.
My family is my motivation to work hard to afford more financial freedom and financial peace. Financial peace is a term I first heard from this week’s guest who is mega successful thanks to his TV show The Everyday Investor but he has peace as he does very little other work other than starting his own church. He has peace as he called his phone company to remove the texting function from his phone and he deleted all of his social media.
Rav was a Realtor and owned his own brokerage plus several investment properties but the lifestyle of hustle and demanding schedule did not suit him so he stopped being a broker and sold all his investment properties. Instead Rav focuses on his producing his show and others, teaching others how to invest passively in land developments. But by far the majority of his time is spent with his wife and two teenagers. Financial Peace indeed as Rav is rich yet his favourite store is Old Navy and the only car they own is not fancy and over ten years old.
Here am on as a guest on Rav’s Show https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IzRuyalspiY
If you’re interested in learning more about investing in real estate we have upcoming Street Smart tours of two of the elite 8 towns: Brantford and Barrie.
Saturday morning of April 27th, we have the former Economic Development Officer of Brantford leading our tour of potential investment properties. One property will be ideal for the recreational investor and another for more intermediate to advanced. The tour will be followed by a mastermind lunch with fellow local investment including experts from the iWIN community.
To get your tickets: https://www.eventbrite.ca/e/iwin-april-27-brantford-street-smart-tour-tickets-59267081436
Save the date: Saturday morning of May 18th, same idea for Barrie, a street smart tour led by award winning Realtor and investor of 10+ properties, John Beddome, he was a guest on this podcast just two weeks ago and has been investing in Barrie since 2007. John will be hosting a tour of properties followed by a mastermind lunch with fellow local investment including experts from the iWIN community.
Save the date for now and stay tuned for how to buy tickets which will be in the show notes at the http://truthaboutrealestateinvesting.ca or get on the email list so you are emailed when new episodes are released and informed when we host events.
To follow Rav, again he doesn’t have social media:
Onto this week’s show!
I’m getting a lot of emails and seeing it all over the investor Facebook groups folks are experiencing basement leaks so I’ve invited my secret contractor, friend and client Manny Cabral on the show. Just to warn you, he’s ultra busy and selective of who he works with. He’s earned the right as he’s so busy with his own portfolio and existing referral business.
Anyways, Manny is a real professional contractor, he used to manage government renovation contracts for government buildings and schools. He’s used to large scale projects with lots of regulation and moving parts which makes him well suited to be a general contractor and investor and house flipper.
Manny plus his two sons are members of iWIN and he used to sing and play guitar in a travelling rock band. As the serial entrepreneur that he is Manny also collected Corvettes including a time when our dollar was near par where Manny was the biggest reseller of Corvettes in Canada but that’s all boring compared to leaky basements so have at it Manny!