How 8 Rental Properties Bought Dion His Freedom

I prefer to invest in red counties in blue states. The new estate has to have good weather, a better tax structure, be more landlord friendly, but also be where I want to live. If you have time freedom and you have control of what you're going to do, what would your life look like? After years of investing in Washington state, my guest Dion McNeely is at a crossroads. Right now he's deciding which properties to keep, which ones to sell, and where to reinvest for the next phase of his life and invest in. But what makes this interesting is he's not simply chasing the hottest market or the highest return on investment. He's trying to optimize for freedom, flexibility, lifestyle, and long-term resilience. So in this episode, we unpack how experienced investors choose markets, manage risk, and build rental portfolios that actually support the life they want. So Dion, we've just caught up on text messages the other day, and you let me know that you had sold your residence in Washington state, which is the duplex that you rented out one side, you lived on one side at a really good price. We could talk numbers, but I think you sold it in the 700,000s, right? We sold it for, you've got that money in the bank, you've been traveling around all over the place. I couldn't keep up with where in the world you were, scuba diving, doing all this stuff. So I guess the question I want to start with is like, where you are right now, selling a property, traveling, what's on your mind? What are you working on these days? So it's really weird. I always caution everybody not to compare year 10 to year one, right? So the moves that we make later in investing aren't the ones we tell people to start out with. An example is this property, it's the first one I've sold, right? I usually purchase my properties and I hope they perform better than all of my marriages, right? Like I'm actually planning on until death do us part with these properties. So selling one, that was a big change for me. There's a few reasons why I'm moving and there's a few reasons why I selected a market, but I sold a live in burr, right? So I don't recommend starting with the burr method that buy, rehab it, rent it out, refinance, repeat. It's a later strategy because there's so many ways to mess it up. So after reaching financial freedom and after retiring, I did my first burr and it will be my last burr. Even when people hear how good the numbers were, it's still going to be my last one. A lot of headaches, right? There's some headaches involved in that as well. Mental peace is worth more than money. Return on brain damage is a phrase that I borrowed from a friend of mine, Arion Sheehy, and it's like, I'm using that all the time now. Return on cashflow, cash on cash return, return on brain damage, like what are we looking at here? That was definitely what happened here is, I mean, the numbers were great, but the loss of 10 months in the year that I could have been traveling and scuba diving. So I'm glad I did it. It was good, but I'm relocating to another market. I sold the property. I was living in it for the last three years, so the half of the duplex that I was in qualifies for the IRS 121 rules. No capital gains on up to $250,000 in gains on my half of the unit of the property. The other half, I'm actually just paying taxes on. I hear so many people talking about the tax strategies and the different things you can do. And for me, I'm not going to let the tax tail wag the dog. I'm picking a new market. I didn't want to be constrained by time, so I wanted to be able to spend a month in each of the three states that I kind of prioritized as where I might move to. And it's been nice having that freedom. The really cool thing with being financially free and putting in that decade that it took to get here using the small and mighty method, getting a really small portfolio, it was only eight properties that produced a couple of hundred thousand a year in cashflow and let me travel and scuba dive and spend the winter in Thailand. This winter, I'm probably going back to the Philippines. And the real power from this came from I'm selling the property and going to another state. I listed it and every agent that I talked to, my agent and some really good agents that I know, recommended listing it for $680,000. And I thought, oh, that seems to be the comps. That seems fair. But I have no pressure. I have no reason to sell. It's still rented out to a tenant. It was purchased with cash. It was cash flowing. While I learned these markets, I thought I'll just list it at some ridiculous number and see what happens. And I thought I would list it for three or six months and then I would slowly bring it down to the price where agents told me it would sell. So I listed it for $715,000 and thought, I'll let that sit. And within 11 days, I was under contract with multiple backup offers where they were competing with lowering the buyer's agent fee and no money towards closing and waiving inspection. And so people were competing in offers. And so I ended up closing in 45 days. And now I'm still free. I'm still taking the time to find a market. I've spent a month in Tennessee, two or three weeks in Florida, and I'm spending a month in Texas now. And it's really nice to have this time freedom to go, where do I feel like investing and living? Yeah, the flexibility, the options, there's so many things that you could put a price tag on. I could buy this car. I could buy this vacation. But I know you've been living this and experiencing it. I've had the benefit of doing it, too. I can't put a price on the ability just to pick up and go and say, these three weeks I'm going to do this and this two weeks I'm going to do this. I wouldn't sell that. There is no price for me. That's just an incredible feeling. And I want to talk about your choice to get up and move to another state. And what I really want to talk about and dig into is how do you pick a market? Because I think everybody listening to this, whether they're doing exactly what you're doing or not, has to evaluate the market where they invest. So I want to tease out some principles that you use beyond to evaluate a good market as you're searching for it actively. But before we do that, just like kind of wrap up that part of your story. Are there any particular reasons from is it investment reasons? Is it personal reasons? I mean, anything you want to leave out what you don't want to talk about. But I'm just curious about the motivation for going to another state. So I'll try not to be too political because I'm on your channel and that usually just gets you hate comments no matter who says the political thing to be. Let me see. Is this at least political as I can be? I prefer to invest in red counties, in blue states. That's my political sweet spot as far as investing goes. A lot of people invest on math. Math is the eighth thing that I look at when I look at rentals. I have seven criteria I go through before I even get to the math. And so many people are just what's the ROI? And I'm like, yeah, I'll get to it eventually. But the state I live in Washington state is getting too, too far in the political spectrum to want to be fully vested as cause I'm, I'm 100% of real estate. I don't own any stocks. I don't own crypto. I don't want to run a business. I just own real estate. I don't have retirement accounts. So I'm diversified in three different, you know, areas where my properties are at least 10 miles apart in the state of Washington where my rentals are. And I have three different tenant types, right? I have one third military, one third section, eight, one third working retired. So I thought I was very well diversified, but that state recently tripled the amount that property taxes can increase every year. Evictions can take four to nine months. They instituted rent control. So the limit, how much you can make, they've increased how much they can charge. And I'm not selling all of my Washington rentals. I will still continue to own probably six properties there of the eight because they have that they have mortgages on them under 3%. The debt on those properties is the asset more than the properties are. But I had two paid off. So I'll be selling those and redeploying those funds in the new market to diversify States to, you know, further diversify my portfolio. And I want to live in the new state. So the new estate has to have good weather, a better tax structure, be more landlord friendly, but also be where I want to live. Got it. No, that's, I think that makes sense. And I think no matter where people land personally on the political spectrum, you can agree that view and rental properties taking nine months to evict somebody is going to be more costly than, you know, one month when you have somebody who's just choosing not to pay you. So there's some, there's some business decisions. And I know a lot, I may have a lot of students and people listen to the show who invest in New York city, invest in LA, invest in California and Washington. So it's obviously not a thing like an all or nothing thing, but it's regulations are one of the many factors that you look at. Right. And so you're, you're hedging your bets a little bit more. You have all your, you had all your eggs in the Washington basket. Now you're like, all right, I want to put some of my eggs in a different state. That's a smart, that's a prudent thing to do. So let's, let's take that. So you're, you're, you could go anywhere. You can invest anywhere. You can live anywhere. Um, I'm just curious, what are some of the criteria you mentioned, whether you wish in a good place to live, like what, what are your, on the personal side of the ledger? And then what are some of the things on the investment side of the ledger that are kind of weighing your decision? Almost any time I talk with a newer investor about picking a market or picking the next asset area is they'll, they'll focus on the math. Where can you get the best returns? And to me, that tends to be the war zones, like the places you don't want to go. They can have, you know, the 2% rule is possible in some areas or Gary, Indiana had a program for a while where if you bought a property, you got a second one for free. The city was giving the second property. Buy one, get one free. It was a real estate deal. That's how the numbers there can, can work. So for me, picking a market to invest is a little bit about the math, right? I don't want to have negative deal. I'm not going to San Diego, California Kern County, California would make sense, but not LA County or one of the more expensive ones. So looking at States, I was looking for, there's a tool that people used 10 years ago where you can go to U-Haul and see where all of their trucks are moving, where it is very expensive to buy, to rent a truck in Washington and go to any other state. But some months of the year, U-Haul will pay you to drive a truck from Texas back to Washington because they have were out of inventory there. And so the States where people were moving was Texas, Florida, Tennessee, a lot of the Southern States. And part of that to me was a weather improvement, right? Washington has cold, wet, rainy weather. It has beautiful spring, beautiful summer. And like, I still probably plan on spending the summers there. But so weather was a factor, but weather also eliminated some markets, right? So there's a tornado alley. It's not on the top of my list. The hurricane zones of Florida and certain areas where people swear, Oh, they never hit here. A friend of mine purchased in Cape Coral, Florida and was told that they never hit there in the first year he was there. The hurricane came and took out his enclosed area on his house. And so he's now in Tennessee. And so weather was a factor. Income tax was a factor. So there was a political aspect to it too. I didn't want to move to a state that has an income tax and almost all my income comes from rental. So I personally don't really care about income tax, but I want, I don't want to buy properties that make money as the only reason to buy them. I want to buy properties that keep tenants long term and States without income taxes have tenants that stay longer than people who can now work remote jobs and do the same thing. Look at the whole country and go, why would I live in California where I can pay 13% in income tax in the state or Washington adds the millionaire tax, which we all know will quickly in the next few years become everybody income tax. And so even though that tax doesn't impact me, it was part of the criteria of picking one of the new States. Got it. Okay. So you're, you're sort of, it's almost like parallel to the reason people are moving in the first place. They have jobs in a certain place. If there's some incentive, personal incentives from an income tax standpoint, you're betting on the fact that in real estate is a demand supply game and you want a demand of tenants who are going to stay a long time. And so you're sort of following the trends of, you know, here's where people are moving. Here's why they're moving their weather, taxes, jobs, whatever. And so you've, and I have this, I don't know, I would love your feedback on this, but I often when I'm helping people pick a market, I use this idea of an economic sun. Like you want to find an economic sun where there's just this confluence, this gravity of jobs and people moving and just there's activity going on. Like I grew up in Atlanta, Georgia. So Atlanta is like a very obvious economic sun because you're just, it's just, it's burning, it's burning hot. You know, there's a lot of good stuff going on economically, but then it's hard to buy in the center of the sun because the prices are also really high. So like, I like to have like satellite little, you know, Mars or earth or orbiting around. It's like I grew up in noon in Georgia. That's one example of a satellite city, 30 miles outside of Atlanta and you can find little kind of niches within the sound of the solar system, so to speak, where you can find some affordability, but it has to draw the gravity of that economic sun. So that's, that's my kind of way of thinking about it. But I feel like you're doing something very similar in your own, your own way. So almost in any market, I think there is a concentrated city area where it's higher income, high cost of living, even in the lower cost of living States. And to me, it's, I, you draw a ring, a circle around that and the further out you get, you start to find an equilibrium between prices and rents where the properties do make sense in almost any market. You know, I would again, stay out of LA County, but if you go to Kern County in California, you can be just outside of the bigger city and you have that price to rent ratio that makes sense. And so each state that I'm looking at, I didn't pretty much the same thing. I'm currently just, I'm inside San Antonio right now, but I'm looking just outside of San Antonio, where the ring goes out far enough to where prices and rents make sense. But there's a couple of things that eliminated markets. I was looking at that. I really, some I've heard people talk about. One was a new thing to me. And so with the time freedom, I'm spending at least a month in each market at a minimum before I start making offers or start really digging in with to see the local area that I want to actually end up in. And I want where I invest to be within an hour of where I live because I'm going to self manage in the new market. I'm still going to self manage my properties in Washington because I already have the systems in place there. So the first place I went was Tennessee. And there's several places where the math makes sense. There's a lot of places that are, the whole town is a flip. I don't know a bunch of investors came in and bought everything and has it flipped and ready to sell. So I wasn't too interested in that. And I've heard a lot of people did some YouTube university research on what is it like to move to Tennessee, right? And a lot of people talked about the complaint was the infrastructure. So if you go to the comments, it's all of the locals saying, please don't come here. We have too many people. And I thought that meant the freeways would be backed up. The freeways couldn't handle the influx. And that wasn't my experience at all. The traffic on the freeways in Tennessee was a fraction of what it is at a slow time in Washington state. So that fruit, that infrastructure was fine. It was when I got off the freeways and I started looking at the areas where I would buy to rent or there is where I would buy to live. And the roads are one lane road with ditches on each side and intended for horse and buggy or something. You have to pull into driveways to let people go by. So the last one to two miles to get to any place where people lived in the markets I was looking at, most of the markets were eliminated because if it was frustrating for me to get there to look at the property, there is no tenant that's going to want to live there long term. And you know, cause it's easy to get people to move into a property. You can make deals, you can go low rent. It's hard to get a tenant to stay because they move for quality of life more than just the money. I found some markets, Athens, Cleveland, where the infrastructure made sense. There were some other things that made it, it's a possible, but I wasn't super excited about it as much as I was when we're sitting at home thinking, I'm going to move to a new state. You pull up the internet, the photographs look great. The descriptions sound great. The math looks amazing. And then you get there and you realize in Winchester, which is a town in Tennessee, there was a couple of nice rentals on some nice streets that I would very easily happily purchase at the price they were listed for on the MLS. Good return, nice neighborhood. And then I went two streets over in the same town. And I looked at places. It was literally like, if you look to the left, it's a Norman Rockwell painting. If you look to the right, it was a Norman Bates painting. There were five or six vacant houses, trap houses boarded up with plywood in the same town, just two blocks away. And so I thought if I was out of state looking at these listings online, they look the same. The math looks the same. The pictures look the same. What you don't get is somebody walking up and down the street saying, Hey, this is an area you can't walk at night. And you don't want to start handing here in the same town. So going to a new market is definitely boots on the ground. Either someone you trust or for me, it's me spending time there. Tennessee became a maybe even though it was the one I was most excited about because of the strong political alignment that I have with the state. There's as least political as I can be. So then I go to Florida. Technically I'm there to marry millennial Mike and his new bride, but I spent weeks there researching the markets and looking at the areas. And I found some areas that I really liked. And the problem I ran into is I couldn't talk to investors and I couldn't talk to insurance brokers and get it nailed down in any way, shape or form, what the expected cost of insurance on a property should be. The brokers went specifically to age of building, elevation of foundation, elevation of the land, water flows. So to have an understanding for the cashflow on any property in Florida, I would have to go through almost the entire purchase process to find out all of the costs on each property. So separately that my very simple Marine Corps brain said, if I had to, I could figure this out, but it's so volatile and so different in markets that the work it would take to invest in that market. Isn't what I'm looking to do in retirement. So here I am in Texas. I ended up here just outside of San Antonio is where I'm looking. It's a lot more consistent. The population is growth is I'm with you. It's that, would you call it a real estate son? Yeah. Economic son, economic son. Yeah. So you've got San Antonio, the triangle of San Antonio, Austin, Houston, like that's just, that's a pretty big magnet at the moment. It is. And it seems like over the next 10 to 20 years, San Antonio and Austin are going to grow and merge and become like a DFW where people just start associating them with one megaplex. So I kind of want to own in this area. There's several bases. There's the, whether there are some areas where I'm going to avoid because it's so flat, it seems like a hurricane, bad weather risk, but the Hill country has rentals that make sense. There's small multifamily, there's single family, the cashflow. I need to learn the markets. It's so I'm spending the month to figure out where do I want to invest? It's going to be two to three months before I go, okay, I understand the market. Now I can recognize a good deal from an average deal. I could, I can start making offers on rentals. It's not something where I would go online and research this or even come here and spend a few weeks and then start buying things. Yeah. So it's the little pockets. That's what takes a long time to figure out. It's very interesting to hear all this comments, the commentary you have. I have a couple of thoughts that I want to share with people. And then a question, a followup question for you. What, one of the thoughts is that even, even in the States you didn't necessarily choose yet, Tennessee, Florida, I find it really interesting, but that the micro knowledge that it takes to be good in a market is what, how you, what you pointed out, like even in Florida, I have a lot of friends who invest in Florida and there's definitely ways to make money there. But like the knowledge you have to have on the ground of the elevation and of this area and weather patterns and, you know, flood zones and things like that, like that, that to me is like real estate. One-on-one it's like, you have to have that local knowledge. And if you're out of state and you're not taking the approach that you're taking beyond where you're just going to like, Oh, I'm going to go in and two weeks go buy a property. Like that's, that's got problems. Like you, I think I find it. That's my, it's my second comment is that how much of the research you're doing, like you're, it's very obvious how deliberate you're being and you're taking it seriously, understanding like a wide variety of criteria for a city. You're understanding, you know, the, the big picture, the demographics and the economic sun kind of stuff. And you're also looking at zoning and you're looking at, or you're looking at, you know, the environmental risk and things like that. So I find, I just want to point that out to everybody that I think that's a really good case study to show how you should approach investing in a market. My question is, you, you, you mentioned a couple of times, like the math worked, right? Even though you were looking at other things that didn't work, but the math work, what does it mean for the math to work for you on a deal? People talk about the cash on cash return on investment. And there's so many videos on the way to calculate that. And a lot of people really get into the math has to work. I need to get a good return on my money. And I guarantee if somebody right now calls an agent in San Antonio in Chattanooga or in any one of the markets that I'm checking out, and you say something like, I have California money, or I have Washington money. I want to invest in this market. They'll send you deals that mathematically make a ton of sense. The rents are, they look like they'd be really high. The price is right. If you're not factoring in what the taxes are going to be, what the insurance is going to be, what the cost of repairs can be. An example is in Washington. If I set aside 15% of gross rents for repairs, maintenance, and vacancy, I've never had a year that came up to even 50% of what I'm setting aside. But our friend millennial Mike who invests in Gary, Indiana needs to set aside 20 or 25% because the rents are lower. The prices are lower, but the roof is going to cost almost the same. A water heater doesn't cost much. Lowe's isn't sourcing them from Gary, Indiana, Lowe's and Home Depot get them from the same distributor and put them countrywide on where they're going to be. The labor might be a little less, but those materials are about the same. So you have to factor in at the local market. How does that municipality, city, county, state, factor their taxes? One of my criteria here in where I'm investing is I have a map of the shape of the city limits of San Antonio and I will not own a property inside the city limits of San Antonio because of the tax stacking aspect of it. If you have to understand what insurance is going to be required, if you're in Florida, an investor there taught me about the orange tree method where if you purchasing properties that have orange trees on it, that is at or above sea level because they won't grow in the salt lands below sea level. And so if you don't know these local market things and I'll reference him again, millennial Mike, he, he lives in Washington. He's a long in law enforcement. He's investing out of state and Gary, Indiana. He didn't just go randomly pick a market. He found an investor, a guy named Mark Matsky who invested for years, got to 25 rentals. And then Mike said, I'll use his systems to get into that market. So if I was going to invest at a distance, I would probably go in millennial Mike's path and say, Hey, let me use your property managers, your contractors, your, let me use this friendship to use his systems. I'm investing in a new market by being the boots on the ground, being the person who's going to go and say, okay, which neighborhoods make sense. San Antonio is a great, I've had some great experiences here. I took a short trip through a little area called Kirby or the Southern edge of San Antonio. And I thought, Oh, this is where you don't want your car to break down. So this is not where I want to own a rental, right? You have to know the little nuances like that. And if you're, so again, if you call from out of area, the agents will send you some great mathematically sound deals where the cost to acquire versus your annual profit looks like you'd get a great return, but it's not factoring in those other costs that you don't know. How did the taxes work? How did the insurance work? What's my turnover going to be like in this area? Because I don't want properties that make good money unless I can keep the tenants long-term. The point for me is all my rentals are long-term rentals. I'm going to do midterm. I don't do short term and low tenant turnover is what lets me travel the world and do whatever I want. Yeah. Yeah. I love that. So surface level math, like people might look at it like a rent to price ratio. Like that's, that's on the surface. You look at something that it rents for $2,000 a month and you can buy it for 20, $250,000. You're getting cut. Oh, that ratio looks pretty good. Like that's a good place to be. It's kind of close-ish to the 1% rule. But then if that property is an area that the property taxes are twice as much as the County next to it. And if it's in a flood zone and that particular property and has that flood insurance, then that increases your insurance by 75%. And if that property was had really poor workmanship and it's built 1920 and you're having to replace the foundation and you can have like, you know, $10,000 a year in CapEx. Like so what you're saying here is like the devil's in the details. Like you can't just use a rule of thumb. You actually have to dig in and run the actual line by line numbers eventually in order to know whether that's a good deal, not good deal. Well, I mean, the best takeaway for me is all of my deals have been from the MLS, right? I don't do anything creative. I don't do driving for dollars. I don't do mailers. I just go on the MLS, start on Zillow to get an idea and so it was never accurate, but it gives you a feel for an area. Then you get on the MLS search. And why are the local investors with all of their knowledge and all of their resources passing on the deal that you think is amazing when you find it, when you find it even off market or on the MLS, what problem does that have that you don't recognize? And that's why it takes that boots on the ground or, or the local experience of spending time there, which makes investing in a distance really hard when you're working full time. Yep. I find this to be one of the good things about real estate. A lot of people's, you know, they'll give on comments. I get all the time on YouTube or like, well, that's not passive. It's not passive to buy a real estate investment. And I say, well, of course it's not like, and especially on the front end, like all the stuff you're doing, Deon, you're, you're having to almost, you're almost accumulating like a, a body of knowledge in your head around a town that it's like just hundreds of data points, like all these different things that kind of come together into sometimes a gut feel of like, well, that's not exactly the place I want to be. And I think that's good. Like, I think that's our competitive advantage. If I wanted to just to press a button and invest passively, which I do also, I just buy an index fund and I would own the entire market and diversify. But like, this is why real estate has so many advantages in my mind. Like the process you're going through right now, which is why I found this conversation so interesting, Deon is like the, it's the like building of the competitive advantage that you're going to have in San Antonio. And you're doing it slowly. You're doing it deliberately. And I find there's no shortcuts to that. Like that's, that is what it is. Well, I think I talked about this with you in Las Vegas at the bigger pockets event. And I'm looking forward to seeing you at the one rental at a time event this January. Yes, I will be there. But the real estate investing is life consuming. Real estate ownership is close to passive. The IRS calls it passive, but it's close to its passive. It can be two to five hours a month to manage a small portfolio. That's, that's easily doable, but acquiring it can be two to five hours a day. Like that, that's the difference where a lot of people think stocks versus real estate versus what's more passive or whatever. The control of owning real estate to me has far more benefits than the control and owning stocks. And I'm not comparing the two. I think pick an asset class and master it. It doesn't matter which one it is. For me, it was real estate because I didn't make a lot of money and I, I didn't start thinking about money until I was 40. So I didn't have time for compound interest to do its thing, but I had to live somewhere. So to get to financial freedom, I have sacked a couple of times and then I added the real estate. And so in a shorter period of time, I was able to reach financial freedom by letting it be life consuming. Like there, it's one of those memes where the person gets kidnapped and they throw them back in the house because he wouldn't stop talking about real estate. Like that's how it was for a decade. Every conversation they had, every YouTube moment that I had was spent watching, educating, learning my market, learning my asset class, changing direction when I got new evidence. So one of the, one of the problems I think a lot of new investors make is they, they think, okay, I want to do this. And here's the example that I will use. As I worked in law enforcement for eight years and a police officer can't show up on scene and go, okay, I think this happened. Let me find evidence to back it up. If to show up with kind of a blank mind and go, okay, let me look at the evidence, make an opinion and then be willing to change my opinion. If new evidence comes up in a market, investing is exactly the same way. I wanted single family houses. I understood them. I thought tenants stay in these the longest. That's what's going to be my investing and in my market in Washington in what 14 years now, since I started thinking about this, I still haven't seen a single family house that would cashflow. So I shifted to small multifamily. I'm looking at new markets. I can't come here and go small multifamily or what works. That's what I'm going to go for. I have to learn the cash on cash return, tenant retention, what markets like, what markets don't like to go, okay, this is the asset that works here and be willing to change my opinion. I find new evidence. Yeah. You're going there with a, you're going there with a core set of principles, which you learned, and then you apply those principles to the moving background of the reality of your market. Like every market's got different nuances, but you're, you're taking the principles of, I want to own a property where people stay longterm where I get cashflow out of it, where I'm not having to deal with major maintenance issues. Like you take these kinds of core principles, but then I like that you're open-minded to the idea. Almost like, it's almost like a childlike curiosity. You know, it's like, you just, you gotta be open to ideas. And then by being open, you can then, Oh, well, maybe this strategy that I didn't even think about is the way I should go instead of like, just, this is the way I gotta go. I gotta put that I saw Dion and Chad talk about buying small multifamily on YouTube. Therefore I am going to do that too. Like that's, that's the wrong way to approach this, this, you know, hearing somebody talk about it. Yeah. And so I get asked often, you know, if you had to choose between a single family and a small multifamily, which one would you buy? And I like to think since, and so here's, here's my lived experience of the last five years, since 2021, I've wanted to purchase a fourplex that costs at least a million dollars. How many times have we heard people say, I want to buy in the cheaper market because I can buy it faster. It's a lower down payment or whatever. I wanted my properties to cost more because if you're going for a cash on cash return, the more expensive properties, if you get the same yield, it takes less properties to get more cashflow, right? So I want the right amount of cashflow from the least amount of units. Well, in 2021 I bought a duplex and then 2023 I bought a duplex. And this year I'm probably going to buy a single family house or a duplex or a triplex or a fourplex because what we want is part of the element of our hunt for the next property. But what deal pops up that is the best is actually more of a deciding factor than what I want. That duplex that popped up in 21 and the one in 23, they just made more sense than the fourplexes I was seeing. And so I have to do the same thing now is I would like to buy, I want to buy five to 10 acres for myself, house with an EDU. So there's somebody there to take care of the animals when I'm gone. But maybe I find a place where I have to build an ADU. I would like to find cash on cash return rentals. I haven't, I haven't learned the market yet enough to go, okay, that's house, house with ADU, small multi-family. I'm still in the 30 year fixed rate debt train. I want to go with conventional loans. So that kind of tells me what to look for. But I talked to a lot of people who say, I want to invest in single family houses. I need to pick a market. I want to invest in small multi-family. I need to pick a market. And it's search for both learn the market and figure out which is the better deal. Just like Michael Zuber says, he'll get, he'll go for the best yield. I'll go for the best tenant retention and you. Yeah. Agreed. I like it. Like that approach. Well, I'll be really curious beyond to follow up with you in a few months to see where this goes. I think this will be fun to ongoing story. Everybody should check out your channel. I'm sure you'll be doing some updates or on one rental at a time with Michael Zuber. I know you come on there pretty often. I want to do a pivot here from your story, from this part of your story to sort of the bigger picture. Like I always tell people when I talk about you and your channel, like I feel like you're, you do a better job of talking about the small and mighty investor philosophy and living it than I do. Like you, you have, you, you have squeezed the most out of a portfolio of properties and you're living the lifestyle you're traveling. And I guess the question I want to ask is lesson lessons learned in terms of the stage you're in, in your career. I talk about like starting as a beginner, buying your first deal. Then you're in this wealth builder phase where you grow, grow, grow and then you get to the harvester phase where you can actually pay some properties off, perhaps maybe start focusing on cashflow. I'm just any thoughts that come to mind for you? Like you're, you're in a really interesting stage that a lot of people aspire to get to as a small and mighty investor and just any thoughts or advice you'd have for people about you've learned from this, this part of your journey. I think everyone's different, right? So I don't want to make a blanket statement and say that this is how it is. But I think this is how it is for me. You started investing a decade or two younger in physical age than I did. Again, I didn't start thinking about money until 40 and get the first duplex until 43, right? Like I started saving way late in life. So by the time I reached financial freedom, I was 52. I'm at the point where I go, okay, I want the next decade to be whatever I feel like doing in the moment. Had I started younger when, like when you did, I think my late thirties and my forties, I probably would have went, wow, I reached financial freedom. Now what kind of empire can I build? Like that's the mentality of, but you still have a couple of decades before we hit what we call old age, older age. But I was basically, if I don't enjoy this next decade, what was the point of reaching financial freedom? So I could do this, something similar. I could think, okay, I've got time freedom. I've got money. What kind of business can I start? Could it be, I don't go very hard into YouTube. I do three videos a week. I'll go and talk at presentations, but I don't have a team. I don't have an editor. I don't, you know, put a lot of time and energy into that. It's just, I'll go live and I'll talk and I'll say, here's something I'm sharing, I hope it helps you. Uh, I'm not making a business, you know, YouTube revenue itself isn't where the money is. The money's in affiliates or events together or something like that. And I'm not doing any of that really. I reached financial freedom at the point in life where time freedom mattered more than anything. If you reach financial freedom, a person watching this in your thirties or forties, that doesn't mean you have to go and say, okay, the next 30 years is just going to be travel and scuba dive. That's fun for a while, but you still have all of that energy and all of the ability to go, okay, what can I build now? And I think that's more so of what you've done. And so I don't think it's, I'm lazy or I enjoy being lazy. That's a part of it. It's there's this kind of a thought. Let me see if I can articulate this. We have a friend, Cody Davis, and he invests in Washington state. He's been to the one rental at a time event. He's, he's talked on our channels. Um, he had 30 rentals before he could buy a beer. And I interviewed him when he was 20 and he said, he actually said, I wish I started sooner. And now he got up to like 200 units and now he's right sizing. He's getting it back down to like a hundred. He's getting newer properties and he was getting rid of some older stuff and he's, he divested himself of partnerships to where he's going to own it all himself. He never had 10, 20 or 30 years of work that sucked. Right. I've got a Marine, a cop and a truck driver as a single parent, raising three kids. Work sucks. And so I reached financial freedom with the mentality of how do I diversify? How do I protect myself? How do I never have to go and have a boss or a schedule or anything like that again? I think there are some people who do it at such a young age where Cody's at risk of not knowing how much work sucks and risking actually thinking, well, I should probably go try a job out someday. I don't think he will, but I think there are people who do that. And so I think there's, there is some benefit to doing this later in life, but there's definitely benefits to having time for you sooner. So you have options. Yeah. Well said. I think it's really interesting. One of the most interesting parts for me of this journey is talking to friends like you to Michael Zuber, to millennial Mike, to others, the people on this channel and just seeing how many different journeys there are, like I've, I've had human beings, endlessly fascinating the different opinions and life experiences and jobs people had therefore, but that also means like, there is no, there's some principles that we can share. You can tease out some principles here and there, but like every journey by default has got to be unique because each of us has our own unique journey. So like, I find that so cool that financial freedom gives people that word, the freedom to like, do the, do you do you the way you want to do it. And for me, like my journey has been more like this. It's been, you know, work, work, work, grow, grow, grow. Like I tasted the, you know, the candy of like, go big. That's why I'm so big on the small and mighty is because like I tried to go big and it sucked, like I hated it. Like it was stressful. It almost cost us everything in 2007, eight and nine. Like we were, we held on, but like it was, it was dicey there for a little bit. You know, we had some luck, we had some good relationships. We had some hard work combination of all those things. And so like, I kind of got to the edge of the cliff and was like, no, thank you. Like I'm, I'm good. I'm going to pull back from that cliff. And so for me, it was a matter of like the, the cadence that my journeys look like is grow, grow, grow, grow, harvest, pull back, take some risk off the table. Take a mini retirement. So instead of like a permanent retirement, I'll take like six months, a year, a year and a half, go do something totally different than I'm doing. And I press pause on it. And then I go back to building. Cause I like building. I enjoy even this coach Carson business I'm doing for five, six years. It was like, not really a business. It was like just my hobby thing. And finally, like I was in sitting in Spain and I was telling myself, you know, I think I still have some building in me. I don't want it. Like it was, I was drinking, you know, some, some, some Kanye, some beer there and hanging out and do it all. It was wonderful at the time, but there's just knowing myself. I was like, I like to build, I want to build. My kids are in a stage where we're going to kind of put roots down. And so for me, like coaching and teaching was something I wanted to push a little bit. I wanted to try to do it. I would, I was always kind of nervous about having a team. I didn't want to have people that depended on me and I was free, you know, free. And, but it was like, in order to make more impact and to see if I could do that as a teacher and as a coach, I had to build a little bit. So anyway, I guess I'm saying all that just to say like, there are so many unique paths. And I'm, I think it's cool that you've done you Dion and that whatever the next step is, it's going to be uniquely you. And the real estate though, can, could be the foundation of whatever you want to leap into and go into next. And it can, it can be the part that enables your, your unique aspect of it. Well, one of the reasons I think it's really important that people like you and Zuber and the lumberjack landlord and Mike and myself share this information is because imagine the world, if people had jobs, they wanted instead of jobs, they had to have teachers who just love to teach and mechanics who have to solve problems. And you said it almost perfectly. It's like at some point you can chase impact instead of income. And, and that's kind of the whole point of sharing this information is whatever your asset classes, whether it's stocks, crypto business, real estate, or a combination of those, if you have time freedom and you have control of what you're going to do, what would your life look like? Cause most of us are just trapped thinking, okay, I have to work until retirement retirement. So far away, why even plan for that? And so one of the ways I like to look at it is I hope people build a life where work is in the way, maybe not in YouTube university. Cause we're talking to people who are trying to figure this out, but in our, in our sphere of people that we know that aren't investing, you'll have people say, I don't know why you would retire early. I don't know what I would do with my time. I've had people say that like, like, first of all, I didn't retire. So you can have your time. That's something you'd have to do. But if people had something they wanted, it could be remodeling old cars. For me, it was, I want, I want to travel and experience other cultures and I want to scuba dive in places I've never been. Well, the job was definitely the problem. Cause even if you take like a two week vacation, some of the places I want to go, it's two days of travel to get there. So a week or two week vacation becomes very limited. But if you can go like your mini you're, you did much longer than me. My first ones were like a month long. Columbia for a month, Thailand for a month. Now I do three months at a time, but that makes the two days of travel a lot easier to put up with. Yeah, exactly. And so that's the thing is where towards the end. And in 2021, I was still saying, I don't think I'll ever retire. I don't think I'll retire early. I might not even retire late. I just love my job. But by 2022, I started realizing there is, there's a whole world to experience. And if I built a life where work was in the way, then exiting this job is not a negative. You don't lose your identity. You get into the life that you've been building. And so I think, I think I'm in the parking lot trying to tell people like, there's another way to do this and it's worth it if you make it worth it. But there's a ton of people who will just never even want to do this because they can't think of what they would do it with their time. Uh, they don't think it's possible for them. And the biggest excuse I hear all the time is you're only successful because you did it before. Hmm. Right. And every year that I purchased a rental or made an investment was a year, somebody was telling me not to. People are saying not to do it right now. It's like they're pretending inflation's not going to happen for the next 10 years or that there's going to be an opportunity this year or next year that five years from now, people are going to be saying you're only successful because you invested in 2026. Do you remember when lenders were still lending to people before that, whatever happened? Yeah, I find, I find the same thing and this is just my personal theory, but I think some people need to work on their imagination, their imagination muscle. Like, you know, when we were, when you were a teenager or maybe you're 10 or 12 and you were like, when I grow up, I want to be this, or I want to do that. And you remember how like exciting that is as a kid, you're like, Oh, it's just the world is possible. I can do this. I feel like work in some ways for some people, for many people kind of smashes, smashes that down. And it's like, no, no, no, you can't, you can't do what you want to do. Like that's not, that's not possible. So your, your imagination kind of gets limited, almost like a horse that has blinders on, you know, like you can only see like right ahead and I know it's a little, maybe that's a little harsh in some cases, but I do think imagining giving yourself permission, like you just said to let work get in the way of something, some passion, some, even if it seems silly, like even if it seems impractical, especially if it seems impractical, like that's, that to me is like the, the, the engine of everything we're doing. And really, I love that perspective. I appreciate it. Dion, I want, I want to encourage people. You gave us, you know, they won't be able to watch this cause you did this last year, but you gave a speech at, as the keynote speaker at bigger pockets conference last year that I thought was amazing. You really like knocked it out of the park. You told your story. So if people want to get like a taste of that, they should go to your YouTube channel, check out what you have going on there. I'm going to put a link below. It's one of those channels you just need to have subscribe on and just watch it consistently because Dion's always dropping gems there. I also want to recommend another episode that you and I did together, which has been one of the, I think one of the best ones on my channel that you, you, you unpack the strategy of how you get tenants to volunteer, to raise their rent and actually be happy about it. And it's a strategy you've made really well known with the binder strategy. I, I referenced that video all the time, beyond with people. When I talked to them about, you know, how do you raise rents? How do you have a relationship with your tenant? It has a lot of gold there. So I'm going to, if you're watching on YouTube, click on the thumbnail above me here and go check that one out. If you're listening on the podcast or watching on YouTube, there'll also be a link to that below in the description. Dion, thanks for being here. It's been a lot of fun. Look forward to catching up with you again soon. Thank you so much.