B (40:49)
There wasn't much before then and it didn't last very long. What's the Hobbes quote? It was brutish and short. Brutish and short, right. It is interesting that a successful retirement looks a lot like entrepreneurship. Being a self starter is important, treating it like a job, but a job that you love is important. Christine Benz in her book last fall, how to Retire, it was shocking that the very first chapter of this book, she's talking to an annuity expert, which is exactly what you expect. But, Paula, they didn't talk at all about annuities. They talked about this. They talked about getting out of bed, putting on actual pants with a button. With a button. Setting a schedule so you've got your scheduled activities for the day and sticking to that. Because I like what he said in that piece about we don't have any boss who's telling us what to do anymore. So blowing off the things to doom. Scroll longer, you go, well, I deserve it. I'm, I'm in retirement. The bad news is, is, yes, you do. Beware what you ask for when it comes to real estate. Real estate is not my forte, but real estate syndication gets very much into an area, Paula, that I know a lot about, because evaluating investments is something I've spent my entire career doing. So if you don't mind, I'll take a quick stab at this and then we'll hand it over to the expert. I think syndication is far more dangerous than people give it credit for. The number of headlines we've done on stacking Benjamins over the years related to people not getting what they wanted out of syndication is big. It can be immensely profitable. It can be fantastic. But here is the problem with syndication and Kip, you. You actually alluded to this in your question, but a lot of people don't even know what real estate syndication is. But this is where you are essentially like a limited partner. You are handing money to a general partner, to somebody who is going to make all the decisions. You don't make any of the decisions. They're going to buy and develop some property. Maybe they've even already bought it, and they're already developing it. They're going to give you a list of conditions around a property or properties. You're going to be the funding. They're going to take your money and leverage it so that everybody's able to hopefully do really well. And if things work out as expected, it can go really, really, really well. But much like if people have ever done a Kickstarter campaign, if you know what Kickstarter is, you're helping some developer, some maker, create a new thing. Even if, even if the maker has a long, long track record of successfully bringing things to market, you can still hand them money and they could just run away with it. Unexpected things still happen. So the past, what you're evaluating here, Kip, is the past, and you have to do that. And the number of people that get there was a Huge developer in Dallas. Just maybe 18 months ago, the Dallas newspapers did this horrible expose. It got picked up nationally about this guy who could tell a great story, got millions of dollars. In fact, Paula, there was one person that was being profiled in the piece who had given this developer over a million dollars. And they only had like a million and a half for all of their retirement. So they gave this guy two thirds of his retirement and the guys didn't know what he was doing. He had no idea. He was a great talker, but he had never done syndication before. And shock of shocks, he ran into zoning requirements he didn't know anything about. He ran into the fact that cost overruns with contractors that this guy didn't know anything about. He was just great at sales and people flooded him with, with money. So you have to look at their, their past track record. In this case, I would have told a client of mine that asked me to evaluate this. I would have said, this guy's got no track record. He's telling you a great story. He's got great numbers. He probably has charts and graphs, right? He's got no track record. You can't hand the money that you can't afford to lose. So if you do hand him money, make it a small amount and consider it a bet. But even after the track record, the problem with syndication is somebody could have done 20 of these, 30 of these, 40 of these, a hundred of them, and the next one could still go really bad. And there's nothing you can do about that. I see people go, well, rather than put my money in index fund, I'd rather give it to a real estate syndication. As if we're talking about two honeycrisp apples. We're not even talking about apples. We're talking about the same type of Apple. These things are not risk wise anywhere in the same generation of each other. They're not even close. A real estate syndication is always at the end, even after meticulous research, going to be a bet that this particular person is going to do what they said they were going to do. On top of the fact that you also have concentration risk, meaning it's one development versus in an index, you've got hundreds of different companies that have hundreds of different outcomes that are going to help you get rid of that concentrated risk. So I don't know, Paula, that's my feeling about syndication. It can be huge. It could be great.
