Transcript
Dave Meyer (0:00)
This is how you become a millionaire. Through real estate investing, you can completely replace your income and achieve a seven figure net worth in a relatively short amount of time by buying rental properties. No matter how much money you make or where you're starting from, today I'm going to show you how to get from your current financial situation to at least $1 million. Hey everyone, it's Dave, head of real estate investing at BiggerPockets. And you've probably already heard this, that real estate offers the best path to financial freedom of any asset class. But how does that actually happen? How do you actually become a millionaire through real estate and replace the income from your current job? Today, we're going to discover just this. First, we're going to start by talking about the four core wealth building elements you need in your real estate portfolio and, and how to optimize each one. Because building wealth in four different ways at the same time is really unique to real estate. You don't get all of these benefits from stocks or from crypto or really from any other assets. So after we talk about those four key wealth building elements, we're going to move in the middle of this video to talk about the actual math of how you can take your current income and starting capital and grow it to $1 million by using these real estate wealth generators and this stuff that I'm going to show you. It's simple math, but it's also important to know it's not just theory, it's a real path. I've personally followed this for 15 years and the numbers prove it out. And then towards the end of the video, I'll also show you two additional growth levers that you can pull in your real estate investing to increase the velocity of compounding and your wealth. These two things are going to be really useful to everyone, even advanced investors out there who already understand the basics, but, but maybe want to achieve their financial goals faster. So let's get into it. All right, so let's start with these four basic building blocks that really every real estate investor and every real estate portfolio is built on top of you. And again, I'll share two extra bonuses later. But let's start with the really important four things. They are cash flow appreciation, amortization, which you may hear called loan pay down, same thing, and taxes. Those are the four core things that you need to remember. Cash flow appreciation, amortization and taxes. So let's go one by one and just define and talk about what each of these four growth levers are. The first is cash Flow, and you've probably heard this term, you maybe the whole reason you're listening to this podcast, the whole reason you're interested in real estate investing in the first place, is cash flow. And it's an important, really important part of being a real estate investor because it's the thing that eventually is helps you quit your job to replace your income. The literal definition of cash flow is basically you take all the revenue that you generate from a property or a your entire portfolio. You subtract all of your expenses, and I mean all of them, not just the mortgage and interest, but things like your repairs, your vacancy, your turnover costs. You subtract all of that and what you have left over is your cash flow. If you own a rental property, and let's just say that you generate $3,000 a month in revenue and it's $2,500 in expenses, you make 500 bucks a month in cash flow. This is an amazing wealth builder in real estate. And again, one of the main reasons people get into real estate in the first place, because the cash flow building potential for real estate is way better than other asset classes. You don't get the same cash flow potential with the stock market or crypto or anything like that. Real estate really is, in my opinion, the best way to generate cash flow of really anything you can invest in. So that's the first growth driver. The second one is appreciation. You probably know this, but generally speaking, housing prices go up in the United States. And by owning these assets, when you see real estate and property values go up, you make money off of that. If a property goes from $200,000 to $205,000 and you own that property, you just made $5,000. And so that is a very valuable, really sort of long term, reliable wealth building force in real estate investing. So so far, our first two are cash flow and appreciation. The third one is a little less obvious than the first two. It's something called amortization. You may hear this called loan pay down as well. But the basic idea is that most people who buy real estate buy it with a loan. They take out a mortgage and you have to pay that mortgage back. And if you're just a normal homeowner, you're taking your salary and your ordinary income and paying it back. Or but if you're a rental property owner, for example, the money that you use to pay down that loan is rent. So it's not necessarily your money, it's a business expense. Like you have to pay it out from your revenue, but you Actually get it back by paying down your loan. And how much this generates for you depends on the size of your loan and your interest rate. But it can add. Usually my ballpark is 2 to 4% annual return just from this. That's pretty amazing, right? Like that's as good as a bond or your savings account. And this is just this, like underappreciated, basically. Never talked about part of owning rental properties that can offer you a really great return and is one of the core builders of wealth from being a real estate investor. So those are the first three, cash flow appreciation and amortization. The fourth one is another one people really sleep on when which is tax benefits. It took me a while to truly appreciate the tax benefits that you get as a real estate investor. The tax code in the United States really favors home ownership and property ownership. And that basically just means in short run, if you earn, let's just say a thousand bucks in real estate versus a thousand bucks from your job, you are going to keep more of that money that comes from buying in real estate. And I can get into all these details. We have plenty of other videos about that, but that is generally just true. Well, whether you're taking advantage of capital gains, depreciation, 1031 exchange, there's tons of different tax advantages that real estate investors can enjoy. And that just means when you earn that cash flow, when you get that appreciation, when you earn that amortization, you get to keep more of them. And that's what's so cool about real estate, right? Is these four things actually work together to build wealth for you. Your cash flow gives you money each and every month that you can either reinvest or you can choose to live off. Most people reinvest at the beginning of their career and then eventually live off their cash flow. And then you get appreciation and amortization, which build equity, which is long term wealth creation that you can reinvest and gives you a really stable foundation for your net worth. And then the tax benefits lets you keep more of those gains that you earn through cash flow appreciation, amortization. And this is why I was saying at the beginning of the video why real estate investing is such a good way to pursue financial freedom and is because it's the only asset class that does this. No other thing that you can invest in gives you this combination of wealth building that real estate investing does. So those are our four wealth building cores that I am now going to show you an example of how you can actually buy a property and turn these four ideas into $1 million or more. But first we have to take a quick break. We'll be right back. This week's bigger news is brought to you by the Fundrise Flagship Fund. Invest in private market real estate with the Fundrise Flagship fund. Check out fundrise.com pockets to learn more.
