45 Rentals and $0 Debt: The Money Mindset Shift That Made Me Financially Free

Worried you’ll never be able to buy rental propertiesIf you’ve ever told yourself, I’m just not good with money, today’s episode might completely change that story.Our guest, Liz Carroll once will leave the same thing, but she did the hard work to rewrite her money mindset and it helped her and her husband build a completely debt-free real estate portfolio of 45 rental properties.Yeah, and Liz didn’t come from a finance background. She worked in IT sales. She’s proof that you can create financial independence by shifting how you think about money first and then how you use it.Whether you’re buying your first property or you’re trying to get control of your spending before you invest. This episode is going to help you bridge the gap between mindset and math.Liz, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for joining us today.Thank you, Ashley. Thank you Tony for having me. I’m very excited to be here and it’s fun to think back at the rookie days because it’s been a while.Well, Liz, I want to start at the very beginning. You’ve said you used to think that you were bad with money. What did that look like in your life at that time?Well, for me, it looked like I had been bailed out on some credit card debt from my mom while it got in a little credit card trouble in college, which today doesn’t sound like a whole lot of money, but back then a thousand dollars with a maxed out credit card felt like a lot. And I’m talking about 1989, so this was a long time ago. And then when I got married, I had heard I wasn’t good with money. I had heard that a lot growing up from what started when I was 12 and had some money stolen out of the ice rink locker, which I don’t know why a 12-year-old at that time was bringing $40 to the ice rink. But I had all of it stolen and I just felt like I wasn’t good with money. I had made some money mistakes in losing money or having it stolen from me, and I just had heard you’re not good with it. So I started to believe that. I started to believe that I wasn’t good with money, and I then proved it because I got into some more credit card debt and then I had some car trouble. And at that time, my fiance, now husband, we’ve been together 38 years now, paid for all my car repairs, and I just was like, I don’t want to be in this situation. I don’t want to be the one who doesn’t understand money.So when was that moment in time where you decided to take action and actually change things for yourself? And what were those first action steps you did?Well, it really happened a little later in my life. So it was about when I was 30 years old that I just was like, I can’t do this anymore. So we had already been real estate investors at that time and I still felt like I wasn’t good with money. And we had actually even built a big home. We had made many money moves at that time and we got a little ahead of ourselves. So I felt like I was on a treadmill that was on number five and the speed, I just couldn’t keep up anymore. And we had two little kids. And so at that time is when I read the book Financial piece by Dave Ramsey and a coworker had suggested it to me. I had a great career. I was making good money. I just didn’t feel like I was getting ahead. I felt like I was drowning and that speed, I couldn’t keep up anymore, so I needed to have some relief.Liz, let me ask because when we talk about being bad with money or being good with money, smart financially, I think it can kind of take a different meaning for different people. So for you, how would you define the difference between someone who is good at money and someone who’s bad with money?Oh, I love that question. And it really comes down to your own personal thoughts of what you think. If you’re feeling like you’re getting ahead, meaning you’ve got money in the bank, you have the opportunity to make money moves or that as soon as the bill comes in you feel like you can easily pay it, that the other thing is is that you’re investing for the future. I mean, I grew up in a time that it was very important for us to put money aside for our future. Not that it isn’t now, it’s just that it was a little bit more ingrained at that time.And I think to add to that, and Ash, I want to get your take on this as well, but when I think about that for myself, I think there’s three buckets. It’s your ability to cover all of your day-to-day expenses, your ability to have some money saved, whatever that number may be for bigger expenses in the short term, your emergency funds, saving for your first house, buying a car, whatever it may be, but those things that aren’t necessarily day-to-day expenses. And then also having assets that build for your future. So day-to-day living bigger short-term expenses, and then long-term thinking. And if you’re checking all of those boxes, and to me, you’re in a good spot. Ash, I’m curious for you, how do you define being good with money? Is it different from what Los or what I’ve said?Yeah, I mean the biggest thing for me is just financial security. And when that moment in time happens or an expense comes up where you’re not panicking and feeling like the world is ending, and I think the first time that I really ever experienced not having that feeling, when I finally felt like, you know what? I have a sense of security. I’ve been so good with my money. I was in Florida and I had changed our plane tickets somehow and the way that I changed them, it ended up our flight home got canceled and I didn’t realize it. And I went to check in 24 hours before our flight and we did not have tickets. And I called and it was going to be very expensive to fly our family home. And in that point in time, I realized like, okay, I have savings. I don’t want to spend the money on this, but it is okay.
It is not the end of the world. And that right there was what I realized why I wanted to be financially secure and why I was doing certain money habits to actually implement that, to have that security was for moments like that. And since then there’s been a ton of other times, a $30,000 tax bill one year. There’s all these things that will happen and I don’t want to have to stress about them. So that’s what motivates me to be mindful about money and making sure that I have my reserves in place that I’m spending within my means, but I’m also creating different income streams to support income coming in. So I think those are the three big buckets for me is diversifying my income, living within my means, and then just having savings.And as you mentioned this on the podcast before, but it’s like if you have the money to solve the problem that it’s not really a problem. And I love when you phrase it that way because it’s like if the money’s there, then just spend the money to get it fixed and you can move on with your life. So Liz, going back to your story, you talk about this point in your life. You’ve got some young kids, you guys are making some progress, but I guess what actual steps that you take to convert yourself from that person that, Hey, I don’t feel like I’m good with money. Okay, now I actually feel like I’ve got a good handle on. What were some of the tactical things you focused on to make that transition?Well, we sat down and we created a plan. Really it came down to that. Now I don’t want you to think that it was some elaborate plan at that time. It was a yellow pad of paper when we wrote down three things that we really wanted to do. One, we wanted to live completely. So that was number one. And number two, we wanted to college educate our children. We had two children, our parents educated us and we felt that it was our duty to do that for our children. And then three, we wanted to create enough passive income to be able to make work optional by the time we were fifties. So when I was 30 years old, our youngest was two at the time, and so that would coincide with on a standard track, her graduating college at that time too. So my husband and I would then be able to decide what we wanted to do or maybe not be so pedal to the metal and we could lower the speed on that treadmill we were on.
And so that’s what it was for us. It was the three things that became guiding our guard rails that became our destination of where we were going, and then every little decision we were making going forward from that time was it getting us closer to the goal? And again, those goals were simple. There were just three things that we wrote down that we wanted. We didn’t really know how we would do it. We had already been real estate investors, and so it made a lot of sense that real estate would be part of that journey for us.Well, Liz, we’re going to take a short break, but when we come back I want to hear about that first rookie deal that sparked it all. We’ll be right back. Okay, we are back with Liz, and we talked about Liz’s money story, but now we’re going to go into Liz’s rookie deal. So you started investing just three months after you got married. Tell us about that first deal.We got married in 1990. I was 22 at the time and we moved states, so we moved away from California, moved up to Spokane, Washington, and my husband and I at that time, I had already taken a little real estate course at the community college after college, but we were interested in real estate and we got up there and we were kids in a candy store because things were so inexpensive comparatively to where we had moved from. And so my husband, they had these throwaway newspapers that were called the little magazine called the Nickel Nick or something like that. And he found an opportunity for us and we were like, how could that house, how could there even be a house for less than you could buy a car for? So we ended up buying a house where we identified it. It was $13,625.
The owner was willing to carry the contract because that was the other thing. The owner was willing to carry the contract and he needed $1,500 down. And we were like, we don’t have $1,500. I’m 22. Just that previous week had turned 23. And so I called my dad and I said, dad, we figured out how we can pay you back within this min time. So it was like three months we could get him paid back. And so my dad sent us the money for us to put the down and then we rented that house out. I can’t remember the exact amount of rent, but it was like a one bedroom, one bath house. It was tiny and it was white with a Pepto Bimal pink trim. It was the cutest little house. It was tiny. And so anyway, the tenant stayed in there. This is one of the first only houses that we’ve ever bought where the tenant actually stayed. And so he rented from us for 18 months or so, and then we put $900 into the whole property. That’s it. And then we ended up selling it about 18 months later for $18,000. So we thought we would done, it was amazing deal. Right.Liz, we talked about your personal finance foundation a lot, but as you go into this first deal, you mentioned like, Hey, we didn’t have 1500 bucks to cover the down payment. As you’ve grown your portfolio, looking back, do you think it was a smart move to jump into that first deal given that you guys maybe didn’t have a whole lot of discretionary cash at the time, but obviously it worked out for you guys or looking back, would you have waited to maybe buy that first deal? And to give some context here, the reason that I ask that is because sometimes we do have folks who are in the rookie community who are looking to get started where there is a good deal that presents itself, but taking that deal down would maybe stretch them a little bit more financially than what they’re comfortable with. And I think they’re asking themselves that same question, do we pull the trigger or do we wait until we’ve kind of built up this strong financial foundation? So looking back, would you have done it again? Did you feel like it was the right move?Well, I would say yes. I think it was the right move for us for sure. It was a little risky. In fact, our accountant, because we ended up doing a couple more deals after that, our accountant set us down and was like, listen, kids at that time, he was a middle aged man and we were in our twenties and the accountant’s like, okay, kids, I think you guys are getting a little far out there. You might want to settle down. But we were living very lean. I will tell you now, that was a long time ago. Our incomes were very different at that time. I think Dan was making somewhere around 36, $40,000 and I was making 22 or something like that. I mean it was ridiculous. So the dollar amounts are really different that we’re dealing with now. We’re adding zeros, but it was just a good thing for us to learn from. We cut our teeth, the actual risk was pretty low. Does that,And I think that’s the key part of it, is the risk associated because I mean we’re talking about less than $14,000. Like you said, it’s a car payment, so the risk associated with that specific deal was low. But I think it’s an important question because I think there are a lot of people who are listening that want to get started, but feel like their current financial situation maybe be holding them back. And there is some truth to that. If you’re super upside down on every single bill you’ve ever had, then probably not. But if you’re in a similar position to Liz, then maybe it makes sense. I think one follow question to me because we’re going to get into how you scaled your portfolio, but something you mentioned earlier in the show was that you and your husband made the decision to build your portfolio with no debt and Ash and I talk a lot about Dave Ramsey and we agree with everything that he says on the personal finance side. We tend to disagree with him when it comes to debt on real estate. So why did you and your husband decide to follow Dave Ramsey? Not only for the personal finance, but also for the real estate investing side?Yeah, well thank you for that because it wasn’t that way. I want you to know. So we were following the personal for a long time and really wanted to live debt free, and however, that didn’t mean our real estate portfolio was debt free. So there was a time when we became debt free, meaning our mortgage free meaning no car payments, all those kinds of things. However, we kept debt in the real estate side and there was a time about a four year lag to where we made the decision that once we became personally debt free, we were also going to switch the real estate portfolio to being completely debt free. There was a time that it wasn’t like that. However, we sat down and decided very strategically that it’s time for us to be debt-free real estate investors because we were getting to that time in our careers where we were going to be stepping out of them. So we wanted to have that security of having a debt-free portfolio since we were leaving our W2 jobs.When you made that decision, did you look at this as more an emotional decision or did you actually sit down and kind of run the numbers? So when I think of paying off a property, I am outweighing, am I going to, could I take this money and pay off this mortgage? I’ll get more cashflow on this property, or could I leave this mortgage on the property and go and take that money and go invest into another one? What was the reasoning, the thinking behind all of that? What did you actually ask yourself and what questions should a rookie ask themselves when they’re deciding if they should pay off the properties or not?Well, for us, it became flexibility too. It was emotional for sure. We didn’t want to owe anyone anything, and I would say it was more me than Dan when I really wanted to have a debt-free portfolio and there were some deals that were coming along in this window of time back, if you think about from 2010 to, so there’s a few things I kick myself on about that. However, I wouldn’t change it for anything now to being a debt-free real estate investor. So we did do math, but we also talked about the emotional energy associated with being debt-free real estate investors, and there’s another component also. It offers so much more flexibility when you don’t have the debt on the properties. And that has been really important to us also as being great and grateful landlords, that’s important to us to have that flexibility.I think one thing too is you have less properties, so you have less to actually manage. So if you would’ve kept properties, kept debt on ’em, went and bought more properties, that in a sense is just more work for you because now instead of 45 properties, you have maybe a hundred properties and it’s more time, more energy having to put into your portfolio. Even if you were to get a property manager, that’s still asset management, where in reality, if you are looking to pay off your properties, you could look at maybe it makes sense just to pay off the properties I have now and I’d actually have closed to the same amount of cashflow if I went and doubled my portfolio because I paid off all of these mortgages. So I think this is a great example and something we don’t talk often enough about on the podcast too.Ash, it’s a really smart point because as you’re talking, I’m thinking about this. It’s like say that you went out and you built over the course of two decades. Say you build a portfolio, I don’t know, $2 million, but it’s fully paid off. You put everything on 15 year notes, you paid it down aggressively, you took all your extra cash, you paid it down. Now you have $2 million worth of fully paid for real estate. Even if you went out and say maybe you refinanced or maybe even got lines of credit for 50% of that a million bucks, you took that million bucks and even instead of going out and buying more real estate, if you just lent that money to other real estate investors, you still have your portfolio, still the same management, but now you’re still earning some money on that equity. There’s so many different options you have when you’ve got all that real estate paid for. And we just interviewed Devon Canard who’s a professional private money lender, and he was saying, this is probably the best return you can get in real estate is just lending money to other people. So if you can combine both of those paid off real estate, taking some of that equity and using it to go out there and lend to other people, you get the best of both worlds.Now, Liz, I want to transition to actually the mindset piece of this, and you do a lot of mindset stuff and help other people get motivated with their money and change how they think about money. So what do you see for maybe even yourself or rookie investors that are getting started? How should they plan for the future and kind of change their money mindset that way?Well, there’s part of it is just the belief and being able to shift from believing. Where I did was that I was not good with money and being able, I’m amazing with money now and it’s not that hard. That’s the other part that I think we all have to come together and notice how it’s, it’s intentionally difficult. Does that make sense? The marketing and things that we hear out there make it so that money’s so complicated. And I think that money mindset and the money, the things that we do, and as real estate investors, I mean it’s not that much more than a fifth grade math education. So I think that’s the part is so many people think, I can’t do that because I’m not good at it. Well, we weren’t good at it either when we first started and we still make mistakes today.
I think that’s to know also is that we took a break for a few years with raising our children and then we’ve come back, we’ve tried all kinds of different things when the mindset is like, what’s the worst that could happen and am I willing to take that risk for the upside? So that’s where it’s making sure your math, but also where is that inside you? What’s the worst that could happen and would you still be okay? I’ve coached many people that have had bankruptcies but then come back to do really amazing things with money. And I think that’s where it’s the knowing what to believe in yourself, and that’s the mindset part.For a rookie investor that’s getting started now, what are some maybe action items or different ways they should be planning for the future, whether it’s just with their personal finances or with investing journey? What are things they could be doing to actually plan out what they want their future to look like?Well, I think it’s important to pause and really get intentional. I think that’s probably been the secret sauce for us is that we were intentional all along and very mindful with how we were going to do this. And also we allowed ourselves to make some mistakes and we’ve made definitely mistakes along the way. The other thing to plan though is that we have always lived below our means ever since we’ve made that shift in 1997 when we created our plan. Since then, we have always lived below our means. And the other thing that we didn’t do is we didn’t take any money out of the real estate business. So that is we stayed in our W twos long enough until that real estate portfolio was kicking out enough cash for us to step out of our IT sales careers. So we didn’t try to get out too early. Does that make sense? So we kept the money in the business and let that money grow, and that’s what helped us pay down properties as well. So that’s the setup.There are so many advantages to keeping your W2 job or still running your small business rather than just quitting and going full-time real estate investor. First of all, you can get better financing on deals. You also have a better sense of security because you still have a W2 to pay for your expenses and you’re not relying on that next deal coming in to actually feed your family. And I think a couple of years ago, the real estate, there was a lot of hype, a lot of people talking about it is possible to quit your job and become a real estate investor. And the deals were a lot better, a lot juicier, a lot more meat on the bone at that time. And now I’m seeing the shift of more, it becoming harder and harder to actually leave your job. Even some people going back to jobs just to have that sense of security after those few years of really great deals coming in and people making a lot of money in the real estate world and now it’s just more difficult to do.
And I think that has to be rephrased that it is so much harder to leave your job and even if you do find a way to leave your job and to live off your real estate income, that you really don’t have that security blanket anymore. And I think that’s something you need to think about is not only, okay, I have X amount of cashflow, this covers my W2 job, I can quit now, but also if a capital improvement comes up, if your child all of a sudden needs $7,000 in dental work, these things come up, is that going to be detrimental to you or do you want that extra blanket to be able to have that extra money and to build wealth faster really if you were to keep your W2 job?Absolutely, and as you’re saying that, that’s definitely what I teach is number one is we have to know the cashflow, the ins and outs of the household, what are the household finances so that you know those are covered for sure. As you go into real estate investing, I also coach that you need to have a safety net. I don’t call it an emergency fund because I don’t know about you, but I have never felt good calling nine one one. So I call it a safety net because I want to be able to take risks, and we have been able to do that because we did have that safety net built and that is cash that’s set aside in a high yield savings account that’s not cash, that’s like in the checking account and we have access to it. That is money that we set over to the side that is that literal safety net I think allows us to walk some tight ropes sometimes. And we certainly did, and there were times when we didn’t have that safety net, so if I had to look back, it’s a whole lot easier with the safety net. So I would build that up for a rookie first before they left their W2.Liz, I feel like now might be a good time to tee you up for the future self since we’re on the mindset and the personal finance piece, but I guess what would be the best way for me to tee you up to go into that?I think it’s important also to talk about, we didn’t talk about how we niched our portfolio and I think I would like to talk about how that maybe is that part of that future self, what did we want? How do we want to exit our portfolio too? I think that’s really important is that we went, so we can talk about that. Yeah.Liz, you’ve got a really unique strategy and I want to share this with the listeners. I think a lot of people haven’t niched down in the way that you have, so we’ll cover that right after. A quick word from today’s show sponsors. So we’re back here with Liz and Liz as you’ve built your portfolio up, you started with this $13,000 home, but I know as your portfolio has grown, you’ve shifted your strategy to really focus on a very specific niche. So what is that niche and how did you land on it?Yeah, I think thank you for that, Tony, because we have had done all the things. We’ve had single family, we’ve had multifamily, we have done short-term rentals, we’ve had a long, long term. We find that we really like the buy and hold long-term rental and we have continued to refine our niche in the long-term rentals. So we found a product that we really liked and it was unusual. I wouldn’t have ever thought this as a real estate investor in the beginning because we first were buying stick frame homes, but we have found, we live on the Oregon coast, Tillamook County where we get a lot of rain. So we have found that there’s a terrific product here for rentals, for workforce housing, and it feels like it’s a win-win win because it’s a win for the tenants, it’s a win for the employers, it’s a win for the county and the neighborhoods and us of course, but we have standardized now on manufactured homes. So we look for a product of a manufactured home that is three bedroom, two bath, which is terrific for families and that in Oregon when we started this, it makes a lot of sense here because we get a lot of rain, so they’re lifted up off of the foundation. So it really does help because as a landlord, water is one of your biggest nemesis. So that was a good strategy for us also because it reduced some risks that we would have with the wet wood.Liz, again, we don’t talk a lot about manufactured homes as an asset class or as a property type on the podcast, so I’m glad that we get to chat about it here, but I think there’s maybe a stigma around investing in manufactured homes where people think that there’s less appreciation or maybe the quality of tenant won’t be as high as a stick-built home. Have you found any of those stereotypes or stigmas to be true?Not here so much. One. They’re pretty nice nowadays. So that’s the other thing. It’s not like we’re, but I do know the stigma exists because you hear about it, it’s like real estate or wheel estate. These are not RVs. I want you to know these are manufactured homes. They follow the same requirement as stick frame. They’re just built in a factory and then brought to the facility. We own the lot. We’re not talking about these are in a park or something like that. These are in a neighborhood where we own the property and they are most often, especially in Oregon, they are deeded to the property. So they’re no longer, it’s not like we’re moving them around where we invest. Now we do keep them und deeded to the property because we, depending on where workforce housing is needed, we can move them, but they are pretty nice homes. I would’ve had that stigma myself until Dan and I bought a manufactured home at a weekend home for us, and I would’ve never thought it, but I don’t think anyone ever came to that house and thought that it was a manufactured home. SoNow Liz, you’ve also put together a creative exit strategy on these properties. So what are you doing differently to unload some of them rather than just putting them on the MLS for sale?Well, that is important for us is like how are we going to exit? I think it’s important to always go into this with the exit in mind, and that was one of the reasons we left multifamily. We had a 16 unit apartment complex, and I kept thinking in our retirement, you can’t have to sell. It’s a one transaction. So what we wanted to do was instead of having 16 units, we wanted to have 16 manufactured homes so that over the course of 16 years we could sell one a year or be able to have that extra cash and appreciation. These homes have appreciated too, by the way. I just want you to know that that is true. They don’t appreciate it, the same rate, but the cashflow is so high. We buy them for cashflow. They rent so much for the same for rental. They rent very much the same as a stick frame.
However, the purchase price is less. So we go into it not thinking of appreciation. However, we have benefited from appreciation. The exit that we’ve used though is that we have wonderful tenants that have stayed with us for a long time, but our tenants might not have thought they could be homeowners. And so for several of them, we have gone to them and asked, do you want to stay here for long-term? Is this where you want to be long-term? And if so, we were willing to sell the property to you. So we’ve done three of those in Oregon here with our existing tenants that they never really thought they could ever own a home, and we educated them. Dan and I are both financial coaches, and so we educated them on how they could do this. We structured their payments to be similar to their rent, and now we hold the note, but they are buying the houses from us. So that has been really rewarding. It’s a great win for us too, because those houses had appreciated and now we take that capital appreciation over time.Liz only interviewed, I think a couple of other folks who have done the lease to own as the landlord, but just give us the quick mechanics of that transaction. If someone moves in and they move into your unit, are you agreeing on a preset purchase price the day that they move in? Is it after a couple of years? Are you taking any big refundable, non-refundable deposits? Just what are the mechanics of that transaction?Yeah, these are tenants that have been with us for a while where we have said, you’ve been paying us, and this could be you paying yourself so that you own that. We do require them to, we walk through the opportunity and say, this is the price, this is what it would be. This is how much we would require as a down payment. So we do take a down payment just like a bank would, and then we structure the payments for their finances, and that’s how we do it. So we don’t do it at the front because one, we want to date first just before we get married, does that. We don’t do it upfront and we do quite a bit of the education and then of course, the flexibility. So we had one tenant that we have sold a home to that wanted to restructure her loan, and we were able to do that to meet her new finances. And that worked out really well for all of us. And it was one of those things, it feels so rewarding, and that’s what I like to think about is legacy wealth, because not only are we benefiting, but we are really helping lift our tenants up. We’re really being able to help. It helps the community. They become homeowners and that’s a win for everyone.I think also too is that when that tenant cames you was proactive about, I need to restructure it and came to you ahead of time before they’re six months behind on payments and not communicating with you at all, whether it is someone paying rent or paying you a mortgage payment, that really shows the difference in a quality tenant as to the one that’s going to be proactive. I would way rather work with somebody to work out some kind of payment arrangement or change their structure because they came to us far and were proactive about their money situation than being reactive and having to chase them down. And then finally figuring out the reason or whatever it is, or having to start the eviction process and then finding out the reason in court. So I think that also goes to show how you’re choosing the right people to actually do this with instead of just offering it upfront too.Well, that also speaks to us as self-managing because since we do self-manage, they know us, they know we are the landlord, we are the owner of the property, there becomes a relationship also. So we stress, Dan is particularly good about this is communication is key. We need communication. We need to know if there’s something wrong with the property because we are very responsive in getting it fixed as a landlord because it only works to keep the tenant. We have so many tenants in our history that have been with us for years, some decades, and that’s where you really find that if you get that good relationship, it’s a win-win for everyone.Well, Liz, thank you so much for joining us today. We are so grateful to have you here today to share your journey, share your experience. Where can more people reach out to you?Yeah, I hang out on Instagram, so mindful money coaches.com, not as active as I used to be there, but Mindful Money Coaches dot Mindful Money coaches on Instagram, mindful money coaches.com on our website.Well, Liz, thank you again. Thank you for everyone listening today to this episode of Real Estate Rookie. I’m Ashley. He’s Tony, and we’ll see you guys on the next episode.