Making Millions with Real Estate Investing 📈 Albert Preciado & Cole Hatter | E18
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I had 25k and I had another credit card. And then I told a buddy, "Hey buddy, you want to start this Driven event with me 50/50?" So meaning he would have been 50% owner of a company that makes millions of dollars now every year. And he said no. And so then I said, "Well, okay, well, I'm going to put the 25k that I have and I'm going to pay Grant," because he was our first speaker, "I'm going to pay him." And I was thinking I'm going to get his audience. And I paid him a 25k deposit.

And then I used my credit card to pay 25K deposit to the RIT. So we were out of money. Yeah, we're out of money because we're making like a million and a half more or less. But we're spending more than that because the company eats up all the real estate company ambiance and TMG, they eat up the money. Right.

So I don't really have money to play around with. My cards are kind of maxed out. So I don't have money, but I had 25K, put the deposit for the Ritz. And then I told Sil, we're going to sell tickets and that's how we're going to fund the event. So we funded the event. And even the day of the event, we owed 26K. They wanted 26K more. I don't know for what. The AV team, something happened. And Elena's on stage, Elena Cardone, because she came with the package with Grant.

And they said, if you don't pay us the $26,000, we're going to cut down... We're going to cut the mics. And so...

Zyl went and spoke to the guys and they just let us, they said, okay, you'll pay us when we're done. We'll give you a week to pay. We're like, cool, let's go. The event ended. Crazy event, had 500 people. Oh, 500 your first event? 500 people. Oh my gosh. We had Grant Cardone, we had Bradley, Tim Story, we had Sam Bakhtiar, and we had a few others. So I kind of copied how Grant did it and it worked out really good.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays, where we focus on three main topics. How to make money, how to invest money, and how to give some of the way to charity. Today's guest I've known for years. I've watched him put on multi-thousand person events. I've watched him throw masterminds, have real estate conferences, and everything in between because people want to listen to what he's built and what he's done in his overall business and life.

not just the real estate side, but how he's built a beautiful family with three kids, the flashy cars, the mansions, all the fun parts of aspects of life in between working hard morning, noon, and night, and mixing in a little bit of the gym and fitness and health stuff.

what I call the all-encompassing life. Not that many people have it. And today's guest, Mr. Albert Preciado, definitely has it. Thank you, Dan. All right. So the way this works is you're going to give your quick two-minute bio and then we're going to get straight to the money. Okay. Well, I'm just an example, I think, for people that come from nowhere and

And for me, at least, I always had like an insecurity, I would say, because I didn't speak English right. And I struggled through middle school, high school and dropped out of college. And I always thought that I was never going to be anybody because people would tell me that it's not for me. But I just fought. And I think the biggest breakthrough was that I started...

investing a lot of time into self-improvement and learning from people like you and other coaches that are out there in business in the space, Grant Cardone, Tony Robbins, et cetera. There's a lot of them. So then I just started grinding and learning through mistakes. So now, uh, you know, we opened a few companies and I made a lot of mistakes and then the companies didn't grow until I built my personal brand. So once I built my personal brand and started doing this, these events,

It scaled all the companies, which turned to multi-millions. Wow. All right. So there's a lot to unpack there. Let's walk through. Let's walk first through some of the companies. What is the realty company, the mortgage company? Like walk us through what those, what are those? So the mortgage brokerage, it's called the mortgage guys right now. And we're in the process of becoming TMG lending, which is going to be a nationwide lender. Oh, okay. And, but it started as the mortgage guy. So the mortgage guy was just me.

And then what I, a mentor told me, if it's the mortgage guy in Albert, it's too like single person. Yeah. Never sell it. Yeah. And yeah. And then people are not going to,

Be your little bitch. So he said, why not do the mortgage guys? It's plural. And you could also involve a woman. So then we did that. And then that started attracting more people. And that's how we started growing it. So that's the mortgage brokerage. But then I said, well, how can I get more mortgages? I thought getting a Ferrari would attract more people.

And then I also thought that giving people like a high split, a high commission split would attract more people. But it wasn't until, and then also before I got the personal brand involved, I said, I'm going to open a real estate company, which is Ambiance Realty, the real estate brokerage, because then I'm going to get sales from there and get more mortgages.

All of that didn't work out. But what did work out was that when they, when I got the Ferrari, even though I could barely afford it, it was my dream car. I got that Ferrari pre-owned and then that started getting me attention. And with that, I started getting a lot of agents to join both brokerages. And that's how that started. Oh, I see. And so why do real estate and mortgages and like, there's so many aspects to the real estate market. Why do multiple things?

Well, I used to call it a triangle until I got more business educated and they told me it's vertical integration. So then we started integrating companies in the same industries, which then led to an escrow company. So then we opened an escrow company. So now when we sell the property, we get a commission for the real estate, we get a commission for the mortgage, and now we get a commission for the escrow fee.

So that's how we started integrating all of them. But the biggest breakthrough was that I think everybody can learn from that is creating events and

And being out on social media in the beginning, it's scary because you don't feel confident and you feel like, man, I'm going to say things the wrong way. People are not going to like me. I'm going to get nervous. So I just threw myself in there and I made a lot of mistakes and people made fun of me, but I still kept going. And over the years, I just got better and better. And now it's like seven years of driven events. And that has scaled the companies because we have thousands of people that come. And then I recruit a lot of agents.

and they also get a lot of sales from other companies. So the Driven events have grown over the years. I mean, the first one, how many were at the first one compared to now? You're getting like 2,000 people to show up. Walk us through that scary first event when you threw the very first Driven conference.

I always wanted to speak on the stage. And you've heard about the 10X conferences and I wanted to be on that stage and I wanted to speak and I never got the opportunity. And before that, I wanted to speak on another conference, which was mortgage related, but I never got the opportunity either. So I just got tired of waiting. And I just told Sil one day I came home and I said, I'm really inspired, but I can't wait.

let's just start our own event. So then she said, well, what do you mean? And I said, well, if Grant Cardone started a 10X and he started it with three months in anticipation, because he didn't have a year to plan it. He just said, I'm going to do it in three months. And he did it in three months. So I said, if he did it, why can't I do it? Exactly. So I said, I'm going to do it. And most people would say, well, Albert, you're not, you're not as good as Grant. Grant's like,

you know he has so much more money than you right now he's more experienced he's done it before and I said I don't care I'm just going to do it because I'm not getting an opportunity to speak there I'm just going to create my own so I told Sil let me take a shower and let me come up with a name so then I was listening to Patrick Bedevid who was another mentor of mine and he kept on saying drive drive drive on a video he was doing when he started his value team and channel and

And then I came out and I told Till, I got it. We're going to call it Drive. And then it's going to be in three months from now. And then she said, I don't like that name. It's missing something. And it was missing one letter. So then we added the N. We called it Driven. We planned it for three months from that date. And then I didn't have any money. But I had $25,000.

And I had another credit card. And then I told a buddy, hey, buddy, you want to start this driven event with me 50-50? So meaning he would have been 50% owner of a company that makes millions of dollars now every year. And he said no. And so then I said, well, okay, well, I'm going to put the 25K that I have and I'm going to pay Grant because he was our first speaker. I'm going to pay him. And I was thinking I'm going to get his audience. And I paid him a 25K deposit.

And then I used my credit card to pay 25K deposit to the RIT. So we were out of money. Yeah, we're out of money because we're making like a million and a half more or less. But we're spending more than that because the company eats up all the real estate company ambiance and TMG, they eat up the money. Right.

So I don't really have money to play around with. My cards are kind of maxed out. So I don't have money, but I had 25K, put the deposit for the Ritz. And then I told Sil, we're going to sell tickets and that's how we're going to fund the event. So we funded the event. And even the day of the event, we owed 26K. They wanted 26K more. I don't know for what. The AV team, something happened. And Elena's on stage, Elena Cardone, because she came with the package with Grant.

And they said, if you don't pay us the 26K, we're going to cut down. We're going to cut the mics. And so...

So Zill went and spoke to the guys and they just let us, they said, okay, you'll pay us when we're done. We'll give you a week to pay. We're like, cool, let's go. The event ended. Crazy event, had 500 people. Oh, 500 your first event? 500 people. Oh my gosh. We had Grant Cardone, we had Bradley, Tim Story, we had Sam Bakhtiar, and we had a few others. So-

I kind of copied how Grant did it and it worked out really good. And then the next year I said, we got to double it. And then we went to a thousand, then 2000. And then the driven conference, we've kept it at around 2000. That's perfect. That's the big event. I never wanted to go bigger. And then the, and then we added the business bootcamp, which is in the, in the middle of the year. And then the other one's in the end of the year. And the business bootcamp is smaller, like 600 people more or less, but it's more business and more expensive.

It's a little bit more expensive, not too much, but it's more business related. It's more for people that want to hear the boring stuff, like the business stuff that really pays you. But the conference is more like motivational, inspirational and everything. Business also, but more for everybody. So my third and final book of my series is called How to Set Up Your Events for Under $1,000. First one was How to Set Up Your Personal Brand, How to Set Up Your Business, etc. All under $1,000.

Let's walk through some of the events so people can hear. If someone wants to throw their first event and

and they don't have much money and they have their credit card and they want to put it together, what are some of the things that they need to do? Because what you kind of said was, I booked my one big name speaker, I booked my venue, and the rest I just kind of figured out. But 500 people showed up. Walk us through the main idea. Someone says, you know what? I want to throw a real estate event. I want to be like Albert Preciado. And in three months from now, I'm going to throw a real estate event. What do they really need to have to throw a small event? Not a big event, a small event. Yeah.

I think one person that's going to bring their audience and you got to pay them. You can't be cheap. So like if you don't have 25 grand or 50K, I think with 25 grand, you could get a good speaker that has a good audience, maybe not top level speaker that requests a lot of money, but you could get somebody on the way up that's kind of like in the middle, but has a huge audience. Like for example, David Goggins. I got David Goggins when he was on his way up.

So it didn't cost me a lot of money. But if you pay somebody like that on the way up, instead of paying somebody that's already up, that they're going to request a million dollars, 500,000 or 250,000, you could easily get somebody 25K, 50K at the most.

and they're gonna bring the audience, you're gonna market, and they're gonna bring in people, they're gonna bring in sales, and then you're gonna get known, so you're paying yourself to get known. But now, what happened is that you always told me this was gonna happen, now people wanna pay me to be at their events, and now everybody wants to come speak at my events for free, and I'm talking about big names, and sometimes even people wanna pay to speak at my events. So that's what happens, but...

If you have a company, a business, whether in any industry, if you don't have a personal brand, you're going to grow it very slowly. That's how I feel. But if you become a huge brand, then I think it's going to make your business scale fast and very easy.

So on the personal brand side, what are some of the elements that you like to use to help build your personal brand? And for someone that doesn't have money yet, they don't have the Ferraris and Rolexes and fancy watches, you know, Patek Philippe, like there's so many different things that are the flashy things. What are some things people could do to start building their personal brand until they can afford some of the flash that might not fit everyone else? By the way, some people don't, doesn't fit them. Yeah.

Well, for me, what worked is that I always, I think you have to make some money. And once you make some money, you start with like a starter watch. You start with like a starter car. That's the way I started. And the reason for that is because I started focused, I started thinking about like,

You have Grant Cardone, you have Tony Robbins, and there's others, right? And I started thinking about like, what do they have? And what do I have? Like, how am I different? How can I compete with them? Because I can't compete with them if I just compete against their audience versus their audience. So I said, what's different? And I started thinking. And then, you know, friends like Brad Lee and yourself and even Grant himself and Patrick B. David, they were like, you're Latino, right?

And I said, yeah, right. I'm Latino. And I speak Spanish. Spanish was my first language. I'm Mexican. So I'm thinking like, I'm Latino. Like Grant, Tony Robbins, they're not Latino. They're white. So I said, well, why not go after that Hispanic Latino community? Because it's huge in the United States. And they can, I could actually dominate them in that space because the Latinos are going to be naturally attracted to me because they're going to be like, you're one of my guys. Like I came to you, I walked into your event right here.

And a few Latinos went up to me and they're like, hey, where are you from? And I said, well, I'm Mexican. They're like, no shit. Are you serious? And I'm like, yeah, I'm Mexican. And they were like, wow. And right away they fell in love with me. And it's like, I said, well, man. And then Herma Ilet told me that too. Herma Ilet, he's like, you're the guy for the Latinos. You're the guy. So then I said, well, what Latino mortgage guy, what Latino real estate guy drives a Ferrari? So I knew that that was going to be like a big splash. That was going to be my splash. Forget the watches.

because people can get watches, people can get fake watches, but you can't get a fake Ferrari. So I said, I'm going to go get a Ferrari because I think that's going to get a lot of attention. And this before the robberies and before it started getting all crazy here in California. But I went and I started looking at cars and I said, I'm going to get this Ferrari and I'm going to market myself as, hey, if you want to, why join Albert? Because if you join Albert, you're going to become a millionaire mortgage guy that drives Ferraris. So I went out there and I got this Ferrari, but I got a great deal. Also,

I didn't have the money to get it, but I had, I spent my last pennies getting it because I told Sil, "Hey, this is it." And she was pregnant with my first daughter, which I named after the car, Italia.

So that's the car I got, the 458 Italia. That's why I named her Italia. But I told Sil, she was pregnant. I said, I'm just going to go check him out. I'm going to put a deposit. It's okay. I'm not going to qualify either. Anyway, so I went there. Long story short, I qualified after a few calls and they try to work things around. But they asked $39,000 down and they gave me a $2,200 payment a month. So I said, $2,200 is not a lot.

And we could afford it. And hopefully we could afford it. But if I lose it, it's not the first time I get a car repossessed. And then I put all the money, though. The crazy part is that I put $39,000 and that's all I had for my reserves for my mortgage company. Oh. So then I knew that I needed to make sales again, which is the same thing as like I did the event. I needed to sell tickets or else I was going to die. Right.

So I said, okay, well, I'm going to use the Ferrari. And yeah, it worked. I got the Ferrari. And all of a sudden, the business just goes crazy. And people are sending me mortgages, real estate deals because I have the Ferrari. Now, everybody wants to go have lunch with me. Everybody wants to do business with me. And from there on, I created my brand as the Ferrari guy in mortgage. Because everybody, when they see me, they're like, oh, you're the mortgage guy that drives Ferraris. That's how people know me now. So that's my brand.

And then, you know, I started just doing other things. I started working on the fitness. I bust my hair off. And I said, that's going to be kind of like my persona that I'm going to put out so that people recognize me when they see me. So if someone's out there in the real estate market, why should they or how did they decide what mortgage broker or real estate agency to work with? We just walk through a real life example. Like if I'm a real estate agent in San Diego, L.A., Orange County, why go work for Ambiance Realty or the Mortgage Guys?

Because we teach them how to market. And what I noticed with every mortgage company and real estate company and people that come and visit us, they're like, wow, the headquarters, the training that you guys have, you guys are teaching us technology, social media. I think the big one is social media because all mortgage companies and mortgage companies, I'm not going to say all of them, but like 99% of them, they don't know social media. Like they're not in that space. So when you think about mortgage, like when you think about a mortgage person,

It's a typical older man that's doing the mortgages. And you have a few, you have also women, but it's like an older person handling paperwork and mortgages. No Ferraris, no social media. It's just old school. So when you start using social media to market, it opens the doors for so much business. So when this market change happened, which some people call recession, it's

It slowed down and it killed a lot of mortgage companies and real estate companies because rates went up and then property values started going down. So people started like panicking and it became very hard for those that didn't have...

an audience, for those that didn't know how to use social media. For us, it dropped a little bit, but it also eliminated all the competition. So we got hurt a little bit, but then we just took off. So right now we're on the wave up and it's all because of social media. If I didn't have social media, like Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, all of those things, we would be dead now. Seriously, like we wouldn't be here right now. We would be in the same spot as all the other mortgage and real estate companies.

Who's the best realtor right now? Josh Altman. What does he have? Personal brand. - So what's interesting is when there's chaos in the world or there's people are nervous is when you can actually grow your business the most. - Yes. - We went through this with Ever Bowl, our acai bowl chain.

There was 25 locations. The country shut down, right? It was March, 2020. The whole country shuts down. Restaurants are screwed over. Nobody's making new leases. Landlords and commercial buildings are freaking out. Malls are freaking out. Strip malls are freaking out because restaurants are not coming to sign leases right now.

So what we did was me and some friends actually bought 23 out of the 25 locations. Two of them were in stadiums, so we didn't buy the ones in stadiums. We bought locations and we're like, hey, Everbull, focus on franchising and go get more leases. And they like went on a rampage. They went and got 297 new leases. Think about that for a second. Yeah. They went from a company that owned 25 stores to focusing on franchises, go get 297 leases because...

Jeff Fenster and the team realized we can negotiate six months to 12 months of TI, free tenant improvements, six to 12 months of free rent. And they're just betting on the fact that America is going to come back at some point, which it did. And so they had all the leverage because in times of chaos, like you just said, like right now, some of the mortgage companies are going to go away. Your mortgage business will go up. When a bunch of restaurants went away and they weren't signing leases, we go sign leases. Now fast forward a year and a half, Everbull has 60 locations.

Opens one new location every six days, tens of millions of dollars in funding because during the chaos, we went full steam ahead. Yeah. All right. So we talked a bit about the making money side. Let's talk about the investing side. Why should people be considering investing into real estate? Well, I think that it's the best investment because there's five things that you get from real estate. So I don't know stocks. I'm not an expert. I know the basics, but

crypto and there's a lot of other investments that people can make but you can you don't have the same things that real estate offers for example if you want to buy a stock you can finance the stock you got to buy it all complete

If you want to buy real estate, you could leverage. So you could leverage, number one. You put 20% down. You put 10% down. 3.5% down FHA. A lot of people don't know this, but me and Sil became millionaires the first time. We became millionaires through business and through real estate. So the first time we became a millionaire was through real estate because we used an FHA loan.

which requires 3.5% down. So not only that, to qualify for four, you could go up to four units. So it's easier to get approved for a four-unit property than a one-unit property. Whoa. Because you live in one unit, and then you could use the other three units as rental income. Right. So me and Sil weren't making that much money. So we used our income, plus we used three units for more income. So let's say one unit's renting for...

each unit is renting for a thousand. So you get a thousand, a thousand, a thousand, that's 3000 that you could use. They give you 75% of that. So you could use 75% of that as income and also add your own income. So you qualify for more. However, there's one rule. You can't get married. So like if you're watching this and you're thinking about you're engaged, keep it like that. Don't get married. Or if you're married, you could also get divorced. So,

Let me explain why. Okay. Because when you're married, you only qualify for one FHA loan as a married couple. Okay. But before you get married, you qualify for two.

So you could go and get a four unit property FHA, put three and a half percent down. And then Casey could go and get another four unit, put three and a half percent down. So now you have eight and you each put three and a half percent down. Wow. So once you get married, it's only one time. Got it. So I told Syl, Syl was dying to get married with me and she wanted to get married with me. And I told her we're going to have to wait and we're not getting married until I get my four unit and you get your four unit.

So she was pretty grumpy at the time and she wanted to get married and she was pissed off. But that made her get a unit like that, some multi-units. So I ended up getting three units, she got four units.

then from there on after that we got married then she was a happy lady but then once once we got married we started buying more multi units yeah but now we had to put 25% down for four units so it's a very good program FHA so we bought more then we refinance cashed out you don't get taxed on money you get you cash out so if you borrow money from your property to buy another one you don't pay taxes when you borrow the money when you cash out refinance so

So we played that game. We made $2 million just with those properties that we gathered. Yeah. So that was the first time nobody knew that. But that's the money that I had to open up all my businesses. Because when you open a business, I don't know if you make the same mistakes I made. But when I started a business, I thought it was going to be easy and I was going to make a lot of money, keep all of it. But I was losing money. So I had to sell all the properties one by one to survive because I was negative for the first five years or more.

And it wasn't until the last three years, more or less, that we just started making like a lot of money, like a lot of money. And then obviously we had COVID, which affected us, but then we took off from there. And then we had what recently happened, but then we took off from there again. So long story short-

We sold all our properties and that saved our businesses. But that's just one leverage. So that's leverage. Also the tax deductions that you get. You also get rental income if you buy multi-properties. You're paying the principal down every single month. When you make your mortgage payment, your principal is going down. And then the fifth one, most important one, appreciation. So when you buy real estate, if you keep it for five years...

more or less five years, what I found for me at least, I can't promise it to everybody, but for us, our properties all doubled in five years, in less than five years. So I bought a property for $266,000, I sold it for $600,000, and all of our properties were the same story. So even if it takes six, seven years, what other investment is going to give you

a double in appreciation plus the tax write-offs, the leverage. There's just so many things. So that's why I believe that real estate is the best. And not only that, I know about it because I'm in that game. So for me, it's a no brainer. I'm sold. I'm in. I'm doing more real estate now. You sold me. I've heard a lot of people explain it, but the way you explained it

Rental income plus appreciation plus the tax part of it. Because I think the way I explain it is for the typical Joe that's making 60K a year, they qualify for a multi-unit easy like that. And if they're never going to make more than 60K, maybe they get a promotion. Now they make 70K or 75K. They're never going to become millionaires. But if they buy...

a four unit property, then they buy another two unit and another three unit every year, they'll become millionaires in a short time. So this makes it very easy for anybody to buy some multi units. - So you also talk about investing into yourself. You know, you've hired mentors, you've hired coaches. People at the highest level are still hiring coaches. We just interviewed Tim Grover a few minutes ago and the highest level people on the planet, Michael Jordan, Kobe Bryant, hired Tim Grover to coach them.

- Why do you think it's important to bring on mentors, bring on coaches, no matter what level of the game that you're on? - Dan, I just hired a mentor right now, and there's mentors for different things. You know, like Wes Watson, I became really good friends with him. We're like bros now. I'm just his brown version.

but we're alike so much. We did a podcast, it's going viral right now. - We gotta get y'all tattooed up. - Yeah, maybe I'll start with one. - And we need full sleeves. - But you know, this guy's killing it in the space. - Two million a month, I've literally seen his merchant account. He's very open about it, it's amazing. - So that shows you, also for anybody watching this, he got out of prison, he was in prison 10 years, gets out, in less than five years, he's making two million a month selling coaching.

So I'm like, dude, I have four. I started seven businesses from scratch. Four of them did really well and four of them are active and multimillion dollar companies. I have the track record. I've been a business owner for over 10 years, for a decade. And before the prior decade, I was working for a company. So I have 20 years of experience in business and I don't sell any coachings. Like I sell a little bit, but I'm making like, fuck, like 60 grand a month.

And then this guy's like, I make two million a month selling coachings. And I'm like, I have businesses. Why am I not teaching people businesses? So I hired him as a mentor in that space. And now, you know, he said, like he said, the first in three months, you'll be making half a million a month easy like that.

- Wow. - So, you know, I hired him. I made like 50 something thousand in the first three days. In the first three days. - You hired him and three days later, $50,000. - I paid him $12,500, I think. - Yep. - And I made like 50 something thousand in three days. - You made four times your money in three days. - Just following his stuff, like his scripts, his... - System. - His system, yeah, his system.

I always want to learn more. So now I have two companies that I want to sell in the next three years, three to four years and a half. So four years and a half is my cap, but I'm selling two companies. So right now I'm building, I'm setting up the companies to sell. So I'm going to move to Florida.

in maybe a couple years before I exit. I want to be there for one year. But now I'm hiring mentors to help me sell. Because I hired a mentor to help me start a business, then to grow the business, and now I need a mentor to help me exit. That's why Bobby Castro was one of them. He sold a lending company for a billion. So that's why it's very important to hire mentors. You're one of my mentors.

Like I'm always asking you, Dan, how do I do this? Am I doing that right? And you'll always tell me like, you got to do this, this, this to do this. And like, okay, I just follow it. And then it works. The best person to hire when it comes to exiting companies, his name is Roland Frazier. He lives about a half an hour from here. He's himself been a part of selling over 90 companies.

And he's the one that he founded a mastermind called War Room. War Room has been around for years and years. They stopped doing it now, but he has masterminds. But more importantly, he does one-on-one. Yeah. Roland Frazier. I will introduce you to him. He is the guy when it comes to excellent company. Okay. So we talked a bit about making money. We talked a bit about investing money.

Let's talk about on the charity side. So why do you think it's important? Because you recently decided, you know, you're like, you know what? I'm going to start getting more involved. You motivated me too. Yeah. Thank you. Why do you decide to dive more into the charity world? And why do you think it's important for people and or businesses to involve themselves in charity? Well, you know what? You motivated to me. So I want to give you a lot of credit to that because,

I heard your show and at first I'm like, I want to be in your show. You have Dan Bilzerian and all these people that are super mega wealthy and famous. So I'm like, I want to be there. But then I listened to your show and then I saw, okay, I make the money, I invest money, but what about charity? And then I started saying like, you know what? I need to do that.

And then because that's one of the main things of your podcast. So I said, I'm going to start one. So one of my good friends, really close friends is Tim Story. So I like I'm one of his biggest donors. You could ask him. And I noticed that the more I give, the more I get.

So the more, I make more, we started making way more money when we started giving more, whether it's like, there's the valet guy, and instead of giving them 20, I'll give them 100 bucks. I go to dinner and our bill is 500 bucks, and I leave a $500 tip instead of 20%. So I just match it. And every time I do that, people are like, damn, are you crazy or what's going on? Sometimes people think you're drunk, that's why you're doing that. But that's not the case. Like,

I know that whenever I do that, and even when I've done it a few times when I was drinking a lot, it always comes back in multiples. So I believe that a principle of a life principle for me and Sil has always been give, give, give. And, you know, God is going to take care of you.

So because of that, I hit up Tim Story and I said, you know what, Tim, I know I help you a lot and I'm one of your biggest donors, but I also want to have my own. And what I'm thinking is, you know, I want to help people that I'm a very proud Mexican, but I'm also a very proud American because without America, because I was born here, but my parents are Mexican. Without America, I wouldn't have the opportunity to go after my dreams. Sure.

And also I came from Mexico, so that's where I came from. So I want to be a big inspiration to the Latino community. And I want to help them and help them believe that just like I did it, because I was an ESL and special ed kid, that just like a special ed and an ESL student kid was able to create these businesses that last year combined did $30 million in revenue. And I started all of them with Zill from scratch. I never borrowed money, no partners, nothing. We put all the money in.

And then that led to the lifestyle Bel Air, the Jets and all that stuff.

But I want to be an example to them that they could also do it. So I want to do something for them to help them. Obviously, I want to help the whole world. But I just want to be a good positive influence. And I want to give to people that need that extra little push. People that maybe they're on the floor or they're homeless or they're about to give up. I want to give them hope. And if it's a little bit of contribution that I can do for them, I know that just giving, God is going to come back and take care of all of us. Yeah.

For the last nine years, we have what's called the Trina's Kids Foundation, which helps 300 Latin American families in downtown LA. And every year they come for four different events. And the reason I post about it so much is not to raise money for Trina's Kids. It's that I want people to replicate us. Yeah.

So we do a report card day. So right there in June, the kids bring their report cards. It's 300 kids and their families. And based on the report cards, C, they get this. B, they get kind of cool stuff. A, they get really cool stuff for the report card. And we have a back to school day. They bring their, they don't have to bring a report card. They just come for back to school. We give them backpacks and haircuts and supplies and everything they need for going back to school. Thanksgiving food drive. That's where we really rally the troops. We get everyone to come there and bring all the meals. And then the toy drive is just escalated crazy. Yeah. Right.

Where we've started with seven, eight of us on the floor. Now we just broke the record for biggest toy drive in history. None of those things do I go out there and say, hey, give me a bunch of money, donate money. I want people to replicate us. And so if you, Albert, can go out there and inspire the Latin American community and just your followers in general to do more charity, by default, you're doing charity. It's not about you donating 10 grand or 50 grand, 100 grand, whatever the number is.

You inspiring people and showing them, hey, we just helped out 200 homeless people. We just helped out 400 kids or we helped out. Showing them what you do is actually going to go help and impact more of the world far beyond the check, far beyond the money that you donate. And so it's important. That's why I showcase charity so much is that things like this, that if I helped inspire you even a little bit to go do charity, then you go help inspire 47 people to go do charity. Think about the butterfly effect of that. All right. Last question.

Right now, people have a lot of options. They can invest into stock market, cryptocurrency, businesses, real estate, etc. But the world's in chaos. The media is going crazy. Stock market's going crazy. Real estate market is going crazy. When people are making decisions about what they're going to invest in and why, how do you determine for someone's family or friends what they should be considering investing into? You have to know it very, very well or you have to know somebody that knows it very, very well.

So for me, I only invest in real estate because that's what I know. And I'm not a big believer in having partners. I'd rather do it on my own. But if I do have a partner, then it has to be someone special because we've tried with partnerships and we haven't had good luck with them. And I guess I'm a control freak and so is Zyl.

So I think like for partners, it has to be somebody that you really, really trust a lot. Like, for example, with you, you know, I'll do anything for you and I'll do any business with you. But it has to be a selected few. So like if you tell me I have this idea, Albert, and you and you have so many people that trust you 100 percent because a lot of people, every time you have an idea, it's always a good one. So that's why everybody's like, yes, yes, let's do it. And you build that credibility and you have the track record.

So if it's somebody like that that knows their stuff, then of course, 100%. If I know it, 100%. But a lot of people, they'll come to me or I'm sure you get hundreds of DMs or thousands of people that tell you, Hey, Dan, I'm raising money for this restaurant. Hey, Dan, I have this crazy idea. It's going to become the next billion-dollar company. Hey, Dan, give me some money. Give me some money. But these people don't know what they're doing. So...

I either have to know the space or I'll have somebody like Dan that knows his space and I'll be like, "Hey Dan, I'll invest it with you." Ladies and gentlemen, you have just listened to Albert Preciado. I want to make sure that you go follow him across social media, especially on Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube. You will like his content. It's very entertaining. It's fun. You get to see his family, his life, his travel, everything in between all of his events.

This is an important request that we have at the end of each episode. We all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. I think it's rude to not talk about it. I think it's the reason that we have a lot of financial crisis in our country. I think it's the reason people have debt. They don't know how to talk about rent, leases, apartments, salaries, investing in real estate. They don't know any of these things because it's rude to talk about it. We need you to share the podcast, have discussions about it with your friends, families, and followers. Get people talking about money and we're going to see you guys next Monday.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the Money Mondays. This episode is going to be so easy for me because I have one of my dearest friends here in the building. This guy's flipped over a thousand homes. He's invested in real estate from dirt, fourplexes, apartment buildings, and everything in between. He's had masterminds. He's had events with 1500 people at them year after year after year. The household name speakers, Andy Vercela, Gary Vee. I could do an intro for like 17 minutes, but we only have 40 minutes here because we only talk about three topics, how to make money,

how to invest money, how to give it away to charity. And actually the charity part is the most compelling part because Cole has inspired me and thousands and thousands of other people to make money matter. So we're going to dive deep about these things, how to make money, how to invest money, how to give it away. We have the perfect person in the building. Please give a warm round of applause to Mr. Cole Hatter. What's up? What's up? So glad to be here. Nice to meet you.

Thank you for having me, bro. Excited to be here. Been watching you climb the charts and so super excited for your success with this show. No surprise, but super excited for you nonetheless. So honored to be here. Thank you, bro. So we need...

There's no stress, but we got to stay number one. Yeah. You got to put on a show. You got to perform for me today. I'll take my shirt off. Way more than number one. Oh, then you'll be like in the 300s. All right. So the way it works is we do a quick two minute bio so we can get straight to the money. Yep. So two minutes on who I am. I am a husband to my beautiful wife. I'm a father to my three beautiful children and I'm a life enthusiast, man. I love to travel. I love to surf. I love to be in the water. I love to be on the lake like you took me to yesterday. Thank you very much.

and the life that I live isn't cheap so I do run some businesses to pay for it all but I definitely identify as someone who is filled with life who lives

freely who passionately is obsessed with my family and then runs businesses in my free time that create the millions of dollars to give me my lifestyle i'm definitely not a businessman i wouldn't say i'm a man who runs businesses to fund my my dreams my life and um that was a clarification that i got actually from some of our mutual friends of just kind of thinking about myself differently and of

of putting my family and my priorities as first and the businesses are secondary to just fuel those. And it's actually kind of changed my whole life, which is cool. And we can talk a little bit about that too. You've spoken for over 10,000 hours on stage. I don't know what the number is. You probably don't know what the number is. I do. 7,000. 7,000? I'll take the over. I'll take the over. Yeah. It could be because I don't count all the little events that I do too. You speak at like $100.

little events per year. And that's one hour here, two hours there, three hours here, four hours there. Sometimes I put you on a panel for freaking four hours straight. Okay. With all these, let's call it 7,000 hours. I think it's more than that. How, why, like, you know, people talk about Tarzan and the snakes and how that's so scary, but the number one fear in the world is actually public speaking. Yeah. And you've mastered that by obviously speaking the

way more than most any human on the planet. Yeah. How? Why? Walk us through it. Sure. So let's start with the how. How I did that is I did for a very long time, seven straight years. I did three day conferences where I was the only speaker all day Friday, all day Saturday. Yeah. So I was on stage by myself, bro, for nine hours on Friday.

nine hours on Saturday and then another nine hours on Sunday. And I did 228 of those conferences alone. So if you add that up, that's like 6000 hours right there. So that's a lot of people will call call me out. They're like, no way you did seven thousand hours. And that right there takes 90 percent of it. It is recorded.

It is all of it recorded. And then I've got my own events in there and all the other events. So that's why it adds up to over 7,000. So that's how the 7,000. Why is because I'm passionate about inspiring people. And when you have the opportunity to have somebody's undivided attention and the privilege to suggest things to them that could definitely impact their lives and, and put them on a better course, it's an honor. And so it's a shame that some people are afraid of that. We can talk about that fear in just a second. But the, the why I do what I do is because I know that God has given me, uh,

story to tell I know that God has given me amazing talents to share with other people and I think that it's selfish to not talk about it and I love the subject of money I think that for whatever reason the conversation around money is somewhat taboo and a lot of circles and a lot of households like if you ask someone what do you do that's okay but if I say how much money do you make that's rude for some reason and so I love the conversation around money and helping people feel freer to pursue it kind of doing a lot of the stereotypes around

big income earners tearing those down and then ultimately teach people how to make their money matter as well. So that's why I speak. And it's something that, again, anytime you give me a microphone, bro, I'm going to hog it. You're ready. So...

Thrive conference had over a thousand to 1500 people year after year after year after year. Why did you do it? Talk us through it. And the tagline afterwards is make money matter. We'll talk about that afterwards. Yeah, sure. So I did thrive to build my brand. I was realizing that I think that attention is the most valuable form of currency on earth. I think that if you have a large audience, you can literally monetize it in any way, ethically, morally and legally, of course, but any way you want.

And I didn't have an audience in 2014. I had heard of guys like you and read the various books from these influencers. I was super impressed by the Gary V's of the world in 2014. But it was it was in 2014 that I realized I was costing myself money by people not knowing who I was, by me not even becoming a household name like the Andy for Sales and Ed Miletz. But literally nobody besides my family knowing who I was was costing me opportunity.

So I said, how can I become the center of influence? And I thought an event would be a good try and it turned out to work. And I said, if I can host an event with people who are popular, but they're all coming to me for my event, so everyone in the audience is coming because they know who Gary Vee is and he came to my event and who Robert Herjavec from Shark Tank is and all of these big name speakers,

people came for them and they're like, well, who's this Cole Hatter guy? Well, if Cole Hatter is a big enough deal and a cool enough guy to get Robert Herjavec from Shark Tank and Gary Vaynerchuk, and you've spoken at Thrive, of course, but I'm focusing on that first year. Lewis Howes came out that first year. John Lee Dumas, a bunch of great names.

And I was able to get 500 people at the very first Thrive and introduce myself to the world. I didn't even have an Instagram in 2012, I don't think. Like I turned it on in 2013 and posted some pictures of my family. And what's really cool about that is it worked. I was able to borrow the brand credibility of other people. So for the listeners that are wanting to build a brand,

One of the fastest ways to brand hack, if that's even a term, is by sitting next to people like Dan Fleischman, who has millions of eyeballs on him at any given time. And through that association, some people migrate over and start following you. Then it's important for you to stay interesting and create content that keeps them engaged.

But ultimately, that's how I built my audience. And, you know, I don't have millions of followers, but I have a loyal following. People found me. They checked me out. They saw what I was up to. And if they were if they were interested, they stayed. And if they weren't, they left. But I now have this diehard following where,

I mean, just the other day, I needed to raise a few million dollars for a real estate deal. I was on a jog, bro. I wasn't like in a studio. I wasn't with microphones and lights. I was running with no shirt on, pulled my phone out. And while I was jogging, literally said, hey, guys, I've got a deal. I need to raise some money by this Friday. If you're interested, let me know. I got over 400 DMs. Come on. Over 400 DMs. I built an entire list of potential investors for future deals. And I raised four point two million dollars.

From my Instagram. Oh my God, I love that. From a 13 second post I did jogging down the street. Now, of course, the follow up conversations took some time. Of course. But I generated 400 people that just saw Cole with no shirt on running down the street saying, hey, I got this awesome deal. If you want to participate, shoot me a DM. Over 400 people did it. So why I did Thrive, back to your original question, was I wanted to build a brand and

It's interesting. If I told Gary, hey, do you want to be friends? He'd probably be like, you're creepy. Like, leave me alone. But if I say, hey, Gary, do you want to come stand on my stage? And I negotiated in his contract that I could fly to New York and record 20 minutes with him included in that. And this was 2014. So he said yes to that. And so I just kept hanging out with him. And on Thrive number two, I had Grant Cardone come. And I can't remember who Chicken Soup for the Soul. Mark Victor Hansen. No, no.

I'm interviewing him in an hour. Oh, are you really? Yeah. Of course you are. No, Canwell. What's his name? Maxwell. John Maxwell? No, not John C. Maxwell. I'll remember it when it doesn't matter, of course. But regardless, I had some incredible people come and speak at my event. And because of their brand credibility, because of how important they were to society, and because they were promoting me in their own Instagrams, tagging me and saying that they were at my event, that's how I built my brand. And that's why I did Thrive. I don't know if you know this, but I actually was in

in the limo from the airport with Gary Vee to your events. Oh, are you serious? Yeah. For that first one? Yeah. Oh, that's hilarious. I still remember it clear as day and walking in and like him explaining the events and everything. That's cool. You should have spoken it, bro. Yeah.

I didn't get invited, you know? Yeah, that's true. We haven't met yet. I just was in Vegas and Gary was in Vegas. And I want to say one more thing about that, though, for anyone who's listening and even considering throwing a live event, everybody who's significant in my life right now has come from Thrive. I can't find a person that I'm doing life with or doing business with that wasn't already in my life, of course, that didn't come from Thrive. For instance, you I met through Tai Lopez. I met Tai Lopez because Maya, his right hand, reached out to me and said, Thrive looks cool. You should have Tai Lopez come and speak at it.

And at the time, this was 2015, I was like, who's Ty? I saw his garage video or whatever. And I was like, oh, that guy. But as you know, Ty and I became friends. He spoke at my event. He asked me to come speak at his event where you and I were on a panel. And I was like, who's this really smart guy that's at the end of the panel right now that's saying things that I'm learning right now on stage?

And so I met you because of Ty, but I met Ty because of Thrive. So every single person is either one directly connected to Thrive or one person removed for it. So I can say that Thrive has literally made me tens of millions of dollars above my brand because of all the opportunities and stuff. I mean, you and I have made a few million dollars together now because I met you because of Thrive and you're just one person of many that has come.

Why is it important for people to attend events, seminars, business conferences, and networking? Because relationships are everything. Your business partner, Joel, a friend of mine, is wearing a hat right now that says rich in relationships. I want to freaking take it from him. There's all those cliches. Your net worth is equal to your network and you are the average of the five people you hang out with. And we hear that so often that it doesn't really resonate, I don't think. It's

It's like so common that people don't actually stop for a second and process what it means. But you are who who you have access to completely dictates your future, not just from my deal flow and the opportunities, but the quality of life I want to experience is directly impacted by the people who I'm around. So building your network and networking is important. So back to your question, why should people come to live events?

Virtual events are convenient. They're super great. You and I have produced virtual events together. I got nothing but love for those, but you can't network in the same capacity that you can at a live event. And I'm old fashioned in the sense that I would way rather do things in person. Yeah, exactly. When it comes to certain meetings, uh,

Like you, most meetings should be an email and shouldn't exist at all. But some meetings, especially really critical ones, just have to be done in person. There's something about that in person. And so even though in a virtual event, you've got the chat rooms and maybe even some breakout rooms where you can kind of quasi meet people, there's nothing like looking at somebody in the eyeball, shaking their hand and having a conversation with them or in your case, your events, a meal because you feed us every 15 minutes.

with somebody and getting to know them. So I think that everybody should attend live events with an intention. You don't just show up to a live event and wait to see what happens. You have to set your intentions at a time. You need to say, I am going to go and raise the money I need for this deal. And by having that intention in your mind of why you're going to this event ahead of time, you can usually make it happen. Or your intention could be, I'm going to meet six new people and my next business partner, whatever it is, right? I mean, I

we're at an event right now is we're recording this podcast and I literally just watched two people in my breakout room who were the exact pair that needed each other who are now gonna go do a business together yeah happen right in front of my face those two would have never known it and they were at the same event they wouldn't have known it if they weren't in the same breakout room right right and so it's super important to get to live events to shake hands to have conversations with as many people as possible because your next business partner your next spouse your next lender your next

person that's going to bring you your next deal is at that conference. So let's go a level beyond the live events. What about masterminds? There's 50 to 100 people at most masterminds. Masterminds range from 10K, 20K, 25K is kind of the average. The one here is $100,000. It's all relative to situations. And there's a lot of niche masterminds with real estate niche

e-commerce niche, et cetera. Why do you think it's important for masterminds that are very expensive and maybe a big risk for someone to pay 10K, 20K, 30K, et cetera, to join? Why do you think masterminds are important to take that risk at some point when they can afford to jump in? So I would say, depending on the mastermind, it's super important.

because I have seen and been asked to speak at other masterminds where I know for sure I wouldn't personally get any benefit from them. You're super careful to curate your attendees. And that's what I want to say is important. So for people who are considering joining a mastermind,

make sure that there's some sort of an entry barrier, that there's an interview or something to make sure that all members are quality candidates. 'Cause when you go to a live event, you don't necessarily care who else is in the audience. You just assume because there's a volume of people that the right people for your connections will be there. But in a mastermind, you're really joining for the members.

Mastermind hosts like you and I will bring in incredible speakers to curate conversations and to create thinking, right? To get people to start thinking differently. But the real value is in that community. So I would say the first thing that's important, even before we talk about why joining a mastermind, is making sure that you're joining a mastermind where the host or the owner of the mastermind is curating their attendees to some degree. There's some sort of a qualification to get in.

Now, let's just assume that that's the case. Now you're sitting in a room where every single person has earned the right to be there. And so not only are the speakers on stage incredible, but I get more value. I mean, you bust your ass to put really quality people on our stage. I get way more value hanging out with your friends. Sure. Like I was just hanging out with Trav for 20 minutes. Dude, that guy blows my mind every time I'm around him. And so and he's not even a speaker this week. He's just hanging out.

And so he was just blowing my mind with NFTs and his watch and everything that he's got going on. And so I personally usually get more value from the conversations I'm having with other mastermind members than I do from even the speakers. And so going to live events is important to shake hands, to have conversations and to hear from stage content.

But masterminds are important to learn from one another. And so you're being put into a room where every single other person is up to big things, theoretically, again, if you've joined the right mastermind, and it levels up. And that's the last thing that I think masterminds do for me personally, is they encourage me and they inspire me. The way my parents raised me, the way God wired me, however you want to say it, when I see other people's success, I get motivated.

Thank God I don't have a cell in my body that has envy or jealousy. The more and more I see you succeeding, the more I elbow Sonny and say, look at Dan, look what he's doing. I could do the same stuff. Right. And so masterminds really fire me up because I'm around producers. And again, another reason why it's so important you join a mastermind that has some barrier to entry, because I don't want to be the only person that owns a business. I'm like, Hey guys, I'm stuck at $10 million. I want to scale to 20. And everyone's like, well, I have a job at target. Like, well, how are you going to help me? I want to be

the biggest loser in the mastermind always, which for me is kind of easy to do sometimes. But legitimately, I want to be the biggest loser in the mastermind so that everyone I go to has the solutions to my problems. All right. So we talked about investing into yourself. Let's talk about investing into real estate. Yeah. You've done, I don't even know what the heck the number is, amount of flips, lots, investing in flips, fixing flips, investing in rental properties and doing some high-end flips, $1 million type, $2 million type houses, et cetera.

Walk us through when someone's trying to research and figure out whether they should invest in a fix and flip or a fourplex or a single family house or apartment building or a commercial building. There's so many options. How can someone learn about real estate before they make a decision? So there's two types of income in real estate. Well, there's three technically, but there's active income and then there's passive income, right? And then there's technically interest income. That's lending money. We'll talk about that later. But when it comes to passive or

income, you need to decide what type of investor do you want to be. Do you want to be an active dealmaker like I am where you're making offers, you're buying houses, you're renovating them, you're flipping them, you're wholesaling, you're buying apartments, you're doing value ads? Or do you want to be a passive investor where you're just parking money and essentially forgetting about it, just working with a property manager at that point?

So that's the first thing that people need to decide once they decided whether they want to be active or passive. Like I just kind of described, there are dozens of strategies within them. Within active investing, there's 30 different things you can do in real estate as well as within passive as well. And then the last thing I would say is what financial position the person that wants to start investing in real estate is in. For instance, you're not technically a real estate investor, even though you own a bunch of real estate now.

But you are in the financial position where you can be a bit riskier because you can afford to take a loss right now versus someone who might be in their mid to late 20s, early 30s, who's about to do their first deal that if they do it wrong, it could completely take them out. I mean, you're in the position right now where you could completely botch a deal, lose all your money, be pissed about it, learn a lesson and just move on in your life. And so I think that it's important for people to evaluate what their own risk tolerance is and what

what money they have the ability to lose. I think that it's an important lesson that one of my early mentors taught me is only invest money you're willing to lose. And even though real estate is a very safe and tried and true asset class, only use money you can afford to lose. And if it's money you can afford to lose, that should dictate what type of deals you even have the opportunity to participate in based on what type of money you have to allocate towards. So let's walk through a real life situation.

You find a $500,000 fix and flip house. You're going to put 20% down on average. Let's just call it that, $100,000. Walk us through the process of what is interesting. If you're going to buy a house for $500,000 and then you're going to put X amount of dollars into it, how much do you want to sell it for? What type of percent interest? Just give us the main idea of what a $500,000...

fix and flip will look like that makes you interested? Yeah. So for me personally, I live in Southern California where real estate is way more expensive. Margins are thinner, but because it's expensive, it's still a decent amount of money. So my goal is to net 10% of my total capital allocation. So

if i bought the house for 500 grand but then i had to put a hundred thousand dollars worth of renovation into it let's just say so i'm into it for 600 grand i have to be able to sell it and after i've paid my realtor fees closing costs carrying costs all the interest borrowed on the debt assuming i had it all that good stuff i need to make a minimum of 60 000 net net net for me to even look at it and that's in california right where we have much thinner margins

Across the Midwest, you can buy deals that pay you 20, 30, 40%. So for me, my net, net, net needs to be 10%. So it doesn't necessarily matter what the number is. I could buy a house for $4 million and put $2 million into it. If you do it for $6 million, well, then I need to make $600 grand minimum to do that deal. So that's kind of my walkaway point is anything single-digit returns,

doesn't make sense to me because I have other things to park my money in. And so for me, I'm bullish on real estate, but I will park my money where it's going to be treated the best and come back to me the fastest. And so

I can lend my money to anybody and charge them 10 to 12%. I'm a private money lender. And so a lot of even your students here in this mastermind come to me and ask me to help fund their deals for them. Well, at a minimum, I charge 10%. So if I'm going to do a fix and flip, that's going to pay me 8%. I'd be better off to just loan that money out to you and forget about it. Do no work at all and make 10%. So the fact that I know that I'm a lender, the fact that I know that I understand the lending business and how to underwrite deals and risk tolerance again, and all that stuff, because I'm an active lender that gets...

no less than 10% or else I just won't lend you my money, then every deal I do kind of has to make 10% or more. Otherwise, it just doesn't make sense to do it.

So someone's considering a fourplex and they want to live in one unit and rent out the other three. House hacking, maybe. Right? They keep reading about it. They hear about it. They saw it on a podcast. They saw a TikTok video. Get a fourplex, live in one unit, rent out the other three. Does that concept work? Walk us through just a general idea. Works beautifully. I literally just told someone to do it. He's here. He's in his 20s. He's like, Cole, should I rent at this age or should I buy? I said, technically both. You should buy a fourplex, rent three of them out and live in one for free and probably not only have your bills covered, but cashflow. And so-

the way that it works is pretty, pretty obvious. You would buy a multifamily. So like a duplex, triplex, fourplex, right? If you get to five units or more, you're now in commercial financing changes and a few other things as well. So I would recommend doing a duplex, triplex, or a

fourplex to get started you move into one unit and you rent the other ones out and if you want to you can hire a property manager so you don't even talk to those tenants if you want to manage it yourself you can property management for a residential property like that would range like eight to ten percent collected rents so it's not too expensive they're doing all the work you're still keeping 90 to 92 percent of the rental income but in a little duplex scenario like that if you only have one or two other renters in a triplex then you could probably manage it yourself but

But that's the point, and I think it's an incredible strategy. I think that house hacking is how everybody should buy their first residence. Now, when you get a little older and you make more money, then you don't necessarily want to share your home with other people and you have a family and kids. But honestly, house hacking is a smart strategy for anybody. - So let's walk through real life math. The fourplex, let's just use 500K as the example, and maybe it's not California, but let's say it's 500K for this fourplex, and you're living in one unit.

The other units are like 800 bucks a month, a thousand bucks a month, 1200 bucks a month, whatever that number is. Walk us through, like what's the actual like math kind of main idea. So today is recording this interest rates have gone up. So if you're buying the property, you would have to secure long-term debt. You're not doing a fix and flip. So you'd go get a 30 year fixed.

you'd have to figure out what that mortgage is. And I can't calculate that quickly, but on a $500,000 mortgage. - It's about 2500 bucks a month. - Okay, you got 2500 bucks a month. The next thing you need to evaluate is what's the rental comps for that square footage in that area for the quality of home that you have. So for instance, do you have crystal chandeliers or is it more rental type? So depending on what you've done to your property, what it looks like, how it compares to other properties is called comps.

you're then gonna get what are called rental comps and you'll know what it is. So I know you're a math guy and you want me to give you math, but it would change if I moved 30 miles in one direction. So what you need to know is,

depending on what your purchase price is, what are your total carrying costs? Total carrying costs. And be very careful not to throw my lenders under the bus, but what you qualify for and what you afford are two very different things. Anybody who's considering purchasing real estate right now, a lender will tell you what you qualify for. That does not necessarily mean what you can afford. You need to also keep in account that you're going to have taxes, insurance, maintenance. Your tenants are going to clog their toilets. There's going to be issues. So

Do not max yourself out. So the first thing you do is if you're evaluating a property, figure out what it's going to cost you on a monthly basis for your debt service, your taxes, your insurance, and then set aside five to 10% minimum for maintenance. Okay. The next evaluation is what's that rental income going to be. And it might not cashflow off of one or two units. You might need to go all the way to a fourplex where you're renting all three out to make that cashflow. Uh, but again, it,

you know, usually duplexes are three bedroom, two bath, two bedroom, one bath, two bedroom, two baths type scenarios. So they should be pretty affordable. They're not, you're not going to get rich off of this. The idea is to either live for free or live with a little bit of money in your pocket. Um, so I would say house hacking definitely isn't how you become a multimillionaire, but it's a great way to own real estate that costs you nothing where you still get all the appreciation depreciation benefits. Um,

and that staple in your portfolio that when you're done with it, you can sell it in 1031 exchange into the next one or whatever it is. So I wouldn't worry as much about the numbers. It's more about the ratios. At what ratio is the rental income going to service my debt and my carrying costs? And

even if it's running a little bit of a negative I so this is hear me out before anyone out there judges I would usually say you never buy real estate that is a negative cash flow but if this is your primary residence well okay and then you're living in it then instead of it costing you 2500 a month maybe it's costing you 400 a month right which I would say as a passive investment that's a bad investment because it's costing 400 a month but if you're living there well that's still house hacking yeah you're saving two grand a month 2100 bucks exactly

Okay, I've watched you evolve over the years after going flipping so many houses and doing some big houses in Orange County. I saw you flip a million dollar house, a two million dollar house, et cetera. You also started recently buying land. Yeah. And like arbitrarily, I bought it for four million, sold it for eight or nine million. Like walk us through just like a main idea of why you started buying just dirt.

So I learned about something called the land entitlement strategy. And it is, in my opinion, in many people's opinion, the most lucrative form of real estate investing that's out there as far as how much money you can make in profit for how much time, energy and effort you put out.

The skinny of it is you identify land in developing areas. So we're currently sitting in Phoenix, Arizona as we're recording this podcast. And this is one of the markets I'm investing in. Phoenix is booming right now. And Phoenix is in the middle of the desert. So there's like an edge of where the city's growth is, where it just turns into sticks, rocks and coyotes. Right. But that growth will continue to go outward like ripple effect like it does in all areas. You and I live in Southern California. It's completely built out. There isn't really any more raw land, just patches here or there.

But so we're targeting areas where there's growth. When cities plan their future progress, their growth plans, they do what's called zoning and they zone certain areas agricultural so people can have farms. They zone certain areas residential so they can build houses. They zone other areas commercial so we can build things like restaurants and strip centers, et cetera. And they kind of guess what they think would be a good ratio spread out in however they want to do it. This could have been 50 years ago that they did this.

Well, now fast forward and the city has grown around an area. And so we just put in an offer for 4.7 acres in Chandler, Arizona for $2.2 million. It's currently zoned residential. It's in the middle of a bunch of houses. This would be a great example to teach your listeners what land entitlement is.

It's zoned residential. It's in the middle of houses. So right now, if you look at it on Google Earth, it's just a little square patch of dirt in the middle of endless houses. Why would you want to put more houses there? The closest Starbucks or strip center is a 15 minute drive from those areas.

So what we're doing is we're changing it from residential through this entitlement process. It'll take us about a year. We work with the various municipalities, so the cities and counties, and we say, hey, guys, this is cleared to build houses on it. We want to change it to build a strip center here. You need a Starbucks. You need a grocery store. You need restaurants. You need whatever. Gas station, exactly. And so we will work with the county. We will spend about $200,000 worth of legal fees. We won't touch the dirt. We won't even pull weeds.

And they will change it so that it was no longer zoned for residential but is now zoned for MU, mixed use, which is what we want to do here, put in some eateries and things like that. And we estimate, based on comps, that by doing that, the land that we purchased for $2.2 million that we then put $200,000 into, so we're all into it for $2.4 million, is going to be worth $5 to $5.5 million. So we're going to double our money just doing paperwork.

Now, your listeners might say, that sounds too good to be true. Well, let me tell you about the one we already did. We bought land for $4.2 million in a place called Bloomington, California, and we sold it, or excuse me, we bought it for 4.2, put about 300 grand in the entitlement. It's taken 13 months, and now we've sold it for $9.5 million. When all of the dust settles, all the realtors are paid back, or not paid back, excuse me, paid their commissions. All of the lenders are paid back, and everybody's done. We're going to net...

net 4.7 million dollars on a piece of dirt i've been to once that i never removed a single weed from haven't touched haven't done anything to we just changed what the legal use of that dirt could be and we're making 4.7 million net net net on that deal and i know it's for sure because my business partner joel invested with you yeah yeah he's one of my lenders on that deal yeah okay so we talked a bit about making money side now we talked a bit about investing money side

Walk us through how you make decisions because you could invest into Everbull restaurants. You could invest into sports card businesses. You could invest into real estate. You have options. How do you decide amongst your capital where you want to deploy it? So again, and for me, I'll answer for me personally, and then I'll do a more broad answer for me personally. It totally depends on what, like what's frustrating me at the time. Um,

I have most of the opportunities that come to me are active deals where I've got to be involved in them and they'll make millions of dollars and it's great. And that's how I pay for my bills and feed my family. But what I'm more interested in right now are passive income. And so for me, I'll pass on a deal that would take my time.

and make less money right now on a deal that would cost me no time at all. That makes sense? So really what I'm looking for right now are passive opportunities like Everbull where I can park money and not need to be an operator and not need to earn that money twice. What I did in my early investing days that I made the mistake for is I would go make money at Thrive and I'd earn that dollar and then I would put it into real estate where I had to work that deal and I would have to earn the same dollar twice, if that makes sense.

I don't want to do that anymore. So for me personally, how I'm evaluating deals is literally like the mood that I'm in. Like, do I feel like having to work this deal right now or should I take that money and put it into something passive? So it's kind of unique to my situation for a broader answer that might be more applicable to the listeners.

Again, we're going to go back to risk tolerance. What can you put your money in that you're going to be able to sleep in at night or sleep? Not necessarily in, but like you're going to put your money out there and not lose sleep because you're so concerned about what your investment is doing. Investment thesis is important. What's your investment thesis as an investor? What do you think is the best use of your money and time based on your relationships and your own experience? That's important. And then, like I said before, what type of money do you have to lose? That's super important. I just...

I don't want to scare people, but you do your due diligence. You underwrite your deals. You make sure that it has the highest probability for success, but there's always risk. There's no such thing as no risk. So be careful what money you're investing.

All right. For the third segment, we talked about giving it away to charity. So you created this Make Money Matter and you started working on for-purpose companies and doing good while doing good. Like all these great phrases that are burned into my brain. Walk us through why you make money matter. Why did you literally name your events and nickname? You know, the whole headline is Make Money Matter. Yeah. Talk us through it.

So I got started in real estate in 2005. 2008, the recession came and almost took me out. I mean, I was losing, hemorrhaging very crazy. My girlfriend at the time and I broke up, which I then married her, so I got her back. Yeah, but at the time it hurt. And so here I am running a business that is failing in the recession. I didn't know how to make money in a down market. Anybody can make money, like everybody made bit money. - Everybody's genius, yeah. - Yeah, everybody made money in Bitcoin when they bought it at three grand and went to 20 or whatever. I remember and they were all coaches all of a sudden or whatever.

But when things are going down, that's hard. And so for me personally, 2008 killed me. And I slowly lost money through 2010, moved down to Mexico, became a missionary. 'Cause that's what you do when you can't make money anymore, you just become a missionary, right? True story, I lived in Mexico, I built houses for a homeless family and I ended up founding an orphanage down in Mexico. I found a couple down there and they were trying and it just long story short for the sake of this podcast, we started an orphanage in 2011 and it's freaking incredible and I still have it to this day.

Well, while I was down there, I was living off what savings I had left from my real estate heydays, right? I had probably 20, 30 grand when I moved down there that I was just living off of. And because I was a missionary, it was lasting. But once I founded this orphanage with this other couple, uh,

I was completely funding the whole thing and I was running out of money. And I got to this critical place where I knew I had about 60 days of money left until I was going to be broke. And then I wouldn't be able to take care of these kids anymore. So my first thought was I need to go back to America. I need to start a nonprofit like model citizen fund or whatever. Start a 501 C three, find wealthy individuals like yourself, ask you to donate to me and, and hope that I get enough donations. I can continue to run my charity.

But having been an entrepreneur and already making a bunch of money in real estate, it just didn't feel right just asking people for money, for charitable donations. So what I decided to do instead was go back to my roots and start businesses. And I was like, you know what? I'm just going to become so successful in business.

I'll set some money aside for the orphanage, right? Well, at the time, this was 2010, Tom's shoes was blowing up at the time. And I saw this model, this business model where for every pair of shoes he sold, he gave a pair away. And I was like, that's it. This isn't just charity. This isn't the founder getting rich and being generous.

In the business model, they give back. That's what I want to do. I want to go back to America and run businesses instead of asking the Dan Fleishmans to just give me money. I'm going to run businesses that give back. And then I stumbled across it. My mom was asking me what I wanted to do. And I was like, I don't want to just make money. I want to make money matter this time. And that's where the saying came. I remember

literally where I was sitting at a nectar juice, drinking a green juice when I thought of it for the first time. And I, uh, Everbowl didn't exist yet. Otherwise I would've been at Everbowl of course. But bottom line is I said, I want to make money matter. And I created this concept of for purpose businesses like Tom's shoes. Didn't even know that they were in this category. They're not a standard for profit cause they don't just make money, but they're not a nonprofit because they do make money. There's something in the difference. They make money and they make it matter. So we call that for purpose organizations or for purpose.

purpose businesses, excuse me. And so that's what I did. I came back to America. I started my fix and flip business again with my dad. I was flipping houses. I was making a bunch of money, but I was making it matter because our business is now for purpose. And all of the businesses that I've started since are all for purpose. And friends of mine started kind of talking a little bit about it. And I would share a little bit on podcasts. This is like 2012. And this is how Thrive was born was 2012 and 13, as I'm now building my businesses and they're all for purpose. Uh, the P and

And by the way, they became phenomenally successful. I had never made a million dollars in a year ever prior to this, became a for-purpose business and haven't made less than a million dollars since. Interesting, right? When you get a Y and connect it to your business. So started making big money, started giving back, started talking about it on podcasts.

I got a bunch of people that were asking for help. So that's what made me first throw thrive, make money matter and bring it in the Gary Vaynerchuk's rubber Hershey's like we talked about, because I wanted to actually teach the four purpose business model. And I'm proud to say we now have thousands of four purpose businesses that have put out tens of

millions of dollars worth of charitable contributions and have completely changed a bunch of the things in the world. And I feel like we're just getting started. And so back to your original question, how did I come across it? I just needed to feed my kids in my orphanage and I didn't want to ask people to donate. I wanted something that was sustainable. And so I wanted to start businesses that gave back. And so again, for your listeners, I would encourage you to look into the, um, the four purpose business model.

selfish plug. If you just Google Cole Hatter TEDx talk, I do an 18 minute talk on how to become for a purpose. So that's free. You can find that on YouTube. But for the for purpose business model, I think is

going to be the future of commerce. I think that with consumers, the way that they are, they're more touchy-feely now than ever. They have this expectation on business owners to give back, to not just make money, but to make money matter. And I think that hopefully with you and I and others influencing the markets, that we can completely change the way that businesses are ran, where consumers just expect them to be for a purpose or they won't spend money with you anymore.

Well, inside this casino, we have 140 people waiting to play a charity poker tournament for your orphanage right now. So for all of you guys listening, make sure to follow at Cole Hatter on social media, especially on Instagram. You guys got to check out the things that he's doing, what he's building with the orphanage. He likes to showcase his life, his family, his events, et cetera, and everything between.

We all grew up thinking it's rude to talk about money. And you guys have heard me week after week after week. So passionately want to have these discussions with people that make money matter, with people that talk about money openly and bluntly, because it's not rude to talk about money. We need it. You guys have to have these conversations about salary and loans and FICO scores and credit and everything that comes with apartments and leases. And what should I rent or buy? Like you've got to have these discussions. You've got to study it. You've got to search on YouTube. You've got to watch videos, listen to cool people like this, go to events.

Talk about it with your friends, family, and followers. Come watch with us. We have themoneymondays.com. We go live every Monday at four o'clock and have live Q&A sessions. Obviously the podcast, share with your friends, comment, like, subscribe, all those things because we want to have people that have these discussions. It's so important for our country, for our society. We need you guys to make more money. We need you to have more discussions. We will see you next Monday. Talk to you guys soon.