CEOInterviews.AIHe Left his 9-5 Using THIS Real Estate Strategy (low interest rate)

U

Unknown0:00

Cam Cathkart, what's up, dude? I got a question for you.

C

Cam0:00

What is it?

U

Unknown0:00

All right. What time did the man go to the dentist?

C

Cam0:07

Uh, you're already laughing, so tooth. Ready? Tooth hurt. Oh, 2:30. Tooth hurt. Get it. 'Cause his tooth hurt.

U

Unknown0:19

Yes. That — I mean, no. Like it hurt. It hurt. Look at the tooth hurt. Tooth hurt. The tooth hurt. Tooth hurt. Hey everyone, what's up? Speaking of tooth hurt, I have no connection. Tooth hurt. Michael Miller has beautiful teeth.

C

Cam0:31

He does have beautiful teeth.

H

Host0:33

So, today's guest is a good friend of mine, one of my favorite humans in the world. His name is Michael Miller. And Michael is spelled with an A or EA. It's like, what is normal Michael? M I C H A E L. He is E A L. It's different. Michael Miller. Mel. It looks like Michael. We made fun of him on the show for that. He is just one of my favorite people. I met him a few months ago. He came to a Maui master class and then he joined the 50. He's in town hanging out and so we interviewed him and I love his story of just getting into real estate not that long ago, leaving a comfortable job to pursue the entrepreneurial life. He's already built up over 100 units in his portfolio and he shares everything today and how he did it.

C

Cam1:07

Yeah, it was incredible and he's just a great guy. He's a great guy. Like literally, he's one of my favorite people in the entire world. Easy to talk to, interesting, tells great stories. So he's also an adviser right now for I have a program called First Deal, as you know. And in First Deal, we have a thing called FastTrack. So, the first five weeks when you join First Deal, you don't get just tossed into the pen with everybody that's in the program. You go through a week-by-week process. And I actually brought in Michael Miller to teach those five weeks.

H

Host1:32

Oh, dude. He's great for that.

C

Cam1:34

Yeah. 'Cause he's like he's so good and he's close to — he's only four years in or whatever now, four or five years in. And so, he teaches the first five weeks and then you join the rest. So, if anybody wants to join First Deal and want to check out Michael Miller and what me and him are doing there, firstdeal.com, you can go there. But I think we're ready to get to the interview. So, let's do it. Michael Miller, welcome to the podcast, man.

M

Michael Miller1:54

Thanks for having me.

C

Cam1:56

Is it Michael or is it Muel? It is spelled different.

M

Michael Miller2:00

The product of a 15-year-old mom.

C

Cam2:05

Oh, let's really start that.

M

Michael Miller2:07

But let's think about it objectively. Say Michael phonetically and tell me which way makes more sense. Ael or E? Is it Mike Ale or is it Michael?

C

Cam2:14

I don't know. Think about it. Like how would you do Mike? M I C L E Michael.

M

Michael Miller2:22

I don't know. That's the 15-year-old logic. I think she was like, she's like this. I just write it how it sounds. Cole. So that's how I ended up with it.

C

Cam2:30

All right. Well, I know you as a real estate investor, a master of creative finance. I know you as a father of several — some adoption stories in there we maybe get to today. I know you as a genuinely like just not funny guy. No humor whatsoever part of your life at all. No, I absolutely love hanging out with you. Part of the Maui mastermind, part of the Maui real estate mastermind, part of the 50, hung out this week here in Maui with you. I know you're part of First Deal. Not that you're buying your first deal, but you're one of our leaders, advisers in there leading the FastTrack program. So, you're pretty much drinking every bit of Kool-Aid I can possibly make.

M

Michael Miller3:04

Dude, I'm so drunk on your Kool-Aid right now. It's not even — I love it.

C

Cam3:08

Don, you have 100 plus units. I know you got your amazing husband. I know I met your wife. She apparently likes you quite a bit. She may disagree. I don't know. We'd have to ask. I don't know. I'm not sure. We'll find out. So, that's how I know you, but there's a lot I don't know about your past. You and I have never actually just been like, Hey, tell me about your past. So, I'm going to start right now. Who was Mike Miller?

M

Michael Miller3:32

Man, I'm just a kid. I was, you know, I was telling him earlier like my story started young. I was out on my own when I was 16. So yeah, I was born to a teen mom. She crushed it. I love my mom. Super grateful. But we had a young, hard life when I was getting started. And so then I was legally adopted by the man she married. And that marriage didn't last. And so that ended up in a situation where I was out on my own, 16. So my life, my adult life started really young. And I found out I was, you know, everybody says that they're like, Oh my god, that's such a hard story, but I'm like so grateful for it because it's, you know, like I wouldn't have what I have today if I didn't have to figure out how to adult, you know, and I know there's an adverse side to the sadness of part of the childhood and all that, but for me, I'm just really grateful. And so I started out early when I was 16. I found out on accident I was good at sales. Started selling car stereos and cell phones at the equivalent of a Radio Shack up in Seattle and met an executive for Bank of America. Sold him a car stereo system and he recruited me to Bank of America when I was 18 and that's what started my career. I was in banking for, gosh, almost — I mean collectively I took a little break in the middle there but collectively like 15 or 16 years. Lived the majority of my adult life in banking and then ended up in real estate somehow about two and a half years ago.

C

Cam4:59

Well, wow.

M

Michael Miller5:00

Yeah. It's not been that long. Two and a half years.

C

Cam5:03

I know. Isn't that crazy? It's wild. Wild.

M

Michael Miller5:06

I know.

C

Cam5:07

What did you start at the bank? What was your role?

M

Michael Miller5:09

I started as a personal banker.

C

Cam5:11

Oh, did you really?

M

Michael Miller5:12

Yeah, you know that US Bank personal banker.

C

Cam5:14

Okay. We do. We have some weird commonalities. It's kind of strange. Really weird. It's like a soul tie probably, but we should figure that out. You're my twin flame, you know. Oh my gosh. If you haven't watched that documentary, that's a good one. Have you not?

M

Michael Miller5:25

No.

C

Cam5:26

Oh, no. I just know a song from Machine Gun Kelly.

M

Michael Miller5:28

Oh, there's another one called There's a cult called Twin Flame. Really?

C

Cam5:32

Yeah. It's like an active cult. There's a documentary on it.

M

Michael Miller5:34

Well, maybe we're that, too. I hope not.

C

Cam5:37

Yeah. Okay. All right. So, you were a personal banker. You moved up in the world of banking. Obviously, at some point, you were doing — what was your career at the end? Like, what was your —

M

Michael Miller5:44

Yeah, I was a VP. So I did a bunch of different things. I started in retail banking. Took a small tour in the investment bank right before the Mel merger in 2008. And so that didn't last, for obvious reasons. And then my last role was in small business banking. So I was a VP of small business bank. Kind of ran the north state of California. That was my last role. Led mostly sales teams. I was kind of always on the sales side of the organization. But I led — when I was 20 I led my first banking center. I was a manager of a bank. At 24 I think I had like 15 or 20 in my region that I was managing and then I moved to the small business side. So that was my last gig at the bank. It was a crazy journey for sure.

C

Cam6:44

And you were crushing it there. So, why did you move over to real estate?

M

Michael Miller6:48

It's a great question. I loved my job and I always hesitate to clarify because I'm not the typical I hated my W2 was trying to get out and needed to do something different. I loved the bank. The bank was so good to me. All my development, all my leadership came from Bank of America and the leaders that I interacted with there. But I remember shortly after COVID, we had our daughter at the beginning of COVID 2020 and it wasn't very long thereafter I remember sitting in my little nook and in hindsight it's so obvious to me but at the time it was like a light bulb went off in my head which was no matter how much money I make here I'm still trading my time for it and I'm not building anything I can give to my kids. And four months later I was out of the bank. I took some consulting in a tech company to kind of bridge my start in real estate, but I went all in. We bought a bunch of dirt and started doing real estate.

C

Cam7:45

Do you remember — and I like this question because I'm not actually fishing for a compliment here because I know it's not coming because you did not start real estate because you started listening to the Bigger Pockets podcast.

M

Michael Miller7:54

I had no idea what Bigger Pockets was. That's the funny part about being in this world now is like I didn't realize how big of a deal Brandon was until I ended up in Brandon's world, which is cool. It was just super cool.

C

Cam8:06

But also like I feel like I still got a compliment out of that even though I was not trying to fish.

M

Michael Miller8:11

Yeah. Well, you know, it worked out for you. I'm pretty good at that. The cool part for me though is like now I've got this backlog of resources that everybody's been listening to for a decade that I'm like it's all new to me. So I've got an unlimited library of information.

C

Cam8:25

So what was the thing? Like do you remember — was there a book? Was it a podcast? You just heard something on the radio?

M

Michael Miller8:29

I always loved real estate. So for me, at some level I don't know if I knew that I would be doing it for a living, but I always knew that it would be a part of my wealth journey because I loved it. Like when my wife is watching the Bachelorette, I was doom scrolling Zillow. So I've just always loved the asset. I bought my very first deal when I was 19 in 2007, November of 2007. Not for any reason other than something in my brain told me that it was a good idea to own real estate. I had no language for it or data or anything. It was just something I knew was good. And that's when I decided I was going to get out of the bank. I was like, what's the thing I'm going to do? I'm going to become an investor.

C

Cam9:08

Had you already built up a rental portfolio before you got out of the bank?

M

Michael Miller9:11

Not really. I mean, I had rentals along the way. So that first deal I bought, I turned into a rental. That's a terrible story that I could tell you. Buying your first deal in 2007 before the crash was not awesome.

C

Cam9:22

But well, actually, it is time for the first deal question brought to you by firstdeal.com. Oh, I love that. Let me tell you all about it. Tell us about that first deal, man. Continue that.

M

Michael Miller9:35

The short version of a long story is I bought the house in 2007. I was 19. I'd been at the bank for about a year. Thought I was the coolest 19-year-old that ever lived. Bought it. It was a townhome in Mill Creek, Washington. Got it for $252,500. And I was like, it was a steal at the time. Everything else is like 300. And I was like, I'm so smart. Bought it, moved into it. Six months later, the market fell out. It was already happening, but I didn't know it at the time. Bottom fell out. Six months later, my neighbor who had the exact same unit sold theirs at auction for $50,000. So, if you don't know anything about comparable sales, that was bad news for my real estate. So I went from the coolest 19-year-old that ever lived to my financial life is ruined and I'm over. And all my advisors at the time told me just short sell it and foreclose. Do what everybody else is doing. Every unit in our community sold or short sold or foreclosed — every one of them except for mine. And it's not because I'm awesome, but I just had a weird conviction. I was fortunate — not only did I keep my job through the recession, but I got promoted and grew. And I just had this conviction that like I didn't sign up for this mortgage saying that if I didn't feel like paying it anymore that I didn't have to. And no judgment to people that lost their jobs and had to lose their home. It's terrible. But that wasn't my story. So I kept it. In 2009, we got married. We bought another house and I turned it into a rental. And I sold that property 10 years later to the month for $2,500 more than I paid for it. And the crazy part of that story is if I would have waited four more years, it sold again for double. So I would have actually made money. But I don't regret selling it because that is the lesson that taught me in real estate. If you wait, you win because I went from I'm just going to have this burden forever. I had no idea about appreciation and I just assumed that this was my mistake I was going to hold on to forever. And then I held on to it and time taught me that the values do come back and we will survive. So that's my first deal. It was the worst deal ever, but the best lesson of my real estate life. So to answer your question, I had rentals along the way, but they were accidental rentals. Like a house I bought, turned it into a rental, bought another house, turned it into a rental. It wasn't like I was actively buying. I just knew that buying real estate was a good idea.

C

Cam11:57

All right. So you leave the bank, you do some consulting gig, and you're like, okay, it's time to jump in all in. I'm going to go do this. That was two and a half years ago. What happened next? Like what did you go and do first to start building a portfolio?

M

Michael Miller12:12

The first thing I did is I went out and bought a bunch of dirt. To give a little context, I had partnered with somebody on a construction company. So we had a little construction company and I knew we could build some houses. So I had some cash. I went out and bought a bunch of dirt. And that was right at COVID, actually right in that time period. So maybe it's been three and a half years now that I'm thinking about it. But anyways, I bought all that dirt with the plan to build spec homes, develop them. That seemed smart. COVID hits, construction costs go through the roof and now it no longer pencils to build these houses. The problem was that I had spent all of my cash to buy this dirt and I wasn't worried about losing the money, but I knew that I was just going to have to hold. I still have this dirt just sitting. But I couldn't develop them. I couldn't turn it into money. It's not producing cash flow and I have no money to go buy anything else. So I was like, crap, I need to get around people that know how to do this and start to figure it out. So I went shopping for real estate groups and I'd never been in a mastermind. The first thing I looked for was real estate events. I went and did like four or five conferences, found the one that felt the most approachable to me and signed up for it. And that was my intro to true real estate investing. Whereas in hindsight, I would have never bought that dirt. They were MLS deals. I just paid full price. So in hindsight, I wish I would have waited. But once again, my lack forced me to get into a new environment to go, oh, I can't just become a hobbyist. I've got to become an investor. And that introduced me to a bunch of different strategies. I met a few people including Brandon. Started consuming a ton of content. Got in the room with a bunch of people that were doing cool stuff. And I figured out that's really what pushed me into creative finance out the gate was to close the gap on the fact that I didn't have a ton of capital anymore. At least I didn't have a ton of cash. I had a lot of equity that we were able to leverage.

C

Cam14:13

So a lot of new investors jump into a program, they get excited, whether it's a paid program or they just listen to the podcast, whatever. They get excited and then they do nothing. It's very common. In fact, it's the number one thing we were trying to solve for in First Deal. How do we actually make sure every single person buys a deal when majority of people left to their own devices won't? What made you different?

M

Michael Miller14:35

I just did the work, man. People ask me — we were talking about this before we started filming. People always ask me because I paid my first year $50,000 in educational resources: conferences, masterminds, travel, e-courses. I literally just bought it all. And people are like, did you get a return on your investment? What they typically mean is, did you get a deal that was worth $50,000 to you or did you get a lender? The answer is fundamentally no. What I got was the knowledge and the exposure that taught me what I needed to do, but I still had to go out and do it. And that was the difference for me. I made the connections, I got the exposure. So did I get an ROI? Of course, but on the P&L? No. It's an expense. Without doing that stuff, you wouldn't have done anything. I would have ended up back in the bank because I would have gone, oh crap, I guess I'm not a good real estate investor and I should just go back to making money.

H

Host15:44

Brandon, you told me at one point we were talking about the Kave dinners. These Kave dinners are amazing dinners. You used to host quite a few of those.

C

Cam15:52

Yeah, 23 of them.

H

Host15:53

And they're expensive. I loved it because I sometimes would get a tag along and I had to pay. But you made a comment that I thought was so great and it made me look at just real estate and meetups. The 50 joined, it was amazing. But you were like, I probably on 10 of those that I host, nine of them that are $15,000 a piece, I don't make a penny back on. But on one of them, I'm going to meet somebody cool, have a really incredible conversation, and it's going to change the face of my business and make me millions of dollars over the next 20, 30, 40 years because of somebody that I met there. And that's how I started looking at every event, every conference, everything that I pay for. I might not make anything but just meet really cool people, but there could be a connection. I feel like the 50 — I met so many people that I don't know if I'll do business with them, but I'm going to get something just from the friendships.

C

Cam16:48

Here's a tangible way that actually works and to go full to tell the rest of the story. I've always said I think in averages. If you read 10 books and nine of them don't change your life but one does change your life, each book changed your life on average. So I always would say that about the Kave. I might spend $15,000 on dinners over and over entertaining celebrities, rich people, business people, traveling people. I always knew it would come back. But here's one real way that it did in a way that I didn't expect. One of the owners of Kave was Matt Francois. I brought him on to run the 50. Now we've got 40-some or late 30 — almost 40 dudes, solid real estate investors. I will do lots of business with people in the 50. At dinner the other night I sat next to Trey Stone. That conversation was worth every dollar I've ever paid for a Kave dinner. It went one to the next to the next, which led to that conversation at dinner was worth it all.

H

Host18:02

Well and that's a five-year story. I think that's important to get. It wasn't the hey I hosted this and I didn't make a million dollars next week or I signed up for this conference and I didn't make a million dollars next week. It's a five-year story. I've had some dudes in the 50 — maybe one or one and a half conversations where guys have said to me, like, I don't know if I'm going to renew because I came to the event and I went home and I didn't really feel like I got what I needed. I didn't really get deals or anything out of it. And I'm like, I understand it's a lot of money. It's very expensive to join the 50, but it's the arc that matters. And again, this is for anything, not just the 50. It's the arc that matters. You stick with it long enough. It's the one conversation will change your life forever. But if you don't have those conversations regularly —

M

Michael Miller18:48

Well, look at us. We were talking about this earlier. Maui mastermind 2021. I come there, I meet you. I meet a lot of incredible people. I don't go home and all of a sudden my portfolio blows up or we're doing business together, but we stay in contact. I get invited to go to Sedona. It was amazing. And then Limitless and just over time, I'm making all these connections. And then three years later, I move out here and then you're sitting at a table signing a contract to buy a house. Exactly. So it's such a long story where if you were to look six weeks after the Maui mastermind that we spent — Lexi and I both went, I think it was $7,000 a piece plus it was probably $20,000 all in once you include travel. Six weeks later I would have been like, yeah I didn't get my $20,000 back. Now I'm like, I got millions and millions of dollars back from that. That's all of it. The exposure to what is possible. That's the ROI. Exposure to possibilities. I met Pace Morby at one of these conferences. Never heard of the guy. He gets up there, starts talking about sub 2. I'm a banker, so I'm like, this is for sure illegal. I'm certain this is illegal. After the event, I go look it up and I'm like, holy crap, this not only is this legal, but it works. And I consumed all of that content for the next two weeks. Literally two or three weeks later bought my first sub 2 deal with no cash. That's the stuff that changed my life. It was a tool in the tool belt. We talk about this in the 50 or in First Deal a lot. It was a tool in the tool belt that allowed me to go continue to build when the other tools had been tapped out. It was these events, it's exposure, it's knowledge.

C

Cam20:56

I want to dig into sub 2 a little bit on what it is and all that. Before I do, I do want to say just to the people listening and watching, we'll come back to that, but I don't want to forget it. A lot of times the other day we issued a podcast and somebody's like, completely unrelatable because of something that the person says. Not this podcast, but it was another podcast. The reason I bring that up is because when I say something on this podcast like we spent $50,000 to go to a mastermind or we spent $20,000, there are people listening to this right now who are going must be nice to be rich. This conversation doesn't apply to me. It's unrelatable. So I just want to translate that down so everyone understands it's the principle we're talking about. It could be a book, going to a real estate conference, a meetup in your area. So don't get caught up on the idea that we're talking big numbers. Big numbers get you in big rooms with big people, obviously, but you don't necessarily need to pay $50,000 to get in the room and join the 50 tomorrow. In fact, you can't get into the 50 if you're new. The key is just are you putting yourself out there? So I just want a disclaimer to everybody.

M

Michael Miller22:03

I would take it a step further and go there is a bite-sized version of that for everybody. Everybody can show up. You start free. The best investment you can make is in your knowledge and it doesn't take a bunch of money to do it. So it's meetups and books and e-courses. I know we're burnt out on them, but there are legitimate value-add courses that don't cost $50,000 that could change your life.

C

Cam22:28

Dude, I'm thinking of the trajectory of my own life where it started at a meetup completely free. At that meetup, I met Brian Schroeder and Sam Prim who then I joined their mastermind and from that bought a lot of real estate. They got me into the M — and it can start with just that free thing. So I think that's really important for people that are watching this. It doesn't have to be going dropping $50,000. If you do want to reach out to me on Instagram, though, I will take it. We've all got something we can sell you.

M

Michael Miller22:59

It's fully.

C

Cam23:03

All right, before we get to sub 2, I got a question for you. It's called charity question. I probably should have a better name for it. But I want to know what charity breaks your heart or what mission breaks your heart? What do you care about? Because all the profits from this show go directly towards a charity of the guest's choosing. So where are we sending money from today's show?

M

Michael Miller23:22

That was super cool. By the way, I didn't know that until I met with you guys. So appreciate you guys doing that. Little shamelessly, it's our own organization. It's called Marked. It was originally called Marked by Heaven, but we shortened it to Marked. We work with kids that are targeted by organized crime in Latin America. We started in orphanages. We've been an organization for a little over 12 years now. We started in orphanages, meeting needs, building orphanages, housing kids, food, education, clothing, medical. And I woke up one day and I was like, we could build orphanages for the rest of our lives and not change anything. All we're doing is housing a problem. We got to start to think about how we get to the root system. So we ended up in these super rural villages that are largely ran by and targeted by organized crime where families are getting torn apart because of poverty, no work, easy targets. So we went out there and started going low and slow meeting needs. Now it's evolved into this organization where we try to provide safe places for kids to find home. We work on educational resources, putting kids back into education to give them a better shot at a brighter future. We work to keep the nuclear family together. We believe that if there's no broken families, there's no unwanted children. That's our mission. It's very specific and not as sexy as orphanages. People when they talk to us are like, can we go visit your orphanage? I get that. I'm not saying orphanages are bad, but for us, we're trying to get to the kids before they end up there. We just crossed over a million meals provided. It's been super fun. We deal with a lot of human trafficking, cartel exits, cartel kids getting out of the cartel. The cool part is that we've been able to build really cool, meaningful relationships with local municipalities and governments to create systemic change, not just provide services or a handout. We work predominantly in Mexico and we're grateful for whatever you guys are able to contribute to that.

H

Host25:39

Dude, that's legit. Where did that come from? Like where did that heart come from?

M

Michael Miller25:43

It came from my wife. My wife is the rock star of it. She went on a missions trip when she was 10 years old with her dad who was the youth pastor. She fell in love with the culture. We started working early on with a group called YWAM and then we ended up in orphanages and it just kind of evolved from there. When we got married, every night she sat and drew the 501(c)(3). We didn't hire an attorney to get the 501(c)(3). About six months, for hours and hours every night. She wrote her own bylaws and really did the work. I was super — at the time I didn't have a grid for how hard it was, but now knowing that I can just hire that stuff out, I'm like dang, that was intense. Her dad gave us the $500 filing fee. So it really started with her. I went for the first time when I was 16. It's a cool story. We went out with a group called YWAM to build a house in these villages and it was just like a typical missions trip. You go out there, play with kids, build a house, feels good. I met a kid named Gustavo who was like my little shadow. He just locked on to me and we hung out. Little connection. We shared lunch together every day. When I left — it was my first missions trip, my first time out of the country ever — he asked me the day we were leaving, hey, when you come back, could you bring me shoes? He had no shoes. None of the kids there had shoes. I was like, of course I'll bring you shoes. Like duh. And I never got back. And I kind of carried that with me not as a shame but more as a heaviness. I never got back to Gustavo. Fast forward, we start our own organization. We hadn't been back to these villages in decades. I didn't even know where these villages were. We were 16. The group we were with isn't there anymore. We decide to go back to rural communities and transition our resources more towards these villages. Found somebody who knew of these villages and took us out there. We started doing feeding programs. We ended up doing a big shoe drive. Not connected or thinking at all. Never thought about it being similar to where we had been. About two or three years later after we had done this thing, my wife was at her parents' house up in Seattle and she sends me a text message with a photo of a photo that she found in a book. It was me standing in front of this house with this little boy who was Gustavo. I saw the photo and I'm like, oh, that's cool. I remember Gustavo. And she's like, no, look at the house. I look at the house and I realize this is the house that we built. This is now across the street from our base that we now operate in in this community where we handed out not one pair of shoes, but 2,000 pairs of shoes to kids in this community. I never found Gustavo again. That would have been a really cool story. But that part of my heart that was connected to him from a decade earlier, we ended up back in these same places — I didn't even recognize that we were there. We were literally reaching the same places and touching a lot more people as a result.

H

Host29:26

That's amazing, man.

M

Michael Miller29:28

Yeah, I love it. Thanks for asking, dude.

C

Cam29:31

I know I'm fairly well off financially, right? But did you know I still house hack? That's right. I've got an extra couple units at my house here in Maui. I decided to actually rent one of them out because hey, it's like almost $2,000 a month and I'm an investor, so why not? The first thing I did when I decided to rent that out, I went to turboenant.com because there I can advertise the unit, screen for potential tenant, sign the state-specific lease, get automatic rent payment set up, track my income and expenses, and even communicate with my new tenant via the app. It literally made the process so much easier. So whether you've got one unit or a ton of units, check out turboenant.com. I love it and I know you will too. Let them know I sent you. Let's talk about sub 2. What is sub 2? Why did you use it? Pros and cons. What's your middle name?

M

Michael Miller30:15

Middle name is Gabriel.

C

Cam30:18

Okay.

M

Michael Miller30:19

Yeah, that was my grandma actually. My grandma gave me Gabriel.

C

Cam30:25

Grandma's name was Gabriel?

M

Michael Miller30:27

No, my grandma gave me Gabriel. That'd be a weird grandma. But okay, no judgment. Sorry, grandma. So sub 2, very simply put, is the process of buying a property subject to the existing mortgage. Meaning that I can take legal ownership of a property and the mortgage that's on that property stays in place as it sits. The best way to think about this is that in any real estate transaction, there's two documents. There's a deed and a deed of trust. Deed equals ownership. Trust equals money. I can transfer the ownership of this property as many times as I want to without ever even talking to the bank about their loan. It just stays in place. A lot of people don't know that. This has been happening for a hundred years. If you've ever heard of people transferring into a trust or an LLC or a holding company, these are all forms of subject to transactions. It's just changing the legal ownership of the property with the mortgage staying in place. As a matter of fact, I think you just bought a sub 2 property.

C

Cam31:23

I have. Yes. I'm still very worried about it because I still think it's illegal, but it's not. It's crazy.

M

Michael Miller31:29

Now, there are other headwinds which I'm sure you'll ask about.

C

Cam31:34

Well, like, so why does the bank not care? Like, wouldn't the bank want to have a vested interest in who owns the property?

M

Michael Miller31:40

So, yeah. I wouldn't say that it's necessarily that the bank doesn't care. I think that's an overgeneralization. I think that in many cases, the bank cares more about their payment security than they care about owning. Despite popular belief, banks don't want houses. They want payments. Every mortgage has a clause that gives the bank the option to call that mortgage due if the property sells without the mortgage being satisfied. But in most cases, that doesn't happen because the bank is more interested in the consistency of their payments.

C

Cam32:10

Is it that or is it also they just don't know? Like most times they just don't know, I'm assuming. Or do you think they always generally know and they're just choosing?

M

Michael Miller32:17

No, I think they genuinely don't know. But I think it's both. In a sub 2 deal, we go out of our way to not inform the bank. So there is an element of secrecy which is what makes it feel illegal. I really wrestled through that because I was like this is crazy. But the more you learn about it, the more you understand it is a strategy that works and it does have risk and you have to know how to mitigate that risk.

C

Cam32:42

The difference is legal versus consequence. It's not consequence-free but it might be legal but there could be consequences or problems that could arise.

M

Michael Miller32:53

I would just say it comes with a different risk set than another type of acquisition strategy, but all acquisition of real estate comes with risk. One just has a different set of risks.

C

Cam33:02

So the obvious one that I'm sure people who are real estate people are listening, they're asking the question, what about the due on sale? The due on sale is that clause in a contract that says hey if you sell the property, you got to pay us back. If you don't, we have the right to foreclose on you. It's due on sale. Or you get foreclosed. What about that? How do you get around it?

M

Michael Miller33:22

Yeah. So, that's the big boogeyman of sub 2 for sure. Every forum is going to pop up due on sale, due on sale, due on sale. It's a real risk. The mortgage contract says if you sell the property, we have the right to call the note due on sale. The right is the important part that makes it legal. It does not obligate the bank to foreclose or accelerate the note. The first thing you have to understand is how to communicate if this happens. We've done probably 20 or 25 sub 2 deals. We've had two due on sale clauses. That is statistically high. One of them for sure was our fault. We just didn't manage the process right. The other one I think was just the mortgage provider, they were especially difficult to work with.

C

Cam34:17

Why was the first time your fault? What did you do?

M

Michael Miller34:19

We didn't update insurance properly. We changed insurance and didn't go through the proper process of adding the bank as the mortgagee and then notifying them that they still had insurance. So basically the bank got notified when the first insurance policy canceled that basically we canceled their insurance. They're like, screw you guys, due on sale. When we called them, they were like, first of all, we need to be insured. Second of all, can we see the contract so we know what's going on here? They actually were like, yeah, we're good. So they didn't call. They want their money back. The second one did and we had to resolve that. There are about a dozen ways you can resolve a due on sale clause ethically, legally, and as a true win-win between you and the bank. So it's just a little bit more administrative work and understanding the who, not how. That's how I've been successful is I've got the best consultant that helps me navigate the transactions on the front end. Processed correctly through the transition of the property and then if we have a problem, he helps us solve it.

C

Cam35:30

So that's what we did as well. So yeah, Cam and I sold Cam my house. Part of that was a sub 2, right? So but we didn't know how to do that very well. We're not sub 2 people. We've done very little of that. So we found a consultant, a guy that helps us walk through the whole thing, get all the paperwork right, handle all this stuff, and then should something go wrong, then we can work with him to remedy it. My problem with sub 2 has typically been — tell me if I'm right or wrong here. Newbies get in, they don't know what they're doing, they go to Miss Johnson. She owns her house, she's 75 years old, she wants to get out, and they say, hey, I can sub to your house. I'll just take over your mortgage. And the little lady said, well, what about this and that? They say, don't worry about it. It's fine. Everything's fine. We'll just take over it. They take over. Miss Johnson leaves. Newbie puts a new tenant in there. He holds a rental. Now, the bank calls a note due, and the newbie has no money. They don't know how to remedy the problem. Who does the bank go after? Is it the newbie or is it Miss Johnson?

M

Michael Miller36:33

It's Miss Johnson.

C

Cam36:35

Correct. Whose credit is going to get ruined?

M

Michael Miller36:36

Miss Johnson.

C

Cam36:38

So there's so much power and responsibility there. With great power comes great responsibility. The power and responsibility on the newbie, the real estate investor, to do it right. And if they do it wrong, it screws over the homeowner potentially. That's always been my issue with it.

M

Michael Miller36:58

You're absolutely right. As is with any real estate strategy, there are bad actors and immature actors. There is a difference, but unfortunately the outcome of both those actors is often the same. So we have to manage these things through the lens of both legal and ethical. I don't do a sub 2 deal unless I — they get a full, we literally in our sub 2 agreement — this comes from our consultant that we use. We have a two-page addendum that is called a sub 2 disclosure addendum. It's almost too aggressive. I've had deals go south when they see the addendum, but we kind of want that because it literally says if this happens, this is your risk. If this happens, this is your risk. I made this mistake on my very first deal where I didn't do a good enough job. I wasn't a bad actor, I was an immature actor. I didn't do a good enough job explaining the whole profile of what was being proposed and the seller was disappointed at the end. Luckily there was no harm to them, but they were frustrated and upset. That was a part of me just not knowing how to rightfully disclose. So for me, if I'm a newbie, this is why it's especially important. We pay $3,000 for my TC on every sub 2 deal I do. I refuse to do a sub 2 deal without him because I think he's written the book on it. He was one of the original guys.

C

Cam38:31

What's his name?

M

Michael Miller38:33

Caleb Christopher. He's the best. Creative TC, shout out. He is literally the best. His team has 12 consultants on their team now. They don't even call themselves transaction coordinators. They're transaction consultants. They help you consult on the paperwork. They're great. We pay $3,000 about for that service because I never want to be in a situation where the seller can come back to me and go, you didn't disclose this to me or I don't have a solution to a due on sale clause. So now we do. No seller that ever sells me a sub 2 deal is going to go into foreclosure because I have a process that ensures that doesn't happen.

C

Cam39:21

How do you negotiate a sub 2 deal? I know you just say it's like one of the tools in your tool belt. I've never done one. I've done notations before, but never an actual sub 2 deal. One of the reasons is because you know when it was super big a couple years ago and everybody was talking about it, I would try to, but it would always just confuse the seller and I thought I did more harm than good because then I wouldn't be able to buy it with my cash offer and they were confused with the sub 2 offer. So how do you explain that?

M

Michael Miller39:51

The way that it works for us is, it depends upon your camp. If you're in the sub 2 tribe, sub 2 is your strategy. So they're going after sub 2 opportunities. They're marketing to the best opportunities for sub 2. For us, sub 2 I view is like a second or third layer of defense. The best acquisition strategy for off-market deals in my opinion is always cash. I'm starting with a cash offer. The best acquisition is a sub 2 deal at a cash price, but those are infinitely rare. The way that we negotiate it is we come in with our cash offer and we explain it to them. This is what we can pay you cash. If it does not fit their criteria for whatever reason, then we explain to them, hey, what if this becomes a price terms conversation? What if we're able to increase our price offering to you because you're able to offer us terms that make this deal more attractive to us? So that's how we approach it. Hey, I can't give you $300,000 cash, but I can take over your $280,000 mortgage at 3% and give you $20,000 in cash. Would you be open to that? You're winning because you're getting your price and I'm buying the interest rate and now playing the long game for appreciation and rents.

C

Cam41:15

Can you walk me through an ideal situation? Maybe a real property you've done a sub 2 on. Where does sub 2 just make sense?

M

Michael Miller41:22

There's a lot of situations. The way we teach our students is that every real estate transaction has three motivations. Time, speed, convenience. Every seller gets to choose one. Sometimes two, but never all three. In a cash deal, we're looking for people who want to trade their price for speed and convenience. In a sub 2 deal, we're typically looking for somebody who's willing to trade their convenience for their price. They want the highest price, but they can't go on market for any number of reasons. A practical example would be distressed sellers. People that are in pre-foreclosure. They're about to go to auction. They've stuck their head in the sand for too long. They can't get it on market and sell it fast enough to beat the auction. That's a textbook distress seller scenario where we would come in and say, hey, I'll pay the bank to catch up your mortgage. We'll negotiate a price or terms to keep you out of foreclosure, but I'm going to take over that mortgage subject to. The beautiful part of that is they're going to lose it anyway. So even if the worst case sky fell, those are easy negotiations because they're like, well, my name's still on the mortgage. It's like, yeah, well your name's on a foreclosure for the next decade. So we're actually doing those people a genuine service. Another scenario where it can come up is I did one deal with a guy who bought a house. I think it was VA because he put zero money down. Bought the property, like a month later, he got a job offer back east for his dream job. He had to be there in two weeks. Even if he could afford to leave it on market, after real estate commissions and fees, he'd have to bring cash to the table to close. He had no ability. He was literally trapped in this property between I stay here or I take my dream job. He didn't want to be a landlord. I came in and worked out a deal where I said, hey, I'm actually going to pay full price for this property. But because your interest rate's good and I can rent it for more than the mortgage, I'll just take it over subject to you. All I had to pay for was closing costs.

C

Cam43:53

With a distressed seller and you're subbing it, but then you got to put — typically they're going to want a little bit of cash in their pocket and then you have to rehab it. How are you ever recapturing those costs?

M

Michael Miller44:03

I would say distress in sub 2 is not typically rehab. Not typically. Sometimes it is, but not typically. With sub 2, it gets a little tricky, especially if you're doing zero down strategies. The way to do the zero down strategies in sub 2 if there's equity or rehab that you have to pay is you've got to bridge it with a private money lender, which we've done a lot of. But then the question becomes, how do I exit that private money lender when the rehab's done? In many cases for us, it's either been that the private money lender is a longer term person and it still pencils for us to pay them 10% or 12% because the cash flow is so good because the main chunk of the mortgage is so low. Or we roll them forward. I've done a lot of that where I've had a private money lender for a year and then the year comes up and they want out and I just bring in another private money lender and keep rolling it forward. It's getting harder now because the interest rates are not as sexy. You're not finding nearly as many 2, 3, 4% interest rates. Sub 2 as a strategy — maybe the sub 2 community would hate me for saying this — but I think it's probably dying as a primary strategy. It doesn't make as much sense to take over a mortgage at 6%. But these are real problems coming up for people that are immature where it's like, okay, cool, Brandon, lend me the $50,000 I need to pay off the seller. I'm going to take this sub 2. I'll pay you off in a year. A year rolls around and now I've got no option to pay you off and we've got a dispute.

C

Cam45:45

That's one of the things that we've ran into is because some of the best interest rates were 2020, 2021. They're getting locked into those, but then over the next couple years their house has gone up $150,000 in value. So they don't want to just give that up. They want some cash in the bank. So you got to bring $70,000 and take it over, but then you're never going to get that $70,000 back.

M

Michael Miller46:04

Yeah. I've actually got a chart that has the sweet spot of equity that we've found in sub 2. If they're in this middle spot of equity where they've either got — they don't have all their equity or they don't have too little — these deals are almost impossible to make work sub 2 for that reason. But if they have a little bit of equity, they're great. Or if they have a ton of equity, they can be great. It's that middle place that's getting harder. They've appreciated a ton. The only way that those work are for people that are not motivated by cash, but are motivated by some other outcome. I did one hybrid deal — sub 2 with a seller finance of their equity. This is one of my favorite ones that I've done because it's so creative. The seller's husband had passed away. It was super tragic. She wanted out of the house, but she got a huge life insurance settlement. She was great. They put it on market at $675,000 — don't quote me on the numbers — got it into contract and it fell out of contract. A realtor calls me because I'm the creative guy in town. They're like, hey, we had this deal, she wants out, but it fell apart. What do you think? I was like, well, why did it fall apart? They said the appraisal came back at $600,000 and the buyer wasn't going to buy it. I was like, well, why didn't she just drop the price $75,000 to get it sold if she's so passionate about getting out? She said her husband's last thing was never sell the house for less than $675,000. So she was stuck on this number. I thought about it for a while. She owed like $300,000 at 3%, but she had $375,000 in equity and she didn't need any cash. I went back to her and I said, hey, I want to be really clear. This is a very creative scenario and I want you to think about it. I don't want you to feel like I'm trying to take advantage of your situation. Here's how I would do this deal. I will take over your mortgage sub 2 for the 3% for however many years they had left on it. I want you to seller finance me all of your equity, but you're going to have to give it to me at 0% for 10 years, no interest. The reason is because I'm paying you $675,000 for a house that's worth $600,000 and I'll pay all the closing costs. They had an unfinished ADU I wanted to stabilize to make the money make sense. I said, I want no payments on that for the first year. She literally at the table was like, you can do that? I was like, yeah, we can do that. She said done. To her, the pain was I can't be in this place anymore. It hurts me. I don't need the money because I'm good and you're checking all of my boxes. That's the win-win-win scenario. I'm going to save way more than $75,000 in a decade on $375,000 in free money. That's the win-win. I'm playing the long game. We've got about $1,000 a month in cash flow in that place.

C

Cam49:28

Yeah, that's amazing. What else have you done for creative finance? What is your portfolio like today? Then we'll go back to the creative finance. Like, what are you at unit-wise?

M

Michael Miller49:37

Yeah, unit size — we've been selling some stuff, trying to restructure. We're somewhere around 100 units.

C

Cam49:44

So you must have done other things besides sub 2.

M

Michael Miller49:47

Yeah, I've done a ton of BRRR. That's my favorite strategy.

C

Cam49:51

And for those who don't know what that is, can you explain that?

M

Michael Miller49:54

Yeah, it's just buy, renovate, rent, refinance, repeat. Another fun thing I learned is that Brandon coined that phrase. I had no idea. I'm just like, wow, I'm in the —

Presence of real estate royalty. Real estate royalty. Yeah. A crown somewhere. Yeah, it's genius. So that's the process where I buy a property that's distressed of some sort. We do the construction to add some value. We put a renter in it to stabilize it. Then we go back to the bank and ask for up to 80%, 75-80% of the value of that property. Pay off my original funding source, whether it's hard money or private money or whatever, and now I've got 30-year debt on a stabilized rental. So I bought a lot of that. What else have we done? I've got a couple Airbnbs, to be honest. They're not my favorite asset class. The one that we have is mostly because it's for us personally and we just make it work as an Airbnb. So we bought a lakehouse up in Seattle that we Airbnb. And then I'm all single and small multi. My biggest building is eight units. That may change soon because I have hit a ceiling of operational efficiency, I think, in a lot of ways. So I'm thinking about liquidating some of our portfolio or stabilizing it a different way and then going up in asset class, but largely single small multifamily. And we've done it all largely with private money lenders. That's been our strategy. So it's not been... I do have some equity partners, like some more joint venture type deals, but the majority of the portfolio has been, hey, you've got $100,000 in cash or maybe a retirement account or retirement equivalent. You be my lender. I'll give you better returns than you're getting elsewhere and it's stabilized or secured by the asset.

H

Host51:29

Are they equity partners or debt partners? I mean, they just give you loans.

M

Michael Miller51:35

Yeah. 90% of my capital that I've raised is loans, really.

H

Host51:40

So let's talk about that difference a little bit because I would say 99% of my money that I've raised has been the opposite. It's been equity-like partnerships. That's what syndication is. So why the debt side and what does that look like and how do you negotiate that?

M

Michael Miller51:52

Yeah, I mean, I'm learning as I go. So I'd be open to some feedback on why this is the wrong strategy, but it always made more sense to me to pay somebody. You know, when I started it was 8%, then it went 10%, now it's 12%. But to me, it makes more sense financially to give somebody 12% than it does to give them 50% of a deal. Right. And so, and I've just, maybe dumb luck, maybe I've been good at it. I've had a lot of success raising money from people that are really excited about 12% returns that are not super passionate or maybe even can't stomach the perceived risk of partnering on the deal versus getting a stabilized return like the bank would get. And so that's how we've done it. I would argue pros and cons of that now in hindsight because effectively I've got a lot of debt that I have to service that, when things get hard or if a vacancy comes up or whatever, I could typically pass that in your scenario by not making distributions. Yeah, we don't do distributions. In a hard year like this we pause distributions on half our deals. So I still have to service all this debt, right? And so that's the trade-off. So I am looking at the strategies and trying to figure out how to do this better. The benefit is I own basically 100% of my portfolio. The disadvantage is that I own substantially less real estate than all my cool friends now. So that's the thing that I'm honestly trying to figure out. Like I'm a little bit, even this week at the 50, I'm like what am I going to do next? Like how do I really scale next? I've done well with debt and I'll continue to do debt when it makes sense. But I am starting to consider, as we go up in asset class, the idea of a little bit more breathing room with partnerships. If I could only do debt and I could raise the volume I need and I could afford to make the debt payments, all I would do is debt, right? So if I could do it I would do it, but I can't do it. Or maybe that's a limiting belief. Maybe I can do it. In fact, debt is becoming easier to raise because people are more interested in security because the world doesn't feel secure right now. So where in the past I gave investors 3 years ago an option: you can make 10% cash on cash return starting from month one and you just your debt, or 15% IRR but most of that's backloaded on the end. 90% of people would have chosen the 15%. They all want the long-term risk. We feel optimistic, everyone feeling good. It is exactly the opposite today. I think I could offer 10%. I think more people would be interested in 10% cash flow than 15% IRR right now.

H

Host54:28

Well, and I think we're seeing that in the debt fund, the surge of debt funds right now because Capital's launching a debt fund. It's been easier to raise than anything else we're doing.

M

Michael Miller54:35

Well, and likely you're not paying 10% either in that fund if I had to guess.

H

Host54:40

We're actually going to pay more than that, yeah.

M

Michael Miller54:45

Significantly more than that.

H

Host54:48

Interesting.

M

Michael Miller54:49

But it's hard money. It's private credit in real estate. So it's got a pretty stupid high return.

H

Host54:52

But could one of you guys explain for people, because I know that I didn't learn this until about a year and a half ago, the difference between a debt and an equity partner?

M

Michael Miller54:58

Simply, debt is a loan and so they don't own the property. Equity means they own part of the deal.

H

Host55:05

So Open Door Capital only gets like we do 70/30 splits on most our stuff. So for those, if you want to start, if you have an equity partnership, they're going to own a big chunk of it. When I got started, I used to do a lot of 50/50 equity partnerships. They bring the money, I bring the deal, we 50/50 split it at the end. And that's fine, but yeah, I would write checks for hundreds of thousands of dollars to my partners just for the benefit of the reduced risk of having to make the payment along the way. When I look back on my career, actually, I tell this story all the time in books and podcasts about that triplex I bought and I went to my buddy who had money, or he didn't have that, he just had a line of credit, and I borrowed 40 grand from him, but we just 50/50 the deal. It's a story I tell all the time because it illustrates the power of an equity partnership. Could I have instead said to him, 'I'm going to pay you 12% on your 40 grand and you're going to make that money for a long time.' He would probably have been like, 'Yeah, that sounds great.' And really, because that deal cash flowed really well, it probably would have been the same amount of money monthly as his 50%. But I would have owned all the deals. So I should have probably pursued that. It just never occurred to me to pursue debt versus equity.

M

Michael Miller56:10

Have you ever, with some of your, if you ever worked with your lenders to where it's just accrued interest and you don't pay till the end?

H

Host56:18

Yeah.

M

Michael Miller56:20

So you don't have that overhead that you have to be stressed about. I wouldn't say most. I'd say it's probably half and half because a lot of my lenders, I've retired probably three or four families, which is kind of crazy to think about. One of them's my in-laws because they need that monthly cash flow. So then I have to put them in deals that I can afford to pay it, which sometimes doesn't pencil because I can refinance that into more stable debt at a lower rate, but it's like okay, I'm kind of getting that cool win and I'm raising the capital that I wouldn't necessarily have raised if I couldn't offer that. But I try for most of my deals to pay on maturity. The challenge with that, as with anything, is you're managing risk. It's not risk-free. It's just a different risk profile. And that's another thing that private money lenders like over private money partners or equity partners, however you want to say it, is they like the fact that part of what we pitch them is that your return is not connected to the performance of the asset. Correct. And so people understand that. They're like, 'Oh, I'm, you know,' after you explain it to them, I'm going like, 'At the end of the day, if I do a project and I open up a wall and it's full of cockroaches or whatever, and I got a $50,000 bill that I didn't expect, I still have to make you whole.' Just like if you were Bank of America, right? If Bank of America lent me this money and I opened up the wall, they would not care what the project cost. And so people like that because it's never risk-free, but I think it is a lower risk profile in some regards.

H

Host57:47

One thing we do at Open Door Capital, this might get a little bit complex, but I think people listening can translate this however you need to, is when we do a fund, we will usually do both a debt and an equity component of it. And so there'll be like 10% of the raise will be for, let's say we need to raise $10 million. Maybe a million of that is going to be in A-class debt, which basically means they get their 10% or whatever the number we offer, usually between 10 and 12. But there's no upside. Or you could choose class B, which is a partnership, but you get the equity, but you're lower in the capital stack, which basically means you get paid back. The A person who's getting the loan gets paid back first. Anyway, so the benefit of that is now when you're pitching them, you give them two options. It's the negotiation strategy when I'm buying a house from somebody, I'm like, which option do you want? It's one of my favorite negotiation things. Same thing with investors is like, hey, are you somebody who needs the passive income? Like, oh, you're older, you don't have the risk, the seven to 10 years we're going to be holding on to this. You don't want to hold that long for that risk. Great. I think you'd fit better in A. Oh, you don't need the money right now. You have a great job. You work at Bank of America making a killing. Great. I think B is better for you. And so you get two types of people and you can get them in either way. And the reason we do that just from a mathematical standpoint is that debt that we're paying for that 10% allows us to actually get a higher overall return for the next class, the B class, if that makes sense. Because we're only averaging 10% on the A class. Therefore, that little segment bumps it up like let's say another percentage. So from 14% IRR to 15% IRR on the B, right? Because you're saving that 5% spread or whatever. Yeah. So it's a cool strategy and it works.

M

Michael Miller59:28

Yeah, I'm saving that spread with the B.

H

Host59:33

And I would say this, I mean I don't know what your experience has been, but that's interesting because the biggest challenge so I did like out the gate I raised like 5 million almost instantly in debt. Like it was pretty easy and I'm like this was easy, I'm just going to keep doing this. And then all of a sudden it got really hard because the markets have done so I would say unreasonably well, almost inexplicably well. And so like I don't know if you're only paying 12%, I get 22%. I had a guy that called me literally yesterday and was like, hey man, I'm really disappointed with my returns. And I'm like, I'm confused. And he's like, yeah my IRA got 22% last year. And I'm like, well that's not what you signed up for. That's not normal. But people have this illusion and I'm afraid of the bottom of the market falling out too. I think debt raising is going to be very attractive the back half of this year because I think more and more people are afraid of the bottom of the market falling out, the stock market, and so they want to get into a more stabilized return and you can't get stabilized returns at 10 or 12%.

Wild, man. Let's talk about IRA money. I love IRA. I know you do that. What is that? How can people do that? Why is it beneficial? Give us the...

M

Michael Miller1:00:45

So, most people do not realize that they have more options than stocks, bonds, and mutual funds when it comes to their retirement money. So it could be an IRA, could be 401k, could be 403b, like any retirement equivalent account. Even some pension funds are eligible for this. But basically, we've all been taught that we just give it to Fidelity and Fidelity invests it in some blue chip fund and that's our retirement account. Well, you actually have the ability to invest your retirement money in hard assets, including most notably real estate, but you can also invest in cryptocurrency, LLCs, precious metals. Like I know people that buy a ton of gold with their retirement account right now, Rick Kiyosaki style. And so for me, what we figured out is like, oh, this is an area of people, because as soon as I start telling, especially new investors, hey, if you want to scale, you're going to have to figure out how to raise capital. And they immediately go, 'I don't have any friends with money.' Like that's almost the number one thing. Like, 'My family's poor and I don't have rich friends.' And the reality is that if you scroll through your Rolodex of your iPhone right now and you just think about people who have either worked in the same career for two decades who work in a corporate job, or they're a professional of some sort, lawyer, doctor, whatever, all of these people likely have money that they do not even consider a part of their money. Because typically when I'm kicking my, you know, 3% per paycheck into my 401k, hey, I forget that. I can't tell you how many people I talk to, they're like, 'Oh yeah, I've got a 401k. I don't know what's in it.' Then they look it up and they're like, 'Oh my gosh, it's like 200 grand.' And they just don't think about this as their money. And so one of the strategies that we've been able to utilize, which has been another great win-win, is that we can help somebody who has, say, $100,000 in their IRA account getting, many times they're not even managing them, so they're in money market accounts at 3% or whatever, really bad returns. They can roll those dollars into what's called a self-directed IRA, which is the exact same thing as an IRA, but it gives you access to these different asset classes.

H

Host1:02:48

Or if it's a 401k, a self-directed 401k, right?

M

Michael Miller1:02:54

Well, typically the 401k rolls into a self-directed IRA, because the 401k is typically a corporate plan and the IRA is a personal plan. So even if you weren't doing self-directed and you were rolling out of a corporate 401k, you would likely roll into an IRA personally. But you can roll that money into a self-directed Roth IRA or self-directed traditional IRA. There may be self-directed 401ks for self-employed people, but that's not common.

H

Host1:03:25

Yeah, that is a thing.

M

Michael Miller1:03:28

Okay, yeah. Most people aren't going to have those that you're talking to typically. Those are bigger business people. And you can roll that money over and people have a number of options, particularly in real estate. One of which is that you can go out and buy your own deal, right? You can do your own fix and flip. You can use that money, acquire a deal, fix and flip it, or buy a rental and hold it as a rental. All of the returns, all the profit and loss of that deal goes back to the IRA with the same tax deferred benefits of any other type of retirement account. So if it's a Roth, it's post tax. If it's a traditional, it's pre-tax. So hypothetically, you're a big flipper. You go use your IRA money to go buy a flip. You flip it. You make $100,000 and it's a Roth IRA. That $100,000 goes back to your Roth IRA tax-free. If it's a traditional, it goes back tax deferred. And Peter Thiel, hasn't he done everything? He's got like billions of dollars sitting there that are tax-free. It's amazing. He did all his... Yeah, it was $5,000. The story for those that don't know it is that he used his IRA, rolled it into a self-directed IRA for the seed money in PayPal, and it was a Roth IRA. And when PayPal sold, I think he got something like how many hundreds of millions of dollars, and all of that money is tax-free. And he draws it out now pre-retirement age but he pays the 10% penalty because 10% penalty is substantially lower than the taxable rate for capital gains. So that's the most famous story of self-directed IRA, but you can use that money to go buy your own deals and get all the tax benefits. If you don't want to do your own deals, you can use that money to partner with somebody like me or Brandon or Cam to be either an equity partner. Like you can invest in Open Door Capital with that money. I'm sure you guys raise a lot of IRA money. Or in my scenario, you can become the bank, right? So this is where most of my investment comes from is people that have $100,000. They give it to me as a private money loan with a deed of trust secured by the property. I give them 10 or 12% returns and all of that return goes back to the IRA.

H

Host1:05:43

Well, it's another piece and I don't want to get too deep into the weeds on this thing, but the tax, like when you lend, they don't get depreciation. So if an investor lends, yeah, they don't get depreciation. So a lot of my investors who care about tax, if I care about taxes, I'm going to have a big tax bill if I'm not careful. I make a lot of money. I would personally not do debt right now. I wouldn't do it. I don't because I don't get depreciation off of me lending you money. I want to be an equity partner because I get depreciation based on certain criteria. The challenge with that is it has to do with the leverage of whatever the partnership is, right? Yeah. So there's some dynamics there.

M

Michael Miller1:06:17

But I was going to say the opposite. IRA people don't need the tax benefit because it's already a tax beneficial account.

H

Host1:06:29

Oh, I'm sorry. I get what you're saying. If you were using your own cash, you wouldn't lend. You wouldn't partner.

M

Michael Miller1:06:32

Yes. But in an IRA, I would be perfectly fine going and if I'm raising for a debt fund, I really want to target the IRA people because that's great. So I'm just saying there's a difference there on how you raise. An IRA can do either one, but IRA doesn't need the tax benefit. So I would not give it to them.

H

Host1:06:46

Well, and even further, even if you do partner with somebody in an IRA, if you're the investor, it's awesome because even if they get equity, the IRA doesn't benefit from the depreciation if they funded the deal. So you can keep 100% of the depreciation as the investor even if you do partner. So that's a little in the weeds, but there's some interesting things to look into if you're going to simplify. If you're like, 'I need to figure out how to use retirement account or raise capital with retirement account.' It's very simple. It feels super complicated, but the first thing you do is identify a custodian. There's a million of them. You roll your money over just like you would with any other type of rollover into that custodian account. And then you work with that custodian to deploy that money into the asset that you choose. It is literally that easy. So I know you have done webinars teaching recently. You did one on IRA. Am I correct to assume it's because we've... I've done a webinar on IRA. So did Grant Cardone. Are we all doing the same reason is because people attend it. Maybe they want to then invest with you instead of doing it on their own?

M

Michael Miller1:07:46

Yeah. Is that ultimately it's a way to raise capital? I mean I would say both. And what was cool about this last one is I had a ton of first deal people on it and so it was an actual help to our students. But the trade-off of that is, yeah, most people and this is true, most people that want to invest in real estate, when they actually get in and learn what it takes, they go, 'I don't have time for that,' or 'I don't have the capacity for that. Here's my money.' And that is for me, yeah. If I can get people into those environments and honestly, maybe this is wrong, but I do this all the time where I'm like, even if you don't invest with me, let me help you figure out how to invest better because I'm just a big fan of people having more options with their money.

H

Host1:08:32

Where is that recorded?

M

Michael Miller1:08:33

We have a free community online. It's called Dead President's Club. We do all sorts of financial education stuff. So you can literally go on Facebook, Dead President's Club, and get in there for free and it's just posted in the forum.

H

Host1:08:44

Yeah, it's a cool strategy. The reason I bring it up is because one of the best ways to raise capital is by raising awareness and by educating people. In other words, that's why I've been able to raise like $480 million is because I've educated a lot of people, right? And there's no agenda behind it when I educate people. This is just one, it was my career for a long time and today it's I really enjoy it. But there's a benefit to it is that a lot of people invest with me because they just like you said, don't do it themselves. So I think Cardone, I've heard a rumor like Grant Cardone raises most of his money. Again, I don't know that to be true, but a lot of his money he does these IRA webinars. Count to my 'Learn How to Do an IRA' and hundreds or thousands of people show up. They learn how to open up an IRA. Then they take action. They open up an IRA. They move their money in and then it's like, well, they can't find a deal. So what are they going to do? Probably lend it to the guy that they just learned from on a webinar last month.

M

Michael Miller1:09:38

The funny thing you say that is that's how I learned about self-directed IRA. I literally signed up for an investment-like webinar of Grant Cardone's and then ended up in his ClickFunnel. The guy called me and I was just talking and to be honest, I wasn't really interested in investing in the fund. I just wanted to learn what they were doing. And as he was talking to me, he started talking about my retirement accounts and I was like, 'Tell me more.' And so I literally learned from Grant's salespeople about self-directed IRAs and went down the rabbit trail. My first investor used Equity Trust, which is Grant's preferred custodian. So yeah, Grant Cardone does do, I think, the lion's share of his raising from retirement funds.

H

Host1:10:18

Yeah, that's very cool. So anyway, you can translate that for those who are new to real estate or just trying to get into it. That same thing applies. You learn really good how IRA works. You start just talking to people about it. You're going to inform them and there's good money there. And I will tell you, I mean, I think you guys all know this, but my average investor is not uber wealthy. My average investor is Joe the Plumber with 100, 150, or 100 grand in a self-directed IRA. And that changes the entire game if you're trying to get into it. You can't do that when you're Open Door Capital obviously, but as a private money investor or starting out getting private money lenders instead of accredited investors is a huge tool.

M

Michael Miller1:10:55

It's amazing. Cam's got to get out of here. It's all right, Cam. You got to go. You have a deal flow call. Deal flow call. DealFlowRealEstate.com. All right. Go do your call. Go meet with people. Get them. We'll do it. Make it happen, bro. Dozens of deals a year. That's what Cam's going to teach people. We're here till Sunday. Yeah, Sunday. We'll hang out. Let's do it. Sweet, man. See you guys. All right.

H

Host1:11:17

All right. Well, get out of here and we're going to continue this. Don't knock those cameras over. Good job. All right. Let's shift gears a little bit. Adoption. I love it. Can we talk about it a little bit?

M

Michael Miller1:11:23

I'd love to.

H

Host1:11:24

What's your history with adoption?

M

Michael Miller1:11:28

So, I told you I was technically adopted. And so, I've always had a passion for this. I was raised by my bio mom, but I was legally adopted by the man she married. So Miller comes from my adopted dad. So I guess I'm like half adopted. I don't know what the actual language is, but anyways, adoption's always been a big part of my life and passion. I met my bio family when I was about 16 and it had a huge impact. So I have such a deep connection to it. And my wife, obviously with her upbringing, literally when we started dating we talked about adoption as our primary way to build our family. So that's what we did. We adopted our first baby in 2020, Everly Brave, and she's a nut job. Her middle name is Brave. Oh my gosh, that's so cute. It was so dangerous though because she's living up to it and now it's scary. I'm like, Wilder. Yeah. I should have named her Everly Timid or something. So she's amazing. We got her through private adoption. She was 3 days old. Our adoption journey started when we were first married in Mexico. We pulled a little baby off the streets into one of our orphanages and we tried to adopt her for 7 years. Just red tape, legal process, and then something called the Hague Convention got involved and basically made it impossible. It was designed to help eliminate misuse of adoption for human trafficking purposes. But anytime you get global regulators involved without individualized concessions, it just makes a messy due process. So it's not really considering what's best for the kid. It's trying to protect a systemic problem, which I think sometimes harms the case of the kid. That was our first what we would consider a failed adoption. We fought and we really fought for her and that was really painful, really hard. But we still have a relationship with her which is kind of cool but also a unique dynamic because she knows we tried to adopt her. That's where our adoption journey started. Then we decided to try domestic private placement.

H

Host1:13:41

I don't know what that means.

M

Michael Miller1:13:43

What does that mean? Basically, there are two ways to adopt domestically. Foster to adopt, where you're adopting a child that's been placed into the foster care system through CPS for any number of reasons. You can foster them, and some children, not all children, are eligible to go through the process towards adoption from foster. There's a lot of pros and cons to each. The foster to adopt system is free, largely paid for. But the design of the foster care system is for reunification with the bio family. So the system is not built for adoption. That can sometimes be painful for people that are trying to move in that direction because you could have a foster child for three years in your home that you think you're going to be able to adopt and then they end up going back, which sadly is not necessarily, you hear that and you go, 'Of course you want them to reunify with their family.' But sadly, that's actually not always the best case. It's just the way the system is designed. So that's one way: foster to adopt. By the way, just a side note, a little bit of an ad: Beardy Brew Coffee, 100% of all the profits from Beardy Brew Coffee, which is BeardyBrew.com, goes to Village of Hope, which is a foster care community here on Maui that takes care of all the foster kids. They do night outs every month where the parents get to go out on a date. You need to talk to my wife about this. She was literally telling me about this organization because my wife's big in the adoption space. She was literally googling on the van, 'Who's the local Village of Hope?' They're unbelievably good. So all the profits from that coffee company go right to them. So anyway, get your coffee, get a subscription at BeardyBrew.com. It's not very much money and all that profit goes to good. And if you can get into the foster space, because we need good foster parents.

H

Host1:15:33

That would be so hard. We've talked about it for years, Heather and I, and I'm like it's just so hard. And I'm like that sounds selfish because it's harder on the kids, but having a kid for a while and grow the attachment and you lose it.

M

Michael Miller1:15:45

The way that we've always said is you have to know what you are and are not called to. Because it can feel selfish. Even in the adoption space, foster's one side, private's the other side. Private placement is basically when a birth mom who knows she's pregnant decides that she's going to place for adoption as an active process. So the child never becomes a ward of the state or into the foster system. They work with an adoption agency or an attorney to place that child into a family. So that's the direction we chose. We wrestled with private versus foster because there's such a need in foster, but also it's such a challenge and you have to know what you're called to. It's okay to not have the space or be called to one or the other. We did private placement for our first two. Our first was Everly in San Antonio. She was a baby born case. We literally woke up on a Monday morning to a text message with a photo of a baby asking if we could get to Texas in 24 hours or less. That's how we went from no children, we've been in this process waiting, to holy crap, we're parents of a 3-day old 24 hours later. It was wild. She's the best and it's been so fun. Then our second, our son Alias, was another private placement in Phoenix. Everly's adoption is a closed adoption, no interaction with her birth mom, never met her birth mom. We did since develop a really cool relationship with the extended birth family because they found us on Facebook. So it was this weird connection and now we've been able to have a cool relationship. She's got a bio sister with a bio uncle and some grandparents. So it's been fun to build that relationship. But our second son is an open adoption. We go once a year to spend time with his birth mom and birth dad in Phoenix. They're a sweet couple. They were young and just weren't ready for parenthood yet. So it's a totally different type of story. We thought we were going to be done until actually we were done. We finalized our second adoption in October of last year, I think October of 23, I guess it was. Two days later, we got a phone call from our oldest's birth uncle. He said, 'Hey, the birth mom had another baby and they just got he just got dropped off here. We're not able to take another child. Would you guys consider it?' And we literally a month later packed up and went to Texas and spent a year in Texas getting the bio brother of our oldest daughter. So that's our adoption journey. Man, it's hard. It's messy. The system is so jacked. The interesting part is that even though Everly was private placement, our third one was technically foster to adopt because he had already been placed in the foster care system before they got to us. So we've had both experiences now and it's really interesting, but we're so grateful.

H

Host1:18:53

Wild. My wife and I have always said we're going to adopt and so we just now, we've got we wanted to get through the kids that we could have and would have and I think we're through that now with Gilly being seven months. So so cute. Would you guys do an infant again or would you go with an older child?

M

Michael Miller1:19:06

I think we do infant, I think. But I don't know. I mean, this is going to sound terrible, right? Infants don't really have the trauma that the older kids have and the trauma can cause a lot of drama. So it's hard and I don't want to do it, but maybe we should do it because we can handle it better than others. I think it comes back to that call to. Even if you do private placement, it's even weirder because you literally set your preferences. You fill out like in the process, you go like what would we and wouldn't we take. This includes race, ethnicity, special needs, substance abuse, and you have to decide whether or not you want to present. I tell anybody who talks to us about adoption, you have to go into it deciding what you are and are not called to upfront because if you don't when those cases hit your inbox and you don't have that decided, you're in trouble because some of the stories are really painful. And you go, 'Of course I can do this,' but am I called to it? It can't be an emotional thing. It has to be a practical thing for your family.

H

Host1:20:21

Good advice. Weirdly similar to real estate, having your kind of criteria nailed down. Have your crystal clear criteria. If not, every deal looks like a good deal or a bad deal. You find yourself talking yourself into deals that aren't deals and out of deals. I used to be super crass but I literally used to go, it feels like baby shopping. That's what it is. And if I don't know what I'm looking to pick up, I'm in danger of buying the wrong thing. That's a terrible crass analogy, but that's what it feels like.

M

Michael Miller1:20:51

Yeah.

H

Host1:20:57

Well, that's a good transition to maybe the last thing I want to chat with you about. You've been helping me out with First Deal. Can you talk a little bit about FastTrack? What is it that you do? I brought you in like originally and I pitched you on this idea to lead this part of the company because I just instantly thought your personality and knowledge and experience would be perfect for it. But what is FastTrack? What are you teaching in that? How does that work for people when they come into First Deal?

M

Michael Miller1:21:15

Yeah. The language that we've used is that it's the on-ramp to your first deal. What I think you were dealing with, and we've experienced this in our own programs, is that you get new students that come into the program, they get dropped into the center of the freeway of information. Everybody's going 70 miles an hour and they're just trying to dodge traffic. Like where do I go? What do I look at? What am I at? FastTrack is just the on-ramp for all new students that come through. It's a five-week kind of pillars program where we go through the framework of like what are the foundational pieces of information I need to have so that when I get onto the freeway, I know the direction I'm heading and I know what lane I should be in. I think you'll keep me more honest than I am, but we've got, first week is Discovery. Then we have Decisions, which is defining your criteria: what type of investor you're going to be, your strategy, location parameters, asset class, all of those things. Then we talk about Financing, the dollars, the debt, which is one of my favorite weeks because I like the creative stuff. Then we talk about the Disciplines.

H

Host1:22:20

Deal flow. Oh, I'm sorry. Deal flow.

M

Michael Miller1:22:22

Ah, yes. I knew you were going to catch me. What's the order? It's Discovery, Decisions, then Deal Flow.

H

Host1:22:28

So Deal Flow is how do I like, am I just going to get on the MLS and start making offers or am I going to go try to find properties that aren't there yet? We talk about having good marketing, funnels, how to load the funnel to get better outcomes.

M

Michael Miller1:22:44

Then it's Dollars. Then we have Disciplines, which are the things that we have to do. You don't have to be a full-time real estate investor to invest in real estate, but it is work. What are the disciplines that will lead to success? One of the things I've become obsessed with, which I learned from you, is this idea of inevitability. The framework of FastTrack and the framework of the program is: what do we need to do to make your first deal inevitable? I'm become obsessed with this because I realized anything we want in life can be inevitable if we know how to reverse engineer the actions that it takes to get to the outcomes. So in First Deal, we are going to make sure every student gets to their first deal inevitably by following the steps in repeatable action. That's FastTrack: helping people get from 'I don't know what I don't know' to 'now I'm in a group of 200 or 300 people who are all on the freeway going towards their first deal but with different lanes, different off-ramps, etc.'

H

Host1:23:44

That was a great explanation. I heard a great quote the other day about discipline from the book 'The Life You Always Wanted' by John Ortberg. He said discipline is the things you can do to get the things you can't get. In other words, you can't just right now have a six-pack, but there are things you can do that will get you the six-pack. That's a discipline.

M

Michael Miller1:24:27

This is the unfortunate part of the Disciplines section of the FastTrack teaching. You developed it and the analogy is all about diet and exercise. So the fat guy comes on camera who's like trying to figure out his health and so guys, what would you do right now if you wanted to get a six-pack? Asking for a friend. But anyways, I like that idea. There's actions we can take that will deliver the result we want. Hal Elrod says every result you desire is preceded by a process needed to produce the result. When you define the process and commit to it for an extended period of time, the results take care of themselves. One of my favorite quotes of all time.

H

Host1:25:05

What is the process? That's 'Miracle Morning' by the way. 'Miracle Morning for Sales People' but that quote is from it.

M

Michael Miller1:25:11

So what are the actions that deliver the results? If we define them and track them and stay accountable to doing them, shockingly we get the results. Nobody woke up with a six-pack and was like, 'Shoot, how'd that get there?' It doesn't happen. So discipline is probably the most important thing you could do in any area of trying to improve your life: just figure it out.

H

Host1:25:30

Well, what's interesting is that we all have disciplines of various kinds, but we choose our outcomes. That is the reality. Maybe find the, I think we even go through this exercise: what are the areas where you have disciplines that produce results that you're proud of and then how do we take those things and apply them to other areas? It's not complicated. It's simple versus easy. It's not easy but it is simple. You define it, you follow it, you get to the outcome.

M

Michael Miller1:26:01

That's exactly it, man.

H

Host1:26:07

All right. Let's move on to the next segment of today's show, which sadly Cam's not here to help me out with it, but that is the Three, Two, One Pivot. The idea is your life's going one direction, then something happens to make your life shift direction a little bit, pivots you. First of all, three books that have pivoted your life, man.

M

Michael Miller1:26:20

I got these questions ahead of time and I'm still agonizing over it. There's so many good answers. I'll give you two business and one spiritual. 'When Heaven Invades Earth' changed my life. It was written by our pastor, Bill Johnson. He's somewhat well known in the Christian space. It's this idea of what it looks like to manifest heaven on earth. One of my favorite quotes that a friend of mine says is that the more that heaven comes to earth, the more earth looks like a family. So for us, we've built our lives around this idea of building a really awesome family, sometimes extended for community. The idea of hosting heaven on earth through that book was transformational for my spiritual development. Business-wise, there's been a ton, especially since I've gotten into this ecosystem. I came from corporate America and I had this illusion that I was automatically great at all things business because I was so successful in corporate life. I am substantially ill-equipped to be successful here. So I've gotten into book mode. The two biggest ones for me right now have been 'Traction'. That's EOS. I realized that I was a very high performing driver of somebody else's car in my past life but I have no idea how to build a car or, more importantly, how to build an engine. 'Traction' has been transformational and it's already changing our life in a lot of ways. The second one is 'Buy Back Your Time' by Dan Martell. I love that one because they kind of connect. He talks about the GSD culture, the Get Shit Done culture. That has been the basis of my investing career so far. Now we're learning to pivot from just getting stuff done to actually becoming a business. So 'When Heaven Invades Earth', 'Traction', 'Buy Back Your Time'.

H

Host1:28:28

Two people that have pivoted your life. Is 'pivoted' a word? I think so.

M

Michael Miller1:28:34

Yeah. There's a lot of great people. I would put my pastor on that list. Bill has, there's been very few people that have modeled this ability to not just have wisdom but actual revelation. There's a difference. Not just in spiritual life, but in business life. I think you're a great example of this. You're not just wise, you have a lot of revelation. There are people that are uniquely equipped to have a unique perspective on an old truth. In business, that really applies. I again joked about the burst, that to me those are revelatory ideas of an old concept. You just gave it a very new perspective. So Bill has been spiritually true, but not just because of my spiritual development. I really admire people who have the ability to see old wisdom in a new light and reframe that in a really relevant way. The other one is a little more obscure. I hope he gets to see this someday because I don't know if I've ever told him. The boss that I had for the majority of my professional career, at least a good chunk of it, was a guy named Roger Foreman. He taught me so much about business and leadership and life without ever knowing he was doing it. He was the executive I worked for. He gave me my first banking center manager job when I was 20 years old. He was the guy that bet on me when nobody else would because he saw something in me that he knew he could cultivate and form into something. Sometimes I even tell people about him and I get a little choked up because I think in a lot of ways he was a father figure to me in business that really transformed my life. Not by anything necessarily that he specifically said, but his holistic ability to just believe in me unswervingly. I can't tell you how many mistakes I'm sure I made. But I never once walked out of a meeting with him not feeling like I could conquer the world. That taught me that I want to be one of those people. I want people to walk away from me feeling like no matter what, I got their back and they can conquer anything. So, Roger Foreman, I hope he hears that someday.

H

Host1:31:03

I love it. You're a good public speaker. Have you ever done that for your career? I know once in a while. You're so good. What about a quote? One quote that's pivoted your life.

M

Michael Miller1:31:17

If I can only choose one, I would say the one that I use. I don't know if I came up with it or if I heard it. A wise man once said, Michael Miller, 'Action is better than information.' That has pivoted my life. This ability, you asked earlier what made me different than somebody else who went through a program that didn't get the outcomes, and it was my willingness to take action before I had all the answers. I think action is better than information. Information is important, but not as important as action.

H

Host1:31:46

Beautiful. Next: Past, Present, Future. This is weird without Cam. Past. What's my past question? This is awesome. All right. What's your advice to your 18-year-old self? Cam always takes that question. Advice to your 18-year-old Michael.

M

Michael Miller1:32:13

I think my advice would be don't take yourself so seriously and have way more fun in your 20s. I don't regret my story at all. I have little if any regret genuinely. But if I could do it again, I would have had way more fun. I was way too busy trying to be way too cool in business and corporate life to actually enjoy being somewhat successful in my 20s. I think I would have traded in a little bit of that success for a little more fun.

H

Host1:32:44

Cool. What about something you've done in the past, this is a present question, you've done in the past 12 months that's just given you a better life. Something that's really just improved. Could be habit, trait, action, routine, something.

M

Michael Miller1:32:55

I just hired a concierge doctor. I don't know if you have done that. It's great. I've had some health issues, one of which is a spinal disease I developed which is why I didn't ride the mechanical bull. I really appreciated the pivot by the way. That was smooth. The concierge doctor, I lived, so when we found out it was actually in Hawaii, my back seized up and I collapsed about 10 years ago and I've been in tremendous pain ever since. I went to all these specialists and they send you to another one. 'Well, maybe we'll do surgery.' 'Nah, you're too young. Here's some injections.' Those don't really help. I kind of gave up. I just went, 'This is my life now.' And it's I'm not saying it's the only reason why I've had other health issues, but it's been largely tied to some health issues that I've had. A friend about 6 months ago came to me and said, 'Hey, I had this spine problem. It's not exactly what I have, but it's similar. I got to this doctor in San Diego and he gave me this stem cell research. I know there's all sorts of thoughts on good, bad, and different, but I went from borderline suicidal pain to I don't feel pain anymore.' So I just got hooked up with him. It's taken about 6 months because you go through a whole bunch of testing and I'm on, you should see my packet of pills now, supplements and peptides. So I'm really, for the first time in a long time, hopeful for not only healing in my back but getting my health back. The reality is that I really want to walk my daughter down the aisle and I really want to hold my grandkids one day. So I haven't experienced the transformation yet, but I have hope because of that decision.

H

Host1:34:57

Very cool. Future. Someday you are going to pass away. Many years in the future. Your kids are going to be standing around your grave and they're going to be talking about you. What do you want them to say about you?

M

Michael Miller1:35:21

Dad was... I don't know why you got me all tender all of a sudden. How'd you do that? Kids, death, you know. I think the first thing that comes to mind is what I shared about Roger. I want my kids to feel like they could have conquered anything because dad was in their corner. I want them to know that I believed in them and that they didn't earn it. It was nothing to earn, nothing to prove. I just got dad. I want them to recognize that. A lot of times in business we make ourselves feel better about our choices by saying that we do everything for them. Frankly, I think sometimes it's BS. We really do it for us. I want them to make the decisions that they see that I really did it for them. I don't know exactly what all those decisions are yet, but as I continue to grow, I want them to feel like I really made them the priority.

H

Host1:36:17

So awesome. All right, man. Let's close things up. Last segment of the show. We call it the Wrap-Up. First question, what are you excited about in your life that's coming up? Business, personal, whatever. What's coming up that you're just fired up about?

M

Michael Miller1:36:33

I hired a consultant for our EOS process, our office process. I'm really excited about that. I've been getting kicked in the nuts, so to speak, the last couple of months just on team and systems and process. And I'm really excited about that. Candidly, I'm really excited about the stuff that's happening in the Brandon Turner ecosystem. I'm loving First Deal, and I'm trying to figure out all the other ways I can ride your coattails to the top. That's half joking, but also half real. I have an all-in personality in general, which I have to resist the temptation of sometimes. But I'm really excited about what we're doing. It's fun seeing people, you've been doing this for decades, but it's so fun for me to watch people have that light bulb moment and they go, 'Now my life is different for the better.' Being able to be in that ecosystem, I'm really excited about it.

H

Host1:37:23

Well, hey, I did not ask this ahead of time. I had not thought about it until this very moment. But are you, and I'm going to put you on the spot here to make you say yes, are you up for doing a webinar class about buying your first deal that we can tell people about right now that they can come to?

M

Michael Miller1:37:34

Let's go.

H

Host1:37:36

All right, I'm going to make up a URL right now. Just like let's go to FirstDeal.com/Miller. So go to FirstDeal.com/Miller. M-I-L-L-E-R. And you can sign up for a class that Michael Miller and I will do together and we'll just teach you guys for free kind of what we do inside the program, but it'll just be a FastTrack of the FastTrack.

M

Michael Miller1:38:03

I love it. We'll go through the five Ds. Discovery, Decisions, Deal Flow, Dollars, and Disciplines. We'll just go through that in a one-hour class and it'll be fun. Let's do it.

H

Host1:38:21

All right. Well, with that said, last question. Where can people connect with you at?

M

Michael Miller1:38:27

You can find me on Instagram. Somebody told me I should have had this set up before I came on a podcast, but I think the best way to connect with me is 'Miller Time Me.' Miller time me. Miller Time Me on Instagram. That's my handle. Or honestly, the best way is the Dead President's Club on Facebook. Just search 'Dead President's Club.' It's free. That's our community of people learning how to do money different. There's a big real estate focus there. We do at least a weekly call, sometimes bi-weekly, where we're just getting on and bringing in specialists. I had my CPA on last week talking about taxes. So it's a great little place to connect.

H

Host1:39:10

You going to invite me on to talk sometime?

M

Michael Miller1:39:14

I actually had you on the docket and then our adoption came in the way. So we're going to get you in. We got lots of fun stuff I'm going to try to leverage Brandon for. It's great.

H

Host1:39:22

Perfect. All right. I appreciate you, man. This has been a lot of fun. So thank you for being part of my ecosystem and coming in the 50 and First Deal and all that good stuff. Grateful. Thank you.

M

Michael Miller1:39:28

Appreciate you, man.

H

Host1:39:35

Hey, thanks for tuning in to another episode of the Better Life Podcast. I hope you enjoyed this show and got some valuable insights to help you lead a better life for you and your family. Now, hey, if you found value in this episode, please consider subscribing here to our YouTube channel. And let me know in the comments down below what you thought of this episode. Your feedback actually helps us improve the show and reach more people with that message of living that better life. So be sure to subscribe so you never miss an episode. And hey, before I go, you know, this show and this channel is all about the habits, actions, beliefs, and strategies that give you a better life. But in case you're interested and you want to know my opinion on what it takes to live not just the better life but the best life ever from like a spiritual and faith standpoint, check out abetterlife.com/bestlife. Thank you again for listening and watching. We'll see you next time on the Better Life Podcast.

He Left his 9-5 Using THIS Real Estate Strategy (low interest rate) | Micheal Miller (Ep 151)

About Michael Miller