From Broke to Retired in 4 Years Through Real Estate Investing

What does it take from having a negative net worth to retiring within 4 years through real estate investing? Michael Manthei shares his journey, along with some of the top advices he would give us today, and some of the biggest challenges that he encountered throughout that journey.You can read this entire interview here: https://bit.ly/2Qr3waJWhat are a couple of advices that you would want people to know, let’s say for back then, what was going through your head and what would you want someone that was in your situation to know in order for them to get their career started?The action taking is a huge one for me. The other one is to get around positive people, generosity minded people that want to help, that was huge for me, I started going to local free meetups and just meeting people. And there were a couple of people in those groups that would walk properties with me, give me advice, that was a huge deal. I was always one that wanted to do everything on my own. And I’m realizing more and more throughout life, that that’s fine, and you can be successful that way. But working with other people is also an amazing way to add strength to your picture. If you have a certain skill set, and you work with someone that has a complementary skill set, that can be a beautiful partnership. With partnerships, you have to be very deliberate with, you don’t want to enter them flippantly. But if you really get to know the other person, and being open to working together can be a shortcut to success as well.What were some of the biggest challenges that you faced during this journey?Staying encouraged, and maintaining belief is challenging. If you have something in your heart that is greater than what you see around you, and what your peer circle is. That's probably why you're listening to something like this, it takes courage to break through the average of the people you're closest to, and enter a new realm of wealth and success. Just managing that, and staying encouraged is a huge part of the battle. That's more on the mindset side.On something more practical, we started with such little capital, that it took every penny we had just to get into the next building. And I thought that we would just fund any renovations that were needed out of cash flow, which is fine. But you can't fund a renovation and live off of the same cash flow. You can't spend it in more than one place. If you're running a pro forma, and that's something that you need to be good at in this business, you typically put, in some of the older properties in our local city, 10-15% for maintenance and repairs. There were some years that even on a very large portfolio, I was spending 30 and 40% of the gross income on repairs, because I was buying buildings that had a deficit in deferred maintenance. It has worked out, we've made the repairs and dug out from that. We quality buildings now. But that made things tight for a while. And it's a great practice to make sure you have all the money upfront to correct any deferred maintenance. That's something we do today, if a building needs something, we raise additional capital and make sure the deal can support that and get that done at the beginning. I didn't really have that luxury when we got started. But we definitely had to work hard to still make it through.What made you start thinking about real estate investing? Like a lot of people, I read a little purple book. That was the first entry point that completely rocked my world. And I'm referring to Rich Dad, Poor Dad. It just blew my mind that people thought that way. I didn't grow up in a family that talked about money, or had any wealth.Michael...