From Rentals to 10,000 Units with Lane Kawaoka

In this episode, host Derek Dombeck interviews Lane Kawaoka, a former engineer turned real estate syndicator and the creator of the Wealth Elevator framework. Lane shares his journey from purchasing his first rental property while working a demanding job, to building a massive portfolio of over 10,000 multifamily units. He dives into how he transitioned from single-family investing to large-scale syndications, what to look for in deals, and why understanding your stage in the “wealth elevator” is crucial for long-term financial success.

—

Watch the episode here

 

Listen to the podcast here

Welcome to the Generations of Wealth Show. I’m your host, Derek Dombeck. And once again, we have found an incredible guest. I know you’re not shocked because all of our guests are incredible. But all the way from Hawaii, and we recorded this when it was pretty early in the morning for this gentleman. But Lane Kawaoka is with us. And Lane’s journey has been really, really impressive, right? He started just like many, many start with just a single house, going into a duplex, some other single family properties, and then grew into the world of syndication and has at this point done well over 10,000 units that he’s been involved in and just so much information. He’s got what he calls the wealth elevator, and that’s how he kind of took his journey. So that’s what we’re going to talk about. before I bring Lane on you know I try to say this on every show too we appreciate you and let me help you anything that I can do don’t hesitate to reach out that is what the Generations of Wealth family is all about so jump on the website go to DerekDombeck.com shoot me an email Derek at GlobalGOW.com whatever it is and you know let us help you and grow your network too. So with that said, let’s bring on our guest. And once again, with an incredible guest, Mr. Lane Kawaoka, all the way from Hawaii. How are you this morning, sir?

Hey, I’m doing great. Aloha, everybody. Thanks for having me, Derek. I know we were just chatting a little bit before we started recording, and you’re getting your coffee in you, you’re getting your caffeine in you. It’s a lot earlier there than it is where I am. so I really appreciate you taking the time out of your morning to chat with us yeah it’s kind of the bad thing about living here in Hawaii when we wake up always to an inbox full of emails and catch up a little bit you guys seem to shut it off by my noontime it seems like so I can actually get work done without emails coming in the inbox at that point of the day. Nice. Well, you’re going to get no sympathy from me or probably any of the listeners when you get to live in paradise. And we deal with snow and cold and all that fun stuff. So, well, let’s just start off. Tell us a little bit about yourself and your background. And then, you know, I want to dive into our topic, which is what you call the wealth elevator.

Yeah, so I guess maybe I’ll start, you know, probably not very much different from most investors. I was kind of taught to go to school, study hard, eventually became an engineer, graduated from the University of Washington up in Seattle. And I call this the linear path where we were taught to be a good citizen, work a good job, and also buy a house to live in. So that’s what I did a couple of years out of college. I saved up 80 grand to go buy a house in Seattle. I think it was like $350,000 at the time. So $80,000 down payment. Because that’s what I was brainwashed to do, buy a house to live in, which I don’t necessarily think is a good idea for some investors out there. And do the whole 401k thing. At this time, I was working as a construction supervisor, traveling all over for work, never home. So I was in my early 20s, and I was just like, well, this is a little silly. I’m only here on Saturday. Why don’t I just rent this thing out and just be semi-homeless? So I wasn’t homeless. I was living in the company, hotels, and just kind of on travels and expenses all the time. But this is where two things happened. I got the aha moment for like rental real estate. And I was like, wow, I kept doing this. I’ll be able to quit the rat race and also triple charge my savings. So I think before this, when I was renting or had a mortgage, I probably saved $30,000, $40,000 per year. But when I did this, lived off the company dime, 100% expenses, I probably pushed my annual savings to $100,000 per year. And, you know, doing that for five, six years, putting it all into real estate, you know, eventually bought a duplex in Seattle the next couple of years. So I bought the first in 2009 and then 2011 bought another duplex. And then by the time that I started to understand what rental value ratios, you know, Seattle is a very high priced area. Started to buy properties of Birmingham, Atlanta, Indianapolis. So in 2015, I had 11 of these rental properties. You know, later I went to larger syndications and private placements, but that was kind of my early days trajectory.

And when you were doing that in the early days, you’re buying stuff remote, I’m assuming paying management companies. Did you go out to those areas to look at the properties or was it? I mean, because that was really when virtual was just kind of starting back in 2010, 11, 12. It’s much easier to do virtual investing now than it was back then. How did you handle that?

Yeah, I mean, I was working my full-time engineering job. which was my biggest, you know, took a lot of my time. So I would hire third-party property managers in each of these locations. I think I paid them like that 10%, and then maybe half of the first month’s rent. That was kind of the standard property management fees. I would buy them, you know, pretty much turnkey. I know a lot of people are into that buy, rent, rehab, repair. No, didn’t do any of that. Didn’t do any of that. You know, I think that’s great if you don’t have too much money and you need to kind of create value out of nothing. But didn’t do that. Too lazy. Didn’t want to take on as much risk, right? I mean, especially being remote. You hear a lot of these contractors, they might help you with a property or two like that. But once they get lazy or something happens in their life, money starts disappearing. on those and you can’t really verify the construction and and to your other point there i didn’t really visit a lot of these properties initially so it was really nice to somewhat rely on the bank’s appraisal um verifying what i was buying out in these locations so a lot of it was that with you know the fannie mae freddie mac 20 down payment non-owner-occupied type of financing. But yeah, just kind of rinse, wash, repeat. Did the same thing from 2009 to 2015.

So what happened after 2015? You mentioned you started doing more in syndications or other things. How did that start? Yeah, I mean, what does any semi-smart guy do? You know, the single family thing is working. And I’ve been doing it a while. And I’m like, well, why don’t I do multi-family, right? Kind of a logical progression. So I started to, you know, get more involved and started to meet other people, started to travel a lot, started to pay for a lot of these mentorship groups out there. You know, the ones you pay 30 grand, 50 grand for. I would join a few of them. I didn’t really, and it wasn’t married at the time, so I could just do whatever with some of my side money. And it made sense at the time, right? I was in my early 20s, well, not in my early 20s, but I was in my 20s, early 30s. So it made sense to kind of put money into myself and learn a little bit more. Because I knew that the single-family homes wasn’t the way to do it. I mean, I think that’s a great way, you know, when you’re a non-accredited investor, you know, to build the network. And that’s exactly what I did. But to give anybody any type of insight, you know, with more than a rental to, you know, with 11 rental properties. Sure, I had nice cash flow coming in every month, maybe a few grand, a couple hundred, few hundred dollars per property, right, with 11 properties. But man, was it a little bit up and down, right? Like I, with 11 rental properties, maybe I had an eviction once or twice a year. Some kind of big catastrophe that happened every quarter, like a flood in the basement. You know, not a huge deal, but, and then the property managers are taking care of all that type of stuff. But, you know, quickly realized that, hey man, this just was not, it’s not scalable. You know, most of my clients today aspire to $10,000 to pass a cash flow. I had maybe a few grand with. 11 of them. So you got to multiply that exception rate by three or four. So now you’re talking about an eviction every month or two and some kind of catastrophe happening every couple weeks. And you can see how this quickly becomes a full time job and the legal liability. And this is kind of where I started to meet other investors that were accredited and had done what I did, buy a handful of rental properties or more. And we were all accredited investors, net worth a million dollars or greater or make over $250,000 a year, essentially.

And when you’re in that category, legal liability is a huge thing. You’re actually a target to getting sued. Nobody really wants to sue you when you don’t really got much to grab. and then the scalability and why did we all get into this in the first place so we can do what we want when we want as opposed to being tied down to these 30 rental properties where something’s crazy happening every other week on that and then I think the big thing for me was these huge repair bills when you never really have a tenant go through a hard turnover like I said with 11 rental properties maybe had only a couple a year but I would say out of every three evictions so if you do the math every 18 months probably have one of three evictions end up to be a big you know big drama where the sheriff comes those are stuff out on the streets because they’re evicting them and then they screw up the property on the way out you know my YouTube channel But I would put up a couple of these walkthroughs of how these guys just dismantled the house. And I’m left with a $10,000 to $25,000 repair bill. And I can’t really collect from these guys. These guys are uncollectible. So that was kind of what was going on in my head, making the transition to the larger syndications and private placement worlds as a more of an accredited investor.

So how did you start to vet those syndications? Because everybody’s got the best deal in the world and you’re accredited. They want your investment. Was it relationship-based? Because I know for us that’s huge. Our network is really important to us. Betting deals, letting our friends and colleagues let us know what we’re looking for and doing the same for them. What did you do?

Yeah, I mean, this is the hard part, right? I think this is where the threshold I was walking through in 2015-16. First off, you don’t really have access to good operators, right? There’s a spectrum of operators out there. On the institutional side, you’ve got guys who’ve done billions of dollars of deals. I wouldn’t say you necessarily want to invest with them. They’re certainly more reliable and longer track records. But on the institutional side, you have higher fees and splits where you’re not going to get the nice returns that you’re looking for. And plus, they’re not looking to bring in little investors at $50,000, $100,000 check sizes. They don’t want to bring in anybody less than a million dollars. That said, you know, when I was coming in, I would get access to the guys on the opposite side of that spectrum, right? guys who are just getting started, I would say under $1 billion of assets of past deals. I was just essentially investing with a lot of new people. But that was all I knew. That was all I had access to. I didn’t have the relationships, as you mentioned. So, I mean, what I did is I learned how to underwrite the deals. You take the P&Ls, you take the rent rolls. I add my analyzer, I do it to my analyzer. I spot check certain big cells on the spreadsheet that impact the model. I think that’s whether you’re investing in private equity, real estate, or a single family home. There’s always two or three cells on the spreadsheet that really impact the projected returns at the end of the day. I think as an investor, you’re trying to figure out, or at least what we try to teach our folks is, there are a few things that you can spot check.

The operator may not give this to you in the pitch deck. It may not be in there, so you have to ask specifically for these things. But those things to look for are, what is the reversion cap rate used to model out the deal? What is the full occupancy assumptions and economic occupancy assumptions? And then what is the annual rent escalators? And from those three pieces of information, you kind of get a good sense of how aggressively underwritten this deal is. It doesn’t matter if a deal is showing 120% return in five years on a PDF pitch deck. It means nothing. What you have to combo with that is, like, what are they using to get those numbers, right? What are the assumptions? So if they’re assuming the asset is going to be occupied at 95%, that’s a little high. Normally 92% is assumed full occupancy. And then also add on top of that another 3% of economic vacancy. Because if you have 100 people saying, you’re probably going to have at least three or four people not pay, right? Just be deadbeats, essentially. So that’s why economic occupancy in the 89-90% range for nicer assets is at least par for the course. But these are the things to look out for. Annual rent escalators. I’m not going to beat up on Oklahoma City or the state of Oklahoma, but it’s not quite a gusher in terms of growth. I don’t really want to see an annual rent escalator higher than 1.5% to 2% per year, where that might be okay for a place like Phoenix or Dallas, right? But I would say these are the things that I kind of learned about and I used as kind of a preliminary stage to kind of look at the deal. And then if the operator was using appropriate type of assumptions, then I would waste time and talk to them. I’m a little bit of an introvert, right? Or maybe I’m just lazy. I don’t like to waste my time on a Zoom call with somebody He’s just going to tell me everything that I want to hear, especially when they’re just a salesman and a firm that’s under half a billion dollars of past deals. But that’s kind of where I started, right? And I would also, the only relationships I had at that time were I knew some of the PPM lawyers, the syndication lawyers. And a little bit of asking around and building my network of other purely passive accredited investors was kind of how I did this initially. That said, I wasn’t that great. My first 15 deals I went into, I would say probably a few of them. So maybe one out of five, you want to look at it as my failure rate or four or five was, I think I did well at, but one out of five, you want to be negatively biased was kind of my failure rate. And I was like, you know, after going into the deal, I was like, hmm, probably shouldn’t have done that. But hey, you know, like that’s part of investing here, right? Like you have to take a step into the unknown. You have to like learn by doing too.

Well, you pay for education one way or another. And most people, even if you learned it from books, YouTube, wherever you got it from, it doesn’t always sink in until you actually experience it in real life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, I subscribe to the 70-20-10 rule where 10% is the academic stuff. I mean, we’ve got books, we’ve got podcasts, we’ve got YouTube videos. I encourage people to go consume them, but that’s only 10% of the equation. The other 20% is the people, getting people around you who actually do this. Purely passive accredited investors. Problem is those people aren’t at the local real estate club. They’re incredibly hard to find. They’re typically in their 50s. Most of our folks are in their 50s. they’re not hanging out at a happy hour with some other young people. They’re more secretive into their finances and their identities too. But yeah, to your point, 70% of this is actually going out there and doing it. Hopefully you invest with the right people that don’t kind of steal your money. And then you kind of go from there. You eventually get access to better, better deal flow. That 20%, the network gets better, get access to better deal flow. And then you just become a better investor. You know kind of what to look for. Is there preferred equity in this deal? You know, that’s kind of pushing up leverage. What kind of debt are they using? You know, you start to learn things. And unfortunately, speaking for myself, you know, you learn things by losing money sometimes, right? Or, you know, going through the peak of the market in 2021 to 2022. You know, we, like everybody else, got hurt too. And, you know, a lot of lesson learned that we take to future deals and underwriting.

Yeah absolutely I mean I started in 2003 and got my ass kicked in 2007, 8, 9 and you know I didn’t have a network I didn’t have anybody to call back then so what I say publicly on this show and other people’s show all the time like that that was a blessing because it taught me or forced me to learn what I know now and now I get to help a lot of people because of the stuff that we went through and you know that’s one of the things i love about this show i i get to talk with people like yourself that in most other cases you and i wouldn’t be having a conversation you know we wouldn’t even have been introduced to each other so there there’s there’s reasons for everything and you do lose money uh i had a former business partner you say all the time you know it’s a batting average we need to have more wins than losses and um but they’re you’re gonna have losses at some point in time whether you yeah you know yeah i know you guys have a little bit more of an experience this term based here certainly not what they really talk talk about um to the newbie crowd right

Because it scares them away i get it right i mean it’s been impactful to my life very positively but yeah like you know there are market cycles just like the stock market just like I mean, crypto seems to go a lot faster market cycles. But, you know, with real estate, especially even commercial real estate, right? Like there’s, what do they say, every six to 10 years, there’s a market correction. So the idea is you got to get after it when the times are good. And you got to take it on the chin in those couple years when it’s bad. You know, it always crashes more than it steadily rises is typically how things go. It’s not an even side curve both ways in the recovery and the trough. But part of that is understanding where things are relatively to where the value is or the rising moving average of 10 years, 20 years. And having the fortitude to go in when fear is high, as Bournemouth says. When there’s fear in the streets, that’s when you invest. And understand that when times are most fearful. And I believe now the times are the most fearful, right, especially after a correction. But the value investors know, I mean, especially the people who’ve been through one or two market corrections, they know that sort of maybe now is the time.

It is nice to go through the corrections and come out the other side without, you know, being destroyed. Because now you see things more clearly. It’s like knowing the punchline to the joke or knowing the end of the movie before the end of the movie. You don’t have all the answers, but it’s much more clear. And there’s opportunities that, quite frankly, were always there, but you didn’t know what to look for. And even if you would have seen it, you wouldn’t have taken action. I think the biggest fear now is getting caught up in shiny object syndrome because there’s more opportunities than you or I should chase. Because in my opinion, if you’re chasing too many things, you’re not giving any of them 100% of your focus. But I’m assuming you get approached periodically or very often with opportunities, right? And you just got to have your bullshit meter ready to go. Is this worth the Zoom call, as you said, to even talk about it, or is this just another wishful thinker?

Yeah, exactly. I mean, part of it is, you know, we know what our buy box is as operators, general partners, but maybe the past investor does not know what they’re really looking for. They’re getting started, and they just need to kind of diversify, too, over different business plans. You know, right now, I think it’s safe to say that we’ve seen a big correction 20 to 30 percent off the peaks of a couple of years ago. Some categorize the correction as greater than 2008 in commercial real estate specifically. So in theory, now’s the time to buy, right, with prices low. I would say that the biggest, there’s a two part of this do you do a deal. It’s the price, which, again, I think now’s the time. But it’s the loan package, right? Especially if you’re doing a longer-term hold, more than a year or two, right? Then the interest rate really comes into impact. And more specifically in commercial real estate, it’s not so much the interest rate. Sure, the FedRaid and the 10-year-old treasury drives these loan-term packages, but it’s the loan-to-values, right? And still, you’re seeing the loan-to-values a lot less than what it was a couple of years ago. You used to be able to get like 75%. And I’m talking general, right?

Every deal is different. But you’re still getting these lower loan-to-values, maybe even the 50%, 60% range. And you’re not able to make the deal work. The deal doesn’t pencil, even with the price lower. So that impacts us personally because we like to go in with a strategy of do some upgrades and you bump the rents up very modestly, nothing huge. And we’d like to go into deals where it’s not really distressed too. I think my days, when we first got started, we would buy a lot of these classy, smaller properties, but economic occupancy would be like 80%. So two out of 10 people were just deadbeats. They just didn’t pay.

But that’s how Class C is a lot of times. But I don’t really want to do that anymore. I don’t know. Maybe we should. Maybe we should. But that’s just not what we’re – we’re not swinging at that strike, that pitch anymore, to use a baseball reference. And I think that’s kind of where right now, you know, where prices are and where the interest rates are. Nothing’s really penciling. Sure, we could change our strategy, what we swing at, but I think we kind of stay steadfast to those, what we’re looking for, I guess, for now. At this point, you mentioned banks, and everyone that knows me and listens to my show, I don’t use institutional financing for hardly anything. I’ve always just been a private capital type of person. Not always, but the last 15 years. So, you know, do you like using traditional banks? Is there do’s and don’ts when it comes to using traditional banks?

I mean, we use traditional banks. I mean, this is in the commercial real estate world above 50, 100 units. So similarly, it’s a little bit different than residential, but you still have somewhat of the same foundation of Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac-backed loans from the government. So any bank or any lender can access these types of loans at good pricing because it is sort of backed by the government. Your deal needs to fit in a certain box. Like I said, usually 90% occupied, hidden debt service coverage ratio of 1.25. now what we’ve typically seen is gone after like the smaller banks so i think we’re kind of talking the same thing here um certainly not going to go after a top 10 bank that’s for sure but in our world there’s also debt funds so and then you know other family office or insurance companies will also lend and at similar terms too um i think what’s good about the commercial real market in the lending world is it’s a pretty, it’s not a fragmented market. It’s a very, you know, you talk to one loan broker, you pretty much got all the loan packages out there. I think it is where a single family home residential real estate is a little bit more fragmented in that sense. But, you know, sometimes you run into these circumstances, and this has probably happen on a few occasions for us where you start to get cute with things and you start working with a smaller lender and you don’t find out so after you close maybe a year or two down the road that this you unfortunately invested with a predatory lender right somebody who you know the deal’s going great and the lender’s just being real real stickler on the dozens of loan covenants that they set you up with and they’re trying to, in reality, steal the property from you. So that’s kind of where, I mean, that’s where having a good loan broker who kind of has the lay of the land knows which lenders to stay away from, what smaller shops to stay away from. And then also just putting it on your internal, like our internal company blacklist in a way. But, you know, that’s a rare occasion, like I said, but it does come up. I mean, on both of those occasions, we just switched lenders and essentially refinanced the deal, too. And now we’ve kind of got a list of lenders in our particular markets that we go to.

Well, let’s switch gears a little bit. Talk about the wealth elevator. What is it? And, you know, you’ve got different floors on the wealth elevator, I’m assuming. Yeah, so this is the book that I wrote recently. It’s made for more of an accredited investor profile. I get it. There’s a lot of books written for, I mean, the first floor of the wealth elevator is the basement, right? So people who make under $50,000 a year don’t really have any net worth going on. I think most of the books out there, you know, Dave Ramsey, CZ Orman, a lot of personal finance blog who tells you don’t buy a $7 latte. right they they kind of focus on the basement level investors like now you know going back to my story i started i didn’t start in the basement i had a good job um i had some student loans but essentially i started on the first floor of the wealth elevator and you know people ask me all the time you know should you have gone to commercial real estate right away i’m like no i think i think you gotta go on the first floor first somewhat adolescence of investing and pick up some rental properties. And for me, it took a while, right? 2009 to 2015, 16 before I actually came in a credit investor by network status. You know, it just, it took a long time, especially in the beginning. And yeah, you know, like, so that, that persona I would say is a non-accredited investor, but you got money. Right. But then I think that what we focus in on the book is that transition from the first floor to the second floor of the wealth elevator when you, you know, now you have something to lose in terms of legal liability. And you get, your world gets opened up to accredited investors and accredited only deals, syndications, private placements, and multifamily or any other asset class. Then comes the third level of the wealth elevator, right? When your net worth goes over two and a half, three million net worth.

And you now maybe your universe opens up to things of real estate. Real estate is how I put myself on the map, essentially. And I did it at a good time, right? Now, if you’re getting started, I think there’s really good deals to be had. But I think one thing macroeconomic-wise, the world might have changed. I’m still a real estate fanboy. Don’t get me wrong. But the days of free money are over, right? If you go look at the chantham financial curve, they’re not predicting that the Fed rate’s going to come under three, three and a half percent, maybe in the next decade. You know, we were living in a interest-free, like a zero percent Fed rate for a while. Of course, that influences the 10-year treasury, right, which more directly impacts the loan packages for everybody. But we essentially just lost a big trade win to our back as real estate investors. So it’s really kind of, you know, scratching my head. We kind of stopped doing deals summer of 2022 because the interest rates just weren’t conducive to where the prices were. Now the prices have come down, but still, like I said earlier, it still doesn’t really work. And we’re going to be in this environment. Again, everybody should have the chance of financial curve bookmarked. And another resource is the CME, FedTracker too. But Long-term forecast is we’re not, free money is not coming back. Unless there’s a war or some kind of big catastrophe, of course, right?

Yeah, but that’s kind of where, what do you do? Well, maybe you invest in things outside of real estate, right, like private equity, buying businesses. Not entirely, but as a part of your portfolio, especially when you get to that third floor of the wealth elevator or greater. You know, just to put a number out there, It could be two and a half mil network or investable assets. And then later on in the book, we talk about the penthouse level, the wealth elevator, and some of the strategies from there. But, yeah, you know, like what I essentially realized is that there’s different stages to the wealth building game. There’s different paradigms. We live in this world of TikTok and, you know, these shorts. You know, maybe these are good tips for certain people on certain stages, but they may not apply to you as an accredited investor, say, on the second floor. And then, you know, to kind of wrap up the concept, to me, like my goal for a lot of my folks is to just get them to four and a half, four to five minute network. Why? Because at that level, you’re able to just put it into life insurance or T-bills and live off the remainder for your life. or give one or two million to each kid, right? You have two kids, whatever. But at that point, you’ve kind of hit a level that I call end game. And this is kind of where you’re on the third, fourth level, the wealth elevator. And that’s the idea. It’s like race, get to that level as quickly and safely as possible, right? You have to take on risks for sure. But once you’re to that level, you know, You got to change the tires on the race car a little bit and go with the cruise control because the game kind of changes at that point.

But if you’re not even to a million dollars net worth, don’t listen to what I’m saying. You got to get going, buddy. Or if you’re even to two and a half million, you still got to keep going. What do you think the biggest mistakes are for the people that are under the million dollar net worth? Are they playing it safe? Are they trying to do the Susie Orman, you know, save their way to wealth versus invest their way to wealth? Yeah, I mean, a variety of things, right? Like, I mean, I think we’re all brainwashed to buy a house to live in. I think if you’re a good saver, which is probably 1% of the population out there, buying a house to live in is not going to make you as much return on investment than putting it into investment properties. Or, heck, even go buy S&P 500, right? where it makes sense for 99% of the population that should not read my book. They have trouble saving. They need a forced piggy bank. So that’s what a house is for them, right? They have to pay their mortgage, right? A lot of people need that. So it’s kind of a, there’s always three sides of the coin, right? Yes, no, and then this shiny rim in the middle for the very few. But that’s a big common mistake. Another common mistake is, I got to where I’m at with real estate, which is an alternative investment. I think another part of this is investing directly with an operator sponsor as opposed to investing through a gazillion middlemen, such as through a REIT or a financial planner selling financial products. So when you cut the middlemen out, you typically get higher returns. It does come in with now you have to take a little bit more personal responsibility in betting what deals and people you’re working with. So there is inherently more risk. But hey, that’s up to the investor to realize if they want to put in the effort into going down that path. But I mean, I had maybe 80, 90% of my net worth in alternative investments in my 20s and 30s. And that’s kind of got me to where I am at now. And it certainly kicked my ass in 2022 and 2023. I was very concentrated in real estate, and that’s where the big commercial real estate correction happened.

So obviously lessons learned, which is why I’m kind of rounding out my portfolio a little bit more with private equity. Things are outside of real estate a little bit and life insurance. But I’ve always kind of been an open book and kind of learn as I go and be open-minded to kind of new things. but these are things that I think plague the people who aren’t accredited. Unfortunately, it’s a little difficult because are these nice, cool syndicated deals, they’re not made for non-accredited investors, in my opinion. I mean, in every deal, there’s risk. And for somebody to lose $50,000, $100,000, I mean, I was there at one time. I remember watching every month go by, going to a job I didn’t like, what it felt like, you know, see it go up by three, four grand every month. Freaking takes you a year to save up 40, 50 grand, right? I mean, I get that. And to see it, you know, just disappear like that, you know, emotionally may not be, a non-accredited investor may not be able to process it, but as they say, no risk, I mean, no risk it, no biscuit, right? I mean, that’s what kind of is tough, right? I mean, we have a lot of content on our website for, like, non-accredited investors that will buy little rental properties because that’s what I used to do. So we just give that out for free. But I think you got to build that base if you’re getting started there.

Yeah, definitely. Well, as we kind of start to wind this up, first of all, how do people get the book? Yeah, they can go on Amazon. And then they can also, if they buy the book, maybe send us the receipt. And then we can email us at team at thewealthelevator.com. We can give them the PDF version or the MP3 version. I know some people are doing that hack these days where they get both versions. and they get the PDF and they put the audio at 3x speed and they just bum rush to the entire book. I think it’s like 200 pages, so it might take you a little bit. Yeah. Any way we can help people move a little bit faster. Absolutely. And I guess the last question I ask most of my guests, what’s one question I should have asked you that I didn’t? And it can be about anything.

Yeah. I think, you know, from a high level, what’s the strategy? I think kind of what’s worked for me, and I think, which is pretty much the formula on the second floor of the wealth elevator, is this kind of trifecta of strategies of investments and alternative investments, real estate, where you’re getting good tax benefits and implementing these tax strategies of the wealthy, maybe even real estate professional status too, and then running it through an infinite banking plan, Like this Triforce, this effect of strategies is very powerful when you combo them. And this is kind of what I realized. Like when I started to interact with all these accredited investors, everybody was kind of doing. But it wasn’t anything that the average guy couldn’t implement. But it’s in some ways the opposite of what we’re all taught in a way. But I would say, you know, leave people with the final piece. I think the first step is understanding where you are in this wealth building journey. So pick up my book. In there, there’s a chart on here’s basement, first floor, second floor, third floor. You can kind of see where you are. And I think that self-awareness is important because that dictates what you do. And then I think it also makes sense to the universe out there when you’re just bombarded with these random financial tips here or there. What things I do now would certainly not be things I would do in the first floor of the wealth elevator if I was playing my cards right. So it depends on kind of what paradigm, what floor you are in the wealth elevator.

Well, that’s awesome insight. And again, we really appreciate you coming on and sharing your journey. I always like talking to people that have been in the business for more than just the last five years because, you know, last five years, especially in residential real estate, if you had a house, you made money on it in most cases. But that’s not how you build long-term wealth. That’s not how you get up to the penthouse. You’ve got to have a plan in place. And as we said a couple times, there’s going to be deals that go bad. There’s going to be losses and you need to be prepared for them. So with that, we’ll wind it up. But thank you very much. And you can go on with your morning now over in Hawaii. And the rest of us are into the afternoon for the most part. But again, thank you so much, Lane. Yeah, thanks for having me. Thanks, Derek. Bye. And for everybody else, thanks for being here. thanks for sharing your time with us as well and taking the time to also go out and and spread the word about the generations of wealth anything you can do i i say it on every show you know if you know somebody that this specific show is going to help share it with them give them the link and until the next one thanks and see you then

Important Links:

• • Govoyage.com
  • derekdombeck.com
  • TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/FBGroup
  • TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/YTChannel
  • TheGenerationsOfWealth.com/Instagram

About Lane Kawaoka