Fail Fast, Succeed Faster: A Time-Tested Strategy for Real Estate Wealth Building with Maggie and Patrick Wills

Getting into more of the passive investments was really re educating me on what the different asset classes were, how we could do this without being landlords and needing to spend every weekend fixing pictures and toilet, and what the different opportunities were and what that could be.

Welcome to truly passive income. I'm Neil Henderson.

And I'm Clint Harris.

And today we have some friends of ours that we've had a chance to get to know for a little while and met in person and now excited to have them on the podcast, we've got Pat and Maggie Wills on with us.

So Pat is, we met him through a community called the Left Field Investor Community, which is an educational platform for passive investors looking for syndication opportunities.

We connected with that community a couple years ago through an event in Columbus, Ohio, in person, met Pat there, had an opportunity to meet his wife Maggie as well, and kind of grew a relationship from there and wanted to have them on today for several reasons, which I'll get into momentarily. But first of all, Pat and Maggie, thank you for being here. We appreciate your time.

Hi.

Thanks for having us.

Thanks. Appreciate it, guys. So a lot to get in here in terms of like Pat, your background. You guys are limited partner investors.

You also have a background, a little bit on the operational side, on the educational platform side. You're also doing this on the side while working a w two job. So I think a lot of us have been there, right?

We all have kind of had that balance, and it's a lot of times you have to build an off ramp from that w two lifestyle to get to the full time investor lifestyle. I know I did it, Neil did it, and it's part of the journey. And balancing those two things is not always easy.

The real reason I wanted to have you guys on is because one thing that's really important to me and the relationship that my wife and I have is that we work together, we invest together both actively and passively. I think that that's really important is that you have a relationship.

Like we all have goals of what we want to accomplish in terms of time, location, financial independence.

But it forces you, when you're making a decision with your spouse, it forces you to have a conversation as to about what your goals should be together for your marriage, for your life, for if you have children or how you want to spend time with your family.

So tell us a little bit about yourselves, your background, how long you've been married, the type of investments that you've done in the past, active and passive, and we'll take it from there as to what your goals are together as a couple.

I'll start. I've been in it for basically my entire career, work in the northern Virginia area. Systems administrator and engineer by trade.

So relatively decent analytical mind, at least I like to think so. And I grew up, my dad was renting out my grandparents house as a self managed rental since high school.

So ive been exposed to just real estate as a concept from a lot earlier on in life than I think most folks have been. And I got to see the side that the pros and cons of it, I got to see the good side.

Hey, look, this was paying for our high school, and then the cons of dad was pretty much always over there fixing something, doing some type of maintenance or having tenant turnover, that type of thing. So from an investment perspective, that always got me thinking.

Looked at the stock market for a while, did some exploration around options as well, and then came across bigger pockets. Got interested in the brrrr concept. My brother and I did a brrrr up in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. That was an enormous learning opportunity.

And lesson learned, it's been successful, it's worked.

But I know that that's not something that I'm going to do going forward, because to your point, Clint, having a w two and then trying to manage a brrrr two or 3 hours away on the weekends and do a lot of the work yourself is just impossible. It's not able to be done. That got me down the turnkey alley a little bit.

Got a couple down in Memphis, Tennessee for a while, sold those at the tail end of COVID and then kind of cycled that money into syndications.

What mainly brought me that direction was I wanted asset class diversification, and I knew that if it was going to be something I was going to be doing, I could only do rentals. I'm not going to be a self storage expert. I'm not going to be a triple net expert or anything like that.

So I would like to leverage other people's expertise and time there as well.

Preston, you bring up such a great point, and Clint and I hammer this home.

We're like broken records when it comes to this, is that in order to be a successful real estate investor, you need a combination of these three things, time, experience, and money. And what you had was money from an it background.

You didn't have the experience and you didn't really have the time, so you went out and you tried to get the experience by leveraging some of your free time, and you discovered that it's a lot harder than it looks to do successfully.

And so that's often where, it's where I discovered syndication, it's where many investors who go down the real estate paths discovered I is, oh, okay. This is what they mean when they say time, experience, and money. And the problem is that without the time, you can't get the experience.

And without the experience, it can become really hard to make money.

And some people are able to slog through it and eventually get to that point where they've built up that systems and maybe they become active investors, you know, like Clint and I are. Or maybe they just go, you know what? I'm going to keep the main thing.

The main thing, which in your cases, you're an it professional, and to keep the main thing, the main thing, and I'm going to leverage other people's expertise with my money. Is that an accurate description of sort of the path you're on?

Yeah, absolutely. I wish I had heard that, you know, like a decade ago. That would save me a lot of drama, I think.

Same here.

Yeah, yeah. It's funny that we hear this same journey over and over.

Now, you did it a lot faster than some people did, but before we expound on that and kind of follow that through, because the idea is like, you want to hear about a journey, really?

Because, yeah, it's important to recap it, but what we really want to do is look at the trajectory and can we time warp as to where you really want to be 510, 15 years from now? And can we take the hard lessons that other people have learned and get you to your destination faster?

But before that, I want to talk to you, Maggie, and tell us a little bit about your background, what you've done. And then, like, this whole real estate thing, is this something that you drug pat into kicking and screaming or.

I have a feeling maybe it was the other way around and tell us about what it was like the conversation the first time it came up, or if you come from a pedigree of that and what the process has been like as you guys learned as a couple together about this.

Yeah, I have a degree in interior design and architecture, so I spent a lot of my career in renovation and remodeling. This investment thing was really Pat's wheelhouse. I don't want to say I was brought along kicking and screaming, but it was.

Oh, yeah, honey, go ahead. Fine. I did enjoy dealing with the Harrisburg house that was being rented out.

I enjoyed going down to Memphis and seeing the houses that we had down there. I mean, I have a really specific knowledge set that meant single family homes and things like that.

I understood how they worked more from a physical standpoint than a money standpoint, but I at least knew if we were walking to a house that was gonna need a lot of work, it probably wasn't worth the money. So that's the expertise that I kind of brought to the table.

But getting into more of the passive investment, that conversation went a little differently.

You know, it was really reeducating me on what the different asset classes were, how we could do this without being landlords and needing to spend every weekend fixing light fixtures and toilets and things like that, and just what the different opportunities were and what that could be for the future of our family.

Trey.

So, because you have that background in design and architecture, I'm assuming that you probably have. You're a good visionary to what you can turn something into, and I don't have that gift. My wife is pretty good at it.

But obviously that's something that. That's your occupation, right? Is that you have a vision as to what you can turn projects into.

Do you think that that background helped you understand the vision that Pat was trying to put together for your family and what you were doing? Because to me, it seems like you're in that real estate realm, right?

You're in that world, and it was probably an easier conversation for you guys to have that than some people have to have when they're bringing it up for the first time.

It was in some ways, and in other ways, it wasn't talking about money and investments and things like that was not something that I was kind of brought up doing. So having the conversation about, oh, we're going to write this really big check, and, like, hopefully it's going to work out.

That was a little harder in terms of the conversation. And also, he was talking about analytical mind, and he can handle large numbers in his head and what is Rois and all of that.

And I didn't understand any of the acronyms.

I had the kind of large picture understanding of what it meant, but the actual day to day or the terms, that was where the big education on my end kind of came in. Did that answer your question?

Yeah. Yeah, it did. And I love the fact that you guys have different sides of this, right?

The analytical side is something that's extremely important, and then, like, the visual side of, is it worth doing this to this house, or is it not worth it? Is the juice worth the squeeze on this individual project? And then somebody else is more like the nuts and bolts on the back end of the numbers.

I think it's important to know thyself. Right.

Recognize what I'm good at, recognize what I'm good at, what I'm not at, whether or not that's being analytical or whether it's driving to Pennsylvania and swinging a hammer on the weekends. Right. What are you good at? What are you not good at? Any property is only as good as the person operating it. Let me ask you this.

A lot of times this happened to be in my marriage as a young married couple. Our background. We had nine single family homes before we relocated to Wilmington and started buying small multifamily, converting them to Airbnbs.

Got out of most of that. I still have 14 Airbnbs and a property management company, but now we exclusively do.

I'm a general partner, but most of what we do is passive investing into nomad deals or other syndication. So that's kind of our track record.

But in terms of, for you, a lot of times early on, as you come up with the next project, especially if it's a burr and it's a single family, it is really easy to get laser focused on the next project. This is the goal. This is the project that we're doing. And sometimes it's hard. You lose sight of the project that's coming after that.

And sometimes if you don't keep that the focus, you can over leverage yourself on the next one property because you're just so focused on getting the next one done that it can steal your ability to scale to where you want it to be. So I'm curious to know, as you were doing this, was it kind of like, let's get in, let's do a property, let's figure it out?

Or had you at the time put a goal together, what you wanted for your marriage in terms of time, location, and financial independence of like, obviously, at some point you probably don't want to be an it professional anymore. Or did this force you to have a conversation as what do we want our lives to look like for our marriage?

For our ability to be location independent or travel? Do you guys have a goal in mind that you're working towards now, or is that something that's constantly evolving and that you guys talk about?

Yeah, we do now. And over the years, it's obviously been refined. It started out very generic, like, hey, do you want to work till you're 75?

No.

Okay.

And that was kind of what really did it for me was when I was working a couple jobs ago, there was a guy literally sitting in front of me at the desk, like the next cubicle in front of me, and he was just all squeezed out of life, and he was just miserable. He's getting ready to retire.

He was talking about how he's got a certain amount of money and how he's going to have to downsize medical expenses and stuff like that if I stay here. That's my future. I can't do that. So then we started to try and get a little bit more proactive there.

And one of the big things in my industry is learning how to fail faster. So that's why we started looking at the burrs and the turnkeys and everything like that.

And when we get one of them under our belt, I would say, all right, I know this is probably as bad as it's going to be, because I'm learning while I'm doing all this stuff as well. But how would this look if I had 20 or 30 of these things?

How many term keys am I going to need at two or $300 a month back then to get w two replacement, plus another 50% for investable income and expenses and emergencies, stuff like that. I actually wrote a Powershell script. Like, I coded it out, like, hey, how many months will it take to buy the next one?

And it spit out a spreadsheet for me. And I was like, oh, I cant do this. This is insane.

Just with the bank selling loans and all the upkeep and school taxes, school district taxes and stuff like that, escrow, if I was going to need 30 or 40, couldn't really do it. So I used those two or three that I had as an example of, all right, these individual deals were a success, but this is not the way.

I know this doesn't scale, this isn't the way. Same thing with the burrs, by nature of it being a one to one relationship. So we got some experience out of that and realized that wasn't the way.

Stock trading, options trading. Yeah, sure. Enormous risk, enormous tax implications, definitely not passive. That's probably not the way.

And that took a lot of your time when you were trying. It was a lot of effort.

Yeah.

So, you know, what is something that, yeah, you sacrifice a little bit of the return upfront, but you get some time, freedom, back and expertise. So we were really finding what didn't work.

I'm not trying to compare myself to Edison at all, but they said he failed to invent the light bulb, however many times similar thing of just trying out different methodologies because you can listen to podcasts and read books, but the questions you ask and the way you feel about something when you actually write a check and actually do it completely different.

Yeah.

And I think in all of these kind of failing forwards, you had a big vision of where you wanted to get to, and I would say I was a little bit more reserved just in making sure that, okay, if we're writing all of these big checks, can we actually afford to do this?

Yeah.

And not eat ramen noodles every night.

We ended up having talks about buckets of money and, you know, okay, if we're going to do this next project, what bucket of money is that coming out of? Is it coming out of our travel money?

Is it coming out of eating out, you know, those type of things and making sure that we're not sacrificing the life we're living now for a potential future and making sure that we're not accidentally double spending the same money, making sure that those buckets stayed separate.

I love that. This is exactly what I'm talking about, like, putting things together. You have different skill sets.

Everybody's looking at the same problem, but you're taking away different perspective, and you have different ideas of what that looks like. But if you're all in the same boat, you're rowing in the same direction. Right. The idea is that you're working towards a common goal.

I love something that you said, Pat, about failing faster. I love that. I've never heard that before. We've coming up on like 70 episodes or something like that. I've never heard that.

It's an it thing.

There it is. That's why I didn't get it.

The technology.

Yeah. Whoo. Right over. Neil's my it guy. It resonates with me, and I'm reflecting back. I'm like, oh, man.

I've done a lot of different things, most of them wrong.

And one of the things that I've learned, I was thinking about the first time that you started talking bad, is that there's this common journey that we see among real estate investors, especially if they start out young. And for those listening to this podcast, I'm sorry, you've probably already heard me say this at least five to ten times over the last six months.

But a lot of times, what we see is if somebody's really young, and a lot of times the wholesaler route will be like somebody just out of the military that's got hustle and they're ready to go, they're a little bit older than somebody getting just out of high school, but they've been around for a couple of years. They're driven. These are motivated people, but they don't have any money.

And one of the journeys that we see, whether it's there or somebody just becomes a real estate investor or real estate agent or whatever it may be, they don't have any money. So they get started as either a real estate agent or a wholesaler, right? And they're trading time for money.

They're hustling, they're putting up the signs, they're making the calls, doing everything. It takes a few months, but they start having a little bit of success.

They sell one deal, they make five grand, ten grand, whatever it may be, and it's just enough to keep them motivated and keep doing it.

So they do that for a period of years, and they find some buyers that are buying these wholesale deals from them, and finally they realize, oh, I'm passing up some good deals. I'm selling these to these flippers, and these flippers are making all this money. I'm going to start doing that. So they're wholesaling deals.

They start selling, they do one or two flips on their own. They bomb the first one or two, just like I did, right? But then the third or fourth, they get one and they get it, right.

And like, okay, supposed to make 30 grand, I made eight. The next time I was supposed to make 40 grand, I made like 16. But the third one I did. Well, those are the ones my wife and I did, right.

So you kind of fast forward. And for me, it was just enough to realize, I don't want to do that. That's not me.

You get your check. That's it. And the day you stop working is the day that you stop getting paid.

So that person starts realizing, oh, I need to keep some rental properties. Which is where you started out. You said, I'm an it professional. I need to keep the main thing. The main thing.

But let's buy rental properties to pay for this. So you start buying rental properties, and a lot of people will waste five to ten years there.

I built nine of them up before I realized each one of those properties is one or two headaches a year.

Every time somebody moves out, I've got thousands of dollars in capital expenditures of things I have to fix, and a whole year worth of cash flow can get wiped out really quickly. I wasn't doing section eight, but it wasn't much better, and I did it for the cash flow. There's very little appreciation on these properties.

So for me, it took nine single family homes before I realized that for me and the goals for my family, that was a failure. You failed a lot faster, and I love that, because the time is more important than anything else.

And the journey typically is that wholesaler or flipper starts keeping single family rentals until they figure out it's a very slow way to get ahead. Eventually they start moving towards small multifamily, then media multifamily.

And a lot of times you realize that if you go a little bit bigger, you can afford to have a manager who's going to take good care of it. Because if you only have a few properties, it's hard to find a property manager who cares about the property or about you.

So there's an economies of scale. Eventually you get up to the point that it's easier to have one medium sized apartment complex than a bunch of single families.

And it makes more sense for them to take the money that they made over the years and invest it into other people's deals.

Instead of making 30, 35% as an active investor and spending all the time doing it, you'd rather make 20% to 22% passively invested into somebody else's deal. And that person is often like the average investor we talk to, I believe is like 55 to 57.

Understanding that when you get started with a passive investment strategy, you really need to give yourself a couple years before that starts paying out in a meaningful way. So that person that discovers it in their mid to late fifties, they're in their sixties before it starts paying out in a meaningful way.

And what you really lost is all that Runway you could have had earlier. If you started years or decades earlier, there's a snowball effect, and it grows and continues to grow over time.

So the idea of time warping, that 25, 30 years of failure, and it may be a success for ten years, but as your goals change, that's going to be end up being a failure for what you're trying to accomplish for your life.

If what you're trying to accomplish is time and location independence, so fast forwarding, failing faster on that, put you guys in a situation where you're lp investors at a very young age. I just said way more than I intended to. I was very lonely.

We're used to it.

Classic Clint.

I don't want to gloss over that because I think it's really important that you did that, especially the fact that you guys did it together as a couple. So now, and one of the things that's tough is, like, when you're investing together and you're married, but you're also partners.

Like, it's always around, it's always part of the conversation, right. On date night, Abby and I talk about real estate a lot of times, and it's like, man, you know, sometimes we need a break from that.

But, Maggie, you mentioned before that money wasn't really something that you thought about it. You guys talked about what about now? Is it part of the conversations that you guys are having and is, are your goals constantly changing?

Yeah, it is. I should probably point out that we started this investment journey before we were married.

So we were living together and we were talking about it before we got married. And I think that helped also, because it showed that, okay, he's doing this separately from me.

I'm seeing that this is working, and we're talking about our future together and how this can be a part of it. So I think that that was also really helpful and it helped kind of again with that Runway. We've been talking about this for five, seven years.

Sure.

But I think the other thing is the number of single family rentals that we were going to need was to break even for where we were then, and realizing that if we wanted to not be living essentially paycheck to paycheck, we were actually going to need more. And I wouldn't say it's every date night, but we do talk a lot more about this.

I mean, every once in a while, he'll walk in and be like, hey, I heard about this deal. And I'm like, okay, tell me the big picture part of it. And, you know, making sure that.

I think the biggest thing now is making sure that the asset classes start to get more diverse, because I think when we got into more of the passive, it was really multifamily properties. An operator, too. Yeah. When we were with one operator and realizing that that's, oh, no, now we're putting too many eggs in one basket.

Well, talk to us about the journey. I mean, you've touched on a little bit the journey of sort of the active road now to the more passive.

And I want to dig in a little bit about how the genesis of the left field investor community happened and your part in it. Patrick?

Yeah, I've told this story. Jim knows.

Jim is the founder and leader of LFI. I found those guys because all the other investment groups that were out there were either owned and run by sponsors.

So enormous conflict of interest there. For me personally, they also cost $10,000 a year, which is predatory in my mind.

But once I got into the left field investors group, it was just a bunch of guys hanging out, men and women just hanging out. And there was no pushing, no salesmanship, nothing like that. It was just a bunch of casual people together who you could talk to about this.

We were able to get financially exposed and vulnerable and talk real numbers with people and not have to worry about being shamed or judged or anything like that. You could ask dumb questions and people would give you smart answers. It's a great combination.

And then how my involvement wrapped up, I made the mistake of volunteering to help Jim out with some cryptocurrency education, and then I just got roped in and that was it for a little.

Bit of background for those who don't know. And we've actually had Jim Pfeiffer and Chad Ackerman have both been on the podcast.

And those are two of the founders of LFI, which is left field investors, along with Steve sue and Ryan Steig and Pat Wills. And they're all kind of the principals and founders of Left Field. And left field started as just a local meetup.

I think it was supposed to be at a brewery or a bar or something like that, like the month before COVID hit. And ultimately when Covid hit, everything got shut down and it was an alternative investing educational forum.

And they ended up just opening up online instead of doing it in person.

Left field investors is the reason it's called left field is like, these are left field investments, right? These are non traditional, not paper assets.

These are what's out there in left field that you can invest in that might give you a better return, right? So that's the name behind it. And they had their first event in the outfield of a baseball stadium, which was really cool.

Got a chance to connect with everybody in person. A couple hundred very intelligent investors there and everybody. Exactly what you mentioned, Pat, is the culture.

Everybody's trying to help each other. Very educational. Then they went on to sponsor the best ever event this past year. Best ever real estate conference, which we sponsor.

We sponsored lFI and the BEc event as well. And then recently, this just happened over the last couple of weeks. Hope you don't mind me bringing it up.

Left field investor was bought by bigger pockets. And I'm going to make an assumption here. I think it's gotten a lot harder for people to find deals over the last few years.

My wife discovered bigger pockets for us. That's how our kind of journey. I did real estate wrong for a lot of years before I understood the power of networking and podcasting.

And my wife came home from being on the road a lot was like, you need to listen to this. I was like, what is this podcast? Something about pockets, like, you're learning how to make dresses. What's going on?

I started listening to it, obviously got hooked from there. But, you know, a lot of us started down that and eventually kind of grew out of that.

I think biggerpockets has done a lot of amazing things for a lot of people. And as deals have gotten harder to find over the last couple of years, I think the value of bigger pockets has gone down.

If you're not actively working on a flip or a duplex or something, and you're not actively investing, the value of that community is probably not the same. If you're actively invested in a deal, there's an unbelievable amount of resources there.

And I think that biggerpocket saw the writing on the wall of it's harder to find deals. There's not as many active investors.

It's pushing more and more people to look to, partner with, professional operators that still know how to operate and find deals in any environment. And they sent out a feeler. Tell me if I'm wrong on this, Pat.

The number I heard was something like they put out an email like, hey, anybody interested in learning about passive investing? And they had something like 20 or 30,000 people sign up for a newsletter. Is that right?

Yeah, that's correct. That blew up my mind too.

Yeah, that's crazy. So as a result, I think they did something very intelligent and they acquired left field investors to be rebranded as passive pockets.

And I think that's a testament to Jim and Chad and you and the hard work that you guys did building that community because you tapped into something that was clearly a need. It's a very inexpensive community to join, or was.

I don't know what it's going to be in the future, but I love the fact that it costs something, right. People have to pay something to be a part of it because it keeps out people that are going to be a little bit non committal.

So that's the way that we connected. I didn't realize how you got involved. There was through volunteering for cryptocurrency. No good deed goes unpunished, right?

Yep. Yep.

So you found that community on your own. How has that pushed things forward for you?

And in terms of the exposure you had to syndication and things like that, how much of your success do you attribute to that community?

Almost all, honestly.

So before left field investors we were solely with that one operator that Maggie referenced and one asset class and it was just because I didnt know anything else existed. We were not accredited at the time so that obviously precluded a lot of opportunities for us.

And just getting into LFI and hearing people talk about self storage, nomad car wash, all types of random stuff that id never would have thought about before. There are some people talking about marinas and RV Parks, not mobile owned parks, but rv parks. Awesome. I didn't even know that was a thing.

And when they all kind of. This is where the analytical mind comes back in.

Getting exposure like that and getting a backlog of videos that I can just binge on second, monitor content while I'm doing work and just hear somebody talk about some different asset class.

The sponge is going to absorb some water a little bit, maybe not everything, but it's a good way to multiply my time and being able to approach those sponsors as a community and say, look, yeah, we might all send in a bunch of different checks, but I'm not just one investor here, we're part of a network and the answers you get are obviously going to be shared with the community, good or bad. So I don't want to see it gives you a bit of a vip treatment, but it kind of sort of does.

You'd probably be able to answer how that is received better than I.

But just getting exposure like that and getting the time of day from sponsors and some type of preferred terms, your reduced minimums, that really, really helped as well. So it's really just drinking from a firehose as soon as I joined the community.

Yeah, for sure. That's, I love that. So I want to put you on the spot a little bit here. First of all, if you don't mind me asking, how old are you guys?

Give me a range if you want to.

I'm 39.

I'm 35.

So you guys are really young to have found a syndication, right? I stumbled into it as an operator along with Neo and our general partners. But you're really young to have found it.

And I think that that Runway gives you a lot of opportunity.

But you know, if you're willing to go on record and you don't have to give me a specific number, but like what are the goals that you guys have put together for your lives as to what you want to accomplish? Like is there a time that you want to walk away from a w two? What do you want to do with your time from there?

Is there a financial goal that you're looking for? Is there a travel goal that you're looking for? Like for the sake of creating a vision? What are you guys working towards?

Sure, ill jump on that one. First. We invest through an LLC, were 50% members and everyone talks about, oh yeah, you have to do these corporate meeting minutes every year.

Its a formality. Were taking that seriously. We actually have basically an investment policy statement and we would have with traditional stocks and thats our meeting.

So well go through it and say, all right, what are our actual goals for the next year? And lets break that down into monetary terms and figure out do we need more appreciation in our investments or do we need more near term cash flow?

Whats the tax treatment of it? Okay, now we can look at what does the existing portfolio have? Are we geographically or asset class or operator unbalanced?

When do some of these deals go full cycle? Are we going to have to worry about recapture and all that type of thing? But it starts with the goal.

So im assuming you guys have heard about that ideal day exercise, expound on it, please?

I think I have, but I'm sure that a lot of our listeners have not.

Yeah, yeah. So it's a brainstorming session. Leave your phones away. We did this on paper and said, forget about money. What do you want to do?

What lifestyle do you want to have? You want to have a primary residence? You want to have a vacation home somewhere? How many vacations do you want to take?

What hobbies do you want to do on a monthly basis? All right, forget about numbers. So just write all that stuff down and go nuts. Okay, we've got that exercise completed.

Now let's circle back and assign some rough numbers to these. They're going to be inaccurate. We're going to highball a little bit, but hey, that's cool.

So, all right, if we want to take a vacation every three months, that's probably three grand a quarter that we need to set aside, depending on, you know, how big and how small the vacation is. And we just kind of reverse engineer that into an average. All right, it's three k a quarter for vacation. That's one k a month.

So now here's our monthly number that we need, and then that goes through and informs the investment decisions, or at least what we try and look for, because there's so many syndications that are out there and so many opportunities. I need the first decision I say to be, no, I need to find a no immediately, otherwise I'm just going to drown in ppms.

So for me, I would love to get out of my it job eventually.

It's going to be tough because that's where our insurance is through, and it pays really well, but it is restrictive in what you can and can't do just in life.

So that is something I would love to do eventually, but it's not on the horizon for me, probably for ten years, realistically, probably on the kind of.

Flip side of that, I left my job at the beginning of August. So thank you.

Yeah, it was partially, I mean, partially because of your w two and knowing that our insurance and things are covered, but it is also because of the passive stuff, just knowing that our money is growing and working for us.

And, you know, I'm trying to take, I mean, the last couple of weeks, I've really tried to sit and do that ideal day of, what does my day look like if I don't have the structure of having to get up and go to a nine to five? What things were falling through the cracks that would make our life better if I had the time and the energy to be able to put towards that.

Not to throw you out of the bus, but you said swimming bastards.

Oh, yeah. I was a competitive swimmer for 14 years, all through college.

And, yeah, I've been wanting to get back in the pool, and that's just something that hasn't been a high priority. It's also very difficult to do if you're trying to join kind of a master of swimming program where they tend to have set practice times.

And it's just not something I thought I would be able to do again. And now I have the time and the opportunity.

Yeah.

You know, in Tim Ferriss book for our work week, he does sort of a similar exercise, which is sort of like remove money from the equation. What do you want to do with your day?

And he even sort of talks about some of the challenges around that is like, if you suddenly become financially independent at a young age and your friends and your family are not financially independent, it can be kind of isolating. I love this, where he talks about thinking about those things that you want to do and then putting a cost associated with them, a monthly cost.

And then he talks about sort of trying to find the asset that's going to pay for that particular thing. And I've had this thought as well sometimes.

Like, all right, I'm not going to pay off my mortgage on my primary residence because I have a 3% interest rate. I mean, it's absurd. I'll never get that again.

But if I had a sudden windfall of money that would allow me to completely pay that off, would I do that?

I think no, what I would do is I'd try to put it into an investment that's going to pay a return, that's going to pay my mortgage, plus, because then it never goes away.

Have you guys used that thought process at all when you think, okay, we want this $3,000 a quarter vacation, so now we need an asset that's going to pay us $1,000 a month in order to be able to afford that. Is that sort of the thought process you're going through?

Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. We really like the perpetual ownership model as well. That's one of the things that attracted us to best with nomade, another firm.

But, yeah, I mean, I like the hunt for deals in general, but being time bound for it when you're going to have a capital event and then you're kicked out and that money is just idle, it puts a lot more pressure on than, I think, the passive lifestyle I would like to pursue, at least in part.

I know, it's unavoidable to an extent, but, yeah, the decisions, the lifestyle decisions that we're talking about definitely inform the investment decisions to an extent. Yeah, I really like that model.

Yeah, it's funny. My wife and I have that conversation all the time.

It's like, we'll get the money that we need to do something, and I always want to turn and invest it.

And I'm like, yeah, we could do that or we could invest it over here and that could pay for, you get to the point, like, I don't want to pay a mortgage. I want to have an investment that pays my mortgage. I don't want to buy a new truck. I want this. That buys a new truck. It's a mental. You have that.

And now we're to the point, I'm 41, my wife is 40. And it's like we're having the conversation of like, I'm always building towards the future.

And at this point she's like, yeah, I get that, but what future are we building towards? At some point, we have to start spending money. We have to start enjoying our life. We have to do start, have to travel.

And I think there's a balance, right? Most people don't even get started with the front.

It's like, you know, how much money can I make or how much money can I borrow to get this thing that I want or do this vacation that I want?

And the shift is like, how much money can we invest so that its kicking off this much, so that we can spend it on this experience or this item that we want? And then eventually youre just outpacing that. Its like, how much can we invest in general to make more so that we can reinvest it?

Because you realize that life is not about things. Its about memories and experiences and things like that. But even then, there is a balance thats like, listen, were all here for a blink of an eye.

Lets enjoy it as well.

Make sure that the money only means something if you're using it to turn it into memories of things that you've done with people that you love in beautiful places.

Yeah, I don't know if you caught Maggie giving me the stink eye a little bit, but boy, that resonated. I have overcorrected on your side of the fence there, Clint. With every $10 I save, that's another 0.01 of acidication.

So why are we going out to eat dinner and stuff like that?

That $200 is we have food at home, more storage.

It's funny, we had a similar conversation like last night or yesterday, where it was. We have all this money in investments. It's there to be used. If we don't use it, why is it there?

And being able to make sure that it's working for us rather than us working to put the money into investments? Because then you're stuck back in the exact same cycle of working for a paycheck. It's just a paycheck from a different plate.

I think it's a testament to the mentality that you guys have built for yourselves. You've been talking about this since before you got married and realize that the conversation we're having is.

It is just as hard to talk to some people these days and get them to save any money at all or to stop living off credit cards. It is the same conversation is just as difficult.

And then the other side of the coin is someone that has trained themselves to save and to invest and to plan for the future. Sometimes it feels like you're pulling that investment out of their cold white fingers to get them to spend it on something.

But wouldn't you rather be on that side? Like, it's easier to learn how to loosen up and to spend that on your family and on experiences than it is for the people that are.

Can't save anything. They make those financial decisions that as soon as they have it, they have to spin it and it's burning a hole in their pocket.

I think it's easier to learn how to loosen up a little bit and to enjoy that than to start later in life and try to have to teach yourself how to save or how to dig yourself out of a financial hole. So pat yourselves on the back. It's the same conversation I'm having in my marriage. And no, it's the same conversation Neil's having in his marriage.

And it comes with part of the territory is that I grew up poor, I'm one of six kids, and it's like, I know I'm not going to have anything unless I get it for myself, but within reason. Like, you have to realize that, like, look, I can't take it with me. There's got to be a balance there.

And, you know, that's a game that we're all playing. But the important thing is that it is a conversation we're having in our marriages, and it's important. So.

All right, well, listen, I think that'll probably wrap it up from here. I want to say thank you. I've enjoyed the chance to get to know both of you guys.

And like you mentioned, you guys are invested with us, so we've navigated that process together. Pat, I've had the joy of watching what you guys have done with left field.

I look forward to continue to support you guys any way that we can and seeing how that's growing to.

But if anybody is curious about connecting with you guys, specifically through left field investor or whatever's coming next, or want to hear more about your journey, is there any way that they might be able to do that?

Yeah, hit me up on LinkedIn Patrick Wills. I can get you an email address, put in the show notes as well. Hit me up on leftfieldinvestors.com dot. Love talking about this stuff.

That sounded great. Well, thank you. Thank you, Maggie. Appreciate your time as well. Appreciate the two of you guys coming on together as a couple.

And yeah, let's do it again a year or two down in the future and let's see how some of those goals have changed. Alright, thanks guys. Appreciate it. Thanks a lot.

Thanks for having us.

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