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and welcome. This is Financial Survival Network. I'm your host, Carrie Letts.
Well, a lot of people have written a lot of books about how
to become wealthy, how to make wealth, but you're about to hear about
one right now. It was rated as one of the top ten personal finance
books or twenty twenty two by the distinguished The Bank Rate, which is an
interesting site you should take a look at when you have a chance. Number
one Amazon best selling off her Harley Holli more Fhew is with us now and
Ali. So Simple Wealth kind of sums it up. What is simple wealth
and how do I get some? Yeah? Well, Simple Wealth is is
a book about how to reach early financial independence while creating personal wealth along the
way. So you know, my own experience with wealth buildings started in my
twenties where I was a high earner and I realized I was living paycheck to
paycheck, and I had a lot of debt, and I was kind of
doing mental accounting at the time. And we had three back to back snowstorms
in Colorado where I live, and at the time, I drove a Honda
Chord and my office was forty miles from my house, and and I realized
if I went to work that day that I'd be risking my life. And
so I thought, through, you know, what am I doing, Like
what am I doing in life? I'm going to risk my life to go
to a job so that I can pay my bill. And in the back
of my mind, I'm thinking, I know, I have a lot of
credit card debt. There's always more month than money. And I just had
this anxiety. It was really like I had financial anxiety, even though I
come from a family where we talked about money at the dinner table. My
dad's an entrepreneur, my grandfather was an entrepreneur. My mom's a real estate
investor, her parents were real estate investors, and so I understood money from
a young age. But nonetheless I found myself living in this, you know,
sort of state of just financial anxiety and not really knowing what to do,
and so I did make it to work that day, made it home
safe and sound, got out my credit card statements, looked at my balances
for the first time in a very long time, and realized I had sixty
seven thousand dollars of credit card debt. Okay, So next day, call
my financial advisor, explained the situation, and then the first question he asked
me, how much more money do you want to invest? And this was
my AHA moment. Carry this is where this is when I realized that there
was a big gap between what a financial advisor he was helping me doing,
which is invest money that I already had, and what I really needed help
with, which is which was to create more money to invest and to get
to a point in life where I had more freedom in choices where I wasn't
working sixteen seventy hours a week and one day work could be a choice for
me, like I could see the end of the tunnel. And so that's
where it began. You know, I just created a system. I applied
it to my personal finances. Three years later, totally debt free, kept
on going money in the bank, became financially independent in my thirties, and
today I have eleven streams of income, and that's what I'd do. I'm
a financial coach. I help other people reach early financial independence and just get
their money sorted so they feel awesome when they think about money. Yeah,
well that's that's a noteworthy accomplishment. So how did you do it? Obviously
you had an epiphany that it wasn't worth the forty mile drive through hazard is
terrain just so you could make your credit card payment, right, Yeah,
yeah, I mean it started with okay, let's actually look at the numbers.
You know, what's my cash flow, what do I have coming in,
what do I have going out? And what do I have left over
to put to its highed and best use. So I call that awareness.
You know, I always say awareness is the seed of transformation. So if
you don't like where you are, let's look at where you are right now,
without any judgment, and let's just get some information. And for me,
it was like, okay, I'm pretty much paycheck to paycheck, but
I've got maybe one hundred bucks to do something with. How can I increase
I call it your impact number? How can I increase my monthly impact numbers?
So I've gotten more money to play with. So that was the first
thing I did, and for a couple of years it was about you know,
eliminating expenses that I didn't really need or reducing expenses. But then I
realized, you know, I can get to financial independence a lot faster if
I increase my income. So I created my first additional stream of income.
In two thousand and five. I was, you know, working my full
time job, but I added I realized that I was watching about five hours
a week of TV, and I thought, okay, well what if I
replace this was something that was income producing? So I like to think about
income producing activity. So I got connected with a company that I really liked
and started sharing the products of this company and making an extra three to five
hundred bucks a month. And that was great. But then the recession happened
and I lost my job. That was in two thousand and nine. So
here I am, you know, back to square one. I fell back
on that part time income at the time, Thank god, I had some
kind of income coming in. I increased that income and then I just started
thinking about what are some other things that I can do with my extra money.
Eventually got another full time job, and that's when I got really serious
about investing in real estate, and that was my first big investment, and
that's been really one of the keys to my financial success has been investing real
estate, cash flowing real estate, not fix and flips, not buy and
hoole, but cash flowing properties. What kind of properties you look for,
Holly, Well, I've got single family properties, so you know, monthly
rent exceeds monthly expenses. And right now, the even with the current state
of the real estate markets around the country and higher rates, can you still
find these properties you're looking to add them to your portfolio. Well, at
this point, I'm I'm just hanging onto the assets that I have, and
I'm more interested in creating, like scaling business. So my company is called
Financial Impacts. So just like I have multiple streams of income and my personal
finances, my focus is really and my energy and my excitement is really about
creating businesses that also have multiple revenue streams within them. So I'm not actively
buying properties anymore. Plus, I live in Colorado, which is a pretty
expensive real estate market to begin with. So I have the properties that I
have, I'm very happy with them. I take really good care of them.
I also managed them myself. That's not for everyone, but that's something
that I've chosen to too. Tennants and toilets, preach my friend, But
that's the thing. Yes, Yeah, So you buy properties local or you
agnostic as far as location goes. What do you look for in a property?
I look for properties that are in areas where there are jobs. So
we're talking you know, universities, hospitals, close to a metro area,
and generally a property that's got at least three bedrooms, two bathrooms, one
that's you know, easy to turn. One of my properties actually is a
short term rental and I've been doing that for about four years and that's been
really interesting. It's it's very high touch. It's a lot of work.
You know, people ask me all the time, you know, should I
invest in a property for short term rental? And it's like, you know,
if you've got a great team, a great cleaner, and you know
you want to interface with people constantly, yes, But if you're trying to
be a silent real estate investor, that's not that's not the right path.
Yeah. The cleaning up is the weakest link in short term rentals from everyone
I've heard from. I've got a friend here in Florida. I've been like
Port Saint Lucy in that area and tried to find numerous cleaning people. Pays
them double what they can make cleaning houses, right, but they have to
do it, you know, every two three days, a deep clean because
you can't have any crud in your short term rental because people expect it to
be like a hotel room, right, and they're paying for it. And
that is the hardest thing to fight. How do you incentivize somebody to be
a decent cleaner and to be thorough. I haven't heard a good answer to
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network, the information you need to drop now more than ever. I call
it paying the fat tax. So if I want to have a great result,
then I'd have to be willing to pay for it. Okay, so
you've got to Yeah, I totally get what you're saying there. And as
you can find that person, well, if you're making more money cleaning places
for you, then they could be in the open market to doing an office
job or whatever. Maybe that's the way to go. So you like a
long term do you like for a short term vacation rental market? Obviously Colorado
you've got ski season in the winter and you've got the outdoor sport activities in
the summer, so it's more of a year round kind of thing. Can't
do that everywhere now, I think that's really key, and thank you for
bringing that up and for anyone who's listening who has an interest in this.
You know, for a year round short term rental to have consistent months,
and you have to remember this as a seasonal business. You know, real
estate a sort of seasonal anyway, if it's short term or medium term.
But you do need to be in an area where people are actively traveling into
for various reasons. You know, my house happens to be in a town
that's just outside of Boulder, Colorado, which you know, it's not a
town that anyone's going to say, hey, I'm going to go visit this
town, but because it's so close to Boulder, in Denver and Fort Collins,
and it has easy access to the mountains, and you know, there's
tons of weddings that are happening and lots of races that come into town,
so you know, the place does stay booked. But this year, actually
in twenty twenty two, has been the slowest short term rental market that I've
experienced since twenty eighteens. It's been going on five years that I've been doing
short term rentals. Yes, that's economic related here it so twenty twenty two
was the best year yet with this one short term rental rolled into twenty twenty
three and just crickets and I have a lot of friends and my family's also
in the real estate business, both short term and long term rentals, and
that's been the consensus across the board is that most people short term rentals bookings
have dropped in twenty twenty three. And I have to ask myself did this
have something to do with the massive amount of money that hit the market last
year in the form of EIDL loans etc. To you know, get people
through the pandemic, And now that stuff is drying up, student loans are
coming back. There's just there's a lot of I think trickling down from the
pandemic that still hap and still impacted people's personal finances, which impacts their ability
to travel and spend on travel. Hey, a very close friend of the
show is a bought a large property in Canada near the oil field where there's
shortage of worker housing and rehabbed it. An amazing job on it and just
about ready to start cash flowing. In that case, it's a highly specialized
thing. It's a year round market. You know, these oil workers come
in, they're on a on for four weeks, off for two weeks,
or crazy schedules like that. So in that case, different types. So
there's a lot of ways to cash in on the short term rental phrase Airbnb,
the RBO, obvious obvious ones, but even more so, there are
these little niche markets here that maybe you never thought of. For sure.
You know, traveling nurses are always looking for months to months or three months,
you know, rentals, and that could be really beneficial for someone who
you know. The downside and my experience of being a long term rental property
manager is that you know, people get into the property and a lot of
times because I don't have eyes on it because let's say it's a year lease
or two year lease, by the time I get in there, there's stuff
that that I didn't know that had, you know, maybe there was a
slow water leak or something that I just didn't get to look at to repair.
And so what I like about short term rentals that I get to see
the property every time someone checks out, and if a repair needed, I
can do that. So the property does stay in better condition, but it
is a lot more maintenance in time. Okay, so we talked about real
estate, what other avenues to building wealth cash fload. Do you see out
there that you think are the trend is a favor? Yeah, I mean
I think for anyone who's looking to create personal wealth, it does come down
to two things. It's it's positive cash flow and positive net worth. And
I feel like positive cash flow is where the game begins. So, you
know, if you can create just another stream of income to maybe make the
car payment like it was for me, or to support the mortgage every month,
and whether that's MLM, multi level marketing or direct sales, that's a
plug in play system. There are a lot of great companies out there.
That was my first additional stream of income. Again is what works for me,
what I like to spend my time, energy, resources doing is not
going to be the same thing for everyone else. And so when I'm working
with client as a financial coach, my first question is, you know,
what's your definition of financial success? What are your core values? What do
you want to spend your time doing? Because some people want to be out
there hustling, and a lot of people don't. They want to come home,
put their feet up, play with their kids, whatever, And you
know, then we're looking at a different you know, monthly cash flow.
Maybe that's dividend stock investing. And of course I'm not an accredit I'm not
a financial advisor, so I'm I'm sort of prohibited with my accreditation, which
i'm an accredited financial counselor from telling people where to put their money in the
market. I'm not the person that's going to help build portfolios. But definitely
when I'm looking at my different streams of income. And that was how when
I was in my twenties and my financial advisors asking me, well, how
much more money do you want to invest? It's like, well, what
if I save my financial independence number, which is over three million dollars,
because that's just the kind of lifestyle I like to live. You know,
we all like a different kind of lifestyle. But if I want to save
that and I get to age, say sixty seven, and I'm ready to
quit working at that point, we have another recession of two thousand and eight
or pandemic and my three mill goes down to two, well, I'm not
going to be very happy. And so that's why when I think about other
income streams, it's like, what can give me a monthly cash flow,
whether that's MLN, starting a a side business. Maybe you create a course,
maybe write a book, maybe you write a song. Then of course
there are the things that come with selling the things that you've created. You
know, because I hear a lot of people say, Holly, I want
residual income. How do I do that? I want it right now?
Well, we need type capital or energy to create residual income. And that's
the truth of it. And so what are you willing to show up for?
You know, what are you willing to show up for for a period
of time, whether it's building the e course so that you don't have to
show up as much down the road, but it still does take some degree
of marketing and outreach, endlist building, etc. All right, I think
we got a good handle on this, so simple wealth. That's the book.
I guess we find it on Amazon and wherever fine books used to be
sold, and hey, wish you the best on it. People want to
find out more about you, connect with you on the web and and you
know, see what you're all about. How do you do that? Financial
impact dot com great site, financial impact dot com. There's a link to
it in the show notes. This interview on Financial Survival Network dot dot com
just click the link you'll get right there. While you're there, take a
look at the newsletter. Sign up for it. You'll get it weekly.
Great but taking a little hiatus from it, but it's going out today.
Ali really appreciate your stopping by, and hey, we'll talk to you again
soon. Thanks, carry it's been a pleasure. Thanks for listening to carry
Less. Financial Survival Network your solution to today's trying times. For the latest,
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