Clint Coons, Esq. speaks with Kenji and Letizia Alto, who are both MDs and founders of Semi-Retired MD. They share their journey from being high-income physicians to achieving financial freedom through real estate investing. The episode delves into the mindset shifts required to excel in the property market, overcoming common obstacles, and utilizing strategic tax benefits. The couple also introduces their new fable-like book, contrasting the financial paths of two couples. You’ll hear about building a strong investment team, identifying hidden equity, and leveraging techniques like cash-out refinancing and 1031 exchanges to maximize returns and accelerate the journey toward financial independence.
Highlights/Topics:
- Kenji and Leti’s journey from physicians to real estate investors
- Mindset shifts essential for real estate success and tax reduction
- Introduction to Kenji and Leti’s book
- Overcoming fears and hurdles in out-of-state multifamily investments
- Building a strong team for informed decision-making in real estate
- Hidden equity and trusting instincts for better returns
- Real estate for significant tax benefits and wealth growth
- Profiting from real estate through various streams like cash flow
- “Lazy equity” via cash-out refinancing and 1031 exchanges
- Fast FIRE concept for accelerated financial independence
- Resources for high-income earners
Resources:
Tax and Asset Protection Events
Full Episode Transcript:
Clint: Welcome, everyone. Hi, it’s Clint Coons here with Anderson Business Advisors.
I’ve got a really great podcast in store for us today. I am bringing on two of my favorite clients. They’re physicians. I’ve been working with them for many years, and I’ve just watched their real estate investing explode, not only the real estate investing side but the business.
What they’ve taken from this is they’ve developed the mindset. They’ve figured out what it takes to actually go out there and start investing in real estate, looking at all the options and getting past many of those barriers that many people face.
Now, they are physicians and typically speak to physicians, but the concepts of what they’re teaching speaks to everyone. If you’re just starting in real estate and you’re wondering how you get started in real estate, I think these are two of the experts when it comes to thinking about the mindset and understanding those challenges and how to move past them.
They have a brand-new book that they’ve just released, and we’re going to get into that. We’re going to talk about it. We’re going to teach you how you can get a hold of it. We’re going to bring on Kenji and Leti of Semi-Retired MD.
Hey, guys, thanks for joining me.
Letizia: Hey, Clint. We’re so excited to be here with you today.
Clint: Thanks. Why don’t we start off where you guys are at right now?
Letizia: We are in Puerto Rico. We moved here a couple of years ago and have the beautiful winter sun here. It’s really an incredible place to be and that 4% tax.
Kenji: We don’t see the snow.
Clint: Alright. That just goes to what we’re going to be talking about. You’ve really figured out that you can invest in real estate, but there are so many other angles to it on how you can maximize your profit and how to reduce your taxes.
You’re those people that you hear about all the time saying, hey, we’re just picking up. We’re moving to Costa Rica, and we’re going to lower our taxes down to 4%. A lot of people like to do that, but they don’t know how to get there. I’m hoping we can get into some of that today, and you can explain what that’s like for someone who’s considering that.
But before we move into that, Life on Your Terms, you just released it. What inspired you to write the book?
Letizia: Kenji and I are both physicians, as you alluded to. When we started this journey ourselves, it was all about creating this other source of income that would free us from having to work in medicine and getting to work in medicine by choice.
Over the years, we’ve run across a lot of physicians but also high-income earners who feel stuck in their jobs and don’t really see the path of how to get out.
What we wanted to do was show a really easy-to-consume kind of fable, actually. It’s a fable of two couples. One couple works and also does real estate investing on the side, and the other couple gets stuck in this cycle that I think a lot of us do as high-income earners where they’re buying the fancy houses, buying the things, and stocking away money in the stock market and in their retirement accounts, but it’s not money they can actually use, so they spend their whole life trading their time for money and working.
We wanted to show people how they could use real estate investing in a very tangible, easy-to-read format, and they could just see the pathway.
We wrote this across multiple years of following these two couples. You see the couple that invests in real estate and goes through a lot of the challenges that we see in real estate and how they deal with it and their mindset. It just wanted to provide a very clear path of how to do it for people who are looking to do it themselves.
Clint: That’s really evident when you read the book about those challenges because a lot of people face those. It’s about getting past those barriers and how you’re able to do that. I saw that come through a lot.
When you brought up having the two different couples and their experience, you leaned a little bit on the Rich Dad’s Cashflow Quadrant model inside there. You talk about this, but you do it in a different way.
That other book that I’ve read in the past just didn’t really seem to resonate with me because it didn’t have those journeys, the way you’ve described it from a fable standpoint. I really liked that back and forth to really show people when you’re out there and you start now, trading time for money long term, the impact, what that’s going to be like for you, and then making that shift.
The hardest thing about it, of course, is always the fear of doing something that you haven’t done before, to get out of your comfort zone and realize there’s a better way. Just like the two of you have done with your careers and investing.
You mentioned that you’re both physicians. Do you practice anymore?
Letizia: We don’t. Since 2020, we have not practiced in the hospital, but we still feel like we’re serving in a really beautiful way by helping others be able to create this source of income and enjoy medicine again.
Clint: Yeah, but the thing that you can draw inspiration from is you spent all this time. You made a major investment to become a doctor, and then you walked away from it, so to speak, to realize that, hey, that wasn’t the best decision for us.
Where do you think you would be today if you had the information in your book well over 15 years ago? Do you think you would have been a doctor?
Letizia: I think I would have. Kenji can speak for himself, but I don’t regret it at all. I loved being a doctor.
Actually, our intention was never to leave medicine. Our intention was to create this other source of income and work in medicine on our terms, which is what we did for many years.
We achieved financial freedom after three years and stayed working in medicine although Kenji cut back for real estate professional status, which I’m sure we’re going to talk about a little bit.
The reason that I ultimately decided to leave medicine, which was a tough decision, was because Semi-Retired MD, our course business had grown so large that I had six employees. It was during COVID, and I was pregnant. This was before the vaccine, so I was going to work financially free. I knew I didn’t have to be there, was pregnant, and was treating COVID patients. We were both hospitalists.
I was in the middle of things, trying to deal with six employees. I realized this was not what we had signed up for and something had to go, and so it ultimately came down to what was more fulfilling for me. That was serving our people at Semi-Retired.
Kenji: I agree. I’ve always viewed real estate as something that you can do on the side. It was never meant to replace medicine. We’re already always intending to continue to practice and invest in real estate.
The beauty of real estate is it allows you to earn money a lot more efficiently because you’re able to reduce your taxes. You can keep more of what you earn. You can build your wealth a lot faster that way. As Leti said, the thing that led us to really leave was because we had this other thing.
Letizia: There’s other business.
Kenji: A business that we had to run with all these employees and all these people depending on us. We also had a greater mission, and we could actually touch many more lives. We can have a greater impact through this business.
That’s what we really wanted. We love taking care of patients, but we also have this broader mission of helping our colleagues and other high-income earners who are burnt out, are suffering, and are looking for another way to earn income so they can ultimately live life on their own terms.
Clint: That goes to the mindset. In the book, you do talk about mindset and the importance of that. Can you share with us how changing your mindset was pivotal in your success and where you are today?
Kenji: Mindset is one of these things where I think when people hear the word, they go, just show me the strategies or show me what I need to do.
What they don’t realize is that anything new is going to generate fear anytime you do something like real estate. It doesn’t have to be real estate, it could be business. Whatever it is, you’re going to encounter some challenges. You’re going to encounter some curveballs.
When that happens, you realize, wait a second, that mindset is so critical to keep you going because a lot of people in those situations want to quit. If you’re going to be successful, you can’t reach a point where you feel like you are going to quit. You have to keep going.
We teach our kids this all the time. They encounter a thing, and they’re learning every day. They’re encountering new things every day, and there are many times when they just want to quit, so we have to encourage them. We have to also remind ourselves that when we’re in that situation like our kids are, we need to keep going.
Letizia: Absolutely. The most important thing in our real estate success has been our mindsets. There were so many challenges we’ve had with sellers coming last minute to the table and saying, hey, I’m not going to sell this property. We had actually house hacked and had a squatter in there, which we included in the book.
So many challenges that could have made us quit, but we just kept going because we had such a vision of where we were going, and what we were building for our family and our future is such a strong why. We didn’t get derailed because we could turn around those failures or those challenges as opportunities to grow.
Clint: When you’re thinking about real estate and put it in that context, what are some of those challenges that you find—as you talked about in the book—that people typically run into? How do they have to work through those?
If you’re getting started, it’s a whole another area. You know how to do what you do as a physician, but if somebody tells you, hey, you need to start investing in real estate because it can produce passive income, you can live in Puerto Rico, and you can live the life you want, this seems so complicated. How do you get past those challenges?
Letizia: One challenge we see people get very hooked upon, in the beginning, is choosing a market. That is one of the most challenging for people, especially people who are starting to wrap their minds around investing out of state because a lot of our community does invest out of state.
A lot of our community lives in California and New York, and they’re deciding to invest in multifamily that potentially are thousands of miles away. They’re choosing a market where maybe they’ve used to live, maybe they have visited once, or maybe they have family, and they’re just freaked out because they don’t feel like they know enough about that market.
There’s a lot of fear that comes up with market choice, for example, among many things. For people who have bought their first property, they’re going to be fearful about running a rehab remotely. That’ll be another one.
But really, the key starts with believing you can do it. Oftentimes, that comes from having examples of people who have successfully done it around you. When we first started out, we didn’t know any doctors investing in real estate. But now, there are so many people from our community who are doctors and high-income earners doing this.
If you can just see one example of what’s possible for somebody else, that’s when people start to realize, you know what, I can do this too, and start to move beyond analysis paralysis, which is where a lot of people get stuck making decisions. Ultimately, decisions are what move you forward. If you don’t make a decision, you’re not going to be able to build a portfolio. You have to make decisions along the way.
Clint: Correct. We talked about the Atlanta purchase in the book. What I got from that was that the characters had built a team. This comes true that you need to have a team around you to help support you going forward. Could you speak to the team concept of what you started looking for and the challenges you faced when you started your investing?
Kenji: When it comes to the team, that is the key to getting over some of that fear of investing remotely, or let’s say, overseeing a rehab, like Leti said, from a long distance. It’s the relationships that you build with them.
What happens is we can say team all day long, but at the end of the day, they don’t realize that if you have a really good-quality relationship, you can build some amazing relationships with team members. Some of the team members that we have are people that we’re actually really close to.
When you develop that type of trusting relationship, then it’s very easy to see that you can rely on them. You can count on them to show up and not steal your money. These are some of the fears that are going through people’s heads, but as you start to go through the process of building the team, you start to realize, okay, I can build these relationships too. I can build these trusting relationships. When you’re just talking about the theoretical and you just say build your team, people aren’t thinking through or even seeing that they can build these types of trusting relationships.
Letizia: I just want to add for the newer investors who are listening to this podcast. One of the things that we didn’t get initially but we now definitely make part of our course and what we do in our community is have people build their entire team before they start putting in offers because there’s nothing like getting an offer under contract, being able to have the inspector, property manager, contractor, or agent there, and being able to ask the property manager, what am I going to be able to rent this for?
The contractors are giving you a bid, and you say to the property manager, if I make these changes that the contractor is saying I should make, how much am I going to be able to rent it for then? And then you have your agent there thinking about, what would I be able to sell this property for down the road if I make these changes and increase rents?
Having the whole team there, you triangulate the data because you have multiple opinions. I think what new investors think is they’re on their own, but it’s not the case. You have a whole team around you, and you can get multiple opinions.
What we often tell people in our community when they’re not sure, let’s say they have one team member saying one thing and one team member saying another thing, they’re not sure which is the right answer, and they’ve gone and looked at the data themselves. They can get another person to weigh in. They have multiple data points, and then they get that certainty because what you’re lacking as a new investor is certainty, but you have the ability to be able to get that with a combination of your team, and of course, understanding how to run the numbers yourself.
Clint: What you’re talking about there is a team approach, but in the book—it was Jay and Maya, I believe—they ran into that issue where they found a property, but you talked about this term about hidden equity or hidden value. Your team members may not be up on it, they might be down on it or don’t see it the same way you do.
If you can expand upon that because I’ve worked with team members before in my own investing, and sometimes they just don’t see the hidden potential. How do you talk about that aspect of finding the hidden potential, that hidden cash flow, or that hidden value? How do you train yourself to recognize that?
Kenji: That is one of the keys to success. When people are looking at, let’s say, Redfin listings, what we get all the time is they say, I can’t find any deals. What we typically say is, well, a big part of it is you’re not seeing that hidden value or hidden opportunity. A lot of it turns out to be pattern recognition. You’re recognizing patterns of opportunity that other people are missing.
For example, there may be a garage that you could take part of and maybe add a bathroom to it. It doesn’t work for every garage, but there are certain homes that are developed in a certain way where there’s extra room in the back of the garage where you can build a bathroom and the plumbing is all there. That’s an example of something that on the surface, you’re not going to see, but when you start to recognize these types of patterns, then you will be able to spot this hidden value. Again, it’s hidden because it’s not obvious to the person who is just casually looking or somebody who is not trained to look for it.
Letizia: Clint, you were saying what happens when you disagree with your team members. I can tell you very early on, we read a book, and it had a section on how to rent garages separate from the units. It had this whole formula. We’re like, oh, we’re doing this.
We found our first property. It was a duplex that we bought together with a separate garage down in Auburn, Washington. It had this separate, detached garage, and we’re like, okay, we’re going to take the door off, put this roll down, and close up all the windows. We did the whole thing on the book, and we’re like, okay, we’re going to rent it, property manager. They’re like, no, nobody rents garages.
Kenji: We wrote a lease agreement.
Letizia: We’re like, no, we’re renting this garage. We found a lease agreement and rented a separate electrical. We’re like, the book says we can do it, so we’re going to do it. We rented it for $250 a month. That was huge. It added so much value to that property. That was a property we bought for $174,000 or something, and we sold for $ 416,000 maybe four years later. Part of that was the garage itself and that extra income.
As an investor, you have to trust yourself sometimes. Sometimes, your team members will have different opinions, but you can go try things. We were just talking to one of our students who ended up pricing a unit $300 more than their property manager was telling them that they should, and they rented it. What we had said to them is, well, if you put it out there and there’s no interest, you can always adjust a week or two from now.
Sometimes, you got to trust yourself and just try things, and you can always adjust. Failures are just learning opportunities. If you see it that way, you’re going to get better with time.
Clint: I would agree with you. I remember when I started investing down in Vegas in a certain area and we started buying properties, I wasn’t sure what we could get for rent, so that was hampering our ability to purchase because we wanted them to cash flow at a certain rate. I’d throw up ads on Craigslist, take a property, say this is available for rent for $1800, and see how many calls I got on it. I didn’t own it yet. I’d say, oh, it’s not available yet, and then I’d hang up like, oh, there’s plenty of interest here. We want to invest in this area.
I would agree with you. What we were being told was completely opposite. If I followed their advice, I wouldn’t have bought those properties because the people that we were working with on that market didn’t think that we could get the rents we wanted from them.
In order to gain that experience though, you talked about reading a book. Your book is phenomenal, and I would encourage everyone. We’ll have a link to get this book on Amazon. But that aside, what are some of those areas in which someone would be exploring if they want to look for more value and appraise things from a different mindset?
Letizia: I don’t know that there are many books that we’ve ever read that have talked about hidden value and that creativity. I must say we’ve seen so many forms of hidden value. There’s the typical stuff that people think about like adding an extra bedroom, or if you have a large multifamily, charging for parking, but we’ve seen some wild stuff.
For example, we recently had a student who bought a short-term rental. It was listed for sale as a four-bedroom. It was on septic, and it was actually six bedrooms, but it could only be approved and listed for four because that’s what the septic was approved for. During due diligence, they went and looked into the cost of connecting to the city sewer. They could actually do that, and then it would make it a six-bedroom. That’s already forced appreciation that you would just never imagine.
We have another student who noticed that oftentimes real estate agents would leave the mother-in-law unit off of the listing and not count the bedrooms and bathrooms. He started looking in his community for 4-bedroom, 2–3-bathroom units with a mother-in-law in the Britain section, so he’d actually Google it. When he found that pattern, he was able to make them into a four-bedroom, two-bath on both sides. He was able to force a ton of appreciation, and he was able to add a different tenant type. He found an oil and gas corporate company that wanted to rent for their tenants, and then all of a sudden his cash and cash was over 30%.
There are so many different ways to force appreciation, not only by changing the building but also by getting different tenant types. You can bring in so much more cash flow. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen a book that contains all that although we definitely tried to include a lot of those patterns in our book.
Kenji: You’re right. I haven’t really seen a lot of sources of that. That’s why I think we do put a lot of those examples in our course. Also, we have an annual virtual summit that we do where we highlight stories of students who have gone out and done some amazing things. A lot of it is centered around identifying that hidden value and tapping into it. That’s why we chose the stories because we learn. Every time we interview somebody, we learn about all these new patterns that other people can then tap into.
Clint: It just accelerates the entire process for somebody when they have that type of community and those types of coaches like what you provide to help them go from zero to 50 rather than just inching along slowly. Because at the end of the day, people become dispirited if they don’t see that progress quickly enough. You need people around you to keep pushing you and to keep giving you that confidence.
I think you do a phenomenal job at doing that—because I work with a lot of your clients—and helping them understand what real estate can provide to them and their families. One of the interesting things I read in the book is that you talk about cash flow, but you also say you evaluate things based on tax savings. Maybe you could talk a little bit about the tax-saving side to investing.
Quite frankly, I’ve said this before. On the short-term rental stuff, Kenji, you are ahead of us here at Anderson on harvesting the benefits from short-term rentals. I remember the phone call that you and I had. I was like, […], I never thought of it that way before.
I started looking into it. I was like, he’s right. He is 100%. We’d actually missed out on that aspect. We had a meeting with all the attorneys, and I started repeating what you were talking about. They’re looking at me going, I don’t know if you can do that. I was like, you can do it.
That’s something I think is you’ve always been a leader in who people talk about real estate investing, the individuals out there. You bring it up in your book. Could you explain to the listeners right now what you’re referring to when you’re talking about using tax strategies in evaluating real estate?
Kenji: One of the benefits of real estate, I actually learned this from my dad who was investing for many years, and I grew up with real estate. He was buying for the tax advantages. There were some changes to the laws where they introduced something called Real Estate Professional Status.
But just to back up, the idea here is that you can use real estate to lower the taxes that you pay on your income. If you have a W-2, if you have a 1099, or maybe you’re getting a K-1 from a partnership, you can lower the taxes you pay and sometimes even down to zero, which is what we ended up doing. We paid zero income taxes for seven years. We lived in Washington at the time. We were paying zero federal and zero state.
Taxes are the single biggest expense of your lifetime, so if you can eliminate that, you can grow your wealth so much faster. Not only that, you then recycle that money back into real estate which is what we did because, again, we looked at real estate as something that we did on the side. We still had our doctor jobs for many years until 2020. We continued to work. We lived on what we earned from our work, but what we did was with the tax savings, when we got that huge tax refund back, we would reinvest that back into real estate and help us grow our portfolio even faster.
That’s how you incorporate the taxes. What we’re looking at is, okay, how much are we making in W-2 this year? Okay, we want to shelter that, so how much in real estate do we need to buy? Whether long-term rentals or short-term rentals, it can be a combination. Let’s go out and buy enough real estate to shelter our income, and then we know that we’ll have that amount to put back into our real estate portfolio. That’s how you can grow your portfolio very, very quickly.
Letizia: I just want to add. Tax savings are just one of the ways that real estate makes you money. You’ve mentioned cash flow, but there are a number of other ways. I would say most of our wealth has been built through forced appreciation, which is increasing the value of those properties by tapping into that hidden value that we’re talking about. The renters are paying down your mortgage, then you have the opportunity for immediate appreciation where you buy a good deal and make money on day one, whether you got an off-market deal, you negotiated, or whatever.
There are actually six ways you can make money with real estate investing. I didn’t mention market appreciation. When you add all those together, that’s what makes you grow and be able to get to financial freedom so quickly. I mentioned we did it in three years. It was because we were tapping all six of those including the tax savings, which was allowing us to not pay income taxes.
Clint: I read in your book about evaluating a deal. In bringing taxes to the deal, you talked about, alright, you could buy this house for, say, $300,000, or you could take that same money and buy a house for $1.2 million. You use the tax code then to put a ton of money back in your pocket just from savings.
That’s a mindset issue right there, how people look at things. They get scared, and they don’t see that that $1.2 million may cost you more, but what is it going to do for you on the tax side? Could you touch on that?
Letizia: Specifically, let’s just talk about short-term rentals because that’s a really great one that a lot of people buy single-family homes for. With short-term rentals, there’s this ability to (in one calendar year) take one property—let’s say a $1.2 million property—and do 100 hours and more than anyone else with that property. That allows you now to take the losses that you generate on that short-term rental and shelter W-2 income. You get losses through depreciation.
Basically, the government sees the property as losing value every year, and they allow you right now, and they just brought back 100% bonus depreciation. You take that 100% bonus depreciation, you shift those first 20 years of depreciation into year one, and it can generate this huge loss that then shelters a lot of your W-2 income.
Because we’re so interested in forcing appreciation, a lot of times we’re rehabbing, then we’re able to write off a lot of that as well as a loss and shelter W-2 income. Buying a $1.2 million property, if you’re just guesstimating that you’re going to maybe take 20% of that purchase price and be able to shelter W-2 income just from the depreciation alone, not accounting all the furniture you’re going to buy for the short-term rental and any rehab you’re going to do, it adds up. Even one property like $1.2 million can shelter your whole W-2 income for the year. Then if you have extra losses, you just bring it forward and shelter future W-2 income. That’s how we were able to do this for seven years and continue to shelter all our W-2 income using those types of loopholes.
Clint: And one spouse can continue to work full-time, so you can then take those losses against your spouse’s income. There’s a lot that can build on with this strategy. The other thing that is important that you mentioned is the savings. That becomes your down payment for your next property right then and there just by using the tax code.
Kenji, I heard you touched on it, but you brought up the term lazy equity. Maybe you could explain to people what is your strategy around, what lazy equity is, and how they should be looking at a property to harvest that and grow their portfolio.
Kenji: Lazy equity is the equity you have in your property, and that tends to grow over time for a number of reasons. One is you might get immediate appreciation. Let’s say you negotiate a discount on day one, so you get the property for less than the market value.
Another way would be that the renters are paying down your mortgage. The third way is with forced appreciation. Let’s say you buy a property for $300,000, and you’re able to force the value of that property to go up to, let’s say, $350,000.
Letizia: And market appreciation.
Kenji: Yeah, and market appreciation as well. What you’re doing is you’re taking the value of the property that you either force, or maybe you get market appreciation, and then you’re looking at, okay, how much of a loan do I have to pay back on it? The difference is your equity.
What happens over time is you might initially start out with a 75% LTV (loan-to-value). The value is, let’s say, $200,000, and you have a loan for 75% of that, so your equity is only 25%. Over time, as you increase the value, you force appreciation or you get market appreciation, then as the renters are paying down your mortgage, the equity starts to build.
That equity that you have built up is called lazy equity, and you can tap into that equity. If you just let it sit and do nothing, then it’s called lazy because it’s not working as hard as it could for you, but if you pull that money out and put it into another property, then you have that money working really hard for you because that money is then generating a return.
That’s what we mean by lazy equity. You want to always be looking at that lazy equity and see, okay, should I tap into it and get it working for me?
Letizia: The ways to tap into it are cash-out refinance or 1031 Exchange, and we have over 150 doors now. We didn’t do that because we had all this cash sitting around that we could make for down payments. It’s because we bought these properties, we forced appreciation, and then we utilized that lazy equity and the tax savings to be able to buy more properties and to be able to roll smaller properties into larger and larger ones over time.
Clint: You’re also using those other strategies as well about building the value, so you’re creating more income and can qualify for larger loans and more loans as well. There are so many little nuances that you’d layer upon layer inside of the book that if you’re not up on it when you’re reading it, it’s going to start to sink in.
One of the things that I noticed there was a few times, you referenced the concept of Fast FIRE. That’s about financial independence. I know your website discusses it, but for people who haven’t been to your site yet, how would you say Fast FIRE differentiates from traditional financial-independence-retire-early strategies that other people talk about?
Letizia: When we decided to invest in real estate, for us, it was getting into financial freedom as fast as possible. We didn’t want to be achieving financial freedom when we were 65, and we could retire like most people do. Actually, our goal was seven years. As I mentioned, we did it in three years.
For us, Fast FIRE is financial freedom while you’re young enough to enjoy it, while you still have kids whom you want to spend time with, and while you still want to be able to travel, have your health, and be able to have those freedoms. It doesn’t necessarily mean you quit your job, but it allows you to work on your job on your terms. If it’s a toxic work environment, you can leave it because you don’t need the money anymore. You’re working there by choice. I think most of the people in our community and probably most of the people learning and listening here, work feeds our purpose, and we enjoy it. If this work doesn’t feed our purpose, if we have financial freedom, we’re still going to go contribute in a very meaningful way because there’s only so long you can sit on a beach.
For us, Fast FIRE is not about necessarily retiring. It was part of what we are about, a semi-retirement, which is being able to do what you want when you want it, and that Fast FIRE is doing it while you’re young, not having to wait until you’re 65.
Kenji: It’s the combination of strategies, making sure that you max out all of those different ways to make money with real estate. Literally, in this episode, we touched on all the different ways. We talked about that hidden value. If you can get really good at it, you can force a lot of appreciation. That’s what Leti said is one of the ways that we built our wealth so quickly.
Then, 1031 exchanging is another aspect of that where you take that lazy equity and put it into bigger properties. When you put it into bigger properties, then you can create bigger tax losses because you have bigger depreciation numbers. That also helps. You can create these massive tax losses and shelter your income.
It’s really just about maximizing all those different ways of making money with real estate. That’s how you can really boost those returns and create that wealth so quickly.
Clint: Like you stated about having kids and being able to do things you want and enjoy them, you mentioned before we got started here that you’re heading off to Disneyland tomorrow. What provides the ability to do that is that you have financial freedom.
For the people who are listening in, I’d highly encourage you to pick up a copy of the book, Life on Your Terms. We’re going to put a link in the show notes so you can go there. Just click on it to get right to the page so you can order it. Phenomenal read.
You also have a number of resources available for people on your website. Could you just describe to the listener right now about your site and why they should go there?
Letizia: We run Semi-Retired MD, and what we’re really focused on is helping high-income earners and doctors to be able to achieve financial freedom. We really are into providing actionable data and useful information that people can take and actually apply. We are not about fluff.
We have a blog, and we have a podcast called Doctors Building Wealth. What we give in are useful things that you can use no matter where you are in your real estate journey, whether or not you’re just considering real estate all the way through owning a portfolio. You’re going to find something very useful that you can apply to your own portfolio.
If you’re interested, we have Zero to Freedom which is our course that takes you from knowing nothing about real estate all the way through building a portfolio and ultimately building an empire. That’s what our community is doing. They’re all doing this Fast FIRE, getting to financial freedom with an empire of real estate and being able to contribute. We think of it as, be more, do more, and give more. That’s what it’s about in our community.
Clint: I want to thank you for taking the time to be here with us. If people want to reach out to you, just going to the website is the best way to do it?
Letizia: Yup, absolutely, and there’s support@semiretiredmd.com. Email in there, and we’re happy to hear from you.
Clint: Awesome. Again, thanks, guys, and enjoy your trip to Disneyland.
Letizia: Thank you, Clint. It’s really amazing to be here with you.
