Henry:
At age 47, Neil Whitney and his wife were living paycheck to paycheck, and they were one bad day away from losing everything, which he found out after watching a Lifetime movie. Now less than a decade later, he’s financially free with $8,000 a month of passive income from his rental properties. Neil started investing with no money. He drove Uber for a year and a half just to save up the down payment, and he promised his wife he’d never touched their bank account through acquiring boring rental properties. Neil is now a millionaire in his fifties with generational wealth for his children. Once his rentals are paid off, his rental portfolio will make him over $20,000 a month in his own words. If I can do this, you can do this too. So if you’re in your forties, fifties, or sixties and thinking it’s too late for you to turn your life around and get financial freedom from real estate, Neil is here to prove you wrong. What’s up everybody? I am Henry Washington, co-host of the BiggerPockets podcast. Today we’ve got an investor story with Neil Whitney from Picayune, Mississippi. In less than 10 years, Neil went from living paycheck to paycheck to sitting on the beach and watching passive income roll into his bank account. Literally, he did this. So let’s hear about it. Neil, welcome to the show.

Neil:
Thank you, appreciate you and super excited to be here.

Henry:
Yeah, man, we’re glad you’re here and you’ve got a pretty interesting story, so I’m excited to dive into it a little bit here. So why don’t you start at the beginning. Tell us about your background and what got you interested in this real estate gig.

Neil:
So real estate kind of came as an accident. Funny how it all started. I was at home on a crappy, rainy weekend. My wife was bugging me to come watch a movie in the back. She’s like, Hey, will you come watch this movie with me? And I’m like, yeah, I guess so. Wasn’t super excited about it. And so we went in the back and watched one of these lifetime movies that this guy, he’s driving home from work and he gets creamed by a dump truck.

Henry:
Oh man.

Neil:
And got really, really messed up. And he ended, he lost his job. They ended up losing their house. So him and his wife and the kids, they’re all living in this minivan underneath the bridge, and finally the church comes in and helps them out and gets them kind of back on their feet. And she’s like, wasn’t that movie great? And I’m like, are you kidding me? That movie just scared the crap out of me. And she’s like, well, what do you mean? I’m like, I’m one car accident away from being that guy, right? So I didn’t know what to do, and I’m a big believer in law of attraction

Henry:
That

Neil:
Monday I go into work and my boss walks in and he hands me Rich Dad, poor Dad. And he says, you should read this book, swear to you. And so I read Rich Dad, poor Dad, and the light bulb came on. I was like,
Okay, so I need to figure out how to get into real estate. But we were living paycheck to paycheck. We had no money. And so I told my wife, I says, Hey, we need to get into this whole real estate thing. And she’s like, there’s no way. I says, I’m going to figure out a way. She says, okay, I’m going to support you on one condition. I says, all right, what is that? She says, you can’t touch our bank account. Alright, fair enough. Okay, alright, we’ll figure that out. So we went down to a Broadway show and we were watching a Broadway show and we ended up taking an Uber and I started talking to the Uber driver and the light bulb came on again. I said, oh, okay. So wait a minute. I can start Ubering, make a little side hustle money, and then use that to get my first property. And so I signed up for Uber, started driving Uber. I hustled every Friday, Saturday and Sunday every day off that I could

Henry:
Before you get too far in. There’s so much good stuff here. A, it’s very similar to how I got started. I had an epiphany in the middle of the night and then woke up and was like, I got to figure this out. Went to meet somebody who I knew was a commercial broker and she basically handed me a box of books and Rich Dad, poor Dad was in the box, and that’s the one I picked randomly. So very similar, changed my life obviously, but I think there’s some things I want to make sure that people understand.

Neil:
Roger,

Henry:
You had a full-time gig, saw a lifetime movie that scared the pants off of you. You’re like, I need to be more financially secure. Told your wife you’re going to do real estate. She said, great, you can’t touch our money. So you said, I need to make some money in order to help me be able to afford the down payment for the first property. So the first question I want to ask is, how old were you at this time?

Neil:
Oh, I was late forties, 47.

Henry:
You were 47 and decided let’s do this real estate thing,

Neil:
Roger. Yeah.

Henry:
And then decided, let me pick up a side hustle driving Uber. So how many hours did you drive a week and how much money were you trying to save up?

Neil:
I didn’t know how much money I was going to need at the time. This was all new to me. I started listening to BiggerPockets. I had found BiggerPockets at the time.

Henry:
What year was this?

Neil:
2017.

Henry:
Okay.

Neil:
I started listening to BiggerPockets and hearing how everyone was getting involved with real estate and just picking up little tidbits here and there on random podcasts. I would drive Friday night until I got tired on Saturday near my house where I lived in Slidedale, Louisiana. There’s a swamp tour that comes in every day at 11 o’clock, and I said, if I go meet that swamp tour as they come in, there’s bound to be somebody that needs a ride back into the city.
So that’s about a 40 minute ride, and I figured I’d make a quick 50, $75 on a ride into the city and like clockwork at 11 o’clock, that tour would come in, I’d get a ride and I’d go back into the city and then I’d drive till I got tired again. And then Sundays I would get up at three in the morning and I would go sit down in the French Quarter at the hotels and I would be picking up airport runs. Everyone’s going to the airport to leave on Sunday mornings and running back and forth between the airport and the city airport and the city airport and the city. So that was my thing. Friday, Saturday, Sunday, I did that pretty much every weekend, every free that I had, I devoted to Uber to get that first down payment. I think about 18 months in, I had saved enough for my first house and I found a cheap little house in Pearl River, Louisiana for 70,000

Henry:
And

Neil:
I had 14,000 to put down, plus a little closing money. So it was roughly about 16, 17,000 I think I had to come up with, and we bought our first property.

Henry:
So you bought a single family home, first property, $70,000?

Neil:
Yeah, a little 900 square foot, two bedroom house.

Henry:
Did it need work?

Neil:
It really didn’t. It was super, super nice. The lady that I bought it from had really done everything already to it, so she put in all new tile floors and crown molding had it painted. It was super cute. I mean, like I said, super small but super cute and it was an easy rant. So we rented it out and I think we made, I don’t know, maybe a hundred, $125 a month on it. But we thought this is great, right? Yeah. We got an extra a hundred dollars a

Henry:
Month. You paid 70, you didn’t have to put any money into it and you rented it out for how much?

Neil:
I want to say at that time it was probably about 7 50, 800 a month. Right around the 1%.

Henry:
I assume you used a conventional loan.

Neil:
We used conventional. Everything I’ve ever bought has been conventional.

Henry:
Conventional loan, 20% down. And how’d it perform? Did it stay rented?

Neil:
It did,

Henry:
Yeah.

Neil:
I still want it to this day. Haven’t sold anything. I

Henry:
Love it. I love it. Well, it sounds simple when you hear your story, but it really isn’t that complicated. You needed to find a deal that worked. You did live in a market where you could find deals that work in your market. That’s something that works in your favor. Not everybody’s in that position. I understand that, but you put in the work, you put in extra hours to generate income to get yourself to a point where you were financially ready and able to purchase a property.

Neil:
Yeah, because bear in mind, we were paycheck to paycheck. We didn’t have extra money whatsoever. And so that’s why she’s like, you can’t touch the bank account. And so by taking that Uber hustle money and putting that aside and any little side job or whatever I would do, I’m in the HVAC business, so any little side thing I would find, I would take that money, I would buy the pigeonhole all that money away and eventually we got to a point that we could buy one.

Henry:
Well, Neil, I am thoroughly impressed with the story thus far, and I definitely want to jump into what you did from here and how you bought that next property. But first we got to take a quick break. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets podcast. I’m here with Neil Whitney, and we’re diving into his second real estate deal.

Neil:
The second deal was kind of crazy. I found out about equity and I had built a lot of equity in my home I was living in, and we took a HELOC out on the house to purchase our next property, which I found a fourplex that was available and I had the equity in the house, so I pulled it out. I bought that fourplex, and so we did touch the money there. However, the fourplex was such a good deal for us that we were seeing significant cashflow like over a thousand a month on. And so we were able to pay back that HELOC really, really quickly.

Henry:
Let’s talk about that for a second. I think a lot of people have thought about this as a plan or a strategy, but since you executed it, let’s kind of dive into what that looked like. So you took out a heloc, and for those listening, that’s a home equity line of credit. So you tapped into the equity in your personal home, and when you do that, the bank gives you access to your available equity somewhere to the tune of between 75 and 80% of the equity they’ll give you access to. And you said you found a fourplex. Is this another one that was listed on the market?

Neil:
Yeah, on the MOS.

Henry:
What was the purchase price?

Neil:
A free 12.

Henry:
So purchase price, 312,000. You purchased it on a conventional loan, which means you had to put 25% down as you said. So that’s about $78,000. Is that the money that you pulled from the line of credit?

Neil:
Yes.

Henry:
I assume you had closing costs and some other things, and so the line of credit was used for the closing costs. Did the property need work?

Neil:
No.

Henry:
So these were turnkey?

Neil:
Yeah, so we did do eventually some work on ’em as people vacated, right? We would remodel and then raise the rents, but as they sat, they were all fully granted.

Henry:
What were the rents when you bought them?

Neil:
Six 50, I want to say

Henry:
Six 50 a unit. So it was bringing in about $2,600 as it sat. And so you just kept it rented and then did renovations As tenants moved out?

Neil:
As the tenants moved out, we went ahead and basically it just went from crappy countertops, pull those out. On two of them, we had to pull the entire cabinets out. They were just complete garbage. And we put new cabinetry in, new toilets, new bathroom vanities, but then we went from $600 a month rent to a thousand dollars a month rent.

Henry:
Awesome. So is that what everything’s rented for now? A thousand per unit?

Neil:
Yeah,

Henry:
$4,000 a month on this quadplex that you bought on the market using a conventional loan. I like to call this old boring real estate. Yeah, I’m boring as it gets. It’s just old, boring, tried and true real estate. Find a deal that makes sense. Buy it on a conventional loan. If you don’t have the money, save it up till you get it. Fix it up as you go. Rent it out. Old born real estate works, it works awesome. I think everybody’s kind of, people are always looking for what’s the next fad, next big thing, creative finance, rent by the room, Airbnb, midterm rentals, but old, boring real estate still works

Neil:
Guys. My wife and I started making a game, right? Again, let’s go back to Rich Dad, poor dad, right? An asset versus a liability. And my wife, we started making a little bit of money and she’s like, okay, so I want a Jeep.
I said, well, okay, we’re not going to just go out and buy a Jeep. We’ve got to go out and buy a duplex to pay for that Jeep. And so that’s what we did. We went out and we bought a duplex, and that duplex pays for our Jeep, and that Jeep Long been paid for, but the duplex doesn’t stop paying us. It just keeps coming. God forbid she wants another Jeep or whatever. Well, you know how it works, right? We’ve played this little game and we were in Mexico, Jesus, this must’ve been eight, nine years ago when she really quick version, we’re sitting on the beach and her phone’s going, bling, bling bling. She’s getting all these text messages. And I’m like, who the hell keeps texting you all these texts? She’s like, I don’t know. And she drives her phone and she looks at me and she says, I get the real estate thing now we’re getting deposits in the bank while we’re laying on the beach in Mexico. And that was her aha moment, right? That’s when she figured it out like this works. And at that point, we had accumulated a few properties. So currently we’re up to, we have two fourplexes, six duplexes, and three single family houses. 23 doors in total cashflow is right about $8,000 a month.

Henry:
That’s amazing. And you found all of these on market listed properties,

Neil:
Every single one.

Henry:
And when’s the last time you bought a property?

Neil:
I bought four duplexes at once. October of 23.

Henry:
I think that’s where a lot of people kind of get stuck is after that second or third deal, people try to figure out, all right, well how do I scale this thing

Neil:
One at a time?

Henry:
Absolutely. One at a time, one at a time. Save up enough money. That’s right. And what I like about the strategy that you’ve said that you’ve talked about, it seems like you’ve done the right thing by the income that you have coming in. I feel like people start, they buy rental property, it starts the cashflow and then the cashflow just kind of disappears. It gets mixed in with all of the other lifestyle creep expenses. It’s just kind of, it comes and it goes, and it sounds like you and your wife are very intentional about having the money go to a certain account and so that you could save up a certain amount in that account and then you could go and do something with that cashflow. We do something very similar is we have an expense account, so I set up auto drafts for all the expenses in my account. All that goes into an expense account. That way if and when a problem arises, the money comes from the expense account and it doesn’t feel like such a burden financially, and it’s just having those fundamentals when you’re investing, tracking the money, making sure it goes into the appropriate accounts, and then making sure you’ve got enough allocated saving up till you get to $20,000. We did something very similar. So for us, I wanted to save up a little over what it would cost to fix. Probably the most expensive thing that would happen on a house.

Neil:
That was my exact thinking. A roof, a

Henry:
Roof, a roof. Absolutely. I need to save up at least 15 to 20 grand. That way if I have to replace a roof, I can replace a roof. And then anything above that, depending on how many properties we have, we would take out. And so that number goes up. The more properties we have and all of these things that we’re talking about in this episode, and I hope people are taking notes, these are just fundamentals of real estate, and it sounds simple when you hear us talking about it, but the fundamentals will keep you afloat. The fundamentals will build wealth for you over time. It doesn’t sound sexy, it doesn’t look sensy. It’s not over complicated, but the fundamentals will keep you wealthy, saving up enough until you can afford the down payment, buying the property, renovating it when the right time comes, making sure you’re keeping up with rent raises, making sure that you’re allocating your funds appropriately, and then buying assets and using the cashflow to pay for the debt that you’re bringing in because of the asset. This is really a lesson in real estate 1 0 1, and you did this starting at 47 years old, so I don’t want to hear any excuses from anybody about you don’t have time. You had a full-time gig and you were married about that. You don’t have money because you hustled and drove Uber to save up enough money and that you can’t do it at your age. You let none of that hold you back. I think that’s really incredible.

Neil:
It’s been a fun journey, and to be honest with you, anybody can do this. If I can do this, anybody can do this, right? I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed. No one’s going to out hustle me. I’m going to go out. I’m going to do what I need to do to get it done. This is generational for me. I did this not just for my wife and I, but we got kids and my kids, my son’s heavily involved. He’s cutting all the grass and all the properties. He’s getting ready now to either buy or build a new duplex for himself, so he’s going to live on one half. He’s going to house hack and rent the other half out.

Henry:
Boy,

Neil:
He’s on it. You know what I mean? Boy, he’s 21 years old and he’s on a mission and he wants to, so to speak, follow in our footsteps. All those properties are for them. They’re going to inherit these. This is going to be generation wealth. I told him, we don’t ever sell properties.

Henry:
How would you say you’ve managed risk as you’ve grown your portfolio? Because a lot of people feel like, if I’m doing this and I’m later in life, then I need to take on less risk. How have you managed risk?

Neil:
I’m looking at this as my retirement plan, right? I’m investing all of my dollars, if you will, instead of into a 401k, which I still do a little bit into a 401k, but instead of into a 401k, I’m investing into tangible assets. Here’s the thing with real estate that a lot of people miss. If I had a hundred thousand dollars and I wanted to buy gold, I’m going to get a hundred thousand dollars worth of gold. If I wanted to buy silver, I’m going to get a hundred thousand dollars worth of silver stocks, bonds, you name it, it’s 101 to one. But if I have a hundred thousand dollars in real estate, what can I do with that? Henry,

Henry:
You can buy a lot more than a hundred thousand dollars in value.

Neil:
I can buy $500,000 with my eyes closed with a hundred thousand dollars in cash, I can get a $500,000 piece of real estate. So you can leverage in a good way. This is good leverage that you can take that and get much more than what your dollars are. And so to me, that’s a no brainer for risk. It’s good assets that you, you’re purchasing and good debt, and we use that debt wisely. Most of our properties we started, the first one was 20%, second one was 25. I think everything after that, it was like 30, right? The more that we buy, the more that they want down. Everything now at this point was at 30% down, and now we’ve got one of ’em paid off, a second one getting ready to get paid off, and this is our plan at this point. We’re not really looking to acquire anymore. Our plan at this point is let’s get these things paid off. And with everything paid off, I’m looking somewhere between 20, 25,000 a month, right? I think I could retire pretty comfortably on that.

Henry:
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. I’m in a very similar boat now. We’re focused less on growth and more on paying down assets. You use the term generational wealth, and I feel like that gets thrown around often and people don’t realize truly what it means, but in my eyes, you can’t pass down generational wealth if you’re passing down leveraged assets. So you got to get those things paid off so that you can pass down something that truly produces income for somebody without them having to work. So we’re focused on that as well. Well, I’ve got a few more questions for Neil, but we’re going to take a quick break and we’ll be right back.
All right. We’re back with Neil Whitney talking about how he grew his real estate portfolio starting at the age of 47. Neil, one of the things I want to talk about is you are buying properties in that sub $200,000 price point. Typically for a single family. Some would call that lower income, depends on the neighborhood, but I think there’s a stigma a lot of the times with the tenants that can afford to rent these places. I want to hear from you on what’s it been like to own assets at this price point. Have you had issues with tenants? Is it, and who’s managing these?

Neil:
So my wife and I still manage ’em, and I think we’ve had two evictions over the course of, I guess we’re coming up on nine, 10 years. The biggest thing is you’re screening. Make sure that you’re screening your tenants and finding the right tenants income. We want to make sure they’re earning three times the monthly rate, and we want to make sure that if they’ve got bad credit and it’s because of medical bills, I’m not going to hold that against them if they’ve got bad credit because they just don’t pay their bills, that’s another whole different animal. And so we take everything into consideration and we just, I don’t know if maybe we’re lucky or we are just really good at screening. We’ve had really, really good tenant, and most of my tenants are long-term. I mean, in the original fourplex that I bought, two out of the four are still the original ones that are in there. And the first property I bought, I’ve had I think two or three tenants over the whole time. And most of these people that move out, it’s because they buy a place. They bought their own place.

Henry:
Now, I want to make sure that people still understand this. You’re just blowing stereotypes out of the water right now. Do you still have a full-time job?

Neil:
Yes.

Henry:
Does your wife still have a full-time job?

Neil:
Absolutely.

Henry:
And you manage your portfolio of how many units? 23 doors. 23 doors starting at 47. See, I’m reiterating these things for people. I don’t know how many times I hear, I don’t have time. I can’t manage properties, I can’t do this. I can’t figure it out. And you are literally still to this day managing a sizable portfolio at a price point where people think all the tenants are going to be problems. And you’ve done this, like I said, starting at the age of 47. People can do this if you stop making excuses and just starting putting things into action. You can also hire property managers if you need to, but anyone can literally do these things. We’re still cutting the grass. Oh, your son is.

Neil:
My son is, that’s right.

Henry:
And one thing I want to make sure that I reiterate for people is what you said that was very important when we started talking about tenants and if you’re managing them, is you said you are really good or you take the time to be good at tenant screening. And that is what I find the problem is with most landlords who tend to claim that certain tenants in a certain class can be a problem, because what I found after managing rental properties at both high price points and lower price points, it’s that it’s not that one price point of tenant is worse than the other. I’ve had bad tenants at a low price point, and I’ve had bad tenants at a high price point. Do you know what the common denominator was among those bad tenants at price points

Neil:
Screening?

Henry:
Me, me, we have to take responsibility for being good and doing the detailed work it takes to screen tenants. I couldn’t tell you how many times I hear landlords who don’t call and talk to references or I hear landlords who don’t call the previous landlord and ask questions, or I hear landlords who don’t call their employers and ask questions. All of that stuff is tedious, but that’s the stuff that’s going to help you make sure you select good tenants. If you’re good at tenant selection, it doesn’t matter the tenant class that you’re in, it’s because you’re picking the right people for the property that you have to offer. And it sounds like you’re just, I’m going to call you the Tim Duncan of real estate, man. There’s big fundamentals over here. He’s just fundamentally sound real estate investing. I love

Neil:
Him. And so Henry, one other thing too is we treat our tenants like the best customers on the planet.

Henry:
Oh man, you’re talking my language.

Neil:
So we love our tenants. We want them to be happy. We want them to stay forever. And I’ve got, I’ll give you one example. I’ve got one tenant that she lived in this really, really nice house and her husband passed and she’s like, look, I don’t want to take care of anything anymore, so I just want to move into an apartment and have you take care of everything. We’re like, okay, great. We’re happy to do that. Well, she came in, she put gutters on our property, she put in porches, did all kinds of landscape and all in her dime, not on my dime,
But because we come out there and we cut the grass and all that, she’s perfectly fine. She invested probably five, $10,000 into my property that’s going to stay there when she leaves at some point. But she did all that on her own because she wanted someone that would come out and take care of the problems when she had ’em. And we do, right? If someone calls us and says, Hey, I’ve got this and this going on, we’re prompt. We’re out there. We’re getting it taken care of as quickly as possible and making sure that our tenants are taken care of and that they know that when they call us, we’re going to respond.

Henry:
This is something I’m passionate about because I feel like there is still a pretty big divide between landlords and tenants. Tenants typically come into a rental relationship with a stigma towards a landlord no matter who it is or where it is. And a lot of landlords unfortunately, look down on tenants

Neil:
Live up to that reputation.

Henry:
It’s such a weird dynamic for me because in any other business industry, we would not accept that because we are in the customer service business. And so if as customers of other businesses, we do not allow people to treat us a certain way because we are the customer. But when it comes to real estate, landlords don’t see tenants as their customer and they don’t treat them as such. But what I found is when you treat your tenants like customers and you provide them good quality customer service, and you give them that respect, they respect you and they respect your property in return. And a lot of people want great tenants, but they’re not willing to treat tenants great to get that same result. And so I just want a lot of landlords to hear what you’re saying and to hear what I’m saying and realize that without tenants, we don’t have wealth. We don’t have a business. We provide the service. They are the customer. If you treat your customers with quality customer service, treat them like human beings, treat them like you would want to be treated in a service-based business, you’ll be surprised at how much better your life becomes as a landlord.

Neil:
1000%. And I couldn’t have said on any better, Henry, what we’re talking about here is taking care of your people, and whether it’s my employees at my day job or it’s my tenants that live in my properties 1000%, you got to take care of ’em.

Henry:
What I want to do as we shift toward the end here is you’ve done something great, right? You decided you were going to do something. You didn’t let any of the negative self-talk stop. You didn’t let any of the, oh, you mean my family members. You said, what are you doing? You’re out of your mind. Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. You figured out a way to be successful, and now you’ve built a portfolio up to the point to where you’re starting to figure out how to protect that portfolio by paying off the assets. So you have truly done the thing that a lot of our listeners want to do. And so what advice do you have for the person that’s listening who’s maybe in the same boat as you, who has the full-time job, doesn’t have any money saved up, but really wants to get to that financial freedom point? And yes, you still have a job. I get that, and it’s great to have. I don’t think people should quit their job unless they absolutely have to. But what advice do you have for that person who’s hearing all this negative, who’s hearing all the negative talk from the people around them who thinks it might be too late or they don’t have enough money or they don’t have enough time?

Neil:
I think it all starts with you. You have to make a decision as to who you’re going to be, right, and how it is that you’re going to live your life, and what type of future are you going to set up for yourself. If you don’t like where you are today, go look in the mirror. You’re there because of the choices that you make. And so make a decision. Where do you want to go? I didn’t like where I was at 47 years old. And like I said, we watched that silly lifetime movie that changed my life, and I decided then and there that I wasn’t ever going to be that guy. There’s no way I was going to let that happen to my family. And I made the decision and I just dove in and the hell with all the naysayers, all the negative people out there. I focus on what’s good for me and my family and what’s good for my business.

Henry:
I love that. I’ve given many a talk about this is the power of deciding. There’s a difference between what you’re saying and what a lot of investors say. Because what a lot of investors who are getting started say is they’re going to try, they’re going to give investing a try

Neil:
In my vocabulary, makes me want to throw up. And so I run an HVAC company as well. And if anyone in here says try, they immediately go, because that’s a no-no word in my business, try means plan to fail,

Henry:
Plan to fail,

Neil:
Plan to fail.

Henry:
100%. There’s power in decision because decision says, no matter how many times I fail, I’m going to keep going until I get it right. And your brain understands that and starts to figure out ways to help you. If you tell your brain you’re going to try something, the second you try and fail, your brain goes, we accomplished our goal. We did it. We tried. And the beautiful part about what you did is you decided before you knew how. And I think that there’s a lot of power in that because most of us want to know how first before we decide if we want to do it. And that’s not how life works. That’s not how life works.

Neil:
This is not rocket science. This is like you said, basics. And I’m a simple, boring investor. I’m doing basic 1 0 1 investing. Nothing crazy. No Airbnbs or anything. I’m just buying properties and getting them to cashflow and watching properties that I bought for 70,000 now worth 140,000 property that I bought for 300 is now worth almost 500. So these properties are just continually growing. When my wife and I, we sit down and we go through our books and look at things, and when we saw that our net worth finally had that million dollar net worth, it was like, Hey, holy slugs, we’re worth, we’re millionaires. Are you kidding me? I mean, we still don’t have a million dollars on the bank, but technically we’re there with it. Forbes says, you’re

Henry:
A millionaire,

Neil:
But so keep it simple, right? Don’t complicate things. Basic real estate has made millions and millions of people wealthy.

Henry:
That’s right.

Neil:
The riches are in the niches, so to speak, but if you’re going to be that niche guy, you better be really good at whatever it is you’re doing. I’m not really good at anything, so I just focus on the basics. And I guess I’m good at the basics.

Henry:
I’m with you. I’m good. I’m good at keeping things simple, and this is a great simple framework for people to follow. I know you mentioned that your goals were to start paying off some of these assets, and you’ve already done that. You’ve paid off one or two and you’re working on some more. Is there anything else you’re working on in the future for your portfolio? Are you planning to grow anymore? Is it particularly just pay ’em off, or are you going to pivot to anything? Or is it just stay the course?

Neil:
The goal right now is to help my son get into his first property. And I told him, Hey, look, whatever it is you decide if you have 20,000 to put down, I’m going to match it 20,000. So whatever you put down, I’m matching you a hundred percent.

Henry:
Are you adopting any more sons? I could use a match program.

Neil:
It’s a one time deal for him, right? You’re not going to use it over and over again, but first place. And I told my daughter the same thing. I got a daughter who’s getting, she’s pregnant and she’s going to be having a baby shortly. And so

Henry:
First grandkid.

Neil:
First grandkid,

Henry:
Congrats. That’s right.

Neil:
Thank you. Thank you. And so, yeah, now I’ve really got something to start building this whole thing off and something

Henry:
Tells me you’re going to be a sucker of a granddad.

Neil:
Yeah, I think so too. Yeah. And then here’s the other thing, right? My wife and I when we first met, she is from New Orleans, and she hadn’t really traveled past the Gulf Coast. I think the furthest she had ever been in her life was to Florida. And since we met, we’ve gone Caribbean and Canada and all. But I want to fill her passport book. That’s my end game, right? I want to take $20,000 a month and blow it because I can, and travel the world with her and fill her passport book and show her what an amazing world that we live in, right? The United States is great, but there’s so much more. And just the places in the US that she hadn’t seen, I’ve taken her to New York, I’ve taken her to Niagara Falls and Tennessee, and just a bunch of places that she’d never been before.
Georgia and North Carolina, and just all over, and she’s blown away. So every time I take her somewhere and she sees something that she hadn’t seen before, that for me is the it moment, right? When you get your wife out there and she’s just in awe and just so appreciative of things that we never thought in our wildest dreams that we’d be able to do that. Now we can do. We just bought our dream home. Didn’t ever think we’d ever have a house that like we have now. We’ve got a great house that we bought in South Mississippi, and it’s been a life-changing event getting involved with real estate, and it started with a lifetime movie. And Rich Dad, poor Dad, I,

Henry:
I’ve heard a lot of real estate stories about how people got started. This is the first one I’ve heard that started with a lifetime movie. Well, someone’s got to fill a niche. Oh, man. Well, Neil, thank you so much for coming on the BiggerPockets podcast and sharing your journey with us. It is a truly inspirational story. You have done the things that a lot of people think either you shouldn’t do or you can’t do, and you did them well, and you did them fundamentally sound, and it sounds like now you and your family are reaping the benefits of those great decisions. So thank you for coming on sharing with us,

Neil:
Henry. Thank you for having me. It was a real pleasure meeting you.

Henry:
Alright, thank you everybody for tuning into this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast. We’ll see you on the next episode.