Episode 67: Investing For High-Income Earners

 

This is The WealthAbility® Show with Tom Wheelwright, way more money, way less taxes.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

 

Welcome to The WealthAbility® Show where we’re always discovering how to make way more money and pay way less taxes. Hi, this is Tom Wheelwright, your host, founder, and CEO of WealthAbility®. So a lot of people are in high-income jobs and they wonder what happens when they can’t do their high-income job, or is this what they’re going to be doing until they’re 80 years old and can’t walk. And we’re very fortunate to have a special guest who is a high income professional, and has learned what we’ve been talking about on this show for many years that getting into investing, investing outside of your profession and actually investing in something that will produce passive streams of income can be very freeing and really can have an impact, a positive impact on your life. So very excited to have Jeff Anzalone. Did I say your name right?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Absolutely.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

All right. And Jeff, I’m going to let you introduce yourself and give us a little bit about your background and why you’re talking about financial education to other doctors.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Yeah, sure. Thanks. Special thanks for having me on the show. I’m a avid listener of your podcast, your books, your Tax-Free Wealth book is fantastic. What you and Robert and that group Kiyosaki, Rich Dad group is… You’re really inspiring a lot of people because I talk to doctors on a daily basis and majority of them have read your books and his book. So it’s really doing a lot of good. So I really appreciate that.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

That’s awesome, thank you.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

So it’s an honor being on your show with you, but I’m a practicing periodontist here in Louisiana. And most of us got out in a lot of student loan debt but didn’t really care too much about it, because hey, we’re going to make good money, right? Kind of like college athletes that are going to the pros. Well, I don’t make that kind of money, but they’re thinking, hey, who cares?

I’m going to make a lot of money. So unfortunately the practice that I was going in with, the deal fell through right before I finished my training. So I had about $300,000 of student loan debt. I was married with a two month old, had already purchased a interest only home, but the worst part of it was I had no clue how to run a business or practice. So long story short, I was able to network with that helped me out a lot, cleaned up a lot of the consumer debt, but got to the point where I realized during a skiing trip, when I fell, kid cut in front of me and I fell and I kind of landed on my wrist and that kind of sparked me thinking, well, what would I do if I couldn’t work?

I was so focused on, like so many of us, because we spend all this time and money training that you never think about anything else. You’re going to go, you’re going to treat patients. You’re going to make a lot of money. You’re going to pay a lot of taxes, but hey, that’s the American way, right? So that started me thinking, what if? What if I was disabled, temporarily, permanently, what would I do? And that sparked the me starting to go out, looking for passive income, which kind of led to where I am today.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

I think that’s a story that we hear a lot, actually that a lot of people that… I mean, I’m one. I’m in a high income, high earning professional. Maybe not as high as you, but a higher earning professional. And I was fortunate to come out of school with no debt, which was for which I’ve been eternally grateful to the schools that paid my way.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

Tom Wheelwright:

But at the same time you go, I’ve had the same thought, what happens if I can’t do my job? What happens if I can’t do accounting? What happens? Fortunately, I can do it without my hands, but let’s say I got a head injury or something like that, and I’ve seen that happen. So what did you decide to do? I mean, how did you actually get to the point where you were going, okay, I’m actually going to invest in something now, obviously you’re still doing your job. You’re still practicing. How did you decide that you were going to do something to… How’d you decide on what you were going to do and how to do that?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

That’s a great question. I knew that other people were doing it. So why reinvent the wheel? So I started reading, I’m a big reader. I love to read and listen to podcasts and I’ve studied a lot on successful people, millionaires. And it seems like the majority of them had real estate in their portfolio. But really at that time, Tom, about five years ago, when I was starting to get into this, I had no idea about the whole passive income, passive real estate investments. So I thought you got to go buy a house. You got to go buy a trailer park, you got to buy a storage unit.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

You had to go wash toilets, right?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Yeah. I mean, that’s what I thought, so that’s where I was focused. And I met people. I went to seminars and I was ready to go. And then I was meeting with people that they do it all the time here. And I see all the phone calls they get and somebody broke into apartment having to meet the sheriff over there. And this and that, I’m like, I just don’t know. But luckily that was kind of the time that the crowdfunding started coming out online and I started doing a little bit of that, little debt deals, small deals. And that worked out pretty well. Then I decided to bite the bullet and get into the big equity deal. It was a $50,000 investment in a apartment complex in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and long story short, after about two years, I had not receiving any money distributions, all the investors lost everything.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Oh my heavens.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Yeah. And it was at that point where I realized, I didn’t know what the heck I was doing. And I made it a point from them on out because I was just looking at, going to a website, looking at the deals and going, what’s the highest return? I didn’t know what COC and IRR and I didn’t even… I was just looking at what’s the highest return and what apartment complex looks the best and that was it. So it deserved me right really to lose because I… So now I’ve made it a point to learn, network with people. So now all of the investments that we’re doing now, knock on wood have been successful, but that’s kind of how I started to get up to this point.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

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Well, I always say that we learn more by losing than we do by winning. There are a lot of lessons there and I think you make a really good point. This is a point that I see all the time is that there are always winners and losers in investing. It doesn’t matter what type of investing, whether it’s real estate or stock market or business, there are always going to be winners and losers. I mean, nine out of 10 businesses go under. So within the first few years, so what types of things, when you started getting educated, what types of things did you see as far as what you needed to learn, what you needed to be able to look at in order to make a good decision on that stream of income?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Probably the most commonly asked question I get when I start talking to high-income earners, doctors, whatever, auto engineers for whatever reason, they’ll call and ask me, and the question is, Jeff, how do you find the best deal? And that, as you know, that’s the wrong question to ask, it’s how do you find a trusted sponsor? And they’ll find you the good deals. It’s kind of like if your need neck surgery or something, you find a good surgeon and they have the skills to do whatever procedure you need. And unfortunately, Tom, there’s a lot of them out there that if you look at their website or listen to their podcasts or talk to them on the phone, you would think this guy owns 5,000 units where he owns zero and you just have to re… I mean, you have to dig into it.

You got to research, you got to talk to current, their current investors to see what they say about them. And so that was one of the reasons that pushed me to start my website because doctors don’t have a lot of time and I’ve been messed over and I’m sure a lot of people have been messed over. So I wanted to sort of be that trusted resource out there that, hey, look, I’m vetting. I’m doing all the legwork for you, but I do encourage people to learn for themselves, but I wanted to put my name on it and say, “Hey, I recommend, or I trust this person. I invest with them or answer their questions to help them.”

 

Tom Wheelwright:

No, I think that’s great. You make a good point that one of my favorite things I learned from Robert, my friend, Robert Kiyosaki, is that you can’t do a good deal with a bad partner. And so it doesn’t matter how good the deal is if the partner is bad and that’s particularly true. I mean, when you’re talking about, for example, multi-family housing or commercial real estate or something like that, that takes, and the money’s made in the operations. That’s where you make the money is. Not only are you buying the right deal, but are you taking care of the property? Are you adding value to the property? Are you operating the property? So in such a way that it’s going to produce cashflow because cashflow is what it’s all about. And one of the things that I think… The second thing that I think people miss a lot is that all investments are a function of their cashflow.

So the value of investment is directly related to your cashflow. You mentioned COC, so cash on cash, right? Cash on cash return. And a lot of people, especially in the last, I think in the last few years, we’ve had the same issue that we had back in 2005, six and seven, where people are buying for capital gains and they’re relying on the capital gains when the rule is, is that if you look at the most important term in real estate, I think which is cap rate, it is a function of what’s your cash that’s coming to the investor. You’re buying a stream of income when that’s the whole idea behind a real estate investment, a stock shouldn’t be behind the stock investment or any other kind of investment is you’re buying a stream of income. So I think you’re absolutely spot on Jeff, that the very first thing we have to do is we have to find a good partner and so now you’ve found a good partner now, and now what are you looking at?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Well, actually, to take a step back before that, I actually had a conversation last night with a guy that is from my neck of the woods down here in Baton Rouge, anesthesiologists. And he said, “Hey, I’ve got three kids, they’re in private school and I just want some passive income.” And so there wasn’t really any driving factor. So I’ll always tell them, if you’re married, sit down with your spouse, number one, start with why you want to do it. Because as you know, that’s going to keep you going, not just, I want passive income. It’s, hey, I want to retire in 10 years and have options to go coach football, or start a mission somewhere, or donate more or whatever, whatever that is. Or you might have a different job you want to do.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Thank you. Thank you for bringing that up. It’s been interesting over the last year, the best thing about doing these podcasts is meeting people like you. And one of the things that I’ve really run into a lot is a lot of people talking about, look, you need to focus on what’s the dream. What are you wanting to accomplish there? And even Eckerd totally talks about… And he’s a very… He’s about living in the present moment, but he talks about adding the goal and it really adds some enthusiasm, that’s where you get enthusiasm is when you have a goal.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Right.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

And that’s actually the first thing we do. So when we take a new client in our WealthAbility® Network, the very first thing we do is we have them determine where are they going, what is it that they’re trying to accomplish? For the exact same reason, it’s not easy is it? I mean, this is not something that is easy stuff to do. You have to actually have a reason for doing it because otherwise you just won’t pay attention to it.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Right. And he said, “Hey, I’ve been looking at real estate for a while, but I hadn’t done anything about it.” But that’s because he didn’t have a definitive purpose of why I wanted to do it. And then I asked him the next question. I said, “Well, you’ve got three kids. You’re about my age. And you’re busy, right?” He said, “Yeah.” I said, “Well, do you have time to take a lot of calls, be a landlord?” He’s like, “No.” I said, “Well, you’ve answered the next question between an active or passive investor.” So once you determine your goals, then if you want to be a passive investor like myself, and most of the people that I talk to because they just don’t have time. Then you can go and start down the path of finding the correct sponsor operator of passive deals that allow us to invest with them.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Yeah. I love that. I’ll get back to this in a second. Hey, if you like financial education the way I do, you’re going to love Buck Joffrey’s podcast. Buck’s a friend of mine, he’s a client of mine. He’s a former board certified surgeon and he’s turned into a real estate professional. So he has this podcast that is geared towards high paid professionals. That’s who he’s geared towards. So if you’re a high paid professional, you’re going, look, I’d like to do something different with my money than what I’m doing. I’d like to get financially educated. I’d like to take control of my money and my life and my taxes. I would love to recommend Buck Joffrey’s podcast, which is called Wealth Formula Podcast with Buck Joffrey. I hope you join Buck on this adventure of a lifetime. Now back to what we were discussing.

And one of the things that we do, we encourage our clients to do is to actually be very clear on what type of investing you’re doing. So one of the mistakes, and let me ask you, if you found this with people you talk to, one of the mistakes I find is people chasing returns, instead of understanding that you can get good returns in every type of investing and you really ought to be focused. My experience is when you’re focused on the right… On a type of a deal that works for you. I mean, let’s say for example, that you care, I’ve got a client that is a syndicator of multi-family real estate, and they’re all about building the community. That’s the reason they do it. And so, I encourage people that are… If they want, if that’s what they’re trying to accomplish, that maybe they ought to consider, that type of a sponsor, right? That type of a partner. If you just want cashflow, then maybe you look at a syndicator that is doing just has a really good system for doing it.

But chasing cashflow, I think chasing returns is always a mistake because then you get scattered and you really can’t get focused on one thing. And then what I find is, is that if you’re focused on one thing that the deals show up, because once you’re focused, of course, then your mind is there, your energy is there and the deals show up. Have you had challenges? And now that you’re focused, now that you’re doing the things that… And you’ve got the education, are you finding it difficult to find deals or are you find that deals are finding you

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Well, this depending on when people listen or watch this, this year with the pandemic, it has really shut down a lot of the lending and shut down a lot of the deals. Whereas usually, I would see maybe six to eight good deals. I’ve seen maybe two thus far this year, but again, it goes back to the sponsor. If you have a good one, they’re always… People don’t realize, the ones that I work with, they’re looking at 80, sometimes a 100 deals a month, underwriting them and they may make an offer in one or two. So people don’t see that behind the scenes versus these websites, like the one that RealtyShares that I invested with, that’s actually going under now, they just get pitch deals all the time. And I talked to one of the sponsors one time that actually pitched a deal to them.

They said there was no vetting, there was nothing. It was like, okay, you got a deal? Yeah, I’ll put you on my site. But the way that a lot of these websites state is, “Hey, we get all these deals and we’re only putting the best of the best on our website.” If I’m going to invest a lot of money, I want to… I meet them personally, I go. And if I have time to tour the property, I want to see their business plan. Because again, if I’m going to spend my hard earned money on something invest with them, I want to know that.

Plus if I’m going to recommend to family or friends or whomever, again, that reflects back on me. So I think that’s very important, but something you didn’t touch on, which you have a lot more knowledge than me is taxes. And a lot of times, instead of just chasing returns, you’ve got to look at… You’re talking about cashflow and getting a lot of this tax free money from these distributions based on the depreciation. And you don’t realize how much money you have to put away, which you’re usually taxed. And then you take it out and it’s taxed again, to get them out, that we’re getting tax free. So you have to take that into consideration as well.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

No, for sure. And when you talk about cashflow, people… Particularly stock financial planners, they like to talk about your return before taxes. They don’t always like to talk about return after taxes. I give an example in Tax-Free Wealth of a real estate deal versus a stock deal where the stock deal has a higher cash on cash return before tax. But the real estate is almost double the cash on cash return after tax. And so it’s really the money. It’s money that you end up with that matters.

On top of that, so one of the issues that I run into all the time is people that are passively investing, like your folks, that they’ve got tax advisors say, “Well, if you’re a passive investor, you don’t get to use the deductions.” So I don’t know what your experience is. This is the first time we met, my experience is that it’s pretty rare that I can’t find a way for my passive investors to use their deductions. And they can use them upfront. That’s actually not that difficult to do. Have you found that to be a situation where a lot of your… That the people who are advising your friends and your colleagues are telling them, wait, you don’t get to use it anyway.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Yeah. There’s two things. Number one, they’ll always say, “Hey, well, I’m going to discuss with my financial advisor to get some money over so I can do this.” And I’ll tell them right now, they’re not going to let you do that.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Right.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

And they’re like, “Why?” I say, “Well, that’s taking money out of their pocket.” And then number two is typically nine times out of 10 when they talk to their accountant, they usually just say, “We don’t really know much about real estate investing.” So they don’t have a really good background. So finding people, such as yourself and other groups that help real estate investors, I usually encourage them to speak with their accountant first, if not, we can link them up with people that are more well-versed in the real estate side.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

I was doing a virtual seminar yesterday with a friend of mine who’s in the apartment investing business. He’s an educator on apartment investing. We were talking about your team members and specialists. And it’s interesting. I mean, you’re a specialist in your field, right?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Right.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

And there’s a reason somebody comes to you and not to general dentistry to get what they want done when they have the issue that needs your specific services. And the same is true. People forget that the taxes are actually as complex in a different way as surgery. They are very, very complex. Einstein’s quoted as saying that the most difficult thing in the world to understand is income tax. And that’s Albert Einstein who said that. So I remind people that you want a specialist, general business is fine for general business. So, for your practice, a general practitioner is probably going to be okay on a regular, ongoing basis to handle your general practice. But when you start getting to specialty areas like real estate, natural resources, agriculture, or other things that require a specialty, you probably ought to have a specialist.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Yeah. Just like if you went to your annual checkup and your doctor said, “Ah, I think we may have maybe have possibility of having some heart issues.” What’s he going to do? He’s going to send you to a cardiologist, a specialist who has some more training in that. Especially, people that I deal with that just they get clobbered with taxes all the time. Once you add it all up, it’s about 50% taxes. So you want somebody that knows what they’re doing, because even if you don’t really get much good returns on it, what they could save you in taxes sometimes is worth the benefit of that.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Yeah. We’ve actually done… Of course, we’re numbers people, right? So we run numbers all the time and the numbers actually the first two or three years of an investment, the best return you’re going to get is from the government, if it’s done right. You’ll get a better… Especially right now with bonus depreciation and conservations, everything, real estate is a highly favored investment right now. But if you do it right, then you could actually end up with a much higher return from the the government, reducing your taxes. And by the way, the government does this on purpose as you know.

This is not a loophole, this is something the government has done really affirmatively and said, “Look, we want to build more housing. We want to build more commercial properties. We want to generate that for the economy. And so therefore if you’re willing to take the risk, we’ll be your partner in that.” And so we always say, partner with the government and you either partner with them by paying high tax and your [silent 00:24:53] partner, or you partner with them by paying low tax and doing what the government wants you to do. So what are maybe three things that you would suggest a high-income earner do if they’re looking at getting into investing and passive income?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Yeah, sure. Well, as a Christian person, I read the Bible a good bit. And one of the Book of Proverbs pretty much has literally everything that to answer your question and whether you’re a believer or not in the Book of Proverbs, it talks about if you want to be successful, surround yourself with people that are smarter than you and with advisors. So make sure that you look on your team if you do want to do real estate, is your accountant well-versed in real estate? Do you have potentially an attorney if you had to run by some questions about if you… I mean, I’m sure there’s people in your neighborhood or your area that are real estate investors, network with them. So don’t try to do it on your own, and that, again, that’s one of the reasons why I started my site debt-freedr.com to help with that.

But there’s probably people… And once I started talking to people in my area, it’s almost like they’re looking for somebody to mentor. I’ve got my real estate mentor here. He’s actually a billionaire with a B that just opened his office to me two and a half hours. And I told my wife, I said, “I learned more talking to him than literally that I did two years of college.” Because what he just… You have these blinders on and once you hear all those rags to riches stories, it’s like, I could do this. So it really opens your mind to that.

So that was really holding me back. And I think for a lot of the people that I talked to it’s sort of that scarcity mindset now that we’ll only have so much and we’re going to run out. And that kind of the way that we’re raised we can’t afford that or that costs too much. And so we always hear that. And I was like that for a long time, you can ask my wife, but it’s taken a while, but once you start realizing there’s plenty of money going around. I mean, look at the government, they just print more of it, right?

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Well, exactly. I mean, the way I look at it as it’s a competition or cooperation and actually have, we have a network of CPA firms and I invited somebody I knew, another CPA. I said, “Would you be interested in joining?” This was early on, and he said, “Why would I ever want to share what I know with somebody else?” I’m like, “I don’t know, maybe because they’ll share with you what they know.” And so he was very much about competition and our network is very much about cooperation. We meet literally every month, at least once, sometimes twice a month to get together, to share information with each other.

So here you have a bunch of CPAs that tend to be competitive by nature and cooperating and sharing stories and sharing here’s how we do this. And I’m like you, I think, you know what? There’s plenty of money to go around. There are plenty of deals to go around. There’s really not a scarcity except up here. And that’s where the scarcity is.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

True.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

All right. So getting the right people around you, that’s one thing. What are a couple of other things that you think people ought to be doing?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Well, as we just stated, starting with the mindset and really sit down and think, do I have a scarcity, or do I have an abundance mindset? Because if you have a scarcity mindset, it’s going to be very difficult to really do any type of investing. As you know, you’ve got to take risk. And if you’re just so like that, so scared then it’s going to be difficult and it may not be for you.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Well, and I think it’s tough for professionals, especially because we got where we were by being right. I mean, you think about it. I mean, we were right in school, we got A’s in school, we’re the proverbial A students, and it’s hard to be an investor or as an A student, I find, I actually find my most successful investor clients tend to be C students, B and C students, because they don’t have this need to be right.

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Mm-hmm (affirmative).

 

Tom Wheelwright:

And they don’t have the scarcity. Well, if I get an A… if for me to get an A, you have to get a B. So for me to win, you have to lose. Whereas, the reality is, is we can all win. So I think that’s great. So, we’ve got the people around you, the mentality, what would be the third thing you would say you would recommend to people?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Well, really defining your why and your goals. What are you really wanting to get? And if not, you’re just going to wander around and not get anywhere. You’re going to have the… I’ll have calls with people sometimes, they’re like, and they spit off all kinds of information. I said, “God, how many units do you own?” He said, “Well, none.” I was like, wow, well, it’s just this… The analysis by paralysis. And so you have to really, hey, this is what I want, this is my goals. And once you get that, then you’re able to work backwards. It’s so much easier to do that. Hey I want this amount of cashflow to cover my expenses.

And this is the returns that I made and this and that. And it’s easy to get that, but everybody’s so focused on putting money in a 401(k) for 40 years and hoping that when you retire the stock market didn’t go any crazy. Hope you don’t run out of money. And that’s all that we’re pitched to as we’re going through training and we get out and if you’re comfortable with that, that’s fine. But I like to eat a lot and I like options. And having passive income right now gives you options because what you think you know right now, your life is going to be different in five years, it’s going to be different in 10 years. So I like options.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

No, I love that. What I find is, is we work with our clients and they’ve figured out, okay, here’s what I want and here’s when I want it. And then you can come up, like you say, with a rate of return that I’m going to have to have. So it actually, part of that tells you, can I get to where I want to be passively or do I have to be active because obviously passive, you’re sharing the money with the person who’s doing all the work, the developer. Whereas if you’re active, you do end up with a higher return. You just spend more time at it. So that’s part of what, for us helps make the decision. Am I going to be active or passive, or do I need to change my goals? And then we can start narrowing the focus to the point that you mentioned, really what I considered to be criteria for investing.

What’s my rate of return? What’s my loan to value? What type of property? Where is it? What kind of market am I looking at? And then start looking for the sponsors, if you’re a passive that do what you want to get done. So I think those are great tools. We’re certainly on the same page here, Jeff. And of course, I always say that you’re smart if you agree with me. So you’re very, obviously very smart. Now, I really appreciate it, Jeff. I appreciate you taking time out. I know you’re in between appointments here and any final words? Where can people find you? I know you mentioned it once before, but where can people find your information?

 

Jeff Anzalone:

Yeah, I’ve actually written a guide that just the very basics on how I got started with passive income. So they could download that at debt-freedr.com forward slash free guide. And if they have any questions, they can email me at Jeff at debt-freedr.com.

 

Tom Wheelwright:

Oh, that’s awesome. Thank you, Jeff. And thank… I really appreciate when I see a busy professional taking time to do financial education, particularly among their peers. And so I would like to thank you, Jeff, for what you’re doing and taking the time and doing your website, doing your due diligence, learning so that other people can learn from you. Instead of having to learn the hard way, it’s always good to have a mentor. And it sounds like you would be an absolute great mentor. So thank you for that. Remember everyone that when we talk about multiple streams of income like this, we’re not talking about, you’re doing real estate and you’re doing stocks, and you’re doing a bunch of other stuff. We’re talking about you’re doing multiple streams of income from the same type of real estate, or the same type of investing. It’s very important to stay focused. When we stay focused, we get the right, like Jeff said, we have the right people that we’re surrounded with. We have the right mentality and we know why we’re doing it. We’re always going to make way more money, and pay way less tax. Thanks everyone.

 

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