Flipping With RealSuccess

By Joe Arias

In "Flipping with RealSuccess," real estate expert

• Language: English
• Publisher: Real Success
• Release date: May 3, 2021
• ISBN: 9781626765481

Book preview

Table of Contents

An Introduction to RealSuccess

Two Pyramids: The Busy Worker vs. The Entrepreneur

The Power of Compound Interest and the Danger of Inflation

The Art of Flipping

The 13 Problems of Flipping

The Solutions to The Problems

Building Your Team

Asset Protection

Systems for Success

Building Your Brand

The Importance of Raising Money

How to Find Properties

Understanding Construction

The Sales Process

Tax Planning

Revisiting Problems (and Reviewing Solutions)

OK, So What’s the Next Step?

The RealSuccess Real Estate F.A.Q.

1

An Introduction to RealSuccess

Success. It's often discussed but rarely defined. While the good people at Merriam-Webster may disagree, I happen to believe that this indefinable quality has a lot to do with the fact that success means very different things to different people.

Not long ago, I wrote a book. I titled it Finding Your RealSuccess: Your Journey to Financial Freedom. Now, if you were to see this book in a store or on Amazon, you might think that it was just another self-help or business guru tome in the vein of Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill or Mastery by Robert Greene. While this isn't entirely untrue, I like to think that one of the ways I set my book apart from all the other entrepreneurship manuals out there was my rather unique take on the concept of success. For instance, throughout the book, I constantly reference an allegory in which the reader is a hero on their own personal journey. At one end of the journey lay their humble beginnings, while at the other end sat success - at least, success as they define it. And like all novels, movies, and fairy tales that use this theme, I was careful to tell my readers that theirs was a Hero's Journey that would involve many, many steps. 

For instance:

Nearly every story of this type starts with the hero living in what we refer to as the ordinary world.  At this point in his or her quest, the hero is an average (or maybe even a bit below average) person for their time and place. In fact, the only thing that makes the hero special in any way is that they are typically not satisfied with their day-to-day activities. So even as the people around them express contentment with the way things are, they are uneasy, unhappy, or even frustrated with their lot in life.

In the first few chapters of my book, I compared this feeling to people who are caught up in the Rat Race - the stereotypical approach of life, finance, and success - but who long for something else.  To their surprise, many of my readers instantly recognized their life as relying on this Rat Race and discovered a new-found desire for change. In fact, even people with prestigious jobs who were making great money saw a reflection of themselves in the hero who wanted more than anything to grab life by the horns and do their own thing.

Later, I defined these heroes by their real-world titles: entrepreneurs.

According to the Hero's Journey formula, life presents the hero with a call to adventure – an invitation into a brand-new world. Though he or she may express trepidation at this massive undertaking, they are eventually convinced to enter that world by the encouragement and support of a mentor. You know how it goes from here. The hero faces challenges, overcomes difficulties, and ultimately undergoes a transformation into someone else – someone better. No doubt you could apply this simple story template to dozens of your favorite movies or books. After all, it is an incredibly popular way to tell a story. But my goal was to get you to apply it to your life; specifically, your journey from the work-a-day world into the life of a successful real estate entrepreneur.

Whether you've read my first book or not, in this next book, I will assume you’ve committed to real estate entrepreneurship in some way or another – even if your goal is merely to learn more about it. And while you won’t need all the details from our discussions on the Hero’s Journey to understand what I’ll be showing you, it’s still an allegory  I hope you’ll carry with you as we discuss the main principles and concepts contained in this book.

Sure, I won't be quoting The Matrix or talking about The Movie of Your Life, as I did before, but that doesn’t mean you are any less a hero on a challenging, but ultimately extremely rewarding journey. To that point, I am here to support you, to shine a light on an area of your life that perhaps you didn’t know it existed, and help you answer your call to adventure. In the end, I hope this book helps you as you undergo that all-too-important transformation into a successful real estate entrepreneur.

But before we get into how you can make that happen, we need to talk about a little thing called Financial Intelligence.

Types of Intelligence

There are a lot of different types of intelligence out there. In fact, my mother used to say that everyone in the world has a gift, a sort of inner genius, even if they go their entire lives never discovering what it is. But the type of intelligence we're going to be focusing on throughout this book is very rare. We aren't born with it, but we can learn it (if we have the right teacher). I'm referring to Financial Intelligence, or – as I like to call it - Entrepreneurial IQ.

You see, making money is something that virtually everyone can do. That's not to say that those who struggle with finances are doing anything wrong, per se. I'm merely saying that there are rich investors, rich farmers, rich salespeople, and rich mechanics out there, so what we do doesn't really define how successful we can be. Due to talent, luck, marketing savvy, or a combination of all three, some people simply find ways to make money hand over fist where others struggle. Still, just because someone has more money doesn't mean they are more intelligent.

For instance, we've all heard the story of the one-hit-wonder who puts out that first big single and buys a mansion, three cars, and a private jet. Or how about the lottery winners, football players, and Silicon Valley developers who blow their money in similar, ostentatious ways. But how do most of those stories end? Well, if we follow their trail of spending long enough, sooner or later, most of these people end up in bankruptcy or – at the very least - losing most of their cash. These men and women had it all, but they lost it fast because they didn't have the Financial Intelligence to make their money last. But, as we’ll see, this principle doesn't just apply to those who earn their money fast and spend it faster – they’re just the most obvious example. The same thing can also happen to those rich investors, farmers, salespeople, and mechanics. Because regardless of how much they make at any given time, if they lack Financial Intelligence, they will always be just a few bad months away from going broke.

How is this possible? Because when people don't have a solid foundation of financial knowledge upon which to build, they don’t move down the path toward success - at least, not as fast and as securely as they should. Despite them having investment intelligence, mechanical intelligence, and sales intelligence, the fact that they've neglected to teach themselves some very basic things about how money works keeps them in a constant state of financial vulnerability. 

This brings me to the point of why I call this type of intelligence Entrepreneurial IQ. You see, as we go through this book, I will illuminate the fact that entrepreneurs are not ordinary people. By this, I mean that entrepreneurs aren't the least bit average in how we see the world around us, how we define success, and how we pursue our individual journeys toward it. We have a different sort of programming – a different sort of mindset. In fact, by the time you finish reading this Introduction, you’ll find out that there are really only two types of mindsets out there: the Traditional Mindset and the Success Mindset. Ultimately, all that really separates entrepreneurs from the rest of the world is that their eyes have been opened to the power of systems and the many flaws present in the Traditional approach to making money.

Knowledge and Implementation

My last book focused a lot on helping readers shed that cumbersome, unproductive employee mindset so they could start thinking like an entrepreneur. We talked about getting over bad habits, learning to combine our passions with our work, finding and listening to coaches, and creating a lifestyle around our quest for success. Now we're going to dig a little bit deeper into how this new mindset can be applied to real estate; specifically, our ability to generate life-changing wealth through this incredible industry. 

To get started, I want to discuss a few very powerful concepts: knowledge and implementation. Without getting overly granular, I think it's pretty safe to define knowledge merely as information. This refers to the data, facts, figures, and statistics we use every day when completing various tasks. And thanks to technology, many of us have spent most of our lives in a world where knowledge has always been readily available. For instance, if someone were to ask you a question, you could tell them the answer in seconds (providing you had a few bars of signal on your cell phone). So, if the old saying knowledge is power is true, we should all be ready to join The Avengers.

But while knowledge is indeed powerful, it is also a bit dangerous in its pure, raw form.  How so? Well, what if that knowledge is incorrect? Since knowledge on its own is nothing more than data, who's to say that that data is accurate? Moreover, what's to stop us from adopting that so-called knowledge and applying it to our lives, relationships, and finances in a way that ends up doing serious harm to all three? 

This brings me to implementation. You see, like many other entrepreneurs, I use the word implementation to refer to the things that can't be taught, but have to be experienced instead. When we learn to do things the wrong way due to bad knowledge, we start to develop bad habits - and creating bad habits is certainly not the goal of this book. So, while I'm going to be passing on a lot of knowledge in the following pages, that pure, raw data is also going to be coupled with implementation - examples and applications that will help you apply that knowledge in the right way.

In short: knowledge alone is not enough. You need the right knowledge and the proper implementation to achieve success.

As I've mentioned, the word success will mean something completely different to everyone who hears it. And if you've spent time identifying your passion, purpose, and why as described in my first book, you should have a pretty good idea by now of what success means to you. That said, nearly every person's definition of success will have something to do with generating wealth. This is because wealth is integral to accomplishing almost all of the things that we humans find important, such as providing for our children and living a life of financial freedom.

But generating that sort of life-changing wealth is not as simple as merely making money. As we’ll learn, it’s so much more than that.

Coming to America

To help you apply what I talk about in this book to your own journey, I will often use myself as an example of someone who successfully moved from one mindset to the other. In fact, this book will frequently refer to both my entrepreneurship background and my various struggles on my path to financial freedom.

Most adults today were molded according to a very Traditional Mindset - particularly when it comes to money. This type of mindset tells us to go to school, get a job, work hard, buy a house, pay our taxes, and save up whatever we can so that we can retire when we get old enough. There might be a few extra steps in there, sure, but this pretty much sums up the life template that's been in use for the past 70 or so years.

Now, don’t feel bad if this is how you were raised, because it was certainly how my parents raised me back in Argentina. In fact, the vast majority of parents around the world still teach this mindset today. If they didn't, it wouldn't be called "traditional," right?

Like I said, I was born and raised in Argentina. But when I graduated high school, I received an offer to come and study in the United States, and I took it. Though this was a unique opportunity for me to start a new life, I carried my parents’ Traditional Mindset along with me. So powerful was this mindset, in fact, that when I graduated and decided to pursue my future in the States, I outlined all of my plans according to  its rules.

For instance, because acting and filmmaking had always been one of my passions, I moved out West and started working in Hollywood. I enjoyed the work immensely, made a lot of friends, met lots of celebrities, and even had the opportunity to direct an award-winning short film. However, after years of struggling to make it in one of the world's most competitive industries, I was not only unfulfilled, but struggling to make ends meet. It wasn’t long before I realized that I'd never become financially independent just by working hard – even if it was in an industry I loved.

I’d followed what I’d been taught to a T. I’d gone to school, I’d gotten a job, and I’d worked as hard as I could, but I wasn’t making any progress toward success.

The Traditional Mindset was failing me.

Sure, I was making money, but I was also spending it. Every year I'd work as much as I could and earn as much as I could, but I never seemed to have anything left at the end. To make matters worse, there were so many people around me with the same mindset that I found it hard to figure out just what I was doing wrong. Had I stayed on that path, I might have ended up in the same spot as most others who follow the Traditional Mindset: facing retirement with barely enough money to support myself.

You see, what I didn’t know at the time was that the average American in their 60's only has about $170,000 in their savings for their retirement. Taking those figures into account, if a person was to retire and live another 20 years, they’d have to live off $8500 a year ($708 dollars a month) for the rest of their lives! In what world would you call that retirement, let alone success? These unfortunate individuals reach their journey’s destination only to find they’ve been lied to the whole way there. This is why you see so many older people holding onto their jobs for dear life – they simply can't retire! And while we could argue about the many different factors contributing to this situation, there’s no escaping the fact that the majority of the blame lies squarely at the feet of the Traditional Mindset. 

So, there I was, attempting to make it in Hollywood and quickly realizing that hard work and passion alone weren’t going to get me there. I was where you might be right now: aware that my approach to life was somehow incorrect, yet unable to see how. Finally, I admitted to myself that it would take a major stroke of luck for me to ever retire with enough cash in the bank to survive. But being a kid who had already moved to a new country, learned a new language, graduated college, and gone through the immigration process, I wasn't about to let luck dictate my success.

The Mechanics Behind Mindsets

At this point, I knew that I needed to transform my mindset, but into what?  Since I wasn't getting the results I wanted financially, career-wise, etc., I figured the best place to start would be to study the mindsets of those who had done what I wanted to do. So, I started analyzing the lives and habits of millionaires; specifically, millionaire entrepreneurs.  Not only was this extremely enlightening, but I’m not ashamed to say that it became a bit of an obsession for me. In fact, it still is to this day.

So, when I wasn’t working, I committed myself to understanding the secrets of those men and women who had not only changed their mindset, but used that transition as a springboard to change their financial futures. What was it that they did differently along their journey that led them to such a different destination than the majority of Americans? Specifically, how did they shed the Traditional Mindset that had been drilled into them by society, parents, and teachers their whole lives?

As I researched and studied, the answers started to come to me. Soon, I realized that I wasn’t just seeing a new sort of mindset take shape – I was actually uncovering the mechanics of building wealth. And as with anything else mechanical, I slowly began to see how the process was all controlled by a series of systems.

Now, you're going to hear the word systems a lot in this book, but it may not mean exactly what you think it means. When I say systems, I'm talking about a set of strategies, principles, and tools that operate together to accomplish a series of goals. For instance, at RealSuccess, we design our systems with the goal of saving our students time, energy, and money, the three principal resources that every person has and can use as they see fit. As we go forward, I'll demonstrate how the right systems can help turn us from Busy Workers into true entrepreneurs, help us build wealth, and let us scale our businesses at rates we could never have dreamed of before.

But first, let's talk in more detail about the Traditional Mindset, how it's supposed to work, and – most importantly – why it doesn’t. 

The Traditional Mindset (and Why it Fails)

As I sit here writing this, there are about 17 million millionaires in the United States. This is the highest per capita concentration of wealth in the world, and it says a lot about this country and its opportunities. But considering that the Traditional Mindset is still the prevailing approach taught by parents and educators, how did all of these men and women achieve this level of success? What did they do? More importantly, what did they not do to become wealthy enough to take control of their lives and their finances in such a profound way?

As I said, I became obsessed with these questions around the time I was questioning my career, my future, and my mindset. I wasn't an entrepreneur quite yet, but I had gotten to the point where I realized that it wasn't just the choices I was making that were holding me back - it was my entire approach to life.

Do you remember the steps of the "Traditional