How I’m Earning Reliable & Truly Passive Income
Today I purchased another piece of passive income producing real estate in West Virginia and I want to write to you about it so you can understand that there are reliable ways to earn passive income.
First, I want to share a bit about my investing background so you know where I’m coming from.
My first investment was in a mutual fund. It was what everyone I knew was doing and I was pretty uneducated on the topic of investing. I ended up having to cash it out to buy a car and by doing that I lost money due to volatility and also due to fees.
After that, it was some time before I began investing again and my next asset was physical silver. I had spent quite a bit of time learning about how precious metals work and I liked the idea of having something tangible with a really long track record (thousands of years) that I could understand easily.
From there I got my first Sacred Account (High-Early-Cash-Value-Dividend-Paying-Whole-Life-Insurance…which you can probably see why I just call it my Sacred Account it’s way shorter to say haha). I began to accumulate money into that and learned to become my own banker. I paid off debt with it, self-financed large purchases with it, invested in myself and my business with it, and today I own 6 of them.
This whole time I had been eying real estate. Many people I knew were involved in either transacting real estate as a realtor or buying investment rentals or doing rehabs and flips as investors. I had heard quotes like “90% of all millionaires are made in real estate” and it seemed like the way to go.
The only problem was that I was already a very busy guy. Between my work, my family, physical fitness, travel and all of the other things I was doing, I didn’t see how realistic it was to now also become a landlord. And to be honest, the idea of being a landlord really made me cringe. I didn’t want to fix toilets, receive 3:00 am phone calls because the pipes leaked, handle drug use complaints, or deal with cleaning up units after people trashed them and moved out. Someone mentioned to me that I could hire a property manager to do it all for me and this gave me hope. However, I need to mention I’m also a numbers guy. I like to understand the numbers on any financial transaction I do and see if the math makes sense.
Well, when I did the math, I quickly realized I’d be paying a property manager usually about 10% of my rents plus the cost for jobs and materials and other odds and ends…even if I wasn’t profitable on the property I’d still need to pay this. I realized I’d be making a few hundred dollars per month in profits at best and that it just didn’t make sense.
After searching, I thought I found the holy grail. I’d learned about private real estate funds. It seemed to good to be true so I really did my due diligence and I found an investor that had a private fund that I’d known since I was 12 years old, who had a 40 year track record of success in real estate investing, who had never not paid an investor as agreed and who was local to me. I toured the properties, met with the guy several times and for several hours and decided this would be my route. How easy was that right? I just give him money and he does what he does and pays me 10–12% every month completely passive.
Well, I learned the hard way that someone else’s investment fund is a business and that I wasn’t investing in real estate. I was investing in a business and that business was investing in real estate. Businesses are only as good as they are viable, legal, organizationally sound, and managed and run well. This person was really good at making real estate deals happen, but really bad at business management. I got a letter in the mail one day saying the fund had an unexpected loss and I wasn’t going to be paid as agreed and that I could not get my money back out.
This really let the wind out of my sails. After literally years of searching for the perfect way to earn reliable and truly passive income, I found out that even that one didn’t work. And as I began to research, I found that about 7/10 private investment funds lose money. I quickly crossed this avenue off my list.
All of this brings me to now. I buy turnkey seller finance real estate.
I work with a company that buys distressed single family homes as-is and in bulk and usually for around $30-$40,000. These are what I call “turds”. I wouldn’t live in them. They’re dirty. They’re ugly. They need work. But that’s all part of the model.
This company gets the homes up into a sellable condition, places them in a series of land trusts so that I am protected as an investor, and then sells them to me for anywhere between $40-$60,000 (which is ridiculously cheap for a single family home). I take loan against my Sacred Account to acquire these.
The company then lists the property and finds an ideal family to move into my home and that family does a seller finance mortgage with me (very similar to a rent to own situation). I typically sell the property to them for 10–30% more than I paid for it, they give me a down payment of 5–10%, and then I charge 12% interest for 20 years.
The company manages the property, the family and the payments for me so that I can be as passive as possible.
The great thing with this style of investing is that I’m not a landlord. I’m a bank and they are on a mortgage with me. If their toilet breaks, they fix it. Just like if your roof leaks, you don’t call your mortgage company. You fix the roof and they collect their payment.
If the family doesn’t pay, I can choose to foreclose and take the house back. Part of the agreement with them is they fix the house up as they live there and they get to keep all of the sweat equity. If they default though and I do take the house back, I am getting back an asset that is more valuable than when I sold it…which is opposite of what often happens with rentals.
And lastly, this is not a private fund. I am not investing in someone else’s business. I am buying and controlling physical real estate. The company that helps me with this does so on a contract basis and they are simply managing things for me.
Now, I started this article telling you about the latest property I bought and I want to give you the details on it!
I paid $43,000 for the home, which I borrowed from my Sacred Account (which means that $43,000 is still growing at 3–5% per year tax free while I use it for this home…I’m double dipping with the money basically).
The family is putting $3,000 down and financing a balance of $47,590 with me.
My monthly net income on this property will be $459.01.
My first main personal goal is to accumulate 31 homes like this in as little time as possible, and all with my Sacred Accounts.
For the first time in my life, I feel like I have a “go-to” real estate investment to produce passive income for me that is both reliable and truly passive.
But the key difference is that I’m investing in real estate the way the banks do, not the way a landlord does and it isn’t too hard to tell which of those two groups is more successful financially.
In closing, my mission in life is to help good people build more wealth who make the world a better place.
So, if you’re a good person who wants to help make the world a better place and this article helped you, I want to encourage you to start planning your next quarterly trip and putting this into practice. And feel free to write to me and let me know how it went.
If you’re a client of mine and you’d like help leveling up, send an email to my team with “Level Up” in the subject line to Contact@WealthDynamX.com.
If you’re a follower and have not read my book The Blueprint to Financial Freedom yet, that is the place to start. This book covers the specifics for each level in the various chapters and you can grab the book for free as my gift.
Click here to get a copy!
The Blueprint to Financial Freedom by Jerry Fetta
To Purpose, Wealth & Freedom,
Jerry Fetta
Jerry Fetta is the CEO and Founder of Wealth DynamX. He is a nationally recognized financial expert featured in Forbes, Yahoo Finance, Fox, Chicago Weekly News, New York Finance, interviewed on 100+ podcasts with world renowned experts, earning endorsements and affiliations throughout his career with names like Kevin O’Leary, Grant Cardone, Dave Ramsey, and Pamela Yellen.
Jerry’s mission in life is to help create millions of financially educated and solvent families achieving greater financial freedom and sharing the truth about money with those around them.
Learn more at www.WealthDynamX.com
(DISCLAIMER: The information in this content should not be considered tax, financial, investment, or any kind of professional advice. Only a professional diagnosis of your specific situation can determine which strategies are appropriate for your needs. Wealth DynamX can and does not provide advice unless/until engaged by you.)
