Nate Lambert: Episode 654

Transcript

[0:00:24] Jane Borden: If you’ve ever found yourself sitting at work, thinking how much you hate your work, you have something in common with Nate Lambert. He walked away form his job as a psychology professor, learned the real estate business and eventually became a millionaire. If you would also like to have that income with Nate Lambert, you’ll be happy to hear that he has written a step-by-step guide called Active Life, Passive Income: Achieve Financial Independence Through Real Estate Investing. On Author Hour today, Nate takes us through the steps you’ll need to master to get into and succeed in real estate. He discusses the importance of entering with the right mindset and he shares what has kept him motivated throughout. Hi Author Hour listeners. I’m Jane Borden and I’m here today with Nate Lambert, author of Active Life, Passive Income: Achieve Financial Independence Through Real Estate Investing. Nate, thank you so much for being with us today.

[0:01:22] Nate Lambert: Hey, I’m stoked to be with you, Jane.

[0:01:25] Jane Borden: You were a struggling psychology professor and then you switched paths and now you’re a wealthy real estate investor. I want to ask you about that decision to switch paths, to start off a conversation today. You wrote something in the introduction about the power of dissatisfaction. Can you tell us about that?

[0:01:43] Nate Lambert: Yeah, you bet. Before you make a big switch in life, you got to be, most people I’ve found have some level of dissatisfaction with where they’re at currently. If you’re loving every aspect of your life, you probably don’t want to switch it up. Why switch it up, right? For me, I was like, I was really bored, I was just feeling like I wasn’t really contributing that much. I was spending a lot of time by myself, I was kind of lonely in my office all day writing these research articles that nobody really reads or cares about and I just felt like I wanted more and that’s why when I read a book about – a book similar to what I’ve written about real estate investing. It really caught me and just got me so exciting, gave me a vision and a dream of something that I could shoot for and possibly achieve. Man, I just decided to go for it, made it, I mean, that’s a total 180 going from a psychology professor to a real estate professional. But it was – it’s been the most satisfying decision I’ve made in my life. It was scary at times. No question but I’m so grateful that I made this leap, this made all of the difference.

[0:03:05] Jane Borden: Yeah. Well, clearly, you’ve got tenacity because becoming a professor of anything is no easy task either. Let’s talk about the specific kind of real estate investing that you dug into. There’s so many different kinds. This book focuses on creative financing, short and long-term rentals and fix and flips. Can you quickly tell our listeners what those are?

[0:03:31] Nate Lambert: Those are kind of the key basic types of investing that most people start with, single-family homes, duplexes, fourplexes. Figuring out how you’re going to either rent them or flip them and make some cash. The ultimate goal is to create passive income in your life. Even if you’re flipping, you know, most people want to get a rental in some degree or fashion so that they can have that passive income flow stream coming into their life.

[0:04:01] Jane Borden: Yeah, you have written what is truly a step-by-step guide. I mean, first of all, why are you giving all your secrets away?

[0:04:13] Nate Lambert: You know, I just feel like, if I had a book like this starting out, it would have made all the difference. To be able to read literally step by step, how to find the deals, how to fund the deals, how to analyze and make sure that you’re getting a good deal, how to really just do every single step. I feel like that’s so important for people and ultimately, I just want to help people to really achieve the kind of financial freedom that I’ve had in my life. I thought hey, might as well just give them everything I got, put out all my learning and all the growth that I’ve learned over the last six, seven years.

[0:04:56] Jane Borden: Okay, well let’s dig into it. There are five parts to the process and to the book. The first one is vision and strategy. I guess these are all the sort of things you need to have worked out before you actually start or you tell me.

[0:05:13] Nate Lambert: The vision is so important, okay? You got to have a “Why”, you got to have a very strong reason for jumping into this. For most people, it’s not like “I just love fixing up houses, I’ve always wanted to be a landlord.” Right? That’s not what most people are in this for. Most people are in it for financial freedom. When I say financial freedom or independence, what I mean is, you’re not working for someone else, you’re working for yourself. You’re your own boss, you can determine when you go somewhere, you can determine what you want, where you want for how long you want, with whom you want. Go do anywhere — literally have that freedom of choice and time and that’s what most people want to do. Ultimately, but you got to decide why is it that you want this financial independence, what are you going to do with it? Are you going to travel, are you going to spend time with family or are you going to go and try and help people on a massive scale? In terms of contribution, what is it that you are really looking for? You got to have that really clear in your mind before you start that journey because it’s not an easy journey, there’s a lot of work, there’s a lot of learning that you need to do and so you got to have a really strong “Why” before you begin this kind of journey.

[0:06:45] Jane Borden: Okay. The next step is to actually find the funds to start purchasing something that you say that it doesn’t have to be your own money, which is somewhat of a revelation for anyone who doesn’t know much about real estate investing at least. What are some creative ways that people can get started?

[0:07:11] Nate Lambert: That’s a great question, Jane. Most people think “Hey, I go tot have a lot of money saved up before I can even think about real estate investing.” A lot of people think, “I need a down payment, which is usually like 20%, I need $40,000. I need to just save up.” Most people have like a W2 income job that if they’re lucky, they’re maybe making an extra five or 500 or a thousand dollars that they’re not using, a lot of people are living paycheck to paycheck. "Where do I really save up $40,000 per down payment for a property?" Right? What I do is I show people all the creative ways to source money, there’s so many ways, it doesn’t have to be your own money. In fact, when I flip properties, I usually don’t use any of my own money. I find a deal that’s a great discount, huge – way below market value and people are like, “How do you even find properties in this kind of market that are below market value?” I know it sounds incredulous, but there are deals out there. You just need to find the ones that are off market. You're not looking on the internet, right? You're finding deals that have a huge discount and then when you find the deal like that, to be honest, the money comes pretty easily. There’s hard money lenders, there’s private money lenders that are like, “Wow, this looks like a great investment. I would love to lend you the money to do that deal.” That’s one of the ways is just getting people to lend the money, sometimes you can convince the seller to do seller finance. Let’s say someone’s about to lose their home, maybe they haven’t been able to make the payments for several months and they’re like, “All right, here’s what I’m going to do. I’m going to…” What you can say to them is, “I’m going to get you caught up with the bank, I’m going to give you some money to find a new place to live, pay some of your bills and then I am going to just take over your payments for it.” You don’t have to worry about those payments again, ultimately, the person remains on the mortgage but you’re making the payments on their behalf and you’ve given them money to – for them to find a new place and that doesn’t have to be a lot of money, right? You can borrow someone else’s money and it doesn’t even have to be yours but you can then control the property and you can rent it out or sell it, essentially you are on title, you own the property. Seller financing is such a great way to get deals without even using any of your own money or without having to use a bank.

[0:09:51] Jane Borden: Right. Speaking of banks, the third part, the nuts and bolts of the deal, that’s I guess where we really get into the nitty-gritty. How can people even begin to understand everything they’ll need to know to strategize around deal completion?

[0:10:10] Nate Lambert: There is so many aspects to the deal and you want to make sure that you’re finding a really good deal. That’s the core, most important first step is finding the deal. I teach the five major ways that people can find a below market deal where you can easily find funding for it and then either flip it or rent it, right? Another core piece is how to analyze it because you make the money on the purchase of the deal. If you're not in a spot where this is actually a really good deal then you know, you could be in a spot where you could actually lose money and that’s the last place you want to be. I share a way to do some quick formulas, how you can analyze it and make sure, “Hey, this is going to be a deal that I should make money on.” There’s a lot of checks in place and things that you're going to want to do to me. Sure, it’s actually a deal, and then really, I teach you how to negotiate the deal and how to ultimately build your team. You got to find a good title officer, good lenders, good contractors, good property managers, all the – there’s so many different players to help you do this the right way and a lot of these people have decades of experience. Even if you’re just beginning, you can rely a lot on a really good team to help you process the deal and the cool thing about this Jane is you don’t have to do it yourself. You can have someone else to do most of the heavy lifting and there’s enough profit in real estate that they can do all this work for you and you can be off on vacation or doing what you want to do while your team is working on completing the steps for you. You just need to get really good at finding the deal and finding the money. You can have other people do almost everything else.

[0:12:03] Jane Borden: I mean, you’re making it sound really great, Nate. Okay, after that, the next goal and strategy and portion of the book is about how to scale and as you say, take your real estate career to the next level. Do you mean moving from a couple of properties to – you tell me?

[0:12:30] Nate Lambert: I say nail it, then scale it, right? First one, do a couple of deals, get your feet wet, understand how it works and then ultimately, you want to start delegating. You want to start having other people, contractors, other people handling all of the steps for you so that you can focus your time and energy on finding the next deal and funding the next deal. What I like to say is there is a rule of three. You’re going to start with maybe one property in the finding stage and then have one in the fix-up, get ready to rent stage and then either the sell/rent stage. There’s three stages, you’re going to ideally have one property in each stage and then as you scale it, you’re going to try and get two in each stage and then three in each stage and then you know at different points in my craft has many support team flips going at one time and it’s because I have a great system to get all of these pieces running effectively. I had a team, you’re not going to do that all at once but ideally, if you want to really make big money, you got to do multiple properties all at once. I talk a lot about the systems to get this running so that you can make large six figured checks and then ultimately when you’re making all of that money, you don’t want to be paying half of it out to the government. There is several incredible strategies of what you can do to save on your taxes, so you don’t get hit with a massive tax bill at the end.

[0:14:05] Jane Borden: Okay, so to maintain all of this, you’re going to need what you discuss in the last section of the book, a success mindset. Talk to us about how we can maintain that kind of mindset and not fall into pitfalls?

[0:14:27] Nate Lambert: Yes, so you know your mindset is so important. Tony Robins talks about how 80% of your success is going to base on your mindset. What I like to tell people is a lot of people first of all get stuck with analysis paralysis. They spend so much time just analyzing the deal that they never really just go and do it, right? They start to think about all the ways they might lose money, so what I tell people is, “Hey, you just got to ready-fire-aim,” instead of ready and fire. You’re always like thinking and analyzing, overanalyzing. I just say, “Hey, go do some lighting analysis then get that thing under contract.” Which means you’ve had the seller signed that they’re going to sell it to you and then at that point, you want to do your heavy due diligence to make sure that the property is in a good spot. That’s a lot of what I teach in this last section is really how to get a property going quickly, how to overcome the rejection. Because you know, you’re going to have people say no. You’re going to have a lot of people say no, so you just got to move on, you just got to keep pushing forward and move on to the next property. Then there is a lot of pitfalls that new real estate investors fall into. I point out all of the different pitfalls, so that you can just push forward and ultimately become a millionaire real estate investor. That’s my goal is to create thousands of real estate millionaires that are contributing in a major way to other people’s lives through the wealth that they’ve created and through the financial freedom that they’ve created.

[0:16:07] Jane Borden: Let’s talk about that a little bit. What was your vision that propelled you into this and kept you motivated?

[0:16:16] Nate Lambert: One of the things I like better than anything is traveling the world. Exploring the world with my family. What I did, you know, ultimately in 2019 before the pandemic I mean we spent three months of the year on family vacation. We went to 14 different countries around the world.

[0:16:35] Jane Borden: Just in time.

[0:16:36] Nate Lambert: I mean — yeah, just in time, exactly and we’ve continued to do a lot of travel even during the pandemic. But it’s been so fun to just be able to book whatever hotel I want and to ultimately still get business going, get business done while I’m on family vacation and so that was a big driver for me, just to be able to have that time freedom to just go and travel the world. We lived in Fiji for seven months. We’re on House Centers International. It was just such an adventure for us. I’m all about adventure and being able to do that, not to mention, you know, when we were in Cambodia, we were able to dig – we were able to contribute to some wells for several villages like you know, about 20 different villages to have fresh clean drinking water and to be able to have my kids hand out bread and help these people in that way, I mean that was just such a powerful experience for them and for me just to be able to give back in such a powerful way. We built this school, an English teaching school for people to be able to get ahead. So I think for me really, the vision was about being able to have adventures, spend that time with my wife and five boys and to give back and contribute in meaningful ways. Not only by to people in developing countries but by writing a book like this, right? To ultimately coach and help, you know, I am actually coaching over 300 people around the country and it’s so much fun, Jane, to see the light bulb come on in people’s minds when they see the potential of what you can do in real estate. You know, I had a group called The Determined Dozen, where I help people in a small group setting to give them the advice and the guidance to really take their investing to the next level. It’s really been gratifying to watch so many of these people quit their jobs and be able to start traveling around the world, just like I’ve done. That’s been my biggest driver is teaching and helping other people like that.

[0:18:55] Jane Borden: What do you find to be a common roadblocks for people when they’re getting started on this?

[0:19:02] Nate Lambert: That’s a great question. I feel like there’s three main things that people really need to be successful. You know and a lot of them I am trying to give them in this book but the book isn’t enough by itself to get to, to really get you started but what I feel like people need are three things. They need good education and I’ve just unloaded so much of what I know and what I’ve learned in this book but there is also other resources, right? Other resources to go deep and to find out all of the details about how to do whatever type of real estate you’re really interested in. It’s important to really learn that well. The other thing is you know, a lot of people just feel like they can just do it all on their own and they end up – they don’t – people don’t know what they don’t know. They might think that something is a good deal, go buy it, only to find out that they forgot there is money cost. There is title insurance, that there is this and this and that, right? It’s just like, “Oh my gosh, this is getting so expensive so fast.” And now they realize that they are actually going to lose money on a deal, right? Have a guide, to have someone who’s done dozens and dozens of transactions looking over the deals that you come up with and just giving you that guidance on how to find those deals and how to find the money for them. You know having a coach is so crucial. That is the other thing that a lot of people miss out and then finally, I think having a community. Having other people, being connected to other investors that you can talk through when you’re discouraged that when you need a little hand up they are going to be there to help you, to keep you motivated, to keep you pushing forward. I think having a community of people that can inspire you and can guide you and just likeminded individuals who are on that same path, that same journey as you, I think is just so important.

[0:21:07] Jane Borden: Yeah, definitely. Well I want to ask you, I can’t help it before you leave, I imagine that your background in psychology that’s been really valuable. I mean first of all, you talk – we’ve talked a lot about mindset and vision and dealing with other people when you’re making deals or trying to secure properties. Do you find that your two careers in life have a lot in common?

[0:21:36] Nate Lambert: Funny you should ask that because at first glance, they look like they’re too completely different tracks but you’re absolutely right that there is so much about teaching and guiding that’s helped me. I mean it’s especially helped me to be a good coach because it’s one thing to know how to invest in real estate yourself but it’s a whole different thing to know how to guide and teach and mentor someone else and I got so much practice. You know, not only did I teach thousands of people in different universities but being able to mentor people in writing manuscripts and there were dozens of students that I helped publish and that mentoring process was – it’s funny because you actually don’t get paid anything when you publish a manuscript. It sort of just like your pat on the back kind of thing. But going through that process with so many people is amazingly similar. There is just similar steps, they’re different, totally different steps but it’s just like working together with someone else for a common goal and just mentoring them through the process and working on that together, that’s been supremely helpful for me in what I’m doing now, like helping people. Now, it’s just, “Hey, there is 40 to a $100,000 paycheck at the end.” It’s a similar process and yeah, it’s been helpful to kind of understand the psychology of sellers in so many ways. In the psychology of just really learning how to improve yourself and be the kind of person that can be a leader and that can help so many people out of difficult real estate problems. Yeah, it’s been a huge impact for the best for me.

[0:23:31] Jane Borden: Interesting. Thanks Nate, it’s been a pleasure speaking with you. Congratulations again on the book and listeners, to remind you, the book is titled Active Life, Passive Income: Achieve Financial Independence Through Real Estate Investing. Nate, in addition to reading the book, where can people go to learn more about you and your work?

[0:23:51] Nate Lambert: investwithnatelambert.com is a great source where you can go and you could even potentially book a call with me to see if it’s a fit maybe to work together, so investwithnatelambert.com is a great resource. I’d love to have anyone that’s listening to jump in and let’s chat. Let’s see if — get a copy of this book, it’s going to be great and I’d love to help you in any way I can to really get the journey going quickly because this is an exciting thing, especially right now. There is so many opportunities that have been created that are just waiting for us to take and help other people and help ourselves in a major way.

[0:24:31] Jane Borden: Thanks so much Nate.

[0:24:32] Nate Lambert: You bet.

[0:24:35] Jane Borden: Thanks for joining us for this episode of The Author Hour Podcast. You can get Nate Lambert’s book, Active Life Passive Income: Achieve financial independence through real estate investing, on Amazon. You can also find a transcript of this episode as well as previous episodes on our website, authorhour.co. Make sure to subscribe to The Author Hour Podcast for more interviews and insights into life-changing books.