The Truth About Building a Freedom Business - Ryan Lee

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Thank you, brother. I love it. This is such an honor to be here. Thank you, brother. I appreciate that. So give us a little bit of a little color on Ryan. You know what? I probably grew up a lot like most traditional people. I had a great family, good upbringing, phenomenal parents. But man, when I got into the space of earning money, I got stuck. I got stuck.

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And this is really what prompted me to write this book after several years. But really, you know, for me, I started climbing the corporate ladder.

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I thought that's what a professional, responsible young man would do. And when I got that first paycheck with my college degree, I remember I took it to the Bank of America and I opened it as kind of like a symbol of success. And I opened that thing.

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And after I opened it and looked at it, and I kind of flipped it over a couple of times to make sure there wasn't a mistake on it, man, there was not much money there after taxes and insurance and everything. And I thought to myself, man, there's got to be a better way.

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I looked at all the people I was working with, modeling my life after. And these were people that were 20, 30 years ahead of me. And their entire dream, their entire vision of retirement was melting before their eyes and before my eyes. And for the first time I realized that's me. Like if I don't control the outcome, how can I ever predict retiring early? How can I ever impact it?

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I'm just along for a ride. And this is what set me off on the path of questioning the traditional model. And once your paradigm changes, once your perspective changes, the world that you see changes. And my gateway into this whole world was Rich Dad, Poor Dad, right? I mean, I remember I read that book and I'm like, oh my gosh, everything I thought I knew about money.

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And Robert's on the back of your book, I see. Yeah, it might be wrong. Yeah. Yeah, there you go. So that was your first forays, that book. Yeah, that was the first. That was the opening to the door that there is a whole different world of money that if I was willing to step into it and learn it, it's governed based on financial intelligence, not dependency.

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If I was willing to raise my financial IQ, I could maybe take back control over my money and really learn how to invest, not just speculate.

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That if you bought two single family homes every single year for 10 years in year 11, after 20 single family homes, you'd have enough wealth to be financially free. So that was my first action. I bought three single family homes in my first year of investing outside of Wall Street. And that was how I got into the game. What year was this? This was 2009. Okay, so you're buying houses.

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Where were you buying them? I bought my first one in Utah, but then I bought my next two in Arizona. Okay, so you're buying Arizona, you're buying Utah. So you're probably paying $100,000. $50,000 a door, $160,000 a door? Last, man, man. You guys here in Arizona, you guys got hits. It was lucky timing for me. I get it. I've since now bought many, many more single-family homes.

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And, like, you look back now, here we are 20 years later, he built an amazing, a massive amount of wallets. He was buying doors for, like, $30,000. Oh, yeah, you were buying them, like, 30%, 40% on a rebuild cost. Yeah, it was insane. I mean, literally, my mother-in-law, you know, I did buy a few of them for, like, for people that I knew, because this is a good deal, you need to do this.

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And my mother-in-law at the time, well, she's still my mother-in-law, but at the time, all of her money was like under the mattress, right? Not a sophisticated woman, cash just saved her money and not literally under the mattress, but just in a bank account. And we took her money and bought a couple of these houses. And now here we are 20 years later, she's in the best memory care facility in

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it's in the parking lot at $8,000 a month being paid for because of those decisions. Because of that, man, 100%. You know, that's the number one regret I hear from people I serve and work with. You know, we've done 5,000 transactions, single family homes since I started doing this over the last decade now. And the number one regret is I wish I would have bought more win back in the day, right?

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And after three properties, I got further away from financial freedom than when I started because now I have a part-time job and a full-time gig. And I realized I could not scale my portfolio any faster. And I'll be honest with you, John, where the lesson really punched me in the gut is property management, right? I am the world's worst property manager.

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That is something you do not want to do as managerial Oh my gosh, man. And after that third property, like I was losing money and, you know, unless you want to go into it, like I had- Was it a late night phone call that finally pushed you over the edge?

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And a voicemail from the tenant himself saying that that's his lawn and he would do it again if he had to. Then I had the final voicemail from a police officer saying, son, you better call me. I call him up and I find out that my tenant shot with a gun, a neighbor's cats who he perceived coming on his property, blew up the cat right there on the property.

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And I realized to myself, I can't do like, can I do it? Maybe I didn't want to do it. Like I was further away from financial freedom because I have a part-time job and I'm not a good property manager. Yeah. And this opened me up to like quitting, number one.

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And so we'll take a piece of that plumbing business and get them going the right direction by just extrapolating the principles from the business. And that's so powerful, man. That's the whole game. So when you got to 17, so, okay, when you were buying properties, obviously it's changed a lot since then, right? The yields, well, I mean, rents have gone up a lot too.

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What was your box as far as rent yield? 15% cash on cash. That's all you wanted. That's all I wanted was a 50%. I built a calculator and I could just run things through my system and say, okay, if it's 15% cash on cash, if it's in the right neighborhood and you know, there's no major, you know, foundational issues with the property, I'll buy it. Right. Sure.

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And that's obviously since changed a lot, especially if you're doing a passive. So I think really for me, the biggest game that I've learned now over owning, you know, I've owned real estate now since 2009, all the way to today is it's not trying to time the market market's going to change. It's going to go up and down. Interest rates are going to be what they're going to be up, down, high, low.

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But the real wealth in owning real estate is owning the real estate. And so if you can build a portfolio in a system, and that's really what that book is all about. This book that you wrote here? 100%. Okay, cool.

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I know how to get, like, anyone can become financially free and generate six figures of tax-free income using the system talked about in that book with less than 20 single family homes, as long as you own it for 10 years. Well, we, you know, we... We buy property all over the place, and a lot of people are scared to do that. So let's talk a little bit about building that system.