Title: “From Claustrophobia to Financial Freedom: Aaron Chapman’s Remarkable Path”
Episode: 194
What are the things many real estate investors are doing, and what should they be doing?
In this episode of the Profit First for REI podcast, Aaron Chapman shares his experiences in real estate investing, especially on the mortgage side.
Aaron is a veteran in the finance industry and has been doing loans since 1997. He is a published author and has released books and tons of magazine articles. He also runs a team and is now sharing his wealth of knowledge with us!
Know more about him and enjoy the show!
Key Takeaways:
[00:57] Introducing Aaron Chapman
[05:51] Transition from working outdoors to being a telemarketer
[13:23] Why do you think investors live deal-to-deal on their business?
[17:42] Importance of life insurance to Aaron’s financial freedom
[25:57] First-time home buyer program
[29:43] About his books
[35:37] Connect with Aaron
Quotes:
[12:40] “Our focus is on giving people practical data to make decisions with, not speculation and theory.”
[13:27] “Good judgment comes from experience, and experience comes from bad judgment.”
[33:45] “The most useful, elegant, and powerful tool ever created is the human mind, but if you misuse it for a split second, it can destroy not just you but everything around you.”
Connect with Aaron:
Website: https://www.aaronbchapman.com/
Tired of living deal to deal?
If you are a real estate investor or business owner who is tired of living deal to deal and want to double your profits, head over here to book your no-obligation discovery call with me. Either myself or someone from my team will hop on a short call with you to get clear on your business goals, remove any obstacles holding you back, and map out a game plan to help you finally start keeping more of the money you work so hard to make. – David
Transcript:
Speaker 1:
I get where people say, Hey, you don’t know how long you’re gonna live, right? You want to experience everything you can now, but you gotta do that within reason. This whole thing is like, I’m gonna go have my best life tomorrow. But then what? Right? You don’t have that future thing. So you gotta understand where, where things, where, where you’re heading, how you’re gonna get there, but also have your experiences on the way. I’m a big proponent of the infinite banking strategy, and I believe the use of that will set the foundation for people to do exactly what you’re talking about.
Speaker 2:
If you’re a real estate investor who’s sick and tired of living, deal to deal, then welcome home. Hear from everyday real estate investors just like you, and discover how they’ve completely transformed their business by taking a profit First approach. This is the profit first for r e I podcast, where we believe revenue is vanity. Profit is sanity. It’s time to start making profit a habit in your business. So here’s your host, David Richter.
Speaker 3:
You
Speaker 4:
Have Aaron Chapman in the studio today. Really excited about this one because we talk about some pretty crazy things on here. But he does talk about in the mortgage side what he sees a lot of real estate investors doing, not doing what they should be doing. Like there’s, he’s got a crazy insight ’cause he’s been doing loans for lots of years, since like 1997. And then from there, like helping a ton of real estate investors on that side runs a crazy good team. And then also talks about his experience in the ups and downs he’s seen in the market throughout all those years. He’s someone with a wealth of knowledge that you’re going to be able to walk away with action steps and talk about too. Like if you need loans, like this is someone that I definitely recommend as well too. So please listen to him.
Hope you enjoy this episode. Thank you for being a listener of the Profit First r e I podcast. Hey, hey, welcome back to the Profit first r e i podcast. I have Aaron Chapman here today. I’m excited about this one. I’ve known Aaron for a long time, for years down in the real estate space, and he’s even worked with my dad and the company that I refer to back in the past doing all those real estate deals. But he does a crazy amount of business. He is a mortgage, he’s in the mortgage space. I’m gonna have him go into what he does, but I mean, he, he’s written books. I gotta have you tell the title of your books. You gotta get, you gotta work that into the show here sometime.
Speaker 1:
I’ll definitely throw that in there.
Speaker 4:
Right? I was gonna say for sure. But Aaron, thank you so much for being on this podcast today.
Speaker 1:
Well, thank you man. I appreciate you taking the time and allowing me to talk to your audience. I know that sometimes I might not be the, the, the person that speaks to your avatar, but I am always grateful for those who are willing to let me come in and, you know, take a little bit of time.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. Well then why don’t you tell what you’re doing? ’cause You’ve been in this space a long time. You’ve been in the real estate investing world and the real estate mortgage and the finance space. So talk about what you’re doing so people get to know you a little bit.
Speaker 1:
So I’ve been in it since 97 now. I started off, you know, cattle ranching in high school and then from there went to the oil fields of Wyoming, then ran heavy equipment, drove truck, and I had an opportunity to work in the mines in Northern New Mexico in, in 96 and 97. Phenomenal job. I absolutely loved it. And they started shutting down the project. So when they shut that down, I got laid off. I had to come back to Arizona. I had a wife, infant son here. And I thought I could easily get a job anywhere. I had a phenomenal resume, but that was my big problem. My resume was too good for all the jobs that are out there. I kept getting told I was overqualified at the time. I didn’t understand. I’m like, you either qualified or you don’t. That means I’m the best you can get for this job, <laugh>.
But now that I’m an employer, I understand overqualified, right? So that being the situation, I remember going to a point where I needed, I, I just, I needed money so damn bad that when I left that morning to go apply for a $10 an hour truck driving job and you apply in for in person. ’cause I wanted to be sure I got the job. And it was just to haul landscape rock. My wife had given me a coupon for free diapers at a specific chain of stores because we couldn’t afford diapers. So I go over there, I got turned down by him for the same damn reason. Everybody else turned, turned me down, wiped tears from my face. And I’m going into my truck. I’m 23 years old, driving down the street to head down to a grocery store in a rougher neighborhood, in fact.
And my gaslight comes onto my truck. Now, I hadn’t driven very far on a gaslight to know exactly how long ago. So I found the first door that I knew that would have the diapers, that had a, a gas station out front, pulled up to a pump. I had my debit card. That’s the only form of payment I had. So I said a quick prayer knowing my account was overdrawn and I slid that card and I got a decline. So I rifled through my truck looking for a, a lost dollar. Hopefully I found a few quarters or coins of some sort. Locked the truck door. And I started walking that parking lot of that grocery store full. It felt like a couple of hours. Now, I don’t remember exactly ’cause I’m going off from memory here. From 20 some odd years ago, I found enough change to exchange a couple gallons of gas.
Now, luckily it was at a time of, of, you know, our, my life or the country’s life, whatever, that people still carry change. And it was at a time where the gallon of gas was under a buck. So I could literally get those two gallons of gas after a quick run through the parking lot. Not a quick run, but a run through the parking lot. Went into the store, got the gro the diapers head down, going through the the checkout stand with just one item, right. Which sucked. And you’re paying for that one item with a coupon. Hmm. It felt pretty rough to have to do that. Yeah. Personally, as I’m getting out of there, I had my head down, no eye contact, trying to get outta the store. Store. And somebody saw me, recognized me and called my name. So I engaged this person guy’s name is Keith.
He asked me how things were, I gave him a really quick overview, not in a whole lot of depth. And he said, Hey, let’s go to dinner. So he took me to Red Lobster with a gift certificate. Me and my wife and he shared the mortgage industry with me, introduced me to a broker. And I started as a telemarketer, I believe in December of 1997. So coming into the industry as a, as a telemarketer, right? I had to cut a foot off of my hair, I had to shave, my mom bought me some businesslike clothes. So I look like I should be there. And it was miserable going from working outdoors, right? And, and cattle ranching to you know, the oil fields to the, to heavy equipment and to the mines, to now an office and trying to learn a new industry. Yeah, dude, have you ever, have you ever felt claustrophobic? That’s how I felt, right?
Speaker 4:
Yep. Well,
Speaker 1:
It’s crazy to feel claustrophobic when I was sev several hundred feet underground playing with explosives. Why was I not claustrophobic there? But I loved it. ’cause You’re just engaged, working, working, working. As long as you’re busy, I’m good. The first, the first time underground, it freaked me the hell out when I went down there. It’s, it’s a darkness you feel to your core when you’re light. My, you know, I was with my pop and we walked into our area where we’re supposed to go. My very first day underground, he goes, shut your light off. So I shut my light off. I’m like, holy shit, this is dark. Like, put your hands in front of your face. You can’t see nothing. You feel that darkness, you kick that light on and you go to work. So it was awesome. There’s some really, really crazy stories from underground. There’s things that we experienced, but that’s how it got going. And then okay.
Speaker 4:
What kept you in it though? Like, if you were suffocating, you know, like going from that to actually in an office and like working the telemarket. Why’d you stay in the industry? This Juan
Speaker 1:
It was an interesting group of characters within that broker shop. Okay. So when I went in there and I show up and I, I, I convinced the, the manager Scott, to allow me to work some of the leads I, I generated. Then he put me together with this guy Greg, who is my trainer, if you will. And Greg showed me the ropes the best he could. And we, we developed a great friendship. I started to see the different characters within this office. And one of these guys, his name was Ed and the way he would talk to people was crazy on the phone. Like, how does he get away with that? Right? I was taught how to talk as a telemarketer. Then you see this guy just, he just shit talks people and he did decent business. Yeah. So I started, you know, really kind of adapting to the people around me and developed this relationship and kind of started figuring out who I needed to be.
And it took me years to develop to, you know, I can just be me. I really don’t care. Right? Yeah. You try and fit into what the industry says. ’cause You need to build business. Then you get to a point where you’re building enough business. Like, well, something, I’m just gonna do whatever I want. Yeah. It wasn’t until 2008, you know, the crash happened At that time I was doing very well. I built up a great business. I was working for Countrywide. I had a team that was doing a bunch, bunch of deals and they were funneling up to me. It was really, really awesome. We did a lot of business. And then I got in a motorcycle accident August 8th, 2008 that I actually always had a goatee. I couldn’t grow a beard. There’s a patch that wouldn’t feel in here. Well, I tore up this side of my face.
I shattered both my legs, had a collapsed right lung with a bunch of broken ribs. I only had one good limb. It was my left arm. And I woke up with a memory that was erasing every three to five minutes. Wow. So I was restarting my memory and then I got to learn. At that point it’s like, it doesn’t freaking matter what’s all going on in the world. You gotta just do the best you can with what you got. And I changed how I went about things. Yeah. And then I come back from that to a completely obliterated industry. Right. And I, I didn’t wanna go backwards, right? Go back to running heavy equipment and that kind stuff. You had to forge forward. Now, I don’t know what you were doing in 2008.
Speaker 4:
High school.
Speaker 1:
High school. So your, your experience of oh eight may be vast is definitely vastly different from mine. Yes, for sure. But everybody who was in the industry I did business with was gone. I had two people still doing business. And since my memory would only work so often, they would call me up, gimme a recommendation. One gal’s name was Carolyn. She worked with Callwell Banker, phenomenal person. Still loved that woman to death. My mom, she was a realtor, she was still doing business. Both of them would call me then they would call me back, say, Hey, did you write that down? I said, write what down. Get your pad, get your paper. Write this down. They were very patient with me. And so I walked around carrying a notepad everywhere I went with what I needed to do. And I would just cross off Once I did it, what’s interesting is when I forgot to cross it off, right then I’d look at my notepad and say, oh, I gotta call this client.
So I called them up, explained who I am. They’re like, yeah, we talked about 10 minutes ago. I’m like, oh, what did we talk about? Because I’m sorry I didn’t take notes. And I had to explain to them. And then you have to earn their trust again with saying, I have a memory that lasts three to five minutes. You know? And then I took really, really good notes. So I trained my brain back. But that’s when the real estate investor came into Arizona when the prices dropped so low and they were coming in, started working with those guys. And then we went from Arizona to Indiana to Texas to Missouri. And, and it kept growing. And that’s how I built a 30 state business, was just following those, those handful of people and they’d recommend me to somebody else. And now we’ve got a very, very big broad footprint. I do a little over a thousand transactions a year, which ranks me in the top 10 in the industry which over a million people in it. And I have my, I have my, my argument as to whether or not I, I, and I know I’m number one in the investor space, but I have my argument that I’m not in the total space because of how my team is structured versus some of these other guys.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. No, that’s awesome. So then now you’re helping a lot of the real estate and investors and the people out there and actually get loans and secure loans and do that. Correct?
Speaker 1:
Yes. That’s what we’ve been doing all along, is helping people to secure financing for investment real estate and for their primary residents and their, their vacation properties too. And we do all of it. I have all that kind of stuff. It would be non QM loans, conventional loans, blanket loans or portfolios, if you’ll call them construction loans. We’re doing a whole bunch of different things because you wanna help everybody become successful as, as you can in in, in any area of what they’re trying to build. And the reason I, I am hell bent on that is ’cause I don’t trust my industry at all. Yeah. My industry is loaded with predators that don’t give a shit about the individual that they’re working with. They care whether or not they’re closing that deal. And when you start looking at the statistics, right, you’ve got people in my industry right now, statistically speaking, closing between zero and one transaction per month, maybe two transactions a month.
And if you have a person on the real estate investor side and they’re looking at a deal and they’re like, I’m not sure if I should buy this house. It seems like it might be. Or this asset might create me problems down the road, I’m gonna talk to my mortgage broker or mortgage banker and see what they think. Well if you’re talking to a guy that you could be zero, I mean a hundred to 50% of their income that month, they’re gonna do everything they can to convince you to close the benefit we have. If we’re closing a lot more deals, that one deal is not gonna affect my ability to bread my table. So I can have an honest conversation with the person. Say, Hmm, I don’t know that you should get this. You need to look here, here and here. Give ’em some things to consider.
Make their own decision themselves. I just give ’em some things to think about and ask a lot of questions about and really determine whether or not it works for them or they can make adaptations to make it a better deal for them. Make it work. ’cause I know they’re gonna do another one. ’cause I am more interested in their 10th transaction than their first transaction. I need the first one to be good for them. And the second and the third. So we get to number 10. If we, if number one’s not good, they’re not gonna get two, three, or four. And they sure as hell will never go to number 10. So our focus is heavy on giving people practical data to make decisions with not speculation and theory. Because we, I’ve seen thousands of people do their real estate business over the years.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, there you go. I like that. You gotta have it, the data and making sure that it’s all in the, the right place so you know, if it’s good deal, good person, good business, what are they doing? So that’s what we like to talk about on here. It’s like making sure that you’re actually keeping the money you’re making, but then knowing where it’s going too and where it’s flowing. So I have, you’ve got a lot of experience, seen a lot of different, I’m sure lots of real estate investors that you’ve talked to over the years. So I ask this question of a lot of people on the show. Why do you think a lot of real estate investors live deal to deal in their business?
Speaker 1:
Oh, it’s a very, very good question. I mean, it’s, and one of these things I like to quote a lot is, good judgment comes from experience and experience comes from bad judgment. I think it has a lot to do with the judgment that they’re exercising at the time they’re doing the deals. The other thing is a, a misinterpretation of where the real value in the real estate is. People don’t really realize where the value is in the deal. They’re too, they’re too busy looking at, at, to me, the wrong metrics. There’s a lot of great metrics to look at and it’s not like it’s a completely wrong metric. Cashflow or cash on cash or cap rates are great metrics. But when you make that for what it’s all about, then sometimes you end up living deal to deal because you’re so caught up in, in what you’re getting in one spot.
And sometimes you’re needing that to make, to make your your long-term. The other thing is, is some people are so hell bent on becoming a full-time real estate investor or a full-time real estate professional that they forgot what got them there. So I had a mentor years ago, tell me you ne you always stick with what got you there. Well if let’s just say I work with a lot of dentists and doctors and other people that, that have practices and you know, as a dentist it’s amazing how so many people will, can’t, you know, I’m gonna go to a dental school and I’m gonna become a dentist. And then they’re standing over people with elbow deep in their face. I’m like, oh, I hate this. My back hurts. I I don’t make money unless I’m standing over this guy. Right? They’re not business people. Their teeth were, they’re, they’re teeth people.
They get that. So they don’t understand how to run a business unfortunately. ’cause They’re never taught that. They’re taught how to do teeth, not how to operate a business. So because they are never taught how to operate something of such, they become, well then I need to do this real estate investing that’s gonna do that for me. But then they start to fail on their business side of it. And they’re trying to make their real estate replace it so fast that I think that they’re getting away from what it should be. It should be for the future, stick with what got you there, continue to generate the revenue that this is, pay for your bills and all that stuff. And keep socking away as much as you can and keep building up our instant gratification society is also that a, a a create a creation of that particular symptom.
Yeah. That people are living deal to deal. ’cause We want what we can’t have now. We feel that today is the day you need to have everything. And I get where people say, Hey, you don’t know how long you’re gonna live. Right? You want to experience everything you can now, but you gotta do that within reason. This whole thing is like, I’m gonna go have my best life tomorrow. But then what? Right. You don’t have that future thing. So you gotta understand where, where things, where, where you’re heading, how you’re gonna get there, but also have your experiences on the way there is. I’m a big proponent of the infinite banking strategy and I believe the use of that will set the foundation for people to do exactly what you’re talking about. Right? So take the capital that you have. Me personally, what I did was after the crash 2008, right?
I was worth about three-ish million dollars, got in this motorcycle accident. By the time I wheeled out of the, the, the hospital I went in at 190 pounds worth about 3 million approximately. I got wheeled out a few weeks later at 156 pounds with a negative net worth of 1.5 million. I had hospital bills rack racking up at that point, almost just a little over $3 million. It was 1.7 million my first week. So when I came out of that and everything came crashing down, I lost everything. And then some went negative by a significant amount. So it was a four and a half million dollars swing basically. I had to try and recover from that. So now you’ve got, you, you, I was by, by the grace of God was I blessed to be able to deal with my creditors by saying, Hey, here’s my first medical bill that just came.
It’s 1.7 million bucks. And they’re like, whoa, shit, what do we do? Right? We, you know, they, they actually had clemency on me at that point. Got to keep my house, got to keep my cars, I negotiated all my debt to go away. But then I started at a 460 credit score or something like that with zero money. And I built back by 2016 to a 700 plus with a, with 90 grand that I put aside. Well that 90,000 was gonna go to some investment real estate. And then I had heard about one of my clients who was left the military. Now he was a, he was a nuclear subcap, an instructor at the Naval Academy and then worked for the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs at the Pentagon to leave that to sell life insurance. When I’d heard that I’d take a personal interest in all my clients, I’m like, dude, what the hell are you doing?
So I asked him, he was freaking stupid. He said, I can answer that question, your wife on the phone. But by the time we were done, I took that 90,000, purchased a life insurance policy, borrowed 83,000 against the life insurance policy, bought three houses, took cash flows, plus 10% of my income, started paying back that life insurance policy loan. So I knocked it down enough to buy another property, keep taking it out and keep taking out, built it up. I deployed over $1.1 million out of those policy loans now. Wow. and I think that’s the greatest foundation you can have because one, if you put it in your bank account and you take it out and invest it somewhere, it’s gone. You have an empty bank account. Right, right. You’ve done investments in an empty bank account. Something happened to me, my family would have three houses in an empty bank account.
Yeah. But by putting it to a life insurance policy, and if I bought those properties and then something happened to me, my family would have the three assets that I purchased, which are three independent businesses plus $2.7 million minus the 83 grand they took out to buy the houses. That foundation is strong. But it also created an engine that I keep moving it through, moving it through, moving it through, moving it through. Now when it sits in there, that money available in there, it drives me insane. Yeah. It’s still making money. It’s making 5%, which is way better than the bank account, but I need it to be deployed. So I have, I have money scattered all over into businesses and assets and real estate and all these things. You know, if I end up Boeing broke someday, it’s not from a lack of trying, but ultimately that money needs to always be working.
But I never left my mortgage practice. Right. Yeah. Always am gonna keep doing this. Some people ask me, when am I gonna retire? So when I go to the grave, I’m coming in hot. I built a brand, I built a system, I built a team. I’m gonna continue to operate it till death. And that’s going to fuel everything. And the beauty of my life insurance policies, the absolute beauty of everything is so many people are so caught up in building up, I gotta save money and I gotta get assets for my kids. No, I’m gonna, I’m gonna, I pray to all things holy that I can time it just right. That I spend my last dollar, the second I croak that there’s nothing left. Because when I die, there’s gonna be 20 some odd million dollar windfall that hits my trust. They’re gonna be well taken care of. They don’t need me to save nothing. I need to save enough for me or prepare enough for me to have the kind of life I want up until death, not a life that they want after my death.
Speaker 4:
That’s awesome. So it sounds like that conversation in 2016 was pretty pivotal when he had it with that guy. And
Speaker 1:
That conversation was huge. It taught me a lot. One, I hated life insurance agents before that. I thought there some of the tags of the dirt bags, right? Yeah. But then we understand what an actual whole life policy can do. You realize exactly how powerful it is. It’s truly the holy grail. And then now I have a policy on myself, my wife, and each one of my kids. My kids get married. They are required per my trust guidelines that they have to get a policy themselves on them and their spouse and do the same process. Because when I pass, they need to be able to continue to operate the business, the family trust. So they vote on everything we do. We, they interview people we invest with. In fact, they interviewed my in infinite banking guy. I have a picture of them all sitting around the family in the living room with a screencast from our zoom call as he’s talking to them. So it it, it does a couple things for everybody. One, it improves the knowledge and the questions that my kids were asking. And the youngest was nine years old at the time. But it also improves the presentation and how they present for the people that we do business with. And now they have, they, they’re better at explaining to a nine year old. So they’re better in their business. We’re better because of what we have improved our knowledge on. And we become, become tighter as a family and as a, as a future future business.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. Oh, that’s awesome. And I love that because it’s not just about, okay, it’s the money here, but the, the knowledge that you’re being able to pass on to your future generations and help them get not only a head start because so many people leave the money, but it’s like you’re also teaching ’em your values and like, why are we doing this? And like, being able to ask the questions of the people that you respect as well, too
Speaker 1:
Ignorance with money, all it does is fuel, fuel stupidity.
Speaker 4:
No, I love that. So then you’re educating your, your kids, but then you’re also being able to weigh that foundation for them as well too. But then, you know, going out there and I just am, I’m very flabbergasted because then from 2008 to 2016, were you basically building up again, like weighing that foundation after going into the debt and like after that accident? And then 2016 was kind of when all this was turbocharged, you had that meeting with that insured agent
Speaker 1:
In, in a way, yeah. So 2008, yeah. So come back in 2009. It was just really, really slow going. You just build up, start getting those clients, starting to build up from there. And we’re doing, I was doing the loans nobody else wanted to do, nobody wanted to do 50,000 loans. I was doing stuff nobody else wanted to change. But you’re building an education, right? And understanding the real estate investment better. Then I got that super hot rod. I was, I was a force to be reckoned with in the space. And there was a couple other people that definitely the, the, the, they were the silverbacks in the room, right? They were the ones that everybody would go to. And one of ’em sat down with me in January of 2015 and said, we should merge our businesses. So I said, well, you know, I, I didn’t, I didn’t take him seriously at the time.
Then I called him. ’cause He was, he was kinda like a mentor, if you will. When I run into a problem, I called him up and he’d gimme a rundown how to do it. And he goes, Hey, I was serious about what I said in, in in LA Jolla. I know, were you in Irvine, California at an event? I said, what was that again? He goes that we should merge our businesses. Well, I just had shoulder surgery and I was, you know, I had, I actually had my, some hardware taken outta my leg. I had shoulder surgery, so I had a sling on and a cane. And he wanted me to fly to Utah to meet with him in the executives of Security National. So I did. And we proposed that we merge it and I, I liked the idea. So we did.
And we lasted about six months. And by the end of 2015, he yanked the rug out and I started over again at zero. He took everything, ah, he took the database, he took the business. He pretty much checked, ah, sorry, we’re better as competitors. He just took it all. But what he didn’t take was the fact that my name was still out there. He didn’t take the fact that my phone was still gonna ring. He didn’t take the fact that all that did was gimme an emphasis to be better at what we were doing together. Because I got to see under the hood of how he did his business. Yeah. And I got to take a lot of those little things like, cool, we can do this, this, this, and this. So I got my little team in there. There’s three of us or four of us.
And I say, okay, that phone’s gonna ring in 10 minutes probably. What are we gonna do with that? And we built out a system. And that system now has expanded today to where I have 22 people on my team. Had as many as 33 total on the team. Now we have 22. And we have built something pretty significant as a result of that one thing. So I had to start over again. Hmm. Wow. And it wasn’t, it was six months later I started at zero and six months later I was at a at a corporate conversa, well it was a, a regional conference. And the chairman, c e o was there talking and what he says, Hey, in this room we have three of the top 10 people. And then he, then somebody got his attention and the state western, he goes, oh, we have four of the top 10.
And he shows the stats. I was ranked number nine in the company at that time in six months. And within another few months I was ranked number one in the company. And then I’ve been number one ever since in the, in the company since that date. And that was really the, the start of everything. And he was, and I, I don’t feel at all angry or frustrated, whatever that guy, I was frustrated what he chose to do. But his business has obliterated since then. He is no longer in the industry at all. And I felt bad that he made that choice, but it’s actually one of the greatest things that could have ever happened to me. And I’m one of those, I’m one of those guys that believes that you should take the worst thing and find out where it becomes a benefit. Because the greatest thing that’s ever happened to me have always been the worst thing at the time.
Yeah. And so I, I look at really, really shitty situations. So, okay, what are we gonna get here right now in the market’s kind of a shitty situation. We’re battling hard, but it’s forcing us to work, work, work, work, work. And I am as anything, I’m gonna outwork everybody else in the space. So when the things start to get a little bit better, we’re gonna see the huge, massive fruits of our labor and I’m just gonna keep going until I see it and then I’m not gonna stop even then you keep building off of that momentum.
Speaker 4:
Awesome. So Aaron, I definitely recommend you and if you’re listening to this, Aaron could probably potentially help you as well too. So who do you like to come in the door? Like who’s your ideal person like that is looking for a loan real estate investor, mom and pop? Or is it like you said the dentist doctors, is it a combination like, or who, it might be better to say who do you turn away for the most part, but like who are you looking for before we wrap it up here soon?
Speaker 1:
Really I would say we term away, we just don’t have a real good grasp of anything to help ’em. Is people buying their first time, their first home. Right. Okay. First time home buyers that need a first time home buyer program. But if you’re a first time home buyer, hey, I’ve never bought a house before by, I’ve got, you know, 5%, 10% down, we can help you all day long. We were like, Hey, I got really rough credit and I wanna buy a house, but I need money for down payment and I need these, these extra little bells and whistles to help me qualify because of this and this. I, I just don’t have the horsepower to do it. I don’t know those programs well enough. It’d be a huge disservice to try and get me to even learn them. Sure. And not only learn them but then get signed up to do ’em. There’s a lot of people that specialize there. My specialization is really anybody buying houses, but mostly is investors that want to get started real estate investing and then scale so we can go up to 10 new deals. Right. there’s a lot of things we can do and the benefit to our team is not just the experience I have. Well, have you ever heard of the term underwriter reference when it comes to lending? Yeah.
Speaker 4:
Yep.
Speaker 1:
Okay. Underwriters usually not talked about till about the third week of the deal when everything’s blowing up and they want all this paperwork. We got this asshole underwriter who’s being a pain in the ass.
Speaker 4:
Yep.
Speaker 1:
Well what I do is I hired the underwriters to do my pre-quals. So instead of me or assistant just running through a person’s court report and their pay stubs say, oh yeah, it looks like it should work. We do a full underwrite. So what normally is collected by a processor in the first three weeks of the deal, tax returns, pay stubs, W twos, bank statements, K ones, all these assets and looking at the credit documentation sorting through that we gathered up front, you submit an application on aaron chapman.com, you click on the apply now button, you submit your data, then a member of my team reaches out to you. Has you upload all that information. A handful of times I’ll get some of who sends me a text. I’m like, really? You want all this just for a pre-qual? Like yeah because I’m not pre-qualifying you.
I’m ensuring that this thing is gonna close. I do not want you wasting a single second of your life unnecessarily. So you submit that information in, we get all that data and then I have an underwriter look at it. I take what normally takes a lender three weeks to do. I do it in 72 hours. And now the underwriters are looking at this, the one who’s kind of overseeing all that. She’s been doing this since the early eighties. She has a master’s degree and she is one who is all over the understanding of all the needs that a person has. So when we have any potential inkling of an issue, it’s worked out well in advance. You don’t go out there and waste your time on contracts, appraisals, inspections unless we are reasonably assured this deal’s gonna close.
Speaker 4:
Yeah. <laugh>, that’s a big difference. And then a lot of other <laugh>, a lot of other mortgage companies and board. ’cause Yeah, it’s that third week and then you hear the term underwriter and then you’re like, oh great. You just a wing and a prayer at that point hoping that it gets done well, you gotta
Speaker 1:
Scramble. That’s where you scramble. You gotta closing is impending, right. There’s penalties if you don’t close. But now you gotta scramble and drop everything to get all this paperwork that they shoulda got a long time ago. It’s not the underwriter’s fault, it’s the fault of the person who gave you the letter to begin with because you didn’t do your their damn job. So I just decided to take it levels above anybody else to ensure that we don’t burn up any of your time and we don’t burn up any of our team’s time on something that’s not gonna get done.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, no, that’s really good. And you said that was@aaronchapman.com.
Speaker 1:
Aaron chapman.com is the best place to go. Awesome. Especially buying real estate whatsoever.
Speaker 4:
There you go. Just go look at that homepage. I have it up on my other screen. It’s a great homepage, but you could get started with the process as well there too. Then do you have your books for sale anywhere? Like you gotta talk about the books like that. I’ve seen you post
Speaker 1:
About, they’re on Amazon, so all you have to do you go to Amazon, just search my name. And so what it is, I wrote one book, 370 pages and I had a an editor take a look at it. She goes, this is great, but nobody gives a shit. You need to write something that they’re gonna give a shit about. So what I did is I took the concepts within it and I broke it down into individual. I had a, actually I had a call. I was, I was hung up in Dallas on a layover and I was talking to my brother-in-law. He goes, dude, you should write little books instead of a big book. I’m like, he goes, nobody wants to read a big book. So what I did is I took the chapters and I rewrote them in a way that more addresses the individual, but, and I still probably could have done it better on the writeup.
But 30 pages or less, they’re about the size of a dom a dime novel of the 18 hundreds. They got their own their own cover. And you’ll, so you’ve got one that the first is point your head and heart, your asph will follow. It basically tells you if you want something, decide what it is, write it down and it just shows up. And I’ve got, I’ve got little case studies in there, things that I did that happens an amazing story that’s in there. The other happens to be the practical application of gratitude. Understanding that gratitude is not some sort of thing between us and God. It’s not some feeling you walk around with really. And it’s not this big gratitude pinata that floats around above you and drops candy on you when you’re doing good things. It’s an actual economy between people.
So what happens is when you share, share an expression of gratitude, if you will, towards somebody, then there is a natural reciprocity that comes back when you do for one person. They, they reciprocate because of that, that concept of gratitude. And the second a check changes hands, transaction’s done. But when you’re just expressing that to each other, it continues. And that as an economy continues to go. And I explain that in great detail how I discovered that particular item. The other is which I’m sure what we’re talking about here is quit jerking off. Now that particular book goes into interestingly enough is a story that I had heard from a friend of mine living out in Chicago explained to me a an event he went to and where, when he went to this event, I asked him what was the most pivotal talk in this event?
And he goes, well this guy up there talking about how he took his business from a quarter million a year to over 2 million a year in total revenue for him. And people kept asking, what did he do? What did he change? He kept talking about processes and systems and somebody asked no something. There was an emphasis in your life that you’re not telling us what changed that got you so focused. He goes, you really wanna know I quit masturbating. He goes, I found that I was spending so much time on porn and doing all this stuff. I was wasting time there every day. I’m like, that’s crazy. This guy once said on the stage and that this is a thing. So I went and did some research. You find Chris Rock talked about that in his special on, on Netflix called Tambourine. Pornhub is very, very, very, very proud of their statistics at the time.
They published their statistics showing 6 billion hours logged in that year, which is 2018, if I remember correctly. 6 billion hours or 2000, 17,008, something like that. And it went up like 30% during the pandemic. So they’re saying 6 billion hours in their site, one website. That’s 5,000 centuries of time being wasted by the by, by the, by humans, right? Just on one particular vice. Think about all the other vice we have. Think about scrolling on, on social media. So when you start considering that we are wasting a shit ton of time as a species, so we’re going backwards in evolution in my opinion. So that’s why I talk about those statistics and how to get away from that kind of stuff. How to focus your energy, focus your time. It was Napoleon Hill called the Sexual Transmutation. You can read his, read his stuff in Outwitting the Devil and in think and Grow Rich, that being you allow your mind to go that direction, route the animalistic part of your side, that part of your brain to drive you.
You are not going to be focused and not attentive. The big book I think everybody should pick up is called the Master Key System. This teaches you over 24 weeks how to focus your brain. It was written in 1910 as a correspondence course and the final book in there is called Steal Running. And it’s it, it explains why I wear the hat everywhere. It’s part of the brand. Everybody thinks I work for steel. No, I just believed the chainsaw since I was a child. My dad had this, this steel chainsaw. I own it now. The exact saw. I swindled ’em out of me by buying ’em a new one. But it was my opinion that it was the coolest, most useful, most powerful tool ever made. But it’s also the most dangerous tool ever created. ’cause It’ll kill you in just mishandling it for a split second.
It has, yeah, it has no way of discerning whether or not it should cut into you or would. Now, the reason I wear the hat, it reminds me every day I put it on that the most useful, most elegant, most powerful tool ever created the human mind. But if you misuse it for a split second, it can destroy not just you but everything around you. You’ve gotta be focused. So that’s part of also that quit jerking off and all that stuff is all wrapped up in the same thing. Now I’ve got four more books that are written that we have yet to publish, actually five, four of the smaller ones. But I’ve written another one that should be about 120, 130 pages. It’s in illustration right now. It went crazy with the illustrations. I’m gonna come back on the show when we’re ready to start, when we’re ready to publish the forward.
Now the Forward’s being written by Robert Allen, he’s a very good friend of mine. And he was busting my balls to write something different. And so we did. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to write because I wrote it the way I talk, not the way I write. I write like a writer talk like a redneck. So to write it in that respect was very, very difficult because my mind wanted to do something different. And then I had my brother read it who is an artist and he decided to start illustrating it. We wanted to just something in the margin, but he went crazy with it. It’s some of the most crazy illustrations you’ll ever see because if you’ve ever seen like the 13 hundreds, 14 hundreds, the old religious texts that have all the in ornate artwork and the first letter and a few words of the chapter, that’s how he’s doing it. But it’s all redneck shit. So it’s pretty awesome.
Speaker 4:
<Laugh>. That’s awesome. So
Speaker 1:
You’ve got ornate, really, really ornate artwork with this crazy wording and the concepts that are there. It was, it was a lot of fun. It’s been a lot of fun. Worst case scenario, I just have a really kick ass one version of it sitting for posterity. I hope that it takes off. I hope people get the message out of it to really reallys about taking a beating. You cannot be successful unless you’re willing to take a beating.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, no, this is good. This has been good stuff and Aaron, this has been amazing. So again, give ’em the website where if they wanted to go and like either work with you or just get more of Aaron,
Speaker 1:
Well aaron chapman.com is where you wanna go. You can go to the media section on there. I’ve got, you know, this podcast will be on there. I’ve got a bunch of podcasts, also videos. I do two YouTube videos a week explaining the market and how it is being influenced and how it affects you as a real estate investor. I also got a lot of other blog posts and stuff that I put out and writing for magazines. But you know, one of the things we definitely need to talk about, if you guys are really, really intent on investment real estate, I know you’re really, really tempted to look at cash on cash returns. What’s going on with, with interest rates and our interest rates going up, guys, they’re going up, they’re not gonna come back down, I’m sorry. But if anybody tells you to get an arm and refinance when the rates drop, they’re lying to you.
Right? I can show you exactly why on the charts what’s happening and that we are never going back where we were. Where you have to look back at 2000 to 2008, see where interest rates are going. I have all that data. The other thing is you can be you, well you can create 20 plus percent returns on your investment on buying single families without even thinking about cashflow. So let your mind wrap around that for a second. If you wanna understand that math, you understand how that works, you contact me. Another thing you can do is you can just you can reach out to us, send a message through the website. For the videos on how to run my app, I have an app called the Q J O Investment Tool. You can go to your app store right now and get it. Q J O investment tool stands for the quit jerking off investment tool. ’cause That’s exactly what you’re doing when you’re so worried about interest rates to time the market. You can’t ever time the market. But I can show you how you’ll get predictably 20% annual gains on your investment nearby a single family residency. You could do it correctly. You just gotta do it correctly. And I’ll show you how
Speaker 4:
Cool. There you go. That’s how you get in touch with him. And then we’re gonna wrap up here. So if you are also like saying, okay, I wanna get the loans, I wanna get started in real estate, I don’t know where my money’s going, you could go to simple cfo.com to schedule a call with our team. We can make sure that you’re keeping more of that money and making sure that you could be in the best position possible to get the best loans out there. So that’s what you wanna do as well. Go to Aaron’s site. I mean, if you didn’t enjoy this episode, I mean like, what’s wrong with you? Just kidding. It’s
Speaker 1:
Aaron. Yeah. What is all of you?
Speaker 4:
Right? What is wrong with you? But that’s where here, if you want more of Aaron, go to his site, go look at what he’s got to offer. Also his books on Amazon. Go look at those too. Those sound amazing. Like there’s probably something you could take out of each one and then it could be just profound and taking that nugget with you the rest of your life. Aaron, this has been awesome. Thank you for being on here and sharing your wisdom. I think a lot of people could get a lot of it out of what they heard today. Thanks for being on here.
Speaker 1:
Thank you brother. Appreciate you taking the time and allowing me to participate.
Speaker 4:
Yeah, for sure. And if for a listing, remember, make Profit a Habit in your Business.
Speaker 2:
This episode of the Profit First for r e I podcast is over. But there are plenty more where that came from. Are you ready to learn how David and his team can help implement the Profit First system in your business? Schedule a discovery call@simplecfo.com right now. We’ll see you next time on the Profit First for r e I podcast with David Richter.
