On this episode of The Passive Income Attorney, Seth sits down with Travis Watts of Ashcroft Capital. Travis talks about his previous career and how he transitioned from active investing to passive investing. Enjoy!

 

“We have to get to a point where we’re passive in some capacity. Why not focus on building a diversified, passive income stream sooner than later to, if nothing else, give you a little flexibility and freedom.”

 

HIGHLIGHTS:

0:00 – Intro
1:38 – Seth asks Travis about his previous career and how he got started in real estate investing
4:26 – Travis discusses how he transitioned into real estate syndications
7:36 – Travis explains that he didn’t enjoy being an active investor
8:34 – Travis offers advice for those professionals who want to diversify out of their 401k and find new income streams
13:44 – Travis explains how often times certain deals take more work for less profit and others with less work and more profit
14:57 – People have to get to a point in their life when they’re passive
16:17 – Travis defines what a real estate syndication is
18:48 – Travis mostly finds doctors, attorneys etc. are the investors in multifamily investments
20:06 – Travis explains what his typical investors look like
23:31 – Travis talks briefly about how to vet a sponsor and a market, and explains the 3 aspects of investing
28:11 – It’s time for the Freedom 4 – In an alternative universe where you weren’t involved in real estate, what would you be doing?
28:47 – What’s the best thing you do to keep your mind and body healthy?
29:37 – Where were you at 5 years ago and where will you be in 5 years?
31:02 – How has passive income made your life better?
32:40 – Travis recommends finding a mentor

 

FIND | TRAVIS WATTS:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passiveinvestortips
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/passiveinvestortips
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/traviswatts1234

Travis Watts is a full-time passive investor. He has been investing in real estate since 2009 in multi-family, single-family and vacation rentals. Travis is also the Director of Investor Relations at Ashcroft Capital. He dedicates his time to educating others who are looking to be more “hand’s off” in real estate.

FULL TRANSCRIPTION:

Seth: What’s up law nation. So glad you made it. We have a fantastic episode teed up for you today. Man, what if you could retire from your current job today right now? What would you do? Where would you go? Who would you spend your time with? Even if you like your career or even love it? Just imagine the possibility of true freedom, no more billables, no more patient or client consultations. Just you doing what you want, when you want to and who you want to do it with. That sounds pretty good to me. Well, our man of the hour, Travis Watts is a professional, full-time passive investor. He’s also the director of investor relations at Ashcroft Capital spreading a good word about passive income and how it can change your life. He dedicates his time to educating others who are looking to be more hands-off in real estate. All right, here we go.

Seth: Hey, Travis, what’s going on, man.

Travis:  Seth, thanks so much for having me thrilled to be here.

Seth: Yeah, absolutely Man. Thanks for being on. Thanks for being on man. So happy to have you on. Let’s just jump right in. Tell us about your previous career and how you got started in real estate investing.

Travis:  Oh boy. Yeah. So, I used to a W2 job that required 14-hour workdays, 98-hour work weeks. It was in the oil industry. So, you know, it didn’t have a lot of spare time, but I really had an ambition to get started in real estate. So, I got started in 2009 with single family homes. If you had asked me back then, you know, what does a real estate investor look like? How do you get started any of these types of questions? That’s all that would have come to my mind is a single-family home in my own neighborhood. I didn’t know what multi-family was. I didn’t know what syndication meant, none of that stuff. So, the story goes, as many stories go with people getting them started this way. I immersed myself. I jumped right in, I did fix and flips. I did vacation rentals. I did house hacking. I did everything that was hands-on and active and used up my time. That’s what I did. And so about five years into that you can imagine with the workload I had, in addition to real estate, I burned myself out. That’s what happened, long story short. So, 2015 rolls around. I knew I had to make a change. I knew I had to find a way to be more passive and on my own, I wasn’t figuring that out. I was trying the property management stuff and I wasn’t reading a whole lot. It wasn’t really getting mentors or coaches. I was just trying to rack my head against the wall and come up with answers and they weren’t very good. So, 2015 was like that year that I said, look, people do this. People are passive to an extent with real estate. You know, you take people like Robert Kiyosaki, you know, or Donald Trump or a Steve Wayne and like, they’re not out there flipping properties. They’re not out there wholesaling. They’re out there in a passive manner, investing in real estate. I want to figure out how do you do that? And I think my limiting belief for so many years was that you had to be like a billionaire to get involved with stuff like that. You know, I mean to own an apartment building, I didn’t even consider that in the deck of cards, but come to learn later that, you know, you can partner with others to do bigger deals. You can actually be mostly passive. It’s never a hundred percent passive instead of trying to you know, be everything and do everything myself. So that’s kind of my backstory, is working in a job that I didn’t like working in an industry that didn’t fit me and wanting something different, if nothing else to work less hours and do something that would make me smile. And that was not what I was doing. So that’s kind of my backstory.

Seth: Yeah. That’s awesome, man. That’s awesome, man. So, tell us about kind of that transition from you know, getting started with real estate and doing flips and just single-family stuff, and then discovering what we call real estate syndications here.

Travis:  Yeah, exactly. So, 2015, I dedicated to be more or less an educational year. I didn’t really know how that was going to pan out. I just said, look, I have to make a change. I have to do some different, I have to learn this stuff. So, I ended up working in the middle East and the reason I chose to do that primarily was because of the schedule. It was like a 50 50 schedule. So, I would be 35 days in the States with nothing to do 35 days overseas working. And so when I was home, I dedicated that time to reading books and listening to podcasts and, you know, real estate mentors and coaching all this kind of stuff to expand my context, you know, to, like I said, try to learn how to be more hands-off so to speak. And we got to remember too, this was 2015, you know, these private placements and syndications have been around for decades and decades and decades, but the marketing wasn’t really there. So, to speak, at least not what I could see, you know, we have like a million more conferences and podcasts and things today in 2020 than we did in 2015. So it was, it was a struggle. And so, I read a ton of books that year. I really immersed myself. I read 52 books. So, my goal was one book per week. Most of those were business and real estate related and in addition to podcasts and everything else. And so, on the other side of that coin came you know, I did a lot of, back testing, a lot of self-study on multifamily. Once I learned about what a syndication was, I don’t even know honestly how I figured out or first heard of a syndication, but regardless I started diving deeper into that. I looked at what happened in 2008, nine and 10 with multi-family. I did a lot of this philosophy of if I’m going to be in something long-term for decades, potentially as an investor, I want it to be here in decades. I don’t want to be investing in Bitcoin today and then losing it all next year and then having to start over what’s next? What do I invest in now? And so that’s kind of how it came to be is what I realized is in some cases I could make similar the same or in some actual cases, more of a total return being a passive investor than I was actually being hands-on and active. And quite frankly, why that is, is I wasn’t very good at it on the active side, you know. Yeah. I could fix and flip a house and I could do this and that, but I wasn’t that good. As an operator, as an asset manager, I didn’t have a lot of connections between contractors and everything else, brokers and realtors. So yeah, there’s a lot of folks in this camp, right? Whether you hate your job, you love your job. A lot of people just don’t have the time commitment. A lot of people just say, hey you know, you can’t beat them, join them. So that was kind of the path I took.

Seth: Yeah. And that’s the beauty in it is that, you know, if you’re not necessarily a good operator, maybe you try it and you’re not good at it. Or you don’t think you’re going to be good at it. Or you don’t think you have time for it. Investing passively allows you to vet the sponsors and people that have done it many times before and, you know, ride that winning horse.

Travis:  Yeah, exactly, exactly. It all comes down to, I just recently wrote a blog called what type of investor are you, a quick guide to self-awareness and it goes into like the traits and the characteristics of active investors and passive investors. It goes into just some psychology and just understanding yourself and having that level of self-awareness. For me, you know, I didn’t enjoy it. I didn’t necessarily want to do it. Why was I doing it for a return on investment? You know, it was like it was a money play. And unfortunately, that wasn’t for me anyway, that was the wrong approach, you know, that shouldn’t have been what my focus was all about.

Seth: Gotcha. Yeah. So, what advice maybe, would you give someone in our listener’s shoes who is an attorney or a doctor or a nurse or another professional who might not necessarily hate their job, but they know they want to diversify out of their 401k and perhaps into real estate or some other sort of passive investment or active investment. I mean, what would you say for some advice?

Travis:  Yeah, I would say, let’s look at it like this. So, two questions to ask yourself upfront. Okay. One is, if I’m going to go out there and do an active deal, whatever that means, wholesaling fix and flips, vacation rentals, even buy and hold single family. First of all, do I enjoy that? Does that match my strengths and my weaknesses? Do I think I can be a key competitive player in that space? Do I have the ability and connections to pull that type of business plan off, be real with yourself first of all, and then ask yourself, you know, what would my likely return be if I were to do that, you know, what would my annualized return be? Let’s just call it just for simple sake. And how much more could I potentially get? Nobody knows the actual answer to that then perhaps doing a passive investment opportunity, which we’ll get into. So that’s kind of all, that’s a big number one, but that’s number one. And then number two would be you know, how much time will this likely require and see, this was where I failed as just a naive investor. You know, you go in as an optimist or at least I did think, Oh, you know, this fix and flips going to get done a couple months. And it’s only going to cost this much. And it’s only going to take that much time, well, way wrong. It always takes twice as much money, twice as long. Like it’s a disaster in a lot of cases, not everybody’s, but in my case, it was always like a disaster situation. The first few.

Yeah, exactly. As you’re kind of learning. So, this is kind of the self-awareness and get real with yourself. So, let’s put this into practicality. Let’s say I have a hundred thousand dollars today to go invest. Here’s my two options, generally speaking, I can go buy a single-family home, buy and hold, rent it out to someone. Maybe it needs some light rehab to it, whatever. Or I can go do a passive syndication. I could be a limited partner and like a large apartment complex. Both take some front-loading right. We need to find the deal. We need to vet the deal. We need to crunch some numbers. We have to have a little bit of education to back us up to at least get started. After that the LP syndication route is pretty much hands-off and passive at that point, I really wouldn’t be doing anything with that deal after I made the investment. On the other side with the single family, you still are basically an asset manager, right? Still having to make decisions, you know, call property managers, deal with people, moving in, moving out, changing leases, working with CPAs attorneys, saving your receipts you know, checking up on the property. There’s just a lot, you know, there’s just, you know, this there’s a lot to it. So, here’s the question then? How much more would I potentially make on that single-family home buy and hold versus doing that passive deal. Let’s put this scenario in favor of doing the active side, right? Let’s say that that single-family home, I’m going to make a 15% annualized return. Just to use a simple number. And that syndication is going to give me 10%, 10% annualized return. And I’ll caveat that at the end as to why that sometimes maybe true, maybe not. But what that means is I would make a 5% additional yield by managing my own project to doing everything myself. Even if I had a property management company. Well, on a hundred-thousand-dollar investment, what that means is I would make $5,000 extra at the end of the year by doing that work potentially. These are all just projections. So how do you figure out if that’s a good option? Well, first of all let’s say it takes me a hundred hours throughout the year in total to execute that business plan in that deal, in that management. And then I end up selling it or something. Well, that would be a 5,000 divided by a hundred hours. So that’s $50 per hour. So, the real question is what do you value your time at, you know, is your time worth 50 an hour? Well, let’s say that you’re an attorney or you’re a doctor and you know, you bill out at 300 bucks an hour, well is 50 worth your time? Maybe for some, maybe not. Maybe if it’s a little side hustle, I don’t know. But a lot of people would probably say no in those positions because they’re making more at something else and that’s more or less a distraction from their primary focus. Now back up to me is like a, you know, punk kid in my early twenties, you know, I made, let’s say 30 bucks an hour at my job. So, was 50 an hour worth it? Yeah, I think so. I think that was worth it. And that’s why I did active real estate for so long, but then I started valuing my time a whole lot more later on and I decided that, Hey, even in that situation, I’d rather be the passive investor and have that flexibility and freedom to do other things with my time that I enjoy more because it’s not always about money and dollars and cents. So that’s kind of how I look at it.

Seth: Yeah. That’s awesome, man. That makes a lot of sense. I mean, most of our listeners are going to be, you know, making more than $50 an hour and they can use their time to make more money than they’d make on that extra 5% that they might make actively  doing a deal and not to mention all the, you know, just the time constraints and just the learning curve and everything else. And the headaches that go along with dealing with contractors and property managers and tenants and all that kind of stuff, man.

Travis:  Exactly. And I’d tell you, I’d point out a caveat at the end of this scenario. So in truth, the way it actually panned out in many situations is, you know, I had done fix and flips that only netted me like a 10% return and took a whole lot more than a hundred hours of my time. Equally so I did some passive deals that resulted in a 30 plus percent return where I really only had to do the vetting upfront and make the choice to invest. So not obviously saying that’s how it goes all the time. That’s not a guarantee or anything, but certain deals in my portfolio have panned out that way. So, I know that exercise is a little difficult. Like how much time is it going to take me annually to manage a property? Well, obviously it depends. You put a bad tenant in there. You might be 300 plus hours a year, you know, and then you get the perfect tenant, maybe only, you know, 50 hours, I don’t know. So, it’s a hard exercise, but it makes you think a little bit about your time value. And to me, that’s my message to the world is, you know, what is your time worth? And what could you do with your time that brings the most fulfillment and happiness to you? That’s why I’m such an advocate for the passive side of this stuff.

Seth: Yeah. And we’re really trying to create more time not to work more, but instead to spend it with our friends and family and, you know, traveling or hobbies or whatever it is we might want to do.

Travis:  Exactly. Everybody has their own why. You know that question, I’m sure we’ve all been asked from one time or another, you know, if you won the lottery, what would you do? Or if money was never a factor, what would you do? Everybody’s different charity and travel and friends and family and all this kind of stuff. But here’s the facts. The fact is realistically speaking in the United States in 2020, like we have to get to a point in our lives at some point we’re passive, right? Like say our sixties or seventies or eighties, like, there’s going to come a time. You either A don’t want to work anymore or two, you can’t. So for a lot of folks in previous generations that might come from a pension and social security and all these things, but what about millennials and everyone beneath, you know, we’re kind of on our own to create our own system here. That’s my opinion. I don’t rely on social security to be in there. I certainly don’t have a pension. And most of my working career has been self-employment income anyway. So, I’m kind of hosed on relying on the government. Let’s just put it that way. So, you know, we got to kind of take matters into our own hands at some point, I chose to focus on that a little earlier versus later.

Seth: Nice, nice. So, let’s maybe take a step back and just get back to basics for our listeners who don’t even know what a real estate syndication is. How would you come to define that?

Travis:  Yeah, that’s a great question. I know that there are all kinds of jargon out there and just jump right in. All right, cool. So, here’s the deal. You could have a 400-unit apartment complex in Dallas, Texas. Okay. One of two buyers, usually with something that size, you’ve got an institutional buyer, so like a REIT, a real estate investment trust, or an insurance company or pension fund, you know, somebody like that wall street basically buying that asset, or you can do as syndication or a private placement, which means you’ve got a general partnership group. So, a couple people or more coming together to find that asset and put some legal docs together and an investment package and whatnot. And then they’re going to raise capital. They’re going to attract a bunch of limited partners, which is what I do to put in, let’s say, $50,000 or a $100,000. And then you get, you know, 50 people or a hundred people to do the same thing. And now you have enough money to put a down payment and a renovation budget, and to close that deal privately. So that what I would I become then a limited partner of course the legal jargon there. But I become basically like a 1% owner, let’s call it in a 400-unit apartment complex. So I get to share in the cashflow and the potential equity upside and whatever the business plan is, you know, I get to share in those profits without having to fork up $20 million on my own, or buy into like a REIT or a mutual fund, that’s publicly traded on the stock market. Well, that’s very hard to understand the ins and outs of that and what the valuation is and whether you’re overpaying or underpaying, it can be complicated. This is very simple and straightforward. And so that’s kind of what it is in a nutshell, general partnership, limited partners coming together to buy a private asset. Usually something that’s a hundred units or greater as far as multifamily is concerned, but private placements could be anything, you know, I mean, you can invest in private businesses or self-storage and mobile home parks. There’s a lot of different ways to invest this way. But what I do mostly is multifamily.

Seth: Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I mean, the beauty about that is just, you know, as a limited partner, you know, because you’re a limited partner, you have limited liability, you can get into these big deals without operating them and without having to come out of pocket millions of dollars.

Travis:  Yep. 100%, 100%. And to your point earlier, I know I didn’t really get into this, but that comment I made about had you asked me in 2009 about being an apartment investor and what that looks like, I probably would have said either a billionaire or someone with like 30, 40, 50 years’ experience in real estate, that just somehow knows how to do that. The irony is as I’ve immersed myself into this world, and now I work in investor relations capacity, and I get to speak with investors nationwide, what I find are attorneys, you know, lawyers, doctors, dentist, you know, pro athletes, business owners. These are commonly the limited partners who invest in these types of offerings. You know, it’s to the point earlier of, Hey, listen, I like my career. I like my job. I don’t want to take my eye off that ball. I don’t want to go be a weekend warrior trying to wholesale and flip houses, and then go back to the office on Monday. Rightfully so, but this is just a diversification piece if nothing else, to an entire investment portfolio, you know, maybe you’ve maxed out a 401k or IRA and, you know, put some money in a brokerage and the stock market. Now you’re saying, Hey, what else is there besides just stocks, bonds, and mutual funds? Well, there’s real estate. And if you don’t want to do all the work yourself, you can partner with others that can take on that workload for you.

Seth: Yeah. Yeah. So, what is maybe one of your typical investors at Ashcroft look like?

Travis:  A lot of that demographic, a lot of attorneys, engineers are a huge sector too, of course, a lot of folks that are out in California, New York, you know, where maybe just buying that single family home in the traditional way financially doesn’t make sense for them, you know, to go put $2 million into a single family home in the Bay area. You may not get a ton of great cashflow off of that, for example. So, this can be a great option to invest in other markets kind of diversify and own some, you know, whatever Texas and Florida while living in one of those States. But mostly it’s accredited investors, high net worth high income individuals looking to either diversify their portfolio, or some of them go pretty heavy in this stuff, but because they love real estate, they just don’t have the time to dedicate to it themselves. And they probably would, quite frankly, if they were retired or didn’t have their career in front of them, but rightfully so, like I said, it’s a nice diversification piece, if nothing else.

Seth: Yeah, for sure. How would you go about finding one of these deals?

Travis:  Good question. And again, it’s evolved since, since 2015, at least in my world. So, it seemed like they didn’t exist back then. And it was super like this. It is like a secret club. I was trying to find access to it. Today, So there’s two types of offerings, primarily. There’s your 506B as in boy and 506C as in Charlie. So, where that matters is that 506C’s can be generally advertised and solicited. So, you might come across those on Google, or you might see an ad somewhere, if you’re on bigger pockets or something, something might pop up. But the, the issue with that, I call it an issue, not really an issue that the caveat with that is they can only take on accredited investors. Okay. So high net worth high-income individuals that are third party to be accredited. That’s why they can generally advertise the 506Bs can, they can advertise their company, like what it is they do, but they generally still don’t even do that really. So, it’s a lot harder to find. It’s a lot more word of mouth, how I found them was through conferences. So if we back up before COVID struck, I was going around the United States do as many multifamily and or real estate conferences that I could possibly attend just for networking purposes and to meet people and to learn. And so you know, you can get on online forums, you can Google search it, you can do conferences digital or in person or, you know, like I said, you’ll probably see an ad here and there that’s 506C. So they’re out there and more so than ever before, but the other way too, is finding someone like myself or anyone else who’s in the space, you know, heavily and actively to reach out to, and just say, Hey, you know, send me a list of 20 groups that are out there, happy to do that, you know, there’s I know that can be tricky and time-consuming.

Seth: Yeah, yeah. For sure, man. So, you know, once you find someone that does this, how do you, how do you vet the sponsor and even the market that it’s in and you don’t need to go too deep into this, because this, you could take a whole episode just answering that, but just maybe just some general pointers on, you know, once you meet someone and you see that they’re, you know, they’ve got some deal flow, you know, how do you vet that sponsor and even the market as well.

Travis:  Yeah. A great question. And I do have a PDF. We can put that in the show notes, it’s 20 pages about how to vet a sponsor in a market and a deal and questions to ask and, you know, common industry terminology, all that good stuff, but I’ll highlight that right now. So, there’s three aspects to investing, right? There’s the team that’s actually executing the business plan. There’s the market that is located in, and there’s the deal itself, right. Three components. So when I got started, I had that all backwards in priority, and I would look at the deal and I would try to like crunch numbers and disagree with the general partners and say, I think it’s this, not that like, it was stupid. And so that led me to not do a lot of deals and you know, who was the expert, right, not me. And so that was a problem because I ended up partnering with some GPs that didn’t have any experience. They didn’t know what they were doing. They couldn’t execute the business plan. It didn’t end up in a loss, thankfully because we did buy a good asset and a good market. So, the other two kind of saved us, but it’s important. My point, it’s important to vet out the team and the operator, in my opinion, as number one, track record, experience, likelihood that they can execute the business plan. Let’s just simply put it at that. You know, how big of a business plan is this? How big of a renovation is this? Have they done it before? If not, you know, how likely is it that they can pull it off? So that’s number one. Number two is to me anyway, it’s the market. So I look from a macro level, just a high level of migration trends and where people are leaving, which States they’re leaving, which States they’re moving to can look up like U-Haul statistics for free, see where people are renting and dropping off. Look at you know political stuff. Look at landlord, tenant laws, tax friendly States, warmer climates. Think about baby boomers. There’s a lot to it, but again, you don’t have to be an expert in all that. That’s just something I enjoy researching myself. So, I’m kind of doing this, this macro level research to decide which States I like and which particular markets I usually don’t go as specific as submarkets, but just generally like, let’s call it like Dallas. Well, Dallas is basically Fort Worth these days. And then amongst that, you know, they’re Richardson and Irving and, you know, [24:26 inaudible] city. So, there’s a lot of these suburbs. I can’t be an expert in all that. So, what I do is I say, okay, I like Texas in general. I like Dallas in general, but tell me why, you know, Haltom city or whatever, you know, why that specific property in that specific sub-market, that specific three-mile radius? What are the median incomes? What are the school ratings? What are the job and employment centers? How far away are they all that good stuff. And so, to answer your question, it goes like this. I define my criteria. Number one. So, I decided I liked value add, BNC class multifamily, five-year holds, monthly distributions, whatever, and I’m just naming off some criteria pieces. I find operators doing that. I get to know those operators. I ask those operators a lot of questions, right. I get to look at their past performance and their current deals.

I skim all that. Now I know that I’m aligned or I’m not with the operator. So those are the deals getting sent to me on a weekly basis or a monthly basis. Then you know, if it’s going to be you know San Francisco deal, well, I’m not going to do that because it doesn’t match my criteria. So now we’re getting into the market. There’s reasons I don’t personally want to invest there in multi-family or New York city or something like that. So, then it’s either, that’s like a big check box there. And then as we get into the deals specifically you know, I’m looking at breakeven occupancy and entry and exit cap rates and all this kind of jargon that’s in the PDF, I won’t go into a lot of detail here. And so, I’m just trying to check as many boxes as I can. Let’s put it simply, right. That’s what I’m doing. And if 80% are checked, I’m likely going to do a deal like that. I’m never going to get a 100% of everything perfect, you know, on my criteria. But if it’s 50% I’m passing, you know. And so that’s the name of the game. It takes a little bit of leg work to get there to know criteria, know yourself, know sponsors, know deals, but once you get there, it’s fairly simple to me, you know, years later. But find a mentor, coaching program books, something, you know, to get yourself there a little quicker. Information is out there. I mean, once you’ve looked at one offering memorandum, you’ve probably seen the next one. I mean, they’re all are very similar in presentation and you just need to get, you know, your market criteria and your sponsor criteria and your deal criteria down. And when fits the bill, go for it.

Seth: Awesome, man. Well, let’s jump into the freedom four questions in an alternative universe where you were not involved in real estate, what would you be doing?

Travis:  I’d been traveling. My wife and I, we love to travel, you know, again, before COVID and all this chaos, we were just internationally traveling. That’s, that’s really one of our passions. And that’s what I’d be doing, any way I could, I did it in the oil field, but it just, wasn’t a fantastic destination.

Seth: Not quite the same. I’m big on health and fitness man. So, what’s the best thing you do to keep your mind and body healthy?

Travis:  I wrote a blog recently on celery juice, which was kind of like a little trendy thing, but you know, juicing celery, you know, and just having like 16 ounces on empty stomach, first thing in the morning, stuff like that is very powerful in a multitude of ways. Other than that, you know, I’m not the best at sticking to a workout routine. I still am kind of a work in progress there. So, but you know, my wife and I, we experiment with all kinds of things, you know, cryotherapy and red light stuff, and just like whatever, you know, different workout routines and orange theory and all that. So, you know, find what works for you and try to make it sustainable is kind of the trick there. The key.

Seth: Yup, absolutely man. Where were you at five years ago in your business and where do you see yourself five years from now?

Travis:  Yeah, five years ago. I was just starting this passive journey, transitioning from active to passive selling off all my single-family real estate, going one at a time into these syndications. It was a nerve-wracking time, but at the same time, a very exciting time. And I think it’s just, well, it is, it is. And as much, you know, book homework, you, you do, there’s still just the reality of it, you know, and this big decisions to do that, that kind of thing, to make a big jump that way. And I was switching careers in the process. It was a big thing. So yeah, so in five years so there’s some folks in my network that are like me, they’re full-time LPs, but they’re like in their sixties or seventies, or perhaps even eighties at this point, and they’ve done hundreds of LP deals. And to me that’s very inspiring, that paints the picture, that this is a real thing. People really do this, very educated people, very wealthy people. And I want to be on that track. I want to stay on that track. And so, I’m asked all the time when I’m going to do my GP deal. Hopefully I’m not going to, that’s my answer to that, nothing wrong with that. It just, it isn’t right for me. You know, to do a GP thing. So still LP with, I don’t know, twice as many deals, let’s say that.

Seth: Nice, nice. So final question. How has passive income made your life better?

Travis:  So, here’s my message to everybody listening. So, like I said, we have to get to a point eventually where we’re passive in some capacity. Why not focus on building diversified, passive income stream sooner than later to if nothing else give you a little flexibility and freedom and options in your life, whether you want to move from full-time work to part-time, whether you want to pivot careers, but right now that’s a little scary, cause maybe you might lose your house or you couldn’t make your payments. This passive income can at least provide a backstop, right? Just a supplemental income source. And I think it’s important to start learning this stuff sooner than later, additionally, right? To understand private placements and investing in cashflow and passive income before you’re 70 years old. I have these conversations with people in their seventies, and it’s just a lot harder to open your mind at that age and to take those kinds of risks. So, the more you can learn and master earlier on, I think the better off you’ll be.

Seth: That’s awesome, man. Well, I’ll tell you what, I mean, attorneys are pretty conservative by nature anyways. So, they, you know, it’s a pretty big hump to get over for them to kind of understand these deals and then wire $50,000 or a $100,000 to someone and let them take it over. So, it’s a, you know, it it’s a big step, but man, if you can figure this thing out, like you have, it’s an awesome pathway to wealth.

Travis:  Reach out to people doing it, you know, a great point by the way. But, seriously, what helped me the most is finding a mentor. It was an unpaid mentor, but I’m not promoting like coaching programs and things that are great for some, but I’m talking about a person who had done a hundred LP deals that I could actually speak to like a real human being, whether through zoom or in person where they could say, look, I’ve been at this for 25 years. This is kind of my portfolio. This is kind of what it’s done, how it’s performed, the lessons learned, like that’s what paints the confidence and the picture and the case, you know, like I said, you can read a book all day and it sounds great, but then you close that book and it’s, what about my situation? What about COVID-19? What about, you know, so find a mentor. It can help walk you through the practical and realistic and modern things happening in this world.

Seth: For sure, man. All right. Well, I think we’re running out of time, but you’ve provided so much value today. I really appreciate having you on where can our listeners find out more about you.

Travis:  Sure. So, I do free 15-minute Q and A calls. Anything we spoke about, you want to learn more about see how that pertains anything we talked about to your specific situation and that downloadable guide, they’re all at the same place. So, it’s www.ashcroftcapital.com/connectwithtravis. It’s just a simple calendar link. You pick a time that works for you. We connect, we can do a zoom call this or a phone call and check out that guide. There’s no upsell to any of this. I’m just happy to be a resource for anybody and help paint this picture in terms of how it pertains to you. The listener.

Seth: That’s great, man. Yeah, man. We’ll throw all that stuff in the show notes. Thanks for being on Travis. Really appreciate it.

Travis:  Thanks Seth. Appreciate it.

Seth:  Wow. Travis is the man with the ultimate plan. This guy is the living blueprint on how to invest passively in alternative assets to become truly and completely financially free. And Travis couldn’t be any more humble and giving with his time. Just an amazing human being. That was incredible. All right. If this doesn’t get you motivated to learn more about passive investing, I’m not sure what will. To get started, go to www.passiveincomeattorney.com right now and get our free passive investing guide. Until next time, Enjoy the journey.