Closing the Wealth Gap with Real Estate Investing

I am on a mission. I want to close the racial wealth gap via real estate investing.
Real estate investing has many perks from cash flow, to tax benefits and building generational wealth.  All these will help bridge the racial wealth gap.

In this episode I share the four ways that investing in real estate helps build wealth known as the 4 pillars of wealth creation. 

From building multiple sources of income to appreciation and debt paydown. And let's not forget the tax code—your secret weapon in the real estate game! I get into how to harness tax benefits like depreciation and deductions for expenses, paving your path to maximizing returns. 

Link to YouTube Video
https://youtu.be/sBshqkNPwZI

Chapters

• 0:00 Real Estate Investing and Wealth Creation
• 3:57 Real Estate Investing
• 22:26 Tax Benefits of Real Estate Investing

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

But in my opinion, I don't believe we're going to have a big housing crash like we did in 2008, because, again, that was more because of the lending practices that caused that. Over here we kind of are just with interest rates and the housing value. This one is more kind of like a tug of war between like sellers and fires. Welcome to the Money Cheese man podcast, a fun and safe space for personal finance, investing and entrepreneurship tips, where we get the cheese man on all things money, with sass and humor. I am your host, violeta, a first generation Mexican immigrant, a real estate investor, entrepreneur, and I am here to help you kick ass in the financial game. Each week, I not only bring you expert tips but also share the financial freedom and entrepreneurship journeys from our own community, because, you know, representation is important. So grab un cafecito or, si quieres, an adult beverage and let's get into this week's Money Cheese man. Hello, welcome to another episode of the Money Cheese man podcast, and this week I want to do a kind of real estate investing one on one, to kind of like tell you the ins and outs, like basics of real estate investing for those that may have been interested about it or may be wanting to start this year or possibly next year, want to give you the basics so you can make an informed decision if you want to start investing in real estate. And the reason I want to do this is because I feel like every time I kind of mentioned that I invest in real estate, you know people will hear about it, but they don't really know the basics about it, what they can do with it, how it makes some money and you know what all goes into it and how to even start. So a lot of them may feel intimidated by it, they might feel like it's not accessible to them, and I want to change that. Another reason is because, I mean, it's no secret we are behind in the racial wealth gap and we are like making strides, but we are still kind of behind. I mean, only about 49% of Latinos in Hispanics actually own homes, compared to our white counterparts. They're at like at 74%. And not only that, out of the real estate investors that we do have, we only make up about 16% of real estate investors and that is very low. And that's one of the reasons I, you know, have money achievement and I'm out here trying to, you know, inspire more of my community to get into real estate investing, because real estate is a great wealth generator. This is how you pass down generational wealth. There's several ways that real estate investing makes you money, and if we're not participating, then we are really selling ourselves shorts. And that's why I want to kind of change that and I want to like educate and put real estate investing out there for more of my community to join in so we can start helping combat this racial wealth gap. So that's why I want to dedicate this episode to you know, just telling you about real estate investing, what it is, how you can get started and how it makes you money. And so in this video, I want to talk about what is real estate investing, give you the basics of it and tell you about how it creates wealth. And you know the many benefits of real estate investing. So let's get into it.

Speaker 1: 3:57

What is real estate investing? I mean, in just lame terms, it's just basically purchasing or managing or selling or renting out real estate for profit. Now it sounds simple enough, but real estate investing is a huge umbrella. There's so many strategies, so many niches, and you can really mix and match real estate investing to fit your needs, for example, there's so many different types of real estate. Like you have your commercial, which is like your office spaces, your hotels, big apartments. You know people can invest that way. You also have the common one that you hear about is investing in single family homes, where you just kind of either fix and flip them or you buy some to rent out. Or, like me, I do the smaller multi family homes, which are like between two to four units. So those are your duplexes up to your quadplexes. There's even people that buy land to either, you know, sell it for a bigger profit once it appreciates, or they buy land and, you know, put mobile homes or RV parks. Or, you know, the big thing now is like tiny homes, you know, to help combat this home affordability and housing crisis.

Speaker 1: 5:23

And then, of course, you have your different strategies, like how I mentioned, your fix and flips. You also have your rentals. It could be like long-term rentals, like I do. You can do your Airbnb's. You could do your midterm rentals, which are, you know, geared to more of the traveling, you know, professional workforce and usually you know these are geared towards, like the traveling nurses. You have people that do the burn method, which is how I actually ended up, you know, getting into real estate investing where you just buy your first property, you live in it, you rehab it, fix it up, make some updates or repairs, and then you rent it out. You move out, rent it out and then, once it appreciates enough, you refinance it to take cash out and then you buy another property and you repeat the whole process again. But really, with real estate investing, you can really get creative with it, like I know people that are buying land again to do tiny homes, which is a great way to, you know, help combat this housing crisis and create affordable you know housing. And in the same way, I see people that buy like old hotels or motels or whatever, and they convert that into little, small, individual apartments and you know all that starts to help out, you know, bring down the housing costs. There's people that buy mobile parks. There's people that just buy land and make it an RV park and you know there's so many different ways that you can make real estate investing work for you and there's so many benefits that we will get into and you. Once you know these, then you can start seeing how you can create a strategy that benefits you.

Speaker 1: 7:17

Now let's talk about how real estate investing actually builds wealth. Now, if you're listening to this on your regular podcast, like Apple or Spotify, then if you want to see the visuals that I have for this episode, you can hop on over to YouTube and I will have kind of like a shortened version of just this part of the episode. So how does real estate investing create wealth? Well, there are four main pillars. You have income, you have appreciation, you have debt pay down and then you have tax benefits, and you have to take into account all these pillars when you are looking into investing in real estate. This is why I talk about yes, interest rates have an effect, but it's only one piece of the puzzle and you have to look into the whole picture to figure out if this property that you're looking into buying is going to make your money. Now, if you're listening to this on Spotify or you know Apple, wherever you listen to your podcast, I do have the the visuals for this. If you hop on over to YouTube, it's a shortened version of the podcast just going into the these four pillars. So the first pillar is income, and you can make income with your fix and flips, but, you know, buying a property for that needs some rehab or some updates and repairs, and then you buy that low, you fix it up and then you sell it for a higher price and you make income that way. But these pillars really apply to the long term game. So if you're doing a long term rentals, even if it's like your Airbnb's, you are still holding that property kind of long term. You're just renting it out for shorter periods of time, but these four pillars apply to rentals.

Speaker 1: 9:19

So with rental properties, this income is called cash flow, and cash flow is really your monthly net income from a rental property. Now, each property has its own cash flow, which the more you buy properties, the more cash flow, the the more multiple sources of income that you are creating. Now, to calculate your cash flow, you're going to subtract your monthly operating expenses from your gross monthly rental income. So now, what do I mean by operating expenses? These are your expenses that are required to either maintain the property that goes along with the property. This can be like your mortgage, your taxes, your insurance, which is usually included in your mortgage. But if you bought it like cash, then you would have your taxes and insurance, other things like your property manager, and you also want to put like a certain percentage.

Speaker 1: 10:26

I do about 8% from my rental income per month. I set that aside for maintenance. And then I do another 8% for just put that money aside for like emergencies or for your big repairs, like maybe you need to purchase a new water heater, which I actually had to do recently, and so you set that money aside, and you also want to put a certain percentage for vacancies. So, for example, with one duplex, I bring in about 17.70 per month from this duplex. It has two units and my management fees are 8%, so that's $142 per month. My mortgage is $850 and this includes my principal, my interest, my insurance and my taxes and then, like I said, I put aside 8% for maintenance and another 8% for big purchases or emergencies and my vacancies. So that's about another 16%, which is going to come out to like $284. So the total amount of my operating expenses per month is around $992 and I bring in 17.70 per month in rental income. So that leaves me with about $494, which I could just round it up a little bit to $500, just to make the numbers you know, pretty easy.

Speaker 1: 11:58

So with this one property I get to pocket $500 a month. Now this is just with one property. So you can imagine if you just scale this up you could start compounding your income. Because you start off with one property. It's giving you about $500 a month, and then you save that money plus other money or whatever, and you buy a second property and now you have two properties that give you $500 each per month. So now you have a cash flow of $1,000 per month and then you just keep ongoing. Each time you buy another property. Now you have three, that's $1,500 a month and then you buy fourth and so on and so on, and so then it starts compounding and you start building multiple sources of income and then this is how you can gain financial freedom and eventually build that wealth.

Speaker 1: 12:56

The second pillar is appreciation, and appreciation is just a gradual increase in value of the property that you have over time. And you know historically and I will link the chart down in the show notes if you want to check it out. If not, check it out on YouTube, I have it up but on average in over a decade a property is going to increase in value from like 3 to 5% on average per year. So the property that you buy now, in 10 years, is going to be worth a significantly amount more. Now, with all the high interest rates and how crazy the housing market was the past few years and with these rumors that there's going to be a housing market crash and blah, blah, blah that the housing market bubble and blah because you know houses were had some really overinflated prices, you still are going to make money and this is where, like, some people kind of get stuck in that mindset that they don't want to invest in real estate because they're worried that they're. You know the value of their houses is going to decrease. But even in 2008, like, yes, the houses dipped in value, but they came back up and then continue to rise up and are now worth more still from when they were first purchased. Now, of course, you know it's not linear. It's not like an increase. That's linear. It's going to go up and down. For example, when we hit the 2008 housing crash and all that which was, you know, created because of lending practices, but, yes, the value of those properties dropped but then they recovered and then they came back up and they're still worth way more than the purchase price.

Speaker 1: 15:01

And with stock investing, you talk about that. You don't want to sell that stock, even if it drops in value, because it's still going to recover and still be worth more than when you purchased it, unless a big thing happened right, Like the company closes or whatever. But if you have a stable stock, like Coca Cola or whatever, you want to maintain that even if it dips in value, because the only time that you really are losing money is whenever you sell that stock. So if you panic and that you see that stock is losing value and you sell it, then that's when you actually do lose money. And kind of the same mindset when you own a property is that you know there's going to be times where your property kind of loses a little bit of value, but if you just keep it long term it's going to even out and you're still going to, you know, appreciate over time with that property. The only time that you kind of want to take that into account is when you're doing your fix and flips, because that's a shorter time span and you know you're buying a property low and you want to sell it high. So that's when you do take that into account.

Speaker 1: 16:17

But for, like the long term, people like me that buy and hold properties and have them as rentals. What we care about is the cash flow and yes, we will more. Some people care more about appreciation, but for me, I care a little bit about appreciation as long as it's going up, but I'm more geared towards the cash flow aspect of real estate investing. So, as long as my property is still cash flowing, you know I am not going to sell a property if it drops in value, because I'm holding it long term and it's going to recover. I'm still making, you know, money from the rental income and you know it's still going to be worth more in the long term.

Speaker 1: 17:02

And this is one of the other things that has been stopping people from investing in real estate. The past, you know, a few years with the craziness of the housing market, because house prices soared and you had low interest rates. And now it's like the opposite to where you have high interest rates and then the housing is still kind of high. People are worried that the housing market is going to crash, but it's not really going to crash. But in my opinion, I don't believe we're going to have a big housing crash like we did in 2008. Because, again, that was more because of the lending practices that caused that. Over here we kind of are just with interest rates and the housing value. This one is more kind of like a tug of war between, like sellers and buyers and eventually there's going to have to. You know, these housing prices are going to have to drop a little bit, but not significant enough to consider it a housing crash, but there's going to be some slight correction. But at the end of the day, we have limited amount of housing and that's going to keep these prices pretty stable for the most part until something drastic comes along.

Speaker 1: 18:27

Another plus with appreciation is that this helps hedge against inflation. Now it's kind of a little bit different the past few years, because inflation was crazy. But imagine having your $20,000, which is, you know, like the typical 20% ish right, that you usually put down on a property and you leave that in savings. You're losing money that those $20,000 are not worth the same amount in a few years because inflation. But with a property you put those $20,000 as a down payment for a rental property. Now those $20,000 are going to be better protected if you put that money into a rental property. Now, mind you, you always want to have like an emergency fund and stuff, but any extra cash that is just sitting there that you don't need as an emergency fund and you want to like protect. That is better off in a rental property because it's going to appreciate three to five percent historically and in some cases houses skyrocketed, so you had even more than five percent in appreciation and that's going to help protect your money from inflation.

Speaker 1: 19:53

So the third pillar is your debt pay down, and this is where you build your equity. Now, again with this pillar, this one's more geared towards the long-term rentals or your buy and holds, even if it's your Airbnb's. This one applies for that, not necessarily for your fix and flips. So if you have a property that you bought with a loan and now you have a mortgage on it, part of the mortgage is used to pay down that loan, and as you pay down that loan, you start building equity, and equity is just the difference between the market value of your property versus what you owe on it. Now, the way that this creates wealth is because, with rentals or like, whether it's short term or long term or midterm your tenants, the people that rent out your property they're paying that mortgage down because, like how we talked about in the first pillar with cash flow. When we calculate cash flow, we include that mortgage payment. So with the rental income it is paying down your mortgage, so it's paying down your investment. And not only are you getting that debt paid down, but you're building that equity. And if you build enough equity, eventually you can refinance, you know, pull some of that cash out and then use that as leverage to buy another property. So, for example, if you buy a property for a hundred thousand dollars, you put your 20% down, so you have a loan of 80 thousand dollars, but you're renting out that property so that rental income is used to pay that mortgage. And so, as the mortgage just gets paid down, the amount that you owe gets paid down and you start building that equity. And that is money. That is money that you can eventually, once you hit a certain level of equity, then you can go and get another loan to refinance and pull that money out and then you could use that as a down payment for another property. And this is how you start building you know your portfolio and start building wealth.

Speaker 1: 22:26

Now the last pillar is tax benefits, and this is where real estate investing really comes through with reducing your tax liability. I mean, this is how the rich keep a lot of their money by putting their money into real estate, because when you own a rental property, you get a lot of tax breaks and a lot of tax deductions, and all this helps bring down your tax liability, which means that's more money that is in your pocket that you get to keep and that you can invest again in whatever you want to do. So you have several different ways that your taxes are reduced when you own a rental property, and the first one is depreciation. Now, with depreciation, your rental property is an asset that creates income and over time, because it's being rented out, there's going to be wear and tear on that property, so that's going to reduce the value of your home theoretically right. So the IRS recognizes that and gives you a tax break. Now the IRS allows you to deduct that loss throughout several years, in a span of 27.5 years.

Speaker 1: 23:54

Now this is awesome because, regardless if your property appreciates which, like I said, historically it does go up the IRS is still allowing you to say, hey, my house has lost value, and allows you to reduce your tax liability with that depreciation. Now depreciation is spread out over 27.5 years. Now this doesn't count the land that's attached to your property, because they don't consider that land depreciates. So this is just the house itself. So, for example, let's say we have a property that's a hundred thousand dollars minus the land, you know, I'm left with seventy eight thousand dollars of what the house is valued when I purchased the property. Now you divide that by the 27.5 years that the IRS says that you can spread it out with, and that leaves me with 2836 that I can use to reduce my tax liability every year for as long as I have the property. So that's awesome because, as I'm making rental income now, I could say that I lost 2836 when I really didn't. And I know it sounds kind of like you're cheating the system or whatever, but this is what the IRS says that you can do, so take full advantage of it.

Speaker 1: 25:26

On top of that, there is this thing called bonus depreciation, which is another tax break for the wear and tear of the appliances, like the main components of the house, like the HVAC system, the water heaters, stuff like that. Now this one's a little bit trickier and you want to definitely talk to your tax advisor to see what actually falls into it. Now to explain you know bonus depreciation in you know, just easy terms, is basically a bill was passed that said hey, if you own rental properties, then you can deduct those, that depreciation of appliances and some of the main components of your property, like an HVAC system, again like a water heater, if you had a washer and dryer, things like that. You can take all of that in the first year when you put that rental property in service. Now the thing is it's a temporary tax benefit, so it's set to expire in 2027. So you want to make sure that you purchase a property and set it in service between that time, because it's in the works to get renewed. But we'll see if it does, and hopefully it does, because it's an awesome tax benefit. But the caveat to that is that it does reduce the amount of depreciation that you can claim. So, for example, in 2023 you can only do 80% and then it just drops 20 points each year until it cancels out in 2027. But it's still a great tax benefit because, especially these older properties that you get into, you have to replace, like HVAC systems, you plumbing, water heaters and all that, and you could just depreciate that up front and really benefit and help reduce your tax liability and again keep more money in your pocket.

Speaker 1: 27:32

Now, the other benefit with owning a rental property is that you can deduct the cost of certain things with you know taking care of that property. So like maintenance items and even the mortgage, the interest, the taxes, the insurance, property management, all of that you can use as deductions to lower your tax liability. Now, again, you want to talk to your tax advisor to see what all you can deduct, but I know I deduct all those with mine and it really, you know, helps reduce how much taxes I pay on that rental income that I make. So, for example, you see people saying like, oh, I make $50,000 a year with my rental properties and so many people are always like, well, yeah, but what about you know the cost and all that stuff? Like, we're still including that because we're allowed to deduct that, and that's still, you know, reducing the amount of taxes that we pay on that rental income. So I'm bringing in $50,000, but I'm only having to pay taxes on a portion of that because some of it goes to the mortgage, it goes to maintenance, it goes to depreciation and all of that. So I'm still bringing $50,000. So I get to pay less taxes on that $50,000. And so that is how the rich stay rich, because they know all of these tax codes or they have somebody that knows the ins and outs of taxes and with real estate investing, you have so many tax benefits and this is how you create that wealth.

Speaker 1: 29:20

So, going back to my first rental, where we said it was like $100,000, and we were making about $500 of cash flow per month. So, first pillar, we're creating cash flow, a multiple source of income, at $500 a month, but you are bringing in $1770 in rental income per month, which comes out to $21,000 and $240. Now, pillar number two appreciation, and let's low-ballot. We talked about how it was three to 5% on average historically. So I want to low-ballot and say, hey, it appreciated 3% in the first year that I have this rental property. So that means this property appreciated $3,000 in its first year.

Speaker 1: 30:15

Now, because I have a mortgage on it, part of that mortgage includes paying off that principal. Now I looked at this rental property, I looked at my statement and it came out to $138 per month. That's actually applied to the principal. So I'm just going to round it to $140 just to make it easy math. And so each month that the mortgage is being paid, $140 of that goes into the principal of the actual loan. Everything else is interest rate. It's the taxes and the insurance. So that means from the rental income, $140 times 12 is going to give me $1680 per year that I'm making paying off this house and that's money that is not coming out of my pocket, it's coming out of the rental income. So it's paying off this investment by itself through the mortgage.

Speaker 1: 31:15

And that's pillar number three, which is equity. So I'm building equity because, as the principal is getting paid off, that means I owe less and over time it just keeps growing and growing and that's how you build equity and eventually I get enough I could buy. I could pull that cash out and buy another property. And the last pillar, tax benefits. This is where you really get into keeping more of that money because, although we brought in $21,000, $240. Now you can deduct the interest payment, the insurance and the property taxes. You could also deduct the property manager, which I pay 8% for this property. So in one year I pay about $1,700 in property management fees.

Speaker 1: 32:09

And then again we said it was about 16% of the rental income for things like maintenance and just putting setting aside money for like big projects. So now let's just say for EasyMath that I used up all that 16%. I had to do maintenance and I had to replace a boiler or whatever. So that comes out to $3,400 for that year that I can deduct from my rental income as well. So, deducting all of that from my rental income that we originally started out with $21,240. Now we're down to $6,000 of income for that year that we're going to pay taxes on. But we still get things like depreciation and remember we calculated that for $2,836. So that's another deduction that I can put on that income that I brought in.

Speaker 1: 33:10

And now you can see how, even though I received all this rental income and it's going towards a property that I'm making money off of and that it appreciates and I'm getting equity, I get to pay way less taxes than my W-2 job. And this is how real estate investing makes you money, this is how you build wealth and this is why I'm so passionate in getting the community to get into real estate investing because of all of these benefits. And I'm trying really hard to help that mindset to overcome, that mindset of being worried about the interest rates, being worried about housing market crashes, because realistically that's very low likelihood and I get it. Some people are worried about losing money because they had a bad tenant or tenants not paying or whatever. Like all that gets to be deducted, because that's money that I kind of lost and that helps reduce my tax liability and I'm still you know my property still getting paid off.

Speaker 1: 34:20

So with real estate investing you have to look at the whole picture and how all of that comes together to make money, reduce your tax liability and have an asset that increases in value over time. And you know, don't just let these interest rates and this scariness of like that you hear on YouTube or on TikTok or whatever of like housing market crashes, like don't let that deter you from getting into this, because the benefits really outweigh the risks. So what is stopping most people from jumping into real estate investing? Well, I already covered kind of that fear, that hesitation because of the interest rates and that fear that, you know, housing market crash and like the tenants not paying or whatever.

Speaker 1: 35:13

But the other part is that just people don't know where to start, how to start or anything like that or what like it sounds super complicated, which is why I created my real estate investing for beginners course and this is going to be a six week course. It walks you through all the steps from preparing to invest, like getting your finances together, figuring out what loans you might be eligible for and figuring out what kind of strategy you want to go for and we go into, like how to plan to buy your first rental property, building your team and so much more, and I give you lots of tools and checklists and all that. So if you're interested, that is linked in the show notes. So you've been playing around with the idea of real estate investing but you're kind of hesitant. You know this is a good opportunity to. You know, build that knowledge and, you know, be guided step by step. Itself paste, and again, it's linked in the show notes.

Speaker 1: 36:15

But really I just want my community to get more involved with real estate investing because of all these benefits and like we don't get told about these. We have to figure this out on our own and that's why I'm so passionate about real estate investing. So if you have any other questions, you can email me, you can DM me on Instagram or whatever. You know, let's get our community out here real estate investing. Other than that, I will see you in the next episode. Bye. Thank you so much for listening. Don't forget to like and share this episode so others can also find this podcast. Don't forget to follow me on all my social medias listed in the show notes below, where you can also find resources to help you in your financial journey If you're interested in becoming a guest on the podcast, you can find that information in the show notes. Other than that, thank you so much for your support and I will see you in the next episode. Bye.