Jay Mirando: House Flipping Expertise, Real Estate Stories & Scaling Success Tips

Hey Fit & Frugal Tribe!

Can you really make a fortune flipping houses? How does a strong online presence revolutionize real estate investing?

In this episode, I'm diving into the world of house flipping with the incredible Jay Mirando.

Jay is the real deal in the world of house flipping. He's made a name for himself not just for his savvy flips but also for his engaging podcast.

His journey from the glitz of the casino industry to the grit of real estate is nothing short of inspiring. Jay's all about sharing his expertise, whether it's through his podcast or on his growing YouTube channel, helping aspiring flippers navigate the complex yet rewarding world of real estate investment.

Join us as Jay walks us through the rollercoaster of flipping houses, he shares the highs and lows, the challenges and the wins, and everything in between.

From the importance of rocking your online presence to balancing your ego in the cutthroat business world, Jay's got insights that are pure gold. Plus, he's gonna dish out some of the invaluable lessons he's learned from his podcast, where he chats with some of the best in the biz.

But hold on, it's not all business talk! Jay's got stories that'll have you on the edge of your seat – think dangerous encounters, squatter showdowns, and some downright bizarre finds in his flipping adventures. Despite the wild ride, Jay's passion for house flipping shines through, and he's even eyeing future ventures in development and expanding his digital footprint.

So, whether you're a real estate enthusiast, an aspiring flipper, or just here for some wildly entertaining stories, this episode with Jay Mirando is an absolute must-listen. Let's jump into this exciting world of house flipping, and maybe, just maybe, you'll walk away with a few tricks up your sleeve!

Key Takeaways:
Jay transitioned from the casino business to real estate and flipping houses in Las Vegas.
He emphasizes the importance of having a strong online presence and using social media to connect with potential clients.
Jay discusses the role of ego in his career and the challenges of balancing confidence with humility.
He shares the lessons he has learned from interviewing successful investors on his podcast.

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Transcript

[TRANSCRIPT]

0:00:03 - (Tawni Nguyen): Hey, guys. Welcome back to the Fit and Frugal podcast. I am your host, Tawni Nguyen. So, you know, we're in a different setting today. We're checking out the Podspot LV. Shout out to the boy Luis over there. Today I have here with my friend Jay. So you want to tell me or tell them a little bit about yourself before I butcher their entire thing?

0:00:20 - (Jay Mirando): All right. Yeah. So, Jay Mirando on Instagram VegasFlipperJay I'm a flipper out here in Las Vegas. I have my own podcast, too, so I had Luis on the podcast, so I saw this when it was just. It was a blank room, so I'm loving it right now. Yeah, I love this whole entire. But, you know, Flipper out here. I'm from east coast. Originally, I started in the casino business, so I spent seven years throwing cards at people and got into real estate, was a realtor, and then got into flipping houses, throwing cards at people.

0:00:54 - (Tawni Nguyen): The ninja.

0:00:54 - (Jay Mirando): Ninja cards right at them.

0:00:56 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:00:56 - (Jay Mirando): I was mainly a craft stealer, but sounds more fun to throw cards at people.

0:01:00 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. So now you're used to the business card ninjas, right, at networking events, the one that hit you for, like, a 32nd intro? Like, bam, bam, bam.

0:01:07 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. Hi, my name is Sean Smith. I do this. Here you go.

0:01:10 - (Tawni Nguyen): Call me if you need any.

0:01:11 - (Jay Mirando): To the next person. Thanks for the relationship, buddy. That told me a lot.

0:01:16 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. So how did you make the move out here from the east coast? What was that moment like?

0:01:21 - (Jay Mirando): I remember when I had enough so I was plowing, like, a foot and a half of snow out of the driveway just to get to work. So when you're plowing snow for, like, 2 hours just so that you can go and work, you're like, I'm sick of this. It'll never happen again. So, I mean, dealer in east coast making, like, 44,000 a year. I knew that when I went to the west coast that I could make twice as much money, pay no money in state tax, and never see snow again.

0:01:51 - (Jay Mirando): And on top of that, it was like 2011 at the time, right? Or when I made the decision, it was 2010. Ended up moving out here in 2011, but at the time, the world was burning, right? We're still recovering from the great recession, and I'm like, man, anybody who moved to. Can we curse on this podcast?

0:02:10 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:02:11 - (Jay Mirando): Anybody who moved to Miami, Phoenix, or Las Vegas could clean the fuck up. So where am I going to go? I can't get a job. Miami, except for a waiter, can't get a job in Phoenix except for as a waiter. Let's go to Las Vegas, where I have a career. So I did it.

0:02:28 - (Tawni Nguyen): Did you start as a car dealer here?

0:02:31 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, I was a dealer. Well, crafts dealer. So I was crafts dealer at the m for, like, a full year, and then I was working the m in the Mirage doing two jobs at once. And then on my 23rd birthday is when I got hired at the win. I spent the last four years at the win. So do you know Jason Griggs?

0:02:48 - (Tawni Nguyen): I do.

0:02:49 - (Jay Mirando): We got hired at the same day at the win.

0:02:52 - (Tawni Nguyen): Oh, really?

0:02:52 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:02:53 - (Tawni Nguyen): And now he's big into, right?

0:02:55 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:02:55 - (Tawni Nguyen): Oliver Henderson.

0:02:56 - (Jay Mirando): And our employee number was, like, one away from each other.

0:02:59 - (Tawni Nguyen): Oh, really? Yeah. That's so cute. Yeah. Tell me more about your podcast.

0:03:06 - (Jay Mirando): So, I mean, I want to talk about the experience, because we were just talking for a little bit of how you forget to turn the microphone on for a little bit. You forget to turn the camera on. There's all the things you have to double check. You're like, does this have to be in front of me the whole entire time? Yeah. Okay. Mic check. Okay. No, you got to keep it here for the whole entire time.

0:03:27 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. Do I put the headphones on? Do I want to look like. What's that thing called? Like, jigglypuff today with the mean.

0:03:35 - (Jay Mirando): We have some people on, and by the time the podcast is done, you see the rings around their head?

0:03:40 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, it's all sweaty, like, with the hair and stuff, too.

0:03:42 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. You look at, like, Spencer Cornelia. No one. He was just on a podcast that day because he has the rings across his hair.

0:03:49 - (Tawni Nguyen): Oh, really?

0:03:50 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. I can tell if anyone's been on a podcast that day. Yeah, I look for it.

0:03:54 - (Tawni Nguyen): I try not to have the headphones on just because I'm really cautious about my earrings, like my piercings, and I just feel like it's so hot that I get all uncomfortable.

0:04:02 - (Jay Mirando): Well, it does a few things. So you can hear a little bit of feedback. You can hear your voice back. And to a lot of people who aren't used to that, it really throws them off. Right. So we've had a lot of people, because who we interview the most are people who are flippers, investors. They're not social media people. Like, when you see someone interviewed, unless, say, it's like Joe Rogan or some big podcast that you really like, generally, these are people who are in front of a camera a lot. Like, yeah, they're good at what they do, but they're also. I mean, you know what it's like when you're filming content that's like its own job in and of itself.

0:04:38 - (Jay Mirando): Right. And there's a skill of it. There's a learning curve of it. And these people are used to being in front of cameras. They're used to hearing their voices back, so they know what to do. So when they hear that little bit of feedback, they don't get thrown off by it. When I have people who've never been on a podcast before, but they're really successful, they make, like, over a million dollars a year.

0:04:59 - (Jay Mirando): They're really good at what they do. They put on the headphones, and it really throws them off. It is like when you put a sweater on a dog, how it loses all of its personality, and it doesn't.

0:05:11 - (Tawni Nguyen): Shoes when it can't walk.

0:05:12 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, you put the shoes on it or on a cat, and they just completely freeze up. That's what the investors are like, and it's like plugging into the matrix. But for people who aren't used to it, it throws them off. But for people who are used to it, they want to hear how they're sounding like. Because I was just on Galindo's podcast last week, I noticed I moved a little bit like this, and voice is completely gone.

0:05:38 - (Jay Mirando): I'm like, this way too much gain, and I start having massive reverb throughout the system. So the people who know what they're doing love hearing the feedback, and it doesn't throw them off.

0:05:50 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, I think for me, it's the mic distance, too, because I was on another podcast as a guest, and I think the thing started moving away from me, and I didn't realize it because I was on a chair, and I started sliding back because I got comfortable, so I started leaning, and then I think the chair just got away from me. And then I was like, this far. So one of the guy had to come over and push it into my mouth.

0:06:09 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, you have to be aware of it.

0:06:11 - (Tawni Nguyen): I'm still getting used to it. He's like, make sure it's like this much. Your mouth is not on it or in it.

0:06:19 - (Jay Mirando): A fist away. That sounds dirty, but it's a fist away. But even if someone's gain is too high and they didn't adjust it, if you go a little bit too high with your voice, maybe they adjusted the mic for them because they like to speak like this and they don't get too high. So when they adjust the gain, they adjust how the microphone sounds. Sounds perfect when they're talking just like this. And then when it goes a little bit higher.

0:06:44 - (Jay Mirando): You get the reverb.

0:06:45 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. I think for me, I'm used to the labs, and the thing I get stuck on is, like, the mic. It's near my necklace and my hair. You know what I'm saying? So I try not to move or something like that.

0:06:55 - (Jay Mirando): The things where it clips on.

0:06:56 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, the little clip, like the little road.

0:06:59 - (Jay Mirando): I've done a whole podcast with one of those. And the mic wasn't on. No, it was all for nothing.

0:07:05 - (Tawni Nguyen): Oh, my God.

0:07:06 - (Jay Mirando): We only got audio off of the base, audio of the camera that's, like, over there.

0:07:11 - (Tawni Nguyen): So it's all echoey. Like, it sounds super far.

0:07:13 - (Jay Mirando): It's terrible.

0:07:14 - (Tawni Nguyen): My second episode or my third episode was like that because it was a group shot. It was the five of us, and we had five mics, but I think two of them kind of ran out of battery. So we just had the two mics in front, and it was like a boardroom, so it was a table. It's wood, so it bounced, like, a lot of sound. I'm still going to post it just because I like the content. It's still just got to be going through the process. But that's what I learned.

0:07:36 - (Jay Mirando): You should listen to it just to live in the shit.

0:07:39 - (Tawni Nguyen): Fuck yeah, dude. I love that shit. I'm like, this is progress.

0:07:43 - (Jay Mirando): I hate my first two episodes, but I don't delete them. I think I want to put on there. Don't watch this. But then I know if I put in the comments, don't watch this. Don't watch this episode. I hate it. I will leave it up here just as reminder that this is the first episode. I think more people would watch it if I told them not to watch it.

0:08:00 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. I think my first view was rough, like, when I had to watch it to look at the edits and all that stuff, like the timestamps and stuff. I'm like, is that what I sound like and look like? You become very conscious of your image, right. And I think you get over it by, what, like, episode five?

0:08:15 - (Jay Mirando): You never get over it. You don't.

0:08:17 - (Tawni Nguyen): Are you always aware of how you look on camera or how you sound?

0:08:19 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. You're going to go to the gym right away. You're going to lose more. You might be like, I'm already skinny. You're going to be on a fucking diet when you start looking at the picture. Yeah.

0:08:31 - (Tawni Nguyen): Not a lot of people hear that coming from, like, a guy's perspective. Right. Because girls are very cautious about what they wear or their image that they're putting off or something like that. Because I've shot with girls who wear, they can't uncross their legs if they're wearing a dress. So they're sitting like this the whole time just to make sure. It's like the good leg, the good side and whatever.

0:08:49 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, it matters. Everybody talks about how looks matter for women. We know that. But looks matter for men too. If you take a look at the top ten most successful realtors out there right now who are men, I think three or four of them were blatantly on steroids. Like blatantly, like the most swollen, jacked. They're maybe 45 or 50 now so they don't have it as much. But they were as swole as they come. If you see pictures of them from 15 years ago, they all have fantastic hair, dress really sharp. Is that a coincidence?

0:09:22 - (Tawni Nguyen): No sex sales, no physical appearance does matter. Like in a court of law in real estate specifically too.

0:09:28 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, you got to look the part like who's the person who blew up faster than anybody in the past like year and a half? Andrew Tate. Would Andrew Tate have blown up if he didn't look like a professional kickboxer? If he was some fat chubby dude with a neck beard, would he have blown up the way that he did? Nobody would give a fuck about what he had to say.

0:09:50 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:09:51 - (Jay Mirando): Could you imagine everything that came out of his mouth came out of someone who looks, know, just some chubby dude with neckbeard how it would sound like.

0:10:01 - (Tawni Nguyen): Dude with the neck beard. I can't unsee that right now, dude.

0:10:04 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, you can't unsee it, but it came from him which is why it resonates more.

0:10:08 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, because I think right before this we were talking about Spencer's video, right on your episode. Like do you want to go through what happened? Is that a learning curve?

0:10:22 - (Jay Mirando): We got a lot of criticism. Like a lot of people are going to give you advice when you're new, right. And the best advice is never take advice. But a lot of people are going to give you advice. And one of the things that they said is, oh, Jay, you need super chats. You got to go live. Patrick McDavid goes live. These people go live fresh and fit goes live. And they get all these like people just send you 1020, $30 to read off questions. Right.

0:10:46 - (Jay Mirando): So, okay, well, if everybody's going live, I'll go live too. We went live. Everything fucked up. It was just the worst. It wasn't working the way it was supposed to. Nothing was going the way it's supposed to. Plus, in hindsight, a lot of people end up saying things that they don't want to leave in there. Like, a lot of people say things that they regret afterwards. They want it deleted. So, I mean, we went live. A lot of things screwed up.

0:11:13 - (Jay Mirando): And then I rewatched it later that night because I love going live because that means it's instantly edited and put on YouTube that very moment. Yeah, I love it. There's no downtime. There's no editing time. There's no. This will get back to you in three days. It's. Right.

0:11:28 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:11:29 - (Jay Mirando): So we did it, and it couldn't be any we. I heard that if you delete things from YouTube, for some reason, their algorithm hates you for it. So we turned the video invisible or private or whatever that is. We turned the video private, and then we just shot it again the next week, and it was way better.

0:11:50 - (Tawni Nguyen): Oh, really?

0:11:50 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, way better.

0:11:52 - (Tawni Nguyen): Same content? Like, same format, same questions?

0:11:54 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, same content, same content, same format, same everything. But everything was more refined because I watched it two more times before I interviewed him again, and I got to see, what was it that I said that I liked? What did I say that I didn't like?

0:12:08 - (Tawni Nguyen): So the difference between going live. I've only gone live once, and I didn't watch it till, like, the next morning, and I'm like, what the fuck was I talking about? It's because I think you black out somewhere in between, too. And I kind of forgot it was kind of live. So I guess I was in the moment, and then I was like, I don't remember talking about that shit.

0:12:24 - (Jay Mirando): Almost every time greatness is happening, you're blacking out while it's happening.

0:12:27 - (Tawni Nguyen): Really? Why do you think that is?

0:12:29 - (Jay Mirando): Because you're in the flow state. When you're in the flow state, like when steph Curry's on a basketball court, he's doing his moves, and he's dribling in between people, and then he goes out for a three pointer. He's not thinking about anything. He thinks while he's in practice. He thinks while he's in training. And you practice and you train and you practice and you train, and then when you go on the court, things are happening too fast to think. So it's all your reflexes. It's all what you train yourself to do.

0:12:56 - (Jay Mirando): This is why I hate whenever anybody says, oh, my God, it was just practice. Yeah. Michael Jordan said, what you do in practice is what you do on the court. You got to treat practice like the full thing always. Because when you're doing, like, you're just blacking out. You're not thinking, yeah.

0:13:10 - (Tawni Nguyen): So that is a good thing then. Yeah, it's like public speaking, right?

0:13:13 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, public speaking. You lose yourself, you don't know what you're saying. You get in front of the microphone, time's going to go by. I have no idea what's even going on right now, but I don't even have power. What's coming out of my mouth right now. I'm just in the zone of what's right.

0:13:29 - (Tawni Nguyen): I think that's the beautiful thing that people don't really understand about podcasting because they think it's like a structured interview thing. That's the mistake I made on my first one, is I tried to have a script because I'm like, I don't know what it was. This was before I had the brand and the vision and the understanding of what I wanted for my podcast. Like, what is the value I'm trying to bring?

0:13:47 - (Tawni Nguyen): And so I try to set up like ten questions thinking like, oh, I've listened to a lot of podcasts, but this is what I'm curious about generally. But it wasn't about the person, and that's why the format now, it's so open. It's because I want to flow with the person. It's like you enter a zone together and everything just kind of naturally comes to frequency, right? Yeah, that's the flow state you were talking about.

0:14:08 - (Jay Mirando): That's the flow state.

0:14:09 - (Tawni Nguyen): Because if I watch my first one, I cringe, is because I'm like, oh, man, I am way overthinking. I'm trying to focus on the question that's coming up next, rather than connecting with the person, which is the superpower.

0:14:20 - (Jay Mirando): And one of the best things I ever heard was by a great real estate investor named Shelby Osborne. And she's know, you're wondering, what are people going to think? What are people going to hear? Should I release this? Is this good? Is this bad? You think people are actually going to watch your first fucking podcast? No one watches the first podcast. No one watches your first videos. Do you think the whole 100,000 people are going to watch your first or second one? No one gives a fuck about you.

0:14:46 - (Jay Mirando): Just put it out.

0:14:48 - (Tawni Nguyen): They care about themselves. You're doing it for you, not for them.

0:14:51 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, nobody cares about you. You're going to get 20 views. You're going to get 80 views. It's okay, you just put it out there and then people aren't going to tune in until later on anyways.

0:15:02 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:15:02 - (Jay Mirando): Nobody watched Joe Rogan at first. They watched him on, like the 500th episode. Not on the first and the second.

0:15:07 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:15:09 - (Jay Mirando): What episode are you on right now of what's released? I think we're at like 18 or 17. I think we're releasing a Nick Marietta one, like tomorrow or something like that. We didn't film the episode, but I just bought a new house where we had a few in, just in holding just to drop them for every few days. And then we're moving over to the new house, rented out Richie incognito's house, who's like a four time pro bowler. I call it the bully House bully house bully.

0:15:42 - (Jay Mirando): I didn't know who Richie Incognito was, so I googled him. He's like 6364, 320 pounds. Got in trouble for bullying all of his teammates. Like, every team that he went to. He's like the biggest asshole, right? Like the biggest.

0:15:55 - (Tawni Nguyen): I google him after this.

0:15:56 - (Jay Mirando): Oh, you have to. He's just the biggest friggin dude. But he was the old owner of this house, and I used to play for the Raiders, and he got an Achilles injury, and then a few months later, he got a calf injury. He's already 39 years old, so he's just done right. So he moved back to Arizona, but I'm renting out his house right now, so got to move everything in there, switch the whole podcast studio up.

0:16:22 - (Jay Mirando): But we'll have a way better scenery, I hope.

0:16:24 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. How'd you get in contact with him for his house?

0:16:28 - (Jay Mirando): I mean, I negotiated a deal with a different. I'm in the real estate community, so negotiated a deal with this person to that person to get it through.

0:16:37 - (Tawni Nguyen): It's always the touch points.

0:16:39 - (Jay Mirando): It took multiple people to arrange the deal that I end up getting, but it's pretty dope. I'm not going to disclose all the insider secrets, but connections help until we.

0:16:52 - (Tawni Nguyen): Go there and film it.

0:16:53 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. Oh, my God. I'm excited to have people over.

0:16:56 - (Tawni Nguyen): Is there a pool? What's so cool about the house? Give me, like, the realtor walkthrough, like, the 22nd. Paint me a picture.

0:17:06 - (Jay Mirando): Super open and modern. It's either 5000 sqft, but the new, modern, contemporary design style. And the designer was from Europe, designed it 2018 with. It's crazy. Everything that happens in Europe ends up coming to America, like, three or four years later. So the way that he designed it in 2018, waterfall Calcutta islands. I didn't start using Calcutta in my flips till, like, 2021 because that's when it was popular. Right.

0:17:34 - (Jay Mirando): What were we doing in 2018? We were still painting everything gray, right?

0:17:38 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:17:38 - (Jay Mirando): Everything was 50 shades of gray, lighter gray, darker gray. And the whites, 2018, he painted the whole thing white. What's popular right now, just this year? White. Nobody was painting anything white last year. They were all doing agreeable gray. He painted the whole thing white with the natural tones in the LVP. A crazy design style on all the accent walls. So how they ran the tile was evens, which we were always doing thirds or halves, meaning, like, if you have a twelve x 24 tile, halves is like, it starts at the half and it's laid like bricks, and then thirds is like every third, it kind of lines up. Right.

0:18:18 - (Jay Mirando): It started to be more popular to lay things in ones, like, only recently. He was doing that in 2018. Right. Just crazy. For someone who designs a lot of houses and flips a lot of houses, this is super impressive. I might be just boring everyone to tears right now because this is super interesting to me, but maybe not to them, but european cabinets, which right now, european cabinets are in 2018. European cabinets, you'll probably know. White shaker. Right? European cabinets are the ones that might have the wood design on it. So they'll have, like, a wood tone wood design.

0:18:59 - (Jay Mirando): Okay. It's not like, just white, black, or gray. Right. It's not a single tone. There's, like, a design to it. There's not a shaker pattern. It's just like, a flat face.

0:19:09 - (Tawni Nguyen): Okay. I'm trying to think at my house what I have, because I'm not as into cabinets as. You know what I'm saying?

0:19:16 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:19:16 - (Tawni Nguyen): I just know the color is, like, smoky maple or something.

0:19:20 - (Jay Mirando): But all the bathrooms are super dope. Every bedroom, like five bedrooms. Every bedroom has its own bathroom. Like, the pool is modern with, like, a dope hot tub and all that. I mean, it's just awesome.

0:19:34 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. I'm excited for you, man.

0:19:35 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. When we have people over, you'll see it.

0:19:37 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. And congrats on the 18th episode. I think I heard. Was it on Instagram or something? Someone sent it to me. Like most podcasts, I give up around the 21st episode. That was one of the milestones I wanted to hit too.

0:19:49 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:19:50 - (Tawni Nguyen): Why do you think that is?

0:19:51 - (Jay Mirando): Because you're just not getting a lot of traction as you think. Like the Grant Cardone book ten x rule. A lot of people dismiss that as being corny, but the one thing he said is, whatever you think that you need to be successful, you need to do ten times more. You think you're just going to make a few calls to sellers, and they're just going to sell you their houses. You need to do ten times more calls to sellers. You need to do ten times more flips, ten times more podcasts, ten times more everything.

0:20:19 - (Jay Mirando): And you need to flood it. You're not good. No one's going to watch your early episodes. But, I mean, I'm already rich, so I don't have to start the game at level one. I spent money in ads. I spent money on Google Ads. I've been banned from Google Ads.

0:20:35 - (Tawni Nguyen): Why?

0:20:36 - (Jay Mirando): Because when I run the podcast as an ad, I'm not filming, like, a one or two minute thing. I'm running the whole hour long podcast as an ad that appears in front of your YouTube or on the side of your.

0:20:53 - (Tawni Nguyen): Oh, like, until people click out.

0:20:54 - (Jay Mirando): Right.

0:20:54 - (Tawni Nguyen): Like the skip ad.

0:20:55 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. So not very effective. But with all the technology that there is right now, they can get a transcript of what we say because they can hear what we say. They can get the text version of it if we say a word, like the c word. The big flu that happened three years ago, which we'll say as, like, a placeholder in time. So on YouTube, your video won't get banned, but you can't run a Google Ad that has the word Covid in.

0:21:25 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:21:26 - (Tawni Nguyen): Why?

0:21:27 - (Jay Mirando): I don't know, but red flag. Violating community guidelines, violating the ad words, violating all that stuff. I've had multiple red flags at this point.

0:21:37 - (Tawni Nguyen): Holy fuck. I didn't even know that.

0:21:39 - (Jay Mirando): And I noticed the views on my one last video was down, too. And I think I didn't check it yet, but I'm pretty sure I got banned again on that one because we said, what did you do when Covid happened? So then you say, that's just a placeholder in history, just like 911 is a placeholder in history, just like 2008 is a placeholder in history. These are the major events that happen that you reference to, right? Yeah, especially people in our age group.

0:22:05 - (Jay Mirando): And if you just say, what did you do when Covid happened? You can't run that shit as a Google Ad. Nothing to do with COVID even if you're not talking about it. But they don't know better. They just hear the word. So I've repealed a few, appealed. Not repealed, but I always get banned anyways.

0:22:25 - (Tawni Nguyen): It's interesting. So do you run, like, your own comment section and stuff, too? What do you notice most in there? Is there a lot of hate positives?

0:22:35 - (Jay Mirando): I don't know. Some people just say, good job. I don't read the comments.

0:22:39 - (Tawni Nguyen): That's one of the advice I got. It's like, don't pay attention to comments. I'm like, I want to talk to people. They think they're trolls. I'm a troll, too. What if I just troll them harder?

0:22:47 - (Jay Mirando): Well, I wanted to troll when I had Spencer Cornelia on, people trolled to say, oh, fix the tv, by the way, if you can. When I had Spencer Cornelia on, people were trolling saying, you know, broke person giving real estate advice, or people trolled on him hard. He has a group of haters that go around and troll him nonstop. But I wanted to say some things that were flagrant.

0:23:16 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:23:17 - (Jay Mirando): I mean, I just want to be like, yeah, that's what he said when he was banging your mom or something like that. But I'm like, no, don't do it, Jay. Do the Ben Franklin thing. Just write angry letter. Wait till the next day, and then see if you still want to send it. And you don't. Right. I didn't write out a text or a letter, but I thought about what I wanted to say. I waited till the next day. I still wanted to say it, but I'm like, you know what? You're not getting anything out of it.

0:23:40 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, I think that's, like, almost the five five five rule. If it doesn't matter in five years, don't spend more than five minutes, like, marinating in it or something.

0:23:49 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:23:49 - (Tawni Nguyen): Is that the thing?

0:23:50 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:23:52 - (Tawni Nguyen): I can't even envision being mad. Do you know what I mean? Like, reading other people's comment that you.

0:23:56 - (Jay Mirando): Don'T know, that's really wise.

0:23:58 - (Tawni Nguyen): And it comes down to online bullying, too. And I think that's another fear that I had before starting a podcast is, I think, because I was bullied when I was younger and the fear of being seen and being validated because social media has a lot of stigma around, oh, you're doing it for validation. You're doing it to be seen. Right. But the whole point of it is like, yeah, we're doing it to be seen for our authenticity, not be seen for this performative mask that everyone else is wearing.

0:24:26 - (Jay Mirando): This is one of the things that I struggle with, and I can tell that you have done some reading on this and some reading in, whether it's philosophy, stoicism, psychology, whatever. But I've read so many books, and in all those books, they say, don't care about what these things think. Don't live your life in comparison. Don't do that. And they really teach you how to be grounded but with all these things, it makes it so that you're not very good at social media. Because if you don't care about what people think, why are you posting?

0:24:55 - (Jay Mirando): Exactly right. You kind of lose your motivation to post because you don't give a fuck what anyone thinks. I don't post things because I just don't care. I'm stuck in my own business. I'm doing what I want to do, and I don't care about anyone else's validation. But then at some point, a lot of books tell you about ego death. Like kill the ego. It's not a good thing, but sometimes you need your ego.

0:25:21 - (Tawni Nguyen): Ego is not a bad thing.

0:25:22 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, you need your ego to post. You need your ego to have the biggest, have fit and frugal, be the biggest podcast that ever existed.

0:25:30 - (Tawni Nguyen): Self belief, right?

0:25:32 - (Jay Mirando): That's a cocky thing to do. You need that.

0:25:35 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:25:35 - (Jay Mirando): So at what point I've had to re explore how to get an ego and how to be a little bit petty about things. I should lean into it more. I'm going to fucking troll everybody in the comment section.

0:25:46 - (Tawni Nguyen): No, I think that's a really great point you brought up is because it is a really big distraction because I feel like there's all this talk about dopamines, like you're just on it, doom scrolling and all that shit, right? That scares people. And for me as an introvert, it is very distracting because once I post something and I just notice my phone notifications is just like going off or whatever and then you don't really realize it till later, but you're actually ignoring important messages on top of all the little noise like the likes and stuff like that.

0:26:12 - (Tawni Nguyen): And the thing with the ego is that it's actually trying to protect us because that's who you are in a sense of like, that's still you. I mean, people call it darkness, right? But it's not really true. Darkness. Darkness. If you've done enough shadow work to understand how to work with your ego, to use your ego, not for good, but for noticing when it's there, like when it's in the presence of you acting on behalf of you, you're actually surviving a situation that's not really meant for you because you're not in alignment in that moment.

0:26:45 - (Jay Mirando): Interesting. So when you're leaning into your ego, it's not good.

0:26:51 - (Tawni Nguyen): I feel like listen to your gut intuition, right? Because you want to do more soul enriching activities, like have better conversations, have better relationships, have better flow with the universe, right? Tapping into your true frequency. But at the same time, once your ego shows up, I feel like it's a reminder that it's like, hey, this side of you doesn't like this situation.

0:27:15 - (Jay Mirando): Interesting.

0:27:16 - (Tawni Nguyen): How do you feel about that? Death of ego is terrible. That's a terrible thing to say. Yeah, I did say that during 2021.

0:27:25 - (Jay Mirando): It's something I struggle with because everything that my ego does and it's something that I have had to put a lot of work in. I'm naturally a one upper. So if I allow my ego to exist, I have to be better than you. I just moved into a 5000 square foot house because I have to metaphorically whip my dick out and say I got the biggest in the room. I have to, right?

0:27:54 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:27:55 - (Jay Mirando): I can't stop it. I have to flip more houses than you. I have to make more money than you. For everybody who said, jay, you were supposed to go to college, Jay, you were supposed to do these things. Jay, why didn't you go to college? Why didn't you get good grades? Everyone who was yelling at me in high school because I had a terrible school experience. Because I didn't put any effort into school. Right.

0:28:13 - (Jay Mirando): I could still ace the test because anything I hear, I remember, but I didn't do any work for it, right?

0:28:19 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:28:19 - (Jay Mirando): And I don't have to just do better than them to prove them wrong. I have to do so much better than them that it's completely unrelatable. There has to be such a bigger house, such amount of cars, such a lifestyle with so much more money that they couldn't even imagine what it's like to be me. Any teacher who said, jay, you didn't study enough. Jay, you didn't put any work into this. I make so many times more than what a teacher makes that it isn't even worth having the argument.

0:28:49 - (Tawni Nguyen): And that's also a really sad thing about institutional education too, because I did go back to college when I was 26 too, but for different reasons. It was an asian parent thing. They didn't realize I dropped out at 18. And they're like, where's your college degree? Like, what degree? Yeah, but that's a whole nother story. But I do agree with you on succeeding in the material world, right?

0:29:11 - (Jay Mirando): There's a meme and it's like type B personality. Like I want to be an astronaut. And then type a personality, just like that person smiling. Type A personality is like angry at them. Does this aces class? Aces class. Go to NASA, go to the moon. And they did it just despite them, just to one up them.

0:29:31 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:29:32 - (Jay Mirando): That is who I am, and I have to work on not being that. That's what I feel like. But then I feel like now that I'm putting out content out there, I have to lean into it. But if I let it go too far, then I'm a douche at that point.

0:29:49 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:29:49 - (Jay Mirando): It's always a struggle between, is this my ego that makes me better, or is this my ego towards just plain douchey?

0:29:56 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. Do you notice when you're being an asshole, like, you catch yourself?

0:30:02 - (Jay Mirando): Not always. Sometimes, but not always because I'm from East coast, one thing. So being an asshole is how we showed love.

0:30:13 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:30:13 - (Jay Mirando): Busting your balls, talking a little bit.

0:30:15 - (Tawni Nguyen): Of shit to you, being really sarcastic. Yeah.

0:30:19 - (Jay Mirando): That's how you know there's love in the air. Shit talking.

0:30:23 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, that is the love language. Memes and shit talking.

0:30:26 - (Jay Mirando): Yes.

0:30:26 - (Tawni Nguyen): We can't be friends if you can't take a little joke. Right.

0:30:29 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. The west coast, like, oh, my God. Explore your feelings. I fucking hate it.

0:30:33 - (Tawni Nguyen): Fuck you. I'm all for that too.

0:30:35 - (Jay Mirando): Be nice to people. People want to hear nice things.

0:30:38 - (Tawni Nguyen): No, but I do understand that because I'm from the East coast, and I was in hospitality. So it was about fucking, like, sucking dick your whole entire fucking career and know. And I think that's where a lot of people pleasing patterns. California, the nicest. I mean, West coast. Did I say East coast?

0:30:55 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:30:56 - (Tawni Nguyen): I grew up on the east coast in Virginia, like, when I first came here as an immigrant, but that did not fly well with my mom because there were too many white people where we lived, and she was kind of culture. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that was a big difference about hospitality and kind of shapes you. That's why it's really interesting seeing that you dealt crap. So you deal with people and their emotions and the gambling.

0:31:19 - (Jay Mirando): It was all hospitality. I was trying to run away from customer service for so long. I mean, from the moment that I was kicked out of school, I just got right into being a bus person at Applebee's, then waiter there, and I was a waiter at, like, eight different restaurants. And then I got into the casino. But all that's customer service. Right. And I'm like, I don't want to do customer service, but then became a realtor, which is just customer service.

0:31:44 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:31:45 - (Jay Mirando): And then the closest thing to not being customer service is being a flipper. But then even being a flipper, there's still a point where you have to sell. There's still a point where you have to work with customers, no matter what you do, there's a point where you have to sell.

0:31:58 - (Tawni Nguyen): Still working with vendors, too. It's all relationship based anyways. Your contractors, all of that.

0:32:03 - (Jay Mirando): And I'm great at customer service. I'm the best at it.

0:32:07 - (Tawni Nguyen): Is that your ego talking?

0:32:08 - (Jay Mirando): It is. It might be. Shit, I don't even know anymore, dude.

0:32:12 - (Tawni Nguyen): I just saw that come out right now.

0:32:13 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, I'm the best at everything, but I'm really good at it. If you don't believe me, just ask me. But I don't want to do it. It's disingenuous to be nice to someone when you're getting something out of it. It's only genuine when you're nice to someone and you're not getting something out of it. So that's why I don't want to get things out of people by being nice to them. I want. Like this is just because that's manipulation.

0:32:45 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, well, let's tone that ego down a notch and tell me what's the worst flip you've ever done that you want to cry about?

0:32:52 - (Jay Mirando): The worst one? Man, I've had a flip burned down on me.

0:32:57 - (Tawni Nguyen): Shut up.

0:32:57 - (Jay Mirando): And it was the only flip I didn't take insurance on. So what? Thousand perump. But that was even the worst one. I still made money off that.

0:33:06 - (Tawni Nguyen): Really?

0:33:07 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:33:07 - (Tawni Nguyen): Did you sell the land?

0:33:08 - (Jay Mirando): Because the house was already so beat up that I think some vandals just went in and burned it down because they disrespected it. But I bought it for pennies on the dollar, right? They thought it was unsavable. I knew I could save it, but I didn't put any money in yet. So I still sold the land and it still had a little shed on it. So I still made some money. But the most money that I lost was actually one that I bought in. Like, it was either May or June of 2022 in Summerlin never got broken into.

0:33:42 - (Jay Mirando): I get broken into over 20 times a year. I have awful things happen every single year. And nothing bad happened to it. No major events, no major catastrophes, no major floods. Just the market started going down so fast, so quickly, that we got into escrow at like 560 or something like that. Took a while in escrow, and then the interest rates went up, then they no longer afforded it. Then it came back on market, got into escrow again at like 550, but then they backed out because they got scared because of the rates.

0:34:17 - (Jay Mirando): And then I think maybe one more time or something like that. But by the time that we got back onto market, it was falling so crazy that we end up settling at 490,000.

0:34:33 - (Tawni Nguyen): So how much money were you at.

0:34:34 - (Jay Mirando): Between all the holding costs? Because the holding costs ate me up because overtime was over budget.

0:34:39 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. How many months? Like nine months. Six months?

0:34:42 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. In total, I think I held it for, like, about eight months or nine months, and I end up losing about, like, 40 grand off it because it's a higher price point. So everything was more money. The mortgage was more money. The cost of renting, the staging, all the utilities, it added up quick.

0:35:05 - (Tawni Nguyen): So what did you do? Wait, what was interest rates around that time? It was like five from the time that I bought.

0:35:10 - (Jay Mirando): It was still like 2.8 or, like 3% interest rates. But obviously, as a flipper, I'm paying between nine and ten. So I think I was paying, like, 9% interest rate on that one. But by the time that it was sold, I think the person got, like, a 6.5% interest rate.

0:35:28 - (Tawni Nguyen): Holy shit.

0:35:29 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. So that affected the cost.

0:35:31 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:35:32 - (Jay Mirando): But even that one, even though I lost the most money off that, that's not the one that haunts me the most. That one in Summerlin, even though that was, like, the most, I lost the most on. But if you're saying which one haunts me the most, I say off of, like, eastern and Di is one to where bought it in the middle of COVID Couldn't evict the tenants who were there. I got to evict the one because he had a heroin overdose in the house.

0:36:02 - (Jay Mirando): So because there's a police report that made it. So I guess it's sad that he had a heroin overdose, but it's fantastic to me. I put this on silent mode for. So even though it's terrible that he had a heroin overdose, I guess still, when there's a police report filed, that means that even if there is Covid restrictions now, you get to evict because you get to evict in record time if they're ever breaking the law.

0:36:28 - (Jay Mirando): Right. So got them out, paid for the other people to get out. We got broken into two or three more times. Then we got broken into a time where I had to pull a gun on this lady and her dog sprayed her dog with pepper spray because the dog was going to bite me.

0:36:43 - (Tawni Nguyen): Oh, my God.

0:36:45 - (Jay Mirando): And then she's, like, sticking to her guns. I'm like, what are you doing here? She's like, oh, the owner rented this place to me. What are you doing here? I'm like, I am the owner. She's like, show me paperwork. I'm like, you show me paperwork, I'm the owner. So she stuck to her gun. She just kept on lying the whole time. Cops came, arrested her. Through all the times that I was renovating this house, everything that could have went wrong went wrong.

0:37:08 - (Jay Mirando): Like multiple break ins, multiple homeless problems, multiple issues with the house, multiple contractor issues, construction issues, electric issues. I had to replace the whole entire roof. Then after we replaced the whole roof, it rains, it leaks again in the new roof. You're like, but it's brand new. Yeah, it leaked.

0:37:32 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:37:32 - (Jay Mirando): And I still end up making 50 grand off it.

0:37:36 - (Tawni Nguyen): That's such a painful 50k that I'm here.

0:37:40 - (Jay Mirando): It was the worst, but because things were going up so much so fast. Did I sell that early 2022 or late 2021? Either way, it might have been like early 2022, but the market was going up so much, so fast that after repair value just went through the roof, which is why all the flippers who are in Vegas at that time were walking around so cocky, right?

0:38:08 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:38:08 - (Jay Mirando): They're walking around like, oh, yeah, making all this money. I went to a real estate event, and the guy who hosted it is like, this is why we get top value at all of our neighborhoods, because we do flips like this. I'm like, buddy, there's people whose cabinets are from the 1990s who set record prices in their houses. The market is crazy right now. Don't get high on your own supply. As much as I was saying that there is ego and stuff like that with me, I know when I'm getting lucky, the market was going up so much, so fast, and everybody was riding that wave, but you had to recognize that it was luck.

0:38:46 - (Jay Mirando): That's not something that's going to continue going up 1.5% month over month.

0:38:51 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:38:51 - (Jay Mirando): Like, a $500,000 house is worth 515 two months from now. Insane.

0:38:58 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. I like that. Where you can pick up your ego, too, because it takes a lot of self awareness to be able to dial into who you are, especially when you're making money to fund your lifestyle, too. Right? Because you're mentioning like, yeah, that was a painful $50,000 or whatever that you actually made. How would you describe your lifestyle switching over from hospitality to now flipping full time?

0:39:23 - (Jay Mirando): I mean, I was always super frugal. How I came to Vegas was at the casino on east coast. Work and save, work and save, work and save. Spent almost none of my money. And then when I came out here, I had 26,000 or 28,000 in the bank. So I got to put three and a half percent down on my first house, FHA, and then 20% down on a condo. Right. Then the whole time I'm in the casinos, I'm probably saving 80% of my money, maybe 70% of my money at least, or maybe only 60%. Really? But by the time that I got to real estate, by the time that I got to real estate, I had all this money to invest in leads, right? I had, like, 100k in the bank.

0:40:15 - (Jay Mirando): Most people, when they become a realtor, they have to join a team. I could just throw money at leads, throw money at whatever I wanted to make it happen, right? And when you leave a consistent job to go into real estate, it's scary because you've never made a dollar. When you're getting an hourly wage, you're getting an hourly paycheck, and that's addicting. But you know that hourly paycheck is there every single week, right? And even though it's tips, it fluctuates, but still, you know, it's there.

0:40:44 - (Tawni Nguyen): Your tips are going, you know, roughly.

0:40:46 - (Jay Mirando): Your tips are only going to fluctuate.

0:40:47 - (Tawni Nguyen): So much, you're walking away with a couple of thousand at least a week or something.

0:40:51 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. And when I became a realtor, and especially when I quit my job, right, because I'm like, let's see how it is to be a realtor. First time, full time, I put in the leave of absence. I'm like, if I can get two houses in the contract in this month, I'm quitting the job, because that means I'm tripping over dollars, picking up pennies, right? Let's get rid of it. So at the end of that month, I put a $630,000 house into escrow.

0:41:21 - (Jay Mirando): So that's 18,900 and then a $250,000 house, which was 7500. So I'm like, okay, I'm quitting. So when I quit, even though I was making the money, there's no guarantee of this, there's no guarantee of anything. So I conserved so much. But then another year or two goes by, you're making more commissions, things are flowing, you have more certainty, but then you go into flipping, and flipping is capital intensive as hell.

0:41:54 - (Jay Mirando): So 2017, I start flipping. I sold that first house, got $140,000 back from title. Then I sold the second house. 2018, got $80,000 back from title. So now I got money to work with on top of all the money that I saved. I'm buying one house, I sell it, I buy two more. Now I'm flipping two houses at a time. I sell one, I buy two more. Flipping three houses at a time. I sell one, I buy two more. And I was playing the most reckless game of Monopoly you've ever seen.

0:42:26 - (Jay Mirando): Every time I was selling a house, I was buying two more houses.

0:42:29 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:42:30 - (Jay Mirando): So even though I was making all this money on paper, I didn't increase my expenses at all.

0:42:37 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:42:38 - (Jay Mirando): Like, I gave nothing to myself. And then 2021 was the first year that I guess I got a little lucky and made 840,000 that year. And then last year, things didn't go as well as what they should have. So I made around like 790,000 last year. And I increased my expenses a bit, but it wasn't until I bought a new car last year. But it wasn't until this past month that I just rented out that mansion. Yeah, but I'm only renting out this mansion.

0:43:13 - (Jay Mirando): One because I need a mansion because I had like $450,000 in equity in the house that I bought in 2017. So I got to take all this money out. But I only spend, even though I'm making all this money, I don't spend barely any of it. Like, I was living off of 10% of my income for that whole entire time.

0:43:36 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, for real, that was like five years, right? Five ish years until this year.

0:43:41 - (Jay Mirando): It's short term pain for long term gain. Flipping takes so much money to run it that I had to have all this as ammo. You need reserves. What about when things go wrong? What about when you hold things for longer? And you know what? Things always go wrong. You're always holding at least one or two of your properties for longer than what you thought. And when you're doing ten or twelve houses at a time, there's always a few where something major break ins, major floods.

0:44:08 - (Tawni Nguyen): Do you have any squatters?

0:44:10 - (Jay Mirando): All the time.

0:44:10 - (Tawni Nguyen): All the time?

0:44:11 - (Jay Mirando): All the time? Yeah.

0:44:12 - (Tawni Nguyen): What do you do? You just walk in, gun them out or what?

0:44:16 - (Jay Mirando): Depending on where it's at in the renovation, sometimes you buy it with the squatters, and that's how you got the deal to begin with. If you have squatters in the middle of the renovation and there's nothing in there, then the cops will kick them out because they're like, oh, I'm renting here, dude. There's no toilet, there is no kitchen. How could you say you live here when there's nothing here? Yeah, but then when it looks like a home, then if they want to go in and squat, they have more of a leg to stand on. They're more alike.

0:44:46 - (Jay Mirando): But I haven't had anybody. I've been broken into after it's been renovated, but after it's been renovated, we've always had either security cameras or realtors are checking up on it so they see the person squatting. My assistant, me. Someone's always going in and catching it within a reasonable amount of time to where they don't get the squatter laws so we can call the cops to kick them out.

0:45:08 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, but you've never been under imminent danger or anything, right?

0:45:11 - (Jay Mirando): Well, yeah, I've been under imminent danger.

0:45:15 - (Tawni Nguyen): Do they come at you? That's what I'm afraid of. I don't think I have the ball to do it, man.

0:45:18 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. So, like, desert and mobile estates, one of my contractors. So we had the one guy come back to break in all the time, and we end up finding out was the person who got evicted there from before. So he was a bully. And the next door neighbors who I hired to clean out the place said that he went over, he recognized that someone from that street is the ones doing the clean out in his head. He's like, you're against me because people who do bad things, they think everyone's out to get them, right?

0:45:48 - (Jay Mirando): When you do drugs, you think fucked up shit. So he's like, he grabbed their wallet, like, real tough dude. Grabbed their wallet and took it. I think he took, like, their id or something like that and said, you leave all my shit right in front of the house. If you take any more of my shit, I'm going to fucking kill you or something to that extent. Right?

0:46:07 - (Tawni Nguyen): Holy shit, dude.

0:46:09 - (Jay Mirando): And so I go over there, and then I go to talk to him. I have my gun on me, and he goes. And he goes out to me, and he's like, I put the gun in his face. Now, I pulled my gun on people probably like three times before that, and every other time they've said, no beef, or they walk away or they run away. This is the first person I pulled my gun on, and he says, shoot me, motherfucker. Shoot me. Shoot me. And he's kept on walking towards me.

0:46:36 - (Jay Mirando): So I'm in the middle of the street. I'm in the middle of the street on a road. If I was in a house, then I'd have a leg to stand on. But you can't say you're in imminent danger if you're in the middle of the street, because you're probably the person who's starting it. So I walked up, I walked back, I went to my car, we had a conversation and he ended up leaving them alone. But it was from that day where I started carrying pepper spray with me all the time.

0:46:59 - (Jay Mirando): So now when people say, shoot me now, I spray them with the pepper spray.

0:47:03 - (Tawni Nguyen): How many people have you sprayed?

0:47:05 - (Jay Mirando): Only one person.

0:47:05 - (Tawni Nguyen): Only one person?

0:47:06 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. And that person at that place off of Di and eastern.

0:47:10 - (Tawni Nguyen): Okay.

0:47:10 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:47:11 - (Tawni Nguyen): And like the dog that tried to bite you.

0:47:13 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. And then it's soft situation, but also I spray it when I think there's. Sometimes I'll walk into a house, the attic will be open or think there's someone there. I'll spray the pepper spray because I know that they can't help but reveal their position if they are there.

0:47:28 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:47:28 - (Jay Mirando): So it's like a better way to.

0:47:30 - (Tawni Nguyen): Kind of gas them out kind of thing.

0:47:32 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, it's a better way to make sure, for sure that there's no one there.

0:47:35 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, man, that's some intense shit.

0:47:39 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. But there's been a few more times than that. I mean, that's just like one of the more fun stories. But there's been a lot to where the people really hated me and they look at me because I'm evicting them. Like I'm the person doing it. And last year, three times, people have shit on the floor before they left the house.

0:48:02 - (Tawni Nguyen): What?

0:48:02 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, I evicted them and they're upset at me for evicting them, so they shit on the floor and they do it in funny ways. Look at my hands. They're smooth. You think I'm doing the fucking clean out myself? I'm not doing the cleanout. It's my contractors who you're offending right now. So they'll shit on the floor, they'll cover it with the shirt. And then the contractors who I play to clean it out, they'll be like, grabbing things off the floor, they'll grab a shirt, it's all squishy, and then like, gooey poop comes out of it.

0:48:34 - (Jay Mirando): And then they call me and they're like, jay, they pooped on the. They shit on the floor and they put in the shirt and all this. And they did this and this. We hate this house. And I'm over there trying to hold back a laugh, like, oh, man, that sounds terrible, but it's so fucking funny. It's so funny. All you did was make it so I have a great story. I love that you shit on the floor. I don't care. I'm not doing this myself.

0:48:56 - (Tawni Nguyen): Oh, my God.

0:48:58 - (Jay Mirando): I'll give my contractors a tip because I feel bad about it now.

0:49:01 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. Because imagine if. Oh, my God, I can't imagine if I did that.

0:49:05 - (Jay Mirando): Oh, my God. In the early houses, I would do the demo and the cleaning out myself just to save on money, but I don't do that nowadays.

0:49:13 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, thanks for sharing that. Because I think on social media all the flips are so glamorized, they'll start sharing like, horror stories and stuff now. But everything's always like, before and after.

0:49:25 - (Jay Mirando): It's not. People love showing the victories, but flipping is not victories.

0:49:30 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:49:31 - (Jay Mirando): What flipping is and what I don't like about them showing victories is you're enticing people to flip who shouldn't be flipping because you need to have the stomach for flipping because everything is going to be bad until the finished product and the finished product is glamorous, but every step along the way until that final photo is all you're dealing with shit either metaphorical or literal in this case.

0:49:55 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. And you've dealt with both.

0:49:57 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. Fucked like. And everything that happens, it's your fault. You're the one who has to take care of the problems. Even on houses that I've taken on partners with, I'm still the one who has to take care of all the problems because they don't have the fucking stomach for it. They think it's going to be like HGTV and then real things happen. I'm like, you're not being reliable right now. You're not doing anything.

0:50:17 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, I think that's exactly the shit that I want to talk about with flipping, too, because I went into real estate thinking I can flip a house, I walked a couple of flips. I'm like, fuck this. I'm out, no doubles. And I'm like, this is not for me. It's not my style.

0:50:31 - (Jay Mirando): In some of those more hostile situations, I mean, at least I'm a dude. But still, even when I go to some of these places to where we have to talk to the person on drugs and try to negotiate them to get out, or they're really angry and they're threatening to hurt people around them, I have to bring people who are like 200 and 5260 pounds, just like people who look more tough than me, which is everybody, really. But I need to bring people who look more tough than me to help me negotiate and navigate the situation.

0:51:02 - (Tawni Nguyen): Damn. I'm still marinating in your shit story. I don't know, man.

0:51:05 - (Jay Mirando): Marinating in the shit.

0:51:06 - (Tawni Nguyen): Marinating in the shit, dude.

0:51:09 - (Jay Mirando): That's actually funny. But that's happened. It's funny how many times that's happened.

0:51:16 - (Tawni Nguyen): How many times do you remember?

0:51:17 - (Jay Mirando): Three. Yeah, three times just in 2022.

0:51:24 - (Tawni Nguyen): Goddamn, dude.

0:51:25 - (Jay Mirando): And I even posted something on social media, like, man, everybody of just like a month and a half ago, there was shit on the carpet of one of my houses. But that one, it turned out an animal just came in the house through one of the doggy doors and shit and left. But it was still funny, though, because shit is always funny.

0:51:42 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah. So what's next for you? I know you're doing the podcast. What do you see yourself doing next?

0:51:50 - (Jay Mirando): Dig your well before you're thirsty. And I think that I can flip houses at about 40 or 50 a year right now in between 20 and 30 a year. But after I'm at the 40 to 50 a year, at that point, it will start getting difficult. You can do it, but you need a larger team in operation. And every person that you hire is another person that you have to manage. Right? I think 40 to 50 is the sweet spot. And what am I going to do after that?

0:52:23 - (Jay Mirando): Right? That's when I'm capped out, I feel. So I think after that, in the investing space, I'll probably go more into development. So I might do new homes, and I think I could scale that a little bit bigger to where, maybe buy big lots to where I could just create 20 new homes on it. And I could use all the skills that I have now of managing a contract, negotiating deals, negotiating terms, negotiating all the right things and getting financing.

0:52:57 - (Jay Mirando): But other than that, the podcast is when I'm at that 40 to 50 deals, I'm going to have to have a little bit more influence and I'm going to have to be able to reach out and find people for my next project. I would love if people just came to me like, we would love to either be partners with you or we have all the right tools to do this, or we have just having that influence and putting it out there of being an investor. And when you're an investor, you don't get hundreds of thousands of views, but you have fans and not just viewers, right?

0:53:32 - (Jay Mirando): Like Spencer Corneli. One of his struggles on his channel, on his main channel, they get 60,000 views a video is that no one will buy from him on that channel. He's putting out gossip, he's calling out fake gurus and stuff like that. Oh, I sell Amazon, how to do Amazon, FBA and all this stuff. And this is how you can make 100,000 a month. And they flex in front of a Lamborghini, but they don't make that.

0:53:59 - (Jay Mirando): That's just what comes in, but they're just trying to get you to buy their course. So he's like, I can't sell anything on my first channel. So he's creating a second channel as a way to sell, as a way to get people to be a fan of him, as a way to get people to know him better. And I'm creating my channel as a way of. I think that's what I would do for, like, if you got paid the same amount for everything, having a YouTube channel, putting out podcasts, having high level conversations with people, and knowing, talking to interesting people, that's what I would do for free.

0:54:36 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:54:37 - (Jay Mirando): And then all the connections that come with that are just great, but I want to make those connections now before I need it. Right. I don't want to be bored out of my fucking mind. Like, Josh Galindo was just successful as hell flipping all the houses. And then he's like, 14 years in. It's like, man, I got to start now. And he should have started earlier. The earlier you start, the more it can snowball, the more you could work out where you need more help, the more you could work out what your viewers like, and you can really hone in of what makes the best channel.

0:55:11 - (Jay Mirando): And I just want to have interesting conversations with interesting people and just have the right connections from that standpoint, I guess.

0:55:19 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah, no, I'm glad to have you on this journey, dude.

0:55:21 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:55:22 - (Tawni Nguyen): I didn't realize you were that frugal. Yeah, that's the thing I was really interested about. Super frugal, like, people's lifestyle and how they actually got to where they are is because people think financial freedom is just a number. But once you hit that number, and then what? You're on a mission to get there. You get there. If you're not happy, then.

0:55:41 - (Jay Mirando): But from all the people who supposedly make all that money, there's so many, to where they're not spending any of it. If you read the book shoe dog of the guy who created Nike, every single year he get, okay, make an order of, like, for 10,000 in China and then sell all those shoes. Then his next order, he's buying 20,000 shoes. Then he sells them all. Then he buys 60,000 shoes. He sells them all. He buys 120,000 shoes. He sells them all. He buys 400,000 shoes. He sells them all.

0:56:12 - (Jay Mirando): And he has all this revenue coming in, all this money coming in, but he has to open new store. He has to hire new employees. He has to hire new this. He goes to the bank to get some loans. They're looking at him and they're like, you don't have any reserves. This is really dangerous. You're growing too fast. And he's like, what do you mean I'm growing too fast? Isn't that a good thing? This is a business.

0:56:31 - (Jay Mirando): And they're like, no, dude, you don't have any reserves. You're really dangerous. If one thing went bad, you wouldn't have anything to back it up. So he was dealing with financial strife after financial strife every single year until the day he went public. And the day he went public was when he was finally like, I'm finally rich now. I don't have to deal with this by myself. I finally have all the money to back this and to deal with all my lawsuits and to deal with all these companies.

0:56:58 - (Jay Mirando): And on the early first five years of owning a business, probably all your money will be poured back into it.

0:57:05 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:57:06 - (Jay Mirando): That's why I had to rent a new place, because I'd have flippers coming into my house, and the flipper's house needs flipping. And they'd be like, jay, what is this? Your cabinets are bad. There's bad work here.

0:57:18 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:57:18 - (Jay Mirando): I'm like, yeah, man, I had bad contractors on the first year, and they screwed everything up. But if you really want to grow, it's short term pain for long term gain, and you have to sacrifice for the later on. But, yeah, that's what I say.

0:57:36 - (Tawni Nguyen): That is exactly, like the model of fit and frugal life. Right?

0:57:38 - (Jay Mirando): Fit and frugal.

0:57:41 - (Tawni Nguyen): Well, thanks for sharing your time with me today. It's, like, a really valuable resource.

0:57:46 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah, I'm happy to be here.

0:57:47 - (Tawni Nguyen): This energy is, like, so amazing. It's a little high marinating and shit.

0:57:53 - (Jay Mirando): I love that. I love that. I love showing it.

0:57:55 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:57:56 - (Jay Mirando): I'm fucked up. I think the most worst things are the funniest.

0:57:59 - (Tawni Nguyen): Yeah.

0:58:00 - (Jay Mirando): When people post good things on Instagram or something like that, I'm like, yeah, everybody has that. When someone posts something awful, then I love it.

0:58:07 - (Tawni Nguyen): It's like something like, everyone's riding on that high, like, all the fucking time.

0:58:10 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah.

0:58:11 - (Tawni Nguyen): That's why everyone's so sad, because they're trying to compare themselves to that and they're never, ever going to get there.

0:58:17 - (Jay Mirando): It sucks. Yeah, I like that. That's why I like Doja cat. She posts pictures of her being, like, weird. Just, like, weird stuff. Like, why'd you post that on the Internet? You're famous as hell. Yeah, but she just does it. It's the weirdest stuff.

0:58:30 - (Tawni Nguyen): It's authenticity. I think that's it. Your vibe attracts your tribe, right?

0:58:33 - (Jay Mirando): Yeah. Oh, I like that. Bars.

0:58:36 - (Tawni Nguyen): Okay. That's it. It comes down to who you vibe with and who truly sees you for you and understands you. And that's what separates belonging and fitting in, because fitting in is just doing socially acceptable things while belonging. It means that you are truly seen and accepted for you, and you belong in that community. That's what I hope to build. So thanks for being on this journey. Thank you.

0:58:58 - (Jay Mirando): Thank you.

0:58:59 - (Tawni Nguyen): All right, that's it for us today. Again, I am your host, tawny Nguyen. If you want to connect more, you can find me on ig at Tawnysaurus and Jay, you can find him at.

0:59:07 - (Jay Mirando): VegasFlipperJay on Instagram or YouTube.com at ThePaperTrails.

0:59:12 - (Tawni Nguyen): Cool. That's it for us. Peace.