Episode #096 - “Successfully Unemployed” with Special Guest Dustin Heiner!

Today hosts Braden Cheek, Brian Duck and Joel Thompson discuss the life and career path of a real estate success story who became financially free at the age of 37.

Well how is it going guys and welcome back to how to invest in commercial real estate. And we are back with another exciting episode and today we have a guest with us Dustin Dustin Heiner did I pronounce that correctly? You sure did Dustin Heiner and he has been investing in real estate for quite some time and we thought we would have him on the podcast and kind of tell his story. I know Joel kinda says it best. Um say what say what you kinda said Okay well what were you know everybody gets to listen to us talk all the time and they've heard some of our story of how we went from day jobs to retiring early or whatever it is. But Dustin's done that he's doing some exciting things he was able to retire early and so we know the listeners want to hear his story on how he did it. Awesome. Well Dustin, let's kick it over to you, introduce yourself, tell us how you got started and we'll go from there. Yeah thank you so much guys for having me on the show. Yeah I am a real estate investor. That's literally what I do. In fact I was blessed to be able to quit my job or I like the term successfully unemployed basically.

I found a way to make money to provide for myself and my family without working that dead end J. O. B. Or that just over broke job and so I go to the end so when I was 37 years old I was blessed to be able to quit my job because I had enough rental properties long term buy and hold rental properties and other investments that made me money and passive income every single month. Now I didn't start out that way. In fact I did start out with just like everybody else. We're all taught this same thing. We're taught to go to school and get good grades. This is the plan we're all taught good good grades. And then you go to college or university and you get even more good grades and getting thousands and $1000 into debt and you get a piece of paper it's called a degree and you go to do different companies. You try to get a quote unquote career there and then work 40 plus years of your life and then retire at 65 70 years old and live on what you managed to save that entire time of working that just over broke job. Well I'm doing that exact same thing and I got actually one of the most stable secure jobs I could ever think of. It was in California working for the local county government doing I.

T. So California is not going away governments definitely not going away. And same thing with I. T. So I'm doing that but at the same time I was always been entrepreneurial in my life so I like a newspaper route you know not not what people know the newest paper outside now but I would ride on my bike and throw newspapers at five a.m. And bang them on garage doors, waking people up. I had a graphic website, I had a graphical website design company, skateboard manufacturing business, uh, convenience store in a pizzeria started this all from the ground up and it was enough to quit my job. But I had extra money coming in a little bit and I bought one rental property at the time. This is 2006 when I first started investing and I remember that check that I got from my property manager. So all the expenses subtracted out from the income was $317 and I thought my goodness, I need to be an investor. This is amazing. But you know how it happens life started getting in the way my wife and I started having Children and the career just kept on going. Now here's what really shoved me catapulted me to be a real estate investor. So after my fourth child was born I went on paternity leave, that's where the dad stays home with, mom, changes poop diapers and all that good stuff and you know, bond with the baby.

And so I'm off for a couple of weeks and then I go back to work and in that week I go back to work on a friday at 3 30 in the afternoon, I get a call from my boss's boss's boss's secretary like the top dog and she says Dustin, would you please come to the office? And I said sure. And I hung up the phone. I paused for a second. I thought, why in the world that they call me the office like this isn't normal. And I've seen plenty of movies, friday at 3 30 is not a good time to get called to the main boss's office. And I started remembering a couple of months before I went opportunity to leave. There were some rumors, there's some running going on. There could potentially be layoffs in the county. I immediately shook that office said there's no way that's for me. So I get up and I go down the off down the hallway to my boss's office and I get down this hallway and it feels like the hallway gets longer and longer longer because the weight of potentially losing my job is just weighing down on me and I feel feel like their lead bricks. Well I get down the hallway and I turned the corner and I see my boss's door, his door closed and I see a secretary, They're super sweet, nice old lady and she says Dustin, would you please have a seat? And she's kind of sheepishly grinning at me, trying to console me with her eyes because she knows everything about what's going on.

I know nothing about what's going on. So I go and I take my seat and start thinking about this life, that I've been this plan that people told me. Well if I lose my job right now did I just waste my life doing this. And then I realized, oh my goodness, if I don't have a job, how am I going to feed my family? Does that make me a failure as a as a father that make me a failure as a man trying to provide for his family? Well as I'm sitting on my hands get all clammy, my forehead gets all sweaty because the nerves are just crushing out of me. With the door to my boss's office opens up and out walks a lady, a coworker of mine with a piece of paper in her hands. She's noticed will be distraught, not necessarily crying, but her world has been rocked and she passes by me and my busses Dustin. Would you please come in the office? So I get up and I go into his office and I get laid off and this is the government. Remember nobody gets fired or laid off from the government, but I did. And the reason why I tell this story is so that you can learn what I learned. So I took that layoff notice and I went back to my desk just getting laid off and I sat down and I realized two things. Number one, I need to get another job I need to be able to provide for my family.

So I was really blessed praise the Lord to find another job in the same county. A whole nother department wasn't having issues. So check I got that. Now the second thing that everybody needs to realize this is what I realized was that I need to make sure that this never ever happens to me again. I didn't make sure that nobody has the ability to take away my ability to feed my family. So right then and there, I told myself whenever anybody would ask me the question, we always get everybody gets this question, What do you do? I would always Reply. I work for the county. You know, I do technology for the county. Just I'm projecting the value that I put on myself is coming from my job. So my value doesn't come from my job. My value comes from God, from myself from my family. And so right then and there I told myself every time I would always reply, I am an investor now. It may so happen that 100 per cent of my money comes from my job. That's now my part Time job. I'm a full time investor so fast for the story started buying property after property after property. Each one making me a minimum of $250 a month in passive income eventually had 30 plus properties. And I realized, why am I working here?

I'm wasting my life here. So the last part of the story, I walked away from my job for the very last time. It's a mile and a half walking too frugal to paper parking worked in downtown. I felt like I was walking on clouds because I knew I would never, ever need a job again. And everybody listening to this, you need to realize that nobody will ever, you will never get paid what you're worth. In fact, your boss will never pay you what you are worth. And this is how you know this, your boss is paying you just enough to keep you working without quitting, but not so much that keeps that takes money out of their pocket. If you got paid with what you're worth, they'd go broke. So instead investing in real estate for me or starting businesses investing in commercial real estate syndications, land events. If you start taking your life in your own hands, so you become financially independent, then you're able to make sure that nobody is able to take your ability to feed your family. So I'll positive because you guys probably got plenty of questions. That's great. It's a great story. So, uh you said you bought your first house in 2006 um and then you were able to retire.

Uh what year? Yeah, 2017 is when I was finally able to retire, it's 2016 to December is when I was in my layoff notice. But you know, a couple weeks, it was January 20 17. I love that because that's practical. Yeah. And it's interesting. I mean we, we might be the same age I the story is marrying my own, I retired from my day job at 37 and I think it was in 2016 I started investing. Yeah, I started investing. I bought my first house, I believe in 2003 or four. Uh So really, really similar. Um So you had your first house, but then you said that with the lay off that you got, it sparked you to buy more real estate. Uh what was the plan? How did you go about acquiring more real estate? Cause that's what people would be interested in. Hey how did you go start buying all these houses? That's a great question. And well I'll tell you the wrong way that I did. And so in 2006 everybody has probably seen these. I was watching tv late at night, I didn't have anything other than a job and a couple other things going on. But I was watching tv late at night and one of the late night infomercials came on and said, hey we're gonna come to your town, we have a free two hour seminar to teach you about real estate.

I was so excited. I was like that's great, let me go ahead and do that. So I went to that two hour seminar, it was horrible. It was all hype all sales pitch and they said now run to the back and it's normally $50,000, that's $1 $1000 today. So I was like yeah I ran to the back and just got sucker for that. So I ran to the back, spent $1000. There was a two day seminar. All more hype and more sales pitch for $80,000 course, 100,000. It was, it was bad, but I took what little they told me and I implement that and the sad thing is my property manager started stealing from me within six months because they didn't, my my belief now is that they just regurgitating what other people say. Well now I realized how to do it. That what's the wrong way which is what happened and I'll quickly give you the wrong way but I'll give you the right way of how I then scaled the business now the wrong way with the quote unquote gurus will tell you is you find a property anywhere in the country, you run the numbers which means you make sure your expenses are lower than your income from your rents by like $25. But remember this is 2006 so I say and you'll get appreciation which is what you're investing for, which I'll pause this, I don't invest for appreciation.

I am literally getting generational wealth, I will give these properties to my kids and I still make money like the homes I own since 2006, I still make money. In fact, they're making me 506 107 100 a month. Well then I said once you run the numbers then you spend thousands dollars to buy the property, then spend thousands dollars to fix up the property and then find a tenant and then try to find a property manager. After all done. Well I did that and my property manager starts stealing from because I didn't do it the right way in my opinion. That's just about backwards. Let me quickly give the right way and show you how I see Scaled it because from that one property to eventually get 30 plus properties before I quit. I had to scale it fast because I wanted to get out of that job. So here's what I did. I realized that it takes not a property. That is your business, which is what the Gurus will tell you. It's your business owns inventory. So here's what it looks like if you're gonna start a convenience store, you know, it can be sort of candy bars and soda machines and all that good stuff. Well you're not going to sign a lease on the locations. Open the door and set a box of candy bars in there on the ground.

No, you wouldn't do that. You go out of business in two seconds. What you would do though is you would build the business first, you get the gondolas under the shelving units, All the candy bars, go on the cold storage, that countertops the bank accounts, cash registers, insurance employees, everything in the business before you buy any inventory. Same thing with real estate investing, all types of real estate investing. We build the entire business first and then we buy a property and that property is our inventory and that's how we put it into our business. Now. What I did was once I figured out the wrong way I started implementing because remember I've always been entrepreneurial, I said let me approach this from a business mindset. If I would have hung my head and said all this doesn't work, I would not be here today. But I realized it does work. I just need to figure out. So what I did was created an entire business. Had experts on the ground. I invest all over the country. I don't invest out of state of love investing out of state. But I have experts on the ground. Zilla is not an expert. Redfin truly, those are not experts who are the experts. It's the property managers, the contractors, the roofers, the plumbers, the handyman, the realtors and everybody in the business before you buy any properties.

Once you have the business built, they are going to help you to make sure you do it right. And that's how you scale the business is you then just buy the next piece of inventory and put it into your business. Does that all make sense? Yeah. I mean do you focus on like a few key cities because obviously you can't have all those those people as part of your business. But their advisers in a particular market that you say you're gonna maybe go after love it. Yeah. Absolutely. So every city that I invest in I think I'm in five cities now personally and all my students that I coach were all over the country. But what we do is every city that go to, it's almost more like every county. So usually um one property you know cover the entire county but it just depends on the area. So let's say and here's remember we're starting a business, you would not start a business that you could not buy any inventory for. What you would do though is you make sure there's inventory. So what I do every city that I go into, I make sure that there's a good inventory. The types of homes that I want to buy. And here's my suggestion, cookie cutter type homes. These are homes that everybody either wants to rent or buy a three bedroom 22 bath 1200 square feet to 1700 square feet.

Not too small that families don't want to live there not too big, that there's extra walls to paint and carpet and everything like that. But we make sure that there's inventory in that city from that we make sure that we're gonna make. And here's my suggestion This is how I was able to scale my business to quit my job. I try to make sure that I'm always making $250 or more in passive income from every single property. And in doing that, once I have the inventory then I build the business. So I have all the people in the ground on the ground running the business. And here's an example how you would know you have the right people. So let's say you do all the wrong way that the Gurus tell you. You know, eventually the last step is finding a property manager and count. I kid you not. This happens all the time. I talked to investors say I did that and I tried to call property managers and then property manager would say I won't manage that property because I'll get shot there. Well you no longer have an asset. You have a liability. So what we do is instead of calling a property managers first and last and say I have this property, Would you manage it? Already spent thousands of dollars. Instead use a property manager. I'm looking to buy this property?

Tell me about it. Will you manage the property? How much will it rent for? What's the vacancy factor? What type of clientele? What I have to tell me more about the property. A good property managers say, oh I know that area. In fact I have a house two blocks away, we were trying to get $1400 for Zillow set $1400. We couldn't get that. We can only get $1300. That's expert information. So that's what I do every single That I go to and invest. To get back to answer your question. I build an entire business in that city of all the people that need to run my business. And what I do then is I give them systems and procedures and processes so that they run the business. I don't do anything in my business. In fact, I maybe work 30 minutes a month on all my properties. I just grab my property management statements, make sure everything looks good and then put it aside. So you have people in these cities that you've chosen. Uh, and you have property managers already established there. You have people who are finding the properties for you then and there and then they sort of analyze them for you. And then they ask you, okay, is this one you want? Is this a, is this a home you want to buy?

So I have a great question because as investors, there's no one way to really do anything. And so finding properties, I don't want to find properties. I don't want to go, like you're saying, I don't want to go out and like, you know, hunt for properties. I have realtors, wholesalers, other investors, even property managers sending me deals, land and title companies. I let everybody know remember the very beginning I started telling everybody I'm an investor. So I tell everybody that I I'm an investor. So all these deals come to me now. I have as best I could just made it so simple in my business and it usually takes me about a minute to do all the analysis on a property to know how much I can pay for it and how much passive income and making all that sort of stuff. But I have all these deals come to me because I think of it like a tool belt. I have lots and lots of ways. Lots of tools of ways that properties come to me from like I said realtors wholesalers, other investors all run the gamut. So I try to do as little work as possible and have other people do the work.

I love, wholesalers wholesalers are fantastic. They work their tail off and they make sure that I get what I need. If they don't have what I need then I don't buy from them. But I buy from the companies, the people that actually can make me money in passive income. I don't mind giving them you know commission or anything that. But yes, I try to find lots of people to send me deals. So I love this because it should sound overwhelmingly familiar to everything we've talked about. There's so many people in Tulsa that that come up and approach us and say, how are you guys buying things in Ohio or how do you even buy a deal in Vegas or how, how are you building this deal in Dallas or something like that? And I mean Dustin said it absolutely perfectly and I love that it, it transfers over asset classes because that's the same for a house, that's the same for an apartment complex. It's the same for a shopping center. It's the same for any piece of real estate or, or almost any business. We're identifying markets and we're getting our inbox and our email and and getting all of these deals sent to us right?

Exactly. Like you're talking about people, people know we are buyers in that market, they're finding them, their sourcing them, we plug it into a model and then we can go in and dip employed that amount of money because we built our business like you're saying, we went and got a local leasing agent, we went and interviewed managers. Exactly. And then like you said, we end up and it's a little more intensive. We handle lease renewals and some of the other things with the properties. But at the end of the day, you really are just opening a monthly report and seeing, okay, it's a variance report, we set a budget, here's where it should operate, here's where it's normally gonna operate. So you're looking at variances and then most of the time if you bought good things are pretty, pretty steady, right? Dustin is at all single family. So my bread and butter single family, So residential, when I call single family residential, four units and below that's my bread and butter, I literally do it in my sleep. I literally dream like, oh, I just bought a house, oh wait, I woke up and so I do it all the time and I coached that. But I also, because of my bread and butter, I have blessed to have lots of coming in from all my properties.

And so now I take that investment apartment complex. I recently just got into hotels, which is a lot of fun, you know, playing monopoly as a kid. I'm like, oh, now I get the hotels. So I love all asset classes and here's the great thing, like I specialize in residential four units and blow all over the country, but there are other awesome people that, let's say commercial buildings or multifamily or land investing or storage units. There are awesome people and it doesn't have to be where I win and you lose or somebody else loses. We can all help each other out. And so what I love to do is now, not once a partner, but work with other awesome investors to help them and they help me. And so I love all types of asset classes. Excellent. So, um, tell us a little bit about your equity structure. We talk a lot about raising money and how we raise money and, and just forming that entity and, and how to set up your offering, how to set up your returns. Are you currently doing any sort of syndications or taking on limited partners or are you just using your own money to source and fund all of these deals? Usually it's my own money, but at the same time as deals come up, I would do some sort of some sort of a syndication, not necessarily full syndication.

Like you see with multi family, 203 100 unit apartment complexes where the goal is to get out in 3 to 5 years now, my goal is to then get into a property with my investors. I got a laundry list of investors. Again, I've been telling everybody for many years that I'm an investor. So everybody wants to, you know, they say, hey, I would like to invest with you, but what I would do is buy the property and then use it at like, let's say syndicate, but bring all that money together and then in three or five years refinance and pay them off. So I would then own it outright. Now, all the residential, literally all mine, it's So simple and meaning all my money to buy these because residential fortunes are below. It's really not that hard. There's great financing options, but here's another thing, I've literally used creative financing and I counted 15 different ways to get financing to buy these properties that I don't really necessarily need, you know, anybody else, anybody else's money. I could just borrow it down alone, private money, commercial loans to home equity loans, all these sort of things. These are all just tools that we use to get whatever deal we isn't in front of us to take that deal down.

And so because of that, I just have lots of tools to make sure, hey, here's the deal that came in from somebody. Can I buy it or does it fit my criteria? And then what type of funding can I put into that property? I love that. So, um, I have one last talking point here, I see you have a note on starting online businesses and I've, I've heard you throughout the entire interview kind of refer to your students and some of your coaching briefly kind of walk us through how you got into that and what that looks like now and, and kind of what you're offering and then we'll probably close it out. Yeah, that's so much fun. So here's a great thing. If everybody realizes if you're listening to this and you realize how much your boss is not paying your number one, you're not getting paid for your value. But at the same time how much time you're giving to somebody else, another organization or something else that's 40 plus hours of your life back when I was in getting your question. Absolutely. I was quitting my job and I was telling people, hey, I'm about to quit. I quit in like six months and I said, what are you gonna do? And I said, I don't have to do anything. I want real estate. And the second question always came so fast.

Well, can you show me like, yeah, sure. You know, friends and family members and coworkers and stuff. And so I'd be teaching them and I realized I enjoyed it. The second thing I realized it was really, really hard teaching them one on one. It took a lot of time. So what I did was I wrote a book, I said, here's my outline of what I do in my business. I'll just give it to you and then when you're ready we'll have better questions that fit you so fast forward from there. I realized I enjoyed it. Then I had 40 plus hours of my life back and I realized, man, I really want to be able to help more people. So I started a podcast, started a youtube channel coaching and courses. And now I even started a conference, I have a conference called the real estate wealth builders conference, all types of investing from syndications to commercials and land investing storage and it's all that good stuff. But at this conference now is basically my entire audience. I'm bringing at least 100 people from my audience. But I have 43 other speakers that are friends of mine that have their own podcast students, everything just like me, we're all coming together to help more people out. But that's what I love is that when you Have your life back, 40 plus hours of your life back, you can build businesses, get investments and then I love to look at generational wealth, like you can't give your job to your kids, you can't do that.

But what you can do, build businesses, buy real estate by precious metal by things that are tangible to then pass them down your kids and it just keeps making money over the same thing with online businesses. All my online business is I will, I do literally have my kids work into my business. In fact, my daughter, she's 14 oldest daughter, she's 14, I have a podcast, my own podcast called Master passive income, she edits it. I have her edit, I pay her money to to edit the episodes. So that's the thing. I love to be able to bring my kids in. I have more time to spend with them because now I have the money that there's four things that we should strive to leave in our life or having a life, the legacy of money. So we can buy whatever you want. Then the leg that leads into the legacy of time. So we can do whatever we want with our time that legacy leads into the relationship legacy. I'm blessed to have got 33. So the relationship, I now have more time to develop into my family. The last one where I'm at now is the service legacy. Everybody should strive to get to the service legacy because I found the more people that I help invest to have great properties to rent or even just coaching them, whatever it might be, the better my life gets and the better their lives give and the gray.

Great thing about this is I'm now seeing my students, I've literally, I think I've got like thousands of students now, but I'm seeing my students retire. I took me about 10 years retire and become successful employed. They're doing like two or three years because they're just, they're seeing what I've done and I'm helping them skip over the problems that I have, the loss of money and all that sort of stuff and now they're being successful. So imagine 40 plus hours of your life back developing to yourself and your own businesses. Guys uh successfully unemployed. Go check him out, get his book. Uh it's so good to hear other success stories. Each time you hear a success story, you have something to rely on in your brain, it goes to work on, how do I solve my problem of becoming financially independent and great examples like Dustin's will help you Dustin, Thank you so much for coming on the show today, man. Yeah, we're, you know, congrats on the success. For sure. Thanks guys. Hey, I do have a free course, I just love to give out, Just give people started you mind if I share that with everybody awesome. So I have a free course literally walk you through everything, the blueprint of everything and people have actually invested with just that if you text the word rental, you already on your phone.

Listen to this text the word rental, R E N T A L 233777. Very simple rental. The 33777. I'll show you, I'll give it to you, show you how to find an area in the country, anywhere to invest, how to build the business, how to scale the business to quit your job. You can even go to master passive income dot com forward slash free course of course I'll give it to you. You can even find me on my podcast, the master passive income podcast. Love it's really a solo show, I just give out all this content. Just try to give out for free. But then also if you want to find me on instagram, I like instagram so you can DM me on there, I'm the Dustin Heiner. So tht Dustin Hiner and guys I'm not that arrogant, it's the only handle I could come up with but find me on the Dustin Hiner and um I love helping people out, awesome man, that's great, awesome, thank you so much Dustin and everyone else, we will catch you next week on how to invest in commercial real estate.