Hey, there, this is Seth,
and I run a little blog called REtipster.com.
In this short video, I want to give you
a quick overview of how I make money
with my various entrepreneurial endeavors.
Now, in order to explain this properly,
I kinda have to start from square one,
As you can see right here, this is a picture of me
and back when I first got out of college,
the first thing that I did is what most people do...
I went out and I got myself the best job
I could possibly find.
And as far as jobs go, it was a pretty good job.
It took care of
all my immediate living expenses, it covered health insurance,
it took care of all my
basic immediate needs.
From the standpoint of
getting myself established,
that pretty much checked the box.
But I always knew that it wasn't really "secure"
and there really was no absolute certainty
that it was going be there for me at all times.
I also knew it really wasn't the most "free" life.
I had to be at a certain place
from 8 - 5 every day (sometimes longer than that),
and I just kind of knew, you know,
this can't be it - this can't be the entire story of my life.
There has to be something more.
So even though it did provide adequate income
to finance my living expenses,
I eventually decided to get into real estate investing,
and the first thing I got into specifically
was the niche of land investing,
and land investing is something
I talk about a lot on my blog
and it's a really cool approach
that a lot of people don't really think about.
The standard approach that I've always taken
is finding motivated sellers,
specifically of vacant land properties,
who are delinquent on their property taxes
or for some other number of reasons,
are just highly motivated to get their property sold,
and through these techniques, I'm able to buy
vacant lots at just, like, crazy low prices,
things that most people wouldn't even believe.
Like, we're talking anywhere in the range
of $100 to $1,000, maybe more, you know,
if I feel like going after a bigger fish,
but with this technique, I was able to buy
a lot of properties with nothing more
than the cash in my pockets.
I mean it was just very low risk,
very easy to buy these properties,
and because it was land, I mean, there was just
very little complexity to this type of real estate.
I didn't have to lose sleep wondering
if I could make the mortgage payment
or if contractors were gonna show up on time
or if tenants were gonna trash the place.
Just all of that stuff was completely
wiped out of the picture because it's just dirt.
There wasn't a whole lot to worry about.
Because I was buying this land at such crazy low prices,
it wasn't hard to turn around
and resell them at a pretty big markup,
that would still be far below market value
but would have a pretty big profit margin for me.
And this has just been a really,
really cool investment strategy,
and it's kind of been my primary
that I've been working on for a lot of years now.
Land investing, obviously,
made me more money than just my job.
Land was great, and it could have some huge deals,
but I also found that the income
wasn't like the most predictable.
Like, I didn't necessarily know when I was gonna find a deal
and how big that deal was gonna be,
and I mean, it was great for creating these large paths
and whenever I would sell these properties
with seller financing, they would
turn into small streams of income
but I always kinda just felt like I kinda wanted
another source that was sorta unrelated,
but would still be predictable and permanent,
and that was when I got into rental properties,
and I decided to pursue rental properties for a few reasons.
First of all, I knew that rental properties
were a lot more expensive to get into.
I couldn't necessarily just buy in
with a few hundred bucks in my pocket
but with the big influxes of cash
that I was getting from land investing,
I could afford to buy some of these things
either outright or put a huge down payment on them,
and that was okay because I had large chunks of cash
to play with at that point, which, you know,
I never would've had if I didn't have land investing.
The nice thing about rentals is that
they're really, for all intents and purposes,
permanent sources of passive income,
and it actually is passive income,
because for my rental properties, I hire a property manager
so I'm never, ever, ever dealing with tenants.
I don't have to find them, I don't have to evict them,
I don't have to do any of that stuff,
because frankly, I wouldn't be any good at it.
I knew that that just wasn't my area of expertise
and I didn't even wanna go there,
so my property manager, for 10% of the income, which is
honestly a bargain for how much stuff they deal with,
they handle everything and they frankly do an amazing job,
and at most, I would spend on average
maybe five minutes a month
even really thinking about my rentals,
and usually less than that, and all I'm really doing
is checking my bank account to see,
yep, they deposited my money this month.
And to me, that is an amazing and remarkable thing,
to have income that literally comes in
whether or not I'm doing anything
and it's just money that's made in my sleep.
And rental properties, don't misunderstand me,
I'm not saying they're everything.
I'm not saying they're the only, best,
most wonderful investment strategy to pursue,
'cause there are some things about them
that kinda stink too, like you have to fix stuff
and furnaces break, and you know,
there are tenants who just stop paying
and you lose revenue there.
So I mean, it's not always a walk in the park,
but in the end, it definitely makes money
and it definitely does not take
a lot of work on my part to do that
because I've hired somebody else
to deal with all that stuff,
so in a lot of ways, rental properties
kind of fill in the gaps where land investing leaves off,
and land investing fills in the gaps
that rental properties have.
They're kind of a perfect couple
that sort of goes together and they complement each other
in a lot of ways in terms of smoothing out income
and providing those big influxes of cash.
I think they're just kind of a match made in heaven
if you're pursuing them both
and you're doing both the right way.
So with my job, with land investing
and with rental properties, things are going pretty good.
I mean, I've got, you know, a few sources of income now
that are all largely independent of each other,
and after doing this stuff for a few years,
I kinda started to realize,
I've learned a lot of stuff doing this.
Like, there's just a lot of random knowledge
that I have now which really you only get from experience,
and on top of that, I also started to realize
that a lot of these lessons that I learned, like,
I didn't really see anybody else
out there talking about them.
I didn't see any books that had
really addressed this stuff that well.
I didn't see a lot of blogs or forums or anybody
who really truly knew what they were talking about
and/or, you know, were explaining it clearly
in a way that I could understand it.
I just figured, you know, I think I can do a pretty good job
of explaining some of this stuff to people,
and that was when I started my next little project,
which was the REtipster blog, and really,
the point of this blog is just to tell the world
everything I know and try to make it
as easy to understand as possible,
and honestly, it has been so much fun.
I never really knew how much fun it could be,
but I've kinda realized that I really enjoy
teaching people what I know,
and this isn't coming from a place
where I'm all knowing and I have all the answers.
It's more of a, here's what I know,
and if you know something else, let me know.
If anything, I've actually learned a ton
just from putting a lot of this content out there,
showing people the lessons I've learned,
because other people can chime in and say, yeah,
have you thought about this too, and that's a great idea,
I'm gonna try that, and just, the feedback
that I've gotten from readers has just been awesome.
I mean, it has just been truly remarkable
to build this sort of community of people
who are checking out this blog and learning from it.
It's just been really, really cool.
And over time, I found ways to monetize the blog as well.
The way that I make money from this blog
is a couple different ways.
First of all, I've got a page here
that lists a few different blog posts
where I actually sell things that I use in my business,
like for example, postcard templates
and contracts that I use
and different checklists and recordings
and just things that I have used in my business
that have really helped me a lot
and cut down a lot of wasted time.
The place I have all this stuff listed
is on my gear up page, is what I call it.
So if you're watching this on the blog, you can actually
see it in the navigation menu right up at the top,
and if you're watching this on YouTube or somewhere else,
all you gotta do is go to the blog
and click on the gear up page
and you'll see what I'm talking about.
So that's one stream of revenue, and then the other one
would be when I list affiliate links
throughout the blog for all kinds of random tools
and courses and things that I've used in the past
that have helped me along the way.
So for example, phone systems, sources
that can help you create your own corporation or LLC,
software services that can help you
set up a very good looking, very easy to create
website for your business,
a small handful of educational courses and books
that I've found to be really helpful
as I've been learning how to do this business.
Those are just a few examples,
and whenever people click on those links
and then buy the thing that I'm talking about,
I get a small cut from those sales,
so it doesn't necessarily happen often,
but when people do find value
in the things I'm talking about
and they choose to spend the money on that too,
I get a portion of that.
So really, those are kind of the ways
that I make money from the blog
and honestly, it's just been really cool
because my goal with the stuff I talk about
is not really to like sell people on anything.
I'm just talking about what's worked for me,
and if people think it would be helpful to them too,
then great, check it out.
If not, no problem.
I'm certainly not trying to convince people to do anything
that's not right for them.
It's more just showing people what I've used
and how it works and why it works and why I did it
and why I would do it again.
So through all these things, I mean at this point now,
I've got several sources of income
that are all pretty much independent of each other
and what I love about this is that
with all these different sources of income,
it creates a well-diversified form of financial freedom,
and what that means is that at any point in time,
say if I wanted to quit my day job
or if I got fired for some reason,
or say if land investing just got old
and I got sick of it, or rental properties,
if I wanted to sell those off.
If at any point, I wanted to pull the plug
on any one of these things, the beauty of that is I'm okay.
It's not the end of the world
because I've got several other sources of income
that are propping me up and I can rely on those
and build up those in the absence of another one,
so while it has certainly taken me a lot of time
and effort and work and mental energy
to build up all of these things,
I gotta tell you, at the end of the day,
it really has reduced a lot of stress, anxiety,
and just kinda given me a lot of peace of mind
because of the fact that I'm not, like,
ultimately reliant on any one thing,
and if something happens, it's okay.
Me and my family are gonna be fine
because we've got a lot of different things coming in
and a lot of different ways to support us.
So, in the end, the point of this blog is
not necessarily to plug one particular investing strategy
and tell you that, you know, this is the ultimate thing
and if you're smart, you're gonna do this and nothing else,
'cause I don't think that's true.
I think there are a lot of different directions
that you can go, and it is important to focus
on one or two things and not go crazy trying to do it all,
but it is good to have more than
one thing going for yourself
and not to put all your eggs in one basket.
So in summary, that's how my business model works.
That's the way I've been pursuing it
very intentionally for a lot of years now,
and that's really how I intend to keep going
because I love passive income, I love diversified income
and I love the financial freedom,
and all these things kinda work together
to help accomplish that.
So thanks for checking out this video.
I hope that all makes sense
and I hope that's helpful to you
and hopefully, I'll see you again soon.