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What's the Alternative? | Episode 12 | Be The Bank: Real Estate Debt Investing with Ben Lyons
7 Plays6 months ago
Welcome to Banrion Capital Management’s What’s the Alternative Podcast! Join host Shana Orczyk Sissel, the “Queen of Alternatives” Founder & CEO of Banrion Capital Management, as she interviews leaders in the alternative investment space. Learn more about their firms, their passions and about the many different ways investors can use alternative investments to add value in their investment portfolios.
In this episode Shana sits down with Ben Lyons, Founder & Managing Director at LYNK Capital, to dive in to his passion for Real Estate investing.
In his 37-year career, the Managing Director of LYNK Capital, Ben Lyons, has learned a lot about real estate and investing. As a financial advisor, investor, and business owner, he has experienced his share of highs and lows, starting with modest roots in a middle-class family in Baltimore, MD. It was a chance encounter at an early age with a local real estate agent that formed the foundation for a career in real estate.
By the age of 25, he owned 100 rental properties and had a million-dollar lending business.
The beginnings, as they say, were humble. Originally planning for a future in community college, he instead went to work for a real estate company at the age of 18 for free. Determined to learn all he could about the business, he convinced his boss to place an ad in the money-to-lend section of the newspaper – he would work all the leads and split the profits with his boss 50/50. In January 1985, he collected over $10,000 in mortgage broker fee revenue, receiving $5,000 after the split.
“In one month, I went from earning $600 a month to $5,000. I thought I was rich. It was extremely exciting and only increased my motivation to learn and grow.”
After that, he read everything he could get his hands on and took mentors to lunch or dinner to learn what they knew. By the age of 21, he became the youngest licensed mortgage broker in Maryland and that year purchased a four-bedroom, two-bath home with a pool. His friends moved in and paid rent – becoming his first investment property.
Since that time, he has owned or managed over 375 residential and commercial real estate projects – and his lending organizations have produced more than $6.5 billion in mortgages. (He was previously an initial investor and large shareholder of a commercial bank, a title company, and three mortgage banks.)
His interests in real estate and financial freedom have produced some interesting insights – after decades of talking to hundreds of investors (many of whom are financially wealthy), he noticed that while everyone’s path to wealth was different, they all shared four things in common:
- They created predictable and scalable monthly investable income to reinvest for growth.
- They acquired assets, including stocks and real estate, for long-term growth.
- They learned how to leverage people, money, and knowledge to accelerate their success.
- They learned how to utilize time effectively.
It is on these principles that Ben believes anyone can find their path to financial freedom. He has recently authored his second book – this one in partnership with Ortus Academy, a financial literacy training company – to share his personal journey and financial formula for success. The book, titled From Worry to Wealth, is available for purchase and download.
“One of my favorite things is sharing my financial journey with others. There are several factors to determine financial success: our attitude about money and our education, which is not necessarily a college degree. Wealth is available to everyone. By understanding the components of wealth creation and applying them to your unique circumstances, you can build your own future, starting today.”
Learn More About LYNK Capital:
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Transcript
Introduction to Alternative Investments
00:00:02
Speaker
Welcome to Bonnie and Capital Management's What's the Alternative podcast. Joining host Sheena Orsik-Sicil, the queen of alternatives and founder, CEO of Bonnie and Capital Management as she interviews leaders in the alternative investment space. Learn more about their firms, their passions, and about the many different ways investors can use alternative investments to add value in their investment portfolio.
00:00:30
Speaker
Hello, everyone. My name is Shayna Orzak-Sissel, and I am the founder and CEO of Bonner & Capital Management. And this is What's the Alternative?
Meet Ben Lyons: Real Estate Visionary
00:00:41
Speaker
Today, we have with us the founder and managing director of Link Capital, Ben Lyons.
00:00:49
Speaker
Ben is a prolific real estate investor over his 37 year career. He has learned a ton about real estate and investing as a financial advisor, investor and business owner. He grew up in Baltimore, Maryland, and by the age of 25, he owned 100 rental properties and had a million dollar lending business.
00:01:10
Speaker
Now that has grown, but one of the things he loves the most is teaching folks about real estate investing. And since real estate is such a area of interest for a lot of investors right now, and I know our financial advisors are getting asked about it, it seems like a very good time to have Ben on the show. So welcome to the show, Ben. Well, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.
00:01:36
Speaker
Thank you. Link has recently joined Bonwyn's platform and has some really interesting opportunities for advisors. But I think the best way to kind of help people understand Link and Link's offerings is to understand where you come from and how you started your endeavors into real estate investing.
Link Capital's Focus on Real Estate Debt
00:01:56
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. Well, first of all, Link is an 11-year-old firm. We're structured as a Reg D 506C offering. And we say we're in the real estate business, but we're specifically in the real estate debt. So senior secured debt, meaning first mortgages, only on predominantly residential housing. So that's single and multifamily housing.
00:02:23
Speaker
We are in what's considered the transitional space, which means that we don't make long-term loans. The loans that we provide are specific to real estate investors and real estate builders, developers.
00:02:39
Speaker
mostly for the transition of the property. So example, they buy a foreclosure, renovate it, and then sell it, or they are building it. Once the property is built, if it's multifamily, the borrower will get permanent financing. And if it's a single-family home, it may also get permanent long-term financing for which we don't do those loans, only as an accommodation.
00:03:06
Speaker
I've been doing this now, it's 40 years, August 21st, 1983 is when I started, that's the exact date. And I got very lucky, I went to work for a father-son, the father was retiring and the father had been in the real estate business for 40 years. And they had lent, they'd been a private lender, the father was a private lender and also bought a lot of real estate. So for 40 years now, I have been,
00:03:33
Speaker
enjoying the benefits of real estate, both on the debt and equity side. So can you talk a little bit about how you first endeavored into real estate? Was it purchasing properties as sort of like a rental properties where you served as landlord and how did that kind of grow and build and really what piqued your passion for real estate?
Ben's Real Estate Journey Begins
00:03:53
Speaker
Well, truth be told, the summer I graduated high school, I met a PhD in exercise physiology who no longer was in the exercise field. He said, well, Ben, if you want to be financially successful, you really don't want to go into exercise, which is what I was thinking I was going to go into. So he said, get into real estate. And a neighbor of mine happened to have been in the real estate business and knocked on her door, borrowed some books.
00:04:19
Speaker
She happened to tell another neighbor who was the father and the son, and they invited me to come work for them for free. So I graciously took a job at age 18 working for a father-son, very successful father-son in the real estate space. And they agreed to teach me if I want to work for them for free. But I knew it the first day. I knew it by noon that day.
00:04:46
Speaker
What was fascinating to me was that you could buy a property, and I talk a lot about in my courses the use of leverage. When I first started buying real estate, so I bought my first rental property for myself at age 19, and I borrowed money from a wealthy attorney at 2% a month.
00:05:07
Speaker
So I was paying the low cost of 2% a month, but I ended up using this gentleman's money and I bought over 100 rental properties by age 25. And these were all single family, relatively low end rental properties in Baltimore. I would use somebody else's money, buy a property, stick a tenant in there, renovate it. I did a lot of renovations myself at night.
00:05:32
Speaker
And the ability to leverage other people's money, if you think about most people buying real estate, they are using bank financing, which is leverage. So they're buying an asset that is typically five times, in most cases, as high as 20 times the amount of capital that they actually put in. So I was very drawn to real estate for the wealth creation benefits. So I'll pause there.
00:06:00
Speaker
So you said 2% a month, but we're talking like mid to early, early to mid 80s. So what were the prevailing interest rates for mortgages at that time? Because I think everybody who's listening is like, wow, that seems insane. And it probably was higher than market rate, but it's also probably not that insane considering where rates were at that time.
00:06:20
Speaker
That's right. 30-year mortgage rates for the average home buyer when I started in 1983 was 12%. So when rates hit 9.99% for the 30-year home buyer, everybody thought that they were giving money away, which is fascinating today. If you think about getting 30-year mortgage rates at 9.99%, everybody would say that the world is coming to an end.
00:06:44
Speaker
That's why the world's coming to end right now in mortgage rates are like six and a half seven, you know, that's right. Well, it's relative to affordability. You know, what's the percentage of someone's income relative to the mortgage payments? And so affordability isn't great right now, just because as we know, low interest rates pushed asset prices up.
00:07:07
Speaker
And now no one wants to sell and that adds to this problem. So yeah, that definitely is a different landscape in that time than it is today for sure. Maybe that's a good time to kind of transition into how real estate as an investment has evolved since you started in the business all those years, like 40 years ago.
Real Estate Investment Forms Explored
00:07:30
Speaker
What kind of ups and downs have you seen and sort of how has the way you approach real estate evolved over time?
00:07:38
Speaker
Yeah, I'd like to explain that real estate really comes in several different forms. And as an investor, and since your listeners and watchers are really investors, you can invest in real estate equity or you can invest in real estate debt. If you think about it fundamentally, the approaches are not the same. Real estate debt has been historically dominated by the financial institutions, the banks, the credit unions.
00:08:05
Speaker
And you don't really think about individuals investing in real estate debt. I used to go around the country asking people that were high net worth individuals, how many of you have a checking and savings account? And everybody would raise their hand and say, of course I do. Then I would ask, well, how many of you know the top two lines of income at most banks in this country? The answer is real estate secured interest income and fees.
00:08:31
Speaker
I'd say, well, let me ask you this. How many of you in this room have mortgage interest in your retirement or non-retirement accounts? In other words, you're the lender secured by a property. So you collect mortgage interest. How many hands do you think would go up in a room of 100? How many people have mortgage interest? Maybe two. That's right. It was typically 5% or less. In some cases, it was zero. So let me get this straight. You all hand your money to a bank.
00:09:00
Speaker
a checking and savings where they pay you very little and the bank takes your money on a 10 to 1 leverage ratio because the banks in this country are leveraged an average of about 9 to 1 and they lend it out so somebody else secure and collect interest but yet none of you do that as an investment. So for me talking about real estate debt as an investment strategy
00:09:22
Speaker
is really my passion because I learned at age 18 from a wealthy father-son that regularly would provide mortgages to people as an investment strategy. But yet historically, most people just don't do that. So investing in the property as an owner and collecting rent or investing in the property in debt and collecting mortgage interest, still investing in real estate, just two different strategies.
00:09:49
Speaker
Similar cash flows, correct? Similar cash flows, sure. Yeah, go ahead. I was going to say, which do you think is more stable and what are the pros and cons of each?
00:10:00
Speaker
Yeah, so with a mortgage loan, it's income, it's taxable income, right? It's interest income. You don't have the benefit of appreciation, depreciation, and amortization. So the reason we come in as a real estate investor is that we get the benefits of tax, right? We get the depreciation of tax, tax benefit. We get the appreciation, the fact that
00:10:27
Speaker
as an owner of an asset, the real estate values historically go up. So you get the benefit of that. You also get the benefit of amortization. If you use debt to finance a property, your tenant is basically increasing your net worth on the investment. Then you get the benefit of cash flow. So owning real estate or coming into the real estate equity side gives you actually four attributes. Whereas if you come in on the debt side, you only really get one. You get the contract between the borrower and you, which is really just income.
00:10:57
Speaker
A little bit different. The way I explain it in my courses that I teach is, if you're coming in as a real estate lender, so on the debt side, and you are not leveraging that strategy, meaning you're only using your own cash,
00:11:16
Speaker
you're going to get between 8 and 12% return. If you're coming in on the equity side, which is what most REITs or most real estate plays are, most real estate plays typically target 15 to 25% all in return. So it's a very different investment strategy.
00:11:38
Speaker
So it's really just a matter of which strategy you want. I like to tell people come in on both sides, both debt and equity, but they serve two different purposes. The last thing I'll say is that mortgage debt acts very similar to fixed income. You really need to think about if you're going to deploy money in mortgage debt. So you've got a secured investment. Your money is secured by the property. So it's somewhat protected.
00:12:04
Speaker
You've got a contract with the borrower, so it acts more like a fixed income contract. So it's a little bit more consistent and a little bit more predictable. See, I really think that mortgages are a fixed income investment on steroids. That's how I explain it.
00:12:22
Speaker
So I also have to imagine that if you are, you know, an investor who's thinking about like, do I want to do mortgage debt or do I want to purchase properties? All of the benefits you talked about, that's great. But the one thing you didn't touch on, which I think the kind of is important not to gloss over is when you own a property and you're serving as the landlord and you have tenants, there's also, you have to manage the property and you have to deal with those relationships, which
00:12:47
Speaker
you know, may be worth the hassle for the extra amount of potential return that you get, but it is still a job and work and there's, whether you do it yourself or you outsource it to a management company, there is, there's, there can be potential stress involved in that, just the nature of the beast.
00:13:09
Speaker
Yes, great point. And what I explained is that the reason you're only getting, let's say, an 8% to 10% return on debt, you're targeting double that on equity, is for that exact reason. It doesn't come without a price. And the price you pay coming into equity is the fact that you have to collect the rent, you have potential vacancies, you have also potential valuation declines in real estate.
00:13:38
Speaker
So it comes with a lot more risk. On real estate debt, if you've got a property worth 500,000 and you lend somebody 300,000, you've got 200,000 of protection there. And if the worst thing that happens is the borrower doesn't pay and you have to foreclose, well, you end up with a $500,000 asset for 300, which is you end up on the real estate equity side anyway, but you end up there at a discount.
00:14:08
Speaker
Yeah, so there's there's program cons to everything and your returns or potential returns are reflective of the potential risk that comes with it. And I always think that's important for people to consider there's no free lunch and with any of this. So those are important considerations so
00:14:28
Speaker
Let's talk a little bit about real estate broadly speaking. I mean, I know that you're more focused on the residential side, but real estate is pretty vast. And I think a lot of our audience, you know, I once helped launch a residential real estate house with Armada ETFs. And we always used to talk about everybody understands real estate and the idea that everybody needs a place to live.
00:14:51
Speaker
But the actual landscape of real estate is broader than that. There's a lot of different types of real estate. I know you're more in the residential market, but can you speak at all about how there's just different areas and pockets of opportunity in real estate? And right now, some of them may be more attractive than others.
00:15:10
Speaker
Yeah, and as a form of background, I used to own, I was a founder of a commercial bank, community bank, Maryland Department of Bank and Trust, and we did nothing but commercial real estate. And today I'm developing self storage offices.
00:15:25
Speaker
wedding venues. So all of my career has not just been residential. I love residential, but commercial serves their purpose. When I talk about real estate equity, what I like to say is that real estate, owning income producing real estate is nothing more than renting time and space. And depending on
00:15:47
Speaker
whether it's self storage where you're renting little tin boxes or whether it's hospitality, you're renting rooms for the night or whether it is a golf course or a wedding venue where we're renting an event space or event, real estate, you know, nightly rentals in the residential side
00:16:08
Speaker
Real estate is always about renting time and space. How much time and how much space really depends on each individual investor's appetite.
00:16:20
Speaker
for whether they want to own industrial? Do they want to own office? Do they want to own hospitality? Do they want to own single purpose Walgreens or fast food restaurants or whatever? So I just think at the end of the day, it's really what's
00:16:45
Speaker
what's attractive, what's producing the best returns, what's got the highest risk, and what's gonna give you the great opportunity to maximize time and space.
00:16:56
Speaker
So there are two areas I hear often are sort of the areas where their supply demand dynamics are really off. And that's residential, which I think we talk about all the time, but also healthcare and this idea that, you know, senior living and
Diverse Real Estate Opportunities
00:17:16
Speaker
nursing care type facilities are inadequate for
00:17:21
Speaker
the boomers. And then in the residential side, we all know that the dynamics there are also a little off. So where are you seeing the best opportunities? Is it those two places? Are there somewhere else that you mentioned self-storage? I hear about self-storage a lot. I know a lot of people that invest in that space because they like its predictable cash flows, very low management costs because it's a tin box, as you put it, and there's stuff in it. And if somebody doesn't pay you, then the stuff is yours.
00:17:52
Speaker
And there's not like, you know, heat or tenants you have to deal with in that respect. But where do you think there are the most interesting opportunities in today's market?
00:18:02
Speaker
Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not sure I'm really qualified to answer broadly. I think we all know about the vacancies with office not being a great place. I'm always partial to where the demand is there, and demand still exists in housing. So multi-family, I would say entry level, multi-family.
00:18:30
Speaker
is so workforce housing, tremendous population of people that still need to occupy that area. I personally like wedding venues. The reason I like wedding and event venues, the premium you get on a per square foot basis for a weekend, one night you can rent a
00:18:57
Speaker
A space for a very high premium just because it's a one night event that that is. Pretty cool. Gladly spend ridiculous amounts of money on. That's right. Yeah. I mean, if you think about a property where you can lease it out three times a month, three days a month, right? Three out of 30 days a month.
00:19:16
Speaker
and make 200 coverage. It's a great business. It's a specialty business. I think it's great. Obviously, logistics for a while was really hot.
00:19:35
Speaker
But I don't know that I know all the sectors to give great advice in this area. Multifamily housing I think has really been great for the last five, six, seven years. I think you're seeing an oversupply potentially coming in the next three to five years because everybody got into that space, but there still seems to be a shortage of housing.
00:19:57
Speaker
That's really interesting. My younger brother has been looking and my ex-husband for that matter have been looking for residential housing rentals for months now and just having all kinds of trouble in the case of my brother.
00:20:12
Speaker
affordability is an issue. He lives in Massachusetts, which I recently learned is the most expensive state in the entire country to live as a family, which shocked me. I was completely unprepared. I believe it's for a family of four to live comfortably in Massachusetts, you have to have an annual income of over $300,000, which is
00:20:33
Speaker
Bunkers. That's four ahead times the national average. Yeah, that's bunkers. I figured it would be California or New York, but no, it's Massachusetts. And then in the case of here in Chicago, if the rentals are few and far between and they go quick, real quick, and they end up in weird bidding wars, which is such an odd thing to be in a bidding war for an apartment,
00:20:57
Speaker
where it goes on the market at a certain rent, but there's so much interest in it that the rent gets pushed up just by people saying, no, I'll just pay you extra or I'll pay you six months in advance. And the entire concept is crazy to me. Are you seeing similar trends in other areas of the country? And I haven't heard anybody say anything about potential for oversupply of multifamily. Is that nationwide or are there specific pockets where people should be cautious because there's overdevelopment going on?
00:21:26
Speaker
Yeah, and I'm one of these guys that I'll give you the negative side of something just because I like to talk about risk and risk management. It's just my personality. I'm the same, so I get it. I think when you look today, I think the demand absolutely way outweighs supply. So we're talking about today, it's fine. And maybe even tomorrow, it's fine. What I look at is,
00:21:49
Speaker
The pendulum always swings. The Fed push rates way down through the treasury through money into the system and all of a sudden you've got just asset prices ballooning. And then to correct that they jacked up rates in an unprecedented way. And that's gonna have an effect. But what happened with housing is
00:22:16
Speaker
We have this huge demand for housing. Money's cheap. Everybody's going to build. And then it's going to cause an oversupply at some point. Now, today, the data suggests there's not an oversupply. And I agree that there is still a great demand. There was pent-up demand because of lack of supply and household formations continue to outpace the construction. But I think my forecast is that three years down the road, we're going to potentially see an oversupply of housing.
00:22:46
Speaker
My own opinion, just because of what happens, everybody jumps in. And when I look at the permitting data, acquisition of assets and properties going through pre-development, I see three, four, five years out where there potentially could be an oversupply dropping this demand that we see today. Just my own view.
00:23:14
Speaker
Interesting. You did mention earlier that you do both multifamily and single family. I think since the pandemic, we've seen rising demand for single family rentals. Is that an area that you're seeing development? And how does that work? Because that's a relatively new trend, correct?
00:23:34
Speaker
Yeah, I mean, you've seen three or four of the very large private equity firms of the last five years gobble up. In fact, the largest buyer of single family homes, foreclosure homes and distressed homes in the last five years have been institutional investors, not individuals.
00:23:54
Speaker
So the reason for that is that rents have gone up much faster than the costs and demand has been very strong.
00:24:06
Speaker
Um, I think you're seeing because of home prices that is slowing down dramatically, but. Traditionally mom and pop were the buyers, you know, individuals were the buyers of single family. Investment homes, but I've been buying single family homes for Reynolds. For 40 straight years, I enjoy it.
00:24:30
Speaker
You know, you can get more efficiencies when you buy a multifamily, you can get more efficiencies buying other assets than single family homes, but you've got a huge population.
00:24:44
Speaker
of buyers and renters in that home price between 150 and say 500, you have an enormous population of buyers and renters. So it's for that reason. 150, where can you buy a house for $150,000? Yeah, I know. Well, in a lot of urban areas, I'm from Baltimore and I could buy in 20 zip codes here regularly at 150, believe it or not.
00:25:13
Speaker
Yeah, yeah. Interesting. Are these areas that most people would want to live, or are these places where there's additional risks associated with them? Well, we're talking about, as an investor, from an investor's point of view, where the population of renters and buyers. So as a buyer, I'm looking for a premium in rent. And in these areas of 150,000 to 200,000, there's a tremendous population of renters.
00:25:43
Speaker
and that drives premium of rent. Typically I tell investors that once you start getting 250 and below, the lower you go from 250,000. I know it's in Miami and San Francisco and in Boston, 250 is a garage, right? You can barely even buy a garage. So it's hard to believe that in most of America, the median home price is $400,000.
00:26:12
Speaker
So it's actually less than 400, but when you get down into the entry level housing numbers in urban areas, you're typically seeing 12, 13, 14, 15% cap rates, even on single family housing.
00:26:31
Speaker
That's interesting. I spoke to a while back, a firm that was doing development of sort of public housing, working with municipalities to refurbish public housing and provide better resources on site. And one of the remarkable results of that was
00:26:52
Speaker
that they saw a reduction in crime in the areas of which people who were investing in the real estate and actually providing quality homes at a reasonable price with good services actually found that people took care of their spaces because they cared and they were getting something for it and there was value there. Do you see similar trends when you think about kind of where you're investing say in Baltimore, where if you go in as an investor and actually
00:27:20
Speaker
take care of the property and make sure your tenants are living comfortably and that the heat is working and that there's no rodents or anything that all of a sudden like the areas around it other investors come in and crime rates go down or are you seeing similar trends like that on a like more microscopic level?
00:27:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think so. I think if you provide a great environment for people to live, whether it's to live or work, I think generally people react to that. So it's if you're, you know, a lot of these urban areas like Philly, Baltimore, Washington, D.C., especially in the last 40 years, you know, you can go into neighborhoods where you've got 10, 15 percent of the homes are boarded up and, you know, it's
00:28:06
Speaker
It's been my philosophy that when you go into an urban area where you have that you have to come in and buy all the homes that are boarded up and renovate all of them on your block or in your immediate neighborhood so that you can really change the the culture change the mindset change.
00:28:23
Speaker
People, I believe, are products of their environment. I'm a firm believer that if you go into a community and you get rid of the board ups and you take pride in the environment that people around you will rally around that idea.
00:28:42
Speaker
Yeah, I think actually investors love that too. It's one of those things where, you know, we talk about it all the time, this whole idea of passion and impact investing. And I think people like to invest in a way where they know they're making a positive difference in their community or in society as a whole. And we talked about this before we went live, but I used to do pageants and it sounds very cliche pageantry. Like I want to make the world a better place, but like realistically, I think we all feel that way.
00:29:11
Speaker
Yeah. And the opportunity to invest in a way and to support investments where you can get a good return for your investment, but also have a positive impact on a community is one that's really appealing to investors for sure. Yeah, absolutely. I've done a lot of teaching for the last 30 years, volunteering and teaching. I've been on the board of four schools, high schools. I've gone into a lot of inner city schools and taught 10th, 11th, 12th grade finance, personal finance.
00:29:39
Speaker
When you can impact people's lives and give them a different perspective, I use the word awareness a lot. If people grow up in a crappy neighborhood with board ups and drugs and just, that's all they know. If you can change their environment, you can change their awareness, which has a big impact. I think kind of a great example of what happens when people actually take the time to do exactly what we're talking about is say, like a city like Detroit, which is kind of having a renaissance.
Urban Revitalization through Investment
00:30:09
Speaker
Yeah.
00:30:09
Speaker
now, where if you went back even 10 years ago, Detroit was just all boarded up and dangerous and nobody wanted to be there. And then people took the time and made the investment and walk by lock, bought up the houses, refurbished them, put them back out to the community at reasonable rents. Everybody wins in those cases. And now Detroit is transforming itself into a completely different type of city.
00:30:35
Speaker
Yeah, well, you can thank Dan Gilbert Rocket Mortgage for his leading the way there. Yeah, that's amazing. You said you teach courses all the time. What are some of the topics that you like to focus on and your courses with potential real estate investors?
00:30:53
Speaker
Yeah, and before we hang up from this interview here, I'll plug my two books and a handful of my courses. So I like to teach private mortgage lending, but my main thing I like to teach, I have a book called From Worry to Wealth. A lot of people, I tell a story. I have four children. My youngest is a emergency room nurse. And when my 18-year-old daughter says, hey, dad, I want to be a nurse,
00:31:21
Speaker
What do I do? I say, well, it's real simple. Go get a four year nursing degree and become a nurse. What if my 18 year old daughter said, hey, dad, I want to be a nurse, but I also want to be wealthy. I want to create wealth. What do I do? Where do I go? And for me, as somebody that at age 18 went to work for a wealthy individual and then became surrounded by wealthy individuals,
00:31:43
Speaker
And what I didn't tell you is my dad grew up in an orphanage. My mom grew up very poor. I grew up in a very, I guess, poor-minded environment. I went to public school. I grew up where there wasn't a lot of money. And the mindset of being broke existed. So I teach awareness that people that use real estate and people that leverage capital
00:32:13
Speaker
especially other people's capital, there is a formula that exists. And I don't teach anything so profound. What I do is just organize a process for people that say, well, if I wanted to become wealthy, and I wanted to understand what it is that I need to do, what would that process look like? And so all I've done is written courses and books about giving people tools to answer the question of process.
00:32:42
Speaker
Well, that's really, I have a similar background. I grew up in Worcester, Massachusetts. It's a very blue collar central Massachusetts kind of town. It's and, you know, my dad was a cop my mom was an inner city school teacher and we didn't have a lot of money and that broke mindset is one that's really hard to break. You know, even when you have money, you are always in
00:33:03
Speaker
anxious about not having money because you know what that feels like and sometimes those things can actually influence your decision. So when you think about it, how were you able to kind of break out of that Baroque mindset? It's very simple. The reason I say August 21st, 1983 was the enlightening day. That was the day of enlightenment. And the reason I say that is that
00:33:31
Speaker
I was taught up to the age 18, up to that day, how to think about money when you're around wealthy individuals who are self-made.
00:33:41
Speaker
They think differently and they teach you differently and they explain how to approach something differently. I call that awareness and people that grow up in an environment that is less privileged than others, they may not be exposed to the awareness. I don't want to get on my soapbox, but often we're influenced by our parents.
00:34:08
Speaker
Right. That's our first influence and we're influenced by our teachers and we're influenced by our friends and then our employers and often most of those people, those people that are influencing us, they're all broke.
00:34:25
Speaker
So if we ask the question of how to become financially wealthy, and this is only about monetary wealth. We have many different selves, but from a financial self perspective, having a broke person teach us
00:34:42
Speaker
to be financially self-minded is very difficult. And it's not the person teaching his fault. If you were trying to get physically fit and you weighed 500 pounds and you wanted to weigh 200 pounds, you'd probably go to somebody who's been fat at one point and then became skinny. I mean, that's who you would want guiding you. Unfortunately, our society is made up of teachers
00:35:09
Speaker
that are broke teaching other people how not to be broke, but they don't have the capacity to do it. So that's my two cents on that.
00:35:20
Speaker
Oh, I think that's very valid. I think that, you know, to your earlier point, that's why having folks like yourself and myself and my team, we do a lot of financial literacy courses and we go into the schools as well. So we fully support that. And I believe that having some foundation in that and understanding
00:35:41
Speaker
that mindset is not necessarily the only mindset, that broke mindset. But if you've never been exposed to anything else, you don't know, and having them just be exposed can be powerful.
Learning Resources from Ben
00:35:53
Speaker
Well, we're coming up on time, and I have loved this conversation, but I want to give you a chance. Tell our listeners where they can find your courses and your books, and I'll include links in the show notes so that people can find it as well. But tell us a little bit about where people can find you and where people can find information about LingQ.
00:36:10
Speaker
Yeah, hang on one sec. Let me grab these two books. This one is the one from where to wealth, they can get this on Amazon, or they can contact me and we'll get it to them for free.
00:36:26
Speaker
And this is also on Amazon. This is for any investor. This is about becoming a private lender. And I wrote this book in 2015 for an explanation of why private lending is so powerful. Anybody that actually acts as the bank.
00:36:47
Speaker
capital. They can find us on the web. We're a great opportunity for investors looking for a secure, relatively safe, consistent investment return. We're an 11-year-old fund. We produced a billion dollars' worth of mortgages, had about $700 million repay, and have net yielded to our investors' distributable cash of about a little over 10.2%. So that's
00:37:15
Speaker
dividend in investors pocket. The last thing I'll say is that link capital dividends monthly. So we publish our financials and dividend to our investors monthly. Awesome. And of all the capital in our fund, the general partnership, myself and my partners that are the GPs, we have 21% of all the capital is ours. So we're invested side by side with all of our investors.
00:37:42
Speaker
And just for compliance purposes, past performance is no guarantee of future results. Make sure we get those through compliance, you know? But that's very compelling. If you're an advisor and you're interested in learning more about Link, feel free to either contact Ben or myself. As I mentioned, Link is one of our partners on our platform and we're happy to provide you with our due diligence and any of the additional information that we have put together about Link to help you as a fiduciary make these decisions.
00:38:07
Speaker
I want to thank Ben for being on the show today. I hope you like what you heard. If you did, remember to like and subscribe to our podcast. We really appreciate the support. And until next time, thanks for listening. Thanks for having me.
00:38:25
Speaker
The opinions expressed on the What's the Alternative podcast are for general informational purposes only and are not intended to provide specific advice or recommendations for any individuals or any specific facility. This is only intended to provide education about the financial
00:38:43
Speaker
appropriate review, consult with financial advisor prior to investing. Any past performance discussed during this podcast is no guarantee of seeking results. The guests featured on this program are participants on Barmine Capital Management's platform. As such, Barmine may receive payments for their participation as a platform partner. Any indices referenced for comparison are unmanaged and cannot be invested into directly. As always, please remember investing involves risk and possible loss of principal capital.
00:39:11
Speaker
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00:39:35
Speaker
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