Note Investing While Having a W-2 Job | Real Estate Notes Show

Episode: Note Investing while having W2 Job with Cody Cox. Dave's Goals and Plans: - Managing JKP Holdings - Experiencing multiple inches of snow and ice with state campus closures - Working remotely 80-90% of the time with state employment Nathan's Goals and Plans: - Has known Cody Cox for many years and goes to him for questions - Interested in understanding how to balance note investing with W-2 employment Key Recommendations: - Start note investing with your own capital in a self-directed IRA before seeking outside investors - Note investing is easier to manage part-time than wholesaling or rehabbing houses while maintaining full-time employment - Use settlement negotiations and deed-in-lieu offers as alternatives to foreclosure when possible Topics Discussed: - Balancing note investing with full-time W-2 employment - Cody's 38+ year mortgage industry background and career progression - Oregon's state veteran home loan program - Hardest Hit Funds program and homeowner assistance (2008-2009) - Self-directed IRA structure for note investing - First note deals and due diligence in note acquisition Guest Insights: - Cody Cox started note investing in 2014-2015 after 30+ years in mortgage industry when he realized it aligned with his expertise - His first note was a second mortgage in Bend, Oregon that went into foreclosure and settled for $7,000-$10,000 profit - Second deal was a distressed property note in Klamath Falls purchased for $12,500 that was sold two days after listing mid-May - Note investing can be done evenings and weekends without interrupting a full-time day job, unlike wholesaling or rehabbing - Capital constraints post-2008-2009 financial crisis limited initial investment capacity but self-directed IRA approach worked Episode: Note Investing while having W2 Job with Cody Cox.

Guest: Cody Cox Summary: Cody Cox discusses his 38+ year mortgage industry background and how he balances a full-time W-2 job as a senior executive managing Oregon's state veteran home loan program with note investing. Main Topics: Note investing while maintaining a W-2 job, Mortgage industry background and experience, Oregon state veteran home loan program, Hardest Hit Funds program and foreclosure mitigation, Balancing full-time employment with real estate investing Key Takeaways: Cody Cox has 38+ years of mortgage industry experience spanning servicing, origination, and management | Maintaining a W-2 job in government (State of Oregon) while pursuing note investing is possible with proper time management | Deep knowledge of mortgage servicing and loan origination provides valuable background for note investing | Experience with large-scale loan servicing (managing 225+ servicers during Hardest Hit Funds) offers unique perspective on note business | Oregon offers a dedicated state veteran home loan program separate from federal VA loans Keywords: note investing, W-2 employment, mortgage servicing, loan origination, hardest hit funds, veteran home loans, real estate investing, state of oregon my inside all right got all that turned off all right guys make sure you get this off we're supposed to get three to four inches tonight so that'll be fun oh nice hey everybody dave puts here from jkp holdings alongside of me nathan turner nathan how you doing my man i'm doing great awesome our special guest today mr cody cox how are you sir i'm doing well out here on the west coast got a little bit of a sprinkling of some snow overnight of course in oregon when it snows everything shuts down so i'm nice and toasty in my office home office today oh yeah i i've had snow inches for days now i think my kids want to see grass again which is amazing it's interesting we got about i'd say half an inch of ice overnight uh and then it snowed about maybe another half inch on top that and uh you know for the first time uh since i've been with the state for 10 years they shut down all the state campuses from portland all the way down to salem so so uh it's yeah but i i think the reason they did that of course is because most of us are working remotely you know 80 to 90 of the time anyway so it's like uh just like normal but i get to sit down and look at the little uh little weather and uh we're supposed to get some more tonight for the weekend so that'll be great yep we don't get enough of that here i know we feel bad because our kids are not knowing what snow days are anymore yeah right they're like wait a snow day's a remote day for our kids our home right now so it's kind of stings for them right but i actually hear somebody somebody outside uh shoveling the the sidewalk which is unusual for us yeah we did last weekend we built it up we've got enough snow piled up right along the driveway and along the edge of the street my son and i went out and we built a snow tunnel and it's big enough you can get we did a corner unit kind of thing a little room where we can sit in and you can sit up and there's room for a couple of us in there and that's awesome it's so much fun so stephen tucker was listening and said it's 80 degrees in phoenix right now so i'm not sure if i'm jealous or none of them but you're missing out man i like the snow yeah so we went snow tubing yesterday so uh awesome well cody i think that we kind of went to our normal conversation with each other because cody cox me nathan has known cody for many years now yeah he's been one of the guys that we've gone to for questions um cody has some very unique knowledge in space yeah share a little bit about that but he didn't dive into you know today about being a note investor having a w-2 job and how to do it and then what the struggles are with that so let's start off with cody how did you get into notes how did you hear about it and what time frame was it about well a little bit about my background i've been in the mortgage industry since uh 1984 so i've been in it 38 and a half years i started off uh with a mortgage loan servicer out of walla walla washington and uh i i basically my first permanent job there i was the guy that when you called the 800 number to talk about your mortgage i was a guy that answered the phone okay and i had all the all the case numbers with the loan numbers that ended in eight six to zero zero so that was my case numbers and so so i got to learn the servicing side of things uh uh right away uh and so all the calls that came in customer service uh was a good basic background for what this target is and then i uh i moved from that area into the portland oregon area uh later on that year uh and uh and uh worked for the largest savings and loan in the northwest at that time but that was on the origination side and eventually i went into loan originations i became one of the leading loan officers for this large savings and loan uh that is no longer in business uh but then uh and and so i got a a pretty good idea about originating loans then i stepped into a management role and managed a couple of mortgage origination offices uh for washington mutual out here uh in the northwest and you know they're no longer in business and so uh so but you know we i manage an office that did 210 million on an annual basis and so got to know that aspect of his as well uh and so you know i i i then went into uh worked for a company that where i became an account executive a wholesale account executive and those are the folks that uh you know go out and used to be able to say as a mortgage broker i have 100 different lenders to choose from well i was one of those lenders and my goal was to become one of the top one or two lenders for these particular brokers that company is kind of no longer in business so i decided that i'd go to the state of oregon and so far they're still in business uh but i came to the state of oregon in in 2011 uh and started work in what was called what is called the oregon homeownership stabilization uh initiative which is the oregon version of the hardest hit funds and so and so uh my role in that position was i was the servicer liaison which basically meant i was a single point of contact for all the servicers across the country that had homeowners in the state of oregon so they all called me and i all called them and so all the exchanges all the all the uh what they called uh uh they had a term for that it basically was glorified excel spreadsheets that would back and forth came through me and when i first got there we had about 55 to 57 uh mortgage loan company servicing companies on board uh by the time we i left there was 225 on board so i got a pretty good mix of all these kind of folks across the country that were servicing loans and then if they had questions on the program on the hardest hit funds i was the one that was supposed to answer those questions so in those days you know i was pretty well deep into the hardest hit funds uh you know from a state agency uh perspective and of course you know those that's the for those of you who may not know what the hardest hit funds were uh back in the 2008 2009 2010 period when the country was going through you know excessive foreclosures and you know homeowner loss and all those kind of things uh the u.s treasury set up a 1.7 trillion dollar fund dispersed it out to all the what they consider the hardest hit funds across the country oregon being one of them and uh i think we got you know several hundred thousand dollars and our goal was to try and keep people in the houses uh and i think we did a pretty good good uh good uh job at doing that as i see here on the website that's still up uh uh that we helped over 13 000 homeowners retain their houses in the state of oregon and so uh i was with them for a couple years and then i got a position which i call is across the street uh uh the state of state of oregon is one of those unique states uh in the in the country that offers a dedicated veterans home loan program uh to the state's veterans that's a separate and distinct from the federal va program it's it's our own program uh so in california they have that program they call it calvet texas has a program wisconsin kind of has a program alaska has a program and so does oregon and so i'm the senior executive that runs that program for the state of oregon i'm in charge of originations and servicing uh and now i report to the director and and the chief financial officer so uh that's my day job it's a pretty intense day job uh and so everything veteran oriented for home loans that's not a federal va loan you know comes through across my desk for the most part so you know it's still very much in the thick of mortgage loan servicing and originations and maintaining a full-time day job but also trying to get involved in this note stuff i remember uh one of one of the things in my background as well is that i was the president of the board of directors of the local real estate investors association here in portland oregon which we call northwest ria and it was part of my job was to bring in you know speakers national speakers to speak to the group and that's one of the ways that ria's you know generate revenue for the ria because they're mostly non-profits although some of them are privately owned is by selling products and get it kind of the product that these national speakers came in so i had a national speaker you know i was here in portland and trying to wholesale houses trying to do some minor rehabs you know all those kind of things that really are difficult to do when you have a full-time day job you know if you're trying to negotiate with the seller you know you kind of have to do it after hours or on weekends it takes up a tremendous amount of time and most of those require some sort of huge marketing effort with trying to find lists generate letters send them out respond to phone calls and it's just really hard to do that on a full-time day job so i just i'm sitting in a real meeting one time i have a guy come in which way i think we all know uh and uh he's out of florida uh his his he works for companies out of uh out of texas and uh he's a he's a great guy became great friends with him uh and he's sitting there i'm sitting there on the saturday webinar uh listening on saturday presentation and listening to him and i go what the heck am i doing i've been in the mortgage industry at this point 30 some years this makes perfect sense to me why don't i just start doing this because you know i can do it anywhere in the world i don't have to generate a bunch of letters to send them out and you know and there's a lot of people that target you know seller finance loans and they still send out marketing letters but the way it was presented i go this just makes sense to me you know i can do it in the evening i can do it on the weekend and still not interrupt really what i've got going on a full-time day job yeah so what i started doing then is is you know meeting guys like you and there's other people's out there and getting advice on how to get this going and i asked what year was that what was happening what year was this uh i had to be 2014 2015 somewhere in that in that time rate yeah because i remember the first note they bought was in 2015.

and one of the pieces of i i of advice is you know i need some help with this because you know after going through the 2008-2009 my capital was was you know very limited uh you know i had to save my house twice all that sort of stuff i mean i've been through some stuff and then uh so i asked the guy i said well how do i get going how do i get people to want to invest with me he says the first thing you need to do is do your own thing use your own capital so i stood up a self-directed ira i bought a couple notes one was a a little second mortgage on a rental house in bend oregon and uh apparently the owners of that particular rental house thought that a second mortgage could not foreclose well we started foreclosure and as soon as it hit uh they contacted me we ended up settling at a reduced amount and still put you know seven or eight ten thousand dollars into my self-directed ira that's not a bad deal yeah so the second thing i did is i bought another little uh note uh out of uh out of klamath falls organ which is not exactly the hotbed of anything uh but this this particular borrower had bought it as a second home uh this borrower was out of california i'm quite sure that that borrower never set foot in the house uh when i bought the note i bought it for twelve thousand five hundred dollars uh it was in pretty bad shape uh we ended up uh i hired some people to chase this borrower through southern california we finally caught up to it to the borrower they signed a deed in lieu i said if you sign the dean lou you know they bought it as a second home so the deficiency judgment on that could have taken place right but if you sign the deed in lieu i'll waive my rights to deficiency uh they signed it we got it back uh i boarded up the house i listed it uh mid-may of that year and it sold two days later uh we closed at the end of the month and i the return on that particular one we i think we sold it for 25.5 and he did the calculations it was an annualized return of 103 fantastic so now i had some case studies and so by using those case studies i was able to start a new venture that where i was able to get some investors and we did some joint venture investing we did that for about four or five years i am now in the process of winding that venture down it is something that when you do a joint venture one of the there's a couple things you need to be really really uh sensitive to uh one is is how the joint venture is structured uh because if you structure it wrong and i see a lot of it being structured uh incorrectly it could be considered selling the security and although it may not rise to the attention of the sec it certainly will rise to the attention of the of the state regulators and so you need to be sensitive to that is if that's the way you're doing it um the second thing is is all the risk on that particular venture is tied up into one asset and so if something goes wrong with that one asset uh you know the the risk escalates quite a bit and so one of the things i wanted to do is i wanted to do something at a higher level and so at the beginning of last year 2020 we actually stood up a fund and we're in the process of you know doing some capital raise or i just submitted a a a bid on 19 assets yesterday that we're trying to raise we've got some investors involved there it's all you know filed with the states it's all filed with the sec and so really what that is is a difference to me between investing note investing in a note business which is something we can talk about a little bit later but again the whole thing about around this here is i still have a full-time day job and talk about that because that's a big thing for a lot of people yeah that has not departed from their full-time job you know right in his home all the time i still have a w-2 job right so that flexibility is limited so how were what were some of the struggles you had with having a w-2 job how did you get over them and what have you done that you did differently when you first got started well i i think you know how the struggles i've had with that amount to time and energy you know because if you're working with investors you're working with sellers you've got to get things ordered in the note business you know you still got to find a time and be able to do that uh because you have investors that have put some faith and money into you but you still can't do anything to neglect the state job and the interesting thing of course is with my with my job you know being the executive that runs the home loan program for oregon veterans you know i had to go through uh a potential conflict of interest test that with my employer uh and and because i was not at purchasing notes although the first notes i just talked about were in the state of oregon with my self-directed ira i'm not purchasing anything in the state of oregon and so i'm able to differentiate that i also am not allowed to use any of the state's equipment so even though i have a laptop next to me here in my home office which is the states or if i'm in my office down in salem you know i've got i've got to make sure that i am not using state equipment to do anything on uh my personal business so you've got to be very disciplined i guess that's the other word you have to use here is you have to be disciplined to keep that separated and if you have to make a phone call to a vendor or or anything like that during your work day you know you have to wait till the lunch hour you have to wait to your break and so it's it's a matter of being very very disciplined and then when you get home you know dedicating the time to the lot of the paperwork because you guys will know there's a lot of paper in the mortgage industry uh even though a lot of what we're trying to do here is uh is electronic and digital and we all say from time to time that we can do this job anywhere in the world provided we have a good internet access yeah uh you know there's still a lot of paper involved here and you know we haven't quite got to the full digital signature yet uh and and things such as that but uh but trying you know just just maintaining that discipline with keeping the two separate but yet given the proper time and energy and then you know it's it's a 40 minute trip one way to my office and so i lose about an hour and a half each day when i make that commute and by the time i get home you know i've got to try and maintain a certain energy level because it's it's it's you know it's hard you got to have a why you've got to have some motivation uh to give up coming home and putting your feet up and watching tv uh to come in here and do this and so you know part of my motivation is is that uh you know we got behind when it was the 2009-2010 uh mortgage crisis we got we got behind and and so i've got to catch up that difference and so i've got to keep motivated to do that uh as well as you know there's things i want to do and uh there's a lot to be said about being you know a solopreneur uh versus being tied down to a w-2 i mean here's a quick example easy example here about three weeks ago my oldest my youngest son that lives here as well doesn't live with me but he lives he took a day off from his job to go skiing and uh he wanted me to come with him and it couldn't i mean i had things scheduled i had stuff on the calendar and i couldn't get out of him and so i don't want to do that again if he calls me up on a thursday and say let's go skiing tomorrow i want to do that i want to have the flexibility to do that and with the day job i don't actually have that flexibility kind of i do but if things are already on the calendar you know it's hard to do that so i guess too is that sometimes you take a day off from your w-2 job to work on your business yeah exactly you have a lot going on as a you know nasa that you're coming to doing due diligence on you're looking at 19 assets you may need a day off take a day off a sick day just to work on your business yeah yeah unfortunately i get personal business days and you know sometimes i get the cough uh but like like monday the monday's president's day and i get that day and so you know you've got to take advantage of those as well so what do you do to assist you in those struggles of having a w-2 job the limitation of hours right yeah that i only have commute what were some of the things you adjusted what tools you use what do you do to accommodate the lack of time how do you stay organized enough to be able to put it all in place yeah that's that's a really good question yeah obviously i have a pretty good calendar a calendaring system but i have a really good filing system too and i use the cloud quite a bit uh and my phone i have a a nice iphone with with the google drive on it so i really can get to any of the documents uh whenever i need to so i try and maintain kind of a structured filing system to keep that organized and that works out quite uh quite well uh any software you use or anything like that you know i i use uh i i have pipe drive going on for my crm right now uh there's some things about it i really really like there's some things about it that i wish it did more uh and and such is also the struggle is they keep adding features yes which means i have to sit down and take some time to learn these features and so you've got to say well do i need to recalculate the roi on this asset to submit or do i want to look at the video on on that so i mean some of the other things i've done is is you know you do i get up a little earlier sometimes and especially now that i'm working out of the house i'll get up a little earlier to do that uh make sure that during the the lunch hour whenever that is you know you never want to let the clock tell you when you're hungry uh and and then i'll do some things in the evening but uh you know saturday mornings i get up early and uh and work on things on saturday mornings and you know fortunately one of the things about you know having an office in your house and being an entrepreneur you know you're always available it always works and so in those sometimes those sleepless nights when you get up at three o'clock in the morning you can't go back asleep yeah i can sneak into it i can sneak into my office it's been an hour in here uh and just trying to do some stuff you know whether it's dealing with a vendor or paying an invoice and and all this other stuff i mean a lot of us in the last couple weeks sent out 1099s you know so some of us are doing i think we're doing that i think what you said there made the sense because i found myself more and more getting up at that 3 a.m and like my week and the problem i had was once you're up i'm off right next you know austin and i hour doing something wrong hey i'm going to be an hour it's four hours later and you dove into so many rabbit holes and yeah you haven't caught up on emails like you found time and you don't have a lot of it right yeah so i agree with you i think so was there anything you did like system-wise software-wise that kind of helped you deal with the time because this is a space where you're doing due diligence or you know finding assets running numbers do you use any kind of tools or automations or assistance or you know virtual assistants to kind of help you with time restrictions you know i i don't i have an roi calculator i use obviously my best friend is this thing right here oh you guys let's see can you see it yeah yeah 10v2 this is the yeah this is a hp 12c i've had one since the early 90s actually i have several of them uh and so this is my best friend on especially on the performing notes uh and so i you know i held calculate a lot of things i can tell you right now how many days until christmas and so that's one of the features in this thing in fact here's a funny story if you guys don't mind a funny story is that you know at one point in time when i was a loan officer for uh uh washington mutual early in my career with them uh i was right down the street from intel corporation and so we had a lot of high-tech people come in and i i had a guy come in to be one of my loans i did a lot of construction lending all-in-one construction money and a guy came in to build a house and he worked for hewlett-packard and you know i whip out my my little thing here and he goes you know let me tell you about that says i am actually the guy that programmed the algorithms that go into that way i go wow that's pretty cool he says and all that tell you you'll notice that the keys never wear out i go no they never do no matter how many times and i've had this one here for 15 years he says the reason is is when they make those keys they put those letters that go all the way through the key so if you took one of those keys and cut it halfway it'd still be as crisp as it is right now so you know it's just kind of a funny little thing that i learned a long time about go about this material but you know just that's just a trivia in case you get a trivia question on it so so i want to talk about your the discipline things it's really interesting because both you guys still have your your regular daytime job this is my fall time yeah so it's really interesting um and and you know people coming into the business they're going to be coming from both sides i think a lot of people are coming from the side of having a regular day job and you're talking about the discipline and getting things done when you can versus me where um i actually have two cell phones canadian american so my american one is my business phone yeah and and at five o'clock or thereabouts whenever i'm done you know sometime between 4 30 and 6.

uh i plug this in back here and i close those doors and that's it and i walk away and my business is done until morning nothing that will happen that seven o'clock at night is going to make any difference i like it now and tomorrow morning i think that's part of what i've got driving me as well is that you know i've i've got this entrepreneurial spirit i want to work for myself i want to set my own hours uh but the day job inhibits that so part of my motivation in moving from a note investor even though i do have no investments of me personally was setting up this fund which is a note business right and so and so because my goal at some point in time and maybe this is the year you know i have some benchmarks that i have set that will give me a guide me along the way maybe this is the year that i'm able to say okay i'm done with the w-2 job i'm at a point with therm that i can just move full-time into the note business right and and you know do what nathan does now i only have one phone but i can still you know set my own hours and i i know right now i'm going through a a a big deal because you know i i've been married for 36 years 36 and a half years and even though that's been going on for a long time there's still you know you have to continually build relationships and so i've got to have a kind of an understanding wife but at some point in time you know you've got to say something has to give because when you think of you know i've still got my own known investing i've got the old entity that i'm winding down i've got the day job i've got the new entity that i'm building up and then i have a family relationship and so there's a lot of things that hit me on a day-to-day basis yeah and yesterday was one of those days to be honest i was a little overwhelmed you know there's just so much going on because every one of those things i just listed there has a sub list of things going on as well in fact i i use a a a software program an online program called workflowy okay okay workflowy is an online thing that basically is a list builder and so i use that with every one of my headers being the things that i just mentioned there and a couple of other ones and then all the sub things going on underneath that one of the things i want to do and i hope to be able to do it in 2021 is start a podcast okay okay i have a company that you guys may have seen called funding factors uh funding factors is really my note media company it's going to be something where i want to to talk about you know notes to some degree uh there are a lot of podcasts that talk about notes and so i don't want to try and replicate that there's a lot of great note uh of podcasts out there but i'm more interested in talking about business and lifestyle and being a solopreneur and those kind of things and so that takes a heck of a lot of time to do a podcast yeah you know i'm going to pull it real quick cody and let you know that one thing we did you touched on before with the phone years ago i created myself i have all my emails are g suite emails right yeah so with g suite comes a google voice number so you can literally turn that on and off so that text message phone calls all that stuff can be shut off a period of time and it's forward to my cell phone and if i ever have to call somebody from the google voice it calls and it shows by the normal number so just an idea if you don't have it already or someone else is listening and if you want to have it separate from your business you can shut off the google voice number in any moment at except for nine to five or whatever you want to set for you have text messaging and phone calls if you receive a text from us more than likely it's not from our personal it's from our business thing so that multiple people could check it and also get forward to your email as well yeah i i do have that opener that makes such a difference got to be able to what i learned at some point along here was i run the business the business doesn't run me yeah i and it was getting to a point where i was getting completely out of hand where all of my time was spent you know worrying about and thinking about and dealing with business and then i took a step back and said no no no i'm in charge here not the business and it was a real mind shift to set parameters and boundaries and and there's exceptions of course and if there's some kind of emergency then sure i'll we'll deal with the emergency but on a regular basis no no no work hours are nine to five and yep and if i want to go skiing in the morning i go skiing in the morning because i can catch the benefit anything you have there is the lack of w-2 right you have eight hours you can spend on doing whatever you need to get done yeah where you know cody and other people like ourselves have that limited time where sometimes you have to get up at 5 00 a.m if you have 30 emails and then before your wife want to go to dinner right yeah you have that struggles are for myself and yourself we have the kids going on right right and the kids come in here i'm gonna put that off for a minute so yeah what we did to change it is automate a lot of stuff right you know as i talk about my automation is you dedicate your time and block out and you're able to spend a half hour on the phone with a what a borrower where you know someone like cody or myself or other people you have to find that break during your day job to sneak out to make the phone call right for the most part yeah now one thing i did different with the business that i didn't have with the with the prior entity is my oldest son is part of the business with me my son josh and and he's he's just brilliant he's brought a new level uh of analysis uh and just and just a business acumen to the business and and he's been a tremendous tremendous help and and he's very sensitive to my schedule he's very sensitive to my goal of of exiting the w-2 job so uh and so he's been really really integral to the successes that we've had with the with the fund and so i i want to make sure that that you mentioned earlier do i have va's or anything like that no i've got something better i've got my son and he's pretty accomplished uh you know he understands a lot about excel that i just don't uh with the vr lookups and all these other kind of things he knows some formulas and he's been putting some things together so you know hopefully that when we make a bid especially on a bulk basis that we've been able to drill down and get a quality bid that works for both parties uh because he's set up uh you know uh his systems on his side that give us the numbers i've kind of got to the point where rather than me having to you know drill down on every file so specifically uh that i've relied on him and so far i've been very very pleased and very happy and so uh you know he's he's again i want to make sure that i get a shout out to him because you know we can't do this job by ourselves we talk a lot about all the vendors that we hire whether it be you know a uh you know some sort of concierge who will order our bpos and our own e's or you know somebody to call the county or all these other things involved there uh you can't do this by by ourselves in fact i need you guys you know because there's things that we do just the various platforms and the and the pages that we have on our social media uh just to reach out and bounce stuff off so i mean that's the important thing is is i i certainly don't want to say that i'm doing this all by myself uh because you can't you just you just can't do it and it's funny because i had time to talk to josh i know you you know about this me and josh spent probably a good hour on the phone and it was amazing his excel knowledge and whatnot we went back and forth to some things and i was teaching him some stuff he i was sharing him stuff with him but he has some amazing hours so yes josh i know you're probably listening on this great conversation um and his knowledge was good for you to kind of teach him what you've taught him but i'm sure there's things that in the business that you still need to teach him where he's the numbers guy yeah you're the the notes and understanding the legality of stuff yeah um what's on the relationships with borrowers through your servicing experience and things like that like there's there's ways to talk to people and yeah not yeah honey become a cognizant of the fair debt collection practices at which i act which i am and he isn't but yeah you know and and we were we've done a pretty good job uh and it continually refines uh you know is josh is going to be responsible for these kind of things like i love him because he's paying the bills and dealing with the accounting side of stuff okay but that allows me to try and seek new sources and deal with borrowers as i need to uh and and deal with asset managers so so uh and each letter that we send out we bounce off each other for a second set of eyes and so i think you know if you if you were to go to our website bridgecityfactors.com you know we have a little scene in there that says a a refreshing approach to node investing and and so that's one of the little mantras that we kind of talk about is we want to bring something different to the table that maybe a asset manager or whomever an investor finds it a little bit different and so that's that's the challenge that's the challenge we have every single day is what can we do different to differentiate ourselves from everybody else that's out there and you guys know as well as i do there's you know 1231 new node investors that started here just within the beginning of the year and and they're either going to rise up to a higher level or my concern in some ways is is that you know just because of inexperience that you know they'll make a mistake they'll create a situation that becomes pretty public and pretty visible and so you know there's a time i believe just to sit and learn i know that there's some eagerness that goes out there but if you do have a day job you know the note investing side is a great supplement it's a great time to ramp up there's a there's opportunity there but don't want to get too hasty in it you know because you know one of the bigger concerns is you're looking at various uh legislative bodies across the country yeah you know they're doing two things one there's always a lack of revenue and they're all very very consumer oriented now we always want to do the right thing for our borrowers our consumers there's a lot of ethical things that we bring to the table as well but i you know what i what i get concerned about from time to time when i see certain questions being asked is is there is will this present a situation that becomes public enough that the government gets involved and is there some sort of new rule regulation or something that comes into play uh because somebody does something based on inexperience so i i think i guess what i would say assuming that there's some newer people listening to what we're talking about right here don't ever be uh hesitant to reach out to the those of us that have been around for a while you know i i don't want to be a guru that's the thing i don't want to start an education platform i don't want to do that not only because i don't have the time for it but there's plenty of good educators out there already but what i will always do is i will always answer your telephone call and so if you just want to give me a call about some stuff i mean i talked to a guy yesterday uh who's kind of new in the business he's got some financial resources behind him uh and he kind of just wanted to talk about some things residential commercial and kind of what sort of stuff like that and i enjoy those calls it's kind of a give back uh that i like to do uh back into the industry especially the mortgage industry that's been pretty good to me for the last 38 and a half years and so i agree i i'll take that call all day and i'll i can talk about notes oh yeah yeah but i'm not going to be your teacher but for everyone's sake please do reach out if you don't know yeah don't guess because like you say cody it can it can land you into a whole lot of trouble and frankly you can make a lot of trouble for the rest of us yeah yeah and what's the answer that yeah i still remember the phone call i had with you cody and we talked about some private stuff a couple years ago and you're like listen i'm kind of new not sure about things but that phone call me understood that you knew where you were but the fact that you can always call and ask questions and every assurance is good for a lot of people um which is different from normal real estate because you can't do that with normal real estate what you're buying now let's just dive into a little bit about what you're doing now you're looking at assets without getting to details are you looking at i think are states performing non-performing first seconds where's your where's your desire at well our our target uh acquisition is about 60 to 65 percent of performing notes we set up our fund if you will uh to try and provide a certain uh preferred rate back to you know our investors and i can't talk about that specifically just because of the limitations in the regulation the uh platform that we we are registered with uh but that's what we're trying to target we're trying to target a uh you know a 60 to 65 percent of performing loans uh we'll look at another 15 to 20 percent of reperforming loans uh ones that i consider real re-performing loans not one that just had a modified and three payments that's not a re-performing loan in my opinion i need some i'd like to see a 12-month history uh to pay the prices but but you know you you think uh the premise would be that you can actually get a little bit better price on a re-performing loan than you could on a regular performing loan uh and then we left a certain 10 to 15 percent uh available for non-performing loans uh and and there's some specific strategies we have in in that i mean one of the things that i've said uh since i've got into the no business for my own self is that you know i've spent 30 plus years putting people into homes i want to end my career keeping people in homes and so that's what we're trying to do when we buy non-performing loans is i never really buy one specifically with the target of going through a foreclosure and reselling it we want to try and find one where that homeowner has some sort of issue that created the hardship the distress that perhaps they have overcome it or with certain you know strategies we can find a workout that works for everybody and so so that's that's what our goal is to try and keep those homeowners in the house get them to make 12 months of consistent payment and then i can resell that out as a a re-performing note so that's kind of our strategies that's what we're looking at you know trying to provide a cash flow opportunity for ourselves and for our investors uh then and also take advantage if we do have to end up going through a foreclosure process process that that homeowner gets to exit that property with dignity uh and that we can get them and get another person in that house or sell it at an auction or position it where you know it works out well for everybody so you know that's our goal on that it's part of just the morality and ethnic ethics that you know we want to try and bring to this note industry business and i'll be one of the first ones that call bullcrap when i see something that is anything other than that because if you're in the in this here just simply to try and foreclose on somebody uh i i think that's secondary of all and that's your primary you know goal you know another thing is you foreclose you can always turn it into rental property uh we got one right now my old entity that we ended up taking a dean liu uh put about 35 40 000 into it put a tenant in it now i've got trying to market it as a turnkey rental to another investor and keller carries seller financing on that because another thing is i don't want to be a landlord i am from the moment uh but i want to be a note investor and that'd be one another one that i could put in my personal portfolio so i mean i know it's a lot of things there but hopefully that answered the question so so one of the questions that uh in the facebook feed is that um someone's looking for a mentor right um one thing's holding it back is deciding who should hold their hand what is your suggestion or answer to those who are looking for a mentor to hold their hand along the process yeah well i i think a lot of it has to do with the vetting process if somebody aligns with your own personal philosophy uh then that's probably the right person to continue to talk on i i know one of the things and i'll use this as an example is that you know again there's a lot of note funds out there but really rather than invest in the note fund you're really kind of investing with the sponsor and so you have to go through that vetting process to make sure that your personal philosophy and goals and morals and ideas match up with the person that you want to align yourself from a mentor aspect of it and so i think that's the main thing so what if somebody's getting started out you know they don't want to talk to the first or get aligned with the first person they talk to you know so talk to somebody should talk to all three of us okay and even though the three of us for the most part have a lot of similar looks at it you know at this industry uh there's just something that's going to click in whatever we do from a personality standpoint or whatever and and that's the the thing that uh that you know might push you towards one person versus another so i mean that's the main thing you gotta make sure that you align philosophically uh with the person that you're gonna work with and so you know it's all a business whether you're a note investor or running a no business you have to treat it like a business and so every one of us need to have a model written down and stay within the model so you know one of the things when i was a rhea president and i did bring speakers in every month uh whether they were local or national some of them a lot of them sold stuff and i always would tell the the you know the members of the ria that you know we're bringing somebody in this is what they're talking about if it's part of your written model you got a business going on even though it may be a side hustle if it's part of your model and they click with you then go ahead and buy the program and add it to what you're doing but if it's not part of your model or you don't click with something or something set right you know in your gut then listen grab a few nuggets but don't spend your money and so same thing goes on with educators the same thing goes on with people that you're going to mentor with or want to mentor with you uh you know a lot of it is how you align and i've said this a couple times aligned philosophically with him so and i think it's seeing what you said there is one of the things i tell people i i'm not being unmentored with one person right i think if you know you reach out to three four no investors and just get their idea about what situation you're gonna get maybe a slightly different answer from all of them but it's actually better than just getting it from one oh i agree yeah absolutely sometimes not pitch and hold yourself into one mentor pivot yourself to four or five and you do like or three that you like and say listen i'm gonna bounce the same idea of three different people to get their opinion their suggestions their thoughts because we all have our different experience versus just one thing right um i think that with that it helps the person get a different perspective um but you know so i'm always in favor of don't find the mentor find the network yeah i agree i agree and and rarely i can't even think of one time but rarely will uh somebody who's been in the business for a while not pick up the phone and talk with you i find that very very refreshing in the note industry is that you know there's there's only really two things that we keep secret and that's uh that's our well maybe three maybe maybe four but one of them of course is is our sources one of them is our roi calculators all day although dave you know you've been very very generous with yours uh and and there's in our marketing uh aspects of things you know we kind of keep those kind of secret uh but as far as you know situations and uh things that we encounter or how would i look at this or maybe a technical question i mean this is a very very refreshing industry because we're all open i had an old boss a long time ago when i was uh kind of a what we call the grunt loan officer i was just getting my feet wet being a mortgage loan officer this was before computers uh but everything was done by hand uh and uh he told me all boats rise with the tide and so if nathan's doing well then i'm pretty sure that dave's doing well and i'm doing well and if i can help you know somebody who's been in the industry for six months or less them do better then i think it's positive for everybody and so that's you know kind of my approach as people talk to me is if i can help you take a step forward then we all get to take a step forward together so i would add one more thing for the for the mentor question yeah i think before you if you if you are looking for somebody that's going to hold your hand and walk you through it make sure your expectations are very clear on what exactly does that look like because because mentors definition and your definition may not match make sure that you're on the same page of that and and the expectation is clear what it is what are you exactly looking for and yeah and and then be realistic if you want to be sitting in their office with them and you know day in day out that may not be realistic maybe it is maybe somebody's gonna offer that but that may not be realistic so just make sure that you you understand and i think by networking with them you're gonna find people say you know who else are you talking to and there are people in space that we all know we don't agree with and if that person comes to us we're not gonna talk bad about them but you can get a sense who we trust who we don't trust sure and you can kind of get that we don't talk bad about people but you can say hey listen um look at this person where your thoughts are and you can agree between the lines what we think of that person versus someone reached out to me just recently all that up and said listen i'm looking alone nathan has for sale right away yeah it's a good guy you can trust him the deal is good that happens so quickly because the relationships we've built over the years not three months we've been talking to cody nathan for years now which is crazy but it's a tight community and and not to say that it's exclusive but tight just meaning we're we're everyone's friendly with each other and like you say cody we can talk to each other and we do all the time and to say hey i've never seen this yeah me neither nathan i remember the first time i met you face to face it was that uh i was a paper source in vegas one year okay and you're taller than you look on tv and and i remember walking up to you and it's like we've known each other for a while yeah you know it's like you know we don't know all the intricacies and details but it's like hey i can pick up a conversation at a conference as well as i can on the telephone so that's that's the the the tightness that you refer to in this industry is is there there's folks that you can just talk to and you know you get to know us all uh yeah i i'm pretty excited i'm i'm hoping that uh sometime this year uh conferences start up again face to face i mean because you know i miss the personal interaction these the zoo meetings are great they're fine they've kept us uh uh you know connected but you know going and talking to somebody just for the networking asset aspect of it all uh is uh is very very uh worthwhile for me so me too yeah yeah you know i know she asked additional questions like she's looking for someone who's not a scam someone to help with your diligence um you know due diligence is a big word right um in some of that stuff you gotta have to learn your own um and there are great courses out there i know dan deppen i'm sure not sure dan's listening in he has a due diligence course um but i think a lot of stuff is just asking questions yeah when you get into it just hey guys i'm stuck in due diligence and i was comment back what part of the diligence there's plenty of space in due diligence we're talking collateral we're talking o e we're talking you know the deal itself valuations what do you do how do you value your property it depends also what's your final what do you want from this because that's going to shape your due diligence up front as well if you're looking for a performing note that's going to be totally different than one that you're looking at you know a potential foreclosure and that that's like there's so many nathan that is a great point because i'm listening to you and i'm thinking you know that old adage uh from seven habits is begin with the end in mind exactly and then you start there what do i want this to look like and then reverse engineer it back to where it is to go so how do you this is what i wanted to look like how do i go backwards to get it to where it looks like today uh and then in under with the understanding that it may not get to what you want it to be ideally and be prepared for you know to to zig down this other rabbit trail and if it does that what does your net result look like that so that's a really great point is you know and it all goes back to your written model what do you want exactly what's your predominance amount of what you want to do as a business and how do i get this particular one to work and there's just going to be some loans some notes that you look at that aren't going to work that way you'll see that but as we've heard a thousand times i mean i can drive from portland to new york and it's better if i go buy a map rather than than not uh because otherwise who knows i might end up in you know in jersey so yeah don't want it up here you don't want to come here we're still trying to get out so cody you know i'm gonna ask this last final question what is keeping you inside your day job and not retiring three years ago besides the money is there something else that's happened you know we don't want to get into intricacies on how much millions of dollars you've made but what if what what's held you back from diving in is it nervousness is it scaredness is it something else but i know what mine is unfortunately yeah well you know that's that's the philosophical question i've been asking myself for a while uh you know i i talked to a very important a very uh somebody outside the industry just this last sunday very very briefly after church and and they said you'll know when you know you know and sometimes you just have to take that leap uh i asked my one of my sons last night and i asked josh from time to time is that is that is there something in my day job that keeps me comfortable okay and and so is that one of the things you know and i look at everybody teaches us shows us that you know you've gotta you've gotta have three or five months of reserves in the bank and you've got to work your side hustle to a point it can replace your your income from your day job and then you know you drop this budget and say i need this for the house payment this for the car payment and all these other things i want to keep the lights on it's throwing out i need the heat on uh you know and so and so sometimes it's it's being comfort i i'm not uh it's really scared to take the the pull the trigger but i also know like you know i'm trying to buy 19 notes that's kind of a pretty significant trigger uh and so uh but i'm not the only one that gets to make that decision also okay like i mentioned i've been married for 36 and a half years and so that's a pretty big decision that affects her lifestyle as well as mine and so uh you know those are the kind of things that come into play on that uh you know i i'm uh this is a kind of a funny thing but it's amazing how many uh medicare insurance companies know how old i am uh and so that's a choice that's coming into my in my vision here real real shortly i mean i got stuff all over on my desk you probably can't see that of of just mailers i get about trying to make those decisions that come with that plan and so i'm trying to build like a three or four legged stool okay so i've got stuff coming from this account stuff from this account so uh those are this kind of the things that run through my head at three o'clock in the morning is that you know when can i do that i have set probably a resignation date three or four times i have the letter written and i keep forwarding the date okay uh but it's coming to the point it's coming it's gonna come to the point where i say i just i just can't do this anymore i'm limited in energy i'm limited in time uh and what do i really really want to do it's like you know what do i want to do when i grow up and so it's it's that's kind of what i'm hoping comes clear uh here this year you know i see eventually one impedes the other yeah you gotta make a choice yeah and and and you know if if we're successful uh in this in this submission this indicative bids that we sent in yesterday you know if i'm successful on at least half of them that's gonna be a big step a big step to what we do next uh you know i've been very very fortunate that i've been able to work out of the home uh since uh almost a whole year now yeah and been able to do the quite the good division between the two uh but that's been this it's almost like it's been preparatory in a lot of ways so you know it's interesting because for me you know it's more for healthcare my wife won't let me quit because the health care package with the state um but yeah we juggle a lot you know when you do your lunch hour stuff like that but you know or you bring your laptop to work with you we've done i've done that before um you know my day jobs fulfill some other needs which you said before it does have some good perks to it you know that i enjoy doing but at one point or another you do have to make that leap and your spouse is your second partner on it everything you do yeah um but i think i think for a lot of those who are listening um getting into the even the person speaking she wants to buy our first note right yeah and learning the space can you be scary what well final i'll make probably one of our five questions what would you give advice a person who's scared to get in what do you how do you get over that fear well you know a lot of that comes from what you've done yesterday and so if if you've prepped yourself yesterday uh or the day before then that'll lead you to take action today yeah you don't want to be a professional student at some point in time you've got to get over that hump but you know i think uh preparation and you know and there's a scripture that says there's wisdom and a multitude of counselors and so don't like we talked about a little bit earlier here don't be able to don't be concerned or hesitant is the word i use not to just pick up the phone and say hey i'm looking at this note it's my first purchase this is what i see and then one of us will be able to ask him is okay what is it you don't see and so and so those are the kind of things is preparation ask people and and then you just got to do it a lot of us say that if you purchase your first note maybe you do it in your self-directed ira or similar vehicle and buy a performing note one that's going to take care of itself while you learn the nuances of that you know the other preparation part of it is is make sure you have your vendors already lined up you don't want to buy a note today and then not have somebody to order and own ephraim that's not a realtor i mean dave's got tremendous resources where you can pick up a phone and call a realtor in the in the area that uh this asset is sitting uh but make sure you have your servicing company set up you've looked at their contract you've looked at their fees you know all that preparatory back office stuff helps you take a step and build your confidence because you've got that already taken care of one of the things i talked about and i i used to send out a newsletter every week i've got a little bit more uh sporadic on that but uh it had to do with with talking about you'll find in the in the note history it's it's hurry up and wait okay and and so you'll you'll notice that uh you're going through a whole bunch of notes and you kind of find find maybe one or two or three you want to put a bid in on so there's you you put your bid on it then you've got this two week period that you know once you get approved and you got to finish it all off and then you wait again as the note gets transfers it gets up and servicing so use those down times those wait times to build your confidence get a little bit educated look a little bit deeper in the file that you're looking at and so it's all preparatory it's a little bit education but you don't want to just be a professional student you want to make sure that if you're going to spend the money that you got to take that next step again going back to my experience as a rhea president we had a lot of people that bought those packages but they're still sitting on the desk getting all dusty you know that's the not wisest use of your funds it may be the easiest but it's time to get uncomfortable if you want to take the next step yeah yeah awesome advice my man thank you i don't have any further questions nathan you have anything else you want to add mr cody i think that's it it's really interesting talking to cody because because so many of us come from a real estate background and cody's coming up from the right side of it yeah from the servicing and finance side of it uh which is really the best preparation much much much better than than the real estate side so it's it's that you've got an interesting perspective and yeah it's again i i you know i yeah i'm trying to be kind of visible right now the day will come where i'll fall off the radar uh but uh you know as long as i'm visible anybody out there is listening uh go ahead and reach out to me i'm i'm encouraged to see what's going on out there yeah it's a great industry to be in uh if you do it right it's a win-win-win for everybody involved and as long as we maintain that philosophy on it uh it's going to be good for us so last question that i got for you cody i asked fred moskovitz a couple weeks ago where do you see this going where are we going in 2021 where's the industry going well you know it's kind of an interesting thing because i've had some conversations about that you know there's a lot of forbearance stuff that's going to expire here yeah uh there's some legislation that's getting involved on a national statewide basis uh there's a lot of scratching dents that are out there too that are still overpriced uh but i i'm pretty optimistic about it i mean uh for for the people who have the right uh connections if you will uh the right network uh it's gonna be okay and so building the network uh there was a period of time where i uh i just kind of had to take a pause on some things dave knows you know the issues surrounding that and so i spent my time in that season building my network and so we don't want to be too hasty we certainly don't want to over buy over over buy some things there's a lot of that that some sellers are counting on but use this as a season to develop to read more to learn more i think opportunity is going to be around the corner actually i think at the end of march when the forbearance stuff is completely uh and the moratoriums are lifted yeah you know there'll still be some things going on you know we deal in the private sector if you will the private secondary market uh which is opposed to the government sponsored stuff and there's still things out there that can become available so uh i i'm optimistic about what 2021 and 2022 are going to do again to me it looks like it's another opportunity for us to help some homeowners and that's what it's all about yeah agreed yeah well cody i'm going to disconnect from facebook live um we did i did post uh we had my assistant posted your name and email address into the feed okay anyone wants to reach out they could definitely do that sure so um i appreciate everyone tuning in watching it we'll have a replay of them shortly live and we'll go from there hope all well thanks a lot everyone for watching and we'll go take care have a great weekend all right talk to you guys thanks a lot for the opportunity you bet thank you my son and i went out and we built a snow tunnel and it's big enough you can get we did a corner unit kind of thing a little room where we can sit in and you can sit up and there's room for a couple of us in there and that's awesome it's so much fun so stephen tucker was listening and said it's 80 degrees in phoenix right now so i'm not sure if i'm jealous or none of them but you're missing out man i like the snow yeah so we went snow tubing yesterday so uh awesome well cody i think that we kind of went to our normal conversation with each other because cody cox me nathan has known cody for many years now yeah he's been one of the guys that we've gone to for questions um cody has some very unique knowledge in space yeah share a little bit about that but he didn't dive into you know today about being a note investor having a w-2 job and how to do it and then what the struggles are with that so let's start off with cody how did you get into notes how did you hear about it and what time frame was it about well a little bit about my background i've been in the mortgage industry since uh 1984 so i've been in it 38 and a half years i started off uh with a mortgage loan servicer out of walla walla washington and uh i i basically my first permanent job there i was the guy that when you called the 800 number to talk about your mortgage i was a guy that answered the phone okay and i had all the all the case numbers with the loan numbers that ended in eight six to zero zero so that was my case numbers and so so i got to learn the servicing side of things uh uh right away uh and so all the calls that came in customer service uh was a good basic background for what this target is and then i uh i moved from that area into the portland oregon area uh later on that year uh and uh and uh worked for the largest savings and loan in the northwest at that time but that was on the origination side and eventually i went into loan originations i became one of the leading loan officers for this large savings and loan uh that is no longer in business uh but then uh and and so i got a a pretty good idea about originating loans then i stepped into a management role and managed a couple of mortgage origination offices uh for washington mutual out here uh in the northwest and you know they're no longer in business and so uh so but you know we i manage an office that did 210 million on an annual basis and so got to know that aspect of his as well uh and so you know i i i then went into uh worked for a company that where i became an account executive a wholesale account executive and those are the folks that uh you know go out and used to be able to say as a mortgage broker i have 100 different lenders to choose from well i was one of those lenders and my goal was to become one of the top one or two lenders for these particular brokers that company is kind of no longer in business so i decided that i'd go to the state of oregon and so far they're still in business uh but i came to the state of oregon in in 2011 uh and started work in what was called what is called the oregon homeownership stabilization uh initiative which is the oregon version of the hardest hit funds and so and so uh my role in that position was i was the servicer liaison which basically meant i was a single point of contact for all the servicers across the country that had homeowners in the state of oregon so they all called me and i all called them and so all the exchanges all the all the uh what they called uh uh they had a term for that it basically was glorified excel spreadsheets that would back and forth came through me and when i first got there we had about 55 to 57 uh mortgage loan company servicing companies on board uh by the time we i left there was 225 on board so i got a pretty good mix of all these kind of folks across the country that were servicing loans and then if they had questions on the program on the hardest hit funds i was the one that was supposed to answer those questions so in those days you know i was pretty well deep into the hardest hit funds uh you know from a state agency uh perspective and of course you know those that's the for those of you who may not know what the hardest hit funds were uh back in the 2008 2009 2010 period when the country was going through you know excessive foreclosures and you know homeowner loss and all those kind of things uh the u.s treasury set up a 1.7 trillion dollar fund dispersed it out to all the what they consider the hardest hit funds across the country oregon being one of them and uh i think we got you know several hundred thousand dollars and our goal was to try and keep people in the houses uh and i think we did a pretty good good uh good uh job at doing that as i see here on the website that's still up uh uh that we helped over 13 000 homeowners retain their houses in the state of oregon and so uh i was with them for a couple years and then i got a position which i call is across the street uh uh the state of state of oregon is one of those unique states uh in the in the country that offers a dedicated veterans home loan program uh to the state's veterans that's a separate and distinct from the federal va program it's it's our own program uh so in california they have that program they call it calvet texas has a program wisconsin kind of has a program alaska has a program and so does oregon and so i'm the senior executive that runs that program for the state of oregon i'm in charge of originations and servicing uh and now i report to the director and and the chief financial officer so uh that's my day job it's a pretty intense day job uh and so everything veteran oriented for home loans that's not a federal va loan you know comes through across my desk for the most part so you know it's still very much in the thick of mortgage loan servicing and originations and maintaining a full-time day job but also trying to get involved in this note stuff i remember uh one of one of the things in my background as well is that i was the president of the board of directors of the local real estate investors association here in portland oregon which we call northwest ria and it was part of my job was to bring in you know speakers national speakers to speak to the group and that's one of the ways that ria's you know generate revenue for the ria because they're mostly non-profits although some of them are privately owned is by selling products and get it kind of the product that these national speakers came in so i had a national speaker you know i was here in portland and trying to wholesale houses trying to do some minor rehabs you know all those kind of things that really are difficult to do when you have a full-time day job you know if you're trying to negotiate with the seller you know you kind of have to do it after hours or on weekends it takes up a tremendous amount of time and most of those require some sort of huge marketing effort with trying to find lists generate letters send them out respond to phone calls and it's just really hard to do that on a full-time day job so i just i'm sitting in a real meeting one time i have a guy come in which way i think we all know uh and uh he's out of florida uh his his he works for companies out of uh out of texas and uh he's a he's a great guy became great friends with him uh and he's sitting there i'm sitting there on the saturday webinar uh listening on saturday presentation and listening to him and i go what the heck am i doing i've been in the mortgage industry at this point 30 some years this makes perfect sense to me why don't i just start doing this because you know i can do it anywhere in the world i don't have to generate a bunch of letters to send them out and you know and there's a lot of people that target you know seller finance loans and they still send out marketing letters but the way it was presented i go this just makes sense to me you know i can do it in the evening i can do it on the weekend and still not interrupt really what i've got going on a full-time day job yeah so what i started doing then is is you know meeting guys like you and there's other people's out there and getting advice on how to get this going and i asked what year was that what was happening what year was this uh i had to be 2014 2015 somewhere in that in that time rate yeah because i remember the first note they bought was in 2015.

and one of the pieces of i i of advice is you know i need some help with this because you know after going through the 2008-2009 my capital was was you know very limited uh you know i had to save my house twice all that sort of stuff i mean i've been through some stuff and then uh so i asked the guy i said well how do i get going how do i get people to want to invest with me he says the first thing you need to do is do your own thing use your own capital so i stood up a self-directed ira i bought a couple notes one was a a little second mortgage on a rental house in bend oregon and uh apparently the owners of that particular rental house thought that a second mortgage could not foreclose well we started foreclosure and as soon as it hit uh they contacted me we ended up settling at a reduced amount and still put you know seven or eight ten thousand dollars into my self-directed ira that's not a bad deal yeah so the second thing i did is i bought another little uh note uh out of uh out of klamath falls organ which is not exactly the hotbed of anything uh but this this particular borrower had bought it as a second home uh this borrower was out of california i'm quite sure that that borrower never set foot in the house uh when i bought the note i bought it for twelve thousand five hundred dollars uh it was in pretty bad shape uh we ended up uh i hired some people to chase this borrower through southern california we finally caught up to it to the borrower they signed a deed in lieu i said if you sign the dean lou you know they bought it as a second home so the deficiency judgment on that could have taken place right but if you sign the deed in lieu i'll waive my rights to deficiency uh they signed it we got it back uh i boarded up the house i listed it uh mid-may of that year and it sold two days later uh we closed at the end of the month and i the return on that particular one we i think we sold it for 25.5 and he did the calculations it was an annualized return of 103 fantastic so now i had some case studies and so by using those case studies i was able to start a new venture that where i was able to get some investors and we did some joint venture investing we did that for about four or five years i am now in the process of winding that venture down it is something that when you do a joint venture one of the there's a couple things you need to be really really uh sensitive to uh one is is how the joint venture is structured uh because if you structure it wrong and i see a lot of it being structured uh incorrectly it could be considered selling the security and although it may not rise to the attention of the sec it certainly will rise to the attention of the of the state regulators and so you need to be sensitive to that is if that's the way you're doing it um the second thing is is all the risk on that particular venture is tied up into one asset and so if something goes wrong with that one asset uh you know the the risk escalates quite a bit and so one of the things i wanted to do is i wanted to do something at a higher level and so at the beginning of last year 2020 we actually stood up a fund and we're in the process of you know doing some capital raise or i just submitted a a a bid on 19 assets yesterday that we're trying to raise we've got some investors involved there it's all you know filed with the states it's all filed with the sec and so really what that is is a difference to me between investing note investing in a note business which is something we can talk about a little bit later but again the whole thing about around this here is i still have a full-time day job and talk about that because that's a big thing for a lot of people yeah that has not departed from their full-time job you know right in his home all the time i still have a w-2 job right so that flexibility is limited so how were what were some of the struggles you had with having a w-2 job how did you get over them and what have you done that you did differently when you first got started well i i think you know how the struggles i've had with that amount to time and energy you know because if you're working with investors you're working with sellers you've got to get things ordered in the note business you know you still got to find a time and be able to do that uh because you have investors that have put some faith and money into you but you still can't do anything to neglect the state job and the interesting thing of course is with my with my job you know being the executive that runs the home loan program for oregon veterans you know i had to go through uh a potential conflict of interest test that with my employer uh and and because i was not at purchasing notes although the first notes i just talked about were in the state of oregon with my self-directed ira i'm not purchasing anything in the state of oregon and so i'm able to differentiate that i also am not allowed to use any of the state's equipment so even though i have a laptop next to me here in my home office which is the states or if i'm in my office down in salem you know i've got i've got to make sure that i am not using state equipment to do anything on uh my personal business so you've got to be very disciplined i guess that's the other word you have to use here is you have to be disciplined to keep that separated and if you have to make a phone call to a vendor or or anything like that during your work day you know you have to wait till the lunch hour you have to wait to your break and so it's it's a matter of being very very disciplined and then when you get home you know dedicating the time to the lot of the paperwork because you guys will know there's a lot of paper in the mortgage industry uh even though a lot of what we're trying to do here is uh is electronic and digital and we all say from time to time that we can do this job anywhere in the world provided we have a good internet access yeah uh you know there's still a lot of paper involved here and you know we haven't quite got to the full digital signature yet uh and and things such as that but uh but trying you know just just maintaining that discipline with keeping the two separate but yet given the proper time and energy and then you know it's it's a 40 minute trip one way to my office and so i lose about an hour and a half each day when i make that commute and by the time i get home you know i've got to try and maintain a certain energy level because it's it's it's you know it's hard you got to have a why you've got to have some motivation uh to give up coming home and putting your feet up and watching tv uh to come in here and do this and so you know part of my motivation is is that uh you know we got behind when it was the 2009-2010 uh mortgage crisis we got we got behind and and so i've got to catch up that difference and so i've got to keep motivated to do that uh as well as you know there's things i want to do and uh there's a lot to be said about being you know a solopreneur uh versus being tied down to a w-2 i mean here's a quick example easy example here about three weeks ago my oldest my youngest son that lives here as well doesn't live with me but he lives he took a day off from his job to go skiing and uh he wanted me to come with him and it couldn't i mean i had things scheduled i had stuff on the calendar and i couldn't get out of him and so i don't want to do that again if he calls me up on a thursday and say let's go skiing tomorrow i want to do that i want to have the flexibility to do that and with the day job i don't actually have that flexibility kind of i do but if things are already on the calendar you know it's hard to do that so i guess too is that sometimes you take a day off from your w-2 job to work on your business yeah exactly you have a lot going on as a you know nasa that you're coming to doing due diligence on you're looking at 19 assets you may need a day off take a day off a sick day just to work on your business yeah yeah unfortunately i get personal business days and you know sometimes i get the cough uh but like like monday the monday's president's day and i get that day and so you know you've got to take advantage of those as well so what do you do to assist you in those struggles of having a w-2 job the limitation of hours right yeah that i only have commute what were some of the things you adjusted what tools you use what do you do to accommodate the lack of time how do you stay organized enough to be able to put it all in place yeah that's that's a really good question yeah obviously i have a pretty good calendar a calendaring system but i have a really good filing system too and i use the cloud quite a bit uh and my phone i have a a nice iphone with with the google drive on it so i really can get to any of the documents uh whenever i need to so i try and maintain kind of a structured filing system to keep that organized and that works out quite uh quite well uh any software you use or anything like that you know i i use uh i i have pipe drive going on for my crm right now uh there's some things about it i really really like there's some things about it that i wish it did more uh and and such is also the struggle is they keep adding features yes which means i have to sit down and take some time to learn these features and so you've got to say well do i need to recalculate the roi on this asset to submit or do i want to look at the video on on that so i mean some of the other things i've done is is you know you do i get up a little earlier sometimes and especially now that i'm working out of the house i'll get up a little earlier to do that uh make sure that during the the lunch hour whenever that is you know you never want to let the clock tell you when you're hungry uh and and then i'll do some things in the evening but uh you know saturday mornings i get up early and uh and work on things on saturday mornings and you know fortunately one of the things about you know having an office in your house and being an entrepreneur you know you're always available it always works and so in those sometimes those sleepless nights when you get up at three o'clock in the morning you can't go back asleep yeah i can sneak into it i can sneak into my office it's been an hour in here uh and just trying to do some stuff you know whether it's dealing with a vendor or paying an invoice and and all this other stuff i mean a lot of us in the last couple weeks sent out 1099s you know so some of us are doing i think we're doing that i think what you said there made the sense because i found myself more and more getting up at that 3 a.m and like my week and the problem i had was once you're up i'm off right next you know austin and i hour doing something wrong hey i'm going to be an hour it's four hours later and you dove into so many rabbit holes and yeah you haven't caught up on emails like you found time and you don't have a lot of it right yeah so i agree with you i think so was there anything you did like system-wise software-wise that kind of helped you deal with the time because this is a space where you're doing due diligence or you know finding assets running numbers do you use any kind of tools or automations or assistance or you know virtual assistants to kind of help you with time restrictions you know i i don't i have an roi calculator i use obviously my best friend is this thing right here oh you guys let's see can you see it yeah yeah 10v2 this is the yeah this is a hp 12c i've had one since the early 90s actually i have several of them uh and so this is my best friend on especially on the performing notes uh and so i you know i held calculate a lot of things i can tell you right now how many days until christmas and so that's one of the features in this thing in fact here's a funny story if you guys don't mind a funny story is that you know at one point in time when i was a loan officer for uh uh washington mutual early in my career with them uh i was right down the street from intel corporation and so we had a lot of high-tech people come in and i i had a guy come in to be one of my loans i did a lot of construction lending all-in-one construction money and a guy came in to build a house and he worked for hewlett-packard and you know i whip out my my little thing here and he goes you know let me tell you about that says i am actually the guy that programmed the algorithms that go into that way i go wow that's pretty cool he says and all that tell you you'll notice that the keys never wear out i go no they never do no matter how many times and i've had this one here for 15 years he says the reason is is when they make those keys they put those letters that go all the way through the key so if you took one of those keys and cut it halfway it'd still be as crisp as it is right now so you know it's just kind of a funny little thing that i learned a long time about go about this material but you know just that's just a trivia in case you get a trivia question on it so so i want to talk about your the discipline things it's really interesting because both you guys still have your your regular daytime job this is my fall time yeah so it's really interesting um and and you know people coming into the business they're going to be coming from both sides i think a lot of people are coming from the side of having a regular day job and you're talking about the discipline and getting things done when you can versus me where um i actually have two cell phones canadian american so my american one is my business phone yeah and and at five o'clock or thereabouts whenever i'm done you know sometime between 4 30 and 6.

uh i plug this in back here and i close those doors and that's it and i walk away and my business is done until morning nothing that will happen that seven o'clock at night is going to make any difference i like it now and tomorrow morning i think that's part of what i've got driving me as well is that you know i've i've got this entrepreneurial spirit i want to work for myself i want to set my own hours uh but the day job inhibits that so part of my motivation in moving from a note investor even though i do have no investments of me personally was setting up this fund which is a note business right and so and so because my goal at some point in time and maybe this is the year you know i have some benchmarks that i have set that will give me a guide me along the way maybe this is the year that i'm able to say okay i'm done with the w-2 job i'm at a point with therm that i can just move full-time into the note business right and and you know do what nathan does now i only have one phone but i can still you know set my own hours and i i know right now i'm going through a a a big deal because you know i i've been married for 36 years 36 and a half years and even though that's been going on for a long time there's still you know you have to continually build relationships and so i've got to have a kind of an understanding wife but at some point in time you know you've got to say something has to give because when you think of you know i've still got my own known investing i've got the old entity that i'm winding down i've got the day job i've got the new entity that i'm building up and then i have a family relationship and so there's a lot of things that hit me on a day-to-day basis yeah and yesterday was one of those days to be honest i was a little overwhelmed you know there's just so much going on because every one of those things i just listed there has a sub list of things going on as well in fact i i use a a a software program an online program called workflowy okay okay workflowy is an online thing that basically is a list builder and so i use that with every one of my headers being the things that i just mentioned there and a couple of other ones and then all the sub things going on underneath that one of the things i want to do and i hope to be able to do it in 2021 is start a podcast okay okay i have a company that you guys may have seen called funding factors uh funding factors is really my note media company it's going to be something where i want to to talk about you know notes to some degree uh there are a lot of podcasts that talk about notes and so i don't want to try and replicate that there's a lot of great note uh of podcasts out there but i'm more interested in talking about business and lifestyle and being a solopreneur and those kind of things and so that takes a heck of a lot of time to do a podcast yeah you know i'm going to pull it real quick cody and let you know that one thing we did you touched on before with the phone years ago i created myself i have all my emails are g suite emails right yeah so with g suite comes a google voice number so you can literally turn that on and off so that text message phone calls all that stuff can be shut off a period of time and it's forward to my cell phone and if i ever have to call somebody from the google voice it calls and it shows by the normal number so just an idea if you don't have it already or someone else is listening and if you want to have it separate from your business you can shut off the google voice number in any moment at except for nine to five or whatever you want to set for you have text messaging and phone calls if you receive a text from us more than likely it's not from our personal it's from our business thing so that multiple people could check it and also get forward to your email as well yeah i i do have that opener that makes such a difference got to be able to what i learned at some point along here was i run the business the business doesn't run me yeah i and it was getting to a point where i was getting completely out of hand where all of my time was spent you know worrying about and thinking about and dealing with business and then i took a step back and said no no no i'm in charge here not the business and it was a real mind shift to set parameters and boundaries and and there's exceptions of course and if there's some kind of emergency then sure i'll we'll deal with the emergency but on a regular basis no no no work hours are nine to five and yep and if i want to go skiing in the morning i go skiing in the morning because i can catch the benefit anything you have there is the lack of w-2 right you have eight hours you can spend on doing whatever you need to get done yeah where you know cody and other people like ourselves have that limited time where sometimes you have to get up at 5 00 a.m if you have 30 emails and then before your wife want to go to dinner right yeah you have that struggles are for myself and yourself we have the kids going on right right and the kids come in here i'm gonna put that off for a minute so yeah what we did to change it is automate a lot of stuff right you know as i talk about my automation is you dedicate your time and block out and you're able to spend a half hour on the phone with a what a borrower where you know someone like cody or myself or other people you have to find that break during your day job to sneak out to make the phone call right for the most part yeah now one thing i did different with the business that i didn't have with the with the prior entity is my oldest son is part of the business with me my son josh and and he's he's just brilliant he's brought a new level uh of analysis uh and just and just a business acumen to the business and and he's been a tremendous tremendous help and and he's very sensitive to my schedule he's very sensitive to my goal of of exiting the w-2 job so uh and so he's been really really integral to the successes that we've had with the with the fund and so i i want to make sure that that you mentioned earlier do i have va's or anything like that no i've got something better i've got my son and he's pretty accomplished uh you know he understands a lot about excel that i just don't uh with the vr lookups and all these other kind of things he knows some formulas and he's been putting some things together so you know hopefully that when we make a bid especially on a bulk basis that we've been able to drill down and get a quality bid that works for both parties uh because he's set up uh you know uh his systems on his side that give us the numbers i've kind of got to the point where rather than me having to you know drill down on every file so specifically uh that i've relied on him and so far i've been very very pleased and very happy and so uh you know he's he's again i want to make sure that i get a shout out to him because you know we can't do this job by ourselves we talk a lot about all the vendors that we hire whether it be you know a uh you know some sort of concierge who will order our bpos and our own e's or you know somebody to call the county or all these other things involved there uh you can't do this by by ourselves in fact i need you guys you know because there's things that we do just the various platforms and the and the pages that we have on our social media uh just to reach out and bounce stuff off so i mean that's the important thing is is i i certainly don't want to say that i'm doing this all by myself uh because you can't you just you just can't do it and it's funny because i had time to talk to josh i know you you know about this me and josh spent probably a good hour on the phone and it was amazing his excel knowledge and whatnot we went back and forth to some things and i was teaching him some stuff he i was sharing him stuff with him but he has some amazing hours so yes josh i know you're probably listening on this great conversation um and his knowledge was good for you to kind of teach him what you've taught him but i'm sure there's things that in the business that you still need to teach him where he's the numbers guy yeah you're the the notes and understanding the legality of stuff yeah um what's on the relationships with borrowers through your servicing experience and things like that like there's there's ways to talk to people and yeah not yeah honey become a cognizant of the fair debt collection practices at which i act which i am and he isn't but yeah you know and and we were we've done a pretty good job uh and it continually refines uh you know is josh is going to be responsible for these kind of things like i love him because he's paying the bills and dealing with the accounting side of stuff okay but that allows me to try and seek new sources and deal with borrowers as i need to uh and and deal with asset managers so so uh and each letter that we send out we bounce off each other for a second set of eyes and so i think you know if you if you were to go to our website bridgecityfactors.com you know we have a little scene in there that says a a refreshing approach to node investing and and so that's one of the little mantras that we kind of talk about is we want to bring something different to the table that maybe a asset manager or whomever an investor finds it a little bit different and so that's that's the challenge that's the challenge we have every single day is what can we do different to differentiate ourselves from everybody else that's out there and you guys know as well as i do there's you know 1231 new node investors that started here just within the beginning of the year and and they're either going to rise up to a higher level or my concern in some ways is is that you know just because of inexperience that you know they'll make a mistake they'll create a situation that becomes pretty public and pretty visible and so you know there's a time i believe just to sit and learn i know that there's some eagerness that goes out there but if you do have a day job you know the note investing side is a great supplement it's a great time to ramp up there's a there's opportunity there but don't want to get too hasty in it you know because you know one of the bigger concerns is you're looking at various uh legislative bodies across the country yeah you know they're doing two things one there's always a lack of revenue and they're all very very consumer oriented now we always want to do the right thing for our borrowers our consumers there's a lot of ethical things that we bring to the table as well but i you know what i what i get concerned about from time to time when i see certain questions being asked is is there is will this present a situation that becomes public enough that the government gets involved and is there some sort of new rule regulation or something that comes into play uh because somebody does something based on inexperience so i i think i guess what i would say assuming that there's some newer people listening to what we're talking about right here don't ever be uh hesitant to reach out to the those of us that have been around for a while you know i i don't want to be a guru that's the thing i don't want to start an education platform i don't want to do that not only because i don't have the time for it but there's plenty of good educators out there already but what i will always do is i will always answer your telephone call and so if you just want to give me a call about some stuff i mean i talked to a guy yesterday uh who's kind of new in the business he's got some financial resources behind him uh and he kind of just wanted to talk about some things residential commercial and kind of what sort of stuff like that and i enjoy those calls it's kind of a give back uh that i like to do uh back into the industry especially the mortgage industry that's been pretty good to me for the last 38 and a half years and so i agree i i'll take that call all day and i'll i can talk about notes oh yeah yeah but i'm not going to be your teacher but for everyone's sake please do reach out if you don't know yeah don't guess because like you say cody it can it can land you into a whole lot of trouble and frankly you can make a lot of trouble for the rest of us yeah yeah and what's the answer that yeah i still remember the phone call i had with you cody and we talked about some private stuff a couple years ago and you're like listen i'm kind of new not sure about things but that phone call me understood that you knew where you were but the fact that you can always call and ask questions and every assurance is good for a lot of people um which is different from normal real estate because you can't do that with normal real estate what you're buying now let's just dive into a little bit about what you're doing now you're looking at assets without getting to details are you looking at i think are states performing non-performing first seconds where's your where's your desire at well our our target uh acquisition is about 60 to 65 percent of performing notes we set up our fund if you will uh to try and provide a certain uh preferred rate back to you know our investors and i can't talk about that specifically just because of the limitations in the regulation the uh platform that we we are registered with uh but that's what we're trying to target we're trying to target a uh you know a 60 to 65 percent of performing loans uh we'll look at another 15 to 20 percent of reperforming loans uh ones that i consider real re-performing loans not one that just had a modified and three payments that's not a re-performing loan in my opinion i need some i'd like to see a 12-month history uh to pay the prices but but you know you you think uh the premise would be that you can actually get a little bit better price on a re-performing loan than you could on a regular performing loan uh and then we left a certain 10 to 15 percent uh available for non-performing loans uh and and there's some specific strategies we have in in that i mean one of the things that i've said uh since i've got into the no business for my own self is that you know i've spent 30 plus years putting people into homes i want to end my career keeping people in homes and so that's what we're trying to do when we buy non-performing loans is i never really buy one specifically with the target of going through a foreclosure and reselling it we want to try and find one where that homeowner has some sort of issue that created the hardship the distress that perhaps they have overcome it or with certain you know strategies we can find a workout that works for everybody and so so that's that's what our goal is to try and keep those homeowners in the house get them to make 12 months of consistent payment and then i can resell that out as a a re-performing note so that's kind of our strategies that's what we're looking at you know trying to provide a cash flow opportunity for ourselves and for our investors uh then and also take advantage if we do have to end up going through a foreclosure process process that that homeowner gets to exit that property with dignity uh and that we can get them and get another person in that house or sell it at an auction or position it where you know it works out well for everybody so you know that's our goal on that it's part of just the morality and ethnic ethics that you know we want to try and bring to this note industry business and i'll be one of the first ones that call bullcrap when i see something that is anything other than that because if you're in the in this here just simply to try and foreclose on somebody uh i i think that's secondary of all and that's your primary you know goal you know another thing is you foreclose you can always turn it into rental property uh we got one right now my old entity that we ended up taking a dean liu uh put about 35 40 000 into it put a tenant in it now i've got trying to market it as a turnkey rental to another investor and keller carries seller financing on that because another thing is i don't want to be a landlord i am from the moment uh but i want to be a note investor and that'd be one another one that i could put in my personal portfolio so i mean i know it's a lot of things there but hopefully that answered the question so so one of the questions that uh in the facebook feed is that um someone's looking for a mentor right um one thing's holding it back is deciding who should hold their hand what is your suggestion or answer to those who are looking for a mentor to hold their hand along the process yeah well i i think a lot of it has to do with the vetting process if somebody aligns with your own personal philosophy uh then that's probably the right person to continue to talk on i i know one of the things and i'll use this as an example is that you know again there's a lot of note funds out there but really rather than invest in the note fund you're really kind of investing with the sponsor and so you have to go through that vetting process to make sure that your personal philosophy and goals and morals and ideas match up with the person that you want to align yourself from a mentor aspect of it and so i think that's the main thing so what if somebody's getting started out you know they don't want to talk to the first or get aligned with the first person they talk to you know so talk to somebody should talk to all three of us okay and even though the three of us for the most part have a lot of similar looks at it you know at this industry uh there's just something that's going to click in whatever we do from a personality standpoint or whatever and and that's the the thing that uh that you know might push you towards one person versus another so i mean that's the main thing you gotta make sure that you align philosophically uh with the person that you're gonna work with and so you know it's all a business whether you're a note investor or running a no business you have to treat it like a business and so every one of us need to have a model written down and stay within the model so you know one of the things when i was a rhea president and i did bring speakers in every month uh whether they were local or national some of them a lot of them sold stuff and i always would tell the the you know the members of the ria that you know we're bringing somebody in this is what they're talking about if it's part of your written model you got a business going on even though it may be a side hustle if it's part of your model and they click with you then go ahead and buy the program and add it to what you're doing but if it's not part of your model or you don't click with something or something set right you know in your gut then listen grab a few nuggets but don't spend your money and so same thing goes on with educators the same thing goes on with people that you're going to mentor with or want to mentor with you uh you know a lot of it is how you align and i've said this a couple times aligned philosophically with him so and i think it's seeing what you said there is one of the things i tell people i i'm not being unmentored with one person right i think if you know you reach out to three four no investors and just get their idea about what situation you're gonna get maybe a slightly different answer from all of them but it's actually better than just getting it from one oh i agree yeah absolutely sometimes not pitch and hold yourself into one mentor pivot yourself to four or five and you do like or three that you like and say listen i'm gonna bounce the same idea of three different people to get their opinion their suggestions their thoughts because we all have our different experience versus just one thing right um i think that with that it helps the person get a different perspective um but you know so i'm always in favor of don't find the mentor find the network yeah i agree i agree and and rarely i can't even think of one time but rarely will uh somebody who's been in the business for a while not pick up the phone and talk with you i find that very very refreshing in the note industry is that you know there's there's only really two things that we keep secret and that's uh that's our well maybe three maybe maybe four but one of them of course is is our sources one of them is our roi calculators all day although dave you know you've been very very generous with yours uh and and there's in our marketing uh aspects of things you know we kind of keep those kind of secret uh but as far as you know situations and uh things that we encounter or how would i look at this or maybe a technical question i mean this is a very very refreshing industry because we're all open i had an old boss a long time ago when i was uh kind of a what we call the grunt loan officer i was just getting my feet wet being a mortgage loan officer this was before computers uh but everything was done by hand uh and uh he told me all boats rise with the tide and so if nathan's doing well then i'm pretty sure that dave's doing well and i'm doing well and if i can help you know somebody who's been in the industry for six months or less them do better then i think it's positive for everybody and so that's you know kind of my approach as people talk to me is if i can help you take a step forward then we all get to take a step forward together so i would add one more thing for the for the mentor question yeah i think before you if you if you are looking for somebody that's going to hold your hand and walk you through it make sure your expectations are very clear on what exactly does that look like because because mentors definition and your definition may not match make sure that you're on the same page of that and and the expectation is clear what it is what are you exactly looking for and yeah and and then be realistic if you want to be sitting in their office with them and you know day in day out that may not be realistic maybe it is maybe somebody's gonna offer that but that may not be realistic so just make sure that you you understand and i think by networking with them you're gonna find people say you know who else are you talking to and there are people in space that we all know we don't agree with and if that person comes to us we're not gonna talk bad about them but you can get a sense who we trust who we don't trust sure and you can kind of get that we don't talk bad about people but you can say hey listen um look at this person where your thoughts are and you can agree between the lines what we think of that person versus someone reached out to me just recently all that up and said listen i'm looking alone nathan has for sale right away yeah it's a good guy you can trust him the deal is good that happens so quickly because the relationships we've built over the years not three months we've been talking to cody nathan for years now which is crazy but it's a tight community and and not to say that it's exclusive but tight just meaning we're we're everyone's friendly with each other and like you say cody we can talk to each other and we do all the time and to say hey i've never seen this yeah me neither nathan i remember the first time i met you face to face it was that uh i was a paper source in vegas one year okay and you're taller than you look on tv and and i remember walking up to you and it's like we've known each other for a while yeah you know it's like you know we don't know all the intricacies and details but it's like hey i can pick up a conversation at a conference as well as i can on the telephone so that's that's the the the tightness that you refer to in this industry is is there there's folks that you can just talk to and you know you get to know us all uh yeah i i'm pretty excited i'm i'm hoping that uh sometime this year uh conferences start up again face to face i mean because you know i miss the personal interaction these the zoo meetings are great they're fine they've kept us uh uh you know connected but you know going and talking to somebody just for the networking asset aspect of it all uh is uh is very very uh worthwhile for me so me too yeah yeah you know i know she asked additional questions like she's looking for someone who's not a scam someone to help with your diligence um you know due diligence is a big word right um in some of that stuff you gotta have to learn your own um and there are great courses out there i know dan deppen i'm sure not sure dan's listening in he has a due diligence course um but i think a lot of stuff is just asking questions yeah when you get into it just hey guys i'm stuck in due diligence and i was comment back what part of the diligence there's plenty of space in due diligence we're talking collateral we're talking o e we're talking you know the deal itself valuations what do you do how do you value your property it depends also what's your final what do you want from this because that's going to shape your due diligence up front as well if you're looking for a performing note that's going to be totally different than one that you're looking at you know a potential foreclosure and that that's like there's so many nathan that is a great point because i'm listening to you and i'm thinking you know that old adage uh from seven habits is begin with the end in mind exactly and then you start there what do i want this to look like and then reverse engineer it back to where it is to go so how do you this is what i wanted to look like how do i go backwards to get it to where it looks like today uh and then in under with the understanding that it may not get to what you want it to be ideally and be prepared for you know to to zig down this other rabbit trail and if it does that what does your net result look like that so that's a really great point is you know and it all goes back to your written model what do you want exactly what's your predominance amount of what you want to do as a business and how do i get this particular one to work and there's just going to be some loans some notes that you look at that aren't going to work that way you'll see that but as we've heard a thousand times i mean i can drive from portland to new york and it's better if i go buy a map rather than than not uh because otherwise who knows i might end up in you know in jersey so yeah don't want it up here you don't want to come here we're still trying to get out so cody you know i'm gonna ask this last final question what is keeping you inside your day job and not retiring three years ago besides the money is there something else that's happened you know we don't want to get into intricacies on how much millions of dollars you've made but what if what what's held you back from diving in is it nervousness is it scaredness is it something else but i know what mine is unfortunately yeah well you know that's that's the philosophical question i've been asking myself for a while uh you know i i talked to a very important a very uh somebody outside the industry just this last sunday very very briefly after church and and they said you'll know when you know you know and sometimes you just have to take that leap uh i asked my one of my sons last night and i asked josh from time to time is that is that is there something in my day job that keeps me comfortable okay and and so is that one of the things you know and i look at everybody teaches us shows us that you know you've gotta you've gotta have three or five months of reserves in the bank and you've got to work your side hustle to a point it can replace your your income from your day job and then you know you drop this budget and say i need this for the house payment this for the car payment and all these other things i want to keep the lights on it's throwing out i need the heat on uh you know and so and so sometimes it's it's being comfort i i'm not uh it's really scared to take the the pull the trigger but i also know like you know i'm trying to buy 19 notes that's kind of a pretty significant trigger uh and so uh but i'm not the only one that gets to make that decision also okay like i mentioned i've been married for 36 and a half years and so that's a pretty big decision that affects her lifestyle as well as mine and so uh you know those are the kind of things that come into play on that uh you know i i'm uh this is a kind of a funny thing but it's amazing how many uh medicare insurance companies know how old i am uh and so that's a choice that's coming into my in my vision here real real shortly i mean i got stuff all over on my desk you probably can't see that of of just mailers i get about trying to make those decisions that come with that plan and so i'm trying to build like a three or four legged stool okay so i've got stuff coming from this account stuff from this account so uh those are this kind of the things that run through my head at three o'clock in the morning is that you know when can i do that i have set probably a resignation date three or four times i have the letter written and i keep forwarding the date okay uh but it's coming to the point it's coming it's gonna come to the point where i say i just i just can't do this anymore i'm limited in energy i'm limited in time uh and what do i really really want to do it's like you know what do i want to do when i grow up and so it's it's that's kind of what i'm hoping comes clear uh here this year you know i see eventually one impedes the other yeah you gotta make a choice yeah and and and you know if if we're successful uh in this in this submission this indicative bids that we sent in yesterday you know if i'm successful on at least half of them that's gonna be a big step a big step to what we do next uh you know i've been very very fortunate that i've been able to work out of the home uh since uh almost a whole year now yeah and been able to do the quite the good division between the two uh but that's been this it's almost like it's been preparatory in a lot of ways so you know it's interesting because for me you know it's more for healthcare my wife won't let me quit because the health care package with the state um but yeah we juggle a lot you know when you do your lunch hour stuff like that but you know or you bring your laptop to work with you we've done i've done that before um you know my day jobs fulfill some other needs which you said before it does have some good perks to it you know that i enjoy doing but at one point or another you do have to make that leap and your spouse is your second partner on it everything you do yeah um but i think i think for a lot of those who are listening um getting into the even the person speaking she wants to buy our first note right yeah and learning the space can you be scary what well final i'll make probably one of our five questions what would you give advice a person who's scared to get in what do you how do you get over that fear well you know a lot of that comes from what you've done yesterday and so if if you've prepped yourself yesterday uh or the day before then that'll lead you to take action today yeah you don't want to be a professional student at some point in time you've got to get over that hump but you know i think uh preparation and you know and there's a scripture that says there's wisdom and a multitude of counselors and so don't like we talked about a little bit earlier here don't be able to don't be concerned or hesitant is the word i use not to just pick up the phone and say hey i'm looking at this note it's my first purchase this is what i see and then one of us will be able to ask him is okay what is it you don't see and so and so those are the kind of things is preparation ask people and and then you just got to do it a lot of us say that if you purchase your first note maybe you do it in your self-directed ira or similar vehicle and buy a performing note one that's going to take care of itself while you learn the nuances of that you know the other preparation part of it is is make sure you have your vendors already lined up you don't want to buy a note today and then not have somebody to order and own ephraim that's not a realtor i mean dave's got tremendous resources where you can pick up a phone and call a realtor in the in the area that uh this asset is sitting uh but make sure you have your servicing company set up you've looked at their contract you've looked at their fees you know all that preparatory back office stuff helps you take a step and build your confidence because you've got that already taken care of one of the things i talked about and i i used to send out a newsletter every week i've got a little bit more uh sporadic on that but uh it had to do with with talking about you'll find in the in the note history it's it's hurry up and wait okay and and so you'll you'll notice that uh you're going through a whole bunch of notes and you kind of find find maybe one or two or three you want to put a bid in on so there's you you put your bid on it then you've got this two week period that you know once you get approved and you got to finish it all off and then you wait again as the note gets transfers it gets up and servicing so use those down times those wait times to build your confidence get a little bit educated look a little bit deeper in the file that you're looking at and so it's all preparatory it's a little bit education but you don't want to just be a professional student you want to make sure that if you're going to spend the money that you got to take that next step again going back to my experience as a rhea president we had a lot of people that bought those packages but they're still sitting on the desk getting all dusty you know that's the not wisest use of your funds it may be the easiest but it's time to get uncomfortable if you want to take the next step yeah yeah awesome advice my man thank you i don't have any further questions nathan you have anything else you want to add mr cody i think that's it it's really interesting talking to cody because because so many of us come from a real estate background and cody's coming up from the right side of it yeah from the servicing and finance side of it uh which is really the best preparation much much much better than than the real estate side so it's it's that you've got an interesting perspective and yeah it's again i i you know i yeah i'm trying to be kind of visible right now the day will come where i'll fall off the radar uh but uh you know as long as i'm visible anybody out there is listening uh go ahead and reach out to me i'm i'm encouraged to see what's going on out there yeah it's a great industry to be in uh if you do it right it's a win-win-win for everybody involved and as long as we maintain that philosophy on it uh it's going to be good for us so last question that i got for you cody i asked fred moskovitz a couple weeks ago where do you see this going where are we going in 2021 where's the industry going well you know it's kind of an interesting thing because i've had some conversations about that you know there's a lot of forbearance stuff that's going to expire here yeah uh there's some legislation that's getting involved on a national statewide basis uh there's a lot of scratching dents that are out there too that are still overpriced uh but i i'm pretty optimistic about it i mean uh for for the people who have the right uh connections if you will uh the right network uh it's gonna be okay and so building the network uh there was a period of time where i uh i just kind of had to take a pause on some things dave knows you know the issues surrounding that and so i spent my time in that season building my network and so we don't want to be too hasty we certainly don't want to over buy over over buy some things there's a lot of that that some sellers are counting on but use this as a season to develop to read more to learn more i think opportunity is going to be around the corner actually i think at the end of march when the forbearance stuff is completely uh and the moratoriums are lifted yeah you know there'll still be some things going on you know we deal in the private sector if you will the private secondary market uh which is opposed to the government sponsored stuff and there's still things out there that can become available so uh i i'm optimistic about what 2021 and 2022 are going to do again to me it looks like it's another opportunity for us to help some homeowners and that's what it's all about yeah agreed yeah well cody i'm going to disconnect from facebook live um we did i did post uh we had my assistant posted your name and email address into the feed okay anyone wants to reach out they could definitely do that sure so um i appreciate everyone tuning in watching it we'll have a replay of them shortly live and we'll go from there hope all well thanks a lot everyone for watching and we'll go take care have a great weekend all right talk to you guys thanks a lot for the opportunity you bet thank you my inside all right got all that turned off all right guys make sure you get this off we're supposed to get three to four inches tonight so that'll be fun oh nice hey everybody dave puts here from jkp holdings alongside of me nathan turner nathan how you doing my man i'm doing great awesome our special guest today mr cody cox how are you sir i'm doing well out here on the west coast got a little bit of a sprinkling of some snow overnight of course in oregon when it snows everything shuts down so i'm nice and toasty in my office home office today oh yeah i i've had snow inches for days now i think my kids want to see grass again which is amazing it's interesting we got about i'd say half an inch of ice overnight uh and then it snowed about maybe another half inch on top that and uh you know for the first time uh since i've been with the state for 10 years they shut down all the state campuses from portland all the way down to salem so so uh it's yeah but i i think the reason they did that of course is because most of us are working remotely you know 80 to 90 of the time anyway so it's like uh just like normal but i get to sit down and look at the little uh little weather and uh we're supposed to get some more tonight for the weekend so that'll be great yep we don't get enough of that here i know we feel bad because our kids are not knowing what snow days are anymore yeah right they're like wait a snow day's a remote day for our kids our home right now so it's kind of stings for them right but i actually hear somebody somebody outside uh shoveling the the sidewalk which is unusual for us yeah we did last weekend we built it up we've got enough snow piled up right along the driveway and along the edge of the street my son and i went out and we built a snow tunnel and it's big enough you can get we did a corner unit kind of thing a little room where we can sit in and you can sit up and there's room for a couple of us in there and that's awesome it's so much fun so stephen tucker was listening and said it's 80 degrees in phoenix right now so i'm not sure if i'm jealous or none of them but you're missing out man i like the snow yeah so we went snow tubing yesterday so uh awesome well cody i think that we kind of went to our normal conversation with each other because cody cox me nathan has known cody for many years now yeah he's been one of the guys that we've gone to for questions um cody has some very unique knowledge in space yeah share a little bit about that but he didn't dive into you know today about being a note investor having a w-2 job and how to do it and then what the struggles are with that so let's start off with cody how did you get into notes how did you hear about it and what time frame was it about well a little bit about my background i've been in the mortgage industry since uh 1984 so i've been in it 38 and a half years i started off uh with a mortgage loan servicer out of walla walla washington and uh i i basically my first permanent job there i was the guy that when you called the 800 number to talk about your mortgage i was a guy that answered the phone okay and i had all the all the case numbers with the loan numbers that ended in eight six to zero zero so that was my case numbers and so so i got to learn the servicing side of things uh uh right away uh and so all the calls that came in customer service uh was a good basic background for what this target is and then i uh i moved from that area into the portland oregon area uh later on that year uh and uh and uh worked for the largest savings and loan in the northwest at that time but that was on the origination side and eventually i went into loan originations i became one of the leading loan officers for this large savings and loan uh that is no longer in business uh but then uh and and so i got a a pretty good idea about originating loans then i stepped into a management role and managed a couple of mortgage origination offices uh for washington mutual out here uh in the northwest and you know they're no longer in business and so uh so but you know we i manage an office that did 210 million on an annual basis and so got to know that aspect of his as well uh and so you know i i i then went into uh worked for a company that where i became an account executive a wholesale account executive and those are the folks that uh you know go out and used to be able to say as a mortgage broker i have 100 different lenders to choose from well i was one of those lenders and my goal was to become one of the top one or two lenders for these particular brokers that company is kind of no longer in business so i decided that i'd go to the state of oregon and so far they're still in business uh but i came to the state of oregon in in 2011 uh and started work in what was called what is called the oregon homeownership stabilization uh initiative which is the oregon version of the hardest hit funds and so and so uh my role in that position was i was the servicer liaison which basically meant i was a single point of contact for all the servicers across the country that had homeowners in the state of oregon so they all called me and i all called them and so all the exchanges all the all the uh what they called uh uh they had a term for that it basically was glorified excel spreadsheets that would back and forth came through me and when i first got there we had about 55 to 57 uh mortgage loan company servicing companies on board uh by the time we i left there was 225 on board so i got a pretty good mix of all these kind of folks across the country that were servicing loans and then if they had questions on the program on the hardest hit funds i was the one that was supposed to answer those questions so in those days you know i was pretty well deep into the hardest hit funds uh you know from a state agency uh perspective and of course you know those that's the for those of you who may not know what the hardest hit funds were uh back in the 2008 2009 2010 period when the country was going through you know excessive foreclosures and you know homeowner loss and all those kind of things uh the u.s treasury set up a 1.7 trillion dollar fund dispersed it out to all the what they consider the hardest hit funds across the country oregon being one of them and uh i think we got you know several hundred thousand dollars and our goal was to try and keep people in the houses uh and i think we did a pretty good good uh good uh job at doing that as i see here on the website that's still up uh uh that we helped over 13 000 homeowners retain their houses in the state of oregon and so uh i was with them for a couple years and then i got a position which i call is across the street uh uh the state of state of oregon is one of those unique states uh in the in the country that offers a dedicated veterans home loan program uh to the state's veterans that's a separate and distinct from the federal va program it's it's our own program uh so in california they have that program they call it calvet texas has a program wisconsin kind of has a program alaska has a program and so does oregon and so i'm the senior executive that runs that program for the state of oregon i'm in charge of originations and servicing uh and now i report to the director and and the chief financial officer so uh that's my day job it's a pretty intense day job uh and so everything veteran oriented for home loans that's not a federal va loan you know comes through across my desk for the most part so you know it's still very much in the thick of mortgage loan servicing and originations and maintaining a full-time day job but also trying to get involved in this note stuff i remember uh one of one of the things in my background as well is that i was the president of the board of directors of the local real estate investors association here in portland oregon which we call northwest ria and it was part of my job was to bring in you know speakers national speakers to speak to the group and that's one of the ways that ria's you know generate revenue for the ria because they're mostly non-profits although some of them are privately owned is by selling products and get it kind of the product that these national speakers came in so i had a national speaker you know i was here in portland and trying to wholesale houses trying to do some minor rehabs you know all those kind of things that really are difficult to do when you have a full-time day job you know if you're trying to negotiate with the seller you know you kind of have to do it after hours or on weekends it takes up a tremendous amount of time and most of those require some sort of huge marketing effort with trying to find lists generate letters send them out respond to phone calls and it's just really hard to do that on a full-time day job so i just i'm sitting in a real meeting one time i have a guy come in which way i think we all know uh and uh he's out of florida uh his his he works for companies out of uh out of texas and uh he's a he's a great guy became great friends with him uh and he's sitting there i'm sitting there on the saturday webinar uh listening on saturday presentation and listening to him and i go what the heck am i doing i've been in the mortgage industry at this point 30 some years this makes perfect sense to me why don't i just start doing this because you know i can do it anywhere in the world i don't have to generate a bunch of letters to send them out and you know and there's a lot of people that target you know seller finance loans and they still send out marketing letters but the way it was presented i go this just makes sense to me you know i can do it in the evening i can do it on the weekend and still not interrupt really what i've got going on a full-time day job yeah so what i started doing then is is you know meeting guys like you and there's other people's out there and getting advice on how to get this going and i asked what year was that what was happening what year was this uh i had to be 2014 2015 somewhere in that in that time rate yeah because i remember the first note they bought was in 2015.

and one of the pieces of i i of advice is you know i need some help with this because you know after going through the 2008-2009 my capital was was you know very limited uh you know i had to save my house twice all that sort of stuff i mean i've been through some stuff and then uh so i asked the guy i said well how do i get going how do i get people to want to invest with me he says the first thing you need to do is do your own thing use your own capital so i stood up a self-directed ira i bought a couple notes one was a a little second mortgage on a rental house in bend oregon and uh apparently the owners of that particular rental house thought that a second mortgage could not foreclose well we started foreclosure and as soon as it hit uh they contacted me we ended up settling at a reduced amount and still put you know seven or eight ten thousand dollars into my self-directed ira that's not a bad deal yeah so the second thing i did is i bought another little uh note uh out of uh out of klamath falls organ which is not exactly the hotbed of anything uh but this this particular borrower had bought it as a second home uh this borrower was out of california i'm quite sure that that borrower never set foot in the house uh when i bought the note i bought it for twelve thousand five hundred dollars uh it was in pretty bad shape uh we ended up uh i hired some people to chase this borrower through southern california we finally caught up to it to the borrower they signed a deed in lieu i said if you sign the dean lou you know they bought it as a second home so the deficiency judgment on that could have taken place right but if you sign the deed in lieu i'll waive my rights to deficiency uh they signed it we got it back uh i boarded up the house i listed it uh mid-may of that year and it sold two days later uh we closed at the end of the month and i the return on that particular one we i think we sold it for 25.5 and he did the calculations it was an annualized return of 103 fantastic so now i had some case studies and so by using those case studies i was able to start a new venture that where i was able to get some investors and we did some joint venture investing we did that for about four or five years i am now in the process of winding that venture down it is something that when you do a joint venture one of the there's a couple things you need to be really really uh sensitive to uh one is is how the joint venture is structured uh because if you structure it wrong and i see a lot of it being structured uh incorrectly it could be considered selling the security and although it may not rise to the attention of the sec it certainly will rise to the attention of the of the state regulators and so you need to be sensitive to that is if that's the way you're doing it um the second thing is is all the risk on that particular venture is tied up into one asset and so if something goes wrong with that one asset uh you know the the risk escalates quite a bit and so one of the things i wanted to do is i wanted to do something at a higher level and so at the beginning of last year 2020 we actually stood up a fund and we're in the process of you know doing some capital raise or i just submitted a a a bid on 19 assets yesterday that we're trying to raise we've got some investors involved there it's all you know filed with the states it's all filed with the sec and so really what that is is a difference to me between investing note investing in a note business which is something we can talk about a little bit later but again the whole thing about around this here is i still have a full-time day job and talk about that because that's a big thing for a lot of people yeah that has not departed from their full-time job you know right in his home all the time i still have a w-2 job right so that flexibility is limited so how were what were some of the struggles you had with having a w-2 job how did you get over them and what have you done that you did differently when you first got started well i i think you know how the struggles i've had with that amount to time and energy you know because if you're working with investors you're working with sellers you've got to get things ordered in the note business you know you still got to find a time and be able to do that uh because you have investors that have put some faith and money into you but you still can't do anything to neglect the state job and the interesting thing of course is with my with my job you know being the executive that runs the home loan program for oregon veterans you know i had to go through uh a potential conflict of interest test that with my employer uh and and because i was not at purchasing notes although the first notes i just talked about were in the state of oregon with my self-directed ira i'm not purchasing anything in the state of oregon and so i'm able to differentiate that i also am not allowed to use any of the state's equipment so even though i have a laptop next to me here in my home office which is the states or if i'm in my office down in salem you know i've got i've got to make sure that i am not using state equipment to do anything on uh my personal business so you've got to be very disciplined i guess that's the other word you have to use here is you have to be disciplined to keep that separated and if you have to make a phone call to a vendor or or anything like that during your work day you know you have to wait till the lunch hour you have to wait to your break and so it's it's a matter of being very very disciplined and then when you get home you know dedicating the time to the lot of the paperwork because you guys will know there's a lot of paper in the mortgage industry uh even though a lot of what we're trying to do here is uh is electronic and digital and we all say from time to time that we can do this job anywhere in the world provided we have a good internet access yeah uh you know there's still a lot of paper involved here and you know we haven't quite got to the full digital signature yet uh and and things such as that but uh but trying you know just just maintaining that discipline with keeping the two separate but yet given the proper time and energy and then you know it's it's a 40 minute trip one way to my office and so i lose about an hour and a half each day when i make that commute and by the time i get home you know i've got to try and maintain a certain energy level because it's it's it's you know it's hard you got to have a why you've got to have some motivation uh to give up coming home and putting your feet up and watching tv uh to come in here and do this and so you know part of my motivation is is that uh you know we got behind when it was the 2009-2010 uh mortgage crisis we got we got behind and and so i've got to catch up that difference and so i've got to keep motivated to do that uh as well as you know there's things i want to do and uh there's a lot to be said about being you know a solopreneur uh versus being tied down to a w-2 i mean here's a quick example easy example here about three weeks ago my oldest my youngest son that lives here as well doesn't live with me but he lives he took a day off from his job to go skiing and uh he wanted me to come with him and it couldn't i mean i had things scheduled i had stuff on the calendar and i couldn't get out of him and so i don't want to do that again if he calls me up on a thursday and say let's go skiing tomorrow i want to do that i want to have the flexibility to do that and with the day job i don't actually have that flexibility kind of i do but if things are already on the calendar you know it's hard to do that so i guess too is that sometimes you take a day off from your w-2 job to work on your business yeah exactly you have a lot going on as a you know nasa that you're coming to doing due diligence on you're looking at 19 assets you may need a day off take a day off a sick day just to work on your business yeah yeah unfortunately i get personal business days and you know sometimes i get the cough uh but like like monday the monday's president's day and i get that day and so you know you've got to take advantage of those as well so what do you do to assist you in those struggles of having a w-2 job the limitation of hours right yeah that i only have commute what were some of the things you adjusted what tools you use what do you do to accommodate the lack of time how do you stay organized enough to be able to put it all in place yeah that's that's a really good question yeah obviously i have a pretty good calendar a calendaring system but i have a really good filing system too and i use the cloud quite a bit uh and my phone i have a a nice iphone with with the google drive on it so i really can get to any of the documents uh whenever i need to so i try and maintain kind of a structured filing system to keep that organized and that works out quite uh quite well uh any software you use or anything like that you know i i use uh i i have pipe drive going on for my crm right now uh there's some things about it i really really like there's some things about it that i wish it did more uh and and such is also the struggle is they keep adding features yes which means i have to sit down and take some time to learn these features and so you've got to say well do i need to recalculate the roi on this asset to submit or do i want to look at the video on on that so i mean some of the other things i've done is is you know you do i get up a little earlier sometimes and especially now that i'm working out of the house i'll get up a little earlier to do that uh make sure that during the the lunch hour whenever that is you know you never want to let the clock tell you when you're hungry uh and and then i'll do some things in the evening but uh you know saturday mornings i get up early and uh and work on things on saturday mornings and you know fortunately one of the things about you know having an office in your house and being an entrepreneur you know you're always available it always works and so in those sometimes those sleepless nights when you get up at three o'clock in the morning you can't go back asleep yeah i can sneak into it i can sneak into my office it's been an hour in here uh and just trying to do some stuff you know whether it's dealing with a vendor or paying an invoice and and all this other stuff i mean a lot of us in the last couple weeks sent out 1099s you know so some of us are doing i think we're doing that i think what you said there made the sense because i found myself more and more getting up at that 3 a.m and like my week and the problem i had was once you're up i'm off right next you know austin and i hour doing something wrong hey i'm going to be an hour it's four hours later and you dove into so many rabbit holes and yeah you haven't caught up on emails like you found time and you don't have a lot of it right yeah so i agree with you i think so was there anything you did like system-wise software-wise that kind of helped you deal with the time because this is a space where you're doing due diligence or you know finding assets running numbers do you use any kind of tools or automations or assistance or you know virtual assistants to kind of help you with time restrictions you know i i don't i have an roi calculator i use obviously my best friend is this thing right here oh you guys let's see can you see it yeah yeah 10v2 this is the yeah this is a hp 12c i've had one since the early 90s actually i have several of them uh and so this is my best friend on especially on the performing notes uh and so i you know i held calculate a lot of things i can tell you right now how many days until christmas and so that's one of the features in this thing in fact here's a funny story if you guys don't mind a funny story is that you know at one point in time when i was a loan officer for uh uh washington mutual early in my career with them uh i was right down the street from intel corporation and so we had a lot of high-tech people come in and i i had a guy come in to be one of my loans i did a lot of construction lending all-in-one construction money and a guy came in to build a house and he worked for hewlett-packard and you know i whip out my my little thing here and he goes you know let me tell you about that says i am actually the guy that programmed the algorithms that go into that way i go wow that's pretty cool he says and all that tell you you'll notice that the keys never wear out i go no they never do no matter how many times and i've had this one here for 15 years he says the reason is is when they make those keys they put those letters that go all the way through the key so if you took one of those keys and cut it halfway it'd still be as crisp as it is right now so you know it's just kind of a funny little thing that i learned a long time about go about this material but you know just that's just a trivia in case you get a trivia question on it so so i want to talk about your the discipline things it's really interesting because both you guys still have your your regular daytime job this is my fall time yeah so it's really interesting um and and you know people coming into the business they're going to be coming from both sides i think a lot of people are coming from the side of having a regular day job and you're talking about the discipline and getting things done when you can versus me where um i actually have two cell phones canadian american so my american one is my business phone yeah and and at five o'clock or thereabouts whenever i'm done you know sometime between 4 30 and 6.

uh i plug this in back here and i close those doors and that's it and i walk away and my business is done until morning nothing that will happen that seven o'clock at night is going to make any difference i like it now and tomorrow morning i think that's part of what i've got driving me as well is that you know i've i've got this entrepreneurial spirit i want to work for myself i want to set my own hours uh but the day job inhibits that so part of my motivation in moving from a note investor even though i do have no investments of me personally was setting up this fund which is a note business right and so and so because my goal at some point in time and maybe this is the year you know i have some benchmarks that i have set that will give me a guide me along the way maybe this is the year that i'm able to say okay i'm done with the w-2 job i'm at a point with therm that i can just move full-time into the note business right and and you know do what nathan does now i only have one phone but i can still you know set my own hours and i i know right now i'm going through a a a big deal because you know i i've been married for 36 years 36 and a half years and even though that's been going on for a long time there's still you know you have to continually build relationships and so i've got to have a kind of an understanding wife but at some point in time you know you've got to say something has to give because when you think of you know i've still got my own known investing i've got the old entity that i'm winding down i've got the day job i've got the new entity that i'm building up and then i have a family relationship and so there's a lot of things that hit me on a day-to-day basis yeah and yesterday was one of those days to be honest i was a little overwhelmed you know there's just so much going on because every one of those things i just listed there has a sub list of things going on as well in fact i i use a a a software program an online program called workflowy okay okay workflowy is an online thing that basically is a list builder and so i use that with every one of my headers being the things that i just mentioned there and a couple of other ones and then all the sub things going on underneath that one of the things i want to do and i hope to be able to do it in 2021 is start a podcast okay okay i have a company that you guys may have seen called funding factors uh funding factors is really my note media company it's going to be something where i want to to talk about you know notes to some degree uh there are a lot of podcasts that talk about notes and so i don't want to try and replicate that there's a lot of great note uh of podcasts out there but i'm more interested in talking about business and lifestyle and being a solopreneur and those kind of things and so that takes a heck of a lot of time to do a podcast yeah you know i'm going to pull it real quick cody and let you know that one thing we did you touched on before with the phone years ago i created myself i have all my emails are g suite emails right yeah so with g suite comes a google voice number so you can literally turn that on and off so that text message phone calls all that stuff can be shut off a period of time and it's forward to my cell phone and if i ever have to call somebody from the google voice it calls and it shows by the normal number so just an idea if you don't have it already or someone else is listening and if you want to have it separate from your business you can shut off the google voice number in any moment at except for nine to five or whatever you want to set for you have text messaging and phone calls if you receive a text from us more than likely it's not from our personal it's from our business thing so that multiple people could check it and also get forward to your email as well yeah i i do have that opener that makes such a difference got to be able to what i learned at some point along here was i run the business the business doesn't run me yeah i and it was getting to a point where i was getting completely out of hand where all of my time was spent you know worrying about and thinking about and dealing with business and then i took a step back and said no no no i'm in charge here not the business and it was a real mind shift to set parameters and boundaries and and there's exceptions of course and if there's some kind of emergency then sure i'll we'll deal with the emergency but on a regular basis no no no work hours are nine to five and yep and if i want to go skiing in the morning i go skiing in the morning because i can catch the benefit anything you have there is the lack of w-2 right you have eight hours you can spend on doing whatever you need to get done yeah where you know cody and other people like ourselves have that limited time where sometimes you have to get up at 5 00 a.m if you have ....