In an enlightening episode of the ‘Raising Private Money’ podcast, host Jay Conner is joined by Brian Davis, a seasoned real estate expert. Having founded the innovative Spark Rental, Brian shares invaluable insights on how both novice and experienced investors can achieve financial freedom through co-investing and private money. Coupled with his advice on intentional lifestyle design, Brian presents a blueprint for transforming how we perceive work, time, and investments.
The Concept of Co-Investing: A Gateway for Middle-Class Investors
The cornerstone of Brian’s approach lies in making real estate investments accessible to middle-class investors. His Co-Investing Club offers a compelling solution, allowing members to pool resources and bypass the traditionally prohibitive entry costs of real estate syndications and equity funds.
Unlike conventional investments, which require significant capital, the club invites members to engage with just a $5 minimum investment. This model not only opens doors for those with limited resources but also offers diversification for those with larger investment capabilities. Through collective vetting of high-return, low-risk opportunities—deemed “asymmetric returns” by Brian—the club democratizes access to quality real estate investments.
Demystifying Asymmetric Returns: High Gains, Low Risks
Brian introduces the idea of asymmetric returns, challenging the traditional assumption that high returns are inherently tied to high risks. Instead, he encourages a more nuanced view, recognizing investments as multifaceted opportunities influenced by factors beyond risk and return.
For instance, liquidity, time commitment, and investment minimums play pivotal roles in crafting a balanced portfolio. By understanding these dynamics, investors can seek opportunities that offer substantial returns with controlled risk exposure. Brian’s investment club is a testament to this, strategically positioning its members to tap into diverse, high-performing assets without conventional barriers.
The Role of Lifestyle Design in Financial Freedom
Beyond investments, Brian advocates for conscious lifestyle design—a principle that resonates deeply with his life as an expatriate. With his family, Brian has crafted a lifestyle that prioritizes experiences and financial efficiency over traditional job constraints. By leveraging international living, they enjoy significant cost savings while accessing rich cultural experiences.
Lifestyle design is more than a trending concept. It’s an intentional process where individuals identify their core values and align their life decisions accordingly. Brian emphasizes the importance of financial planning, location independence, and work flexibility in this journey. By focusing on what truly matters, individuals can design lives that are not only financially sustainable but also deeply fulfilling.
Steps to Your Ideal Life: Embracing the Five Freedoms
Brian outlines a practical framework called the “Five Freedoms” to aid listeners in mapping their ideal lives:
- Financial Freedom: Eliminate financial stress by establishing a sturdy monetary foundation—encompassing budgeting, savings, and emergency funds.
- Time Freedom: Adjust your work schedule to gain control over your hours, enabling a healthier work-life balance.
- Location Freedom: Decide where you want to live and work, embracing opportunities that might lie beyond your current locale.
- Work Freedom: Pursue work that aligns with your passions and values, recognizing that true satisfaction often comes from doing meaningful work.
- Comprehensive Financial Independence: While complete financial freedom is desirable, achieving work freedom allows for a balanced fulfillment between personal dreams and financial responsibilities.
Conclusion: The Journey Ahead
Brian’s innovative investment strategies and his philosophy of lifestyle design collectively encourage a transformative approach to both work and wealth. By integrating these practices, individuals can work towards a life defined by choice, autonomy, and financial independence.
For those ready to embark on this journey, joining Brian’s Co-Investing Club at Spark Rental offers an accessible route to real estate investment. Simultaneously, his upcoming mastermind group promises to equip participants with the tools to effectively design their dream lifestyles.
As the podcast episode underscores, with the right strategies and intentional living, achieving financial freedom is within reach. By exploring these avenues, listeners are invited to reconsider their paths and embrace a future rich with potential.
10 Discussion Questions from this Episode:
- What inspired Brian Davis to transition from owning rental properties to becoming a passive real estate investor, and how did his experience living abroad influence this decision?
- How does the Coinvesting Club that Brian Davis founded help smaller investors access real estate opportunities typically reserved for accredited investors?
- Brian Davis mentions the concept of “asymmetric returns” in the episode. How does this concept differ from the traditional understanding of risk and return on investments?
- What are some of the key benefits and challenges of forming or joining an investment club, as discussed by Brian Davis?
- How does Brian Davis’s approach to financial freedom through co-investing merge with the concept of lifestyle design?
- What are the “five freedoms” that Brian Davis outlines in the podcast, and how do they contribute to creating an ideal lifestyle?
- In the episode, Jay Conner mentions that his business tripled when he started raising private money. How does this compare to Brian Davis’s experience in raising private money through his investment club?
- How does Brian Davis address the legal considerations of forming an investment club that allows non-accredited investors to participate?
- What strategies does Brian Davis suggest for individuals who want to transition from traditional employment to work that they are passionate about while maintaining financial stability?
- How has living abroad impacted Brian Davis and his family’s financial situation, and what lessons can be learned from their experience in terms of cost savings and tax advantages?
Fun facts that were revealed in the episode:
- Brian Davis and his family live abroad and enjoy traveling, which aligns with their passion for lifestyle design and real estate investment.
- The investment club founded by Brian Davis allows members to invest with as little as $5, making real estate investments more accessible to middle-class investors.
- Brian Davis and his wife have been able to live comfortably on her income while saving and investing his income due to advantageous international teaching benefits and the foreign earned income exclusion, which provides significant tax advantages.
Timestamps:
00:01 Passive Real Estate Investment Strategies
03:30 Early Career in Hard Money Lending
06:51 Challenges in Real Estate Investing Shift
13:26 Multidimensional Nature of Investments
15:58 Diversification for Investment Stability
17:44 Connect with Brian Davis:
https://www.SparkRental.com/free
20:09 Achieving Comprehensive Life Freedom
21:08 Pursue Ideal Work, Supplement Income
26:11 Advantages of Overseas Living
28:06 Access Free Real Estate Guide
Connect With Jay Conner:
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Jay Conner is a proven real estate investment leader. Without using his own money or credit, Jay maximizes creative methods to buy and sell properties with profits averaging $67,000 per deal.
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Diversifying Investments for Passive Income: Brian Davis Explains His Strategies
Jay Conner [00:00:01]:
Welcome to another amazing episode of Raising Private Money. I’m Jay Conner, your host, also known as the Private Money Authority. And today, I’ve got a very, very special guest who knows all about raising private money from investors. And, also, he’s gonna be sharing with you, if you’re interested in being a passive investor, how you can participate in that. Well, he raises hundreds of thousands of dollars in private money from his investors every month, and he does that primarily through the investment club that he founded. Well, he’s a rental industry expert, and he co-founded a first-of-its-kind rental automation service. Now, he and his wife and daughter, love traveling the world. They love real estate, passive income, lifestyle design, and teaching.
Jay Conner [00:00:54]:
So he and his wife combined all those three to create what’s called spark rental. So we’ll get him to talk about all that. Well, some people just want the high returns and tax benefits of real estate investments, but they don’t wanna go through the headaches of finding deals, negotiating deals, or becoming a landlord. So for them, my guest has created what’s called the Coinvesting Club and Fire from Real Estate Program to help them invest passively in real estate syndication. My guest now is one of those passive investors as he spends, as I mentioned, most of the year traveling overseas with his wife and daughter. Now, other investors want the control of owning individual properties directly. Now for them, my guest has created what’s called the free landlord software, free calculators, such as a free rental income calculator and free depreciation calculator, and interactive maps that show the best cities for rentals and where you would want to invest. So with enough passive income from real estate, you can reach your financial independence.
Jay Conner [00:02:07]:
You can live off your rent and your distributions. And then what’s nice, your day job becomes optional. In just a moment, you’re gonna meet my special guest, mister Brian Davis, right after this.
Narrator [00:02:24]:
If you’re a real estate investor and are wondering how to raise and leverage private money to make more profit on every deal, then you’re in the right place. On raising private money, we’ll speak with new and seasoned investors to dissect their deals and extract the best tips and strategies to help you get the money because the money comes first. Now here’s your host, Jay Conner.
Jay Conner [00:02:52]:
Well, hey there, Brian. Welcome to the show.
Brian Davis [00:02:55]:
Jay, thank you so much for having me. I’m glad to be here.
Jay Conner [00:02:58]:
I’m excited to have you. I’m so excited to have you because, first of all, you walk the walk and you talk the talk. You’re doing this business, and you’ve created some pretty cool avenues where people can learn how to be direct investors themselves or to be passive investors and that type of thing. So give us, in short, the background story as to what got you into real estate and what got you to where you are from where you came from.
Brian Davis [00:03:30]:
Oh, man. The super short version is that, out of college, I had no idea what I wanted to do. Like so many young people, I fell into a job working for a subprime mortgage company. This is back in the early aughts when that was all the rage, as you remember. And they, I was working for the owners of the company, and they didn’t need another loan officer or processor or anything like that. They needed someone to help them with their hard money loans that they did totally on the side of their their subprime mortgage lending business. So I ended up working with them as a loan originator for hard money loans. I’m working with real estate investors, you know, flippers, BRRRR investors, you know, throughout the odds when it was all one big party in real estate watching all these guys make money hand over fist.
Brian Davis [00:04:18]:
And, of course, I conclude that I can do this too. I mean, you know, everybody’s just making all this money in real estate. I need to I need to jump in and make all this money in real estate too. So, you know, I plowed into real estate, invested all of my money, lost all of my money in the when the in the crash of two thousand 2008. But I learned a ton about real estate investing. I went on to work for e-commerce companies and SaaS companies that service real estate investors. I sold off all my rental properties by this point. After moving abroad, I sold off all my properties.
Brian Davis [00:04:54]:
I still wanted to invest in real estate, however. So I got into passive real estate investing, and that is what I do every single month today. But I don’t do it alone. I do it as part of an investment club, of hundreds of other investors. We get together and we vet investments, and we go in on them together to make it more accessible for all of us.
Jay Conner [00:05:14]:
So it’s been my observation over the years. I’ve been full-time investing in single-family houses since 02/2003 here in Eastern North Carolina and then started raising money when the banks cut me off in 02/2009, which was pretty funny. Our business tripled that first year because we were raising private money and no longer relying on the banks. But it’s been my observation that all real estate investors have a story where something happened that caused them to find a better and quicker way to fund their deals, I e private money. Did something happen in your business, or did you just automatically do it because you have the hard money background and experience?
Brian Davis [00:06:01]:
So I was living in Abu Dhabi at the time. My wife and I moved abroad in 2015. I still had, I guess, at that point, I had 15 rental properties, back in The States. And I realized just how much those properties were reliant on my time and effort to perform. You know, when I was living, in the same city as those properties, it was not as obvious. You know, I would spend my nights and weekends here and there, supporting those properties even though I had a property manager. Moved overseas, and it became glaringly obvious just how much of that I had been doing because I couldn’t do it anymore, and those properties were just not performing. So I got rid of those properties, but we had founded Spark Rental at that time, my business partner, Denny, and myself.
Brian Davis [00:06:51]:
And we’re teaching real estate investing. We’re providing all these tools and resources for real estate investors, And I just felt really out of alignment in, you know, servicing real estate investors and teaching real estate investing while no longer being a real estate investor myself. So I started experimenting with different ways to invest from the other side of the world. And I messed around with, most of the different real estate crowdfunding platforms that were available to non-accredited investors. I started investing in real estate syndications, and I quickly got to the point where I ran out of my money, to invest in those. With syndications, the minimum investment is typically $50, sometimes a hundred grand. So you run out of your own money pretty quickly in that case. And it was around that time that, you know, we we kept having our audience members and our core students and our our customers saying, like, hey.
Brian Davis [00:07:46]:
You know, I wanna invest in real estate. Not ready to go out and buy a property by myself yet. Can I just invest with you guys on some of the projects that you’re investing in? And, again, I was feeling kind of out of alignment about that. So I turned to my partner and said, well, what if we went in on some projects with our audience members and our core students and, you know, do some joint venture deals with them? They can learn the ropes. We can all invest with smaller amounts of money. And she said, well, sure. Let’s try it. So we did a couple of JV deals with a boots-on-the-ground partner, and those were fine.
Brian Davis [00:08:19]:
They went okay. The returns were good. It was way too much work, these active deals that we were doing, and we weren’t making any money on them. It was just a way to kinda service our core students. So I say, alright. Well, what if we tried doing this with syndications? What if we go in on some syndications together with our core students and with our audience members? And we did. We did a pilot deal, and it was popular. People liked it.
Brian Davis [00:08:48]:
People were able to invest with much smaller amounts of money than the typical 50 or hundred grand. I was able to invest personally with a lot less money than that typical 50 or hundred grand, and that’s how our Coinvesting Club was born. So nowadays, we get together every month, and I I wanna be careful about how I use terminology here. I don’t wanna say that we raise hundreds of thousands of dollars a month because it’s not we’re not cosponsors of these deals, but we are organizing our investor members in our investment club, to collectively invest typically between 250 and $600 a month in a new passive real estate investment. And I can speak more about, you know, what types of investments those are or in whatever direction you wanna go in here.
Jay Conner [00:09:36]:
Sure. Well, I was going to ask, what it was that caused the investment club to be born and for you to find that. And you alluded to that, you know, to some degree.
Brian Davis [00:09:50]:
Yeah. So initially, we only opened this up to people who had taken our courses. You know, we’re we’re selling online courses at the time. And then my partner and I were wondering, well, can we open this up to the general public? You know, does it have to just be our course students? So we sat down with an attorney, and we talked about the legalities of that. And we set it up as a flat fee, membership business model. So we don’t get a cut of any of the money that’s invested, by our club every month, you know, by our members. Quite the opposite. We’re putting our money in these deals as just one more member of our investment club.
Brian Davis [00:10:29]:
But we charge a flat membership fee, a monthly membership fee, for being a part of this investment club. And that’s the business model that we use. That’s that’s, how we stay on the right side of the law. You know, we’re not selling securities.
Jay Conner [00:10:44]:
So what you’re doing is you are offering and selling a membership.
Brian Davis [00:10:50]:
Yes. Yeah. It’s it’s a flat fee membership business. And, collectively, as a club, we vet a new passive real estate investment every month. Sometimes it’s syndications. Sometimes it’s a private JV partnership on a a real estate deal. Sometimes it’s a a private debt fund or a private equity real estate fund. You know, it could be a private note.
Brian Davis [00:11:13]:
So we’re agnostic on the type of investment as long it is it is a hands-off real estate investment. And we we do wanna earn, in what we would call asymmetric returns. We wanna earn, you know, know, potentially high returns with potentially low to medium risk, because otherwise, with the point of people paying a monthly membership fee, if they’re just going to get average returns. Right? So that is that’s the mission really of our club is to find asymmetric returns and make them available to middle-class investors, not just the ultra-wealthy.
Jay Conner [00:11:44]:
So let’s dive in on asymmetric returns. I’ve been I’ve been in this business a long time, and I never heard that phrase. Asymmetric returns. So dive in on that. What is it, and how do you find investments that offer asymmetric returns after you define it?
Brian Davis [00:12:04]:
Yeah. So asymmetric returns are those that offer high risk, with low I’m sorry. High returns with low to medium risk. So those those investments are out there. People the average investor thinks of just a a linear relationship between risks and returns. Right? They think pretty one-dimensionally about risk returns that, you know, high return investments must come with high risk and low return investments must come with low risk, and that that’s the, you know, the invisible hand of the markets, if you will. That is a very one-dimensional way of thinking about investments. There are a lot of other dimensions to investments, such as liquidity, for example.
Brian Davis [00:12:51]:
You know, can you access your money quickly, or are the investments, really difficult to buy and sell? It costs a lot of time, costs a lot of money to buy and sell. Time commitment. How long are you locked into an investment? You know, that is another dimension to investments. The minimum investment amount is another dimension too. You know, for example, you could find the best investment in the world that pays high returns within really, really low risk. But if the minimal investment is a million dollars and you don’t have a million dollars, you can’t access it. Right? You know, there’s all these other dimensions to investments. You know, accreditation requirements.
Brian Davis [00:13:26]:
You know, do you have to be an accredited investor to participate in an investment? A lot of the best investments out there are only available to accredited investors. Personal values are another example. So if you look at the historical, volatility versus returns on, say, oil drilling investments, they come with pretty high average annual returns, with relatively low risk, but a lot of people’s values don’t align with drilling for oil. Right? So, you know, again, there’s there are all these many different dimensions to investments beyond risk and returns. So once you wrap your head around the fact that risk and returns are not just on this linear spectrum, that this is, you know, a multidimensional, you know, beast that you’re looking at, then you can accept the fact that there can be asymmetric returns out there. There can be returns with high, investments with high returns and low risk, but they’re gonna have these other things going on that, you know, maybe other drawbacks, you know, maybe a high minimum investment, maybe low liquidity or no liquidity. Maybe it’s a long-term time commitment. And that is the foundation of what we’re looking at in this club trying to find those asymmetric returns while being clear-eyed about other drawbacks or other dimensions to these investments.
Jay Conner [00:14:50]:
So, it sounds like the investment club that you cofounded answers that or gives a solution to that problem of people having to have 50,000 or a hundred thousand, available in liquidity either from investment capital or retirement funds to even get involved in those. But in your investment club, it sounds like you got the answer to that. So people can start with smaller amounts in your investment club. Right?
Brian Davis [00:15:21]:
That’s right. So that solves a couple of problems for investors. One, it allows people with less capital to invest. Right? I mean, if you don’t have $50, you just can’t normally go out and invest in a real estate syndication or real estate private equity fund. Our club solves that. It gives access to people with less money. And even for people who do have plenty of money to invest, it allows them to diversify and spread their money across a lot more investments. You know, I like to think of these returns on a bell curve where, you know, at the bottom left-hand corner of the curve, you’re gonna have some investments that underperform.
Brian Davis [00:15:58]:
Right? They’re gonna miss it. And then at the far right-hand corner of that bell curve, you’re gonna have some investments that just hit it out of the park and way overperform. And most of these investments are gonna be somewhere in the middle of that bell curve. But if you only have enough money, you know, if the minimum investment on these $50, a hundred grand, you know, it’s hard for you to create that bell curve in your investments because there aren’t enough plot points on that data chart. Right? You know, you’re you’re investing a hundred grand in a single asset. You’re gonna be chewing on your fingernails at night worrying about how that asset is doing as opposed to, you know, if you were gonna invest, across 12 deals in a single year, you know, $5 a piece instead of $60 in a single deal in a year, then it just becomes numbers on a page, and you’re just looking at the average returns across those different deals. Some of them underperform, some overperform. That’s okay.
Brian Davis [00:16:52]:
It’s not gonna keep you awake at night the same way. So, yeah, those are some of the problems that we solve by going in on these investments together. The minimum investment in our club is $5, by the way, which just, yeah, makes it more accessible to everybody. And we do have a policy where we want to make all of these investments inclusive for our nonaccredited investor members. So we only look at investments that allow nonaccredited investors as well, not just accredited investors.
Jay Conner [00:17:22]:
Well, that’s great. As you said, the investment club does answer the problem for people who don’t have as much to start with, and it also matches the problem to people who have large amounts of investment capital but want to diversify. Right? And so you offer the diversification solution. In case any of our audience members need to jump off before we finish the show, I want you to go ahead and give, Brian, the best contact information to learn about your investment club and how people can become a members of your investment club.
Brian Davis [00:17:59]:
Yeah. So come to sparkrental.com. We have a free course as well. If you are interested in asset real estate investments and how those work, we have a free course at sparkrental.com/free, that will also show you how to set up your investment club with your friends and family. If you don’t wanna mess around with us and ours, you can create your own, and that’s fine too. But most people are not familiar with these types of hands-off real estate investments, you know, syndications and private equity real estate funds and private notes and private partnerships. So we walk through all of those and sort of the pros and cons of each, you know, how they all work. So, yeah, take that free course.
Brian Davis [00:18:36]:
And then, of course, yeah, come to our website, check out, the details of our investment club, and you can email us at support@sparkonall.com if you have any questions.
Jay Conner [00:18:45]:
Wonderful. Of course, we’ll have all that in the show notes. Now another area that you are an expert in and you’ve dialed this in is being very, very intentional about your lifestyle design. You and your wife and your daughter, y’all live abroad. You travel abroad. You’ve been doing this for several years. So here’s the question. How can people intentionally start creating their ideal life through what you call lifestyle design?
Brian Davis [00:19:18]:
Yeah. I mean so lifestyle design is one of those terms that a lot of people, some people don’t like it. Some people find it pretentious, but it’s just about intentionality and getting to the root of what it does your dream lifestyle looks like. What are your highest priorities in your life? And there’s a framework that we use to help people wrap their heads around this that I think is very useful. So we talk about what we call the five freedoms, and I’ll walk through those quickly. The first is simply freedom from financial stress, because if you’re lying awake at night worrying about money, then nothing else matters. I mean, you can’t think about anything else. So the first thing you have to do is get out you know, escape, financial stress. You know, get on a budget, you know, get a higher savings rate, get an emergency fund, all this sort of fundamentals of personal finance.
Brian Davis [00:20:09]:
Then once you have that done as a foundation, you can get into some more exciting stuff. You can start creating time freedom where you control the hours that you work, in both the number of hours that you work every week and when you work those hours. You can start creating location freedom where you can live and work and earn money anywhere in the world, or at least in the place of your choice, you know, living in your ideal city or state or country. And then work freedom. People often don’t think about this one, but being able to do your ideal work is ultimately the pinnacle here. It’s not necessarily the fifth freedom of financial freedom, whichever one thinks of as sort of the pinnacle. But, I mean, I’ve interviewed dozens of people who have, reached financial independence and retired early, and they all went back to work because there’s only so long that you can sit on a beach sipping mai tais. Right? I mean, you just become a fat alcoholic at a certain point.
Brian Davis [00:21:08]:
So if you know from the get-go that working freedom and doing your ideal work is the ultimate goal, then you can skip that fifth level of financial freedom or not skip it necessarily, but it becomes the cherry on top instead of the end all be all. So you wanna start thinking about what, you know, what is my ideal work? You know, how much does it pay? How much income can it generate? If it can generate enough to meet my needs, my, you know, my living expense needs, then great. You know, what are you doing? What are you waiting for? You know, go go quit your current job and go do your ideal work now. Most people, find that their ideal work maybe doesn’t pay quite as much as what they wanna spend every year, and that’s okay. So in that case, you just need to plug the gap. You just need to fill that shortfall between what your ideal work pays and what you wanna spend every year. And you can do that with passive income from real estate investments, passive income from other investments, like stocks or bonds or, you know, your your investments of choice. But that’s a lot easier to do, you know, just to cover that shortfall than it is to cover all of your living expenses and reach true financial freedom.
Brian Davis [00:22:27]:
So that’s a mindset shift that we encourage people to go through, and sort of go through these mapping exercises of figuring out, you know, what does my ideal life look like? What do my ideal working hours look like? What does my ideal location look like? What does my ideal work look like? How much does it all pay? How much am I short every month? And how do I plug that gap?
Jay Conner [00:22:47]:
And how does the audience, get connected to that exercise or learn how to do that? Which URL would they find that at?
Brian Davis [00:22:57]:
Well, we are planning on launching a mastermind group, specifically around this over the next month or two. It is not live yet, so I I can’t I can’t plug it yet. I can’t give your audience a a URL to go to to sign up for that. But if you go to our website and if you sign up for our mailing list, we will make you, we will send out notifications when that goes live. And we are going to be sitting down with those mastermind group members every single week and and working, on on those exercises with those members every week. It’ll be very intimate, very hands-on. It’s very much about actual life changes as opposed to just the investments that we focus on in our co-investing club.
Jay Conner [00:23:43]:
So they can get on your mailing list at sparkrental.com?
Brian Davis [00:23:47]:
That’s right.
Jay Conner [00:23:48]:
Okay. Then they’ve been notified of this group that’s coming up. The last question I have for you, Brian. So you live overseas. You travel the world. Do you do that solely just because you want to, or is there a direct connection to saving money?
Brian Davis [00:24:09]:
Oh, well, both. We so in fact, we’re we’re we’re planning on moving back to The US later this year, after ten years abroad. And my wife and I were running the numbers, and it was a little intimidating. It’s gonna cost us an extra $60 a year to live in The US compared to what we’ve been doing overseas. And some of that is the cost of living differential, of course. Some of it is that my wife gets amazing benefits through her job. She’s an international educator. So she is a school counselor.
Brian Davis [00:24:40]:
She works for, embassy schools around the world. And they provide us with free housing, full health insurance, and paid flights home every year. I mean, just incredible benefits, that if anyone works in education as a teacher or administrator or, you know, some other, job in education, definitely look into international schools. It is a, it’s one of those secrets, one of those life acceleration secrets out there. So, yeah, we have been able to live a very comfortable lifestyle entirely on my wife’s income for the last decade living overseas. We’ve been able to save and invest all of our income, which has accelerated, our journey to building wealth and reaching financial independence. That’s that’s been huge. And in fact, we don’t even have a car anymore.
Brian Davis [00:25:32]:
You know, it’s interesting. When we first left The US, we had that American mindset of, oh, you know, every adult in the household needs to have a car. So we moved to Abu Dhabi, and we were like, well, could we get away with sharing a car? And then we tried it for a month, and, yes, it was very easy for us to share a car. And then we moved from Abu Dhabi to Brazil. We moved to the capital city of Brasilia and it to a very walkable area. And we were like, well, what if we didn’t have a car at all? So we tried a month living with no car and just walking, biking, and Ubering around if needed. And we’ve been careless ever since, and it’s been wonderful. I walk to work every day.
Brian Davis [00:26:11]:
I walk to a coworking space where I have an office, and I can’t speak highly enough about that lifestyle. So, yeah. I mean, there are a dozen advantages to living overseas, adventure, of course, being one of them, but there are a lot of financial advantages too. And I’ll touch base on one last one, that might interest listeners is that we don’t pay very much in US income taxes because we’re overseas. There’s something called the foreign earned income exclusion that means that roughly your first a hundred and fifteen grand of income per adult is tax-free every year. So between my wife and and me, that’s $230 in tax-free income. Now you do still have to pay self-employment taxes if you are self-employed, but, yeah, there are a lot of advantages to living overseas.
Jay Conner [00:27:00]:
That is amazing. Brian, thank you so much for sharing your lifestyle design, and I’m excited for the new mastermind group that you’re gonna be starting up to work with individuals on how they can create their lifestyle design. For our listeners and viewers who want to learn about being an investor in your investment club, they want to go to sparkrental.com. And so, Brian, the joy is all mine. Thank you for joining me here on Raising Private Money.
Brian Davis [00:27:32]:
Oh, Jay, thank you so much for having me. This is a lot of fun.
Jay Conner [00:27:35]:
You got it. And there you have it. Another amazing episode of raising private money, and I need your help. To continue to have amazing guests join me here on the show, I need you to like, share, subscribe, and give a five-star review. And if you happen to be watching on YouTube, be sure and click that bell so you don’t miss out on the upcoming episodes. I’m Jay Conner. I look forward to seeing you right here on the next episode of Raising Private Money.
Narrator [00:28:06]:
Are you feeling inspired by the knowledge you gained in this episode? Then head over to www.JayConner.com/MoneyGuide. That’s www.JayConner.com/MoneyGuide and download your free guide that shares seven reasons why private money will skyrocket your real estate investing business right now. Again, that’s www.JayConner.com/MoneyGuide to get your free guide. We’ll see you next time on raising private money with Jay Conner.
