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WIN Ep163. Creating Lasting Wealth: Why Asking the Right Questions Matter with Whitney Elkins-Hutten

Writer: AJ ShepardAJ Shepard

Intro speaker: Welcome to the Westside Investors Network. WIN, your community of investing knowledge for growth. This is the real estate professionals investing podcast for real estate professionals by real estate professionals. This show is focused on the next step in your career, investing. Thank you for listening.

 

And please, if you like our content, rate us on your podcast provider. Just a quick disclaimer, the views and opinions expressed in this podcast are for educational purposes only and should not be construed as an offer to buy or sell any shares or securities, make or consider any investments or take any other action.

 

Trent Werner: Welcome back to another episode of the deal deep dive segment on the Westside Investors Network podcast. I'm your host, Trent Werner. In this segment, our future guests will share their unique stories on a specific deal they've invested in. We will dive deep into finding the deal, financing the deal, writing an offer, and the due diligence. Do us a solid and smash that subscribe button, leave us a rating, and share this episode.

 

And now let's dive deep. Welcome back to the Westside Investors Network podcast. I'm your host, Trent Warner. On today's episode, we are joined by Whitney Elkins Hutton. Whitney is the director of investor education at passiveinvesting.com.

 

Whitney is gonna share some questions that you should be asking operators as a limited partner investor when you're interviewing them and potentially investing in one of their deals. Whitney is also gonna go over some different asset types and investment strategies to help you diversify and reduce your risk in your portfolio. Whitney is also gonna share about her book, Money for Tomorrow, and some of the helpful tools that she's included in that book for you to help improve your investing career. Now let's welcome Whitney Elkins Hutton. Alright.

 

Whitney Elkins Hutton joining the Westside Investors Network podcast today. Whitney, thanks so much for taking the time to chat with us.

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Thank you so much for having me on, Trent.

 

Trent Werner: So Whitney, correct me if I'm wrong, but you are the director of investor education at passiveinvesting.com. Correct? Yes. And what does that mean?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: I'm gonna say that's usually the second question. So I I my role here at passiveinvesting.com as the director of investor education means I get the fun job of helping an investor invest in a private equity deal without having to, like, sell them the investment. So essentially, I'm kinda like a coach and a mentor. I meet the investor where they're at. I help understand their goals, their risks, their timeline, help educate them how our investments at passiveinvesting dot com help them reach those goals, risks, and timeline.

 

And then I can kind of mash them up to a particular deal, and then the investor relations team can work through the details of that deal with them.

 

Trent Werner: And, I guess in a short and sweet way, how does a typical conversation with an investor look for you?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Yeah. Well, honestly, the conversation that I had should look like, you know, a conversation that you should be having with any operator because they should be coming from a fiduciary, you know, position. Like when you hop on a phone with an operator, as a passive investor, you're interviewing them, they're interviewing you. You should be understanding who they are as a business, what's the background track record, their expertise, all those things that make passive investing so wonderful for you in your portfolio. But they should be asking questions to understand who you are as an investor.

 

What are their goals? What do you need from your portfolio? Do you need cash flow, capital preservation, equity growth, diversification, tax benefits?

 

Trent Werner: I mean, those are the kind

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: of the big five. Those are the big wealth pillars. I, as an operator, want to know what that person really needs, not so much spend fifteen minutes with them and say, hey, here's our menu of investments you want to invest. I want to get to know them a little bit more, understand, and really wholly understand that we're a good fit for each other. Because especially when you go into an equity deal, you know Trent, you're making money together and I mean possibly writing out a very challenging environment together.

 

And so I think that's the relationship sometimes limited partners don't quite understand when they're investing in passive deals that they actually more often than not, they're on the equity side of things, which means they're on the partnership. You're going make money or lose money together. And unlike the stock market, which is super efficient and you can get in and out, but it's super hard to make money, you know, getting into an equity deal, getting into an alternative investment, getting into real estate, there's a longer glide path to making money, but that's where the opportunity lies. But it also is less liquid. And so, when you ask what does a conversation look like, should be a two way street, not just the LP asking their list of questions that they may be downloaded off of a form or, you know, offline.

 

Hopefully you're working with a mentor or a coach on this, but really the operator understanding who you are and making sure that they're bringing you into an investment because it is holistically a good fit for you.

 

Trent Werner: I love that. Yeah. I mean, I think from a passive investor LP side, a lot of people may especially newer limited partner investors, they wanna diversify from the stock market or their other investments. And so they find a real estate operator that they can invest with, and they don't necessarily understand maybe even what they're looking for, whether it's capital preservation, equity growth, cash flow, all those different things. And so I think that's great that you hit all of those on the head with as a limited partner, you have to be asking the right questions of your operator and making sure it's a good fit.

 

And I think identifying what you're looking for out of the investment, because not all real estate investments or or business investments are going to be the same for you as a limited partner investor.

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Yeah, I think one of my red flags when I'm talking to a limited partner is maybe a more skilled investor. It doesn't necessarily maybe they're more skilled at private equity investing, but they come in and they're like, I've been investing for like, fifteen, twenty years. Just tell me what the returns are. I'm like, Okay, my first question is, have you invested in the space before? Nine times out of 10, they haven't.

 

And I'm like, Okay, this is a very different game, because you can't just invest in the stock market. The stock starts sticking down. You have your stop loss mechanism in place and immediately sells. This is investing in a partnership. It's investing in people.

 

It's investing in relationship. Let's get to know each other first, right? We're gonna be married in an investment for five to seven years, whether it goes well or not well, let's get to know each other first.

 

Trent Werner: Absolutely. And so at passiveinvesting.com, you mentioned that you have different types of investment vehicles that you guys operate. What are some of those different investment or asset classes that you invest in?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Yeah, so we really have tried to, you know, create a menu of offerings that hit different layers of the capital stack. That way, and then when an investor comes into our ecosystem, they truly can diversify their portfolio over all the different layers of the capital stack and also markets and also asset classes so they can create true diversification. So one of our my favorite vehicles right now in this market environment is the debt layer. We have a residential real estate debt fund. We call it the pick debt fund, real estate debt fund, and that invests in fix and flip loans.

 

It's in first lien position. We have done several promissory notes, which that's moving up the capital stack. You're not in first position, but now you're in second position, but still debt. We're imminently opening a promissory note fund for multifamily, primarily. And then, then we move up our capital stack and we get into our equity deals.

 

And so we do multifamily equity deals. And primarily in the Southeastern Part of The United States, we focus on class a assets. Our sweet spot is buying from developers and completing the lease up on a project and then just holding it for five, seven, you know, ish years. And then we also will do self storage deals, similar model. We love buying in the Southeast.

 

We love focusing on that, you know, a a plus asset. Not so much doing straight value add, but we look for opportunities that have expansion opportunities to them, like maybe additional land that we can build additional units on. And then we also have our cash flowing businesses. And one of the businesses that are open to our investors is investing in express car washes. And so that's a unique opportunity to own the cash flowing business as well as the real estate together.

 

And so you're going to hold that investment by, you know, depending on when you enter the fund five, seven, ten years. And then, you know, the asset's gonna kick off cash flow during the whole time. And then when we exit, our primarily our our first goal to exit is gonna be doing an IPO and then possibly doing a roll up sale to reap. But there's going to be a nice back end kicker for our investors because we actually hold the land and that provides equity growth as well.

 

Trent Werner: Very nice.

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: That's a lot to dive into there guys. There's a lot. Somebody's like scribbling and taking notes. I'm gonna give you one place. Go to passiveinvestingwithwhitney.com.

 

There you can get on a one on one call with me. We can talk about all these different things. You can also see our open deals. So you don't have to like, you know, take a ton of notes.

 

Trent Werner: Yeah. And you can always skip back ten, fifteen, thirty seconds when you're listening to this if you do absolutely want to take notes. But yeah, visit passiveinvestingwithwhitney.com and you can absolutely schedule a call with Whitney and she can dive into all the other or dive into it deeper. Whitney, I have a question for you because we're in a tough market right now. It's it's not as roses and rainbows as it was a few years ago, where people seem to be making money hand over fist.

 

And now operators are having to actually work for it. I think the the operators that are still doing well in this market are the ones that, I guess, maybe focus more on their operations and their efficiencies. If a limited partner investor is nervy or apprehensive right now on investing in multifamily class A, for example, what would you tell them? You know, is now still a good time to invest in multifamily that's class A, maybe not value add, where you're really focused on the longer term hold? Or would you maybe talk to them about an alternative investment that you just mentioned?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Yeah, so this is where I love having conversations with people because we need to understand where are we in the market cycle. And you're gonna have your local market cycle and then you're gonna have the larger national market cycle. Regardless of what you think or what political, you know, affiliation you are, we are all the red light indicators are flashing are recession. Okay? But, you know, it takes time for that that for people to actually say that word about six months.

 

So I would argue we're we're there. But, you know, what happens before a recessionary environment? We have hyper supply. So, you know, in the Southeast, in in certain, you know, Western State markets up in the Northeast as well, we've seen a huge amount of building and growth. There's tons of hyper supply in the multifamily arena, self storage arena too.

 

In some markets, even in express car washes. We've adjusted our market strategy there. So in the market cycle, we have to absorb the hyper supply. Then we come into the trough, the recessionary, and then we start moving through growth. You can invest in equity deals in the trough of that mark, that cycle, the recessionary part, but they have to have an extreme upside advantage.

 

Okay. Meaning, things like tax abatement strategies work really well because you're eliminating one of your largest tax bill, extreme value add if you're okay taking that risk. But there is an investment that the market is giving you in this trough, and that is debt. Because when you head into this hyper supply into the recessionary trough, banks get scared. They flee to the sidelines.

 

So all that liquidity gets sucked out of the market. And so this is an amazing opportunity for investors to step in and fill that gap and get paid. They don't have to compete against the banks anymore because the banks are sitting on the sideline. They tucked tail and ran. They're the first to get out and the last to get back in.

 

So there's this amazing opportunity here for investors to get into lending, be it fix and flip lending. I argue fix and flip lending works in any market cycle because you're investing in any value add strategy. You know, the the actual you're backing a value a value add deal. But you also have your promissory notes. Right?

 

You know, there there are gonna be operators that have great assets that are going to recover, that are performing in today's market, their cash line, but maybe they need an equity injection to make it to the other side whenever banks can interest rates nudge down a little bit more and they can refinance. So the those two investments, the debt investments are going be huge to add to somebody's portfolio. Now, somebody there might be a listener here and they might be going, wait, Whitney, I'm not in this to earn like a 6% to 10% return or even a 6% to 12% return. I'm in this for the 20%, thirty % IRR. Show me the money.

 

Where is that? Well, you probably got beat up the last two years if you had all of your deals in the equity space because they all were exposed to the interest rate environment. So this is a unique opportunity too for investors to diversify their portfolio across the capital stack because it's not a matter of if another recession will happen. It's just a matter of when. And so I equate this for my listeners that are super versed in the stock market.

 

We used to say 60% to 70% stocks, 30% to 40% bonds. They were uncorrelated. When stocks were on a tear, bonds were underperforming. But when stocks were underperforming, the bonds would go on a tear. That has been disproven.

 

Those things are actually correlated, now. But when we have the different layers of the capital stack, right? Have real estate, for all intents and purposes, is still very highly inefficient. So those layers will remain separated for quite some time. So this is a unique opportunity to add those cash flowing layers to your portfolio, stabilize your portfolio, And you earn a return right now because sitting on the sideline for another year or two waiting for an amazing equity deal, that it could have been a year or two that you could have been putting your money to use, earning 6% to 12% return, right?

 

You know, when we talk about compounding interest mean, you know, most amazing things and sliced bread, part of that is because there's a time factor involved.

 

Trent Werner: So if an LP or an investor in general is one of those people that you mentioned that maybe got punched in the mouth a little bit over the last few years, and they're listening to what you just said, what would you say if you if, hey, I'm down to, you know, I have a hundred thousand dollars that I am I'm I'm comfortable investing right now because I'm I'm a little skittish after the last few years. Would you recommend breaking that hundred thousand dollars up? Or is there one of these positions in the capital stack right now to get involved in if you can only choose one?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Well, yeah, well, that that's a loaded question. But before that, I was gonna say you must be a Mike Tyson fan. Right? Everybody has a plan until you get punched in the face. That is so very true for the past couple of years.

 

I've taken my fair share of punches as a limited partner investor. When you're in an equity deal, especially if you've been investing for any period of time, like I would say longer than ten years, you know that not all equity deals are going to 100% perform. You, you hope you have more winners than you do ones that break even and you hope you have more that break even and that are winners than you do that are losers. So it's all about not putting too much capital in any one deal that it could sink you. And I've seen investors violate that immutable law of passive investing over and over and over again.

 

Right? They they have a hundred thousand dollars in cash. They take it from their home equity line of credit because nothing ever has ever gone wrong in investing. And they invested it and then you know, now their deal has a capital call, right? Or they took their, you know, child's wedding money and invested it, right?

 

So, you know, we still want to keep our, what we call, this is a concept that I cover in my book Money for Tomorrow. We want to build our financial moat, right? We want to have that firm financial foundation, Then we wanna seal all the leaks in that foundation. Then let's add the investments on on top of that foundation. Right?

 

Let's prepare for the rainy day first. That way when we know the rainy day is gonna come, but we don't know if it's gonna be like one hour or like a forty year flood. Right. Okay. So now back to your question, I have a hundred thousand dollars.

 

The loaded part of that question is you gave me two options and then you took it away and you only gave me one option. A little hard there. You know, for somebody who's been sitting on the sidelines, let's get the money working. That's why I like the first tier, a residential real estate debt fund, something simple, easy. It gives you monthly, you know, cashflow, at least our, pick that fund will, it'll give you monthly cashflow.

 

If you don't need the cashflow, you can allow it to compound so you can take advantage of that. By the way, you take a hundred thousand dollars and let it compound for ten years, you could have a 17% annualized return. So you can get equity like returns in debt space. You just have to allow time to work for you. Now, you know, and that's if you need liquidity or you're kind of skittish and you just, you know, you're you want to reprove to yourself that passive investing still works.

 

I can bring home the bacon with this. I can port my dreams. I can support my lifestyle with this. Now for somebody who needs a higher level of return or is willing to take on a little bit more risk, you think about taking on the second layer there, the promissory note layer. Because there you're going to earn for $100,000 you're not going to earn not just 8% preferred return, you're going to earn 10% to 12% preferred return.

 

But generally those promissory note layers don't return all of that 10 to 12% interest in monthly or quarterly or annual cash flow. You have to hold the note until maturity. So you got it. It's got to be delayed gratification. You got to be one of those kindergartners that's not going to like you know, that you got two marshmallows sitting in front of you, and you get a third if you don't eat the first one, right?

 

You got to be willing to hang on, you know, for that time. So for me, I mean, if you have retirement fund money that you don't aren't going to ask access for like the next five to ten years, I think promissory notes make a perfect complement to retirement account. Now if you have cash that you don't need, that hundred thousand dollars is actually sitting in cash and you don't need the cash flow from it, you don't need the liquidity of it, the AO promissory notes can be, you know, you should take a look at it and make sure that it meets your goals, your risk, and timeline.

 

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When I don't think what

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: the quote is Did pass the pass the test there?

 

Trent Werner: Yeah, check. You're you're good. What's the quote? It's a time in the market, not timing the market. Right?

 

And I think, at least me personally, I trade stocks too in my, you know, in some free time. And there's a emotional aspect to any type of investing that when you struggle, whether it's for one day or for, you know, extended period of time, you start doubting yourself, second guessing yourself. And I mean, what you just said, Whitney, is you don't have to go try to hit a home run again. You know, you you can you can take some lower risk investment strategies, and you don't have to, you know, go you don't have to leverage a HELOC to do it. Be smart about it, but just get your money working again, which is, I think, more difficult than a lot of people realize if you haven't been punched in the mouth during your investing career.

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: You know, here's a way to think about it. And for people that are visual learners, go, any compound interest calculator, right? You can take any one, you know, but for the irs.gov/compoundinterest calculator, I think it's still up and working. I don't know. I haven't checked it in the past couple of days, guys.

 

But I think, you know, it's an automated tool. It should be. I say that I jest. But long story short, like, put in a hundred thousand dollars into there, plug it in at, you know, 8%. And let's just say you just made one investment and allow it to compound for ten years.

 

You would be amazed. That would be over $200 and you've more than doubled your investment. But now, you can add to it. With our data point, you can add to it in increments of $1,000 so maybe you can sock away $500 a month. Look at how the growth on that, then change the number from eight to 3.4 because if your money's sitting in the bank, that's about what it's making right now.

 

We're recording this in February of twenty twenty five. Most high interest savings accounts are around 3.4 are money markets. You'll see it's not that what you make is cut in half because you took away compounding. You're probably earning a fourth of what you could be making in just the next step up of, you know, I don't call anything guaranteed, but the next step up, you take just that next step in the risk layer from getting it from the bank into a low risk debt fund, and that's how just taking one step, that's how people build real wealth. Do that for like six months or a year.

 

Re prove to yourself that this works, then take the next step. So it doesn't have to be an all in one. I mean, I was the director of investor relations at a private equity firm in 2017, 'eighteen, and 'nineteen. And I I had people that had never invested in the stock market before placing $400,000 on resident, you know, multifamily value add deals. I mean, that's a huge leap in the risk continuum.

 

Yeah. So, yeah, if you need a if you need it just a an entryway. Right? Let's just do it one little step.

 

Trent Werner: Well, apparently, you had some people that were pretty, risk tolerant back back when you were doing that.

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: I just don't think they understood the rest. I I honestly like, you know, if you've ever read the book, Morgan Housel's, oh my gosh. I'm, like, blinking on it. We need to Google that and put it in the notes, but it's the psychology of money. I think that's the title of it.

 

And he has the second book out since then. But the whole psychology I mean, he goes through a whole track chapter around, like, studies of just the people looking at a deck that offers a 20% IRR return versus a deck that offers a 10% IRR return, it could be the same asset, same business plan, technically the same asset, but just like in the study, the the metrics were, you know, changed. I mean, people's brains, they were just like, oh, this is more valuable. I'm going to go do this. Like, it was like a drug.

 

Like it hit all the dopamine receptors in the brain. So that it's such an interesting case study. I think, for investors. I mean, hopefully somebody is doing some research right now. But yeah, I mean, people get attracted to the numbers and they are willing to just throw risk to the wind.

 

And that's actually where we need to start is understanding what's your investor roadmap, your profile, and what is your goals? What do you need from your portfolio? Because you might be asking me like, hey, what do you what would you invest in? I may have different goals than you do. And so anything that comes out of my mouth, if you take that and run with it, you're going to wake up three years later and go, she doesn't know anything.

 

And it's because I have an entirely different direction than I'm going with my portfolio scale. Right? So there's a lot to unpack there for sure.

 

Trent Werner: So it sounds like what you recommend is, well, first of all, identify what your goals are and where you want to what your your roadmap looks like. But the first step is not what returns I want to hit. It's what is my risk tolerance? What's my risk profile? And how much?

 

Or how do I need to break this down in my overall portfolio in terms of, you know, percentages on riskier versus less risky? Right?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: There's we call this business alignment. So think of your portfolio. This isn't just like, I have a million dollars. Let's go, like, figure out how to invest it. This is like, I have a million dollars.

 

What do I need this million dollars to do? I might need it to do a few different things for me. I might one, I I might be like, I can't lose any of this. Or maybe I can play around a little bit in stocks so I can maybe take a hundred thousand dollar hit. Okay.

 

Well, now we know $900,000 of it needs to be in in investments that have a hard asset backing it. Okay? Then the next question is, what are my risk risk tolerance? Like, am I I I have people ask this question. What will keep you up at night?

 

I think most of us as investors are, the fraudsters, the people the Ponzi schemers. You know? All that's gonna keep me up at night. But then I have some people that are like, if my if I don't get that monthly check, I'm gonna sweat. Like, I need that monthly check coming in.

 

Okay. Well, great. So now we now know that we're probably gonna be looking more at the debt side of investment, so you get paid first. Okay? And then we're gonna look at the timeline.

 

Okay? And this is where it gets really fun because then we can allocate certain parts of the portfolio. And I'm not a financial advisor, guys. I'm just giving you, like, things that I figured out as an investor. But then you might wanna allocate certain parts of your portfolio to long term growth that are just stable cash flow.

 

Right? Maybe 250,000 of it. I don't know. Whatever that that breaks out to you. And then another 500,000 is into your equity growth of your portfolio.

 

And then maybe the last quarter is like, those are your flyers. Right? You maybe you have twenty years. Okay? That portfolio will look very different than somebody who is three years away from retirement and all they have is a million dollars.

 

And they're like, Winnie, I I'm gonna retire here in three years. I need a hundred thousand dollars coming in monthly on cash flow. Great. I know where I'm gonna put them. I'm gonna put them in the debt tiers.

 

It's gonna kick off monthly cash flow. Now what they do with that cash flow, they could continue to reinvest some of that back into their plan and continue to grow their equity. But that's going to be very different. We're not going to, you know, you know, I might discourage them a little bit from taking on like super risky equity deals or, you know, there's been some horrible stories in the news lately about like, you know, investments that we thought were super sound like, ATM fund investment and they turned out not to be. They turned out to be Ponzi schemes.

 

So we're gonna, you know, get with great operators. We're going to invest in those sound deals.

 

Trent Werner: Definitely do your due diligence when you're investing, especially if they are funds that you absolutely cannot lose. Get with the right people, please.

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Yeah. I mean, it's a yeah, it's a I've seen people over optimize their portfolio. I think we mentioned this at the beginning. They're like, oh, I've got debt equity in my house. Let me take out a HELOC and let me invest that.

 

I do that too. But I put that into investments that I can liquidate that produces cash flow that covers that bill. And that at any point in time, can get out of like if I I sense something is off.

 

Trent Werner: Right. So Whitney, I do want to talk about money for tomorrow. What are I guess what's the reason someone should buy your book and read it?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Yeah. So I actually wrote the book as a it was a series of notes for my daughter, you know, as I was scaling our portfolio, you know, just down to, like, what are the basics? Like, how does money work? What are the, you know, what are those skills that you need to execute on every single day, every single month in order to create your wealth? And then what are those things that you need to have in order to keep it?

 

Right? I think people that get into as, you know, investing, whether it's in the stock market or, you know, passive investing, they get addicted to the growth side of things, and they forget that we gotta go back to basics a lot in order to create and keep our wealth. And so I put this primer all together for her and then, we turned it into a book. And so it's really for somebody who's just starting off their wealth journey, maybe you have a teen or a kid in college, this is a great book for them to start kind of clean and have a blueprint to scale their wealth looking forward. They're not going to step on the big landmines that you and I might have done.

 

But even for my more seasoned investor, I have a lot of people that have read that book and they go, oh, snap. I don't automate the tracking of my income and expenses. And that was the puzzle piece for me to find the extra dollars to be able to combine that with my tax savings to be able to go into my next investment. It's amazing how a lot of people skip just kind of the basics. I coach kids soccer.

 

And so what do we do? Like, with any sport, you know, you you warm up, you run around the field, you pass the ball, you shoot on shoot on goal, then you get to do the cool, like, strategy and, you know, learn the bicycle kick, all those, like, cool things.

 

Trent Werner: Yeah. Which I like how you mentioned you have seasoned investors that maybe get a reminder on some of the things that they've either forgot about or have gotten away from throughout their investing career because I'm guilty of it personally. There are times where I like to see the growth and want to keep doubling down. But, you know, every now and then you gotta I gotta remind myself, hey, let's, let's stay within ourselves. And we're looking for a single here, we don't need to get it all back in one swing, you know?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Well, it's really interesting, because a lot of a lot of times, like, you know, my more seasoned investors, they they look at that they look at like, I don't need to track my income and expenses. And I'm like, but do you have a business or a real estate holdings? Yeah. I'm like, do you track your income and expenses there? Oh, absolutely.

 

To a t. I know exactly how much I'm bringing in there. I'm like, well, why wouldn't you do that for your personal life? I had one coaching client. They, they were accountants.

 

They are an accountant. Long story short, they were trying they were like, I know I have 15 to $20,000 a month to invest. I just don't know where it is. Like, I get to the end of the month. It's poof.

 

It's gone. I'm like, well, what do you do for your clients? How do you track your business expenses? I have everything's in QuickBooks. I'm like, okay, cool.

 

Do you have that set up for your personal? Do you have a chart of accounts set up for your personal life? And they were like, no. I was like, well, let's do that first. And then they figured out that they actually didn't have the 15 to 20 a month initially because they were just spending, just writing checks left and right.

 

But once we aligned their spending, right? I don't ever want to call it budgeting. I don't want to I take people through a process to align their spending to what they truly want to get out of life. Once we did that, we found more than $15,000 We found closer to 20. And now they are taking that 20.

 

This is monthly savings. That's 100 and or $240 a year that they're now putting into their investment plan. You put that in the compound calculator at 8% for like ten years. That's huge. That's millions of dollars just by finding that monthly savings.

 

Trent Werner: Whitney, is there anything else about this? I think I'm gonna I'm gonna go buy it as soon as we get off this conversation. So because again, I I think now is a good time for me to get a reminder for myself and my investing career. But is there anything else about this book that you wanna touch on?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Yeah. So, you know, and another thing for the more seasoned investor, again, we go through, you know, how do we invest on investor, again, we go through how do we invest on principle and strategy, not based on tactic. We don't get in the conversation. Are we doing opportunities on investments? How do we optimize till the cows come home for taxes?

 

We're going back to the basics and understanding when you look at an asset, what are the seven pillars of wealth, those seven levers it can pull to earn you money? And you would be shocked when you go through your portfolio that most of your assets might only pull one or two, maybe even three levers. So we're missing out on a huge opportunity there. And then for people that are getting close to retirement or heaven forbid, end of life, I walk people through a process to not only get your legal house in order, like your estate plan in order. I'm not a lawyer, but we go through a lot of the different things that I learned in settling in five different estates.

 

But how do we actually set up those systems to train our executor, to train our heirs, to make sure that we keep our families out of court, keep them from squabbling with each other, and that money actually make it into their hands?

 

Trent Werner: That's all great stuff, Whitney. Is there any place that people can hear more from you or connect with you?

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Yeah. So you can find the book Money for Tomorrow on biggerpockets.com or you can find it on amazon.com. And if you wanna get in touch with me directly, you if you're ready to pick an investment, you can find me at passiveinvestingwithWhitney.com. If you're like, wow, I need some serious help getting my financial house in order, you can find me at ashwealth.com, a s h wealth Com.

 

Trent Werner: Very nice. Whitney, thank you so much for taking the time to chat with us today.

 

Whitney Elkins-Hutten: Yeah. Thank you so much for having me on, Trent.

 

Intro speaker: Thank you for listening to this episode of the Real Estate Professionals Investing Podcast on WIN, your community of investing knowledge for growth. We hope that this episode has increased your knowledge and added value to your path to freedom. If you would, please take a second to rate us so that we can get more great investors to interview. If you or someone that you know wants to be on, please visit West Side Investors Dot Com and fill out our form to be on the show. Thank you again, and enjoy your day.

 

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