Ep. 16 Lauren Keen Aumond | Unlock Financial Freedom: Mastering Real Estate to Escape the 9-5 Rat Race!

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:00:00]:

Couple years ago. We hit million dollar net worth, recently hit $2 million net worth, and we have enough cash flow to pay for our lives. And so because of that, I was able to leave my nine to five. You know that you're going to change the real estate one way or another. You're going to put new tenants in there. You're going to renovate it. You're going to paint it. You're going to do some new landscaping. But you don't know how much real estate is going to change you until you get into it.

Andres Sanchez [00:00:19]:

Your podcast, Twitter, how those things have helped you in your real estate journey and what your plans are for them going forward.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:00:26]:

So I started the Adulting Is Easy podcast as a way to sort of talk to my sister about personal finance. But then she got busy with SATS and applying for colleges and things like that. And it worked out because she got into Florida, but she didn't have the time for the actual podcast. Our conversations are mostly off mic now, so I switched to interviewing personal finance experts. Our main offering and what we want to do is launch first generation real estate investors. So, people who.

Andres Sanchez [00:01:03]:

Welcome back to the Virtual Ventures podcast. I'm your host, Andres Sanchez. Today we have a very special guest. We have Lauren Keen almond on the show. She is a podcast host, real estate investor, and the co founder of House Money Media. Lauren, thank you for coming on the show.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:01:18]:

Andres, thanks for having me. Really excited to be here.

Andres Sanchez [00:01:21]:

Thank you. Thank you. Something I always forget, so I got to do it now. Please, if you're listening, like, subscribe comment, give us some love. It really helps us grow, and we love to hear kind of feedback from all of you. So, Lauren, I like to just get the ball rolling right off the bat. Tell us a little bit about yourself and a little bit about your journey, and we'll start there.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:01:39]:

Absolutely. So I am lauren is my name. Like you said, I am at adulting is easy on Twitter, by the way. So some people know me as adulting is easy. More than Lauren. I am 33 years old. I am married to my husband. He's 30. And we are real estate investors based in the Tampa Bay area of Florida. Both of us are born and raised, and we are financially independent through real estate. So about a couple years ago, we hit million dollar net worth, recently hit $2 million net worth, and we have enough cash flow to pay for our lives. And so because of that, I was able to leave my nine to five and my husband's thinking about his transition plan in the future. And so that's kind of what we've got going on in our lives right now.

Andres Sanchez [00:02:19]:

That's awesome. And I'm not too far from you. I'm Miami native, born and raised. I absolutely love Tampa and tampa Bay area is amazing. So I love that. And I love that you were able to kind of just go in and leave that nine to five. I know that's a very common theme. I've had a lot of people on the show who are also on that journey, some who have already accomplished it, some who are trying to accomplish it. Talk about that transition. What was it like to go away from having that stable income that you regularly had to going out and taking a little bit of a risk and then betting on yourself?

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:02:50]:

Yeah, having this stable paycheck has been huge. I got into sales when I was, like, 24 years old. I think that was the first time I made six figures. And so that makes it even somewhat harder to walk away because it's a pretty good chunk of money. And then I married my husband, and he joined me in six figure land not too far after that. And I say all this not to say, oh, I'm a six figure earner, brag about it. I'm just saying the reality is when most people are making that much money, they're spending pretty close to it, which makes it even harder to replace that income. So I went down that path a little bit when I bought my second house, I did keep my first one, which was good, but I bought the BMW. We moved into the golf course community. This was before we were married. But basically I bought us our first two houses. I was like, we're good. We're making good money. We were maxing out our 401 KS and our Roths, and I was like, oh, we must be able to retire early. And that wasn't true. And so we could retire early. It was like 55 or something. And I was like, well, that's not like, bad early. I don't know if I want to do this for the next 2030 years. And so that's when we took the steps to replacing the income. And so I sold that first house, bought a Duplex with it later on, traded that Duplex up in a 1031 exchange to a six unit apartment building, and have bought three other properties along the way. So we now have four properties that add up to eleven short term rentals and three long term rentals. And we knew that especially if we house hacked, which is buy a property, live in one unit, rent out the other units, or even bedrooms, for example. I knew that if we did that, we could decrease that timeline significantly. And then we just kind of snowballed from there into these other things. But at first it was just meant to speed up retirement a little bit, and then now it really became a big goal, a big push in the last three years. So in 2019, if you would have looked at our spreadsheet, would have said retiring at 55, and now in 2023, I did it at 33. And my husband's not far behind me. I'm trying to get him to work till 33 because that seems fair since he's 30.

Andres Sanchez [00:04:43]:

I love that. And then there's a lot of similarities to that to actually my life right now. I'm 24, just started my career in tech sales at a great company. My girlfriend, my significant other, has also just started her career in sales at a tech company. And we are making a good amount of money between the both of us. So it's like, how can we really get ahead? And finance is something I've always been very conscious of, always educated myself on that. We both max out our 401 KS, like you said. We both invest. We both have a great savings plan. We're fortunate now that we still both live at home and are utilizing the keep your expenses as low as possible and make as much money method. And I like to do the 40 40 20, which is something I've talked about. Invest 40, save 40, and spend the other 20 on things you want and things you want to do. So it's awesome to hear that. And I've said this on a ton of other episodes, and it's kind of a reason why I started the podcast. I get to interview amazing people like yourself and learn more. It's a little bit selfish, honestly. I'm in this position. I want to learn from you. So let's talk about that first Duplex and kind of build off that. How was that experience? How did you decide that was the property you were looking for? Give us a little bit of insight on that.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:05:50]:

Yeah, absolutely. And congrats to you and your girlfriend.

Andres Sanchez [00:05:53]:

That's awesome.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:05:54]:

Yeah. Once you can save 50 to percent of what you're making, I think that's really the tipping point where things get a lot easier. And then last year, our real estate was paying all of our bills, so we had, in some ways, like a 100% savings rate last year.

Andres Sanchez [00:06:06]:

That's amazing.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:06:07]:

Yeah, that really propelled things. But it does take a little while. I bought my first house. I went under contract at 22, closed at 23. When I was 27, I bought my next primary and kept that first house and started looking for another one like that with basically like, you know how sales is, or at least how it was for me. I got a lot of my commissions and bonuses at the end of the year, and so I would end up with kind of this chunk of cash. And it didn't really cross my mind for some reason to put it in a brokerage account. It was like, well, this is for more real estate. And I started making offers on Duplexes in St. Petersburg, Florida. And I was just getting turned down left and right because I needed financing. And so I was like, well, how can I get a Duplex? How can I go from one door to two doors. This was my goal. And I was cash flowing probably like $500 a month. I was like, I can cash flow like $1,000 a month. If I pay cash for a Duplex, I can have two doors instead of one. So I sold the first one. I'd lived there two out of the last five years. There were no capital gains taxes on it, and I paid cash for this Duplex, and it was in a terrible area, unfortunately. And then we went through COVID, and the one side stopped paying rent, and then there was a squatter, and then I couldn't get the squatter out. And then it was like a whole thing. And so I only held onto that Duplex for about two years, but it did appreciate somehow $100,000. So I went from actually, I bought it for 170. I sold it for 285 two years later, and we did the 1031 exchange into a six unit apartment building. That cash flows about $50,000 a year because we do short term rentals there. Real estate doesn't have to be this preordained thing. You don't have to get into real estate investing knowing exactly where you're going to go. You can sort of figure it out along the way and decide, all right, do I want to be the single family home person? No. Do I want to be the long term rental Duplex in a d neighborhood person? No. Do I want to buy a bed and breakfast, live a part of it, rent out some accessory dwelling units on airbnb? Yes. Okay. I like doing short term rentals. All right, now, what can I do with this long term Duplex to get me into the short term rental game? Oh, the six unit is for sale. I'm going to buy that, and I'm going to short term rent four of those. Long term rent two of them. So it's a journey. It's a journey of trading up. It's a journey of figuring out what you like, what you're good at, and what lights you up. And for me, that does happen to be short term rentals. It also is much more lucrative than long term rentals, but I have a lot more fun with it, and I'm a lot better at it.

Andres Sanchez [00:08:21]:

So two things I want to touch on there. One just for people listening that maybe want to get more educated on real estate or are just completely uneducated, maybe explain a 1031 exchange for people listening. And then also after that, I'd love to talk about the squatter. People don't love to talk about the tough times, but I think that's really good for people listening who want to learn a little bit of both sides of the equation, because everybody loves to talk about the great cash flow, but not everybody shares kind of those tough times in real estate. So what's a 1031 and then maybe talk a little bit about that squatter situation.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:08:56]:

Absolutely. And just a side note, if everybody wants to learn about real estate investing, follow me on Adulting is Easy on Twitter. I also have a podcast called Adulting is Easy. It's personal finance with a lot of real estate. And I've also just now launched a new podcast with some business partners, the frugal gay Tom Brickman and real estate maximalist Alan Corey. And we're launching House Money Media, which is going to be a real estate education and content creation company. Side plug for me. But if you do want to know more about this stuff, 1031 exchanges, for example, how to run a short term rental, how to deal with squatters, things like that, we're going to be covering all of that. So, side note, so 1031 exchange, love to do this. 401k is the same way in this country. We like to name things after the tax code and the section of the tax code that is in. So 1031 is some number in there. And what it means is when you sell a place, you could normally you would take the money out of it, right? Like my example, paid $175,000 sold or 170 sold this place for 285. You would take that, say 100 grand. I'm ignoring some of the transaction fees. Do you take that 100 grand and then you pay taxes is on the difference, right? So I made 100 grand, I pay 15%, say, in capital gains, the government, and then I have $85,000 to go put in something else. Plus the money I got back because I paid cash, but whatever. So that's the point. So I, instead of doing that, took that money. It immediately went to a qualified intermediary. I never possessed the money from that sale. And then I bought a six unit apartment building and that qualified intermediary sent that money to them for that closing. And in doing that, you also have to file some paperwork with the government and things like that. But in doing that, I don't pay that, say, $15,000 in taxes now. And some people are like, that's stupid, just pay it. Why do this whole complicated thing? But I knew I was selling and buying at the same time. I'm the kind of person, I do this all the time and I don't know, it might get me in trouble someday, but I'll do something just to learn how to do it, just to see what it's like. And I had heard about 1031 exchanges and I'm like, I'm selling and buying, so I'll do that. So I'll let you react to that and then we can get into the squatter if you want.

Andres Sanchez [00:10:54]:

Yeah, no, that's amazing. And I personally have done my homework on that. So I loved when you brought it up because I think that's something extremely important. And for some people that are like, oh, it's just 15,000, wait till you get to the bigger priced homes and those 1031s become a lot more money that you're saving in these transactions and you should always try and maximize the amount of money you're putting in and out. I mean, this is your investment, like your money. 15,000 is a lot of money. So for anybody thinking about selling their current home and flipping into another one, 1031 is something you should 100% do homework on and then make sure to follow all of the areas Lauren is going to be educating on. And I'll have all that stuff linked below the video as well, but I think that was a perfect description and I hope anybody listening is taking some notes because it's extremely beneficial.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:11:37]:

Yeah, so those are two things I've done. One, as sold a primary that I lived in, two out of five years. And you can buy a rental property, I think, rent it out for three years, then live in it for two years, then sell it and have no capital gains taxes. So you wouldn't really need a 1031, something like that. I don't know if you could even but those investment properties, so I've done that a couple of times. Basically, I was supposed to pay the government $15,000 and I kept it. So I sort of am borrowing this $15,000 from this government and I used it to put money into this six unit apartment building, so to the squatter. So I bought a Duplex in really like a D area. I think at the time I kind of had convinced myself that was a C area, but there was a murder on that block while I was under contract and there was a murder the following year, so I owned it for two years. There were two murders on the block, like not in the neighborhood, same block. Yeah, but I really wanted to get more cash flow. I was like, well, I'll be safer if I own it outright, then I don't have a more mortgage payment and I'll have more cash flow. And I think differently about things now, but at the time that was what I wanted to do. I also wanted to be very hands off, so I had a property manager, so I was like, it's fine if it's in this D area, someone else is going to be going there and handling it. Obviously, I don't think anybody really foresaw this global pandemic eviction moratorium. And so basically as soon as most people live paycheck to paycheck, I think it's something like 40% of the United States, certainly in Deers, it's going to be probably all of your tenants. And so as soon as everything shut down for COVID, our tenant lost his income. He was around 65, we did not know, but he had moved a 26 year old in, so he lost his income, wasn't able to pay April rent. On April, like 4th, 2020, there was some sort of domestic dispute. Knowing how this woman is now, I think she may have even initiated it, or certainly whenever this domestic happened, she came out on the good side of it. So she calls the cops on him, he gets taken, she gets his place, has no lease. Wow. Writes that down as her address on the police report, changes the locks, never speaks to me, and then no lawyer would take this case because it's actually not an eviction, it's some kind of other thing because there was no lease, so I couldn't get a lawyer to take it. So the bright side of it was she ended up not well. Basically the utilities got shut off. She broke the meters, started stealing the utilities, and then they got shut off again. And that makes it kind of basically uninhabitable. This is like June in Florida, you know, terrible. And she basically, at that point, abandoned the property when she wasn't there for, I think it's 15 days or whatever the rule is. We were able to gain entry back into the place. Packed all of her stuff up, rented a storage unit, put the stuff in the storage unit for her to go get, told her where it was because she wouldn't call me back, but she called me immediately once her stuff was out of there. Well, she actually broke a window and broke back in that night. But anyway, so we changed the locks, finally got her out of there. It ended up costing us I don't remember the exact number. Maybe I've blocked it up something like $5,000. Between the lost rent and the damage that she did, and then also having to pay for the storage unit and the movers and the deep clean of the place because there was no plumbing, but she was still going to the bathroom, so there was a pretty serious clean that needed to be done. While that was going on. We had bought a bed and breakfast, and we're renovating it completely too. So that was a really stressful time. At the time, I was 30. My husband was 27. We had just gotten married. There was a global pandemic. I had just changed jobs, and I say this a lot, but you know that you're going to change the real estate one way or another. You're going to put new tenants in there, you're going to renovate it, you're going to paint it, you're going to do some new landscaping, but you don't know how much real estate is going to change you until you get into it. And I knew from then on that if I could handle all of that at the same time, there wasn't going to be much that real estate was going to throw at me. So I became really very confident and really then started that flywheel spinning, adding units, launching them, and became financially independent pretty quickly after this. And I don't know how much confidence I would have had had I not gone through those trials and tribulations with that squatter.

Andres Sanchez [00:15:29]:

Yeah, I love how you even during what you could say is the roughest time in the real estate journey, you were still confident to make other moves and continue to grow and learn from that situation, which is extremely unfortunate, but it's surprisingly not uncommon when you're in these d areas. I've heard it from other people and I think just the laws are a little wacky and need to be kind of relooked at. But I'm happy that you were able to move past that and kind of go into the bed and breakfast. I know earlier you said short term rentals were what you're really passionate about and what you really enjoy. I'm guessing that bed and breakfast was the first step into that short term rental journey. How was that? Let's kind of look towards the positive now.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:16:07]:

That was the first step. As I mentioned when I ran the numbers around 2019 when we got married, and I realized we couldn't really retire till we were 55, even with six figure salaries saving, say, 25%, and not really living above our means, living really within our means, that's when I knew something had to change. And the most obvious answer, remember, I already had one rental property at this time. I had, I think, the duplex. If not, I at least had the first primary. And I ran the numbers and I was like, okay, the biggest bill that we have is our mortgage payment. It was $25,000 a year, but it's mortgage taxes, insurance, flood insurance, which means you pay taxes and then you pay the $25,000. I was like, $30,000 of what we earn for at least for 30 years till we pay it off. But even then you still have the taxes and insurance and flood insurance. That's our biggest bill. It's like, we got to get rid of this. And that's when I really started thinking more about house hacking. And what I originally wanted was a house with like an above garage apartment. And I was just going to long term rent above garage apartment. So I thought, okay, my current payment was like $2,200 or something like that. I was like, Is that it? Up? That one would be $25,000, maybe like 2000, let's say it's $2,000. And I was like, maybe we'll get somebody that can pay 1200. At least we'll cut it down a little bit. It was a really modest goal, but that was the plan. Sort of like a buy one, get one half off rental property. And I sat my husband down at breakfast. I was like, hey, what do you think about that? And he's like, Absolutely not. We've only been here three years. We can't move. I was like, but listen, what if we get rid of some or all of our mortgage payment? What if we buy somewhere where we can bike on a trail every day, walk to restaurants, walk to bars? I'm not saying we have to move, but let's at least explore it and at the end of about a 15 minutes conversation, he was sold. And so we started looking and we settled on what was I mean, I call it a bed and breakfast because it was it was a functioning commercial bed and breakfast at the time. It had a house, two accessory dwelling units, which are like little they call it ADUs, these little separate freestanding cottages is what I call them, and a mobile home. And you're like, wow, Lauren, that sounds like a huge property. No, it's downtown, really small lot. I don't know, it's all jam packed in there. But so we bought that, and it needed a ton of but. And we can talk about the renovation or not. That took about six months. But once that was done, we were living in the main house. The two back units were rented. We switched out the mobile home for a camper that was rented on Airbnb. But that really just kind of pays for itself or whatever. So we literally, instead of doing what I originally sought out to do, which was get rid of some of the mortgage payment, I ended up buying a bed and breakfast. So I was like, oh, I guess I'll just do airbnbs. I'll do short term rentals because that's what's already happening here. I'm in this little touristy town. And so we didn't really set out at all to do short term rentals. We set out to house hack, and the property that we found lended itself to short term rentals. And so that's how we ended up in this game. And we had done it. We had killed the bill. I mean, that $25,000 was gone just like that.

Andres Sanchez [00:18:47]:

It's amazing.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:18:47]:

I was good there. My husband's like, hey, let's cash out, refi, and buy some more. And so that kind of started us down the path that we're on now.

Andres Sanchez [00:18:54]:

Yeah. You mentioned the renovations again, for people listening, when you're investing in real estate, sometimes the best investment is something that needs a little work that you can go get for a good deal and put some time into, maybe shed some light on how that process went. What are some do's and don'ts when you're doing renovations, just from your personal experience?

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:19:11]:

Well, the number one thing with renovations is you're going to have access to a property that's not going to have as much competition as one that's done. So if you're able to look at a property, it's like the diamond in the rough thing from Aladdin. You can cut that out. Probably Disney won't let that stay in here. But this idea that if you can see value in a property that other people aren't seeing, it's automatically not going to be as competitive of a situation. And this property had been sitting for six months. It was oddly listed. It was listed as six bedrooms, which meant that it was counting the two cottages and the mobile home. And it was listed without an address. It was listed kind of on the income section versus the traditional residential section of the MLS. It was listed kind of weird. So it had been listed for six months. And I think part of the reason we got it was a, we were young and had no idea how crazy it was. But the other side of it was I think a lot of people just weren't interested in doing the amount of work that it needed. She also said it price kind of high. I think it was like around 350 at the time. Through the inspections, different negotiations, the COVID shutdowns, which were really bad for bed and breakfast, as you can imagine. We ended up getting it for 280 with 5000 in closing cost assistance. So I think also some people didn't think they would be able to get it for the price that we got it. But the number one thing with the renovations is assume there's some crap there you don't know about. And we made some assumptions for what was going to happen with the property in terms of percentage wise, how much more was it going to need or were there some decisions that we were going to make along the way? We ended up changing out a vanity, doing some floors we weren't planning on doing, taking out a slider and putting in a regular swinging door. Some of it was a little bit of unexpected things like we found a leak. But some of it was we just chose to make some different decisions. Like, while we're here, why don't we just do a little more? So that's really the number one thing. But that took about six months. So we bought in in June, and luckily peak season for Florida starts in January, and so we were done by then. So we lived in the little cottages while the main house was being done. And that was roof structure, replacement kitchen, master bathroom floors, new deck, total yard remodel, including a new fence, new flooring in one of the cottages, and a total remodel of one of the other cottages. And so that was about $175,000 in six months. And we got the 175 through my savings and the equity in the house that I sold.

Andres Sanchez [00:21:27]:

Awesome. I mean, that's amazing. And I love how you guys completely redid the place. I'm sure it looks amazing. Was your husband I know you had to convince him a little bit. Was he also passionate about real estate, like you were right off the bat? Or did you have to convince him to do that as well? And then when you started seeing the results, everybody was like, all right, we need to keep doing this.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:21:46]:

So my husband's mom has two rentals. His grandparents had one at the time. They've since sold it. So the idea that real estate as an investment wasn't this foreign idea to him. He went along with it. He. Wasn't passionate about it. But he's an engineer. He understands numbers. So when I tell him, here's what we're spending on this, and we can be spending zero, and we could take that money and do more with it, he understood, and he came a long, long way since then. Now he's way more into it. He dragged me into our fourth property, this most recent Duplex, and he was the one, like I said, after we did the rental on the bed and breakfast, which does look amazing, we did a cash out refi. So, like I said, we put about 175 in, we got 100 out and that we actually were able to drop our interest rate to 2.99, which was amazing two years ago or whatever. And we took that $100,000, which we wouldn't have had if he not encouraged me to do that. Cash out refi and bought a really nicely cash flowing duplex on the water a little bit north of Tampa Bay that has a 3.25% interest rate.

Andres Sanchez [00:22:50]:

Wow.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:22:51]:

Yeah. And then he also found the six unit apartment building. So I kind of started it, but all I wanted to do was house hack and get rid of our mortgage. He then started seeing like, no, let's take this further, and let's try to reach financial independence through it. And I was already familiar with the financial independence retire early movement through different things that I had been researching when I first became a landlord. And I was like, okay, I guess, hey, we can do it. And that's something I wasn't really thinking too much about before we got married. It was really after we got married where we could start kind of acting more as a team and making joint financial decisions. And, I mean, that's your number one person, I mean, on your real estate team. And just obviously in life, they have to be on board in some capacity. They don't have to be as passionate about you, but they have to understand your why and your passion for it, and you can do great things together.

Andres Sanchez [00:23:38]:

100%. Hearing those mortgage rates gets me extremely jealous just because and I think this is good for anybody around any of the younger audience. I'm 24. Like I said earlier, me and my significant other are making a good income. It's hard to go out and buy a house, especially unfortunately when you live in Miami, these high interest rates and all these things. And I've had a very unique experience. I understand real estate. I'm 100% going to be a real estate investor for the remainder of my life just because I do see the value and have friends and family members who have reaped the benefits from it. But I guess I had an unfortunate experience on my first try. Me and my best friend, we had started our LLC. We're like, we're going to go buy a college apartment because that's going to be the easiest to rent and we drove up to Gainesville. We found the apartment we wanted. We negotiated the price. We were going to pay 71,000. It was going to be a two two right by the hospital. They had more of the grad students that rented there. And then we realized when the inspection came that they marked the AC as 2018, but it was really 2008. And we're like, okay, that's a little OD. That's a significant difference. And then when we got the AC inspected, they're like, oh, yeah, this is pretty close to end of life. So we were like, okay, that's fine. But our first experience, we were like, whoa, this thing's like four grand to fix, like, on a $71,000 house. Adding another four grand is a lot. What if it breaks right after we buy it? So then we kind of nickeled and dimed a little bit, which would, I would say was our major mistake. And then we didn't want to go through with the renovations because she didn't want to use a contractor. And then our real estate agent was like, all right, this is getting a little weird. Maybe we back off that condo sold two weeks later for 82 and now recently sold again for 134. And it's like, wow, we nickeled and dime four grand and missed out on almost 70 grand in profit in three months. I mean, in three years. Three months would have been amazing. Three years. So it's like sometimes it is tough, and I say that just for people listening who might have had these other experiences, but I think you've done such a great job of outlining that there is going to be some tough times. But if you persevere and keep going, there is a light at the end of the tunnel, and this is an amazing path to financial freedom. So I want to kind of move the conversation over to your podcast, Twitter, how those things have helped you in your real estate journey and what your plans are for them going forward.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:25:52]:

Nice. Yeah. I have a friend who has a couple of apartments near Shans that he short term rent, so that is a good area, but I just want to respond to that really quickly. Oh, God, I wish I bought in Gainesville, like, five different times. I wish my parents bought when I was there. And then I tried to convince them to buy right now while my sister goes to school there and haven't been able to make it happen. But what I was just going to say about that is in everything you do in real estate and the mistakes you make, it's all tuition on life, and you learn. And was that a little bit of an expensive lesson? Sure. But just forgive yourself. I mean, at least you tried. Do you know how many people have never made an offer on something? Right?

Andres Sanchez [00:26:28]:

Yeah, we were right there. 22. We're both 22. And, yeah, we were both 22. Our check was in escrow. We had our check written out. We had a family member who was going to give us a cash check to go out and buy it cash. We were right there. But like you said, we learned so much. And now I'm not hesitant to go out and keep looking when the time is right. Obviously, priority now is getting a home for me and my significant other. But when the time is right now, I already know so much from that little experience. So I think that's a great call out. Like, go out and take the risk even if it doesn't go through. Go educate yourself, learn, see it. It's something that is going to be really beneficial for you down the road.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:27:05]:

Yeah. And you'll be easy on yourself. Give yourself some grace. I mean, there's enough people out there speaking of Twitter that will not be nice to you, so you might as well be nice to yourself. So I've started the Adulting is Easy podcast as a way to sort of talk to my sister about personal finance. We are 13 years apart, so I'm 33, she is 20. And this started four years ago, so I would have been 29 and she would have been 16. And I had taught her everything. I mean, I was there when she took her first steps, said her first words. I taught her to tie her shoes. I taught her to ride a bike. I took her to Florida when she went up there for college orientation. So of course, all through her life I'm teaching her. So of course I'm going to teach her personal finance, right? So that's how adulting is easy. Started. It started like that. It was like 20 something episodes of that, which was good, and those are still some of my favorite episodes in a way. But then she got busy with SATS and applying for colleges and things like that. And it worked out because she got into Florida, but she didn't have the time for the actual podcast. Our conversations are mostly off mic now, so I switched to interviewing personal finance experts. And like you said at the beginning, I knew that the listeners were going to learn something. I knew that I was going to learn something. I didn't know how much I was going to love the networking aspect of it. And I originally started the Twitter account at Adulting is Easy to grow. The adulting is easy. Podcast. And then the Twitter kind of became the thing of its own. And so for a while I was in this group, we did spaces once a week and then I was in this other discord service for a while, which was fun. And then now I've met my business partners, Tom and Alan, through Twitter and we've met in person a couple of times and we are starting this whole venture together. And so it's something that started it's kind of like what I was saying about the real estate investing know, I set out kind of to do this podcasting thing and now it's expanded into so much more. And we're creating some courses. We're going to be doing group coachings. We're still going to be getting sponsors and things like that. For the Adulting Is Easy podcast, but also the House Money Podcast, which we launched the first episode in the middle of June 2020, the day after I left my nine to five job, we launched the podcast. And so it's been a crazy fun journey. The Internet can be a really not fun place if you let it. But if you look for the good and you look for the networking and you are there to learn and meet people, it can do a lot of good for you. And it's like what I was saying also about the real estate. Take action, do something, get on Twitter, message somebody, start a podcast. You're going to learn even if nothing financial comes out of it. I mean, the Adult and X podcast makes some money. My Twitter account makes some money. House money. Media is making some money. But it's all part of the journey. And I don't know exactly where we're headed, but I don't think I've ever been more stoked about the future.

Andres Sanchez [00:29:43]:

Yeah, and I think that's great to say. Take that leap of faith in Twitter or any social media platform. We have these amazing tools at our disposal that hits home for me. I was a consumer of Twitter for a long time, and when I started my first companies in college, I had a lot of traction and I had a lot of attention on me. But I never leveraged social media the way I should have, and I do regret that now. So I try and always tell people when I have people like yourself on the show, like, these are perfect examples of reasons why you should be leveraging social media just because you're going to learn. And then what you said about the podcast, that the networking was the kind of pleasant surprise that came from it. My whole thing is I started this podcast with no financial goals in mind. I love my job. It's a great job. This was a way for me to disconnect and do something fun after work. I love building. I'm an entrepreneur at heart. So this was my way to continue on with that and it not be extremely stressful like running an actual company. But my whole thing is I think podcasting is networking at scale. I'm able to interact and network, which is normal. If you met somebody at a happy hour or something like that, you'd network. But now we were able to network, meet, build a relationship going forward, and create a bunch of content from it to continue to grow that story and not benefit myself, but benefit you as well. So it just became such an attractive way to kind of go and continue to build my network because that's what I enjoy. I love talking to people. I mean, wouldn't be in sales if that was the case. I love to just talk to people and meet everybody. So I couldn't agree more with you on what the hidden gem of podcasting really is and that is growing your network and getting to talk and interview people that you might have not been able to naturally have a conversation with. So I just needed to call both of those things out because it was great, I guess. What are the next plans with the money media? What are you guys doing? What are you kind of pushing towards?

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:31:28]:

So our main offering and what we want to do is launch first generation real estate investors. So people who haven't seen it really one on one in their family, maybe don't have friends that are doing it, but want to learn and want to grow and want to basically change the trajectory of where their family is heading. I'm not going to throw the term generational wealth out there because I don't think you have to be that ambitious. You can do what I did right, buy one place, get rid of that mortgage and change your life. So we are launching first generation real estate investors through our courses, our podcast and our newsletter. So those are the main things. The podcast and newsletter are obviously free. We're also going to have a discord service that is going to be a monthly fee and then the courses as well. So for people who are very, very motivated, we're going to have long term rental, short term rental, long distance investing courses that people can purchase and then they will get us, me, Tom and Alan, for group coaching sessions to help analyze deals and really help people. So we feel like we can beat people whether they like to read and whether they like to listen or whether they want to actually get the real hands on experience in terms of the courses. And we fought it for a long time. We were like, no, we're not going to be those people that have courses. But we basically have gotten to the point where we can no longer mentor one on one. We just don't have the time. And we felt like this was the best way to help the most amount of people. Really?

Andres Sanchez [00:32:48]:

That's awesome. And I'm looking forward to seeing that from you all. Again, like I said, that stuff is going to be linked under the description of the video. So you guys can go interact and go utilize this amazing like if you've listened to this episode, if you've gotten this far with us, there's been so many nuggets of amazing information and that's really why I do it. I want people who are listening to be able to learn continuously new skills, new areas, new ways to better yourself. This is the first real estate conversation we're going to have on the virtual ventures, so I'm very excited about that. And then a question that I always like to ask on my shows as a way to kind of take us to the end of the episode is lauren, what are you excited about in the near future for yourself?

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:33:28]:

I am excited to be on a real estate content creation panel at So. I went to Fincon last year, got to join some of these sessions, and I am beyond excited. Tom and Alan from House Money Media, crystal who's from Snacking Deeds, and our friend James from Rethink the Rat Race are all going to be doing a panel about content creation for real estate investors. And we don't quite have it all written out yet. Really excited for that. And that's in October. That's in New Orleans, which is one of my favorite cities. And so I'm really excited for that. Not getting ahead of myself, though. I got a few months between now and then, but definitely looking forward to it.

Andres Sanchez [00:34:02]:

That's amazing. And I'm so excited. And I know you're going to crush it. I know you all are going to crush it. So I'm really excited to hear about it, see about it. So that's amazing. Lauren, thank you so much for coming on the show. It has been an absolute pleasure. This was a very selfish episode for me. So many great nuggets of real estate, so much stuff that I get to go back now and do some homework on my own. I know that all of your information is going to be listed at the bottom of the episode, but I do have to cater to the lazy people who don't go and click the description that we take time and beautifully write. So what? Where can they find you? I know you mentioned at the beginning of the video, but where can they find you? Where are you most active? Any of that good stuff? Before we wrap up, what I would.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:34:43]:

Love is if people would follow me on Twitter at Adulting Is Easy, please follow House Money Media as well at Adulting is Easy and subscribe to the Adulting Is Easy podcast as well. If you're listening to this, you'll probably like my podcast as well.

Andres Sanchez [00:34:55]:

Awesome. Again, Lauren, absolute pleasure meeting you. Thank you so much for coming on the show and look forward to staying in contact.

Lauren Keen Aumond  [00:35:02]:

Sounds good. Thanks for having me. Andres.