510 | Real Estate 2024 Update | Scott Trench

25:08I'm keeping my eyes open and I won't be surprised if there's a couple of really bruised egos in the space. And I won't be surprised if there's a couple of folks who come through and emerge as heroes from the space and are able to attract a lot of capital and perhaps rightfully so. So I think that's one way. The debt markets are really interesting at this point, right? That's true for across essentially everything where interest rates rise, great, you can earn more interest, right? You can lend to somebody who, one way to frame it is you can lend to somebody who has a 800 credit score and makes 200 grand a year at seven and a half percent on their backed by a first position deed of trust on a single family residence in a nice neighborhood right now.

25:45That's just reality of the situation. So you can do that. You can get even higher yields on certain of these types of assets, depending on if you really want to get to know what you're doing. You can look at credit funds that are doing that. Some of them are trading at big discounts on their existing portfolios today. If you want to get skilled in evaluating that, you can do that. If you have enough capital, you could potentially purchase some of these loans outright. Hey, I'm going to look at this apartment complex. It was worth 10. It's now worth eight, but I'm going to buy a loan that sets seven.

26:14So a highly levered loan. But if I worst case scenario comes together, I can just foreclose on the asset. And now I own this$8 million apartment complex for 7 million, or I get a 10 to 12 % interest yield. So there's ways to do that that I think will be interesting. And those are the things that I'm looking at and I'm exploring right now. Gotcha. Thanks for listening to Chooseify and for all your support of our mission here. The absolute best way to support Chooseify is when you sign up for your next rewards credit card to use our cards page at chooseify.com slash cards. I keep this page constantly updated so it should always be the top resource for you.

26:51Thanks for being part of our community. and for your support. So you mentioned in there syndications. I know this is something you feel very, very strongly about. You just kind of glossed past it, I think, because you anticipated we were going to talk about it. All right. Clearly, based on what you just alluded to, there have been some bad actors. Maybe that might be a stretch. I don't want to put words in your mouth, obviously, but bad actors and or people who just got out ahead of their skis. They thought they were brilliant. they wound up raising a ton of money. And from the sound of it, there is a world of hurt coming.

27:25I'd love to hear you talk through the current state of play in terms of syndications. Because I think there's something alluring for people, even in the FI community. I see posts in our Facebook group like, oh, I'm thinking about investing$50 ,000 in this syndication, blah, blah, blah. It almost reminds me, I remember having this conversation with the VP of my tax department, it was like, there was something so alluring for him about like investing in a hedge fund. And I think it was just because it sounded really cool. Like, you know, he could tell his buddies basically. And like, that's what it reminds me of Scott in terms of like, oh, I'm going to invest in a syndication.

28:02There's just something about it that sounds cool. I know that's seemingly a silly reason, but frankly, you and I both know that humans are very interesting and silly animals sometimes. So I think this is top of mind for a lot of people in the fight community. So long way of saying, what's going on with these syndications? Yeah. Look, I think you nailed a huge part of it here. What's going on is in the 2010s, you buy this apartment complex for$5 million that I'm using as an example. In 2015, it swells to$7.5 million. By 2017 or 18, it swells again to$10 million by 2021. And the people who've been flipping those apartments have put down$1 million, $1.5 million to buy the$5 million.

28:41They made$3 million, three times their money, essentially, on the sale. They did it again. The next time I go around, they did it again. And they look like geniuses. People who invested in these 2010s and these deals might've got a 30 to 35 or 40 % IRR on their investments over and over and over again across... And everybody was doing it. Anybody with a pulse was getting these kinds of returns. That's a little bit of an exaggeration. I'm sure I'm going to get beat up for that one, but that's sort of the theme. And so what emerged here is if you're trying to make a lot of money, you want to get really rich, syndicating the equity is about as good a way to get rich as you're ever going to find in America.

29:20When you raise that capital at$4 million to buy that$10 million asset, what happens is this from a fee structure, the syndicator gets a 1 % fee just for buying the thing, sometimes 1 % to 2.5%. So 100 to 250 grand for buying the property. That's their brokerage fee. Then they'll get another few hundred basis points for managing the property, either percent of rent or percent of assets or management or percentage of the asset value. Then they'll get a fee if they ever refinance the property. So 1%, 1 % or 1 % to 2.5%. Then they get another fee if they sell the property. And if there's profits, they get a percentage of the profits, sometimes before or after what's called a preferred return.

29:58So on this$10 million deal, we could rack up $700 ,000 in guaranteed fees, regardless of whether the people that invested alongside them make any money or not. And let's say that the property performed as expected or as hoped and became worth 13 to$14 million. And that$4 million becomes$8 million. Well, they're also making 20 to 30 % of that. So that's another million dollars on top of that. And 10 million would be a small syndication, right? So some of these guys raised a hundred million. Some of them raised a billion. Some of them raised 3 billion. All, essentially all in many of these cases from LPs like this person you talked about there in chunks of 50 to$250 ,000.

30:37And they like that capital because it's a new market that they don't have to compete with like the Wall Street institutions for. And the LPs are so small in aggregate, that$50 ,000 is so small relative to the pile of money in a billion or whatever dollar syndication, private equity fund, or series of them that they don't have any power to negotiate the terms or like the fees down. So if those fees that I described there would be totally inappropriate and just laughed out of the room by a legitimate family office or institution, those are not known to this person potentially who's posting in your Facebook group.

31:08So what ended up happening here is this ended up being a very high risk and low upside, relatively speaking, way to invest in the 2021, 2022, 2019 period. And a lot of pain is now starting to hit the markets because that property that was bought for 10 million is now worth 8 million or 6 million. And the debt is 6 or 7 million on this thing. And the lender is like, I wanted an equity buffer. I wanted what's called a debt service coverage ratio to be hit. And because the interest jumped from three to 7 % on this variable rate loan, your income from the property only covers 80 % of the debt service.

31:47So guess what you have to do here? You're going to have to, we're going to foreclose, or you can do one of two things. You can raise more capital and inject it. So put$2 million in, you buy the loan balance down, good to go, which is called a capital call. This is the LP's nightmare, right? Because you put in 50, 100K and now you got to put in even more and you're still at risk of losing all of that cash. Or what they're doing is they're turning to what's called a preferred equity investment. Sometimes they call this like a protected or a secure or whatever, but it's basically a second position loan.

32:19So they'll raise$2 million there, chunk down the debt and promise these guys 10 to 12 or 15 or 17 % interest, which will accumulate rather than get paid out as cash until market conditions improve. So that either way, that has huge risks for the original investors, because you could wipe out the initial position here. And that second position equity, which is often real private equity, real family offices who know what they're doing in the space. They're like, well, I'm going to accrue 13, 14%. No way do the actual equity holders get paid out anything unless there's a miracle in the markets over the next couple of years, because that's a huge hurdle to beat.

33:00So this is a disaster. I don't think a lot of LPs who are in these deals would be able to articulate the situation with anywhere near, and I'm not even an expert on this, the sophistication that I just did here, and are just aware that they're losing money or that things are going poorly or that their operator's there. And this is going to be a real challenge for the industry to pick apart. What here was bad luck or people just getting caught by the top of the market. What was gross negligence from the syndicator doing a terrible job not being on site or overseeing the assets unoccupied or whatever?

33:32And what's outright fraud, which I hope is going to be a rare component of the industry, but we'll see. Yeah, that is a pretty grim picture. Certainly. I guess it's hard. Where does one go from there? You're like, what do I do now? Yeah, this has been a huge problem, right? This is the world that I live in here. And we want to help people make the most of these types of decisions and then make good decisions about what to do in this context. Yeah. Well, yeah. Okay. Let's talk about that. So let's talk about the person who is just today. So not the person in 2019, 2020 who invested. I'm not sure that we can necessarily help them, but the person in 2024 who still thinks, oh, the syndication sounds kind of cool.

34:16I think it can outperform. I think this person that I'm randomly finding as a genius and is going to get me a better return than fill in the blank. Realistically, what advice would you give that person today? So mid 2024, they're thinking about a syndication. Again, you just painted the picture for what has gone on, but there's the today. And also, are there other options? Of course, nothing we ever say here on this podcast is financial advice. So let's be clear, Scott is not giving you financial advice. But are there other things that you personally might look into to get whatever the purported benefits of a syndication might be in a slightly more above board and less fee-laden manner?

35:00Well, look, there's no free lunch. So if you're not willing to do a lot of work, the best thing you can do is invest in index funds. And half of my portfolio is in an S &P 500 index fund. The other half's in real estate. So if you're going to go into real estate, which I like, and I'm obviously a supporter of, there's many ways to do it. You can buy a duplex in Denver. That's most of my real estate portfolio. You can lend, right? I can lend. I actually have bought hard money notes. I was like, how do I get a good high interest rate on this? Well, hard money lending is not a passive activity. You have to really understand the borrower.

35:35A fraction of the time, I hope it's less than 1%. If I'm a hard money lender for a long career, I will have to foreclose. That means I'm going to have to foreclose on and take over management of a project that's in deep trouble, finish it off or sell it at a discount or whatever with that. Now, if you want to do that passively, then you have to go and say, okay, I'm going to be part of a fund. That fund can have all types of issues. I called every hard money lender on the Bigger Pockets hard money lender network and asked them if they had a fund. About a third of them had a fund. Every fund was different.

36:06Some of them are levered debt funds. That means they get$50 million to lend out in these hard money loans, maybe 100, 200 notes in the Boston area or whatever. They'll have$20 million in debt from like Citibank, right? And$30 million of equity from investors like me who put it in. They lend that out. They get a spread, 13 % interest versus the 6 % or 7 % they're paying to Citibank. And that's how they generate a yield in that front. Some are completely unlevered. They offer lower returns to the people who invest in them. Some offer, do it all around the country, higher risk. Some do second position.

36:36And so like, there's no free lunch in this space. If you're going to get into this world and you don't know that in the context of a credit fund, you're going to lose your shirt. You have to make an opinion about this. And I think the only answer is reps. You have to look at dozens or hundreds of these things and have a thesis about what good looks like in the context of a syndication before you go into investing in syndications. And if you're listening to this right now, you have a luxury of being like, wow, wow, the tide's going out and I can see which companies are getting wrecked right now.

37:07And if the people are getting wrecked, which ones are getting wrecked perhaps because of they didn't know what they're doing and which ones had bad luck, but are good, true souls that will actually be well positioned to take advantage of the falling prices in their market in the next deals. That's an art. And again, I think it comes down to repetitions and looking at these things, forming a hypothesis. So hypothesis for me, the person who's going to win long-term is the person who has... I'm not paying for someone to diversify my investment in the syndication world. If I want to do that, if I want diversification, I go to the stock market index fund or I can go to a REIT right?

37:41That's publicly traded. I want concentrated expertise. Somebody who knows this market, who lives in that market, who is onsite buying the same thing year in and year out for five, 10, 15, 20 years, who didn't get too big, who's been growing linearly and doing the next logical step in their progression, who charges reasonable fees that amount to a modest or reasonable salary relative to the asset base that they oversee. And with almost all of their gains on the come after my money is returned and we begin splitting true profits with that so that incentives are aligned. I want somebody who actually puts in enough of their net worth where the guaranteed fees from the investment do not dwarf the amount that they're putting in.

38:22So on that$10 million apartment complex, I'd like to see the operator putting in a million dollars. Yes, they can make$700 ,000 in fees in that example, which I think is too high in that particular one. But at least if things go poorly, they're out a million dollars, which means that they have some healthy fear of risk, which I think needs to be there for a lot of operators. So that would be my hypothesis for good. And those are the types of folks that I'd be looking to invest with over the next couple of years. Well, I might wait until next year though, personally, because of what the fears I put about in the market.

38:50That's market timing though. So there you go. How's that? I love it. I mean, listen, Scott, I'm never going to, never going to interrupt you when you're on a roll. So that's okay. I'm sure. So, right, obviously no free lunch. And that extends to you got to do the research, right? That's what you just painted the picture. I mean, this is not just something you can close your eyes and find the first syndicator syndication that crosses your plate or your buddy told you about, and it's going to be a slam dunk. You have to look, as you said, incentive alignment. I think that's like a really wonderful way to just go through life is look for situations where incentives are aligned, not just with real estate, in every aspect of life.

39:31Incentives run everything. And by the way, these GPs are all master salesmen. That's how they raise tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. And I've never met a GP who agrees that they should put in enough capital where they have a real risk of losing. And I've never met an LP who disagrees. So we'll find that one. Maybe someone will react in response to this one. But yeah, don't ask a GP if they should be putting their own money at risk. That is like asking a fox to count your chickens. And for the listeners, GP is general partners, LP is limited partners. And Scott said also before basis points.

40:11So a basis point, one single basis point is one one hundredth of a percent. So when you're talking 100 basis points is one percent. I always like to just kind of cut through. Obviously, Scott, you live and breathe this, but our people don't. Yeah. And again, I think a question that's emerging is like, what is market? What is reasonable for fees in that context? And there's no answer to that question that I can figure out at this point. The best answer that I can come to again is modest salary for the person putting together the deal during the hold period. You don't want them worrying about their mortgage payment while they're managing your money, but you also don't want them buying their mountain house with your money before they've delivered your money back.

40:50So I think that that's the way I I would frame it in terms of thinking about what the fees should look like for your syndicator. Yeah. I mean, you're basically describing the Berkshire Hathaway of real estate, right? As people getting paid modest salaries, but the Buffetts, Mungers, Ables, Janes of the world, modest salaries, they have a significant amount of their net worth in Berkshire stock, and their incentives are aligned. What would be cool to come out of, I don't expect it necessarily to come out of this podcast, but hey, if you have an idea for a company that maybe fits this, send me an email, feedback at chooseify.com.

41:26I think Scott would love to see it. I'd love to see it. Again, it's incentive alignment. If that exists, that would be pretty cool to know about. There are a few that exist, but again, I don't want to name names, make enemies, or put out people that could create problems downstream. Of course. And a lot of these, by the way, this is really another problem is the GPs that are failing right now and doing capital calls, when they're called out on the BiggerPockets forums, they send threatening letters to the people that have been calling them out. So it's really hard, but we're going to figure out a way and we're going to do this and shine a light on this industry.

42:00But these are powerful, high ego people who are getting wrecked and are very trigger happy on the lawsuit front too. So it'll be an interesting way to see how this shakes out over the next year or two. Okay. I like that. Shining a light. We'll check back in with you at some point soon to see about that. That sounds cool. I'm curious. So you talked about your own split. So 50 % S &P 500, about 50 % real estate. I'm curious, this was kind of like a thought experiment that I had with my own real estate investments. And I think it's going to tie in to you as well. So I have just two very small single family rentals in rural Georgia, basically.

42:40I bought these things for after renovations. I mean, a pittance, they were$55 ,000 each. Okay. So I'm talking 110K all in. And I think last year my net income was like$12 ,000, which is pretty fantastic on the original purchase price. But what I didn't actually take into account was, oh, the fair market value of these is not 55 anymore. It's more like 100 or maybe more. So now I'm making$12 ,000 on 200 plus thousand of fair market value, right? So now that looks more like a 6 % return. Now, especially when there are high yield savings accounts giving you 5 % currently, and now of course that's not locked in stone, but it kind of rethinks the calculus in terms of, oh, the opportunity cost is very different here than what I was originally looking at.

43:33And I'm curious because it sounds like in Denver, where you have a lot of your real estate or maybe all of it, is the home prices have gone up dramatically. It sounds like the rent has not followed suit quite as much or certainly in lockstep. Have you rethought, hey, maybe it's time to sell some of these things that, again, maybe I could just put this in high yield savings account, or obviously you wouldn't necessarily do that with half your net worth. But just again, as that thought experiment, have you rethought your own 50 % currently? All the time. This is like, I think the question that's coming in here, and I think it has to do with landlords like you and me, but it also has to do with, I think, tens of millions of people who will have to move for some reason or other, and many of whom will not want to sell their current primary house and then become a renter, right?

44:23And so that's a decision like three years ago, it was a no-brainer. Sell your house, take your tax-free capital gain and redeploy it and something else. But I'm working on this one too. I think that for a good chunk of people, that is no longer a no-brainer decision, even though there is that tax benefit from the tax-free capital gain on a primary residence exclusion. So I think that's a whole other tangent there, but that's a big problem. Landlords typically bought with the intent to hold over a long period of time. And that's my intent. I'm locked in to those low interest rate mortgages, generating cashflow for my portfolio.

44:56And to realize that equity, I would have to realize a capital gain, incur the transaction costs, and then I'd have to deploy it in something else like a 5 % interest savings account, which to me just is not a mechanic that makes a lot of sense right now, or I'd have to put it into the stock market. And while I'm a big index fund investor, reallocating my rental property portfolio to an index fund at a near all-time high price to earnings ratio is also unattractive. And I think that's the game that's been going on for the last five years is what's the least bad asset class in the context of right now, right?

45:31There's the stock market at all time highs. There's real estate with low cap rates relative to interest rates. There's Bitcoin. There's the savings account, right? So I think that that's the challenge that a lot of people are going to grapple with. And I've chosen to just hold on to my portfolio. you. I think that the next two years are not going to see a lot of rent growth in that context. But once that supply abates, the way that new construction works is there's a big boom. It takes two or three years to really get it through the system because there's permitting. You start a development that has 10 ,000 single family homes.

46:04It takes you years to deliver them all. You're not going to just interrupt that, but you're not going to start a new project right now. And so that is going to tail off. And at that point, I think you're going to see rents really begin to swell. So if you're thinking about the next two years, you're right, you're not really going to go anywhere on those. Think about the next 10, you could see a big swelling. If interest rates remain high, you're going to see rents increase pretty dramatically over that long period of time would be my bet. Yeah, that's an interesting way of looking at this. So right, A, it sounds like partially a diversification play that you don't necessarily want 100 % of your net worth in S &P 500 or the stock market.

46:41And also, I think I was myopically looking at today, but you're looking down the field and saying, all right, look, there's a reasonable likelihood that rents are going to rise. And therefore, it might change the calculus of this a little bit. Because maybe today, again, obviously, you have to incur the capital gains, et cetera, et cetera, the closing costs. But there might still be a case that today, that high yield savings actually is pretty comparable. But again, you can't know where those rates are going. And like you're saying, there's a reasonable likelihood in your estimation that rents are going to increase on the real estate portfolio.

47:21So therefore, it's a bet, right? I mean, I guess at the end of the day, it's a bet just like anything else. Yeah. And I choose to make a long-term concentrated geographic bet on Denver, Colorado. That's not like a two-year decision, right? That's a 25-year decision. And so I just keep making that bet very consistently, but not aggressively, not going all in and just holding on through that. And so I had 10 years of incredible gains. I'm going to have two years of a slowdown, maybe even a backslide in either rents and or property values. And then I think I'm going to experience on average 25 years of gains there.

47:54And you just can't get into and out of real estate like you can with the stock market. And I wouldn't trade the stock market around those puts and takes and near term projections because of how hard that is. So that's just how I think about it. But yeah, I think, you know, everyone's got to make their decision. I think many people are making the decision just not to transact. And that's reflected in the highest level numbers. Transaction volumes were at a close to the historical low last year, at least in the last 30, 40 years. And they'll be ticking up this year a little bit, but still taking, I think, several years to ramp back to the median level.

48:27Yeah, no, that all makes sense. And right, my scenario for myself presupposes that rents are going to stay the same, right? because my little calculation was just based on the original purchase price versus current fair market value. But I mean, frankly, I haven't really raised the rent all that much, if at all, over the last five years that I've owned these things. So obviously the calculation changes, but like we've been talking about this entire episode, there's always this interesting give and take between the interest rates and the, how are the rents going up and down? So it's a multifactorial.

49:01And I think that's what I personally was missing, Scott, when I set up this random example. But that's what I love about, I mean, frankly, just talking to you about this, because I think there's a clarity of thought that those of us who aren't living and breathing the real estate market, there's just things we miss. So that, I mean, frankly, was very helpful for me, and I suspect it was for other people. Yeah. And hopefully, I'm supposed to be this raw, raw, real estate guy. I'm hopefully scaring a number of people away from real estate with this conversation while also acknowledging that there are rational plays for it as well in the space.

49:34But yeah, this is like, no, the next two years, I don't think you're going anywhere. Nationwide. Now, I don't know if you're a region in Georgia, but I would bet on Denver not going anywhere, puts your takes on appreciation, not a big crash, not a big gain on residential, single family residential, or like the small duplexes I buy, which move in lockstep with a single family. But the rents, I think, are going to surge if interest rates remain high long-term. And that's the key part. Right. And the interesting thing, since we've talked about incentives, Scott, is I know you kind of jokingly said, I'm supposed to be the rah-rah real estate guy.

50:08But frankly, you're so much more credible because you're not just the crazy rah-rah real estate. I think that's honestly what a lot of people have an issue. A lot of people like me, I don't want to paint broad, like me personally, I have an issue with a lot of real estate investors who seem to be living in fantasy land. That's my, my issue with them. Like they come up with these crazy projections. It's always better. You can get to fly so much faster renting, investing in real estate rather than the S and P 500. And they, they come up with these fanciful things or, Oh, of course the tax code is set up so that you can't lose with real estate.

50:47And like, anytime you hear that kind of nonsense, you should run as far and as fast as you possibly can. I see you nodding. That's my issue with the true rah-rah real estate people. So to hear you be realistic about it is really wonderful and frankly, gives you so much more credibility, obviously, than those kinds of people. Yeah. There's plenty of people out there who make a living selling$5 ,000,$10 ,000 courses on how to invest in real estate. You got to believe that or at least you got to pitch it in order to do that. You got to believe that's the New York Mets. My incentive is I hope you do all your hundred reps on these syndicators on bigger buckets.

51:23Like that's what I'm trying to do. Love it. So one last thing I wanted to ask about is another thing that people are struggling with is, all right, look, I just got a mortgage in the last two years at X percent, six, seven, 8%, whatever it was. How do you think about paying off a mortgage early? I guess both the people who had it prior to the 3%, the lucky people who have the 3 % mortgages versus, hey, I just got a new mortgage. What the heck do I do? Is there a lot of talk going on inside your community about this? Not enough. And I think an 8 % guarantee is as good as it gets, and I pay it off.

51:59Now, that's not what everyone else would share, but great, guaranteed return. And you're like, oh, you can always re-leverage later when the interest rates go down. Well, well, if you pay it off, you can still do that. So I'm personally in that camp, but I would say that I would dissociate from that camp if I wasn't working at bigger pockets. I didn't have a W2 here and I was a professional investor, like a flipper or like finding these off market deals or those types of things. Then I would think that there should be a spread that's much higher between that 8 % mortgage yield and the activity set of my business.

52:33So that would be where I would say there's an exception there. But I don't think the spread is high enough between that mortgage after the 401k match and the stack of HSA, 401k, Roth, those types of things. Once those are completed, I don't think adding money to an after-tax brokerage account to invest in this S &P 500 makes more sense than paying off the mortgage. And here's another part of that. I did this from a FI perspective here. So let's say a mortgage is 7.5%, 8%. And I'm sorry, I should have had this math handy, but I was like, I think you're going to need like a million to 1.25 in like a 4 % rule portfolio to pay the P and I on a$500 ,000 mortgage in that.

53:14So like, if you're like trying to choose FI, run that model for yourself for the next 20 years, like how much more wealth do you need to pile on to have enough 4 % rule cashflow to actually fire? right like so that's another huge consideration on this front yeah i like that i think that's something we'll have to run those numbers and yeah i've actually thought about that in the past and it's an interesting calculation also true with your three percent mortgage but it's a little like that one's like okay there's such a spread at that point but i think with the if you're getting one the current rates like yeah yeah interesting and right and you are living and breathing this right now because you just recently bought your own single family house at the current prevailing interest rates, right?

53:57Yep. That's what I'm doing myself. I'm prioritizing that over the next investment. Yeah, that's really, really interesting. So right, it's prioritization. And like you said, I mean, guaranteed in your case, somewhere plus or minus 8%. That's hard to pass up. It's really, really hard to pass up. I get it. Scott, that feels like the perfect place to kind of land the plane here. I really, as always, I love having you on. I love chatting with you. I love how your brain works and I can just let you run and just kind of regale us. It's really wonderful. I appreciate you being such a friend of our show over all these years.

54:31And it's amazing to see from where you came to today. It's the set for life days to now. It's awesome. Yeah. Well, it's been wonderful to watch the incredible growth, the trajectory of Choose Fi and what you've been up to. So thank you for all the good you do in the financial independence world. And thanks so much for the, I think it's the three-peat invite here on the show, or maybe it's been four at this point. It might even be four. Yeah, we might be up to four. Well, yeah, I really appreciate it. Obviously, people can find you at biggerpockets.com. You're the co-host of the Bigger Pockets Money podcast, which is wonderful, with our good friend Mindy.

55:05Is there anywhere else we should send people to, or are those the two places? No, check me out there. I'm very responsive on the Bigger Pockets forums, or you can DM me there. Beautiful. As always, Scott, thanks for coming on. Thank you, Brad. Thank you for listening to today's show and for being part of the Chooseify community. If you haven't already, the best ways to get involved are first subscribe to the podcast. So you're listening to this on a podcast player and just hit subscribe and then subscribe to my weekly newsletter. I actually sit down every Monday and write this by hand and I send it out Tuesday morning.

55:39So just head over to chooseify.com slash subscribe. And it's really, really easy to get on the newsletter list right there. and I would greatly appreciate it. It's the best way to get in touch with me. You can actually just hit reply to any of those emails and it comes directly to my inbox. So that's the way that I keep a pulse of the community and how we keep this the ultimate crowdsource personal finance show. And finally, if you're looking to join an in real life community, we have Chooseify local groups in 300 plus cities all around the world. So head to chooseify.com slash local and you'll find a list of all of those cities in 20 plus countries all across the world.

56:17And if you're just getting started with FI or you have a family member or a friend who you think would be interested, two easy ways. Choose a FI episode 100 is kind of our welcome to the FI community. And even though it's a couple years old at this point, it still stands up and it's a really great just starting point to get an understanding of what is financial independence? What are we doing here? Why are we looking to live a more intentional life where we save money and use it as a springboard to live a better life. And then Choose a Vi created a Financial Independence 101 course. That's entirely free.

56:52Just head to choosefi.com slash fi101. And again, thanks for listening.