How to Turn Your “Stuff” Into Cash-Flowing Assets (And Buy More Rentals)

0:00Ashley Kehr:Most rookies think creative financing means one thing, getting a deal with no money down. But today's guest has built a portfolio across multiple countries, multiple asset types, and multiple income streams, all while stationed overseas with the military. And she did it without waiting for perfect conditions.

0:17Tony Robinson:Kimber Rachey is an Air Force veteran, PhD candidate, and founder of Pathfinder. And she's used seller financing, IRA lending, and even her own camper and truck to build cash flow for her family.

0:32Ashley Kehr:This is the Real Estate Rookie Podcast and I'm Ashley Kerr.

0:36Tony Robinson:And I'm Tony J. Robinson. And with that, let's give a big warm welcome to Kimber. Kimber, thank you for joining us on the Real Estate Rookie Podcast. Happy to have you. Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.

0:44Ashley Kehr:So Kimber, give us the background on who you are, where you are now in life, and how did you get started in real estate? Well, I guess I'll start from when I joined the military. I joined in 2010 and my first space was in Germany. When I was getting ready to move from there to Utah at my next duty station in 2013, one of my mentors was kind of telling me like, hey, you should really just buy a house when you move because you're already going to get housing allowance from the military. So when I moved there at 22, I bought my first house by myself. And that kind of just got me really interested in, hey, there's like other things I could be doing, you know.

1:27So I had my first house. I met my husband there. He's still active duty in the military. And we ended up going to Korea for a year. We were at separate bases there. We ended up coming back to Utah again. We went there to try and go somewhere new, but we ended up right back in Utah. We bought another house there, but I had sold the first one so unfortunately like I didn't get the chance to maximize that but I bought it with a VA loan and I didn't have to have any money down you know and my mortgage was like$700 so it was really kind of easy to navigate and when we bought our second home we had our kids and ended up getting out of the military during COVID I ended up buying an incubator and I was like hatching out chickens on the side.

2:22Ashley Kehr:At first I thought you were talking about like an incubator business, like a startup business from like an incubator. I bet you were, you know, we were during COVID and everyone wanted to start their own farm. So I tried to aid that as much as I could. And we bought our camper and when we weren't utilizing it, I was renting it out on other platforms. And kind of like my motto the whole time has been turning our liabilities into assets. So like anything that we have that I could potentially put to work, like I'm trying to do that. So we moved to England. We just came back from there. So we moved to England in 2021.

3:02And that kind of got us started in a rental. So our Utah house was getting rented out. And in 2022, we bought a home in England. You know, a lot of people didn't think It could be done for like one of five people I know maybe that bought houses over there. And now that's being rented out. We're in Virginia. We've done all sorts of extra, I guess, side hustles, you could say. Like if it's a potential, I'm going to try it. And right now I have a deal that should be closing in the end of May for a mobile home park. I'm going to be using my home equity to do the down payment and it's the rest of it's going to be seller financed.

3:48So like I'm super excited about that. It just kind of started on. I saw.

3:54Tony Robinson:I mean, you just you've been in so many different scenarios already, like, you know, incubator, England, like all over the place, Utah, Korea. Give us the quick overview. What is your portfolio look like today? So to put it in simple terms, we have a home in Utah that's being rented out with long-term tenants. They'll actually be sadly moving out this summer because they want to buy their own home. They've been great. And it's on an acre. It does great in the area it's in. It's close to the base. And then we have our home in England that we're renting out right now. And that's also close to the base.

4:28So like our target is kind of military members potentially because it's kind of secures us for the two to three years that they're potentially going to be there. And we bought a home here in Virginia. So the home in Utah, the home in Virginia are on VA loans. And then I'm going to be buying this mobile home park. We rent out our camper. We were running out our truck. Like, yeah, like there's just so much. And I just got my Virginia notary certification. So I'm just like, now that we're back in the States, I'm ready to just go full throttle on everything. Just do what I can for my family.

5:07Ashley Kehr:Well, Kimber, I want to tell you, first of all, thank you for your service and your husband's service also. Let's go back to the beginning and let's start with that Utah house. So you made a decision to rent it out instead of selling it. and why did you make that decision and how did you end up managing the property and what was it like being a landlord for you to begin with? It's like a very complicated story. We ended up having someone interested that wanted to run it out because they knew we were moving. So we did that and we initially had a couple property managers, but there was just so many issues and lack of communication.

5:49And I eventually just kind of took it over. I use an online platform for property management for myself, for our property. I have an agent there that I work with that helps with showings and doing like routine check-ins every so often.

6:07Ashley Kehr:How was the process? Was it what you expected when you rented it out? Did you find it easier than you thought? The biggest mistake we made kind of was not having the best like practices in place right away. Like we just had a basic lease and that was a big mistake. So now I've learned from that and we have a great attorney that put together an amazing lease for this home. Yes, it was a big investment to pay the attorney to do it, but it's paying off. And like, that's something I wish I would have done from the beginning, but it was a good learning experience. And now I can put that to practice with everything else I'm doing.

6:53Tony Robinson:Kimber, it sounds like something may have happened that like encouraged you to go pay an attorney to build up this new lease. You want to share with us? Yes. I don't want to deep dive onto it. I will just say like, oh, we had some things happen when a tenant moved out and it has just piled into this long ongoing thing. Hopefully it's going to be over with in the next couple of months. But all of our other tenants have been great. And like, we haven't had any issues after that. Kimber, for for rookies that are looking to get started, because obviously, you know, it sounds like you had a bad experience with the tenant, which is an unfortunate part of being a landlord.

7:29Tony Robinson:And usually it's not a matter of if that happens, but just when. It sounds like it happened maybe a little bit earlier for you in your investing career, but for all of the rookies that are listening, whether it's either specifically about the lease or maybe how you screened, what are the lessons you took away from this experience that you would pass down to the folks who are looking to get that first tenant and their first rental? What I would suggest is treat it like a business from the very start. Like don't kind of skimp on anything, I guess, like going for the basic lease. Yeah, that fulfilled what we needed.

8:02And I didn't know any better at the time. I didn't think about having an attorney go ahead and like do a lease special for our property. So I think that was the biggest thing. And especially since we weren't in the same location, we were overseas, which is like thousands of miles away. You know, it's a long flight to get there if something drastic happened that I had to go there. um so having a trusted person there to be able to help us and we do have that now it's a real sure that we've known he actually sold us the house um and we just have a really good relationship with him and he's trustworthy um i can count on him to be able to be my backup like my eyes on

8:49Tony Robinson:on the site when i need it last question how much did your attorney charge you for the lease just so rookies have a sense of what it costs, at least in your market. Okay. So in our market, it was with the revisions and everything after I reviewed it, it was about$3 ,000. But it's also like a 25 page lease that covers everything, you know, just not only to cover us, but to cover the tenants as well and making sure that we have everything in accordance with Utah a law, like we're good to go on anything that can be questionable. So like if they have any questions about if they can have a pet or if they can paint or, you know, make any kind of like modifications, like getting permission beforehand and stuff like that.

9:36Ashley Kehr:When I first started as a property manager, before I had any rentals of my own, the very first day I was put into an office and it's like, here you go. Here's a drawer full of lease agreements. It was a one page lease agreement. And I mean, I'd never managed a property. I don't think I'd ever even seen a lease. I mean, when I was in college, I lived on campus. I probably had to sign some kind of lease, but I don't know. It was just piled in all the documents I had to sign for college. But I knew that this probably wasn't right, that it was just one page. And like, this was for a 40 unit apartment complex.

10:12Ashley Kehr:It wasn't like it was just a single family home. And over time, I started to ask people to see their leases and things like that and worked with an attorney to develop an actual lease agreement and not just this one pager. But that I just think a lease agreement can protect you in so many ways. It can be the bad guy. Every year I send my lease agreement to my attorney and I say, can you review it? My attorney works with a ton of investors, a ton of landlords. I want to know if an issue came up throughout that year that never has happened before, but happened. I want to be protected now when I do all my lease renewals for the year.

10:55Ashley Kehr:And it's not very costly. Once you have the lease agreement built out to have them reviewed every year, I don't even know if I'm getting charged for it, but to get it reviewed every year, it doesn't take that much time to ask for it. So that's something else you guys could put into your asset management list for everyone listening is to make sure that you are updating your lease agreements every single year. Or if you had something happen yourself too that you need to take care of. Yeah, definitely. I'm so glad that we just went ahead and I guess bit the bullet as you'd say and paid for it and got it done because like now I have a little bit more peace of mind.

11:33And like if something happens, like it's already laid out and what what can and can't be done. And, you know, what happens if something else happens?

11:41Ashley Kehr:Coming up, Kimber is about to close on a mobile home park through a seller finance deal. We're also going to learn how she's been able to finance her deals. We'll be right back after a word from our show sponsors.

11:53Tony Robinson:My home and I have a very one sided relationship. I work hard to pay for it and it mostly just sits there. It's got no side hustle, no part-time gig, just four walls living its best life while I'm covering the mortgage. Here's something I recently learned. When you're away from home, it doesn't actually have to sit empty. You can list your space on Airbnb. And now there's something called the co-host network, which makes it a lot easier to do and takes a lot of the pressure off getting started. A co-host is a vetted local with hosting experience who can help take care of all the details. that can help set up your listing, manage reservations, message guests, and even provide on-site support so hosting stays stress-free and manageable.

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14:15Ashley Kehr:Okay, welcome back. We're going to talk about something that most of you are probably wondering about. So Kimber, you were lending money through your IRA. First of all, how did you even know this was possible to purchase a property? And can you explain to us how it actually works? So I ended up finding a mastermind group and I went on a retreat in 2025. It was a retreat in Tennessee, I met a bunch of other ladies and some of them were talking about they were lending their money out via an IRA to other investors. So I got the name of the lady. She was also like affiliated with the other people in this mastermind.

14:58And I just reached out to her and I was like, hey, I'm thinking I have my money in Vanguard right now, but I'm thinking of switching it over to something so I can lend it out on deals. So I ended up moving all my money over to Madison Trust, which is like where you can put your IRA money and lend it out to other people. And they, her company sent me a couple of slide decks of a couple different investors that were looking for capital on deals they were doing. And there was one in Tennessee that was a three bed, two and a half bath, I think, and it was getting renovated. So I ended up lending out$38 ,000 something dollars and I was getting 10 % interest a month.

15:44But actually, this was my first time doing it. And the borrower, when it came time to finish paying out at the end of the term, he pretty much ghosted the company and hasn't been answering anyone. Multiple chances, reaching out, reaching out, reaching out. Finally, the company I'm working with, it got their foreclosure attorney and he just filed all the paperwork to get it going. So basically, I mean, my money is guaranteed. So like, I'm not freaking out because I'm not the one doing all the little details like I normally am. They're handling it all. So they're going through foreclosure. And what's going to happen is if nobody puts a bid on it, that's what like we need to at least get paid out as then it reverts to the company and they'll either wholesale it or they'll finish out the rehab whatever else needs done and then just we'll sell it at market which could potentially be better for us investors because we could get a

16:53Ashley Kehr:bigger payout so this i think is a huge cautionary tale of there is some risk to to doing this but also there can be a lot of upside of investing in a deal. I do have a self-directed IRA also. I just did it last year. I rolled money from an old 401k into it. And I actually invested in a tech company where it's a lot longer waiting period to actually make any money off of it. But I think it is so interesting as to how you can take this money if you have money sitting and you have it invested in stocks and it's your retirement money, you can go ahead and put it into a self-directed IRA and actually use it to lend out on other people's deals.

17:40Ashley Kehr:If you want to kind of diversify your retirement or your portfolio by investing in other people's deals, there are lots of rules and regulations that you have to follow. Like I can't go and invest in my own deal, things like that. So yeah, Tony, have you ever done a self-directed IRA?

18:02Tony Robinson:I haven't. No. Yeah. I've never explored it, but there's definitely a benefit to it. I've worked with a lot of my private money lenders who use self-directed IRAs or solo 401ks, but ever personally.

18:15Ashley Kehr:So Kimber, you've been able to do this with your IRA to diversify into real estate. How are some of the ways that you have funded your deals? You did mention a little bit about a VA loan and creative finance. Kind of tell us how you've been able to do all this funding. So the first home I bought was VA loan. The second home we bought in Utah was also a VA loan, and it still has the VA loan on it.

18:38Tony Robinson:Can I ask one follow-up on that? Because, you know, I think there's a lot of... Oh, a limit? Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of confusion, I think, around like the limits around a VA loan, where some folks think that you can only have one loan out at one time, but we've interviewed guests who said there's actually like a limit. As long as you're under that limit, you can potentially get multiple properties. So walk us through, because it sounds like you purchased two properties, both with a VA loan. Did you have to refinance that first VA loan first to purchase the second, or were you able to have two open VA loans at the same time?

19:10No, you can have multiple VA loans open at the same time. There is like a threshold, and I'm not sure of the exact dollar amount. It's pretty high though, but you can have, like even after we're here for two years and say we end up having to move somewhere else and we're going to rent this out, we'll still be able to buy another house with a VA loan.

19:32Ashley Kehr:Is that because your husband is active military? I would still have some benefit left probably, but like he also has his benefit as well. But we use mine because since I'm a disabled veteran with the VA, I don't have to pay a funding fee. Usually that's the one kicker to the VA loan is there's a funding fee on it, which could be like from$3 ,000 to, you know, like$10 ,000 or whatever. So that's waived for disabled veterans if you're able to do it. But it gets added onto the loan. It's not like you have to pay it as a down payment or anything like that. Isn't there another thing with the VA loan is to like the interest rate.

20:14Ashley Kehr:It's like RBFL or something where like even when you close on the loan after so many months, you can go and refinance it or you're not refinancing it, but they'll adjust your rate. I haven't done that and I haven't heard of that, but we refinance our home in Utah. And I'll actually tell you guys, we have a 2.25 interest rate on our home in Utah. And I will never refinance that house. um we financed it like after we initially bought it and got like a point lower so we will be keeping that forever um the home in england so when we moved to england we had two newer vehicles and this was in 2021 there was like a big thing going on with vehicle chips not having enough of the chips for the vehicles i don't know if you guys remember that like there was a shortage on yeah there was a shortage on new vehicles because they didn't have all these microchips they weren't being like made or something like that during the whole covid era so we ended up selling our two vehicles and we actually got more for the one than what we paid for it and they yeah yeah so i was like yeah well i sold one during covid as well and it was the same thing yeah so we sold them and then we ended up having like a decent amount in our savings when we got to England.

21:35And, you know, that's when I started asking in the local community there of military families, like, hey, has anyone bought a house here? And, you know, a lot of people were just such Debbie Downers about it. Like, oh, you can't do that. It's like such a long process. You'll never get approved. They don't lend to Americans, but obviously they do. Like we have our home now. And that's where we use the down payment money from was from selling our vehicles. So like I just and other people that are there because I post about it in groups there still to kind of give people info and people will tag me with questions.