10Xing a Real Estate Portfolio as a Busy Professional with Vincent Rodriguez

Vince. Thank you for joining us today. 

Hey, what’s up, Taylor? Thanks for having me. 

It’s great to talk with you. I love getting to know people and learning from people who are scaling their businesses and doing it in, especially such economically uncertain times if you will, or such a, maybe it means there’s an opportunity going on.

I won’t ramble on too long here, but for our listeners out there who don’t know about you and your business, can you tell us about your background and what your. 

Yeah. I’m originally from south India. I came here in 2008, did my master’s in mechanical engineering. So I am a Vidal. I’m a full-time engineer.

So I work, I used to work for a nanomaterials company and now I moved on. For a medical device company, it’s called applied medical, a super cool company in Southern California. What I do for them is I work on intellectual property, come up with solutions for complex problems. They have, I work on a very specific type of devices called bipolar energy devices, but that’s my day job is so I read the book, restripe quota a few years ago and.

Then head-on into a real estate and then he bought a few units and we really scaled up from $400,000 in assets, under management to, I think about three and a half million dollars now. Yeah. So about 

$30 28 doors. That’s awesome. And you’re calling from California. Where are your assets? 

So I have a lot of them in California, actually.

Almost all of them are here, mostly in Kern county, a city called Bakersfield it’s in before Fresno. So it’s like a cool spot. And I do also have a couple of duplexes in the inland empire, which is also a California outside of LA, east of LA Fontana. And. That’s, those are nicer areas. And I do have a duplex in Georgia, outside Atlanta, my sister lives there.

Awesome. Awesome. Great. As I mentioned before, a lot of people. Want to scale and their real estate business, granted, not everybody does, but a lot of people would rather have, a few million dollars in assets, under management rather than do a hundred thousand dollars in assets, under management, because there’s more money to be made and you achieved that and you’re continuing to push forward and I’d like to dig into, having.

Strategies and things that really have driven you to, continue to grow it and what’s helped you. First, what comes to mind, or what deliberate actions did you take to just continue pushing forward and growing your portfolio? 

Yeah. So it all started with reading rich dad, poor dad, Robert Kiyosaki’s book.

So then I was really, I was before that, I was really convinced I’m super smart because I’m an engineer. And I was like, wow, I’m really killing it. I was not, I wasn’t actually the worst person probably. I was probably at the bottom of the barrel like just losing her, doesn’t do anything. So I read the book and then I figured out I’m on the wrong side of the equation.

So then I read a cashflow quadrant and we’re like, okay, we gotta get to the right side of the quadrant. I started reading a lot of books, like a lot like hundreds of books. And then just like I’m on podcasts, like listening to podcasts, like eight hours a day. Insane. Just so I, it took me about six months to tie something up in contracts inside of the first book because I was trying to figure it out.

And then I bought the first triplets and then took me another year to buy the second tribal duplex. And then I really started snowballing because I was pretty comfortable. So I was able to start raising capital and, just buying like one to four units. 

But that’s still, you mentioned, taking six months to get the first thing on our contract.

That’s still a lot faster than a lot of people that, you know from the years when I started, it took me longer than that to do my first deal. You’re still keeping you started with a pretty good trajectory and really kept going and kept growing. 

Yeah. Yeah, I am very nerdy because I’m an engineer, so I like to know how things work and like to know the details, how they fit.

And then I found that the math in walled-in real estate is almost elementary and I’m like, dude, this is nothing. What are these guys talking about? Is it really difficult? The cap rates? And I’m like this. Multiplication division. There’s nothing there. So those things were easy for me to grasp the concept of, in wise and auto wise and, camp rays and DSE are all these, different terms.

They’re not that hard to comprehend. So I started, I was very disciplined trying to just figure out different systems and then just trying to go for it. My goal, like I, always liked that Gary. The one thing I’m like, okay, what’s the next thing? What is the first thing? Oh, I need to get qualified.

Okay. How much can I qualify? But, oh, I can easily buy a $300,000 five plex looks okay, let’s buy that. And then, I have a business partner, Andrew, so that’s where on the, it comes from Andrew and Vince. That’s my company’s name. So I could put a loan on him. I can go on me and my sister has got warned my brother-in-law’s card one, and then.

Equity partners and bring to the table. They all have their own loans on them. You figured out different strategies and, figure out what works the best for you. 

Okay. Okay. But I think one of the biggest things that a lot of people struggle with and I’ll call myself out on this for the beginning, I’m an engineer too.

I said my background in engineering is. Building that business owner mentality, and that is a big thing that’s covered in rich dad, poor dad. Did you find yourself, dealing with that and getting through that, or did that kind of come naturally to you? 

As in how to go into becoming a black, business owner.

Okay. Yeah. 

Treating your business like a business rather than a job, it’s easy to cheap out and say, Hey, I’ll do all of these things myself, rather than, working on your business as opposed to working in your business. 

Yeah the big change for me, actually came from identifying, what is an asset?

What is the job? What, how is trading money for training time money is different than actually trading time to buy an asset. And the asset pays you, it’s very little complicated stuff. So if you have a deep understanding of how these things work how a debt-based society in the US works, how a credit basis society works, like how, if you save money or you’re, Kiyosaki calls as losers.

If you save money, I’m saying, you’re personally a loser. It’s just saying your money will lose value because they will just go ahead and print trillions of dollars behind your back. So you will never be able to keep up with printing by how much I make. You and I, we’re engineers, we make six figures.

We are probably in the top 10% in the US and I consider ourselves very poor. Like we are part of the system, which is not going to really help us, but I’m not super worried. I’m not like super. I can see all the system is, and the government is an evil kind of guy. I’m like, I like to use things that we have remote.

I’m an immigrant. I, the opportunity I got to come to this country is my engineering degree. So I’m not an idiot. I know that helps me, I make good money. I can qualify for millions of dollars alone by myself because I could show the income, W2, income, and all those things. So I understand how it works, but everybody should have a path.

I say, 10 to 20 years should be like your career if you wanted. But in that time you should figure out a way to get out of it like that. There is a new motivation for me to work to 65 and retire with $240,000 in my 401k. I would rather just give it away. I’m like, just keep it. I don’t even want it. What is that?

40 years? And you’ve saved two 50 K by the way. That’s the average. That’s not the median. That’s the average amount of us person has the median is 45,000. 

That’s wild. And I was just talking with my fiance about this, the other day, about the, where we are on a percentile basis in the US and for ourselves in us versus the world, basically any American with a six-figure job is well into the 1% of the world.

Within us, six-figure job. And if you have, especially like a million dollars to your name, your way in like the, actually in the upper echelon of net worth, because most people didn’t spend their lives investing and building wealth. Unfortunate. 

Yeah, that’s true. If you compare like I’m from India, right?

I’m pretty sure like 1% if you do in India, because there are a billion people, of course, I’m going to be in the top 1%, I like to tell people, I didn’t come to the US to be averaged. I could, I, could I be an average in India? It’s easy to do that.

Like I want to buy this street, I love that. That’s no, I think, Yeah. 

And speaking of which, you. We talked in our little pre-interview discussion about having a 10 X mentality. And then that’s what you’ve done. And presumably, you want to do that 10 X again, how has, how does that translate to your business in a practical sad?

So what actions are you taking to turn the mindset and mentality of 10 X into, actions and then ultimately resolve? 

Yeah. For people who don’t know, 10 next is a term coined by cran Kundu and I’m a huge fan of Grant Cardone. I don’t know if you are, and I make fun of him it’s a loser buddy.

What do they call him? Dave Ramsey. That guy has, I don’t know why he’s still around. He should be in jail, but he’s really good for, for people who are in a lot of debt and, as consumer debt and stuff, Dave Ramsey is really good too, get you out of that and get you to base your, but you will only be at zero.

You won’t be negative. We’ll be at zero, but you’re not going to be voting you. Can’t like, if Dave Ramsey told, save cash to buy your house in orange county, that’s the dumbest thing I’ve heard of. There is not a lifetime where I can save enough cash to buy. I have some actually in contract to buy one in orange county, it’s a million dollars, right?

There is no way I’m saving a million dollars. And by the time I save a million dollars, my house will be worth $3 million. So it’s their MCs. And it’s so funny because he has a show which is a capitalistic society where he’s getting a loan on that, the TV, the monitor, the people he’s paying, it’s but he’s it’s all cash.