How She Turned $10 into $36,000 on Her First Flip with Angelique Naylor

You're listening to the flip houses like a girl podcast where we educate, empower, and celebrate everyday women who are facing their fears, juggling family and business, embracing their awesomeness and wholeheartedly chasing their dream of flipping houses. Each episode delivers honest to goodness tools, tips, and strategies you can implement today to get closer to your first or next successful house flip. Here's your spiky hair to breakfast, Taco loving host house flipping coats . Debbie Dabiri .

Hey you guys, I am so freaking excited about today's episode. So check it out. As I promised in the podcast description and as I've talked about, we are here to celebrate everyday women who are out there flipping houses. So here's the thing. Today is the first interview with somebody who is out there doing that very thing. All right, so I am super excited to introduce you guys to one of my dearest friends, Angelique Naylor . She lives in Austin, Texas. She's been investing in real estate since 2001 during this time, she's been involved in over 300 real estate transactions. Okay? She's done things ranging from wholesale deals to rehabs to rental properties as well as commercial deals, she's a baller. Right? But keep in mind she started out just like you, just like me at ground zero. She started with nothing in her pocket. Okay? So that can no longer be an excuse for you. She's also the founder and former owner of the Austin real estate networking club. But guess what? She's just an everyday person. She's just like you and me. Okay. The only difference is she's out there doing it. So some of you who are still on the sideline, you really have this big dream to go out there and flip houses, but you're still scared. You're still stuck. The only difference between you and somebody like Angelique or somebody like myself who are actually out there flipping houses. The difference is we made a decision to flip a house. We committed to that decision and then we found somebody who had already done that successfully multiple times and we followed the plan. And then lastly, we were resourceful, period. Those are the only differences. Those are the four things you've got to do. Decide, commit, follow a plan, and be resourceful. All right, so let's do this. Let's hear Angelique's story. All right . Awesome. So you have been investing since 2001 and I mean, I know our brains are a little bit old these days, but if you could take us back to your very first flip , uh , can you, can your brain do that? Goodness. That was a 18 years ago. I've definitely , uh, I've slept since then, but let me see if I can recall. Yes. Okay. It was, it was hard to think of what the first one was, but , , luckily I, I lived in the neighborhood where that flip was, so it was , , not as hard to remember the details. So the actual flip was in a neighborhood called University hills in Austin, which is kind of east side ish. Used to be in a really old neighborhood. , I targeted it for two reasons. One, I knew there'd be a lot of older people that had equity in their homes there. And I also lived in that neighborhood. So I was familiar with some of the challenges of trying to buy and invest in a piece of real estate there. And interestingly enough, I was never intending to rehab this house. I had read a book on wholesaling. I was only going to try to make a quick $5,000 by wholesaling it, which is what I learned to do in the book. And so I was just going to tie a property up, find another investor to take it off my hands and mark it up a few thousand so that I could make a little supplemental income cause I was working full time and in high tech back then. Got It. So wait, hold on a second. I'm gonna. , we're circular thinkers so we will go on tangents, but I promise it will all come back together. , at least that's the plan and the goal. Okay. , so you said you were targeting the neighborhood. What were you doing? What do you mean by you're targeting the neighborhood? I actually walked around in the neighborhood and I looked for houses that look like they were either abandoned or run down in some way. , this was way before I knew anything about real estate investing and investing. I had literally just read one single book at that point. And the premise of the book was to either use direct marketing or do door knocking or walk around neighborhood and talk to neighbors. , basically do your own bird dogging of finding your own properties. And they taught me what to look for, you know, like problems with a roof or a red tag on the electrical box or high grass newspapers piled up. Like just some sort of sign of the glass act for an older property is an indication that there could be a deal there if the person's interested in selling. And that's exactly what I looked for. Gosh . Luckily in that neighborhood there was an abundance of possibilities and I happened to stble across this property. When I looked in the tax records, the man owned, he owned probably six other properties. They were all rentals. This one had become vacant. , and I just wrote him a letter. I actually wrote him a letter and put it inside of a greeting card. I'm very fond of doing that type of marketing because you know, who doesn't want to receive a greeting card and they're like, oh, someone sent me a greeting card. Nobody wants to receive a business envelope. Like that can only mean a bill is due. Yeah. Yes. Or some, you know, it , it's basically junk mail and you can tell what that is easily, particularly if it's in that ridiculous window on the envelope format. And it says urgent on the outside. I never did that. I did very personalized marketing. This particular one was with a greeting card with a beautiful colored envelope, and a beautiful stamp, not a business stamp. Yeah . And handwritten by me. And my best penmanship was just really hard for me know . And so when he got it, yeah . You know, it just wrote him a letter and said, hey, I'm interested in buying your property. Literally had no experience in real estate investing. Had no idea what I was doing. I was simply following the format that I was taught in the book. Because at this point I'd had no coaching, no mentoring whatsoever. So I wrote a letter that was nearly verbatim from what it was in the book. , you know, I'd like to buy your property. I can pay cash, I can close quickly. None of those things were true. That's fine . No one needed to know that. No , they didn't. And so I met with him and I pretended to know what I was talking about. Again, completely following the formula and the rubric from the book. Yep . I'm at 100% like at that point I didn't feel safe or confident enough to try to deviate from any form of plan. Like I was like, this is what the book said. This guy's a multimillionaire. I'm following this plan. Right. And it worked. I mean the guy wanted $52,000 I talked him in somehow magically down to $45k it took a few meetings because he was an old guy and he didn't want to do business and he had no incentive to do business. He's like, I'm keep this property, I don't really care. Right. But I knew the formula didn't work based on what I had learned and read in the book. So I just kept getting further and further down and we settled on a purchase price of $45,000. Nice. , and again, my plan was to just mark it up to $50k and try to find some investor to buy it from me. Back then there weren't a lot of real estate investment clubs right there. There was nobody to pitch to . Right . And we'll probably talk about that later. But I ended up starting my own real estate club, right. And which became crazy wild successful in Austin because I didn't have a buyer's database at that point. Right. I know a lot of people. So , , I started doing more research and back then I wasn't licensed so I got a real estate agent to pull some comps for me and I realized, oh my gosh, the backend profit, this is, you know, upwards of $30,000, you know, maybe a little bit less, let it maybe a little bit more. So maybe I got a tiny bit greedy. I don't know if greedy is the right word, but I started thinking that I'd rather have $20k or $30,000 than $5,000. Right. At that moment though, I didn't know all the risk I'd be taking all that . I was trying to borrow money and renovate this thing. And you know, I, I know that there are questions later to talk about timelines and contractors and things like that, but let me tell you, nothing ever goes quite as planned. , and so as a new wholesaler, realistically it turned out well, but I probably should've just wholesaled that property because I didn't know enough to go straight into rehabbing that moment. And again, no coach, no mentor, simply read a book. Once I discovered that I wanted to rehab it, I of course had to go find a lender. And that ended up being a hard money lender because the condition of the property was terrible. Yep . Had a cracked slab. It needed a roof, at the end of the day, about $42,000 in repairs. Okay . So , , was in the property for about $87,000 total at the end of the day, seven, eight months later. It was supposed to be a six months flip, but the timelines got out of control at the time that I sold it, I sold it for $132k. Nice. , so a significant profit there, that same house in the same horrible, terrible condition today would be worth about $220k. That's , that's the name that I targeted last saying like, no , I literally wrote a check for $45,000. Yeah, $ 220k, like it's probably honestly closer to $300k. The last year is, it's been insane over there. , okay. So did, did the hard money lender finance 100% of the purchase and the renovation or they didn't? And I did buy it according to the formula of 70% of ARV after repair value minus repairs, et cetera. , but because it needed so much in repairs, I had to, I borrowed the purchase price on the hard money lender and oh my gosh, back then I want to say I paid 13 or 14% to the hard money lender. Yup . And I still was going to make so much money on the back end that I didn't fight with anybody about interest rates at that point. I had not a penny to my name when I, when I tied up the property, I think I was actually slightly negative in my bank account . I literally handed the guy a $10 bill to bind the contract, you know, and so for me to get a loan at any time, even at 14%, I was grateful and then went out to friends and family and I borrowed a second mortgage to cover the financing. So I had $10 total invested in this, in this split. Because I got creative and I followed the plan in the book for how to get hard money lenders and how to get private lenders and how to properly protect and secure those investments so that people didn't lose money and they were taking a huge gamble on me having no experience, you know? Right . It's trust. Right. And the last thing you want to do is do anything to compromise that trust. Absolutely. Cause they won't loan to you again. You can lose friends and family go south. Like you have to be so careful. And I actually created a portfolio to present people so I would pitch to them, here's what you're going to get when you invest in me. Yeah , yeah, totally. Absolutely. I think you should. Well I'd never done a deal before. You know, like if you sound like you know what you're talking about, right. Generally you follow the plan and and things because this plan was created by someone who had done it right. So there was no reason for me to try to do anything different. I just presented to my friends and family and they're like, oh my God, that sounds amazing. I totally want to do that. , what you'll find is a lot of people don't have time to invest in real estate, so they'd rather partner with you or loan money to you to do your deals and then they're more of a passive investor and that seems to work better. At least it did for, for my building, my career and flipping. Yeah, totally. So what I find is often the case with some of the women that I work with in my coaching programs is initially there's, there's some mindset work that has to be done. There's some inner work that has to be done around feeling confident enough and feeling worthy enough honestly, to go out and ask people they know and love for money to do something that they have never done before. So how did you, did you struggle with that at all or were you basically so naive that you didn't know? I mean, honestly, I've been there like then you didn't know that you should kind of feel maybe like an imposter . Yeah, a little bit. You know, it was a combination of things. , I think if I didn't have that book guiding me, I would've been a lot less coordinated in my efforts. I would've absolutely felt more nervous. Sure . , but this guy had a CD that he had made and it talked about, you know, real estate being an alternative to the stock market. And so I made a PowerPoint. I, you know, so I, I kind of tapped into some of my skillset from my previous work in it to , , to make a presentation that made me look and confident, even though I was terrified on the inside, because I'm like, I've never done this before. If someone says, how many deals have you done? I'm going to literally die right in front of . And sometimes the answer is, you know what? This is my first investment, but I've researched it. These are the comps, the returns are strong. This is how I'm gonna make sure that you're safe. This is how I'm going to secure your investment. , just speak to what is possible. , you know, and for a lot of investors it's a math transaction. It's sort of like , you know, if you make it emotional than people get scared, you know, it's you. If the nbers don't lie and you've got research and you can substantiate what the, the returns are, the people will love you for it, that you've done all that leg work and they don't have to go and do that. They might , you know, a , a more savvy investor, not your cousin from down the street might do additional research. But if your cousin or your family member believes in you and you feel and sound confident, then I think it's going to be , , you know, people will just be writing you checks, which is what , what happened to me. They want to make that money. They want to do better than they can do on a CD or in a bank account. People love real estate investing, but they're afraid of it themselves. So they want to, I rarely got turned down when I asked friends and family for money. And here's another tip too. You can't decide who has money and doesn't have money to give you. One of my investors was a school teacher who had $40k sitting in a, in a whatever the school teacher retirement plan as it wasn't called a 401k back then. , and she rolled it into a self directed IRA and invested 100% and wanted to do it over and over because she was making a solid 10%, which she was not making in that account at that point. So don't judge it, just tell everyone in your circle what you're doing. They'll get excited for you and with you. And then the conversation to ask for an investment will be easy at that point. It's huge. You have to follow the plan to protect them, you know, like talking about doing . Yeah, exactly. And you can't just borrow $20,000 from mom, $30,000 from your cousin and $50,000 from your neighbor down the street and combine that into one investment. Like I'm sure through your coaching programs you could teach people how to borrow the money properly. Oh yeah. It's so important to protect the people that are investing in your deals. Like it's no joke. Honestly, I think I'm more, no, I know I'm more protective of other people's money than I am of my own. Like I said for me , because that's integrity and that's your trust and no, we're not. We're not going to be messing around with other people's money. Things don't always go as planned. And that's another thing I'll say is when a deal does go south and sometimes it will, you have to, you know , over communicate to your lenders, particularly if they're friends and family, like institutional lenders, they have a lot of recourse for how to come after you. But if it's a friend or a family member, absolutely over communicate and then over-communicate again, you know, here's what's happening on the deal. Here's how I'm handling it. Promise I'm going to get you your money. Did you know I need a three week extension? Whatever that conversation is. If you duck it , , you're going to lose faith and confidence from your lenders and not a good place to be. And it'll be hard to ever get , , their confidence back to invest in another deal. Totally, totally agree. Okay, so let's talk about, I know one thing that comes up often is how, how are you, how do you find and keep contractors? The big question of the day, it's so hard. , initially when I was starting out, I would find people on craigslist. I would ask friends and family if they knew handymen . , nowadays there are a lot more sources for contractors like on tech and Angie's list. And , , the local real estate clubs will often publish a list of contractors where other investors have had a good experience. That's one of the trends that I started in my real estate club was nobody could get on my contractor list unless someone in my group had done business with them and how to get experience. So we, we never publish negative reviews. We all need to did that privately. You know, someone said, Hey, do you know Xyz roofing company? , we would handle that through private message if we hadn't had a good experience or if we had heard bad things. But that if it was a good experience, they got added to an excel excel spreadsheet and anyone who is a member of the real estate club could download the sheet of really good contractors. And it's important to , , reward those people with paying them fairly, with giving them your loyalty and using them over and over again. Because if you give them loyalty and you are fair and you're good to those people, they'll, they'll do the same in return for you very often. You know? Absolutely . Last one of the ways that I think I kept my mind core group of contractors and eventually I built my own crew and they worked on every single deal with me going forward, but that took about a year and a half to build, just to be perfectly honest, you know ? So will you guys list, I'll handle the , the one offs or Angie's list or thing like I said? Sure. Yeah, totally. , yeah. You know, while I've had struggles sometimes with plbers and electricians, contractors, like my key contractors, I just haven't, I've been really fortunate I guess. But honestly, I don't know that it's been that I've been fortunate. I think it's because I treat people well and I think that a lot of people who are running projects don't treat contractors well. And yeah, I get it. There are some contractors who have done bad things. They've taken money, they haven't finished projects. I totally get that. And also there are some renovators who haven't paid contractors or who don't pay them on time or who treat them terribly. So it's, it goes both ways I think. So I'm glad that you said that because I totally agree that treating people well and paying them well and taking care of them will make everything so much easier. Absolutely. And it's, it's harder to get. So, so I'll back up a little bit and say that, you know, you can find the cheapest flooring guy on craigslist that'll do your job for a dollar a square foot. , he may or may not show up after he gets your initial deposit. Yep . , it might be a dollar and a half more expensive to go with one of those more reputable services. And , and sometimes you have to create balance for them . You know, like if you get the dollar an hour guy or a dollar a square foot guy and he leaves your job halfway through and then you've still got to hire the $2 a square foot guy, maybe it was a smarter thing to go with the more reputable public facing, you know, the, a lot of these websites now , , certainly thbtack, and I forget what some of the other sites are, there's a rating system, so that's more accountability. The people that are on there a little bit more expensive, but they also have this public facing presence where they can be rated if they don't do a job well. Yeah . And that didn't happen to me. I mean, I ended up knowing my first contractor personally and it still didn't go well because he overran the budget. He overran the timelines. My inexperience allowed me to mismanage that and not stay on top of him. And it caused a lot of delays. It caused an eating into my profit and it caused a falling out with he and I. So , build your team , treat them well, pay them well , maybe don't always take the cheapest guy in town unless it's some tiny little thing that you know, you can either do yourself or it wouldn't crush your project to have to do it again. Yeah, totally. And on the flip side, yes. Take care of people. And on the flip side, get rid of contractors when you need to. That was a big lesson I had to learn because I'm super loyal and so I'm like, no, I hired this person. At some point they'll come back and finish instead of cutting ties quickly and moving on and finding somebody who will actually come do the job now because times it's just business and time is money. Exactly like you're saying. And that's a hard one. Me Too . I don't like to hurt people, dissapoint them. I , you know, I also like to finish things that I started and , so yeah, that I think firing people is one of the hardest parts of the business. If you don't have that, if you're not that kind of person that has that skillset at your core and can't separate the two of them , this person isn't performing. Maybe I give them one chance after I've had a heart, heart conversation with them, you know, hey, I need this job done by Wednesday of next week. You haven't been here in four days. Are you going to finish or do we need to conclude our relationship and me hire someone else. Yeah , yeah, totally. So along the same lines, did you use any software or some sort of magical system to manage your projects or was it like good old excel calendar? Luckily I am an it nerd, so I did do excel. , I was not as good at calendaring as I wish I would have been. Now like looking back, I think every project milestone in the spreadsheet should have been tied to a calendar event with some form of reminder because in that first project, for sure I was traveling a lot for work. I wasn't staying on top of what was happening in the house. Yup . Huge mistake. I mean, I don't, I'm not saying somebody has to be there every minute of every day, but check up on your contractors and make sure they're adhering to what's been agreed to in the contract in terms of the timelines. You know, if kitchen cabinets are supposed to go in on Wednesday and it's Friday and there are no kitchen cabinets, it's time to have a conversation and to manage that before it, it runs your project out two, three, four more weeks or months. , every day that property doesn't sell, you've got interest to your hard money lender, you've got holding costs of utilities and that not being able to recognize your profit. So yeah, absolutely. I absolutely wish through all of my projects, all 300 of them that I would have stayed on top of this, the timelines and the calorie ending calendaring much better. Yeah. Yes. Okay, so in terms of partnerships, did you ever do any sort of partnering with people on projects or was it mainly you and maybe like some investors? But did you ever actually partner with people on projects?

I only did it once on a commercial property and I'm not sure that it's my favorite thing. , you know, it didn't go well for me, but it can be a viable plan as long as the agreements are in writing, they are iron clad, they are solid. I am, I'm such a, I used to be a fan of the handshake agreement. I am no longer a fan of the handshake agreement. It needs to be solid and writing undisputable even if you are my best friend on the planet, if you and I did a deal, we would have contractual agreements. Even though we're the highest, you know, two highest integrity people on earth, we still would need to have a written agreement because if there's any kind of miscommunication or misunderstanding, the agreement can prevail. And , , I learned that lesson over and over the hard way by trusting people. , and the reason why I wasn't so great on con, on, on partnerships is it ate up a lot of my profit. You know, it ate in one case on this commercial building, 60% of my profits went to this partner. , had I just gone with a lender and then borrowed the rest of the money with friends and family, I would've made a lot more profit because I'm just paying interest to people rather than bringing them into my deal . And if they're not experienced and they don't understand how a real estate deal can go, it can be miserable having to babysit someone. Now if you're going to partner with an experienced real estate investor who knows the drill and is willing to sign agreements, that could be a whole different experience. I was bringing in partners who , , in, in the case of this commercial building had no other investment experience other than rental properties. So they didn't understand commercial buildings or renovations or you know, what the end game was going to be, why I made a great profit. But it, it sadly, I only made 80,000 and I could've made 60% more had I not had these partners.

And why did you bring partners into that deal?

We were short on severely short. The lender initially told us we could bring 10% down for this $2 million building and later came back and said, Oh, I'm sorry you need 20%. Oh , uh , uh, that was a lot of money and we didn't have it. So , , we just, we sought out a, what I'm calling a money partner and that's what I thought they were going to be. And , and passive investor just giving us the money. , they actually bought into the LLC, wanted to be a part of the daily operations of the business, although they lived out of state, they couldn't be on site to help me manage the renovations and manage the leasing of the building. , so there were a lot of mistakes that I made in that partnership agreement. I think partnerships can be wonderful if you do them right and you bring in the right people and you have the right set of written agreements. So I don't mean to sound like I'm poo-pooing partnerships and it cost me a lot of money and certainly a lot of heartache for over the course of this project.

Yeah, absolutely. No, I , I completely get where you're coming from. I agree. Partnerships can be great and they can not be great, but you've got to do it right. So yes , you've got to protect yourself and you've got to protect other people, so everyone needs to be protected in the deal. Yeah . Okay. Let's see. Now when you did, when you completed a flip, were you typically your own realtor then? Because you mentioned you got your real estate license. Did you just list those properties yourself?

Oh, in the beginning, no. I actually had to partner with real estate agents over time. I started using a flat fee agency and then I just got my own license at that point because I was seeing how much profit was being left on the table. , you know, obviously you always have to offer a , a buyer's agent, a, you know, market reasonable commission, but to list, I knew I could do all my listing activities on my own. I was doing so much marketing at that point. I didn't feel like I needed a real estate agent. And I also don't believe that people need to be licensed agent to be in this business. , I wasn't for several years. I am started in 2001 I don't think I ever even got my license. So 2004, 2005 , , you can do all of your own activities. You can have partnership agreements with your realtors, you can go with a flat fee listing company. There are dozens of them now. , I don't think people should run out and get a real estate license necessarily to do this business.

Yeah, no, I think once you, you're actually committed and your consistently flipping more than one property a year because otherwise the fees to have your license and the fees to have mls. Yeah. It doesn't make sense if that's, if you're only flipping like one house a year. The only thing is , , if you do, if you, if you do not have a license and you are relying on realtors for information, they need to be responsive and they need to be sending you the information in a timely manner because things move way too fast in this business to sit, sit on your tail. That's the only thing

what I had to do in the beginning and what I offered to do because after a while , if I wasn't listing properties with these realtors, they become less and less responsive because obviously everybody wants to get paid and get their slice of the pie. Right. So I used to also offer a, Hey, if you give me a CMA, I'll give you $50. Gotcha. And I'll take you to lunch. Like something that incentivizes them. , and you know, you can tell them they might get the listing, but that you can't say that too many times and not give them the list thing. , at that point they don't have any faith in confidence. So it's easier to just pay them by the CMA, the Comparative Market Analysis. Who for people who don't know the terminology yet , , pay them by to pull comparable sales and a lot of realtors, particularly junior level realtors might be excited about that because it's a chance to make a little bit of money, get some exposure, analyzing the market, get exposed to a bunch of different and maybe at some point secure listing or a buyer referral from you. You know, like, yeah. Again, fostering loyalty and treating people fairly and respectfully often pays off in the end.

Oh my gosh, for sure. This is such a relationship business. It is. Yeah. I mean even with my hard money lenders, they are incredible. I mean one deal that went super south and was a couple of years late because of a title policy , , or a title company error. You know, if I didn't have that hard money lender involved, they would have , who knows, they could have called the note due . Instead, I communicated like you mentioned earlier, the importance of over-communicating things and he hung out for two years and waited

one wait for an entire year on that Durham property. Right now, every week I was sending emails to my private lender to say, I am so sorry. Here's what [inaudible] , what's going on to be expected . You know, here are the court dates, this is what's happening. I guarantee you you're going to get your money. , and he hung in there and it was amazing. And that's a part of the beauty of a private lender too . I mean, you were lucky with a hard money lender. , private lenders often have more flexibility and are often willing to compromise as long as they feel , , confident and they trust you and you haven't done anything to violate that trust to that . The other thing too, when you mentioned relationship business, there are other types of people that you need to build your dream house slipping business. You know, you'll need a good title company. You'll need someone who at the drop of a hat can pull, can create a HUD settlement statement or a closing disclosure statement for you so that you can see what your profit is going to be. , if you just Walton as a new investor and you haven't done any kind of relationship or rapport building, it's gonna be hard to do that. You need a good insurance agent, you need a good mortgage lender. , in case you're gonna refinance that after you rehab it and jp it as a rental property. I call these people a Dream Team. Yup . And so I'm sure in your coaching program you probably detail like, here's how you foster these relationships. Here's how you find these connections. It's so important to have a database of people that you can go to. You know, I had one title company for probably about four years. , when they got less responsive, I started interviewing other title companies and spread the business around when I wasn't doing deals actively, I would still work for , , clients and friends and family to that one title company because I had a good relationship with them up to that point. , so definitely building your Dream Team, you know , , I don't really like the Cliche of let me take you to lunch kind of relationship building. It's, here's, here's my letter of intent. This is who I am. This is what I'm trying to do. I want you on my Dream Team. I want you to be my title company. I bring every single deal too . How do we foster the best relationship and do that with each type of professional contractors , insurance people, mortgage people, hard money lenders, title companies , , the works. Yep . Can't do this. Yeah, you cannot do this in a vacu. And there, there are people that you're gonna need to be able to be successful in this business. And those are the types of professionals that, that make it happen. You know, an insurance agent that can get you a declaration page, you know, 8:00 AM on a Monday morning for a closing. Those are good people. Those are the people you need in your corner and they, they need your repeat business and your loyalty.

Yes. Yeah, totally. Give and take. You cannot just reach out to people to be on your team and just expect to receive without giving anything. It's the same thing for free information, you know? Right . Don't, don't say to an investor, I want to take you to lunch and pick your brain. I could buy my own lunch. I don't know . I don't , I don't need that. I want you to bring something solid to the table, you know, not just tenacity, but do you bring credit to the table? Do you bring money to the table, bring experience. And if you don't find a way to give back to that person that's giving you information, you know , and, and I think that's really important too . Like a lot of the gurus teach that like, oh, just call a real estate investor up and take them to lunch. Nobody's got time for that. You know, like I will go the lunch with a select few, but they're going to have to show me their business plan and show me like what your commitment level is to getting the training and the teaching that you need to do this business. Right. So that I'm not babysitting you, you know, I'm just being real here. I mean, most people aren't actually going to do anything. So you know , it , it gets very frustrating to give a lot of information and help only for somebody to not do anything with it because your time is precious, so no, totally get it. Okay. So to wrap things up here, one big question that, so what I did was I asked the members of my tribe of awesome women who are in my program, in my coaching programs, I asked them questions that they wanted to know. So one of the big ones was around mindset and I know we touched on it a little bit ago, but what kinds of, I guess challenges, did you feel like you had mindset wise? Like did you have worth issues or money, bad relationship with money or did you have any sort of challenges that you realized needed to be addressed in order to really like step into your own badassery basically

yes . All of those things. I think you could do it an entire separate week long podcast , right ? Those things. , I had no money in my bank account when I started, so I was terrified of, you know, what am I going to do if this goes south? How am I gonna pay for this , , you know, the mortgage , , from the hard money lender cause I had to pay a monthly interest on that. , I was afraid to ask people for money cause I, you know, again, I had to follow a plan to do that because just creating that on my own. I didn't feel safe or competent. I didn't think like who would give me money and when, you know, I don't manage my own money that well. , and so having the plan and sticking to it boosted my confidence so much that I didn't feel like an imposter at that point. I mean, maybe in the first few presentations, but once I got rolling, my competence level was soaring because I felt like I had this book and I had , , after my first flip, I paid $5,000 to enroll in an a real estate flipping class. And then I enrolled in a rehab in class. So I started to get training and coaching. , the mentor programs weren't that great back in the day, so we didn't have like this individual step-by-step mentoring. But having the training and the knowledge helped me feel even more confident. So in deals two, three, and beyond, I didn't have a lot of those issues because one, I had had some success to . I'd invested in a lot of training at that point. , at by my third deal, I had invested about $10,000 in training. Yeah . , and which is practically nothing in today's dollars. , but it gave me that extra confidence boost. But in terms of worth issues , , I could tell people, visualize success. Don't think about what you don't want, right ? Think about what you do want to happen. I want this seller to say yes, I want them to say yes, not even a want. I visualize seeing them saying yes at the price that I want to pay. You know, and again, remembering to be fair and all of your dealings, you know, it's not about trying to hoodwinked someone and steal their house from them and not, you know, if, if 40 when I offered that man 42,000 or 45,000 that worked for him, he wanted 52 but even taking 45 he still, that house was 100% paid for. So that was still money in his pocket, still was profit and I through the pain and suffering of rehabbing it, realizing profit . So right, everybody won in that scenario. And that helps a lot too when you're operating from a level of integrity and fairness, that helps with confidence as well. It gives , you know , I'm doing good things. I'm helping solving people's real estate problems, right ? They have a , an empty, ugly property that's abandoned, that needs love, and I'm going to go about this business with heart and integrity and do the best that I can do and how , and make sure that everybody wins . Oh my God, that will put your competence through the roof because you'll know you're doing good things as a good person and you're also arranging to be paid for it handsomely and that's okay . Life changing. Yeah , absolutely. It is okay to get paid for it. Yes. I grew up extremely poor, so I've always had these weird and negative views about money, and once I started making money, I realized, oh my gosh, this allows me to give more back to charity, to invest more in my communities, to take care of my family at a level that I couldn't before. , and again, it's , it's 100% life changing.

Yeah. Well that is probably the best note we could end on. I don't know a better way to end because I love the fact that we're ending on the note of it's not about you, it's not just about you. It is about how you can be a positive force in other people's lives, in seller's lives, in hard money. Lenders live in your family's lives and everyone's life . It's not just about you.

Yeah . And the neighborhood that you're renovating and that you're going to create this beautiful product where there was once this ugly place .

Yeah. If you're only focusing on you and how you're going to benefit from the transaction you're missing, you are 100% missing the point I think so. I think that's a great, that's a great place to end. Thank you so much for sharing. So glad to be here and your wisdom and all of the things with us. I think people are going to love this episode and I'm grateful to you.

Thank you. Thanks for hosting me and for all that you do.

Take care Angelique. Bye. Okay. I love that. Not just because she's a very good friend of mine and we like to laugh and have fun, but there's a lot of wisdom there and there are lots of little tidbits that you can take away from this episode. Remember, she started with nothing in her pocket, potentially negative something in her pocket. She followed a plan. She stuck to it. She had no idea what she was doing. She just did it. She took the steps, picked a plan, and she stuck to it. All right , you guys, I hope you love this episode as much as I loved recording it, and if you are finding value in this podcast, please do me a huge favor. Leave a rating and a review wherever you listen to podcasts. Why Debbie? Why are you giving me homework? Because here's the thing. In order to reach more people like you, I need you to let people know that it's worth their time. All right, and ratings and reviews are the way to do that for podcasts. Also, make sure you click the subscribe button so that you are always notified when I drop a new episode. And then lastly, I've got some goodies in the show notes, so be sure to check those as well. I appreciate you so much for tuning in. I can't wait to connect with you on the next episode and I hope you make it a great day. Bye for now.