PODCAST

The Note Business With Ben Fredricks

Mitch Stephen|By March 10, 2020

Episode 355: The Note Business With Ben Fredricks

View this episode on:

REIS 355 | The Note Business

The note business can be a difficult one if you’re just feeling your way through, not knowing what you’re doing. In this kind of industry, it’s best to find support from people in the same field who are open and willing to help. Ben Fredricks has created over 100 notes and flipped over 250 properties. Ben sits down with Mitch Stephen to give a good overview of the note business as a whole, especially as it’s represented in the NoteWorthy Convention. If you’re looking to get in on the note business, let this be your beginning.

—

I’m here with Ben Fredricks. He’s with NoteWorthy. I used to go to the NoteWorthy Convention all the time in Las Vegas back when Jack Sternberg owned it, but he sold it to Aaron Halderman. Aaron asked Ben to come on and help him with it. We’ve got some new blood over there at NoteWorthy and it’s always good to see the changes. Jack and I are getting older. We’ve got to bring in some young blood to spice it up and keep it all ripped and roaring. How are you doing, Ben?

I’m doing awesome. Thanks for having me on.

You used to be in RMLO and you were helping people deal with Dodd-Frank or get new loans. Which one was it?

It was both but the tail end of me being in MLO, it was discovering this owner-financing niche and helping investors getting compliant on their notes. It was something I learned. I never even knew it existed until an investor approached me about it.

You cut your teeth with the NoteWorthy network and the people there.

I used to go there as a vendor. I was looking to meet investors so I could help them with my MLO business. During the sessions, while all the other vendors would sit around checking their phones and Facebook and email or whatever, I’d go sit in on sessions and take a ridiculous amount of notes so that I could learn everything that I could. What I learned was it’s not that hard. I took the information and went home and ran with it. I started buying properties for myself and creating owner-financing. It’s perpetuated over the last few years.

You don’t specialize in buying notes as much as you specialize in creating them like what I do.

My other business, which is Odell Barnes REO, we buy properties in bulk from banks and auction. We’ll either sell those or we’ll either flip them to a local investor or we will create an owner-financing note on that property.

What state are you doing this in? Where are you doing this at?

It’s pretty much from Texas to the East Coast. We don’t get much out West, but it’s a lot of Midwest Rust Belt for the most part.

Those laws vary a lot with the state property codes and all that. You can’t cookie-cut it when you’re going across states, can you?

Unfortunately not. That would be the easy way and the simple way but it does change from state to state. In Texas, it’s difficult to make a land contract. Illinois has made it impossible to do land contracts anymore. It’s got to be a mortgage or deed of trust.

Relationships are key in the way you're building business, especially in an industry like real estate. Click To Tweet

They didn’t make it impossible but what they’re telling you is they’re going to penalize you as if it was a sale in a mortgage and deed of trust or whatever. They’re going to make you go through the regular foreclosure process. People say they outlawed the lease options in Texas. They didn’t outlaw them. They said they outlawed the contract for deeds. They made the penalty that if you didn’t report in a timely fashion by January 31st and accurately on a certain amount of data to your note payer, that the fine was $250 a day or whatever up to the value of the house. They didn’t outlaw anything. They made it strict that why would you want to do it? You started coming with the conclusion that it’s not that hard to comply. Get what they want, do it within the time frame they want and you’re fine. Everyone always runs away from it, then they come back like a dog sniffing a rattlesnake and they finally say, “I can take this snake. I can do this.”

I had that same discussion with a lot of the investors I worked with and said, “At the end of the day, I know you paying the cost of an MLO seems like, ‘This is a bunch of hoops I’ve got to jump through.’” At the end of the day, it’s going to help increase the value of your note because you’ve got a second pair of eyes. You’re taking your emotion out of it and saying, “I want to get this deal sold.” You have somebody looking at it and saying, “These people probably are not good qualifiers to get into this property.” It’s going to save you a headache down the road. It’s going to increase the value of your note. I think it’s a win-win. You can look at regulation one way, but if you look at the silver lining of it, it does help from a value standpoint.”

If you’re not compliant, your note isn’t worth anything.

You’re going to take a huge discount. It’s not worth it.

When Dodd-Frank first came about, a lot of my competition got out of the business. They ran away and I started to run away with them. I started backing up and I caught myself. “I think this business has made me a pile of money. I shouldn’t run away from it easily. What is this Dodd-Frank? What am I supposed to do?” In the beginning, it was 2,500 pages and no one knew what it said. I found out who was controlling it. It was the Savings and Mortgage Loan Commission in Texas. I found out who was the commissioner or the head chair. I had to call him up and say, “What am I supposed to do? I’m unclear and I want to be compliant.” I first walked out with my hands up and said, “I surrender. What do you want to do?” I became good friends with them. We discovered how to do it ourselves along with Eddie Speed of the Seller Finance Coalition and people that were up there trying to lobby for common-sense regulation for the benefit of real estate investors.

Go to Texas100.org if you’re in this business in any way, shape or form, in the creative real estate business or the note business, you better watch out what’s going up in Washington. If we’re not at the table designing what they’re going to say or how these laws are passed or having input, then we’re on the menu. They’re going to eat us alive. You should see some of the crazy stuff that’s up there now. Please become a member and help us out. You have some real guts. You buy property all over the flyover states mostly.

It does take a few brass tacks to be able to do it. The first go-round was super scary. You’re like, “I’m not getting eyes on this property per se.” When you’re buying in bulk, it’s a little bit easier because even if I screw up on 10% of these, I’m going to be okay. If you’re buying onesie or twosie and you can’t see it, you don’t go out to the property, you don’t have those resources, it’s going to bite you.

When you’re buying in bulk, you’re buying REO lists from banks or something. You’re paying $0.10, $0.15, $0.20, $0.30 on the dollar. Your margins are huge. You’re going to have a couple of losers. It doesn’t matter. You take the $5 million you would have made, now you only made $4.5 million. That’s why you have to deal with all the multiple states because those lists never come with all the houses in one state. They’re spread out all over the place. I imagine you make some friends with some people in the states and you can share in the purchase of that group.

You have to. This business is all about relationships. At the end of the day, you have people that are there to help you through the process. We work with a lot of wholesalers that help us out on deals. People that will be there to put up signs or whatever the case may be. The entire idea of this business is that relationships are totally key in the way that you’re building a business, especially in real estate.

You can’t glean the field. If you’ve got a wholesaler that’s helping you out, if you’ve got five houses in that state or whatever, give him one of the super great deal so he can make some money too. You can’t glean the field and keep it all, then you won’t have any sincere help.

We take that same approach too with our investors, the guys that buy deals from us on a consistent basis for themselves to fix up and flip or whatever they’re going to do. We’re all about hitting singles and doubles. I don’t need to swing through the fences every time on a deal because how many times are they going to come back to that well if they’re not winning on the deal as well. Together we can all win and that’s a mantra we tried to live by in our organization.

No matter how easy that sounds, you’ve got to work to find the right people. When you have the right people, it makes all the difference in the world. Don’t get discouraged if you go through a couple of people to get to the right guy in that city. Finding the right guy for the first time usually doesn’t happen. There are probably ways to up your odds. Sometimes it’s trial and error until you find the right guy. I’ve had to go through sometimes 3, 4 or 5 people. I was like, “Is there anybody in this town that’s honest or gives a crap?” Then finally, I find the guy. This event or this network, this group of people at NoteWorthy, there are some pretty sharp people in those crowds.

The Note Business: When you’re buying in bulk, it’s a little easier because even if you screw up 10% of them, you’re going to be okay.

I always say when I go to these seminars, “I’m paying to see the speaker but I’m getting sometimes just as much or sometimes more.” After you become an expert in a field, it gets harder to find a nugget from a speaker. Speakers are usually trying to sell something. They’re telling you all the upside and everything. Usually what I’m learning from the audience or at lunch and dinner is the downside. How do I mitigate the downside? What happens when this crap happens? Tell me how big this boulder is that’s teetering on top of the cliff above my head. What do I do to get out from under it? That’s where you learn that stuff. It’s usually from real people that are out doing it. I speak on stage too. I try hard to give the upside and the downside. A lot of people that are talking to you, they’re giving you the upside.

Every conference I’ve ever gone to, the most I’ve taken away is from the people that I get to talk to in between like having coffee or meeting for breakfast before the event starts. I’ve made amazing relationships that way. I’ve raised a bunch of private money doing that, so it wasn’t going to a conference. If it costs me a couple of thousand bucks to fly out there and be away from my family to do the hotel room and everything else. A lot of people don’t listen to the speakers. They’ll take a whole bunch of notes and never go back and do anything with it.

If your main goal is to go out there and say, “Who can I meet that is going to help my business? Who can I help with the knowledge that I have?” It’s a huge impact because I took a bunch of notes from a lot of the speakers, but the people I met at events like meeting you at NoteExpo, I’ve met Eddie and talked to him off stage at NoteWorthy, NoteExpo and other note investors that aren’t on stage that are there in the thick of the game doing it every single day. You can go and talk to whoever the person is and say, “Who’s the player in this room?” I know they’re probably not on stage. Those people are working for a company and they’ve got, “Come and service your notes with us here, come do this.” Who are the players in this room? Who do I need to meet? That’s a key question at any event you go to that will serve you well.

That’s why live events will never die. They say they’re going to die because you don’t need them. You can do tele-events and people don’t have to leave their house, but that’s not where the magic happens at the event. The magic happens in the hall.

I’m glad you said that because I was debating this on Facebook. I asked a question because we’re doing a live event and then there are other virtual events going on. I’ve done virtual events, the problem is that I get easily distracted when I’m at home. I’ve got a five-year-old daughter. If I’m sitting there and trying to watch something on my iPad, she’s like, “Daddy, what are you doing?” It’s not going to happen. I’m not going to have the time to get to it. Granted, I’ll get a recording and maybe I won’t get distracted by the 5,000 other things I’ve got going on to go back and watch that video later. If I’m in it and I’m right there physically in person, it’s much better. The networking piece is important. If I’m doing it virtually, I can’t lead anybody. Who am I going to talk to?

I have lifelong friends. Since the time I went to that seminar, they’ve been my friends. Some of those people have been for many years. We may not see each other regularly but we talk all the time via Facebook or email or whatever. I want to encourage people. You’ve got the next NoteWorthy Convention. Is it in Vegas again?

This one is in Anaheim. It’s right across the street from Disneyland so people could bring their family or they can head out to Disneyland afterward, see the fun and eat at restaurants.

I have never understood why anybody had a convention in Vegas. Maybe you should have it in the middle of the Arizona desert somewhere where there are a pool, a restaurant and a bed, so we could concentrate and get this done. When is this event in Anaheim?

February 27th through the 29th.

It’s the NoteWorthy Convention. I want you to go to 1000houses.com/notebiz and all the details will be there. You can sign up and get the itineraries, who’s speaking and what’s going on. Who is speaking out there? Do you know?

We have a whole bunch of people. We’re going to have people speaking on owner-financing. We’re going to talk notes and partials, which Eddie Speed and his wife, Martha, taught me. That blew my mind. I was like, “What? Can I sell a piece of this thing? That’s amazing.”

I’ve known Eddie since 1998 or 1999 or certainly right around 2000. We’ve talked for hours and hours and then one day, eighteen years later, I’m finally ready to own the concept of a partial. You can read about it or they can tell you about it, but sometimes until you’re ready, which probably has to do with maturity and how you understand the subject, you don’t get it. You can read the same exact two pages in a chapter eighteen years later, and it means a completely different thing to you because you’re ready to accept what got told you. I know what happened to me with Eddie. I started running back to Eddie. I said, “Eddie, if I would’ve kept the last 2 or 3 years of every note I’d ever sold, I’d only given up $1,000 of note, but I’d be worth millions of dollars now.” He said, “I’ve been telling you that for many years but you haven’t been hearing me.” I said, “I heard you. I just wasn’t capable.”

Raising private money is a much better deal because you're getting more money to buy more inventory. Click To Tweet

It’s going to go beyond notes a little bit. We’ll have some guys that are talking about multifamily syndication. We’re going to tailor it towards getting some young blood in there. A lot of the events that I’ve gone to in terms of notes, they tend to be people of my age group or older like 40-plus. A lot of young people don’t know about it as I was. I didn’t have a clue about notes.

Selling your houses with seller-financing certainly has been one of the best-kept secrets on the planet. As much as you or I might go out there and try to even talk about it, no one grasps it. You’d think it was a nasty thing to do or something because if you talk to bankers about wanting to borrow money so you can wrap their note, they glass over. Certainly, you understand this concept. It’s not rocket science, but no one gets it until they do get it. They’re like, “I can have cashflow. I don’t have to have liability for everything that breaks.” I understand it’s going to be temporary but my markup, I received my appreciation the day I bought. I can be in control of how much of it I want when you’re creating it.

If you could buy quality notes at super discounts all the time, you can shortcut the whole process of buying a house and selling it with owner financing. You can get a note but you never know that note like you know the one that you made. I know exactly about the guy who’s in that house over there because I put him in there. I know that his work record and his criminal history was verified and that everything was done. I know that guy in that house. When you buy a note, there are ways to mitigate your circumstances. Most people I know that buy notes don’t know about that note except for how long it has been seasoned and how long it’s been paid if that hasn’t been fabricated somehow.

They know the data and a lot of times, the data is not all of the information. You haven’t had a conversation with that buyer. You don’t know their background. Maybe they’ve progressed in their job or they had a hiccup before. They had a prior bankruptcy, but now they’ve gotten their lives back on track. If you look at that file and you see bankruptcy, you’re like, “This is out.” You haven’t had that conversation with that borrower to know that they screwed it up, but they’ve got their lives back together and they’re rolling now.

The truth about that is every one of us can be up for bankruptcy if the good Lord says we need that to learn a lesson or whatever. It can happen to anybody and it doesn’t have to be your fault. You don’t have to cause it. It can be caused by a whole range of things. We’re looking at people to go in and talking to a lady who had a 430 credit score. She was perfect for a long time, then she got to 430 and then it went for a couple of years and then it went back up to good. I’m like, “What happened here?” “My husband was a truck driver and I have four kids. I was a stay-at-home mom and he got killed in a truck accident. That’s where it went bad.” I said, “What happened to make it better again?” “I met a man who made three times more money than he did. We got married.” You said it’s from the 27th to the 29th. That’s going to be a lot of information in three days.

It’s for 2.5 days. We’re going to have a lot of panels as well so people can ask all the questions.

I like that form. I like them a lot better though when I’m on the panel and people are asking questions. Sometimes they don’t ask questions.

One of the things we’ve done is start to survey the audience ahead of time to find out what they want to know about. Hopefully, we’ll have a jam bunch of questions asked. I know we’ve got a ton for private money. That always seems to be the biggest question for people, “I got the deals, but I can’t find any money,” or “I’ve got money but I can’t find the deals.” It’s usually those two things.

I know how to make private money on buying my house and everything. Is it the same for raising money to buy notes or a little bit different?

You’re looking at margins. When you go and buy a property and you’re using private money to do it, you know, “I’ve got to pay back my private money person 8%, but if I’m getting a 30% ROI on this property because of the note, there’s my spread.”

As for the lender, he’s still in the same position too, because he still has a first lien on a piece of real estate. The question is, what is that real estate worth? Not that the value means anything to me like the note holder or the note buyer, except for if I have to take it back, what boat am I sitting in? The higher the value of the property compared to the balance of the note, the more secure everybody feels. It’s all the same paperwork. The note purchasing business and the note creating business are exactly the same except for one little piece in the middle where I have to go out, buy a house, find someone and create a note. When you buy a note, you’re finding all that’s already happened.

You’re finding the source for the paper.

The Note Business: At the end of the day, the note business is all about relationships. You always have people that are there to help you throughout the process.

Private money is critically important to the note buying as it is in my business to the house buying and then selling with seller-financing. I have a course on raising private money. I have $22 million of private money and counting. When you’re holding these notes long-term, it’s not like $1 million and you can go in and out. When you’re holding notes, these notes got 15, 20, 30 years left on them. When you get your private money out, it stays out there for a long time. You potentially need a lot more money than a flipper does because the flippers are putting the money out and getting it back. Do you have a lot of private money?

That’s one of the lessons we learned at the beginning. We started out with one private lender who gave us about $160,000 and then about 50% of that went to notes to buy or to hold, they became owner-financed properties. It’s exactly what you said, “I’m only getting so much money back. I can buy fewer deals with that now.” You have to find a way to either raise more money or liquidate those notes or a partial of them so you can recapitalize. Raising private money is a much better deal because you’re getting more money to buy more inventory and create more wealth and notes.

The money in the seller finance strategy and in the note buying strategy is in being the bank. The money is not in liquidating the note. Although when you’re young in the business or when you have some special financial needs pop up, you might have to liquidate some to get done whatever you’ve got to get done. The art of the business is to never sell a note. Keep adding notes on top of the notes that you own. I like the way I do business and buying notes because I can do a lot of little deals and not have everything in one basket. I can do a ton of little deals, but you look back over your shoulder and there’s a mountain of notes and the cashflow is tremendous but it all hinges on the private money.

One of the worst calls I get is, “I want to pay off my note.” That’s like, “Crap.”

I have to get the 500 notes owed to me and my partner, Mike. You can hardly do it because once you get around 275 or 300 notes, you’ll go out and create ten owner finance notes in 1.5 months, then you get eight phone calls saying, “We need a pay-off,” from ten other people in your coffers. You did all that work for 1.5 months and now you’re at 302.

That’s one of the challenges but I’ll take it.

What a shame, ten people lumped sum some money on me at $10,000 to $30,000 apiece. It’s a horrible problem.

I’m only crying over the work, not the money. Let’s make that clear.

My course is called Private Money Changes Everything. You can find it at 1000Houses.com under coaching and mentoring. It is not a thick or heavy course. When you buy it, it’s light. It’s like crème brulee or cheesecake. You don’t need a lot of it because it’s rich. It’s only seven steps. I’ll show you exactly what to do, then there are 21 objections that I have the answers for you. You memorize the answers to the objections. If you hear a 22nd objection that I don’t have on there, call me and tell me. I’ve been doing this for a long time and I’ve never heard more than these 21 objections.

I have the way that I present it. The way I’m presenting it is I’m not asking anyone to borrow money. I’m telling them how my business works. I find an excuse to tell them, “You’re an attorney, let me tell you about my business and tell me if you can poke any holes. Am I doing this right?” I then started explaining my business. We get to the part where I’m borrowing money and how much I’m paying and how they’re protected. Pretty soon they raise their hand and go, “Can I be one of those guys?”

I read your book a few years ago. This is the time I was being an MLO. I’ve seen you in an event and I was like, “Let me pick up that book.” I breeze through it. It’s a funny book. There are lots of great stories in there that I enjoyed. My takeaway from it at the end was, “This guy is like me.” You forwent the formal education and said, “I’m going to go to work. I’m going to see what I can make myself in this world.” I had an epiphany. I was like, “If Mitch can do it, so can I. There was no reason he can buy 1,000 houses and I can’t. He’s figured it out. All I have to do is figure out the process and then put it into play.” It’s not a mystery. Nobody’s better than anyone else. Many of these people at the note conference are so unassuming. You wouldn’t know that they’re successful until you talk to them. When you realize what they’ve been able to do, you have to become a sponge.

That’s another plus to go into the event as opposed to doing a webinar or something. You find out that the people that are successful at this business, they’re not just phenomenal phenoms or anything. They’re regular people that dedicated themselves to a subject that became an expert in it and worked it. They became worth sometimes millions and millions of dollars. It’s not hard to fathom how you can become a multi-million dollar. When you buy a house for $50,000 and owner-finance it for $100,000. You get $10,000 down but they still owe you 360 months of $500 a month positive cashflow. That’s $180,000 they still owe out in the future after the down payment has been collected and before the first payment was ever made. If every time you do a house, you collect some money upfront and they owe you $200,000 plus or minus on average, it doesn’t take long to become a multimillion-dollar.

The only thing you should be chasing is potential. Click To Tweet

Overnight, your net worth is going like this on paper. It’s unbelievable.

I met my business partner, Mike Powell when he was 25. I don’t normally take students right in my hometown for a whole host of reasons. I found that this guy put himself through college all by himself. It’s like dad said, “You’re 18 and 1 minute old, you’re on your own in 30 days. You’re going to do it all and you’re going to pay for it yourself.” I decided to make an exception for him. He’s a multi-millionaire and just getting started. In as short as 1.5 years of being a student and 5.5 years of putting his nose to the grindstone, his future is going to put mine to shame. I had my head so far up my butt when I was 25. Were you a young starter or late starter?

I was a late starter for sure. It didn’t click for me until my daughter was born. That was when it was like, “This is real. It’s time to get to work.” I was 37.

I was 36. I did everything from 36 to 59 and I say this in a humble way. I exceeded my expectations over and over. I had no idea what I expected for myself in this life. I wasn’t trying to compete with Ben or with Eddie Speed. I’m not trying to compete with anybody. I’m trying to do better than I did last year and easier. When I was young it’s, “I’ve got to do more than I did last year.” It doesn’t become about more after a little while. I need to make more money easier than I did last year. Hopefully, the plan is to cut the volume. You can’t keep increasing the volume or your back will break.

You said something interesting there. It makes me think of what one of my mentors told me. He’s like, “I’m not chasing anybody else. The only thing I’m chasing is my potential.” I didn’t learn that until later age. That’s why I wanted to bring some more youth to this industry because they don’t know. If we can show them and raise it up and bring more awareness, it creates more opportunities for everybody.

Can you imagine what would happen if they taught this stuff in school?

I think about that almost every day. What if I had to learn this in high school? I know I’ll set my daughter up. I’m already talking to her about it at five years old. She’s getting the seed planted to buy real estate and these are what it can do for you.

If you put $2,000 a year in an IRA from the time you’re eighteen, you can retire by the time you’re 40 or something. I don’t remember the math but to be able to make $15,000, $20,000, $30,000 at a whack starting at age 20 to 23.

I didn’t have anybody in my circle that was doing that stuff.

That’s what these things are for. NoteWorthy or wherever, that’s what they’re for. It’s to figure out those people in that audience and on that stage that can explain to you in whatever language you need so that you can understand. Sometimes they had to talk slow to me because the subject was far over my head. I was like, “Please, you’re like talking Chinese. Can you slow down?” At other times, I was right with them. I find that if you’re not getting it, don’t leave the room. Keep hanging around the guys and keep listening to the talk until there’s a breakthrough in your brain.

If you’re not getting and you’re not understanding it, it means you’re in the right room because you’re about to level up.

There was this guy named Peter Fortunato. I would be in a room with this guy and he would be blowing my mind. I’m right with him as he’s explaining it. The minute he left the room, I could not explain it to anyone to save my butt. I had to watch that guy over and over again before I could repeat back what he said. I understood it when he was showing it to me, but I couldn’t play it back. I couldn’t go out and do it myself because I couldn’t play it back, so I had to stay. I went on about my life and then four years later, Peter Fortunato is down the street talking. I said, “I’m going to listen to this guy. I wonder if I’ll understand him now.” I went to see if I would understand him now. Have I grown any? Am I going to be able to keep up with him now? I went and I could keep up with him. That’s why I know I went from someplace to another place in the last four years.

The Note Business: Many people at note conferences are quite unassuming. You wouldn’t even know they were successful until you spoke to them.

Sometimes that’s all it takes. It takes constant dedication and time to learn and understand. That’s why college takes four years. When these people get in, they don’t know how to be an engineer when they get to college. It takes some time to learn what that is going to entail and get through that process. There’s no difference in your personal education.

It’s my personal opinion that most of that stuff can be learned in 1.5 years. If they cut out the bullcrap they’re trying to ram down your throat with all the other courses. Who needs that?

You might be right. I’m still not using that algebra from college.

I learned math a whole lot better when I needed it to improve my bottom line financially. I started learning division, subtraction and multiplication. I learned how to arrive at the ROI and all that stuff. I wasn’t interested in high school because it didn’t mean anything to me. Go to 1000houses.com/notebiz and get the details on the NoteWorthy. It’s February the 27th through the 29th in Anaheim, California, right across the street from Disneyland. Get in some learning, maybe book a couple of extra days and take the kids on the teacup ride or something. This is a huge topic. Checkout Private Money Changes Everything. Do you have a course you recommend on private money? Have you talked to anybody like Alan Cowgill or anybody that could help you with raising private money?

Your course helped me. Dan Zitofsky is another fellow investor. He helped me with private money, understanding it and the nuances. Get Mitch’s course. It is great.

I hope I’m being transparent. I love to sell your course. I think I can help you but I’m not the only guy. What’s important to me is that you get somebody and you learn how to do it. I’d love to be the guy but I’m not on this show for that. I’m sincerely on this show to try to help people get wherever they’re going, however they got to do it. I know one thing for sure. I am for some people but I’m not for everybody. That’s the way it is for everybody. The whole world is like that. If I’m your guy, I’m your guy. If not, find somebody. Raising private money will change your life. It probably doesn’t even matter what business you’re in.

There are always investors looking to invest in something. They’ll follow a deal.

What’s important about raising private money is when you go to banks, they tell you what the terms are. “These are your choices and the loans we’ll give. This is how long we’ll go. These are the rates we’re going to charge.” When you’re out there looking for private money, you’re naming what you need and you’re trying to find the person that suits. You’re going to get exactly what you need for your business. The most major component of private money is you’re setting the terms of how it’s going to go. What’s your advice to those thinking about getting into an entrepreneurial career where they can take control of their financial future as it pertains to notes?

Learn something from somebody that’s in the industry. Model who you want to be like. If it’s somebody like Mitch or Eddie Speed or what I do or anybody else in the industry, pick somebody, model what they do and then take massive amounts of action. If you do that, the sky’s the limit.

I’m going to plug for MoatNoteServicing.com. They service notes in Texas. If you have notes in Texas and you don’t want to go through the day-to-day grind of keeping up with them like late fees, sending out notices, collections, and end of year reporting, they’ll do it all for you. It’s $35 a month. I’m not exactly sure, but it’s inexpensive. If you’re creating notes, did you know that you can add the note servicing fee into your buyer’s payment? You should be writing notes for your buyers that include Principal Interest, Taxes, Insurance and Servicing fee. Instead of PITI, it’s PITIS, servicing fee. You can get it set up so that your note payer is paying for the servicing fee instead of you. It’s probably a little hard to go back and buy a note then renegotiate that they have $35 more added on. It’s not going to happen. If you’re buying notes, you have to buy what’s there. If you’re creating notes, you can build the servicing fee in.

I want to thank you for stopping by to get you some Ben Fredricks. I want you to strongly consider going out to Anaheim, California. Hang around with NoteWorthy at the convention there and meet some forward-thinking individuals intent on acquiring their financial freedom or expanding their financial freedom. A lot of people there are already financially-free. I know that for a fact because I’ve been in that room. Grow in a lot of different ways. Thanks for being on, Ben. I appreciate you.

It’s my pleasure, Mitch. I appreciate you.