Master Your Money Mindset With Edna Keep

Episode 407: Master Your Money Mindset With Edna Keep

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Mindset plays a huge part in achieving success in whatever field you are in. In this episode, real estate entrepreneur, Edna Keep, joins Mitch Stephen as they talk about how to master your money mindset and why it is important. They also discuss how challenges inevitably arise when scaling your business and how you can manage those with the proper mindset. You’ve got to have money to be successful. Learn how you can allow yourself to make the kind of money you want by mastering your money mindset.

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In this episode, we have Edna Keep. How are you doing, Edna?

I’m doing great, Mitch. It’s so nice to talk to you again.

We’ve interviewed before. It was interesting and you’ve got some new stuff coming out. You have a free giveaway for the audience here, it’s called 90 Days to 5K: Multifamily with Other People’s Money. Be sure and get that digital copy of the book over there at 1000Houses.com/ednakeep. For those of you who haven’t read the previous episode, tell us a little bit about your background.

Mitch, my story starts back when I became a single mom at the age of sixteen. A lot of people gave up on me. For a while, I gave up on myself thinking, “How could you get into yourself in a situation like that so young?” I had people say, “You ruined your life,” and all this sort of stuff. I didn’t ruin my life. My daughter was one of the best things that ever happened to me. It got me to grow up maybe sooner than I should have, but it didn’t matter. Now, I’m a multimillionaire real estate entrepreneur. It was a classic rag to riches story that I loved to tell. I waitressed and stuff through high school, but my first real job, I was making $1,200 a month and now I get $1,200 a month a tenant.

That’s one thing that’s catchy about your bio. It will stop you in your tracks. From a single mom to $65 million in real estate assets. It’s not bad for someone who screwed up their life. I finished interviewing a guy, Yan Stavisski, who says, “The sooner you fail big, the sooner you’ll get on with it and figure out where you’re supposed to be and hit it big.” Let’s get it out of the way, jump out there and try some things while you’re single and broke or whatever. I’m not sure if you meant running out and getting pregnant at sixteen, but when it happens, what are you going to do about it? You’ve got to take whatever the cards that are dealt and make it into a real game and win. You have a course called, it’s Master Your Money Mindset. Tell us a little bit about what someone can expect to learn or get out of this mentorship.

Over the years, I’ve been mentoring a lot of students to buy multifamily with other people’s money. That’s the title of my other course, 90 Days to 5K, all about building up a passive income stream through multifamily investing. I focus a lot on mindset because I believe that 90%, 95% of my success has been mindset and constantly growing myself over the last number of years, getting better at what I do all the time, and wrapping your head around success. There are a lot of downsides to success that people don’t tell you. There are a lot of stresses that come with it. Managing money is as stressful as not having money in some instances. I still prefer it.

Making a lot of money, especially at one time can cause more problems than it solves. For a lot of people who are not ready or have not heard, or have not reviewed the things that can happen, it can get ugly. It also can get ugly if you make a lot of money and then you get acclimated to having a lot of money for 1 or 2, and then you lose it. That can cause big swings.

I didn’t realize, I would say a new level, new devil. Every time you want to go to a new level in your business, you’re going to have challenges. You’ve got to have the mindset to be able to navigate those challenges. I focused a lot in the years teaching people about mindset primarily with my own students, the students that were already in the 90 Day to 5K program. The ones that wrapped their head around the mindset portion are the ones that are super successful. In talking to different people, I was requested, “Why don’t you make that available to people outside of your students?” That’s why I decided to launch this course all about mastering your money mindset. It is geared towards money because I think money makes the world go round. You’ve got to have money to be successful. Live a good life. You just have to, that’s the way the world is built. Master Your Money Mindset is about allowing yourself to make the kind of money that you want to. It’s totally a mindset shift.

In my first book, I talked about that it takes money. I said, we have to buy our freedom and what we buy it with is we buy it with money. If we could buy our freedom with jelly beans, and there would be a whole bunch of books about how you collect jelly beans. If the red ones were more valuable than the yellow ones, then we’d be talking about how to hone in on the red ones. Unfortunately, we have to earn our way out of certain servitudes. We always have to answer to someone. There’s never any real scot-free thing. You answer to the IRS and laws and regulations. The question is, how can we dumb it down to where there’s just the most minimal amount of people we have to answer to out of the whole pile? The other thing is money mastery or studying the money mindset, it’s twofold. One is I don’t have any money. How do you guys make that kind of money? That’s unfathomable to me. You’re making $20,000 a month, $100,000 a month, or $300,000 a month coming in like clockwork or $1 million a month. There’s always another level to go to.

No matter what level you’re at, there’s some jerk down the street dragging in twice as much. There’s always a faster gun in the West. They asked me, “How do you do that?” I say, “How often do you study money? How many hours have you spent studying it? What books have you read about how to make money or about people who made money with the idea of starting to take notes on how do you get money to come into your door? How many hours are you spending a week studying that topic?” Of course, it’s always, no. “I’m watching Modern Family for three hours in a row at the end of the day.” I say, “That’s the problem.” How can you expect to do anything if you don’t study it? If you wanted to fly an airplane, do you think you’d just get on the airplane?

That brings me back to something that somebody said to me when I was very young. I was earning that $1,200 a month. I had a big credit card bill that was like $2,000 and I could never get that bill down. People would say to me and family members, “Edna, you’ve got to learn to live within your means.” I thought, “If I’ve got to learn something, I want to learn how to be rich. I don’t want to live within my means.”

How about we learn how to expand our means? We don’t have to learn to live within them. We can grow into our means. We can spend some more now because my means got bigger.

That’s what I started to study. Mentorship is so important in this, Mitch, because if you’re taking your advice from your neighbor or even your father, who means well, but he’s never earned much beyond a decent wage, $40,00 to $50,000 a year. There’s nothing wrong with that, but if you want to be rich, those are not the people you want to take advice from. You’ve got to take advice from people who got rich. That’s another premise with my book, 90 Days to 5K, we’ve done it. We built our first 5,000 months in passive income, but we didn’t do it by ourselves. We took a full education coaching program through Robert Kiyosaki. We had mentorship, partners, and all kinds of people to help us. To this day, I have mentors that are doing better than I am. I would never be without a coach or a mentor ever.

When I was starting out, I started reading all the autobiographies of the people that I admired, but then it started to gravitate towards financially free. Less famous people or people I didn’t even know, but they had a great story of how they made a lot of money or became very successful. I was randomly reading their books. I didn’t even know who they were, and they’re starting to be these trends. One of the most famous books that I started with by accident. I didn’t even know what it was just, it sounded interesting is Think and Grow Rich. I picked it up randomly by accident. I didn’t know I was picking up one of the all-time classics. It set a whole bunch of things to me because it said that great wealth could come from anywhere from any person of any ethnicity, any level of education, any lack of education. It could come out of the most unlikely people who weren’t afraid to fail, get back up, then learn from it and go forward.

It didn’t matter if you had a Harvard degree or you had just been picking cotton your whole life and you didn’t know anything else. We have this beautiful machine up here and sometimes the common sense is more important than all the minutiae, because you can figure things out if you have common sense. I like to tell people I’m not very smart. I don’t test good at all. I test horribly, but I have a ton of common sense. Part of what makes me not test good is they can ask the question and then there’s choice A, B, C or D. How I mess up my testing is my common sense starts running and they didn’t give me enough information. It could be A if or it could be B if, or it could be all three if you tell me enough in this one line. You need to explain a little bit more to me. Some people say that it’s a sign of genius. I think it’s a sign of how I almost failed out at school because I can’t answer a test question. How important is plain old common sense?

I was not an A student or anything either. I was so-called as a classic C student. As good at what I liked, but wasn’t interested in, therefore I couldn’t be good at what I didn’t like. I just thought it was a huge waste of my time. I know you have to learn some of that stuff just to have an idea, but I still feel that way to this day.

Money Mindset: The ones that wrap their head around the mindset portion are the ones that are super successful.

I know multimillionaires that don’t read or write. They don’t know how. They never had time to stop and go back. They never thought it was that important because I had figured out how to navigate life without it. To go back and learn to read and write when you’re an older person is a much bigger deal. Time needs to be compressed because you don’t have a lot of time and that part of your brain is not as open any more. They never went back and they don’t need to.

They hire people to do that for them.

I know how to read and I won’t read. Someone goes, “Here’s the contract.” I said, “Someone read it over and tell me what it says.”

Every once in a while, a student will send me this long contract and they’ll go, “What do you think of this?” I’ll send it back and I go, “I’m not your person to be reading a 40-page contract. I hire people for that. I don’t even do it for myself. Why would I do it for you? Go and hire your own lawyer.”

Let’s get down to one of the greatest misnomers of success in the whole wide world. I think some people conveniently say it because they’re lazy and they just want to escape. They want the out. It takes money to make money and I don’t have any money. If it took money to make money, none of us, you, me, or anybody I know in this business would be in business right now. We all started out broke we couldn’t rub two nickels together. Let’s get that crap out of the way right now. If you think you need money to make money and you’re going to stick with that, then it just turns us off because it’s not going to work. What happens when you don’t have money is you have to find out what asset you have and you have to leverage that asset to become part of the deal.

In my business, finding houses at discount prices, you need money to do that business. Somebody needs money to do that business, but I don’t necessarily need to have it. My job was to get the $200,000 house under contract for $100,000. I had an asset and I leveraged that asset. Who wants to split $100,000 with me? I have the deal. You need to bring the money. You go around splitting deals for a while because 50% of something is way better than 100% of nothing. You give up part of your ingenuity or whatever your idea is to the person who has the money or the other side of the equation has the things that you don’t have. After a while, you may or may not need to split with anybody because you’ll rack up your own account, your savings account, or your finances. If you’re smart, you probably stay with these people anyway because sometimes 1 plus 1 equals 3. The quality of life is all better and everything. Do you have a lot of partners?

Yes, we have a fair amount of partners. Our ultimate goal is to move on and stop dealing with certain partners because they’re not growing in the same sense that we are. They’re stocking and they’re looking at everything that can go wrong instead of everything that can go right. We’re changing our partners, but I’ve got a lot of good partners in my life where they have an expansion way of thinking. Those are the ones that I want to keep in. Those are the ones that I want to learn from and be around because they opened my mind to possibilities every day that even I don’t think of. I think I’ve got a pretty extended mind.

I have a lot of partners. Most of my partnerships have last for decades. If they didn’t last, it’s just because whatever the business was, it ran its course and it was done. When I have good partners, I stay with them. My hard money loan business partner, which I’m in the hard money loan office because I was running and I had to find a place to land to do this show. I’ve been with him since 2003. Why am I partnered with him? I had too much private money I couldn’t spend it all. I have this firm belief that just because you have access to a lot of good reasonable money, it doesn’t mean you run out and start buying a bunch of crappy ass deals.

My underwriting bar has been the same for many years. If I can’t buy it at 65% or less, I’m probably not going to do it. This guy, fifteen years as a managing partner of Coopers & Lybrand, which is now PricewaterhouseCoopers. As a managing partner in Austin, Texas, this guy has the degree, all the accolades, the monikers behind his name. He’s a very sophisticated man. He has a CPA, still is a CPA with one of the top big five or big three. That’s who I team up with for that business because I don’t read the fine print. This guy reads the fine print. Not only that, he eats it for lunch.

We had this problem. I had too much money that I couldn’t get out and people were starting to leave me because I couldn’t get their money out. This guy was a real detail-oriented money-savvy guy and understands ROI and risk very well. We teamed up and for many years, we’ve been at Loans2Go.net. We loan hard money to our competition out here in San Antonio who found deals before we got to them. It’s not like a big-time business, but it runs out of the exhaust of everything else that I do. There’s $12 million out on the streets at 18% interest and short-term loans for people with great deals that are going to be in and out quickly.

How I run across these partners generally is I do one little side deal with them, or we do one little one-off deal that’s open and closed, and then if it works good, we do another one. We start to get to know each other and hopefully, during some of this, there are some stressful times or things that don’t work out because everyone’s a great partner when everything’s peachy keen. The recession hits in 2008 and you’re holding the bag on $500,000 worth of raw property that’s not going to move for the next four years, that’s when you find out who your partners are.

The people that can stomach the business because not everybody can stomach the business, can they?

No. I can’t even point out to all the things that probably I’m analyzing, as I’m saying that guy’s probably a good partner. I probably don’t even know a fraction of the things that I’m sizing up and all, but it’s all this one big feel.

It’s an intuition that you’ve developed over the years, Mitch, from getting those good ones. You get that feeling. I get it. It’s a feeling that you get from people, whether they’re going to be a good partner or not. We’ve turned down many as well, because different things that they’ve said, which is like, “You’re not getting this. You’re not understanding the ups and downs of the market. You probably wouldn’t be a good fit.” “No, I want to earn the 12% interest.” Of course, you do, but what if.

The partners that I have always shied away from the ones that were too nitpicky and like, “Why did you spend $1,150 on this tile? I could have got it for $1,125.” I’m like, “This is bullshit.”

If you keep here so great, you go do it.

Money Mindset: Money makes the world go round. You’ve got to have money to be successful and live a good life. That’s the way the world is built.

I made the call and I got it done. They’re over there walking on it and you want to bitch about $50.

Lots of people find 150 excuses why something won’t work. They tell you all of them. They know more than us. Of course, they’re way smarter. They know everything that could go wrong. They know the price of everything inside and out, but they don’t know how to get the deal done.

One of the things I like about all my partners is we’ll sit down, we’re always looking at the back door. What’s the worst thing that can happen to this? If it catches on fire, can we get out of this burning house? What is it going to take? We get down to this point where it’s like, “If this doesn’t work, we’re going to have to write a check for about $10,000 apiece. Are you good with that?” They go, “Yes,” then we’ll jump in. That’s the worst case. I don’t think it’s going to happen, but if it does, we’re going to cut the plan Z, which means the last plan and we’re going to write a check. I’m going to get out of this, or we’re going to sell it over here for this price and just get out of it. We’re going to make a run at this bigger upside. It doesn’t happen very often. We don’t fail very much, but I think it’s important to talk to your partners as often as you can. What’s the worst thing can happen on this deal that we’re trying to make a decision on? If that decision is we might lose some money, what’s the most it could be? Are we all willing to write a check for X amount if it happens?

Mitch, I talk about that in my Master Your Money Mindset course too, because even investors or potential investors, they need to have the right money mindset to make money with their money on a consistent basis. They can’t be panicking. They can’t be trying to ditch the deal every time as soon as the first thing goes wrong. They have to be able to master their mindset to be able to follow through, to make those deals come to fruition.

One of the magical things about real estate is if you can give it enough time, you can usually outrun your problems. I bought something and wanted to do something with it. The city gave me a hard time. It was crazy so I rented it out to some food trucks and it made the payment and we held onto it for several years. They built across the street and now we’re making money. I just had to find a way to hold onto it for a few years where it didn’t cost me much or anything.

Mentally hold onto it too. Financially is one thing, but if it’s absolutely driving you crazy, a person has to be able to manage that mentally as well holding without making that money in the meantime.

I always believe there’s another deal and there’s another investor or money guy. There’s always another one. If I have a deal now and I have a money guy, I put them together and say, “That burns the last money guy that we have right now if we do that deal.” I said, “Maybe we don’t have one right now, but we’ll have another one. Just put those two together. We’re dry now. I had to go out and I’ve got to find some more people.” It’s a never-ending thing. One of the things you’ll never, ever stop doing as a real estate investor is you’ll never stop looking for favorable funds. Do you do a lot with private money?

Yes, private money and joint venture partners. We have some programs where we can use registered funds as well. In your country it’s called the IRAs or here it’s called RSPs. We can do stuff with that too.

Our sponsor, which I forgot to mention is TaxFreeFuture.com. If you do not have a tax-deferred or tax-free retirement planner or an account to grow your money tax-free over a long period of time or forever for that matter, then you don’t have any idea the size of the tool that you’re missing in your tool belt. Please go to TaxFreeFuture.com and check out the 37 little video vignettes. My favorite videos of how you start with a little bitty piece of money. They show you some strategies on how to grow that little bit of money into a lot of money in a very short period of time.

I want you to go to 1000Houses.com/ednakeep, and I want you to get a free book called 90 Days to 5K: Multifamily with Other People’s Money. It’s how to get through it. If you’re broke and you’re tired of being broke, stop using that excuse of it takes money to make money because that’s bull pucky. Get out there and learn how you leverage what you can do. There are things you can do about your situation and you need to discover what they are. You may not even know the choices that you have yet, but figure out one that you want to apply yourself and start becoming an asset to someone who does have money and you’ll get your piece.

Also, check out the course, Master Your Money Mindset. If you don’t have money and you don’t like that, then the first place you’ve got to start is right here, because it’s the key to anything and everything. You are not thinking about or how you should be thinking so that you can get to this place that you’re being deprived of. This thing we call our brain between our two ears will take us anywhere we program it to take us. The deal is you need to learn how to program it.

They give us a driver’s test so we can learn how to drive. That comes to my mind because I got to take my sixteen-year-old out for practice. Nobody gives you any roadmap to how to manage your mind or how to manage your money mindset. That’s one of the key things that people miss. You’ve got to study it at least as much as it teaches you to study a driver’s license. First, it’s conscious, you don’t know how to get the brake, the gas or turn, and signal and all that kind of stuff. Pretty soon you’re driving for hours on end and you don’t even give it a thought. That’s how money gets to be after all.

I remember the first time I started driving. I was sweaty. I was at 10 and 2. I’m passing a car on the other lane, I was so petrified. A year later, I’m eating a hamburger, smoking a cigarette, having a drink, and shifted with my feet.

You don’t have to be a subconscious level. Eventually, you get to be consciously competent without having to think about it. When you master your money mindset, that’s the place you can be. At first, you’re like that driver going, “What do I do? Tell me what to do, mom?” Pretty soon it’s like you pass somebody, pull in and you’re talking, listening to music, dancing. You can do all of that. It’s key, and so many people forget to take the time to study.

What qualifies Edna Keep to teach you about mindset? She was a young girl at sixteen when she got pregnant and had a baby girl. She had everyone in the world tell her she’d ruined her life. That’s a lot of negativity heaping down on top of her and she did not accept that. Now, she has $65 million worth of real estate assets, successful and in way exceeded what those naysayers said was possible for her. I think that is a good person to listen to when they’re talking to you about mindset, wouldn’t you agree?

Thank you so much, Mitch. I totally agree. I still study mindset myself all the time. I’m learning from other people. I’ve definitely got the accolades to be able to teach it and show people how they can master their mind and make something of themselves.

You have a fascinating story. I’m glad you came on. I would like to thank TaxFreeFuture.com and I would also like to thank all the readers who stopped by to get you some Edna Keep. Please, go to 1000Houses.com/ednakeep, and get your free eBook, 90 Days to 5K: Multifamily with Other People’s Money. Check out and delve a little deeper into this course, Master Your Money Mindset. It’s where it all starts. Bye, Edna.

Thanks very much. Take care.

Important Links

• 1000Houses.com/EdnaKeep  
• 1000Houses.com/LiveComm  
• 1000Houses.com/Grow  
• 1000Houses.com/aof
• 1000Houses.com/Coaching

About Edna Keep

Making money is a love of mine. To make it, I focus primarily on real estate investments focussing on multi-family residences and joint venture partnerships.

I am a co-founder of 3D Real Estate, Profit in the Prairie Real Estate Investor Group and Multiple Ways to Wealth, a training, education and membership organization for real estate investors.

Since 2001, I have built my own real estate portfolio to over 520 doors with a value of $60 million. All except the first two properties were bought with the help of other people’s money (joint venture partners).

My husband Warren and I own 14 doors personally and the rest with joint venture partners. Most of these partners are passive investors looking for a great rate of return without being actively involved in generating it.

Now, I am a real estate investment coach. I teach others investing in real estate how to do it so they receive passive income, allowing them to live the life they want and retire when they want.

Multiple Ways to Wealth is a training, education and membership organization for real estate investors that I have developed. It is based on my experience, knowledge and education.

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