After all, all you have to do is a quick Google search to find page after page of real estate investment ‘opportunities’. Or, “Why can’t I just buy some properties, and learn how to fix and flip like they do on TV?”

It’s a great question. Number one, Freedom Founders is not an educator to show you how to go do this in your backyard – i.e. being your own boots on the ground, buying properties, hiring contractors to redo them, finding and managing tenants, etc. 

I am not opposed to you doing it by yourself, if it makes sense for the value of your time. If you’re young in life and have more time than money, it’s a great way to start. That’s how I got started in real estate some 40 years ago.

But today I wouldn’t do it that way for anything.

You probably feel the same way. You are likely in a business or professional practice in which your time is extremely valuable, and your time is better spent on maximizing that business, vs. trying to do everything in real estate on your own. And for your extra income that you want to invest, ideally you can put it in investments that are passive and don’t require too much of your valuable time.

So, again, why can’t you just find opportunities and do it on your own? As I mentioned before, there are plenty of places you can go.

What is a Capital Aggregator?

There are a lot of what I call “aggregators.” An aggregator is usually a company or an individual who has created some type of online platform, live event, or a combination thereof. They're usually good marketers who have figured out that there's a big play to be made by aggregating other people's capital like yours. 

People like you, doctors and high-income earners with discretionary capital to invest, are big targets for this stuff. Especially today because there’s so many people trying to get money invested in diversified assets. Yes real estate is a great place to invest, but you've got to know what you're doing – there are a lot of sharks, and it’s easy to get eaten. These aggregators really make money off of your money with no risk to them at all.

You'll find in their disclosures about being part of the group that it's come one, come all. They really don't care. I'm not going to say they do no vetting, but they do very little vetting, underwriting, or due diligence of the real estate opportunities that they bring to their group – because again, they're going to make money off of your money.

We don’t do that at Freedom Founders. We don’t sell real estate, and we don’t make money off of what you choose to invest in. We're totally agnostic to that. You pay a membership fee, but have you ever thought about how much you might pay by doing it the wrong way? 

We have had practitioners who joined Freedom Founders after losing a lot of money from trying it on their own, whether the stock market or alternative investments. Some lost several hundred thousand dollars, while one lost over two million dollars of their hard-earned wealth. It’s heartbreaking.

It’s understandable why this happens. Investors (like you) want to get in the game because everyone else is talking about how much money they can make.

And in up markets like we've had, everyone looks like a genius. But especially with where we’re at now in the cycle, along with the endless trillions of dollars in stimulus pushing assets up…this is not a time to be doing it on your own. This is a time when you've got to be very discerning about how and who you're investing with. Don’t be cheap with your money and gamble it away.

If you do research on Freedom Founders, you won’t find anything negative about us. Why? Because we are very careful about what we do. We do very deep background checks, and even though I personally know our Trusted Advisor partners, for new opportunities they bring we still utilize a third-party audit company with a securities attorney and CFO who can do the necessary due diligence and underwriting (which costs thousands of dollars).

This is not deal of the day – our partners are people who have gone through at least one deep recession like 2008. Most aggregators out there have only been around the past several years, so a good question to ask them is “How long have you been doing this?”

Warren Buffet famously said, “Only when the tide goes out do you discover who's been swimming naked.” It's going to happen, like it does with every market reset: The cards will come tumbling down on those who are not diligent in assessing how, and with whom they are investing their money. 

Like with most everything in life, you get what you pay for. Many times when we look for the cheap way or we try to do it on our own, it ends up costing us the most – whether in time, emotional distress, or loss of capital.

Don’t let that be you.