Jeff Anzalone - RV Park Investing Success From The Debt Free Doctor

Jeff Anzalone is a successful doctor. His journey from being a periodontist with $300k in student loan debt to thriving real estate investor started with a wake up call. A skiing accident that injured his wrist made him realize how fast something like that could take away his ability to earn an income and provide for his family. He shifted his mindset and attention over to real estate investing as a way to build another stream of income. He's invested in RV Parks, Campgrounds, Self-Storage, Apartments, and Hotels. He has now built up passive income to grow his wealth in addition to keeping his practice on a part-time basis. Learn how the Debt Free Doctor did it!

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Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

A couple of years later we were snow skiing and my kids at that time were eight and six got off. The ski lift kid cut in front of me. I swerved, I fell. When I fell I injured my wrist. Luckily it wasn't anything permanent. But that was the first time that I thought well, what if I couldn't use my hands to work? You know how would I provide for my family? ["the World's Most Beautiful Song"].

Speaker 2: 0:24

Welcome to the Real Freedom Show, where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some real freedom together. ["the World's Most Beautiful Song"]. Hello everybody, Welcome to Real Freedom Real Estate Leverage Freedom where we talk about different stories of people building time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate. And I'm your host, Mike Swenson.

Speaker 2: 0:52

If you're looking to start your journey in real estate investing, head to our website, Freedom through realestatecom. We've got a lot of great articles, blogs, videos that you can watch to help you get started in your journey. And for today's guests, I've got a really cool story to share. You know, most people think being a doctor is kind of the end game. It's the place where you wanna be, and for some people, they realize that that role isn't necessarily the freedom that they thought it was. And, in the case of our guests today, had an accident and realized, well, what if my main source of income isn't there anymore? And so we've got Dr Jeff Anzalone here and he's just got an incredible story of getting in the medical field, getting into real estate and then building time and financial freedom through real estate. So he is known as the debt-free doctor. So, Jeff, we're so excited to have you on the show.

Speaker 1: 1:41

Happy to be here, excited to help educate people any way we can.

Speaker 2: 1:46

So why don't you get us started here and just share a little bit about your story?

Speaker 1: 1:49

Yeah, I'll give you the short and down version of it. So two weeks before I finished my residency I had the group practice that I was supposed to join here in my hometown in Louisiana. They pulled the deal out from me and they don't teach you how to start a practice or run a practice in medical school or dental school. And we had a two-month-old $300,000 in student loan debt. I already bought a house, was just paying interest only. But the worst part was I didn't know how. To you know, I didn't have any patients. I didn't know how to run a business or practice because I was relying on them. And, as you can imagine how scary that was for you know, a young family, a young couple not knowing what to do. But you know, god was looking out for us and opened some doors, had a guy reach out to me. He said, hey, look, you can come into my building, I'll kind of teach you how to do this. He was another dental specialist and you don't have to buy any equipment, go into further debt, just kind of pay me rent. So I did that for two years and started my own practice, bought my own building and back then Dave Ramsey was like the only you know you're talking like 20 years ago. He was like the guy you know, that was kind of who I listened to. So I, you know, that's all I knew. So I followed his baby steps and after about seven years, paid off all of that debt, including the house.

Speaker 1: 3:22

Well, the thing was, you know, I was thinking, hey, you know, kind of like winning the Super Bowl, you know, you hit that goal, it's like it's over with you, you've made it. But it was kind of like, okay, yeah, it felt good, but it's like kind of like now what? So a couple of years later we were snow skiing and my kids at that time were eight and six got off the ski lift. Kid cut in front of me, I swerved, I fell. When I fell I injured my wrist. Luckily it wasn't anything permanent. But that was the first time that I thought, well, what if I couldn't use my hands to work? You know how would I provide for my family? I couldn't. And you never think about things like that until you know, something bad happens to you. Like people never think about having a heart attack till they would have chest pain, right. So I, that eventually led me down the road to start looking for things more sort of like an insurance policy and and eventually led me to real estate.

Speaker 1: 4:20

But when, when I started studying really wealthy people you know YouTube videos, blogs, podcasts, networking with people like you know, I've just been totally in the dental field, you know just, and that's what most people do. They never feel they're in. They go to the dental meetings or medical meetings or whatever and that's all they do. They don't, they don't ever get out. And that's probably one of my biggest regrets is is not broadening my environment, because now it's it's so much different. It just it just opens your world up.

Speaker 1: 4:53

But I realized that wealthy people number one over 90% of them they owned real estate. So like, if you have somebody that's really wealthy, what do you do for a living? They don't. They don't tell you I am. They don't say I am a doctor, I am an attorney. They say I own, I own businesses, I own real estate. So that that was the one thing that over 90% of them owned real estate. The second thing was that they all had, anywhere from you know, multiple strains of income, but average of seven, most people that I know, including myself, back then had one. So that really narrowed my focus on figuring out a way how to own real estate for multiple income streams, and I I thought at that time the only thing that that you could do to get into real estate was you go out and you buy a home and you rent it out or you go buy, you know, self-storage buildings or whatever. So I started to learn how to do that, but little did I know. Once I went to a meeting in Dallas it was actually for Dennis. They opened up my whole world to other ways to invest passively because you know, as a, as a doctor, we spend our time, money and resources to getting that degree. So when you and that that's your biggest income building tool is your, you know your active income, whatever it is. So I see these doctors, they're they're what they start doing. They start taking their time away from their practice and trying to learn all this stuff on their own, and what happens is their practice struggles, they make a bunch of mistakes and now they kind of, you know, get upset and give up. But with these different passive types of investments like real estate syndications and that's that's the ones that I'm mainly doing now we can focus on what we knew how to do best, our active income. And then the more money we make actively, we can invest passively. And then what happens is you start replacing.

Speaker 1: 7:00

You know, to me, you know the Dave Ramsey debt snowball was. You know you list out all your debts, smallest to largest. You start with the smallest one first and you throw all the money in it and once that was paid off you move on to the next one, and so on and so forth till everything's paid off. Well, I came up with, you know I don't really have a name for it, I just kind of call it the passive income snowball. To where you know the.

Speaker 1: 7:24

I remember my first indication I invested in. It paid back. Then it was paying monthly $333.33. That was a $50,000 investment apartment complex in Dallas. It was an 8% preferred return. And I got that money and I was like, wow, you know, this is paying, like the internet bill. And then, you know, like the gas bill or whatever. And then, like eight months later, I did another one. It was like 666. So it was just so.

Speaker 1: 7:52

I was slowly replacing my expenses to where I didn't have to do it. And it's crazy, once you get that mindset of you, you're just going out there and investings, you know. So now I have a different mindset. You know I'm the kind of the Robert Kiyosaki. You know I don't take 100% of what everybody teaches. I take little bits and pieces there. But what I like what Robert Kiyosaki teaches is you know, you get your assets, you know your real estate, your syndications, that sort of thing, to pay for your liabilities. So if I want to go out and buy a boat or a truck or whatever, I go buy real estate to pay the note. And that's a different mindset shift and once you start doing that it totally changes things for you.

Speaker 2: 8:39

Absolutely, and I'm glad it didn't take the catastrophic accident to help you think differently about it. It was kind of the what could have been accident that helped you to think differently about it. So, yeah, talk a little bit about everybody kind of has their different preference and niche of where they like to invest in. Obviously, you mentioned its syndications, but talk a little bit about the types of investments that you like in the syndication side.

Speaker 1: 9:02

I started this was like 2017 multifamily and I did several multifamily actually had an old traditional IRA that I wouldn't. I wasn't able to put money anymore and actually opened up a self-directed IRA so I did actually a multifamily syndication through it. It sold and went full cycle. Then I got into, so I started a website, debtfreedoctorcom, to educate people. Back then, just as I was learning things like what's a cap rate, then I would write an article what's cap rate, how to calculate it, why is it important? And so writing these articles not only was getting the word out about what I was learning, but it was helping me reinforce it to learn. But then I kind of realized I don't really for me learning. I don't really read articles too too much. I watch YouTube videos. So then I started okay, why don't I start a YouTube channel? So I took those articles and basically repurpose them into YouTube and now Instagram and YouTube shorts. So once I started doing that, then I started having people reach out to me and said, hey, look, you know you're investing in these syndications and projects and I started building a following. Do you want to see if some of your investors, if we go through all the legal channels to allow you to raise capital for these groups. You want to see if some of your investors want to invest in the projects you're already investing in. I said sure, and that kind of led to I didn't even know that was anything about raising capital, I just kind of fell into it.

Speaker 1: 10:30

But the reason I say that is because I start off with multi-family. Then I moved, then I started doing some self-storage, then I got into short-term rentals. I have a couple of short-term rental funds mobile home parks and now RV parks. And now that I've got to experience all that, I'm more focused now on mobile home parks and mainly RV parks, just because of the expenses, the taxes, the insurance. They're much cheaper to operate. Like if a hurricane comes and we have an RV park, well, everybody hooks up their RVs or they get on them and they leave, right, and there's not a lot of structure there in an RV park to really damage versus a 200-unit apartment building. There is there's pros and cons to everything. Private equity has really, as you probably know, bought up a lot of the mobile home parks. I know it's Sam Zell's group. Before he passed away he did. Now they're starting to get into RV parks and we've built up a really nice portfolio and our goal is to. Right now we're at 14 parks. Our goal is to get about 30, and then we're gonna sell out to one of these private equity groups that are already calling us. But that should tell you something private equity doesn't invest in things that can't make money in it, and we see this trend coming.

Speaker 1: 11:59

Really love the RV space. I love it because I didn't realize there's so many different ways to make income through it. You know, like an apartment, you know people will rent from you for you know a sign of six month or 12 month lease and that's pretty much it. Well, rv parks, you have people that come in and they'll stay a night or two. That's called your transient visitor. You can actually charge more. You know, let's say, there's a ball game or there's a Super Bowl or there's a holiday or something. Well, you know, kind of like hotels, you can change those day rates. Then you have people that work in the area. Maybe they're going to be working for several months or whatever. Well, they'll rent from you monthly or weekly. And then you have people that actually permanently live there. So you actually have three types of tenants that are there. Then you have people. Then you have laundry services that you can add on to. You have ICE, if somebody wants upgraded Wi-Fi. Another huge thing some of our parks make six figures of propane cells, you know, for these people. So there's all types of different ways, different, multiple strains of income you can make just from the RV park.

Speaker 1: 13:12

And then one of the most important things is RV parks and mobile home parks have some of the highest appreciation year one. So my accountant he told me the average apartment is anywhere you can depreciate year one anywhere from 15 to 20 percent of your purchase price. So let's say you have a million dollar RV park and a million dollar apartment. Okay, so that let's say 20 percent. So you can deduct $200,000 year one for a million dollar. Average million dollar apartment complex versus mobile home park 60 to 80 percent, 600 to $800,000. So it's a huge difference and a lot of that accelerated appreciation comes from the land improvements that you're able to do and that's what the majority of you know whenever you buy these parks. You know the land improvements that allow you to accelerate the depreciation.

Speaker 2: 14:07

Wow, that's awesome. It's great to hear you've dabbled in a lot of different spaces, because some people might say, hey, I'm in apartments or multifamily, I don't know anything about self storage, I don't know anything about RV parks. What would you say, even just like the little nuances and the differences? How did you learn about that? Was it watching videos, reading articles? Was it meeting other people that were in the space and doing it? You know, branching out to some of those kind of other areas, how did you grow your learning?

Speaker 1: 14:34

curve. I guess it was cool in my position because I was connecting with the operators of these groups like people that's all they do. So I was learning from the experts, not just kind of piecemilling it together. So I would rate, you know, I would help a guy you know. He was actually another dental specialist and we did four self storage projects together. So I was really involved in looking at the underwriting, how they look at projects, how they, you know, get the, get the debt and get all. You know how they manage it. You know the insurance costs are higher over here or they're lower over here, their expenses, you know. So I was learning from the operators, from the syndicators, from each one.

Speaker 2: 15:16

And what states, what areas are your investments in? They're kind of all over the majorities in the southeast.

Speaker 1: 15:23

you know we have 14 RV parks. They're all in the southeast except one. We actually have one that we have under contract right now that I'm probably the most excited about because it's in my favorite state, montana. We're two miles from the west border of Glacier National Park and I mean it's absolutely gorgeous. You know it's a bed and breakfast RV sites so they have some pods and they have some cabins there. But for the most part, florida, georgia, mississippi just bought one here in my hometown Louisiana, kentucky, tennessee, oklahoma, and I have a mo. We have a mobile home park syndication in Wyoming as well.

Speaker 2: 16:01

Yeah, now, you mentioned about building relationships with operators For people that haven't done syndications. Why don't you just explain what an operator is, what that role?

Speaker 1: 16:10

is yeah, and again, if I would have always been in dental meetings, I would, I would have never learned this, you know, right. But basically an opera, you know, a syndication is a group investment where people come together, they pool their money, you know, form a partnership to go to go buy, like a building or something like that. So the. I kind of look at it like a plane. So when you there's there's passengers and there's pilots, so the pilots of the plane, they do everything, they run the systems, check they, they manage the plane, they manage the flight, the flight plan, the takeoff, the landing, everything. So that that is the operator, that's, those are the syndicators. And then you have the passengers that just basically sit back and enjoy the ride, which is like the limited partners, the, the the passive investors. So they, they buy their ticket, they pay their money, they let the pilots do the work to take off and then land on the project. So that's, that's that. That would probably be the easiest way to explain it.

Speaker 2: 17:05

And, as you're working with investors, how do they feel about being that limited partner? I know for some people they might say, well, shoot, if I had my own flip and did it myself, I'm in control of that right, like I can say when I want to sell it, I can say, you know, when I want that money back. In this case you're following somebody else's plan, so kind of talk about the benefits of that Cause some people might see it as like I'm giving up control, but there's a ton of benefits for being able to do that?

Speaker 1: 17:32

Yeah, that's a great question and I always have to answer the question like if I'm doing it personally and I can only tell, speak from personal experience, and it really helped me being a limited partner in 10, 15, 20 deals before I even got comfortable enough to go out on my own and and and these projects I've gone out on my own. I'm still partnered with people that know way more than me and and if. But if you, if, if you are already experienced in real estate, well then, yeah, just keep doing that You're an active investor. But if you're not, I would encourage you to start off passively, start learning those routes. Then you're going to be naturally learning and naturally connecting with people. You're going to be connecting with other syndicators and other limited partners. You're learning the ropes and then At that point you may, you may want to diversify more and you know I don't want to get into the real estate professional status.

Speaker 1: 18:31

But if you can get to that point in your career to where you're all your depreciation is offsetting your active income, then that's, that's the game changer, that's been the game changer for us. But that that could, that could be a you know another, a whole, another episode to talk about. But when we, when we coach other doctors and High-income earners, we're always looking for ways that if that, if they could do that, then Really really they really don't have to cash flow a whole lot Because if they could just wipe out their active, their, their taxes. You know, you know I got a oral surgeon in Louisiana. You know he's paying five, six hundred thousand dollars a year in taxes. Well, we were basically, you know it's a wash frame now, so that's it's worth it just doing that. So there's People a lot of times just look at real estate as just extra income. But you also have to look at all the tax benefits and everything else that goes along with it too.

Speaker 2: 19:26

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Speaker 2: 20:03

I've priced it super low, so price can't get in the way, but did want to have some skin in the game for you to help with that accountability. So go check it out, realfreedomcom click on the store. We're excited to connect with you and excited for you to connect with your tribe of real estate agents Investing, trying to build their financial freedom. So talk about your dental practice. Then, as you did, more real estate investing. What did that do for your time in your quote-unquote day job?

Speaker 1: 20:29

Yeah, it's been great because I've been able to go part-time now with the practice, but I'm working, you know, more hours in general, but I'm really, and I think it's important too, because a lot of times people don't quit what they're doing because they're like, well, I don't know anything else to do, so it's it's good to have something to retire to and transition to, and I really like that. You know, when you get older I'll be 50 this year you know most of the research and books say you're actually happier Whenever you're at a point in your life where you're teaching people stuff, and I find more fulfillment in that, and so being able to do that Is it's great. But in order for me to do that, I did have to cut the cut the numbers down in the practice, which has allowed me to spend more time in the real estate Creating content, teaching, connecting with people and then running these projects.

Speaker 2: 21:18

What does your schedule look like on a given week in terms of?

Speaker 1: 21:21

Versus. I practice three days a week. While I'm practicing three days a week I can do a lot of stuff. You know I can do management and a lot of the things. It's while I'm still here and then I'm. But I'm pretty much working Monday through Friday, three days a week of the practice, but money through Friday with real estate and then sometimes on the weekend if I have to go run over and check Something or whatever.

Speaker 1: 21:42

To me it's weird. You always hear people say, if you love what you do, it's not really working. I'm like, yeah, whatever that's, you know that's BS or whatever, but it it's really true. It's just like I doesn't feel like work when I'm on calls, where I'm helping manager, whatever it's, just like it's, it's so cool, it's just I'm so glad I found it, and it's not. It's not right for everybody. And and and I always try to listen to people's situation and sometimes I discourage them from it because a lot of people have analysis paralysis and they'll wait three, four or five years before they even attempt to invest in something. And I'm like, if you're not investing in anything during that three or four or five year period Because you're scared to get into real estate, I said just don't, don't fool with it anymore, just keep investing in the stock market or whatever, because you're losing out on all that time. Because time, you know, at the other day at times was important thing.

Speaker 2: 22:32

Well, it's really great to hear I mean, you're, you know, going from having all your eggs in the one basket there to having all these different things happening, both as a limited partner and then on the general partner side, and then helping to educate people. So you're creating a lot of Content. I've watched, you know, your videos and and looked on your website, but who are the people that you're really hoping to work with, to help kind of invest with you and partner with you on deals?

Speaker 1: 22:55

well, when I first started this it was mainly for Physicians and dentists, but I guess it's just kind of a naturally other people, other high-income people, accredited investors have kind of flocked in, have a lot of IT people. You know people working at Google and Apple where they have these huge, big, huge six figures, sometimes a low seven figure salaries, but they're paying a ton of taxes, right and and they don't want to keep putting all their stock in Google or Apple or whatever. They're looking for diversification.

Speaker 2: 23:27

And you know nursing ethicists and you know other other healthcare professionals, physical therapists, then I have some accountants and you know, but but I would say eighty, eighty, five percent or more the healthcare healthcare professionals well, and it's good too, because, like people can relate to you because You're in the healthcare field, they can kind of see the writing on the wall of what their future looks like if they don't diversify and do other things, and so you're a Great example of that. So for people that want to reach out to you and learn more about what you're doing, how can they do that?

Speaker 1: 23:56

Yeah, they go to debtfreedoctorcom and I've got a free resource on there, a passive income guide they can download, and Once they do that, we'll start sending them information and everything's free between Podcasts, articles, youtube videos, some cool giveaways that we give out throughout the year and Occasionally some events and I'm attending, so people want to kind of join me on some of those as well.

Speaker 2: 24:22

Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story, jeff. It's cool to hear what you're doing and branching out to so many different Investment opportunities as well, so congrats to you and best of luck in your future.