Jason Porter joins us in this episode to enlighten us about strategies for successful investment in tax-defaulted real estate. You’ll also hear about the mindset required to explore multiple business ventures and invest with a clear purpose. So tune in to embrace your entrepreneurial spirit and discover the path to success as you venture into new horizons!
Key takeaways to listen for
Resources mentioned in this episode
About Jason Porter
Jason Porter is the director of education for the Tax Lien Code. He authors the book, "Real Good Deeds," which became an Amazon Best Seller. Drawing from his extensive experience, he has generated millions of dollars in returns from tax lien and deed investments. Jason's expertise extends beyond borders, as he has shared his knowledge with audiences in 17 countries, captivating crowds as large as 12,000.
Connect with Jason
Connect with Us
To learn more about growing your wealth through multifamily investment opportunities, visit Monument Real Estate Capital and schedule a call!
Follow our social media pages!
Facebook: Monument Real Estate Capital
LinkedIn: Monument Real Estate Capital
Jason Porter joins us in this episode to enlighten us about strategies for successful investment in tax-defaulted real estate. You’ll also hear about the mindset required to explore multiple business ventures and invest with a clear purpose. So tune in to embrace your entrepreneurial spirit and discover the path to success as you venture into new horizons!
Key takeaways to listen for
Resources mentioned in this episode
About Jason Porter
Jason Porter is the director of education for the Tax Lien Code. He authors the book, "Real Good Deeds," which became an Amazon Best Seller. Drawing from his extensive experience, he has generated millions of dollars in returns from tax lien and deed investments. Jason's expertise extends beyond borders, as he has shared his knowledge with audiences in 17 countries, captivating crowds as large as 12,000.
Connect with Jason
Connect with Us
To learn more about growing your wealth through multifamily investment opportunities, visit Monument Real Estate Capital and schedule a call!
Follow our social media pages!
Facebook: Monument Real Estate Capital
LinkedIn: Monument Real Estate Capital
[00:00:00] Jason Porter
The homeowner that was in trouble and house poor wins because their credit is repaired. You win because you got in the middle of a deal and made the money in the middle, and the person who bought it from you won because they were able to live in a home as owners from the beginning and buy it for a fair price years later.
[00:00:15] Podcast Intro
You are working professional but struggling to balance the workload of your career, family obligations, and preparing for your financial future. If so, this podcast is for you. You've spent years learning your craft, and now it's time to focus on your financial future. This podcast will teach you what you need to retire wealthy and happy. Let's dive in.
[00:00:40] Ben Waller
Are you looking for a real estate investing strategy that requires little or no money out of pocket? In this episode, we get to learn from Jason Porter, who is a tax lien and tax deed expert. Let's jump in so you can learn if this investing strategy will help you grow your wealth. Welcome to the Retire Wealthy and Happy podcast. We created this podcast to provide financial tips and tricks to help you build up your passive income and also provide methods that you can use to protect your wealth so that you can plan a better future for yourself and your family. We're grateful to have this podcast sponsored by Monument Real Estate Capital Monument Real Estate Capital, helping you retire 10 years early through real estate investments.
[00:01:24]
On today's episode, we're excited to have Jason Porter with us. A brief background about Jason. He has been a real estate investor for over 30 years. He's an Amazon bestselling author and public speaker. He's married with four kids and at least seven grandkids. He loves to travel, surf, ski, and eat. Don't we all? On today's episode, we're gonna be covering mindset and law of attraction. We're gonna be talking about tax liens and tax deeds, and also land flipping.
[00:01:52] Roger Jacobsen
Jason, thanks for being on the show today.
[00:01:52] Jason Porter
No problem. I'm excited to be here.
[00:01:55] Roger Jacobsen
Would you be willing to share a little bit about your history, what you did at the start of your career, and how you came to be a real estate investor?
[00:02:01] Jason Porter
Sure. I'm kind of boring, so I'll try to keep my personal history to a minimum, talk about things that'll actually help these people make money. But bottom line is I'm originally from Tempe, Arizona, fourth generation, Arizona, and dang proud of it. And I grew up number six outta seven kids. My father was a trial attorney and my mother did a really good job of making sure that none of her seven kids ever spent a night in jail. So she did a good job of that. To my knowledge, none of us ever spent a night in jail. There may have been some moments for some of us, but nobody overnighted, so it was good. But mom did a good job of making sure we went to church, making sure we did the right things right, and Dad made sure he paid for everything.
[00:02:40]
So I grew up in a pretty normal situation. I had problems though as a youth. My parents went through a a separation for a while, and I needed to make some money and needed to change from being a paper boy to. Something that would make more money. And my oldest brother is a designer builder and was at that time right out of architecture school at Arizona State University and was designing his first home. And my second oldest brother was a foreman on a framing crew. So he hired me when I was 12, turning 13 that summer to frame my first house. And I started in construction, I guess at the age of 12. And I'm still in it. I don't swing a hammer anymore for a living. I don't wanna do that. But I've done everything from framing to finished carpentry to cabinet making to gosh, back in the day, we do additions and pour our own footings and foundations and flat work and, and none of it's fun.
[00:03:37]
But it gave me a good work ethic and my folks did a really good job of making sure their kids work their guts out. So I love work. I wake up in the morning, excited to go to work. Fortunately, I've been successfully unemployed for, well since 1992, so I just work for myself and it's pretty hard not to love what you do and you're your own boss. You can call in sick and know you're lying and not care. That's worth a lot of money. So I enjoy it. And bottom line is, I've just been around construction a very long time. Well, kind of a skip through, uh, some struggle. Years of youth, I think we've all had those, or many of us on the call here have had some difficult years.
[00:04:13]
But to make those years go quickly, I got involved with drugs and alcohol at a young age and was given an opportunity by my dad to go to Brazil and live with an individual who was a missionary there. Retired at the age of 47 to preside over a group of missionaries, and I went and lived. There in Brazil to dry out, sober up and get control over my life. And it was there that I had a conversion in my faith and, uh, change. And I've been sober since I had one relapse while in Brazil, but I've been sober since I'm 17 years old. And the coolest thing about that experience wasn't just that I fell in love with other languages and cultures and people, and I realized how much bigger the world is. It was that I lived in the home of a real estate investor. You see, my father as an attorney never really invested in anything other than just paying for everything, right? And he was a bit of a spend thrift. He'd spend it before he got it. And when a big case was coming in, you knew it because he started buying things and boats and other things that didn't depreciate value, but that's how he grew up.
[00:05:19]
So money wasn't really taught at home. But I was fortunate enough to live with a wonderful family in Brazil called the Cowley out of Arizona, and they're very successful real estate investors. And they didn't teach me anything. I was just surrounded by a different lifestyle. A lifestyle of passive income, a lifestyle of being able to retire when you're 47, and just go serve, do what they truly had their greatest passion towards, which had no monetary compensation for at all. And my father, you know, he had to work until he was. And he passed away at 82 and he still had a few clients as that he was taking care of as a lawyer. So I was able to really see the juxtaposition between somebody who was an investor and somebody who had a job, even though that was a very high paying job for my father.
[00:06:03]
Nonetheless, it was trading time for dollars and that made an impression on me. Although young and dumb, I didn't really understand how big of an impression it made, uh, until later on in my marriage. So that's the beginning years. I came back from Brazil and turned right back around and was a missionary for my church there, and came back from Brazil after being a missionary and didn't know really how to be a good kid in the US I needed to move away from Arizona and moved someplace where I didn't have a brand. My brand from high school is not the best. So I, uh, I moved to California and met my wife there. Typical, if anybody here spends time at church, there's probably a young single group in your church, regardless of which denomination. But let me tell you those work, man.
[00:06:47]
I hung out with my wife. I saw her, she had beautiful almond eyes and had dark hair. Man, there's a Latina over there. So I went and hit on her in Spanish and. She told me she was Samoan and I didn't know where that was. I didn't know that the pronunciation of Samoa threw me off. And I said, well that's okay. I've always been into Africa cuz I thought she said Somalia and uh, strike two. Right. And anyway, we were married less than three months from our first date, and it's been 35 years. We've got four kids and seven grandkids as you said. We've got one more coming here soon in September that'll make seven boys and one granddaughter. And I will tell you that they are the best thing in my life. Best thing in my life is my sweet wife. But. Other than that, it's the grandkids. Kids are amazing. Love them and grateful for them. They make me a better man. But, uh, those grandkids get your heart. I'll tell you how I got into investing guys is, is really, I think, more important to the call than really my story.
[00:07:45]
So enough of that. But I promised my father-in-law that I would take care of his daughter, and that was a serious promise to me. I had to go to Samoa to ask permission to marry her, and I literally believed that I would be able to provide and bring in a enough money for us. And we had a baby nine months and 16 days after our wedding. We had another one, a year and a half after that, and I was trying to go to school full-time, avoid debt because I'd been taught that debt was bad and just wanted to avoid it at all costs. So I was swinging a hammer, paying my way through college. Slowly I was on the eight year plan. I think I never did graduate, but it was just a slow path and we were in debt. We had, uh, two credit cards cuz they give you credit cards when you go to college, even if you're dumb. And I got two $500 limit credit cards. One was a Discover and one was a Visa and I had about $750 balance on both of them. So we were over limit. Credit was horrible. We went through the experience of having our.
[00:08:44]
Lights turned off and water turned off and then turned back on when he could afford to pay for it. We were struggling. We were on wic, government assistance. They paid for our milk, egg, and cheese for the kids. And I felt like a failure, guys. I mean, I couldn't even sleep at the same time as my wife because I felt so inadequate. Right? She'd go to bed after Johnny Carson. Uh, in fact, I was our, our son's second phrase, the first phrase he ever learned was Donald Fries, and I don't even like McDonald's, but that was his first thing he ever said. And the second thing he ever said was, here's Johnny. We watched a lot of Johnny Carson. I liked to laugh and he was amazing. But anyway, after Carson, my wife would go to bed. I couldn't go to bed at the same time. I just felt so inadequate. So I stayed out there and, and the lineup was after Carson would come, Arsenio Hall, and then would come, uh, star Trek, next generation, and then would come infomercials. And there was an infomercial that was running at that time from a guy named Carlton Sheets who talked about no money down real estate investing.
[00:09:39]
And I swear there was a halo over the television, right? And I knew if God could bless me with a house, I didn't care how bad it was. I had the construction skills to be able to fix anything. So I knew if I could just get a house for free, if this guy wasn't lying, I, my whole life could change. I just didn't know how to do it. And I knew I needed his course and I called him up, but they wanted money and I didn't have any, so I couldn't buy his course. I think it was a hundred and, I don't know, 180 something bucks or something like that. It was a long time ago, but I was too broke and I didn't understand why. Now call the law of attraction, that's what it's called in the business world now. But we attract to us the things we think most about, right? As we think about food, we get hungry as we think about. Sleep. We get tired as we think about sex, we get horny or whatever we think about, we get, you cannot think about money and not find it. We get what we need, right? Because that's what we tend to focus on. I remember being broke and wondering how I'm gonna pay for something. Lo and behold, I figured it out. Lo and behold it worked.
[00:10:40]
And you can blame that on pure dumb luck. But the reality is, is our bodies and minds are inseparably connected. And whatever we think about our bodies are gonna begin to make happen. And you have to be very careful that you not think things you don't want, but rather focus on the things you do want. Because if you think about things you don't want, your body tends to make that happen, right? And we all know people who attract into their lives, things that are toxic just go from one bad relationship to another, and they wonder why. Well, It's really the power of their thoughts. Just gotta be careful. Anyway, I'm thinking about Carleton Sheets. I'm thinking about getting a house for no money down. And we went to a place in Utah, there's a thrift store. That's where we raised our kids. We now live in Vegas, but we raised our kids there in Utah and we went to a thrift store called Desert Industries.
[00:11:30]
And the reality is we were so broke. We went there to shop for clothing for a kid that was coming. And number three, we were that broke. And I don't know why, but I looked over at the bookshelves at that thrift store and I'd never looked at books, didn't enjoy reading at the time. That was something I had to do for college and didn't love it. But there was the course for Carlton Sheets sitting there for five bucks. And I knew that that was an answer to my prayers. I knew that it wasn't an accident, that that was for me, and I grabbed it. And it was missing two cassettes. But I also knew that if it didn't have those two cassettes, I didn't need them. I started listening to that thing while framing houses on in my Walkman Carlton sheets was in my ear all day long. And for your young listeners, a cassette is a way to listen to things and a Walkman is the way you listen to a cassette. But, uh, in fact, I, this is so long ago that I was so poor. I didn't want to burn my batteries on auto reverse on the Walkman.
[00:12:27]
So I'd take the cassette out and use my construction pencil and flip it around to rewind it and it would save my battery. But anyway, Carlton Sheets was in my ear and. Again, neural linguistic programming is real, right? What we hear over and over again, it becomes part of us and it becomes visceral. And business is a language. And I didn't speak that language. I spoke Portuguese, I spoke some Spanish pretty well. I spoke construction. I did not speak real estate investing. I didn't speak business. I didn't know that language, but it was pumped into my brain, fixed to eight hours a day while I was framing houses. And my life began to change because my language changed. And things like zero down lease options started meaning something to me when before, if somebody said a zero down lease option, I would've thought, what the heck is that? But it now had context and it had meaning, and you can't do what you don't understand. So you gotta have some training in anything you want to become good at in any, any way.
[00:13:22]
You want to make money, you gotta have training. And guys, I'm not smart enough to learn finance at university. Furthermore, most of the guys I knew with finance still have jobs and are just a paycheck away from being broke. So, you know, they're just running finance for somebody else who's wealthy. So I knew I didn't wanna look. I was framing houses for people who were independently wealthy. We were framing a 16,000 foot house up Sundance Canyon in Utah overlooking the ski resort, 16,000 square feet. This guy didn't have a job, right? This guy owned a business. I don't remember which one it was, but it was one of those herbal businesses, like a Nature sunshine or something. But he was building a 16,000 square foot home when my 1980, I think it was a 1984 Geo Prism, was repossessed while I sat in his trusts up in his trusses. That's how broke I was. I wanted to own that business. I didn't want to have a job. A job was a pathway to get to what I wanted. I wanted what Mr. Cowley had.
[00:14:22]
I wanted some financial independence. I wanted to own my own businesses, and I wanted those things. Just didn't understand how to do it. Anyway, Carlton's sheets was in my ear all the time while I was swinging a hammer. Bottom line is, It worked. I started looking at houses and getting newspapers and the arguments my wife and I had were not fun. What are you trying to buy a house for? We can't even pay our rent. Right? We can't even keep the lights on. And she didn't understand, and I didn't understand either, but I knew what we were doing wasn't working. So the greatest blessing in my life is I have a supportive wife and she just is like, okay, if this is, if this is your form of crazy, I'm gonna embrace it. So she did and and allowed me to just knock on doors at night and ask people if I could buy their house for free. And eventually, over the course of several months, a fella in Provo, Utah, named Mel Stewart said Yes and let me buy his house for no money down. I entered into what's called the zero down the lease option, and I didn't think anybody with Carlton's sheet Sheets knew what that was.
[00:15:22]
So I went to the old man's house and I said, Hey, you've got a property in on this street and you're asking 50 grand and your sign's been up for months and nobody's bought it. I'd like to buy it for 53. Obviously I had the guy's attention, right? But there's gotta be a catch when you're asking for more than he's asking for. You're offering more than he's asking for. So I said, here's the catch. I'm a broke college student and I can't pay you $53,000 right now, but your house needs fixing. And I swing a hammer full-time and I go to school part-time and I can fix everything outta that house. I can patch the roof myself. I can fix the things that need to be fixed while I live in it with my family. I can pay you $500 a month rent because my current rent is five 50. I will never be late. You'll have your money on the first of every month. That'll leave me 50 bucks a month to fix it. And if you'll give me an option to purchase it two years from now, from 53,000, I'll fix it and sell it before then, and I will pay you 53,000 when I sell it.
[00:16:15]
But I get to keep the difference. And the old man looked at me and said, you're talking about a zero down lease option, aren't you? And I swear, I thought, oh my gosh, he took the same course I did. But no, he just was been, he's been in real estate a long time and he had that language right. He knew what he was talking about. So he went over to his file and he pulled out a blank contract for lease off and put it on a table in his kitchen and filled in the blanks with my name and information and his name, the property information. And I signed the dotted line and I bought a house I'd never been inside, first house I ever bought, I'd never been inside the house. Didn't matter what it was, it was 50 bucks cheaper than our little basement apartment I knew. That I could afford to live there. I knew we could fix it and I knew I just owned a home. And bottom line is we moved in, I had to get rid of the carpet before we moved in cuz it smelled like cat pee and cigars.
[00:17:08]
And I didn't want Mona to smell that. So I tore all of that out before I showed her that we bought a house and. She thought I was nuts when I went home and said, Hey, I just bought a house. Let's go check it out. We're gonna move. And she just thought I was crazy. But when we went in there, it was a little three bedroom, one bath. We were in a two bedroom, one bath apartment, and we moved it with three. One. It had oak floors with big old pet stains like it was. White oak with mahogany pet stains, just almost black pet stains. And she's like, oh, these floors are horrible. And I, I'm a wood guy. I said, babe, we'll, we'll, we'll sand the floor. And, and I didn't have to sand it much because it was so old. It was pretty much raw wood at that point. But anyway, I just feathered the stain into the pet stains to make it all look pretty much the same. And then we urethane it and, and we painted it and fixed the roof and sold it.
[00:17:57] Roger Jacobsen
What was your stain match color?
[00:17:58] Jason Porter
No, I think I used mahogany, that stain. Mahogany, I think I just used mahogany and I brushed it in instead of wiped. I had to let it sit and really soak into that old oak. Well, we got it to match pretty well and we sold it and made 7,940 bucks. That was the first check I ever got at closing. And that eight grant in my hand changed my life, honestly. That's awesome, man. I was off to the races, been schlepping property ever since, man. And I love it.
[00:18:24] Roger Jacobsen
I want to drop back just for a second and say how many similarities I've seen between your life and my life. The Carlton Sheets, I actually got mine for free from a friend that was on construction sites and I was listening to cassettes. So a little bit later, or no, I was listening to CDs and stuff. Cause that's so a little bit later in my life when I started having that pumped into my ear. It wasn't a Sony Walkman, it was a iPhone smartphone with a tethered head phones. Like they Yeah, yeah. Weren't cordless like they are now. I worked on a 17,000 square foot house and I was like, what do you do? Just explain to me. We just built a 10,000 square foot house for this guy as a spec home up at the top of Deer Valley. Then we went to his personal house that was 17,000 square feet. And I'm like, what do you do? Like, just stop for one minute and explain how you can build 27,000 square feet. And he says, I sold a company that made marshmallow rice crispy treats. And I'm like, I'm getting nowhere. I just stop.
[00:19:33]
He sold the first company that was able to make rice crispy treats in mass production. So he was able to go from mixing 'em up in a bowl in his kitchen to mix 'em up in a cement mixer, to mixing 'em up to the point that he was out in the Freeport Center. Uhhuh in Syracuse. Yeah. Selling a million rice crispy treats a day. And he sold the campfire marshmallow. Wow. And was independently wealthy from then on. And so he was, he became a, a missionary. For his church and was just living his exact life. And I was sitting there going, I can do better than this. You know? That's awesome. That's awesome. And so I owned a cabinet shop and really learned all the same things.
[00:20:16] Jason Porter
You're my brother from another mother. This is awesome. Yeah.
[00:20:20] Roger Jacobsen
It just keeps hearing the same thing. It's like, yes. Funny to me.
[00:20:24] Jason Porter
That's crazy.
[00:20:25] Ben Waller
So, Roger was very excited to have you on the show today. That's why we're gonna have him ask you a lot of the questions. Before we get there, Jason, you started out giving us your, your back history and then you were saying you don't know, you didn't know much about business, but from my research on you, I would consider to you a serial entrepreneur. It sounds like you've started many businesses since that time and now you're doing specific things with real estate, which we're gonna get into as well. Can you just give us like a two minute overview of the businesses you did? Do I understand there was like a, a serve resort in Samoa, cuz that's where your wife's from, I believe. Um, yeah. Just quick overview of that.
[00:20:58] Jason Porter
Yeah. You know the, the term serial entrepreneur, I, I would. Put myself right there with it. The bottom line is I've got a d d real bad, but I've never allowed myself to be diagnosed because I don't need a label. I just know that I'm never happy doing one thing. It drives me nuts. Even with real estate investing, I probably only spend two or three hours a day on it. I just have other things always cooking, and some of them have been fantastic successes and some of them have been glorious mistakes and, and that's okay. We live in a country that allows us to write off our mistakes, so not a problem. But um, yeah, I've been opening businesses and running businesses. I don't know, I'm probably 30 or 40 businesses over the years. Some of those we were able to take into raising capital to go public, and some of those were just little mon pa.
[00:21:46]
So yeah, we moved to Samoa in, uh, 19 December, 1994. Had no clue what I wanted to do. I started speaking on stage on entrepreneurship, weirdly. I also sold insurance while framing kind of part-time. I wanted to, I was out knocking doors, looking for houses. I might as well knocking doors. If I can't buy your house, can I sell you life insurance kind of a thing. Was that Traveler's Insurance? It, it was a company called I, I can't even, mm, M c A or something like that. Back in the early nineties. They were a competitor to Al Williams, so they sold a, a life insurance product and investment grade insurance, and that also taught me that could invest and have money for later, and taught me a little bit about taxes during retirement.
[00:22:30]
I learned a little bit about a lot of stuff doing that, but bottom line is one of my insureds, a guy, an awesome guy named Bob Catel came in and he, he was a public speaker. His brother-in-law worked at the to advanced insurance in Orem. There's a shout out to Walt Purcell in the, and the Parcell family, right? Parel Construction. But anyway, this fellow named Bob came in and, and he said, Hey, my brother-in-law tells me you're a pretty good salesman. Can you come out? We're, we're a little short staffed. I need some people to help me out. I took off and went to my first seminar, and this was an entrepreneurship seminar that talked about business, talked about owning your own business, and I sat.
[00:23:05]
Three days in a ballroom and watched these speakers get up and they were both amazing, inspiring. They were motivational, inspirational, all the stuff I wanted to be when I grew up. And in the end, they sold businesses in a box basically. It was kind of a crazy little time in that industry, but man, I saw the kind of money these fellows were making and it scratch my head was spinning. I didn't know you could make that kind of money without being a movie star or a professional athlete. Right? It's crazy. So anyway, I asked him if I could go out again because I made in one weekend with him as much as I made in a month selling insurance. I'm like, I like this more than insurance and it's just on the the weekend.
[00:23:45]
So I can do this and just make some money on the side. Get that ready for my own business or for my own real estate, and I'll just do it on the side. Well, One thing led to another. I outworked everybody really around me because my mom and dad taught us how to work hard. So when somebody would grab one box, I'd grab four, and when somebody would set up one row of chairs, I'd set up three and I just was not gonna be outworked. And I added value to myself there for this company. I wanted to hang around them and learn. And I thought it was a pretty cool thing. And bottom line is they, they gave me a spot on their team and I went around the country and did these entrepreneurial conferences all the while putting more serial entrepreneurship ideas in my brain, right?
[00:24:26]
And one day just happened to be my manager of the sales crew that was out there that weekend. He was a little ornery that day. He didn't wanna speak. He had like a 10 minute spot that he was supposed to do where he sold a long distance. That was right when at and t broke up and you could, you know, save money and switch over to MCI I or whatever, M c I eventually went bankrupt and took everybody's money, but whatever it was, it was some long distance pitch that he was doing. And he is like, I'm not even gonna go up on stage. These people suck and, you know, there's no money in this room. And, you know, just kind of grumpy about it all. And I, I was cocky enough at the time to say, well, you suck anyway, so I'll go do your spot and I'll do, I'll do better than you. And he's like, all right, you, you a little sack. And I mean, I still, I'm still friends with the guy. He's awesome. He just retired, actually. He retired, he went into.
[00:25:15] Jason Porter
Educating for, for our church. And he taught seminary and he was just retired from that. He's, he's one of my heroes cuz he walked away from a bunch of money to a higher calling and I'll talk about that a little bit later. But he, anyway, he made me get up on stage and I did his pitch. Never had, having practiced, never public spoke in my life. He gave me overheads. That's how old I am. You were listening to disc, uh, CDs. I actually started speaking when there was no PowerPoint guys. It was just overheads on a transparencies that you put on an overhead projector. And so he gave me his overheads and I went up, did his pitch just from, you know, what I could remember. And I sold really, really well. I sold really well. And there happened to be a guy in the back of the room that I didn't know that came and talked to me afterwards and said, Hey, who are you? And have you ever spoken before?
[00:26:01]
Was that your first time? I'm like, it was my first time. He's like, you could be really good and. And he was developing a entrepreneurial series where we led out doing some Franklin Quest, Franklin Covey now, uh, time management, life management stuff. And then we also trained on business. So that put me in an opportunity to go out every week and make a lot more money than I was making. And I started speaking on business and that went really well for about two years. But after two years of telling people how great it was to own your own business, and me never having had real success owning my own business, I couldn't sleep at night again. I got into the guilt phase of, dang, I, you know, I can't just tell people, do what I haven't done.
[00:26:41]
So I went home and told Mona, I, I said, I think we need to move to Samoa. And she's like, why on earth would we do that? We're finally making money, and why would we do that? I just asked her to pray about it and she didn't want to because her dad worked really hard to get her outta that country. And eventually she did. And, and we moved our family to Samoa without any understanding of what we were gonna do. We just knew we needed to go there. And first business we built, there was a soap manufacturing plant. They have coconut oil on the island and all you need for soap is oil and acid. And so I imported acid there, caustic soda, and we made soap. And that led to a company for cleaning roofs and the roof cleaning cup, cuz you need soap to clean roofs. And I had soap. So that led to, strangely to a, uh, a t-shirt printing company, which strangely led to a surf shop. And that strangely led to a surf resort. Which is really my goal in going. I knew there was good surf there that hadn't been discovered, and surf resorts were just kind of, they're just becoming popular.
[00:27:46]
There was a place in Fiji called Tavarua that was pretty darn popular, a place in Indonesia called Garage Again, or Gland. They didn't have a full scale resort, they just had some huts. And then there was a place in the Philippines called Cloud nine. So I just copied them and that's one of my models for success guys, is I don't start anything new. I just find somebody who's doing what I want to do and copy 'em. Right. And I'll put my own tweak on it, my own flavor. But I'm not the first surf resort. I was just the first one in Samoa. So I think that's too many people try to figure out, okay, I gotta find something everybody wants, but has never existed. And when I get that one thing, I'm gonna get $1 from a million people and be a millionaire. That is not how you do it. Okay? Just find something everybody needs and build a better mousetrap. Just tweak something that's already out there. Find a market that's not being, uh, nurtured properly and nurtured that niche of the market. And really, that's all I've done is I've just found niches. Niches.
[00:28:48] Jason Porter
And I've serviced those niches pretty well and been able to turn 'em into money. But the one thing that has always been with me is real estate investing. Other than that, you know, we, we bounce from, uh, gosh, I built a weight loss company. I've built a lot of stupid stuff, but it's been fun. It's been a fun journey.
[00:29:04] Ben Waller
We wanted to have you on today because you have such a wealth of experience. Obviously. You've got all these businesses you've run and and sold and I'm gonna throw in a segue here cuz we've got some specific questions we wanna ask you about your experience. You have two companies that one's called Total Wealth Management System and the other is Real Good Deeds. Do I have that correct?
[00:29:21] Jason Porter
Yes, I have some others. But those are both real estate related. Real Good Deeds is really a brand that is owned by Total Wealth Management Systems. So Total Wealth Management Systems owns that, owns that brand and Real Good Deeds is a brand that I'm still continuing to develop. It's really just me and Real Good Deeds is a philosophy and real estate investing that there can be, and I believe should be, especially for those of us who have have been doing it a while and have had some success. There needs to be a social component to your investing. There needs to be a reason greater than money.
[00:29:55]
Money's not a motivator. I mean it is for a while, but once you attain a certain level of money, It's not the motivator that it once was, and there needs to be a higher purpose to what you do, and that's a real good deed. So now in real estate, I don't do anything that doesn't serve a, a higher purpose. Everything I do, I moved away from high-end real estate long time ago. Everything I do provides safe, clean, affordable housing to underserved communities. And I go to sleep at night with more money, but I also sleep on a pillow of good feelings because I'm actually helping somebody, right? So let's just as an example, take a standard H GTV show, right?
[00:30:32]
They wanna show you hot, cool, sexy, so they're showing million and a half dollar flips, right? You got somebody in California who buys a flip for, they buy the property off the mls, which number one, don't do that. Right. You're paying retail. So first row in real estate is you make your money on the purchase, not on the sale. So you gotta buy well below retail. They pay retail on the MLS and then they, they have to fix it in order to make money. So they're really not real estate investors. That's not real estate investing. I'm gonna repeat that. If you pay retail and have to fix it to make money, you're not a real estate investor, you're a contractor. You just bought a job that's not investing. Investing is buy low, sell high, do no work. So there is no real estate investing being taught on H D T V. It's all construction jobs. And I used to do that, right? And it feels really cool. You buy a $750,000 house that needs some work and you put a quarter of a million dollars into it and you're in a 1.25 million, or excuse me, you're in a million and then you sell it for 1.25, right?
[00:31:28]
Woo. I'm gonna make a quarter of, no, you're not. There's expenses for selling. Selling a house will cost you 10% of your sale price, so you got 6% in commissions, plus closings and warranties and inspections and changes that you have to do. When the inspection comes through. Bottom line, it's gonna take you about eight and a half to 10% to sell a house. So on 1.25, you're gonna remove. 120 grand of that in your selling expenses. So you're 1.1 million, right? 1.1 in change your profit margin on that's 10%. There's no reason as an investor to go through all of the headache of that construction project for 10% when I can just buy a no-load mutual fund and I'm gonna average eight and a percent without any headache. That is not real estate investing. It just is dumb. I'm sorry to tell you. That's stupid. Well, yeah, but you made a hundred grand. Well, your cash on cash return is your most important metric for real estate investing. If your cash on cash return isn't 15 or 16%, don't do it. Just buy mutual funds and let 'em sit there.
[00:32:31]
And over time, you'll average what a lot of real estate investors are averaging with all the work. And that just doesn't make sense to my brain. So, no, I work on the low end now. And once I figured that out, I get to sell houses to people who are generational renters. And there is a joy that comes from taking a family and letting them actually live the American dream. The American dream is home ownership, and there's a segment of our population who generationally they're just never gonna be owners. They didn't grow up around it that don't understand how easy it is to own. And, and that's really not even in their mindset to even want to do it. They have been conditioned to think, well, no, homes cost money and that's bad, right?
[00:33:12]
There needs to be a new water heater. That's, that's money. There needs to be a new hvac. That's money. They haven't been taught the other side of the equation, which is equity. And so the expense versus equity mindset, they just, they don't possess it. Well, if I can take a renter and say, Hey, if I could make you an owner for less than the cost of rent, would you prefer to build equity? Would you prefer to become wealthy or just stay a renter? Because look, wealthy people own poor people rent. Period. End of story. Now there's a few caveats to that. I know Grant Cardone and, uh, my buddy Tyler Devereux and some others that they'll tell you that renting is good. Keep your money liquid so you can invest. And I understand it, but they're playing at a different level than the average American, right? The average American, the number one investment they will ever make in their lifetime is their own home. And you know, Robert Kiyosaki tells us that's not an investment. It's on your liability column and he's right.
[00:33:59]
But eventually that thing gets paid off and eventually it is on your asset column. And that's a, an investment that you can make from your earliest years. You, you can own a home and you can do it for no money down. You can do it on a lease option. Still today, right now is a great time to lease op because we have a descending marketplace. I'm not flipping anything right now. Flipping sucks in a descending market. So I'm gonna, if you're wanting to flip houses, stop it. Wait until the market turns back around and we've got four years for that. Four and a half years away from a rising market again. So just be patient right now. You should be acquiring homes with non-traditional methods and subject twos and lease options and sandwich lease options, and tax lis and tax deeds and owner finances.
[00:34:47]
And that's the way we get our properties right now. And then we'll turn around and we'll fix and flip those same properties that we're holding through the down. When everybody wants to rent, we'll sell 'em on the way out. What I do right now is I pick up a home and instead of fixing and flipping, I just do a general clean out on the home and I'll sell it to somebody on owner finance and let them own it. Their payment to me is equal to rent, but I don't have any property management headaches, so it's better for me. My margin is better and it's better for them because they get the up equity as the market turns around and goes up. So let's say I sell a home to somebody for 200 grand and I carry the note.
[00:35:20]
I allow them to make payments to me of $1,800 a month. Well, if I'm gonna rent that, I'm gonna charge 1800 a month, but if I'm renting it, The cost of rent is now on my burden as the landlord, right? So if, if any maintenance, any issues, that's on me. Well, if I sell it to them and I carry the note, I've got $1,800 a month coming in, same as rent, maybe even a little less 1600 give 'em a good deal so they can take care of maintenance. They're maintaining the home. They will experience the upside. So in five years, they sell the home for 2 25, that's 25 grand in their pocket. But how did I do? I had cashflow for four years. That was fantastic. And I get to sell it for way more than I paid without having to fix it. So those are the kind of things I'm doing right now. So it's in the same vein, but not.
[00:36:06] Roger Jacobsen
I hear a lot of that tenant, buyer stuff and just have done it a little bit in that space. So I did one that was a lease with the option to buy, and I took it over and, and could have done the. Sell to a tenant by instead ate a couple hundred bucks for a while while I was fixing the rent. Mm-hmm. Just like a property management play. Yeah. And then when I sold it, I was able to go through the sale and fixing and all the work that goes with that. I really never have done any of those sandwich leases, Uhhuh. And I think that's something that a lot of people will need a little bit of coaching just to get through. Sure, sure. After you've done that, you really get a different kind of tenant. Somebody that's like caring and wants to take care of the property as opposed to they don't care if they punch holes on the walls cuz there's no upside for them.
[00:36:54] Jason Porter
You're absolutely right. Any, anytime. I would much rather do a real good deed and take the deed to the property, provide that deed to somebody who is in need. Let them get into home ownership by creatively. Letting them do that. Now we can do that on an owner finance, we can do that on a lease option, but mentally I wanna make 'em buyers and eventually I want them to buy, it's better for them and it's better for me. So that's what a, a real good deed is and there's lots of ways to do it. So a sandwich lease option is a lease option within a another lease option. So just, I'll give you an easy example of this, right? When people become house poor, because they were young and dumb and they went and bought a spec home, they went and bought a brand new home and a new development where lots of new young people go and they just spent $375,000 for a new home in a neighborhood with a 5% down or something like that, right?
[00:37:48]
And then the economy turns and that $375,000 house is only worth 300. And they lost their job because the economy is down and they can't make the payments and it's worth less than they paid for. They're in trouble, right? When somebody becomes house poor, we can show up and provide them a solution. And the solution is, look, let me just rent your home. With an option to buy it for five years. I like to do a five year lease op when I buy, and I'm gonna buy your home by paying a down payment equal to all of your payments to the mortgage company that are in arrears, and you're $12,000 back on your mortgage and they're gonna take your home and that's gonna ruin your credit for seven years and yada yada.
[00:38:25]
Right? You don't want a foreclosure on your name, so I'll avoid the foreclosure. I'll bring the mortgage current as a down payment for the lease, and if I don't perform, that's money. You don't have to give me back. We'll make that by contract. And my lease payment will be your mortgage payment and I'm gonna pay that directly to the mortgage company and send you proof of payment every month, but you get no money above the mortgage payment. Why would they do that? Well, because they're gonna lose the home and their, their credit's already bad. And, and if it goes to foreclosure, they, it's gonna be horrible for seven years. There's nothing. Bankruptcy is better than a mortgage foreclosure. On your credit. Okay? So they don't want that to happen. And I'm gonna make their payments. So that's gonna repair their credit. They're gonna get proof of that. And if I don't perform, they take the house back. They don't even have to do an eviction, right? They don't have to do a foreclosure. Rather because I breached the contract. Now what they will need is some cash in the pocket to move out and get into another place.
[00:39:23]
And this is what we call cash for keys in the business. So we're gonna give 'em some cash for a first and last month and a little jingle in their pocket. And I might say, listen, you're gonna need to move out so that I can do what I need to do the home and get it ready to go. And I will give you some money to to get out. And you know, we'll give 'em five or six, seven grand and get a little jingle in their pocket so they get some wind under their wings. They're gonna feel better, they're gonna have enough to get into another place that they can actually afford now. And you just gain control of a property for, call it 12 grand of back payments, call it eight grand of cash for keys for 20 grand. You now control $375,000 property with a mortgage on it of say three 30. It would be kind of a common situation, three 40. So let's say it's got a mortgage of three 40 on it.
[00:40:03]
Now I'm gonna turn around and and lease option that to somebody who wants to buy it. Generally, guys, a lease option is not a renter. These are people who want to own. So these are gonna be your higher end homes. These are not gonna be little three bedroom, one bath, 1954 ramblers, right? They're gonna be newer construction, they're gonna be nicer homes. People wanna buy those. And I'm gonna do a lease option and I'll sell it for three 90 in three years or four years. So give 'em an option to buy it at three 90 or what have you see, let's say we're gonna sell it for three 90 and they're going to rent it and their rent payment, their lease payment will be standard lease payment plus maybe a little bit because they emotionally want to own it. And then I'm going to make all property management their responsibility because emotionally they're owning it.
[00:40:50]
So water heater goes out, you need to fix it. I may say anything over $2,000, I'll take care of anything under 2000. You take care of something like that. So all of the little headaches of being a landlord are removed. They move in and are paying, they're gonna give me a, what's called a non-refundable option consideration, formerly called a down payment, but we don't call it that anymore for legal reasons. It's an N R A non-refundable option consideration. They're gonna give me, generally 8%, four to 8% of an nro. If we take $375,000, I'm gonna do it real quick so your audience gets the correct number. But if I take $375,000 times, call it 4%, right, their down payment is gonna be 15 grand. Well, what just happened to my cash exposure on this deal? I spent 20, they gave me 15 grand back for them to have a lease option. So I'm in this thing $5,000 now and in total control of the property, they lease it. Paying a payment that pays for the mortgage plus gives me cashflow of say, $500 a month. So I've got $500 a month in my pocket for three years.
[00:41:56]
That's going to be $18,000 of money just passively coming in over those three years. And then three years, four years later, they sell the house before the option is up. And when they sell the house, it sells for three 90 or whatever our negotiated rate was. And all I gotta do is pay off the mortgage. Th they've been paying down for three years. So instead of a three 30 mortgage balance, we have a three 20 mortgage balance. And the difference of that 70 grand minus closing cost in yada yada is for me. So you know, you're walking away with $18,000 of cashflow for three years. You're walking away with 40 or $50,000 at closing, and everybody wins, right? Everybody wins here. The homeowner that was in trouble and house poor wins because their credit is repaired. You win because you got in the middle of a deal and made the money in the middle, and the person who bought it from you won because they were able to live in a home as owners from the beginning and buy it for a fair price years later. So I love a sandwich lease option right now. It's a great way to go.
[00:42:55] Roger Jacobsen
So when you set that up between the buyer and the seller, do you have a different time between the one you set up and a shorter time for the seller?
[00:43:05] Jason Porter
Yeah, absolutely.
[00:43:06] Roger Jacobsen
You can foreclose and keep it somehow, well, there's no foreclosure.
[00:43:10] Jason Porter
Remember that You don't own it and they don't own it. You're both just lease optioning it, right? So no, there's no foreclosure. If they don't perform on their lease, then we go through the, what we go through. Anytime a renter doesn't perform on their rental agreement or their lease agreement, right, we just do an eviction or a notification of, Hey, you need to quit or pay all the money they've given you will have been lost. So that's just yours and you want to make sure that you give yourself a one or two year option difference. So the option dates are gonna be different. If I do a five-year option, I'm looking to find somebody who wants to exercise a three or four year option so that I have a year minimum to take care of whatever needs to be taken care of before uh, my option is due.
[00:43:49]
Now remember, I don't have to exercise my option, do I? If things fall apart, I could walk away and give the house back to the people who still own it and keep the money that I made in the middle so I don't have to exercise that option if things go bad. It's a really flexible system of purchasing. Now, again, I'm gonna sell a house before I bought it, which is for some of your listeners there to say how? How can you even do that? I have the option to buy it at any time before the fifth year or before whatever year we negotiate, right? I have an option to buy it at a predetermined price. Now that option can be exercised or not exercised. If I exercise the option, then I go to a title company and I formally buy it and we change the title.
[00:44:32]
If I exercise my option to buy and then I sell it to the person who I did a lease option to, I can exercise both their option and my option on the same day. It's called a simultaneous close, so the title company knows how to do this. We just go to the title company and I buy it. And the person that I bought it from walks out and one minute later, the person that's selling it or that's buying it from me walks in, I buy it and I sell it the same day in a simultaneous close right there in the, in the title company. We can actually do it all remotely now and don't have to go to a title company, but that's the way we used to do it. One person, the seller to me, would come in, get their money, leave, and then the buyer would come in, buy it, and I'd walk out with a check.
[00:45:17] Ben Waller
Jason, I'm sure you can speak better to this, but just as a disclaimer to our listeners here, each state has different policies on how this is handled. Make sure you check your local laws with whatever state you're operating in.
[00:45:28] Jason Porter
Amen and amen. Um, every state is different. I do not operate any of my tenants relationships, any lease options, any rents in any state that is going to have laws favoring tenancy. So everywhere I work, the laws are strongly in favor of landlords. Um, and we get to pick and choose where we work. I live in Nevada. I do not own any property in Nevada. I used to live in Utah. I did not run properties in Utah. I work in places where evictions are really quick, really down and dirty. I work in the Southern United States where landlords have the rights, and as tenancy rights change, I move out of that state because we get to pick and choose where we domicile our, our entities. We get to pick and choose where we conduct our business, and I'm not gonna put myself or my family or our wealth in a position that it can be easily taken or strung out for years. For example, Chicago right now has a law on the books right now. Today, this is Cook County and it's statewide, actually, it's a state law where squatters cannot be evicted in less than eight months.
[00:46:33]
It cannot be removed in less than eight months. So what they're doing is they're going to new construction homes, brand new, they're breaking the windows and moving in, and they will stay there eight months, even though that home was under contract and was going to be sold next Monday. Those buyers have to now wait eight months before they can move in. These people know it and seven months and 30 days, they move out and break the windows on another one. And I'm not ever going to be a, a landlord in a place that allows me not to, to have any rights for somebody who is illegally in my property. For eight months. That just doesn't make sense. So Illinois is dead to me as far as rents and leases go. We can flip in Illinois, we can wholesale in Illinois. We can do lots of other things in Illinois, but I'm definitely not gonna be a landlord there.
[00:47:20] Ben Waller
Jason, you have a ton of knowledge, which is wonderful on today's show. In respect of your time and just our episode here, let's move on to a different topic. So for as a reminder for our listeners today, we've talked about law of attraction. Jason threw in a surprise topic of lease options, which is wonderful. Worry about that. Hey, it's okay. It was great information. And now we wanna talk about tax liens and tax deeds, cuz I know you have a ton of experience there. So are you okay if we move into that?
[00:47:46] Jason Porter
Absolutely. This is actually my bread and butter, so we're right in my wheelhouse. Okay. So property taxes are due every year, right? There are approximately 14 million households or properties, not necessarily houses, but properties each year that fail to pay their property taxes. When a property owner becomes one year delinquent, a lien will be placed by the taxing jurisdiction. Generally a county, uh, back east, it'll also be a township. So anyway, the taxing authority will lien that property. What makes a tax lien a property tax lien special is the fact that in every jurisdiction, it's a first position lien, and it will go ahead of.
[00:48:24]
The mortgage, it will go ahead of the IRS. It'll go ahead of everybody and everything, always in every case. And it bears an interest rate, depending on state law of between 8% to 36% per year. So this is social investing, right? This is a real good deed. I can buy from a county that's offering up their liens for sale. I can buy that lien, assume first position ahead of everybody else. But by buying lien, I'm providing cashflow to the county so that they can pay teachers, firefighters, police, they can fix roads, bridges. There's a social purpose to that investment, right? It does social good. 55 to 65% of all property taxes go to public education. So massive influx of, or excuse me, a massive lack of cash flow occurs in every county every year when people don't. When they choose not to pay the property taxes. So 26 states allow us as investors to go buy these property tax li and they have fantastic mandated interest rates on them. Now there's a, a whole lot to, uh, to how to buy them, when to buy them, where to buy them.
[00:49:31]
And the rules are difficult to understand because there's 5,013 taxing jurisdictions in the United States. So it's like, it's like playing basketball. If you can imagine, I'm a good basketball player. Let's say you say you're a good basketball player, but you show up in this county and the hoops are set to 15 feet and the free throw lines at 32. Right. Well, that's just the way we play here. Let's still basketball. And then you go to another county and you can take six steps without it being traveling. Kind of like the N B A. The rules change everywhere we go, and it makes it really hard to figure out. So I've spent enough time, and I have one of those weird brains that when I, when I learn something, it, it, it's in there forever.
[00:50:09]
It's kinda locked in. And so I've been able to, to skin that cat and find places that, um, that, that become really, really good at providing great interest rates and methods to getting, you know, 16, 18, 24, 30 6% of my money without the hassles of property ownership, although it's collateralized by property. If it doesn't work out, I get the property eventually, but after foreclosing, but I would just put this out to your, your clients. Where can you go? Your, your listeners rather. Where can you go in America today to get 16 plus percent on your Monday mandated by law? And have that investment collateralized with real property worth 50 x your investment. The answer is nowhere, right? Except for property tax. Li, they're the safest, most lucrative investment that exists. And statistically, very, very, very few investors do it. Now, you will be competing against hedge funds and banks, so don't go where they go, right? Hedge funds managers are lazy. They fly out of New York City and they want to get to the auction in the market very quickly, and they wanna be back on a plane before the end of the day, right?
[00:51:22]
So I do not do this in big cities. I do this in places that are one Walmart towns. I love one Walmart towns. I raised my family in American Fork. We're a one Walmart town. We're a one high school town. That Lone Peak, they're not in our town, right? I love, love one Walmart towns and one high school towns. And trust me, hedge funds aren't going to Marksville, Louisiana. Right. They're not doing that because you gotta fly into Shreveport and then drive for two hours. Well, I can do that. I can do that for that kind of return on my money. Why not? Right? So we have to have strategies. So tax liens are an interest rate. Play tax deeds is the end of the life of a tax lien. A tax lien starts out as they didn't pay their property taxes, but eventually the county needs that money. They, they will eventually foreclose and 24 states sell the deed. So it started off as a tax lien, but it was foreclosed upon and it's become a tax deed.
[00:52:17]
Now, the opening bid at a tax deed auction as compared to a bank foreclosure, the opening bid is only going to be the back taxes. So you get the properties way cheaper because let's say it's a $200,000 property with back taxes due for the last three years. Of 15 grand, the opening bid's only gonna be 15 grand. Where if that was a bank foreclosure, $200,000 property, you would expect that opening bid to be at one 50. 1 31. Gosh, two years ago, the opening bid would've been 200, right? And people would've paid over retail at auction and then had to fix it up and do a construction project. So bottom line is tax deeds are a great way to get the property every time. Tax liens are a great way to get passive income. And the way we get our passive income with tax liens is you buy them every month and you basically ladder them like CDs at a bank and they start redeeming, meaning people pay their taxes plus penalties. They pay those over time. So let's say I spend two years laddering CDs, well two years from now, every time I go to the mailbox, there's checks from the counties coming in with my money back plus interest, and I just go buy more on the front end of the funnel.
[00:53:27]
Now eventually somebody doesn't pay you back. But we have a foreclosable position. First position, we go ahead and, and hire an attorney to foreclose. They will notify the bank, they will notify the irs, they will notify the, the homeowner and everybody else, roofers, plumbers, and if they don't want the property, they let it go and we get the tax deed. Even though we started out with a lien, we end up with a deed to the property for just the back taxes, plus our legal fees and what we call roll up fees. All the first position liens have to be paid off. So we end up getting properties very cheap that way. That those are the cheapest properties you'll ever get. The cheapest one I ever got was 2100 bucks for a five bedroom, two bath home. But those are rare. To be candid, you're gonna get one in a hundred of those probably. So you gotta buy a lot of liens to get houses that way. If you want a house, just buy the deed. You're gonna get a better deal than a bank foreclosure, and you're gonna get the deed to the property.
[00:54:22]
Now, there's some special things around tax deeds that you need to understand as well, but I've already been along in the tooth on this call, so probably need to tune into a second. Uh, Call or what have you, um, to, to learn those things specialize a little more. What's your best method for finding these? Best method for finding tax liens or tax deeds is simply call the county and, and ask when their next sale is. Right? You can do a Google search and it will tell you what each state is. You can hire a company that will give you a map to this, the country. You just to keep it down and dirty. You can do the way I started out, just, just call Sally down at the county and, and ask, you know, when's your next tax lien auction?
[00:55:00]
And each state will have a time period when they do theirs, right? So for example, Florida, may and June, Arizona, February. Right. Utah May and it is just they, they all have a season when they do it, Indiana's gonna be October and April. So it just depends. Texas on the courthouse steps every first Tuesday of the month. So 254 counties in Texas holding auctions every month on Tuesday, first Tuesday of the month. So it just depends on the place. And when you contact the county and say, how do I get the list? They'll, they will tell you because they want you to invest. So it's, it's not adversarial. We're not pulling any tricks. We're just getting county public information and saying, I would like to participate in your next auction. How do I get that list? And that list will be made available to you, one of many methods. It may be available through a third party company that the county works with, and they'll give you the name of that website and you can go there and get the list.
[00:55:52]
It may be available through a law firm if you're dealing in Texas. It may be available through an Excel spreadsheet that they. Literally just email it to you and you might have to pay for that, you know, nine bucks or whatever to get the list. But you just want the list of the stuff that they're gonna take to auction. Now that list is going to come down naturally before the auction. It will come down because people will pay their taxes they have up until the day of the auction to pay their taxes. So, point of frustration, if you're gonna do this, is you're going to research quite a few properties that will not make it to auction because the people will come and pay their taxes off and, and you will have wasted time. So I do want to talk about law of attraction here on that or mindset. Just a moment. If you research a property and you get ready for an auction and these people come in and heaven bless, and they pay their taxes just before losing their property, don't feel bad about that. You have to feel happy for the people.
[00:56:47]
You have to say, well, God bless 'em. Cool. They kept their house. You need to have that weird mindset of being happy that other people won. Right. If you're the kind of person who's only happy if you win, then this investment's not for you. You gotta have the mindset that sweet. They won. Awesome. I'm gonna get the next one. You gotta be able to rinse and repeat that because it is frustrating to new investors in tax liens and tax deeds to discover that they spent a lot of time in research and didn't want anything and, and that can be lights out. Business over before it ever started. But if you have a great attitude about it and your mindset is one of abundance where you understand God is good, this earth, this universe, whatever you believe in, man, it's awesome. There's gonna be a deal for me tomorrow, right around the corner, and I'm gonna be looking for it today. Oh shoot, I got to tomorrow and, and I didn't get a deal, but you know what? There's gonna be another one tomorrow. And I'm just one of those fellas that life is good and getting better. And anytime I'm going through a struggle and I go through just as many as anybody else, this isn't something that I can learn from.
[00:57:48]
It's going to make me a better person overall. I'm gonna be had better granddad because I went through some crap and I'm glad I went through it. I'm glad I got through it. And who can I help get through it, right? That's the attitude to have about it. And I hope that helps somebody here who might venture into tax liens and tax deeds and, and decide it's a little harder than you thought it was gonna be. Yeah. But show me anything good that doesn't come with some work. And, and I'll, I'll show you something that's a lie.
[00:58:15] Roger Jacobsen
All right. I think to use your basketball analogy, that would be a good way to say the win-win in that situation is you may not get the slam dunk, you might get the assist and the AlleyOOP, they'll get the slam dunk and, but you're still a team player and, and you win. All of you really win in that situation cuz you've gotten the interest.
[00:58:33] Jason Porter
You know what guys, that's a secret to investing. It's finding, especially real estate investing, it's finding win-win relationships, finding, informing those relationships where you win, of course. Or you wouldn't be doing the business, but where you're providing a solution to other people to win too. And when you can do that, you get rich. That's the outcome. Bottom line. And that, that isn't necessarily always money, but I'll tell you, there's two ways to count rich. Right? It's just that happiness and peace that comes at the end of the day, knowing one, my tomorrow's taken care of so I can sleep and not worry. And two, I've got more friends than enemies. And that's a good way to sleep. Absolutely.
[00:59:09] Roger Jacobsen
Do you teach a. Course on tax lien investing?
[00:59:13] Jason Porter
I do. Yeah. People can enter in contact with me through Instagram or TikTok or, um, Jason Porter invests or real good deeds. So Jason Porter invests real good deeds. I do have, you know, coaching programs that I do. I don't take on very many people because I like to make sure that the people I work with are successful. So I don't wanna spread myself too thin.
[00:59:33] Jason Porter
And I do have online courses that that can. It can be purchased, but, um, bottom line is if you want to do this, you can do it. I didn't invent it. I just have streamlined things and made it faster. So if anybody wants to reach out to me, I'd love to talk to him.
[00:59:48] Ben Waller
Jason, you have provided a wealth of knowledge for our listeners today. We have other things we wanna talk about, but generally we keep our episodes to about an hour. So we're probably not gonna go into the land flipping discussion, at least on this episode. Maybe we'll have to do another episode in the future to talk about that. So we have questions we ask everybody at the end of an episode. But before we get into that, is there anything else about any topic we've discussed so far today that you feel we should add to, or anything else that you feel like should be covered on this episode?
[01:00:17] Jason Porter
No, I think that's great. We'll save, uh, that great Luke Bryant song for another day, buy Dirt. Well, and hopefully you're taking that the right way. I'm not, no problem man. I'd love a chance to. Yeah. And if people reach out to me, I, that's stuff that I teach too, so No problem. You answered most of my questions.
[01:00:32] Roger Jacobsen
Are you sure you don't want to go into the Samoan Surf Resort or something else? I got time. We also could do an episode called by Sand and segue into the beach resorts.
[01:00:45] Jason Porter
I'm down, I'm down. Let's buy some sand.
[01:00:49] Roger Jacobsen
I just got back from Roatan off of Honduras. Nice.
[01:00:52] Jason Porter
I hear it's beautiful. I've never been.
[01:00:54] Roger Jacobsen
Oh, it's gorgeous. It's definitely so much raw than any of the other places I've been like Grand Caman, the Leaves. Costa Rica. Nice. There's, there's a whole different contingency there, but it's just beautiful and if we get our way, we've already got a partner that owns the land outright. And we would build a 40 unit hotel and 20 ish homes that could be Airbnb or, or however you do it. And so buying sand and, and keeping it and building on it would be our strategy. But yeah.
[01:01:26] Jason Porter
I'd really recommend when you're doing that action sport tourism. Think about that and think about what we now call glamping, right? People don't want a hotel experience anymore. So if you've got that kind of land, get creative with your lodging. Very creative. And that can be containers that can be converted old RV trailers, right? So that it's a juxtaposition. They go from something that's kind of old and rusty and, and yucky. And when they walk in, it's Egyptian linen and incredible lighting and just exquisite, right? So you want that juxtaposition in a place that where one, their breath is taken away. And two, the, the lodging experience. Is truly memorable because you can walk into a hotel on any beach in the country and you know exactly, open the door, bathroom to the left, closet to the right, walk a little further bed to the left tv to the right window. There you go. There's a hotel anywhere in the world, and it's boring. So if you've got that kind of sexy dirt, have you got sexy sand like that pH call me.
[01:02:31] Roger Jacobsen
We've got some ideas about doing yurts and cabanas.
[01:02:35] Jason Porter
And yeah, man, that's the fun stuff right there.
[01:02:38] Roger Jacobsen
I haven't figured out how to do a tree house in a palm tree yet, but the thought has crossed our minds.
[01:02:43] Jason Porter
It'd be pretty sway. Pretty sway. Lots of this rocky to sleep.
[01:02:49] Roger Jacobsen
All right, well, let's get onto the final four. Okay. These are four questions that we ask everybody.
[01:02:55] Jason Porter
What is your favorite business book? Jack Canfield's, The Success Principles.
[01:03:01] Roger Jacobsen
Awesome. What brings you happiness?
[01:03:02] Jason Porter
Family, and God.
[01:03:05] Roger Jacobsen
Describe to us what your future retirement looks like.
[01:03:08] Jason Porter
I will retire to missionary service. I want to build libraries for orphans. I wanna talk about Jesus. I want to dig wells in Africa. Well, speaking Portuguese and Mozambique, I don't care. I just don't wanna die slow. So wherever it is, I wanna be doing something fun and I've already talked to God about it. Take me at 109, digging a well in Africa and then just bury me in the dirt in Africa. I'm good. I don't need a box. I know where I'm going, so I'm good to go. I don't really worry about it. I don't think I'll ever retire from investing because I love it. Right? And it's what keeps your mind sharp. The people who struggle most with seen all dementia tend to be people who do the same thing every day. And investing, especially real estate investing, you have to solve new problems. Every day. And I love it because the a d d in me needs it, and it keeps you young. So I, I'm gonna always invest. Yeah.
[01:04:08] Roger Jacobsen
Either, uh, lost five years of my life, risking it, riding a motorcycle in Honduras, or I added five years because of the extreme change that that was.
[01:04:19] Jason Porter
Yeah. Yeah. It, it, you know what, it's, it's healthy to put yourself in new positions. So travel is wonderful. It'll be part of my future forever. Um, language is wonderful. So we've already mapped out, uh, first three locations for missions or Papua New Guinea, Samoa and Brazil. After that, we want to head to Africa.
[01:04:40] Roger Jacobsen
What do you think is the best way to give back?
[01:04:42] Jason Porter
Teaching. Honestly, I think it's a crime that people who know how to do something valuable, don't share that with others. This earth, this universe we live in, this God that we have, whatever you believe in is abundantly good. And there's no reason that we not share. I am not afraid of any of your listeners beating me at a tax deed auction. I would be stoked if they did, because there's gonna be another one the next day that's gonna be good for me, and I need to be happy with people being successful. So I think that's, that's just it, man. Um, learn what makes you happy and then teach others how to do it, and the right people will find you.
[01:05:27] Roger Jacobsen
That's awesome. We really appreciate you coming on the show today. Well, thanks. I think we've learned a lot and it's fun to do.
[01:05:32] Jason Porter
I talk too much, but Oh well.
[01:05:36] Ben Waller
Lot of value though.
[01:05:36] Jason Porter
Lots of value. I hope so.
[01:05:38] Roger Jacobsen
We ask you to do that. Our story gets repeated a little bit every episode and especially in the first five and now we just wanna hear you speak, so Okay. We appreciate it.
[01:05:48] Jason Porter
Awesome. Well thanks guys.
[01:05:50] Ben Waller
You already mentioned this a little bit, but I'll just ask it as a question. Where can our listeners find you online?
[01:05:54] Jason Porter
Real good deeds.com. It's just a basic little website guys, but if you want to kind of follow Instagram, Jason Porter Invests or TikTok, Jason Porter invests, and pretty much it, you can just message me right from either of those platforms.
[01:06:08] Ben Waller
We'll have those links on our show notes for our listeners as well. Just a quick summary of what we covered on today's episode. Jason gave us a lot of value in talking about law of Attraction. He threw in a surprise topic of lease options, which I thought was super valuable, so I'm glad he did that. We also talked about tax liens and tax deeds, which is his bread and butter, and he's got, uh, training courses that he can teach you how to do that for yourself if you're interested. We were supposed to talk about land flipping, but Jason just shared too much value in other stuff, so we didn't get to it. But maybe next time we have 'em on, we can talk about land flipping. Jason, we wanna thank you for being on the show today. Uh, everybody, thanks for listening to our Retire Wealthy and Happy episode of today's podcast.
[01:06:45] Jason Porter
We hope to see you next time. Thanks guys. Take care. Thanks, Jason. Bye.
[01:06:48] Podcast Outro
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