Today, Brandon Gustafson is here to talk about a strategy for professionals looking to improve their portfolios. We'll be diving into the details of designing assisted living facilities, specifically focusing on creating spaces that adapt to the changing needs of senior residents. So, if you want to invest in senior living facilities, tune in!
Key takeaways to listen for
Resources mentioned in this episode
If you’re interested in learning the different tiers of assisted living, visit https://www.assistedlivinginvesting.net/wealthy to get your free senior living industry webinar and other free gifts!
About Brandon Gustafson
Brandon has worked in the healthcare industry for over nine years. During that time, he has gained experience working with several healthcare disciplines, including elderly care. He previously worked as a CNA in a nursing home. He has experience running the billing process for Medicaid claims (having worked on a contract billing Medicaid in the state of Utah along with other payers) and developing relationships with providers. Brandon holds a master’s degree in healthcare administration from the University of Utah. Brandon also serves on the board for the Utah chapter of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society as the sponsorship director.
Connect with Brandon
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
Today, Brandon Gustafson is here to talk about a strategy for professionals looking to improve their portfolios. We'll be diving into the details of designing assisted living facilities, specifically focusing on creating spaces that adapt to the changing needs of senior residents. So, if you want to invest in senior living facilities, tune in!
Key takeaways to listen for
Resources mentioned in this episode
If you’re interested in learning the different tiers of assisted living, visit https://www.assistedlivinginvesting.net/wealthy to get your free senior living industry webinar and other free gifts!
About Brandon Gustafson
Brandon has worked in the healthcare industry for over nine years. During that time, he has gained experience working with several healthcare disciplines, including elderly care. He previously worked as a CNA in a nursing home. He has experience running the billing process for Medicaid claims (having worked on a contract billing Medicaid in the state of Utah along with other payers) and developing relationships with providers. Brandon holds a master’s degree in healthcare administration from the University of Utah. Brandon also serves on the board for the Utah chapter of the Healthcare Information Management Systems Society as the sponsorship director.
Connect with Brandon
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] Brandon Gustafson
If you're purchasing and seeing home, the best thing to do is just buy what it is and keep operating that way until you want to make some changes to it. But if you're starting a new one, you want to do a conversion, then do some goal setting and think to yourself, what is the population that I want to serve? And then you're going to build that house around that.
[00:00:17] 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] Roger Jacobsen
Welcome to the Retire Wealthy and Happy podcast. I'm Roger Jacobsen and we have my co-host Anthony Esparza. And today we have the assisted living specialist, Brandon Gustafson, welcome to the show, Brandon. Thanks, Roger. Why don't you start out with telling us a little bit about yourself and your assisted living career and take it away.
[00:01:02] Brandon Gustafson
Yeah. So I have a master's degree in healthcare administration from the university of Utah. I graduated in 2015 and was really interested in getting into healthcare and so I did, and I have worked in healthcare since then, actually prior to that, since like 2012, and a lot of that has just been like analytics and working through healthcare processes, understanding government programs, Medicare, Medicaid, running programs through that process, and I love working in healthcare. I got into it because I love helping people and the difference that we get to make in people's lives. And I was working at a bunch of companies through that process, working through for large healthcare payers, working for nonprofits, working for a few different organizations, and just really enjoyed it.
[00:01:46]
But in 2019, it was June 9th, actually, 2019. My daughter woke up and she was sick and so I stayed home from church with her and read Rich Dad Poor Dad in one day. Like, I just read it, fell in love, and I was like, I've got to figure this thing out. And so I did. I went to a Rich Dad Poor Dad event and left a little bit early because I could see where it was going on the upsell. So I was like, I don't really want to handle that, but I'll have an excuse and then just leave, you know, an hour early or whatever. So took off, but... I really enjoyed learning about the process. And as I started diving deeper into real estate and how I wanted to go through just investing in real estate and getting into that asset class, I found assisted living as an asset class. And when I found it, my background in healthcare. And the interest in real estate just seemed like a perfect blend for me to get in and figure that out. So from there, I had joined a local real estate group and had started building some relationships there, really educating myself on real estate and what it is and how it works, all the different processes that go into it.
[00:02:53]
And so I had in my mind, I'm going to do fix and clips, I'm going to get some money, and I'm going to use that to then buy an assisted living facility or buy a house and convert it into an assisted living facility, and so that was my plan. And I was talking to a mentor of mine, and he's like, you clearly just want to do assisted living, why don't you just… Jump into that and figure it out. So I did. Um, I went and I took my dad to lunch. He had money through his HELOC and I was like, Hey, look, I want to do this assisted living and stuff. I had been talking to him throughout the process. So it wasn't like out of the blue, but you know, I want to do assisted living, but I need cash. Are you guys interested in doing this? Being the down payment for it. And he said, yeah. So we went and started looking and. Found a house here. I started like looking on loop net and biz by self because like I had no idea how to find a facility and so I just got on those resources, started looking. I remember I was sitting at the chiropractor office.
[00:03:52]
I got there early. I was sitting there 30 minutes early. Looking on loop net and I'm like, I'm just going to call the broker and see what happens. And so I fumbled my way through that conversation. He's like, well, yeah, let's just sign an NDA and then I'll send you over the stuff. And I was like, I don't know what an NDA is, but sure. Yeah, send it over. Let's figure it out. So I like quickly emailed my attorney. I was like, what is an NDA? Can I sign it? Am I signing my life away? And he's like, I don't know. It's totally fine. Not a big deal at all. Just go ahead and sign it. It basically says you're not going to share this with anybody else. So I got that NDA, signed it, got the financials, started looking at it. We were going to go and see the house, but it was like we were actually at Ikea in Draper and I was listening to the radio and it was the night that Rudy Gobert got shut down because he got tested for COVID. So that was the night we were going to go and see the facility and like, it was just, we can't go there anymore.
[00:04:50]
So. We drove by it, looked at it, beautiful homes, just fantastic home, but I started running the numbers and I'm like, this just doesn't make sense for what I like to do for how much it's going to cost me to purchase this house. And so I started trying to figure it out. Through that real estate group, I was able to meet a guy in Colorado, in Denver, who was purchasing a facility there from a group that owned two and they were looking to get out of both of them. So he introduced me to his broker. And then we started the conversations for one in Colorado Springs, and this was in, I don't know, April or May of 2020. And we liked it, ran the numbers, have a background in analytics, so I created my own underwriting calculator, like really deep dive into it based off of a multifamily calculator that I found, and I just started underwriting it. Going through the process and we're like, yeah, this one makes sense. So we drove out to Colorado in May and Saw the facility went through the process and ended up closing on it in September of 2020 and then from there I got bored again, so we purchased another one in February of 21 in Idaho So just kind of fun process to go through that. I love the underwriting and a startup process there Uh, figuring all that out and getting in and starting businesses, for me, it's like energizing. I love doing it. And so getting in and figuring that out was a lot of fun.
[00:06:15] Roger Jacobsen
Why don't you tell us a little bit about the individual facilities, like how big they are, how many beds, how you were able to acquire them and money and loans and stuff like that.
[00:06:25] Brandon Gustafson
Yeah, so the one in Colorado Springs, we purchased, well, actually I purchased both of them on SBA loans. So the way that we structured this was I partnered with my dad who had the cash through his HELOC for the down payment on the SBA loan. And the SBA loan, if you talk to a loan officer, they're going to tell you SBA, you can be as low as 10%. Uh, what I found in our situation is it ended up being Like closer to like 17, 18 percent when it was all said and done based off of collateral that was in the deal. But I've closed three SBA loans at this point. And I would say 15 to 20 percent is more likely what you're going to see if you're going SBA. But I've learned a lot through that process as well. There's two loans there. There's a 7A and a 504. And so if you can get the lenders and talking through that process, you're going to be able to figure that out. But 17 to 18 percent down. And then the home that we purchased was collateral for the rest of the loan. And then it's 25 year term. And what I found out though, that I did not know when I did SBA is they fluctuate when the Fed raises rates. And that is kind of a pain. So our debt service is actually like almost doubled in the time that we've owned it, which is just. Ridiculous. So we're hoping that we're done with rate hikes.
[00:07:39] Anthony Esparza
Uh, your rates are, are pretty good right now.
[00:07:42] Brandon Gustafson
They were good. They're too high. They're way too high now. Yeah. So we went from like a 4, 500 payment in the beginning to a It's like 7200 right now in Colorado, like it's just insane what it's done.
[00:07:57] Anthony Esparza
So yeah, is there a way to lower or lock that rate or is it just in a like an adjustable rate type of the rate that we have is adjustable.
[00:08:03] Brandon Gustafson
We're actually working right now with the banks to see if we can adjust that. We're trying to figure that out. We didn't have enough experience at the time to do a 504 because they typically want to see you to have about two years of, of work experience or owning that real estate. The 504, I believe locks it in. So we're in conversations now to see if we could adjust that. Or we've also talked about potentially looking at doing a HUD loan, which is HUDs are great loans for inassisted living. It's like a 35 year. It's fixed. Um, they're typically like less than five percent. Like they're really good. There's a lot of extra stuff You have to do and rules, but it's really good that the other thing with hud loans is they become assumable So if we ever wanted to get out of it, we could sell the house plus the loan and somebody can just go in and assume it, which is really nice. So we're trying to figure out different ways or just even putting it into a traditional mortgage with something that's locked in that would save us quite a bit as well. So we didn't know I going in, we didn't realize it going into it or we didn't. I think we'd have to worry about it, I guess. And now we do. So we're trying to figure out exactly what we're going to do with it. So. I have a question.
[00:09:12] Anthony Esparza
When you talk about assisted living, is it assisted living compound? Facility. Facility. Okay. So you mentioned you were looking on LoopNet. And so for the viewers out there, LoopNet is kind of a commercial. Real estate website. You can go on and find commercial property. So my question is, are these residential properties? Are they zoned commercial? Are they multifamily? Can it just be one home with six bedrooms? Kind of what's the definition of that?
[00:09:40] Brandon Gustafson
Yeah, so there's a few things there. So there's different tiers. So there's, and I've actually got a thing on my website for you guys is for your listeners. So it's assistedlivinginvestment. net slash wealthy. And I've got like a little mini course that kind of teaches the different tiers of assisted living there. But basically there's a care home, which is typically like a residential house and a care home is going to be something that's like four to six residents depends on the state and what they're doing, but it is in a residential setting. There's not a lot of rezoning you have to go through, you just need to make sure that you get a proper license in place. Then they step up and there's a residential facility, which are what mine are. So they are residential homes, but they're bigger. But the one in Idaho is in an HOA and we have 16 residents there, but it looks just like all the other houses in the neighborhood.
[00:10:29]
Back in the early 2000s, there was a builder up in Idaho who built like six or seven of these. You have main living space in the middle, and then you have rooms all around it, and they each have their own half bath or a full bath attached to them to those rooms. So there are just like little mini suites. But it's just residential home. The one in colorado is actually really cool. It has 16 residents as well But it's four stories. It was built in the 1890s in the 1950s 60s, they picked it up and they moved it across the bridge. So it used to be in downtown Colorado Springs They moved it over to old Colorado City And put it back and plastered it together. So it's, it's kind of a cool house. But yeah, they're just residential houses. When you do that, you do have to check on zoning for those ones. If you're purchasing a house and you want to do a conversion, you want to make sure you're talking with zoning and planning at the city. And figure out, can I do this here? And a lot of that is going to be based off of like parking spaces or just any other issues they might have that they need to do. I've talked with a bunch of municipalities in the Salt Lake area and some of them are super friendly and it's like, yeah, this is what you need to do. It's super simple.
[00:11:35]
Others are like, you're going to have to do a whole rezoning process. It's going to have to go to the city council. It's going to have to do XYZ. And it's just like a headache I don't want to deal with, so I'm not going to do it. I coach people, that's what I tell them is, start first with the municipality and make sure that it's one that's going to work for you. That's the residential side of things. And then above that is what you probably think of when you think assisted living, where it's a big box, kind of a commercial style building, looks like an apartment building that has 30 plus beds up to 300, you can see huge ones, but they're more commercial in style. As far as finding them, a lot of owners of these like little residential facilities are just mom and pop shop type things. And so. They actually are listing them on the MLS and they're working with a traditional real estate broker and they're not getting a lot of traction. So that's when they resort to getting on loop net because it's kind of, you know, last resort, I don't know what I'm going to do.
[00:12:33]
It's kind of a commercial. It's this hybrid thing. So I'm going to throw it on there and see what happens. And so that's where I could find them because you actually filter down on loop net clear down to an assisted living facility and see where they're at in the nation, which is really nice. But what I found that process as well as working with a traditional real estate agent is it's not a great experience when you're purchasing that assisted living facility. Because it is a commercial style loan and my experience with going the SBA route is there's an added level of Scrutiny that goes into looking at those deals and the underwriting of them because you're buying a business as well And so there's just this extra thing And it takes more time and a traditional real estate agent is like, you know, we're going to close this in 30 to 45 days and it's going to take me three to four months to close a deal if I'm going an SBA route. So we had to manage a lot of expectations as we went through the purchase of our second facility in Idaho because we were dealing with a real estate agent.
[00:13:32] Anthony Esparza
Interesting. So you outsmarted the real estate agent.
[00:13:34] Brandon Gustafson
Yes. Yes. And it took a while. It took a lot of convincing, honestly. My broker was great. Like, he's done assisted living several times, so he knows the process. But I would get messages, we're like two and a half, three months into this process. And the real estate agent is messaging me and like, if you don't do this thing, then we're going to walk away. And I was like, Oh man. So I talked to my broker and he's like, what she doesn't realize is if she does that, she's going to have to start all over again. And it's not going to pick somebody up right where we were left off. And she's going to have to do this again. So we had to, Have a lot of conversations there and figure out how to just talk to her and work through it. I would even talk to the seller who was much more even keeled about the situation, more understanding that it was like, this is going to take a while. And so she would have to talk to, to her agent as well. But just something to just like realize is it's not a typical normal close that goes fast. It's going to take some time to get there. Now, if you're buying a house and converting it, then that's a different story. But if you're buying something that exists, it can take some time.
[00:14:37] Roger Jacobsen
So one of the things that you, uh, told me while I was talking to you on the phone before was that you're fully passive.
[00:14:44] Brandon Gustafson
On these facilities, tell me about that. So, I live in Utah and I have a facility in Colorado and a facility in Idaho. So, we've hired administrators to go into the facilities and they just operate everything for us. We just have great people, I work with them on a pretty regular basis. We'll do like bi weekly or monthly calls. And just make sure that we're meeting the needs that they have. And when it comes to some of the higher level state regulations, we will handle those conversations. But 90 percent of the work is done by those people that are on the day-to-day. And they're handling, finding a store for us. They go and do the grocery shopping. Everything that you would need to operate this type of a house, they are doing that work for us. And so there's pretty minimal involvement by us. And we go out to the facilities. It's three or four times a year just to kind of vacation as well, but just see how things are going. I'll do like updated resident agreements and I'd like to talk to the residents as well, but that's certainly not a requirement, but I'd like to get in there and just talk to them and get to know them and their families and their story. It's a lot of fun to just chat with them and get to know them and see what it's like.
[00:15:51] Anthony Esparza
I like this because it's a feel good business. You know, you feel you're doing something good and it's also an asset in some way. So now you got your facility you get your administrator who's gonna manage and like you said do 95 percent of the work How do you find these people? Do you focus on a mental health one or like an elderly one? Do you kind of decide which route you're gonna what type of assisted living you're gonna do and then also Sorry for all the questions, but is there some tax advantages that attach to assisted living stuff? And how does that business structure look like is it? I guess I'm curious how that income is made. Is it insurance paid state paid or something? Or is there any tax advantages involved? How'd you kind of figure out the structure of your financials and how you're going to make it work?
[00:16:39] Brandon Gustafson
Yeah, it's a lot of questions there. So I'll try to unpack it for you. So, um, number one, as far as like the type of house that you want to do, if you're doing, I mean, if you're purchasing an existing home, I would suggest the best thing to do is just. Buy what it is and keep operating that way until you want to make some changes to it. But if you're starting a new one, you want to do a conversion, then what I would suggest you do is do some like goal setting vision exercise planning and think to yourself, what is the population that I want to serve? And then you're going to build that house around that. You're going to build your marketing around that. You're going to. Just kind of, you know, I want to work. So sobriety houses are another one that are kind of in this industry, slightly different license, but a lot of the same stuff. I want to work with people that are going through the process of becoming sober and getting back and reintroduced into the community. So you could do that. You could work with. Independent, which is a lower level of care than we have where you're just kind of providing them with a house, not section eight housing, but kind of low income or lower amount of rent for them to live. And so you can say to yourself, what population am I passionate about and how am I going to help them through that process?
[00:17:47]
You can build it out talking with the state to make sure you get the proper license in place, but it can be really flexible in letting you. Identify which population you want to serve and then building up a house to serve that population, which is really cool. Beyond that, as far as like the structure for what we've done, so we own the business, so the operating entity, and then we own the real estate. And so we own both of those entities, but they are set up in separate LLCs. And so we just have like a simple lease agreement that we set up between the operating entity that pays the real estate entity. At this point, we don't make enough money on it to find any real tax advantages. But if you get into a larger facility, you're going to be able to see some of that. So right now it's just kind of a straight across. This is the best service payment. So we own the real estate and the operational entity and we have a basic lease agreement and the operational entity will pay the real estate entity. Basically our debt service at this point, because the scale of what we do in these homes specifically are small enough that there's not a lot of real estate benefit to put in there.
[00:18:52]
We just don't have enough income for it to make sense, but if you do a larger facility, you're going to see that we will shift over some of those expenses like insurance that go over to the real estate side. That can help benefit the operational entity a little bit, but at the scale that we're at, there's not a lot of tax benefits that we can have. But if you scale up either more homes or larger homes or larger facilities. You're going to start seeing some tax advantages and get into that. Very cool.
[00:19:23] Roger Jacobsen
Where do you see yourself in five years? How many of these facilities do you plan to own and how many is it going to take you to get out of the rat race per se?
[00:19:32] Brandon Gustafson
Yeah. Yeah. So I have a goal to be really like operating in Idaho. And I want to get to 10 facilities in the next three years so we can get some better scaling there. And I think we'd be able to do it. I've had a lot of conversations. The market is kind of cooled on it right now, just because of where we're at in the economy. But I think it will warm up here in the next year or so. 12 to 18 months. And there's going to be a lot of opportunity out there because this is a small business. And the baby boomer generation is not only aging into this population where we're going to serve them. They're also a lot of these. And so they're going to be selling them, which is nice. There's going to be a lot of opportunity to purchase these types of facilities. So we want to scale up, get to 10 in the next three years. And that would get me where I want to be. Um, uh, you know, get out of the rat race kind of a situation and really focus on just running these facilities.
[00:20:32] Anthony Esparza
So you got the general or the generational transfer of real estate coming up and the best way to Kind of grow this business is to scale because having one facility is awesome, right? And you get your feet wet and you learn but it's really kind of break loose You would have to scale it bigger and bigger kind of what it sounds like just one facility. Yeah be enough.
[00:20:54] Brandon Gustafson
Yeah, I think you do and what I would say is if you're down in Arizona and Arizona is kind of getting saturated But Arizona, Texas, Florida You're going to be able to see that you're going to be able to charge higher rates for private pay residents. And with those rates, you can really start to see where you get a lot of income for a house. And you can start generating quite a bit and be in a good spot. If you're up like where we're at in Utah, Idaho, those types of areas, the culture is such that people are, they're just a little more frugal. And so they're not going to pay Six, seven, eight grand for a bed in a facility or in a home, even if it's nice, they're going to be closer to like three, four grand a month is kind of their price range. And so what we found is the way that we operate, we actually do Medicaid and Anthony, you asked this question on kind of how we get the income. Um, so there's. Two ways to do it in assisted living. One is private pay, which is pretty straightforward. You're just set up essentially a lease agreement that says you're going to pay us X amount, and it's going to be based off of the amount of care that we provide you.
[00:21:56]
And so we'll do an intake form and assessment where we say, yeah, you need this much help. Your base rent is 3000. And then for, we use a point system. If you are at this range of points, then it's an extra 800. And if it's this range, then it's 1600, et cetera. And so we just kind of place the rent off of how much care we're asking. That's one way. The other way that we do with a lot of ours is Medicaid. So Medicaid is something that a lot of people are scared of because it's government run program that can be confusing and it can Be and for those that don't know what Medicaid is that it's a federally run program But it's administered at a state level and so the funding comes from the federal government But the state will dictate they go through their their Congress and Senate sessions and they'll say yeah we're gonna do X amount of money and For this type of service that is provided. And so, when we do that, we, our Billing Medicaid, a daily rate, and that, again, is going to be somewhat dependent on the amount of care that we provide to a resident. But, say it's 100 a day, which is reasonable. I've seen them as low as like 50, but I've also seen them as high as like 180. So, 100 a day is pretty, you know, I would say is pretty good.
[00:23:11]
Very reasonable. And so we would do 100 times 30. So that's 3000. And then on top of that, with Medicaid, we get to bill them for what's called rough, the rent utilities and food. And that is based off of their social security income, the state will set a base amount for that. In our states, it's around 800 is slightly less than that, but it's around 800. And so we collect that amount directly from the resident. From their social security income and so they'll pay us. That's that's 3800 right there in this example. And then for some residents, if they have more income or they have more social security, we're able to build them an additional amount. What's just called a share of cost. And so this isn't, doesn't happen with every resident, but we could get a share of costs. It's an extra 100 to 500 that comes in based off of their assessments and working with their case managers. And so we're able to, you know, it gets us up to around 4, 300, 4, 500 a month with those residents. And then the other thing that you can do with Medicaid that can't do as easily with a private pay is you can have multiple residents in a single room and we want to make sure there's privacy and we're not creating a bad environment for them to live in.
[00:24:27]
But we could have two residents in a single room if they're each bringing in 4, 000, 3, 500, that's seven to 9, 000 per room that we're doing in a house. So I've got 10 rooms. And I'm bringing in 7, 000 for each of those rooms. That gets me up to 70, 000. So, there's more complexities that happen with Medicaid, but you can still do it. And because you can have multiple residents in a room, you can be profitable with Medicaid. A lot of people don't like it. Like to do it because there's hoops and things to jump through, but you can actually make it work quite well. It's something that I like to teach people so that they're aware that there's multiple ways to do this and still generate income and generate profit.
[00:25:12] Roger Jacobsen
Awesome. Any other final questions or anything, Anthony? Brandon, let's see. Let's have Anthony jump in and lead us through the final four.
[00:25:20] Brandon Gustafson
Final four.
[00:25:23] Anthony Esparza
I actually have one more question. Can I do one more question? Do you want to do final five?
[00:25:26] Brandon Gustafson
Final five. Let's do final five.
[00:25:30] Anthony Esparza
Okay. I got a good one for that. The final question. So Brandon, tell us what your favorite business book is. Maybe one that helped you learn a lot or. When you'd recommend for our listeners to read.
[00:25:40] Brandon Gustafson
So I mentioned Rich Dad Poor Dad, which had a huge impact on me, but I love books by Benjamin Hardy. And I would say ones by him, I had the most significant impact on what I do. So I love be your future self now and who not how and 10x is Easier than 2x. Those are all just incredible books, anything that he's done with Dan Sullivan, like just awesome books and highly recommend those. And the other one that I do inside, I'm like cheating here because I'm gonna be like five of them is the 12 Week Year by Brian Moran. I run off of that to that process and I love it. It works well with my brain and helps me be efficient with running businesses and getting things done. And so those are all the books that I said, there's more, but we kept it at five there. Nice.
[00:26:22] Anthony Esparza
All right. So just a few.
[00:26:25] Brandon Gustafson
I would say on be your future self. And there's a story where he shares an experience that they had with his daughter and it really hit home for me. I have two daughters and just like have his daughter and he's like, he's writing this book, which is, you got to think about yourself 20, 30, 50 years down the road and what it would be like if you could come back to this moment. And so he does that. He's driving home, drives up the road and sees his daughter playing there. And like he breaks down and he's like, this is so incredible. So even his teenagers fighting and stuff, he's like just relishing in it. So even for just that story, uh, the book is worth it. It's great. Awesome. I really liked that one.
[00:27:01] Anthony Esparza
All right. So question number two, Brandon, what brings you happiness?
[00:27:05] Brandon Gustafson
I would say the thing that brings me the most happiness is just spending time with my family. So I've got two daughters. I've been married for 14 years. And spending time with them is probably what brings me the most happiness. And it really is what drives me to try to build these businesses and help them be successful so I can spend the time. That's what brings me joy.
[00:27:28] Anthony Esparza
Awesome. 14 years of marriage, you said. That's crazy. Congrats on that. Question number three. What will your... Future retirement look like or will you retire?
[00:27:38] Brandon Gustafson
That's an excellent question. I don't know that I could like fully walk away from anything. I feel like I'd get way too bored way too fast. And so for me, what retirement looks like is having sufficient. Passive income coming in that allows me to do what I want to do the flexibility to spend time with my family and to go on trips and things like that, uh, to have that kind of financial and time flexibility is the thing that I think is most important to me and what I've found and what I've realized is that doesn't take a lot, right? It doesn't, it doesn't take to get to that point and you can do it, right? Relatively quickly and then, then you have that freedom and you don't have to have billions of dollars and be Elon Musk and right. And all of that stuff. You can make, you know, 10, 15 grand a month and have enough for a nice house and the flexibility to spend time with your family and go on trips and all that.
[00:28:34] Anthony Esparza
And that's enough. I agree. I think a lot of people, and sorry to tail on your question, but that actually really hits with me. I think a lot of people think you need to make a million dollars a month. Start some huge corporation that looks something like Coca Cola or really if you can figure out how to get your expenses covered and make a little profit on top of that, you know, you can, as long as you're not going to live the crazy yacht Instagram lifestyle, you can get to that financial freedom. That's a good answer. I really like that one. Moving on to question four. What is the best way to give back?
[00:29:03] Brandon Gustafson
Yeah. For me, I love giving back by teaching and mentoring people as an example of how I've done this prior to COVID taught at the University of Utah as an adjunct professor. And I got paid a little bit for it, but like for the amount of time that I put into it, didn't get paid all that much. And I loved going there and teaching people and mentoring people. I volunteered for my grad school program and their mentorship program. To just go in and work with people and help them find jobs and kind of understand the healthcare landscape, something I realized when I was going to grad school is that program that I went to, I loved it, but they really push hospital administration and there's just so many different areas and avenues you can go down in the healthcare industry. And that's something that I really enjoyed coaching people and teaching them that, that you can do this. And so, that's probably the biggest way that I get back is just getting in there, talking with people, developing relationships, networking, seeing how my network can help somebody else out and building those relationships and doing that. And then the other thing that I do that's a really big thing for me is my church. And so, I spend a lot of time serving there and giving back in that area where it's just very much community-based, building relationships and helping people out.
[00:30:15] Anthony Esparza
That's awesome. Very fulfilling. All right, final five. This time it's not final four, but all right, so you own a house, a single family home, and maybe someone's listening to this, and they're interested in doing what you do. Can they take their home and convert that into an assisted living single family residence, and How simple is it? I mean, I know we went over municipalities and calling the city, wherever you might live in zoning and planning to see if it even fits, but I mean, is that something anybody can take? I mean, for me, I bring it up because I'm single, so like, I have a few bedrooms in my home, you know, but is it something I could just convert and be like, all right, I'm going to do a, like a get sober living Home or something like that. Like, is that somewhat simple or is there a lot of research and getting your ducks in a row involved to even make something like that happen?
[00:31:05] Brandon Gustafson
Yeah, so I would say there's definitely a level of you've got to kind of research and figure out what it is and how it's going to work. So the first step is to talk to the municipality and see, you know, can I do it here? What's that going to look like? And then it would be Identifying what type of house, what level of facility you want to level of license you want to have talking with the health department and saying, okay, what does this look like? This is what I want to do. What type of license is that? And then what's the application process like? And so those are the very 1st conversations that you want to have. When you go through that process from there, it will kind of dictate any renovations you might need to do on the house. So in our houses, because we're this kind of like type two facility where we're a residential facility, but we have 10 plus people, we have to have a sprinkler system in our house. And so if you're doing a conversion, that's a large expense and it can be prohibitive, but that's in the states where I operate, not all states have that rule. And if you're doing something smaller, you might not have to do that. Or if you're doing a different type of a facility, you might not have to do that.
[00:32:08]
So questions are the best way to figure that out. The other thing that I would point out is if you're a landlord or you own a house, and you're like, I don't really want to do that. I don't want the headache of running a business out of my house. You could be the landlord of one. I just did a YouTube video on this, actually, because I was talking with somebody in North Carolina that is. She owns a house and she had somebody, an operator approach her and they want to do a facility in the house and do the conversion and everything. And so she's like, you know, she's freaking out. So she called me and we just chatted through that process and what it's going to look like. And so even if you have the house and you're like, I love this idea, but I don't want to run the business. You can find operators that are interested in running it for you out of the house and you could set up some kind of an agreement. You're probably going to be able to charge a little bit higher than you would for a single family to rent the house, set up some kind of agreement. If you have to renovate a restroom, a bathroom or something like that to make it a little more ADA compliant, um, maybe they are paying for that renovation, those types of things.
[00:33:10]
And so there's a lot of different ways to get into this. You don't have to be the person running the business. You can do it different ways. Yesterday, I was talking to somebody in Illinois who he owns three single family homes and we're working on an agreement where I can help him do the conversion on it. And so you can definitely do it. It'll take some time. I would say it's going to save you time to work with somebody that's done the process, but you can figure it out. It's really not that hard. You don't need the healthcare background. I have it, which is great, but you don't need him and you can be successful with figuring this out.
[00:33:41] Anthony Esparza
Cool. Thank you very much. I will thank Pass the mic to Roger and let him kind of close us out here, but I appreciate chatting with you and appreciate all your information.
[00:33:48] Brandon Gustafson
Yeah. Thanks, Anthony. All right.
[00:33:50] Roger Jacobsen
Well, we want to start off by thanking Monument Real Estate for sponsoring us. Monument Real Estate and Finance, helping you take 5 to 10 years off of your retirement goals. Today, we've had Brandon Gustafson on the Retire Wealthy and Happy podcast talking about assisted living. It's been a really great show. Appreciate you, Brandon, and we'll see you all next time.
[00:34:11] Brandon Gustafson
Goodbye. Hope you got value from this episode, and if you have a minute, then take the time to leave an honest written review for the podcast because we take those reviews seriously and it'll help us serve you better on the next episodes. And most importantly, be sure to start taking actions so you can control your financial future today.
[00:34:12] Podcast Outro
Hope you got value from this episode, and if you have a minute, then take the time to leave an honest written review for the podcast because we take those reviews seriously. And it'll help us serve you better on the next episodes. And most importantly, be sure to start taking action so you can control your financial future today.