

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>0:00</time>
      <p>
          And keep in mind, guys, I had no money. I had bad credit, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But Carlton Sheets said I could do it, so I just jumped in with both feet and bought that house, just like you said, Ed, a leap of faith. I had people around me that were begging me not to make that choice.
      </p>

      <time>0:20</time>
      <p>
          If you&#39;re within three feet of me, we&#39;re probably talking about real estate, much to my family&#39;s chagrin. But here&#39;s the thing, most people see 7% rates and freeze. I see opportunity. They&#39;re waiting for the perfect deal, and well, I&#39;ve analyzed thousands of them, and perfect just doesn&#39;t exist. So I talk to operators across every asset class, flippers, multifamily syndicators, note investors, and whatever else is working. No sales pitches allowed, just real lessons from people actually doing it. I&#39;m Ed Mathews, and this is Real Estate Underground.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>0:59</time>
      <p>
          Greetings and salutations real estate undergrounders. It is Ed Mathews with the Real Estate Underground. As I&#39;ve told people in the past, and I am really not that I am pretty pretty out there with this I don&#39;t drink, I don&#39;t do drugs. Ed- so I need a vice, and my vice is flipping. I absolutely love it. I love everything about it. I love f- the chase. I love helping people. I love fixing them and I certainly love selling them. So with that we we&#39;re able to f- to through Robbie&#39;s son, McKenna, who was instrumental in helping us make this happen, so thank you McKenna, wherever you are. Robbie Crager from the Flip Flop Flipper. I&#39;ve been I&#39;ve been watching you on YouTube for a very long time, sir, and I&#39;m really excited to have you on the show, so welcome.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>1:44</time>
      <p>
          Oh thank you, Ed. That- that&#39;s it&#39;s always nice to hear that some of this content gets out there and that people connect with it and enjoy it. So- Yeah it&#39;s my pleasure to be here. Thanks very much.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>1:54</time>
      <p>
          W- without a doubt. Yeah, it&#39;s always funny when I s- when I hear people and they say, &quot;Oh, I listen to the show,&quot; or, &quot;I saw you on this social platform.&quot; I&#39;m like, &quot;Oh, you and my mom. Okay, cool. All right. Tha- those-&quot; two people. You- you&#39;re the one. All right, that&#39;s cool.&quot; Robbie, for th- for those folks who haven&#39;t discovered you on YouTube and elsewhere, I want you to tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>2:14</time>
      <p>
          Awesome. Yeah. Tha- thanks again for the chance to sit down and talk with you. I- I&#39;m what you just said. I also don&#39;t drink and don&#39;t do drugs. I&#39;m a bit of a deal junkie, and I&#39;ve been at this for going on 28 years. Thousands of houses that I&#39;ve bought and sold. So over the years, we&#39;ve mainly gone to actual foreclosure sales in Florida, and then about eight years ago we moved to the island of Puerto Rico and started investing there. I am what you described as a flipper. I like to take the, we call them zombie houses here on the island of Puerto Rico, something that&#39;s not being lived in, that has nothing but upside, needs to be revisioned and reimagined up to its highest and best use. And then probably the thing that I get the most joy out of is taking that house that we renovate and then selling it, and at the closing when I hand the keys off to someone who takes a house I renovated and gets to call it home, for me, that&#39;s a good day. So that&#39;s a little bit of who I am. And then we&#39;ve we have started telling the story of the deals we&#39;re in on YouTube about four or so years ago. So that I&#39;m pretty passionate about as well, Ed, about inviting people to see that there are opportunities out there that- Maybe they weren&#39;t thinking about. And you don&#39;t have to stay in these broken systems where you get a job, pay taxes, and die. I think there&#39;s a better life, and real estate for me has been what&#39;s provided it.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>3:42</time>
      <p>
          Couldn&#39;t agree more. Yeah, it was... i, like you, I spent a pretty sizable chunk of my professional career and life working for somebody else, making somebody else a whole lot of money. And got to the point where I realized real estate was my access to time freedom, right? Which meant that I got to spend time with my kids and my wife and my dogs and, doing things that I actually wanted to do, not things that I had to do, right?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>4:07</time>
      <p>
          Yep.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>4:08</time>
      <p>
          So one of the things that I&#39;m curious about is, you quit your job at 25. You had two little kids at home. And, you bought a flip on basically on a leap of faith. So tell me about that.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>4:21</time>
      <p>
          That, that&#39;s probably the best deal I ever did was the first deal that I ever did, and nothing about it went well. Ah I was in a position where I had a corporate job, and I was losing that job and saw this guy, Carlton Sheets, on the inter- internet. Not the internet back then. There wasn&#39;t an internet. It was- House late night television.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>4:41</time>
      <p>
          Me too.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>4:42</time>
      <p>
          And he told me o- over a series of testimonials that I could buy a house with no money down, and I was young enough and dumb enough to believe him. And again, the handwriting was on the wall that the job was gonna go away. Not that I was a really bad employee, but I was fighting with my boss, so I needed a change. And I went into this thing back then, it was called the newspaper, and found a wholesaler who had a house for sale, and I ended up contracting that house. And keep in mind, guys, I had no money. I had bad credit, and I had absolutely no idea what I was doing. But Carlton Sheets said I could do it, so I just jumped in with both feet and bought that house, just like you said, Ed, a leap of faith. I had people around me that were begging me not to make that choice. And probably for different reasons than they thought. It, maybe it wasn&#39;t the best choice, but I still say that&#39;s the best deal I- one of the best deals I ever did because that led to this life that we&#39;re, we&#39;re a few thousand... We&#39;ve done it a few thousand times now, and I would&#39;ve never gotten there if I didn&#39;t make some mistakes early on that first deal that we bought- sure from watching- Yeah, you&#39;ve done what? Carlton Sheets at 2:00 in the morning.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>5:52</time>
      <p>
          It&#39;s so funny you mention him. It, it&#39;s, so we had the two systems that I bought back, oh my gosh, m- early 2000s was the Carlton Sheets system and the Ron LeGrand gold something system, right? And we had Ron- Yep on the show g- a few years ago, and what a treat that was. I&#39;m not sure Carlton&#39;s still with us in all candor. But he he was, Carlton and, Carlton was the first system I ever bought, and it came to me on probably a dozen cassette tapes. For those those kids out there that don&#39;t know what a cassette tape was, that was what we had before CDs. Which was before DVD- Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>6:32</time>
      <p>
          Right after the eight tracks, eight, eight tracks. Then we went to the- right. Yeah
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>6:35</time>
      <p>
          the
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>6:36</time>
      <p>
          cassette tapes. Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>6:37</time>
      <p>
          That was the, that was state-of-the-art back in the day. Yeah, it&#39;s interesting. And y- what they espoused to a certain extent i- is possible, right? And you, you&#39;re living proof of it, so am I. You&#39;ve done 3,000-plus flips here in the States, and probably a couple of hundred more on the island in Puerto Rico. At that scale, what do your operational systems look like?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>7:02</time>
      <p>
          You... So the entire time, Ed, we have run a fairly lean business. I&#39;ve, throughout the years I&#39;ve had different partnerships. But generally it would be me and a partner, and then some staff that-
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>7:15</time>
      <p>
          Okay
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>7:16</time>
      <p>
          we&#39;re talking about very much, we&#39;re in it in, on the day-to-day, making the decisions. And it&#39;s not ever been a really big team. A lot of what we&#39;ve done, we&#39;re able to do a large volume at this point because we invite one-off partnerships with people. Okay. But early on just myself and a business partner in a small office, spreadsheets galore, making tons of offers, making lots of mistakes. And and building systems that, that eventually led to something that we were able to repeat and do fairly regularly, to the point where for 20 years we were buying a couple of houses a week.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>7:54</time>
      <p>
          Wow, okay. Yeah, you&#39;d have to at 3,000, 3,200-plus,
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>7:59</time>
      <p>
          Yeah
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>7:59</time>
      <p>
          flips, right? Yep a- and so h- how does... obviously the world is rapidly changing with technology. I&#39;m a former and now current again technologist and I look at technology as a force multiplier, right? Much you have a process, you have the systems that manage that process, and then enabling technology that hope- hopefully allows you to scale, right? And it sounds like you have figured that out. So kinda walk me through, how does, how do you use technology within your business? We don&#39;t have to get into the bits and bytes, I&#39;m not asking you to do that. But I&#39;m curious about, your vision in terms of what do you automate versus what&#39;s just fine on a spreadsheet versus, looking at things and saying, &quot;Hey, McKenna,&quot; your son can AI do this for us going forward?&quot; Yeah. Do you get there?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>8:47</time>
      <p>
          Y- yeah, so we&#39;re using AI every day now. And my goodness what a, a benefit those people that are starting out have versus when I was starting back in 1996, &#39;97.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>9:00</time>
      <p>
          Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>9:01</time>
      <p>
          We had actually physical files on everything. We had whiteboards where we would track everything we were doing and physical maps that we would put pins in for the different properties. Now, all of that stuff is done through technology. We love GoHighLevel. I don&#39;t know if you&#39;ve- Yeah ever used them, but they&#39;re a really good source for keeping us keep- keeping us organized and to be able to track things. McKenna and my business partner, Adan, are both super deep dived into Claude AI and implementing AI technology to really help us to do things that f- for years and years we would spend dozens and dozens of man hours, every week on tracking offers and closings and contractors and all of that stuff. And now AI is picking up the ball and doing a ton of that stuff. And it changes so rapidly. And I&#39;m not a tech guy, so I&#39;m not a programmer or a tech guy. I- Pretty much sat out the internet when it first started off. But when I learned about this AI stuff, even at my age here, I was like, &quot;I&#39;m not gonna sit this out. This is going to be life-changing technology, and for those people that decide to not learn it, they&#39;re going to be at a disadvantage.&quot; So we&#39;ve really gone all in. I say we, and I don&#39;t really mean me, I mean we, my team, because I keep a cellphone. I don&#39;t even have a laptop at this point, Ed. I rely on my small team to, to keep things on track and AI.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>10:32</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. So I had a, I had an old boss back in the &#39;90s mid &#39;90s, that said... I was thinking about buying a BlackBerry. And for those folks that out there that don&#39;t know what those are, those were what we had before Steve Jobs invented the iPhone. And he looked me straight in the eye and he said, &quot;Don&#39;t do it, man. It&#39;ll ruin your life.&quot; And and, to a certain extent, he was right, &#39;cause people like me and you have been tethered to these phones for, the last 25-plus, 30 years. I&#39;m interested in the differences that you see in the markets. Obviously you&#39;ve been super active in Florida and here in the States and then, of late, more in Puerto Rico. I remember you talking about something about the difference in returns. And so I&#39;d like you to walk us through w- what that difference is and why there&#39;s, what are you seeing in the market that&#39;s so different, in the islands versus here in the States?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>11:23</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, no, that... So that&#39;s awesome. A- around 2015 or &#39;16, my business started to tighten up. Things started to go online, where we used to be physically at a foreclosure sale, every day of the week. And we had, we were part of the good old boy network there. We had a lot of control over that room. It went online and it opened it up to a lot of people. You could be in Connecticut and bidding on a foreclosure house in Orlando, Florida. And so what happened is profit margins got squeezed. My ability to deploy capital got squeezed. And- I started looking for other markets and I was pretty keen on a few markets. I was either Indianapolis, Indiana, Chicago, Illinois, or Puerto Rico. And then Puerto Rico had Hurricane Maria happen, and that absolutely was the deciding factor for us, is we&#39;re from Florida, had at that point been through a half a dozen hurricane cycles. And I had this idea that by m- moving to this new market where they had just had this terrible storm called Hurricane Maria, my money would go further, and there would be lots of deals, and my profit margins would expand. And so that, that was why we made the move. And now when we&#39;re looking at new markets, we have added a third question. What... It used to be will our money go further and will our returns be bigger? And now as of... I&#39;m at eight years into this and we&#39;re looking at other markets, the third and the most important question has become will our investment in whatever new market is have an impact that we can be proud of? And so that... those are the three questions that we kinda answered when we came to the island. And as we&#39;re gonna go other places in the world, those are the three questions that we ask each and every time. Will our money go further? Can we make a bigger return? And will our impact be greater because we show up somewhere? So we always wanna leave wherever we are better than how we found it. And yeah, that... I hope that answered that question.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>13:20</time>
      <p>
          It does, and I&#39;m interested in the third criteria. And so when you&#39;re looking at it from an impact perspective what are some of the things that you&#39;re, what are some of the things you&#39;re looking to impact?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>13:32</time>
      <p>
          It, there&#39;s a couple of ways I could answer that. But I&#39;ll tell you, moving to the island of Puerto Rico our idea of impact was there&#39;s a housing shortage, and can we be a part of, h- of fixing that to some extent, right? Obviously, I told you we&#39;re a small business, and so I think we&#39;ve done a couple of hundred flips. But literally taking homes that have been sitting abandoned for maybe a decade, could not possibly be lived in. Not even homeless people are living in these homes. There are no doors and windows, power doesn&#39;t come on, the water doesn&#39;t come on. So when we buy these zombie homes and then renovate them back up to the level at which where somebody could come in and get an FHA loan, w- we&#39;re feeding that market of first-time home buyers. And we&#39;re hopefully hoping to solve, at least on those individual cases, part of the housing crisis. And so that impact has been huge. Employing people has been huge, and that, that&#39;s what kind of floats my boat, if you will. I... And I will tell one other way that impact is huge. I s- I have started to tell this story. You guys recently there was a war that started in Ukraine, and maybe you all remember the Stand With R- Ukraine the little Ukraine blue ribbon flag things. Sure. Myself and Adan who&#39;s my business partner here, we went to Ukraine on a humanitarian trip. And be- because we were there we were feeding people, and we were bringing money and food and stuff, and we ended up in an orphanage. We ended up meeting three orphans who had become orphans in the war, and this is back in 2022, right at the start of the war. And I was very fortunate that God put me in that place where I was able to help a pastor adopt those three boys out of that orphanage, where if they didn&#39;t get adopted out within months of me being there, they would&#39;ve been kept in a Ukrainian permanent state type of thing until they were 18. It was a pretty bleak situation. And because we were real estate investors, and I happened to meet these kids and this pastor, I was very fortunate to Help him to buy a house that was big enough that he was then able to adopt these three kids out of this orphanage. And so I stay in touch with that family. But for me, whenever I&#39;m having a bad day, that kind of impact is what I look at and go, &quot;Hey, if I never did anything else that was good on this earth, I helped those three kids.&quot; So that is the sort of impact that I&#39;d like to do more of. And you don&#39;t get to have those opportunities very often. But God has put me in different places at different times. And at this point I&#39;m looking for those type of impacts. So I&#39;ll never make any money on that home. Those kids don&#39;t know who I am. I get a Christmas card from them every year. I get to see pictures. And it&#39;s just That, that type of impact we can have, Ed, because God has allowed us to be fortunate in life.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>16:33</time>
      <p>
          Right.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>16:33</time>
      <p>
          And I wanna do more of it.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>16:35</time>
      <p>
          That&#39;s phenomenal. How are they doing now? Yeah what&#39;s the latest on them?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>16:39</time>
      <p>
          They&#39;re It&#39;s So this story is so incredible. So they are doing phenomenally well despite a war that&#39;s going on. The family now has two adopted girls, those three boys that I told you about, and a fourth boy. So they&#39;re a family of six. And the pastor uses the house to minister to all of the orphans. And you can imagine the orphanage has exploded. We have been getting reports that there are 70 orphans that are regularly being ministered to and fed from this pastor and his wife at the house that we bought. And it&#39;s not anything special. I it&#39;s just a little red brick house. Nothing at all special. But the amount of good that is happening from that re- You can see it puts a smile on my face. Nice. And, and- I can see that I j- I just love to follow the story. So I say every house has a story. That one&#39;s pretty good.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>17:34</time>
      <p>
          Probably one of your best ones. And,
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>17:36</time>
      <p>
          That one&#39;s pretty good.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>17:37</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. Congratulations and thank you. So I&#39;m curious, where, rough order, is that house here in the States? Is it in Ukraine? Where&#39;s it located?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>17:44</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. So that house is in Ukraine right near the border of Belarus and Ukraine. And and hopefully one day soon this war will end, and we&#39;ll get to go back and visit them.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>17:55</time>
      <p>
          Wonderful. What a wonderful story. Congratulations. And again, thank you for doing that. It&#39;s amazing the opportunities that get presented when, it&#39;s the old Zig Ziglar thing, right? If you help enough people get where they wanna go along the way you get to ha- you get to go where you wanna go as well, right? And in this case, you did it in reverse. But nevertheless, it&#39;s just as valuable.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>18:16</time>
      <p>
          Yep.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>18:17</time>
      <p>
          So let&#39;s, since we&#39;re on the subject of family, let&#39;s talk about your son, McKenna. So in, in in bringing him on board, I&#39;m always curious about, I&#39;ve been trying to talk at least my oldest into coming and joining the company here. She was a criminal justice major. She just graduated from school and wants no part of this business. She wants to go, into law enforcement and help people that way. But and I admire her for that, and But, I&#39;m curious about how you manage the dynamic of dad and son versus Robbie and McKenna, &#39;cause I know- from personal experience they&#39;re two different things, right? There&#39;s the professional version, and then there&#39;s, son and dad at home. How do you manage that dynamic in the office?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>19:02</time>
      <p>
          So we work very closely together. I&#39;d say we talk every day at this point. Right after McKenna graduated from FSU, the university he actually moved to Puerto Rico and worked with us for a short period of time. Then COVID happened, and he moved home. And he really wanted to go out on his own and be his own man, so he did that. He had a few years where he was off being a wholesaler, and he did a very large volume of that working with, in Orlando, Florida, one of the largest wholesalers in the area. He got a lot of really good experience. And then I think it gave him the confidence to come back and not feel like he was just getting a handout from his dad. And so he he is an amazing kid, and he saw that I was doing this YouTube thing, this Flip Lop Flipper YouTube thing, and we really had gone a few years and maybe a thousand videos and had no monetization side to it. And he said, &quot;Hey, I think I could help you to monetize that.&quot; And so that&#39;s the business that he and I work on a day-to-day basis together with. And now we own real estate together and stuff as well. That&#39;s awesome. So a- and part of his story in becoming his own man, he, he left Puerto Rico. He met his now wife and, they&#39;re hopefully soon gonna have their own family. And so it&#39;s just, it&#39;s something that I&#39;m overjoyed to, to get to witness and get to be a part of. I&#39;m really happy to work with him. And yeah, it&#39;s just it&#39;s been something where you have these kids. I have another... I have a daughter who she also, she graduated graduated in anthropology, and she&#39;s an artist. And she wants nothing to do with real estate. But she&#39;s probably the smartest one in the family. She&#39;s super talented, and she&#39;s got her own skill set and her own way that she&#39;s getting through this world. But real estate hasn&#39;t yet been on her radar. So I&#39;m very glad that McKenna does wanna be a part of it because I know not everybody gets that, right? As a dad you want to hand, I want to hand off what we&#39;ve built- and have him or her be able to take it and run with it and not just die at the end of my life, and then they sell everything that I built. So- I&#39;m very glad that&#39;s very likely not gonna be the outcome.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>21:18</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, so s- so i- it&#39;s funny you say it the way you say it because I, there&#39;s an envelope in my desk here, and it&#39;s also in my attorney&#39;s office that says, &quot;Upon my death, sell everything.&quot; Immediately, right?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>21:31</time>
      <p>
          Yeah.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>21:31</time>
      <p>
          And, a whole lot of reasons why I do that, but it doesn&#39;t matter here. I&#39;m curious about the dynamic between you and your son when you look at deals. Ever had a deal you didn&#39;t agree on, and what&#39;d you do?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>21:45</time>
      <p>
          Y- we&#39;ve had lots of deals we don&#39;t agree on, and usually it will be him not agreeing with me, and then I buy it anyway.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>21:54</time>
      <p>
          That&#39;s good to be the king.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>21:54</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. That&#39;s I... Yeah and then sometimes he will be right. But I think because he has his own properties and he does his own thing it&#39;s only recently that we&#39;ve started to buy things together. Like I told you about the Connecticut building. Yeah. We own that one together. So that&#39;s that, that&#39;s pretty cool that we now are really... We have a couple of businesses going on together. So he&#39;s got his rental portfolio. I&#39;ve got a few of my own, and now we&#39;ve started to do some flips together and do... and we do own that apartment building in Meriden.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>22:28</time>
      <p>
          Excellent.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>22:28</time>
      <p>
          I think right now, if we&#39;re looking at a flip together and one of us doesn&#39;t agree, we have the benefit and the pleasure of missing out, and we can say no to things. So I think if it&#39;s not just a slam dunk at this point that we both are going, &quot;Hell yeah, let&#39;s do it&quot;- then we&#39;ll just say no and not do it.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>22:46</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. Sometimes the deal you don&#39;t do is the better deal, right?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>22:50</time>
      <p>
          A a lot of times. I have a friend who said that he, you, you have the fear of missing out that most people suffer from. And I heard my friend Dave Steck say, &quot;I have the joy of missing out,&quot; and I&#39;ve stolen that because I see it that way as well. I look at so many deals come across my desk, and I say no to most of them. And I don&#39;t feel bad about it at all because the ones that we say yes to at this point, we just know are like a slam dunk,
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>23:15</time>
      <p>
          yeah and, h- here in Connecticut, where I&#39;m based, and I know you know this market a little bit still a whole lot of dumb money on the street. A wh- whole lot of money doing dumb stuff. Not dumb people, but yeah, people- Yeah and I think it&#39;s, I think it&#39;s fear of missing out. I think it&#39;s, I&#39;ve missed so many opportunities. I&#39;m not missing this one. I&#39;m going to figure out a way to make this work.&quot; And that&#39;s where you typically go, &quot;Okay, good luck.&quot; And- three, six, 12 months down the road you bump into them at a coffee shop and go, &quot;How&#39;d that work out?&quot; And, you&#39;re hoping that it worked out, but in a lot of cases, nah, not so much. So I&#39;m curious about... I&#39;m also curious about how your brain works. And really I&#39;m interested in obviously you&#39;ve built a tremendous business, and you get up every Monday morning, and the, the bills are paid, right? Mortgages are taken care of. College tuitions are handled. Car payments are taken care of. And nevertheless, you go to work. I look at that as purpose. And so I&#39;m curious from your perspective, what is that in your life? What&#39;s purpose? What gets you out of bed on Monday?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>24:18</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, there, there&#39;s a few things. I think the main driver at this point is it&#39;s, its purpose. It&#39;s legacy maybe, if you will. The idea... Two things. One, any chance I get to buy something that&#39;s severely distressed and renovate it, that&#39;s... I&#39;m not very artistic. I can&#39;t sing, I don&#39;t play any musical instruments, but I can look at a pile of rubble and see a beautiful home there, and I have a skillset of being able to put the pieces together to get that done, and I really enjoy that process. So that gets me out of bed. I absolutely have always loved then turning the keys over to someone and letting them raise their family there and call it home. So that, that further gives me th- that further is one of the reasons why I just... I literally do jump out of bed. I wake up early and I leap out of bed. And the last part of it right now and I think this will be the driver for the rest of my life, will be handing back to the younger generation, or even to people that are my age that haven&#39;t done it yet to show them that there&#39;s a skillset out there that can change their life. And so we&#39;ve gone about building communities where there are partnerships that are being had and there&#39;s impact in the investments that those communities are making. Whe- whether that&#39;s in Connecticut or Florida or Texas or Puerto Rico, or i- if we go to Argentina next month. It, it doesn&#39;t really matter where we are we&#39;ve built a blueprint now where we think we can invite a community to come alongside of us and through partnerships do a lot of good and have everybody have what you talked about earlier freedom I would call it financial freedom for sure. Travel freedom is another big one. And then the freedom to, to have that impact and invest with impact.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>26:11</time>
      <p>
          Excellent, yeah. And you mentioned communities. One of the things that I wanted to shine a light on was your free school community.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>26:19</time>
      <p>
          Oh, yeah. Th- that&#39;s the main, that&#39;s probably our biggest community that we interact with on a regular basis, and then it does funnel down, like if people want to do more with us, there&#39;s opportunities for that. But a- anybody who&#39;s watching that, if you wanna come inside of our free community, there&#39;s a link there, and you can- Yeah you can come and join us and network with us, and maybe we can do a deal together.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>26:40</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. I&#39;ll I&#39;ll make sure that the link is in- Got it is in the show notes so that everybody can can access that. Y- one of the things that I firmly believe, and I think I learned this in my corporate life although I still am prone to mistakes. Nevertheless, you can ask my wife about that. The the I fundamentally believe we learn way more from the mistakes we make than from the successes we have. So I&#39;m curious about a professional mistake or d- decision that you&#39;ve made along the way that you look back on and go, &quot;Man, I&#39;d love to have that back.&quot; And what&#39;d you do about it? How&#39;d you manage through it?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>27:14</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, that, there, there&#39;s one that just jumps to the top and like you said, there&#39;s lots. We, we, we learn by having mistakes, and we call them lessons. But- the one thing I would tell myself if I could go back to 1996 I would say, &quot;Listen, as fast as you can, keep some real estate.&quot; And I didn&#39;t do it. I think I did a thousand flips before 2007, and had a really good life because of it. But I wasn&#39;t really building anything that was gonna be long-lasting. There was no wealth. And then if you remember along that timeline, 2007, 2008, the world went upside down, and we didn&#39;t have anything to fall back on. So it was a massive mistake that I made. Had I just kept a few properties a year in those early years, and it wouldn&#39;t have been difficult. It wouldn&#39;t have probably changed my life at all. It just wasn&#39;t the way that I was focusing. I was just buy it and sell it as fast as I could. And so w- we lost it all when the times got tough, because we didn&#39;t have any income to fall back on. And at the time, we were a debt-driven business, so everything I did, I borrowed hard money. I really have never dealt much with the banks, but I borrowed hard money. And the shift that I made, the way we recovered, one, thank the Lord I went broke like a year and a half before the rest of the world. So I was back at it by the time the rest of the world started to go broke. But we started partnering with people who had money instead of borrowing money, and that, that was a major catapult for us to have success. We started keeping a lot of stuff at that time. We were partnering with people who had money, and we were investing for cash flow rather than for chunks of money by doing flips. And those two decisions allowed us to get all of our net worth back and add a zero. So that was-
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>29:11</time>
      <p>
          Awesome
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>29:11</time>
      <p>
          That that&#39;s what jumps to mind. I really wish I could shake that young man and say, &quot;Hey, don&#39;t just sell everything you&#39;ve got. You need to keep some of this stuff so that you&#39;re building wealth.&quot;
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>29:21</time>
      <p>
          Yeah, right on. I agree. I tell people I, I regret every building I ever sold even if it was for a good reason.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>29:27</time>
      <p>
          I don&#39;t really ever regret the ones that I keep, Ed, right?
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>29:30</time>
      <p>
          So that&#39;s No, exactly. My point exactly, right? In fact, I have this unofficial policy where I will go out of my way not to drive by a property that I once owned just because I don&#39;t even wanna think about it. Denial is a, keeps me from going cuckoo, so I&#39;m curious about how you take in information. What&#39;s a, what&#39;s an auth- what&#39;s the author of the book you&#39;re currently reading right now?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>29:52</time>
      <p>
          So I&#39;m rereading and actually in- inside of our free community we&#39;ve got a book club that we are studying Think and Grow Rich. So that&#39;s my second favorite book of all time. I- I&#39;m always reading the Bible, and I&#39;ve read front to back Think and Grow Rich this is at least the fourth or fifth time. And there are a few other authors that I really like. I like Outliers. I just reread Outliers, which is Malcolm Gladwell book. I read a lot of books, and I say I read them. I like to get the books on tape, and when I&#39;m driving around I let the author read their book to me. And there&#39;s a lot of them. I&#39;m always reading something. Right now the one is Think and Grow Rich, though.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>30:35</time>
      <p>
          Excellent. And then the- finally, I&#39;m curious about how you define success in your life.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>30:44</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. And th- and that&#39;s changed over the years, right? So o- obviously when I was young I liked to have boats and fast cars and front row seats at the Magic games. And after going through the time where we went broke, none of that stuff, turns out, was important at all. And how I really define sas- success at this point is the impact that we can have, whether that&#39;s helping some orphans in Ukraine or showing someone who&#39;s never done it before that they can break outside of a broken system, that they could become something that they maybe never were told. Maybe their parents didn&#39;t say that they could become an entrepreneur, but we have a lot of joy, or I get a lot of joy out of showing people how they can do it. So that&#39;s that&#39;s where I plan to focus for forever. I say this. Over the years I&#39;ve helped thousands of people buy a house and become a homeowner. Over the next several years, I hope to help thousands of people actually become entrepreneurs and real estate investors.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>31:45</time>
      <p>
          That&#39;s awesome. So when you&#39;re not talking about real estate, what do you like to do for fun?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>31:50</time>
      <p>
          I like to travel. And you&#39;re not gonna believe this, but when I travel, I always look at the real estate. But I, but we travel quite a bit as a family. And we just went on a trip. We got to go to the Olympics this year. My daughter, a- around Christmastime, she&#39;s a hockey fan, and she said, &quot;Hey, Dad, you wanna go to a hockey game?&quot; And I said, &quot;Yeah.&quot; And we were having a little family office meeting, and we were talking about taking a trip. She says, &quot;Great. The US is playing at the Olympics in Milan, and here are the dates.&quot; And so we ended up taking a big family trip like we used to do when the kids were younger. And, n- now my kids are around 30, and we all got to go and go to the Olympics. And so that was a big joy. I like to do that. And we&#39;re planning lots of other trips now as a family. That&#39;s gonna be probably something that we&#39;ll do ongoing together as well.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>32:39</time>
      <p>
          Awesome.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>32:40</time>
      <p>
          So- Yeah. We&#39;ll play them we used to do it Yep. We used to do it when we were young, and then we got away from it for a while, and now we&#39;re back at it.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>32:47</time>
      <p>
          Excellent. So Robbie, if people wanna learn more about you or what you&#39;re doing what&#39;s the best way to do that?
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>32:53</time>
      <p>
          The easiest thing to do is to join our free community on school, the FlipFlop Flipper community. I think you&#39;ve got a way to share that in this video. Yep, sure do. And you can always check out our YouTube channel. Love... We&#39;d love to get some more subscribers, but really the best way to get ahold of me is through that free community. You can send me a DM once you&#39;re in there and we can set up a strategy call. You can tell, guys, I like to talk about this stuff. Th- this a... it&#39;s a joy for me. So I&#39;d love anybody that&#39;s seeing this, if you let me know that you saw it and then, and now you&#39;re in our free community, that, that would really put a smile on my face.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>33:26</time>
      <p>
          Awesome. We&#39;ll definitely have the show li- the school link in the show notes so that folks can find you easily. Robbie, thank you so much for your time today. I&#39;m really grateful. I apologize we went a couple of minutes long, but I was actually having a lot of fun and I really enjoyed learning more about you and getting to know you a little bit, so thank you.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>33:44</time>
      <p>
          Yeah. Thank you, Ed. Thank you for having me on and I&#39;d love to extend the offer for us to do this again, and maybe I interview you next time and we&#39;ll put you out on the FlipFlop Flipper YouTube channel.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>33:55</time>
      <p>
          It&#39;s a date. I&#39;ll be there. Tell me when.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>33:57</time>
      <p>
          Awesome. We&#39;ll set it up. Thanks very much.
      </p>

        <cite>Ed Mathews</cite>
      <time>33:59</time>
      <p>
          Right on.
      </p>

        <cite>Robbie Crager</cite>
      <time>34:00</time>
      <p>
          God bless.
      </p>