Episode 79: I Made $135 in 2 Years… Here’s Why I’m Selling Everything

I finally sat down and looked at the real numbers—and they changed everything.

In this episode, I break down the actual profit and loss from my first rental property… and it wasn’t what I expected. After putting nearly $20,000 into the deal, the return over two years was barely over $100.

I also share the numbers behind my second property, which is cash flowing—but still not aligned with the bigger goal.

This isn’t about saying rentals don’t work. This is about understanding what works for YOU and your goals.

For me, it’s about speed, leverage, and putting real pressure on replacing my W-2 income.

So I’m making a shift.

In this episode, I talk about:
– The real profit and loss behind my rentals
– Why cash flow alone isn’t enough for my goals
– The mindset shift away from “door count”
– Why I’m selling and repositioning my capital
– What I’m focusing on next (flips, midterm rentals, and scaling faster)

This is the real side of real estate investing—the part most people don’t show.

If you’re building your portfolio or questioning your strategy, this one’s for you.

🎥 Watch the full video episode on YouTube:
 youtube.com/@therickyricardoshow

📲 Instagram:
 @rickyricardoshow

About the show:
The Ricky Ricardo Show documents the real journey of building financial freedom through leverage, better decision-making, and real-world lessons — in real time.
Real estate is the current vehicle, but the principles apply far beyond it.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

What's up, everybody, and welcome back to the Ricky Ricardo show. It is me, your host, Ricky Ricardo. And today I just want to talk about something that honestly changed everything for me. So I talk about wanting to change the path of investing, trying to get some freedoms, and the rentals that I had in Indiana just weren't cutting it. So I want to go down that road with you guys real quick and actually sit down and look at the numbers, not what I thought I was making, actually what I was making. So you're probably wondering why now? Well, I just got the profit and loss statements and I just finished my taxes. And so this puts everything into perspective. Granted, it's only been um a couple of years, uh maybe just a little bit over, but I want to share the exact numbers with you guys just to let you know my thoughts and why I want to pivot from this. And again, it's not to steer anybody away from cash-flowing rentals. That's not what I'm trying to do at all. I'm just wanting to let you know why I'm even considering moving on to bigger and better things, I guess you could say. And this looks completely different from what we see or what what you guys have seen on social media. On social media, at the time, a while ago, everyone talked about doors. Doors, doors, doors. How many doors do you have? How many homes do you own? You know, people were so excited to share that they were an owner of a hundred doors, as they would say. And come to find out, all they are is a, or, you know, not all they are. I don't talk bad about it, but you know, they're a partner in some large multifamily unit, which consists of a hundred plus doors, for example. And we just got so fixated on that number. And I remember being super excited for having the door count or even seeing a door count. And I'm moving on from that. I don't know if that's a thing now. I think I see on social media a lot of people are talking away from that because it's a different time. The reality today is it's hard to stack up doors. Obviously, the more doors you have, the more money you should be making, but that's not always the case. I was watching a highlight of somebody just recently, an investor talking about how many doors they've had or they had, I think it was 50 plus. And they were actually losing. They were losing a lot of money. It's just what it is. I mean, there's a lot that's going on in the world, a lot that's going on in the market that, you know, is not what this was a few years ago. I mean, a bunch of people made a lot of money prior to COVID. Uh, if you were savvy enough to get involved and actually take action during COVID, like selling some um some of your assets or properties, you actually made a pretty penny. We're not looking at those numbers anymore. That's not realistic. Um, but like I said, I'll go over that with you guys. Profit and loss from my first property that I'm selling, so we should be getting that closed. We had to change the final closing date. So sometime early next month, it should be official. We'll move on from that property. But with the rents that I had, remember it was a turnkey property. I put about $19,000 down to obtain that. In two years with expenses, it was a total of about um $150. I'll round up. Oh, the real number is less than that, but I'll round up, we'll say $150 over two years, and it's gonna determine what I really make, or the sale would determine what I really make at this rate. I'm probably gonna make less than a thousand dollars uh total. So I put basically twenty thousand dollars down in a little over two years. I made a thousand dollars. The first year I made about sixty, eight hundred, seven thousand dollars. Uh, there was a lot of expenses, and then this last year I did have vacancies. Um, I chose not to pursue to rehab the property and put a tenant in place while I was doing the flip, and that's the reason why there was a lot of expenses because the loan payment was about six hundred and fifty dollars, and so that added up really high. So the overall profit and loss of that is about $135. I'll give you the number. There you go. And then we'll see exactly what it is with the sale as it pays off the loan and what the payoff amount is. And I'll share that with you guys. It's it's it's not gonna be much, uh, but that wasn't an exciting property in terms of cash flow, anyways. I wasn't willing to put the $20,000 plus rehab into it to get it to rent ready because the cash flow from there was was wasn't gonna be much more than um a couple hundred dollars a month. Get rid of it, moving on. Someone else can take it and rehab it and and do the best they can with it. The rents are a little bit higher now, so hopefully it's it's uh it's a win um for that person or they're moving into it. I'm not sure exactly the end buyer and what they're doing with the property, but just want to go over that. Numbers in a line though, right? $105. Um, but my second property, I want to let you know, is actually a cla uh cash-flowing asset. It's doing pretty good. It's making me roughly $250 a month. I've had one expense, so it's it's not bad. It's a legit property. Mind you, it cost me about $14,000 to get, but remember, I got about $9,000 back of that. So the property technically, money out of my pocket was only $5,000. And $5,000 has already been covered. I've already got my money back. And now from here on out, we just it would just be positive cash flow. However, it doesn't align with what I'm trying to do. And that's the biggest thing that I learned from all of this is I'm trying to not just sell off assets, but I want to fast track a way to put pressure on the job. The reality is, is it's gonna be really hard to replace my income. I keep getting further and further away from that, and I'm gonna have to be creative. But if I'm going to move the needle in that direction at all and be realistic with myself, because I can't get 80 properties, I'll be honest, I can't, I can't get to that, which you know, it all depends on what your income is. But you know, I I'm not gonna replace my job just buying um long-term rental properties. It's it's just not gonna work. But that is a perfect home. It's a good burr. It cost me five grand making me some money every year, but I'm doing away with it because so let's say based off the comps, I might be able to have turned that into roughly $30. $25,000, $30,000. The cool thing is that would be the case. I'm trying to sell it, I'm not in contract, but based off of the comps, that's the kind of money I'm looking at getting from it. Obviously, we're gonna shop it around, we're gonna try and get in contract with someone and offload the property as fast as possible. It's not a contract yet. I'll share with you guys as soon as we do that. But I want to get that money now versus waiting 10 years to make that money because the goal is to take this money, repurpose it, and tackle a flip. Tackle a bigger cash-flowing property like a midterm rental. There's a lot of argument out there about do Airbnb, does it even work anymore? I've never done an Airbnb. This property that I'm working on right now that we're in rehabbing renovation, whatever you call it, that we're in currently, we're going to try midterm rental first. And then if we can't get money in that, no, we'll hybrid Airbnb it. But on social medias and hearing others, like Airbnb is not what it used to be. At least that's what I'm seeing. I know there are people still making money with it. I'm I imagine you can, but it doesn't matter. I'll look into it more if that's what you know gets in front of me. Right now it's a midterm rental. I want to take advantage of some contract rental agreements to get higher cash flow. So we'll see where that goes. I do want to get another flip, but the properties I've looked at, you know, everyone's holding tight right now. They're not taking these lower offers on these properties that really need some work. And I get it, you know, there's there's a shift in the market right now, and people are scared. People are scared to sell. They're trying to get top dollar because of what if, what, what could happen. But this is good. This is actually good because it resets me. It helps me really fully look into a lens of what I'm trying to do. And a lot of us look at our properties, I'm guilty of it, and just saying what it is. You look at that profit and loss sheet, you're gonna learn everything. You're gonna learn exactly how your property's going, how it's working for you. And does it make does it make sense? And if I can fast track that income 10 plus years, give it to me. Let's go, let's move on. It was a nice market. It got me started. I have a friend that's in the market, a couple of friends that are still in the markets. You know, we just all have different goals. We all, we all have different um ideas of how we're gonna tackle this thing. And, you know, I applaud everybody because we all think different. We all have, like I said, we all have different goals at the end of the day. So I'll repurpose the money. That's the whole goal behind that. Or that's the reason is if I don't repurpose the money right away, then why'd I sell? Because I could just keep that house forever, assuming there's no major maintenance or major repairs. But remind you, I renovated that property to get it up to normal. So there was already a lot of work done to it to bring it up to normal. So I would assume a CapEx wouldn't be too bad because it's already been renovated somewhat. So this is this is where I'm at. Just wanted to let you guys know on those properties. Taxes are done. Finally, deadlines here. Are your taxes done? If not, you got to file an extension, right? Soon. And and good luck to you. If you need a tax person, file your extension, let me know. If you need help with an extension, let me know. I have somebody for you. If you're listening to this and you're not a real estate investor and you just need help with taxes, I have a tax person for you on that as well. So hit me up, DM me. If you know me personally, send me a text message. If you want to ask anything, like I said, in the description of these episodes, it does show uh a way, a hyperlink that you can click and send me a text through that. That's another way to get a hold of me. But just want to share that with you guys. The movement's still happening. I'm trying to move the needle. It's slow right now, and we'll just keep plugging away, attacking this in any direction and see what happens. So thank you for your time. Happy Monday. Enjoy your week. Tax season hopefully is done for the majority of us. Uh, so that's a celebration. And let's talk next time. I will see you guys in the next episode. Take care. Bye bye.