133. Moving Overseas and Extreme Long Distance Real Estate with Becca Hintergardt

Mike Cavaggioni: 0:00

Hey, welcome back to the Average Joe Finances podcast, everybody. I'm your host, Mike Cavaggioni, and today's special guest is Becca Hint. I'm super excited to talk to her today. We were talking a little bit off camera about where she lives in Costa Rica, comparing the paradises that we both live in. She's in Costa Rica, I'm in Hawaii. It's pretty cool to talk to somebody that has palm trees around them at all times like I do as well. Still way different time zones. So I appreciate you taking the time but welcome to the show.

Becca Hint: 0:28

Oh, thank you Mike. It's a pleasure to be on the show. I wish we should both have our real backgrounds of palm trees in the beach.

Mike Cavaggioni: 0:35

Yeah. Absolutely. But here I am in my closet, in my house. This is my studio.

Becca Hint: 0:40

I do podcasts outside and then the hell of monkeys start howling and people think I'm groaning at them and a couple times back I got hit by a beetle in the side of the head. So I've decided to keep it indoors, but pleasure to see you, my friend, and thanks so much for having me

Mike Cavaggioni: 0:53

Yeah, absolutely.

Becca Hint: 0:54

I look forward to our conversation.

Mike Cavaggioni: 0:56

I am as well. Speaking of our conversation, I'd like to ask you the first question, which is the same question I ask everybody that comes on the show. And we wanna know about you, so if you could share with us your story. Who is Becca Hint?

Becca Hint: 1:09

Oh, you bet. My husband and I were medical device reps and we lived in the San Francisco Bay area. And when I started my career in med device, I simultaneously bought a duplex in San Francisco that I house hacked. And this was an enlightenment into real estate in the beauty of passive income. And I realized that whether I go to work or not, that mailbox money still keeps coming in. So my journey into real estate began about 18 years ago while straddling my med device job and currently you find me in Nosara Costa Rica, which is a boutique surf and yoga hub on the Pacific side in Costa Rica. This is one of the blue zones of the world. You being in Hawaii might know about this. Are you familiar with Blue Zones?

Mike Cavaggioni: 1:58

I am, yes. So I see them actually. They have people that walk around with the Blue Zone shirts on all the time. I see them in my neighborhood. They just walk around and they are much older people.

Becca Hint: 2:07

Really? Impressive. Yeah. For your listeners that don't know about this, there's books on it, movies on it, cookbooks on it and it's essentially places in the world where there's the largest concentration of centenarians, people that live to a hundred years old and beyond in very good health. And part of that, A huge part of it is their lifestyle, food and other factors. And you Google it and, you'll see what I'm talking about. But where we are in Guanacaste Province of Costa Rica, this is a blue zone of the world. We've been here several times and I've been trying to teach my kids Spanish since they were quite young. So we frequented Costa Rica and it came about the pandemic that things just became a little crunched in the Bay Area. And I said to my husband one day, Hey, have you thought about how much we can get for rent for this house right over the Golden Gate Bridge when people are dying to get out of the city and how much we can go live in the tropics for and work off that arbitrage, that delta of the income. And so the quest began, it took us about six months, but we moved here to Costa Rica about a year.

Mike Cavaggioni: 3:09

So when you moved to Costa Rica, did you still just have that one duplex or were you doing other things as well?

Becca Hint: 3:16

No, other things. Other things.

Mike Cavaggioni: 3:18

Okay. Okay. I just, I, yeah, I just wanna make sure, because I know you invest in multifamily, right? So I wanted to get into that a little bit, but I wasn't sure if you moved to Costa Rica first, then started investing in multifamily. Cuz then I was gonna say, wow, not only did you move to another country and then you started investing in multifamily. That's crazy.

Becca Hint: 3:33

Oh. No.

Mike Cavaggioni: 3:33

Cool, cool.

Becca Hint: 3:34

So this has been a bunch of things stitched together over the years. Several investments, but we just rounded it all up and hit the road for the tropics.

Mike Cavaggioni: 3:42

Okay. Awesome. Yeah. So it all started with a duplex in San Francisco that you house hacked, what was the next steps? What made you go from doing the house hacking thing to looking at other aspects of real estate, mainly multifamily?

Becca Hint: 3:55

From the house hack, I was addicted to the passive income and mailbox money. And anybody who hasn't house hacked or is a young person that has the opportunity to do this, I would highly encourage it. In the case of, just to give you an example of how this works in San Francisco, it's a duplex. So I lived in the upper unit, renovated the lower unit, then flip flopped and lived in the other unit, renovated that, lifted up this 19 hundreds Victorian, put steel beams in and put a garage underneath to charge another 500 bucks for parking. Blew out the backside, rebuilt the backside, put in deckings, condo converted, and boom, done. This was in its huge project for somebody who didn't even own a hammer, wasn't married, I was single at the time, but it has turned out to be such a good investment. And for those folks living in expensive cities, as you do when you're young, you wanna be in the cities, The San Francisco, the Chicagos, New York, this is a great strategy to get into these markets at a very low cost. You can get owner occupied loans and still have a little bit of economies of scale of at least a duplex, a tri or a quad. Doing that again, I would've done another one and I would've done a quad just to have more income from that. But there's certainly a place for things like this in your portfolio, even in these expensive cities, which you'll find, it's pretty hard to get these to cash flow. But think of these as your house hacked to get started and then you keep 'em later on in that appreciation bucket. These are Rip Van Winkle investments where you set it and forget it. You fall asleep for 10 years and you've made a million bucks in appreciation, not a cash flow game, but in appreciation game and that's the beauty of these house hacks. You can get in expensive markets, live there, and then keep it for the longer term.

Mike Cavaggioni: 5:42

Now I love that Becca. I appreciate appreciation a hundred percent. Cuz where I live at, out here in Hawaii is very much a buy and hold market. It is an appreciation market. It is not a cash flow market right? Now, in today's economy, cash flow is king, right? But to still have a couple things in there that are going to appreciate and give you that value. And I like what you said too Hey, in 10 years, I accidentally have a million dollar home, something like that, right? You build this equity, over this time while you forget about it. And it's one of those things that you can just set it and forget it, like you said. Now sometimes your tenants might remind you that it's still there, when a toilet breaks or something like that. But yeah, it's one of those things essentially that, House hacking can be that catalyst that drives you into bigger investments because you know, that first property, there's so much you could do with it. After you've had it for a couple years, you've built up this equity, you could take out a HELOC, you could do a cash out refinance, use that money to get into something bigger, right?

Becca Hint: 6:43

Yeah, convert 'em and sell one, pay off the others.

Mike Cavaggioni: 6:46

A catalyst to help you scale and step it up to the next level. But I like what you said about that too, about the economies of scale, right? That if you would've done it again, you would've, the second one would've been a quad, right? Just to get the number of units up and a lot of people, when I talk to them about investing in real estate in general, they're like, Oh, it's not about the number of units, it's about the quality of property that you buy but at the same time, if you can buy something on a single family budget, , that's actually four doors, not only is that gonna pay your mortgage for you, but it's gonna put more money into your pocket as well.

Becca Hint: 7:18

That's right. And then think of the repairs around the property too, right? if you're in a quad, three quarters of those repairs become tax deductible as opposed to a single family home. It's all on you.

Mike Cavaggioni: 7:29

Exactly. and a duplex, it's 50-50. So you get to expand on that a little bit more, which is really good. Yeah. Okay. Awesome. Okay, so you bought the duplex, then you started getting involved in other things, but why did you choose to go the multifamily route instead of maybe purchasing more single family assets or anything like that? Why was multifamily so enticing to you?

Becca Hint: 7:48

I started in the multi-family game, just in a smaller scale. And I don't know, at that time, Just getting a taste of the extra income and, small multi, I knew I wanted to go bigger, so I took a coaching program back then. This was a while ago. And it was the RE mentor program. It was Dave Lindell. He was the only guy in the game at that point. There's many of them now. And then from there I said, Okay, I need more of these. I need more mailbox money. So I used my IRA and I bought a 12 unit in Kansas and that was my first venture really into out-of-state real estate using my IRA, my retirement money for that and also it was quite a training ground. We all get our battles scars from real estate investing. I sometimes think like I'm the crash test dummy lady of real estate investing, but boy have I learned a lot . This 12 unit in Kansas City was just so much learned there and this was a funny deal because it was a speculation play and the path of progress only needed to move one block. One block, That's it. It was a, one block away. It was a B plus area, and I was right on the border, which was like a C property, but something to think about, your strategy must match the timeline so the path of progress happened. The area rose up, but I only kept it for three years and it rose up 10 years later. So that same property, I was on a women's group call a couple of months ago, and one of the other women bidding on the property that I had owned, and I bought it for 250, sold for 300, and there were 12 bids on it for 950,000 in Kansas City. Good grief, . I saw it coming, but I just couldn't wait it out.

Mike Cavaggioni: 9:30

Oh my goodness. So there's a lot to unpack there. So for one, you tapped into your IRA to purchase this property. Can we talk about that a little bit? What was that like? Did you wind up paying the penalty or was there a program that you went through? Were you were able to pull it out or was it like self-directed IRA? Like how did you get into that?

Becca Hint: 9:49

Yeah, it was a self-directed IRA.

Mike Cavaggioni: 9:51

Okay. Fantastic.

Becca Hint: 9:52

Self-directed. Yeah.

Mike Cavaggioni: 9:53

A lot of people don't realize that you can take your retirement account and buy real estate with it if you have a self-directed IRA. So that's just another way to do something a little different right? Than the standard, I'm gonna put it in the S&P 500 and retire at the age of the ripe old age of 65 or later, so there are other options out there. Okay. No that's great.

Becca Hint: 10:12

The self-directed IRA is so powerful. And also solo 401ks. For any of your listeners that aren't familiar with those, definitely Google those, and see what power that can bring you, but at least you have control over it and control over those investments. On solo 401k, I'm a little bit more fond of these days as I'm looking for places in Costa Rica and you have a bit more flexibility with solo 401ks in buying property out of the country. And so I like to have different buckets, Mike. So I'm looking at property in Costa Rica for a greater velocity of money. These quick flips, fix and flips. Here you can buy land for 400, build for another 400, and then sell for one four in 18 months. There's an abundance of labor here, huge labor force. And then I like another bucket, like what I describe with San Francisco. You're Rip Van Winkle investments. You're set in and forget it bucket. Bucket a good appreciation play like in Hawaii, New York, Chicago, San Francisco. And then my favorite of the three buckets is our beloved multifamily. And I love this multifamily investing syndication for the cash flow benefits it brings and the tax benefits and ultimately the goal for us, lifestyle, independence, location, freedom, and mailbox money does that for you. And that avenue I'm finding best fits in the multifamily space.

Mike Cavaggioni: 11:34

Yeah. No that's fantastic. And I like that it's about the independence, right? So when we talk about building financial independence, on this podcast, I think Becca, you're really hitting on the importance of that. It's not just about being financially independent, it's about having that true sense of freedom where you can say, You know what? We wanna pick up and leave the states and go move to Costa Rica and then we can go live in paradise, right? And we can go figure out something else that we wanna do. And now you have the options that while you're there, you're like, Hey I wanna buy some land out here and build some property, develop some property, and turn around and flip that for a profit. And now you've got these profits that you could say, Hey, I could turn around and put this into a multi-family deal back in the States, right? So there's all this stuff you can do once you build that freedom and that independence like you have done, right? So I think that's one of the things that you get with investing, not just in multifamily, but just investing in general. If you're investing in good cash flowing assets, good appreciating assets and things that are gonna help build your wealth you can get there in a relatively short time. And I say relatively short time, I'm talking like, 10 years down the road. Whereas typical retirement plan, you're looking 30, 40, 50 years sometimes. Yeah. Before you get to that point where you've truly reach, quote, unquote independence but in the real estate game, you can really get there in 10 years and sometimes even less and it's just about how aggressive you are and how much you attack and and go out there and find the deals, and put in the work and put in the effort which it looks like you most definitely have. So congratulations to you and your family, with being able to have this time freedom and this location freedom to be able to live in Costa Rica.

Becca Hint: 13:16

Oh, thank you. Thank you so much. And likewise, right back to you. You're living in paradise. And it's a paradigm shift. It's a new thinking that the new currency of the rich isn't your Mercedes or your Tesla. It's your time freedom.

Mike Cavaggioni: 13:30

I like that. I like that. That is the currency is time, right? Getting that time back, because you could have all the money in the world, it means nothing if all you're doing is working all the time to try to keep that cash flow coming in. So building up these passive cash flow assets is just something that's going to give you that freedom. And you could do it as slowly as you want or as quickly as you want, depending on how aggressive you wanna get. I wanna touch on something you said earlier about the Blue Zones, right? Like I said, I've got the Blue Zone people that I see walk around here in Hawaii. Hawaii's not a blue zone, right? We have, yeah. There's the Blue Zone Hawaii club, I don't know. But we are not a blue zone and when you look at some of the different Blue zones, I think a lot of that, like you said, it's lifestyle, it's the health. But part of that healthiness and that healthy lifestyle is that you have that time freedom that you have the time to go eat healthy meals and cook for yourself and do that instead of always being in a rush cuz you're in the rat race and picking up fast food and things like that. I feel like that makes such a big difference and just the mental side as well. Your mental health because you worry for nothing. You don't worry about money because you know you've got the cash flow coming in. The biggest thing you're worrying about is making sure, is my team doing what they're supposed to be doing to ensure that all operations are still running smoothly? And once you know that you've got a good team and you've built this, that's one less thing you have to worry about as well. Sure you still worry about it, but it's not, it doesn't have to be something like, Oh my God, the world's gonna end every time you get a phone call.

Becca Hint: 14:55

You're right.

Mike Cavaggioni: 14:55

You see the phone ring and you get that sense of dread and it's oh no. And once you get past that, man, stress free life, you get to eat healthier. Yeah. So tell me what it's like living in a blue zone? Cause I'm curious are you surrounded by a bunch of old people? Are you surrounded by a bunch of people that are healthy, vibrant, and just living a great life?

Becca Hint: 15:13

Surrounded by people that are healthy, vibrant, and living a great life. On the blue zone front for your listeners there's, I think about six of these in the world. As Mike said, Hawaii's not one of them, believe it or not. There's Costa Rica, which is one of 'em. Okinawa, Japan's another one. Sardinia is another one. There's a few more after that, but it's not areas where people are eating fast food, and it's not areas where people are completely stressed out on the corporate job and they work 70 hours a week. It's a place where people value their family time. It's just so much more relaxed overall in the food. A big part of it is the food. And if you look up blue zones, you'll see this, in Costa Rica in particular, it's pretty basic food really. It's not a flavor explosion by any means, but it's your beans and rice, your homemade tortillas your plantains, coconut water, lots of tropical fruit. Probably quite similar to Hawaii in the sense of that, except with the absence of fast food. There's no boutique surf and yoga town on the beach. But in the big cities, you can find that and as you look in the big cities, the health of the people decline. The more they're eating those kind of food and the busier that their life become.

Mike Cavaggioni: 16:22

Yeah, no, that's a great point. And one of the things that I've found especially since retiring from the Navy and being home a little bit more, is I'm not eating as much of the not so good foods as I was before. Cause at home, like we're plant based, right? Yeah. Yeah. So it's awesome. Pretty much every morning I have an Acai bowl with fresh fruit on top. And it's just something that's refreshing and, I was talking to a couple military buddies of mine, and one of the things we were talking about is oh yeah, oh, you're retiring, man, you know you're gonna gain weight after you retire and this and that. I said, Honestly, guys, I think I'm gonna be the guy who actually loses weight in retirement. Oh, what do you mean? How, why? And I was like I was like, I'll be eating at home. Okay, so what's that mean? I was like at home we, first of all I'm a vegetarian, right? So I eat plant based anyway. But secondly my wife cooks very good organic whole foods, right? Yeah. And a lot of times we eat a lot of raw foods too. So it's having that shift and having the time freedom now to make sure that I get up every morning and work out every morning before I start my day like this past week has been so awesome cuz I've been getting up every morning, I've been getting my workouts in first thing of the day. I drink my lemon water before I even have my coffee. And I just feel so refreshed and I honestly I could probably cut coffee out now at this point, but for me, 20 years in the military, it's just, it's like one of those things that's, it's memory that my hand goes like this and I sip the coffee. It just has to happen, right? So trying to transition fully over to just waking up and having the lemon water and that's it. But yeah. But this is something that you get by putting in that effort up front, right? And that's what I'm talking about with you here and everything that you've done. I'd like to kinda touch on some of the investments that you have made. So if we could talk about that a little bit. What are some of the multifamily deals that you're currently involved in right now?

Becca Hint: 18:06

Yeah. Yeah, you bet. And for your listeners, and if anybody is aspiring to do this or move to the tropics and leave it all behind, like we did part of the great resignation and tell your med device boss is adios, or people that just of wanna straddle to warm weather locations or maybe, move overseas and keep your corporate job but just work less hours. You can absolutely do this. And how you do it is you just stitch a bunch of things together and that's what we've done. So how this works for us is we have the San Francisco building. My house hack, my Rip Van Winkle one, right? We have that passive income. It doesn't kick off a whole lot. It's still an appreciation market, so we have that one. Then we have our primary resident over the bridge in Marin that we rented our primary residence. And that's another thing to think about for your listeners, should you decide to do this, turn your primary residents into an asset rather than a liability up to a year ahead of time, all those repairs to prepare your home for a rental, become tax deductible. You need a new kitchen, bathroom, Windows, the whole bit. Dial it up. It becomes tax deductible. Going to see your property, visit your property, hence visiting your family while you're there. That flight is tax deductible. So a big part of it is turning things into a tax advantageous situation. That's one. And then and then on the multifamily side, we have a number of things going. I'm a passive investor in several deals. 450 total units currently and counting, gonna throw another 215 on this week and these are deals where I'm a passive investor primarily in Texas. We look for Texas, Georgia, the Carolinas, we look for emerging markets with population growth, job growth, and all the other indicators that we like because all boats rise in a rising tide provided you know what you're doing and don't screw up too much. So we like those type of markets where things are emerging. And then I'm on the Co-GP side, so in addition to being a passive investor, I'm probably 60 or 70% passive investor and probably 30% on the general partnership side. And what I do is I combine my money with my investor's money, and we go into this deal together in big chunks, often about a million dollar chunks. And sometimes we're able to negotiate a better deal, like things that could be, we looked at a deal a couple weeks ago at 9%, pref if you bring a million bucks and it was a 7% pref if you just come in with your 50,000. So we like that coming in as a group and multi-family buildings are what we primarily invest in. About 18 months ago, I did a hotel conversion, My investors and I, and this was a lot of fun. These are fun deals for any syndicators you have out there. But this was a deal, it was a hundred unit quality in that were taking down to 65 units of multifamily, 31 1 bedrooms, 31 studios, and three, two bedrooms that were suites. And these are fun deals that you can get at such a good price. We got this 30 cents on the dollar, 70% discount.

Mike Cavaggioni: 21:09

Wow. That's awesome. Now actually I wanna kind of talk about that a little bit cuz I know a couple of the people that have done hotel conversions, and I've seen people do it both ways where they took a multi-family unit and turned it into a hotel, or they took a hotel and turned it into a multi-family, project. So you took it from a hundred down to 65, and obviously there was some knocking down of walls and all that stuff to make it happen. How much of it did you have to completely just gut to make that work? And how much of it was just as simple as knocking down a wall and putting up a wall or anything like that? Cuz that sounds like such a huge undertaking. But like you said, it sounds like a lot of fun too.

Becca Hint: 21:47

It's both, It's a lot of fun and it's a huge undertaking. These are deep value add, heavy lifts. So for investors, buckle up, no money coming in for 18 months to two years. But on the other side of that, there's huge gains because we're getting it at such a discount. And as far as the renovation, there's lots to do. It's not just knocking down walls it's quite a bit. But even we, even more so before you even get to the renovation there's lots of pitfalls in in hotel conversions. And I'd say the three of 'em the themes would be zoning, franchise, and fire. Before you even start something like this, you have to buy out that franchise. So you have to buy out the quality in franchise or whatever franchise you're looking into. And those could range from 35,000 to 250,000. And it starts there because if you can't do that, then you're in the hotel business and you don't wanna be in the hotel business unless you wanna be. and then there's the zoning. So once you can get past the franchise, simultaneously you're gonna look at the zoning, the need to zone that, rezone it from a commercial hotel to multifamily. Ours was in a tertiary market in Arizona, so it was zoned similar for multifamily on hotels. It was just a change of use permit for us. But in Phoenix, one of our fellow investor friends, the city said, We'll give you your rezoning, but you'll need to put in a new road and two fire hydrants at the cost of $500,000, half a million bucks zoning with strings attached. And then, if there was any one theme with hotel conversions, it would really be fire, strangely. Many hotels don't have fire sprinklers, and I guess that's because they don't have kitchens unless you get a suite, something like those. And that's the suite. That's the play, by the way, to do the suites that already have the kitchens. So you spend hundreds of thousands of dollars putting in fire sprinklers alone. They must be dedicated lines, so you need to put in a fire hydrant to go with it. Even the Sheetrock. Yeah. Sheet rock's.

Mike Cavaggioni: 23:40

A lot of work.

Becca Hint: 23:40

A lot of work. The Sheetrock has to be thicker than it is in a typical hotel because of the fire risks there. So that's just at the beginning. And then, as you get into these, on the renovation side as you mentioned, what do you do there? That's a whole lot to do there. If it's a second story hotel, you have these windows. We had these floor ceiling windows that were beautiful, but because of fire, you need windows with egress. So next thing you know, you're tearing out these beautiful Florida ceiling windows and putting in these small windows so that they can open up. And people, I guess jump out of the second story. It seems crazy to me. But yeah and the water hookups you need to optimize those to put in kitchens. So what we did is we put the kitchens on the other side of the bathroom. To save costs there and then,

Mike Cavaggioni: 24:24

yeah, cause you already had the plumbing already all set up there,

Becca Hint: 24:27

yeah. So there's ways to save, but I could go on and on. I probably should write an e-book someday on this because there's so much to it, but there are a lot of fun.

Mike Cavaggioni: 24:36

If you do, let me know. I'd like to get a copy and then make sure we could share that with everybody as well Okay. Awesome.

Becca Hint: 24:42

Maybe I will.

Mike Cavaggioni: 24:43

Yeah. So yeah. That's very interesting. And I guess I was being a little I guess maybe not so much downplaying it, but when I was saying, Oh yeah. Did you like have to knock down walls and put up walls? Yeah. I know there's so much more work that needs to be done. But the thing is, like when you get a project like that, I'm pretty sure that return that you're gonna get when that as asset is ready and ready to go and it's, Occupied and cash flowing and you refinance it or sell it, right? it will be worth way more than what you paid for it, plus the amount that you put into renovation.

Becca Hint: 25:15

And way more than you can make in multifamily, because as you and I know, it's been tricky to find deals in multifamily with cap rates compressed. Sellers not reasonable and a whole lot of buyers out there. So the margins in multifamily, even on value add multifamily have been really squeezed, though it's time to start looking other places. And that's what we did. We got this deal right at the like the hotel apocalypse at the beginning of the pandemic.

Mike Cavaggioni: 25:39

Oh, wow. So I guess what, it's been I guess two years then, so where are you at in the process with this current deal?

Becca Hint: 25:45

We are just about to get the occupancy permits for phase one, and while you hold these hotels, you still have your hotel permit. So you continue, you can run Airbnbs out of it or run it as a hotel. So we do have some kind of straggler people still there. But yeah we're almost the floors are in, the kitchens are in paint's on, phase one is ready to go. We're just waiting for the occupancy permit.

Mike Cavaggioni: 26:10

Yeah. I'll be interested to just see to follow this journey and see what, how this winds up. That's really cool to take a hundred unit hotel and turn it into 65 multi-family unit apartment building. Just sounds like really cool. And when you talk about the fact that you were able to buy it in 2020, like during what you called Hotel acap. Wait, what did you say? I can't even say it. Hotel.

Becca Hint: 26:32

I know I could, I can't spell it either. Don't worry.

Mike Cavaggioni: 26:34

I'll just say the hotel apocalypse.

Becca Hint: 26:36

That's it. You got it. You got it.

Mike Cavaggioni: 26:38

I can't even say it, but Yeah,

Becca Hint: 26:40

and don't try to spell it,

Mike Cavaggioni: 26:41

but that's, that's very interesting, right? Because you were able to get such a good deal on it because hotels were really like having a very hard time. Now, did you run into issues with the supply chain and everything or were you able to squeak a lot of that in before that issue started happening this past year?

Becca Hint: 26:59

Good question. We hoarded supplies. So we did okay with supply chain and we had all these vacant rooms to store everything in. So we have several rooms filled with just doors, several hotel rooms filled with just cabinets. So we did okay on the supply chain and we checked and double checked and triple checked cuz we were very nervous because this is a huge lift. Where we struggled a little bit as everybody's struggling is labor. So we've had a little bit of labor shortages and now we've got people back on what they needed to do in there, we have more people on than we need just to keep, get back on track. But we just lost a couple weeks. But it's what I hear from several people that are doing these deep value ads. There's so many things involved in with the supply chain and labor crisis, labor shortage. Those are two tough things for deep value ads. We've managed. And then, another thing, as I mentioned, there's so much meat on the bone on these deals too. We're all just sitting back knowing that there's a great payout on the other side. I could go on in hotels forever, you hit on one of my favorite topics here, but there's so many uses for these too. Another thing that you can do, there's a company in Austin that are taking these hotels and they're leaving them as studios and renting them to millennials and then the downstairs area is like a shared workspace. And so that's a great usage in a city like Austin, New York, San Francisco, where we're used to smaller rooms. And then San Francisco is buying hotels and repurposing them into homeless shelters for that situation that never seems to be able to resolve itself. And then Florida is loving these hotels for the purpose of senior living because you have your common area that down below to know in senior living when you go into the fire side of things, those sprinklers have to have a greater velocity because it takes longer to get the older folks out of the building. So you'll probably have to have a couple dedicated lines, but something to think about, and it's a big cost, something to think about in floor market. But there's so many things you can do with these hotels.

Mike Cavaggioni: 28:58

Yeah that's a great point. All of that and, I think we're gonna really see like a huge shift in a lot of these cities with some of these bigger hotels that are having to rethink how they're doing business. And probably gonna see a lot more hotel conversions in the future. I wrote a whole article about this on my blog two years ago about the great escape from the city, right? How, everyone's, with so many big companies now saying, Hey, we're gonna keep this telework thing going. You're gonna see a lot of people just not going back to the cities and they get, they're gonna wanna either stay in the suburbs or do something different. But if you create more affordable housing options that are closer, where if people are slow going in once a week and stuff like that might be enough to motivate them to stay a little bit closer, but they want something that's gonna be affordable and that's gonna work for their use, right? That even during their off time, that they're gonna be able to do the work that they need to do. And, lot of places like that have that common area. And everything like that is, is it's more conducive to, the younger generation Yes. That wants to work from home and, but also at the same time be able to socialize with other people. I'm a millennial too, I'm on the older spectrum of millennial born in 84. , but the piece of that, that I know, like a lot of people in my generation I call it the the coffee shop workforce generation. Because, that's when it became popular. The whole I'm gonna go to Starbucks, have some coffee, and do some work on my laptop, get things done, or I'm gonna go to Panera Bread and order my soup and sandwich and get some work done. And it just became a very popular thing. So now you're creating these, apartment complexes that have that same feel where on the first floor you've got the coffee shop, you've got the wifi, you've got the comfortable seating areas, you've got the work stations. If people need em, you've got everything set up. I think we're looking at what, like the next. I guess living situation for the younger generations might start looking like towards the future, right? Or am I just off my rocker here?

Becca Hint: 30:48

No, I think you're right on . You're not off your rocker. No, I think you're right on, on that. And on the multi-family side and additional income streams, put a coffee shop down there, have a barista, and then you have a pool. All these, almost all the hotels come with pools. So it's, I think it, it's a beautiful working situation.

Mike Cavaggioni: 31:07

Yeah. A very attractive option for someone that's looking for that decent living space at a affordable rate, where they can still do everything that they wanted to do and not have to be so far away from everybody and so far removed from the hustle and the bustle

Becca Hint: 31:22

that's right. And then not have this huge place that they have to pay so much for two or three bedroom condo in San Francisco. All you need is a little space to sleep and a kitchen that's comfortable enough to maybe entertain a friend or two and then go downstairs and do your work. I think it's a brilliant idea.

Mike Cavaggioni: 31:37

Yeah. That's awesome. So this is not where I expected our conversation to go. It's pretty neat and it gets you thinking, right? That, especially with real estate investors, we're always looking at different ways to be creative and do something different that's gonna work. And that's, we're always looking to solve a problem. And that's the biggest thing is solving the problem, solving the affordable living for people. People look at real estate investors and they're like, Oh, they're greedy and they just wanna make all this money. But no, a lot of real estate investors are very much problem solvers and trying to figure out ways to make things work that yes, our advantageous to them to make a profit because, this is how they make a living. But at the same time, create something that is more unique and something that is more affordable for somebody that might wanna stay in the city and be in those situations like that. It's that creative thinking that just, that makes this world go round and round.

Becca Hint: 32:26

Yeah, it does. And if you can solve big problems for people that's where the money is. And it feels good. It feels good while you're improving communities. And in respect to the housing crisis, hotels are a big part of that because when builders build, as we know, they create new inventory, right? They build a class buildings, and that's the housing crisis isn't there. It's not for your A class tenants will just pay more. The housing crisis is for this lower middle class to upper lower class. And this is the working poor, the people that don't qualify for any concessions from the government or vouchers or anything like that. In the case of our hotel conversion, that is from the rental market of about 700 to a thousand dollars in Arizona. That's the working poor. And these are people that are traveling nurses people, living off the military base, off space and people that are retail workers, that's where the housing crisis is. And with hotels you can create, bring inventory to market that wasn't multi-family inventory as with doing a value add renovation of a multi-class building, you're not bringing new inventory, you're improving living spaces for existing tenants and that's great, but it's not new inventory and it's not solving the housing crisis. You're just upgrading what's already there.

Mike Cavaggioni: 33:38

Yeah. No, that, that's a great point because, we do, we have a problem right now where there's not enough homes for people to live in right now. . And now with supply chain shortages and everything else, it's put lot of pauses on development and things like that. So if you have an opportunity, like with what you're doing, where you're converting a hotel where, yes, you still need materials for that, but it's not as much as building a brand new development. So now you're at a place now where you're able to create 65 new places for people to live that wasn't there before, right? Cause all that was there before is hey, people swinging through town and needed a place to stay for the night. That's what you had. You're adding 65 units for people to live in that town. And that is huge. That's where the value add comes in. That's where the, you as a real estate investor being a problem solver. That's where that all comes in, cuz you're solving a problem in that community by providing more housing for the residents there. So that's absolutely awesome. And that's the kind of perspective that, that's the way people need to look at this, right? That's the way you need to look at these things. And, Becca, you are solving a problem. Being a real estate investor is just a side thing to that. Your main thing is being a problem solver. And that's what you're doing

Becca Hint: 34:50

how can you pick a problem and throw all your resources at it.

Mike Cavaggioni: 34:53

Yeah, absolutely.

Becca Hint: 34:54

And choose a problem. There's plenty of them, but in, in real estate, we can choose the housing crisis. And then there's also the hotel problem. Simultaneously. There's two things that are struggling there. How can you bring those together and solve a problem?

Mike Cavaggioni: 35:05

Yeah. Oh, I love that. I love that. Again, wasn't expecting the conversation to go this way, but I'm so glad it did because this is something that I haven't really talked about on the show before. It's different. It's unique. I like it. I'd like to transition this into something that we call the final round. And this is where I'm gonna ask you four hard hitting questions. It's gonna give the audience a good understanding of how you are and how you handle.

Becca Hint: 35:27

Oh, okay. I thought you were if you were ready to go about, I thought you were gonna ask me how my surfing is in the tropics.

Mike Cavaggioni: 35:32

Oh, we'll get to that. We'll get to that, but if you're ready to go, we'll get this party started.

Becca Hint: 35:36

All right. Let's get this party started. Hurry it up. The beach is waiting.

Mike Cavaggioni: 35:40

All right, Becca. I know. Same here. So Becca, what is the biggest mistake you've ever made?

Becca Hint: 35:47

Oh, gosh. I think it would come back to probably real estate investing. I think a big mistake was that 12th unit in Kansas City that I bought out there as the lone wolf. And it's just me and my IRA and not being in a partnership and it's was me trying to solve some of the problems of this building so far away. I'm thankful for that experience because there was a tremendous amount and learned there. I cut my teeth there, but it was painful at the time.

Mike Cavaggioni: 36:13

Yeah, that's fair. That's fair. Even when you were talking about it initially it just, it sounded painful when you purchased it and then talking about it a couple years later watching other people bid on it in the 900 s and you're like, Ugh, so yeah, no, definitely. I appreciate that. I appreciate that the honesty and the full disclosure there. Okay, so the next question kind of ties into all this and what is something that you've learned that you wish you knew when you first got started?

Becca Hint: 36:38

Oh, what I wish I had learned when I first started was partner quickly, especially in multi-family. This is a team sport. You can partner up with people that are much better at you at certain things that you're not good at. So look where your weak points are and partner for your weak points. And I wish I would've known that early on. And had I figured that out early on, I would've never gone into that 12 unit in Kansas City, I would've partnered up than probably about a much larger building with a team that specializes in asset management.

Mike Cavaggioni: 37:08

Yeah, no that's a great point. Thank you for that. Cause, and that kind of also ties into that first, that first answer to the biggest mistake that you ever made too, right? And you even said it just now with that, is that this is a team sport, right? Sure you can invest in real estate by yourself. but you're not gonna scale and there's a lot more risk there because you're taking all the risk, right? Where if you go in with a team, that risk is equally divided. The benefits are equally divided, but at the same time, you're not doing it alone. And this is even for you introverts out there it is very possible as an introvert to make this work as well, right? You get, you gotta come outta your comfort zone, get out there and meet people. But I think that's huge. And one of the things I talk about a lot on this show is networking and meeting people and going to real estate conferences, going to meetups, and just getting to learn what other people are doing. Learn the mistakes that they made. Listen to podcasts like this or bigger pockets and just see what other people are doing, right? And it gives you that idea. And maybe, who knows, Maybe you can go and have that perfect record in the future where you don't have the same issues and mistakes that everybody has. But I'm telling you right now, that'll be very hard in few in between, because everyone makes mistakes. There's always something that, you could have done better. But the best part is and I think you mentioned this a little bit earlier before Becca, is that, with like with your 12 unit, it was an educational piece, right? It was just an expensive education. You could sit here and say, Hey, I lost money, or whatever. But the way most of us real estate investors look at that is I paid an expensive for an expensive class on real estate.

Becca Hint: 38:40

That's right. It was an expensive seminar. It was, Yeah.

Mike Cavaggioni: 38:43

There you go.

Becca Hint: 38:43

Even though I was in a coaching program at the time, you think that, I would've known, but, sometimes you just don't know until you really get your feet wet.

Mike Cavaggioni: 38:51

Yeah, absolutely.

Becca Hint: 38:51

You always have to jump in and educate yourself as much as you can beforehand.

Mike Cavaggioni: 38:56

Yeah.

Becca Hint: 38:56

And partner quickly. And for any introverts, as you mentioned, Boy, if you wanna sit behind a desk and look at Excel spreadsheets, great. There's plenty of extroverts to partner with that could use your skills. Just make sure you partner up.

Mike Cavaggioni: 39:10

Yeah, absolutely. All you gotta do it all starts with, Hello, my name is awesome. Okay, cool. The next question I have for you ties into all this as well, and that is, do you have any tips or tricks that you would recommend to somebody that is just getting started today?

Becca Hint: 39:25

I would say if you are a passive investor, there are tips and tricks. I would partner up with somebody who will vet deals for you. I wish I had known as a passive investor when I invested in another deal 10 years ago that actually went sideways too. But it's because I didn't know what I was looking at then and my model now is a product of those couple investments that went sideways. I actually look at these deals for my team, somebody to vet it, somebody to make sure that the property is not underinsured and several other landmines along the way. If you wanna just start as a passive investor, it would be good to team up with somebody who will look at these deals side by side with you and invest their money with you. Key number one. And then if you are interested in syndicating these deals on your own, I would say get into a coaching program, or at least get into a mastermind and surround yourself with like-minded people. And you don't wanna be the smartest one in the room. If you're the smartest one in the room, go find another room.

Mike Cavaggioni: 40:28

Yeah, no, I love that. That's huge. Those are all key things like when you go out to these masterminds and you go to different meetups or you get involved in a coaching program. I believe in all that stuff. I'm in Masterminds. I go to real estate meetups all the time. I go to conferences. And I have a coach that I pay. This is one of those things where you're either gonna pay for your education up front or you're gonna pay for your education on the back end. You know what I'm saying? These are the things that for, at least for me, it works. It, it's great to have a mentor, It's great to have a coach. It's great to have a team that's got your back. It's great to have a network of like-minded people that you can go talk to when you're having issues with something or say, Hey, has anyone else ever run into ABC or D? What have you done in that situation? Things like that. So when you build this network, and I even said this on the last interview that I did about two hours ago but. It's cliche, but it's the truth. Your network is your net worth, right? Yes. And it's gonna be the people that you surround yourself that will drive your success. So absolutely love that response. Becca, it's very telling especially when I'm talking to somebody that is so experienced in so many different facets of real estate. Goodness sakes, you're doing this awesome hotel conversion, right? And you've learned so much. So to have somebody like you on the show be able to share, and impart your knowledge on us, is just something that I'm very grateful for. Thank you so much for that.

Becca Hint: 41:53

Oh, thank you Mike. And likewise. Thank you for all, all the knowledge you bring to us and elevating us all in our investing knowledge. It really, it does take a village.

Mike Cavaggioni: 42:02

Yeah. No I appreciate that. I really do. Now I have one more question of the final round for you, and this is more of an opinion based question, and I'm pretty sure I know what the answer is because we talked about it offline a little bit. But do you have a favorite business investing or real estate related book or podcast, or, both?

Becca Hint: 42:19

Oh boy do i, books are my favorite. Of course there's the Purple Bible, right? Everybody knows that. The Rich Dad, Poor Dad, building a story brand is also a good book. I'd recommend that read. But my favorite of all of them is Who Not How. And I love this book because I feel it has liberated me. It liberates me from the point of, beginning to outsource all the things I don't do well. And the concept of this book is you can take anything from the zero to 80%. Fairly easily. It's all in your head. You just write it down. But taking things from the 80 to 100% is pretty hard. Taking things from the 80 to 90% is hard, but from the 92, a hundred percent is like climbing a mountain. So I don't struggle with taking things from that 80% to a hundred anymore at that 80% mark I outsource. And it's just been a game changer.

Mike Cavaggioni: 43:10

Yeah, that's fantastic. I had to learn the hard way to start outsourcing myself and it's been A good learning experience for me and once I started outsourcing, certain things to free up my time for one, but for two, to have somebody else to bring that particular task from that 80% to a hundred percent, where I was just struggling to keep it at 80, knowing when to let go of the reins and let somebody else take that and run with it, and feel comfortable with doing that, completely changed the game for me. It's actually one of the reasons why my podcast has been able to grow the way that it's grown. Because I had to learn to let go and let somebody else that was better at something take care of it. And me, I get very like, Oh, I like to do things myself. I was like they're not gonna do it better than me because I know what I want. , what I want is this, but I don't have the time to do this. I need somebody that knows how to do this that's gonna free up that time for me. So I can go do yoga in Costa Rica.

Becca Hint: 44:03

Yeah. Love it. You're speaking my language, your speaking my language. I love it. It's funny with us real estate investors anyway, because we often start out as do it yourself first. So I think it's even more difficult for us to outsource because we think, Oh, we've done this and we've done that, and we know how to do it ourselves. We're just the diy. Many people start that way, but there's a time to, to release that and outsource it. And from that you can grow tremendously as you discovered. What part of your podcast do you outsource now?

Mike Cavaggioni: 44:33

The editing, the social media posting pretty much everything. I just record the content and give it to my team now. I used to do a lot of the self-editing and then, let the editing team edit other parts. But now I literally, I record the content, I hand it to my assistant. She does what she does, hands it off. Next thing I know, it's getting posted on Buzz Sprout. It's getting uploaded to YouTube. My audiograms and social media caption videos are coming out on social media, and none of that is me anymore. Which has been like life changing, to tell you the truth.

Becca Hint: 45:01

Oh, wonderful. And did you use fiverr for that in finding your VAs to do it?

Mike Cavaggioni: 45:07

I used Upwork,

Becca Hint: 45:08

I used work Upwork too.

Mike Cavaggioni: 45:09

Yeah, I've talked about that a couple times in the show too. And one of the things that I've learned was to, let them come to you. Don't go try to find somebody, let them come to you. So I created the job, I let people apply for it, and then I narrowed it down to a certain amount of people. I interviewed four people and then picked the one that I knew was the greatest for it. And I know because she's gonna, she works on all my stuff. She's gonna listen to this and, don't let your head swell up, but you're doing a great job. But yeah, she has been like saving my life here. She's been a life changing experience. And she's amazing. And, you can't beat that. You can't beat.

Becca Hint: 45:40

You can't, you can barely put a price on it. I use Fiverr quite a bit and my hack is, I always search for level two and up and it's gotten a whole different degree of specialty work just by doing that.

Mike Cavaggioni: 45:54

Yep. I've used Fiver plenty of times for specialty items. Actually the intro and outro for my podcast was from fiverr, I hired somebody to do that. So little things like that, there's so many different ways and there's so many great freelancers out there that do this as their full-time job. It was part of what you had mentioned earlier, that great resignation and there's so many people out there just doing amazing things online that you can hire to do the work that, that maybe you could do, but you're not gonna do as good a job as somebody that's passionate and doing this full time as, right? Yeah. So instead of trying to save a couple bucks, get the right person to do the job so it's right the first time and you're not fixing it on the back end like I did when I first started. Stuff like that is huge for sure.

Becca Hint: 46:37

It's huge. It's huge. Yeah. Yeah. Especially on the design works.

Mike Cavaggioni: 46:41

Oh, yeah. Oh yeah. Especially. Oh yeah. We just got, I got an email from Canva, just the other day, I posted up on social media that said we're in the top 5% of something on there, like with designs and stuff like that, with the amount of work that we've done on Canva that our team is in like the top 5%, which I thought was really cool. So I posted it on Facebook and I told my va she's awesome. So yeah, a lot of that is thanks to her and all the work that she's putting in and the team. But Becca. This has been an absolutely awesome conversation. Again, like I said, this went down a route that I didn't expect to go, but I love it it was different and it was it got me thinking a lot, right? Really got the juices flowing. So I'm pretty sure for my listeners, the same thing is going through their head right now. Wow, this was different, but this was like really good info. And you know what? We wanna know more about Becca and what she's doing, and we wanna learn more about her projects that she's working on. Maybe they wanna learn more about stuff in the blue zone and why that's important. . they're like, Hey, where can I find information on her? So let's answer that question. So if you could, Becca, please share with us where can people find more information about you? Do you have a website, social media, anything like that you could share with us that would be awesome.

Becca Hint: 47:50

You bet. I'm an open book to talk to any of your listeners, whether you want to move overseas, whether you're interested in hotel conversions or interested in investing as an LP in deals, I'm putting my own money in that I would vet for everybody. So feel free to reach out. You can you can email me directly, which is beca@hint investments.com .So it's B E C A, hintinvestments.com. I have a free e-book for your listeners in case anybody is desiring to move overseas and leave it all behind. And it's called Six Steps to Put Your Income on Autopilot and Move Overseas. You can find that at Hint Investments with an s.com. And This is a guide that has links to cost of living indexes throughout the world to determine how much it costs to live in those places. Also, the best places for expats to live in 2022, the most economical places for expats to live, and a number of other things. It goes through how we, pulled everything together with our retirements accounts and our stock accounts, and how to look at those that often aren't loving you back, like our stocks weren't. It talks about how to pull everything together. Hintinvestments.com, you'll find that or you can find me on LinkedIn. Becca Hint or Hintergardt my very long married name that no one can spell. Just do Becca Hint, much easier.

Mike Cavaggioni: 49:06

All right, awesome. Becca, thank you so much. This truly was a pleasure. And for my listeners here, you guys know that I love to keep these conversations with, or these interviews very conversational with my guests. And I tend to go down whatever route we go as we're talking. And that is the same thing that we did here with Becca. There's so many more things that she does that we didn't even get into. So this is just wave tops of who Becca really is and everything else that she's doing when she built up her passive income portfolio to live this life of freedom that she lives right now. Definitely go check out her website, go check out her ebook. There's so much more information about her that I think will really just blow your mind with everything that she's been doing. Absolutely awesome. Again, Becca, thank you so much. I really genuinely enjoyed this conversation.

Becca Hint: 49:54

Me too. It's been so much fun. Thank you. Thank you very much. And I'll, we'll have to meet up in Hawaii and you can show me your surfing. Let's see.

Mike Cavaggioni: 50:02

you won't see much. You'll probably just see me falling over, but Yeah. No, I appreciate that. Hey everybody, thanks so much for joining me in our special guest, Becca Hint, on the Average Joe Finances Podcast. Don't forget to go leave us a five star review and tell us what you liked, particularly about today's episode with Becca. And hey guys, we're outta here. Aloha from Hawaii.

Becca Hint: 50:24

All right. Pura Vida, as we say in Costa Rica, pure life.

Mike Cavaggioni: 50:27

Love it.

Becca Hint: 50:28

Thank you, Mike. It's been so much fun. Love it.

Mike Cavaggioni: 50:31

Aloha.