Hello Cashflow Hackers,

Welcome to the new members, especially the new 119 members on LinkedIn. It’s heartwarming to see so many of you joining this community and taking steps towards your financial independence. 😇

After attending Business Mastery a few months ago, I’m all about Measuring because if something is not measured, then it cannot be improved.

So here’s a few recent lessons learned and update on where things are in my businesses right now.

Business 1: Single Family Rentals

Together with my husband, we have been reviewing numbers on our 10 SFH rentals in and around Austin with a realtor friend. Shout out to Veronika for helping us out! 😍

We realized that we will make a whopping amount of… 6% in Average Annual Return (AAR) across the whole portfolio if we sell all of them now and pay a 7% transaction fee. 😳 

Hopefully this is the lowest price point that Austin market is experiencing recently. We’ll see. 😅

Luckily we don’t need to sell now.

Even I’m already so excited thinking of a day I will be free of all the landlord tasks. 🥹

🧘🏻‍♀️ Lessons learned: It’s not like Rentals don’t work. There are cycle and seasons in real estate market. I was focusing on the numbers too much while ignoring the opportunity cost. The hours and emotions went into it made me decided that this is a business that I will slowly shut down.

Business 2: Fund Business

I started a Fund business focus on Multifamily since September 2023. I am bringing fund from my friends and family investing into deals that I believe in, together with my own money. 😌

I finished 2 Funds so far and currently doing one called SKJD Rise Spring Pointe LLC.

For the SKJD Rise Spring Pointe LLC Fund, my target raise was $500,000 and so far I got $350,000 in soft commit.

I have 3 more spots on the deal to fill.

If you don’t know what I am talking about, this is the Deal Link.

I just sent this deal out to about 50 investors through texting.

I need to text more people since that would catch their attention and remind them about the deal better.

Through emails, almost 200 investors received the deal email but just maybe 60% of you opened the email, and just 12% clicked on some links, so probably just 24 of you really spent time reading the deal details.

So I personally raised $925,000 so far.

And it means I will get paid in some equity projected to become about $125,000 when these deals exit.

It’s a very humble amount of fund 5 months in the business, since I heard from quite a few people saying that in their first deal they raised 2M dollars!

“The first 1M you raise is the hardest!” Many people also told me.

This result is already far out of my imagination, being a recent immigrant from Vietnam, came to the US in 13 years ago knowing no one.

The next milestone is when I get to 10M raised.

Paul Hutchinson also said that when your fund gets to 100M then you can start to get fund from institutions. So that’s the next big milestone.

🧘🏻‍♀️ Lessons learned: The hardest thing is just keep putting in the repetitions and keep going. The trust and mutual understandings that I was able to form through working with my investors so far is priceless.

Business 3: Coaching

I got 2 clients to coach them to start a fund business.

From my few first coaching sessions, I confirmed that 90% of the things that holds people back is MINDSET.

So I plan on bringing a lot of leverage into my coaching to Up level my mentee mindset by using: vision, incantation, gratefulness, mindfulness, Tony Robbins stuffs. ❤️

Most people who starts raising Fund will feel like they are begging people to borrow money. 😅

The reality is you’re bringing people investment opportunities that a lot of the times change their lives for the better.

The decision to change their lives or not is theirs.

All you have to do it to get the message to them. 😊 

I haven’t really focus on marketing for the coaching even I told myself that I would be open to coach 3 more people this year. 👩🏻‍💻

Instead I’m seeing myself wanting to go back to my comfort zone coaching new people in real estate, and reality is I’ve been doing that for years for free.

 🧘🏻‍♀️ Lessons learned: Marketing myself everyday to get coaching clients or investors is extremely hard. Same with promoting this Newsletter or promoting my current deal. I love how uncomfortable it is. And when I do uncomfortable stuff, good things will happen. 🚀

FIRE - Creating Real Passive Income

My goal is to build a passive income of $200,000 per year for our family to live on.

In order to do that, I have to put $200,000 cash into Multifamily syndications in Year 1 and do that every year for 5 years. So in Year 6, I will get $200,000 back to live on while keeping the $200,000 principal invested.

I started investing passively in Multifamily in 2022 but I was using my self directed IRA, but that can’t be counted as income since I will not be able to live on that return in 5 years.

So Year 1 for me started in August 2023, since then we invested $75,000 cash in, so in the next 6 month I need to find and deploy $125,000 more.

The goal is to find the cash to invest in 4-8 deals a year and do it consistently for the next 4.5 years.

For documenting the journey I’m writing this Build in Public Newsletter and hope to make some videos about this journey in the future.

Also during our Meet up, my fellow small business owner Lucy Zhao who created 4 businesses and still run 2 of them mentioned something very important, so I made a video on Why she invested in 22 Multifamily syndications last year 

My Resources

Investing in real estate so far for me is just like running a small business.

In this business, I was the main operator and did not get paid for many years.

My income is just accumulated over the years in house equity and then get rolled on to more houses.

2024 is the year to change that.

I feel like I learned enough about ways to make money in real estate. At the end of the day, real estate is just another business. It’s time to dive deep into learning how to become a better business owner and not an operator.

I just finished listening to Tony Robbins’ Creating Lasting Change and Time of Our Life.

Powerful stuffs.

More on those and how I am using them for my businesses in another email.

My friend Sanjay Das also just introduced to me the EOS (Entrepreneur Operating System) so bought 2 books on that: Traction and The Five Dysfunctions of a Team. He said it changed his business from 9 years of having no profit to finally profitable in year 10, and he learned how to build his team and everything is way better.

I will keep you update on what I learn from those books.

That’s it for this week, I hope you enjoy this first letter where I try “Build in Public” and here’s what I will end with…

Live with Passion! 😇

Q&A

Depending on how limited.

If you can save up $50,000 per year from your income to invest then start right away. I would put $25,000 in stocks and $25,000 in one syndication deal with someone I really like and trust with the business plan that I totally understand. After you understand more and have more capital, then you can start participating more actively.