How you know you've made it:

You get to stop doing business with assholes.

No asshole clients.

No asshole partners.

No asshole investors.

Don't identify yourself with any one business or one industry.

Be an open-minded opportunist.

A thread on how real estate investors, developers and operators can make millions a year and pay almost nothing in TAXES by using depreciation, bonus depreciation, and 1031 exchanges.

How it works:

Depreciation is the act of slowly, over time, deducting the initial expense of an asset against your taxable income. Generally over a 27.5 (residential) or 39 (commercial) yr time frame. So each year you can write off 2-3.6% of the purchase price against your income.

Thats a big deal. We're buying a new property, a $3MM self storage facility. Thats a $60k a year write off against about $260k in NOI and 200k in cashflow on a $3MM deal.

It makes 30% of our cashflow tax free.

Very powerful but there is much more to it...

Different parts of the asset can be depreciated on different schedules.

We'll have a cost segregation study done to split up the depreciable lifespan of different parts of the building. The raw land can't be depreciated so you have to give that a value.

But other items can be depreciated on a quicker timeline. A roof, road, sidewalk, fencing, walls, gates, doors, latches, flooring, air conditioners, pavers, curbing, landscaping, etc.

The IRS has a depreciation schedule for each type. Some parts are 5 yrs. Others 15 years...

A thread on how to turn $100 into a lot more:

People are spending a lot of money on their homes right now. Its time to go get some of that money and help out some of these people.

Sound silly? Good.

It really is this simple sometimes.

Lets go 👇

Get on your computer and buy a web domain.

Get a freelancer (upwork or fiverr) to make you a logo/flyer and get $45 worth of flyers printed at your local print shop.

Buy a box of sidewalk chalk if you really want to grind and get gritty.

Go downtown with the sidewalk chalk and write “pressure washing and home cleaning 888-555-1234” as many times as you can in high traffic areas.

Go to a middle class or high end neighborhood and hand out flyers on porches and wherever else.

Get creative. You might get ran off but its low risk. Target those with dirty payment.

Your cell phone will start ringing. Book all of the jobs for Saturday.

Rent a power washer Saturday morning with the other $50 and go make $300 in one day.

Do the same thing the next weekend and then buy a power washer. Then put $200 into a website and nurture a Google My Business location.

Get reviews, upload photos, make it look nice. 50% of your biz will come through here.

The hardest thing about entrepreneurship, real estate, or anything else worth doing:

You have to be able to look at incomplete information...

Or a complicated problem without a clear-cut solution...

And make a good decision on which way to proceed.

A thread 👇👇👇

There is nobody who can take you by the hand and lead you through a step by step guide to win.

Everybody's journey is different.

The 1,000 important decisions I made to win will look nothing like yours.

This is why success is so hard to teach..

Because there is one skill you need to have to win:

Resourcefulness.

The ability to find what you need and figure out solutions to problems that there are no correct answers to.

Life isn't a textbook.

You can't turn three pages back and look up the answer. You can't ask a teacher.

When you are an entrepreneur there is nobody out there who can help you answer problems except YOU.

And this is the opposite of what most people are used to doing.

High school and college teach you to comply and look up the answer and memorize. Google gives us answers to any question we have at our finger tips.

Except what to do when a problem in your business arises.

Time for a BOOK LIST.

I've read over 250 self-help and business books..

Heres a list of the ones that have had the largest influence on my life and career.

A thread:

Never Split the Difference - @VossNegotiation

It outlines and reinforces the fact that business, negotiation and any human interaction is inherently very emotional. Mirroring, tactical empathy, starting with no and labeling are all phenomenal.

The E-Myth Revisited - @MichaelEGerber

The first stop for any beginner. This is a great book about the importance of creating a business that can thrive without you. Preaches a lot of my favorite business principles like working on the things that are important but not urgent.

Entreleadership - @DaveRamsey

This book just has non stop quality advice about how to build a business the right way. Dave doesn’t preach about politics or religion. He just tells it like it is and tells the stories of what worked for him. Phenomenal read.

Ego is the Enemy - @RyanHoliday

Ryan preaches stoicism and how to handle emotions, rejection and stress. Managing that split second between an event and your reaction is what life is all about. It shows the importance of remaining humble and the dangers of overconfidence.

🤔 Thread: More of the wrong thing is less
(or, how I stepped off the hamster wheel)

I’m going to share a personal story with hope that it inspires at least one person to re-examine their definition of success 👇

Through hard work and an unfair share of luck, I’ve done some cool “bucket list” things in my career:

✅Raised VC from the worlds’ top firms
✅Helped build 100’s of millions in revenue from nothing
✅Rang the bell at the NYSE
✅Met & did deals with billionaires & business icons

These are things I dreamed about when I was young and I treasure some of the memories. But when they finally happened I felt surprisingly unfulfilled. I was scoring lots of points but didn’t feel like I was winning.

Then a few years ago during a board meeting I had a moment of clarity. I looked around the table at 10 people, all absurdly successful by financial measures. There wasn’t a single person I wanted to emulate. Most were unhealthy and several had told me that they were unhappy.

Within months I walked away from from a 7-figure salary, moved my family to Boulder, & haven’t looked back. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a capitalist & like money as much as anyone. But for me it's not the thing, and *more of the wrong thing is less*.

Why are states in Nigeria not paid their share of the oil and gas earnings in the currency it was earned in, i.e., the United States Dollars (USD)?

Crude oil in Nigeria is owned by the Federation — the Federal, State, & Local Govt. Shared as follows: 13% is deducted & paid to the oil and gas producing States; next, the Federal Government (FGN) gets 52.68%; the States get 26.72%, & the Local Governments get 20.60%.

When Nigerian crude oil is sold, the proceeds are in USD and get paid to the NNPC/CBN/JPMorgan Account in the US. The Oil taxes, e.g., Petroleum Profit taxes, are also in USD and are collected by the Federal Inland Revenue Service and paid to the Central Bank of Nigeria (CBN

The same thing applies to the royalty bonus collected by the Department of Petroleum Resources (DPR) and paid to the CBN. The CBN then converts the USD sales proceeds to Naira.

The CBN and Ministry of Finance then fund Federal agencies like NEMA and the Consolidated Revenue Fund in Naira, even the 13% derivation is paid in Naira. In other words, while the CBN retains the USD, the Federal, States, and LGAs get Naira

10 Key Takeaways from the book: The Emotionally Intelligent Investor

1. Investing success does NOT come from ignoring or suppressing emotion. Assuming that you have relevant expertise, disregarding intuition and empathetic feelings because they cannot be explained, is a mistake!

2. Self-awareness is the first and most important step in improving as an investor. An investment approach needs to fit with your unique set of motivations, personality traits, weaknesses, and strengths. Don’t try to be exactly like Warren Buffett if you are not like him!

3. Humans have certain common investing vulnerabilities, but everybody is unique in their susceptibility to them. Consider your weaknesses to be the investing biases and traps to which you are most prone.

4. Because we are constantly changing, introspection should be incorporated into the daily and weekly routines of any investor. Try writing in a trading/Investing journal.