Using Land Flipping to Create Passive Income and Lifestyle Freedom with Jack Bosch – EP 273

Justin Donald: What's up, Jack? Welcome to the show.

Jack Bosch: Thank you very much for having me. I'm excited to be here.

Justin Donald: Well, it was fun being on your show just recently, and it was good getting a chance to get to know you. I've heard great things from afar, and I have to say our conversation left me very intellectually stimulated because we got into really cool conversations about legacy and kids and having kids work in your business and in the family office and learn how to invest. So, we have to dive into that today for sure.

Jack Bosch: Sure. We'd love to. Yes, we'd love to.

Justin Donald: Before we do, I think it would be really good to kind of dig in. I've had, I think, only one other person before on the podcast on land as an investment. And I've done plenty of land deals myself, and often I feel like they're not set up for success, but I know you can set them up for success. You have to have the right deal, the right strategy. You've got to be careful. You're not sitting and holding where you can't earn income, but it costs you a lot. And money dries up, right? So, I'm curious why you feel land flipping maybe beats traditional real estate. I've had a lot of people on the show that have done cash flow investments on self-storage, multifamily, mobile home parks, industrial. Those are probably the four major ones. So, I'd love to get your take on it.

Jack Bosch: Yeah. Well, I'm not going to say that it beats any other real estate investment strategy per se, because you can make a ton of money with any kind of real estate investment strategy. So, I'm not going to be here bashing other real estate investment strategies and so on and so forth. I just found it to be the easiest and simplest entry strategy to get into real estate because I half-jokingly like to say there's no tennis, toilets, and termites involved. So, in other words, when my wife and I discovered land, we’re both immigrants from Germany and Honduras. I'm from Germany, obviously, and my wife is from Honduras. We met here, fell in love with each other, fell in love with the country, decided to stay here, got jobs, got disillusioned by the jobs very quickly, and then started realizing we needed to do something. We wanted to go into real estate.

We simply failed at all other real estate strategies, at least at the beginning. Now, I have done all kinds of other stuff, but we didn't know how to estimate repairs. We didn't know how to do all these kinds of things. And when we stumbled into land, what we figured out is the most important things, like, yes, you can do land completely wrong and get stuck with it and end up pouring money into it. But what we discovered really is you can make a lot of money with land in a very simple format if you do basically land wholesaling or land seller financing. So, in other words, we really specialize in finding pieces of land that owners have had for sometimes 20, 30 years, or they have inherited.

They really don't want it anymore. They're sick and tired of paying these property taxes, of just paying HOA fees and paying maintenance for their properties. That's all the stuff that if you buy and hold land, and you just don't do anything with it. And let's say you bought it on the west side of town, but the city's going to the east side of town, the value hasn't gone up. Nothing has happened. There's no benefit in owning the land unless you like to go out there, spend your weekends on there. But other than that, there's no benefit. These people are very frustrated often with their pieces of land, and because they’re owned free and clear, banks don't like to lend on land. They have held on to these properties for a long time.

They simply are like, to them, it's like a sunk cost. They're like, "You know what? I don't care about it. I don't want it.” And they give you these pieces of land sometimes for $0.20, $0.30 on a dollar. So, the very first deal I got was an infill lot in a rural community. It was worth not a high-value piece of land. It was worth $10,000, and I paid $400 for it, and I got it. And I literally sold it to the next-door neighbor that same day for $4,000. I didn't have to estimate repairs. I didn't have to go even look at it. In this case, I did drive there because it was many, many years ago. Google Street View, Google Maps didn't even exist back at the time, but I simply was able to just go there, and the neighbor walks across the street and says like, "What are you doing?” It’s like, “I'm looking to sell the property.” He's like, “I want to buy it,” and buys it right there from me.

Now, we typically sell about 30% to 40% of our properties to the neighbors, so those people in the neighborhood. But the key here is that with land flipping, why it is something that is such a great strategy is that if you focus on finding the people that don't want them anymore, they give you bigger discounts than in the housing area. There's nothing to estimate, nothing to repair, and all you do is you mark it up a little bit to a still bargain value so that even that lot on the west side of town, where nothing is going on, somebody still wants that land because nothing is going on. Not everyone wants to build in the path of growth, and then five years from now, or 10 years from now, has 2,700 neighbors around them.

Some people want five acres half an hour outside of town with the hopes that nobody moves there and that they can actually have space and have peace and quiet. Now, these lots are still worth $50,000. You can get them sometimes for $10,000 or $15,000, turn around, sell them for $35,000, make a $20,000 profit, and you do that very quickly without having any kind of estimating repairs and any kind of boots on the ground, and those kinds of things, and often actually, without even using your own money. So, as an asset class, land wholesaling can be even simpler than household selling, 10 times simpler than house fix and flipping, and a million times simpler than multifamily or other asset classes like that, which by the way, I'm all involved in most of those right now.

I own 700 apartment units. I have rental houses and those kinds of things. But what I've done, talking about, to your subject of the Lifestyle Investor, what we have done, we have made land flipping our cash machine, then taking the profits, invested that into buy-and-hold cash flow real estate, and now all our bills are being paid from that real estate.

Justin Donald: Yeah, I love that. And part of why I wanted to have you on the show, I mean, number one is I really enjoyed our time and just really think the world of you, and your values, just the way you look at the world, the way you want to help people. And then, number two, I feel like this is very lifestyle investor-esque. It's very lifestyle-friendly. You flipped over 4,000 properties, but what I also love is that you've helped over a thousand people become millionaires through your programs and products. And I'd love to hear even a story of one of your students that has had success. Maybe it's someone who just got started, now they're a millionaire. But what did that look like along the way? What were some of their stories of land acquisition?

Jack Bosch: Yeah. Just to make sure this is proper, our goal is to get 1,000 people to millionaire status. We don't entirely know if we are there yet. I think we're very close because sometimes what people do is they learn from us and then they go off and three years later or a year later or two years, or five years later, they're millionaires, but they never reported back to us. So, we kind of have a little bit of a hard time exactly measuring how many people, but I know it's hundreds that we have turned into millionaires, and hopefully, I think, based on our calculations, we could be close to the thousands already. So, to your question, yeah, like what happens is you're right. It is a very millionaire lifestyle investor-esque kind of business.

Because, again, the fact that you don't have to go look at the properties means that you can do deals anywhere in the country. Like, for example, there's this concept called virtual house wholesaling. There's a few people that teaches out there, so like virtual house wholesaling, you can find houses anywhere in the country, and then you just make them an offer, and then you wholesale it to somebody else. But the reality is that if you want to do this right, you still have boots on the ground, right? And somebody's got to go look in that house and see how outdated everything is, what condition the roof is, and what condition the foundation is. And we tried that too after having done a lot of land deals. And what happened 8 out of 10 times is that the people that were the boots on the ground ended up stealing the deals from us.

So, we're like, "Okay, let's go back to just land.” Because the land, that doesn't happen. So, in other words, because in land, you're dealing with a seller directly. The seller might be in New York City. The land might be in Texas. I'm in Arizona, and the buyer might be in Florida wanting to move to Texas. So, it is 100% location independent. Nobody goes and looks at the property. Everyone just works off aerial pictures. And as a result, you can be anywhere you want to be. And we have worked out some virtualization methods, that if you have like a virtual mailbox and a virtual phone number through services like RingCentral and OpenPhone, and things like that, you can be anywhere in the world.

As a matter of fact, one of our coaches in our company is a guy in Germany. He sits in Hamburg, Germany, does about 40 to 50 deals a year. Average profit, about $20,000. So, it's about an $800,000 to $1 million a year business sitting in Hamburg, Germany but does the deals in the US. And for example, during COVID, when the borders were closed, he couldn't even enter the United States, but he continues to do deals in the US.

So, from an example point of view, it's very lifestyle-ish because it allows you to automate a lot of things. It allows you to use mailing houses and call centers, and things so that you really only deal with the people that want to sell you the property and the people that want to buy the property from you. And even that one can be outsourced to a realtor. And so, you can enjoy your life. So, for example, one of our coaches, Aaron, is, by the way, all of our coaches are former students. So, all our coaches in our company started as students. And Aaron, for example, is a product of foster care. So, he came from the foster care system. Obviously, that's a tough upbringing. He went to the military afterward, then he paid for his college.

He started becoming an engineer, but he abandoned it. I think he finished, or he might have not. I don’t know. And then he started doing some Amazon and other things. Now, Aaron is an outsourcing and automation expert. He now does about 30 to 50 deals a year. Again, profit’s about $20,000, $25,000 a pop, and he does it in five to eight hours a week. Now, that's a lifestyle business.

Justin Donald: That is. That's incredible. People watching this and listening to this, I think that resonates that you could, in a much less period of time for what you're spending or whatever your career is or your business is, whatever company you may work for in a fraction of that, or let's just call it half that time, make two, three, four, five times as much.

Jack Bosch: Yeah. Now, given, of course, on day one, he didn't make that, right? I'm not going to be here telling you like, "Yeah, this is get-rich-quick,” or anything like that. No, there's work involved, of course. But what Aaron did and what all our students now are doing, and one of his, like an attorney that was really sick and tired of being an attorney, in his first year, he made $370,000, and then he quit as an attorney. They moved to Mexico, bought a beach house in Mexico, and they continued doing deals from Mexico in the US now. I mean, that's a beautiful lifestyle business there. But the point is what Aaron did is, over time, little by little, he just implemented more and more and more outsourcing pieces to the point that now he just basically works Fridays on his business and perhaps a couple of hours on Tuesdays or so.

Justin Donald: Well, that's nice. Something else, Jack, that I love about your program is your concept of forever cash. So, you have this philosophy, but I would love for you to explain exactly what the forever cash model is, and really how it can help people escape their earn and spend lifecycle. “I earn this much, I spend this much, I'm keeping up with the Joneses, or I'm just getting by. I don't have a whole lot of extra capital.” How do we solve for that?

Jack Bosch: We talked a little bit about that, about your philosophy in my podcast, The Jack Bosch Show, which I don't know when each of them are being released, but the way we discovered this concept of the forever cash principles of philosophy is that we made mistakes like everyone else. My dad is a high school teacher. My mom's a stay-at-home mom. My wife's dad died when she was nine months old, and our mom never remarried. And her mom is an elementary school teacher. So, we did not grow with any kind of wealth philosophy other than get a good education, get a good job, like the traditional kind of one.

So, what we did when we started making money, we intuitively were kind of almost like afraid. We're like, "What if this stops? What if this was just a fluke? What if there's no more pieces of land that anyone wants to sell to us? What if we can't then make any more money?” So, kind of intuitively, what we did as we started making really good money with this and we became millionaires in 18 months using the strategy, is we just put money off to the sideline and didn't spend it. We continued living in our little starter home that we bought for $151,000 in 2001, a three-bedroom, two-bath home. We continued driving our old cars and so on.

But then one of the things we did is we started selling, not just wholesaling these properties, so not just taking a $50,000 property for $10,000 and selling it for $30,000 and making $20,000, but we started also selling these properties with seller financing. And when we started seller financings, let's say you have a $50,000 property, you have it on a contract, let's say, for $10,000, you have two choices. You can sell it for $35,000 and make $25,000, and I'm ignoring closing costs here just for the simplicity of the calculations, or I can say I put it out on the market for full market value, which usually means it takes a long time to sell.

But I can say, "You know what, on the market I'm offering, you don't have to pay me $50,000. You can just pay me $10,000 or $12,000 down, and then the remaining $38,000 you pay in monthly payments over the next 15 years.” So, we started doing that, and it's actually way more profitable to do deals like that.

Justin Donald: Yeah. You're the bank.

Jack Bosch: You can actually turn land into cash flow because if you look at it, if you have it on a contract for 10 and you're getting a $12,000 down payment, that's enough to pay the title company, pay the seller, put $1,000 in your pocket, and now you bought the property, sold the property $1,000 in your pocket, but they still owe you $38,000 and you create cash flow. So, we did some deals with 15 years cash flow, some deals with five-year cash flow, some deals with three-year cash flow, some deals with seven-year cash flow. And as we kept doing these deals, about five, seven years later, we started realizing, "This is amazing, but all of these notes are starting to stop. They’re winding down,” so we actually have to start recreating all this cash flow.

So, that's when we had an epiphany, and we're like, "Oh, there's a difference between how you apply your cash and what it produces,” and we classified it into three things: one-time cash, temporary cash, and forever cash. So, the quick definition of that is one-time cash is very simply, you do something and you get me once, and you get paid once. It's like your neighbor asks like you're a teenager, and your neighbor says, "Can you mow my lawn?” You mow their lawn, you get $20 or $50, and that's it. You're done. You have the money. There's no repeat in here. You did the work. A job is a one-time cash thing, too, because even though people say, "Well, I get paid twice a month,” well, try to not show up at work and see how quickly you're not going to get paid anymore. You really get paid for the work that you deliver. So, it's one-time cash.

Now, what we realized is a wholesale deal, getting that $50,000 property for $10,000, selling it for $35,000 is also one-time cash. If you stop flipping, the income stops. However, it's a higher quality one-time cash, because what is better? Spend 10 hours mowing a lawn and make $200, or is it better 10 hours working on a deal and make $25,000? Obviously, it's the higher quality one-time cash, but it still is one-time cash, meaning if you ever stop, income stops. So, we're like, "Okay, we need to do more of these seller financing deals.” So, the second thing is then temporary cash. Temporary cash, the best example is a seller-financing kind of deal.

Because in the seller financing situation, it's like you do the work once, you find the property, you market the property, you sell the property, you sign the agreement, all of that is done once, but now the money comes in month after month, after month, after month, but not forever, only for three years, five years, 10 years, or 15 years, whatever you arrange in the note. Now, that's better because what we did in the first six months of doing this business, we built up $5,000 in passive cash flow, which at the time was more money than we made in our job. So, we were financially free temporarily for the next three to seven years. But what it did, it allowed us to quit our jobs. By that time, the green card had arrived. We were in the process. It took me five and a half years to work with an H1B Visa until I got the green card and so on.

So, once I had the green card, I was able to quit my job. And then we just poured all that energy into the time that before I had spent on the job, now into this business, and we skyrocket like that. But the $5,000 a month were a crucial part to my financial freedom, but we realized it's only going to be for like seven years until all these loans are paid off, and then you have to restart it. So, that's temporary cash. So, temporary cash is better than one-time cash because it provides you with temporary stability and the ability to sit back, see, "What am I going to do with my life? Why am I going to do this?” and if the cash flow comes in without you having to do anything in addition. So, this is just money coming into the mailbox.

Justin Donald: And you've got a little bit of interest that's helping out. So, let's say instead of taking 25,000 one time, you're probably making closer to 50,000 over that seven-year, whatever the term is. Yeah, you're getting the asset value and then the lending interest value.

Jack Bosch: Exactly. And we typically charge about between 12% and 15% interest, which in the land space is very normal. Because if you go to a bank today and you want a loan on a piece of land, first of all, they're going to ask you for about 50% down payment, and then on the other 50%, they're going to charge you about 10%, 11%. When we sell a piece of land with seller financing, we’re only asking for a 20% down payment, and we're financing 80%. And because of that, we can actually raise, the more you finance, the higher your interest rate you can actually charge. So, we're charging 12% to 15% and that obviously accumulates very quickly.

Justin Donald: Yeah. And obviously, if someone defaults at any point, that land is still yours. You haven't deeded that over to them. So, you take it back and you restart the process again with a new buyer.

Jack Bosch: Exactly, right. So, you get it all back, and then you get another down payment, and the cash flow starts again. So, financially speaking, really the default is like the best that could happen to you. Philosophically speaking, core value speaking, I don't want people to default. I'm working with them for three, four, five, six months, as long as they're willing to work with us. We have restructured notes, lowered people's payments because I want them to have the ownership of the property. I want them, just like, for me, it was the fulfillment of the American dream of owning a piece of real estate in the US, coming here as an immigrant.

I want our customers to also have that American dream and the ability to say, “I own a piece of America here.” But financially speaking, it's the best that can happen. So, what we realized at that point, and that's about six years in, now, we have done lots of flips. We created cash, cash flow, have money in the bank. We realized that a lot of these notes are starting to dwindle down and that we have to go rebuild it again. And that's what we realized what we really need in our life is what we call forever cash. And forever cash is something where you do the work once, and you get paid really forever. I mean, I'm not a musician.

If I would be Michael Jackson, well, Michael Jackson has been dead for, I don’t know how many years, but his estate makes something like $50 million a year. Elvis Presley’s estate makes something like $60 million to $100 million a year. That is the ultimate passive income that goes for even past your death. Now, I'm not a musician. I'm not an artist. I'm not Michael Jordan that has a shoe deal with Nike, right? So, the simplest thing we could do is just simply think about, well, we are already in real estate. We really like real estate. By this point, we are experts in real estate because we've done so many deals, we know about title work and title issues, and thing.

The simple next step is, instead of just like doing more deals, let's take some money off the table, utilize our land business as a cash machine, and take every surplus dollar and move that over into forever cash real estate, meaning cash flow, improved property real estate. First, we started with rental houses, then we moved to apartment complexes. Now, we also have industrial and commercial property. And we have a portfolio that continues to grow and that spits out that we own. Some of that we own with investors because it was too big for us to take down, so we syndicated some deals. But other properties like a 90-unit apartment complex in North Carolina, we own simply, my wife and I now own that thing, and that's just it's a cash machine.

It just like spits out cash and other properties in different parts of the country do the same thing. And so, now we basically look at it. Now, we understood it. You focus on creating cash. Like your first thing is focus on expanding your ability to generate cash, one-time cash. There's nothing wrong with it, but it's only a means to an end. The goal of one-time cash is not for you to go buy a bigger house and spend it. The goal is to make as much as possible, put it off to the sideline for a short period of time, and then invest it into something that provides more cash flow so that, over time, you get one cash flow resource, another cash flow source, another cash flow source. And it's like money pouring in from everywhere for literally ever.

And at that point of time, at some point of time, that passive cash flow from these forever cash sources exceeds your wildest dreams. And at that point of time, you do whatever you want to do in life. And if you want to go rescue baby seals in the North Pole or something, then you do that because your lifestyle is being paid by the assets that you were able to purchase.

Justin Donald: Oh, I love that. It's beautiful and it's systematic and you have a framework built around it, which I think is great. I talk a lot about this in the Lifestyle Investor about get to your survival income number and focus on whatever it costs you to live and just get by and then get to your lifestyle number. And then everything above and beyond that is surplus income. And as you get surplus income, there's one of two options here. You can either upgrade your lifestyle or you can upgrade your ability to earn the forever cash like you're talking about and grow your wealth, and use some of those dollars for impact, which we talked about on your show.

And so, I love that methodology, and something that I really admire about you, it's something that was important to me was instead of splurging on lifestyle, when we had all this surplus income above what it cost us to live, we focused on diversifying, investing more, putting 100% of that towards impact and wealth creation, creating more diversified income streams. And you did something very similar, but we just had kind of a really cool experience this last month, where I've got, I don't know, somewhere in the range of about 100 plus different income streams. And it's built up over time. It didn't happen overnight.

But we had 15 or 16, it was either, I can't remember, let's just call it 16 different income streams, that, A, kicked out regular recurring money or, B, had a return of capital or, C, had a deal go full cycle and we got the full return. Maybe we had gotten part of it before, and then this was the end of it. But on those 16 deals, we made more in the last month than I ever made in any business that I had built for the year prior to starting Lifestyle Investor. And so, I had started several other companies, bought other companies. I'd done a bunch of real estate, and it was literally the most I had ever made, and it happened just from passive distributions.

Jack Bosch: This is something that I’m learning now, right now, as our means have gotten to the point where I’m actually, where my wife and I consciously started to make the next transition in a way. It’s not a transition because I’m not leaving the other area. We continue to have a land flipping business. We have continued to have a land coaching business. We continue to have a real estate asset and an investment business. But now, we also have been recently adding the aspect of being just a business, passive business investor. So, we recently had the opportunity to invest in SpaceX by Elon Musk, which is a private company. It’s not public. But one of their executives who are selling some companies, some shares, and through a friend of mine, we were able to get in there.

I was currently considering an investment in a completely consumer kind of food, kind of item company, I think. And I mean, probably not all of them will turn out great. I’m sure SpaceX will, but I’m an investor in a bank that I helped create and I’m a board of their advisors and things like that. And I can already see that some of those things are going to turn out exponentially so well that they will make a massive impact in our income, in our net worth. But again, you couldn’t do that without first having focused on building up your cash machine as I call it, and then having that turn into that income stream because now, if I invest whatever dollar amount into a company and that goes down the drain, guess what? In the next month or three months or six months, that money is being replaced from these assets that I do have from these cash flowing assets. We’re going to replace, then yes, I lost some money, but it’s almost like, it feels like it’s monopoly money because it just keeps coming in, like whatever you do with it. You burn it. Of course, we don’t. We are very respectful of it, but you could technically put a bonfire and burn it and the next month, more comes. And of course, we would never do that.

Justin Donald: And I love that point. I want to double down on that because that’s a philosophy I also have. We have very similar philosophies, which I love. And also, by the way, I’m a fellow SpaceX investor, huge fan.

Jack Bosch: All right, very cool.

Justin Donald: I’ve invested in all of Elon Musk’s companies because I just think he’s going to continue to do great things and he is one of the smartest people on the planet. And I would like to ride his coattails.

Jack Bosch: Right. I always say, never bet against Elon.

Justin Donald: That’s right, that’s right. But you made a comment here that was really significant and I just want to make sure our audience didn’t miss it. You talked about how you used your surplus income to do different investments that would exponentially or could exponentially grow your wealth. What I have identified and noticed is that a lot of people starting out and investing who don’t know better start with really risky things, early-stage companies, angel type of investments and seed and pre-seed rounds, or just other things that are super speculative. And so, if you lose that money, it’s gone. Now, you’re like, it takes so much time to work just to get that money back, right? But your comment is what I love talking about, which is I worked hard saving 15%, 20%, 25% of what I was making every year. And at peak years, I was saving 50% of what I was making because my goal was not to have our lifestyle increase, it was to have more investible capital.

And so, that surplus money went to create– I mean, at first, the extra money I had went to create passive income. Once I had all the passive income, now I have surplus money. I didn’t waste the money that got me to financial freedom on risky deals. I waited until I had surplus income that I know is going to come again next month and next month and next month to make risky investments for that portion of my portfolio. And if you follow what the billionaires do, I studied all the single-family office data. It’s about 1% of their net worth or less in early angel deals. It’s about 4% to 10% in venture, which is a collection of deals. You’re in a fund, but it’s still early stage, just not that early, not as early as seed and pre-seed. And so, it’s like using that extra money to try to get those exponential returns when it’s recurring. This is recurring surplus passive income and I just wanted to kind of double click that again because I think it’s such an important point. Like, create the passive income first. I had financial freedom before.

Jack Bosch: This means with conservative…

Justin Donald: Yes, conservative.

Jack Bosch: Proven investments that actually, that you have an extremely high likelihood of actually making it into a cashflow investment. You don’t want to take your seed money and go to the casino with it. You want to make sure you have your seed money to produce reliable income. Then once you’re in the surplus area, you take that and you go to any casino you want to with that, like…

Justin Donald: That’s right. And I think you’re probably similar to me, correct me if I’m wrong, but for me, I had financial freedom before I was ever a millionaire. So, my net worth was not even a million dollars when I had more money coming in than what it cost me to live.

Jack Bosch: Yes, correct.

Justin Donald: Okay, so you’re the same. And so, but the more cash flow you get, the natural byproduct is more net worth, right? So, it’s like you can focus on this. You got real utility over here on the cash flow side. So, I don’t want to swing for the fences. I want singles and doubles. I want to buy my time back. Once I own my time, then maybe I could go for a triple or a home run. periodically, not all the time, right? And the goal is to just keep growing that, and as you grow it, diversify it. And the more wealth you have, the more impact minded, I hope, people can become. I think that we can have impact at any level, any time, and I think it’s great to be generous no matter what we’re making, that some dollars go to something that does good in the world, but the more money you make, I think there’s a responsibility to double, triple, quadruple those efforts. And I know you agree with me on that.

Jack Bosch: Absolutely. I mean, everything you just said, I’m just like nodding, nodding, yes, absolutely, yeah. The thing is, yeah, on the impact side, I came to the conclusion that I’m never going to be running an orphanage or something like that. I’m never going to be the person that runs a big foundation or so. It’s just not me, but I care deeply about these things. What I’m really good at is creating businesses and running businesses and things like that and have those businesses produce income. So, I just chose that I’m going to be the financier in a way behind those things. So, we are just heavily donating to causes that are important to us, where other people, they’re called upon, that they’re called to the service of actually fulfilling those purposes. They’re the ones that they’re not good at making money, but they need money to help people. So, we are funding them and they’re doing the work, and I think it’s a great symbiotic relationship between the two of us.

Justin Donald: That’s awesome. And what I will say, we’ve got a lot of people that listen here and that watch this show that are eager to take the next step. And in fact, when we wrap things up, I’m going to ask a question that I ask every week that kind of helps move people in that direction, but for someone listening or watching today, Jack, what’s one step they could take to start moving or living this forever cash philosophy?

Jack Bosch: Great question. So, a few things go through my mind there. The first thing is– where do I start? There’s so many different things I could say here. So, to start it, like, look through your expenses and start eliminating a whole bunch of expenses. Like, do you really need subscriptions through everything? Now, I’m not a fan of, like, if you want your daily Starbucks, go get your daily Starbucks. I’m not a big fan of eating just rice and beans. Nothing wrong with that. My wife is from Honduras. That’s one of the staple foods there. It’s delicious, rice and beans, but I’m not one, like, there’s no joy. If you want to have joy, you want to enjoy some of this stuff, you want to have some things, go out for dinner and things like that, but I bet that almost everyone with any kind of normal income, wastes probably several thousand dollars a year on stupid little decisions, subscriptions for that they have not just Netflix, but have all the different streaming services.

Well, probably, you’re watching two of them and not five of them, so just get rid of the other two. look through your credit card bills, look through some of the things, and just eliminate some of the money. But what I like to do then is, what I like to recommend is go open a separate bank account. And ideally, find a tiny little bank on the other side of town that you don’t just drive by all the time and simply open a bank account there and then simply have some money funneled over into that bank account every month so that it’s out of your reach because a lot of people, when they see money in their bank account, it burns a hole in their pocket and they feel the need to just spend it.

Well, get it out of your main bank account, get it somewhere else, have accumulate there. That would be one thing to just at least start saving something because while it doesn’t take a lot of money to make money, it takes education to make money. Eventually, money will come in handy to actually place some of these investments. And the next thing you want to do, the other thing, if I may add a second piece, is just simply start educating yourself. Like, there’s all these free information out there. I mean, we have hundreds of videos on YouTube that you can watch about how land flipping, generally speaking, works. You can learn about the real estate terminology in the ChatGPT world. You can ask ChatGPT about what does this mean and what does that mean, financial concepts, things like that, and just spend 20 minutes a day just on the drive home.

I just heard the other day that if you have a Tesla, Grok is included and implemented in the Tesla. If you hold it and say– I don’t have a Tesla yet, but if probably buy one, say, sometime later in this year, I’m thinking about it, but you can turn on Grok and you can actually tell, “Hey, Grok, I want you now, every time I drive home, I want you to teach me some financial concepts.” And literally, you have a tutorial going on, an interactive tutorial with a Grok or ChatGPT, where you can start learning business knowledge, business 101, finance 101, things like that. So, you can start making yourself familiar with, overall, the world of business, the business concept, real estate 101.

When I started, I didn’t even know what the word deed meant. I thought deed was something to do with church, because in church they tell you, do good deeds, not bad deeds. And then I started, because, and from Germany, the real estate language, I knew how to speak English, but I didn’t know the real estate lingo. I didn’t know what the 2x4 is and drywall and all this different wording around it. So, I had to learn that lingo. Well, today, it’s everywhere. I had to buy dictionaries, literally, real estate dictionaries, and go through there. I found them the other day and have all my notes in there. Today, you simply go pull up some videos and think and have all these free resources teach you all of this. And as you build more knowledge, you’ll start seeing more opportunities.

Justin Donald: Yeah, that’s a great answer. You know, something else that I’m really impressed with, that I want you to highlight this part of your story is even just the patience you have to get nice things for yourself. So, it’s not that you subscribe to the fire movement and you go super scarcity mindset and you don’t spend any money on anything and you stop your Starbucks and eat your ramen noodles. So, it’s not that. I really want to live an abundant life and I want to be able to do a lot of things that inspire me and create memories and experiences with my family. I like spending money on experiences way more than stuff, material possessions, but early in my career and even today, the home that we own has always been, it’s been worth much less than what we could afford. We have always been a decade or even two decades behind on what we probably could do from a total purchase price and to a total mortgage price.

And something that you are saying on your show that I’d love for you to repeat here is kind of your patience. And when you transitioned from your starter home, you moved into a much nicer home, and then you eventually moved into a gorgeous home. But you could have done it way sooner than you did. You were patient and you would rather put money to play for your lifestyle and creating your passive income than in something that took away from that, even though it might feel nice to have a bigger, fancier home.

Jack Bosch: Yeah, absolutely. So, we bought our house in 2001. So, it took me three years. I came to this country in 1997, took me four years to build credit, enough to buy a house, and we bought a simple starter home, $151,000 just two months before my wife and I got married. And a little old fashioned, I wanted to make sure I have a house for us. And my wife is an MBA and everything. She’s the co-founder of this business, so she’s a powerhouse, but still traditional in the sense that she’s like from Latin America and thing, and I’m, as the man of the house, kind of like, I felt like I wanted to have that, I wanted to provide that. And it was wonderful. And it’s wonderful. We are married for almost 25 years now and…

Justin Donald: Amazing.

Jack Bosch: So, we bought the house and we stayed in that house. In that house, we started our business in our living room. We had this formal living room kind of concept and then the kitchen with the family room and nobody used the formal living room. So, we put the office desks in there and that’s how we started working. And then first on the weekends, then I quit my job and then even our first two employees came to the house and we put two extra office desks into our office, so we didn’t have an office expense.

And we started doing this and our neighbors, this normal neighborhood, the neighborhood was a high school teacher, the other neighbor plumber, they’re across the street. I don’t know where they worked. And just the point is that within 18 months, we’re millionaires. Within three or four years, we had built an eight-figure business, but we kept living in that house for almost 10 years before we then moved into a 5,500-square-foot home with a double staircase and semi-custom home. And then after a few years in that house, well, yeah, almost from 2010 to 2019, nine years in that house, we then ultimately moved into our dream home, which is a 7,100-square-foot custom home on an acre with beautiful, gorgeous mountain views and et cetera, et cetera.

And so, that’s kind of like, we even drove our old Chevy– not the Chevy. It was a Geo Prizm and an old 4Runner for years. And nobody knew, as multimillionaires in a way, we used to go to the local pub and the local, like, the sports bar, eat nachos and have a beer, and just because we never thought of ourselves as all of a sudden, this hotshot people, we just figured out a way to make money. And it didn’t really change us as people, I want to say. And I think to this day, it doesn’t change us people.

Now, we go stay in five-star hotels and I got a 911 convertible in the garage and things like that. But I could have afforded that 911 convertible turbo in year two of doing this, but I bought it three years ago. I bought it three years ago because, at that point, it just didn’t affect. It’s a do that. It’s a car that, yes, it’s not going to lose all its value. Eventually, it’s going to come back, but still, it can easily lose a hundred thousand dollars in value over a few years. And I just didn’t, if I would’ve done it back then, I would’ve burned the growth money, the early money that we needed to grow. Now, it doesn’t even affect our net worth or it doesn’t make a dent into anything. Now, it’s finally a reward for that. And that’s just how we like to live.

Having said that, one of the non-negotiables we always had is that every year, we go visit family in both countries. So, every year, we go through, we spend three to four weeks in Germany because I’m the only one of my family here. My parents are in Germany. My brother’s in Germany. All my cousins and uncles and aunts are in Germany. Some high school friends are in Germany. So, I’ll go. Every year in summer, we go for three to four weeks to Germany, travel through Europe. And now, my wife’s mother comes, lives with us for most of the year. But before that happened, we actually would also go to Honduras all the time and visit there and spend money on that.

Travel money was always money that is a must have, but I didn’t feel the need to buy a fancy car. I mean, we bought eventually a nice BMW X5 and so on once the other cars kind of broke down, but I never needed to upgrade and show the neighbors what we have done and so on. Keeping up with the Joneses was just never, I think because the Joneses don’t pay your bills, the Joneses don’t pay your retirement. Your neighbors are not responsible for your financials. You’re responsible for financials. And if you live just to show off to your neighbors, you’re going to just regret it later on because you waste so much money early.

Justin Donald: Yeah. You said that so well. I love it. What a great– I kind of want to end right here because it was so good, but we have to get into at least one little bit of legacy. You’ve got kids, I’ve got a daughter. We’ve talked about what that would look like and making sure that they’re financially educated and prepared, and could they ever come work in the business or, in my end, I’ve talked about how maybe it’s a private foundation that my daughter eventually comes and works and I’d be thrilled if she came and worked in the family office and learned how to invest and helped us do that.

But I’d love to just have you share some of your thoughts around this because I think you’re very wise in the way that you’re setting up. I think we have to be careful when we have amassed a lot of wealth and we have done very well. We have to be careful how we teach that to our kids, and I think you’re very wise in the way that you’ve gone about doing it.

Jack Bosch: Yeah, well, thank you. I hope so. I mean, my daughter is 17, or by the time this is probably broadcast, at 18, she turns 18 next week. She’s a senior in high school right now. And we always told her very clearly that she’s living an exceptionally privileged life. When we went to Honduras, we always made sure that we go into the poorest areas, that we donate some money there to orphanages and things like that, that she’s part of that, that she keeps her feet on the ground and sees that the life she’s living is not normal.

And then I think that was one successful thing, that she is very grounded and she doesn’t spend money easily. And then if something costs more than 20 bucks, she’s like, text us. Can I go spend this? And I think that’s a success. But from a legacy point of view, it’s like she's very artistic but also loves business. So, it’s like she loves art. She loves art galleries. When she turned 16, I told her, you’re not getting a car. You can use one of our cars, but what do you want? She’s like, okay, I don’t need a car. I want a piece of art. I was like, okay, a certain piece of art. So, we bought her that piece of art. Snd she loves it and she’s going to probably keep that piece of art for the rest of her life.

But the thing is, I always told her, Sophia, you can do whatever you want in life. You can become a zookeeper if you want. You can do whatever really you want to do, but you do need to understand business if you want to become an artist. The most successful artists in this world are also the most successful marketers. Like, we talked about Andy Warhol, he’s like a fantastic artist. Stuff sells for millions of dollars. While he is alive, it already sold that because he became a master networker and got his name out there. There’s many, many artists that die in poverty because even though they’re doing amazing art, because they understand nothing about business. So, it’s like you got to understand business because whatever you’re going to do, it’s going to have to be marketed, it’s going to have to be run somehow and so on.

And even if we just use it to manage what you eventually will inherit from us and don’t just run it into the ground, then it has its purpose. And she’s like, she fully understands that. And so, she’s excited about business. She understands business. She wants to work in a business capacity, ideally, perhaps combine it with some art thing. So, we are talking about her coming to the family business and us creating a branch of some kind of like a chain of art galleries or something like that. We have particularly one role model in mind of a company that does really well with beautiful art galleries, beautiful art and different things. Very profitable, we believe. And so, anyway, but also, she wants to come along to the real estate meetings and so on. So, I basically groomed her along, but without forcing her is the key.

Justin Donald: Yeah. That’s so beautiful.

Jack Bosch: It’s like, if she wants to become just– again, if she wants to become an artist, great, become an artist, but at least, you’ll know how to market yourself when you’ll become a successful artist because I truly believe in the art world. For example, the difference between somebody who is successful and not successful has nothing to do with talent. It is just simply how do you get yourself in front of the right people, in the right galleries, in the right things. And if you have talent, like equal talent, the one with marketing skills will massively succeed. The other one, the world will never hear from.

Justin Donald: Ah, that’s so beautiful. Thank you for sharing that, Jack. It’s been a pleasure having you on the show. Where can our viewers and listeners learn more about you?

Jack Bosch: Sure. The easiest way, if you want to learn about our land flipping method, you can simply go to LandProfitFun, like F-U-N, like having fun, LandProfitFun.com. And under LandProfitFun.com, you can download what we call a 30-day blueprint. So, it’s a very detailed document that actually shows you how you can set up your own land business in 30 days. You can go to LandFlipping (dot), I think it’s LandFlipping.com, and there, sometimes we do certain kind of multi-day webinar series where we go live for an hour a day and things like that.

And then, of course, I have my podcast under JackBosch.com, yeah, The Jack Bosch Show. And YouTube, JackBosch.com, there’s a seven-part series you can watch there. Lots of different places to find it out. The thing is, with Bosch, it’s B-O-S-C-H. There’s a C between the S and the H. Often the American way to spell it would be without the C, but it’s B-O-S-C-H. So, if you look at that on YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, you’ll find lots of opportunities to find stuff about us.

Justin Donald: That’s awesome. Well, thank you. I hope people tune in. We’ll have all this in the show notes. And I really like to end every episode with a question. I kind of prompted this earlier with something we were talking about. But I just want– if you are watching and you are listening, so Jack, you don’t have to answer. This is for everyone else. What is one step you can take today to move towards financial freedom and really living a life that you truly desire on your terms? So, again, not a life by default, but a life by design. And my challenge is what– that really, that you just find one thing, it could be more than one, but at least one thing from Jack today that you can implement that can move you towards financial freedom. Thanks for tuning in, and we’ll catch you next week.