Insider Secrets Podcast Season 2, Episode 40

 Guest: Joel Miller

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Guest Bio:

After obtaining a BA in accounting, Joel Miller began investing in rental property in 1978 while simultaneously pioneering a 35-year career as a professional mobile disc jockey. He soon became a respected contributor to magazines for both trades. He has flipped over 100 houses since 1991, and as a leader of a professional organization for landlords, he teaches their Landlord 101course and a class on house flipping. Additionally, he is now a hard money lender to other investors as well as a trusted mentor, best-selling author, and a frequent podcast guest as well as a noted benefactor and volunteer in his community.

https://youtu.be/6TPngtl_oSs

SHOWNOTES

Key Takeaways

Take consistent daily action even if the results don’t show right away. Over time, those small steps build momentum that leads to big wins.

Seek out mentors who have walked the path you want to travel. Their real-world insights can help you avoid costly mistakes.

Treat every setback as a lesson rather than a failure. The skills you gain in hard times will make you stronger in the long run.

Focus on creating lasting value instead of chasing quick profits. Sustainable growth comes from thinking long term.

Surround yourself with a network of supportive, like-minded people. The right connections can open doors you didn’t even know existed.

Keep learning and adjusting your strategy as the market changes. Adaptability will keep you ahead of the competition.

Standout Quotes

“Sometimes the best opportunities appear right after your toughest challenges. That’s when growth truly begins.” – Joel Miller

“Real success is built on daily habits, not one big breakthrough. The grind is where the magic happens.” – Joel Miller

“A great mentor won’t just give you answers—they’ll guide you to think differently. That’s where transformation happens.” – Joel Miller

“Your network can either limit you or launch you. Choose the people who push you forward.” – Joel Miller

“Every mistake is tuition you pay to learn the business. The key is to make each lesson count.” – Joel Miller

“Consistency beats talent when talent doesn’t put in the work. Show up every day and the results will follow.” – Joel Miller

Episode Timeline

[00:00] – Introduction to Joel Miller

[03:15] – Early beginnings in real estate investing

[07:42] – Facing and overcoming early challenges

[12:30] – How mentorship shaped his investing journey

[17:55] – Building a network that opens doors

[22:40] – Strategies for staying consistent in tough times

[27:15] – Turning market shifts into opportunities

[32:48] – Final advice for new and seasoned investors

Contact

Company Website: Joel Miller Books

TRANSCRIPT

Kristen: [00:00:00] Welcome to this edition of Insider Secrets, the weekly podcast that turns real estate investing goals into reality. Each show we interview guests who are seasoned real estate professionals, actively closing and managing real estate deals. Mike is the founder of My Core intentions and would like to help you make your real estate investing dreams a reality.

Mike coaches you to buy investment real estate, creating short term cash flow and long term wealth. Your host and real estate coach, Mike Morawski, has more than 30 years of real estate investing and property management experience. Here’s your host, Mike.

Mike Morawski: Hey, what’s up everybody? Welcome back. Hey, hope you have your coffee this morning. Buckle up. We’re in for a good ride. As usual, great guest this morning that we will get to here in a minute.

But I wanna ask you about your intentionality this morning. What are you being intentional about? I think our mindset [00:01:00] is so important and so impactful in what we do on a day-to-day basis in our business. A lot of times we can sit back, especially in this market environment that we’re in right now, a lot of times we can sit back and say. Oh, the interest rates are too high. The market’s not good. People aren’t doing anything. Investors aren’t investing.

We buy into that rhetoric of that negativity, of that negative mindset, of course it’s gonna keep you from moving forward. So, I always encourage you to be intentional. To be intentional about your thoughts, about your actions. Napoleon Hill said, What you believe you can achieve. And it’s the same thing in everything that we do in our lives.

And I wanna encourage you to be intentional. So, what if you were to sit down every day and just write out what your intentions are for that day, how many, private investors are you gonna talk to about raising capital? How many deals are you gonna [00:02:00] underwrite? What activities, what actions are you gonna take? Start to create that mindset for you that’s gonna open the doors for you.

So, if you’re new to the show, welcome. Thanks for being here. I’m Mike Morawski, I’m your bounce back coach and, real estate cash flow expert. And, if you are new, please follow us, subscribe. Do us a favor. We are here every week, working with you and bringing you the gift of somebody who’s a little bit smarter than we are.

This morning, my guest bestselling author, Joel Miller. Joel’s calling in from Erie, Pennsylvania. He wrote a book called Build Real Estate Wealth, and we’re gonna dive into that and talk about that this morning. So let me bring Joel in. Morning, Joel, how are you?

Joel Miller: Oh, Mike, I’m excited because I just really loved your intro there and I’m gonna show you something. Napoleon Hill, Grow Rich with Peace of Mind is follow up to Think and Grow Rich. This is one of like, [00:03:00] if I’m on a podcast and somebody says, oh, tell me a book that influenced you, this is what I pull out.

Mike Morawski: Wow. And that’s different than Think and Grow Rich. Everybody talks about Think and Grow Rich. Show that book again if you would.

Joel Miller: Okay. I had to reach down here to get it.

Mike Morawski: That’s all right. So that’s Napoleon Hill’s Grow Rich with Peace of Mind. I love that. That looks like, it’s got some miles on it.

Joel Miller: Yeah. My copyright is 1967 on the inner cover of this book. That’s the addition that this one is.

Mike Morawski: It’s almost as old as we are.

Joel Miller: Almost whenever I was getting started.

Mike Morawski: That’s almost as old as we are, Joel.

Joel Miller: Maybe a little older. I love what you had to say about mindset, because I spent a lot of time on that in my book, it’s one of the things that makes a difference, makes my book different from a lot of books in the genre, which are about acquiring the property and taking care of it and [00:04:00] having tenants and all that stuff. I start with mindset and we spend time on that before we even talk about, and then we go into forming an entity before we even talk about buying any properties.

Mike Morawski: Yeah. Well, I think we’ll talk a little bit about that this morning. We’ll circle back to that. Hey, one question I always ask my guests, and this is really the only question I ever have preplanned or ask, but in one word, what best describes you personally and professionally?

Joel Miller: Loyal.

Mike Morawski: Loyal. Love that. What makes you loyal?

Joel Miller: Because, and I have a discussion about this in the book after we get done with all the how to have property stuff, talks about like the difference between riches and wealth. And it’s kind of like the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Knowledge is, you have the facts. Wisdom is how to apply the facts to do the right thing. And with riches you have the money, but wealth is when you are [00:05:00] using your money to do the right thing to better your life and in the community.

And a thing that I say that if I had a choice of losing all my money, losing all my relationships, I would lose all my money in a heartbeat because my relationships would help me get my money back if I just had a pile of money and no relationships to share with that would just be empty. And that’s not what the goal is here.

And so what I say is, don’t make a withdrawal from a relationship just to make a deposit in your bank account. So what I’m getting at is that relationships are what’s key, and if you have relationships, you have to be loyal.

Mike Morawski: And we’re in a business that relationships are so important. Just even you and I connecting this morning, I feel an energy between us. We’ve never met before, but I feel like we have some synergies between us that could cause us to build a relationship.

Joel Miller: Sure, [00:06:00] yeah. Right. And, you have relationships at a whole bunch of different levels with operating rental property. I mean, you have relationships with buyers and sellers, depending on which part of that equation you’re in. If you’re in the rental business, you have relationships with your tenants. And of course if you just simply have property, whether you’re flipping or having rentals or whatever, you’ve gotta have relationships with contractors, with suppliers, and with lenders.

All that helps this all run, and if you fall out of relationships, let’s say all the relationships in any of those areas, any one of those areas you are out of business. So, I say loyal because that’s what keeps the relationship going. And, not looking for ways to ring every dime out of every transaction. Something that ends up with somebody feeling slighted, or just having a quote unquote bad taste in their mouth about dealing with you. You [00:07:00] can’t have that.

Mike Morawski: Yeah. I’m in the coaching business and one of the things I always teach my coaching clients is create a win-win situation. If you’re in a transaction and you walk away feeling like you got the upper hand, that’s not a winning situation. If you’re in a relationship or in a acquisition and you walk away from a contract negotiation feeling like you lost, that’s not winning either. I think both people have to feel an equal amount of win in every transaction.

Joel Miller: Yeah, sure. And actually in the real estate business there, you can have more than two people winning. You’re talking about just like a buyer and seller sort of thing primarily. But let’s say you’re gonna flip a house or something like that, it might be a five way win between you, the seller, the banker maybe that doesn’t wanna hold this property, doesn’t wanna foreclose.

The neighbors where they get to see an improved property next door to them and the person that buys that house that you have [00:08:00] rehab to perfection. And now you’ve created beautiful place for somebody to live. Everybody wins.

Mike Morawski: Right. I always say in a deal that there’s two groups of people. You have the stakeholders and the shareholders. Your shareholders are probably your limited partners when they’re investing in a syndication, but those shareholders are important too. Those are the people, the little convenience store in the neighborhood that gets an impact because you fixed your property up or the gas station on the corner, or the neighbor who’s next door. It does make a difference.

Joel Miller: Exactly.

Mike Morawski: Let me ask you this real quick. Have you always been loyal or do you think that that’s something that you learned over time?

Joel Miller: Oh my gosh. Learn it the hard way. I’m not saying I learned it late on in life, but I just mean growing up and moving through adolescence and, like a lot of kids, I had a tough time in junior high. And maybe a little bit into high school and I had some experiences in high school that [00:09:00] really helped me with my job.

I worked all summer at a summer camp. I was on permanent staff with kids that didn’t know each other, that came together and had to work together as a unit to be on the staff. And I made lifelong friends that I still have today, and that was in the seventies, when that I did that.

And, as I move through that and then into employment and self-employment and that just those life experiences was like, buffing or sandpaper sometimes for grinding sometimes to get you where you need to go. I don’t think people are absolutely born with that sort of thing. I think loyalty is learned.

Mike Morawski: Yeah. I was just gonna say, I think so many things in life, we learn the hard way. And I think a lot of times we create that ourselves, that difficulty. But it doesn’t always have to be hard. I always heard when I was younger, listen to older people because they have more wisdom, but no, you always think when you’re younger you’re smarter than everybody [00:10:00] else.

Joel Miller: Yeah. It’s like the guy that says, man, my dad didn’t know anything, but he sure learned a lot by the time I was about 30.

Mike Morawski: Yeah.

Joel Miller: Really what was happening is you were just realizing how much your father already knew.

Mike Morawski: Right. Hey, so why don’t you take a minute or so here and just kinda give a synopsis of your background and what you do, what you’ve done, and where you’re at today.

Joel Miller: Well, a couple of things happened to me in junior high and we’re talking about formative years there that really set me on the two main paths that I’ve had in life. Number one, an investor built four unit apartment buildings at the edge of our subdivision, right on my paper. ’cause I got all those tenants as customers on my paper, that was a good thing.

And I have a distinct memory of sitting down in my bedroom right in about eighth grade and kind of doing the math on rental property. ’cause we all lived in this subdivision with our parents in a single family home that they own. So this whole thing where okay, those people live there, they don’t own that. They [00:11:00] pay to be there and somebody else owns it and makes money. Whatever rudimentary understanding I could have of it at that time, it was enough for me to say, I want to do that. And I kind of put that in my back pocket so that was something that I would do later on.

The other thing that happened was that an older kid in the community, built a pirate radio station in their basement. A pirate radio station is a illegal unlicensed radio station. I got to hang out there, and that’s where I decided I wanted to be a dis jock, which I assume was gonna be on the radio.

And I actually did a lot of radio production in high school and went to a college to major in accounting because I wanted to get that background for whatever I was headed into in accounting, but also a college that had a really good campus radio station. And I worked at the radio station in the town where I was at college and so on and about halfway through college I got called back to the big 50,000 watt FM, top 40 radio station in my town to be the weekend guy.

‘Cause they knew me from my production work in high [00:12:00] school. So I transferred colleges back to Erie here and just before I graduated, I went straight through in four years, didn’t change my major. That job went full time on the radio. So that meant that I could take the calls from the kids at the schools that wanted the DJs at the radio station to come out and do the sock hops in their gyms, or record hops, whatever.

And I went out like I made $75 and it changed my life. That was in 1976. I ended up being able to realize that I could make more money in one night than I was making all week at the radio station. Raised my prices a little bit, and so I actually ended up pioneering the professional mobile disc jockey business in this part of the country.

And I did that for 35 years. I retired from that in 2011. But, I did 5,051 appearances, and it wasn’t long after I did that first mobile DJ appearance and left the radio station. Then several months later that I bought my first rental property in January of [00:13:00] 1978, and I still have it. I was at there yesterday. It’s a cash cow and that was what I did then, in addition to starting an accounting practice.

Mike Morawski: Hey, hang on one second. Just put a pin in the accounting firm for a minute. I want people to take in what you just said about your first rental property you bought in 1978 and you still own it. It’s 2025. And you said it’s a cash cow. I want people that are listening this morning just to absorb the impact of that. And obviously you probably don’t owe anything on that property.

Joel Miller: No, I haven’t for many years.

Mike Morawski: Yeah. And it’s cash coming in.

Joel Miller: Yeah, I actually own the first three properties that I bought.

Mike Morawski: Oh, interesting.

Joel Miller: Which were all, two or three unit places. That’s all.

Mike Morawski: That’s unbelievable. So go ahead, go back to the accounting firm.

Joel Miller: I did start in accounting practice after college, but I sold that after about four or five years because the [00:14:00] DJ business was really blowing up. And so was the rental property stuff. And that leads me to one of the major premises of the book is that real estate investing does not have to be an either or thing, which sometimes holds people out of getting involved because they think they’ve either gotta do only that or not.

And my point is that you can add rental real estate to something else that you are passionate about, a career that you don’t want to give up a job or something, or a hobby that takes a lot of your time that you also wanna do.

And that’s what I did with the mobile DJ business. I wanted to be a professional entertainer, for 35 years. And so my point is that if your objective is to invest in enough things that you can leave your job as soon as possible. That’s great. My book provides those tools.

But if you feel that you just want to add income to something else you don’t want to give up while you bolster your retirement, which whatever you’re not giving up is maybe not offering [00:15:00] you, like when you’re self-employed, your retirement’s up to you. So you can do that and the book provides the tools to do that.

So then after a number of years of just building my rental property portfolio and continuing to do the DJ appearances in about 1991, started flipping houses and I have flipped over a hundred houses over the years. And in 2018, got into something that gives me great pleasure, which is I became a hard money lender to the other investors in our area.

And, it’s great to be a part of the equation for the journeys that investors that are a little earlier on are having. And then in 2020, started when I’m sitting around the house, when we can’t go anywhere. During COVID, I started taking notes and that was the beginning of the book being written.

And I have to tell you that it was also at about that time that my son, who at the time was about 14 or 15 years old, it became [00:16:00] apparent that he was wanting to follow me in the rental property business. And so Mike, I have to tell you that although it took me four years to write this book and it came out last fall, finally.

It was basically written as though he may be the only person who reads it. In other words, there’s nothing in there that I haven’t done or that I wouldn’t do if I had the opportunity and that I wouldn’t tell my own son to do. It was not written as though I would never meet the people that would read it, and I just put stuff in there that I thought would sell a book and I would never be held accountable by them or anything like that.

The person that holds me accountable to what’s in this book lives down the hall. And he graduated from high school last year 2024, and bought his first rental property about a week after he got outta high school. And then he’s in the business department at Penn State, at a branch campus in our hometown here in the business department.

And he bought his second property a few months ago. So [00:17:00] he’s continuing on and this is working out well with our plans. My wife and I plan to retire about the time that he is getting outta college and we’re working it all toward that he will literally purchase our properties and I’ll hold the financing or we will hold the financing on them and get a check every month from him, from a mortgage instead of some money from rental income, and then it’ll be his then.

Mike Morawski: Good for you. Good for you. That’s awesome. That’s building generational wealth. Hey, let’s talk about your book. What’s the name of your book? Do you have it? Can you show it to us?

Joel Miller: Yeah, sure. It’s called Build Real Estate Wealth: Enjoy the Journey of Rental Property Investment. Kind of a bigger book. Most of them are like two to 300 pages and they cover things like acquiring property and operating the property and so on. And, this is about 460 pages long, but like we talked a little bit earlier, it starts with mindset and then [00:18:00] forming your business entity, which you should have done before you even start making offers on places because you probably wanna hold your property in some sort of an entity, and you don’t wanna waste time after you found a property to form the entity before you have the closing to buy the property.

But then it moves into finding, negotiating, financing property, and then preparing a property to either sell or rent. Finding tenants. We spend a lot of time on tenant selection because or tenant screening as well. Tenant screening is only a part of tenant selection, selection starts when you are thinking about the possibility of buying real estate because every decision you make after that, as far as the location and the type of property it is and how you prepare the property, how you market the property, every one of those decisions slowly narrows the universe of possible people that are likely to wrench your place.

And then tenant screening comes in and when you finally interface with somebody that’s inquiring about the department, and you really have to develop a skill with [00:19:00] that. So we spend time on that because you might be good at finding property, fixing property, managing, doing the back office account. But if you are not good at tenant selection, you will not have a good time in this business. And it is totally possible to learn what you need to know so that you don’t have the preconceptions that you and I could touch on with mindset about rental property, being all broken toilets and bad tenants.

That’s a preconception that’s wrong. And just as much as it’s all unicorns and rainbows, where you end up having a little speed bump and the first thing you know, you drop out because it’s harder than you thought it was. You have to have the right mindset of making the first step and committing for follow through. Taking action and following through.

Mike Morawski: So I love what you said about tenant election. And, I think that’s so critically important. But here again, like loyalty, that’s something you learned along the way. Made some mistakes, right? So, top [00:20:00] two things that help you pick the right tenant for your property. What are the two biggest things you focus on?

Joel Miller: Well, let’s make the assumption that you’ve advertised a unit and you’ve wanted people to call and talk to you about the possibility of seeing the unit as opposed to you’ve advertised it and you just want them to fill out an application and then you’re online and you’re never gonna really talk to them until you get the showing or whatever.

But let’s say we’re talking to people over the phone. The, first thing I would say is that you would need to have the right questions to ask and the right way to ask those questions. And you need to take it to the next level of, let’s say they got through those questions and you’ve actually made a commitment to meet them and show them an apartment and so on.

Then you need to avoid the mistakes of misjudging people once you meet them in person and you are [00:21:00] evaluating a filled out application. Spend a lot of time on that in the book. And, you just don’t wanna make the mistake of bothering to show places to people that you know you’re not gonna rent to.

And then once you do show it, you need to not make the mistake of not following through on references, especially past landlord references and current landlord references, of course. Learn to build your instincts. That’s this sort of thing. But to just briefly finish telling you what we move into in the book is I also talk about the tax implications of operating rental property business.

Obviously coming from my accounting background, preparing financial statements for lenders. Big subject. Spend a whole chapter on that. At some point, as you move through rentals, you’re gonna interface with institutional lenders, banks, whatever. And, you need to be able to present your financial picture adequately.

You might be good, like I say, at all the other stuff [00:22:00] that we talked about, including tenant selection, but in order to grow, this business runs as you know, Mike, on OPM, other people’s money.

Mike Morawski: Right.

Joel Miller: I mean, it’s great. We talk about hard money lending, which I do, and seller financing and all that private lending and stuff. But, if you have a lot of properties, you’re probably gonna be involved with applying for mortgages with financial institutions and the reality is that a lot of banks have people in their twenties and thirties that are in the underwriting department, that are trying to check boxes and make financial decisions about your future.

Mike Morawski: Yeah.

Joel Miller: And if you don’t make their job easy so they can get off at four o’clock, provide them the information to check their boxes that they need and the right information for them to run their ratios and so on, then they just reject you. So if you can learn what the techniques are to increase your chances of being approved for loans, you’re gonna be able to grow a lot faster.

Mike Morawski: And how many properties do you own?[00:23:00]

Joel Miller: Oh, right now, I have been selling off things. We’re down to 20 some properties.

Mike Morawski: So at your peak, what did you own?

Joel Miller: Over 40.

Mike Morawski: Okay.

Joel Miller: I never was one of those I got a hundred guys. I didn’t need to be, ’cause I was operating the ones we had successfully and flipping a lot of houses too, which gives you the big checks. But obviously if you stop flipping, you don’t get those checks anymore. It’s the rental property, income property that provides you the ongoing income that has to come in. Whether you feel well that day or not. They still have an obligation to pay the rent and that’s how it works.

Mike Morawski: Yeah, awesome. So we kind of talked about this before the show a little bit. But let’s talk about legacy a little bit. You kind of have a legacy strategy set up for your business to create generational wealth. And I want people to really imagine the impact in their own life that this could have on their [00:24:00] life. What you’re gonna talk about in your son. I think this is a great story.

Joel Miller: Yeah. As I was saying, the time has come for that he has decided to move into this while he is getting some more education, like traditional. If you asked him right now, he would tell you he’s a finance major in the business department.

But his objective is not to go to college to get a job. His objective is to never have a job. His objective is to completely make his living off of various types of rental property investment, primarily the rentals. And I’m sure he’ll flip some houses along the way. And he has a little bit of a running start on it.

I get it because we have a ready, stable of properties that he can buy at the right time. The time we’re interested in getting rid of him is the time he wants to have them. And so those people that have those leases with me will have to pay him the rent. It’s not like whenever I sell the properties, their obligation ends. That all [00:25:00] transfers to the new owner who is going to be the next generation in our family. And I fully believe that he will take this further than my wife and I ever did.

Mike Morawski: Yeah. And that’s that generational wealth piece. I wanna ask one question back to the other people’s money and utilizing banks to leverage and buy property. Isn’t there a rule with banks that you can only own four or six have residential real estate loans?

Joel Miller: That is on a per bank basis.

Mike Morawski: Got it.

Joel Miller: That’s not any kind of a law. That’s not any kind of a banking regulation. That is what ever the appetite of that bank is. And that changes we have found around here especially, that the appetites that the banks have for different types of property gets shut on and off, and changes. Like, we might all be going to one particular bank because they’re just loving the one to four [00:26:00] units for a while, and then all of a sudden, hey, our portfolio’s got too many of those, so we’re not doing any of those anymore.

Hey, you got any big commercial properties you wanna have us lend on? And then you gotta go to a different bank. So that’s an example of how they changed your appetite. And one of the aspects of that can be what they feel is the maximum number of loans they wanna have with you, no matter what the dollar amount is or the maximum dollar amount they wanna have loan to you or the number of properties that they are encumbering. That that’s all up to them.

Mike Morawski: Yeah, I believe there’s a misconception out there of that rule. And you’re right, ’cause I’ve owned 200 single family homes and I never really had a problem getting a loan when we needed to get a loan or especially a portfolio loan. It all depends on the bank and where you’re at and what the flow of money in the market is.

Joel Miller: That’s right.

Mike Morawski: What are you seeing right now? And I don’t know [00:27:00] if you’re in an acquisition mode at all or if you’d buy something if the right deal showed up, but what do you see in the environment today for buying rental property?

Joel Miller: See around here, and I’m a firm believer that real estate is very much a local economy. And so if you’re primarily investing in the town and around the town where you live, you gotta pay attention to what’s happening locally, more than nationally even. And around here, it’s still a pretty strong market. I mean, Erie, Pennsylvania, it is not one of the markets that has booms and busts.

We have always just kind of chugged along over the years with some sort of a steady increase. And there were some big increases, though, more than normal in the past several years, since COVID, like a lot of markets experience. And that just seems to be leveling off a little bit, and rents have come up a lot in the past several years.

What I [00:28:00] think I calculated last year, our rents went up 22%. Our actual rents on our properties, if I looked at the a dollar amounts on the leases at the beginning of the year, at the end of the year with all the renewals and turnovers. That’s how much we were able to raise rents, and I think that is leveling off a little bit, but it’s not gonna drop back. There’s still what I would call a bit of a housing shortage here. Nice single family homes don’t last on the market very long.

Mike Morawski: Yeah. There’s no doubt we’ve become a renter nation, and for the real estate investor, whether they’re buying single family, whether they’re taking advantage of the economies of scale with multifamily. There is a huge opportunity that we’re sitting on today, and I believe that, and Joel, you and I are old enough to know about market cycles.

Joel Miller: Yeah, we’ve been through a lot of.

Mike Morawski: Right. We’ve been through a few and I know that where we’re at in the market [00:29:00] cycle today, that people that get involved today in real estate investing, whether they buy that first home that they’re gonna keep for 30 years, or whether they’re trading in and out every five to seven years like we do, are gonna really experience some growth here as there’s a shift in wealth in our country.

Joel Miller: Yeah. And it’s still pretty hard right now for people to shift from renting to owning, in a lot of markets. I get that. And it’s a shame. And only part of it is the interest rates, which are, as they’re kind of more normal right now.

When I first got in this, bought my first property in 1978, Jimmy Carter was President and Prime was 22%. And we were struggling with inflation and so on, but that’s when I bought my first property, which I still have.

Mike Morawski: At 22% you bought it.

Joel Miller: Well, that was Prime. I got less than that from my mortgage rate from the bank. But obviously Prime does impact interest rates somewhat, in all different types of loans, [00:30:00] car loans, house loans, whatever. And I was a tenant for the first five and a half years, while I was also a landlord. So when I bought my first personal residence in 1983, I was pleased Mike to get 12.5%.

I was pleased. And of course that mortgage got refinanced out, after not too long. Obviously didn’t keep that for 30 years, but that’s what I had to pay to get into my house then. And so I love what you said at the beginning when you were touching on when people are just looking for the perfect moment to get involved because there’s naysayers about the market’s not like it used to be.

It’s never gonna be like it was, or whatever they’re saying that is making ’em say, oh, I’m not gonna invest. I wanna say that at any given time, there are good deals. There’s a way to have a good deal in real estate no matter what’s going on, because there’s always gonna be [00:31:00] motivated sellers and, you might have to shift your technique or your marketing or do something that changes to the way you find your deals and put them together. But there’s never a point where you should just give up.

Mike Morawski: Right. Right. I agree a hundred percent.

Joel Miller: You can’t make money in this business. That’s wrong.

Mike Morawski: Yeah. Hey, I appreciate you. I appreciate you being here this morning. We’re way over what I said we would talk for, but you know what, the conversation has been great. And I hope that the listeners get a lot out of this morning because I think we touched on some really good things to talk about.

Joel, how do people get ahold of you? Get your book? Do you wanna show your book again?

Joel Miller: Yeah. The best way is to go to the website that is dedicated to the book. It’s very simple. It’s, joelmillerbooks.com. And on the homepage there, you can click on a button that’ll show you [00:32:00] the entire table of contents detail. You can see exactly what we’re getting into. And also another button that’ll show you sample paragraphs from each of the chapters. The media stuff give you an example of what’s in there. If you click on the buy button on the site, it just takes you to the page on Amazon where it’s available.

Mike Morawski: And we’ll have that information in the show notes for people to get ahold of that. Thanks for being here. I’m gonna move you to the back room. Say goodbye to everybody. If you hang out with me for a minute, that’d be great.

Joel Miller: Okay. Thank you everybody for hanging in there on an extra long one today. Appreciate it.

Mike Morawski: Thank you. Hey, everybody. That was a great show. Had no expectations before I started this morning about my guest, about his business.

And you know what? I was really encouraged to buy your first, second, third home and still own them after 30 years, is incredible. I mean, how else do we build generational wealth, [00:33:00] long-term wealth, wealth for your retirement, and then the pass on to your children, or your heirs or however you wanna dismantle that in your later years.

There’s no doubt that you can create wealth in real estate and whether it’s financial wealth or whether it’s a wealth of knowledge or blessing other people, any way you look at it, there’s wealth to be had. So thanks for being here this morning. Hey, reach out, grab a copy of Joel’s book Building Real Estate Wealth.

You can go to the Joel Miller Books website and get a copy of that. I’m convinced you’ll really enjoy the read. Thanks for being here, everybody. This today’s show was sponsored by Sync Va. So if you’re somebody who is in the real estate space or in business and you need that virtual assistant, whether it’s an executive assistant or a transaction coordinator or somebody helping you source deals and opportunities, reach out to Sync [00:34:00] va.

You have the ability to partner with your VA and to help build your business. Sync VA is your source for finding that individual that’s gonna be the best match for you and for your business. Hey, everyone, have a great week.

Kristen: Thank you, Mike, and thank you for joining us for another great episode of Insider Secrets. As always, Insider Secrets is brought to you by My Core Intentions. Wherever you hang out on social media, you will find Mike and My Core Intentions. Please like and follow us to get the most up-to-date real estate investing trends, visit mycoreintentions.com where you can get expert coaching on all things real estate investing and property management.

If you are looking to become an expert, Mike’s coaching will help you scale your real estate investment business. We’re looking forward to having you back again next week for more Insider Secrets.