Welcome back to the IRA Cafe podcast. In this episode, your host, Jasmine Trocchia, sits down with Whitney Elkins-Hutten, the Director of Investor Education at passiveinvesting.com.

Whitney shares her journey from accidental investor to real estate guru, emphasizing the importance of mentorship and strategic action. You'll get insights on how to avoid common financial pitfalls, build a robust investment portfolio, and the significance of educating the next generation about wealth management. Plus, don't miss Whitney's tips on identifying and leveraging current market trends to enhance your financial future. Tune in for a treasure trove of knowledge that promises to elevate your financial savvy and investment strategies!

Key Takeaways:

Path to Real Estate: Whitney's journey began in 2002 when a breakup left her with a house to manage. Turning challenge into opportunity, she filled the house with roommates and completed a profitable flip, sparking her passion for real estate.

The Role of Education: Whitney emphasizes the importance of learning and mentorship. From leveraging resources like books to seeking mentors, she highlights how education has been pivotal in her success.

Asset Strategies: Whitney explains strategies for leveraging real estate investments, focusing on capital preservation, cash flow creation, appreciation, and diversification. She underscores the need to adapt strategies based on market conditions.

Future Trends: Looking forward, Whitney discusses the significance of debt-like structure investments, emphasizing the opportunities in being "the bank" in times of capital constraints.

Personal Finance Wisdom: Sharing advice for her younger self and for her daughter, Whitney stresses the importance of understanding money, leveraging compounding interest, and taking strategic, informed action to build a secure financial future.

This episode is packed with practical advice and inspiration for anyone looking to expand their knowledge of real estate investing and achieve financial freedom. Tune in to hear more from Whitney Elkins-Hutten. Plus, Jasmine will be answering a common listener question about obtaining an EIN number for IRA investments.

For more information on American IRA and self-directed IRAs, or to have your questions answered on the podcast, reach out to Jasmine at marketing@americanira.com.

Hi. Welcome back to another episode of the IRA Cafe podcast presented by American IRA. My name is Jasmine Trocchia, and I am the head of the marketing department at American IRA and your host for today's episode. I am super excited to introduce a new guest to the podcast. Her name is Whitney Elkins-Hutten. Hello, Whitney. And we met I think we met first at one of the investors roundtables for ladies, I think is how we came about, crossing paths. And, I know I definitely got a chance to talk to you during one of those.

So it it's so exciting that you're here. I'm really glad to talk to you today. So tell us who you are and what you

do. Well, thank you so much for having me on, Jasmine. This is gonna be fun. My name, again, Whitney Elkins-Hutten. I'm the director of investor education here at passiveinvesting.com. And, you know, really what I do is I help, high income earners and business business owners, take their active income and savings and turn it into passive income and long term wealth. That's very simply what we do. We focus on helping people invest in multifamily, express car washes, and real estate debt investments.

Now I do this personally and professionally. I I also, coach people one on one. But again, you know, the through line through everything is teaching people how to scale their passive income in long term wealth.

So would you define your role as an adviser, or are do you just assist the clients who've already made a decision? Like, where is your role in the whole process?

Yeah. So I, you know, I meet the client where they're at. I'm not a financial adviser. You know, that's you know, we're we're true fiduciaries to our investors, so we're not necessarily selling them, advising them on their finances, and then selling them into our investments. Really, what we do is we meet them the the investor where they're at. You know? I give them you know, we'll coach them, you know, help them through, like, whatever questions they have about scaling their portfolio or their understanding of passive investment. And then I'll make some suggestions on what could be best fit their portfolio. Oftentimes, it's something that we have here at passiveinvesting.com.

But also, you know, we understand that all investors should be diversifying across operators, markets, and deals in different layers of the capital stack anyways in order to build the most route well rounded portfolio.

Oh, love it. Wow. That sounds really rehearsed, but tell me how you became to be part of passiveinvesting.com. I wouldn't say it's rehearsed.

I just this is what I love doing. I talk to investors all day long, about this. As far as, like, how did I get to this point? Yeah. How did you actually you are now. I started investing in 02/2002, and, actually, I didn't even know that I was investing. I bought a house with a significant other. A month later, the relationship fell apart, and everything was under my name. You know, the more principal, interest, taxes, insurance, all the utilities.

And so when that relationship crumbled, I actually panicked. I was like, oh my gosh. What am I gonna do here? And so I stuffed the, you know, the the rooms with roommates, people that didn't mind living in a construction zone because this was a, you know, rehab type property. Had green shag carpets, psychedelics, theseies, people to deliver the walls straight out of the 1960s. And, I taught myself electrical, plumbing, drywall, how to resurface floors, paid my friends in sushi, beer, and pizza in order to get the work done, and sold the property eleven months later. And Oh, wow. What that property you know, my mindset was is get out from underneath this. Don't let this thing make you go broke.

Right? But when I sold it and I we they just handed me a $52,000 check for work that I did on the nights and weekends and, you know, paid other people in sushi, beer, and pizza. And I hadn't been paying for any of my expenses. My roommates covered everything. So I'd been living for free for eleven months. I was like, wait a second. There's something to this real estate thing. How many more of these projects can I do? And so not I did several more live in flips as what they're now called in house hacks. Not all of them went as swimmingly well as this one did.

But what it did, it taught me, is that I can actually, you know, use the roof over my head to unhook the value, that I create in the world with the time that I use to create it. And so that's really where I started learning about money, how money truly works, how creating value in the world truly works, all those different strategies that the millionaires and billionaires put to use in their portfolio. I just really started diving down a rabbit hole and, you know, focused on growing my wealth through real estate. I didn't have to go back to school to do it. Anybody can buy a building. And so did it. Several more living flips and house hacks, scaled this, 40 unit single family rental portfolio, eventually transitioned into multi buying multifamily buildings. And then, got into partnership on a, private equity firm and helped scale that.

And, was general partner on 10 multifamily buildings, and then eventually transitioned into my work today or what I

do here at passiveinvesting.com. So really the school of hard knocks is where you graduated from. I mean, if you were forced to live in the crib first. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely.

I mean, trust me, I've had the hard knocks for sure, but we haven't. Right now, it's just the school of life. Right? Like, really studying what the wealthy are doing, with intention and taking consistent and persistent action.

Did you have a mentor or, like, an important person? Or was there someone that you could come to that was I were like, I don't I don't know how to do this. I have questions about that. Especially when you scaled into commercial, that's that's a big step.

Mhmm. Initially, I didn't, have a formal mentor. I was following, you know, people like David Bach, probably, you know, which is kinda on the same vein of, like, Dave Ramsey and Suze Orman. And so, I mean, that helped me get out of debt, but it wasn't really helping me build wealth. And it was really when I started, you know, listening and reading about, you know, Tony Robbins' work, I was like, oh, wait a second. You You know, he wrote the book Money Master the Game. And I just devoured that book. And it's it's like a 600 page book, just end to end about how money works and, you know, how Wall Street works.

And I was the annoying person in our benefit manager's office going, okay. Wait a second. Are you guys fiduciaries? Can we add, like, gold and, like, commodities to our investment portfolio? And she was like, Whitney, no. You don't understand. We're we're pushing the easy button here. Right? This is a marketing tool to get you to stay here. It's not about us helping you build your wealth. And I was like, woah.

Wait a second. I'm building somebody else's wealth, and they're kinda like little just throwing me a bone, so to speak, to get me to stay here. It's like, oh, hold on. I need to start taking matters into my own hand. And it's when I got into buying single family rental properties, I did the first couple on my own. And I can't say that I did anything wrong, but I didn't even know what cash flow was. I don't even know how to calculate it. Mhmm.

And,

you know what?

I should probably get a coach. You know, I'm gonna go further faster if I can find somebody who's already done what I want to do and just have pay them, get close to them, get in their world and pay them to teach me. Because one, I'm gonna shorten my path, but two, I'm gonna sidestep all of those landmines that they stepped on. Now, of course, I'm gonna go step up my own landmines. Right? And it's not gonna keep me completely making the idiot move. And so that was I got my first coach in about 02/2015, '2 thousand '16. And I went from having two rentals in one year to 40 at the end of two

and a half years. So that was huge.

And every every, you know, every time I hit a ceiling achievement, I would try to figure out, okay, who am I missing in my world that's gonna help me get to the next level?

Wow. That is impactful. Like, who am I missing in my world that's gonna help me get to the next level? That's interesting.

So for the list all the listeners out there, you know, read the book by David Dan Sullivan, Who Not How. Especially if you have a business, that's that's such an amazing book. Right? You're gonna, you know, it's gonna walk you through exactly how you should be thinking about outsourcing and going for your next hire to scale your business. But these are lessons and learnings that you can implement in your own personal finances in order to get scale your portfolio.

Okay. That was Dan Sullivan. Who not how? Yeah. Interesting. Love it. So speaking of books, the elephant on the wall in the room. Yeah. So Money for Tomorrow, tell me about that.

You obviously, you're the author.

Yeah. Money for Tomorrow. So the I wrote it in partnership with Bigger Pockets, and this book is really the end to end blueprint on how many works and how to build and scale your wealth and pass it on to the next generation, so the generational part. Now the book is for anybody anywhere in their point in a journey. It's not necessarily for new investors. It can be for more seasoned investors as well because you can definitely get value from the book. Read it. You'll figure out how to, you know, plug the six major money leaks in your portfolio.

You'll if you're, you know, been challenged in the past two years of investing and you're just like, wait a second. I was sold passive investing. Passive investing in real estate was a good thing, but my portfolio has had issues for the past couple years. You know, we could walk through the seven principles of building wealth and we show you, you know, how to invest based on strategy, not on tactic, which is how most people got nabbed in the last two years. They invested in tactics with not understanding the actual strategy of developing their own personal investing roadmap. And then we go through the three phases that anybody needs to tackle in order to pass on their wealth more effectively and efficiently and not lose, say, 400, 5 hundred thousand dollars, at the finish line. And, you know, somebody might go, hey, that's not me. I I don't care.

Like, that happened to my grandfather. He lost $400,000, like, you know, of course, he's he passed away. He didn't lose it, but the estate lost it at the finish line. And just for some very simple moves that should have been thought through and completed. But I the promise of the book, I actually started writing these notes down, along my investing journey for my daughter. Because as, you know, we scale our portfolio, she needs to know how to steward what we've built. One, so, you know, she doesn't lose it all. But two, so she can grow the empire, so to speak.

Right? I I don't pretend that I'm gonna have all the wealth build built for the family, you know, by the time I leave this earth. She it's like cathedral thinking. She's gonna pick up what I've done and she's gonna run with it. So what were those lessons and learnings? Like, how can I shortcut her path? And that's really where this book, was born out of was all those notes, that I was taking for myself.

Oh, wow. That's actually one of my candid questions that I ask a lot of my podcast guests, is, you know, what would you tell your younger self? And I think thinking what you wanna pass on to a version of your younger self, your your kid, so what what kind of advice would you give your younger self had you if you knew then at 18, 19, 20, 20 one, 20 two, what you know now? What would you tell yourself?

A lot of things. But, so, really, read the book. Read the book. And, honestly, you know, that's a huge, huge tool in and of itself. I would probably put in my hand two or three very critical books that shortcut, those big obstacles that we have in our life. Right? How does money work? How does our how do our relationships work? How does our health work? Like, how do we how do we manage this all together in order, you know, to create the best life that we wanna live? Now my book is pretty focused on the financial side of things. So I would probably hand over through, you know, a couple of, you know, additional books to my younger self.

Mhmm.

But, you know, as far as financial information that I had hand over to my daughter, you know, it's what we're actually doing right now. Like, you know, she's 12. She knows about interest rates and inflation. She knows about investing in the stock market. She she's she's a cash flow investor in the stock market. She does have some appreciative stock. She has her own Roth IRA. We're talking about how can we use time on our side to scale our wealth.

And so, you know, for her, she's seen dad and I, like, having to sock tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars away into different strategies. But for her, and I'm like, hey. You know, you get $500 at Christmas, you know, all told with all the cash, let's put 250 of that, like, investing in stocks. We do that year after year. And, you know, you get additional money for working in our businesses, put that in a Roth IRA. You're gonna be a net worth millionaire by the time you're 50. Mhmm. And and you're not gonna have to be scraping to try to figure out how to save, like, when you're 30 and make up for all that time and compounding.

Yeah. Ugh, golly. Now I feel guilty that I was like, you know, keep it in the piggy bank to my kids. So yeah. So that was looking in the past. So looking to the future, what trends or opportunities do you see sort of coming down the pipeline in your industry? As a financial guru or maybe a personal or personal investing, what do you see coming down the future? What do you think to some of the good trends?

Well, in see, that's where I really like pushing pause in the conversation because we gotta go back to what the objective is for scaling our wealth, which is to get what we want with whom we want for as long as we want. Right? Had that passive income. And then we gotta learn the rules on how money actually works. Okay? When we understand the objective of the rules and we learn the strategies in order to win the wealth game, we're now not looking at trends. We're looking at making sure that we're investing in, assets that are, adhering to the strategy that's working in today's market. And so what what is one of those strategies? Right? If we're gonna grow our wealth, when we grow our wealth, we should be investing to preserve capital, create cash flow, get some sort of, you know, appreciation or compounding if we can, and then diversification. Now some people go, well, don't you always say tax benefits? I'm like, that's like icing on the cake. We should never be investing purely for tax benefits.

Right? We we should be able to use that as a velocity lever to pull. But if we invest for those four different, criteria, now I can go to the market and go, okay. What asset right now in today's market is gonna give me the most capital preservation, the most cash cash flow, or the most opportunity to create, safe compounding or safe appreciation, and then create the most diversification in my portfolio? Well, most investors, you know, if they've been investing, say, five, six, seven, eight years, they probably have a ton of equity or, you know, investments already in their portfolio. So the market today is actually giving us debt and debt structure, like investments. So either a debt fund or a promissory note fund, maybe even, you know, a preferred equity fund, you know, to kinda debt like structure investments. Those are gonna be really key right now because it's what the market's giving us. It's taking advantage of the the capital the access to capital that's been sucked out of the market in this hyper supply recessionary environment. And somebody's listening to this and go, Whitney, we haven't called a recession.

Just because we haven't called it doesn't mean it actually isn't happening. Yeah.

I was gonna say it's a kind of a you just stringed a lot of buzzwords, but I know in your to you that that that that sounds like that makes a lot of sense. But no. Yeah. So do you see that as positive, negative, or just a force to be reckoned with? You know, so

I I'll back it up with a story. So a few years ago, as a passive investor, this is what I do. I I love, you know, identifying other operators and and investing in their businesses, you know, real estate businesses, real estate backed businesses.

Mhmm.

And so I talked to other passive investors. I called them up and I'm like, okay. These are the top guys in the world that are making millions of dollars a year passively investing. And I'm like, tell me your perfect portfolio because I wanna copy it. And they every single one of them laughed. Not at me, but just laughed. They were like, there is no such thing as a perfect portfolio. They're like, we have guidelines of where we wanna be, but we always are paying attention to what the market is giving us and making sure that we're, adequately diversified and we maintain that diversification.

Because when the market is on a terror, that's I mean, like, going up positively, like, our equity assets are probably everybody's gonna look like a genius. Our equity assets are gonna do amazing. But when the market is struggling, when capital's being sucked out, you know, essentially, banks stop lending on projects, which is what's happened in the past two and a half years in multifamily, office, commercial real estate, or it's become more challenging to qualify. Now, well, you should be the bank. Right? The bank's left. It's left this gap in the environment. This is an amazing opportunity for investors to step in and be the bank. Mhmm.

And so we have to constantly look at what does our portfolio need, what is our timeline and risk tolerance, Where are we in the market cycles? And and kind of work some magic in line these things all up. Now these this is a I help people put together a base investment strategy and plan in the book Money for Tomorrow, so that would be a great tool for somebody to start just sit down with some, you know, 15 just very focused, important questions. And if you answer these for yourself, one, you're gonna have more clarity on what you need to be investing in. But if you're working with a financial advisor, you're gonna be able to hand that information over to them and be like, okay. This is what I want my portfolio to do for me. Instead of them telling you what your portfolio should be doing for you, you're telling them what you need your portfolio to do for you, what your risk tolerance is as you identified it, and then they can help you go shopping.

That was actually gonna be my next question is talking about the present. An ideal client at passive investing for you, what do I need to know already, or what should I bring to the table? Like, who would your ideal client what do they already need to know?

Well, that's part of my role is, you know, meeting people where they're at and filling in the gaps. Gaps. So, you know, but for most people that come to us, they probably should already have some sort of understanding that they like real estate or what the what real estate could give them or a real estate backed asset. And then I can meet them where they're at. I mean, if they're completely new, let's learn the terminology. Let's learn all the lingo. Let's learn, like, what a PPM is. Let's learn learn all the documentation.

Let's learn how to vet operators, markets, and deals. Let's learn what the process looks like. Let's learn, you know, what what's the difference between cash on cash return versus a preferred return. Right? So I wanna help kinda close all those gaps, meet them where they're at, and move them forward to the next level. Now if somebody is more seasoned, you know, then, you know, they're probably coming in with some of that knowledge in place. And so I need to help, one, demystify. Figure out is what they think is true actually true? Okay? Is there a myth there that they've adopted? And then two, teach them more about us and what we do, what our philosophy is as an operator. Because not everybody, you know, any operator you talk to, they're gonna have an ideal investor that works best, investing with them.

And then they're, you know, they're gonna be people that, you know, that aren't ideal fits. You know? If somebody wants to do ground up development with hotels, we don't do that. Right? It's not to say that you can't make money, but we have a more conservative cash flow like approach to our investments, and that's what we're helping our investors get. So if I'm very interested

in, what you have to say or what you

have to offer, where can someone find you online? Yeah. Simply go to passiveinvestingwithwhitney.com. That'll get you to a subpage on the passiveinvesting.com website. And more importantly, that gets you to me. Right? If you wanna talk directly with me, you can fill out a little form and then you'll get access to my calendar and you can schedule a call. And we'll we'll discuss your investing goals and what it is that you're trying to do with your passive investments and if we're a good fit.

Fantastic. Any last notes or parting words of wisdom, anything we didn't cover that you'd like our audience to know?

Oh my gosh. I can sit here all day and talk about investing in real estate and goal setting and mindset. I can talk talk about it all. So, I think number one, you know, the the biggest thing that I can leave investors with is, you know, taking action. What is it that you need to do to take action? And sometimes that action is just as simple. If you don't know what your plan is, I invite you. Get on a call with me, and we can talk through what you're wanting to do in life and then also what your obstacles are. And then we can start kind of pointing you in a direction in order to start meeting those goals.

Fantastic. Wonderful.

Yay. This is so exciting. I think we should have you back again. We're gonna need to have you back in a few weeks so we can continue the conversation for sure. So thank you so much for joining us, Whitney. It's been a been an absolute pleasure. So, stay tuned for just a second. We'll have another segment after this.

And if you have any questions about American IRA or self directed IRAs, you can also reach me marketing@americanira.com. But check out Whitney. Check out Whitney's book. She's fantastic. Now it's time for another segment of the IRA Cafe q and a. This is where we answer a client's questions or a viewer's questions or a listener's questions, every week. And if you'd like to have your question answered live, you can reach me at marketing@americanira.com. This question comes from an anonymous person who is listed as Jay, the letter Jay.

Hi, Jay. Thank you for submitting your question. We have had actually more than just this listener, but we have had a lot of questions at American IRA from clients about an EIN number associated with their IRA account. Now the IRS indicates that for certain investments made within an IRA, that that IRA has to obtain its own EIN number. EIN is an an employer identification number. You think about like a business or an LLC usually has an EIN instead of a Social Security number. So IRS regulations state that the EIN is required for all SDIRA investments that generate UBIT. Now whether or not your investment does is between you and your CPAs.

You need to have a qualified professional give you advice on this. It's very easy to apply for an EIN number. You can do it online at the IRS.gov. And it's it's free. It's easy. And you set it up just if you've ever done an LLC, you would obtain an EIN number the same way. We have had a lot of clients asking American IRA for the American IRA's EIN number, and that's not the case. It needs to be an EIN number made specifically for your IRA account.

If you have further questions about that, you can visit our website. We have blogs, recent blogs from this past year with more information about obtaining an EIN number and when you would need to do that. Otherwise, you probably need to ask your CPA, tax attorney, or other trusted professional about whether this situation applies to you and your assets. Thank you, Jay, for submitting your question, and you can submit other questions at American or marketing at American IRA dot com.

American IRA LLC, a North Carolina LLC acts as a third party administrator for new vision trust company, a state chartered South Dakota trust company. As a neutral self directed IRA administrator, American IRA does not recommend or endorse any investments, individuals, or entities, including financial representatives, promoters, or companies. American IRA and the IRA cafe are not responsible for other statements, representations, or agreements, nor do we evaluate the quality or profitability of any investment. American IRA does not endorse guests on the IRA cafe podcast. Guest opinions are their own and do not necessarily reflect the views of American IRA, its subsidiaries, associates, or custodian. Participation in the podcast is voluntary, and no compensation is provided. American IRA is not a fiduciary and cannot offer financial advice. Please consult your CPA or another professional before making financial decisions.