Kathy Fettke, a renowned real estate investment expert and co-founder of the Real Wealth Network, shares her inspiring journey from being a housewife to becoming a successful investor. She highlights the crucial role of asset ownership, macroeconomic trends, the housing market, and the Federal Reserve’s interest rate policies.
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Transcription
Introduction: The Difference Between Business Owners and Investors
Ben Fraser: Just because you’re a good business owner doesn’t actually mean you’re necessarily a good investor.
Kathy Fettke: It seems like there are more tools to prevent recessions than ever before.
Ben Fraser: If prices do come down more, there’s so much capital out there waiting to get back in the market. Very big players have started writing very large checks.
Kathy Fettke: I think that the housing market could see a crash is naive and uninformed because homeowners have never been in a better position.
Ben Fraser: What are some of the kinds of keys that you guys have seen that I think? I know a lot of our listeners that are business owners may or may not be in real estate as a primary business, but I know a lot of these principles probably overlap any kind of industry.
Kathy Fettke: Always just know that if you’re going to take risks, have a safety net of enough reserves.
Welcome and Guest Introduction
Ben Fraser: Hello, Future Billionaires! Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast. Have a fun show for you today. We brought on a returning guest, Kathy Fettke. She’s the co-founder of the Real Wealth Network. She’s been running a radio and now podcast for over 20 years talking about wealth building, talking about real estate investing.
Her and her husband, Rich, are amazing. We’ve known them for a long time, the conference circuit and just lots of other things that they’ve been doing. So definitely provided. A really great perspective from many decades of investing. She talks about why owning assets is the number one way to get ahead, talks about the Fed, the economy, housing market, what to expect and where there’s opportunities.
And also a new book that her and her husband wrote about scaling your business and how to scale smart. So definitely a lot of great things. Things to pull from this episode. If you’re enjoying the episode, the podcast in general, we ask, if you’re willing to leave a review, share with a friend who always really appreciates that.
It’s very helpful for us to continue to grow the show, get on, big name guests, and really meaningful content. So thank you so much for being a listener. We appreciate you. Hope you enjoy the show.
This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast, where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth, the tools and tactics you’ll learn from. From this podcast will make you a better investor and help you build legacy wealth. Join us as we dive into the world of alternative investments, uncover strategies of the ultra wealthy, discuss economics and interview successful investors.
Welcome back to another episode of the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast.
Kathy Fettke’s Background and Journey
Ben Fraser: I’m your host, and today I am joined by Kathy Fettke. Very excited to have her on the show. Kathy is a returning guest to the show. She was on, I don’t know, maybe a year and a half ago. And a long time friend of the podcast and of our firm here.
We’ve had lots of conversations together, spoke a lot over the years, and loved what she and her team were doing. She’s the co-founder of the Real Wealth Network and the host of the Real wealth show as well as a co-host on BiggerPockets podcast. So super excited to have her come on. She’s a real expert in just tracking big picture macro economics.
They’re also got a lot of interesting real estate opportunities, having been in the space for a long time. So just a wealth of knowledge, always interesting things to learn from her. So Kathy, thanks so much for coming on the show.
Kathy Fettke: Thanks for having me.
Ben Fraser: Yes. So for those that maybe aren’t familiar with you or didn’t catch the first episode, we did that a year or so ago.
Give a little background on, on you and then what you’re doing right now with some of the kind of education networks that you are running.
Kathy Fettke: Yeah. So the kind of long short story is that when I started I was a very happy housewife. I ended the broadcast business and I got to be a stay at home mom when Rich was a business coach.
And then she had melanoma and we had done everything right. We had put, saved 10%, invested 10%, 10 percent of charity, all the things our financial planner told us to do. And then when Rich had this melanoma and the doctor thought it spread and told him he had six months to live, you would be amazed at how quickly you can go through your savings and your investments.
Time like that. I just thought, first of all, I didn’t believe the doctor. I was like, I just got to take over the finances and get us through this. I still had a radio show in San Francisco. So I started to interview people on how they made their money and not just a little, but a lot. How did you create an empire?
And then I wanted to, how did you create passive income? Because if the doctor was right, I wanted to be able to be home with my family during this difficult time. So that’s when I just used my radio show. It’s the real wealth show today. It’s still around 20 years later. There’s still stuff to talk about.
It’s amazing. But that’s when I just learned the secrets of the wealthy. And there is a difference between the wealthy mindset and the average person mindset. And once you get into that and adopt it, it just can change your life. So that’s the story.
Ben Fraser: Yeah. So you guys have been in the space for a long time, you and your husband Rich, and both just a huge wealth of knowledge and a lot of people that are newer to syndications or real estate investing and all this is so cool. So new. You guys have been around the, for a long time and have seen a lot of things that have happened.
And. These different cycles talk a little bit.
Insights on Business Growth and Investment Strategies
Ben Fraser: Are you, have you written, I think a few books or I know Rich has and you guys have together, but you have a new book coming out. Talk a little bit about that. Cause I want to definitely put the link to the show notes. I don’t think it’s going to be released until September, you said, but we’ll definitely put all the links in the show notes, people can get their hands on it.
But a really powerful story. You guys have seen a lot, gone through a lot of cycles and have really found things that have worked. Talk about the new book a little bit.
Kathy Fettke: Bigger pockets reached out and asked us to write it because we haven’t been in business for 20 years, over, over 20 years.
And as you probably know, many businesses fail after a couple of years and definitely after five years. So what was the sticking power, especially during so many different presidencies, so many different recessions, different, a pandemic, like what worked? So it was something we hadn’t really thought about and had to sit down on sticky notes.
What are the things we learned? What are the things we did wrong? We put that in the goal. It’s called scaling smart because I like to think of it like an iPhone or something like technology today, a smart anything you could get an iPhone and for you, yours might be set up completely different than mine because it’s based on our preferences.
And too often we don’t know what our preferences are as business owners or investors. What are we really trying to achieve here? What do we do? How is this going to make our lives better and more simple? How’s it going to really help us in the long run? It’s just, it’s funny too often. We just don’t even ask these questions.
It’s Oh, so and so invested in that. We’ll do this or I’m just going to, then you find out you’re working your life away and you’re, you wake up at 60 and you haven’t, where you live. So it’s called scaling smart to make sure that you, that your investments and your business work for you so that you’re not working for them.
Ben Fraser: Yeah. Yeah. So interesting. I had a guest in the podcast a month or so ago who’s in business acquisitions and he was rattling off some stats about business acquisitions. small businesses and 90 percent of businesses fail, right? And I think we take for granted a lot of times that just staying in power is actually difficult, right?
To make it past some of these big hurdles of the first year and what have you, but then even five years and you make it through market cycles. And I think real estate especially can be challenging because there can be really low lows, really, hard recessions or difficult things that can impact industry.
You have to give all the secrets away because we’ll put the link in the show notes for people to read. But what are some of the kinds of keys that you guys have seen that I think, I know a lot of our listeners that are business owners may or may not be in real estate as a primary business, but I know a lot of these principles probably overlap any kind of industry.
Kathy Fettke: Oh, for sure. The number one, and I am super guilty of this is one of the things I learned over the years You don’t, how do I put it? You don’t want to grow faster than you’re ready. I’ve often seen investors, I had an investor come to me recently and say I just got this big windfall.
We sold a business. I’ve got all this money. I’m going to put it all in this syndication. And I was like no, you. You heard about diversification, right? Nobody gets it perfect every time you’re going to diversify your money. Never put it in one place. So that’s an example of, same thing in business, just going big too fast.
We saw a bunch of family investors just. Buying like crazy buying a multifamily building fixing it up, flipping it for millions and millions of dollars of profit. And then taking all that money and throwing it back on the table for another gamble and going bigger and bigger than they were ready for bigger than they had the systems for.
And again, I’m guilty. I, I. Ooh. Got big too fast. My radio show took off before I was ready, before I knew how to invest and opportunities came to me, I didn’t really understand well enough. That, that is what I teach today is like, Oh boy, understand, what you’re investing your money in. Or at least at a minimum, make sure that the people you’re investing with understand what they’re doing.
Don’t invest with a first time, investor or first time syndicator. If they’ve got a track record, that’s where you can get confidence. If you don’t have the time to truly understand it. So just again, getting too big before you’re ready to diversify. When it comes to business and also your investments, like I said, having a super clear plan about where you want to be, like what is the ultimate purpose?
What’s your five year, 10 year, 20 year plan? No, nothing ever goes totally as planned, but you got an island that you’re swimming towards instead of just paddling in circles like so many people do because they don’t know what they really want or where they’re headed. That’s the first place to start.
Ben Fraser: Yeah, no, I love that.
Yeah, the principle of diversification and it can apply in so many different areas, and especially as an investor, as a passive investor, I’m actually in the same situation where, someone sells a business and. Just because you’re a good business owner doesn’t actually mean you’re necessarily a good investor.
It might sound a little bit mean, but a lot of times people that are business owners, they become successful by taking pretty extreme risks sometimes. And many times they’re calculated, many times, it’s, they know what they’re doing, but it’s also, it can take that level of risk to be able to separate yourself to be successful.
But in investing you don’t want to have the same approach, right? And I was just talking with a very wealthy investor the other day. He has multiple nine figure net worth. He has a principle. He does not invest more than the minimum of any syndication or fund that he invests in.
He can easily do the whole equity stack and probably most of these deals. He just does the minimum. I asked him how many LP investments he had, and he said he has a thousand LP investments. He has a thousand K1s a year. I was like that’s a whole other problem, you know what I’m saying, but yeah, the point is he’s not taking any, idiosyncratic risk in those individual deals.
And I think there’s something to be said for that, where it’s difficult. Sometimes you’ve got a ton of cash, burn all your pockets. You want to just. Get rid of it, but it’s actually better to go slow. And it’s, I think the same thing in business, when I used to be a commercial banker I did a lot of small business loans on SBA loans.
And one of the other stats was really interesting. I can’t remember the exact number, but it was a large majority, somewhere like 70 percent to 80 percent of businesses that went out of business that failed. So we said 90 percent of startups will fail. A very vast majority of those don’t fail because of a lack of paying customers.
It’s a lack of cash flow, right? And it’s, That, not understanding the implications of your, like you’re saying, growing too fast actually can put a huge stress and strain on cash flow and that can actually be the bigger problem. It’s not for lack of demand or for lack of customers.
It’s actually not managing the cash flow well. Is that something you guys saw too, or do you guys talk anything around that in the book?
Kathy Fettke: It’s all about the cash flow, right? Nothing. Is worse than not having cash flow, not having reserves. And I don’t care if you’re running a household or you’re running a business or you’re investing or you’re managing an investment things go bad when you don’t have enough money to get to the finish line.
And that unfortunately happened to me on several occasions. We have a development in Park City, for example, I just had an investor say, man, I thought this was going to be your best deal because it looked like it, it really looked like the best deal. And I’m so glad I require people. I don’t require it, I strongly suggest that people only invest in my syndications because you just never know.
With Park City, one of the things that we didn’t know is that there would be a pandemic that would shut down our entire development for a year, and we have a development in Costa Rica and didn’t see that coming, that the entire country would shut its borders for a period of time.
The, this, yeah, how do you move things forward in that situation? And then do you have enough reserves to get you through? And we didn’t, we had to find creative ways to find the money, but this is, Just, yeah, always just know that if you’re going to take risks, have a safety net of enough reserves.
Elon Musk has done great interviews on that. He was down to his last penny when he started. But I think it was probably SpaceX that was completely out of money and then he got a call from the government and they were ready to do a deal. But too often entrepreneurs throw the dice and gamble a lot and sometimes they win.
But like you said, 90 percent of the time they don’t. So investing in someone’s business is probably new, that’s why I love real estate. It’s a little less risky because you have an asset. It’s always a risk. We’ve lost money probably three or four times just investing in someone’s business that we believed in and figured we’d lose the money.
You’ve got to be. You could, it’s okay to take risks as long as you’re okay losing that money, knowing it’ll be great if it doesn’t, Oh
Ben Fraser: Yeah, no, it makes a lot of sense.
Market Commentary and Economic Outlook
Ben Fraser: Let’s shift a little bit. Because one of your kinds of expertise is that you talk to a lot of people, come to your shows and listen to you on, is your commentary on the market, right?
And you’re always talking about what the Fed is doing, what the economy is doing, and what housing looks like. Yeah. Talk to some broad strokes. So as we sit right now, we’re at the beginning of August 2024. Actually I think the feds about to have a meeting in a very short this afternoon but talk a little bit more broadly on, where we sit, what kind of expectations on, we’re in election year interest rates, or everyone’s hoping that they do a rate cut later this year talk, talk, some broad strokes here for us.
Kathy Fettke: Yeah, sure. It really just comes down to, we had a pandemic, the world was shut down and it had to get started up again. It takes a while to get machines up and running and people up and running. So a lot of the job growth that we’ve seen over the past few years has been a return to jobs, but it doesn’t reflect that way in the job data.
It’s just Oh, we have lots of jobs as opposed to we’re getting back the jobs we lost during COVID. along with growth. So the bottom line is right now we are where we would be job growth wise had there been no COVID. But because it looked so robust over the last few years, there was a belief that we had a really hot economy.
Where it was just, we’re getting back to normal. So the best way that I could describe today and right now is we’re back to normal. But when you come from a return of jobs back to normal, it looks a lot like things are slowing down. So you’re going to see more and more reports saying that there’s less job growth.
And it’s great, because we had too much, he didn’t, he had so much job growth. And That for a time, there were more jobs than people that wanted them, that employers have a hard time, as we know, finding employees and to find employees, they have to pay more. That creates inflation. So that whole cycle, I think we’re done.
We’re done with all of that. We’re back to normal. The question is, can the Fed land this plane? Is this the tough plane to land? People keep saying, I think they are, if it looks like at this moment, they’re going to land the plane that in that meaning that inflation has come down inflation that was really generated from the pandemic, partly because you had factories shut down yet people still want those goods that we’re passing out money to people.
They have money, but there’s nothing for them to buy. So it’s lots of money chasing a few goods that creates inflation. So again, that has been resolved because factories are back up and running and the stimulus has hopefully stopped somewhat. So that’s over, but we also had 7 trillion created during 18 months.
That’s the amount of money that was circulating in 2007. 7 trillion was run into our economy. Of course, it’s going to create inflation. Of course, it’s going to throw off the numbers. So we’re, we’ve, we saw the Fed really slam on the brakes after seeing that, Oh, I guess if we create that money, it will have an impact.
Hopefully. It would be better if they raised rates or if they cut rates today, they’re probably not going to other countries already, they’re already on board with that. We’re probably not going to see rate cuts until September. Many people think that’s too late. And if they keep delaying what they really should be doing, then it could be a harder landing than a soft landing.
Let’s put it that way. You can’t fight market rates and they’re holding rates higher for longer. Take care. So fingers crossed that they’ll get it right. They usually don’t. They’re usually either too late, they’re usually too late to the game. They were too late to the game in hiking rate and probably too late.
But at this moment right now, things are coming in for a good landing. If they could just like.
Ben Fraser: Yeah. No, it’s so interesting. And it’d be so interesting to listen to this episode a few months from now, because I think so much is hinting on what September is, is there a right kind of September?
And it’s a great point. A lot of people thought the Fed should have reacted a lot quicker, when inflation started, putting out these screeching high numbers. And now that we’ve had some good readings and things seem to be going the right direction, will they hold out a little longer, and so it’s definitely not a role that I have been before for not being in, but And hopefully they will, move, react quicker, as they start to see some things. And, I was talking with someone the other day where they’re mentioning usually, like you said, the Fed is too late to react, both on the upswing and on the downswing on the rates.
But a lot of times, if they’re late, they’re not going to react. There are rate cuts that will precipitate a little faster because they have to catch up. So we had a very rapid ascent of rates because they were late. And so it’s possible, if they do wait a little bit long, based on history, that’s not a perfect predictor, but it might actually precipitate a much faster rate cut environment.
If things start to Okay. concerning.
Kathy Fettke: Yeah. So that, and that really affects more short term rates. It’s not mortgage rates, what we’re talking about. So it absolutely affects commercial real estate, which is normally at an adjustable rate. Not all, but most commercial properties are. Whereas in the residential sector, the housing market of one to four units, most people today as opposed to 2008, Most people today are on fixed rate mortgages, so they’re really feeling any of this in America really alone.
Other countries like Canada, they’ve been on these adjustable rates and they’re feeling what we all felt in 2008 when most homeowners were on adjustable, their rates adjusted, couldn’t pay it. That’s the commercial world today. The rates adjusted is throwing a lot of commercial deals off.
And construction. It’s just ah, I had this great business plan. Now the payments are working so much. A lot of construction deals just didn’t get done, like mine are struggling because wow, what a difference from, 2 percent to 6, 7, 8 percent on those loans. The bigger the deal, the harder that is to swallow.
But residential, and this is where so many YouTubers are getting it wrong. Residential, people who own homes are on the party boat, there’s no distress there.
Ben Fraser: That’s right.
Kathy Fettke: People, they, they are, they have the lowest payment income ever in history. They are, they have the highest equity, they have fixed payments, they have had to qualify for those payments.
There are very few non adjustable rates and silly headlines that say, Oh my gosh, adjustable rates are up and, coming due on, on a residential absolutely not. They’re mostly fixed. So to think that residential, the housing market could see a crash is naive and uninformed because homeowners have never been in a better position.
However, the people trying to get on the party boat. The homebuyers and there are at least 15 million millennials today. There’s 72 million millennials, but 15 million of them are our first time home buyer age. They’d really like to go on that party boat. They’re having kids. They’ve got dogs. They don’t want to live in downtown apartments anymore.
They don’t want to live with mom and dad or with roommates. They want to form a home. And they’re swimming after that boat and it’s getting harder and harder for them. And that’s tragic. That’s hard. So as we go into this. Cycle of this rate cutting cycle. Hopefully that will also affect mortgage rates that will hopefully come down and allow a few more people onto the boat.
Won’t be everybody, but every time they lower rates, there’s a few more million people that can get into the market. And then hopefully all these crazy headlines about a housing crash will go on so people have more confidence getting in because over time we’ve seen the greatest wealth is created in real estate and assets basically.
Great. A lot of this extra money that’s floating around is going into assets and into the stock market. So if you’re not on the asset train you’re dealing with inflation and not on your assets, if you’ve got assets, you’ve got inflation and that’s okay. Because they’re going up in value.
You’re just paying more for stuff and that’s not.
Ben Fraser: Yeah, no, I think it’s a great point. I think I’m definitely aligned there on expectations for residential. I’ve talked to a lot of people that have been sitting on the sidelines that are waiting to get in the market and I’m just going to wait for the prices to come down or for the big correction to come.
And it’s, Oh, we had a big recession or a big housing correction, back in 2008, 2009. So we’re probably due for one of those. And yeah, there’s been a little correction, but to your point, because so many people are sitting on such low interest rate mortgages That are historically, some of the lowest rates we’ve ever seen, they’re not incentivized to sell anytime soon.
So it’s restricting supply. Meanwhile, new construction is not keeping up with demand. So you have to look at fundamentals of supply and demand alongside interest rate and market dynamics. But, I’m with you. I think if you’re trying to get in now, you probably should’ve got it last year or the year before that.
But, it’s. The cost of entry is high and maybe the payment is a little bit higher. Maybe the down payment is a little bit higher, but you gotta do it because it’s the cost to get in and not to be on the party boat. That’s what you said.
Kathy Fettke: Yeah. Right now, I right now, because there is still a lot of misinformation out there.
There’s still a lot of people that think there’s going to be a housing crash. They just don’t understand the fundamentals of it, that there’s a massive amount of people that. You want to get it, you want to buy homes and there’s not enough supply, and then you’ve got no, just hardly any distress in the housing market.
So there, it just doesn’t work that way. Prices will just come down because people feel like selling their home for less than they paid for. It doesn’t work that way. Yeah.
Ben Fraser: Going back to the interest rates. So you know, we’ve had an inverted yield curve for a long time where basically short term rates.
Are higher than long term rates that in most instances in the past has predicted a recession or kind of precedes a recession. What’s your opinion? Do you feel your earlier point that we might have the soft landing that the Fed is hoping for? Do you feel it’s inevitable that we had a recession if we do have a recession?
What does that maybe look like? Whether it’s in housing or commercial real estate or otherwise. Do you feel like we’re in the clear as of today? Things were pretty good. What are the external risks out there that could create a bigger recession? Or do you think we’re in the clear as of right now?
Kathy Fettke: It seems like there are more tools to prevent recessions than ever before. And it seems that our government and the Fed just really will, they’ll use those tools to prevent it. I think a recession could actually be a good thing in terms of resetting values and making it more affordable, but I just don’t believe it.
That will happen. It’s too easy to just print our way out of it. And that’s what we’ve done and we have no choice anymore as a country. You saw that our nation is dead up to a new record level and nobody wants to cut anything. We don’t have enough money to tax people to get through this.
So the only solution that the government has is to continue to inflate the money supply, to in, to continue to print and every time it’s more and it’s more and it’s more because they have no option. Now when you’re inflating the money supply, you are inflating as you’re basically lowering the cost of debt.
Because money becomes worthless, but assets seem and appear to be worth more, even though they’re really the same thing. It’s just that you need more dollars for them. So you know, the bottom line is I don’t, I think there’s enough stops. Should there be a massive crash because of all these defaults on commercial loans?
Absolutely. But there’s not. So what’s happening? Oh, there’s stuff happening behind the scenes. There’s extending, they’re doing the extend and pretend game. They’re just allowing people to maybe not make payments for a while, or they’re having equity, equity groups come in and take priority in those deals, but you’re not seeing the collapse that would normally be there.
Without intervening. So it just seems like there’s more and more quote unquote tools to prevent recessions. And that, and so to answer your question, the risk is being the one in the water. That’s all I can say, but trying to swim after the thing that is avoiding you and that’s getting away from you because of a manipulated system.
We’re not going back to the twenties. 19, and I do mean like the 1920s, where every time we have a recession, there’s new stops that are put in place to prevent it next time. The people who get hurt the most are the people who don’t own assets and that’s the bottom line. It’s the people that if things cost more, if bananas and eggs cost more, I don’t know about you.
I don’t even look at my receipts. I don’t even know what I’m paying for eggs. If you ask me what I paid for eggs, I actually, I do lots of eggs, but when I get organic and they’re expensive, like there are people on fixed incomes who absolutely know what it costs to buy eggs and it matters to them. And when the price goes up, they can’t eat.
And so it’s the, this whole financial system hurts the poor and those on fixed income. So I don’t care what it takes for you to get into assets. You just gotta do it. When Rich and I started, it wasn’t as easy as it was in 1997. There was a recession then it wasn’t like you could just go out and buy a house.
It’s never been easy to invest. It takes self control. It takes having a plan. But we decided to do it in 1997 when we got married and we rented out like three rooms in our house. I turned it into a fourplex. I had a guest room that I turned into a, it was before Airbnb even, but it was like, I knew that this is how wealth is created.
And I was willing to. Do what it takes and young people are doing it today. Their house hacking, they are getting JV partners. There’s lots of ways to get a side job and save that money so that you can invest. But. But spending money on thousand dollar concerts in Europe, which so many kids are doing, that’s not the way.
That’s fun though. That’s a good life, but try to put some away for investments too.
Ben Fraser: Absolutely.
Real Estate Opportunities and Trends
Ben Fraser: Where are you seeing some of the biggest opportunities in real estate right now? So a lot of like you said, there’s been some challenges in commercial real estate, different asset classes and different markets.
But we haven’t seen the apocalypse that maybe some people were predicting a year or so ago. And, the more we go further into this, I’m probably of the same opinion where I don’t think we’re going to see, if we do have a recession, I don’t think it’s going to be very deep or very long, right?
And if prices do come down more, there’s so much capital out there waiting to get back in the market. And I think we’re seeing some of the early signs of that capital, thinking we’re close to the bottom of some very big players that started writing very large checks to buy assets again.
And so to me, it feels like we’re getting to a point where it’s a good buying time and, but you have to look, you have to muddle through some of the The headlines, some of the challenges, see past some of the things from yesterday and find opportunities.
So where are you seeing them? Cause you guys have done a lot of different things. You invest lots of different asset classes and, you’re not a one size fits all, or a hammer and things. And now you can do lots of different things. So where do you see the biggest opportunities right now?
Kathy Fettke: Yeah, for 20 years we’ve been helping people build real estate portfolios in the fastest growing markets in the U S and now a little bit in Europe. Our strategy hasn’t changed very much, which is interesting. What we look for are where the jobs are moving to. And generally they’re looking to move to more affordable places where there’s a lot of land where they can have their employees come in and have a nice lifestyle because it’s cheaper to live there.
They are looking for business friendly environments because COVID taught us a lot about where you could do business and where you couldn’t. So we’re seeing a lot of migration to the Southeast for that reason. I’ve been hearing reports that as people get to the Southeast and they feel like it’s too hot now, they’re moving back up to the Midwest.
Although you just told me you’re having a heat wave. Supposedly Ohio and Michigan are less or are resisting climate change because the great loans keep it cool. I don’t know. I’m not a scientist, but right now the migration patterns are to the Southeast. As we’re seeing, I’m sitting here in California, Elon Musk moving a couple more companies to Texas.
This is a pattern that’s been going on for 20 years. We started investing in Texas 20 years ago because we saw that pattern of Texas putting a flag in the ground saying do business here. We’ll give you tax credits. We’ll make it easy for you. But that’s mainly for terms on the real estate side that were, you know, bullish.
Ben Fraser: Very cool.
Conclusion and How to Connect
Ben Fraser: Kathy, so fun to have you on again and it’s always a pleasure to catch up and see what you’re working on and your perspectives. What’s the best way for folks that want to hear more about what you’re seeing and get into your ecosystem a little bit and your podcasts and books, other things.
What’s the best way for people to find out more?
Kathy Fettke: Yeah, just https://realwealth.com/ is our website. Real like real estate wealth, like your wealth. It’s free to join and then you get access to 500 webinars that are educational. There’s investment counselors that are happy to help you create a plan.
And then of course the Real Wealth Show is my podcast and our new book, Scaling Smart, I guess could be found wherever you get your books.
Ben Fraser: Awesome. We’ll definitely put some links down and yeah, thanks so much for coming on. It’s been really fun.
Kathy Fettke: Thank you so much.
Ben Fraser: This is the Invest Like a Billionaire podcast, where we uncover the alternative investments and strategies that billionaires use to grow wealth.
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