I recently sat down with my husband, Harley, to talk about something that comes up again and again with real estate entrepreneurs who want to scale but feel like they’ve hit a ceiling. We unpacked why so many investors stay stuck, the surprising power of financial leverage, what most borrowers misunderstand about private lending, and how using someone else’s capital can unlock more deals, more freedom, and more long-term stability. If you’ve ever felt like growth is out of reach because you are using only your own cash or credit, this conversation will open up options you might not have realized were available.
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I have with me a very special guest, my husband. Thanks for joining me today. Thanks for having me. Now, for those who may not be familiar with your investing work, can you share a quick snapshot of your real estate journey? What does your business look like today and how did you land on private money lending as your focus? Yeah. So for many years we did traditional real estate investing, rent ready, buy and holds. We did some fix and flips. We did the BRRR strategy. We even got into short term rentals and we actually landed on hard money lending because of your real estate team.
Do you remember those stories? Yes, you know as a real estate agent working with investors it was always a struggle because I knew hard money lenders, we would do email introductions and then they would not reply and they would not talk to these clients which is crazy to think about. We are handing them a client on a silver platter, but that was the kind of service that unfortunately a lot of hard money lenders provide from the beginning to the end of the process. Yeah, so we knew there was a better way and we had opportunity with our retirement funds that we could step in and become the lender on these deals.
Right, and so we really started as a side gig to solve another problem. But then it turned out to be pretty lucrative and a pretty good seat on the bus for us with all of our travels, right? Yeah, so it is great because we can underwrite deals, we can do communication and wire funds from anywhere in the world. Right, it is a good fit for us. And that is one of the things I love about real estate and investing in general. There are so many ways to do real estate investing. You can always find the right seat on the bus or the right type of investing for you, your skill set, what you want to do with life, right? So let’s talk about financial leverage. Let’s talk about that piece that we provide to others by being their lender. So let’s talk about the challenge where most real estate entrepreneurs start. They try to scale using only their own cash, their own credit, but that leads to limits on growth, right? Yeah, absolutely. A lot of people maybe had some bad experience with debt or they have heard the talking heads talk about how you do not want to have any debt and they are kind of afraid of it. The reality is using debt strategically, especially when it is secured with a hard asset like real estate, can be a really smart move to help you grow your real estate investing a lot faster. Right, because I always say we want that leverage. We want to be able to use somebody else’s time, wisdom, or money for our own growth and development. That is what you are doing when you are borrowing someone else’s funds. Yeah. And so we have a lot of very wealthy real estate investors who have a lot of their own cash, but they still use us for doing flips because they understand the value of leverage. They are able to do more deals and actually net more money for their family by using our funds for the real estate deal and keeping their funds invested elsewhere with things their experts have.
Exactly. Now from something I see a lot, I hear a lot of investors who feel stuck because they cannot afford to scale. They started using their own funds and they bought a few properties, but now money has stayed in those deals and they feel like they do not have the funds to buy another property. What are they missing about using other people’s money wisely? Yeah, so the great thing about private money lending, what we do, is there are multiple ways you can structure deals and build relationships with people. There are opportunities especially for experienced investors who have a track record showing they used their own money starting out. They can come to a lender like us and demonstrate that and say, hey, are there ways we can structure this deal so that they have less money in the deal? One of the unique things we have offered is for borrowers who have done multiple deals successfully with us. We are able to cover 100 percent of their costs so they can keep their cash on hand for paying their contractors, buying supplies, and doing that faster and scaling so they can do multiple deals at one time.
So if you are using a lender, this whole “cannot afford to scale” thing kind of goes away because you are using a lot less of your own money and what you are doing should be giving you profit. So you have more money to do more investing, right? Absolutely. With real estate investing, like any kind of investing, there may be that one flip where it is not a perfect deal. You do not get all your money back out if you are doing the BRRR strategy or maybe you have to bring a little bit of money to the table, but you still own the home. You have rental income, you have cash flow. That is the beauty of it. There are great exit strategies, and when you are using the right leverage and the right financial partner, it can still be a win.
Now we have talked about the benefit of using financing. Investors often say the financing is the hardest part of the deal. Getting the financing, getting through underwriting, everything like that. What are the options there? How can we have a financing process that does not feel like we are jumping through hoops? Yeah, and that is one of the things we focused on streamlining when we got into lending because we had used lenders ourselves as active flippers and it can be painful with the wrong lender. They can have burdensome documentation requirements, clunky online applications, and then constantly coming back wanting more and more. What we have done with InvestAway is streamline things using online tools with a simple application and integrated document uploads. We do not require appraisals unless it is a large deal. A lot of lenders are not set up to close quickly because it is not their direct funds. They are not the ones making decisions. There are other people behind them pulling the levers. With InvestAway we are the ones who make those decisions. We know the markets we are in and can underwrite quickly. It gives our borrowers a unique advantage.
The average borrower does not understand that, so you may be speaking to someone at some lending company and before you have a property they say yes, we can help you. Then you get under contract and suddenly they say this is too rural or they cannot help with a short term rental or they need more down or they cannot lend what they originally said. These come up because the person you are speaking to is not the one making the decision. They are often just a sales rep, and it is not their money or their boss’s money. It is some backend investor or private equity firm. They are the ones setting requirements and they want maximum return for minimum risk, so they have all these nuances in place.
Is that a good example? That is exactly right. Plus, they add a ton of fees because you have all these people in the middle who have to get paid. You have underwriting, documentation, junk fees, and some even require you buy insurance through them. They do not advertise these fees upfront, so you are at the end two days before closing and suddenly see all these extra thousands of dollars. When you are doing entry level fix and flips that are maybe 100k, that is a big percentage of your budget getting eaten away.
Yes, that is a very good point. There has been so much done with truth in lending, but it is still an issue. You bring up those smaller deals and we see that a lot. Versus our system at InvestAway, where we control the funds, we do the underwriting and decision making, we keep it simple because we are investors, and we use our virtual assistants from Workergenix to help with all of it. We can do the volume and the back end work at a fraction of the cost compared to those large lending companies.
Absolutely, and the speed is important. Once we get that application, we can do the quick initial underwriting and get loan terms with all fees included within 24 hours. Borrowers can accept or reject depending on whether the deal makes sense. They do not have to wait weeks. Right. So to be clear, someone submits an application and within one business day they get a conditional yes or no and what the terms and fees would be. Exactly. It lays out the interest rate, the term, everything they selected, whether they want closing costs rolled into the loan, which many lenders do not do. They can also choose to defer the interest payment. We are all about leverage and helping borrowers scale quickly. They do not have to worry about monthly interest payments. They can focus on getting their projects done.
We got into the weeds here, which is helpful for potential borrowers listening. But for everyone, I would love to shift into the bigger discussion of the power of leverage. Financial leverage is just one example. Maybe we can share some stories of clients who leaned into leverage and what difference it made. One investor comes to mind who was new to real estate investing. They had been lurking on forums and came to one of the meetups my team hosted. I told them about our private money lending and they had doubts. They had been burned by debt. They were in a lot of credit card and student loan debt and hesitant to start investing until they paid it off. There are benefits to that philosophy, but if you want to pay off debt quickly, earning more money can do that. And earning more money can be done by getting in and doing good flips. I walked him through what it looks like to leverage our funding where he was able to put a little bit down, like 5 percent of the purchase price, and have all the other costs covered. He started with one, made some money, started paying down his debt. After several, he was doing it full time. In one year he made enough doing flips with us exclusively that he got out of debt and now has an income higher than anyone in his family has ever had.
We have also had an investor who did one BRRR that ended up becoming a flip. It was a little rocky and they have not done anything else. Their life has not changed. It is sad. They ended up making money but it was not perfect. They sold it, were positive, but got burned mentally and decided to stick with their W2 job. They are still making the same salary years later. Meanwhile the investor from the first story is working for himself, controls his destiny, and can scale as much as he wants with financial leverage. I would add that his wife is also a licensed real estate agent now handling their deals. It has become a family business transforming their family’s legacy. They have options now because of that stream of income. They can leverage multiple exit strategies. They can hold rentals or flip depending on the deal. They are building rentals, seller finance deals, and flipping others. They have a whole ecosystem that started because he leaned into financial leverage.
Right, because he could not have done this with his own money. I have found we often do not get out of our comfort zone unless we have to. In his situation he did not have his own funds. He had to use borrowed money, and because he was in that tough spot and chose to do it, it was transformational. For me, when I talk about starting with virtual assistants, it was the same thing. We had moved to a new area, I was restarting my real estate business, I had three kids five and under. If I wanted my business to be what I needed, I had to get out of my comfort zone and bring on a virtual assistant. I would not have made that choice without pressure. That choice opened the world of virtual assistants and changed our lives. Many people who choose the path they see as low risk and comfortable are actually more uncomfortable. Their businesses struggle, they stay in debt, and they keep telling themselves they will start investing once they pay it off. If you have a good strategy and the right financial partner, it does not have to be that way. You can start now and clean up the mess.
For my own story, if I had not brought on a virtual assistant I would still be a moderately successful solo real estate agent in Chattanooga. I would need to keep doing that because I would not have created a real estate team that was a saleable business that allowed us to travel the world full time as a family. That one decision had a ten times return in life. Sometimes you do not see the long term impact of little decisions. In our family every couple of years we look back and think we had no idea those little decisions would lead to this life of traveling internationally full time, having a lending business, having the staffing business. These opportunities allow us to live our passion and serve others. It would not have happened if we had not decided to rent out our basement, get the virtual assistant before we could really afford it, or lend our money even though we had never done it before.
Now let’s talk about people who may be looking for a passive investing opportunity. That is one of the things I love about our lending business. It is really win win win on all sides. We talked about helping borrowers and transforming their family’s legacy. It is also amazing to see the transformation of houses. Seeing the before pictures of homes that are unsafe and unsanitary, and seeing them become beautiful, livable homes is incredible. Then there is the win of helping people who are busy W2 employees or not interested in flipping hands on, or who want to supplement with a passive strategy.
One of the ways we serve more borrowers is by bringing on people who want passive lending opportunities and helping them become lenders like us, without the headache of running an operational lending business. They do not have to deal with strict timelines for wiring funds or delays. So yeah, we have created an opportunity for people to become lending partners with InvestAway. They can choose from the loans we have active and serviced, pick how much money they want to put in each loan, and become a lending partner with us to enjoy the benefits without the headaches. If someone is interested, what is their next step? I recommend checking out our website investaway.co. We have a contact form. You fill it out, it comes straight to me, and we will have a quick meeting to talk about what it looks like, make sure it aligns with your goals, and get you started. You pick out the loan, we send you documents to sign, then you wire the funds and you are earning interest.
There are SEC regulations on what can be shared publicly. But in general, what differentiates partnering with InvestAway is that your money is earning interest the moment you deploy it with us. You choose the exact loan you want. You see the house, the strategy, the timeline, the interest rate, and you choose exactly what you want. It is a click of a button. You can choose a quick fix and flip from an experienced borrower or something with a higher return from a newer borrower. You can diversify. You do not have to fund a whole loan. You can put a little here, a little there. Everything is secured by first position mortgages on real estate. We keep conservative loan to value ratios, so there is margin if something goes south.
Thank you so much for joining me today. If people would like to learn more, the best place is https://www.investaway.co/. We have a contact form at the bottom. Fill that out and we can see how we can partner with you.
Please leave a comment wherever you are listening. It is a huge help to me, and if this has brought you value I would appreciate that. Join me again next week.