Ep 17How I Lost $45 Million, Made It All Back & Then Some
His electricity got shut off, and he refused to send his kids to a hotel
Abe Breuer
How I Lost $45 Million, Made It All Back & Then Some
with Abe Breuer
Real estate isn't a business, real estate is an investment.
More moments · 4
Try this · top 3
Quotes
“If you have a partner that you think alike with, he's your friend, he's not your partner.”
“Don't negotiate the price, negotiate the terms. (a lesson he took from a book about the Reichmanns)”
“They don't invest in the business idea, they invest in the person.”
“I wasn't a millionaire beforehand. I was a millionaire on a delusion.”
“I also did college, but my college cost me $4.5 million.”
“If you don't have an end game you don't have a goal. If you don't have a goal you don't have a purpose.”
“If a life insurance agent walks in and says a whole policy is an investment, he's lying... It's at best a savings account.”
Takeaways
- 1 He started with side businesses as a child, sold a computer business at 16 and sold cars as a teen. He's had ADHD all his life and says he's a dealmaker, not a detail person.
- 2 His first building (a 24-unit property in Hartford) was bought at the full $400,000 asking price. He won it with a staged payment plan, only $25,000 upfront, which was borrowed.
- 3 By 2006-2007 he had 65 partners and about 400 Connecticut houses bought to flip in a rising market. After the 2008 crash he owed about $4-5 million to family and friends plus about $40 million in non-recourse bank loans.
- 4 His biggest mistakes: maxed-out credit cards, a flashy lifestyle, too many partners, no business plan, and treating paper equity as wealth.
- 5 During the crash he worked on his own trucks instead of taking a low-paying job. Keeping busy, growing the business and showing investors he was working hard kept their trust.
- 6 He paid everyone back in full by about 2017, roughly 10 years later. Small weekly payments grew over time.
- 7 He wouldn't buy real estate with other people's money again until his debts were paid. His first purchase was buying back his own house from the bank.
- 8 Today he runs portable toilet, luxury restroom trailer and prefab booth companies, and owns about half a million square feet of warehouse space, including the buildings his companies use.
- 9 He prefers commercial property over residential, partly because commercial tenants are around 9 to 5 and not on weekends.
- 10 He uses a bank-financed whole life policy as a source of liquidity and a legacy tool. By his own account this only works at a very high net worth, and a regular whole life policy is a savings account, not an investment.
- 11 Know your type: entrepreneur or operator. His example: an employee who couldn't read or write English well went from $70,000-80,000 a year to $150,000 as a COO elsewhere, then was hired back as CEO at $220,000.