15 years into his real estate investment journey Anthony Diaz tells us how a balanced and conservative strategy can make a federal employee a millionaire. From short term rentals to multifamily, Anthony has done a lot of different things in the real estate space.
In this episode Anthony discusses:
- How having a team in place in your local market is crucial to success.
- How he changes asset classes based on market cycles.
- How to make vacation rentals work for you, even from a distance.
- How focusing on cash flow rather than appreciation can save you when the market drops.
Listen and be inspired by Anthony’s ability to use shifts in the market to make changes to his portfolio.
Music: “Higher Up” by Shane Ivers
https://embassywealthpodcast.podbean.com/e/anthony-diaz/
Listen to the episode here:
Tanya: Welcome to the show, Anthony. It’s great to have you.
Anthony: Thank you. Very excited to speak to you today and to speak to the foreign service audience.
Tanya: Yeah. So tell us a little bit about yourself and your investment journey.
Anthony: Sure. Well, um, I’m probably. 14-15 years into my overall kind of real estate investment journey. Um, currently I’m in New York, on a long island in the Hamptons where I made my most recent acquisition about a year ago. Right. As a dependent. What’s happening? Uh, over time, I’ve tried to balance out my portfolio slightly away from heavyweight and real estate. And now, uh, back in a lot more financial assets, but really try and strike a balance. And, uh, yeah, I love real estate and exploring lots of other different investment opportunities.
So I’ve tried to balance out, uh, around 50%, real estate and 50% in financial assets. And when I say financial assets, I’m talking about things like the thrift savings plan, which I hope everyone out there is contributing to at the max and in an aggressive fashion. The funds such as the S and C are the ones that really have the potential for real growth, uh, also in stocks.
So in individual securities, interesting companies that,, have strong growth possibilities, as well as some more cyclical types of stocks that are,, where maybe there’s a value opportunity. They’re, essentially, under-priced. Well, mainly due to COVID, but, uh, but maybe for some other factors, I’m also investing in more speculative things like Bitcoin, the cryptocurrency market is really taken.
Uh, it’s become more, more mainstream now and there are larger investors looking at those types of assets. And well, personally, I think. Mainly speculative. I think there are some opportunities there for some, for some nice returns, just in smaller amounts of the portfolio. So if I had to break down the financial asset one, it would be maybe 70% TSP, 25% in individual stocks and ETFs 5% in crypto.
And then on the real estate side, it’s a residential and multiplex.
On the real estate side, one of the things I’ve come to realize over the years is that it’s hard to do this by oneself, especially if you’re overseas. But it depends. There are opportunities.
In which you can do it by yourself. And it’s easy. For example, when I owned condominiums that were in relatively new buildings and I went overseas and I rented them out and managed them from afar, it was pretty easy to do it. Didn’t require a lot of work. I didn’t even hire a property manager. So I saved myself temporarily.
There are pitfalls to doing that. So I think that depends on every individual risk assessment, but it is something that can be done now on the multi-family side,, I have a few multi-families in Louisville, Kentucky, and those are older buildings, multiple tenants, so different kinds of turnover structure and, And so in those scenarios, I have a local partner, which is my brother, and he is a very handy person and we’re basically 50 50 investors.
So I’ve put up the capital and have assessed the potential deals and he is on the ground managing, repairing, fixing. Because he’s a general contractor. And his own profession. So he’s very good at those things. And we can save a lot of money. So depending on the type of property. It can take a lot more work.
Luckily I have somebody on the ground when it comes to financial investments. That really is a matter of,, just doing extra research in the evenings perhaps, or looking at validating companies, talking to people and trying to figure out where’s the best way. But the money. So that, that, that requires some time too, but it’s not as,, as it’s not as stressful, it can be stressful.
It can be very stressful when the market is bottoming out, but it doesn’t require a ton of work, like maybe a multifamily property might. So it just depends on the circumstance.
Tanya: So Anthony, you mentioned that you recently decided that you were going to move away from real estate or at least being very heavy in real estate to more sort of financial investments. I’m just sort of curious because you have been investing for a while, right? Like what sort of. Prompted this realization.
I mean, did you find out that the real estate wasn’t performing the way that you wanted to, and, you know, kind of what went into that decision and, and out of curiosity for the listeners, kind of, what does your real estate portfolio look like in terms of, cause I know you’ve done short-term rentals, right?
You’ve done a number of different things., what do you think has been kind of the most profitable real estate investment for you as well?
Anthony: Okay, well, I’ll start with the, with the, the second one first and I’ll come back to the other one. I think I’m done with condos. In a couple of different states, one of them long-term rentals, one of them short-term vacation rentals and the ski mountain. That’s done fairly well, but there are lots of costs associated with managing marketing.
Of course there’s always the tax benefit there, but, you know, in a bad season, for example, that could hit your profits. Uh, as it did last year, for example, for me, that being said, it was. Those were decent returns., the multi-families have definitely shown strong returns, so I’m covering costs and generating cash flow.
So those are definitely a good place to be and have been profitable. The most profitable has been short-term rentals in high-end locales. So currently in the Hamptons, for example, we rent our home out for a couple of weeks during the summer. And the numbers there have been pretty spectacular, compared to everything else I’ve done and seen.
So the, that’s been the opportunity for me has been in the short term where I’ve gotten the most kind of bang for the buck, but that being said, No condominiums over a 10 or 12 year period of holding and renting and maybe just covering costs and having a little extra cash,, in a, in a good area where the market appreciates can be very profitable as well.
And now leading into that, the first part of your question, which was about why reallocated. With this recent purchase, it put a lot of my net worth essentially into real estate exclusively. I was almost a 75, 25 split. And so I really wanted to balance that out some more. One of the reasons why I noticed that.
In the past, I had taken out money from financial assets. So stocks at a time when they were performing well, I took those funds out because I wanted to build a larger real estate portfolio and had I kept some of that money in the market, those profits or those, those, those, uh, those funds would have grown at a much higher rate than what I got on my real estate.
And that in combination. Some of the things I picked up while at business school over the last couple of years, especially. Talking to a lot of wealth advisors and people who invest other people’s money for a living. There’s really a lot of money to be made in the stock market. If one is disciplined and has a decent investment strategy,, you don’t have to be Warren buffet, although you could follow his advice and just buy an S and P 500 ETF and consistently put money in.
And that’s going to have a pretty solid turnover alone life experience. So all those things in combination made me conclude that I needed to balance out the portfolio and have a bit more in the stock market and kind of financial insurance.
Tanya: So I’m just curious. Could you give some numbers on that? Because if you’re looking at real estate versus stocks, for example, like I’m just not a stock person. And I always feel like they’re on a tear. They could go down, they could go up. I mean, hindsight obviously is 2020, right? When you look back, what kind of numbers are you talking about in terms of returns and in terms of real estate versus.
Anthony: Absolutely great question. And it is important to always do, make, do the assessment, uh, and take a look at the numbers. And if, if you look at something as simple as the S and P 500, and you look at a, um, like a fan. S and P 500 ETF over the last 10 years, a 14 to 15% return annual. And, um, so that’s, that’s pretty good.
If you’re getting a 10% return, you’re doubling your money every seven years and that’s so 50% of the last 10 years now. Again, past success is no guarantee of future success, but that’s in a very, what’s what generally would be considered a. Safer, investment in the stock market.
You’re buying an exchange traded fund. You’re not buying individual securities that are more volatile. So this is following the stock market more broadly. If you had bought, um, you had bought Facebook. Seven years ago., you’d have a 10 X for 10 right now. If you had bought Tesla three years ago, you’d have a 10 X return.
You’d have more than a 10 X return right now. The price has dipped a bit recently, but from a high you would be sitting on an extra zero in the calculation. So it’s, uh, it’s, it can be significant if invested in the right companies, it can be astronomical, but even in a relatively. Safe. Can I put that in quote unquote in quotation marks an exchange traded fund, like the S and P 500 can, can, can over a lifetime, maybe 7, 8, 9, 10%. That’s over like 30, 40 years.
My parents never invested in the stock market and things like that. So I really didn’t have that advantage of learning very early. However, they built their nest egg via real estate. So I did have a chance to see it early in life. How w how purchasing a home can really happen., it couldn’t really have an impact for longer term financial stability.
So that’s one, one thing I picked up in 2006, when I was in graduate school, I was on a fellowship. And so I had tuition covered and I had housing and things like that cover. And I was renting. And at that point in time, I saw the benefit of buying something and, and,, that was. That was when I took the plunge.
Now this is 2006. So the market was peaking. There were a lot of opportunities for someone to buy a home. It was very easy at both 5% down and I bought my first property and that was a condo. And through there, I was able to,, Learn more about real estate. Learn more about how, uh, you know, the rental car rental program of work and doing that from overseas., when I went on my first tour, by then I was 30 is when I finally started investing in the stock market. Buying individual stocks. The TSP I had started maxing out the second. I could, when I was in the military prior to joining the state department, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. I didn’t, I wasn’t allocating money properly.
I wasn’t really taking it that seriously. And it wasn’t until I joined the foreign service where I really realized I should be maxing out the TSP issue, putting it in the more aggressive funds, because I have a lot of time to, to. The more time you have, the more risk you should be willing to take up because it’s that volatility that really helps drive prices over time and lead to a profit.
So it was, it was around the early foreign service start that I got into the real estate and individual stocks.
One of the benefits is as you know, in the foreign service living overseas, when housing is covered, it really does give you a lot more flexibility to look at opportunities where you could make purchases, where,, you could potentially buy something to live in for some time. And then later converted into.
So the idea around scaling was first with the condo, then I didn’t buy anything again. For about another six years, I looked at an opportunity for something in Florida to do a pre-construction in a, in a community that was developing near. And it had good potential. My parents were living in Florida. I thought that might be a nice place to have my RNRs.
And so it was based around, around that. Then a couple years later, I was in Baghdad and I did two years of Baghdad. And those types of sip posts pay really well as some of you may. And that was another opportunity then, to look into a vacation rental, again, something I wanted for personal use, but also could be rented.
So I always had an eye when I looked at these properties potentially to their rental potential. If I have to leave, if I can’t use it, what is, what, what is the, what is the chance that I can cover costs and what is the chance that I can actually make money?
Tanya: Actually. The vacation rentals for a second because I, you know, I haven’t done vacation rentals myself and I always have the impression. Yeah. You know, if you want to use it for personal use and it breaks even that’s kind of the minimum standard. Right. But can you talk to us a little bit about vacation rentals and especially since you’re overseas, right?
Like how do you manage it? How do you find, you know, good people on the ground to take care of your investment and especially because of the high turnover, right? Like you’re, you’re constantly receiving guests. I mean, how do you make sure that things are checked on., talk to us a little bit about that process.
Cause I know a lot of foreign services are especially interested in vacation rentals in lots of really interesting parts of the.
Anthony: I’m happy you emphasize that because it is, it is challenging and it takes time. And during that time, you could, you could, you will face challenges and you could potentially lose out on quite a bit of money. When I first bought my. The first vacation rental, which was in Taos ski valley, New Mexico.
I did my diligence. I did some diligence. I didn’t do as much diligence as I should have. Now at that time, a very wealthy New York hedge fund manager. Bought the mountain. He bought the entire mountain from the founding family. And so I saw an opportunity there. I said, if somebody like that with that kind of capital is coming to renovate and to give new life to this mountain, it might make sense to be in this market as well.
What I didn’t do more diligence on was the rental I relied on the management company that was there., I didn’t really. Challenge them on what their strategy was and how they were going to market my property, et cetera. It wasn’t until I was able to harness technology, things like Airbnb, that I was really able to start getting a better sense for price, for pricing and having pricing analytics built into it.
In, into my strategy for the, for the property. Then I tried to find somebody who was a local on the ground to manage the actual intake. So for 10%, I would pay a company to do pricing analytics and book reservations online. And I would pay an individual 10% to deal with the intake check on the place. That wasn’t a good long-term strategy, but it was a good bridge.
Until I was able to find somebody who could take this task full-time and pay them 20%. And so I think that has to be an essential part of diligence when looking at a rental property. How am I going to manage this? And who can I depend on, what are they using for their pricing analytics?
What is a, what does a good year look like? And what does a bad year look like? Because in a place where maybe. You’re looking at ski rentals and you’re hoping one could use snow, but what happens in those years when there isn’t that much snow and that can, that can be a real factor. The other thing I would say is that there are a lot of platforms now that, that, that essentially, like a multiplier.
So you can go on, you can have your home on Airbnb, on HomeAway and VRBO and, uh, In one centralized platform manages all of those. So that’s definitely the way to go nowadays, I think. But, sometimes property managers will want to take care of the marketing themselves. And so, you have to really compare and see what the best way is.
But a lot of these firms. For example, uh, out here I use a company called State Marquis. When I was renting out my place, I was using a place called the Volvic location rental network. You can have them do assessments on a property before you buy it and have them run analytics, say, I’m looking at buying a property, and if I want to buy this, I might hire you.
Um, tell me what my property would go for. How would you structure it through the course of the year? And that at least can help you do some diligence.
Tanya: Is there a cost to those, if you go to those companies and ask them to do that prior to.
Anthony: No, at least not for me. I, again, I think if you can, I don’t think it’s that difficult for them. And if you are enticing them with the promise of future business, then I think that they’re, they’re willing to do that.
Tanya: And you mentioned you found someone on the ground. I always feel like this is the really key piece, right? Especially when you’re overseas finding that trusted person. And especially if you don’t have family or friends, Particular area. How did you find this person ?That was managing rentals for you?
Anthony: That was just pure luck. The condominium board where,, where I had my unit, I actually just sold it a month ago. The condominium board found somebody, they realized we need somebody to manage this property and to help just maintain it. Because we were all on vacation.
You know, how to vacation rent, property owners, and somebody found him. He had great recommendations locally. He’s just somebody who had been there for quite a bit of time, quite a bit of time. Now I have spent a month on the ground interviewing people and looking, and really trying to understand who has that, who has that hustle and who really wants to go after I probably could have found them.
But if you’re not going to make that commitment, then, in some cases it’s just referrals. And in my case, it really was just luck that somebody was able to find this bird.
I was looking at a plate. So I went to university to undergrad in New Mexico. And so I had a bit of a tie to that state. And I had never skied in towels, but I just wanted a connection to New Mexico. And, I wanted to get in on something that maybe wasn’t super expensive because if I were to look at places like Aspen or Telluride, the prices were much higher.
And so in my research, in looking at properties, I just happen to come upon articles about. Individual who’s buying the mountain. And then when I went to Taos, that was like the talk of the town, because it really had just happened. And, so there, a lot of the renovation hadn’t even started yet, but it was well-known that he was going to put millions and millions of dollars into the mountain, which he did.
And it was a phenomenal mountain. And it’s probably why I was able to sell it for no higher value than what I paid for it. About six years ago.
In certain circumstances where you’re buying already from somebody who has been using the place as a, as a rental as well,, furniture was just part of the package that was all included. It needed a couple of upgrades. But nothing substantial. So, that had, uh, the furniture or right in the case of this, this home, which is my principal residence, but it’s,,, we do rent it out just a little bit.
In that scenario, we bought all the furniture, but we bought all the furniture with an eye to making it an attractive rental. So it is it’s higher end,, materials and in furniture that photographs, well, I guess if I wanted to focus on something,, if you want the place to photograph really well. A lot of these places I should mention that you, the.
The pricing analytics and the platform, a rental program, a lot of them have professional photography that comes with the, with the package, so to speak. So when they’re going to put your property online, they’ll send out a professional photographer to take pictures of the place they come out, way better than they do on an iPhone promise.
And so that’s something to rely on the better it photographs, the more likely you’re going to get rentals and you can demand it.
A lot of these platforms that you use will have insurance tied into the payment. So, the tenants will be paying some kind of insurance premium and there’s usually a security deposit, so security deposit insurance.
And then I have my own insurance just to make sure it could happen. Definitely can happen. And people are not going to take care of your own the way you would, as long as you can stomach that. And yeah. Some financial protection. I think it’s it’s I didn’t lose sleep over it.
Tanya: So another question shifting a little bit from short-term rentals to kind of, you know, different markets. So you’ve had experience investing in New Mexico, New York, Kentucky, I think you had condos in DC too. Right? So you’ve, real estate in several different markets. And one of the questions we always get is how do I pick a market?
Like, where do I focus on my investing? Right? Do you, do you have any tips for people who are getting into real estate investing about picking a market and what’s been your experience with the different states taxes has that kind of shaped where you’re going to invest in.
Anthony: Great question because we know it does have to be looking at the larger trends and dynamics. If you want to stay in a market for a long period of time. You really have to get a good sense of the longer-term picture in those regions. I would say that as far as taxes are concerned and things like that by state, by state.
So from Florida to DC, to New York, to Louisville to New Mexico, no big difference. There are some laws though, in certain states, That protect tenants,,, in a way,, that, that, that some might feel is,, is a burden. And, you know, not to sound like a nasty landlord or anything like that, but you want to be in a situation where you have rights as well as a landlord.
So that’s important, I would say that’s a very important thing to look at and perhaps more than taxation, but you also want to look at Airbnb laws and what kind of restrictions there are around that, because some places do not allow it. Short-term rentals for more than a certain period of the year. So those are two big factors.
As far as identifying a market. For me, it was always about who I have on the ground. Or can I,, can I find somebody now in the case of New Mexico, that was sort of the lesson learned is like, I don’t really have somebody on the ground and the next time I purchase something, I should have somebody on the ground.
That being said, you can even find somebody, but having somebody on the ground, I think is. The way things are going right now. If you look at what’s happening,, I think sales are through the roof, across the country. A lot of markets have a dearth of supply and increasing demand. Prices definitely are going up.
And in a low rate environment, that’s only increasing demand. I know that, you know, housing starts were up last year, but it has not been enough to keep up with demand. And now with the cost of materials increasing as well, lumber and other types of materials and the shortage, to some extent in the kind of labor you need to build quickly and build professionally across the country.
You’ll be buying at a premium right now. And so that’s another factor to take into consideration. There might be some markets that have grown more quickly than others, but it’s incredible to see how much has changed in just a year. Even here in New York, where I am on Long Island, the prices here have absolutely gone through the roof in just one year. And so what I would have said a year ago with respect to buying, I don’t think it would apply anymore.
It’s a good question cause I’m not, I’m not really sure. Obviously try to find value, try to understand if I, if I were to buy a home. Well, I guess first thing what are the goals? Right? What’s my time horizon? What am I trying to achieve? And if I’m, if I’m renting and I’m looking to buy a,, just for myself, well, maybe I could buy a multifamily home and rent out the other three apartments. That’s a play that would make sense.
, maybe a single family home. It doesn’t make as much sense right now unless I’m looking to buy 10 single family homes to rent out and,, you know, in a market where maybe they’re coming on in a year. And so I buy in pre-construction. At a discount., that’s one of those, that’s an area that I’ve only done one of those transactions where I bought in pre-construction on plans, basically in a company and a community that was under development.
And that actually had a very good return, but the timeline is a bit longer. So if you believe in a developer. Has real potential. And right now there’s because there’s such an under supply of property. If there is a development coming on the market in a year or two, then it might make sense to buy a property there and then potentially bank on a little bit of appreciation, which is nice.
It should never really be the goal, but hopefully that can happen. And then as that new property is introduced or that new availability is introduced, then there’ll probably be some, there will probably be demand for it. So that’s one thing I would be looking at, but it’s tricky right now. And it’s hard to say to,, sit out on the sidelines for a little while and wait, especially when Rachel is low, but the object should always be to find that.
, to find an area that’s under-priced for whatever reason and make a play there.
Tanya: Actually to follow that up since you’ve done, you know, cause like the Kentucky market and the multifamily is going to be a very different play than, you know, high end. From rental in the Hamptons. Right. And you’ve had experience in both high-end markets and kind of, cashflow markets, right.
Appreciation versus cash flow. And we always hear like, oh, it’s, it’s so expensive to get into markets like DC or New York, you know, what are your thoughts on that kind of thing? Conundrum because there’s people who want strictly cash flow, they want to go to the Midwest, have a hundred thousand dollar house and just make cash flow, but you know, kind of forgo the appreciation bit.
Tanya: And there’s other people who were like, I’m just going to buy this place. I don’t care if it’s cash flow., because I know the appreciation is going to be awesome. Right? Like where do you fall in that spectrum? And, you know, what’s your experience been in terms of like what the actual profitability right.
Has it been? Because I think for a lot of people you go into real estate investing, thinking that you’re going to do. a certain thing. And then as you get more experienced, like you’ve had,, you learn some stuff and then you kind of adjust your investment strategy. I’m curious if you have any thoughts about.
Anthony: I do. And it’s an important distinction to make. So I’m glad you raised it because I personally don’t believe in banking on appreciation. I mean, I think it’s safe to say you’ll have appreciation in real estate in the United States. That’s just history. Mostly, except for those dramatic downturns, more than likely your property is going to appreciate over time or the properties that you’re looking at probably appreciate over time.
But I think that banking on that can be very dangerous because you never really know if you’re buying, how far, how far along in the cycle you’re buying, because then it depends how long you’re going to hold. And so if you’re buying near the top of the cycle and you have only a five-year window, and then there’s a, there’s a big drop in.
In the real estate market, for example, you might be left holding that for a long time. So I’m very wary of putting appreciation at the top of the list. Now, cashflow is definitely, what it’s all about at the end of the day. That’s what I would be focusing on more than appreciation that the challenge is,, you know, the best, some of the best cash flowing properties perhaps also require the most amount of work.
I don’t really believe that real estate is passive income. I know people will talk about it in that way, but real estate is a lot,
Tanya: A hundred percent agree.
Anthony: like there’s nothing passive about it.
It’s a lot of work. You have to be, you have to have people on the ground, you have to be making repairs. You have to deal with tenants.
You have to be assessing where when and when to increase rents,, on a certain market schedule, that’s not going to scare tenants away, et cetera. I think the thing to focus on is cash flow. What you want to be going after, but it’s not. It does require quite a bit of work.
You know, it is with respect to the question, the angle of the question, but with a market, like, let’s say like a Hampton versus a Louisville, in a place like Louisville, I just saw an opportunity for relatively steady cash flow,, college towns. A couple of large employers, some nice areas that have traditionally been attracted to renters and a place where I knew I wasn’t going to have high turnover and I could get decent tenants, who were going to take care of a place in the Hamptons.
It was sort of a personal investment, a place where you wanted to have a home for the long-term. But we knew that at this moment, The rentals, the rental prices and what you can get from people from New York city who want to come here during the summer where we’re significant. And so that calculation was not so much on appreciation.
Appreciation here has just been just completely lucky, awesome timing, but hadn’t even not been appreciated. We still would have done very well., on the record. Even for those short periods, because we did a lot of research in this area and realized how much people were paying in the summertime to rent a home for a week.
And it just made sense to rent it out when, when possible. So that’s my view on that. But again, I would just say I appreciate banking on appreciation, not something I ever do. I hope for it, but I don’t plan for it. And cashflow really. I mean to make an additional plan about cash flow, it’s important to really build out a detailed model when you’re looking at a property.
I mean, an Excel spreadsheet with everything you can possibly think of that can go wrong. Turnover, real kind of industry average or standard for what turnover looks like, what utilities look like, what, random allocations of money. Or the roof in 10 years. And you really want to put that out on, on a well detailed model that goes out five, 10 years to really understand the larger picture early on.
I would fudge the numbers. Oh, okay. Rents for this. And this is my cost. Great. That sounds like I’m making money. But when you really get into the numbers, you think about how much you have to put aside and how you have to deal with a certain amount of vacancy every month. Those numbers can.
Tanya: That’s awesome. Really great advice. I love how we’ve gone over your experience in short-term rentals and multifamily and vacation rentals and the stock market. So I think we’ve covered a lot of areas that our listeners will find useful. I did have one question before we wrap up and that is about resources.
How did you learn all of this? It sounds like you studied business, but also were there any books or blogs that you recommend or any podcasts besides this?
Anthony: Well I think there’s so much out there now there’s so much literature and information out there. Um, obviously the basics, like the basic things you can do, uh, Investopedia for example, has tons of great resources and very, very, um, very useful articles.
And Descriptions and introductory kind of things. And then very advanced ones as well for understanding different types of investments, real estate and mortgages and interest rates and even things like how are we financing and points and all those things can, can function same for stocks and for, for options for derivatives, you name it, that website can go deeply, can go deep on a lot of things.
A lot of it though is just through experiences., talking to people, just, just talking to other folks about what I’m doing and then learning from them. Um, some lessons came the hard way just because I didn’t think to ask folks or to, to really do more diligence, um, books.
I mean, I think for things like stocks in the stock market, I think you can’t overlook people like Warren buffet. It was just a legend and not everybody believes in his value investing strategy, but, but I think his approach to understanding the stock market and stocks can help people understand why it’s not just, it’s not gambling.
It’s not some type of, there are ways to do it that are methodical and that are analytical and that can really pay off., and as far as podcasts, well, I think it is just besides this one, of course, it depends on. On your level of, uh, of understanding, um, you know, Bloomberg surveillance for example, is, is a great one to listen to every day,, they’re very technical on the financial stuff.
So that was challenging. I listened to bigger pockets, quite a lot, and found some of those stories really interesting. And, some of the, some of the speakers, great, good ideas, things to keep in mind, but you know, you gotta figure. At any of these, you’re probably hearing more of the success stories and you’re hearing about failures.
So to the extent that you can go and find out real horror stories, that’s always important too.
Tanya: I love that piece of advice, because honestly, in my investing journey, I have learned so much from the really bad things that have happened, and that’s been really useful to share with other people so that they don’t have to go through that too. So I really liked that tip. To wrap up, we always ask the same question for people, which is what’s your best tip for, um, the foreign service investor community?
What, what, what do you think is sort of something that people should know about?
Anthony: I think people should know if you’re in the foreign service that, uh, well, first of all, you can become in terms of not that this should be your life goal, but you can become a millionaire working in federal government. And that is a, that comes through a mixture of, of the right investments. So I think that that should not be, maybe when I was starting my journey, that was, I didn’t really think about that as a possibility in the way I do now.
And I think that we were very balanced and the tactical approach to investing in real estate in the stock market. In TSP, you can, you can achieve wealth and you can, you can be an. And that’s not an exaggeration.
Tanya: Love it. You can be a millionaire working in the federal government. You heard it here first folks. Awesome. Thank you so much, Anthony. We’ve really appreciated hearing about your story and all of your different, um, adventures and investing. Where can people get in touch with you?
I guess LinkedIn is probably the easiest place. or on or on the, for foreign service? Facebook web page that we have either one of those is probably the easiest way.
Thank you folks. Thanks for having me. Good luck with everything.