225: Beyond the W-2: How to Achieve Real Estate Lifestyle Freedom with Jeremy Beland
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Welcome to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast! It's June already, can you believe we're almost halfway through the year? If you're feeling that mid-year slump, perhaps even dreaming of building a life you don't need a vacation from, then get ready to be inspired and gain ideas from this conversation. We're joined by Jeremy Beland, a real estate investor and co-founder of REI Freedom. At 40, Jeremy boldly sold his townhouse, downsized, and used the equity to begin his wholesaling journey, ultimately achieving 450+ off-market acquisitions and $10 million in gross profits.
Now, managing multi-million dollar businesses (NH Home Buyers, Coastal Florida Home Buyers) and running the REI Freedom Coaching Program, Jeremy is passionately dedicated to helping others achieve financial freedom. Tune in to learn how Jeremy built multi-million dollar businesses and helps others escape the W-2 grind.
In this episode, we're discussing...
From Rock Bottom to Riches: Hear Jeremy's raw and inspiring story of rebuilding from financial ruin after the 2009-2010 recession, driven by an intense motivation to escape poverty forever.
The Audacious Start: Learn exactly how Jeremy leveraged just $17,000 in home equity at age 40 to kickstart his real estate journey, quickly turning it into significant profits and building foundational success.
Action Over Perfection: Understand why taking massive and imperfect action is the fastest path to achieving your real estate goals, even when you don't have all the answers.
Mentorship is Your Midas Touch: Discover why Jeremy, despite his immense success, continually invests hundreds of thousands of dollars in expert coaches and mentors. This insight is key to his 450+ off-market transactions and $10 million in gross profits.
Designing a Life of Freedom: Explore the core philosophy behind building a real estate business that grants you time freedom and the ability to work from anywhere in the world, breaking free from the traditional W-2 handcuffs.
REI Freedom: Your Coaching for Lifestyle Investing: Get an inside look at Jeremy's specialized coaching program, designed to teach you sales acquisition strategies and convert leads into profitable deals, all while focusing on a balanced, free lifestyle.
Navigating the Nuances of Off-Market Deals: Gain practical insights into the complexities of working with distressed sellers and properties, emphasizing problem-solving and providing true value beyond just the transaction.
Leveraging Private Lending for Accelerated Growth: Learn how high-net-worth individuals can partner with experienced real estate investors like Jeremy for strong, consistent returns on their capital, offering a dynamic alternative to traditional investments.
Resources from Jeremy
Resources from Mike and Nichole
Gateway Private Equity Group | Nic's guide | Franchise With Bob
+ Read the transcript
Mike Stohler: Hey everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast, your host, Mike Stohler. We have Jeremy Beland today. He's an investor, he's a coach. He's going to teach you how to do it all. He helped over 1,700 people empowered throughout his career in both real estate and how to do wholesaling, you know?
How are you doing, Jeremy?
Jeremy Beland: I'm well. Thank you, Michael. Thanks for having me on your show today. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to your audience and introduce myself. This is great.
Mike Stohler: Absolutely. Ladies, gentlemen, if I hesitate at all those things, I'm getting through that man that month long, whatever's been going around, so...
Jeremy Beland: Oh, brother, I'm sorry to hear that.
Mike Stohler: If I have to take an extra swallow and hesitate. That's why. Jeremy, talk to us about who you are.
Jeremy Beland: Yeah.
Mike Stohler: Everybody hear that. That east coast, northeast coast.
Jeremy Beland: Right on my shirt. Wicked Smaaht.
Mike Stohler: Pahk the cah.
Jeremy Beland: Yeah, exactly.
Mike Stohler: Who are you? How'd you get started in where you are today?
Jeremy Beland: As you said, I'm definitely from the northeast with my accent. We talked offline before we started about being in the military. Everywhere I went, my nickname was 'Boston'. The accent falls on me forever where I live. It's funny, I've never lived in Boston, but I always live within about 30-45 minutes of Boston and just have a thick accent with it. But yes, I'm Jeremy Beland. I live up in Southern New Hampshire, just north of Boston. I've lived here pretty much all of my life. I'm 48 years old. I'm married to a beautiful woman. In my second marriage we had five children, blended. Three in college. One getting ready to go to college and one a freshman in high school. So getting close to that empty nester period of time. And I started my real estate journey at 40 years old. I was one of these people back during the Great Recession in 2009-2010.
That was completely wiped out from my W-2 life. And that's actually why I went into the military. To rebuild myself and learn a new trade because I don't have a high school education. I don't have a college education. It was one of those moments in life where I had to kind of figure out how to provide for my first wife at that time and my two young kids, and I couldn't get a job anywhere.
So I went into the military, came back out, rebuilt myself, and then I was approaching 40 years old, Michael, I decided to feel like, you know what's gonna happen if the market shifts again, my owner of my company decides to sell it. There's been moments in my life, not just for me as an adult, but in my childhood where we were facing foreclosure.
I went through foreclosure, bankruptcy. It has just been like a recurring theme of my life. It's always built like this fear of being broken, poor again in me. After about a year of when I was traveling as a single dad of two kids. I was listening to this podcast and I came across this guy named Tom Kroll.
If you guys don't know who he is. He's very dynamic and he is magnetic, and he is just "bam, ding, ding, ding, ding", brings this cowbell and stuff. And he had this thing called Wholesaling Inc. back at the time, and I was just drawn into his personality. I listened to that podcast for a year and I thought to myself, " that's what I gotta do. I gotta get into this. How am I gonna figure this out?" Because I do wanna buy property at some point. Back then, I didn't realize I could use other people's money to flip offices and buy rentals. I just thought it had to be my own, because I didn't know what I didn't know. So I'm like, well, if I can learn how to wholesale. If people listening, wholesaling is getting properties off market and assigning the purchase of a sales agreement, the rights to that purchase sales agreement, to basically a cash buyer, another investor, and getting a spread for it, 10, 20, $30,000. And I thought, " Hey, that doesn't cost much money. I don't need much money." That's the greatest, the lowest barrier of entry into real estate I could think of. I ended up at 40 years old, I just turned 40. It was September. A month later, I sold my townhouse because it was the only money I had.
I was still living paycheck to paycheck, month to month. I had only $17,000 of equity in that home, but I said, "You know what? I'm gonna do it." So I sold it. I moved my kids into this little two bedroom apartment and not such a great apartment complex. It was definitely a huge step backwards.
But you know, the $17,000 that took $11,000 of it, 5,000 went into the coaching program. $6,000 like my initial marketing spend to send out direct letters and get myself running. And we got our first deal in 90 days, which I made $5,000, and then we went on to do 10 deals that year for $73,000. Built a foundation of something great.
And here we are eight years later and we've done over 450 off market transactions. I've done over $10 million in gross sales, since I've started gross profits, I should say. Not sales, but gross profits. I built million dollar markets in three different markets now.
It all just started with that leap of faith that I'm gonna sell this, I'm gonna burn the boats, and God, if this doesn't work, I'm screwed, so I gotta make it work.
Mike Stohler: Yeah. You know, people ask me, " What's the motivation?" And there's no bigger motivation, losing everything, right?
Jeremy Beland: Exactly.
Mike Stohler: For people that are multimillionaires. "Yeah, I'll do this, I'll do that." And who cares if it fails because they got money. But man, when you're backed up against a wall, two young kids, that's a motivation right there. And also, everybody, you'd all agree that is the American Dream.
It doesn't matter what your education is, right? Real estate doesn't care who you are, what color you are, what you look like, or what your education is. You can make money in real estate.
Jeremy Beland: A hundred percent. Yep. Just gotta take massive and perfect action and get some good mentorship along the way.
Mike Stohler: Let's talk about that, because I hit on just about every single one of my podcasts, even today I still have mentors and I look upon the mentors and talk to them constantly have coaches.
Jeremy Beland: Me too.
Mike Stohler: What is the importance of having that mentor? People look, it's like, "Eh, I'll just watch a couple of these podcasts and try to do it on my own."
Jeremy Beland: Yeah. I'll watch YouTube University and figure it out, right?
Mike Stohler: Yeah. HGTV.
Jeremy Beland: Which is the worst place to learn anything. Starting out with that first program, right? It wasn't the greatest program, but it taught me how to wholesale my first house. And I knew about how to wholesale at that time, but I remember going through that program being like, "Wow, there's so much more to this that I didn't know."
And I thought I knew, but I didn't know what I didn't know. And I just remember being like, "Man, I thank God I took this because it would've taken me six months, seven months to figure out what to do. And the two or three months that I did this, right? So it definitely expedites your path to success because these people know what works and what doesn't work, and they're gonna give you actual steps and actual guidance to prevent making a lot of those mistakes.
You're gonna pay one way or another. You're gonna pay through extra time, you're gonna pay through making losses, or you're gonna pay through education, right? And I'm a firm believer in education and I just thought it only makes sense. I'm just gonna pay somebody to teach me so I can get there faster because I have this urgency to reach my goals as quickly as possible. I don't want to take forever. And if you're going to YouTube University, there's a lot of great content out there. My YouTube channel has a lot of great content down there, but if you don't know what you don't know, you don't know what information is accurate and what information isn't accurate.
So it's really, really tough and like you. So I'm here over eight years in this business now. I still have a mentor. My mentor today is Steve Richards. He's a business coach for me. What I've learned a lot through him is that I continue even with all my success and experience to have blind spots and he's able to see them when I can't, which helps me be a better leader, better business owner, better husband, better entrepreneur, better investor.
And ever since I started my journey, I never had a coach come out to me. I went and found every coach that I needed. For us it was like, I need to learn how to wholesale. Okay, now I need to learn how to do the sales of wholesaling. Okay, I'm gonna go find a sales coach. Then it was like, I need to learn about private money.
I found a private money coach. Then it was like, I need to learn how to be CEO. I went out on a CEO coach, right? So CFO coach and all these other things, right? The reason why I've done 450 deals is not despite what my shirt says about being 'wicked smaaht'. It's really not that. It's because I've invested hundreds of thousands of dollars into mentorship and I've just done what they said.
And of course, I've made mistakes and I've had imperfect action. But needless to say, I've accomplished 450 off market deals in six states that made $10 million in eight years. That would've never, ever happened without mentorship and a lot of mentorship to say the least.
Mike Stohler: Absolutely. So along those lines of mentorship, you've decided to give back.
Jeremy Beland: A hundred percent.
Mike Stohler: Let's talk about your website. If you have one, how you share your knowledge and your coaching programs. REI Freedom Coaching Program, ladies and gentlemen. Let's talk about that.
Jeremy Beland: So we created REI Freedom about a year and a half ago. Real Estate Investing Freedom, it's more for the lifestyle investor, right?
So I've had my moments where I've tried to scale, scale, scale. What I found in time is less is more. I'm all about the lifestyle now, and I've been really blessed to build a life of time freedom through real estate investing, right? And financial freedom is great. That's what we're striving for.
And I'm still working towards financial freedom, but I make enough financially to give me plenty of time freedom, and I'm always gonna find a way to make more money. There's always an opportunity to make more money. I can't make more time. I'm running out of time. So I really want to value as much time as I can.
And because I've had this blessing, I felt like it was a way to start teaching other people to do that. Now there's a lot of great mentorships out there. A lot of great programs. What ours is designed to do is really to specialize in sales acquisition, coaching, so there's a lot of ways to generate leads to find off market deals, right?
Whether it's cold calling, direct mail, pay per click, right? You find motivated sellers and take those leads and have a conversion process to take them into contracts that actually close, right? So you're spending all this money on marketing to generate leads, but there's an integral, delicate process of how to talk to people on the phone and in person to convert those leads into deals with whom you get a good ROI. When you do that, you basically start becoming an off market expert like we are. So we've generated this machine where in our markets we have off market deals that come in every single month. And then with the help of private lending, I have the ability to either wholesale this deal, cherry pick the nice flips, cherry pick the nice rental properties I want to keep, I can wholesale, I can do innovations, I can do all these different things.
So I'm not just wholesaling, I'm looking at all the different exit strategies, which makes sense for my business. You know, maybe it's cash cycle, cash flow, most revenue, right? How much money I got out on the streets at any given time. Can I handle any more projects, right? All these scenarios come into play and maximize revenue on the back end.
So rather than doing a hundred deals a year, I could do three, four deals a month, and I can be well into the seven figures and make myself a really good lifestyle with a small team. Only work a dozen to two dozen hours a week. Really in my home buying business, I work less than a dozen. I work more as a coach than I do as a home buying company leader and business owner.
Now, we've built a coaching program where we could teach other people to do that, right? We're not the best fit for everybody, but if you want to be a home buyer where you're providing value, build a life of freedom to get out of the golden handcuffs of the W-2 and corporate America and not be sitting in traffic on Monday mornings and be like, me and my wife, we can go out to the beach or go get facials or get massages and you guys do all your stuff on weekends.
We do them on Mondays and Tuesdays because we don't have to do them on the weekends. If you wanna build that lifestyle, then I'm the kind of person to work with. But I will say I only work with people who take massive and perfect action. This isn't a place where you come and I'll give you all the education, but we work hard here and we take action.
Mike Stohler: Yeah, absolutely. I've got it above my office right here is, "Build a life you don't need a vacation from."
Jeremy Beland: That's exactly what I've done. I love that quote. That's what it's all about in my opinion.
Mike Stohler: It is. If you bust your butt and do the work, the money comes.
I don't like when people say, "I wanna be a millionaire." This is America. If you work your butt off and you are dedicated, you can be a millionaire.
What I want to do is work anywhere in the world.
Jeremy Beland: Right, exactly. And being a millionaire, I mean from somebody who was poor, seemed like it was impossible. But as you start to get into real estate, you realize making a million dollars and becoming a millionaire is not really that difficult at all. It is for people who have paycheck to paycheck in corporate America, but real estate can get you there really quickly. I mentioned earlier that we're starting to become empty nesters, right? One of our goals is when our youngest is out, for about a year to two years, we kind of wanna be roaming nomads. And you mentioned a boutique hotel in Spain, right?
So one of the things we want to do is kind of bounce around Europe, and we'll spend like a month in Spain, a month in Portugal, a month in Italy, through Airbnbs. We'll probably travel to different parts of the United States, in different parts. All while still being a coach, running my coaching business, all running my rental portfolio and still running my house buying business.
because I can do it anywhere I'm at. I don't have to be anywhere. Because I don't really need to go anywhere. I work for my kitchen table,
Mike Stohler: And that is one of the secrets, not only do you get the depreciation, the deductions, but the freedom. I can't even stand if I'm in traffic for 10 minutes.
It's like, " Oh my God." Because I'm just not used to it. And I'm like going, there's people that do this every day.
Jeremy Beland: I'd say the same thing, Michael. I go to the gym and I'm like, if we go a little earlier for some morning, because we go to the gym every day and it'd be like traffic.
I'm like, how do people do this every day? I'm so spoiled and thankfully so.
Mike Stohler: I know. So ladies and gentlemen, if you're sitting there and you're listening to this on your way in traffic, this is probably where you're gonna listen to this. The only way to think about it, what lifestyle changes that Jeremy and I have undertaken, because I was in that corporate world. I was doing all that sort of stuff. Just freedom.
Give us some, the disadvantages and some of the challenges of being a wholesaler.
What are some of those that you could, it's not all easy breezy. I know some brokers are like, "Oh, wait a minute, he's a wholesaler." I'm not gonna, you have to kind of find them off market, right? Because a lot of brokers are like going, "Nah, you know what? He's just gonna flip it."
Jeremy Beland: We don't just wholesale, but if you're a wholesaler, we're all about off market acquisition, so we flip, we buy and hold, we wholesale, we do it all. We just look at each property and decide what's the best exit strategy for us. And I love having those options because if I was just a flipper.
Then all of a sudden, 2022 comes into 2023 and we have the fastest interest hike in human history, right?
And a lot of those flips almost went outta business because the houses were all stuck and all the capital, right? I didn't have to flip anything. I had exit strategies and I did 48 deals that year and I was successful making money on all of them.
But now we're flipping again because the dust is settled, the people are getting used to the new norm. But it is all about off market acquisitions and it's not easy. When I was in 2009, 2010, before I went to the Air Force and I mentioned that I got hit really hard in the recession.
I was on the brink of foreclosure on bankruptcy and there were no options for me at that time. The government was bail out the banks, but they weren't bailing out the American citizens. It wasn't like CoVid where there was SBA loan help or nothing, the mortgage companies were folding left and right.
There were no loan modifications, there were no refinance options. And within a year and a half, my house was upside down, $150,000. And I went from making six figures and I couldn't find a job to making 30K a year. It was crazy. It was a real estate investor who saved me because I knew enough about real estate investing at that time that I reached out to somebody because nobody else could.
And if I went through foreclosure in bankruptcy, I couldn't go into the Air Force 'cause I needed top secret clearance, but with a short sale I could. So he came out short, and sailed to my house. Great story behind it. But the reality is, he gave me a reset button in life, and if it wasn't for him, I wouldn't be on your podcast today and be in the position that I was today.
And we're all one or two life experiences, or one or two life choices away from being at that rock bottom position, right? So a lot of good people fall in high times, but when you're in those high times, you're irrational, you're emotional, you're depressed, you're the worst version of yourself.
You're not making good choices. You tend to hide your head in the sand and be an ostrich and avoid everything that's falling apart around you, right? At least a majority of us do. So as an off-market acquisition expert, you're dealing with people like that all the time, and there's a lot to navigate to get them to make the right choices, to handle their emotions, handle them where they're at the worst of themselves, not the best of themselves.
And so there's a lot to navigate there. Obviously you're buying houses that need a lot of love and things of that nature. So the hottest thing is finding these people because they don't always come to find you. Finding them and then seeing if you're the right fit for them, and then getting the property under contract's amazing.
It's an incredible feat. Getting it to close is a whole other can of worms and it requires a lot of effort and that's where people really earn their money in this business. So we provide a lot of value in exchange for equity in people's homes. So we're all about problem solving.
Do you leave all the junk behind? Do we help relocate you? Do you need help finding a new place? Are we buying the house with non-paying tenants in there? Is the place completely trashed? Or does it have mold? Is it fire damage? All these scenarios were taken on and that's where it gets really challenging.
Mike Stohler: Yeah. And all of a sudden you're a contractor, you gotta know some type of plumbing. Unless you have best friends. Once you get in the house, you're looking around, it's like, "Oh my God."
Jeremy Beland: Yeah.
It's more about the people's distress than it is actually house distress.
because let's face it, people are tough to navigate and to handle. Relationships are hard. Especially when they're not at their work. Nevermind trying to get a divorced couple to agree on a situation when they both need to sell the house when they despise each other. Those are the type of things we have to navigate.
Mike Stohler: That's why I got in hotels. I don't wanna deal with people.
Jeremy Beland: Yeah. Yeah. We're a people business. That is not the business being if you don't wanna deal with people, that's for sure.
Mike Stohler: I don't like that at all. Jeremy, how can people get ahold of you once they get to the website?
What happens?
Jeremy Beland: Just go to reifreedom.com. There's a lot of information there. If you're interested in joining our coaching program, go to reifreedom.com/apply. You can book a discovery call with me and see if we're the right fit for you or if you're the right fit for us.
I'm all over Facebook. Jeremy Beland, B-E-L-A-N-D, Jeremy Beland, B-E-L-A-N-D, YouTube, uh, Instagram, LinkedIn. I talk to people all day every day even if I'm not the right fit for you. If you have some questions and I can help provide value and send you in the right direction, I'm always happy to do that.
I'm all about collaboration in this industry. I've been really blessed by a lot of good people taking time out of their days to help me. And it's our job to pay it forward as much as we can to help others as well.
Mike Stohler: Perfect. And before I let you go, is there anything else that I might have missed that you'd like to let our audience know?
Jeremy Beland: I would say, you mentioned that a lot of people that listen to here are looking for the more limited partner types, right? People who want to invest into syndications, maybe be private lenders. If you're somebody who has, you know, you're a high net worth individual where you maybe have a lot of cash to invest, whether it's in real estate or it's your 401(k), self-directed IRA, whole life insurance, home equity, line of credit, whatever those resources are.
If syndication isn't for you, because it's not for everybody, but if you find somebody like Michael, you're gonna get a great return on that investment. So, stop there. But people like me can be a great resource for you. We're getting constant deals so we can give you 6 to 12 month long-term investments with some of the multifamilies that we're borrowing, which is buy, rehab, renovate, refinance, repeat kind of deal which is just basically stabilizing small rental properties.
But we flip and we do small transactions as well. So somebody like me can do deals where you get returns in 60 to 90 days. 6 months, 9 months, 12 months. And then if you could get them to do a variation of them, your money's always working and you're constantly getting paid every month, every couple months.
It's a good way to use your money to get great returns if you can find the right person. And somebody like me who's in this industry, private lending, which I'm great at. I'm not looking for private lending. I got more than enough, but private lending has been a game changer in my life and my business model.
So if you can find somebody like me and bring that marriage together to be a marriage made in professional real estate heaven where the two of you guys can make a ton of money working together as a team.
Mike Stohler: Absolutely. Ladies and gentlemen, Jeremy Beland with REI Freedom. Thanks so much for coming on The Richer Geek Podcast.
Jeremy Beland: Thanks, Mike. I appreciate it.
Mike Stohler: Yep.
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ABOUT JEREMY BELAND
Jeremy Beland is on a mission to empower real estate investors, from beginners to seasoned pros. With over 1,700 individuals already transformed by his guidance, Jeremy's expertise is unparalleled. He began his own journey in 2017, at age 40, by downsizing to fund his first real estate investment. Since then, he's completed over 450 off-market acquisitions—including wholesaling, wholetailing, flipping, and rentals—generating an impressive $10 million in gross profits. Today, Jeremy successfully manages NH Home Buyers and Coastal Florida Home Buyers, both seven-figure operations, and leads the REI Freedom Coaching Program, all driven by his passion for helping others achieve financial freedom.