237: Real Estate, Risk & Retiring Early
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What does it take to retire at 44 without winning the lottery or inheriting wealth? In this episode, we are joined by Tony Lopes, CEO of Dirty Boots Capital, real estate professional, best-selling author, coach, and speaker. Tony shares how his immigrant roots, engineering background, and calculated risks in real estate allowed him to achieve financial independence and how you can apply the same principles to your own journey.
In this episode, we chat about…
Tony’s journey from mechanical engineer to full-time investor and entrepreneur
The wake-up call that shifted his mindset after being laid off at 28
Why keeping a W-2 job at first can be a powerful tool for real estate investors
How to leverage 401(k) funds wisely to build your investment portfolio
The psychological barriers (fear, resistance, conditioning) that hold people back from starting
Tony’s “swim lane” in multifamily real estate and why he focuses there
The role of networking and coaching in finding opportunities and accelerating growth
Building not just wealth, but a legacy for future generations
Key Takeaways:
Financial independence starts with understanding your expenses and creating enough cash flow to cover them.
A W-2 paycheck can be an advantage, banks value stability when you’re just starting out.
Don’t reinvent the wheel, model the success of others who’ve done what you want to do.
The biggest hurdle is often mindset, not money, overcoming fear and resistance is critical.
Networking opens unexpected doors; opportunities often come from simply sharing your goals.
Legacy matters: investing in real estate can provide stability and opportunity for future generations.
Retiring early isn’t about quitting life, it’s about having freedom to live on your terms.
Resources from Tony
LinkedIn | Dirty Boots Capital | www.thriftbooks.com
Books recommended: The ONE Thing | The War Of Art
Resources from Mike and Nichole
+ Read the transcript
Mike: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. Today, we have Tony Lopes. He's a first-generation American, CEO of Dirty Boots Capital. I love that name. He's a real estate professional, best-selling author, coach, and speaker He earned a BS Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from UMass. He worked in the defense industry for 19 years. We'll get into a little bit about that. There's a lot of people, you know, I'm former military, so we'll get into some of the defense stuff in his background. But while he did that, he was building a portfolio of residential income properties. And, along with his understanding of markets and economics, it allowed him to retire at 44 years old. We'll get into that and what that means to be retired and if he really retired, but he's sharing his knowledge and experience. He loves to give back so that others can achieve financial independence and enjoy the same level of freedom he does. Welcome Tony. Tony: Mike, thank you so much for that kind introduction. I appreciate you having me on the show today. Mike: Absolutely. Well, it's a pleasure. It's always nice to talk to another real estate guy. You know, I've given me a brief survey of who Tony Lopes is, where are you from? How did you get started from mechanical engineering to real estate real quick? Tony: Yeah. So, I live in both New Hampshire as well as Florida. I grew up in Massachusetts and so the Northeast is a place I love to be for four seasons, but it's too cold in the winter, as I've gotten older. So I needed to find a warmer climate. So here we are in Florida. I grew up in a household. My parents were immigrants, right? they migrated to this country, probably like a lot of your listeners out there, right? And again, probably like a lot of your listeners, I was handed down the probably similar tablets for my parents to go to school, get a good education, you'll get a great job, and you'll be taken care of forever. Right? That's a pretty standard mantra when I talk about that. People like they resonate with it, right? So I'm no different. I'm not any more special, skills or anything than anybody else. So I did just that, right? I did what my parents told me to do, went to school, got a great education as you read off, you know, mechanical engineering degree and an MBA, very popular degrees engineering, getting into business. So I did that. I did get a great job, and then four years later I got laid off. And I was like, wait a minute, Mike, this one's not part of the mantra. I was handed down. Right? And it was a wake up call at that point for me. I was28 years old, thereabouts, 28 years old. and I'm like, this is not how I want my life to start. I wasn't financially independent at the time. So I had to get another job. Okay, so, but quickly thereafter, I just said to myself, you know, I needed to find additional avenues for cash flow to protect myself, right? Nobody's gonna do it. My parents were immigrants. They had to go figure out their own retirement and their own, you know, thing. I wasn't gonna, you know, go crawling back to mommy and daddy. I had to figure out my own thing and plus they would've told me, " Hey, young man, you go figure it out." They had to figure out their own thing, right? It wasn't this coddling of people that we have these days, right? We have a very weak culture. We need a stronger culture and my parents scribe to that, they were like, "Hey, you're a young man. We sent you to school. You have a ton of education more than we have. You go figure this out." Right? So I didn't even dare, you know, crawl back to them in any way. So I have to figure that out on my own. And for me, real estate was an interest of mine. I knew I could do it. I liked running spreadsheets and running the numbers and doing the analysis and the whole bit. And so that's what I gravitated towards. And I purchased my first building, which was a classy building. It was, man, I made all the wrong mistakes on my first property. I made all the wrong mistakes, right. I didn't know shit from Shinola Mike, right? Mike: Yeah. Tony: I didn't know cap rate equations. I didn't know how to do cash on cash equations. And I share this story because like we were saying before, you hit the record button, we're not extraordinary people. We're just like everybody else, right? We take different risks, right? We put ourselves out there, and the reward comes to those who take the risks, right? Calculated risks. You take calculated risks as well as I do, and that's really what's led to your success. My success is putting ourselves out there following people who have come before us, right? Mike: Yeah. Tony: That's one way that we take our calculated risk, right? I don't reinvent the wheel, I just go look at people who've been successful doing what I want to do, it's that easy. And so I follow that mantra that they were so successful at. and so that's what led me to building up my real estate portfolio from there while I was working. Again, calculated risk. I didn't quit my job right away. I continue to work my day job, my W-2, right? Get that paycheck, which was very valuable because when I went to the banks for mortgages, they saw me as very safe. Safe risk for the bank, right? More so on. And truth be told, honestly, today. I have more pushback from institutions, from banks, because today I'm essentially unemployed, right? Mm-hmm. I don't have a W-2, right? I don't have a standard paycheck. I have investments that pay me, but because I don't have that standard weekly or biweekly paycheck coming in, they see that as a little more risk. They're not used to that. People find this funny, but it can be harder. For me to actually get a mortgage, get a loan from an institution. Mike: Yeah. And you know, you hit on a couple really, really good points, Tony. You know, number one, ladies and gentlemen, it's not an HGTV episode, okay? You're not going to be successful in an hour episode, and you're gonna be flipping houses or all these sorts of things. It's harder than that and Tony mentioned about the W-2. I listen to all these young kids, it's like, "Yep, I'm gonna quit my job and flip houses and I'll just get hard money." Yeah. Tony: They're not gonna listen to me and the most important of what I did, ladies and gentlemen, and Tony can, it's right along with what he said. You know, my wife had a W-2. It allowed me to quit my job and do it because she had a W-2 and Tony is spot on. Mike: Spot on a hundred percent, where the banks don't like entrepreneurs. I tried to buy, I was worth tens of millions and we like to leverage. I went in to buy a rental that was $160,000. They wouldn't give it to me because they wanted to see all of my LLCs, all of my K-1s, all that stuff. And they're like, "Oh, Mike, you don't make any money. You're showing losses on all these companies." And I'm like going, " Yeah, I've got a good CPA." Tony: That's one of the beauties of real estate but you have to know how to play it. There are pros and cons. That's what you show people how to leverage, how to do these things. That's what I show people through my coaching, Having a W-2, leverage that. Leverage the fact that you are lucky enough to have a standard paycheck coming in. They love that. Leverage it. Yep. You can also leverage, I have so many people say to me, "Tony, where do I get my down payment for this?" I'm like, "well, do you have a 401(k)?" "I have 401(k)." Leverage your 401(k). Borrow from yourself. Now, I'm not saying that's for everybody because sometimes I get, you know, people bang on me for this. "Oh, you should never borrow from your 401(k)." Again, you have to do it smartly with a plan in mind, right? With a strategy, low risk, right? To basically say, "Okay, I have this available to me that I can leverage." At the end of the day, I'm paying myself back for that money that I take out of my 401(k). Mike: That's a loan. Tony: That loan, right? With interest, you're paying yourself back with interest, plus you're giving yourself that opportunity to go off and buy an investment property that you otherwise would not have been able to buy. Right? So there's beautiful leverage there that can be had if you have a W-2, something that neither Mike nor I have. You're starting off in, in a good space. Mike: Absolutely. It's kind of funny, when I speak in front of, when I do conferences, I see the same people and I'm like, "Okay, you know, did you buy your first house yet?" "You know, well, the interest rates, right?" "Well, you know..." I get five or six excuses. "Well, one more seminar." You know, to you, when you go through the coaching and you're teaching people, what is it that mindset, you know, the hardest part is jumping off that into the deep water, right? It's taking that risk. Tony: Yeah. So when I do coaching, Mike, it's a lot of real estate stuff, but I would've been better served with a psychology degree than a mechanical engineering degree. And I don't say that to be mean or anything like that. But it's like we, the way we are where, where animals and we all kind of do the same thing and it all starts with, you know, think of it as like an onion. The center of an onion was some idea. Somebody put it into our heads very early on. Investment property. Ooh, that's high risk. Okay, that's the center. Then a layer forms over that somebody else, maybe your neighbor is peppering in your air, you know? Ooh, you can lose all your money. You can lose your money. That's another layer. And then another layer forms and another layer forms. and by the time they get to me, there's this entire onion that I need to peel back and truly understand before we even talk about real estate. Mike: Yeah. Tony: It's that question of why haven't you started yet? Yeah. And that's not to pick on anybody, right? Because I need to help that individual get over that first. If they don't get over that, I'm just gonna be working with them for six weeks. Six months, a year. I'm just gonna be working with them and waste my time. I need to break through. I need to have that major aha moment. The same thing as me, I was conditioned a certain way and my parents gave me the mantra, and until I got laid off, until I had that major smack upside the head. I wouldn't have figured it out. I had to have that moment. And that's the moment I need to have with people when I coach in that psychological moment. So I have a process that I go through with folks to get there quicker. Once we're there, we work to fix that because that's what needs to be fixed first. A lot of people enter into these things with a big thing is fear. And we have to understand, well, what's that fear in many cases it's fear of not knowing. . And so we need to get over that hurdle. We need to educate ourselves, and there's a lot of different ways we can do that today. Today it's amazing. Mike, you know, we live in an amazing world. When I started doing this 20 years ago, I didn't have social media to leverage people who were doing it, you know, to buy books. It was Barnes and Noble and maybe, Books-A-Million, right? I didn't have the resources to go to thrift books where I could buy, and even today, I'll be honest with folks, even today, I go to thrift books online, thriftbooks.com. Well, you can buy used books for like $3-$6. It's so cheap to buy a book and read and learn and get educated, right? Podcasts, what we're doing here today. I didn't have those but there's so many things and resources we have today. Mike: Yeah. Tony: To get educated, it's amazing what's out there and we should all leverage these things. Mike: It's almost no excuses, right? Unless it's information overload, you know? But yeah, you and I are old enough to where I call it when I'm on podcasts, I call it the PG days when I got started in real estate, the pre-Google Days. It's like I couldn't thumb through the yellow pages on how to be a landlord, That's right. And now today it's amazing. I was just sharing with somebody else. Doing podcasts and things like that, you get introduced to so many amazing people that you can actually have conversations with. Whereas before, if you like, watch tv, but I used to watch Tony Robbins and things like that. Tony: His energy is just amazing. Just amazing his energy, you know? And a month or two ago I was speaking with one of his previous marketing executives, and I was like, "This is so wild." I would've never had I not done certain things, right? pulled on certain levers that we have today that we didn't have back then 20 years ago when I was watching Tony Robbins, I didn't have those levers to pull on, but today we have them. We all have them and now I'm talking to one of his former marketing executives. Do you think that's incredibly valuable to me as a business person? Of course it is. To learn and engage with somebody at that level. Huge. Mike: Well, people would pay tens of thousands dollars to have lunch, just lunch with these people, you know? That's why ladies and gentlemen, the networking never stops learning. Never stop having a coach like Tony and never stop learning. I still have my mentors. It never sucks because in these networking groups, I found one of my future partners that was in the hotel business. I would have never gotten in the hotels if it wasn't for knowing these people and just opening my mouth and saying, "Hey, what do you do for a living?" It's just amazing. Tony: You know, these networking events that we go to are tremendously valuable. and I can share so many examples of things, right? where in a networking event, that's a great opportunity to share with others your goals, what you're trying to achieve because when you're there and you're telling people about these things, these are people who potentially can help you, right? And I'll give you an example, a couple weeks ago, I was at this REI Summit at Sea Event. Great event, great people. Somebody was presenting, talking about their real estate experiences and where they want to go with things. A young woman, doing amazing things for a young woman, she's in her 20s, she had shared with her, you know, one day I want to buy my own private island, and that's struck me. I'm like, "Oh, wow, that's a great goal to have." And she had a vision of it and what she wanted to do and build it out and grow it and create some cash flow for herself. I'm like, "That's great." Later on, I met up with her after she shared that vision, that goal of hers. And I'm like, "Do you know anybody who's actually bought a private island?" She's like, "No, I don't." And I'm like, "Well, would you like to meet some people who have and kind of pick their brain and maybe get. some experience there." She's like, "Wow, that'd be great." So I'm connecting her with, there's an individual who bought a private island, and then there's another individual who develops private islands, right? Develops private islands in the Caribbean. Right? So do you think those are important people for her to meet? All she did was open her mouth and say, "This is my dream, this is my goal. I wanna buy a private island," and there was someone in the audience who took notice and said, " Let me connect you now." Maybe something will come of it. Maybe nothing will come of that but unless we go to these networking events, unless we open our mouths and say, "This is what I'm looking to do." Unless somebody tells me, "You know, Tony, I wanna buy a single family home." "Tony, I want to do Airbnb." Now I don't do Airbnb but you know what? I have rock stars that I know that do Airbnb and are awesome at it, right? Do you think those are valuable people for you to meet and know and have a private introduction to people who you would probably never even meet? Mike: That's right. Tony: But that's right. You gotta talk to us. You gotta let us know. So networking, what'd you say? Huge. Mike: Huge. Now let's talk about huge. You retired at 44. How'd you do it? What'd you concentrate on? Did you build up a portfolio, single family, multifamily? What's your secret? Tony: So my swim lane is multifamily. I love multifamily. You know, part of the genesis of it all is I love all things macroeconomics. I love studying macroeconomics, understanding the forces that are not just economic-related, but also political and geopolitical and societal, different factors that are pushing us towards the multifamily space. So that's my swim lane, right? That's my swim lane that I operate. I know it incredibly well, and we do great things with that. I'm not saying that investing in a single family is bad. I'm not saying if you invest in a storage unit that's a bad thing, or RV parks. That's just not my swim lane, right? I can talk about it, but that's not really my swim lane. My swim lane is multifamily. That's what I do, right? And so I just started slowly, right? My first one was a fourplex. It was a Class C. The wrong neighborhood. The wrong tenants, the wrong building. Again, I did all the wrong things. But from there, I bought more. I bought more. I got into building spec homes. The experience that decided, not really what I want to do, wasn't my full interest. So I went back to multifamily and just built from there. The secret, you ask about the secret. So really the secret is, to retire early, understand what your expenses are or will be at the point you wanna retire. Say you want to retire in 10 years. Understand what are my expenses at that point, either today or in 10 years when you want to retire? And then you have to have enough real estate with enough cash flow coming in to cover those expenses, right? If you have enough income coming in the door through real estate to cover your expenses. Essentially you can retire, right? It's a pretty simple equation. Income equals expenses. You can say bye-bye to the day job. Now, for me, I was an engineer. I had my spreadsheets, I had it all mapped out, very detailed. I put a factor of safety on it, right? You come from the airline industry, you understand the factor of safety, right? So I put a factor of two on it, right? That was just me. Again, just calculated risks, right? We wanna be safe. So I put a factor of safety of two on it, and I said, I wanna make two X my expenses. In case anything goes wrong with my building, if I have tenants move out and reduce cash flow, I still want to cover my expenses. Right? I want to live well. I didn't want to just like, you know, sit at home and watch tv. I wanted to go on vacation. I wanted to have experiences, so I needed money to do that. So for me, I put a factor of safety of two onto that. That number of income cashflow that I needed. And that's really the secret. I could have left sooner had I wanted, I could have retired in my 30s if I wanted but it just wasn't. What's right for Tony Lopes may be different for Mike, may be different for Jim, may be different for Sally. There's no judgment and we need to, I encourage folks to think what do they want? And that can be a very hard question. You're shaking your head because I know you've been there too. You think about it, and when you get to the point where you know finances, so to speak, the money doesn't matter. You start to think about it. What do I want? What do I want my life to look like now that I'm no longer racing every day, getting to the job, making a buck, paying my bills in the rat race now that I'm no longer doing. What do I want? Right? You don't need to do podcasts, Mike, right? You don't need to do what you do to help communities go and speak with folks and network and try. You don't have to do that. And the same here that's not to be braggadocious. We do it because we love the community. We love helping people. We love it when the light bulb goes off and people get excited and they say, "Ah, I can't, I can do that. Thank you for encouraging me." It is just so funny in our community here, we have a group of mailboxes where all our mail is delivered. I went down there to check on the mail, and then here I am walking down there, checking on it, and I run into this neighbor of mine that I see occasionally. He has a little baby in the stroller and the whole bit, and we start yaking about stuff and it turns into real estate. And so he's like, "Oh yeah, I always wanted to get into real estate." "I always wanted to invest, right?" And so I start to peel back that onion, right? "Well, why?" " You're 42 years old, why haven't you?" So we start decomposing that and so we start talking a little bit more. Again, he has a relatively newborn, maybe 1-year-old little girl in the stroller. And I say, "If you start doing this today in 10 years, do you think that's gonna make a difference in her life?" In 20 years, when you have to start paying for college or pay for a wedding. Mike: Yep. Tony: Do you think that's gonna help her? And so he was like, "Yeah. Right." And so some of this stuff, and it's amazing when I go through coaching, a lot of folks who think they want to do it for cash flow which we all love, right? We all love that 'cause it gives us freedom to do what we really want to do. But some of these folks, I'm gonna say to a greater extent than what some may think. It's for legacy. It's for providing a better life for the next generation. " Oh, I want to create a portfolio so I can leave it to my kids because I see this world isn't going in the right direction and I'm not here for a gloom and doom, but there's a lot of things that are going off the rails and there's a lot of like older people with gray hair like you and me, who kind of look at it and say, wow, we want a better place for the next generation." And so that's why you do what you do. I do what I do and people invest in real estate because we're all trying to help each other get to a better place. Mike: Yeah. You know, I know some people, Tony, that we'll buy a single family house for each of their kids, and all the proceeds of that rent goes towards whatever that annuity is for the college education. And then once they graduate college, they get to keep that house and now they have college paid for. They now have a stream of money while they're in college that they can use for food and all that sort of stuff. But it's fantastic. You know? Tony's been a pleasure having you on. And ladies and gentlemen, you know, one of the things that you can get out of this is why do I keep having people like Tony on, I talk about the hotels. We talk about all the different ways to diversify your portfolios, and it's to build that life for me, it's the why. For me it's to build a life that I don't need a vacation from. I'm on vacation every day, because I love what I do. I can do it anywhere in the world, and Tony can do that. I can do that. We're not bragging because look, I'm from a trailer park in small town Indiana. If I can do it, Tony, you know, first-generation American. There's no excuses. You just have to jump in, trust yourself, get the education, and just do it. Tony, is there anything else before I let you go, that you'd like to enlighten our guests with? Tony: I'm gonna throw out a couple of book recommendations out there. Because I always love books. I love working to help people there, and they're super cheap, right? So, the first book is called The ONE Thing, right? It's written by Gary Keller. The ONE Thing, it helps folks to achieve clarity and focus and what it is they're striving for, right? There's a lot of things in our life. Our lives are very, very complicated. Kids, family, school, work build. Very complicated. That book helps us condense that. What is the one thing that's very important to us? One thing, one goal that we're trying to strive for. That's one book. The other book that I love is a book by Stephen Pressfield. It's called The War of Art. It's a great book that helps us understand resistance. What are the things preventing us from achieving greatness? If I wanna go to the gym every day and it's like, "Oh gee, you know? I haven't been successful at going to the gym every day and eating less." Like, what's the resistance there? Well, the part of the resistance is I go to a grocery store and I fill the refrigerator with junk food and the cabinets. Which junk food? That's resistance. I have to stop that. I have to realize. That's resistance, right? Yeah. Resistance is, I'm trying to go to the gym after I've completed a full day of work and I'm tired and I don't have the energy, so I need to flip that resistance if I know that's resistance. I need to start going to the gym first thing in the morning. Make it a priority before going to work. Set the alarm early. Let's go to the gym. Find a workout partner that if you don't show up, you are now letting them down too. The War of Art helps us understand what is resistance in our lives that is preventing us from achieving greatness, So those are two books that I share. Hopefully it adds value to the audience. Mike: Absolutely. Well, I wrote them down and you're never too old, or never too comfortable to understand what my Rs are, you know? It's a struggle every day, no matter how successful you are. Those things are a struggle for everybody. Every day they get up, but those people that are able to use a default calendar, get those things under control and go out and say, you know what? I'm tired. I don't care if I'm tired. I'm hitting the gym. And for me it's sometimes I have to call myself a couple names, to encourage myself to get my butt up. Tony: Yes, sir. Mike: But you do whatever it takes in order to conquer those Rs, those resistance. Tony's been absolutely wonderful having you on. I appreciate you coming on. Everybody, Tony Lopes, first-generation, retired at age 44. Listen to this podcast to find out why, and thank you for listening to another episode of The Richer Geek Podcast. Take care.
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ABOUT TONY LOPES
Tony Lopes is a first-generation American, CEO of Dirty Boots Capital, real estate professional, best-selling author, coach, and speaker. He earned a BS in Mechanical Engineering and an MBA from UMass. He worked in the defense industry for 19 years managing multi-million dollar programs while simultaneously building a portfolio of residential income properties. His investments, coupled with his understanding of markets and economics allowed him to retire at age 44. What really drives Tony is sharing his knowledge and experience so that others can achieve financial independence and enjoy the same level of freedom he does.