Jeff Anzalone - RV Park Investing Success From The Debt Free Doctor
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Jeff Anzalone is a successful doctor. His journey from being a periodontist with $300k in student loan debt to thriving real estate investor started with a wake up call. A skiing accident that injured his wrist made him realize how fast something like that could take away his ability to earn an income and provide for his family. He shifted his mindset and attention over to real estate investing as a way to build another stream of income. He's invested in RV Parks, Campgrounds, Self-Storage, Apartments, and Hotels. He has now built up passive income to grow his wealth in addition to keeping his practice on a part-time basis. Learn how the Debt Free Doctor did it!
In this episode, you will be able to:
- Achieve financial freedom through strategic real estate investments.
- Discover how Jeff was able to make a transition from the medical field to real estate investing.
- Uncover the advantages of real estate syndications for wealth diversification, while keeping your normal W2 job at the same time.
- Explore the art of diversifying income streams with real estate for long-term financial security.
- Learn about the tax benefits of real estate investments for maximizing wealth growth.
The key moments in this episode are:
00:00:00 - The Wake-Up Call
00:04:20 - Realization and Education
00:09:02 - Investing Journey
00:14:20 - Learning and Growth
00:14:28 - Learning from Experts
00:16:10 - Understanding Syndication and Limited Partnerships
00:18:39 - Leveraging Real Estate for Tax Benefits
00:20:25 - Real Estate and Work-Life Balance
00:22:55 - Target Audience for Real Estate Partnerships
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Jeff Anzalone
A couple of years later, we were snow skiing, and my kids at that time were eight and six. Got off the ski lift, kid cut in front of me, I swerved, I fell. When I fell, I injured my wrist. Luckily, it wasn't anything permanent, but that was the first time that I thought, well, what if I couldn't use my hands to work? How would I provide for my family?
Mike Swenson
Welcome to REL Freedom show, where we inspire you to pursue your passion to gain time and financial freedom through opportunities in real estate. I'm your host, Mike Swenson. Let's get some REL Freedom together. Hello, everybody. Welcome to REL Freedom real estate leverage freedom, where we talk about different stories of people building time and financial freedom through different opportunities in real estate. And I'm your host, Mike Swenson. If you're looking to start your journey in real estate investing, head to our website, freedom through realestate.com. We've got a lot of great articles, blogs, videos that you can watch to help you get started in your journey. And for today's guest, I've got a really cool story to know. Most people think being a doctor is kind of the end game. It's the place where you want to be. And for some people, they realize that that role isn't necessarily the freedom that they thought it was. And in the case of our guest today, had an accident and realized, well, what if my main source of income isn't there anymore? And so we've got Dr. Jeff Anzalone here, and he's just got an incredible story of getting in the medical field, getting into real estate, and then building time and financial freedom through real estate. So he is known as the debt free doctor. So, Jeff, we're so excited to have you on the show.
Jeff Anzalone
Happy to be here, excited to help educate people any way we can.
Mike Swenson
So why don't you get us started here and just share a little bit about your story?
Jeff Anzalone
Yeah, I'll give you the shortened down version of it. So two weeks before I finished my residency, I had the group practice that I was supposed to join here in my hometown in Louisiana. They pulled the deal out from me. And they don't teach you how to start a practice or run a practice in medical school or dental school. And we had a two month old, $300,000 in student loan debt, already bought a house, was just paying interest only. But the worst part was I didn't have any patients. I didn't know how to run a business or practice because I was relying on them, as you can imagine. How scary that was for a young family, a young couple not knowing what to do. But God was looking out for us and opened some doors, had a guy reach out to me and said, hey, look, you can come into my building. I'll kind of teach you how to do this. He was another dental specialist. And you don't have to buy any equipment, go into further debt. Just kind of pay me rent. So I did that for two years and started my own practice, bought my own building. And back then, Dave Ramsay was, like, the only. You're talking, like, 20 years ago. He was, like, the guy that was kind of who I listened to. That's all I knew. So I followed his baby steps, and after about seven years, paid off all of that debt, including the house. Well, the thing was, I was thinking, hey, kind of like winning the Super bowl. You hit that goal, it's over with. You've made it. But it was kind of like, okay, yeah, it felt good, but it's kind of like, now what? So a couple of years later, we were snow skiing, and my kids at that time were eight and six. Got off the ski lift, kid cut in front of me, I swerved, I fell. When I fell, I injured my wrist. Luckily, it wasn't anything permanent, but that was the first time that I thought, well, what if I couldn't use my hands to work? How would I provide for my family? I couldn't. You never think about things like that until something bad happens to you. People never think about having a heart attack till they, what? Have chest pain. Right? So that eventually led me down the road to start looking for things more sort of like an insurance policy, and eventually led me to real estate. But when I started studying really wealthy people, YouTube videos, blogs, podcasts, networking with people, I've just been totally in the dental field. And that's what most people do. Whatever field they're in, they go to the dental meetings or medical meetings or whatever, and that's all they do. They don't ever get out. And that's probably one of my biggest regrets, is not broadening my environment, because now it's so much different. It just opens your world up. But I realized that wealthy people, number one, over 90% of them, they owned real estate. So, like, if you ask somebody that's really wealthy, what do you do for a living? They don't tell you, I am. They don't say, I am a doctor, I am an attorney. They say, I own. I own businesses, I own real estate. So that was the one thing that over 90% of them owned real estate. The second thing was that they all had anywhere from multiple streams of income, but an average of seven. Most people that I know, including myself back then, had one. So that really narrowed my focus on figuring out a way how to own real estate for multiple income streams. And I thought at that time, the only thing that you could do to get into real estate was you go out and you buy a home and you rent it out, or you go buy self storage buildings or whatever. So I started learning how to do that. But little did I know. Once I went to a meeting in Dallas, it was actually for dentists. They opened up my whole world to other ways to invest as, as a doctor, we spend our time, money and resources to getting that degree. That's your biggest income building tool, is your active income, whatever it is. So I see these doctors, what they start doing, they start taking their time away from their practice and trying to learn all this stuff on their own. And what happens is their practice struggles, they make a bunch of mistakes, and now they kind of get upset and give up. But with these different passive types of investments, like real estate syndications, and that's the ones that I'm mainly doing now. We can focus on what we knew how to do best, our active income. And then the more money we make actively, we can invest passively. And then what happens is you start know to know the Dave Ramsey debt snowball. Know, you list out all your debt, smallest to largest. You start with the smallest one first, and you throw all the money in it. And once that one's paid off, you move it on to the next one, and so on and so forth until everything's paid off. Well, I came up with, I don't really have a name for it. I just kind of call it the passive income snowball, to where I remember my first syndication I invested in. Back then, it was paying monthly $333.33. That was a $50,000 investment apartment complex in Dallas, and it was an 8% preferred return. And I got that money, and I was like, wow, this is paying the Internet bill and then the gas bill or whatever. And then like eight months later, I did another one. I was like, 666 days. So I was slowly replacing my expenses to where I didn't have to do it. And it's crazy once you get that mindset of you're just going out there and investing. So now I have a different mindset. I'm the kind of Robert Kiyosaki. I don't take 100% of what everybody teaches. I take little bits and pieces there. But what I like, what Robert Kiyosaki teaches is you get your assets, your real estate, your syndications, that sort of thing to pay for your liabilities. So if I want to go out and buy a boat or a truck or whatever, I go buy real estate to pay the note. And that's a different mindset shift. And once you start doing that, it totally changes things for you.
Mike Swenson
Absolutely. And I'm glad it didn't take the catastrophic accident to help you think differently about it. It was kind of the what could have been accident that helped you to think differently about it. So, yeah, talk a little bit about everybody kind of has their different preference and niche of where they like to invest in. Obviously, you mentioned it's syndications, but talk a little bit about the types of investments that you like in the syndication side.
Jeff Anzalone
I started, this was like 2017, multifamily, and I did several multifamily, actually had an old traditional IRA that I wasn't able to put money in anymore and actually opened up a self directed IRA. So I did actually a multifamily syndication through it. It sold, it went full cycle. Then I got into, so I started a website, debtfreedoctor.com, to educate people. Back then, just as I was learning things like what's a cap rate? Then I would write an article, what's cap rate? How to calculate it, why is it important? So writing these articles not only was getting the word out about what I was learning, but it was helping me reinforce it to learn. But then I kind of realized for me, learning, I don't really read articles too, too much. I watch YouTube videos. So then I started, okay, why don't I start a YouTube channel? So I took those articles and I basically repurpose them into YouTube and now Instagram and YouTube shorts. So once I started doing that, then I started having people reach out to me and look, you know, you're investing in these syndications and projects, and I started building a following. Do you want to see if some of your investors, if we go through all the legal channels to allow you to raise capital for these groups? You want to see if some of your investors want to invest in the projects you're already investing in? I said, sure. And that kind of led to, I didn't even know that was anything about raising capital. I just kind of fell into it. But the reason I say that is because I start off in multifamily. Then I moved, then I started doing some self storage, then I got into short term rentals. I would have a couple of short term rental funds, mobile home parks and now RV parks. And now that I've got to experience all that, I'm more focused now on mobile home parks and mainly RV parks just because of the expenses, the taxes, the insurance, they're much cheaper to operate. If a hurricane comes and we have an RV park, well, everybody hooks up their RVs or they get in them and they leave. Right. And there's not a lot of structure there at an RV park to really damage versus a 200 unit apartment building. There is, there's pros and cons to everything. Private equity has really, as you probably know, bought up a lot of the mobile home parks. I know it's Sam Zell's group. Before he passed away, he did. Now they are starting to get into RV Parks and we've built up a really nice portfolio and our goal is to, right now we're at 14 parks. Our goal is to get about 30 and then we're going to sell out to one of these private equity groups that are already calling us. But that should tell you something. Private equity doesn't invest in things they can't make money in. And we see this trend coming. Really love the RV space. I love it because I didn't realize there's so many different ways to make income through it. Like an apartment. People will rent from you for sign a six month or twelve month lease and that's pretty much it. Well, RV Parks, you have people that come in and they'll stay a night or two. That's called your transient visitor. You can actually charge more. Let's say there's a ball game or there's a Super bowl or there's a holiday or something. Well, kind of like hotels. You can change those day rates. Then you have people that work in the area. Maybe they're going to be working for several months or whatever. Well, they'll rent from you monthly or weekly. And then you have people that actually permanently live there. So you actually have three types of tenants that are there. Then you have laundry services that you can add on to. You have ICE if somebody wants upgraded wifi. Another huge thing, some of our parks make six figures in propane sales for these people. So there's all types of different ways, different multiple streams of income you can make just from the RV park. And then one of the most important things is RV parks and mobile home parks have some of the highest appreciation. Year one. So my accountant, he told me the average apartment is anywhere you can depreciate year one. Anywhere from 15% to 20% of your purchase price. So let's say you have a million dollar RV park and a million dollar apartment, let's say 20% so you can deduct $200,000 year one for a million dollars average million dollar apartment complex versus mobile home park, 60% to 80%, $600 to $800,000. So it's a huge difference. And a lot of that accelerated depreciation comes from the land improvements that you're able to do. And that's what the majority of whenever you buy these parks, the land improvements that allow you to accelerate the depreciation.
Mike Swenson
Wow, that's awesome. It's great to hear you've dabbled in a lot of different spaces, because some people might say, hey, I'm in apartments or multifamily. I don't know anything about self storage. I don't know anything about RV parks. What would you say? Even just, like, the little nuances and the differences, how did you learn about that? Was it watching videos, reading articles? Was it meeting other people that were in the space and doing it, branching out to some of those kind of other areas? How did you grow your learning curve?
Jeff Anzalone
I guess it was cool in my position because I was connecting with the operators of these groups, like people. That's all they do. So I was learning from the experts, not just kind of piecemealing it together. So I would help a guy. He was actually another dental specialist, and we did four self storage projects together. So I was really involved in looking at the underwriting, how they look at projects, how they get the debt and how they manage it. The insurance cost are higher over here, or they're lower over here, their expenses. So I was learning from the operators, from the syndicators, from each one.
Mike Swenson
In what states, what areas are your investments in?
Jeff Anzalone
They're kind of all over. The majority is in the southeast. We have 14 RV parks. They're all in the southeast except one. We actually have one that we have under contract right now that I'm probably the most excited about, because it's in my favorite state in Montana. We're 2 miles from the west border of Glacier National park, and, I mean, it's absolutely gorgeous. It's a bed and breakfast. RV sites, so they have some pods and they have some cabins there, but for the most part, Florida, Georgia, Mississippi. Just bought one here in my hometown. Louisiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Oklahoma. And we have a mobile home park syndication in Wyoming as well. Yeah.
Mike Swenson
Now, you mentioned about building relationships with operators for people that haven't done syndications why don't you just explain what an operator is, what that role is?
Jeff Anzalone
Yeah. And again, if I would have always been in dental meetings, I would have never learned this. Right. But basically, a syndication is a group investment where people come together, they pool their money, form a partnership to go buy like a building or something like that. I kind of look at it like a plane. So there's passengers and there's pilots. So the pilots of the plane, they do everything. They run the systems check, they manage the plane, they manage the flight, the flight plan, the takeoff, the landing, everything. So that is the operator. Those are the syndicators, and then you have the passengers that just basically sit back and enjoy the ride, which is like the limited partners, the passive investors. So they buy their ticket, they pay their money, they let the pilots do the work to take off and then land on the project. So that would probably be the easiest way to explain it.
Mike Swenson
And as you're working with investors, how do they feel about being that limited partner? I know for some people they might say, well, shoot, if I had my own flip and did it myself, I'm in control of that, right? Like, I can say when I want to sell it, I can say when I want that money back. In this case, you're following somebody else's plan. So kind of talk about the benefits of that, because some people might see it as like, I'm giving up control, but there's a ton of benefits for being able to do that.
Jeff Anzalone
Yeah, that's a great question. And I always have to answer the question, like, if I'm doing it personally, I can only speak from personal experience. And it really helped me being a limited partner in 10, 15, 20 deals before I even got comfortable enough to go out on my own. And these projects, I've gone out on my own. I'm still partnered with people that know way more than me. But if you are already experienced in real estate, well, then, yeah, just keep doing that. You're an active investor. But if you're not, I would encourage you to start off passively, start learning those routes. Then you're going to be naturally learning and naturally connecting with people. You're going to be connecting with other syndicators and other limited partners. You're learning the ropes. And then at that point, you may want to diversify more. And I don't want to get into the real estate professional status, but if you can get to that point in your career to where all your depreciation is offsetting your active income, then that's the game. Changer. That's been a game changer for us, but that could be a whole nother episode to talk about. But when we coach other doctors and high income earners, we're always looking for ways that if they could do that, then they really don't have to cash flow a whole lot because if they could just wipe out their taxes, I got an oral surgeon in Louisiana. He's paying five, $600,000 a year in taxes. That's a wash for him now, so it's worth it just doing that. So people, a lot of times just look at real estate as just extra income, but you also have to look at all the tax benefits and everything else that goes along with it, too.
Mike Swenson
You'll see the options there.
Mike Swenson
So talk about your dental practice then as you did more real estate investing. What did that do for your time in your quote unquote day job?
Jeff Anzalone
Yeah, it's been great because I've been able to go part time now with the practice, but I'm working more hours in general. And I think it's important, too, because a lot of times people don't quit what they're doing because they're like, well, I don't know anything else to do, so it's good to have something to retire to and transition to. And I really like that when you get older. I'll be 50 this year. Most of the research and books say you're actually happier whenever you're at a point in your life where you're teaching people stuff. And I find more fulfillment in that. And so being able to do that, it's great. But in order for me to do that, I did have to cut the numbers down into practice, which has allowed me to spend more time in the real estate, creating content, teaching, connecting with people, and then running these projects.
Mike Swenson
What does your schedule look like on a given week in terms of I.
Jeff Anzalone
Practice three days a week while I'm practicing, three days a week. I can do a lot of stuff. I can do management and a lot of the things while I'm still here, but I'm pretty much working Monday through Friday, three days a week of the practice, but Monday through Friday with real estate, and then sometimes on the weekend if I have to go run over and check something or whatever. To me, it's weird. You always hear people say, if you love what you do, it's not really work. And I'm like, yeah, whatever. That's Bs or whatever, but it's really true. It doesn't even feel like work. When I'm on calls or I'm helping manage or whatever. It's just like, it's so cool. I'm so glad I found it and it's not right for everybody. And I always try to listen to people's situation and sometimes I discourage them from it because a lot of people have analysis paralysis and they'll wait three, four or five years before they even attempt to invest in something. And I'm like, if you're not investing in anything during that three or four or five year period because you're scared to get into real estate, I said, just don't fool with it anymore. Just keep investing in the stock market or whatever, because you're losing out on all that time. Because at the end of the day, time is the most important thing.
Mike Swenson
Well, it's really great to hear. I mean, you're going from having all your eggs in the one basket there to having all these different things happening, both as a limited partner and then on the general partner side and then helping to educate people. So you're creating a lot of content. I've watched your videos and looked on your website, but who are the people that you're really hoping to work with to help kind of invest with you and partner with you on deals?
Jeff Anzalone
Well, when I first started this, it was mainly for physicians and dentists, but I guess it's just kind of naturally, other high income people, accredited investors, have kind of flocked in, have a lot of it people, people working at Google and Apple, where they have these huge six figure, sometimes low seven figure salaries, but they're paying a ton of taxes and they don't want to keep putting all their stock in Google or Apple or whatever. They're looking for diversification. Nurse and ethicists and other healthcare professionals. Physical therapists, then I have some accountants, but I would say 80 85% are more the healthcare professionals.
Mike Swenson
Well, and it's good, too, because people can relate to you because you're in the healthcare field. They can kind of see the writing on the wall of what their future looks like if they don't diversify and do other things. And so you're a great example of that. So for people that want to reach out to you and learn more about what you're doing, how can they do that?
Jeff Anzalone
Yeah, go to debtfreedoctor.com and I've got a free resource on there, a passive income guide they can download. And once they do that, we'll start sending them information. Everything's free between podcasts, articles, YouTube videos, some cool giveaways that we give out throughout the year and occasionally some events that I'm attending. So if people want to kind of join me on some of those as well.
Mike Swenson
Well, thank you so much for coming on and sharing your story, Jeff. It's cool to hear what you're doing and branching out to so many different investment opportunities as well. So congrats to you and best of Luck in your future.
