A Jillian Dollars
Let me ask you a question: What would you do with a jillian dollars?
Before I give you my answer, I wanted to tell you a joke. Recently we heard a broadcast come in over the TV that said that six Brazilian workers were injured in a training exercise. My daughter looked up at me with a look of concern and said, “That’s terrible. How many is a Brazilian?”
Hehe.
She meant bazillion, but just like a jillian, that’s not a real number. But people use it to mean a lot.
I really do have access to a jillian dollars, though, and I want to tell you about it. You see, Jillian is a private money lender of mine.
How I came to know Jillian is a very interesting story because her father, who is also a private money lender of mine, introduced us. He called me up and said his daughter was wanting to invest and he could not think of anyone else he’d rather have her invest with than Ashley and me.
Y’all, that was an honor. This father, whom I have done 40 plus deals with, trusted me not only with his daughter’s savings, but also to help her learn how to do her very first deal “right” as he put it. I don’t take trust like this lightly. As such, I wanted to meet with Jillian about the deal we needed funding on.
Some investors like to be mechanical when it comes to their lender interactions. That’s not the case with us. We want to have an actual relationship with our lenders. That’s because we are about to enter into a long-term partnership, and we need to make sure we like each other.
If we don’t feel that way, we don’t do the deal. I have had folks approach me before wanting to loan and it just didn’t feel right. So, we didn’t do the deal.
Because of this approach, our lenders quickly become our friends. We text, email and call each other regularly. We go to lunch and call each other on birthdays. We go to meetings and just hang out sometimes. This is the kind of relationship we like to have with our private money lenders.
With that in mind, I wanted to meet and get to know Jillian. She and her father came to Calhoun, and we drove out to look at the deal we had going. It was a four-bedroom, two-bath doublewide on two acres, and we were planning to keep it as a rental
We talked the whole way. I got to learn about Jillian personally. She let me know she was about to be married and that she has a very interesting and fulfilling job. I encouraged her to ask lots of questions about lending. I even prompted her with some questions she might want to ask.
She asked things like how she would be secured to the property and how long it would take for us to get it rented. She also wanted to know how long we had been in business and if we had insurance that covered her as a lender. Finally, she asked what would happen if we didn’t pay and why we are willing to pay a higher interest rate than a bank is willing to loan at.
We went through all those questions in the car. And then we came back to my office to go over them again where I could write things on the board.
I explained that she would be secured to the property like a bank is with a security deed, which meant I couldn’t sell the house until she was paid off. We talked about how our lenders are listed as a loss payee on our insurance so if disaster strikes, she would get her money back. We even talked about how foreclosures work and how if I didn’t perform, she would own the house after the foreclosure. Then we talked about why I was willing to pay more on the interest rate than a bank because of two things: ease of use and I want my friends to succeed.
At that, she looked at her dad and he shook his head in a “Yes” to confirm everything I’d said.
After everything was done, Jillian felt very comfortable. She has now been a lender for coming up on two years and we have done multiple deals.
So, let’s go back to the question of “What would you do with a Jillian dollars?” I would use my friend’s money to buy a piece of property, secure it with a security deed at the courthouse and then protect it with insurance and make in-full- and on-time monthly payments.
Joe and Ashley English buy houses and mobile homes in Northwest Georgia. For more information or to ask a question, go to www.cashflowwithjoe.com or call Joe at 678-986-6813.