Educating for Financial Success – Episode 101

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[00:01] Welcome to the Prosperity Podcast, fresh alternative personal finance talk for independent thinkers who prosper outside of Wall Street. Here’s your host, bestselling author, Kim D.H. Butler and No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of the Prosperity Podcast. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel. And once again, we have a real treat for you today. We have reached out to actually one of our clients who has turned out to be just an incredible asset to us. Her name is Ray Perry, and that’s R-H-E-A Perry. And she has a company called EducatingForSuccess.com. And her real field of expertise is homeschooling our children. You know, this was something that I kind of came into and didn’t really fully understand.

[01:01] But I’ve come to just have so much appreciation for the fact that not only are you homeschooling your children, but you’re building those relationships with those children that will last a lifetime. So welcome, Ray. How are you? I am awesome, Todd, and it’s great to be here. Thank you so much. Well, Ray, kind of tell us how this all came about. And, you know, I mean, obviously you have a story, and I think our listeners would love to hear it. Well, I appreciate so much the opportunity that you’re giving me to share this story because it’s really pretty remarkable. My husband was a super educated man. We had seven children, and we never did really make enough money to get by on. So we were living less than the American life, and we were rather frustrated.

[01:55] So we decided that we wanted to try to figure out how to bring our dad home. So as I’m homeschooling six children, because I actually one actually left and then I had another baby. So I only I only ever had six at the house at one time. But as I was homeschooling all of them, we just really wanted our dad to be with us. We had lived in Alabama in a 2000 square foot house on two acres. And at one point we just said, hey, let’s just live the American dream and move to the country and buy the big farm. So we left our house in Alabama and bought a four thousand square foot log house on 44 acres in Tennessee. Well, we loved our life. We started bringing it, buying all kinds of animals. And we had cows and goats and chickens and a water buffalo at one point.

[02:41] And we had a great life. Absolutely loved it. But our daddy had to drive an hour to work one way each day and an hour back. And then he was there eight, 10, 12 hours a day. You know the story and he got real tired of it. He left in the dark in the morning and he came home in the dark at night. He never got a chance to see the cows and the goats and all the stuff that we had, including the water buffalo. So my son and I said, if he’s going to come home and join us, then we’re going to have to figure out how to do it. So what we did was we started trying everything. We started trying to monetize farming. That didn’t work. Uh, then we tried, um, selling stuff on eBay and we made a little bit of money with that.

[03:24] Uh, then we started playing with the stock market and we had some successes and we had some failures with that. Then we started studying real estate. Well, we loved real estate. And so my son, we started when he was 14, my oldest son, who was actually my second child, and we did pretty well with real estate. And then we had this one house that we could not sell. It just wouldn’t sell, couldn’t rent it, held it for 10 months, didn’t know what to do with it. And so we created a system for selling houses on eBay. Now this was probably 15, 20 years ago and nobody was selling real estate on the internet at that time. And so we sold the first house, uh, by selling the down payment only starting the bid at a dollar and we subtracted whatever the down

[04:13] payment was from a think it was about $30,000 that the house was worth. It was worth more than that, but that’s what we put in the option. And it took him seven days to sell the house and, uh, the guy that bought it was in the UK. And so after he made about two payments, he said, okay, I don’t want to do this anymore. Would it be okay if I just paid you the balance that I owe you? So my husband, my son bought for a minute and he said, sure. So he paid us the difference of the 30,000 that he owed us. And we’d actually only paid $5,000 in a big screen TV for the whole house. So we turned out doing pretty well on that. So then we said, well, let’s, let’s see if we can do it again. So we tried again.

[04:55] And the second batch of houses that we sold was 12 houses in one option. And we sold those to a real estate investor in California who moved to Alabama where the houses were to manage them. And, um, we got a significant down payment on that. And that was in 2005 and he has never missed the payment, never been late and still making payments to us today, um, on that property. So then we listed more and basically over a few years, my son sold 70 houses on eBay. So then what he did, you know, he’s about 17, 18, about this time. He decided to create a course because a lot of his real estate investor friends were asking him to help them. And so he created a course and then the real estate investment clubs

[05:43] started asking him to come around and speak and teach these old guys how to sell their property on the internet. So he created this course and sold it for about $1,500 at real estate investment club meetings all over the South. And eventually he turned it off because of customer service. He just didn’t have the system in place to manage that. And so he basically sold it to a real estate investment teacher who now has continued to sell it all these years. So he, he created such an amazing portfolio that even though that’s what he was doing during his high school years, by the time he was 20 years old, he had two goals. He wanted to bring his dad home from corporate America, which he accomplished and he wanted to have 21 houses and he, he did that too.

[06:26] And he was worth $1.4 million. So we looked at that and we said, okay, we did things a little bit differently than making him sit down in a desk all day long, because we allowed him to have a lot of projects and be self-educating, but we also did make him do his schoolwork because he had to make sure that he kept up with, um, you know, some basics. So he did his educational work in the early part of the day. And then in the afternoons and at night, he would go outside focus on, uh, different projects that he had to do on the farm. And then also the real estate. And so today he is married and he has six children. The oldest one is seven, no twins. He owns a trucking company. He’s out of debt.

[07:11] He is living a really good life. He’s able to travel and do the things he wanted wants to do. And he has never in his life ever seen a day of serious bondage where somebody else was telling you what to do and he, and making him do something that he did not want to do that was going against what was his heart. And so we look at what we’ve done with the freedom to homeschool our children in this country. And we’ve realized that it’s an amazing opportunity and you have so much freedom that you can really teach your children some of the real things about life, like creating their own income and investing. And the second son did an apprenticeship. He stepped into a situation where he started a commercial and

[07:52] industrial roofing company and he’s doing very, very well too. So we had a couple other children who were not so entrepreneurial, who have a really good jobs, but they just decided that they didn’t want to deal with the risk and the responsibility of having their own company, but they’re all happy doing what they’re, what they’re doing. So it’s kind of worked out for us in a vocational way so that everybody’s happy doing what they love to do. One of the most intelligent man that I think I have ever met in my lifetime told me that the value of a man is the amount of snot that is on the front window as their children press their nose against the glass waiting for them to come home. That is the only true value of a man is when they stand there

[08:42] and wait for daddy to come home. And I think that is just, there’s so much wisdom in that. And again, I want to mention that it’s www.educationforsuccess.com for more information about this, because you know, Ray has dedicated her life to helping to accumulate these resources that not only help people come home financially, but also, you know, how to successfully, you know, teach these children and raise children in a homeschool environment that are continuing to be productive. As a matter of fact, my experience so far has been that, you know, probably I would say homeschool kids are actually ahead of the curve. Wouldn’t you? Absolutely. Academically, they test out much, much higher and they don’t have the

[09:40] social problems that children who are in age-segregated learning situations do have. So here’s another piece of the story too. I started telling people on a Yahoo group what I was doing with my children. And so I started, I actually invited them over to my farm for a one day workshop and a hundred people came off of a list of 300 for a one day workshop and the next year they did it again. So the third year I was at that point starting to study with the internet marketers and they said, you need to learn how to host a conference. So we hosted our first conference in 2003, had 220 people from 21 states in Canada, and from then on we have brought different people from the internet marketing world, the real estate world, the motivational world

[10:28] in to speak to these homeschoolers. And we’ve had a conference every year since then. And now it’s up to like, you know, 500, 600 people at one time. And two thirds of the audience are young people between the ages of six and 20, because I want them to learn the concepts that Utah teach when they’re young so that they can get it in their mind and allow it to make their direction, directional decisions. And so I believe in having young people listen to millionaires talk about business things at an adult level. So we’ve been hosting that conference for several years since 2003 and it’s been very, very positive to see how the young people who have been coming for a long time, gain that mindset and then start applying it into the decisions

[11:16] that they’re making for their own lives. And then of course, at night, every night when we have the conference, we have English country dancing so that all the kids and even the grownups can go into the ballroom and have some real fun. So it’s a great experience. If there’s one challenge that I see in the homeschool industry, it’s people rebelling against society to the point that they think that there is a necessity for poverty. And that would be the one message that I wish I could get across to them is that prosperity, responsible prosperity is absolutely possible and you’re God given right. There is, you know, I respect every person wherever they may be, but you do not need to teach your children poverty.

[12:10] They can live in the financial world and still have a family life, can’t they? Absolutely. Well, and I don’t like to seek after money, but the thing that I’ve learned, I’ve lived in some for many, many years in serious poverty when my husband was the sole provider of the family. And now that we have multiple streams of income that are also coming in passively, we’re not in the seriously poverty mindset as we were before that you have the power to do a lot more when you have money, because there are lots of needs out there and you have people around you all over that, that need different things. And when you have money at your fingertips, it’s a tool. That’s what it is. And it allows you to accomplish so many things.

[13:02] And so that’s the thing that I try to help our families understand is that you can do so much for the community that you serve around you. And the other thing I teach them too is you’ve probably seen the attack on capitalism here lately where wall street is the bad guy. I don’t know where they’re, where they’re coming from with that because business is you helping me and me helping you. It is a win-win thing. You have a product, I give you money. We exchange equal amounts of what we have and what we need to meet each other’s needs. And I believe that it’s a God given thing that capitalism is God’s way of people meeting each other’s needs. And so for there to be an attack on capitalism in its essence, I think

[13:50] it’s just a ludicrisy. It’s just crazy because that’s the way that you, that you live. And if you have a job, that’s one thing. If you have a business, that’s another thing. But you fit into the system with whatever your talents and gifts are so that you’re giving to the community around you and it makes the whole place and everybody in it better. I had a chance to meet with the president of the Mormon church and I will fully admit I am not Mormon, but he said, Todd, serve God, create value and solve problems. It’s as simple as life is. Absolutely. Well, and also if you look at the Bible in Genesis, God basically was speaking to the Jewish nation and said, he’s talking, I think it’s in chapter three

[14:39] when he was creating all the things and he said, he created something and he said, this is good. There’s one little place where it said, where he’s talking about four rivers and he goes, and there was gold and gold was good. And so the Jewish people teach their children from the get-go when they’re very young that gold is good. And so that it has a purpose in life. And when we worship it and when we hoard it, we kind of lose focus on what its purpose is, but when we understand that it’s just a tool and that it can help us to accomplish the things that we have in our heart to accomplish and God’s projects at the same time, then it becomes an asset for us and as long as we’re controlling it and don’t let it get

[15:21] out of control, then it’s a good thing. So I don’t have a problem with a prosperity message because I totally believe that it’s, you’re more able to serve God and man when you’re prosperous more so than when you’re poor. Before we wrap up here, I just want to once again, remind everybody that it’s www.education4.com Ray Perry, R-H-E-A Perry. I invite you to go to her website. She’s got a lot of free materials out there. Reach out to Ray. If you’re thinking about homeschooling your children, she’s been so good about talking to our listeners and Ray, I want to take a special moment just to thank you. This is No BS Money Guy, Todd Strobel for the Prosperity Podcast saying, take care everybody. Thank you for listening to the Prosperity Podcast.

[16:15] To take control of your money and have it work for you, visit us at partnersforprosperity.com. If you liked this episode, make sure you subscribe and leave a review.