In this week’s podcast, we talk to John T Griffith, who is the first person to ever tell us about Bigger Pockets and inspire us to get into property. 

We share how the podcast started with a simple email from John, that led to him sharing his journey in the #MoneyMagic student group, which led to the Property Magicians Podcast. As part of the 100th episode, we thought it would be fun to have John come on the podcast to share his property investment and entrepreneurial journey.

John is based in Boston, MA and defines himself as an entrepreneur. He runs several businesses; real estate is one of them, the other is a coaching and healing business.

He got into property because he was tired of paying rent to his landlord who was chilling in Florida and collecting rent checks from his tenants.

He also had a job where he was paying US$50k (R767,000) in taxes a year, which upset him because when he ran his own business he barely paid tax.

So he started asking questions on how to pay less taxes and was told, by a friend, to get into property. 

He bought his first property - 3 unit property (1 bedroom units)  - in 2017 for US$540,000 (R8.282 million) for no money down (he got a VA Loan). 

The property was positive cash flowing from the start - he and his wife decided to house hack; they lived in one of the units and converted the other two units into 2-bedroom units, which allowed them to pay zero rent and still increase their rental income.

When their daughter was born, they needed more space and decided to buy a new property. They used a home equity line of credit to borrow US$33k (R506k) in equity, which became the down payment for the next property.

The second property had 2 units - 1 top and 1 bottom unit. They AirBnB'd the lower level for a year and have now gotten a day-care license and will use that unit to run a day-care centre with 6 kids at US$2000 (R30,673) per kid per month.

This is another jam-packed episode.

Click play to listen to episode 100 and leave us a comment in the comments section below.

PS: To celebrate the 100th episode, we are running a series of live interviews with some guests that have been on the show on our Instagram profiles to hear how being on the podcast has influenced their journey as investors. The interviews are happening in the evenings this week; we will announce the guests and the time of the interview on the day of the interview. To get information on these follow us on Instagram: @VangileMakwakwa and @PropDocMom