Truly Passive Income

Will Harvey started a lending fund by accident: a borrower putting 75% down on a million dollar house needed a first lien loan, and the deal was too good to turn down. Today his fund pays investors 8.5% to 10% fixed returns, monthly, by financing the deals that don't fit a bank's box.

Will Harvey is the founder and managing partner of Harvey Capital, a 506(c) fund that holds first lien real estate notes, primarily in Virginia. A double college dropout turned mortgage originator turned house flipper, Will realized he was better positioned on the finance side of real estate than the operating side. His fund lends at conservative loan-to-value ratios, around 40-50% on cash-out loans, mostly to experienced BRRRR investors and borrowers with unusual situations who need fast, flexible capital. Across about 55 loans the fund has had no defaults. Investors hold a promissory note with a contractual fixed return and receive a 1099-INT instead of a K-1. For high-income professionals looking for credit-backed passive income outside traditional equity syndications, this conversation shows how private lending works from the inside.

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Chris Naugle had a 36-unit rental portfolio bought at about $16,000 a door, and he still had to sell all of it in 2014. In his words: "I had cash flow, but I had no liquidity."

Chris is a former professional snowboarder who became a Wall Street financial advisor, a real estate investor, and the founder of The Money School and the Private Money Club. He came close to bankruptcy twice. In 2008 a hard money loan on a strip mall development went bad when the Great Recession hit mid-construction, and a single tenant who called out of the blue got the building to the occupancy his bank required for takeout financing. In 2014 he learned that financing rentals in his personal name for a lower rate had pushed his debt-to-income ratio past the bank's limit. The bank declined his next deal, froze the line of credit he used for renovations, and he was forced into a fire sale of the entire portfolio.

Those lessons shaped what he teaches now. Chris explains why he says that in real estate you never lose if you can get to the end, but most people run out of time first. He describes how a private lender introduced him to privatized banking and the infinite banking concept, how he built Private Money Club as a free dating site for money with more than 10,000 members, and why he believes cost is only an issue in the absence of value. He also makes the case for using AI to handle the busy work so you can spend more time on human relationships, and leaves listeners with a 30-day challenge built around Earl Nightingale's The Strangest Secret.

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After nearly five decades and more than 100 developments, John McNellis has a contrarian view of the metric the industry runs on: the IRR, he says, is "an utter load of crap."

John McNellis is the co-founder of McNellis Partners, the Northern California firm he started 43 years ago with two colleagues, Beth Walter and Mike Powers. Together they have developed more than 100 properties, principally supermarket-anchored shopping centers. In this conversation John traces the path from journalism major to reluctant lawyer to developer, working nights and weekends on duplexes until the side business became the real one.

He explains why he walked away from financial partners after seven-year deals that returned his firm nothing, why he would rather own 100 percent of a small deal than a fraction of a large one, and how he uses ground leases and leasehold interests other buyers avoid. He also covers the barbell shopping center model, knowing when to sell the disco while people are still dancing, keeping overhead low enough to survive a bad cycle, never relying on a single bank, and the four words he offers for financial security: one house, one spouse.

Free audiobook for the first 100 listeners. John is giving away Making It in Real Estate, 3rd edition, audiobook to the first 100 Truly Passive Income listeners who claim it.

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Mikkel Thorup left school at twelve, dropped out at fifteen, and started traveling as a teenager. Twenty six years later he has lived in nine countries, visited more than a hundred and twenty, met his wife in Germany, married her in Africa, and had four children born in four different countries. He has never owned a single piece of real estate in the United States.

Mikkel is the founder of Expat Money, a thirty-person firm with in-house lawyers and tax professionals that helps high net worth families relocate, secure second residencies, and build portfolios of foreign property. In this conversation he draws the distinction most people miss, that an expat is not an immigrant, and explains what that difference makes possible. He describes the homework he does before a dollar goes anywhere: understanding the culture, the economic drivers, the migration patterns, the national debt. He keeps a PhD political scientist on staff producing geopolitical reports, and he visits the countries himself, meeting local law firms, politicians, and on several occasions sitting presidents, including Santiago Pena of Paraguay.

That last habit is the heart of his edge, and he makes the point sharply. In public markets, acting on private information is insider trading. In private markets it is simply the work: "private information is completely legal and it's completely what you should be doing." It is the difference between reading about a country and standing in it.

Along the way he explains how his community buys entire pre-construction buildings for cash at a discount, why he favors Panama, what he genuinely thinks about safety in Colombia, how foreign tax credits keep US investors from paying twice, and why he would talk you out of that one euro house in Italy.

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After more than 100 syndications, a string of capital calls, two operators who turned out to be running Ponzi schemes, and the worst stretch the LP world has seen in a decade, Jim Pfeifer has a very different set of questions than he did in 2018.

Jim Pfeifer is a former teacher and financial advisor turned full-time limited partner, and the founder of Passive Pockets, the community he started as Left Field Investors before BiggerPockets acquired it. In this conversation he is unusually candid about what the last few years cost him and what they taught him. He explains why his first question for any operator is now whether they are going to steal his money, why he walks away from solo sponsors and from deals with too many layers between him and the asset, and why he would happily reinvest with operators who lost him money while refusing to touch some who made him money. Jim also breaks down what a well-handled capital call actually looks like, why the old Left Field red line of "have you ever had a capital call" no longer makes sense, and where he is quietly putting capital now. He closes on an argument worth sitting with: that the next two to three years may be a better entry point for passive investors than 2017 and 2018 ever were, precisely because the cycle taught everyone what they did not know.

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With 24 years and more than 200 deals behind him, full-time passive investor Jeremy Roll explains the single metric that tells him whether to deploy capital or stay on the sidelines, and why most LPs get the timing exactly wrong.

Jeremy Roll has been a full-time passive cash flow investor since 2007 and currently holds positions in more than 60 deals across over a billion dollars in assets. In this conversation he breaks down his framework for reading the real estate cycle: positive leverage spread. If he cannot get 125 to 150 basis points between the cap rate and the interest rate, he considers the market too expensive and waits. He explains why the riskiest value-add business plans get marketed at the worst point in the cycle, tells the story of a fully occupied student housing deal where four unexpected dominoes led to foreclosure, and describes the daily macro reading habit that lets him strip emotion out of his decisions. He also shares his unconventional read on Bitcoin's four-year cycle and why Warren Buffett's patience will be vindicated.

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Patrick Grimes lost everything in a speculative deal before the 2009 crash, rebuilt as an engineer, and now manages a diversified portfolio spanning apartments, litigation finance, and medical receivables that perform regardless of stock market cycles.

Patrick Grimes is the founder and CEO of Passive Investing Mastery and a former robotics engineer who learned the hard way that concentrating in one asset class can be devastating. After losing his first investment ahead of the 2009 crash, he rebuilt by studying how the wealthy allocate capital across non-correlated industries. Today, Patrick finances contingency-fee law firms and medical practices, earning secured returns that behave nothing like real estate or equities. His thesis centers on three filters: recession resilience, non-correlation, and insulation from AI disruption. He explains how lending against a law firm's settled case portfolio or a medical practice's insurance receivables can deliver mid-teens to mid-twenties returns from a senior secured position. For high-income professionals already invested in real estate, Patrick Grimes offers a compelling framework for true portfolio diversification beyond familiar asset classes.

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Only 12% of couples who walk down the aisle end up in a truly fulfilling marriage, the same success rate as making it through Navy SEAL training. Larry Hagner has spent 11 years and 1,500 interviews figuring out why, and what fathers can do about it.

Larry Hagner is the founder of The Dad Edge, host of one of the longest-running fatherhood podcasts in the world, and author of The Pursuit of Legendary Fatherhood. In this conversation, Larry shares the three questions he asks his kids every day to build trust and connection, why 80% of the time your spouse and children want validation instead of solutions, and how emotional intelligence is a learnable skill that most men were never taught. He explains why the couples who thrive share one trait: a purposeful commitment to keep growing together. For high-income professionals building passive income and financial freedom, Larry offers a critical reminder that the "why" behind the wealth is what matters most, and that being a great father and husband requires the same intentional skill-building we bring to our careers and investments.

• [0:00] Meet Larry Hagner
• [2:50] Why Larry started The Dad Edge
• [6:52] Marriage stats that will shock you
• [10:30] The dark moment that changed everything
• [30:40] Three daily questions for your kids
• [36:31] Validation over problem solving
• [48:22] What Larry still struggles with

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• The Pursuit of Legendary Fatherhood by Larry Hagner
• The Dad Edge: Book + Free Courses Bundle
• 25 Intimate Conversation Starters for Your Wife (free)
• Questions for the Car: Kid Questions by Age (free)
• "It's Not About the Nail" by Jason Headley
• The Dad Edge on Facebook
• The Dad Edge on X

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What if chasing cash flow is actually costing high-income earners more in taxes than it's worth? Dr. Benjamin Aaker, an ER physician and multifamily syndicator, built a contrarian strategy around equity growth and tax-deferred wealth that made work optional a full decade ahead of schedule.

Dr. Benjamin Aaker is an emergency medicine physician, multifamily syndicator, and author of Your Authority Problem. Operating out of South Dakota, he scaled from a single rental property to a 226-unit multifamily syndication by prioritizing equity over cash flow. His reasoning is simple: as a high-income earner, every additional dollar of passive income gets taxed at the top marginal rate. By structuring deals to be cash flow neutral and building equity instead, he plans to take income later when his tax bracket drops in retirement. Aaker also shares hard lessons from a syndication where occupancy plummeted to 25% after a nonprofit pulled tenant subsidies, and how setting investor expectations upfront saved those relationships. His approach offers a valuable alternative framework for high-income professionals who already have enough income and want to build long-term, tax-efficient wealth.

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A single infrastructure bottleneck, municipal sewer capacity, is quietly killing housing deals across the country. Tom Bartlett has spent 27 years solving it with compact wastewater treatment plants that cut developer costs by 40 to 50%.

Tom Bartlett is the founder of Aquatech Systems, a company building decentralized wastewater treatment plants that allow developers to bypass overburdened municipal sewer systems. Joined by development partner Charles Poindexter of CG Design and Build, Tom explains how these compact, stainless steel plants treat wastewater to the highest standards while costing a fraction of traditional hookups. For real estate developers and land investors, the implications are significant: cheaper land outside municipal sewer lines, higher unit density per acre, faster permitting through North Carolina's engineered optional permit process, and phased infrastructure that reduces carry costs. In a country where aging sewer systems are failing and housing remains unaffordable, Bartlett's technology represents a real solution to a problem most investors never think about until it kills their deal.

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