Find out how far you are from it: your stage on the six-stage road to work optional, your monthly gap priced three ways, and the one income source I'd pick for your stage. Seven questions.
Your Roadmap: 17 pages built from your answers, in your inbox in a minute. Ranges, never exact dollars, and nothing you type is shared.
Dan WilsonReal estate investor and private lenderSay your bills run $2,000 a month past Social Security and whatever pension you have. That's $24,000 a year your savings have to produce, every year, without you going back to work. Three ways can do it. They cost very different amounts of money, and each one asks something different of you.
Stocks and the 4% rule
$600,000
Pull 4% in year one and give yourself a raise for inflation every year after. It has lasted through every 30-year stretch American markets have produced. The catch: every year you decide how much is safe to sell, and this month's groceries are priced by what your shares are worth the day you sell them.
A Treasury bond ladder
$535,000
Bonds held to maturity pay interest on a schedule and hand the money back on a set date, whatever the market did in between. Nothing to time. The income is flat for the life of each bond, and $535,000 comes back out worth less than it went in.
Private mortgage notes
$240,000
Lenders on residential real estate commonly charge 8 to 14%, depending on lien position, loan-to-value, and term (The Entrust Group, NoteInvestor.com). At 10%, the middle of that range, $24,000 a year takes $240,000: three or four notes, each secured by its own house. That's the market rate, and no one's particular deal. Like every investment it carries risk: the money is committed for the term, and if a borrower stops paying, getting it back takes time.
Your Roadmap runs this with your own gap, gives selling shares, dividends, rentals, annuities, and reverse mortgages each a fair hearing, and then lands on the one I'd pick for your stage. Six stages, Exposed to Abundant, tell you how far along you are. Price my gap →
Last October we bought a two-story house on Samuel Avenue in Youngstown, Ohio, for $37,000. No bank will write a mortgage that small, so the cash came from a private lender's self-directed IRA. One person's retirement account did what a bank does.
Before any of it moved, the lender had the address, the title report, the purchase contract, the insurance binder, and the note, and could check each one without trusting us. The custodian wired the $37,000 to a title company, never to us, and the title company recorded the mortgage at the county with the lender in first position. The note is $37,000 over five years, fully amortized, so every payment pays down the balance.
A young couple who couldn't get a bank loan moved in on a rent-to-own lease at $954.50 a month, working toward owning the house outright. That rent is where the note payment comes from. The family isn't the borrower. We are, so the payment is our obligation whoever is living in the house, and the lender never gets a call about a tenant.
The whole deal, page by page, is in the Starter Kit.
On paper
Say a lender puts out $50,000 at 11% over six years. About $952 arrives every month, part interest and part principal, and the balance is zero at month 72. The lender never fixes a furnace, never finds a tenant, never sells a share to pay a bill. The trade: the money is committed for six years, and if the borrower stops paying, the house pays you back after a wait, through the recorded lien.
One free PDF, 23 pages, from the lender's side: what pays you, what protects you, how to do it from an IRA, and the ten questions to ask any borrower before a dollar moves.
Like every investment, a private note carries risk. The kit shows you what can go wrong and who this isn't for, so you decide with your eyes open.
Send Me the Starter KitDan Wilson
Both sides of the note
I spent 14 years in the Air Force, I've done 100+ real estate deals, and I hold 24 rentals in Ohio. I fund houses with private money, and I lend private money myself, so everything here is written from both sides of the note.
The Samuel Avenue house above is one of mine. The lender on it is a real person with a retirement account, and the checklist in the kit is the one I'd want any borrower to answer, including me.
If you want to learn what it takes to be a private lender and figure out whether it fits your situation, apply for a Private Lender Fit Call. It's a conversation, not a pitch. Thirty minutes on the phone about your money and your situation. You leave with a clear read on fit, your one question answered, and your next step in writing within a day. I take six of these a week.
Book My Fit CallPlain-English breakdowns of retirement income: where monthly income comes from, what a gap costs to fill, and the real numbers from the houses we buy. Every video is also a podcast episode, most about fifteen minutes.
A house, a note, or a number from the week, told with the math. Here are the three most recent.
One email every Tuesday morning. One real thing from the business, read in a couple of minutes. No pitches, and you can leave any time.