Search here...
Home Blog

Why a Credit Union Might Be the Smartest Place to Get a Student Loan

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
0
Why a Credit Union Might Be the Smartest Place to Get a Student Loan


When families map out how to pay for college, the conversation usually starts with federal loans and then jumps straight to the big national private lenders. Credit unions rarely come up in student loan conversations. That’s a miss, because for many borrowers, they can offer lower rates, simpler borrowing experience, and personalized service that many large national lenders can’t match.

In partnership with Student Choice, let’s dive into why a credit union might make the most sense to help you pay for college this year. Check out Student Choice here >>

Would you like to save this?

We’ll email this article to you, so you can come back to it later!

Rates That Hold Up Against The Big Lenders

Let’s start with the numbers, since that’s what most people care about. For the 2026-27 school year, federal student loans carry fixed rates of 6.52% for undergraduates, 8.07% for graduate students, and 9.07% for Parent and Grad PLUS loans — and PLUS loans add a roughly 4.2% origination fee on top of that.

Private student loans from credit unions, through a network like Student Choice, currently run as low as 2.99% APR. 

Over a standard 10-year repayment term, that rate gap alone can mean paying roughly $2,056 more in interest on a $10,000 loan, about $5,141 more on a $25,000 loan, and about $20,562 more on a $100,000 loan, before factoring in any origination fees.

For families filling the gap after federal aid, a credit union loan often beats a Parent PLUS loan on both rate and fees — worth checking before you sign anything.

A Loan That Doesn’t Make You Start Over Every Year

One of the biggest frustrations with traditional private student loans is that you must apply for a new loan every academic year. That means another application, another approval decision, a new rate, and another round of paperwork – all while you’re already juggling classes, financial aid, and tuition deadlines. 

Many credit unions offer something different: an education line of credit You get approved once for a borrowing limit that can be used over multiple years of school*. Draw from it as needed without a brand-new application and approval cycle every fall. Unlike taking out one large loan upfront, an education line of credit lets you borrow only the amount you actually need each semester. If your costs change because of scholarships, grants, or living arrangements, you simply borrow less helping reduce unnecessary interest over time.

We covered how that works in a previous article, but the short version is that it spares you the annual paperwork scramble and gives you a known borrowing ceiling to plan around. Lines are still subject to annual review and satisfactory academic progress, so it’s not unconditional, but it removes most of the friction of borrowing year after year. 

Service Built Around Members, Not Shareholders

Credit unions are member-owned nonprofits, not investor-driven banks. Because of this, their goal isn’t maximizing profit for shareholders. Instead, they provide value to members through lower rates and fewer fees. It also often means you can reach a real person when a payment question comes up — something co-borrowers paying tuition for more than one child notice quickly.

You also don’t have to be a member to apply. With most credit union student loans, you can apply first and join once you’re approved, so membership eligibility isn’t a barrier to getting a quote.

See for yourself at Student Choice.

Easy To Compare, Easy To Refinance Later

The old knock on credit unions was that you’d have to track down each one individually. That’s no longer the case. Student Choice lets you answer a few questions about where you live, work, and go to school, then compare real rates from several credit unions at once — like how you’d shop with a national lender, but with member-owned institutions. 

Bottom Line

Credit unions won’t be the right answer for everyone, and you should always max out federal aid first, since those loans carry protections private loans can’t match. 

But once you’ve hit federal limits, used up all your scholarships, and you’re comparing private options, a credit union deserves a place at the top of your comparison list. Between competitive rates, the flexibility of an education line of credit you don’t have to reapply for, and personalized service built around members. Many families discover it’s one of the simplest and smartest ways to pay for college.

You can compare credit union rates through Student Choice to see what you’d qualify for. 

Disclosures

* Subject to annual review and credit qualification. Must meet school’s Satisfactory Academic Progress (SAP) requirements.

Editor: Colin Graves

The post Why a Credit Union Might Be the Smartest Place to Get a Student Loan appeared first on The College Investor.

The crypto startup trying to put a barrel of oil on blockchain

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
0
The crypto startup trying to put a barrel of oil on blockchain



The oil industry has spent more than a century pushing into new frontiers. Its engineers pulled crude from beneath deserts, oceans and frozen tundra. Its traders built markets that turned oil into the world’s most actively traded commodity.

Now a small crypto startup is trying to persuade the industry to experiment with a different kind of frontier: putting a barrel of oil on a blockchain.

The company, Energy Substantiation, wants oil suppliers to help support a digital token tied to physical crude. For decades, ownership of real-world barrels has largely been the preserve of producers, traders and large institutions. Energy Substantiation is seeking to open up the market to anyone with a crypto wallet and a small outlay. 

“It is remarkable to me that people can own dollars and people can own gold, but they’ve never been able to own oil,” JP Thieriot, who is spearheading the idea as Energy Substantiation’s co-founder, said in an interview.

His startup is borrowing from a familiar playbook. Stablecoins digitized claims on dollars, growing from a fringe experiment into a system that settles trillions of dollars a year. Energy Substantiation is betting something similar can be done with oil — a far messier asset than the currency behind stablecoins.

Its WTIC token is designed to represent one barrel of West Texas Intermediate crude. Unlike oil ETFs or crypto perpetuals, the product is being pitched as a token backed by physical oil rather than futures or other derivative contracts. Investors can also trade it around the clock. Today, benchmark WTI and Brent crude futures trade primarily on CME Group Inc. and Intercontinental Exchange Inc., with markets closed on weekends. That has become a growing source of frustration for investors as developments in the Iran conflict occur before trading resumes, driving recent interest in products that lean on crypto’s always-on infrastructure to facilitate 24/7 oil trading. 

Read More:  CME, ICE Push US to Curb Crypto’s Oil Trading Upstart

But even if speculators are ready for it, an oil-backed token may be a tough sell to an industry built around physical assets. Thieriot recalls one early investor meeting where the idea was dismissed as an uneasy mashup of Texas business culture and crypto: “Bubba meets Bitcoin — it’s never going to work.”

For now, the vision remains far larger than the market. The on-chain value of WTIC currently stands at about $80,000, though the token is expected to debut on LMAX and receive an additional $1 million in liquidity down the road. Thieriot said the startup is working with about a dozen commodities firms and oil suppliers, including one major trading house, and is in talks with other exchanges and market makers.

How it works

WTIC is designed to track the price of West Texas Intermediate crude. Suppliers feed oil into the system through a reverse Dutch auction, which entails offering barrels at a discount to the day’s market price. The company says the tradeoff lets producers monetize operational inventories, including pipeline line fill and tank bottoms, that would otherwise generate little revenue. Investors can then buy and sell the tokens on blockchain networks, while new ones are created through a daily minting process.

Holders can redeem WTIC at the daily spot closing price, though the company does not expect many investors to take physical delivery of crude. Energy Substantiation says the structure allows the underlying oil to be treated as a spot commodity rather than a derivative, which the company says would subject it to lighter regulation.

“Launching a token is easy. The challenge is building a liquid market,” said Javier Molina, a crypto analyst at eToro. “Success will depend on if they can attract energy participants and not just crypto players.”

There is clearly demand for round-the-clock oil exposure, though much of it is already being met. On Hyperliquid, tokenized WTI and Brent perpetual futures have become the two most actively traded commodity products on the platform, with activity surging in the grip of the Middle East conflict. CME surprised industry participants — including its own regulator — with plans to offer 24-hour, seven-days-a-week trading in new, smaller crude oil futures by late August.

On top of pulling liquidity away from products that already exist, Energy Substantiation will have to ensure that blockchain ownership is legally enforceable in the offline world, said Christian Catalini, founder of the MIT Cryptoeconomics Lab. “For the market to be truly efficient, the bridge between online and offline record should have minimum counterparty risk. Otherwise you’re not trading the actual underlying asset, you’re essentially trading an IOU.”

In the making

Thieriot first pursued the idea more than a decade ago after helping build one of crypto’s earliest digital-dollar businesses. But unlike dollars or gold, crude posed major obstacles: storage is expensive, barrels differ in quality and oil moves constantly through a sprawling physical network.

The breakthrough came when Thieriot teamed up with financier and mathematician Donald Putnam, who developed a framework for converting different crude grades into a common energy unit measured in British thermal units. The model attempts to solve one of the industry’s oldest problems: treating unlike barrels as a single tradable asset.

The system also relies on inventory that typically sits inside the machinery of the oil business itself. Pipeline line fill, tank bottoms and other operational inventories are often carried on company balance sheets but generate little direct revenue. Energy Substantiation’s model attempts to monetize those dormant barrels while using them to back digital tokens.

“It’s the best beta you can get in the market,” said Eric Melvin, chief executive officer of Mobius Risk Group and a member of EnSub’s advisory board, referring to a measure of how closely an asset’s price tracks the broader market. 

The idea remained largely theoretical until institutional acceptance of crypto, a friendlier regulatory environment and war in the Middle East pushed oil back to the center of investor attention just as Energy Substantiation prepared to launch.

“We dramatically underestimated retail in oil,” Thieriot said. In moments of geopolitical stress, the commodity “really does become a ticker for global instability,” he added. 

Still, WTIC depends on producers maintaining sufficient inventories to back the tokens, something that is no longer a given as war-driven supply shortages undercut reserves. Energy Substantiation says operational inventories are unlikely to fall to levels that would threaten the energy complex, even during periods of market stress.

The company’s pitch has also drawn scrutiny in other ways. Texas Railroad Commissioner Wayne Christian, a sitting member of the agency that regulates the state’s oil and gas production, is a part of Energy Substantiation’s advisory board and personally emailed prospective investors ahead of the token’s launch, the Texas Tribune reported in April. Christian referred questions from Bloomberg to Energy Substantiation, whose spokesperson said he was invited to serve because of his “extensive knowledge of the energy sector” and does not direct the company’s day-to-day operations or business decisions.

The startup plans to introduce tokens backed by Brent crude and Henry Hub natural gas later this year. Whether those products succeed may matter less than what they represent. Stablecoins transformed dollars into internet-native assets. Projects like WTIC are attempting something similar with commodities, testing whether claims on physical resources can move as freely as digital money.

“At the end of the day, blockchain makes it all possible,” Thieriot said.

[Targeted] Apple Card $200 Signup Bonus

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
0
[Targeted] Apple Card $200 Signup Bonus


Update 7/8/26: New round of $200 bonus was sent out via email ([email protected]). Requires $1,000 in spend. 

Update 6/26/25: new round of $300 bonus was sent out via email (from: [email protected]): Must get a new Apple Card by July 7, and spend $1,500 in your first 60 days.

The Offer

Check your emails for the following targeted offer: (subject: Preview your new Apple Card credit limit offer.)

  • Signup for Apple card by September 3, 2024, and get $300 after you spend $1,500 within 60 days.

Card Details

Card earns the following rewards:

Other details:

Our Verdict

Initially Apple Card offered no signup bonus at all, then they mellowed and started doing some smaller $50 – $100 bonuses; the highest we’ve seen before was a targeted $200. And so I was surprised to see this offer popped up in my email inbox – at $300 I might go for it. If you’re targeted, keep in mind this will count toward your 5/24 count for future Chase applications.

Deal History:

  • Update 3/10/25: There’s now a public offer at this link for $200 back. Valid through March 21. Each month through December you make 10 or more purchases and earn $20 Bonus Daily Cash. Total will be $200 if you meet all the months from March through December.
  • Update 3/6/25: Another round was sent out for $300 bonus. Must apply by 3/31/25.
  • Update 12/12/24: Another round was sent out for $300 bonus with $1,500 spend. Must apply by 1/13/25.
  • Update 9/4/24: The $300 offer just expired. Apple is now sending out a new targeted $200 bonus which is broken down to ten $10 bonuses for each month you make 10+ purchases, through June 2025. Not as high offer and more annoying, but it will be easier for those who don’t have a lot of spend volume to get a $200 bonus by doing 10 tiny transactions at the vending machine or self checkout each month.

Why the Silent Rules Nobody Made Are Killing Your Company

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
0


Opinions expressed by Entrepreneur contributors are their own.

Key Takeaways

  • If no one can name who authorized a rule or why it exists, it’s probably not a real policy — it’s a habit wearing a costume. Kill it.
  • Each extra approval or check costs a minute. Multiply across every employee, every week, and you’re paying salaries to wait, not produce.
  • Removing friction is cheaper than buying growth. Cut the red tape you never approved before adding another headcount.

Every successful business relies on policies and procedures. Policies and procedures create consistency, improve quality and allow organizations to move in a unified direction.

For this reason, most successful companies have policies and procedures manuals and other written policies. Without them, companies become chaotic and inconsistent as they grow. But there is an important distinction between systems that are intentionally designed and those that simply evolve over time.

The most damaging policies in a business are often the ones that were never actually created.

These can be called made-up rules — unwritten practices that slowly become accepted as official policy, even when no owner, executive, or person with authority ever approved them. They emerge quietly and gradually. An employee assumes something is required in every circumstance. Another employee observes that behavior and repeats it. Before long, an entire department believes a process is a mandatory policy when, in reality, it is not at all.

As organizations grow, these unofficial rules have a way of growing. Each one may seem insignificant on its own, but together they create a layer of legalism that slows decision-making, frustrates employees, delays customer service and quietly limits growth. It can also upset employees by creating an abundance of rigid rules that make the employees feel restricted. Unlike obvious problems such as declining sales or rising expenses, these self-made policies and procedures are rarely visible on a financial statement. Yet, their impact can be enormous.

Good intentions can create bad processes

One of the biggest challenges is that these rules often originate from good intentions. An employee wants to avoid making a mistake, so an extra rigid rule is added to prevent a situation from repeating itself. In other instances, someone encounters an unusual circumstance and begins treating that exception as the standard procedure. Over time, isolated events become permanent rules that harm, not help the company.

The problem is that businesses rarely struggle because of one unique situation. Instead, hundreds of small, unnecessary rules accumulate over months and years. Each additional email, approval, signature, or verification adds only a minute or two. Standing alone, that seems inconsequential. Collectively, however, those minutes become hours, days and eventually weeks of lost productivity, revenue or efficiency across an organization.

Imagine an employee who must wait for an internal confirmation before beginning work, even though all of the information needed to proceed is already available. Perhaps no owner, CEO or senior leader required this waiting period. It simply became “the way we’ve always done it.” If that delay happens dozens of times each week across multiple employees, the organization begins paying people to wait rather than to produce. Customers experience slower service, revenue decreases and management wonders why the business feels less efficient despite hiring more people.

Growth often brings more red tape

This scenario becomes even more pronounced in growing companies. Startups often move quickly because communication is simple and decisions are made by a small group of people. As headcount increases, however, there is a natural temptation for mid or lower level employees to add more approvals, more meetings, more documentation and more checkpoints. While some of these additions are necessary, many are simply reactions to isolated situations rather than thoughtful improvements to the business as a whole.

Over time, employees begin confusing caution with excellence. Instead of asking, “What is the best way to accomplish this?” they begin asking, “What is the safest way to avoid criticism?” Those are fundamentally different questions. The first encourages innovation and efficiency. The second often produces bureaucracy and red tape out of a desire for self-protection.

Perhaps the most dangerous aspect of made-up rules is that no one takes responsibility for them. Ask employees why they follow a particular procedure, and familiar responses usually emerge: “That’s just what we’ve always done,” or “I thought that was company policy.” Continue asking questions, and it frequently becomes clear that no one can identify when the rule started or who authorized it. The process has simply taken on a life of its own.

Challenge every unwritten process

Business owners should periodically examine their organizations with fresh eyes. Rather than asking employees whether they are following procedures, leaders should ask why those procedures exist in the first place and who authorized them. Every recurring process should have a clear purpose. If no one can explain why a particular step is necessary, it deserves careful scrutiny. In many cases, the unwritten rule should be disavowed and eliminated.

One effective exercise is asking managers to identify the biggest obstacles that slow their teams each day. Their answers are often revealing. Employees are rarely frustrated by hard work. They are frustrated by preventable delays — waiting for approvals, tracking down information, duplicating work or complying with procedures that no longer serve a meaningful purpose. These bottlenecks consume time without creating additional value for customers or employees.

It is also important to recognize that removing unnecessary rules does not mean lowering standards. High-performing organizations absolutely need accountability, quality control and thoughtful procedures. The goal is not to eliminate structure. The goal is to eliminate red tape that adds complexity without improving outcomes. Every policy should either reduce risk, improve quality, enhance the customer experience or increase efficiency. If it accomplishes none of those objectives, or it creates more problems than it helps, it is reasonable to question whether it should continue to exist.

Speed is a competitive advantage

Business leaders often focus tremendous energy on generating more revenue. They invest in advertising, marketing, recruiting and technology to accelerate growth. Yet, they sometimes overlook the operational drag occurring inside their own organizations. A company can spend millions of dollars attracting new customers while simultaneously slowing those customers’ experience through unnecessary internal processes. Removing friction is often one of the least expensive — and most profitable — ways to improve performance.

In today’s competitive environment, speed has become a meaningful differentiator. Customers have more choices than ever before, and they increasingly expect prompt responses, efficient service and straightforward interactions. Organizations that eliminate unnecessary delays position themselves to deliver a better experience without spending additional money on customer acquisition.

The best leaders understand that their role is not simply to create new policies. It is also to challenge existing assumptions. They recognize that every process should earn the right to continue existing—and should not be professed as policy without the company specifically authorizing it. As businesses evolve, procedures that once made perfect sense may become outdated. Failing to revisit them allows yesterday’s solutions to become tomorrow’s obstacles.

Eliminate the unnecessary rules

Every organization accumulates unwritten rules over time. Meetings become longer, approvals become more numerous and workflows become increasingly complicated. Left unchecked, these changes gradually reduce the agility that once fueled growth. Successful companies recognize that maintaining operational excellence requires periodic auditing and removal of these unwritten rules. Just as businesses routinely evaluate expenses, marketing efforts and financial performance, they should also evaluate the rules employees create or follow every day.

Sustainable growth is not achieved simply by working harder or hiring more people. It is achieved by creating an organization where talented employees can perform meaningful work without being slowed by unnecessary red tape. The companies that consistently outperform their competitors are often not those with the most elaborate systems. They are the ones disciplined enough to remove the systems that no longer serve a purpose.

Sometimes the greatest improvement a leader can make is not introducing another policy. It is eliminating unwritten rules that were never approved in the first place.

Key Takeaways

  • If no one can name who authorized a rule or why it exists, it’s probably not a real policy — it’s a habit wearing a costume. Kill it.
  • Each extra approval or check costs a minute. Multiply across every employee, every week, and you’re paying salaries to wait, not produce.
  • Removing friction is cheaper than buying growth. Cut the red tape you never approved before adding another headcount.

Every successful business relies on policies and procedures. Policies and procedures create consistency, improve quality and allow organizations to move in a unified direction.

For this reason, most successful companies have policies and procedures manuals and other written policies. Without them, companies become chaotic and inconsistent as they grow. But there is an important distinction between systems that are intentionally designed and those that simply evolve over time.

The most damaging policies in a business are often the ones that were never actually created.

Credit constraints and housing market access – Bank Underground

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
0
Credit constraints and housing market access – Bank Underground


Belinda Tracey and Neeltje van Horen

The Help-to-Buy (HTB) programme introduced in 2013 reopened the 95% loan to value (LTV) segment of the UK mortgage market, thereby reducing the minimum deposit requirement for many first-time buyers (FTBs) from 10% to 5% (Chart 1). That policy change offers a useful natural experiment to study how deposit constraints shape access to homeownership. We previously demonstrated that this easing of deposit constraints generated a clear increase in local spending. In a recent paper, we show that lowering this constraint increases FTB home purchases, particularly among households without access to external financial support for their deposit.

Chart 1: Share and number of ‘low deposit’ (95% LTV) FTB mortgages

Chart 1: Share and number of ‘low deposit’ (95% LTV) FTB mortgages

Note: ‘Share’ is the share of FTB mortgages that are 95% LTV (ie 5% deposit) out of all FTB mortgages. ‘Number’ is the number of such FTB mortgages (in thousands). The shaded area indicates the HTB period.

The HTB programme

HTB included two main schemes that shared a 5% deposit requirement but differed in their design. Broadly speaking, the Equity Loan scheme (2013–20) applied to new-build properties only and involved the government taking an equity stake in the home. The Mortgage Guarantee (2013–16) was available for older properties and new-builds and involved the government providing a guarantee to the lenders.

On the face of it, the programme had a significant uptake. Over the period from 2013 to 2016, when both schemes were available, there were around 200,000 home purchases facilitated by HTB and this number was split evenly across the two schemes. HTB purchases represented 10% of all home purchases during the period.

But to properly understand the impact of HTB on home purchases we need a counterfactual. That is, we need to account for what would have happened to home purchases in the absence of the programme.

Methodology

Our analysis draws on the FCA’s Product Sales Database, covering all regulated UK mortgages.

We use a difference-in-differences strategy to identify the causal impact of HTB’s easing of credit constraints on FTB home purchases. The intuition is simple: we compare how FTB purchases changed before versus after 2013 in areas that were more exposed to HTB, relative to areas that were less exposed. Any UK-wide changes in the housing market around that time affect both sets of areas, so the key question is whether FTB purchases rose disproportionately more in places where HTB was more likely to bite.

To capture exposure to HTB, we calculate the share of mortgages with deposits below 10% in each local authority district before the financial crisis, when these mortgages were still widely available (Chart 1). Because housing market characteristics evolve slowly, districts with higher shares were likely to contain more households constrained by deposit requirements after these mortgages largely disappeared, and were therefore expected to respond more strongly once HTB reopened the 95% LTV market.

To examine who benefits from the easier access to mortgage credit, we distinguish between FTBs who could fund their deposit from their own savings from earnings and those who relied on additional financial support, such as gifts from family (‘Bank of Mum and Dad’) or inheritances.

Because these transfers are not directly observed in mortgage data, we construct a proxy of ‘financial support’. We compare a buyer’s actual deposit with an estimate of how much they could plausibly have saved themselves based on their income and age, using a deliberately generous assumption about savings behaviour. If the buyer’s actual deposit exceeds this estimate, we classify the buyer as ‘financially supported’; the buyer is otherwise classified as ‘unsupported’. This approach is similar in spirit to that used in another Bank Underground blog post.

Chart 2: Financial support and deposit size for FTBs

Chart 2: Financial support and deposit size for FTBs

Note: The x-axis groups buyers by deposit size (as a percentage of the property value). The y-axis shows, within each deposit-size group, the share of FTBs classified as having ‘financial support’.

Chart 2 plots the share of FTBs classified as financially supported by deposit size. It shows that at the low end, only a small fraction of FTBs relied on outside funds. The share then rises steadily with deposit size, reaching about one quarter for 25% deposits and exceeding 50% once deposits surpass 40%. In other words, households without access to financial support disproportionately rely on low-deposit mortgages.

To look at the impact of credit constraints on FTB sales, we regress the district-level number of FTB sales on our exposure measure. We also examine the response of FTBs depending on their income, as well as whether they likely received financial support.

The impact of HTB on FTB purchases

First, HTB generated a marked increase in FTB purchases in more exposed districts.

Chart 3 shows how FTB purchases evolved in districts with different levels of HTB exposure. Prior to the introduction of HTB, FTB purchases followed similar trends in high and low-exposure districts. From 2013 onwards, they rose more strongly in districts where low-deposit mortgages had historically been more common.

To make estimates more intuitive, we compare a district with average exposure to one with the lowest exposure in our sample. In 2013, FTB purchases were about 16% higher in the average-exposure district relative to 2012. By 2018, this gap had widened to 45%, consistent with deposit constraints being a key barrier to entry.

Chart 3: The effect of HTB on FTB home purchases

Chart 3: The effect of HTB on FTB home purchases

Note: The line shows how the relationship between pre-policy exposure and FTB purchases changes over time. The shaded bands show the confidence intervals around the estimates.

The impact of HTB on the composition of new buyers

Second, the composition of new buyers shifted.

In high-exposure districts, the increase in FTB purchases was driven primarily by buyers who could fund their deposit from their own savings, rather than by buyers relying on additional financial support. In areas with average exposure, mortgage originations by unsupported FTBs rose by 45% relative to 2012. The number of supported FTBs increased by roughly 7%, but this effect is statistically insignificant.

Because unsupported buyers tend to have higher incomes, this also shifted the income distribution of new entrants to the right, reflecting the entry of households that were income-rich but liquidity-constrained.

Summing-up

These findings underscore the importance of deposit requirements in shaping access to homeownership. High deposit thresholds disproportionately exclude households without access to outside funds. By reopening the 95% LTV market, HTB lowered this barrier and enabled more households with sufficient income but limited savings to enter the housing market.

Our proxy cannot identify the precise source of additional funds and should therefore be interpreted broadly as capturing reliance on resources beyond a buyer’s own savings. In practice, however, parental transfers (the ‘Bank of Mum and Dad’) are a prominent source of support for UK FTBs. The patterns we document therefore most likely reflect a reduced role of family wealth in determining who can become a homeowner.

A final point is that easing deposit constraints can affect both quantities and prices. While the results here show a strong increase in FTB purchases (especially among buyers without likely external support), our previous work showed that such credit expansions can contribute to higher house prices. For central banks, this highlights why understanding mortgage market constraints matters: changes in credit conditions can reshape who enters the housing market and influence wider housing-market dynamics.

Belinda Tracey works in the Bank’s Structural Economics Division and Neeltje van Horen works as a Professor of Financial Economics at the University of Amsterdam.

If you want to get in touch, please email us at bankunderground@bankofengland.co.uk or leave a comment below.

Comments will only appear once approved by a moderator, and are only published where a full name is supplied. Bank Underground is a blog for Bank of England staff to share views that challenge – or support – prevailing policy orthodoxies. The views expressed here are those of the authors, and are not necessarily those of the Bank of England, or its policy committees.

Share the post “Credit constraints and housing market access”

Why character, not rate sheets, builds a lasting broker brand

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
0


That mindset now shapes the content I create, too. Most market content is built around products. Mine is built around principles. I ask one question before I hit record: if someone watched this, would they trust me more? Sometimes that is teaching. Sometimes it shows leadership, admitting mistakes, or highlighting someone else’s success instead of my own, because leadership is not about constantly talking about yourself. 

Building brand at the individual loan officer level 

I do not want 1,300 loan officers hiding behind the Edge logo. I want 1,300 entrepreneurs building their own businesses. Consumers do not wake up looking for a mortgage company anymore. They look for someone they trust, a shift I unpacked further in how to build trust and visibility in a low-trust mortgage market. 

Our job as a company is to provide the technology, support, education, compliance, and lender relationships that let our loan officers build those trusted brands without having to build the infrastructure themselves. When our loan officers become recognized experts in their own communities, everyone wins. That is very different from trying to manufacture leads from the corporate level, and it is part of why strong broker-lender partnerships that actually work matter as much for the individual broker’s reputation as they do for the company’s bottom line. 

Referrals are still the business 

If you do a good job for someone, they will tell one or two people. Do a bad job, and they tell twenty to a hundred, or they go straight to social media. 

Part of protecting that word of mouth is finding the right people. It is a big reason we have not grown to five thousand loan officers. I am looking for people who genuinely care what their reputation is in their own market, people who align with how we treat customers, referral partners, and the broader community, not just people who can close volume. 

the $1 infinite money glitch? 💀💵 p1. #finance #money #crypto

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
25
the $1 infinite money glitch? 💀💵 p1. #finance #money #crypto



Like and subscribe for more…
the $1 infinite money glitch? 💀💵 p1. #finance #money #crypto

source

The Simple Systems Behind a 150-Unit Rental Portfolio (8-Hour Workweeks!)

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
0


When the dot-com bubble burst, Matt (the “Lumberjack Landlord”) watched his 100% stock portfolio go to dust.

Having lost everything he had saved throughout his early twenties, his only option was to rebuild. But with what? He needed something that could help him offset his living expenses today and propel him toward retirement.

That “something” was rentals.

But Matt didn’t just buy a couple of rental properties and sit back. He did what many investors won’t: he house hacked. And again. And again. Nine times in 13 years. This, combined with the income from his nine-to-five job, allowed him to stack small multifamily properties quickly, and today, he owns a rental portfolio of over 150 units!

Real estate investing has completely changed Matt’s life—not just the cash flow or the appreciation, but the freedom he’s already enjoying in early retirement. Despite self-managing all of their rentals, he and his wife spend just eight hours per week on their portfolio. In this episode, he’s giving you the simple framework you need to scale sustainably, whether you dream of owning a handful of rental units or a few hundred.

Dave:
Imagine waking up to discover that the wealth you spent years building is gone. That’s exactly what happened to Matt. Well, the dot-com crash wiped out his 100% stock portfolio overnight. He was left asking, “What now? How do you rebuild from zero?” For Matt, the answer was real estate. But to keep his dream of early retirement alive, he’d have to make up for lost time. And he did. One property snowballed into a few. A few turned into dozens. And today, Matt, known as the lumberjack landlord, is retired in his forties with more than 150 rental units. Many investors spend a lifetime getting to where Matt is. So what’s his big secret? In this episode, he’s going to share his exact playbook for scaling with small multifamily, including the systems and processes he uses to self-manage his really large rental portfolio. And he does it in just eight hours a week.
So whether you’re starting small, starting late, or starting over, Matt is proof that financial freedom is never too far out of reach. And if you mimic what he did, it’s probably much closer than you think. Hey, everyone. I’m Dave Meyer, joined as always by my co-host, Henry Washington. Our guest on the show today is Matt, the lumberjack landlord who self-manages a rental property portfolio in New Hampshire. Let’s bring him on. Matt, welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. It’s great to have you here again.

Matt:
Super excited to be back and now we brought friends.

Henry:
What’s up, buddy?

Dave:
Yeah, this is going to be great. I’m glad we’re all here together. Matt, you had a very fun first episode here on BiggerPockets Podcast, but for people who didn’t catch that one, maybe just give us a little bit of your background, who you are, how you got into real estate.

Matt:
I’d lost my money in the dot-com bomb in the early 2000s. For a 20-year-old, I’d saved up a lot of money. I’d saved up like $27,000 at 20.

Dave:
Damn.

Matt:
Wow. That was a lot of money. And it was because I lived on almost nothing and all I did was tuck it away and put the money away. And so I did that. And I was rewarded with two companies that got hush numbers and then one was found for fraud and I watched my $27,000 largely evaporate. Man. Then started a search for what’s the next thing I’m going to do? And where can you get an asset that you can also live in? It also pays you to live in it. And by the way, it also appreciates over time as well. I can’t think of anything else like that. I did nine house hacks in 13 years. Then my wife finally said, no more.

Dave:
So you weren’t doing real estate. You were just like house hacking, but you were working –

Matt:
Yeah, I worked a W-2 job until two years ago when I retired.

Dave:
That’s awesome.

Matt:
I could have retired 10 years ago, but it was how big did I want to make this? And so I said, I’m in the prime earning years of my career. I was in my late 30s, early 40s. I’d gotten to the executive level. And so I said, you know what? Let’s just keep on rolling. And so that’s what I did. But now fast-forward, we range between kind of 52 and 55 buildings. What I like to say is over the last three years we’ve been a net ad investor, meaning that we always are trading out of assets, but we always add more.

Dave:
Why haven’t you bought bigger commercial or anything like that?

Matt:
I think we all see how commercial’s going for all the big boys. It’s really tough to re-steer a battleship of 180 units versus a building that’s no longer working anymore that might be three, four, six, 10 or two, four, six, 10. If I don’t like an asset, how hard is it for me to sell that? I can sell it like that. I can wholesale it off if I want to, or I can call a broker, I can get it on. And it’s something that most likely with Fannie Freddie, it’s easier now than it’s ever been for people to do owner oc deals. You can get 5% money on a three unit or 5% money on a four unit. I was not that lucky. I was having to put 20% down moving into those things.

Henry:
One of the cool parts about real estate is you can invest to your level of risk tolerance. Of course. And everybody’s risk tolerance is different. I have a very similar risk tolerance to you it sounds like. I play in the single and small multifamily space. There are some warm, fuzzy reasons why I play in that space, but there’s really a managing risk factor about why I play in that space because A, I don’t want to raise a bunch of people’s capital because I would lose sleep. Thinking about that gives me stress. And so I can use my own money or maybe one private lender to do a deal. I’ll have multiple exit strategies on a deal because I’m going to buy a really good deal and being able to pivot is important. But I think people talk about investing to your risk tolerance when you’re researching and getting started, but then once you get in, that kind of goes away and everybody’s like, more, do more, buy more, do the bigger.
It’s the same level of effort for bigger than it is for smaller. You should do bigger. The voice of the investor changes than when you got started. And I kind of got caught up in that and we’ve made some pivots since then and I’ve sold some assets and I’m in a much happier place with a more manageable sized portfolio that has options instead of large scale multifamily. You got one exit, buddy. You got to get that thing to perform or you’re in trouble.

Matt:
The cool thing is that with small multifamily, and Henry, you know especially a duplex, I can put that on a market. It can be an investor. It can be a house hacker. It can be like a mother-in-law. It can be multi-generational. It can be all of these things. And so when you look at the grand scheme of things, people say, oh, well, real estate isn’t liquid. Oh yeah. Put a duplex on the market well priced and see how fast it lasts.

Dave:
Even now, even in a sell market. No problem.

Matt:
We’re going to do a 1031 and I’ve been shopping and there have been in the last 40 days, there have been 40 buildings go on market and 37 are under contract. Guess what the other three are? Overpriced.

Dave:
I just put a duplex on the market. I got six offers first weekend.

Matt:
Yeah. I think that small multifamily, and that doesn’t mean buying in bad areas. My focus is still buying in B and C class areas and making A and B class product. That’s the goal.

Dave:
The other thing that residential doesn’t have when we’re talking about risk is, and I think what most syndicators who are losing their shirts right now, I think what a lot of people got wrong is they misunderstood supply risk. Everyone’s like, “Oh, the debt’s better.” But with small, multifamily, with residential, the idea that a builder’s going to come in and totally change how much supplies in your market, it’s just not a risk. It’s not going to happen. In multifamily, if builders all of a sudden get excited about your market, you have no control over what other people are doing. They could all start building right next to you and totally diminish the value of your product.

Matt:
You’re dead on. I mean, in my market, there are 700 new apartments coming online in the next two years and this is an area of about 70,000 people. That is a lot of supply. And so the cool thing is we’re going to leave it to all those guys to fight it out and fight over the nice shiny quarters and the people that are 800 credit scores. I’m just taking the people that need a place to live that are working for a living that I can rent out for les than what they can rent out because my debt is much different than theirs. So people should be excited. Yeah, the first five years is awful. The next five years, it gets a little bit better. The next five years, you really start to get to enjoy the fruits of your labor over a 10-year period. You really start to see significant returns in a normal market.

Dave:
All right. Well, clearly Matt has proven that you can scale successfully with just using residential, small multifamily, single family homes. Clearly Henry has too, that you can absolutely do this. But I want to learn exactly how you’re doing this, Matt, because that’s a lot of units that you’re managing and I’m sure audience would love to learn how you’re doing it. Stick with us. We’ll be right back. Welcome back to the BiggerPockets Podcast. I’m here with Henry and the lumber jack landlord talking about how he has scaled up very successfully just using residential real estate. Matt, how do you do it? You self-manage, right? All 150-ish units you got?

Matt:
Yep. Yeah, we self-manage. So the first 120 I managed while I had a career in tech.

Dave:
And when you say we –

Matt:
My wife and I.

Dave:
Okay. Yeah, just the two of you. Wow. How on earth did you do that?

Matt:
Systems and processes. They can completely change the complexion of your business. So for us, everything was very templatized. Our kitchens, our colors, our management process, our application process, our go – to-market process on a unit, how we draft our ads, how we screen tenants, everything became very templatized, which meant for us, it was very, very easy to scale because now it just wasn’t about acquiring another asset or another building and then saying, “We better figure all this out. ” No, it was acquiring the asset and acquiring the building. And I use asset and building interchangeably, but it was about acquiring it and then saying, “All right, we just snap it in. Here’s our processes. Here’s all the things that we do when we buy something. Here’s all the things that we do when we’re getting something to bring to market.” And now that’s something that we can do in 15 to 30 days after acquisition if, for example, we’re buying something that’s vacant.

Henry:
Right. For the person that’s listening who wants to manage their properties on their own and start to build some of these systems and processes, but they have no idea where to start, how do you figure out where to start and what’s the difference between a system and a process?

Matt:
So this is what I spend my time teaching. What I spend my time teaching is essentially how we’ve automated our business and here’s how we’ve done it. Something silly, we actually print magnets and put them on two or three different places in the apartment. And we just say, “Hey, if you ever have an issue, just reach out to that number.” And then anytime that there’s a problem, they can send a text message to that or they can call that. Transcription, we actually have it go into an email where there’s a group of three of us that see it and somebody gets to it and forwards it onto the contractor or I say, “Hey, this one’s yours, you take it. ” That’s it. So we all have phones. I run my entire company from this. I am an elite email forwarder. And that’s the thing is it’s all there.
People might need to be taken through that. And that’s what I spend my time teaching people is here’s exactly how you do what I’ve done. But it’s building those systems and building those processes and taking all of those steps. And it puts people on the right path to imagine having that framework. That framework didn’t exist 24 years ago when I started.

Henry:
What I like about what you just said is A, you were using tools that didn’t cost any money and B, it wasn’t over automation. I think when people start implementing systems and processes, they want to make it as overly automated as they can. But what I’ve learned is that if the system/process is too overbearing, I will avoid it and do it the manual way. Yes. And so I need a system up and to a point. I like that it just transcribes it and then I get an email and then I have to forward it. And so what I want people to hear from this is design the system that you would use, not the most perfect automated system. Design the system up until the point that you’re comfortable with it. You’re not trying to eliminate everything in everybody. You’re just trying to eliminate the parts that you suck at or that you hate.

Matt:
I’m trying to bridge the gap for where my skills, talents, and abilities drop off.

Henry:
Perfect.

Matt:
That’s what I’m trying to do.

Dave:
I have to say though, Matt, you must be good at time management too because I worked full-time and was self-managing, I don’t know, 10 units at a time and I felt busy as hell. I don’t know. I just was constantly doing stuff. So how do you do it? Because that’s one example, right? That’s maintenance. But then you’re leasing, you’re managing rehab. So your skill must be somewhat in time management because that’s a lot of stuff to do in one day.

Matt:
Yeah, it is. I mean, I think I won’t take credit for it. It’s really something that Steve Jobs and Elon Musk do really well. They have the top three things on their list that have to get done every day. And then the rest of them can potentially be done tomorrow. So I make sure that every single day I get the three things done that I need to get done that have to get done. And then the next day, hopefully I don’t have three brand new things. There’s some stuff that might be on the list that can bubble up that I can get and rip through. But the other thing too is that recognizing that my other option is working 10 hours in some soulless job while I’m making some other man’s dream come true. I don’t really like that. That doesn’t sound wonderful to me.
What sounds wonderful to me is that I get all the fruits of my labor and that my family gets that and that we then get to help others accomplish that same task. So time management I certainly think is a piece of it. But again, if you can deduce running this entire business essentially down to having great contractors that listen that you pay on time.

Dave:
That’s like 90% of it in my opinion.

Matt:
Knowing what they’re going to do. Right. Well, here’s the thing. How many people, and I would be willing to bet, I’d love to see this in the chat because I will go back and review the chat. How many people don’t inspect when the job’s done? They just pay the bill. A lot of people do.

Dave:
But see, this is what I mean about time management. You’re running around at 50 properties inspecting properties.

Matt:
On all of these amazing devices is a high def camera.

Dave:
Oh, okay. So you’re virtual inspecting.

Matt:
Yep. And I’m either doing it live on a video or I’m saying, “Hey, just send me 10 pictures.” Because what happens with that email or that video? I can get to that at nine, 10, 11 o’clock at night. I can get there. And so how much time am I spending every single day? Not hours. The only time I’m spending that kind of time is when we’re doing a multimillion dollar big, big project down to studs and we’re basically going through nine contractors to do something big project.

Dave:
How many hours a week do you think you work? On

Matt:
The actual management of existing assets, probably six to eight hours a week I would say.

Dave:
Total?

Matt:
Yeah.

Dave:
Dude.Man.

Matt:
Had to become elite at something. I’m that good. So I think the key for it, again, I think the big thing that people miss out is they feel like they can’t ever see that result coming for them because they see what they’re going through at 10 units.

Dave:
I

Matt:
Promise you there’s not that much big of a difference between 10 and 50. There just isn’t.

Dave:
I mean, honestly, the reason 10 was a lot or whatever it was is just because I was trying to fix things myself. I think I wasn’t forwarding stuff. I should have just been forwarding emails.

Matt:
Listen, the first 50 I did all of that on and I get that. That’s an expanding problem, right? Yeah. You can’t accelerate through growth when you have one set of hands for throughput.

Henry:
One thing I’ve learned across all levels of property, so A class, B class, C clas, whether you’re paying $500 a month rent or $3,500 a month rent, there are bad tenants in both classes. So do you have some golden rules for tenant selection or some systems or processes in tenant selection that help you stay on top of being very good at selecting good tenants?

Matt:
So I hired an agent. I hired her for not a high amount of money in the $30 range. I said, “This is how I want my unit shown.” But I provided copy, which is the actual ad. I provided the pictures. I paid for those. She was no money out of pocket. Her job was to follow my three criteria for bringing in great tenants. And that is this. We do not have an application fee.

Dave:
I like that. Even though it does cost you money to run their background check, you eat that.

Matt:
At the end it does, but I don’t do it in the beginning because in the beginning I say, “I want three things from you in the beginning. I want a pay stub. Just need proof of payment of your last three payments to your landlord. If they pay on the 6th, the 9th, and the 15th, they’re probably not somebody I want when it’s due on the first. And then I just want a screenshot of their credit score with their name on it. Who am I to say which credit scoring model’s correct? Vantage three, Vantage 10, Experian four. It doesn’t matter to me. Just show me a picture of the credit score with your name on it. And that’s all I need to get you a spot in the arena to get a chance to actually rent this apartment from me. And that helps us drive significant traffic to our units.
I probably get two to three X. In fact, we’ve done studies in Zillow and we get on average 250 to 300% more traffic to our properties than other properties because of our process.

Dave:
I love this idea. I did the same thing where it’s basically like I’m only going to charge you when I get charged essentially, which is like they charge you whatever it is, 40 bucks to go run a background check in anything. It’s like until then, I’m going to evaluate everything else about your application. That way, if you’re not a good fit, you’re not incurring any costs. I’m not incurring any costs. But at the point where I need to pay 40 bucks, you pay 40 bucks. I’m not making any money off of this. That’s the fair way to do it.

Matt:
Absolutely.

Dave:
I have friends who rent and they just apply for all these apartments and get rejected. It sucks. It’s b*llsh*t, honestly, to have to go out and get rejected 10 times. You’re out 400 bucks because even if you’re a good candidate, maybe you just got in too late. It’s nonsense. The people I really, really hate when landlords try and make money off rental applications fee, it drives.

Matt:
Well, you see it. In a lot of the cities, they’re the ones that are most guilty in where they do that churn. And it’s disgusting how much money they make on the churn. They’re like, “Well, hey, I can afford to do a lower priced unit because I’m getting 5,000 bucks in fees when all these people were applying.” It’s disgusting. It is. It totally is. We don’t do it that way. I agree. We legitimately want somebody to find a house with us. That’s legitimately what we want to do.

Dave:
That is the only sentiment to have if you’re getting into this industry.

Matt:
Yes.

Dave:
The idea to just profit off churn is ridiculous. You should earn money by providing a service. That is the industry, right?

Matt:
That’s it.

Dave:
If you are just making money off application fees, you are providing nothing. You are just leaching money from other people. It’s messed up.

Matt:
Absolutely right.

Dave:
All right. So much good stuff here from Matt, but we got to take one more quick break. We’ll be right back.

Henry:
All right, we are back on the BiggerPockets podcast with the Lumber Jack landlord. I wanted to ask about some tenant red flags. So as you’re evaluating some of these tenants, are there some red flags that you’re like, “This is an absolute no?” And are there some green flags potentially where you’re like, “This is the kind of tenant that I’m looking for? ” And I’m not looking for the… Obviously there’s some very obvious red flags that people should look out for, but maybe what are some things that maybe some other landlords might overlook because they weed these people out? Example, for me, one of my best tenants is a convicted felon and most landlords rule out convicted felons.

Matt:
I do not.

Henry:
I do not either.

Matt:
Listen, they paid their debt. Who am I? I’m not special. They paid their debt to society. Everyone does the wrong thing eventually in their life. Some get caught, some don’t, and the ones that do and they pay their debt so long as they’re not a future risk to others, then we can have that conversation.

Henry:
Absolutely.

Matt:
And I think that’s the human side of it. So for all those people that call people slumlords, hey, listen, at the end of the day, there’s a lot of people that need that hand up. And I like to be one of those landlords that provides that even if it burns me every once in a while. Amen. You still got to do the role and be the salt, right? I love that.

Dave:
Yeah.

Matt:
I think that the red flags for me are when they come in and they’re already complaining about their old landlord, there certainly is you send me nine messages in six hours.

Dave:
Yeah, urgency.

Matt:
You need to spend some quiet time with yourself

Henry:
Because

Matt:
You’re not that important. If you’re that way trying to get the place, imagine what you’re like once you’re in there.

Henry:
Yeah.

Dave:
Well, it’s like you’re either a little bit crazy or there’s some reason why you need to be out quickly, which isn’t always a red flag, but it’s worth asking some more questions about

Matt:
That. Yep. There’s that piece. Asking for a discount on the rent? Oh

Dave:
Yeah. No.

Matt:
Already. My favorite is we have as many issues, so we’ll make some exceptions with people in 500 credit scores. Dical debt.

Henry:
Oh yeah, medical debt doesn’t bother me at all.

Matt:
Yeah. So there’s some exceptions that we’ll make, but they’re consistent exceptions if that makes sense.

Henry:
Yes. Medical debt, divorces don’t bother me.

Matt:
Yes. Yep. So what we’re looking for in those particular cases, honestly, we’re looking for much more of a, you got the opportunity to walk the place based on your credentials. If you get the place is based on how you treat my people when you’re in there.

Henry:
Amen.

Dave:
I like that.

Henry:
Or how you treat me. Oh, boy.

Matt:
Yeah. So we had somebody that said, “Yep, absolutely love the place. I want it. ” We’re like, “Okay, this is great.” And we’re like, “Okay.” We told her exactly what it is. “Pay the deposit right now when you sign the lease. We’ll send that over to you in the next few hours. “Sent it over in the next few hours. She didn’t sign it for a day, didn’t sign it for two days.

Dave:
Now that’s

Matt:
Bad. The third day we sent back and said,” Hey, just wanted to double check, see if anything has changed. “She wrote back, she goes,” Nope, I still plan on signing it. “And I’m like, ” Well, we talked about the fact that we have other showings that we canceled because you said you were good to go. We want to call those people back and have them come look at it. She just went vacant again. That was one of the lessons that taught us we don’t take assets off the market unless you’ve signed a lease and paid the deposit.

Dave:
Yes.

Matt:
So it was just silly things like that. If you want to expect performance from us, we can certainly expect performance from you.

Dave:
That’s total fair. It’s a mutual exchange of benefits.That’s what this is and every business.

Henry:
The amount of people who, when I let them in to look at the unit, just assumed I was a helper or a worker or a property manager and treated me poorly. And then at the end asked me when the owner would be in touch. It’s flabbergasting to me.

Dave:
All right, Matt, well, this has been a lot of fun. This is great advice for everyone listening. Before we get out of here though, I remember last time you were on the show, you were telling me you were converting an old prison, I think, right?

Matt:
Yeah.

Dave:
Remind us what it is and give us an update because I remember it sounding very cool.

Matt:
Yeah. So one of the strategies that we’ve started spending a lot of time on is there are very often are buildings that municipalities, cities, towns, counties that they want to get away from, that they want to abandon or they have been abandoned and they turn into plight or they turn into things being in disrepair. So we had actually found specifically a building that had been vacant for about 15 years. We had talked to the city about selling it. They had a formal process. They had to put it out there for sale. And I was like, “This is a building I want because I can make an impact in the local community with it. ” And so it was a police station and a jail. So it actually has a functioning jail in it, multiple cells. I think it was six jail cells. So the cool thing was is we then just got in the building and we did four luxury apartments.
We did two for disabled vets. We love the patriots that fight for our country, whether you’re active military or you are retired. We love you and we appreciate you and we want to be a part of the solution. So we look for buildings that we can turn into units that will get people the next step in their life and give them their life back because so often disabled vets can’t get access to something that gives them all the amenities that they need. And so that’s one of our focuses. That’s

Dave:
Awesome.

Matt:
We’ll be live in probably the next 60 days. Nice. We’re waiting for our final set of inspections. But yeah, very, very exciting. We’ll have an indoor kids playground along with a cold kitchen. The idea behind that is we want to deliver for the community that doesn’t really have anything like this. Something for less than 20 bucks where kids can go play for the day and they can eat food too.

Dave:
Wow. Dude, this is so cool. I love your aproach to all this.

Matt:
Unperfect. Thank you.

Dave:
Thinking about mutual benefit, how to benefit tenants, yourself, the community at large. Everyone can win. Henry and I talk about this in the show all the time. It’s not a zero sum game. No one has to lose for you to win. You can actually improve people’s lives through this industry. Matt, you’re a great example of that. I love hearing what you’re up to.

Henry:
Appreciate

Dave:
It. Well, thanks for being here, Mat. I loved catching up with you and hopefully we’ll have you back on again soon and hear what you’re up to because your story is super inspiring and relatable. And not that it’s not impressive, but I love that it’s just things that normal people can do. These are things that everyone in our audience can mimic if you want to build the kind of portfolio Matt has built. There is nothing really from stopping you. Matt showed us that you can really start from anywhere and achieve this. So thanks for being here, man.

Matt:
Always a pleasure. Henry, great meeting you on the podcast like this. It was great to meet you again. And Dave, always a blast. Hey, look forward to the next one, boys. We’ll give you an update soon.

Dave:
Awesome. Looking forward to it, Mat. Thank you all so much for watching this episode of the BiggerPockets Podcast for Henry Washington. I am Dave Meyer. We’ll see you next time. Thank

 

Help us reach new listeners on iTunes by leaving us a rating and review! It takes just 30 seconds and instructions can be found here. Thanks! We really appreciate it!

Interested in learning more about today’s sponsors or becoming a BiggerPockets partner yourself? Email [email protected].

Easy Bonus! Earn 25,000 AAdvantage Miles with AAdvantage Business

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
0
Easy Bonus! Earn 25,000 AAdvantage Miles with AAdvantage Business


Earn 25,000 AAdvantage Miles with AAdvantage Business

American Airlines has launched a new promotion for AAdvantage Business. Businesses can earn 25,000 AAdvantage miles by joining the program and using promo code JOINA7, then completing the required qualifying activity.

A business must have at least 5 active travelers and $5,000 in eligible spend on flights with American during the calendar year. But the interesting part is that if you have a Citi  AAdvantage Business card, these requirements are waived. So it’s just 25,000 free miles.

To make things even better, this promotion even works for existing AAdvantage Business accounts. You just go to settings in your AAdvantage Business account, go to Promotional Codes and enter promo code JOINA7.

You can join our Facebook Group for more tips and discussions.

Guru’s Wrap-up

This is a nice opportunity to pick up an easy bonus of 25,000 American Airlines miles for free if you have a Citi  AAdvantage Business card. It’s actually too easy, so I doubt it will last long.

HT: FM

Billionaire Steve Cohen Sold Amazon and Nvidia but Loaded Up on This Beaten-Down Stock

globalinvestmentstrategy.com
-
0
Billionaire Steve Cohen Sold Amazon and Nvidia but Loaded Up on This Beaten-Down Stock


Steve Cohen runs Point72 Asset Management, and investors closely watch his investment decisions through that hedge fund’s 13F filings. The most recent 13F highlighted two interesting moves. First, Cohen took profits in artificial intelligence leaders Amazon (AMZN 0.80%) and Nvidia (NVDA +3.74%). Second, he dramatically increased his position in Boston Scientific (BSX 1.08%).

Here’s a look at Steve Cohen’s stock buying and selling and why you might want to consider making similar investment moves.

Image source: Getty Images.

The AI trade could be changing

Since the start of 2026, neither Amazon nor Nvidia have been a particularly strong performer. Amazon and Nvidia were only up around 5% year to date as of this writing, trailing the roughly 10% gain of the S&P 500 index (^GSPC 0.28%). That comes after a multi-year advance for each company.

Over the past decade, Amazon was up over 560% compared to a gain of 260% for the S&P 500 index. Nvidia’s stock rose more than 16,000% over the same span. Taking profits from strongly performing stocks is hardly shocking, especially as they start to lag the broader market after a long period of strength.

However, what’s notable is that the artificial intelligence trade that helped push these two stocks higher appears to be shifting. The early leaders may be giving way to infrastructure companies, such as hydrogen fuel cell maker Bloom Energy (BE 5.67%), that support the build-out of the AI backbone. Between the fourth quarter of 2025 and the first quarter of 2026, Cohen trimmed his stake in Amazon by 6% and his Nvidia position by a whopping 24%.

NVDA Chart

NVDA data by YCharts

Cohen is betting on an unloved healthcare giant

While Cohen was selling Nvidia and Amazon shares, he was buying Boston Scientific shares. His position in this medical device maker increased by 50% from the start of the year. What’s interesting is that the dollar value of the Boston Scientific position barely budged because the stock has been heading sharply lower. It is down over 50% year to date as of this writing. This is a value play, with Cohen likely betting that the company turns its fortunes around over the long term.

Boston Scientific makes medical devices used in cardiac care (66% of revenues) and medical-surgical products (34%). The products it sells are not optional, so demand is steady regardless of economic trends and market cycles. The company has long been a top player in the medical technology space. However, all companies go through good periods and bad ones. Right now, Boston Scientific isn’t hitting on all cylinders.

Notably, the company reported a strong first quarter, but provided a particularly weak outlook for the rest of the year. The numbers here speak volumes. In the first quarter of 2026, Boston Scientific posted organic sales growth of 9.4%, but in the second quarter, it projects organic sales growth could slow to as low as 5%. For the full year, the company lowered its adjusted earnings guidance range from $3.43 to $3.49 per share to a range of $3.34 to $3.41.

Boston Scientific Stock Quote

Today’s Change

(-1.08%) $-0.49

Current Price

$44.81

There’s a reason investors are downbeat right now: the new high end of the guidance range is lower than the old low end. But the company has a long history of success, driven by innovation and strong customer relationships. It is one of a small number of medical device makers that have entrenched industry positions. It is highly likely that the company will eventually emerge from its current funk.

Boston Scientific: A deep value opportunity

The big story for investors right now, however, is Boston Scientific’s valuation. For example, its price-to-sales ratio of 3.2x is far below its five-year average of 6x. And its price-to-earnings ratio of 19x is well below its longer-term average of 64x. To be fair, buying a value-oriented stock like Boston Scientific should be viewed as a long-term investment.

Indeed, you can’t turn an over $60 billion market cap healthcare giant around on a dime. But it seems highly likely that this industry-leading medical device maker does, eventually, get back on track. Which is likely what Steve Cohen is betting on, and you might want to, too.

123...826Page 1 of 826

About Us

Get the Latest Insights based on: business, finance, mortgage, credit cards, Investments and better Ways to Make Money Online

Categories

Latest news

Why a Credit Union Might Be the Smartest Place to Get a Student Loan

Investments 0
When families map out how to pay for...

The crypto startup trying to put a barrel of oil on blockchain

Finance 0
The oil industry has spent more than a...

[Targeted] Apple Card $200 Signup Bonus

Credit Card 0
Update 7/8/26: New round...

Popular news

Why a Credit Union Might Be the Smartest Place to Get a Student Loan

Investments 0
When families map out how to pay for...

The crypto startup trying to put a barrel of oil on blockchain

Finance 0
The oil industry has spent more than a...

[Targeted] Apple Card $200 Signup Bonus

Credit Card 0
Update 7/8/26: New round...

© 2024. All Rights Reserved.