Jenny Jones
Jenny Jones – Stocks vs Mutual Funds vs Dividends.
Which is best? Investing in stocks, mutual funds, or dividends? That all depends on your goals and we break that down in this episode. Please welcome Jenny Jones.
Payback Time Podcast
Payback Time is a podcast for investors. The goal of this podcast is to help make investing approachable and easy to understand. We will interview beginner and experienced investors and ask them to share stories on how they got started, what challenges they faced, what mistakes they made, and what strategy works for them today. The overall objective is to provide you with a roadmap that helps you become a better investor.
key timecodes
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(00:52 ) – Background history
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(04:33) – The experiences that led him to be a financial advisor
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(05:23) – His investing journey
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(06:49) – What type of funds did he start investing in
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(12:30) – What dollar amount did he start investing with?
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(13:53) – What is his investment strategy today?
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(15:16) – His recent approach to real state and retirement advisor business
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(18:30) – A different strategy for younger people who are focused on the retirement savings
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(21:50) – How you can use TYKR on both cases to help you make the best investment decisions
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(26:10) – What is his biggest investment success?
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(28:08) – His real estate flipping strategy
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(32:27) – What is his biggest investment mistake?
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(30:12) – The importance of the support network in this business model
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(39:05) – Guest contacts
Transcription
[00:00:03.430] – Intro
Payback Time is a podcast about building businesses wealth and financial freedom. We try to uncover the challenges our guests faced, the mistakes they made, and the steps they took to achieve their goals. The overall objective is to provide you with a roadmap that leads to your own success. Sean Tepper is your host. Are you ready? It’s payback time.
[00:00:33.390] – Sean
Which is best investing in stocks, mutual funds or dividends? That all depends on your goals, and we break that down in this episode. Please welcome Jenny Jones. Jenny, welcome to the show.
[00:00:46.520] – Jenny Jones
Hi, nice to be here. Nice to be here. Sean, how are you doing today?
[00:00:50.360] – Sean
Doing well. Thanks a lot for joining me. And I would like for you, if you could, kick us off and tell us about your background.
[00:00:59.550] – Jenny Jones
Where should I start? When I was in kindergarten no, I’ll ask for it a little weird.
[00:01:04.350] – Sean
We get a lot of people, they’ll start at, like, maybe if they went to college. College years, early 20s.
[00:01:10.370] – Jenny Jones
Right.
[00:01:10.680] – Sean
And then work to the present a little bit.
[00:01:12.910] – Jenny Jones
Yeah. No, it’s not that serious. That was more of an ice breaker for myself, if you will. Right, sure. No, I didn’t do the traditional right. After high school, I went to college. I actually went to the military because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. So I went to the military, spent about ten years there, got the GI bill, and was able to go to college after that. So I was in there, I was doing inventory management, so counting beans, bullets, toilet paper. And so that kind of brought me to an accounting background. And when I got out, I was doing some accounting work and went back to school and started getting into finance. But I had this passion for It, so they all kind of verge together and leads me to now where I have a background in It, finance and accounting. So you mix that up as a mixer, you got a good little combination of vast background there.
[00:02:10.170] – Sean
What do you do? Do you work for somebody or do you have your own business?
[00:02:14.370] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, I’ve been advising clients for a little over two decades now, about 23 years, and that was a challenge within itself, because my way in was right after 911, the market crashed and a lot of things, and I was doing it, obviously, for at and T, and they were like, we got to start thinning back. And the funny thing about that is they started laying a lot of people off because we were getting pressure from WorldCom. Right. So if you remember WorldCom do you remember WorldCom?
[00:02:47.570] – Sean
I do not.
[00:02:48.490] – Jenny Jones
No, you don’t. They were the biggest competitor to at and T, but ironically, they were cooking the books. Right. And so at the time, our CEO was trying to beat WorldCom. We were heading neck and neck with them. They were the other largest telecom. I was like, Why can’t we seem to beat them. Why can’t we seem to beat them? And then so at the same time, it says the markets changed. Right. They’re always leveraged from the market as well, and they wanted to reduce the workforce. So I got reduced out. And it’s funny, when I got reduced out, I said, you know what? Let me get out of telecom. Let me go back to finance. And when I got reduced out, it came out, like, six months later. Next thing you know, they have Bernie Evers, the CEO, and all the officers of WorldCom and Jim Can cuffs. They’re escorting them out because they were lying to Wall Street the entire time. Right? They were lying, and they cost all of us our jobs because we were trying to beat them, and we couldn’t beat them, and the company ended up folding and all that.
[00:03:51.190] – Jenny Jones
The whole point of the story is I learned a lot in that, and I wanted to get into the markets a lot more. So the only way in was I had to start selling insurance. Got it.
[00:04:02.170] – Sean
Okay, so you sold insurance. Were you a financial advisor as well?
[00:04:06.450] – Jenny Jones
No, I started out that was my only way in. Right. I didn’t really have an entry way in. And once I started selling insurance, I gradually learned how to scale in that particular profession. It was insurance. Then I went to variable products, then I went to getting a general license of stockbroker, then advisory, and I kind of went up the ranks through that. But I had to start I had to be door to door first. Right.
[00:04:34.050] – Sean
Got it. The reason I asked those questions to give our audience some context and what you do for a living. So it sounds like you’ve got experience there in it, then insurance, and eventually working up to wealth advisory or financial advisory.
[00:04:47.210] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, I guess I just wanted to and I didn’t know where you were going with there. He’s like, hey, just give her some of your background on what you do and how you got there. So I apologize. I should have just said, hey, I got over 20 years in advising. Mostly the core area is long term, right. Because I do a lot of retirement planning, which I love, because it’s almost like just sitting down and helping people put these plans together, and I have more experience in that area. And then we’ll see later on when we talk how the it ties into that down, how to come together now. Yeah.
[00:05:24.110] – Sean
Okay, well, let’s dive into your investment journey. So when did you first start investing in the stock market? What year?
[00:05:30.880] – Jenny Jones
So I started investing in the stock market in around 1988 or so.
[00:05:38.320] – Sean
You didn’t happen to buy Apple or Microsoft at that point, did you?
[00:05:41.680] – Jenny Jones
I did.
[00:05:42.590] – Sean
Okay.
[00:05:43.250] – Jenny Jones
Did you hold it? No, I did.
[00:05:45.650] – Sean
Come on, man.
[00:05:46.780] – Jenny Jones
No. So what happened was I bought Apple as soon as they announced Steve Jobs is coming back. But I didn’t know what their vision was, and I didn’t know what they wanted to do. And I got chicken. Right. I got chicken on that. I had opportunity to buy Netflix. There’s a lot of other things, but I didn’t know I kind of was faddish. Right. Now I can read financial statements. Now I can read statement of cash flows. I now understand where the money is going and how it’s traveling. Fast forward now, I’m like, yes, but man, if I would have held onto the Apple and I didn’t have that much there, and I was still trying to figure it out, but I didn’t have that much. But I think their stock was $7. Either seven or $11.
[00:06:33.410] – Sean
They’ve done, I believe, five stock splits. I’m just doing a quick how many?
[00:06:37.860] – Jenny Jones
Yeah.
[00:06:38.080] – Sean
Thank you.
[00:06:39.650] – Jenny Jones
You’re going to really make me feel bad.
[00:06:43.710] – Sean
Yeah, okay.
[00:06:44.780] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, that’s exactly what happened. Yeah.
[00:06:47.060] – Sean
But anyway, what did you invest in at that point besides Apple? Did you go into, like, ETFs or index funds, mutual funds?
[00:06:55.510] – Jenny Jones
No, when I first started, because that’s pre kids, right. So it’s before you have any other responsibilities. I was just doing stock. Right. And I was with a company called Share Builder. I don’t know if you remember them. I’m actually dating myself, but Share Builder allows you to buy partial shares. So if you couldn’t afford a whole share, you can buy a fractional of a share. And so I was doing some dollar costs averaging into that, and I was buying Wnt, which is Walmart, walmart, Home Depot. So I was buying brands that I knew. Right. I bought at and T some of those brands. So that’s what I initially did. I start out in stock. Right. And as I learned more, I was like, I don’t have time to day trade, basically.
[00:07:44.310] – Sean
Okay. Those are some solid names that are still performing well today. Do you still hold any of those?
[00:07:54.150] – Jenny Jones
I don’t hold a lot of the portfolio I used to hold. Several years ago, I had cancer, and I had kidney cancer. And as a result of that, I wasn’t the sole breadwinner at that time, but I was advising, but a lot of my business came from commissions, and when I wasn’t able to produce anymore as a result of having cancer, I had to liquidate a lot of my positions just to kind of keep the household flow at that same time. That was when the housing market was crashing. A lot of things came at the wrong time, and I had to liquidate a lot of my positions since then. I’ve had to rebound, but just built it. I didn’t build a house of cards this time. Sure. If you will.
[00:08:38.660] – Sean
Well, here at Tykr, we’re all about buying stocks over bundled products, if you will. So we very much support that strategy. You got some blue chip names. You definitely have it.
[00:08:50.110] – Jenny Jones
Yeah.
[00:08:51.210] – Sean
I have to ask for a quicker how are you feeling? Are you recovered?
[00:08:54.130] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, so I had kidney cancer and they removed one of my kidneys. So now they have one kidney. Got you. That happened. I was on this trajectory, right, learning, understanding, growing in the market, getting a lot of new investors, bringing them into the market. Was I like holding an equity position only portfolio, but I also liked holding a basket of mutual funds for the long term. So I kind of had these two working. I had a lot of things going and I was on this trajectory. Then I had cancer, I almost ended up on dialysis for the rest of my life. It was really unfortunate time. Yeah, I learned a lot from that. And I had time to reflect and I said if I had the opportunity, that was my prayer. If I had an opportunity to rebuild this, how would I rebuild it? And as we move on, you’ll probably see how I kind of rebuild everything on a core foundation. I think I had a lot of things because I was so new to the market. It was so exciting and it was in good times that I built a lot of things, almost like the market, I built a lot of things on a house of cards.
[00:10:03.210] – Jenny Jones
When I worked for, I’m not going to say the actual company, sure, but I used to work for a brokerage and all we sold, and I did very well, was we sold CMOS, which were collateralized mortgage obligations, right? And I did very well in pushing those and selling those. But on the back end, this is for the whole crash, what they were doing, they were putting them in trenches and bundling them together and reselling the interest to thousands of other investors on the back end. But all these other investors owned all the mortgages of one or two families. And that’s why no one could really refi because all these CMOS collateralized mortgage applications, they owned all the tranches and the mortgage interest payments to them. So that’s why Joe Smoke down the street couldn’t refinance because his mortgage was owned by 2000 people. But it was doing well for my investors. I made a lot of money off of that because I was commission based at the time. And after the collapse, that led me to believe that I no longer wanted to be commission based because it was more or less motivated for me to make the commission and I wanted to just be an advisor only.
[00:11:19.190] – Jenny Jones
So that’s kind of what happened. So I went to these Evans and Flows in this whole market.
[00:11:23.040] – Sean
So what you were selling here, I think back to the big shorts, the movie, and there are a few guys in the film selling those garbage collateralized mortgage products. Is that essentially what you were selling?
[00:11:37.080] – Jenny Jones
I hate no, that was the thing. And that’s exactly what we were selling. Wow. Because of people. But I didn’t know I could say that now. But now, what were we thinking? Right?
[00:11:49.550] – Sean
Sure.
[00:11:50.970] – Jenny Jones
Well, you got to think, if Lehman Brothers fail behind that, what am I? I’m just a street broker. Right. I knew the returns it was making, and I knew what my clients wanted. Hey, I need something that’s going to give me this kind of return. Added to my folder. I said, hey, how about collateralized mortgage obligations? And it’s like, people make their loan payments, right? Like, yes, but I didn’t think the other side was they have variables. And then when the market adjusted, it blew everything up. And so, yeah, that was a lesson in history.
[00:12:23.740] – Sean
Yeah. That’s a major lesson, I’ll give you that. I want to circle back here to your investment journey. So you said you started in the 80s, you bought some blue chip stocks. What kind of dollar amount did you start with?
[00:12:37.540] – Jenny Jones
I started small, and when I say dollar amount, I would start with a flat $100. And then when I found opportunities, I would increase it by increments of 50. Right. Until I would be doing about 250 a month. Just dollar cost averaging into a stock or something like that. In one position? Just one position.
[00:13:00.450] – Sean
That’s exactly what our customers want to know, because they’re comparing that number against how they’re starting and what they could do. So it sounds like low amount, $100 a month, then increase that by $50 as your income increases. And there you go.
[00:13:15.530] – Jenny Jones
Yeah. I learned, again, as I’m putting everything as I put everything back together, wealth is built two ways. To me, it’s built brick by brick and it’s also inherited. Right. So people inherit wealth and they’re like, I inherited. I don’t really know what to do to keep it. I don’t know what to do to extend the legacy, because I didn’t build it brick by brick. When you build it brick by brick, you learn the nuances, the ins and outs, the risks. What type of risk? There are there’s political risks, there’s all kinds of different risks. But when you’re building a brick by brick is when you learn. And I think you build a more fundamental portfolio that way.
[00:13:52.980] – Sean
Absolutely. So what is your investment strategy today? What are you investing?
[00:13:58.060] – Jenny Jones
So what I invest in now, I’m a tried and true mutual fund guy.
[00:14:03.620] – Sean
I think you like paying the fees.
[00:14:07.330] – Jenny Jones
I do like the fees. I hate to admit that, but I’m able to yes. The fees are there for a reason. Because when you look at some of the portfolio managers that are managing it, right, if I can get 13%, they take their 23% off of it. I can get 10%. I can get 10%. Right.
[00:14:33.040] – Sean
Well, what if you just bought the SMP 500? Average returns are 14% per year over the last ten years. No fees.
[00:14:40.510] – Jenny Jones
Boom.
[00:14:41.050] – Sean
There you go.
[00:14:41.960] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, but the S and p 500 doesn’t pay a dividend. Right? I mean, you can invest in the index, but the index isn’t going to pay you a dividend.
[00:14:53.830] – Sean
Yeah, I get some investors that come to me. They want to invest in stocks that generate dividends as opposed to going for returns. And I’m like, do you enjoy chasing pennies on a highway? I mean, come on.
[00:15:06.560] – Jenny Jones
So you didn’t tell me this podcast would turn into that.
[00:15:11.530] – Sean
Hey, I push people, man. No, delicately, but you know what I’m saying, though. There are people that look, let’s say I own X amount of shares, and my dividends are like, let’s say $100 a quarter if they do the math, as opposed to four or five percentage points greater than the market, when you take that percentage against your account, I mean, $400 a year versus it could be $4,000, it could be 10,000 a year.
[00:15:40.640] – Jenny Jones
Right.
[00:15:40.960] – Sean
When you walk people through the math like that, they realize, like, oh, gosh, you’re right, dividends are nice, but if I really focus on the returns, my.
[00:15:50.940] – Jenny Jones
Wealth builds a lot faster. Yeah, I mean, there’s a couple of rules of thought on that, right. And I’m not here to challenge that’s.
[00:16:00.190] – Sean
Okay.
[00:16:00.700] – Jenny Jones
The payback time man himself, let me give you my thinking in that. Right? Okay. That’s a very good argument. There’s a lot of philosophies. Philosophies because I deal in retirement and real estate. Those are the two areas that I concentrate in. But I don’t deal in some enormous. I’ll manage a portfolio. If a client move a portfolio to me, I’ll manage that portfolio. I’ll look at their positions, things like that. But really what I’m doing is I’m managing people to retirement.
[00:16:39.070] – Sean
I got you.
[00:16:40.990] – Jenny Jones
And I try to do it where I’ll put them on a couple of good horses and then I’ll ride them. And what I do is, it doesn’t matter. I don’t let my clients be concerned with the evidence and flows of the everyday market and watching it every day versus I don’t care. A dividend payment is coming. What I’ll do if that dividend payment comes when the market is low, I’m reinvesting at a lower dollar amount. When the average mutual fund, let’s say the average cost of the mutual fund is $35 per share. I own 200 different companies, and so the probability of me, of my entire portfolio just blowing up, I mean, everything would have to be underwater all at one time. But when those dividend payments come in, if the market has dropped, then say my mutual fund is now worth $20. But the average cost of that mutual fund is $30. I’m actually buying $10 less. Right. So I’m buying it while it’s on sale, and I’m reinvesting in it as it goes back up.
[00:17:43.150] – Sean
Yes. Now I get what you’re doing, and now I agree with you 100%. My audience, we got a lot of people in their twenty s, thirty s and forty s. Some people in their fifty s and sixty s. I agree with you there, because I do know some people are like, hey, I don’t want the big returns anymore. That’s not what’s important to me. I just want to hold a bunch of stocks that pay the dividends. And I can just hold the stocks. You can just ride the roller coaster up and down, and regardless of where those stocks go, you’re getting your dividends. And that’s what they use to pay for golf, pay for travel. Right. Pay for if they want to lease a new Tesla, whatever. They’re like, okay, so I get my four dividend payments for the year, depending on what they own, of course. And that adds up to an office. It could be 50, 60, 70, whatever.
[00:18:30.640] – Jenny Jones
Now, I don’t give that advice to my son because my son, he’s 22. Yes, we have a different strategy. I work with him a little bit differently, so I get the difference. But I’m telling you the way I am and the way I’m conditioned, because 90% of my clients, they’re on the latter part of the accumulation phase, moving into the distribution phase. So I have to be a lot careful with their money. And what I learned from being in this industry so long. I remember when we had the first crash when I was in the industry, I was hiding under my desk and I was telling my assistants to send all my calls or voicemail because I didn’t know what to do. I had never seen that before. I was a young guy, man, I’d only been in the business like two or three years, and I didn’t know what to do after writing it out, understanding it, going back, getting a master’s degree, understanding finance and the economic expansion and contraction, understanding what’s consumer staples, understanding the core fundamental pieces. Now I’m just like, yeah, send them on through. But now I know up front, I’m setting expectations up front.
[00:19:42.250] – Jenny Jones
So those are the things I didn’t do. I didn’t know. Now that I’ve been in a business.
[00:19:45.360] – Sean
Like, I already know that, I support that strategy. And to be honest with you, I want him over.
[00:19:52.610] – Jenny Jones
Yeah.
[00:19:53.770] – Sean
What I would do is if I fast forward a few decades and I get to retirement age, I’ve got a Roth IRA that I’ll start taking out 59 and a half, I believe around that age, yeah, I might move my stocks into more blue chips that pay dividends and just ride them out and live off the dividends. Don’t sell shares to pay for things. Right? I’m all about just keep the shares and then just take the dividend payments. You can afford your lifestyle.
[00:20:25.090] – Jenny Jones
I’ve been living that and sharing that philosophy with my clients, and they just love it. It’s like, yeah, magic. I’m like, no, I’m buying your large blue chip dividend paying. There are some mutual funds that increase the dividend every single year, right? And so I just get on good quality horses and I ride them. I don’t overlap a lot. Right. Because if there’s a good core amount of funds in this one, it’ll probably overlap with another one. And I don’t need to own them both. Then I got double fees for no reason. I won’t mention any names, but some of them, any advice that I share, whatever. There’s things that I do with my clients because it depends on their risk tolerance. Right. And even when I’m working with clients outside of when I’m on my podcast, when I’m sharing different things, I’m always saying, always seek out your own professional advice. But there was this one, it was called Capital World Growth named Tom, and it was by American Funds. And they just had a handle on the international market and they had a lock on kind of the dividends from all over the world.
[00:21:35.040] – Jenny Jones
And I used to ride them really a lot. So I’d have a good international mix and I have a good domestic mix and I just kind of rolled them both for the dividends and it was magic. I still do that combo. I do some other ones now, but I just wanted to share with you.
[00:21:50.690] – Sean
Yeah, no, that’s smart. And to the listeners out there, just to kind of reflect on what we’re talking about is like in your younger years, I recommend you can use Tykr for no matter what your age is, but go for those individual stocks to really accelerate your wealth building process. But as an older, that’s when you kind of shift. You can use Tykr to find some really safe, great on sale stocks that pay dividends. And as what Jenny and I were talking about here is live off the dividends, that way you don’t have to sell any shares.
[00:22:21.190] – Jenny Jones
Yeah. No, I mean, I own Tykr. Right. And that’s kind of how you and I met because I have an It background and so I own Tykr. And it’s funny, and I’ll just tell you this because I’m on your show. I started looking at I said, when I first got it right, I was like, who is this guy? I saw what you’re doing. Let me see. So what I did was I started running it against some of the other advice that I was using because I use a lot of different things. I’m looking at different things morningstar and some other so I bounced off. I said, man, this guy kind of knows what he’s talking about here, right? I did that. I’m not trying to blows more. I appreciate he really knows what he’s talking about. And so I turn my son on to your methodology and some of those things. I said, Man, I like that, but I’m not in that season. But I’ll still do that. There are portions of my portfolio, I do allocate to that and so I do subscribe to that. I’m a securities guy. Tried and true. But I think if I can get those same securities with floaties at my age because if I lose it, I can’t put it back, right?
[00:23:30.300] – Jenny Jones
And that’s the thing. Once you get to a certain age, you’re like, man, I’m not getting ready to go back. I’ll get it to a certain point where the dividends just pay for themselves. But to get there, I’m going to ride it, I’m going to take the risk. So that’s what it is. So, yeah, you’re good.
[00:23:47.620] – Sean
I like the way you phrase that. A season in your life and that’s it. Your son is in a different perspective or different season, you could say. And he can go for it. He can go for more of those growth stocks with great financials. He’s going to make the return. But yeah, he turns the corner to another season. That’s when play it a little more cool. If you don’t ride this, like, I’ve got some stocks that I hold that they are down to 80%. Yeah, that’s significant. But I’m prepared for that and I’m capitalizing on that. But if I were a lot older, I’d be like, oh boy.
[00:24:20.710] – Jenny Jones
Yeah. The only reason why is because if you lose it, you can’t put it back like that. Because really your greatest strength in investing is time. If my window is like this, meaning that if I lose and that’s the biggest fear when I meet with a lot of my clients, I was like, you’re only in the money market. And I know, but if I lose it, I’m like, dude, you’re in the money market, right? And you have to walk them through that. And a lot of people, I’ll open up their retirement portfolios for the first time and they may have 60% of their investments in the money market because they just don’t understand. So I’ll run into a lot of people like that. I’m like, let’s live a little. Let’s try to at least get seven, 8%, right?
[00:25:01.820]
Sure.
[00:25:02.570] – Jenny Jones
And I’m just like, you’re crawling around one to 3% in your money market. I said, you know, you’re still in partnership with Uncle Sam, right? You’re still in partnership with the government. What do you mean? I said, well, they still got to get their money out too, right? Now you’re still in partnership with them. Once you go into a retirement plan, you are in partnership with the government.
[00:25:24.610] – Sean
Good point. Let’s take a quick commercial break. Hey, this is Sean. I just want to say thanks a lot for checking out this podcast. I know there’s a lot of other podcasts you could be listening to, so thanks for checking out this one. Could you do me a quick favor? If you haven’t done so already, could you leave us a five star rating on either Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Google or any other platform you use to listen to podcasts? What this will do is help us rank higher in the podcast search engines, you could say. So that would be much appreciated. Also, if there are any questions you want me to ask the guests or a specific topic you want me to address, please go to our Tykr Facebook group. You can leave a comment there and I’d love to hear what you have to say. All right, back to the show. What I’d like to do is transition to another question here on your biggest success, biggest win and biggest mistake from an investment standpoint. I know you’ve invested in stocks and past mutual funds and real estate, everything you invest in, what was your biggest investment success?
[00:26:28.810] – Jenny Jones
My biggest investment success was going and getting educated on real estate at its core, right. From the ground up, going out and finding out what does it take to actually rehab a house. Right. Because I think a lot of people want to be real estate investors, but they don’t realize how much you have to be involved. You have to hire good general contractors and all because time is money in real estate, right?
[00:27:00.270]
Yeah.
[00:27:00.720] – Jenny Jones
And you make your money on the buy. Right. There’s a lot of different things that you have to learn. And a lot of people say, oh, well, they’re going to do away with the rehabbers and all that they can’t, because it’s the rehabbers that keep the tax roll up. Right. It’s this unwritten rule that if houses in this particular area work for a certain amount, it is the rehabbers or the residential, what we call what I call myself is a residential redeveloper that comes in and buys a house that’s 30, 40 years old, comes in guts, it brings it up to the 2000s. Right. And keeps the value of the tax loan for the state or county.
[00:27:39.710] – Sean
Right, sure.
[00:27:40.140] – Jenny Jones
So it’s more of a partnership. Are there bad actors? Sure there are, but knowing how to do that, knowing what time it takes to put contractors to work, how long they’ll be in a job, and hiring good contractors, because you can have good contractors, they’ll be there today and then they don’t show up for two or three days. Now put your whole project back and now time is money. So just learning all of that from start to finish and being involved in that process is really what made me become a better resource.
[00:28:08.470] – Sean
Just keep it high level here, it sounds like. Do you own residential properties, like multifamily or single family?
[00:28:15.860] – Jenny Jones
So residential, that’s where your biggest pops are. So when you invest so if you’re a residential redeveloper, which I am not, how many have I rehabbed?
[00:28:28.270] – Sean
That’s more of are you flipping or are you trading income properties?
[00:28:32.320] – Jenny Jones
Right, so, no, I’m flipping. That’s what I mean. So there are different types and I guess that’s the reason why we need to clarify that. So I’m flipping homes in what we call ourselves, quote unquote, residential redevelopers, if you will. And so what. I’ll do is last year we did four properties. This year I think we’ll probably do about ten. And so what we’ll do is we’ll take our money from California, right, where we’ll take it to different states where we can squeeze more out of the California revenue into another state, right. Because your money’s not going to go that far in California, right. Average home out here is a half a million. Right. You go to another place, a Tennessee or something like that, where homes are like 200 or maybe 130, we’re able to get a home for 70, right. We’ll go to Milwaukee, get a home for 70, 75,000. So what we’re able to do is we’ll put 25, 35,000 in it, and then we’ll walk away with like 70, $80,000, and then we’ll put it back to work again. And so I’ll do that, and then I have some clients that want to do some different things, right.
[00:29:42.730] – Jenny Jones
Not just seeing it on TV, being involved in it. It’s a lot of hard work, too. It is.
[00:29:47.790] – Sean
I give you credit because I don’t know too many people that do the fix and flip. We have had a lot of people on here. The majority of real estate investors create the income property, buy it once, hold it and just increase the rent every year is really their strategy. And they could have two units, 20 units, 200 units. We have some people with even more, but yeah, that’s interesting. So if you’re doing four properties a.
[00:30:11.130] – Jenny Jones
Year, that’s quite a hustle.
[00:30:13.050] – Sean
You got a lot of coordinating, a lot of contractors.
[00:30:15.320] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, I have a network of access to about 30,000 of us, all part of this large network. And we’re spread out across the entire United States. Sure. So there’s people I can pick up the phone and say, hey, do you have a contractor there? I need a photographer there. I need to do this and do that. Or we’ll fly in and do some different things. I’ve kind of stayed closer to home, more or less just to Texas where I can just fly over and do that. And I have a good relationship with a friend of mine out there. So it’s a little bit different. There’s two methods. There are two schools of thought just for your audience. The fix and flips are bigger returns, right. But when you do the buy and hold, the buy and hold either going for growth or you’re going for growth in income, or you have aggressive growth. Growth and growth and income. Aggressive growth is you’re just trying to just hit it out of the park. You’re going to go buy something over here in this community where you see the development, you see all the other things that they’re doing, and you bring that house up to value and you try to buy and hold that house, right?
[00:31:23.670] – Jenny Jones
And then you try to squeeze on the back end on the back or you’re just getting the money, you’re getting out 100,000, and then you’re going to do another and turn 100 and 250 or something, so on and so forth like that.
[00:31:34.900] – Sean
Yes, I follow that. That does make sense because you get these windfall events throughout the year, and you could take that reinvest in another property, which it sounds like you’re doing, or you could reinvest in the stock.
[00:31:46.250] – Jenny Jones
Market or your own business. And I switched on you because that’s one of my LLCs. I own a corporate I know I own another LLC because I do these different investments. So that’s one business I have. But I have two other businesses. But I like that business because I understand it like that. And I know how to make the quick 80 $90,000. I know how to do that and I have the relationships with that already.
[00:32:14.020] – Sean
So yeah, that’s a lot of coordinating. Good to hear you got the network. But yeah, for some coordinating, do a few windfall events, it can be 80 to pop.
[00:32:23.260] – Jenny Jones
Right.
[00:32:23.860] – Sean
Now we’re talking.
[00:32:24.770] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, that’s good. Absolutely.
[00:32:26.540] – Sean
Cool. Let’s flip the equation here. What was your biggest investment mistake or lesson learned?
[00:32:34.030] – Jenny Jones
Just investing? I think my biggest lesson that I would give to any person probably in your demographic is and the biggest lesson, and I share this with my son because he just took a six figure job out of college. And it surprised me. I was like, what? And one of the things that I had to learn was, and I never knew this, because no one ever told me, if you may be making good money today, but it’s not guaranteed that you’ll always make that. And one of my lessons was so I was making a lot of money and I always thought that I would make that kind of money. Right. And so you always think that you’re either going to make that kind of money or it’s going to continue to go up, always in exponentially. And that’s not the case as a young person. Right. I had to learn that. And so making this amount of money early and then going back down to this amount was an adjustment. I was like, I should be making that amount of money. You’re not always guaranteed to stare, step up, is what I’m saying. I guess that would be my biggest mistake because I always thought I would.
[00:33:40.650] – Sean
Yeah, good advice. I was just going to summarize a big lesson learned there is for everybody listening is probably if you’re making good money, try to invest. Don’t just spend it on dumb things.
[00:33:52.350] – Jenny Jones
Absolutely.
[00:33:53.200] – Sean
Because your income tomorrow could be significantly less and you won’t have that money to invest.
[00:33:59.080] – Jenny Jones
Well, working in a private organization, right. Your company’s publicly traded. You might come in on that Monday. Most companies adjust in the last quarter because they’re trying to get thin moving into the next fiscal year. They’re trying to get things in so they do a lot of the layoffs happen in the last quarter, right. And a lot of people are getting ready for Christmas, and they go out and spend all this money on credit card stuff and all that, and then they end up getting laid off because the company is saying, hey, we need to go into the next fiscal year. We need to be thinner. There are some positions we need to eliminate. These positions are overlapping. Or we just acquire this company. So that’s creating overlap. So doing that a lot. You’re not always guaranteed you’re not.
[00:34:39.990] – Sean
No.
[00:34:40.990] – Jenny Jones
And so investing is good. I lived off my investments when I got cancer, and it was really because I invested early.
[00:34:47.900] – Sean
Yes.
[00:34:48.270] – Jenny Jones
It allowed me to live off of that. No.
[00:34:51.220] – Sean
Good advice. Good lesson learned. What I’d like to do next is transition to the Rapid Fire rounds. A few fun questions here where we can find out who Jenny really is.
[00:35:01.750] – Jenny Jones
Rapid Fire rounds.
[00:35:04.570] – Sean
Try to answer each question in 15 seconds or less. You’re ready?
[00:35:07.740] – Jenny Jones
All right.
[00:35:08.340] – Sean
What is your favorite podcast?
[00:35:10.040] – Jenny Jones
My favorite podcast is payback time.
[00:35:14.230] – Sean
That’s my favorite favorite podcast.
[00:35:16.010] – Jenny Jones
I appreciate it.
[00:35:18.900] – Sean
Thank you. What is the recent book you read and would recommend?
[00:35:24.050] – Jenny Jones
Recent book that I read. One is called The Cash Flow Quadrant. Robert Kiyosaki, I think he does a very rich dad or dad, right? Yeah, he does a very good way of breaking things down. Definitely. We want to move into a full time investor that he breaks it down.
[00:35:43.020] – Sean
Sure.
[00:35:43.440] – Jenny Jones
Yeah. Good book.
[00:35:44.930] – Sean
What’s your favorite movie?
[00:35:46.850] – Jenny Jones
My favorite movie? I’m a big Fast and Furious fan. Have you had it?
[00:35:54.840] – Sean
Yeah. Now I have to ask which one? Be very careful.
[00:36:01.010] – Jenny Jones
I think it was five, man. Really? Five?
[00:36:05.030] – Sean
That was the first one The Rock was in, correct?
[00:36:07.150] – Jenny Jones
I think it was. Yeah, it was the first one. Yes.
[00:36:11.340] – Sean
It’s funny. Of the nine or ten that have come out, that is actually my favorite as well.
[00:36:17.270] – Jenny Jones
Okay.
[00:36:18.470] – Sean
I thought the tone was a little more serious.
[00:36:20.520] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, it went to another level. That was when it went to another level. That was the movie to get to another level. Did you cut into my 15 seconds by answering your question?
[00:36:28.980] – Sean
I did. I had to push it to see the movie. Question I always love because I get a little better read on who I’m dealing with here. Fast five. Good choice.
[00:36:41.010] – Jenny Jones
Yeah.
[00:36:42.000] – Sean
What is the best investment advice you ever received?
[00:36:46.010] – Jenny Jones
The best investment advice I ever received was pigs live another day, but hogs get slaughtered. Don’t be greedy. That’s right. If you’re riding it, you’re riding it. Just don’t take them too much and just stay diversified. Always have something good advice.
[00:37:10.230] – Sean
And what is the worst investment advice you ever received?
[00:37:15.630] – Jenny Jones
In the next book that I’m writing, I talk about, everybody has a different investment DNA. Right. Is you the guys the same? No, we’re not the same. You can have twins. They’re not going to be the same. They’re not going to have the same investment DNA is because let’s say they’re twins and they grow up. One gets married, they both get married and all that. One has two kids, one has one kid. The DNA, it’s shifted. And you’re taught as a child how to handle money differently by what your parents extend to you or what they share with you. And so everybody has a different investment DNA. So if I’m on TikTok and I’m sharing, hey, do this, do that, it doesn’t work for me, right? I have to work for what’s? For me. So it’s really getting yourself a professional, right? No one’s trying to take you to school, trying to take all your money. Get someone that’s going to educate you and invest and pour into you so that you can fish for yourself. To get me started, man, you almost got me started around here, man.
[00:38:12.840] – Sean
No, good answer. I can agree with that. And last question here is the time machine question. If you could go back in time to give your younger self advice, what age would you visit and what would you say?
[00:38:25.030] – Jenny Jones
What age I would visit. I would go back to the 25 year old and I would say start investing in blue chips. And I would say never, ever, by any means necessary, cash out any 401 KS or any IRAs. Never cash out. I got rid of one fund. It’s closed now. I don’t even open anymore. I would be up so much right now, I’d be retired, and I’d be somewhere relaxing on the beach with a colored drink, somewhere with an umbrella in it. I agree with drinking a lot of food, drinking it.
[00:39:02.900] – Sean
So I can agree with that. Great advice there. All right, I’ll turn it over to you. Where can people reach you?
[00:39:08.780] – Jenny Jones
I’m not hard to find. I mean, a guy named Jenny Jones, it shouldn’t be hard to find. I do a lot of real estate stuff, but I do a lot of retirement stuff as well. That’s more my bread and butter. That’s what I know I can roll out a bed and do and give advice on. So one of the place we can find all the tools that I developed because I have the It type set up is retirementplanning tools. So that’s retirementplanning tools. From there, you’re going to find an array of different tools that I’ve built for people planning to go into retirement. And then as they get, what I ended up figuring out was a lot of people, because they made the wrong mistakes, the mistakes that I made as a youth, they are not ready to retire. They can’t afford to retire. So I created a plan B for them, and that’s the Side Hustle retirement plan. So I created that specifically for people that cannot retire. And so I had to add that to my mix because I’m running in people and say, what can I retire? We do all the numbers.
[00:40:11.620] – Jenny Jones
You can’t afford to retire. So let’s start getting you some passive income coming in on the side from the things you love to do, from your experiences. Let’s start writing books. I start starting podcasts. Let’s create some residual income. So now I turned into this consultant of showing people how to take what they know and take the experience that they’ve had and turn that into a passive income stream, why they continue to work on the side. So that’s something I added that I needed it because they were asking me, and I’ve done it. I’ve built three companies, so I’ve done it. So I’m able to add that to them. So there you go.
[00:40:45.110] – Sean
Awesome. Thanks a lot for your time, Jenny. Really appreciate talking about the dividends and the benefits there, especially as you’re nearing or in retirement age. And then it’s pretty cool to hear what you’re doing with real estate as well.
[00:40:57.200] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, I didn’t even get into my double duty dollars with the dividends.
[00:41:01.450] – Sean
We’ll have to get you back on the show then.
[00:41:03.110] – Jenny Jones
Yeah, we’ll have to talk about it. It was good hanging out with you today.
[00:41:07.990] – Sean
Thanks, Jenny. We’ll see you.
[00:41:09.220] – Jenny Jones
All right, thanks.
[00:41:14.990] – Sean
Hey, I just want to say thanks for checking out this podcast. I know your time is valuable, and there’s a lot of other podcasts out there you could be listening to. So thanks for taking the time to listen to my guest story. If you did enjoy this podcast episode, could you head over to itunes and leave a five star review? That would be much appreciated. Thank you. And last but not least on this podcast, some episodes we do talk about stocks. And please keep in mind, this podcast is for entertainment purposes only. So if you did hear any buy or sell recommendations, please don’t make those decisions based solely on what you hear. Thanks a lot. See ya.
