How Tobi Neal Retired Herself with Real Estate in Three Years

All right. Now the fun’s really going do start. I have got a great guest. A member here for Lifestyles and our Dallas/Fort Worth office we have Tobi Neal. Tobi, how are you doing today?

TOBI: I am good, Kevin. Thank you.

KEVIN: You’re great. And I am excited. I am really excited. Last week we did a case study down in Austin and Tobi and her other Steve Neal—you guys came down and presented, and you guys did a great job. Did you enjoy presenting in Austin?

TOBI: Oh, very much so.

KEVIN: That was a lot of fun. We had fun in Austin. So appreciate you going down there and sharing your story with them. And that’s when we were down there last week and you did a lot of the presenting, it was like oh, I need to have Tobi come on the radio and tell everybody else about what you have been doing. So give me a little background on yourself. We will get into your real estate, but tell me a little bit about Tobi first.

TOBI: Well, I have been an entrepreneur for a long time. I started a few different companies with my husband. When I met Steve he was interested in real estate. I had no concept of that, but he was very excited about it. And as it went on I got more excited about it also when I saw the difference in taking a house that was in very much need of repair and turning it into something that was beautiful. In some cases they turned out where I told him I said I could live here.

KEVIN: Yeah. I have had some rent houses too where it’s like, boy, even walking in it’s like we could live here, and that’s great. I am interrupting. Keep going you are doing great.

TOBI: We weren’t able to a hundred percent be involved in the real estate because we had another company that was holding us back from being able to do what we wanted to do. But you have to have a job.

KEVIN: Uh-huh.

TOBI: We have to have an income, so we continued with that. But when Steve took me to the Del Walmsley two-day, after the first day I was totally hooked. It was as if instead of him talking at me he was talking with me. I understood what he was saying and how to become financially self-secure with the real estate. And that was three years ago this June. We didn’t right away get involved with the real estate. We still had to do our business, and we had to travel a lot for that business. So we didn’t have any kind of time to actually pay attention to the real estate. But once the traveling was done, we were able to follow the procedures that we learned from coming to the mentoring groups—which is something that I totally, totally love because there’s hand-holding, there’s videos, there’s meetings, there’s actual field trips. And those are the things that—it was like going back to school and getting another education. To make a long story short, I got rid of my company. May 31st was the final day.

KEVIN: Congratulations.

TOBI: Thank you. And I spent two weeks, this last two weeks with my grandkids completely with me. They slept over and everything ‘cause I don’t see them that much even though they live in town. Next week I am going to be signing up to be a volunteer at a no-kill animal shelter. My passion has always been dogs. I love dogs. And one of my dogs has just passed her good citizenship test. And what we are going to do is I am going to get her certified to be a therapy dog so that we can go to nursing homes and hospitals and children’s schools and just—that’s my passion is to just make other people happy. If I couldn’t have my dogs and be with them it just wouldn’t be any fun. And this is what I have—

KEVIN: Yeah, ‘cause Steve’s not fun by himself.

TOBI: Well, he—

KEVIN: He’s kind of fun. He’s busy, but you have to have your dogs.

TOBI: Yeah.

KEVIN: You have real fun with your dogs.

TOBI: Right. My dogs are my kids.

KEVIN: Well, tell me a little bit—okay, so you became a member of Lifestyles about three years ago, but then you didn’t do anything for what, six months? Is that right? TOBI: Uh-huh.

KEVIN: ‘Cause your other business had you bogged down, and you still had to make income and—but it was very hands-on. I met you a couple times as a member and I met you at your business one time, and you know, you were busy. Steve was out doing some things, but you were almost kind of a one-woman show. So you were tied down to it, because if you weren’t there, you weren’t going to make money.

TOBI: Exactly.

KEVIN: So you had to be there. You were tied into that. So as you were kind of transitioning, you didn’t do anything for six months—so that’s like two and a half years ago, right, roughly?

TOBI: Uh-huh.

KEVIN: And so then you started, what, you started buying some houses, right?

TOBI: Uh-huh.

KEVIN: Tell me about that.

TOBI: We bought one and we started rehabbing that one, and it was—I guess we were halfway into rehabbing it when another offer came up. So we wound up purchasing that one also, and we got them rented right away.

KEVIN: How did you rent them? What did you do to rent them?

TOBI: We had signs out front, and we put ads in the newspaper at that time.

KEVIN: Okay.

TOBI: Trying to think.

KEVIN: So you had two houses pretty quick. You had two houses going within a short period of time?

TOBI: Uh-huh.

KEVIN: Okay. So then over the course of the next year then how many houses did you end up—single-family houses next year, year and a half you guys did a lot in a pretty short period of time, right?

TOBI: Well, we wound up with ten—

KEVIN: Okay.

TOBI: — actually, and one of them—actually we had one house that we had already had before we joined Lifestyles, but it didn’t fit the criteria. So when there was an opportunity to sell it we decided to go and sell it. So then we got to nine and we wound up buying a tenth one again, and we wound up actually selling that one to another investor with Lifestyles.

KEVIN: So that’s kind of when when—I mean, you bought it, rehabbed it, you got a renter in there, you are doing it and then you sold it to another member at Lifestyles. In fact, that member I think lives out of state—

TOBI: Uh-huh.

KEVIN: — and was looking to invest here—was from here, but didn’t live here anymore. So it was kind of no problem, walked in—and I saw the numbers on that deal, so he was making a great return. He captured equity—you left equity in the property for him. He’s making a good like 20 percent cash-on-cash on it. So I mean you guys got your money back out of it, made a little bit, and you had held it for a little over a year I think too, right? Something or six months or—

TOBI: Uh-huh.

KEVIN: So you weren’t flipping it. You just decided the right deal came up. I want to say something about — we were talking about helping Tobi, helping each other on the break. We were talking about what a great group of people, you know—say that again kind of about who you have met, what kind of people have you met around here?

TOBI: Well, that was one of the things that also made this such a great group of people to join up with. Everybody wants to help. In any business that I have been in, it’s never been that way. You ask a question and you get a so-so answer. They are not going to give you the answer that would make you competition to them. But with Lifestyles,

people can’t help you enough. Everybody’s willing to tell you how they did it, or who they’ve used for maybe an inspection or just those types of things.

KEVIN: Contractor.

TOBI: Yeah.

KEVIN: Accountant. Anything.

TOBI: Yes.

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