In this episode, Chris Seveney sits down with real estate investor Dustin Heiner to dive into Passive Income Strategies that can help you break free from the traditional 9-to-5 grind. Discover how Dustin transitioned from a stable government job to a life of financial independence through real estate investing. This episode is packed with actionable insights on building a successful passive income stream, making it a must-listen for anyone ready to take control of their financial future.

Text the word “RENTAL” to 33777 to get access to Dustin’s real estate investing course for FREE or visit https://masterpassiveincome.com/freecourse.

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Financial Freedom Through Real Estate Investing With Dustin Heiner

Introduction And Dustin Heiner’s Background

Welcome back everybody to another episode of the show. I have Dustin Heiner who is a real estate investor and focuses a lot on the passive investing side and hosting conferences, including his Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference, which is coming up in the near future.

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Dustin, how are you?

I’m blessed. How about you? I love that you have this passive investing show. This is terrific. Thank you so much for having me on the show.

You also have a podcast as well, The Master Passive Income Podcast. For those who are watching this on YouTube, I have to say I love the shirt.

A quick side note about that, when I quit my job when I was 37 years old, I was telling everybody that I was retired. They were like, “What do you do with your life? Do you play golf all day?” I’m like, “No. I do a lot more. I love businesses. I create businesses.” My wife helped me come up with the term successfully unemployed. It’s a different way to say, “I’m not working for somebody else.”

His shirt says ‘Successfully Unemployed.’ Let’s rewind and talk about how you got from point A to being successfully unemployed.

I was blessed to be able to quit my job at 37 years old, but I didn’t start as a real estate investor. In fact, I started like most of us where we go to school and we’re told, “You get good grades, and then you go to college.” You get thousands of dollars in debt. We’re told, “Get good grades and a “career” with a degree. Work for a company. Work 40-plus years of your life and eventually retire at 65 or 70 years old and live on 40% of what you’ve managed to save that entire time working at JOB.” I like to call it the Just Over Broke job because that’s what you’re living. It’s Just Over Broke. I’m doing that exact same thing.

In fact, I got the most stable, secure job you could ever think of. I was living in California at the time, working at a local county government doing technology. Technology’s not going away. The government’s not going away. California’s going to be sticking around for a long time. I get a job and work a regular 9:00 to 5:00, but I’ve always been entrepreneurial, the idea of starting businesses. I had a graphing website design company. I had a pizzeria that I started from scratch. I had a skateboard manufacturing business. I had all these businesses to try to make it so I didn’t have to work for somebody else, but they didn’t do very well.

The one that I started which was amazing was I bought one rental property. I bought one piece of real estate back in 2006 before the crash. Eventually, I had enough properties to be able to quit my job. This is a story of what really shoved me to get out of the rate race and get into real estate. My wife and I started having children. I knew I needed to become a full-time investor, but life started getting in the way. We had four children. We have five now.

When my fourth child was born, I went on paternity leave. That’s where the dad stays home with the mom, changes the poopy diapers, bonds with the baby, and all that good stuff. I get back to work after two weeks, and then in the same week that I get back to work on a Friday at 3:30 in the afternoon, I get a call from my boss’ boss’ boss’ secretary, the top dog. She says, “Would you please come to the office?” I said, “Sure.” I hung up the phone and paused for a second. I thought, “Why in the world did they call me to the office? This isn’t normal. I’ve seen plenty of movies. This is not a good sign.” I paused for a second. I thought, “If I get laid off right now, what’s going to happen?” I shake it off. I say, “I have so much seniority. I work for the government. Nobody gets fired or laid off in the government.”

I get up and I start walking down the hallway to my boss’ office. This hallway isn’t very long. In fact, it’s short, but with every single step I took, I felt like the hallway got longer. I felt like my feet became lead bricks because the weight of potentially loosening my job was raining down on me. I get down the hallway, turn the corner, and see my boss’ door. His door is closed. I see his secretary there. She’s super sweet, a nice old lady. She says, “Would you please have a seat?” and sheepishly grins at me and tries to console me with her eyes because she knows everything about what’s going on. I know nothing about what’s going on.

I go and take my seat and start thinking about my life, this whole plan that I’ve been told to go through. I started thinking, “If I lose my job right now, did I waste my life doing this? We had our fourth child. If I can’t make money to feed my family, does that make me a failure as a father? Does that make me a failure as a husband or as a man trying to provide for his family?” As I am sitting there, my hands get all clammy and my forehead gets all sweaty because the nerves of potentially losing my job are crushing me.

The Turning Point: Getting Laid Off

The door to my boss’ office opens up and out walks a coworker of mine with a piece of paper in her hands. She is noticeably distraught and upset. She’s not necessarily crying, but I could tell her world has been devastated. She passes by and my boss says, “Would you please come into the office?” I get up, go into the office, and get laid off. Remember. This is the government. Nobody gets fired or laid off from the government, but I did.

This is the reason why I tell everybody this story. I take my layoff notice, sit back down in my chair, and realize two things. Number one was, “I need to get another job. I need to be able to provide for my family.” I was really blessed, Praise the Lord, that I found another job in the same county, another department that wasn’t having the same issues. I got that.

Sitting in that chair, the second thing I realized, and the reason why I tell the story, was, “I need to make sure that this never ever happens to me again. I need to make sure that nobody has the ability to take away my ability to feed my family.” Right then and there, I started telling every single person that I ever met. When you asked the question, “What do you do?” I would normally reply, “I work for the county and do IT.” Instead, I replied, “I am an investor. It may so happen that 100% of my money comes from my job. That’s not my part-time job. I’m a full-time investor.”

To fast forward the story, I started buying property after property, each 1 making me a minimum of $500 a month in passive income. Eventually, I had 30-plus properties. I realized, “I don’t need to work anymore.” A quick last part of the story, I went to my new boss after I had 30-plus properties and said, “Boss, I’m laying you off,” jokingly. We laughed and he said, “What are you going to do?” I said, “I don’t have to do anything. I own real estate. That makes me money without even working.”

As the last part of the story, I would walk to and from my job which was a mile and a half every day, because I’m too frugal to pay for parking downtown. This last walk, I felt like I was walking on clouds because I knew I would never ever need a job again. As opposed to that short walk that I got laid off, this was such a different change.

 

To everybody reading, you need to realize this point. You will never be paid what you are worth. Your boss will never pay you what you’re worth. You’ll know that your boss is paying you enough to keep you working without quitting but not so much money that it takes money out of their pocket. As soon as you realize that, you’ll realize that there are better ways to make money. That’s why I love passive income where we invest our money and buy investments that make us money without working an hour and getting paid for that hour. That’s the big thing that really grabbed me and shoved me into becoming a passive investor. I’ll pause the story because you probably have plenty of questions.

Passive income means investing in assets that make you money without working an hour for it. Share on X

A few things popped up. I have a similar story of, “Go to college. Get the job,” and so forth. I remember the first job offer I got. I turned it down and my parents were like, “Why would you do that?” I ended up making college an extra $10,000 going somewhere else. There’s one of the phrases that somebody coined at one point in time. I forget who it was but I love to use it. You hit the nail on the head. We call it the 40/40/40 club. You work 40 hours a week for 40 years to collect 40% of your income. That’s the reality of it.

The people think, “I’m going to retire off of my 401(k). One of the things that my story is similar but different is the fact that I had a life event that caused me to reflect and realize, “I got to care for my family and my job or I can’t have that income. How am I going to do that?” That’s what kickstarted a lot of my investing and becoming an investor. It took me a while before I became a “full-time investor” because I still had that W-2. When you’re thrown into it, sometimes it’s probably better. You never ever hear anybody say, “I waited too long to quit my W-2.”

I wish I would’ve quit sooner. There was one thing that you mentioned, the 401(k), that I really got to say. If people are relying on their 401(k) for retirement, you need to realize why the 401(k) was created. Back in the 1970s or before then, there were pensions. Companies had pensions. The rich people who ran those companies realized, “Let’s make the tax laws.” The rich people are the ones that have to do the government. They created the 401(k).

What the 401(k) is is instead of putting the pension or creating the pension on the company where the company has to manage it, take care of it, pay it out indefinitely, and all that, they said, “Let’s put it on the employee. Let’s make sure it’s their fault. If they lose money, let’s make sure they’re the ones that have to raise money. We’ll give them a little bit of money to match whatever.”

The 401(k) goes back into their own companies, stocks, and mutual funds. It’s a win-win for everybody. I love what you’re doing with note investing. I believe, and you might know this better, you can use a self-directed IRA. Don’t give it to the big companies. Invest it in notes. Invest it in real estate. Instead of making other people rich, you need to make yourself rich.

We do allow self-directed IRA custodians to invest. We also allow even people who have specific accounts they’re using with Charles Schwab. It’s called a brokered account. If you’re using an actual broker with Schwab instead of investing in their product or investing in Microsoft, you could invest in my company as well. A lot of people don’t realize that or know that. There are risks in investing with smaller private companies.

Risks investing in every company. Exactly.

I graduated college and took $5,000. I graduated college in the late ‘90s. I’m like, “I’m going to invest in this awesome tech company called WorldCom because they’re going to take over the planet.”

I do remember that.

If you’re young enough or you don’t know who WorldCom is, it’s because they don’t exist anymore. They were Enron before Enron or what they were. That’s an awesome story because a lot of people can relate to that. You’ve continued on the path of investing on your own, but you also give back and provide a lot of content and feedback. You have the podcast and conferences. Tell us a little bit more about all the stuff you do that you give back.

It started because I quit my job when I was 37 years old. I had everybody asking me, “How did you quit your job?” The second question always came, “What can you show me?” I told them, “I bought one rental property and it made me money. I then bought another one and it made me more money over and over again.”

I started teaching my friends, coworkers, and family members one-on-one. I realized two things. I enjoyed it and I had a lot of free time because I wasn’t working. I thought, “There’s got to be a better way to reach more people and to help more people.” After I had 30-plus properties, each 1 making me a minimum of $500 a month, and we have hotels, apartment complexes, and all these different assets, I had extra time. I thought, “I don’t need to continually buy more real estate. I’m not driven by money.” I’m not saying that’s wrong if you are, but it’s not how I am.

I started helping people. I started feeling more fulfilled in my life when I saw my students buy their first property, quit their jobs, or get what their goal was in financial independence instead of an accomplishment. When I bought a house, it was an accomplishment. When my students bought the house, I felt like I was fulfilled because they accomplished something. I helped another human being get what they really wanted.

To fast forward the story, once I started realizing, “This is something I want to do,” I wrote a few books and then I started a podcast. We’re at two million downloads. I started a YouTube channel, courses, and coaching to help more people invest in real estate. We have two conferences. We even have local real estate investor meetups.

Here’s the reason why I do all this. I know you’d appreciate this. The more people that I serve in this life get what they want, the more money I make, the more money they make, and the better our lives get. I realized that. When I was 26, I said, “I want to quit my job in ten years.” I was blessed at 37 years old to be able to quit the job.

I then made a new goal. My new goal is to help one million people to invest in real estate and become financially independent. Here’s the great thing about it. I make money because they want to come to my conference. We make some money, but at the same time, they get what they want. If I’m coaching somebody, we make a little money because our time is worth money. They get what they want because they get assets. They make money. They get financially free. I kid you not, all of my students thank me for all the time that I give them. What they’re saying is, “Thank you for letting me pay you to do this and teach us because I know you don’t have to do this so.”

Success isn't just about making money—it's about helping others achieve their financial independence too. Share on X

To wrap everything up and to fast forward everything, it’s because of my goal to help one million people to invest in real estate. We have two conferences. I’ll be completely honest. I work more now than I ever did working for the government. I have five businesses that make me money. Real estate is one of them. At the same time, it’s what fulfills me and what gets me out of bed every morning.

That’s awesome. How long have you been coaching, teaching, and putting on the conferences? How long has that been going on?

It’s been a growth. We started with the books, the podcast, the YouTube channel, the coaching, and the courses. The conference has been maybe 3 or 4 years. I started back in 2015. I started coaching people, the podcast, and everything like that. When I first started investing in real estate, I followed those gurus. You might have seen these. We’re about the same age.

In 2006, I was watching a late-night infomercial. That’s what you do when you work a job. You work and then go watch TV. A late-night infomercial came on. These real estate gurus came on and said, “We’re coming to your town for a free two-hour seminar.” I’m like, “That’s great.” I went to that and was so excited, but it was all hype and a sales pitch. They said, “Now, run to the back. It’s normally $1 million but it’s $1,000 a day for this 2-day seminar.” I ran to the back because I didn’t know what I was doing. I spent a lot of money.

I went to the 2-day seminar, which is another sales pitch for an $80,000 course or a $100,000 course. I don’t have that money. I did take what little they told me and bought a property. My property manager started stealing from me within six months. I knew if I hung my head and said, “This doesn’t work,” then I would not be where I am. I said, “There’s got to be a way to do this right because people have been doing this forever. I didn’t do it the right way.”

Building A Business First In Real Estate

If you remember, at the beginning, I said, I’ve been very entrepreneurial in my life. Instead of taking what those gurus say, and they say, “You buy an investment. That’s what you do,” I realize what we do is we build a business and that business runs itself because we hire experts. The gurus tell you, “Find a property anywhere in the country and then spend thousands of dollars to buy it and fix it up. You find a tenant and then you try to find a property manager to manage it.” In my opinion, that’s backward. What you need to do is build the business first so that it runs itself.

 

What I decided to do was instead of going the route of what they told me, I built the business and then I considered every single piece of property a piece of inventory that goes into my business. If you’re going to start a convenience store, you’re not going to sign a lease on a location, open the doors, and set a box of candy bars on the ground. You wouldn’t do that. You’d go out of business in two seconds. What you would do is build the business first. Get the gondolas, which is where the candy bars go. Get the countertops, cold storage, bank accounts, cash registers, insurance, employees, and everything in the business before you buy any inventory.

How To Get Dustin’s Free Real Estate Course

It’s the same thing with real estate investing. I had to realize, “We need to do this.” This is what I teach all of my students because I’ve done it. I invest in Ohio, Texas, Arizona, Tennessee, Indiana, and Missouri, so six different states and many different cities. In all of that, each time I do it, I build a business and hire the experts so that I can make passive income. In the 30-plus properties, apartment complexes, hotels, and everything that I have, I work maybe 30 minutes a month on all those because I have experts doing it. I look at the property management statements. I look at everything, make sure everything’s good, and then go back to play with my kids. Does that all make sense?

It makes a lot of sense. It’s one of those things where sometimes, there’s so much information out there on how to do things that people get overwhelmed with how to do things. There’s a process and a methodology behind it. That leads me to the next question I want to ask you. You’ve been coaching and teaching people. A lot of times, you go to those seminars and they’re very gung-ho. They’re like, “Get to the back.” People are so excited. They want to buy property the next day. They’re jumped on adrenaline. What are some of the biggest mistakes you’ve seen people make when they try and get into whether it’s real estate, passive investing, or investing in general?

The biggest mistake is running to the back and spending that money. I would 100% say that. I have two conferences. We’re getting a third one in 2026. Each one is a no-sales pitch conference. We’re not going to be at the main stage and say, “Now, run to the back.” It’s none of that. It’s building a community. That’s the first one. I made that mistake. That’s my very first mistake.

The second mistake when investing in real estate is you don’t create the business, which I talked about. In creating the business, you do not find the right people. You don’t hire the right people. This is what I did. This is why my property manager started stealing from me. Imagine that same scenario where you are starting a convenience store. You get everything. You get inventory and employees. When you see somebody walking across the street, would you say, “Do you have a pulse? Come in here and manage my business, my money, my inventory, my customers, and everything?” No, you wouldn’t do that. You would hire and take your time interviewing lots of candidates.

It’s the same thing with real estate investing. We build the business first and make sure we have a good city that has lots of inventory, the types of properties we want to buy, but then we also make sure that we find before we buy any real estate the right property manager. For that right property manager, you’re interviewing 6, 7, 8, or even 10 property managers and you’re going to find 1 that really stands out. I have a list of twenty-plus questions that I give my students to ask property managers when they’re interviewing them and the answers. When you find the right property manager, they’re going to help you do this business right.

The last thing I’ll quickly say is a lot of people have come to me and said, “I bought this house and I did everything those gurus said. I went to try to find a property manager. I called and the property manager said, “I will not manage that property because I’ll get shot there.” It’s no longer an asset. It’s a liability because you have to manage it yourself or you have to figure out what to do with it.

If your property manager says no to managing your property, don't buy it. It's not an asset; it's a liability. Share on X

Instead of calling a property manager and saying, “Property manager, I bought this property. Will you manage it?” and they say no and run away, you say, and this is building the business and getting the right people before you get the inventory, “Property manager, I’m looking to buy this property in #1 Happy Street or whatever the address is. How much will it rent for? What’s my clientele? What’s the vacancy factor? How much will the repair be?”

You ask all these questions. If they say no, you don’t waste your time and your money to buy that property. You move on. If they say yes, you have such great information because your property managers are the ones who are going to be working with that property day in and day out for many years. I had a property manager stick with me for ten-plus years. That’s the biggest thing. You build the business and then you hire the property manager. Everything else comes into place.

One of the things that I see people do is they want to go cheap and they won’t hire a property manager. I see people who are out-of-state investors not hiring a property manager. I’m like, “Oh.”

That’s silly.

One of the interesting things that really hit is that you mentioned if you ask a realtor the question, they can’t tell you, “I would not buy that property or invest in that area,” because they can’t. A property manager can give you more information on that property as well. That’s really interesting.

A lot of people always do it backward. They buy the property and then figure it out from there. How about you figure it out before you buy the property? One of the things I’m a big proponent of, especially for people getting started early, is if you’re going to spend $150,000 on an asset, spend the $500 bucks again on a plane and go look at the property.

I’ll share this story and then we can start wrapping up a little bit. We took a property back at foreclosure and I turned it into a rental. I interviewed property managers and did the whole thing. The property manager was very responsive and good, but then they started having some turnover. The tenant was there. We had the victim. The new tenant goes in and is having trouble renting.

I called an agent and was like, “I am considering selling this. Can you go by and tell me what you think it’s worth?” She walks in and is like, “What the heck happened?” I’m like, “What do you mean?” She’s like, “Did they do some plumbing work?” I’m like, “Yeah but everything’s fixed.” She’s like, “They didn’t fix it.” They had to replace a drain line. They had an eight-inch cut through the drywall up the wall in the ceiling that they never patched or repaired. The first thing you see when you open the door is an exposed pipe running around. She says, “The bathroom doesn’t work.” I’m like, “Oh my God.” I’m like, “I should have probably taken a ride up there.” I did at one point in time, but even periodically or having somebody, a third party set of eyes checking on this stuff.

Can I tell you how I get around all that?

Yes.

Of the 30-plus properties that I own, I’ve only seen 1 of them. Here’s the great thing about this. Here’s what you do. You hit it on the very end. It’s having a 3rd set of eyes, but I like having 10 sets of eyes. This is how I get around all of this. Number one, your property manager is your quarterback. They help you score, protect your money, and all that stuff. If your property manager is bad, you also have to figure out how to get around them or make sure that they’re doing things right.

When I say ten sets of eyes, this is what I teach all my students. We also use other contractors. We also get other people to get into the property to see the property. Let me give you a quick example. This happened to me in Houston. In one of my properties, we had to replace the sliding glass door. We had a company come and replace it.

I knew I had a plumber going in there the next day. The plumber was going to fix the other toilets or whatever. I said, “Plumber, there’s a sliding glass door I installed,” and he had no issues whatsoever. He’s helping me out and doing the work. I said, “Would you mind taking two seconds to open the door, close the door, and see if you notice anything? Does it look bad? Is it broken? Whatever it might be. Let me know.” He did that. He called me up and said, “Everything looks great and looks fantastic. I love this.” I’m like, “Perfect.” There are so many ways to get around having all these issues.

We want to have passive income. Your point was if you’re going to be investing out of state, which I love doing because I invest all over the country and all my students invest all over the country, you need to have the property manager and you need to pay your property manager. I get the question all the time, “How do you afford a property manager?” I say, “I don’t.” The reason why I say this is I don’t pay my property managers. I don’t pay my taxes. I don’t pay my insurance. I don’t pay my mortgage. I don’t pay for repairs. I don’t pay for any of that stuff. I don’t have to get a job to pay for those. I account for all those expenses before I buy the property or I don’t buy it if I cannot afford those expenses.

 

There’s also one last key. That passive income of $500 a month, that’s $6,000 a year. If I make that passive income, I make sure that is a line item as an expense. I make sure that I will always get $500 every single month. It’s an expense that has to come out because my family needs to be fed. If you bring all this together, when you build a business, you’re going to have a business that makes you money. That’s what businesses are for.

You would not buy a candy bar for $1 if you could only sell it for $0.50 because you’d lose money every single month when you sell the candy bar. What you would do if you bought a candy bar for $0.50 and you could sell it for $1 is you’d do it as many times as you could. The great thing about real estate is let’s say you didn’t have $0.50. It took you $0.25 to borrow the $0.50, and then you’re out of pocket $0.75. You still sell it for $1. You make $0.25. That’s a beautiful thing about real estate.

When you came on my podcast talking about leverage, I use leverage all the time responsibly. My wife is very frugal, so she helps me to be responsible with the leverage. When you are utilizing leverage, you can grow and scale very fast. I have extra money that I could park in notes or other people’s deals and all that great stuff.

Leverage is powerful when used responsibly. It allows you to grow and scale your investments quickly. Share on X

That’s great advice and tips there as well. As we wrap up the show, how can people learn more about what you do, get involved, and reach out? What’s the best way for people to contact you?

I have a real estate investing course I’ll give away for free. Do you mind if I share that with everybody?

Yeah, go ahead.

If you text the word rental RENTAL to 33777, I’ll give you my free real estate investing course and show you how to do everything I talked about and more, like how to scale your business, quit your job, and invest anywhere in the country. You could even go to MasterPassiveIncome.com/FreeCourse. I’ll give it to you. You could also find me on my podcast. You’ll also even be able to hear Chris on my podcast. If you go to Master Passive Income. You can listen to the podcast anywhere the podcast is played. It is the Master Passive Income Podcast. On top of that, you can find me on Instagram. Reach out to me on DM. I love chatting with people. It’s @TheDustinHeiner. I’ll be there to help you out as well.

Thanks for coming on. Thanks for providing great input and great advice. For those people tuning in on Spotify or your favorite station, leave us a review. I’m going to text you to get that course as well because you can never not learn in real estate. There’s always something you’re going to learn.

Thanks a lot.

Thanks again. Take care.

 

Important Links

• Dustin Heiner
• Real Estate Wealth Builders Conference
• The Master Passive Income Podcast
• YouTube Channel – Dustin Heiner | Master Passive Income
• @TheDustinHeiner – Instagram
• YouTube – 7E Investments
• Spotify – Creating Wealth Simplified
• Master Passive Income – Free Course
• Dustin Heiner – LinkedIn

 

About Dustin Heiner

Do you aspire to more out of life? Are you tired of working a dead-end J.O.B. (Just Over Broke)?

Would you rather be spending your life doing the things you want to be doing rather than what your boss tells you to do?