Commercial Real Estate Pro Network

Darrin:

I'd like to ask you, Bill Danko. What is the BIGGEST RISK?

Bill Danko  

Yeah, I think when people are just so blind to well, for example, in Miami Beach right now. There are a lot of people with very beautiful houses on a flood plain or a rising ocean. And one of the things that they're doing in Miami is raising the roadways and creating culverts to drain off the water. What seemed like a good idea at the time to build a house next to the ocean is, in retrospect, not a very good idea. So sometimes we bring this on ourselves. And, you know, I remember reading a book from the 1950s, how to build your dream house for $3,500. And it was kind of a classic and chapter one talks about first select the building site on a hill as opposed to on a floodplain. Okay. People walk into these problems, I think in a, in a naive way, saying, oh, there's land available on the build. Okay, so that's one thing being just not being prudent, okay. But also in minimizing risks. If you do have some pretty good assets, you know, one thing that I have seen with some high net worth individuals and one thing that I use myself is that for example, my timber, my rental property and a lakeside property, I have not my primary house, they're all individual limited liability companies freestanding, then all three of them are held in a limited partnership. So my physical assets are divorced from my my might, my liquid assets and so having some good legal structure is certainly very good in terms of minimizing the risk as well as having your umbrella policy from your insurance company, but having the ability to separate your assets through like the LLC s and then that limited partnership. That is something that is Well, one thing I use And I endorse. And it works for me. My accountant likes it because he gets to do all these extra tax forms every year. Right? I don't. But but but it's okay. It gives me peace of mind. And then in terms of, there's a societal risk. You know, we talked about a lot of lessons here you know about frugality and the 20% and living below your means and all that stuff. And that's all important. Those are good, solid lessons. But at the end of Franklin's essay on the way to wealth, he really summarizes it so well. The people heard the message, agreed with it, and then practice the contrary. The problem is change is hard. People are going to walk into traps. They don't understand the risk they're getting into. What we have to do is be better students. And let's take on some personal responsibility and don't expect the government to bail us out. But build, don't build in a floodplain. You know, don't drive recklessly. You know, a lot of things depend on how our society behaves. And that's going to be the thing that minimizes risk. So I think risk is all the stuff that we take on ourselves. Because we just don't do the homework.