Investing Through Private Equity For Tax Benefits & Passive Income with Alina Trigub

What You’ll Learn in the Podcast:

● Alina’s backstory and how she got started in real estate after immigrating to the U.S. and initially going into accounting and then IT.

● Why she was drawn to investing in private equity, the tax benefits it gave her, and how an initial investment snowballed into her startingSAMO Financial.

● How Alina got involved with TF Management Group during Covid, keeping SAMO as a sister company providing real estate investing education.

● A breakdown of how investing in real estate through private equity provides substantial tax savings and therefore is a great way to invest one’s money.

● What type of asset class and property does Alina look to invest in at TF Management?

● Why is Alina so passionate about real estate investing, to the point where she teaches it to others (partly through her meetup group The Power Of Passive Investing)?

● Common concerns Alina sees from people who are looking to invest in real estate for the first time, and what’s essential about the first deal.

● Why a mindset shift is crucial to be successful in your first few real estate deals, and what that actually means.

● Why hiring a very good real estate attorney is important for any new real estate investor.

 Summary and Highlights:

Host Jason Lee, versed in the San Diego Real Estate agency, walks listeners through Alina Trigub’s story. Alina Trigub, an immigrant to the United States, first started off in accounting. She found herself in two different positions that didn’t fulfill her. She ventured into information technology and two decades later, found herself in real estate.

It was in her quest to find ways to offset the increasing tax bracket that she discovered direct investing in real estate. She advocates for private equity investments. Real estate is an effective way to mitigate a higher tax bracket and receive passive income. When you invest in a property and see it through from beginning to end, you can make a substantial return on your investment— passively.

When Alina shared this newfound source of income with her coworkers in the financial industry, she was surprised to learn very few people knew about it. Therefore, after many successful investments, she decided to open her own firm, SAMO Financial. In this role, she offers education and investor opportunities to her clients. Through syndication and private placement, many people can invest outside of Wall Street. She helps investors diversify their portfolios and move away from stock market investments.

Like many, when COVID occurred, Alina’s full-time position dissolved. This is when she decided to jump into real estate full force. After being introduced to the fund manager of TF Management, Mike, the pair got along well and he welcome her abroad. She works as the head of all marketing and investor relations.

Insights

•  When it comes to taxes, there are very few ways to mitigate your tax bracket. Essentially, you have to pay what your income tax bracket determines. However, there is one solution— real estate investing. With direct real estate investing (not trusts or mutual funds), you have tax advantages and passive gains.
• With this type of investing, passive gains and passive losses are possible. You can take the loss against your gains and only pay taxes on the difference. This is the best way to get a tax benefit while investing.
• When you have capital gains, you can use tax harvesting to your advantage.
• This is critically important because you can not receive this type of benefit from Wall Street investments.

Key Points

• In her role at TF Management, Alina describes the types of properties she looks for now when investing. She looks at hotels and other housing structures as the best buildings to turn into affordable housing. She explains how much more difficult it is to take an office building and make it into a housing building, whereas a hotel with kitchenettes and living rooms/bedrooms is a much easier conversion.
• She has seen success with this method and the projects have come full cycle in only two years. The main reason for this is due to the high demand for affordable housing, especially post COVID.
• She emphasizes the importance of committing yourself to your goal and knowing you can achieve it with focus and determination. She spoke on how her beliefs of what is possible completely changed after attending a Tony Robbins event.

Episode 16: Investing Through Private Equity For Tax Benefits & Passive Income

Watch the Podcast | Read the Transcript

Transcript

00:01 [Intro] Welcome to the multi-family millionaire podcast. The show that interviews multi-millionaire real estate investors and top producers in the real estate industry. If you’re looking to create passive income and achieve financial freedom so that you can do what you want whenever you want, you’re in the right place. Our goal is to simplify and make real estate investing easy for you. For more information, you can find us at www.JLM.realestate.

00:30 

Jason Lee: All right, everyone. Welcome back to the show. Today We have Alina Trigub on the show. How are you doing today, Alina?

00:37 

Alina Trigub: Doing great Jason, thank you so much for having me on.

00:40 

Jason Lee: Yeah, it’s an honor. I mean I did some research about you, and you have a really cool story and you’ve done a lot of big things in real estate and outta real estate. So, I’m really excited for what you have to say to listeners today, but I guess the first question I like to ask to start the show is, you know, can you just tell the listener who you are and what your background is and kind of what you’re focusing on today?

01:03 

Alina Trigub: Sure. And again, thank you for having me on. My story began many months ago when my mom and I immigrated to the United States, it’s been almost 30 years since that happened. And I was at a point where I was deciding what kind education I should get and essentially what kind of career to pursue. Well, a lot of folks were telling me if you’re good with numbers you’ll be good with accountings. And I went with that old stereotype and essentially majored in accounting and then got my first job with big five at the time. Never really liked it. So, I figured maybe it’s the public accounting. Maybe I should try private, which I did and that proved that it was the accounting that I didn’t like, not the type of company I was with. So, I quickly moved into information technology world where I spent the next 20 years and had a pretty successful career. And while doing that during that time I noticed that my tax brackets, and then my husbands were also growing. And so, with the tax implications and as a former tax accountant was not happy with that.

So, I decided to find ways to mitigate our tax implications, and, in my research, real estate kept coming up and you know, I wanted to take action, but took much longer than anticipated. And then finally, when I decided to take action, I came across this private equity placement where you can invest, someone else does the job and you get passive income, and then you can also get tax advantages and, essentially see the project from the beginning to an end and do it completely passively while somebody else has taken care of the project. It sounded like an amazing opportunity. So, after validating the sponsor, the project I finally took action invested in one. And after that, there was this snowball effect, if you will, where I invested in the second, third and so forth. And I invested in a bunch of projects. And saw the tremendous benefits of it and started sharing with my coworker, my friends, which for the most part are people that are work in the financial services industry because of my education. So, most folks are either in finance or accounting and to my surprise, most people have never heard the word syndication didn’t know what private placement was and had really no idea that you can invest outside of wall street, do it passively, save on taxes, get passive income. So, this was news to them and to me, and I decided to take action and help other people essentially follow my footsteps. 

And with that in mind, I opened my own firm, SAMO financial with a goal in mind of helping other people generate that passive income, save on taxes and essentially be able to diversify their portfolio outside of the stock market so that the stock market fluctuations like the one with sold couple of days ago don’t really impact you tremendously because your portfolio diversified not only within the wall street, but also outside with, in alternatives, such as real estate. And that’s how SAMO financial was born and it’s still to this day continuing its growth and educating folks. And while in that journey working full-time COVID happened my full-time role got eliminated and I decided not to do that, but [04:49 inaudible] stayed full-time, which I did. It’s been over a year by now and while working in real estate field I was introduced by a friend of mine to a fund manager who runs TF management group. And we essentially [05:06 inaudible] the very beginning with Mike, who’s the fund manager as people call him big Mike, cause he’s pretty tall. And he invited me to join the group as an investor relations person, which I agreed and now working with them as well while growing SOMA of financial on the side as a sister company providing passive investor education to our investors and beyond. So that’s my story in a nutshell.

05:37 

Jason Lee: That’s fantastic. I kind of want to pick apart kind of what you said in the beginning about saving on taxes, how you were kind of rising in the tax brackets and your percentages were getting higher and higher as your income grew. As a listener who doesn’t understand the benefits of tax in real estate, can you kind of explain, you know, how and why real estate is such a powerful tool to kind of mitigate those tax burdens?

06:00 

Alina Trigub: Absolutely. As W2 employees most folks don’t really have many advantages of saving in taxes. You know, you are what your tax bracket is, and you have to pay based on the tax bracket and which by the way, are supposed to rise hopeful by not much once the legislature takes effect. And so, there are literally very little you can do in order to save on taxes. What real estate provides by investing directly into real estate, not REITs, not real estate investment trust, which are essentially a replica of mutual fund investing in the real estate through wall street That’s taxed as your ordinary income. When you are investing into real estate directly through private, there is a potential of having such tax advantages as you know, generating passive gains when your investment sales that are taxed as of this point while we are having this interview at 20%, who knows maybe it’ll rise to 25, but again, that’s still TBD. In addition to that, when you invest in real estate in know, projects that require repositioning, there is potential to generate passive losses through the depreciation that these projects accumulate.

And that allows you to take advantage of this loss as while passive, because you’re a passive investor. You can take this loss net against your passive gains and essentially pay the taxes on the difference between the gains and losses. If you can take advantage of these passive losses in a particular year, you just simply carry them forward into future years, to the point when you do have capital gains and can take advantage of what’s wall street calls, tax loss harvesting and that’s not available through the wall street investments, it’s only available when you invest directly in the, to real estate. And there are many more advantages I can probably take the whole interview to talk about cost segregation study, accumulated depreciation and the extensive tax losses. But I think we’ll keep it at that. And, you know, if you have any additional questions on that topic, I’m more than happy to answer.

08:19 

Jason Lee: Yeah. I mean, I think it’s one of the biggest benefits of real estate that is talked about the lease. So, I think that explanation’s a good summary, but like you said, I’m using cost segregation myself on my properties. And it makes a huge difference on your total income versus, you know, what you can say based on the losses quote unquote, you’re taking on your property. So, it’s really good stuff. And at TF management group, kind of, what kind of assets are you looking for to invest in? Like, what do you see as an asset that, you know, meets your criteria when you’re looking for properties?

08:54 

Alina Trigub: Sure. So as a real estate fund management a company that concentrates for the most part on a commercial real estate will look at the whole variety of assets. And when considering them, we also consider the current economic times and the conditions of a particular market. So that being said, at some point in the past, we are we investing in the office space. Well, COVID happened, obviously the COVID the office space hasn’t been performing well in majority of the market some has been performing, but not like in a primary market. So, we started looking for new opportunities and during the pandemic, this pandemic driven demand for the affordable housing rose. And we saw that what operators were doing; they were buying hotels that weren’t performing and converting them to affordable housing. So, we picked up on the trend quickly and started investing in a hotel, affordable housing conversions. 

And that proved to be an amazing opportunity. I mean, we’ve seen one project go full cycle already. Another project is on the contract. Hopefully it will also go full cycle soon. And it hasn’t even been two years, which is incredible. The plan was to hold it for about five years with both of these and many others. And they’re already turning around. Why? Because as I said, number one, there is a demand for affordable housing. And number two, it’s a lot easier to convert an in hotel. If you take an efficiency hotel that already has small kitchenettes, maybe even two rooms like small living rooms and to bedroom into the small apartments versus taking an office space and converting that where it’s not set up to be an apartment plus the parking lot may not be supportive of the amount of people that going to be living in that place as a tenant and many other aspects of the conversion. So that proved to be a great, great investment product during the pandemic. And it proved to be performing really well for our funds and our investors as well.

11:10 

Jason Lee: That’s fantastic. I think that asset and I think apartments did extremely well during COVID, I think that the office spaces, you know, did take a hit. So, I think it’s cool how you guys adjusted your investment strategy to fit the economic needs of what people might be looking for. And then also, what locations are your favorite locations to look in when you’re buying these asset classes that you are investing in?

11:38 

Alina Trigub: Excellent question, Jason. So, a lot depends on the asset class. We’re considering, I would say that Carolina, Florida, Arizona the markets that we are considering a lot of it has to do again with the asset class. For instance, if you want to invest in storage space, for instance, where would the storage be? Most applicable probably in places like Florida, which has a lot of condos and fewer houses where people don’t have enough storage space, so they would need to have additional storage or maybe in the places where people do have houses, but don’t have basements places like Arizona, for example. So again, they need an extra space to store that stuff.

So, storage would be an essential asset class in that area. And the demand would be higher than anywhere else because as most people know storage performs better during the recessions, like we’re going through right now. But you know, you don’t want to have an investment and keep waiting for the recession to happen for your investment to pick up the trend and perform well. That’s why look for the economic conditions and see what else triggers the demand besides the economy in a particular area. And that will help you to determine where each particular asset class would make sense to invest in. Does that make sense? 

13:06 

Jason Lee: Yeah, it makes perfect sense. I think that it’s really cool, which I haven’t heard much is you look at the asset class and then you, you look at exactly what location, you know, fits that asset class the best. Whereas most investors I talk to just focus on either one or two asset classes and just look anywhere the numbers make sense. So, I think it’s a good way of looking at it for sure. Kind of switching gears here, you know, are a mentor and a coach to many people who are looking to, you know, passively or actively invest in real estate. Why are you so passionate about real estate investing compared to other ways of, you know, potentially investing your money?

13:47 

Alina Trigub: I guess that’s a personal choice. I wanted to have my own business for many years while being a W2 employee and I’ve looked into different things and considered and research them, but I can say that I was as passionate as I’m passionate about real estate, about other things. And number one, when I see investors happily reading their summaries about their returns getting their money back and principle back getting their gain and been happy about receiving passive income. And when I see that my mentee folks that I mentored in a real estate field that came to this field as complete new, didn’t know what it was about and how to get around it. And after going with me a number of lessons they’re able to be more confident and comfortably move forward in the real estate investing journey and continue on the way to their real estate investment success.

14:52 

Jason Lee: Got it. Got it. And then you also have a meetup group right called the power of passive investing?

14:59 

Alina Trigub: Right. Right. I started that meetup I want to say almost four years ago we actually used to have two occasions. One was in the city in Manhattan. The other one was in Jersey here where I live and when COVID hit, we temporarily stopped it, but then it didn’t look like we would be able to return back to normal, relatively fast. And I noticed all these virtual events kept popping up. So, we switched to the virtual and obviously combined both meetups into one and at this point, and some of the events are going back to be in person.

My main reason for hesitation is because now I have visitors and members from west coast and other places, and I want to be respectful of their time and their commitment because they’ve already committed to our meet up. I want to you with the virtual so that they have this advantage of joining our events networking, and then learning from our presenters. So, we’re continuing with the virtual seem to work really well, and we’ll continue for the time being, we’ll probably have someone often person events down the road but most likely it’s going to happen in the spring of 2022.

16:16 

Jason Lee: Fantastic. And in those meetups, you know, when you’re talking to people who you’re, you know, coaching or trying to help, what are some of the biggest concerns that you get from people who are looking to, you know, get into real estate or start their journey?

16:29 

Alina Trigub: I think most people are afraid due to lack of knowledge. I notice it to be a common theme, not only among folks that are looking to invest in multifamily like you and me, but also among folks that just even want to be flippers wholesalers who do other things within real estate, they want to start, they heard that you can make money in the field, but they’re afraid to start because they only heard bits and pieces here and there. And what I always encourage folks to do is to number one, get educated, number two, speak to as many experts within the field that you’re interested in as possible. And then find a mentor within that field. Someone who already knows how the field works and can show you the ropes so that when you are taking steps, you’re making less mistakes and essentially learning from the mistakes of your mentor, rather than making your own mistakes. I think it shortens the path and makes your progression much more effectively. I mean, I’ve done it myself and I strongly encourage folks to do that as well.

17:37 

Jason Lee: Yeah. I couldn’t agree more. I think for anyone looking to get started, I think a lot of people know that, you know, there’s a big opportunity in real estate, but they don’t fully understand how to do it. And then, you know, they are looking for stuff online. There’s a lot of misinformation on like YouTube and stuff like that. So I think your point of having a mentor that is great is you know, the most important thing and also is just taking the courage to do your first deal to invest your money for the first time is huge too, cause I know a lot of people I know it’s, you know, doing that first investment or that first deal is extremely tough. So, I don’t know if you want to add anything else to that.

18:15 

Alina Trigub: Oh sure, Jason. Yeah. Thank you. I think an essential part of doing your first deal is the mindset shift. And I actually covered it in my introductory training. I think it’s called introduction to real estate. [18:29 inaudible] if you need the link I can share. But one of the critical steps for anyone entering into real estate or any other field of business into the field of entrepreneurship, what’s critical is to be able to be open-minded to whatever you’re doing because you will be hitting many obstacles on the way and without being able to have the grit and the dedication and desire to succeed you won’t be able to move forward. So, one of the things that help me and helps a lot of people is to identifying your reasons why you’re doing what you’re doing. For instance, in my personal case, I can here as an immigrant, same for my husbands.

 We were both immigrants from poor families that came and started with nothing. So for us it’s always been very, very important to make sure that we can provide to our kids and future generation build wealth in central built legacy beyond the future generation and having that in front of me, my, you know, the pictures of my kids and thinking about the future and thinking what my grandkids and so forth will be saying and thinking about when thinking back about my husband and myself helps me to continue moving forward and finding solutions to the obstacles of finding ways to solve the problem problems, because believe me problems will be there small and big. You just need to be able to always get up dust off the problem that you had, find the solution to find the workaround and continue moving forward. If you think that it will be a smooth pass forward, then you are in the wrong business. You shouldn’t [20:10 inaudible] stay a W2 employee.

20:13 

Jason Lee: I think that is you know, one of the best answers I’ve ever heard, mostly because it relates to me directly except my why with my parents, cause when I came to America, I was seven years old and my parents struggled with, you know, financials a lot growing up as a kid, they would fight a lot about money, you know, get in these big arguments. And I’d always think in my head like, you know, why, you know, why don’t we have it better? Cause I’d have friends who are much better financial situations.

So, I mean, long story short I think real estate is an extremely hard industry to break into. But you know, me, I started as a real estate agent and you know, I had zero salary, zero, you know commissions coming in the beginning. So, you know, I was looking at photos of my parents when I was trying to, you know, get through the hard times and remember what my, why was like could succeed and gets to the point where I am now out and continue to grow. But you know, my, why was I want to retire my parents, I want to build generational wealth. So, I think your story’s fantastic, and it really relates to me. So, I think anyone listening, you just got to have a powerful why, and just never, never give up on your dreams. If you have a will to succeed, you’ll make it.

21:27 

Alina Trigub: Absolutely Jason, beautiful story. Thanks for sharing yours as well. I think, you know, there’s definitely a huge parallel between so going on between your parents and what I experienced cause, I came here as a grownup essentially. 

21:44 

Jason Lee: Yeah, so I mean, when you came here how long you came here 30 years ago, you said?

21:51 

Alina Trigub: Yeah, yeah. I was a student at the time. So I was, you know, I started just to be clear, I started ecology back in Soviet Union. So, when I came here and did my research, I realized that being a scientist is not going to get me very far. And you know, when you are poor and have very little to live on you want to make sure, or at least I wanted to make sure that whatever profession I’ll choose will help me to provide for my mom and myself at the time. Cause it was the two of us.

And when I researched accounting, I was shocked. I mean the numbers were amazing. There was job security. Ironically like five, 10 years after I left accounting field, the recruiters were still calling me and maybe it’s because I worked for Earnest and Young, maybe because of the college and stuff, but in general, that field wasn’t still is and always has been in a huge demand. And I know that because when I started that first job, I was paid much better than most of the other folks that I knew that also graduated from colleges. So yeah, accounting is a solid field for anyone who is interested to pursue that. And definitely is related to real estate if anyone wants to be an accountant in real estate field. But it just was not the field for me.

23:11 

Jason Lee: Yeah. And when did you kind of realize that it wasn’t the right field for you?

23:15 

Alina Trigub: After trying. So, I started with the CPA firm and after I thought maybe it’s public accounting. So, I went into private, tried the private, I was in the manufacturing company and I just, I could not stand that every time I was pay enough to go to work. I’m like, oh no, not another day here. So, it was dreadful five years in the field after which I just ran away and moved into IT. And in IT, I quickly realized that I, I seem to act the field so I I’ve stayed in it 20 years and I’ve done many different things, but my main role within all these information technology jobs that I had was to be the liaison between the business and technology. I understood both worlds. So, I was able to connect them and have them speak the same language if you will. And ironically, I was able to take that experience and bring it into the real estate investing world where I am the liaison between the investors and the investment and sales. So, it’s relatively easy for me to explain most of the topics and people like following me on social media, they read my articles. They look at my videos.

I have this funny, well, not funny, but three-minute animated videos that in three minutes explain you know complex topics. So, a lot of our investors at TF management group in the physic or dentists, and obviously being from a completely different field, it’s challenging to understand the terminology and the topics within real estate investing. It would be hard for anyone. You know, if you are a pilot or whatever other profession you have, a teacher understanding real estate is hard because it’s just not your field. So, I’ve got a lot of compliments from folks about my videos because they are number one, short, number two, explain the topic easily and easy to follow. So, it’s been very helpful for many people.

25:21 

Jason Lee: Yeah. I checked out one of those videos and it was short to the point, and it was very educational. So, I think it’s, I think it’s a great way for you as an investor relations person to kind of educate your investors on how to, you know, make their money, go to work safely and know the knowledge from an accounting background. I think finance and knowing numbers and real estate’s extremely important. Something that I’m not that good at and your background definitely and your degrees support that. So, it’s fascinating What you’ve done. 

25:55

Alina Trigub: Happy to share the YouTube link, if your listeners that are interested to check it out.

26:00 

Jason Lee: Yeah. I’ll put in the show notes for sure. And just outta my personal curiosity was anyone in your family involved in real estate or are your kind of the first one to dive into it on your family?

26:11 

Alina Trigub: I am the first one. No, everyone has been a W2 employee. No one was an entrepreneur, so this was definitely challenging. I will say for me it took quite a few years and quite a few books to change the mindset. One of the steps that was helpful to me was attending Tony Robbins event, which I wasn’t planning on attending. But then when I heard that he was coming to Jersey about four years ago. Again, I didn’t think of it, but then the next thing I hear is every single one of my real estate friends kept telling me that they’re going to the event and I’m like why are they all going? Maybe I should check it out and see, I mean, I knew Tony Robbins was, but never really was interested in his books or his teaching. So, I joined a group of friends to my surprise more than half of the audience was in real estate investing in that Newark continental arena where he came four years ago. And the event was absolutely incredible. I mean, from that fire walk to Tony Robbins story to his coaches’ stories and everything that he brought to the stage was absolutely incredible. I really loved that experience. And I think it helped me to propel my progression faster in general and was a crucial part of the mindset shift in my case as well.

27:44 

Jason Lee: So, diving deeper into that. What were some of the crucial points you got out of that meetup or that event with Tony Robbins?

27:53 

Alina Trigub: You can do anything and everything. You just need to set your mind, I mean, never in my life I would’ve thought that I would be able to walk on fire or, you know, its hot coal, but it is hot coal. I don’t remember how many degrees, but it’s not typically, if you tell that to someone, if you were to tell me that I would do that, I will think that you were crazy, but you know, I walked on it. It was a great experience, and it left no burns. You know, I, I still don’t know how we did that. It was, it thinks it was October or November. It was pretty freezing outside. So, we had to walk barefoot to that field and then walk on call and then walk barefoot back to the field where we had our shoes. Again, all of that sounds surreal even now that I’m talking about this, but he essentially preconditioned us through his teachings, through the classes that we had with him at that time and explained that we can do anything and everything. We just need to set our minds to it and set the goal and do everything possible to achieve the goal.

29:03 

Jason Lee: It’s amazing. So, what are some of your goals that you’re chasing today at this point in time?

29:07 

Alina Trigub: In terms of that, that’s a great question at this point, the plan is to continue growing SOMA financial and continue expanding the TF management business in terms of bringing more investors, bringing more investments and potentially bringing new kind of businesses, entity of management. I mean, we have always been within real estate that will probably continue. But there are many different lines within real estate investing that we can expand on. So, we’re currently discussing some, which I’m not in the position to share yet publicly.

29:45 

Jason Lee: That’s amazing. And someone that is looking to potentially raise some money and buy real estate, they don’t have the funds to buy a deal themselves. What tip would you get to that person who’s looking to buy their first real estate deal with maybe some partners who have more cash than they do to help for the deal go through.

30:03 

Alina Trigub: I would say hire a really good detailed real estate attorney and put everything in anything into the contract. Especially when you are working with your friends, if you don’t want to lose them, make sure that the contract is detailed and has as many and what if clauses as possible because you just never know what’s going to happen. And if everything is detailed in the contract what if one of us decides that we need the money, or what if one of us is not in a good financial position?

Or what if God forbid something happens to one of the family members, all of that should be detailed in a contract. In addition to that, contract, the operating agreement should detail every person, roles and responsibilities, because again when the push comes to shove, when you close and you start working on a project the things that come up, oh, I assume you would be doing this. And I assume that you will take care of it. You don’t want to make any assumptions you want to break down who does what and where, and clearly define all roles and responsibilities. So that later on that the question does not come up.

31:14 

Jason Lee: That is fantastic. I think I’ve heard three or four horror stories of partners splitting, because they didn’t know the roles, or they thought they could control more than the other or this and that. I think the most important thing is to put it in writing, like you said, and have it in the operating agreement because you never know things can go wrong and people can go into bad situations. So, you never know what might happen.

31:39 

Alina Trigub: Yeah, no, absolutely. And unfortunately, in my case, I also learned from my own this mistake, I, you know, I had their own partner at the very beginning. And yes, it cost me a few bucks in hiring an attorney afterwards. But I learned my lesson and don’t plan to repeat that again. So, I want other people to learn from my mistake rather than learning from their own mistakes.

32:03 

Jason Lee: Got it. And on the other side of things if someone’s looking to find equity and find capital, how are you able to do that in your own personal experience?

32:11 

Alina Trigub: So, like you said, everything comes with experience. If you want to start raising money for your projects, I will say building your thought leadership platform is absolutely essential. Putting together your credentials and deciding which social media platform you’re going to concentrate on. My preferred choice has been linked in, but it doesn’t have to be. I learned that, you know, it could be Facebook, or it could be bet TikTok. It doesn’t really matter. You can find audience literally anywhere or, you know, even Snapchat for some folks that works as well, as long as you pick a platform or two and concentrate on them. Yes, there are ways to be on all platforms at once. But there are only a handful of grant Cardone’s and Gary Vaynerchuks, everybody else is a human.

So, and each social media platform takes the time, even though yes, you can repurpose the content, but the content while repurposed, it has to be reshaped in a certain way to suit that particular social media platform. So, I strongly encourage folk to stick to one or two while continuing to build the credibility outside of it. By speaking at the events being interviewed on the podcast, writing your own articles, maybe writing your own books and literally providing value to other peoples, which essentially entails helping folks based on the experience you have. And I can share with you one short story from my past experience. So, when I was just starting out in real estate, I had no clue what I want to do, where I want to invest and what kind of investor I want to be. So, I started going to local New Jersey meetups. And while at those meetups I was always very, very shy. So, I would just sit in a corner and do nothing. And because I thought that, you know, I was lacking real estate knowledge. I couldn’t really contribute much to the conversation. So, I would just sit in a corner and wait for the presenter to take stage and start speaking.

And then as I overheard a number of conversations people were having, and I you know, I heard the questions they were asking. I realized that I knew the answers to some of these tax questions they were asking because of my education and prior experience. So, I slowly started getting up and slowly started talking to people. And I realized that in some cases I knew a lot more than majority of the folks that were at these events. Why? Because while they may maybe were good developers, flippers buying hold investors, they knew little to nothing about tax benefits and tax aspects in general, which I knew very well at the time. So that pushed me start getting up and start networking with people. And no one you know, everyone was [35:08 inaudible] and you know, I, I realized that people wouldn’t bite if you just have a conversation, it’s only natural to ask, and you just say, no, I don’t know this. Can you explain what you mean? And that’s how my journey progressed. So, the power of networking is definitely very, very strong, whether you’re at the local or not at the local, at any event, definitely start networking and establishing, building your connections that also helps to reinforce your thought leadership. And that helps you to get invited to the events once you become a speaker, because people want to hear more of you and more of the value that you bring to others.

35:48 

Jason Lee: That’s a great answer. Kind of closing the show here. It’s been an amazing show so far. For someone who’s looking to get involved in real estate the first time, what is the biggest piece of advice you would offer to that person? 

36:01 

Alina Trigub: I would say educate, educate, and educate yourself as much as possible before taking action. And once again, once you choose the field within the real estate investing that you want to pursue find the experts in the field and talk up to those people that will help you to get a better idea what that field is about, and at least will help you to plan out your initial steps. Yes. Again, you will see challenges on a way, but it’ll help you to determine what are the first few steps that you need to take. And after that, I’m sure it’s going to escalate forward.

36:40 

Jason Lee: Fantastic. Well, Alina it’s been a great show. Where can people go learn more about you and maybe get in contact with you if they want to learn more about who you are and what you have to offer?

36:51 

Alina Trigub: Sure. They can find me either at www.tempofunding.com or www.samofinancial.com or on LinkedIn, I am in number of other social media platforms, but like I said, LinkedIn is probably one of the best ones.

37:06 
Jason Lee: Awesome. Well, hey, thank you so much for your time. And I hope to stay in touch with you and it’s been a great show.

37:11 

Alina Trigub: Thank you. Thank you. It’s a pleasure to be here Jason.

37:13 

Jason Lee: Have a good one. Thank you so much. 

37:15 

Thank You for joining us on the multi-family millionaire podcast. This show that interviews, multimillionaire real estate investors and top producers in the real estate industry. We’re here to help you create passive income and achieve financial freedom so that you can do what you want whenever you want. We’ll catch you next time on the multifamily millionaire.

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