Well, hello, and welcome back. And today, I have another guest. He is Axel Meyerhoffer, and his main interest is property investing. He started off life as, an officer in the air force, and, he he saw the light, recognized that he'd have a lot more freedom and control if he invested in properties and his wife and he he who live in Spain have their own portfolio, which he describes as modest, but he also shares his wisdom with other people.
And in the course of doing that, recognize how many people have issues with mindset. So Axel has a manual, which he, will tell us about, and, also, there will be links to various other interesting bits and pieces that he has on offer. So, Axel, how would you like to start talking about your your, expertise? Well, like you said, I was in the air force first, and then afterwards, I got a job. It's just a regular employment job in a software company.
And after a few years, I started my own business. And initially, it had nothing to do with doing what I'm doing now really as a business or service offering. It had mainly, to do with providing consulting. But I realized if I do this as an as basically a self employed, entrepreneur, what I used to both from the air force and as an employee is that there's some sort of a contribution that is ultimately helping you with re your retirement income.
And that as a as, you know, your own business owner, you don't have that. And so I started looking what what could we do and started realizing that a lot of people that are entrepreneurs, especially the really successful ones, pretty much all of them have investments in real estate. And so I checked into that, and I had all the same things, all the same thoughts that a lot of people have. I looked around in the area. We were I was an employee.
We were living in the Santa Barbara area in California. And anybody has ever been there, or in California in general, it's a very expensive area. All I had ever heard until then was that investing in real estate is basically finding a suitable property somewhere in the, maybe, 1 hour drive distance from where you live, and then try to buy it and invest in it and, you know, rent it out and stuff like that. And that obviously didn't work or wouldn't have ever worked in Santa Barbara.
So I started looking. Is there any way to do it somehow differently? And there there are a lot of different ways. But what I found is you can invest in literally outright owned even if you don't live anywhere close. And we can talk a little bit about how that works. And when I turn that into business, people ask me, hey. How did you build this portfolio and how can I do this? Or why can't I do this? And oftentimes, when I said, so what have you done so far?
It turned out that they were basically telling me why a lot of times their investments didn't do what they expected, but it was never themselves. It was never their fault. Yes. This is the point. This is where I really want to get deep into discussion because it's what we discuss what we describe as mindset. And I think it's amazing how many people don't really know what you're talking about when you say mindset. Right. And I agree.
And, I mean, one thing that introduced me to this concept first is a book literally titled mindset by Carol Dweig. And she described in the book very well, and they have really nice graphics if anybody wants to ever go on Google and and look at it between a limited mindset and a growth mindset.
And I basically converted the terminology limited in my experience to mean in some way being the victim and growth, most of the time, manifesting itself in the way that you are creating what you want by yourself through your own actions.
Yes. You seek help where appropriate, but it is really believing that you can actually go from where you are to where you wanna go mainly through your actions rather than sitting somewhere and let the environment and your employer and the economy and whatever else dictate more or less to you how your life and how your wealth and how your money and how everything else basically evolves and and emerges around you. And do you discuss much about the influence of the subconscious on mindset?
Well, I mean, I I am also in a sense a subscriber of the whole abundance idea or if you go back for those who can remember, there was, like, a book and a movie about the secret, which basically says what you what kind of thoughts you put out will be recognized whether you believe into the universe or not. But in some way, you're basically putting an energy out that is at least a stepping stone towards realizing what you want.
Some people also say I do a vision board or I setting goals or I set myself a vision. The main point is gaining clarity of what do you really want to accomplish. And for my audience or my clients, it is I wanna get to a point in time in the future, not too far into the future, where I have the freedom to decide what I wanna do with my time. And set your mind to accomplish this point in the future on the calendar as soon as possible, then everything else is basically execution.
What steps do we have to take and how do we have to take them and who can help us to get to that point? Where you have the freedom to say I have enough passive income to sit on the beach, play, fiddle, you know, work for charity for free or whatever your fancy might be. But that's basically the direction that for, at least, for what I'm helping people with where we wanna go, that we get you to a point where your investments lead to the freedom to decide what you wanna do with your time.
Yes. So your system is called the Ideal Wealth Grower System? Correct. Yes. And, please tell us a little bit more about it. Well, it has basically 2 components, and the goal is in the middle. It might sound a little weird, but the first component is ideal. And, yes, it's a word and we like the word and it, I think, has a good connotation in what we're doing. But it's also an abbreviation that stands for I for income, d for depreciation.
Because if you buy a piece of real estate, government says you can depreciate it as if it were a machine. Meaning, like, you can write off a little bit of it every year on your tax return. Then you have equity, which is basically, if you buy something for 20% down and 80% from the bank, then those 20% on day 1, that's your equity. Then, you have a for appreciation. So a year later, that $150,000 house gained, let's say, 5% in value. So it's now $6,000 or $75100 worth more.
That is your appreciation. And then the l stands for leverage, which is you put 20, the bank put 80. So you have basically a 5 to 1 leverage when you look at the overall value or price of the property. So that that's what these letters of the word idea mean. And then I said the goal is in the middle. That's wealth. And grower is what I am basically helping people with is number 1, getting access to all the resources that I have developed over the years.
But then in the mentoring program that you basically sign up for to work with me, we're applying, a methodology or model that's called the grower model. And and that's, again, a good word because we wanna grow, obviously, but it's also an abbreviation that stands for the cycle of our conversation, which starts with what's your goal, the big goal and the small goal. Then the r stands for what's your current reality? Where do you finding yourself right now?
Then the o looks at both what are the opportunities you have. Like, if I, for example, had you find a good property, what are the obstacles? Maybe you don't have the 20% down payment yet. Right? And then the w stands for what actions will you take. Because without action, nothing is gonna happen. And then the e stands for what was your experience when you took those actions. And if you say, well, Axel, it's nice if you show me properties that you think are good, but I wanna find my own.
Well, when we have the next session and I say, hey. Anne, what was your experience? You might say, I got totally overwhelmed. There are 10,000,000 properties out there. I don't know which one to go with. And then the r, the last letter in grower stands for what were the results of your actions? So if we go back to this example and say there are so many properties, I have no idea how to know which one is the right one. One result would be to say, okay.
You don't have to do this if you want me to give you the properties that you can choose from rather than all the properties out there. Or the result could be to say, now I know that I really need some help in mentoring and in my tech service and all kinds of other things. The last question in this cycle is then, okay, now that you took action, now you had experiences, now you have results of these actions, does that make any difference? Does it change your goal? The small ones and the big ones.
Now you might say, okay. Now I realize that the area in which I can actually realistically make, investments in the United States is not really the whole country. It's more or less the Midwest. Well, then the result is we are going to modify our goal a little bit and say, instead of I want to invest in well performing properties, we say, we want to invest in well performing properties in the Midwest the United States.
And so we go through the cycle again and again to keep refining what our actions are, what our goals are, what our results are. And, obviously, throughout the process, the results hopefully include, which I'm helping you with. And so far, it's always been, I can say, a 100% success rate in that sense. We found a property that you actually invested in, and that is meeting all the criteria that we put together.
And it takes, if we come back to mindset, a certain positive outlook that you can do it at least as long as you have had. You might not be able to or convince to be able to do it all by yourself. But when we work together, I take you by the hand and we're doing it together, that this positive energy goes in the direction to say, I don't necessarily know everything on the how, but I am convinced.
I am optimistic that we can actually do it because the other people that are part of this program have been doing it too. And, obviously, I'm always open to say, hey, Anne. If you were to consider it, here are 3 or 4 people that I can send you to, and you can talk to them and see if what I'm telling you we're gonna do has happened to them. So I'm suspecting that your expertise is relevant to the United States because that's where your experience is, or do you work with clients in many countries?
Well, those are 2 slightly different aspects. I do work with people from other countries. But right now, at least, the focus is on the United States even though I personally have some investments outside of the United States. But, obviously, you wanna invest where I'd say the government and the assets and everything that is involved in an investment treats us the best.
And when you I'm as you mentioned, I'm right now in in Spain and Europe because I'm kinda setting up my retirement location here for the future. If I compare the European market and the US market, it is absolutely no contest. The US market is so much more generous to us as an investor and would be kinda silly if you had the same amount of money and you would say, should I invest it in the US or should I invest it in Europe? No contest. What about the tax treatment of non US residents?
Well, the tax treatment, you you made it sound like it's a negative thing. I would say it's a Sorry. No. It's just a a a case of not having the knowledge in any way, shape. No. No. No. No. Don't worry. Don't worry. No. The point is, if you are a citizen or a legal resident in the United States, you get the full gambit of all the tax benefits that a real estate investor can get.
If you are from the UK or from Germany or Spain or some other place in the world, you get about 50, 55, maybe 60% of the same benefits. Certain benefits you can only get if you are actually living and working in the United States because a deduction on your personal tax return can obviously only happen if you have a personal tax return. And if you're an investor from the UK or let's say from here, a friend of mine from Spain would invest, they would never have a personal tax return.
The only thing they would have is a business tax return because they have a business in the United States that buys the properties. So if you only have a business return and no personal return, then that part is not applicable. It just doesn't happen. Right? Now anybody who lives in the US has to, by law, have to have a personal return, and then, obviously, that benefit also applies.
So the treatment in the sense as how much can you get out of it is slightly less than a US citizen would, but it's still way better than what you would get it in in Europe. Interesting. Very interesting. Yeah. And you also speak about the 6 laws of conscious creation. Is that right? Well, I'm aware of them. I don't wanna claim that I'm an expert about this about it or anything like that. So for me, the more important thing is the term conscious as in it in and of itself.
Okay. Because for me, in all honesty, I believe when we elevate something like, let's take the desire of becoming wealthy and not having to work anymore. That can be and oftentimes, it's a subconscious desire that has evolved at some point. But when you start bringing it into your consciousness so that it can become either a vision or a goal, I'm a little bit on the fence what the better word is. Now you raise your level of awareness. Now you raise your willingness to take action. Right?
All those kind of things that are related. Anything I always use, and you might chuckle a little bit about this. And I always use the analogy of anybody who has a commute from home to their office or to their workplace of work. If you consciously ask yourself, have I seen anything changing when I walk into the building and scan my little security badge to go to my cubicle to my office?
If you have been doing that commute for anything more than, like, 3 months, you could not, in all honesty, answer that question. I've actually done this as a little experiment. I asked the company that I was consulting to literally move all the pictures that they had behind the registration desk to the left and right side and make the wall blank. Not one person ever said a peep.
Even when you said, while they're coming in, while they're scanning their thing, they're going through and they say, hey, how do you like the new design? And they honestly, like, 100% all said, I what what what are you talking about? New design? Why? Because when stuff gets repeated and the commute I mean, your car is almost like driving itself. Right? You can do foam balls and coffee, and you put on your makeup and whatever you might be doing. And you Not in the car. Make it no. But some do.
If you've been ever in a computer, then you go. Yeah. No. But the point the Yes. It's the power of habit, really. You can use it for the positive or negative. Yeah. Yeah. Right. But what I'm getting at when we're talking about consciousness, if I asked you that one day when you scan in okay. So you didn't realize it. But look around. Don't you see this is a blank wall and all the pictures are to the sides now?
For about the next anywhere between 5 days to, like, 2 or 3 weeks, when you come in, you have now elevated this into your consciousness, and you kinda look around if anything changes. Partly also because you're afraid that you embarrass yourself again when you're being asked. Right? But if if you don't get asked again and you don't really see anything changing, and let's say 2 months later they put the pictures back, you don't recognize it because it went back into your subconscious.
So it's not just consciousness for a moment or for a week. And that's why I am a big fan of mentoring because we have our mentoring sessions ideally at least every other week. And that allows us to keep this topic of I'm working consistently.
That doesn't mean you buy a house every other week, but you're consistently working on getting to this point on the calendar where you have consistently working on getting to this point on the calendar where you have the freedom to decide what to do with your, time. And I'm obviously, as a mentor, help you also to convert and transition your mindset from a victim to the creator of your own future.
And so in a way, with even without the 6 principles, I'm kind of in a way an a a helper, a guide to make sure that what you really want to accomplish in that particular area remains in your consciousness, if not ideally at the top of your consciousness. So you're always aware there and you can always see, am I on the right track? Do I need to adjust? Do I need to ask a question? Should I need to listen in to the episode that ends podcast at, online? Those kind of things.
Because you only do that, in my opinion, when it's really like, we use this term top of mind. Oh, definitely. We do too. And that's yep. In your mind or top of mind means, in my opinion, in your consciousness and not somewhere in your subconscious where it only comes out when somebody kinda sticks your nose into it. Mhmm. Yes. I think so many of us just walk around or drive around on autopilot, and we go with the flow to such an extent that we don't even notice it happening.
Yeah. But there is a good excuse. At least I wanna give the audience a little bit of an explanation why that is, if you don't mind. Please do. One of the things that, these consciousness theories, and I studied some of it as as you might be able to tell, have found is that when you try to measure the amount of data, like today everybody talks about data.
If you look at the amount of data that the sensors that we as human beings have is bringing in to your eyes, through your skin, through your nose, through your taste, through your ears. The amount of data is just absolutely amazing. And some of that data is being handled automatically. Like, you know, your eyes know, okay. Eyeball gets dry. I need to blink to make it a little wet again. The skin can measure if it's getting warm or cold.
And if you're shivering a little, you know, okay, temperature needs to be adjusted. Some of it is almost automatic. But then, on top of all that sensory data, we also basically learning constantly new stuff. And our brain ultimately has to say, okay. I can only at any given moment consciously handle, let's just pick a number, a thousand things. And so it constantly has to decide what are these thousand things that Anne and Axel and any other human being can handle at any given time consciously.
While everything that goes beyond goes in short term memory, medium term memory, long term memory, and when your brain decides the arrangements of the picture in the entry hole of your workplace of work is really not that important, doesn't belong into the 1,000 things, then it just puts it further and further into memory. And that happens constantly. It's a constant process because you can't be aware of everything.
It's just literally impossible to be aware of everything and and analyze and look at all the data. So your brain, and I call that the differentiation between conscious and subconscious, is deciding what do I need to have available if it becomes relevant and how quickly. And my extreme example of the pictures on the wall is very, very unlikely to ever be important versus to say, okay.
I can drive myself to work, but if I suddenly come up to an intersection that normally goes straight and then started to make a, some kind of, like, repair and they they close it and I have to go around. Now for the time that you have to drive this alternate route, you're immediately 100% conscious and paying attention because it's completely new until you get back to the old track. And then your brain looks, oh, I know this. Now I can and you can try this actually, by the way.
If you're ever on a call on the system in your car, not on your phone, but on the free speaking system, and something like that happens to you, you either pay full attention to the car and your conversation goes down the drain, or you keep paying attention to the conversation and your driving is like like a beginner that just got their license. I'm well aware. To I've actually stopped calls sometimes. I've said to people, sorry. That's right. So it doesn't know what it's doing.
I've got to pay attention. I need the map. I'll talk to you later. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. And that's basically in in a in a way what I mean. Right? That you you reach a certain situation of what can you keep in your conscious mind. And if something else comes on top, your brain has to decide, do I drop something else, or do I have to basically get less precise? And that's what we fear. Right?
Like, we can either drive or we can talk, but we can do both when 999 other things are already occupying everything. Yeah. You can only do one thing properly at a time unless the other thing or things are mindless automatic. True. But also don't don't forget all the things that your brain and your body is doing for you without you having to think about it. Oh, yes. But that's the subconscious, isn't it? Right. But that is you see, this is when people say, okay.
Well, then subconscious and conscious, well, that's why we have memory. Right? It it it goes conscious to subconscious to short term, medium term, long term. That's that's how it typically goes. And in the process, the brain decides each time. Short term, yes, we keep it there because we might need it in the next couple minutes to couple days. Medium terms, it might still be relevant at some point in the in the future. Long term is really the question, how much do we need to know?
And this is what we sometimes also struggle. We know there is a memory. We kinda have a notion of what it was, but it has very little precision. Why? Because, obviously, even though the brain is amazing, it doesn't have infinite storage. So the further it goes back, the less and less of the things are related. This is, by the way, it's maybe a little, side service for your audience.
If you have the opportunity to take something that is in your conscious and you can add as many sensory inputs into the memory of that situation as possible, it is much more likely that you remember it. So if you're in a space that you look at and you say, this is amazing, and you really kinda say, wow, I hope I can remember this. And I know we don't do this very often. But every so often we get in a circumstance or in a situation, then I highly recommend get something to drink. Smell it.
Go outside and smell how it smell. Touch some of the things that you find so amazing because the more sensory input you associate with this experience, the more of that gets stored. Right? And you never know if you remember the smell or you remember the lighting or you remember the taste or you remember what you touched and the the structure of the surface or any of those kind of things.
But the brain obviously says, if it's only something I saw, that's kinda like a picture on your on your screen. Yeah. That may not be that important. But if it has, like, all kinds of NLP type sensory input, those get stored together because they belong together. And it is more likely that when you remember the smell and then slowly, it's kinda like a puzzle where the pieces start, filling in again to make it a whole image. I like that. I haven't heard that particular piece of advice.
That's great. I know if you learn something on a course or a lecture, say, if you don't look at it again for quite a short period of time, it goes right out of your memory. But if you do just revisit the key facts reasonably soon, you've got a massively better chance of remembering what you've learned. Yeah. That's actually one of the great benefits of having a wife. Right? And I I mean this, like, in a cheeky way, but also in a very meaningful way.
I always recommend at the end of any kind of workshop or or training that I do for people to go home, relax a little bit, take a break, have a meal, but then take the whole day that we were together. Think about what were the 3 or 4 things. Most of the time, it is enough if it's just 2 or 3 things that you really want to remember, and then try to explain them to your wife or to your to your partner.
As in learning theory, and this applies for us since we are constantly learning if you think about it. The highest form of confirmation that you really comprehended something is when you can teach someone else. Absolutely. The the best opportunity to do this is when you just heard it. Right? Like, you heard it during the day. Now you're at at home at in the evening. You maybe had a a meal with your wife or with your partner. And my I'm saying wife because that's my situation.
And, and then my wife learned a lot by me. Just me dumping the 2 or 3 things that I learned or that I talked about. But the good thing is also for your memory since that's what we were talking about. You don't just more remember what you learned. You also now have an additional memory of telling somebody else about it. Indeed. And what is frequent, at least in my case, because I'm a blabbermouth, that my wife said, well, I hear what you're saying, but I don't quite get it.
So I have to somehow explain it in a little bit different way one more time. And so if you do this, you have basically now spoken 3 times about these most important things. That tells your brain, this must be something important if he's or she is talking about it 3 times in one day. Yeah. And it sticks better.
Now that doesn't mean that you can recite every little detail that you did during the training, but it's a great head to say, at least I try to force myself to teach somebody else what I think I learned. Yep. Yep. Absolutely. So, Axel, I presume you have an easy way for potential students to get in touch with you? Yeah. Absolutely. If you go to Ideal Red Score.com, you find our website, you find the mentoring program, and you also find a button, that says book a call.
And I always love to get to meet people like you and I did before we ever really decided to do this episode. Have a complimentary conversation because what we do, what I do is relatively narrow as far as where it fits into the financial industry. I'm a living example that it works, but it might not be for everyone.
And to find out, the only way, in my opinion, we can really find out is by having a conversation and get to know each other a little bit and see if what you want and what I can offer fits together. Right. Well, I will be putting all your contact details in the show notes. So it just remains for me to say thank you so much for being my guest. It's been such a pleasure talking with you and, having my own knowledge expanded. Thank you so much for having me, Anne. My pleasure. Bye bye. Right.
Oh, this thing's moved. Stop.