The 12 House Blueprint: Creating Cash Flow with Creative Financing

Christian (00:01.142)
Hey everybody, welcome back to the show. Today we are diving into a unique and highly effective real estate strategy with William Tingle. William is a creative real estate investor. He’s a coach and he’s also the author of the 12 house blueprint. He has over two decades of experience and has perfected the art of acquiring properties subject to, which I’m sure you’ve heard of this before, existing financing and selling them with seller financing, creating steady monthly cashflow without

doing the headaches of renters, renovations, or rehabs. Known for his no-nonsense approach, William simplifies real estate investing and helps others achieve financial freedom. So today we’re going to unpack his strategy, how it works, and how you can use it to build wealth. So let’s jump right into it. William, welcome to the show, my friend. Why don’t you introduce to the audience who you are, your background, how you got here, and currently what you’re working on.

William Tingle (00:53.166)
Well thanks Christian, I appreciate it. I really appreciate you having me here today. My name is William Tingle. I’m a real estate investor. also teach a little here and there. I bought my first investment property in 1999. I ordered a Carlton Sheets course off of late night TV. A lot of people watching this probably won’t even know who Carlton Sheets was, but he was the first info marketer guru.

But I bought that $300 course and a month later I bought my first investment property and after I bought another three or four a few months later I said, well gee, this stuff might really work. And a year later I quit my job and that was in 2000 and I haven’t had a job in over 25 years. I go out, I meet with sellers, I solve their problems, buy some houses and teach some other people how to do it. And that’s really what I do.

Christian (01:43.382)
I love that. No J-O-B in over 20 years. That’s incredible. That’s incredible. That’s a milestone. So I’m curious to know, William, mean, creative financing, right? There’s a lot of talk about it. You know, it’s, it’s, it’s still something that I think is honestly, it’s changing the landscape of real estate, in my opinion. You know, why do you prefer creative financing over traditional real estate investing?

William Tingle (02:05.579)
Well, Christian Creative Finance, you know, when I got started, I didn’t have a lot of money. I was married, I had two small kids, and I live like probably 90 % of people in this country do. You know, I was three or four paychecks away from living in the street if something bad happened. And unfortunately, a lot of people live that way. You know, we spend what we make, we don’t save much money, we’re not taught financial literacy in school. And

So when I got started, I had good credit, I paid my bills, but I didn’t have a lot of money. so, you know, conventional wisdom is you go out, you save up money, you put 20 % down, you buy a house, you use it as a rental. And then a few years later, if you’re lucky enough, you save another 20%, you buy another house. And, you know, we’re, we’re impatient now. And I know when I got started, I was in the restaurant industry. I was a director of operations for three states and I worked a lot of hours and I was never home for holidays.

or that sort of thing. So I wanted to leave my job very quickly. Creative Finance offers the best opportunity to do that that I’ve ever seen, mainly because most deals that we do, even today, we can get in with very little money, sometimes no money, and we can close on it in just a matter of days. I never have to go through an approval process with banks or any of that garbage. You don’t pay all those excessive fees. And I’ll tell you, we still do those deals today. In fact, we…

just closed on a house recently that it was in foreclosure. The lady had walked away. She didn’t want the house. And this house is worth about $250,000. She owed about $91,000. She was $9,000 behind in her payments. And she just signed a deed over to us. Now, why would anybody in their right mind do that? That lady was mentally divorced from that house. She didn’t care. We sent her a letter. It cost us about a buck to do that.

And she called us and said, take it. And we did. And we sold that house as is for 165 and made a $65,000 net profit. And I didn’t have to have a penny of my own money to do it. Technically, I could have not made up those arrears and just flipped it right away. But we went ahead and made up the arrears to get her square with the bank before we did it.

William Tingle (04:21.803)
You can do those kind of deals every day and a lot of people just don’t realize it. That’s why we love creative finance. There’s so many more opportunities for people that don’t have a ton of money to get started in the business.

Christian (04:34.062)
Mm That’s amazing. That’s amazing. So how about you break down the concept of a buying subject to right? Existing financing like why is this such a powerful strategy? How do you do it?

William Tingle (04:44.917)
Well, buying subject two is just as easy as somebody that, let’s just say the lady that I just talked about, her name was Abby, and she had a problem. She had a house that was in foreclosure. She had already moved. She didn’t live in the house anymore. She didn’t want it. But a foreclosure would have wrecked her credit for years. And as it stands right now, she was a couple of months behind on her payments, probably, I think, four or five months behind on her payments. And while that looks bad, it’s not as bad as foreclosure. And we were able to stop that.

foreclosure and repair somewhat her credit and made a nice profit in the end, you know, by doing so. But buying subject to really I met with Abby, she showed us the house, we signed a sales agreement and a couple of disclosure documents explaining what we’d be doing. That it wouldn’t be a conventional sale, it would be us taking over her payments. And she was okay with that.

Now a few days later we met with her after title work had been done. She signed a deed and some other disclosure documents and we own the house. Now you can’t buy a house through the bank that quickly. But that’s really what it is. You know a lot of people don’t understand. There’s a lot of paperwork that you fill out when you buy a house conventionally. There’s a big stack. It’s inch thick full of forms. But the two main documents in there are the deed

and the mortgage or deed of trust, depending on what state you’re in. if, Christian, if you go and you buy a house today with bank financing, those will be two documents that are in your closing package. There’ll be a deed of trust or a mortgage, which is your guarantee to the bank that you’ll pay or they can take that house back. And then there’ll be a deed that the seller will sign over to you, giving you title to that property. Now, when we buy subject two, we get

our seller to sign a deed over to us giving us ownership, but we leave that mortgage or deed of trust in place and we just continue making payments on it. that’s really how you do it and it’s really simple to do.

Christian (06:51.126)
Wow, that’s incredible. So maybe those who don’t know, right? Is there any risk or downside to doing creative financing?

William Tingle (06:59.169)
Well, the complications that come from that, a lot of people won’t understand exactly what you’re trying to do. Most people think when you sell a house, you go to the bank or you write a check and that’s what you do. So in the most unmotivated sellers that require a lot of explanation, it can be a little bit difficult to…

to make them understand what you’re trying to do. Now, super motivated sellers that just have a problem they wanna get rid of, most of them just don’t care. They don’t even, I remember one time I got the deed from a lady. She met me at the bank where we had a notary and she left her car running. That lady didn’t care. She was in a hurry to get a problem solved. But as far as risk from subject two, the biggest risk that you’re going to have and the most commonly discussed.

is the due on sale clause. And that’s because every mortgage or deed of trust from any financial institution pretty much since the early 80s has had a due on sale clause. And really what that says is that if you transfer any interest in that property without bank approval that they can call the entire loan due and payable. Now I’ve been doing this for 25 years and I’ve never had one call due yet. Are they called due sometimes? Yes, they are.

but usually it’s because you mishandle either insurance on the property or you don’t make the payments like you’re supposed to. But can it happen? Yes. And you need to have a plan for when and if that happens.

Christian (08:30.942)
I think that’s the importance too of knowing and having the right knowledge and doing things the right way, right? Because if you don’t do it the right way, if you try to just maybe do a shortcut or think it can’t happen, it can hit you in the future one day. And if you obviously, if you don’t have the cash reserves, it could be make or break for your business, right? So yeah.

William Tingle (08:48.493)
It can be absolutely. So you need to, you you take calculated risk, but you do that in everything and daily life. You know, it’s dangerous when you get in a car and drive down to the grocery store, but you’re going to get in car and do it every day because that’s just part of life. But yeah, that’s why you’re different.

Christian (09:03.762)
Exactly, exactly. So let’s talk about maybe some of the biggest misconceptions people have about creative real estate investing right now. A lot of people, they’re focusing on wholesale, they’re doing fix and flips. mean, land development, there’s so many things going on right now. So let’s maybe talk about some, know, misconceptions people have about creative real estate investing. They might have some hesitation behind it. It might sound like too good to be true.

William Tingle (09:11.393)
All

William Tingle (09:27.991)
Well, the biggest issue that I see, and I’m out there just like everybody else, I’m in Facebook groups, I read stuff, I see what people talk about. The biggest misconception about creative finance and subject two in particular is that if someone will give you a deed, it’s a good deal. That’s not the case. If the house doesn’t have equity, if it doesn’t have cash flow, if it doesn’t have the things that make a good deal a good deal, it’s not.

I mean, somebody, we turn down more deeds than we take either because it’s not a good deal. The house isn’t in good condition or doesn’t have equity or doesn’t have cash flow. It’s got to have a couple of those things. But just because somebody will give you a house and I see these guys now and they’ll post in these groups, listen, this house doesn’t have any equity. It’s negative cash flow as a long-term rental.

but just use it for a pad split or just use it for an Airbnb. Listen, if you’re relying on something really unconventional like a pad split or an Airbnb to make your cash flow, that’s problematic because, you know, a city, and I’ve seen this happen, this happens right here where we are, one of the cities that we live close to, a city can decide not to allow any more Airbnbs. Then what do you do on a house that you’ve taken the deed to and made a promise to make the payments?

It won’t cash flow as a long-term rental, but you’ve been banking on using it as an Airbnb and now you can’t. So just because somebody will give you a D doesn’t mean it’s a good deal. It still needs to go through the proper underwriting to make sure that it’s smart.

Christian (11:08.598)
Wow, then this all goes back to full circle, right? I’m being educated on these things so you don’t run into these types of issues, right? That’s awesome, William. So I mean, I’m curious too. mean, in your business right now, how are you finding motivated sellers to do creative finance with? mean, what type of people are open to do these types of deals and how can people get involved with doing marketing? Is it Google PPC? Is it Facebook? Is it texting? Why don’t you talk about that?

William Tingle (11:34.808)
You know, Christian, any lead generation, any form of lead generation will work if you work it. You first need to decide what works well for you. For us, we do radio ads. Now radio can be a little bit costly. Of course, it’s negotiable. They’re going to quote you a rack rate when you call and you have to work them over a little bit. But we do radio and we’re on three stations and we spend about 1500 bucks a month on radio. But when you think about the fact that

We’ll do an easy probably half dozen deals a year from radio with average one netting us $50,000 to $60,000. So do the math, okay? Is it worthwhile to spend $18,000 a year on radio? Yeah. So we’ll continue to do that probably forever. Now foreclosures are another great source of deals and we’ll do a few deals through that every year. I go out every Thursday.

Christian (12:17.801)
say so.

William Tingle (12:29.515)
and I’ll door knock a few houses and try to get face to face with a homeowner. If we can’t get face to face, we do a leave behind an envelope that’s got some information for them. That’s very low cost. It’s a little bit of your time, gas money, and some stamps to mail some postcards after the fact. So that’s very low cost and we’ll do a few deals a year from that. We also do some mailings to high days on market listings in the MLS and Zillow.

But that’s really about all we do. we’re looking at about 10 or 15 houses a year. I’ve been doing this for a long time. And if you buy them right, that’s enough.

Christian (13:04.31)
Sure. Very cool. I want to talk about that too, because I know you said you’re even door knocking. I think that is something that is so important. Even someone that maybe doesn’t have a lot of money, they’re trying to get started. That is the best skill building thing you can do with getting involved. It’s because it’s going to teach you how to build relationships with the seller. Being face to face, in my opinion, is the best way to build rapport and earn someone’s trust. think nowadays, everything is now being taken away from…

moving away from that, right? You don’t need to do that, move online. But I feel like it’s, there’s a very big difference between trying to speak with someone over the phone versus in person. You really will be humbled at doing in person if you’ve only done phone interaction. It’s a whole different experience. So I like that.

William Tingle (13:50.072)
Yeah. And that’s why it’s successful for us because most people either won’t do it, they don’t have the courage to do it. We’re in a, I call it a fast food communication with people now. It’s texting or, know, best mailing. But we try to get face to face with these people and we approach them with a heart to help. When I knock on the door and answer the door, I’m going to ask for Joe, if Joe’s listed as the owner. And he says, Hey, I’m Joe. And I say, Hey, Joe.

Christian (14:03.536)
Yep.

William Tingle (14:19.521)
My name’s William and I’m here today because I understand the bank’s trying to take your house and I want to see if there’s anything I can do to help you. I mean, they’re immediately disarmed if they had a tendency to be angry. I’m here to help. Most people aren’t. I’m not immediately saying, hey, I want to buy your house. I want to steal your house. And they say, well, how can you help me? the first thing I’m going to say is, well, do you want to keep your house? And most people do. And then I’ll go over a long list of things they can do to possibly keep their

Now, if they don’t want to keep their house, like in Abby’s case that I talked to you about earlier, the deal we just did a couple weeks ago, then we move right into how we can buy their house, possibly put some money in their pocket and let them move on with their life. So that’s how I do it.

And I’ll knock on, gosh, I don’t know, four or five houses a week probably. We don’t do them all. do the ones with a lot of equity or that look very attractive. But it’s really not that scary. mean, people are just people. They have problems and we’re there to try to help fix them.

Christian (15:18.752)
That’s That’s right. That’s right. But the only way to get good at it is by doing it, right? You can consume content all day long, but I believe the biggest teacher and the best teacher is action.

William Tingle (15:24.269)
That’s right.

William Tingle (15:29.997)
That’s right. And that’s the problem. That’s what most people do. Most people that I meet know enough to go out and buy a house, but they’re so afraid they’re going to screw something up or something’s going to go wrong. I’m telling you, man, anything you’ve ever done in your life, dating or anything, you’re going to mess it up in the beginning, but you just got to stay after it. And people, if you’re really there to try to help and you’re thinking about them instead of just yourself, you’re going to be okay.

Christian (15:49.706)
yeah.

Christian (15:58.358)
Absolutely. You just have to go into it with the right intentions upfront, right? Absolutely. Cool. Well, let’s talk about, you know, your book, right? The 12 House Blueprint. I know you have it in front of you, but that book outlines, you know, a clear path to gaining financial freedom. So why don’t you just give us a high level overview of that book and why you wrote it.

William Tingle (16:07.981)
I got it right here.

William Tingle (16:18.861)
Okay, well when I got started in 1999, like a lot of other people, I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I knew that I wanted cash flow because I wanted to replace my job. Wholesaling is great. You can make chunks of money, but wholesalers are highly paid employees in my opinion. You can wholesale a deal, wholesale one next week, but you’re always looking for that next deal. When you create cash flow, no matter whether you like being a landlord and I don’t,

Okay, or not, cash flow will set you free. If you want to take a break and take six month vacation, you can. For the first 10 years, I did a bunch of stuff. I held rental properties, I flipped houses, I rehabbed houses. I did all kinds of stuff. And then around 2010, I got a divorce and my life changed. And I had the opportunity, you know, a lot of times we say, man, if I could just start over, what would I do?

I do things differently and I had the opportunity to do that. So I took a legal pad. I’m still real old school. I took a legal pad and I said, what did I enjoy about the last 10 years of investing? What did I hate? And I just put together a really short list of what I really liked. I loved creative finance. I loved buying houses subject to, and I loved the cashflow and the freedom aspect of seller financing those houses.

If I’m a landlord and I put a tenant in and Junior flushes a hot wheel down the toilet, they pick up the phone and they call me. And I don’t want to hear from them when I’m on vacation. So, but with a seller finance deal, I make them the homeowner. If Junior flushes a hot wheel, they call Roto-Rooter. They don’t call me.

So I decided all I wanted to do moving forward was buy subject to sell with seller financing. And what I discovered was even in a very low or almost no equity deal, I could make 50, 60, $70,000 over three or four years of seller financing those houses. So, you know, the math don’t lie. And you can buy 12 houses a year.

William Tingle (18:27.177)
And I use a very cookie cutter approach with the kind of house that I’m looking for. And within three years, be making north of half a million dollars a year, buying one house a month. And what I did with the 12 House Blueprint was I just laid out, and this is almost 200 pages, no fluff. I mean, this is just the game plan, exactly how I do it. And I’m just sharing that with everybody. I think it’s a really good model. think most people don’t want to buy 20 houses a month. I don’t want to.

that hard. But anybody, I mean your grandma can buy one house a month and you can do that with a job. Most people that I meet, a few houses a year would change their life. But we put together a business model that’s worked for me for the last 15 years and that’s really what the book’s about.

Christian (19:16.022)
That’s remarkable. That’s remarkable, William. Thank you for sharing. Now definitely gonna check out the book myself. So let’s talk about this way. mean, someone that’s just trying to start on real estate, like you said, I mean, there’s a lot of people that are still in your, maybe working a nine to five, they’re working a job, right? mean, what is the best way they can begin to start using creative financing strategy successfully? Is there any starting steps that you could give advice on or ultimately, I know you teach this as well. So you could talk about that as well and how people can work with you and how they can get involved.

William Tingle (19:45.154)
Right. If you want to learn about creative finance, my advice is to carefully vet who you want to learn from. There are a lot of teachers today. I joke with my wife all the time. She runs the business with me that there are three teachers, gurus. Guru’s gotten a bad name lately. I thank God for gurus. I’d still be working in the restaurant business if it weren’t for them.

But there are three of those for every man, woman, and child in the country now. Everybody teaches real estate investing. But some important questions. How long has the person that you’re wanting to learn from been teaching? How long have they been in the business? Do they still do the business today? If the last deal that I did was 20 years ago, I’m probably not very up to date on what’s happening out there right now. Were they around through the crash in 2007, 2008?

because if you made it through that, you probably know some stuff, okay? But that’s really important. And then don’t think you’ve gotta run out and spend 10 or $20,000 on education. Follow this person, they probably have some social media channels. I know we teach on YouTube. Jody and I were just talking this morning. Everything that I do, I have shared for free.

on my YouTube channel and you can go to Sub2TV.com and check that out if you’d like. That’s SUB the number 2 TV.com. But we share everything we do there from how we generate leads to how we close deals to the documents we use and everything else. That’s the best way to get started. Don’t think you can just rely on social media alone though. You probably will need to invest at some point in some good training.

but make sure it’s somebody that’s doing deals and has been around.

Christian (21:33.718)
I love that. I love that, William. I couldn’t agree anymore. think you can watch a lot of content and obviously you offer that now, which is a great stepping stone for someone to get involved. And honestly, mean, people can get their first deal just by utilizing that. But if you want to get to the point where you want to scale, right? You want to build a team, you want to build a portfolio, eventually you are going to have to take that jump and invest in yourself to take that next step, right? Because there’s just no other greater value that you’re going to get by putting your own skin in the game.

and getting involved with somebody, right? That’s actually been an expert. You’ve been doing it for over 20 years. You’ve been there 2008. A lot of people haven’t been through that experience, myself included. So I’m obviously a young bloke in here. So I’m curious to know too, to pivot with that William, during 2007, 2008, what was that like for you?

William Tingle (22:23.885)
Well, you know, it was funny and I’ve joked about that in the past. I made it through the crash and then got a divorce. And it was the divorce that devastated me more than anything because man, you’ve never been divorced, don’t, anyway.

Christian (22:38.71)
Yeah.

William Tingle (22:40.845)
But you know, that was tough. But if you were in creative finance, a lot of people were impacted by the fact that they relied on banks to do their business. But if you still, you know, if you did most of your stuff creatively, I know I had lines of credit, we did a lot of stuff with small local banks during that time. But if you understood creative finance, you could still proceed as usual, you could still buy houses subject to and that sort of thing. Equity becomes much more important.

during the times of a crash. And that’s why you gotta be in tune to that thing. You know, I lived in Florida a couple of years ago and it was really funny when we lived in Florida, right during and right after COVID, banks suspended all appraisals on houses. So you’d see a house go on the market 400,000 and sell for 500 with no appraisal. Interestingly enough, guess which state is taking the biggest hit on values right now in the country? Florida.

So a lot of people are underwater. You’re starting to see that. You said you’ve never been through to, you weren’t around for 2008. I’m thinking people are gonna get a taste of some of that stuff here in the next year or so. We’ll see what happens. I mean, I don’t have a crystal ball. I don’t know if it’ll be as bad or it’ll be worse, but I made a post the other day on Facebook. FHA delinquencies are at 11 % now. In 2007, 2008, they were only at 9.2%. So there’s some things that are telling.

out there right now. Higher days on market, of course interest rates up a little bit. We can’t predict what’s going to happen, but I would say be cautious.

Christian (24:14.528)
So how can someone maybe protect themselves, right? If this was to happen, let’s say, I how can someone position themselves to thrive in during this type of maybe recession, depression type of environment again, like we had in 2007, 2008.

William Tingle (24:28.397)
I’ll tell you this, we actually did a couple of rehabs last year. We bought houses that needed repair. They had plenty of equity. I tell my students, buy houses with certainty. Okay, that’s what I say. We used to have a saying in the restaurant business, if there is a question, there is no question talking about food quality. And I took that approach to real estate as well. I don’t wanna lose money on a deal. Now, that means that if a house needs work, it’s gotta have a lot of equity.

Christian (24:40.373)
Yeah.

William Tingle (24:58.401)
I’ve got to have a clear exit strategy. Does that mean that I can’t buy houses with no equity? No, it doesn’t. But if I’m buying a house with no equity, it’s got to be in excellent shape and it’s got to have a killer interest rate loan on it. We’ve got one right now. We’ve got under contracts 2.8%. Now, what does that mean? That means that I can rent that house for a good cash flow. Even if rents drop, I can rent that house for a nice cash flow. I can sell it with seller financing and make plenty of money, but you’ve got to know how to

these deals and have certainty. No matter what happens, I’m going to make money. That’s the way you have to run.

Christian (25:35.254)
I love it. I love it William. Anything lastly that you would like to share with the audience? I know you shared your YouTube channel, but would you like to share maybe your website, your socials, where people can find you?

William Tingle (25:43.661)
I’ll tell you this, we’re in our pre-launch right now and I’m not sure when this is going to air, but we’re in our pre-launch right now. That means we’re giving away a ton of bonuses with our book and you can get the book at 12 House Blueprint Book.

This is the number 12, HouseBlueprintBook.com. Even after the launch happens, which will be March the 11th, we’ll still have a ton of bonuses with it. You know, the book’s very inexpensive. It’s a great way to learn a model that really lets you…

I call it a lifestyle business. My business doesn’t dictate when I have to work. I built this around the life that I wanted to lead. So check out the book, check out our YouTube channel. YouTube channel’s free.

It won’t cost you anything to go learn how to do some stuff, but don’t consume content for five years before you take action. Learn enough to know what to do. Hire someone to help you if you need a mentor, if you need somebody. The best mentors are local to you that actually do what you want to do. Do some stuff for them for free. Put out some bandit signs, do some door knocking for them and learn how they do what they do. But don’t just consume content.

Christian (26:57.846)
That’s right. You couldn’t have said it any better. Ladies and gentlemen, you heard it from William. You got to get in the trenches to get started. I love that. William, thank you so much for your time today, my friend. I really enjoyed our conversation. I know the audiences as well, and I’m just wishing you nothing but more success in your business going forward.

William Tingle (27:14.253)
Well thank you Christian, I appreciate that and again I appreciate you guys having me on today.

Christian (27:18.076)
Absolutely, absolutely William. Well guys, I hope you enjoyed today’s show. As always, we will see you on the next episode, which you know is very frequently. So William again, thank you for your time, my friend and enjoy everybody. Take care.