5 Secrets to Balancing Teaching and Real Estate Investment Success

Dylan Silver (00:00.91)
Hey folks,

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (00:04.206)
Thanks.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (00:12.152)
Okay.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (00:15.529)
H-A, H-A Holmes, my name is.

Dylan Silver (00:30.028)
Real estate Hussein Abdullah Hussein. Welcome to the show.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (00:35.042)
Thank you for having me, Dylan. Appreciate you.

Dylan Silver (00:37.6)
It’s a pleasure to have you here and I always like to start off at the top. How did you get into the real estate space?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (00:44.878)
started out because somebody gave me the book Rich Dad Poor Dad when I was about 19. And then I started, I opened my first CD, Certificates of Deposit, and then a couple years later, when I moved back to New York City, I’m sorry, I was living in Minneapolis at the time, and everybody had homes and boats and everything, and then when I got back to New York, I was like, I don’t want to rent.

stay in that situation. So I tried to purchase property. I realized that properties in Minneapolis versus New York City are very different. And long story short, I ended up buying a co-op studio apartment with credit cards along with a partner when I was 23.

Dylan Silver (01:22.038)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (01:28.14)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (01:34.286)
So you got in very early. that point in time, were you a teacher at that point in time?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (01:38.734)
No, when I came back to New York, it was to start school. So at that time, I was an assistant teacher, actually. I worked my way up. I ended my public school career as an administrator. I was a math coach for the last five years of my career.

Dylan Silver (01:56.396)
Well, God bless, because I know the public schools, it’s, I mean, I New Jersey public schools, New Jersey public, I was in Northern New Jersey, like we discussed, and you were in Brooklyn. Was that where your whole education career was in Brooklyn?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (02:11.15)
Primarily, and I worked in a couple of districts within Brooklyn. For those who don’t know, New York City is the largest school district in America. There are over two and a half million students in the New York City public school system.

And that includes charter, parochial, and then just your regular PSIS. But at the end of my career when I was a staff developer, part of what I did was I bounced around and helped schools in other areas work on their test scores and teaching teachers how to understand math better and that sort of thing.

Dylan Silver (02:47.854)
So let’s talk about having a W-2 job while being a real estate investor. So you have the first property that you did before you were a teacher. And then you’re a teacher. Are you still doing both? Are you managing both? Or did the real estate take a backseat? How did it work?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (03:02.926)
No, I actually was able to retire from teaching at the age of 37 because my real estate portfolio was doing so well. And now this is in 2019. That’s before the boom. So my strategy was if I had enough rental properties to double my salary, then I could afford to retire because you know, your rent roll.

Dylan Silver (03:16.386)
Wow.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (03:29.24)
things to pray, have vacancy. So I said I needed to double my salary so that I could walk away comfortably. And I did.

Dylan Silver (03:38.326)
Now, I think a lot of people who have a W-2 job would like to invest in real estate. You mentioned with credit cards was your first deal. I think not everyone has the courage to do it the way that you did it. Was there anyone that while you were a teacher that was coming to you who maybe heard about or saw what you were doing in the real estate game and said, hey, Hussein, how do I get involved in real estate?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (04:01.036)
Absolutely and please do not try to buy property with credit cards. You have to really know what you’re doing. There’s a lot of moving parts. I will say I did just buy a mobile home park with credit cards with a lot larger amount. But again, please don’t try this at home. You can get hurt. To answer your question, along the way I had a bunch of people in my ear. think now…

everybody says you know have a mentor I have a coach I’m old so we didn’t have Instagram and TikTok I mean in Carta on discs I mean was a step up when I was already involved in real estate but I did have a bunch of people who helped me along the way and I did have a bunch of people who were interested in investing with small amounts of money

Dylan Silver (04:36.494)
You

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (04:49.006)
Because being from New York, when I started to invest in Texas, you could purchase a home. At that time, we were buying condos in Houston for $50,000, $60,000. So I could go to somebody and get three grand, five grand, 10 grand, and that ended up being three, five, 10, 15 % of the purchase. So their money was really working for them. So yeah, I really liked it.

Dylan Silver (05:12.654)
Were you having a lot of teachers come to you? Was it people that you were interacting with at your job or was it a little bit less of that?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (05:21.678)
It was a lot less than that. I I’ll say this just to generalize, teachers, city workers, people like that, are often skeptics. And I will say, at the time, just to be fair, this is me speaking after 20 years of experience in real estate. When you start, let’s take me at age, I’m 43 now, so let’s say I was 30 back then, at the time.

If I have one property, maybe two properties, it’s really hard for me to tell you, hey, Dylan, I know you have 10 grand in the bank, why don’t you invest with me 10 grand on buying stuff in Houston, a place you’ve never been? I’m still at work with you. So how convincing can I really be if I’m so well, but I’m still at work with you?

I noticed that when I retired, my uptick in investors and clients and friends and family calling me skyrocketed because they were like, wait, you retired? You walked away from $100,000 a year, including, you know, some overtime? You walked away from that full benefit to everything? Because you’re so good in real estate?

I gotta get involved with this now. So for anybody who’s gonna watch this podcast, who’s just starting out, or who’s trying to work on the people that they know.

Don’t be offended when people tell you no. It’s not that they don’t trust you, it’s that they don’t trust the process because you don’t have proof of concept yet. Once you break your first million, five million, 10 million, or 20 doors or whatever the number is that satisfies them, you’re going to notice that you’re going to get a lot more feedback. I mean, you charge them more, of course, but you know.

Dylan Silver (07:11.254)
Now, when you retired, I’m curious, what is the typical retirement age for teachers in the area that you’re in? I mean, you were young, but what’s the typical?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (07:22.19)
Oh, actually, let me use the proper term, because I’m a retired union rep. So you technically cannot retire. Like, I can’t pull money out of my retirement until I’m least 55. So technically, I still have 12 more years to retire. So I resigned. I walked away at age 37. But typically, if you don’t count teachers that burn out within the first five years, if you’re talking about a long-term person,

Dylan Silver (07:49.421)
Yeah.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (07:50.094)
when you work until you’re 60, 65. And in America now, there’s been an uptick of 70 year olds working because what happens is when people retire, they don’t realize how expensive it is to really retire. And they end up having to go back to work to supplement their income.

Dylan Silver (08:05.133)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (08:08.694)
And you’re talking about one of the, I don’t know about Brooklyn specifically, but just New York I know is one of the more expensive places maybe on earth. so teacher, mean teacher, we need many teachers, but teacher salary, I don’t know if it’s keeping up all the time with inflation. So if you’re dealing with inflation in one of the five major boroughs, I mean, I just can’t imagine it’s that easy to retire. I’m curious, maybe pivoting a bit here, and I don’t know how often you think about this, how feasible is it for teachers to

retire, let’s say in their 50s and 60s, and live off of what they’ve saved if they’re not investing in real estate.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (08:45.676)
I’m going to use your term just for conversation. You said save. No one is retiring off savings. Because saving means money in Chase Manhattan, Capital One. You’re losing money every year because you can’t keep with inflation.

Dylan Silver (08:51.949)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:06.626)
Right.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (09:07.566)
Now investing, that’s a whole different conversation. I think if you’re a young person and you’re gonna listen to this, you have to start investing in your retirement early. If you’re not gonna become a landlord because that’s a very tough task, maybe you have to diversify. You have to find a REAP, which is a real estate investment trust, a trade group, some sort of organization, an organization like mine.

where you can pool funds, they do the heavy lifting, and you get a dividend. It’s gonna be impossible for anyone, teachers, whoever, to retire if they don’t invest because social security’s not gonna be here. Pensions are done. So if you’re living off of what you put away and you don’t put away anything, it’s just gonna be impossible. You’re gonna work till you die.

Dylan Silver (09:50.466)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (09:54.958)
What do you think about the let’s talk about investing right. So if you do let’s say an index fund or however you’re investing you’re getting 12 percent 11 12 percent annually. But I don’t know how much you need to be putting aside in order to retire. I I don’t know what the number is. Is it two million is a four million that you need to retire in Brooklyn. I don’t know how long are people going to live for. So.

I’m thinking like how realistic is it even if you are doing the investing for you to stop working completely and live off of your investments in your 50s or early 60s if you’re a teacher in that area.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (10:28.43)
Well, let’s say this, in my age group, when I was born in 82, so that makes me a millennial. My life expectancy as a man is like 67 on average. So let’s say if I’m a retirement age, 55, that gives me 12 years. If I lived over 100,000 years, let’s say anywhere in America outside in the big five cities,

I do okay with $100,000 a year. So that would mean I would get $1.2 million in my account to maintain a pretty decent life. And let’s also assume that I don’t have a mortgage and that’s a big bill that I don’t have.

Dylan Silver (10:58.691)
Yeah.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (11:11.438)
Now, 1.2 is very easy to get. If you invested $100 a month, and I’m gonna like round these numbers, but you can Google it to fact check it, the actual status, if you save $3 a day for 365 days a year, so on and so forth, and you got 10 % interest, then you end up with about $550,000.

Now that’s only $1,200 a year, $1,100 a year. So if you save $5,000 a year and you got 10%, you continue to do it, you’d have about four or five million dollars. But you have to start young. So if you start at 18, 19, 20 by 55, you have a few million, you should do just fine. Now if you’re born in 2000,

Dylan Silver (11:46.178)
detail.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (11:57.358)
and you’re going to become 18, 19, 20 now, your life expectancy is closer to 82, 83. So now you’ve got to survive 20 years, give and take 20, 25 years, and then you’re adjusted for inflation, so you need at least $1 million.

Dylan Silver (12:14.837)
No, I can.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (12:14.926)
to live anywhere in Sorry, I’m pause. Anywhere in America. In the five cities, like New York City, California, Los Angeles, Chicago, the big cities, I mean, you easily need a quarter million. So if you wanna live there, you need about eight to 10 million in your retirement account.

Dylan Silver (12:30.54)
Yeah, I mean, let’s talk about, mean, how much do you need to survive in that part of Brooklyn, annually?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (12:36.27)
Well, I lived downtown, I with a kid called Clinton Hill, I lived right up the street from Barclays, I lived in a full panoramic apartment where could see all the bridges and all these things. So I was doing all right. And you gotta remember, at that point I had already owned several properties.

So it wasn’t just my teaching income, it was my business, it was my rentals, all of these types of things. So I wasn’t just living off my salary. And then my wife at the time was also a teacher and working in her way of administration. We had a mortgage. So we were able to save and do things. So we weren’t the norm, especially at the age of 30.

Dylan Silver (13:21.166)
Yeah.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (13:21.634)
But no, the average person is not gonna do that. And I also didn’t have student loan debt. She didn’t have student loan debt. Her parents paid for her school and the city paid for my education. So I don’t have to pay for school.

Dylan Silver (13:37.782)
Now the average person, what’s the cost to survive out there if you’re renting a place, food, transportation annually?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (13:45.454)
It’s ridiculous. think they say you need something like $150,000 to just survive. A one bedroom in a decent neighborhood is $25,000, $3,000. And then you got taxes, so you pay state tax, city tax, and federal tax. So if you’re making $100,000 a year, $40,000 to $41,000 of that.

It’s gone, just in taxes. You got union dues, have, if you’re trying to retire. So let’s say half your check is gone. Now you got 50 grand. Let’s just make it 52 to make the conversation simple. So that is…

Five grand a month would be 60 grand, 48 is four grand a month, so you make 4,500 a month. Your rent is already 2,500 a month. You got two grand on the bull fuck. Now if you have student loans, $100,000 student loan is $1,100. Groceries for one person’s gotta get at least 200 a week, at least 800. You got lights, you got water.

Dylan Silver (14:46.862)
Yeah.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (14:49.41)
I mean the Wi-Fi and cell phone. You don’t even get transportation is 200 months. I mean you are broke. You are broke, broke, broke. If you factor in student loans. I mean that’s why so many young people stay home or they get roommates. You have to have a roommate to live in New York.

Dylan Silver (14:49.454)
You’re you’re gone.

Dylan Silver (15:07.351)
It’s it’s I mean, I know I’m not even from there, but I’m from New Jersey. And every time I think about going back, you know, to be closer to family, I just look at what home prices are out there. And I don’t know the exact numbers, but I know what they are out here in Dallas. Like a nice home brand new new build you can get for mid 300,000 mid 400,000. I don’t even know what that would get you where I’m from in New Jersey and northern New Jersey. I have no idea. And I’m sure it’s even more, you know, heightened 10x maybe not 10x, but something along those lines.

in in brook

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (15:35.982)
Yeah, you could live a place like, which is right next to you, kind of like Newark, LinkedIn, Raleway. I Hoboken is through the roof right now, especially that you’re gonna build a tunnel. In Brooklyn, you could live in a bad neighborhood and get a two-bedroom condo for $450. In a place where you don’t feel safe, you could pay $450, and then you gotta pay HOA, which is about $200 a month.

Dylan Silver (15:47.18)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (15:55.662)
So

Dylan Silver (16:03.66)
So pivoting a bit here, I want to get into the mindset of you were young, doing real estate teaching as well, but you saw I’m passionate about real estate. You saw this is maybe where my future is, maybe where my retirement is. How come you went that route where you mentioned the skepticism? I think a lot of people too, you think about a very more or less stable job, stable career, but you went on a route that not a whole lot of people go down. What do you think it was? Was it just the way that you tick? What made you go that route?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (16:32.59)
I think there’s a lot of contributed factors. You know there’s always the discussion of nature versus nature. So I fell into education because my mom was a public school teacher. My father was a businessman.

Dylan Silver (16:46.436)
There you go.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (16:47.598)
So it kind of just makes sense. And he also was an educator because he was a martial arts instructor. So I got education from both sides. I got business at a young age. And I also have a gang of siblings. So being competitive, having tough skin, being able to deal with headaches and stress on a high level. Because I’m the middle. I got two older siblings and I got four younger. So like.

Dylan Silver (17:08.397)
Yeah.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (17:13.644)
Yeah, it’s a lot. And being from New York is tough already, so like, you know.

Dylan Silver (17:13.806)
You

Dylan Silver (17:19.04)
Yeah, you need a lot of that. I’d say definitely to be a school teacher. know, people think, I’d say about the real estate space, that it’s passive, that it’s hands off. I can say without owning, I don’t have any deeds in my name or an LLC that I own. Here’s to and I hope to have some. it’s anything but that because especially what I’m doing with real estate wholesale, you’re solving other people’s problems. And at the end, you may get an assignment fee for your efforts. But

A lot of what I’m doing is just solving other people’s problems. And when it comes to investing and providing housing for people, that’s what it is. And then now you’re responsible for, if they’re running it out, for maintaining the place and responding to their needs. so passive is difficult to do unless you have a great team in place. So I understand the skepticism from other people, but at the same point in time, being from that area, not too far from where you’re from.

I also feel like it’s so hard to retire. It’s so hard to just survive out there. We talked about the cost of life that without the real estate game, I feel like it’s riskier not to be involved in real estate because then you’re dependent on, you know, the market doing well. What happens if when you’re set to retire, 50 % of your portfolio gets wiped and now you have to do another three to five years? Well, there goes three to five years of your life, right? So to me, it’s like

get involved in real estate, want as many teachers to be involved in real estate as possible. I want as many people to be involved in real estate as possible. Because that will really set them up for a trajectory where their wealth is appreciating faster than really anything else.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (18:57.422)
Can I ask you a question or two? First off, if you don’t mind how are you? Okay, I was gonna assume in 30s good, that’s one. You said something, and we can talk about this off screen whenever you…

Dylan Silver (18:59.128)
Yeah, go ahead.

31.

Dylan Silver (19:09.816)
No, let’s do it.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (19:11.5)
You said you don’t have an LLC. That’s crazy. So I’ll help you get an LLC today. Show you how easy it is to do that. One of the things I teach, because I’m still a teacher, is all these tax strategies. Now this is something I put out publicly. I don’t like to do it too publicly, but it is what it is, this public record. You live in Texas. You know what Texas franchise tax is. You’ve heard of that?

So for those who don’t know, I I pay franchise taxes every year. Five years in row, year six just happened. Six years, no, five years in row, I pay franchise taxes. I have not paid income taxes five years in a row. So what that means is the school teacher in Texas that makes $40,000 pays more in year in taxes than myself.

who, I’ll you all Google it, Google how much you have to earn in the state of Texas to make and pay franchise taxes. And I get a tax refund every year. So Dylan, first up, we gotta get you an LLC. You’re young, so here goes the actual question. This is the building. This is me working on my podcast game. How did you learn about wholesaling?

Dylan Silver (20:24.931)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (20:30.168)
So I was selling cars working for Nissan and I saw the price of my rent. I lived in a nice apartment in San Antonio. By the way, with talking about apartment, I had a one bedroom apartment, brand new updated kitchen, brand new bathroom. We had two pools and two gyms on like a sprawling campus in really just outside the center of San Antonio.

I shouldn’t say just outside, but it was within the city limits of San Antonio in a nice area and I was paying $1,300 a month. Okay? So then I saw it go up to $1,400, then about $1,500 and I said, they’re increasing rents like every year. So how do I keep up with this? And I felt like I like where I’m at, but also, man, this is a lot of money. Like I’m so much of my check away is doing this and…

I’m thinking, well, what do I do? And then I’m working long hours. If you know anybody in the automotive space, specifically in a dealer world, I mean, you’re practically live in there. If you had a major dealer, I was at the number one Nissan dealer in South Texas between Austin and San Antonio was the number one spot. And so I was living there. I was there from about 8 a.m. up until about 10 or 10 30 at night, Monday through Friday, and then sat on Sundays from about nine 30 up until seven 30. So I was like, man, this is really not a whole lot of free time and

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (21:25.728)
Thank

Dylan Silver (21:51.532)
I feel like I’m not building real wealth. was seeing a lot of people kind of make a lot of money but then have no savings. So long story short, I said, what do I do? And I was hearing all about the different ways that you could get involved in real estate and wholesale was just the one that I happened to get lucky enough to get involved with.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (22:10.19)
Can I please say that you heard about it? How did you hear about it?

Dylan Silver (22:13.538)
So there was two ways. I heard this term like cash for keys. I had no idea what that meant, but really that, you know, people will refer to that as like subject to an existing mortgage. And then I was also hearing about this term like assignment, assignment of contract. And I was seeing this probably on Instagram. don’t, wasn’t a big TikTok user at the time. Saw it on Instagram. But then what also happened was I had a job that I applied to.

which I didn’t really know what it was. It was involved in the real estate space. It took a big pay cut to go do that job. And what they were was they were a big box, you know, wholesale company. So that’s how I got more involved in it.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (22:44.814)
Thanks.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (22:53.518)
Okay, so that’s one thing and I guess I was trying to get it. This is me being a teacher. So what happens is any young person, anybody, but really it’s a young person’s game. You have access to everything. So like I was wholesaling and I didn’t know the word wholesale existed. I didn’t know that’s what I was doing.

I had done subject twos and I didn’t know that’s it was called. It just was a good idea. And everybody else in the title and whoever else knew what was, they were just processing the paperwork. So any young person, there’s no excuse.

You watch this podcast, I don’t know what’s up to is write it down, go Google it, come to my channel, come to this channel, watch the rest of the podcast. You will learn everything you need to know to get you started. And then to fast forward yourself, you work with a mentor or something like that. But I just had to ask to go back to your last question or your last comment where you said everybody should own or you wish everybody could. The reality is, and this is for the young people watching this, everybody won’t.

I had a class last night, if you look on my Instagram, boy, this is by the time this comes out, I’m be old, but I’m sure I’ll have some classes. 20 people in there, teens and everything, all the way up to 60-some-odd-year-olds. I could talk to a thousand people. Only 10 of them, only 100 of them are gonna take your next step, and out of that 100, only 10 of them are gonna stay consistent.

1 % to 5 % are gonna keep going, because like as you said, as you know, wholesale is very rough. Real estate is very rough, being a landlord is very rough. Most people are gonna stop once they hit their first roadblock. And that creates opportunities for those of you who could stay the course, because everybody else is gonna be attending. Everybody’s not gonna be a homeowner. It’s gonna be more and more difficult.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (25:00.59)
Even right now, if you’re trying to buy a home, you’re competing with people like myself, and I’m a small fry. You can’t compete with me, you just can’t. If you’re saving money and trying to get in the house, and I’m offering cash, like you can’t beat me. Or a big company like BlackRock, they can paint over and change the demographics of the neighborhood, price people out, like, it’s gonna be impossible. Everybody was never meant to be a homeowner, it’s not gonna happen.

Dylan Silver (25:16.696)
Yep.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (25:27.502)
So you’ve got to make sure you’re on the other side because the disparity between rich and poor is growing. Middle class basically doesn’t exist anymore. You need to have it or you don’t. If you want to be on that other side, learn, learn, learn, play the game, jump in early because you’re going to be broke more likely than not. 70 % of Americans are broke.

Dylan Silver (25:27.554)
Yeah.

Dylan Silver (25:50.03)
I agree with you. think it may be tough to bite off, you know, a big bite early on and get involved in real estate, but the it’s not like other investments, right? So a lot of times people will think, well, I bought a car and it’s not like that. Or they’ll think, you know, I went to school and, you know, it’s again, not like that. These are again, huge investments, school car. But with the school.

You may spend the first five years outside of school where you’re not feeling like you’re earning enough. So the return isn’t there. Five years after you buy a real estate investment, you should have some equity in that home if you bought it right. If you pay that full ask at the top of market or above that, you may not. But five years after you buy real estate, you should have some equity, maybe sooner than that. And definitely you can’t compare it to a car or anything that’s going to depreciate. my thing is, to your point, not everyone’s going to do it, but let’s see how many people we can.

Hussein, we are coming up on time here. Where can folks go to learn more about your business and also to get a hold of you?

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (26:54.764)
You can find me everywhere. I mean everywhere. Just by searching HAHomesUS. That’s Instagram.

That’s YouTube, subscribe, smash that subscribe button. Facebook, our website, and TikTok. And TikTok is more fun. It’s just me going all over the place, eating food. There’s still some real estate, but it’s really the best pizza in the world. We go all over and get pizza, because we’re looking at real estate in different places. So, HAHomesUS, easiest way to find me. I’m sure the links will be down in the comments or something. We look forward to continuing working with you and helping you along your investment journey.

Dylan Silver (27:33.794)
Hussein, thank you so much for coming on the show. Congrats on all your success and to your continued success.

HUSSAIN ABDULLAH (27:39.918)
Thank you very much, it doesn’t mean same to you and I can’t wait for you to get your LLC in a couple weeks.