Subscribe via:
Show Summary
In this conversation, Jonathan N. Feniak discusses the importance of asset protection in real estate, emphasizing the need for strategic planning and understanding liability. He shares his journey from various professional roles to becoming a lawyer, highlighting the significance of client engagement and the challenges faced in the legal field. Feniak also addresses the complexities of business structures and the necessity of creating optionality in one’s career and investments. The discussion concludes with insights on building meaningful relationships and delivering value to clients.
Resources and Links from this show:
-
Listen to the Audio Version of this Episode
Investor Fuel Show Transcript:
Jonathan Feniak (00:00)
Creating optionality was one of the things that I think is most important to not have anyone who’s got a gun to your head when it comes to your employer or it comes to your partner or whatever it is in the world or the economy, right? Do you have options? You’re always leaving yourself and outQuentin Edmonds (01:50)
Hello everyone. Welcome to the Real Estate Pros podcast. I am your host Q Edmonds. And listen, I am excited to be here today. I have another fantastic guest here. And listen, he’s all about asset protection. So if you got assets, perk up and listen, because he’s going to get into how to protect your assets. And I’m sure most of us watching have assets we need protected, right? And so I’m excited.to pick his brain to see things through his lens. And so for him to bring his expertise to this show, which I’m so grateful for. So I want to introduce you all to Mr. Jonathan Feniak at Mr. Jonathan. How you doing today,
Jonathan Feniak (02:31)
I’m doing great. I’m super excited to be here with you, Quentin. ⁓ Love what you all are doing, educating folks. And that’s what I do as well. Just trying to help people avoid a ruinous ⁓ event, some ruinous liability event. Hopefully get in some details here about how people can do that. But thanks for having me. Appreciate you.Quentin Edmonds (02:50)
man, thank you for being here. You’re absolutely right. You know, if we can help people along the journey, that’s what it’s all about. Right. And so again, as I said, stated before, thank you for bringing your expertise to the show. And so Mr. Jonathan, I want to dive in. I would love for you to tell people what your main focus is these days. Mr. Jonathan, you want to us a little bit of an origin story of kind of how you got into where you are. We love origin stories. And so we love that. And then, if you don’t mind, tell us what part of the world you’re in. And so we would love to know.graphically where you are. So Mr. Jonathan, sir, you got the floor, man.
Jonathan Feniak (03:22)
All right, man, we’ll try to make this quick, the elevator pitch on it. So started out, Transpac and Logistics, DHL, Airborne Express was in Manhattan as an operations manager on 9-11. Went, got my MBA. Finished that up in about 2004, 2005. Went to work at a hedge fund, investing in micro cap companies, put over $165 million with the deals together for micro caps, public, private, debt, equity, convertible.After that, I did go and became a financial advisor for Wells Fargo advisors managing high net worth portfolios for customers, advising them on building great retirements and thinking about those things. And then the ripe old age of 45 went to law school, graduated law school in 2019, took the bar, became licensed practice as a lawyer in Colorado and Wyoming.
And so that is the origin story. And then to keep going, one of the founders of a company, LLC attorney and Wyoming LLC attorney.com. form 2000 plus entities for individuals, a lot of people in real estate every month. And then moved to Puerto Rico is where I live effective in 2022 moved to Puerto Rico.
And have been here and then I have my my consulting business. So if any consulting group is I do single serving, I’m effectively a single serving attorney. Did over 800 consultations, individual consultations last year, trying to make it easy. People are pretty close to where they they need to be. And so I help them get over that.
trepidation or concern, they’re going to mess it up, help them understand what some of the costs, benefits and opportunities are when it comes to liability protection and business structuring. So that is a ⁓ lot of experience and a lot of different areas from insurance, was an insurance licensed stockbroker, as well as real world ⁓ investing, managing businesses and so on. So bring a lot to the table for my ⁓ clients.
Quentin Edmonds (06:23)
Love it, man. Thank you. Thank you for taking us through the origin journey. Thank you for the elevated pitch. Because you did. You gave me a lot in a very condensed way. And I love it. And I want to get more into what you do. But I want to get more into you, just for a little bit. Because listening to your resume, of course, like you’ve done a lot of different things. You’ve risen in a lot of different spaces. And so I have a saying where I say, destiny has no wasted moments. Meaning no matter what we go through, you like every destination, every stop.gives us something that makes us who we are today and we apply it to what we do today. And so I would love to know throughout your moments in destiny, every stop DHL hedge fund, financial advisor, when you, what, did destiny pick up? What did you pick up on these moments that kind of make you who you are today?
Jonathan Feniak (07:12)
Creating optionality was one of the things that I think is most important to not have anyone who’s got a gun to your head when it comes to your employer or it comes to your partner or whatever it is in the world or the economy, right? Do you have options? You’re always leaving yourself and outsort of like you watch a spy movie or something and one of the spies goes into the room. What are my exit points? And things, know, they’re saying, you know, burn the ships on the beach.
right? Where you’re is no other way. I have led my and I think early on there was some times where I did burn the you know, burn the ships on the beach. But as I’ve gotten older, been able to create that optionality where and the transition from being a financial advisor to a lawyer was that point. Not happy as a financial advisor didn’t like the direction of the so the whole business the whole industry as a whole and said what is it I really love and I love
the talking to people, hearing their stories and had coming up with solutions for them. And then being a lawyer really would allow me to do that. And so I had the optionality to go back to school full time, went back to law school full time, two and a half years, you graduate early, graduated top of my class, took it very seriously. And so that was the optionality though, to not work for two and a half years, you got to plan for that kind of thing, right? If you want to go back to school to retire early, whether it’s you’re doing the fire stuff or you’re, you know, just trying to build up that mailbox money, what
can someone do to make you things you don’t want to do or you have to continue when you’re not happy. People are living, know, paycheck to paycheck outside of their means. ⁓ They have no choice.
Quentin Edmonds (08:51)
Yeah, yeah, I love that word optionality. I don’t think I’ve actually heard that word. mean, heard the word, but the way you put emphasis on it, it kind of just again, you have a way of condensing things into like this one little kind of focus and the optionality. Definitely understand because people want freedom, right? People want the freedom of that time, the freedom to choose. Our time is our most precious commodity. And just listening to you, what you said impacted me in so many different ways. I’ll be 45 next year. So thinking about howAt 45, you went back to law school. I feel like at this age now, I’m ready to attack a new portion of my life, something that I see that I’ve kind of actually been running from that’s been right in front of me. it’s like, like, what have you been doing? And so I love that. And I am interested to know because you have written to success, you have reinvented yourself. If that’s OK to say, you know, taking on different identities, you are a lawyer, you are who you are now.
Has there been any adversity that you faced as you was growing to success to where you are? Have you bumped up to any adversity as you grew?
Jonathan Feniak (10:33)
Yeah, you know, coming out of law school at almost 50 years old and then, you know, but top of my class and I went to University of Denver. So regionally, you know, well respected school and then going and applying for positions, a traditional career path for a graduating attorney. Go work in the law firm. get that. You get to a clerkship, all of those things. And I was not a good fit.I’m older than the lawyers I’d be working for and have more experience. it was, I could have been, I think a great ⁓ sort of rainmaker for them. ⁓ But I was, they’re like, we want the young, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed person coming in here, not some old curmudgeonly. My wife, excuse me, been a curmudgeon, get off my lawn kind of thing. And so I had to find something different and that was the opportunity with.
Wyoming LLC attorney, ⁓ Mark and Andrew Pierce, a father and son who had started this thing and ⁓ very entrepreneurial for me getting that, you know, I call the lottery ticket, right? The ownership interest, take less money, get an ownership interest in it ⁓ as a way to, you know, do something different, but that adversity not getting the job in the traditional ⁓ lawyer.
graduating from law school, that path created this opportunity. At time I didn’t know it.
Quentin Edmonds (12:00)
Yeah.Right. But again, Destiny has no wasted moments. I clearly see it now. And it’s funny how your wife called you Comudgeon. My wife called me Henri. we got it the same one a little bit. But listen, you have done over 800 consultations. And so I guess my question is, you have people coming to you. Of course, people are interested.
What is your next main focus? Like, what are you looking to solve a scale next, Mr. Don?
Jonathan Feniak (12:30)
So there’s really there’s sort of three types of liability people have related to their investments related to their real estate, right? And you got the business liability, right? This is what an LLC is ⁓ at its core supposed to do, limit your liability. So you got a piece of real estate, put it into an LLC. If there’s an issue with the tenants, somebody sues, can they break through? Can they pierce the veil and get to you as the owner? We want to make sure that it’s very difficult for them to do that.⁓ corporate formalities, maintaining separateness of the entity. It’s got its own bank account, it pays its own way. It is respected from an entity perspective, it’s likely to be respected by the courts. So you got that kind of liability where it flows up from the entity itself or from its activities. The other kind of liability is liability that falls on your shoulders. You get in a car accident, right? If you’re a professional, you’re a doctor, a lawyer, an engineer, ⁓ those kinds of things, you can’t shake that liability off of your shoulders.
So if you are sued, they’re gonna go after your assets and are they gonna go after your real estate, right? So you’ve got that liability that flows from you that could affect your real estate, the stuff from the real estate could affect you. And then there’s the liability just sort of partners, liability related to partners. Is your partner a good partner? Bringing on partners, investing in things together. A lot of ⁓ the liability or the stress.
comes from those interpersonal relationships, managing the entities, and then taxes. Another liability people don’t think about or don’t think about enough, hopefully people listening to this do, but are you managing your taxes in the best possible way? Taking all of those things, you then say, how much is too much? people, come to me and they have huge plans. They’re going to be multimillionaires. But right now, it’s sort of like a wish or it’s a dream.
But they want to go and set up a super complex structure on day one, put a lot of cost into it. And, the analogy I make is, you know, they don’t have a Ferrari yet, but they’re going and buying brake pads for the Ferrari, wiper blades for the Ferrari, new headlands for the Ferrari, they have them sitting there. Get the Ferrari first, right? Get the Ferrari first and then build those things around it. And so sitting, you know, sort of Occam’s razor, the simpler solution is often the best. A lot of folks out there in a, you know,
on the internet are talking about you need this trust and then you need this and that and it’s like 12 different things, but the people are just starting out. I don’t recommend that they will neglect the strategy, the structure and it will lose its efficacy. So where are they in the process? And then let’s build from there. Typically entity to own the real estate, we’re talking real estate context, entity to own the real estate founded in the state in which the real estate is located above that holding company in Wyoming.
Wyoming is great for that part where if there’s a personal liability I have, can they get to my real estate? It’s also that Wyoming is great if they do pierce the veil through the entity which owns the real estate, can they get to you? Makes it very difficult. It also, from the, there’s a privacy perspective there that’s very helpful, but we start out with that. That’s the simple starting point. And then beyond that, you go, all right, well, how many properties do you have? Should you have a management company, a property management company?
that sort of removes the entities which own the real estate from some of the negligence related. You failed to shovel the sidewalk or those sorts of things. Does that fall in the management company? And then you got the next step is you go to a lending entity, right? Because you’re doing deals. Maybe you’re doing cash deals to get them done quickly. But if you go in and you own that piece of real estate, 100 % cash, all that equity is at risk. So instead, set up your own hard money lending entity, go close the deal.
And then you’ve got very little equity in it until some later date, you do a perm financing or something else. So think about that, but you got your first property, you’re buying your first thing, you don’t need all that stuff. You can even go just your single LLC in the state in which the property is located. Keep it simple, see how it goes. And then these structures are highly adaptable ⁓ and don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be.
Quentin Edmonds (17:26)
Love it. That’s kiss that kiss analogy. Keep it silly. I you know, they’re going to say steeper anybody silly silly silly I love the knowledge that you’re giving sounds like you know, your clients are definitely um, you know in a great position Connecting with you talking to you. And so I want to talk a little bit, you know a client’s Relationships, right? What is your perspective on relationships?Jonathan Feniak (17:34)
Rubbish stillQuentin Edmonds (17:56)
Has relationships served you well? Do you put a premium on building, you know, healthy relationships within your space? Tell me a little bit about relationship, even if you want to, I know you have a COO that you told me that your co-COO, that’s incredible. So even you want to talk about that relationship, but I’ll leave that up to you. But man, what is your perspective on relationship building?Jonathan Feniak (18:14)
You know, one of the things that I think there’s a lot there’s false relationships, right? And so it is a, you know, as a financial advisor or, know, what are you acting as a, you know, a salesperson where you’re becoming friends and you’re, you know, asking about their kids and all these sorts of things. And it becomes a, you know, is it just a mechanism to get more business? I’m not a fan of that, right? I want to prove myself out as delivering great advice andI view every conversation I have as, you know, this is extremely important to that person. And, but I don’t want them to pay for or have a longer relationship with me than they need to. I don’t work on retainers. Right. So, so what people do, if you go to my website, feniak.com, F E N I A K.com, you can schedule a consultation, 30 minute consultation. We get on the phone, we talk it through.
We go and figure out by the end of that call and, you know, 90 % of the time we’ve got a recommendation, arrive at a structure. Here’s how you execute on it. And if you need to talk to me again, great, right? If you don’t, that’s great too. A lot of people are repeats, right? Repeat clients, they call back. They’ve got some other issue. People calling up now, you know, because I do come at the law from a different perspective. And I tend to, as I said, I tend to be pretty negative. I do.
Uh, uh, look for, know, anytime I’m having a conversation, I’ve warned people. I’m like, look, during this call, you know, widows and orphans, busloads of them are going to die. People are going to get maimed. There’s going to be fires and you even you’re going to die, but we’ve got to talk through those things. So, um, I want to deliver what people need and when they need me, I’m there. But if you don’t need me, um, I’m not, I’m not badgering you. There’s nothing on retainer. We don’t have an ongoing relationship, uh, in, that.
Outside of that, having ongoing relationship with people who help you be a better version of yourself. In real estate, buy the smallest house on the block and with a friend group, build a friend group where you’re the smallest person in the group. Hopefully you’re adding something. They think they’re the smallest person as well. This is something in marriage where if both of you think you’re giving 70%, then you’re probably in the right spot. Being a great friend to people, but also having friends who you rely on.
for their guidance, can have honest conversations and not being afraid to say, oops, I think I screwed up. Right. And, I need, you know, how, how can you help in this area? Have you faced this somebody’s got a perfect life and hasn’t made mistakes as charmed or liars.
Quentin Edmonds (20:57)
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I love it. I love your perspective. Thank you for your honest take on relationships. And it’s interesting because I live by a similar philosophy. I don’t want you to have to depend on me. Like, I want an organic relationship with you, but I don’t want your codependency being on me. I will give you what I rely on. I’ll give you my expertise. I’ll give you what I think is going to be helpful. But at the end of the day, if this is not what’s needed, that’s actually one of the best things possible. And so I appreciate your honesty.I’m on takes. I’m up when it comes to relationship. ⁓ This has been very, very refreshing. It’s been great talking to you. Mr. Jonathan. Absolutely. If someone wanted to reach out to you, connect with you, collaborate with you, learn more about what you’re doing, how can they get in contact with you,
Jonathan Feniak (21:43)
Yep. Feniak.com, F E N I A K.com. that is where you can schedule a consultation. Got the descriptions of the consultations, you know, as a complex matter, setting up a holding company, real estate, those sorts of things. Pick the consultation type and, ⁓ it puts you on my schedule, right? That’s all there is to it. You answer some questions, you pay, and then we talk for half an hour. Sometimes you get people and they’re like, well, I’m not sure if he can offer anything with about five minutes. If we figure out I don’t have.really value to add. Refund you. Thank you very much. I couldn’t help, but you can schedule really quickly, you know, a day, sometimes the same day, to speak with me. So pressing matters, whether it’s, Hey, we got sued or Hey, we’re not sure on this big deal we’re going to do or bring on a partner. And then I do as, one of the owners of LLC attorney.com, all the things, most, almost all the recommendations and the, ⁓ sort of structuring stuff you can do.
through LLC attorney.com really reasonable prices. It’s not, you’re not paying for a lawyer to form your LLC. It’s like comparable to legal zoom prices, that kind of thing. But it makes it easy to get or execute on the plan that we arrived at.
Quentin Edmonds (22:57)
Sir, I appreciate you. want to say three things to you. One, thank you for your time. You know your time is very, very valuable. We do everything we can to get our time back. So thank you for allowing us some of your time today. I appreciate it. Two, thank you for your story. Thank you for your honesty, your authenticity. You’ve been organic. I greatly appreciate that. And lastly, thank you for your perspective, for your mindset. You have paid a lot of money.to craft your mind. thank you for bringing that mindset to this platform. I appreciate it. Thank you for being here today,
Jonathan Feniak (23:31)
And thank you very much. It was an absolute pleasure. Love talking to you. And I think you pulled some things out of me that usually don’t get pulled out of me on podcasts. I really do appreciate you. Thank you.Quentin Edmonds (23:42)
Well, that’s what makes me good at what I do. And so I appreciate you saying that, sir. So listen, y’all heard Mr. Feniak. Definitely check him out. Look at this show notes, get in contact with him. Let him protect your assets. So get in contact with him, but definitely make sure you are subscribed here because I promise you we’re going to continue to bring up amazing people just like Mr. Jonathan. So sir, thank you again. And to everyone else, y’all have a fantastic day.Jonathan Feniak (24:11)
Thank you.
