Why Promissory Note Investing Could Be Your Best Financial Move

Stephen S. (00:02.976)
Welcome back to the show where we interview the nation’s leading real estate entrepreneurs. If you’re joining us for the first time, welcome. Otherwise, welcome back. It’s your host, Stephen Schmidt, and I am here with my guest today, Jimena Cabrera. And we are going to be talking about her incredible journey in real estate coming from Argentina to Florida and what she has cooking in the hard money.

Space as well as single-family investing promissory note investing and all of the above So just remember here at investor fuel we help real estate entrepreneurs investors service providers and And others two to five X their businesses to allow them to build the businesses They’ve always wanted to allow them to live the lives. They’ve always dreamed of so with all that being said Humana We’re super excited to have you here and for our conversation. Thanks for being here

Jimena Cabrera (00:57.56)
Thank you very much, Stephen, for having me.

Stephen S. (01:00.232)
So I know we got to speak for quite a little bit here before we started recording, but tell the listeners, you have such an incredible story. Tell the listeners how you got your start in real estate and just where you came from and where you’re at now today. You’ve been all over and it looks like you’ve got some really exciting things going on now.

Jimena Cabrera (01:23.342)
Yeah, I started from Argentina. I had a uniform business and when the pandemic hit, I needed a change. So I started studying real estate and really getting passionate about it. And since I was in Argentina, I don’t know, I was thinking about what everybody needs and I can do it from here.

and started working in the States and well, everybody needs money. So I started there. Well, that was my story. Once we had the opportunity to start traveling again, I came to the States. I started networking, created my company, started with the traditional fix and flip, DSDR and all the traditional

lending in real estate. And then I started with my partners in promissory note investing.

Stephen S. (02:31.743)
Wow, that’s awesome. Now, when you say uniform company, I I know, but for our listeners, what kind of uniforms?

Jimena Cabrera (02:38.158)
Sorry, school uniforms.

Stephen S. (02:40.767)
Okay, and how did you land into owning a business making school uniforms and producing those?

Jimena Cabrera (02:47.534)
Well, it was my business. I wasn’t an entrepreneur before I started in real estate, but I think that the algorithm, Google, Google started taking me where I needed to go. I really got really passionate about real estate. So here I am.

Stephen S. (03:00.988)
Yeah.

Stephen S. (03:13.319)
Now, so for some of our listeners there, because you got that start in COVID, during COVID and the pandemic, maybe we’re not supposed to say COVID, don’t know, hopefully that doesn’t suppress the show or anything, the pandemic, we’ll just call it that. But when you were going through that change, realizing, hey, school uniforms isn’t for me, it’s not forever, how did you end up landing on real estate and deciding to do that? Was it because you could?

Jimena Cabrera (03:33.208)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen S. (03:42.877)
do it here in the States while also not necessarily physically being here when you started or what made you decide to go that route?

Jimena Cabrera (03:50.89)
No, I decided that I wanted to be in real estate and I wanted to make my first investments and be a real estate investor, but I didn’t feel so confident that I could do it from Argentina without having the possibility to travel yet. like I started, I don’t know, finding the way to start with this.

Stephen S. (04:07.155)
Mm-hmm.

Jimena Cabrera (04:19.95)
and from Argentina and then start like whatever what I really wanted that was investing in real estate. But I’m really passionate about what I do because we are helping people really accomplish their goals. So now I’m focused in promissory notes.

Stephen S. (04:30.975)
Hmm.

Stephen S. (04:49.535)
Okay, so tell me more about promissory notes and that type of investing. I think that’s one of those niches that might not be very well known within real estate. mean, most people don’t think of investing in real estate as promissory notes. So what exactly is that for our listeners? Can you explain that?

Jimena Cabrera (05:10.806)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it’s not very common. It’s like a passive way of investing in real estate. I think it’s a really good starting point and also a great point for to diversify the portfolio. And it’s basically like mimicking the bank’s strategy. You lend the money.

to people that need the money and you get an annual rate interest and at the end of that we we don’t work with long-term notes we do one to three year promissory notes so yeah so at the end of the it’s interest only and at the end of the period of the time you get the the

Stephen S. (05:56.531)
Mmm. Okay.

Jimena Cabrera (06:09.87)
principle. So we have a system that we cover all the process. We control everything. We start with the due diligence of the property. We study the title. We make sure that it has one, it may be a first position or second position. First position, there’s no other liens on the property.

Stephen S. (06:11.461)
Jimena Cabrera (06:38.094)
Second position, you have a first lien that can be a bank, for example. But we don’t exceed the 65 or 75 loan to value. So let’s say a house is worth 100K. We won’t let more than 75K on that property. And that’s like a cushion that it’s also for the safety of our investors.

Stephen S. (07:07.506)
Mmm, okay.

Jimena Cabrera (07:08.034)
So we do all the due diligence for the property, also for the borrower, of course, although it’s important that the equity and the value of the property, the one that is going to pay is the borrower. So we also request some documents from them. We don’t do a hard pull of credit or a soft pull of credit mainly because

Stephen S. (07:22.921)
Yeah.

Jimena Cabrera (07:37.78)
Most people that come to us don’t have good credits, but we make sure that they have the means to pay. Also, because if we are trying to help people, if you give money to people that don’t have the means to pay, you are not helping. are pushing them down.

Stephen S. (07:59.744)
So how do you verify they have the means to pay?

Jimena Cabrera (08:04.14)
Well, we ask them for income proof. say, sometimes people, I don’t know, they are back in their mortgage for three, four months and they have to pay all at once. So they don’t have all the money, but they have already a new job and they can start paying monthly, they can start doing monthly payments again, but the bank won’t accept that. So they need the money altogether.

Stephen S. (08:09.214)
Mmm.

Jimena Cabrera (08:34.06)
and they don’t have those savings. So that’s why they come to us and we help them out. But if they don’t have work or any income that they can prove, they can, yes, they can prove that they have the income. We try to find other solutions.

We usually find other solutions, but not lending money.

Stephen S. (09:07.999)
Now, is there like a specific guaranteed rate of return for somebody that’s gonna invest in something like that? Or tell me a little bit more about that.

Jimena Cabrera (09:15.47)
Currently we are working with 18 % annual interest and it’s all backed by with real estate. We handle all the process. We do all the documents, get the signature of the borrower. We send the mortgage or the deed of trust to the county for the record. And we also have, we,

we can guarantee also the payments in case the borrower, I don’t know, something happened and they are not paying, we guarantee the payments. The thing is that we have a good relationship with our borrowers. We usually get to other, how to say, agreements. Let’s say,

For example, we have now a lady that she was in a promissory note and her husband died. She’s a 75 year old lady with a kid. Well, it’s an adult, but has like a disability. And she’s also a 75 year old lady. And she was not able to afford the first mortgage.

Stephen S. (10:30.9)
Hmm.

Jimena Cabrera (10:40.992)
and the second mortgage. So yeah, she did the property to us and she stayed there with an agreement that she was going to pay whatever she could. We made an agreement of a monthly payment for her. So she’s now renting and we take care of the rest of the mortgages. So she’s going to be there and we can find her another solution. So that’s

Stephen S. (11:06.633)
Hmm.

Jimena Cabrera (11:10.968)
how we help someone that doesn’t have the means to pay.

Stephen S. (11:16.945)
Right. Now, so how do you how do people find you for this type of thing exactly? Generally.

Jimena Cabrera (11:23.31)
Well, yeah, we generally run marketing campaigns. We send letters to people that are, I don’t know, going through foreclosure, but we also have lots of clients that come to us because worth of month.

Stephen S. (11:30.1)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen S. (11:35.743)
Mm.

Stephen S. (11:42.291)
Really? Now, so with the promissory notes, what got you excited about starting to do those? Was it you tried it out on one deal or what made you decide, hey, this is something that makes sense, we should do this?

Jimena Cabrera (11:58.062)
Well, I started working with another company and I realized that it was something that it was really helping people through a difficult time, but also people that needed the money and did, I don’t know, they couldn’t go through a traditional loan because their credit was too low or they have high usage of the credit.

or maybe fix and flippers that they need like cashflow moving all the time and they kind of go through a traditional loan that takes, I don’t know, a couple of weeks. And I started working with this company and we started like, I started like understanding that there were different things that were not too good in the process.

And we started having different issues that I had to solve, that I had to find another way to do it. well, there I understood that my way of doing the things was different. So I decided to do it myself. And there I partnered with my two partners that they have lots of experience also in the

Loan market, one of my partners has been in residential loans first and also in real estate loans. So we are a great thing.

Stephen S. (13:47.743)
love that. when you found your partners, how did you find your partners and what made you decide to have partners instead of doing it all on your own?

Jimena Cabrera (13:55.982)
Well, this is a team work. It’s too much work between underwriting, the due diligence, the documents. It’s better to do it in working with a team. I found them in the networks event that I started to go and I started…

Stephen S. (14:16.692)
Mm.

Jimena Cabrera (14:24.684)
like connecting and first started working with the other group of people and there I met my two partners.

Stephen S. (14:33.809)
Awesome. So that also even goes to speak to how important networking is and actually like being able to go to events, right?

Jimena Cabrera (14:41.388)
Well, yeah, I’m an introvert. I did. Yeah, I really had to work on that and understand that. I’m from Argentina. It’s not my language. I’m an introvert. So going somewhere to speak in another language with people that I don’t know in places that I didn’t know. Sometimes I didn’t know. It was a…

Stephen S. (14:46.433)
really?

Jimena Cabrera (15:10.446)
I don’t know, stressful, where I parked my car? What if I park here and I cannot park here and then I don’t have my car? Everything was like a challenge for me. But networking, you have to work on your skill.

Stephen S. (15:25.257)
Yeah.

Stephen S. (15:32.159)
Sure, well, I don’t know if I believe you on that whole story of you being an introvert. I don’t know if I can get behind that.

Jimena Cabrera (15:39.101)
Absolutely, I have to, no, you have to believe me. I have to bring my husband here to tell you that how introverted I am. I’m the kind of girl that after a network event, I need to close all the windows and go to sleep in quiet.

Stephen S. (15:54.944)
man, I hear you there. Yeah, so it’s just you have such a great personality that I would have never guessed that. I think most of us are ambiverts, right? Have you ever heard that term before? An ambivert?

Jimena Cabrera (16:01.471)
Thank you.

You

Jimena Cabrera (16:09.902)
No, but I…

Stephen S. (16:12.243)
So because we have our preferences, right? Because I lean towards extroversion, but I also there’s situations where I’m very introverted. And I guess my point is, is an ambivert is you’re a mix of them both in the sense where like if you were with your best of friends, right? And it’s you two or three hanging out together. Chances are conversations going to be lively. It’s always going to it’s going to you’re going to be as extroverted as possible. Right. So you’re extroverted in those situations.

Jimena Cabrera (16:18.018)
Mm-hmm.

Hmm.

Jimena Cabrera (16:38.158)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen S. (16:39.165)
Whereas situations where you gotta park the car, I’m not gonna have the car, like all of those, then you might actually be more introverted and it takes energy from you, But still, I love this story, that’s so great. And really what it speaks to is it speaks to one thing that I think most people aren’t willing to do, and that’s to get out of their own way and just start and not be perfect.

Jimena Cabrera (16:43.009)
I’m sorry.

Jimena Cabrera (16:48.363)
No.

Stephen S. (17:07.241)
but you overcame your own fears and we’re able to get going and look at where it’s brought you today.

Jimena Cabrera (17:16.5)
Yeah, absolutely. It was these five years were incredibly challenging for me in every sense that you can imagine. But it’s really true what you’re saying. It’s important to start. It doesn’t matter if it’s not perfect. It’s not going to be perfect. It’s not going to be. The important thing is that you have

Stephen S. (17:18.655)
Yeah.

Stephen S. (17:28.979)
Mm.

Jimena Cabrera (17:45.71)
At least 1 % better every day. I heard yesterday, think that I heard, I cannot remember the book I’m reading that said that the 100 % rule that you need to get 1 % better every day so you reach the 100%. So that’s important thing. Start.

Stephen S. (17:49.854)
Mmm.

Stephen S. (18:02.548)
Mm-hmm.

Stephen S. (18:12.212)
Mm.

Jimena Cabrera (18:15.328)
whatever you want to do, start. You’re going to suck. Absolutely, you’re going to suck. It’s not going to be good, it’s not going to be perfect, it’s going to be horrible. But learn from it and keep going.

Stephen S. (18:15.902)
Yeah.

Stephen S. (18:30.559)
because eventually you’ll get good. But you won’t get good if you don’t start.

Jimena Cabrera (18:32.589)
Mm-hmm.

Jimena Cabrera (18:36.844)
That’s the same. You don’t have to be great to start, but you have to start to be great.

Stephen S. (18:45.277)
You bet, love that. Now, so for anybody that’s looking to get started, what advice would you have to somebody that’s wanting to get into the space that does what you do? Maybe from some of the mistakes you made in the beginning, or what would you say is the best advice you would give to someone looking to be a real estate investor or to do maybe even some of the things that you do with promissory note investing?

Jimena Cabrera (19:11.918)
Well, for anything that you want to do, what I would say is get a mentor, start learning and then start. Do it imperfectly, but do it. And that’s for anything in your life, whatever you want to do, that’s the best thing, the best way to go. And for real estate promissory notes, you can contact me and I can

Stephen S. (19:35.677)
Hmm.

Jimena Cabrera (19:41.39)
tell you whatever you need to know and all my knowledge I can share to anyone to understand this business. It’s pretty simple and secure. So, and we handle all the process. So whatever you don’t know, I’m here to help you and make you understand. I really take this business really personal.

have a close relationship. I’m in the customer relationship area and the post and the servicing. So I have a very good relationship with all our investors and borrowers. So that’s what I do. I always try to be clear in everything and try to explain at the best what they can do with their possibilities and try to help.

Stephen S. (20:40.415)
Why do you think that mentorship is so important? It’s one of the things that you just mentioned. Why do think that’s so important for anybody doing anything?

Jimena Cabrera (20:54.082)
Well, because sometimes today we have a lot of possibilities with mentorships and that will help you to go a little bit faster. It’s not that you cannot do it by yourself, but it’s always better when you start doing things in a group with somebody that can guide you, somebody that is doing what you want to do. And

Stephen S. (21:06.537)
Mmm.

Jimena Cabrera (21:22.592)
Maybe he went through the challenges that you are going to go through. And that’s really important because you can speed up your learning. And maybe you go faster.

Stephen S. (21:40.221)
Yeah,

Jimena Cabrera (21:42.124)
And we have lots of options. You can start with something that it’s inexpensive like YouTube. can start YouTube with like high school, the, I don’t know, high school, say university. Absolutely. Networking, it’s, no, no, you can start learning whenever, wherever you

Stephen S. (21:50.888)
Right.

Sure.

Stephen S. (21:57.408)
or even go into like a local REI, a local real estate investing association meeting or something like that. It doesn’t have to be complicated.

Jimena Cabrera (22:12.492)
You go, you can start learning, but start with someone.

Stephen S. (22:14.515)
Yeah, absolutely. Love that. And as humans, we crave being in community with other people. So it allows us to also sometimes get out of our own way and be able to have somebody to bounce the things off of that has been there potentially before we have. So that way when we are about to make a mistake, we can sometimes course correct. So that way the pain of learning isn’t as great either. So.

Jimena Cabrera (22:36.77)
Mm-hmm.

Absolutely. Yes.

Stephen S. (22:42.321)
So tell me this Humana. So if you could go back to when you got started and you could like really put yourself in the shoes of where you were at searching for something more than than what you were currently doing and you found real estate lending, you know, et cetera. If you could go back then, but take

what you know now and you could do it all over again. What would you do different and what would you do the same?

Jimena Cabrera (23:17.838)
The same, I would absolutely do all the mentorship that I did. I invested a lot in mentorship. And different thing, I would be a little bit more…

Jimena Cabrera (23:45.622)
I tend to trust a lot in people and in some ways I think that…

Stephen S. (23:49.375)
Hmm.

Jimena Cabrera (23:57.23)
I have to be a little bit more cautious in that sense. I had bad experiences with some mentors that I trusted, people that I trusted. For example, my first immigration lawyer, it was a disaster.

Stephen S. (24:03.391)
Hmm.

Stephen S. (24:24.232)
really?

Jimena Cabrera (24:26.442)
a disaster and it took me like a whole year of, I don’t know, being like crying every day until I finally found another one. But I think that I would be a little bit more cautious in my trust with people because…

You have to be very, very cautious. There’s a lot of mentorships, there are a lot of people that trying to teach and they are not so good. But if you do your due diligence and try to understand that not everything is gold, I don’t know how to say that in English. In Spanish you say, not everything that shines, it’s gold.

Stephen S. (25:22.867)
Yeah, for sure. I understand what you’re saying. Yeah. How do you say it in Spanish? You might as well say it in Spanish. Maybe there’s that one person that’ll know what you’re saying. Okay, all right. Well, someone else, y’all can translate that for me later.

Jimena Cabrera (25:24.398)
Okay.

Not all that shines is gold.

Jimena Cabrera (25:37.996)
Stephen S. (25:40.518)
It sounds better in Spanish too. I mean, I don’t know. I we should probably just say that. Yeah, it sounds better to me. Man, it just flows. I love it. So essentially, essentially it sounds like to kind of maybe help with with pinning it down to like one thing. There’s there’s actually a movie. Have you ever heard of The Italian Job? That movie by any chance? OK, so so there’s a line in the movie.

Jimena Cabrera (25:43.273)
Really?

Okay.

Jimena Cabrera (26:03.618)
No. No.

Stephen S. (26:07.581)
where basically they’re thieves. They do heists and they ironically steal gold and whatever else. it’s a really, really interesting movie. But there’s a scene in the beginning right before the thieves basically get double crossed by one of the people that they just did a big bank. They stole a safe, right? And they’re about to get double crossed. And in that, the old man in the movie before, he of course gets shot in the beginning and it’s a whole thing. But he said, he goes,

I trust everyone, I just don’t trust the devil inside them. I’ve, that is single-handedly the one movie quote of anything I’ve ever seen that has stuck with me because that’s how I think I am too. Because I have that tendency as well, like to just naturally trust that people are, you know, good for their word and that they’re saying what might be may not actually be that way. And so, you know, it’s, I even myself have a…

Jimena Cabrera (26:40.962)
Absolutely.

Stephen S. (27:06.135)
have a caution when I go through life of, you know, understanding that I do want to see the good in people, but I also understand that like some like if someone is a snake, like it’s sometimes not even their fault. Snakes are meant to bite, right? How do you go about avoiding that?

Jimena Cabrera (27:22.818)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, absolutely.

Jimena Cabrera (27:28.686)
Well, now I have, I think that I found my people. So, yeah. And it took me what it took me. I learned a lot and I start like reading people and being in another country with different communication codes and everything.

Stephen S. (27:38.196)
Love it.

Jimena Cabrera (27:59.286)
Again, it’s not my strength, the communication. So I needed to learn a lot, but I did. I fortunately find my people and I feel safe and I know who to ask whenever I need information or advice or whatever. And now I can be more like sense.

the spirit or the light in that person.

Stephen S. (28:34.621)
Yeah, sure. You bet. Love that. Well, hey man, thank you so much for joining us today. If anybody wants to learn more about you, what you’re working on, get connected, where should they go?

Jimena Cabrera (28:50.367)
Well, my company is at Open Door Living without the G, the final G. Or if not, yeah.

Stephen S. (28:57.663)
So, living.

Awesome. Keep going. Where else are you on social media? LinkedIn?

Jimena Cabrera (29:02.668)
That’s my company.

Jimena Cabrera (29:06.89)
yeah, and my personal one is Jimena Cabrera, official.

Stephen S. (29:14.335)
Awesome. Perfect. Well, folks, you heard it here first. Go get connected and everyone, I hope you enjoyed today’s show and we will see you on the next episode. Humana, thank you again so much for being here. We’ll see y’all then.

Jimena Cabrera (29:25.838)
Thank you very much. Bye.