This podcast has been removed. Here in the FI Garage, we’re all on the path to FI, however, we consider the RE part optional. #FIRE
Now on YouTube!! Check out our channel for bonus content and please subscribe.
Beers – [2:30]
- Steamworks Lager
- Biere Sans Alcool
- The Mechanics Homemade Cider [3:00]
Enjoying the FI Garage podcast? Support our show by using our referral links or buying us a BEER from our Cheers page!
Hey Guys,
This was a great podcast and something my wife and I have been looking for since we sold out AirBNB cottage. We love buying and investing in properties but hate dealing with the renters. This idea is perfect for us!
We are still doing all our homework but if we do buy or fund a flip how can we thank you? Do you have a referral link to epic Alliance? We want to make sure you guys get your $1000 as we would never of heard of this if it wasn’t for your podcast.
Thank you all so much.
Cheers 🍻
Hey Gary,
Right on, I’m glad we could introduce you to an investment that might work well for your situation. Thanks for offering to use our referral, I will split it with Eunice to help fund her cross Canada bike trip!! I’m email you with the details. Cheers, MM
Look at us creating win-win-win-win solutions! I appreciate spreading the word and the wealth! I will definitely raise a glass with you, Gary, and the Mechanic in celebration.
Yes, It’s all about helping and sharing in the FI community!!
MM – seeing as how you borrowed the 20% from your HELOC are you employing the Smith Manoeuvre to maximize the financial impact? This is something my wife and I are discussing if we invest with Epic Alliance. Essentially if we take the 20% + closing costs from our HELOC we can get the tax credit from the interest incurred on the HELOC, pay down our mortgage faster using the cash flow from the EPIC rental using the SM (saving mortgage interest), invest the newly created room on the HELOC (index funds) and do it all with none of my own money. Thoughts?
Hey J,
Well as I always like to point out, there’s a difference between the SM and leveraged investing. For my situation, I am leveraging the 20% + closing costs. The cash flow I get from EPIC does not ‘specifically’ pay my mortgage. I don’t get too specific with where things go. I have monthly ‘profits’ and monthly ‘expenses’, it’s all one big account for me. I will be keeping the HELOC total and just pay the interest.
I like your plan though, you leverage for the purchase of the rental, then pay down your mortgage with the extra cash flow, then re-borrow the room you have created for index funds. This is the SM, and I think if it works for your overall financial plan, it’s a winner. Just make sure you track all the money movements, and keep records and dates. Happy to chat more about this if you want to zoom sometime. Remember to use Eunice as a referral so we can help fund her bike trip across Canada!! Cheers, MM
Thanks for the reply MM, I’ll send you some background info via email, I may take you up on the Zoom offer as it’s always good to get another perspective on potential investments. I’m also a novice home brewer with about ten 20L brews under my belt on the Brewzilla – I know you and the boys are getting into home brewing so we could chat a bit about that too if you like.
Yes! we’d love to compare notes on the Brewzilla. I just brewed the 4th batch last night. We could definitely use some help fine tuning our execution. I bottled the first batch that we fermented in the Fermzilla yesterday too, so I’m interested to see how that does. Sounds like you’re an honorary member of the FI Garage, talking investments and beer!
Loved this podcast and have done a bit of research with Epic. I was just wondering if you put into account being taxed on the 15% which is obvious but do you also get taxed on the principle paid down? And with Epic receiving all the money from the principle paid down and you being taxed on that, what would the return would be? Thanks for podcast.
Hi Sean,
You bring up an excellent point. One that we completely neglected to mention in the podcast. (I’m going to edit a section in) I have to admit my ignorance to this as I haven’t dealt with the tax consequences of RE investment before. As I understand it now Epic pays you a lump sum every month. That sum is the total of your mortgage payment, property tax, insurance, and the 15%. At the end of the year, for taxes, you will have the 15% return taxed, and the amount of principal paydown on the mortgage taxed. Unfortunately you are not seeing any of that paydown returned to you, so the result will be a reduction in your rate of return. I did some basic math on my situation, and after taxes that 15% is more like 8% net. As always it’s important for people to do their own due diligence and make sure they understand their investments.
Cheers,
MM
Thanks for the reply and clearing that up! Cheers
Hey MM,
Now that some time has passed would you still recommend the Epic alliance option? Would you purchase multiple properties with them in the future?
Also, isn’t the house Insurance and property Tax a write-off on your taxes with rental property income? If so, this would boost your ROI.
Thanks,
Kyle
Hi Kyle,
Yes I would still recommend EA. I think the single house for higher purchase price is the better option, but they have a promo on right now that offers 17% on houses below $250k. At least I think it’s below $250, anyway the math on that might work out. Yes, you do write off the property tax and insurance. We’re going to record a short follow up to this episode with some things I didn’t think about as far as taxes go. Anyway, all in for my $400k house, my annualized after tax return is 9%. That does not include the cost of borrowing no my HELOC. Feel free to email me with specific questions, I’ve been working through this with a few other listeners that are interested.
Cheers,
MM
Hi Money Mechanic,
Big fan of both your podcasts! I’m seriously considering investing with EA and am wondering why you chose the HFLP instead of funding a flip at 10% return. You mentioned in the comments above that after taxes etc. you net ~9% with the HFLP, any idea what the ROI might be on a flip after tax considerations?
Hey Jules,
Thanks for listening to the shows! I went with the HFLP because I already have private lending and wanted a little more diversification. With the HFLP I own the house, and potentially could keep it, or choose to keep and sell it at my discretion. The 10% return on the fund a flip would only make sense if it is tax sheltered with TFSA or RRSP. The ninja flip is a pretty cool concept, but I just don’t have the funds in the right place at the moment. Without actually running the numbers, which you should do if you’re considering any investment, for my situation borrowing to invest in the flip would be around 4.9%. Feel free to shoot me an email if you want to chat further about the EA options. Cheers,MM
Ah I see. Thanks for the response. From cursory calculations, the fund a flip seems like it’ll work better for me. I’ll be booking a discovery call with Rochelle from EPIC to find out more. In one of the online EPIC videos, Rochelle mentioned that there is a referral bonus for new investors. Since I learned about EPIC through you, it would only make sense for you to have the bonus! How do we make that work? Can I just tell them the Money Mechanic sent me?
Hey Jules, Thanks for offering to mention us. Let them know you heard about the Fund a Flip from FI Garage. Cheers! Hope it’s the right investment for you. I think it’s good if you can use your RRSP or TFSA and ninja it.
MM
Really interesting podcast! Thanks for sharing!
I’m curious if payments/communication are still running smoothly from epic alliance?
I’d tried contacting them through their site and didn’t get a response. When I did some more looking it seemed like their socials hadn’t been updated since February and there were quite a few broken things on their site.
Hope that they are just busy making deals and haven’t disappeared on you! 😉
Hi Matthew,
Your comment on Epic is timely!!! They apparently are having some issues with the FCAA and have a court hearing pending. I don’t know what that is all about, but we suspect it is because they may have been considered (by the province) to be a private REIT, yet not having registered as such, there are questions. Prior to this I was fully on board with Epic and my investment there has been hassle free. We’ll just have to wait and see how this plays out. As I said, the worst case is I end up owning a house in Saskatoon. I’m okay with that.
Thanks for the response!
Hope it all works out for you! If you need someone to check on your house in stoon let me know :p
Awesome, are you offering to be my property manager?! LOL
Hope you’re used to the weather. You invested in a ponzi scheme that laid off 60% of their staff this week.
Having seen the inside of the typical property they manage, You’re probably going to be lucky to be returned a moderately crack den west side house. That is, assuming you aren’t one of the people left holding the bag when it all shakes out.
Best of luck. I legitimately mean that, but I’d talk to your lawyer and make sure you know your options.
Hey Vince,
What’s your connection? How have you been inside the houses? I’m sure there are some investors who would like to hear more about what ‘inside’ scoop you have. As far as I’m concerned I own a house on the east side Brevoort area. I always acknowledged that the biggest risk was the company (EPIC) itself. You’re right, perhaps it will be worst case scenario and I will be the owner of a rental which will need property management. I knew that going in, and am fine with it. I guess we’ll just have to wait and see how everything shakes out.
Former employee using a fake name because I don’t feel like being sued. I called the company being a scam on my second day working for them, and chose to get out early specifically because I assumed this was going to be a thing eventually.
And just to say it up front, I don’t blame the investors, regular staff or people who got suckered. When I say best of luck I don’t mean that sarcastically. I hope you come out of this clean, because the shitty thing is that I know a lot of people aren’t going to. I’ve seen the normal mom and pop investors come in, and it sucks to know someone is probably going to lose their life savings over this.
I’ve been inside probably about 1/3 of their owned properties, and dealt with a substantial number of their wonderful tenants. Not to disparage the poor, but when your business model is low-cost properties in the worst neighborhood in the city, you’re going to end up with bad tenants.
When you end up with bad tenants you end up with destroyed properties. Almost every eviction (~3-4 a month) ended with a property that had taken thousands of dollars worth of damage. Broken windows, destroyed fixtures, holes in walls.
Drug use is common enough that all staff were promised (but rarely issued) puncture proof gloves to deal with needles. Pest issues were omnipresent, as is squatting in vacant properties. They have (sorry, had) a seven man staff to inspect vacant properties, and a four man staff to rent properties and deal with tenants.
As of October, houses in the Saskatoon market were 55% vacant. Of the 45% that were occupied, (~250 homes) about 60 were at least one month delinquent on rent. So of 600 properties, a bit under 200 are occupied with paying tenants. This is slightly below average, but I don’t think I saw them break 50% occupied and paying in the time I was there.
You run an investment podcast, so I’m sure you can do the money math behind their business model and see the issue. Hundreds of vacant properties the company is paying mortgages, insurance, taxes, utilities and investment returns on. Using just absolute back of the envelope math, each vacant house probably costs the company at least $1,500 a month. At 300 properties that is half a million in liquid losses every month, even if they recoup the mortgage portion of that when the term on the agreement expires. The remaining 200 properties probably don’t even break even, even with tenants paying.
It’s why they had to fire the majority of their staff. They can’t afford to pay them. Their entire business model relied on a steady source of new investors to pay out existing debts and debtors, you know, like a ponzi scheme does. The cease trade order stopped the gears of the machine from turning, and now it is just a question of when it collapses and who is left holding the bag when it does. I genuinely don’t know if they’d be able to stay in business if the order were lifted tomorrow, let alone in six months like it is being asked.
Bright news for you.
The Nutana (brevoort) houses they have aren’t too bad. Unless it is one of the ones that is going to be stuck mid-renovation when they go out of business, which is like… half the ones on that side of town. I know you get a monthly report card, thing, so unless they’re just entirely faking those (which I don’t put past them at all, but hope isn’t the case), if your house isn’t in renovation you’re probably good.
Anyone with a house halfway through the flip is going to be left up shit creek. Anyone with a property on the west side of the city should be contacting their lawyers immediately to see what options, if any, they are going to have. It sounds nice to be a hassle free landlord on paper, but a lot of people are going to be shocked when they find themselves having to manage a house on ave n s occupied by seven gang members, none of whom are on the lease, with no damage deposit and $30,000 in structural damage because the tenants set the basement on fire but didn’t tell the company or the fire department.
If you are really curious I could go on.
Whoops, looks like the website ate my formatting
Wow, that is quite the report. Thanks for sharing all of that. Definitely hope that things don’t turn out that bad for people. I really had no doubt that cash flow was an issue with the underlying business model, but it was hard to judge how close to the ‘end’ the situation was. I will maintain hope but plan for the worst. Any suggestions for a property manager??
Be great to have you on the podcast for a short episode if you’re interested. You can email me at mechanic@figarage.ca
You are probably a bit hesitant towards similar programs from this experience but I wanted to raise another real estate investment program that I’ve been invested in for almost 10 years in Ontario to your attention. Generally, they buy up apartment buildings and convert them to condominiums to sell each unit individually to their investor base. They are the property manager of the building and you pay condo fees, property tax, mortgage, etc. They are also your tenant and will sublet the unit out to an actual tenant. There’s about a $100 monthly fee for this arrangement on top of the above fees. Unlike Epic you get to keep the appreciation and mortgage pay down of the property when/if you sell. The company is called The Simple Investor and they have a YouTube channel with some old webinars that can provide more information (skip to the last 15-20 mins for when he explains their program).
Thanks for letting us know about this program. I watched the introductory video and scanned the website. A few things jump out at me, there’s definitely less risk, as you are just collecting your cash flow after expenses, no promise to pay additional. But why not just buy a property and have a manager? I’d also have to look at how comparable their selling price is to market. It’s worth more investigation if you want to be invested in Condo’s. Personally I would rather have single family homes or own part of the whole building. What do you think is the biggest risk with their program?
Cheers,
MM
Why not just buy and hire a PM: The initial agreement with them lasts for two years and then I believe there’s an option for you to begin to be more hands-on after that initial period. Personally I feel a higher sense of risk doing my own research on locations and properties as I in no way consider myself a real estate expert. There’s an element of trust I place in this company to do that research and execute the conversion/renos needed based on their experience and reputation. I’m not sure the cost of a property manager but their ~$100 monthly fee seems reasonable to me. They manage the entire building and most if not all of the units so I would assume that fee is somewhat competitive given they’re on site.
I also use my properties to implement the cash flow dam and and will burn through the rest of my primary residence as a result. Like I said, I’m no expert and would not be involved in real estate If not for this program so there’s indirect value to me there.
Condo vs Single Family: For me this is a way to add leverage to my portfolio with cheap credit and less about cash flow (as long as I’m not in the red). If I did the same in my stock portfolio I’m more at risk of being margin called due to movement in the market than I am if the debt is secured by property. So whether it’s a condo or single family doesn’t really matter to me. What’s the reason for your preference for single family or ownership in the building?
Risks: Similar in Epic, business risk is a big one. The rents are marketed as “guaranteed” which is always a term I roll my eyes at. However if something DID happen then I own the unit and can sell or hire a property manager. Another one which is less of a risk and more of a hidden fee is that, because they are your tenant, you’re only getting 1%-1.5% rent increases per year whereas they can sublet at a higher amount per our agreement. Therefore my rent is perpetually under market and the effect of this will only compound over time.
What happened to Epic Alliance?
I was impressed and interested in getting involved with them.
In Nov they had to cease activity. After that was lifted they indicated they were looking for $10 million.
Now they’ve gone dark. rentPerks has posted a youtube video that seems to indicate Epic Alliance is bankrupt and rentPERKs will manage some of the Epic Alliance portfolio. Can you shed some light on this? Were you able to arrange a short podcast with Vince Caro?
Hi D&C
Yes, EPIC is indeed bankrupt. They have turned over all properties to the owners, in various states of repair. I haven’t arranged anything with Vince yet, there are legal issues to be worked out and I don’t want to cause any problems for property owners. Stay tuned for a full update on the show in the future.
Cheers, MM
I have to bite down on the worst of my personal opinion, as I wouldn’t want to get MM in trouble, but I can give you a short and sweet version if you’d like and MM approves the comment.
The simple version is they had no money because their business was (in my opinion) not legitimate. Now what form that ultimately takes is up in the air (and again I have my opinion and have had it for quite some time) but the simple fact is that they were a business kept running by new investors.
This was baked into everything about their growth strategy. They always needed to be expanding, always needed new buyers, new properties etc. As soon as that stopped, in their case with the temporary FCAA hold in Nov, their business model fell apart. They canned half their staff the week after the FCAA order went up because they couldn’t afford to pay them, and brought back a lot of them under insulting pay cuts. Every person working there knew that it was a matter of when, not if, the company would go under.
As to the why, well I broke it down somewhat in my earlier post but think of it this way. They have ~300 vacant properties in Saskatoon. Their own marketing materials broke down the cost to them like this (more or less):
Rent -1200
Utilities -200
Taxes – 100
Insurance – 100
Round it down for simplicities sake (and assume their numbers are valid, which they ain’t) and you should see the problem. 300 x 1500. $450,000 in cash losses. Every. Single. Month. $5.5 million in losses every year. Staff alone adds probably another $2 million. Then costs for repair and renovation I can’t even guess at but say $1.5 million. Even if every single house they had left was breaking even, they somehow need to recover effectively 18 million (9 million over two years) in losses through principle payments on 600 houses. They were not paying down $15,000 in principle over two years. Not even close. Their business was losing money, they were just pulling in enough consistent new investment in order to obscure that.
What would you call that? I couldn’t possibly say.
And the houses they did have were getting consistently trashed due to their policy of renting to essentially anyone with a pulse. At least 50 of those 300 houses needed to be completely gutted. Another 100 needed serious repair work. I’m sad to hear that they’ve gone back to the owners because there are going to be a few hundred people who thought they had nice investment properties who just found out they have bedbug infested crack dens.
I hadn’t heard that they were asking around for $10 million, but I’m glad no one was stupid enough to flush their money down the toilet.
Put simply, never invest in anything that promises you double digit guaranteed returns. It is a scam. I get how people were suckered into Epic, because the owners could spin a good tale and make it look like it worked on the surface, but from parallel to the company (I knew people who worked there before I did) I was skeptical, and I think I knew from day two that the business they were running was never going to be sustainable. When I left the company I gave them two years at best, and they lasted less than one.
Hi Vince*
I invested in Epic and would love to chat with you. Could you email me your contact details. I lost a ton of money. amrita.dhanji@gmail.com
Amrita
And this is why you deal with registered brokers…this was a scam from the beginning and shame on you for recommending EPIC on your podcast to begin with.
If this was a scam from the beginning, it definitely fooled 1000s of investors, not just us. I don’t give them credit to be smart enough to engineer this. Regardless, I do regret recommending them and have since deleted that episode.