The Truth About Financial Independence for Canadians

Hello and welcome to the Oliver Manalese show with your guest Erwin Szeto. LOL. This episode is something different.  My old friend Oliver Manalese, one of the most successful rent to own investors I know asked me to be his first return guest on his show.  Oliver is a good guy, his business is to coach people through their problems, many self inflicted. I joked with Oliver when booking our intervi...

Hello Wealth Hackers!! Welcome to the Truth About Real Estate Show!! If you’ve ever felt like an underdog or that project or investment you wanted to start looks insurmountable then please just think of this podcast. Everyone and everything starts from the bottom. If you did me the displeasure of listening to the first few episodes of this show, you know how bad it was.  I was nervous like heck, I...

On to this week’s show which has been a year in the making! Rachel Oliver is an award-winning investor and co-host of Mothers of Real Estate TV Show. After 20 years in the corporate world, Rachel retired from the rat race to spend more time with her family and invest in Rent to Own properties. Today, she is affectionately known as the “cashflow queen” because she helps investors profit with Rent t...

This week’s guest is a real estate investor who received media attention east of Toronto. Alex Kouramanis is real estate investor from Toronto, specializing in the Wholesale and Flipping strategies in markets throughout Ontario. He has been investing for over 6 years, with the last 2 years being full time. In addition to investing, he is an online educator on Udemy and Skillshare, teaching Real Es...

“Christian Szpilfogel started as a hobby investor in 2005 in the Ottawa area and, with Chaunei Chan, converted the hobby into a full time business in 2017. Originally they would acquire cash-flowing Multi Unit Residential (MUR) buildings and ride the market but this has been refined into a more focused forced appreciation strategy including MUR renovations, expansions and new builds. Their early d...

Speaking of short term rentals, Mr Sve Pavic uses AirBnb as part of his repertoire in his rental hacking.  He is the CEO of RentalHacker.com and LUX Rentals. Sve’s a young man who’s already spent an extended period of time in Costa Rica with wife and young daughter while operating his rental portfolio from there.  What’s interesting about Sve’s story is how he’s implemented several strategies: roo...

On to this week’s guest! Just wow, my mind is blown. I was introduced to Ryan Poole, Founder of Real Trade after I posted on Facebook in search of an expert on BlockChain and real estate and what do you know, Ryan’s Major Goal: To combine blockchain technology with real estate to revolutionize the real estate industry for the better and he’s rolling it out in phases including a globalized version...

Hello fellow wealth hackers!! How do you convince someone to invest in real estate? This was a question I was asked while on a podcast which caught me off guard as I generally don’t try to convince anyone actively as I in I don’t tell someone to their face they should invest in real estate but maybe I should because that’s my exact advice to my family. My cousin Christopher is about to turn 19 and...

Hello Wealth Hackers and welcome to another episode of the truth about real estate investing. Happy birthday to my partner in business and life Cherry Chan !! She’s a Super Woman in how she raises our kids, keeps me and my businesses in order and has her own thriving practice. Quick funny story about Cherry: while she was still working in corporate, we were dating then and she would surf the MLS a...

Hello Wealth Hackers!!   If you missed the last episode, I shared how family and I were enjoying the weather on our back deck then we stood there powerless to watch a family of five skunks scramble to hide under my shed.   I love animals as much as the next person, I’ve had two dogs before, I teach my kids to respect all life, when an electrician was upgrade the service to my home, they left a spa...

On to this week’s guest!! She is not a real estate investor yet but she really wants to be but please don’t hate on her or my this podcast as she has many dynamo investors as best friends such as guests of this show Ian Szabo and Dion Beg, and maybe one day guest Brian Scrone who is a what I call, a centurian investor have owned over 100 investment properties in Florida.   Why I brought Shauna on...

Onto this week’s guest, my friend, client, and my go to guy on construction. This interview was triggered by hearing interviews on other podcast by beginner developers which is totally cool. Sharing is awesome and I wanted someone with mastery level experience to come on this show to share on developing and building houses. That brings us to Steve Ford who has 12 years experience in construction a...

On to this week’s guest! For those with sights on bigger projects, Shane Melanson does exactly that! Shane started like many investors do with single family homes, did a few flips, progressed to commercial real estate including trailer parks, developing industrial condos and retail plazas. Other than tackling these very large and complex 7-8 figure projects is Shane’s path to become a commercial e...

Do you golf? I used to think golf was an inefficient use of time and poor exercise. I used to think of golf like fishing, or darts. It’s a great hobby to do with friends but my investor friends more and more have convinced me golf is great for networking and meeting fellow entrepreneurs so I bought a set of clubs and giving it go. 🏌️‍♂️But I suck at golf. Even w/ a few mulligans i shot at 139 incl...

Congratulations Toronto and Canada, we are the champions!! We did it!! History was made so I may have taken more liberties than I normally do in my conservative, boring life.  I like boring, I like being at home and going to bed early, and I’m glad life can finally get back to normal with less late nights and stress replaced by more family time, more sleep, more martials arts and Crossfit.  Life i...

Have you been following the Raptors? Secretly I’m hoping all the hoopla ends soon so my early to bed lifestyle can get back to normal :) Speaking of Raptors, my all time favourite Raptor player Vince Carter has some kinda words to share about our upcoming Wealth Hacker Conference. Like Vince says, we including the leader of the 10X movement, Grant Cardone.  On November 9th, 2019 at the Toronto Con...

Hello wealth hacker nation! As our regulars know, I converted one of my single family homes from being rented to students to AirBnb after an awful experience with one tenant and then dealing with the pro tenant, Landlord Tenant Board Tribunal. Good friends of mine who have much experience with short term rentals told me how great the tenant profile is vs. long term tenants.  Guests of short term r...

What does work/life balance mean to you? I make it no secret that I take Sunday’s off as Sunday is recovery from Raptors Game 6 Series clincher AND Sunday Family Day!! For all you entrepreneurs out there seeking balance I have no idea what balance is. What I do know is no one likes working on Sundays so it’s a good day to take off. Note I’ve been a young hustler for over a decade and my business a...

Did you hear about the major happenings this week?  The Toronto Raptors won back to back home games in the NBA Playoffs vs. the Goliath like Milwaukee Bucks.  My wife got us tickets and took me out for date night and it was awesome. In other big awesome news, I was finally allowed to share our big fat secret I’ve been dying to share for the last three weeks.  That’s when we signed our keynote spea...

This is the biggest, craziest thing I’ve ever done. Bigger than buying a house without conditions, without seeing it, without my wife’s permission while we had another house vacant and undergoing renovations. The feeling is more like that combined with skydiving, bungee jumping, hangliding, competing in martial arts, and public speaking in front of 600+ investors. Everything I’ve done in my life a...

To be clear, my financial position and goals are different than most, I’m looking for 30% returns from my investments.  My overriding principle is the investment you do is better than the investment you don’t. If I never lost 40-60% of my stock portfolio during the last major recession, I would never have given my full focus to real estate and the money I lost in stocks is pennies compared to the...

Have you seen The Avengers Endgame?!? We did just last night and holy cow!! I won’t share any spoilers but I will share that I'm a superhero movie fan.  I’m wearing my Iron Man shirt as we speak, I’ve watched every Marvel Universe movie minimum twice, some three or more times. I’m so nerd, I caught pretty much every inside joke intended for those who watched the past movies including Hulk a Hulka...

How goes your balancing act with life, work, investing and charity? Last week for us was definitely pushed our limits to the edge.  My wife and I are parents to a three and five year old, Cherry is in her final stretch for tax season doing Accounting to over 100 local real estate investors, our charity for which Cherry is VP Finance and I am President had one of our three major events this past we...

What is the deal with AirBnb rentals and short term rentals? First off I’d like to thank everyone for leaving their reviews on itunes results in this show being one of the top investment podcasts in all of iTunes.  If you have any constructive feedback or questions please send them in and not write them in a less than 5 star review. We received a less than stellar review about my lack of understan...

Are you ever really sure you know what you’re doing? I regularly check in with our investment decisions and more importantly what my wife and I are doing as parents.  No different than investing, a custom approach is best and kids with their personalities is no different. Admittedly I’ve taught my kids some controversial things and today is international bully awareness day so I thought I would sh...