Welcome to Getting Rich Together. I’m your host, Shama Bunton. This show was born from my own journey. Coming out of a divorce, I reached out to 50 women to talk to them about money.

95% of them did not want to go there. That’s when I realized we need spaces where wealth isn’t hidden in silence but shared in possibilities. Here, you’ll meet women from all backgrounds, trailblazers, risk takers, visionaries, each expanding what wealth can look like. This is your place to be inspired to discover new pathways and to remember that we rise by building wealth together. Getting Rich Together is a wealth catalyst production.

At Wealth Catalyst, we bring together education, networks, and great opportunities for women to build wealth and change the world. Now, on to today’s show. I am here with the incredible Anne Michelle Wands. Anne Michelle, you just got off the phone with me telling me that you took the boat out today in order to get outside and that is something that I think is so wonderful.

I feel like we all want to just hop on our boat and travel and go outside and have some fun. But you have found yourself in the most unique position as the founder of passive profit partners, taking your real estate experience in the US and combining that to help people find incredible places to live internationally, some of the housing projects you’re interested in, not to mention everything that you shared with me about how you’ve really developed this incredible entrepreneurial life and spirit from salon owner to developer. I am so excited to have you here today. Thank you for taking time off the boat and coming on to Getting Rich Together. It’s so great to have you. Thank you so much. It’s my pleasure to be here. So Anne Michelle, when we first met, I remember just being so struck by how bold and robust and juicy your life has been.

And while all the details of everything that makes you an incredible fearless woman today are things that everyone’s going to want to hear and get into, we are going to start from the beginning. We’re going to start from a young Anne Michelle, someone who was around seven, 10, 12 years old, maybe pigtails, maybe ponytail, like I know what kind of little girl you were, but take us back. What was life like for you at this young age? Where did you grow up? And what was money like around you?

Let me look about that for a second. I grew up in upstate New York. It was a small town that was about 70 miles north of New York City. And even though I was born in Brooklyn, my parents moved to this little town upstate to start a business.

And they did. They started a business. My father’s father was a butcher that came from Austria with six children.

And I think all of them grew up to be in some sort of meat business. And so my father opened this business, built a little factory underneath our house. And that house cost them, I was born in the 50s, so it cost them $35,000 to build this house in this little suburb of Middletown, New York. It was this basement, huge basement where he put the business. And it had walk-in freezers and refrigerators.

And people would be working down there, witchers chopping up the meat and the chickens and putting it in boxes and putting those boxes in the freezer for my dad to drive around the state and deliver meat to restaurants and schools and individual people if they wanted it. So I grew up, my father was in business for himself. And I had that role model.

And for the times then, he was successful. And we lived a pretty good middle class life. My mom was a stay-at-home mom. And she helped my dad in the business. And she was very practical, raised four children, three girls and a boy. And she kept going till she had that boy.

I love that. And so as you were navigating the world as a young woman, as a young girl, let’s say in high school, did you find yourself seeing this entrepreneurial streak in the family and saying, huh, like I kind of understand how these things work. Was it hands down in your books? What is it that you thought you knew of yourself when you were a young girl in high school? In high school, I don’t think I know what I wanted, to be honest. I was the third child, the third girl and the youngest girl.

And they’re often known as the lost child. And I, whereas my older sister, she knew she wanted to be a veterinarian from the time she was 12 years old. But when I graduated high school, I didn’t even want to go to college because I didn’t know what I wanted to do. I wanted, what I wanted to do is be wild and travel the world. But my mom said I was too smart for that and made me go to college.

I love that. And so as you decided then to go to school and what were made, volunteer, to go to school, I had to go to school. Because my parents didn’t have a college education.

And their dream was to have all their kids be college educated. No, I was quiet and sweet. I was very rebellious. So did that translate through your college years? What did you end up studying?

What was cool like for you? They spent a couple of years in college and I studied psychology because the brain and the human brain has always fascinated me. What happened was I ended up quitting college and taking off with my current boyfriend to travel the United States. Where did you end up traveling? Where did you go? We traveled all the way across the United States from New York to Washington State, where we had some friends who were working in a shop there. And we went there to see if maybe we’d like it too and spent about six months in Tacoma, Washington.

Wow. Outside of Seattle, did not like it and ended up traveling back to Colorado where we had some other friends from high school that were living and did like Colorado and ended up staying there. A few months after we arrived in Colorado, I really had been, this had been brewing where this guy I was with wasn’t somebody I wanted to stay with and we broke up.

Oh my gosh. And so here you were in a new state. You had just been like traveling around. You quit school.

You’re like, I’m here, Colorado. How did you get yourself on your feet? What did you start to think about is what do I do now? What did you start to do with yourself? I got a job.

I didn’t know what to do. So I got two jobs. And as you were starting to figure out this early life, right, how long did you end up staying in Colorado? Was it did you find yourself finding any work there that really spoke to you and a lot of capacity?

How did you start to think about yourself if you were developing? I had a friend from high school, one of the only women that I stayed in touch with all these years. And she was going to go to nursing school. And I was going to go to nursing school with her.

That was our plan. And then suddenly I got pregnant. I was dating this guy. And I didn’t think I could get pregnant because I’d been with my previous boyfriend for five years and never got pregnant. And then I met this other man and instantly got pregnant, had to change all my plans. She went to nursing school and became a new nurse. I stayed home and moved in with this guy, had the baby.

And then promptly when that baby was three months old, got pregnant again and had two children in two years, they’re 11 months apart, two boys, and spent the next 10 years being a senior mom. Didn’t go into business for myself. I sort of let myself be led by other people. And I was go with the flow. And I ended up in places I didn’t want to be. Because I wasn’t planning to have children that early. But once I got pregnant, I had to deal with the reality of it.

So I did. And chose to have the babies. So I spent 10 years and then because we were, we never got married, but we were common law because we had children and property together. We lived in the mountains of Colorado.

And I left him after 10 years, the boys were nine and 10. That’s when I really started thinking about, okay, where do I want to go from here? Now I’m 30 years old. Now I know what I want and don’t want when I’ve got two kids to take care of. So what were the things that started to come to you?

I mean, what an incredible inflection point to be like, I know I don’t want this. I’m now responsible for this family. I have dreams of my own.

Maybe they’re starting to come up now. How did you start to call in what would be next for you? I had to think about survival for me and boys first. So I moved in with a friend that had an apartment.

I had lots of friends, I guess, looking back at it. I moved in with a friend that had an apartment in Boulder, Colorado. And it had two bedrooms.

So I let the boys have the bedroom and I slept in the hallway. And I went out and I got a job, supported the boys and I used the skills that I had since I didn’t finish college. And I got a job in a restaurant as a prep cook. And I moved myself up from being a prep cook. And then I had a second job at night sewing cowboy shirts. So wild.

That is so wild. And as you were then now having two jobs and like really figuring out like what is this life thing look like? At what point did you start to get that like independent entrepreneurial streak? When did you start to go, huh, I think I think I can try something else.

I want to expand my horizon. You know how when you have a boss and they don’t appreciate you. So I had a boss that didn’t appreciate me and I just didn’t want to work for anybody anymore. And so I decided to strike out on my own and it took the work experience I had gained from being a prep cook, moving up into restaurant management for several years.

When I that’s when I made that realization. And I said, I quit and I decided to start a catering business and be on my own in the food business. And I was quite successful at it. Believe it or not, I, I made really good food and I learned how to cook because I love to eat. So really good food to enjoy that food and help other people enjoy that food. And I did, I was a specialty caterer where I did weddings and theme parties. So as an excellent baker and I baked the cakes for the weddings, I served dinners with if they wanted Thai or they wanted American or whatever they wanted for the theme, we would follow that theme all the way through. Had a great time for a few years. But again, the boys were in school age and I realized that I needed more freedom. Caterers work nights, weekends and holidays.

All the times you want to be with your kids. That’s right. That is like working a retail job, right?

Like you are on all the time. And I hadn’t thought about that when I started it, I was just using my God given talents. So I said, okay, I’m going to get a different position that’s going to create the income that I want even better, but have the freedom. So I decided to put myself through beauty school. I had two friends that were hairdressers. I didn’t want to go back to college and want to spend all that time. So I put myself through beauty school while still working. And then when I got my license, my friends got me a job in the salon where they worked and was on commission.

And I then closed down the catering business. I built my clientele for over three years in that salon, a very prestigious salon in downtown Boulder. And after three years, I had a pretty decent clientele and I was the highest salesperson that sold shampoo and hair products of anybody in the salon. And once again, my boss didn’t appreciate me because I would have stayed there if he appreciated who I was and what I was doing for his salon, who would have stayed there a lot longer. But since he didn’t, I went looking for a better opportunity.

And I think we talked a little bit about this. I went into a salon and this woman had owned this salon for 17 years. And all I wanted to do is rent a booth from her to make more money instead of paying commission. And she said, why don’t you buy the salon? Because I’m getting ready to retire and it’s her sale. So I thought about that. And at the time, I had the wherewithal to do it. She wanted $20,000 for the business and she was willing to finance it with $2,000 down.

It was amazing to my ears. And I had the 2000 because just sold a piece of real estate. And I’ll tell that story after this one. But, and I had a little bit of money in the bank. So I bought the salon, paid it off in three years. She also owned the building. And I also bought the building from her once I paid the business off. And this was a building in downtown Boulder. And it happened to be, it was a historic building.

This changed my life. How I was able to have the $2,000 to put down because I was just making a normal salary and the boys were in Waldorf school. That was an expensive school to pay for.

But that’s where I wanted them instead of public. I wanted to buy a house. I’d been a homeowner with my previous baby daddy and I wanted to own a home. And I was making good income as a salon person, but I didn’t have a down payment. So I had to borrow the down payment. I found a house on the outskirts of Boulder, Colorado that was under $8,000 and I needed $20,000 down. So I was able to borrow from a family member $20,000 and buy this house because I could qualify for the payments. I had bought this house and I found out that it was on an acre of land outside the city limits. And if I joined in the city, I could subdivide it into four lots.

So I did exactly that. I gathered 13 of my neighbors. We joined the city. We annexed into the utilities and then we subdivided our lots into four lots. One lot had the house where the boys and I lived and there was three other lots which I promptly sold. I sold them with enough money to pay back my sister and the 20 grand and buy two other properties. And that was my start in real estate and it was happening exactly at the same time that I found this salon opportunity. I just sold the first lot and I had a little money to put down on the business. So you’re already experiencing like serial entrepreneurship, right?

You’re like closed on catering business. Now you’re buying properties, selling these lots, opening up your beauty salon in all by the age of how old Dan Michele, how old are you at this point? When I bought the salon, I think I was 37. So okay, so you buy this salon. So now you’re like on your way to knowing you’re good at this real estate thing or at least starting to figure out after that.

I was like, let’s do this for the rest of my life. That was going to be my retirement account. I could have the salons and create income for everyday life and then put the money away from the real estate for my future and the boys’ future for their college, for my retirement, etc. And that’s exactly what I proceeded to do.

The minute I moved to that salon with my clientele and then I had six hairdressers that were renting booths from me, my income went up by a third. So that was wonderful too. The house was a duplex and on the other side of the duplex, a little old lady lived that was the current owner of the house and Miriam, the woman I bought the house from, had given this woman a life estate that she could live there until she died. And I took that over and allowed the woman to live there until she died, the sweetest little old lady who did her hair. And a couple years after I bought, she died and I was able to take over the whole house and I expanded at that point and remodeled and added a massage room and a skincare room and nails. So now I had a full service salon producing even more income and continuing with my real estate travels where I want two other houses on excess land, subdivided the land, fixed up the houses, sold them, sold the lots and kept moving.

That’s incredible. And at this time as you’re navigating these two different, very similar in the sense that when you’re dealing with people and customer service, it’s always about the people. And I guess it doesn’t matter if it’s selling a house or getting someone to have them fall in love with their hair, you’re giving and there’s a service component. But these are also different business models.

One is like a long term tail game and the other is cash in the bank the same day where you’re receiving any sort of mentorship or guidance or anything when it came to how you were building your business. Honestly, I’m self-taught with everything that I know. When I wanted to do something and YouTube didn’t exist, when I wanted to do something, I found a way to learn about doing it just like I put myself through beauty school and became a hairdresser. I decided to become a real estate mobile and so I learned everything I could about real estate and I realized that I should get my license. So I did get my real estate license. I wasn’t serving other clients at that point. I was just doing my own deals and a few for my family. But at that point, I started serving other people and once again, I started as an agent for another company. And that was after I had owned the salon for 15 years, I sold everything and went full time into real estate.

Just really, that was the vehicle that was going to skyrocket me further and the boys were now in high school. What was it like to sell that beauty business? Was it difficult?

Did you find someone easily? Was there a business broker? I had hired a new hairdresser just similar to what I had done and I told her I wanted to sell the place and she was interested in buying it. So it just worked out and I gave her the same opportunity that Merriam had given me. I let her put a down payment and pay the business off and then buy the building.

In retrospect, I shouldn’t have sold the building, but she really wanted it and I wanted to move on so it worked out. It’s so interesting when you think of how much business can be done on personal trust and credibility and ultimately, sometimes I think we overcomplicate the nature of business transactions. We need all of these things and certainly we need protections and legal things. But ultimately, the fine-tuned details of these things are really two people coming together for an agreement.

You can make that agreement whatever it is that you guys decide and then have the supporting actors there to verify and put the stamp on it and everything like that. But it’s so interesting to hear how you paid forward that generosity of business ownership and allowed someone to take the wings of that business. Yeah, it was fun. It was interesting.

I learned so much and kept going. At one point, I owned five rental houses in Boulder, Colorado. And when you were in the real estate business, you know that when you sell something, if you don’t want to pay taxes, right away you defer it by doing a 1031 exchange. And so when you do a 1031 exchange, you have to keep getting more expensive properties. So instead of just increasing the numbers of single family homes, I broke off from that and did duplexes and apartment buildings and started moving into multifamily. As you were continuing your business, was it still heavily on the, let me fix this up and sort of turn this into something? Or did you also start to have a different kind of appetite for the kinds of properties that you were buying? I started to have a different appetite for the kinds of property I was buying.

I moved sort of away from fix and flip. And when I got into the apartment buildings, I was more into bound what they call value add, where you could see the opportunities. I would find old owners that were older and had their properties for a long time and wanted to sell them, but they hadn’t really done a lot of upward maintenance and the people were paying under market rents and things like that. So I would buy these buildings and again fix them at, but to raise the rents and then resell them at a higher price. But now it was multifamily instead of single family.

Wow. And at that time, as you were now starting to increase in your net worth, right? And you’re starting to see increased amounts in your bank accounts. How did you start to think about how that money was being put to work for you? Was it, okay, I’m going to keep all this money in a savings account and sort of see it compounded?

Savings? Did you at any point start to think about was real estate? Okay, I’m going to keep investing in my real estate properties and that’s going to be the primary thing where I hold my asset or maybe in the public markets.

At a certain point, when you sell stable with your asset, how did you start to think about where you would continue to put them to work for you? I didn’t know everything there was to know back then, but I experimented with things and I felt safe with real estate since I’d been so successful at it. Now, of course, I had a savings account and a certain amount in a savings account to be an emergency fund for me and the kids. But beyond that, I wanted to diversify and I was in a women’s networking group and we had all kinds of women in that group and all kinds of different businesses and one of the women that I met and liked was a financial advisor and I got to know and trust her and she said that I should start an IRA and I should put money in it every month, which so I followed her advice and she gave me very good advice and put me in just a lot of stable things that weren’t too risky to put some of my income aside for the future that worked out really well. And then I also, I was, but I was heavy into real estate. That was my safe place for me, because the way it had developed for me. And I just kept investing in real estate, helping other people invest in real estate and doing it for myself.

And at one point my sister and I bought a vacation home in Hawaii. How did that go? How was it to go into business with your sister? Fine, she was like a silent partner and we’d just go on vacation together.

It was great. Now Hawaii is obviously not as close as things in your backyard. So this sort of decision, like as you were deciding, okay, we’re gonna go somewhere we can drive to, to somewhere we have to fly to. How did you guys start to decide to take, how did you decide to take this business from something more regional to something that one’s gonna start to take on a larger footprint? I could see the potential of diversification. That if I had all my real estate in one market and that market crashed, where was I gonna be?

I had a lot of common sense around that. So I saw the advantage to diversifying and so I wanted to buy stuff in different states. So I joined another networking group with people who were doing exactly that and took classes about investing, finding out which states had the best rent to own your ratio and where you could use this money that I had to invest into my best advantage. So I ended up investing not only in Colorado and Hawaii but bought fix and flips and rentals and every kind of real estate in Wyoming, Florida, Oklahoma.

I had about five states where I invested at one time. Did you start to spend a lot of time in those markets? Yes, I did reconnaissance trips where I’d go out and look at the properties. And it’s interesting because I went down to Florida to look at a place in Cape Coral back then. That was the hot place to invest outside of the metropolitan areas and looked at a potential house to buy. And that’s where I met my now husband was he was looking at the same house because he was a real estate investor.

That’s interesting. Like in your experiences as you were navigating this, did you find that there were other women who were also sort of down this path of finding independence for real estate? Did you develop any great relationships with people? What was it like being a woman in this market?

Yeah, I would say that the market was more dominated by men but yes, I met some women, became friends with some of them, did deals with some of them and encouraged some of them to do things they might not have done had they not met me. Pause for a second. If you’re not already on the wealth catalyst sub-stack, you are missing out. Over 20,000 people have subscribed and they are diving into stories, strategies and money expanders you won’t find anywhere else. Join us today and keep fueling your wealth journey. Check out the link in the show notes.

Now back to the show. When you went out to Hawaii, did that, what was the project like that you were working on there and how did that sort of become a pivotal point for sort of the next adventurous things that you would find yourself in? We bought a cottage on the island of a little town called Kapa’a and it was not on the ocean, couldn’t afford anything on the ocean, but it was this beautiful little garden up in the hills above Elvis Presley’s old hotel from the 50s. That hotel was closed down but that’s how I landmarked where the road was where I turned to get up there. And I went up and we had a main cottage that had two bedrooms, so that was perfect for me and my sister when we visited.

And it had two other cottages on the property in this beautiful garden like lot, you know, with bogey and hibiscus and tropical everything. And so we enjoyed that for about five years and we bought it right after Hurricane in Niki when everybody was selling at low prices and wanted to get out of there. And then kept it for about five years and both of us realized that we wanted to do some different things.

So we sold that in 2001 and she moved on to buying some other properties in other parts of the United States. And I was traveling with my friend through Central America and decided to buy property in a Central American country. After Hawaii, I hadn’t realized that I wanted some things different than I could get in Hawaii. I wanted a property that was closer to the United States, even though Hawaii’s in the United States, just an eight hour plane ride from where we lived. So I wanted something closer than I could easily get back and forth to visit my kids who are now grown. I wanted something that was cheaper than Hawaii because everything in Hawaii, not just the real estate, but everything in Hawaii is very expensive. I wanted someplace friendlier where it was family oriented and people said hello on the street and I didn’t find that in Hawaii. And I wanted something that was an opportunity to grow with me again. That had a stable government and yet was another diversification and this time outside the United States.

That was appealing to me. I wanted to live in the Caribbean. All the other Caribbean islands were too expensive. And we went to Costa Rica three years in a row looking for a place. We went to every country in Central America, some other islands like Belize, we went to Amis-K and explored. We went to the Corn Islands in Nicaragua. Those sound like really fun trips. That’s right, it was all tax deductible because they’re scouting trips. And I had business revenues when I’d buy. So yes, we mix pleasure and business here.

I love that. And so then how did you then decide what were the triangulating factors that had you land on where you are? We were in Costa Rica at the time, our third trip to Costa Rica, having a great time with our friends there. And I subscribed to a magazine called International Living at the time, it’s still around, I still read it, although it’s digital now. And I read a little ad in that paper that said cheapest land in the Caribbean and a phone number. So I called that phone number on a whim, talked to the guy for 45 minutes and he convinced us that we should take a side trip over the border of Costa Rica to Panama because Costa Rica was supposed to be the Be’Aulind all then. And it was very hot in the 90s and everything that we found there was either too expensive or too remote.

It was overpriced. So when we went to Panama, got off the plane in this little town called Bocastel Toro and it was reminded me of Key West in the 50s. I don’t know if you’ve ever been to Key West but the colorful little houses, shacks, and then we walked down the street and people sat below.

So I had the friendly and everything just felt right. And after four days there, I realized that this was the place I was gonna buy something and put a deposit on a piece of land we had been looking at, came back the following year and bought another property, two properties that year actually, one in the mountains. I didn’t wanna go to the mountains, Panama when I arrived there, was from Colorado, right? I lived in the mountains, done with mountains. So people said, you gotta go see it, it’s so beautiful.

Panama has so many beautiful parts of the country. So I did, I went up there and I met a guy that was doing a development up there. He was building a nine-hole golf course on a river and a coffee farm that he bought and I couldn’t resist.

I couldn’t resist. I decided to buy a house up there as well. It was a pre-development, pre-construction deal where you would put a third down and then he’d build it and you’d put halfway down and put a third down and then when it was done, you’d pay the last third. And within a year, I had a villa on the third hole of a golf course in a gated community without, that was totally a surprise and delight but wasn’t expecting it. So at that time, what years are we talking about and how, I mean, how much did this incredible project cost you? We were talking about the years between 2000 and 2010 and 2001 was when I, in year 2000, I contracted for that property and 2001 it was done.

So then we had a big party, invited the family and had a big party. And was it, how did you find developing and working? Obviously there are language barriers, there are needing the certain kinds of raw materials and making sure you’re doing right by the people who are working there and getting yourself in bed with life there, right? It’s a different, it’s different to do business in other places. So how did you find navigating all this new territory?

I found the Panamanian people charming and friendly and a lot of them spoke English so I didn’t have that much of a language barrier. When I got the villa, I didn’t have to do anything. Sam, the developer, he took care of everything and all we had to do was approve the construction at certain stages. But it was very, very different in Bocas where we’d bought land and supposedly, now this developer was supposed to be another gated community and that seemed appealing to me at the time to have this nice little expat community where we could go and do things with the locals and come back to this little haven that we had. And I bought a piece of land and my friend Don had bought a piece of land in there as well. The land was so cheap that we decided to buy two or three just in case it became more valuable.

But I didn’t do anything with it right away because this developer wasn’t going to build your house for you. He was just going to build infrastructure and put golf cart paths around the place and build marinas for people to put their boats because it was on an island called Solarte, a little island off the coast. And there are nine islands in Bocas del Toro off the coast of Panama.

The main one is Isla Colón, a big island with one road that goes all the way around it and all the other islands don’t have any roads. So I decided to buy land on an island with no roads. But the developer was supposed to put in these paths and this infrastructure where we would all have access to water and sewer and no cars but golf cart paths.

And marinas were for every 10 houses where you could have a boat if you wanted one. And this experience was very, very different because while we were making great progress very smoothly up in the mountains, this developer got to a certain point with the infrastructure and stopped. And some of the homeowners got very unhappy with him and found out that he was taking some of the money from selling the lots and spending it on his house in California and not doing the project in Panama. So a group of them got together and sued him and he went bankrupt and never finished the project.

So here we are, all of us. I had brought several of my friends down to buy property because it was such a good deal and a lot of them had bought lots as well. Fortunately, it was a low amount of money but the infrastructure never got finished. And we had to decide what to do with that. And so I immediately sold the extra lots that I had bought and found people interested in doing that. This was after a few years and decided that I had to make lemonade out of lemons.

And like sometimes you have to make lemonade. So fortunately for me, I had married a construction guy who knew how to build houses. Yay, amazing. We together designed and built a house and built this house and made it into this beautiful cottage over the sea. And that’s how I got my dream cottage over the sea. Here you can build on pure posts over the water.

And then this was back in, I don’t know, 2015 and we’ve been living in it ever since. In the meantime, this ground, we bought some of the lots around us to make our lot bigger instead of a quarter acre but three other pieces of land around us that came up for sale because people were wanting to sell. Now we have about an acre of ground and we built two more houses on the back on the land part. One for a full-time caretaker that we have, a Panamanian employee that we hired and we give him a house as part of his salary and he keeps the yard maintained. He paints and maintains things and he changes the oil and the generator and all of those things that we don’t wanna do. So we have him in the back and then behind that we built a rental house that we rent out to a nice couple who are what I call prunet renters.

I love the story. And so as you’re sort of turning attention to building your home and dealing with this debacle but then also you have this mountain property that is going really well. Are you at that point, have you sort of taken your eyes off of fully the like domestic US market and I’ve sort of started really thinking more about building in Panama or at that point, did you still have things in other places and we’re sort of navigating this more complex portfolio? That’s a good question. When I started out, I had lots of real estate still in the States.

Mostly in Colorado. And one by one, I would sell them and invest the money down here. That’s how we built these houses, had the funds to build the houses and also my commercial property that I also have. And I sold the last condo that I had in Boulder, Colorado in 2021. So I no longer have any vested interest in the United States and we became permanent residents here in Panama. Not that I didn’t give up my US citizenship. I’m still a US citizen. I still travel back to the States a minimum of twice a year to see my family. So all is well, I just don’t own any real estate there right now. I own everything in Panama.

And that was a choice that I made for now. Yeah, anything can happen, right? This is definitely… These are exciting times ahead.

And so I’d love to sort of unpack a little bit. Obviously, your journey has been so incredible and it’s taken you all over places and you definitely have approached life with this. And it’s ended you up in some of the most incredible spaces and most beautiful places. As you have now turned your attention to supporting others with starting to think about living and buying property and thinking about what this can look like outside of the United States.

How did you start to take what you would seemingly been doing for other people as an actor? Hey, I like you. Let me help you. I still like you. Let me help you, but let me formalize this relationship.

What has that been like? You’re talking about my current family office type business where I’m doing a new project. That was something that got led up to because at the same time that I owned the villa in Boquete and lived in my home here in Boca San Salarte, I had a real estate franchise on Isla Colón that I owned and operated for 10 years called United Country where I was actually helping people come down and buy or build their dream homes similar to what I had done. So I was doing that at the same time. And I did that for 10 years for 2011 and 21. And then I decided to retire from the active agent type relationship. And in the last four years, I’ve been developing this company called Hasseb Profit Partners. And that’s where we form a Panamanian company partnership. And I am the general manager and I take on limited partners as investors. And together, I want to build the first senior housing in Boca San Salarte.

That’s my new dream and new plan when I find the right partners and am able to move forward on it. I think that’s so incredible. And tell me a little bit about what you’re seeing in terms of this care facility. How did the idea come to you?

Like, what are you sort of noticing in the world that’s really indicating that this is an important endeavor? I’ve always been kind of… I’m known here as the Gapziller. I see places where things aren’t an envision what could be there, what needs to be there. And I did that in my real estate business. Since I sold the business, I saw a shortage of single-family homes in the $200,000 to $400,000 market. So I decided I would build and sell one single-family home each year.

So I wouldn’t tax myself too much in my retirement. But with Gapziller, something that was fun and easy for me to do. By this time, I’m knowing all the ins and outs of building. I’m knowing how to get the permits, how to get the materials, everything that you need to know, who the good contractors are, that type of thing. And built and sold three houses.

I have the third one currently for sale. And I have a nice renter that’s in it, keeping it nice and clean for me until I sell it. So that was the precursor to all of this. And what I’m seeing now is that when I first started building those homes, there was nobody else really doing it. Fix and flip or buy and sell was not a thing here. It was, in fact, known that it was difficult to make a profit doing that in Bocostel Toro.

But I did it. And now other people are doing it following the lead. And there are several companies building housing developments here to continue to fill that shortage for housing. So I’ve decided to move into something, again, different for the next gap.

And so what I noticed is that all the expats are moving here relatively healthy, ready to live their dream life, and things happen. Fall and break a leg. They get a debilitating disease. And there isn’t really the kind of care that they need. So many of them would have to leave Bocostel, closer to the city where a bigger hospital is, or go back to the United States for the care that they need.

And I said, well, what ifs? What if they had some cute little homes with the medical care available here that they could enjoy life and live here longer? They didn’t want to leave.

Everybody who ends up staying here really loves it. As you’re starting to think about legacy, right, you’ve created this incredible spirited body of work on this planet. And you are already leaving so much impact as you sort of entertain curiosities and fill in gaps and like see opportunities. As you start to think about legacy and this continued body of work, what are some of the things that you’d like to look back on to a life while lived? What does that legacy look like? That’s what I’m creating right now because this project will be a legacy. It will not only elevate the community because it will be there for many, many, many years, assist and it will help the lives of the people who live in the community and their cute little tiny homes and apartments. And the people who have jobs there caring for those people, where they build their own little space.

And it’s on so many levels, it helps people on so many levels that it inspires me. It will be cash flowing for the investors so they can continue to cash flow and give it to their kids or we can decide as a group to sell it later. It just depends how everything goes, but it’s a legacy. I’m creating a legacy right here.

I love that end, Michelle. So I have two final questions to take us home. The first is, we talked a lot about money today in terms of investing and real estate. And there are so many things in business that we use money for, but money can also give us so much joy and pleasure and happiness.

What are some of your most favorite things or experiences that you have paid for recently that have given you so much joy? At this point in my life, one of my motto is that I like to tell people, I love cliches and one of them is make money while you sleep, or you’ll work for the rest of your life. So that’s what I’ve done with my life. And one of the things that gives me joy is the simple pleasures in life. I’ve got it down to I do what makes me feel good. And then if I feel good, I’m able to spread that love and that prosperity to others.

I appreciate, I sit and enjoy these wonderful meals that I make or when we go out to dinner and enjoy every bite of that food. I enjoy my relationships with other people. I have wonderful friends of all ages, some my own age and many, many that are younger than me. And I go and hang out with them. I go back to the States twice a year and spend quality time with my family. I’ve created this life where I can do whatever I want, whenever I want with whoever I want. And that’s joy, that’s happiness.

That’s incredible. Ed is what a beautiful, beautiful answer. And my last and final question is, and Michelle, everyone is listening to this podcast. We all cheer one another on fearlessly and we’re all here to support each other. Is there something that you are calling in right now, something that you are wanting?

How can we support you? I would love to sell this last house because it will allow me to move on to the next project. All right. So all the buyers out there, anyone who’s ready to come on over, it’s a beautiful panaman. Have this incredible life and hang out with Anne Michelle and eat amazing food. Thank you so much today for your spirit of generosity, for sharing your story and for inspiring us to really think about just moving forward with our intuition and letting our truth guide us. It’s really beautiful. Thank you. Letting your intuition guide you and just taking the leaf.

So be brave, do it. Thanks for tuning in to this episode of Getting Rich Together. My hope is that you leave every episode feeling more inspired, more powerful, and more connected. Until next time, remember, you have everything it takes to create wealth on your terms.