Rentals Gave Me Freedom. Passive Income Will Give My Kids Theirs. | Ep. 26

In this episode of The Sage Investor, Brian Spear speaks with Lane Kinney about how disciplined real estate investing helped him build financial freedom from a modest public-service career. Lane began as a state law enforcement officer in rural Florida and, after a chance encounter with mentor Jimmy Napier, learned how to buy foreclosure houses, fix them up, stabilize them, and reinvest profits into additional rental properties. The core idea of the episode is that real estate wealth is built through patience, conservative leverage, durable cash flow, and a clear definition of freedom—not by chasing the largest possible portfolio.

Lane explains how he and his partner used side businesses, courthouse-step foreclosure purchases, strict buy-box criteria, and low leverage to scale a rental portfolio while avoiding overextension. He also shares painful lessons from tenant damage, arson, a murder-suicide, and a failed buy-here-pay-here car note investment that reinforced the importance of understanding and physically verifying what he invests in.

The conversation then shifts from active ownership to passive investing, tax planning, estate simplicity, and legacy design. Lane discusses selling rental properties, reallocating capital into debt funds and passive real estate investments, and reducing operational burden for his children. This episode is especially relevant for investors, business owners, and families evaluating whether their portfolio is creating usable freedom or quietly becoming another job.

Key Takeaways

• Build wealth around the life you want, not just the largest portfolio possible. Lane’s rental portfolio created financial flexibility, paid for his children’s college, funded travel, and eventually gave him the ability to simplify.
• Conservative leverage can protect investors through difficult cycles. Lane’s portfolio was only around 25–30% loan-to-value during 2008, which helped him move through the downturn without major distress.
• Reinvesting early profits can create long-term compounding. Lane and his partner avoided taking money out of the business for years, using income and equity growth to acquire more properties and strengthen the portfolio.
• A clear buy box reduces risk and operational complexity. Lane learned to focus on brick or block homes on concrete slabs because they were easier to estimate, renovate, and maintain.
• Legacy planning should include simplicity, not just asset transfer. Lane’s children did not want to inherit the burden of managing rentals, so he began shifting from active ownership toward passive investments and easier-to-manage income streams.

Key Topics Covered

• Building wealth from a public-service income
• Real estate investing for financial freedom
• Single-family rental portfolio growth
• Courthouse-step foreclosure investing
• Reinvesting profits and building equity
• Conservative leverage and downside protection
• Buy-box discipline for rental properties
• Tenant risk, property damage, and operational stress
• Failed outside investments and risk lessons
• Active real estate ownership versus passive investing
• Mailbox money and simplified cash flow
• IRA investing, debt funds, and passive real estate funds
• Negative K-1s and passive income offsets
• Estate planning and generational wealth transfer
• Building a portfolio that does not become a burden

Episode Chapters

00:00 Intro

Brian introduces Lane Kinney’s investor journey, including his background in public service, his start in rural Florida, and the shift from building wealth to simplifying wealth. Lane’s story frames the episode around real estate, freedom, family, and long-term discipline.

01:37 A Chance Encounter Changes Everything

Lane explains how a chamber of commerce meeting introduced his wife to Jimmy Napier, a successful local real estate investor and mentor. That relationship gave Lane access to real estate education, seminars, and a network of experienced investors.

06:15 First Deals – Farmhouse Foreclosures

Lane describes buying foreclosure houses on courthouse steps, often from Farmers Home Administration foreclosures. These early deals became the foundation of his single-family rental strategy and were located outside his mentor’s home market to avoid direct competition.

08:49 Systematic Scaling (15+ Rentals)

Lane shares how he and his partner ran out of capital, started side businesses, and used investor partnerships to keep acquiring properties. They stabilized homes, refinanced cautiously, and only pulled out enough capital to fund the next deal.

11:23 Don’t Touch Your Profit!

Lane explains that he and his wife focused on building equity rather than spending early profits. For roughly ten years, they reinvested everything back into the business, eventually building a sizable portfolio of free-and-clear rentals.

13:35 The Expert Eye

Lane discusses how he and his partner developed a strict buy box and could quickly estimate rehab costs. They preferred concrete slab, brick, or block houses because those properties reduced maintenance variability and made renovations more predictable.

14:52 Surviving Big Property Problems

Lane shares difficult lessons from tenant damage, major repairs, arson, a murder, and a murder-suicide in rental properties. He also discusses a failed car note investment that taught him not to invest in anything he could not understand, inspect, or physically verify.

22:13 Buying Your Freedom

Lane explains how the portfolio eventually funded college for three children, travel, hunting trips, and a more flexible lifestyle. He also reflects on the years of hard work behind the results, including working on properties at night and then returning to his law enforcement job.

25:44 From Active to Passive Income

Lane discusses the transition from active rental ownership to passive investments. As he and his partner reached their 60s, they began selling houses and reallocating capital into debt funds, IRA investments, and passive real estate opportunities.

28:47 Pass Down Wealth, Not Worries

Lane and Brian discuss estate planning, legacy, and the challenge of passing assets to children who do not want to manage rental properties. Lane explains how he is teaching his children about the investments while reducing the burden of active ownership.

32:02 Real Estate Pays for It All

Lane shares how real estate income helped fund major life experiences, including trips to Africa, Alaska, New Zealand, and Canada. He also discusses his background as a crossbow hunter, published writer, television guest, and former world-record holder.

33:51 Lane’s Sage Principle

Lane’s core investment lesson is to buy rental property that can pay for itself over time. He emphasizes that wealth comes from mortgage paydown, appreciation, patience, and simple math rather than quick wins.

36:54 Are You Investing for Freedom?

Brian closes the episode by reflecting on Lane’s story as an example of disciplined, durable, cash-flow-first investing. He challenges listeners to evaluate whether their portfolios are supporting their life, family, and future—or becoming another job.

Full Transcript

[Transcript begins]

Lane Kinney: And at that time, almost every house we bought, we bought on the courthouse steps. Actually, in those days, now you buy them all online, but in those days they actually sold them at noon on the courthouse steps. Most of these houses were Farmers Home Administration foreclosures.

Every second that I had off, we were either working in the pressure washing business or working on these houses, trying to get more money for more down payments. Then once we got about five houses, we were buying the houses so cheap on the courthouse steps that we would basically stabilize them, put them, work a job, and then only take enough money back out so we could go do the next deal. We weren’t overleveraging anything.

Brian Spear: Welcome back to The Sage Investor. I’m Brian Spear. My mission is to help you generate cash flow and build legacy wealth in a tax-efficient manner. That’s what I’m trying to do for my family, and I’m sharing everything that I learn along the way.

I’ve got a great investor journey story to share with you here today. It is Lane Kinney. He spent 45 years in public service, and it all starts from a very small rural area down in Florida that, to this day, the county only has eight traffic lights.

We’re going to share how a chance encounter with a mentor introduced him to what was possible with investing and how that decision changed the entire trajectory of his family’s financial future. He created the freedom to spend time outdoors doing what he loves. Now, like many of you, the question for him is shifting away from, “How do I build wealth?” and now shifting more to, “How do I simplify?”

Lane, welcome to the show. Excited to have you jump on and talk shop. Thank you very much for your willingness to spend some time and share some experience and some wisdom that you learned along the way. Man, I enjoyed our time together in Florida, and again, thanks for coming on the show.

Lane Kinney: Absolutely. I’ve been looking forward to it ever since we scheduled it.

Brian Spear: Let’s go ahead and dig in here and try to add as much value as possible for all the folks that are tuned in. What I really want to do, where I really want to start, is I just want to understand what type of investor you consider yourself today.

But in order to do that, obviously there’s a journey and a story and a background that got you to where you’re at today. Can you give a little color and background and kind of your story, how you got to where you’re at and ultimately what led you to the type of investor that you are today?

Lane Kinney: I was a state law enforcement officer. Actually, I still am. I’m retired, but I still work part-time. I came to work for the state of Florida in 1981. I met my wife some years later. She was working at our local hospital at the time, and we were looking for something that would give us a better life.

I knew I was never going to get rich being a state law enforcement officer, and she was never going to get rich working at the hospital. She had actually helped this family at the hospital at one time, and the family took a liking to her.

Fast forward another year or so, and my wife was on the board of directors of the chamber of commerce. They had a meeting that about six or seven people came to, and it was a meeting for people that wanted to be young entrepreneurs. There was a wealthy guy in our town. In the county that I live in in northwest Florida right now, it only has eight traffic lights. At the time, this was 1989, it had two red lights in the whole county.

So when there’s a very wealthy person in the county, everybody knows him. He was kind of like this mythical man. Well, he actually came and was the guest speaker at this meeting with seven or eight people at it. He said, since the county had been so good to him, he was offering to teach any of those eight people that were all residents of our county what he knew.

What he did was he was primarily invested in single-family houses, and he had a portfolio of over 100. He was kind of like this mythical person in the county. Everybody kind of knew him, but they didn’t really understand what he did.

He had written a book called Invest in Debt, and he gave out that book to everybody. My wife came home all excited. I read the book, and she said he invited everybody to come out to his house and he would teach them. He sold seminars all over the country, sold books and tapes all over the country, and he was offering anybody that was in this meeting that he would teach them for free.

My wife was like, “Oh, I’m sure he’s been bombarded.” So we waited like a week, and she called him up, and he was kind of aggravated because she was the only person in that whole class that took him up on the offer. He invited us to come out to his house for dinner, and we did. He said that it was going to be his mission to make sure we became very successful.

Brian Spear: Kind of like sticking it to the other people, like, “Hey, you had this opportunity and you blew it.”

Lane Kinney: Exactly. Over the next several years, on all of my days off and a lot of vacation time, I would go to his house and spend the whole day with him. Over that time, over five or six or seven years, we went all over the country. I would sell his books and tapes, and he would teach these seminars. We went to California, Chicago, all over. I went to dozens and dozens of seminars with him.

I learned most of what he knew, but then it became that all these other investors were coming to these seminars, and I got to talk to all these other successful people. I kind of built a network of these successful people.

He basically taught me and my partner. My partner’s wife at the time did all his taxes, was his accountant. We formed a partnership, this other man, Mark, and myself, and he’s actually one of your investors now because of me. With Jimmy Napier’s help, he taught all of us how to buy these foreclosure houses.

The one rule we had was that he said we could not buy in the city that we lived in because he didn’t want us to be his competition. He suggested we go 40 miles to the west to a town called DeFuniak Springs, and to this day, that’s where all of our rental property is. He didn’t want us to be competition.

Brian Spear: Absolutely amazing. At that time, you were buying almost every house on the courthouse steps?

Lane Kinney: Yes. In those days, now you buy them all online, but those days they actually sold them at noon on the courthouse steps. Most of these houses were Farmers Home Administration foreclosures. Since that’s a federal agency, the U.S. Marshals Office was the one selling these houses. We were buying these houses on the courthouse steps.

Brian Spear: Absolutely beautiful. A couple things come to mind for me as you tell that story. Phenomenal stuff.

One is the power of the network. I’ve come to understand that it’s such a huge piece of individual success over time. The old adage, you become the average of your five closest friends. Getting yourself around unbelievably successful people typically will elevate you in due time. I’m always trying to get in those rooms where you’re leveling up, guys that have seen further than others. If I’ve seen further than others, it’s because I’ve stood on the shoulders of giants. Just trying to be around people that have done amazing things.

The second thing is regarding opportunity. There’s a little term that I use. I heard it first with Ron Polk back in the days, famous NCAA baseball coach: opportunation. It’s a mashup of preparation and opportunity. You never know when that opportunity is going to come across your desk, but you’ve got to be prepared to take advantage of it. When that opportunity was presented to you, you always have to be ready. If you always stay ready, you never have to get ready, and when the opportunity presents itself, you’re able to take advantage of it.

It led you down this unbelievably winding path to where you’re at today. So, started in single-family homes. At the time when you first were introduced to Jimmy, did you know at that moment that it was a major turning point, or did it only become obvious years later?

Lane Kinney: It probably took a couple months of spending a lot of time with him to realize it was actually possible. But one of the problems that my partner and I faced very early was running out of money. So we started a pressure washing business on the side. We started awning cleaning.

For three or four years, every second that I had off, we were either working in the pressure washing business or working on these houses, trying to get more money for more down payments. Then once we got about five houses, we were buying the houses so cheap on the courthouse steps that we would fix them up and then put mortgages on them, basically stabilizing them, and then only take enough money back out so we could go do the next deal. We weren’t overleveraging anything.

There was probably a year span that we bought 15 houses. Then we had to take in some outside investors. Those investors were people who were going to Jimmy’s seminars that I had met. These were older people that had excess cash flow, and the deal we cut with them was they would put up all the money to buy the house and all the repairs. We would do all the work. They would get all their money back, and then we’d split it 50-50, kind of an early waterfall. That was the only way we could keep buying more and more houses.

Brian Spear: Yeah.

Lane Kinney: But we were buying them very, very cheap. We were getting really good deals.

Brian Spear: Beautiful. At the very early onset, when you’re doing it yourself, direct ownership became self-sustaining, but if you wanted to continue growing, you had to bring in some capital. Absolutely beautiful.

That’s ultimately the same exact path that we’ve taken over time. We used to buy mobile home parks with our own money. Over time, implementing a very similar strategy to what you’re referencing, and then eventually, if you want to keep on growing, serving society at large, ultimately continuing to grow the portfolio, you have to bring on partners to continue to do just that. It’s beautiful.

Let’s walk through, so you’re in the single-family space continuing to build a direct portfolio. It’s starting to get pretty large. When you started buying those rentals, what were you actually trying to build for you and your family? Were you focused on freedom, income, security, just momentum? What was the goal right when you were getting started?

Lane Kinney: I realized that equity would one day be wealth. We were just trying to build equity. We were not taking any money out to spend. For about 10 years, we never took a penny out of the business to go do anything else. Everything went right back.

Where we differed from some people was we wanted to get the houses free and clear. We could have used leverage. We could have grown more. Then Mark and I decided we had enough houses when we got to about 23 together. Then my wife and I started buying them. It took 15 years, but one day we woke up, and with my half of the 23 plus another 12, we had 24 houses free and clear.

Brian Spear: It’s so funny, right? You put in 5, 10, 15, 20 years, and then everybody calls you an overnight success.

Lane Kinney: Right. Exactly.

Brian Spear: It takes a long time to do it, but it is an inevitability. Housing and affordable housing has been in high demand literally since the inception of time. From my perspective, that’s why such a huge piece of what I’ve got going on, my net worth, is wrapped up in it because you want to invest in something that seems inevitable.

Lane Kinney: We were seeing growth in the values of the houses every year, so we were building that equity. I realized that one day that equity would pay off.

Brian Spear: Yeah, it’s beautiful. It reminds me of the Buffett model. He spent 60 years, has never sent an outbound distribution or dividend, as it were, to partners because he’s trying to keep that compounding. Folks can always sell their shares and then pay tax at that point, but he’s trying to do the after-tax compounding, reinvesting all the profits along the way, similar to what you did during your earlier years while you were building that equity, and then eventually you tap into it.

Let’s go back to those early years. When you first started buying the properties, you got five, you got 10, you got 15. Did it feel like investing to you, or did it start to feel like taking on a second job?

Lane Kinney: It was definitely a second job because we were doing all the repairs, all the maintenance. When we were buying these houses, they were in bad shape to begin with. But we soon learned, we built our buy box that we would only buy houses on concrete slabs, and we’d only buy brick or block houses.

Mark and I got where, when this house was coming up on foreclosure, we’d go look at it. We could walk in there and literally, and I am not exaggerating, in 10 minutes, we could come within a couple hundred dollars of how much it was going to cost to fix the house. All you can do is do flooring, cabinets, paint, sheetrock. So that was our buy box. We’d buy stuff on concrete slabs to make sure that your maintenance is going to be a lot easier.

Brian Spear: I agree. The goal is to try to increase unit-level economics, and the easiest way to do that is to minimize the number of variables. If you can get absolutely on the pulse of the handful of items and then drive down the cost of those items, you’re in a good spot. It’s beautiful.

So we walked through some of the wins over time and some of the early hurdles, but hit me with some of the painful lessons that you’ve learned along the way. What are some of the things in that journey, because it’s not all sunshine and rainbows. It took you 20 years to ultimately build this portfolio. It’s been beautiful, but give me a little bit of some of the experiences that you had that have been tough during that process.

Lane Kinney: The biggest lesson that I learned quickly was tenants aren’t going to take care of your property as well as you are. So we had to do a lot of rehabs, had to do a lot of repairs. I mean, we’ve been in this house now 38 years that we’re in now, raised three kids in this house. I’ve never had a broken window, never had a head go through the sheetrock, but with tenants, you deal with that kind of stuff.

Some of the other problems we’ve had, we actually had a murder-suicide and a murder in a house, so two different houses. That gets kind of stressful. Had a couple houses burn. They were both arson done by tenants. Got the scars, but we survived.

Brian Spear: Those lessons obviously stick with you. What about any investments that you made outside of real estate and any investments that maybe didn’t go as planned or hard lessons that you’ve learned along the way?

Lane Kinney: One I can think of, there was a couple that were coming to Jimmy’s seminars. He would do these three-day seminars, and on the last day he would let people get up and offer to sell stuff, whatever kind of business they might be in, to the group. He’d always do the disclaimer, “I’m not recommending this. I’m not saying this is good. I’m not saying it’s bad. Do your due diligence.”

Well, I got a little greedy. There was a couple that owned a buy-here-pay-here car lot, and I waited probably a year before I invested with them. Other people were having amazing results. Basically what they would do, they’d go to the auction, they’d buy a car, they’d sell it to somebody that had horrible credit and do it at 18%, and then they would sell those notes to investors for 14%.

It worked great until it didn’t. Eventually, those buy-here-pay-here car lots, you’re dealing with the kind of clients that that’s the only place they can get a car. They went into bankruptcy, and I lost about $40,000, which was super painful back in those days.

The lesson I learned from that was I would never invest in anything ever again that I couldn’t go see. As we were talking earlier, just last week I went to the Nautica parking lot with one of my daughters because we went and saw the Constitution, so we parked in our own parking garage. I’ve got the addresses of all our mobile home parks, so if I want to go look at them, I can.

That was the main lesson that I learned there, never invest in something that I actually can’t go see and put my hands on and maybe, if it did go bad, you might get some of your money back. This was a total loss of all the money, and the people just kind of disappeared when they defaulted on everybody.

Brian Spear: We talk about it all the time over here about avoiding the single zero events. Those are the things that absolutely kill you. We’re trying to drive the best risk-adjusted returns, so it’s just trying to look holistically at the marketplace and minimize all those respective risks, mitigate them to the best of your ability.

Oftentimes, you’re not trying to generate the highest rate of return, but rather the best risk-adjusted return, because those single zero events absolutely crush. I don’t care if you’ve gone from $100,000 to $200,000, gone from $200,000 to $400,000. If you have a single zero event on the next investment, you’re in an extremely precarious situation, and it just absolutely crushes. We try to avoid that like the plague. I’m glad that you learned it, albeit for a $40,000 hit. It could have been a lot worse.

Lane Kinney: It could have been a lot worse. I got greedy because they were offering 14% or 15%. Should have known better.

Brian Spear: Something’s too good to be true, right? That whole adage.

Lane Kinney: Absolutely.

Brian Spear: If you build a large enough portfolio, it becomes an inevitability. That’s why diversification is an important piece of the puzzle. If you put all your eggs in one individual basket, one individual property, you never know when that act of God is going to occur, when that crazy tenant situation is going to happen, etc.

Having multiple of them obviously has helped you be able to survive. I would also say it’s not just having a little diversification on the 20, 30, 40 homes. It’s also the modest amount of leverage that you put on the portfolio that helps you when those crazy things happen. You have a fire, you have some of these insane things happen, you can kind of survive.

Lane Kinney: During that period of time when 2008 happened, that didn’t affect us at all. We were down to probably 25 or 30% loan-to-value at that time on the whole portfolio, and we just breezed right through 2008 like nothing happened.

Brian Spear: Very interesting. So you got a ton of houses free and clear, a little bit of leverage along the way. What you’re describing, it’s kind of like the old adage of good enough. Good enough is kind of a version of investing of good enough.

The contrarian perspective of that, because if you’re looking at Ivy League guys inside of a spreadsheet day to day trying to drive the highest internal rate of return, I can assure you they would be pointing to adding additional leverage to try to drive the further internal rate of return.

So where is good enough wise discipline to make sure you can rest your head down at night prudently, and where can it become laziness? How do you know the difference? You want to try to drive the best return, but simultaneously have a great life along the way. How do you think through that?

Lane Kinney: No doubt we left some chips on the table by not doing more leverage and keep growing and growing and growing. But I started a management company to manage all of my partner’s properties, my properties, and then I took on some of Jimmy’s investors that had a bunch of properties, too.

I was working full-time for the state and still managing 69 properties for probably 15 years, and that was all I could handle. I could have quit managing other people’s properties, but that was really good cash flow. That’s what I was using for all my trips and everything. That’s also what put three kids through college with no student loans.

Brian Spear: Of course. That’s a good segue into why we do what we do. You’ve obviously at this point built some wealth in your journey. You’ve had some of that income, and of course there are struggles that come with it. You’ve got a second job along the way, but you do it so that you have more of that lifestyle freedom.

Could you speak to that a little bit? Ultimately, that transition, because it was a grind to ultimately build the wealth. Then the big why of why we’re doing all this, so that you can have the life that you want with the kids. Walk us through that transition, if you’re still locked up day-to-day doing this. Walk through a little bit of your perspective of lifestyle design, what it means to you, and how you’ve seen that play out in the real world now that you’ve built a little bit of wealth along the way.

Lane Kinney: Once we got to a certain point, I remember telling my wife on New Year’s Day that I had just set a New Year’s resolution. That was that I was going to start. I hired a handyman, and I was never going to work on a toilet that didn’t belong to somebody in my family ever again.

That was the first time I gave up doing all the work on my houses. That handyman started working for me probably in 1995, and he’s working on a house right now as we speak, because I talked to him earlier this morning. I don’t do any of the repairs anymore.

That was the first step to work freedom, which was, “Hey, there’s enough income coming in now. I don’t have to deal with toilets and sheetrock and all that kind of stuff.” Everybody talks about tenants, trash, and toilets. Well, that’s a real thing when you’re a landlord.

Eventually, as the houses were paying off and more income was coming in, then we started spending some of it. Like I said, put kids through college with no student loans, started taking trips. I’ve been to Africa nine times hunting, so I’ve been blessed. That’s what the houses eventually did.

But it’s kind of funny. So many people look at me and it’s like, “Oh, you’re so lucky. You got to do all these amazing trips.” They don’t remember the days, or they don’t even know about the days, that I was literally painting houses during the night and putting the sleeping bag down on the floor, taking a couple hours’ sleep, go back paint, and then go home, put my uniform on, and go to work. They don’t realize the work that was behind it. They only see the results.

Brian Spear: You have to be willing to do what nobody else is willing to do for a period of time, so for the rest of your life, you can do what nobody else is able to do. Absolutely.

My perspective, again, I’ve resided inside of communities turning them around, a lot of different stuff, in order to ultimately get dirt under the fingernails and make it happen. Then as you continue to grow and scale, you can begin to delegate and elevate out of some of those roles, just like you have over time. But it’s not something that happens overnight.

I’ve always said this: Real estate’s not a get-rich-quick style of business over a short period of time with a low probability of success. Real estate is a build-massive-amounts-of-wealth-over-a-long-period-of-time with a very high probability of success. But you have to actually invest. It’s not like you can do this quick fix-and-flip stuff. You’ll fall on your face inevitably. You’ll miss time.

Just buy wonderful businesses and hold them over long periods of time. It becomes much more of an inevitability from my perspective.

Lane Kinney: Absolutely.

Brian Spear: Let’s get to the tail end here, buddy. You’ve done a great job, built a great business partnership, also some personal portfolio, and then you start transitioning out of it. You’ve started to move toward the passive side of the house. Walk me through that evolution and kind of where you’re at today, where your head’s at, and what you’re trying to do on behalf of the family.

Lane Kinney: My partner Mark and I were both in our 60s. I’m a couple years older than him. I’m 67 now. The realization came to us, I don’t know, we really started talking about it probably 18 months ago, that his kids don’t want to take over these houses. Mine don’t want to. Mine don’t even live here anymore. One daughter that you met lives in Tampa.

We just decided it was time. It’s been a wonderful ride since 1989, this partnership that we’ve got, but we just kind of decided we needed to start selling some of those houses. We’ve sold three in the last nine months. We’re closing on one the day after tomorrow, and we got another one under contract yesterday. We’re starting to get rid of these houses.

As we’ve been selling some of these houses, a couple years ago I started looking at alternatives, and obviously Sunrise is a big part of my portfolio. Most of my IRA money, my wife and my IRA money, is in debt funds that just throw off 1099s. Personal money, I’m in funds like Sunrise where I can get those negative K-1s to offset the passive income from the rental houses, because I’m not going to sell. We’re going to keep probably eight of our own houses, but we’re going to cull out all the rest of them.

Brian Spear: The partnership stuff, just to simplify things from an estate planning perspective, it’s always kind of tough.

Lane Kinney: Yeah.

Brian Spear: Beautiful. Let’s talk more about, as you make that transition, there are a couple of different triggers there, and it’s a balancing act of a lot of different stuff. As you move into the debt funds, the IRA investing, some of the passive syndication stuff that you’re doing, as opposed to the direct ownership, do you think the shift is mostly about the returns, the simplicity, the tax planning, estate planning, getting your time back? What would you rank those, or what would you say are the primary couple of reasons?

Lane Kinney: Getting the time back for sure, but also the simplicity of it. You send me a check every quarter. I don’t have to do anything. That’s as good as it gets when you get to this point in life.

Brian Spear: Nothing wrong with that. Again, the old adage, “mailbox money.” It ain’t that easy. There’s a ton of stuff that goes into it. But from the perspective of a limited partner, it actually is more of a legitimate passive investment comparatively speaking. There are a million ways to make money in real estate, but that is more of the version of the quote “mailbox money” that you see.

Let’s talk a little bit about the estate stuff. You’d mentioned I had the luxury of spending a little bit of time with your daughter down in Tampa. I thoroughly enjoyed that. In the conversation that we had, it was really fun for me because now that I’ve had thousands of calls with different partners over time, we’ve got over a thousand different partners now that have joined the team, it’s just amazing to see the common themes over time, the evolution that people make during their journeys.

It was so fun for me to see it play out: a guy that is first-generation wealth, congratulations, doing your best to change the family tree in one generation and now trying to find out how to balance that and pass it along to the next generation with your daughter and the other kiddos in the most smooth manner possible.

You mentioned that they’re not too keen at this moment on becoming active investors themselves. So how are you thinking about that? From my perspective, this is one of the biggest and most important conversations. All the folks that are listening to this call, all the folks that have joined our team, we’ve all reached some semblance of success in the eyes of society.

For me, my biggest fear in life is spoiling the kiddos rotten and trying to find a way to ensure that when we pass along what we’ve been able to build to the next generation, we do so prudently. It’s a blessing. It’s not a curse.

Share some of that experience, some of the conversations, and how you’re thinking about it and how you’re trying to pass this along to the next generation, leave a legacy to them, and not have it be a burden. Not have them be forced to manage the 20, 30, 40 houses themselves doing the tenants, toilets, termites, all that stuff. Walk me through your thought process here on how you’re trying to serve the kiddos to the best of your ability.

Lane Kinney: All three of our kids are medical professionals. Their mom pushed them into that because that’s what she was, so they’ve all got good careers. The difference where I am from where you are, you’ve got young kids. My youngest is 37. I’m past the point now of too much worrying about spoiling them because their life is already set. They’ve already got successful careers.

But when you get into your late 60s, you start having those conversations with your kids. “Hey, you’re going to inherit this stuff. You need to learn some about it.” With Megan, and you were there, you got to see kind of the light bulb moment with her. She came to the dinners both nights, but then she spent all day Saturday with us at the meeting. At first, she was like, “Ooh, trailer parks,” and then she was like, “Wow, these things make a lot of money.” It was kind of like that light bulb moment, and now she’s a lot more open to learning about it.

I’ve spent a lot of hours trying to teach them about the different funds and stuff that we are invested in. Hopefully, we’ll get rid of most of the houses so they don’t ever have to deal with them.

Brian Spear: Beautiful. Best of luck in that transition. If there’s anything that we could do to help along the way, obviously please let us know.

Let’s go through this one little piece again on the lifestyle. You’ve done an exceptional job. Now, trying to enjoy the fruits of your labor. You dug in a little bit on the trips to Africa. I don’t know if anybody else knows this. They probably don’t. We didn’t dig into it yet, but you are an absolute stud in terms of some of the world records that you hold. Give a little bit of color on some of the things that you’ve done historically and what else is on the docket. Anything else?

Lane Kinney: Back probably 20 years ago, I was one of the premier crossbow hunters in the world. I was one of the pioneers of modern crossbow hunting, and I was working for TenPoint Crossbows as their pro staff. I did seminars in Vegas for years and years and years for them and in other places.

Over time, I started writing magazine articles. I think I’ve had 17 articles published. I’ve done four or five or six TV shows. I started hunting animals that had never been hunted with a crossbow. Then again, you wake up one day and I got 23 world records. Now, some of those have subsequently been broken, but it’s been good. The houses paid for it all.

Like I said, I’ve been to Africa nine times. I’ve been to Alaska four or five times, New Zealand, Canada a dozen times. It’s been good, and every bit of it was paid for by those little single-family houses that we bought in the ’80s and early ’90s.

Brian Spear: It’s uncanny. Kudos and congratulations. I love every bit of it.

In rounding this out, we always ask one parting question for everybody coming through the pipeline. You’ve had an unbelievable run, phenomenal first-generation built wealth from scratch, an amazing career, tons of experience actively, passively, the whole kit and caboodle. If somebody could remember one lesson, one piece of sage investment advice from your entire life experience, what should it be?

Lane Kinney: Especially starting out, buy some kind of rental property that will pay for itself over time. As your mortgage balance comes down, the value goes up, and that’s how you build equity and wealth eventually. Like we discussed, it’s not quick, but it’s mathematically pretty sure. You pretty much know the outcome.

That was the thing with us. We didn’t even care if they made money at first, just as long as they didn’t lose money, because we knew we were paying down the mortgages and the value was going up. It’s simple math.

Brian Spear: Beautiful. It doesn’t have to be groundbreaking.

Lane Kinney: No. Like you’ve said many times, you don’t have to hit a grand slam. Just hit singles and doubles.

Brian Spear: The biggest takeaway that I’m walking away with here is that the goal is not simply to build the biggest portfolio. It’s to build a portfolio that gives you freedom, that can survive any sort of life transitions that you have, and that doesn’t become a burden to the people that you build it for.

It’s just absolutely phenomenal stuff. Lane, this has been absolutely outstanding, buddy. Thank you for sharing all the wins. Thank you for sharing the scar tissue, some of the good, the bad, the ugly along the way, all the wisdom that you learned. It’s a great reminder that good investing doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It just has to be disciplined. It has to be durable. It has to be aligned with the life that you’re trying to build for you and your family.

I just want to commend you for the unbelievable amount of hard work that you put in over many, many years to change the family tree in one generation. Kudos. Absolutely beautiful stuff. Thank you very much, man.

Lane Kinney: I want to thank you for Sunrise and all the other people at Sunrise because I’ve got a good chunk of money with y’all, and I’m about to add some more. That’s stuff I never have to worry about. That’s truly mailbox money. I want to thank you. As I’m transitioning out of the active ownership into more passive stuff, y’all have been great.

Brian Spear: It’s an honor to serve you and your family and all of our partners out there. Again, we’re trying to help as many people as possible generate cash flow and build legacy wealth in a tax-efficient manner because that’s what I’m trying to do for my family, and we’re going to help as many people as possible do the same thing.

It’s a similar journey to that which I’ve had in my life. You’re a little bit further along than I am, but it doesn’t change the fact that it’s the same philosophy. It’s beautiful.

The biggest takeaway that I’m walking away with here is that the goal is not to simply build the biggest portfolio. It is to build a portfolio that gives you freedom, that survives transition, and doesn’t become a burden to the people that you build it for.

Lane’s story is a powerful example of what happens when somebody combines hard work, persistence, simple execution, and a cash-flow-first mindset over a very long period of time. This was not passive investing in the beginning. He had a few extra side hustles along the way. There were tenants, toilets, repairs, arson, hard lessons, and even a painful outside investment loss that taught him never to put money into something that he could not see or touch or understand.

He built real wealth through direct ownership. He created freedom. He created options. But Lane also learned something most investors don’t think about early enough: assets are only as valuable as the life they support and the legacy they can actually transfer.

I think that’s a really important Sage Investor lesson here. At some point, every investor’s got to think to themselves: Am I just accumulating assets or am I designing a life? Am I building net worth on paper, or am I actually creating usable freedom in practice? Am I passing down wealth, or am I accidentally passing down complexity?

The transition that Lane ultimately described here from active ownership of rentals and operational burden into a more simplified capital allocation model is incredibly important because wealth should eventually buy back time, reduce stress, support family, and create the ability to live a life that you actually want.

For Lane, that meant putting three kids through college with no student loans, taking meaningful trips, building a life around hunting and fishing and traveling, doing some amazing things, and creating memories with family. For others, it might look different for you, but the principle is the same: investing is not the end goal. Freedom is the goal.

For everyone listening, the challenge is simple. Look at your own portfolio. Ask yourself whether it’s truly serving your life, your family, your future, or whether it is slowly becoming another job.

Lane, thank you very much for sharing the wins, the scar tissue, the wisdom along the way. It was a great reminder that good investing doesn’t have to be overly complicated. It has to be disciplined, durable, and aligned with the life that you’re trying to build along the way.

That is a wrap. That is a wrap. Make sure to support and to follow along, guys. Go ahead and click the subscribe button. Share it with somebody you think might need to hear this, and I look forward to seeing you on the next one. Until next time, be great.

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