PP 338: Moneeka Sawyer, The Blissful Millionaire from BlissfulInvestor.com

“Bliss is your birth right. Chose to claim it — every single day.”

In this episode, Moneeka Sawyer shows just how important pushing forward through adversity is. After suffering severe depression due to discrimination, Moneeka was introduced to tools and strategies that allowed her to attract and keep joy in her life. Listen to hear how she has turned joy into money — and is teaching others to do the same!

Highlights:
09:30 The definition of bliss
11:00 “Things will be good when…”
17.25 I admit I’m not happy all the time — and how I react when I’m not happy
20:00 Feeling emotions vs. displaying emotions
24:14 What success looks like to Moneeka and I
26:18 How Moneeka got into real estate

Listen as @moneekasawyer shares with @thekimsutton how she overcame discrimination and depression in her life and is now teaching others how to turn joy into wealth: https://www.thekimsutton.com/pp338 #positiveproductivity #podcastClick To Tweet

Episode Transcription

Kim Sutton: Welcome back to another episode of Positive Productivity. This is your host Kim Sutton, and I’m so happy to have you here. I’m also thrilled to introduce our guest today, Moneeka Sawyer. 

Moneeka, welcome to Positive Productivity. I’m so happy to finally have you on the show.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yay. Thank you so much for having me, Kim. Yeah, it’s been a little bit of a journey, but I’m so glad we’re here.

Kim Sutton: Oh, yeah. Listeners, you’ve heard me say it a thousand times before, you’ll hear me say it a thousand times more. I didn’t mean to rhyme there. Positive Productivity is not about perfection. And I can’t even remember why we’ve rescheduled at least once, but I’ll just blame it on my kids. And whispering because there’s one in the room with me right now. 

Anyway, listeners, Moneeka, it is the Blissful Millionaire from blissfulinvestor.com. Moneeka, I would love if you would introduce yourself even better to the listeners, because you know your story so much better than I do.

Moneeka Sawyer: Oh, okay. That’s the very first time I have gotten on to a podcast and they say introduce yourself. That’s cool. So I am the Blissful Millionaire, as Kim said. I have written the book Choose Bliss: The Power and Practice of Joy and Contentment. I’m honored to receive an award for that, it was called the Women of Impact Quill Award, with the focus on women magazine. It was a nomination award, so that was really, really about me. So been on television all over the country. I’ve been so excited about the message of Bliss is being well received, because it’s so important for all of us to live a really blissful lives. And it really is possible. We’re going to be talking about that today. I also am a millionaire through real estate. And so what I’ve decided to do is marry my two deepest passions, which are bringing bliss into the world and building wealth through real estate to bring you the Blissful Real Estate Investor Formula. So that’s a little bit about me.

Kim Sutton: I love it. Thank you so much. And yes, everybody does need bliss. I could use like a few magic bliss pills right now.

Moneeka Sawyer: Let’s see if we can make that happen.

Kim Sutton: Oh, please. Yes, definitely. How did you get on this journey? What brought you here?

Moneeka Sawyer: There’s two journeys that have kind of happened simultaneously. We’ll start with the bliss one, and then we can talk a little later about the real estate journey. But the Bliss part journey, I was born in a part of the country where I was the only non white person in school, and I was tormented, humiliated and bullied constantly. So I grew up very scared, and eventually became very, very depressed. Life seemed to kind of get worse when I became a teenager. The bullying got even worse, it sort of started to take the form of the horrible things that boys do to girls. And there was a point in my life where I wasn’t sure how I was going to keep going. Because like I said, it just stuck, kept worse. And I had to make a decision whether I was going to continue my path on this planet or not. And fortunately, I made the decision to live. But the thing is that, yes, I could decide to live, but I didn’t want to keep living this way. And prayer on that day to God was, God, either have mercy and bring me home, or teach me how to live. And almost like magic. About an hour later, I got a call from a friend who hadn’t been in touch in the years. She called me and she turned me on to my coach Ted, who basically saved my life. And what Ted really reminded me of was that, first of all, who I am? He empowered me to really be who I was born to be. And this he told me something that I really think applies to everybody. We are all born on this planet, tiny little bundles of joy. Isn’t that what babies are? They’re these little bundles of joy, don’t you think?

Kim Sutton: Yeah, let’s just go with that. Depends on the day in my house. Sorry, I don’t know what’s in my bloodstream today, but we’re going to go with that.

Moneeka Sawyer: Born like in all this excitement to be alive. All the things are gonna learn and eyes wide open. Well, not really. But you know what I mean. And then we kind of learn about life and what isn’t possible. And that joy may not be natural. I think what Ted really helped me to realize is that joy is a huge priority for me, and I was born that way. I can get back there. And so tools that I had developed through my traumatic childhood, because I had studied self help just to get through things. And through his tools, together, we brought me back. Made me the person that I feel I was born to be. And then eventually, I became a coach, started becoming an executive coach. 

And the one thing that I found with all of these really rich people with the perfect houses, the multi-million dollar businesses, the perfect spouses, the beautiful kids, they weren’t happy. The reason they were seeing a coach is their businesses were starting to fall apart, their marriages were falling apart, they didn’t have relationships with their children, and it was all because they weren’t happy. And so through my strategies and techniques that I taught them, they were able to bring bliss back into their lives. And then their businesses took off, their passion was back, their excitement for life was back, their marriages came back together. Real magic happens when you’re living in this place of bliss. So as a coach, I could only reach so many people. And so that’s why my book was born because I really wanted to make a larger impact in the world and make this accessible to many people, so Choose Bliss was born. So that’s kind of the journey.

Kim Sutton: I love that. And I have to apologize to you and listeners for my smart baby response. Yes, babies are beautiful, and they’re so sweet. I’ve just had one of those challenging couple of days where the kids are doing everything that they probably shouldn’t.

Moneeka Sawyer: We’re all on a journey. Right?

Kim Sutton: We are.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah, but we come to this planet, I believe, and there are people that disagree with me. But I believe we just come here in the state of awe, jewel and excitement. Obviously, we can’t as babies define that. It’s indefinable, but I’m defining that as a bliss.

Kim Sutton: What I find unfortunate is that babies do come here with no preconceived notions, everything is beautiful. But then through the their upbringing, and the adults that surround them, they are taught discrimination, they are taught that their skin color is better than somebody else’s, and it’s just so unfortunate. And I went through bullying in high school too. I mean, I’m bad as white as you could possibly get. But being female, and I’m not just gonna say it’s being female, because I know men face their own harassment of sorts. But I had the same type of boy bullying, and I have made it clear to my boys that that is not going to be accepted.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah. Bullying is not about your skin color. And I say it because I know that that’s what I was most tormented for. The beautiful nicknames that I had, really, it was very, very clear that it was about my skin color. But yes, there are many, many, many people from every walk of life that get bullied, and it’s just part of my story. But I think that it’s really true that it teaches us. For me, it taught me that nobody was ever going to like me, that I was alone in the world. It taught me that I had to be tough. And these walls to protect myself, it taught me to want to be a pleaser, that nobody was gonna like me unless I danced a tap dance and bends myself into a pretzel. Choosing bliss is really about being who you truly are in the world, and having the emotional strength to do that. To have emotional mastery, to be able to be who you are have your emotions. Allow yourself to love and tear down the walls, and being strong enough to deal with all of those consequences. Whether it’s love back, it’s rejection, it’s fear, whatever it is. So let me define bliss really, really quickly. Is that okay?

Kim Sutton: Oh, please. Yes.

Moneeka Sawyer: So I define bliss as a deep sense of joy and contentment, and the confidence that I can handle, and you can handle anything that comes your way. It’s about emotional mastery and emotional resilience so that no matter what happens out there in the world, you always have this home base of bliss to come back to, because this home base is inside you.

Kim Sutton: Wow. So that’s not saying that everything’s under control.

Moneeka Sawyer: No, absolutely not. I think as humans, we have this huge range of emotional capacity, all the way from absolute ecstasy to, I want to die. Literally, I want to die. And we go to all of those places. And the thing about being blissful is that you get to choose to have all of those experiences because you know that you’ve created a home base, I call it the bliss equilibrium, that you get to just keep coming back to. And because of the tools that I teach, and the strategies that I teach, you get access to that bliss equilibrium much more easily, don’t stay depressed as long. If you’re in ecstasy, you know that you can stay there and that you’re not going to be afraid when they’re really, really happy that it’s going to go away. But yeah, if it goes away, you get to just go back to bliss. So it’s this place, and that place also can be constantly evolved and improved. I don’t think I’m as blissful today as I’m going to be next year. I just hope it’s gonna keep getting better, and I’ve got the tools to make that happen. Does that make sense?

Kim Sutton: Oh, that absolutely makes sense. And I will share that sentiment exactly. I just want to keep on seeing me get better. I used to be of the mindset that things will be good when? Things will be good when I have more money in my account. Things will be good when I have more clients. Things will be good when this and that. But I went through my own discovery that things are good now.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah. This is the thing with bliss, a lot of people think of it as a circumstantial emotion. So when I have this, when I have that, people have said to me, of course, you’re blissful Moneeka. You got a beautiful husband, you’re rich, whatever it is. Yes, I am very, very lucky. But what I believe is that I have those things because I’m blissful, and they did not make the bliss. Well, they certainly help. They amplify my bliss, and they support it. But they’re not the reason that I’m blissful. And so this is what I tell my clients all the time, we can’t control what’s going on out there in the world. We can’t control what people do to us. The only thing we have absolute control over is how we choose to respond. It is our choice, and we can choose to respond from a place of bliss.

Kim Sutton: What do you see as being some of the biggest self sabotaging tools that people use?

Moneeka Sawyer: Definitely all blissful when is the biggest one. The nail on the head on that is giving away their power to what’s going on in the world to an outside circumstance. Being at the mercy of other people’s opinions, and what other people are doing. Just not being in their own power and understanding that they have a choice. When I tell people that they have a choice, I get all sorts of stories back. Can I tell some of that?

Kim Sutton: Oh, yes, please.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah. So people will say things like, I got a story recently during the holidays. I had a client that said to me, Moneeka, you don’t seem to understand. I have to go back and see my family because my mom is dying. The thing is that he was estranged from a brother who had done horrible things to his family that he was very, very angry. His brother had never apologized. So he had not been going back to Christmas because of his brother. Now, his mom’s in the hospital and he feels he has to go back, which I agree with. So I thought to him, do you really not have a choice? He’s like, I don’t have a choice. I have to go see my mom. And I said, so you have a choice to choose the love of your mom over the anger of your brother.

Kim Sutton: Wow. Wow.

Moneeka Sawyer: What a different perspective in any situation. We may not think we have a choice, but we always have a choice about how we respond, how we think about it.

Kim Sutton: After I left my ex husband, I found myself in a text message battle on my cell phone until I realized that I didn’t need to do that anymore. And I actually found an auto responder for my phone. I set it up just for him. I think it said something like my phone has received your message, and when I find appropriate, I will respond. And I had to tell you, it did wonders. He finally got the hint that I wasn’t going to be responding to ridiculous texts.

Moneeka Sawyer: And it’s so interesting, because in this world where we are always connected, often we think after we respond to everything. You don’t have control over what you respond to and how. Just because someone texts you does not mean that they deserve a response. And you don’t have to respond right away either. You can say, okay, this deserves a response. Maybe it makes me angry too. Don’t push them, don’t do the text right now, you wait, you do a response that’s going to serve both parties rather than just reacting.

Kim Sutton: Absolutely. I realized earlier today that my home phone, yes, people, I do still have a home phone. Well, my home phone right here in my office was dead. Actually, it’s still dead. I don’t know what’s going on with the charger. And my cell phone, the ringer was turned off. And I only noticed it after I realized that it had been amazingly blissfully quiet while I was working, no interruptions. I wasn’t checking my email, and I was choosing bliss in the lack of notifications.

Moneeka Sawyer: It’s so good. I actually create that now. You get that experience once. I’ve had similar experiences, why hasn’t my phone, in two hours. And then like the joy of all that, I accomplished in those two hours while I was not looking at my phone. Or for me, it was airplane mode. Oops. But it really taught me a very valuable lesson.

Kim Sutton: My littles have learned how to put my phone in airplane mode, and I didn’t realize it.

Moneeka Sawyer: Wow.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. But it’s amazing those days. It’s not necessarily always convenient, especially when I can’t find it and I’m trying to call it to find out where it is. But it’s amazingly quiet. I was introduced to the law of attraction, let me just back up for a second in 2009. And it was an eye opener for me. Because up until that point, I was letting everybody and everything determine my happiness. And I’m not going to say that I completely changed after that. There was still a lot of growth that had to go on. But just that one discovery alone changed my life. The realization that I had the power to make myself happy. Yes, listeners, that’s not saying that I’m happy all the time. There are days when little things will get under my skin. But for the most part, it’s limited to kids. And I can choose how to or to not respond. But I’ve learned to respond for the most part, usually not my kids. But when anything else is getting under my skin, I’ve learned to just keep my mouth shut. Because often in the heat of the moment, we can say things that we can’t take back, or we can give in to something that we don’t want to do just because we feel the need to respond so quickly.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah. One of the things that people tell or ask me all the time is, are you happy all the time? And you brought that out, Kim. Because, no, I’m not happy all the time. And I don’t actually believe it’s healthy to be happy all the time. Because what you’re doing is you’re denying the resource of your emotions. If we are in fear, or we are in sadness, or depression, really examine what’s brought that on. If we’re in fear, there’s so much talk about how fear is the enemy. You have to get past your fear. Yes, you do in many cases, but it also keeps us alive. So when we’re in fear, looking at that and really, is it appropriate fear? Is it serving me? And how? Do I want it to continue to be that way? Or do I want to get past that? And same with sadness. Why am I feeling this really deep sadness about this particular, whatever it is. Is there something that I need to work on? Or do I just need to honor that sadness at this moment? And then when I’m ready, when I feel like I’ve honored enough to go back to that place that I would much rather spend most of my time in, which is bliss. So emotions are not a bad thing. And having that full range of emotions is not a bad thing. It’s just knowing and creating the ability to go back to an equilibrium that really serves you and creates the life you want to live in most of the time. The negative emotions give us a lot of lessons. Bliss allows us to live fully.

Kim Sutton: Right. I want to touch upon something really quickly in that. We’re two women talking about this, but I have had plenty of men in my life who I have never seen cry. So I’m wondering, I’m just trying to figure out how to vocalize this. And I don’t mean to stereotype men. I’ve seen my husband cry when they don’t display, I’m not saying they don’t feel, but when they don’t display the full range of emotions, would you say they’re not experiencing them either? Never might have seen really like stereotyping here, not stereotyping, but generalizing.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah. No, I think everybody experiences emotions. I think it’s healthier to display or express them. But I think the reality is that when you are displaying them, it might just mean that they look the same. So I think men who have become more expressive, they still have a heart crying. It’s not societally what they’ve taught is how to express it. My husband, when he’s really sad, he goes and works out. It’s sort of getting himself physically into his body. He also has a mouth twitch that happens when he’s really really sad. So I see it displayed. He’ll talk about it, and express it. But societally, that’s not what they’re taught. I think it’s not fair. Just like women, there’s all these expectations about who we are. Men will say women break down crying, and they’re not as strong as we are. From my perspective, ability to express emotions takes a lot of courage and strength. Because in our society, especially, it’s looked down upon. So men stereotype as we stereotype them. And there’s never an intention of harm, but it’s just kind of like, these are the guidelines that we operate on. And however we learn to express it, as long as we do express it, that’s the key. It doesn’t need to look the same for both of us.

Kim Sutton: Yeah. That is one of my pet peeves when women are generalized as not being as strong as men. We do tend to show emotions more, but don’t tell me I’m not as strong as any man. I’m not out there doing pull ups, I can bench press. The ability to do things that I’ve done including giving birth to children. I’m not saying that just giving birth to children has made me stronger, but I’d like to see some men try.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah, right. And they’re strong in different ways. I’m so glad we’re having this conversation. Because just as much as we get stereotyped in women, that we do it right back at them.

Kim Sutton: Yeah, we do.

Moneeka Sawyer: And they resent it. Men are not as good in their hearts as we are. And we’re not as good and are as strong in our bodies as they are, necessarily. I mean, again, I’m just generalizing. But yeah, we say those generalizations because it’s a lot of our experience in life. Like you said, I will never be able to lift the level of weights [inaudible], it can’t. No matter how good shape I get into. Maybe some women will, whatever. All I’m saying is that we are as we are, and instead of stereotyping and judging, and putting our own expectations on each other, part of being blissful is really allowing and accepting people to be their very best selves and to live in their strengths, rather than criticizing and judging them for the things that they’re not quite as strong as we are. Strong at as we are..

Kim Sutton: Love it. Definitely. I know a lot of us get caught up in the fact that we set goals. And I have to say, for just about every goal I’ve set, I can’t say I’ve ever met it. But that doesn’t mean I’m not super happy with wherever I’ve gotten to. I’m not gonna let whether or not I have met that goal to determine if I’m happy, and that’s been a huge transition in my life. I still made progress. I still took action. I did. I’m still successful. And success to me does not look like a lot of money, or 10 gazillion, I’m just making up numbers here. Social media followers, that’s like the least of my concern. Success to me is in my heart. What about you? What does success really look like to you?

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah. Success to me is in my heart also. Success to me is really about being able to live my life on my terms. So I want to be able to be out there making the impact that I believe I was sent here to make. I want to be helping people. I want to be passionate every single day of my life. I want to be living in my bliss most of the time. That’s the sort of high level, what does success look like to me? Then there’s the how I’ve achieved it, what I’ve done to get here. And that’s when we start to talk about real estate. For me, my ability to really shine in the world was going to be reliant on how safe and grounded I personally felt. And to me, having a foundation of wealth was that thing that allowed me to step most into my power. Because now, I’m not so worried about how to pay the bills. I’m not worried about, but I’m going to be having my basic needs met. My housing, my food and those sorts of things. I don’t worry about any of that. I can instead spend my time, energy and passion on learning how to get the message out there. What’s possible for people to shine in my own light? And to become my very biggest, best possible self.

Kim Sutton: I would love if you would share how you transition from being in the dark place you’re in to getting into real estate.

Moneeka Sawyer: Oh, yes. Okay. So the real estate story begins when I was three years old, and my dad started investing in real estate. So they came to this country with only $200 in their pocket as newlyweds. And it heard that real estate was the golden ticket to wealth in the United States. So I had grown up with real estate in my life. My dad, he saved money and bought investment properties. And he paid for my education that way. He paid for the education of my sisters. So real estate is really served my family. The thing is that when I was in that dark place, I was probably in my early 20’s, I was really overcome with fear in so many different areas of my life. So even though I yearn for stability and security, I even knew how to do that because I had had the experience living with my dad. There was a lot of fear in me about how to do this. 

And I remember I had this conversation. I just graduated from college and I had a conversation with my dad. He was sitting across the table from me, and I was telling about all my fears about money and being alone, all these things that college students new into the world go through. Plus all the stuff about people didn’t like me, I was gonna be alone, how was I gonna make it? All of those things. My dad said something to me that night that completely changed my life. What he said to me was, everybody’s afraid. And everybody has money issues. Well, do you want poor people money issues? Or are you going to step through your fear and have rich people money issues?

Kim Sutton: Wow.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah. I mean, it completely took me aback like, what a different perspective. And so I made some decisions that night, that things were gonna be different for me, and I was gonna have rich people money issues. Which meant, there were things that I was gonna have to do that were gonna be really uncomfortable. There were things that I was gonna have to deal with in my life that were gonna be really uncomfortable. But you know what? Everybody has that. Everybody has that. So it was part of the process, actually, for creating this stability for creating the foundation for my bliss.

Kim Sutton: Wow, what are a few of the first steps that you had to take that were really uncomfortable for you?

Moneeka Sawyer: Well, so the first thing, my husband and I, when I got married, my husband and I bought a house with $10,000 that we got as a wedding gift. And making those payments were really, really hard. It’s scary to buy your first house, and we only put 5% down. So there wasn’t a lot of equity. I was very aware because I knew about the estate that that kind of leverage could be scary. 

So I was living in those days, I was really living in a place of fear. Instead of looking at the opportunity, I was looking at what could happen to me. So buying that first house together. Then when he and I decided to move to the next house, which was about four years later, the decision became, Am I going to rent this out and start dealing with the tenants and the toilets, and all these things that I’d see my dad go through? Or am I just gonna sell it and buy a new house, and you just have appreciation on each of the houses as I move up. And I remembered what my dad said so I decided to rent out that other house that we bought. The new residence that we were going to live in. And that was really beautiful getting my very first tenants, getting the place fixed up. There’s all sorts of stuff people go through when they are investing in real estate, and I went through those things. Am I going to get the right tenants? What if they stop paying rent? What if they wreck the house? There’s all that. What if he doesn’t appreciate it? What if I can’t make the mortgage? All of those things. So I had to step through each of those in order to make the decision to rent it out and just allow the universe to serve me that I created. 

And I know that sounds a little esoteric, but there has to be a level of faith in your decisions about what you’re going to do in your life. And one of the things that I have always done, and I teach all of my clients to do is always have a plan B. So for instance, based on my own strategies, I like people to look at a 10 year time frame. I do not recommend that if you’re looking for appreciation to buy a house and expect to appreciate it in two years and be able to sell out, it’s happened. But there really is a 10 year cycle in real estate. So give yourself the time to be right. 

A lot of what happened in 2008 and 2009 is that people didn’t understand. There were a lot of people that lost their jobs, they just couldn’t pay the mortgages. It was scary. But there were also a lot of people who could have just rented the place out because they couldn’t make the mortgage. But they would have paid the mortgage and their rent, and they could have moved somewhere else until their property recovered, and they wouldn’t have lost. So it’s so much of it is just about getting the information and making decisions about what’s your exit strategy, and what’s your plan B. And that’s really how I’ve built my wealth. I’m fairly conservative, and I don’t have to be fearful all the time. I have to step out of my comfort zone a lot. But now, it’s fun because I see the potential. My eyes are all about the potential rather than the fear.

Kim Sutton: I love how you talked about the 10 year plan. But I do want to make a point to the listeners that we’re talking about a 10 year real estate plan. Because I know for myself in my business, which does not involve real estate, not that I have a business that involves real estate because I don’t. But I don’t look at any type of plan that’s over six months, or nine months tops. Because it’s just not feasible for me. I mean, I’ve a chronic idea disorder, that just would not work because everything changes from one day to the next. But when real estate is concerned, yes. But even going back to my six to nine month plan, I have to give myself grace. And we have to do the same in real estate as well. Things just like you were just talking about with 2008, 2009, everything is not always going to go to plan. And for those of you whose plans do go as you intended, more than 50% of the time, I want to know your secret. Because I would have to say that even in my six to nine month plans, no, it’s greater than 30% when things change in the meantime.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah. And you know what? I do have chronic idea disorder also. It’s part of being an entrepreneur.

Kim Sutton: Aha.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah. And I think that really, for me, one of the really intelligent moves that I made so long ago, and that was at such a young age. I have no idea, but thank you God. And thank you, dad. But I wanted to have my own business. So this real estate thing was kind of a part time backburner thing. But what it was was the safety net for the future. So many of us that are in business, we understand that there are things that are going to come up for us. We’re going to have to pay for our children’s education. We’re not have to, we want to. We want to pay for our daughter’s weddings. Whatever it is. We want to retire in style by the time we’re 40 rather than 60. There are things we want in our life. And so many business owners hope that their businesses will go well enough that they can handle those things when the time is needed. And the thing is that hope usually doesn’t pay for those things, planning does.

Kim Sutton: Say that again.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yes. Hope does not pay for our future, planning does.

Kim Sutton: Yeah.

Moneeka Sawyer: And so yes. I had my business, and I did all my ideas. Things would change every three to six months. But there was always this thing that I knew that in the future when it was time, this was going to take care of me. So I put in $10,000. Over 25 years, I put in a total of $149,000. But I’m worth well over 2, 3, 4 million dollars now. So we can take care of it. And it didn’t take a concerted effort, I only spend 5 to 10 hours a month, kind of watching over things. I’ve got the systems now to do that, to keep it joyful. To have it supports the joy of my life, rather than taking my time and energy and creating a huge amount of stress, and getting away from the business that I’m truly most passionate about. So I totally get what you’re saying. I tell my clients all the time, there’s now money now, which is the money to pay the bills, there’s more money later. So usually, our clients are in the pipeline that are going to pay for our bills later. And then there’s me to deal with the business of life. And that’s the money that I talk about. You don’t give it too much of your time and your energy, but it will be there for you when you need it. That’s kind of how I see real estate.

Kim Sutton: I can hear some people just shaking their heads not understanding the math, because you said that you have put $149,000 in? Or am I not hearing the whole picture? But maybe I’m just not understanding properly. You said 149,000, and now you’re worth 2, 3, 4 million. How does that math work? I know people are wondering, how the heck, I want to know how to do that.

Moneeka Sawyer: Yeah, right. So I bought my very first house for 5% down. And then when we went to go get the next house, even though I rented this out before I did, I took money out of the house to buy the next house. So I haven’t actually had to take any more money out of the bank to purchase houses. However, when I wanted to buy several at a time, I did take out a little bit more money for that. And when I bought my primary residence, I currently live in which is my dream home. I actually took out quite a bit of money then because the equity in the other place I was moving away from did not have enough equity for the downpayment where I’m living. This is actually money [inaudible], and there are a lot of people that don’t agree with me on this. But I only have 50% of my assets in real estate. I like to keep a lot of liquid assets around so that when, excuse the term, but when the shit hits the fan, I have safety.

Kim Sutton: Yeah.

Moneeka Sawyer: So I keep my real estate money in real estate, and I keep my liquid assets, meaning stocks, mutual funds, those sorts of things. I keep that liquid. So I try not to pull money out of my liquid assets to buy real estate. What that means is that it has been a slow journey for me. It’s taken me 20 years where it might take someone else. But I committed to the safety net for myself. And so I just haven’t been willing to put a lot of my own cash into it. So it’s taking me 20. Maybe that’s not motivating to people. But it was motivating to me, and it met the goals that were aligned with who I am and what I needed.

Kim Sutton: Your real estate side of the business sounds very much similar. I mean, not the same, exactly. But similar to how we actually run our whole lives. Because it’s based on cash. I’m not seeing the equity as cash, but it’s as similar as I can think right now. You’re taking what you have, and you’re reinvesting.

Moneeka Sawyer: Exactly.

Kim Sutton: Rather than accruing more debt, which I know that would be the scariest part to me. How can I afford to take out another mortgage? I’m not saying that you haven’t, but you’re using assets that you already have to fund your future.

Moneeka Sawyer: That’s right. That’s right. And the numbers can be a little bit tricky, which is why you really want to hire a coach because you want to make sure that you’re not making decisions that you don’t really understand what the consequences are. But yes, that’s exactly how I operate. I take the equity from my real estate and buy more real estate, and I take the equity for my stock and I buy more stock. And that’s the way that I’ve sort of built things in a really safe. I’m the turtle, not the hare. I can teach people how to be a bit more hare-ish, but I really am the turtle. It was slow, it was easy blissful, and it really served me.

Kim Sutton: A bit more hare ish sounds [inaudible]. I’m Okay, without being hare ish, I’d rather be turtle. There’s a tweetable people, do you want to be hare-ish? Or turtle ish?

Moneeka Sawyer: Exactly.

Kim Sutton: Yeah, yeah. No, I will totally go that route. Where can people find out more about you and your coaching? I just want to hear more about how you work with people.

Moneeka Sawyer: Oh, yeah, thank you so much for asking that. And that has recently evolved. So I used to be a coach, like I said 11 years ago. I’m no longer coaching because my priorities have changed. My parents are elderly, and I want to be able to have a more flexible time schedule. So now, the way that I connect with people is I teach workshops, and I have a mastermind. So really to kind of get to know who I am. The very first way to get in touch with me is to download my Free Report at blissfulinvestor.com, and that will take you from $10,000 to $2 million just on that track. So you can see exactly what I did and how I did it. You also get to know a little bit more about my philosophy around real estate the blissful way. So that’s one way. 

And like I said, I work with people in a mastermind, in group coaching and through workshops. So that’s how people can connect with me personally. Also, I have a podcast called the Real Estate Investing for Women Podcast. And this is all about, so we talk about strategies, of course. But we also talk about mindset, and hard set, and money smarts, and all of those things you need to know as women to be successful. So that’s another option. I also have the book ,Choose Bliss, which we talked about earlier. That’s available on Amazon. And of course, I’m on Moneeka Sawyer, and Twitter, and LinkedIn. So people can connect with me there too.

Kim Sutton: Fabulous. And I know listeners, your minds are going crazy right now trying to keep up, but you can find the links on the show notes page at thekimsutton.com/pp338. I am going to have to use that turtle ish out. I look forward to turtle ishly, oh, my gosh, I’m just making up crazy now. But building my wealth in the future, you’ve inspired me because I really didn’t see how it could work. But I’m getting a glimpse, and I look forward to more discussions with you about it. So thank you.

Moneeka Sawyer: Oh, thank you, Kim. Yes, I would love that. And that’s exactly what I wanted to hear. I want to inspire people to take a different look at a different point of view. Look at the options, and definitely get in touch with me.

Kim Sutton: Do you have a parting piece of advice or a golden nugget that you can offer to listeners before we go?

Moneeka Sawyer: Absolutely. So always remember that bliss is your birthright. Choose to claim it every single day.