[00:00:02] Speaker A: This is short term rental management, the show that is all about short term rental property management with your hosts, yours truly, Luke Carl.
Well, here we are. We have gathered here today to talk about rental real estate with long hair. Luke, the reverend of real estate. Happy to be here with you. We're going to talk about landlord. We're going to talk about money management. How do I get my money right? Matter of fact, today's topic is banks. What's the best bank for me to keep my funds straight? How do I keep my bank accounts? Right? Because if you're not keeping your eye on your money, it's gone, man.
It's like Snoop Dogg. Keep your mind on your money and your money on your mind. So today we're going to talk about banks after a word from this week's sponsor.
Did you know there's actually a company that will help you find and purchase your first or next short term rental? The short term shop is the premier short term rental acquisition company.
They have a team of realtors with tons of experience, and most of them actually own their own properties as well. They are the best in the business and would be happy to help you with your next purchase. You can find
[email protected] brokered by Exp, the shorttermshop.com.
Here we go. Here we go. Landlording at its finest. We're doing our best out there to make a better future for our families.
[00:01:38] Speaker B: And if you're listening to this show.
[00:01:42] Speaker A: You are obsessed and I salute you. You need to be obsessed. You've got to be obsessed to be the best. I'm obsessing with my hair right now. I got to make sure it's perfect.
It's a lot more gray than it used to be, but it's great to be with you here on short term.
[00:01:59] Speaker B: Rental management, home of the five star review.
[00:02:02] Speaker A: So please hit me with a five star. It will be good karma for your listings after all. So I have, over the years, found.
[00:02:10] Speaker B: I've had a need for better banks.
[00:02:13] Speaker A: And I have done all sorts of research and I have all sorts of fairly useless knowledge on the subject in my brain from all the obsessing and research I have done over the years. So I want to share that with you today. Now, the first thing I want to explain is, why do you need a virtual bank?
Why do I need a virtual bank?
[00:02:37] Speaker B: If you're asking that question, you probably don't.
[00:02:40] Speaker A: I also have no reason to tell.
[00:02:42] Speaker B: You that you do. I have no rabbit in that fight.
[00:02:49] Speaker A: If you think you need a brick.
[00:02:50] Speaker B: And mortar, then you probably do.
[00:02:53] Speaker A: If you think that bank of America is a good establishment for handling your day to day funds, then I can't.
[00:03:01] Speaker B: Help you because it's right.
[00:03:04] Speaker A: Let me, let me get into that a little bit. So for me, I am not going to go to a branch and wait in line. If I lost a debit card, I'm not going to call and sit on the phone for 2 hours trying to get somebody to replace a debit card to do this, to do that. So going to a brick and mortar is a complete waste of my time. I just don't have the patience for it. And yeah, fine, have a local brick and mortar for your savings accounts and your day to day funds and your car loans and all that stuff. Absolutely. I'm not saying that. But what I am saying is for.
[00:03:38] Speaker B: Running the day to day of your.
[00:03:41] Speaker A: Vacation homes or your properties in general, it would behoove you to have a virtual bank.
[00:03:49] Speaker B: Benefits of a virtual bank well, for.
[00:03:52] Speaker A: Me, the biggest benefit is that I can add employees very easily and I can give them control of certain things and they can't see other things. Like if I need to add some sort of assistant or let's say I hire my daughter. She's a little young right now, but maybe someday if you want to hire your daughter, you can add her and.
[00:04:08] Speaker B: She can buy shower curtains with her.
[00:04:12] Speaker A: Own debit card on a virtual bank.
[00:04:13] Speaker B: And you just one button, add her on there, create her own.
[00:04:18] Speaker A: She can have her own debit card right there in 1 second. It's virtual. Or they will mail you one.
You can add your bookkeeper, you can.
[00:04:27] Speaker B: Add your CPA, you can add a virtual assistant.
[00:04:31] Speaker A: We're going to get deeper into that because some of these banks do not allow overseas employees. Okay, if you have misplaced your debit card, that's me. If you can't find your debit card, you click one button and you see.
[00:04:45] Speaker B: Your debit card right there on your phone. Just type it in.
[00:04:48] Speaker A: Or you can add it to your.
[00:04:49] Speaker B: Apple Pay and buy the salad at the salad store or the gas station, whatever it is.
[00:04:55] Speaker A: Don't buy the salad at the gas station.
[00:04:57] Speaker B: Won't be a good salad.
So have the brick and mortar old school small bank do business with them, have them do loans for you, et cetera.
But in my opinion, for running the day to day of a business, especially.
[00:05:16] Speaker A: When it comes to a virtual business, like an Airbnb or a verbo or.
[00:05:20] Speaker B: A booking.com.
[00:05:24] Speaker A: Virtual is the way to go. And if you don't agree with that. Good news.
[00:05:28] Speaker B: You don't have to listen to the rest of this.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: If you think that waiting in line at a Wells Fargo is okay with.
[00:05:34] Speaker B: You, then you're good. We're done here.
[00:05:39] Speaker A: That's not good enough for me. I'm not going to wait in line with a bunch of people that are.
[00:05:44] Speaker B: Trying to figure out why they're overdrawn, not going to do it. All right, so now the next thing.
[00:05:53] Speaker A: I want to talk about is profit first. Mike McCallowitz, profit first. We are huge fans of his around here. He's an amazing author.
[00:06:00] Speaker B: And all of the principles that I'm.
[00:06:03] Speaker A: Talking about today come from a book called profit first. It is about paying yourself first. So you can't even have a good understanding of what we're talking about today if you have not read that book. So finish this podcast, go read that.
[00:06:15] Speaker B: Book, then listen to this podcast again.
Profit first.
[00:06:20] Speaker A: All of his books are a necessity.
[00:06:23] Speaker B: If you want to be a badass in any type of business. He's awesome.
[00:06:31] Speaker A: So read profit first so you understand what you need to do to get your money, right?
[00:06:37] Speaker B: Creating buckets of money, basically to make sure you're making money.
[00:06:45] Speaker A: Because if you're not paying attention, I can guarantee you you will not make money.
You have got to be reading owner statements.
[00:06:55] Speaker B: You have got to have somebody in.
[00:06:58] Speaker A: Charge of the day to day funds, whether it's you or you're big enough to hire somebody to do it for.
[00:07:03] Speaker B: You.
[00:07:06] Speaker A: Because you will wake up one day and all of a sudden that bank account doesn't have enough money for the mortgage.
[00:07:13] Speaker B: And that's going to happen.
[00:07:15] Speaker A: It is going to happen. And in your first year or two.
[00:07:18] Speaker B: It'S probably going to happen a lot.
But you need to know why.
All right, I need one $200 over here to pay this mortgage over here.
Why didn't we hit our numbers?
What can we do better to hit those numbers next month?
[00:07:33] Speaker A: It's always a rehab, it's always countertops or whatever it is, or unit turn.
[00:07:37] Speaker B: Or you had to put a new know.
And as time goes by, that gets better. Of course, the debt pay down is happening as well, right? So anyway, read profit first by Mike McCallowitz. So you understand exactly what we're talking about here.
[00:07:58] Speaker A: Sell with the short term shop.
Are you looking to sell your short term rental or even 1031 into a different property?
Our team of realtors will work hard to get you the most for your investment. We are experts in our field and would love to earn your business when it's time to sell, call the shop. The shorttermshop.com, that's the shorttermshop.com brokered by exp.
And then from there, I do want.
[00:08:31] Speaker B: To talk about different banks and the research that I've done and ones that you may be interested in.
[00:08:39] Speaker A: The one that seems to come up.
[00:08:41] Speaker B: The most is one that I've been.
[00:08:43] Speaker A: Using for quite some time.
[00:08:44] Speaker B: It's called relay.
[00:08:45] Speaker A: And you do hear some negative stuff about relay.
[00:08:48] Speaker B: So I'm going to clarify what's going on there about it was Christmas time, 2022.
[00:08:57] Speaker A: They had an issue where they had to get a new routing number. Let's just leave it at that. And it was a mess.
It was a complete disaster. They had a brand new routing number. Nobody recognized it, and it just didn't go well. And they got kind of a bad rap, bad reputation for that. I was in the middle of that. I hated it. It stunk.
But that's been fixed. I am here to tell you that's been fixed. No problem there with relay.
[00:09:22] Speaker B: Now, another downside of relay, no checks.
[00:09:26] Speaker A: They say they're working on that, but they've said they've been working on that for quite some time. I kind of like that they don't have checks.
[00:09:32] Speaker B: But if you're old school, you're not.
[00:09:34] Speaker A: Going to like that. And if you've got vendors that only want to get paid by check, you're not going to like that.
To me, it was kind of like when Steve Jobs got rid of the CDRom.
[00:09:44] Speaker B: Everybody was like, what? Are you kidding me? And WHOOP. Turns out we didn't need it anyway.
[00:09:50] Speaker A: Checks are stupid, let's be real. All right, so I'm cool with that. I just tell a vendor, hey, if.
[00:09:56] Speaker B: You want to get paid, you need.
[00:09:58] Speaker A: To send me a voided check and then I'll put them in my system.
[00:10:01] Speaker B: As a payee and I can just.
[00:10:03] Speaker A: Shoot them an ach right now.
[00:10:05] Speaker B: Boom, direct deposit payment.
[00:10:08] Speaker A: Super simple. So where people run into problems with relay and the fact that they don't send checks is because they are thinking old school, they're stuck in the past, and that's just not going to work. If you're going to use relay, you got to get over the fact that the checks, they do have checks, but.
[00:10:25] Speaker B: It takes like ten days to get it.
[00:10:28] Speaker A: And if you've got a tile guy that you need to pay right now.
[00:10:31] Speaker B: Then he needs to send you avoided.
[00:10:35] Speaker A: Check or just a bank account and routing number is really all you need to get him paid.
[00:10:38] Speaker B: Right now.
[00:10:41] Speaker A: Now, again, the upside of all of these is that they have all this awesome virtual stuff. Like, you can add your. We already went over this, but just to reiterate, I can have 100 bank accounts right in front of my face for the same business. Not 100, but as many bank accounts as I need for this business to run it, right in front of my face, I can click a button, open a new bank account instantly. I can click a button, close a bank account instantly. I don't have to go wait in.
[00:11:02] Speaker B: Line at a freaking branch.
[00:11:06] Speaker A: All right, so relay.
[00:11:08] Speaker B: They've been around for a few years.
[00:11:09] Speaker A: They've had some bumps and bruises.
[00:11:11] Speaker B: I do recommend them.
[00:11:13] Speaker A: Customer service stinks. If you need customer service, a virtual bank is probably not going to work.
[00:11:18] Speaker B: For you, because the whole thing about.
[00:11:21] Speaker A: Virtual is that they need to save money on customer service in order to survive.
[00:11:27] Speaker B: And so that's with every business these days. There's so many businesses like guestie for host.
[00:11:35] Speaker A: If you're using guestie for host, you can just pretty much forget about talking.
[00:11:38] Speaker B: To somebody to manage your properties.
[00:11:40] Speaker A: They're not going to help you.
[00:11:41] Speaker B: You're on your own.
[00:11:43] Speaker A: And I'm okay with that because quite frankly, I don't really want to wait on hold and deal with somebody anyway. I can figure out how to find it on my own, on Facebook groups.
[00:11:50] Speaker B: Or, you know, YouTube's, et cetera.
So that's something you got to keep in mind.
[00:11:55] Speaker A: That's not just relay.
[00:11:56] Speaker B: That's going to be all of them.
[00:11:57] Speaker A: Customer service is not quite going to be there with a couple of exceptions. Hostfi, I want to mention Hostfi. I don't know anything about it, to be honest.
[00:12:05] Speaker B: It's brand new.
[00:12:06] Speaker A: It looks to be, to me, quite frankly, like about a relay ripoff.
They are marketing themselves towards short term rental hosts.
[00:12:16] Speaker B: It is a brand new bank.
[00:12:18] Speaker A: I have been through a brand new bank before.
[00:12:20] Speaker B: I'm never doing that again. But Hostfi is out there.
[00:12:23] Speaker A: I don't know a whole lot about it. It does look pretty cool.
[00:12:28] Speaker B: I'd say it's a bit of a risk.
[00:12:31] Speaker A: Let's go with Mercury next. Mercury has been around for a minute and it is pretty freaking fantastic. Again, it's very similar to relay.
They had a problem for a number of years, a long period of time where you could only have one entity per dashboard.
[00:12:48] Speaker B: That doesn't work for me.
[00:12:49] Speaker A: I've got tons of entities. So you would have to have a different username and login for each one.
[00:12:54] Speaker B: Of your houses or businesses. What that's ridiculous.
Mercury has fixed that.
[00:13:02] Speaker A: Again, that issue is no longer in existence.
[00:13:07] Speaker B: And mercury is a good option. It's actually a great option. It's a very good looking dashboard, et cetera.
[00:13:14] Speaker A: I have not used it extensively.
I didn't use it because of the one entity per dashboard thing back when.
[00:13:22] Speaker B: I was shopping around.
[00:13:24] Speaker A: Now that doesn't exist.
[00:13:26] Speaker B: So if I were to look to.
[00:13:28] Speaker A: Find a new bank today, I think I would look heavily at Mercury Chase.
[00:13:34] Speaker B: If you want, in my opinion, the.
[00:13:37] Speaker A: Research I've done, if you want a.
[00:13:40] Speaker B: Brick and mortar bank that you can walk into and touch and feel and.
[00:13:47] Speaker A: Talk to somebody, if that gives you warm and fuzzies, I would go with Chase. And what you're doing there is chase for business, chase for business. So you're going to go walk into a chase bank and say, I'd like.
[00:14:01] Speaker B: To open a chase for business account.
[00:14:04] Speaker A: From what I understand, it is fairly sophisticated, and it's going to have everything.
[00:14:08] Speaker B: You need much better than, say, a.
[00:14:11] Speaker A: Bank of America business account or a Wells Fargo business account. If you want the brick and mortar.
[00:14:15] Speaker B: I would recommend Chase.
[00:14:17] Speaker A: Let's talk about Stessa. Stessa is fantastic for bookkeeping. If you've only got two or three properties, you're going to want to look at Stessa. All right, it's a little off topic here slightly, but it's a great way.
[00:14:29] Speaker B: To keep your books as you grow.
[00:14:31] Speaker A: Now, once you get up to 7810 properties, you're going to outgrow it, most likely. Again, coming from a guy that doesn't have extensive knowledge of it, I have not used it extensively or anything. I've just signed up for it and had several discussions with them and folks that use them, et cetera.
[00:14:46] Speaker B: But it is a great way to.
[00:14:47] Speaker A: Keep your money, right, especially in the early days. But they also offer high interest savings.
[00:14:52] Speaker B: Accounts, which is cool.
So if you're looking to park some.
[00:14:56] Speaker A: Money for your next down payments, that would be a good option for that.
Relay has that as well. Relay is doing like one to 3% rate as of the recording of this podcast. One to 3% fluctuating on a savings account.
[00:15:10] Speaker B: The truth?
[00:15:11] Speaker A: There is a local brick and mortar is going to likely have a better savings account situation than a virtual bank.
[00:15:18] Speaker B: And if you're going to leave it.
[00:15:19] Speaker A: Parked for a long time, you're going to probably want to open a money.
[00:15:21] Speaker B: Market savings account that's going to be the highest interest.
[00:15:27] Speaker A: All right, so give you five options.
[00:15:29] Speaker B: Today.
[00:15:32] Speaker A: I am going to throw one.
[00:15:33] Speaker B: More at you, which is NBKC.
[00:15:38] Speaker A: National bank of Kansas City. You're never going to believe it. It's crazy. How is that even possible? That's being brought up. But it is a fantastic option.
[00:15:47] Speaker B: Another really cool thing about NBKC is that if you call, you will get an actual human at the freaking bank in Kansas City.
[00:15:59] Speaker A: NBKC.
Basically what happened there was that there were all these software banks using them as their actual bank underneath them. That's another thing. Hold on, I'm going to write that down. We'll come back to that. NBKC got so popular in that virtual space that they said, you know what.
[00:16:18] Speaker B: Let'S just do it ourselves. And so NBKC has a great virtual.
[00:16:23] Speaker A: Option, and it's nice, warm, fuzzy because you can talk to a real human at the actual bank. I'm telling you, I've tried it several times. You just call and they answer right away and you say, wait a minute, are you at the actual bank? Are you actually in Kansas City?
[00:16:37] Speaker B: There's no way. She's like, yeah, I'm in Kansas City.
[00:16:41] Speaker A: I'm at the front desk. That's pretty cool. Downside of NBKC, no overseas assistance. You can add assistance of any kind. Again, your daughter, your cousin, if you hire somebody to do your bookkeeping, you can do all that. But if they are overseas, it will not allow them. It won't allow their IP address.
So if you have virtual assistants, say, in India or the Philippines, probably won't work for you.
All right, I'm going to talk briefly about FDIC insured. I don't know a lot about this. You're going to want to talk to these banks if it's of interest to you or a concern to you. Most of the banks we talked about today are not actual banks. They are softwares that sit on top of some other bank. I don't really know all that much about it, if you want to know the truth, but look in to see how much FDIC insured you're going to get out of that and if you care or not.
All right, so some good options out.
[00:17:40] Speaker B: There to keep your money, right?
[00:17:43] Speaker A: When it comes to your rental income. Again, for me, I'm not standing in.
[00:17:48] Speaker B: Line at a branch. No way I'm doing that. No, of course, as you grow, you.
[00:17:54] Speaker A: Get a good relationship with a local bank. You just shoot your bank or a text and that kind of thing. But those local banks are not going to have good day to day virtual dashboards for running money in, money out.
Hope you found some value in the discussion today.
No legal advice or CPA or accounting.
[00:18:15] Speaker B: Advice of any kind from the long hair. But I do love you. I appreciate you.
[00:18:21] Speaker A: I wish you much success in your landlording endeavors. Please leave us five stars, wherever you're listening.
[00:18:31] Speaker B: And as always, don't overthink it's.
