About Mike
My mission is to empower pilots to fly for the love of it, rather than fly to survive.Like most boys, I always wanted to be a pilot growing up. But begging Dad to go to aircraft museums all the time could not change the fact that my family couldn’t financially support flight school. So instead, I channeled my fascination with flight on the engineering side and eventually got a degree in mechanical engineering. After working as an aircraft engineer for a few years, I felt my life melting away behind those cubicle walls and let my adventurous side take over. I joined the NOAA Commissioned Officer Corps, the seventh uniformed service of the United States. NOAA trained me to be a Maritime Officer of an oceangoing research ship in the tropical Pacific. I finally felt the freedom that life could offer, sailing the South Pacific to islands off limits to the public. I continued that freedom in the air when NOAA provided me the training to fly weather research aircraft.
Chasing storms in the wildest parts of the country, I was free and in control…but sadly not of my finances.
My lack of financial education became obvious in 2013 when I watched a friend create enough passive income for complete financial security. No matter what happened in the world, she would always have a check with her name on it. What is passive income? It’s receiving a check from a system you created rather than working for a paycheck. It’s the rent check every landlord receives, it’s the mortgage payment every bank gets…from you. Watching her go from stress to complete control, I knew I had to learn.
I left NOAA and the security of a federal job in 2017 to fly for the airlines. Airline life gave me my two big “wants,” time for a personal life and time to gain financial education; producing more security than a government job could.
Most people think Real Estate investing is: you pay a down payment, get a mortgage from the bank, rent the property then collect the rent minus expenses. But there’s a limit to the amount of mortgages you can receive from the bank. You have a limited amount of cash for a down payment and your credit is limited by your W-2 income. But isn’t the goal not to have a W-2? Then what do you do?
Mike Marino
Airline Pilot & Real Estate Problem Solver
I found the answer!
I found the answer when I attended Larry Harbolt’s workshop, “Never Step into A Bank Again,” and it turned my mind upside-down. If you learn that you don’t need to rely on the banker, you can solve almost any real estate situation, it just takes a different mindset and a great team of professionals.
I started in Real Estate Investing by short-term renting out my house when I was away flying. Seeing that check in my account without any direct labor was liberating. That sensation started my craving for more training.
Now I’ve moved on to Multi-family housing like duplexes and small apartment buildings. Why? With apartments, sellers are investors who look at the numbers compared to families who pay exorbitant premiums for that pretty house. It’s hard for reason to compete against emotions. Of course, it’s a numbers game too; it takes more deals with houses than it does in apartments to produce the same cash flow.
After thousands of hours in the cockpit…
…it became quite clear, pilots train hard to sit in that flight deck but no one trained us on multiplying the money we earn. Now with the downturn in the Airline Economy, we are faced with a possible halt to our paychecks. If you have no passive income it’s a scary time, but it doesn’t have to be this way. My mission is to empower pilots to fly for the love of it, rather than fly to survive. By teaching you through my experiences, furlough doesn’t have to be a scary word. We’ve trained hard to get to this point in our careers, investing is just a “lap in the pattern”.