Axel Meierhofer, founder of idealwealthgrower.com and host of the Ideal Wealth Grower Podcast, began coaching real estate investors for an unusual reason — he has a passion for making sure people in his care don’t die.
Not that he has a particularly deadly approach to real estate investing. It’s just that as a mentor and a leader, he cut his teeth as a German Air Force pilot, helping students learn how to pilot military aircraft — like Top Gun, only German.
“Part of my job became to help develop a new fly training center for young,” Meierhoffer told Michael Duncan on the CamaPlan Podcast. “Through training you go and learn flying on training aircraft, but then at some point you get assigned to your real plane. So that’s what this training center was for. And when you start flying the rear, there is also a real risk of dying.”
Meierhoffer took this responsibility seriously. And having lived through the Dot Com bust and the Great Recession, when people came to him asking for mentorship on his specialty — financial freedom through single-family real estate investing — he knew what they were really asking: How can I do this and not get killed?
Financially speaking, of course.
A Retirement Fund Shortcut
At nearly the age of 40, Meierhoffer retired from the German military and went to work as an executive for a software company. There was no question of continuing to fly.
“When I finished my career in the Air Force as a test pilot,” he said, “they said, ‘Didn’t you want to fly for the airlines?’ Because a lot of my, my friends did” To Meierhoffer, this was like “if you were a NASCAR or Formula One driver on in car driver, and somebody said, ‘Wouldn’t you like to drive a school bus?’”
Despite his German heritage and military career, Meierhoffer had spent much of his test pilot career in the US, where the planes get made. His daughter had already started school in the US, so he jumped at the chance to transition into the US private sector. With that, he began looking into what it meant to save for retirement in the US labor force.
Suffice it to say, he didn’t like what he found. “I found out normally people have like a thirty, forty year career, right? “ he said. “And I knew at that time I wasn’t going to work that long … or didn’t want to work that long. So it wouldn’t be easy to get any kind of significant retirement amount of money together. So I thought, ‘Well, what else can I do?’”
Financial Freedom, Faster Than You Think
What he ended up doing was investing in single-family rental homes … and he found that the road to financial freedom was shorter than he thought.
“In most cases, the reality is that you never really need to quite acquire as many [properties] as you thought when we start,” Meierhoffer said. “When you buy a house and rent it out, and let’s say you start out with $250 a month, you would not keep that house for the next eight or ten years and never increase the rent.”
“So, and your cost, meaning like what you pay for mortgage, insurance, maintenance, those kind of things pretty much stay the same,” he said. “The one variable that actually increases pretty predictably is the rent, right?”
The “Time Freedom” Point
Meierhoffer’s goal with new coaching recruits is to identify the “Time Freedom Point” — a volume of passive cash flow where you are able to start reclaiming your time, no longer dependent on a job to provide for your necessities or even your luxuries.
“So let’s just say, just because the calculation would be easy, you had actually investments one after the next that generate $500 a month,” Meierhoffer said, “and you want to get to $4,000, right? And you know you need eight of those.”
“Not all at once,” he said. “I mean, most people at least can’t buy eight properties right away. But over time you can buy maybe one a year or one every 18 months.”
Meierhoffer limits his coaching to single-family rentals — his own area of mastery — so his students don’t get distracted. Like he did, they have the luxury of picking one segment of the real estate industry and mastering it.
His coaching packages range all the way up to a one-time fee for lifetime mentorship access to him.
“Some people say, ‘Axel, why do you have this crazy thing, like a lifetime mentoring program?’” Meierhoffer said. “Well, I want people to not have to worry that there is a clock that runs out.”
“It’s very intense in the beginning, for about the first year,” he said. “And then it becomes a more as-needed basis … I have clients who contact me three, four times a year for the last three or four years.”
