Welcome back to the wisdom lifestyle money show i'm your host scott dillingham today. I have an awesome guest germy friedberg and germy is Well, actually, what is your role at Seaport Credit? I don't want to butcher this. What is your role at Seaport? I run the company. I am the currently the corporate director of Seaport Credit Canada. Awesome. Awesome, and you guys are doing amazing things, which this whole episode is to discuss that. So we want to dive into that, but I guess before we do I want to hear your story, Jeremy. How did you get to, you know, growing up, whatever, to where you are now, to running a company? Excellent. Yeah. Thank you. Great to be here on the show. Uh, I grew up in Richmond Hill, Ontario, just north of Toronto. And then I went to Western Ontario. And then after, shortly after that, I got into the resorts. Real estate vacation ownership business. That's cool. Yeah, and and I I took it I thought I was gonna come down to Cancun where I currently live for six months but I end up really liking it and I stayed here and This whole area the Riviera Maya that goes from Tulum right north to just north of Cancun what they call Playa Mojeres Is probably the biggest real estate area not only in Mexico, but probably the Caribbean. Uh, And so, you know for the last I got here in october of 2002 Thinking i'd stay six months and I ended up staying I ended up uh meeting my The girl that would be my wife the following year. Uh, we got married she uh shortly at after that We started a real estate company called chappa properties named after her uh, and then I was still kind of just helping out with that in the backend stuff, but I was very active in resort real estate, very, very high end vacation ownership memberships. Okay. And then what ended up happening is while I was, uh, the corporate sales director for a company called the fives, which a lot of your listeners might be familiar with cause they got various different properties. It came across my desk of this company called Seaport Credit Canada. And then I found out that one of my old time friends that I'd known since the early 90s Had started it and this was a few years ago. And so I was actually referring clients, Canadian clients that were buying real estates in this condo tell project, uh, that would be able to use a Seaport credit Canada, then what happened is between them and another friend, that's a partner of the company. They were, they felt they wanted someone that understood Canadian business as well as international business. They finally convinced me last year to join them and it's been absolutely amazing since I've really, really enjoyed it. That's cool. That's cool. And for those listening, right, because we're talking about Seaport Credit, but we haven't discussed what you guys do. So what is it that you do high level? I know we have a presentation we're going to go over, but high level for those that are just like wanting to make sure that they want to listen to the whole episode. What do you guys do? So, what we do is we help Canadians with retirement funds, we set up a loan that's backed up by those retirement funds, and then that loan is used to purchase all sorts of different real estate products, anywhere outside of Canada. Yeah, which is amazing. And I know that we've worked with you in Mexico and obviously the U. S. as well. So that's really, really cool stuff. Yeah, yeah, we're really excited about some of the stuff we're doing with your whole team. They're just amazing by the way Well, thank you. Thank you. And and and for those listening to so these loans That jeremy is speaking of we can then use it as a down payment for the real estate So we'll help get you the financing. Jeremy ultimately gives you the down payment Be alone. So super cool stuff. So why don't you yeah, why don't you dive into the the product? Uh, share the screen now for those Listening, obviously, you're not going to be able to share it So we'll make sure that we are detailed in the descriptions of anything and those who might be watching this Obviously you can so excellent. So That's a little bit about me. Just kind of what we talked about Also, you'll notice down here on the bottom, a pet enthusiasm, a pet enthusiast, uh, my wife and I do animal rescue. So if you hear some barking in the background, they're just very happy to be on the show as well. A couple of disclaimers here. We'll skip those. Okay. Uh, and then we'll talk about us here. So you can see it. We got started. C4 Credit Canada actually got started in 2020 and ironically, it was started to help Canadians out of very high interest. ownership timeshare loans. And then what happened in 2020 is the pandemic and nobody was visiting the resort. So the company, uh, luckily made a pivot and they started focusing on, on real estate. And, uh, what you're looking at here on the screen is our office. Our head office is in Toronto, uh, right by the airport. And then our international office is in Cancun, uh, Mexico. That's where, uh, my team is at right now. I'm actually working out of my home office right now. Uh, and, uh, let's just go on to the other one. Our loans are good for pre construction, finished home, land, renovation, commercial, vacation ownership as well. Our main loan that we're talking about here is what we call our Canadian International Real Estate Loan, and CIRL for short, C I R L, and this is a very short kind of, uh, summary of what it is. It's exclusively for qualified Canadians who meet any of the following criteria. So number one, uh, they can earn at least 100, 000 a year or earn 100, 000 combined with their spouse, or they have a 400, 000 in net combined assets. What happens is that, uh, something called an exempt market dealer, and we'll talk about that in a second, invest your available retirement funds into trust units. Support the Seaport loan. What's nice about this, Scott, is, you know, all the costs are ruled up into the loan, so no one's coming out of pocket, up front. There's not a, a fee or a deposit that's all ruled right into the loan there. And so my next slide here just shows, uh, kind of a, a cash flow and how the, the how, the, how money travels on. So, currently most people listening to this probably have their re uh, retirement funds. In a place like BMO or Scotia. Uh, what happens then is that money is moved to what they call an approved RRSP trustee company. And a lot of the listeners would be familiar with companies like Olympia. Uh, we deal with Western Pacific for most of Canada. And anybody living in Quebec, we deal with a company called Odyssey Trust. From there, uh, the funds are then, uh, what happens is class A trust unit securities are issued. Uh, from a mutual fund trust, what they call an MFT. And the name of that is SVF Trust. And we'll give you links for you and your listeners, uh, that you can go out and check that webpage, uh, so you can see more about that. All of this is handled by an exempt market dealer, what they call an EMD. We use a company called Turnian Financial. I know you've met with the owner of Turnian Financial, Alison. She's wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. Um, and basically for anybody who doesn't know what an exempt market dealer is, the way I like to say it is this, if you're going to buy real estate in Canada, you need to go to a licensed real estate broker. If you're going to buy stock, you need to do a stock, go to a stock broker that's licensed. When it comes to buying exempt market products, which is what this falls into, you have to deal with an exempt market dealer or an EMD. From there, what happens is Seaport issues a loan for that amount. Uh, and then that loan, that money get goes to the vendor, the seller, the developer escrow, uh, or in your case, I know you deal with a lot of people that set up corporations and do investment projects in the States, whoever that end project is there. So those are the five steps that the, that the money kind of goes through. Uh, the main thing that we get asked a lot of time is how much time does it take? Well, from the time it goes from a client's bank till the time it ends up in its final destination could be somewhere around six weeks. Uh, believe it or not, the majority of that time is from the bank to the approved RRSP trustee company like Western Pacific. Uh, that, that sometimes can take four to five weeks and then the rest is almost immediate there. Now on the way back, uh, it just works in reverse. So can they, clients are paying a loan back at 6 percent interest to the seaport to seaport credit Canada. Uh, it's a 20 year, uh, loan that's open with no prepayment penalties. And what happens is because their money is, has been issued trust unit certificates from the MFT called SBF Trust, clients are getting back 4 percent per year, or sorry, a targeted return of 4 percent per year from SBF Trust. Clients are getting a targeted return of investment of 4 percent per year from the SBF Trust. Okay, can I interject here for a second? Sure. So if I'm, you know, listening to this and I'm hearing this, so, so I have to pay Seaport Credit a loan of roughly 6 percent interest, which is actually very low for a loan. Like, it actually is a very good interest rate. But because my funds are still invested through SVF Trust that they're estimating or targeting a return of 4%. So let's just say they get the 4%. Then that means I'm only actually paying 2 percent per annum to tap into the RRSP funds to invest in real estate. Is that right? That is absolutely correct. And in the next two slides I'm going to show you some real examples of cost. The way, I love the way this was broken down a couple weeks ago from an investment raiser. Even with the fees, if you look at it like this, that the cost of the client in the first year is 6 percent with all the fees in. And then after that, it's for the rest of the 19 years, it works out to about 2 percent cost. So I'm going to show you some examples of this. Now, what I'm showing you, Scott, all of this is available at seaportcredit. com. I'll show you the link after, and this one I'm going to go through all the fees there for anybody's listening to this. FAQ question number one goes through all these in details. So one thing you're going to, uh, one thing that we're very, very careful about, and as a company, we have to do third party audits every year. And so everything we try to do is fully transparent here. So what you're seeing on the screen here is a lender fee of 6%, a processing fee of 2, 500 U. S. And then what we call an exchange differential, and this can go anywhere from two to 4%, most people that, and probably not your network, but, but most people out there that don't know much about international. You know, moving the money, typically what they do when they want to see the exchange rate, they go to Google and they go one USD and one CAD and they get a rate. They don't know about the buy. They don't know about the sell. I mean, because it takes six weeks to go from somebody's account to the end seller, the fluctuations can be, you know, well, just look what's happened in the last six. Nevermind last six weeks. Look what's happened to the Canadian dollar in the last two days. It's been crazy. And full transparency here as a company, we make money on this. I mean, we're a business. Sometimes we lose money, but I mean, in a perfect scenario, we do make money on that. Our clients still love us because even when you add everything up, like I said, it works out to be about 6 percent the first year and then 2 percent after that. So the loan interest, we've talked about this, it's a 6 percent loan. There's a servicing fee, uh, 4. 99 Canadian. Uh, the annual trustee fee, for those of you that are listening, that are part of Olympia Trust or Western Pacific, know that this is a fee that they charge. Uh, it's less than a couple hundred dollars a year. The first year is actually included. Uh, and then loan insurance. This is an unsecured loan. And because clients are using their retirement funds, what happens is those retirement funds have to go back into their retirement account. So God forbid, let's say 10 years in, right? Let's say you, let's, let's use an example of a hundred thousand dollars and you have 50, 000 of it paid off and somebody, you know, dies. That responsibility to paying off that retirement fund falls to the family and we don't want to see that happen. So we've, uh, we've, we've vetted some, some insurance companies. We found one that's called Atlas and they're out of, uh, Ottawa, Canada. And what they will do is they will provide insurance on the loan. And, and they're one of these companies when you get the quote, they give you like 10 to 20 different choices. You can pick the one. And because they do business with us, it's very, very simple. Now a client doesn't have to go with them. But I don't know any clients that, you know, maybe if somebody owned their own insurance company, they want to use their own product, but it's very, very simple. Uh, so these are all the fees. And again, Scott, these are all available on the link I'm going to send you. So people can see this and check this out on their own time. What I got, sorry, can I ask you another question? Sure. So the S, SVF fund. Yes. Yes. So I know they're targeting a 4 percent yield. Is there any way, or maybe not, right? And I'm just, again, thinking of a question a listener might ask, but is there any way that you can choose what SVF invest in or is it's like, like that is their own fund and that's the targeted return that they're offering? Do you know what I mean? Like, can we pick asset classes when they manage the funds or no? Excellent question. And that the only, there's only two people or two ways that people can get information about that one is from a registered exempt market dealer. The other is to go to SPF trust. And that exact question, I can put it on the screen that answers that that's FAQ question number three, and it answers that exact question for people. Okay, so I got here an actual example, uh of a first year breakdown and we'll just take a An amount here of a hundred thousand dollars Uh, I don't know if you can hear the barking in the background. It's going right now. Okay Uh the loan let's take a hundred thousand dollar loan Uh, and the monthly payment on that you can see here is fifteen hundred nine dollars that's on a 20 year loan Again, that's fully open people can pray that out anytime and that includes the four dollar ninety nine cents service fee You can see the annual principal of eight thousand two hundred and three dollars Uh the annual interest of nine thousand eight hundred and forty four dollars and then an estimated insurance And of course that's going to vary but you can see three hundred dollars. So the total paid out eighteen thousand and forty seven dollars Uh, the targeted return, uh, to the RRSP principal return is 8, 203. The distribution earned from that targeted return of 6, 562. You got total deposited into the RRSP at the end of the year, 14, 765. So, uh, you've paid out just over 18, you've gotten back just under 15. Your total cost on a 100, 000 U. S. loan in the first year is 3, 341 Canadian. Okay. Uh, and what I'll do is I'll shine up here on the screen. Uh, the three sites that I talked about, Seaport Credit Canada, sorry, Seaportcredit. com, svftrust. com, and, uh, our exempt market dealer, Tourney Financial. That's super cool. That's super cool. So then for the investor, one of the things that you told me in the past that was very interesting, so I know we're working with you, uh, in Mexico and U. S., but these loans can be used worldwide, correct? It doesn't have to be just Mexico or USA. Is that right? That's correct. It's anywhere outside of Canada. Okay. So that's super cool. Yeah. What are some of the craziest things that you've seen people invest when they get these funds? What do you see? Or can you not say? Yeah, no, I think my favorite thing that I see is a lot of the things that wealth genius people do where they'll go in and they'll find an undervalued apartment complex. Sorry, I went into my Spanish there. All right, an apartment complex and then they'll raise the funds from the investors and a lot of them, what they'll do is they'll use this, they'll use our loan for that investment. They fix it up, they improve the area, they raise the rent, they raise the value and then they do a sell on this, you know, five years later and the returns, uh, that people, people make are, are pretty, pretty incredible. We have a mutual friend, as you know, that's a special in this and that Thomas, he's just incredible at it. On his webinar, uh, again, a couple of weeks ago. And then of course, I mean, that that's the money side of it. That's really cool. Uh, we're really excited about getting into stuff like solar panels. There's a lot of Canadian, uh, for renovations and, you know, in third world countries, I don't know if Canadians are familiar with this, but the cost for electricity is, is huge. Now the number one area in the world that Canadians invest internationally. It is actually in Mexico more than any other area. In fact, if you look at Tulum and Playa del Carmen and Puerto Morelos, those three alone fit into the top five places where Canadians put their money. So a lot of times when Canadians, I mean my real estate side on this, people get shocked when they see some of the electric bills. So the idea that, that they could now, you know, use this money and invest in solar panels where their electric bill goes down to nothing. You know, and it's connected to the grid or they can be self sufficient in the jungle That's really really that that's probably what i'm really excited about the most coming up and we're That's super cool. So then, then for these loans then, cause you're saying solar panels. So if I get a loan, um, I can use the funds for anything you're saying. Well, anything related to real estate. So it could be renovations. Uh, it could be like, if you're anything that we can show, uh, that you're doing it. The only thing you can't do is the loans can't go back to you. Right. So we have a couple of clients right now that found out about us too late and boy, do they, they're, you know, they, they, they spent a few hundred thousand dollars and. They're sitting on this in the retirement funds and they're asking how can they get reimbursed? You can't do that. But, uh, if they were to invest in solar panels or do a redo or renovate that they can tie in. And of course, as you know, that brings up the equity of their investment. That's perfect. So then quick question. So let's say, let's say you did a loan for a hundred thousand, like what you said, um, but I only need 50 K for a property. Does the balance of the loan stay with you and I can use it on a different transaction or do I have to use the full 100 K? On one single transaction. Uh, that's an excellent question. You have a couple of different options. It's going to depend if you're going, if you're buying the property and then you are immediately doing a reno. Or putting in those solar panels. That's probably, we haven't had this come up, but that's probably something that we could do if it's one of these things, uh, okay. I only need 50, 000 right now, but I know next year, Hey, next year it's come around. We just set up another loan. So we have clients and, uh, if I can, if I could call out her name, she's, uh, she's vital to, to our organization, you know, her, uh, Deanna actually has a client that's, that's now on his fourth loan with us. Wow, that's crazy. So I'm just thinking out loud here. So say that say that's the case Where I want to tap into my rsps and I want this loan, but you know Maybe the property is a small down payment. I don't want it to go to waste Could I just increase the down payment on that property? Could I just put the full 100k down and then get a smaller mortgage then in that case? We have people that pay the whole property out with their, so what happens is the exempt market dealer. Uh, the process is somebody talks to us. Uh, we fill out a couple of forms and then we tend to book a call with, uh, Alison Travers, who is the president and owner of Tourney and Financial. We have a great working relationship with her. You've met her. She's amazing. Uh, she was going to be on this show, but Unfortunately, she's doing a call with a client right now, which is good. Uh, but what happens is she will then, uh, let that, that client know how much they can qualify for, and there's a bunch of different categories. Uh, and we're real, real happy, uh, that there's a new category, uh, for people that have either high net worths. Uh, or, uh, that they are business investors, meaning that they are, they are investing in different, uh, properties, you know, that, uh, that they have that are, that are income property. So we're pretty excited about that, but that's all, those are all things that need to be discussed with the registered exempt market dealer. Got it. Got it. No, that's perfect. Well, listen to me. I really appreciate it. I know we're coming up to the end of the show here. So what I'm going to do, uh, cause I know my whole team, uh, works with you and your team. So what I'll do is I'll put, uh, the booking links there. If anybody wants wants to chat and we can make those introductions to you. Obviously you've got those links there that people can also look, look at. So we'll, we'll add those there too. Um, but was there anything else that you wanted to say before we, we ended the show for today? Yeah, it's just it's really exciting. If somebody's teetering on the fence right now and you're in Canada, uh, And you're looking at you know doing some of these deals like like in the states Uh, especially if you're in a warm climate like florida or arizona. It's just It's just a, or if you're, you know, in those areas there, you got yourself a second home or if you're in Ohio or, or I know you've done a lot of stuff in Michigan, you know, where people are doing it more for an investment, but if they are going to do somewhere that provides them with a second home, it's more than, I don't know how to describe it when, but when, when you have a Canadian that invests In the area that I'm from, uh, all of a sudden they want to take Spanish class. They want to learn how to dance. They want to learn how to cook. It really, it's a really nice thing. They become familiar with the local fauna. They, you know, they get a more global outlook on other than just, you know, the nine to five that they go to work with every day. And it's, and they, and especially when it gets cold in Canada, we all know what that's like. Sounds glamorous for the people online of a white Christmas, but trust me when you're wiping the snow off your car, boy, the idea of like, you know, wiping the sand off your feet off the beach feels really nice. Yeah. It sounds much better. Yeah. We do sand angels here, not snow angels. That's it. That's perfect. I'll be doing them in a week. We got that real estate investing crew. So awesome Yeah, so we'll be doing that. But anyways, thank you so much. Jeremy. It was great. I love uh chatting with you And and I love your product. I think it's super cool. And uh, just wanted to have you on so thank you very much. Scott. Have a great day. Yeah, you too. Take care