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 Road to Financial Freedom 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?
At nearly the age of 40, Meierhoffer retired from the German military and went to work as an executive for a US software company 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?’”
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.
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.
