Is it possible to borrow $500,000 and pay NO interest? How can you make that work in your favor to build your business or wealth faster? That’s what our guest, Brandon Elliott, shares with us today. Tune in to find out how this is made possible.
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How To Leverage $500K At 0% Interest With Brandon Elliott
I brought on a special guest today, somebody who has his own show, but then realized we got to get them all here. If you haven’t already been sucked in by the title here, the fact you can get $500,000 at 0% interest rate, I know for any of us that like to talk about leverage, we want to know how in the heck can we do that. That’s exactly why I brought Brandon Elliot on here today.
Now, Brandon’s story is pretty interesting. I’m not going to spoil it all for you, but he went from House Arrest to building over an $8.5 million business in real estate using credit cards. The very thing you’re never supposed to do, he did it. He didn’t put on a block advice, he actually used it. He not only did that, but he was also able to scale his business and even teach these same strategies with this company called Credit Counsel Elite, CCE. They teach business owners how to get up to $500,000 every 6 months at 0% interest. Brandon, welcome to our show.
What’s going on? How are you? I appreciate you having me on.
It’s an honor to have you on here. Obviously, people are going to wonder, “What did you do wrong?” I did end up on house arrest. How did you go from house arrest to where you are today?
I grew up in New Jersey with a single-parent mother. I met my father when I was eighteen in court so he could stop paying child support. I didn’t have the right male influence around me. My mom being manic, depressive, and bipolar. I was American poor. When I say that, I mean we’re very blessed in America, but we had section eight housing, food stamps, help from local churches and schools, and social security per month about $1,000. That’s what we lived off of. At a young age, I was like, “I need to get money.”
The misguidance was I was looking for a job at nine. I got one when I was twelve. I was working part-time when I’m in school, but full-time during the summer. Being around the restaurant industry and stuff like that, I ended up seeing other guys around me smoking marijuana. I got addicted to that. Stupidly, I used it for the good times, bad times, and everything in between.
Years later, on September 24th, 2012, I had an explosion in my apartment making hash oil like a moron. I didn’t know any better. I was young, dumb, and misguided. I was literally on fire. I had an explosion in my apartment on fire. I burnt 40% of my body. I was induced into a coma for a full week. I went through three surgeries, had to learn how to walk again, and obviously had a lot of court charges over my head for making a mess. That’s where I was misguided but it was also a blessing in disguise because the court made me get a mentor at that time. He positioned me, prepared me, and gave a damn about me for the first time for a male figure. That was the changing point for me.
Even the fact that at 9 or 12 years old, you’re getting part-time and full-time jobs, I have to struggle to get my teenagers to take out the trash sometimes and you’re making it happen. It’s pretty impressive. What a story. Obviously, you have this male role model and it’s getting you back on track and having somebody looking at a brighter future than what you were looking at before. Where did real estate come into play? How did that even enter the picture?
Real estate came into play because I was doing door-to-door sales with Kirby’s Vacuum Cleaners at that time. It was a $3,500 vacuum cleaner. I became very good at it. I got recruited into a real estate investment company. I knocked on somebody’s door and he was like, “You got to work for me.” I was like, “Let’s do it.” I got inspired. It totally rocked me off my feet with the inspiration behind it.
The systems were in play. I saw so much money coming in and the impact we were making on the homeowners because it was back when pre-foreclosures were very common to notice of defaults. I got a little bit of education, but way more motivation. Afterwards, I went down this rabbit hole of, “I want to do real estate. Let me figure out how to do it.” Books, YouTube, and podcasts like this, and I was off and running.
I fell in love with the BRRRR strategy. Years later, I was investing out of state over in Ohio and other states afterwards. I was doing the BRRRR strategy having little to no money in my deals. I was also working in restaurants. I had no money saved up. I was getting out of debt from having an explosion in my apartment. I figured out that when there’s a will, there’s a way. I figured out how to be able to get cash from my credit cards, how to be able to get credit limit increases, how to apply for more cards, and all the craziness behind it. I had to protect myself against contractors as an insurance policy so they would stop screwing me over. I’d be able to purchase properties with credit cards.
We’ve had a few guys on here that have mentioned this, but they always talk about using credit cards. This has always been back in the ‘80s or the ‘90s. It’s the OGs of the real estate world. Mitch Stephen for example. We had him on the show and he talked about how he used $100,000 of credit cards, bought his real estate, and now he’s got millions. The thing that’s fascinating me is you’re starting from ground zero, even less than zero. You’re still paying back all the damages and everything. Who in the right mind would give you a credit card?
What’s crazy is I’m very blessed. I can’t state this enough. At eighteen years old, I signed up for a credit card at that time for getting points for gas because I wanted to save some money. It ended up being a Chase Freedom Unlimited card. It snowballed into getting a couple of cards here and there. By the time I was 25, I realized, “I have several credit cards the average person maybe. Every six months, I kept on doing something good by requesting credit limit increases.” I had a Bank of America card at that time that was $70,000 on it. I’m still rubbing my head and like, “How the heck did they give me $70,000?”
It was very important for me to always pay on time. If I used it, I would pay it off right away. Over time, I figured out, “Maybe I can call these banks and see if I could utilize some of this credit line, but I don’t want to pay any interest.” That’s the caveat. What do you have behind the scenes that I can’t see? I have this amazing deal and I want to take it down. Lo and behold, they told me, “There’s a promotional deal going on on your credit cards.”
Some might think of it almost like a cash advance or a balance transfer option. A lot of people will see those. It was one form or another like that, except it was 0% interest and they would take the funds from my credit card and put it right into my bank account that I had with them. The next day, I get all this funding. I close on two properties, a single-family house and a triplex. I then have my other credit cards to be able to complete the remodels that desperately needed it. I could refinance later and pay off the credit cards. It just starts snowballing. Now we have $8.5 million in real estate assets. We have 24-plus units at this time and we’re making $30,000 a month passively.
That’s awesome.
I’m very blessed.
Is that the trick then? We’ve talked about on the show increasing lines of credit or calling up and doing that every 6 to 12 months. It sounds like one of the key tricks that you had there is you make sure you paid them off too and then call up. Would you carry balances? What was the real trick there to make it work?
Honestly, after I realized that it worked and before I even knew what I was doing, five years before that, I was doing certain types of credit hacking type of abilities that I didn’t even know. I stumbled into it. Call it a calling if you want, but there are so many metrics. There are 25-plus different moving pieces.
That’s it?
Yeah. It’s either going to help you or hurt you. Unfortunately, many people out there don’t know because it’s not being taught, so they’re getting hurt by it. Long story short, there are 9,500 banks nationwide and they all want to lend to you. That’s their business. It’s important to realize how they’re judging you, how the bureaus are judging you, and then how your six boxes make up your FICO score, and then how to be able to fit within their box of lending. Every single bank has its own rules, processes, procedures, and internal ratings. It’s important to know these things so that you can set yourself up for success.
They’re changing all the time too.
All the time, yes. It’s important as well to learn how to do the proper research to be able to get the newest data because that’s a great point. It’s constantly changing.
I remember I did credit things for creative stuff. It was from 2006. Some of those things still work, but some of them are outdated. They don’t even matter.
Yeah, exactly. It’s a little difficult.
We’re going to ask this now and I’ll bring it up at the end later too because I have some big questions, especially from a skeptical point of view. How would people even learn about how to do this with you?
We have more education on our website. I have 50 articles on there that you can geek out on. Otherwise, we have a video that’s about 10 to 15 minutes that people can watch. Ideally, it will give more education there. You can even set up a call with either me or one of our team members on Credit Counsel Elite. You’ll be able to learn more about us and we get to learn more about you, see where your goals are, and how to be able to help you get there. It’s CreditCounselElite.com.
Here’s the big thing. Right now, we’ve seen interest rates rise quite a bit. That definitely affects credit cards. They’ve been higher than they’ve ever been. Does this still work? Can this still work for people if they’re trying to leverage that? That could get people in some big hot water if they’re not careful.
That’s why understanding the difference between good debt and bad debt. Also, identifying that we don’t want to pay any interest. We want to get the 0% interest. For as long as possible, they’re usually ranged from about 6 months to 22 months. There’s a good handful of them that are 15 to 18 months or longer. Let’s focus on those. You also want to have an investment opportunity that is more short-term. The BRRRR strategy works out perfectly for me because, in one year or less, I am getting all my money back from doing the refinance. You want to be in and out on opportunities like that and be more aggressive in a sense. We don’t ever look at any interest rates because we know how to have it at 0% and we also know how to avoid all of those fees as a whole.
One of those myths is going to be everybody is thinking it’s got to be the balance transfer. You mentioned it’s not a balance transfer because that can destroy your credit. Eventually, you keep balance transferring over and over, you have this small average line of credit history, then all of a sudden, your credit score starts going down, which also affects things too. You’re even saying there are ways to do it even with the same credit card company with promotions that they have.
Correct. Something that most people sleep on is having a bank relationship. As I mentioned, there are 9,500 banks nationwide. The majority of people out there have 1, maybe 2, or 3 bank accounts with different banks. That’s not what you want to do. You want to have as many as possible, but also, there are rules behind that as well. You shouldn’t open up more than one bank account every two weeks. If you’re opening up too many, too fast, too soon, then check systems will flag you as if you stole somebody’s credit information and you’re running off to do a mass apply on your own.
They’re like, “He’s doing money laundering. What’s he doing here?”
They think that you’re trying to get a bunch of money and then take off with somebody else’s. Realistically, a mass apply is when you apply for 10 to 40 plus credit cards and we teach you how to be able to get 90% approval odds doing this over 30 days. The good news is, once you get this new credit line, you can do this every six months and get credit limit increases, but then do it again to be able to get up to $500,000.
You’ll end up typically getting a big boy stack like this so that you can learn how to liquidate into cash. If you have opportunities on your hands and you’re simply missing out on them from the lack of capital and it could benefit you, then we encourage people to take down those deals and do it smart. We teach basic budgeting 101 and fundamentals that are very needed.
As you said, this strategy would be best not for someone who’s being a passive investor, which a lot of our audiences are. This is somebody that needed to be an active investor where they’re moving money pretty quickly, whether it’s through flips or whatever it might be. The BRRRR strategy you mentioned was another way too. I know there are a lot of people on this show that are also business owners.
This could be something to be used inside the business, especially if you’re trying to scale, increase, or grow your business a little bit. Especially during these times when everybody starts shrinking, it’s almost an opportunistic place to be able to get to a place of expansion. Is that something that would work for business owners too? Do you use personal credit versus Dun & Bradstreet? How do you look at that?
We teach business credit and personal credit, but it’s imperative as a whole. At the end of the day, we have people that are getting the new capital that is 0% interest for the next two years and they’re becoming hard money or private money lenders. I sent out money paid with a credit card to a lender that we’re getting 20% on in the next 90 days. It’s just in and out.
Those types of opportunities come. You want to be positioned and prepared for it. Think of it like this. eComm businesses get held back because they need more capital to keep growing. Simply, if you have competitors that are spending more ad spend to over-deliver to be able to throw you out of the game or they can hire on the best of the best. Now that you have this capital, then you’re going to be able to compete with the higher elite that has all the money in the world because you know how to be able to get all the money from the banks.
If you think about it, the banks and the mega-rich, they know how to do this. At the end of the day, we give all of our money to the banks and they give us 0% back. Seriously, they give pennies on the dollar if that and then they lend it back out to us on personal loans, auto loans, business, mortgage, cars, student loans, all of this stuff. They’re averaging anywhere from 500% to 3,000% interest ROI on us and it can compound even more. We give it to them at 0% interest. If we can figure out how to be able to get the money from the banks and do exactly what the proven system is doing then you can get all this money, flip the script on the banks, and put it to work.
If we can figure out how to get the money from the banks and do what the proven system does to us, then you can get all this money, flip the script on the banks and put it to work. Click To TweetObviously, as a huge caveat, we talk about stewardship on the show. Some of these strategies only work for your Y steward. I would love to hear, what are 1 or 2 stories of whether it’s yourself or even some of your clients, how they’ve been able to apply this and make it work. Maybe they were completely anti-credit card. They were like Dave Ramsey’s disciples and they still made this work. Can you give us a few of those stories?
I do have a few stories of people that were Dave Ramsey very inspired by that. I’m forgetting which ones they were right now. I have some amazing stories though of people like Jayden. At 18 or 19, he messed up his credit. He wasn’t being taught in school. Once he learned from us, within ten business days, he was able to boost up his score by 300 points, get into the low 800 FICO score, and then do a mass apply where he got 41 credit cards at a 43 approved. What that enabled him to do was he got $350,000 as 0% interest and he didn’t even have a job at that time. I know that sounds scary. Trust me. I was guarding him like a hawk to make sure he didn’t do anything. You can’t go buy the Gucci shirt for $20,000. Don’t do that but buy assets.
He ended up starting three new businesses. He got his dream car. He ended up renting it out on Turo. He makes a couple of thousand per month and gets to drive it a few times throughout the month for free. He started an eComm store, which is successful. He then invested in real estate with us and he got a strong ROI. I just paid him back a couple of weeks ago. He also got $17,000 in free cash from signup bonuses. Incredible stuff.
Also, there is Brandon Smith. He ended up buying two planes. He flipped one and he’s going to flip the other. He bought several cars. He bought a property in Huntsville, Alabama. He lives in San Diego here. Buying assets, flipping them, putting them to work, and so forth is incredible. Duncan did exactly the same strategy as me. He got $650,000 in new credit lines and then he ended up investing in real estate. He got three new properties at this point. He might’ve closed it on his fourth, but out of the three, he’s making $9,000 per month. In my opinion, that’s life-changing in so many ways.
Those are incredible stories. I would imagine that you also tried to help teach the different things that people could be doing with these credit cards, so they’re not just sitting with these open lines as the clock is ticking on them.
It’s a four-step process that we’ve proven and realize that this is what works. It’s educate, fix, build, and then leverage. After build, they get all the funding, then they’re able to leverage it. We give multiple different options like infinite banking strategies, real estate, eComm, or Turo. All these different things. I also want to instill in them, “What are your goals?” Once we break off all these myths that you thought credit was and then you start reprogramming the truth behind it and seeing what you can truly do, what gets you excited? Where do you want to go with this stuff? Ideally, I want them to experience that. If they have something already, then fuel to the fire basically.
The effective four-step process is education, fix, build, and then leverage. Once you get after building, you get all the funding, then you can leverage it. Click To TweetI know you perked a few years for some people here because we talk about infinite banking quite a bit on this show too. They’re like, “What? I can go infinite banking with this stuff.”
I’m telling you, it’s all financial literacy. It’s credit. We’re teaching what the banks and the rich do and that’s just what it is. It’s pretty impressive.
It really is. It’s always trying to figure out that game. I had to learn that game a little bit when I was trying to dig out of that million-dollar-plus debt hole. Even negotiating with creditors and things like that, how do I boost up my credit score when it was down to 480 or things like that? It’s a rough battle. I got inspired by hearing Trump’s story because Trump was in a slimmer position. Instead of $1 million in debt, he has $100 million in debt. He was doing all kinds of creative things to negotiate and pay off lenders, have lenders pay other lenders off so that he could get out of the little debt hole that he created when he had a failed airline. It’s financial literacy.
A lot of people sleep on the fixing part too. Education is crucial. Everybody needs education to understand it, but then afterwards, the fix. Whether you’re in the 800 club or the 300 club, you need fix, believe it or not. A lot of people will think that’s not the case for them because they’re like, “I got high 700s or 800s.” It’s important to do a little bit of fixing. It could be as simple as updating personal identification info.
After that, you jump into build. After fixing is done, you’re going to be in the low to mid-700s. We can show you how to boost up your score and get to the 800 club in less than 30 days every single time. You do your mass apply and get all this new funding then you can leverage it into true assets. You can have fun with travel hacking and fun stuff like that. We want to show people how to buy assets and do exactly what the rich and the banks are doing leveraging good debt at 0% interest.
One more time, how do they find you?
If anybody is interested in getting up to $500,000 at 0% interest every 6 months, learning the techniques, fixing credit, travel hacking, and so much more, then go to CreditCounselElite.com. There’s a quick ten-minute video. After that, you can book a call with us and ask any questions under the sun. We can have a conversation and talk more about it.
Brandon, this has been incredible and valuable. I know you’ve piqued my interest in my own situation and I’m sure many others as well. Everybody, definitely go check that out. You might have perfect credit. This might still be a great opportunity to help you build it and get it to the point where it’s being utilized. The one thing we talk about and you guys say this to me all the time, “I can use my money, but after I’ve used all my money or what if I don’t have any money, how do I get this to work for me? How do I get out of the rat race?”
One of the most unutilized assets, if you don’t have financial capital, you have human capital. Your credit score is a big part of that human capital. Most people never realize they can leverage. Here it is. That human capital can lead to financial capital and the rest is history. I definitely encourage you guys to check that out. Of course, Brandon, thank you for being on the show.
I appreciate you. Thanks, Chris.
Everybody, make a wonderful and prosperous week. We’ll see you later.
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About Brandon Elliott
Brandon Elliott went off track from House Arrest to $8.5M in Real Estate by using Credit Cards to buy small multi-family and scaling his businesses using the exact strategies taught in Credit Counsel Elite (CCE). CCE teaches business owners how to get up to $500,000 every 6 months at 0% interest.