We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Edward Rushing. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Edward below.

Hi Edward, thanks for joining us today. So let’s jump to your mission – what’s the backstory behind how you developed the mission that drives your brand?

The mission of White Feather is as simple and powerful as any mission I’ve ever been on in my life: To help our nation’s heroes build Financial Freedom so they can live the American Dream they fight to protect.

It started without me even realizing it. I read Rich Dad Poor Dad on a deployment to Afghanistan, began buying rental properties in between deployments, and was so excited about it I talked about it to anyone who was interested. Over the course of 10 years my wife and I flipped houses, wholesaled, did Joint Ventures, Trust Deed Lending, bought an apartment complex, executed BRRR strategies and everything else creative you can think of. The combination of these two elements served up a perfect storm that would launch in 2017.

Once we combined our passion for education with the knowledge and experience we’d gained over the previous 10 years, the current version of White Feather was born. Since then we have helped hundreds of people invest in rental properties, launch businesses, become mortgage brokers and Real Estate agents, launch syndications, funds, buy raw land, develop Opportunity Zones, run Short Term Rentals and even invest in virtual Real Estate!

What was once an idea with nothing more than excitement behind it has become a movement of military families that are creating Financial Freedom for themselves and generational wealth for their families. As each new White Feather member becomes a millionaire, hits their passive income goals, quits their 9-5 job or launches their new business, the impact in our community grows, because the desire to achieve Financial Freedom is only matched by the desire to give back and help someone else do the same.

As always, we appreciate you sharing your insights and we’ve got a few more questions for you, but before we get to all of that can you take a minute to introduce yourself and give our readers some of your back background and context?

White Feather currently has three main elements: White Feather Investments, White Feather Education and White Feather Solar.

White Feather Investments is responsible for finding and providing high ROI Real Estate investments around the country. This comes in the form of turnkey single family rental properties, BRRR opportunities, Apartment Complexes, Syndication Opportunities, Investment Funds, Short Term Rentals, Greenfield Development opportunities, Build To Rent, and even Virtual Real Estate investment opportunities. The goal is to empower members to build Financial Freedom by providing them with awesome investments.

White Feather Education is focused on educating our members so they can find and take down deals themselves. The purpose of this is so we can grow as a group and leaders can spring up in different markets to find deals for themselves but also to provide opportunities for the group, thereby making us stronger as a whole. The primary focus is a six-month Real Estate Investing Accelerator that has produced insane results for the almost 300 members who have graduated.

White Feather Solar is a SoCal based company that was created because I was pissed at having to pay $600/mo for electricity…I’m dead serious! It has now grown to become a powerful tool for our military homeowners in Southern California, because we show them how to leverage the solar opportunity to crush their energy bill, tap into a huge tax credit, improve the value of their home and create cashflow at the same time.

The main difference between White Feather and anyone else in any of these markets is that we not only is our mission to help each member create Financial Freedom but we track the progress. So that means we are not finished until you are free, even if it takes ten years. That breeds a kind of loyalty that only resonates with people who are serious about changing their lives, and it turns everyone else away who isn’t as committed.

Can you share a story from your journey that illustrates your resilience?

– My first investment was a gut-wrenching, eye-gouging type of mistake that should have ruined me. I came into 29 Palms, California because I was going to be stationed at the Marine Base there and I had one goal in Real Estate: Buy an old house, renovate it and sell it.

I had no education, no experience, and no mentor, just a big dose of motivation. I bought a run down two bedroom house and poured every dollar I had into renovating it, including doing most of the work myself, with only my wife Kimberly to help. We slaved for 18 months to renovate it and when we finished we had it appraised. 18 months earlier we had bought it for $154,000 then poured the entire $30,000 into it plus 18 months of hard work…and it appraised for $69,000.

Not only did we waste all that time but now after putting all our money and time into our first investment we actually had a NEGATIVE net worth! We really should have pushed back from the table and said “Real Estate sucks” but we didn’t. We looked around and noticed that the entire town of 29 Palms (and the whole country) had plummeted in value, but the rental market in this military town had gone up. The wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were causing troop numbers to swell, so you could buy properties cheaply and rent them out for a premium. That caused us to have a courthouse wedding, take the money we’d saved up to pay for our wedding, and invest it in a second rental property which we bought for $68,000 brand new and rented it out for $950 the next week. That decision alone would grow into a multi-million dollar portfolio that would eventually set us free financially, but if we had allowed the first disaster to stop us we never would have known what lay on the other side of resilience.

We did years later have a big fancy wedding by the way! :)

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

We built most of what White Feather is today while I was still an Active Duty Marine, which was super challenging. But eventually I felt comfortable enough with how the business had grown that I submitted my papers and was set to transition out of Active Duty late in 2020. Unfortunately in March of 2020 the world experience a global pandemic, and everything changed dramatically. As I neared my EAS date I knew that the gamble I’d taken that my new business would be able to provide for my family was in serious doubt.

Once I transitioned out (and stopped receiving a paycheck) the doubts and seriousness of my situation were constantly in my thoughts. To top that the Real Estate market shifted as well, becoming savagely competitive, which effectively ended the business strategy we’d built White Feather on, which was providing turnkey rental properties to servicemembers. We had to completely shift the investment opportunities, overhaul and update the Accelerator, and I had to realign my personal investments to withstand the unpredictable turbulence of COVID-19. All of this while coming to terms with what it meant to not be in uniform anymore…

I would love to say I read a book, meditated, prayed and the answers came to me but that was just not the case. I struggled a lot with anxiety, doubt, and the stress of not knowing what would happen. The only thing that kept me from being afraid was the realization of two key things: 1. I’m not being shot at. 2. I’ve eaten beans and rice 7 days a week in my life, and while it sucks, it’s not the end of the world.

Those two realizations allowed me to see the problems for what they were and deal with them accordingly. I may be running into vacancies and cost overruns and contractors who are stealing, but I’m not being shot at like I was in Afghanistan, so it’s not as serious as problems I’ve dealt with already. And we may lose everything, but you can survive on very little in reality…and if you don’t let your pride get in the way you can be incredibly resilient. So we fought, and we fought, and came through the pandemic with a new business model that has skyrocketed in value!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.whitefeatherinvestments.com
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/edward.rushing.69