Richard Garcia on Achieving Freedom Through Property Investment and Trading

Written in partnership with Ascend Agency

For many people, the idea of achieving financial freedom is nothing more than a pipe dream. With the current economy, many are resigned to saving money for years, implementing careful spending habits, working overtime to bring home more paychecks, and still missing this elusive dream. However, that does not have to be the case, as Richard Garcia proves. With a few creative strategies, Richard became a multimillionaire before 30, then scaled further through hard work and dedication. At 33, he is now building a company that will help others achieve financial freedom and eliminate any worries about the future or their retirement.

Richard Garcia is the bestselling author of The Seven Steps to Wealth Creation Through Real Estate Investing and the Founder and CEO of Cash Flow Club and Day Trade Today. The investor is currently building his investment company, wealty.io, a platform dedicated to helping investors buy investments. Garcia embarked on this journey immediately after the pandemic when he began raising money, buying investments and assets with investors, and laying the foundation for the company. So far, wealty.io has amassed over $20M in real estate in the last few years, and the journey is ongoing.

Garcia’s extensive trading and investing experience date back to 2008 when he began his career at the Bank of America at 19. He started in the retail section and rapidly climbed the corporate ladder. In his first four years, he quickly went from teller to sales and services specialist to personal banker and then the senior personal banker. In the fifth year, he was handpicked as a top salesperson on the retail side as a top senior personal banker to work at the private wealth management firm, Merrill Lynch. Garcia’s portfolio at Merrill Lynch had over 70 clients with between $50M and $1B in assets. He oversaw that for about 1.5 years and then left to do ultra-high frequency trading in 2014.

Ultra-high frequency trading involves buying and selling stocks in milliseconds for small profits on each trade, which is not a skill you learn in a day. Although Garcia had mastered some skills and started making money, he took a break and returned to the workforce. He got a job as a headhunter for technologists at Robert Half, a renowned recruiting company.

After about seven months, Garcia was offered a position at a startup called SolarCity, directly reporting to the founder Pete Rive, Elon Musk’s cousin. Garcia’s role was recruiting software engineers for the business, a position he retained for one and a half years later when Tesla purchased the company. In his second year at Tesla, Garcia worked on a solar rooftop product reporting directly to Elon Musk. He left Tesla in 2017 and worked at Google under Nest Labs until 2018 when he joined Facebook. Garcia played a significant role in the Instagram team that transitioned the platform from text to video, then left the company in 2019.

By that time, Garcia earned a considerable amount of money that he leveraged to acquire bank financing and buy real estate. He leveraged the BRRR strategy (Buy, Rehab, Rent, Refinance, Repeat) and successfully built a portfolio worth $10M. After quitting his job, he started posting on Instagram and acquired a thriving audience. Since then, he continued to invest in properties and educate people on the secrets of successful property investing and trading. His dreams and aspirations include becoming the top real estate educator and investor within the next 10 years and inspiring people to take risks and create wealth by scaling their real estate portfolios.