Amelia Misenheimer Consulting

10/16/2026

She went quiet on the call. That is the part I keep thinking about.

She is self employed, expecting a baby, and she had done what you are supposed to do, which is ask the question early. She wants six months at home with no stress about getting back to work or where the money is coming from. About $10,000 a month between her household and her business.

So we ran it live. If half of that came from interest on cash, she would need $1.2 million sitting in an account. And she went quiet for a second, and then she said, "I don't even know how to wrap my head around how people actually make that happen."

I hear a version of that sentence almost every week, from women and men both, all of them running real businesses with real revenue. They are good at making money. Nobody ever showed them the back half of the equation, and somewhere along the way they decided that not knowing it was a character flaw rather than the plain fact that nobody teaches this.

Here is what I told her. She was solving the wrong problem. The $1.2 million buys income that arrives forever from one source, and she did not need forever. She needed six months, which is $60,000, and $60,000 comes from four places stacked together rather than one enormous account.

When we finished, her number was $1,367 a month into savings, alongside a group program she has a year to build. Not a number she loved seeing. A number she can act on.

The other thing I tell people, which I will say here too: do not wait until your finances are tidy to ask. That is like scrubbing the kitchen before the house cleaners show up. Come as you are. The mess is the job.

Full breakdown here:

Most people who say they want to live off their investments have never done the multiplication.

10/09/2026

I bought a rental property for $50,000.

That price barely exists anymore and I am not going to pretend otherwise. If I handed you that number as a model, you would go looking for a deal that is not out there and decide this whole thing does not work.

The number was never the lesson. The structure was.

I paid 8 percent, amortized over ten years, nothing down, and I ran about a hundred dollars a month negative from the first payment. A ten-year schedule on any balance produces a payment that outruns the rent, which is exactly why I was in the red. I took it because I was buying an asset I had no capital to buy, on a schedule that would have it paid off in a decade, and a hundred dollars a month was the price of admission.

My seller was relocating and wanted the monthly income without the ownership headache. He gave me the down payment lever and took the rate and the term, and he got exactly what he came for. I got a property I could not have financed any other way.

Run those same four levers against today's prices and today's rates and the arithmetic changes completely.

What does not change is that every term is negotiable, that the seller's reason for selling decides which lever has any give in it, and that the person who asks the question gets the deal.

That is what I wanted you to have from these four weeks. Go find out what somebody is trying to solve.

Final piece in the series: https://ameliamisenheimer.substack.com/p/i-paid-10000-more-for-the-house-and

10/04/2026

I learned a hard lesson when I moved overseas after getting married.

The business I had built did not give me flexibility. My personal assets did.

That is why I help entrepreneurs build wealth outside their business. Only about 30% of businesses ever sell, and so many owners are counting on an exit to fund the rest of their lives.

I joined Dustin Riechmann on the 7-Figure Leap podcast to share the four mistakes I see most often, the questions I ask every client, and the three-part Wealth Flywheel I use to turn a vision into a written plan.

If you are growing a business and have not made time to build personal wealth alongside it, start with this conversation.

Listen here: https://youtu.be/SZjnER2n0P0

Wealth education, not personalized advice. Your situation is your own.

10/03/2026

I watched a seller sit down at his closing expecting a $15,000 check and find out he was only getting $8,000.

The realtor commission came out of the same money. Nobody had walked him through where the cash was going, and he had every right to be upset about it.

In a real estate contract, the down payment is the only cash in the whole transaction. Everything else is a promise to pay later. That one piece of money has to do more jobs than most people count.

It is the seller's security. If the buyer defaults and the property comes back, that down payment is the largest sum available to repair whatever happened to it and get it back into sellable condition. A property that comes back after a default rarely comes back in the shape it left.
It is also where the commissions come from.

A down payment that covers the commission and leaves nothing behind for the seller is a fat check for the realtor, and it leaves the client exposed and carrying most of the risk. It looked good on the offer sheet. In reality it was not enough.

So be specific, early, and in writing. How much cash, arriving when, going where, and what is left standing between the seller and a bad outcome after everything is paid.

Part three of four on how a real estate contract works, this one from the seller's side of the table. Link in comments.

09/29/2026

Today's the day.

12:00 to 1:00 PM ET at MatchBOX Coworking Studio, Caterpillar Room, right here in Lafayette.

Bring your laptop. Come build something before you head back to work.

If you signed up, see you soon.

09/25/2026

Can I be real with you about something people keep asking me?

"What's an AI employee, and how do I actually get one?"

Fair question. Most explanations either wave their hands or drown you in technical setup. So on September 29 I'm doing this in person instead of trying to explain it in a caption. We go through the AI tools available right now, where each one earns its place and where it falls short, then we build the actual thing together.

One hour. MatchBOX Coworking Studio in Lafayette. Bring your laptop, this is hands-on, not a lecture.

Free, capped at 12 spots.

Link in the comments.

09/24/2026

When I got divorced, I needed to sell my house fast.

I sold it on a real estate contract. The buyers brought a sizable down payment, and that money is what let me close out the divorce. I still owed a mortgage on the place, so I used an escrow company to handle the paperwork and the payments. Every month the buyer's payment went to them, they sent my mortgage company its portion, and whatever was left came to me.

That is the correct way to do it. I did it the correct way.

The buyer was not consistent. Some months the payment showed up on time, some months it did not, and when it did not, there was no money sitting in escrow to forward to my mortgage company. My loan went unpaid. My name was on that mortgage and my credit was attached to it, so his cash flow problems showed up on my credit report.

So I stopped counting on his payment. I paid my mortgage myself every month whether his money had arrived or not, and I treated whatever came through escrow as reimbursement instead of as the source of the funds.

The escrow company will faithfully move money it has. It cannot move money it does not have.

If you are selling a property on a real estate contract and you still owe on it, plan for that from the first month. You are the one whose credit is standing behind that loan, and nothing about the structure changes who the lender is going to call.

Part two of four on how a real estate contract works, including the failure that runs the other direction and takes the property away from the buyer through no fault of their own. Link in comments.

09/21/2026

I want to tell you who Tuesday's Lunch & Learn is for.

It's for the business owner who's already comfortable in ChatGPT or Claude, uses it regularly, and wants a real system instead of more prompts to remember.

If that's you, I'm walking a small group through building exactly that on September 29 at MatchBOX Coworking Studio in Lafayette. Coworking format, laptops open, we build the infrastructure together instead of just talking about it.

Free, capped at 12 spots, in-person only. Bring your laptop.

Link in the comments.

09/18/2026

I managed property for over a hundred investors. One of them called to tell me he was leaving the area.

He owned several rentals. He was not in trouble and he was not in a hurry. He just did not want anything tying him back once he moved, and he had spent enough years taking maintenance calls to be done with that part of it.

What he did not want to give up was the money showing up every month. After years of collecting rent, that rhythm becomes part of how you live.

So we built a deal around exactly that. I bought one of his properties on a real estate contract, which means he financed me instead of a bank. My payment went to him every month, the same way a rent check used to. He kept the income and walked away from the ownership.

I put nothing down. Not a dollar. In exchange he got a higher interest rate than a bank would have paid him and a bigger monthly payment, amortized over ten years rather than the twenty or thirty most buyers reach for.

That last part put my payment high enough that the rent did not cover it. I ran about a hundred dollars a month in the red from the first payment, and I took the deal anyway, because I was buying an asset I had no capital to buy and the price of that was a hundred dollars a month.

Somebody else in the same conversation should walk away from that deal. If a monthly shortfall would strain you, or you need the property producing income now, buying at negative cash flow is not clever. It is a slow problem. It worked because it matched what I was trying to do.

The reason he said yes had nothing to do with me being persuasive. We structured the deal around what he wanted, and what he wanted was never the money up front.

Want part one of four on how a real estate contract works? Link in comments.

09/11/2026

Last week I sat down with Carolyn Herfurth and Tina Forsyth to talk about selling my company.

Somewhere in the middle of recounting all of it, the conversation turned to the money we had wasted. Not the sale price. The spending that went out the door over the years and produced nothing. Coaching, mentors, programs, software.

All three of us could recall thousands of dollars of it. All three of us had examples ready, and the examples came fast, which tells you how close to the surface they sit.

None of us wanted to add it up.

Three women who have each built and sold something, sitting on a live video, and not one of us reached for the calculator. Some things are better left unknown.

That is what a price tag does to you. It makes performance measurable, and measurable cuts both ways. The same number that motivates you on a Tuesday can sit on your chest for a decade.

You already know the smaller version of this. The thing you bought at eleven at night that is still on the shelf with the tag on it, and you do not return it and you do not throw it out, because getting rid of it makes the loss official. The thing you bought in three colors and now call the best investment you ever made. The thing you use every week and do not like, and keep using, because it still has life left in it and you paid for it.

None of those is a decision about the item. Every one of them is a decision about the money that is already gone.

That habit does not stay in the closet, and where it goes next is expensive.

I wrote the whole thing up this week, including the one mechanic that takes the feeling out of the decision. Real estate investors have been using it for decades and almost nobody applies it to the rest of what they own. Link in comments.