Joe Forti

Background on the Starship story

I had a conversation with an old acquaintance recently who believes that only evangelism really matters. After all, the world is not our home, so civil life is secondary. Building lasting things is not necessary, children are optional, having a legacy is suspect, etc. His view is that the dominion mandate has expired, and so the Great Commission is really our ultimate, only mandate. He is married, but he and his wife do not want children. Instead, they fill their time with travelling and seeing the world. Why not? If the world is going to be destroyed anyway, and the Christian life is reduced to extracting souls from the world rather than discipling men to take up their duties within it? Why invest in households, institutions, and future generations? This is a thinner Christianity than what the Scriptures portray. The point of being a citizen of heaven is not to despise earthly duties, but to be ambassadors of heaven here on earth. After all, it is still our Father’s world: “The earth is the LORD’s, and all its fullness, The world and those who dwell therein” (Psalm 24:1). In Jeremiah 29, God did not tell exiles in Babylon to sit around waiting for escape. He told them to build houses, plant gardens, take wives, have sons and daughters, and seek the peace of the city. The Great Commission does not cancel the dominion mandate, but rather, it restores men to God so that they can order their lives toward Christ. A disembodied Christianity is not the goal. Christ saves men with bodies, spouses, children, homes, churches, grandchildren, etc. And then he restores their nature so that they can order all of these aspects of their lives for his glory. The Gospel does not make the dirt we till unimportant, and no faithful servant buries his tools because the Master is coming back.

This was the ethos of Campus Crusade at MIT when I was there: "It's all gonna burn." "Rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic." "Only eternal things are God's Word and men's souls." Your willingness to turn your back on your ambitions and your parents' expectations was a measure of devotion to Christ. "Sacrifice your Isaac." Imagine teaching young men and women with gifts of creativity and intelligence, providentially at a place that could develop those gifts and enable them to accomplish great things to God's glory that they could only serve God by going into full-time Christian ministry or funding those who do.

The richest person I've ever met at a closing table wore a Carhartt jacket and drove a 2009 Silverado with 210,000 miles on it I assumed he was the contractor He was buying the house next to mine. Cash. His 63rd He's a retired mailman We talked in the title company parking lot for 40 minutes and he rearranged my brain. This man delivered mail for 31 years. Never made more than $61,000 in a single year. His coworkers retired with a pension and a bass boat He retired with 63 paid-off rental houses and around $52,000 a month in rent I asked him how. He said something I think about constantly: "One house a year. That's it. Everybody wants ten houses by Tuesday. I bought one ugly house a year for 30 years and let the tenants pay for all of them" His system was almost embarrassingly simple: Every year he bought the cheapest structurally-sound house he could find in a working-class neighborhood. The kind of house that scares regular buyers. Bad carpet, ugly kitchen, overgrown yard. He paid $30,000-$80,000 depending on the decade He fixed ONLY what mattered. Paint, floors, a clean kitchen, working systems. He never once installed anything fancy. "Tenants don't pay extra for granite. They pay for clean and safe" He rented it out and used the rent to pay the mortgage. Then he mostly forgot about it Here's the part that made me put my coffee down. I asked him how much of his own money was still in those 63 houses "None. Hasn't been for 20 years" Every few years he'd refinance a few houses (the bank hands you cash against the value of a property you own) and use that money to buy the next ones. The tenants' rent paid back every loan. His mailman salary paid for his groceries and that was it. The portfolio built itself off its own rent Nobody at his job knew. For 31 years. He said his supervisor found out two weeks before he retired and thought he was lying Then he told me the thing I want tattooed on the inside of my eyelids: "People think real estate is fast money. It's slow money that gets fast at the end. The first 5 houses feel like nothing. The last 30 bought themselves" The math on his "boring" pace: Year 1: 1 house, maybe $400/month in profit after the mortgage Year 5: 5 houses, $2,000/month Year 10: 10 houses, $4,500/month and the early ones are half paid off Year 20: 25+ houses, $12,000/month, refinances funding everything Year 30: 63 houses, $52,000/month, wearing a Carhartt to closings and confusing 25-year-olds like me He never had a viral moment. Never raised money. Never watched a course. He bought one unsexy house a year in a flyover state and let three decades of rent do the heavy lifting Meanwhile people won't start because they can't have 55 houses by age 27 You don't need 55. You need ONE this year. The mailman math works at literally any speed He shook my hand, got in the Silverado, and drove off to Home Depot. 63 houses. $52,000 a month. 210,000 miles on the truck Most retirement plans are a prayer. His was a paint roller If you want to flip a house but have $0 in the bank, you can get funded for up to $150k with a hard money loan or 0% APR credit cards. I'm going to keep sharing what actually works, keep an eye out

so this shyness thing doesn't go away with age huh

I wrote this song in thanks to God for my ancestral homeland. It is a tremendous gift, and one worth fighting for. May our affection for our home on earth train us for the far greater gift of our eternal home. 🇺🇸✝️