I’m Sid – I’m a trained classical musician, now working in data analytics while still actively performing. Prior to investing with Hearthfire, my wife and I were “good savers”: we each held ROTH IRA accounts, a 529 account for our daughter’s future college education, a 30-year mortgage on our first home, match my company’s 401(k) contribution, and even formed a business entity for my wife to teach music lessons. We had just completed a major renovation on our house, and I would estimate our household net worth to be around $250,000. We made smart, educated financial decisions and had modest savings to show for it. Had we stayed on that path, I estimate our net worth today would perhaps have doubled through growth in the stock market.

Our first investment with Hearthfire was to directly acquire a rental property. I approached Sergio with this idea – at the time, Hearthfire was little more than the efforts of its two founders – and we vetted dozens of properties. My biggest reservation was that no one I knew owned investment properties and I had no first-hand knowledge in this area. I’m good with numbers and had learned how to analyze real-estate investments but I didn’t know how to account for the data points numbers don’t necessarily capture – deferred maintenance, bad tenant history, poor location, etc. I expected Hearthfire to bring opportunities to my attention, but it ended up being the other way around. I kept sharing investment ideas with Sergio, and he would point out problems or questions with each one. I started to think Sergio was simply running me around in circles, but we finally settled on a mixed-use multifamily property in Delaware County. I had to take out a second mortgage to make the down payment, and needed to pull together additional savings in the first several months for several items of deferred maintenance. Corinn provided suggestions for using the property’s cash flow towards our renovations and plan when and how to pursue each project efficiently and effectively. The property has since stabilized and offers about a 16% cash-on-cash return. During this time, I was willing to work towards improving this investment, but only because I was confident that my efforts were being shepherded in the right direction through Hearthfire’s advice.

Soon thereafter, our first syndicated investment was Hearthfire’s first self-storage syndication in central Pennsylvania. By this time, our household net worth may have eclipsed $500,000 through equity in both our primary home and investment property, plus some growth in our equity accounts. From my experience acquiring a rental property with Hearthfire, I had come to trust (and perhaps rely) on Sergio’s analysis, and I felt an investment of $25,000 wouldn’t expose us to tremendous risk. In fact, we exited the investment about 3 years later at over a 2x multiplier, which far outperformed my stock positions over the same period.

We’ve since invested in 2 more syndication opportunities, and I believe we would now qualify as accredited investors from our assets. Through this journey, which only began in 2019, I’ve come to recognize my opinion of the Hearthfire brand: there aren’t lots of bells and whistles or sales pitches, but the results seem to consistently outperform expectations. It’s not what you normally experience in the investing world – instead of a fancy sales pitch and overhyped value proposition, you receive plainspoken projections that the company typically exceeds, and you sometimes wish you had invested more in the first place. This mirrors my relationship with Hearthfire’s founders, Sergio and Corinn – I always feel comfortable telling them if something doesn’t look right, and they’ll be just as plainspoken if they see a problem in my thinking. Even as I’m writing this testimony, I can assure you that Sergio and Corinn barely asked for my participation – they simply told me about this initiative over lunch, and I offered to lay out the simple decisions and facts that have doubled our net worth, and more than doubled it again since we began this journey 5 years ago. Concepts like frugality and IRA accounts are a great starting point for financial security, but Hearthfire Holdings has helped me see the bigger picture and tap into investment avenues I likely could not have pursued on my own.

Siddhartha Misra