GI245: Alternative Investments with Ben Fraser

GI245 Alternative Investments with Ben Fraser

Ben Fraser is the Chief Investment Officer of Aspen Funds, a private equity firm that Ben helped grow to over $500 million in assets under management. Before joining his current firm, he served as a commercial lender, a commercial underwriter, and an asset manager on a team overseeing over $7 billion in assets.

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Announcer:
Welcome to the Global Investor Podcast, a show that focuses on helping foreign investors enter the lucrative US real estate market. Host Charles Carillo combines decades of real estate investing experience with a professional background in international banking to interview experts in all areas of US real estate investing. Now, here’s your host, Charles Carillo.

Charles:
Welcome to another episode of the Global Investors Podcast; I’m your host, Charles Carillo. Today, we have Ben Fraser. He is the Chief Investment Officer of Aspen Funds, a private equity firm that Ben helped grow to over $500 million in assets under management. Before joining his current firm, he served as a commercial lender, a commercial underwriter, and an asset manager on a team overseeing over $7 billion in assets. So Ben, thank you so much for being on the show today.

Ben:
Yeah, thanks for having me, Charles. Looking forward to it.

Charles:
So please tell us a little bit about yourself, both personally and professionally prior to getting involved in joining Aspen Funds.

Ben:
Yeah, yeah. So you kinda get a little bit of the bio. So I kind of started my career in finance and banking and was a underwriter for a while and then a lender for period time. So business banking, did a lot of real estate deals kind of small middle market mergers and acquisitions. Really kind of cut my teeth on the debt side, right? And so was able to learn a lot. It was really great training. You know, but you only kind of learn to look one directionally, which is downside, right? So as banks, they don’t go to the upside. All they care about is risk. But it’s a great skill to learn, right? How do you assess risk? How do you manage risk? But eventually it got not as fun, right? Because I kind of projected where my career would be 10, 15 years down the road.

Ben:
And, you know, most of those people were pretty pessimistic and, you know, hadn’t, you know, probably made much more money than they had 10 years ago. And I was like, you know what? I don’t think this is for me, it had opportunity to kind of join Aspen Funds, and at that point they were pretty small, but had been operating for about five years and built a great operation in kinda their first vertical, first niche. And you know, only raised from friends and family. But from that point, you know, kind of helped us grow to where we are now about half a billion under management, raised about 200 million in equity from high net worth investors and really have awesome team now. So it’s been really, really fun, you know? And what kind of prompted the, the move aside from just, you know, fear of getting stuck in banking?

Ben:
You know, one of the cool things I gotta do as a banker was get to look under the hood of these very successful borrowers. And because we were a boutique business bank all, most of our borrowers were entrepreneurs and investors. And so what I started seeing over the years of doing, doing this was this common thread of these ultra, you know, high net worth borrowers had usually two things in common at one. Either they were business owners or entrepreneurs. They built businesses built value that way. And two, they’re real estate investors. And so that really, to me, just created a, a desire to kind of get it, that side of it. And so I’ve got to do both now building new business and also investing in real estate through Aspen. And it’s been a, a really fun journey and can share all the ups and downs along the way or where we wanna go. But yeah, that’s kind of, you know, where we’re at now.

Charles:
So with, with Aspen funds, it’s, you have a pretty unique business plan compared to other maybe syndicators out there that might focus on one asset class. You guys focus on several different asset classes. I mean, what are your investment strategy and your kind of economic thesis when you’re looking at different asset classes and making decisions on where to invest and put your LPs funds?

Ben:
Yeah, absolutely. And it’s great question because I think it is a little bit different than maybe the, the standard approach a lot of operators take in that we operate in multiple asset classes. And it really comes through the experience of our partners. So I’m one of four partners. I’m the youngest by probably 20, 25 years, so they’ve got a lot more experience than me. I got, I got the hustle and muscle to, you know, drive things forward. But it’s been, it’s been a really great balance of being able to have the perspective that they’ve been through multiple cycles in real estate and private equity in the public markets. In, you know, some of the takeaways were the timing really matters, right? And I’m not saying market timing. I’m not saying, you know, timing the market perfectly and, you know, being a nostradamus, but understanding what we kind of call the tides of the economy, right?

Ben:
These are longer term trends that are driving changes in the economy over a longer period of time, right? Those can generally be identified and you can position yourself with the tides and benefit from that. And so a rising tide lifts all boats. We wanna be in the, in the asset classes, in the verticals that have rising tides, because our thesis is a rising tide creates a massive amount of margin of opportunity of outperformance over time than, say, choosing one vertical and vertically integrating, for example, of maybe you take on construction in house, maybe you take on property management in-house, but that can actually create a conflict of interest down the road, right? If, if you’re, if you’re in a asset class that is actually in a downward trend, but you’ve vertically integrated, you’ve actually created inherent need to continue to do deals to kind of feed the beast.

Ben:
Yeah. And you can actually make poor decisions because of that inherent need that maybe you don’t even realize. But our belief is that vertically integrating and picking one asset class, going, going deep in one isn’t a terrible strategy if it makes sense. We’ve actually done that in a few different verticals that we focus on. But to save maybe 10% operating margin by vertically integrating, if you’re in a downward trend market that’s actually not gonna rescue anything, right? It’s, we’d rather be in an area where you have a lot more opportunity, a lot more tailwinds behind you to create more margins. That that’s really the, the thesis. And, and so what we’ve done is our kind of tagline is macro driven alternative investments. We look first at the macroeconomic drivers that we believe will, will be in play for a long period of time that we can position ourselves behind those drivers to benefit from them. So I can talk about what some of ’em are that we’re looking at, but that’s really our thesis of how we approach investing.

Charles:
Yeah. Give us a, give us an overview of several kind of, some of the asset classes maybe you guys really focus on. And and you know, how you found those and what are the huge drivers for being part of those?

Ben:
Yeah. So you know, a few that we have, and we have a, a podcast as well, and we’ve talked about this a lot, so people are interested, they can go and check that out. And we have a an hour long presentation called our Investible Mega Trends for the next decade. And it lays out seven megatrends, I’ll, I’ll just hit a couple right now. But one, and that, I think the one that kind of underlies a lot of these things that’s going to, you know, we think it’ll be in play for a while, is inflation. We’ve been saying inflation was, is here to stay. And you know, been, been calling that for a little while, and we think it’s obviously come down quite a bit. Mm-Hmm, <affirmative>, but it’s floating about that 4% mark right now as we’re talking annualized.

Ben:
And the Fed is staunchly stood on the 2% number. And while it feels like we’re getting closer, that’s still a hundred percent higher than they wanna see it, right? And so four percent’s a small number, but on a big economy, that’s a very big number. And the challenges that we’re seeing right now, and the reason we’ve been saying inflation’s gonna be sticky, really driven by, by a few things, foremost being labor shortages. We’re seeing pretty significant labor shortages across the board. But especially in skilled labor areas and, you know, kind of coming outta covid, we had a lot of you know, boomers and folks that were nearing retirement decided to leave the workforce, and they haven’t come back. And meanwhile we’ve continued to have, you know, growth of the economy, but we have very low on unemployment right now, and that’s gonna continue to, to drive wage inflation, which drives overall inflation because consumer spending makes up about 70% of the GDP.

Ben:
And then the other kind of big driver of inflation is energy costs. And this is another one of our mega trends is, is petroleum you know, energy based thing. So that’s really the other kind of driver of this is you got inflation from labor shortage, you’ve got energy. There’s been a massive underinvestment in new supply for oil and gas development. It’s very inelastic. It’s something that we think is gonna create a pretty significant energy crisis over the coming years and going to create higher energy prices, which again, is very infl inflationary. It’s not, you know, a direct component of CPI, but it impacts all components of CPI. And so if you believe that inflation’s gonna be in place, you wanna position yourself in an area that you can benefit from inflation, right? So most, most areas of real estate are great places to have a hedge against inflation.

Ben:
But there’s certain verticals right now that we think are better than others, right? Multifamily is in a challenging position. And so we’re actually taking a different approach. And the other kind of big trend that we’re seeing, a really big opportunity that we think is, is gonna be around for the next several years is really we’re calling kind of gap funding, right? So we’re seeing in this market a lot of deals that were originated the past several years, used bridge financing, and is very attractive to a lot of newbie syndicators because very high leverage and non recourse. So you could get, you know, 80 to 85% leverage on a project and you know, didn’t have to raise as much equity and hey, it’s non recourse. I don’t have to personally guarantee this loan that that’s the best of all worlds. Yeah, well, the only thing that you have to kind of trade for that is floating rate debt.

Ben:
And at that point, no one, you know, even considered that rates would go up as much as they have, but lo and behold, they did. And we’ve seen the fastest interest rate increase that we’ve had in history. And it has really impacted a lot of a lot of deals, right? Because not only do you have higher interest costs on servicing your debt we have massive increases in operational costs, right? We’re seeing insurance costs go up massively across the board. Property tax, you know, is going up as these property values are being adjusted. And then meanwhile, we’re seeing the biggest amount of supply hitting the market in, in a lot of markets, mostly sunbelt, of new developments that are, you know, were started three, three or four years ago that are now just hitting the market. And we’re seeing the highest level of deliveries of new apartments and housing in general hit the market at a time where, you know, there’s other things going on.

Ben:
So it’s kind of a perfect storm. And so what we’re doing is we’ve been operating debt funds for a long time, and we’re big believers in going lower in the capital stack. And right now it’s very, very accretive to go lower in the capital stack. You can reduce your risk of capital loss, but you can still actually demand pretty high rates of return because you’re this last equity or, or debt in and you know, they don’t really have any other options ’cause banks are pulling back massively mm-hmm, <affirmative>, right? They’re tidying their credit. It’s very hard to raise equity right now from high net worth, especially syndicated deals because everyone’s freaked out, right? No one wants to do a capital call. And so there’s not a whole lot of options. And so that creates demand. And so that’s another big vertical and and area we’re focusing on this year.

Charles:
Yeah, that’s really interesting. Ben

Charles:
Do you have money sitting in the stock market? And you’re worried about it or worse. You have money sitting at the bank, not keeping up with inflation. My name is Charles Carillo, founder and managing partner of Harborside Partners. And since 2006, I’ve been investing my money and my family’s money into income producing properties. These are real assets, real properties with real addresses that produce real cash flow. At Harborside Partners, we provide passive investors who love real estate with a turnkey investing solution. If you want to put your money to work in real estate, but can’t find deals, don’t have the time to get funding in. The last thing that productive people want to do is manage real estate. We find the deals. We fund the deals and we manage the tenants, the termites and the properties. Partner with us at investwithharborside.com. That’s investwithharborside.com. Go to investwithharborside.com. If you love real estate, you like the idea of passive income and believe that income producing properties will appreciate over time. Go to investwithharborside.com. That’s investwithharborside.com.

Charles:
So just can you just explain a little bit more about gap financing? ’cause It’s not something we’ve really tackled that much on this podcast. And can you explain how you have the senior debt, how you have common equity, and where you guys are coming in in that mix?

Ben:
Yeah, great question. So, you know, for those that are maybe less familiar with the term, the capital stack, right? That’s really what we’re talking about here. And so to purchase any asset you have to have, you know, formation of capital. That’s generally most commonly, you know, some, some form of senior debt, whether it’s from a bank or a debt fund or life insurance company or agency, whatever. That’s your senior debt. That’s what most people are familiar with, you know, buying originating senior debt. Then you have equity, right? You gotta go raise equity. Maybe the senior lenders, you know, a couple years ago they were doing 75, 80% leverage. So they purchase a million dollar property, they’ll give you 800,000, you gotta go raise or invest $200,000 to kind of bring in the equity. But what’s happened now is both of those pieces have kind of pulled back, right?

Ben:
<Laugh>. Yeah. And so senior debt, the leverage ratios, depending on what type of project it is, whether it’s development or value add, you know, if it’s not a stabilized project, which most people aren’t investing in, unless they just want, you know, preservation of capital, leverage ratios have come way down. So we’re seeing like on developments, 50%, 55%, you value add maybe 65, 70% if you’re, if you’re lucky or you can go higher, but you’re paying a massive amount for it from a debt fund, right? They might go 75%, but you’re paying, you know, seven, eight, 9% interest rate to do that. Meanwhile, equity, it’s difficult to raise equity right now, right? Equity investors, they don’t know what the market’s gonna do. Equity investors get paid last. And so when, when the market’s kinda risk on that, that’s harder part to raise. So what we’re coming in at is either in a preferred equity position, which means we’re coming in as equity investors, but we have a preferred payout in the waterfall of distributions, whether it’s operational cash flow or you know, a capital event.

Ben:
We’re gonna get paid first with the kind of current rate of return plus a backend. Then some circumstances will come in as a mezzanine debt. So they’re both, you know, functionally come in before the equity, but after the senior debt the mezzanine debt were generally secured and it’s more structured as a promissory note or like a debt like product, but functionally they kind of operate the same. And you come in, you kind of come up to say 70 or 75% overall leverage. So the property value can drop, you know, 25 to 30%. We still haven’t lost any, any principle, right? The equity investors will get wiped out in that scenario, but we still preserve capital and we can charge, you know, rates of return that are probably pretty similar to what equity investors were making a couple years ago, right?

Ben:
But they have no other options because they can’t do capital calls. The equity investors won’t contribute, banks aren’t willing to put new money out on existing pro projects. So it’s kind of creates this gap, right? And, and there’s, there’s a big spectrum of, you know, distress deals and some are just, they’re just bugs looking for a windshield. There’s no amount of capital that’s going to save them <laugh>, right? It’s, they purchased it way too at way too high of a basis. The business plan was never realistic. The, you know, I mean, I was talking with a a group the other day. They’re, they’re at 91% occupancy, but they are negative cash flow <laugh> still. And why is that too high of a basis, right? And the, you, there’s not a whole lot you can do to, to get out of that other than just accept you purchased at the wrong time and probably gotta take an equity wipe and, you know, move on.

Ben:
But there are deals that are purchase a good basis. They have a proven business plan, but either the lenders requiring them to bolster up reserves, right? Which lenders are doing, they’re saying, Hey, you need to have X amount just in cash, just as a reserve. Maybe they’ve done part of the business plan of renovating units, I’m thinking multifamily right now, but they need to finish the business plan. They’ve kind of proven out the model, the rents are there, but we don’t have the cash to go finish the renovation program. But we have a path to stabilization to get there. Or it’s buying an interest rate cap, right? Be, you know, a lot of lenders are requiring interest rate caps to be purchased, which basically limits the upside exposure to interest rates. And those are very expensive right now because you know, a lot of ’em are expiring and people still dunno exactly what trades are gonna do. So there’s a lot of reasons why people are in these positions, but they’re good assets in good locations with good operators that just need to kind of get to stabilization to be able to sell or to refinance. And those are kind of the projects we’re looking at.

Ben:
Yeah, great. <Laugh> great, great point. You know, I I always say, you know, never let the tax tail wag the dog, right? And that’s, that’s a common phrase, but I see this all the time, right? Especially at the end of the year, we’re kind of now in 2024, so less of it now, but a lot of people have a need or they have a fear, oh, I gotta pay so much taxes, I got to just make an investment, right? And, and this happens a lot in a space that we’re heavily invested in, which is oil and gas, right? There’s amazing tax benefits in oil and gas investing, but there’s certain strategies that will give you great tax write-offs, but they’re also really, really risky <laugh>. And so you’re, you’re making the investment because of, you know, the write-offs. But if those, you know, strategies don’t bear fruit and they don’t work out, you have a permanent write-off of a capital loss, right?

Ben:
Of zero. So that’s not something that you, that’s, that you don’t win in that scenario, right? And so that’s where I just think it’s so important to, to first understand your overall investment strategy. What’s your goal as an investor, right? Am I trying to maximize total return? Am I trying to preserve capital and generate income? Where do I, what’s kind of on my mix of investments in the capital stack, right? Am I a hundred percent equity invested? I should probably have some investments in some debt you know, vehicles and, you know, reduce risk that way, and then the tax conversation becomes that, that next part of it, right? But I I, I do think a lot of investors are so far, they don’t even think about taxes until end of the year and what do I owe? But there are, you know, understanding the buckets of income that you generate and where you can protect, like against that income in how you invest. That’s a great way to, you know, create the framework for what things should I be looking at given my current tax situation. That makes sense for me. But again, just looking at you know, a big bonus depreciation year one as the primary driver is usually two myopic in your, in how you’re viewing it.

Charles:
Yeah, that’s, that’s a lot of great information. I think with, when I get to spend time with savvier investors, it’s really before they’re even thinking of selling an asset or having any type of liquidity event, they’ve already have a plan of really where they’re planning on putting that money and becoming more like that of forward thinking, I think is a great way for investors, especially ones that are investing in alternative assets where you do have tax consequences if you’re outside of your retirement account.

Ben:
Totally. Yeah. We see it all the time, right? And if, if someone is gonna have a big liquidity event, you’re gonna get hit very hard in taxes, right? If you just sell it all and year one you get a huge lump sum of cash, you’re not keeping a lot of that, that cash, right? And so being able to, to even structure buyouts if you’re selling a business in certain ways to, you know, prepare your situation for how you can, you know, manage a new lump sum and ways to offset some of those tax liabilities. Becoming a real estate professional is a, is a game changer if you have the ability to do it. So there’s a lot of strategies that you can employ, but to your point, you gotta be forward thinking about it. You gotta be anticipating some of these things before they happen because once that tax year is over, there’s not a whole lot you can do retroactively, right? And so you, you have to be thinking ahead of time.

Charles:
So moving forward with that in strategies you might see, I mean, you have a podcast, as you mentioned before, invest like a billionaire. So over the years of working with ultrahigh net worth individuals, what strategies do you see them employ regularly that may differ from mainstream investment strategies or stuff you hear on your typical news?

Ben:
Yeah, you know, I, I think it, it depends on where you’re kind of coming into investing from, right? If you’re in the public markets exclusively, and you’ve said, oh, I’ve been investing in, in real estate through REITs, you know, I would argue that that is a an equity investment that tracks the real estate market, but it’s not true real estate, right? And be, and there’s so much difference between investing in a publicly traded REIT versus investing directly into a real estate fund or syndication that has direct ownership of an asset. Because when you do that, you can accelerate depreciation you can even do bonus depreciation and cost irrigation studies that, that, that kind of create a big lump sum on the front end that can be used against other passive income. And so if you’re just kind of new to it, like just starting there is a massive game changer, right?

Ben:
If, if you can start to start generating these, these passive losses through depreciation that’s, that’s a pretty big deal, right? If you’ve already been doing that, you’re kind of, you know, been investing, you’re generating these, these losses. Another great strategy to think about as I, as I alluded to, is becoming a real estate professional. It’s, it doesn’t work for everybody and it helps a lot if you have a spouse that you know, maybe isn’t working or has the ability to be more active in real estate, you know, whether it’s buying rentals or even Airbnbs, sometimes they can qualify working with property managers because if you can hit the status, I’m not gonna go into that right now, it’s for time’s sake, but if you can hit it, it can be a massive game changer. Because if you’re, you know, married filing jointly and one of your spouses or one of the spouses is a real estate professional, all the income generated at that family unit is now can be sheltered.

Ben:
Active income can be sheltered from these these passive losses. And that’s, it’s a pretty big game changer. So I’ve known several friends who, you know, one spouse is a business owner, the other one was working full time, and he ended up actually leaving his job. He was making like really strong six figure salary because they realized we’ll actually make more if I stop working and I become a real estate professional and just manage a couple rentals or Airbnbs, and now I have all my time back and we’ll make more through tax savings than the income that I’m generating as a W2 employee, right? This is a scenario a lot of people could be in if you’re high, high paid working professional, to me, it’s the single most powerful tax strategy that you can employ if you can figure it out. You know, and if, if you can save, you know, 30 to 40% taxes per year, you know, especially earlier in your wealth putting career, you can compound that savings and investing. I mean, it’s just, it’s insane what that can do for your personal financial situation if you can, if you can achieve that.

Charles:
Yeah, that’s a great point being that real estate, having one of those real estate professionals in the family there allows you really to shelter a lot of that income and kind of kick the can down the road a little bit further. But as we’re, as we’re kind of closing up here, Ben you know, you as you’re dealing with a lot of these high net worth individuals, I mean, what are common mistakes you, you see alternative asset investors make?

Ben:
Yeah, common common mistakes. I think the, the foremost would be, you know, I think investing because of only tax reasons. It’s one, it’s probably not the worst mistake. The worst mistake, I would say is not educating yourself enough to understand how to do basic due diligence, right? And I think that’s where a lot of people get stuck, right? Where they feel like, I just don’t know what to do, so I’m not gonna invest in alternatives because I don’t know how to make a decision, right? That, that’s one end of the spectrum. But it’s not terribly complicated. It’s not rocket science, right? If you’ve been able to generate a net worth of a million or a couple million bucks where you’re making half a million bucks in income, you’re smart. You can figure this out, right? <Laugh>, it’s not, not rocket science, but you need to do enough just basic education of understanding the right things to be looking for before you really start going all in on, on on alternatives.

Ben:
So I, I see a lot of people in this boat where they were a business owner, they now sold a business at a big liquidity event. They have say 10 million bucks, 20, 30 million bucks, and they’re just ready to go all in on investing. And I just say, go as slow as you possibly can because the investments you’ll make on the front end, you know, you probably won’t make all of those five years down the road because you’ll learn a lot of things along the way. And so, as much as you can go slow, learn as much as you can, and, you know, some of the basics of due diligence are, are not that complicated, right? But just trust, trust, but verify <laugh>, right? It’s kind of a simple, a simple idiom that’s really, really helpful. And as humans, we all innately we trust people, but a lot of times the trust isn’t necessarily rooted in logic or rational thinking.

Ben:
A lot of times it’s emotional, right? And it’s emotional beings, you know, we make decisions emotionally and then we justify that decision logically. And so we think we’re logical, we’re not. And a great case in point is, you know, Ponzi schemes, like there’s a Ponzi scheme that’s kind of come through and it’s still alleged. So I can’t say it’s a Ponzi scheme, but you know, evidence seems to point that direction of this group that had gone through all these kind of private investor networks was this carbon capture technology they created to capture carbon, you know, from wellheads. And they raised $250 million from accredited investors, and it appears that it was a Ponzi scheme from the outset. And most of that capital is gone. And there’s some pretty basic stuff of just from a diligence standpoint that could have easily shown that this was not legit, right?

Ben:
And one just doing ba basic background checks on, on operators but also like they, they claimed they had patents, right? But they couldn’t share those patents with anybody because they didn’t want the competition to, to see them. And you know this, to get out before they could do it. Well, if you have any basic understanding of, of a patent, it’s, it’s filed with the government, right? So you can go into the patent office and, and see the, the patent number. Apparently no one decided to go check that that was actually legit. And so there’s just stuff like that where it’s like you as humans, we kind of innately wanna trust people, but that we also just gotta verify. And so that, that’s kind of, you know, some of the basic stuff here.

Charles:
Yeah, that’s a lot of great information. One thing too, you said about education, I just want to add there, is just investing in the things that you understand not, I don’t wanna say like one asset class or another, but there was asset class out there and people were all this stuff that was happening a couple years back, mainly with crypto, let’s just say. And people would say something to me, and I’d be like, and I would ask, I remember I was playing golf with someone and I was like, like, do you understand like how that worked? I, I didn’t understand myself. I was just seeing, and nope, no idea. I mean, you know what I mean? I somehow knew more than they did and I didn’t know anything about it. And it was just that’s a huge red flag. I mean, that’s just, you’re preparing yourself for failure. Not saying you have to be in the trenches of like, you know, managing properties to passively invest, but it’s something that understanding is kind of how the business goes, you know what I mean? And I think if people did more of that than when they do their due diligence and they review a deal, they’d be pulling things out and they’re like, oh, I heard this was like a red flag. Let me, you know, speak to someone about that

Ben:
A hundred percent. You know, and I’ve, I talked with a gentleman who’s a founder of a group called Tiger 21 recently. So a large network of ultra ultrahigh net worth families. And he makes the contention, you should even go so far as to only invest in things. Not only that you understand, but that you have a significant competitive advantage in, right? So if you have a, if you exited a company in biotech, right? You have a distinct advantage of identifying good private equity investments in biotech, right? Like, why would you go and try to become a crypto expert? I mean, maybe you could, but you have this inherent knowledge that’s taken you a long time to develop. Why not use that to your advantage in your investing strategies, right? So I, I think there, there, there’s some, you know, arguments on both sides of that, but at a minimum, I agree with you that you should invest in things that you at a, at a pretty good level understand, right? And Warren above it says, you know, invest in what, you know. I mean, it’s just, it’s, it’s, it’s almost too simple that we just assume, you know, well, uncle Jerry’s investing in this and he’s smart, so I’ll just go do that. Well, that, that’s how you get into trouble, right? And you lose, you lose money. So I think it’s a great, great point, Charles.

Charles:
So so Ben, how can our listeners learn more about you, your podcast and your firm?

Ben:
Yeah, we have a podcast that’s called Invest like a Billionaire. It’s really focused purely on passive investors education around leveling up your passive investing and, and really mimicking the strategies and tactics that the ultra wealthy like the billionaires are using. And then we have our, our private equity firm called Aspen Funds us. We work both with LPs, family offices and fund to fund managers. So if you’re, you know, liked any of the macro trends that I shared, you can reach out to us there and see more of what we’ve got going on and, and offerings we’re putting out.

Charles:
Well, thanks a lot for coming on today, Ben. Looking forward to connecting with you here in the near future.

Ben:
Thanks, Charles. It was great.

Charles:
Hi guys! It’s Charles from the Global Investors Podcast. I hope you enjoyed the show. If you’re interested in get involved with real estate, but you don’t know where to begin, set up a free 30 minute strategy call with me at schedulecharles.com. That’s schedulecharles.com. Thank you.

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Nothing in this episode should be considered specific, personal or professional advice. Any investment opportunities mentioned on this podcast are limited to accredited investors. Any investments will only be made with proper disclosure, subscription documentation, and are subject to all applicable laws. Please consult an appropriate tax legal, real estate, financial or business professional for individualized advice. Opinions of guests are their own information is not guaranteed. All investment strategies have the potential for profit or loss. The host is operating on behalf of Syndication Superstar, LLC, exclusively.

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About Ben Fraser

Ben is the Chief Investment Officer at Aspen Funds, where he combines his analytical nature with a passion for delivering outstanding client service and strong returns through out-of-the-box investments.

Prior to joining Aspen, Ben served as a Commercial Lender at First Business Bank, one of the top SBA lenders in the nation. There, he specialized in government-backed loan originations, specifically SBA and USDA loans. Before that, he worked as a Commercial Credit Underwriter for Crossfirst Bank, where he personally underwrote over $125MM in C&I and CRE loans across various industries.

Ben also has experience working in the asset management industry, having served as a key member of the team at Tortoise Capital Advisors. At Tortoise, he helped grow institutional managed accounts from ~$3BN AUM to ~$7BN AUM.

Ben holds an MBA from Azusa Pacific University and a Bachelor of Science in Finance from the University of Kansas, where he graduated magna cum laude.

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