Amelia Misenheimer Consulting

Amelia Misenheimer Consulting Helping successful entrepreneurs invest in real estate to create passive income and financial freedom

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.

When I got divorced, I needed to sell my house fast.I sold it on a real estate contract. The buyers brought a sizable do...
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.

I want to tell you who Tuesday's Lunch & Learn is for.It's for the business owner who's already comfortable in ChatGPT o...
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.

09/09/2026

Tomorrow, 1:00 PM ET.

If most of what you own is still tied up in your business, this hour is for you.

$27, and the replay is yours for 48 hours if you can't make it live. Save My Seat. link in comments.

Here's what we're covering live on September 10.Wealth education, not personalized advice. Your situation is your own.$2...
09/05/2026

Here's what we're covering live on September 10.

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

$27, live online, September 10, 1:00 PM ET. Save My Seat, link in comments.

A friend told me at the gym last fall that he had been talking with ChatGPT about investing.He said it the way people co...
09/03/2026

A friend told me at the gym last fall that he had been talking with ChatGPT about investing.

He said it the way people confess they cheated on a test with notes written on their hand. Lowered voice, quick glance around, the whole production. He was finally making real money with some excess to invest, he wanted to do it correctly, and I had been running investing classes for women at the time so he was not in the room for those. He went and found his own room. Then he felt bad about it.

He had nothing to apologize for.

He was not embarrassed about the money. He was embarrassed about not already knowing, which is the same sentence I hear from women running businesses at half a million a year. Different rooms, identical sentence. I should know this by now.

Nobody knows this by default. There is no class. Most of us got handed a form at 22, told to pick a percentage, and everything after that came from a podcast or a friend or a book written for somebody in a completely different situation.

So a tool that will explain any of it, at any hour, with no judgment in its voice, is a real thing to have. I use it constantly. I ask it to explain concepts to me like I am a sixth grader and it does, and I walk into decisions steadier than I did before.

It also has a hard limit, and the limit is not where most people assume it is.

I wrote the whole thing out this week, including the three questions I would never put to a chatbot and the ones I ask constantly.

Link in comments.

08/29/2026

I spent a weekend with friends, some new and some I have known for years, and we covered everything.

Revenue coming in and bills going out. Employees and what they cost. What it takes to ship something to an island. Dream homes, and the repairs we all need to make on the homes we already own.

Not one of us said a word about what we paid in taxes last year, or what we are putting into a retirement account, or where our money goes once it leaves the business.

I have been the person who brings it up. I can be blunt, and I have put my foot in my mouth more than once asking something somebody thought was inappropriate. What surprises me is not that people refuse to answer. It is how often the answer starts the same way. I've never been asked that.

Nobody has asked about their tax strategy. Nobody has asked whether their company should be offering a retirement plan. These are people running real businesses with real revenue, and the question has never once come up.

There is no good moment for it. Not over dinner, not over a lunch where things are supposed to stay casual. It stays awkward until enough of us do it anyway, and the shame around what our money looks like only holds as long as nobody says anything out loud.

The next time you are sitting across from somebody whose business you respect, ask them what they did about their taxes last year. Worst case, they tell you nobody has ever asked.

I wrote the longer version on Never Go Broke, including the part about why you cannot take her answer and run it in your own business. Link in comments.

08/14/2026

Think about the independent stores you grew up with. The hardware store, the diner, the shop on the corner that had been there since before you were born.

Most of them did not fail. The owner got tired of working and there was nobody there to buy the business.

That is happening right now at a scale most people are not tracking. According to the SBA, one in twelve US businesses closes every year, which works out to hundreds of thousands of exits. Compare that to the roughly 10,000 small business sales that happen in the same stretch of time. BizBuySell counted 9,586 in 2025.

Right now 52.3 percent of US business owners are 55 or older, and one in four is past 65. Thirteen percent have a written transition plan.

I spent a decade building a property management company from 35 units to more than 450 properties for over 100 investors before I sold it. That job became my identity for ten years. What I learned on the other side of it is that the sale was not the thing that gave me freedom. The investments I made all the way through that decade were.

Most of us have some picture of what life looks like after the business. Time with kids and grandkids. The trip you keep saying you will take. Whatever it is, something has to fund it, and for the overwhelming majority of owners that something is not going to be the sale of the company.

I wrote this week about the three ways a business ends, what each one actually pays, and what to build alongside the business so the ending is your choice instead of your only option.

Link in comments.

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West Lafayette, IN
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