Real Wealth Show: Real Estate Investing Podcast · Kathy Fettke / RealWealth

Mikey Taylor: From Pro Skateboarder to Real Estate Investor

·28 min·1 clip

"Income does not give you freedom" became Mikey Taylor’s early money rule.

1. Real Wealth Show: Real Estate Investing Podcast features Mikey Taylor, a former pro skateboarder turned real estate investor, talking with Kathy Fetke about wealth, housing, and investing. 2. Kathy Fetke hosts the conversation as the voice of The Real Wealth Show, and Mikey Taylor matters because he has been a pro skateboarder, mayor of Thousand Oaks, and a real estate investor. 3. The episode asks how a short sports career became a long-term investing strategy and why Taylor says housing is the central issue right now. 4. Taylor says his skateboarding career felt like a "dream come true" because companies paid for trips to Japan, France, and China, and he traveled the world before age 30. 5. He says skateboarding sponsorships, signature boards, a shoe line, a clothing line, and contest winnings created income when the sport was growing in the early 2000s. 6. Taylor says his parents treated his career as risk, brought in a mentor and a financial advisor, and pushed him to think about life after sports. 7. He says that mentor told him "income does not give you freedom," and the advice became to grow income without increasing lifestyle. 8. Taylor says he started with $800 a month, then used a target of $180,000 a year and about $3.5 million invested to define financial freedom. 9. He says the plan began with retirement accounts and the stock market, but his first real estate investment was self-storage, which he could not initially afford. 10. Taylor says self-storage appealed to him because it produced wealth and income at the same time. 11. He says he lived on about 20% of his income for years and directed the rest into investments in a way he compares to a reverse Dave Ramsey approach. 12. Taylor says a lunch with his future father-in-law forced him to answer what he would do after skateboarding, and that conversation pushed him to plan for a business career. 13. He says his first company was St. Archer, a craft brewery in San Diego that launched around 2012 and sold to Miller Coors in 2015. 14. Taylor says that sale created a windfall for him and his investors, which changed the scale of what he could invest. 15. He says he will never let go of real estate because it remains a major factor in his wealth build. 16. Taylor says he likes lower-risk investments for most of his capital, with a smaller portion reserved for higher-risk opportunities. 17. He says housing is a major problem because an $80,000 salary can face a $250,000 starter-home down payment, especially in California. 18. Taylor says affordability requires alignment between government, policymakers, capital, and builders, and he uses his role as mayor and entrepreneur to work on that alignment. 19. This episode is direct, practical, and interview-driven, with Kathy Fetke pressing Taylor on money habits, startup risk, and how housing gets built. 20. People interested in athlete transitions, real estate strategy, and California housing policy will get the most from it, while listeners wanting only skateboarding nostalgia may skip it.

As heard by us

From skate fame to ownership, this treats wealth as a long game.

Mikey Taylor's arc is less about celebrity than about what changes when a pro athlete starts thinking like an owner. The conversation moves from skateboarding fame to business building, then into real estate as a way to keep wealth working after the spotlight fades.

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Why you'd press play

Want a pro-skateboarder-to-investor story about building a brand, selling a company, and thinking about housing supply?

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

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