Meet Brad Thomas, a real estate-focused visionary, the founder of iREIT®, a son, father, grandfather… and a real-life rags to riches (to rags to riches) story you truly need to know. Because his financially secure, retirement-ready end results could now be yours as well.

The son of a single mom, Brad grew up knowing he wanted to work with real estate. His maternal grandfather owned a hotel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, which he always admired. And some of his best memories of his dad before his parents’ split involved playing Monopoly, where he played hard to build up a commercial real estate empire (with admittedly fake money at the time).

Many children’s tastes change as they grow up, but not in Brad’s case. He went on to earn his degree in business and economics from Presbyterian College, then went right into real estate. And while he began working for someone else to begin with, learning the ropes through someone else’s expertise, he soon saw how much money he could make by owning property himself and renting it out.

So that’s what he did, starting out slowly with just his own personal house… and then moving on to owning entire shopping centers and stand-alone retail space. As a commercial real estate (CRE) developer, Brad selected sites for companies like Walmart, CVS, and Dollar General, helped design building blueprints, and oversaw construction from start to finish.

By the time 2007 concluded, he ruled a booming CRE empire, allowing him to send his five children to private schools, jet-set in private planes, and treat his wife to some very nice pieces of jewelry.

But then the 2008 real estate crash happened, and the Great Recession set in. Just like that, Brad lost almost everything. Nobody was asking him to build anything anymore, his tenants were downsizing or going out of business altogether and, because he hadn’t exactly been saving money, the creditors were coming to call.

To say the next several years were rough would be the understatement of Brad’s life. He could have given up. And, truth be told, there were times he wanted to. But he knew his family was still counting on him, and so he set out to find a solution.

That solution was with real estate investment trusts, or REITs.

Clearly much more focused on sustainability this time around, Brad built himself back “from the ground up,” as he likes to say. This time, he made sure to start with a firm foundation: a brand-new mindset focused on the long term instead of instant gratification.

He now knows that people saving up for retirement can take the dividends REITs offer (with their higher-than-average yields) and reinvest the money right back into those same stocks. Then, the next time these companies pay out, it means even more dividends which, when reinvested again, mean even more dividends.

It’s a slow and steady process, it’s true. But years down the road, it can pay off intensely, as Brad is living proof of. And long after retirement, REIT owners can use their dividends to help make up for their missing paychecks.

Of course, REITs aren’t a perfect investment. They tend to be much more stable assets due to the rules and regulations they abide by… but they can still fall out of favor for various reasons. Those downturns don’t usually last long; but obviously, the more well-managed and well-placed a REIT is, the more sustainable it tends to be.

In the same way, the more informed REIT investors are and the more confident they are in their portfolios’ long-term stability, the greater their chance of success.

That’s why Brad’s focus for himself and his followers is to cut through the hype and noise to invest in reliable, consistent income-based strategies. This premise, which helped him build back his personal wealth into the multimillions, is now the foundation for his financial newsletter firm, Wide Moat Research.