WHY I BUILT THE INCOME FUND
ALMOST NO ONE BUILDS AN INCOME ENGINE.
When you play in the NFL, everyone wants to show you a deal. I took those meetings for nine seasons and invested in plenty of them — more than fifty real estate syndications and private deals, alongside building my own rental portfolio one property at a time. I wasn't a passive listener. I was writing checks and learning what happened after.
Almost none of it offered income I could actually live on, arriving on a schedule I could actually plan around. The pitches were about what my money would be worth in seven years. My question was what it would pay me next month — because an NFL paycheck has an expiration date, and I knew mine was coming.
Private equity, venture, and syndications are real growth engines, and every portfolio should probably have some. But they lock capital up for five to ten years with little cash flow early. The stock market offers the opposite trade — daily liquidity and roughly 10% average annual returns over the long run, delivered with volatility that makes monthly planning nearly impossible. The growth side of a portfolio is crowded with options. The income side is strangely empty. So I built it.
I came to this through football, but the gap has nothing to do with sports. It is the same for the business owner between liquidity events, the executive with compensation tied up in equity, the professional who has earned well and has no time to manage it, and anyone approaching the year their portfolio has to start replacing their paycheck.
“This is not just my business. It is my own largest income investment, and investors are in the same loans I am in. I eat my own cooking, every month.”
DEVON KENNARD • FOUNDER, 42 SOLUTIONS
What I wanted, and couldn’t buy.
I wanted four things at once, and I could never find all four in the same place.
Income I could plan around. Not appreciation, not a projected IRR at exit — money arriving on a schedule. If you can’t put it on a calendar, it doesn’t replace a paycheck.
Collateral I could see. Real property, first position, in a market I know well enough to price. Not a cap table, not a promise.
Alignment I could verify in writing. Not a founder telling me our interests are aligned — a document showing me who gets paid first. That’s the whole reason the waterfall on this site is public.
Short duration. Loans that turn over in six to twelve months rather than capital locked for seven years. Short duration is a form of risk management that almost nobody talks about.
Every private deal I looked at had one or two of these. Almost none had all four. So I built the thing I wanted, and then opened it to people who want the same thing.