Seller financing is more than a way to help a buyer who can’t get a bank loan. In the right hands, it becomes the foundation for DIY note investing, working with capital partners, and building steady passive income secured by real estate.
That’s the central theme of ZimpleMoney’s most recent webinar, “Why Seller Financing Wins: DIY Note Investing with Private Capital Partners,” hosted live on May 28th, 2026 by CEO Ted Tekippe featuring special guest Dawn Rickabaugh aka the Note Queen. Dawn brought her extensive insight into structuring seller-financed deals having spent years securing partners for capital instead of her own.
From Nurse to Note Investor (With Other People’s Money)
Dawn’s journey started as an ER nurse and busy mom of four before she became a real estate broker then a full-time note investor and advisor. After digging through every note and seller-financing training she could find, Dawn faced a practical problem: by the time she truly understood the business, she no longer had much of her own capital left to invest.
Instead of defaulting to brokering for small fees, she asked a different question: “How can I keep my foot in the deal and bring in capital partners?” Dawn detailed her first transaction where she was able to bring in a capital partner and set up a small arbitrage that created real passive income, establishing a model she could repeat and scale with different capital partners.
Why Capital Partners Want Professional Servicing
As Dawn’s network grew, more people wanted to fund her deals. That’s when the quality of servicing stopped being a “nice-to-have” and became a non-negotiable. Capital partners expect clean accounting via clear ledgers, on-time reporting, and transparent performance.
Ted highlighted that this is exactly where many DIY investors hit a wall. It’s one thing to self-service a single seller-financed note in a spreadsheet. It’s another to manage multiple deals, track late payments, allocate extra principal, and report performance to outside investors. ZimpleMoney is designed to bridge that gap. For DIY note investors who want to bring in partner money and keep it, showing bank-level reporting on mom-and-pop style deals becomes a competitive advantage.
Structuring Seller-Financed Notes for Future Liquidity
The webinar also covered how to structure seller-financed notes from the beginning with an eye toward both capital partners and future note buyers. Dawn walked through the “big four” drivers of note value.
For investors working with capital partners, these deal design choices determine not just the yield, but also how easily they can sell a full or partial interest in the note down the road. Ted pointed out that a well-structured note with clean servicing data will often fetch a much better price on the secondary market than a “DIY ledger” that exists only as a marked-up amortization schedule or scattered bank statements.
Doing Deals With Capital Partners (Without Creating a Legal Headache)
Dawn shared her philosophy on capital partnerships highlighting relationship-driven structures. Rather than pooling many investors into one deal, she typically partners with one person (or a couple) per transaction. Ted demonstrated how ZimpleMoney’s loan builder and payout tools let a DIY note investor with capital partners on various deals can act like a small fund manager without the cost of building their own back office.
They also addressed the ever-present concern with these deals: what happens if the borrower stops paying on a deal you’ve made with capital partners? Dawn’s take is that default risk is managed up front in how you structure the deal, not in a panic after the first missed payment, explaining exactly what DIY note investors should do ahead of time.
The combination of Dawn’s creative deal structures and ZimpleMoney’s servicing stack shows a practical path: you don’t need Wall Street money to build a note portfolio. Webinar attendees learned how to get started with seller-financed deals backed by capital partners and supported by a platform that keeps everyone’s money and reporting organized.
Allison Murray is a recognized payments and financial technology expert with more than 10 years of leadership experience in payment technology and financial services infrastructure. With a proven track record of developing frameworks that drive value creation for fintech companies, Allison’s technical knowledge and industry foresight have earned peer recognition across the payments industry. She has spoken at leading fintech conferences including Money20/20 and Finovate, received the Los Angeles Business Journal’s Women’s Leadership Award in 2020, and actively contributes to the fintech community through NYC Fintech Women and the Women’s Network in Electronic Transactions (WNET).
Disclaimer: This article is for general educational purposes only and does not constitute legal, tax, or investment advice. Consult qualified professionals before structuring or investing in any private loan note or partnering with private capital.